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Dream Journal

Old Bedroom Illusion, Zebra & Giraffe Chase, Mental Patient Rescue

In my old room in Cathedral City I imagine I am wearing my sleep blindfold that I wear every morning. While staring at the window I imagine the room to be a simpler place, with flowers decorating the desk below the window. It’s hallucination within a dream. Most of the room is taken up by books left there by Patrick when it was his room — sometimes two bookcases deep. There are a few old posters on the wall, which I’ve left up as I’m simply too apathetic to remove them

Several giraffes have randomly joined a herd of antelope in a sloped desert canyon outside Las Vegas. Following them on motorcycle, I see a tall head peak from behind an electrical substation. I’m off my bike temporarily and the giraffes summoned zebra which would kick me to death. but I rush and to get back on my motorcycle, speeding off just in time.

On the edge of the open plain where the zebra chased me down I ride past a refueling station for bio-fuel cars. It’s weird to think that driving such a car during my lifetime I’ve used fresh green leaves as fuel from a station like this. Now we have much more compressed versions available.

I walk down the hall of a mental hospital prison, perceiving the intricate infrastructure built into such a place, intentionally concealed behind dirty rough slabs forming the walls. I find a mother-daughter pair housed in a blocky suite of rooms. I realize the two are only sick because they’re being kept here. Part of my plan and coming here was to break people like them out. I just have to wait for the end of the day shift and the nurses to complete a headcount before locking the door for the evening. One of them stares right at me as I perch on a low bed against the interior wall, though I manage to still go unseen — I practice invisibility like the witch Seraphina Peccola.

At the last minute before I do the breakout, Sarek from Star Trek shows up from the hall. The dream itself and my ability to maintain immersion breaks up as I break through the glass window victoriously, smashing it with my wallet tool like a pair of brass knuckles. My female co-conspirator is waiting outside to help us with a quick getaway across the wide parking lot and dry summer grass plains.

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Dream Journal

My Building’s Social Scene

My friends (P+S) who moved away from our neighborhood are called out for still wanting to live nearby. I walk back from somewhere and get called out myself, someone greeting me by saying “it wasn’t the first time I could hear you coming by how loud your shoes are”, referencing the color (not the sound) of my bright yellow crocs.

I choose to go into my apartment a different way than usual, through the set of glass double-doors. I have to actually sneak past the small triangle-shaped convenience shop that my landlord’s family runs; it’s a bit of an afterthought and not something I’ve really seen anyone use. I’ve been in there maybe twice in the 16 years I’ve lived in the building. As I head up the half-spiral stairs I look down toward a basement entrance I’ve never used and something drops down, causing a sound. I perfunctorily call out that it “was just me” and hope the landlord’s kid in the shop doesn’t think anything further of it.

So I go in what I’d consider the back way. But the space is very different than what I remember. Instead of the liminal blank corridors that always felt empty, there are dozens of people simply hanging out. I peek into the garage space, too. There’s a Jeep being parked on a steep carpeted surface there and it seems people are socializing there too. I’d forgotten there even was an elevator, as I haven’t used it since I moved furniture in. This is a thriving social community which I’m only noticing now — more people live in my building than I realized. Perhaps this happened since the pandemic, if I’d guess. My mind is opened to the possibilities. It’s like a public library workshop, or a university student union. I wonder if my landlord even knows how many people talk to each other now.

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Dream Journal

Frozen Offices, Freezing Time

Ambling along a boring straight street of an office park. Boring isn’t the right word — faceless, eerie, liminal are better. With my every step the foam façade exteriors creak, with age, even with just the wind. Like the entire place has been ignored since the 1980s. Starting to feel like I’m sneaking around. I stop to read the plaque next to a door; it’s a video game company that hasn’t made anything since 1989 yet claims to be releasing a new game in a week. And there it is, on a plaque of all things.

In their offices I start zooming around, teleporting and phasing through rooms. I use an ability to freeze or slow down time. People really do work in these identical offices, and there are many of them. Cheerier than I’d expect. Unexplainably like New Orleans in the winter. Bland, predictable, the same old conference rooms, but in good condition. I inspect the structure from inside the walls and it’s sound.

In the middle of the office space I begin operating on pair of dogs (or maybe donkeys), male and female.


Brushing my friend Tracy’s arm with a smooth flat hair brush. Her husband Don watches me carefully but with calm apathy.

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Dream Journal

Scenic Truck Stop Knick-knack Store set on Fire

An odd hybrid landscape, round trees and rolling grassy hills. Gazing into the distance where I know about a trail leading to a waterfall. I’m stationed in a bulky building laid out in a wide intended word meaning for ‘exurban’ truck stop surrounded by parking lots.

A friend and important person (someone on the level of a president) parks a long semi truck with cargo in our lot, inexpertly, and leaves it to hike the trail. They don’t have the skill to get it lined up in the marked diagonal spots, but assume it’ll be good enough on account of their status. It’s not though — legally our site counts as interstate commerce, so it’s regulated by the feds. The lines are there for evacuation safety and the semi is at risk of being towed.

My friend Reecy is opening a shop on one of the outside corners of the grey, industrial concrete structure. Her opening day story is intercut with a Strangers With Candy episode (complete with theme song). Also intercut towards the end is some oddly stylish and classy porn — porn which I can’t remember saving, but the file creation dates show as from February 14 2013.

A small fire is (intentionally or carelessly) set inside the front room of Reecy’s glass-fronted knickknack store, trash dropped from above into a short can. Among the densely-packed low shelves it goes unnoticed for a bit. Mr. Jellineck (an art teacher from Strangers With Candy) pulls the flaming garbage out then cavalierly drops it down a hole in floor, where I can watch it land in a neglected basement understory.

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Dream Journal

Witch’s Hidden Jungle Bar in the Rock

Testing bulbs in a possibly broken glass double lamp. Appears that one side works, I try in the other side a more modern bulky electronic bulb, which has the problem of staying lit after unscrewed.

Pull what appears to be a minidisc MDLP deck from a garbage bin, in the center of a roundabout room. I ask my mom, who likely threw it away there, if I can keep it and if she kept minidiscs. She responds saying she doesn’t know why I want it, ejecting a thin bluish CD that’s apparently called MDLP. Next to it, I still see the little rectangular minidisc slot, and a number counter.

Walking along a deserted upper floor hallway of a long mall, a light rain in the pre-dawn hour (a highly sensory experience, near lucid). Days are much longer here and soon we can expect 20 hours of sunlight.

I reach the end of the corridor and a set of papered double doors, behind which is an Adobe-branded shop. There’s cutesy displays of different stores nearby and well-trained staff behind desks answering questions. I inquire about a friend’s craft store and eventually locate it myself, listed on a handmade sign in an upturned suitcase decorated with paper flowers. The attendant continues to try to help me so I must mime finding it again.

Sometime later I’m with my wife, driving a car via orange rope pulleys from the back seat. Might even have a tape deck playing. Eventually I’m convinced to take a more active “safe” position and climb into the front, and find that the rope wrapped steering wheel is much stiffer than expected. The car, like a stripped-down Volkswagen bug, is cruising atop a thin clearing of ridge in a scenic rocky jungle landscape below along all sides. In our path, we navigate through a large hole in a rock outcrop with a sophisticated obstacle: a giant rotating stone gear that lifts the car in its teeth. At its greatest height the car gets stuck; we have to scrabble down the granite rockface.

Our car essentially lost, we descend to the base of the outcrop. Another person now seems with us (perhaps the Olson twins little brother?). Improvising what we have, we project a homemade video onto the rock face, craning our heads upward to see through the foliage as best we can. It’s footage made from elements of the jungle around us, but altered/crafted by a human perspective — one striking image is of green parrots flapping through the canopy, parrots cleverly remade of lush green leaves. Though we’re still stranded, it’s nice to have created some cool art, something recognizably purposeful. We want to attract the right rescuers. I hope it’s bright enough in the tropical daylight, spread thin as it is across the huge formation of stone.

We’re not waiting long before I notice an unusual feature nearby our display. There’s a thin ledge high up the face with a partially-hidden door. We deduce this must be a famously remote establishment, retro-country themed, run by semi-legendary singer/witch Marni Knox (no relation to Marnie Noxon of Buffy, more like Stevie Knicks of Fleetwood Mac). This is an exciting opportunity and we enter the door post-haste.

Inside it’s dim and empty, feels like it could be at least 100 years old. Victorian woodwork has undergone numerous repairs and coats of paint. It feels cozy, rustic, special, yet uninhabited. I immediately want to explore. Despite protestations from my wife (and Reecy, who came in with us somehow) I climb through a small low food order window in the front foyer into the cramped but orderly kitchen. It’s an oddly-shaped room, everything carefully stowed away for what I assume is the off-season. I quickly find a stairway in the back, leading down to the cook’s bathroom, more levels for their living quarters, storage for holiday decorations (everything in its place)… I even look through a wall-sized set of white drawers in the bathroom, like something from a ship, and find supplies inside parceled out in neat little rows. From somewhere above I hear a companion yell something along the lines “that’s not how you thought Guinan would live?!” I leave everything as it was and continue down, the stairway built at odd angles to accommodate the narrow tower-like arrangement of rooms. Startled, in one corner I come across a pair of cardboard cutouts made to look like workmen or painters against a glass-brick wall, silhouetted with diffuse light and plants growing on the other side. I realize this is exactly the intended effect, except for curious intruders on the outside of the building.

Finally I come to the bottom of the stairs. They end in an unsupported diagonal span leading into an open courtyard behind Marni Knox’s inn, so far I can’t see the back. I spot my wife before she spots me, having found her own way down to the back garden. I lay low in the disused space behind the stairs, hoping to evade her so she’ll explore the tower herself (much more novel than having me share my findings, perhaps deciding not to even look).

I succeed, smiling wryly after I see her go upstairs. I only get a few steps into a plot of the garden, though, before a witch materializes close behind me. She regards me with a smirk, apparently having observed my sneaking about. She makes a brief pronouncement, phrased ironically as a question, to the effect of “now would you like to show me your true form perhaps?” My body vibrates and shakes off what looks like a layer of snow, revealing — or was it sloughing off perhaps? — the form of a long-haired dark housecat. While not as confusing in the dream, either way it’s obvious that the jig is up. I’ll be going along with whatever the witch wants. I realize on waking she must be none other than the proprietor, Marni Knox.

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Dream Journal

Private Property: Several Absurd Scenarios

In the hinterlands far out in Nevada, rich citizens build a pair of eccentric mansions right next to each other. These private residences resemble city apartment blocks in their scale, shape, and modernist aesthetic. Yet a lone high-end car is usually all that can be seen on the miles-long public access road that links out to them (essentially just a private drive), crossing a sandy ridge which obscures them from eyeline. The buildings belong to a pair of relatives who still don’t often see each other, a father & son or perhaps an uncle and nephew, yet though the twin properties are huge the structures are built in a small corner practically touching, with the absurd addition of a tall wall between them blocking a direct view.


Zooming in on a map of islands in the Pacific, and it appears that one has been completely bought and taken over, now labelled “twitter.com”. I realize the islands are a bit further north than I though, and the the round bad in the middle of the grayscale topological map is the Hawaiian island of Molokai.


Participating in a reenactment of the Titanic sinking, I remember the 1997 movie and position myself near the middle. When the ship keels into the air, I hope to survive the split by minimizing the distance I drop. I do, but things have gone a bit differently and it’s the forward half that stays afloat. Long enough, as it happens, that its momentum carries it within swimming distance of the shore of a small private island (owned by the musician Sting, in fact). The ship effectively pulls aside it. I spot a few Mexican dudes hanging out playing cards, listening to ranchero music. It’s oddly domestic enough that even on our sinking vessel we passengers hesitate to jump in the water and interrupt their day.

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Dream Journal

Boat, Bus, (Another Bus), and a Pretty Good Date

On a boat, minding my own business reading. Three lavatory cabins sit on the left of the boat, bobbing widely up and down in the spray. I’m friendly with the boatman, and we take a 15 minute break on a shoreline so I can get up and stretch my legs, and take a pee break outside those challenging lavatories. I watch as a water pressure rocket shoots into the sky.


Asking a girl I know out on a date. (As it happens, this girl will later become my crush.) We’re at a college, riding around on student buses, among huge institutional buildings with wide lawns laid out on a grid. I point out to her the many little groups of animal sculptures placed on balconies of an incomplete building, supposedly a tradition in Arabia and the Emirates. One group of wolves, though, is alive, and we watch enthralled as they stalk across the empty road outside our bus windows.

We go somewhere inside a big university building, a place with high-ceilinged two-story elevators. A maintenance man actually points out how they’ve recently made them nicer. There’s somewhere I think would be nice to take her for a date, but when we get there it’s a student mental health clinic (maybe we mis-navigated, maybe they moved the location). I figure this out looking through forms over the light of a desk lamp, politely decline their services, and take her somewhere nicer.

We find a plain rectangular room with a bed. I ask her directly if she’d like to have sex. Her reaction is everything: she ponders with her finger pressed to her lips, eyes cast upwards, gently scratching her now bald head. It’s a subtly amusing overacted display of thoughtfulness, and I take the time to evaluate her unique beauty. Finally she turns to me and pronounces a simple, conclusive “yes”. I smile, but realizing we haven’t actually had any regular fun yet I change tack. We snuggle up back-to-front and proceed through a card I have, a written series of jokes and responses, and she quickly picks up on it. We start to form a bond.


Again I’m a young kid, reading on a bus this time. Keep my tiny fuzzy rat Pierre under my fuzzy sweater, with the waist tucked in. My reading is interrupted by a bus guard (seem like a lot of rules on this bus) who scans me with handheld detector. But I feel uncharacteristically fine about it, and don’t worry about Pierre. My dad sits in the seat next to me. While I’m reading, the left lens of my glasses comes loose and blows out the window. I quickly try to remember the street, 45th I think, so we can go back and get it. However, the next street is 11th and the street after that is labelled 11:11.

I attempt to improvise, putting a grid of various colored glitter-water into a cat-eye-shaped lens and frame. Remarkably, the lens is the correct size, yet has a crunchy ice texture that makes it useless for reading through — but fascinating to look at. I study it intently and wonder what I could use it for, my reading forgotten.

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Dream Journal

Found and Lost, The Old House that was Ours

Revisiting the old house I sort of co-own, where I stored a lot of my stuff sometime in the last few years. Uncovering newspapers reveal records carefully arranged on the table, laying out a pattern of which ones I’ve already recorded. A big book, like a newspaper log, has something to do with Dr. Hal. The speaker cables running up the walls are thick and I remember they’re painted the color orange from their previous room.

Outside, I unlock several latches of a wooden truck cabin — the topmost is the only locked. My wife helps, sitting on top of it, but I ask her not to make fun of me as I’m worried about my pets inside: a little arrangement carefully made of light bulbs, moss, and sticks, with a little spider sealed up in each one. It’s been so long that all the moss that which lived is dark green, and all that died is bleached white. One of the spiders comes out and waves, which warms my heart (but actually only proves the seal wasn’t good enough and this might not even be the same spider). I look inside a nearby bag and discover it’s full of my stuff I’d forgotten about, junk drawer items and the like. It’s been so long, I might use this stuff again.

I decide I’m going to find and buy this place. After this decision, what happens may be time travel, or it could be searching to repeat the luck of finding the place but with a similar house.

I get a hint to search near “Cold Key” creek, in southern California or Arizona. The climate isn’t what I’d want to settle down, but maybe the community I find will be a bit cooler. Peeking in through a window in the rocky canyonside, I spot my first girlfriend. I pause time by snapping my fingers; everything remains still except her — her head looks like my pet naked rat Nüdl, or an Afghan hound, although I don’t note her different appearance at the time.

Working my way down the track of the creek, I come across a run-down desert community with a few empty buildings. One beige chunky run-down Victorian seems exactly like the old place, but for some reason I pass it by (maybe I can’t follow the same timeline precisely?), looking around the rest of the dusty neighborhood. I spot what could be a futuristic mosque, emerging in rendered shapes piece-by-piece from the ground, black ovoids stacking through each other to build up something like a stepped classical colonnade.

Eventually I find a torn-up former restaurant kitchen, a little low-slung 1-story on a concrete lot, that I preternaturally perceive as correct. It’s crowded with people trying to plan things together, my friends and collaborators. I’m bustling in the middle with them, trying to squeeze through what was the kitchen service window and the hole in the structure (to it’s right) where a door was removed. There’s a cardboard box of stuff there which I recognize as mine, my first teapot from CostPlus, the white one, and an oddly shaped pitcher with a flat-top handle and beak-like pour-spout — one that has a name that I don’t recall.

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Dream Journal

Spork the Cat has Kittens in a Traveling Home

My Dad sits under tree. We sit together under a tree and watch a film projected on a portable screen, sharing in sadness.

Spork the cat (normally my male rat, mind you) has had kittens. She’s young and this is her first litter, and in a weird space. It’s shared with a number of people (all of whom I know in waking life), a large travelling quarantine structure. Perhaps it’s a bit like a hostel, but of people who all know each other. The gate is tall double doors like a church door, in the far corner of an open high-ceiling room, with sloping edges near the walls in a flattened “V”. The next room is an light airy bunk bed sleeping/lounging area, billowy drapes and a grid of rafters. I find a conch shell similar to my own under the blankets of an middle-aged Asian acquaintance, Dav. It has a narrower stem/tip and blows easier and louder. Childhood friend Robby T. is also in this dream, chatting lazily from his bunk with me during sunny midday.

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Dream Journal

Short Stairs Make Quick Work

I see my friend from middle and high school, Alexx Sanchez. I never did finish that drawing of her as an elf that she requested in 7th grade — I didn’t know how to draw, and I still don’t think I could make a passable go of it. Demonstrating some of the knowledge of the weird sandstone building we’re in, since I’ve been working there so long, I slide down set of stairs with an extremely low ceiling (perhaps a 2 foot space). I then call to her from the subterranean work area. She looks mildly horrified that we’re expected to get in and out through a space so small.


My younger friend Lily Zheng is in a band. I round the corner of my high school, playing a drum, telling her about three other Lilys I met with her exact name, and how strangely different and the same they are.