Hose

6 February 2011

In this dream I had a few hours layover in LA airport and ran into Ben, one of the people from my Antarctica voyage, and since he was setting up an exhibition stand at the airport I offered to help. He was keen but said he wouldn't need me for a couple of hours, so I wandered out to a supermarket and rented a hose for a few hours to kill time. When I say rented a hose, I mean not just in a packet, but one that was connected and running. So I wandered several blocks of LA trailing enormous lengths of garden hose and dribbling water behind me. At one point I came to an alley with some neat little shops, but a local man hurriedly advised me that a squad of the neighborhood authorities (not police but more like community constables with a bent for street cleanliness, grey-clad, almost like a militant wing of rubbish men in a way) were coming and flagrant use of hoses was forbidden. Luckily he had an idea and as the squad arrived on foot he was using my hose to blast off graffiti from a wall. The squad grudgingly acknowledged this and moved on, so in thanks I went to the man's father's shop and bought an interesting boxed set of stylised and abstract toy soldiers made sculpted from stainless steel. Then with time running out before my onward flight, I caught a taxi to the airport – though also bringing the hose with me still as that was due back promptly as well….

The white men

I had many dreams while on board ship in the last month but most were fragmented, too dimly remembered or even dull to make them worthy of blogging. However this one stood out and is pretty bizarre even by my standards.

27 January 2011

The white men

The title doesn't refer to anything racial, instead these white men were a supernatural force dedicated to the colour white. They weren't men in the conventional sense, but (man-sized) smooth and nearly featureless plastic-like figures with a single 'leg', who hover and are invisible – though not truly so, more in that they existed slightly beyond our perception (see epilogue). These white men would commit criminal acts and whatever it took to champion the colour white – I have a vague sense of them doing something macabre in a corner shop earlier in the dream. But primarily in this dream they were out to correct the world of art. In a vast wooden-floored art gallery (the sort of restored old warehouse such as the Britomart district in central Auckland) they roved through after hours splashing white paint over an exhibition of colourful paintings. Then, some weeks later, a new exhibition opened which instead of on canvas, was large square areas of the gallery floor painted white in broad and anarchic brushstrokes – but with a hint of colours at the very edges, as if colour had been covered up and conquered by white. At the opening function, a sit-down dinner, a beautiful woman was sitting at a table and one of the white men hovered up next to her, leans over and in a creepy tone says "I LIKE this."

The white men also could make women swoon with their (detected on a subconscious level) presence and in the latter part of this dream several women had stripped nude and writhed sweatily on their chairs as a white man randomly molested them, then had his way with one of the celebrity attendees, Victoria Beckham.

Epilogue: I'm not sure if this was part of the proper dream or if I had woken a little then fallen back asleep and semi-lucidly introduced this aspect, but some days later there was a pitched battle between the white men and a special squad of the SAS soldiers who had been trained to be able to see them. At some stage one of the white men expressed amazement that they could be seen and one of the SAS soldiers snarled that did they think they hadn't attracted attention? In any case, a further bit of symbolism for you to interpret if you will is that the SAS soldiers (as they do anyway) were clad entirely in black.