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Dream Journal

Vacated House, Last School Day, Old Floppy Disks

Big empty house that I can move into with a group. The house is recently vacant — so recent there’s still laundry on a bathroom island, a teacup with Earl Gray mixed with gin & tonic made on a big pullout bed. The bed has a big frame headboard like my Nana’s bedroom.

It’s the final class on the last day of school. My history teacher Mr. Conklin is in the classroom of my English teacher Mrs. Snowden at my middle school. The room is rotated so it’s facing what would be the back wall. Students are excited and animated, gradually catching on that we have to stop participating in whatever activity there is before we get to go home. A kid at the end of the front row throws around a pistol carelessly, causing it to land on the ground.


Hanging around former crush in a space that’s hers. Been long enough since she was a jerk to me that I realize she should I’ve already trusted me by now. I consider asking to take one of the floppy disks she has sitting in a pile, the ones she was saving for an art project. Despite that, it occurs to me that if it’s a floppy disk it most likely contains ancient financial documents from her parents or something equally benal yet private.

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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

Prince Andrew’s Art Class

My third grade crush is swearing and idly playing with her junk, talking about “cunt cunt cunt”.

Prince Andrew (or George W. Bush) is teaching an art class. Has some hapless young students, some journalists fishing for stories. Hard to learn anything as he actually doesn’t have ability to communicate his aesthetic sense, if his royal one is worth communicating.

I pack up to leave early on my motorcycle, as  this class is on a Friday. The Prince is rambling about his mistress/lover not showing up. I clean around the sink during my many attempts to get out of there, and leave a bin of pancakes with a lid for the next folks who will use that space. On the way out I take an old bag someone has left behind so it doesn’t rot there, but it has an Apple Watch clipped to it — now I wonder if this good deed is essentially stealing the expensive watch.

“Patrick library” written on a sign with a photo of a forest fire. Trying to figure out what that means, and show someone else, but the words become more faded and harder to find the more I look around. I end up in a back room, with a few parking spots for rented electric trikes behind a hospital’s ER. I give my parking spot up voluntarily for a frazzled mom.

Planting trees in a backyard which represents America, possibly. Two of the pines will grow oddly where they’re sited, I reckon, but I’ll wait till they grow in and harvest them. The credits roll with soft music (which is an unusually on-the-nose ending for a dream).

But interestingly, what actually ends the dream is me repeatedly rehearsing what notes I will take upon waking. So, here we are then.

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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

Dord: Abbreviation of Density

An unusually intimate experience with density, by melding inside layers of a substance. Understanding the thickness of a substrate, then coming up a less dense surface layer. Watching how a new member of SNL is playing a person good at darts, or temperature. Understanding how this can replicate the circumstances from a famous murder mystery case.

Dord, a notable accidental word added to the dictionary during the 20th century, is my odd gateway to finding this experience. It was meant to be a reference to an abbreviation for density, D or d.


A camping trip up a hill. A tram takes you up in a loop, with the station dropping you off along the length of a tree-dotted ridgetop in a long cycle — if you miss your timing you could be waiting for it to come back for a long while. It’s scenic and sparse up there, reminding me of some places in Arizona. I’ve just completed an outdoor class I was assigned as part of my work (this isn’t entirely a vacation) and now have the unforeseen opportunity to take the next class. The professor, who I know, is going to share an in-depth presentation on love. I have a short time to decide and I’m very tempted…

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Dream Journal

Disrupting Sponsored Classroom Propaganda (plus, a Girl’s Fence-Butt)

Three times during the night’s dreams I find myself in a situation where a young girl expresses her attraction to me: one Scottish, one Japanese, and one American. Though hypothetically sketchy, I don’t sense any impropriety. I’ve been acting like my usual self (perhaps in a slightly better mood) and me being a target of infatuation seems like harmless fun all round. It’s also odd and sort of a running joke that it keeps happening; not sure what else I should do but take it in good humor.

One girl, memorably, sees we’re alone then smushes her undie-clad butt against the diamonds of a chain-link fence. Looks a little like the pillowy pattern on a sewn duvet? Maybe an elaborate pie crust? Ridiculous.


As a candidate, President Biden famously enjoyed traveling on the campaign tour bus. Now, a new All-American Travel Bus is made based on that design. One even meets presidential limo standards set by the Secret Service.


I show up to one of my regular classrooms as usual, though I quickly discover it’s officially an “optional” day — I didn’t need to show up but now I’m already here. The unfortunate reason (though unacknowledged) is obvious: there’s an Xfinity company rep sitting in the middle of the classroom joylessly disgorging some scripted promotional presentation. The class is mostly locked into a semi-trance in the projector-lit darkness. This ill-conceived sponsored pitch on its own is boring, mildly offensive even, but as the dowdy sad-sack shill drones on I begin to detect creepy undertones of propaganda. Militaristic, imperialist narratives seemingly weave through the dullest possible fabric — hypnotic, odious, uncontested.

I completely disengage, deeming it more effective than causing a scene. Since there’s nothing more important in class today, I set about searching high and low for my missing spice jar. It feels like part of the problem is I can’t remember the name, almost like I could simply call for it. Tactically, I interrupt the creepy droning corporate lump to ask if anyone can closer recall the name. The drone, in reflexive boorish overconfidence, wrongly declares it as “Erizetti”, then pairs it with an incorrect and simultaneously insulting definition. Seizing my opportunity (and also just fed up) I attack them on everything I can think of, with as much conciseness and authority I can summon. When I’m done Ms. Xfinity ignores me again and plows ahead exactly the same, but I can tell her incantation isn’t really working anymore. She can only run out the clock.

While I’m distracted still searching for the jar, class gradually empties out. My fifth grade teacher (Mrs. Plescia) returns, emerging from a back room now that the sponsored nonsense is over. We have a friendly relationship and can joke about it a bit. Behind the projector screen, I find a curious set of nesting jars with parts that interlock on both top and bottom. Not the jar I’m looking for, certainly close enough to evoke it though.

There’s a ledge above the screen that I can examine, barely, if I scoot along the counter on tippy-toes of one foot. No jar here either, though for some reason there is a little toy alligator. I realize, standing extended as I am, that the blue snowflake-patterned boxers I wore this morning (it is in fact June) are longer than the shorts I’m wearing. They’ve likely been peeking out all day — when I greeted Mrs. Plescia, while I ranted to the corporate drone, perhaps even earlier. Exasperation. Resignation.

Looking back at Mrs. Plescia I’m tempted to ask, on account of how class went today, where I would’ve found out that today’s class was optional. I half know, half dread that she’d probably just say “the syllabus”.

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Dream Journal

Legend of Gastromo

I’m on a date with my crush (who won’t be named here for now). We eat in a narrow restaurant on a corner, and it’s… ok. We leave, a bit weary, then turn left and find an open garage next door. There’s a bubbly alt-culture girl who tells us about the art collective operating there, the project they’re working on. We barely have energy to engage with what sounds like a cool local thing.

Besides being tired nothing goes particularly wrong, but I remember feeling like it turned out a disaster of a date.


Marissa Tomei is one of my teachers. She’s gets in some unusual positions, backflips and the like, in some half-walled area with a hexagonal backdrop. She (or someone nearby) reminds me of the unopened vape juice bottle I’ve stored here for awhile, that I meant to give as a present to my brother.

Turns out I didn’t read the label properly. I thought it was peanut butter flavored — weird but not outlandish. But the still-sealed playful yellow bottle, sitting near an upturned chair where I left it, is a bizarre flavor I’ve never even conceived: “Clear Onion Butter”. Not something I would necessarily give as a gift. I hesitate to open it though, knowing rules about buying new vape juice have changed and I’m no longer sure how easy it is to get anymore.

Curiosity gets the better of me (only live once and all that) and I crack it open. It’s utterly strange as a flavor, but the uniqueness grows on me: clean, a creamy smoothness like butter, with the oddly transposed delicious light smell of cooking onions thrown in. I give it some time then very much start enjoying it. Who knows about the onion breath; I forgot to even consider it.


Later I’m on a bus made of bricks, or perhaps driving past many brick buildings. I have to start yelling to the driver that two people need to get off, that he needs to flip the bus around so the exit will be on the right side. The bus stops but on the wrong side. I’m about to have to explain this when the two people (my dad and some other adult male, maybe an uncle) thank the driver and descend the exit at the back corner of the bus. Frustration turns to reflexive self-critique — I completely forgot you could use those steps and I don’t know why.

Two girls took my single bus seat a long while ago, and after waiting they finally get off the bus too. My backpack is still piled there, along with a cast iron skillet. I was in the middle of cooking when my seat was stolen — the meat and veggies needed to be flipped long ago. Annoyingly, a youngish guy comes up and seems to think he has a claim to the seat too. Ugh.


Just now, I went to title this entry and realized ”Legend of Gastromo” was one of the first things I wrote. The title was just there when I woke up; a whimsical little evocation. Useful. Sometimes choosing the title can be my least favorite part.

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Dream Journal

Secret Party Villa, Finding Freedom in the River

In an unfamiliar city, I’m part of a group trying to make it to a secret party. You see, at the moment it’s not the right time for parties — maybe it’s the pandemic, maybe it’s just illegal, so we’re operating on old-school I-know-a-guy wink-wink-nudge rules — ring the right doorbell, know the right password, that sort of thing.

The city is like New Orleans but located where Seattle should be. In full costume, I end up in a villa newly purchased by a cool girl I know IRL (we’ll call her Plarvolia). All the lights are off to keep things on the down-low. For a bit we’re the only two people inside the building (she’s working on her laptop), and alone I explore a graceful courtyard, and admire a plaster wall hand-painted with sunflowers — real sunflowers growing just outside the window in the drizzly charm of what looks like the French Quarter.

I try to bid farewell to her several times, each time not quite getting it right. I screw up enough that it’s starting to weird her out, but I… can’t… quite… get there.


I wake up about 2 am, knowing I’ve gotten enough sleep and could in fact start my day. I decide against it and continue the rest of the night, but successfully encode the previous dream in memory.


The noble coast of Greece, transposed to be the same as the California coast but facing an ocean to the east. Broken into fiefdoms of varied size and population, equivalent to counties of California, with history and legends stretching into deep antiquity. Beyond a large promontory on the map, I view the lined topography as far as Zephyrr county — its steep forested cliffs set along a low-lying sea shelf, so wide it’s almost a lake made of ocean.

In the persona of a college-age young adult, I explore the lively historic rectangular valley which is an inverted Parthenon. I discern it’s evolution by visiting every corner, seeing the specific purpose it’s grown into. This activity itself is academic, and there are often structures of learning too. It is an elegant, civilized, manicured, but undersized space.

I eventually leave via my teacher (Mr. Suggett from 4th grade) challenging some of us to escape through a maze of militarized/fortified utility pipes. I am the first to make it outside, observing structures for flood control; another sluice beyond this exit doubles the water-shedding capacity. I see a broad swath of green valley and mountain range in the far distance below the slope on which I stand, larger than Yosemite — a greater vista than any I’ve seen in a long time. It’s obvious how the Parthenon Valley has been hidden, as now that I have left I can understand how it sits flush with the slope of rock leading down. On the rock perches an unassuming Orthodox church, American flags hung outside of it. Perhaps it is a monastery; perhaps it’s abandoned.


I sit in class in the middle of a row of four desks between my childhood friends Vince Saunders and Khalil Amin. I have let my long hair fully down and it feels a little greasy; I keep my hand grasped in it most of the time and feel more at ease knowing there are students behind. Yet I sit in class idly dejected, ignoring the lesson. I search through my binder for an old assignment, one I decided not to do at the time. As I pore over the photocopied chapters it’s obvious it would have been useless to complete anyway; I would have learned nothing.

Outside the school, in the wide desert in my childhood home of the Coachella Valley, I view the central river (where there is usually a freeway). Adjacent to the river my school district has set up a tall, boxy, sandstone-colored water treatment facility along a long stretch of mucky marshland. I make my way, with a group of friends, to explore with the hope that we can escape the pointlessness of school for a time. Luckily it turns out the treatment/harvest facility can be run with a bare bones staff — and they’re not even there right now.

Having now gained access to the length of the river, we wade along the bottom moving down the current. Soon it gets very wide, and we can walk. The day is hot, bright; the river red, rocky. We walk mostly in contemplative silence, Vince, Kahlil, Lauren, perhaps others. I wear a watch which, if I double-click it, starts recording audio — I usually don’t remember until it’s a little too late though. The river narrows around a curve, the dry desert hillside sheltering someone’s garage under a little overhang in which I hunt bats with my Homepie friend Lauren. Just a little further down river from that we venture up into a little canyon, discovering public bathrooms marked with red/green lights for occupancy. Lauren, a bit like Patsy on Absolutely Fabulous, panics that I won’t be able to get out, though I do by backing out. As usual I’ve forgotten to start recording.

Our group has become larger as we gather in a large hanger set into a precipitous cliffside along the river. Inside is an abandoned Ferris Wheel which we begin to incrementally repair. The thing has the feel of long-neglected military hardware; it shouldn’t surprise us (though it does) when it explodes. Several important characters are destroyed, but then perfunctorily a saved game is reloaded. The progress of the story then depends on deciding which of the collected characters should be sacrificed — the Jules Verne, the Swede, or perhaps Patroclus — anyone with a mechanical aptitude rating can activate the machine while the rest of us, conveniently, stand back this time. But it is known that it will explode no matter what.

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Dream Journal

Midnight Menagerie, Starfish Swansong

Donald Trump’s existence suggests an axiom: the higher the getting, the bigger the dark side.


Being hosted at some guy’s elaborately-decorated stylish apartment, white walls and expensive décor, a congenial upper-middle class bougie gay dude. He gives up his bedroom per my request. In the middle of the night I’m awoken and think I’m being visited by a group of raccoons, but it turns out to just be a few of his cats.

Later, I think it’s happening again so I stay asleep. Yet slowly I realize that in the bedroom with me are a whole menagerie of apes, macaques, zebra, even a giraffe maybe. This is his personal zoo, something he acts like I should be impressed with, while he himself acts nonchalant. It is (I admit) bizarre and impressive. Doubly so with the apartment’s trendy Instagrammable Pinterest-y surroundings.

(This is midpoint of my night’s dreams, which I remember when I wake up earlier in the night — for real — with some insight into my own progressed technique into the writing of dreams. Yet I still don’t wake up to take notes on it, worried I might not get back to sleep…)


In the classroom of a middle school, which feels near the coastal location of my University. I’m my current age, hanging out in bookshelves behind the rows of desks observing class, but I pop in occasionally, keeping tabs on the teacher and mingling with students.

A class lesson: “what’s wrong with this cream cheese recipe?” I personally think they added lemon juice, or didn’t use real cheese. Moving past, the teacher calls on me, somewhat jokingly. Nose in a textbook, I respond mispronouncing ‘book’ like ‘boooook’. She responds in the same joking tone that we’ll name our next lesson’s monster “Orin”.

I abruptly notice that a green starfish kid in the front row has suddenly developed injuries consistent with exposure to a contagion we studied in class. Teacher has also noticed but is playing it off so as not to alarm the students; I don’t do so well hiding it. We help get the student out. Afterwards I take time reflecting on it in the bookshelves.

I return just a bit later, but class appears to be over for that year. Instead, the room is occupied by a choral group of young kids, 4-6 years old, in flowing robes with hoods, singing what could be a Buddhist funeral dirge. Their parents wait behind them to take them home, some breaking down crying. It’s obvious the starfish kid didn’t make it.

Jolted, reminded of life’s brevity, I set aside time to enjoy hanging out with one particular girl I like who reminds me of a fun redhead I knew in high school — Sam Promenchenkel. She’s quite taller than me; my head reaches just under her armpit. With a group we stroll along a stepped boardwalk away from the school. On the way I’m goaded into doing a scooter trick up some stairs, and manage to leap all the way to the second-to-last step, where I do a little bounce and make it all the way up.

My cousin Betty is with our group, skipping away ahead of us toward her wife. She seems so happy and excited, I’m very happy for her, though I watch her get further and further away.

We get to the ocean and do tricks leaping into the surf on scooters. Someone brings up how left-brain-focused people will typically veer to the left and miss their mark on the waves. We practice crossing our eyes, water streams squirting from our pupils, trying to get the streams to meet where we want.


Music in my head upon waking:

Heartsrevolution – Heart vs The Machine
Architecture in Helsinki – Heart It Races
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Dream Journal

Last Day of School

Enacting last days of an ancient invasion between two peoples, visiting a string of gates which jump to different reenactment zones, stories of the war. Lofty snowbanks, rocky canyon passes, battle plans, gruff male voices, muscular insectoids (they look like the Krogan from Mass Effect).


It’s the last day of the school year, at a place that feels like my middle school. They have us sit at other’s desks and read aloud from their journals of that year — an exercise in “seeing though other’s eyes”, so we’re told. But it feels very much like tricking us into spying on ourselves.

The drama teacher at my high school, Mr. Thelan, is lecturing after the last bell of that year has passed. He hasn’t even told his assembled students they could go, if they wanted. I would guess it’s a test or object lesson for his theater students: that actors can be held longer than in their interests, by their love or fascination or even novelty with the story. I myself am lounging behind this herd of a class because there’s comfy chairs and internet on the stage. One guy tries to argue with me for being there instead of a class and I have to quote the school district handbook about when “school year” is defined.

Digging through drawers at the side of the gym, making sure I don’t leave any of my stuff (clothes or information, etc.) since I’m not going to be here again. I’m asked about moving a pair of giant owls constructed over the year from a massive amounts of wooden boards. I start to give an answer, but the answer becomes “this being 2020 I don’t even think we can donate it to Urban Ore.” I resign myself to the idea of someone else deciding if they’re lost.