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Dream Journal

The Old Neighborhood

Driving around the mall parking lot in my hometown where recent development has put in two new movie theaters, both run by right-wing religionists. I realized that I have knowledge enough that, if I wanted, I could burn at least one of them down. Then again, they are new construction very high fire codes. Either they wouldn’t burn or my exceptional knowledge would single me out.

I drive out of the parking lot. In line at a new parking gate, I realize I never grabbed a parking ticket. I gun it through the gate when the truck ahead of me opens it. I worry for a second I did it too early and will hit a horizontal bar, but nothing comes of it.

My dad in the car has me drive through the neighborhood of my old home, towards the house itself. I’ve done this many times before. I’m more practiced than when I lived here, even. I cut through an older part of the neighborhood ( San Eljay) and peel out hard onto a perpendicular street without really looking. My dad makes no comment correcting me, though I expected he would.

It’s evident the neighborhood has changed a lot. At the corner, the sign for the development has decayed, breaking down and being absorbed into neighboring homes yards, chicken pens and such. My old elementary school has a short wooden fence around it, and the road past it has become a footpath.

At the end of the footpath is a clearing in the forest, where my family’s home was when I was a kid. It’s an odd mashup between Cathedral City and Eureka. The house itself is gone but a lot of our stuff remains — I take it that my parents have wheedled their way into storing stuff there long-term, but we’re here today to pick some of it up.

The site is now part of a trailhead inside a National Park though. There’s a long slope just beyond. Many people pass through on a daily basis, some unfriendly. I actually stop my sister from engaging in an altercation with some red-faced boomer. A bit more happens but details have been lost.

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Dream Journal

Checkpoint Loses My Bike

Stopped at a new checkpoint run by ICE or homeland security. This is here in SF on what should be a busy street, but it’s a weekend (or maybe weekday) so they feel like they have lots of time to waste inspecting me. I’m initially fine with complying despite what you might expect, if for no other reason than I’ll know what’s going on after I’ve done through it. But the process is so haphazard that I end up losing –that is, they end up losing — my rainbow-striped bicycle somewhere. I love it so, and it was so much work! (In real life this bicycle has been an uncompleted project since March 2017.) I’m quite sad about it and realize how unnecessary the loss was. I could do what undoubtedly everyone else will be doing, especially anyone not wanting to get caught by homeland security: just take a different street.

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Dream Journal

A Different Old House

Colonizing three rivers into a city on a plot of jungle that used to contain cannibals. Traveling up and down the rivers, like an escapee or an explorer, sneaking underneath forgotten concrete overpasses in the jungle. I wake and see that it’s 3:43, and it takes a moment to realize that means 3:43 am. I make the obvious decision to go back to sleep if possible. And I do.

Pulling back into a house to pee after just pulling out. Similar to the house I grew up in, but a different orientation, layout, and details. Pine cones have been shedding by the front door. Calling for Dad while I walk through the place, but no reply. Turning handle of door to garage, which Dad got as a novelty fruit (berry cluster, I think) and it’s hard to turn. I suppose I should see this room anyway, as it’s one of the last in the house I’ve never looked at. The house is mostly empty, familiar and unfamiliar.

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Dream Journal

Wrong Bed in an Attic

On a table near an outside door, a falcon marching in a circle, making little pip sounds , carrying a mouthpiece in its beak with a map attached — a rolled up map of greater Boston

Testing a bed in the attic for sleeping. It’s so close to the ceiling though, sitting up is impossible and my forehead is so close to the wood beams. It’s functional but claustrophobic, and at the very top of a house that’s actually quite tall. Someone, perhaps my brother, uses one of the built-in bedframes near the main door to the outside, and those beds are much more convenient. I hadn’t noticed them before, or they hadn’t been indicated.

This is my aunt’s place. I realize, as I’m setting out for a journey. I gather many trinkets in my knapsack before departing.

Another part, lost because I didn’t write it down in time: the character Woland from Master & Margarita appears.

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Dream Journal

Lonely Australia

Once again in Australia, for the second time in my life. I remember trying to get all our stuff together to leave. Staying in a hostel with many others, multiple levels and multiple trips back and forth attempting to gather everything. It’s not just my wife and I though, I’m helping other people.

I wake up and it’s 5:45 pm — too early to wake up for the day when I only went to bed after noon. I manage to get back to sleep.

Discussing an isolated rural part of Japan, a single town with a name like Duport, or Depont. Doesn’t sound Japanese, in retrospect. It’s possibly cut off from road access. Could be haunted, in a HP Lovecraft/Cthulhu-people kind of way.

An isolated town in Australia with three residents, or maybe three homes. I can peer past gates to see corrugated steel rooves. Ringing the number for the town and hearing a phone inside ring.

Then, a view flying over an abandoned Middle School, perhaps the same town, but still in Australia. The field between buildings is an overgrown basketball court. A lone kid walks through it on a long journey somewhere by himself. At the other side, which is another entrance to the school, a kid in a wheelchair is pacing back and forth between the door and a long coastal inlet. There’s so much room in this country they have space even on the coast for empty real estate.

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Dream Journal

Second Dream of Chris P.

I dream of a childhood friend I haven’t thought of in awhile, whom I haven’t seen in a long time — Chris P. It’s weird calling him that, since that name was the joke my 4th grade teacher used when he was absent the first day of class: crispy. It would’ve been the day before I met him. We were good friends, and he defended me in 9-square (a class-particular variant of the handball game 4-square). There’s a lot of detail and backstory that’s lost. I don’t know why I didn’t write it down. This seemed especially important, as the specific dream I had was remembering that I dreamt of him the night before… and didn’t write it down. But I really don’t know if that’s the case, or that was just the story in the dream. I haven’t been writing my dreams lately. Obviously I really should write it down this time… I might dream it a third time otherwise.

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Dream Journal

Night Before a Christmas Birthday

Floating above the waterways of an oasis, doing that thing where I breathe to get higher. I get higher than my companions behind me, only to grab stray palm fronds and debris, which of course sinks me lower. The oasis itself appears once inhabited yet now abandoned. We start scavenging some apartments. There’s a shower that made an impression, boxy white plastic at the front of a low-ceiling hallway, a thin plastic curtain evoking sadness with the strong impression it relates of a human not there anymore. Another space we raid is a deck with a hollow space underneath, which turns out to be filled with Christmas presents, already labeled with names and notes. The notes are sometimes for people we know — a kid who’s not there, her family. We actually do find a lingering resident, sitting dully facing a TV. His recognition of us could be dangerous, and he has to be neutralized.

A long walk in a long train station — reminds me of platforms of big city train stations I went to in Italy. But the actual route I’m taking is via this very long train platform, with a building at the end, on the horizon. It’s a landmark, possibly a destination. I’m missing school walking here. Perhaps school is my destination.

I’m reminded of another part, perhaps out of order: when we got off a train at a rural platform, for a supposed switchover. There are several of us, a distinct group, who get off for the train on a parallel set of tracks. But it never comes. Instead, the train we got off of speeds away in what clearly feels like a trick. If we don’t catch up to it quickly, we’ll be left behind, and you just know we’ll be blamed for it somehow. Maybe this is how I missed school.

As I come up toward the station proper, I look to the right. There’s an old building that might’ve been a barracks, tall, almost neglected looking. There’s a big patch of moss covering the front of the house. But as I look carefully at it I see the furniture of rich people still living in the old place. Somewhere between the venerable age, the good location, and the disposable wealth to ignore expensive quirks of building maintenance, the place is surprisingly prestigious. Despite having no other indicators of being in San Francisco, this feels like a very San Francisco situation.

Off the back of the fancy folks moss barracks there’s a cliff into a wild green gully or canyon of suchlike. A possum drops off this cliff. I don’t remember much more.

At my friend S’s house (of P&S), there’s a plastic stormtrooper outfit that I try to fit on. The set appears to be missing boots though, so I have to wear my own shoes with the outfit laying over them. It looks a bit silly but maybe it won’t matter, or maybe we’ll find the boots.

Title is actually when this was: I went to a very nice birthday party today, that was Christmas-themed. Seems oddly specific though. Feels like it could be a weird dream reference, but that’s just what it was.

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Dream Journal

Bathtub, Petting Pet Rats, Cracked Windshield

Long time in the bathtub together with my wife. Soaking at opposite ends, both on our phones. Searching for a song I’m trying to remember, something relevant to our conversation. I step out of the bath for a second to go to the bathroom door, noticing that I have a boot and sock on my right foot, which I’ve been hanging out the bathtub this whole time without thinking about it.

Petting my rats in their cage, petting all of them by name. Swapping between old ones and new ones. Xolito gets pets. I notice how much slower my older rats are, much easier and accepting of affection. I’m trying to remember something about one of our newer rats, where I got it, or maybe what its name was — something like Lapassan Confederacy? This is mixed up with the other drain or I was trying to remember.

I need to get the car key back from my former friend Sarah G., who lives in the East Bay instead of the Mission (like she really does). As I arrive at the parked car I remember I need to let her know I’m coming in case she’s not home — but I realize I still have the other key to drive right now so it doesn’t matter as much. I find the car’s windshield cracked open in a very specific way on the driver’s side. I’d kind of been expecting this what with the age of the car. It’s always some damn thing. I immediately take some pictures as evidence, but realize my tarp is still partially laying over the car — insurance might blame me for that, despite how silly that theory is. I pull it off and lay over a nearby electrical wire under a tree over the sidewalk.

Fragments:

  • Wandering the streets of New York (or maybe the Mission District in earlier days) looking for Zorhan Mamdani.
  • Burning Man — what about Burning Man? Seems like a setting from much earlier in the dream sequence, but no idea its relation to anything else.
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Dream Journal

Extra Jacket Rat

We have two rats. I left one rat out of the cage, with my new Neapolitan white jacket on top of that. Go to put it back and there’s a new small rat I don’t recognize, nesting there with my rat. Decide to make him part of the tribe and see how things go, surprise my wife.

My old friend Spy seems to receive bad news at my house, but I don’t pry. In the space of the house there are many illuminated images from old children’s books that look really good, a lot are rural-themed. It looks like a carefully curated collection from ’70s stuff found at thrift shops, the kind of thing Spy might have made.

Younger guy seemingly following me around a pool, either naievete or annoyance. Helping guy with mystery clay meth pipe left on table. The pipe itself is much more story-rich, but I can’t recall.

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Dream Journal

My Fake Sleep for Plarvolia

Visiting a museum that’s in a big converted old house. After we (my spouse and I) drop our stuff in the ground floor locker room, we fiddle with a colors exhibit halfway up a pastel stairway (like the 90s Dream Pop movie “Toys”). We continue interacting with the apparatus so as to avoid going on roof — I learned via tweet that Plarvolia is on the roof. For awhile stalling works. I’m still playing with the exhibit, trying to reposition typography to fit neatly inside gaps, when eventually I get too anxious about running into her and head downstairs. I get onto a cart/wagon there but become delayed in retrieving my stuff and packing up, drawn deeper into a corridor of rooms on the first floor. At some point I come to understand that Plarvolia is partially invested in the house/museum and is somehow even in charge of parts of it. Then, cornered in the mostly-empty farthest room, a dead-end master bedroom suite, Plarvolia herself fucking comes in. Leaned against a wall I instinctively feign asleep. Just my luck, but it’s her bedroom. She sticks around. Thankfully she doesn’t seem upset, but seems instead to have a maliciously curious attitude — as if she knows she could fuck with me, but is still considering whether I’m actually somehow dangerous, since that’s how she justified her past acts to herself. That’s all I can really glean with my eyes closed.

There’s a bit of a gap, and then I’m also in charge of aspects of the museum/house. Perhaps I’m just taken along for a task. Plarvolia isn’t directly involved (unless she sent me here). But the task itself is to contact an old man staying a bedroom of the building, also on the first floor. He’s a former Christian priest, a long-time tenant who I think is behind on his bills. The hallway has a black and red cast to it. I can see him peeking from behind a clothing rack that forms part of his front wall — not the best way to hide from a landlord. I don’t think anything was accomplished. Then again I’m not sure it’s really my problem.

Later — much later, I think— I’m hunting a special elephant on a range or track, some kind of set course. After that I’m hunting a bird that’s shaped like an orca, which I proceed to break apart so I can to find wood piece inside. I do this messy with in front of someone squeamish as they have to narrate a story to me. I get a little bit of sadistic glee at sticking to my task instead of deferring to whoever this is.
—
When I wake up I’m a bit frustrated to realize I’ve once again dreamt of Plarvolia. It’s been five years now. I’m… mildly less annoyed when I realize that today, somehow, is her birthday.

As soon as I step outside my home, I find an unusual elephant figurine, set carefully on a scooter, clearly as an offering. It’s on my desk now.