Tag: gate

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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

Hitting it Off with Art Girl, bit of a Pokémon

Twilight in a round mid-sized stone cathedral, an art show of one girl’s work is displayed in every direction at eye-level height. I find it enthralling, wanting to know more.

Back in my own building, the grubby ground floor apartment of the girl includes a living room half open to the outside, cute little plants on the exposed basement walls. Her sideboards in the disused interior still have the landlord’s old stuff such as 80s radio scattered about. Next door (in apartment #306?) where the landlord’s family has just moved in recently, it’s a lot less grubby than expected, like an 80s nightclub in a mall — colored plexiglass panels, plush diner booths, knocked out walls — a multi-level living space big enough for the family not to have to see each other.

My wife introduces me to the girl who made the art, repeating her name like a Pokémon. We really hit it off; before I know it I’ve been pimped out and the girl is making out with me.

A twisty beige ground-floor office in the process of being decommissioned. As a stop-gap measure we often lock things in place so they don’t move — for example, a log in the hallway, or a heavy military-style desk made of enameled metal (like something I’d see on old Fort Ord during college). We’re setting little plants out on the exposed retaining walls outside, going back and forth down the unlit hallways even as someone pulls up in a red sports car outside, looking for someone I don’t know.

In a rolling almost artificial landscape, unfinished-looking, grid-like. Myself and a few associates are trying to get to a power plant I now own. In our way is a locked gate and barbed wire-topped wall abutting a rocky outcrop of a hill. Trading property here is like trading cards, and I only recently acquired the power plant (sight unseen) from a Mr. Burns-type character.

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Dream Journal

A Stadium like a Nation

A big rectangular stadium has been repurposed, serving to represent something much larger — a polity of some kind, a country or region. For a gateway it has a car boom gate, something I simply walk around. I search out my friend Autumn and meaningfully gesture at her to point out the gate’s existence.

I walk the circumference of the vast semi-enclosed space. At one corner, a convoluted passage leads to a locker room hallway. As I exit this corner, under some decorative wooden slats adjacent to the wooden walkway, I hide a soda can. The can may be a container for something else more risqué entirely.

As I complete my circumnavigation the search for a certain person is finally concluded. Seeing him, he seems very generic, someone so boring he’s almost a threat in his inoffensive blandness. He’s a relatively young father, overweight, maybe midwestern, a blond white guy. He’s to be designated as the “remainder” of the nation, someone outside the normal political moieties which cancel each other out, who should ultimately decide many issues. Not coincidentally, he lives in the same corner where the can was hidden. I’m left wondering if its contents will factor into future handling of this unassuming, yet discernably perilous individual.

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Dream Journal

Portcullis Dream

(Let me tell you about my dream this morning…)

We were walking up the stairs to your apartment. I was behind you. You opened your front door, turned around, and suddenly noticed me. With a gasp, you hit an emergency switch which slammed down a portcullis — a genuine medieval portcullis — over the entry. Immediately you recovered, apologized… a bit embarrassed perhaps… and began trying to retract the damned thing. It was stuck. There was a solid mechanism, but it was finicky, antiquated. This went on for a long while. It got awkward. I felt silly helping you from outside. I don’t know how we got it open. Or who. But the portcullis ended up on the floor. I don’t know if we just broke it down, or what, but by the end of the dream we were making out on top of it… metal spikes and all.