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Dream Journal

Body Snatching, a Tricky Family Role

It’s a big budget music video parody shoot, on the caliber of Saturday Night Live. The gag is that there’s too many words to fit, lots of nonsense scatting and repetition of catchphrases. It has to be cut early because the singer’s pun of “pear of genes” has been ruined by colored pineapples in the background instead of pears.

I’m a speedboat valet, participating in a training program which shows how to correctly give up your life battoning down doors during a hurricane. I’m with another bro-type dude, and we later sink together into a tumultuous sea giving each other fistbumps.

In Asian-feeling apartment quarters, taking possession of bodies, and playing different roles. An Uncle Iroh-like character from Avatar: Last Airbender. Taking a body and talking to my real-life aunt, but though I need to accomplish a task, I suspect I’m failing to play the role well enough — she may begin to believe I’m not her sister, my mom.

A load of cookies on the stove, the recipe includes letting them float in water to seal in flavor. I have an internal argument with the mom-spirit, where she keeps insisting how I’m doing it wrong. In faux anger I pretend I’m about to slap a stylish black girl with silvery metallic bangs, but she reacts somehow the right way. So I ask her why she reacted that way, and she answers, sensibly “because I thought you were going to slap me”. I say, “if that’s the way you reacted to me about to slap you, you reacted correctly, because I didn’t slap you.” Hmm.

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Dream Journal

Moving After 10 Years

Moving out of the apartment we’ve lived in for 10+ years, there are new people moving in soon. Various recollections:

  • Shelves and shelves.
  • Packing things away with boxes, yet often while being inside them.
  • Hundreds of semi-forgotten nostalgias.
  • Turning a Brita mini-fridge back into a working water filter fridge, from a litter box.
  • A tiny desiccated plant box, a former fridge magnet.
  • The wood on the top shelf of cabinets has sagged down from all the bottles kept on it, almost to the point of the bottles falling off. One notable unidentified bottle in a high kitchen windowsill, from a hike my wife and I took once on the day that would be our anniversary — except in the narrative, this hike actually occurred on our wedding day.
  • My friend Val was there, to express her sympathies.

A narrow tall Victorian house (like the Carson Mansion in Eureka, California) up on a hill. I’ve negotiated with our landlord or perhaps the temp-stay management to let me store stuff in the attic there. Yet I haven’t even been up there by the time our scheduled check-out date arrives.

During the dream I constantly have the feeling that all the solutions I’ve sorted out over the years are being dismantled, one by one.

A Russian-style hot tub hut with distinctive green tiles is another place we’ve rented, and another place we’re also giving up. Frustratingly, I realize we’ve only visited 2-3 times. On the side, the green ceramic vertical tiles (like long pyramids) have fallen off a small section, revealing what I never noticed — small handmade classical Russian banya tiles, even more beautiful.

Displayed on a rotating platform nearby is a model train made to resemble an expensive handmade miniature yacht, built of metal, wood and cut glass.

“Maep” is a strange word said by a midget which is used to remind me: time is up. Time is up, and I awake.

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Dream Journal

Lone Beach Tower Motorbiking

Nighttime along a brightly lit coastline, reminiscent of southern China. High cliffside roads hug scraggly beaches, threading by tucked-away housing developments. I can zoom around changing the perspective. I focus in on one usually bright street lamp right on the beach, so bright it has a pixelating distortion effect. Its two layers of trestles are color-coded by location and height. It morphs into a detailed 3-D mountain, the highest in the region, which is now seems more Japanese.

High above the beach, at the top of a tree, I print out multiple orders for motorcycle stuff using an older printer located there (to save time). I ride my motorcycle with dirt tires on and pop a wheelie, jumping over a fallen log. I commit mentally to a fantasy of bumming around Europe by motorbike, staying for $0 just on sides of roads

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Dream Journal

12 Elements, 12 Deities, 12 Powers

Heritage church out forgotten in the desert of my hometown. A screen of tamarisk trees hides it between my middle school and the mountains beyond. No one has visited in years. I climb the rafters inside, feeling transported to an earlier time. Perhaps the reason I wasn’t reported to the authorities exploring such a place is because I was just a lone kid. I hope they preserve this place, even though no one seems to love it but me.

An airplane journey, within a strange morphing and expanding fuselage. At the beginning several portal-making objects of power are released to 12 special passengers, forming the side of good. They are hunted by an evil master witch with broods of alien slave dogs, zergling-like. Some good-siders hide behind doors, some in hidden passageways, some in other time periods, some in other realities, all enduring attacks from the witch and her brood.

Each object they are blessed with are aligned with certain elements of the periodic table, and certain deities of the Greek Pantheon, granting them unique powers. They learn to wield them one by one — the dream is broken into chapters and has an unusually sophisticated structure.

Finally in the last chapter it’s revealed that Element № 1, aligned to Zeus king of the gods, has all the while been overseeing events unfold with their sublime omniscience. The left side of the movie theater inside the main fuselage has remained mysteriously empty during the pitched battles. It turns out to be a staging area for those special objects-holders who reach the last step in their training, now hiding in plain sight. They take their seats wordlessly, building anticipation one by one with each assembled conspirator, and finally together open the small sealed chamber to the right of the screen — that the witch and her hunters never even noticed. The supreme holder is revealed, having learned his training instantly, observing all, but withholding his omnipotence until the time was ripe.

The witch is gobsmacked, the energy in the room electric. She is defeated without a battle, finally seeing what has played out.

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Dream Journal

Wooden Art Time Machine(s)

Sitting in my dad’s handmade palm-covered Kish structure in my childhood home’s backyard in Cathedral City. Neighbor has situated their patio structure with loud music just over the fence. No saguaro cactus like there used to be.

A wooden bamboo theater, very exclusive. Ticket stand out front and snack bar just inside, barely manned as the movie already started. Dark, stylish, yet still homemade-looking.

My Uncle Mike, Aunt Terry and cousin Spencer come to visit — in a time machine. I ride along with them on their way back, travelling on train tracks laid into the city streets. A car gets in our way during a left turn and this odd jalopy-looking time machine honks and honks — which I remember as both funny and stressful.

Perhaps the same vehicle but shifted pulls up with a large mobile art project newly-made, by an entirely new Chicken John crew. A giant redwood-sized log has been made into a vehicle. There’s a girl I sorta know, light brown skin and dark hair, wearing a revealing onesie with the crotch and breasts sewn to be open. I take some pictures of her, ostensibly of the vehicle though. She’s very friendly and seems pleased I’m interested. Unrelated to this, Chicken comes up and starts spouting some characteristic spiel. I lightly spit in his face (almost missing), he and the whole crew get the message. Hell of a way to get someone’s respect.

An aquarium of worms is being worked on, on the kitchen table. I pull one worm out but there’s actually hundreds stuck together. This is an otherwise barren tank with just a single small fish surviving, the last of several remaindered animals.

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Dream Journal

Mr. Begby’s Slippers

During a babysitting job, I’m called in to put the baby to sleep. Begby is my drug buddy, same guy from the movie Trainspotting. Some whispers over my shoulder as I gab with Begby — the baby? — “you should try some heroin (was it heroin?). Begby is a menace, and I eventually find it simpler to I kill him, putting his flesh leather in a carefully Ziploc, promising to throw it out as soon as convenient.

In a many-roomed hostel, I nibble a bit. My female friend Oz gets in bunk bed, and has a penis. I jump and startle her before she knows it me. I’m sure it’s a dream so I grab the strange girl-dick under the sheets.

As part of my job, I’m being requested to go to market to get only one thing, because it’s Sunday and most things closed. I’m trying to argue my way out it, when someone asks about a bag they found labeled “Mr. Begby’s Slippers”. There’s someone present I told (thankful that I got rid of Begby but worried about the evidence), and they gasp, mortified that I’ve still not thrown the skin out. It would appear I’m caught.

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Dream Journal

Mikl Em, the Hamster

A pleasant exercise with my wife planning for our next trip to Palm Springs, when quarantine is over. Visiting upscale nice art galleries in places like Palm Desert because we’re adults and damn well can now. We wear fancy clothes with my friend Lauren.

Driving up the tramway road, while considering how long it would take to walk. It’s quite steep. There are jackals or more likely coyotes nearby. I challenge my wife to a race up the sandy desert trail, giving her a headstart. She matches me speed for speed, until she makes one error in a turn and I gain on her just barely enough to leap and graze her behind, shouting “monch butt!”

I ponder the question of why we dream of certain people. I observe it’s often not who you first think of when you ask that question. In this case the first person I think of is Meredith Scheff.

I experienced the last moments of a soldier from a defeated army, from their perspective. A burning curved shield is placed over his face and he doesn’t even burn to death as you’d expect, the oxygen is completely sucked away and he suffocates as well as breathes burning hot gases.

My old friend Mikl Em transformed himself into a hamster, or claims to. I leave to get Rick (of Rick and Morty) and return in the middle of a conversation: “average is actually a size 40, everyone should start from 40.” I ask Rick if we can talk to him as a car. He flips some cage controls around, there’s nanotech hidden within the thin bars and the cage corner snaps. Starting from the top, he morphs into a Disney-ish green Cars character. “We don’t really believe you’re Mikl Em” he says.

EDIT: two and a half months later, Mikl Em passed away. R.I.P. you beautiful not-hamster.

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Dream Journal

Little Left-Behind Things at My Old Neighbor’s House

My late friend and neighbor Pete Goldie’s house. Old parking meters have been charmingly repurposed into shelf supports outside. I spot a few stolen telescopes too. An old plant rests on high shelf under the front window, with a hard-to-pronounce scientific name (arbracht-racht perhaps?) It’s big broad succulent leaves look like green Zerg creep, its brown hard woody patches overgrown the pot sides. It’s been there so long, been left to it’s own devices, I’m almost sure it must be forgotten.

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Dream Journal

No-Go Costco

At Costco, it’s taking me a long time to pick out stuff. I only have my wife’s membership card, but I hope to convince the cashier. Before even looking at it he says they can’t accept it. I get uncharacteristically mad at a cashier, cursing the guy out for being such a dick.

Looking for an exit then. Storing stuff in a Spanish-style back hallway. One room is a walk-in freezer that looks like a bank vault. They escort/guide me out a back door, but it exits to a housing development in Florida.

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Dream Journal

Dirty Tortoise, Maral Remix, Cryotherapy

A desert tortoise is nesting in the front yard of my neighbor’s house across the street from my childhood home in Cathedral City. It’s dug quite a dirty, poopy-colored crater gash in the lawn.

I go inside a Middle Eastern music store just where their house was, and ask for Maral Ibragimova. He not only has her, but the guy and I listen to a pretty good remix together. I nod my head as I make eye contact. I then take the first opportunity to leave as he helps another customer, to avoid the intensity or awkwardness (though I feel embarrassed about not buying anything).

Getting ready for school and I think I have 45 minutes to make it… it’s like 6:45 or 7:45. Turns out it’s actually the afternoon, but it’s also not a school day.

While out on the lawn, I notice my faded green striped belt that’s faded significantly over time (and which I incidentally saw a photo of yesterday) has been redyed.I feel like I was having this exact thought in front of my computer only 12 hours ago perhaps.

In the state of Iowa, with a pickup truck. There’s an official state urn or statue memorial, a concrete cup with words ringing it, “Mayor Of City Of Los Angeles”, referencing some historical event (sounds like a ship name to me). Thinking about how California tends to draw in outsiders, how it’s good at it, how there are increasingly two countries now in America.

I visit my brother Chris who is working front desk of a nice wellness office out of state. I try to float through the front desk’s window counter to say hi to him, playfully annoy him a little. The gap is too small though and I don’t fit. I float over the waist high office gate, asking a little girl walking passed why she doesn’t float or fly herself. She claims she’s scared, or not allowed to, or doesn’t have enough practice. Interestingly and curiously evasive.

I slip into a cryotherapy bed, something new in their facility that my brother wants me to test. It is both thrilling and relaxing, oddly so, and I don’t remember much of being in there though I remember being inside for a long while. The angled plastic top has built up a lot of condensation while I’m in there. I find a bogus parking ticket for my truck, despite having parked legally, in the wellness centers parking lot, per instructions and with permission, in a place where they can’t take it unless they’re called. I know I can fight it, but am still annoyed at the gall.