Tag: abandoned

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Dream Journal

Building Inspection Plarvolia Friendliness

Visiting London. Picking random stop, to check out how average people live. Walking around the block wearing a bright blue poncho, which happens to be the exact uniform of a school nearby. Someone mistakes me for one of the schoolkids and I have to point out the logo on the side of my hood. London is in a much steeper valley than I expected, with parts that had to be leveled flat and interstitial slopes left unbuilt — this gives a terraced appearance.

Inside a neglected industrial building, I inspect the many floors one by one. While in the dim former stairwell or elevator, I encounter Plarvolia by chance, not really realizing it’s her at first. While carefully examining the dappled moldy walls, newly decorated with art, she mentions working on something to help with a virus. I immediately but subtly pick up on it, responding by mentioning the exact name (which could’ve been Epstein-Barr or Tay-Sachs) — as it’s something I’ve been working on too.

Soon, we are in shared company in an open communal lounge on one of the floors. The furniture looks scavenged, cozy, the room layout open and welcoming. We don’t talk directly but seem to mix together pointedly in conversation. While I’m sitting low at a coffee table, I remember one question topic involving proper form of a word combining “themselves” and “threesome”, which someone poses as possibly “threeselfs”, but which I jump in to say should grammatically be “threeselves”.

It is difficult to describe what happens next. Plarvolia and I are scattered amongst the group as it devolves into affectionate touching and partner play. I lean against a couch with my leg stretched out. She is moving around under a blanket with her companion, possibly a boyfriend or something equivalent. My foot comes in contact with her hand while she sits on the floor in front of him. It isn’t rejected. She seems to touch it purposefully over some time, perhaps even absent-mindedly. It’s not clear she knows it’s mine, but I can see where she is and know it’s her touching it. It is pleasant to be here in this room, with this camaraderie.

Eventually she moves my foot under her butt. This is an escalation, and well-considered. I know it’s intentional. I know she wants it there; this isn’t merely the mere absence of rejection. I can tell now she knows it’s me. Her butt is smooth and warm. I am here, with her, having made up, enjoying having bodies together — with no words or even eye contact exchanged.

I wake up peacefully 15 minutes before my alarm, reminiscing. I get most of the dreams down… minus the last paragraph. That takes me about 3 hours of stalling on my phone late at night. Even though the dream felt good, felt meaningful, it’s still challenging to feel so vulnerable about her. I’ve often wondered if she reads these, or what she would think if she did. Rationally I doubt it, but I don’t know how to feel about it anymore. I’ve lost sleep over it.

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Dream Journal

LA Cinderalla Phone Sale, Returning a Message

A gambit pays off, and after I leave a comment or invite for Plarvolia she finally responds. I think she messages about being open to meeting. I spend the rest of the dream vaguely excited and anxious how this will turn out

In the Los Angeles area I witness the rich meddle with reshaping hilly land near the coast. I decide to interview for a job available in the oil extraction industry. In the dream I’m in persona as an older black guy, wearing tall black leather boots and a blackleotard outfit. There’s some logic that this minimizes the problems of getting the black-colored oil on one’s skin when you’re a worker, so is kind of part of the job.

Through Criagslist, I visit a decaying neighborhood to but an older candybar-style phone. I look around and recognize many “Cinderella” style details on the underkept houses, fairytale roof awnings and such. The whole neighborhood was once an overly-decorated marketers dream in (perhaps) the 1950s or 60s, though it probably looked overly cookie-cutter back then. It’s obvious there was never any plan to upkeep them, and the natural tides of money and time left buildings that were difficult to distinguish between abandoned and simply poor.

I spend time going up and down neighborhood catwalks trying to conclude the sale. It’s a mess. In the course of negotiations I realize that since this is LA I don’t have an easy way to get back to where I’m staying unless the person who broght me here on the prospect of buying the phone also drives me back. I settle for a much-inflated price of $100, hoping to get back sooner than later at least.

The dream ends with me realizing I’m now the one who has taken a long time to respond to Plarvolia, much different than before. I am worrying that the phone won’t even work and I won’t be able to get back to her in time. I find I can’t get back to sleep and message…

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Dream Journal

Beast Outside Cafe, Beauty of Diner

I’ve been dispatched to check out Beauty and the Beast cafe, in a double decker bus. There’s more story before this but I can’t get myself to recall more. I pass through the entire layout and ponder what I’ve seen in a smaller area behind it, above road level. I’m people-watching, happening to see a small fancy-looking yorkie dog plodding purposefully around the corner, no owner in sight. Hm… I’m not familar enough with this region to understand whether I should be concerned and do something about it. My companion introduces me as Neil, which in this story is my deadname that I didn’t even know they knew.

I go up the hill outside, exploring further into this land I’m visiting (Alaska, I think). It’s a glorious climb. I take my first step onto late-season snow with a satisfying crunch. There’s a geometric dome structure that’s prismatic and pretty, a puzzle of some kind. Summiting the hill I come into view of a famous diner, fully as picturesque as any tourist brochure could hope for, with massive snow capped peaks in the background. It’s a ideal image of classic rugged Americana, with classic cars and station wagons nearby. Turning around, I discover something of interest to me personally, an abandoned building with a plaque outside, reading simply “Train Ruins”. Some relic of railroad infrastructure that, in it’s way, is as beautiful as the postcard-worthy diner and mountains uphill from it.

Unusually, I only got half this dream down after I woke in the morning. I had (as is frequent) intended to write it down completely, having put in the effort to remember it while lying in bed during my typical hypnogogic time. I was still able to recall *enough*of it to be satisfied.

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Dream Journal

Band Hotel Storage, Free Nowheresville Home, Movietime Interruption

I’m tracing the early crimes of Phil Spector, before the kidnappings. I’m with one of his bands at a hotel and he’s abandoned them. The realization of this is slow. Eventually I’m begging the hotel staff to help us find a place to store a piano. A staff member disappears through a reinforced metal service door, leaving me anxious as I wait next to it. Another staff member warns me to step back, and I assure him I didn’t plan to follow. Hours pass, and I sit outside at a temporary plastic table, surrounded by fancy guests, with my cheap water bottles. I’m far less dressed up, just waiting for an update on storing the piano.

In a vast industrial area, there’s a secluded courtyard with two apartment blocks, feeling like a tight-knit community, possibly in Anaheim or even Antarctica. I live in a home there for free. The layout eerily mirrors my childhood home, making me uneasy. I sleep in the room that would have been my parents’, and I try to describe to my wife how it feels to be surrounded by these familiar yet disorienting surroundings. Outside, the narrow backyard has pathways and large trees, and I spend time planning how to adjust their positions to modify the shade, having nothing else to do.

I’m watching a movie in a theater, discarding the tiny bones from my chicken snack on the floor. A greyhound dog starts bothering me as I sit in a single chair ahead of the other rows. Eventually, I move closer to the screen and concession bar. A young girl sits across from me at a cheap temporary table, chattering nonstop, even annoying her friends. I drag her by her hair across the slick floor and dump her outside, which her friends seem to enjoy, but I continue talking to her afterwards. She’s now naked, complaining yet acknowledging how she’s being a pain. She finds a scooter on the street with my old blue leather motorcycle jacket draped over it. The similarity is striking – it looks identical, and the scooter is the same color as mine, with a brown battery that doesn’t quite fit under the seat. The memories it stirs up make me emotional. The scooter appears to have a loose security chain, and its back wheel is missing.

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Dream Journal

Missed the Bus; Mother Zerg

On an overnight group bus trip. We crowd into a wood-panelled roadside tchochke store filled with various odd objects. Happening to know the purpose behind many of them, I regale my companions (classmates? friends?) about one item after another. I know at some point that I’m oversharing and being annoying, yet I’m so enjoying being an expert on something — I get carried away with it. I recall this as “acting enlightened” (whatever that means). As a result I miss the group bus when it departs, leaving me stranded after the store closes. I loiter and pace outside in the parking lot, wondering what to do, trying to reason out where I might get a ride. Across a long distance of strip mall emptiness, I make out what might be the bus, my bus, with all my people that left me here. But that could be simply wishful thinking. By the time I could walk all the way over there, they might very well be gone.

I’m part of an alien hive-mind-ish force, zerg-like, bred in great numbers like insects. As one of the exceptional males who survived, today I’m tasked with re-fertilizing the zerg mother. This is regarded as somewhat of an honor for a zerg drone — it’s rare for us to have sex. The actual experience is unpleasant though. The zerg mother stares at me with gazeless eyes, her exaggeratedly big hips meant for storing vast quantities of genetic material to make whatever brood is needed. But I am a brood — could this be my mother? Not that it matters really; we’re all so genetically alike anyway. But since that’s the case, why does it even matter if I contribute my material to future broods? I find myself wondering if I’m allowed to simply stop having sex with the empty-eyed queen. Eventually I do — and nothing bad happens. But what now is my purpose as a drone?

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Dream Journal

Mall Empty, Different Owners

Over visiting someone else’s place, a rental. I run across the landlord in the downstairs garage, with his tools out, fixing some old Victorian equipment. I quickly get buddy-buddy with Mr. Landlord since I seem to understand what he’s working on. The light in the garage / front room has a gauzy look from being filtered through dusty windows.

An aquarium sits on its side such that I can dip my fingers through where the front glass would be. Working out how to get a filter to work, I flip it back and forth over different surfaces of the water. The water remains cloudy and dirty, despite that I’m confident the filter is now working. It will just take a while to clear.

I walk all the way down the ramp of a mall lined with storefronts. Then back up. During the time I walked down many stores have closed, and the place feels much emptier. Maybe like SF’s Chinatown.

Across a mall parking lot (different from above, I suppose) there’s an abandoned store which is poorly renovated. The owners perception was it just seemed any good buyer would consider it dated. I think it looked fine, warm and nostalgic even, but they insisted on renovating it for whatever fad they imagine business owners want this year.

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Dream Journal

Glad to See an Abandoned House

Passing though a neighborhood, I notice something though thick metal fencing. There’s a charming abandoned house deep within a private lot I’ve never been in, to the right of a flat patch of dried grass. I thought it had been redeveloped years ago and was long gone. It’s just a neglected barn-looking thing but it’s surprising and nice to see it again. I take pictures through the fence.

I’ve been having trouble lately getting myself to write down the dreams. The habit comes in cycles; I admit it. Sometimes it seems like there’s certain more powerful dream that overwhelm me, make me resent how relevant or insightful they are. Often I just get sick of having so many dreams end up in the hopper (that’s what I call the large backlog of unpublished, partially-edited dreams clogging up the back end of my site — currently sitting at 376). Even though I’m aware that these are fully for me, and that I can go look though them at any time, there’s something bothersome. Perhaps it feels a little like disrespecting those dreams. I know, too, that those are remembered more poorly — the longer they sit back there, the less likely I am to review them. So I want them published. But what’s the solution? Occasionally I’ll tell myself to strap myself in and power through the more recent ones. I’ll get through 3, maybe 5 if I’m lucky. And that could happen once every few months. Maybe more. Meanwhile, it’s not a big change. Turns out I mostly don’t remember most dreams. Worse, it seems that when I do go to the extra effort to carefully document them, the memories of writing them down can overwhelm the feelings from the dream itself. Such a delicate balance.

This has been an interesting experiment, this dream journal of the last 6 years. But it would seem I’m starting to come up against diminishing returns. I need to change something. I want it to be more than it’s been.

It occurs to me, not without some savor, that I’ve been meaning to pen down some of these dream journal meta-critiques for awhile. And it was a dream of an abandoned barn house that did it…

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Dream Journal

Three Wines: Hard, Mineral, Spicy

At the end of an unpaved road in the desert, dunes on either side. Searching for a spot to park and sleep in the overland SUV. Up a short side road is a private campground, but they’re full of long term RVs after recent redevelopment. I get the impression people aren’t even staying there.

Viewed from above, I survey another hilltop location once a vantage for scenic stark beauty, recently built up with houses. A bit of the outback lost to civilization. Overpriced houses, packed tight, the parking all in the center of a cul-de-sac. They cite new houses right up against fences built the year before, knowing the residents only work in offices nearby and couldn’t care less.

We leave the end of the dusty unpaved road, passing through a rough-hewn log gateway — something you might see built by the orcs of Warcraft, yet having the semblance of an old English gallows gaol. We’re waved on; everyone here knows us. Past this point the car accelerates, as if on a track, rocketing toward a towering city. Sooner then expected we pass under vine-laden bridges and all manner of infrastructure. It’s so sudden that while I’m zoning out looking at an apartment building I’m struck by the baffling thought of just how many human lives are now within my eyeline.

An unexpected bit of FOMO while camping at an event that occurs during Burning Man. Cited on a hill with acres of underground bunker to be explored, dirty, dangerous, and wild. A total of ten levels. I’m warned that the lowermost has toxic mud that can get tracked up when trod by the unwary.

Sharing a house with longtime roommates. The suggestion of renovating the walls comes up while I’m off nearby playing on the floor, and I notice that behind each of the wall panels — and I deliberately check them one by one — is pressure treated wood. We couldn’t replace them if we wanted. I’ve been quiet for a while and wait for the opportunity to speak up, hoping I needn’t wait too long.

A man is hoping for a new income stream by advertising his well-trained dog as a performer. The dog is loyal and easily performs for the scheduled entertainment industry boffs who’ve come to scout for talent. I’m pleased to watch him do so well, but understand there’s only so many roles one dog can get; he will always still look like himself. I can already imagine the man (who reminds me of my cousin Ricky) pushing his dog into more absurd and dangerous stunts with the goal of getting more business. I can imagine it getting bad enough to border on animal abuse.

Ensign Tilly fakes her death at an airlock. She lands underneath in a metal rack.

Three wines: hard, mineral, spicy. No explanation left of this detail, a curiously distinct detail nonetheless.

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Dream Journal

First Visit to Russia, Photographing Derelict City from Peninsula

Journeying in Russia for the first time. Exploring a little on my own, taking lots of pictures of signs and beautiful worn-out stuff. It’s strange to get around as I can’t read the street signs, but I memorize locations (I think about this as I take photos, which I will later geotag). It’s bright out and there’s a lot to explore. I can remember being on the airplane earlier, perhaps this is still on the first day.

I lead the rest of our large family group out on a flat rocky peninsula to see this cool derelict industrial city on the horizon, hyping them up telling them it reminds me of ancient ruins. On the way there I even realize it’s translated as “Stonehenge” on one map. The sun is starting to get low in the sky and although we’re walking slow (because it’s a group) I reckon we’ll be able to catch the sunset over the city, which means some cool pictures.

I’m having to carry the cage with my rats Spork and Puff, though luckily I can use magic to teleport it. I set it between rocks near the end of our trek… but continue to worry about it. I encounter the strange realization that we have both a rat named Puff and a newer rat that we named Puffy, quite unintentionally.

We’ve reached the end of the peninsula and are gazing at the beautiful dusk skyline. As I’m taking picture after picture I notice the curve of a Russian freeway nearby on what must be a causeway. A motorcycle buzzes past and it seems like there should be many chances to photograph it, but I just can’t get my focus correct in try after try.

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Dream Journal

Suzie the Mechanical Brass Goat

I’m playing tuba in a marching band. Have to haul it back from the field in pieces. When I get to the enclosed, beige, semi-circular practice room I have lengthy difficulties assembling it — the band has already started playing. The pieces for a brand new percussion drum the size of a person are laid out on the floor. Since those are clearly present, I consider playing that instead.

The brass of the instruments reminds me of a friendly goat, Suzie. She’s mechanical, also brass, and we amble together down a tree-lined sidewalk in a archetypical sunny American suburb (away from the band). I spot some Halloween stuff in the branches of a tree between the sidewalk and the street, forgotten so long ago that the tree is now growing through the plastic decorations. Reminds me of an image I saw recently, of a Barbie doll placed by someone’s granddaughter being engulfed by branches. Even though it’s enjoyably bizarre, I climb the tree to retrieve the spooky plastic junk. Suzie watches (perhaps giving commentary) and it’s a shiny, fresh, sunny experience, abnormally wholesome.

I’m later cruising on my motorbike down a curvy dirt road, fast. Hand-tilled grain fields border it. I narrowly dodge Indian pedestrians carving around corners, following the road’s course between blocky grey utilitarian buildings (like the setting from a fair dream on Feb 19, 2021 at 11:29 am). I get as far as a narrow corridor whose walls are made of train cars. I can’t reverse, and have to navigate back through twice. It feels like I’m towing a trailer or three. Headed back where I came now, I pull off a few wheelies — having the thought that I’ve only ever done that in dreams before (this is true). I soon notice (due to another person’s recent use of it) some pieces have shaken off the bike as I’m riding, importantly 3/4 of the front instrument panel. I manage to see a bit fly off over a fence and decide to hunt it down.

This neglected industrial area is officially off-limits, but also officially abandoned. I suspect it’s still quite inhabited though and used for all sorts of under-the-radar activity. This seems confirmed when I discover rows of diagonal pews inside one decayed warehouse, carefully draped in elegant purple fabric. I hide between these pews as I hear fumbling at the bolted front door. A few furtive-looking priests enter, and I consider announcing myself to avoid a potentially worse situation startling them. Yet I seem to overhear them talking about me without using my name, wishing perhaps to recruit me.

I do volunteer for some project cleaning up a diesel locomotive covered in grass. I scrub it’s side skirt clean of flecks and debris, leaving tall stalks of grass to grow proud and green over the engine’s back/top. It’s taken on an expedition up a marshy stream to study dinosaurs living nearby, blending in with the flora. Back in the yard we hide as a few mafia guys come to inspect the locomotive. A goon tears off the grass in one cohesive layer, saddening me even though I’m still proud of how healthy the greenery I helped grow turned out. We’re trying to trick these mafiosos somehow, and I know all my plants were integral to the plan.