The Ishmael Gradsdovic Papers, part seventeen


Part seventeen of the Ishmael Gradsdovic papers finds our hero again battling the demons of the other side of sleep, this time from his days at the Moon...


26 February, 1995

Dream #1

A short dreamette. I'm at the mOOn, on the couch where I sleep, and near the whiteboard are 1-----, 2----- and someone else. The someone else is hamming it up with a microphone connected to speakers which previously had been playing music. His hamming is uninspiring, mostly consisting of saying the same word over and over and then pointing the microphone at various objects in the room. I remark, sotto voce, that I preferred the music. 2----- expresses surprise at my pathetic tastes with an argument resembling: "All you want to do is listen to music that you can listen to any time, instead of listen to the creative efforts of real people here and now." I see this as an absurd argument and figure 2----- is just picking a fight, so I oblige and call her names.

Dream #2

A long, involved dream I only remember in bits and pieces and probably all in the wrong order. At some point I'm with a friend in the middle of a cliff (i.e. there's more cliff above and below us, and we're on a ledge) overlooking the ocean. There's something kind of 50s Hollywood backlot prop about the cliff. There's something out at sea a ways, but I forget what. Between this ledge and the edge of the cliff there is a smooth concrete barrier which probably serves both as erosion control and to keep sightseers from walking off the edge. It rises at a right angle to the ledge we're standing on, goes up to about chest-height, then swiftly turns toward the horizontal, and gradually slopes downward for maybe four or five feet before plunging to where you couldn't see it unless you were under it or floating in space in front of it. I'm feeling confused and disoriented (it's a dream, after all), and my friend pulls out a head of lettuce, cores it and tells me to chew on the core because it will calm me down. I do so, and it makes this big, hard-to-swallow mass in my mouth. Instead of calming me down, it makes me just as disoriented, but also somewhat dopey and uncoordinated. A car pulls up and levitates in space right next to the concrete barrier, over the drop, as if there were a parking space perpendicular to the concrete. The car is painted an organic, squash- yellow with organic, beet-red diamonds painted on it by covering the car in a tilted grid and painting in alternating diamonds with the red color. The car is a long, semi-sporty model from probably the mid 1960s. I forget who was in the car or what they were doing there. I admire the paint job. At some point we decide to leave. My friend has to pull me off of the concrete thing I'm sitting on, because with my disorientation and the slope of the concrete, I'm likely to slip and fall off of the cliff. We start climbing a staircase that is so vertical it's almost a ladder. I'm having a difficult time of it and am in the lead. We reach a point where we can continue going straight up the cliff, or can go to the side and cut back. I think the side route looks easier and I try to get on that path, but the transition from the path I'm on to that path is difficult. While I'm trying, I feel someone climbing over me. I think at first that it's my friend, but it's someone else. I eventually abandon the attempt at transition and continue scaling the vertical staircase. Cut to a building interior: The staircase is now a more conventional stairway in a multi-storey building. Still it is steep, with metal guardrails. Up above, I see the guy who passed me on the cliff. I yell up to him that if I had fallen, I would have taken him with me. He seems unconcerned. I reach the top of the stairs. My friend is 3-----, although before now, this was not necessarily so. We are in a very large indoor basketball arena, and he's shooting hoops at one of the courts, waiting for me. I exit the arena through the door behind him and am on the street. I walk toward a ferry and pay what I think is a large amount for a ticket. I'm trying to find a stop that has a grocery store near it because I'm hungry.

Dream #3

An aborted night terror. I wake up and see the room dimly lit as it is at night. Standing next to the couch, at about the middle of my body (I'm lying face up), is a goblin chanting what sounds like a mantra or sutra or something (Om dom gom lom tom rom wom som zom...) that I hear in my skull and gets louder and louder the more I pay attention to it. The goblin itself is indistinct. I know it's there, I know where it is standing and how tall it is (maybe 3-4 feet), and how much space it takes up. I have the subjective impression of "seeing" it, although when I break out of the terror and it vanishes, I can't say in what way my visual field has changed now that the goblin is no longer in it. I am paralyzed, but I'm not really trying to move, I'm just listening to the chanting and trying to decide whether to try to give myself over to it or to resist it. I have the feeling of having experienced things like this before, and they have always ended up bad in a spasm and a flood of adrenaline. I think that the intention of the goblin is to bunch his hands together and slam them into my solar plexus. I decide to resist, but it's difficult. The chanting gets louder, then softer, then louder again, but finally I banish it, and the goblin and I'm no longer paralyzed. But it's a long time before I can get back to sleep because I feel like it's still out there and can still slip into my mind.




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