Dream Logic

At the apartment (we had nicknamed it Chaos Central and I have difficulty thinking of it as anything else) I was strangely alone. Usually the place was jumping, someone was always there. There were three of us on the lease, but the usual occupancy was closer to 12 to 15 people crashing on couches, floors, or sharing beds. The gender ratio was about 40/60 with the higher percentage being female, so a warm bed was almost always guaranteed. Kerry, Nick, and I were the lease signatories, and anyone else who stayed kicked in for rent and groceries. With a monthly rent of only $250, all inclusive it was probably the cheapest place I ever lived. Of course minimum wage was $4.75 then, but even so, divided 15 ways it was pretty doable.

Kerry, as the only female leaseholder, got her own bedroom. Nick and I shared, but that had only become a problem since he’d started dating Mary. Even so we slept on opposite shifts so the two of them making loud monkey noises never bothered me much, and we were always pretty much a clothing optional place, which meant an attractive woman sharing my bedroom if not my bed was not something I was going to complain about.

It was really odd to be alone here though.

So how, my rattled brain asked, are we going to figure out who the fuck David Warren Green is?

I know about as much about hacking as I do about Siberian ice dancing, so that was a sort of dead end road for me. Google was still a long ways off, so I fired up Netscape (this was before they sold out to AOL) and brought up Lycos. A half hour later and none the wiser, I decided to crash.

When I was in my teens I spent a bit of time researching the occult and mysticism. Nothing serious, mind you, but I dabbled. I had the cheap mass market paperback Necronomicon, LaVey’s Satanic Bible, Crowley’s Book of the Law, and a slew of New Age crystal waving bullshit texts. I also had a copy of Castenada’s Teachings Of Don Juan. One of the things in the “Yaqui” way that the latter book covered was lucid dreaming, and being the thing least likely to damn my soul to hell out of all the shit that I was reading (I was still in the process of recovering from a serious case of Catholicism at the time), I decided to give it a shot. I actually got pretty damn good at it, finding I was able to control the direction of my dreams, and giving me an insight into dream logic (which, much like ‘military intelligence’ is a distinct contradiction in terms).

I was around 18 when I stopped remembering my dreams. The only way I know that I still have them is that often I’ll wake up in the middle of one. What I do remember is usually jumbled.

I bring all this up because that night I dreamt. And with that dream came some revelation. It’s safe to assume that throughout this account that I had just gotten high at any point unless otherwise specified, by the way. Aside from the usual surreal imagery that accompanies dreams while high or on some sort of chemicals (you know… anthropomorphic ferrets doing the tango with cyborg chimpanzees, sex with my ex transforming mid thrust into BigWig) I eventually found myself walking along Louisa St., heading toward the Hive. Suddenly in front of me was Shakey Jake wearing what can only be described as a sexy White Rabbit costume, which in turn was even more freaky than the rabbit thing from Donnie Darko. He was hopping around the corner onto Meyran. This was a dream. I’d just had an encounter with Shakey Jake, or something that looked and acted almost exactly like him, and I was currently researching something called Rabbits. So I followed the White Rabbit down the hole. Or in this case on a merry chase across the surface streets of Oakland.

Of course we ended up at the Hive. I stood and watched as the prior day’s scene played out in front of me. Handjob tacking up his collage, going to the basement, screaming. Watching myself burst into the men’s. The paramedics showing up. One of them taking his wallet.

That’s when I saw his VA card. They say you can’t read in dreams, but I know that’s bullshit. Because Handjob’s VA card identified him as none other than David Warren Green.

And that’s when I woke up to a literal handjob.