VITAL STATISTICS
Dreamer: Helen
Date: June 10, 2001
Title: CIA Drug Tests in My Living Room
The dream opened with me living in a house similar to the communal household I had lived in on North Champlain St. in Burlington, VT. Most all of the residents were grad students or had full-time jobs, so we were out of the house for most of the day.
During our absence, however, the CIA had started using our living room as a site to test powerful, mind-altering drugs on people without their consent, and without informing us or getting our permission.
With increasing frequency, we would come home to find some poor schmoe completely out of his skull on highly potent hallucinogens. In fact, this drug which the CIA was testing also contained some sort of paralyzing component because these complete strangers quietly wigging out on our couch were usually in a catatonic state until the drug began wearing off. But the part that infuriated me most - aside from the CIA skulduggery; aside from the fact they were messing these people up and leaving us to deal with them; aside from the breaking and entering and violation of privacy aspects of them using our house for these cruel experiments - the part that made me the absolute maddest was the fact the bastards never even bothered to remove the hypodermic needles from their victims' arms. I had to remove it, before they started getting unparalyzed and moving around, and possibly tearing it out or otherwise hurting themselves.
I even had a very vague confrontation on the street with two guys I believed were CIA, but I had no proof and they denied everything without even trying to pretend they were telling the truth.
The last straw came when we found a young man whom we knew on our couch, with the needle left in his arm still. He was probably in his late teens, and we vaguely knew him from around town as a hustler, although he was basically a nice guy. I pulled the needle out of his arm, and eventually he started talking and moving again, albeit completely wrecked on CIA drugs. He was an experienced drug user but this stuff still was way more than even he could handle. We managed to help him pull himself together eventually. It was clear to us that the CIA had used this kid whom we knew and basically liked, as their way of saying 'fuck you' to us.
I went to my psychology professor, a vain but fat man with a neatly trimmed moustache and beard wearing a maroon turtleneck, and told him what was going on. I strongly suspected that he was in on it, and perhaps had even suggested to the CIA that they use my house. He may have been involved on an even more despicable level. The psych professor replied with obviously fake sympathy about this 'awful situation', and insinuated that no one would believe my outlandish allegations. He denied that any such a thing could happen, and then he denied that he was involved. The conversation turned nasty as I became more specific in my charges and he became more specific about the many ways I could be ruined if I didn't shut up and stop interfering.
At this point in the real world a noise woke me up for a few seconds again, and when I fell asleep again I found myself at work. This dream version of the office was located on a former warehouse near the rail yards, and it was furnished and decorated much more like a home than an office. I started telling Cristina N. about the clandestine drug tests at my house, but I realized she probably wouldn't believe such a way-out story. So I told it like it was plot to a movie, and she reacted predictably; wondering who would believe such an outlandish story, that the CIA wouldn't do that, etc. Lillian L. came over and asked what was going on. Cristina told her the plot of my movie, and she agreed the whole thing sounded crazy and implausible and switched the topic to the Wizard of Oz and pieces of oddball Oz trivia.
For a moment I thought trivia was the answer. Using pieces of movie trivia and plots to movies as a test, I would find the person who would believe me if they gave the right answer. Unfortunately I didn't know what the right question was, or what the right answer would be.
It was clear that Lillian and Cristina wouldn't buy that the CIA was drugging and abandoning unsuspecting citizens in my living room. I thought David K might believe me, provided that I primed him properly for the revelation, so I struck up a bizarre conversation with him about movie trivia. Lillian asked about a particular piece of Oz trivia to which I knew the correct answer - which happened to be quite grisly, and which no one wanted to believe could possibly be right. David became particularly agitated when I insisted that I was correct. He was also wearing a wedding ring which I hadn't seen on him before, and I couldn't recall if he and his girlfriend were actually married or not. I tried to tactfully ask if he had obtained it in a formal, legal wedding ceremony. Apparently I didn't ask tactfully enough - or he was sensitized to the notion that I always imputed evil and corruption to pure and good things, like the Wizard of Oz. Testily, he replied that he had married in a small ceremony in the lobby of a local hotel with a fountain. They had 12 witnesses and a minister. He said it as though he was daring me to assign some sinister imputation to his wedding. I backed off.
Cristina had to deliver something down on Broadway (in Albany), but she didn't know where to go. I did, and told her I would show her. She invited David and Lillian to join us on our walk, and along the way Cristina and Lillian told David about the ridiculous plot of my CIA drug experiment 'movie'. He figured out pretty quickly that it wasn't a movie, however, and launched a thorough offensive on the whole idea: explaining how the CIA wouldn't possibly pump psychoactive drugs into unsuspecting citizens and leave them in my living room of all places. As he was trying to explain to me how paranoid I was, a guy driving a Miller Lite truck backwards up the sidewalk tried to run me over very slowly, swerving several times to follow me when I dodged the truck. Cristina convinced the driver to stop, and he seemed very apologetic when he saw that he had almost run me over very slowly. He had in fact parked right on top on my knapsack, which I had placed on the sidewalk for some reason just before I ran away from this bizarre slow-motion assassination attempt.
Now things get really disjoint. In the middle of a torrential thunderstorm, Gene drove to the Schenectady Museum to interview for a job as a sys admin. We were laughing at how undoubtedly terrible this job would, be. I was also going to a job interview that day, hours later, with someone who I was quite sure would turn out to be connected with the CIA drug tests of unconsenting, uninformed, and unwilling individuals in my living room. I got the impression that I had learned enough that they figured they might as well recruit me.
Then it turned out Lillian was building a house nearby. I stood on the [imaginary] porch of the Schenectady Museum admiring this incredibly weird three-story building (think a large scale Pee Wee's Playhouse kind of thing) painted bright purple, yellow, orange, and red, consisting of wild geometric shapes stuck on, or jutting out of an otherwise traditionally-shaped rectangular wood house common in that area of Schenectady. She gave us a house tour, during which I almost walked in on her fiance, Phil, in the shower. Then I went back to the porch of the Schenectady Museum with her. Cristina joined us, ready to do her volunteer work with a disadvantaged young girls. She was bringing the girls a combination coloring book/frosted cake thing from 1962 with a picture of a cartoon character little girl bear encouraging all young kids to get immunization shots. And I realized that this cake was part of a CIA psychological conditioning plan dating back almost four decades to get people used to the idea of taking hypodermic needle shots from strangers without asking questions. I was horrified but I didn't say anything, because I knew that Cristina was totally unwilling dupe and she would never take part in such a thing intentionally. Also, I already had seen how unreceptive people were to my theories about, and experiences with American intelligence agencies.
I tried to forget the whole ugly situation by playing with radio on the Schenectady Museum's porch. Next door were some seniors singing old songs, which they sang beautifully but they too had some kind of conspiratorial connections. Finally somebody started forwarding me phone calls from vendors who I got to reject. It was a relaxing change of pace from CIA conspiracies, and I began to enjoy being terrible to the vendors. The dream ended when one naive and obnoxious vendor tried to trade a rat-sized Hav-A-Heart trap with me for a recent-model computer. To really torture her I took her down to CompUSA and let her try to set a trade up with unhelpful and unusually vicious salespeople while I watched, laughing.
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