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Dream Journal

Protest at a Water Park, Saved

I’ve been dropped off at a water park with a group of friends. I spend most of my time by myself, but I see my handsome childhood classmate Zane Flynn walking around and I walk beside him twice.

There is a water slide being used by a giant girl near the edge of the sea. The slide cuts through a low straight ridge, water fed to it by two channels behind the ridge, the water sloshed in by two manatee-shark creatures from either side.

I’m involved in a dramatic incident where the coast is drained for an approaching tram. A lone protester walks up to the track and places his foot on it, forcing the tram to stop. Two armed guards approach to arrest him. Moving as one, myself and a large crowd surround both guards and protester, like white blood cells isolating an infection. We sweep back to the shore in a wave and break apart, saving the protester. Angela Merkel (who is in charge here) begins a retribution campaign, which I immediately notice by the presence of a creepy guy recording video directly in front of me as I walk back.

Some things in the park are already closed even by 3:00 pm, like the gift shop/president’s hall located on a mezzanine at the edge of the park. Headed back down long twisting perpendicular concrete stairs, I jump and surf on a series of long sloping metal handrails. Finally, on the way out, I consider how the musician Weird Al always seems to be on top of knowing about these protests. Then, I just happen to see him on the way out, playing an accordion cover of “We Don’t Need No Education”. I thank him. I’ve heard that he remembers all his fans names, and he yells back at me “thanks Amy!” Hm. Leaping up the stairs in bounds, I see two hip-hop kids having an argument about the protest. My answer to them is that it doesn’t matter what happened in the past, what happened today is always more relevant. And the protest happened today.

On my way back out to the communal bus, around the corner from the exit, I run into my family, which is the family from Malcolm in the Middle. In the cozy second story living room/kitchen, they’ve written a single name on a big board, “Artemisia”. I start saying “don’t even tell me, I know you’re up to something,” but they explain anyway (of course they do) it’s their list of names for people that would both wear cutoffs and who could be male or female. Of course it is.

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Dream Journal

Girl Named Fragrant, and Cooking for Cannibals

I’m writing on a railway tram with a load of people and, due to a breakdown, itself being hauled on the back of a towtruck (tow-tram?). Seems dangerous but whatevs. Seated next to me is a girl who’s very friendly and flirty. Reminds me of someone I know, maybe someone Asian, but despite otherwise having the same features this girl has bright orange hair and freckles. Her name, as she introduces herself, is “Fragrant”. I find this charmingly silly.

Later I’m staying in a room like my smaller childhood bedroom. But there’s this weird 30 degree corner with a built-in desk/ice chest. My friend Heph has graffitied one side of it which I didn’t notice at first — in fact, a good amount of the front is broken away. It turns out the desk is a switch which turns on the oven.

I prep a meal at home that I’m hoping to eat at a famous cannibal restaurant in Santa Cruz, one where you bring in your own meat. Naturally. I’ve foolishly left the plastic bacon keeper in the kitchen oven for 45 minutes. Thankfully it’s not melted, but after all of that, the bacon slices aren’t even cooked through. I’m not sure I’ll even have anything to eat at the restaurant. Which is all well and good, since it occurs to me it’s probably best not to admit where specifically the meat came from.

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Dream Journal

Dive Camp with Friends

A summer camp for diver’s training in underwater oil recovery. Mixed co-ed group of youngish people, high sexual tension but everyone is working too hard to do anything about it. A girl I know from the PacTrades hostel, Adrienne F., is climbing the rope ladder to our next task area but stops to masturbate. Supposedly, I remember her doing this in the past.

Karma Raya  is the name for the communal ranch house some of us stay in. A low wall separates our small sleeping rooms from a main activity area. The place looks like an architectural cutaway model that someone actually made a building of.

There, my school friend Vince Saunders is playing piano. Well there’s a piano in the same room anyways. I slide down the wall, over the edge, and land on the piano bench facing away from him. It’s a silly yet simultaneously classy move.

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Dream Journal

Motorcycling the Hills, Shopping Ice Cream

Rounding a rarely-visited corner on the rocky coast of San Francisco, a road built around a dirt hill. In the ’50s it was used in a bank promotion, which is how most people know it.

I drive past two flatbed trucks with massive reinforced metal plates for moving homes and other buildings. Watching an educational film on the subject of a motorcycle’s back case, addressing it being further from the center of gravity. Watching (or rewatching) a video of a Motorcycling Mom going backwards over a long patch of rocks in a canyon side road, laughing about how clumsy she is.

Visiting a destination ice cream shop whose flavors constantly change. Hugging my own mom, who wears several buttons of her favorite flavors — she has an idle fantasy that one day she can point to them, and that will serve as her request for a particular ice cream.

Having planned to go out, I end up shopping most of the day. I keep a stringy cactus attached to my ankle, while I trip over other plants. Drop off my childhood friend Robby T. at a sand-lot home he’s staying at somewhere in a working class neighborhood of our hometown. Two Rottweilers come out the front door as I’m parking my motorcycle. They immediately try to get the chocolate in my duffel bag, then jump up to the top of the closet to get a sausage hanging there.

A demo of someone who isn’t Italian but loves to cook Italian food; the man is buying $500 of ingredients on a grocery checkout belt. So much, the clerk can’t even let him pay for it and has to wait for a manager. She stands at the end of the line (per policy) to keep the customer from running. This wastes all of our time, so we waste hers explaining how stupid it is she that can’t accept our money. We could, if we knew, just split it into more than one checkout. A security guard comes out afterwards dressed in pink camo.

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Dream Journal

Poly Reindeer Toy, Mayo Cult Fishing Pond

Sent by my employer, a magazine, to replace another reporter-photographer. The assignment is at a fetishist’s retreat farm compound. They much overuse mayonnaise (I don’t much remember except I expected most of our readers would find it disgusting while I only found it unhygienic).

Taking a moment, outside on a patio lounger in my long blue velvet robe which I haven’t seen since too long, I film them with a baby hippo on their arm. In the communal pond of the trailer park-like community, a man catches a smaller-than-hoped long-finned fish with extendable mouth parts, calling it “pterodac… no, it’s, you know, wing fish”. He regales us with his imagining the panic it had being drawn up from the bottom. Then breaks its mouth off to kill it. I end up in a garage watching TV with some siblings of widely varying ages, followed by a crossbow contest where the older siblings are one-by-one held back from leaving by an arrow shot just ahead of them. The youngest (a Madeleine-like girl) looks back from the door innocently, not knowing why her older siblings aren’t behind her.

A toy reindeer like something from Frozen, molded seats molded in its sides for human figures to ride. The figures are numbered “polyamorous #0, #1, #2”. In what seems an odd detail, the male figure has a 0 over it’s crotch and a female figure has a 1.

A shelf of carved and painted stone miniatures of buildings, like my parents used to have. Different eras and styles, which I rearrange to sit better on the shelf. I begin to mess with a round, very plain train layout just behind it.

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Dream Journal

Stalker’s Ridge, Tabernacle Airship

Driving in a rented sleeper van southward from San Francisco with my family group, a brother and sister. We pull off at twilight onto a barren peninsula jutting into ocean. While the campfire we make is pleasant enough, the van becomes trapped and our dark environs become distinctly spooky. We clamber up the side of a sharp rocky ridge. From the chipped line of its knife-edge peak, I spot the shadowed outlines of enemies stalking us, nearly surrounding us. I don’t have an end for this dream… sorry.

As a kid I famously broke into the Mormon Tabernacle Airship. Now, as circumstance would have it, I’m being asked to do so once again. I make my way through a side entrance, timing events so I blend into a large crowd just filing in for a special occasion. For a short while I wait in a winding line, then matter-of-factly jump the square barricade into a reliquary with the appearance of a backgammon arrangement. I deftly pluck a hollow pin hidden in a scepter which grants me the power to skip around short distances. Mischievously I hop from alcove to alcove in the labyrinthine line, confounding the sleepy crowds attending for flat religious duty.

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Dream Journal

Lindsay’s Secret Past

A YouTuber I’ve followed for years, Lindsay Ellis, narrates and hosts a long movie-like narrative dream allegorically revealing her past trauma. Most of the details of story are lost (I had a convention class to possibly attend starting at 9, but didn’t make it and fell back asleep).

It began on a steep cliffside road overlooking the ocean. Small, languid, statuesque lions watched over some of the scenes. We drove most of the time, often being tricked by clever transitions like the imagineering inside the Tower of Terror ride. One long sequence is in an oversize warehouse/grocery store, aisles like rooms of a building. I think out of respect for Lindsay I won’t repeat what I remember might’ve happened there. It’s mostly forgotten anyway — though I’m left with a feeling of sympathy and understanding, a feeling that I’ll keep the exact nature of the secret in the same spirit she has.

It’s worth noting here that I don’t know her personally, I’m just an member of her audience. But she’s a real person. I don’t often have dreams about strangers like this.

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Dream Journal

Ocean at the Window & Messages Sent by Past Self

dark water

Beginning with the strongest image: ocean waves suddenly lapping up the windows of a beachside bedroom. My mom lies sick in the bed closest the window. She’s half blind, nursed by the family for years, and today she asks me to get her a bar of white chocolate. I drive a pair of motor-scooters — like standing astride two horses –and retrieve one, then the other, from the room where my mom (who is also “Queen Anne”) is resting up with her eyes open.

I leave my friends and family in the beachside cottage (now much closer to the ocean). Searching the beach where I earlier helped organize a game of guys vs. girls volleyball — right up against the water’s edge — I looking for a computer which was recently inherited from when I lived in between bus seats. It’s a rack of outdated tech, box-shaped, a thin shiny black panel with Motorola wiring. It could’ve been from techie-artist friend Rich Humphrey. Now in the evening’s dark, fleeing rising waves, we instead rescue a dog that looks like Aislinn’s Catahoula hounddog Rose (we = me and I-don’t-know-who).

Makeouts in the large family garage of my childhood home, on a long massage platform, relaxed cool friends makeouts, with a tall athletic strawberry blonde friend from my Chicken John days. Laying on my side, happily killing time, I use a fully-sopped paintbrush to slather purple-to-grey paint over a piece of scrap cardstock. I paint from top-left to bottom-right, like Georgia O’Keefe.

I’m tasked with leading a group of my family/friends back to a ground floor hotel room I once stayed in as a kid. I observe my brother Chris attempt to carefully sneak under a low-hanging tree branch, hoping he’ll see what I see: the (sabertooth?) tiger just above eye level. After giving him the chance, when it feels almost too late, I shout out a clear warning. The look on his face as he made eye contact with the tiger! We get to the hotel room, where the quality of time seems a bit slippy — I’m able to simultaneously receive and send a message to myself, by gesturing to the 4-year-old me within the room. I tapped at the top of a large conch/whelk shell with my fingers joined (an upside-down “ma che vuoi” 🤌), holding the eye contact and attention of myself in the past. It is, I believe, what should be called a strange loop.

Back in the garage with my makeout friend, we’re joined by a recently victorious celebrity, a Chris Farley-like man. Together we hug him in a warm, cuddly friend sandwich. The situation is fond and intimately familiar, even somewhat sexual although I can’t touch my female friend over him (he’s a big guy just like Farley).

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Dream Journal

Landlord Fixing the Stairs

The landlord is in the backyard, and the wooden stairway has had one of its columns eroded away. I call him and he actually starts to fix it. I discover the shady lower column, underneath the landing, is also broken completely through. There’s barely anything holding up the right side anymore. The physical orientation is oddly different than our normal backyard, rotated somehow — the landlord too — both true-to-life and not. Lazy overgrown potted plants grow thick and lush over puddles and concrete, everything seems to have a fine coating of moss.

The view zooms out, showing the Victorian building that Ais lives in being a relic of earlier development, isolated in a business park, itself within a large airport and whose roads serve cars as well as planes. Reminds me of Alameda.

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Dream Journal

That’s A Wrap (Party)

Sitting around at a wrap party in a park with a bunch of friends for a show called Dame. Mickey is there, as is Feral. We start passing phones around showing the different things we’d saved during the production. I’ve been hungry and drinking often lately, but tonight I’m not imbibing at all and I’m just as happy.

A long car pulls up to the curb at the outdoor crew party. I’m asked to drive it, and I agree to volunteer, as long as it’s not a manual transmission. But it so happens that an older black guy in the crew excitedly volunteers after I’ve already climbed inside. The driver sits on a raised platform towards the back, so I take a ride in the spacious cabin, which is luxuriously laid out like a sightseeing tour boat crossed with the Batmobile.

We bump along at speed along the long curve of an unpaved rural hill. I have a dramatic view of an impressively acrobatic helicopter fight, the mismatched belligerents ducking and sliding and swooping in midair.