Being the Dream

A nightmare of sorts.... at least I thought it was but maybe just an ordinary dream.…

I dream I am going to bed and as I draw the covers aside to get it there is a woman lying to my left. The woman has long black hair and she is young and I realize that she is dreaming.

I entire the woman's dream and the woman is dreaming that she is on the bed with me (in other words, I am something in her dream and not the reverse.) And the woman is thinking, I am about to have a nightmare. I am going to dream that a corpse or monster will lift the sheets and horrifically glide under them to do terrifying things to me.

But when I look up at the foot of the bed it is not a monster. It is an aged crone, and she holds a huge staff which she has slid beneath the covers, And she appears to be stirring something. My bed is a cauldron and the sleeping woman is a magic potion.

I don’t know if I am HAVING a dream, or IN the dream, or OBSERVING the dream, or whether I am myself the dream.

Eating on Starships

So my dream was entirely about food. Mikey and I were enjoying a delicious buffet, item after item. Absolutely incredible.

Then we were walking around in the same mall and it was time for another meal. We entered this restaurant and realized that we were too full to eat. There was room at the counter for two, all you can eat.

"Never mind," I said. "Our whole ship can eat." Apparently we have a starship parked on the roof of the mall. I instruct the entire troop to prepare black, alien-mecha-looking prosthetics. Every few minutes, one of us leaves and a fake "alien" joins the table, and they all look alike, so the entire ship's crew gets to eat a meal for two ...

Kafka without Cockroaches

Have awoken from a rather curious dream. I am back in school. There are two classes; I am supposed to go to one of them (downstairs, male teacher) but sneaked away to a different one (upstairs, (female teacher.) The dream appears to be in Thailand, pre-air conditioning — the 1960s.

The upstairs class is airy, pastel-cream-white walls, sparsely attended, high ceilings. The teacher is a middleaged (well maybe in her 50s) blond but greying, some wrinkles, always smiling, and though Caucasian reminds me greatly of M.R. Smansnid, my brilliant teacher at Patana.

The downstairs class is infested with cockroaches; I had secretly sprayed the class that morning which I why I don't want to be there.

I do go downstairs for a while. There is a staircase, wooden, angled with a landing. The wood is painted grey. I come down and stand on the landing/ I can hear the other teacher droning away in the other classroom and know there is only one student left there, a girl. I already smell the cockroach spray. It is sickening and I go back up. 

When I get back to the class they are watching a video about the moon landing (putting this dream squarely in my childhood years). The teacher says, "Oh you've come back. You been gone twice, without any excuse, a total absence of two hours. Why?"

Very guiltily I tell her about how there was an infestation downstairs and how the smell of cockroach spray has driven me up to her classroom.

She says, "I would feel that way myself." And smiles a wrinkly smile, showing me all is forgiven.

The moon landing continues to play on big monitors in the schoolroom.

(Though I don't see the cockroaches I can help but think of Kafka.)

Czech my Specs

My first vivid dream in months. I am in Olomouc (Czechia) about to judge a singing competition. My whole family is staying at the hotel. I wake up late and I'm already needed at the judging so I bring my family out through some French windows onto a stony veranda. The stage is far below; steps are cut into the rock and my parents at first do not want to go down to the VIP seats because of the stairs. My aunt is particularly fussy. My mother is wearing a fur coat. At length I coax them down and I descend onto the stage. I realize I have forgotten to get dressed and I am wearing only some purple sweatpants.

Seeing my state of deshabillé the crowd starts to applaud. "I need a teeshirt" I say and start looking around. First I wrap some plastic wrap around myself (wodering if it will cut off the air and if I will suffocate). Then I find a bag of logo teeshirts and empty it out and squeeze one on, thinking it might not be my size.

None of the other judges or contestants are there yet. So, I decide to take a brief break. I tell the audience I'll be back shortly. Amazingly, to my left (audience right) there is another French winoow. I go through it through another room and find myself on the street and there is my old car, which the Czechs have kept for me for 40 uears at least — it's a turquoise colored Malibu or other big American car. I decide to go for a spin.

The streets are picturesque and very narrow and at first I'm driving on the left by mistake. I leave the tiny town behind and move into the countryside, and I pass some fields and make a sharp, uphill right turn, Beautiful stone houses. After a while I retrace my steps. I go back and the left turn back into town is surprisingly tight and I realize that the road is at the edge of a cliff that I could easily have driven off by mistake.

There are huge orange bricks and concrete blocks lying the road and I barely believe that the car's wheelbase is narrow enough to avoid them, but I presently I do make it back to the hotel, though it isn't quite the same hotel; I park the car in what looks like an American motel parking lot and go up some steps. I find myself in the corridor hurrying to my hotel room (not the same one I woke up in). 

Leaving my door open, I feel about on the shelf (there's a narrow corridor into the sleeping area with the bathroom on the left) and I see a pair of very thick, child-sized glasses (such as the ones I used to where when lenses were thick and not plastic) I wonder who has been in my room.

I look out. My door is still open. A blond child wearing only underwear is staring curiously at me. I look away and when I look back he has vanished.

On the shelf I find another pair of spectacles. It's newer. The frames are black. So there are at least three pairs; the ones I am wearing and the two on the shelf before I get to the bedroom. 

And then I wake up.

Domesticity.…

So here's another in my recent series of incredibly mundane dreams. It's about visiting the home of a bald, rotund person and suddenly realizing that they have a huge selection of music scores hidden away ... first, behind a counter, I find a large, green hardcover Mahler edition. It's wrapped in plastic.

I thought I was the only person with a copy of this work. I look around and there's an entire room behind this counter, with shelves and scores packed high, each one face outwards leaning against the wall, each one really BIG (at least 2 feet tall) hardcover with plastic wrap, pristine, each one an opera by a really composer but a work I've never heard of. Each one is really brightly colored. One is yellow, I think it's a Verdi. 

And that's it. It seems a simple enough dream but it seems to be telling me that I barely begun to unwrap the huge body of music that is hidden away....

Lately, my dreams have been so "domestic" ... no strange planets or visits to ancient history ... who knows, should I be taking drugs?

Agent of Chaos

In my dream, I visit my film agent, Judy Coppage, at her home, which I've actually never been to. It's a rather tropical home, full of bamboo and rattan, and she invites me to sit in a lanai, in a very comfortable armchair. I find myself on the phone with Joel Gotler, who used to be my agent in the 1980s, but his voice is inaudible. And that is my whole dream. I never understand the purpose of my visit, or why I am the home of one agent yet talking to another agent.

In The Third Reich

I had a really disturbing dream. It is during the Third Reich and I am a young person slavishly devoted to it and trying to join the SS. I especially am trying to impress a girl, an extremely "Aryan" looking blonde one. During the dream it all seems natural yet now I am awake I get the creeps.

In the dream I am trying to figure out what to wear to a huge rally. I keep trying on uniforms, each one more and more extravagant. Finally I think, THIS is what I need, and I put on a cloak that has a huge, red flapping front part. The crimson is so bright that it dominates the whole dream. Surely, I think, no one will be wearing a uniform this bright.

I am in a courtyard and there is an iron gate, I step out through the gate and there is a huge square lined with hundreds, perhaps thousands of uniformed men. And I realize that I am not the only one with such a red cloak. Dotted amongst the black-garbed men there are many people with the long, flapping cloaks, bright spots of crimson in the sea of black.

The rally is about to start and I wake up.

At the time of the dream, there seemed to be nothing disturbing at all; my consciousness felt detached, even clinical. But now that I am typing this I'm very shaken. I do have dreams about this period of history from time to time. But in those dreams I'm often in a concentration camp. I've never dreamed of admiring the other side before. Indeed, I've worked very hard to combat the lack of knowledge in Thailand about this part of the past. 

What am I being told in this dream?

An Upper Room

My dream:

We are sitting around in an upper room in a nice condo or apartment in Sherman Oaks, a bunch of ageing writers shooting the breeze. One of them is, I think, Larry DiTillio or looks very much like him. He's drinking and laughing, I haven't seen him in so long. We are all talking about our novels, or our writers' block.

A giddy young man enters, He has been writing a book ... he is the son of the one who looks like DiTillio (although I didn't even realize a son exists.) He says he has a discovery that connects all history. 

He go through a curtain and we are suddenly in a huge square. In the middle there is a polygonal wall covered with an inscription, it seems to be something like the Iliad or Ramayana. Behind it, a similar polygon is being excavated and there stands a four-sided white column, whitewashed, with some red letters that have been transliterated from the polygon, where someone is prying loose some brass plates to reveal masses of writing, The transliteration appears to speak of Romans, a bridge and a river. There is a character that looks like a cross between V and L and we read it is R or L. 

The giddy young man says, "This is what's in my book — the ultimate proof — that everything in the universe — all stories, all truths — are connected."

Going back through the curtain, we join the others in a lower level of the house which looks like a lanai, and they're all still drinking and carousing.

This is the first time I've remembered a dream for months.

Shatner Imitation

I have been dreaming A LOT, but unlike before, I cannot really remember the dreams clearly. This morning, I was negotiating with a woman who I used to know, you ran science fiction conventions in L.A., and she was berating an actor who was trying to do a William Shatner imitation, just screaming at him about getting the tone wrong .... and that's all I remember. I woke up.

Sulfadiazine

I've gone back to dreaming every morning since I had to calm down and actually get a decent night's sleep.

This morning, I dreamt that my feet were scarred, raw and bleeding from a strange disease, perhaps leprosy. Someone brought be a wooden bowl that contained a small round flat metal tin. 

"It's sulfadiazine", said a woman's voice. "You're lucky to be living in a time when the drug exists. Now you can cure it." 

I opened the tin fully expecting it to be full of a yellow powder. Some yellow powder was already leaking around the edges. But instead, it was a sort of jelly like yellow goo, a bit like the stuffing of a custard bao. And it was empirical proof of the doctrine of miraculous multiplication because I sat on a stool and slathered the goo over my feet and it never ran out, and presently I was also covering my hands and arms and the yellow goo was still there.

Not sure what the dream means, but maybe it means that there is no limit to the balm of healing.…

A Mundane Dream....

This is the first dream I have had in a long while. It's quite vivid.

I'm with Mikey and we are in Pattaya. We arrive in front of a huge multi-stories exhibition or mall, similar to the one in Pattaya that has Ripley's and Madame Tussaud's, but but bigger and more eclectic. At the entrance foyer there are steps and a woman meets me. It seems that she knows me, though I don't know her. She calls me "Ajarn" (though most of the dream is in English.

She offers to give me a tour. I follow her. We pass through a parlour where there are some tables and condiments for hamburgers like jars of pickle relish (which I am allergic to). But there is something very comforting about the place. We cross a courtyard and I realize there are signs for Roy Rogers, where I haven't eaten for 25 years since living on the East Coast ... comfort food.

We go up and make a turn and I turn to look for Mikey but he has vanished. I'm worried about him for the remainder of the tour but eventually we reach the top floor which has a wide open space with a concrete floor. "You know," I say to my guide, "We should bring the Sinfonietta here." 

She has never heard of the Sinfonietta which in my dream is mildly annoying, but soon I start to describe the orchestra in glowing terms. She seems quite taken with the idea. This open space on the top floor seems ideal, though we have a long discussion of the possible audience in Pattaya for classical music.

When we are through we come back down to the same foyer and I get a call from Mikey. His voice is very faint, at first I don't recognize it. He says he's at the restaurant. I tell him the place has a lot of restaurants on all corners and I can't tell which one it is. I tell him to come and meet me at Roy Rogers. His voice is garbled and the phone hangs up.

*** all in all, a very mundane dream compared to ones I had before. ***

Savoy Buffet

My dream. 

I wake up early (in the dream). I am in a bungalow outside a rather Victorian family home, I'm staying with Mikey. In the dream I say to myself, I'm waking up early because I have to go and see "Star Wars" this morning. But I need to write a few speeches first.

I walk over to the main house and my mother is there. "Have a little breakfast before you leave," she says. There is a stuffed armchair to my left and on it, there are seven things that in my dream are called "khau mau" - but they're not, they are actually "khau nieu tod" - fried sticky rice. Each of them is stuffed with a different kind of fish, and seven more are stuffed with different fruits.

I take a bite of one which has a sort of plummy taste, and I see my dad sitting at the table. My mother says, "Don't eat too much, because we're having the breakfast buffet at the Savoy hotel." She points out that the buffet costs $2,500, so it is a big deal. I feel very pleased that she's willing to shell out $2,500 for breakfast for Mikey as well as her immediate family.

Then I wake up. And here I am, getting ready to go and see the morning showing of "Star Wars." I guess it officially comes out tomorrow, but here in Thailand it seems to be a day early and I'm getting up at the crack for it. I won't publish any spoilers.

Revolution in the Raj

I had a very strange and somewhat traumatic dream last night. This morning I had forgotten it, but 14 hours later, it comes back to haunt me.

In my dream I am with my family in the foyer of a luxurious hotel. It looks very grand, like something from the British Raj. The clothing, too, is Raj-like, pith helmets and 20's women's wear. Potted palm trees, a ceiling of white girder-like beams. 

Suddenly, the hotel is under attack by Burmese soldiers. It's quite clear they are Burmese, in dark green uniforms, barking orders. One officer shouts, "We have invaded your country. All of you are now under threat of instant conscription at any time. We will now pick some of you, randomly, to join the Burmese army."

They start dragging people out of the crowd of hotel guests. There's a little girl, barely pubescent. They throw her roughly by the front steps of the hotel which is shaded with more palm trees and a cloth awning.

Suddenly they seize my father from the throng. "You can't take him!" I scream. "He is seventy years old!" (In real life, my father is 85.) Still, they drag him (he is wearing the white jacket of a Thai government official) and make him stand among the recruits, who are all the unlikeliest army recruits I've ever seen — children and old people — chosen precisely because a war would make them suffer. 

A general, wielding a cane, walks up and down, inspecting them. He starts to beat the little girl savagely. At this I can't contain myself any longer and I go down the front steps and grab the cane from him. "You are not going to beat any of these people, let alone my father," I say and I begin whipping the general savagely.

Curiously none of his aides rush to arrest me. They all watch me beating up their boss with a mixture of shock and bemusement. And I wake up.

What I want to say is that this dream, like so many of my dreams that seem to be set in alternate but completely self-consistent realities, appeared so vivid both in sound and color, it was more like a memory than a dream.

Let Sleeping Polar Bears Lie

My dream began with my bedroom. My Pomeranian Chihuahua Gustav is running around on the floor near my bed. Next to him a large black dog sleeping. And in my bed right next to me a huge polar bear.

When I wake up in my dream everything is peaceful. My sister knocked on my bedroom door. She says, “you can’t keep those animals in there.They must be outside or the room will get dirty.” First I let out Gustav. Then the large black dog goes out and runs through the kitchen, through the back door, into the yard outside. This appears to be the house I lived in 20 years ago, on Cohasset Street. At least, the layout of the house is very similar. 

When I go back to the room I discover that there are small black pieces of shit on the floor where the large dog had lain. I see that I can’t keep any animals in the room at all. But I don’t want to disturb the polar bear. He’s big, and he’s dangerous. However, I see that he has left green stains on the sheets. In the dream, this particular polar bear is a vegetarian hence the color of the stains.

I decide to trick the bear into leaving. I open the door and make a lot of noise for the bear jumps up and runs out of the room and follows the same path at the black dog into the yard. Now the polar bear is running around outside.

Now I’m in the front of the house which for some reason it’s made completely of glass. It seems that the bear is outside, I wish I could play with him. So the bear and I run back-and-forth. We run together he outside the glass and I inside. It’s like a little game. We are together but separate. It is safe.

Suddenly it occurred to me that the neighbors might be frightened because a polar bear is running around in the neighborhood. I look through the glass walls and see a few of them. They seem a little worried. I decide to risk going outside.

In my backyard I ran into a woman and a child who treat me very brusquely. When she sees the bear instead of being afraid she decides to use the bear in a plan to take over my house. SheCalls out to the bear, and then runs in the house and then I see that the house has stairs going all the way up to an attic. She has Lured to the bear to the roof and the bear is going to come down through the roof into the attic and terrorize the people in the house. As I wake up I hear the bear padding upwards, up the walls of the house.

A VIP

I dreamed about a very important person last night. We were standing outside a resplendent palace. The VIP's husband and my sister were there, too.

I said to the VIP, "I'd like to give you the score to this song."

She said, "Bring it over at 9."

I said, "But we're having dinner at 6."

She answered, "Oh, all right, 7."

What does 9-6-7 mean? If anyone buys this lottery ticket, I want a percentage.

A Dream about Ganesha

I dreamed that I’m in the middle of producing one of my Buddha operas. Except that the venue is not a theater but an actual city. We are doing a scene that has something to do with the God Ganesha. 

In the scene hundreds of people clad in garlands are supposed to run through the streets. They are dancers or chorus members dressed as elephants or as nagas. At the crucial moment I’m panicking because the crowd of garland cloud dancers does not enter the stage. Where are they, where are they I am screaming.

I discover thousands of yellow flower gardens hanging in an area in front of where the state should be. But there are no dancers. Then at the last minute, I realize that the dances are running in with dozens of white garlands, which my sister has sent.

The scene it’s completed and I walk through the street. I reach an area where White garlands are piled everywhere. They come in every size some of them much bigger than a human could wear. And I’m shouting at my stage crew, it’s not enough, it’s not enough.

How do you seen the real festival in India? I say the festival of garlands. In that festival, the garlands are so thick and high that you can see nothing else. They’re absolutely higher than chest level. The street cannot be seen for garlands.

I woke up at around 4:30 AM. I have not had enough sleep so I will go back to sleep now. I believe that this dream means that I need to offer a lot of garlands to Ganesha. It’s very vivid and there are two colors of garlands in the dream. The yellow ones hanging, and the white ones that are used in the ritual.

Show Biz....

Dream:

Viswa Subbaraman has managed to arrange a performance of my work THE SNOW DRAGON in some strange town. Actually it appears not to be my opera at all, but a spoken word stage play adapted from it. What's more, he has arranged for me to play the role of the villain, Stark, myself, but as it happens I arrive at the theater on the opening night, with my parents and sisters and their companions, and I have to see them to their seats before we begin.

We discover that they are seated in Row B, but this row isn't part of the tiered, bleacher-like seats that are the main part of the theater, instead there are two rows sort of tucked under the diagonal shelter created by the angle of the bleachers. These two rows are directly above one another and each accessible by their own stairs, and have a mini-wall in front so each is equally a "front row" seat.

We have the tickets but for some reason, we need to pay for them even though we're already at the seats. My mother hands me a wad of 500 baht notes, and the seats are 1,100 each. I am desperately trying to count out the 500 notes to come up to a correct number of 1,100 seats with no change. At length I realize it will never work, and the play will start soon and I have to change, so I leave them and go to find my dressing room.

However, I can't find it anywhere. I go up some stairs and enter a room where a small group of African Americans wearing period costume is rehearsing a costume drama, but it's not my play. Presently, I see, looking out a window, some of the characters from my work, warming up and getting ready to go on stage. I look down but don't see where they're coming from or what the access to the stage is. They are wearing Victorian dress and the lines are not familiar to me.

In one dialogue exchange, a man is trying to talk a woman into something (perhaps sexually harassing her) and he says, "But they all do this on Neptune!" and she responds, "Ha! I doubt you've even been to Neptune."

I start doubting the wisdom of appearing in this play since I've never been to a rehearsal, even though it is supposedly a version of my work. I keep thinking, How did Viswa Subbaraman get me this gig? He's a conductor, he's not in the spoken word world. Finally, I realize that whatever it is, it should be like my opera more or less, so whenever they push me onstage, my first line is going to be "I'll talk to him."

I come down the stairs to the foyer of the theater, I tell the usher, "You gotta tell me how to get into makeup and costume!" They are confused but finally one of them takes me outside. Across the street there is a a huge square not seen from the street because it is bordered by shops facing the street. "It's in the fair, in the square," says the usher. 

"Show me where! You realize this show is going to be totally different as it is. I will have to improvise my part. The other actors are going to have to wing it too."

I enter the concealed square where indeed, a fair is going on, with stalls, balloons, and stands selling toys. But where is the dressing room? Finally someone directs me to an entrance in the center that leads down to what he calls Level X. It looks like the entrance to an underground parking lot, and there are wide stairs with railings in the center leading downward. I dash down the steps, noting that everyone has already left, shouting, "The play is gonna be at least thirty minutes late, and won't even be the same play!"

Then I wake up.