I was in a back yard of a small house. Lauri was standing in front of a dark plastic trash can. My hair was really long, probably almost two feet in length. I grabbed a hand-full of it and in a stroke, cut it off and dropped it into the trash can as a sacrifice, tho to what I wasn’t sure. As I did so, it thickened into an almost spaghetti-like wad. Lauri turned and dragged the trash can away around the house toward a back door to the garage. I asked her what she was going to do with it but her response wasn’t clear.

Next, I’m standing in a very dimly lit bathroom of slate and gold. It was beautiful of what I could see of it, but it was only illuminated by a small led light standing in a power outlet. I was holding a hair dryer in my hand and immediately wondered what I was doing here. The bathroom was opulent and very large and I was standing in front of the mirror with the door to my left. I felt out of place and walked thru the door into a large foyer near the front door of an enormous house. Standing around and sitting were a group of men that seemed to be in a sort of trance. Mel was there near the front door. I had a sinking, uneasy feeling about being there and realized that I need to leave immediately. I walked over to Mel to coax him to leave with me but he sat there with a blank look about him. The other men started to descend upon me as if to prevent me from leaving so I rushed out the front door to a sidewalk and proceeded to turn right away from the house. A young man that looked of East Indian descent with long, black hair came out to persuade me not to leave. He told me that I was very important to them. I told him that I was not returning. He became even more persuasive, telling me that they would give me anything I wanted. I told him that the only thing I wanted was the only thing he could not give me… freedom.

I was staying in a very large and extravagant hotel somewhere. I think the situation was music related and my mom was there. The day before we were concluding our stay, a large film crew checked in. They were there to film a new version of American Beauty, but with the edginess of The Virgin Suicides. I ended up in a clothing shop of some sort along the lines of Abercrombie and Fitch, the kind of place where you’d shop if you were 18 and had wealthy parents. I was laying back on a long cushioned bench chatting with my mom when a young Norwegian man and woman walked in and sat nearby. Both were very pale, slender and blond and had that Northern European character of everything having a proper place about them. As it turns out, the couple were working for wardrobe for the movie. The young man wanted me to try on a shirt for him because he was unsure of the size and whether it would fit whomever he was dressing. It was a polo style shirt with royal blue and white horizontal stripes. I told him I was a medium, but he wanted to see how the large would fit me. I took it and went into the dressing room which was more like a bedroom. There were benches, clothing hanging on the walls, and there was a salesperson in there. The shirt the young man had given me was part of a package; a hat, belt, and some other accoutrement all hanging from the same hanger. The salesperson was upset that I was trying to dismantle this set to get the shirt off just to try it on and insisted on finding the shirt apart from the package. She looked around the room and became exasperated at not finding the shirt in there.

Next thing I know, I’m in The Poet & Patriot in Santa Cruz. I’m walking thru the bar with a bicycle, thru a group of performers. I realize that they having an open mic and I’m thinking of checking in to see if I can play a song or two. I walk toward the bar and have this knowledge that the bar is different than I know it to be, that the beer is served deeper into the back instead of the bar that I’m accustomed to. As I proceed toward the back, I’m stopped by a young brunette twenty something with a clipboard who insists that I can’t proceed with the bicycle. I ask her why not and she starts talking about the number 1, and examining her clipboard. She finally acquiesces because she can’t give me a justifiable reason why I can’t proceed to the bar with the bicycle. So, I walk to the back and the bar is similar to a horse stable with corrals on both sides of the room. On the right were three of these where the dividing walls had been removed and there was a menu up above. In the corrals were large kegs where the beer was stored. There were all boutique beers. I recall looking for Newcastle but it wasn’t there. I settled on a beer with a green label that looked similar to Sierra Nevada, but I don’t recall the brewer, but the name of the beer was something like Bright Buffalo at Wounded Knee. It was a light ale which isn’t something I’d normally go after, preferring dark ales and porters, but it seemed to fit for some reason. I could order at the time because the servers were all in a corral on the left side of the room filling beers so I walked over to the wall to the left of them where there were rows of shelves filled with elaborate steins. On in particular caught my eye. It wasn’t particularly large but it had a button on the handle that activated a top the slid back allowing just enough space to sip the beer from the stein. I picked up the stein to examine the mechanics of this mechanism and see how hard it was to clean. I was impressed with it and it’s emerald green colour and decided to get it. I proceeded over to the other side to get the beer and asked the server who was now present how much it was. He wasn’t sure whether this was my stein or whether I wanted to purchase it. I told him I was interested in the stein the the light ale on the sign to me left, so he walked over to a cash register, punched in something and told me that it would be $3.50. I said, “I’ll take it,” surprised at the lost cost of the item. A guy had perched next to me at the bar so while the guy was filling my beer, I told him about the film crew in town to remake American Beauty but it didn’t appear to know about the original. I reflected on how many people have so little knowledge of the brief past.

This dream came about the same day that I had done an EMDR session which went way back in time to unearth some dirt. I was in the big house. A family appeared to have moved in and they had two children, both under 10. They were playing upstairs when I came across them. In the back of my mind was a shallow memory of the house being haunted, but it was so vague, kinda like painted over wall paper. You may find a seem somewhere but the original image is gone. I looked at the children and realized something new was taking place and I was okay with it.

On the morning of Sept 23, I had an interesting dream: I was in an automotive repair shop standing at the counter talking to the manager, who just happened to be my real-life manager at my real-life job. He was showing me a picture of a steering wheel and a set of tale pipes. He said that I had to replace these parts on my car but that they didn’t carry these particular parts and I needed to go get them myself. I’ve been keeping a dream journal for about 20 years or more, so I’m pretty good at interpreting dreams. I remember waking up from this dream and thinking, “Wow, that’s a pretty clear indicator that my boss is telling me that I need to do my own steering, find my own means of propelling. I wonder if I’m going to lose my job?”

As it turns out, we’d just had a re-org the day before, so I could say that I was having an anxiety dream. I went to work that morning, logged into my computer, and no sooner had I been there for 10 minutes, my boss grimly approaches me and tells me he needs to talk with me, and it’s not good news. I remember my skin crawling as I followed him downstairs to an empty conference room, where he informed me that there was no easy was to say it so he was just going to come out with it. I got “the package” as I call it. I throwback to the dot bomb days when I worked for another company that laid off about 75 people in one day. I remember standing in the stairwell with other co-workers, waiting to see if the whomever was behind the closed door with exit with or without a “package.” I always wanted to submit that to Wired Mag’s Jargon Watch. Maybe I still should.

Sept 28: I have to set the stage for this to put the experience in context. I needed to get a new receiver for my stereo system because the old one ate CDs, ate tapes, and was now sending the volume in all sorts of directions when turning the volume nob. I was done with the Awai POS so was scouring the craigslist ads and trying to learn about latest connections on receivers in a short period of time while trying to find something modern to support them and at a reasonable price, since I’d just lost my job the week before. The day before, I’d called on an Onkyo that looked promising. The guy who owned it lived quite far but worked fairly close to my home, so we agreed to meet at or near his work the next morning.

Dream Sequence, Sept 29: There’s a woman that I’m observing, and yet is a part of me. She is a living on a compound with a group of others. The compound building in which she is in the courtyard, is ranch style; building on three sides and open on the fourth. Her building is under siege and she’s just been shot while she was going to retrieve what looks like a large off-white Nerf football. She picks it up, presses it against her injury and pleads with the person who shot her to not shoot her again, that she’s already very well injured. I guess because she’s female, the perpetrator holds off shooting her again and gets up and starts to cross the courtyard as she is heading down a short flight of stairs and into a doorway. But instead of stepping thru the door right off, she turns and blasts the guy with the M16 she’s carrying. He’s really caught off guard by this and protests at her shooting him but he explains that she made no deal not to shoot back if the guy was going to be stupid enough to expose his whereabouts. She finally steps thru the door, leaving her victim in whatever state, and shuts it behind her and starts walking up the hallway toward the infirmary. Even thought she’s walking past people, no one notices her because the critical nature of the siege.

So, the guy calls me at 11am, right on time. He gives me the location where I’m going to meet him. The timing is perfect as I’ll be heading to my therapist’s office for my appt. at noon. I get in the truck and I’m about 10 minutes into my journey when my cell rings. It’s the guy. He tells me that he’s changed his mind and that he’s decided not to sell the unit. My normal reaction would most likely have been fairly passive and I would’ve said, “That’s okay, I understand that you’re having a change of heart, it’s a pretty good deal.” But no… not after I’d already spoken to him on the phone earlier, and I’m close to 15 minutes away from home driving in the opposite direction of my noon appt. I was kinda pissed. I said, “Couldn’t you have reached this conclusion at some other time when I’m not already on the road to meet you and I’ve arranged my morning to do this?! Jeez!”

After I’d hung up, I decided that it didn’t make sense to go back home so I drove to my noon appt. and made a business call along the way that gave me time to conduct. I discussed the dream with my therapist and realized that the dream predicted the occurrence with the guy over the stereo and that I’d take the dream to the infirmary, i.e my therapist.

Dream Sequence, Oct 6: I’m with George and we’re at an archeological and anthropological site where a tribe of natives to the area once lived, and now is an historical preserve of the tribe’s living environment, complete with tree houses, with ramps leading around the place, kind of like an Ewok village. We’re there, looking to discover some unfound remnant of this tribe and talking about not going into the preserve where the possibility of finding something is most likely futile. We’re walking down a ramp from the village and I stop because I see a very large cat that would be best avoided. It’s dark gray with almost black stripes on it’s back, and has the appearance of a bobcat with an even larger body and tail. George just continues talking and not even seeing that huge creature, and I’m telling George to watch to his right but he’s completely ignoring the cat. He walks to the bottom of the ramp and turns to the left with his back to the cat and still, not a clue that this thing it a mere 5 feet from him. I’m expecting the worst when suddenly… the cat turns around and walks the other way. I’m astonished, nearly peeing myself at this point. I walk down the ramp and grab him and drag him back up to the top where I can see the cat walking away thru the slit in a couple pieces of stacked timber. I have George look but he still doesn’t really see what he’s looking for. I’m gabberflasted and wake up.

This was another therapist day, and with this dream still on my mind, I get to the office and start talking with her. She’s not happy with me because I’d not made my Paypal payment for my previous two session like I was supposed to. She was telling me that it was affecting her personal feelings toward me and that if I wasn’t able to keep my end of the agreement, she may need to terminate our relationship. I apologized and told her that I understood how she felt and that I was a complete airhead for not remembering and that it wasn’t right for me to not follow thru. Also, it was difficult for me to remember such things because all of my finances are on auto-pay and auto-submit, just so that I don’t have to worry about not making payments. Once this conversation was concluded, I mentioned that I’d had a dream this morning and proceeded to tell her about the dream in detail. She asked me what George represented too me. I told her that he was an airhead and boom, I completely connected the whole dream to the conversation we’d just had 5 minutes prior. She was the cat. Our conversation could’ve turned into a nasty conflict depending on how both of us conducted ourselves, and the preserve was representative of the exploratory uncovering that we did in her office and my psyche.

Now, you could say what Robert Anton Wilson says, “What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.” But I’m not so sure, especially the first dream which I had interpreted before the occurrence happened. I’ve been dreaming like crazy lately but haven’t held onto them for memory’s sake. The dreams just haven’t seemed that juicy, but… isn’t it interesting?

So, I realize that I’m Batman and Robin and I are stuck on the rooftop of an enormous building in the industrial part of Gotham. The Joker has taken our utility belts and has them wrapped around an air vent not too far away. The problem is, the physics of the environment are all screwed up. If I go to take a swing, my arm flies along a completely unintentional trajectory. If I try to walk, it feels like my legs weigh 1k lbs. Robin is having the exact same problem and we’re looking at each other exasperated at the unfruitful efforts we’re making to defend ourselves against The Joker, who is kicking our asses. He apparently knows how to function perfectly in this environment and probably created it, and he’s not only fully capable but seems to have extended his abilities to making himself elastic-like and is stretching his arms and punching me in the face from both sides at the same time, yet standing about 4 feet from me, when I can actually catch a glimpse of him. It’s pretty awful.

I was in the house I grew up in with my Mom and step monster, Rob. We were in the living room near the piano going thru boxes of some sort and we were all getting along alright although I had some misgivings. Rob wasn’t wearing a shirt and I noticed that he had a really unusual tattoo on him but I didn’t want to look too closely because the strange feeling I had about the situation.

We got done going thru the boxes and my Mom left the room. I walked over and sat on the couch. Rob took off the rest of his clothes and wrapped up his lower half with some sort of sarong and started walking over toward me. I watched him more intently now and noticed that the tattoo appeared to start on his back and it was a geographical map of a city. All over his back were large glass beads that had been placed into cuts in his skin that had healed over with a hole to reveal the glass bead inside. I was really astounded.

When he sat down near me, I asked him about the tattoo. He showed me the from of it and I noticed the name “Elvis” on it, and I realized that part of the city layout was a cemetery in Memphis, TN. I asked him if the tattoo was Memphis and he replied that it was taken from a very old map “before the Brazilians arrived.” I really didn’t know what he meant by that but he showed me how the tattoo wrapped around onto his stomach into a large open scroll with a lot of writing. I started reading it but unfortunately don’t remember what it said anymore than it was some sort of historical perspective on the period.

I was standing in a room with a man in his early 30’s, tall, dark hair, dark skin, clean shaven, possibly Puerto Rican. We were talking with a woman in a dark suit. She was in her 50’s, dark hair, educated. The conversation had gone into the topic of 60’s and 70’s television programs and she was talking about programs that the man didn’t know about. I don’t recall the names she used. I was given a book that had the name of the dark skinned man at the top of the first page. His name was Geronimo Gar.

I’ll be playing at The Blue Rock Shoot this Friday night at 10pm. I will be joined by some great musicians so if you wanna see Rhythma as a band, this is not a show to be missed. Get there early because seats tend to fill up but the crowd does come and go.

Also, I wanted to let you know that Tarradiddle (Sean Michael Imler and Bill Mason) will be the featured performer at the Red Rock Coffee Co. open mic on Monday, May 17. We’ll do a 1/2 hour set starting at 9pm, so come down and enjoy a post dinner coffee.