THE ROLLING STONES CONCERT: DREAM 1
Let me just tell you about a wild dream I had about a Rolling Stones concert I went to.
I donāt know how I ended up there. But right away they pulled out this hologram of Mick Jagger that started glitching out. He looked really overweight for how you normally think of him. Like a clown.
It turns out it was one of those cover bands. Periodically a switch would appear in the air above every single member in the audience and youād have to select what you wanted the band to do, what songs they would play. The switches were linked to everybodyās credit cards, so the concert ended up costing $220 dollars a piece. The weird thing was, when you looked over at other peopleās switches, you could see that they were asking people something other than what they themselves thought it was asking them. It was deceptive. It was one big trick.
No one looked like a drug addict, how people generally think of The Rolling Stones.
I didnāt really recognize any of the songs they played. There were lots of stage antics like people chasing each other with props, like in Scooby Doo when ghosts are chasing the gang through all these hallways of doors, popping in and out in all these patterns.
I kept waiting on them to play āWaiting on a Friendā or āStart Me Up.ā
THE UNDERWATER MALL: DREAM 2
It started out with the death of a major poet which caused us all to attend a convention on a mountain. There was a library where we were all studying the poetās masterpieces but it was competitive to get space in the library with the books. I was trying to get a look at the right books but so was everybody else. I just remember being inspired to write something about a needle being thrust into a barrel of foamāāfucked the sudsā was the terminology I used I believe. It was all very inspiring.
Then the scene shifted to a mall where I was wandering as I do in every large dream building. I went through the whole mall once, and over time I figured out that the mall was underwater and that a great breach was coming where the water pressure would flood the mall, killing everybody. But no one seemed to sense this but me.
I kept envisioning what would happen and how to be safe, if that was at all possible. Jumping through glass walls, how would that help. There was already a pool in the mall, that I kept envisioning the water level rising, so jumping into the pool seemed like a way to stay safe.
Then there was a very strange passage where I was running down the mountain road toward the mall at night. This was the day that the breach would happen and I was headed for the mall to loot it before the catastrophe. I had on a mask and a black hoodie. I saw cars and other running robbers headed down the road behind me, after me, you could hear the runnersā heavy breathing, and again there was the powerful feeling of competition.
Not sure how I got to the underwater mall when I was on the mountain road.
The first place I went was the lowest and most dangerous point of the mall. Where I had earlier set up businesses. Like chocolate. There were people setting around in chairs ignorant of the fact Iād set up chocolate shops nearby. They also seemed ignorant of the fact they were about to drown. I showed them the chocolate and they seemed to finally notice. I went and got three large malt balls and put them inside three blobs of pistachio ice cream, put them in a bag and took them with me to the upper part of the mall where survival seemed the most likely. It was every man for himself. Again in my mind movie I kept seeing the place flooding. I woke up with the most terrible feeling that something awful was about to happen. It bled over into consciousness as the worst nightmares tend to do.
A SHOCKWAVE OF CLARIFICATION: DREAM 3
Little terrorist kid, destroys a floor. Misbehavior. Dancing crazily with drumsticks in front of a video of another child trying to blot her out in a video composite. Being quietly bitched out by a cross between Jimmy Fallon and Michael J. Fox, after closing the door to his office. Going to check on a very old P.O. Box at a college campus I once attended, I forgot the number but they gave it to me anyway, thereās a poem wrapped in plastic I must have put there during the pandemic year. Canāt remember what the poem was about. But the script was interesting, you could place it in my oeuvre by comparing the orthography with other written drafts from other eras. Letters of different sizes and ligature-matrices, like Arabic calligraphy.
The storyline of the dream hovered on the edge of significance but I got the feeling that like a mystery, once the end was reached, a shockwave of clarification would be sent backwards through the narrative of the dream. A-ha moment. Coherence. Already chewed bubblegum.
Prejudice against astrological sortings. That replaces the prejudice of black, brown, yellow, red skin.
Couldnāt tell the itch from the scratch
āIt smells like electrified cumā
THE HOTELās SPIRITUAL ADVISER: DREAM 4
No religion matches neatly, said the hotelās spiritual adviser. He had to kiss everybody on the cheek.
The girl said she didnāt want to see me again and it was sad how much of a shocker this was to me.
So much hotel dream. The hotel had grown like a massive fungus to overtake the golf course. Annex upon annex upon annex. All these new features. It was my first day back on the job. No one trained me to the new building. No maps. I just wandered about trying to look busy but looking for the smoking area. I donāt know if I saw anybody I knew. They might have been disguised by the job. Young people in the smoking area fucking around like a different race or species. Itās hard to transcribe the dream without the memories of the actual life hotel taking precedence. Slipping themselves in. Guests and customers were swarming around the place wanting things, wanting to get into their conference rooms. Some of them looked so brilliant and cool Iād want to go back to sleep to get in there. I did talk to other employees and wanted to stay with them but they said they had a long way to go, it was a long walk to get to the part of the hotel where they were going suggesting miles and miles away, the hotel was immense.
The real life woman I knew from college who came to the hotel and recognized me. The hotel is where recognitions happen that derail life. I could have run off with her and left my wife. Or had a drink at the Hawkeye Bar and Grill. The hotel stories must be told one day. The pitfall is you rush to tell them and by rushing to claim one story it makes all the others tinkle apart like a dome made of snowflakes. Dream stories must be approached like the cabin in the woods made of mirrors that disappears if you should ever see your reflection in them. So it must be approached at the corners.