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.