Tag: swimming pool

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Dream Journal

Flinging Skittles as a Flourish

An outdoor complex with pathways along water, wooden verandas, locker rooms, and pools. Part of the story seems to be that my side has returned victorious from some conflict. As part of that I’m at an outdoor pool party and overhear a 20-something girl talking about how she finally wants to try coke for the first time. I go to retrieve some from a locker room. In the dream, at in waking like sometimes, I get distracted and I never find out what her reaction would’ve been.

I’m about to talk to my friend Matthew and as a dramatic gesture of flourish, I throw a handful of Skittles over my shoulder in a wide arc. Maybe a single prescription drug bottle, too. I don’t get a chance to get his attention though, so I suppose it was just for me.

I’m walking along through an indoor space — kind of an endless “backrooms” vibe to it — and I’m being Wolverine, from the X-Men. As I’m passing by an automated Sabretooth machine (Sabretooth was Wolverine’s traditional enemy in the X-Men if memory serves). The flung projectiles scathe my arm and it’s the first time I’ve taken any damage in this body/character, which I find much more upsetting than the actual injury.

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Dream Journal

A Spillway of Colonnades

Sliding down a long wide slope of water, riding a boogie board attached by rope to a remote-controlled motor. Meet my brother at the bottom of this spillway and we talk about how fun yet frightening it is. The water is startlingly deep and dark for a pool despite civilized touches, like the pleasant collonade at water’s edge.

I’m with a subby girl who might be a satanist. She has a distinct, plump shape and is usually seen intently talking with her boyfriend (also a satanist). It’s clear she has a keen interest in murder, perhaps even a fetish for being murdered. (Probably derived from the Silicon Valley characters Gilfoyle and his girlfriend Tara, who I just learned were also satanists.) There is an acknowledged creepiness to this, and I do worry about being drawn into it or even blamed somehow.

Off to the side of the vast slide area is an anteroom, part of a museum. The cases have a display of California coins you can leaf through. I knew that before the Federal Reserve Bank, states used to mint their own currency. But I never thought to check before.

My tenth grade English teacher Mrs. Roos assigns homework: the paperwork they give you to fill out when checking in to the mental ward. The forms are oversized to be able to read it, copied from real materials but structured like every other generic homework assignment. Supposedly this is too help us understand what a character in our book I going through when she goes to the mental ward. I approach Mrs. Roos in what can only be described as a sanctum; darkened archways, candles, burnt offerings. I explain playfully but confidingly that I might skip the exercise, even deserve extra credit — you see, I once filled out these forms myself at the mental ward. How better to relate to the character than to have had to same experience?

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Dream Journal

Swimming through Election Chaos

It’s shortly after the election, and the Cult of the Dead Cow has hacked Whitehouse.gov. A documentary now posted there with a French-language title exposes exactly how Trump has stolen the election. I swim in a deep natural pool at the road’s end of my childhood home on Kemper court. Beto O’Rourke (a.k.a. Psychedelic Warlord) is sworn in as president by Mike Pence. I see the military on a double-decker bus, unsure who to take orders from.

Spot my old blue truck parked down the street, make sure it’s mine (yup, dents are the same), and I worry about moving it for street sweeping. Soon I realize my neighbor now owns it by some coincidence. Narrow windy sand-bottomed channels are the unique pool outside this home, my father-in-law’s old home, evocative of hot springs. The neighbor volunteers how police officers often get deeper, sandier waterworks as they can skirt regulations.

I watch more of the documentary and it’s actually rather daring, exposing all manner of American government corruption — no matter what side wins I figure a lot of people are going to jail. Wasn’t aware any libs still had this much bravery.

At the end of the court I swim past a driveway hosting an Avenue Q-style Broadway play. A fat Alex Jones puppet dressed as a king heckles Trump and his crony walking up the steps of the White House, as they slam the door. I manage to get in a quip of appreciation, telling him I didn’t expect some puppet guy would do such a good job.

The documentary continues. The movie is being streamed from dsicu.net or dsico.net — I marvel at the incredible amount of pressure their servers must be under right now. Watching more I realize there’s a call to action at the end and I’m actually behind most people, which explains the largely empty street.

I bust my way through a set of double doors, a backstage area that feels like New York, during some performance. They won’t let me through between the audience bleachers. So to get through this big donut-shaped arena building, at knifepoint I make them open the rear doors so I can go around outside. I avoid a murderous knife-wielding Donald Duck (could I have been the Donald Duck?) and reach a hospital emergency ward that’s been hit hard with the recent public revelation/call to action and the righteous chaos that has followed. There’s Mickey Mouse graffiti written in blood. Inside, the documentary plays on whiteboards, with handwritten explainer notes jotted next to it.

Just such an amazing job overall, the whole story and especially the documentary central to it. I awoke suddenly pre-dawn with a fascinated “huuuuuh”, wrote down pretty much all of it, then managed several more hours sleep.

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Dream Journal

My Re-Assembled Apartment, On Mars

Front gate of my building. An unfamiliar Asian hoodlum-looking guy demands I push in his gate code for him: 626. Feel like I must sneak into my own home afterwards, to learn what apartment is his. Clambering outside of the spiral stucco wall; a view of a wide green backyard lawn beyond the scaffolding support beams. There’s no railing, but through tiny castle-like windows I can regularly peer in to navigate my way up.

One apartment has a broad sun-facing window with only two chairs in it, with a large dropcloth backdrop with plants hanging on it. The people are similar to some I know, Allegra, Creech, SF-adjacent folk. Empty glass aquaria are stacked behind the blacked out window, with a single long blanket trailing through all them. I spot a few drying mushrooms under there.

Then: to Mars. Somehow I offend my wife’s mushroom dealer (who she’s been texting recently) when I stare at him beside a bed, not knowing if he’s real, and trying to imagine his face as an older me with gray hair. He doesn’t speak though; he’s too shy. He’s like my cousin, Gabe. In the sky, and on my conveniently motion-synced watch screen, I view the tightening spiral trajectory of his return ship to earth.

I’m wearing an unusual two-level belt: the top part green, the bottom red. My wife takes off red part and squeezes it out, making it yellow. Supposedly a symbol of feminine renewal or something.

In a tower, in a room near the top of the tower, a group of black kids treat me as if I’m Bart Simpson (maybe I am?). An odd family feeling pervades, as if we all know this is only because we’re all together on Mars. But perhaps for different times and reasons.

It’s a rather wonky tower, a group construction project made from 100% scavenged parts — some from a creative reuse place like Urban Ore, some even some from of my apartment (I see my own bedframe post with the electric blanket controller still attached, and feel a a twinge of sadness/nostalgia). Frustratingly, even though I’m on Mars I have the same view out the window, the same corner here in the Mission District, with the same laundromat.

On the tower’s top floor, I can see the freeway traffic moving below, and our tower itself moving on freeway. The vibrations here on top are terribly strong; I wish we could’ve have used metal. Yet we’re still in the process of digging out a pool — structured like an inverted tent, a frame of PVC parts. But we discover it can’t be slid into the dirt, so we’ll have to undig it and start again. This exact pronouncement is made our Patrick Stewart leader figure, more like Q actually, sitting in judgement on a floating chair atop a pike.

Later we have to improvise a new navigation protocol on our spaceship (Enterprise-like, with shovel-spade front and flat-sided shape) in order to avoid murder-class planets. Funnily enough the algorithm still keeps suggesting homicide-class planets (sounds just as fun), which the crew has to manually decline.

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Dream Journal

Forgetting the Unforgotten

Flirting with a friend, Naomi Most, asking if she still loves on Blatrero — a silly pet name for her residence. She raises a Puck camping trailer from the ground floor on a circular platform with a spiral winch.

I happen to later visit her while she’s not there to drop off some keys. The door, which is locked, has an open wall right next to it so I just reach around and place them just inside, still feeling oddly like I’ve broke in.

A few crony political leaders are in a pool. They need to plot, but lack a secluded spot to do it. Reminds me of old Chinese court ministers, who had to wear long bars on the back of their hats so they couldn’t whisper in meetings. The only possible place these guys now have is on the top of the hill, where the pool snakes upwards (in defiance of gravity). One scolds the other feebly.

A long sequence intricately weaving around the song “Unforgotten” by Canadian indigenous singer Iskwé occurs, and I wake up with it my head, but ironically I forgot most of the dream.

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Dream Journal

A Cozy Compound in the Woods, and Famous Guests

Lazing around in some open vacation courtyard, an asymmetric rhomboid. Tired, I order Carl’s Jr., instead of pizza which my wife later reminds me she asked me to. I switch on the Weather Channel for light background noise… but apparently now it has ads?

I catch sight of a man I know, his balls exposed, but it’s just another fashion choice somehow. For a moment it strikes me how oddly it’s much less obscene than showing just a dick or the whole package, but I’m surprised to admit, it totally is.

I find myself idly wondering: when do surgeons learn how to bring someone back from the dead? Is there a day where they talk about the rules, the records, joke about being necromancers? Strange job.

I’m soon walking around a swimming pool while my friends and I are all skinny dipping, but then it seems a new group of grungy beer-drinking hipsters has showed up to the compound/courtyard — private party over. My wife and I start packing clothes and arguing about how long it will take, how much exactly we still have to pack.

Take a break briefly to shop at a grocery store, but I’m sad from the arguing and the mis-ordering and the leaving. On the ground I find a strangely-shaped oblong orange fruit (mango? squash?). I discover among the produce its other half, the banality of the explanation causing me to sigh and set it back on the ground instead.

While visiting my high school creative writing teacher Ms. Fitz’ classroom, I perch on the edge of a blackboard. But Lauren joins me, and us both sitting on it causes it to crash off the wall. Taking responsibility, I construct a replacement of a homemade paper version covered in art selections. The piece on the back, which I think clever (and which won’t normally be seen), is of a hand-drawn skeleton: an oblique downward view of the spine, scapula, and pelvic ridge. This is apparently a too-creative stretch for Lauren, who pans it and has me explain what she’s looking at.

On a creaky wooden staircase out the back, becoming woods, I encounter a weird deer with moss growing over the side of one eye. It’s friendly — almost spirit-guide friendly — so I go to get it carrots. I bring out an ice chest with two bags. As I re-emerge outside I gaze down the neighborhood hill, a single puff of steam popping out the rustic chimney of a tall squarish cabin house down the hill. The morning silence and fog is impressive, encompassing. I have a brief chat with a random neighbor guy and tell him what I’m doing. He asks for one of the bags. A bit selfish, but I offer to give him as much as will fit in his hands. A few animals immediately show up, at least one anteater (which I don’t think eat carrots, “but oh well” I say as I offer some) and a deer with teeth that look like it should definitely be carnivorous. I hand-feed that angular animal with great caution, but it seems not so much dangerous as derpy.

Up in our personal quarters, the musician Amanda Palmer is visiting. Hanging out with friends and band-mates, mostly naked. She’s very easy to host, quite self-possessed. and independent. Hangs out with her crew and chats/chills, taking breaks to talk with me or other family.

Meanwhile my wife tells me Kevin McAllister (Macaulay Culkin) a.k.a Kevin Pill is staying in another room in the complex. I want to thank him for his recent funny tweet and say how glad I am to have him, but I peek in and he’s doing some private conference. I don’t mind, but it could’ve been a sex thing? Masturbating? I don’t know.

I ask Amanda Palmer if they’d like to meet. I’m like “oh wait you already know each other”, and we together recall a time where they got into a debate and she surprised him with a detailed rebuttal, concluding at his shock “that’s right, I went to formal school too”. Listening to her voice is mesmerizing… deep and gravelly and calming. I remember that I should be recording it, and regret not doing so already.

A group of jock-ish “Lost Boys”-looking kids fly onto the room’s balcony. I block the view of my naked celebrity guests while he asks some random probing question, hoping to see them. Gauging my guests’ reaction, I deflect and gently let them down with whatever it is they wanted to ask. Part of being a good host, I guess.

Writing this all down, I realize we never finally departed to courtyard complex after all.

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Dream Journal

Sea Turtle Pool

Standing beside my family’s backyard pool. Sea turtles of all different sizes swim in a circle, and I stand by the edge with a tank full of just incubated babies, scooping them out and placing them in the water one by one. Only on waking do I realize how cute and hopeful this dream sounds.