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Dream Journal

Rewatching Avonlea

Show up to get a ticket on a Russian train. I’ve been staying at a hostel nearby so I can leave when convenient. I show up as it’s pulling into the station, but the interface of the ticket machine proves fiddly and I have difficulty working with the Russian interface. I’m trying to select St Petersburg, getting the shorthand wrong, having to swap destination with current location. The train is unusually prompt and pulls away in an absurdly brief one or two minutes. Last time it was in the station for about half an hour. I’m very, very mad, finding myself awake in bed at 6 a.m. I quell my rage with a sleep mask.


In a pool (a specific corner of a pool much like my family’s in my childhood home) doing a baptism ritual for an infant — something to bless America, I think. A wedge of lime is carefully melted down on all the exposed surfaces to make it smooth as possible. The lime is delicately anointed on the baby’s forehead. Perhaps it was my own disinterest, but I wish it had been better explained.

Watching episodes of the old TV show “Avonlea” pen-pal style with my wife. There’s a scene where the plucky kids start on a gravelly Canadian beach and cross an open water channel on a dingy, following the fin of a whale cutting through the water. It’s a scene that I made and filmed myself, somehow. I remember not realizing how pretty summers are in that part of Canada.

Meanwhile I’m trying to explain something to my wife after she inquires how to do it, The solution I attempt is to send her a gray t-shirt, scrawling a message across it in pencil. Proves itself difficult to write on though; I end up making the lines too close together, and the capital letters are too blocky. While this is going on, I think I can hear her listening to Kate Bush songs.

Dream ends with me wanting to get back the three microphones I lent her. She’s never ended up using them, and I want them again to use in programming my code. My wife wakes me up to bid farewell on her way to work, and I inquire about these microphones. She jokingly confirms she won’t be giving them back.

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Dream Journal

Spider-Man and the Body Snatchers

In a theatre watching a new Spider-Man movie. My seat is round and spins, a beige leather “fashion” chair like my Nana might’ve had in the 1980s. It’s difficult to get the angle where I can look comfortably at the screen and also get my feet up. Not to mention I won’t block anyone’s view.

There’s an important character scene in the movie which occurs at the lip of a waterfall at night; the setting reminds me of one that could be in Jurassic Park game. Two group members (who resemble my friends Ani N. and Safire) go off for a minute to exchange info. Only Ani comes back. I’m the only one — watching the movie, but also now in the movie as teenage Spider-Man — who immediately realizes that it wasn’t Safire, but a body snatcher. And that isn’t Ani either. I grab a trusted friend and attempt to inform them of the danger, pulling them aside into a pitch black garage (note: only in rewriting do I notice the similarity to the previous situation).

But before that, in the ’70s paneled wood living room of our shared house, I encounter a housemate bottle-feeding her baby. She shares an appearance with my childhood friend Christy T. Someone (perhaps her, perhaps not her) has left on a very unpleasant overhead fluorescent light. I feel this light should never be on, and say so to the mother. I don’t think I came across as nice.

An old tape recorder with a Bluetooth app. When I install it, my phone spits an error and starts installing every app I ever downloaded. All the ones I’ve deleted, too. There are whole series of them, as I can spot several donut icons among the many screens-worth of unwanted apps. In addition, a bunch of books I didn’t know I still owned are taking up entire pages. The phone has now become a square book. Many of the pages will now need to be ripped out or blanked out. It’s a strange difference to actually see how much physical space these wasted apps can take up… not that it makes it any easier to get rid of them

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Dream Journal

Coma Girl, Classroom Laptop, Brand New Train

I explore a tiered arena in an alternate world, where my crush has been in a coma since April 2019. This is a common occurrence and there’s a name for such class of person — basically never coming back, but not technically dead. Alive simply with the momentum of life, in an uncontactable reality. I wish I could remember the term used for it…


I sit in a high school classroom (Mrs. Fitz’s) engaging in a friendly discussion while on a laptop, another classmate next to me on theirs. The teacher mentions that my older hipster friend Marc Roper helped work on a music video, which we check out. I note that I feel more comfortable behind the laptop — I have something to do while in class.


On a brand new red train. The gimmick is that you can store stuff top-to-bottom in your personal traincar compartment “infinitely deep”. Train is renewably powered and spits out water from a hose that runs its entire length. A young man squats leaning out a door at the very rear waving the hose end back and forth to ensure the water diffuses, looking glum and underappreciated. We exchange a glance, hoping this job can be made obsolete once the train is fully tested.

Riding on the train with me are my elementary school friends Robby & Christy T. We make idle conversation while watching the landscape pass by. The train rounds a corner, following tracks parallel to the ocean, traveling on a street bordering a beach. Under the shade of a tree I recognize a particularly nice parking spot somewhere I’d parked my pickup truck many times — logically it should’ve hardly ever been free, but I always got lucky somehow. Robbie makes a sarcastic comment about how hard it is to get a baby, and I counter with a Big Lebowski joke, saying “You want a baby? I could get you a [random] baby today.”

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Dream Journal

Medieval Nemeses & Nana’s Bedroom

An elevator to your underground secret base. Biological material grows through cracks into the inside, like the fungal contamination of the City of Ambergris (from Jeff Vandermeer stories). I realize that every time you complete the most recent mission, a  new monstrous baby extrudes from the ceiling.


Two small medieval-age kingdoms sit along the bank of what looks like a wide moat. They’re always in conflict, yet always in balance, each making up what the other lacks. If one of these nemeses should ever fall, a new nemesis twin takes its place. The society is stable and thus doesn’t change or advance.


A full-size pink latex mat is under my nana’s bed in our childhood home. I’m able to finally squeeze under the bed to try to get it out. My brother Patrick is there, and I’m trying to convince him to help me, and there’s something to do with him being gay — trans, actually, but it’s unclear.

In Nana’s sitting room, next door, I break up with an ex of mine — yet again. This time it’s easier as I’m part of an intelligence service. They take care of all her follow-up issues after I’ve told her we’re breaking up. I note how much easier this is with the help of an authority.

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Dream Journal

don’t worry, the gorilla baby in traffic is fine

A baby gorilla in the street, more of a juvenile actually. I see it almost get hit by a car. I rush to see if I can help, almost forgetting my mask (it’s still the pandemic).

I look again at my phone, and the whole thing is like a Reddit post that’s been edited to more clearly show it was satire.


A blue handmade glass dish, with an olive branch contributed from my friends Don and Tracy’s garden. Tracy is in a parked car holding a metronome on her lap. It keeps going off like an alarm and I’m having trouble figuring out how to disable it.

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Dream Journal

Grand Canyon Birth, Creepy Mannequin

Lynae gives birth to our daughter earlier than planned while visiting the Grand Canyon. This is inconvenient, obviously, but I note to myself how unique her birth certificate will be.


Transported via flat-bottomed boat behind an experimental wakeless speedboat, which is mostly underwater and creates an odd rippling divot in the water. We pass conifer-lined shores and disused “water basketball” courts, part of an out-of-season summer camp.


I’m moving a creepy “live” mannequin that has become a problem. I don’t want to touch the thing more than absolutely necessary and so, dragging it along, I can see it blink and look around. Propping the torso up on a ladder, I examine its inhumanly long eyelashes — the thing seems to lunge at me for an instant. I’m instantly awake.

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Dream Journal

Baby Chimpanzees

Holding eight baby chimpanzees in my/your arms. At the end of a hall, behind a curtain, during a film shoot.

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Dream Journal

Out-of-Aquarium Fish, Psychic Baby Moment

At my kitchen table, the fish are swimming outside of the aquarium. Classic dream image for me. One fish bullies another into synchronizing their movements, which is entrancing to watch. From out of the aquarium, I lift out a curved plastic support to help a baby turtle out of it — a tiny little miracle which gradually coalesced from particles shed by the fish.

While I’m flying surveying a wide cul-de-sac, I watch as a rabid giraffe stampedes across driveways, a dilophosaurus one of its victims. Like a whole zoo went awry.

In another dream, I am introduced to a tousled black-haired baby, and lay my head on it. The longer I lay there, the stronger I feel the familiar feeling of a psychic link — the same feeling you get looking into directly into someone’s eyes. I pull back suddenly, startled by how strong this feeling is.

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Dream Journal

Sea Turtle Pool

Standing beside my family’s backyard pool. Sea turtles of all different sizes swim in a circle, and I stand by the edge with a tank full of just incubated babies, scooping them out and placing them in the water one by one. Only on waking do I realize how cute and hopeful this dream sounds.

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Dream Journal

Naked but Not Crazy

Dreamed I was walking through the streets of the Haight with Lynae, nighttime. I was naked after the end of a hard day and some body encumberence. It was pretty awesome but as Lynae got paranoid about people seeing me she dragged me back a little. I was psychically connected to her and kind of slipped out of this invisible magic underwear belt binding me together. She ran off and I went on myself. The police showed up quickly and I was left to hide lying still behind an old car leaning near a fence, assuming they’d look under the cars. I evaded them awhile then came back and people assumed, again, that I’d gone crazy. Still not wanting to explain enlightenment I talked to my dad, asking “well what do you think I did?” “You ingested something a little while before, and…” I interrupted and explained it was simpler than that: I wanted to do what I was doing and it was a good idea. My dad cracked and told me about this Asian couple which had been “smoking him out”. My possessions were being sifted through by other friends and sorted for transport, I don’t know where.


There was a baby someone was taking care of, an incredibly precocious toddler with wispy hair carried from one room to the other. She told about how fast it takes to get to the moon when you ride your bed (imagine it?). She had different body shells it turned out, and her brain was switched into a different one so that body could be bathed. The body immediately started complaining that it wanted the brain back and it hated keeping its brain in its butt. The body with the brain, smaller, maybe a newborn, did a play-dumb routine that was instantly recognizable as clever. I thought it would be easier to bathe the body with no brain.


Sitting in a golf cart in a living room with two women in their house. The cart started going upstairs of its own accord seemingly but no one acted concerned. It was enchanted to do that, or was somehow intelligent.