Making our way to a tiled subway station in Brooklyn. We arrive, and one can choose an exceptional person (matched with a color) on a pendant to be placed on the entrance of the station. The entire rectangle is covered in a single small portrait, the reddish color of bentonite clay.
I think perhaps the entire subway station changes to the portrait you pick. But I don’t know, I only visited just the once.
Viewed from above, I can see that my childhood friend Robbie T.’s house on Desert Inn road is only a few hundred feet, by air, from a dinosaur excavation exhibit/museum. The several blocks in between are separated by a main thoroughfare but it’s still surprising that we never realized when we were kids.
My wife and I take the subway there (a short trip) and while exiting the station on a short connecting dirt path, with scrubby but pretty green nature on the side, I momentarily think we’ve angered a guy walking behind us. He’s muttering something loudly and it takes an anxious second to realize he’s talking to his directions via headset.
The museum is outdoors, the ground muddy under a sky of brisk blue. There’s preserved dinosaur footprints and maybe puddles. I prod downward with a stick as to measure depth. A detectable but unidentifiable smell is then on the stick, a nearby elder volunteers the information that they smell like The Devil (like the tarot card, not anything recognizably satanic or evil).
A sizable chunk of my back molar comes out and I sigh, looking at it in my hand. It’s been going on awhile without being addressed, falling away in pieces so it’s down to nub. No one around me seems to care or notice.
We set our pet rats to free roam loose in our home, halfway hoping they can find some wild ones. (Yesterday I saw a whole group of rats in the New York subway.)
In a thrift store I run, I prevent an old friend from buying my warm comfy German army jacket for $4. I actually chase her off, hoping she isn’t too upset despite appearances. The friend is either Meg from college (who played Columbia in Rocky Horror) or Amy Pollard from middle school (whose birthday was on Christmas). Soon I reveal a surprise gift for her — the jacket, which had a hole in the lining around the armpit, I completely repaired. Now I can give a perfectly functional jacket to her for free! Which might even make up for how I treated her in the store before. (The large atrium room reminds me of the Temple of Dendur in The Met, which I didn’t visit until today. And hadn’t even planned on seeing today.)
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.
Riding a train across an expansive strip mall, long and oversize. So long there are multiple stops of a subway that pass through. I get out at one of them into a huge enclosed rectangular gym used for prestigious ballet training. I’ve heard of it, a famous training space sponsored by the coffee company Yuban. I imagine it as a model, trying to understand how the tracks run through it at an oblique angle. I wait in the part of the large room where I think the train platform is, not knowing what side I need to be on. The train of course arrives and I have to scramble over it when it stopped to reach the correct side.
Lately it seems I’ve spent a lot of effort in between dreams trying to remember. Too much time passes and the interesting details fade, but oddly my impressions of them don’t. Having rehearsed the words I will put down, even dreaming as though I am writing, I lose the important and unique vibe. Which may be impossible to capture anyway, but the gap has started to be more noticeable and disappointing.
Later I realize I can buy the destination I’m trying to reach on the subway as it’s a chain store. It’s easy to come across, easy to replace. The brand is so generic I think of it as “McBrand”.
I arrived from a long overseas flight in London with my wife. We set out on the next leg of our journey, having to catch a tube train closer into town. A series of mishaps ensues: misplacing luggage, catching the wrong train, getting on the right train only to get off as it leaves. One train is made of narrow little linked platforms just big enough for a person, each shaped like beige pyramids that one must balance to ride on. My wife finds it difficult to stay on and dismounts just as this small short train leaves. Finally I get mad and yell at her, harumping down the stairs to see if I can find someone to talk sense into her.
There is a linking dream at this point in the night, forming a cohesive three-part story, but it’s been forgotten.
I view a map of Scotland, highlighting a major province disconnected into three parts. You’d think it was the nice part, that’s it’s reputation, but locals would rather you visit anywhere else. It’s almost camouflaged plaid coloring shifts into a saturated pink, revealing how ungainly it is on the map. I notice it’s shape seems to form the negative space on a Union Jack flag.
I possess a gigantic condom as big as an arm, though it’s almost completely dried out. While trying to demonstrate to my little brother how to use it, the ring at the base chips off immediately. It’d be a waste of a unique object to simply throw it away… but this is difficult. It’s so large it’s useless for anything but a demonstration anyway.
A cottage my dad worked on when he was young, in his twenties. Situated at the left edge of a canal gate, it’s a former industrial drawbridge operator’s cabin, narrow as as a subway line, somewhere in Los Angeles near a museum. Dad was a “2sq/fter”: someone who could take two square feet of soil from their home (in this case Illinois, though my Dad is actually from LA) and transform all the ground on their farm with it. Dad didn’t do that though, he’s just taken care of the native soil and built a charming and solid little shack just above the water level.
I kick off 4 of the 6 teammates on my canoe. The only ones left are one Finnish guy (looks like Willem Dafoe plus angry/sad Moe from the Simpsons) plus my dad. A theme song plays while we watch a betrayal.
Replacing the stove in my house after finding a more matching 1970s stove. The back control panel slides off separately, with my normal spice rack on top of it. I set up a hanging fluorescent click light at the back, near the vent (like the one above my kitchen table in waking life).
I discover RobertBLalonde.com, a web domain of my grandfather’s name, still registered by my dad. I make a phone call to the associated number but hang up when someone answers who’s obviously waking up from sleep.
A character named Jean Auern (an alias of Jean Grey from Marvel) has been alive for 14 billion years. She’s been involved in US politics for 300 million, non-linearly. I learn in depth of these events while traveling through a box of charcoal.
The person I called when investigating RobertBLalonde.com calls back. Jean confesses the truth of shutting down his home, punishing him. She then restores power to the narrow tube apartment, the same one my dad built, just like flipping a switch. I watch as he throws a few stray items out of the way in the narrow kitchen, before a train comes through at a T junction near the end. So he didn’t have to move the things out of the way — he’s been here since before the trains stopped running, before the place’s powers were cut off. So whose was it before him?
A large model of gray naval ship, as long as two men. I’m escorting it by swimming beside it, against a kind of curb, within a twilight concrete jungle. My companion demonstrates how the bow of the ship, even in gentle water on our floating wooden slat platform, vibrates so profoundly that it’s genuinely unsafe and unusable — why it’s being retired.
I’m revisiting Melbourne, Australia and meet a girl. She wears a dark-haired ponytail and is strange and energetic, youthfully careless but with an edge of urbane worldliness. We have an adventure preforming the mundane task of buying subway fare, semi-drunkenly carousing in a grotty, rowdy corner shop. We end up asleep near a rocky beach somewhere down the subway line. She’d neglected to tell me I had to clock out from the ride (of which I remember nothing) and I’m worried that, on account of it being so long after, all my credit is now expended. She languidly reassures me, no, the maximum is one day… I take it we’ve been on the beach at least overnight.
Later, I’m staying again at the last hostel I stayed when I was there. I remember thinking that I should have chosen The Friendlies, which was my favorite. This one has tall sunny glass walls in the guest lobby, and quite a drinking culture. Reminiscent of the Gold Coast in Queensland, or Florida. A Scottish guy, or maybe just someone doing a raucous impression of one, proves his drunkenness by head-butting a glass table. Not content with simply cracking it, he continues head-butting until the entire countertop of the hostel is smashed. Guy is now quite covered in blood and his friends take him away.
Inside a school complex, a range of all age students. Concrete everything. I’m waiting for a subway train on an underground platform with large posts that obscure my view. There are minders to help escort you onto the train, but mine is an inexperienced black kid that is dressed like a security guard. He screws up, despite my verbal protestations, and I miss the train despite standing right in front of it. The complex is big enough that I’m annoyed but not surprised.
Reminds me of a dream where I worked in an underground parking lot for Munchery — much like a coal mine. But also another parking lot dream, one where a cultish society had grown up in a renovated railyard roundhouse (like the Sacramento Railroad Museum) and I was the only one who could go in and out. I’ve also had dreams of a subterranean Space Mountain-style roller coaster. And a city-sized labyrinthine airport/spaceport.
The odd thing was that, from the satellite view of the school, this looked like my elementary school in Eureka… I haven’t thought about that in quite awhile and don’t know what it could mean.