Tag: forgotten

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Dream Journal

Unforgotten Recordings

I uncover several recordings from 2011 made in Italy and South Africa that I don’t remember making. Certainly I don’t recall going to those places in my 20s, can’t exactly recall any occasion for going, but I suppose it was a long time ago by now. I’m using the new location feature of my recordings archive (note: this hasn’t been built yet). It’s hard to tell if these have simply been tagged incorrectly — i.e “Naples” isn’t the Naples in Italy — or if this is genuinely something I’ve forgotten. But they are uncanny nonetheless, and have a quality of a recovered memory… which in the best of circumstances, is exactly what my archive does.

One recording appears to deal with participating in an art event at a library. I helped decorate a whole chamber off the main modernist colonnade (perhaps like the modernist Palm Springs Public Library, except I’ve never been here). I only see the streamers hanging near the front, as though I didn’t bother to remember the room layout since I was actually looking outward into the main hall while I experienced what the recording recorded.

Another, from South Africa, appears to be from a time I was enroute to Australia and went exploring just for a few hours. I walk along a trashy yet beautiful Victorian-era street, witht both marigolds and broken parking lots. Nostalgic but I’ve never thought about it since I was there. Despite being tagged in my archive, everything is difficult to place. Events blend.

Some parts of the re-experienced recordings are difficult to place even now — it’s like I had been skipping through them looking for other things forgotten. There was part of a quiz where the answer was Tanzania, and I recalled a land of Muslim shawls and small pyramids in the corner of Africa — not exactly where Tanzania is. But it very much felt like something from another dream, a land starting with D, rectangular and overlaid almost with a grid-like plaid pattern. I had friends there, but it wasn’t a very populated country.

In one recording (either from South Africa or the library installation) I brought out a plastic bag of butterflies along with a tray of parrots and set them in the center of a room. I worry briefly about the butterflies, before remembering that they’ve survived being stored in that bag for years. Perhaps this was after the occasion with the pool…

One time I’m swimming in the pool in the backyard of my childhood home with my dad and brother. It’s twilight and the layout is more rectangular than normal (the hot tub isn’t near the fence). I arrange light for us with a long string of Christmas lights, still attached to the stubby tree. But this too has the feeling of being a recovered memory, and seems to occur in relation to the butterfly bag — but unplaced. Perhaps I listened to an earlier part of the recording later?

There’s only one recording from Naples specifically. For some reason I liked it best, though it was no more crystalline. I could verifiably identify myself, for sure, but I couldn’t piece together enough context (or recognize the voices) to identify who else was there or what we were doing. But it’s odd and interesting to find out that I went to Italy before… and must’ve forgotten. I watch some replay of casual mischief, me going onto the flat roof of
a tall square apartment block. Then I’m inside on the top level of a bunk bed overhanging a window, when I see Dara below. She stretches forward showing her nice hourglass figure and I can see on her silhouette the fine hairs covering her body. I eagerly call out, encouraging her. This causes her to pull back, so I try to rewind time. I do, but it doesn’t quite work — the reset is incomplete. What was I going to do different anyway?

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Dream Journal

Empty Apartment Rooms & Old Hostel

My dad has a very late in life baby who’s still small named Rubor. Sometimes it’s spelled with an eñe over the b, a highly unusual accent.

The two front rooms of our apartment have been emptied and I can spread out stuff on the floors, reusing the space for something totally new. The rooms seem much bigger — they *are* much bigger I think. But it’s still creepy to have everything gone, though.

I’m back to my original paid-job hostel, a flat-fronted shack (possibly made from shipping containers and roll-up doors) with graffiti covering the windows. Being here finally reminds me of a girl who loved me, who I simply forgot about. Somehow my time with her just never was revisited, her story never came up again.

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Dream Journal

Strobble Noople-Poopin

Alexx Sanchez is in my dream somewhere, I remember thinking “wow, it’s been so long! I don’t know if I’ve even dreamed about her before.” I’m sure I have, but no earlier than a few decades ago, she’s someone I last knew in high school.

Sharing a sizeable horde of money with Angelica R. We have to hide the burner phone after it’s brought up by third party friend, suspicious someone had taken the money, who doesn’t realize we have and are keeping the secret. We need to erase their memory… problem is such a technology doesn’t exist. do we just disappear on them and pretend?

A water dispenser on a top cabinet leaks. While I’m up there, I grab a plastic diner-style coffee pot — my dad (or someone related to me somehow) throws it away because don’t want those hot microplastics in his body.

From atop a structure, I spot a beautiful baby tapir in shades of blue and pink wander into our camp. Gorgeous creature. I remember too late to try and get a photo and it’s a little too far away. I get one distant photo and a bit of shaky video. I go to prepare a grain snack for the critter. But the grain shelf has a forgotten jar of prepared oatmeal which is now a science experiment. I forgot to eat it. Best left alone perhaps.

Regarding the Title: it was just a lot of fun, some phrase definitely within — yet assuredly unlocated — within the night’s stories.

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Dream Journal

Needs a Pirate Font

So I’m only messing around here. Just now added the ability to choose fonts in my Dreamkeeper, the app I made to write my dreams in every morning.

Oh wait! Sorry. Not every morning. I was pretty good there for a bit, had a 5-day streak. It always tapers off though. This morning, despite efforts, I couldn’t remember a single one. And I never should feel bad about this, should I? Cuz they’re my silly dreams… and after all why would it matter. The feeling of “sad” is just a balancing feeling (a counterweight, a reaction, a shadow) trying to tip me to do the thing I like doing in the first place.

So the thinking in my head goes: well, maybe if you had a pirate font, you would’ve written that silly pirate dream the other day! This is a sensible and good thought. The dream was pretty nice in it’s weird way… kind of a sad memory hole way, admittedly (which is ironic given that you didn’t write it down…)

The dream was all about a group of pirate people who are pretending to forget a person — and that even when done perfectly, there’s always that strange feeling, the feeling that you’ve forgotten something. The feeling that you *know* what you’ve forgotten. That you can remember that person, in intimate detail. But you’re pretending you can’t, so you don’t. Really you’re not pretending to forget, you’re pretending that other people have forgotten. Both just playing a game of memory chicken. And in my dream, the captain who loved the captain was almost confused by this. He remembered. He knew he remembered.

I wish they hadn’t canceled the gay pirate show…

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Dream Journal

Double Dream Sequence

A long set of story beats, repeated — the same dreams twice. If this was intentional or not, I don’t recall. I do remember waking up afterwards and wondering if I should write the story down, thinking it might be important, but they’re effectively evaporated.

Burning Man spent mostly scavenging. A sand quarry adjacent to the site. A small plane made of plastic you climb inside, used by the crew, with a single front facing plastic window — seems terrifying but I can imagine myself flying it. In a trash can, I discover two discarded pet slugs which are still alive. In the long canal of sand on the ridge, I leave as soon as I realize there are still workmen (who have yet to see me). Red jelly beans chewed up and dried in a jar into pebbles, then dumped out on the ground by my cousin Betty.

On a pair of stilts, I run after a departing train with a sackful of quarters in my pocket. It speeds up rapidly, but I’m not worried I won’t catch it was the stilts carry me at great speed. There’s a section missing, like a film that skipped, which those of us watching realize having seen it before.

During a theater performance, the Spanish royal couple have their view blocked by a large hexagonal cracker — ostensibly for security purposes, though deliberate provocation seems also likely.

A valet service has a wall of red ribbons and white ribbons, coded to mark self service. Too expensive for me to get myself.

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Dream Journal

Found and Lost, The Old House that was Ours

Revisiting the old house I sort of co-own, where I stored a lot of my stuff sometime in the last few years. Uncovering newspapers reveal records carefully arranged on the table, laying out a pattern of which ones I’ve already recorded. A big book, like a newspaper log, has something to do with Dr. Hal. The speaker cables running up the walls are thick and I remember they’re painted the color orange from their previous room.

Outside, I unlock several latches of a wooden truck cabin — the topmost is the only locked. My wife helps, sitting on top of it, but I ask her not to make fun of me as I’m worried about my pets inside: a little arrangement carefully made of light bulbs, moss, and sticks, with a little spider sealed up in each one. It’s been so long that all the moss that which lived is dark green, and all that died is bleached white. One of the spiders comes out and waves, which warms my heart (but actually only proves the seal wasn’t good enough and this might not even be the same spider). I look inside a nearby bag and discover it’s full of my stuff I’d forgotten about, junk drawer items and the like. It’s been so long, I might use this stuff again.

I decide I’m going to find and buy this place. After this decision, what happens may be time travel, or it could be searching to repeat the luck of finding the place but with a similar house.

I get a hint to search near “Cold Key” creek, in southern California or Arizona. The climate isn’t what I’d want to settle down, but maybe the community I find will be a bit cooler. Peeking in through a window in the rocky canyonside, I spot my first girlfriend. I pause time by snapping my fingers; everything remains still except her — her head looks like my pet naked rat Nüdl, or an Afghan hound, although I don’t note her different appearance at the time.

Working my way down the track of the creek, I come across a run-down desert community with a few empty buildings. One beige chunky run-down Victorian seems exactly like the old place, but for some reason I pass it by (maybe I can’t follow the same timeline precisely?), looking around the rest of the dusty neighborhood. I spot what could be a futuristic mosque, emerging in rendered shapes piece-by-piece from the ground, black ovoids stacking through each other to build up something like a stepped classical colonnade.

Eventually I find a torn-up former restaurant kitchen, a little low-slung 1-story on a concrete lot, that I preternaturally perceive as correct. It’s crowded with people trying to plan things together, my friends and collaborators. I’m bustling in the middle with them, trying to squeeze through what was the kitchen service window and the hole in the structure (to it’s right) where a door was removed. There’s a cardboard box of stuff there which I recognize as mine, my first teapot from CostPlus, the white one, and an oddly shaped pitcher with a flat-top handle and beak-like pour-spout — one that has a name that I don’t recall.

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Dream Journal

Little Left-Behind Things at My Old Neighbor’s House

My late friend and neighbor Pete Goldie’s house. Old parking meters have been charmingly repurposed into shelf supports outside. I spot a few stolen telescopes too. An old plant rests on high shelf under the front window, with a hard-to-pronounce scientific name (arbracht-racht perhaps?) It’s big broad succulent leaves look like green Zerg creep, its brown hard woody patches overgrown the pot sides. It’s been there so long, been left to it’s own devices, I’m almost sure it must be forgotten.