Little part of Canada nestled in a shadowy river-side forest of Nebraska, a map of thin little medieval-like individual plots. Eventually this odd holdover secedes to America out of convenience.
Traveling along a road and I convince my mom that it’s a good idea to stop at the smallest country I’ve ever been to, Bensbensvideo. It’s essentially just an old building, ground floor bar, upstairs apartments, with a little side lot for me to leave my motorcycle while I go to the beach. In the thick undergrowth someone has left glasses of white wine covered with Tupperware tops. I discover decayed whale bones under a little alcove. My mom and I finish our wine as we see the tide has quickly come in, up to the wheels of my truck. Getting ready to leave, I can feel the psychic pressure from the grumpy old woman tending bar when I scurry through on my motorcycle.
Lying in bed on my side as a kid/teenager, wearing an oversized pajama shirt, in a house which belongs to my parents. Realizing how I’m not a real contributor to the household, even though I might be focused on how I work on stuff all the time.
Hummingbird babies in their nest inside a Tupperware, I’m surprised to see when I turn it over. This is the reason we’re walking toward the tropical forest gorge. It’s my female friend and I walking along a sidewalk near where she met her husband, and we’re rolling along a big concrete pipe section. Nearby there are oddly narrow buildings made of the same stuff. Our pipe rolls over a stop sign and it produces the humorous message “Windows has encountered an error”.
There’s a town called Seattle in a rainy spot on the north coast of Queensland, on a little isthmus of a peninsula. It’s hard for me to find by zooming in, as other town names pop up instead such as Williamsonia.
Staying as guests in a house, my suitcase stuff scattered around some oldsters couch. Their cute but fussy young son or grandson doesn’t want to wear pants, and is dressed in my dashiki suit. He’s happy to stay that way even though they look like pajamas.
My wife and I leave for her makeup fair an hour and a half after it starts, at 1:24 pm. I have difficulty with my phone, setting it to correct timezone, from where I am in Australian East coast time.
A group of us are studying at the end of a trail up a tall mountain. I end up the last one studying at the waist-high workbenches. Once the instructor/monitor (my 10th grade English teacher Ms. Roos?) brings this to my attention, I leave and say hi to Sherilyn sitting in a small cubby-like room off to the side of the exit, wearing fishnets, perhaps working as a librarian.
Shortly thereafter I’m asked to get something off a high shelf — on the trail — and I’m “caught” by my landlord, who has a ponytail. No clue why he’d be upset by that, but that sounds like him.
Even further down, there’s a very steep, conical icy slope. As I slide down the crunchy snow, I relate to someone the posted warnings I saw about “Karen”, a trans lady in our [dreamt] social group who perpetrated some property destruction before she got it together and become trans.
I notice my facial hair in a mirror. The left side of my face is shaved into a goatee and sideburns, while the right is still a beard. And looking up, my hair has a wide ¼ off-center stripe shaved out to match, with my long hair hanging over on either side. It looks pretty stylish, but I think I couldn’t pull it off in real life on account of short side hairs.
Someone rediscovers an old secret of mine, that when I was in high school I got a letter of acceptance into Yale but never followed up on it. I lost the letter and chose to forget about it over the years. I’m embarrassed but also just don’t know what to say. I don’t have an explanation for why I left behind the opportunity, it just… slipped away.
Later on I’m at a swap meet near a terraced park. I’m packing up some metal rods embedded in parking lot asphalt into the truckbed, hopefully to sell. Their partially dug already, and it turns out a vendor there already decided they weren’t worth it and gave up. That same vendor has just sold a small black heart-shaped vessel for $302, a vessel I sold to them only a few days ago for $16. I calculate it immediately in the dream as $285, oddly off by one. For a variety of reasons, I’m not actually upset — although the way he told me, it seems what he expected.
Then I’m cleaning up the park after the show. Walking away with my arms full I see I’ve missed some vape tips in the dirt. I’ll get them another time, I think. I go to visit a group of friends in a further-away part of the bay. I pass their apartment and open a heavy door to a tiny bare windowless ground floor apartment, somewhere no human should live of their own free will. I know it must be hella expensive, too. I go next door to see my friends and their place is the same, but twice as wide.
As I’m driving home, I’m dropping off one of the girls at her subway stop. The town is like New Orleans, her stop is named Mystic, and it’s practically right by the swap meet earlier. Just as we get there she begins to try sweet-talking me into driving her across the bay. She’s cute, might’ve worked, but I see pretty clearly how it’s manipulating my attraction. There’s no actual feelings from her.
I’m in a neighborhood of San Francisco with my wife Lynae. In the distance I see the Golden Gate Bridge, beautiful dusky light in the air, and huge swells of an oncoming tsunami. I start looking for shelter, trying to use the time we have wisely, but it’s quickly apparent that we will probably be trapped outside.
Working for Thanos, vaporizing people and such. I’ve got some cool high-tech vehicles but things start getting precarious once my special magic starts wearing off… my body has fewer and fewer of the 100 eyeballs I was once lucky enough to grow. It starts to look like I’ll be the one getting vaporized soon, so I need to get evasive and clever.
Applying to work at Acme Bread Company which is a big multi-level modern building, glass, columns, and white walls. I encounter Mary (from long ago at the PacTrades hostel) in an art installation in the ground floor. While I’m there I unexpectedly get a phone call from Chicken. He starts in on a speech about how the time has come for he and I to settle the past, make up and all that. It’s such twisted wish-fulfillment claptrap that I actually break out of my dream in order to shut it down.
Back in the dream, I’m working across the street from Acme Bread at a more overgrown/neglected industrial building, I watch the company car’s futuristic white plastic dashboard light up the underside of the car through the dashboard as I drive away. Incredible overkill for a safety feature, reminds me of the F-35’s $400,000 helmet that lets a pilot see through the plane.
A run-down rustbucket of a bathroom at a friend’s house, maybe Don & Tracy, maybe Uncle Robert & Aunt Carol. I peer the over top of the wall’s half-height window/mirror a look into the exquisitely messy bedroom of some punk rock artsy girl. She comes in and notices me, comes over friendly-like but with a glint of challenge in her eye. Reminds me of Koe a bit.
Outside the Fartpartment, on the sidewalk of the Mission, I’m helping unload a bus. We have to rescue Mabel’s stuff that’s been left on the curb in disarray. Perhaps echoes of the occasion when Mabel moved out from downstairs and a crew including Lorelei left all sorts of interesting stuff out overnight, only to get collected for the dump the next morning. I wish I’d rescued all of it.
On a bike, escorting Chicken to the hospital after the birth of his second child. I find it difficult to pedal up the ramp, and I’m actually escorting him less and less. We make it but I wait outside with my bike.
Lynae tells me a rat has died, calling it Scrap at first (Stimp?), then rat #1. When she finally admits that our rat Henry died in the night, I’m instantly bawling. We just had such a nice time playing together on a chair, I even read an article about him. I wake up exclaiming “but he wasn’t even sick!!” That morning at breakfast we discovered that one of our fish had, in fact, died in the night.
Waiting under a tree for the apocalypse to be over. I’m mostly in denial about it, “it won’t be that bad, or that long”. I’ve stockpiled soft drinks. One night, I must I hide inside my neighbors’ converted rest stop bathrooms, plastic panels enclosing it from the wind. I just barely close the doors while a killer cop stalking the neighborhood searches the place. I manage to lock myself behind the supply closet door. He kills everyone else.
After that, I decide living away from [former] civilization is safer. I hole up in a country house in a small coastal community isolated from the damage of society. We’re glad to have no idea what’s going on, we just see the consequences — like a massive locust swarm passing through one day.
Our jungle island becomes an all-male commune. In the center stands a statue of a crab, whose long, colorful, plastic eyebrows I pose into a cartoonish expression of anger. It’s the same place as the restroom, years later. The “Crab People” chant starts up in my head. I show a video to a fellow commune member who reminds me of Vince Saunders or April Arcus, a video I shot just off our shore of a baby crab person. They watch, reflected, in a crevice-shaped mirror embedded into the hillside, scratched into squares. I leave via the narrow café on our northern exposure, eating a lone lost French fry left on a table.
In the backyard of our property, a steep pine-covered hill leads up to the neighbor’s building. It’s somehow the last address on the street, without any street leading to it. They yell down at us trying to get some kind of assistance. We gather around the backyard pond, someone leads us to shout their name all at the same time: “Hot Chocolate!” Thus amplified, we proceed to pack up their deliveries, and I trudge up the sandy slope.
I expect it to find a vineyard-like rich-people estate of stone walls, but it’s more of a spacious modern apartment tower. I carry two deliveries in oversized Munchery bags. Ring the buzzer of apartment 517, just around the corner from the actual door (confusing, a bit). It’s Dav Yagunuma’s place, and he’s pleased to see me as it’s been awhile. My other delivery is for a game design studio, the door covered in hand-scrawled notes. It’s the studio that makes the Myst games. Suitably puzzling, they have a peephole on their door labeled “channel” and a note saying if you wish to “alter the terms of your entranceship” look through the peephole and figure things out.
I never looked, but somehow I know the other side was like a steampunk café/lounge from another dream, 2nd floor catwalks, leather benches, Don Bruce in fine regalia. The riches of old San Francisco, perhaps.
Kid is happy to eat replicated (irradiated) mammoth meat. There’s a feather in a shotgun, the kid mistakes it to mean it’s for him to control and change things. It’s just a gift! Next stage in this game is little stars or circles in a form that get bubbled in.
In an unfinished wood building, I live with four other adults in a 20 x 20 room split four ways lengthwise. Aislinn is there. We mostly pretend we have our own spaces, but one day I blurt out how absurd and frustrating it is that the landlord has split it like this. Outside in the hall there’s a poster framed in plastic mounted to the floor. I’m usually complaining about it because I think it’s dumb since it routinely gets slippery when it rains.
A hotel / food counter up a winding hill. Strangely Victorian and Modern. Go there with friends (Ais, Reecy) but I remember it from long in my past. I order a big plate of various fried food served in styrofoam to-go container. Before I leave I return a distinctive flat clock I took from a stairway when I was very small — back then I didn’t understand it probably broke off from something. But I immediately recognize things when I came up the grand entry stairway which, Victorian/Modern again, had an odd ’70s green shag carpet paired with Golden Age woodwork. This is an odd reason, but I think this dream happened because I smelled a bizarrely familiar apple body cleanser at a Korean beauty store — like something I played with when I was very small.
Staring at monstrous face, like the Pan’s Labyrinth pale man or tentacle-faced Davy Jones. It’s supposedly my Dad’s face but I remember it as being oddly still. I reach out to touch it, coincidentally Lynae is sleeping towards me and I awake with my hands over her face.
Wandering through an autumnal neighborhood, there’s a strange abandoned mansion next to a stepped ice hill or pyramid. I sneak in through elegant Art Deco Gehry-style (or Mucha-style) windows. On the white-carpeted central stairway I easily overcome a barricade blocking off a craftsman-style kitchen, a barricade with elaborate written warnings. The house, even after you leave, is cursed to put you into a personal hellscape — a tortuous existence meant to frighten others from temptation. But the curse is that you are “just ok”, forever. It’s a curse of moderation and I’m content to explore ice mazes and sloped game-courses with friends and strangers. I’m… totally ok. I suppose that’s why it’s not such a great haunted house.
Later, inside a big building run by a friend, I discover they’ve made a cozy dark hostel with a tiki theme. Many errant reviews of hamburgers start showing up in my dream backups (just completed that job late last night). There’s Rick’s snarky comments from Rick and Morty, too.
In a wide upstairs apartment, I find myself in bed, suddenly noticing the remarkable beauty of a girl I know. (Perhaps out of superstition, I’m not saying who it was — but she wouldn’t be surprised to know I found her beautiful). Perfectly proportioned, and simply fascinating. I’m somehow allowed to just keep looking….
But when I touch her it’s frustrating. Trying to massage her, I can’t hear her feedback or instructions. Instead I end up cleaning a congealed mass of sweet potato/quinoa/smoothie.
My wife kisses me (to wake me up perhaps?) and I don’t recognize its a person. Like, it happens, but that there’s a person who does it simply isn’t understood.
Seems unrelated, but also: there was an escaped convict guy crossing a bridge across a bay, careening off the bridge onto New York’s shoreline. He and I shoot buzzsaws out our hands (as you do).