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Dream Journal

Train Got Problems

I’m trying to get off a passenger train (a tram, really) with an unwieldy bag slung over my shoulder. Heedless of my struggle, the train starts along again quickly — the cowcatcher in front scoops me right back on board, like a set of stairs lunging at me.

In the station a giant diesel locomotive idles noisily, producing an overpowering mechanical smell. There’s no indication what it’s here for. Maybe I climb around on it.

I become angry that they spent a bunch of time and effort renovating and rearranging rooms on the next train. They all seem patently inferior to me. I storm off after hearing again of the coveted exercise classes for adult men.

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Dream Journal

A Spillway of Colonnades

Sliding down a long wide slope of water, riding a boogie board attached by rope to a remote-controlled motor. Meet my brother at the bottom of this spillway and we talk about how fun yet frightening it is. The water is startlingly deep and dark for a pool despite civilized touches, like the pleasant collonade at water’s edge.

I’m with a subby girl who might be a satanist. She has a distinct, plump shape and is usually seen intently talking with her boyfriend (also a satanist). It’s clear she has a keen interest in murder, perhaps even a fetish for being murdered. (Probably derived from the Silicon Valley characters Gilfoyle and his girlfriend Tara, who I just learned were also satanists.) There is an acknowledged creepiness to this, and I do worry about being drawn into it or even blamed somehow.

Off to the side of the vast slide area is an anteroom, part of a museum. The cases have a display of California coins you can leaf through. I knew that before the Federal Reserve Bank, states used to mint their own currency. But I never thought to check before.

My tenth grade English teacher Mrs. Roos assigns homework: the paperwork they give you to fill out when checking in to the mental ward. The forms are oversized to be able to read it, copied from real materials but structured like every other generic homework assignment. Supposedly this is too help us understand what a character in our book I going through when she goes to the mental ward. I approach Mrs. Roos in what can only be described as a sanctum; darkened archways, candles, burnt offerings. I explain playfully but confidingly that I might skip the exercise, even deserve extra credit — you see, I once filled out these forms myself at the mental ward. How better to relate to the character than to have had to same experience?

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Dream Journal

Frozen Offices, Freezing Time

Ambling along a boring straight street of an office park. Boring isn’t the right word — faceless, eerie, liminal are better. With my every step the foam façade exteriors creak, with age, even with just the wind. Like the entire place has been ignored since the 1980s. Starting to feel like I’m sneaking around. I stop to read the plaque next to a door; it’s a video game company that hasn’t made anything since 1989 yet claims to be releasing a new game in a week. And there it is, on a plaque of all things.

In their offices I start zooming around, teleporting and phasing through rooms. I use an ability to freeze or slow down time. People really do work in these identical offices, and there are many of them. Cheerier than I’d expect. Unexplainably like New Orleans in the winter. Bland, predictable, the same old conference rooms, but in good condition. I inspect the structure from inside the walls and it’s sound.

In the middle of the office space I begin operating on pair of dogs (or maybe donkeys), male and female.

Brushing my friend Tracy’s arm with a smooth flat hair brush. Her husband Don watches me carefully but with calm apathy.

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Dream Journal

Aiae Spotted, Interesting Map

Rocky front walk from my childhood home. A mixed gender band, maybe from the 80s, enthusiastic but outdated. I might have a lip plate stretching on my right side.

I spot Aiae on a map, a modern spelling of the island of Circe. A floating jiggling landscape, I flip the on/off switch to lock it in place. Once the map is done baking/rendering/uplifting it looks like an impressive mashup of video game assets, an intricate road network connecting meso-American pyramids mixed with Middle Eastern. A few disparate cultures jumbled together from files already at hand. A giant Alladin asset pops through the floor of a Greek parthenon temple.

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Dream Journal

Last Zipline with Mom

I have a saved memory with my late Mom that I didn’t know I had, that I’ve never seen. It’s comparable to a voicemail one has never reviewed. It’s a zipline experience (something I’ve never done), over an old gold mining area with hand-hewn wooden posts, and pines; looks something like Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. It’s long, with the cable suspended across several pillars, big circular pulleys, looping back in places. There are tasks to complete sometimes. It plays through and at the end my mom disappears — the file auto-deletes and that was the only time I’ll get to see it.

I have a moderately intense good cathartic cry then wake up. It’s still early. Usually I have a dilemma at this point, since this seemed like a unique and important dream, yet writing it down will probably wake me up for the day. But when asking myself if I would forget it completely should I fall back to sleep, the answer was… no, no I won’t. And so I didn’t.

I’m one of a privileged few able to attend a new archeological attraction in Afghanistan. The ground is dusty and broken out of shape. There’s a special feeling crisping the air, a feeling like this could be the same as it was thousands of years ago when the artifacts were buried.

While in Arizona for unrelated reasons, I rediscover a railroad museum I visited as a kid. I use the opportunity to pull around the narrow side road and into their back parking lot, which has quite a view. It’s on a gentle clear slope overlooking a valley. The lot itself is a rounded square which I have repeated difficulty pulling into with my big class field trip van. The museum is having an outdoor thrift sale day. Alone among the liminal grassy area of the museum’s backside I peruse stacks of colorful boxes on shelves. Occasionally I find one worthy of carrying around like a talisman, maybe to buy. There’s one odd steam engine which I locate in two pieces separately, clicking into place the oversized cabin. I’m rewarded for this with much interest from museum staff and other shoppers. Yet I find myself most comfortable around the shallow pond, with the distant view. I’m there when it begins to snow.

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Dream Journal

Prince Andrew’s Art Class

My third grade crush is swearing and idly playing with her junk, talking about “cunt cunt cunt”.

Prince Andrew (or George W. Bush) is teaching an art class. Has some hapless young students, some journalists fishing for stories. Hard to learn anything as he actually doesn’t have ability to communicate his aesthetic sense, if his royal one is worth communicating.

I pack up to leave early on my motorcycle, as  this class is on a Friday. The Prince is rambling about his mistress/lover not showing up. I clean around the sink during my many attempts to get out of there, and leave a bin of pancakes with a lid for the next folks who will use that space. On the way out I take an old bag someone has left behind so it doesn’t rot there, but it has an Apple Watch clipped to it — now I wonder if this good deed is essentially stealing the expensive watch.

“Patrick library” written on a sign with a photo of a forest fire. Trying to figure out what that means, and show someone else, but the words become more faded and harder to find the more I look around. I end up in a back room, with a few parking spots for rented electric trikes behind a hospital’s ER. I give my parking spot up voluntarily for a frazzled mom.

Planting trees in a backyard which represents America, possibly. Two of the pines will grow oddly where they’re sited, I reckon, but I’ll wait till they grow in and harvest them. The credits roll with soft music (which is an unusually on-the-nose ending for a dream).

But interestingly, what actually ends the dream is me repeatedly rehearsing what notes I will take upon waking. So, here we are then.

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Dream Journal

Favorite Tchotchke Store

Checking in on my favorite Japanese tchotchke store which has been shut for the duration of the pandemic. It seems like it’s appeared in previous dreams as a place where I stored my clothes sometimes. Among the tall wooden columns of its business complex, I feel like I’m sneaking around. The windows are dusty and the door is locked, but I’m relieved to see there’s still stuff inside. It’s obvious they’ve moved a lot of merchandise out, perhaps long ago when the pandemic started. I’m worried they still might go out of business as it’s been so long they were closed.

In my home I’m carrying a “Omicron and Delta” handheld COVID temperature sensor device. It’s a smooth bubble-form electronic, a little fancier than I’d typically buy. Reflecting how it can’t be that old as the branding of it for detecting Omicron could’ve only happened recently.

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Dream Journal

Surviving Zombie Apocalypse / Revisiting Grandma’s House

I’m proudly surviving the zombie apocalypse. I can zap around, I’m vigilant and quick. These zombies aren’t mindless but seem to hunt together as if controlled by an overlord somewhere. Despite my cocksure attitude I’m keenly aware of being constantly in danger. The world is changed and though I’m getting on, I know this isn’t what it should be. There’s a moment where I (or someone controlling the teleporter) accidentally teleport into a classic officer’s club/New Orleans style place called the G.A.&G — which happens now to be a zombie headquarters.

Staying up the night before on a writing spree of five stories, completing an assignment from 8th grade. Could be the same year; could be decades later. I’ve cobbled together two complete stories so far, maybe three. I consider for a moment how the teacher should’ve made the deadlines spaced out. But something clicks and I realize it’s my teacher from 9th grade, while the classroom is from sixth. An idea begins to form of why it was silly to re-do the assignment. Could be the beginnings of lucidity.

I’ve collected my pet rats together in a box. These are a new set of hybrids made from recombined pieces of earlier pets (giving reality to a metaphor I’ve been using lately for when all our older rats died off last year). I carry their box as far as inside a massive building and against a partially destroyed wall of the zombie-haunted zone. The gesture is carefree, but I’m also tired. My wife points out that they can now get loose, and there are many other rats roaming here. This is exactly the idea though — they have their little gang group, a home base in the form of the box, they won’t have a better chance than this. They need to survive in the world just like us.

In the basement bowels of this apocalyptic interior I find myself nostalgically watching a TV program from the 80s. I’m lounging in a disguise. Someone next to me is apparently in a new bodysuit. I say “you must be Chris then” assuming it’s my brother. I never am sure, though.

Revisiting the neighborhood of my maternal grandma’s house. It used to be exactly 10 minutes drive from my home when I was small, maybe 4 years old. I gradually piece together how it was on Fritz street, itself a branch off Glenn street where we lived in Santa Rosa (note: we did live there but these places aren’t real). It’s been redeveloped, that much I knew — but I never guessed how I wouldn’t even recognize it. It was once an overgrown single lane like you might find in the English countryside. Due to its convenience just off transit routes now it’s a thoroughly chopped up suburban neighborhood. There’s a poorly selling development of built-out treehouses. My Nana’s house back then was a compact little warm wooden space, like the inside of a boat. It was perched on the ridge of a hill overlooking the foggy pine forests of a wide valley beyond. Even that shows scattered signs of human colonization now.

I recall the flooded channel between two ridges as I saw it as a child in the 1980s. Smoking men used to paddle across in dinghies. I witness one instance where a wheelchair was transported off the back of the boat, dragging in the water, using its electric motor as an improvised outboard. I think then, certainly not all the regulatory changes since my youth haven’t been improvements.

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Dream Journal

Double Houses of the CIA

CIA has built a pair of identical houses, one in Chile, one a block away in my neighborhood. There’s a link between them, like a portal. I had accidentally visited mine before it’s renovation, when it used to have a green tile lobby. Now the stairway has been cut off in the renovations and it’s not clear how one would even get upstairs. There’s not even any windows on one side.

I indulge in a thought experiment with my friend Anthony, who has a government job himself. What secretive jobs do they pull in there? Drone operations? Covert assassinations? Paperwork?

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Dream Journal

Cleaning Up After Burning Man

I volunteer to clean up after Burning Man. It’s a camp I used to belong to, people I used to be friends with who I haven’t seen in years. Now I’m idly cataloging the junk left behind — piecing together the stories of what happened at the week-long party. Specifically I recall searching under flip-up style Murphy beds that are semi-permanent and remain in desert for the year (an unusual change since everything used to be completely leave-no-trace). Sponsorship in the camp is by Ritual Coffee, naturally. I still drink Ritual to this day.

Perhaps an object I find, perhaps a different dream: a golden metal orb with triangular holes lining its surface. Thin tetrahedral slices which fit exactly through the holes, as if it were a 3D puzzle to be assembled through the tiny gates. But it seems too elegant and precious to be a toy.