Ishmael Gradsdovic Papers, part sixty-two


5 October 1997

Yesterday, after a stint at the Law Library downtown, I came back home and took a nap. I was asleep for two hours at the maximum. I had the sort of dreams that remind me again that not all is as it seems inside the brainpan.

In dreams I seem to have effortless and playful access to a vast and playful realm of creativity and whimsy, all (if you believe the consensus of the Wise Ones of our culture) originating in a few handfuls of neural tissue and squirts of enzymes inside my cranium.

I'm going to tell you about my dream - keep in mind that, as is pretty typical for dreams, I don't remember big hunks of what went on.

As far back as I can reach into the dream, I don't know where I parked my light-blue rental moving truck, but I'm not too worried and am just scanning the parking lot of a place somewhat like the Foothill shopping center, where I'm stopping at a somewhat crowded fast food place to order a big mac and a bacon cheeseburger (I change the big mac order to some sort of value-meal, and the uniformed staff confer as to how to influence the cash-register to change its mind).

There's some kind of comic drama afoot in which I've been recruited to help a couple of folks fool some people into fronting a bunch of money for some really primo grass, but at the same time the grass disappears and the folks who were trying to recruit us for their scheme are the likely culprits (no honor among theives), so we're trying to catch them. In the meanwhile, they're trying to impress their marks by lighting up a fatty the size of a hefty pickle and passing it around.

This whole scenario plays itself out with a bunch of us following each other around stealthily trying to either rip each other off or keep each other from ripping us off. At one point, I'm following the most suspicious of the bunch, he steps into the shower, I step into an adjacent room, and my partner steps into another shower in another bathroom; it's got a leaky faucet and in a television-style "meanwhile, back at the ranch"-type segue, I see her flailing about in six feet of water behind the shower's (water-tight, apparantly) sliding glass door, fully clothed and quite sorry she ever got into the amateur detective business. But this is just a tangential part of the story line that I don't remember well at all (maybe it was all the weed we were smoking :-)

I'm wandering around this shopping center, and it's mostly full of shops that I'm not familiar with, and seem to have been set up very recently. Some of the places look interesting, and specialize in unusual stuff. One place is a serve-yourself diner with microwave food and the kind of mashed-potatos that you squeeze from a dispenser and stuff. There's a white-plastic sign above the counter with cheap prices in plastic sliding letters.

I check out another place because I hear unfamiliar (live?) versions of Ween songs (from "Pure Guava") coming over the speaker. Some sort of Karaoke thing is going on (although only employees are around) and I join in as best I can. I know a lot of the lyrics from Pure Guava, but not all of them - in the dream I only know the ones I know in real life, so I have to pause or mumble while I'm singing. But the singer from the song sings right along and gets all the lyrics right and I have the "oh yeah, that's right" feeling.

It's not the first time this has happened - A song I don't know the lyrics to is playing in a dream, and all of the lyrics are there, even though I couldn't tell you what they were if I were awake, and my persona in the dream doesn't know them either. Goes to show that there are huge shadows in the mind that keep libraries and internets of trivia hidden from the astigmatic consciousness.

I go into another restaurant (I think) and am talking with an enthusiastic fellow who invites me to dance - another case where only employees are in the store - but later on, I notice that he's a puppet on strings and I wonder why I didn't notice this before. The store is packed full of christmas gee-gaws - lots of puffy felt santas and the like.

I ask, annoyed but not too impolite, why the hell they've got all of this stuff up in the beginning of October, and they say that today is Santa Day. I say, "Santa Day? Never heard of it" and they explain that it's something that their family (the store is family-operated) celebrates and that it's common in the African-American community and that they're not surprised that I'm unfamiliar with it. A young woman explains that there's some ritual (I forget the name) that's a lot like the ritual of writing up new year's resolutions, only it's in the form of a letter-to-santa, that's done on this day.

My next stop is a big warehouse that serves as a dead-letter office. Old dusty letters and parcels, arrayed on metal cabinets in approximate order of zip-code (where this can be determined). Letters that can't be delivered come here to die. I look about casually for a while, open one box and see some shrinked-wrapped checks destined at one point for the Indianapolis ACLU, and then head for the 93401 zone to see if there's anything for Mr. Gradsdovic.

One side of the warehouse, near the windows, is reserved for items removed from packages that have been there so long that they're due to be discarded. They're putting these out thrift-store style for public purchase. Lots of amazing kitchy stuff from the early-sixties. Carved wooden racks with macrame hangings, blown-glass vases, stuff like that. I look around for cheesy stuff for the lounge and I'm absolutely delighted - it's like a museum of early-sixties American folk baroque cheese and I'm like a kid in a candy store.

I'm noticing to my annoyance that every time I reach out to grab something I've already got something in my hand and I don't know how it got there or where I should put it back. If I casually put it down on some empty counter space, the next time I look down I'll be holding something else I don't remember picking up.

There's neat stuff at every turn, amazing wads of picturesque wall-hangings and glassware and knick-knacks and such. And it's right about here that I start to get suspicious and make a guess that it's all a dream. At first I decide that dream or no dream I'm going to keep looking around because all of this shit is marvelous, but then I remember my determination to practice lucid dreaming techniques at every opportunity.

I decide to pick something up and throw it at the window. It takes me a while to find something sufficiently hefty that I can get a good grip on, but I let loose with that one and a few others, breaking the window in a fairly unsatisfactory, vague and unconvincing shattering of glass.

Walking away from the mayhem are other folks in the warehouse, all dressed up in early-sixties Zapruder-film-type fashions. I walk out through the broken window and onto the sidewalk; nobody has bothered to come after me for my wanton vandalism, and I'm in semi-lucid dreamland.

I walk down the sidewalk and suddenly I'm propelled into some sort of newsreel concerning a gentleman who lives on the corner. His first wife has suffered a terrible tragedy and is currently trapped inside some sort of broadcast medium, existing only as ephemeral electromagnetic waves bouncing about (illustrated using cartoon lightning bolts wiggling between two antenna). This broadcast is all in 1960s-era filmstock-quality and announcer-style, and everyone in it is of the pointy-glasses style of that period. Since the accident, the gentleman has had a series of wives, all of whom have been troubled by ghostly messages and apparitions (not directly blamed on wife #1, but you can fill in the blanks), and most of whom have died (primarily from abuse of prescription drugs).

The current wife was once (a photo caption reads) a user of some prescription stimulant (the name of which I forget) but has moved onto "Lady's Benzedrol" or some other sort of 'safer' mother's-little-helper as a way of coping with this weird, other-worldly harassment. We sense that her tragic overdose is only a matter of time.

I'm popped out of the newscast and back onto the sidewalk, to pick up a newsprint-booklet blowing in the breeze. It's a discussion by the husband from the newscast of the wonderful qualities of the present wife. A lot of them are really corny and archaic and it's written like a pretty funny put-on. It's the kind of thing I might be able to throw together if you gave me enough time, but I turn the page and it goes on and on in witty nonsense and I just close the book and say "Shit" and reflect on the fact that this is all supposedly being constructed in real-time inside my skull while I sleep.

As I'm walking along, I try to remember what day and time it is and whether I've got to go to work or do anything else in the real world or if I can go ahead and cruise along in my dream. I remembered that I fell asleep in the afternoon, but I had a hard time remembering if I had any pressing obligations. I decided to try to speak using my sleeping body without leaving the dream.

With some effort, I say "Hello, I'm having a really interesting dream; if anyone is there and needs me, please let me know, otherwise I'll talk to you later." There's an echo in my voice, and I imagine that I'm hearing both my dream-persona-voice, and the voice of my real-life body talking in its sleep (nobody was home with me, so I guess I'll never know if this was an accurate supposition). I have the impression that the echo is slurring its speech, and this makes it seem more likely that it's me talking in my sleep.

I hear the phone ring and take this as a signal to wake up, and so, with a bit of effort I do. End of dream.



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