Category: Dream Journal

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Dream Journal

Lindsay’s Secret Past

A YouTuber I’ve followed for years, Lindsay Ellis, narrates and hosts a long movie-like narrative dream allegorically revealing her past trauma. Most of the details of story are lost (I had a convention class to possibly attend starting at 9, but didn’t make it and fell back asleep).

It began on a steep cliffside road overlooking the ocean. Small, languid, statuesque lions watched over some of the scenes. We drove most of the time, often being tricked by clever transitions like the imagineering inside the Tower of Terror ride. One long sequence is in an oversize warehouse/grocery store, aisles like rooms of a building. I think out of respect for Lindsay I won’t repeat what I remember might’ve happened there. It’s mostly forgotten anyway — though I’m left with a feeling of sympathy and understanding, a feeling that I’ll keep the exact nature of the secret in the same spirit she has.

It’s worth noting here that I don’t know her personally, I’m just an member of her audience. But she’s a real person. I don’t often have dreams about strangers like this.

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Dream Journal

Ocean at the Window & Messages Sent by Past Self

dark water

Beginning with the strongest image: ocean waves suddenly lapping up the windows of a beachside bedroom. My mom lies sick in the bed closest the window. She’s half blind, nursed by the family for years, and today she asks me to get her a bar of white chocolate. I drive a pair of motor-scooters — like standing astride two horses –and retrieve one, then the other, from the room where my mom (who is also “Queen Anne”) is resting up with her eyes open.

I leave my friends and family in the beachside cottage (now much closer to the ocean). Searching the beach where I earlier helped organize a game of guys vs. girls volleyball — right up against the water’s edge — I looking for a computer which was recently inherited from when I lived in between bus seats. It’s a rack of outdated tech, box-shaped, a thin shiny black panel with Motorola wiring. It could’ve been from techie-artist friend Rich Humphrey. Now in the evening’s dark, fleeing rising waves, we instead rescue a dog that looks like Aislinn’s Catahoula hounddog Rose (we = me and I-don’t-know-who).

Makeouts in the large family garage of my childhood home, on a long massage platform, relaxed cool friends makeouts, with a tall athletic strawberry blonde friend from my Chicken John days. Laying on my side, happily killing time, I use a fully-sopped paintbrush to slather purple-to-grey paint over a piece of scrap cardstock. I paint from top-left to bottom-right, like Georgia O’Keefe.

I’m tasked with leading a group of my family/friends back to a ground floor hotel room I once stayed in as a kid. I observe my brother Chris attempt to carefully sneak under a low-hanging tree branch, hoping he’ll see what I see: the (sabertooth?) tiger just above eye level. After giving him the chance, when it feels almost too late, I shout out a clear warning. The look on his face as he made eye contact with the tiger! We get to the hotel room, where the quality of time seems a bit slippy — I’m able to simultaneously receive and send a message to myself, by gesturing to the 4-year-old me within the room. I tapped at the top of a large conch/whelk shell with my fingers joined (an upside-down “ma che vuoi” 🤌), holding the eye contact and attention of myself in the past. It is, I believe, what should be called a strange loop.

Back in the garage with my makeout friend, we’re joined by a recently victorious celebrity, a Chris Farley-like man. Together we hug him in a warm, cuddly friend sandwich. The situation is fond and intimately familiar, even somewhat sexual although I can’t touch my female friend over him (he’s a big guy just like Farley).

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Dream Journal

Landlord Fixing the Stairs

The landlord is in the backyard, and the wooden stairway has had one of its columns eroded away. I call him and he actually starts to fix it. I discover the shady lower column, underneath the landing, is also broken completely through. There’s barely anything holding up the right side anymore. The physical orientation is oddly different than our normal backyard, rotated somehow — the landlord too — both true-to-life and not. Lazy overgrown potted plants grow thick and lush over puddles and concrete, everything seems to have a fine coating of moss.

The view zooms out, showing the Victorian building that Ais lives in being a relic of earlier development, isolated in a business park, itself within a large airport and whose roads serve cars as well as planes. Reminds me of Alameda.

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Dream Journal

That’s A Wrap (Party)

Sitting around at a wrap party in a park with a bunch of friends for a show called Dame. Mickey is there, as is Feral. We start passing phones around showing the different things we’d saved during the production. I’ve been hungry and drinking often lately, but tonight I’m not imbibing at all and I’m just as happy.

A long car pulls up to the curb at the outdoor crew party. I’m asked to drive it, and I agree to volunteer, as long as it’s not a manual transmission. But it so happens that an older black guy in the crew excitedly volunteers after I’ve already climbed inside. The driver sits on a raised platform towards the back, so I take a ride in the spacious cabin, which is luxuriously laid out like a sightseeing tour boat crossed with the Batmobile.

We bump along at speed along the long curve of an unpaved rural hill. I have a dramatic view of an impressively acrobatic helicopter fight, the mismatched belligerents ducking and sliding and swooping in midair.

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Dream Journal

Australia, What Might’ve Been

I go return to Australia now, as myself, a middle-aged man. I end up spending much time reading in a dark pub and saving really good memes. The room where I’m staying is compact and oddly shaped, on the corner between two long rural streets. The whole thing is very much a nostalgia tour but it’s made more difficult on account I didn’t have Google Maps in Australia back then. I remember one thing on my to-do list: “ivywalk”… though I admit I don’t even know what that was. It’s relaxing — yet nostalgia itself is a kind of pain, the bittersweet pain of a place you cannot truly go back to.

At some point near the end of this trip I consider revisiting the town I spent the last days of my younger trip in, Shepparton, where I was humbled as a salesperson and walked up and down the sheep inhabited main street. This is… somewhat close to my real-life waking memories. I try to think of even one person I could visit there, and the one who comes to mind is the charming old lady Josephine, the only customer I feel I actually helped, getting her new bill put under the name she’d always chosen to use: Jo. And yet she was fairly old then, and that was 14 years ago.

Curiously enough — and this is the waking truth — last November I had a brief lucky few hours when I could’ve bought deep discount plane tickets for Qantas 100-year anniversary. I had a three week trip for two all queued up (for $1400!) yet ultimately we decided that even that wasn’t quite low enough for us, what with food and lodging too. I’d quite forgotten about that untaken chance… today would’ve been about when we flew back.

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Dream Journal

Grand Canyon Birth, Creepy Mannequin

Lynae gives birth to our daughter earlier than planned while visiting the Grand Canyon. This is inconvenient, obviously, but I note to myself how unique her birth certificate will be.

Transported via flat-bottomed boat behind an experimental wakeless speedboat, which is mostly underwater and creates an odd rippling divot in the water. We pass conifer-lined shores and disused “water basketball” courts, part of an out-of-season summer camp.

I’m moving a creepy “live” mannequin that has become a problem. I don’t want to touch the thing more than absolutely necessary and so, dragging it along, I can see it blink and look around. Propping the torso up on a ladder, I examine its inhumanly long eyelashes — the thing seems to lunge at me for an instant. I’m instantly awake.

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Dream Journal

The Slow Plane to Russia

Travelling to Moscow, Russia, with my wife for an extended vacation. The airliner is laid out as rows of seats on risers, sideways to the direction of travel. We’re the last people to be able to order at the grotty little on-board cafe — they’re closing and also almost out of food. I move seats to get more room, but still can’t get much privacy. I turn my huge CRT monitor in the seat next to me but there’s seemingly no direction I can point it where a stranger can’t see it. The space isn’t much like an airplane, a crowd of people moving around in what sometimes feels like a filthy abandoned stadium. At some point I have to prep and clean a poorly-maintained old toilet.

The dream after this is what came before. We’re in the planning stages for this east-of-eastern Europe vacation. I fantasize about the routes we could take, passing through places like Crimea, Turkey, the Balkans, maybe even the Greek Isles. No firm itinerary has been made, as is typical for us. I realize I need to worry whether Russia, and all the countries we may go to, still consider kratom legal.

We have a small fight while driving down to Palm Springs, on the way to Las Vegas, where our deep-discount direct-to-Moscow flight leaves from. I tell my wife I left my luggage at home and we need to go back. She angrily asks why I didn’t take it, and I say it’s because when we left, I asked her if we were just going out to run an errand and would have a chance to come home before we left. I insist she answered yes, but she insists on having no memory of that. But I know we make the flight, because I’ve experienced it already.

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Dream Journal

Oops, Giant Flute

Walking back from somewhere, I stop in at a store on 24th street (near my home) that sells music equipment. It has a spare layout, isolated displays in little clumps, floor models on display. With help from the staff I pick out a curious modern version of a traditional flute, with big playful colored buttons instead of finger holes. Taking it out of the bag to play on the way home, I discover that I’ve been given what is actually an absurd 11 foot long pipe — the one I picked out being most likely 11 inches. How did they not notice?! Rather amused, I know I’ll soon go back and exchange it, but play this more expensive monstrosity for fun in the meantime.

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Dream Journal

Summer Camp School Reunion

School reunion at a place like a summer camp. I run into my friend Robby T. and gloss into an explanation of everything I’ve done since high school. I look down and realize at some point I put on the white-and-blue shirt with my high school logo, split down the middle like a button-up.

I’m myself but shrunk to the size of a mouse. Maybe I am a mouse. I’m on an artificial high cliffside ledge, maybe steep stadium seating.

I wake up and go back to sleep and dream about having written some notes in my dream journal. I open the app in my dream and there’s a short mathematical formula. I know that I wrote it and it’s meaningful, but I defer trying to figure it out.

In a room killing time. Waiting to occasionally sexually service Dara. She’s leaning on a table with a knit shawl or lace draped over her backside, playing on her phone. Every once in a while she gestures over and I go at it from behind.

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Dream Journal

Left Behind at Omura Station

Travelling by train in Japan, stop momentarily at a station called Omura. The train leaves without me and my wife is on it with both our tickets. I have to walk along the line in a foreign country, or ride the train and hope they don’t check my ticket.

The back wall of my dad’s house in Cathedral City has been stolen. I suspect it might be a construction site somewhere in the lots behind it. The city recently has only sold cheap plots, ones in the middle of blocks without good road access. Exploring this area, I pass a lane of farm trees, not knowing the neighborhood anymore. I see Fifth’s Grocery store, and a Marie Callender’s inside it. I orient myself with the mountains but it’s harder than usual. I sit and wait underneath a shady tree out of eyeline, eat a couple coconuts and scope out the area.

Climbing up a set of colorful ersatz stairs, through a vertically-tilted bus where a giant girl is sleeping in one of the bunks. I pass by her and she seems interested in me but I’m kind of on a date. My date (a younger girl with dark fluffy short hair) and I make it for a wedding on this long plateau walkway at the top, something like the Alden Royal Skyway… very underwhelming for the title. No one else seems to be there yet, but I know this is where it is.

I’m shopping for a blue vest in a small department store, even though I already have a few blue vests. The department store is in some kind of college, concrete archways and corridors.