In my dream I am a student in the school where people are separated from the siblings by language. I'm the nerdiiest, most unpopular kid in the whole school. I am in love with the most beautiful girl who is a French speaking person. She and her friends always bully me. Her friends are all very cool.
In this world, siblings are always taught different languages and kept far from each other. Only one day a week are they allowed to come together, And they must do it by murmuring in different languages until they are understood by someone.
We are standing in the hall or barn. A young blonde boy repeats over and over, my name is Chaim. He is speaking Hebrew. At last his sister recognizes him.
I have written a message. It is a rebus. Word lines go sideways and at an angle. The girl reads the message and realizes that it contains fragments of Shakespeare. She looks at me with wonderment. I never knew who you really were. She said I too am a Buddhist. I too believe in that philosophy.
I hear a voice say, all thou hast thou shalt give me. Wearing saffron robes, we step through a wall, a huge concrete wall that slides open. I wake up.
All's Well??
I had a very strange dream in which I was directing a comic opera in what appears to be a palace or large chamber in a baroque building. The seats are not fixed but are those cushy ones with carved wooden frames (Louis XV style?) and I am fixing the plot so that the right couples end up together in the end.
Next to me is a stuffy German critic, He tells me that this is the very nature of a comic opera and praises me for my innovative solution.
Not at all, I tell him, you find this already in Shakespeare "schon in Shakespeare find' man das." He hems and haws and is trying to remember a title and finally says "All's Well That Ends Well.: I know that one doesn't quite fit the mode (being one of the "problem plays") and instead I tell him of the clown Feste in Twelfth Night. Well, I say, that's not quite right either, because he has a long monologue and then a song....
... and I wake up.
The Naked Orpheus
I dreamed that I was directing a bizarre Orfeo that was part spoken dialogue, part dance, part singing. It was in a sort of church hall or something - not an opera house. The dress rehearsal was starting. I was called out to look at the dancers' costumes which were orange and green. They asked me if they should perform nude, since Orfeo was doing so. I was surprised.
Looking to my left, I saw the Orfeo singer who happened to be Damian Whiteley, only he was very elongated, like an alien, and he was nude, but to my surprise had no penis. I was trying to figure out whether this was actually nudity or an extremely convincing body suit, when I was asked to mediate a dispute on the pavement outside the hall.
There, some souvenirs were being sold, but it looks like they're being sold out of the back of a van. They are piled up against the side of the brick hall. A lady in furs is being very demanding, and only speaks German.
There is a shelf piled with little toys - it looks very incomplete. She wants to be the whole thing, toys and all. "Das Ganze?" I ask her. She nods impatiently. I try to reach my sister Pinky on the phone as she appears to own the sales concession.
Finally I get her and she says (in Thai) that they cost her 100 baht so she wants 300. I say this but the buyer seems insulted that they are so cheap. I try to formulate the sentence "we aren't a shop that cheats tourists" but I get stuck ... I say "Wir sind kein Geschäft ... (then I struggle to remember the gender of Geschäft, which I then get wrong) DER Turisten .... (and then I can't remember the word for "cheat"). I am standing there trying to figure out how to finish the sentence.
I wake up.
The Archway
I dreamed I was running through a city, Bangkok I think, though it looked nothing like it. I was escaping something. It was very crowded.
I took a right turn to duck through an archway and hundreds of kids were flinging paint at canvases. The kids were in a line and there was a passageway ... and the paintings were leaning on a wall to my left. It was a festival of action painting. It was a wild spectacle. There was a boy covered in green paint wildly flinging paint and he turned to call my name. "I never thought you would come here!" he said. He wasnt't a child at all, I saw when I looked closer, but a friend - a writer - only I couldn't remember his name.
I ran through the gauntlet of paint. I found myself in an enclosed concrete space with a tiny door to the street outside. I saw rare electronic and music equipment in a shop. It was top of the line stuff, some of which had never even been released. There was a sort of fork lift-like elevator and people were entering furtively. I saw signs. There were yellow markings on the pavement beneath me, reminiscent of an alien airfield.
I suddenly realized this was a branch of "Dan Clark" which in my dream was the name of a huge electronic music dealer. Such branches are in major cities but are always hidden, and only open unpredictably, so only those in the know can enter them. I saw a guard and said, "I didn't know there was a Dan Clark in Bangkok."
"Go on in," he said, but the doorway was closing with a metal door sliding downwards.
"No, no, it is just good to know this," I said. "I will be able to come at my leisure."
Looked through the low doorway - hole in the wall, really - to the street beyond. Started to leave.... and woke up.
Disappearing Diamonds
I dreamed I'm watching a play, sitting in the wing. A beautiful woman with a pointed traditional Thai crown is on stage. She receives a diamond. She sings about its beauty. Then abruptly the diamond falls on the floor. She kneels down to look for it. As I watch she improvises a song of loss. I despair that the diamond is actually gone forever. When hope is gone, the diamond reappears by magic. The lady sings of joy but now the loss and reappearance have become part of my play. It seems that the diamond will disappear again yet will return again.
In the next moment I am standing by a row of chairs and an old woman with a white hair bun is giving me advice.
I wake up.
CHUBBY
I had two dreams, one in which I adopted a series of people ending up with a chubby, crew-cut boy with blond hair.
In the second dream the chubby boy also appeared and we were all working together in some dank place. There was a break and I said, I'll take you to have some pancakes. We exited the building and the pancake house, with neon sign, was on the right. To the left was a rickety wooden bridge across a river. The boy said, "Let's go to the bridge instead, on the other side there's a noodle shop, I'd rather eat that."
We walked toward the bridge but before we could cross we found ourselves entering a huge reception. People were wearing tweed suits, excepts some suits had no arms, or were just pieces of tweed wrapped around in bizarre ways, only everyone was wearing the same matching gray tweed, rather a coarse design, like a tartan seen in a black and white photograph.
I suddenly realized that this party was the Democratic convention. I knew that it was going on, but thought I was going to miss it. I started apologizing for being late.
Then I woke up.
THE LAST TRUMP
I dreamed that Donald Trump had a nuclear device in his car (an orangey-brown Pontiac) and that he drove it into a wall and blew up everything. Luckily, my dreams are not predictive.
BORDER PATROL
I woke from a dream in which I was walking to America along the river bank. I reached the border but right next to it was a bridge to Canada, a rickety bridge made of planks. The bridge was so insecure and at one point only a single plank made it across. The American border was just a few yards further along with another bridge. But I was too exhausted to go any farther and I decided to enter through Canada.
A big hockey game was going to happen soon. It was all the immigration people could talk about. Immigration looks a lot more like the security line in airport. All the officers were women. The officer taking my passport had a white blouse and shoulder length dark hair and brown eyes. I gave her my passport, she welcomed me, then she carefully folded a page and ripped it out along the seam (so it was a center page).
What are you doing? I asked her. She said oh we always rip out a page here. I said they never rip out a page in America. So anyway I went through. I just had to go through a single door, turn left and there was a concrete bridge across the river into America. The guards there were paying no attention. They changed into swimsuits took some hockey sticks and abandoned their posts.
I sauntered across the concrete path. At the gateway into America I saw there were no guards anymore. I went through the gate and I was home. I said to myself, the kids could just sneak into America. They would never ask any questions. And I was walking down an empty street across from some tall and faceless buildings. Then I woke up.
LANGUAGE DISSOCIATION AT THE OPERA
I had a very odd dream. We were at the opera. Not sure which, but the bright red velvet seats make many major opera houses possible candidates.
Where I was sitting appears to be the first Circle. There were a lot of VIPs. There's an intermission and a little girl with dark hair dressed in black sitting next to me. I'm introducing her to where all the VIPs are sitting even though most of them are not here because they left for the intermission.
For some reason we are speaking French. I point out various people people. Then she says, indicating behind us, c'est la grande dame. And I say, Oui. Lort. No that is a very weird word because it is the word for "there" (là and dort) mixed up between the German and French words. But in my dream it is French even though when I wake up I know that it isn't Lort, Lort I keep repeating c'est la grande dame.
KEVAN
I had a wild dream. I went up north to see a play. The north of england. It was the world premiere of a play by a friend of mine. While there I visit a friend who is a ballet teacher and her student, a very pale, blond teenage boy who is a bit fat and sulky, The teacher says you should meet Kevan, his brother (spelled with an a in my dream.) Kevan is a young and wide-eyed kid wtih incredible charisma, a bit like Timmy Valentine in my novel but with golden skin. He's a dancer, too. Kevan invites me to his estate in the south because I have a few days left in England and nowhere to go. I ride south in a train with the author Norman Spinrad, who entertains all the way south with witty stories, but leaves me at Kevan's estate. Kevan has extremely posh and weird parents and they throw a huge dinner in a sort of atrium of their palace, and Kevan dances to entertain the guests. It is a dance about love and cuminates in a furious fast section. Afterwards I spend the night (innocently) in Kevan's room and when we awaken he declares that he is going to order a scrumptious breakfast and meet his brother, the fat one.
We enter a really impressive palatial dining room and the brother is there cowering in a corner. It takes me a while to realize it is the same one I met up north. The dancing teacher, my friend is there, as are a governess and other hangers on typical of an aristocratic household. While Kevan orders bacon and eggs, they ask me what I am doing here and I proceed to narrate to them the entire story of this dream all the way from my friends play to my journey south.
At the end the governess says, "But what do you think of Kevan's parents?"
I shrug. "They are what they are," I say, Apparently it is the right answer and they all nod sagely. I wake up.
KING CHARLES IS A ROBOT
I had a very rare dream about Jay last night at about 3 am I dreamed that he and I were in Central Europe (where I am right now) and we were visiting a park. In this park there was a huge robotic reenactment of Mediaeval history, about the execution of someone called "King Charles", except it was not the British one, but some obscure European ruler. The players were all robots, but they did not look like people, more like giant green and yellow Legos. It was a huge spectacle.
I woke up to find an email from one of his students asking for an orchestra audition.
FORCE SHIELD
My dream. Mikey and I are on a long trip. We are in a city far to south but oddly enough the place is called Wisconsin. We are taking an electric bus which at first leads us through the air over a river where there is an incredible, colorful visa of buildings that jut up in the air and twist into great circles, and spiralling roads. We pass through an electric gate and each time we go through and back up my hair stands on end and I feel an electric shock. The shock comes from a field generated by a large sheet of plastic, but now a woman in a nurse or cook's uniform is folding up the sheet and we enter a place where spring rolls are being served. I decide not to eat, because I have a fear I will miss the connection which is in Los Angeles, where we must change planes for New York. I'm in flight now, checking my ticket.
ONE OF OUR BABIES IS MISSING
I had a vivid dream about searching for a missing child. A baby. The child apparently is my nephew. The child belongs to my sister but this is not one of my real sisters. Sister in my dream is very distraught and weeping. Two other sisters are sitting in a restaurant waiting. The restaurant is in a hotel. It has wood paneling. And they're sitting at a nice wooden table.
I'm knocking on a door and when I go in and ask about the missing child the family inside make disparaging remarks about my being a Mexican. I said, the kid is white.
In fact, the kid has a Caucasian father. I reminded myself that the kid is like my niece, Vanina.
As a mother goes on wailing a blond man and a three-piece suit comes up to me and says are you the one looking for a lost child? I say yes. I know where he is he tells me. The man takes me through a very shabby anteroom with a cockroach walking on the decaying rug. He opens the door and we are in a very elegant restaurant.
I see the baby in the distance sitting with my friend Vishwa. Vishwa is also wearing a beige three-piece suit. Improbably, the baby is wearing one too. They are having a lovely time and I suddenly realize that Vishwa is the father. He says to me don't tell her right away because she doesn't let me see him.
I return to where my sister is still wailing and I say I found him. He's with his father. And don't you ever forget that he needs time with his father. Don't take him back yet. I go back to the dinner table and neglect to tell the two other sisters for some time. But eventually I relent. Then, I wake up.
Naked in the Lobby
Such a cliché ridden dream. I was stuck naked in an elevated hotel lobby. I was shielded from people only by the fact that I was sitting in a monstrous green striped sofa that faced a huge window that looks out over the outside world.
Two friends came to my aid, I have never known before they were brothers. One of them was a Frenchman named Jean-Claude. The other was German. Apparently they have been separated at birth. They were both trying to find ways of helping me. Finally they got me an oversized white T-shirt and some sweatpants but no underwear.
I needed to find a way home but they told me I also had to eat. I had no money but a menu from the hotel restaurant appeared in my hand. I realized that I could order food and have it sent to my house and then I could slip away myself and go home in these outlandish clothes, perhaps by taxi.
There were turned out to restaurants, both serving beef. One specialized in steaks, the other in roast beef with crepes. I decided on the former. They served steak in three sizes. Each came in a black steel pan. The pan had a small steak and a triangular piece of roast beef. Even the largest size wasn't very big. But I didn't want to have the one with crêpes.
I was figuring out which credit card to use, and how to slip in to the massive T-shirt so I could get away with walking down the lobby. I woke up.
Coffee in Paradise
I dreamt that I was watching CNN and there was a movie trailer. I stepped into the television and became part of the world of the film. I was on a pathway in an Idyllic landscape. Three bald dead people were lined up, on the ground kneeling, touching each other, face to back of head. In the back was a living person in the same position. This was a sort of yoga exercise. Attaching oneself to a kneeling row of corpses was a pathway to a higher consciousness.
As I walked further down the pathway children in brightly colored clothing skipped by. The pathway doubled back. There was a vast banyan tree with little purple streamers hanging. We were supposed to walk beneath the tree with tongues sticking out and let the streamers touch our tongues. Behind, across a river, will more trees. There foliage was overlaid with bright turquoise maple like bunches of leaves.
Someone said to me, "this is a preparation for the life after life."
I stepped through the CNN wall and now I was in a political wrangling situation with people running for office. But I didn't care because I was about to take off in a new adventure, an L5 colony that was being shot off into space.
As the colony lurched into the sky we were all rolling around inside. Presently, the flight became smooth, and I was able to see the beautiful world inside the skin of the L5. First, we were all lined up at a ticket booth. Everyone was buying a ticket to go somewhere. It was like a museum. Everyone was passing through the ticket booth on the right-hand side. It had a glass wall with someone inside. I looked next to the lady in the ticket counter and saw what looks like a stamped hotel receipt that said room. I said, "Could I have some coffee please?"
She said, "no, this is only a ticket booth. You have to go inside." I said, "I'm so sorry I saw the receipt, you see, and assumed that if you could get a room you could also get coffee."
The conversation seemed to distract the lady and I was able to pass through on the left without paying at all.
Within the skin of the L5, a vast vista of fields could be seen just like in that famous book by O'Neil. Ahead, there was some kind of carnival or fun fair. And finally, that was in fact a large counter behind glass selling coffee. I went up to the line and asked for a cup. But before she couldn't give me a cup, there was another official holding a license sticker in his hand. I'm sorry, said the officer, but you will need an official license before selling the coffee.
I said to the officer, we are outside the jurisdiction of the United States. We are not even on earth. Why are you insisting on imposing Earth's authority here?
The officer said technically, this is a territory of the United States. He stuck the license sticker on the glass and I was able to get coffee in a Styrofoam cup.
Then, I woke up.
Filming the Killer
I had a terrifying dream. It's about a serial killer of the John Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer variety. In my dream At first I'm like the serial killer's assistant. I'm like someone that he decided not to kill and now keeps around to help him murder people. There's also an old couple who looks after him. He has a crazy house that is able to fold up and become a prison. When he brings a victim, the old man who guards the house pushes a button and the entire living room raises up like a drawbridge and folds up the house.
I watch him chasing a boy who is very reluctant to go with him in a dark alley. The boy says he cannot go because he is sick. But the killer grabs him. He starts screaming and the killer somehow jumps into a canal and keeps walking, holding the victim who now has a screaming muffled because they are underwater. They enter the basement of a house. The rooms are completely underwater, yet look normal. We enter the house. I'm following and watching. There is a doorway. The doorway is up three or four steps, it's a black door. Behind the doorway it is completely dry even though we have been walking underwater. I'm thinking to myself that is not logical, the water levels cannot be this different. What scientific anomaly is this?
The killer carries the victim into the pantry then up some stairs into a central hallway. To the left is the sunken living room. He gives the instructions and the old man pushes the button. The house closes up. He disappears somewhere with his victim, up into an attic. I reflect upon the fate that I escaped.
The old man says, don't worry. It's not so bad. When he's not looking, I mess around. He shows me where there is a
crack in the wall where he can go out. The house is not a trap after all.
Suddenly, I realize that none of this is really happening. Actually I am a filmmaker. The boy is a real former victim who has volunteered to be an actor, reliving his trauma and perhaps working through it in the process. I am sitting on the bridge outside the house which is actually a set. The buildings are stone and we are near a canal.
I tell him, I'm really sorry to put you through this. Now the next scene in the script isn't exactly what happened. Please don't be disturbed. Just act.
More and more, since leaving the house, this film is becoming a period piece in which people addressed in Victorian clothes. We filmed the scene in which the victim goes to the police. The London constabulary marches over to the house and raids it. They discover evidence and go back to the police station.
However, the next scene is unexpected. We go upstairs into a hidden room. A group of 19th-century people who appeared to be some kind of Oscar Wilde secret club is having a meeting. There are people in extravagant costumes, and someone in drag. I film the scene. They are discussing what to do with the serial killer.
This is really terrible, says the man in drag. He is a blonde in a green dress. This person will damage our reputation Things already bad for us in the society where we are hated and condemned.
Another man says, we must take care of this ourselves. We must make him disappear. Yes! They all agree. From now on the man says he is marked.
I continue to film the smoke-filled room then I wake up.
This terrifying dream appears to somehow be a replay of the film Tenderness of the Wolves. I watched it on video about four months ago.
Coming To Town
Tonight I fell asleep at 9 PM and I had a vivid dream just now waking up at 5 AM. In this dream, I'm directing a Christmas play. It's very brightly colored — a comedy about a family.
Looks to be a sort of amateur production. It's a small theater, with the audience on those fold up aluminum chairs. The setting of the play seems to be the night before Christmas and it's very slapstick.
The play has already started when I suddenly realize standing back stage that we never cast Santa Claus. Santa Claus has a couple of scenes in this play where he appears with one other character. The script appears in my mind's eye on those pages with Santa Claus in them become suddenly very glaring. The fact is, they are essential to the play. That's why we forgot to rehearse those scenes. I realize I will have to play him myself.
I am wearing a white jumpsuit as I stand backstage. Quickly I tell someone who is with me, I think he is playing the father in the family, to run to the store and buy me a red Santa Claus outfit. The outfit is identical to the one I'm wearing right now except that it I s red.
"What size?" He asks. I tell him size 46. Then I say no, bigger, bigger. The biggest you can find. I stand in the wings stage right. The audience is having a great time, laughing and smiling. On stage every character is dressed in green and white. I am needed in my red to complete the color scheme. Anxiously I await the arrival of the red jumpsuit.
Mr Somtow Goes to Washington
I dreamed that I was at a gathering of presidential candidates. All the Republicans stood in a crowd on the left side of the room. The Democrats were in a semi circle on the right. I myself was a candidate and I found myself standing in the middle of the room next to George W. Bush. We were ordered to arrange ourselves in the order of those who had the most to the least votes. George and I had the highest and with therefore next to each other.
I asked who the lowest scoring Democrat was. To my surprise it was another George Bush. He was also a governor. He stood off to one side, looking like a cross between George and Jeb.
I said, I really miss you Mr. President.
George smiled and said, yes those were some fun times.
I said, no matter how horrible things got, you always put a good face on things.
He began laughing, and then presently we all got the order to march forward and the candidates all went, shoulder to shoulder, down a winding path behind a monstrous boulder.
Wounded Fish
I dreamt that my sister and I were investigating some kind of murder. We are in a house and we come to a room full of cats. But the cat we seek, a silvery tabby, is missing.
There is evidence of missing cats in another room, plus an injured fish named Ivan. We find a row of stools in another room and it's sort of a cat hospital; on each stool is an injured cat. These are sort of bar stools with low backs by the way, a row of about seven of them. The stool that should have our missing cat is empty. Next to it, wrapped in swaddling, covered in a blanket, is a weird shape. My sister lifts the blanket and screams. It is the tortured body of the missing fish Ivan.
We go to the kitchen, to our left, and await the owner of the house who will come. He is outside the kitchen door. He is a fat man with a rifle. We have our pistols ready. He will be here in just a minute, I say. (Actually I'm not sure if I say it or my sister says it, but in those minutes, my sister is suddenly a strange man, then my sister again.) We hear footsteps. Shots ring out. I wake up.
Emicturate!
Here is an odd dream I had. I dreamt that my son Johnny (in the dream he is in his late teens) wet himself and was being dragged out by thugs to be flogged as a punishment. I came out into a large quadrangle and saw this horror — these burly guys were whipping him and had thrown him down on the ground. I managed to fight off the bullies. I pulled Johnny up and waited for him to pull his pants on, and walked him across the grass. I said to Johnny, "This is called emicturation. There are three ways to cure it, three kinds of medication." ... In my dream I remember listing the three medicines in great detail, but I don't remember that part.
I know that the proper word is "enuresis", but the word "emicturate" appeared in my dream. This as far as I know is a "joke" word used by a science fiction writer (I can't remember who) who said in an article "But what emicturates me most (look it up)" - i.e. "pisses me off".
P.S. Johnny never had that problem. I can't figure this out. The whipping scene was very frightening.