Standing beside my family’s backyard pool. Sea turtles of all different sizes swim in a circle, and I stand by the edge with a tank full of just incubated babies, scooping them out and placing them in the water one by one. Only on waking do I realize how cute and hopeful this dream sounds.
Spent a good long time at a waterpark. Dara V. is there. Somehow we miss a bunch of activities, and so I agree to meet her again the next day. She expects me there at 8:30 am for some reason and I’m trying for hours to get motivated out of bed, receiving intermittent texts the whole time, but end up getting there by noon anyway. I expect her to be grumpy about the whole thing, yet she seems inexplicably unperturbed when I finally arrive.
I discover, in an area that’s part of an archeological exhibit from before the waterpark was built, a busted-up wagon wheel. It has only four spokes left — an arrangement that resembles a rhombus. I know it’s a valuable artifact, but I end up putting it inside a large glass of Coca-Cola and the damn thing dissolves like a tooth in a science fair project.
I’m absorbed reading a math book in my old bedroom of my childhood home (the smaller front bedroom). My family has stored three picnic benches in there, and I’m sitting at the middle one, quite unbothered by the crowded room.
In the family room, I’m chewed out by my mom for not installing some speaker wires yet. Yet I’m being super nice in response. There’s a masked person standing nearby us; reminded me of Boba Fett. While organizing books in front of the bookcase immediately after this, I spank my Mom’s butt. She’s grumpy again, I manage to be positive and kind despite her mood.
There’s a book I acquired, but didn’t read and forgot about at the near end, with vintage-looking chapters on The Quantum Ape, and also Doubts (with a real-seeming pic of the Queen of England surrounded by stacked beer bottles).
Accepted back into the Chicken community somehow. I help park the big RV/bus even though with its large overhang and narrow windows it should’ve been difficult. I leave it out of park as there’s some finesse Chicken is very finicky about. Next to the driver’s seat is a compartment of fuel tanks that look like molded glass, the long fuel lines permitting the driver to switch them out mid-journey. I’ve seen everyone but Chicken, who finally appears, and I anticipate a quiet, amicably awkward minute… I grab the top half of a crocodile skull to just, you know, casually hold while we sit there. I wake up right then and it’s still half an hour till I have to move the car.
Riding an oversized bunk bed with a few acquaintances and a cute (but nervous & skeptical) toddler. At the top of a stairway, we all slide down, holding onto the bed railings and play-screaming.
Leaving a low-ceilinged semi-outdoor restaurant without paying… I instead end up across the street and pay the tab that belonged to Mickey and his friends. I pay more, meddling with social order, and the action is both self-evidently ethical and appealingly subversive.
Walking down the median of a busy street in a caftan and sandals, an ethnically Mideastern young kid hops out of his dad’s car to say hi and ask me about myself. I realize it’s because he’s excited to finally see someone else who dresses like his family. I turn the corner and pass a Walmart where I overhear someone flub the word ‘teleport’ — I telepathically correct them as they huff past the painted white brick walls.
Sort of flying, sort of floating. I go very high up, above City Hall, which is cavernous and lavishly renovated, with expansive enclosed spaces of exposed wooden beams. The roof is more utilitarian, simple tarpaper with a steel rod decorated with religious iconography. Peering over the side, I can see it’s twice as tall as Grace Cathedral nearby. Perhaps it has the air of Seattle.
Inside a school complex, a range of all age students. Concrete everything. I’m waiting for a subway train on an underground platform with large posts that obscure my view. There are minders to help escort you onto the train, but mine is an inexperienced black kid that is dressed like a security guard. He screws up, despite my verbal protestations, and I miss the train despite standing right in front of it. The complex is big enough that I’m annoyed but not surprised.
Reminds me of a dream where I worked in an underground parking lot for Munchery — much like a coal mine. But also another parking lot dream, one where a cultish society had grown up in a renovated railyard roundhouse (like the Sacramento Railroad Museum) and I was the only one who could go in and out. I’ve also had dreams of a subterranean Space Mountain-style roller coaster. And a city-sized labyrinthine airport/spaceport.
The odd thing was that, from the satellite view of the school, this looked like my elementary school in Eureka… I haven’t thought about that in quite awhile and don’t know what it could mean.
The backyard of the house where I grew up has been paved over. The pool and the lime trees look especially desolate. You can still see the outlines of our life here, though. The hill against the far wall is the only other remnant of back then. Everything is toned a shabby pink-beige-grey.
I survey this from atop a publicly accessible platform of fence-height, built on a portion of what was once the neighbor’s property — ceded by eminent domain to satisfy some unloved bureaucratic subclause, without rationale. It occurs to me on waking I’m only feet from where I lost my virginity.
Inside the house, in the addition, I look up to the naked rafters toward what looks like a faraway sky. A cypress tree and a telephone pole peek through. Oddly, I have a vague fantasy of taking down the pole’s crossbeam and carrying it like Jesus would’ve. I am left with the impression of gems/jewels dropping from that telephone pole.
Project I’m working on for Chicken (or some boss like Chicken) is a large, decorated, blue-tone fishtank. We work with masks on, I think. The last part to be done is add a large, scale-less, small-eyed fish, similar to an electric eel. At that point the tank gets partially obscured by a mattress, and it’s surface moves like a waterbed.
In a storage drawer, in a small anteroom off to the left, I find the huge preserved head of a predatory flightless bird, either a Moa or Elephant Bird or Roc, and playfully bite with it’s detached jaw and cranium.
Doorway with viewing windows at head level and foot, doorbell rings and outside are trick-or-treaters! Somehow everyone inside has forgotten it’s Halloween, and all our lights are still on.
Traveling by a handbuilt wooden bus, connected with a matching wooden trailer, a long and capacious artsy space. Chicken is absorbed driving. I’m at the very back with Eileen.
Helping Eileen in the city of Shenzhen, navigating an inconvenient alleyway obviously not designed for people. She rides a bulky horse named Henry clopping up an oversize stone stairway. At the end of this linear maze of a commercial zone, under an alcove are samples of pre-made snacks. One is decent, the others flavors are unfamailiar and unsuitable to serve in a cafe, and Eileen says as much.
Tiny bow and arrow made of workshop scraps shoots metal bits arcing through the air. The dream perspective follows it in cinematic slow-motion style.
Took two Calea pills. Only a short time to sleep due to staying up late and needing to get up early to move the car. Song going through my head: Birdhouse in Your Soul.
Classic psychedelic cartoon “Fantastic Planet” set to a trippy sample-heavy song by Gaslamp Killer, “Shattering Inner Journeys”, found via WhoSampled entry for Psyché Rock, R.I.P. Pierre Henry (1927 – 2017)