Last night I dreamt of a mountain camp that I was attending, almost like a retreat participate. We were living in shared quarters, participated in group activities, shared meals, the works. As I was approaching the camp I found myself experiencing the ride like a child experiences the drive to a family vacation destination— watching out the window with a crystal clear sense of observation, watching so intently like the newness of what I was witnessing would last forever. In this case, it was a winding road through the valley, and the Appalachian Mountains were coated with a lushness of evergreen pines and cedars, deep and beautiful shades of dark green which gave the mountains a flowing hair like quality, hair that was wind blown and gorgeous.
I was riding on this approach in the desired means of travel— a scooter like mini bike. The two-stroke engine pierced the forest’s quietness with each turn of the throttle and I raced past picnic areas, and vacationing campers. On this road there was designated gas fill ups for these scooters; think an old well, but instead of a handle and pump, it was an old folksy gas fill up. I stopped there, and had a memory in the dream of “Oh yeah, I forgot they had these gas pumps up and down this road.”
When I got back to camp, people were sitting around a large well designed modern house. There was a cast of characters, artist types young and old, huddled around doing some group activity. I felt a bit alienated from them, which is a typical feeling in my waking life. Pretty soon the group got wind that one of the favorite participants of the camp was leaving, or had already gone, and he left behind a present. It was a large landscape painting where, as the note left instructed us to each paint a tree to construct a forest. Interesting, the first two painters paints a topiary ball tree, though it didn’t extend into the atmosphere. It sat like a giant globe on the ground, which hedges surrounding the globe in which one couldn’t see the globe meet the ground. As the painting got around to me I really wanted to do something exciting. I was steadfast in my research of finding the oddest looking trees in the world on a google search in the iPad. I only found cosmos pictures, pinks and greens, high in the night sky and the elusive tree I sought was not available. So then, I started to paint, and the most unusual light green shapes started to flow from my brush, Dali-like, but solid, digital, and futuristic.
At that point, I remembered my friend Ken came to visit. He was making small talk with some other participants and he decided to leave a cluster of records in a strange plastic custom made record carrying case. I suddenly remembered that I needed to return these records to him and I asked the others if they had seen them. An older man, hippy-like whom dressed much younger and cooler than his age, a California burn out with a hair of wisdom took me upstairs where he thinks he saw the records. “I now they’re here somewhere.” As he opened and flipped through a catalogue of interesting items, he finally found the records; in a mop bucket. The custom case was gone which seemed to be more important than the records to me— because of its uniqueness. I examined the records in the bucket and at the bottom there was an inch or two of water. The water had a strange characteristic— it was magic, extremely wet, and almost had a mind of its own, twisting and moving in an unnatural way, and shining the records to the point where they became mirror like, a la a CD. There was no apparent damage done to the records, but still the custom case was missing.