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Dream Journal

Family Schemes, Good Date/Bad Date

My extended family has been sending me on a series of themed errands all day. Eventually, I arrive in a private back room to find them in a circle talking intensely and in a suspiciously evasive way. My Aunt Carol (my mom’s brother’s wife), by way of informing me and bringing me into the conversation, tells me this involves an elderly uncle with the last name Kilit. She quizzes me, expecting me to know it was her maiden name — he’s her brother. He’s unexpectedly fighting the stipulations of an inheritance, which somehow threatens money for the whole family. The whole thing seems purposefully overcomplicated.

I take leave of my family and wander into an adjacent closed restaurant. The bar is riveted metal, the lighting dimmed, a liminal space. I find I get along well with several staff who are there preparing for evening diners. I feel comfortable among the relative poverty of the employees who sleep in hammocks slung in backrooms.

Moving onward, I go on a date with a girl walking together down the street. While she’s behind me and I can’t see her she lifts me into the air — surprising me with her ability to take me flying. We survey the countryside. I observe a timelapse of how plots of land are drawn, then grouped together, such that there’s always a house. Some houses grow as grand mansions while others remain farmsteads. It depends on the land, and less on who lived there.

On my second date with the girl I’m kept waiting in her room for some time. She wasting my time (and hers, in my opinion) railing a less attractive dude just because he’s newer. Many random visitors drop by. One pops in and says “is that what I think it is”, gesturing toward the closet. Turns out he’s here to acquire heroin. I nope outta there ASAP.

Categories
Dream Journal

Old Gas Station, Renovated for a Cult

I inherit a gas station and repair shop from a rich uncle. Good to own, simply to have such a resource, but the land itself is probably a multi-million dollar value. The neighborhood is rusty and industrial, but wooded and scenic, near a picturesque mountain bend.

Roof has plants growing on it and the sloped edges are chipping away with age. I note to my dad that several electrical inlets have started to swell (especially an old Christian cross near the road). Kids are inquisitive about my motorcycle as I roll it into the first set of doors.

I allow the visitors who show up to start becoming gurus. Everyone wears white clothing with yellow details over them. A game is played over the course of a day, where the cult members get more and more expository, grandiose. A car trunk starts blinking in the repair shop, which is a prize for our scrappy band, but by the end of the day the winner doesn’t even want it. There are blue finches in the gritty central courtyard — not endangered but it’s nice to give them a home.

“What is inevitable?” I ask a small group of disciples. Some petite blonde mishears me and gives a definition of a weird drug (N-N2-DL?) — dredged from her past life of sometime debauchery in the city. Eventually we agree, mostly, on a definition of “unavoidable”.

The phrase enters my head, profound and banal at once: “you can’t teach a god how to behave.” I awake with my arm powerfully asleep, hanging off the side of the bed.