Flug wakes up and grabs the laptop by the bed... in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

Just now dreamed an Elmore Leonard special and no mistake. It started with a man, a private detective, meeting a woman, and a strangely whirlwind romance, with the woman finding him so strangely familiar… It turned out she was his girlfriend and it was a pre-arranged romantic game, she’d been hypnotized so that she didn’t remember him. But then odd notations, like coded ransom instructions, started showing up on the love notes, and the law took notice, and he of course had the most suspicious alibi in the world for whatever it was…

But it was drugs, not kidnapping, and the link was to the far-off Southwest and Juarez, where the cartel laid out murdered bodies in rows in the sun. (Apparently “here” in the dream was somewhere between, I don’t know, Detroit and the East Coast.)

Throughout the dream there was this business about donating blood - the woman worked at the blood center, where the private eye donated, it was how they’d met - and at the end he had been tricked into giving himself an HIV-tainted transfusion, he had thought he was outwitting them but it was the reverse, and he was fading fast.

I’ve had no choice but to leave out the private eye’s partner, the choleric sheriff, another blood-center worker (far less generic than she sounds), and the two FBI agents with the remarkable vehicle. Those people took up as much of the dream as the two people I mentioned above, as much of the action and plot, but I no longer know how they fit in; too much connective tissue has already blown away, and all I have is the skeleton, or not even a skeleton, the spine.

If I had waited another five minutes the dream would probably all have been gone when I tried to remember. Like an ink-erasing wash that spills across a printed page and takes away all the nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs, leaving only a few scattered, meaningless conjunctions and articles. One morning I was actually thinking about a dream at the very moment when the censor struck, and it was horrible - as if I had been looking through a spyglass when someone else grabbed the cylinder and pulled the focus out of true, except that it wasn’t merely a blurred view, my very comprehension was rewritten into vacant idiocy.

Every night, every morning, my true empire unknown to me. The secret, unloggable portion of humanity’s business.

(The FBI agents’ vehicle was remarkable, though. If you can imagine a cross between a double-decker bus and a hearse - a great black vertically-stretched paddy-wagon-like thing that might have been built in the first third of the twentieth century… and when the suspicious sheriff opened the great front grill in the parking lot, he discovered four old-fashioned machine guns on swivels, but non-functional ones, purely decorative, backed by a cast-bronze frieze showing noble agents and exaggeratedly dopey local cops. What is the point of being an FBI agent if you don’t have a sense of the romantic.)

It’s later now. Of the dream beyond these notes, what is sticking best seems to be only the gold-tinged afternoon light.

More than anything else the physical background situations stick, if anything does. Structures; buildings. From one dream I remember a vast, complex grand hotel that was also a royal palace with the royals actually in residence, the boundary marked only by a range of red-velvet rope lines unpredictably distributed. That awful sun-blasted parking lot in Juarez with all the bodies is going to stick, I think. In some town there is a curving little street of small shops, including a funhouse with a gaping grinning mouth, behind which, behind the fence-row of low buildings, is a blighted space of tumbled, hummocky earth and trash and short, fire-blackened trees. And of course the endless array of warehouses, industrial buildings, and huge circus-like tents that are my places of employment, where I always hurry in and situate myself and have to ask my co-workers: can you tell me who the client is and what we’re doing now, I can’t seem to remember?

(My memory of dreams may be better when I’m dreaming than otherwise. Many times I have recognized places that I’ve dreamed and have been before - sometimes even apparently dreamed and been several times before - and I’ve remarked on the fact to myself - and it is galling to no end when I then wake up and once again can’t remember a thing about what I noticed.)

Innovations in mass transit I seem to remember the most vividly of all. Like:

Somewhere, in a hazy city (the sky a deep ochre yellow) in a less-developed country - perhaps India, Indonesia, Malaysia (surely not Singapore) - there is a huge, rickety tram system, with cables suspended high above the buildings, even above many of the skyscrapers. And the real analogue of this city, wherever it is, may have an aerial tram system for all I know, but it is not like this: the cars do not dart along the cable itself; instead they are suspended at the end of long, long tethers of their own that dangle from the main cable. Must make it easier to have low-altitude stations. But how fast those tiny cars swing through the smoggy city like bees or gnats - and how wide and very far out they swing on their strings when the main cable makes a turn! (And how few tourists must ever dare to ride them!)

Or: Somewhere, in some alternate, very, very class-defined version of Portland, Oregon, the light rail system has been built in concert with the construction projects of the elite, and with a view toward serving the elite particularly. (I have to admit that both the light rail system and the skyline of this version of Portland are much more spectacular than in my own. Plutocracy pays, it seems.) It is common for the train lines in this city to pass through buildings, and sometimes the doors of all the cars open - as in shopping-mall stops and the like… but, at certain stops in expensive environs, only some of the cars open their doors. These are cars where only certain people have the means to purchase boarding privileges - or are allowed to. The commuters packed into all the other cars must simply wait for the train to proceed. At a few stops, only a couple of cars open. And there is one stop where the train comes to a slow stop in a dark tunnel and only a single door on one of the cars opens. This train door opens onto a sumptuous walk-in closet, that gives off the bedroom of the richest man in the city. This man gets dressed, at his ease, conceivably with the aid of a servant… and simply steps onto the train.

Much better than either of those I like a different revision of Portland’s transportation. The vehicles in this case also seem to be on a track, but they are not big train cars, and they do not even seem to be fully closed compartments. Disneyland’s “Peoplemovers” - do they still have those? - come closest. This version of light rail often moves as fast as you would expect but certainly does not always move at the same speed… because, at a certain point, after making a sharp 135-degree turn, it also passes through a building - through a long, narrow, dark, crowded greasy-spoon diner. Literally down an aisle, the track inset in the floor. And in this diner it is moving at perhaps one or two kilometers per hour! Almost drifting, amid the hubbub of conversation and clatter of dishes and the reeks of coffee and the grill… certainly making it easy to slip off and take one of the stools just inches away - and I think slow enough to actually place an order and have it handed to you before you reach the end! This too is a delay for non-hungry commuters, but it is more egalitarian - and I have a feeling the food is tasty, though probably extremely undietetic.

This latter dream has remained frustrating because I know exactly where this sharp turn (to the left) and the building with the gunbarrel-straight diner would be. The spot is only a couple of miles from my home, a hair northward of due east. In the dream, just before the turn, the track was already elevated - the diner was on the second or third floor of the building - and for a moment, from the train/Peoplemover, you could see down into a minor street angling off to the left. That street, I knew, was a street of sculpture businesses - of statue-makers specifically. And the view was a fascinating series of animals and gods and people and huge forms of creatures along the sidewalk, fur, beaks, breasts, talons rendered in pale stone. I saw it just for a moment and I made a note to go there and browse…

In the dream. And I’d still really like to go to that street and look, but it’s just not there. Nothing is there. The real, very different trains do not go anywhere near. There are no large buildings like the one the diner is in, nor the wooded hill that anchored the turn, and no little street running at that angle. There’s flat land with completely other streets, residential neighborhoods, and if I circled wider I’d find a glass recycling center, a big motel, and a highway. Nothing corresponds. But I think I could go out and walk right to the spot where it’s not.

How much mystery is there really in my dreams? The question must remain forever unsettled. The cues will not all fit in one basket.

For example, often my dreams do seem to be simply very clear riffs on TV I have just watched or books I have just read. But at other times a dream will seem to be something, not only with no obvious cue, but that it seems could not have come from me. (Sometimes almost as if the dreams could have come from someone else. Are there boundaries in dreamland?)

Have I caught the amazing complexities in the process of their construction through detection of stupidities? I’m not sure. There was recently, in a dream, a supposed racist meme-image in Facebook that consisted of four panels that depicted four different ways of stacking objects of some sort. Or, sort of. I only glimpsed the image, not long enough to understand it, then I wondered for a while what the racist implication could have been, what the idea had been… And finally - I don’t know whether it was before or after waking - I concluded that there was no answer, no sense in it; this thing was merely scenery-bluff-gobbledygook thrown together, like the result of a random-number process. There was nothing to understand. But then I never really took in the image, did I? I didn’t have time; it was too brief. I carried away only an insufficient nonsensical impression. If it actually was interpretable, or could have been, I wouldn’t know. Just as if I had glimpsed something in life.

And not everything is amenable to this sort of suspicion. How, on these terms, could I account for the couple of dreams that have been entirely in rhyming verse… dreams which I cannot remember at all except in that I am convinced that the marvelous rhyming did not merely seem to me flowingly perfect and brilliant but was flowingly perfect and brilliant, and I know this because I was there? With some kinds of things and some kinds of perception, there seems little room for fakery.

(And, once, I knew and relished the perfect insult with which to describe an assassin. I’ll never find it again.)

I remember a co-worker (in real life, I should say) who insisted confidently to me that there really were never any vast distances in dreams. He had dreamed and observed how it went, he said, and the dream had simply generated a finite block of asserted distance, and then another block of asserted distance, and another block of asserted distance, and another block of asserted distance… and had created the impression of X distance that way. That was how people’s brains do it.

It could be. But… this guy was a computer geek, and he was describing a commonsensical way in which a computer program could do it. And this was his dream. He had dreamed that his dream did it that way. As evidence that his dreams did it that way when he didn’t have that impression (or when anyone else didn’t)… well. There was an oddly confident conviction in him that he had been seeing “behind the scenes” of dreaming. Instead of just dreaming. Somehow.

I don’t know.

Your guess - and your dream - is as good as mine. :-)

Last updated December 06, 2015