Tag: rats

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Dream Journal

Doppelrätters

A group of tiny look-alike rats has sneaked their way into our home. I pick up a small one, it’s blocky, with chunky, almost gargoyle-like features. Henry chases one of them. I find many of them in a small 10-gallon plastic cage, noting that these wild intruders each appear be a different take on our existing rats.

Meanwhile, one of our own rats is missing (that we don’t have in waking reality) named Amethyst. I’d almost forgotten about him/her, but they haven’t been seen in weeks. We suspect it ran off.

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Dream Journal

Dara, a Pastel Rat

I spot my old crush Dara walking across the crosswalk outside my house. She’s dressed in faded pastels, a pastel hoodie pulled over her head. I recognize her despite the personally unlikely color palette and the odd gait she has, a side-to-side waddle like her hips are too big.

She turns into a rat, scrabbling around the kitchen for Teddy Grahams to eat. Squeezing inside an empty milk jug, I start feeding her Teddy Grahams.

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Dream Journal

Drum Repair Room

Drums professor is teaching in my childhood bedroom on Kemper court. He helps repair a pair of Lynae’s drums. I pick up a bongo and the bottom immediately cracks right off.

A little round jug or goblet for Henry rat, full of special flavored milk. So good I keep finding a little brown rat — or a little black and grey rat? — or other Henry-pattern-like rats squatting in it. I don’t realize it at the time, but it sounds a lot like our rat Spork.

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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.

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Dream Journal

The New Apartment

On a public street near a riverbank somewhere downtown, things appear neglected and abandoned. Around the corner there’s a grand old white-columned courthouse that has seen better days. Old cars rust outside industrial-sized garages — no people can be seen. I’m there to move into the neighborhood. Eventually, with time, the residents show themselves. It’s a bit of an initiation they do.

In the living space I settle into there’s a rat cage, not much bigger than a 10-gallon terrarium, but which is decorated beautifully with plant clippings and dry moss. Around the corner in this strangely welcoming squat group-style apartment is a leopard in small cage. It’s at first unfriendly, even hostile. Then one day it asks to be handled and is so friendly I almost let it escape by rolling through a crunchy plastic carry-out box.

Working on a student project of some kind, I take figurines of the evil Mongol leader from Mulan and add a jet-pack. Mostly, this doesn’t result in its limbs being melted off — mostly. Heph, my partner, does a much more diligent job and regales us with a moving story (which I watch through a gap underneath the rat cage). Blake is also living here, and I recall it being her birthday. The dream ends outside in a oddly-shaped triangular parcel, cars parked tight, with stalagmites of rust rising out of the ground.

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Dream Journal

5 Scenes from Varied Dreams

Chicken is attending a concert by a Japanese cellist with his wife and daughter. We have a friendly stilted conversation afterwards. He says he could’ve done without the cellist’s political discursions, but found the concert enjoyable.

A lifted pickup truck with a circular rollbar parking on the street. It brakes hard while backing up and flips over — and odd, interesting old feature.

Fixing Autumn’s air conditioning. There’s a purpose-built enclosed orange space just left of the stairs where all the air is pushed through.

Donald Trump is a sad, half-cocked big city real estate investor. He’s leaning against his family, of which I’m one. Simply being there is the most sympathy I can think to have.

Our pet rats have been set free for a long time, and we’re outside calling them. They come quickly, seemingly from nowhere. It’s a teary, warm-hearted reunion. I know they won’t be able to breed (neutered) but they’re living out their lives in freedom, among their rat people.