A flat by the Bay, in Berkeley or Albany. A pond or lagoon, several hectares. It's winter, an unusually cold one, and the pond has frozen. But this is an alternate Earth, where frozen water isn't hard dense and clear--instead, it forms a light, porous, pale blue foam! Good insulation, not especially cold, but flimsy--takes a foot or more to support a person. Still, the drifts here are up to my head, and even the windswept surface of the pond looks thickly frozen. People wander on it, clumsily, like giant penguins.

I meet my bandmates Mike & Nic. We're all bundled in gauzy layered robes that flap in the gusty wind. I say "We look like ghosts." Nic flaps her arms. Yep. Ghostly.

This is a park, AND a storage area for the road agency supplying historical statues and plaques. A few of the biggest breach the sea of blue foam. A wooden, bright-painted (but starting to fade and chip) cowboy, lifesize--lean and moustached. With a mean look. I suspect he's Nineteenth Century and got banished here because he backed the Confederacy--or the Klan. Just a suspicion based on his glare and sneer; his historical plaque, if any, is deep-buried.

Whale ho! I slog over and find... no, it's an overturned wagon or boat--hard to tell which, as it's just a big brown hump awash in blue, with at least four bronze pioneer kids climbing on it, looking dismayed. Shipwrecked? Conestoga wagon crash? Again, the plaque is covered in foam; I don't bother clearing it to find out what their political crime was. Stole Indian land? Though I can't see blaming kids for their parents' choices. Change the plaque, not the statue.

Tons of bronze, worth a fortune--in art-limbo. Unwanted images. Under the foam.

Oops, forgot to paint ghostly gauze-robes on me. Addicted to using that red shirt in bluegreen nature scenes!

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• East Bay shore, abandoned place, statues: real! Driftwood- and junk-sculptors turned the Albany Bulb (an old dump for concrete chunks and landscaping dirt, jutting into San Francisco Bay) into a sculpture park.
• Weird blue ice:
  1. Statues on ice literalizes the slang "on ice", in storage, which the statues are.
  2. Blue: leftist politics!
  3. Blue ice is what falls out of jet bathrooms. Frozen sewage. Piss and shit. So a whole pond of this blue stuff may emphasize that the art's been declared (at least by some easily offended group) shit.
• We seem ghostly: I just read The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by VE Schwab: Addie made a deal with a creepy forest god. Now she's ageless, but is cursed to be instantly forgettable; even what she writes or draws soon vanishes. A long but lonely life.
• Wood & bronze: Addie's dad carved a wooden bird inspiring someone centuries later to sculpt a bronze piece. Even his short life left more of a mark than Addie's centuries. Here we have the opposite--art that lasted long enough to become embarrassing.
• The statues:
  1. Probably not suppressed personal stuff. I didn't recognize or respond strongly to the figures--more to their banishment & burial in blue. So I suspect the dream's about broader social censorship of some kind.
  2. The bronze Confederate leaders and Indian-killers toppled this year. Yet the dream figures seem poor and powerless--a skinny cowboy, shipwrecked orphans. Gone too far? I support "Black Lives Matter" but hate its focus on individuals--neglecting policy. Systemic neglect of murders of women, dark-skinned people and the poor leads to more deaths than from police violence, so I support not police defunding but reprioritizing to catch those killers. And a thousand times more people get killed by bad (or no) healthcare, so I want Medicare for all. Policy.
  3. But besides a warning not to expect effective reforms from a movement that prefers slogans... could the buried statues also mean dreams themselves? Full of politically unacceptable images, urges and feelings! So we bury them. Or we just let them be slowly swallowed by the blue foam of... time.
  4. That's a griffin buried in the background! In my dreams, griffins mean ESP or magic (as in Girders & Dust). We throw out magic, too. And barely even notice.

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