Categories
Dream Journal

A Cozy Compound in the Woods, and Famous Guests

Lazing around in some open vacation courtyard, an asymmetric rhomboid. Tired, I order Carl’s Jr., instead of pizza which my wife later reminds me she asked me to. I switch on the Weather Channel for light background noise… but apparently now it has ads?

I catch sight of a man I know, his balls exposed, but it’s just another fashion choice somehow. For a moment it strikes me how oddly it’s much less obscene than showing just a dick or the whole package, but I’m surprised to admit, it totally is.

I find myself idly wondering: when do surgeons learn how to bring someone back from the dead? Is there a day where they talk about the rules, the records, joke about being necromancers? Strange job.

I’m soon walking around a swimming pool while my friends and I are all skinny dipping, but then it seems a new group of grungy beer-drinking hipsters has showed up to the compound/courtyard — private party over. My wife and I start packing clothes and arguing about how long it will take, how much exactly we still have to pack.

Take a break briefly to shop at a grocery store, but I’m sad from the arguing and the mis-ordering and the leaving. On the ground I find a strangely-shaped oblong orange fruit (mango? squash?). I discover among the produce its other half, the banality of the explanation causing me to sigh and set it back on the ground instead.

While visiting my high school creative writing teacher Ms. Fitz’ classroom, I perch on the edge of a blackboard. But Lauren joins me, and us both sitting on it causes it to crash off the wall. Taking responsibility, I construct a replacement of a homemade paper version covered in art selections. The piece on the back, which I think clever (and which won’t normally be seen), is of a hand-drawn skeleton: an oblique downward view of the spine, scapula, and pelvic ridge. This is apparently a too-creative stretch for Lauren, who pans it and has me explain what she’s looking at.

On a creaky wooden staircase out the back, becoming woods, I encounter a weird deer with moss growing over the side of one eye. It’s friendly — almost spirit-guide friendly — so I go to get it carrots. I bring out an ice chest with two bags. As I re-emerge outside I gaze down the neighborhood hill, a single puff of steam popping out the rustic chimney of a tall squarish cabin house down the hill. The morning silence and fog is impressive, encompassing. I have a brief chat with a random neighbor guy and tell him what I’m doing. He asks for one of the bags. A bit selfish, but I offer to give him as much as will fit in his hands. A few animals immediately show up, at least one anteater (which I don’t think eat carrots, “but oh well” I say as I offer some) and a deer with teeth that look like it should definitely be carnivorous. I hand-feed that angular animal with great caution, but it seems not so much dangerous as derpy.

Up in our personal quarters, the musician Amanda Palmer is visiting. Hanging out with friends and band-mates, mostly naked. She’s very easy to host, quite self-possessed. and independent. Hangs out with her crew and chats/chills, taking breaks to talk with me or other family.

Meanwhile my wife tells me Kevin McAllister (Macaulay Culkin) a.k.a Kevin Pill is staying in another room in the complex. I want to thank him for his recent funny tweet and say how glad I am to have him, but I peek in and he’s doing some private conference. I don’t mind, but it could’ve been a sex thing? Masturbating? I don’t know.

I ask Amanda Palmer if they’d like to meet. I’m like “oh wait you already know each other”, and we together recall a time where they got into a debate and she surprised him with a detailed rebuttal, concluding at his shock “that’s right, I went to formal school too”. Listening to her voice is mesmerizing… deep and gravelly and calming. I remember that I should be recording it, and regret not doing so already.

A group of jock-ish “Lost Boys”-looking kids fly onto the room’s balcony. I block the view of my naked celebrity guests while he asks some random probing question, hoping to see them. Gauging my guests’ reaction, I deflect and gently let them down with whatever it is they wanted to ask. Part of being a good host, I guess.


Writing this all down, I realize we never finally departed to courtyard complex after all.

Categories
Dream Journal

Keanu’s Midnight Movie Favor

On the top floor of an abandoned school, the walkways are completely inundated with trash. You can see even more of it layering the ground in hills from this high vantage, and this is enough of a novelty that people visit and it becomes an attraction. The waist-high concrete walls of the round corner balcony have been given elaborate murals, inspirational remnants from it’s time as a (elementary?) school. There’s a post-apocalyptic teen movie vibe.

I’m approached by a middle-age bearded guy asking me to do him a personal favor. Surprised, I realize it’s Keanu Reeves. I manage to do the favor, which involves closing the doors to (his?) movie theater near the mural, at the start of the Rocky Horror midnight showing. Makes sense, as I can imagine what the reaction of a packed midnight movie would be to spotting Keanu at the door. He thanks me and gives me some sort of token.

Similar to how right now, during quarantine, one doesn’t make outings as much, in this dream only cashless order-online places are open. I visit two such stores near the far end of a long mall, somewhere I feel I’ve dreamed of before — although I didn’t even think of it as a mall this time. The stores are clean and novel, merchandise displayed on floor-to-ceiling shelves, but for the moment they mostly only have shampoos and other bath stuff in stock. I remember there’s an Amazon store somewhere in the center, and make my way there while carrying a rolling barstool on my back. I lean on this occasionally during on the walk there, and no one seems to mind although I sometimes reckon I’m too young for it.


Skip ahead and I’m with a redheaded friend, headed somewhere together through twisty, rugged dirt paths. We pass a group of women talking about a place called the Fergiles, a group of islands I deduce. I walk ahead a little ways while she remains behind in a small hollow. My sibling Patrick is now with me, and we notice the end of a log has had its end made into a fairy cottage, a gnome home, in the shape of an Ewok’s face. I start to open it but he warns that if it’s anything like the others he’s seen, it probably has a lizard hiding in it (a Betta lizard? like a Betta fish).

Categories
Dream Journal

Ocean at the Window & Messages Sent by Past Self

Beginning with the strongest image: ocean waves suddenly lapping up the windows of a beachside bedroom. My mom lies sick in the bed closest the window. She’s half blind, nursed by the family for years, and today she asks me to get her a bar of white chocolate. I drive a pair of motor-scooters — like standing astride two horses –and retrieve one, then the other, from the room where my mom (who is also “Queen Anne”) is resting up with her eyes open.

I leave my friends and family in the beachside cottage (now much closer to the ocean). Searching the beach where I earlier helped organize a game of guys vs. girls volleyball — right up against the water’s edge — I looking for a computer which was recently inherited from when I lived in between bus seats. It’s a rack of outdated tech, box-shaped, a thin shiny black panel with Motorola wiring. It could’ve been from techie-artist friend Rich Humphrey. Now in the evening’s dark, fleeing rising waves, we instead rescue a dog that looks like Aislinn’s Catahoula hounddog Rose (we = me and I-don’t-know-who).


Makeouts in the large family garage of my childhood home, on a long massage platform, relaxed cool friends makeouts, with a tall athletic strawberry blonde friend from my Chicken John days. Laying on my side, happily killing time, I use a fully-sopped paintbrush to slather purple-to-grey paint over a piece of scrap cardstock. I paint from top-left to bottom-right, like Georgia O’Keefe.

I’m tasked with leading a group of my family/friends back to a ground floor hotel room I once stayed in as a kid. I observe my brother Chris attempt to carefully sneak under a low-hanging tree branch, hoping he’ll see what I see: the (sabertooth?) tiger just above eye level. After giving him the chance, when it feels almost too late, I shout out a clear warning. The look on his face as he made eye contact with the tiger! We get to the hotel room, where the quality of time seems a bit slippy — I’m able to simultaneously receive and send a message to myself, by gesturing to the 4-year-old me within the room. I tapped at the top of a large conch/whelk shell with my fingers joined (an upside-down “ma che vuoi” 🤌), holding the eye contact and attention of myself in the past. It is, I believe, what should be called a strange loop.

Back in the garage with my makeout friend, we’re joined by a recently victorious celebrity, a Chris Farley-like man. Together we hug him in a warm, cuddly friend sandwich. The situation is fond and intimately familiar, even somewhat sexual although I can’t touch my female friend over him (he’s a big guy just like Farley).

Categories
Dream Journal

Parking Lot Shower & A Car Named Felony

Naked, in a coin-operated shower, in a parking lot, without glasses on. Phone is on the soap tray. I’m alternately wearing a shirt or pants, washing one area at a time. I see a group of plainclothes cops walk by and start preparing arguments in my head, concerning this being private property and the property owner losing money if these showers weren’t here. They pass me by as if the arguments were a forcefield.

I meet Lindsay Ellis who has a new convertible she named Felony (unexplainably). I swing above and around the parked car and we get to friendly conversing. But while sitting at a long wooden outdoor dining table, something I say or do shuts her down. She excuses herself hastily and drives away. My wife and I puzzle over it together; I lament that I didn’t even record the conversation.

I run out the front door after strapping on my paramotor flying machine and I’m airborne in a few seconds, I even see her car make the turn at the end of my street. But I never catch her and the dream ends.


A fancy diamond ring. The appraiser comments “I shouldn’t ask how you got this”. Two large studs sit on either side, with rectangular chunks shifting between them, rotating and moving in and out of alignment. It shifts before my eyes and the big, flat sides take on a tiger’s eye gem-like chattoyance — then its aspect shifts again, altering itself into a large, expensive house, the flat chunky side becomeing a fake 3-car garage. It’s a neat trick which fools buyers into thinking the house is worth more than it is.

Categories
Dream Journal

Taking Tom Hanks to the Gala

“Hey I just realized… I’ve met Tom Hanks.” I say this convivially to him as we sit together, waiting for a call so I can escort him further. I’m glad I mentioned it — he really is as nice as everyone says, and we share an appreciative conversation on the unfortunate fact that, for some, Hollywood and the movie industry will be forever coded as gay/liberal. He thinks motion picture and television might be better in that regard. I note that Hannah / Rhey (Daisy Ridley from Star Wars? IDK) had that same problem.

I get the call and ask if we should he over there ASAP — they say they need as many people, as soon as possible. We drive speedily in the silent darkness of the night toward neon-lit old Chinatown for this event, a fancy excavation gala of recent archaeology.

We arrive, the place is absolutely crushed with people (most of whom are there to party and drink). We don’t have two tickets like we’re technically supposed to, but wend our way directly to a staff storage room. While I’m still in the doorway, a shamelessly bitchy rotund blonde ponytail woman taps me on the shoulder to demand I go back in line and have my big bag checked — ignoring the hundreds of people milling around, my staff badge, and the obvious fact that we’re only in this room to stash our bags. I tell her in no uncertain terms that despite all that, I’d be happy to comply, except the request had to come from someone without such a horrible attitude. Immediately afterward I turn to see my friend Ais, who says “well that wasn’t the proper emotional reaction” — I have a brief flash of disappointment, before I realize she means it 100% sarcastically, and she, Tom Hanks and I share a relieved laugh.