Tag: neighbors

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Dream Journal

The Volcano Still Erupts

Supposed to be fleeing a volcano which is about to erupt in a tiny community. But a bunch of us just stay there, to see if it’s really going to happen. Seems like it works out? But the volcano still erupts?

“Opens 6:00 am” changed to 6:08 on the sign of The 500 club, a neighborhood bar I’ve never been to.

We have a Wolfram brand GPS unit that came in flat plastic bag that’s the wrong size, that’s supposed to serve as the case. It looks like it’s in sideways. It’s usable, but I don’t feel like I never want to show it to anyone.

In a strange unfamiliar bedroom of San Francisco, that nevertheless has been my small corner bedroom for several years. Easy to tell how awkward and small it is — it’s so close to neighbors I can see three of them working on their gutter just outside my window. Maybe 5 ft away. It’s strange to notice as I look down they’re all standing on individual ladders.

Picking up a bag, set on top of a full trash can, and seeking to find the true owner — the inventor — of this, the embossed aluminum hummingbird bag. More of the pinch opening like of a coin purse. I fill this hummingbird pouch with discarded finches, of which there are many. Like the Styrofoam ones I got from New York a year ago.

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Dream Journal

My Building’s Social Scene

My friends (P+S) who moved away from our neighborhood are called out for still wanting to live nearby. I walk back from somewhere and get called out myself, someone greeting me by saying “it wasn’t the first time I could hear you coming by how loud your shoes are”, referencing the color (not the sound) of my bright yellow crocs.

I choose to go into my apartment a different way than usual, through the set of glass double-doors. I have to actually sneak past the small triangle-shaped convenience shop that my landlord’s family runs; it’s a bit of an afterthought and not something I’ve really seen anyone use. I’ve been in there maybe twice in the 16 years I’ve lived in the building. As I head up the half-spiral stairs I look down toward a basement entrance I’ve never used and something drops down, causing a sound. I perfunctorily call out that it “was just me” and hope the landlord’s kid in the shop doesn’t think anything further of it.

So I go in what I’d consider the back way. But the space is very different than what I remember. Instead of the liminal blank corridors that always felt empty, there are dozens of people simply hanging out. I peek into the garage space, too. There’s a Jeep being parked on a steep carpeted surface there and it seems people are socializing there too. I’d forgotten there even was an elevator, as I haven’t used it since I moved furniture in. This is a thriving social community which I’m only noticing now — more people live in my building than I realized. Perhaps this happened since the pandemic, if I’d guess. My mind is opened to the possibilities. It’s like a public library workshop, or a university student union. I wonder if my landlord even knows how many people talk to each other now.

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Dream Journal

Mayan Motif, Feelings of Early Winter

A racing game set on a semi-oval course laid out in an office store. Speeding above the aisles, like a trainset hung from the ceiling of a dentist’s office. Tall narrow windows flood in color like a sunset. The brown tones and amber light give it a nostalgic mid-century aura.

I descend from the track after I am intrigued to notice a seated Drew Carey. I thank him for his show I enjoyed as a teenager, and he mentions another Drew Carey Show actor — I’m embarrassed I can’t continue the conversation, as I don’t know if that’s the blond or the brunet guy, as I don’t remember their names.

I take it upon myself to advance the next part of the game, headed up to a sunny Mayan temple level on the outdoor mezzanine. There, power-ups transform the player/POV character into a multi-legged mythical beast, a praying mantis centaur that rampages across the chessboard-like lawn outside the gates. Mayan revival architecture is a motif running through all these dreams.

My household spends a long time trying to leave our house to start a weeks-long cross-country journey. It’s winter and we’re packing a boxy car, maybe an SUV. We eventually get out the door, but by then it’s so late that we have to turn back — there’s not enough time to reach a safe stopping point. So we leave the house the next day, too.

Back in an office workplace, an unexpected meeting is called at the of end of day. It’s an unusually chummy workplace, and as part of the culture I snuggle my coworkers in a big dumpster/dent in the white floor. At first I’m warmly pressed against a girl I like, but a shuffle later I’m left with either a single other guy or no one. It’s simply the flip side of this arrangement, so I kill time standing near a fence and fiddling with a drawer.

Back in our apartment again. Asking our neighbors Dolly and Candida for to-go container (I say “greenbean box”) as they’re rushing out the door. They’re actually former neighbors but in the dream they still live next to us. I peek inside — their apartment is a mirror of ours, having the same long narrow hallway which unfortunately consumes so much space. In the dream it slopes upward and is supported by thin columns, and I’ve decorated ours with hanging art. Since I realize both neighbors are gone I’m tempted to visit the hidden upper levels of the building; I’ve discovered a blocked-off stairway passage in our kitchen, which leads to a forgotten door (technically part of the neighbors place). Even though supposedly we live on the top floor, I’ve previously accessed a roof level where there is a park-like garden and commercial vendors. I’ve been to it in a dream before, and I find myself gazing up at the obfuscated structures wondering if they survived the pandemic.

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Dream Journal

Singular Standing Dream, Dad’s Casserole

A marathon of a first dream that seems to last most of the night. Yet little of it is remembered… as so little seemed to happen. My crush and I stand next to a program guide — this is the main image. We simply stand there, still, static.

As the dream deteriorates into wakefulness, I ride a bike around a specific blind corner in my neighborhood (the crosswalk at Potrero and Cesar Chavez). In the instant I round the corner I imagine threading my trajectory between a former crush and new crush, one oncoming and one outgoing. I wake up and realize I’ve had the strange experience of sleeping nearly 8 hours dreaming basically a single scene.

I go back to sleep wishing to gather more dreams. Not the worst excuse, I suppose.

Visiting my childhood home after a long hiatus, where my dad still lives. I notice the house’s original CRT TVs are mostly gone. When I ask about this my dad says they tended to get cracked from falling forward onto the ground, since their design was off-balance. Eating some of my dad’s
hastily prepared food at the kitchen bar (maybe Cheez-It casserole?) I find a hair embedded through it. I make a conscious effort not to worry about it. My dad puts on an 8tracks playlist he made through tinny computer speakers. I help by casting it to the living room speakers too — they coincidentally sync together on the first try, no trouble. My wife mentions she’s hungry so I offer her the casserole. She tries it but finds the hair right away and can’t eat it. Because of the hair. Guess I can’t blame her.

It dawns on me that the amount of males and females living in our apartment building has always remained constant. Whether this is intentional or not I couldn’t guess. But I do note this was true until a pair of kids move next door not long ago. They are, curiously enough, a boy and a girl.

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Dream Journal

Hitting it Off with Art Girl, bit of a Pokémon

Twilight in a round mid-sized stone cathedral, an art show of one girl’s work is displayed in every direction at eye-level height. I find it enthralling, wanting to know more.

Back in my own building, the grubby ground floor apartment of the girl includes a living room half open to the outside, cute little plants on the exposed basement walls. Her sideboards in the disused interior still have the landlord’s old stuff such as 80s radio scattered about. Next door (in apartment #306?) where the landlord’s family has just moved in recently, it’s a lot less grubby than expected, like an 80s nightclub in a mall — colored plexiglass panels, plush diner booths, knocked out walls — a multi-level living space big enough for the family not to have to see each other.

My wife introduces me to the girl who made the art, repeating her name like a Pokémon. We really hit it off; before I know it I’ve been pimped out and the girl is making out with me.

A twisty beige ground-floor office in the process of being decommissioned. As a stop-gap measure we often lock things in place so they don’t move — for example, a log in the hallway, or a heavy military-style desk made of enameled metal (like something I’d see on old Fort Ord during college). We’re setting little plants out on the exposed retaining walls outside, going back and forth down the unlit hallways even as someone pulls up in a red sports car outside, looking for someone I don’t know.

In a rolling almost artificial landscape, unfinished-looking, grid-like. Myself and a few associates are trying to get to a power plant I now own. In our way is a locked gate and barbed wire-topped wall abutting a rocky outcrop of a hill. Trading property here is like trading cards, and I only recently acquired the power plant (sight unseen) from a Mr. Burns-type character.

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Dream Journal

Family of Church-Neighbors, Destroyed

An abandoned pioneer-era church at edge of the freeway in my hometown, a place I’ve explored in a dream at least once before, in the form of a small kid. My wife and I are able to explore it a bit — but some family has built their home right against it, with big windows facing the rustic interior. They threaten us, accusing us of trespassing, and in impulsive righteousness I use special powers to electrocute them. My wife does the same, wiping out this entitled family who constructed their modern ritzy hellhole against sacred ground. As we leave, my wife points out a security camera DVR — I fry it to hell, too. I note the time I wake up from this dream as exactly 4:44 am.

In Disneyland, I sneak up a narrow obscure trench up the side of a hill. From my vantage, I can see broad open walking areas where people mill about, fairytale mountains seeming more like Middle-Earth than The Matterhorn. I reach the top and can see through a triangular gap into an exhibit of animals — gorillas, flamingoes, perfectly sculpted fake natural surrounds. As I lie prone in the small area where I can peek, I realize the park staff must somehow know I’m here — so many security cams, so much well-preened presentation. But they let me gaze secretively nonetheless, enjoying a view someone, sometime must’ve made on purpose.

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Dream Journal

My Re-Assembled Apartment, On Mars

Front gate of my building. An unfamiliar Asian hoodlum-looking guy demands I push in his gate code for him: 626. Feel like I must sneak into my own home afterwards, to learn what apartment is his. Clambering outside of the spiral stucco wall; a view of a wide green backyard lawn beyond the scaffolding support beams. There’s no railing, but through tiny castle-like windows I can regularly peer in to navigate my way up.

One apartment has a broad sun-facing window with only two chairs in it, with a large dropcloth backdrop with plants hanging on it. The people are similar to some I know, Allegra, Creech, SF-adjacent folk. Empty glass aquaria are stacked behind the blacked out window, with a single long blanket trailing through all them. I spot a few drying mushrooms under there.

Then: to Mars. Somehow I offend my wife’s mushroom dealer (who she’s been texting recently) when I stare at him beside a bed, not knowing if he’s real, and trying to imagine his face as an older me with gray hair. He doesn’t speak though; he’s too shy. He’s like my cousin, Gabe. In the sky, and on my conveniently motion-synced watch screen, I view the tightening spiral trajectory of his return ship to earth.

I’m wearing an unusual two-level belt: the top part green, the bottom red. My wife takes off red part and squeezes it out, making it yellow. Supposedly a symbol of feminine renewal or something.

In a tower, in a room near the top of the tower, a group of black kids treat me as if I’m Bart Simpson (maybe I am?). An odd family feeling pervades, as if we all know this is only because we’re all together on Mars. But perhaps for different times and reasons.

It’s a rather wonky tower, a group construction project made from 100% scavenged parts — some from a creative reuse place like Urban Ore, some even some from of my apartment (I see my own bedframe post with the electric blanket controller still attached, and feel a a twinge of sadness/nostalgia). Frustratingly, even though I’m on Mars I have the same view out the window, the same corner here in the Mission District, with the same laundromat.

On the tower’s top floor, I can see the freeway traffic moving below, and our tower itself moving on freeway. The vibrations here on top are terribly strong; I wish we could’ve have used metal. Yet we’re still in the process of digging out a pool — structured like an inverted tent, a frame of PVC parts. But we discover it can’t be slid into the dirt, so we’ll have to undig it and start again. This exact pronouncement is made our Patrick Stewart leader figure, more like Q actually, sitting in judgement on a floating chair atop a pike.

Later we have to improvise a new navigation protocol on our spaceship (Enterprise-like, with shovel-spade front and flat-sided shape) in order to avoid murder-class planets. Funnily enough the algorithm still keeps suggesting homicide-class planets (sounds just as fun), which the crew has to manually decline.

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Dream Journal

Surviving the Apocalypse with the Crab People

Waiting under a tree for the apocalypse to be over. I’m mostly in denial about it, “it won’t be that bad, or that long”. I’ve stockpiled soft drinks. One night, I must I hide inside my neighbors’ converted rest stop bathrooms, plastic panels enclosing it from the wind. I just barely close the doors while a killer cop stalking the neighborhood searches the place. I manage to lock myself behind the supply closet door. He kills everyone else.

After that, I decide living away from [former] civilization is safer. I hole up in a country house in a small coastal community isolated from the damage of society. We’re glad to have no idea what’s going on, we just see the consequences — like a massive locust swarm passing through one day.

Just…doing iceberg things…

Our jungle island becomes an all-male commune. In the center stands a statue of a crab, whose long, colorful, plastic eyebrows I pose into a cartoonish expression of anger. It’s the same place as the restroom, years later. The “Crab People” chant starts up in my head. I show a video to a fellow commune member who reminds me of Vince Saunders or April Arcus, a video I shot just off our shore of a baby crab person. They watch, reflected, in a crevice-shaped mirror embedded into the hillside, scratched into squares. I leave via the narrow café on our northern exposure, eating a lone lost French fry left on a table.

In the backyard of our property, a steep pine-covered hill leads up to the neighbor’s building. It’s somehow the last address on the street, without any street leading to it. They yell down at us trying to get some kind of assistance. We gather around the backyard pond, someone leads us to shout their name all at the same time: “Hot Chocolate!” Thus amplified, we proceed to pack up their deliveries, and I trudge up the sandy slope.

I expect it to find a vineyard-like rich-people estate of stone walls, but it’s more of a spacious modern apartment tower. I carry two deliveries in oversized Munchery bags. Ring the buzzer of apartment 517, just around the corner from the actual door (confusing, a bit). It’s Dav Yagunuma’s place, and he’s pleased to see me as it’s been awhile. My other delivery is for a game design studio, the door covered in hand-scrawled notes. It’s the studio that makes the Myst games. Suitably puzzling, they have a peephole on their door labeled “channel” and a note saying if you wish to “alter the terms of your entranceship” look through the peephole and figure things out.

I never looked, but somehow I know the other side was like a steampunk café/lounge from another dream, 2nd floor catwalks, leather benches, Don Bruce in fine regalia. The riches of old San Francisco, perhaps.