Return to Switzerland

I was back in Switzerland, living there with my aunt and uncle in Wallbach, where we'd first lived before we moved to Brunegg. The how and why was never made clear to me.

In the beginning of the dream we were gathered outside around a patio set of two chairs and a small table, something smoking away in the black Coleman™ barbecue nearby. My aunt was sitting in a chair reading while my uncle was engaged in setting up some strange thing that jutted up into the sky that was being blown about by the wind and resembled the Pod (sculpture) on Burnside near Powell's Books but was probably a dream-distorted covering of some sort, because it was blustery and looked like it was going to rain even though we were in sunlight at the time. In fact, that was the strangest thing I immediately noticed about this dream: the initial environment consisted of us on a rectangular plot of green grass in a nondescript field of gray, and the sky was gray, too, and though where we were was in a brilliant wintry-seeming spot of sunlight, the sky was a nondescript roiling of darker gray. I saddled my large internal-frame mountaineering backpack on and asked my aunt for permission to roam around the village, leading me to conclude we must have just recently arrived, and she said that I would need to be back in one or two hours.

And so I set forth down a gloom-enshrouded street, apprehensive of who I would run into and wondering what my old friends and acquaintances would make of me and my return. I was heading toward a landing on the Rhein I used to go to in summer to wolf down fish and beer in some kind of recurring weekend river festival, meandering aimlessly and looking around. Somehow, at some point I ran into Grenacher, an acquaintance I knew when I lived in Brunegg; only it wasn't the towering poster child of the Third Reich I knew, who used to masturbate on train windows when we went to go drinking or to buy hash in Zürich, but a strange composite of people I can't immediately recognize the components of. I was also in school again, apparently, because I was working on a speech that had to be at least three hundred words long. It was assigned to me earlier in a classroom by a bombshell of a Spanish teacher I had in St. Mary's, and since the subject of the speech was of our choosing I selected to do one about the future of energy production. The speech was going to be the basis for an essay on the chosen subject. I was working on my speech in the car Grenacher was driving, from where and to what destination, neither were clear, but we ended up at what I assume was Grenacher's house.

It was still blustery and the sky was darker and lowering menacingly, as we sat on stone steps leading up from the sidewalk to the back porch on which was piled precariously an assortment of what looked like junk. We must have had somewhere to go, because Grenacher was telling me to hurry. I was starting to bog down toward the end of the essay, and for some inexplicable reason I we both lit up long, thing cigars that burned slowly and fragrantly, more like shisha (hookah tobacco), and I ended up trying to write the last few sentences with the tip of my cigar, which ended up scrawling thick smudgy lines similar to crayons but a bit oily and the text turned out to be illegible. When I bitched about how hard it is to hurry when you're writing with a cigar tip Grenacher found a pen for me, causing a summit of junk to cascade down to the wooden deck. I only had a couple more sentences to go, but time was approaching so we jumped into his car and sped off while I continued working on the speech, getting frustrated with the pressure of a deadline and starting to have a hard time articulating myself in German.

We arrived at the school, meaning our destination must have been there and I was cramming an assignment that was due that day, in fact in a few minutes. The classroom looked more like a dimly lit bridge of a ship, as if the crew of Star Trek's Enterprise had settled on a romantic ambiance for a change of scenery. In the room small groups were scattered around and they seemed to be quietly arguing of fighting, though it was quiet and there were no overt signs of agitation or violence; it was just a feeling in the air. Grenacher had taken off somewhere and I was walking around trying like hell to beat my head through the block that was keeping me from finishing what was so far an excellent speech, counting my words and also counting the people in the room for some reason connected to the words and almost as if they were words in the speech. Andrea, a girl I knew in Wallbach who was a classmate, was there and followed me around interrupting, and though I can't recall what she was saying I kept losing count and she was making it impossible for me to complete my last sentence to my satisfaction. I told her respectfully to please leave me alone until I finished my speech, which she did, and shortly afterward I jotted it down.

Stoner Charlie

Charlie Brown and Linus were leisurely scaling an upward path of rocks protruding out of a shallow pool in a brick-paved plaza towards the large boulder in the center under the bright mid-morning sun. Charlie explained to Linus that earlier he'd found a couple hand-rolled cigarettes in a depression near the top of the boulder, Linus accompanying him presumably because he'd expressed an interest in smoking when Charlie Brown had a pack of Marlboros, that were confiscated by Charlie's mom. They were still there, and when Linus examined one he sniffed it and commented on how funny it smelled, whereupon Charlie Brown lit his and Linus' and inhaled, agreeing that it also tasted a bit odd. Undeterred, the both smoked their cigarettes with much hacking and coughing. Shortly afterward they both started laughing and holding a strangely incoherent and disjointed conversation that wasn't really a conversation at all.

Their friends showed up and asked them what they were doing, but on receiving no reply that made any sense from the giggling and gibbering idiots Lucy asked Charlie what the hell was wrong with them. Anyway, it was time to go to Charlie's house and so Charlie and Linus stumbled down to join their friends in the plaza and off they went. Because Charlie and Linus kept uttering the queerest and nonsensical things and kept giggling and chuckling, Lucy repeatedly scowled at them and the rest exchanged puzzled glances. Upon arrival at Charlie's house everyone gathered into the kitchen, whereupon Linus froze and stared dumbly out into space while Charlie started slowly jerking his head around with his eyes glazed and after sniffing some Comet started tossing it up in shafts of sunlight streaming in from the windows and oohing and awing as the lime-colored clots of heavy dust fell to the floor, commenting on how cool it looked. After a time wherein this and similar such antics occurred Charlie's mother returned home to an apartment that was thoroughly trashed and in the midst of which stood a group of children looking both guilty and worried looks, except for the mute Linus and Comet-covered Charlie, who on noticing her walked up to her grinning and held up to her what looked like a PC tablet that had speakers and proceeded to play a dissonant Ween-like song relating how in 1984 the doggies will get their revenge, rise up and enslave us, the lyrics to which he'd obviously made while in his delirium scrolling down the screen.

"That's nice," his mom replied in a surprisingly offhand manner considering the condition of the apartment and her son, "Now clean this mess up immediately!" Whereat Charlie's friends leave without a word, leading the still-entranced Linus with them by the hand. Time shifts forward into evening and Charlie, appearing to be back to his senses, nervously walks up to his mother sitting on an easy chair and reading a paper and asks her what it means to be high. Not even taking the paper down she replies casually that it depends on the kind of drug you're on.

Dognapping

Night had fallen an indeterminable amount of time ago and a light snow flurry was adding to the already almost ankle-deep sheet of snow covering the ground in a large slightly concave clearing in a forest, where I and around twenty others stood and sat in a large dispersed group around some picnic benches. We were waiting for food; all of us were homeless and it was meal time. When the grub finally arrived there was the usual murmur of complaint at the meagerness of the portions, among which I recall were what appeared to be burger shots. The dogs, however, that my less responsible peers insist on having for security and as panhandling props, didn't complain, though they certainly did beg.

At one point, and this is a section where my recollection of the dream is hazy, a couple dogs got into a rather mild tussle, and in the process one got loose and ran off somewhere. We all felt bad, or acted like we did, but meal time was over by then and it wasn't getting any warmer or earlier and individually and in small groups we dispersed to our respective camps and squats. For some reason I ran a ways, perhaps out of fear for my belongings or because I didn't want anyone to see where I was camping, through another clearing nearby, passing out of view of most of the group behind me and catching up with a solitary figure some score or two yards ahead of me. At some point I ended up eavesdropping on a small camp of about four traveling punk rock kids, which was probably near my camp, and they had the runaway dog there and were discussing eating it — though to their credit the discussion lacked enthusiasm.

The fun part: my awareness existing in two places simultaneously. I could see the owner of the dog, an old bearded man, looking for his dog with three charitable peers near the clearing where dinner was served, looking rather forlorn. The wind had picked up a little and the snowfall was picking up in intensity, promising a rough night for those who don't bed down early enough. He called the dog a couple times, but his voice was feeble, and one man put his hand on his shoulder and recommended that he save his strength and worry about bedding down for the night, on account of the weather. Meanwhile, I walked into the kids' camp and patted my legs and called to the dog by its name (an advantage to not being restricted to just a single point in space-time!), and the dog followed me, surprising the kids but eliciting no overt hostility from them. I jogged ahead of the dog, calling its name repeatedly and it gleefully loped after me; it was one of the most beautiful Malamutes I've seen and I'd fallen in love with it immediately. We ran into the search party on the other side of the clearing we were in, as they were morosely trudging back to the dinner clearing and presumably from their to their camps.

The dog ran up to the old man and licked his hand, wagging its tail slightly and he was overjoyed and thanked me. At that moment in the story a shift in time occurred and a small group of us homeless were sitting near a roaring fire, the man sitting with his dog and I all by myself near one of the punk rock kids, a girl I recall as being the one who expressed the most vehement reluctance to kidnapping the dog and eating it, and who looked miserable with both hunger and guilt. I though of consoling her, suggesting that she take and eat another similar, and apparently masterless dog (where did that one come from?) sitting nearby. I'm not sure if I was serious or if it was a cruel jest on my part, to rub some salt into the wounds in her conscience, but either way I thought better of it.