Tag: dog

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Dream Journal

Beast Outside Cafe, Beauty of Diner

I’ve been dispatched to check out Beauty and the Beast cafe, in a double decker bus. There’s more story before this but I can’t get myself to recall more. I pass through the entire layout and ponder what I’ve seen in a smaller area behind it, above road level. I’m people-watching, happening to see a small fancy-looking yorkie dog plodding purposefully around the corner, no owner in sight. Hm… I’m not familar enough with this region to understand whether I should be concerned and do something about it. My companion introduces me as Neil, which in this story is my deadname that I didn’t even know they knew.

I go up the hill outside, exploring further into this land I’m visiting (Alaska, I think). It’s a glorious climb. I take my first step onto late-season snow with a satisfying crunch. There’s a geometric dome structure that’s prismatic and pretty, a puzzle of some kind. Summiting the hill I come into view of a famous diner, fully as picturesque as any tourist brochure could hope for, with massive snow capped peaks in the background. It’s a ideal image of classic rugged Americana, with classic cars and station wagons nearby. Turning around, I discover something of interest to me personally, an abandoned building with a plaque outside, reading simply “Train Ruins”. Some relic of railroad infrastructure that, in it’s way, is as beautiful as the postcard-worthy diner and mountains uphill from it.

Unusually, I only got half this dream down after I woke in the morning. I had (as is frequent) intended to write it down completely, having put in the effort to remember it while lying in bed during my typical hypnogogic time. I was still able to recall *enough*of it to be satisfied.

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Dream Journal

Band Hotel Storage, Free Nowheresville Home, Movietime Interruption

I’m tracing the early crimes of Phil Spector, before the kidnappings. I’m with one of his bands at a hotel and he’s abandoned them. The realization of this is slow. Eventually I’m begging the hotel staff to help us find a place to store a piano. A staff member disappears through a reinforced metal service door, leaving me anxious as I wait next to it. Another staff member warns me to step back, and I assure him I didn’t plan to follow. Hours pass, and I sit outside at a temporary plastic table, surrounded by fancy guests, with my cheap water bottles. I’m far less dressed up, just waiting for an update on storing the piano.

In a vast industrial area, there’s a secluded courtyard with two apartment blocks, feeling like a tight-knit community, possibly in Anaheim or even Antarctica. I live in a home there for free. The layout eerily mirrors my childhood home, making me uneasy. I sleep in the room that would have been my parents’, and I try to describe to my wife how it feels to be surrounded by these familiar yet disorienting surroundings. Outside, the narrow backyard has pathways and large trees, and I spend time planning how to adjust their positions to modify the shade, having nothing else to do.

I’m watching a movie in a theater, discarding the tiny bones from my chicken snack on the floor. A greyhound dog starts bothering me as I sit in a single chair ahead of the other rows. Eventually, I move closer to the screen and concession bar. A young girl sits across from me at a cheap temporary table, chattering nonstop, even annoying her friends. I drag her by her hair across the slick floor and dump her outside, which her friends seem to enjoy, but I continue talking to her afterwards. She’s now naked, complaining yet acknowledging how she’s being a pain. She finds a scooter on the street with my old blue leather motorcycle jacket draped over it. The similarity is striking – it looks identical, and the scooter is the same color as mine, with a brown battery that doesn’t quite fit under the seat. The memories it stirs up make me emotional. The scooter appears to have a loose security chain, and its back wheel is missing.

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Dream Journal

Three Wines: Hard, Mineral, Spicy

At the end of an unpaved road in the desert, dunes on either side. Searching for a spot to park and sleep in the overland SUV. Up a short side road is a private campground, but they’re full of long term RVs after recent redevelopment. I get the impression people aren’t even staying there.

Viewed from above, I survey another hilltop location once a vantage for scenic stark beauty, recently built up with houses. A bit of the outback lost to civilization. Overpriced houses, packed tight, the parking all in the center of a cul-de-sac. They cite new houses right up against fences built the year before, knowing the residents only work in offices nearby and couldn’t care less.

We leave the end of the dusty unpaved road, passing through a rough-hewn log gateway — something you might see built by the orcs of Warcraft, yet having the semblance of an old English gallows gaol. We’re waved on; everyone here knows us. Past this point the car accelerates, as if on a track, rocketing toward a towering city. Sooner then expected we pass under vine-laden bridges and all manner of infrastructure. It’s so sudden that while I’m zoning out looking at an apartment building I’m struck by the baffling thought of just how many human lives are now within my eyeline.

An unexpected bit of FOMO while camping at an event that occurs during Burning Man. Cited on a hill with acres of underground bunker to be explored, dirty, dangerous, and wild. A total of ten levels. I’m warned that the lowermost has toxic mud that can get tracked up when trod by the unwary.

Sharing a house with longtime roommates. The suggestion of renovating the walls comes up while I’m off nearby playing on the floor, and I notice that behind each of the wall panels — and I deliberately check them one by one — is pressure treated wood. We couldn’t replace them if we wanted. I’ve been quiet for a while and wait for the opportunity to speak up, hoping I needn’t wait too long.

A man is hoping for a new income stream by advertising his well-trained dog as a performer. The dog is loyal and easily performs for the scheduled entertainment industry boffs who’ve come to scout for talent. I’m pleased to watch him do so well, but understand there’s only so many roles one dog can get; he will always still look like himself. I can already imagine the man (who reminds me of my cousin Ricky) pushing his dog into more absurd and dangerous stunts with the goal of getting more business. I can imagine it getting bad enough to border on animal abuse.

Ensign Tilly fakes her death at an airlock. She lands underneath in a metal rack.

Three wines: hard, mineral, spicy. No explanation left of this detail, a curiously distinct detail nonetheless.

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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.

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Dream Journal

Ocean at the Window & Messages Sent by Past Self

dark water

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).

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Dream Journal

Bedroom Remodel and Big Pool

Mom and Dad’s bedroom in Cathedral City. Furniture has been mostly cleared. Bathroom has had fixtures removed, replaced with single sink. Dad is going to remodel to make the bathroom smaller since Mom is no longer around. In my Cathedral City bedroom, the bed has been moved to be by the corner window. There are white curtains, and a neighbors dog sticks his head in to lick my arm. Our Japanese neighbor seems bothered by this and tries to adjust the curtains. I haven’t made any solutions to the bedroom yet, so there aren’t any clever shelves on the walls (for hidden condoms for instance). There’s a computer desk right next to the bed. I have more room to work with and I’m trying to imagine how I’m going to use it.

In a very big pool connected to the ocean. It’s the end of California street, which is one-way. The waves are large enough that ships would have a hard time sailing through them, that’s why it’s one-way. The next street over has even higher waves. The ocean looks dark, cold, like Eureka, but I’m not scared of it. I’m swimming with many acquaintances, none of whom I know in waking life. There’s a man who comes up, is very angry. He claims none of the males there exist, because he didn’t sire them/create them. I alternately cajole him and sympathize while he’s being floating around on a bogey board. All the while the waves are crashing around.

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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.”