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Dream Journal

Lumberjack at Old Italians’ Farm

Roller skating down a slope in my hometown. Though I’m having a nice easy time, I frequently have to use lucid dream control to smooth the texture of the road (similar to video game level of detail, a.k.a. LOD). I reach a private property gate with an old couple, who might be Italian. A split wood fence on the right shores up some grassy semi-neglected farmland. The fence is rotted and peels apart with simple tugging.

Speaking in a folksy, feigned Italian accent, I convince them to let me work on replacing it. There’s a stand of pine trees on the property, further to the east, in need of maintenance anyway. I show up and pass through the locked railing/gate, feeling like I’ve somehow pulled a trick on them — after all, this is what I’d like to do with the place anyway. I’m really excited to try fixing it up despite not having experience. Felling the tree is simple: you find the direction you want it to fall, make a diamond-shaped cut on that side, then cut through from the other. I have my everyday Fiskers brand axe (a waking life possession) which would work but might be tiring; I consider whether want to learn the chainsaw for this task.

In a more urbanized area nearby, reminiscent of California’s Lake Arrowhead, there stands a statue known for its jar of marijuana. Difficult to say if this is official or simply the popular use of it. The statue and the jar have been moved around recently, likely some kind of prank.

I take a picture of my friend Aislinn in front of it, zooming out in a weird way so that faces get smaller while the person’s head stays big. This is, in fact, just as strange and amusing as it sounds.

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Dream Journal

X-ARDOS

I don’t know why the dream must be named what it is, but it was the strongest word in my head upon waking. Perhaps it has some relation to bardo, the Tibetan spiritual state in between death and rebirth.


Three of us are traveling on a long motorbike, my friend Aislinn, my wife and me. I’m driving from the farthest rear, which proves difficult on the freeway. As I’m about to take an exit, another motorcycle passes me on the right making things just that much more difficult. This exit is somehwere in the state of Iowa. It strikes me how much like every other freeway exit in America it is, yet with subtly apparent differences that make it like Iowa.

Rounding through a parking lot and a few low buildings, I swing around to a gas station (something like a gas station anyway) that’s broken down and is now freezing everything around it. I comment that it’s gonna be some expensive snow, and we decide to park and check it out. That proves somewhat difficult, as I back into a space alongside a cinderblock wall. The car ignition also seems to freely turn with any key I try, which is clearly something else to be concerned with. The vehicle is an SUV now, more like the old Nissan truck I used to drive (and drove from Iowa).

As soon as I park and get out, Aislinn asks if I worry about parking in front of that door, pointing to a barred gate which looks into the courtyard of an African monastery for junior monks. I curse and start to park all over again — though the neighborhood looks shabby, there’s clearly a lot going on. I do more back and forth nudging into a space, now there are even more cars to work around.

When I finally make it out, I’m at a family reunion for my Dad’s side. They’re loud and boisterous, very familiar with each other. The car becomes some white-furred furniture or a stuffed figure. There’s an exchange of gifts, and I must find a place to stack long tentbag-like objects on a similar white-furred bed (not sure if it’s the same, but it’s a different location). I correct my dad and place these objects off the head of the bed, onto the sheet, to minimize dirtiness.

I get invited to follow my uncle Vince on a short tour. I follow him while adjusting a set of recording glasses, falling behind because of them after he exits a set of double doors, then jogging after to keep up. I feel younger and younger in this dream, my role shifting. My uncle and I tour a dark, mostly empty parking garage, a caverous metal warehouse-like space, while he narrates the story of various murals telling stories of our family. (On reflection, this almost sounds like a transplanted version of Aboriginal Australian lore.)

One particular story, high up on a side wall, tells the story of a broken branch hanging high in a pine tree, staying stick even in strong wind (I’m almost certain this story is from another of my dreams a long while ago). Something all my male relations witnessed at the time, some broader story I can’t make out now. I confess how even though I never met my great-grandfather I have a nickname for him.


After a great effort to remember am earlier set of dreams, I can recall being transposed back to Australia in 2006, nostalgic for when I actually visited. I’m physically emobodied in that time again, as I was when I was really there. I stand outside a grand modern airport or mall, manicured fountains outside, the curved steps leading down to a light rail transit line. I carry an iconic backpack I’ve used forever in Australia (not accounted for in waking life) which is like a trailer-like shell which unfolds, revealing pockets within pockets, all labeled with names of politicians or notable Aussie figures.

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Dream Journal

Landlord Fixing the Stairs

The landlord is in the backyard, and the wooden stairway has had one of its columns eroded away. I call him and he actually starts to fix it. I discover the shady lower column, underneath the landing, is also broken completely through. There’s barely anything holding up the right side anymore. The physical orientation is oddly different than our normal backyard, rotated somehow — the landlord too — both true-to-life and not. Lazy overgrown potted plants grow thick and lush over puddles and concrete, everything seems to have a fine coating of moss.

The view zooms out, showing the Victorian building that Ais lives in being a relic of earlier development, isolated in a business park, itself within a large airport and whose roads serve cars as well as planes. Reminds me of Alameda.

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Dream Journal

Cheap but Familiar Dreams

Kid is happy to eat replicated (irradiated) mammoth meat. There’s a feather in a shotgun, the kid mistakes it to mean it’s for him to control and change things. It’s just a gift! Next stage in this game is little stars or circles in a form that get bubbled in.

In an unfinished wood building, I live with four other adults in a 20 x 20 room split four ways lengthwise. Aislinn is there. We mostly pretend we have our own spaces, but one day I blurt out how absurd and frustrating it is that the landlord has split it like this. Outside in the hall there’s a poster framed in plastic mounted to the floor. I’m usually complaining about it because I think it’s dumb since it routinely gets slippery when it rains.

A hotel / food counter up a winding hill. Strangely Victorian and Modern. Go there with friends (Ais, Reecy) but I remember it from long in my past. I order a big plate of various fried food served in styrofoam to-go container. Before I leave I return a distinctive flat clock I took from a stairway when I was very small — back then I didn’t understand it probably broke off from something. But I immediately recognize things when I came up the grand entry stairway which, Victorian/Modern again, had an odd ’70s green shag carpet paired with Golden Age woodwork. This is an odd reason, but I think this dream happened because I smelled a bizarrely familiar apple body cleanser at a Korean beauty store — like something I played with when I was very small.

(Messy remembrance, I got woken up a few times.)

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Dream Journal

Osmosis versus… what was the other one’s name?

I find my former roommate Emily’s dating profile. Her first pic is from our apartment hall, which tells me that she’s still nostalgic for our time together but also doesn’t share what she looks like now.


In a store’s lost and found, I discover about 30 mini discs in a CD case which I, realizing their rarity, covertly steal in my hoodie. As it happens the attendant saw me and wryly confronts me, but after I tell him what they are and what I’m going to do with them — transfer them to archival digital — he gives a mysterious little nod of passing. Despite what I’d usually do I go right to work on them but there’s something amiss and none of them read correctly.


Sitting in a middle row of a classroom, Robby in the row ahead of me, Michael (Mickey before he was Mickey) in the row behind. Unusual as it’s the second night in a row I’ve dreamt of both of them.


I creep quietly toward the door of Aislinn’s North Beach apartment where there’s a bright glowing fishtank in window, but the rest of her lights are off so I leave without knocking.

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Dream Journal

Dream of IN20MN1A

Truck is parked on a curvy road, with it’s bed oriented up the slope to where two men sit in a car. The gate has been brought down and slid off somewhat. I check and, seeing that nothing appears to have been stolen (I have a bunch of typical junk kept back there, like a subwoofer speaker enclosure) I slide the gate off the rails and discover that it *can* be stolen. Obviously this isn’t desirable so I lock the gate closed with my car key. The two men on the hill have been muttering complaints this whole time — I think they disliked having me nearby. One of their aspersions directed so I could hear it was that they should call the police to deal with me, and I shot back with “do you think they’ll arrest me for existing?” I notice the car license plate reads IN20MN1A…

(I’d been kept awake until 6 in the morning feeling weird about money.)

Someone is telling me the story of the first time their partner took the test to be a contractor. It could’ve been Ais, about Reece. There’s a fence made out of foot-diameter PVC pipe ends, and there’s a big open pit filled with toxic, discarded seeds the previous testees have picked and discarded. (For some reason the ‘end-of-the-cul-de-sac’ locational feel reminds me of another, maritime dream, a street-side deep pool with old military ships sunk into it in with a Hawaiian vibe.) Of course, Reece falls headlong into it and contaminates himself and everything around him. This is related as both embarrassing and hilarious. He still has three more tries, though.

In an elegantly-styled modern library, section titles tastefully backlit, there is a flash-mobby conspiracy to hide behind the walls during closing hours. The day is communicated with candy bar wrappers placed in the trash cans. Of course, the hidden couples, eluding detection, still manage to all make out together in the secret compartment.