Categories
Dream Journal

Cheap but Familiar Dreams

Kid is happy to eat replicated (irradiated) mammoth meat. There’s a feather in a shotgun, the kid mistakes it to mean it’s for him to control and change things. It’s just a gift! Next stage in this game is little stars or circles in a form that get bubbled in.

In an unfinished wood building, I live with four other adults in a 20 x 20 room split four ways lengthwise. Aislinn is there. We mostly pretend we have our own spaces, but one day I blurt out how absurd and frustrating it is that the landlord has split it like this. Outside in the hall there’s a poster framed in plastic mounted to the floor. I’m usually complaining about it because I think it’s dumb since it routinely gets slippery when it rains.

A hotel / food counter up a winding hill. Strangely Victorian and Modern. Go there with friends (Ais, Reecy) but I remember it from long in my past. I order a big plate of various fried food served in styrofoam to-go container. Before I leave I return a distinctive flat clock I took from a stairway when I was very small — back then I didn’t understand it probably broke off from something. But I immediately recognize things when I came up the grand entry stairway which, Victorian/Modern again, had an odd ’70s green shag carpet paired with Golden Age woodwork. This is an odd reason, but I think this dream happened because I smelled a bizarrely familiar apple body cleanser at a Korean beauty store — like something I played with when I was very small.

(Messy remembrance, I got woken up a few times.)

Categories
Dream Journal

Not So Haunted House

Staring at monstrous face, like the Pan’s Labyrinth pale man or tentacle-faced Davy Jones. It’s supposedly my Dad’s face but I remember it as being oddly still. I reach out to touch it, coincidentally Lynae is sleeping towards me and I awake with my hands over her face.

Wandering through an autumnal neighborhood, there’s a strange abandoned mansion next to a stepped ice hill or pyramid. I sneak in through elegant Art Deco Gehry-style (or Mucha-style) windows. On the white-carpeted central stairway I easily overcome a barricade blocking off a craftsman-style kitchen, a barricade with elaborate written warnings. The house, even after you leave, is cursed to put you into a personal hellscape — a tortuous existence meant to frighten others from temptation. But the curse is that you are “just ok”, forever. It’s a curse of moderation and I’m content to explore ice mazes and sloped game-courses with friends and strangers. I’m… totally ok. I suppose that’s why it’s not such a great haunted house.

Later, inside a big building run by a friend, I discover they’ve made a cozy dark hostel with a tiki theme. Many errant reviews of hamburgers start showing up in my dream backups (just completed that job late last night). There’s Rick’s snarky comments from Rick and Morty, too.

Categories
Dream Journal

it simply isn’t understood

In a wide upstairs apartment, I find myself in bed, suddenly noticing the remarkable beauty of a girl I know. (Perhaps out of superstition, I’m not saying who it was — but she wouldn’t be surprised to know I found her beautiful). Perfectly proportioned, and simply fascinating. I’m somehow allowed to just keep looking….

But when I touch her it’s frustrating. Trying to massage her, I can’t hear her feedback or instructions. Instead I end up cleaning a congealed mass of sweet potato/quinoa/smoothie.

My wife kisses me (to wake me up perhaps?) and I don’t recognize its a person. Like, it happens, but that there’s a person who does it simply isn’t understood.

Seems unrelated, but also: there was an escaped convict guy crossing a bridge across a bay, careening off the bridge onto New York’s shoreline. He and I shoot buzzsaws out our hands (as you do).

Categories
Dream Journal

Secret Merkel Protectorate of Freedom

Make a baseball save in a square frame net in my childhood backyard. Didn’t know I was playing before, so it was rather lucky.

Minding my own business for the most part, I accidentally commit an act of high patriotism, but high treason to the enemies of… what I assume is freedom. Angela Merkel escorts me safely behind a set of double doors disguised as a bathroom entrance. I spot George W. Bush walking by and immediately realize this is an even more important meeting than I anticipated. I try to start an audio recording on my phone as Merkel explains the situation to me, but I can’t get the damn thing to start properly.

The details are lost, but the concern her unnamed group found relevant to me involved Captain Janeway of Voyager landing her starship underwater in order to escape the US.

Categories
Dream Journal

Chaos Ghost Derby

A railroad encircles the edge of Sacramento river delta vineyards. Slow journey. I’m a kid, and it’s a parallel journey to my flight back home after a living abroad — flying across the entire continental USA and landing somewhere in Oregon. My parent says we’re going home, to the pine state, but I check my weekly predictions and foresee several saddle & ranch-themed places and events… dusty winds from the East.

I’m a ghost, a spirit, and I’m called to enact the Destruction Derby. A motorboat near the scenic park-side boardwalk splits in existential mitosis, splitting again into four motorboats, panicking at my invisible intensity. Other boats flee into the sides of houses trying to escape my wake. After the chaos, while clothed in humanness, I witness buses driving around torn in half, motorcycles needing to be un-embedded from the street. There’s great disorder and possible loss of life, but I only do it once in awhile and I’m not me when I do it, anyway. And I’m never mean. In fact, I’m fair.

Afterwards, Betty and many other girls are being evacuated, marched out in formation. In semi-ghost form I squeeze butts & hips. New girl with them is like “and… you randomly just sometimes have a ghost feel you up after this stuff happens? HUH.”

Categories
Dream Journal

Fan Dads! at The Old Western Zoo

Fan Dads!Somewhere on vacation with Lynae, a specialty zoo with a quirky-healthy-family vibe, uniquely Mormon/Utah. We decide to go back a second day — something we’ve never done before. Get there late in the afternoon, so late I wonder if it’s still worth it. Paying admission is a long chore… exchanging coins for a donation slot, Lynae finally making change herself from the cash register, leaving notes on slips of paper for the individual drawers. There are some obvious indications of a seedy underbelly: repeated graffiti pieces and tags on the Old West log cabin facade (a consequence of being so far out on a country road), a hollowed-out warehouse across the street, where local teenagers congregate. I witness a bizarre and memorable instance of albino giraffes galloping through a dilapidated Fort Ord-like building of broken glass, rusty support columns, and families with young children.

We climb aboard a personal paddleboat-steamer-themed mini train and go through a set of swinging saloon doors. I immediately spot a few large folding knives in a water feature. I retrieve one (hey, free knives!) and it’s comically huge, the size of a sword, branded as ‘Bowie’ — not a Bowie knife, though. Turns out people have a habit of discarding their knives in this particular ride after they stab someone. Like I said: seedy underbelly.

I make my way out of the visitor areas of the park and access a back room with rows of rickety shelves, like a rural garden nursery, stacked with curious merchandise. They’re aging avocado water here for instance. Here I find what is certainly a unique marketing demographic: Fan Dads! That is, men of a certain age who enjoy working with all manner of circulation systems, professionally or as a hobby, who nurture a passion for controlling flow of hot/cold, water/air/oil, or rotational propulsion! I see a beautiful silhouette of myself testing one of these boy-toys, plumes of air or water billowing from my face. Of course I manage to tip over a weathered old shelf and just catch it before disaster strikes. Gah, the maintenance with this place! To be fair, I wasn’t supposed to be there.

I don’t know why I find Fan Dads inordinately hilarious, but… Fan Dads! I’ve been saying it in my head for like 2 hours. Fan Dads!

Categories
Dream Journal

A Game of Ghost Story

Store/cafe near Disneyland, heavily themed with natural wood for an ol-time-country feel. Space is sunk below street level a bit, bright windows in the back. The whole neighborhood is a shopping district, curved downward becoming more Disneyland the further you go. Near the cafe counter, I see a few people in costumes with masks that look like Will Smith crossed with the “I, Robot” robots, featuring a glowing 20% discount over the mouth area. It’s suggestive of some kind of Black Panther protest.

I’m a successful smuggler and I’m getting out of the business. I know my compatriots will be upset, even panicked at my departure, so I leave a letter hidden under sawdust at my regular drop. It’s a semi-abandonded lot protected from the street by overgrown trees, the same hillside view as the Disneyland cafe earlier.

I drive off in a convertible with Lynae. We’re briefly diverted onto the other side of a divided highway, the broad expanse of a mountainous pastel evening desert before us. I suggest we play a game called Ghost Story — Lynae side-eyes me, knowing I know the edge of night isn’t exactly when she wants to hear ghost stories. I clarify that the objective of the game is to start saying something that seems scary, but that has its scariness vanish (like a ghost) once the sentence is complete. I’ve just played the first round, now it’s her turn.

Categories
Dream Journal

Unwieldy Car, Stealing from Church

In the big backseat of car, one practically too big to drive. A big sunroof, which is actually the rear window. From a driveway out, going up a slope onto a ramp, the engine isn’t quite powerful enough. It even takes a long time to brake.

Onward. Stealing from a church gift shop, inside the church itself — an elaborate English Gothic style cathedral. I look out the back window with my wife as we leave, not feeling too bad about it honestly.

Categories
Dream Journal

Rusty Oil Truck Island

Array of plastic tables indoors on first floor, light streaming in through the windows. Lynae is there, many others, Dara V. too. We’re all waiting for something in enforced silence while outside a dense, tall city bustles.

Lynae and I are looking for a suitable oil truck to make deliveries on a small island in the central valley delta. In a steep, small dirt harbor we check out out a poorly maintained rustbucket with catwalks, the tanker alone costing our total $1500 budget. Chicken steams in on the Relentless and tells us we need to buy it and get started already. I expect we’ll get stuck working on the island, but consider that we’ll be the first to settle the area — we’ll be pushing the edge of civilization.

Categories
Dream Journal

Forlorn Feast

Attending a well-attended feast where I just don’t feel hungry. Spend most of my time in a little dead-end hallway off to the side, passing the time by myself. Eventually Autumn notices me and brings me a small plate, just a bit of food… lime green jello and white beans. It’s a nice gesture but makes me both wish I had an appetite and wish the food was more appetising.

In another dream, Lynae hits me (or I hit her) and it’s a terrible situation I wish neither of us were in.