THAT DAY

My wallet vanishes. Self-sabotage! Prevents my going to work. Finally, after an hour, my unconscious lets me see it--sitting in plain sight. I'm an hour late for work. Furious at myself.

After work, meet my sister Miriel in a cafe. But it has bad food--all sugary. We walk to another, but it's full. The third, Old Uncle Gaylord's, has a bluegrass duo, but not too loud; we can talk. I confess how mad I get--about our mom's teaching that I'm sexually unworthy (even for a man, and she thinks men in general are pretty useless). Dunno if the hysterical blindness to my wallet this morning was related. It certainly turbo-charged my anger. Dating self-sabotage hurts but doesn't endanger my life; but I NEED this job to survive! If my unconscious starts sabotaging THAT...

As I relive my fear and anger, tensing into a knot, a fluorescent light above us blows out with a bang. Toxic black gunk, probably PCB, drips from the ceiling on us.

Maybe I didn't do it. A crowd of teens was playing videogames, maybe they were on the same circuit and overloaded it. But games don't pull that much juice. I have this weird feeling I tipped it over the edge.

THAT NIGHT

A windy, open-air market. Craft booths. A lesbian couple studies rugs and mattresses. Older than me, seem know their bargains. And ready to buy--but then, they have money. I don't.

I look around a shop. A big-screen TV plays ads. A jingle says

The ad uses sex to sell the lemon lotion, or tonic, or whatever--a golden-tanned bikini-girl sings the jingle on screen. But she ALSO materializes right here, in the shop! I wander the aisles, surreptitiously gawking at her, but I feel too shy to talk.

I peer out the door. The craft fair is now a ski resort high in the Sierra Nevada, east of Modesto. It's evening. Heavy clouds; a little snow is falling. Ice skaters zoom round a big pond, playing... not hockey, but SNOW-SOCCER! Have to kick with the side of the foot or the knee--kick straight-on and your skate'll puncture the ball.

Whoops! The ball zooms by my head. I don't intervene--I don't know the rules.

Shivering, I head toward to the family car. A woman also leaving asks me "Are you going to car-camp, is there a state park near? Or a motel?" I say "Anywhere but up here would be good." I really don't like this cold and I plan to head for the lowlands. Snow, brrr. Rushing to the car, I sort of forget gravity--flop, bounce, tumble & fly! Fear I'll fall in the icewater creek, but grab onto the car. A one-ton anchor.

Can't get the engine to start, so I just release the parking brake and... roll down the Sierra slope. And let the car steer!

Reach a tunnel. In the dark, the ignition catches at last. Drive on. Emerge into woods, but no snow. Warming already.

Roadblock ahead--a traffic jam caused by... radical psychologist R.D. Laing! He's directing traffic around the bottleneck--which he generated!

He waves me to stop and roll down my window. He leans down to give me this message: "What your father told you is--you seek Shia friends!"

Whaaat? And there I wake.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Jingle: huh? Music isn't rare in my dreams, but remembering a song is.
• Lemons against disease: huh? (Years later, the song looks literal. I have a mutation that gives me a high need for Vitamin C and its cofactors. I crave the peel of Meyer lemons, and if I eat one daily, I get way less infections.)
• Bikini in snow: Maybe that odd combination of sexiness and shivers helped focus my attention and fix the song in my memory?
• Ice soccer: some cold game I don't want to play. What? (Years later, it's obvious; it echoes a comic nightmare, Icerink, about a psychodrama group I was in; so this image means "the psychodrama crowd", who I'd mostly dropped by this point.)
• R.D. Laing: I've read him, but never met him, or even heard him speak.
• "Shia friends":
  1. Islamic sect common in Iran & Iraq. Devotional, following teachers. I'm a wary lone wolf, with few devotional friends--little in common.
  2. She-friends... girlfriends?
  3. Xià, the Chinese for under/down/low, pronounced sh'YAH!. Underdogs, humble people? Or lowlifes!
  I'm just not sure WHAT he meant--just that it was important. An oracle, introduced by music, surrealism, & flying!
• ACTION: Uh... eat more lemons, I guess--to avoid those tropical diseases. But Shia friends? I dunno.

My friend Jade calls me. Long time no hear--I quit Psychodrama where I met her, and avoid most of that crowd. "R.D. Laing is lecturing, you HAVE to go hear him!" She's a big fan--pushes and nags me till I agree to go. She's coming from another direction, so we can't carpool. Gotta drive alone.

FOUR DAYS LATER (2/18)

I drive to Menlo Park to hear R.D. Laing. But the organizers didn't plan for a mob; they're overwhelmed. Big traffic jam, as in the dream. When I finally park far off in an overflow lot, and start walking in, I run into a couple of women I know... the couple at the craft fair in my dream!

What Laing said deserves its own page. In brief, though, he talked of dreams he called transpersonal [decades later such dreams of messages for others, not the dreamer, got dubbed 'cledonic'.] I'm startled, since before I knew what Laing would talk about, my dream had him giving me a transpersonal message, supposedly from my dad.

AFTERWORD

Classic dream-types will come true now and then by coincidence. If I dream a loved one dies, and it happens, well, everyone dreams of death, and loved ones die. A big pool of dreams & deaths that can line up!

But in this comically cluttered dream (I still can't figure out "Your dad said you seek Shia friends!") the predictive elements are so petty and specific: I reconnect with that Psychodrama circle I outgrew, I meet a particular lesbian couple, I face a traffic jam caused by the writer R.D. Laing, who talks of transpersonal messages! And this is one of well over a thousand such unlikely match-ups--from just one dreamworker. And almost every published dreamjournal I've read has ones the writer deems psychic. They're common as dirt.

Sorry, skeptics. ESP, whatever it is, is normal. Of course, the norm becomes obvious only if you bother to read the history of dream research. Have you?

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