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Dream Journal

Legend of Gastromo

I’m on a date with my crush (who won’t be named here for now). We eat in a narrow restaurant on a corner, and it’s… ok. We leave, a bit weary, then turn left and find an open garage next door. There’s a bubbly alt-culture girl who tells us about the art collective operating there, the project they’re working on. We barely have energy to engage with what sounds like a cool local thing.

Besides being tired nothing goes particularly wrong, but I remember feeling like it turned out a disaster of a date.


Marissa Tomei is one of my teachers. She’s gets in some unusual positions, backflips and the like, in some half-walled area with a hexagonal backdrop. She (or someone nearby) reminds me of the unopened vape juice bottle I’ve stored here for awhile, that I meant to give as a present to my brother.

Turns out I didn’t read the label properly. I thought it was peanut butter flavored — weird but not outlandish. But the still-sealed playful yellow bottle, sitting near an upturned chair where I left it, is a bizarre flavor I’ve never even conceived: “Clear Onion Butter”. Not something I would necessarily give as a gift. I hesitate to open it though, knowing rules about buying new vape juice have changed and I’m no longer sure how easy it is to get anymore.

Curiosity gets the better of me (only live once and all that) and I crack it open. It’s utterly strange as a flavor, but the uniqueness grows on me: clean, a creamy smoothness like butter, with the oddly transposed delicious light smell of cooking onions thrown in. I give it some time then very much start enjoying it. Who knows about the onion breath; I forgot to even consider it.


Later I’m on a bus made of bricks, or perhaps driving past many brick buildings. I have to start yelling to the driver that two people need to get off, that he needs to flip the bus around so the exit will be on the right side. The bus stops but on the wrong side. I’m about to have to explain this when the two people (my dad and some other adult male, maybe an uncle) thank the driver and descend the exit at the back corner of the bus. Frustration turns to reflexive self-critique — I completely forgot you could use those steps and I don’t know why.

Two girls took my single bus seat a long while ago, and after waiting they finally get off the bus too. My backpack is still piled there, along with a cast iron skillet. I was in the middle of cooking when my seat was stolen — the meat and veggies needed to be flipped long ago. Annoyingly, a youngish guy comes up and seems to think he has a claim to the seat too. Ugh.


Just now, I went to title this entry and realized ”Legend of Gastromo” was one of the first things I wrote. The title was just there when I woke up; a whimsical little evocation. Useful. Sometimes choosing the title can be my least favorite part.

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Dream Journal

Civic-Minded Unusual Dilemmas

A voting station is located at a sunny plant-lined street corner in my neighborhood, near the Five Markets grocery. A older mom is setting a bad example by parking herself in her camping chair too close to where voting is happening, advocating her causes, believing she’s not breaking the law because as an experienced mom she only has good intentions.


I’m volunteered/recruited to serve in an official capacity on a committee fulfilling the protocols of French justice. We’re brought into a long narrow indoor space with all manner of investigatory equipment stowed away in compartments. One such instrument activates a reenactment of the perpetrator’s statement. It’s a gray-haired Jewish lady, older but not elderly, who appears very evidently happier locked away and isolated in her own boxed-in world. Inconveniently, the transgression she is accused of committing seems both 1) intended to have gotten her locked away, and 2) not serious enough to merit such “punishment”. An ethical conundrum thus results for we judicial volunteers.


Inhabiting an odd communal outdoor space comprised of a large wave pool interspersed with metal tool lockers as tall as a man. Periodically other men and I rummage around in the wire-walled lockers to fetch tools for one job or another. I’m less experienced than most of them and might be doing an apprenticeship. One of the friendlier and artier guys demonstrates his solution to moving audio between distant parts of the wave pool, crossfading between top speakers and bottom speakers, creating an illusion of living sound.

I’m assigned a certain one of the locker-tops close to the wave machine, where sea creatures like starfish and barnacles crust heaviest. I am to use the roof for lounging and my home base. A teenage girl named Megan is randomly paired with me to share it. She’s lanky and skimpily dressed, stylishly suntanned, with a breathy unpolished voice. On first meeting she’s immediately suspicious of my maleness, giving a speech about how we’ll never sleep together and don’t get any ideas, et cetera. She says this to me while laying on her stomach in a bikini, sunglasses pushed down her nose, gazing at my shirtless torso. We’ll be sharing this intimate little room-sized island for several months… and this is the first thing she says to me. Whether Megan realizes it or not, the two of us having sex has become an immediately apparent eventuality. I respond to her haughty pronouncements with only a wolfish grin.

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Dream Journal

On the Asteroid

Sitting around with my family, I introduce my brother Chris to the girl I’m dating, Kasey (!) though they have trouble seeing each other as there’s a column between them.

A brief virtual visit to a terraformed asteroid that’s become very high tech and high density, a beautiful panoramic ground-level view with detailed sculptural high rises and alien beaches, inhabited by a sophisticated race of space orcs.

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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

Boat, Bus, (Another Bus), and a Pretty Good Date

On a boat, minding my own business reading. Three lavatory cabins sit on the left of the boat, bobbing widely up and down in the spray. I’m friendly with the boatman, and we take a 15 minute break on a shoreline so I can get up and stretch my legs, and take a pee break outside those challenging lavatories. I watch as a water pressure rocket shoots into the sky.


Asking a girl I know out on a date. (As it happens, this girl will later become my crush.) We’re at a college, riding around on student buses, among huge institutional buildings with wide lawns laid out on a grid. I point out to her the many little groups of animal sculptures placed on balconies of an incomplete building, supposedly a tradition in Arabia and the Emirates. One group of wolves, though, is alive, and we watch enthralled as they stalk across the empty road outside our bus windows.

We go somewhere inside a big university building, a place with high-ceilinged two-story elevators. A maintenance man actually points out how they’ve recently made them nicer. There’s somewhere I think would be nice to take her for a date, but when we get there it’s a student mental health clinic (maybe we mis-navigated, maybe they moved the location). I figure this out looking through forms over the light of a desk lamp, politely decline their services, and take her somewhere nicer.

We find a plain rectangular room with a bed. I ask her directly if she’d like to have sex. Her reaction is everything: she ponders with her finger pressed to her lips, eyes cast upwards, gently scratching her now bald head. It’s a subtly amusing overacted display of thoughtfulness, and I take the time to evaluate her unique beauty. Finally she turns to me and pronounces a simple, conclusive “yes”. I smile, but realizing we haven’t actually had any regular fun yet I change tack. We snuggle up back-to-front and proceed through a card I have, a written series of jokes and responses, and she quickly picks up on it. We start to form a bond.


Again I’m a young kid, reading on a bus this time. Keep my tiny fuzzy rat Pierre under my fuzzy sweater, with the waist tucked in. My reading is interrupted by a bus guard (seem like a lot of rules on this bus) who scans me with handheld detector. But I feel uncharacteristically fine about it, and don’t worry about Pierre. My dad sits in the seat next to me. While I’m reading, the left lens of my glasses comes loose and blows out the window. I quickly try to remember the street, 45th I think, so we can go back and get it. However, the next street is 11th and the street after that is labelled 11:11.

I attempt to improvise, putting a grid of various colored glitter-water into a cat-eye-shaped lens and frame. Remarkably, the lens is the correct size, yet has a crunchy ice texture that makes it useless for reading through — but fascinating to look at. I study it intently and wonder what I could use it for, my reading forgotten.

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Dream Journal

A Twin with a Tail

Massively sped up time-lapse of one early civilization, a primitive community building itself from raw nature over generations of real time. Just as a thought comes that “they’ve reached the stage where they need walls to protect what can now be destroyed”, and one wall of an enclosure has been built, I watch as a gigantic rhino beast smashes in and tramples all their work into splinters. I realize: this is my ancestry, although not a part which survived.


At Burning Man, I lounge with many friendly acquaintances in a communal camp where we spend most of our time. This day we’re in the midst of a low-key engineering competition. I go on repeated walkthroughs of a semi-outdoor hardware store scrounging for the right supplies. The desert is less dusty than usual, more crunchy.

Dara Vinne introduces me to her twin sister, called Dana Vinne. She appears mostly identical but has lived a distinctly different life — she was born with a clumpy, fleshy, twirled-up tail. I find I’m still just as attracted to her, which is an odd conundrum; I feel like the tail should make a difference, or that my existing intellectual attraction to Dara should instead favor her, but… well, no conclusions there.

I get a good look at the tail while we’re all sitting around naked. In the open space between couches she’s facing away from me, semi-squatting on a mattress. Her tail gives the conflicting impression of both a deformity and a banality. I watch then as she lazily maneuvers her hips to hump down onto a fresh tampon, driving it in no-handedly. Vulgar but bemusing, comfortable with her body and her company, the shocking gesture comes off as bizarrely endearing. Uncommonly feminine, too — a rakish femininity that’s happy with gross-out humor even at one’s own expense.

Later I pass by a camp on the corner where I again spot her (Dana Vinne), and consider backtracking for the chance to hang out with her. But I soon notice several other individual twins from my communal camp all headed that direction. I decide there must be a twins meeting of some sort, and head back to my own camp… still very curious about this new person.

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Dream Journal

Kiss from a Girl who Found Me

An auto updating input window surrounded by a circle overlays the dream. Soon, if gets updated with info from Madeline Mladich.

I’m lying on the top back bunk of a row of communal bunks one day, reading Wikipedia while everyone else is out. A bald heavyset dude peeks in randomly, making an expression like like I might be in what he feels is an incorrect bunk. So I move down to the lone single level bed, then after he leaves, into a lower bunk next to it where I’m unlikely to be noticed. That’s where a girl finds me… a girl that seems to have specifically sought me out.

After a brief but very good conversation (where I somehow feel compelled to convey the importance of my contributions during the night, when I usually choose to work) she leans over the bed and gives me an absolutely glorious kiss. Our time available together, I realize, is far too short, and I get the idea to have her write down her info. The input window hovering over the dream updates — I feel like our relationship is solidified, saved in the computer memory sense. Madeline Mladich.

I show her some of my work, zooming around a simplified model of the city (still quite complex), overlaid onto the city itself. We’ve recently expanded, and I’m aesthetically placing more structures in the center of map, choosing as much as possible to stay away from downtown and the older well-established parts of the model.

Later on I’m walking up and down the narrow communal hall, knocking on white-painted doors looking for anyone who knows what the pink glitter paint I keep seeing on the doors means.


I’m in a part of the Ukraine. I explore a probably abandoned white building glinting in the weak spring sun. All the walls and ceilings are glass window-frames, like a greenhouse, but I get the impression this was light manufacturing of some kind. There’s a hobo-like character on roof helping me, and he spots a terminator robot outside for me to avoid. I can see it’s dark outline and the bright red blotch of it’s eye.

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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

Dirty Tortoise, Maral Remix, Cryotherapy

A desert tortoise is nesting in the front yard of my neighbor’s house across the street from my childhood home in Cathedral City. It’s dug quite a dirty, poopy-colored crater gash in the lawn.

I go inside a Middle Eastern music store just where their house was, and ask for Maral Ibragimova. He not only has her, but the guy and I listen to a pretty good remix together. I nod my head as I make eye contact. I then take the first opportunity to leave as he helps another customer, to avoid the intensity or awkwardness (though I feel embarrassed about not buying anything).

Getting ready for school and I think I have 45 minutes to make it… it’s like 6:45 or 7:45. Turns out it’s actually the afternoon, but it’s also not a school day.

While out on the lawn, I notice my faded green striped belt that’s faded significantly over time (and which I incidentally saw a photo of yesterday) has been redyed.I feel like I was having this exact thought in front of my computer only 12 hours ago perhaps.


In the state of Iowa, with a pickup truck. There’s an official state urn or statue memorial, a concrete cup with words ringing it, “Mayor Of City Of Los Angeles”, referencing some historical event (sounds like a ship name to me). Thinking about how California tends to draw in outsiders, how it’s good at it, how there are increasingly two countries now in America.

I visit my brother Chris who is working front desk of a nice wellness office out of state. I try to float through the front desk’s window counter to say hi to him, playfully annoy him a little. The gap is too small though and I don’t fit. I float over the waist high office gate, asking a little girl walking passed why she doesn’t float or fly herself. She claims she’s scared, or not allowed to, or doesn’t have enough practice. Interestingly and curiously evasive.

I slip into a cryotherapy bed, something new in their facility that my brother wants me to test. It is both thrilling and relaxing, oddly so, and I don’t remember much of being in there though I remember being inside for a long while. The angled plastic top has built up a lot of condensation while I’m in there. I find a bogus parking ticket for my truck, despite having parked legally, in the wellness centers parking lot, per instructions and with permission, in a place where they can’t take it unless they’re called. I know I can fight it, but am still annoyed at the gall.

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Dream Journal

Prison in the Deep Hills

Tegan, teenage girl I meet who wants relationship but we have to split up for a bit. In saying goodbye I pronounce her name as Reagan, then Regan, then Teagan. As I’m lying on floor, she does ridiculous poses with her torso distorted, making her junk look ridiculous too, and I ask and take a photo up near her crotch. Somehow this proves (and is meant to prove) she does really like me. A worthwhile souvenir, and an image strong enough to survive the whole night’s dreams.


Falsely imprisoned in a remote location, somewhere in the occupied Tibetan mountains. Sewing a pattern of beads into what passes for camouflage. Discovering a former prisoner has left instructions to a map crafted into a hillside, showing a multi-day escape route. Guards suggesting everything was washed out in a flood. Gathering together small colored objects of various shapes for some prisoner display, I instead arrange them in a replica of a map to the map.

A road passes outside the prison. Against the roadside slope, I secretly bury a colonized tray of mushroom starter under a garden bed. It looks like the same beaded camouflage. Passing by on the curvy mountain road are automated robotic garbage cans, cows with their directions pre-programmed. I cling to the underside of one briefly before it skids off-road, not having been programmed for added weight.

Close by in the mountains is the Akrokorinth, much closer than expected. Perhaps 27 meters. It’s a walled funeral arena.