Month: June 2026

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Dream Journal

Long Bus to Coachella

Based on someone’s explicit advice, I’m standing in the street watching a video billboard. It’s an announcement, made by a public broadcaster like PBS. There’s a certain part I’m watching for — perhaps a part someone I know is in, or that I’m in. It’s weird watching a billboard on purpose though… and watching its video all the way through.

I get to visit the home of my old friend and roommate Emily W. It’s a long single-wide trailer sitting diagonally in the middle of the block, without any other homes nearby. She owns it outright (I feel an upwelling of pride even though we haven’t seen each other in a long time and didn’t part on great terms). I seem to remember dropping by at a pretty time of day with the sun low in the sky.

I arrive at an Indian council meeting. I sit at my spot at the long table fiddling with a promotional sticker left there near the placemat, trying to discreetly signal to my wife. I immediately interrupt the meeting doing this. The elder speaker/chairman is assertively aware and asks politely but directly if we need to go. I’m embarrassed but we actually do, of course. While leaving, I gather my clothes off the floor and stuff them in my large backpack. It’s my wife’s tall rucksack and well-accustomed to being forcibly stuffed with large volumes.

My wife has signed us up to do a delivery far south in the long desert valley where I grew up, all the way to Coachella near the shores of the Salton Sea. On the frigging bus. I have no illusions — I already know how bad an idea this is before we set off, but it’s just what we have to do. It’s a long, boring ride.

At some point I lose time. One moment it was a bit after 1pm; then I look and nighttime stars are outside.

But, my favorite part: there’s a girl seated next to me on bus seat who keeps bumping my hand. To my surprise I realize that it’s Alexx S., who I thought a lot about in Italy on account of her being half Italian. I’m unsure if my wife, seated on the other side of me on the seat, planned this somehow. I smirk and ask Alexx, “you think just because you’re my longtime childhood friend you can ignore customary boundaries?” We make out for a long time on the bus seat together, gently communicating through our tongues, learning about each other. I haven’t done that for the first time with someone in a long time. I’m uncharacteristically hesitant sometimes, perhaps second-guessing what I’m sharing about myself, or if I’m sharing it to my best ability. We’ve waited so long… I was friends with this girl and attracted to her in like 8th grade.

Watching on the map as bus passes down the coast of the Salton Sea, past where we were supposed to get off in Coachella. The bus comes back around, but now if we get off it might be going onward which means waiting on another bus (hopefully) in an hour. Several of us get off in the dusty isolated bus stop and beg the driver to stay there an hour, take his lunch earlier. Relying on the other bus is someone no once wants to do. I set off down a sparse desert town road trying to see if I can work something out.

The dream ends just like that, still in the middle of a story. A very active and bothered moment, a moment of annoyance and possible peril. We still have to deliver the package, after all. It’s a lot easier to remember the dream and piece everything together though, on account of all the sweet kissing.

Categories
Dream Journal

Cleaned Out the Back Room

I’ve cleaned and reorganized some rooms of my apartment, including the back room where I do most of my creative work. The back room in particular feels much larger and eerily empty. The far wall, with the outside windows, now has some orderly central decorations (flowers or hubcaps or bosses pleasantly arranged) and a light nautical style. Things that are still saved are put away in lockers, and the room is so large it’s bizarre. Calming, but almost unsettling. There have been dreams like this before in this room.

Long story short, I rearranged and cleaned out my sewing bin today.

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Dream Journal

Evacuation: Lines on the Floor

A student crisis playing out in Nepal, where all students (young people, really) are in general danger. You can piece together most of the story behind the crisis in headlines, with several stages — B2, G2, G3, etc.

I participate in a self-organized evacuation which recaps how things played out. I follow labeled lines on the floor (B2, G2, G3) following a sorting mechanic to divide us into manageable groups. I step off the path and reset my place a few times because I’m not sure about the group that I’m heading into. I recall a fact I just learned, about how humans innately and unconsciously prefer left turns. Although I’m trying to balance myself statistically while walking the path lines, I end up in a group on the left — I don’t know beforehand where the last sorting decision is.

Now that I’m beyond the curtain, in a room with other random students, organizers provide instructions and hand out lanyard badges. This is so we can move around the site and gather our things before our group’s departure. I try to helpfully remind the instructors by asking what time our evac bus is, but worryingly they don’t immediately know. It was actually the last choice we made: 9:00 pm, the time of last bus (not a safe thing to forget). The organizers in the room seem surprised then, changing their attitude about task urgency and how actually we should try to pace ourselves before then.

I think I’ve probably lost most of the dream, but I am able to hang onto important parts by retracing parts of the lines. As I said, the lines themselves teach the story of the crisis. I couldn’t tell you what it was originally, of course, but I could tell you that the image of the turning lines on the floor is what brought the dream into wakefulness.

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Dream Journal

Time Conspiracy, Pure Era

I already don’t remember what this means, but: there’s a peanut butter garlic taste test. Still have the taste in my mouth as I realize, in the shop, there’s some quandary with causality. Either I have passed a message to myself, or my friend/spaceship passes a message to me — before it’s written. This feels like being in a conspiracy, but also there is camaraderie of shared knowledge with the store manager that others don’t know.

Sometime after, I pursue an insistent inquiry trying to determine when the last “pure era” was of the prophetic temple (I have been researching the temple at Delphi a lot the past 2 days). I weigh monetary influence, the priestess’ age, structure of the prophecies (poetry vs prose), outside influences, actual effects. This is an intriguing like of questioning and really goes with what I’ve been pursuing while awake.

Categories
Dream Journal

Unforgotten Recordings

I uncover several recordings from 2011 made in Italy and South Africa that I don’t remember making. Certainly I don’t recall going to those places in my 20s, can’t exactly recall any occasion for going, but I suppose it was a long time ago by now. I’m using the new location feature of my recordings archive (note: this hasn’t been built yet). It’s hard to tell if these have simply been tagged incorrectly — i.e “Naples” isn’t the Naples in Italy — or if this is genuinely something I’ve forgotten. But they are uncanny nonetheless, and have a quality of a recovered memory… which in the best of circumstances, is exactly what my archive does.

One recording appears to deal with participating in an art event at a library. I helped decorate a whole chamber off the main modernist colonnade (perhaps like the modernist Palm Springs Public Library, except I’ve never been here). I only see the streamers hanging near the front, as though I didn’t bother to remember the room layout since I was actually looking outward into the main hall while I experienced what the recording recorded.

Another, from South Africa, appears to be from a time I was enroute to Australia and went exploring just for a few hours. I walk along a trashy yet beautiful Victorian-era street, witht both marigolds and broken parking lots. Nostalgic but I’ve never thought about it since I was there. Despite being tagged in my archive, everything is difficult to place. Events blend.

Some parts of the re-experienced recordings are difficult to place even now — it’s like I had been skipping through them looking for other things forgotten. There was part of a quiz where the answer was Tanzania, and I recalled a land of Muslim shawls and small pyramids in the corner of Africa — not exactly where Tanzania is. But it very much felt like something from another dream, a land starting with D, rectangular and overlaid almost with a grid-like plaid pattern. I had friends there, but it wasn’t a very populated country.

In one recording (either from South Africa or the library installation) I brought out a plastic bag of butterflies along with a tray of parrots and set them in the center of a room. I worry briefly about the butterflies, before remembering that they’ve survived being stored in that bag for years. Perhaps this was after the occasion with the pool…

One time I’m swimming in the pool in the backyard of my childhood home with my dad and brother. It’s twilight and the layout is more rectangular than normal (the hot tub isn’t near the fence). I arrange light for us with a long string of Christmas lights, still attached to the stubby tree. But this too has the feeling of being a recovered memory, and seems to occur in relation to the butterfly bag — but unplaced. Perhaps I listened to an earlier part of the recording later?

There’s only one recording from Naples specifically. For some reason I liked it best, though it was no more crystalline. I could verifiably identify myself, for sure, but I couldn’t piece together enough context (or recognize the voices) to identify who else was there or what we were doing. But it’s odd and interesting to find out that I went to Italy before… and must’ve forgotten. I watch some replay of casual mischief, me going onto the flat roof of
a tall square apartment block. Then I’m inside on the top level of a bunk bed overhanging a window, when I see Dara below. She stretches forward showing her nice hourglass figure and I can see on her silhouette the fine hairs covering her body. I eagerly call out, encouraging her. This causes her to pull back, so I try to rewind time. I do, but it doesn’t quite work — the reset is incomplete. What was I going to do different anyway?