Dream XXXVII

I was with two women from my work, and we were going through vanilla folders full of clippings from magazines. There were articles, cartoons, graphics and covers and it was our job to coordinate these.

The woman to my left noted how she could feel some unease forming in her mind.

Suddenly, we were all gripped by a stark, smothering terror. This seemed to have no source, but we were unable to work further. We sat at our workbench, paralyzed while waiting for the fear to pass.

Dream XXXVI

I was with a couple of orphans and we went to a rich old lady’s house to see if we could get a handout. A small blonde girl opened the door and told us the old lady would not be seeing us. The girl was very sad about this, but could do nothing.

I had a sudden idea and told her to put on her uniform, and lead us to a place where we could be overheard. When we were led to the foot of a stairway, I said in a very loud voice, “Oh, you mean this isn’t the theatre?” hoping to convince the old lady that I thought her performance as a curmudgeon was just that—a performance.

She was delighted to hear this flattery and came down to us, promising to take us to the real theatre, which was next door.

There, we saw a play based on our experiences as traveling orphans. The part of the old lady was played by a real bull, who was dark-brown and could talk. He also had oven mitts on his hands.

At the same time, Lou Reed’s wife kept coming to me with questions from Mr. Reed. One asked which yellow fruit had the scent I preferred. Others dealt with peculiar questions of distance, to which I replied that there was a series of small lenses, each with an “X” factor, that could be used to judge these distances. She said he was insistent, though, that I provide the answers. Every time I saw him, though, he was mourning the death of a different fellow musician and friend.

The audience in the theatre, as well as the actors on stage, were very indulgent of these many interruptions in the performance. The bull, in fact, seemed to regard me as a potential actor in some future production.

Dream XXXV

I was at a traffic island, and a car pulled up behind me and shut its engines off. I turned to look, and there was no driver inside. There were a couple of large friendly dogs, however, in the back. Another dog, who might or might not have belonged with the others, was running around outside.

I decided I should take the car to the police station so that it and the dogs could be returned to their proper owner. I drove in what I thought was a likely direction, though the streets became more and more suburban. Many people were out raking leaves and hauling them to the edge of the street.

I passed one house which seemed likely to me, for some reason I could not say, and stopped and backed up so that I was parallel with the house. Across the street, a policeman, who looked and sounded like Lee Marvin, shouted “Hey!” at me and drew his weapon, saying that what I was doing was wrong. I got out of the car to try and explain, and he began firing. A huge wall of flame engulfed the rear of the car, and I yelled, “You can’t do that, there are dogs in there!”

I jumped back in the car and drove off. Fortunately, though there had been a lot of fire, nothing was damaged and the dogs were all right. I pulled into a side street, a sort of drive-way type road that spanned two other roads, and parked the car, trying to think of what I should do next.

After a few minutes, I decided the best thing to do was to back all the way down this alley and back on to another road, and try again. As I started the car and backed down, a man who looked like Clint Howard rose up in front of the car, as if he’d been working on the engine and I’d backed away from his work. On his face was a look of bemused puzzlement.