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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

Grandma Australian PM tours Medieval Monument Valley

Slept at a couple friends’ home in Oxnard, CA

In a familiar communal velvet plush gathering space, chairs and windows in an oval, I talk with Patrick who is a week out from graduating high school, very bright and proud. The building is long, with conveyor belts in the workshop/basement open to the air, reminiscent of the Acme Bread Co. Unfortunately an old sorceress grandma has recently put herself in charge. I’ve no recollection of why she was evil, but my co-conspirators and I concoct a plan to overthrow and kill her. I shapeshift and sneak over the back fence. My disguise seems to fail on the way down, and I land naked in a puddle. Luckily the enchantment only gives me the illusion of failure, and to others I appear as a football (the most similar object that would make sense coming over a fence and landing in a puddle). I’m thrown by a conspirator to nearby the witch/sorceress/grandma and successfully trap her face in a plastic bag.


My wife’s late grandfather, Pa, sitting peacefully on a chair in the middle of his old living room. Grams sits on his lap, both gazing at something I can’t see. They’re having a fond conversation, and although I watch their lips move, I hear nothing.


Malaysian news crew leaves a 200 ft. folding ladder in our student news studio. Of course, this is a great temptation for my lads and I. Later, on my way somewhere else, I climb a similar fire escape ladder. A bubbly, distressed blonde runs up and hugs me, surprisingly warm, then effusively apologizes for mistaking me for her close friend who regularly climbs that fire escape.

On the city’s jagged, street-level highway there’s a single minivan going the wrong way, but the cars manage to drive around it as though it were an extremely temporary one-way lane. Later the same thing happens while I’m riding a scooter on a one-way street, an entire line of cars that were diverted, with no notice from our direction.


Australian PM has a special rule, 612, where she can reject things based on being a grandmother. A door displaying the news is marked 612. Sitting around a table, Lynae gets up and a made-up but world-weary Asian girl sits in her chair. Despite the possible tension from bringing up politics, I solicit opinions by sharing the analogy of an internet response code, ‘4xx – machine on fire’. The Aussies seem properly amused. A newsstand reports “PM unhurt by nip dip”, and I learn this refers to the particulars of temporarily banning high-priced smart devices. Australia, after all, is the country exporting the raw materials to make them. Unbeknownst, the PM was sitting at the next table over, appreciates my gab, and takes me on a local tour.

The semi-arid town seems generic — there’s a central roundabout, off to the left is the industry, upslope to the right are short flat houses with fenced-in yards. In the distance is a chunky green promontory, much like Monument Valley USA. As we drive closer I see stunning medieval-imitation towers, ramparts, and fortifications. I can’t even fathom such artistic means, or their intent. This is what the area is famous for. I’m so awed by the beauty I begin to doubt its realness, even telling the PM it looks like a Myst game. This only exacerbates it’s majestic quality. Against the golden dusk light, the elegant stone buttresses on the far side of the hill spout waterfalls, the leafless trees clutching spherical mud-daub treehouses. Yet nothing degrades into unreality, it simply remains repentantly beautiful.

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Dream Journal

Two Different Political Dreams

I am an incorporeal presence floating above the crowds of the Republican National Convention. Loud and angry is the clamor, wretched partisans yelling for blood, dressed in white and reddish-orange. I despise the vicious and violent desires of these people. All gathered, I want them all blown up. Instead (by my intervention, perhaps?) the crowd is suddenly turned against their hotheaded petty potty-mouthed loser of a champion… they yell for his blood now, “Kill Trump! Kill Trump! Kill Trump!”

But that’s not all. In a separate dream, I’m the personal servant/slave of none other than Adolf Hitler himself. Fortunately for me, he’s not thoughtful enough to realize that his Jewish slave being sent on an errand to the railway depot might just escape. I manage to sneak out my wife too, who bafflingly robs the drama from the situation by dryly noting “this is good, I’m glad we do this every year.”

Let’s hope this dream doesn’t get me put on the wrong kind of list… (but if you did read this post under the aegis of law enforcement, I’d be interested to know).

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Dream Journal

Attending Trump’s Kids Wedding (A Dream)

I’m invited to a huge wedding party — the catch is that it’s one of Donald Trump’s kids.

It’s at this expansive palladium/neoclassical sports grounds (not soon after, I witness it being torn up and redeveloped). Decorations are sparse and modern, and Lynae and I play music on these white plastic devices made available… the volume down is hard to control (using shift+F6). I notice someone I once dated, Meredith S., walk in arm-and-arm with another former partner of mine, and realize they’ll eventually realize they have me in common (she turns and glances back at me for just a second). There’s also a bin full of elaborate foreign hats (I have the thought “this is what our wedding would have had). Donald gives a toast and I enjoy it the same way I enjoy my father-in-law, knowing that our politics differ greatly but appreciating him as my family.

The celebration winds down, I head north to explore some tangled dry woods (this dream turns into a city-planning dream, the industrial and residential areas angled diagonal to each other, joined by a single thick link road, arguing in favor of adding more links). I view a flyover of all the thin multi-story houses (the opposite of the bungalow in Ojai that I’m visiting).

Afterward, somewhere near the wedding grounds, Lynae and I are talking and realize we left some important item under the table. Returning, we fruitlessly search. We ask a large hairy bearded guy who seems friendly if he knows where else to look — by way of answer, he and two other guys perform a song-and-dance bit about how reasonably long certain things might be held for lost-and-found. As our item (maybe a bag) is much less important than a dog (48 hours) there’s not much chance for it. At least I got an entertaining soliloquy from my subconscious regarding expiration dates on “lost” things.

Oh yeah, my wife got scared because she thought I was a monster shape-shifter (one with little white ropes for a body) and I decided to play along for a while until she came up with a reason to believe I wasn’t. It was easier that way, but I must admit to a certain sinister enjoyment of a well-received villain act. Maybe that happened because I was still waiting for a response from earlier in the dream, where I was out-of-communication with Dara V., and my wife said she woul resolve the problem one-on-one. That… makes me long for the long-lost girl again (not unusual for me). I suspect her presence is a big reason why the dream felt important enough to write down — here in the summer heat and flies of Ojai valley, sticky and rough.

“There are those that are lost to us forever.”
–message from a dream I had in 8th grade