Tag: sleep

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Dream Journal

Revisit to Australia

Visiting Australia, I never thought I’d see it again. I’m traveling deep inland and the green hills and my feelings for the land are very specific, nostalgic, touching. There’s been a series of contaminations lately, and quantities of high-quality cow fat has to be dumped. I dig a shallow hole to pour out what someone calls “beautiful 90s fat” into the dirt while the wizard Gandalf comforts me.

Renting a place in Mexico. We’ve still not acclimated and made friends, partly because it would mostly be expats, so we mostly stay in our room. This isn’t so much an issue since there’s sometimes a beautiful golden light in the evenings in the corners of our room (which is like my childhood bedroom in Kemper court). The house where the room is has a private road veering off to one side, though I don’t realize that’s what it is at first. I see a Mexican man sleeping on the road surface in the shade near the first curve. He would be hard to see in the shadow there, which seems intentionally dangerous, even suicidal. I take stock and realize I’m being imperceptive of the cultural environs, after all how many cars are really going to pass this bumpy road passing by the front of this dinky house.

In what must be a different dream, we discover the room our landlord has rented to us is still being used as a commercial kitchen. It was reasonable enough when we assumed it had been converted for residential use, but we don’t even have any private area… it’s literally a working kitchen using rolling industrial fridges.

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Dream Journal

Strip Mall Waystation, Rat Deaths, Map Anomalies

I find myself sleeping in an odd, interstitial liminal space — a kind of waystation for world travelers. It feels like a forgotten space within a strip mall, perhaps a former party supply store. A solidly-built, boxy metal grid forms the internal structure of this place.

A rat dies. This is the second rat to die, unfortunately. I have to tell my wife before she gets back. But then I remember the first rat died a long time ago. Does that make this news a little easier to share?

I’m allowed to sleep there. I’ll be sleeping just outside the big metal grid, but still inside the store. It’s a privilege to be here for a few days, but feels strange too.

When turning the perspective of a 3D map, all the buildings change too. They’re very detailed, but wrong — a bad guess by the 3D analysis algorithm. It’s too bad, since they look so crisp and good. But there’s no way now to tell what they really look like.

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Dream Journal

Dream on the First of May

Stand up comic at a zoo telling jokes standing on a deep pool. Underneath is a moose covered in dirty algae, which she also then tells jokes to. She doesn’t see the bear behind her, though.

A stack of frogs.

Kindergarten is selling mattresses. Well, the school is.

While playing as a Garak character, I trigger his drop-down menu choice early.

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Dream Journal

Doing Nothing, Variations

In a shared closet passing in-between rooms I discover a few very cute baby rats. It’s in a house that resembles my childhood home, making this my parent’s master bedroom closet.

I go to search for my buzz razor. My sister Alia is using it to cut her hair in the hallway using a mirror. I know better than to interrupt something like that. Still the same house.

Leaving a hotel, while our arms are full of travel gear, my wife decides she wants to check out the inside of a specific hotel room. She jimmies open the lock and saunters around, proceeding to lie down on a bed. We’re spending a little too long and I start to get worried that she’ll fall asleep, and begin complaining to her. I’m starting to suspect that there’s more to her motives than mere idle curiosity.

Map-based naval video game where the strategy to advance is unclear. A long featureless coast with a small inland lagoon. Beach waves endlessly repeating. Patiently, I expend a disgraceful time not doing much in the game. Not particularly minding, either. I don’t notice the blocks of cash at southeast corner until after I exit the map, immediately realizing that was probably the way to win.

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Dream Journal

First to Arrive in India, Drip Basket in Back Room

Travel to India. I’m the first to arrive and start figuring out the Airbnb, which is like a drained indoor pool with a shallow ceiling. The feeling of being outside, looking at the totally different architecture and streetscape, thinking about all the humans who made it (and it being a whole different society) is memorable. Trippy even. We are asked for our passports and realize we didn’t even have them on the packing list. Luckily, I find mine — and two more I didn’t intend to pack — in the sunglasses pocket of my wife’s backpack.

Laying in bed with my wife and suddenly get the urge to have sex. Somehow know what to do with the right timing to get it really nice.

I lay out a receipt for my friend Dara to sign. Some kind of reimbursement from 2017, in the period we were broken up and didn’t talk to each other. It’s next to another similar receipt for my neighbor friends the Goldies.

At the same time, the mother/daughter pair are sleeping in the back room of my apartment. Birds are playing outside the back window. A water dripper designed to be calming streams down into a wicker basket above their heads. It’s a bit too fast and I keep trying to figure how to slow it down, with no success.

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Dream Journal

Bubble Defense Exercise (some Starships too)

I’m Captain Pike sleeping on a bolster pillow all night. Very comfortable, more under blankets cool above, great sleep.

Perhaps I’m a mature responsible student, perhaps I’m sucking up to teacher. Cleaning up after a lecture class in a hall longer than it is wide, gathering all the spent materials together on a bed. The bed is the front rightmost in a row of semi-private anterooms that face the main science desk, a plain slab of rectangular black rock. Stephen Colbert could have been the instructor. On the far side, floor-to-ceiling windows reveal a gauzy view of lush sunlit valleys in the far distance.

We have a big training exercise in a mega-gymnasium using tennis rackets. The class is directed to hit back any bubbles that fly over from the other team. Fog misters are turned on (this gym is fancy) and the lights are dimmed so the far side is totally hidden. Quickly, it appears being fast enough to hit even a majority of bubbles is a near impossible task.

Then we form a line across one end of the large room to the other. This soon proves, as befits an actual school lesson, much easier. With only a certain small territory to defend, students can focus better on the projectiles they can hit. By chance I end up stationed almost behind a column. I speak with the short blonde girl who is posted directly behind it, joking about her readiness to perform her duty.

On the other side of her I observe a frisky lesbian girl working herself up to something. She briefly hits on the blonde then begins making out aggressively. There’s a moment of shock before anyone decides to do anything about it, separating the girls and holding back the unexpected aggressor.

After the exercise is concluded the expansive chamber is flooded. The water causes time to pass quickly. I zoom in on a view of an underwater spaceship, the Enterprise, left behind by a crew not unlike my class. The view pulls back and I notice an odd humorous little detail: a metal necktie carefully encircles the ships bridge, aging into deep time with the rest of it all.

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Dream Journal

Early Morning, Up to Clean the Tanks

Living in my old room at my parents house in my hometown. It’s been awhile now, the once bright turquoise carpet is starting to grey with my walking patterns. I spend a lot of time here, in this 10’x10′ room. I’m thinking about taking the closet doors off so there’s more space to move my mostly bare work desk into. Maybe my clothes racks could take up the far wall, I’d stare at them while half asleep instead of the desk and its neglected aquarium. The desk itself is bare unfinished wood, and a chair from my grandfather with a bullet hole in it (this references a real chair, with family lore). The room’s drywall is partially stripped open and I can read the builder’s notes, examine how they made the house. Yet despite the circumstances I’m thankful.

It’s early morning, maybe 7:15, and I’m up after a fitful night. I’ve been awake intermittently, idly staring at my fish tanks opposite my bed. The one across from me has been set up a long time, and I realize I’ve not done a water change. The betta inside bobs at the surface, breathing through its mouth. Amazing that it’s still alive, really. I look up the proportions of water to peroxide to salt that I need to use, filling my arms with the supplies, hobbling back to my room in the dim interior of the pre-dawn house. I hear my wife laughing behind the door of the next room over and talking to our pet rats (I can’t recall why we’re separate, but this arrangement has also lasted a while). I realize it’s only been maybe three hours of interrupted sleep I’ve had. But I’m happy I’m finally taking care of the aquariums again, now that I noticed and had the energy. A humbling dream. Humbling, but grateful. I wake up with a smaller ego.

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Dream Journal

Eggshell Gym, a Snippet

Sleeping under the curved wooden rafters of a roof like an eggshell. Reminiscent of my middle school gym.

All else lost, no further notes were made this night.