Dream Log: A Piece of Urban Real Estate, Status Uncertain

I dreamed that I and a few other poor people were living in abandoned cars parked on a rectangular patch which was about fifty yards wide and jutted out about twenty yards, like a cliff, from the middle of the downtown of a city with many tall buildings. One of the fifty-yard-long sides of the area was level with the developed city around it; off of the other three sides, there was a fifty-foot drop to another relatively-flat area covered with limited-access roads.

At the beginning of the dream there were three abandoned vehicles on this patch of ground, and five of us living in them. But more people kept moving in, some bringing vehicles or tents with them.

It was entirely unclear how much the ground we were living on was man-made and built up from the lower level, and how much had been there, with the upper level of ground, before humans built anything there. The mix of concrete and earth, and of jumbles of pipes and trees sticking out from the concrete and earth, made it very hard to tell which was more primary, and which had been added on.

At some point it started to seem to me like a good idea to encourage the homeless people who were passing through to stay and to build up actual homes here, and to invite other people to do the same. There was a vague feeling that developers were going to come and claim the -- the land? the building? whatever it was -- and have us all kicked out. They hadn't tried to do that so far, but it seemed to me that the more of us there were, and the more we had done to make the place a real home, the harder it would be to remove us, when and if someone tried.

Someone donated some solar panels and batteries to us, and soon that led to our having electrical heat on cold nights, and cold for storing food, and heat for cooking it without having to build a campfire. Some lawyers started working building a case for our right to stay, when and if someone challenged that right. We started to hold free classes on engineering, architecture and law, and used what we learned in those classes to strengthen our hold on the area, physically and legally.

Television news crews stopped in now and then to film and to talk to us. Republicans sometimes yelled and threw rocks or beer cans at us out of the windows of their trucks as they drove past on the street adjacent to and level with us. Democrats walked past and were much friendlier. Often they waved and flashed peace signs or held up clenched fists. Sometimes they stopped to talk.

No one was charged any money to stay there as long as they wanted, or to eat some of our food, or to take something else if they needed or wanted it: clothes, or books, or a phone, or what have you. It got to the point where the thing which most frequently made people want to move on was overcrowding. Ordinarily, I'm one of the first to feel crowded. But in this place, my fascination with everything that was going on outweighed my discomfort over the crowding.

A lot of what was going on was high-level education. It had started out with engineering, architecture, law and medicine, for purposes of the self-preservation of the community, and although classes quickly branched out into many other subjects, those four areas remained prominent among the things we taught. It had started out with people coming and helping us, but soon we were going out into the city to help people install solar power or repair their dwellings, or to represent them in court, or to check on their physical health, or to volunteer in other ways.

One area of the law in which we soon became well-known was advocating in favor of the legalization of marijuana. Some of the people who lived with us began to complain about the pot smoke, and so we agreed to smoke pot only in one designated area, which was designed to ventilate and blow the smoke away from the rest of the community, puffing merrily out through a smokestack and carried by the prevailing winds safely away from those who chose not to partake. If you wanted to get high, and you went to the designated smoking area, at some times it wasn't necessary to puff on anything, because enough people were in there going to town on bongs and joints, and the smoke was so thick, that if you just stood or sat there for a few minutes, you'd definitely get high.

Vegans were very prominent in our community. Some of them, unfortunately, were intolerant in their rhetoric about non-vegans. It was very tiresome. On the other hand, they made vegan food which, everyone agreed, was amazingly delicious.

I had begun there as a homeless person who'd crawled into an abandoned car to try to keep from freezing to death. But soon -- despite the overcrowding, which was definitely an issue for me -- it became the best home I had ever had.

And then I woke up.

Dream Log: Getting High With Mel Brooks

A personal note before I begin: it's been decades since I smoked pot. (And I've never met Mel Brooks.) (And I have no idea whether Mel Brooks has ever smoked pot.) (And movie stars again.) I think pot should be legalized, not just decriminalized and not just legalized for medical use, but completely legalized. Not because I think that pot is so great, but because I think that putting someone in prison for using drugs is much worse than drug use. I know, allegedly these days from the perspective of law enforcement it's less about the user than about the big dealers. Allegedly. We're all supposed to be very, very afraid of the Mexican cartels. But that just makes drug prohibition even more of a crock. If governments actually wanted to hurt big drug dealers, the worst thing they could do to them is make drug use legal. That would take all of the money out of it. It costs about as much to grow a pound of pot as it costs to grow a pound of tomatoes. The rest of the money in the weed business makes dealers and crooked cops rich, and buys a lot of guns for both sides and gets a lot of people killed.

And everybody knows all of this. Legalize it.

Alright. And now with the actual dream log:

I dreamed that I was being held prisoner with several other people in an old, small, 2-story 1-family house by gangsters from eastern Europe. We were being forced to work for them, operating a furnace which was melting down gold and casting it into large ingots. The ingots must have weighed 50 or 75 lbs or so each. They were far from uniform in size or shape. They all came from the same mold, but the mold wasn't filled to the same point every time.

We decided that we had to break out of there -- so we did. The escaping was such a short and simple process that it seemed to be over all at once. We took the gangsters' revolvers, called the cops and the journalists and left the house.

A lone police cruiser pulled up to the house as we ex-prisoners were leaving. I said to the others that I was suspicious of these two cops: they might be working for the gangsters, and intending to immediately enslave us again. I called out to them that we had called the cops and the news and told them everything. Upon hearing this, they did exactly what I would've expected cops who were working for the gangsters to do in that situation: they didn't rush to our aid, they didn't rush to apprehend the gangsters in the house. They just sat there, listening to the sirens of other police cars getting closer.

But it seemed that the sirens weren't coming fast enough, so we had to run for it. We hid out in an abandoned building next to a truck stop. The 18-wheelers on the highway went by with that low-pitched zing that big trucks make at high speed. We had the gangsters' revolvers in case we had to defend ourselves, but fortunately it didn't come to that, and we were freed.

I didn't see what happened to the gangsters or to the cops who were working for them. The next thing I knew, we 4 or 5 former captives, plus some people we knew, were in the living room of a house that some people would call cozy and lived-in and other people would call a dump, splitting up a big bag of very powerful pot, a couple of pounds of it, and rolling up some joints to celebrate our freedom. Mel Brooks dropped by, among other well-wishers, and he and I shared a big doobie and talked about show-business stereotypes of Eastern European gangsters: a character in an action-adventure TV show or movie just mentions "----- gangsters" or "the ----- mafia," fill in the blank with an Eastern-European adjective: "Russian" or "Ukrainian" or "Armenian" or "Albanian" -- and everybody's blood is supposed to go cold, as if these are super-gangsters, new and terrifying genetically-modified gangsters which make mere Italian or Irish gangsters from traditional fictional crime stories seem like a Swedish massage. Mel pointed out that in a way, this was insulting both to Eastern Europeans, and also to Italians and Irish, as if they were wimps. I told Mel I couldn't agree more.

The weed was very powerful. I was hazy on where we had gotten the weed, whether we had taken it from the genetically-modified Eastern European super-gangsters, or if we had obtained it in some other way. Very soon I had gotten about as high as I was going to get, and from there on I just got more fucked-up, which made me sad.

Which, in real life, is one of the reason I haven't smoked weed in decades, and why I don't drink a lot any more either.

Legalize Pot, And All Other Drugs Too

Whom would it hurt? Drug dealers, who make thousands of percent profit on their merchandise; their lawyers; the prison industry; and the DEA. They'd all be forced to find careers not based on sheer insanity. One very dangerous recreational drug, alcohol, is legal for adults to consume in the US except for a few counties here and there who are as backwards in their laws about alcohol as the US is in its laws about drugs generally. For the most part the rest of the country realizes that Prohibition was a disaster except for crooks and cops. Many still don't grasp that prohibition of other drugs is no different. Many seemingly don't want to even hear about things such as that the rate of marijuana use in the Netherlands, where it's legal and about as easily obtainable as alcohol in the US, is much lower than in the US, or to think about things such as the claim by a Dutch politician: "We have succeeded in making pot boring." (Those stoned people you see stumbling around downtown Amsterdam? Most of them are American tourists.)

None of what I'm saying is rocket science and none of it is new. If sensible thinking were more common I'd say it's merely common sense. As are further things to consider such as this: I don't deny that some drugs are dangerous and addictive. The main economic commodity in "Breaking Bad," methamphetamine, comes to mind. But people with a meth problem who want help will be more likely to seek it out if they know they're not going to risk imprisonment by doing so.

So many good reasons to just legalize it all. So many bad reasons for keeping it illegal.