Category: Dream Journal

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Dream Journal

Boban Vervinsky

My wife and I are sitting in our living room when a sudden noise shakes the wall overhead. A 4-in nail has popped through and knocked off one of the top row trading cards, the same like the arrangement in our apartment’s hallway art gallery. My landlord has been renovating the apartment next door for weeks (this is waking-life true, actually). I angrily walk down the hall to give him and his crew working next door a piece of my mind. He opens the door and as soon as I start describing what happened he pretends to act like they did it on purpose — despite one guy down the hall yelling “hey I’m sorry”. In response I act like I’ll helpfully go measure exactly how many inches of nail are sticking through the wall, so they can measure it from their side, possess an accurate perception of wall thickness, and not do it again.

While we stand outside on the balcony, an older sickly-looking interloper shows up who starts stealing the conversation away, acting like they’re trying to empathize but only talking about their own problems. They’re abruptly standing in the apartment next door while my landlord is standing in mine. Normally I suppose I’d be sympathetic, but instead I turn to my landlord and ask “who the heck is this?” He just says “someone annoying” and I’m simply inclined to agree. There’s nothing to do but let this energy vampire drone on and try to avoid them.

I’m standing in a long winding line on the street here in my neighborhood, the Mission District. I went out to buy a case of beer, Pabst Blue Ribbon, for like $23.99. The line moves surprisingly quickly, but it’s split up into a few sections that complexly join into one. The lines’ purpose is labeled only at the penultimate merge, so of course it appears I’ve gotten in the wrong one and should be in the $19.99 and above line. Right about the final merge I look and see the entrance to the store, just another neighborhood corner store that happens to handle particularly high volume right now. The place only allows one or two customers inside at a time, and it’s upstairs through a single doorway — the place I think is called Boban Vervinsky. Exasperated, I realize in this unnecessarily crowded line that I’ve had my mask around my neck the whole time.

Some unannounced blonde attendant (who’d otherwise be pretty cute) starts blithely giving me instructions from behind my back, that I can’t hear, don’t understand, and don’t want. The stress and crowding involved are too much and I give up, throwing my items on the ground toward to store, flipping off the clueless unhelpful attendant on the way out.

This leads to a short back and forth where I’ll see someone I know on the sidewalk giving the middle finger, like Courtney K., and I have the great timing to give them the middle finger back. I’m getting in flipoff doubles, at some point I feel like I’m physically throwing flipoffs… all in a cinematic-quality slow motion montage with scenes bouncing one to another to another. (It reminds me of another dream, where I first learned to double-middle-finger the whole world around me like Rick Sanchez on Rick and Morty.) But the chain is broken when there’s a girl, Morgan or Megan, with long dark hair over her eyes who doesn’t see me gesture to her.

Not about to stop acting free, I set off running down the cracked asphalt streets of my neighborhood. I run like a big cat, galloping on all fours. While doing this it’s like I’m narrating my method to some unseen flirting female observer riding along with me. I start running on just my hands, floating my legs up for more speed and maneuverability. It’s at this point the observation strikes me that this is the kind of locomotion I’d choose to do if I were dreaming. The dream rapidly breaks down; I wake up with a sharp inhalation and a beating heart.

A search of the name “Boban Vervinsky” has no results at time of writing.

Music in my head upon waking up, Eydie Gormé, “Blame It on the Bossa Nova” (1963)

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Dream Journal

On the Origin of Terminators

An incident on November 18. 1970: an unpaved side road in Japan. Gritty, tan, a little downhill and out of sight from the main road. A few joggers, maybe military, going one direction, while a vehicle travels another. The nature of that vehicle is unclear; could be a forklift, some military specialty unit, utility/construction equipment. It’s driven by a single driver who sits not quite in front… with not quite a clear view. What happens next is the subject of years of investigation and litigation. The vehicle and the joggers collide head-on, full speed, in the middle of a clear day, on a straight stretch of road, with adequate signage, no intoxicants involved… the list goes on.

I’m there to watch it in some abstract form. I don’t get the impression that I’m viewing a re-enactment or simulation, rather I feel like the scene I view is in fact better than any from the years of inquiry — that is, better than what those present saw. And I feel like I know what caused it, because in my time it’s been fixed: human inattention. My purpose in viewing these records is to write an unobtrusive message to send back in time via the obscurity of the early internet, yet an obvious warning for those looking for it. It can’t be too specific, though it might change events; this may or may not be paradoxical. But the reason I can send things back in time (and the reason this incident is so important) is that I live in a world with Terminators, a superior general artificial intelligence. In their exponentially sophisticated causal analysis, this is the inflection point where they determined AI became a priority for humanity. This is their own origin story.

I’m now in the present day or near future, going with my wife to a gathering at our old stomping ground The Dark Room on Mission street, here in San Francisco. I’ve rarely been here during daylight. I notice a curious architectural detail: atop the Spanish-style façade is a short half-cylinder crowned with a short half dome. Adorned with a mosaic tile pattern, it turns to reflect light from any angle into the shaft of a skylight. A number of people show up about the same time as us, several old SF and Chicken John friends all with large bulk food boxes. I open one that my friend Abbie brought, a heavy flat of granola bars, and snack on some tasty loose grains that got compressed inside the box. My wife reminds me (in question form) if I know why we’re here — because our downstairs neighbor Rhiannon’s mom (Mable) has moved back to the country and wanted to go in on a bunch of bulk items. Rhiannon, who worked at the Dark Room with me once upon a time, puts on one of the Terminator movies on the Dark Room’s big screen for background ambiance. This is one I haven’t seen before, Terminator 5 or 6. I find it much much more ambling and philosophical than its predecessors.

Watching the film more intently, it shows how a Terminator always was a Terminator, and as an example shows two in their previous form: an alien’s massive tendril-like ribs vibrating in a museum, and a running almost toy-like tyrannosaur robot.

In my hypnogogic awakening state I piece together the logic and importance of the story, how the mass human suffering — the all the lengthy legal wrangling, the senselessness, from this and countless other cases — focused humanity’s intentions into the creation of intelligent machines. It strikes me also that the first Terminator movies were full of fear, but the later ones I saw were musing and exploring what it would mean if the idea were made real.

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Dream Journal

Unexpected Flat Tire, Unexpected Kid, Unexpected Insult

Filing out of a speaking performance, rows of white plastic chairs. Staying behind to talk with the presenter for a few moments alone.

Afterwards I’m at Rainbow Grocery nearby — or maybe it becomes Rainbow Grocery? A cool collection of recent cartoons is posted on one wall. Pretty art, clipped out by employees just for fun. The store is wider, bigger than it was before. This is a bit after the pandemic is over (so sometime in my future).

I parked a borrowed white BMW out the further lot. The thing is refreshingly nice to drive. I chat with a knowledgeable elderly car salesmen out by the BMW, until we realize two of our very short diameter tires are flat. The car has enough spares it first appears, but one is labeled as “only for testing” and remains attached to it’s swingarm… the damn thing turns out to have perfect little punchholes all around the tire so you can’t actually drive on it. So I must come back tomorrow to fix the wheels and retrieve the car. And I have to figure out a different way home today.

My wife discovers source of her recent hunger and bloating is because she’s been pregnant for three months, since December (which makes this March). It’s late enough that a decision should be made soon. I imagine the timeline of if we actually had a kid, when life events would happen for them.

Back at Rainbow Grocery the next day. Addressing not just the car, but the entire situation, I read out a large list I’ve made — one thoroughly indented with multiple sub-options for each option. “Bajoran explosion” is used on the list as a pejorative. I note the faux pas when I notice the reaction of a nearby Bajoran team member.

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Dream Journal

Yellow Shirt for Fun Blonde

Somewhere in Germany during a festival, the streets crowded with people milling about. I notice several black Germans pass by in traditional lederhosen, fully German culturally now — yet I can’t help but wonder what their ancestors put up with, knowing how other European countries treated their African subjects. Soon I’m with a mixed group, sitting to watch an indoor performance in the last two rows. A special request is made of me: get a blonde girl (whom I don’t know personally) a special yellow t-shirt to wear as a top. She slouches cooly in the back row with arms crossed, breasts out, but I can halfway imagine her wearing the yellow top already.

I saunter into an alcove where a meek group of bland-seeming workers is watching a training video, though it ends just as I sit down. Mechanical automatic lockers then open in front of them, though not for me, and we mill into a narrow back area. From these lockers they’ve received tokens (which I of course don’t have) so these back rooms with token-operated machines — arcade games or sewing classes etc — aren’t a practical way to earn the yellow top for the blonde girl.

Which seems like it doesn’t matter, since at the end of this back area is a love den, where she and I engage in another one of our rendezvouses (despite being introduced to her secondhand just earlier, now we’ve been casual lovers for awhile). She’s a sexual athlete and a freak in bed — she actually has stackable bins she carries with compartments for nitrous, whipped cream, amyls, toys, even a case of Greek fireworks (what are those? I don’t know). We’re lounging in bed afterwards, and one of our rules is that we don’t tell personal stories so there’s no chance we could get too attached or bored with each other (her rule, mostly). But I’m reading this newspaper article and it’s a bit shocking actually, so I read it aloud to her — some recent racist government exposé that’s almost too outrageous to believe.

At a desk window back down the hall, on the opposite side from the token rooms is a detective’s office. An ethnic family (older, wearing glasses, perhaps Indian) is trying to file a report. Observing the scene, my blonde girl comments about a stodgy white man visible at the back of the room: “doesn’t he just have that ‘I’ll jam your cell phone’ look to him?” Though I think her comment facetious at first, I watch as the family’s phone signal drops… after which they’re unable to report the crime they’ve been victim of.

A big salt gritter truck parked on a small residential court during the wee hours of the night. I climb into the big cabin and get everything ready for my first drive (fairly sure I’m the yellow-shirt blonde girl now). It appears that in the night someone has stolen much of the trucks tank through the front tank port. However, I confirm the integrity of the single spike guard in front of the port that’s supposed to serve as barricade against a stranger’s siphon hose.

Then there I am, a relatively small blonde girl, driving my new massive beast of a vehicle away at night for the first time. The driver’s view appears as a bright grainy grayscale fisheye lens, a bit disorienting at first but proving very useful. I round the corner out of the short dead-end street, swinging much wider than intended, yet the vehicle’s turning radius is very powerful despite being slow and ungainly.

I drive up a freeway ramp, struggling against the sandy ripples, when I remember I have the option to use the gritter tank to stabilize the slope. There’s a pink effect as I do so, one girl saving the day for all the drivers to follow.

I’m one of two younger girls fighting under table, the other an imposter trying to reach the other side of the room on some nefarious mission. I call “dad, dad!” while holding the imposter down. But the dad is on his computer looking at the email reply of one of his recent online ‘your post has been hidden’ appeals, glancing briefly and perfunctory at our desperate tussle.

In some random rest stop store, I’m looking through the aisles and come across two pieces of a gun hanging from display hooks. It’s wrapped in some kind of sports team graphic, and though they sell other guns from within locked cases, this one is priced so outlandishly that somehow the shopkeepers think it’s ok not to lock it up since it’s in two parts? Ugh.

In a pocket universe, a shabby run-down concrete park is closed during the pandemic. Oddly kids can’t seem to understand this. But adults immediately can spot a certain cracked rear wall, with an exposed adjacent building leaking in foreign universe, among other dangerous problems.

The scene zooms out to the broader area map, revealing the 2-symmetric lobes of this flat bubble universe, and the further 4-petaled algorithmic fractal pattern rotated out from the same central origin. I wish I knew more about this particular place, it seems quite unusual.

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Dream Journal

No Privacy for Sexytime at Cozy Hostel

I’m staying for a while in a hostel, a very long narrow two-story building that’s like a lodge. It’s not swanky, but it’s scenic and has lovely aged wooden construction and friendly common areas, where strangers gather and sit around chatting and drinking. I have a cozy spare private room there I’m sharing with my brother Patrick. It’s a special place, a beautiful relic — viewed from above, I see a version where a fan artfully redid it in a magical cartoony Warcraft style.

At some point I run into a friend of my cousin, a skinny blonde girl, someone who’s stayed at my house before. We hit it off enjoying the outdoors near the hostel, some flower garden or botanical hall for guests. We decide to head up to the main lodge, waiting in a grubby loading dock for the oddly cited elevator.

We start to make out on a couch once upstairs. I’m hoping to move things to my room — where at least we’d only have to keep out my brother — but she’s insistent and we start to have sex there in one of the common areas. Inevitably someone interrupts us and we hurriedly stop. I’m a bit frustrated with her at this predictable outcome.

A bit later and we’re socializing in a room decorated with curiosities, curved couches along the wall, and a big picture window. And she starts going at it again (though I can’t even remember if it with was me or another guy across from where we sat before). I remember the reactions of the group being mixed, from conflicted fascination to willful ignorance. It’s not uncomfortable for me, but I do have a feeling of exasperation; it seems this is just how she is. She had no specific interest in me, and I passingly consider whether we should’ve used a condom. But in the end, the situation does come out rather well — it seems once the ice has been broken those assembled are pretty ok with an friendly. impromptu, afternoon orgy. Though whether she could’ve expected this or not is another thing entirely.

Visiting an oddly mom-n-pop country Apple store (to be clear: Apple the company, not the fruit). There, on a display of shoeboxes, is a display model for the new iPhone mini. It looks much like an iPod mini, the one from 2004, with the chunky last-century grey buttons of an old Nokia phone. An unexpectedly easy pass.

Awake in the pre-dawn light of my workroom. Building a campfire, carefully piecing out kindling into a blackened metal ring right there on the rug. As the fire burns down and the sun comes up, I fiercely whip the edge of carpet, making that edge briefly glow with every strike. When I’m done and put out the fire, I find that the rug is barely warm underneath.

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Dream Journal

all dreams can be interpreted as custom tax advice if you want

Ok, so first off, I should say that I’m not sure what the title means either, but it was funny enough to jolt me awake and get me to write this down — so there you go. Now here’s some custom tax advice (???):

Arriving at the driveway of my childhood home in a fully-laden pickup truck, where I switch out with her to drive. I roll the pickup up the drive a little too slow to make it all the way, somehow trying to do the opposite of backing up.

Unloading is uneven. On the walkway to the front door I randomly remember a colleague’s custom parameters he programmed for CRUD, realizing the letters (only three of which are present) are his daughter’s initials S, L, P and T.

The front door is open and I walk right in. The place has wall-to-wall Saltillo tile floors like I remember, and it’s currently getting cleaned for new residents to move in. I shout a greeting to the maid mopping the next room. I start to record a tour video so I’ll have something to better remember childhood home. The interior bathroom (across from my smaller childhood bedroom) is bigger than I remember, a wide open layout with stalls, high ceilings, and tile gutters. I peek around a couple corners and there’s a cavernous shower stall with a urinal on the opposite wall. I get the impression that it’s architecturally significant, perhaps something shared with the home next door.

I change my mind about the video, deciding it’s a wasteful thing to record my entire walkthrough. I climb over the ¾ wall out of the bathroom itself, and the space is bigger, public, with a few cheerful gay folks I seem to know milling about. Feels like a neighborhood thoroughfare.

Things turn serious and sweetly mournful as I abruptly switch into a greeting card poem moment: trying out different dinosaurs peeking just above a mirror-calm pond gazing at the moon, and reading poem text printed against the sky. Out of the water, the color-coded dinosaur group realizes they can inflate their necks bigger, making them feel larger and safer. In a humorous note, a big predatory crocodile standing right behind them realizes the same, inflating his whole body (looking like the croc in the Don Bluth movie All Dogs Go to Heaven).

Ending that sideline as suddenly as I started, now walking over the cracked tile floors of a derelict mall, toward the wide entrance of an abandoned Sears store. While trying to demonstrate something with my phone, I trip and it slides all the way into an opened elevator door. I monologue about the predictable timing of these kind of things, expecting the doors to shut on cue as I get within reach. But I make it, surprisingly. Honestly I’m still a little flummoxed.

I talk with a cool gay black guy wearing bug-eyed glasses at a check-in desk at the Sears entrance. A brief conversation ending with the Rocky Horror “antici-” … “-pation” joke, which he gets — but the other people at the desk find bizarre.

Peering though a lens on my phone at older pictures from this mall, I discover some that were taken in sequence. In frame-by-frame holographic 3D, I watch a messy, fun, 80s-looking Florida blonde, carrying shopping bags, in a red dress, slip/fall on her butt and laugh.

In our bedroom here in the Fartpartment, we’ve rescued a paper bird. It’s fragile, rough, an appearance like folded newspaper. After a long time caring for it, one day I see it actually flap itself down from the top windowsill onto the bed. It picks up a little upside-down ladies hat and flies it back up to use it as a nest.

I think strongly about how to keep raising this vulnerable little bird, cognizant of how it needs an outside space but that rain would destroy it. I come up with a plan to build a row of little birdhouses underneath the apartment’s outside stairway awning.

The paper bird grows up/time travels into a cute and athletic girl, reminding me of some girls I think I know (Kenna M., Lee T.). She’s wearing workout clothes, hanging out with me on our back stairway. I put my hand on her bare midriff in a flirty way, noting how much flatter it’s become since I last met her. I idly climb upwards on the underside of stairs, checking out the cool moss growing through the stair cracks, feeling very energized and athletic myself just being around her.

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Dream Journal

Revenge Ridge

Image: breaking the tip off a capsule of yellow fish oil and squirting it out.

I’m banished from the settlement to the ridge above. I wait to get something like revenge. Soon, a gigantic old engine is scrapped there atop the hill, in my little grove of dry eucalyptus trees. It can be a Terminator, I realize, and I machine it form it into a useful weapon.

It comes useful soon enough. A low-flying plane of a government patrol agent flies over the swampy, tepid lake below the dry grove. As it comes near for a pass, I swing under a branch then over to sneak attack them and bring the plane down.

Taking letters down off our message board on the front door. Different sizes, starting with vowels, optimizing the storage as I go. One large kindergartener-size ‘F’ is so big it has to go in its own column.

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Dream Journal

A Traveler of Oz, Brotherly Advice, Eyehole Game

A legendary early Australian traveler, mucking about in an island chain that seems familiar from other dreams. Palm trees and native islanders, but not where you’d expect them to be — somewhere north of Australia, but without Papua; somewhere east, but without New Zealand. The fella is a big name but I get to watch him before he’s known. Has a funny way of sitting; I get an x-ray view of his hip bones balancing oddly as he sits leans back on an upturned suitcase while working. The map shows speckles of islets in a lake, a lake that’s the ocean, but a lake like some dusty suburban southern California reservoir (maybe Moreno Valley, Lake Perris, etc). Not like the Pacific — one with loud motorboats and kegs of beer and trashy fun watersports on every summer weekend.

Talking with my younger brother Patrick as we climb into attic in my childhood home garage, though in this dream he’s significantly younger and smaller than me. I tell him I know he’s going to ask about doing things the shortest possible path, yet that’s not the most efficient. As we climb down the attic ladder, my dad asks what we were saying on our way up about Grenada. Fittingly, this situation is somehow exactly the example problem I’d been giving to Patrick.

We’re having a nerf fight in the backyard. It’s a beautiful day and the lawn is green. No fences between us and the neighbor, so I see all their kids playing a game where they take half the pulp of an orange, cut out an eye hole, and stick them in their eye sockets — running around with these weird faces that look like eyehole monsters from Rick and Morty.

Texting my dad as I were my mom as a prank, but I can’t figure out how she’d spell “jare bear” (“gare bear?” “gerre bear”?). I release a scraggly pet parrot into the enclosed tile patio of my parents room, as I follow my dad.

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Dream Journal

Roman Bricks, Zoo Friend Desk

Walking along a seaside path of ancient bricks made in the ancient city of Manchester. The bricks were cast in prehistory, but completely removed, sifted, and replaced in Roman times. As an archaeologist this makes me sad (so much we could’ve learned) but at least the bricks are still there. Grass grows through them, the sky is dark and overcast, and salt spray is in the air, but it’s peaceful and quiet.

A Volkswagen drives up to a sphere at a turn-off of the brick road. It dumps bricks on the family car parked there. This is some family trip with my mom and dad, I delay us by having to stow my cases of cherry soda under the table in the RV.

To enter Cleveland zoo — or Columbus? — you pass through a short-walled entrance into an enclosure with loose animals that might attack you, leopards, gorillas. The next area for guests is large and open, with tacky safari décor, but everyone immediately gets in a line to wait. We eventually get to the line’s front at the zoo assistant desk. The counter person is our friend Chloe. I don’t think we’ve met her before in this dream, but we can be openly friendly and she shows us a special brochure the attendants keep under the desk. She flips through the pages speedily — some seem to have explicit diagrams comparing animal mating vs. human mating. I comment on how cool this is, but only get a “hey, keep it down” expression in reply. Chloe then pointedly resumes the default assistant-guest script.

Atop a hill or ridge I dig through a trash pile against a short cinderblock corner wall. It’s mostly nice lightly-used furniture since it’s so close to a new upscale development. The impersonal row of buildings looms over the narrow plateau; I head over. It gets very quiet as I approach the hotel. The café’s gimmick is serving a bowl of big beans with a big spoon. A charismatic shyster tries to use NLP on me while I eat, but doesn’t say give me anything I want to open up for. I end up trying to give him an empathy lesson instead.

In a different time, a different dream but a similar hill, I gaze out on a hillside toward a stepped stadium, and the dusty hill leading down to it. I put my motorcycle boots on to leave.

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Dream Journal

Swimming through Election Chaos

It’s shortly after the election, and the Cult of the Dead Cow has hacked Whitehouse.gov. A documentary now posted there with a French-language title exposes exactly how Trump has stolen the election. I swim in a deep natural pool at the road’s end of my childhood home on Kemper court. Beto O’Rourke (a.k.a. Psychedelic Warlord) is sworn in as president by Mike Pence. I see the military on a double-decker bus, unsure who to take orders from.

Spot my old blue truck parked down the street, make sure it’s mine (yup, dents are the same), and I worry about moving it for street sweeping. Soon I realize my neighbor now owns it by some coincidence. Narrow windy sand-bottomed channels are the unique pool outside this home, my father-in-law’s old home, evocative of hot springs. The neighbor volunteers how police officers often get deeper, sandier waterworks as they can skirt regulations.

I watch more of the documentary and it’s actually rather daring, exposing all manner of American government corruption — no matter what side wins I figure a lot of people are going to jail. Wasn’t aware any libs still had this much bravery.

At the end of the court I swim past a driveway hosting an Avenue Q-style Broadway play. A fat Alex Jones puppet dressed as a king heckles Trump and his crony walking up the steps of the White House, as they slam the door. I manage to get in a quip of appreciation, telling him I didn’t expect some puppet guy would do such a good job.

The documentary continues. The movie is being streamed from dsicu.net or dsico.net — I marvel at the incredible amount of pressure their servers must be under right now. Watching more I realize there’s a call to action at the end and I’m actually behind most people, which explains the largely empty street.

I bust my way through a set of double doors, a backstage area that feels like New York, during some performance. They won’t let me through between the audience bleachers. So to get through this big donut-shaped arena building, at knifepoint I make them open the rear doors so I can go around outside. I avoid a murderous knife-wielding Donald Duck (could I have been the Donald Duck?) and reach a hospital emergency ward that’s been hit hard with the recent public revelation/call to action and the righteous chaos that has followed. There’s Mickey Mouse graffiti written in blood. Inside, the documentary plays on whiteboards, with handwritten explainer notes jotted next to it.

Just such an amazing job overall, the whole story and especially the documentary central to it. I awoke suddenly pre-dawn with a fascinated “huuuuuh”, wrote down pretty much all of it, then managed several more hours sleep.