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Dream Journal

Vacuuming as a Distraction

I’m on my way to vacuum our multi-story rat cage. On the way I get distracted by vacuuming the subway. A good deed for sure, but also a way to avoid cleaning the rat cage for now. Across the wide open tile floor near a set of frozen cement stairs, an official walks toward me. I think I’m about to get a talking to but he just walks past me. He picks up a suction attachment I unknowingly dropped when I switched to my weed whacking attachment, handing it back to me.

Occasionally I find thick squarish mussels with meat still inside. Recently someone received them as a scavenging reward, but didn’t/couldn’t open them.

The hobbit, Frodo, is excited to visit his favorite bar, The Green Dragon.

Kristin McConnell is helpfully demonstrating an exercise for strippers, flipping gymnastically off of a corner countertop.

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Dream Journal

No-name Town Stop on a Journey

While on a cross-country journey with a pack, we travel through an unfamiliar rural neighborhood. Though remote it’s packed on a grid like a city — yet I don’t know if it even has a name. It could be somewhere northerly, pine trees and scattered brush. We’re all riding motorcycles and have to find a bathroom for my sibling, Patrick. We come across an unusually empty old Victorian painted all one boring color and sneak through a window. The dream proceeds from there but is forgotten.

A man demands the expensive and decadent early California dish, Hangtown Fry. In fact he orders four at a time. I idly think: well it’s a stupid way to spend your money but I suppose this is how innovation happens.

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Dream Journal

Flying Carpet Travels

Waiting in line to get passport approved. Get my paperwork back, and I try not to be rude as I remain standing at the counter looking for the seal of the Queen of England — which I’ve been told is necessary. Very soon though the office is closed anyway, and they tell me if I have any other business I must go to their Denali office.

Flying carpet above a river. Better at it than I used to be, flying between lamppost and building. A section of an onramp is closed, so I must fly over it instead. Piloting a semi trailer over scrubby plains and spotting occasional scrap below, like an abandoned dirt bike. Scavenging vintage yellow Dr Pepper headphones (with a broken-off microphone) as a gift for my wife.

Traveling across a city, going halfway and meeting myself, going back, in the middle. Passing a squat row of buildings like a rundown amusement park on one side of the road. Arriving at the important intersection, on the corner is a semi-famous long McDonald’s which takes up almost the whole block. Under an overcast sky I see bumper boats in the distance.

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Dream Journal

New House, Bathrooms, Basement, Banana

At night in new unfamiliar family home, still in my neighborhood the mission. With my mom, I spot what looks like a stunt plane outside the window, against the houses and hills of the neighborhood, but it’s too difficult to see in the nighttime. I resolve to check tomorrow.

Eating a banana in the morning as I walk around. Punk rock aspect. As I was instructed earlier, things are solved by eating this banana. I inquire about the airplane.

Crossing freeway at pedestrian street and inspecting garishly plain grass field. Considering that it may be useful to host a blindman’s bluff type game for Sam Francisco art people.

New multi-level house after moving in with several family members. I’m the bathroom, I stare at the wall with the confusing tub, easily mistaken for a near identical bathroom on other level with no tub. I sigh; there’s so much work needed to make it nice and feel like ours. So much decorating especially. I know I’ll be doing it frequently and it’ll get done, it’s in my nature, there are just… so many blank walls.

Living in a house next door to my friend Oz. I walk up the stoop outside the mirror-layout house and check out the basement rooms downstairs. I find a resident, dumpy hat and ruffled hair, one of those Bay Area dudes who looks like he’s used to co-living situations. I ask him if he’s seen my friend Meredith — the kind of person I’d expect to live here. He knows her but she’s not in right now. I didn’t even need to find her, I needed an excuse to be in his house.

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Dream Journal

Reliving a Long-Ago Math Class

Peering out at the top layer of a canopy of skyscrapers. Observing an expensive-looking top floor patio garden so scary I wouldn’t want to be in, the reflections off other skyscrapers. A top floor passageway between two buildings permits bureaucratic workers to travel expediently between the two — something that strikes me as the result of having a good union.

Reliving an experience of trying to redo my fourth grade math class, not just to pass but to get it right this time. Sitting in the middle of a grid of outdoor desks on a lawn/sidewalk, sun shining on them in afternoon light. Can’t tell if I’m the only child, or quiet in a group of children. Maybe it was early as second grade? Trying to place it temporally; I sign my name “Orin” so I deduce it must be after seventh grade.

In the neighborhood nearby, a big old 70s sedan lumbers across the railroad track intersection. It selfishly blocks a train temporarily and causes the train (of all things) to divert.

Digging all the way to the white plaster at the bottom of a dirty firepit. Moving a sculpture of an old book into the heat, burning off it’s discoloration. Uncovering the name of a song and remembering the story of trauma involving the math class. It is finished, closed. I can wake up without problem.

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Dream Journal

Pet Store Rattie Daycare Thievery

Cozy inside during a bright summer day. Watching pleasant projector slides (letters with cool patterns punched within) hanging out with a kid just to pass the time. It could be babysitting, but we’re chill enough it doesn’t feel that way. Elsewhere, other adults fret and work preparing for something while we have an idyll.

On the the kitchen counter (like my childhood home) I find the last crab claw left out. I clean it out and wonder if I should ask if it was left there for a reason.

At a pet store, I’ve dropped off
my rats Martin and his same-age buddies in a high wooden display cage. We successfully bet no one would try to buy them. I break them out despite being directly across from the young clerk, essentially treating the store like rattie day care. I walk right out — stealing my own rats back from where I didn’t even ask to stash them.

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Dream Journal

Rancho Chalupa x3, QOs

My wife gives specific but confusing food request for Rancho Chalupa x3, QOs, no ranchito. QOs is her weird abbreviation for queso.

This dream is from earlier in the night and I was pleased I could remember it when I woke up, but there was so much more story originally of course. It seemed an important anchor at the time and it’s a weird title, so I kept it.

I’m building an antenna in flat land not far from the Arctic using an incredibly tall tube. It’s powered with metal that bounces at bottom. Through careful observation I’m concerned that that the bounce is inconsistent, the first bounce loses too much energy and is similar to a pendulum winding down; I think I have to re-engineer it or detection will fail. The tower is possibly part of a covert CIA network, but I don’t know who I’m building it for. The device is named after Queen Elizabeth, in the same tradition as someone might name something after Queen Victoria a century ago.

Takling with my dad about the sequence of events in 2014, why I don’t go public; how there’s no chance of correction or revenge. Playing with a string that serves as a graph line that’s joins two discrete sections of paper which effectively shows how unrelated the before and after time periods are.

My wife and I walk from offramp to offramp in snow country looking for a place to hitchhike. One after the other has nothing, no services not even a place to wait. We crest a last berm and there is a well-stocked service station that even has a bus terminal. But immediately as we see this the bus leaves and we must wait for the next one.

Swimming along a rock wall to find a pickup spot, we spot the islands of Malta sheltered in the distance of a bay. Like a cluster of glittering pirate isles, with a gloriously restored sailing ship slowly blowing our way. I warn my wife as we approach what appears to be a waterfall at the edge of the seawall. But if there were a waterfall then the ship wouldn’t be heading this way would it?

Peeking over the wall, perhaps it is a waterfall, but not like you’d think. Mist rises in bright golden afternoon light and beyond, stretching into distant canyons, are arrayed the houses of mainland Europe (reminiscent of an afternoon in the ritzy canyons of the Hollywood hills).

There’s a cool rectangular structure down near a flat beach. It’s enameled metal almost like a café made of refrigerator material. A local film shoot about to happen, and a teenage girl in a bikini standing outside is asking whether the zip code will change here. She’s referencing the ’90s TV show 90210, it would seem, which would make this Beverly Hills. I answer that no one much remembers that show anyway.

Supposedly now on the island of Malta, but with some offshore banking and casino facets like Monaco. One popular meeting room I’m recommended sounds loud and crowded from the outside, more like a nightclub. When I peek inside it just looks like a long, poorly-lit tile-floored hall filled with vacationing older Russians — the audience uncomfortably far from a karaoke stage at the far end of the room. I go downstairs as according to the map there’s a secondary club directly underneath. I notice an unpleasant acquaintance, David Kaye, sitting on a bench nearby and fat as Baron Harkonnen. As it happens, the second club is currently hosting an exercise class where they fly in the air.

There’s a large casino here in Malta. I consider how there’s a rule that never will a more lenient jurisdiction be far away from centers of wealth — by design (the CIA again, perhaps). I go to the counter and explain, explicitly, that I’m exchanging money for chips then those chips back to money, to test if the place is scammy or honest. I hand over the grand sum of $9, receiving back a sheaf of white on black paperwork. Each is printed with a tiny cash value, cents each, and a redeemable (slightly higher) value at a pizza chain. I look incredulously at the guy, as if to say “I just told you I was checking for honesty, are you really going to make me ask for my cash back?” Yet I wonder if I won’t immediately be escorted by security who are close by.

The casino counter becomes an SNL broadcast of Weekend Update with Colin Jost and Michael Che. A line is missing from a cue card and it is fumbling lane skipped. The next host goes into a long poetry recitation, which now acts context. The other host then (unusually) interrupts to try to salvage what’s left of the bit. This proves to be a joke in itself.

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Dream Journal

Egyptian Hallway Art, Archeology Property Snafu

In the hallway of our home I notice Egyptian art hanging on the walls. It’s been up so long, nearly since we moved in, we’d just about forgotten it. But, what to do since I realize it’s there now.

Tall hexagonal barriers (maybe like the shape of coffins?) contain a flow that fills up the hall like a tank. I can’t recall what substance it was, but I feel like it wasn’t a liquid, but an actual everyday thing.

A shack in the middle of a pasture that serves as both museum and archeological site. Spending my days in dusty careful study without electricity, I’m part of a small group of young people dedicated to its special care. A respectable older man, my teacher, has spent years of his life creating it.

By way of a simple legal trick, a younger female (possibly an estranged member of our group) gets the property line reassigned. We are forced to close up the building and shut the gate till the legal wranglings are sorted through. Knowing the site is in danger without care, I sneak back in one sunny afternoon. I just walk back in. No one stops me, no one seems to even notice though I walk down a gravel road in a broad field. I start to feel the people involved and obeying the law are acting downright foolish.

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Dream Journal

Animation of the Corner of a Painting

I remember where our truck is parked here in San Francisco and it’s gotten a ticket by now. No need to have kept it there, but instructions led me to believe that it was necessary for that time.

I watch the corner of a painting like the Garden of Earthly Delights, a recently assembled animation which shows animals morphing. The action skips around a bit with sections that have been lost over hundreds of years.

I vacuum a fence to where there are no more dead leaves in the backyard, but it starts to feel so clean it’s not our backyard anymore. This unusually parallels actual cleaning I’ve recently done in our own backyard.

Queen Elizabeth, a law passed to make her decrees about family easier to enforce. Learning about this in the gutters of a miniature golf course.

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Dream Journal

Three Wines: Hard, Mineral, Spicy

At the end of an unpaved road in the desert, dunes on either side. Searching for a spot to park and sleep in the overland SUV. Up a short side road is a private campground, but they’re full of long term RVs after recent redevelopment. I get the impression people aren’t even staying there.

Viewed from above, I survey another hilltop location once a vantage for scenic stark beauty, recently built up with houses. A bit of the outback lost to civilization. Overpriced houses, packed tight, the parking all in the center of a cul-de-sac. They cite new houses right up against fences built the year before, knowing the residents only work in offices nearby and couldn’t care less.

We leave the end of the dusty unpaved road, passing through a rough-hewn log gateway — something you might see built by the orcs of Warcraft, yet having the semblance of an old English gallows gaol. We’re waved on; everyone here knows us. Past this point the car accelerates, as if on a track, rocketing toward a towering city. Sooner then expected we pass under vine-laden bridges and all manner of infrastructure. It’s so sudden that while I’m zoning out looking at an apartment building I’m struck by the baffling thought of just how many human lives are now within my eyeline.

An unexpected bit of FOMO while camping at an event that occurs during Burning Man. Cited on a hill with acres of underground bunker to be explored, dirty, dangerous, and wild. A total of ten levels. I’m warned that the lowermost has toxic mud that can get tracked up when trod by the unwary.

Sharing a house with longtime roommates. The suggestion of renovating the walls comes up while I’m off nearby playing on the floor, and I notice that behind each of the wall panels — and I deliberately check them one by one — is pressure treated wood. We couldn’t replace them if we wanted. I’ve been quiet for a while and wait for the opportunity to speak up, hoping I needn’t wait too long.

A man is hoping for a new income stream by advertising his well-trained dog as a performer. The dog is loyal and easily performs for the scheduled entertainment industry boffs who’ve come to scout for talent. I’m pleased to watch him do so well, but understand there’s only so many roles one dog can get; he will always still look like himself. I can already imagine the man (who reminds me of my cousin Ricky) pushing his dog into more absurd and dangerous stunts with the goal of getting more business. I can imagine it getting bad enough to border on animal abuse.

Ensign Tilly fakes her death at an airlock. She lands underneath in a metal rack.

Three wines: hard, mineral, spicy. No explanation left of this detail, a curiously distinct detail nonetheless.