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Dream Journal

Dream of the Future while staying in Verona

Remembering a time I won a race, either in another time or dream. It was a surprisingly good feeling to win, and be congratulated. I did it following my own plan and using my own skill, being a bit carefree. It\’s unusual for me to be in the spotlight like this, or to even want to be.

A sci-fi film of planet Earth in the future, like a James Cameron epic, so many forms of transit that listing them all is a gag. There\’s one in particular, from just before the great leap to hyper-advanced technology, that involves running on a pair of wheels. The landscape is crisscrossed and buttressed with long swooping arcs of white pathways. The viewpoint flies through the colorful dynamic throngs moving in every direction. Most of the mega-diverse populace seems occupied getting from place to place, though of course they are also able to occupy their minds doing whatever they wish with complete connection to anyone anywhere in the entire innervated global society.

Well almost, I suppose. It\’s revealed that Britain has it\’s own hyper-sophisticated blocking system which isolates it at an earlier stage of development. It\’s the butt of many jokes, but it\’s also implied they have good reasons and the true status of the futuristic society has a hidden, perhaps horrifying tradeoff that isn\’t shown. I don\’t finish the film.

Working at a long bench of large TV-sized computer monitors that have become slightly less useful over time by lowering the desk and raising the chairs. I\’m one of the oldest pupils in this class and I\’ve seen the changes over time, but it\’s been long enough that I\’ve stopped complaining and simply keep working, without bothering the younger folk. Our work is interrupted with a request that we hide our neck chains as there is a photographer who specializes in 80s nostalgia style photos who wants to use the class. I\’m singled out for my chunky flats (or perhaps my genuine 80s style) and asked to pose for her, which I do for long enough that I have to readjust from leg cramps. When I get back to my desk, my neighbors have their feet on my chair and the monitor has fallen forward. There\’s a coat of condensation on them too — I seem to remember earlier being in the shower of an RV while it was in motion, but the monitor condensation is probably related to the desk itself.
—
These dreams feel connected in a way I can\’t all put together, despite the fact I woke up for a while in the middle of the night as I didn\’t take melatonin. There was supposed to be a thunderstorm around the same time, but it was just a dark unfamiliar room in a high-rise.

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Dream Journal

Retirement of a Kaiser

Negotiate with a tyrant to turn himself in rather than be hunted by successful rebels. He spends his days finishing the design of his family’s island estate, connecting bristly toy blocks with precise movements of a claw crane. The design is dense, and I certainly wonder whether his previous difficulty focusing and completing it was a significant contributor to his social terror – firing on protestors because he didn’t want to be distracted from it, but unable to concentrate on it in the meantime. One day, the model is finished, and the old Kaiser-looking tyrant promptly dies.

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Dream Journal

A Dream on Bicycle Day, 2026

Just kidding. I don’t always dream, you know. And often, when I do, I don’t write it down — for all sorts of reasons. Last night, I didn’t dream. I did something else. Something close to it maybe.

And what was that exactly? Just ask. I’ll tell you.

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Dream Journal

Missing Jawbone (Aging is Annoying)

In a movie theater for my 43rd birthday. It’s a large, well-regarded old theater loved by the community — a massive room I feel I’ve been to in other dreams. After a show, I return to look for the missing bottom half of my collectible Lego pachycephalosaurus skull (it was only produced once for a natural History museum diorama set). It’s troublingly small to have to search for, and having just the one half would be quite a sad reminder. I manage to find the missing jawbone though, and try to arrange it on the surface of my record player for a delightful aesthetic to share. But the movie starts up just as I’m about to get the shot, and it’s too dark; I miss the picture.

I’m woken up, rudely, by my rat Carl scrabbling at the door to be let out. He found some wrinkly paper, to boot. Ugh. But while I’m awake, I have the annoying realization that I don’t really want to turn 43. Being 42 sounds cool, feels cool. Ugh. I try and succeed at putting the thought out of my head.

Hiking in Russia includes carrying a large machine on one’s back, which reminds me of one of those giant overhead projectors from school. I notice eventually that it’s easy to heft it over ledges and such in the beginning of the day, but I’m surprised to discover how much older I feel by the end of the day.

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Dream Journal

Revisit to Australia

Visiting Australia, I never thought I’d see it again. I’m traveling deep inland and the green hills and my feelings for the land are very specific, nostalgic, touching. There’s been a series of contaminations lately, and quantities of high-quality cow fat has to be dumped. I dig a shallow hole to pour out what someone calls “beautiful 90s fat” into the dirt while the wizard Gandalf comforts me.

Renting a place in Mexico. We’ve still not acclimated and made friends, partly because it would mostly be expats, so we mostly stay in our room. This isn’t so much an issue since there’s sometimes a beautiful golden light in the evenings in the corners of our room (which is like my childhood bedroom in Kemper court). The house where the room is has a private road veering off to one side, though I don’t realize that’s what it is at first. I see a Mexican man sleeping on the road surface in the shade near the first curve. He would be hard to see in the shadow there, which seems intentionally dangerous, even suicidal. I take stock and realize I’m being imperceptive of the cultural environs, after all how many cars are really going to pass this bumpy road passing by the front of this dinky house.

In what must be a different dream, we discover the room our landlord has rented to us is still being used as a commercial kitchen. It was reasonable enough when we assumed it had been converted for residential use, but we don’t even have any private area… it’s literally a working kitchen using rolling industrial fridges.

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Dream Journal

Dreams from The Long List

It seems in the dream I have a list of hundreds of short dreams. I’ve been saving them up, many on the bottom are from nights past. These are ones that happened last night, the ones that I remember at least, and I think they could probably be boiled down to bullet points.

Munich, I’m told by my wife, has the interesting quality of having no tennis courts, because none of the ground is level enough. It started out as a mining town in the Middle Ages. I retrace old trade routes through long and narrow mountain valleys. I go in and out of modernist buildings and long canals or ruts in the ground. I’m there for what feels like an entire night’s dreams, but I think I just fell back asleep after waking.

In another one, I’m entering Sarah G’s house, leaving four pennies outside the gate. Coming to apologize and make up. She had me try on a fancy blue tuxedo coat, which didn’t quite fit. But I did arrive in my nice, fancy blue velvet jacket. Charlie mentioned they didn’t know about a big TV. There’s actually two big TVs inside their house, but the one I came to see is an ancient, fuzzy CRT from the ’40s or ’50s in the garage.

Hanging out in what might be a big hotel with Angelica’s girls loafing around. One is idling, reading a magazine, looking at a plaque on the wall. Have a brief chat with her, saying how I had great times reading magazines as a kid, playfully asking if she’s come up with anything vulgar to scratch into the plaque, which endears her to me. I realize I’m playing the role of the playful adult, scoring points, even though that’s not the greatest idea to give them these ideas. The reaction is fun though. It’s my role here.

Watching two surfer/stoner dudes on LSD get on a Ferris wheel, attacked by turn-of-the-century style old Chinese men, one of them unexpectedly rises to the occasion and bites deep into his nose, possibly biting it off. I remember from some other factoid the surprising thing about the blood tasting salty, that’s why the Chinese man falls off, he spits it at his face.

Oops. Forgot to do the bullet points.

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Dream Journal

Port-a-Potty Stabbing Samurai

Entering an abandoned hospital in the future where there are much fewer people. We’re here to scavenge parts, including an alarm clock block of wood. In the bathroom, I have a strange feeling of understanding: I’ll be one of the last people to know what a place like this was before the fall. In the bathroom, I imagine finding a hidden wall panel to go through a secret corridor, a way to escape the ward — the kind of fantasy someone I would have been trapped here would have, the kind that one day won’t be understood anymore.

A samurai race: one samurai leaves the starting line early, chasing the quarry into a port-a-potty. He stabs his samurai sword strongly right through the middle at first, then seems to have a moment of reflection and genre-savviness, realizing his victim would probably kneel to avoid the strike. So he then thrusts the blade diagonally down into the porta potty, likely killing the victim (who was seen to enter). It is never confirmed, though. The race was scheduled to start at dawn, but the other samurai remains asleep at the starting line. The winner hopes his opponent will not notice his cheating.

A magazine from January 2005 features a light green background. It’s eye-catching, seemingly an intentional misuse of chroma key. More to do with it that is now forgotten (I used to be better at leaving myself hints… hmm).

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Dream Journal

Three Fragments

In the classroom of an enthusiastic teacher before school ends, then I leave right after.

The crew of the Serenity from Firefly are meeting to sign their original flight agreement using melted wax.

Rebooting a computer system on loop. The command “egg” does a job I haven’t heard before, and is essential for use on Discord (with which I’m not super-familiar).

I’m trying to be better with actually publishing these even when I’ve largely forgotten the details. That’s what practice is about I suppose.

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Dream Journal

Suddenly Iced Coffee (dream of LA)

An odd Wikipedia entry of a female author’s biography. It’s odd because it’s the size of a neighborhood, displayed laid out in a giant index like blocks of a city. And if I were to guess the city, I would guess Los Angeles — it’s certainly dry and sunny and industrial enough.

Park the car in a parking spot at a long, convoluted, angular strip mall. Find out there’s a store that has paid to make the spot available, the Panax Ginseng Store. Decide to walk there to check it out. Partway, I realize just how long a walk away it is. It’s shorter to walk back to my car and drive there. That’s LA.

The store itself is small, mostly novelties stored in plastic boxes in front. Plastic tarps cover most areas as though this is all temporary. Honestly, it’s not what I expected. It’s more intriguing, really, as I want to know what the deal with the place is. There’s a certain kind of benign neglect that elderly Asian immigrant shop owners have in their businesses. The very specific type of dirty-but-interesting corners I happen to find quite appealing.

Passing by, someone invites me to Costco with them. The entrance has very tall nursery plants and the same smooth cement floors I remember. We shop separately once inside. I worry whether the person who invited me actually can share their membership, as they said. As I pass by a free sample table, iced coffee is snuck into my hand, or mysteriously appears. For whatever reason, this seems to be the strongest image from the dream (and seemed a funny-enough title — well, why not?)

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Dream Journal

Metal Action Movie Bullshit

I’m in an enclosed all-metal structure, reminiscent of a labyrinth. As I proceed through, around the corner some Marvel movie bullshit starts happening in the next room — lasers firing, superhuman karate, epic scale fighting (way above my pay grade). Reasonably, I’m skeptical that a normal human like me should be anywhere at all nearby. I take a left and crawl down a long sloped metal corridor, a blind curve down a ramp. I start to get scared/worried, actually. For awhile there it’s pretty uncertain whether I’ll be able to make myself go all the way down the ramp. It doesn’t help that I see flashing blue and red lights from the end of the tunnel, indicating there’s some heavy police presence outside for whatever nonsense is going down inside.

I manage to make it out, playing it cool for the gaggle of bored-looking cops standing around at the tunnel exit, on a pleasant terrace adjacent to the structure. Quite soon after me a female friend emerges from the tunnel — she must’ve been right behind me. She asks what the holdup was, if I got frightened or something. Ummm… I try to play it off once again, but consider going on a rant about whatever the fuck superhero garbage we had to deal with. The person I’m speaking to is one of my friends, Reecy or Jessica from La Paz, maybe both in one form. I don’t know the significance of either.

It’s time to take it easy for the moment. I sit at a bench with my father-in-law at the edge of an unused race track, chilling in the sun on a slow afternoon in Sacramento. I’m waiting for something , so now we’re waiting together. As we sit, I watch a massive metal bird made of spare parts loft a monster truck into the air in it’s janky mechanical claws. Oh, right, there’s a destruction derby going on in the stadium next to the track. We both glance at each other, sharing the same thought — it’s highly entertaining to watch, but since my wife is away it would only disappoint her to describe the cool shit she missed. But it’s here for us to enjoy, now, and we might as well.

Later, a single scene dream. My wife walks in the room and informs me with apparent gravitas and regret, yeah, “Fox and Mongreen closed last week”. Sounds like the kind of hipster restaurant place in the neighborhood that we’d typically be sad to see close. But wait… Mondegreen? Did I hear that right? Weirdly clever, upon reflection. This is the dream that woke me up — I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.