Tag: escape

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Dream Journal

Multi-level Video Game, plus NYC, lots of Bright Light Too

Under summery outdoor awnings in a backyard, I wait at a bench examining a pair of eyeglasses on the table there. They remind me of Plarvolia’s. Sure enough, I see her return with a group and I immediately get up to leave, assuming I must be near her chair. I expect neither of us want to see each other. I briefly make eye contact and nod in acknowledgement though, which feels assertive.

In a video game level, while escaping while chased by a gargantuan monster, I under a huge turning waterwheel. It has a strange double mechanism which rotates the wheel at the same time an arm sways the against/away the wall of the pool it’s in. Good to see the monster frustrated while I simply sit and chill.

The video game proceeds. An underwater level of a brightly colored colored mall where I discover an exploit of passing through the sunroof. This adds more time on the breath meter than it should, much more. I can gather pile of trinket loot, handfuls of rings. I go back a second time and find a room with a white abstract sculptural mechanism which activates a boss fight; with the breathing bonus it’s actually quite easy.

In our solarium I discover that my wife and I own a “paper wasp” tree which is quite large. It’s in a huge pot and obviously been there quite awhile. Probably quite valuable considering it’s rarity and development. Beautiful thing too, with delicate papery-textured bark and exotic foliage. I notice while I’m watering it that over time the trunk has curled spiral-like at the base, continually reaching for the nearest lighted window. I gaze out from the glass balcony at the evening skyline of a big city (New York I think) and chuckle, realizing that perhaps the tree isn’t so perfectly valuable as first thought.

Later, my wife is selling an old electronic toy of mine. To our surprise it’s neither a PlayStation 2 or 3, but a famed PlayStation 2.5. This is rare find and should be quite a rewarding sell.

I stand atop a tall square brick tower in a public pool in NYC with a few other people. It topples with us on it, cascading into the wave pool and shoreline. There was previously a different option we chose not to take. It turns out that, instead of being on the tower, we would’ve had to turn a spigot or something. I remember looking across the street at urban multistory residences, sparser than one might hope. Those unlucky enough have to put up with this noise every day. Not that it inspires me to be quieter.

I drag myself up to the beach and notice my wife (who is very young in this instance) masturbating on the seashore facing away from the water, toward some men. She stops as I approach. The men walk away up a ramp. I have to gather my hat, sandals, etc before I leave up the same slope. Near the base of the ramp entrance, my parents are standing — my parents in this dream anyway. They’re unhelpful and neglect to tell me that my stuff is right at the base near them.

I’m in the final levels of an urban maze: interior courtyards, themed shops with neon signs (back from the video game setting earlier perhaps) hidden back areas. I’m tracing my steps back from earlier levels I played here (near where the big monster chased me onto the waterwheel). I flip through dense layers of arranged material making up a packed sewing & fabric store which spans two floors. The courtyard it’s in is highly angular, irregular overhanging floors with empty residential windows lining it. The exit of the courtyard it’s so out of scale it feels like a corner drain. Along the next progression towards back where I started, I take a side track up old-timey wooden stairs to an unassuming door. Somehow reminds me of one that might bring to a psychic reader. But this one goes to more back rooms.

Within, past a small valley and up a hill there (bit like a Appalachian holler), I visit a community that played an interesting role in the Yugoslav war. The single small venue in town was a cafe with a split part of the building open to the street. The front window became a performance stage, with people gathering on the street outside for what became rock festivals. This may have been a loophole for some law against public rock music performances. The cafe now is a popular “quiet cafe”. I watch a commercial for it where a scruffy looking guy puts on a headset and starts blathering on a work call. The entire cafe unanimously shushes him, going around the room as he tries to turn a different direction.

One last image, which I didn’t properly jot down but which was my hypnopompic cue: an unfinished structure built of colored columns, open to the elements, set amid parkland, jauntily angled to the street. I meet someone there as arranged.

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Dream Journal

New Society of Yet-Learned Secrets

I ride on an open railcar through inhabited forest land. It’s like a terraced Santa Cruz mountains full of houses. Once I arrive, I sense that I’ve “woken up” in an unfamiliar post-scarcity society with very different social rules. I must take my time to learn their ways. There’s artifacts from when I was alive previously (hundreds of years ago perhaps) which I get to explain. One is a jade stone green surface with matching sticker, partially torn off and covered in illegible handwriting. I offer to finally clean it off since I’ve explained that it was quite mundane, and it’s treated as a joke. This is their ancient history, after all.

There’s something hidden though — not quite sinister, but a secret aspect I’ve yet to uncover. My pet rat Porkpie (of all people) finds a ways to get away, escaping on a raft across a dark sea/lake. Little guy is cleverer than I expected.

I’m seated at a communal table with my friend Phoenix and her toddler Moxie. Above the table is an angled bar of color-coded lights which resembles the floating plastic lanes of a swimming pool. The linear code represents people at the table I think; Phoenix is white, Moxie green because she’s a baby, several others. Someone jokes to our waiter that they should put up searchlights.

At that suggestion I partially jolt into different consciousness, my view is a spreading fan pattern of messengers being released from a fortress under siege. Through the hostile rocky desert scramble hundreds of little Chinese figures in traditional costume (with conical hats) looking like a golden age Disney cartoon. One by one they’re shot in various ways as the roaming searchlight of the enemy finds them — all but one figure that, by brute luck, escapes the exposed killzone and delves into bafflingly rocky terrain. They must then follow a circuitous route to stay out of sight to reach a second fortress… the searchlights must never discover it as the destination.

Before the saving rendezvous takes place, I’m startled awake but my wife (gently, I’m told) telling me it might be time to wake up, Orin.

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Dream Journal

House of Ukraine

Escaping a house which represents Ukraine, as besieged by the Russians. I was a journalist and accidentally became stuck there, making the most of it going from room to room. Noticing near the end they finally changed everything and cleaned up all the rooms, and are dragging away my big metal box. Yank it away and flee through the front hayloft door. I manage to warn incoming friends about a girl with a vagina between her digits (middle and ring finger), that she secretly works for the Russians. The paper topper for my box detaches and blows across street — I walk to retrieve it, thinking about the image of the Angelic Sword of Michael.

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Dream Journal

A Day at our New Home in the Country

A country house just off a main road somewhere small, rural California, where we’ve moved. My wife and I still have a landlord but are overall happy finally settled into the new place.

It’s bright midday and I seal up our younger rats, Pierre & Roscoe, making sure to stretch the three wire cage doors so the locks are tight.

Outside it’s so much quieter than the city. I ponder the neighborhood as I gaze down the dusty street where ours is the corner house. I haven’t fully explored the area yet. Feels like a hot day, summer. I observe a distinction with the city I never thought of before: here, people are spread out enough that you kind of miss them, back in the city it was so packed that you often like people less because there’s already too many of them.

All our old stuff made it there but most things still need arranging. A few items are out on the grassy brown lawn, or under a covered porch with built-in brick planting beds. Our building is old, and has a name on a vertical sign with green letters — something that sounds like a Chinese restaurant. There’s a smaller sign underneath for wayward out-of-towners, clarifying that it’s just an old name, this is a house, and they can find an actual restaurant a couple lanes down.

Back inside, I see Roscoe is out of his cage. I’m sure I locked it securely, and sure enough I see he’s managed to bend several wire metal bars at the side of the cage! I tell my wife and we’re not sure what to do. There’s a square patch of grass on the lawn where the cage would fit, and be blocked off securely, but the ratties might easily get overheated in the sun.

Someone reveals something about my parents I didn’t know (this part is confusing in retrospect as it’s a persona shift, perspective remains continuous, but the backstory isn’t from my l life). When I was first adopted, my parents kept me in this very house. They were inept, and couldn’t keep things up, to the point where they couldn’t keep me either. They only got me back much later, though I was too young to remember any of this.

Inside a few of us (guests and I) are playing around, searching through storage areas in the house. We’re also in part of a lobby for some unnamed organization, a nexus accessible from many locations. There’s a dried mud sculpture, arched and abstract, looking like the letter Π hunkering in the near distance. Old refrigerators containing long-term food stocks hold many curious root vegetables. Some are still viable, and I take one from the drawer with a 3-foot long taproot and swallow it down to the base as a trick.

Danny Glover is there among us, and soon after I’m beside him at a stone sink (I can think of no connection I have with Danny Glover, his presence is puzzling upon consideration). When I pull the long root out of my throat, the thin length ending in a tangled clump, I realize that it could still be planted in the dirt outside. Whether it’s the worse for wear being in contact with my stomach acid for an extended time, I simply won’t know until I bury it in a garden bed.

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Dream Journal

Bookended Startling Rat Dreams

As I lay on the living room couch, I hear an odd rat-like noise from our back room — but not identifiable as one of our pets. I’m a bit playful when I go to investigate but creeped out by a bunch of our pillows that’ve been slashed almost in half. In an instant I realize no rat or other pet could’ve done this, and a malicious someone in likely still in the house.

I bolt awake, heart pounding, from sleep on the couch… remembering that I couldn’t fall asleep there; I had to give one of our rattie boys his medication.

I’ve been tricked into “checking out” some sort of vacation retreat with a very culty vibe. I try to leave but quickly find myself mobbed by a crush of people who aren’t allowing me to go. I think one even delivers the “it’s for my own good” line; bone-chilling in these circumstances. One bespectacled man grabs my keys and puts them in his pocket. Struggling against the huddle of bodies I manage to retrieve the keys — though I’m almost alarmed they let me have them back. They’re reluctant to do anything resembling an unambiguous assault. I escape climbing through a bathroom window when I think no one’s watching, though at this point… I wonder if they are.

I’m assigned a new group at Burning Man while it’s halfway through (not much like Burning Man — more like a week-long summer camp in an elaborate multi-story wooden atrium). I’m paired with three affable Asian kids younger than me. We’re moved to a different bunk room (a frequent occurrence) and shortly afterwards my first group, of which I’m still kind of a part, gets assigned a room that’s closer. I sleep there as it’s a bit easier, especially moving all my stuff, but I feel disappointed and conflicted for abandoning my cool new friends.

While lying asleep in bed, I hear one of our pet rats crawl up onto my wife’s side. It makes its way across our pillows, feeling oddly familiar. It crawls under the blankets right in front of me and I peek one eye open. It’s a grey rat, but we haven’t had any grey rats since… I bolt awake, realizing that one of our babies that went missing two months ago, Silveroo, has returned.

But he’s not there. There’s no rat at all. I was, for the second time in a night, having dreams of rats, set in the very place I was actually sleeping.

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Dream Journal

Dating & Being Belle Delphine

I encounter the one and only Belle Delphine. Despite how famous she is, I decide to start dating her. This isn’t easy, as she has very high standards and it’s used to respect without feeling like a simp.

The dream switches to first person from her perspective. I escape via some back stairs into another area.

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Dream Journal

Escaping from a Life Among Dioramas

I’m a girl living in an apartment built into a rock outcropping, containing crystal protrusions, waterfalls, and garden diorama-scapes. A distinct relaxing Japanese feel. I make my way out of the enclosed 1-person space by navigating up a waterfall (much higher than expected), revealing that the apartment generously provided for me was also a restriction — there are much bigger areas beyond what was accessible before. I pass over a wooden gate into a back alley, with a tiny, quaint moat running along one side. I can now view my place and its exquisite dioramas from the other side, and it’s 1 of 3 similar apartments for elite long-term guests… guests of who, I cannot recall, if I ever knew. But if I can see so clearly, it seems perhaps our hosts were watching us, keeping tabs. A tiny snowfall lands on the miniature traditional town hall.

I’m angry at my brother Patrick, giving him an explicit warning in the car backseat. About what, I can’t remember.

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Dream Journal

Waited till Bedtime to Write This One Down

I am, after a long hiatus where I was kicked out of the in-group, back on Chicken John’s bus. We’re driving at night, sleeping in shifts, on some mission more serious than the usual Chicken bus trip. It seems he’s chosen to ignore the past between us, but while I’m fussing about with various jobs on the bus I realize that while I’m relieved to be back with my friends, I hardly trust him at all. There’s a soft, eerie glow which under-lights the driver’s seat that accentuates this.

After a wake cycle in the early morning, perhaps 7 am, the dream is echoed, reflected, continued. A group of me, my wife, Rich, perhaps others are trying to cross the Bay Bridge in Rich’s RV. There’s a closure, or a slowdown, or shutdown, and I end up re-routing us on a residential road through Marin, which is located about where Treasure Island would be on a normal map. The road turns triangular along a marina where homeowners have semi-privatized the road, and eventually we run into a yellow house which has an addition built blocking the road itself. I can tantalizingly peek between the corners to where the road beyond, but on examining the map zoomed-in I see only more privatized, road-blocking, rich-people nonsense.

I’m now sneaking about, avoiding some kind of mindless hunter-police. I’m breaking into my own home, a sandstone-colored villa. I parkour over a corner wall into the backyard, similar to the narrow gap from the yellow house earlier. I bypass a few armed guards by wending around their sight-lines. Now I’m in the long backroom, a wine cellar with sunlit arched pane windows. I crawl gecko-like along the stone wall, avoiding the searching guards, and find the alcove of the hidden room. The stray thought occurs to me, “I should really change this code, it’s too easy” before I tap the top left stone and it recedes, opening the false wall into my sanctuary/safe room. It’s a chill dark movie lounge with little colored lights and popcorn and a home theater. Like a cozy fabric-lined cave. I was really happy to spend time there.

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Dream Journal

it simply isn’t understood

In a wide upstairs apartment, I find myself in bed, suddenly noticing the remarkable beauty of a girl I know. (Perhaps out of superstition, I’m not saying who it was — but she wouldn’t be surprised to know I found her beautiful). Perfectly proportioned, and simply fascinating. I’m somehow allowed to just keep looking….

But when I touch her it’s frustrating. Trying to massage her, I can’t hear her feedback or instructions. Instead I end up cleaning a congealed mass of sweet potato/quinoa/smoothie.

My wife kisses me (to wake me up perhaps?) and I don’t recognize its a person. Like, it happens, but that there’s a person who does it simply isn’t understood.

Seems unrelated, but also: there was an escaped convict guy crossing a bridge across a bay, careening off the bridge onto New York’s shoreline. He and I shoot buzzsaws out our hands (as you do).