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Dream Journal

Billionaire’s Birthday

I am specially invited to the over-the-top birthday party of a billionaire — already in progress. Individual areas of a landscaped hillside are dedicated to showing off his different interests. Part of a cohort of other guests, I experience a sequence of fully-themed gardens and rooms. One building contains a pool where the water level rises and falls, revealing more amusements. I point out in another that a sword, casually mounted on the wall, was one of the most expensive ever made for a TV show.

Yet I remember, when I was young, I used to walk a trail through the dry grass nearby. Maybe it was a former family home. It all looks so different now, it’s hard to believe.

Eventually we catch up with the billionaire birthday boy. His manner is underdramatic, overly familiar in an unsettling way. Maybe I do know him from somewhere before — the sale of the family home perhaps? — because he seems to act like he knows me. It slowly dawns on me and the other guests, though. The glittery bombastic showcase was essentially a distraction. This place is a trap; once at the bottom of the luxurious hill one must serve one’s betters in order to escape. I become a butler, or something like it.


I have become a lone warrior on a long-term mission. Lately I’ve been hunting in the corridors of a building which feels like an attic bunker, with inadequate lighting and unfinished wood construction. By piecing together and following old training instructions I locate and make entry into a small interior room. I’m led to believe I can recharge there (the resource is perhaps a powerpack, perhaps water or food, etc).

But waiting in the room is an adversary: a deceptively-presented large fat older woman with wispy greying ginger hair and bulging yellow low-class outfit. She attempts to poison me with urine in a cup. We engage in a heated struggle and are equally matched. Other characters appear also, led to the same room in the same way. One is like King Mob from The Invisibles comic series. All are formidable. These six fighters crossing paths in a small room reach a grueling stalemate and eventually, I’m forced to search for further options.

Upon consideration, such a confluence of skilled warriors seems not likely coincidence. I notice a soft-spoken Latina girl who’s gone overlooked until now — cowering, or perhaps simply willing herself to go unnoticed. Her name is Garan. I get her to sign her name, and share whatever advice comes to her mind with the exhausted group. It fits in like a puzzle piece, a tangram that somehow finishes a set. We are released from combat and from that room, all of us. There then remains though, among we six formidable folk, the strange knowledge that this shy young woman, with her reserved manners and heartfelt words, is akin to us somehow… for all our quite considerable collective violence.


I’m still serving the same billionaire. I’ve been doing it so long, while working off my debt, that I’ve been endowed superpowers — temporarily for the duration, at least. Today I happen to be in a cheap portable building waiting on a job, idly examining a small lizard wrapped around my right index finger. Powerful critter; my digit circulation gets cut off. I infer when I awake later that this means I was left-handed in the dream — an odd detail.

After that I inspect a performance stage below a tent. The backboard features quotes which Mr. Billionaire liked, which given any amount of self-awareness are monumentally ill-advised and cringe. Much like the man himself. I still recognize him for what he is, even though by now I’m supremely skilled at my job for him. Not that I’m any happier with being tricked into the work in the first place.

There’s an issue I have to deal with. As more people filter in for the performance, I need to lure a giant monitor lizard (a komodo dragon) away and out. This is an energetic, determined beast, always focused on something. Even with powers of flight this is a challenge as I can only go so high up. While I can get it outside, and can reliably distract it away from other people, it manages to climb a tall Christmas tree growing among the dry grass field. I’m finally able to shepherd it outside a containment boundary. I am granted, or perhaps simply remember, that I can utilize a very useful power — invisibility.

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Dream Journal

Rocking the Boat (in the boat’s attic)

On a big art boat built by a community overtime. I’m on the second story in a communal attic, being shown the work still needs doing, when chicken John comes up all blustery. He’s not visibly upset to see me, reassuringly. But as he’s talking he does start exaggeratedly thumping himself against the sides of the bus-like space to emphasize some point he’s making. As this attic is well above the center of gravity, the whole thing starts rocking side-to-side rather alarmingly. Obviously it doesn’t tilt over but as this is my first time visiting that’s certainly not apparent to me. Causing me to appear startled seems to be Chicken’s modus operandi.

His bite’s still not gone.

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Dream Journal

A Nice Victorian Space to Fix Things and Learn

I’m being shown around a pale yellow Victorian house, with a complicated and extensive layout that is home for many. I’m considering moving in or helping folks who live there. I peer out a window in the upper floor and am confused for a moment by the jarring blank modern walls, but realize it’s the building next door. Shame… would be a beautiful view of the curved glowing sky above (is this Victorian housing complex in space?). While inspecting a niche and one of the rooms, examining how a tiny hand wash sink has been built into the alcove, I realized there’s a small gap in the baseboard that I can reach through. Probably no person has realized the space exists in many decades.

A map of the island of Hispaniola shows an exaggerated elevation relief, showing the stark vertical east-west border line. The obvious inconvenience really shows how Haiti and the Dominican Republic have been harmed by such an artificial imposed border, even one from hundreds of years ago.

In a wide-open top floor attic lounge space I take it upon myself to repair three stylish pianos. They’re arranged elegantly back-to-back in a triangle, the base ends tilted to be slightly larger. Guests of the lounge are starting to come in for the evening. I’m pleased to find that each piano has a different sound, one has a delightful 1960s electric organ tone.

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Dream Journal

Empty Family Home on an Island, In Australia

I’m exploring a house for sale with my Homepie friend Mickey. The attic is large and has multiple nestled little sleeping areas, a place the current residents call Monticello for reasons not known to us.

I’m having some of my old stuff shipped back from Australia, left behind from when I was there. This must happen before the river islet the Monticello house is on floods. We travel the small circular waterway via canoe. To haul the boat out of the water they’ve rigged up a garage door opener near the riverbank — clever little contraption, useful for rural living.

I pick out my stuff from the many cupboards and cabinets of the newly abandoned home. Most of this stuff I’ve forgotten (it’s been more than a decade). I can’t help but steal one thing: an iridescent plastic bowl from the 1970s, easily missed by the family and easily excused as an accident. It’s unique and oddly beautiful, and obviously unappreciated judging by where I found it.

Having everything gathered it appears that shipping is going to cost $60. I hadn’t thought about that cost and second-guess whether I want any of this stuff at all anymore.

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Dream Journal

A Traveler of Oz, Brotherly Advice, Eyehole Game

A legendary early Australian traveler, mucking about in an island chain that seems familiar from other dreams. Palm trees and native islanders, but not where you’d expect them to be — somewhere north of Australia, but without Papua; somewhere east, but without New Zealand. The fella is a big name but I get to watch him before he’s known. Has a funny way of sitting; I get an x-ray view of his hip bones balancing oddly as he sits leans back on an upturned suitcase while working. The map shows speckles of islets in a lake, a lake that’s the ocean, but a lake like some dusty suburban southern California reservoir (maybe Moreno Valley, Lake Perris, etc). Not like the Pacific — one with loud motorboats and kegs of beer and trashy fun watersports on every summer weekend.


Talking with my younger brother Patrick as we climb into attic in my childhood home garage, though in this dream he’s significantly younger and smaller than me. I tell him I know he’s going to ask about doing things the shortest possible path, yet that’s not the most efficient. As we climb down the attic ladder, my dad asks what we were saying on our way up about Grenada. Fittingly, this situation is somehow exactly the example problem I’d been giving to Patrick.

We’re having a nerf fight in the backyard. It’s a beautiful day and the lawn is green. No fences between us and the neighbor, so I see all their kids playing a game where they take half the pulp of an orange, cut out an eye hole, and stick them in their eye sockets — running around with these weird faces that look like eyehole monsters from Rick and Morty.

Texting my dad as I were my mom as a prank, but I can’t figure out how she’d spell “jare bear” (“gare bear?” “gerre bear”?). I release a scraggly pet parrot into the enclosed tile patio of my parents room, as I follow my dad.

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Dream Journal

Jumbled Hometown School Complex

A large cathedral-like place, and walking out of it as an acolyte. Cars on stilts.

My hometown elementary school (actually long torn down) preserved as a pioneer cottage complex, one woman’s job to maintain. I see jugs from oil changes kept in the attic among the jumbled wooden labyrinth — though I couldn’t explain their presence.

Tilting up a drink in a half-shell as part of a ceremony to allow women’s reproductive insight. Taking in a panorama I see, remembering the exact moment when I admit that I masturbated today. My Twitter friend KC Crowell has a look of slack-jawed surprise.

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Dream Journal

The House of Inequity

I’m a driver for a lowbrow company/boarding school/cult/orphanage. The roads around our compound are muddy and sometimes motor homes in particular become mired in the muck. After one such workday I come back for a shower (in one of the open, sunlit hexagonal group showers) only to find that it’s under repair yet again.

I’m shunted away to what I’m lead to believe is a reserve bathroom, but which has since been converted to a cramped bedroom barely large enough to contain a single, rumpled bed. The place seems to have been a proper bathroom in the 60s. One slanted wall with grimy oval cutouts once would’ve held stately vanity mirrors. I notice that the dimly-lit, echo-y, white tile walls go up unusually high. In fact they keep going up, narrowing into a disused laundry chute — and sneaky access to the otherwise tightly restricted rest of the house.

I’m spotted and nearly dragged off on the first floor I climb to. But from what I could see, it’s a common room, furnishings covered in felt, wooden bunk beds, a 70s handcrafted summer camp vibe… but with the disjointed quality of a children’s bedroom used by adults. The couple I narrowly escaped from could’ve been in a secret relationship, for all I know. No one felt free in this place, though our — were they teachers, minders, managers? — they certainly seemed to be rich enough.

I make it to the top floor, the attic built as an addition atop our oversized building, with bright panoramic windows that are so-angled as to show puffy blue-and-white skies. The people up here sport schoolmarm hairdos and Marie Curie-like studiousness, but to my great vindication, are also preparing an invasion force to wrest control of the rest of the house. This Gryffindor Army gave the impression of fierce, dark resolve. Surely one day theirs will be a glorious fight.

Exploring the upper floor further, I access a balcony that was used in the past for us to monitor the land around the main house. About 90% of this beautiful outdoor spot has been fenced off and replaced with an automated monitoring station. One rickety telescope off to the side for us, at least. I spy an open field of light brown grass freckled with isolated low trees. A single park bench. Nearer to the house, a gated-off chichi picnic dining area. A long elegant bench for rich people to eat our trendy “sweetie creamies”.

Unfortunately, this is about when I awoke. The Calea Zacatechichi I took about 3 hours ago seemed to have a-stirred up some curious stuff, though.

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Dream Journal

Alone with a List

Making a list of things

Things that are googled as I type them

All of which center around dying this horrible navy-colored hoodie I just got (I actually just got a cozy red hoodie)

(and actually it was Lynae who posted this morning about how much she hated an ugly navy-and-grey ModCloth ensemble)

And it’s hard to type because Swiftkey keepsfuckingup thewords

I realize that I’m alone in the attic space, where a moment ago the rest of my classmates (tenth grade history, Mr. Conklin) had been all around me

And that they were all downstairs now, and I was about to get locked in with my depressing craft search list

That’s when I woke up in my loving lukewarm bath and knew if I spent any longer there, I’d be trapped all night

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Dream Journal

Explanations from the Attic

Climbing through the rafters in the garage of my childhood home, above my black-and-white cat Aloysius. Explaining to my dad about the reasons people thought I was crazy, but that showed I wasn’t. Sigh.