Two Recurring Places As Settings for Several Dreams

There are two places I dream about over and over again. The first place is known only as "the roses." By the sea, in a town almost exactly like Pt. Lookout. Only more European. The beach is bigger and more flattened, more urban in demographic and there are long orange cement and pebble boardwalks that are everywhere like in Hawaii. I have a part time job selling jewelry in a pavilion in the shade and the stuff is shiny rocks on leather thongs. There are roses on the walls and there are a lot of stucco surfaces. The house is very much like the house at Pt Lookout but darker, more victorian, greener, more glassy. This place is beautiful but threatening. There is treasure hidden everywhere and there are these hills with long beige tracks running up them, into ominous caves and white terraced abandoned villages. Once in a storm the water crashed and revealed a beautiful shipwreck, covered in moss and slime, with intact violet and opalescent glassware and metal treasure items spread all round it. . . then the next bottlegreen wave crashed over it and it was covered again. There is a beach with gray washes up way high on the sand, where the tide is dramatic and the beach is huge, inaccessible, strewn with boulders, moss, spikes and rebar and all kinds of marine trash. I smell ambergris, I know I smelled it once as a child and didn't know what it was, I know this beach is hiding ambergris and opals and all kinds of tiny bits of semiprecious rocks, the sand has these gleaming gray bands, and the bits are just there, half hidden, waiting to be found. But the green-glass waves are really high and big and intense, and storms come up so fast you could be wiped away in an instant. The beach is close to the house, but the house is staggered from the violence of the shore by these white and brick stone walls. Covered in roses and iron trellises. The streets are gooey and black with tar. Once I was there with Joe in a dream, and
I heard a crash out the right side of the house. When I looked it was a gray helicopter that had crashed in the street, and brought down the tin roof of the porch as well. Another time I dreamed I was nude from the shower, in the upstairs bedroom, and a man came in the unlocked front door, upstairs, pushed me down on the bed and very gently raped me from behind. Then when I turned around it was Adam's friend from somewhere, and I was outraged but physically okay and my brain was telling me that I didn't mind hardly at all, but there was bad darkness sort of in my not minding. Once I was there in a dream and I was selling cocaine and had to escape the police on my bicycle.



The second place is "the house on the cliffs." The house on the cliffs is in the midwest. There are swimming holes and a sepia red river bottom many yards below the house in the ravine. Everything has a wonderful Thomas Hart Bentony green sheen, or the sand by the river is red like a deer. The house is actually a cluster of buildings on a high hill, amongst green hills and
mountains. Its not cold but not hot. There are mountain roads that zoom and bend very fast into the valley. The houses are all this dark red brick and mahogany color and are either a red-bricked, fat and round Richardsonian Romanesque or are a smooth-veneered Adirondack casual. What both places have in comon is that the water is very important. There is always one biggest house, and the whole property is mine, mine, but I don't stay in it, preferring the back house which is littler and closer to the cliff. The land is not the south, I can sense this, and the soil is red, deep orange clay colored. I don't stay in the big house. Sometimes my family is living here, sometimes strangers. In every incident I live in the small house, a cottage or back house which is older and littler and closer to the cliff. The houses are somehow historical, everything is somehow historical, like it was a school or an asylum or a commune, but way back in time. . . there is a smell of the Chautauqua all about everything, although this is Canada or Vermont or the midwest, it has a whiff of that or the Oneidan communities. The biggest house scares me with ghosts or something, it is perfectly modernized and renovated. It is really amazing to see, the Victorian elements perfectly re-pointed and new stair treads, strange passages, superquiet carpeting everywhere. It has a huge beautiful turquoise pool, surrounded by an oak grove, with steps leading down into the backyard from a series of staggered brick porches. There are amazing curved brickwork walls, retaining walls, and structures everywhere, all in Richardsonian excess with multiple styles of decorated brick. The backyard is distinctly gray and stone colored, the pool has curved red brick coping, and round lobed pools of varying depths. The area around the houses on the cliffs is historical and being
developed, there are ticky-tacky little houses with cheap siding and wooden decks in the valley in the cut-up orange-red dirt. My brother in the dream works building houses. The land is
orange clay colored. It is very red. My friends and I take these
dangerous and loopy paths down to the river where no cars and no people are. We swim
naked down there and the river is clean, and there are little fish, its
very untouched. Its very cleanliness is what makes it dark and powerful
and scary.
There is a canyon wash where the cows have trampled to death a black baby bull. It is nothing but flattened hide and stink, I wish there was a skull for me to take but it is already gone. There are lights down in the valley at night, but there are not a lot of people around. One time I can see the job site my brother is working on from my back porch, he parks his truck a little ways from the job site, and wades into a nearby cornfield. . . from the cliff far above the valley I can see him locate a secret pond in the middle of the cornfield. He takes his shirt off and lays it on the top of the corn stalks and it gleams very visibly as he swims around in the pond. Another time I am sitting very sadly in the backyard of the big house, and I see that red oak leaves have completely covered the tops of the pools, like a scaled skin. I am sitting on a gray granite slab looking up at the back of the house, and I am very depressed about something. My mother comes on the scene, appearing very professional, and she has luggage. She greets a little girl, and it probably is my little girl, but I still don't sleep in the big house and I am still depressed.

I suspect that I was nearby this place when I had this recent dream about Joe Quinn's dog, Buddy. I was swimming in a pond that was in the middle of a broad red wood, and the water was brown with leaf tannins, and leaves were everywhere at the perimeter of the pond. I was just playing with the dog and hanging out, and he was pretty far away from me swimming when I got out onto the muddy shore. I was wearing the bathing suit I owned as a 10 year old, and I was sitting in the mud when I saw Buddy come right at me, with a lot of focus and I was afraid. He swam at me as fast as he could, growling, and I just sat there not moving, terrified and confused, and he swam up and out of the water at me, snarling and in one perfect snap, he leaped up and out of the water and bit a rattlesnake's head off that had been sitting right next to me. I looked at the writhing bisected snake all bloodied and slowing and Buddy looked at me like "Yup, I saved your ass."