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Dream Journal

Apt #99

These dreams all take place at night for no particular reason.

Earliest remembered is playing on a school athletic field where I’m not a student. But I manage to successfully fit in, heading in with the rest of them and peeking over the wall into the locker room to see what I’m getting myself into.

Having friends over in my new place, Apt #99 (the only double digit unit on the second floor). I become more aware that it’s cheap and somewhat sketchy building with weird architecture. The hallways and stairways especially are dark and dingy, but with an unusually intense vibe of human activity. Maybe it’s like a one-building Kowloon Walled City — except I think the second floor is the top. I’m up and down the stairs several times, giving instructions on how to find stuff to one of my visitors.

I’m informed by some Mormon friends of a free trip to China. It’s sponsored by our school, but takes only one day. Feels like far from enough, and mysteriously so. I wonder what the Chinese face recognition would make of my all-too-Western face.

Participating in a survey of the Great Lakes and their borders. My favorite is a smallisg lake located higher up between others called King Lake. The view there is very interesting, as from the vantage of its center one can see a ring of the other lakes below. But on a newly released map it’s been labeled “Piss Lake” because locals don’t like the smell and think it doesn’t have enough bathrooms. Near King Lake there’s a small cabin perched on a hill that’s supposed to have a groundskeeper, but when I visit it just has a cat napping on an armchair. I fondly start thinking of him as the groundskeeper.

The Great Lakes also has an international border, and I visit a liquor store near there on land that should never have been claimed. The man who built this place, the so-called owner, has punted on the issue for ages by avoiding paperwork to clear it up. Because of the legal complexities with the border no one has been motivated enough to sort the situation out, and he continues running his business only semi-legally. I have some idea of what the place was like before and so I’m made a bit sad by learning all this.

Later I’m working as an impromptu messenger. In a thick forest on expansive level terrain adjacent to an outpost, I deliver a message to a hidden group. The member I meet uses a mech to traverse the dense terrain. As soon as my message is delivered however, my government launches a nuclear missile at the location where we met. Luckily the rendezvous is not where the other side’s base is, and actually 20 miles away. But now how am I supposed to get them to trust me/us again now? I’ve been manipulated and there’s no easy way to get that across.

Visiting a restaurant in Wyoming which is full old-timey themed. A photo posted in the review shows diners dressed up in frontier style dresses, oversized frilly things which are more Victorian extravagance than Midwestern demure. The cloth patterns remain very much Little House on the Prairie or Potato Sack Dress though, a pleasant combination. The photo’s poster has chosen to recolor their original wide angle image and overlaid a pastel rainbow coloration across it. Another interesting detail is that each table has its own container of dry ice which spills fog across the diners and food — something I would expect more for Halloween than the old west, but this is essentially a cosplay restaurant and the effect is fun. Reecy fits in well among the crowd. She told me about the place (she may have taken me, actually). But since I’m currently traveling all I have with me appropriate to wear is a colorful squarish-patterned shirt with black lapels, which feels underdressed. I find a rainbow bowtie to go with it and feel just a smidge finer.

Somewhere in here, I wake up from dental surgery, having had my chipped premolar that’s been bothering me for years finally removed — wake up in the dream, that is. I’m kind of surprised that it finally worked.

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Dream Journal

Flinging Skittles as a Flourish

An outdoor complex with pathways along water, wooden verandas, locker rooms, and pools. Part of the story seems to be that my side has returned victorious from some conflict. As part of that I’m at an outdoor pool party and overhear a 20-something girl talking about how she finally wants to try coke for the first time. I go to retrieve some from a locker room. In the dream, at in waking like sometimes, I get distracted and I never find out what her reaction would’ve been.

I’m about to talk to my friend Matthew and as a dramatic gesture of flourish, I throw a handful of Skittles over my shoulder in a wide arc. Maybe a single prescription drug bottle, too. I don’t get a chance to get his attention though, so I suppose it was just for me.

I’m walking along through an indoor space — kind of an endless “backrooms” vibe to it — and I’m being Wolverine, from the X-Men. As I’m passing by an automated Sabretooth machine (Sabretooth was Wolverine’s traditional enemy in the X-Men if memory serves). The flung projectiles scathe my arm and it’s the first time I’ve taken any damage in this body/character, which I find much more upsetting than the actual injury.

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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

Return to School/Work: Naardviot or Naardveet

A multi-stage heist to steal a baby (or wealth) in broad daylight. It repeats, the same beats with variations of setting, dozens of times. A grouchy burly male criminal, a heavy cart going off the side of the road, and opportunistic me. A sci-fi Star-Wars-like fleet of floating swarming police assault craft, of AT-AT like bubbles, zooms away from a post nearby foiling bystanders hopes of intervention.

The last repetition, we’re stealing the baby/treasure out of the mother’s body. A gesture made fingering to an unexpected hole in the mom. A blank beat, an empty space, the pattern finally breaks and our criminal gang is dismembered and transmogrified. I see my dream character as the female protagonist of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, just her doll-like torso and head, floating down into a watery abyss trailing tendrils of blood as she rapidly exsanguinates. The question sits there at the end of the dream: what was different this time, what went wrong?


My first day returning to work as a delivery driver after a long break. I feel different, pulling up and parking my motorcycle near the assemblage of other vehicles. I carry a folded-in cardboard box under my arm, two of my smallest pet rats inside. I naively try placing a delivery bag in there too, and hastily pull it out when the ratties predictably find it (but before anyone notices).

It’s my first day back at school, too. I’m in a classroom where the teacher is demonstrating how to hang string lights above a blackboard, but giving wrong information. I smoothly take over and show how to correct braid them so the strands stay together. She admonishes me by asking “something-something to not” and I wittily joke as if she said “to knot”, still trying to act as though I’m not overriding her. She pivots to teaching a lesson of describing me by an insulting term, akin to”North Idiot”, or Naardviot. I’m pretty sure she actually meant Naardveet, though by now I can’t say anything without her authority feeling threatened.

A girl I don’t know is sitting on a locker room bench talking to herself in Korean in a semi-crazed tone. But I can understand her, and see the danger for her, so sit nearby and begin talking too. I begin improvising as if we’re having a normal conversation, miming eye movements as well.

Still sitting nearby, I change from my 2nd school period outfit into that for 3rd period, without taking off my pants. When I see the pants I believed were white on me, they have huge overlapping layers of colorful stains on them. I don’t have enough time to change again and I have to make a compromise one way or the other.

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Dream Journal

Tree Cottage in Washington State

A group of about 6 girls charge into the boy’s locker room, in towels, to officially request better treatment from a coach/official. Unexpectedly, they take the intrusion seriously and treat it the same as if boys had charged into the boys locker room, and have the police arrest them. They sit in a row in jail looking dejected and shocked.


Two sisters, one on a motorbike. Experience of sucking one’s own penis, but from the perspective of slutty sister. Feels like a baton or walking stick.


Watching what seems like a pricey daycare service van with a male driver yell at a few of the toddlers. I raise my eyebrows trying not to show my disapproval — it’s hard enough being male in childcare, I think, and the woman working with him looks like just as much a pill. I use a back door through the messy garage.

Tree in a grassy fenced backyard somewhere in sparsely-populated rural Washington state. I consider it for the site of a cottage-sized tiny home. But if instead I put it in the chain-link fenced lot next door, it looks like it would fit snugly, even have a backyard of its own.

There’s a zombie outbreak. Only one survivor, the smartest man there (someone who appears as the Deep Space 9 character of Chief O’Brien). The town has to be abandoned and they reboot the series.

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Dream Journal

Lakeside Hot Tub Boat

Fancy hotel on a lake’s edge. I’m walking along a narrow cement wall just at the level of the water. In a lakeside dip rests a sunken boat made into a hot tub, snooty-fancy (yet friendly) folks hanging out in it. Boat actually crashed there ages ago and has been worked into the design.


Going into small men’s locker room a half hour before closing, while no one else is there. Can’t find my own locker because there aren’t enough graffiti scratches on it.