Tag: canyon

Categories
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.

Categories
Dream Journal

Rancho Chalupa x3, QOs

My wife gives specific but confusing food request for Rancho Chalupa x3, QOs, no ranchito. QOs is her weird abbreviation for queso.

This dream is from earlier in the night and I was pleased I could remember it when I woke up, but there was so much more story originally of course. It seemed an important anchor at the time and it’s a weird title, so I kept it.

I’m building an antenna in flat land not far from the Arctic using an incredibly tall tube. It’s powered with metal that bounces at bottom. Through careful observation I’m concerned that that the bounce is inconsistent, the first bounce loses too much energy and is similar to a pendulum winding down; I think I have to re-engineer it or detection will fail. The tower is possibly part of a covert CIA network, but I don’t know who I’m building it for. The device is named after Queen Elizabeth, in the same tradition as someone might name something after Queen Victoria a century ago.

Takling with my dad about the sequence of events in 2014, why I don’t go public; how there’s no chance of correction or revenge. Playing with a string that serves as a graph line that’s joins two discrete sections of paper which effectively shows how unrelated the before and after time periods are.

My wife and I walk from offramp to offramp in snow country looking for a place to hitchhike. One after the other has nothing, no services not even a place to wait. We crest a last berm and there is a well-stocked service station that even has a bus terminal. But immediately as we see this the bus leaves and we must wait for the next one.

Swimming along a rock wall to find a pickup spot, we spot the islands of Malta sheltered in the distance of a bay. Like a cluster of glittering pirate isles, with a gloriously restored sailing ship slowly blowing our way. I warn my wife as we approach what appears to be a waterfall at the edge of the seawall. But if there were a waterfall then the ship wouldn’t be heading this way would it?

Peeking over the wall, perhaps it is a waterfall, but not like you’d think. Mist rises in bright golden afternoon light and beyond, stretching into distant canyons, are arrayed the houses of mainland Europe (reminiscent of an afternoon in the ritzy canyons of the Hollywood hills).

There’s a cool rectangular structure down near a flat beach. It’s enameled metal almost like a café made of refrigerator material. A local film shoot about to happen, and a teenage girl in a bikini standing outside is asking whether the zip code will change here. She’s referencing the ’90s TV show 90210, it would seem, which would make this Beverly Hills. I answer that no one much remembers that show anyway.

Supposedly now on the island of Malta, but with some offshore banking and casino facets like Monaco. One popular meeting room I’m recommended sounds loud and crowded from the outside, more like a nightclub. When I peek inside it just looks like a long, poorly-lit tile-floored hall filled with vacationing older Russians — the audience uncomfortably far from a karaoke stage at the far end of the room. I go downstairs as according to the map there’s a secondary club directly underneath. I notice an unpleasant acquaintance, David Kaye, sitting on a bench nearby and fat as Baron Harkonnen. As it happens, the second club is currently hosting an exercise class where they fly in the air.

There’s a large casino here in Malta. I consider how there’s a rule that never will a more lenient jurisdiction be far away from centers of wealth — by design (the CIA again, perhaps). I go to the counter and explain, explicitly, that I’m exchanging money for chips then those chips back to money, to test if the place is scammy or honest. I hand over the grand sum of $9, receiving back a sheaf of white on black paperwork. Each is printed with a tiny cash value, cents each, and a redeemable (slightly higher) value at a pizza chain. I look incredulously at the guy, as if to say “I just told you I was checking for honesty, are you really going to make me ask for my cash back?” Yet I wonder if I won’t immediately be escorted by security who are close by.

The casino counter becomes an SNL broadcast of Weekend Update with Colin Jost and Michael Che. A line is missing from a cue card and it is fumbling lane skipped. The next host goes into a long poetry recitation, which now acts context. The other host then (unusually) interrupts to try to salvage what’s left of the bit. This proves to be a joke in itself.

Categories
Dream Journal

Motorcycling the Hills, Shopping Ice Cream

Rounding a rarely-visited corner on the rocky coast of San Francisco, a road built around a dirt hill. In the ’50s it was used in a bank promotion, which is how most people know it.

I drive past two flatbed trucks with massive reinforced metal plates for moving homes and other buildings. Watching an educational film on the subject of a motorcycle’s back case, addressing it being further from the center of gravity. Watching (or rewatching) a video of a Motorcycling Mom going backwards over a long patch of rocks in a canyon side road, laughing about how clumsy she is.

Visiting a destination ice cream shop whose flavors constantly change. Hugging my own mom, who wears several buttons of her favorite flavors — she has an idle fantasy that one day she can point to them, and that will serve as her request for a particular ice cream.

Having planned to go out, I end up shopping most of the day. I keep a stringy cactus attached to my ankle, while I trip over other plants. Drop off my childhood friend Robby T. at a sand-lot home he’s staying at somewhere in a working class neighborhood of our hometown. Two Rottweilers come out the front door as I’m parking my motorcycle. They immediately try to get the chocolate in my duffel bag, then jump up to the top of the closet to get a sausage hanging there.

A demo of someone who isn’t Italian but loves to cook Italian food; the man is buying $500 of ingredients on a grocery checkout belt. So much, the clerk can’t even let him pay for it and has to wait for a manager. She stands at the end of the line (per policy) to keep the customer from running. This wastes all of our time, so we waste hers explaining how stupid it is she that can’t accept our money. We could, if we knew, just split it into more than one checkout. A security guard comes out afterwards dressed in pink camo.

Categories
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.

Categories
Dream Journal

Might be Metroworld

Walked trail back from an event on the playa. Footprints in dirt and patterns on canyon wall from so many hikers, very clear. Butterfly backpacks on the wall of staging area. I interrupted an older female friend before they could say something snarky about the other burners (?). Found a time capsule in the form of a large round buried cistern of cream soda with the date 2008 (or 1998), do not open for 100 years. Someone asked where everyone present had been then. There was a liability waiver engraved with it on the bronze! Conversation became about how unlikely that was to be useful or used, but I pointed out that while a lot of things change in 100 years, it’s a long time to sort out negotiations. Further down the trail there is a nice clean house, with several interesting coffee table books on racks about beauty or friendship. I point out to Lynae that they’re the same few interesting books that everyone in this community seems to have. We then had a brunch toast, a gentlemen looking like Dean Mermell spoke on doing a drug (ketamine?) and people don’t think of the after-effects as alcohol drunkeness, despite many obvious alkaloids that the body processes. He lauds the possibility of a month of feeling slightly drunk before we have a group cheers of frothy icy orange juice drink. I turn to Lynae and tell her I figured out what I want to do with my life for work. I want to make interesting collectible coffeetable book knickknack-type things, some one-offs, some production pieces. Stuff that’s fun to have and conveys taste and status but is still ok to give away. Something that can let me travel the world. This world has nice architecture and bridges and might be called Metroworld.

In a different dream, there is an omnipotent dirty that shows itself as bright beams of light. I’m in a room for sharing with this deity. It comedically moves to the power outlet behind the couch. There’s a large circular ceiling decoration the light plays off of. The deity throws us (it’s congregants) a big celebration, but it’s revealed that it spent what very little money it had renting marching band uniforms for us (which we couldn’t really use). We found the truck they came in — along the way, near a rusty concrete beam overpass, I find an original Sonic the Hedgehog Sega Genesis box. I consider selling it as collectible but I have a vision of Toys R Us just like I remember it, but with different stock. I manage to find a Jurassic Park toy set that must have been sitting there on the shelves since 1995.