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Dream Journal

Dark Artist Space

A basement artist space, narrow, underlit and unkempt. I can see through the floorboards to the trash that’s fallen into the sub-basement storage, peek through the walls to make eye contact with the guys running a record store. The first night I stay there — I may be moving in — there are big fluffy bathrobes and towels on pegs. I keep my backpack outside with my bike and leave my laptop in there; someone takes it before I realize.

Lauren has been mailed (or needs to be mailed?) a little ground covering net to protect sea turtle hatchlings. It’s kept in a turtle-shell-shaped keepsake container.

This whole dream world feels very nocturnal, dark, dirty.

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Dream Journal

5 Scenes from Varied Dreams

Chicken is attending a concert by a Japanese cellist with his wife and daughter. We have a friendly stilted conversation afterwards. He says he could’ve done without the cellist’s political discursions, but found the concert enjoyable.

A lifted pickup truck with a circular rollbar parking on the street. It brakes hard while backing up and flips over — and odd, interesting old feature.

Fixing Autumn’s air conditioning. There’s a purpose-built enclosed orange space just left of the stairs where all the air is pushed through.

Donald Trump is a sad, half-cocked big city real estate investor. He’s leaning against his family, of which I’m one. Simply being there is the most sympathy I can think to have.

Our pet rats have been set free for a long time, and we’re outside calling them. They come quickly, seemingly from nowhere. It’s a teary, warm-hearted reunion. I know they won’t be able to breed (neutered) but they’re living out their lives in freedom, among their rat people.

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Dream Journal

Novel Anxieties (Ones I Don’t Have to Feel Too Bad About)

“Excuse me, what do you think’s going to happen if you keep doing that?”

An entitled, stocky, well-dressed white girl is throwing dirt and plants over the fence from the garden next door. I happen to be out in the backyard smoking from my smoking kit and tell her there’s people that live here, and to stop. She keeps doing it even when I shut the fence’s windowed door and lower its shades. So I hop the fence and get all up in her face telling her to get out. She pouts all the way back to her tan scooter. I get my phone out and get pictures of her and her license plate, at which point she yanks down her shirt a little bit. I say “come back when you have a better attitude. Thanks for showing me your boobies, that’s always nice.”

My landlord gets called in shortly thereafter and I have to worry about explaining everything to him even though I’m in the right. He’s smelling my smoking kit, and there’s a guy I don’t know who’s complaining on behalf of the woman that I have to sit too close to on the couch. I retell the story and emphasize that the woman was damaging his property.

It looks like two of the cars outside my bedroom window have been sideswiped. I look again later and those cars have disappeared, and I watch as my own truck is sinking up to the grill in the mysteriously liquefied asphalt. Baffled, I visit the coffee shop three doors down. The barista has never heard of such a thing, and I’m worried that people will think I’m nuts.

Stranded on the side of the road in a tropical paradise, could be Hawaii, could be El Salvador. It’s relatively rocky and barren, but since it’s June it’s not too hot yet. I climb over logs and inspect the nature. A public bathroom there has lit-up text on the door when it’s locked. I’m with someone else — a Japanese girl — and I’m not Orin. She manages to flag down a passing motorist, but it’s a large-wheeled 2-seat race-car. She catches a ride promising to come back for me. I’m kinda glad she’s gone since she wanted to be rescued more than me anyways.

In a broad terracotta tile courtyard with modernist angles, underneath the floors of a building, I’m waiting for the elevator to get back to my apartment. The door opens, but opens right into a part of the city’s downtown. I sigh and start running up the stairs the opposite direction, out to the sunny but dry streets that remind me of Florida. I seem to be carrying a dog on my shoulders, and I’m quickly tired.

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Dream Journal

University on a Small Island

A university on a small inhabited island, dry and brown and hilly, off the coast of California. The school specializes in drawing and hand-drawn traditional animation. One day, they have us label our materials kits and fill out a multi-page form. There’s a checkbox to support “56% Magazine” at $8.33 monthly. The school subsidizes students, and half of a large duplex (on the low end) is as low as $80 and $9. At some point I’m staying in Lorie Ohlemann’s house and snooping around her bedroom, finding cards and notes. One place is apportioned with a 4-person guest shower with a hosting bar. This keeps the island a lot more lively than one would expect, and I almost don’t miss city life. I ride my scooter around most everywhere and do deliveries. One day, I ditch work without calling in and spend the day carefully hiding out in different buildings. The next day I sneak out during the long afternoon doldrums with the idea to plant a luscious olive I’ve eaten. I find someone I know, Tiff von Biff, sitting on my scooter handlebars. I impressively veer left and right with her still on there, then manage to pop my first wheelie, making her scream.

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Dream Journal

Sea Turtle Pool

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.

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Dream Journal

Late for the Wagon Wheel Waterpark

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.

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Dream Journal

Being Nice to Grumpy Mom

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).

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Dream Journal

Parking the Chicken Bus, Like I’m Bonafide

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.

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Dream Journal

Bed Rides, Reverse Dine-n-Ditch, Floating Telepathy, City Hall

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.

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Dream Journal

Missing the Subway Under the Education Complex

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.