Dream - The man with the leatherlike fishlike head

On Thursday, August 26, 2010, around 8:00-11:50 AM, I had an interesting dream. I don't remember a lot of the beginning, though I think my father was in it in some way, and maybe my mother too. It seems the earlier part of the dream was in Arizona, at least some of it a little outside the Phoenix area, or at least the most populated parts of it.

Then I looked different, perhaps fiftyish, but with a totally different face and body. I'm not sure where I was, somewhere in Nevada or Arizona I think, maybe in Nevada near the Arizona border. It was daytime. I had come to an area where I had had something going on. I was going along a miles wide strip of land between a small road and a canal, with mountains in the background. The land had lots of vegetation, brush and small trees, and some somewhat faded wispy tall grass. I was apparently raising cattle there, or some other animal. I drove along, following the migration of the animals, and started spraying from a huge broad nozzle, with a thick, very sturdy hose, something that would almost stay in position by itself in the air. The streams came out as though from a broad flat brush, because of the broad flat nozzle with multiple openings. I was worried about it not raining enough the last few months, and the vegetation getting too dry, and there not being enough water for the animals.

A little later, a late middle-aged man with a strange leatherlike, fishlike head showed up and talked with me for a while. He was chinless, with some fine wrinkles, vertical or almost so. His neck was huge, probably bigger than his head, and his head flowed smoothly into it. He had small dark widely set eyes. I'm not sure he had any ears, maybe just little holes with curved wrinkles going into them. His mouth was practically lipless, curved downward and drooping sharply at the corners, and open most of the time, darkness within. His skin was an odd pale tan. He talked quietly, with a bit of flat harshness, like a rural Midwestern accent. I think I was around where I was before, but I might have moved off a little bit, to somewhere relatively nearby.

Sometime later, I drove back to Nevada. I looked more normal, though maybe not entirely like I normally do. I seemed to be younger too, maybe in my thirties. My father was in the area somehow. He came in a different car. He may have been somewhere behind or somewhere else, even off to the side. I was going down the hill toward work now, again. It was dark. The place was different, almost a parallel reality. A business had come in and taken over, and was building something big to the left, in the distance. There were also smaller buildings scattered to the right. There were tall dark brown stakes in clusters at the edge of the road, perhaps a foot and a half high, on both sides of the road. The clusters were widely spaced, and getting larger as I went on, intruding more into the road.

Suddenly someone was standing in front of me, illuminated by the headlights, a hazy figure in the dust. I stopped, and then considered going forward, but I couldn't, because the figure was still there. Then a large earthmoving machine moved in from the right, blocking my path, turning its big scoop toward me. I don't remember now why the man was there, but he wanted to stop me. I'm under the impression that he might have had some kind of car trouble, or something like that, but there was also something else going on, war games of some kind, explosions from bombs dropped by planes, at least some of the explosions in the sky, none real close. It also seems that there were a few other people, not many. It almost seems like they were refugees in some way from the business, off the road a few miles to the left and a little ahead, though it had small branches scattered out in the valley, which was otherwise mostly empty. There was something dangerous happening there at the business, something that shouldn't be happening. It's possible they were let go after they found out. They were afraid that some people might be coming after them soon, to harm them. It was important for them to get away, important for me to get away too. There were still explosions in the air sometimes, bright flashes, from war games apparently, or maybe it was caused by something else, bombs set off for some other reason. The people started to move across the road, heading out across the valley to the other side. I'm not sure if I followed them or not.

I went back again later. It was night. I was worried about my car, the one I was driving, which was apparently the 1970 El Camino. I wondered if it had enough gas, and the gauge, apparently the speedometer, though sometimes it felt like the gas gauge, and it was on the small side, had formed red beads on the upper half of the glass. It was making a strange noise too, and I saw bursts of sparks, like fireflies, in front and zooming over, around and past the car, and I nervously wondered if they were coming from the car, but I also seemed to see them coming on the road from the sides, several car lengths ahead of me, intermittently, and swooping toward me. I was afraid it was the speedometer cable, that it needed oiling. I hoped it could hold out for a while, and not get damaged. There was a place on the other side of the valley, on the right, a large auto parts place, plus something else with it, part of it, it almost seems like an eating place or a motel, although it was all part of the same one-story building. My father was also going this way, maybe coming in from a side road in the earlier part of the valley. I don't remember whether he was ahead of me or behind me. He might have stopped at a little place before getting on the main road.

Then I came back again later, maybe days later, I'm not sure. It was night and raining. The clusters of stakes were still there, indented into the road, but as I went along, getting to the lowest part of the valley, I saw individual stakes driven in the road, widely scattered, in different places. They had apparently been put there to stop people from proceeding. They had evidently been put here since I had been here before, I guess they really decided to block it off this time, keep all but authorized people out. There was no way to avoid the stakes, not at the speed I was going. It was too late to stop too, the road was too slick with the rain, and I was still going slightly downhill. I grimaced and hit the stakes over and over again, apparently breaking them off. I heard a pop-pop sound, and I realized I had at least two tires flat. I kept on going, hoping to make it across to where the auto parts place was, or at least close to it. I could probably get it repaired there. They were open late, I'm not sure they ever really closed.

I got there. It was still raining. The place was lit up and had a tall chain link fence around it, enclosing the building and a small dirt/gravel parking lot. A lot of people were there. I think I talked to some people or tried to. There seemed to be a little bit of tension, not only because I was an outsider, but because something was going to happen, something dangerous was coming. A lot of the people began to move off now, to leave, to get away before it got here.

Then I was back in town, though I'm not sure which one. I stopped in a small shopping center, a strip small. It was daytime. The weather was fairly cool, and it seemed to be overcast. I think I had wanted to get a newspaper, but I had stopped in two stores at the end of the shopping center, one some kind of gift shop and the other an old bookstore, then I was working on the car, apparently the 1987 Oldsmobile. I had the body up in the air, with the frame apparently still on the ground. Dust and pieces of dirt were falling out, getting on me when I walked under it. The body was held up on tall metal poles. Another car was not far away. This section of the parking lot, a fairly small section to the side, was mostly empty. A few people were around though, local people it seems, some out near me and some back toward the stores. Some of them talked some and I talked back. I went back to the stores briefly, and then went back to the cars. The other car also seemed to be associated with me, but I'm not sure how now. I think it was getting late in the afternoon. I really needed to get finished up with things, as best that I could, and then get started back to Arizona.

The man with the leatherlike, fishlike head came back. He was a friend before, but seemed troublesome now, argumentative. He was against what I was doing. I had a gun somehow. It was laying somewhere I think, near or in my car, and I got it and pointed it at him, my arm out straight, and then after a pause, fired, shooting him in the forehead. I saw it hit him and then I saw it from behind too, the bullet coming out the back of his head, out a of small red hole. He stood there for a little bit, then fell. The people seemed bothered by it, saddened. They seemed friendly and I wasn't sure they would tell anyone, but it was possible some of them might, might tell the police and send them here. I felt if they did, it might be a little while before they decided to do it, and that I had a little time, though maybe not much.

I mounted him on the roof of the car, sideways across it, and took him to Mexico, to dispose of him there. My family had a place there, a ranch or something like that. When I got there, or soon after, fireworks were going off, bright flashes in the sky. It was a little disturbing, and a distraction. I had to get the body taken care of, hidden somewhere, and I didn't like all the commotion. I didn't really want anyone from the town happening by and seeing what I was doing, and seeing the body. A few people from the ranch were there, including a few kids. They seemed a little subdued, maybe a little uncertain, because of the body. After a while, surprisingly, he woke up, not dead after all, his wound healed. He stood up and looked at me. I was a little relieved that he was alive somehow, though I didn't really understand it. I supposed that creatures like him must have some special healing/regeneration ability that I didn't know about.

Dream - An audition at a hotel, the small lakes being built, the woman with paper dolls and pictures, and the picture of a woman that came alive with demon horns and tail

On Saturday, December 19, 2010, around 6:00-9:45 AM, I dreamed I was at a big hotel, and had been for a while I guess. Somebody was having an argument with the management.

He left then, going toward the back, swinging his two suitcases up, but he became me at some point. As he/I walked along toward the back of the hotel, an announcer was talking in the distance, like hearing a TV program, but apparently over the intercom, about celebrities, carrying on a discussion with someone. As I went along, over tiled floor now, going past the kitchen area, heading for the double glass doors, he was talking about Bob Hope, about how he in his last few years did some kind of tricks on hotel employees, pretended that something was happening when it wasn't or even that he was somebody else maybe, I'm not sure now. I wondered if it was a good idea to be saying that where it could be heard by the hotel employees and guests, maybe even worried too about the Bob Hope people suing them, unless maybe they could prove it.

He/I went out the glass doors into the parking lot behind the hotel. It wasn't quite as nice out here. I angled toward the right and walked over a high curb separating the pavement from a strip of landscaping, a long narrow strip of green grass. I thought that, oh well, I walked here from home, might as well walk back. It was several miles, but doable. The temperature was pleasant, and though it was day, sometime in the afternoon maybe, though I'm not sure, the light wasn't bright. It seemed to be overcast.

I came to the grassy park-like area again, with the small pond-size lake. I had gone by it earlier, either in this dream or an earlier one that night. When I first went by, it was a small, squarish, with rounded corners, deep-set lake, sunken with a low green grassy mound running around it, with an additional area to the south of it, just across a small lane that was perhaps a pedestrian and/or bike path. The area to the south hadn't been as developed, mostly dirt with patches of green grass.

When I went by another time though, they had big equipment out, working on it, and a machine with a long arm and a scoop, digging, moving earth. People were supervising it, not construction people but people in charge of the project, park people, particularly a man who was in charge and looking at what was happening carefully, intently, his head leaning forward. He was wearing a inexpensive suit I think, but with the collar open and maybe without a tie.

They were making some kind of connection between the small lake and the small undeveloped lot to the south, making them both developed as a park. They were redoing how the lake was, making a connection between it and the undeveloped lot, some kind of channel, that was supposed to go under the walkway area between them, but which was initially being dug straight across, without a tunnel. It would later be roofed over with dirt, and there would be a continuous flow of water when it was done, from the previously undeveloped lot to the lake, and I guess back in some way, maybe looping back further under ground. I had the impression that the return flow would be in a narrower passage lower than and a little to the east of the higher passage.

Looking at it now, things had changed quite a bit since I had been there. Instead of the low mound around the lake being dug up, it seemed to be back but covered by dark tarps that were strapped down, like it was unfinished. The lake itself had been substantially resculpted, and was much smaller. It was divided into two sections, one to the southwest and one to the northeast, both deep funnel shapes, separated by a high mound, and connected by a small tunnel near the bottom. The mounds in general around them were also higher, gradually turning into a relatively steep slope that went down to a trough in the dirt between the southwest section of the pond and the lot, with water running down it, a relatively shallow stream, toward the lake, from a small undistinguished-looking-as-yet pool in the lot. The ground was almost all redone where the lake had been, and was now just slimy brown dirt mixed with river gravel. It was fairly stiff though, and didn't seem to be eroded by the flowing water.

I stood there, on the slope of the trough, looking down at it. The water had started flowing not long after I arrived, the man in the suit warning everyone about it, and worrying about the dirt giving way and telling everyone to stay back. The dirt seemed to be fairly steady though. I peered down at it and the water wasn't taking it away by any noticeable extent. I went and looked over in the southeast section of the lake. The sides were steep and the area where the water would be was fairly small. The point at the bottom curved some, and there was a small hole near the bottom going to the other section of the lake. The small amount of water coming in mostly rushed on through the hole, making a small slurping noise. The lake wasn't getting any higher right now. The water remained around the bottom, and it seemed like it was going to take a long time to get them both filled.

I went around to the other side. A couple of women were there, evidently in charge of that side of the lake. One was slimmer than the other and appeared middle aged, with long, curly, fading, somewhat frizzy hair. The other was younger, twenties or thirties probably, and did most of the talking. After a while she showed me where she had some things of hers kept to show people when the project was done, and more people were visiting. They were things in hinged racks attached to the steep side of the tall mound between the lake sections, large metal-rimmed rectangular plates with scrapbook-like stuff attached, sometimes to or behind clear plastic panels held by the metal frame, sometimes on wire hangers that stuck out. There were several of the tall plates with rods that stuck out up and down at the back, that they were hinged on, so they could swing back and forth, like the pages of a book. Some had the wire extensions, and I think some were mostly wire hangers, that things could be attached to. Some of it that she showed me were old newspaper clippings. A lot, maybe most, was personal stuff, things she liked, stuff about her family, things she used to be interested in, though some was historical stuff about the park and the city I think.

She crouched down in the damp, slick, pebble-embedded dirt, talking about it, one time pulling the back of her shirt down onto her pants, though nothing was showing, maybe a little of the top of her underpants. She had a lot of paper dolls there too, on the boards and wire racks, some showing women in dress styles of long ago, from the 1950s or earlier, though some I think were from the 60s. She was crouched down in the small narrow area where the water would be, when it eventually rose high enough, and was talking continuously now for a while. Her voice sounded very much like the NCIS TV show goth girl, though she didn't look like that, or at least not goth-like. It's possible she may have looked a little like her in a non-goth, more everyday style, though I'm not sure. She really looked more normal. She appeared to be of normal weight, perhaps a little on the slim side, and slightly curvy, but not overly so.

Sometimes the things she showed me came to life for a while, in a strange sense. One time she showed me or I saw a strange figure with a heavily made-up movie star type face, but done in a strange way, a woman but the face was almost androgynous, though it had lipstick and heavy makeup, like a woman playing a guy in drag. Then it came to life, but as a teen or maybe preteen, with the grownup heavily made-up face, overly large for the body it was now attached to, and it wandered along on the sharp slopes of the narrow pond area, six to ten feet from me, frequently looking toward me. It was profoundly disturbing. The face looked even stranger full-size and in vivid color. The woman was still crouching, facing to the north, away from the strange figure. I kept looking back at it, and it looked at me, sometimes with it's face slightly turned to one side, just a little, like it was making a pose or trying to look diffident, all the while looking at me. It was extremely disturbing and distracting. Finally it went away.

I noticed a woman figure, one of the paper dolls, hanging out attached somehow to one of the wire areas. They were just stiff wires that stuck out mostly to the side, just slightly bent toward the ends, like something a store might hang items on. I'm not sure how the cut-out figure was attached to it, it seemed to be stuck to it somehow, but it was a black and white picture of a woman, with clothes from the 50s, but she had had something done to her, something put on the picture later it felt, huge grayish shadowy curved horns projecting up from the corners of her head, from behind, and a shadowy cape, with the collar sticking up, and a shadowy barbed tail coming up from behind. She had her eyes narrowed some, a little, and her mouth in an evil knowing smile, and her eyes looking right at you with a smug, knowing, evil look, enticing at the same time. I touched it, pulling it up closer to me, to see it better, and it came off. I looked at it, and she came to life, a large, maybe slightly larger than life figure, still black and white, shadowy, translucent even, but real, and alive. She kind of flashed before me that way for a short while. I was somewhat alarmed by it, drawing back some.

At some point I let the paper cutoff, the paper doll of her, with its tabs, fall onto the slope, or perhaps set it there, and turned back to the woman, who was still crouching and talking, her head down, continuing to work at something. I came to worry some about the items that had fallen off, looking in particular back at the paper cutout of the horned woman, laying on the slope, and turned back to the crouching woman, and then back to it. I told her after a while that some of the things had fallen off, and would have to eventually be moved, put back, otherwise when the water rose enough they would be covered. She agreed, but said it could be done later, there wasn't any hurry about it, there was plenty of time, something like that, turning her head very slightly toward me, where I stood behind her and a little to the side. She didn't turn her head much, just a little, and her eyes stayed on what she was doing.

I looked back, at where the horned woman cutout lay, mentioning that one specifically as one that had come off, and as I gestured with my right hand about it, I saw the cutout of the horned woman stuck to my palm. I stopped moving my hand, stopped making the gesture, with a little slight final shake, as it settled in on me that it was there. I stared at it, my words trailing off I think, and its face stared back at me, the eyes looking at me, and the face with its somewhat malicious, enticing smile.


The dream had quite a bit more at the beginning, about staying at the hotel, and maybe about going to the hotel, but I don't remember it, except for possibly the portions about walking by the small lake.

Dream - The redwood pool in the back yard that became a pool in the Cadillac

On Saturday, December 18, 2010, around 12:15-2:45 PM, I dreamed there was a tall pool of water with sides of redwood fence material, vertical boards, at the southeast corner of the back yard, near and adjoining the alley. It was something I made. I was inside the house with my mother and some other family members, other people too, I think.

I went out to the pool, fully dressed, and got in it. I wore my glasses too I think, and had a bubble of plastic over my head to protect my hair and ears. The plastic stuck out like a cloud around my head. Other people came out from time to time to check on me. It was late afternoon and we were going to have supper soon. Eventually it came to be that the pool was built onto the back of the gold 1970 Cadillac.

I would bounce around in the water, sometimes going under then coming back up. It was too small to really swim in, maybe seven or eight feet square. Sometimes I looked out to one side or another. There were little kids in the alley sometimes, walking around a bit, playing there I guess. They tended to be to one side or the other of the pool. I don't think I talked to them much, maybe not at all.

Sometimes I would stay with my head above water for quite a while. Some people from the house started coming out again, and I started going under water some more. I realized that the plastic over my head was gone, then. I had taken it off and forgotten to put it back on. I was a bit concerned about it, but my hair seemed unaffected, the water just seemed to roll off when I came up, so I decided to let it go.

My mother came out one time, talking to me, and got in the water with me. She seemed much younger, in her fifties maybe. She then got out of the water, still talking, and made her way over the back seat of the Cadillac, and over the back of the front seat, going along by the windows, and got into the front seat and then out.

A friend of my sister's came over, a tall man with dark hair who seemed to be in his twenties. I didn't know him much, maybe not at all. He got in the water on the east side, and talked with me for a while. He talked gently and tried to be friendly, but I was uncomfortable with him being there, and tended to give short answers to his questions. One time he somehow misinterpreted something I said, to be a remark putting him down, and though he chided me about it a bit, he remained friendly. I think I tried to tell him that it wasn't what I meant, but he didn't accept it. He finally got out.

My sister came after a while with several of her friends, and got in the Cadillac and started it, over my continual objections, and backed it out, pulling the pool loose from the yard. Then she started slowly driving west down the alley, trying to reassure me, saying that I didn't understand.

Partway down the alley, a few houses down, heading west, my sister paused and stopped. She seemed to have gotten bogged down somehow, I think. We were near a chain link fence, to the right, perhaps a little over it, by or partly in a yard that was in disrepair, with uneven and raw dirt, dug through areas of grass. A thin man, perhaps in his late fifties or early sixties, was out in the back yard there, or came out there, and was standing there looking at us and talking to us. I don't think he was mad, though, mainly just interested. People were getting out of the car, Sharon's friends maybe. Quite a few people had been in there, a lot of them fairly young. I headed back toward home. I think I may have gone out there through the air, along by the trees, watching the car from above, instead of being in the car with her, and may have gone home the same way.

There were drinking glasses and other things, in heavy clear plastic bags, in the side yard on the west, over by the old, old bush near the side fence, in the grass, partly hidden there. The bags weren't large, just able to hold a few gallons. They were similar to the bags the hospital gives to patients to put belongings and things in, heavy plastic with a built-in cord for a drawstring. They were in a few places, in the same general area, some of them close by each other, even touching, but none of them very far from the others. They were sometimes in layers, going down some into the ground, into a hole there. I'm not sure there was originally a hole, but one seemed to have formed around them as more and more stuff got added, the lower layers sinking down into the earth. I had put them there when cleaning up the yard, different things at different times, some of it long ago, some of it more recent, perhaps even today.

I was trying to save what I had put there, at least some of it. The glasses were generally old glasses of some kind I think, perhaps some of them some kind of commemorative glasses, perhaps tourist type things, or they could have been something from fast food places, or perhaps some combination of that. It's possible that the tall bumpy green glass with the stem was in there too, the big green goblet, the one my mother got, as a free gift, when subscribing to a book series. She used to let me use it, and bring me drinks in it, such as orange or cranberry juice, and perhaps iced tea.

Other things were in the bags too, I think, that were just trash, papers and things, though some of that I might want to save too, if it turned out to be something that shouldn't be thrown away. It would all have to be gone through, sorted out, with the stuff I wanted to save, including a lot of the glasses, taken inside.

I spent some time digging through them, seeing what was there, before kind of loosely putting them back. This seemed like a really bad place to store them, but I didn't have a lot of time now to do anything with them. I hoped that no one would throw them away before I got it done. I hoped, too, that I would be able to get it done, that I wouldn't pass away and leave it unfinished. If I did, I hoped that someone would go through it, though it seemed a wistful feeling. I took some with me, some of the bags, and carried them around with me, as I wandered around in the yard, sometimes going all the way over to the other side and back, before finally setting them down somewhere, maybe back by the bush. I sometimes went back to the bags by the bush, looking down at them at times, sometimes going through them again a little, worrying about them. There was a lot more trash now, and papers and things, mixed in with them, even outside the bags, some on top, some down in the layers, stuff I hadn't realized was there before, and was surprised to see now.

My mother brought some plates of food out to the back yard, and gave me some, while talking to me about it and about what was going to happen. She was getting dinner ready, there was going to be a family get-together, and some other people were coming, too. The food needed to be tested, before she served it, and she wanted me to try it out. I think it was something she had had in the refrigerator for a while, or had set out too long, or some other thing. It's possible some may have come from suspicious cans, but I'm not sure now. It was odd food, maybe uneven pale green lumps, like some fancy marshmallow type salads. She needed to see if they were actually alright, that nothing was wrong with them, that they weren't poisoned or spoiled. I had some hope, I think, that they might be sent out for testing, but it looked like I was going to have to do it for now, even if they were sent out later.

I stood there, eating some of it, with some distaste and worry. I think she was going to feed some of it to the dogs, too, as well as the people at the dinner. I didn't want to have it served to other people without me at least trying it, to see if it was still good. I would rather it be me that was the Guinea pig instead of the others. I wasn't even really comfortable with serving it to the dogs.

Quite a bit of time passed, as I stood there with the plates of food, sometimes eating a little of it, sometimes talking to my mother, when she was there. She also held plates of food at times, but I think she was saving them for me, or just holding them until doing something else with them. We walked some into the side yard for a while, looking some in the direction of the front, as she talked about the food and the people coming. Sometimes we were in other parts of the yard, and sometimes I was alone. The sky seemed at least partially overcast. It had been afternoon, but as time passed it got closer to night.

We had been going to have something like a picnic, out in the back yard, the family and whatever friends were coming, but it seems to have been reconsidered, and we were actually going to eat inside now. I could see some people in the house already, members of the family, and some other people who had come. They were in the dining room, standing there, talking, not far from the table, which seemed to have been set up with food. My mother went back into the house, leaving the plates of strange food out. They were set near the fence on the west side, perhaps on the ground, though there may have been something there she put them on. There were quite a few of them. I looked at them for a while, from some distance away, considering.