It’s the last day before summer in a fifth grade classroom. The teacher is reading Harry Potter aloud. I’m sweeping up and re-shaping the sand mount the classroom is located on, like a little city on a bluff.
The movie “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is connected somehow to a secret message made with a sharpie and a stencil on someone’s back. I haven’t seen the movie, but I’m already dreaming about it.
Reading in a magazine by the side of my bed when I accidentally stumble on a bit in an article about someone I know. My old roommate, long after she had moved out, met someone for sex every Tuesday. Incidentally their fathers met and became professional friends. It was then revealed: the two of them were secret siblings.
A YouTuber I’ve followed for years, Lindsay Ellis, narrates and hosts a long movie-like narrative dream allegorically revealing her past trauma. Most of the details of story are lost (I had a convention class to possibly attend starting at 9, but didn’t make it and fell back asleep).
It began on a steep cliffside road overlooking the ocean. Small, languid, statuesque lions watched over some of the scenes. We drove most of the time, often being tricked by clever transitions like the imagineering inside the Tower of Terror ride. One long sequence is in an oversize warehouse/grocery store, aisles like rooms of a building. I think out of respect for Lindsay I won’t repeat what I remember might’ve happened there. It’s mostly forgotten anyway — though I’m left with a feeling of sympathy and understanding, a feeling that I’ll keep the exact nature of the secret in the same spirit she has.
It’s worth noting here that I don’t know her personally, I’m just an member of her audience. But she’s a real person. I don’t often have dreams about strangers like this.
In a complex, a restaurant portion thereof, with all sorts of hidden doors. I can’t see them as I haven’t been initiated and attained a certain level, but I can tell from others facial expressions they can. There are multiple Sansa Starks, one of which joins me on a bed that has a slow water drip on it.
Side note, mostly unrelated: the squirrel is my favorite character in Lord of the Rings.
Someone rediscovers an old secret of mine, that when I was in high school I got a letter of acceptance into Yale but never followed up on it. I lost the letter and chose to forget about it over the years. I’m embarrassed but also just don’t know what to say. I don’t have an explanation for why I left behind the opportunity, it just… slipped away.
Later on I’m at a swap meet near a terraced park. I’m packing up some metal rods embedded in parking lot asphalt into the truckbed, hopefully to sell. Their partially dug already, and it turns out a vendor there already decided they weren’t worth it and gave up. That same vendor has just sold a small black heart-shaped vessel for $302, a vessel I sold to them only a few days ago for $16. I calculate it immediately in the dream as $285, oddly off by one. For a variety of reasons, I’m not actually upset — although the way he told me, it seems what he expected.
Then I’m cleaning up the park after the show. Walking away with my arms full I see I’ve missed some vape tips in the dirt. I’ll get them another time, I think. I go to visit a group of friends in a further-away part of the bay. I pass their apartment and open a heavy door to a tiny bare windowless ground floor apartment, somewhere no human should live of their own free will. I know it must be hella expensive, too. I go next door to see my friends and their place is the same, but twice as wide.
As I’m driving home, I’m dropping off one of the girls at her subway stop. The town is like New Orleans, her stop is named Mystic, and it’s practically right by the swap meet earlier. Just as we get there she begins to try sweet-talking me into driving her across the bay. She’s cute, might’ve worked, but I see pretty clearly how it’s manipulating my attraction. There’s no actual feelings from her.
Make a baseball save in a square frame net in my childhood backyard. Didn’t know I was playing before, so it was rather lucky.
Minding my own business for the most part, I accidentally commit an act of high patriotism, but high treason to the enemies of… what I assume is freedom. Angela Merkel escorts me safely behind a set of double doors disguised as a bathroom entrance. I spot George W. Bush walking by and immediately realize this is an even more important meeting than I anticipated. I try to start an audio recording on my phone as Merkel explains the situation to me, but I can’t get the damn thing to start properly.
The details are lost, but the concern her unnamed group found relevant to me involved Captain Janeway of Voyager landing her starship underwater in order to escape the US.
Diving into sparkling blue-white pool naked, after taking clothes off at water’s edge. As recommended by Pan Priest last night. Gathering of high-status leisure, Eileen is there, Koe, others too, attended by gynoid pool-parlor assistants.
Dr. Mrs. The Monarch has an electronically-assisted power to talk secretly in front of outsiders. It’s disguised, warped, imperceptible to normal hearing. She’s doing this on one occasion in a tile-walled library waiting room, located in my teenage bedroom, but when she starts talking about sex the filter starts to break. A maternal woman in the same room suddenly perceives her as a disfigured bird-faced large toddler.
There’s a high-end electronic store whose name I didn’t know. It was similar to Brookstone or Sharper Image, and it started with a ‘P’, but the owner there kept misleading me that it was different stores… that I knew it wasn’t. One, for instance, was affiliated with a Chinese family, incorporated the name ‘Chinatown’ and owned several different places in SF but not this one. I pick up an employment application from the floorboards, but I just can’t figure out the name. Most of the dream, I’m bugging myself trying to remember it.
In an aisle of rifles, there’s a loaded crossbow which predictably goes off the moment I touch it. I practically roll my eyes. Upon drawback, a thin silvery arrow-bolt shaft levers upwards 45 degrees for ease of loading.
In a distant more-forgotten section packed with older merchandise, on a lone mid-level shelf above the aisles, Lynae finds a curious vacuum (or… vacuum-like trinket). It’s package is the size of a coffee cup box, ancient-looking for electronics, from the 1980s at least. Some kind of toilet pun. Christmas-themed, too, with faded rainbow shoehorned in there. I don’t recall us opening it, but it was an amusing curiosity.
Small 1-person boats impaled on pillars, to dry perhaps? Reminds me of a golf cart installation I saw in the Mojave Desert.
In a free movie theater, there’s a disused and neglected triangular video game room off to the side of the hallway. Behind a flimsy wall can be found a secret, colorful 70s dining hall. The hall still has chandeliers somehow. I’m discovered fairly quickly by some other students who work there.
I’m a red-headed sun-kissed kid, looking in a mirror. This is the end of the dream and I’ve been experiencing it as him, and he’s the character I’ve most liked, he’s made all good decisions. I use his image as an anchor, hoping to remember the whole story.
Seeing mom in Cathedral City backyard, confused because I remember some people who are there actually aren’t supposedly around anymore.
Diztroyo: a kind of chaotic and confusing music I hear with glitched-out visuals to match, the end of the night when I’ve essentially slept too long.