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Dream Journal

Inside, Unusual Light & Color

A ground floor restaurant in the hostel where I’ve been staying long-term. I ask the Chinese-speaking waitress what the best food is nearby, but she only names several of their own dishes. One’s I’ve had many times before, as I practically live here.

I peek outdoors briefly, not long enough to see much besides the smoky yellow-gray of the urban street outside. Even during the day the color inside seems murky, unnatural — though few besides me seem to notice. To demonstrate I turn on a light which doesn’t color correct for the altered hue, and the tables, food, everything looks bizarre and unreal, intensely yellow like a poorly edited photo. I turn on the light correction to show difference, and things now appear “normal”.

On the 3rd and 4th floors, we’re deleting an unused backup copy of a few other floors in the building. The question still remains, what to do with the new space we’ve freed up? (Worth noting I suppose that I just cleaned up the bedroom and the space under the bed.)

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Dream Journal

A Twin with a Tail

Massively sped up time-lapse of one early civilization, a primitive community building itself from raw nature over generations of real time. Just as a thought comes that “they’ve reached the stage where they need walls to protect what can now be destroyed”, and one wall of an enclosure has been built, I watch as a gigantic rhino beast smashes in and tramples all their work into splinters. I realize: this is my ancestry, although not a part which survived.

At Burning Man, I lounge with many friendly acquaintances in a communal camp where we spend most of our time. This day we’re in the midst of a low-key engineering competition. I go on repeated walkthroughs of a semi-outdoor hardware store scrounging for the right supplies. The desert is less dusty than usual, more crunchy.

Dara Vinne introduces me to her twin sister, called Dana Vinne. She appears mostly identical but has lived a distinctly different life — she was born with a clumpy, fleshy, twirled-up tail. I find I’m still just as attracted to her, which is an odd conundrum; I feel like the tail should make a difference, or that my existing intellectual attraction to Dara should instead favor her, but… well, no conclusions there.

I get a good look at the tail while we’re all sitting around naked. In the open space between couches she’s facing away from me, semi-squatting on a mattress. Her tail gives the conflicting impression of both a deformity and a banality. I watch then as she lazily maneuvers her hips to hump down onto a fresh tampon, driving it in no-handedly. Vulgar but bemusing, comfortable with her body and her company, the shocking gesture comes off as bizarrely endearing. Uncommonly feminine, too — a rakish femininity that’s happy with gross-out humor even at one’s own expense.

Later I pass by a camp on the corner where I again spot her (Dana Vinne), and consider backtracking for the chance to hang out with her. But I soon notice several other individual twins from my communal camp all headed that direction. I decide there must be a twins meeting of some sort, and head back to my own camp… still very curious about this new person.

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Dream Journal

Racing the F1 Key

A third person perspective of some rival of mine, someone trying to beat my racing record. He’s hired a whole training and pit crew to help, the setting an incongruous “Anne of Green Gables” wide summer-y enclosed lawn.

I watch, knowingly, as his (boat?) craft ungraciously cuts across the rippled edge of a deceptively smooth frozen chrome path/course. He fails on his attempt with a muttered “huh”, and thereafter his many crew have to be deported back to New Zealand because their work has run out.

I remember thinking how unimaginably annoyed I’d be if I had to move back across the globe because my boss couldn’t perform. They seem to take it mostly in stride, though.

In the dream, the F1 is a floating keyboard value that can be filled (similar to yesterday’s dream), but also a reference to the race. The race itself may be called a “key”, as in the Florida keys.

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Dream Journal

Kiss from a Girl who Found Me

An auto updating input window surrounded by a circle overlays the dream. Soon, if gets updated with info from Madeline Mladich.

I’m lying on the top back bunk of a row of communal bunks one day, reading Wikipedia while everyone else is out. A bald heavyset dude peeks in randomly, making an expression like like I might be in what he feels is an incorrect bunk. So I move down to the lone single level bed, then after he leaves, into a lower bunk next to it where I’m unlikely to be noticed. That’s where a girl finds me… a girl that seems to have specifically sought me out.

After a brief but very good conversation (where I somehow feel compelled to convey the importance of my contributions during the night, when I usually choose to work) she leans over the bed and gives me an absolutely glorious kiss. Our time available together, I realize, is far too short, and I get the idea to have her write down her info. The input window hovering over the dream updates — I feel like our relationship is solidified, saved in the computer memory sense. Madeline Mladich.

I show her some of my work, zooming around a simplified model of the city (still quite complex), overlaid onto the city itself. We’ve recently expanded, and I’m aesthetically placing more structures in the center of map, choosing as much as possible to stay away from downtown and the older well-established parts of the model.

Later on I’m walking up and down the narrow communal hall, knocking on white-painted doors looking for anyone who knows what the pink glitter paint I keep seeing on the doors means.

I’m in a part of the Ukraine. I explore a probably abandoned white building glinting in the weak spring sun. All the walls and ceilings are glass window-frames, like a greenhouse, but I get the impression this was light manufacturing of some kind. There’s a hobo-like character on roof helping me, and he spots a terminator robot outside for me to avoid. I can see it’s dark outline and the bright red blotch of it’s eye.

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Dream Journal

Wings Over A Closed Amusement Fortress

My third grade crush and her kids run into me selling wares at a craft fair. It’s the pandemic so I can’t touch anything to help them pick something out, but her small kid manages to find a very special item. I take the opportunity to sell it to her at a discount and I’m overjoyed to have reconnected and, somehow, closed the circle from when I bought her chocolates on Valentine’s day — back in third grade.

Amusement park is closing soon. They don’t kick you out, they just close all the exhibits one by one. Left almost alone in a vast fortress-like space, wooden piles driven into the ground separating rare bird enclosures and such. Like a zoo, but oddly not centered on the animals.

I conspire with Mickey in a small bathroom, but it takes a long time to convince each other of our plan. We leave across a wooden drawbridge, hanging out with shady night-time mob characters in a room like a movie-theater lobby across the way. The theater seats are often moved back and forth, front to back, per the command of an authoritative fit woman at the front (reminds me of a muscular yoga teacher I had in college).

Constructing an ersatz set of wings, I launch off the side of a tall, steep, rocky cliff. The kids I’m with think I can’t do it, but I know I can, my arms are just skinny and I’m nerdy (I’m like Billy the blue Power Ranger). Soon, I fly away from the all-too-3D cliff and over wooden bridge — possibly the same drawbridge I crossed with Mickey earlier.

Woke up in bed at my wife’s dad’s house. I didn’t think I remembered any dreams, then I remembered there was a good significant one in the middle of the night. That was the one with my third grade crush, and everything flowed naturally after letting go while focusing on them.

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Dream Journal

What’s Your Opinion on Rat Autostatus?

Outside the back door of my cozy ground floor apartment, a neighboring building has recently constructed a gravel path. Opening the back door of our kitchen today I discover they’ve expanded it, from merely passing by the front our place, all the way so the gravel runs against the back wall of our kitchen. It’s another parking spot, with no barriers at all — cars could drive right through the wall. To compromise, I negotiate a window to be installed in that wall. When the wall is opened we find there’s a window frame already built into the structure, which I scoff at, and opine that we should’ve had one there all along.

It’s a lovely day outside. Near the other building, I spot a 3-wheeled white BMW which has been parked (or drifted) onto a fence. I move it off the common path, a bit derisively and vindictively, and it settles in front of a realty office. The grill cracks a modest hole in the glass door.

Discussing strange and noteworthy oddities in city layout. From a map high above, I zoom the group’s view into a house here in San Francisco perfectly surrounded by a circular complex of inaccessible military buildings. Abruptly I’m inside the location myself, a tiny community set in an odd miniature forest park — for intelligence agents or staging — where I can’t see the horizon of city buildings.

Boarding a first class airline cabin, which has been adapted now as just a small, unremarkable room. I have a huge duffel bag to stuff under the seat, with nitrous empties in one side pocket. No one seems to mind but I still worry. They get lined up in a long row at the front of the cabin until someone (me, I think) realizes as soon as the plane lurches forward they’ll be scattered everywhere.

I try to convince my sister Alia to quietly help me gather them handful by handful. Alia is engaged singing a two-part Viking harmony dirge, which I join in as a third, middle harmony to get her attention. While she’s deciding I come up with a algorithmic method to get them fastest. I don’t have time to implement it before I awake, but I remember asking, in terms optimizing the algorithm, “what’s your opinion on Rat Autostatus[] ?” A variable I cannot explain, nor am I sure anyone understood me asking.

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Dream Journal

Medieval Nemeses & Nana’s Bedroom

An elevator to your underground secret base. Biological material grows through cracks into the inside, like the fungal contamination of the City of Ambergris (from Jeff Vandermeer stories). I realize that every time you complete the most recent mission, a  new monstrous baby extrudes from the ceiling.

Two small medieval-age kingdoms sit along the bank of what looks like a wide moat. They’re always in conflict, yet always in balance, each making up what the other lacks. If one of these nemeses should ever fall, a new nemesis twin takes its place. The society is stable and thus doesn’t change or advance.

A full-size pink latex mat is under my nana’s bed in our childhood home. I’m able to finally squeeze under the bed to try to get it out. My brother Patrick is there, and I’m trying to convince him to help me, and there’s something to do with him being gay — trans, actually, but it’s unclear.

In Nana’s sitting room, next door, I break up with an ex of mine — yet again. This time it’s easier as I’m part of an intelligence service. They take care of all her follow-up issues after I’ve told her we’re breaking up. I note how much easier this is with the help of an authority.

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Dream Journal

Brachiosaur Pal and Palace

A girl and her Brachiosaur friend explore a rough, wild beach together (reminiscent of Tuba and Hazel from Infinity Train.) She climbs down a steep, near-vertical sand wall. When he tries to follow, the wall collapses with a grainy crush, followed by child-like laughter.

In line waiting for the elevator in a big palace of entertainment, somewhere you might find in Reno, Nevada. At the top of its tower, I get the chance to sleep in a Brachiosaur skull. But when I’m in the hallway outside, on my way to the lone bed, I look out the window and realize it’s probably far too large to be a real skull — or am I small?

Waiting in line again, standing ankle-deep in tiny candy, like Nerds or Indian candied fennel seeds (mukhwas). Towards the end of the line, some bigger candy has seeped under the wall and into the walking path. The rules say we can take any of the smaller candy for free, but I sneak a few larger lozenge-shaped nuggets in my bag before the door checker of the room we’ve been waiting in line for.

I’m told to draw a ticket, which is a chance to win a prize. In the basket on the desk, I clearly glimpse a gold-rimmed one in the shuffle. Skeptical that it could be this easy, I reach in and grab it, to which the staff feign delight. I’m a little put off, to be honest, and the prize isn’t actually something I want. Now I’m quite happy I stole the bigger candies.

My wife uses my prize to take a free ride on one of the uncommon amusements, a motion-simulator mini-plane set in window frame in a wall that plays a black-and-white video game. I realize watching her play that this whole place is World War 2 themed, which I’d oddly missed until just now.

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Dream Journal

Last Day of School

basketballs on court

Enacting last days of an ancient invasion between two peoples, visiting a string of gates which jump to different reenactment zones, stories of the war. Lofty snowbanks, rocky canyon passes, battle plans, gruff male voices, muscular insectoids (they look like the Krogan from Mass Effect).

It’s the last day of the school year, at a place that feels like my middle school. They have us sit at other’s desks and read aloud from their journals of that year — an exercise in “seeing though other’s eyes”, so we’re told. But it feels very much like tricking us into spying on ourselves.

The drama teacher at my high school, Mr. Thelan, is lecturing after the last bell of that year has passed. He hasn’t even told his assembled students they could go, if they wanted. I would guess it’s a test or object lesson for his theater students: that actors can be held longer than in their interests, by their love or fascination or even novelty with the story. I myself am lounging behind this herd of a class because there’s comfy chairs and internet on the stage. One guy tries to argue with me for being there instead of a class and I have to quote the school district handbook about when “school year” is defined.

Digging through drawers at the side of the gym, making sure I don’t leave any of my stuff (clothes or information, etc.) since I’m not going to be here again. I’m asked about moving a pair of giant owls constructed over the year from a massive amounts of wooden boards. I start to give an answer, but the answer becomes “this being 2020 I don’t even think we can donate it to Urban Ore.” I resign myself to the idea of someone else deciding if they’re lost.

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Dream Journal

The Kid in the Apartment

Escorted inside an elevator to be shown it’s “particular” controls. The up button causes it to just keep going up until someone presses the down button. But, you also must time it such that you hit it on the floor above where you wish to land, and it will then descend one floor.

A Mormon family lives on the floor I shakily arrive at. They have a younger boy, shaved bald head, playing alone. I’ve been called to help this family with this child, as I possess a certain way of talking with them, a way of perceiving their true motives. He tries to manipulate me, a technique he’s practiced on all his family.
His powers I consider extraordinary. This is rare, but also dangerous for everyone around him.

I smash his toy as a gesture, a test, but though he clearly understandz, he shows hardly any reaction. This child (if it truly is a child) is preternaturally self-controlled. Beyond many adults. I think I recognize it, and so name it: a Psychopath.