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Dream Journal

June means Bright Desert

While watching an old video from my collection, I notice it appears to have new weird AI-based compression. Letters on signs in a Palm Springs parking lot in are hard to discern. Makes me sad, because I realize this is probably how companies will be encoding our stuff now (whether we like it or not) and I can no longer use it as a reference. The names are squashed down so much they turn out as gibberish.

Across the street from the parking lot is a line of brushy sand dunes. Like the bare desert across from my old middle school when I was a student, once upon a time. Looking at them is almost painful as everything has an * * extra bright * * overexposed look, which I recognize as the look of June. Today, not uncoincidentally, marks June 1st.

As I’m staring into space, down a hallway at a slight angle, an unpleasantly familiar face appears. Plarvolia peeks forward from a booth at a table. She now fully embodies my avatar of rejection and loneliness. Who knows why she’s here. It’s not important, except that now I have to deal with this reminder of her. (My wife is leaving for a trip today, and I tell her how seeing old Plarvolia made me feel.)

Because of Plarvolia I find out about a new rising artist named Margaret Gerulo in Indianapolis. Her schtick is that she cries as performance art, giving ritual catharsis to the entire community that witnesses the act. She’s become a very successful streamer (it works over the internet, apparently). But there are a few curious conditions: the day before, she needs to visit a haunted place of some kind. And the day after, she needs to receive presents from people. Those presents, and the haunted house, determine what trauma and catharsis she can process for her community of viewers.

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Dream Journal

Fossil Comes to Life

Finally invited over to home of acquaintance Colin F. and put to work draining oil from classic 1950s car. Not great at it, and I’ve attempted this job in the past. It’s cool checking out his space though. A plastic 3/4 profile relief head of my friend Autumn T. is attached high on a wall. It occurs to me that this angle, while unusual for a relief, looks better than the dead-on one of her I previously have seen.

In a shallow riverbed I stumble across a perfectly intact fossil skeleton of a raptor (or primitive human) embedded just under the water. I know I’m either very lucky or someone must’ve found this before and left it here. Ritualistically, my partner and I light a tall candle and the fossil comes to life, darting all over and wreaking havoc. I start filming on my phone as this terrifying moment has become a cautionary tale, for young people perhaps. I perform a secret move by cutting off the video to abruptly stop the experience.

While leaning against an L-shaped fence with a middle-school classmate, Amy Pollard, I impulsively tell her she’s pretty. But she calls my bluff and asks me to repeat it. I mangle and abstract my rephrasing into something barely relatable along a formula like “___ is she; ___ is he”. I then openly chide myself for phrasing both people as objects — objects of a sentence, thus objectifying them.

Artistic sequence of a herd of animals, the animal models doubling then all morphing into a different bigger animals. So a rat is stacked on rat which then blends into cat, those cats are then doubled and form dogs etc. I get excited to see what larger animal will be chosen next; the sequence gets to doubles of cows but the next animal is a bizarre model of a cow with two independent heads one on top of another.

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Dream Journal

Eggshell Gym, a Snippet

Sleeping under the curved wooden rafters of a roof like an eggshell. Reminiscent of my middle school gym.

All else lost, no further notes were made this night.

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Dream Journal

Secret Party Villa, Finding Freedom in the River

In an unfamiliar city, I’m part of a group trying to make it to a secret party. You see, at the moment it’s not the right time for parties — maybe it’s the pandemic, maybe it’s just illegal, so we’re operating on old-school I-know-a-guy wink-wink-nudge rules — ring the right doorbell, know the right password, that sort of thing.

The city is like New Orleans but located where Seattle should be. In full costume, I end up in a villa newly purchased by a cool girl I know IRL (we’ll call her Plarvolia). All the lights are off to keep things on the down-low. For a bit we’re the only two people inside the building (she’s working on her laptop), and alone I explore a graceful courtyard, and admire a plaster wall hand-painted with sunflowers — real sunflowers growing just outside the window in the drizzly charm of what looks like the French Quarter.

I try to bid farewell to her several times, each time not quite getting it right. I screw up enough that it’s starting to weird her out, but I… can’t… quite… get there.


I wake up about 2 am, knowing I’ve gotten enough sleep and could in fact start my day. I decide against it and continue the rest of the night, but successfully encode the previous dream in memory.


The noble coast of Greece, transposed to be the same as the California coast but facing an ocean to the east. Broken into fiefdoms of varied size and population, equivalent to counties of California, with history and legends stretching into deep antiquity. Beyond a large promontory on the map, I view the lined topography as far as Zephyrr county — its steep forested cliffs set along a low-lying sea shelf, so wide it’s almost a lake made of ocean.

In the persona of a college-age young adult, I explore the lively historic rectangular valley which is an inverted Parthenon. I discern it’s evolution by visiting every corner, seeing the specific purpose it’s grown into. This activity itself is academic, and there are often structures of learning too. It is an elegant, civilized, manicured, but undersized space.

I eventually leave via my teacher (Mr. Suggett from 4th grade) challenging some of us to escape through a maze of militarized/fortified utility pipes. I am the first to make it outside, observing structures for flood control; another sluice beyond this exit doubles the water-shedding capacity. I see a broad swath of green valley and mountain range in the far distance below the slope on which I stand, larger than Yosemite — a greater vista than any I’ve seen in a long time. It’s obvious how the Parthenon Valley has been hidden, as now that I have left I can understand how it sits flush with the slope of rock leading down. On the rock perches an unassuming Orthodox church, American flags hung outside of it. Perhaps it is a monastery; perhaps it’s abandoned.


I sit in class in the middle of a row of four desks between my childhood friends Vince Saunders and Khalil Amin. I have let my long hair fully down and it feels a little greasy; I keep my hand grasped in it most of the time and feel more at ease knowing there are students behind. Yet I sit in class idly dejected, ignoring the lesson. I search through my binder for an old assignment, one I decided not to do at the time. As I pore over the photocopied chapters it’s obvious it would have been useless to complete anyway; I would have learned nothing.

Outside the school, in the wide desert in my childhood home of the Coachella Valley, I view the central river (where there is usually a freeway). Adjacent to the river my school district has set up a tall, boxy, sandstone-colored water treatment facility along a long stretch of mucky marshland. I make my way, with a group of friends, to explore with the hope that we can escape the pointlessness of school for a time. Luckily it turns out the treatment/harvest facility can be run with a bare bones staff — and they’re not even there right now.

Having now gained access to the length of the river, we wade along the bottom moving down the current. Soon it gets very wide, and we can walk. The day is hot, bright; the river red, rocky. We walk mostly in contemplative silence, Vince, Kahlil, Lauren, perhaps others. I wear a watch which, if I double-click it, starts recording audio — I usually don’t remember until it’s a little too late though. The river narrows around a curve, the dry desert hillside sheltering someone’s garage under a little overhang in which I hunt bats with my Homepie friend Lauren. Just a little further down river from that we venture up into a little canyon, discovering public bathrooms marked with red/green lights for occupancy. Lauren, a bit like Patsy on Absolutely Fabulous, panics that I won’t be able to get out, though I do by backing out. As usual I’ve forgotten to start recording.

Our group has become larger as we gather in a large hanger set into a precipitous cliffside along the river. Inside is an abandoned Ferris Wheel which we begin to incrementally repair. The thing has the feel of long-neglected military hardware; it shouldn’t surprise us (though it does) when it explodes. Several important characters are destroyed, but then perfunctorily a saved game is reloaded. The progress of the story then depends on deciding which of the collected characters should be sacrificed — the Jules Verne, the Swede, or perhaps Patroclus — anyone with a mechanical aptitude rating can activate the machine while the rest of us, conveniently, stand back this time. But it is known that it will explode no matter what.

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Dream Journal

Midnight Menagerie, Starfish Swansong

Donald Trump’s existence suggests an axiom: the higher the getting, the bigger the dark side.


Being hosted at some guy’s elaborately-decorated stylish apartment, white walls and expensive décor, a congenial upper-middle class bougie gay dude. He gives up his bedroom per my request. In the middle of the night I’m awoken and think I’m being visited by a group of raccoons, but it turns out to just be a few of his cats.

Later, I think it’s happening again so I stay asleep. Yet slowly I realize that in the bedroom with me are a whole menagerie of apes, macaques, zebra, even a giraffe maybe. This is his personal zoo, something he acts like I should be impressed with, while he himself acts nonchalant. It is (I admit) bizarre and impressive. Doubly so with the apartment’s trendy Instagrammable Pinterest-y surroundings.

(This is midpoint of my night’s dreams, which I remember when I wake up earlier in the night — for real — with some insight into my own progressed technique into the writing of dreams. Yet I still don’t wake up to take notes on it, worried I might not get back to sleep…)


In the classroom of a middle school, which feels near the coastal location of my University. I’m my current age, hanging out in bookshelves behind the rows of desks observing class, but I pop in occasionally, keeping tabs on the teacher and mingling with students.

A class lesson: “what’s wrong with this cream cheese recipe?” I personally think they added lemon juice, or didn’t use real cheese. Moving past, the teacher calls on me, somewhat jokingly. Nose in a textbook, I respond mispronouncing ‘book’ like ‘boooook’. She responds in the same joking tone that we’ll name our next lesson’s monster “Orin”.

I abruptly notice that a green starfish kid in the front row has suddenly developed injuries consistent with exposure to a contagion we studied in class. Teacher has also noticed but is playing it off so as not to alarm the students; I don’t do so well hiding it. We help get the student out. Afterwards I take time reflecting on it in the bookshelves.

I return just a bit later, but class appears to be over for that year. Instead, the room is occupied by a choral group of young kids, 4-6 years old, in flowing robes with hoods, singing what could be a Buddhist funeral dirge. Their parents wait behind them to take them home, some breaking down crying. It’s obvious the starfish kid didn’t make it.

Jolted, reminded of life’s brevity, I set aside time to enjoy hanging out with one particular girl I like who reminds me of a fun redhead I knew in high school — Sam Promenchenkel. She’s quite taller than me; my head reaches just under her armpit. With a group we stroll along a stepped boardwalk away from the school. On the way I’m goaded into doing a scooter trick up some stairs, and manage to leap all the way to the second-to-last step, where I do a little bounce and make it all the way up.

My cousin Betty is with our group, skipping away ahead of us toward her wife. She seems so happy and excited, I’m very happy for her, though I watch her get further and further away.

We get to the ocean and do tricks leaping into the surf on scooters. Someone brings up how left-brain-focused people will typically veer to the left and miss their mark on the waves. We practice crossing our eyes, water streams squirting from our pupils, trying to get the streams to meet where we want.


Music in my head upon waking:

Heartsrevolution – Heart vs The Machine
Architecture in Helsinki – Heart It Races
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Dream Journal

Last Day of School

Enacting last days of an ancient invasion between two peoples, visiting a string of gates which jump to different reenactment zones, stories of the war. Lofty snowbanks, rocky canyon passes, battle plans, gruff male voices, muscular insectoids (they look like the Krogan from Mass Effect).


It’s the last day of the school year, at a place that feels like my middle school. They have us sit at other’s desks and read aloud from their journals of that year — an exercise in “seeing though other’s eyes”, so we’re told. But it feels very much like tricking us into spying on ourselves.

The drama teacher at my high school, Mr. Thelan, is lecturing after the last bell of that year has passed. He hasn’t even told his assembled students they could go, if they wanted. I would guess it’s a test or object lesson for his theater students: that actors can be held longer than in their interests, by their love or fascination or even novelty with the story. I myself am lounging behind this herd of a class because there’s comfy chairs and internet on the stage. One guy tries to argue with me for being there instead of a class and I have to quote the school district handbook about when “school year” is defined.

Digging through drawers at the side of the gym, making sure I don’t leave any of my stuff (clothes or information, etc.) since I’m not going to be here again. I’m asked about moving a pair of giant owls constructed over the year from a massive amounts of wooden boards. I start to give an answer, but the answer becomes “this being 2020 I don’t even think we can donate it to Urban Ore.” I resign myself to the idea of someone else deciding if they’re lost.

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Dream Journal

12 Elements, 12 Deities, 12 Powers

Heritage church out forgotten in the desert of my hometown. A screen of tamarisk trees hides it between my middle school and the mountains beyond. No one has visited in years. I climb the rafters inside, feeling transported to an earlier time. Perhaps the reason I wasn’t reported to the authorities exploring such a place is because I was just a lone kid. I hope they preserve this place, even though no one seems to love it but me.


An airplane journey, within a strange morphing and expanding fuselage. At the beginning several portal-making objects of power are released to 12 special passengers, forming the side of good. They are hunted by an evil master witch with broods of alien slave dogs, zergling-like. Some good-siders hide behind doors, some in hidden passageways, some in other time periods, some in other realities, all enduring attacks from the witch and her brood.

Each object they are blessed with are aligned with certain elements of the periodic table, and certain deities of the Greek Pantheon, granting them unique powers. They learn to wield them one by one — the dream is broken into chapters and has an unusually sophisticated structure.

Finally in the last chapter it’s revealed that Element № 1, aligned to Zeus king of the gods, has all the while been overseeing events unfold with their sublime omniscience. The left side of the movie theater inside the main fuselage has remained mysteriously empty during the pitched battles. It turns out to be a staging area for those special objects-holders who reach the last step in their training, now hiding in plain sight. They take their seats wordlessly, building anticipation one by one with each assembled conspirator, and finally together open the small sealed chamber to the right of the screen — that the witch and her hunters never even noticed. The supreme holder is revealed, having learned his training instantly, observing all, but withholding his omnipotence until the time was ripe.

The witch is gobsmacked, the energy in the room electric. She is defeated without a battle, finally seeing what has played out.

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Dream Journal

Big School Hallway

Middle School classroom, teacher is having difficulty trying to get us to actually leave our desks in disarray when we’re dismissed. A student teacher answers a phone call. The desk behind me has a roll of foil in it. We could fit all the students in a bus, squeezing double into every seat, but the bus would weigh so much it would drag.

I go on Space Mountain three times. Shoot some video of Ty as the operator, waving the space transports in.


A girl, topless, is crying (could it be Jaime Silva from 8th grade?). I take the opportunity besides all the other guys to actually console her. Go in for a very tactical hug, not holding her anywhere even moderately sexual, light light touch just on the elbows and forearms. She’s relieved and thanks me, and apologizes that her personal censor doesn’t allow me to see anything below her neck. I nod kindly and don’t mention that it does.

The class is then exploring a building which is a very long, wide hallway. I’m the only one to discover a door in the side, with a tiny little inter-door space, and another identical door. There’s even an attic door when I look up. I go inside and it’s a single-occupancy apartment with the TV still on. It makes the lines of the building stick out and should be easy to see from the outside. I get the impression that outside is the Sahara desert though, like something out of Dr. Strange.

I continue walking around the hallway with my classmates, recall the topless girl story and mentally review it, remembering it as important. (This is likely a consequence from my practice of my dream journaling practice.)


I walk down the hall to see my wife. She’s stressed and just as I’m walking down our hall, she mentions the door in the hallway could shut at any point. Of course, right at that moment, a door midway down the hallway — which was never there before — swings shut right in front of me.

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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.

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Dream Journal

Dream notes: June 14, 2018

  • Behind the back fence of my middle school, there’s a big sandy area with plenty of hiding spots in the tall bushes.
  • I pick up fussy a fussy young girl, my neighbor’s kid Daria, or perhaps Molly O’Brian from Deep Space 9.
  • There’s a big house, a computer and TV setup, a green window that looks like mirror
  • Collecting fish for a new fishery
  • Dating Robin, a girl I knew in person very briefly, and who once publicly defended me when no one else chose to