Dream Log: October 27, 2000

If I keep having these goddamn dreams about horrible things whizzing inches in front of my face I'm going to get sued by Hunter S. Thompson for copyright infringement.

I've been having too many of those "startle you awake" dreams that usually involve falling or something like that. I think the killer bats are just an extension of that.

I had another about salting a coke machine which I haven't done for at least five years. If you're not familiar, back in the day squirting a large quantity of salt water into the dollar slot would often make it empty it's contents. Yes, I was dumb and yes, it did totally destroy the machine. This dream also startled me awake because the noise was so real. Salting coke machines is also very noisy. The machine goes crazy and empties itself out in a matter of minutes. The weird thing is that when I woke up my ears were ringing.

In the dream, I'm walking with Chris. We're dressed in full ninja regalia and we're trying to get into the Radiohead / Beethoven concert. It's in the big circus tent and for some reason the only US appearance is Punxatawnee.

We use our grappling hooks to scale to the top and repel down into the center of the stage. Johnny Greenwood gives me a high five and offers me a drink. Then, suddenly, I'm in a room alone with Thom. He says he respects me as a musician.

I look down. I'm wearing a tuxedo, replete with waiter tails.

Tom says "Listen 'ere, I'll pay you an' your wacky mate 100,000 pounds a year to just listen to whatever we send you and email us your opinions about it. If not, you can sod off."

I agree.

I'm back at the dojo. I'm training my ninja clan with Radiohead's cover of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" in the background.

My second in command is the guy from Red House Painters.

I wake up.

I'm not even a ninja.

Frisbee Sex

• I am in a large-scale paintball game where everyone has large .22 caliber rifles. The game is played out old fashioned battle-style, with two large groups advancing on each other. I've never played before and am extremely hesitant when I am forced to fire the first shot at point blank range. There's no paint so far as I can see, but at least the person doesn't fall over dead.

  Afterwards, my friends and girlfriend pile into my car to go to a party. But first we have to drop off Allen, who is driving back to Santa Rosa with his parents. First I drop off the other guys at the party then drive to where Allen's parents are with him and my SO. For some reason they're not there at the moment so we decide to visit my friend Roberto.

  We arrive at his white, country home which has no cement driveway. I am directed by Roberto and his father to drive all the way around the house once and park in the dirt near a pile of sand. Inside, we are introduced to two of Roberto's friends and two girls from UCSC, one whose nickname is Stevenson (presumably because she lives at Stevenson College. We stand around in his room for a while until one of the guy's puts on Little One by Herbie Hancock in the next room. We all go in to listen. I ask the guy and confirm that it's the Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-Sixties. My SO is apparently napping on the floor. I'm standing against the wall listening to the tunes as Stevenson begins to get very friendly. She whispers something in my ear then kisses me on the lips. Then she goes so far as to bend down and "accidently" touch her forehead against my crotch. I laugh out loud at the brashness of this girl.

  Soon after, Allen has talked to his parents on the phone and is not going with them now. We say goodbye and leave Roberto's for the party. It turns out to be quite a large gathering at a park. There is a big tented area covering a stage and seats. I look for my friends, passing guys passing a football back and forth. I keep walking and see a disc golf frisbee on the ground near a fence. I pick it up and look around, seeing another disc flying in my direction. I replace the frisbee and walk towards the group of guys I now see. Once there, they say the party sucks and they want to drive somewhere else. Fuck these guys. I'm fed up with the whole operation and turn to my SO. A fountain of love rises up inside of me. We topple over as I wrap my arms around her, kissing her neck. We hug and kiss in the grass, me on top of her, for the last moments of the dream.

• I'm watching a preview for a horror movie. The psychopath, played by an annoying popular actor, kills his victims in a giant, cheesy lasagne. They are laid out on the sauce, covered with cheese, then isolated from the others with giant metal cookie-cutter type things.

  Apparently they are baked in two stages, one of which is just enough to get them disoriented and the cheese all melty. They try to sit up and escape, but it's hard to move when covered in melted cheese. The villain laughs at them from the tub of ricotta where he's been sitting. Sharp implements: scissors, a paring knife, a scalpel - go hand to hand, people trying to cut the strands of cheese that hold them down. The bad guy laughs at them and snatches them, leaving them right out of grasp, and makes the victims watch him cut himself on his hand, around the thumb, across his palm, up his arm. The cut is rather deep: it's supposed to be a macho thing. He leers at them in a threatening and badly-acted way. Blood mixes with ricotta in a not-unappetizing way. I'm not interested in the movie.

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• I'm walking down an urban street edged by abandoned gardens, stealing ingredients to make pickled cukes. I keep dropping cucumbers: they're large, and i can only hold two under each arm, dropping one each time i reach for something else. My pockets are stuffed with garlic. Who grows mason jars in their garden? Apparently, that's popular here.

  ---

• The old gypsy woman does amazing tricks with colored string. She's really a man but wears a dead woman's face and jeans. She can make the string say words and make pictures hang in the air and light up. Her daughter kills children.

  I have to watch the old woman entertaining a young girl (maybe 13) while her daughter prepares to kill her. I can't do anything. The old woman can't find any string, she looks everywhere as the girl gets restless. Finally, when the girl isn't looking, the old woman picks up the chicken, tears its intestine out, and drops it over the side.

  She pops a tiny egg out of the intestine and passes it to her husband while she untangles her new pink and blue string. He does sleight of hand, making a tiny yellow live chick from the egg, then cracking open the live chick (making it dead) and extracting a smaller yellow wooden chick from inside it. Then a wooden alligator appears, to eat the chick.

  The old woman's face is on crooked. She starts the loop of "string" spinning and makes star patterns, rabbits, and poems appear in the air. It's really fantastic. The girl is criminally disinterested - so much so that i catch myself thinking that maybe if she can't be amazed by this she deserves to die.

Angry Poisoned German Woman

I had a bizarre and vaguely disturbing dream. I'll note, as it will become relevant, that at the time of dreaming this, I was at school at Macalester College in Minnesota, rather than my home in Portland, OR.

At the beginning, I went to a bus stop to meet up with Ralph, who (in real life) had taught at my High School until one day he stormed out of school, declared that he was quitting, and that he was going to move to Mexico and become a Salesman. He ended up moving to Minneapolis rather than Mexico. So anyways, I go to this bus stop, and meet Ralph. There is snow on the ground. I talk with him for a while, but soon his presence becomes irrelevant in the dream. I'm standing there with some of my friends from Portland, and I'm standing at the bus stop one block from my home there in Portland. But there's still snow on the ground, and I still think I'm in St. Paul.

Around now I'm developing a certain anxiety. I am in a rush. I don't have my homework done. I need to be somewhere now but I have to get there first. Apparently that's why I'm at this bus stop, but I'm not really considering that in the dream.

So the bus comes. And it's one whack-ass bus. It's very long. It's shaped like a subway train, it looks like a train, but it's on rubber wheels, going down the street. And it's sort of swerving, but no one notices. It's blue and grey. It has a low floor.

I'm obsessed with public transportation. Yes, I dream about it in absurd detail. Yes, I think about it for fun. I collect transit maps from my travels, keep my tickets, and so on.... Anyway, back to the dream....

I think that by this point there may have been some of my friends from Minnesota mixed in with the Portlanders. The weird transit-mobile stops at the stop, and we get on. But then I realize that really I should be going in the opposite direction, and I knew this all along, and it's very stupid to get on this bus right now. But I do so anyway.

The next thing I remember, I'm in my old bedroom from several years ago, and the telephone rings. I answer it, and it's a very angry woman. She's speaking German (I am beginning to learn German this semester), and I somehow know she's calling from Germany. I don't know who she is. She asks me all these questions. She asks me who I am. She asks me what I want. I don't have answers.

Now is the part when you just start knowing things in the dream. I learn that I have been poisoning people. I learned that I poisoned the German woman who called me. I learn that I've been doing this to get out of doing my homework. (No, it doesn't make sense.) My mother and my girlfriend learn this too. My girlfriend is vaugely upset, and my mom is furious with me. I'm talking with her, but she's not yelling at me or chastising me or anything, it's just that I know she's angry at me.

And then the dream ends.