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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

Criss-Cross Causeway, 777-11-21

I encounter my crush topless in my backyard. She has no nipples though, a smooth flat chest. From context it’s completely unclear if this is a normal state of affairs. It does tend toward disconcerting for us though. Over the course of our conversation they manage to grow, though not returning quite to normal — more like odd unpainful welts in their place. Meanwhile, a party three backyards over continues to rage on (a strange detail is this exact thing was happening as I went to sleep).


After travelling along a causeway, in a car with my male family members, we pull into a gas station. My turn to drive and I immediately pull around and run over the curb at the corner of the pump. Nearby there is a famous but struggling restaurant, Jalisco Taco. They’re known for the great human contact of the restaurant setting. Not so great during the pandemic, obviously.

Young Patrick leaves the little coupe, and inside we examine a map marking out where we’ve been today. There and back again across the causeway, also showing what sections I’ve driven. A feeling of being young and uncertain about what I was supposed to accomplish.

I receive a call from a relative on my dad’s side. The caller ID has changed from a very expected 18626 to the mysteriously intentional-looking 777-11-21. (I feel like I never used to dream of specific numbers, but this was very distinct. I have no impression of its importance, but it was certainly a number tied to an emotional reaction.)

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Dream Journal

Borrowed Lambo, Twin Mistake, Prime Distraction

My wife is on the phone. While I happen to be listening in, I hear a family member on the other side say very specifically “hey, your dad has lost his life”. I have an instantaneous reaction of FUCK, followed by (embarrassingly) a feeling that at least now things are closed. Maybe we can inherit something now, even. I bolt awake at 3:21 am.


I park a borrowed Lamborghini on the street outside a hotel on the waterfront of the bay. Perhaps I used to work there. It’s fancy and expensive, but the neighborhood next to it isn’t. I spend a good long time exploring inside during the uncrowded early morning golden hour — traversing interior suspended walkways, decorating for Christmas, and discovering a second-floor gender-neutral bathroom labeled “Theirs”. One curiosity I come across in this mall-like atrium-like space is a very amusing bird sculpture/toy, finding one cleverly hidden mechanism after another to press with my fingers.

In the back row of a wedding, in an upstairs conference room overlooking the bay, I run into my friend Meredith. I show her the nifty bird sculpture (now transformed into an owl) and offer it to her. I also mention that someone trusted me with the Lamborghini out front. But when I go outside again it’s not there. I orient with the nearby landmarks and the saved location on my phone, inspect around and find a note in hard-to-read scrawl — something about average monthly insurance for it being $1200, about “only 12 inches of cocaine” — the obvious implication being that the car will be returned if I pay them what they erroneously believe I actually pay.


Walking up an indeterminate slope, behind my college girlfriend Jenna & my actual wife, others, but for a moment I can’t remember who it was I married. Finally I do remember, and am thankful. I lay down next to my sleeping wife (now more like a long-ago redhead classmate of mine Lauren Wycoff, or the cartoon redhead hottie Jessica Rabbit) and as fond surprise snuggle behind her in bed, and we have sex. The dream actually proceeds through the whole experience: I lube up, it’s quiet and intimate, I finish inside. But for some reason my wife has never told me before that she has a twin! This is very embarrassing (for all of us) yet no one seems upset. Just a never-talk-about-it thing I suppose, although the twin seems… less upset than you’d expect. Perhaps a happy mistake.


A former British prime minister (like Theresa May), exchanging questions with a circle of Americans about things we’ve done. Tangential to her question — something she almost certainly didn’t bargain for — I tell a bizarre rambling story both fascinating and true (within the dream) of a town I visited in Oregon. Not finding our way in despite detailed instructions; driving past a graveyard to get in; discovering the winding dirt roadway between two other roads along a grassy and forested flat area. Picturesque clouds, children’s book sun, mountains in the distance; a rustic cabin near a pixie-haunted broadleaf tree; the wilderness beyond like a dewy lawn.

The next day I text the Prime Minister, having remembered the name of the place: Rasp, Oregon. While it does bear some resemblance to the town of Sisters, Oregon (which I visited this summer), I’m almost sure this was a place I’ve been before. It all may have come from another dream another night, one unwritten, remembered only in other dreams.

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Dream Journal

Lauren Buys SF Real Estate

I help my hometown friend Lauren buy a building in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. It’s an old six-floor walk-up building housing older Burners, with a soon painted-over mural in the backyard called “Burning Times”: a fire symbol and a series of clocks. I’m glad to have Lauren in San Francisco, and I hope to maybe one day live cheaply in this big building with her, but I’m not sure she understands how precious and sought-after a place like it is. I peek into her first floor room there’s barely anything in there except vintage curtains and sex toys on the bed.


Our class is learning from a science teacher (in the vein of Mr. Suggett or Mr. Lonborg) when class is interrupted by a long phone call about Nick Howell’s mom getting arrested in Connecticut. Nick Howell was a real kid I knew in middle school. The teacher gives a long compassionate speech afterwards, going into the merits of whether or not we should share these things. I find it hard to follow along, despite him being my favorite teacher.

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Dream Journal

Acme Bread, Pet Rat Dead

Applying to work at Acme Bread Company which is a big multi-level modern building, glass, columns, and white walls. I encounter Mary (from long ago at the PacTrades hostel) in an art installation in the ground floor. While I’m there I unexpectedly get a phone call from Chicken. He starts in on a speech about how the time has come for he and I to settle the past, make up and all that. It’s such twisted wish-fulfillment claptrap that I actually break out of my dream in order to shut it down.

Back in the dream, I’m working across the street from Acme Bread at a more overgrown/neglected industrial building, I watch the company car’s futuristic white plastic dashboard light up the underside of the car through the dashboard as I drive away. Incredible overkill for a safety feature, reminds me of the F-35’s $400,000 helmet that lets a pilot see through the plane.


A run-down rustbucket of a bathroom at a friend’s house, maybe Don & Tracy, maybe Uncle Robert & Aunt Carol. I peer the over top of the wall’s half-height window/mirror a look into the exquisitely messy bedroom of some punk rock artsy girl. She comes in and notices me, comes over friendly-like but with a glint of challenge in her eye. Reminds me of Koe a bit.


Outside the Fartpartment, on the sidewalk of the Mission, I’m helping unload a bus. We have to rescue Mabel’s stuff that’s been left on the curb in disarray. Perhaps echoes of the occasion when Mabel moved out from downstairs and a crew including Lorelei left all sorts of interesting stuff out overnight, only to get collected for the dump the next morning. I wish I’d rescued all of it.


On a bike, escorting Chicken to the hospital after the birth of his second child. I find it difficult to pedal up the ramp, and I’m actually escorting him less and less. We make it but I wait outside with my bike.


Lynae tells me a rat has died, calling it Scrap at first (Stimp?), then rat #1. When she finally admits that our rat Henry died in the night, I’m instantly bawling. We just had such a nice time playing together on a chair, I even read an article about him. I wake up exclaiming “but he wasn’t even sick!!” That morning at breakfast we discovered that one of our fish had, in fact, died in the night.