Tag: building

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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 Z. 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.

Categories
Dream Journal

Ritzy Post-Soviet Neighborhood

Visiting a quiet city reminiscent of Eastern Europe. I drive my partner to a small, private neighborhood built around a flat, park-like open space. An older resident, a member of the post-communist bourgeoisie, shows me that you can fly up in the center and view the neighborhood from above. I see what can be described as concrete cubicles many stories tall, containing entire mansions the size of a city block.

I zoom in on the center of the street where stands a very good replica of the Parthenon, exactly as archaeologists found it, with all the ancient debris dutifully and artfully replicated in loving detail. They have at least one performer who re-enacts as a pre-socratic philosopher in daily performances. We drive out of the neighborhood, pulling away from the elegant, curving, grass-lined drive.

Categories
Dream Journal

Lauren Buys SF Real Estate

I help my hometown friend Lauren buy a building in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. It’s an old six-floor walk-up building housing older Burners, with a soon painted-over mural in the backyard called “Burning Times”: a fire symbol and a series of clocks. I’m glad to have Lauren in San Francisco, and I hope to maybe one day live cheaply in this big building with her, but I’m not sure she understands how precious and sought-after a place like it is. I peek into her first floor room there’s barely anything in there except vintage curtains and sex toys on the bed.

Our class is learning from a science teacher (in the vein of Mr. Suggett or Mr. Lonborg) when class is interrupted by a long phone call about Nick Howell’s mom getting arrested in Connecticut. Nick Howell was a real kid I knew in middle school. The teacher gives a long compassionate speech afterwards, going into the merits of whether or not we should share these things. I find it hard to follow along, despite him being my favorite teacher.

Categories
Dream Journal

Crash at Monterey.com/’91

Jon Snow has been killed off. He’s brought back (necromancy) and now has magic powers. Guards rush at him standing on stone steps, and the visual effects are lame-looking drawn on stars, four of them, which fly out and teleport the guards about to attack him. Looks like the flag of Chicago. Ugh, the show really stopped trying.

Watching motorbikes race in a slope-walled mud course — reminds me of running the hose when playing in the sand as a kid. One scooter-looking motorbike driving round a curve gets it’s throttle stuck; the rider loses control and it jumps the fence into the neighborhood nearby. It runs up a hill street and hits a couple cars along the way, smashing into the side of one, which causes the Buick behind it to flip backwards down the hill. Seems expensive, and I’ve no idea who will pay for it. I read the web address monterey.com/’91 (with the apostrophe) and understand this to be a historical event at Monterey, California.

A circular redwood half-height room with Lynae lying in a bathtub in the center. I’m telling a story of some kind.

Fixing the glue on some top floor gutters, trying not to get caught by landlord. Watching buildings next door tumble into place. Buying four oranges out of a vending machine with quarters for someone else, before a trip. Serving a pie baked with a top layer of elegant crinkled-edge blue felt.

Categories
Dream Journal

Fragment of an Eerie Building Dream

The lobby of a tall apartment building, with glossy dark wood floor-to-ceiling shelves. The elevator has either floor 6 or 9. Typewriters. A class I’m not a part of.

Louis CK made of maggots with a single tooth each. 

Categories
Dream Journal

Country of Bensbensvideo

Little part of Canada nestled in a shadowy river-side forest of Nebraska, a map of thin little medieval-like individual plots. Eventually this odd holdover secedes to America out of convenience.

Traveling along a road and I convince my mom that it’s a good idea to stop at the smallest country I’ve ever been to, Bensbensvideo. It’s essentially just an old building, ground floor bar, upstairs apartments, with a little side lot for me to leave my motorcycle while I go to the beach. In the thick undergrowth someone has left glasses of white wine covered with Tupperware tops. I discover decayed whale bones under a little alcove. My mom and I finish our wine as we see the tide has quickly come in, up to the wheels of my truck. Getting ready to leave, I can feel the psychic pressure from the grumpy old woman tending bar when I scurry through on my motorcycle.

Lying in bed on my side as a kid/teenager, wearing an oversized pajama shirt, in a house which belongs to my parents. Realizing how I’m not a real contributor to the household, even though I might be focused on how I work on stuff all the time.

Categories
Dream Journal

Seattle, QLD

Hummingbird babies in their nest inside a Tupperware, I’m surprised to see when I turn it over. This is the reason we’re walking toward the tropical forest gorge. It’s my female friend and I walking along a sidewalk near where she met her husband, and we’re rolling along a big concrete pipe section. Nearby there are oddly narrow buildings made of the same stuff. Our pipe rolls over a stop sign and it produces the humorous message “Windows has encountered an error”.

There’s a town called Seattle in a rainy spot on the north coast of Queensland, on a little isthmus of a peninsula. It’s hard for me to find by zooming in, as other town names pop up instead such as Williamsonia.

Staying as guests in a house, my suitcase stuff scattered around some oldsters couch. Their cute but fussy young son or grandson doesn’t want to wear pants, and is dressed in my dashiki suit. He’s happy to stay that way even though they look like pajamas.

My wife and I leave for her makeup fair an hour and a half after it starts, at 1:24 pm. I have difficulty with my phone, setting it to correct timezone, from where I am in Australian East coast time.

Categories
Dream Journal

Almanac A-Frame Apartments

At a big resort near a body of water. Kids have their own river ferry/train that brings them to an enclosed playground with a long, sloping beach facing a canal and tall hotels. I ride across (cause trains are fun) and play lightsabers with some random kids near an artificial sand-bottomed pool. The fences are fat and colorful. Kids find their way into beige hotel rooms accessible from small doors near the poolside.

The interior of one of these transitions into a building built for older, rich Orange County types. Unusually pleasing architecture — like stacked A-frame houses, nestled together in the form of a steep little hill. There’s a series of these in an otherwise undeveloped Coachella Valley, called Almanac developments. They have the ugliness of being new, their small plants and just-bulldozed roads, but unlike most new developments they actually foster community. My viewpoint bounces from one to another, oldest to newest, until landing on the very peak of a hill which will be the developed next.

Flirting with a younger girl — we leave at the same time from a parking garage.

While sitting in the truck, a lady excitedly approaches our passenger side and tries to hand over a note. Wishing to expediently end the situation, I roll down my wife’s window (to her annoyance). It’s some generic inspirational gobbledygook which, as I expected, gets her to leave us alone after she’s told us “the good news”. I indicate to my wife that I think the lady’s just manic or something. My wife endearingly scribbles some creative additions to the ends of the lines of words, making the platitudes much more perverse and hilarious.

In the courtyard of a winding apartment complex, in a brick-walled barbecue pit area, I watch cousin Betty pick up hot coals with her bare hands. This isn’t far from somewhere on the coast called Mordor Bay.