Dream Log: September 3, 2000

fragment 1

. . .Someone is sitting on the ground(?) in front of 4 holes. He is striking the ground beside the one third from the left. . .

fragment 2

I am buying a ticket for a bus trip with a singles group. I have bought my ticket from the organizer. That is fine. The next person is buying a ticket, and, somehow, my purchase is final until that next one is bought.

There is a pile of gold coins on the table in front of me--Canadian loonies. I reach for them, knock them over.

Now, I am ouside, looking for the bus. The only one in sight is an old, grayish one looking like a schoolbus. The ground is muddy. I am walking past that bus--it can't be the right one. I go to where I think the bus station is; the building is falling down.

I come back towards the bus. It is doun a muddy hill. People are getting on. It is hard slogging through the mud.

fragment 3

. . .There is a plane. It is soaring. I feel excitment, or terror. . .

Travelling together with my old high school class, from which many I haven't met for 10 years. Staying at a hotel in Paris. Taking the sub.

L. Ron Hubbard and I were going out on a date. Everyone referred to him as "Ron", so I was confused when I learned I was going on a date with "Ron" Hubbard, the L always gave me some idea of his identity. The entire point was that if the date went well, he would be highly subjective towards me and would give me a scholarship.

We went to see my friend James and his band play in concert at the House of Blues. I looked up at the stage and I saw the entire band Polaris (the band that did the theme song for The Adventures of Pete and Pete) playing. They were playing Hey Sandy and She is Staggering (both have been played on the show), and L. Ron Hubbard (who will be reffered to as LRH throughout the rest of this dream) would turn to me every othe rminute and tell me about how he was going to write a book about these guys. I imagined a book like Dianetics featuring the band Polaris, and made a mental note to myself to write this book when I woke up.

LRH, old and frail, decided that it would be best that we leave because his ears were pounding from standing right next to the speakers and there was a lot of feedback that night. We were sitting in his car, a '58 Edsel(!) and he turned on the radio and Girls Just Want To Have Fun came on the radio. This gets kind of vague to me here, something about an Interstate loop that would take you from Fresno to the New Jersey turnpike in half an hour, so we could go visit some friends of mine who lived in San Diego that night since LRH lived in some city that starts with a V (I'm wanting to call it Verona, but I think that's just because that's Romeo and Juliet..).

We're driving in Fresno in the median strip of a small highway (compared to the rest of Fresno) and we pass by a basketball court and I catch a glimpse of Latrell Sprewell playing 4 corners with one of the guys from the Mavericks. I hit some emergency break on the passenger side and I run up to the court and ask if LRH and I can join them. 4 corners actually is a two-player game here (that's kind of stupid...) and Latrell Sprewell steps out so I step in. The ball will hit me and will kick it over the fence and hit this car over and over again. It was always the same car, a lemon-yellow Camero that passed by ad nauseum. LRH came behind me, gagged me with a bandana and forced me into his car and drove me off to his house. This was somewhat vague too. The house was full of torture devices and other things I can't explain. I sat down in a dentist's chair as LRH circled around me screaming things like "So you really think the Communist Manifesto was about Communism do you?! Well you're wrong! It was about YOU!" I started to cry. "Oh you big baby baloohoo (I think that was what he said.. some word I have never heard) cry cry cry! I pay my taxes so people like you can sit around crying! It's not my g-damn fault that thirty-eight million kids follow me around thinking I wrote Battlefield Earth! Oh God babe, if you only knew!"

:::I started slipping out of the dream around here because something on television was waking me up, but I somehow came back into the dream, and the stuff on television was becoming part of the dream:::

LRH had two rapid-fire machine guns and was shooting at what appeared to be, only what I can make out as Lisa Loeb. I woke up.

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• I am in a large, old house with a large group of 20-somethings. Turns out to be just like a cheesey 90s horror flick like Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer.

• Lying in my bed, there's a strange shelf built into the wall. The shadows of venetian blinds stripe the wall. A voice says, "the hardest part is remembering." I wake up and a few seconds later a 5.3 earthquake hits my house. I think intently, trying to recall the dream I just woke up from. I succeed and go back to sleep.

• It's bright daytime and I'm walking through an abandoned ghetto. Train tracks are on my left and an enormous concrete parking garage looms on my right. Across the tracks, an old shack stands, covered with a palimpsest of serpentine graffiti. A train lumbers past, covered the same way. I meet an old man, huddled beneath the parking garage. We trade a toothpick for a piece of candy. He says we should each start a business. I'll be his supplier; he'll be mine. We will swap possessions back and forth in the semblance of some kind of economy. At least it would be more alive than this one.

• I'm on the roof of a skyscraper, next in line for a freefall ride that drops you from here to the ground floor. I assume the brakes activate before then. The lady ahead of me is strapped in by the attendant then drops through the floor. I don't remember anything else.

• In the restaurant of an old hotel. There are so many high school kids here. As I'm walking through the parking lot with my girlfriend, a man takes her hand for a moment as he walks towards his car. He then lets go and walks off. I confront him about what he just did. His explanation: "she looks just like my roommate, the perfect woman." Inside I rediscover the disgusting social ethics of teenagers. There is a very clearly defined group of popular kids and the rejects. I seek out to expose the whole mess. I put my pants on upside down and walk around claiming that I'm cool and starting a new style. Of course, I get rejected by the cool crowd.

  Eventually everyone is outside, in-group on one side, out-group on the other. I walk towards the in-group: "who here has ever felt like they didn't fit in? Step across the line." Some kids hesitantly step across. "Who has ever felt like they had to change themselves to be accepted?" More kids cross. This goes on until it's down to four guys, the core instigators of prejudice against the un-cool. I notice they're all dressed almost exactly alike (khaki shorts and tshirts with pictures of green plants). One of them is class president. I ask him, "how did you get to be class president if you make 90% of the school feel inferior?" His answer: "I lie! I pretend to be someone else." "So even the most popular guy in school doesn't think highly enough of himself to be who he really is." Dream ends.

I am talking to knarph on AIM. He says something to the extent of: "You know, you're not as great as you think you are." To which I respond, "Right, but how did you know I was burning?"

I am sitting on someone's deck, smoking pot. Below me, I see some Fed, and he yells up at me to stop, because smoking pot is illegal. "We'll be watching you from now on!" he threatens. I'm not scared. I know he's just referring to the fact that I want to install Linux on my laptop, and I know that they only want to bust me if I partition my hard drive wrong. I've got it all under control. So I decide that I need to sit in the grass, and play with water colors. It's awfully dark, and I can see someone moving in the bushes. Getting scared, I figure I better run inside as fast as I can, but as I gather up my paint, and start running, another Fed jumps out and handcuffs me. "I told you we were watching you!" he exclaims gleefully, like he's just caught me doing something completely terrible. I'm only worried because I know that I have a quarter sitting in my pocket. This causes me to wake myself up with a beating heart and an intense paranoid fear of cops.