Categories
Dream Journal

Third Trip back to Australia

My wife and I manage to cobble together enough money to take a 6-day vacation to Melbourne, Australia. It’s now my third trip to the continent, also the shortest (I must be counting some other dream I’ve had in the past, perhaps I can even remember which one). I relish showing my wife around some of the old places I used to go, but it’s difficult to remember exactly where they are now as it’s been so long — if they’re still there at all. The Friendlies Hostel somewhere in the CBD comes to mind. So does Mt. Helen, which somehow seems like one single pioneer-era street.

In the far back of a long narrow resort, I help myself to the cups in the back storeroom. Service cups for the on-site restaurant, that is. I run into my friend Oz and we do some opportunistic kissing.

Seen from resting position on a couch (but not my couch) I spot my rat Bertie. Also a checkerboard pattern rat, some rattie associate which somehow doesn’t strike me as odd.

I tale bounding leaps across a courtyard up to the grid-pane windows of a Victorian house. In that brief moment, I spot two old cats keeping watch.

In our apartment, I have to distract my wife to keep her from looking in our bathroom. I just saw that her girlfriend has left an N64 cartridge which is supposed to be a surprise present.

I do a double-take at a drinking fountain after I notice that someone (maybe me) put a discarded penis in the drainage hole up top. You can just make out the glans. Shortly after, I meet a cute femme enby named MidJourney who is riding bike. Reminds me of a very put-together clean new Tilde Ann (someone I knew and shared a hot tub with long ago. I ride along behind her. She’s notably meaner than most people I’d consider being around, but we converse and make fun repartee. An unusually caustic friendship but it seems we do like each other.

Categories
Dream Journal

Dreamt above the Casitas Express, Los Barilles, BCS

Outside on a scaffold of our property i release a stray (non-pet) rat into our neighbor’s treehouse platform. It’s a caring gesture, but I don’t know if the neighbors would think so — it’s so high up I don’t they’d see. I realize that I had one of our younger pet rats on my shoulder (Jumby or maybe Fergus) and he must’ve leapt off somewhere along the way. I have to trespass onto the tall redwood treehouse platforms and jump down. I have to trace my steps back through a complicated series of cuboid spaces. This is a bit of a hackers domain: abandoned for it’s original industrial purpose then accessed and gradually claimed by a community of unaffiliated fringedwellers. I establish that little Jumby must’ve jumped off somewhere inside the safe zone of a complex of shipping containers; I don’t have to fear he is lost or in any real danger.

In front, ambling out on the sidewalk, I spot my homeslice friends Lauren and Mickey about to surprise me on my return trip from Australia. I approach from behind them (which unintentionally seems to interrupt their plans) and show them a few spots nearby that I now know. One place is off the street is a courtyard with a big tree. It’s much like the large unusual fig at Santa Rita Hot springs which I visited yesterday, but also like a picture I have of Lauren looking into a small green alley in San Francisco (from her 21st birthday trip, when I first arrived).

Riding a favorite bicycle in urban back alleys, somewhat Melbourne-ian. Magical tools are carried in the panniers but I don’t need to use them. My wife turns into a possum-rat and hides in a few of the lively clubs in this part of town. The vibe is an unlikely combination of Australia, Europe, New York, and cities in Baja Sur, Mexico. I locate my wife in a trendy wood-paneled place that could be a country whiskey bar. She has cartoonified herself flat inside a book, her back backed up to the spine.

By chance I run into my friend Dara, who’s very happy to see me. She’s completely dolled up in colorful goth makeup (looks a little more girlish than usual, not quite the Dara I know) and an all-black Victorian / Gothic Lolita outfit. She asks about my travels; I mention that no one asked about it when I posted about going to South America — it’s been long enough that I can’t remember if I really went, out if it was some prank that didn’t work out. In the course of talking we discover the country of the Bahamas is a place she, my wife, and I all have a connection to (partially true IRL). We express an enthusiasm for maybe one day visiting together.

I’m introduced to a nervous single woman who lives at a monument usually guarded by fog, in the center of a roundabout near a scenic vista. I happen to previously have found it myself, not knowing it was hidden on purpose. She has recently had a fence put up, as the fog patterns have changed. She reminds me of many people I might typically know through Facebook. My impression is she mainly just works on the monument while she lives there as an artist residency, and only socializes online.

I’m passing through a ritzy suburb (possibly military officers) when I chance upon a home I visited long ago. It’s an idiosyncratic burrow home dug into the desert sand, partially open, by an artist who made it for himself as an experiment in minimal living space. My Uncle John toured it as a possible place to live and I got to tag along, years back when I was probably a kid. (This seems like a real event as far as I thought in the dream.) I get invited in by the current owners and I point out the things I notice changed. It’s an astonishing use of space for somewhere that should only be enough room for 3-4 next to each other, especially the clever kitchen. The earthen dwelling seems to expand the longer I’m inside — I comment asking about this to the retired woman who lives there. But I think she starts hitting on me, which presents it’s own problems. I have to politely let her down once I notice her eyes, which have been rendered in low-poly texture like on a PlayStation One. I remember the name of this dusty house, or perhaps the (real) community it was built in: Kayenta.

Categories
Dream Journal

Biking to the Cult Hotel

  • Finding a place to park my bicycle in the snow outside a hotel complex housing a cult.
  • B-movie of trying to return a lost child’s doll which was found in a sealed water bottle during a flood.
  • A tiny little Indian character with a plastic war bonnet.
  • Fighting an old military guy above a concrete stairway, disarming his several switchblades made to look like guns.
Categories
Glot

Free Bike

The best things in life are free? I’d like to agree. Free: friends. Free: bike rides. Free: sore butts.

I rode around the entire northern side of San Francisco today. Don’t ask what inspired me, because inspiration can be depressing. It cleared my head of all that. The pain in my limbs, and in the sudden cramp attack deep in my torso while I watched the sunset on Baker Beach, that clutching muscle-demon I won’t soon forget, was enough to rid me of many woes. Has a way of focusing the mind. Makes me realize a few things…

I’ve been seeking people’s approval too much. Consequentially, my voice has been higher, my words often unnecessary, my intentions confusing even to myself. There’s a balance there (or there should be). You should seek my good graces and I’ll try to find yours too. If I need to get something done it doesn’t matter if I’m gonna be spending 6 hours holed up on my computer to do it—I’m getting it done. It doesn’t matter if I’m not the most social being in the universe if I’m still myself—that’s enough. It doesn’t matter if my blog posts sound like LiveJournal entries—that’s how people keep in touch with me nowadays anyway. I’m free to do any of these things. More free than I thought.

Free things have always been a big draw to me. I’ve never liked paying for things, cause ironically enough it seems to cheapen them. Tiny reminders is the way you keep yourself. Little bike, big town.

Categories
Glot

Last Night I Dreamt

I fell off a cliff. On my bicycle. It was dark out and I was following a path. I’d been riding with a childhood friend of mine and he’d gone away, though I hadn’t noticed. But I did notice the cliff — as soon as I rode off it. It took a second to calculate how high I was, calculate my chance of survival. Zero. My heart raced and I lamented the years I’d never have. Then, instead of sheer granite and the vast unforgiving sky, I was plummeting within something soft and looking at slatted wood.

And I found myself on my bedroom floor.

my room, in sunlight