I got a call from Paul Sprawl.  He was coming to Santa Cruz to play some shows in July and asked me if I wanted to be on the bill with him.  I said yes and we starting talking about possible dates.

I was driving down the freeway with Kirby and Sarah.  We hit a lot of traffic and had to come to a stop.  I had been on the cell phone with Mel.  I got out of the car and walked back and got in Mel’s car.  Traffic picked up and we drove.  We got to a restaurant and ate dinner.  It was Kirby, Sarah, Mel, and some other people.  We all had a very nice time.  We left the restaurant that night and I got a call from them the next day.  They told me that no one had paid the bill.  I went in and paid it.

I was on this beach one the east coast.  There was  a large pier and  on the right side of the pier, it was all sand.  On the left side of the pier, it was all grass.  I remember visiting the neighborhood beyond the beach but I’m not sure why or what I did there.  I do remember that I was walking back there with my mom and two other men.  We were walking on the grassy side and noticed that the house closest to the beach was for sale.  We were examining the brochure in the window and trying to figure out the layout of the house because it was like a two story cottage and the brochure was on the window of what looked like a converted garage.  We joked that it was a beach house in Jersey City and it couldn’t cost that much.

We walked around the left side and found that the door to this room was open so we walked in.  We started walking around the house.  At some point, someone spilled some green paint on the floor.  I decided I wanted to go outside and walk on the grassy knolls on the left side of th pier.  They followed me up a funny little meandering path and we realized that this was a golf course, but the greens has grass longer than the rest of the course.  I was wearing socks and while we were at the top of a knoll, we realized that the sprinklers had gone on and I don’t like to get my socks wet so I was tip-toeing on dry spots to get back to the house.  By the time we made it, it was dark.  I was walking around the outside of the house’s yard and found a large laminated drawing of the layout of the downstairs that we’d already been in so I assumed that there’d be a layout for the upstairs somewhere.  I walked around to the other side of the house and found something from the post master that looked like it would be just that but I was having a hard time making out what it was thru the partially transparent envelope it was in.  I went back in the house toward the garage and told my mom what I’d found.  I noticed the green paint and that there was a large boot print in it.  The two guys were at the front of the house when I noticed headlights coming toward the house.  It looked like the owners were coming home.  I yelled for everyone to run and I closed the garage door and was yelling for my mom to come with me but she just stood there staring at me as the door closed.

There was this beautiful young black woman and this handsome young blonde haired surfer type guy.  They had just gotten married.  They’d gone into their bedroom which had some sort of multi-level bed.  She flopper herself on the lower one, in line of site of me.  The guy climbed up to the upper part of the bed and they were talking.  I got a glimpse into the future when they’d had a daughter.  The daughter looked like a small doll.  She was about 10 years old but much too small and stringy to really be human.  She got picked up by an older girl whom I did not know.  She was holding the young girl by the shoulders and turned away from her, and she was gently shaking her back and forth.  It seemed like it was harmless but there was this feeling of contempt.  Another glimpse into the future would tell me that this older girl would get the younger one hooked on coke or crack simply so that she would allow men to use her for sex so that she could get high.  I don’t know what her reason was for this but it was done out of spite.

I was playing with Kanook out in front of my mom\’s house.  I was training him, and when he ran from me, it was really easy to call him back.  There was a little bit of fear that he would run and continue running because that was what I was used to with Wrigley, but he always came back when I called and my fear led to relief.

I was playing this chord progression of a F# – G# – B in a 4/4 shuffle, very bluesy.  My mom told not to just play the chord progression but to lead on top of it, so I started playing an F#m pent over the F#, a G#m over the G# and B.  Then my mom mentioned that she had cancer.  It didn’t seem like it was a big deal.

I was at some sort of club wondering if I wanted to stay and listen to the music or not.  I vaguely remember chatting with a couple people but don’t recall who they were.  Next thing, it’s dusk and I’m standing on the side of a road with Mel.  I’m closer to the car and he’s up higher on the embankment.  This very large animal walked in between us.  It was a reddish colour except around the neck where it’s fur was grayish and it was shaped similar to a large bear except the body was longer and the legs were shorter.  Mel mentioned what it was but I don’t recall what he said.

This creature got into a truck and started driving it.  We decided to kinda follow it by driving on similar streets where we could look up a block to see where it was going but we eventually lost track of it.  Somehow, we had releated this to an antique dealer being stolen from and “knew” that this creature was in kahoots with a man.  We went and told a sheriff’s deputy who was the sister of a man we knew.  She was dating the brother of a woman we knew.  I was now alone a this point and managed to find the squad car on the side of the road.  The woman deputy and her boyfriend were in the car, rather disheveled.  I told them what was going on and she told me she would look into it.  I was sorry that I’d lost track of the truck.  Later I would try and contact the deputy again but have a difficult time doing it.

I was with this young man named Mark.  He was coming to work with me one day.  I was working on some large campus in a place where it was country-like and not city-like.  As usual, I was working on a project alone.  I was outside at a table behind the building in some sort outdoor patio that overlooked some beautiful rolling green hills, and large hardwood trees, probably oaks, walnuts and poplars.  I was probably back east somewhere.  I was having some technical problems with data loading in a timely fashion and there were a couple interaction issues that were consuming a bit of more of my time than I would’ve liked.  I decided to ask my team to come out and look.  Jane was the one who was giving me the most feedback but I was feeling frustrated with the feedback she gave.  In my opinion, she didn’t have the insight that I did about how the application was working so her feedback was based on limited understanding, but I was having difficulty absorbing the situation, especially my teammates were agreeing with her.  I was getting frustrated, especially when the performance of the app was getting so staggeringly slow that I couldn’t even get things to load.  I decided to ask the team to give me some time to try and sort out the performance problems and they left.  I started looking at processes on my laptop because it seemed to be a resource problem.  I finally ended up shutting down Firefox.  It was at this time that I looked around to see what Mark was doing.  It was odd that he’d come to work with me in the first place but I was now getting this conflicting awareness that I was being self absorbed and neglecting him but at the same time, I was at work and needed to be focusing on these application problems I was having.  I looked over and he seemed to be a little frazzled as I watched him go in thru the back doors of the building to go inside and make a phone call.

Suddenly, the dream changed and I was not at work but on a ranch.  The surrounding countryside was similar to the work environment where I previously was, with rolling hills and large trees.  The house was ranch style, very long and painted a pale yellow.  I was with the mother of a group of pups.  It was a litter of four and I was laying down with a ner and three of the puppies.  One in particular had captured my interest.  It was white with black spots like it’s mother.  I was playing with it on the ground, tapping it’s nose while it tried to bite my finger.  Another puppy laying to the right of it looked very similar, white with black spots, and blue eyes.  It wasn’t nearly as animated so I wasn’t putting too much focus on it.  There was another puppy between the two that was light gray with black patches and green eyes.  I associated this puppy with the father who was also gray with green eyes.  The quiet white and black puppy nudged up to it’s mother to get some milk.  I looked over to a nearby ravine between two hills where there were very small lilac looking flowering plants coming up from the ground.  I guess that would indicate that it was spring which it did look to be.  I picked up the puppy and started walking with it and as I looked over again, one of the plants suddenly grew about 5 feet and exhibited rows of lavender blossoms on long thin branches that bent over from their weight.  I made some sort of connection between the plant’s sudden growth and the puppy I was holding.

Then, out of nowhere, over the hill to my right came charging this large beast.  It was the colour of a reddish cow and had the body of a large steer, but the face had been twisted and controrted in a menacing way with larger than normal jowels and huge exposed teeth.  It charged thru the ravine and up the other side to where a large yellow labrador male was barking at it.  There was also a small herd of cattle there and a couple farmers.  I was particularly worried about the lab because I apparently had an affinity for it.  I put the puppy down an ran to the house, in thru the back and door and cut a left down the hallway shouting for Ed to get his gun.  In my awareness, Ed was Mark’s father.  In fact, they were both named Edward Marcus but the father went by Ed and the son went by Mark.  As I reached Ed’s room, he was laying in bed, but he was on the phone.  He had a door to the back in his room and I wanted to access the state of things quickly while letting him finish his phone call.  I opened the door and looked out on the hill.  I saw a large ring of frightened animals.  In the center, at the apex of the hill was the beast.  It turned toward the house and ran at it.  I came all the way down the hill and charged thru the yard and as it approached this cutaway in the side of the house, it vanished.  Out of the cutaway came this docile yellowish calf, with a sort of startled, just awakened gate.  When I looked back out to the knoll, I saw a man with a double barreled shotgun point, and shoot at something in front of him.  I turned to see what Ed was doing.  Now, he was fully dressed and was holding this strange yellowish calf like head that had a spine still attached too it, both covered with it’s original hide and fur.  He said that he’d gone out earlier that day done a curse unravelling by the creek.  He showed me the back of his door.  He said he’d hung the head of something there, and sometime between then and now, someone had come in a taken the head.  I looked down at the floor just in front of the doorway and there was an image of a bear that had been drizzled in outline with some sort of syruppy substance in two colours, dark and light brown.

In the background of my mind, there was a song playing.  It was a call and response type of harmony with a woman singing in an angelic voice, responded to my a choir.  She was singing, “In want of his leg, he’ll be laying on his side.”  The chord progression was a 1/5/6/4 in A.  The melody was a – b – a – b – b – c# – a — e – a – g# – a – d.