working title: happy slumbers

book four of Dragon City is well under way by this point, working title: Happy Slumbers. 

ain’t nothin’ too happy about it, though. the former trilogy is begging for resolution, as such a high percentage of its readers have been left without an appropriate orgasmic response. by itself that’s not enough motivation for me, but i did find an angle in the whole thing which i had previously left unexplored, only hinting at obliquely now and then – most explicitly in the ‘dream’ chapter of Snapdragon Alley. tantalizing hint hereby dropped.

fiction is an invitation to leave the real world behind and live in make-believe for a period of time – the question is, how much time would you be willing to give in exchange for how much make-believe pleasure? an hour or two, sure. a day or a week, perhaps. how about fifty years? would you go that far? fifty solid years, too, in which time you are not present in this world, on this planet. you are gone and no one knows what happened to you. what would it take to be worth it? we’re not talking immortality here, just a period of time. 

answers most welcome in comments.

in exchange, your dreams are fed upon like candy and your whole life, your existence, your soul (if you will) is slowly sucked dry, as if you were a lollipop. fifty years. an all-day sucker in a slower dimension.

i also have one question to ask you about reincarnation. the question is, cuanto? how many?

memory moment

Memories, like dreams, collapse disparate moments into a single vision.

Images convey information, but that information is not a constant. Only some of it is contained in the image. The rest is in the mind of the observer. For this reason, no one can ever say what the information is. It is and is not. It can be almost anything.

Imagery

My son woke me up at five in the morning today because he dreamed he was being devoured by microscopic cats

dream of the day award

my dream last night: i had a chance to become a striker on an italian soccer team, and all i had to do was use a hatchet to kill a cat.

dream of the day

i dreamed i was assigned to teach human perception to an elephant named lola. i used rudimentary drawings of dogs, cats, and so on. lola already knew all of this, but she was very patient with me.

The Pope’s Green Velvet Golf Cap

In a dream last night, I stole the Pope’s green velvet golf cap right off his head, took it home, and placed it on the skull of some recently departed intellectual. I don’t remember who the head was supposed to be (and didn’t remember in the dream, either) but I figured, if I have their head in my house, it was probably somebody cool. Mostly I was glad that the cap got a place on a head with a brain, even if it was a deceased one

Bad Co-Worker Story # 1024

To go along with the bad boss story below, there was another aspect to this little job. I was hired to replace a guy (Steve) who left under peculiar circumstances. Seems he went insane. Steve was a bright guy who spoke many languages, including Russian and Chinese, but somewhere along the line he got a bit tangled up in Sufism and schizophrenia (always a bad combination). He took to twirling down the sidewalk while shouting ‘Kill the Jews’, and then, one night, he had a disturbing dream. He got up, went out in his pajamas and slippers and walked halfway across the city, broke into a big house in Georgetown (a house he had never seen before) and started slashing at a painting he found in the stairwell. He had taken the painting to be a portrait of Muhammad (bad) and apparently it did kind of look like the prophet. Unfortunately for Steve, the house belonged to a judge of the D.C. Superior Court. Hence, the job opening.

Legendary Incidents in Dream-Sharing

One of the more unusual events in my life was a double case of what I can only call “dream-sharing”. A friend of mine (M) used to apartment-sit for me on occasion. She would take care of my cats and at the same time get away from her drunk and abusive husband. Typically I would come home to an apartment filled with her empty beer bottles and other assorted paraphenalia (so to speak), but twice I came home to find she had left her bad dreams on my pillow. Not only were these dreams really frightening, but they also came true in real life.

These two stories occurred several months apart.

In the first dream, a woman was locked in a closet and kicking as hard as she could against the door but not making any noise.

In the second dream, several of us, including M, were at a meeting with the (crazy) owner of the bookstore where we worked. He went into a rage and pushed one of us (Paul G) down the stairs, Paul hit his head at the bottom and died. In this dream, M was extremely pale and looked like she’d seen a ghost.

When I told M about the first dream, she told me that she had just received a phone call that night, telling her that her best friend had been murdered. She had married a Japanese man, and he had locked her in a closet after stuffing a sock in her mouth and taping over it. She died of suffocation.

When I told M about the second dream she stared at me in absolute horror. The previous evening she had taken a cab home with the other Paul who worked at our store (F, not G). He’d gotten out of the cab at 16th and Mission and stopped at an ATM to get some cash when some guys came up and bashed his head in with a baseball bat. As far as I know, that case was never solved.

Dream of the Beetle

I was driving an old model VW beetle with my young son in the back seat as we headed down our customary narrow windy mountain roads when I discovered that someone had cut the brake cable and there was no way to stop the car. At first I almost lost my head but then I thought, I could panic now but that wouldn’t really help much would it, so I kept my cool and steered us as best I could into the ditch along the side of the road. The car got pretty banged up but we were both okay, except I hurt my back twisting around to hold out my arm to make sure he’d be all right.

The dream served me well today. I’ve been absorbed with some difficult de-bugging lately (subconscious pun probably intended), and I needed to relax and take things one step at a time, instead of my usual approach, which is to jump in with both feet first and only then consider the consequences!

(details: the VW was a rust-red convertible. We were driving at dusk. It was getting hard to see. We were heading “over the hill” (into the greater bay area) on the Woodside side. I couldn’t imagine who would have cut the cable – I haven’t had an enemy worth mentioning in several years. Johnny was, as usual, full of joy. Sometimes I take it for granted, but the boy brings so much happiness into life every day it’s really quite remarkable)

El Sueño del Curandero

This morning I had a dream that I had special healing powers but was reluctant to use them. A young woman was dying. She was very frail and had only a few days left to live. I hesitated, but then for some reason I decided to save her. This involved a series of oils and incense and ritual chants and annointings, much as I experienced one time long ago in South America. I knew I would save her, there was no doubt of that, but I also knew I didn’t want to. I soon discovered why. Once she recovered, she felt compelled to be near me at all times. She quickly became a pest, a perfectly healthy kind of zombie. She could not leave me alone. She wanted to stop but couldn’t and she came to resent me as much as I resented her.