Six Sequential Dreams Poem by Alexandre Nodopaka

1. A Work Place

The dream centers about the difficulty in finding a parking spot where I used to work in the early 1960's & subsequently the extreme difficulty in finding my way out of the labyrinthine rooms layout searching for a way out without secondary emergency exits. Somehow I lose my shoes in this familiar office building. Then I cross paths with old workplace acquaintances & am embarrassed because I am barefoot. The surreal part is that once I find my shoes they keep growing tufts of hair. When I finally escape the building I forget where my car is & spend a very long time looking for it. My method is to spiral out from the central building yet I never find my car. The dream is in color with mostly picturesque architectural sightseeing features.

2. A Venice-like San Francisco

The streets of SF are like an industrial city Venice-like. Huge container ships make sharp turns on narrow one-way streets surrounded by tall office buildings. I wonder at the pilots' dexterity with the controls. The dream is in full color, I am mostly a spectator.

3. Art Show Performance

All the scenery is in mostly whites with some black streaks. People of African descent tend their booths while others perform. I amble around with a malfunctioning camera whose circuit boards are exposed. I try to carefully not short circuit by carefully positioning my fingers on the edges of the circuit boards. Dream in color.

4. Bottom of Embarcadero from Coit Tower

I look up a rising cliff & ask a passerby how high it is. He responds 2,000 feet. A very narrow dirt trail zigzags to the top. Numerous pedestrians hug the mountains as they climb up. A few walk down gingerly. I climb the first 50 feet straight up but with great difficulty. Breathless, I feel I can't go up any further & decide to inch back. The trail is so narrow I cannot turn around. I creep backwards then stop to let people coming up pass me. We exchange words in re the difficult path. When I am down I wonder where I am & where the path leads. Some tourists tell me it's so so & I respond oh yes. I was up there before but never knew what was down from where I am now. The dream is in full color.

5. Les Halles de San Francisco

I levitate around the wharves of San Francisco in a place similar to Les Halles de Paris. I photograph scenery & overhear 2 Frenchmen talking in French but they assume I cannot hear them when one of them turns to me asking where he can buy a lot of fish. I ask him does he mean in kilograms or tons. He laughs at my question. They sit down in a bistro & I levitate away to bring them photos of where they can obtain a lot of fish at the fisherman wharf. The dream is in sepia tone color.

6. Inside the Bowels of Limbo

I find myself at the edge of a swampy pond. All the surrounding earth is whitish. It is slush with corrugated metal structures on the right side of the pond. I am on slippery grounds trying to hang on by grasping small clumpy white mounds but they slowly give way & separate in creeping jerking steps dragging me down towards the slush threatening to swallow me.

The sludge is a dangerously thick acid soup rhythmically sloshing against the shore near the bottom of my feet. From the opposite end there's a chute from where the goop flows through man-size huge tubular structures. Shouting for help I hang on precariously but the noise surrounding me muffles all sounds from being heard. The mass of small moguls I cling to creep down at a snail's pace with me barely hanging on.

A man appears within my sight & hearing distance but turns his back on me trying to save himself. I finally crawl back to safety and slosh towards the corrugated metal outbuildings searching for help but the shacks are empty.

The height of the surrounding whitish mountains are impassable except by crossing the slush pond at whose opposite end I see an entrance with manned trucks.

The dream is mostly in shades of white colors with dark shadow accents. The objects in the dream are very tactile. I sense the thick lumpy texture under my feet & fingers.