Categories
Dream Journal

Hidden Temple Stays Hidden

My father-in-law lives in a large aristocratic manor, in one wing he’s built a grand indoor railroad landscape. Parts are clearly medieval with tiny knights and exquisite sailboats behind glass cases. He presents gifts to his daughter, my wife, while they lounge in front of one such display case. His pricey gifts are even on theme.

The house is tall enough that when I come down from an upper floor, walking down a long stone spiral staircase, I can’t tell at all if I’ve reached my floor (counting in a dream is hard too, I suppose). Eventually I emerge in a massive overstocked kitchen abuzz with people moving about, then finally reach the ground floor. Outside in the gravel drive is a squat yet spacious school bus waiting to return students who came to see Beauty and the Beast.

While driving my car out in the country, I stumble upon a pristine pagan temple — a circle of upright stones embedded in lush, thick ground cover. Hidden, disused, but obviously well-kempt, possibly built by Loreon Vigne of Isis Oasis. I forgot my suitcase for this trip so return home, and when I try to find the temple again the location on my maps app is wrong. It leads instead to a graffitied-over stage at some dilapidated Renaissance Fair summer camp along a disused, cracked, conifer-lined highway. Someone has been clever enough to keep it hidden — I wish I’d written it down.

Returning my colorful Mayan hammock because the net body has split from the hook loop. Surprised to discover I still have 11 days to return it. However, it seems Amazon mostly carries a plain white version, and this was a problem before. In fact, on reflection, the white hammock resembles a cheap nylon-and-plastic one I bought at an Army surplus store, the one which once dropped me straight down from a height of six feet.

Testing forensic evidence by having sex — sex with two women, to see how the female body processes semen. I wasn’t going to leave this in, it seems extraneous and explicit, but I reckon I should err on the side of completionism.

Categories
Dream Journal

Grandma Australian PM tours Medieval Monument Valley

Slept at a couple friends’ home in Oxnard, CA

In a familiar communal velvet plush gathering space, chairs and windows in an oval, I talk with Patrick who is a week out from graduating high school, very bright and proud. The building is long, with conveyor belts in the workshop/basement open to the air, reminiscent of the Acme Bread Co. Unfortunately an old sorceress grandma has recently put herself in charge. I’ve no recollection of why she was evil, but my co-conspirators and I concoct a plan to overthrow and kill her. I shapeshift and sneak over the back fence. My disguise seems to fail on the way down, and I land naked in a puddle. Luckily the enchantment only gives me the illusion of failure, and to others I appear as a football (the most similar object that would make sense coming over a fence and landing in a puddle). I’m thrown by a conspirator to nearby the witch/sorceress/grandma and successfully trap her face in a plastic bag.

My wife’s late grandfather, Pa, sitting peacefully on a chair in the middle of his old living room. Grams sits on his lap, both gazing at something I can’t see. They’re having a fond conversation, and although I watch their lips move, I hear nothing.

Malaysian news crew leaves a 200 ft. folding ladder in our student news studio. Of course, this is a great temptation for my lads and I. Later, on my way somewhere else, I climb a similar fire escape ladder. A bubbly, distressed blonde runs up and hugs me, surprisingly warm, then effusively apologizes for mistaking me for her close friend who regularly climbs that fire escape.

On the city’s jagged, street-level highway there’s a single minivan going the wrong way, but the cars manage to drive around it as though it were an extremely temporary one-way lane. Later the same thing happens while I’m riding a scooter on a one-way street, an entire line of cars that were diverted, with no notice from our direction.

Australian PM has a special rule, 612, where she can reject things based on being a grandmother. A door displaying the news is marked 612. Sitting around a table, Lynae gets up and a made-up but world-weary Asian girl sits in her chair. Despite the possible tension from bringing up politics, I solicit opinions by sharing the analogy of an internet response code, ‘4xx – machine on fire’. The Aussies seem properly amused. A newsstand reports “PM unhurt by nip dip”, and I learn this refers to the particulars of temporarily banning high-priced smart devices. Australia, after all, is the country exporting the raw materials to make them. Unbeknownst, the PM was sitting at the next table over, appreciates my gab, and takes me on a local tour.

The semi-arid town seems generic — there’s a central roundabout, off to the left is the industry, upslope to the right are short flat houses with fenced-in yards. In the distance is a chunky green promontory, much like Monument Valley USA. As we drive closer I see stunning medieval-imitation towers, ramparts, and fortifications. I can’t even fathom such artistic means, or their intent. This is what the area is famous for. I’m so awed by the beauty I begin to doubt its realness, even telling the PM it looks like a Myst game. This only exacerbates it’s majestic quality. Against the golden dusk light, the elegant stone buttresses on the far side of the hill spout waterfalls, the leafless trees clutching spherical mud-daub treehouses. Yet nothing degrades into unreality, it simply remains repentantly beautiful.

Categories
Dream Journal

Fragment of an Eerie Building Dream

The lobby of a tall apartment building, with glossy dark wood floor-to-ceiling shelves. The elevator has either floor 6 or 9. Typewriters. A class I’m not a part of.

Louis CK made of maggots with a single tooth each. 

Categories
Dream Journal

Country of Bensbensvideo

Little part of Canada nestled in a shadowy river-side forest of Nebraska, a map of thin little medieval-like individual plots. Eventually this odd holdover secedes to America out of convenience.

Traveling along a road and I convince my mom that it’s a good idea to stop at the smallest country I’ve ever been to, Bensbensvideo. It’s essentially just an old building, ground floor bar, upstairs apartments, with a little side lot for me to leave my motorcycle while I go to the beach. In the thick undergrowth someone has left glasses of white wine covered with Tupperware tops. I discover decayed whale bones under a little alcove. My mom and I finish our wine as we see the tide has quickly come in, up to the wheels of my truck. Getting ready to leave, I can feel the psychic pressure from the grumpy old woman tending bar when I scurry through on my motorcycle.

Lying in bed on my side as a kid/teenager, wearing an oversized pajama shirt, in a house which belongs to my parents. Realizing how I’m not a real contributor to the household, even though I might be focused on how I work on stuff all the time.

Categories
Dream Journal

Seattle, QLD

Hummingbird babies in their nest inside a Tupperware, I’m surprised to see when I turn it over. This is the reason we’re walking toward the tropical forest gorge. It’s my female friend and I walking along a sidewalk near where she met her husband, and we’re rolling along a big concrete pipe section. Nearby there are oddly narrow buildings made of the same stuff. Our pipe rolls over a stop sign and it produces the humorous message “Windows has encountered an error”.

There’s a town called Seattle in a rainy spot on the north coast of Queensland, on a little isthmus of a peninsula. It’s hard for me to find by zooming in, as other town names pop up instead such as Williamsonia.

Staying as guests in a house, my suitcase stuff scattered around some oldsters couch. Their cute but fussy young son or grandson doesn’t want to wear pants, and is dressed in my dashiki suit. He’s happy to stay that way even though they look like pajamas.

My wife and I leave for her makeup fair an hour and a half after it starts, at 1:24 pm. I have difficulty with my phone, setting it to correct timezone, from where I am in Australian East coast time.

Categories
Dream Journal

Study Peak, Down Icy Trail

A group of us are studying at the end of a trail up a tall mountain. I end up the last one studying at the waist-high workbenches. Once the instructor/monitor (my 10th grade English teacher Ms. Roos?) brings this to my attention, I leave and say hi to Sherilyn sitting in a small cubby-like room off to the side of the exit, wearing fishnets, perhaps working as a librarian.

Shortly thereafter I’m asked to get something off a high shelf — on the trail — and I’m “caught” by my landlord, who has a ponytail. No clue why he’d be upset by that, but that sounds like him.

Even further down, there’s a very steep, conical icy slope. As I slide down the crunchy snow, I relate to someone the posted warnings I saw about “Karen”, a trans lady in our [dreamt] social group who perpetrated some property destruction before she got it together and become trans.

I notice my facial hair in a mirror. The left side of my face is shaved into a goatee and sideburns, while the right is still a beard. And looking up, my hair has a wide ¼ off-center stripe shaved out to match, with my long hair hanging over on either side. It looks pretty stylish, but I think I couldn’t pull it off in real life on account of short side hairs.

Categories
Dream Journal

Missed Opportunities, Missed Everything

Someone rediscovers an old secret of mine, that when I was in high school I got a letter of acceptance into Yale but never followed up on it. I lost the letter and chose to forget about it over the years. I’m embarrassed but also just don’t know what to say. I don’t have an explanation for why I left behind the opportunity, it just… slipped away.

Later on I’m at a swap meet near a terraced park. I’m packing up some metal rods embedded in parking lot asphalt into the truckbed, hopefully to sell. Their partially dug already, and it turns out a vendor there already decided they weren’t worth it and gave up. That same vendor has just sold a small black heart-shaped vessel for $302, a vessel I sold to them only a few days ago for $16. I calculate it immediately in the dream as $285, oddly off by one. For a variety of reasons, I’m not actually upset — although the way he told me, it seems what he expected.

Then I’m cleaning up the park after the show. Walking away with my arms full I see I’ve missed some vape tips in the dirt. I’ll get them another time, I think. I go to visit a group of friends in a further-away part of the bay. I pass their apartment and open a heavy door to a tiny bare windowless ground floor apartment, somewhere no human should live of their own free will. I know it must be hella expensive, too. I go next door to see my friends and their place is the same, but twice as wide.

As I’m driving home, I’m dropping off one of the girls at her subway stop. The town is like New Orleans, her stop is named Mystic, and it’s practically right by the swap meet earlier. Just as we get there she begins to try sweet-talking me into driving her across the bay. She’s cute, might’ve worked, but I see pretty clearly how it’s manipulating my attraction. There’s no actual feelings from her.

Categories
Dream Journal

Outside in a Tsunami, Thanos as my Boss

I’m in a neighborhood of San Francisco with my wife Lynae. In the distance I see the Golden Gate Bridge, beautiful dusky light in the air, and huge swells of an oncoming tsunami. I start looking for shelter, trying to use the time we have wisely, but it’s quickly apparent that we will probably be trapped outside.

Working for Thanos, vaporizing people and such. I’ve got some cool high-tech vehicles but things start getting precarious once my special magic starts wearing off… my body has fewer and fewer of the 100 eyeballs I was once lucky enough to grow. It starts to look like I’ll be the one getting vaporized soon, so I need to get evasive and clever.

Categories
Dream Journal

Acme Bread, Pet Rat Dead

Applying to work at Acme Bread Company which is a big multi-level modern building, glass, columns, and white walls. I encounter Mary (from long ago at the PacTrades hostel) in an art installation in the ground floor. While I’m there I unexpectedly get a phone call from Chicken. He starts in on a speech about how the time has come for he and I to settle the past, make up and all that. It’s such twisted wish-fulfillment claptrap that I actually break out of my dream in order to shut it down.

Back in the dream, I’m working across the street from Acme Bread at a more overgrown/neglected industrial building, I watch the company car’s futuristic white plastic dashboard light up the underside of the car through the dashboard as I drive away. Incredible overkill for a safety feature, reminds me of the F-35’s $400,000 helmet that lets a pilot see through the plane.

A run-down rustbucket of a bathroom at a friend’s house, maybe Don & Tracy, maybe Uncle Robert & Aunt Carol. I peer the over top of the wall’s half-height window/mirror a look into the exquisitely messy bedroom of some punk rock artsy girl. She comes in and notices me, comes over friendly-like but with a glint of challenge in her eye. Reminds me of Koe a bit.

Outside the Fartpartment, on the sidewalk of the Mission, I’m helping unload a bus. We have to rescue Mabel’s stuff that’s been left on the curb in disarray. Perhaps echoes of the occasion when Mabel moved out from downstairs and a crew including Lorelei left all sorts of interesting stuff out overnight, only to get collected for the dump the next morning. I wish I’d rescued all of it.

On a bike, escorting Chicken to the hospital after the birth of his second child. I find it difficult to pedal up the ramp, and I’m actually escorting him less and less. We make it but I wait outside with my bike.

Lynae tells me a rat has died, calling it Scrap at first (Stimp?), then rat #1. When she finally admits that our rat Henry died in the night, I’m instantly bawling. We just had such a nice time playing together on a chair, I even read an article about him. I wake up exclaiming “but he wasn’t even sick!!” That morning at breakfast we discovered that one of our fish had, in fact, died in the night.

Categories
Dream Journal

Surviving the Apocalypse with the Crab People

Waiting under a tree for the apocalypse to be over. I’m mostly in denial about it, “it won’t be that bad, or that long”. I’ve stockpiled soft drinks. One night, I must I hide inside my neighbors’ converted rest stop bathrooms, plastic panels enclosing it from the wind. I just barely close the doors while a killer cop stalking the neighborhood searches the place. I manage to lock myself behind the supply closet door. He kills everyone else.

After that, I decide living away from [former] civilization is safer. I hole up in a country house in a small coastal community isolated from the damage of society. We’re glad to have no idea what’s going on, we just see the consequences — like a massive locust swarm passing through one day.

Just…doing iceberg things…

Our jungle island becomes an all-male commune. In the center stands a statue of a crab, whose long, colorful, plastic eyebrows I pose into a cartoonish expression of anger. It’s the same place as the restroom, years later. The “Crab People” chant starts up in my head. I show a video to a fellow commune member who reminds me of Vince Saunders or April Arcus, a video I shot just off our shore of a baby crab person. They watch, reflected, in a crevice-shaped mirror embedded into the hillside, scratched into squares. I leave via the narrow café on our northern exposure, eating a lone lost French fry left on a table.

In the backyard of our property, a steep pine-covered hill leads up to the neighbor’s building. It’s somehow the last address on the street, without any street leading to it. They yell down at us trying to get some kind of assistance. We gather around the backyard pond, someone leads us to shout their name all at the same time: “Hot Chocolate!” Thus amplified, we proceed to pack up their deliveries, and I trudge up the sandy slope.

I expect it to find a vineyard-like rich-people estate of stone walls, but it’s more of a spacious modern apartment tower. I carry two deliveries in oversized Munchery bags. Ring the buzzer of apartment 517, just around the corner from the actual door (confusing, a bit). It’s Dav Yagunuma’s place, and he’s pleased to see me as it’s been awhile. My other delivery is for a game design studio, the door covered in hand-scrawled notes. It’s the studio that makes the Myst games. Suitably puzzling, they have a peephole on their door labeled “channel” and a note saying if you wish to “alter the terms of your entranceship” look through the peephole and figure things out.

I never looked, but somehow I know the other side was like a steampunk café/lounge from another dream, 2nd floor catwalks, leather benches, Don Bruce in fine regalia. The riches of old San Francisco, perhaps.