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Weird & Lucid
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1464
Up at 5:00 AM, can't sleep, work, sunrise, then at 9:00 go for a nap.
And I have the strangest of dreams. I have to take a parcel to Edmonton for my family, my brother, and so I take a bus to Red Deer then decide I don't want to go all the way to Edmonton and post it from there.
At the bus depot downtown I hang around for a bit, watching the police round up the crazies. There's a cute black hooker, her ass hanging out of her jeans, they take her too, bundle her into the van - "She's crazy" the police tell me.
And when I get home to my dream apartment my brother is there, other people I don't know, a Korean landlord and his 2 children, they've all brought beer and are having a party. There's a childs swimming pool in the living room, some baby in a stroller and this plump girl under a giant plastic umbrella smiling at me and I think the umbrella is really her hat so I complement her on it and she moves away to show me that it's really an umbrella.
There are all sorts of people everywhere..
My brother, he's trying to show me some photos he's got of me, this envelope, he wants me to send it in to Derren Brown, some sort of user participation is required for his next trick...different pictures of me, taken "surveillance style", we talk about the last trick, the lottery prediction, we agree it wasn't the best one...
I go upstairs, carpeted, dark blue, like a normal house. And I realize that this isn't my house, I don't know these people, it's all just a dream.
And so I go back downstairs in my underwear only, they all look at me funny, I've got a dark stain in the front (I just took a pee) and I tell them I don't care, it's just a dream, and they understand.
They're still talking to me. I'm getting upset, looking for meaning, Why this apartment? Why these people? What does it mean? And my brother brings me a chart that shows everyone in the building. In one of the apartments is Celine Dion. There's other apartments too on the same floor with names like "B Dion", so we guess that Celine owns all the apartments and is using Aliases. There are other apartments, we look at the names on those, some are obscured and hidden, like they don't want to be known, others are long strings of numbers and I'm trying to decipher them., remember them because they must mean something....
****
The dream disappears, another, similar related dream which I forget....
****
And then the dream of the world's best dollar cinema. I've forgotten I'm dreaming. I've taken the kids, it's clean, there's a long counter with all sorts of snacks and refreshments and it's empty except for a couple of employees who are doing stock or something. It's empty because we're late for the film, but there's no rush. There's a secretary or bookkeeper going over a long column of numbers with the manager, and so I go and order and give them $50.00 for the food. Meanwhile I'm talking to the manager, it's the best dollar cinema in the world, he's shown up today dressed as Batman, one of those plastic ripped-ab form costumes, but then he's got unicorns and musical notes painted with sparkles on his face, and I'm telling him how it completely ruins the Batman effect, makes him look gay, he's agreeing with me, pleasant enough, there's an usher, she dressed as Snow White but she's done it well and looks fetching as Snow White should. They're both very nice, there's a reason this is the best dollar cinema in the world, but now the manager and bookkeeper have gone back to their figures and the movies started and I haven't got my popcorn, so I tell the bookkeeper and she goes - "Oh, right big spender", because I gave her a $50, and she gives me change of 2 $50.00 bills and some smaller notes. I don't tell her, it's my lucky day, It's bright in this dream, the fluorescent lights overhead, and so I interrupt her again - the bookkeeper, to inquire about my popcorn and pop, she's forgotten, and suddenly I find myself on the end of the counter, in the children's party area, it's darker here and she's still off fetching my popcorn and I'm wanting to pay again to see if I get too much change....
Autumn
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 1765
Today it is Autumn. The wind is blowing, the sky a slate grey, colored leaves blowing in waves down the street.
I've enquired about my cheques, any of them would do nicely, I have the children this weekend and it would be nice if they were fed. If I was fed, it's been an entire week living on pasta with butter and rice fried in oil. But there's been no reply. And so maybe I should simply ignore my email for a day or two and see what happens.
There was the call from the conspiracy group, they were meeting up for coffee, but I couldn't go, I had, I have, other imagined appointments.
It's autumn and the leaves rustle down the streets, fill the lawn, the wind bends the trees. The appointments, they won't show, they were imagined.
And so I work on projects, pass the time "finishing things up", websites forever in development have now the possibility of completion, other things as well draw to their final close and I finish them up, work madly upon them and pause only for a cigarette and reflection.
I'm almost out of cigarettes, must ration them, the absence of reply on question of the cheque makes me think that it could be a while....
Change is in the air.
of Wild Bill Hickock
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1425
I'm somewhere traveling through United States, small towns, ghost towns of the American West. I'm at a party with some strangers, one of them is passing around a joint. It's Christmas and the stagecoach comes through - it's not cold, hot desert, but me and some older gentleman take the stagecoach through town - it's being driven by an coolie, who knows my companion and jokes with him - my companion wants him to take a new route through the town, but as there's only one road through town it's kinda tough....
We end up at a Saloon....
The next morning Wild Bill Hickock is there, I'm in this town or another, some archeologists have found the remains of the Eastend boys, I know them, they were a gang that rode down from Moose Jaw in the twenties and disappeared. They disappeared 'cause the Apaches got 'em, and we walk down from the hotel to a star shaped trench cut in the desert, the Apaches had lashed the boys to logs, suspended them in the trenches and then covered them over with dirt. Buried them alive. Some tribal elders show up, they look old, so old the skin has crawled back from their teeth and jaws leaving just the bone and their eyes roll freely in skeletal sockets, they look and nod, "They found 'em" they say...
Now I'm talking with Wild Bill and asking him if he's dead and all, I was pretty sure he was but he assures me he's not, there are these old prospectors showing me the opals and gems they've found in the desert, there are museums everywhere and he has along some famous Indian sidekick I should know, I do know in the dream, but I can't recall his name now. And they're showing me all sorts of stuff, and asking me all sorts of stuff, and we're getting along famously. It's like we're old friends. We trade some things. Then they do the show, it involves Wild Bill spraying a hose around in front of people, he's holding the end by the water barrel, and eventually a bullet makes it's way through and accomplishes some miracle of marksmanship. We're amazed and he's warning us all to stay back so we do, but one of the bullets goes astray and hits the fireworks-for-sale hut, it sputters, then goes up in blazes, everyone "ooohs" and "aaaahs" but then at once realize it's just another part of the show and break into applause...
BABEL
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Babel
- Hits: 1654
Our technology has knelled the death of communication.
And ironic that so much of it has been devoted exclusively to facilitate communication. The internet, the cell phone, the television.
Yet even as these new languages arise, communication, real communication, is becoming extinct.
There is a box of letters, maybe in your grandfather's attics, written from his wife, his lover, his children. Some of the letters are scented, some contain postcards, photographs, some pressed flowers. Postage stamps, postmarks, thumb printed and tear-stained envelopes and pages. There will be no box in the attics of your children, no CD's or flash drives with the memories of your life, the medium is changing. Always changing.
Email, for example. Email, which exists only in the terabyte storage of offshore servers, streamed down wires in 1's and 0's, traveling hundreds of miles to arrive down the street and be read once and deleted. If not deleted, left on a computer that ends up discarded. Or burned to a CD that will in short time scratch and blister, the patent obsolescence making your memories irretrievable. Were, for some rare reason, it printed and read, the ink, cheap, the paper, rubbish, the generic fonts and backgrounds, there is nothing there to ensure it's survival. Of the countless billions of emails sent every day, the trillions of virtual miles traveled, how many will survive even a week? A month? Yet we entrust to them, to our digital cameras and blogs and online accounts and profiles our lives.
And there is the Jargon. The changing language of the technocrati, with communication so easy and abundant, so continual and constant, we develop shorthands to communicate, to sum up ourselves, and we devolve to become our language.
Formats change. Media becomes obsolete, bytes are erased, written over, destroyed.
We are forgetting ourselves. There are no anchors here, and we are carried forever forward on currents of "New and Improved", having lost all sight of shore....
These are songs to this age. Some as ephemeral as the language, the medium, others, I hope, less so.
To the new tower of Babel.
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