Volume: 2

Dreams

Dreams, layered dreams and surreal reality.

A man climbs onto a red, four feet tall, cube-shaped, loud, 4-stroke engine powered chain saw. The chain cuts right through his left collarbone when he operates it. He stands six feet four, weighs about three hundred pounds and is bald. He extends a sixty-foot telescoping pole out of the saw that has a separate chain spinning on its far end thus allowing the operator to make perfectly parallel cuts.

I was the one who delivered the saw to the site, not knowing what it was. A project manager later showed me how the pole extension was hidden beneath the saw for transport.

The man is one of only thirty-two surgically altered men who have had their collarbones removed so they can operate the saw. The men travel the world to construction sites that require these parallel cuts. They cut anything from wood, to metal, to marble.

People follow these saw operators, known as sopters, just to watch them work. In the early days of soptering a few hundred people followed them from country to country, job to job to watch. Now, though, thousands of vehicles full of faithful fans caravan to the job sites where temporary bleachers are erected. A cottage industry serving the tailgaters follows also, as do multimedia stations that broadcast each cut. The followers wear the same work clothes as the sopters with their favorite operator's name emblazoned on the back.

A giant construction project brought the league to my home town. The event took place in melting snow on a ten acre parcel. I couldn't tolerate the noise so I watched from inside my car. After the event, I couldn't leave, pinned in by six-inch water pipes lying all around that had been dug up.

In real life, the day before the night of this dream, I had ridden by the junior high school and stopped briefly to watch the seventh-graders practice football.

In another dream, I was in the sack with Dolly Parton who was an energetic player. We never had sex, just messed around. Hotel housekeepers came and went, ignoring our privacy. That was all fun but this is why the dream is memorable: toward the end, some guy was on a bunk to my left and Emileanne was on one to our right. They both had hot oil in a roller paint tray. They were cooking French fries in the hot oil.

A couple of weeks after that a dream devolved in which I ended up in someone's private bowling alley in the basement of their home. Again, the memorable part is inexplicable: one ball I rolled went down the alley and clanked into a hard, plastic, glowing, pink hippopotamus. The ball slowly rolled back toward me.

I had a dream one morning before waking for coffee about a girl who was going to help me with the marketing aspects of some nameless company. This woman was in her mid-thirties and had the most gorgeous face, similar to April Meier's. I tried to burn her image into my brain, failed and have lost that face forever. I've often marveled at face creation in this second floor existence, wondering who was in charge of the infinite combinations. In my dream world, it is me. I and only I, created her. (Solipsistically, I allow that I create every face anyway.) Were I an artist, I could have drawn her and kept her. Now, she is gone.

Also prominent in recent dreams are ledges, whether I'm driving, riding or walking. I am within inches of going over but don't.

Other recurring dreams involve earthquakes. I'm always in bed, dreaming that I'm awake. One earthquake was wavy, rocking me slowly, maybe a foot, side-to-side. Then my bed flipped backward, heels over head and I and my bed went through the wall and ended up in the garden. It seemed real at the time.

Here is a journal from my early days of flight training, when I was twenty-six. This occurred in real-life on the second floor.

March, 1981

I'm through one-third of my flight training, so Avion had me fly my first stage check. I've already forgotten the name of the instructor I flew with. His signature was worse than a scribble in my logbook.

I performed for him, all the required maneuvers over the southeast practice area. Returning, I requested the left runway and entered via the horse ranch over Corona del Mar, all normal. As I entered the downwind leg, number three for a touch-and-go, I looked out my left window and watched an AirCal 737 crash land. Most of it was over once I brought it to the attention of my instructor who was bored and looking out at the empty space to his right.