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Dream Journal

Hitting it Off with Art Girl, bit of a Pokémon

Twilight in a round mid-sized stone cathedral, an art show of one girl’s work is displayed in every direction at eye-level height. I find it enthralling, wanting to know more.

Back in my own building, the grubby ground floor apartment of the girl includes a living room half open to the outside, cute little plants on the exposed basement walls. Her sideboards in the disused interior still have the landlord’s old stuff such as 80s radio scattered about. Next door (in apartment #306?) where the landlord’s family has just moved in recently, it’s a lot less grubby than expected, like an 80s nightclub in a mall — colored plexiglass panels, plush diner booths, knocked out walls — a multi-level living space big enough for the family not to have to see each other.

My wife introduces me to the girl who made the art, repeating her name like a Pokémon. We really hit it off; before I know it I’ve been pimped out and the girl is making out with me.


A twisty beige ground-floor office in the process of being decommissioned. As a stop-gap measure we often lock things in place so they don’t move — for example, a log in the hallway, or a heavy military-style desk made of enameled metal (like something I’d see on old Fort Ord during college). We’re setting little plants out on the exposed retaining walls outside, going back and forth down the unlit hallways even as someone pulls up in a red sports car outside, looking for someone I don’t know.


In a rolling almost artificial landscape, unfinished-looking, grid-like. Myself and a few associates are trying to get to a power plant I now own. In our way is a locked gate and barbed wire-topped wall abutting a rocky outcrop of a hill. Trading property here is like trading cards, and I only recently acquired the power plant (sight unseen) from a Mr. Burns-type character.

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Dream Journal

Just Great, I’m a Passenger on a Bus with Politicians

I’m on a bus, full of other candidates for job. In a previous dream I’ve helped Russian President Vladimir Putin defend the country of Greenland from something related to homophilia, homophobia, or both.

An image of Mr. Burns from the Simpsons, and a wall of human bodies made of Legos.

Vice President Mike Pence is near the back of the bus. I point out to the interviewer/autority figure that he’s asleep, he admits jokingly that he was in fact asleep (happening, of course, while I’m actually asleep in this dream). The authority, acting like a teacher, gives him a C for that day despite that I’ve been given an F before for the same thing. Right there I decide to quit this nonsense job, which might mean suicide, but as a protest I can come up with nothing else.

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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

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

Pieces of a November Night’s Dreams

Long catchup conversation with Christy T, my elementary school crush, who’s now a mom.

Riding a long sloping escalator down into a comforting mall, happen to be behind an attractive young-ish girl with all-green clothes, covered in iron-on patches.

Driving down zig-zagging switchbacks to Baker Beach in a golf cart, then ascending again in an elevator.

Magical dollhouse with with tiny little magic stone slab. Take a drop of poison, drop it on the magic book, it absorbs and reveals… something. The rats swim around it.

Ned Flanders’s beatnik parents chant “om-om-om-om”.