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I was outraged seeing a resident of the old building with a child in her lap steering in the tight underground parking lot, but what the hell, I thought, a few more robo-signatures or so and any liability issues are no longer my concern. But I suppose the practice is unavoidable, as I indulged my son during a dream last night with a drive down the freeway in a small open-top coupe. With him behind the wheel like that, we missed our intended exit and went with the next, which took us into unfamiliar rugged territory. Somehow the vehicle managed to climb the first of a few steps from there on, but the rest were impassable, and going back the way we came seemed out of the question, so we continued on foot. The ground was awkwardly uneven, and each platform was separated by an opening to a precarious drop below. (It was only just to another landing, but I didn’t trust him to stay put.) Xavier slipped between such a crack but I got him by the right sleeve. His shirt slipped away, but I took hold of his arm and pulled him up to safety. Woke up and he was passed out on his back beside me.

Well into my 17th waking hour now, but enough of it remains for me to recall a television program being recorded before us among a live studio audience—or was it a new kind of club holding a Scrabble competition? At the bar, I informed my young family, were actors George Wendt (who I saw the other night without all the weight in My Bodyguard) and Rhea Perlman, reunited in Easter Egg roles. The favorites would lose with words ruled ineligible to a bespectacled girl revealed as the crowd dispersed. I lost track of 老婆 after she, in a hooded coat, took off with the boys, and fell in with others who spilled onto the night street. An Echo and the Bunnymen song was playing, but I’m not sure whether it was “Lips Like Sugar” or “Bring on the Dancing Horses”; I heard that Doors remake last week on First Wave in this, my last month with XM Radio. But like far too much Supertramp on The Sound LA, I can’t stand Sting outside the Police.

Jumped up surprisingly sprightly for my recent lethargy when a crash woke me at 4am. First thing I checked was the crib, of course, but the sound was more like broken glass, which led me to one of the small windows above us. It’s the second to have cracked, from who knows what, the house settling (or the builders themselves, for cheap materials), space/time anomaly, or as 老婆 was speculating as I fell back to sleep, pressure from the temperature changes. It’s hard to tell, isn’t it, dream from reality, but the immediate daylight was a giveaway, not to mention the ninja peering inside. And as ill-advised as it might’ve been in the one but not the other, I head-butted him through the dangerous pane.

And as such, I could manipulate the wind beneath me precisely enough (however complicated the mathematics, I reasoned; after all, I was a god) to sustain my flight across the country. My traveling companion, alas, was not one of several comely candidates for oracle at my shrine, but old co-worker Jackson Chandler. We were amidst some discussion when I realized we had wandered into a cave lined with ancient pillars that had long existed unbeknownst to modern man. A change of perspective made me yet another person, and the now three of us stopped our horizontal movement to elevate through an opening above. Behind us, what originally appeared to be a giant statue of a camel broke from the wall and lifted off its brontosaurus neck to reveal several more of its kind, covered with leech-like parasites. [Bafflingly well-received White on Rice mentioned the dinosaur in a rather mean scene about an unusually tall Japanese woman.]

You’d expect it to happen more often, but it doesn’t: I followed up last night’s live-from-New York episode of 30 Rock—and not the awful second installment of the BBC’s new Sherlock that ended my evening… 2009, and cultural awareness hasn’t improved since The Talons of Weng-Chiang—with a dream featuring the cast of characters, myself of course among them. The details are so many tears in the rain, but I seem to recall being a lowly staff writer seeking Liz Lemon for recognition or otherwise and mistaking Alec Baldwin’s character’s last name as Geiss (his deceased mentor) at first before eventually addressing him as Mr. Donaghy. It was one of those typical frustrating affairs where I’d try and find someone who just refuses to be found, or get somewhere and even backtracking won’t return me to the same place. Either way, nothing nearly as good as Internet favorite-for-Superman role Jon Hamm’s “Please, I’m so tired!” line:

Been a while since I’ve been able to transcribe my dreams, but I blame that on the boy (which like Homer, there’ll probably be more of), tending to him first thing in the morning replaces any recall of them with the immediate need to secure my motor skills and consciousness. So it was a struggle, but I managed to rescue a crucial detail. I was on a football field, geared up as an actual team member of the Chicago Bears, or another northern club such as Green Bay, and as you might expect from my involvement, our performance was less than satisfying. So poor was it, in fact, that the crowds had long begun emptying the stands. I was told they were leaving to pursue more interesting, new sports. And as it were, in the first hall of the gymnasium next to the stadium plenty of our former fans had gathered around a fence inside which eight young men paired off were preparing for their upcoming match. I’d move on before they started, but it involved solid paddles and extremely bouncy balls that traveled the length of the arena, and then some. The next game was already in progress, a volleyball knock-off with a position that seemed to be filled by ex-defensive linemen who literally sat in the middle of the court and surprisingly contributed to moving the beach ball to the other side. There in the back was a line of folks playing table tennis but off the floor, which I told myself was too easy a one. My imagination was reaching.

Watched Legion yesterday, and because I’ve been catching up on Supernatural (and read Grant Morrison’s JLA), the whole vampirization—Google it, you can’t make up words anymore—of angels wasn’t anything new, but I did have another dream I had been a recurring cast member on the old Angel TV show somewhere around the third season. Of that I was strangely quite sure. Props to Boreanaz for being the only Whedon alumnus to land a steady job, but come on, the guy cheated on her with her. Charisma Carpenter, who unfortunately hasn’t been successful enough for TMZ to care, and I were searching for evidence to nail a child-killer and thought it might be in a lint filter-like compartment behind a sewer grating. We dug through the contents, including a discarded popcorn bag, but couldn’t find an incriminating tooth among all the undercooked kernels.

I’ve dreamed about them before, but this time I didn’t make it to any actual music. Or create any of my own. The daytime outdoor concert was just starting and presumably the band was prepping their appearance from behind a large white curtain on the stage. Drumming began as shadowy images were projected onto it, reminiscent of the puppetry in that Gong Li movie I stayed up late to get through a few weeks ago, and the sticks formed to spell out their name. The spiraling “E” in the center they couldn’t get right so it was obviously animated from a film; in fact, a montage of archival footage featuring each member performing took over the light show. Then the crowd’s attention was turned to a scene in the quiet countryside, where someone was having a spoken argument with his mother but to the same back-and-forth lyrics from “Uncontrollable Urge”.

While I’m doing the Devo, I might as well look up an old track that’s been at the back of my mind—in a box in the bottom of my storage, same difference—Mecha-Mania Boy, which, as I recall, came only on a nondescript 45 from Sound Warehouse. Back then the only repositories of subculture were those we carried around in our heads and compared only with kindred fans at record conventions, so coming across an off-album B-side was like discovering alternate-universe baseball cards. But even today there’s disagreement over whether the lyrics say “now he wants to know your little mistakes” (by far the more profligated version, copied and pasted complete with spelling error, and laughably transcribed) and “now he wants to know your unit’s name.” I liked it because it sounded like every other song on Freedom of Choice, yet maintained their trademark postmodern sensibility for that transition to New Traditionalists.

Was being chased by some thugs, so I got into a car with a sharp-dressed lady offering a ride. This was apparently an episode of Doctor Who I had only read about online, and the driver was a notorious character by the name of Mrs. Foster. The black car was so small (not too unusual, however, for England), I couldn’t fit into the passenger seat completely and hung out the side as she spun through traffic, literally drifting backwards while being pursued. We stopped at a small office where she took me inside to reveal her secret: there were many different “versions” of her, clones, all at different ages. One was an old woman scientist who had developed the technology, another was a mother carrying a child for an infertile couple. This was how they justified their mischief. Just then a car arrived bringing bad news, in the form of two men whom I tried to keep out by closing a folding curtain the kind that separate banquet halls in hotels. One spoke with a Gaelic accent I could barely understand and insisted on seeing Mrs. Foster. He towered over me by at least a foot but I resisted and asked if he was a policeman; the other said no, but they were on their way. In the lobby behind them sat the rest of their party, and among them was Dr. Gregory House, to whom I pleaded—what’s your take on the moral outcome here? It was the right strategy, because he began a flashback to a case with an unhappy ending for the parents.

Been a whole day now, but here’s what I remember: 老婆 watched me wake up laughing to a Colbert Report skit which introduced another of his aliases: Cullbucks, or Cullbux, owner of the network. (Must’ve mistaken the definition of the word, which happens a lot.) He and Will Ferrell confronted him in a scene where he played both roles like Shatner’s body double for comedic effect. Cullbucks identified his arch-nemesis as “Brain Gap”; Ferrell’s face was painted with black and white stripes like a one of those Star Trek aliens, and Colbert revealed, turning his head so the other side became visible, that the lines had run to half his face, though in a perpendicular direction. The audience ate it up.