You may read a legend explaining the icons here.
Emily and I were staying at a motel in McMinnville, and had gone to Wal-Mart to buy a few things. There I noticed that a purse had been left, hung on the back of the wire bars of my shopping cart. I wheeled back to customer service and tried to return it; I found that the purse was hopelessly entangled with the bars of the cart. For some minutes I struggled to free it, noticing as I did so that several other items not belonging to me had been left in the under-area of the cart.
Down on my hands and knees, clearing this material out of the wooden under-shelf of the cart, I realized that the entire shelf was lined with old faded photographs. There were glued onto the bottom and sides, and had been hidden for a long time. Always interested in old pictures I saw one of me, and one of my cousins; another of my father with his grandson, my nephew, Adam. There was a great photograph of the whole G-H-M family that I had never seen before.
With a little care the photos could be free from their adhesion. They were heavily damaged and faded, of course, but that wasn't really a problem for me; I knew with a high-resolution scan and a little attention on the computer they could be greatly restored. I collected all the photos of my family (there were other pictures of other families as well) and went outside.
The clouds had gathered so heavily it was like night, and the rain was pouring. Dad was waiting in my truck and helped Emily and I load my purchases into the back. Excitedly I told him about the pictures, and laid them out on the hood of my truck. He didn't seem pleased, somehow. I suggested that sometime years ago someone had collected a large number of pictures for reprints. The photos had been lost or stolen (I had never seem any of these pictures before). The reprints had somehow ended up in the hands of a homeless man or woman. This person had used them to decorate the under-shelf of their shopping cart which was, in essence, their home. I imagined some bearded man wrapped in a blue tarp, lying on the ground on a rainy night, looking at the pictures and stroking them with his fingertips. I was stunned by the unlikely chain of events that had brought them back to me.
My father never owned up to having lost the photos, so I wondered if it hadn't been my sister, instead. There was no way of knowing. I was still wondering as we three drove away in the truck, down the streets of McMinnville, canyon-like between the blocks of towering red-brick buildings.
I was on a tour of Australia. On the bus I found an open Zip-Lock bag full of green mamba snakes, ranging in size from garter-snake size down to worm size. I lifted it up to show people and the snakes spilled out, slithering under the seats. A man much like Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, stepped up and, with a care-free motion, flicked a couple of small ones off my shoulder. These he unceremoniously crushed under his boot. Later we were caught in an electrical storm so severe that the lightning bolts interwove, forming the rarely-seen funnel lightning. This was a hollow tube of blinding electricity that blasted down from cloud cover and incinerated everything it struck. Very impressive, although quite frightening.
Background note: The day before I dreamed the following dream, we had gotten three new cellular phones under a new family plan. My daughter was wildly excited, and I promised I would activate the phones that day, so they would be ready when she and her mother and sister went on a trip to the east coast. I forgot to take care of this before going to bed.
I was at a rundown seaside resort in California and it was past time to check out and go home. It was taking several vehicles to haul away our stuff, and my daughter had already left with someone else. The only way to get in touch with her was our cell phones. When I was ready to go I called the cellular provider to activate the phones. The representative said I couldn't do it without all the phones alongside me. I argued, increasingly desperate, knowing that I needed the phones activated to stay in touch with my daughter. He became snide, then insulting, and at last called me several bad words.
Unsuccessful and angry, I then got into a terrible fight with my father. He and a companion - a red-headed woman of middle years - were the only people beside me to remain. The fight grew vicious and hurtful and when it was over I decided that I would make them all sorry. My father and the woman went upstairs and rehashed our fight. I walked out across a wide beach and into the warm water of the Pacific. I swam and I swam, though the mild surf and out to the open sea. Then, as I knew I would, I got too tired to swim, and I drowned.
In my dream I did not experience the acutality of death. Instead, I was all at once in Hell. Hell was somehow in the pages of a New Yorker magazine. It wasn't so bad. The pages were streaked yellow and orange, like flame, but it was really a colorful and attractive layout for the magazine. It was certainly nicer than the screaming fight with Dad in a mildewy motel room. You could flip the pages and see what was going on. I began to read a story about my experience in the afterlife. It looked interesting.
Background note: In high school, two of my friends were S., an attractive girl transplanted from California, and A., a good-natured, intelligent boy from a large Mormon brood. Clearly there was a spark between them, but A. was committed to his LDS missionary work, and had a long-term girlfriend in another town.
After his mission work to Japan, A. returned and moved to the same college town as S. and myself. While he was in Japan his girlfriend had dumped him. S. and A. quickly resumed their interest in one another and soon were cohabiting. Shortly they were married, and in a few years, had a son named Z. Some time after that they divorced. Today the boy, Z., is nearly voting age; in the dream he is four or five.
In my dream I run into S. It is the turn of the century and we stroll in a park; she has her parasol, I my bowler hat. Where is Z, her son? I ask? S. relates a terrible story. A., her husband, was part of a large working class Irish family. A.'s father was the clan's charming patriarch. Shortly after her son was born her father-in-law was turned into a vampire. Once he was transformed, the rest of the family followed, including her husband. Horribly, A. turned their son into a vampire as well. Now the boy misses his mother. Even though he sleeps in a coffin during daylight hours and drinks blood he wants his mother... and his father and family are inclined to give him what he wants.
So now S. must live a day time life only. It is not safe for her to venture out after sunset, for knowledge that her ex-husband, his family and even her own son wait for her, lurking with superhuman strength and razor-sharp fangs.
I decide I will help her get her son back. We know that A.'s family now dwell in the caves and holes of a rocky wasteland on the northern coast. I load up my wagon and bring my two servants (one man, one woman) and S. We ride along the sands until we come to the area where A.'s undead family are said to reside. There we find a single rental cabin, with disturbingly flimsy walls and weak doors. It is more a shack than a cabin. We unload the wagon and prepare for night.
Night comes, and so do two brothers of A. These uncles of Z. want to indulge their nephew's desires: they have come for S. They are dressed like any working Irishman of day; a green shirt under a brown vest, blue demin dungarees, a porkpie hat set back on their heads. But when they speak, their teeth are yellow, long and sharp.
They attack, and although we fend them off (leaving one vampire "dead") it comes at the cost of my two servents. One is dead and the other has been taken to be converted. I assess our chances as very poor; the doors are broken, half our numbers gone, and next will come A. himself, and his father, the most powerful and cunning vampire. Worse yet, S. is being drawn to her son; in some way he is calling her, and she is finding it impossible to resist.
Then I woke up. :(
Aliens had taken over Tom, again. I drove to his house. Indeed, something was wrong: he was moving with slow halting steps, and his skin had a greenish pallor. A quick exam revealed an angry red pin-prick at the end of his index finger. I sat him down and squeezed his fingertip, pinching from both side as if squeezing a pimple. First one, then two, and finally three malign creatures oozed out, wriggling and curling. They were worm-like parasites, about two or three inches long, half an inch across, brown, studded with tiny bones. (They looked a lot like anchovy filets, I must admit now).
They may have looked like anchovies, but they didn't taste like anchovies when I put them in my mouth. I quickly crushed the creatures with my teeth, before they could do more mischief. I spat the pieces out into a sandwich sized Ziplock bag and sealed it. The bag now was filled with big cubes of white meat, like boiled chunks of pork loin, floating in a clear, water-like liquid. I took this with me "back" to Jennifer and give the bag to her.
I dreamed the whole family was travelling through California. We bought two houses in a small town after only a moment's inspection. Almost at once we regretted it; the houses were dumpy, the neighborhoods almost slums, and this "small town" had terrible traffic, crowded and far too fast. In fact, only moments after shouting for a young girl to get out of the street, John walked right into traffic. Instead of watching the road he paid attention only to the three brimming shot-glasses of Jaegermeister he carried and he walked right in front of a canary-yellow Hummer speeding down our street. John was hit and run over. I rushed inside and called 911. The paramedics got John back on his feet, a bit scratched and dusty but otherwise unharmed.
Our house was a big communal home. Dawn and I had rooms in the back, on the second floor. They weren't too clean and what looked like a big black mouse ran across the floor. Closer inspection showed it to be what in my dream I called a "baby fox," but really was a tiny, tiny black french poodle, complete with classic "frenchie" coiffure.
Next door Ross and Chandler from "Friends" were picking through their stuff trying to get ready for a yard sale.
The second floor was a mezzanine level and looked down on the dining hall. I stood by the rail and watched the men of the village eat, drink ale, and puff on their pipes.
Back in the shadows of the mezzanine level were very old storage cabinets. I removed the false front off a drawer and it revealed cunning little interlocking chests. The first was empty, but there was another behind it. That had very old books in it. I blew off the dust and opened the flyleaf; there was John Milton's signature, and I knew that a folio of Shakespeare was somewhere in the cabinet as well.
I dreamed that I had toured a huge mansion on a hill. Afterward I wandered down to Mindy and Tom's apartment, which sat near the bottom of the grassy hillside in the mansion's shadow.
Mindy was in a real state. She and Tom had just had kids a few weeks ago. Mindy dithered and wandered, obviously out of her mind with exhaustion. She wore a large flowing muu-muu of many colors. She had evidently delivered quintuplets. FIve little creatures so premature they looked more like shorn kittens than baby humans. They were so small I could easily hold one in the palm of my hand. They had no names, but were referred to as "that one" or "the other one, there."
One hadn't "made water" in two weeks, according to Mindy (later Tom assured me it was just two days). I agreed to call the pediatrician. Their phone books were three vinyl-bound binders on a shelf. For any number, you had to look it up three times: one book for the area code, one for the prefix, and one for the four digit number. Then you could assemble the three groups into a phone number and make your call.
I don't think I could get through on the phone. As I sat down with Tom in a windowseat, I looked up and admired the ramparts and towers of the mansion beyond the steep, lushly green hillside. I noticed that a river about fifteen feet wide and two or three inches deep flowed down the slope. I turned and looked out at the foot of the hill, where the river deepened, and many people were paddling in colorful boats. These folks were readying to boat onward to Lake Oswego, or even Portland.
1. the family is on vacation somewhere. we gather in a lecture hall that may (or may not be) on a cruise ship to listen to a discussion about the lost colonies of virginia. there are films on the subject. i slip behind the lectern and into the hall, only it isn't a hall but a gangway. then --
-- wearing full cook's whites (toque, houndstooth pants) i am working on washing pots and tools down in a galley. hours pass and i realize that everyone else has departed and the lights have been turned off. i take elizabeth and find our way to an elevator. it is dark and so small that the sides of the elevator cage press against my face and arms. the light flickers as we rise up, deck after deck. exiting the elevator we are still lost, but the sailors are all very helpful and guide us to the uppermost deck. a deck-taxi, with a very friendly driver, delivers us to the gang-plank and we debark. but we are in key west, florida, and how do we find the others? we wandered the crowded streets and go looking for people in the big aquarium.
2. climbing red hills drive up from ninth street with dawn, trying to get to my bus stop before the school bus comes. my stop, of course, is at at the top of the hill. it is hard going, as i am wearing inline skates and dragging a big, rough-hewn block of wood. can't we just wait here for the bus? no, dawn sternly says. but i look around at all the people (all adults) awaiting the school bus, one or two at the end of almost every driveway. it does not seem fair --
-- and with a rumble the bus moves ahead and i look for a place to sit. almost every seat is taken and they all look fearfully small. i drop down in the bench in front of my old friend harvey gail. groaning and grinding gears the bus makes its way through the darkened pre-dawn streets of downtown newberg. i realize that surely these people are not all going to school -- we are all adults and most of them older than i am. then i remember it's mother's day, the most romantic day of the year, the big Kissing Day. --
-- in the basement of my parent's house with harvey. i look at the new copy of the New Yorker. it's one of those special issues in which every article is about the same theme. this issue it's that kissing tribe in new guinea, the ones who have redefined for the world the power of the kiss. one article after another on this uninteresting topic and i get angrier and angrier as i flip through the pages. even the famous new yorker cartoons are all on this topic. in one, two anthropolgists (wearing pith helmets and khakhi) watch an archeologist (gazing lovingly at an old pot) walk unseeingly by two new guineans enganged in an hour-long kiss. the sarcastic aside of one of the anthropologists to the other: "delbert's certainly found true love since coming here to new eden." (you can view a sketch of this cartoon here).
but i hate this new kissing crap and throw the magazine down on the floor.
driving to the top of bald peak i find a house where a man sits surrounded by stereo equipment and boxes of records. it's not a house, i learn, but radio station 93.3 f.m. i tell him i used to listen all the time. he shows me his telescope through which he can look on the side of the hill across the valley. in real life that would be dundee hill, but in the dream it, too, is bald peak. the entire side has been clear cut, a naked and glaring wound. i use the telescope to look at the big house on the side. big is hardly the word. there are tennis courts, and terraced pools, and an airstrip with its own boeing jet. a person so rich as that would make his own rules, make his own law --
-- then i am a private detective played by denzel washington. in this movie i am down on my luck, trying to find information about the movie's bad-guy: a person so rich he can make his own rules, make his own law. this man, who is something like h. ross perot, is played by martin short in a surprising (but effective) dramatic turn. snoop dogg plays a drug dealer and sometime snitch. surprisingly i get shot about halfway through the movie and now i am watching it, surprised that a star as big as denzel gets killed half-way through. then i note that julia roberts is now the lead.
Dreamed I had been invited by Bill Gates to photograph a new project of Microsoft's. Each week the project team would mount a display of their work. I would drive to their display area, which was atop a snowy hill, and take pictures with my Olympus digital camera. The project was the creation of a new microchip made out thermally stabilized ice. The unmelting ice could resemble anything -- glass, metal, stone. It was an amazing breakthrough, but the fact that we had to drive my Fury III with bald tires on a narrow snowy road was a bit unnerving. It was especially bad the one time I let Emily drive.
Finally the project was done and my work was published in a handsome book. We drove down the snowy hill to the employee's area to look it over. Fine pictures in a beautiful hardbound book. Looking up from the pages I could see the roads that led up to where we had travelled; single lane logging roads that were covered with a sheet of ice. I watched as a Coors truck (this was Colorado, after all) went slowly up the road. Then as a pickup approached from the other direction the Coors truck had to go in reverse around a icy hairpin turn. I watched in horror, but the driver was expert.
We decided to take the Fury up the road and continue on to see where it led. On we went, past our photography area and, for the first time, going on further. As we drove down a steep icy road spring came and the ice and snow began to vanish. We came at last to the road's end, where we found a pub and bed and breakfast on cliffs overlooking a huge blue lake. There I left Dawn while I went with our host to take a quick turn around the lake in his enormous barge. The views were spectacular, cliffs hundreds of feet high towering over sapphire blue waters.
We came at last to a city, with it's crowding, pollution and noise. We went to an energy bar, where young men meditated while sipping energy drinks. A young asian man wearing a suit and tie sat in the lotus in the corner. He wore a beer hat, with two plastic bottles feeding tubes that went near his mouth. He couldn't drink himself: The ritual was that passers-by would put a tube to his mouth so he could sip some of his guarina drink, all the while without opening his eyes.
We returned to the boat and thence to the B&B. We'd been gone so long that the man's wife was icily angry, and our hosts' marriage was endangered. Dawn, however, was cool, and we left. Halfway back to our car we stopped to make lunch. I looked in the bag of food she'd gotten at the grocery store. There were some nice tomatoes, a few gourds, the head of a giant duck, and the duck's hoof. (For those who weren't in my dream a duck's hoof is the size and weight of a horse's hoof, but instead of hair sports fine downy feathers). I was peeved that Dawn had bought this, but what the hell, I figured; I can cook anything.
Dreamed I was working with my brother, who ran a law office in the Century 21 shopping center (the old Newberg Plaza). We had two clients. One was a slick-talking fellow from Portland, obviously guilty of his offence, ready to put down a huge sum for John's signing on a counsel. Unfortunately, if we got him off, it would torpedo the career of our close friend, a young woman who had just started working as a cop and had arrested this guy in what was her first collar. Neither of us liked or trusted the man, but our office desperately needed the money. As a strategic move I came into a meeting with him wearing my shirt reversed, buttoned up my back.
Our second client was an order of Islamic nuns in Malaysia who needed an attorney to deal with mineral interests in Louisiana. They sent us very interesting mail (not be a lawyer, I opened all the mail). In one envelope was a gigantic Malaysian "dollar" bill, which sported a map as a background. They had marked where they lived on this currency map.
Dreamed I was the son of a strict disciplinarian with a short temper and a heavy hand. My brother and I lived in constant fear of my father's angry beatings, although it was far worse for me -- somehow my brother was my Dad's favorite, but I could do nothing right. Only a flawless performance would spare me a beating, but my father could always find a flaw.
This life (in which I was not I, but a young boy with black hair) was, according to my dream, created in a series of novels by author Stephen King. The dreams I dreamt were the film versions. My father was played early on by Bill Paxton, and in later films by Christopher Walken. In an early movie I was played by child actor Lucas Black.
Dreamed that I was travelling from Eugene to Dundee with, among others, my neighbor Julie Christie. [Note for world: Julie Christie was my friend's name, but she should not be confused with the British film star also so named.] We were dropped with a group of other travellers into the ocean. We were picked up by fishing boats and taken to a small town on an island. There I caught a ride on mining trains with Monte. There were many others from my high school as well. We all migrated toward another town, on trains, old buses and walking along the tracks. We were amazed to see a town with a real industrial base -- coal mining, iron smelting and manufacturing. But everything was antiquated, rusted out and barely working. I rode on a train which chugged slowly along. The engineer mentioned that the train engine had been the original Casey Jr. in the movie Dumbo. Shortly thereafter the engineer gave me a small green model of a train and said it was for Julie, who worked in the town ahead.
Finally I came to our destination town. I de-trained in a vast trainyard and sought out Julie, whom I knew to be working at a cafe. The cafe, like all of this town, seemed to be completely inside corridors in a building, like the shops in Pike Place Public Market. At the cafe I gave her the model. I ordered a cheeseburger and french fries. Talking to other employees I learned Julie was going to be married, even though her daughter was dying of an incurable kidney disease. Waiting for my fries to finish I walked down to a lower level, and peered at the door to a room below the cafe. I couldn't enter -- it was locked -- but a mysterious green-yellow light glowed dangerously from beneath and around the door.
I got my burger, and gave to Julie the tiny model train. I learned that the old man was her estranged father.
At last I departed (I had been the last person in the cafe, everyone else having gone to get ready for Julie's wedding), and made my way out of the building. Finding the way out was difficult: Almost every way I went led me back to the trainyards where I had first arrived. Finally I made it out to the other side, to a catwalk above the river/sea. My route led me up a hill, down which flowed a river that descended in a series of dazzling silver rills. I climbed up through the ankle-deep water and came at last to the summit.
At this point I entered an enormous Zeppelin-like airship which proved to be from the future. In it I was cleaned up, and then I relieved myself. From where I sat on the toilet I could see down corridors. In each corridor was a monitor, on the screens of which were messages like JUNE 2003. Then the image would change and say FEB 2000. Each monitor was a different view of a different moment in time.
When done I met first the crew, then the captain. They explained (the crew with some exasperation, the captain patiently) I should not have given the green model train to Julie. By reuniting with her father she would learn that he was a organ donor match and his kidneys could save her daughter's life. This was NOT supposed to happen. They showed me the future where Julie never married, and her daughter was saved -- somehow, a future where a huge German empire dominated Europe. So I was returned to the town to prevent this from happening.
Somehow, it was too late. I was in the future of the super-German empire. I figured out public transportation, then boarded a huge yellow bus that took me to London. There I found a reunion of my high school. Monte was there again, and Annette. However I discovered all of us were there ready to turn the auditorium into a fighting machine to attack the Germans. We repositioned spot lights to act as laser cannons. Then I woke up...
Dreamed I was on an early morning walk. I started from my home on Viewmont Drive and moved swiftly across lawns and through people's backyards. At some point I began taking shortcuts through people's houses. It was early and everyone slept; I moved swiftly and without obstruction through dark bedroom and silent kitchen. I made good time, and after some hours I was walking through an airport. I struck up a conversation with a security guard, a tall man with black hair and a deep voice. "You're going to think this strange," I said, "but what airport is this?" The guard and a nearby woman laughed, but good-naturedly, and told me I was in Bloomington International. The security guard was played by Brad Garret, the tall comic who stars as Robert Barone, the brother on "Everybody Loves Raymond.". I promptly became Ray Romano and returned home to my life, which was on a sitcom in the mid 1980's. But right away I returned to Bloomington to visit my new friend. We sat in the parking lot talking while staking out a killer on the loose. As we talked, a group of old women, in disguise with large brown mustaches adhered to their lips, caught the killer. My new friend lost his job, so I, Ray Romano, asked him to come and be on my show. In the last scene he was in bed being tended by my TV wife, Patricia Heaton. Because he missed the snowy winters of Bloomington I was feeding finely crushed ice into a lawn sprinkler.
Dreamed we were at Tom's house with Jennifer when we learned that he had been shot and killed while at a bank. He had been standing at an ATM machine inside the bank, getting cash, when a psychotic woman returned to the bank where she had been turned down for a loan. She shot Tom in the back, then went to the loan officer and asked, "How about now?"
I, or the girls and I, were driving in the country when I had to go over a bridge. Sadly, the bridge was only a few planks and down I went. My car flipped over and was wrecked. Joan and John and Peter were down there already and wouldn't help me fix my car. They wouldn't help me get out and laughed at my attempts to climb up and go to get some help. When I finally left I said I was never coming back, and they realized I meant it. Then I drove home -- turned out I was right by the highway, near the turn-off for Riverwood Golf Course.
Somehow it was an sometimes an office in the bottom of the gully, complete with office workers. Sometimes it wasn't my family at all, but ODOT workers trying to fix the bridge. I pulled desk drawers out of an unoccupied desk and tried to stack them like stair steps to climb out of the gully. That didn't work, however, because the desk's owner returned. This was an Asian guy with a laminated ID badge with a photo in which he wore round Hirohito glasses, had buck teeth, a wide-eyed expression of surprise, and ginger-colored hair that stuck straight up.