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Dream Journal

Going to a Beachside Dentist, Much Preparation

I’m getting woken up for a dentist appointment, by a guy I barely know, who’s been asked to do it as a favor. I tell him I’ve got to write my dreams down first and I’ll be 15 minutes. (Coincidentally, I’m actually woken about 15 minutes later by a loud, stinky truck outside my bedroom window.)

I speak with a therapist in a little room pod, in preparation for the procedure. I feel the need rather quickly to break professional courtesy to actually talk philosophy with her as an individual. She seems visibly exhausted to be forced to engage as vulnerable and human, and to delve into her personal views.

Thereafter, a big black girl helps walk me to (or from) the seaside in the evening — where the dentist procedure will be. I expect it’ll be really nice to watch the sunset during the course of it. I notice that she has the same limp as I do at this moment, in her left leg, and I offer to massage it once we find a stopping point to take a break. She forgoes a chair for whatever reason, lying down, and I start at her still shoe-clad feet and move around to her stiff calves and thighs. I tell her to let me know if she wants more or less pressure. She keeps asking for lighter and lighter touches, as if the massage is making her more sensitive and tense, but she never expresses any desire for me to stop.

I gather shoes I’ll need during and after the procedure. One pair is green and yellow, like a thrift store pair from Brazil I had long ago. I spot an old classic iPod of mine on the ground, wrapped in earbuds. While picking up my mail, I notice that a postbox near the top (for the group hostel/school I’m associated with) has been overstuffed, too full to close. I inspect the economy size bag of incense inside, labelled “Frogge & Kastom”, pilfering a few sticks, feeling that they won’t be missed. I try not to feel too guilty about it.

Bang! The truck outside my window loudly backfires. I’m irredeemably awake.

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Dream Journal

Investigation through the Portal to Birdworld

A pregnant stuntwoman parachutes from great height over a dense urban landscape, steering with her flightsuit, but her parachute never opens and she lands in a massive shockwave. The body is is never found and the impact site never pinpointed, so I’m sent to investigate. It’s suspected she didn’t crash, but was working with a covert group to use the jump to punch open a portal. I work semi-undercover in an office near the impact zone, one that’s apparently been shockwaved back through time, as it’s helping produce the show M AS*H. In commemoration of this I leave a postcard for my future self, drawing out big abstract cursive “MASH” letters, having great difficulty signing my name.

The portal must have been real — I pass into an alternate dimension where birds were the creatures that evolved into people. I’m able to blend in as long as I wear full-coverage clothing, which conceals my non-feathered skin. I get a tip that I should seek information on the person of interest I’m looking in the lobby of The W hotel. A large, puffy, white, embroidered ‘W’ takes up a full wall behind the desk. Under a disused wooden lectern, I find a mysterious handwritten note.

Later, I’m seated in the last row of a plane, being given an English test. The instructor doesn’t seem to acknowledge that their instructions are vague and contradictory. After several minutes of backtracking, I begin collaborating with other test-takers in front of me to corroborate the test’s poor instructions. It’s so bad that I’m thinking the only way to deal with it is to convince the instructor to invalidate the entire thing.

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Dream Journal

At Michigan Bluff Cabin

In the bath, I hear a reminder about a gathering the landlord is throwing. My friend Jerome (who was our roommate once) is texting, wanting to know who’s there at the party.

Some kind of medicated powder. Someone suggests I could just sell it to Max directly instead of showing up at this faraway party (I’m not at home now, you see, and somehow I know it in the dream). I’m highly concerned this whole endeavor could end up causing more anxiety than it fixes.

Walking along a row of plants, watering a few, then being asked by a little kid to please improve their life. Redwood branches are built like stacked walkways; can’t think of how to train them better to become a usable treehouse. I walk away feeling overwhelemed, a failure.

Walking another row of this plantation we’re on, I discover a set of wooden sliding doors that it seems people don’t usually see. Words printed on either door read “interior”/”exterior”. I can’t get them open — but I think this is the secret order who’ve figured out how to live surreptitiously. I keep hearing about them.

“See wha the doves think”, a quote from someone. A pretty short-haired blonde girl, reclining in opulent luxury.

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Dream Journal

The Boss, The Barbarian, The Beast

Sharing a bed with a female boss, and a kid who joins us. It’s quality snuggle time but I have to be a good sport on account there’s an orange-lighted lamp behind us, one I just barely can’t reach while we’re ensconced together.

Female boss and I leave the relative comfort of this bedroom, a place which has the sensation of a single-room ground floor unit of a multi-story underground parking garage. The neighborhood is the dusty, sunny, oldest part of my hometown (although I don’t think of it as Cathedral City at any point, the architecture and streets are no other). We’re leading a class single-file while we roam the near-empty streets, searching for even one business compatible with ours. Finally, in a wider old-west-ish double collonnaded warehouse area, I suggest that the business there — in publishing — is close enough to journalism that it’s worth pursuing.

Unfortunately there’s a brutish barbarian who guards nearby; he manages to kill all of us before we even realize what’s going on. We’re left — not quite dead, but as good as dead — to perish slowly in the sun strung up on a tall post, like a ship’s crow’s nest. But there’s a saving grace — we’ve got a Brock Samson bodyguard just for such an occasion. He hides under a bridge until the hulking brute passes overhead, stabbing his machete through chipped slats and impaling the aggressor in brutal revenge. We’re taken down from our gallows and recover with no ill effects.

Going a little further in the small near-deserted town, there is a wide shallow lake to the right (something like I’ve seen before in dreams, a wistful view with balconies worthy for gazing in reflection) and to the left, what looks like what could be an ornate orthodox church. I’m pleased to go and explore, knowing I’m versed in how to behave in almost any religious building. Turns out it’s a Hindu shrine to Ganesh, one with specific obeisances to enter. My dad advances too quickly through the entryway crowded with votives. I watch him try to balance on two upturned djembe drums, not quite successfully.

Inside the building, I chat with a few close friends as we sit on barstools. Idly we gaze toward the adjacent wall, the only light in the room, adorned with a massive floor-to-ceiling aquarium — and at least one monstrous inhabitant. It looks like a swimming centipede, maybe a polychaete worm, as if from the Ordovician era. My sibling Patrick seems quite concerned — it’s large, aggressive, and very near. Yet I know something about the tank, reassuring him “that glass may look only 10, perhaps 12 inches thick, but it’s not. That’s what we may call ‘arcane glass’, and for that thing it’s actual measure is [literally] infinity inches.” I’m quite serious with this assessment. As if to punctuate my point, the thing winds up to the glass again, bigger, meaner, with a frightening face, and hits it full speed — which makes a satisfyingly tiny donk sound.

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Dream Journal

Found and Lost, The Old House that was Ours

Revisiting the old house I sort of co-own, where I stored a lot of my stuff sometime in the last few years. Uncovering newspapers reveal records carefully arranged on the table, laying out a pattern of which ones I’ve already recorded. A big book, like a newspaper log, has something to do with Dr. Hal. The speaker cables running up the walls are thick and I remember they’re painted the color orange from their previous room.

Outside, I unlock several latches of a wooden truck cabin — the topmost is the only locked. My wife helps, sitting on top of it, but I ask her not to make fun of me as I’m worried about my pets inside: a little arrangement carefully made of light bulbs, moss, and sticks, with a little spider sealed up in each one. It’s been so long that all the moss that which lived is dark green, and all that died is bleached white. One of the spiders comes out and waves, which warms my heart (but actually only proves the seal wasn’t good enough and this might not even be the same spider). I look inside a nearby bag and discover it’s full of my stuff I’d forgotten about, junk drawer items and the like. It’s been so long, I might use this stuff again.

I decide I’m going to find and buy this place. After this decision, what happens may be time travel, or it could be searching to repeat the luck of finding the place but with a similar house.

I get a hint to search near “Cold Key” creek, in southern California or Arizona. The climate isn’t what I’d want to settle down, but maybe the community I find will be a bit cooler. Peeking in through a window in the rocky canyonside, I spot my first girlfriend. I pause time by snapping my fingers; everything remains still except her — her head looks like my pet naked rat Nüdl, or an Afghan hound, although I don’t note her different appearance at the time.

Working my way down the track of the creek, I come across a run-down desert community with a few empty buildings. One beige chunky run-down Victorian seems exactly like the old place, but for some reason I pass it by (maybe I can’t follow the same timeline precisely?), looking around the rest of the dusty neighborhood. I spot what could be a futuristic mosque, emerging in rendered shapes piece-by-piece from the ground, black ovoids stacking through each other to build up something like a stepped classical colonnade.

Eventually I find a torn-up former restaurant kitchen, a little low-slung 1-story on a concrete lot, that I preternaturally perceive as correct. It’s crowded with people trying to plan things together, my friends and collaborators. I’m bustling in the middle with them, trying to squeeze through what was the kitchen service window and the hole in the structure (to it’s right) where a door was removed. There’s a cardboard box of stuff there which I recognize as mine, my first teapot from CostPlus, the white one, and an oddly shaped pitcher with a flat-top handle and beak-like pour-spout — one that has a name that I don’t recall.

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Dream Journal

The Last Blockbuster

While staying at a place a couple towns over, I dream of the last blockbuster. It’s in Bend, Oregon, and it’s a real place.

But in the dream, it’s too crowded for my preference, during the pandemic and all. They serve hipster-y crusty sandwich buns that look pretty good, but I sneak out the side over a railing.

I never saw the Blockbuster sign. And I guess I didn’t need to go upon waking: I’d just been there last night.

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Dream Journal

The Best Place in the World [for] Chinese Restaurant

Twilight in my home city of San Francisco, watching down a street as a bicyclist rides uphill on a sidewalk. I yell at then, manage to get one good “don’t ride bike on sidewalk” as they ride right through a group of pedestrians. Afterward, one good “fuck you” for good measure.

Soon after I find the person, a gray haired but well-put-together lady, a woman of a certain age, while I’m walking crosswalk. I listen to her, get her to tell me what’s wrong: she’s a tourist, a meeting soon. Yet something is switched around in these dream streets. It’s the same setting as other dreams of San Francisco, ones with canals, or social revolutions, or maybe in the southeastern neighborhoods years before my time.

I escort her to her meeting, around a strangely colorful yet hostile SF. The streets bright yet cloudy. She enters her meeting in a plastic-walled tent, a dining establishment just off the sidewalk, while I maintain eye contact. She still doesn’t like how I called her on her riding behavior, but I’ve also been nothing but helpful since. “Good luck, be well,” I say through the window, pausing before mouthing “God bless”. I don’t know her well enough to know how it’ll be received — it feels customary, almost too automatic, tonally off-the-mark.

By coincidence, I’ve also arrived at a destination of my own. I used to work at a Chinese restaurant (in waking life too), and it’s in the building adjacent to the tent. The elaborate yet homey sign outside proclaims “The Best Place in the World [for] Chinese Restaurant”. In truth it’s more of a neighborhood cafe/novelty museum. I walk in and they immediately remember me; I ask them to refresh me on my job since this is the first time in 15-18 years I’ve been there (I worked at Kitty Ko’s Golden Phoenix in 2002 irl, thereafter dreamed of it for a few years after perhaps, so this may be unusually accurate). The chef and chef’s husband still don’t speak any English, but greet me enthusiastically nonetheless. Behind the cash register nothing seems to have changed either, and I’m re-warned about the black electrical cord dangling inconveniently in the walkway behind the front counter.

Reacquainting with the place, I remember there are two sections of novelties, plus a back room. They’re separated by age-appropriateness (or morbidness depending on who you ask). One item in the collection that I remember distinctly is a Victorian-era ambulance for the disabled — it’s an open-air carriage with the cheery “spinach-leaf green” color of a hospital, with robin’s-egg blue accent stripes. However, the coverings for passengers, jet-black and shroud-like, made for the privacy of hiding disfigurement and/or pain, are 100% what a modern person would recognize as the Grim Reaper.

I note all this to my sibling Patrick/Alia, who’s sitting at the bar counter. They seem mildly interested but ask instead about the back room. I’m curious also, squeezing through a narrow opening of blocks in the back wall. There are stacks of boxed-up unused novelties. There’s also the entrance to a vast underground performance chamber, something little-used in my time there, which I’d nearly forgotten about.

A group of string-instrument musicians along the back wall of this cavernous hidden space immediately begin playing (reminds me of Azerbaijani cover band Bizimkilər). Looking over toward the stage, there’s also a dance troupe waiting patiently. In hope of introducing them so they don’t have to continue waiting, I go over and ask the first girl I saunter up to what her name is. She answers “Jeanne Artas”. I have to ask if they are the Artas, or if it’s her personal name.

Another group of audience members, a school group of kids, clambers down the improvised brick blocks in the walls — nothing like a stairway and certainly not considered ‘accessible’ by conventional building standards. But this is technically a private area of the business. I reflect for a minute how this huge enclosed space is completely unapparent from the street, and how many of these hidden human spaces there must be, collectively, across the city and the world. I ponder this aloud to the girl, Jeanne, how such a large space could be secreted away, how it even fit. She ponders too, and notes that Kitty, the owner, also owns the coffee shop next door, and perhaps a small corner of it had been used so as in making the entrance of the tall auditorium. To me this is hardly an explanation, and I regard her incredulously.

I kept the dream alive to write down despite/because of the name “Lenipobra” repeating in my head while hypnogogic. A name from my current book, Consider Phlebas, which I had previously forgotten.

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Dream Journal

Redheaded Mermaid Romance

Sitting in an audience. Conan O’Brian sits in it too, and insults a celebrity guest and her kid. I’m cringing, but he has commitment to keep going with his bit until it’s funny. Reminds me of Chicken John.

While part of some kind of battle or mission, I’m underwater and spot a mermaid with a full head of wavy red hair, but I don’t approach or bother her. I’m not sure she even notices me.

Later my wife and I are sitting in a large semi-outdoor movie theater. This must be toward the end of the war/conflict that’s been going on — posters and screens begin flashing ‘PROGRESSIVE’, as we’ve unwittingly sat in the ‘far left’ of the auditorium. As she’s pulled from her seat by the Conan/Chicken leader, I tell my wife to play along, as if we’d sat there as part of a dramatization (which is indeed what it is). I pretend I can’t be lifted out of my chair, and the performance moves on with us separated.

The rows of chairs rotate, such that I’m now sitting with a row in front of me. I spot the mermaid (now with legs) walk over and nonchalantly sit in front of me. Her hair is huge and rests in my lap, engulfing my face. I have to wonder how intentional she’s being. As we sit through the show, it becomes more obvious that she’s non-verbally seducing me — I’m smelling her hair, she wraps my hands around her waist, and we snuggle our heads together.

We’re also sharing a few sodas, and my wife asks me to pass her the Dr. Pepper. I manage to reach down and behind me, but I don’t notice it’s a half-size can that’s barely got any left in it. I’m a bit embarrassed by this, but I’m thoroughly occupied — even glamoured, maybe.

The redheaded mermaid and I go off alone into a wide, dimly-lit stairway alcove. I take the chance to ask her now that we’re alone… something important. Did she see me? Does she know I know she’s a mermaid? Was all the seduction on purpose? But not her name. I now realize I never learned her name.

Meanwhile, the war is in it’s last days. Members of our side are roaming the streets here and there, solidifying the narrative of our victory. Neither of us is committed to the cause, but are interested in the pretending to for our own survival. The mermaid and I join a group to go hunt for rats, venturing off a New Orleans-style street into a disused sideyard full of groundskeeping equipment. I see some jumping across stacks of tiles, and I know we’ll probably let them go while continuing the pretense. It’s an odd sort of romance, but these are unusual times.

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Dream Journal

Rocks, Parks, Plants, and Avatars

Driving down what seems like a miniature Hot Wheels freeway in San Francisco, through a rocky little cactus and succulent park. I take what must be a wrong turn and continue driving over the road, but it’s now invisible. It’s disconcertingly like flying between the channel of rocks.

I come out the other end at a corner, noticing a small sedan parked just to the side of the intersection, practically in the crosswalk under a tree and sticking out into the lane. It appears to have been there a while as there are pieces of broken-off succulent plant growing on the street around their car. I consider rescuing some to take home.

Instead, I enter uninvited into the condo-like apartment building, in the tall flat block adjacent the intersection. There’s no lights on inside, and it has a “Miami retiree” vibe. I get lost in the maze of bathrooms, trying to leave feels like going through one after another, in the dim interior twilight.

Once I’m outside, I start writing a note to explain how the invisible road in the park must be fixed, and in the process one of the rent-by-hour bikes that’s always parked on the sidewalk in San Francisco gets knocked down. An older, gray-haired motorcycle-type guy with a goatee, his outfit covered in motorsports logos, reflexively tells me it’s knocked over and I should leave a note. He’s just passing by and doesn’t even seem to have any investment. I gather myself and rush after him and ask him pointedly “why did you feel you had to say that?” He immediately understands it was unnecessarily bossy and apologizes, yet I agree I will leave a note and say I’m sorry.

Afterwards, I use a personal gliding machine to fly directly above the rocky triangle-shaped park. There are huge spherical floating balloons holding up art projects, the work of one artist not long ago. I fly low enough to graze them. In a fit of enjoyment, I fly low over the street, wobbling to and fro between the lanes as I idly ply the neighborhood.

Walking between two fancy houses on the seaside. Modernist concrete right angled things, floor to ceiling windows overlooking long patios which double as piers, covered in tasteful potted plants. I walk between two of them (neither of which I have permission to be on) and observe how their roofs hold up a flat trellis between the homes. (The orientation switches at some point, as if I’d been looking toward the sea, or looking toward the street.) I imagine hanging a certain pitcher plant perfectly in between the two homes, such that it overhangs the walkway.

I am, by this point, also an Avatar Aang type character. A younger girl, resident of one of the fancy homes, lays down on the concrete, bereft of energy. In what I understand to be a friendly gesture, I dip my nose into her exposed armpit. I must’ve been invisible to her before, as she startles and knocks me backwards. In penance I turn myself into a potted plant with tall pointy leaves, called a snake plant. I watch the clock fast forward by a factor of 36, while in the background my unknowing allies search for the Avatar.

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Dream Journal

From Forest, to Warehouse, to Casino

(Dreamt in the cabin in Weed, California, before I was woken up from tooth pain)

A line of houses at the edge of a sloping mountain forest, separated by a field, or golf course, recently redeveloped with simple white windmills. In the course of trying to navigate past, I come to a stony circular outdoor temple which is shaped from the trees themselves. There I encounter a bro dude (probably a golfer) who directs me further into the city.

I re-enter a dusty large warehouse space, somewhere I’ve stayed not long ago. Gazing on aged timbers, gauzy light, and empty wooden alcoves, I consider how this would be a bad place to get sick. Outside I come across a kid, a nerdy boy who I recognize as having some sort of eye disability. No one has taken the time to get him to a safer place, this one obviously being abandoned. I gather a group of such disabled children — thick cute eyeglasses on their tiny young heads — and make for the most difficult passage. A group of at least two other caring adults joins me; we cross a tight gap with a folding trap bridge, inside a small tricky mechanical gate. I remember my friend Sarah Bliss there using a bicycle to hold down a rotating semicircular apparatus. We safely get the kids across, thanking each other for a job well done. One girl has her name listed as “[personal attribute] one”, which when asked about she smiles and dismisses congenially.

(Right now, writing this, I feel as though she’s dismissing and accepting my attempts to remember her name, in fact.)

I’m then within what must be a casino complex, a large enclosed circular courtyard somewhere like Nevada or Florida. This is quite different from the peaceful sparsely-populated forest. Trying to get around there, I bump into a bar in the middle of the road/path, the name is a pun on Peyton Place, somehow incorporating “payday” and also being released from “parole”. I’m baffled there are so many people out during the Corona pandemic. I duck into an employee area, a curved restaurant kitchen similar to a rail car. I tactfully ask someone working intently inside how we normally get out, as if I were a recent hire. I managed to exit out that back door, only to soon step onto a multi-car people-mover, some airport tram thing that ferries guests around this circular temple of gambling. I get caught with a ton of Florida types, none of whom seem to know about wearing a mask, and I burst out after only one stop. I try to get far away from anyone else, and end up gravitating to the middle with rows of benches around me. This place is insane. Far more likely to kill me than the dusty warehouse. Where did I bring these kids?