Friday Nights- 10:00pm to 3:00am
Marco's email

Hi. Marco here.

When I'm not reading stories on the air on KMFB or otherwise treading water at one of my day jobs or dashing off to visit Juanita, I'm likely to be typing my sleep-dreams in meticulous detail to send them to alt.dreams in Usenet. Or I might be reading others' dreams there. Or actually sleeping. I rarely wake without remembering at least one dream. When I sleep for more than six hours at a stretch, I usually remember two to five dreams, sometimes more. People ask me how I remember all that stuff. Well, I'm a reporter; I know how to take notes. To report on dreams I take a few very simple notes immediately when I wake up, before anything fades, and count on the act of taking notes, however simple, to put the dreamed experience into reliable memory. (Reliving the dream while taking notes is what fixes the memory.) Then after work or the next night or whenever there's time, I type the dreams from the notes.

I think it's a matter of what's important to you. I don't like forgetting my dreams, so I make an effort to keep them. And I enjoy telling stories. Others collect stamps or mate with strangers or compulsively lift weights or gamble at dice or manipulate others' lives. There might be a hobby gene that determines which thing you're most likely to do. I read that they've just discovered a petulance gene, and a gene that causes a person to mix up verb tenses. It's an amazing world.

Would you like to read some of my dreams? Here are search results for everything I send to Usenet newsgroups. Note that when you get to the bottom of a list of 100 posts, each of which is likely to be a night's series of my dreams, there are several more pages of 100 posts each to wade into. It's a tremendous pile of material, but it was just one day at a time and I type pretty fast. And I don't take drugs or watch teevee, so there's a lot of subjective time --years by now (I'll be 49 in November)-- that I get to enjoy doing something I like, during which most people, I dunno, vegetate. I don't think you're really human when you're stoned or watching teevee. I mean, think of all the extra time I've had to read and write and to be a person, compared to most Americans. Plus I'm pretty smart. You should listen to me, and not just when I'm babbling about dreams.

Some other people use alt.dreams the way I do (as a collective dream journal, which is what it was set up to be). Most don't, but some do, and they have really amazing dreams and they tell them so well that reading them is like dreaming them yourself. If you browse around in alt.dreams in general by, uh, let's see... by clicking here, and you read a dream that you really enjoy, then experiment by doing an Advanced Groups Search for all posts sent by the author of that dream and bookmark the search! It will likely turn out that the writer you admire is prolific and writes to several other newsgroups you'll discover in this way and get a kick out of. And every week or so you'll have a fresh magazine to read by somebody who interests you.

There are all kinds of theories as to the nature and purpose of dreams, most of them laughably overcomplicated and none of them supportable (many theories are more surreal than dreams themselves), but dreams work just fine as thought-provoking infotainment, and it's okay to read and enjoy them as such.

I hope you have fun in alt.dreams. Whether or not your newsgroup reader is set up to read and post to Usenet newsgroups, you might want to join Google Groups so you can participate in any of tens of thousands of newsgroups from anywhere you can get web access, using anyone's computer. Here's the Google Groups help page. You can learn a little about Usenet here, and you're given a procedure to join Google Groups. It's free and they don't spam you nor sell your name to others who do.

p.s. You can see some pictures of people I often seem to dream about here. I haven't added any pictures since 2002, though. Maybe I'll get to that soon.

p.p.s. I'm not only about dreams; the dream journal section of my show is usually only half an hour long. Send me anything you write, on any subject, and I'll read it on the air on the coming week's show.