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Dream Journal

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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Dream Journal

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.

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Dream Journal

From Sleep on Brian’s Portland Futon

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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Dream Journal

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.

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Dream Journal

Thriving African Village

An African village has traded part of its water rights to a group of foreign investors. I dip a hand in murky light brown water off the side of a canoe as I come upon a hut at the edge of their traditional lakeside fishing grounds. The lake contains petroleum that no one has figured out how to extract, but I gather this partially explains the investors interest. Beyond the hut, I’m shown a beautifully restored, wide, gurgling river, bountiful with wildlife including hippos and cranes. In the distance, I see the narrow cliffside dirt road that is the only access in or out for travelers.

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Mixtapes

Hipsterism: a 21st Century Mixtape

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“Uhh, is hipster music a thing?” Well, it would probably be collected on a mixtape made the old-fashioned way — recording the songs 1-by-1 from a collection of favorites. Someone called ‘me’ mighta done that… cause hipsterist or whatevs.

  1. Brothertiger – This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)
  2. STRFKR – Girls Just Want To Have Fun
  3. Misfitted. – M.I.A. – Paper Planes
  4. Milky Chance – Stolen Dance [FlicFlac Edit]
  5. Foster The People – Pumped Up Kicks (Gigamesh Remix)
  6. Kero Kero Bonito – Babies (Are So Strange)
  7. Keren Ann – Life on Mars (David Bowie Cover)
  8. Ellie Goulding – Heartbeats (Cosmonaut Grechko edit)
  9. CHELSEARONQS – Somebody That I Used To Know (Acapella)
  10. Blood Diamonds feat. Grimes – Phone Sex
  11. Black Moth Super Rainbow – I Think I’m Evil
  12. altitude sickness – Frigid Flux (Redux)
  13. Battles – Atlas
  14. Blockhead – Meet You at Tower Records
  15. Plumbline – Once in a Lifetime (Talking Heads cover)
  16. Paddy Steer – Loufoque
  17. Javelin – Tryouts
  18. Prince Rama – Your Life In The End
  19. The xx – Intro
  20. AU – Get Alive
Categories
Dream Journal

Two Different Political Dreams

I am an incorporeal presence floating above the crowds of the Republican National Convention. Loud and angry is the clamor, wretched partisans yelling for blood, dressed in white and reddish-orange. I despise the vicious and violent desires of these people. All gathered, I want them all blown up. Instead (by my intervention, perhaps?) the crowd is suddenly turned against their hotheaded petty potty-mouthed loser of a champion… they yell for his blood now, “Kill Trump! Kill Trump! Kill Trump!”

But that’s not all. In a separate dream, I’m the personal servant/slave of none other than Adolf Hitler himself. Fortunately for me, he’s not thoughtful enough to realize that his Jewish slave being sent on an errand to the railway depot might just escape. I manage to sneak out my wife too, who bafflingly robs the drama from the situation by dryly noting “this is good, I’m glad we do this every year.”

Let’s hope this dream doesn’t get me put on the wrong kind of list… (but if you did read this post under the aegis of law enforcement, I’d be interested to know).

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Dream Journal

Fearsome Giants, an Educational Experience

A house where special kids are sent to learn. A narrow plot on a high hill of San Francisco, up a long, rocky and steep driveway. Deceptively large. Its two-story atrium is built into the trees of its own courtyard. There is a platform whose purpose is not obvious at first, wooden branch railings overlooking a large pit, like an animal enclosure at a zoo. Then appear several selves of the viewing subject, larger and larger — future selves? — and then the last and largest of them all, the fearsome giant, with red and battered single eye socket, furious, powerful, malevolent. I interpret it might be a bit of the ol’ ego-archetype, come to scare some kids straight… not that it doesn’t also inspire them, too.

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Dream Journal

Invasion of Ghost Cat

Awoken suddenly by an unusual growl… unusual because it was clearly one cat warning another, but the only cats supposedly in the house are total BFFs Aloysius and Katie. Jumping from the living room couch, I catch a glimpse of a gray furry mass speeding out the back door like a ghost. In the bright sun of the dawn, I manage to visually confirm a well-built cat with dust-bunny appearance escaping the backyard, into the neighborhood garden (just like a raccoon, too). It’s at this moment of passing danger that I realize I must have been surrounded by cats all through the night… not just Wishus and Katie, but up on the shelf, inside a wooden box, by my dear departed Flop as well. And that for a long while I’d been dreaming of him — playing youthfully and with vigor, tumbling in the pile of blankets behind that couch, watching me with curious attention. There are mere coincidences, and then there are uncannily meaningful and timely coincidences. Come visit again soon, little buddy.

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Blog

33 years, 7 months

I wonked around writing my own code for this-here site I call ori.nz — something to display my exact age relative to the date of my birth in years, months, and days. Logicking though the process can be quite satisfactory, but so can just having the answer you want easily presented. So here’s what I came up with:

$birthdatetime = array(1983,12,13,19,30);
$year_diff = get_the_date("Y") - $birthdatetime[0];
$month_diff = get_the_date("n") - $birthdatetime[1];
$day_diff  = get_the_date("d") - $birthdatetime[2];
if( $day_diff < 0 ){
        $month_diff--; $day_diff += date("t", (get_the_date('u') - (get_the_date("n") * 86401)));
    } // CALC FROM month b4
    if( $month_diff < 0 ){
        $year_diff--; $month_diff += 12;
    }
    $age_then =
        $year_diff .' years' .
        ($month_diff == 0 ? '' : ', '. $month_diff .' months') .
        ($day_diff == 0 ? '' : ', '. $day_diff .' days');
    echo '' . $age_then . '';