Smuggling on the North Shore

Dream | December 9, 2009

A text message from Layne. He wants me to smuggle some drugs on the North Shore. This is immediately suspicious. Why doesn’t he do it himself? He lives just a few miles up the coast. Seems like a setup, or more likely the law is tightening up on him and he needs a scapegoat.

In the dream I have a history as courier of this sort for Layne, with smaller quantities. The last time I snorkeled it around Waimea Bay in a watertight bag. Another time I rode a bicycle with the cargo perched blantantly in a basket out front.

But this time it’s alot of stuff.

So it’s nighttime, and I come around the corner from Waimea Bay and there’s a dirt parking lot on the beachside, with the top part of a house that is built into the cliff, so that the part I see is like the tip of an iceberg, and similarly shaped. A jumble of beams and wood and some glass.

Over to the side of this house I go, and there’s like an indentation where a safe or shed or locker is built. On shelves within are a bunch of metal ammo boxes. I open one up and inside are tightly packed bags of weed. Judging by the quantity of ammo boxes this is indeed a large shipment. Too much for a motorcycle, which is my preferred method in case there’s an ambush.

I replace the box and close up the locker and turn around. Behind me is a large glass window. Inside a couple is making love. I can’t really see the guy since he is laying down and facing away from me and partially obscured by pillows, but the woman is sitting up and facing me, but her head is tilted up in ecstacy. She looks familar and I wonder if the guy is me? Is this some past memory? Then I see the guy’s hair is blonde and I figure I’m just looking in on the resident’s bedroom. They’re humping and having fun, so I smile and walk back towards the road.

Back near Kamehameha Highway my dad pulls up on a motorcycle. He tells me he’s doing such n’ such and we chat for a minute. I tell him I’ve got to ship something but it won’t fit on a bike. Then he speeds off.

So I borrow my sister’s Subaru, but it’s bright yellow instead of green. The stuff gets packed neatly inside and I start off towards Waimea Bay. The road around the bay is a windy, rocky, crazy road with a single store at the river mouth in the distance. All the while Layne is texting me, wondering what’s going on? The air feels ominous and I’m paranoid and worried.

It’s also very dark. The road is strewn with craggy lava boulders and dead trees claw at the night sky. Suddenly I get stopped by some police officer who glares at me and asks me Who am I? What I’m doing there at this time of night? What is in the car?

I answer as best I can and all of a sudden he smiles and lets me go! The new day is slowly dawning and I’ve got this nice optimistic feeling everything is going to work out great.

It’s a good feeling to wake up with.

The Worst Takeoff Ever

Dream | November 26, 2009

This dream took place on the night before we leave Sayulita, after my sistser’s wedding and Thanksgiving. We’ve got to drive all the way back up to the states and it will take us a couple of days. In this dream was alot of travelling but I won’t bore you with the details.

It started at a train station. My dad and I. He gets into this cute red 1959 Mecedes 280SL (which he really has, but it’s silver. This red one resembled the Porsche he drove during the wedding.) and I get into my van. We drive to the airport and wait in some long line of cars in some parking garage. At some point we abandoned our vehicles and boarded the plane.

A steward asks me how was the Caesar salad? I say I haven’t had one yet. A glance around and everyone in the plane is sitting on folding chairs and eating salads. The steward says if I want one I have to go to the dining room at the rear of the plane and ask for one.

I saunter back and pass through a metal door into a barren cylindrical room. A steward is alone inside, doing something or other. Piled here and there along the sides of the room are miscellaneous tools, rusty equipment, etc.

Looking ahead through the room I can see we’re taxxing down the runway at high speed. And the plane is dodging storage containers, tractor-trailers, earth-moving equipment and huge Terex trucks that were parked on the concrete. At one point we ducked under a low overpass and the roar of the plane echoed dully off the reinforced concrete above.

The airplane was able to get some altitude after that, when suddently a huge skeleton of a building loomed ahead. We banked straight up... Imagine a jumbo jet instantly conducting a perpendicular accent! We followed that skyscraper all the way up, then partly down the other side before leveling off onto a skewed path.

Throughout this takeoff I’m standing in the middle of this room with the steward, waiting for the plane to get off the ground. Then I say, "hey man, can I get a Caesar salad?"

He says, "Sure, but I gotta take care of something first."

He pushes up on the ceiling and the roof of the plane opens up into long doors, much like the cargo bay doors of the space shuttle. The force of air escaping draws me out and I’m clinging to the edges of both doors, which start to separate from the plane and float adjacent to its path through the sky.

The steward is casually walking along the roof while I’m desperately holding the two halves of the doors together and trying to keep them from flying off into space.

All around is this drab, sepia-toned landscape of a burned-out city speeding below us. Barren and dead, orange and red in the fiery sunset. Gutted industrial buildings, rusted machinery, sandy streets. It’s sad and empty.

But I don’t have any time to contemplate this scene, ’coz I’m struggling to hold these doors together and keep from flying off into space. We’re floating farther away from the main body of the plane too, like we’re out in orbit and it’s falling to earth.

At some point I manage to climb up into the doors and stand up, as if on a mountaintop with miles of earth and sky all around, and the wind rushing through my hair and over my skin.

The steward has also drifted out into space. Then he waves to me and we pull the floating halves of the door down to the aircraft.

When the doors finally close I kinda woke up, but drifted into another dream about eating corn flakes for breakfast.

A Flaming Bag of Plutonium

Dream | October 29, 2009

An amphibious motorcycle with a cabin, and I’m skimming over a lake at high speed....

Then I’m at a campsite in my van...and it’s like the last day and we’re all packed up, parked in some temporary spot near the office, and I meet some people and we’re talking. It looks like a normal family but I begin to realize it’s George Clooney, a buddy of his and an attractive woman that constitute the group.

Ok, so I have this clear ziploc bag of Selsun Blue. It looks radioactive.

And George is asking, “What’ve you got there? Looks like plutonium.”

And I say, “Yeah it’s plutonium. Makes my motorcycle go nuts.”

And his buddy is like, “You can’t have plutonium man.”

So I’m like, “Yeah I should get rid of it. Dunno why I have it around. I should put it on Craigslist. Maybe I can get some good money for it.”

“You can’t sell it! That shit’s illegal,” says the dude.

Can’t keep it. Can’t sell it. Now I’m thinking I got to get rid of it. Bury it in a hole somewhere.

A girl from the campsite office comes around and tells me I can’t park there ’coz it’s a temporary spot. So I start up the van. George and his buddy bundle in and we’re off.

We parked out at the head of some dirt trail that moseyed off into the countryside. The three of us are soon strolling along next to a barbed-wire fence with a dense orange orchard on the other side. On our side is a broad meadow with a cluster of trees nearby. It’s a warm, sunny afternoon.

The topic of our mission comes up and George says we should bury it sooner than later.

I pull out the bag of “plutonium” and it’s shrunk to dime-bag size, and the liquid is clear. I say, “Heeeeey! Let’s set it on fire.” Fishing around in my pocket turns up a lighter, and I spark the bag.

FWOOOOOSH! It explodes in my hand, bursting out flaming liquid globs! Some spurt over the fence and the trunk of a tree catches fire.

“Fuck!” says I, and jump over the fence. I start patting the tree and manage to put out the flames, but a nearby wooden fence post and a stretch of ground are also on fire. I stomp around and pat out the fires there and duck through the fence again. On the other side are some smaller fires which George steps on.

So we sit down to rest on the trail, just the two of us.

And George starts whacking off! His pants are down slightly and he’s working his johnson. Uh, and he’s also looking at me in appreciative way which makes me uncomfortable. It dawns on me he might be gay. An inkling of it had seeped into the dream earlier as I observed he and his buddy interacting, but it was evident at thinking point when he said that he was actually fantasizing about his friend, which I took to mean the guy who had accompanied us but had since disappeared.

Cut into a subdream or surreal vision of George as the proper husband and father, at the dinner table with his family. Everyone is trying hard to be pleasant. His cute daughter is saying something but there’s no sound. The wife looks like a shrew with those critical, drilling eyes, and sharp mouth. At one point his wife politely covers a yawn. When she draws her hand away her tongue is purple. An evil-looking older woman at the table looks like poor George’s mother-in-law.

Then we’re back at the country scene. George must’ve finished up. “Yeah I did the family thing for awhile. My wife and mother-in-law would gang up on me all the time...”

I interject some bland agreement like, “They’ll do that.”

“...but life is so much easier with a boyfriend.”

After awhile we get up and keep walking on the trail, towards the golden afternoon sun and I wake up in that glow.