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Dream Journal

Inside A Toy Megastructure

An area for therapy goats up an indoor slope. I’d love to have my own goat. I spend awhile on this dim disused space of low ceilings then eventually continue. Odd that I can’t tell if it’s familiar or my first time exploring. I peer out from a high window from within this megastructure I’m inside, a highly decorated windowframe that feels like a toy, between metal bars and through open shutters.

Down in a flat area, a courtyard or entrance of grayish square-paneled floor and walls. Overly modernist, open architecture with no right angles. New dog brought back, Charlie. The name feels like a take on Henry (our first pet rat).

Helping Grandma to use a strange socket with her oddly shaped flat fork-like plug. Shes using a Amtrak navigation module connected with it, something I simultaneously don’t want to deal with but which I’m also curious about.

Cache of papers — don’t know what they were about. They were there. (Later this day, I’ll find a folder of important documents for something I’ve been meaning to sell which got soaked, and I’ll have to dry all of them.)

Near a big house, a complex really, I’m walking through winding garden paths of rosemary. I want to use the kitchen I know of which is attached to the main building. I have cum on my right hand so I only touch anything with my left — like the doorknob. The kitchen is large but cozy, in a French style, laid out so that you can browse book titles on the shelf across from the built-in toilet. The raised bathroom annex is there as a convenience for chefs’ long cooking sessions. The bathroom is really why I came. For a good while I somehow don’t notice a short, older French woman whom I know standing near the middle of the kitchen, naked and almost prepped to step into the shower. I make apologetic to her and resign myself to not using the bathroom here.

While working near it’s aquarium, I hear one of the two new tropical fish flop out the back of the tank. I immediately have to start moving things under the bookshelf with the goal of retrieving it. I don’t know if I manage it…

The night’s dreams were saved by casual and repeated reviewing, less arduous than I’ve had to work at in times past. I know I missed parts though, and I know I took too long to finalize. Nevertheless I managed to actually save them, which has been difficult to pull together recently. The technique is always a practice.

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Dream Journal

Pet Store Rattie Daycare Thievery

Cozy inside during a bright summer day. Watching pleasant projector slides (letters with cool patterns punched within) hanging out with a kid just to pass the time. It could be babysitting, but we’re chill enough it doesn’t feel that way. Elsewhere, other adults fret and work preparing for something while we have an idyll.

On the the kitchen counter (like my childhood home) I find the last crab claw left out. I clean it out and wonder if I should ask if it was left there for a reason.

At a pet store, I’ve dropped off
my rats Martin and his same-age buddies in a high wooden display cage. We successfully bet no one would try to buy them. I break them out despite being directly across from the young clerk, essentially treating the store like rattie day care. I walk right out — stealing my own rats back from where I didn’t even ask to stash them.

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Dream Journal

Christmas Night Dining, Christmas Morning Sunrise

Former crush is asleep in our spare room next to our bedroom. She’s partially hidden by a wall and there’s a feed on the opposite far wall showing a corrected perspective of what would be my point of view of her back, showing her as deep in slumber. I find this comforting despite that we’re in the middle of a move; I wasn’t sure if letting her stay here was a good idea, afraid she might be nervous. I’m reassured that it’s a good sign at least if she’s deep asleep.

I’m in a large enclosed industrial space, maybe a warehouse sized catering facility. There’s a small semi-independent kitchen/bar space in a corner. Has a bit of character to it, hasn’t been used for a bit but seems everyone who uses it leaves their own little token. Someone observes that maybe it can serve as a metaphor for the US Constitution. As I’m packing up this open-sided room inside a room, I’m talking with another former crush, Dara. We’re coworkers and I relate my recent experiences with the complicated new problems of my more recent former crush. She’s fairly sympathetic, and it’s a nice bonding moment.

My high school creative writing teacher Miss Fitz is drunk in the hallway of her apartment building. I help retrieve her and carry her back to her apartment. Later, My wife and I are having dinner with her father-in-law over Christmas night –something like 3:00 a.m. in a fancy restaurant. The slightly frazzled inattentive staff give us a table that hasn’t been cleaned yet. Bowls left out for previous diners cigars, special smoking implements. My father-in-law comments “good for clipping beagle” (a kind of cigar I take it). Finally dawn has arrived. Having waited for it outside near lake, it seems I just missed the sunrise on Christmas morning. It’s still beautiful and crisp and quiet so I don’t regret it too much as I navigate a path between parked cars filled with reverent vacationers, headed toward the shores of a cold fresh mountain lake.

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Dream Journal

Lap-Straddle in a Castle

Being dropped off on the prim green lawn in front of a stately stone boarding school, one topped with turrets and full crenellations. Certainly looks like it was originally built as a castle.

I explore the curiously spaced interior with a group of friends. Seems the castle will once again change hands as it’s for sale (why we are able to check it out). The semi-underground basement has a messy unfinished feel, splotchy white-on-white paint. Attached in the middle of the ceiling is a narrow, multi-sided cabinet which I open and amusedly inspect. There are so many different types of soap in there — and only soap — we have a good laugh speculating on reasons why you’d need such an extensive hoard.

While I’m in a kitchen-y corner of the basement near some sunny windows, I receive a phone call updating me of some new people arriving soon. Soon I find myself lazing on a long rumpled couch in a slightly sunken living space. I lounge together with my crush and a friend of hers, hanging out and chatting for a long pleasant spell. She informs me they used to date but are still good friends and that certainly seems true. At some point without preamble my crush rolls over to straddle my lap facing me. This is clearly playful but also experimental; I mirror her playfulness by grabbing her hips. The joy at each of our reactions shows the experiment was a success. It’s a happy moment and a relief, us both taking initiative like that.

Conversation flows amiably along until I realize the topic has veered into something to do with mourning. My crush shares a story of something she lost. As my absence goes on a bit longer than it should (after I’ve finally figured this out), I become pressured by an incongruous and ill-advised urge to say something “important”. This lands with a predictable flop — from which my companions must afterward fumblingly recover the conversation.


I awake and recall the lap-straddle incident frequently during the day, with understandable fondness. I write not a word of the last paragraph until everything else in this dream journal entry is done. This should give some idea of my mixed feelings for it.

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Dream Journal

Empty Family Home on an Island, In Australia

I’m exploring a house for sale with my Homepie friend Mickey. The attic is large and has multiple nestled little sleeping areas, a place the current residents call Monticello for reasons not known to us.

I’m having some of my old stuff shipped back from Australia, left behind from when I was there. This must happen before the river islet the Monticello house is on floods. We travel the small circular waterway via canoe. To haul the boat out of the water they’ve rigged up a garage door opener near the riverbank — clever little contraption, useful for rural living.

I pick out my stuff from the many cupboards and cabinets of the newly abandoned home. Most of this stuff I’ve forgotten (it’s been more than a decade). I can’t help but steal one thing: an iridescent plastic bowl from the 1970s, easily missed by the family and easily excused as an accident. It’s unique and oddly beautiful, and obviously unappreciated judging by where I found it.

Having everything gathered it appears that shipping is going to cost $60. I hadn’t thought about that cost and second-guess whether I want any of this stuff at all anymore.

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Dream Journal

Dad’s Converted Drawbridge Cottage

I possess a gigantic condom as big as an arm, though it’s almost completely dried out. While trying to demonstrate to my little brother how to use it, the ring at the base chips off immediately. It’d be a waste of a unique object to simply throw it away… but this is difficult. It’s so large it’s useless for anything but a demonstration anyway.


A cottage my dad worked on when he was young, in his twenties. Situated at the left edge of a canal gate, it’s a former industrial drawbridge operator’s cabin, narrow as as a subway line, somewhere in Los Angeles near a museum. Dad was a “2sq/fter”: someone who could take two square feet of soil from their home (in this case Illinois, though my Dad is actually from LA) and transform all the ground on their farm with it. Dad didn’t do that though, he’s just taken care of the native soil and built a charming and solid little shack just above the water level.

I kick off 4 of the 6 teammates on my canoe. The only ones left are one Finnish guy (looks like Willem Dafoe plus angry/sad Moe from the Simpsons) plus my dad. A theme song plays while we watch a betrayal.

Replacing the stove in my house after finding a more matching 1970s stove. The back control panel slides off separately, with my normal spice rack on top of it. I set up a hanging fluorescent click light at the back, near the vent (like the one above my kitchen table in waking life).

I discover RobertBLalonde.com, a web domain of my grandfather’s name, still registered by my dad. I make a phone call to the associated number but hang up when someone answers who’s obviously waking up from sleep.

A character named Jean Auern (an alias of Jean Grey from Marvel) has been alive for 14 billion years. She’s been involved in US politics for 300 million, non-linearly. I learn in depth of these events while traveling through a box of charcoal.

The person I called when investigating RobertBLalonde.com calls back. Jean confesses the truth of shutting down his home, punishing him. She then restores power to the narrow tube apartment, the same one my dad built, just like flipping a switch. I watch as he throws a few stray items out of the way in the narrow kitchen, before a train comes through at a T junction near the end. So he didn’t have to move the things out of the way — he’s been here since before the trains stopped running, before the place’s powers were cut off. So whose was it before him?

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Dream Journal

Witch’s Hidden Jungle Bar in the Rock

Testing bulbs in a possibly broken glass double lamp. Appears that one side works, I try in the other side a more modern bulky electronic bulb, which has the problem of staying lit after unscrewed.

Pull what appears to be a minidisc MDLP deck from a garbage bin, in the center of a roundabout room. I ask my mom, who likely threw it away there, if I can keep it and if she kept minidiscs. She responds saying she doesn’t know why I want it, ejecting a thin bluish CD that’s apparently called MDLP. Next to it, I still see the little rectangular minidisc slot, and a number counter.

Walking along a deserted upper floor hallway of a long mall, a light rain in the pre-dawn hour (a highly sensory experience, near lucid). Days are much longer here and soon we can expect 20 hours of sunlight.

I reach the end of the corridor and a set of papered double doors, behind which is an Adobe-branded shop. There’s cutesy displays of different stores nearby and well-trained staff behind desks answering questions. I inquire about a friend’s craft store and eventually locate it myself, listed on a handmade sign in an upturned suitcase decorated with paper flowers. The attendant continues to try to help me so I must mime finding it again.

Sometime later I’m with my wife, driving a car via orange rope pulleys from the back seat. Might even have a tape deck playing. Eventually I’m convinced to take a more active “safe” position and climb into the front, and find that the rope wrapped steering wheel is much stiffer than expected. The car, like a stripped-down Volkswagen bug, is cruising atop a thin clearing of ridge in a scenic rocky jungle landscape below along all sides. In our path, we navigate through a large hole in a rock outcrop with a sophisticated obstacle: a giant rotating stone gear that lifts the car in its teeth. At its greatest height the car gets stuck; we have to scrabble down the granite rockface.

Our car essentially lost, we descend to the base of the outcrop. Another person now seems with us (perhaps the Olson twins little brother?). Improvising what we have, we project a homemade video onto the rock face, craning our heads upward to see through the foliage as best we can. It’s footage made from elements of the jungle around us, but altered/crafted by a human perspective — one striking image is of green parrots flapping through the canopy, parrots cleverly remade of lush green leaves. Though we’re still stranded, it’s nice to have created some cool art, something recognizably purposeful. We want to attract the right rescuers. I hope it’s bright enough in the tropical daylight, spread thin as it is across the huge formation of stone.

We’re not waiting long before I notice an unusual feature nearby our display. There’s a thin ledge high up the face with a partially-hidden door. We deduce this must be a famously remote establishment, retro-country themed, run by semi-legendary singer/witch Marni Knox (no relation to Marnie Noxon of Buffy, more like Stevie Knicks of Fleetwood Mac). This is an exciting opportunity and we enter the door post-haste.

Inside it’s dim and empty, feels like it could be at least 100 years old. Victorian woodwork has undergone numerous repairs and coats of paint. It feels cozy, rustic, special, yet uninhabited. I immediately want to explore. Despite protestations from my wife (and Reecy, who came in with us somehow) I climb through a small low food order window in the front foyer into the cramped but orderly kitchen. It’s an oddly-shaped room, everything carefully stowed away for what I assume is the off-season. I quickly find a stairway in the back, leading down to the cook’s bathroom, more levels for their living quarters, storage for holiday decorations (everything in its place)… I even look through a wall-sized set of white drawers in the bathroom, like something from a ship, and find supplies inside parceled out in neat little rows. From somewhere above I hear a companion yell something along the lines “that’s not how you thought Guinan would live?!” I leave everything as it was and continue down, the stairway built at odd angles to accommodate the narrow tower-like arrangement of rooms. Startled, in one corner I come across a pair of cardboard cutouts made to look like workmen or painters against a glass-brick wall, silhouetted with diffuse light and plants growing on the other side. I realize this is exactly the intended effect, except for curious intruders on the outside of the building.

Finally I come to the bottom of the stairs. They end in an unsupported diagonal span leading into an open courtyard behind Marni Knox’s inn, so far I can’t see the back. I spot my wife before she spots me, having found her own way down to the back garden. I lay low in the disused space behind the stairs, hoping to evade her so she’ll explore the tower herself (much more novel than having me share my findings, perhaps deciding not to even look).

I succeed, smiling wryly after I see her go upstairs. I only get a few steps into a plot of the garden, though, before a witch materializes close behind me. She regards me with a smirk, apparently having observed my sneaking about. She makes a brief pronouncement, phrased ironically as a question, to the effect of “now would you like to show me your true form perhaps?” My body vibrates and shakes off what looks like a layer of snow, revealing — or was it sloughing off perhaps? — the form of a long-haired dark housecat. While not as confusing in the dream, either way it’s obvious that the jig is up. I’ll be going along with whatever the witch wants. I realize on waking she must be none other than the proprietor, Marni Knox.

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Dream Journal

Idyllic Small-Town Plum Falls

A custom-designed webpage prototype with four alternate positive opinions for any submitted negative. Creates URLs for its suggestions. Created by a short girl wizard, who’s becoming a bit famous for it. (I’d guess this was Plarvolia, whom I just re-discovered via her online activity after meeting her at a party in March this year.)


My family’s got a new fridge, so big you swing open the door and have to walk up to the inside. I lean over the front shelf and discover rows of of wheeled container stacks that roll, and beyond that a half-size kitchen. Remember that I have PBR in my crappy tiny dorm-size fridge that I could now bring. While inside, a corner with twin stoves, I knock loose one electrical clip plugged into the counter wall outlet. I then try to figure how to let my dad know.

Outside, on a street underneath the highway & close to the doorway, I watch a long car pull up (against advice). From it emerge a color-coordinated pimp-styled group, orange and gold and white everything. I continue off without gawking, heading the direction of a town my wife texted me from, hoping to surprise her — Plum Falls (a semi-inversion of my hometown, Palm Springs). I pass unexpectedly through an underpopulated corner of San Francisco, near the wharf, somewhere called like “Southeast Neighborhood” I’ve visited in dreams before. I cross the street at an oddly shaped intersection at Winston Way downslope of a curvy hill, jogging across as a car abruptly pulls around the bend.

I reach the quaint rural community of Plum Falls, a tiny 3-or-4 street grid town from out of my past in Oregon and/or Australia, cast in foliage of bright autumnal orange. Reminiscent of many other dream locations. I amble into a garage sale inside the house of an elderly, thoroughly-countrified man. But I wear no pants or underwear, shuffling side-to-side hiding my naked lower half. An excuse I use is that I just woke up from dreaming (what!?). As I’m behind the man’s table, I take my chance and finally wrap a black t-shirt to cover myself. The man has a only a few items laid out sparely, each clearly special and treasured, and the one he’s pitching to me is an old hand-bound bible. It’s beautifully crafted, raw-edge leather, highly textured and deckled paper, embossed gold lettering (some of it in Ge’ez script)… but unfortunately the font gives away that it’s much newer than it might seem, especially with its deep modern-styled embossing. I find a way to turn him down gently, especially considering his high asking price, but I’m immediately distracted by another book sitting on the corner of his table. A stubby thick hardcover with glossy dustjacket, I remember thinking I’d glimpsed someone casually drop it there while we spoke. It’s a book by none other than Chicken John. I’m forced to improvise an explanation for how I know him, going into how we “collaborated” and why we “fell out with each other”. The experience is terrible: alienating, frustrating, embarrassing, and ultimately useless. I unwisely make the open claim that he must’ve put that book there himself, just recently. All rapport is gone now, and the countrified old man has lost interest in me.

The next day I’m idling along near (but not on) one of the few sidewalks in the dusky town. I spot a familiar figure from behind, and approach him from the side. Turning his shoulder, I stare into the face of Chicken John, who looks more ginger-haired and solidly mustached (almost like my 4th-grade teacher Roy Suggett — if you’re out there, Mr. Suggett, you’re still my favorite). I lead Chicken back to the house where I was yesterday and allow him to believe there’s no one there. He unlatches a small window and reaches in, only for the old man from the garage sale to poke his head out saying “Excuse me. Hello?” I gesture meaningfully, demonstrating that what I said yesterday was true, and exposing Chicken for whatever scheming he planned against me.

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Dream Journal

Bait Locker, Alien Repellent, Rustbucket RV-land

In a locker room, lots of stuff I need to gather. I head out once my time is over, my two friends waiting outside the heavy glass door, before realizing I still left a bunch of stuff. In the bottom half of the locker, the compartment is open so I can reach in and find other people things. There’s at least a few pieces of funny money left as a trap, I assume. The steam room hot tub adventure cost at least a couple hundred bucks.


I am a scientist like Rick Sanchez and I’m inside my house during the course of an insectoid invasion. I am one of the only people with an alien-repellent sound barrier. The insect forces go to great links with transparently fake news reporter interviews trying to discover how it works and to overcome it. I see a diagram of the architectural plan of the house with the bedroom just outside the laboratory and the clean room.


I’m in the small kitchen of my family’s old Cathedral City house. About twice as many people live with us now, and I think of them as in my family. There are two refrigerators and an upright freezer next to each other and we’re even thinking of putting another refrigerator blocking off the counter corner. I’m using a glass tray to keep a group of aquarium feeder worms alive. I have to use the same tray to store macaroni and cheese above the worms. Meanwhile, two younger kids are bothering me, throwing food and interrupting my project. I ask my dad, who is staring into space eating cereal, to tell them throwing food wasn’t okay. He responds apathetically, and in frustration I fling a spoonful of grits at him, spraying the entire kitchen corner. He still doesn’t react.


I move into a community of rustbucket houses. Old RVs and trailers are pushed together into a complex warren-like structure — everyone seems to have built a private hobby space so they can sneak off by themselves to do work, camp chairs inside old shipping containers stocked with rebar. One green RV from the ’40s has a particularly unpleasant individual in it, but a beautiful slide-off stove in the kitchen, converted to be an outdoor courtyard. It’s a very welcoming community, but also “is this how poor people really are?” is a question that comes up. At some point I try to see if I can build a large house on one of the unfilled plots of land. The small house just downhill from the main road was one of the first built.

We go off and drive on an adventure in an old VW van. We stop at a large gate down the road, waiting with an invisibility power-up activated. When a train comes behind us the gate opens and we can use a speed boost to drive overland far away from where we’ve driven before. What would take 20 minutes only takes about 3, but we still don’t reach our destination — a place called Challengeburg.