We Invent Vine Diving & Tips on Flying in your Sleep

There is a place in the Berkeley hills near the carousel where the land falls away and is covered by slippery water oak leaves making it so you can go down but you can’t go up. I’m showing my twelve year old visiting from New York around although I’m new to California myself and not ready for the next surprise.

The land falls away completely almost ninety degrees, no telling how far it is to the bottom but is covered, many feet thick, by vines whose tendrils are an inch thick and spaced apart such that you can squeeze through and descend head first down the hillside, spreading your arms to slow down if necessary.

Half way down I’m thinking I'm glad his mother can't see this. We are recreating a scene from Fantastic Voyage when the crew has been miniaturized and is cruising around inside a body and hoping we get to skip the part where Rachel Welch is attacked by antibodies or in our case diving through poison oak or some other surprise. But that day the gods were smiling on Divorced Dads and after fifty feet of this fun we plopped onto solid ground and toddle off.

TEN YEARS EARLIER

1969

Rhinebeck, New York

Was out walking early one morning with my two year old on my shoulder, way back on one of the tiny farm roads, rounded a corner and there was a full grown lion, no cage, a big chain wrapped around his neck and a generous amount of chain going to one of the two trees that a half butchered cow was hung between. The lion didn’t stir, he was looking at us, content to be sitting next to all that food.

Mostly I remember trying to act cool, which I wasn’t from the series of surprises: What’s that? Lion? LION, no. cage. where’s the what’s the….ah, a Chain. Cancel urge to run. Act like it’s a pleasant surprise. I wanted him to tell his mother how great it was. The owner came out and said he took the lion around to carnivals in the summer. He had a small trailer and a few things scattered around, it was more of a camp site by the side of the road than anything. Did not look like a big money scheme.

The part of the lion is played by Pope Innocent X

ICE BOATS ON THE HUDSON RIVER

.On the frozen River in Winter, you reached for the
bridge two miles away
and for a second it was possible to see it with
your child’s eyes, a toy
bridge perhaps four feet high and just out of
reach.
In the ice boats, huge contraptions, some of them
from Civil War times
that Ricky would bring out when the ice got thick
enough, something like
that bridge illusion would occur. Because there
were no markers, It felt
more like falling when the wind caught us,

Why do we all share this elastic quality of flying

in our dreams, if not

because it is 'real'. Or to put it another way,

why are the things we do

when we are not in our body, not 'real' ? When we

go into a room, we can

tell right away if someone is there and are

startled if we are wrong.

I was talking to someone about flying dreams and they said...and what about those underwater dreams....underwater dreams?

This is what I picture when I play music, to start anyway. A young woman with dark hair pushing off underwater in a stream, continuing for a ways and then I am looking over the shoulder of somebody driving a little cart on a dirt road that goes up and down, is rutted and scattered with with rocks that accent some of the musical notes. The landscape looks like Cranach painting Ireland

Brianna read about a woman who kept having meat dreams, dreams with kitchens with fresh steaks on the counter and even up the walls. She recorded them. I can't remember how it went but her husband started to have them too. The key element was that they slept with an enormous dog. When the dog was out of the picture (died?) the dreams stopped.

We sleep with two little dogs. Brianna noticed she was having a recurring dream of someone tearing open the security door at the bottom of the back stairs. This is not something she worries about in waking ghetto life but the dog go crazy if anyone so much as walks by, which is fortunately not often. And they have dreams in which they make muted sounds and movements that might be those dreams transferring to her.

From a friend: “Wow. The coolest dream. Ever have those dreams where all the sudden you own a Mansion and you just keep discovering more & MORE badass secret rooms ?! Yes !”

I have a shared recurring dream with a dear friend of an old house with a ballroom that has seen better days, and a warren of additions in back going down the side of a hill. We discovered this when we came out of seeing Being John Malkovich which has the dream sequence with trap doors and vents hallways etc.

A friend, seeing this picture said, “I have dreams a lot that look like this.” “ I do too and they are distinguished by time dragging along in “real time.” The cars don't look right either, like an obscure Soviet era copy of the 49 Hudson or something. Lots of brown like in the picture, too.

I have a recurring dream that is close to this. There is a ballroom gone to seed and additions that were tacked on down a hillside getting rickety and warren-like as I go down to the fourth and fifth floor below. There is a scene in Being John Malkovich in which he is running through a similar house. I saw it with a friend. When we came out of the theater I told her about the dream I had and she immediately lit up and said she had one almost exactly like it. “Me, I find a new place to live in my recurring dream, and it has an extra something special upstairs.... a whole amphitheater in some cases. Something that makes the place a real steal on the rent, because there's all this extra room or extra rooms, up a stairway somewhere, partly hidden.”

On the frozen River in Winter, you reached for the

bridge two miles away

and for a second it was possible to see it with

your child’s eyes, a toy

bridge perhaps four feet high and just out of

reach.

In the ice boats, huge contraptions, some of them

from Civil War times

that Ricky would bring out when the ice got thick

enough, something like

that bridge illusion would occur. Because there

were no markers, It felt

more like falling when the wind caught us, more

like falling than

accelerating, nothing but flat white ice evenly in

all directions and,

too, no resistance only steel blades on ice.

If

you stood by the bow stay

so you couldn't see the boat at all, it made the

illusion of flying:

continuously and gently raising up like in those

dreams where you float up elastically when you breathe in, suspending

yourself at the top of

your breathe and then glide forward on the exhale,

concentrating a

little to steer, all the while part of your mind

going, 'Oh right, I

remember, of course I can fly, I'm just a little

rusty, that's all."

When this happens, I sometimes make a note, saying

"I must remember to

do this when I wake up"