Tag: survival

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Dream Journal

New Society of Yet-Learned Secrets

I ride on an open railcar through inhabited forest land. It’s like a terraced Santa Cruz mountains full of houses. Once I arrive, I sense that I’ve “woken up” in an unfamiliar post-scarcity society with very different social rules. I must take my time to learn their ways. There’s artifacts from when I was alive previously (hundreds of years ago perhaps) which I get to explain. One is a jade stone green surface with matching sticker, partially torn off and covered in illegible handwriting. I offer to finally clean it off since I’ve explained that it was quite mundane, and it’s treated as a joke. This is their ancient history, after all.

There’s something hidden though — not quite sinister, but a secret aspect I’ve yet to uncover. My pet rat Porkpie (of all people) finds a ways to get away, escaping on a raft across a dark sea/lake. Little guy is cleverer than I expected.

I’m seated at a communal table with my friend Phoenix and her toddler Moxie. Above the table is an angled bar of color-coded lights which resembles the floating plastic lanes of a swimming pool. The linear code represents people at the table I think; Phoenix is white, Moxie green because she’s a baby, several others. Someone jokes to our waiter that they should put up searchlights.

At that suggestion I partially jolt into different consciousness, my view is a spreading fan pattern of messengers being released from a fortress under siege. Through the hostile rocky desert scramble hundreds of little Chinese figures in traditional costume (with conical hats) looking like a golden age Disney cartoon. One by one they’re shot in various ways as the roaming searchlight of the enemy finds them — all but one figure that, by brute luck, escapes the exposed killzone and delves into bafflingly rocky terrain. They must then follow a circuitous route to stay out of sight to reach a second fortress… the searchlights must never discover it as the destination.

Before the saving rendezvous takes place, I’m startled awake but my wife (gently, I’m told) telling me it might be time to wake up, Orin.

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Dream Journal

Surviving Zombie Apocalypse / Revisiting Grandma’s House

I’m proudly surviving the zombie apocalypse. I can zap around, I’m vigilant and quick. These zombies aren’t mindless but seem to hunt together as if controlled by an overlord somewhere. Despite my cocksure attitude I’m keenly aware of being constantly in danger. The world is changed and though I’m getting on, I know this isn’t what it should be. There’s a moment where I (or someone controlling the teleporter) accidentally teleport into a classic officer’s club/New Orleans style place called the G.A.&G — which happens now to be a zombie headquarters.

Staying up the night before on a writing spree of five stories, completing an assignment from 8th grade. Could be the same year; could be decades later. I’ve cobbled together two complete stories so far, maybe three. I consider for a moment how the teacher should’ve made the deadlines spaced out. But something clicks and I realize it’s my teacher from 9th grade, while the classroom is from sixth. An idea begins to form of why it was silly to re-do the assignment. Could be the beginnings of lucidity.

I’ve collected my pet rats together in a box. These are a new set of hybrids made from recombined pieces of earlier pets (giving reality to a metaphor I’ve been using lately for when all our older rats died off last year). I carry their box as far as inside a massive building and against a partially destroyed wall of the zombie-haunted zone. The gesture is carefree, but I’m also tired. My wife points out that they can now get loose, and there are many other rats roaming here. This is exactly the idea though — they have their little gang group, a home base in the form of the box, they won’t have a better chance than this. They need to survive in the world just like us.

In the basement bowels of this apocalyptic interior I find myself nostalgically watching a TV program from the 80s. I’m lounging in a disguise. Someone next to me is apparently in a new bodysuit. I say “you must be Chris then” assuming it’s my brother. I never am sure, though.

Revisiting the neighborhood of my maternal grandma’s house. It used to be exactly 10 minutes drive from my home when I was small, maybe 4 years old. I gradually piece together how it was on Fritz street, itself a branch off Glenn street where we lived in Santa Rosa (note: we did live there but these places aren’t real). It’s been redeveloped, that much I knew — but I never guessed how I wouldn’t even recognize it. It was once an overgrown single lane like you might find in the English countryside. Due to its convenience just off transit routes now it’s a thoroughly chopped up suburban neighborhood. There’s a poorly selling development of built-out treehouses. My Nana’s house back then was a compact little warm wooden space, like the inside of a boat. It was perched on the ridge of a hill overlooking the foggy pine forests of a wide valley beyond. Even that shows scattered signs of human colonization now.

I recall the flooded channel between two ridges as I saw it as a child in the 1980s. Smoking men used to paddle across in dinghies. I witness one instance where a wheelchair was transported off the back of the boat, dragging in the water, using its electric motor as an improvised outboard. I think then, certainly not all the regulatory changes since my youth haven’t been improvements.

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Dream Journal

Surviving the Apocalypse with the Crab People

Waiting under a tree for the apocalypse to be over. I’m mostly in denial about it, “it won’t be that bad, or that long”. I’ve stockpiled soft drinks. One night, I must I hide inside my neighbors’ converted rest stop bathrooms, plastic panels enclosing it from the wind. I just barely close the doors while a killer cop stalking the neighborhood searches the place. I manage to lock myself behind the supply closet door. He kills everyone else.

After that, I decide living away from [former] civilization is safer. I hole up in a country house in a small coastal community isolated from the damage of society. We’re glad to have no idea what’s going on, we just see the consequences — like a massive locust swarm passing through one day.

Just…doing iceberg things…

Our jungle island becomes an all-male commune. In the center stands a statue of a crab, whose long, colorful, plastic eyebrows I pose into a cartoonish expression of anger. It’s the same place as the restroom, years later. The “Crab People” chant starts up in my head. I show a video to a fellow commune member who reminds me of Vince Saunders or April Arcus, a video I shot just off our shore of a baby crab person. They watch, reflected, in a crevice-shaped mirror embedded into the hillside, scratched into squares. I leave via the narrow café on our northern exposure, eating a lone lost French fry left on a table.

In the backyard of our property, a steep pine-covered hill leads up to the neighbor’s building. It’s somehow the last address on the street, without any street leading to it. They yell down at us trying to get some kind of assistance. We gather around the backyard pond, someone leads us to shout their name all at the same time: “Hot Chocolate!” Thus amplified, we proceed to pack up their deliveries, and I trudge up the sandy slope.

I expect it to find a vineyard-like rich-people estate of stone walls, but it’s more of a spacious modern apartment tower. I carry two deliveries in oversized Munchery bags. Ring the buzzer of apartment 517, just around the corner from the actual door (confusing, a bit). It’s Dav Yagunuma’s place, and he’s pleased to see me as it’s been awhile. My other delivery is for a game design studio, the door covered in hand-scrawled notes. It’s the studio that makes the Myst games. Suitably puzzling, they have a peephole on their door labeled “channel” and a note saying if you wish to “alter the terms of your entranceship” look through the peephole and figure things out.

I never looked, but somehow I know the other side was like a steampunk café/lounge from another dream, 2nd floor catwalks, leather benches, Don Bruce in fine regalia. The riches of old San Francisco, perhaps.