Tornados and Dreams

Haiku for Cell Animation

Tornado
bring the trike downstairs
venture outside
to listen for trains

My dad and I
Looking forward to
our own destruction
in the storm clouds

March 21, 1987

A Dream

Heaps of garbage and junk my partner picks up a flat basket. A shot is fired from within this war zone. I run safe outside the door. The soldier finds me later in the complex. He is going to kill me. I tell him that I could find the basket, but I can't find it. Lisa makes some really good food for him and his friend. He turns out to be a prince. He talks to one of my important friends (the belly dancer? Halle?) While I chat to the poor soldier about what is happening.

This place is all corridors which have multiple levels, elevators which will take you not only vertically but horizontally. The lower levels are very open - sometimes the ceiling is 3-4 levels up, as you get higher, the ceiling gets lower. The doors open up onto different environments: sometimes outdoors, sometimes shell-shocked neighborhoods or gyms or locker rooms, wherever.

There is this house, all glass front. Someone is telling me about the family in it. The mother comes home from work. The children pour out of the wood work - about 30 kids or so. I'm told she is kind of a saint. I have them over for dinner at my place - a boiler room type of place within the complex.

While we are eating, discussing the prince soldier, the ceiling begins to drip tofu-custard-water. Cris and I are making love on a dirt floor in my room. The ceiling drips on my knee. I grab a towel as the ceiling drips over my legs. The family is trying to help. The saint woman funnels the goop into a machine which was present and I didn't know the purpose of. It moves the stuff all over and if you mix in tahini, it makes a good dish - umm - weird...

At the movies, I take the elevator down to the Hobbit. The guy who dropped out of school is the elevator man. He gives me the Pepsi challenge on the way down. It is a trick. There is no Pepsi, only Coke. Coke products litter the floor of the elevator which is now moving sideways. We laugh. I ask him something. He starts talking about hanging out. I ditch him when the elevator door opens.

I am sure everyone has strange dreams that mean nothing. I have never been one to analyze my dreams, merely being amazed or terrified by them. I do not know why I am recording dreams. They don't make any sense to me. 

The haiku, on the other hand, is significant. I was making a cell animation. Drawing each cell with India ink. The 60 second animation was about tornadoes when I was a child. I remember when there was a tornado siren, my siblings and I would pile downstairs with our things. We had a large basement. We brought our trikes in and roller skates. We drew chalk traffic lines on the red concrete floor, so we would not crash into each other, as long as we obeyed the rules of the road.

If dad was home, he took me outside. I remember standing beside him. He was fearless. We looked to the West. He described what the clouds would look like, "The sky will turn green." He described what we would hear, "Tornadoes sound like trains, listen." 

I am convinced that my father was an Aspergian, like me. He died several years ago, so I can't be sure, only conjecture. He was a doctor. He had special interests: calculus, geology, photography, woodworking. He relied on my mother to tell him when it was time to leave a social function. He didn't have a lot of friends, the men he did associate with were husbands of my mother's friends, or they were people that he had went to school with at the U of MN. He was intensly interested in family. He wanted to keep us close. We were very loved, but I am not sure he ever told us.