Some women I know squat in a parking lot at night with a flashlight, alone, and just sit there, till this peculiar rite gives them the power of invisibility. It's not optical but attentional: no one notices them, except peripherally now and then. I acquire it too. We need that power for a purpose: we're raiding a government institution. I worry someone will either notice one of us squatting and think it's a homeless person shitting, or NOT notice us while parking and run over us... but neither fear comes true.

Test my invisibility around the parking lot first... then on an urban street in broad daylight. I watch from a car while my old friend Lindsay from psychodrama walks around, dark-haired, cat-eyed, quite striking... yet no one notices her! It works.

I get out and find I'm unnoticeable too... till a 20ish punk girl in a very sexy slashed outfit, with bare belly and thighs and tiny bikini panties, sits down right in front of me on the sidewalk, half-bare cunt facing me, looks me in the eye and says "You want to buy a shamanic staff?"

She has a sample--a crooked wooden one crowned with what looks like a coyote skull. It does feel full of power. "My boyfriend makes them," she says. Damn, a boyfriend..."That's him, sitting on the corner." Hmm... a tallish skinny blond kid, with a clear mild but strong aura. And a seeing eye! He looks right back--sees us as easily as his girlfriend does!

Uh-oh.

Long preparations for the raid. A macho guy on our team who's into muscle-cars proposes as part of our plan that I unlock a Japanese car that's not mine (I owned the same model once and he claims my old key'll work). Annoyed, I snap "You have cars on the brain! I sold that car and gave away the keys long ago." I do have some old VW keys, but they're useless for this.

We're out to free a Country Boy who's coming up for trial. They want him to confess and cut a deal, but he insists it's a matter of principle and he'll take it all the way to the Supreme Court. We meet a man and woman, the two young lawyers supposed to be his defense team? Or just prospects for the job. He's unimpressed--scornful in fact. "You don't believe I'm innocent, and you won't do WHATEVER IT TAKES to free me!" True. But he seems to mean ANYTHING--kill, for example...

The guy he finally does approve of is the one who's planning our raid! The hick's case DID make it to the Supreme Court, or at least a preliminary hearing before one Justice. If the judge doesn't rule in his favor, our invisible team will bust him out. I'm worried, because the guy hired as his lawyer will go even further if necessary--assassinate a Supreme Court Justice to free his client! OK, lawyers are supposed to fight for their clients, but this goes too far! Yet I'm drawn in...

I help the team survey the site before the hearing. It's not in a hall, but on boulders emerging from water in a lagoon with low cliffs around. A sea-cave or huge pipe in the nearest cliff-face. The Supreme Court Justice always sits on one rock, the defendant on another. People fish from the banks--some teenage girls wear weird flamboyant clothes like they're priestesses or goddesses in the anime films I've been seeing lately.

The Hick's lawyer measures the water's depth: "Six to seven feet. Ideal." He plans to wait behind the boulder, submerged up to his nose, and attack the judge if he condemns the Hick--kill him if he has to. I notice a lot of monofilament strung around the place. Not sure if it's part of the team's plan, or just sloppy fishing.

Man, I'm uneasy. I want to prevent this from turning violent...

NOTES NEXT MORNING

Since the dream ends so abruptly, I've left in more of my notes than usual to give you an idea how, faced with a frustrating dream, I move from guesses like (flashlight: Popcorn Theater?) to firm meanings [VW keys = hippie values], to advice {ACTION: assert more, or this angry side will act for me--and overdo it!}. A dream that feels incomplete in PLOT may still succeed in conveying its MESSAGE; only your conscious craves nice neat endings.

• (Long wait, flashlight: my friends wanted to go to the Popcorn Anti-Theater, where you ride an old bus around San Francisco having weird encounters by flashlight. But it's too popular now, and I didn't feel well enough to go stand in line in the cold wind for an hour to get on...)
• (Invisible to most but not all: in the fantasy anime series El-Hazard: the Magnificent World (a lot of fun--adventure, romance, comedy, with vivid characters and lush settings), a certain Blue Man can spy on them unnoticed. Only... it turns out Nanami the school reporter can see him.)
• (Sexy punk shamaness with coyote-skull staff: I actually met this girl at Open Studios here in SF a few years ago! Why'd my dream put her in? Because her name was Esther, and right across from the Popcorn Anti-Theater's bus stop is a dance club called Polly Esther's! Her cameo made me see the dream was likely about fringe theater)
• (Sexy outfit: anime characters! 1) Ifurita in El-Hazard. 2) Urd in Oh My Goddess!)
• (The staff resembled the rather phallic key that penetrates, energizes and commands Ifurita.)
• [So The staff =
  1. Shamanic power! Dreamwork, and maybe intuition/ESP too.
  2. Sexual assertion (Urd urges her sister "quit being so virginal, grab the boy you like--he adores you!")
  3. Showing my artwork instead of hiding it away (I'm cartooning Thief of Dreams, a dream warning my inner ascetic who condemns sex ALSO sabotages art & money...)
• (Keys: In El-Hazard, Ifurita's an android with a wind-up key; it's sexual for her, but more rape than love: she must obey her key-holder. But in the end she frees herself--finds a way to have independence AND love.)
• [VW keys = hippie values--humane, tolerant, but unassertive--like an underpowered VW.]
• (The hick (and the lawyer he chose) felt sociopathic--indifferent to what others' suffering. He was wronged and entitled to his freedom "no matter what." And my invisible friends were willing to help.)
• [The hick: my OWN sense of entitlement? Angry and extreme, because repressed/ignored?]
• (Pre-trial on a rock by water: 1) in Oh My Goddess! on a rock at the beach, Urd gets a judgment: for crashing Heaven's operating system, she's banned for a while. 2) the Martin Luther King memorial waterfall and pool at Yerba Buena Center. I felt nervous there--I expect the guards to harass me (last time I was there, they did.)
• (Monofilament: at Yerba Buena Center, there was monofilament atop the waterfall, near the brink, to block... what? Also, while biking home, saw a punk girl on Valencia fishing in a grating with a long thread, trying to pick up... what?)
• {ACTION: I better free my sense of entitlement before it gets really mad at being unfairly repressed and blows up in my face! I have to demand more and indulge impulses more. Hard for a shy one like me. But I better do it--or else!}

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