Music for the heart, mind, and spirit...

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.

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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.

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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?

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