Month: October 2020

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Dream Journal

What’s Your Opinion on Rat Autostatus?

Outside the back door of my cozy ground floor apartment, a neighboring building has recently constructed a gravel path. Opening the back door of our kitchen today I discover they’ve expanded it, from merely passing by the front our place, all the way so the gravel runs against the back wall of our kitchen. It’s another parking spot, with no barriers at all — cars could drive right through the wall. To compromise, I negotiate a window to be installed in that wall. When the wall is opened we find there’s a window frame already built into the structure, which I scoff at, and opine that we should’ve had one there all along.

It’s a lovely day outside. Near the other building, I spot a 3-wheeled white BMW which has been parked (or drifted) onto a fence. I move it off the common path, a bit derisively and vindictively, and it settles in front of a realty office. The grill cracks a modest hole in the glass door.

Discussing strange and noteworthy oddities in city layout. From a map high above, I zoom the group’s view into a house here in San Francisco perfectly surrounded by a circular complex of inaccessible military buildings. Abruptly I’m inside the location myself, a tiny community set in an odd miniature forest park — for intelligence agents or staging — where I can’t see the horizon of city buildings.

Boarding a first class airline cabin, which has been adapted now as just a small, unremarkable room. I have a huge duffel bag to stuff under the seat, with nitrous empties in one side pocket. No one seems to mind but I still worry. They get lined up in a long row at the front of the cabin until someone (me, I think) realizes as soon as the plane lurches forward they’ll be scattered everywhere.

I try to convince my sister Alia to quietly help me gather them handful by handful. Alia is engaged singing a two-part Viking harmony dirge, which I join in as a third, middle harmony to get her attention. While she’s deciding I come up with a algorithmic method to get them fastest. I don’t have time to implement it before I awake, but I remember asking, in terms optimizing the algorithm, “what’s your opinion on Rat Autostatus[] ?” A variable I cannot explain, nor am I sure anyone understood me asking.

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Dream Journal

Medieval Nemeses & Nana’s Bedroom

An elevator to your underground secret base. Biological material grows through cracks into the inside, like the fungal contamination of the City of Ambergris (from Jeff Vandermeer stories). I realize that every time you complete the most recent mission, a  new monstrous baby extrudes from the ceiling.

Two small medieval-age kingdoms sit along the bank of what looks like a wide moat. They’re always in conflict, yet always in balance, each making up what the other lacks. If one of these nemeses should ever fall, a new nemesis twin takes its place. The society is stable and thus doesn’t change or advance.

A full-size pink latex mat is under my nana’s bed in our childhood home. I’m able to finally squeeze under the bed to try to get it out. My brother Patrick is there, and I’m trying to convince him to help me, and there’s something to do with him being gay — trans, actually, but it’s unclear.

In Nana’s sitting room, next door, I break up with an ex of mine — yet again. This time it’s easier as I’m part of an intelligence service. They take care of all her follow-up issues after I’ve told her we’re breaking up. I note how much easier this is with the help of an authority.

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Dream Journal

Brachiosaur Pal and Palace

A girl and her Brachiosaur friend explore a rough, wild beach together (reminiscent of Tuba and Hazel from Infinity Train.) She climbs down a steep, near-vertical sand wall. When he tries to follow, the wall collapses with a grainy crush, followed by child-like laughter.

In line waiting for the elevator in a big palace of entertainment, somewhere you might find in Reno, Nevada. At the top of its tower, I get the chance to sleep in a Brachiosaur skull. But when I’m in the hallway outside, on my way to the lone bed, I look out the window and realize it’s probably far too large to be a real skull — or am I small?

Waiting in line again, standing ankle-deep in tiny candy, like Nerds or Indian candied fennel seeds (mukhwas). Towards the end of the line, some bigger candy has seeped under the wall and into the walking path. The rules say we can take any of the smaller candy for free, but I sneak a few larger lozenge-shaped nuggets in my bag before the door checker of the room we’ve been waiting in line for.

I’m told to draw a ticket, which is a chance to win a prize. In the basket on the desk, I clearly glimpse a gold-rimmed one in the shuffle. Skeptical that it could be this easy, I reach in and grab it, to which the staff feign delight. I’m a little put off, to be honest, and the prize isn’t actually something I want. Now I’m quite happy I stole the bigger candies.

My wife uses my prize to take a free ride on one of the uncommon amusements, a motion-simulator mini-plane set in window frame in a wall that plays a black-and-white video game. I realize watching her play that this whole place is World War 2 themed, which I’d oddly missed until just now.

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Dream Journal

Last Day of School

basketballs on court

Enacting last days of an ancient invasion between two peoples, visiting a string of gates which jump to different reenactment zones, stories of the war. Lofty snowbanks, rocky canyon passes, battle plans, gruff male voices, muscular insectoids (they look like the Krogan from Mass Effect).

It’s the last day of the school year, at a place that feels like my middle school. They have us sit at other’s desks and read aloud from their journals of that year — an exercise in “seeing though other’s eyes”, so we’re told. But it feels very much like tricking us into spying on ourselves.

The drama teacher at my high school, Mr. Thelan, is lecturing after the last bell of that year has passed. He hasn’t even told his assembled students they could go, if they wanted. I would guess it’s a test or object lesson for his theater students: that actors can be held longer than in their interests, by their love or fascination or even novelty with the story. I myself am lounging behind this herd of a class because there’s comfy chairs and internet on the stage. One guy tries to argue with me for being there instead of a class and I have to quote the school district handbook about when “school year” is defined.

Digging through drawers at the side of the gym, making sure I don’t leave any of my stuff (clothes or information, etc.) since I’m not going to be here again. I’m asked about moving a pair of giant owls constructed over the year from a massive amounts of wooden boards. I start to give an answer, but the answer becomes “this being 2020 I don’t even think we can donate it to Urban Ore.” I resign myself to the idea of someone else deciding if they’re lost.

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Dream Journal

The Kid in the Apartment

Escorted inside an elevator to be shown it’s “particular” controls. The up button causes it to just keep going up until someone presses the down button. But, you also must time it such that you hit it on the floor above where you wish to land, and it will then descend one floor.

A Mormon family lives on the floor I shakily arrive at. They have a younger boy, shaved bald head, playing alone. I’ve been called to help this family with this child, as I possess a certain way of talking with them, a way of perceiving their true motives. He tries to manipulate me, a technique he’s practiced on all his family.
His powers I consider extraordinary. This is rare, but also dangerous for everyone around him.

I smash his toy as a gesture, a test, but though he clearly understandz, he shows hardly any reaction. This child (if it truly is a child) is preternaturally self-controlled. Beyond many adults. I think I recognize it, and so name it: a Psychopath.

Categories
Dream Journal

My Re-Assembled Apartment, On Mars

Front gate of my building. An unfamiliar Asian hoodlum-looking guy demands I push in his gate code for him: 626. Feel like I must sneak into my own home afterwards, to learn what apartment is his. Clambering outside of the spiral stucco wall; a view of a wide green backyard lawn beyond the scaffolding support beams. There’s no railing, but through tiny castle-like windows I can regularly peer in to navigate my way up.

One apartment has a broad sun-facing window with only two chairs in it, with a large dropcloth backdrop with plants hanging on it. The people are similar to some I know, Allegra, Creech, SF-adjacent folk. Empty glass aquaria are stacked behind the blacked out window, with a single long blanket trailing through all them. I spot a few drying mushrooms under there.

Then: to Mars. Somehow I offend my wife’s mushroom dealer (who she’s been texting recently) when I stare at him beside a bed, not knowing if he’s real, and trying to imagine his face as an older me with gray hair. He doesn’t speak though; he’s too shy. He’s like my cousin, Gabe. In the sky, and on my conveniently motion-synced watch screen, I view the tightening spiral trajectory of his return ship to earth.

I’m wearing an unusual two-level belt: the top part green, the bottom red. My wife takes off red part and squeezes it out, making it yellow. Supposedly a symbol of feminine renewal or something.

In a tower, in a room near the top of the tower, a group of black kids treat me as if I’m Bart Simpson (maybe I am?). An odd family feeling pervades, as if we all know this is only because we’re all together on Mars. But perhaps for different times and reasons.

It’s a rather wonky tower, a group construction project made from 100% scavenged parts — some from a creative reuse place like Urban Ore, some even some from of my apartment (I see my own bedframe post with the electric blanket controller still attached, and feel a a twinge of sadness/nostalgia). Frustratingly, even though I’m on Mars I have the same view out the window, the same corner here in the Mission District, with the same laundromat.

On the tower’s top floor, I can see the freeway traffic moving below, and our tower itself moving on freeway. The vibrations here on top are terribly strong; I wish we could’ve have used metal. Yet we’re still in the process of digging out a pool — structured like an inverted tent, a frame of PVC parts. But we discover it can’t be slid into the dirt, so we’ll have to undig it and start again. This exact pronouncement is made our Patrick Stewart leader figure, more like Q actually, sitting in judgement on a floating chair atop a pike.

Later we have to improvise a new navigation protocol on our spaceship (Enterprise-like, with shovel-spade front and flat-sided shape) in order to avoid murder-class planets. Funnily enough the algorithm still keeps suggesting homicide-class planets (sounds just as fun), which the crew has to manually decline.