Category: Dream Journal

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Dream Journal

Dine-n-Ditch Work Reunion

A reunion of co-workers/friends in Australia. Several people from different groups in my past: my salesman job in Melbourne (my boss Benjamin Haynes, the French girl Bubbles), the Pacific Tradewinds hostel (Laura Lynellen Meller-Weller, Rachel from Felixstowe), and Camp Tipsy (Anya the sculpture teacher, others). Held at an upstairs Chinese restaurant. This place is within my persistent personal dream version of Australia, the one I sometimes see with wide open maps of places I’ve traveled before, like the great red desert, or long port-covered coastlines, that I never went to in person.

I suddenly notice that my co-workers have all disappeared one-by-one, and I’m the last one there in. It’s a dine and ditch scenario and I feel obliged to probably pay for all of them if I can’t negotiate something else.

The last person I see come in Kendra Gilpatrick-Tropez (she’s married since we last knew each other). We share a moment of sympathy as I relate what just happened, and for reasons I can’t explain I feel greatly relieved that she’s the one who came in later.

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Dream Journal

Two Masks, an Empty Simpsons-Inhabited Mansion

Standing in a place where recently a pregnant Marge Simpson stood, waiting to see someone. Now 3 grey chairs are lined up in a row outside that door, on gray carpet, among empty halls. They leave the impression of a scene very recently abandoned. I observe the vibrating cartoon outline of The Simpsons’ Monty Burns standing sideways against the column of my backyard stairway — events unfolding without him, inaccessible yet seen, as if inhabiting a windowed universe. He remains throughout the dream.

Taking the elevator to the rooftop, and the 38th story of this Addams-Family-like mansion. I get the hint that there might not exactly be 37 stories below it… it’s some sort of status thing. Whoever I am in this dream, I recognize I’ve lived a privileged life, and so recognize while gazing out among other high skyscrapers the calculated prestige of this place.

This whole time, we’ve been searching for two masks. One of them is real, of old Judaic provenance, and quite important. My younger sibling brings me one that their crew has found, flattened and rubbery and empty-eyed, a crude (though not cruel) caricature of a Jew. When asked how we will know which is which, I tell them with big-brother certainly, “to really to know which one is real, we can take samples and do composition analysis at a lab — I bet one of these will come up as being made some time in the last 50 years, somewhere in the vicinity of Southern California, while the other will have a vague 1000-ish year estimate, somewhere from Eastern Europe to the Levant… and which one would you bet on?”

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Dream Journal

Russian LGBT, Cartoon Dog for Time Travelers

In my teenage bedroom. A river of ghosts, like a circular racetrack. From the direction of the closet someone says say “that’s us”, then two hand-carved reggae dolls kiss.

(I don’t remember what this means, but: reincarnated as ghost and as colored lights, eaten by a shark to complete the dream sequence.)

Accusing Putin of being gay due to his homophobia, but contemplating the ethics of outing someone even when they’re hurting their whole community. I think this while I’m scraping flakes and microSD cards off of my red metal thermos/cup. Congressional Democrats now have the push to reconsider a Russian LGBT bill, while I look over a box of bottles.

Still in the bedroom, I ask a future traveler as he prepares to return, “hey have you heard of the 80s cartoon — sorry, 1980s kid’s cartoon movie All Dogs Go To Heaven”? I gesture toward two stickers on a filling cabine, different characters named Union Jack: one an actual British person, one a floppy-eared dog from that movie. To prove my point, the time traveler does recognize the dog.

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Dream Journal

Jam Band Like an Accident

Red baby rats lined up to be picked out, males and females unseparated. Some turn in to guinea pigs, oddly. Those not picked will actually grow up to be deer, and future breeding stock. I pick them out in front of a girl with short hair, who reminds me of Allie (a rival of my wife who I recently accidentally matched on OkCupid).

I use the word “Dlv’je’DOY” in some kind of encoding, in French. I consider typing it out phonetically so only native speakers will get it as no automatic translation could hope to parse this double-encoding.

An improvised jam band challenge. Several instrumentalists sitting around playing what would appear to be incidentally placed instruments. Playing an OMFO mix. A double-reed single-spiral conical horn, ancient Arabic-looking instrument — a guy plays the first bar of his solo, quickly whips out a clanging metal belt and uses lubricant on the aluminum. Meanwhile the more traditional single-reed guy next to him covers this interruption. He excalims, inexplicably but with great gusto, “Bulpas!”

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Dream Journal

Bookended Startling Rat Dreams

As I lay on the living room couch, I hear an odd rat-like noise from our back room — but not identifiable as one of our pets. I’m a bit playful when I go to investigate but creeped out by a bunch of our pillows that’ve been slashed almost in half. In an instant I realize no rat or other pet could’ve done this, and a malicious someone in likely still in the house.

I bolt awake, heart pounding, from sleep on the couch… remembering that I couldn’t fall asleep there; I had to give one of our rattie boys his medication.

I’ve been tricked into “checking out” some sort of vacation retreat with a very culty vibe. I try to leave but quickly find myself mobbed by a crush of people who aren’t allowing me to go. I think one even delivers the “it’s for my own good” line; bone-chilling in these circumstances. One bespectacled man grabs my keys and puts them in his pocket. Struggling against the huddle of bodies I manage to retrieve the keys — though I’m almost alarmed they let me have them back. They’re reluctant to do anything resembling an unambiguous assault. I escape climbing through a bathroom window when I think no one’s watching, though at this point… I wonder if they are.

I’m assigned a new group at Burning Man while it’s halfway through (not much like Burning Man — more like a week-long summer camp in an elaborate multi-story wooden atrium). I’m paired with three affable Asian kids younger than me. We’re moved to a different bunk room (a frequent occurrence) and shortly afterwards my first group, of which I’m still kind of a part, gets assigned a room that’s closer. I sleep there as it’s a bit easier, especially moving all my stuff, but I feel disappointed and conflicted for abandoning my cool new friends.

While lying asleep in bed, I hear one of our pet rats crawl up onto my wife’s side. It makes its way across our pillows, feeling oddly familiar. It crawls under the blankets right in front of me and I peek one eye open. It’s a grey rat, but we haven’t had any grey rats since… I bolt awake, realizing that one of our babies that went missing two months ago, Silveroo, has returned.

But he’s not there. There’s no rat at all. I was, for the second time in a night, having dreams of rats, set in the very place I was actually sleeping.

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Dream Journal

Going to a Beachside Dentist, Much Preparation

I’m getting woken up for a dentist appointment, by a guy I barely know, who’s been asked to do it as a favor. I tell him I’ve got to write my dreams down first and I’ll be 15 minutes. (Coincidentally, I’m actually woken about 15 minutes later by a loud, stinky truck outside my bedroom window.)

I speak with a therapist in a little room pod, in preparation for the procedure. I feel the need rather quickly to break professional courtesy to actually talk philosophy with her as an individual. She seems visibly exhausted to be forced to engage as vulnerable and human, and to delve into her personal views.

Thereafter, a big black girl helps walk me to (or from) the seaside in the evening — where the dentist procedure will be. I expect it’ll be really nice to watch the sunset during the course of it. I notice that she has the same limp as I do at this moment, in her left leg, and I offer to massage it once we find a stopping point to take a break. She forgoes a chair for whatever reason, lying down, and I start at her still shoe-clad feet and move around to her stiff calves and thighs. I tell her to let me know if she wants more or less pressure. She keeps asking for lighter and lighter touches, as if the massage is making her more sensitive and tense, but she never expresses any desire for me to stop.

I gather shoes I’ll need during and after the procedure. One pair is green and yellow, like a thrift store pair from Brazil I had long ago. I spot an old classic iPod of mine on the ground, wrapped in earbuds. While picking up my mail, I notice that a postbox near the top (for the group hostel/school I’m associated with) has been overstuffed, too full to close. I inspect the economy size bag of incense inside, labelled “Frogge & Kastom”, pilfering a few sticks, feeling that they won’t be missed. I try not to feel too guilty about it.

Bang! The truck outside my window loudly backfires. I’m irredeemably awake.

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Dream Journal

Investigation through the Portal to Birdworld

A pregnant stuntwoman parachutes from great height over a dense urban landscape, steering with her flightsuit, but her parachute never opens and she lands in a massive shockwave. The body is is never found and the impact site never pinpointed, so I’m sent to investigate. It’s suspected she didn’t crash, but was working with a covert group to use the jump to punch open a portal. I work semi-undercover in an office near the impact zone, one that’s apparently been shockwaved back through time, as it’s helping produce the show M AS*H. In commemoration of this I leave a postcard for my future self, drawing out big abstract cursive “MASH” letters, having great difficulty signing my name.

The portal must have been real — I pass into an alternate dimension where birds were the creatures that evolved into people. I’m able to blend in as long as I wear full-coverage clothing, which conceals my non-feathered skin. I get a tip that I should seek information on the person of interest I’m looking in the lobby of The W hotel. A large, puffy, white, embroidered ‘W’ takes up a full wall behind the desk. Under a disused wooden lectern, I find a mysterious handwritten note.

Later, I’m seated in the last row of a plane, being given an English test. The instructor doesn’t seem to acknowledge that their instructions are vague and contradictory. After several minutes of backtracking, I begin collaborating with other test-takers in front of me to corroborate the test’s poor instructions. It’s so bad that I’m thinking the only way to deal with it is to convince the instructor to invalidate the entire thing.

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Dream Journal

At Michigan Bluff Cabin

In the bath, I hear a reminder about a gathering the landlord is throwing. My friend Jerome (who was our roommate once) is texting, wanting to know who’s there at the party.

Some kind of medicated powder. Someone suggests I could just sell it to Max directly instead of showing up at this faraway party (I’m not at home now, you see, and somehow I know it in the dream). I’m highly concerned this whole endeavor could end up causing more anxiety than it fixes.

Walking along a row of plants, watering a few, then being asked by a little kid to please improve their life. Redwood branches are built like stacked walkways; can’t think of how to train them better to become a usable treehouse. I walk away feeling overwhelemed, a failure.

Walking another row of this plantation we’re on, I discover a set of wooden sliding doors that it seems people don’t usually see. Words printed on either door read “interior”/”exterior”. I can’t get them open — but I think this is the secret order who’ve figured out how to live surreptitiously. I keep hearing about them.

“See wha the doves think”, a quote from someone. A pretty short-haired blonde girl, reclining in opulent luxury.

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Dream Journal

The Boss, The Barbarian, The Beast

Sharing a bed with a female boss, and a kid who joins us. It’s quality snuggle time but I have to be a good sport on account there’s an orange-lighted lamp behind us, one I just barely can’t reach while we’re ensconced together.

Female boss and I leave the relative comfort of this bedroom, a place which has the sensation of a single-room ground floor unit of a multi-story underground parking garage. The neighborhood is the dusty, sunny, oldest part of my hometown (although I don’t think of it as Cathedral City at any point, the architecture and streets are no other). We’re leading a class single-file while we roam the near-empty streets, searching for even one business compatible with ours. Finally, in a wider old-west-ish double collonnaded warehouse area, I suggest that the business there — in publishing — is close enough to journalism that it’s worth pursuing.

Unfortunately there’s a brutish barbarian who guards nearby; he manages to kill all of us before we even realize what’s going on. We’re left — not quite dead, but as good as dead — to perish slowly in the sun strung up on a tall post, like a ship’s crow’s nest. But there’s a saving grace — we’ve got a Brock Samson bodyguard just for such an occasion. He hides under a bridge until the hulking brute passes overhead, stabbing his machete through chipped slats and impaling the aggressor in brutal revenge. We’re taken down from our gallows and recover with no ill effects.

Going a little further in the small near-deserted town, there is a wide shallow lake to the right (something like I’ve seen before in dreams, a wistful view with balconies worthy for gazing in reflection) and to the left, what looks like what could be an ornate orthodox church. I’m pleased to go and explore, knowing I’m versed in how to behave in almost any religious building. Turns out it’s a Hindu shrine to Ganesh, one with specific obeisances to enter. My dad advances too quickly through the entryway crowded with votives. I watch him try to balance on two upturned djembe drums, not quite successfully.

Inside the building, I chat with a few close friends as we sit on barstools. Idly we gaze toward the adjacent wall, the only light in the room, adorned with a massive floor-to-ceiling aquarium — and at least one monstrous inhabitant. It looks like a swimming centipede, maybe a polychaete worm, as if from the Ordovician era. My sibling Patrick seems quite concerned — it’s large, aggressive, and very near. Yet I know something about the tank, reassuring him “that glass may look only 10, perhaps 12 inches thick, but it’s not. That’s what we may call ‘arcane glass’, and for that thing it’s actual measure is [literally] infinity inches.” I’m quite serious with this assessment. As if to punctuate my point, the thing winds up to the glass again, bigger, meaner, with a frightening face, and hits it full speed — which makes a satisfyingly tiny donk sound.

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Dream Journal

Found and Lost, The Old House that was Ours

Revisiting the old house I sort of co-own, where I stored a lot of my stuff sometime in the last few years. Uncovering newspapers reveal records carefully arranged on the table, laying out a pattern of which ones I’ve already recorded. A big book, like a newspaper log, has something to do with Dr. Hal. The speaker cables running up the walls are thick and I remember they’re painted the color orange from their previous room.

Outside, I unlock several latches of a wooden truck cabin — the topmost is the only locked. My wife helps, sitting on top of it, but I ask her not to make fun of me as I’m worried about my pets inside: a little arrangement carefully made of light bulbs, moss, and sticks, with a little spider sealed up in each one. It’s been so long that all the moss that which lived is dark green, and all that died is bleached white. One of the spiders comes out and waves, which warms my heart (but actually only proves the seal wasn’t good enough and this might not even be the same spider). I look inside a nearby bag and discover it’s full of my stuff I’d forgotten about, junk drawer items and the like. It’s been so long, I might use this stuff again.

I decide I’m going to find and buy this place. After this decision, what happens may be time travel, or it could be searching to repeat the luck of finding the place but with a similar house.

I get a hint to search near “Cold Key” creek, in southern California or Arizona. The climate isn’t what I’d want to settle down, but maybe the community I find will be a bit cooler. Peeking in through a window in the rocky canyonside, I spot my first girlfriend. I pause time by snapping my fingers; everything remains still except her — her head looks like my pet naked rat Nüdl, or an Afghan hound, although I don’t note her different appearance at the time.

Working my way down the track of the creek, I come across a run-down desert community with a few empty buildings. One beige chunky run-down Victorian seems exactly like the old place, but for some reason I pass it by (maybe I can’t follow the same timeline precisely?), looking around the rest of the dusty neighborhood. I spot what could be a futuristic mosque, emerging in rendered shapes piece-by-piece from the ground, black ovoids stacking through each other to build up something like a stepped classical colonnade.

Eventually I find a torn-up former restaurant kitchen, a little low-slung 1-story on a concrete lot, that I preternaturally perceive as correct. It’s crowded with people trying to plan things together, my friends and collaborators. I’m bustling in the middle with them, trying to squeeze through what was the kitchen service window and the hole in the structure (to it’s right) where a door was removed. There’s a cardboard box of stuff there which I recognize as mine, my first teapot from CostPlus, the white one, and an oddly shaped pitcher with a flat-top handle and beak-like pour-spout — one that has a name that I don’t recall.