A dark, janky, neon, teenager-y space with steps to rest on.
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Big Beautiful Berlin in the Sky
Driving in a car with Meredith Scheff. Swiftly and unexpectedly, a very large, very artful and futuristic airliner streaks across the overcast sky from bottom left to top right. It’s a great green and white monstrosity of ostentation, made to look like several Berlin row houses, streamlined uncannily, an old oceanliner-style smokestack near the rear, a quiet yet furiously powerful engine glowing smoothly among curvaceously flow-y tailfins. Such a sight! Meredith wasn’t looking up and I excitedly chanted her name, but I can’t say if she actually saw the damn thing.
Other dreams from the night explored a forgotten side of Berlin’s history, when the north and south sides split along religious lines with one area being called Lodz — like the Polish city or the character in Carnivale.
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The Naked Hummingbird
A weird naked little hummingbird that looked like a shaved Gummy Bear flits above our bed, suddenly dropping on us in mid-flight. Yeah, it's weird I wanted to write this down. It was visceral, though, not a little odd, and strangely charming.
Underground tour of the city of Chicago. Walking on rickety crumbling floorboards, they sag enough to reveal the “Big Foot” sculpture, a sculpture… of a large human foot.
My outfit change for the next day is hidden in a suitcase.
While being split into two groups by my friend Autumn for an assignment, I’m late and miss the full instructions or the chance to pick. The place is like a goth/urbex version of the city of Ambergris.
An athletic street-urchin-type kid falls over the rusty railings onto subway tracks, hanging on for dear life while his friends are somewhat lethargic and blasé (how often does this happen?).
Finding a small creature and offering it food, somehow I mistake a vegetable for its face.
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All Sad Dreams
Chicken John speeds by in a gloss black muscle car with Dave Capurro, punk as fuck. I’m a bit sad and a bit jealous.
In the next dream, we’re moving out of the Fartpartment and renting it — renting our own bed, even — as an AirBnB. Very sad dream.
Last dream, I’m walking though a Toys ‘R’ Us filled with adult household items such as buckets, shelving, diapers. The ceilings are low and the products are stacked dense. The whiff of bitter necessity has bloomed into a stank. Also a sad dream, in it’s vile yet eternally popular pragmatics.
So, all sad dreams I guess.
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Real-time Reaction-Diffusion Music Visuals
While looking for info on on something much different, I found this rad music visualization by motion graphics artist Nobutaka Kitahara on Vimeo. (Nobutaka, if you’re out there, have no idea if you typically call yourself a “motion graphics artist”, but you certainly are.)
I’ve no idea how much work went into this but I’m fascinated with the concept and beauty of reaction diffusion. Take simple recursion, feedback loops, and you get profoundly complex naturalistic patterns… totally fascinating. This was made using software called TouchDesigner which is often used for immersive art installations, live projection mapping, and seems quite remarkable.
Music: artist: Sk’p – song: “Astravel”
The original video appears to have since been deleted, but can still be found some places, such as this Facebook post.
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Drew’s Dinosaur-Infested Pad
Pulling into the driveway of Drew Carey’s bachelor pad with a friend of mine, who just started dating him. His bed is very close to the glass double doors. Inside, we find him playing an sit-inside racing game. Drew is an experienced host and the house has a few sparse rooms with dude-ish amusements, including a foldout pool table (the balls have chips in them though). One sunlit room near the back of the house has a water feature with lazy psittacosauri, crunchy brown pine bonsai, and tiny slimy yellow hadrosaurs — eerily intelligent and otherworldly ones that walk on hind legs.
The story seamlessly transitions to a Jurassic Park story, raptors stalking, and I step out the back door into a sweeping valley, only to peek around the side of the house and see a giant carefully escorting a thin, tottering, grayish Godzilla.
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Pizzeria and Checking on Family
A 5-story apartment building, reminiscent of an old European city, where my Nana lives on the 4th floor. Before I climb the arched stairway I see an ad for a chic pizzeria on the top floor, which serves pizza topped with round slices of several colorful specialty sausages – pink, purple, brown — quite surprisingly appetizing. I’m sent to check in to see if my Nana is sleeping (she died in 2001 but this dream persona seemed about age 7, when I lived in a 2-story). I knock on her door a little too loud, hear no response, and enter. She isn’t there, in fact her bed isn’t even there. I look around the room, in the opposite direction, and instead find my mom. We have a brief conversation. The walls are comfortingly ancient. I can smell the pizza, and I’m hoping we can eat there soon.
A therapist ends up detained because she refuses to admit whether a client has been to Bremen, or is Bremen — this WWI story is known as BremenX. I find myself surprised and grateful that a therapist would selflessly protect a client like that.
In a communal sitting room with beige-walled booths, I look in the mirror mounted on the righthand side and catch the friendly eye of two ladies also waiting there. Perhaps we are using the ovens, baking pie. It’s clear to me the mirror was installed at the angle it was for just this purpose. I’ve been hanging about for a long time, and I’ve noticed an abundance of redheads with elaborate spirally hair-does that remind me of this bug:
https://twitter.com/cassiegrimaldi/status/912796613575364609
There’s some (red?) minivan a friend of mine is driving, and it’s creeping slowly toward the freeway on-ramp adjacent to the community bakery. If I can catch it, I pull off a great sex joke. But, having to cross a barrier and get across a few lanes, I ju-u-u-u-u-ust miss it. Then I’m first in line for the on-ramp, though, and I get low to the gravelly road and turn on rocket boosters (not something I’ve really used before) to catch up. They’re shite for hill-climbing, though, and when I encounter a sudden left curve after a steep hill with zero banking, my SR-71 Blackbird (which is where I kept the rockets, apparently) goes careening off the ribbon of dirt into the galactic space through which it wends.
A demonstration: the dynamically resized livery of a train, attractive top-to-bottom color gradients (splendidly coordinated along the length of the train, with occasional repeats). It’s a coal-fired steam train, even. As one reduces the number of cars it collapses into only a single cowboy-soldier pumping a handcar bearing a square American flag.
My family has re-acquired our Kemper Court house where I grew up. In the wall between the stained-glass entryway and the kitchen nook there’s now a rectangular hole just big enough to slip through on one’s back. As I peek through, I note how strange it feels to live there again after it belonged to someone else for so long.
Standing on a hilltop gazing reverently at a snow-covered mountain, kin to Mount San Jacinto in the Coachella Valley. A mirror on a long handle held at arm’s length, revealing another mountain far behind me — holy mountains at opposing ends of the valley where I stand.
I relate this dream to Brian when he, apropos of nothing, called me up to his balcony to view Mt. St. Helens on this clear autumn day. When the view isn’t blocked, one can see Mt. Hood, also.
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About Mithing
Woke up from dreams literally thinking “this is useless, you need to find something better to think about.” But screw that, amirite?
Well, in particular, the useless dream was about mithing, which likely is just a bad missspeling of nothing—although for the most part it centered on a box of rescued baby turtles that I turned into a vet and discovered still in a plastic box, even more dried out, and possibly cannibalizing one another. Clearly inspired by this article I linked (which doesn’t actually give a good reason for anything) but does contain some adorbz capybara pics…
Then there was the dream where I was 2-3 teenagers who’d camped out in someone’s house. The owners came home at the end of the… month? day? and we went to hide behind a redwood fence. Despite only having cleaned and made improvements a police officer was called and peeked over the too-small hiding place. I don’t know how things ended for him, but I remember those teenagers arranging exquisitely detailed Dungeons & Dragons pewter miniatures from a glass case.