Category: Dream Journal

Categories
Dream Journal

Short Stairs Make Quick Work

I see my friend from middle and high school, Alexx Sanchez. I never did finish that drawing of her as an elf that she requested in 7th grade — I didn’t know how to draw, and I still don’t think I could make a passable go of it. Demonstrating some of the knowledge of the weird sandstone building we’re in, since I’ve been working there so long, I slide down set of stairs with an extremely low ceiling (perhaps a 2 foot space). I then call to her from the subterranean work area. She looks mildly horrified that we’re expected to get in and out through a space so small.

My younger friend Lily Z. is in a band. I round the corner of my high school, playing a drum, telling her about three other Lilys I met with her exact name, and how strangely different and the same they are.

Categories
Dream Journal

Moving Scooter, Unseen

Sitting on my scooter around the corner from home. I’ve been awake most of the night, in and out, and realize now it’s Thursday morning and time to move it for street-sweeping. I start it up and carefully putter it down the wrong side of the street, mostly pushing it — yet I don’t have my glasses on and realize it’d be safer to not even have the engine running.

Both about the odd calculations about safety I come to, and the necessary reminder to move my bike. Wasn’t even Thursday, though, so just goes to show I didn’t know what day it was.

Categories
Dream Journal

Nautical Art Show

Nautical group art show. Different boats and boat themed objects. One object on loan from the Riverside County Museum has recently been improved since last time I looked. It’s a polymer sculpted little white boat, a tiny compass underneath a flip-top cap on top of the cabin. But just looking at it bares a kind of threat — it was made by Casey, a much disliked ex of my wife.

As I (with difficulty) attempt to lounge on a craggy rock (with Dana trying to lean back and relax on my leg), another art object is demonstrated by its creator. He’s wrapped a boot in a clever layer of canvas fabric, folding the edges to look like a keel. The patches where the boot boat leaked are only revealed when he points them out.

Watching a lanky latino chef prepare some kind of galley meal, his friend loading the dishwasher at the corner of the stainless steel kitchen. One thing pushes into another, a bin of forks falls over the side but lands upright, luckily. I’m young and eager, and pop up to grab it for him. I observe his internal debate as he tries to calculate if he has enough time to wash a single blender jug.

Maneport Hub, a modern 80s TV show take on the “keeping up with the pirates” drama. See a short clip where a lady is strapped off the gunnels and being hosed down waterboard style. The camera pulls back and it’s revealed she’s just practicing. The files are in a folder, and I accidentally delete the main folder exposing all the sub-season folders and the text entries and the like.

Categories
Dream Journal

Hot Vampire, Bedroom Rain, Hardware Construction

A vampire demonstrates some of his heating powers. First round isn’t too hot, then he has his girlfriend back up. Guess he’s a Twilight-kinda vampire, having someone called a girlfriend and all. The next time he glows bright red. This is a family entertainment show, and I remember thinking how rare it is to see people just comfortably naked (on TV). Someone brings up the idea of using the ultra-cool morgue refrigerator to keep them chill, but aren’t sure if it would kill them.

I spot my 92 year old Grandma walking away down a grassy sidewalk. I try to say goodbye to her as she leaves a gathering. Though I’m myself, fully grown, I still feel like an infant, like it’s still the 1980s, like my relationship to her has never changed.

In the smaller of my childhood bedrooms (second night in a row, here). I’m letting rain run down the walls, dripping from the white “cottage cheese” ceiling, flooding the hardwood floor in an inch of water. My original bedroom had neither that ceiling nor that floor. I remember to peek under the bed and inspect the spot where floorboards are cracked and missing. I reflect that I’m 36 and still live with my parents, gazing at my mannish arm hair. While I don’t precisely feel like a loser, I also don’t feel like someone to be envied.

There’s a hardware store under construction across the street from my home. It’s replacing a leaky warehouse where the second floor temporarily housed my favorite art store, SCRAP. Climbing down from peering over the wall, I notice that an AirBnB there has placed a painted post outside, horizontal rings of dull green and red. It’s a crude wayfinder for helping guests, and I’m sure unlawful, but the longer I look the more I admire it — and the matching ring-shaped gate made similarly. Crude, yet beautiful.

Categories
Dream Journal

Protest at a Water Park, Saved

I’ve been dropped off at a water park with a group of friends. I spend most of my time by myself, but I see my handsome childhood classmate Zane Flynn walking around and I walk beside him twice.

There is a water slide being used by a giant girl near the edge of the sea. The slide cuts through a low straight ridge, water fed to it by two channels behind the ridge, the water sloshed in by two manatee-shark creatures from either side.

I’m involved in a dramatic incident where the coast is drained for an approaching tram. A lone protester walks up to the track and places his foot on it, forcing the tram to stop. Two armed guards approach to arrest him. Moving as one, myself and a large crowd surround both guards and protester, like white blood cells isolating an infection. We sweep back to the shore in a wave and break apart, saving the protester. Angela Merkel (who is in charge here) begins a retribution campaign, which I immediately notice by the presence of a creepy guy recording video directly in front of me as I walk back.

Some things in the park are already closed even by 3:00 pm, like the gift shop/president’s hall located on a mezzanine at the edge of the park. Headed back down long twisting perpendicular concrete stairs, I jump and surf on a series of long sloping metal handrails. Finally, on the way out, I consider how the musician Weird Al always seems to be on top of knowing about these protests. Then, I just happen to see him on the way out, playing an accordion cover of “We Don’t Need No Education”. I thank him. I’ve heard that he remembers all his fans names, and he yells back at me “thanks Amy!” Hm. Leaping up the stairs in bounds, I see two hip-hop kids having an argument about the protest. My answer to them is that it doesn’t matter what happened in the past, what happened today is always more relevant. And the protest happened today.

On my way back out to the communal bus, around the corner from the exit, I run into my family, which is the family from Malcolm in the Middle. In the cozy second story living room/kitchen, they’ve written a single name on a big board, “Artemisia”. I start saying “don’t even tell me, I know you’re up to something,” but they explain anyway (of course they do) it’s their list of names for people that would both wear cutoffs and who could be male or female. Of course it is.

Categories
Dream Journal

Girl Named Fragrant, and Cooking for Cannibals

I’m writing on a railway tram with a load of people and, due to a breakdown, itself being hauled on the back of a towtruck (tow-tram?). Seems dangerous but whatevs. Seated next to me is a girl who’s very friendly and flirty. Reminds me of someone I know, maybe someone Asian, but despite otherwise having the same features this girl has bright orange hair and freckles. Her name, as she introduces herself, is “Fragrant”. I find this charmingly silly.

Later I’m staying in a room like my smaller childhood bedroom. But there’s this weird 30 degree corner with a built-in desk/ice chest. My friend Heph has graffitied one side of it which I didn’t notice at first — in fact, a good amount of the front is broken away. It turns out the desk is a switch which turns on the oven.

I prep a meal at home that I’m hoping to eat at a famous cannibal restaurant in Santa Cruz, one where you bring in your own meat. Naturally. I’ve foolishly left the plastic bacon keeper in the kitchen oven for 45 minutes. Thankfully it’s not melted, but after all of that, the bacon slices aren’t even cooked through. I’m not sure I’ll even have anything to eat at the restaurant. Which is all well and good, since it occurs to me it’s probably best not to admit where specifically the meat came from.

Categories
Dream Journal

Dive Camp with Friends

A summer camp for diver’s training in underwater oil recovery. Mixed co-ed group of youngish people, high sexual tension but everyone is working too hard to do anything about it. A girl I know from the PacTrades hostel, Adrienne F., is climbing the rope ladder to our next task area but stops to masturbate. Supposedly, I remember her doing this in the past.

Karma Raya  is the name for the communal ranch house some of us stay in. A low wall separates our small sleeping rooms from a main activity area. The place looks like an architectural cutaway model that someone actually made a building of.

There, my school friend Vince Saunders is playing piano. Well there’s a piano in the same room anyways. I slide down the wall, over the edge, and land on the piano bench facing away from him. It’s a silly yet simultaneously classy move.

Categories
Dream Journal

Motorcycling the Hills, Shopping Ice Cream

Rounding a rarely-visited corner on the rocky coast of San Francisco, a road built around a dirt hill. In the ’50s it was used in a bank promotion, which is how most people know it.

I drive past two flatbed trucks with massive reinforced metal plates for moving homes and other buildings. Watching an educational film on the subject of a motorcycle’s back case, addressing it being further from the center of gravity. Watching (or rewatching) a video of a Motorcycling Mom going backwards over a long patch of rocks in a canyon side road, laughing about how clumsy she is.

Visiting a destination ice cream shop whose flavors constantly change. Hugging my own mom, who wears several buttons of her favorite flavors — she has an idle fantasy that one day she can point to them, and that will serve as her request for a particular ice cream.

Having planned to go out, I end up shopping most of the day. I keep a stringy cactus attached to my ankle, while I trip over other plants. Drop off my childhood friend Robby T. at a sand-lot home he’s staying at somewhere in a working class neighborhood of our hometown. Two Rottweilers come out the front door as I’m parking my motorcycle. They immediately try to get the chocolate in my duffel bag, then jump up to the top of the closet to get a sausage hanging there.

A demo of someone who isn’t Italian but loves to cook Italian food; the man is buying $500 of ingredients on a grocery checkout belt. So much, the clerk can’t even let him pay for it and has to wait for a manager. She stands at the end of the line (per policy) to keep the customer from running. This wastes all of our time, so we waste hers explaining how stupid it is she that can’t accept our money. We could, if we knew, just split it into more than one checkout. A security guard comes out afterwards dressed in pink camo.

Categories
Dream Journal

Poly Reindeer Toy, Mayo Cult Fishing Pond

Sent by my employer, a magazine, to replace another reporter-photographer. The assignment is at a fetishist’s retreat farm compound. They much overuse mayonnaise (I don’t much remember except I expected most of our readers would find it disgusting while I only found it unhygienic).

Taking a moment, outside on a patio lounger in my long blue velvet robe which I haven’t seen since too long, I film them with a baby hippo on their arm. In the communal pond of the trailer park-like community, a man catches a smaller-than-hoped long-finned fish with extendable mouth parts, calling it “pterodac… no, it’s, you know, wing fish”. He regales us with his imagining the panic it had being drawn up from the bottom. Then breaks its mouth off to kill it. I end up in a garage watching TV with some siblings of widely varying ages, followed by a crossbow contest where the older siblings are one-by-one held back from leaving by an arrow shot just ahead of them. The youngest (a Madeleine-like girl) looks back from the door innocently, not knowing why her older siblings aren’t behind her.

A toy reindeer like something from Frozen, molded seats molded in its sides for human figures to ride. The figures are numbered “polyamorous #0, #1, #2”. In what seems an odd detail, the male figure has a 0 over it’s crotch and a female figure has a 1.

A shelf of carved and painted stone miniatures of buildings, like my parents used to have. Different eras and styles, which I rearrange to sit better on the shelf. I begin to mess with a round, very plain train layout just behind it.

Categories
Dream Journal

Stalker’s Ridge, Tabernacle Airship

Driving in a rented sleeper van southward from San Francisco with my family group, a brother and sister. We pull off at twilight onto a barren peninsula jutting into ocean. While the campfire we make is pleasant enough, the van becomes trapped and our dark environs become distinctly spooky. We clamber up the side of a sharp rocky ridge. From the chipped line of its knife-edge peak, I spot the shadowed outlines of enemies stalking us, nearly surrounding us. I don’t have an end for this dream… sorry.

As a kid I famously broke into the Mormon Tabernacle Airship. Now, as circumstance would have it, I’m being asked to do so once again. I make my way through a side entrance, timing events so I blend into a large crowd just filing in for a special occasion. For a short while I wait in a winding line, then matter-of-factly jump the square barricade into a reliquary with the appearance of a backgammon arrangement. I deftly pluck a hollow pin hidden in a scepter which grants me the power to skip around short distances. Mischievously I hop from alcove to alcove in the labyrinthine line, confounding the sleepy crowds attending for flat religious duty.