Tag: stairs

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Dream Journal

Apt #99

These dreams all take place at night for no particular reason.

Earliest remembered is playing on a school athletic field where I’m not a student. But I manage to successfully fit in, heading in with the rest of them and peeking over the wall into the locker room to see what I’m getting myself into.

Having friends over in my new place, Apt #99 (the only double digit unit on the second floor). I become more aware that it’s cheap and somewhat sketchy building with weird architecture. The hallways and stairways especially are dark and dingy, but with an unusually intense vibe of human activity. Maybe it’s like a one-building Kowloon Walled City — except I think the second floor is the top. I’m up and down the stairs several times, giving instructions on how to find stuff to one of my visitors.

I’m informed by some Mormon friends of a free trip to China. It’s sponsored by our school, but takes only one day. Feels like far from enough, and mysteriously so. I wonder what the Chinese face recognition would make of my all-too-Western face.

Participating in a survey of the Great Lakes and their borders. My favorite is a smallisg lake located higher up between others called King Lake. The view there is very interesting, as from the vantage of its center one can see a ring of the other lakes below. But on a newly released map it’s been labeled “Piss Lake” because locals don’t like the smell and think it doesn’t have enough bathrooms. Near King Lake there’s a small cabin perched on a hill that’s supposed to have a groundskeeper, but when I visit it just has a cat napping on an armchair. I fondly start thinking of him as the groundskeeper.

The Great Lakes also has an international border, and I visit a liquor store near there on land that should never have been claimed. The man who built this place, the so-called owner, has punted on the issue for ages by avoiding paperwork to clear it up. Because of the legal complexities with the border no one has been motivated enough to sort the situation out, and he continues running his business only semi-legally. I have some idea of what the place was like before and so I’m made a bit sad by learning all this.

Later I’m working as an impromptu messenger. In a thick forest on expansive level terrain adjacent to an outpost, I deliver a message to a hidden group. The member I meet uses a mech to traverse the dense terrain. As soon as my message is delivered however, my government launches a nuclear missile at the location where we met. Luckily the rendezvous is not where the other side’s base is, and actually 20 miles away. But now how am I supposed to get them to trust me/us again now? I’ve been manipulated and there’s no easy way to get that across.

Visiting a restaurant in Wyoming which is full old-timey themed. A photo posted in the review shows diners dressed up in frontier style dresses, oversized frilly things which are more Victorian extravagance than Midwestern demure. The cloth patterns remain very much Little House on the Prairie or Potato Sack Dress though, a pleasant combination. The photo’s poster has chosen to recolor their original wide angle image and overlaid a pastel rainbow coloration across it. Another interesting detail is that each table has its own container of dry ice which spills fog across the diners and food — something I would expect more for Halloween than the old west, but this is essentially a cosplay restaurant and the effect is fun. Reecy fits in well among the crowd. She told me about the place (she may have taken me, actually). But since I’m currently traveling all I have with me appropriate to wear is a colorful squarish-patterned shirt with black lapels, which feels underdressed. I find a rainbow bowtie to go with it and feel just a smidge finer.

Somewhere in here, I wake up from dental surgery, having had my chipped premolar that’s been bothering me for years finally removed — wake up in the dream, that is. I’m kind of surprised that it finally worked.

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Dream Journal

Triangle Frame Task

Assigned to deliver a triangular wooden picture frame with writing inscribed on it. Actually a duplicate, though I’m uncertain whether it’s the copy or an original.

Walking down a hillside on a set of stairs through people’s private apartments. Gardens, cottages, wooden gates and fences, open bedrooms. One cozy-looking bedside belongs to Betty White, with whom I briefly converse.

I notice that after carrying it, the long sides of the triangle frame have been bent into the opposite directions — as if they were broken and reattached.

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Dream Journal

Vacuuming as a Distraction

I’m on my way to vacuum our multi-story rat cage. On the way I get distracted by vacuuming the subway. A good deed for sure, but also a way to avoid cleaning the rat cage for now. Across the wide open tile floor near a set of frozen cement stairs, an official walks toward me. I think I’m about to get a talking to but he just walks past me. He picks up a suction attachment I unknowingly dropped when I switched to my weed whacking attachment, handing it back to me.

Occasionally I find thick squarish mussels with meat still inside. Recently someone received them as a scavenging reward, but didn’t/couldn’t open them.

The hobbit, Frodo, is excited to visit his favorite bar, The Green Dragon.

Kristin McConnell is helpfully demonstrating an exercise for strippers, flipping gymnastically off of a corner countertop.

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Dream Journal

Down and Up Again, a Group Celebration

The dream is a narrative following the linear story of a celebration at the end of a year. Some group effort, a school year or perhaps a big work project. We’re all retracing the year-long path together.

First we walk single file downstairs to the lower level, a rocky coastline where our cohort frolics in the ocean. There are flashes of a Monty Python scene: cutlass vs. rapier. A man dressed in an ancient Semitic priest costume bonks someone over the head with the flat side of the cutlass. Not long after, I have the cutlass strapped to my back, climbing over a small crag as a wave crashes over.

After the coastal area we collectively filter up to the windows of a doctor’s office. There we are informed that while there is an elevator, we are supposedly to pay the fee here at the window of $159.

Obviously this is a non-starter. There’s a line of my classmate/workmate friends waiting to ascend the stairs back up for our final 4/6 of the schedule program

I remember in particular one of my classmates is Stephanie Sukhram. She is unique in this case as I went to school with her between 4th to 11th grade. She became a doctor herself but died of ovarian cancer soon after graduating (which I learned much later trying to research her online).

One of the last images is of a dusty keyboard, which I pick clean of spiderwebs and other debris and cruft. Later in the day I’d be typing something important, though I didn’t know it when I had the dream.

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Dream Journal

Witch’s Hidden Jungle Bar in the Rock

Testing bulbs in a possibly broken glass double lamp. Appears that one side works, I try in the other side a more modern bulky electronic bulb, which has the problem of staying lit after unscrewed.

Pull what appears to be a minidisc MDLP deck from a garbage bin, in the center of a roundabout room. I ask my mom, who likely threw it away there, if I can keep it and if she kept minidiscs. She responds saying she doesn’t know why I want it, ejecting a thin bluish CD that’s apparently called MDLP. Next to it, I still see the little rectangular minidisc slot, and a number counter.

Walking along a deserted upper floor hallway of a long mall, a light rain in the pre-dawn hour (a highly sensory experience, near lucid). Days are much longer here and soon we can expect 20 hours of sunlight.

I reach the end of the corridor and a set of papered double doors, behind which is an Adobe-branded shop. There’s cutesy displays of different stores nearby and well-trained staff behind desks answering questions. I inquire about a friend’s craft store and eventually locate it myself, listed on a handmade sign in an upturned suitcase decorated with paper flowers. The attendant continues to try to help me so I must mime finding it again.

Sometime later I’m with my wife, driving a car via orange rope pulleys from the back seat. Might even have a tape deck playing. Eventually I’m convinced to take a more active “safe” position and climb into the front, and find that the rope wrapped steering wheel is much stiffer than expected. The car, like a stripped-down Volkswagen bug, is cruising atop a thin clearing of ridge in a scenic rocky jungle landscape below along all sides. In our path, we navigate through a large hole in a rock outcrop with a sophisticated obstacle: a giant rotating stone gear that lifts the car in its teeth. At its greatest height the car gets stuck; we have to scrabble down the granite rockface.

Our car essentially lost, we descend to the base of the outcrop. Another person now seems with us (perhaps the Olson twins little brother?). Improvising what we have, we project a homemade video onto the rock face, craning our heads upward to see through the foliage as best we can. It’s footage made from elements of the jungle around us, but altered/crafted by a human perspective — one striking image is of green parrots flapping through the canopy, parrots cleverly remade of lush green leaves. Though we’re still stranded, it’s nice to have created some cool art, something recognizably purposeful. We want to attract the right rescuers. I hope it’s bright enough in the tropical daylight, spread thin as it is across the huge formation of stone.

We’re not waiting long before I notice an unusual feature nearby our display. There’s a thin ledge high up the face with a partially-hidden door. We deduce this must be a famously remote establishment, retro-country themed, run by semi-legendary singer/witch Marni Knox (no relation to Marnie Noxon of Buffy, more like Stevie Knicks of Fleetwood Mac). This is an exciting opportunity and we enter the door post-haste.

Inside it’s dim and empty, feels like it could be at least 100 years old. Victorian woodwork has undergone numerous repairs and coats of paint. It feels cozy, rustic, special, yet uninhabited. I immediately want to explore. Despite protestations from my wife (and Reecy, who came in with us somehow) I climb through a small low food order window in the front foyer into the cramped but orderly kitchen. It’s an oddly-shaped room, everything carefully stowed away for what I assume is the off-season. I quickly find a stairway in the back, leading down to the cook’s bathroom, more levels for their living quarters, storage for holiday decorations (everything in its place)… I even look through a wall-sized set of white drawers in the bathroom, like something from a ship, and find supplies inside parceled out in neat little rows. From somewhere above I hear a companion yell something along the lines “that’s not how you thought Guinan would live?!” I leave everything as it was and continue down, the stairway built at odd angles to accommodate the narrow tower-like arrangement of rooms. Startled, in one corner I come across a pair of cardboard cutouts made to look like workmen or painters against a glass-brick wall, silhouetted with diffuse light and plants growing on the other side. I realize this is exactly the intended effect, except for curious intruders on the outside of the building.

Finally I come to the bottom of the stairs. They end in an unsupported diagonal span leading into an open courtyard behind Marni Knox’s inn, so far I can’t see the back. I spot my wife before she spots me, having found her own way down to the back garden. I lay low in the disused space behind the stairs, hoping to evade her so she’ll explore the tower herself (much more novel than having me share my findings, perhaps deciding not to even look).

I succeed, smiling wryly after I see her go upstairs. I only get a few steps into a plot of the garden, though, before a witch materializes close behind me. She regards me with a smirk, apparently having observed my sneaking about. She makes a brief pronouncement, phrased ironically as a question, to the effect of “now would you like to show me your true form perhaps?” My body vibrates and shakes off what looks like a layer of snow, revealing — or was it sloughing off perhaps? — the form of a long-haired dark housecat. While not as confusing in the dream, either way it’s obvious that the jig is up. I’ll be going along with whatever the witch wants. I realize on waking she must be none other than the proprietor, Marni Knox.

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Dream Journal

all dreams can be interpreted as custom tax advice if you want

Ok, so first off, I should say that I’m not sure what the title means either, but it was funny enough to jolt me awake and get me to write this down — so there you go. Now here’s some custom tax advice (???):

Arriving at the driveway of my childhood home in a fully-laden pickup truck, where I switch out with her to drive. I roll the pickup up the drive a little too slow to make it all the way, somehow trying to do the opposite of backing up.

Unloading is uneven. On the walkway to the front door I randomly remember a colleague’s custom parameters he programmed for CRUD, realizing the letters (only three of which are present) are his daughter’s initials S, L, P and T.

The front door is open and I walk right in. The place has wall-to-wall Saltillo tile floors like I remember, and it’s currently getting cleaned for new residents to move in. I shout a greeting to the maid mopping the next room. I start to record a tour video so I’ll have something to better remember childhood home. The interior bathroom (across from my smaller childhood bedroom) is bigger than I remember, a wide open layout with stalls, high ceilings, and tile gutters. I peek around a couple corners and there’s a cavernous shower stall with a urinal on the opposite wall. I get the impression that it’s architecturally significant, perhaps something shared with the home next door.

I change my mind about the video, deciding it’s a wasteful thing to record my entire walkthrough. I climb over the ¾ wall out of the bathroom itself, and the space is bigger, public, with a few cheerful gay folks I seem to know milling about. Feels like a neighborhood thoroughfare.

Things turn serious and sweetly mournful as I abruptly switch into a greeting card poem moment: trying out different dinosaurs peeking just above a mirror-calm pond gazing at the moon, and reading poem text printed against the sky. Out of the water, the color-coded dinosaur group realizes they can inflate their necks bigger, making them feel larger and safer. In a humorous note, a big predatory crocodile standing right behind them realizes the same, inflating his whole body (looking like the croc in the Don Bluth movie All Dogs Go to Heaven).

Ending that sideline as suddenly as I started, now walking over the cracked tile floors of a derelict mall, toward the wide entrance of an abandoned Sears store. While trying to demonstrate something with my phone, I trip and it slides all the way into an opened elevator door. I monologue about the predictable timing of these kind of things, expecting the doors to shut on cue as I get within reach. But I make it, surprisingly. Honestly I’m still a little flummoxed.

I talk with a cool gay black guy wearing bug-eyed glasses at a check-in desk at the Sears entrance. A brief conversation ending with the Rocky Horror “antici-” … “-pation” joke, which he gets — but the other people at the desk find bizarre.

Peering though a lens on my phone at older pictures from this mall, I discover some that were taken in sequence. In frame-by-frame holographic 3D, I watch a messy, fun, 80s-looking Florida blonde, carrying shopping bags, in a red dress, slip/fall on her butt and laugh.

In our bedroom here in the Fartpartment, we’ve rescued a paper bird. It’s fragile, rough, an appearance like folded newspaper. After a long time caring for it, one day I see it actually flap itself down from the top windowsill onto the bed. It picks up a little upside-down ladies hat and flies it back up to use it as a nest.

I think strongly about how to keep raising this vulnerable little bird, cognizant of how it needs an outside space but that rain would destroy it. I come up with a plan to build a row of little birdhouses underneath the apartment’s outside stairway awning.

The paper bird grows up/time travels into a cute and athletic girl, reminding me of some girls I think I know (Kenna M., Lee T.). She’s wearing workout clothes, hanging out with me on our back stairway. I put my hand on her bare midriff in a flirty way, noting how much flatter it’s become since I last met her. I idly climb upwards on the underside of stairs, checking out the cool moss growing through the stair cracks, feeling very energized and athletic myself just being around her.

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Dream Journal

Two Masks, an Empty Simpsons-Inhabited Mansion

Standing in a place where recently a pregnant Marge Simpson stood, waiting to see someone. Now 3 grey chairs are lined up in a row outside that door, on gray carpet, among empty halls. They leave the impression of a scene very recently abandoned. I observe the vibrating cartoon outline of The Simpsons’ Monty Burns standing sideways against the column of my backyard stairway — events unfolding without him, inaccessible yet seen, as if inhabiting a windowed universe. He remains throughout the dream.

Taking the elevator to the rooftop, and the 38th story of this Addams-Family-like mansion. I get the hint that there might not exactly be 37 stories below it… it’s some sort of status thing. Whoever I am in this dream, I recognize I’ve lived a privileged life, and so recognize while gazing out among other high skyscrapers the calculated prestige of this place.

This whole time, we’ve been searching for two masks. One of them is real, of old Judaic provenance, and quite important. My younger sibling brings me one that their crew has found, flattened and rubbery and empty-eyed, a crude (though not cruel) caricature of a Jew. When asked how we will know which is which, I tell them with big-brother certainly, “to really to know which one is real, we can take samples and do composition analysis at a lab — I bet one of these will come up as being made some time in the last 50 years, somewhere in the vicinity of Southern California, while the other will have a vague 1000-ish year estimate, somewhere from Eastern Europe to the Levant… and which one would you bet on?”

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Dream Journal

The Landlord-Hidden Stairs

Our apartment has the same landlord, but is in a 5-10 story skyscraper in New York. There is a set of convenient stairs which the landlord has blocked off. I make my way through a public elevator to three rooftop garden mall, which the landlord also owns. On a path near the edge of the roof, I see strings of Christmas lights left unhung on the ground. I manage to sneak into my own hone by going down a disused private elevator behind the shucking station of a Chinese restaurant there. It’s a charming hand-hewn wood space that reminds me of a spice rack, and it looks like the old lady next door has one just like it. Perhaps that’s why he blocked it off, he couldn’t separate the two and couldn’t bring it up to code as a communal space.

A different dream possibly. On our outside stairway, the landlord has taken all the plants. He’s told my wife (who assures me he said he’ll bring them back) but I still complain that he gets to take them for an entire spring season.

I’m reading a book in class, might be reading on my phone. Walk from the front of the classroom to the back. A small cloud of vapor escapes the precession of students, but I’m not sure if it came from my mouth or the older black student in front of me. Girls practicing basketball in the gym, studying collisions by crashing their bodies mid-throw. I meet a childhood friend, Robby T., as an adult finally. I ask if he even goes by Robby anymore and tell him of my new name. He tells me he was taken out of school at some point. I walk away for a minute and my backpack’s missing. I find it quickly, intuiting that the Robby of now would hide it, as was a prank we might play on each other in school, but wouldn’t hide it far as that would be funnier for me to fail searching for it.

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Short Stairs Make Quick Work

I see my friend from middle and high school, Alexx Sanchez. I never did finish that drawing of her as an elf that she requested in 7th grade — I didn’t know how to draw, and I still don’t think I could make a passable go of it. Demonstrating some of the knowledge of the weird sandstone building we’re in, since I’ve been working there so long, I slide down set of stairs with an extremely low ceiling (perhaps a 2 foot space). I then call to her from the subterranean work area. She looks mildly horrified that we’re expected to get in and out through a space so small.

My younger friend Lily Z. is in a band. I round the corner of my high school, playing a drum, telling her about three other Lilys I met with her exact name, and how strangely different and the same they are.

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Landlord Fixing the Stairs

The landlord is in the backyard, and the wooden stairway has had one of its columns eroded away. I call him and he actually starts to fix it. I discover the shady lower column, underneath the landing, is also broken completely through. There’s barely anything holding up the right side anymore. The physical orientation is oddly different than our normal backyard, rotated somehow — the landlord too — both true-to-life and not. Lazy overgrown potted plants grow thick and lush over puddles and concrete, everything seems to have a fine coating of moss.

The view zooms out, showing the Victorian building that Ais lives in being a relic of earlier development, isolated in a business park, itself within a large airport and whose roads serve cars as well as planes. Reminds me of Alameda.