I was laying in the water bed that I had as a kid when I lived with my mother. I was curled up and very comfortable when my body started being pulled to the foot of the bed. It was like I was sliding because my posture wasn’t really changing, just my location. I felt a presence in the room like I wasn’t alone and whatever was there with me was powerful. When I finally stopped moving, I looked down at my feet and they seemed incredibly close too me. Then, a woman was there, standing at the side of the bed. She was in her late 30’s/early 40’s and was dressed in weekend night attire like she was going out. She had on a green blouse and black pants and wore a lot of silver jewelry. She started talking to me about something but I couldn’t recall what it was, but I flat out asked her if she was there for my highest good. I guess she wasn’t because right after I asked her that, she vanished, leaving her clothes rumpled up on the floor. I swung my legs over the side and stood up and kicked at them to make sure that there really was nothing left of her.
I was holed up in an apartment that belonged to a Mafia boss. His daughter was hiding me because the Mafia boss and a lot of others were looking for me. His apartment was the last place he’d looked so I was in the back in his daughter’s bedroom. I could hear men out in the streets shouting and I was pretty nervous. I knew I couldn’t stay there and needed to get out but wasn’t sure how. The ceiling of the room was about 12ft. high and at it’s apex was a small window that I was considering climbing up the edges of the wall to get to. I heard someone come into the house and realized I didn’t have much time. I was getting ready to climb when I looked to my left and noticed a small hallway where the washer and dryer were, and at the end of the hallway was a small window that led to the backyard. It was covered by a screen, and tho I didn’t want anyone to know that I’d gone thru this window, I cut a slice in the screen at the edge near the frame, and stealthily slid thru the opening and escaped out the backyard, up a small hill. I knew that I was going to be able to escape and I wouldn’t be found.
I was on a large helicopter with a group of people. It was nighttime and there was some sort of system malfunction. The pilot was the only person who knew how to hold the helicopter together long enough so that the passengers could parachute up and jump before it went down. He crawled to the back where he was rewiring and literally holding parts together and keeping connections alive and it seemed certain that he was going to go down with the ship. I was the last passenger and it seemed so heroic and noble to keep the helicopter airborne while the passengers escaped, even if it meant that the pilot would die, that I couldn’t just leave him behind; I wanted him to survive but didn’t know what to do but I didn’t jump with the rest of the passengers. Instead, I crawled to the cockpit chair on the left. The ground was approaching really fast and just as we were going to hit, a voice in my head told me to grab the joystick and yank it to the right, right now. I followed this instruction and just as the body of the helicopter was about to hit the ground, the blades struck first, causing the body to shift upward and alleviate sudden impact that would otherwise have crushed the body. We essentially escaped without a scratch and the pilot was so very grateful for hanging on with him.
I was at some conference where I was talking to some people about heading over to different conference to register for it but was worried that I’d misread the documentation about the schedule and expected that I was too late to get in. I left anyhow and drove into a parking garage that was very similar to the one where Road Rally was held.
When I got inside, it was indeed completely jammed with people waiting to register. The line was so long, I didn’t think there was any way that I was going to get any of the accommodations I was looking for, but I got in line anyway and started chatting with the people around me. Suddenly, this young woman walked up and asked if I was Sean and told me that they’d set aside some panels for me and that everything I had wanted to attend was attainable. I was elated. I went back to the other conference I was at shared my excitement with my friends that everything had worked out.
I was in some sort of salon. Jan was with me and another woman. They started singing what I thought was a “Heart” song. The lyrics had something about the power of love in it and when they were singing it, I could hear it in my mind. Another woman came up and they were trying to remember the lyrics to the second verse. I started singing it and they started fumbling to follow along. We finally made it back to the chorus and and the four of us were singing but as I was singing, I started to get kinda dizzy and it felt like the song was morphing into another song. I could hear the chorus in my head even as I woke up, and realized that this was never a “Heart” song, it was something that seemed very familiar but I’d actually never heard before. Now I wished I remembered it.
I was with M and one of his brothers and his wife. I think we were in Lovelock, NV and had stopped into a very small casino/bar. His brother and his wife took off and left us there. M talked me into buying some chips. I ended up buying $261 worth, and gave the man who sorted out the chips for me a $1 tip. He gave me a lot of chips in small denominations, so small that I had to carry them around in a large gray bin. M took off and left me there alone so I walked around to see what my choice of things to play was. They had about 20 table versions of Ms. Pacman whose interfaces were all linked together so when you went out the tunnel on the left or right of the maze, instead of coming out the other side, you came out on the machine next to you. That meant that your pacwoman could jump from machine to machine and engage with all the ghosts and other pacwomen that other people were playing with.
I was having a hard time deciding what game to play and whether I wanted to play at all since I don’t really care for gambling or losing money. I finally decided to play video poker. I went to this really large obnoxious machine where this man who was dressed like a circus ringmaster and shouting out that you needed to play the greatest game on earth or something silly like that. Although it took a lot of courage, I decided that I wasn’t going to just nickle this machine to death, I was going to play the entire chunk of chips. The machine was so large that I was able to place my gray container into a large slot after grabbing a couple handfuls off the top and I watched my $260 worth of chips disappear inside the machine.
I hit the deal button and away we went. I got a pair of 5’s on the draw and one 6. I felt pretty good about the 6 and let the other two cards go. I hit the deal button and ended up getting two more 6’s. I was pretty stoked. The machine announced a whopping $17,490 return on my play. I stood there wondering if someone was going to come write up a ticket for me or how I could cash this thing out because I certainly wasn’t going to play anymore.
This dream came on the heals of suggesting that A take her friend to look at the town of Moraga as a place to possibly relocate from Arizona. In the dream, I had driven into town and was going to get gas. The last time I was there, there was only one gas station, kind of a mom and pop sorta place. It was still there and they were serving gas from a large steel canister. But two other gas stations had moved into town, a Chevron and a 76. I would always rather support the mom and pops of the world so I pulled into their station and stepped out of my truck. There was an old man selling trinkets so I walked over to see what he had. There was a knife that caught my attention. The handle was actually a blue and white box, about an inch and a half square. I bought it and walked away but as I got back to my truck I realized that the blade when extended was really wobbly so I walked back too him to see if I could make an exchange for one that was more sturdy.
I was with a guy and a girl and we’d broken thru a wall into a long dark tunnel. We followed the tunnel for quite a ways and came out into an incredibly opulent Tibetan temple. The walls were golden and very ornate and covered with beautiful and enormous thangkas. One of the things that was most intriguing tho were the “cats” that were there. I only call them cats because I’m not really sure what they were. They reminded me of the cartoons of the Japanese bobtail cats like the Maneki Neko where the bodies are thick and the heads are fat with a kind expression filled with large loving eyes. One was a dark grayish brown and the other white with gray stripes, and their fur was very short and somewhat course, tho softer, longer and pure white on their undersides and paws. The darker one I found absolutely irresistible and reached out to scratch it behind the ears. It was very cautious at first, as curious of us as we were of them. I managed to scratch just the right spot and whoo it into submissiveness. Within moments, I was lying on my back and it was lying on it’s back, on my chest, and I was scratching it’s belly and beside myself with how cute it was.
All of a sudden, a very angry Tibetan woman came in and completely ruined the atmosphere by screaming at us for breaking into their temple. Within moments, the dream had shifted and I was walking down the street with the girl that I’d entered the temple with, explaining to her that I’d hired a lawyer to defend me and by no means was I admitting that I’d broken into the temple. She asked if I felt I was lying and I said, “Absolutely not! We went in their under no malicious intent and I was not about to be blamed for having any ill intention.”
I was staying overnight at a house somewhere with a large group of people. There was one guy in particular that seemed to be in a bad mood. We all fell asleep and when I woke the next morning, a door to the outside was open and thru the door I could hear him cursing up a storm. He apparently owned a 70’s VW Beetle that he was working on while a kid was in the drivers seat trying to start it. The car wasn’t starting and he was really pissed off.
I suddenly found myself floating up a small river in an old wooden row boat with a cat on board. I had been floating for quite some time and to amuse myself, I had snugly wrapped my arm around and under the mechanism that would’ve held the oars in place had they been attached to the boat. We drifted toward the bank but before we actually reached it, the boat bumped into a large root system from a tree that had probably been dislodged further up the river during a storm months previously. As the boat settled against it, a snake that had already been on this large piece of wood sunning itself became perturbed that I’d disturbed it’s moment with the sun. What was worse was that my arms were still entangled with the oar holder and my hands happened to be positioned right where the snake was on the wood. The snake looked to be a corn snake so I wasn’t worried about death should I get bitten, but I was still not too interested in the prospect of being bitten over and over while trapped in this position with the boat. The first thing I did was to grab it behind the head with one of my hands, but because of my entangling predicament, I couldn’t grab it right where I wanted to and it was about ready to lurch and bit my grabbing hand, so… I distracted it with my other hand which was fa enough away from it that it looked at it as a threat. I continued wriggling my arms to free them and finally they let loose and I was able to throw the snake up onto the shore. With a sigh of relied I leaned back to thank whatever powers helped me to escape the snake’s bite when suddenly the cat jumped up on the shore to get the snake. I tried to stop it but before I could do a thing, it swallowed the snake up whole. I’m not even sure the snake could fit in this cat’s body, but the whole disappeared somehow. This caused me to wake from the dream.
I fell asleep and went back into the dream and I was back at the house. I had told this large group of people that I needed to show them something and it was important for me to show them something and persuaded them to follow me, especially including a female videographer. We walked along a dirt trail next to the river. There was a very old wooden fence; posts cut about 6×6, staggered every 8 feet or so with a couple of 4×4’s connecting them. Along the way were many shelves or boxes built into the fence. The videographer that I was having conversation with out of the blue mentioned that she was deathly afraid of snakes. I told her straight up that we were going to come across them but that she shouldn’t be worried, that I’d protect her. Sure enough, we came across snakes. Lots of them. They were all over the shelves and boxes, the further we walked up river. Then they were in the trees, on the rocks, on the shelves and boxes on the fence. There were corn snakes, gopher snakes, garter snakes, vipers, and what were either king snakes or coral snakes. I remember thinking to myself that I couldn’t recall the striping differences between the king and coral and was worried that I might have a big problem on my hands if someone was bitten. It was really amazing how many there were, must’ve been hundreds.
I reached a place on the trail where a few people were stopped and started to hold a ceremony. They had drums, herbs, and were dressed in ritual regalia. I commented that I could use a drum and beater because I was going to find out what sort of message the snakes had for us. A woman that was there handed me a beater and pointed out that I was already holding a drum. I looked at my hands and sure enough I was holding a drum that looked like an african talking drum with cowhide that was adorned with beads. I took the beater and the drum to a throne that sat in between two large rocks. I started beating on the drum asking for a message from the snakes. Immediately, I got this long sentence the explained some profound truth that bewildered me, partly from how sudden it came on and partly from the length of the message and it’s diabolical nature. I was so startled, I woke up again.
I was kind of flabbergasted that I’d received what appeared to be some important truth so I asked to go back into the dream again and get the message again. Shortly, I fell asleep again and immediately when I did, I got another message. Marc Andrew Dean.  I have no idea what that means or who that is.
Week 3 is all about setting up your web site to build your email list and creating two-way communication between your fans and you as an artist or band. This is actually a really short chapter but is going to be the spring-board for a number of other chapters because it starts opening a can of invertebrates, which will become more apparent in the next couple of weeks. You see, I needed to jump ahead in the book because I’d already done a number of the things that the book requests, as I’ll note later, and I’ve known that there were things I needed to do like opening up this blog to really get things rolling on my site. This is also where most of my work has gone into.
Something that is of high importance for other web sites and yours is to maintain a similar look and feel, as well as maintaining similar content and messages. How does a potential fan draw the connection between you here and you there? This was easy for me because it had already been done. “Music for the heart, mind, and spirit” was already my moniker that was on MySpace, Twitter, FaceBook, ReverbNation and everywhere else I’ve created an account, and I’d created a background image for my website long ago that I also used on Twitter and MySpace. I set up a couple quick colour schemes and added other items like photos that exist across all my web presences to make it all cohesive.
Next, I was to make sure my site loaded quickly and had no Flash intro. Well, that was also done years ago. Luckily, I have years of experience working on the internet and I know what works and what doesn’t. I wrote all the code for my initial web site in 2001 (gasp) and it does need an overhaul to bring it up to web standards admittedly, but it was built for performance and ease of use.
Lastly, the part I actually had to put some work into. Ariel wants you to offer a free download to a song as an incentive to sign up on your mailing list. Since I host my own mailing list created by Active Campaign, I had to build this into my site. I decided to offer “Be the Change”, a song that’s on my latest CD, “Between the Lines”, and currently the only song that I have a video for from the new CD. There’s another coming REALLY soon, but more on that later. And so as not to be unfair, if you’re already on my mailing list and don’t have a copy of the CD or that song, email me and I’ll make sure you get a copy.
