Nightly Venture

Smuggling on the North Shore

2009-12-25T01:32:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-25T00:25:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-24T22:03:00.000-08:00

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.

The One Where I've Got to Get My Sailboat Through the Tunnel

2009-12-20T13:34:00.000-08:00

Dream | December 12, 2009

I’m in Italy. I have a sailboat on the Adriatic side of the peninsula, sitting in a little marina, and I need to get it to the Mediterranean side. Normally you’d sail around the boot in a couple days or so but since Italy was only a mile or so across at this point there was a tunnel through which boats could be transported.

I rode into a cute little marina on the Mediterranean side with some friends on some camels. It was dusk and a bluish tone was settling over the small town adjacent to the harbor. My friends go tooling around near the beach and I’ve got to arrange to get my boat.

From the mountainside the tunnel ended in a building with large glass windows. I head into the building but realize I need to change out of my travel clothes, so I head into the tunnel to find a restroom or something. Some official in a booth waves at me and says something in Italian as if I’m not supposed to go in there. But I’m already gone.

In the darkness of the shaft I see a brightly lit room on the right and inside is a library and glass closet. I go in and start changing. About when I’m done I hear footsteps out in the corridor and voices and I think they were looking for me. So I sit down on a stool and pretend to look innocent.

In strolls a hefty looking official who appears to be the same guy who tried to flag me down. With him is an older woman. He’s speaking to me in Italian but it sounds much like Spanish and I’m trying to translate. He tells me my boat is caught on a vent as it was passing through the tunnel and I ask him why don’t they fix it? He tells me just come and look.

We go into the tunnel and my sailboat is there with the masts collapsed. Lights illuminate the ceiling into the distance like the glowing spine of huge snake. We drop down below the floor into a service passageway and above us is a long row of metal grates that run down the length of it. Quite clearly the keel of the boat has caught on one of these grates and we work it free by unscrewing something. Then the boat lurches forward above us on its journey.

The official and I run back towards the terminus and into an office where we have to do some paperwork. Again he’s speaking in Italian but luckily this time there are subtitles in my dream and this fellow is pointing to each word as he says it. In this way I’m able to both understand him and make the etymological connection between Italian and Spanish.

So eventually my sailboat comes through and I’ve got to wash it. They have a washing service but I’m like, fuck it, I’ll do it myself by having it lowered into the water and scrubbing it with some pool brushes.

The dream ends with me hoisting up the sails and navigating into the Mediterranean.

Where is My Backpack?

2009-12-20T12:06:00.000-08:00

Dream | December 3, 2009

On my way to a party, driving in my van. At some point I acquired some weed and the equivalent of two lines of cocaine. Along the way I rolled a joint and sprinkled a line of coke in it. Then took a big puff of the final product, saving the rest for the party. Seems like I was driving while I did this.

This is just a dream, folks. Not a reflection of reality or my normal practices.

So I get to the party and my ol’ buddy Dan is there. And um...

And uh... ok, so Dan greets me, and it’s kind of an outside party, in the middle of the street, with some buildings all around, and some couches to relax on and so forth. People are lounging around and some groovy music provides dreamy atmosphere.

I meet this Asian guy and he reminds me of someone, so I say “Hey! Haven’t seen you for a long time. What was your name?” He tells me but I’ve forgotten it now. It was composed almost entirely of consonants. He’s put off ‘coz I cannot pronounce it, so he spells it and that just confuses me more.

And I have a backpack, with the stuff I mentioned earlier—the fatty and remaining line. I put the backpack down near a couch as I’m talking with some girls hanging out there. This girl I’m yakking with also has a funny name and I have to pronounce it a few times to get it right. Maybe I was just stoned...

So I’m walking around chatting with people and eventually the happenin‘ nucleus of the party gravitates away from the street and up a flight of steps to a deck on the second floor of a nearby building. Dan and some other familiars are hanging out up there. It’s gotten darker and the lights up there are drawing everyone like moths.

I look around and my backpack is gone! I figure someone just set it somewhere, and I ask around. Anybody seen my backpack? It’s pretty distinct. Nobody has seen it.

I slowly start panicking. Most of the crowd has abandoned the street area and it’s evident my pack is nowhere to be seen.

Nighttime transitioned into the early hours of the morning and the party has diffused. My search had led me to a kind of open warehouse with tons of stuff. It seemed more like a freeway underpass enclosed by chain-link fence, with dirty metal shelves of junk like a lost n’ found, but more organized and official like a gathering of materials confiscated by the police.

Amongst this debris I began to find an iem or two I recognized as mine. A box of something here, a knick-knack there. Things I wouldn’t have brought to the party or that wouldn’t have been in the backpack, but clues to collect nonetheless. The backpack itself remained elusive.

There was this security guard or police officer in a uniform and he was being an asshole. His accent was faux-English or mid-Atlantic and his attitude very snobbish and uncooperative. I was asking him if he had seen my backpack and he was like, “Oh! So that’s your stuff eh?” like he had found his suspect. “Well I’m sorry we can’t give your backpack back!”

But I was like “whatever” and kept snooping. He’s following me while I root around and eventually I find my pack in some corner. But the stuff inside is gone...

That security guard wasn’t letting me out of there. So I slung the pack onto my shoulders and picked up some long metal bar or baseball bat and started swinging at him as I edged towards the exit. All the while he’s whining and screaming “Stop it! That’s evidence. You can’t leave!” but eventually I got around him and he wasn’t following.

The last thing I remember was him yelling and jumping up and down very comically, in a fit or tantrum, with all that junk around him piled up on dusty shelves amidst heavy pillars of reinforced concrete. That was when I woke up.

It's a Conspiracy

2009-12-12T18:17:00.000-08:00

Dream | October 27, 2009

Ok, so I’m in some corporate environment with a sea of cubicles and lots of desks and whatnot.

A buddy of mine (we’ll call him Walter the Wiseass ‘coz that’s what he was in the dream) and myself are investigating some corporate conspiracy. We’ve got these walkie-talkie-like cell phones we use to quickly communicate with each other and are conducting our business with a brisk, authoritarian air.

So we’re walking around interviewing employees and eventually we’re talking with some guy who looks like Ethan Hawke. He’s doing some paperwork and denying he’s involved with this conspiracy and doesn’t know what the hell we’re talking about, etc etc.

We take a lunch break. Walter heads into the restroom and I walk out to the parking lot. A bright but cloudy day and something in the afternoon sky catches my eye. It looks like an elaborate box kite made of teak. Soaring out of the fluffy clouds about a thousand feet up, this kite appears to be towing an amphibious plane that resembles the flying version of a Chinese junk, with curvy, Eastern-style wings resembling sails, and ropes like rigging. It looks like the Sea Duck from Disney’s Tale Spin as manufactured by medieval Chinese shipwrights. Another familiar example might be the plane Indiana Jones took in the first movie.

So it’s soaring out of the clouds and flying a wide arc around the building I’ve just come out of and the first thing that pops into my mind is...

“I’ve got to get a picture of this freakin’ thing!”

I’m near my car and start rummaging around in there for my camera. But I’m not finding it so I snap open my cell phone and I’m looking for the camera button, but it’s a wierd phone and difficult to navigate. On the phone’s screen are clouds and the green earth and I realize the view I’m seeing is the view from the plane. I wonder, how can this be? It’s very confusing...

Then I’m on the plane. Maybe not physically, but as if watching a movie, and I’m up on the plane’s wooden deck as if it were a flying ship, with the aforementioned rigging and Eastern stylings around.

A man is standing at the stern. He looks like Ben Affleck but with long greasy black hair and bangs that make him look rather sinister. He’s holding Walter the Wiseass’s walkie-talkie phone up so that its camera eye is facing the rear and kinda accounts for the view I was seeing.

He turns and starts talking to another guy and it’s Ethan Hawke from the office and it hits me: There is a conspiracy and these are the guys. But they’re really just flying around in a plane and not doing anything wrong.

They both walk back into a room and inside is my buddy Walter the Wiseass. He’s been stripped down to boxers and looks as if he’s been roughed up a bit. Of course Walter is joking as always and being a smartass.

He’s got a towel and he says to Ethan, “This is your towel, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

And Ethan is like, “Yeah, so?”

In the back of the room is a large slot through which clouds are visible and the wind is rushing. Walter shoves the towel through the hole and the wind whips it out with a dry slurping sound.

“Aha! What’re you gonna do about that, huh? You wanna hit me? Go ahead and hit me!” Walter the wiseass offers up his shoulder and Ethan takes a big ol’ punch at it but Walter says, “Aw that felt great! Yeah, gimme another one! Gimme another one!” He offers up his chest this time and gets hit again.

“Yeah that’s great man, great!” and offers up his shoulder again.

That’s the last thing I remember...

Three Angry Monsters

2009-11-20T21:38:00.000-08:00

Dream | November 19, 2009

A Medieval street scene near the docks. Ships in the background with sailors and merchants going about their business.

In the midst are these three grotesque monsters who have just disembarked and are immediately engaged in a vicious three-way battle.

One resembles the Hunchback of Notre Dame but he’s really large and angry-looking. Scraggly clothes and huge forearms, reddish-pink scabby skin covered with boils, and he’s dribbling this midget like a basketball on the cobblestone street.

The second looks like Sloth from The Goonies with a gnarly looking face and large bulging, uneven eyeballs. His upper torso is massive and misshapen and he’s pissed off.

The third character resembles a hovering genie since his lower body is a dark whirling tornado like the Tasmanian Devil, whereas his upper torso is greyish-black and very gross. He’s got an evil disposition.

People mill around this street on the perimeter as these three monsters hurl magic weapons, insults and destruction at each other. They each have unique super-powers and abilities. Sloth spits fire and sets Hunchback’s neck aflame, who pats it out quickly with his free hand. Genie throws some brutal spiky object like a mace at Sloth, while Hunchback sends forth from his pack a surging ball of evil demons at Genie. These demons catch him where his tail tapers off near the ground and begin to suck him down into a vortex which has opened in the ground.

By this time the street is ravaged and looks like it has been destroyed by aerial bombing. And the battle scene draws back into a stage-like setting as if I’m watching a play or listening to a story and suddenly I’m strolling along a street with Sloth and he tells me when he got off the ship Genie and Hunchback immediately attacked him. He’s really a nice guy and he’s speaks very clearly and amiably.

So we go back to his house and his wife is making dinner. In the living room he introduces me to his drop-dead gorgeous daughter. I don’t catch her name but then Sloth tells me her real name as if she is an actress in the aforementioned play. Some famous actress like Angelina Jolie, so I say “Hi So n’ So” but she says no, my name is Such n’ Such as if she’s trying to stay in character.

While dinner is being prepared I’m rubbing her down while she’s laying in bed. Then I’m softly scratching her back like she was itchy and I ask her if this is ok and she says yeah that’s fine. She has nice tanned skin that’s very soft.

Then I’m watching myself doing this from farther away and I see the whole supernatural battle scene from the beginning as if it was an animated Disney movie. Everything has become more cartoony. Then I’m at the dinner table with hideous but pleasant Sloth, his wife and their sexy daughter.

And I have a grenade in my hand for some reason. My body has changed too. Now I’m lanky and blond and kinda inept. The daughter is keeping a scrupulous eye on the grenade I am holding. At some point I think I pulled the pin, and quickly she lurches forward and with a sleight-of-hand trick, swaps the grenade for some harmless object. She slips the pin back in without activating the device and the whole situation is deftly defused.

We all start eating dinner and the whole situation has become super realistic again. Next to me is Sloth. His head is huge and knobby with a little crop of hair on top, and his thick lips protrude over gnarled teeth. We’re chatting and joking like old friends. Then he is hunched forward over the table, eating with thick slurping sounds. At times it almost sounds like he is panting...

I woke up with my German Shepherd dog breathing on my face ‘coz she wants to go out.

Robert Plant Switching Bodies

2009-11-20T21:06:00.000-08:00

Dream | November 15, 2009

Robert Plant was dating this young girl. An attractive female cop who has half his age and resembled the sweet yet tough Sandra Bullock. Neither were married and their relationship was not a bad thing, but the media wouldn’t let them alone. Photographers and journalists would swarm over them whenever they met.

So they decided to meet one last time to call it off.

When Robert returns to his tour bus or RV after their last meeting, he’s looking around for his hat. He finds her blue police-style baseball cap and puts it on. Almost immediately he has these fits and jerks his right hand back like something she used to do. Then he becomes rather emotional about their break-up, sobbing and such, and decides to go for a walk.

Out on the street he’s approaching a group of black-clad street thugs circled around their leader, who is toughly relating how he just broke up with his girl. He says it with a sneer as if it meant nothing to him. But Robert hears this and he starts running toward the leader with his arms outstretched, crying and yelling, "oh man I’m so sorry!" in a very sympathetic way.

The leader is like, Fuck! coz there’s this aging and slightly overweight rocker running towards him and bawling like a woman. So the gang takes off and runs into a secluded alley so they can kick this strange guy’s ass.

But Robert is now occupied by the spirit of this female police officer so when he stumbles into the circle and is bout to get walloped by the leader, he is instantly composed and with a deft blow, knocks the leader on his ass, soundly flattening him to the ground.

The other guys are completely shocked. Then Robert motions with his hand like, okay come here, as if he’s a police officer and this is just his job. They each throw their best punches but one by one Robert smashes the gang members solidly in the face.

Now in the dream this was very comical because it was so systematic and businesslike and totally out of character — Robert being a poet and musician.

Now, Robert heads back to his mobile pad. He’s still a bit confused by all of this, and decides he wants some coffee. In the dream Robert doesn’t normally drink coffee, but he’s suddenly on a frantic search for some.

So the dream segues over to his ex-girlfriend, a hard-boiled yet attractive officer chick who is suddenly acting like the often flamboyant Robert Plant, doing his dance moves and singing in Robert’s singing style, "oo-oo yeah" very sadly. And about that time I woke up.

Going Camping with Michael Jackson

2009-11-20T20:59:00.001-08:00

Dream | July 26, 2009

Another strange dream about Michael Jackson. Perhaps his recent death has inspired millions to have dreams about him. A fitting coda to his life.

As far back as I can remember, some friends and I are rollerblading along a winding sidewalk between a grassy park and a straight pedestrian walkway. And we’re doing some amazing intricate tricks and jumps and twists and whatnot. There’s some kinda haunted theme to our activity, like game or something. It’s peculiar.

And then Michael Jackson walks by. He’s trying to keep a low profile. Black suit, black hat, head down, hand covering his face.

It’s very crowded and all at once everyone realize it’s him. A roar of “Michael Jackson! Oh my god!“ and in a wave they surge forward and envelope him.

He’s not liking this at all. Just cruising along, and suddenly being mobbed. So he’s walking faster and they’re clamoring for his autograph and asking him questions and he’s back-pedaling and saying “Just leave me alone!“ like the song.

So he kinda resigns to his fate but he just stands there kinda listless and inactive, sitting on a boulder or seat or something.

I’m in the midst of this, partly carried forth by the masses and partly because my friends are here, but I’m not really interested in his autograph or the novelty of seeing a reclusive celebrity. He’s this still, sad image of a person amidst the throng. I kinda sympathize with him, trying to make conversation. Maybe since I’m the dreamer that I’m the one he responds to. I say, “You prolly get this everywhere.”

He says, “Yeah.”

“You prolly get sick and tired of it sometimes.”

He says, “Yeah.”

“You prolly want to go some place where there’s nobody around where you can get some peace and quiet.”

He looks at me with this haggard expression and says, “Yeah.”

I say, “Well, you know, we can go out into the country and just hang out. Just a couple of us, and we won’t bother you and ask you a billion questions.” He seems kinda receptive to that.

So a couple of my friends pile into my blue van with Michael and we take off and he’s sitting in the front seat. I think Matt from grade school was there and some other guy.

Out into the country we book it, on some gravel road in remote Colorado, in the middle of nowhere. On a ridge above a river. Hanging out on the road just talking.

So I stoke up the conversation from before, suggesting that although it must get tiring to be him, it’s also cool to be known by everyone in the world. My examples are that kids from Tanzania and tribes from Zimbabwe know Michael Jackson.

He says, “It got old a long time ago.”

I say, “Geez, you probably don’t want to talk about this stuff or anything.”

He’s like, “well, this is...okay.”

I realize he’s still the focal figure in our group. So I suggest we go camping and we don’t have to talk. And he shows some support for that idea, so we bundle into the van and the other two guys kinda disappear from the dream. He’s sitting in the passenger seat looking at the mountains.

A truck with some construction workers comes by and park in front of us as we sit there briefly. I think they were doing some surveying. The van starts and we continue along the dirt road and into an L-shaped town. As we turn sharply at the corner I drive over a big dirt bump and hear stuff being scraped off from under the van. Stuff I had stored there. And I’m looking in my rear-view mirror, which actually becomes my windshield so that I’m looking forward for the things that were scraped off behind me: a few utility towels, large flashlight, and a large bar that looks expensive and useful. There’s this lanky black guy in a beat-up pickup truck collecting up my things like salvage. He reminded me of Sanford n’ Son, but looking like neither Redd Foxx nor his son Lamont. He knows where the stuff came from but he tries not to pay attention to me.

I yell, “Yo! That’s my stuff!”

But he’s packed it all up and is driving off, with ropes and chains trailing out behind the pickup’s bed. So I run after the truck and grab onto these trailing lines. He sees me but he’s accelerating and I’m half-dragging, half-flying behind him on this dirty road with my feet in the air.

We’re hauling ass through this cute little rugged frontier town. People milling about in the morning light, poking into shops, oblivious to this scene. Hand over hand up this rope I climb until I finally grasp the metal bar frame over the truck bed. I get inside and he suddenly stops at a store.

Quickly I grab up my stuff, including this heavy metal bar that looks like an expensive weapon. He gets out and scowls at me and I yell, “Motherfucker! You knew this was my stuff!“ He stares at me and the formidable weapon in my hands and he just turns and walks into the store.

I’m kinda pissed off coz I’m kinda dirty. So I carry the stuff back to the van. But I don’t get there.

Some people come by that I knew. They’re heading towards a stadium along one side street for some kite-surfing event, only it isn’t kite-surfing. It’s more like the people are arranged in a grid, say 5 x 5 for a total of 25 people in a squarish grid, and they’re sitting in these shallow concave cups and holding other’s hands and feet so that they all fly around as a unit. They’re doing some amazing stunts and aerial maneuvers, and I just accept this as a normal thing like Cirque du Soleil. I have a memory of this as something I almost got into but this more very cool, very advanced stuff.

Noah and Max are in this flying grid, accomplishing tight arcs and darting around the stadium as if following crazy wind currents. Their brightly colored fabric costumes flutter around as they sail through the air. The finale was some crazy psychedelic effect as if some glistening slime was poured over the top-level performers in this grid and it oozed over the rest.

After the show the performers and the audience headed over to some café or outdoor office like their training headquarters and I got into a conversation with a girl about the show.

“Yeah that was pretty cool, huh? We’ve been working on that for awhile.“

“It was amazing. What is digital? Some kinda green ooze. Like how the fuck did you do that?”

She tries to explain it but it’s very technical and I notice she’s got some papers there in front of her and one of them is a transcript of our conversation, like a formal letter or something. Then she says she’s got to run out and meet someone and I smile and say that’s cool and she leaves.

So I get up to go, walking down a hall where I meet some cute girl who asks me if I want to go to breakfast where she’ll explain the whole process.

So I’m like “Sure! But can I bring a friend?“ But I don’t tell her it’s Michael Jackson, still waiting out in the van, towards which I point in a silly way with my fingers. She says, “Yeah that’s fine“ and tells me the restaurant is on Beer Avenue. “Where is that?“ I ask. We’re outside now and she indicates a street sign. I tell her I’ll meet her there in fifteen minutes.

I head down the street towards the van in the golden morning sunlight and that’s about the time I woke up.

Suddenly in the Game

2009-07-27T04:49:00.000-07:00

I parked my van somewhere on a country road. Back on the North Shore I think. From the back I pulled my bicycle and set out along the road.

At some point I met my dad at a roadside grill where he had just acquired a delicious steak, which is his custom. It was very rare and perfectly seasoned as if he had cooked it himself. I wanted one too.

We chatted for awhile and he entrusted me to take his grub back to his shop, so I packed it on my bicycle and set out on the road again. After awhile I was riding back to the grill for my own meal, having worked up an appetite from the savory fumes wafting downwind into my face as I toted the precious cargo.

So I arrived back at the grill once more. This was definitely Waialua, with the elementary school nearby. I went in and ordered a steak and rice combo, speaking fluent pidgin with the local proprietors. For awhile I relaxed but the meal was taking forever and I wandered outside. A heavy roar went up from the stadium down the road.

Suddenly I was in the midst of a football game. The action around me was dense and confusing. It was like being dropped into a war front. Blue and red players ran every whichway. The crowd was cheering fanatically. The end zone was a couple feet way. The ball was fumbled and I sought to fall into some formation as the ball was hiked. From military order to total chaos in half a second! Then the ball shot passed my face like a bullet and into the waiting solar plexus of a red player near the end line. The piercing buzz of a whistle and the game was over. Red had won.

Still very confused I began to drift towards the sidelines. A bunch of blue players were heading that way and somebody bumped me roughly as I walked in their midst. I saw that my jersey was red so I navigated a parabola towards the opposite end of the field.

Into a group of red players I fell. They were charged up from the victory, congratulating each other and taking up seats on several sets of bleachers. I sat down on one but noticed it was being occupied mostly by cheerleaders, so I ambled over to another and one of the players patted a bench to indicate which seat was mine. The uniform was hot and itchy so I started taking my pants off. Underneath I was wearing a jock strap and cup. Somehow the pants came off without removing my shoes.

The coach was speaking. I think his name was Thorsen. He indicated some large wooden structure and one of the players climbed into it while the coach took notes. Then it was my turn. I asked if I had to put my pants back on and the coach said yes. He took brief notes while I stood on my tippy-toes in this weird structure on the sideline. Then he motioned me down. It occurred to me that I was probably occupying someone else's body and should skedaddle.

Heading out inconspicuously a face caught my eye. It was Lisa, my sister's friend from way back. She was a cheerleader. I hadn't seen her in like 20 years and have no idea why she suddenly appeared in my dream. I called out "Lisa!" and she looked at me with some recognition. I was heading out to the parking lot and she followed me, taking up a bicycle on the way. I told her it was me and she wondered why I was impersonating so-n-so and playing in the game. I told her I needed to find my van and she said "Race ya!" so I took off on foot while she sped nearby, asking me again why I was impersonating some player, wearing his uniform, etc. She threatened to tell coach Thorsen so I slowed down. Across the sky a warm glowing sunset was spread. The air still had the hum and buzz of the recent game.

I said, "It happened very quickly. Suddenly I was in the game. It's all very confusing."

Up ahead I saw my van way across the parking lot, so I ran off towards what represented a return to the reality of my life. When I reached it I turned back and Lisa was walking her bike near the fence bordering the parking lot. She came over and peered into the van. I think my dog was inside waiting.

At about that point I woke up.

Michael Jackson is Invisible

2009-07-26T09:16:00.000-07:00

I had a dream I was staying at Michael Jackson's house.

Started in a large, luxurious room...not sure what I was doing there. Started with a voice. Definitely his voice. Nobody else has that voice.

We were talking about a hike that was near the ranch. Called Stairway to Heaven. A narrow ridge over a broad waterway, like an aqueduct with stairs carved along its trough, very narrow and smooth. Just a narrow stairway over the water. You were supposed to do was run along it, and was inclined at some points. And at one point it curved very sharply up and the stairs were worn away and you were supposed to run fast enough and clamber up this dusty hill to get past that dangerous point. It reminded me of hiking up the very narrow ridges of Mt. Ka'ala where any mistake meant plunging thousands of feet to death.

So we were talking about doing this hike and we watched a couple of guys running along the stairway and scrambling up that gnarly hairy part that sloped up. Michael said at one point he would do it, but not tomorrow when I wanted to.

At one point I realized Michael Jackson was invisible. I could hear his voice, travelling around to different areas. He said he had made himself becuase he was very shy and didn't like all the media attention. When he wanted to make himself visible he would put on clothes, like his military outfit. And he would paint his face white because so many other people were white and he wanted to blend in.

So he put on a military outfit with short sleeves, and was dancing around, but I said it looked strange coz I couldn't see his arms. So he put on a black long-sleeved outfit with his white gloves, a black mask over his mouth and his classic black hat. But his eyes were hollow, kinda creepy. So he painted his eyes white, but there were no pupils. So I suggested I could get him some colored contacts. But he put on mirrored sunglasses and was dancing around and he was complete and looked like Michael Jackson would normally look at a concert.

Around that point people began to filter into the room — friends and family and security. The place got really busy and Michael left. And I was just some guest and it was like a party except everybody was just doing their daily routine. I asked a couple of guys if they wanted to do the hike and they said sure, so I set about gathering a small party of people who might like to go.

I went poking about in the movie case, which was more like a large cooler filled with water and ice. Movies in small cylindrical glass containers like prescriptions drugs were floating around and each one made its sale in a very strange systematic way. While rifling through I picked up one which revealed the insane adventures of its psychotic protagonist in curious labels wrapped around. Instructions: Take this movie with alcohol. At some point an attractive girl sidled up to me while I was poking around in the movie case, asking me if she could watch the movie with me, but I noticed a guy was watching her from the couch who was evidently her boyfriend. He didn't seem to mind I was chatting it up with his girl. His smile even seem to indicate he approved. Perhaps he wanted to watch the movie too. I said "yeah, sure."

I asked the security guards where I could watch a movie and they said there were two theaters. One was a miniature coliseum on the side of the house which was actually a lrge theater, and the other was a smaller, more intimate venure nestled in a glen of trees down the road, and this one they recommended as a better viewing experience and less likely to be taken.

This was Michael Jackson's ranch, so I figured there must be a billion movies. So I went around to a a hall where a woman was putting on makeup in a shallow recession with an elegant mirror and sink. Older woman who could have been his mother or an aunt. I sat down on the floor and waited for her attention. She was very engrossed in putting on her eye makeup, so I waved my arms and inquired as to the movie vault. She said check the chest. Those were all. But she said they were primo, la créme de la créme.

So I went outside and saw that girl again, sitting on a bunch of green branches, leaves and other green stuff in the bed of a pickup truck. SHe was tying them down. Near her was a cylindrical display case with orchids packed around it. I asked her if she wanted to go on the Stairway to Heaven hike but she said she was takign the orchids to a fair which was a once-in-a-lifetime event and would love to do the hike when she returned in a couple days. I said "ok" and walked around the house, past the mini-coliseum and right before I woke up there was a beautiful view of the ranch.

Robbing the Bank for a Few Rolls of Quarters

2009-04-29T05:26:00.000-07:00

Dream | April 26, 2009

At the tail end of a typically convoluted sequence of dreams I robbed a bank for forty bucks’ worth of quarters.

A buddy and I were returning some merchandise to a furniture depot when the manager bellowed "store credit only!" and showed us a catalog of expensive furniture which would require a serious expenditure to redeem my refund. The only cheap item was some dumb sculpture with offbeat coloration. Either way I was not going to get a full refund. We left to see if my house’s interior design scheme could accommodate the sculpture.

In the van my buddy (and Indian fellow with a technical accent) was describing his new invention. He said it erased the perceived value of any item you programmed into it.

"Around the world the value of the item would be nonexistent!" he elaborated.

I was confused. "But isn’t the value of an item — ah, like a roll of quarters — based on its utility?" The day before this dream I had done two loads of laundry and used up my very last quarter. "It’s a consensus of perception."

"Yes. The effect is only temporary. Once a person appraises the item for any length of time the perceived value begins to climb again." He was grinning. "But for a brief period even the most expensive items are worthless! Would you like to do a test?"

"Ahh, sure." I said this hesitantly ‘coz I was not really sure what to do, even how or whether it worked. But I needed quarters for laundry and I usually went to the bank every few weeks and got some rolls. So I stopped at the BofA on San Fernando and hopped out. My friend indicated that he would activate the invention and I assumed he had it with him and it would take effect immediately.

Inside I asked a cashier for four rolls of quarters. She put them on the tray in front of me, right under the bulletproof plexiglas. "Forty dollars please." She said politely.

I put my right hand over the four rolls and lifted them toward me like a slow-motion crane. "But these rolls are worthless!" I said, then turned and strolled towards the door.

I could feel her watching me with amazement, motioning towards some man standing at a desk near the door. "Mr. Brisby?" She stuttered his name and he was alert.

But I was through the door and leaping up the stairs towards the back parking lot. The van was gone but I hopped into a late-model Mustang and cranked the key. An alarm was ringing somewhere, maybe in my mind. Something had gone wrong and the invention hadn’t worked. Maybe I had acted too soon. Maybe the rolls were worthless but the quarters inside weren’t. At that moment I was peeling through the parking lots and jumping a low hedge onto the street.

Suddenly there were police cars patrolling everywhere. Could they be after me this quickly? I screeched around a corner and raced down a shady tree-lined street. Then another corner and street. I was trying to slow down and be inconspicuous, but I picked up a cop a hundred feet behind, seemingly following me. I quickly turned another corner onto a rather jungly street, quickly parking kind out of the street next to a Frito Lay van. Out of the car I shoved, skidding around the corner of the van and sliding into an overgrown lawn beneath a large Australian tree fern and mostly out of sight from the street and sidewalk.

The police car pulled up slowly past the van and must have stopped because it didn’t appear on the other side. Then I couldn’t see the police car nor my own vehicle. All the while I was wondering why I had made off with only forty bucks worth of coins and what kind of sentence I could expect to receive for this crime. Would they consider me insane? Would the bank forgive? I couldn’t keep running for this petty crime. I decided to give myself up, so I stood up and walked around the Frito Lay van.

The cop was gone. A ticket fluttered on the windshield of the Mustang. I had been cited for parallel parking. As the dream was fading into the morning light I wondered if my buddy had played a practical joke on me.

Dreams within Dreams

2009-04-24T09:39:00.001-07:00

Dream | April 24, 2009

This is a strange phenomena — Dreams within Dreams.

We were moving to some beautiful valley east of Los Angeles. It looked more like Arizona — dry and scrubby but very scenic. I wanted something lush and green but this place had a magnetic charm like Sedona. So we clumsily packed our stuff onto a trailer and lashed it down but we had done a horrible job coz the stuff was all spread out and not compact together over the frame of the trailer. We also had some ugly furniture some old man was guilting us into taking. We looked it over and took a bulky dresser, then wrapped the rest of our possessions around it. On the road Jennifer and I stopped someplace and slept in the cool grass. I fell asleep and dreamt I was talking to an attractive red-headed woman. I knew it was a dream and could do whatever I wanted. We were kissing, then undressing, then making love for awhile. I thought, Dreams rock! I woke up at some point and figured I probably shouldn’t tell Jennifer about it. You know how people are often bored when you tell them your dreams.

So we drive on and eventually stopped at a lady friend’s house. While Jennifer was puttering around in the kitchen I fell asleep on the couch and dreamt I had gotten to second base with the lady friend posing as a breast fruit examiner, which made her giggle and offer hers up for evaluation.

What’s often strange to me is how unconnected dreams during the same night’s sleep can be memories at a later time.

While driving along the freeway I saw some driving high three-wheeled Spyder and I waved to him. Being a motorcyclist I had taken an interest recently (during the day before — not while I was dreaming — I read several articles and even saw one in Glendale on Brand). Further on he was in the second lane pushing his vehicle to start it and I offered to tow him. I pulled off into the shoulder but he said he was fine and kept pushing. As I was pulling back into the right lane an arched bridge up ahead seemed to have very low clearance, or I had very high clearance and to avoid crashing into it I swerved into the right lane and hit a Mercedes. I saw the accident in bird’s-eye view and knew I had hit the front right bumper pretty hard. When I had cleared the bridge I stopped and ran to the car, which was totalled. I pulled her from the wreck and held her in my arms, asking if she was all right. She appeared to have several scratches and cuts but otherwise was fine. I carried her to a Starbucks and we got to talking. We were sitting at a round table and a couple sat at the table adjacent.

I told her about the dream-within-a-dream earlier, but I realized I shouldn’t tell her I had been having sex or feeling breasts, so I stuttered and told her the woman and I had just walked around the neighborhood and talked. My audience was obviously bored and the guy at the next table uttered something sarcastic that could’ve been part of their conversation but seemed more like an opinion that the subject of my dream-within-a-dream was quite boring.

Towards the end of the night Jennifer and I were visiting our lady friend’s job at a school or institute out in the country. I had been up for days and stank horribly so I took a shower and this segued into a road trip with some buddies and were were drinking some strange beer out in some remote desert valley. The trunk had a few cases of it and I helped myself to a can. At a lookout point a truck parked nearby and some Asian boys climbed out for a view. The whole bed of their truck was neatly double-stacked with perhaps a hundred or so miniature kegs of so many different brands. While I chugged my one beer I remarked to someone that they had way too much beer but were obviously on some serious bender and would probably be on a fender-bender at some point. As we drove on I fell asleeep in the back seat listening to my MP3 player.

I dreamt we were all at some friend’s house and someone suggested we all clean it for him. What’s very strange is that we poured bags and bags of dirt on the floor and proceeded to vacuum, at ludicrous speed, all the dirt and trash from the floor, fully expecting that the owner would arrive home from work at any second. I was washing the fridge down when I realized I could do this better in the bright lights of a car dealership, using some reddish radioactive liquid. So I drive to a Nissan dealership in San Diego and washed the fridge down in the last few minutes before they closed. The fridge towered to the ceiling at one point as I admired the fine job I had done.

When I walked out into the parking lot I couldn’t find my car. Indeed, I couldn’t even remember what it looked like, except that it was blue. I ran around amidst the cars on their lot in the darkness. Some employee laughed and called out that I wasn’t looking hard enough, insinuating he knew where it was. I yelled at him, calling him an asshole and telling he should tell me before I get annoyed enough to go find him and beat it out of him.

..And those were the words on my mouth as I woke up from the dream-within-a-dream.

iStab 2.0

2009-04-15T01:20:00.000-07:00

Dream | April 13, 2009

Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this psychotic dream I had... wouldn’t you rather hear about that sexy dream yesterday where I banged that hot girl and woke up stiff and throbbing? Well, unfortunately I checked some box in this blog’s settings that indicated I wouldn’t be posting any sexy content, so let’s hear about the bloody stabbing dream instead.

Actually the only part I remember is the very last segment. The rest of the dream involved some trade embargo in a South American country. Ships couldn’t enter the harbor and I was dispatched to some warehouse to resolve the matter with the president and prime minister. Talks broke down and became violent.

I remember picking up a butcher knife from the table and stabbing the prime minister in the chest while the president reeled backward and shouted something. As I yanked the knife out the victim drew a gun from his bloody coat and pointed it at me. I either grabbed it from his hand or knocked it out because it clattered to the floor and I swung the knife at him again. He turned and ran out the door and I thrust the knife into his back a couple of times as he leapt a brief flight of cement steps and sprinted across the parking lot along the side of the building. As he crossed the road I caught up to him and stabbed him a couple more times in the back but he jumped a few feet ahead and clambered up a chain-link fence and into the scrubby jungle beyond.

My diplomatic tactics were counterproductive.

A shot cracked and I turned to see the president right behind me. Fortunately he had missed. I dodged around him as he charged. As I fled across the parking lot he fired again but I was weaving back and forth in a chaotic way.

When the gun ran out of bullets I woke up sweaty and groggy.

Margaritas with Layne

2009-04-11T16:35:00.000-07:00

Dream | April 11, 2009

A Friday—my very last day of work. Tomorrow I was leaving for Hawaii. I needed to get my plane ticket.

Downtown San Diego. I was working for Layne Womack of International Office Supply, which had actually been in Mira Mesa.

A little background: Layne Womach gave me my first big break by promoting me from Graphic Designer to Print Production Manager and about doubling my salary. He'd come in during the night shift and I'd be working furiously away on the Docutech. Years later I came back to thank him but IOS had folded and was long gone.

Back to the dream. I was scurrying inside and out of the building, presumably taking care of some last-minute business. At one point I was at the curb admiring a red vehicle parked there. I think it was a Honda CRV. Not a car I would normally be interested in, but in the dream I wanted to buy it. A cute girl came out of the building and I asked her how much it was, how many miles. Eventually she told me it was a ‘94 with close to 200,000 miles on it, for $1800. My interest went flaccid at that point so I thanked her and went back inside.

Layne was relaxing on a large, comfy sectional couch watching TV. In the background the song Angelhead by The Supreme Beings of Leisure. We discussed what should be done with all my work—so many files! I suggested copying it to a hard drive and he suggested we have some margaritas, which sounded like a great idea. Rooting through the freezer turned up a bag of frozen strawberries. In the fridge some banana-orange juice would serve as a base. On the counter was a blender with a glass carafe.

The conversation turned to dinner and the choice between chicken and fish, both of which were in the freezer.

While I was mixing Layne came over and produced a tray like a flat baking pan which had a large fresh fish on it. It had been cut from nose to tail along the belly line, gutted and spread open like a book so that its fillets were the thick halves. Let’s read up on fish, shall we?

Layne said it was a tuna but I countered that it was a halibut for reasons unknown.

An idea came to me while looking at that unusual fish presentation. Aliens abducting humans and preparing them in such a way for consumption. A vision of an angry housewife searching for her husband. She peeked under tents and then stood outside a dance hall with a rolling pin thinking he was dancing with another woman. Eventually she conceded that he had most likely been captured by aliens and eaten.

But I acknowledged the idea was cliched. Even though I hadn’t told him what I was thinking, Layne agreed the idea was stale. Another idea occurred. Humans abducted and their knowledge drained from them. They were returned to earth without the ability to think or comprehend, mentally retarded quite severely. Nobody knew what they had gone through. Nobody suspected aliens had been involved until one victim’s MRI revealed the sophisticated pattern of the brain drain. The involvement of some higher intelligence was theorized...

I still hadn’t finished making the margaritas. A layer of ice cubes had mysteriously formed on the top. It was too high and would spill. The blender wasn't working. It was unplugged. I plugged it in and was about to push the button.

I woke up about then. After I finish writing this I'm going to make a margarita! Jennifer will be home momentarily and after a long day she’ll want to chill out in a tropical way.

Dynamite Margaritas

Here’s the ingredients list:

1 cup frozen strawberries
2 cups Pineapple-Orange-Banana juice
¾ cup Malibu Coconut Rum
¼ cup Captain Morgan’s Spice Rum (optional)
1 Banana

Blend until smooth. Drink until buzzed.

UPDATE: The margaritas were delicious!

Smoke and Dust

2009-04-11T02:15:00.000-07:00

Dream | April 10, 2009

I went to visit a friend working at a car dealership.

In the middle of the showroom floor he stood behind a podium with a happy grin on his face. Every few seconds he would surreptitiously bring out a big smoking marijuana bud from a shelf in the podium and take a big whiff. It resembled a sage bundle but kind of wedge-shaped.

"Hey man, put that away. You’ll get fired!" I said.

He giggled. "Naw man, everyone here smokes." And he pointed to a salesman on the floor who was chugging on a cigarette.

"At least keep it outta sight," I suggested.

Again he chuckled, and reached into a recess in the podium and drew out some object which he kept partially hidden. Then he motioned me to come into one of the negotiation rooms at the side of the room. Inside, he drew out a plate more like a flattened, shallow bowl, dusted white and containing various small chunks and piles of cocaine. A straw appeared and he sniffed one of the piles up.

His face was flushed and his eyes were red. "It's quittin’ time. I’ll see you out in the car man." He sniffed heavily and dragged his arm across his nose. The bowl was pushed into my hands and he went out with the smoking bud, leaving wafting trails of smoke behind him.

I broke up a couple of the chunks and snorted about half the remaining powder. It then occurred to me I could neither leave this evidence here nor take it so brazenly with me through the showroom, so I scanned about for something to wrap it up in. A pile of newspapers caught my eye. I snatched up the top sheet and hastily wrapped the bowl up. Across the floor I plodded, trying not to make eye contact and probably looking very suspicious. The sales manager waved to me and beckoned me over.

"Ah, where are you going with that?" He asked. I told him it was my buddy’s but he insisted it was company property and must be left on the premises. Something in the way he spoke indicated he knew what it was and what it had in it. If he got ahold of it my friend and/or I would go to jail. We haggled briefly until I gave in and started walking towards the restroom telling him I was going to unwrap it. In the corner of my eye I saw him stand up suddenly like he was going to follow but I was already at the bathroom door.

Inside I quickly snorted the remaining coke then washed and dried the bowl thoroughly.

On the way out I dropped it heavily on his desk.

Gold Dust Traveller

2009-03-10T22:10:00.000-07:00

Dream | March 10, 2009

I was on a train somewhere in the Swiss Alps. It crawled up steep grades then whizzed along near a crystal-clear lake. When it arrived in Geneva I stood up and looked around for my luggage but I had nothing with me but the clothes protecting my skin from the chilly air. Feeling around in my pockets revealed I had no wallet or anything except my passport and a handful of golden sand.

Afoot in the city I found a jeweler who measured some of the gold dust into a petri dish of acid and stuffed a wad of Euros into my grubby hands. I promptly bought a bowl of pizza soup at an internet cafe. I tried to check my email but couldn't remember my address.

In a dusty hot desert town a man drew me a picture in the dirt depicting three primitive house graphics with a plate of some squiggly food under each. In exchange for a dusting of gold I ate like a king and stayed at his inn for three days.

Somewhere out in the wilderness and deep in a jungle valley with a rushing river I paid gold for a boat ride to the next town. Some of the gold washed away from my pockets.

It happened again when I paid for a skydive over Japan. By the time I hit the ground I was both poor and dead. I don't think I gave them enough for the parachute.

Take My Organs Please

2009-02-26T04:17:00.000-08:00

Nightmare | February 25, 2009

I was a body on a stretcher. Unconscious, but observing the scene from a detached, omniscient point of view. Two paramedics carted me into a grimy room with an operating table in the middle. An evil-looking surgeon with a face mask was putting on white latex gloves.

“Where did you find him?” he asked.

“That restaurant on sixth near the park,” one answered. “Vegetables, chicken, rice. Drank water all evening.”

The surgeon mumbled into the mask something about nice healthy organs and told them to put my body up on the table. “What did you use on him?”

“Stuff you gave us,” The other medic replied. “Out like a light.”

“One more tonight.” The surgeon said. “Now get out.”

They left and I suppose that the surgeon carved me up and sold my organs. But I departed with the medics and followed them as they shot some poor shmoe in a dark parking lot with a tranquilizer gun and bundled him into an ambulance. They took him to another surgeon who looked less evil but ransacked the victim’s body for parts nonetheless. They left again and got some woman as she walked past a dark alley. This time they blew a dart at her through a silent tube and she fell into a mess of garbage cans. The first surgeon was furious that her body was dirty and stinky, but he chopped her up anyway.

I wondered briefly what became of my body.

The next night they shot some fellow as he walked into the hallway of his building. As they were hauling him out the back door someone walked by and they told him the man had a heart attack.

They took him to the second surgeon. As the paramedics were leaving I recognized the victim. It was the first surgeon.

Note to self - Chop up and burn the body

2009-02-26T03:24:00.000-08:00

Nightmare | February 26, 2009

I sincerely wish I could remember the rest of this intriguing nightmare, but the only things I remember now are the main parts.

A best friend had become inhabited by an alien and started to act like a zombie. I got into a fight with it and it took off. A dog barked as it ran. Eventually I found my friend’s body after the alien had abandoned its shucked husk.

Just like a million cheezy films I went pursuing the alien who had murdered my best friend. Someone told me he had gone to the Elysian peninsula and in the dream I googled it and came upon a website for some online game with elves and medieval themes. That didn’t help.

Along the way a German Shepherd dog teamed up with me. I think he was the dog which had barked earlier, so I figured he could sniff out aliens. He was the classic sable color with a black saddleback, more like the standard police dog than my own Shepherd.

Eventually we climbed a stair in some remote house. Two men were talking in a large cozy room with a lively fire in a large stone fireplace. An older gentleman sat in a chair at a desk, smoking a pipe. The younger man put on his hat and turned around to start down the stairs. He got sniffed by the dog as he neared and received a passing grade. The older man smiled at us but the dog growled viciously at him. Somehow we got into a brief conversation about his misadventures in other people’s bodies and eventually I sawed off his head with a kitchen knife which appeared mysteriously. The head rolled off to one corner and the body sorta collapsed near it. I was relieved and tired, so I sat down.

But the man/alien had somehow put the head back on the body and was stumbling towards me with a psychotic grin, telling me that the body and head can regenerate together again. I began slicing at him in a defensive way, shoving him backwards when he groped at me. Finally I managed to slice his head off again, and I lobbed it into the fire, which roared to life with the fresh fuel.

The body was still active, flailing around in my direction, trying to find me. But it tripped on its own feet and sprawled on the floor. I knelt and began cutting it into slices. The meat inside was milky white and rubbery, reminding me of slicing up squid for bait. I wondered if I should feed it to some greedy humuhumunukunukuapua’a fish. Instead each chunk was thrown into the fire and I watched as they burned up. Right before I woke up I realized that I had no proof to show that the man was an alien, and I could be accused of murdering and burning him!

How to Fly

2009-02-21T21:26:00.000-08:00

Dream | February 19, 2009

I’ve had a few of these dreams where I’ve been able to fly, so I thought I’d give some tips on how to do this. All you need is a large cardboard box.

Dreams tend to adhere to some tenuous thread of physical logic, so it’s rare that I’m able to fly on my own. If I take the leap of faith I tend to do more plummeting than flying. So I find that an apparatus like a cardboard box can help bridge imagination and dream reality.

Take a cardboard box and remove the tape and staples which help keep its cube shape.
Flatten the box and you’ll have two ends with movable flaps. These are your ailerons and elevators. You only need to control one end with your hands, since the other end will be down by your feet.
You fly by laying prone on the flattened box with your hands on the forward flaps. You are now an airplane. Adjust altitude by moving both flaps on the front end up or down simultaneously. Bank and steer by independently moving the left flap with your left hand and right flap with your right hand. The set of flaps down at the other end near your feet can increase drag and are handy when you come to a landing.

One of the more recent flying dreams actually started with trying to push a wheelchair into the surf at Sunset Beach with a bijon frise on my head (I’m serious) as a sailboat went by.

It all started when I was talking with some girl on the beachside of Kamehameha highway past Chun’s Reef and we’re admiring and/or disparaging some glass apartment building on the other side of the road and how clean and modern it looks and what a stark contrast it is to the rest of the predominantly wooden residential buildings of the North Shore. Then I wander into some restaurant and a whole bunch of neighbors are talking and playing cards at a table and my dad is there and some other friends. I chat for awhile then leave, realizing I had to get back to some place to meet someone, so I cross Kam Hwy and find their house near the road amidst the Haole Koa trees.

They’re gone but their white bijon frise dog is sitting out on the porch and I believe it could get hurt or lost if not supervised, so I’m obliged to take it with me. I put it on my head ‘coz I have to push this wheelchair I found. So off I go towards the highway and the beach beyond. Over the road I go and down onto the sand and plow the wheelchair right into the surf. I have this idea that it will float and the current will take me on a leisurely tour along the coast. The water is crystal clear and a sailboat is cruising by a few feet offshore and to my right a group of people are walking into the water like a conga line of lemmings. They’re trying to walk along the sandy floor like it was a path but the shorebreak is crashing around and making it difficult. They catch a line trailing behind the sailboat and are being tugged along through the water. This wheelchair is not floating and the little dog on my head is getting uneasy, so I’m wondering if I need to lessen drag and ride the wheelchair more on the surface of the water. Thus I need to flatten the wheelchair a bit, which becomes a cardboard box that I’m trying to fly with. But it’s hard to get it off the surface. Soon the ocean water has vaporized and the sea bottom has become a grassy path instead. The sailboat and its train of people are just ahead and I’m trying to catch up. Suddenly a brisk headwind catches the front flaps and I’m able to maneuver off the ground slightly. Between the breeze and some random, inexplicable thermals I’m able to gain more altitude and speed. Soon I pass the sailboat cruising along the grassy shore and head into a jungle-like grove. I have to steer and bank to avoid obstacles like vines, low overhanging trees and a flying octopus. I remember soaring around this landscape for awhile with that poor bijon frise clinging to my scalp. And then I woke up.

Furrier than Usual

2009-02-21T11:03:00.000-08:00

Dream | February 19, 2009

In the early afternoon I laid down to nap. My German Shepherd jumped onto the bed, turned around once plumped down heavily, heaving up against my leg like a sandbag. I fell asleep almost immediately but soon sat up, kinda dazed. The bed was empty and the light had changed in a disorienting way. Jennifer came in and commented quite loudly that I looked strange. I looked down at myself and thought I was certainly hairier than usual. My chest and belly were covered with a silvery tan fur, and my arms were quite black.

“You stink too!” But then, she always said that. I buried my nose in my chest and sniffed up a cornucopia of pungent smells that seemed normal at the time – chocolate candy bar, sweaty old socks and French cheese.

“Well, I better take you outside,” she said. This made me very happy.

We went outside but she disappeared in a dreamlike way, perhaps because I was so suddenly preoccupied with the distinct reality from my senses. The wet grass smelled rich and earthy. A hummingbird buzzed through my brain like a helicopter. In the apartment complex behind our house someone’s footsteps echoed on cement steps all around my head like a crazy drawing by M.C. Escher. A strange peachy face stretched by as if distorted by an amusement park mirror. It took awhile to pass, its mouth and eyes spanning the whole walkway so I shouted something but it came out as a growly bark.

The light had changed. The sky was brilliant blue but the houses around were in shadow. Next to a doorway near the street corner a yellow bulb glowed.

I woke up and my dog was snoring nearby.

Shipwrecked!

2009-02-21T11:02:00.000-08:00

Dream | February 16, 2009

As far back as I can remember I was part of the crew of an old galleon way out at sea somewhere. Morale was low and the crew was planning mutiny against the captain, who was supposed to be a sour but just man who only makes a brief appearance in the dream. Actually there are two ships and the captain is on the other a few hundred yards away and the substance of the mutiny is to butcher this ship the crew is on and then hijack the captain’s ship and then finish the job by sinking his ship with a cannonball from the other. So the crew is out and about tearing apart the masts and deck. And I’m like I don’t think this is a good idea. They leer at me and suddenly they’re all aboard the other ship lobbing cannonballs at this ship and I’m stuck here with the captain. He’s not doing much but resigned to his fate, and a nasty explosion tears up the ship. Flying wood and debris scatter everywhere and I’m in the choppy sea, struggling through the smoky chaos, groping for planks.

Somehow I gather a few pieces together and bind them with greasy rope and find myself sitting down on my makeshift raft out in the great expanse of the sea. There’s nothing around but endless horizon and rough seas. Nearby a tiny boat floats by made of a drinking straw formed into a triangle with the ends fitted together. It has a tiny straw mast with a plastic sail. But it’s making better time that my raft, so I grab it and hold it up in the wind hoping to make use of its awesome sail power. Within minutes an island comes into view. I paddle for it but it’s just a tiny sandbar about a meter in diameter with a couple of pine trees not more than two or three feet high. In the middle of the island is a tall cylindrical glass with a ring of dried milk at the bottom. I throw it out into the water and sit down in its place. That’s it. There’s nothing else to do. On either side are these little pines and my feet are in the brief shallow area before the land drops off to extremely deep. Night sets in and the water level rises while I try to sleep. Soon the island is two feet under water and I notice a shark is swimming around sniffing at my feet. I kick at it and it goes off for awhile. I have no idea what’s going to happen but the nighttime segment of my dream goes on for a bit with the dark unknown ocean all around.

In the early hours of morning I notice movement and noises nearby. With more light comes more detail. There’s land! A sandy beach with ironwood pines. A group of guys are working on the shore a few hundred yards away. Moving boxes and chatting in some language. I shout to them in English where am I and can they help me get off this island. They look at me quizzically so I try the same phrase in Spanish. They’re Mexicans readying boxes for a ship and one shouts back that I’m close enough to swim, which produces a group chuckle. I realize that I have drifted within a few hundred feet so I jump off the sandbar and swim for the shore. Mysterious dark coralheads move about below me and the water is murky but I keep swimming. I wake up right before I reach the beach.

Brad Pitt at Waimea Bay

2009-02-21T11:01:00.000-08:00

Dream | February 1, 2009

Before all this I was a French teen in the 17th century and my father had just come home and we had to clean our neighborhood and I met a lovely French girl and I gave her a butterfly...

Then, after a bunch of strange random stuff, I’m on a street corner at dusk with a small group of friends and we’re hanging around a sodium halogen street lamp talking about inventions and Brad Pitt is there. I think I suggested something about a nose-related device and he elaborated on it and suddenly he’s like let’s go start a company and build that thing! And off he goes down the dark, lamp-lined street and his enthusiasm draws me after him a few paces back. I’ll never forget the animated figure of Brad Pitt about 10 feet ahead, kinda skipping along and yelling stuff out loud in a happy-go-lucky way and his personality is gushing forth in a contagious way so that I find myself hopping and strolling and dancing and skipping along in my own way. I hear the guys behind insinuate that I’m some kinda groupie copy-cat or whatever and I wonder if I just imagined that in a self-conscious way. Then I counter to myself that I have tremendous personality and I do stuff like hopping and jumping along in a free-spirited way and that I cannot let them damper my enthusiasm coz that’s how I normally am, regardless of whether someone has inspired me to be less self-conscious about being my effusive self in front of a celebrity.

Suddenly we’re turning a corner and Waimea Bay rolls into view and we’re on the bluff on the south side of the Valley and it’s a beautiful day with the sun shining and I wish I had brought my camera. Brad and I are walking together and talking and I tell him I dream about Waimea Bay a lot and that he was in some dream once a long time ago, but I don’t remember about what. He kinda grins and I figure he’s probably in lots of people’s dream. Women mostly.

Now, instead of a 100-foot hike down the the shore there’s just a narrow rocky berm and the water is right there. We found a gap in the jumbled lava rocks and he immediately waded into the water. The surf rolled in and I did a shallow dive into the rocky water and swam to the right where a rocky divider led into a swimming area. The rolling waves shoved me right through the entrance and past some people but someone grabbed me and held me while I gained a footing. Brad was wading towards an inner area of a resort-like setting with natural-looking beverage bars amidst a grouping of trees. So I followed and noticed one or two of our party were also coming along through the water. In a shady inner pool a dessert bar is waiting, and I ask someone if it’s free. But without waiting for an answer I grab one of the delicious deserts and pop it into my mouth. Man, that was good! So I grab another and gulp it down. All of them were different and look absolutely scrumptuous. About to grab another I notice that each has a small price stamped into a tiny brass tag near the plate, and that an LED above the dessert bar is tallying my total, about $5.00 now. So I figure I have to pay that. I notice a ladder against a tree near the desserts and Brad is climbing up, followed by a father and his young son and daughter in swimwear. So I’m about to follow and I climb up a couple rungs but the honest side of me says I should take care of my bill first. I recite my credit card number in my head and take a guess at the expiration and security number on the back of the card, then climb back into the water and look around for someone official-looking who can charge my card.

As it turns out, this person is sitting behind a register, which is sitting on a table in the water about four feet away. So I turn around and tell him I ate two of those desserts by jerking a thumb over my shoulder at the aforementioned confections. He sits up slowly and asks me if I have some paper to add up my bill, which I do happen to have..and this paper is wrapped around another dessert I seem to have myseriously acquired. So I put it on the table in front of him and he lazily starts to tally up my bill with a pencil, working figures around the dessert item which is leaving a clear oil stain on the sheet of stationery and he’s puzzling over whether to add that piece too since it hasn’t been consumed yet.

While he’s doing that I wander off behind a cartoonish car driving down the roadway with Homer Simpson at the wheel, narrating how awesome and modern this car is, even though it looks like a 50s-era car designer’s concept of a futuristic modern car—which is to say it looks like the old Batman car with huge tailfins and rocket engine holes in the rear and it’s pink and gets 150 gallons to the mile. Homer is describing it like I’m watching a commercial for the Car of the Future, perhaps an allusion to the infamous car he helped design while working at his long-lost brother’s car factory. The car begins to pull over and along each side is a set of tentacles moving the car along like feet rather than the expected whitewalls. Just to prove how ridiculous a vehicle it is in my dream, the car begins to separate into several chunks to demonstrate its standard parking procedure. The middle half becomes a kind of crab-like utility driven by Marge in a bubble cockpit that picks up the other two pieces—one containing Homer and the other a small useless body part with classic taillights sticking out like pointy red lipstick from an applicator—and lays them on the side of the road. Smoke is chugging from the crab-utility’s vertical exhaust pipes and I think I imagined Marge smoking a cigarette like a forklift operator, pleased with the job she did.

The Shovel Made Me Do It

2009-02-21T10:46:00.000-08:00

Dream | November 23, 2008

The first thing I remember is sitting on a concrete platform next to a playground with a girlfriend and we were talking of the future, of plans and dreams and timelines. It was a bright warm day in summer, in some New England city. I remember my history was some guy who had been in and out of prison many times for various violent and non-violent crimes, and now I was on my last graces, last time I was on parole. If I did something else I would be put away for a long time. So I was on my best behavior and playing it straight.

So we’re sitting on this platform, and I’m laying down and I looking up a the sky, and I’m seeing these spots against the blue. Then I remember I had to go meet someone shady somewhere nearby. I sit up and look down the street and there’re some kids in the playground and I think I look like Dustin Hoffman playing Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, kind of a sleezy, skeezy person always up to something. If it wasn’t for her sitting nearby the parents of these children would probably come and scoop them up.

So I told her I’d be right back, and I went around the corner and down a couple blocks to where my my old Suburban was parked. While I walked it began to snow and the landscape transitioned from midsummer to midwinter. By the time I got to my truck it was heavily blanketed in snow. I was supposed to meet Tommy the dealer in the back seat to get my fix. I musta figured it wouldn’t be so bad getting caught for buying some drugs as opposed to robbing a convenience store or killing someone.

Tommy is one of those heavy addicts who sells his surplus to support his own habit. When he starts having convulsions I get freaked out coz I don’t want any trouble. He’s been shootin’ up and poppin’ down all day so when his heart goes kablooie the last thing I want is to get blamed for his death. Maybe I forced it down his throat so I could take his stash, so that’s my reason maybe they'd say.

I had just decided to turn him over to the police or hospital and play it straightforward, and they could confirm that he had overdosed, when some lights shine on the back of my truck. It’s dark so the sudden light was startling.

It was an old nemesis named Deckard. He was tall and strong and a criminal in the past who had also taken a safe route in recent years. Like that character in Usual Suspects who was always trying to go the good road and all his cronies were pulling him back. Restauranteur... you know the guy. Gabriel Byrne.

So he comes over and knocks on the window. I open the door and he says get out. He had seen what had happened. I think he wanted Tommy’s stash, coz Tommy was notorious for carrying around large amounts of stash and cash. Deckard could say I killed Tommy, so I get all freaked out and see something in the snow. It’s a short shovel with a handle. The backseat door is opened and Deckard is most of the way into the car and rifling through Tommy’s pockets. His leg is exposed so I take the sharp end of the shovel and I ram it into the back of his leg behind the knee. He screams out in pain — immediately pissed off but continuing what he’s doing. It’s a dream, so normally getting hit like that would cause him to stop what he was doing. I yank the shovel back and repeatedly hit him all the way up this leg and he crawls inside.

So I yell out I’m coming in after him to bash him on the head and I peer into the truck and he’s gone. Remember Tommy? He's still dead and slouched over on the seat. Deckard musta exited the other door, but I hadn’t heard a noise. I look around the back and see his dark footprints and blood in the fresh snow. His vehicle is turned around now so that I approach the driver's side from the rear. The rear turn signal is flashing a glowing red in the dark snowy night and I swing the shovel and shatter the whole taillight assembly into a million plastic shards. As I make my way up to the window I hammer dents in the side of his truck with the shovel and crack a side window. I’m about to thrust it through the open driver’s window I realize a woman is sitting there screaming and Deckard is in the passenger seat. I yell through the cabin that if he doesn’t get out of the neighborhood now I’ll smash the windshield and I might smash their skulls too. She’s in an insane panic and the truck just screeches off at that point and they’re off down the road.

I see them turn left at the intersection and head toward the main street that joins many areas. So I run after them, heading off at a hypotenuse through a vacant lot and past some brownstones. They're waiting at the light and talking with some local kids on rusty bicycles. Probably got axed why their truck is so messed up. The light had turned green but they were still chatting. So I run up and swing around that shovel and the windshield just implodes into their screaming faces. The kids are slack-jawed and I hear someone say that was a bad move. Maybe that was my conscience. I turn around and see a police motorcycle parked at the curb and partially obscured by a storefront corner. The officer is nowhere in sight. So I take off at that point. Plenty witnesses to a violent crime. The last straw I didn’t need. Shovel in hand I lope through the snow and disappear into the night.

I’m running across an athletic field and into a very high fence. I jump up and clamber up the chain-link with the shovel in my right hand. I jump down the other side and find there are two more high fences like that one. So I climb those too and finally jump down into a dark forest and I’m running and running and running and realize it doesn’t matter how far I run they will catch me. But I’m still running now across farmland and into more woods. Eventually I run all my energy out and collapse on the snow. All I have left is the shovel which I should’ve ditched along the way since it was the weapon.

I open my eyes and see spots across the sky. Blink and they’re gone. It’s warm and the sky is that bright blue. I’m laying on the concrete platform again and she’s saying something. I wasn’t really sure if all that had actually happened. Was it a dream inside a dream? The shovel was lying by my side so I knew it had happened and I wondered should I stay, should I run? The dream faded at that point.

Creepy October Landscape

2009-02-21T10:44:00.000-08:00

Nightmare | October 25, 2006

There was some other stuff before this, and suddenly I’m flying over a dead city landscape like New York. I fly in and land in a creepy field with dead trees. The earth is dead and dry-looking in empty greyish-brown sepia tones like an expensive gothic horror film. I’m wandering in this desolate landscape with my mother, and we’re walking to a dark cluster of buildings near an old dusty road. They look abandoned for centuries. Dead trees with scraggly black branches lean in close to the buildings, making it even darker as we walk past their facades. Between the ancient brownstones is an alley. I stroll up to it and peer in. It is pitch-black.

When I look back my mother is gone. Only the desolate landscape and these creepy buildings. I had the feeling she had been drawn into one of the black places by some evil force. I ran around screaming Mom! Mom! and rushed blindly into the inky darkness several times in a crazy search. But I could not go inside those buildings! I ran down the road screaming into the night. The road went around behind the buildings and down a long way to meet another road. I ran down in a madness and turned left and eventually I was on the far side, behind the buildings, looking down towards where we had first approached them.

On the road was my mother, walking slowly and kind of bent over. Her arms are folded in like she’s cold or in pain. When she gets close her arms unfold and her hand is deformed. The actual hand has been sawd off at the wrist and she has a rusty ol’ mechanic egg-beater affixed to the stump much like Captain Hook might have had if he really was a cook. But in a nightmare this was frightening and creepy. I remember feeling sick for my mother, and that I had some part of it because I had lost her back there and now she had lost some vital part of herself like her soul. She had a stunned, empty look on her face like she had some horrific experience and would never fully recover. I cradled her and we were walking along the dusty old road again when I woke up.

Snakes in Her Stomach!

2009-02-21T10:41:00.000-08:00

Dream | November 16, 2008

It all began as I was walking across a parking lot much like the one in front of Fujioka’s (now Malama Market in Haleiwa). At least, that’s as far back as I can remember. It was late afternoon. I walked by a 6-foot pole or pedestal in the middle of the empty lot upon which a very large brown rat was perched. Normally I operate under the live-and-let-live rule (except for cockroaches, which I will go out of my way to kill in some inhumane way) but in this dream I had the urge to find a baseball bat or long stick to knock that thing off. Across the lot was a lit restaurant with some people sitting at outside tables. Musta been Kua’Aina. As I neared them I saw they had a German Shepherd and a couple of other dogs hanging about, and I went over to talk to them and pet their dogs, mentioning that my own dog was similar, except for more silvery grey. About the same time I described the huge rat on that pole or narrow pedestal out in the lot, and began looking around for a stick or something, which I found after a brief search. I think it was a 4-foot dowel about 2 inches in diameter. It was getting dark fast so I whistled for Windsong so she could be present as backup. We strolled back but found the rat was gone, but a sudden hissing growl near my feet startled me and I could hear some creature scurry close by in the dark. It sounded more like a possum though, and I wondered if it would bite.

So I continued through the parking lot and met up with a guy near the front door of the supermarket. Somehow it had gotten much lighter, as time is fluid and subjective in dreams. This man was working on the engine of a small plane, much like a P-51 Mustang or a monoplane version of a World War I biplane like a barnstormer, but half-sized, like a home-built model. He was telling me about how he built this for his son ‘coz when he was in some enthusiast’s club as a child he had built and flown airplanes, and now he wanted his son to have the same experience. Somehow the venue behind us changed and now we were at a beautiful beach house much like our house at Sunset Beach. He took his son flying and this dream story overlaid upon other events in the dream so that two parallel, interwoven stories were happening at once. Rather than confusing you with this, I will relate his story first and then the one about the snakes in my sister’s stomach.

So he takes his son flying. At first I thought they would go together, with him as pilot and the son in the back seat, but for this first flight the young son (maybe 10 years old) was the pilot and his dad was hanging by a couple of ropes below the aircraft as it did acrobatic maneuvers thousands of feet above the ground. I’m inclined to believe that his seat had fallen through the bottom of the fusilage and he had grasped the ropes just in time. Or maybe there were no seats because the son could look straight down below his own seat and see his father dangling there, screaming his head off to land this damned aircraft right now! But they were high above the sea and only clouds and miles of endless water could be seen. But the son obliged and dropped down to the surface, submerging his poor dad at high speed before ducking into a low cave or tunnel and narrowly missing huge pipes going every whichway…

So when the plane goes into that low cave, I was out and about on the deck of the house on the beach. A family was relaxing and playing on the deck with the beach and the ocean beyond, and I was interacting with them in some way when my little sister Robin showed up. We were talking and eventually I was tickling her in the neck then chasing her around the deck furniture making pinching motions and playfully poking her ribs. At one point I poked her in the stomach and encountered a hard, plastic like resistance. She said something like be careful! It was still healing. I asked her what and she told me she had surgery to remove snakes in her stomach. She pulled her large shirt over her head. Beneath, she was wearing wearing a bikini as she often does, and I could see a grey metallic-looking plate wrapping across her abdomen. She peeled off one side and revealed a scabby red mess. It was almost like the internal organs were visible. Something in there was wiggling. I reached out and tugged at it. It was a baby snake, more like a large bluish worm. I managed to pull it out a few inches but Robin said a doctor should probably do it, even though it would probably come out easily. She said the wound should probably be sterilized immediately afterwards or it could become infected.

I asked her about the other snakes. She told me they had been buried after removal and showed me a place in some soft dirt where the snakes were. We began uncovering them slowly and I saw a reddish-orange corn snake at first and commented that while it was not poisonous, it was still not something you wanted in your stomach. One by one we uncovered a whole lot of them buried in a shallow hole. Brownish yellow snakes, black snakes and so forth. A blue snake eventually turned out to be a pair of folded jeans. When we finally uncovered them all I counted 11 snakes, not including the blue jeans. Apparently it was some serious operation. It was about this time that the plane swooped down over the sea and drowned its pilot’s dad in the water. Robin commented that she should go to the doctor to have the final snake removed and so she left.

I realized I had some work to do around the yard, like get rid of some green waste. So I dragged this pile of coconut palm fronds down the road with a bunch of branches, scrap and junk piled on the back. When I arrived at the place I was to leave it at, they said they didn’t want it. So I dragged it back along a wide sandy sidewalk to the house. When I got back home there was some guy who looked like a very young Steve Guttenburg sitting on the pile and I knew then why it had been so hard to drag back. I shooed him off with some insults I won’t repeat here. By that time I was pretty hot and tired, and the ocean was very inviting. The shorebreak was crashing on the beach and the water looked crystal-clear and very refreshing. I wanted to run out but I had keys to the house in my pocket that I had to ditch somewhere. I contemplated throwing them under the door or hiding them somewhere but thought someone might be able to retrieve them somehow. There followed a difficult search for a place to put the keys that was so boring it eventually woke me up.

To the Bottom of the Ocean in a Minivan

2009-02-21T10:36:00.000-08:00

Dream | November 14, 2008

It was about noon on a bright sunny day. We all climbed into the minivan. It was me and four Asian friends: two girls and two guys. We had spent the morning at the beach and now we were on our way to our next tourist stop. I sat in the front passenger seat and one of the girls was driving. In the back, one of the guys was fiddling with a camcorder and holding it like he was filming. On our right the bright golden beach was a thick line between us and the brilliant blue sea. In front of us was a zebu. It was blocking our way.

“I’m gonna ram it.” The driver said. I uttered something like “Ahh—” as a prefix to I don’t think that’s a good idea but she was already cranking the steering column shifter into drive. Her face made a determined look. The minivan rolled forward slightly. The zebu turned its head and looked at us prosaically.

Since our focus was on this animal obstruction we didn’t see beyond it, so when she gave the vehicle some gas, the zebu casually strolled out of the way and we saw that we were on a rocky bluff that sloped steeply down into the ocean. In my mind’s eye I saw a far-away, silhouette-style side view of our minivan driving briskly over the edge and down into the ocean. But in my actual eye I saw the vivid blue sea rushing up towards the windshield. A short drop and we plunged into the water.

Now, normally it would probably take a minute or so for the van to fill up with water while it floated and everyone screamed and tried to escape. But in the dream we hit the ocean fast and kept right on going!

Very suddenly everything was blue—a magnificent, cystal-clear sapphire blue. The rich undersea world was all around us. We were descending very rapidly along the sheer cliff face of the continental shelf. Clumps of coral whisked upwards. Curious colorful fish darted about.

Although I was still in the minivan with its panicking occupants, the vast blue space filled my vision and consciousness. It was just me floating down, casually watching the scenery as the dark void drew me down into its depths. We must have descended a hundred feet or more by now and I still couldn’t see the bottom.

A rocky outcropping with intricate strata rushed by very close. The water had become cobalt blue. Details were becoming indistinct. The world felt dark and claustrophobic.

I’m not sure if we ever did hit bottom but at some point I was free and pumping my arms in a frantic effort to swim to the surface before my air ran out. The faint sparkling surface seemed hundreds of feet away. All I remember of this time was the brilliant blue sea getting lighter, the drop-off nearby, the heavy thudding of my heartbeat in my ears, and the endless struggling and struggling. Near the surface I was getting more and more desperate. My lungs were about to burst or collapse.

I broke the surface with a great splash and a gasping breath. Waves were crashing against the rocky shore nearby and a surging current was sweeping me around the point and into a wide bay. At the last moment I caught the edge of a rock and dragged myself onto its shallow concavity. For the first time I wondered if my friends would make it.

Within a few seconds one guy thrashed up, and then another, sputtering and wild-eyed. The current pulled them in my direction and I reached out one arm to grab his. The other guy managed to find purchase a few feet farther down from us in a rocky recession. The girls had just emerged from the depths. A weary breath of relief went around in our group.

Despite coming up last, the girls fared the current better and were able to climb up on the rocks in an ideal spot, near a natural stairway up the rocky bluff. Us guys however, had a bit of a time clambering around on the sharp, slippery rocks. Eventually we all made it up and stepped, dreamlike, into the front door of a large house where I assumed my Asian buddies were living. The girls were already in the showers. While we waited I noticed one guy was messing with his camcorder and I remarked that he should put his footage of the whole nightmare up on YouTube and he’d get a million views within a couple days. He pumped his fist and said something like YouTube was gonna be his best friend. Behind him was an open bathroom. In it was a tub where I thought I could at least wash my grubby feet. I took off my wet clothes and sat down on a chair, completely exhausted. The whole ordeal caught up to me and I dozed off.

Fast Food Joint

2009-02-21T10:33:00.000-08:00

Dream | September 18, 2008

I was working at a greasy fast-food joint. A work buddy had been disgruntled for awhile. At one point he disappeared, so I went outside to look for him. He was out between the shed and the main building, pouring gasoline over a beautiful burgundy Cadillac convertible parked there.

“What ya doin man?!” I asked

“I’m done with this place! Pissed off good! Can’t take no more of this shit!”

The manager appeared suddenly. “That’s my car!” He didn’t seem angry. Rather he seemed surprised and confused. “What are you doing man?” I’m not sure why we were asking him “what?” when “why?” might’ve been a more appropriate question.

My buddy resumed his rant, mostly about how pissed off he was and how he hated the place. Being oppressed. Called the manager the Man and so forth. Etc etc.

“What I ever do to you?” Said the manager.

At that point my buddy struck a match or clicked a lighter and threw it into the back seat of the Cadillac. The flames exploded suddenly and coughed up a mushroom cloud. But they burned down quickly, so my buddy threw the gas can right into the flames. A loud explosion and the fire leaped out and started burning up the adjacent buildings—the restaurant and the storage shed.

I think we left at that point. We went looking for another job since I presume we were both fired.

We walked around a bit before choosing one particular place. Some kinda burger-and-taco joint. It was a real mess, and super busy. There didn’t seem to be any staff either. Customers were just waiting around and a whole lotta people were inside eating. In a side room the manager was doing something personal like reading a book. We asked her for jobs. She said yes. We were hired.

We quickly discovered the register was broken. We had to take orders by hand and tally up the amount. My buddy was in charge of making the food.

I started scrawling orders on sticky notes. The menu had all sorts of crazy names that quickly became confusing. I didn’t organize the orders very well, my notes got shuffled, nor did I record whether they were paid or not. Random people seem to be paying me for various things, and random change was given. Some of the notes were given to my buddy to fill the orders. Very soon we were amidst a greater chaos than we had come into and exacerbated dramatically.

The manager sat in her office, completely oblivious. I think she was counting her money at that point.

I don’t remember if any orders got filled, but my buddy was running around in the lobby and kitchen, carrying stuff, and looking very busy. Maybe he was trying not to get stopped by customers. They began to pester me about when they were gonna get their food. People started to ask for refunds, but I couldn’t remember if they’d paid of not. Lots of people were raising their voices. It was getting loud, noisy, hectic. The rising din of angry people became a heavy, rhythmic, pulsing symphony which segued into an urgent steady bleeping sound and I realized my alarm was going off.

The alarm meant it was time to sleep for two more hours. I quickly sunk into another dream...

Short Dreams

2009-02-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

The Earliest Dream

Nightmare| c. 1985

I was about 8 when I dreamt this. Its impact reverberates still.

Ropes all around me. Thick, heavy ropes, holding me tight so I cannot move. I’m in the middle of a huge ball of rope as gigantic as the earth, with ropes stretching across the universe. It’s crushing me tight, the insane feeling of claustrophobia is overpowering. I struggle and flail about, going crazier by the second.

I wake up thrashing and knotted up tightly in my blanket.

Football Teams Play Badminton

Dream | October 19, 2008

I had won some prize where I got to play football with two major NFL teams in an exhibition game. My dad was there and he thought that was pretty cool, but I thought he was more the kind of guy who could appreciate this sort of prize.

During the game and I seemed to be playing all sorts of positions randomly. Once I fumbled the ball when it was thrown to me and the second time I threw to someone who wasn’t ready. So during a break I was telling the team members that I hadn’t played in a while and that I needed to warm up and practice for a bit before I could play a game. Like maybe even just jog for five minutes. But in fact I hadn’t played since high school. They seemed to understand and the quarterback suggested we play something else. Someone suggested tennis or badminton, so we all walked down the road to Mokuleia and set up a badminton court in the grass in front of the cottage. But the nets were setup poorly, with various nets criss-crossing and nets against trees and so forth, so that a couple of players were between trees and bushes and had trouble participating. The game itself was also totally chaotic. Add to that a wind was blowing in from the ocean and causing the shuttlecock to go every whichway.

We convened again and discussed playing tennis instead.

Beer ATM

Dream | August 20, 2008

We had to take an amphibious taxi along a rocky shore somewhere in a psychadelic landscape. But I had no money. So I ducked into an underground garage with stalactites hanging from the ceiling, to locate an ATM. I found a bank of machines adjacent to a car repair garage. Inside, a couple of mechanics sat around an old disassembled car. I slipped my ATM card into one of the machines and tapped at some buttons. A heavy clunk sounded inside the machine, but it wasn’t giving out any money. I stood there scratching my head.

Then I turned around and asked one of the mechanics if the ATM machine was broken. They sat there chuckling. I turned back and noticed a silvery can in a dispenser tray on the front of the machine. I pulled it out.

It was some cheap domestic beer, in a short 8-ounce can. Apparently it was a beer-dispensing machine. It never did return my ATM card.

Only One Room

2009-02-21T09:59:00.000-08:00

Dream | October 17, 2008

I dreamt it so it didn’t really happen. If it did happen then I’ll probably be carried of in the middle of the night and all traces of my existence will be thrown into that bottomless pit in the Nevada desert.

I think I was walking Windsong (my German Shepherd dog) through a tenement neighborhood where Jennifer and I lived. In front of our house was a nice grassy spot with a tree in the middle. We laid down for a bit on the green grass and I scarfed some chicken. Soon some older neighbor lady came out and sat down nearby for a chat. Then Jennifer showed up and took a nap on the grass too. It was a sunny day, nice and warm, and perfect for an afternoon snooze. The neighbor lady left at some point after commenting that we were right on the street and she didn’t like hanging out here too long ‘coz it was so public.

So Jennifer and I went to our building and went through the front door. We opened up the wrong door somewhere and were inside a small room with one man in a uniform sitting in from of a huge monitor that covered one wall. Behind him the back wall was covered with smaller monitor, blinking lights, and data panels with information displayed on them. Jennifer asked him some question but I was distracted by an email being shown on the gigantic monitor. Something about the middle east and the text was silly and obviously some kinda code for a terrorist operation or plan. The man had typed some notes at the bottom about his interpretation and so forth. It dawned on me that we had stumbled upon some secret government room where officials read mail, scanned emails and listened in on phone calls, and processed all the data. I thought there must be thousands of these rooms all over the nation or the room and that we were all being constantly surveilled.

We were making movements to go and the man looked at us ratherly sternly, not smiling or making any attempt at a courteous goodbye. I was concerned that we’d soon be unpersons. So I said that we won’t tell anybody what we saw here, but I did have one question. I asked him how many of these rooms were there in the world. And he said flatly, there is only one. As if, there is only one and don’t you forget it.

So we left. I suppose it could have been a security room for the building. But I didn’t believe that. I wanted to write about it but was afraid of the consequences.

We walked up several flights of steps and exited through an elevator door into a vast warehouse filled with shelves of goods. Down the main aisle we walked. Jennifer got to talking with someone at the corner and I noticed that the man had been talking to someone on a platform on top of the wide shelves. On the platform was the room with the government surveillance man at his computer monitor. There were no walls or other devices this time, except for some other computer equipment on his desk. He had a view of the whole warehouse up there and he was surrounded by dry goods and boxes that were stacked around on the shelves.

I left Jennifer and walked down towards the fruits and vegetables. An Armenian guy in his twenties was talking on the phone, bragging about all this freshly sliced fruits and vegetables he had. Indeed, he was sitting within the display of fruit and hovering over a large half-crate of sliced melons, apples, etc. I sauntered by and grabbed something akin to a canteloupe or a fat cucumber that had been sliced in half and was deformed so that it had a natural hole in it where you could hook your thumb through to grab it as I had done. I wandered back to Jennifer but realized maybe I was being rude by taking the man’s stuff, so I went back and asked him. He was still on the phone but said it was no problem, go for it, take it man! He even offered me more and started to walk me back towards Jennifer. As I came near her she was very excited and grabbed me by the arm, pulling me into an aisle. All around us were bottles of wine and liquers and hard liquor. She was saying something about picking out some wine when I noticed a small group on people farther down the aisle, gathered around an older lady in her 60s or 70s. She had a leash attached to some gigantic animal as big as a rhino but resembling a boar. I was not so startled at first until I made the connection to the man-eating boars from the movie Hannibal. This one could’ve eaten this whole crowd if it wished. Large tusks curved from its ugly jaws and it was snorting and snuffling at me. I realized it was very interested in the fruit/vegetable thing in my hand. It was kinda nudging hard in an aggressive way, shoving me backward and chomping at my hand! So I threw the fruit/vegetable thing down the aisle away from me and the boar started to go crazy, angrily shoving people around and snorting and huffing and puffing, trying to get that yummy thing it wanted. We ran out of that aisle and down the main aisle, still hearing the strange mayhem behind us.

A shout went up on an aisle parallel to ours, perpendicular to the alcohol aisle where the boar was snorting and screeching still. Some tall guy with a bushy afro was appraoching that aisle, but it turned out to be some wrestling contest with some other competitor who was hoist up on his shoulders and flung into a group of running people, scattering them like bowling pins. As I came nearer I could see dazed people on the floor in contorted positions, while other wrestled around on the floor. And still I could hear the boar crashing about and snorting.

Then I woke up thinking that since it was a dream, I could actually write about the secret government rooms where they surveil people. So tell the people!

Secret Meeting

2009-02-21T09:54:00.000-08:00

Dream | October 8, 2008

Palestine or Israel… a beaten-up town somewhere. Bombed-out buildings with dead-eyed windows. What was I doing here?

At some local party I got into a conversation with a friendly Jewish man. He kept hinting he was part of some secret organization and got me curious enough to want to check it out. So he invites me to a meeting.

So we go to this house back in some cramped neighborhood. People hustle inside from alleys in front and back. Inside are tons of people, talking in low whispers in a conspiratorial way. When I get there the atmosphere becomes more festive and people are having fun. I hang out and cruise around for an hour or so, and then I head out with my friend, get into a car and he drops me off somewhere.

Something else happened in the dream and a brief time passes.

Then I’m coming back to the party with the same guy. This time the atmosphere is tense and heavy, like some serious militant operation is being planned or actually happening right there. Many people had guns. In the bustle I lost my friend.

I did notice that there were a lot of Arabs and less Jews this time. In fact, it did seem like the ratio was shifting every minute.

Soon there were shots being fired and people were shouting and screaming. From the main rooms I got lost down some maze of corridors and back rooms with all these crazy sounds around me and suddenly I was out the back door into the alley. Through the windows there were children and teens with semi-automatic rifles climbing in through the windows and I scolded them. But they just looked at me like I was an idiot. It suddenly dawned on me that the meeting had been infiltrated and a grassroots raid was occurring. I stumbled toward the mouth of the alley where the parking lot was lit up with a harsh white light.

As I emerged onto the parking lot I had the feeling someone was waiting for me just behind the wall to my left, so I put my hand out and stopped some woman who was about to jump out at me. She had a pistol and was pressed flat against the wall. I suppose they were screening people who were leaving.

There was a waiting car with the door open and some armed people inside and they were just looking at me in a strange way and the whole situation was very freaky. Other people milled around in the dark edges of the small dirty lot and watched. The guy in the front passenger seat which was nearest to me was holding an AK-47 pointed in my general direction. For about 5 seconds I stood there unsure if they were going to shoot me or what was going to happen.

Suddenly they called out my name. Yelled it out into the parking lot. I said, that’s me.

They pulled me inside the car. The engine roared and the guy in the front seat fired his gun back towards the house as if to cover their getaway. Despite the fact that it was being fired a foot or so from my ears, I was more concerned about the two armed people on each side of me. The car peeled out of the parking lot. I felt like some journalist who was being escorted from the scene because I wasn’t involved and they were like, just get him the fuck out of here!

Down a dark highway at night. Several hundred yards in front of us, lightning struck a telephone pole and it came crashing across the road. Could’ve been hit by a rocket launcher. We swerved and narrowly missed it. The road began to curve and slant sharply as drove into a mountainous region. When I say slant, I mean like at a 45-degree angle so that when I looked level out the left window I was able to see down a sheer 500-foot drop into a valley where the ocean crashed onto a beach and a prehistoric mammoth grazed on Naupaka shrubs. It was like driving on the Kalalau trail along the Na Pali coast.

But the road leveled out and we came to some high-tech corporate office building which reminded me of the library at Torrey Pines High School. A few of us went inside and it was very airy and spacious. Broad windows on beautiful scenery, modern office layout and aesthetically pleasing interior design. I suppose we were stateside again, perhaps even in California judging by the style and scenery.

So were went to work doing various things. The guy who had sat in the front seat was using a pistol to shoot out holes in some chunk of plastic so he could keep bullets in it. So I went on a rant for a minute about masking tape – what a great invention it was, how you could wrap a whole bunch of bullets in it and shove it in your pocket and how you only had to unwrap one end and you’d have a bandolier of bullets when you needed it. He was pretty stoked and said that’s a great idea and now I don’t have to keep this plastic shit in my pocket.

And I wandered off down the halls of the building through a sea of pastel-colored cubicles.

Jennifer was there and she had won a free dinner pass, probably ‘coz she was so hot and sexy. But I didn’t rate as high so I had to get some kinda certificate from somewhere and exchange it for a free dinner pass. In doing so we met some guy in his office and I asked him to evaluate my website and give me feedback. He was happy to oblige so I showed him LeadingEdge.com the Flash site I developed.

In his office he had a huge glass screen which was a monitor. The site came up and transtioned from the spinning globe as viewed from space as it currently is on the home page, to this amazingly complex circular city with extraordinary detail that was slowly spinning in a precision coordinated clockwork motion and revealing more and more detail so that its realism was increasing exponentially as this website video began to fill the room and unfold its curves and shapes out into the room, still cast in the reds and warm oranges of the site. And I was explaining to the guy in the office how much work this website had been while slowly realizing that this extensive animation and video had been developed after my portion of the work was done and I was marvelling at how much extraordinary work Leading Edge had done. The vast circular city unfolding out into the office like a spiraling dragon had a surreal translucency that passed through our bodies as it expanded.

Somewhere among all this spectacular vision a love story was unfolding between a man staying on Earth and a woman who had to go off into space for a job, and this was all occurring inside the website which now filled the office we were standing in and everything was happening all around us and we were in it as if the city had become the place we lived in. We were there by the pool of a futuristic house where the man in the story pined away for his woman. And we watched as she returned from outer space and they were reunited and happy. The End.

J.Su set me free

2009-02-21T09:51:00.000-08:00

Dream | October 14, 2008

As early as I remember I was in a low canvas tent on some desert beach. Guards with rifles hovered nearby. Did they know I was there? At some point I leaped out and ran down along the seawall about 100 yards before they shot me in the calf. I must have blacked out, or time skipped forward. The bullet had been removed and the hole roughly stitched up. As punishment for my brief sprint they had used no anasthesia for the operation and now I was waiting for a severe beating.

The long room was mostly dark and lit by only one harsh bulb at each end. I was chained to a chair which was bolted to the floor in one corner. In the far corner a man in a similar chair was being savagely thrashed by an officer. The victim’s face was bleeding from various lacerations and several feet of duct tape had been wound around his head to hold a gag in his mouth. Both his eyes were puffy and blue. The officer circled and delivered blows calculated for maximum surprise and damage. My turn was next.

A door opened in the wall and a dim light shone in. In strode two guards flanking another prisoner shackled hand to foot. They sat him down and locked him to a chair near mine. He was very still and had a strange peace about him, like he was having tea with an old friend. As he sat down our eyes met and he grinned a friendly, benign smile showing two rows of perfect teeth, much like you’d imagine the Dalai Lama would smile.

One guard left and the other stood over his ward and watched him like a hawk, rifle across his chest.

Something familiar about this man’s face. A dozen blurry or grainy surveillance photos came to mind. A dossier somewhere. It dawned on me slowly. His name was Robert Morrison but I knew him better by his code name J.Su. He was about as Irish as kim chee. Free agent. Supposed to be very, very quick. But looking at him sitting perfectly still I never would’ve guessed. In fact, despite the severe beating occurring just a few yards away, he seemed to be meditating, with one hand cupped over the other in his lap, and eyes fixed on a point on the wall.

The man being beaten was screaming into his gag now, a muffled, grinding howl of pain. The guard was distracted momentarily and a most amazing thing happened.

J.Su stood up very suddenly. One second he was sitting still and exactly one second later he was face to face with his guard. I saw the lap shackle fall away in a dreamy slow motion. A sparkle of metal flicked from his fingers. He had been picking the lock with a piece of a paper clip lodged under his index fingernail. From under his shirt cuffs he drew out the broken end of a plastic knife. His hands thrust up and grasped the guard’s neck firmly with one hand and swiped the serrated edge of the blade under his chin with the other. The guard seemed to be paralyzed, unable to breathe, writhing slightly but not crying out or fighting as one might expect. In fact his body seemed to have gone limp and was only being supported by the iron grip on his neck. The blood ran down between J.Su’s fingers. As he dropped the guard he seized the weapon from his rubbery hands.

It all happened with a few seconds. The distinct visual and heavy thud of the dying guard’s body hitting the cement floor caught the attention of the officer beating the other prisoner. Before he could pull a pistol from his holster, J.Su turned and fired the rifle from the hip. The officer’s head exploded and his body was thrown violently backward to the floor.

J.Su turned and smiled at me again. A pleasant grin for old friends. More tea?

Then he was moving swiftly. Keys from the dead guards unlocked our shackles. He did it with a strict precision, wasting neither step nor stance. Can you tell I was in awe? Sure, he was setting me free, but so gracefully!

The beaten man sagged with fatigue. But once freed and standing over the body of his antagonist, a new vigor possessed him. He gave the dead officer a single hard kick in the head which sent blood and brains splattering against the wall. Then we were moving.

Instead of leaving by the door through which we had come, we climbed an iron ladder bolted to the wall behind us, opening a thick manhole with a heavy wheel lock. J.Su went first, poking the rifle up through the hole as it opened. A shot was fired before I even got to the top.

We were standing on a tower, with the spectacular panoramic view one might associate with sudden freedom. The sky was blazing reds and oranges. Into the ocean the desert sun melted, casting everything in a warm, golden glow. The beach and a high wall topped with gun turrets and razor wire stretched off into the distance. Except for the dead guard on the round platform we stood upon, the landscape was empty and desolate.

J.Su had slung the rifle over his shoulder and was climbing over the edge onto a narrow ladder running down the side of the tower. It would be a long, tiring descent. My leg ached in anticipation. But I was gonna run again and this time they wouldn’t catch me.

I peered over the side. J.Su grinned up at me as he climbed down. Just like the Dalai Lama.

You Should be Dead!

2009-02-21T09:43:00.000-08:00

Dream | June 14, 2008

As far back in this dream as I remember right now, I was kid, maybe 12 years, on a highway in the afternoon. The highway slopes through a shallow valley or gorge, like Kaukonahua Road meets Farrington Highway, heading towards Pa’ala Kai Market and Hale’iwa. I think I wanted an ice cream bar. I remember craving one, and Zeca was with me and we were scheming something. We had found invisble cardboard boxes embedded in a low sky. They’re supposed to be filled with ice cream bars or ice cream candy bars or something. They’re above me so that their contents would fall on me if this was at all logical, but they’re empty, except for one, which had O’Henrys. As a teen I had gorged upon them after one Halloween. The O’Henrys spilled out on me but the bus is coming over a low hill and I’m near a bus stop and the driver will stop and scold me, so I shove them back inside and close the hinged doors of the box in the darkeing sky before the bus comes and runs me over.

The dream shifts in that lazy, blurry way. A car passes on the road and I’m in my ol’ T-bird and I must be in college again. Some girlfriend is in the car with me (she reminds me of a disheveled Cameron Diaz from Being John Malkovich) and we’re driving along this highway and I think I have to be doing homework in my car or something. So we stop into a gas station. It’s dark by now and the lights of the station’s mini-mart are shining bright. For some reason I think there is a third person in the car, like a friend of ours, but I’m not sure.

So we pull in and park next to the mini-mart, and I go inside. The guy behind the counter is sort of dumpy-looking with a belly who might’ve ridden a Harley at some point in his life and still wears a greasy vest over a grubby shirt. He’s balding, jaded, and chewing on a toothpick, just eyeballing something or other in the store. As I’m walking in another car pulls up out of the corner of my eye and parks across from us, but at an angle facing the entrance to the mini-mart. I can see a couple guys inside. They look crazy, like white-trash skinheads who’d rob a gas station mini-mart for fun. As I’m walking in, one of them, a gnarly looking guy who doesn’t look too bright but does look very dangerous and very probably psychopathic, gets out of the car and is coming in behind me.

So I’m in the middle of the store and I’m about to turn into one of the aisles to get whatever I’m here for. As I turn, some crazy old bag lady with dirty blonde hair and weird shit draped around her body (like a hose or some flexible pipes, sheets or shredded clothes, and other indiscernible junk), pulls a gun and screams something about a holdup or gimme all the money or something. The skinhead guy behind me stops, like he was gonna do the same thing but is unsure now that someone else is already doing it.

The guy behind the counter is unfazed. He’s actually annoyed. “I told you midnight!”

She lowers her gun with a confused look on her face and kinda meanders out of the scene. She probably didn’t know what time was anymore.

All this was rather surprising to me, so I turned around and left the building. The attendant was saying something terse to the crazy skinhead guy that I only partially caught and don’t remember now.

I walked back to the car and said to her that the place had almost gotten robbed and that it might happen at midnight. “The attendant is probably sick of working there and wants a cut if he allows people to rob the place repeatedly.”

“I wanna see!” she says. She gets out and we take a few steps towards the door. For some reason I was thinking time was gonna go back to the first time I walked inside, or perhaps that time would lurch forward to midnight when the deal would go down.

But neither happened. Instead, about twenty red-uniformed Canadian bicyclists pulled up and were crowding into the building through the double doors. The crazy skinheads picked this exact moment to start opening fire outside as they tried to rush through the door. It was some sort of weird chaos and as we bolted back to the car bullets were whizzing everywhere and even along the side of the car so that I couldn’t open up the door for a second. People were scattering everywhere and there was shouting and general noise.

We jumped in the car and I fumbled with the keys, hoping they wouldn’t shoot my windshield. The car was firing up and I jammed it into gear, it lurched forward but I was giving it too much gas and there was that annoying lag for a few seconds as the engine sputtered and we seemed to slowly turn out of harm’s way before the gears caught and the engine surged. Then we were peeling out of the lot and down the dark highway, heading back the way we came.

We were yelling to each other in joy, having escaped that weird scene. Something like, “We did it! We got away!” And then I said (very oddly) “As long as there’s just the two of us in here!”

That was when the crazy skinhead lunged his head between us from the backseat. One eye was squinting evily and he looked angry with his ugly profile. He scared the bejeesus out of both of us and she screamed loudly. We were still speeding down the highway and she was saying, “We’ll get you a car. You don’t need to come with us!”

He said something like, “I’m gonna need a gun. You got a gun in this car?”

Why would I have a gun? “Naw, I don’t have a gun” I said. But my hand was busy in the center console. I did have a gun. A gun I had fired earlier, at some point in the dream, or maybe that was a new memory I had just conceived. I had even put a few .22 bullets in it from a box. I remember.

It wasn’t in the center console, it was between my legs, nestled down in my crotch! How did it get there? How many bullets were left in it? I took a chance and pulled it out with one hand, trying to find the handle in the darkness by feeling it, and trying to hold it properly so I could aim it at this guy in the backseat while speeding along a dark road. Did I even have my lights on?

I found the handle, I aimed the gun at his greasy forehead, which sloped back and gave him a primitive look of nihilistic insanity. He didn’t seem to comprehend what I was doing for a second while I squeezed the trigger.

But at that angle it was hard to hold the gun straight and squeeze the trigger, so I pulled the hammer back and squeezed again. The gun went off in the direction of his face and the noise was pretty loud in the close quarters, but his face was still intact. I squeezed again and again, two or three shots, then empty chambers clicking. Fuck!

He said something but I didn’t hear because I slammed on the brakes and skidded off the road. We hadn’t even stopped when I turned around and began hitting him in the forehead with the gun as hard as I could, over and over again.

“Hey don’t do that man,” he said.

“This isn’t right!” I shouted. “You should be dead!”

Then she said something like we looked good together. Like we were a team or something, and this was the beginning of a movie where we would become buddies and have all sorts of crazy adventures. Me being more rational down-to-earth guy, and he being the violent psychopath. Odd couple of the post-apocalyptic wasteland. I was waking up now and thinking that it had been turned into a cheezy sitcom.

A Dragon Named Moby

2009-02-21T09:37:00.001-08:00

Dream | August 23, 2008

I was a dragon named Moby who hung out on a ship’s mast. I chased away any crazy creatures which attacked the ship, or helped fight pirates and that sort of thing, though I did suspect that the ship I was attached to was a pirate ship, or perhaps some sort of merchant vessel.

Most of the time my tail was wrapped around the mast and my head was up around the crow’s nest. Life was pretty easy.

The crew was complaining about some rather large fish that had taken up residence underneath the ship and were disturbing its progress through the water. They told me to go investigate, so I dived into the water. It was very dark under the ship and it took awhile for my eyes to adjust. Suddenly a huge eye opened and I could see the gigantic black shape of a whale! But it seemed rather benign and moseyed off before long. The pressing concern was a huge, vicious fish that became clearer to me as my vision improved. It snapped at me and made aggressive moves as I swam near the keel. It seemed to be as long as the ship and was nestled close to the hull like a pilot fish under the belly of a shark. This was certainly what was causing the erratic course of the vessel, and thus it was my task to get rid of the nuisance.

Of course, under water I could not breathe fire, and during the dream I don’t recall ever doing so anyway, but I did have some sort of sharp spear that protruding from my pointy and almost tube-like mouth, so that I could inject this weapon into the fish and other adversaries. With this I attacked the fish repeatedly and succeeded in driving it away from the ship and ultimately killing it. Toward the end of the dream I recall feasting on huge portions of cooked fish, curiously with a fork, until I woke up.

The day before this dream occurred I had heard Moby’s Porcelain.

In my dreams I’m dying all the time

Perhaps this is where the name Moby came from. I had also looked up the animated movie Fantastic Planet, which featured a dragon-like creature chasing the Oms.

Summer and I make a pizza

2009-02-21T09:26:00.000-08:00

Dream | July 2, 2008

Summer and I were wondering what to make for dinner. So we looked in the fridge for what we could use. There was a bag of shredded cheese, a bag of shredded sausage, some tomatoes, a pizza crust, a jar of olives and some bell peppers.

And we’re looking at all this stuff wondering what to make, what to make?

And then it dawns on us—pizza! So we sprinkled together a pizza. While it was cooking in the oven I dozed off in a bed near the stove. The kitchen had become somewhat transparent and the room I was actually sleeping in had become more real, but I’m still dreaming. Dreaming about sleeping.

When I wake up the pizza has been taken out of the oven and put on the kitchen counter, and it’s cooled down and looks like it has sat for a couple hours. Summer is not around, and the pizza is still intact. So I start eating slices and wondering why Summer didn’t eat anything. But while I’m eating there’re these blurring motions around the pizza box and the pieces start disappearing rapidly, like Summer is whizzing in and removing them at high speed, or I’m moving in slow motion.

Then I think I dozed off again, or maybe I woke up and started dreaming another dream about some guy I hired to erase the cover of a magazine with some kind of precision metal brush. When I came back to pay him, he asks for $30, but all I have is a $5 and a $27 dollar bill. I ask him whoever heard of a $27 dollar bill? I give it to him and then realize I also have a normal $20 bill and give that to him instead. Oddly enough, in the dream I thought $5 and $20 made $30, but he was happy and left. When I got back to check on his work, he had created this highly detailed artwork instead of erasing the photo on the magazine cover. This girl and I were critiquing it. I think she was Malia from grade school. I always liked her. We start to clean up this warehouse-type place we're in and this guy comes along (I think he was a manager there) and tells us about this video he has which is about fishing.

So my dream goes into his video. I’m fishing and I catch a lioness…

Catching a Lioness

What was the dream about?

it was a dream inside a dream

and i was fishing and had caught something in a lake just like the one near Crowbar Ranch

and the "fish" was pulling me all over the lake

i was in a flat skiff so i was just wizzing over the surface holding the fishing rod

and i was up ahead some bump in the water that was the thing i hooked, that was pulling

and as i was reeling in and getting closer i realized it was a lioness wading through the shallow water about 15 feet off the bank

i had caught a lion!

as I pulled up and got out of the boat and walked up i saw it was caught in her eyelid

but she was still trudging forward

i got up close to try and get it out of her eyelid and she turned around and growled and made an aggressive move towards me

so i spoke calmly but firmly in a soothing deep voice, please let me take it out

and she allowed me to work it free, even as much pain as it was causing

so i finally got it free, and she seemed rather pleased

but within the next minute she started to shrink to the size of a cub

and then started to look like a kitten, playing around in the shallow water

just kinda splashing around happy

and right before i woke up i thought, that's so cute!

Zeca and I, Stealing a Van

2009-02-21T09:15:00.000-08:00

Dream | February 16, 2008

Zeca was in my dream. We were in Sunset Beach or some surreal place, hanging out and hitchhiking I think. Whatever it was, we were picked up by some guy in a white van with a grey logo graphic on the side that I’ve seen somewhere. The driver looked like Steve Tilford next door. On the way up Pupukea Road he started harranging us and accusing us of being fucking faggots, etc. At some point we overpowered him and forced him to stop the vehicle halfway up the road about where First Alapio is. It’s dark and we can see the lights of Sunset and the moon on the ocean in the background. I dragged him through the side of the car and we beat him severely as he lay on the asphalt. Then we threw him in that cement ditch and took off in his van. We were pretty high on the adrenaline of the thing and realized we had just stolen his van, so we schemed to dump it at Kaena Point.

We drove into the Mokuleia compound to get my T-Bird. Zeca was beginning to annoy me by being rather uncooperative about getting rid of the van. He jumped into my car even though we had agreed he was to drive the van. Maybe I was just shirking responsibility but I owned the getaway car so I was gonna drive it. Get out! I forced him out of my T-Bird and he got into the van. When we pulled out of the driveway I rued the idea of the stolen white van being seen leaving our property. We headed down the road and for some reason stopped in at one of Zeca’s friend’s house halfway to the point. The house was dark and eerie. It looked abandoned for years. I noticed my tires were extremely flat so I went in, creeping from dark rooom to dark room and finally asking a couple of children where was the next gas station. Three miles?!

When we got back outside the van had become a school bus. Zeca asked where the fuck did this come from? Okay, let’s just get rid of it. We drove through bumpy dried mud road on flat tires, edging between fast and slow motorists, finally seeing the gas station appear brightly through the darkness. We pulled in and searched for the air hose, finally asking the attendant. There it is, she said. So I pulled my T-Bird over and they asked if I wanted the works. Naw. But for some reason they were already doing it.

Some guy in a police detective uniform appeared through the mist that movies usually have in this situation. Kinda like dry ice vaporizing on the tarmac. He said your buddy Zeca had stolen a vehicle and I was an accessory. I went back to my T-bird, intending to jump in and drive away but the maintenance hadn’t been finished yet. I woke up about that time and don’t remember if we got away…

That one about the beach in Mexico at night

2009-02-21T09:10:00.000-08:00

Dream | November 4, 2007

We’re walking though the desert, a bunch of us, and the path has all sorts of eroded rocks and water-carved formations close by. We’re on an excursion, and it’s Mexico I think. We’re heading out into the desert, presumably from a large city like San Diego. We get to some kinda visitor center or a set of buildings next to the ocean. It’s nighttime by the time we get there and there are already a couple small groups out there. Most speak Spanish and I get to practice on some fine Mexican girl. The group eventually gravitates out to the front area of the main building. It’s sandy and the sound of the ocean is nearby. The sky is filled with stars. We’re talking and I’ve made friends with some folks who lay on some towels or blankets nearby. It’s very tranquil. There’s someone parachuting and we are able to see him close up as he descends. He’s fit and muscular because we can see this. He’s got no shirt on and looks like He-man. He’s an actor they say and he’s playing a he-man in this current role. I jokingly say the opening lines from He-man, by the power of Greyskull. I am Adam, etc. He grins and knows where I came up with that.

There is a counter in front of us (suddenly) like a concession stand in a movie theater lobby, just sitting in the sand on the beach. One of the guys next to me has a few gummi bears left in his bag. He hands me a couple bags of gummi cokes. One is coated in sugar crystals. I pick them up and tell the world in general that these are my favorites when I do eat candy (which is very rare).

A room has formed around us on the beach and there’s a simulated jet airplane segment behind the counter and on the left are the sounds of people and equipment. I wander around the counter to see the segment of aircraft (just a few windows and the tube-like fusilage). The sounds of people panicking, screaming. It’s a movie scene and they’re filming a crash sequence. I realize I’m in the line of sight of the camera. I can see the director and cinematographer. I slink back to the right side of the counter and there’s more equipment in the room now. Wires dangling, booms, and camera-cranes and such. Most of our excursion group is gone, but Adam is there doing some task. I go over to where the directors are behind the same, talking while the scene is being played out. It’s rather continuous. The plane goes down into the ocean and little dolls (the people in the plane) fall into the ocean and bob to the surface again. I apologise to the director but he waves it off with an “it’s okay but please shut up so we can finish the scene” look. They explain it’s a digital camera and they can easily remove me in post. They say it’s a cinch but they haven’t seen the recorded “film” yet.

The scene is now a deserted island with the segment of plane on the beach like “Lost” and a couple of scraggly survivors (a bearded guy and a woman). Then it’s a jungle scene, presumably later. Adam is running through the jungle like Tarzan, escaping something like a monster of some sort. I realize I might be in the camera’s sight again. I duck under some equipment but the he-man guy jumps over the counter and sits right down on me, still acting his part. He’s supposed to be hiding. He farted briefly but I cannot smell it.

Then we’re running through the jungle. We come upon some indians but somehow get away and find some kinda treasure (we know it’s the indian’s treasure) in a horse-drawn cart. It’s the classic chest of gold and jewels. I wonder why all the pretty jewels and gold are not amongst the indians and why indians would pile it all together like this. Adam sends off the cart along a dirt road into the forest but it comes back along a loop road. We head off into the forest, now on horseback. I think I’m on a white horse. I can see myself, like an actor in a film. And then, instead of Adam, it’s Anita and I, on foot, and we’re looking for land. Some land her family owns. We’re in some New England state and we come over a hill in the forest and there’s a river just a short descent down. Across the river is a hilly meadow of grass and groups of trees. I can hear the ocean and on the way down the slight hill I see the ocean and horizon. I call out to Anita it’s a great spot for a house. Right here. View of the river and ocean and the meadow is your front yard. Beautiful. I ask anita who in her family owns it. It could be worth a fortune with a house. It is worth a fortune right now, undeveloped. Anita wanders off and is gone.

I’m sitting on the back of the river, looking out at what I see, describing it to someone on a cell phone. It’s amazingly beautiful, picture-perfect: vivid sky blue from a dark to magnificent cyan, crowned with fluffy, clumpy clouds. The ocean is green blue. The trees and grass are green and exquisitely detailed. A perfect scene. Suddenly a few flakes of snow. I joke to the person on the other end that it’s a perfect scene but there’s snow, a strange juxtaposition. Suddenly the sky gets darker and clouds over quickly. It looks like the onset of a storm or some rainy weather at least. My lone horse is across the river in a group of trees. I run over there and ease up to it, letting it smell me and get comfortable. Its name is Umer or Urmer. I can smell its distinct horse scent. An overturned metal rowboat is nearby. About 10 feet long and good for shelter from the rain. I grab Urmer’s rope and lead it over there, securing it within reach as I lift up the boat enought to crawl underneath. It’s a little heavy but I manage to wedge underneath as I hear voices. Strange voices or several men on horseback, approaching from across the river the way we came. Friend or foe? Who knows. Wonder where is Anita. Has she returned with them? We’re somewhat hidden and the gathering darkness helps. Max the golden retriever suddenly appears and scrambles underneath the boat despite my protests. Wet dog! I wonder if Anita is close by because her dog has shown up. Urmer is somewhat restless so I tug on its rope to gather it close, but the voices and noises are dying away. I think I woke up then...

Dennis Hopper and the Mysterious Actress

2009-02-21T08:54:00.000-08:00

Dream | November 7, 2007

First thing I remember was walking through the hallways of an office building. I had come to visit my bank for some reason and since there was a long line at the bank’s door, it looked like I was gonna stand in line for quite awhile. This is boring, so I got onto my bicycle and kicked off down the halls at a reasonable speed. This being not an ordinary building but one manufactured by the dreaming mind, the hallways were very convoluted as if designed by M.C. Escher — normal at first but having all sorts of interesting ramps and stairways and courtyards that make for a pleasant bike ride.

So I’m riding around and people are standing in lines here and there and I might turn a corner and the hallway might wrap around a large square stairwell that rose from the floor and people would be forming a line that curved around it and essentially filled up the hall. But remarkably, at no time during the ride did I collide with someone coming out of a doorway or standing in line. It just worked out that way I guess.

Okay, so turning a corner the hall ran alongside an open area and I came upon Dennis Hopper standing in the hall, watching a TV mounted to the opposite wall. In the open area people were sitting about watching the tube. I recognized the movie.

So I said, “Hey, you’re in this!”

He grinned and said, “Yeah.”

Then I rode on. This is where I got some random girl to take off her shirt and give it to me. She was standing there in line and I stopped next to her. For some reason I imagined that we had met before and exchanged shirts for some reason and that she still wore mine, even though the shirt she had on was clearly a girl’s shirt. She refused to give up her clothing and started to walk away. I followed on foot, insistent. My bicycle had disappeared and replaced by two feet. We turned a corner and came into a courtyard with plants and a policewoman. I got her attention and told her this woman had my shirt. She assessed the situation and asked how I could prove it was mine. I pointed at the shirt and the words Tony Romano printed clearly amidst some cheesy graphics of a green meadow, blue sky or something-or-other. I said my name is Tony Romano. The cop then ordered the wearer to take off the shirt. The girl made an exasperated sound as she breathed out and pulled the shirt over her head and handed it to me. It promptly disappeared as things in dreams often do. She was attractive but very thin. In pulling off her shirt she had swayed so that she was just behind the cop and so all I saw was part of her body and her blue bra. What a gyp!

But I had gotten my shirt, so I kicked off again on my bicycle. Down the crooked hallway again.

Once again I came upon Dennis Hopper standing in the hall watching a different movie this time. In it he was driving along the banks of a lake in some strange vehicle shaped like a shallow teacup without a handle, so that it looked like he was piloting a flying saucer.

And suddenly we were there, on the shore of that lake. With us was some famous actress who I recognized in the dream but I cannot remember her name now. She has a prestigious beauty and sexuality which is aging well. She was sitting there and we were conversing about various things and I marveled to think I was just sitting there with them conversing about various things. I asked Dennis what it was like driving that crazy vehicle that looked like a teacup. It was a movie prop but still musta been fun. The vehicle came along the bank as a tiny model and I picked it up and flipped it over, dumping out the tiny Dennis Hopper who had been driving it. Inside and the underside showed no indication of how it worked. There was no space for a motor or propelling device for land or water, so I dropped it.

We were watching the shore and a small group of some indians or other wandering souls were walking along the far bank. Beyond was a forest and the low, late sun filtered through a glade. A few of the people were herding animals that resemble llamas and the mysterious actress pointed to some birds that milled around the llamas’ feet and expressed surprise that all the birds were pregnant, which seemed odd to me because birds don’t get pregnant. They just lay an egg and be done with it.

For some reason the conversation turned towards holiday cookies or desserts or something. The mysterious actress was suddenly standing at an oven there on the bank and talking abut how she and her family grew all this stuff as she pulled a plate of fruits from the mouth of the oven. On it were mountain apples and I told them how I loved them. Still not sure why she was pulling fresh fruit from the mouth of an oven, but hey, it’s a dream.

Turning slightly I noticed a new man sitting on the bank with us, looking a bit like Jeremy Irons and I was sucked through his eyeball into his flashback where he was playing Superman, powerless against a plague of poisoned food around the world. The flashback started with military jets bombing a giant grey mound with the green neon words “Poison Food” on top. The bombs seemed rather ineffectual and Jeremy was hovering in the air having some sort of fit like a frustrated rage. At that point there was a nuclear explosion that utterly destroyed everything and blew me out of the dream world and into my bed, wondering what it all meant…

Peeing in Public

2009-02-21T08:35:00.000-08:00

Dream | November 4, 2007

I just woke up from a dream. It rained hard last night, all night, soaking the ground thoroughly. Jennifer stayed over until after midnight, then I drove her home in the downpour. Perhaps the torrential flooding brought on an especially strong case of needing to pee while sleeping…

After a surreal dream of walking along intricate stone avenues through a Mayan jungle landscape of emerald-cut mountaintops or overgrown, geometric temples. A post office with dense surrounding trees sat in the middle of an ancient plaza. Soon the sky covered over and I found myself in a crowded mall. Fascinating people swarmed all around me. Quite suddenly the urge to urinate was extremely strong. So I turned towards the plants and outer wall and whipped it out. Only for a second I pissed before I realized I could get arrested, so I zipped up and tried to melt into the teeming masses. Near the exit two cops rushed towards me, one tackling me to the ground while the other covered me with his pistol. Damn — I was getting arrested for peeing in public!

Handcuffed and clad in some strange iron shoes with a chain between them, they escorted me to a quiet corner of the mall and we were seated at a round table with a man in a brown suit and tie who looked more like a police detective.

He asked me what I was thinking but I was quiet for awhile. I don’t remember feeling the need to pee at that point.

Then I said, “Did anybody witness me peeing?”

“Several people reported it.”

“Did they see what I was peeing? Maybe I was peeing blood? Maybe I have a serious internal hemhorrhage and I could die if I didn’t pee?” I felt like a lawyer defending a client, cooking up some baloney argument to instill doubt.

“Why didn’t you use a restroom?”

“I couldn’t find one anywhere.” Actually I hadn’t even looked. “No restaurants either.”

At that point they decided to let me go. A look went around the table and I knew. The detective tossed me a set of iron keys to the cuffs and shoes. Taking off the heavy metal shoes was rather complicated, with overlapping clasps and such. While I unshackled myself, the other cops disappeared. Handing the key back I told the detective that normally I would never think to pee in a crowded mall. He asked me why I did it. I looked at him and said…

“This is a dream. You’re in my dream. Soon I’ll wake up and go back to the real world.”

He smiled at that and we stood up together. He looked very much like Matthew McConaughey. From nowhere he produced a book like a boat catalog. He leafed to a page with a nice fishing boat and told me how he used to dive off the back of a boat like that one when he was a kid. I smiled and told him I used to do the same. My dad is a fisherman and I grew up on boats. He turned to a page with a very smooth-cornered boat with a purple jaguar-patterned paint job. I made an appreciative sound. I really just wanted to go. Since our conversation had petered out, I turned and walked away.

Then I woke up. I had to pee real bad. I lay there for a minute thinking if peeing was a phone number, mine had an extra three digits at the end. For a few minutes I looked at that phone number in my head and thought it looked like an international number. If you have to pee that badly, don't do it in a crowded mall.

The one about those crazy suits who were gonna shoot me in the head

2009-02-21T06:50:00.000-08:00

Nightmare | March 10, 2007

I’m on my way out when they grab me and push me down into a chair in the vestibule. Beefy guys, black and white suits, black sunglasses. Identical-looking guys. Police or security or special agents or whatever. They want to know why I was taking this bag I did not walk in with. I say…

“So it told you I had made friends with this guy. Knew he was some sports star like basketball or baseball or something. Everyone knew he just partied now and did lotsa drugs. I was at his house for some mellow party and got to know him and later came back for visits. He’s just a really cool guy and easy to talk with. Lots to say but also listens too. And we’d just sit around and chat. So i brought those computer parts a few days ago and and we talked about upgrading his system. Now I show up and he’s dead and everyone is wearing black and whispering about how he died in some weird way and that creeps me out. I just wanted to pay my respects to a guy I was only beginning to know, and on the way out I see that bag of parts. I pick it up and you guys go nuts! Okay, maybe they could be his but what would he need them for now? And I prolly got receipts for all this stuff anyway. I wasn’t here to steal! Maybe I woulda taken something more valuable than a bunch of old computer parts! Hey stop that! Fuck man!”

They were shoving me now, both of them. Shoving straight out with both palms, like angry robots. The first shove sends me flailing backwards and falling hard against the closed door. I get up and push the door open and they shove me hard again and I stumble through the door and fall on the cement skirt, still clutching the bag of parts. They are marching after me, shoving as they go, crazy looks on their face. I throw the bag at them and scream something and just sprint in terror for my van parked along the building.

The hot dirt and gravel crunch under my feet. I can hear them behind me. I’m sweating now. I yank open the van door with a slippery palm and jump in, fumbling the key into the ignition. The van coughs to life and I stamp the gas to rev the engine as I crank it into drive. In the rear view mirror I can see one of those suits pulling a gun from his shoulder holster and aiming it right at the back of my head through the rear window. He was smooth and steady with the motion, no rush, like he never misses, like he’s done it a thousand times and can do it in style now. The van is tearing up the dirt now but only slowly moving as the wheels spin. He’s aiming the gun at my head now. I can feel the sweat pouring down my scalp. The other guy is just standing next to him with a fierce look on his face. They are framed in the mirror. He is about to pull the trigger. I’m about to die.

“I got my first yes!” she screamed. I am suddenly, violently awake. Anita is running around like a headless chicken squawking about getting a first yes and the horrible nightmare is still fresh on my mind. The guy was going to shoot me in the head. Blood and brain all over a shattered windshield. Anita comes running back up to me and yells into my face that she got her first yes. Apparently this was about signing on a new distributor and would be a good thing. And I suppose that waking me up from that horrible nightmare was also a good thing.