Dreams and Grandma

The dream started out in an aquarium... or an ocean science movie. In any case, I was watching a hippo or a porpoise frighten a squid. The squid was a puffer-squid, and when it got frightened it would expand and a bunch of quills popped out of it. The hippo-porpoise was having a fun time frightening the puffer-squid. It got a little repetitive, with the hippo-porpoise popping out from behind a rock (in the lower left-hand field of vision) and frightening the puffer-squid (in the upper-right hand).

I think I said something about the aquatic scene looking like a ballet, and suddenly, Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty" overture played and I was choreographing three ballerinas. They were traipsing in front of a castle curtain wall toward a fourth, but it wasn't working quite right. The opening dance kept repeating as we tried to work it out. I think my old dance instructor, Pam Hoffbur, appeared at this point and we tried some other things.

I finally decided that we needed to rotate the castle forty-five degrees on the stage with the corner of the castle wall in the lower stage-right area. The lead male, hunched over a sketch of the set in the castle, came up with the same idea independently.

When Pam brought it up to the main theatre instructor, the two women got into a discussion of how the set needed to have a bridge in it so that the theatre instructor could use it for a production of "Waiting for Godot." (Although now that I think about it, it should have been a production of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.")

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Saw Grandma today. Umm, wow; she's really thin -- I guess the last time I saw her she had a long-sleeved blouse on. She said she was fine the several times when I asked. I hope I didn't tire her out with reports from the outside world.

She'd just woken up from a nap when I arrived; so my attempts to get her speaking by asking her advice on things like gardening worked less well than they have in the past. She still has her humor and smiled when I said I was glad I had inherited Lillenas hair (I hope at 98 my hair looks half as great as hers does).

I think the next time I'm just going to bring the harp and not have one sided conversations.

Cool lights and unpleasant dreams

I've lost my soul to a Mathmos Airswitch tc light. It's a light; it's a toy; it's high theatre. In terms of shear coolness, it's right up there with harmonographs, theremins, and kinetic marble sculptures.

Ah well...

Strange and disturbing dreams this morning. I was in a jumbled setting that combined bits of my 1980's college rental, my last rental, a frat house, and a restaurant. I kept waking up part-way thinking, "Gee, that was unpleasant" only to fall back into the dream again....

At first, I was trying to walk around the setting without waking up my housemates, who all seemed to be sleeping with their significant others in unexpected places (and none of these people were the folks I went to college with; I think there were some contemporary folks). There was something about somebody's dad wanting to use a computer to check his stocks, and he had sort of hijacked my session with an unknown program; I couldn't get the machine to stop running it, even with a reboot.

There was a break, and suddenly I was in some sort of custody kidnapping movie or something. A bunch of shaolin monk types trouped into a small, bare apartment living room. They used a sort of bowed huqin or sanxian (and incense, I think) to get a feeling for the room. One spot that they traversed made the musical instrument howl -- an indication that something horrible happened on the spot.

There was something about being served breakfast or dinner or something although I was from the wrong dorm, and very soon after, I found myself being shown out of the building by a malicious maitre'de who pretended not to recognize me. It didn't help that my dream clothing shifted to just a bathrobe and my feet were muddy.

At one point I was fighting a pint-sized ninja while the people around me watched. I wished they would help, but they didn't. In the end, I had the ninja by one arm and one leg, and was trying to keep him from kicking me or slashing me with some sort of ninja knife. I'm not sure if I was in a bathrobe or if my dream attire had become more daytime. Eventually, I had to release him, and for my troubles he painted to F's on my left collarbone, saying, "failure!" each time. This was a type of counting coupe, and someone informed me that I could look forward to having my shoulder broken/stabbed in nasty painful ways in the near future.

Mr Pint-sized Ninja (he was about two or three feet tall) started leaving harassing tassels of red and black fabric around the house to show that he had been there.

The dream ended with a kind of fight in the restaurant's colonnade between three gangs of various ethnicities, with the rest of us trying to stay out of the way. Probably the most interesting piece of gang apparel were black and gold hexagonal pointy hats (sort of like three-tiered pagodas)... but at the time I was too busy trying not to get hurt to pay too much attention.

Writing Report

Slipped away for a few hours to write. Clunky at first, but then I got a hold of an interesting idea and managed to get about eight pages of Very Rough Draft. And about a page of the story's start.

Some writer friends agreed to see the draft of the non-fiction piece and I'm getting some feedback. Mark looked at it also and thought that the first chapter was too much about me -- since I'm not really writing a memoir, I suppose he's got a point. It's also curmudgeonly, which I think surprised him.

Writing News

I sat down yesterday to write fiction and it was very strange.

The last month or so I've been working on a non-fiction piece that I thought was going to turn into a book, but instead it seems to have become a manifesto (and divination system). It might make a coffee-table book. A small one.

I had a bunch of fiction short stories and story ideas that I put on hold and now I have to get back to them.

That and I need to get more stories into the mail.

The New York Trip

Friday -- During the day we have rain mixed with snow. We hop into the car at something like 10 PM, drive to the library to return a veritable boat-load of books. Then we drive to the airport hotel.

Saturday -- We wake up at 5 AM so we can go stand in lines at the airport. Actually the line at the security check point isn't that long. We have plenty of time to kill at the gate. Eight hours later we're pickup up our luggage in Newark. Mark's mom, Mary, and his sister, Melora, meet us there and drive us to Suffern.

Sunday -- I tuned up the Dwyer Manse computer.

Monday -- Since Mark's Mother's house has cable, I end up watching Myth Busters. At a very late hour. The next morning I dreamt that I was in some kind of futuristic gladitorial games. I was in a two-man team with someone else and the team we were fighting against had a flying fighting robot. There was adventure music playing as the flying machine swooped around. Then I woke up; but the adventure music was still playing. It turned out to be Hannah Montana, the favorite performer of Mark's niece.

Tuesday -- New York City with Mark's sister, Melora. At the Metropolitan Opera House, there was a high school band. Um... I don't think they got to NYC on their musical merit. We went to the Central Park Zoo and saw Tango, Roy and Silo the penguins; and had "environmental" fried chicken and French fries. We met Larry.

Wednesday -- Mark's sister, Megan, visited with her two boys. At some point we dug out a marble race game and created cascading runs for marbles to shoot through. Mary took us all to see a 3D Imax Theatre showing about whales and dolphins. It was pretty cool.

Thursday -- John's day to the MET. I made an exciting discovery of an Egyptian ritual item with a goddess figure standing in front of a tree. The iconography is similar to "The Ashera", an 11 C BCE term that might have meant "goddess," "tree," or "pole."

Friday -- Drove to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Mark's other sister, Maria, lives. Mark's brother, Matthew, drove up from Virginia. Made a Mousse (ala Ted Allen). Instead of a candy thermometer, I had to use a meat thermometer (reads way low). I relied on the kindness of Mark, who bought an unknown chocolate from a new source. The chocolate didn't melt the way I expected it to.

Saturday -- Ate Chocolate Mousse. My flavor was more chocolatey. Maria's had a much better consistency. Spent a lot of time in a hot tub. I'm sure there was tequila involved here, somewhere.

Sunday -- Drove back to Suffern. Mark spent some time painting stain glass figures.

Monday -- loafed around the Dwyer Manse. Visited Larry's folks. Drove to Newark. Our plan (from Florida) was two hours late, then sat on the tarmac for another hour. We arrived home around 2:30 AM.

No Bunny Nuke

We were lame.

This year we didn't have a bunny nuke. Part of me misses it.

Fever

This morning I woke up in the middle of a dream. The dream had been going on for a while. I was at a Galaxy Press event of some sort. I think Damon Kaswell might have been there. Through the magic of dream-logic, I started singing, "Fever," by Miss Peggy Lee. Everyone started snapping their fingers, and the pre-event mingling time turned into a dance number around the hors d'oeuvre table. Then the guy the event was really supposed to be about started talking. He did an info-dump on some research he was doing.

I woke up and managed to write down the salient parts, which made much more sense in the dream than they did in recall; but it might be a good story idea. Since the idea was medical in nature, I think this dream was based in part by reading about dengue fever just before going to bed.

Thank Goodness for Illustrator

Sigh.

Today was very gray. I think it must have helped me feel a little depressed. That and I received a particularly annoying e-mail this afternoon. So instead of writing this evening, I've been responding to irritating e-mail. OK; it's not that bad, I've been playing with Adobe Illustrator, too.

Disturbing Dream

In last night's dreams. . . aliens had come to Earth. I never saw them. They had decided that they were going to reduce the human population, and took their cue from horror movies, I guess. So they installed hidden machinery in walls and doors that would lock the doors to trap people in rooms and then the walls would move together. I got caught in a cafe of some sort with a bunch of other people, but I was able to stop the walls by jamming an easel leg into a crack between the wall and the floor. Rooms all over Earth became death-traps. At a later point I had my shirt or jacket caught between advancing mahogany panels surrounding an inset door.

I think I might have been too wrapped up in the covers.

Only in Eugene

I checked out some DVDs -- one on Nefertiti and another one on ancient Egypt -- from the Library. When I opened up the Nefertiti case, sandalwood scent wafted up out of it. I don't know what a previous patron must have done to get the plastic case to retain the scent; the DVD smells like it, too.

Yes. I was surprised when the second DVD case -- this one holding three DVDs also smelled like sandalwood (and a little bit of clove).

Don't these people know that smoke particles make it harder for the DVDs to play?

Writing News

Whew.

Finished up a 900 word entry for another writing contest. I think it works. We'll see tomorrow. It needs to be e-mailed in Friday. And now I need to sleep.

Cats and Dreams

We went on an overnight trip to the coast. Muriel wasn't pleased and left editorial excrement in various places.

Stupid cat.

Not much in the dream department; the other night I had an Arcosanti dream -- it was a little different; instead of being stuck there or visiting and worrying about catching my flight, I was looking at a three-part map of the place. Arcosanti is always greener and in deeper canyons than it is in real life. In my dreams, it's on the edge of a canyon, and usually there's a neighboring canyon that is filled with a lake. Anyway, this was a (dream) map of Arco and the lake and another canyon. (In real life, Arco sits on a Sonoran desert mesa near the half-underground Aqua Freya river.)

Rejections, Pagans, and Books

I got another rejection Friday. But I've managed to get two more short stories out.

In slightly related news, I decided that being the appointed chair of the local Covenant of UU Pagans for eighteen months was long enough and someone else could do it. I expect that I will have more time for writing now that I won't have to keep track of the ritual year and booking the UU Church in Eugene for events.

Not too many remembered dreams lately; I've been staying up too late and getting up too early. Naturally, I'm fighting off a cold.

As for The Book. I've got all my notes in place in a wiki, I think. Now I have to put them into a coherent whole. The wiki is good for linking ideas together, but the hypertext aspect of it makes for a disorganized document. I have had fun writing the opening chapter, which is called "The Purifications" -- I have to let it sit a while and go back to see if it was as funny as I thought it was when I first wrote it. Looking at the writers' guidelines for Weiser, Llewellyn and a few other presses was useful; everyone seems to want "practical" step-by-step books. I can do that; but the text I have so far is pretty theory heavy. Time to outline.

Rejections are my Job

Whew. Two rejections in the last twenty-four hours; three in the last week. At least they've all been encouraging rejections from editors who would like to see more work. This Friday is a mail sending day for me.

Dreams of Chanting

I dreamt I was in Portland. I think I was living above Reed College on a wide sunny street (I have a vague notion that the dream setting was my old College Haunt). I don't remember too much except that I might have been chanting in ritual with M. H. and Shaggy and Scooby-Doo. There was a bad woman who we had managed to shrink down to fit in a basket, but somehow she tricked Scooby into chanting the wrong words and she got out of her basket, grew to giant size, and was tromping along the street.

There's a break in my recollection. I was traveling from Portland to Corvallis by flying. I had my big black and purple cloak, and I was flying by night. I remember there was some difficulty because my shoulder bag was slipping around a little. But mostly I was having fun swooping over night time skyscrapers and countryside, my cloak flapping in the wind. I had some sort of discussion with my dad about flying, but the only thing I recall is that I could fly from Portland to Corvallis in an hour.

Another break. I was flying in daylight. I think I made it to Corvallis, except the Willamette River was about five times wider than it should have been. A blue heron flew underneath me. I remember pausing at the river's edge to be sure that I could fly over the river. I set out anyway, and I made the far shore. Somehow I had lost my shoulder bag -- I was in one of those odd dream situations where a part of me knew that I was still wearing the bag, but at the same time my bag was lost.

There was a large white castle ahead, and I flew to it. I remember being struck by how white and light-filled the castle was; the passage ways were wide. I figured that I'd find my bag in the castle, so I started walking around in the corridors. I came to a plain wooden door with a little window in it. Sonorous chanting came from the other side -- it was so resonant that I felt the door vibrating as I leaned against it. As I listened to the chanting, I felt like my essence was melting into the door's, and the chanting seemed to be vibrating everything into a kind of cosmic monad.

The chanting stopped. I went through the door and into a little stone chamber. There were four or five other people there-- mostly men -- standing in a circle in the center of the room. There was a sense of otherness to them; they seemed too vibrant to be human. I explained that I was looking for my bag, (while at the same time being aware that I was still wearing it) and then we were all chanting together. They sang a kind of ground while I sang an improvised melody. The words weren't English, and it was mostly long stretches of vowels with a few voiced consonants thrown in. I was filled with a very strong holistic feeling of being here and now, and my whole body started vibrating again and then I woke up.