The Dream Projection Machine

Once upon a time, (eight years ago), there was a young man (Amos Rosethunkle, Ph.D.), in a faraway land, (very-west-Canada, which is, well, far enough from my home), who woke up and remembered that he was lonely.

He went to his yellow and red dotted kitchen and opened his soft green cabinet, the one where he kept his jasmine tea. He took the last teabag from the robin's egg blue tin and made tea. When his kettle (the littlest of his eleven kettles) was whistling Dixie (for each kettle had her own song), Amos remembered something else.

Amos remembered that he forgot his last-night's dream. And he was sad, for he did remember it was a very beguiling dream which had made him feel less lonely.

Now, if it had been you or me, we would have just sighed and got our galoshes on (it was raining that cold morning) and gone to work. But Amos was an inventor.

He went to his inventing office on the other side of town and read from some scientific journals, calculated some amazing numbers, and drew some blueprints.  It was to be his greatest invention, the dream projection machine.  Then he could record his dreams and watch them on his television with buttered popcorn.

Amos locked his office at the end of his day's work and went home. He had dinner by himself: a half-loaf of caraway bread; a half-carafe of Merlot wine; a half-hen, roasted; with a half-lettuce salad. He finished his repast with half of a small, lemon tart and hot water (for he had forgotten to buy more tea bags that day, being so preoccupied with noodling and conniving about his new invention).

He read from his Scrabble Dictionary and fell asleep in his favorite armchair, mouthing the two letter word for his favorite irrational number.

On waking the next morning, Amos unremembered his dream. It was that same entrancing dream he had had the night before.  He was now doubly determined to complete his visible light spectrum dream mechanical invention.

For many weeks he labored on paper and tinkered with lead solder and inverse wires and carbon sticks and thorium derived alloys and tubes from discarded, old television sets and South African mined jewels. And each night his wonderful dream repeated; and each morning the dream was devilishly forgotten, just out of memories' reach.

But as the weeks turned into seasons, Amos had to admit defeat. A machine which could record-your-dreams-so-you-could-view-them-the-next-day was beyond his ability to invent, if anyone could.

But his nightly dream teased and would not quit. He tried hypnosis to remember it and many other remedies from odd books. None worked.

Then one foggy, summer morning, Amos read on the back of his breakfast cereal box of another scientist who was had successfully constructed a visible light spectrum dream mechanical device, Doctor Rapunzel Quispelthorm.

He packed up his carpetbag and drove entirely across the continent to Norfolk, a quiet town in north Connecticut, where Dr. Quispelthorm lived and worked.

When she answered her doorbell, (which chimed Dixie), a sad Ms. Quispelthorm informed Amos that the young, eager writer had made a mistake and would be printing a retraction and apology in the next quarterly issue of The Journal of Scientific Practicums. It turned out that she did not actually complete her invention of a dreamatic recording device but had only been working on it and now had come to a dead end.

As she was slowly closing the door, Amos suggested that they compare their failed inventions to see if the flaws in each could be fixed by the other.

This they did. Amos and Rapunzel worked excitedly and very happily at it for months. All the while, Amos's dream continued each night. Rapunzel admitted that she too was haunted by a similar unremembered dream that she longed to remember each morning.

Their thinkings seemed to fit like jigsaw puzzle pieces and they were fixing each other's errors week after week.

But alas, they had to give up when one cloudy day, their contraption smoked and sputtered and fizzled.  It had done this before but somehow they both knew this was it.

Amos was getting his carpetbags ready to go home when he decided to ask Rapunzel to come with him to the restaurant down the road where they could say goodbye and lick their wounds.

At the restaurant, Amos looked across the candle lit table and noticed Rapunzel's eyes. He had those eyes somewhere before. "Where was it," he thought? He had been too involved with the inventing of the visible light spectrum dream mechanism to have looked into them before now.

"Where was it," Amos wondered?

He remembered. It was in his dream.

And of course, across the table Rapunzel was having the same thoughts.

The Great Project of the Summer of 2010





















He worked for 37 days cleaning and clearing his New York apartment.

The Salvation Army made six trips with their van to pick up his donated items. He doubled the local library's books on their shelves with his donations. He gave away watermellon peelers and automatic cat combers to friends and aunts. He sold his 2,800 falsetto records on ebay. He packaged random gifts to random people in the phone book and sent them 322 parcels with postage due.

Finally, there was a space of floor for C. to rest his tired body on. He had a dream that night lying on the floor and NOT several piles of magazines. He dreamt he found his bed.

Two more weeks went by as C. was still making good progress toward finding his bed and cleaning out his clutters. At two AM on a hot Wednesday, he found an old newspaper page under a football and cereal bowl in his kitchen. Had he had forgotten about it, He didn't remember seeing it. Perhaps a friend had left it as a joke and never told him. It read. . .

So, you live in a cramped cluttered apartment in Manhattan or Brooklyn. You have a super cheap, rent controlled lease and can't afford to move. We have your solution! Call Arrowroot Footers. For a small fee, we will expand the square feet of your apartment so you won't have to move. Call (the number was given here) without delay.

If he had been able to find the coffee maker and was less groggy, if it had been a less confusing hour of the day, he wouldn't have dialed. But it wasn't.

A gruff, smoker's voice answered the phone. It seemed C. had woken the guy in this godless hour. "Hello, hello. Who's there?"

(There's more, but you'll have to ask me.)

The Blind Musician and the Elephant (My Retelling of a Classic Tale)

Interviewer, "What is the strangest question you have ever been asked?"
Jon Scieszka, children's book author, "A little guy sitting in the front row at a school I visited asked me where I get my shoes. At first I thought he was probably from another planet or something. Then I realized that from where he was sitting, my shoes were about all he could see of the presentation."
- Author Talk, edited by Leonard S. Marcus



Before the season of rains that year, an elephant wandered into a small village near Takh in Kashmir where lived eight blind men. A young boy ran about shouting, "Elephant! An elephant is come to our village!"

The blind men rushed and stumbled out of their huts like night bats streaming sightless from a cave. For none of them had never met an elephant before, and they wondered what it was.

The elephant made his way along their street to the watering hole they kept for their sheep and goats. Here, under the leafy trees, he stopped to take a long drink and hide from the unkind, afternoon sun.

The men each approached the resting giant.

"Ah! The great beast of our storyteller's tales," thought the first one. He grabbed hold of the beast's tail, thought a moment, then declared, "An elephant is quite a rope."

The second, an old man, put his hands on the creature's side and pushed. "An elephant is exactly a rubber wall. I had wondered all my life; finally I know."

Another ran his hands around the elephant's leg like a potter, "He is an unusual animal, akin to tree trunks."

The youngest of the group came next and touched the the elephant's tusk and its point. He said, "No, you are all wrong. I don't know where you get your ideas from, elephants are like spears."

The fifth, a scholar of sorts, grabbed the wet trunk which wiggled in his hands. He said, "It is obvious that the elephant beast is a nonvenomous snake, a thick one, most likely in close relation to the genus Python."

The sixth man heard all the different opinions and wanted to judge for himself. He went up to the elephant's mouth and felt the animal's large wet tongue. "You are all wrong, an elephant is some sort of large, wet fruit. I have a cold today so I can't smell which one, perhaps a seedless watermelon?"

The seventh man walked up to the elephant and ran his palms along the it's ear. "This is not a beast at all, nor a fruit, nor any of that nonsense. It is a large leafed, dusty plant. Someone should water it."

The last blind man was a musician, he went up to the elephant and by chance touched the length of the elephant's tusk. He strummed his fingers on it. "Ah, this I am sure of," he said to the others, "An elephant is a piano. But it must be broken because no sound comes out when I play it's worn, ivory keys."

"How sad," he added, "I heard a trumpet just a few minutes ago. It would have been fun to play along with the trumpeter on this piano. He's put me in the mood for a bit of jazz."