Tag: mural

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Dream Journal

Moving Bits and Pieces

Taking down the living room wall mural at our old house. It’s assembled from big pieces of vinyl, some in smaller squares as if it were tiles. As I peel off a square, I hold it in my hand and think about how the mural is certainly big art, but only big enough the fit the space. I think about how we would need a new one for the new place because the living room wall is even bigger. Originally, this mural was just found art, but after these years looking at it I have a subtle understanding of the shades of meaning it gives, how it affects you. I realize I have insight into the message it gives when you slowly absorb it. It affects you a certain way.

Underneath the mural is the “radio cabinet” with a sliding door, which used to house a radio station transmitter many years ago. I deal with it separately out on the lawn or elsewhere. In the dream, it’s exactly the furniture piece we’ve had in the living room for many years, but in this incarnation there are circular beams which would block part of the TV — if you kept a TV in there, like they might’ve in the 60s. These support arms are worn from years of minute bouncing, as if the small motions from the rat cage above gradually wore it to splintering bits.

A few rats get loose (or I let them loose). Three scramble away immediately onto a nighttime sidewalk yet I can easily grab their tails so they don’t get away. I notice two rats performing a “leg up” maneuver to climb up a wall — though they’re far too small to get all the way over. Very cute escape artists. I help by grabbing them in my hand and placing them atop the wall. They don’t seem to know what to do!

A few fragments:

Sitting at a desk in class, my rat Porkpie climbs onto a desk of the student behind me. I grab him so he doesn’t bother them.

I joke with my friend Nancy Kleppe acting as though her name was Norma (obviously I know it’s not her name.I’m talking with her about moving.

Remember being in Punjab Chinese food while it was closed. I discover three RAM sticks (that I once pilfered from there) have since been taken out of my computer, but I think the one stick that’s left isn’t in the correct slot.

(the custom font I chose to write in today, which I may implement someday, was called “Lambrada”)

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Dream Journal

X-ARDOS

I don’t know why the dream must be named what it is, but it was the strongest word in my head upon waking. Perhaps it has some relation to bardo, the Tibetan spiritual state in between death and rebirth.

Three of us are traveling on a long motorbike, my friend Aislinn, my wife and me. I’m driving from the farthest rear, which proves difficult on the freeway. As I’m about to take an exit, another motorcycle passes me on the right making things just that much more difficult. This exit is somehwere in the state of Iowa. It strikes me how much like every other freeway exit in America it is, yet with subtly apparent differences that make it like Iowa.

Rounding through a parking lot and a few low buildings, I swing around to a gas station (something like a gas station anyway) that’s broken down and is now freezing everything around it. I comment that it’s gonna be some expensive snow, and we decide to park and check it out. That proves somewhat difficult, as I back into a space alongside a cinderblock wall. The car ignition also seems to freely turn with any key I try, which is clearly something else to be concerned with. The vehicle is an SUV now, more like the old Nissan truck I used to drive (and drove from Iowa).

As soon as I park and get out, Aislinn asks if I worry about parking in front of that door, pointing to a barred gate which looks into the courtyard of an African monastery for junior monks. I curse and start to park all over again — though the neighborhood looks shabby, there’s clearly a lot going on. I do more back and forth nudging into a space, now there are even more cars to work around.

When I finally make it out, I’m at a family reunion for my Dad’s side. They’re loud and boisterous, very familiar with each other. The car becomes some white-furred furniture or a stuffed figure. There’s an exchange of gifts, and I must find a place to stack long tentbag-like objects on a similar white-furred bed (not sure if it’s the same, but it’s a different location). I correct my dad and place these objects off the head of the bed, onto the sheet, to minimize dirtiness.

I get invited to follow my uncle Vince on a short tour. I follow him while adjusting a set of recording glasses, falling behind because of them after he exits a set of double doors, then jogging after to keep up. I feel younger and younger in this dream, my role shifting. My uncle and I tour a dark, mostly empty parking garage, a caverous metal warehouse-like space, while he narrates the story of various murals telling stories of our family. (On reflection, this almost sounds like a transplanted version of Aboriginal Australian lore.)

One particular story, high up on a side wall, tells the story of a broken branch hanging high in a pine tree, staying stick even in strong wind (I’m almost certain this story is from another of my dreams a long while ago). Something all my male relations witnessed at the time, some broader story I can’t make out now. I confess how even though I never met my great-grandfather I have a nickname for him.

After a great effort to remember am earlier set of dreams, I can recall being transposed back to Australia in 2006, nostalgic for when I actually visited. I’m physically emobodied in that time again, as I was when I was really there. I stand outside a grand modern airport or mall, manicured fountains outside, the curved steps leading down to a light rail transit line. I carry an iconic backpack I’ve used forever in Australia (not accounted for in waking life) which is like a trailer-like shell which unfolds, revealing pockets within pockets, all labeled with names of politicians or notable Aussie figures.

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Dream Journal

Keanu’s Midnight Movie Favor

On the top floor of an abandoned school, the walkways are completely inundated with trash. You can see even more of it layering the ground in hills from this high vantage, and this is enough of a novelty that people visit and it becomes an attraction. The waist-high concrete walls of the round corner balcony have been given elaborate murals, inspirational remnants from it’s time as a (elementary?) school. There’s a post-apocalyptic teen movie vibe.

I’m approached by a middle-age bearded guy asking me to do him a personal favor. Surprised, I realize it’s Keanu Reeves. I manage to do the favor, which involves closing the doors to (his?) movie theater near the mural, at the start of the Rocky Horror midnight showing. Makes sense, as I can imagine what the reaction of a packed midnight movie would be to spotting Keanu at the door. He thanks me and gives me some sort of token.

Similar to how right now, during quarantine, one doesn’t make outings as much, in this dream only cashless order-online places are open. I visit two such stores near the far end of a long mall, somewhere I feel I’ve dreamed of before — although I didn’t even think of it as a mall this time. The stores are clean and novel, merchandise displayed on floor-to-ceiling shelves, but for the moment they mostly only have shampoos and other bath stuff in stock. I remember there’s an Amazon store somewhere in the center, and make my way there while carrying a rolling barstool on my back. I lean on this occasionally during on the walk there, and no one seems to mind although I sometimes reckon I’m too young for it.

Skip ahead and I’m with a redheaded friend, headed somewhere together through twisty, rugged dirt paths. We pass a group of women talking about a place called the Fergiles, a group of islands I deduce. I walk ahead a little ways while she remains behind in a small hollow. My sibling Patrick is now with me, and we notice the end of a log has had its end made into a fairy cottage, a gnome home, in the shape of an Ewok’s face. I start to open it but he warns that if it’s anything like the others he’s seen, it probably has a lizard hiding in it (a Betta lizard? like a Betta fish).