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I had betaken myself from bed at the crack of noonish, despite this meaning a less than optimal amount of sleep for the third or fourth day in a row, but it didn't last long. My giddying array of sleep disorders generally reach new heights when my head is beset by inflammation, allergy, toxic irritants, whatever. The mechanism seems to be the swelling of my airways keeping me from going into the REM and Phase Four sleep, the good stuff. I might be glad of this because I could well suffocate myself if I let myself just get the good stuff anyway, but it seems that cranking up the ibuprofen yesterday and today has relieved the situation enough that, after about an hour and a half out of bed, I slammed into dream sleep so fast I almost didn't make my bed. A nap took me.
It was filled with rooms and people and relatives and spacecraft being swarmed by attack jets and being sent crashing into the business district of Sacramento, plus designer clothes, guilty Dorritos attacks, a woman yammering political rhetoric nonstop into a cell phone and my uncle going senile, all punctuated with moments of absolute clarity about the correspondence between certain URLs and the clues to fundamental reality.
I do not fuck around.
It started at Peggy and Jim's place. Peggy was running around and readying everyone for a party full of gourmet treats and the general ribaldry of gustatory enchantment. Jim was trying to help me find the backup hard drive I have hidden from myself. We even looked behind the nuker. Out in the country, with the oblique light through the trees and fresh air, somewhat chaotic, but completely happy and relaxing. Unfortunately, this too quickly morphed into an even larger party at my aunt and uncle's house in Sacramento.
I'd arrived with my mother, but she soon disappeared into the crowd somewhere. I put two quarts of half and half in the refrigerator for coffee. My cousin had also brought half and half, but he'd only brought a pint. We have to do this sort of thing when our parents are involved because they are all convinced real dairy products will send them to the grave with clogged arteries. They replace it, of course, with stuff that accelerates that artery clogging by some quantum exponent, but mentioning this to any of them resembles nothing so much as nagging beach glass. So. Right. We bring the real stuff ourselves... even if nowadays it's more radioactive.
My cousin is an elementary school principal, which is part of how I know we are ruining our children, murdering their intellects and their spirits. He was maybe the one element of this power dreaming that had not gone fantastical instanter. He was completely his usual utterly morose, petty and doltish, nose-picking self. The only sign of life from him in the fifty-eight years I've been his cousin is the occasional burst of inspiration that puts him on personal crusades that sometimes can last as long as two whole weeks. Once, when we were about ten or so, he'd had the earthshaking insight that it was NOT toothpaste that was the important part of brushing; it was the brushing and the brushing alone. He assiduously went about brushing vigorously without toothpaste after every meal... visibly inflated with virtue... for not even the two weeks. Many years later he gleefully accepted an offer of a game of backgammon with me, saying he was an expert and smiling widely when I said I'd almost never played. I beat the living snot out of him three games in a row and, honestly, he became markedly agitated, leapt up and ran out of the house. That's who's running your elementary schools. Okay?
Somehow a bag of Dorritos appeared in my hand, and it being a big party, I thought, oh, what the hay, I could have a few and it wouldn't kill me. So I did and then set them on the counter next to the nuker where Jim and I had been so recently looking for my backup drive. Don't ask me how Jim's nuker in Mendo World got in Sacramento, but I then started to take stock of all the guests. Most of them were pretty old, in various states of dodderingtude, but some of them were younger, and one of the younger ones was a woman with hair bleached platinum with strawberry streaks. It was NOT attractive, and she sort of reminded me of that horsefaced thing with the most idiotic hat at the royal wedding, except she was talking on a cell phone very fast, a glossolalial Vesuvius of hard core political opinions. Whoever was on the other end was obviously speechless because there were no breaks in the declaratory lava stream, and everyone at the party was party to this conversation. She could be heard above all else from all rooms in the huge house.
I was becoming sorry I'd set down the Dorritos, feeling darn peckish, and started looking for it, but it didn't seem to be there anymore. I finally thought I'd found it, only to notice the heavy taste of grease and salt in my mouth where the taste of dread delicious chemical toxins should have been, discovering I'd picked up regular potato chips. I put them down.
I realized I couldn't see my mother anywhere around. I started roaming the huge house. She was downstairs in a huge workroom my ancient aunt had constructed to house her new clothes design business. My mother was down there cutting and sewing pieces of my aunt's creations with a whole room full of young ladies. It wasn't like a sweat shop. It was just a huge room with young things cranking out old lady designs. She seemed happily engaged with this activity and so I went back upstairs. There was a lot of gasping from the front room.
I got there just in time to see about six fighter jets chasing down what looked to be the space station out the plate glass windows. They were going seeeeriously fast, faster by far than you've ever seen a jet go. Still it eluded them, but some other craft, looking like something one might find in Earth orbit took its place and was nailed by the fighters. It started rolling in downward through the air and looked to be going to crash our party, literally, but missed us and slammed into the business district of Sacramento instead. We'd all run through the kitchen and over into the huge family room to see the huge billows of smoke and fire in the distance. Then another dogfight appeared out the windows on another side of the house.
This got the political harridan off the phone, and we exchanged knowing comments in the stairwell as I was going upstairs to find my uncle, who'd excused himself from the party for a nap. He was in bed with my FATHER. He was sound asleep in his boxers with a leg and an arm practically clamped across Poppa, who was in his Jockey shorts, mortified, and trying to squirm out from under my uncle's appendages. He managed it, but it woke my uncle, who then started tittering crazily and suddenly was very, very evidently not in anything approximating his right mind. It seems he was trying to make sexual advances toward my father, who was there strictly to comfort my uncle in his illness.
Always when I awake from dreaming of my father I am upset that I did not immediately run to him and start hugging him as hard as I could, which is what I ache to do while awake, but could only manage in a dream, but in the dreams he and I are always simply attached in a kind of telepathic way where words are not necessary, or if there are any words, they are completely understood, almost no separation between the speaker and the hearer.
I was on a mission to tell somebody of some authority there that Project Blue Beam appeared to be going on all around us, make the official announcement, but there did not seem to be any such person there, and, in fact, everyone at the party was hovering around me as the authority figure in this emergency. It dawned on me that, oh, no, this is actually so.
...
OMG — It's HER... the cell phone political harridan. This is the woman in my dream, in better lighting, but who the hell is she? A celebrity I have never even heard of before. Lots of those, but to see her, for the first time, again, just a few hours after I thought I dreamed her up... whoa....
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