THAT DAY

I'm off to get a free bed from my friend Mark's house in Mountain View. Wait till 10 AM to avoid gridlock. Still bad. So bad I get forced onto Bayshore Freeway near the airport. Traffic goes from slow to stop-and-start around San Mateo. Finally I turn off and drive up into the hills, over to Canada Road and Woodside and Interstate 280 and Arrastradero Road. A long way round, but it avoids the traffic.

Flashbacks all along the way, as I pass places I lived and worked, all through the 1980s...

Strap the bed on my car roof. Mark gives me an easel too. Head home on back roads through Woodside, alond Skyline Boulevard. Wind makes the bed wobble. Will it fly off, or will the car just roll?

Neither. Make it home alive. But even with Lily's help, it's not easy getting it upstairs.

Next I go through my closet hunting for bedding. As I go, sort old clothes. Soon dust causes my allergies to kick in.

Sniffling, I reassemble Lily's reupholstered chairs, and remove an old screen from outside her window. It's what she asked for, in return for helping to lug that bed up.

Evening: so tired I'm numb. Why did I do so MUCH?

THAT NIGHT

Dreamers, at least some of us, are like cows or aphids--we get milked. A woman in a long green dress, my designated dream-milker, comes to collect my latest. I like her personally, but don't trust her profession--what do they DO with my dreams, and what does it do to me to have my dreams removed? I suspect the fact I take it so calmly, so passively, is itself a symptom of dream-milking! Moo.

And I know she doesn't use them herself. There's a hierarchy--dreamer, milker, maybe a processor, then a marketer. Dreams are just the raw commodity; what's the finished product?

Is dream-milking moral, or healthy, or sustainable? I'm not sure those in the milking-chain ever ask themselves, even. But right or wrong, I feel helpless to change the system.

Of course, that could be an effect of dream-milking too.

NEXT MORNING

Face this! Forgetting dreams makes me passive, that I know--I get numb, outa touch, don't know what I want. But does too much dreamwork make me passive too? Is combing my dream-journals to build the World Dream Bank bad for me?

Though... if I am milking my life for art, how's that different from any actor, songwriter, cartoonist, novelist, comedian? We all do it.

And looking back on my exhausting day, I think it was my nondream workaholism that milked me dry.

By sundown, that free bed didn't seem so free.

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