ebogjonson.com

« sweet, sweet spam | Main | paris - a dream »

December 4, 2005

the village - a dream

I dream that I am some kind of vaguely dirty hippie walking the earth like Caine in Kung Fu, only with a laptop, a Caddy and locks. The town I have just entered could be anywhere - a village in the northern prairie, or maybe it's an isolated California desert hamlet. I'm clearly a creature of my own present, but around me the dream is marked by temporal instability and confusion. Sometimes I feel like I'm visiting the early 1960s, other times I'm in a far-flung, post-apocalyptic future, my travels the only thing connecting isolated places struggling to hold on after some unspecified cataclysm.

I have a car, some kind of kitted-out (in a Mad Max way) two-door low-rider Cadillac sedan. Although I'm capable of off-roading it, I have driven into town on what remains of the pre-apocalypse highway system. (The drive in confuses the setting further, as it looks almost exactly like the drive up Francis Lewis Boulevard to my high school in NYC, only without the buildings.)

The locals are almost exclusively white. The town doctor is an aging Latino dude and the nurse is his comely catholic daughter. The town sheriff is white, but his deputy is literally Officer Williams from Reno 911, only minus maybe 15 years and 20 pounds. Her nails are lavish and did, glistening curls are pressed against her temples. After some gentle vetting by the sheriff and deputy (she seems happy to see another black face) I am allowed to mix and mingle. The townspeople are wary of me, but I don't feel unsafe or particularly unwanted. It's just clear to both sides that I'm not from there and that I don't belong there. Everyone is politely waiting for me to leave.

(I never learn the town's name. No one mentions it.)

The dream takes a turn when I discover a series of ovoid underground caverns where a group of "survivors" are living. The underground part of town is vast, way vaster than the aboveground town baking in the sun, and except for the doctor, nurse, sheriff and deputy there is no overlap between the two sets of residents. The folks underground are also polite, but they seem to live under the thumb of an unspecified tyranny, something that even the town elders - the sheriff and doctor - fear. The proceedings have a religious, potentially demonic air to them, all the residents wearing brown sack cloth robes over their clothing and monastic hoods.

I meet a woman in her late thirties underground, an odd, coquettish white woman who smokes and carries herself like an older, stretched out version of Audrey Tautou from Amelie. We have a passing encounter in the cavern's gift store (?) that blossoms into a recurring interaction after she notices my outlandish, foreign dress - Levi's, some busted, vintage Nikes, a tee I bought at the MOCA Basquiat show, an American Apparel jacket made out of Tyvec paper. When she takes off her hood it's like a scene from a bad movie - surprise! It's a girl! It turns out she's the town librarian. She studies me and the contents of my knapsack with intense academic curiosity. I learn she's not from the town either, that she was once a traveler just like me, but she's decided to settle here - that or she's been trapped so long (by what? The unspecified horror?) that she's accepted the terms and condition of her imprisonment.

When I look at the stretched out Audrey Tautou librarian (it's the same when I'm around Officer Williams and the nurse) I become acutely aware that I'm dreaming. I look at her (at her and her and her, three women, three times) and ask myself (another 3) whether she's going stay a generic dream character or whether things will take a more one-on-one turn. The answer always pivots on the same plot point - will she decide to run away with me? Can I steal her away from the town? All three times I realize the answer is no without having to go beyond subtext and flirting. The nurse is too tied to her father, the deputy has duties she takes seriously, and the librarian has been out and above before and was scarred by what she found there.

The town gift shop (again with the funny, random bits) is art directed like something you might find in an airport terminal - magazines, candy, bottled water, neck pillows, cell phone doodads. The librarian leaves me alone there, and for a few seconds of dreamtime I find myself zapped out of the shop. Now I am sitting on an airplane in mid-flight, reading an in-flight catalogue. The listed wares I'm reading about are miraculously doubled, present both on the page in front of me and yet also materialized back in the town shop, which both still exists and doesn't, occupying as it does some weird, dimensionally adjacent dreamspace. The woman sitting next to me on the plane is a rather beautiful Chinese lawyer (as in Chinese national) and I get absolutely nowhere talking to her - for one my Mandarin sucks, for two I'm still dressed like a dirty, traveling hippie, hipster museum tee or no. I cut eyes at her internally, uncharitably assuming there is also a racial component to her disinterest.

Huh. An SD ram card is being advertised in the in-flight catalogue that has a program on it that teaches English-speakers Mandarin. No sooner do I notice it than I'm zapped back to the gift-shop, peering at the rack that contains the cell phone doodads. I find the Mandarin card on the rack, but on closer inspection discover it's not compatible with my Treo. It occurs to me that the thing to do instead is to learn Spanish, which is available for my particular phone. (Is the town in California after all?) But - details, details - I realize I don't have a headset with me and can't imagine how I'd learn Spanish on my phone without one.

I decide to leave the town. As I walk out of the underground city I run into the librarian. We exchange books and I promise to return for a visit. As I walk out of the caves and then out of town, I find that everyone aboveground is agitated, rushing mysteriously to and fro. The road back to my car has also gone flooded in my absence and (shades of Katrina?) I have to hitch a ride on a piece of floating driftwood that's being pushed by two locals equipped with gondolier's poles. As they push away from the town what feels like hundreds of young white college kids start streaming in the opposite direction, carrying kegs and beach blankets, heat radiating off their sun-purpled skin like they were freshly boiled lobsters. It's fucking spring break.

The locals pushing the driftwood get lost. Instead of taking me to my car they've circled back somehow and landed us on the exact opposite side of town from where I'm parked. I get off the driftwood and decide to hoof it to my car on my own, pointing myself towards the center of town. College kids are swarming everywhere. The crowd parts and I see that buried in the midst of all that spring break is another dred walking towards me and away from the town's center. He could be my twin, except that he immediately shames me with his dirty hippie authenticity. His gear is either all brandless or is some next level esoteric brand with which I'm unfamiliar. He's unburdened by electronics and has the rangy, lean look of someone who's been out of doors. I feel fat and soft in comparison.

We exchange ritual dred acknowledgements and then compare wandering hippie notes. He's been walking the earth as well, for years it seems, and has been to some of the same places I have, even knows the same people I do back home, wherever that is. We both lament how the town's been spoiled by the arrival of all those college kids, confess to each other that if there's anything that could make us feel sorry for a town like this, it's the arrival of ten thousand fratboys. We wonder how the word got out, how everyone knew to come, whether or not the kids will discover the underground caverns.

We're getting along quite nicely and it occurs to me that the natural thing to do next is suggest we travel together, but instead of inviting him along I find myself gripped by three forms of panic simultaneously - class panic, liberal panic and then homosexual panic. What if he judges me for traveling around in a cushy Cadillac instead of walking? What if he wants to rob me? What if he wants to fuck me? Wait - what if I want to fuck him? I mean, I had just spent most of the dream trying to maneuver the nurse, the deputy and the librarian into my car.

Before I can get any specific resolution on any of these questions, though, he announces that he absolutely has to leave town as quickly as possible. There are too many college kids around us, and their "energy" is disturbing to him. I have to keep from rolling my eyes at this talk of energy; all of a sudden I don't like him. I notice that his locks are bleached blond, which strikes me as a damning incongruity. We take our leave of each other, make vague plans to keep an eye out, one for the other, down the literal road.

The dream starts to unravel, events and locations galloping past me. I am in the middle of town where thousands of kids are milling about. The sheriff and the deputy are desperately checking bags and confiscating alcohol from underage kids. A parade float roars by. It's the webcast of MTV's Spring Break Beach House. A white guy from Jersey in a sombrero and fake mustache is tossing business cards from the top of the float. "Senor Sanchez," the cards say, "Senor Vice President." His email is printed and his cell phone number is handwritten. The deputy is searching my bag and is puzzled by my multivitamins. Now it seems that the town is located in 1962 in Southern California. "Whole food" multivitamins will not be invented for 30 years. She shows my pills to the sheriff who shows them to the doctor. Doc is a real pill himself. He winks at me, says he's sure I'm just a nice traveling hippie and not a junkie. He pops one of my vitamins and does a cartoony full body stretch, announces that he hasn't felt this good since he was a boy.

His daughter, the nurse, is peering a little awed at the other contents in my bag. What is this flat little typewriter with no paper in it? What about this round, thin wafer of plastic that plays music and shows movies? How about this little handsized thing with the buttons?

She just about trembles. "Are you some kind of humaniod space alien?"

Even though wakefulness is ripping the dream into little pieces all around me, I allow myself a theatrical pause in response, my eyes narrowing into cooly appraising, science-fictional slits. "It's not so much a question of where I'm from," I tell the girl, "but when."

Her eyes widen conspiratorially, she inhales "oh!" in a perfect little wordless hop. As I wake, I think that it would have been nice to have more time, and then I instantly revise myself. The dream is what it is.

I'm always of those two minds about these dreams, especially with the early morning, pre-waking wisps I remember well enough to record. Am I author of the dream, am I spectator? Neither/both? In the mornings I often dream of straining towards outcomes that are invariably sexual, and I invariably dream of failing. Every now and then I get lucky, but instead of experiencing it as a gift from me to me, I go all bare knuckle on myself, crowing about how I made new moments through brute force and phantasmagoric will. It's funny and I never know what to make of it when I'm awake. I lie on my back reviewing what's happened, sniffing at pieces of dream like a tentative cat exploring a recently emptied shopping bag. I tilt my head away at the neck everytime I catch an unexpected whiff, the rest of my body frozen.

[EnD]

Posted by ebogjonson in dream log, on December 4, 2005 3:45 PM