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Lately, I’ve been falling into deep dream-sleeps more immediately. I lie myself down, close my eyes, and voila, I’m in a vivid dream… It seems strange and amazing. No warm up, no slow dozing into it… it just… starts… like I’m sitting down in the middle of a movie, and clicking the “UN-pause” button to re-start….

In the backseat of the car, in the cafe, in the hotel lobby… anywhere, and around anyone…

Near the end of our late-night dinner in the desert, we were laying around the table on pillows, great adventures and stories were being told (in French), I barely closed my eyes, and, boom, I started right in on a dream… a few minutes later (or longer maybe?) I could faintly hear, “Michael… Michael… have some dessert…” and I was yanked back out into the real world again….

I wish I could harness this and control it… and do it with my eyes completely open… dream in front of people while appearing to be wide awake… that would really be something…

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This morning, I woke up and snuck off from camp to find the highest dune I could climb. I was out of sight and alone on the moon, far away from the rest of the caravan, surrounded by the glorious, mountainous dunescape of bright orange and red… no sound… complete silence… and I watched the sunrise and let the sun peek up and peel off the horizon…. while the wind blew truths and a faint whisper-song in my ears….

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Rode into the Sahara desert on a camel tonight… in a camel caravan convoy… the rhythm of the up-and-down is not much different from a horse… except you sit a lot higher and you have to, sort of, lean back and roll and let gravity sway with each camel stride… like riding a rollercoaster or a rocking boat… and the grunting and snorting is much louder…

Once we arrived and unloaded, we settled into camp and got the full Berber treatment with a traditional Tajine candlelight dinner, everyone digging their hands and bread into the community center… followed by pomegranate for dessert… I got laughed at for eating my pomegranate one seed at a time… in all my life, it never occurred to me to bite into all the seeds at once, getting an entire mouthful with each stab…

Afterwards, we went out into the black and sat around a quaint and humble campfire… the smoke kept drifting into my eyes (I can’t remember if smoke chases beauty or runs away from it)… Eventually, Muhammad, our Berber trekking guide, disappeared into the dinner tent and returned with a candle and threw it into the fire… I thought, “What a waste, Berber dude, that still had a few good hours of burning left in it.” Then, something mystical and magical occurred. The beauty smoke that was stinging my eyes stopped immediately. It was a desert miracle! No more smoke…. just fire…

For the rest of the night, I deciphered as much French as I could, drank my mint tea, and stared the campfire down until it gave up and burnt itself out…

Instantly, another Christmas miracle fell upon us… (yes, even on the Muslims and Berbers)… I was hypnotized and pulled into a trance as I laid on my back and silently watched the blanket of night stars in the sky, spun out and frozen-still like a giant kaleidoscope… so strangely crystal clear… like God was holding up his own personal magnifying glass to let me see…

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Sandra and Miguel invited me to ride along in their car to Merzouga (an 8 hour drive, East to the Sahara). About 6 hours in the middle of the desert (everywhere is the middle of the desert), we got a flat tire. Miguel skillfully NASCAR’d us out of a Moroccan rollover, steered through it and safely got us off to the sandy roadside… We opened the trunk to discover that the rental company left out the most important piece of the jack, we were jackless and had no way to change the tire. The sun was going down fast and it was starting to get dark.

After about 20 minutes of fiddling and trying to invent new solutions, I decided to start waving and flagging any passing vehicles. Our angels were right on it, and on the very first try, someone pulled over. He spoke only Arabic and Spanish – which, of course, was no problem for Sandra and Miguel’s boatload of language surplus.

The kind stranger had a jack and we had the tire changed in no time… well, Miguel had the tire changed in no time!

A couple hours more and we met up with the rest of our A-team at the Sahara base camp… recounting and reliving our brave, desert adventure… peppering our Tajine dinner into the middle of the night… entertained by an impromptu drum jam session by the Berber brothers and family who would be hosting the next day’s trek…

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It still surprises and amuses me how much of traveling is a constant lava lamp flow, continually changing and moving and re-setting in mid-stream… dictated by some unwritten law of synchronicity… knowing things will change 9 different ways, every minute, depending on any random number of happy accidents or chance meetings (or missed trains, delayed flights, whatever). I can’t think of a better way to travel and I have made so many friends and seen crazy miracles by just being open to that hippy freestyle thought and letting the unpredictable, unscheduled, unmapped glitches breathe and appear…

We picked up two more team members today at lunch, Miguel and Sandra, (from Portugal, now living in France).

Naturally, they speak 9 or 10 different languages like everyone else who is not American, and since French is the common denominator, I am sometimes swimming in a lost sea of swirling Frenćais… In the eye of the storm, I can still have complete peace and solitude as I easily check out and think of pretty things in my head (in English) while their conversations and jokes and stories shoot around me like a flurry of ricocheting bullets… (I guess I do the same thing back home during meals with family and friends, too).

Later on, after a family style, rooftop tajine dinner and impromptu folk concert (with Shisha), we piled into deux petite taxis, and raced down to catch the final night of the Ouarazate music festival. We arrived just in time for the climactic ending with reggae legend, Alpha Blondy. It was a little scary at first, as I slowed down my brain long enough to realize I was in the middle of a sea of 3,000 mad, chanting, dancing, spirit-filled, crazed locals… it felt like a riot could break out at any moment… in the middle of the dark… in the middle of nowhere… the music was still raging as we snuck away at one in the morning to beat the crowd and make a clean getaway… coco rasta fantastique, mon…

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Last night’s concert was a large-scale, big bucks production… of Moroccan Hip Hop… straight off the MTV circuit… super high end… except it felt like watching Mexican soap operas. A third or fourth generation derivative…. A cheap counterfeit and carbon copy knockoff, imitating American tv… like watching a cast of seasoned, proficient actors all playing a role… Using all the “correct” hand motions and carefully choreographed “rapper moves” that they have been professionally coached to execute….

Completely unfair, I know, to judge (since I have no idea what they’re saying in Arabic or French). It could have been the most poignant, poetic, heart-piercing human truths… filled with clever wordplay and life altering revelations… or the most profound and inspiring pleas for hope and revolution… I will never know….

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After the 5-hour scenic route through and around the High Atlas mountains and discovering the universal truth that, even here in Morocco, people on the bus go up and down (and I think the wheels on the bus go round and round, too) I arrived in the dark in Ouarzazate (WAH-za-zat)… richer and heavier, with my two new friends in tow, German/French DJ Morgan, and French Beauty/Social Worker Nina.

We grabbed a cab, unloaded and reloaded at a hotel in the center of town, and headed out for dinner and the music festival we heard some people talking about back at the bus station… I already love Morgan’s can-do, must-do, let’s do attitude, spontaneous, and impulsive seat-of-the-pants…

Being out in the world with no entangled, constricting, handcuffed expectations or rigid itinerary, means I’m in surreal time and in constant freefalling flight. Every day is wide open and filled with unpredictable endings. Plans change 9 different ways before I reach the next intended destination. Living and breathing in the moment, being okay with sitting in quiet solitude for hours in a cafe, meeting and drinking-in complete strangers, having a constant curiosity and inquisitiveness about each person or thing I unexpectedly encounter…. it’s swimming in a steady stream of rapids or wind storm, and not caring where you’re blown to… it’s more fun to feel the wind and be surprised with each new ending… it’s jazz… and poker… and blindfolded painting…

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Took off to the mountains with Barakat to several nurseries… in search of the perfect bamboo (to decorate his restaurants). With so much mountain air drive-time, I got to chat and hear so much juicy, insider information about Moroccan life, about entrepreneurial heart and soul, about the King of Morocco and how recent world events have shaken things up, about how real business works in Morocco… I got all the nitty gritty, the lowdown, the skinny…

Before heading back to Marrakech, we stopped at a rooftop cafe overlooking the valley of green, green foothills beneath the mountains…

A Berber boy was playing his piccalo flute, and we had him jam for us as we drank our mint tea…. sitting next to us at the next table, some businessmen were getting entertained by a couple Moroccan prostitutes (Barakat explained)… they all pretended to be unimpressed and unaffected, like they weren’t witnessing, at that exact moment, the most amazing flute they had ever heard in their entire prostituting lives…

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I think if I did not have any family, I would live here… Marrakech is rocking me and seducing me and letting me fall madly in love with her…

I originally intended to be on my way to some other town a few days ago, but I ran out of cash and my bank declined all attempts at the ATM… cut me off cold… assuming that any activity in Morocco would be fraudulent (yes, I forgot to tell them I was coming here)…

So I was completely out of money for 3 days, stuck in Marrakech, unable to get a call through to the bank to explain… my hotel was sold out full and Muhammed kindly put me up on a cot on their 4th story rooftop… they fed me and watered me and so generously took care of me… with sit-down, home-cooked style Tajine meals… (just me and the hotel maids and hotel clerks)… where each sitting becomes an intimate, hand-to-mouth, family circle as everyone digs their bread into the center community stewing plate (no forks, no spoons)… and laughs and tells hilarious stories… in Arabic… no English…

I finally got thru to the bank with a clever, crazy scheme… Skype and my sister’s two phones, all daisy-chained… I got some fresh cash, and went back to hang out at an amazing restaurant I found a couple days ago… stretched dinner into a 3-hour pleasure treasure… the owner happened to drop in while I was getting a personal lesson from the chef on how they make their Moroccan mint tea… step by step…. (pushing my way in with my steady persistent curiosity)…

Barakat (the French-Australian owner) and I hit it off swimmingly (he used to own several restaurants in LA) and he invited me to run errands with him into the nearby mountains tomorrow… olay.

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Time has become meaningless again… especially here… there are only light hours and dark hours… no weekdays… no weekends… It is always “today.” Hungry, eat… Sleepy, sleep…. Dreamy, dream…

A million miles away from home, the same rules apply here…. Love everyone you meet…. Always be true… Help each other… give something away and expect nothing in return….. give free light… a free smile… a free memory… a kind word… a generous ear… the contagious gift of timelessness…. give.