Well, maybe I can resume that episode again later tonight, perhaps with more ceiling-lights on and the patio-window curtains pulled closed tightly.
That was just too damn freaky.
Waking up later with a hollow, gnawing feeling in my abdomen, relieved to realize it must be because of the substitutions last night of carrots instead of potato-chips with sandwiches for dinner last night. Hunger pang. No pain, no gain.
I never knew - until today - there is a Minnehaha Park in Spokane.
I've known a long time about those climbing rocks and I thought that itself was Minnehaha Park, a place I've referenced several times before in my postings, with a few illustrations from images I personally captured.
But today, I learned of that actual Minnehaha Park, as designated on Google Maps, only because of a sleeping-dream from early this morning.
Several sleeping-dreams registered on my conscious mind as I was sleeping early this morning but only one stays with me
In the short description of this occurrence, there was point where I was reminding myself at various points while sleeping to not forget, don't forget this detail
While sleeping, I saw a visualization and that was of measuring distance with Google Maps. From the Idaho-Washington State line, I measured 14 miles due west
That detail recurred several times during the night as I slept: Don't forget; 14 miles
After waking, I saw down here at this same stupid desk and I retrieved Google Maps and, from the point I visualized in the sleeping-dream, that point on the Centennial Trail recreation path, I measured 14 miles due west
That pointed to Minnehaha Park in Spokane.
I've been near there many times but it is off the route I often followed in the past.
Looking at Google Streetview, I see an old structure on the park-grounds. Aerial view reveals what seems to be an old tennis-court. A dirt road leads to a higher-vantage point that I've seen often and that I learned today is labeled Beacon Hill. There was a wildfire around there somewhere a few years ago I posted about.
Not making any plans to visit that site. Thinking about it because of my sleeping-dream.
The long description was about a river-bed.
The first part I recall was walking across a highway-bridge and looking at the deep canyon below as I walked along the road
I could see lines in the soil that I guess were water-marks. The gorge was deep and wide and was of no place I specifically recall from the real world. The highest marks were, I guessed, from a flood. The water-level itself was very low.
The next point I recall is that I was at the river edge. Whether that same river or not, I don't know.
The river itself was really just a very narrow trickle of water but it was consistently level for what seemed a great distance.
Above me, highway overpass. And that is strange to consider because it seemed the entire river, vast in its length, was covered by highway-overpass concrete structure
I was aware of the river-bed and its danger.
Along the banks, I was aware of green vegetation. The river-bed soil was sandy and loamy.
Visualizations reminds me of the Red River in Arkansas-Texas and various other rivers and creeks I remember from Oklahoma and the geology that fascinated me as a youth.
In the sleeping-dream, this was a point of great danger.
The soil would quickly liquefy into "quick sand" if one wasn't careful.
All it took was to stand too long at any given spot and then one would begin to sink into the ground
There were four of us. We were beginning our trek, for purpose unknown and destination not considered or revealed, along route the water flowed
Initially, I was third in line, but because I knew the two people in front of me were weakening the ground surface with each step they took, I positioned the woman behind me to my place as third in line so that now I was the last person in line
We were treading along softly, trying to step as lightly as possible on the surface, when we heard screaming from ahead
The river made a sharp turn in that direction and the woman I referenced earlier took off running toward the sound and that was alarming to me because that made the ground even more dangerous for her. And she cut the corner of the river-bend, while it seemed the appropriate course of action would have been to follow along the river-edge, the long way there
I got there are saw that, indeed, two people were about to drown in the sand liquefied
That's the point I realized I was holding a crow-bar metal rod, with both ends flat, was some type of pry-bar
Gingerly, I crept slowly forward to the drowning man and I extended that pry-bar out to him
I pulled him out and as he escaped he seemed to be some sort of weird cartoonish-character that I cannot articulate at all to describe. Whitish, some detail, vague
The next point I recall seems to be an extension of those same circumstances
People were speaking languages I didn't understand
One guy wanted to use my pry-bar and he offered a handful of wooden-matches in exchange
Moments later I realized he thought he was purchasing that pry-bar from me and I gave back his matches and took back my pry-bar
This all seemed to be happening in the distant future from now
After being awake for a while, the notion of the 2006 "Idiocracy" came to mind and I started thinking that was similar to what I was seeing, in that I was in the distant future
Apparently, pry-bars were a valuable commodity and after I went to get back my pry-bar I had seen a smug look on his face as if he had gotten away with trading something of no value for something of great value.
I got back the pry-bar and that seemed to be about the ending
I found myself walking around in a house were a party seemed to be happening. Something about actors sudden incredulousness, brought there to promote a film they had starred in years earlier, the pattern of the cloth of the suits those two wore reminding me of those free t-shirts in "Idiocracy".
In the context of my recent observations, I have to wonder again if this another "Cosmo" moment. Of which, I will never get confirmation as a result of my post here, because I'm in direct contact with no one, and no one who could confirm.
I'm going to try to binge-watch those remaining episodes tonight before midnight.
From (2022) s01e06
"Book 74"
Jim Matthews: We might be onto something with this radio. We're gonna have to get it higher up, but it could
From 6/12/1981 ( premiere US film "Raiders of the Lost Ark" ) To 5/5/2022 ( Today, Thursday ) is 14937 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 9/25/2006 ( premiere US TV series "Heroes" ) is 14937 days
From 10/24/1989 ( "The Stand" complete edition, by Stephen King ) To 5/5/2022 ( ) is 11881 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 5/14/1998 ( {puppet-in-chief} Bill Clinton: Statement of Administration Policy: H.R. 2431 - Freedom From Religious Persecution Act of 1998 ) is 11881 days
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
Chapter 37
“Now let me give you a hypothetical situation, Mr. Stuart Redman from East Texas. Suppose we have Community A in Boston and Community B in Utica. They are aware of each other, and each community is aware of the conditions in the other community’s camp. Society A is in good shape. They are living on Beacon Hill in the lap of luxury because one of their members just happens to be a Con Ed repairman. This guy knows just enough to get the power plant which serves Beacon Hill running again. It would mostly be a matter of knowing which switches to pull when the plant went into an automatic shutdown. Once it’s running, it’s almost all automated anyhow. The repairman can teach other members of Society A which levers to pull and which gauges to watch. The turbines run on oil, of which there is a glut, because everybody who used to use it is as dead as old Dad’s hatband. So in Boston, the juice is flowing. There’s heat against the cold, light so you can read at night, refrigeration so you can have your Scotch on the rocks like a civilized man. In fact, life is pretty damn near idyllic. No pollution. No drug problem. No race problem. No shortages. No money or barter problem, because all the goods, if not the services, are out on display and there are enough of them to last a radically reduced society for three centuries. Sociologically speaking, such a group would probably become communal in nature. No dictatorship here. The proper breeding ground for dictatorship, conditions of want, need, uncertainty, privation… they simply wouldn’t exist. Boston would probably end up being run by a town meeting form of government again.
“But Community B, up there in Utica. There’s no one to run the power plant. The technicians are all dead. It’s going to take a long time for them to figure out how to make things go again. In the meantime, they’re cold at night (and winter is coming), they’re eating out of cans, they’re miserable. A strongman takes over. They’re glad to have him because they’re confused and cold and sick. Let him make the decisions. And of course he does. He sends someone to Boston with a request. Will they send their pet technician up to Utica to help them get their power plant going again? The alternative is a long and dangerous move south for the winter. So what does Community A do when they get this message?”
“They send the guy?” Stu asked.
“Christ’s testicles, no! He might be held against his will, in fact it would be extremely likely. In the post-flu world, technological know-how is going to replace gold as the most perfect medium of exchange. And in those terms, Society A is rich and Society B is poor. So what does Society B do?”
“I guess they go south,” Stu said, then grinned. “Maybe even to East Texas.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they threaten the Boston people with a nuclear warhead.”
“Right,” Stu said. “They can’t get their power plant going, but they can fire a nuclear missile at Beantown.”
Bateman said, “If it was me, I wouldn’t bother with a missile. I’d just try to figure out how to detach the warhead, then drive it to Boston in a station wagon. Think that would work?”
“Dogged if I know.”
“Even if it didn’t, there are plenty of conventional weapons around. That’s the point. All of that stuff is lying around, waiting to be picked up. And if Communities A and B both have pet technicians, they might work up some kind of rusty nuclear exchange over religion, or territoriality or some paltry ideological difference. Just think, instead of six or seven world nuclear powers, we may end up with sixty or seventy of them right here in the continental United States. If the situation were different, I’m sure that there would be fighting with rocks and spiked clubs. But the fact is, all the old soldiers have faded away and left their playthings behind. It’s a grim thing to be thinking about, especially after so many grim things have already happened… but I’m afraid it’s entirely possible.”
A silence fell between them. Far off they could hear Kojak barking in the woods as the day turned on its noontime axis.
“You know,” Bateman said finally, “I’m fundamentally a cheerful man. Maybe because I have a low threshold of satisfaction. It’s made me greatly disliked in my field. I have my faults; I talk too much, as you’ve heard, and I’m a terrible painter, as you’ve seen, and I used to be terribly unwise with money. I sometimes spent the last three days before payday eating peanut butter sandwiches and I was notorious in Woodsville for opening savings accounts and then closing them out a week later. But I never really let it get me down, Stu. Eccentric but cheerful, that’s me. The only bane of my life has been my dreams. Ever since boyhood I’ve been plagued by amazingly vivid dreams. A lot of them have been nasty. As a youngster it was trolls under bridges that reached up and grabbed my foot or a witch that turned me into a bird… I would open my mouth to scream, and nothing but a string of caws would come out. Do you ever have bad dreams, Stu?”
“Sometimes,” Stu said, thinking of Elder, and how Elder lurched after him in his nightmares, and of the corridors that never ended but only switched back on themselves, lit by cold fluorescents and filled with echoes.
“Then you know. When I was a teenager, I had the regular quota of sexy dreams, both wet and dry, but these were sometimes interspersed with dreams in which the girl I was with would change into a toad, or a snake, or even a decaying corpse. As I grew older I had dreams of failure, dreams of degradation, dreams of suicide, dreams of horrible accidental death. The most recurrent was one where I was slowly being crushed to death under a gas station lift. All simple permutations of the troll-dream, I suppose. I really believe that such dreams are a simple psychological emetic, and the people who have them are more blessed than cursed.”
“If you get rid of it, it doesn’t pile up.”
“Exactly. There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud’s being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more—that dreams are the psyche’s way of taking a good dump every now and then. And that people who don’t dream—or don’t dream in away they can often remember when they wake up—are mentally constipated in some way. After all, the only practical compensation for having a nightmare is waking up and realizing it was all just a dream.”
Stu smiled.
“But lately, I’ve had an extremely bad dream. It recurs, like my dream of being crushed to death under the lift, but it makes that one look like a pussycat in comparison. It’s like no other dream I’ve ever had, but somehow it’s like all of them. As if… as if it were the sum of all bad dreams. And I wake up feeling bad, as if it wasn’t a dream at all, but a vision. I know how crazy that must sound.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a man,” Bateman said quietly. “At least, I think it’s a man. He’s standing on the roof of a high building, or maybe it’s a cliff that he’s on. Whatever it is, it’s so high that it sheers away into mist thousands of feet below. It’s near sunset, but he’s looking the other way, east. Sometimes he seems to be wearing bluejeans and a denim jacket, but more often he’s in a robe with a cowl. I can never see his face, but I can see his eyes. He has red eyes. And I have a feeling that he’s looking for me —and that sooner or later he will find me or I will be forced to go to him… and that will be the death of me. So I try to scream, and…” He trailed off with an embarrassed little shrug.
“That’s when you wake up?”
“Yes.” They watched Kojak come trotting back, and Bateman patted him while Kojak nosed in the aluminum dish and cleaned up the last of the poundcake.
“Well, it’s just a dream, I suppose,” Bateman said. He stood up, wincing as his knees popped. “If I were being psychoanalyzed, I suppose the shrink would say the dream expresses my unconscious fear of some leader or leaders who will start the whole thing going again. Maybe a fear of technology in general. Because I do believe that all the new societies which arise, at least in the Western world, will have technology as their cornerstone. It’s a pity, and it needn’t be, but it will be, because we are hooked. They won’t remember—or won’t choose to remember—the corner we had painted ourselves into. The dirty rivers, the hole in the ozone layer, the atomic bomb, the atmospheric pollution. All they’ll remember is that once upon a time they could keep warm at night without expending much effort to do it. I’m a Luddite on top of my other failings, you see. But this dream… it preys on me, Stu.”
The Mist (2007)
Mrs. Carmody: You! You! Don't you know by now? Don't you know the truth? We are being punished. For what? For going against the will of God! For going against His forbidden rules of old! Walking on the Moon! Yes! Yes!
- posted by me, Kerry Burgess 3:35 PM Pacific-time USA Thursday 05/05/2022
