Uncle Steve, Jere, Vivianne, Dad and the bicycle salmon motorcycle trip

 

Last night's dreaming was all over the map with regard to the people I interacted with. First, I dreamed I was in a situation where I was having to decide between whether to work for my uncle Steve doing screen-printing or to try some kind of editor job with my step mom from long ago, Jere. The editor job seemed more interesting; it involved photography and provided more steady hours.

Uncle Steve was once again upset with me. He was expecting to be able to just call me up out of the blue and say, "We got screen-printing to do. Come on, dude, let's knock it out." I was non-committal and told him about my other options. We were in some long, narrow storage closet, and he was pointing out a yellow outdoor wireless camera still in its packaging. 

"You're just jealous of that, aren't you? Well, you'd better not touch it!" he said, in his tit-for-tat, sour grapes type of fashion.

Then, in another dream section, I was talking to Vivianne Van Asperen, a friend from Sharon's past, who I mainly know these days on Facebook. We were talking about some particular kind of salmon. We decided to ride motorcycles up to some creek in the Santa Monica mountains to observe them in the wild.

The ride was kind of disjointed. At one point it was a bicycle and not a motorcycle. I was pretty nervous and lagging behind. Going downhill, I felt like I was traveling way too fast, and I was unaware of  any brakes, so I kept putting my feet down on the ground. Wearing only flip-flops, I was worried that I'd scrape my toes. Going uphill, I got tired and had trouble switching gears. Old people were pedaling faster than I was.

I kept getting separated from Vivianne. At some point, the bike had become a motorcycle, my usual Yamaha V-Star to be exact (the bike Uncle Steve left me). I was having trouble operating this thing, too. I was worried about the extreme amount of gravel on the road, so I pulled off to the side and took a detour through an apartment complex. It got narrower and narrower until I was just kind of funneled into a courtyard between two apartments.

As I was walking the bike past one of the apartments, I could swear I heard my father's voice coming from inside. I stopped for minute. I remembered that I had a previous dinner engagement with him, which I had flaked on to go riding with Vivianne, who was now long gone.

I thought how strange that I should coincidentally wind up at what I presumed must be my dad's apartment. I remember looking at the address and comparing it to a mental picture that I had and they were identical. I debated whether or not to knock on the door. It was going to be dark soon and I had to consider how I was going to get back home. I didn't trust myself to ride the motorcycle at night.

I turned around, parked the motorcycle and began looking it over. All kinds of things were wrong with it. The brake handle pivot pin kept falling out, and the faring looked like it had shrunk, but it had actually just come loose and was tilted to an unusable angle. The saddle bags were missing and, of course, the gas tank was still dented. Yep, same old bike.

I had no tools, but I began trying to work on it with a small pocket knife. A little kid with a toolbox full of new tools asked me if I needed to use anything. I began using his tools and thanked him.

His mother showed up. I thought to ask her, "Hey, does Paul Golding live there?"

"No," she said, "That's the actor, David Paul."

"Oh, he's in that one show, not Ally McBeal, but a similar one," I said. 

I knew the show in the dream, but I can't recall it now. It sounded logical at the time, as their voices had a similar quality. Kind of back East-y and almost Jewish relative sounding but without too much of an affectation. Anyway, I was kind of relieved, as it settled the dinner debate I was having with myself.

It was a pleasant conversation, and I was just enjoying the moment with the mother and her little boy. My plans for catching up with Vivianne were abandoned, but I was content just going with this new situation.

That's about it. I woke up at this point. Now here I am, writing down little bits and pieces of my odd, rambling dream narrative. Oh, I should add that I also woke up to pee between the Steve and Jere job show and the Vivianne salmon motorcycle odyssey.

During the intermission, I put on an audio book,"the Tibetan Book of the Dead," narrated by Patrick Horgan. I find the cadence of the reading and his stuffy English accent to be quite sleep inducing, when played at low volume. I can usually count on some strange dialogue in my dreams, where people I'm interacting with will be speaking in the exact verbiage of this ancient text.

Well, the birds are going to town, and it's not expected to rain today. I might as well join the real world.