Tag: trees

Categories
Dream Journal

Lumberjack at Old Italians’ Farm

Roller skating down a slope in my hometown. Though I’m having a nice easy time, I frequently have to use lucid dream control to smooth the texture of the road (similar to video game level of detail, a.k.a. LOD). I reach a private property gate with an old couple, who might be Italian. A split wood fence on the right shores up some grassy semi-neglected farmland. The fence is rotted and peels apart with simple tugging.

Speaking in a folksy, feigned Italian accent, I convince them to let me work on replacing it. There’s a stand of pine trees on the property, further to the east, in need of maintenance anyway. I show up and pass through the locked railing/gate, feeling like I’ve somehow pulled a trick on them — after all, this is what I’d like to do with the place anyway. I’m really excited to try fixing it up despite not having experience. Felling the tree is simple: you find the direction you want it to fall, make a diamond-shaped cut on that side, then cut through from the other. I have my everyday Fiskers brand axe (a waking life possession) which would work but might be tiring; I consider whether want to learn the chainsaw for this task.

In a more urbanized area nearby, reminiscent of California’s Lake Arrowhead, there stands a statue known for its jar of marijuana. Difficult to say if this is official or simply the popular use of it. The statue and the jar have been moved around recently, likely some kind of prank.

I take a picture of my friend Aislinn in front of it, zooming out in a weird way so that faces get smaller while the person’s head stays big. This is, in fact, just as strange and amusing as it sounds.

Categories
Dream Journal

Destination: Cozy Nostalgic Coffee Shop

A “destination” coffee shop with various odds and ends, tasteful lighting and wood panels, a relaxed atmosphere, comforting smells. It’s run by Eileen (but with nobody else I know). I say hi to her, tell her I finally saw her in that documentary “Caffeinated”, but it was silly how they only used one clip — she’s already turned away though, either doesn’t hear me or pretends not to. Haven’t seen her in a long time, so it might be fair.

I’m here because I spent most of my day postponing putting on my motorcycle riding gear to get to my Russian school, not admitting to myself that I just don’t want to go. Eileen’s shop has rows of merchandise, uncrowded during the pandemic. I find a few items that make me nostalgic for earlier times in San Francisco. One, a cardboard tube with a signature affirming it’s been packed by my old friend Kelly Gallamore. (Perhaps the store is instead run by Noona Nolan?)

Someone I talk with there shares a personal difficulty. In what is a typical response for me, I share a tangential factoid I happen to know… some incident that happened to Queen Elizabeth II (then, viewing a flashback with Prince Philip as a colorful robot, playful geometric designs on all his clothes, colored plates covering his face). Later, I discover my old moto jacket and pants stuffed in a garbage can and fish them out.

The shop has a long row of machines (perhaps for copying or the like). Mine gets a very long piece of paper stuck in it, just as an employee unknowingly points me out to someone as a veteran user/customer who might help them. Down further the row become a trough of water, with a long flat rail down the middle. Several objects I need are floating in it.

Home now. Looking down from our apartment’s back room. To do that, we peer around a large rusty statue of a chicken that our landlord’s had mounted on the corner of the building forever. I think “huh, so odd but I’ve never had that thing remind me of Chicken John.” There are a few massive beasts getting aggressive with each other in the backyard. One looks like a bodybuilding panda with eyeliner, the other a stairway-bumping basilisk. They’ve wandered in, though could choose to fight anywhere. Up closer, I try to consider what to, but there’s not much else except watch.

Spiderwebs encrusting the middle of trees, trees all in a row, as I travel past at high speed. The only way to see them is to line their row and look through several at once. I crack that code, but can’t guess if anyone else has seen this strange metaphor. A metaphor for what though, I can’t say.

I remember: looking up at a dusk-time sky, thinking as if I’m outside my own life, that I was born here and now because I picked this lifetime so I could see humanity’s transition. In this case, the transition to digital.

Categories
Dream Journal

Left Behind at Omura Station

Travelling by train in Japan, stop momentarily at a station called Omura. The train leaves without me and my wife is on it with both our tickets. I have to walk along the line in a foreign country, or ride the train and hope they don’t check my ticket.

The back wall of my dad’s house in Cathedral City has been stolen. I suspect it might be a construction site somewhere in the lots behind it. The city recently has only sold cheap plots, ones in the middle of blocks without good road access. Exploring this area, I pass a lane of farm trees, not knowing the neighborhood anymore. I see Fifth’s Grocery store, and a Marie Callender’s inside it. I orient myself with the mountains but it’s harder than usual. I sit and wait underneath a shady tree out of eyeline, eat a couple coconuts and scope out the area.

Climbing up a set of colorful ersatz stairs, through a vertically-tilted bus where a giant girl is sleeping in one of the bunks. I pass by her and she seems interested in me but I’m kind of on a date. My date (a younger girl with dark fluffy short hair) and I make it for a wedding on this long plateau walkway at the top, something like the Alden Royal Skyway… very underwhelming for the title. No one else seems to be there yet, but I know this is where it is.

I’m shopping for a blue vest in a small department store, even though I already have a few blue vests. The department store is in some kind of college, concrete archways and corridors.

Categories
Dream Journal

Logs in a Tree, Hip Ground Floor Squat

Tree logs stored high up across two trees. A ladder is up there too, blocking access. I look up and point out to my companion that there’s a hawk sitting on a branch directly above us.

The self-appointed minder of this open plot of land is a creepy psychiatrist, a young man who is clueless enough to stand staring at you from behind a couch to “observe” you. I point this out to Lynae, or whoever is with me. Someone escapes out the front door and into the music store across the other side of the mall (they don’t get far).

Behind the tree with the logs is a water chute leading back to a mill pond with a lovely population of loons (ha!). There are inscriptions in concrete, familiar yet written in some Southeast Asian language,

I sign up for a documentary show with Ricky Gervais, and as part of the contract we have to record banter to be played over the footage for at least 9½ minutes. We record it in the back of a car and then I’m told, jokingly, that the rental lasts another 120 minutes. My old friends Chicken and Kelly are in the front seat, smoking, and making out with the smoke.

Driving with my dad, early morning around 4 am, on the streets of our desert home that looks covered in a sheen of smooth white snow. I have a stapled-together packet of printed papers that’s about fighting others’ belief in mental illness, something I’d planned to read on the drive. Dad gets me to close it with a frustrated “really?”

Weird cheap flat on the first floor of a dirty yet hip ghetto. A side street near the heart of the city, clumped-up forgotten backyards and trash gathered in the dead-ends. My friends are thinking of buying this place — or maybe they already have? But that could just be a cover story for a squat, I think. They’ve converted a windowless room in the middle into an “orgy space”, which I guess means stuffing in a ton of pillows and chairs. Bafflingly, there’s only a heavy sheet separating it from a front patio area packed with couches. Ghetto but very cozy.