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Dream Journal

Mini Plesiosaur is Silly

In our large, outdoor aquarium setup (taking up about as much space as a shipping container) I remove one of the former centrally-important fish, replacing it with a very nervous mini-plesiosaur. The thing has a pleasingly silly dark green appearance, darting and swimming around like a toy from a cartoon (or perhaps some Midjourney images I’ve made).

In the open water of a lake with many boats, I’m directed to catch a kid wearing floaties and suspended by the chords of a parachute. I drag him over to the Relentless — a boat I used to crew once upon a time. I tell my friend Anton (reminding him actually) that if something you do is “stealing” from a billionaire… you’re just stealing it back.

At some point I left behind my motorcycle clothing somewhere. It’s since been moved, and I navigate stations of a library scattered about an outdoor terraced environment, collecting it piece by piece.

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Dream Journal

Dino Toys, Bison Charge, Elixir Monument

Amongst a nameless store of long aisles, I’m surprised to find myself one aisle over from a large pile of new-old-stock Jurassic Park toy boxes, both velociraptor and dilophisaur. Obviously I wouldn’t have seen these for sale in retail box since I was a kid, mid-90s. I find myself wondering if I should stock up. I hear a lesbian couple discussing them, unseen, in front of the pallet. I hear them speculating aloud about the toys’ abilities, and unknown to them there’s a tramsmit functionality. Without saying a word, I move a walkie-talkie (previously hanging on its strap in my aisle) in front of them both, on top of the toy box pile. So they can now hear their own voices as heard by the toys.

I’m picnicking under a scenic tree, a blissful naive youth on a sunny noon. I hear from inside the nearby building the struggles of a group of people with a huge animal, though I’m generally unconcerned. Suddenly it breaks through the doors, a paleolithically large bison, never seen since ancient times. Without pause it charges directly at me. I maintain my gaze and observe as its horn catches on a tree, throwing off its momentum. It untangles itself and charges away a different direction. But I know it would’ve got me, that it could sense that I was just another of those animals that would eat it’s kind if I could. Leaves me thinking of the old megafauna… how strange it must have felt living around them.

I arrive and depart my friend Sarah’s house via freeway (normally I walk there so this is a bit of an exercise). I’m too early for whatever I came for, and there’s just her, a floor made of large wet pebbles, and a table with the TV on it. Sarah continues mostly paying attention to the TV as I promptly realize I don’t have anything to do here for now, and should cut my losses.

At a yoga retreat in an old open-air stone construction. It’s brisk and I’m running naked in a circular path — exhilarated. Who knows if I can do this, but I’m getting away with it. I discover a small standing monument that is simply a pipe stuck vertically in the ground, with a little plaque bearing a recipe for elixir. The plaque is obscured as Bud Light cans have been left on it from sloppy guests. I gently flick them away.

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Dream Journal

Dinosaur Footprints and Thrift Store Gift

Viewed from above, I can see that my childhood friend Robbie T.’s house on Desert Inn road is only a few hundred feet, by air, from a dinosaur excavation exhibit/museum. The several blocks in between are separated by a main thoroughfare but it’s still surprising that we never realized when we were kids.

My wife and I take the subway there (a short trip) and while exiting the station on a short connecting dirt path, with scrubby but pretty green nature on the side, I momentarily think we’ve angered a guy walking behind us. He’s muttering something loudly and it takes an anxious second to realize he’s talking to his directions via headset.

The museum is outdoors, the ground muddy under a sky of brisk blue. There’s preserved dinosaur footprints and maybe puddles. I prod downward with a stick as to measure depth. A detectable but unidentifiable smell is then on the stick, a nearby elder volunteers the information that they smell like The Devil (like the tarot card, not anything recognizably satanic or evil).

A sizable chunk of my back molar comes out and I sigh, looking at it in my hand. It’s been going on awhile without being addressed, falling away in pieces so it’s down to nub. No one around me seems to care or notice.

We set our pet rats to free roam loose in our home, halfway hoping they can find some wild ones. (Yesterday I saw a whole group of rats in the New York subway.)

In a thrift store I run, I prevent an old friend from buying my warm comfy German army jacket for $4. I actually chase her off, hoping she isn’t too upset despite appearances. The friend is either Meg from college (who played Columbia in Rocky Horror) or Amy Pollard from middle school (whose birthday was on Christmas). Soon I reveal a surprise gift for her — the jacket, which had a hole in the lining around the armpit, I completely repaired. Now I can give a perfectly functional jacket to her for free! Which might even make up for how I treated her in the store before. (The large atrium room reminds me of the Temple of Dendur in The Met, which I didn’t visit until today. And hadn’t even planned on seeing today.)

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Dream Journal

Fossil Comes to Life

Finally invited over to home of acquaintance Colin F. and put to work draining oil from classic 1950s car. Not great at it, and I’ve attempted this job in the past. It’s cool checking out his space though. A plastic 3/4 profile relief head of my friend Autumn T. is attached high on a wall. It occurs to me that this angle, while unusual for a relief, looks better than the dead-on one of her I previously have seen.

In a shallow riverbed I stumble across a perfectly intact fossil skeleton of a raptor (or primitive human) embedded just under the water. I know I’m either very lucky or someone must’ve found this before and left it here. Ritualistically, my partner and I light a tall candle and the fossil comes to life, darting all over and wreaking havoc. I start filming on my phone as this terrifying moment has become a cautionary tale, for young people perhaps. I perform a secret move by cutting off the video to abruptly stop the experience.

While leaning against an L-shaped fence with a middle-school classmate, Amy Pollard, I impulsively tell her she’s pretty. But she calls my bluff and asks me to repeat it. I mangle and abstract my rephrasing into something barely relatable along a formula like “___ is she; ___ is he”. I then openly chide myself for phrasing both people as objects — objects of a sentence, thus objectifying them.

Artistic sequence of a herd of animals, the animal models doubling then all morphing into a different bigger animals. So a rat is stacked on rat which then blends into cat, those cats are then doubled and form dogs etc. I get excited to see what larger animal will be chosen next; the sequence gets to doubles of cows but the next animal is a bizarre model of a cow with two independent heads one on top of another.

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Dream Journal

Suzie the Mechanical Brass Goat

I’m playing tuba in a marching band. Have to haul it back from the field in pieces. When I get to the enclosed, beige, semi-circular practice room I have lengthy difficulties assembling it — the band has already started playing. The pieces for a brand new percussion drum the size of a person are laid out on the floor. Since those are clearly present, I consider playing that instead.

The brass of the instruments reminds me of a friendly goat, Suzie. She’s mechanical, also brass, and we amble together down a tree-lined sidewalk in a archetypical sunny American suburb (away from the band). I spot some Halloween stuff in the branches of a tree between the sidewalk and the street, forgotten so long ago that the tree is now growing through the plastic decorations. Reminds me of an image I saw recently, of a Barbie doll placed by someone’s granddaughter being engulfed by branches. Even though it’s enjoyably bizarre, I climb the tree to retrieve the spooky plastic junk. Suzie watches (perhaps giving commentary) and it’s a shiny, fresh, sunny experience, abnormally wholesome.

I’m later cruising on my motorbike down a curvy dirt road, fast. Hand-tilled grain fields border it. I narrowly dodge Indian pedestrians carving around corners, following the road’s course between blocky grey utilitarian buildings (like the setting from a fair dream on Feb 19, 2021 at 11:29 am). I get as far as a narrow corridor whose walls are made of train cars. I can’t reverse, and have to navigate back through twice. It feels like I’m towing a trailer or three. Headed back where I came now, I pull off a few wheelies — having the thought that I’ve only ever done that in dreams before (this is true). I soon notice (due to another person’s recent use of it) some pieces have shaken off the bike as I’m riding, importantly 3/4 of the front instrument panel. I manage to see a bit fly off over a fence and decide to hunt it down.

This neglected industrial area is officially off-limits, but also officially abandoned. I suspect it’s still quite inhabited though and used for all sorts of under-the-radar activity. This seems confirmed when I discover rows of diagonal pews inside one decayed warehouse, carefully draped in elegant purple fabric. I hide between these pews as I hear fumbling at the bolted front door. A few furtive-looking priests enter, and I consider announcing myself to avoid a potentially worse situation startling them. Yet I seem to overhear them talking about me without using my name, wishing perhaps to recruit me.

I do volunteer for some project cleaning up a diesel locomotive covered in grass. I scrub it’s side skirt clean of flecks and debris, leaving tall stalks of grass to grow proud and green over the engine’s back/top. It’s taken on an expedition up a marshy stream to study dinosaurs living nearby, blending in with the flora. Back in the yard we hide as a few mafia guys come to inspect the locomotive. A goon tears off the grass in one cohesive layer, saddening me even though I’m still proud of how healthy the greenery I helped grow turned out. We’re trying to trick these mafiosos somehow, and I know all my plants were integral to the plan.

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Dream Journal

Belle Delphine’s Tiny Skull Machine Concert

Belle Delphine invites me to her concert, from a corner balcony at the edge of the venue. She seems really nice and I’m even considering joining her Patreon/Onlyfans for $5. Held inside walled-in park grounds that usually hosts metal shows, once I’m inside I’m not surprised the crowd is mostly guys. It’s a pretty good concert for someone not otherwise known as a singer/musician.

Random piles of cool little toy skulls can be found in stacks, many different shapes & colors. I collect as many kinds as I can. In a confined screened-off space I come across a squat bulky machine totally covered in controls and meters, like Dalek steampunk art or fused-together antique medical devices. But my boating friend Marc Roper comments that to him it “doesn’t look like they’re just kludges” (a.k.a. greeblies, that is to say not just for show). Chicken John does an explanatory bit in the middle of the show for Belle in order to explain the machine: we are to drop the skulls into the top of the device to collect a variety of corresponding prizes. I’m happy that I’m set to collect a lot.

It’s now very crowded with fans behind the machine, among some open-air shelves. Crouched in a small ball near a top shelf, I try to cheer up a sad withdrawn little Triceratops (like Sarah from The Land Before Time).

Part of the show involves an experiment where the crowd is allowed to feel Belle’s outstretched leg. This seems to go well; perhaps something of the peer pressure of not wanting to be the guy that caused the fun to stop. She’s really engaged with her audience and seems to interact on the same level. Soon she is milling among the crowd after the performance and personally thanks me, using my name. I question aloud how she could’ve known my name, and my friends parrot back, perhaps mockingly, “I dunno Orin, how did she know your name?”


Driving a junker car through dusty parts of my hometown. As I drive along, alone, I chuck my signature ping-pong balls with skulls melted into them in the backseat. I’m listening to the radio (AM 1205?) because I don’t have my usual phone transmitter. Only just make a yellow light at a large intersection against a long line of cars going the perpendicular direction — while crossing, I maintain my eyeline on the tall tamarisk trees on the opposite corner.

From memory, I park in the driveway of the address I think I’m headed — 1284 — next to a woman parked in a car there already (it’s a long driveway so there’s room for me to pull right beside her, then back up). If this is the wrong address, I figure she’ll just have a close encounter and nothing will come of it.

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Dream Journal

all dreams can be interpreted as custom tax advice if you want

Ok, so first off, I should say that I’m not sure what the title means either, but it was funny enough to jolt me awake and get me to write this down — so there you go. Now here’s some custom tax advice (???):


Arriving at the driveway of my childhood home in a fully-laden pickup truck, where I switch out with her to drive. I roll the pickup up the drive a little too slow to make it all the way, somehow trying to do the opposite of backing up.

Unloading is uneven. On the walkway to the front door I randomly remember a colleague’s custom parameters he programmed for CRUD, realizing the letters (only three of which are present) are his daughter’s initials S, L, P and T.

The front door is open and I walk right in. The place has wall-to-wall Saltillo tile floors like I remember, and it’s currently getting cleaned for new residents to move in. I shout a greeting to the maid mopping the next room. I start to record a tour video so I’ll have something to better remember childhood home. The interior bathroom (across from my smaller childhood bedroom) is bigger than I remember, a wide open layout with stalls, high ceilings, and tile gutters. I peek around a couple corners and there’s a cavernous shower stall with a urinal on the opposite wall. I get the impression that it’s architecturally significant, perhaps something shared with the home next door.

I change my mind about the video, deciding it’s a wasteful thing to record my entire walkthrough. I climb over the ¾ wall out of the bathroom itself, and the space is bigger, public, with a few cheerful gay folks I seem to know milling about. Feels like a neighborhood thoroughfare.

Things turn serious and sweetly mournful as I abruptly switch into a greeting card poem moment: trying out different dinosaurs peeking just above a mirror-calm pond gazing at the moon, and reading poem text printed against the sky. Out of the water, the color-coded dinosaur group realizes they can inflate their necks bigger, making them feel larger and safer. In a humorous note, a big predatory crocodile standing right behind them realizes the same, inflating his whole body (looking like the croc in the Don Bluth movie All Dogs Go to Heaven).

Ending that sideline as suddenly as I started, now walking over the cracked tile floors of a derelict mall, toward the wide entrance of an abandoned Sears store. While trying to demonstrate something with my phone, I trip and it slides all the way into an opened elevator door. I monologue about the predictable timing of these kind of things, expecting the doors to shut on cue as I get within reach. But I make it, surprisingly. Honestly I’m still a little flummoxed.

I talk with a cool gay black guy wearing bug-eyed glasses at a check-in desk at the Sears entrance. A brief conversation ending with the Rocky Horror “antici-” … “-pation” joke, which he gets — but the other people at the desk find bizarre.

Peering though a lens on my phone at older pictures from this mall, I discover some that were taken in sequence. In frame-by-frame holographic 3D, I watch a messy, fun, 80s-looking Florida blonde, carrying shopping bags, in a red dress, slip/fall on her butt and laugh.


In our bedroom here in the Fartpartment, we’ve rescued a paper bird. It’s fragile, rough, an appearance like folded newspaper. After a long time caring for it, one day I see it actually flap itself down from the top windowsill onto the bed. It picks up a little upside-down ladies hat and flies it back up to use it as a nest.

I think strongly about how to keep raising this vulnerable little bird, cognizant of how it needs an outside space but that rain would destroy it. I come up with a plan to build a row of little birdhouses underneath the apartment’s outside stairway awning.

The paper bird grows up/time travels into a cute and athletic girl, reminding me of some girls I think I know (Kenna M., Lee T.). She’s wearing workout clothes, hanging out with me on our back stairway. I put my hand on her bare midriff in a flirty way, noting how much flatter it’s become since I last met her. I idly climb upwards on the underside of stairs, checking out the cool moss growing through the stair cracks, feeling very energized and athletic myself just being around her.

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Dream Journal

Brachiosaur Pal and Palace

A girl and her Brachiosaur friend explore a rough, wild beach together (reminiscent of Tuba and Hazel from Infinity Train.) She climbs down a steep, near-vertical sand wall. When he tries to follow, the wall collapses with a grainy crush, followed by child-like laughter.


In line waiting for the elevator in a big palace of entertainment, somewhere you might find in Reno, Nevada. At the top of its tower, I get the chance to sleep in a Brachiosaur skull. But when I’m in the hallway outside, on my way to the lone bed, I look out the window and realize it’s probably far too large to be a real skull — or am I small?

Waiting in line again, standing ankle-deep in tiny candy, like Nerds or Indian candied fennel seeds (mukhwas). Towards the end of the line, some bigger candy has seeped under the wall and into the walking path. The rules say we can take any of the smaller candy for free, but I sneak a few larger lozenge-shaped nuggets in my bag before the door checker of the room we’ve been waiting in line for.

I’m told to draw a ticket, which is a chance to win a prize. In the basket on the desk, I clearly glimpse a gold-rimmed one in the shuffle. Skeptical that it could be this easy, I reach in and grab it, to which the staff feign delight. I’m a little put off, to be honest, and the prize isn’t actually something I want. Now I’m quite happy I stole the bigger candies.

My wife uses my prize to take a free ride on one of the uncommon amusements, a motion-simulator mini-plane set in window frame in a wall that plays a black-and-white video game. I realize watching her play that this whole place is World War 2 themed, which I’d oddly missed until just now.

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Dream Journal

Small Apartment in Tower above Asian Grocery

A very small Japanese-style apartment on its own floor at the top of a tower. So tiny when I sweep rat poo with my feet, it flies over the balcony. Every surface is covered with all my possessions.

At the base of the tower is an Asian grocery. They have great prices on packs of beer, specifically Kirin — a big label advertising it above the glass door in a refrigerated aisle. The catch is: the beer is dehydrated and a pack comes in a single can. I remember this only when I realize I still have a can-pack at home in the (tiny) fridge drawer.

The grocery also sells antiques in an aisle behind the beer. One such curiosity is an elaborate frame drum in the abstract shape of a lizard, paint-daubed with black spots. Made with different striking surfaces for different sounds (including part that looks like a cheese grater). I play contentedly for a bit. While sitting there I watch a tiny dinosaur, a miniature Triceratops perhaps, be chased over some hills by a rabbit or other small mammal. Filming it on my phone, I bemusedly note that no one is likely to believe it’s not even CGI.

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Dream Journal

Out-of-Aquarium Fish, Psychic Baby Moment

At my kitchen table, the fish are swimming outside of the aquarium. Classic dream image for me. One fish bullies another into synchronizing their movements, which is entrancing to watch. From out of the aquarium, I lift out a curved plastic support to help a baby turtle out of it — a tiny little miracle which gradually coalesced from particles shed by the fish.

While I’m flying surveying a wide cul-de-sac, I watch as a rabid giraffe stampedes across driveways, a dilophosaurus one of its victims. Like a whole zoo went awry.

In another dream, I am introduced to a tousled black-haired baby, and lay my head on it. The longer I lay there, the stronger I feel the familiar feeling of a psychic link — the same feeling you get looking into directly into someone’s eyes. I pull back suddenly, startled by how strong this feeling is.