Black Minidisc

I'm with Baldur, my brother, and someone else at Baldur's place. It's cold and gray outside and we're smoking on the balcony. We go to a communal kitchen lounge on one of the top floors of the large concrete apartment block.

It's crowded. There's a meeting because there was an accident in a stairwell. A girl died and the building is being evacuated. I'm nervous because I was involved with the affair, but no one knows it. The stairwell was still under construction. It was narrow with exposed wood and insulation.

The girl committed suicide or was murdered. On a black minidisc I had recorded a conversation with her. My voice was on it and we said explained the murder. The minidisc was still on the ground in the stairwell. I was worried but I couldn't go back to retrieve it. It would be too suspicious.

We walk outside onto a lawn in front of the block with low hills. It was evening now and the ground was covered with snow and slush. I realized that I was barefoot and my feet were very cold in the slush.

I had to go back inside to get shoes. An older, short, balding man approached me. He used to be a teacher of mine. He hands me the minidisc, says he found it, that I probably need it and should take better care of it. His carefree manner tells me he doesn't know what's on the disc. Relief.
It's late in the night and the streets of Reykjavík are wet. I'm walking through town with Ýr, on the way to an afterparty.

Alex pulls up to us in an old white Volvo and tells me I have to get in. Mom is having serious problems with the credit card. I get in the car and try to remember if we had charged anything recently.

Speakers

I'm in art school again. I have one among many cubicles in a large, white, concrete, industrial space with a high ceiling. There's a dark blue shed in my workspace. Jack Downey walks into my shed and leaves a wooden bowl of cereal on a shelf. He looks at me and I give him an approving gesture that it's okay for him to leave the bowl there. He leaves and I get up to inspect the bowl. The cereal looks funny. It's more of a porridge, lumpy skýr or rice pudding with heaps of brown sugar on top.

I understand that Jack is cleaning out his space to make room for a project, so I wander over to his space to see what he's up to. The narrow hallway through the cubicles opens up to a large space in the center of the room. The oasis is empty except for a lot of wood construction. The workspaces around the perimeter seemed to be remade in plywood. Some areas are elevated a meter off the ground on wooden platforms. It felt a little like an indoor skateboarding park, but everything looked milky and pale under the harsh fluorescent lights.

I'm walking through a tunnel hallway with big advertisements on the walls and a handrail, like in an airport. I stop, put my backpack on a bench, and rummage through it. I´m wearing white jeans and I want to wear this big, white, hooded sweater for the first day of classes in this new school. I thought I'd look pretty good in all white. In the middle of this school that looks more like an airport shopping center, I walk into a store or depot filled with used furniture and stereos. I need good stereo speakers for making electronic music so I head straight to the back to the speaker section. The space gets crowded and frustrating with so many students rushing to get supplies on the first day. I'm holding a pair of small, crappy, old speakers with formica trim.

In front of me is a large wall crammed with piles speakers in all shapes and sizes.

I spot a man working on a large speaker with a screwdriver and get him to help me. I ask him if he knows if they have a certain plug and wire so I can fix these speakers myself. He told me to forget about it, that the speakers in my hands were crap, broken, not worth it. Deep minimal techno is thumping through a large subwoofer in front of us.

I can see the vibrations of the subwoofer. It gets louder and louder as I explain myself to the man, so I'm nearly yelling at the end. I say I've been working with sound and video in Iceland for a number of years now. I would buy crazy expensive studio monitors if I had the money but I don´t, so that's why I wanted to fix these junk ones. I asked him if he could suggest some good speakers at a decent price. He put a pencil behind his ear and told me to follow him. We walk out of the store and through the airport shopping center. He tells me I'm very lucky. I'm under the impression that he's going to give me lovely expensive speakers for free. It must be some special school supply for students that no one else has claimed yet.

He leads to me to a neighborhood where the teachers live. It still looks like an airport mall, but where an airport mall turns into a hotel. Between little clothing boutiques were dark wooden lounges with brown leather chairs and couches arranged around fireplaces.

At the bottom of some stairs he gestures for me to wait with the back of his hand and rushes down a wooden hall into a lady's apartment, his mother or girlfriend. I hear some muffled arguments from them and wonder how long I'll have to wait. I move over to a plastic, seventies waiting area. There are a number of palm plants and an angular couch built into the ground. The couch upholstery is of a very strange material that grabs my attention. It´s gold fur that moves continuously in the wind from an air conditioning vent. It has a lovely space disco look and I´m hypnotized by its moving patterns of gold, black and red.

I'm running past buildings to a field at the edge of campus. As I come to the clearing and run past some trees I'm overwhelmed that everything around me is transforming. Dusk turns into a warm and sunny high noon. Fragments of Roman ruins of brown clay appear dotted throughout the field, scattered arches and columns. Yellow flowers cover the grass.

A large crooked tower with twisting stairs and a castle on top looms in the distance. I'm getting pulled very fast by a cord, waterskiing barefoot over the yellow flowers.

There's a strong smell of chopped grass and weeds. I can feel the wet plants gliding under my feet. It feels warm and smooth and smells sweet in some areas and sour and painful in areas where there are thorns and barbs in the weeds from which the yellow flowers grow. I let go of the rope and rush back to a church and square on the edge of the field. At the edge of the stone church there's a market stand where a girl is selling old hippy clothes. I approach her, feeling confused and uneasy. I excuse myself and tell her I've not been feeling well, that I've had a fever and can't remember much of what I've been doing. I ask her if she had seen anything, if she saw me arrive, or do anything out in the field.

HEROES

I had special powers but I didn't really understand them yet. I was with a guy who also had them. He was more experienced and was trying to protect me. There was a group of rivals with powers too who were hunting us down. They wanted to capture or destroy me. It was a constant chase. We ran into an airport.

I ran through a dark, futuristic tunnel to the departures. The walls were curved and light came through the iron grille floor. There were two girls dancing, kind of walking through the tunnel. One was Japanese with short, black hair, and the other was pale and skinny, with long, curly, brown hair. They looked at me with confused expressions. In a bright hall with the departure gates, I saw some of the enemies dispersed in the crowd, in lines to different flights. I turned to the guy I was with and told him my plan for escape. I knew they would trap us if we got on a plane. We had to sneak outside and fly away. I knew we had the power of flight. I just had to learn it. We ran down stairs and out a glass door to the concrete runway. I ran and took off. It was difficult to maintain speed and altitude. I had to dolphin kick and wave my whole body. I flew over a large forest lush with fall colors.

Our hunters were gaining on us. I knew they were faster and stronger. I lost them at a river bank. We swooped down to rest against a low concrete structure on the side of the river. We spent the night huddled there. I woke up confused on the concrete, under a blue blanket. We had to fly off at once. The hunters had found us. I darted off down the river, zigzagging over the landscape. I found myself in an old white apartment in a little house. There was a new man with us. He was chubby, with short blond hair and a viking tattoo on his arm. He was holding a machine gun, looking out the window for any sign of our followers. Then he turned to me and I knew I had been tricked. There were two of him, then three, then five, replicas or disguises. I was captured. It was like something out of the TV series Heroes.

Beach Security

I was swimming in Newport harbor with two guests, a guy and a girl.

There was a paradise beach I wanted to take them to in the next cove but it was hard to get there.

It was either to swim all the way around the coast or sneak through a military compound and climb over the ridge. We swam ashore at the military compound. It looked deserted.

We ran through the gates in our swimsuits, through forrest paths and log cabins. I was ahead of them, standing by a basketball court when I heard some voices.

My two guests had been caught. I heard guards asking them for security passes.

Rob, Snoop, Fishbowl

I was at Vassar with Rob. We were walking by the woods. He was talking about doing a masters degree in theology.

I was in an old classroom. Snoop Dogg Was in a seat near me. There was a fishbowl on my desk with a flashing blue light in it.

Fritz Shonting

Chris Shonting and I were at a party in an Icelandic summer house. We were joking around in the living room and he gave me a magazine / comic book that he was working on.

There were funny, erotic drawings of cats that looked a lot like Fritz the Cat stuff, and pictures of drunk fashion kids.

Bayreuth

An aerodynamic piece of luggage filled with blankets. It was black and white, moulded plastic or fiberglass, shaped a bit like a clam or killer whale.

I´m somewhere in Eastern Europe on a summer holiday. The grass and trees are green and lush under a pale blue sky. I´m swimming in a warm river. The current was very strong and I'm moving quickly down river.

I´m actually en route to Bayreuth. I'm going to Bayreuth to see a Wagner concert.


The river is a tributary of the Danube. I could see where they joined up ahead. I was worried the water would be cold in the Danube, but then I saw the Danube steaming.

So I´m carried by the fast currents into the warm Danube. Up ahead, the river is combed through a series of parallel tunnels, rock tunnels and narrow gothic arches, low masonry structures built into the rock. Some are incredibly narrow so I swim towards the wider tunnels.

The current speeds up as I´m swept through tunnels. Low orchestral string sounds build up around me. It´s very much like a Herzog´s Aguirre, Der Zorn Gottes.

Höhner

I was in an big empty apartment in an big old house. The ceiling was high and I could see trees through the windows on the back wall.

It was a big wood house with fading white paint on the walls. The apartment seemed empty except for a couch and television. Sössi was there and he wanted to show me something on the TV. It was an advertising for chicken or turkey. The name of the brand was Höhner, which is the name of a German musical instrument manufacturer. There was a big chicken or turkey against a dark blue background or curtain.

It was obviously a luxury chicken product and the advertisement described the hierarchy of chicken products. Over a certain point you were no longer eating chicken or turkey. You were eating Höhner II or Royal Höhner. But there was something amiss with being in the apartment besides it´s run-down condition. There was a creepy man living downstairs who made a lot of noise. Sössi and Tommi actually owned the place and they went downstairs to talk to him. I wanted them to get rid of him, but when they came back they said he was a good guy. They had a few beers with him and they said he wouldn´t be any trouble.

Back To College

Lots of friends and people I know from Iceland, and I, had just enrolled at Vassar. We were sitting in a circle with a bunch of others outside on the grass by a science building. There were lots of yellow dandelions in the grass. Lars was there with me.

We were sitting with a brunette with 70´s wavy hair, somewhat south-american. It kind of hit me where I was and that I was there again with all these people from Iceland. I wanted to show them around like a host. I thought of this modern looking black metal tower with a room with windows that I made in a previous dream but I got confused and didn´t mention it. I got up on my knees, very inspired, and started telling the others in the group what we could do and what was around. I said there were lots of diners on the highway that you could walk to. The food was greasy but great. I think I talked a bit about the Storm King sculpture park.

The science center we were close to looked more like the one from Choate than Vassar. I pointed passed it because there was another science center past some trees, a bigger one.

I said that there was an incredible pool in the basement of that building. We just had to get our Identification cards and passes to go. I knew this pool from previous dreams, the beige labyrinth of tiled hallways and turnstiles that led there, punctuated by the occasional glass-walled lounge area. Lars, the girl, and the others seemed only vaguely interested. I had a pang of feeling trapped, missing my life in Reykjavik. I hoped that the classes were a minimal time commitment so I could work on my projects and other jobs. I wondered if going back to school was a mistake. I thought we were in or close to Chicago and I wondered about how crazy it was that all of us were in the middle of America now.

Then I was in a dorm. I didn´t recognize the dorm. I think it was one that sucked. I was up around the top. I wondered if I was in one of these big tower rooms with attics etc. I was looking for the bathroom. The dorm was old like the Vassar dorms but more run-down and a little narrower. The paint was fading. All the colors were dark wood with a gray film of dust or faded sand. I spotted shiny gold reliefs of human figures on a pair of doors so I found the bathrooms. The bathroom signs were different somehow. Instead of just a man or just a woman they were pairs of man and woman standing on a golden bar. So I walked through one door and there was a tiny hallway with a glass door to a large bathroom. As my eyes rounded the corner of the room I was shocked by seeing a black girl with an afro in gray and beige clothes sitting on the toilet. I saw her reflection first in the distorted glass of an old bathroom door, then I darted a glance in the room. She yelled out and I recoiled. She actually yelled "Don´t Shoot Me!" She was very paranoid. It even looked like she was holding a shotgun beside her on the toilet. She yelled it a few times and I yelled that I wouldn´t shoot her. I said I was sorry but she seemed seriously scared about this shooting business. I really had to pee so I resigned myself to wait out in the hall. I was holding an ugly pair of shoes in my hand, black and green. It took a while but when she walked out she looked really embarrassed and harmless. She actually wasn´t black anymore, and the afro was replaced with auburn hair down to her shoulders. She looked heavy and mousy as she scuttled away. It was probably at this time that I went into a little shop in the dorm. It was a tobacco shop that sold some candy. It was just a bar in a wooden paneled room that felt like a summerhouse. I wanted to buy cigarettes and the man at the little counter was very difficult. He didn´t answer my questions about what normal cigarettes he had. It was like he only had bags of rolling tobacco and big packages of many packs that cost 185, which I assumed to be danish crowns. He didn´t respond to me and just kept handing me things I didn´t want. The light was very yellow in there. Someone came to my aid but got the same treatment. I think this helper just gave me a cigarette and we gave up the headache of trying to buy some from this guy. I walked out of the dorm and I was kind of wandering. I saw another dorm that looked interesting and I walked towards it. I started to get a bit self-conscious and socially scared. I wanted to make a good impression in this new social environment. I saw these mannequin heads hanging here and there with make-up on them. They were kind of done up like 80s cyborg punks or something.

Some of them looked remarkably like Lauren Howell from Vassar and I remembered something about her having an exhibition. I liked these mannequin heads and I walked in. I think I was wearing my new pink and blue party pants. There were a number of people in the common space of the dorm. I heard Icelandic being spoken from a dark couch on my right as I walked in but I didn´t look. A far wall was lined completely with old arcade games. I saw Baldur over there sitting on a pinball machine and I walked up to him. I don´t remember our conversation. I don´t think we said much.

The next thing I remember was running back to where we were sitting before on the grass by the science center with the yellow dandelions. I was really running. It took a while to get there. When I did I started searching for something, for shoes. I looked up and down this path on a slope with yellow flower bushes on one side and grass on the other. I couldn´t find the shoes at all. There was a house over the yellow bushes and I went in. I felt I was welcome there but no one was home. I looked around for shoes then got a little scared. I didn´t want anyone to come home and see me there like some kind of burglar. I found some shoes, put them on and got out of there. It was still a sunny day out.