THAT DAY

I read Olaf Stapledon's FOUR ENCOUNTERS. As weird as his more cosmic stuff--a rogues' gallery of midcentury archetypes--writ extreme.

1. The Christian (with his total monopoly on truth. Hey, isn't pride a sin?)
2. The Scientist (equally closed-minded, even more sexist, and dangerously amoral--a gun for hire.)
3. The Mystic (so pure he condemns this world as hopeless. Hey, isn't despair a sin?), and
4. The Revolutionary ("Stalin a monster? Capitalist propaganda! And what if he is? The end justifies the means"...)

In the evening, my housemates and I watch The Lightning Thief. The images and cameos are vivid--Medusa, Charon, Hades and Persephone. But the plot and ideas are just childish. Such a contrast with Stapledon...

THAT NIGHT

Branches arch over a jungle creek--bridges for a troop of big monkeys or small apes.

Uh-oh. One female somehow got hold of a gun. And clearly saw how it's used. She deliberately sights and fires at a comrade. A female monkey on a branch collapses. Blood sprays like a firehose. She bleeds out in seconds--fatal for sure. I feel sick, scared, sad.

Weirdly, as the blood-arc slows it also thins to pink then clear--plain water now!

• Monkey with a gun fires without knowing the consequences: Stapledon's view of humanity after Hiroshima, in Four Encounters. Monkey with a gun indeed! In one Encounter set at a party, Stapledon meets The Scientist, who calls a girl across the room a mere animal, a blind stupid sex-thing. He reveals an ugly tangle of desire/envy, sexism, puritanical body-hatred and cynicism (we're all just machines)--flaws latent (and sometimes blatant) in mid-20th-century science.
• Casual/reckless shooting: in Lightning Thief, the real thief (once exposed) quite recklessly and guiltlessly blasts away at Percy Jackson, wrecking penthouses and rooftops.
• blood turns to water: also in The Lightning Thief, water heals bloody wounds if Percy asks it--a gift from his dad Poseidon. So does the water here mean that this "fatal" wound is magically healing?

I bike down to the theater district to check out a singer-songwriter workshop. My friends Mike & Cory meet me at the club, a place called Biscuits and Blues.

I feel nervous and brusque as a skinny, slightly punk, quite gorgeous blonde at the door tries to talk to me. Despite her friendliness, I just can't! Place feels warm, welcoming, but I'm uneasy--dunno why. Sit with my friends, stick close, stay silent.

Mike's songwriting teacher, Bonnie Hayes, critiques demos:

• Kev: "When You're in Pain, I'm in Pain." I'm baffled. No idea what it's about except, uh, pain.
• Kat: a simple folksong about songwriting. I like the chorus but think the verses need compressing. Bonnie feels the same, suggests Kat trim half a verse.
• Billy: "Every Day". Raw, just written, but rich chord changes & nuanced moods. Mike & I agree later it was the best all night. Bonnie's critique shocks me--she DISLIKES its bittersweet complexity. Wow. I can't trust her--MY songs are this complex. During the break, I track down Billy and praise that song, say "Bonnie gave you bad feedback." He's the only stranger I talk to--still feel weirdly on edge.
• Rick Hardin: three songs, each one a mood-slab: monotonous speed, style, rhythm. No development! Some clever puns, but his emo singing--well, mumbling--sabotages himself.
• A Girl Named T plays three songs: "Beautiful", "Bellisima" and "Green". Relentless whanging on over-amped punk guitar drowns her words. I like what snippets I can hear, but her crude playing drags the songs down. She may be trying to overcome street noise--loud backfires and sirens. To her credit she asks "Is the balance off, can you hear me?" but before anyone can answer, Bonnie says "Uh... those were GUNSHOTS!" A growing chorus of sirens prove her right. Lights flash in the windows. Soon we hear that someone was murdered outside.
• Alex Carline: a practiced stage presence, but he tries to win back his rattled audience with sheer volume. Painful. Stick fingers in my ears.

On Mission Street my friends catch a bus, and I bike home, contemplating what I heard. And what I dreamed the night before.

TEN DAYS LATER

I didn't just dream of this reckless shooting one night earlier. For the last month, I've been typing up and illustrating a vivid, dark dream, A Date in Minsk, that I had exactly one year ago; finished illustrating it three weeks back. Minsk has closer parallels with the songwriters' workshop--and the murder--than Monkey. In the Minsk dream...

• A Central European woman is shot outside a cafe full of sexy women: literally true.
• I'm called away, return with a tall guy: that day, I ran into Mike downtown; he urged me to eat cafe food & go straight to the Biscuits and Blues event with him; I biked home to eat healthy, then back to meet him
• In the cafe I met two skinny friendly sexy blondes I feel uneasy with. Again, literally true.

1. The shooter was female too, and aimed for the victim in both Minsk and Monkey with a Gun, yet the suspect in the Geary Street shooting was male, and after someone else. The repetition of these discrepancies suggests they're signal not noise. Debating the existence of ESP, you can slip into dismissing such differences as inaccuracies, rather than as comments or creative use of (future) material. But are such dreams out to confound dream researchers' theories, or to say things (often complex, mixed things) we need to hear? Mind you, I don't know what the discrepancy means--but the repetition hints it's intentional.
2. Minsk was a year before the actual murder, but it wasn't the first. Two years ago, I dreamed of yet another senseless handgun murder on a corner, as I watch and hear helplessly upstairs across the street: Fetal Pause. This killing seems to have sent shockwaves at least two years back through time.
3. A Date in Minsk crawled with references to Audrey Niffenegger's The Time-Traveler's Wife, a book full of time-loops. At the time I didn't think much of that. Now I wonder if the dream wanted to WARN me it was a time-loop itself. Can psychic dreams flag themselves as psychic? Maybe they do want to help out parapsychologists, after all.

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