Tag: crazy

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Dream Journal

Return to School/Work: Naardviot or Naardveet

A multi-stage heist to steal a baby (or wealth) in broad daylight. It repeats, the same beats with variations of setting, dozens of times. A grouchy burly male criminal, a heavy cart going off the side of the road, and opportunistic me. A sci-fi Star-Wars-like fleet of floating swarming police assault craft, of AT-AT like bubbles, zooms away from a post nearby foiling bystanders hopes of intervention.

The last repetition, we’re stealing the baby/treasure out of the mother’s body. A gesture made fingering to an unexpected hole in the mom. A blank beat, an empty space, the pattern finally breaks and our criminal gang is dismembered and transmogrified. I see my dream character as the female protagonist of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, just her doll-like torso and head, floating down into a watery abyss trailing tendrils of blood as she rapidly exsanguinates. The question sits there at the end of the dream: what was different this time, what went wrong?

My first day returning to work as a delivery driver after a long break. I feel different, pulling up and parking my motorcycle near the assemblage of other vehicles. I carry a folded-in cardboard box under my arm, two of my smallest pet rats inside. I naively try placing a delivery bag in there too, and hastily pull it out when the ratties predictably find it (but before anyone notices).

It’s my first day back at school, too. I’m in a classroom where the teacher is demonstrating how to hang string lights above a blackboard, but giving wrong information. I smoothly take over and show how to correct braid them so the strands stay together. She admonishes me by asking “something-something to not” and I wittily joke as if she said “to knot”, still trying to act as though I’m not overriding her. She pivots to teaching a lesson of describing me by an insulting term, akin to”North Idiot”, or Naardviot. I’m pretty sure she actually meant Naardveet, though by now I can’t say anything without her authority feeling threatened.

A girl I don’t know is sitting on a locker room bench talking to herself in Korean in a semi-crazed tone. But I can understand her, and see the danger for her, so sit nearby and begin talking too. I begin improvising as if we’re having a normal conversation, miming eye movements as well.

Still sitting nearby, I change from my 2nd school period outfit into that for 3rd period, without taking off my pants. When I see the pants I believed were white on me, they have huge overlapping layers of colorful stains on them. I don’t have enough time to change again and I have to make a compromise one way or the other.

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Dream Journal

Logs in a Tree, Hip Ground Floor Squat

Tree logs stored high up across two trees. A ladder is up there too, blocking access. I look up and point out to my companion that there’s a hawk sitting on a branch directly above us.

The self-appointed minder of this open plot of land is a creepy psychiatrist, a young man who is clueless enough to stand staring at you from behind a couch to “observe” you. I point this out to Lynae, or whoever is with me. Someone escapes out the front door and into the music store across the other side of the mall (they don’t get far).

Behind the tree with the logs is a water chute leading back to a mill pond with a lovely population of loons (ha!). There are inscriptions in concrete, familiar yet written in some Southeast Asian language,

I sign up for a documentary show with Ricky Gervais, and as part of the contract we have to record banter to be played over the footage for at least 9½ minutes. We record it in the back of a car and then I’m told, jokingly, that the rental lasts another 120 minutes. My old friends Chicken and Kelly are in the front seat, smoking, and making out with the smoke.

Driving with my dad, early morning around 4 am, on the streets of our desert home that looks covered in a sheen of smooth white snow. I have a stapled-together packet of printed papers that’s about fighting others’ belief in mental illness, something I’d planned to read on the drive. Dad gets me to close it with a frustrated “really?”

Weird cheap flat on the first floor of a dirty yet hip ghetto. A side street near the heart of the city, clumped-up forgotten backyards and trash gathered in the dead-ends. My friends are thinking of buying this place — or maybe they already have? But that could just be a cover story for a squat, I think. They’ve converted a windowless room in the middle into an “orgy space”, which I guess means stuffing in a ton of pillows and chairs. Bafflingly, there’s only a heavy sheet separating it from a front patio area packed with couches. Ghetto but very cozy.

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Dream Journal

Explanations from the Attic

Climbing through the rafters in the garage of my childhood home, above my black-and-white cat Aloysius. Explaining to my dad about the reasons people thought I was crazy, but that showed I wasn’t. Sigh.

Categories
Dream Journal

Replay, Shaving Confusion, Cesar Chavez Funeral Home

Replay of experience in February 2014 from an impersonal perspective. Why they thought I was crazy, and how that thought contributed to the problem.

Shaving in the bathtub, but not wet. Miss a lot of spots, very uneven. Lynae texts me and tells me to be where she told me to be when we’d texted previously. I don’t understand for a moment and then Edgar comes to the door. He begins saying something about how we can’t put things in the garden. Before he can finish, a giant dog that I didn’t know was in the apartment bursts from behind me and to my left.

Driving to a Chicken John show, I have to back the truck into a wall along Cesar Chavez. I get out and walk along the outside of a Victorian funeral home that I’ve helped empty. I’m then inside, walking along a hallway. I am counting my distance and imagining the cremation rooms that I’m passing through beyond. A woman passes me from behind and to the left, she’s in her twenties, white, hair done up, and as she passes me and enters a different room she says something like “this place is [fascinating/amazing/built for us], isn’t it.”