I'm at an exhibit of my friend Dave's architectural models. It's fairly crowded with people, but Dave is near me. I'm looking at a very fine white model of some sort of plaza with a gigantic chess board in the center surrounded by fine, intersecting walls -- very deconstructionalist and very well done. Dave is proud of it and I of him.

Next to it, in a plastic display case, is an even larger model of a mosque. It's fine filigrees and intricate carvings are all represented in another stunning display of model expertise. As I walk around the case, it gets larger, expanding to show the underground construction. The model is almost 20 feet tall now, and I can see by a human silhouette next to it that the building itself is supposed to by hundreds of stories high.

By the time I get three quarters of the way around the case the simple exhibit of Dave's architectural models has become a massive exhibition of models, science experiments, and technological displays -- all presumably still created by Dave! The display cases are stacked on top of each other in a maze of tunnels and ladders, dark and spot-lit, full of curious and admiring people -- it looks a lot like the Exploratorium.

One particular display I remember is of traffic patterns. It has a couple of streets filled with tiny models of cars, each moving independently in a marvelous, high-speed recreation of mid-town Manhattan.

I eventually leave the exhibit and wander into another area of the museum. The rest of the museum, in contrast to Dave's Exhibit, is the standard bright white with the occasional painting on the wall. I unexpectedly meet Kristi in a side room with glass walls and we hug for a long time. We begin crying. Soon, through the glass walls, I see Marjie looking at a painting. We exit the side room and greet her happily -- a joyful reunion. Rondii walks up very soon after and we all stand around and chat.

I'm an international spy and I've been having a meeting with two other spies in a hotel room. We are saying our good-byes in the posh lobby near the elevators. It's all very stylish and Bond-esque with tuxedos galore. One of the spies, a tall and extremely beautiful woman in a white mini-dress, begins coming on to me. She whispers in my ear and we hug. I see myself in the mirror squeezing her butt -- her mini-dress rises up above the bottoms of her cheeks and I can see her white garter belt. We excuse ourselves from the other spy and return up to the hotel room.

As a seasoned spy might expect, there is someone waiting for us. I am hit over the head the moment I enter the room and am held to the bed with a gun at my neck. They laugh. Through means hazy and obscure I overcome my aggressor. I turn around to find -- believe it or not -- the woman holding a gun at me. But, as debonair as spies often are, she is far too in love with me to pull the trigger. I dispatch her through means hazy and obscure, possibly involving the window.

I find myself next at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC, wearing my normal T-shirt and jeans. I am very high above the stadium on a wide plank with a number of other deadheads, looking down over the crowd and the stage. I begin to get shaky from the height or possibly from the ordeal in the hotel and have to get down off the plank. I'm very dizzy and the edges of the plank are pulsating with hallucinatory vigor in a wild spectrum of color. I back myself off the plank on my hands and knees, swaying and lurching.

I get into a large freight elevator with one other person and start down. On the concrete beams between floors I can read numbers: 33, 32, etc. I turn to ask the other passenger if we were on the 33rd floor. He says yes. I am very confused. As the elevator gets closer to the ground, the music begins floating in louder and louder until, as we exit on the grass level, it is full volume. I find Eric near the edge of the grass and greet him. I ask him how the beginning of the show was and he raves about flying objects and some extremely bright light that blotted out the stars. I express regret. My actions and speech are somewhat unusual and I can tell he thinks I'm dosed, but I daren't tell him of my near death experience in the hotel -- he doesn't know I'm a spy.

Soon the music starts again. There is a large screen behind the band and on it is projected a beautiful computer animation sequence of a metallic skeletal drum kit -- much like something in the Terminator. The kit is playing itself and I marvel at how well it corresponds with the actual drumming Mickey and Bill and doing. After a while the music quiets down and Phil takes out what looks to be a bass sitar. Jerry then starts playing harp and a beautiful, melodious jam ensues. After the jam, Phil begins to explain what a sitar is and pulls out another, obscure Indian stringed instrument, which he also describes. Jerry looks interested and asks if he can try it. Phil and Jerry begin to jam on the two Indian instruments.

I see FractalEye. He is standing in front of me, his single, huge diamond-shaped compound eye -- all that there is to his head -- is a silvery fractal. The diamond is made up of smaller diamonds, larger ones near the top, each one slightly convex, fading into minute sparkles along the bottom two edges. In each of the multitudinous eyes is a miniature reflection of me. It is frightening.

In an aside, I quickly draw an approximation of his eye on the Macintosh. I start with drawing large diamonds near the top and decrease their size as I move downwards in a snakeskin-like pattern.

Suddenly, possibly as a result of comprehending his massive eye, I *am* FractalEye. I run scared. I am terrified. As I encounter other people in my wild flight I attempt to hide my hideous visage. Some of them look at me strangely for a moment, then point or scream. I end up scrambling down a rocky breakwater near some boats.

An engineering student at UW is on his way to visit a friend. The friend lives with his family in Dream Fremont, across the Mystery Bridge -- that viaduct perpendicular to Highway 99 just north of the Ship Canal. The engineer is one of those modern, angstful types who has shunned tradition and broken with his family, yet he brings a friendly gift for his friend's grandmother, who is sick. It is a beautiful gift he feels will be appropriate for the old woman: a glass rose, delicate and fragile, its petals lustrous red.

The student arrives at the house and is introduced to the family. He tries to give the rose to the grandmother but she does not want it, saying she has no need for such things. She is sitting in a dark, cluttered room fluffy with quilts and illuminated by a single, large TV. "Gather all my things," she says, "I'm going on." The student and the family become sad and confused, wondering what she meant. A couple of objects are pulled in closer and the grandmother urges them to hurry. "See," she says, "I'm going in." She's pointing at the TV screen.

On the screen is some Nintendo game where you are traveling down a tube of spiraling patterns. We all stare at the screen and are drawn into its hypnotic swirl. Blobs of color, Nintendo bushes and patterned blocks trail outwards in graceful curves as we rush down the tunnel.

About halfway through that last dream I become aware that it is a fairly good story with fine themes -- tradition and its corporate desolation, expectations, death, etc. -- and I want to write it down. As the dream ends, I begin scribbling down notes and key phrases as I usually do to remember dreams. Soon, I pull out a larger book and begin writing the story in more detail. Eventually, I have a very large, ornate, leather- bound book in front of me and am inscribing the story in full detail.

Marjie sits down to help me and we both write simultaneously, each one working on different sections of the story. I am writing in honey, she in glue. We write over each other's stuff in a multi-layered, sticky mess. Our combined efforts smear and erase each other's work and ruin the book. We are both angry and sad.

I'm at West Beverly High School. The last day of the year has just let out and I'm walking through a courtyard, threading my way through hundreds of ebullient students. Their faces flow and shift in front of me, cutting me off from those I was following: Brendan, Dylan, Kelly, and the rest of the 90210 characters. We were all on our way to a park to celebrate graduation. Unfortunately, I can't remember what park! This distresses me greatly. Eventually, I locate the principals office and he and I sit down with a map of greater L.A. The principal points to various parks and I rule them out. Suddenly, I remember something the gang told me earlier, about us meeting in the part of the park "across the road". We soon find a park up in Malibu that fits the description and I'm off.

At the park is a circular stadium with about three feet of crawlspace underneath it that leads out to the field. Laying flat in this crawlspace, looking in at the field from equidistant points around the perimeter, are Brendan et. al. David Gans is there, too, and I take up a position about ten feet to his left. In the center of the field is a square stage with a projection hologram above it. The film seems to be a bizarre commercial in a style similar to many perfume ads. It involves lots of black leather and slight sado-masochism. It disturbs me and I crawl back out to go for a walk.

Soon, I'm back under the stadium watching the holos. It's the same movie again, this time more detailed and more intense. The violence is really quite serious and I ache with empathy. The movie runs much longer than before, but soon I cannot handle it any more and I crawl out onto the field to protest. I walk around the stage on the green grass, occasionally crumpling with emotion, and entreat the others under the stadium to reject this movie, to decry its evil psychotopology. Many of them agree with me.

Soon, the movie has metamorphosed. It is now showing two young boys riding their skateboards down a gutter. I soon lose my stadium perspective and become part of the movie. The two boys are the picture of summer vacation mid-Americana: overalls, freckles, and baseball caps. They're scooting down the gutter quickly, riding their boards sitting down. The gutter is about six inches deep in water and their action occasionally resembles surfing. The second boy, the more timid one, expresses concern about the approaching slope down into the storm drain system. The first boy chides him for being cowardly and they continue on. Immediately thereafter, in typical comic fashion, the gutter becomes impossibly steep and they plunge into the bowels of the Earth, screaming and spraying water everywhere.

Now inside the sewer system, they begin exploring on foot -- the first boy excited and eager, the second scared and whining. They walk for miles in the damp gloom, following false trails and dead ends, looking for a way out. Finally, hours later, they climb up to a small concrete box at the end of a hallway, round a corner, and see a passageway sloping up. The passage is extremely small and steep, but they can see a dim light filtering down from above. They try climbing up but it is too thin and slippery. One of the boys pulls out a piece of metal about the size of a pen and begins unfolding it. It unfolds in six-inch locking section to almost 20 feet long. They slide it up the passage way, hoping someone will find it. Just as they feel a tug, I realize that the passage leads up to the stadium where we were watching the movie and we are the ones pulling on the pole. The boys are pulled up the thin passageway into the bright light of the stadium.

Chez Zeus:Writing:Dreams:Part 4

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