THAT DAY

Cold, windy. Bike downtown to meet my sister Andrea, at a writer's conference in the Hyatt Regency Hotel. Been years since I've come here. The famous atrium's changed--cluttered with ugly, angular arches and dividers. The trees are gone, the fountain's turned off and the pool shrunk to enlarge the cafe. They've managed to subvert the architect's radical vision into a gloomy, junky subway station. We go outside for lunch, at the Embarcadero nearby.

Later, up in her suite, I read her revised manuscript aloud. Yep, this draft is better. But I feel funny, and notice a faint chemical scent. I'm reacting to something. Sealed windows. Not just ugly, then, the new improved Hyatt, but toxic too. I can't stay in here! Bike home, drained & shaky; takes hours to recover.

TV: Amazonian civilizations. A pyramid older than Egypt, with a spiral path up to a tomb; huge raised beds, towns and dike-roads above the annual flooding. Cacao and other tree crops. No giant cities--decentralized--but 5-6 million people lived here--today it's just 1.5 million! Plague decimated them. Locals involved with the dig get teary talking of the long train of abuses since; archeology's showed them just how long they lived here, in great numbers, while protecting the land--unlike white miners & ranchers wrecking it.

THAT NIGHT

I'm at an art show. Mostly visual art, but I'm about to do a performance piece in a corner, up a ladder. My audience is two art critics I know and a rich, naïve buyer. Climb the ladder and begin to recite a poem. A critic interrupts "At least tell us the title and origins of the piece." I give those, and start again, loud, nearly yelling. Trying to shock the lone buyer with attitude as well as performance. "Épater le bourgeoisie" I think, and climb down, done.

I follow the two critics, Short and Tall, around the exhibit, curious what they think. Unimpressed so far, and I agree. Nothing grabs me. Until...

We come to a big complex curving set of slides. Climb the ladder. At the top, not just a platform but a cage worthy of Mad Max, with the heads of multiple slides. They're tuba-like bells or funnels in a tilted aluminum wall, like a carnival ball-toss game.

On that slippery slanting metal wall, two kids are dancing--a boy about 10 and a girl about 12. The only near-level footing's in the wells feeding the slides, but the duo venture out by swinging on the cage struts too. They wear only white tights spattered in red paint, still a bit wet--leave red smears on the aluminum. Looks alarming, like blood, but I'm a painter--I know that fresh-paint smell.

The girl is cute, and I feel guilty for feeling attraction, even though she's squirming sexily and her tights hide nothing and her little breasts are bare.

I want to linger and watch her dance, but more viewers, or kids wanting to slide (or dance?) are climbing up behind me; this is just a way station and my turn's over. I squeeze past her, pick a funnel, and slide down.

I ride the spiral slide back toward ground level--a concrete slab round a swimming pool.

The slide coils round a family in swimsuits sitting at a picnic table. Mostly women--tan skin, strong cheekbones, black black hair. Polynesian, maybe?

As the slide coils round them it forces me quite close--in their space.

One girl, a tween or early teen, is peeling out of a one-piece suit. Not just bare breasts this time, bare cunt. Again I feel desire and guilt--though here too, she's stripping in public, so doesn't she want attention?

Near the suit-stripper is a taller girl, slender too, but twentyish, and not peeling off her bikini, so I guess I'm allowed to gawk guilt-free. She looks sexy but fierce. Athletic.

But her relatives are even fiercer. A mom or aunt glares at me. Middle-aged, buxom, muscular, popping out of a too-tight one-piece suit. Her face is weird, heavy--Neandertal brow-ridges and a hair-bun up top like she's one of the giant statues on Rapa Nui.

Not sure if her scowl's built in, or she feels I'm ogling her kids, or is she mad that I'm not admiring HER, or does she see just some old racist who thinks she doesn't belong here? Whatever the reason, she's a thunderstorm of rage.

I reach the ground, and, free of the slide that forced me into that family's face, I slip away from the Great Scowler through the crowd... seeking a girl who won't make me feel conflicted. But then... who'd that be? I carry my conflicts with me.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

Bodypaint for a ritual; dream sketch, Jenny Badger Sultan

• Read aloud up a ladder: climb to my sister's room in the hotel, read her new draft aloud to see how the dialect sounds.
• Art show, blah: TV news showed a poet in the Southeast starting an art center. But the local art looked so-so.
• Tween girl, top bare, painted below waist: a figure in my friend Jenny Badger Sultan's dreams (see right). She was bodypainted for an initiation rite in Jenny's dream. Why am I dreaming her image?
• Red drops: menstrual blood, puberty? But boys don't menstruate; and I could smell it wasn't blood--just still-wet paint.
• Smell: I was slow to notice the subtle chemical scent in the Hyatt's sealed rooms. To my regret. Pay attention!
• Teenage girls in wire cage: from my sister's balcony in the Hyatt, I saw two teens talking in a metal cage on the lobby floor.
• All that exposed skin: odd since it was cold today, everyone's bundled up. Oh! Biking down Market Street, I passed a highschool or college class tramping by; one was in a short sexy skirt. And not even shivering! Four hours later, as I went home sick, there they were, the same class, trooping the other way--leaving their event. Again that one girl stood out. But for sexiness or nonconformity, bravery or masochism, chills or fever?
• Angry glare: second time we met, the only bare-legged girl in town saw me gawking, and glared like I'd been following her around for four hours, not off getting poisoned by corporate America.
• Stocky brown mom or aunt: Amazonians were all stocky, despite the humid heat. Why aren't they thin, like Vietnamese or the Maasai? Bad nontraditional diet?
• Face like an Easter Island statue: the islanders cut down Rapa Nui's forests; descendants lacked wood for canoes, and couldn't fish--or flee. Famine! Echoes whites cutting Amazon woods that locals conserved for millennia.
• Message? Beats me, beyond "you expect scowls if you even glance at anyone attractive", "capitalism mismanages everything", and "when a place smells toxic, LEAVE!" Hardly news. And why say it so strangely? The emotions reflected my day (if heightened), but whence those surreal images? And one's not even mine. Aiiiie! I feel stupid. Dreamwork's hard...

NEXT EVENING

Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) tastes 'blood rain' at dance; it's fake.

My housemates and I watch Wednesday--Jenna Ortega plays Wednesday Addams, sent to Nevermore, a boarding school for monsters and freaks.

Nevermore's prom. Wednesday and Enid the werewolf are adorable! But some townie boys sabotage the dance--copying Carrie, they feed red paint into the gym's sprinkler system and set it off, spattering dancers' tuxes & gowns. Wednesday tastes a drop. "Not blood!"

So now my image of dancers spattered in wet red paint looks predictive. Coincidence? Well, if you dream someone falls ill or a car crashes, we're often ill and cars do crash. But just how often do you dream this specific image, and how often do you see it in life? In my case, not since I saw Carrie decades ago; and that film's pranksters used blood. Wednesday's tribute/parody used fake blood--made a point of it--as did my dream. The night before.

Hmm. That weird setting--a stair to a Mad Max dome with strange funnels--I think my dream was trying to show me I'd climbed out of ordinary dreaming about my day, up to the shamanic level full of wormholes through spacetime--that is, it tried to flag the time-slipped scene as time-slipped. Few other dream researchers mention self-flagging dreams, but I've had a lot, and not all predictive--literal dreams saying they're literal; dream figures discussing lucidity, making me go lucid; dreams full of phones and spy cameras that turn out to echo a friend's dream that night. So my reading may seem odd to you, but it's a recurring pattern.

Do your dreams self-flag? If you don't look, you'll never know.

OMNIDIRECTIONALITY

My dream was cryptic, but eclectic; you can't explain it fully with either "ESP's absurd, dreams just rehash your day" nor "ESP is real, the whole dream's predictive". It blends past AND future imagery. JW Dunne's 1920s dream-journal An Experiment with Time found just such a mix of past & future elements--but Dunne found it terribly hard to see that at first, for he kept discounting his own entries. Casual foresight? Ridiculous! Either ESP is impossible, or rare and striking (and about big issues) were the only two positions, then as now! He found his own protocols exhausting (as did I when I tried his experiment 1983-4) but relentlessly scoring his own dreams both forward and back finally convinced Dunne both skeptics and believers were wrong: his dreams drew casually from events around him in all temporal directions.

This dream suggests mine do too. Past, present, future(s)... sideways?

Do yours? Again--how can you know unless you look?

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