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Dream Journal

Logs in a Tree, Hip Ground Floor Squat

Tree logs stored high up across two trees. A ladder is up there too, blocking access. I look up and point out to my companion that there’s a hawk sitting on a branch directly above us.

The self-appointed minder of this open plot of land is a creepy psychiatrist, a young man who is clueless enough to stand staring at you from behind a couch to “observe” you. I point this out to Lynae, or whoever is with me. Someone escapes out the front door and into the music store across the other side of the mall (they don’t get far).

Behind the tree with the logs is a water chute leading back to a mill pond with a lovely population of loons (ha!). There are inscriptions in concrete, familiar yet written in some Southeast Asian language,

I sign up for a documentary show with Ricky Gervais, and as part of the contract we have to record banter to be played over the footage for at least 9½ minutes. We record it in the back of a car and then I’m told, jokingly, that the rental lasts another 120 minutes. My old friends Chicken and Kelly are in the front seat, smoking, and making out with the smoke.

Driving with my dad, early morning around 4 am, on the streets of our desert home that looks covered in a sheen of smooth white snow. I have a stapled-together packet of printed papers that’s about fighting others’ belief in mental illness, something I’d planned to read on the drive. Dad gets me to close it with a frustrated “really?”

Weird cheap flat on the first floor of a dirty yet hip ghetto. A side street near the heart of the city, clumped-up forgotten backyards and trash gathered in the dead-ends. My friends are thinking of buying this place — or maybe they already have? But that could just be a cover story for a squat, I think. They’ve converted a windowless room in the middle into an “orgy space”, which I guess means stuffing in a ton of pillows and chairs. Bafflingly, there’s only a heavy sheet separating it from a front patio area packed with couches. Ghetto but very cozy.

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Dream Journal

Old Gas Station, Renovated for a Cult

I inherit a gas station and repair shop from a rich uncle. Good to own, simply to have such a resource, but the land itself is probably a multi-million dollar value. The neighborhood is rusty and industrial, but wooded and scenic, near a picturesque mountain bend.

Roof has plants growing on it and the sloped edges are chipping away with age. I note to my dad that several electrical inlets have started to swell (especially an old Christian cross near the road). Kids are inquisitive about my motorcycle as I roll it into the first set of doors.

I allow the visitors who show up to start becoming gurus. Everyone wears white clothing with yellow details over them. A game is played over the course of a day, where the cult members get more and more expository, grandiose. A car trunk starts blinking in the repair shop, which is a prize for our scrappy band, but by the end of the day the winner doesn’t even want it. There are blue finches in the gritty central courtyard — not endangered but it’s nice to give them a home.

“What is inevitable?” I ask a small group of disciples. Some petite blonde mishears me and gives a definition of a weird drug (N-N2-DL?) — dredged from her past life of sometime debauchery in the city. Eventually we agree, mostly, on a definition of “unavoidable”.

The phrase enters my head, profound and banal at once: “you can’t teach a god how to behave.” I awake with my arm powerfully asleep, hanging off the side of the bed.

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Dream Journal

Freeing Pets of Many Sizes

A friendly stubby pet caterpillar, the last of my edible caterpillars. I release him in the rosebushes on the side of the Cathedral City house, near my parent’s bedroom, hoping that he reproduces someday. Later I find him in a planter in the very moist ground (so moist it’s nearly half-full with water). Nearby the hole, in the hedgerow, I find a pet parrot and hamsters that were also released some time ago.

I check on the status of a mouse cage, with very tiny mice — about the size of a pill capsule. The original two have indeed started breeding, with minuscule little mice crawlers lodged in the corners of their cotton-stuffed plexiglas half-shoebox cage.

A beluga whale in a backyard pool? Something like a Christmas wish I made as a child, which my parents had to convince me wasn’t a good idea.

Tracking a feral neighborhood horse outside the Cathedral City house. Driving with my dad in a Mercedes, his Mercedes, we finally find it upon reaching the end of our court, across from a wide lake on the other side of the main road. I say “Great! You know what you can do now? Leave it alone.” Dad leaves car idling at end of the street, takes off for work via different method. Patrick drives car back slowly along the narrow, overgrown court. The neighbor’s tree branches hang low enough that they block their house lights from reaching across the street. A neighbor woman has poor personal boundaries and tries to demonstrate where the light would be going, by entering into the house on the other side of the street.

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Dream Journal

Not-So-Haunted Blue Taffy

Watching American horror story on my phone in the living room, I notice a piece of blue taffy on the couch that seems to be moving of its own accord. I follow it down the apartment hallway as it’s pulled into Lynae’s studio where I can discern that it’s attached by a thin string. I can’t tell if it’s caught on something or is being pulled from below, perhaps. I try tugging the cord in what I consider a very “human” manner, as I figure that’s a useful signal to someone who might be holding the other end of the line.

I wake up and start narrating this dream into my phone and Lynae shouts from her studio “who are you talking to?”

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Dream Journal

Ol’ Time-Traveling Kinky Mr. Rogers

Taking others to see a young paraplegic gymnast, someone I worked with in another dream or movie. She can land from cliffside high bars into a cliffside cave, it’s rock walls patched up with decrepit tile. It reminds me of secretive passages of the Moiety resistance from the game Riven.

I look into a mirror and I’m an older version of my friend Spy. I’m feeling happy, pleasantly humbled, and I speak of how it’s possible to time travel — although you always make a mess. Connects with a quote I read yesterday from Roseanne Barr (of all people) who said “I do Kabbalistic meditation. It’s not unlike time travel; it can change the past and not just the future. You can look at what was lost and go beyond the grief of what was lost.”

Another odd and wonderful segment of the dream: receiving advice on both leather-working and kink relationships from the one and only Mr. Fred “McFeely” Rogers.

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Dream Journal

Old Doctor Shares Old Records

Old doctor with funky left arm, I bang into his side playfully and he protests. I say “I used to be young and now that I’m grown…”

I look through my medical record that’s been kept since my birth, but never shown to me. There are reams of alphanumeric codes.

My four family members are all insane, to a varying degree? Who knows how likely that is.

Broken eggs on the floor of the RV I’m staying in remind me of a dream where I’m feeding a baby chicken, or duck. Unusual connection and not something that would normally trigger a dream memory.

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Dream Journal

Lauren Buys SF Real Estate

I help my hometown friend Lauren buy a building in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. It’s an old six-floor walk-up building housing older Burners, with a soon painted-over mural in the backyard called “Burning Times”: a fire symbol and a series of clocks. I’m glad to have Lauren in San Francisco, and I hope to maybe one day live cheaply in this big building with her, but I’m not sure she understands how precious and sought-after a place like it is. I peek into her first floor room there’s barely anything in there except vintage curtains and sex toys on the bed.

Our class is learning from a science teacher (in the vein of Mr. Suggett or Mr. Lonborg) when class is interrupted by a long phone call about Nick Howell’s mom getting arrested in Connecticut. Nick Howell was a real kid I knew in middle school. The teacher gives a long compassionate speech afterwards, going into the merits of whether or not we should share these things. I find it hard to follow along, despite him being my favorite teacher.

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Dream Journal

Bait Locker, Alien Repellent, Rustbucket RV-land

In a locker room, lots of stuff I need to gather. I head out once my time is over, my two friends waiting outside the heavy glass door, before realizing I still left a bunch of stuff. In the bottom half of the locker, the compartment is open so I can reach in and find other people things. There’s at least a few pieces of funny money left as a trap, I assume. The steam room hot tub adventure cost at least a couple hundred bucks.

I am a scientist like Rick Sanchez and I’m inside my house during the course of an insectoid invasion. I am one of the only people with an alien-repellent sound barrier. The insect forces go to great links with transparently fake news reporter interviews trying to discover how it works and to overcome it. I see a diagram of the architectural plan of the house with the bedroom just outside the laboratory and the clean room.

I’m in the small kitchen of my family’s old Cathedral City house. About twice as many people live with us now, and I think of them as in my family. There are two refrigerators and an upright freezer next to each other and we’re even thinking of putting another refrigerator blocking off the counter corner. I’m using a glass tray to keep a group of aquarium feeder worms alive. I have to use the same tray to store macaroni and cheese above the worms. Meanwhile, two younger kids are bothering me, throwing food and interrupting my project. I ask my dad, who is staring into space eating cereal, to tell them throwing food wasn’t okay. He responds apathetically, and in frustration I fling a spoonful of grits at him, spraying the entire kitchen corner. He still doesn’t react.

I move into a community of rustbucket houses. Old RVs and trailers are pushed together into a complex warren-like structure — everyone seems to have built a private hobby space so they can sneak off by themselves to do work, camp chairs inside old shipping containers stocked with rebar. One green RV from the ’40s has a particularly unpleasant individual in it, but a beautiful slide-off stove in the kitchen, converted to be an outdoor courtyard. It’s a very welcoming community, but also “is this how poor people really are?” is a question that comes up. At some point I try to see if I can build a large house on one of the unfilled plots of land. The small house just downhill from the main road was one of the first built.

We go off and drive on an adventure in an old VW van. We stop at a large gate down the road, waiting with an invisibility power-up activated. When a train comes behind us the gate opens and we can use a speed boost to drive overland far away from where we’ve driven before. What would take 20 minutes only takes about 3, but we still don’t reach our destination — a place called Challengeburg.

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Dream Journal

Jumbled Hometown School Complex

A large cathedral-like place, and walking out of it as an acolyte. Cars on stilts.

My hometown elementary school (actually long torn down) preserved as a pioneer cottage complex, one woman’s job to maintain. I see jugs from oil changes kept in the attic among the jumbled wooden labyrinth — though I couldn’t explain their presence.

Tilting up a drink in a half-shell as part of a ceremony to allow women’s reproductive insight. Taking in a panorama I see, remembering the exact moment when I admit that I masturbated today. My Twitter friend KC Crowell has a look of slack-jawed surprise.

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Dream Journal

Giving Chicken a Sling

Watching a movie, a small black shoulder sling is hidden under my shirt. As I’m leaving and out the doors first, I turned my left and make a comment to my wife, but it’s actually a random guy who answers in the negative. The timing of my walk back to my car works out such that I can’t help but pass Chicken John in the parking lot. The parking lot is somewhere upscale but strip mall-y, like Palm Desert CA near where I grew up. I see that Chicken is very tired and holding a baby. Trying to normalize things, and seeing an opportunity, I offer him my arm sling for the drive home — which to my surprise he accepts.