A recurring game where you have to write a sentence. The sentence becomes your reality, your fate. There’s an unavoidable karma to this, no matter what you choose (and you have to write *something*) there will be some negative consequence, some necessary lesson. This feels like limbo or purgatory in retrospect, but in the dream it’s presented as hell.
I’m volunteering at a fair along with some friends. The booths are indoors but the public walkways outside, a bit like a public market. I’ve been wandering for a bit and come back to our booth, where I think we’re raising money for a charity. My two female friends have been holding themselves up with their feet raised on a dais and their hands on the ground, like the wheel pose in yoga. This has the effect of having their butts flexed tight and held in the air. I offer to take a turn the remainder of a the day to replace them, despite the obvious expectation that my male butt won’t be as eye-catching as both of theirs. Nevertheless, they’re thankful to take me up on the offer and I feel pretty good about being able to provide some equal-opportunity butt presentation.
While I’m zoning out in my pose, visitors to the booth mill around. I don’t pay much attention to them, as my role for now is just to keep the pose during my shift. One of them startles me by pinching my butt, which — while not exactly disallowed — isn’t particularly encouraged. I collapse in surprise, and when I look up to see who did it, I see a familiar face: Gabrielle from the TV show Xena (as played by Renee O’Connor). There’s no obvious connection for why she would’ve pinched me, nor have I thought of her recently. It’s a good laught though, and I’m kind of happy it happened to me. It’s a fun story to retell to the girls, and I doubt the reverse situation would be the case. I mention that hope we got the event on video.
There’s a Mom shopping at the fair who drops her two-year-old with us at the booth. I’m talking to it while, having realized that the kid can understand a lot more that she can answer. It’s fun to have a full conversation though, without regard for what she probably expects from adults. I remember a specific occasion where I made a very long, sophisticated, multi-step question, where I knew she understood the whole thing — but all she can reasonably manage as a response is a flustered “well I don’t know!” It’s a bit of mischief we both seem to enjoy.
We review the time we’ver had when Mom shows up again. Shortly afterwards, I get to tell the girls about Gabby pinching me, which the do find as entertaining as hoped.
Outside my house (my Kemper court house), two of my cars are waiting with people inside. We’re trying to leave and I can’t find the right car key. Eventually I realize we actually have a key sitting on the car’s floor; it looks identical but its untried. And of course, that finally works! Josh insists on driving my convertible Beetle since I made them wait so long. By now everyone’s eager to leave quickly, so both cars are driving in reverse at speed out of the court — I hesitate to ask to slow down since I made them wait. Half-heartedly, I ask if he’ll attempt a fast 180-turn, which I watch the other car do. Unexpectedly, he pulls it off and we merge into busy school-hours traffic — a familiar scene since the court is across from an elementary school.
My friend (S. of P&S) has died unexpectedly young… 32 years old? After realizing what it actually means, I feel the gap of his loss deeply. It’s only later that I also realize he has a kid, which makes it even worse.
A sprawling hostel, where an older lady has stayed so long that her shared dorm room is entirely colonized by bookshelves and stacks of books. The hostel itself is a long building with many stacked rooms in rows overlooking the downslope of a hill — a place that feels familiar from previous dreams.
The setting: a human planet that’s been administratively taken over by harpy-like bird aliens. I’m part of a team robbing a store and things go sideways (though apparently not too badly). Our escape route traverses security-activated bean geysers — most of which erupt chaotically around us during the escape. During the getaway, with authorities obviously observing us, one of the team (who reminds me of Cypher from The Matrix) says into our radio, “Can we blame this on anyone innocent?”
After other dreamss, the setting returns to the planet run by bird-people, where I’m flying in a cathedral-like room with columns and buttresses. It’s filled with redwoods, creating a humid atmosphere reminiscent of a cool redwood forest. There are elegant Asian-style stacked wooden shelves with narrow beams for plants. I fly outside through the large opening in the wall. Beyond, everything seems larger than normal (or I’m smaller than usual). As I fly towards a row of cypress trees (evoking a feeling of Northern Californian natural places), I land on an unoccupied bird-people nest I find. I don’t mess with their eggs for whatever reason. Perhaps I realize I don’t feel the need to indulge, even though I could crush them if I wanted to. I continue flying and swoop over a BBQ picnic, where I impulsively steal the big cooked fish just being brought out for everyone.
For a while now, I’ve had a disorganized stack of papers that I use as study material, flipping over the pages as I go to track of what I’ve read. It’s actually a fictional document but a worthy background reference (perhaps on our avian overlords). I realize suddenly upon flipping a page that I’ve read through the whole thing: it seemed like I was in the middle, but no, the last page I flipped is indeed the final page. I rememeber that, oh yes, I started in the middle, once upon a time.
Lillehammer, the place where the Olympics were held in 1994. The first Olympics I knew of. Somewhere in the woods, confusing to try to remember. A cabin maybe, on a hill maybe. A nuclear explosion of colorful plastic.
No real reason I would’ve lost the dream, except I was awakening and it’s like it was already gone. I was only able to recover it by doing a no-thinking technique, which I haven’t had to do in awhile — also, a decent chance of falling back asleep and losing a dream entirely.
I wasn’t going to write this down, but something about how I was able to recover it (twice, since I also had to remember later today that I remembered) made it worth keeping. Even now, I still throw out plenty of dreams. And by throw out of course, I mean don’t write down.
I’m working with a text editor, learning complicated commands. Thrilled that now I can make my AI model analyze stuff for me from different perspectives — *Brute Force!* The text is a big, complicated block that I’ve generated over iterations, parts of which contain mathematical characters. Sometimes, it seems to waver or throb with the energy inside it, coruscating. I started from a different file, a small base that was just a single character. I feel like I’ll need to hide this method from others because of some ethical aspects they wouldn’t approve of. What those are is unspecified.
I’m tracing the early crimes of Phil Spector, before the kidnappings. I’m with one of his bands at a hotel and he’s abandoned them. The realization of this is slow. Eventually I’m begging the hotel staff to help us find a place to store a piano. A staff member disappears through a reinforced metal service door, leaving me anxious as I wait next to it. Another staff member warns me to step back, and I assure him I didn’t plan to follow. Hours pass, and I sit outside at a temporary plastic table, surrounded by fancy guests, with my cheap water bottles. I’m far less dressed up, just waiting for an update on storing the piano.
In a vast industrial area, there’s a secluded courtyard with two apartment blocks, feeling like a tight-knit community, possibly in Anaheim or even Antarctica. I live in a home there for free. The layout eerily mirrors my childhood home, making me uneasy. I sleep in the room that would have been my parents’, and I try to describe to my wife how it feels to be surrounded by these familiar yet disorienting surroundings. Outside, the narrow backyard has pathways and large trees, and I spend time planning how to adjust their positions to modify the shade, having nothing else to do.
I’m watching a movie in a theater, discarding the tiny bones from my chicken snack on the floor. A greyhound dog starts bothering me as I sit in a single chair ahead of the other rows. Eventually, I move closer to the screen and concession bar. A young girl sits across from me at a cheap temporary table, chattering nonstop, even annoying her friends. I drag her by her hair across the slick floor and dump her outside, which her friends seem to enjoy, but I continue talking to her afterwards. She’s now naked, complaining yet acknowledging how she’s being a pain. She finds a scooter on the street with my old blue leather motorcycle jacket draped over it. The similarity is striking – it looks identical, and the scooter is the same color as mine, with a brown battery that doesn’t quite fit under the seat. The memories it stirs up make me emotional. The scooter appears to have a loose security chain, and its back wheel is missing.
I find myself sleeping in an odd, interstitial liminal space — a kind of waystation for world travelers. It feels like a forgotten space within a strip mall, perhaps a former party supply store. A solidly-built, boxy metal grid forms the internal structure of this place.
A rat dies. This is the second rat to die, unfortunately. I have to tell my wife before she gets back. But then I remember the first rat died a long time ago. Does that make this news a little easier to share?
I’m allowed to sleep there. I’ll be sleeping just outside the big metal grid, but still inside the store. It’s a privilege to be here for a few days, but feels strange too.
When turning the perspective of a 3D map, all the buildings change too. They’re very detailed, but wrong — a bad guess by the 3D analysis algorithm. It’s too bad, since they look so crisp and good. But there’s no way now to tell what they really look like.
A classroom, maybe like high school. My sophomore history class, the one facing east at the of the wing. Mr. Conklin’s. Events play out, forgotten in the morning, but I end up hanging off the side of my new goth girlfriend like a monkey. Playing things back through, it becomes apparent that these events have been reenactments of orbital mechanics in the solar system. The goth girlfriend is a moon that my asteroid self is orbiting.
A video game landscape, well-designed spiral mountain with a river emerging at the top. The sides of the spiral are canted so water rushes down them at just the right speed to not overflow the sides. Water flows from there into a channel and then down a slope, then onto a beach but *on fire* — at least apparently so. There’s a trick where the water flows into a nearly concealed hole immediately before lava emeges from a hole just nearby. After I examine the holes and establish this is trick, I go down the hill and onto the beach. I trigger a short cinematic that plays, showing a god-elf-man climbing into the lava flow and turning himself into stone, creating the epic beach landmark which has stood on the shore 1000 years (or something equally venerable). I get to see the cinematic only once.
Laying on a sidewalk outside hanging out. Outside where? Don’t remember, not important. A pair of ferrets, acting like my pets but instead just very friendly, play in a smallish box of water I’m holding. They swim and play despite that there’s grease floating all in it. Meanwhile, a pair of strangers are reorganizing their supplies from a trip on the sidewalk next to me. My arms are splayed out wide, and the girl incidentally use my hand to keep a book from blowing away — intentionally but withhot really thinking. When this is noticed, they offer to have me look through the book, and it’s quite an exquisite work. It’s actually a sleeve with a kit inside, cloth gloves, a pomegranate chocolate, and a very smooth white book that I leaf through. I give it back to them, realizing I was probably meant to wear the gloves if I were to touch it. The ferrets emerge from the grease box, unformly coated with grey-black slime. They seem to be untroubled, and my efforts to squeegee them don’t seem to have an effect. I figure, well, if they like being this way I’m not going to try to change them. They got themselves into it.
I’m draining water from our household fishtank. The level has gotten very low — less than half full. In the debris below, miraculously, I spot a familiar eel-like shape curled beneath a patch of gravel: a small kuhli loach, still alive!
Later, I’m drawing a Roman-era cityscape in stark black lines while multitasking for a class. Before this moment, I recall walking across the tin roof of an ancient bathhouse, footsteps echoing underfoot.
A particular strange lucidity early in the night with my phone in my hand, as I voluntarily clean my house and enjoy doing it. Despite not realizing for a long time that I’m still holding my phone
Living or visiting in a large mansion-like space, maybe a bit like Isis Oasis. Old 70s stylings, so many various dining tables that we’ve never eaten at some of them. Feels like we haven’t been here in a while too, semi-abandoned even though I understand that others still visit infrequently.
Outside, my wife and I can hear someone rummaging around in a study, the study belonging to a hallowed old professor. I recognize it as a test I’ve encountered before involving a thief. I’m appearance he’s oddly like the character from The Thief and The Cobbler, but his size is variable. It’s difficult to coordinate with my wife to plan how we’ll catch him in the act without him popping away. The whole thing is just a narrative game that has been played before — apparently it randomly respawns from time to time. Now this scenario has happened enough times that I’m starting to grasp the steps needed to resolve it.
The thief is after a small diamond. I know from playing through things before that, actually, he can never find it, because no one can find it. Not alone. Plotwise, all parties including the thief have to coordinate, whether they do so intentionally or not. It’s the only way to avoid the multiple layers of gotchas whereby the diamond gets lost forever, and the scenario resets. Could be a time diamond for all I know. But here, back on the first step of the loop, girded by the wisdom of experience, I still can’t seem to coordinate with my wife. Hm.
Objects. Four important folders to swap between, that must by applied to the project I’m working on. I can clearly visualize them as clunky plastic office documents which I can swap between. Oddly enough I read something before bed and I think maybe these leaked in from there, which are from the instructions for how to set up a tool I need:
– Active Context: Contains information about the current task
– Project Context: Contains high-level project information
– Progress: Documents completed work and upcoming tasks
– Decision Log: Records choices and their rationale
They read like things I should very much know and have around to reference, don’t they? Double hm.