Category: Dream Journal

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Dream Journal

Ritzy Post-Soviet Neighborhood

Visiting a quiet city reminiscent of Eastern Europe. I drive my partner to a small, private neighborhood built around a flat, park-like open space. An older resident, a member of the post-communist bourgeoisie, shows me that you can fly up in the center and view the neighborhood from above. I see what can be described as concrete cubicles many stories tall, containing entire mansions the size of a city block.

I zoom in on the center of the street where stands a very good replica of the Parthenon, exactly as archaeologists found it, with all the ancient debris dutifully and artfully replicated in loving detail. They have at least one performer who re-enacts as a pre-socratic philosopher in daily performances. We drive out of the neighborhood, pulling away from the elegant, curving, grass-lined drive.

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Dream Journal

Volcanic Old Crush Sex

My third grade crush sits right on my face! See her hips move slowly down without seeing her face. Hairless. She’s rewarding me for something, my expertise and skilled performance. We’re glad to see each other again after so many years. I don’t think she has kids in this lifetime.

Two Danish tourists are swingers. Not important to the story, but they were there. I have an appointment to keep and need to climb the lines of a long diagonal tramway upwards to meet our Atlas Obscura tour boat. I get there with just a bit of time to spare, overlooking a small dainty Greek island I’ve been to before. So small, almost a carved model.

The volcano explodes, but I know what to do. It’s the first time in my life I’ve been close enough to feel the shockwave.

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Dream Journal

Dara, a Pastel Rat

I spot my old crush Dara walking across the crosswalk outside my house. She’s dressed in faded pastels, a pastel hoodie pulled over her head. I recognize her despite the personally unlikely color palette and the odd gait she has, a side-to-side waddle like her hips are too big.

She turns into a rat, scrabbling around the kitchen for Teddy Grahams to eat. Squeezing inside an empty milk jug, I start feeding her Teddy Grahams.

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Dream Journal

Logs in a Tree, Hip Ground Floor Squat

Tree logs stored high up across two trees. A ladder is up there too, blocking access. I look up and point out to my companion that there’s a hawk sitting on a branch directly above us.

The self-appointed minder of this open plot of land is a creepy psychiatrist, a young man who is clueless enough to stand staring at you from behind a couch to “observe” you. I point this out to Lynae, or whoever is with me. Someone escapes out the front door and into the music store across the other side of the mall (they don’t get far).

Behind the tree with the logs is a water chute leading back to a mill pond with a lovely population of loons (ha!). There are inscriptions in concrete, familiar yet written in some Southeast Asian language,

I sign up for a documentary show with Ricky Gervais, and as part of the contract we have to record banter to be played over the footage for at least 9½ minutes. We record it in the back of a car and then I’m told, jokingly, that the rental lasts another 120 minutes. My old friends Chicken and Kelly are in the front seat, smoking, and making out with the smoke.

Driving with my dad, early morning around 4 am, on the streets of our desert home that looks covered in a sheen of smooth white snow. I have a stapled-together packet of printed papers that’s about fighting others’ belief in mental illness, something I’d planned to read on the drive. Dad gets me to close it with a frustrated “really?”

Weird cheap flat on the first floor of a dirty yet hip ghetto. A side street near the heart of the city, clumped-up forgotten backyards and trash gathered in the dead-ends. My friends are thinking of buying this place — or maybe they already have? But that could just be a cover story for a squat, I think. They’ve converted a windowless room in the middle into an “orgy space”, which I guess means stuffing in a ton of pillows and chairs. Bafflingly, there’s only a heavy sheet separating it from a front patio area packed with couches. Ghetto but very cozy.

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Dream Journal

Old Gas Station, Renovated for a Cult

I inherit a gas station and repair shop from a rich uncle. Good to own, simply to have such a resource, but the land itself is probably a multi-million dollar value. The neighborhood is rusty and industrial, but wooded and scenic, near a picturesque mountain bend.

Roof has plants growing on it and the sloped edges are chipping away with age. I note to my dad that several electrical inlets have started to swell (especially an old Christian cross near the road). Kids are inquisitive about my motorcycle as I roll it into the first set of doors.

I allow the visitors who show up to start becoming gurus. Everyone wears white clothing with yellow details over them. A game is played over the course of a day, where the cult members get more and more expository, grandiose. A car trunk starts blinking in the repair shop, which is a prize for our scrappy band, but by the end of the day the winner doesn’t even want it. There are blue finches in the gritty central courtyard — not endangered but it’s nice to give them a home.

“What is inevitable?” I ask a small group of disciples. Some petite blonde mishears me and gives a definition of a weird drug (N-N2-DL?) — dredged from her past life of sometime debauchery in the city. Eventually we agree, mostly, on a definition of “unavoidable”.

The phrase enters my head, profound and banal at once: “you can’t teach a god how to behave.” I awake with my arm powerfully asleep, hanging off the side of the bed.

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Dream Journal

Freeing Pets of Many Sizes

A friendly stubby pet caterpillar, the last of my edible caterpillars. I release him in the rosebushes on the side of the Cathedral City house, near my parent’s bedroom, hoping that he reproduces someday. Later I find him in a planter in the very moist ground (so moist it’s nearly half-full with water). Nearby the hole, in the hedgerow, I find a pet parrot and hamsters that were also released some time ago.

I check on the status of a mouse cage, with very tiny mice — about the size of a pill capsule. The original two have indeed started breeding, with minuscule little mice crawlers lodged in the corners of their cotton-stuffed plexiglas half-shoebox cage.

A beluga whale in a backyard pool? Something like a Christmas wish I made as a child, which my parents had to convince me wasn’t a good idea.

Tracking a feral neighborhood horse outside the Cathedral City house. Driving with my dad in a Mercedes, his Mercedes, we finally find it upon reaching the end of our court, across from a wide lake on the other side of the main road. I say “Great! You know what you can do now? Leave it alone.” Dad leaves car idling at end of the street, takes off for work via different method. Patrick drives car back slowly along the narrow, overgrown court. The neighbor’s tree branches hang low enough that they block their house lights from reaching across the street. A neighbor woman has poor personal boundaries and tries to demonstrate where the light would be going, by entering into the house on the other side of the street.

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Dream Journal

Not-So-Haunted Blue Taffy

Watching American horror story on my phone in the living room, I notice a piece of blue taffy on the couch that seems to be moving of its own accord. I follow it down the apartment hallway as it’s pulled into Lynae’s studio where I can discern that it’s attached by a thin string. I can’t tell if it’s caught on something or is being pulled from below, perhaps. I try tugging the cord in what I consider a very “human” manner, as I figure that’s a useful signal to someone who might be holding the other end of the line.

I wake up and start narrating this dream into my phone and Lynae shouts from her studio “who are you talking to?”

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Dream Journal

Ol’ Time-Traveling Kinky Mr. Rogers

Taking others to see a young paraplegic gymnast, someone I worked with in another dream or movie. She can land from cliffside high bars into a cliffside cave, it’s rock walls patched up with decrepit tile. It reminds me of secretive passages of the Moiety resistance from the game Riven.

I look into a mirror and I’m an older version of my friend Spy. I’m feeling happy, pleasantly humbled, and I speak of how it’s possible to time travel — although you always make a mess. Connects with a quote I read yesterday from Roseanne Barr (of all people) who said “I do Kabbalistic meditation. It’s not unlike time travel; it can change the past and not just the future. You can look at what was lost and go beyond the grief of what was lost.”

Another odd and wonderful segment of the dream: receiving advice on both leather-working and kink relationships from the one and only Mr. Fred “McFeely” Rogers.

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Dream Journal

Old Doctor Shares Old Records

Old doctor with funky left arm, I bang into his side playfully and he protests. I say “I used to be young and now that I’m grown…”

I look through my medical record that’s been kept since my birth, but never shown to me. There are reams of alphanumeric codes.

My four family members are all insane, to a varying degree? Who knows how likely that is.

Broken eggs on the floor of the RV I’m staying in remind me of a dream where I’m feeding a baby chicken, or duck. Unusual connection and not something that would normally trigger a dream memory.

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Dream Journal

Lauren Buys SF Real Estate

I help my hometown friend Lauren buy a building in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. It’s an old six-floor walk-up building housing older Burners, with a soon painted-over mural in the backyard called “Burning Times”: a fire symbol and a series of clocks. I’m glad to have Lauren in San Francisco, and I hope to maybe one day live cheaply in this big building with her, but I’m not sure she understands how precious and sought-after a place like it is. I peek into her first floor room there’s barely anything in there except vintage curtains and sex toys on the bed.

Our class is learning from a science teacher (in the vein of Mr. Suggett or Mr. Lonborg) when class is interrupted by a long phone call about Nick Howell’s mom getting arrested in Connecticut. Nick Howell was a real kid I knew in middle school. The teacher gives a long compassionate speech afterwards, going into the merits of whether or not we should share these things. I find it hard to follow along, despite him being my favorite teacher.