Month: May 2020

Categories
Dream Journal

Waited till Bedtime to Write This One Down

I am, after a long hiatus where I was kicked out of the in-group, back on Chicken John’s bus. We’re driving at night, sleeping in shifts, on some mission more serious than the usual Chicken bus trip. It seems he’s chosen to ignore the past between us, but while I’m fussing about with various jobs on the bus I realize that while I’m relieved to be back with my friends, I hardly trust him at all. There’s a soft, eerie glow which under-lights the driver’s seat that accentuates this.

After a wake cycle in the early morning, perhaps 7 am, the dream is echoed, reflected, continued. A group of me, my wife, Rich, perhaps others are trying to cross the Bay Bridge in Rich’s RV. There’s a closure, or a slowdown, or shutdown, and I end up re-routing us on a residential road through Marin, which is located about where Treasure Island would be on a normal map. The road turns triangular along a marina where homeowners have semi-privatized the road, and eventually we run into a yellow house which has an addition built blocking the road itself. I can tantalizingly peek between the corners to where the road beyond, but on examining the map zoomed-in I see only more privatized, road-blocking, rich-people nonsense.

I’m now sneaking about, avoiding some kind of mindless hunter-police. I’m breaking into my own home, a sandstone-colored villa. I parkour over a corner wall into the backyard, similar to the narrow gap from the yellow house earlier. I bypass a few armed guards by wending around their sight-lines. Now I’m in the long backroom, a wine cellar with sunlit arched pane windows. I crawl gecko-like along the stone wall, avoiding the searching guards, and find the alcove of the hidden room. The stray thought occurs to me, “I should really change this code, it’s too easy” before I tap the top left stone and it recedes, opening the false wall into my sanctuary/safe room. It’s a chill dark movie lounge with little colored lights and popcorn and a home theater. Like a cozy fabric-lined cave. I was really happy to spend time there.

Categories
Dream Journal

First Date with Feral

I finally ask Feral out and she says yes. I spend a decent time planning on her coming over. We makeout hot and heavy for a while, getting familiar with each other. We take a break so I can introduce her to my parents (we may be at their house, I may live there). I poke my mom, who looks exactly like my pet naked dumbo rat Nüdl, and ask if they’re starting to feel sleepy for bedtime. Someone asks how long its been since the makeouts, and I check my watch — which is the same as the actual Galaxy Fit I’ve started wearing daily — and to my surprise it’s transcribed our conversation. Perhaps out of anxiety or eagerness to appear cool, I start telling the story of how I found it in a backpack abandoned on the side of the road on Twin Peaks, how the only identifiable information in it was a doctor’s note, how I wrote the doctor and only heard back several months later and the owner told me to keep it… all this is true, in fact. At some point I ignore someone interrupting me by repeating my own name, which I now sort of wish I hadn’t. I don’t even know if Feral will sleep over, or if we’ll sleep together, but it’s a mature and grounded headspace where we all accept things as they are.

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Dream Journal

Flight to Florida

On a plane to Florida. Me and a friend on a nearly empty flight, all the way at the back. I spread out over to the far row from our adjacent seats since there’s room, but have trouble wit buckling my seat belt (reminds me of the scene in Jurassic Park).

We’ve never been to Florida and though it’s hard to make out anything at speed out the windows, it turns out the plane is a turboprop. Flying low over the marshes on approach, I see some plants are labeled with “do not remove – this plant is useful and has a job”.

We land on a plant-carpeted stretch of ground and my buddy and I are both mystified at the natural beauty and excited to stretch our legs. When we are about a minute away from returning to the aircraft the pilots, irritated, do a little car honk to let us know it’s time to get back in. Embarrassed, we somehow missed the part of the announcement where this was just a stopover.

Categories
Letters

💌

I really regret if I hurt you, which it sounds like I did. I admit I base most of my friend-interactions as an adult on the kind of playful fun I had as a kid, and it works a lot of the time. The inner child and all that. Except now most of us have better jokes and our own money and greater aptitude in not being unintentionally shitty to each other. Kids are, like, monsters ain’t it.

But the inner children thing has never quite worked the same with you and me, has it? The thing is, on my better days — ok, on my best days — I can be the kind of kid that’s a bit annoying, a bit pretentious, but occasionally spouts some weird-ass corner-case trillionth-percentile never-yet-spoke-upon-planet-Earth sentence that unfurls a teensy part of reality you never suspected was there. The luck of being that kid? Mixed bag. Some days, hellz yeah… other days… hopefully you can relate to this feeling, because YOU KNOW you’ve been that kid for me.

(First date, morning after, walking back, “I almost feel like I should’ve warned you. I have this thing where I’m a catalyst for people, they meet me and stuff starts changing really fast for them. I don’t know why.”)

So if you find yourself occasionally wondering why it may seem I (or others?) view you as alien yet akin, fascinating yet unfathomable, worthy yet disparaged, or any other false dichotomies we even label ourselves as sometimes, remember this:

I. Fuckin. Love you. Ok?

I love you. Fuck it.

As cheesy as it is, I love that you’re alive and that I met you and that you’re so damn… whatever the hell you are. I love your sacred immutable being-ness. I also love you in that I’m sexually attracted to you, but you already knew that. I do love you though.

Not trying to make stuff awkward here, I promise I’ll stop in a minute, but just let’s agree: it’s probably as difficult to love someone else as it is to love yourself. Coincidentally, both Eckhart Tolle and Wedding Crashers (2005) assert that true love is the soul’s recognition of itself in another. Which in case you haven’t been reading carefully haha, that means WE ARE FUCKED

WE ARE ALL FUCKED, [NAME]
ALL OF US. FUCKED, FUCKED, FUCKED, FOREVER

It took me so much processing to grasp the possible intention[s] of your message — it’s literally so distant an interpretation from what I thought I was saying — though I affirm my frequent, thoughtful consideration of your reactions — yet somehow this whole over-edited notepad monstrosity is still the most linear response I could come up with?! Whence and wherefore hath skewed we awry, I known’t. But here we are.

I’m afraid of losing you again,
but I’m also pleased to talk with you,
but I also grapple with expectations,
but I also just wanna maintain cuz world be fucked rn,
but I know it’s almost always productive to intellectually engage with you,
but you do actually think rather differently than me,
but I also believe that’s ultimately bollocks,
but what the fuck would even BE the answer anyway,
and is the question actually just “hey, are you fucking with me?”

If so here is my gift to you, to both of us, for this day and for every day.

Here it is.

I am no more fucking with you as I am fucking with myself.

Same goes. I still ❤️ you no matter what.

💌 Boop. 💌

Categories
Dream Journal

Like I’m a Wealthy Australian Emigré

While dining in a Mexican restaurant, I order this grab bag thing off the menu which is basically waitress’ choice. I sit and wait a long time. Eventually I leave my table and spot a bag of candy left absent-mindedly on a stove. Finding the waitress, I ask if she forgot it — to which she answers, no, she already brought it. I show her the thing on the stove, and show her there’s nothing in my shoulder bag. She seems unperturbed and the situation never resolves.

There’s one day while I’m visiting Australia, a day without Lynae, and out of boredom or wistfulness or just ability, I pay to take a helicopter ride twice. You can see this in the photos from that day. It’s a little disappointing to not even be on drugs, not have anything “heightened”. In fact I didn’t even pack a nitrous cracker, haven’t had anything while I’m here. The moment where I’m trying to wake up, I open one eye and I’m honestly surprised to be in San Francisco.

Back in the hypnagogic state and I’m in such a cavalier mood I ask a girl I semi-know to see her tits. She does a teasing dance, pulling her shirt in at the middle, then turns around and pours me a glass of booze from a bottle held in her clenched butt cheeks. Novel experience, that.

Categories
Dream Journal

Cymbal Sounds and Buried Glass

Watching TV in master bedroom of old family house, I’m aged as I am presently but with my family relationships as they were when I was in high school, maybe. I’m watching TV, a refreshing change as it’s been so long. I note that it’s like scrying, you don’t know what you’re going to get when you flip channels. I add 100 to whatever’s on and end up seeing part of an interview by someone named Leon Turkas, or Leone Turkes, some older funk-era black musician I remember to have one song by (note: no such artist was found upon waking).

From a viewpoint floating above San Francisco, I see that there are many more repurposed or semi-abandoned military buildings than I realized before. I spot one in particular, cracked wood and partially overgrown with spiky vines, lying between a major road and a parking lot for two other buildings — just out there, waiting to be explored.

Hanging out with my family, my little brother Chris (who is maybe 7-10 in this dream?) asks if I will let him practice massage. Lying on my back, he works on something he calls “windowpanes”, which are my upper pectorals. This goes on a while; he stops, someone says something to the effect “you should be good”, “you’ve gotten enough”, etc.

Now at an outdoor pool near the ocean, I rant at my brothers about the kind of people who make palindromes. They’re the kind of people who need something to occupy their minds, holding and manipulating multiple simultaneous variables, running an excessively complicated algorithm just to burn CPU cycles on their head-computer. Fucking untrustworthy mentats who don’t want to be alone with themselves. Well, I thought the rant was funny.

One of us brothers makes the sound of a cymbal with his mouth, a clean shhhhhhimm-m-m sound, as a comment during conversation. Chris follows it with a sound like sh-sh-sh-sh-sh, which my Dad says doesn’t sound like a cymbal at all. I come to his defense, saying it’s a cymbal with a lot of shimmer on it, which I feel somehow proud to understand and point out.

I wander away from them for a bit to explore. The pool and the beach are a bit like the ruins of Sutro Baths. In the middle distance I see what looks like smoke rising from a low, rocky outcrop. A few others notice it too. On the way to investigate I notice a dead whale on the beach, upside down, with spotty fur and ears. It has fuzzy white tufts over it, and I realize the smoke in the distance is actually steam, and it’s so cold outside frost has begun to form.

Satisfied there is no danger, I practically trip over an odd-shaped item half-buried in the grey-ish/brown-ish beach sand. I pull it out and it’s an elaborate sealed glass container, radially symmetric with alternate bulges and necks and ridges, inexplicably filled with what looks like a mixture of seawater and beach sand. There are a few intact ones I pull out before reaching some broken pieces underneath, which (since I’m already wearing gloves) I set aside to be disposed of properly. A family with small kids pass by as I’m working on this and the little girl in pigtails (maybe 5-6 years old) reaches out to feel the glass objects, though I warn her not to touch the broken ones. She defiantly rubs her hand on them anyway, and I look up and realize it’s a black family. They pointedly don’t react. I’m left wondering whether there must’ve been some black/white dynamic even from a kid that age, some “no white man gonna tell me what to do” aspect.

Woke up with “Mr. Blue Sky” as covered by Pomplamoose in my head. Surprised my wife by playing it in the living room remotely before I joined her in the living room. Ha!

Categories
Dream Journal

Keanu’s Midnight Movie Favor

On the top floor of an abandoned school, the walkways are completely inundated with trash. You can see even more of it layering the ground in hills from this high vantage, and this is enough of a novelty that people visit and it becomes an attraction. The waist-high concrete walls of the round corner balcony have been given elaborate murals, inspirational remnants from it’s time as a (elementary?) school. There’s a post-apocalyptic teen movie vibe.

I’m approached by a middle-age bearded guy asking me to do him a personal favor. Surprised, I realize it’s Keanu Reeves. I manage to do the favor, which involves closing the doors to (his?) movie theater near the mural, at the start of the Rocky Horror midnight showing. Makes sense, as I can imagine what the reaction of a packed midnight movie would be to spotting Keanu at the door. He thanks me and gives me some sort of token.

Similar to how right now, during quarantine, one doesn’t make outings as much, in this dream only cashless order-online places are open. I visit two such stores near the far end of a long mall, somewhere I feel I’ve dreamed of before — although I didn’t even think of it as a mall this time. The stores are clean and novel, merchandise displayed on floor-to-ceiling shelves, but for the moment they mostly only have shampoos and other bath stuff in stock. I remember there’s an Amazon store somewhere in the center, and make my way there while carrying a rolling barstool on my back. I lean on this occasionally during on the walk there, and no one seems to mind although I sometimes reckon I’m too young for it.

Skip ahead and I’m with a redheaded friend, headed somewhere together through twisty, rugged dirt paths. We pass a group of women talking about a place called the Fergiles, a group of islands I deduce. I walk ahead a little ways while she remains behind in a small hollow. My sibling Patrick is now with me, and we notice the end of a log has had its end made into a fairy cottage, a gnome home, in the shape of an Ewok’s face. I start to open it but he warns that if it’s anything like the others he’s seen, it probably has a lizard hiding in it (a Betta lizard? like a Betta fish).