Month: July 2020

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Dream Journal

Cacophony Fair Complications

A Cacophony Society event, tents covertly set up in an elementary school playground — my elementary school, as it happens (the side parking lot where I fell on my ass rollerskating). I’m there helping John Law, Mikl Em, and others break down from the event, but there’s soo much stuff, taking soo long. All while remaining undetected.

A search ensues to find a place to safely leave 3 pet guinea pigs. Eventually I settle on a small, almost cubby-size room in a sheltered school hallway, room 17D, while I return to pack up the rest.

Sitting on a stairway watching a show as the event continues during our breakdown, a lethargically drunk Robin Williams slumps directly ahead of me. He lurches awake and insists he has to get his friend water, knocking down and shattering a glass water pitcher that happened to be in front of him. I start cleaning up the broken glass, and a very diligent 5-year-old joins me to help. Their parent then asks me to help put them to bed. The parent mentions “the sandman” needing to put sand in their eye, and I quite unstrategically ask if the kid if they know about sandman… a.k.a. boogeyman. Immediately I cringe at my mistake, but manage to still get the kid to bed.

For awhile I’m sitting watching another show (maybe put on by my friend Spy) and a guy sitting next to me informs me that my palm is covered in blood. I’ve known the whole time of course, ignoring the injury as I just don’t care, but thank him by saying “oh yeah mate” — somehow being Australian makes it both funny and apropos. But i still make to go clean it up, while dropping my blood in big wet patches on the ground.

Later, I’m positioned in front of a tall row of lockers. I’m confronted by a pair of blonde, white supremacist twins (akin to the racist teen musical duo Prussian Blue perhaps) who are trying to make me jealous. This is almost certainly on account of my rejecting them for their regressive ideology. Two guys I know they recently met brag with bluster of their heavy makeouts with the twins. With a keen eye though, I can tell that the red on the twin’s cheeks isn’t flushing, only rouge. Not makeouts, but makeup. They seem crestfallen.

I finally go to retrieve the guinea pigs from the petsitter in 17D. When I get there, though, he’s not disposed to have us open the door. It seems he just got the three guinea pigs down for a nap together in a cute little shopping bag. Smiling, I say I’m fine to come back.

Categories
Dream Journal

Massive Handmade Map in Quiet-time Classroom

It’s third grade, and I’m starting a painting assignment in the last period of class — a massive mural-sized map. At first I paint on large paper at my desk, then moving to the walls of the classroom. Making the land using smooth strokes of light red against red. Switching to a dark purplish blue for the seas, and aged vintage yellow for other empires of the world beyond my knowledge. The border of the colors is arbitrary, artistic. I experiment, blending darker parts into the sea to make it look deeper. The recommendation was to use blots of red, but it blends terribly.

The teacher leaves through a side door to grab something. Since the door is in my row I have to move aside. As she comes back, I hand her a pair of sunglasses I found lying on the ground there, telling her she dropped them. She claims not to recognize them.

During quiet time at the end I survey my finished work, with the goal of convincing her to let me seal it. I only need to ask her the finish: matte, satin, or glossy. Her car is parked inside the classroom, and I circle around it, noting its make as a Capri, a “Capri Sun.” I look up the car on a website; it’s related to a ’94 Tirder, which is Scandinavian-style word for fending off collisions. She won’t let me ask about either, as it’s still quiet time.

A girl complains in the front row — which now appears opposite of where it was — and tries to impart how worldly she is; needing to tan, that she’s only slept with 10 people. Teacher proclaims “if you’re 9 and have already slept with 10 people, how do you feel about a visit to the school psychiatrist?” This elicits a sigh and shuts down the complaining. The girl acts as if she was talking about her dog sleeping with 10 other dogs.

I’m floating/wandering through a simulation of my neighborhood. It’s 4th of July, nighttime, and I have a special appreciation for its uniqueness — the colors of lights flashing everywhere as I pass through corridors, watching them reflect off windows of closed-up music shops and grocery stores. There’s one large simulated power station which draws energy from the physics engine (in the same way a real-world power generator would). I recognize it as a facility I’ve made a delivery to before. I witness as one of the explosions spawns inside the locked-up doors and begins an explosive chain reaction. I’m the only one right there, and I happen to know how to get inside, and mount rescue efforts even though it means I might be destroyed in the simulation.

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Dream Journal

Return to School/Work: Naardviot or Naardveet

A multi-stage heist to steal a baby (or wealth) in broad daylight. It repeats, the same beats with variations of setting, dozens of times. A grouchy burly male criminal, a heavy cart going off the side of the road, and opportunistic me. A sci-fi Star-Wars-like fleet of floating swarming police assault craft, of AT-AT like bubbles, zooms away from a post nearby foiling bystanders hopes of intervention.

The last repetition, we’re stealing the baby/treasure out of the mother’s body. A gesture made fingering to an unexpected hole in the mom. A blank beat, an empty space, the pattern finally breaks and our criminal gang is dismembered and transmogrified. I see my dream character as the female protagonist of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, just her doll-like torso and head, floating down into a watery abyss trailing tendrils of blood as she rapidly exsanguinates. The question sits there at the end of the dream: what was different this time, what went wrong?

My first day returning to work as a delivery driver after a long break. I feel different, pulling up and parking my motorcycle near the assemblage of other vehicles. I carry a folded-in cardboard box under my arm, two of my smallest pet rats inside. I naively try placing a delivery bag in there too, and hastily pull it out when the ratties predictably find it (but before anyone notices).

It’s my first day back at school, too. I’m in a classroom where the teacher is demonstrating how to hang string lights above a blackboard, but giving wrong information. I smoothly take over and show how to correct braid them so the strands stay together. She admonishes me by asking “something-something to not” and I wittily joke as if she said “to knot”, still trying to act as though I’m not overriding her. She pivots to teaching a lesson of describing me by an insulting term, akin to”North Idiot”, or Naardviot. I’m pretty sure she actually meant Naardveet, though by now I can’t say anything without her authority feeling threatened.

A girl I don’t know is sitting on a locker room bench talking to herself in Korean in a semi-crazed tone. But I can understand her, and see the danger for her, so sit nearby and begin talking too. I begin improvising as if we’re having a normal conversation, miming eye movements as well.

Still sitting nearby, I change from my 2nd school period outfit into that for 3rd period, without taking off my pants. When I see the pants I believed were white on me, they have huge overlapping layers of colorful stains on them. I don’t have enough time to change again and I have to make a compromise one way or the other.

Categories
Dream Journal

Body Snatching, a Tricky Family Role

It’s a big budget music video parody shoot, on the caliber of Saturday Night Live. The gag is that there’s too many words to fit, lots of nonsense scatting and repetition of catchphrases. It has to be cut early because the singer’s pun of “pear of genes” has been ruined by colored pineapples in the background instead of pears.

I’m a speedboat valet, participating in a training program which shows how to correctly give up your life battoning down doors during a hurricane. I’m with another bro-type dude, and we later sink together into a tumultuous sea giving each other fistbumps.

In Asian-feeling apartment quarters, taking possession of bodies, and playing different roles. An Uncle Iroh-like character from Avatar: Last Airbender. Taking a body and talking to my real-life aunt, but though I need to accomplish a task, I suspect I’m failing to play the role well enough — she may begin to believe I’m not her sister, my mom.

A load of cookies on the stove, the recipe includes letting them float in water to seal in flavor. I have an internal argument with the mom-spirit, where she keeps insisting how I’m doing it wrong. In faux anger I pretend I’m about to slap a stylish black girl with silvery metallic bangs, but she reacts somehow the right way. So I ask her why she reacted that way, and she answers, sensibly “because I thought you were going to slap me”. I say, “if that’s the way you reacted to me about to slap you, you reacted correctly, because I didn’t slap you.” Hmm.