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Dream Journal

Singular Standing Dream, Dad’s Casserole

A marathon of a first dream that seems to last most of the night. Yet little of it is remembered… as so little seemed to happen. My crush and I stand next to a program guide — this is the main image. We simply stand there, still, static.

As the dream deteriorates into wakefulness, I ride a bike around a specific blind corner in my neighborhood (the crosswalk at Potrero and Cesar Chavez). In the instant I round the corner I imagine threading my trajectory between a former crush and new crush, one oncoming and one outgoing. I wake up and realize I’ve had the strange experience of sleeping nearly 8 hours dreaming basically a single scene.


I go back to sleep wishing to gather more dreams. Not the worst excuse, I suppose.

Visiting my childhood home after a long hiatus, where my dad still lives. I notice the house’s original CRT TVs are mostly gone. When I ask about this my dad says they tended to get cracked from falling forward onto the ground, since their design was off-balance. Eating some of my dad’s
hastily prepared food at the kitchen bar (maybe Cheez-It casserole?) I find a hair embedded through it. I make a conscious effort not to worry about it. My dad puts on an 8tracks playlist he made through tinny computer speakers. I help by casting it to the living room speakers too — they coincidentally sync together on the first try, no trouble. My wife mentions she’s hungry so I offer her the casserole. She tries it but finds the hair right away and can’t eat it. Because of the hair. Guess I can’t blame her.

It dawns on me that the amount of males and females living in our apartment building has always remained constant. Whether this is intentional or not I couldn’t guess. But I do note this was true until a pair of kids move next door not long ago. They are, curiously enough, a boy and a girl.

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Dream Journal

Too Much Waiting, Not Enough Double Dream Cartoons

While the video game WarCraft 2 used flat 2-D sprites, the years-older “Warcraft: Orcs & Humans” (WarCraft 1) used a grab-bag of early 3-D tricks. I’m finally playing it and oddly, though the game is very basic, it’s more intriguing to discern the clever workarounds they came up with long ago. Pleasingly retro, as well. (Standing in front of my fridge yesterday I randomly appreciated the deep lore they were able to produce in those games, simply by creating the series for so long.)

When my Uncle John is frustrated about having to move, I’m able to share an anecdote about how, when the show wrapped, the sets for “Seinfeld” were almost immediately converted for use on the show “Friends” (I learned this yesterday; it was actually Full House)

Waiting on my motorcycle at a left turn signal. I leave, crossing to the sidewalk when I realize how long I’ve waited. Suddenly I realize it’s essentially just abandoned in a traffic lane now. Going back, I see I even left the key in the ignition. The back compartment must be repacked now (of course it does). I rejigger the back case’s mounting plate and straps, all while standing in front of a line of unusually patient cars also still waiting to turn left.

I’ve been fiddling with nose ring intermittently for most of the dream. It finally splits near the tip, coming off in my fingers just as I realize how long I’ve been fiddling. Still, it seems like it should be able to fit again, but the gauge at the break is inconveniently flat instead of round. It won’t fit in the piercing hole, and repairing something that stays in my skin seems like a non-starter.

In a jaunty Nickelodeon-style kids cartoon, one friend has fallen asleep in the shower. As his friend, and sensing an opportunity for mischief, I hide in the shower drain. Since my friend doesn’t wake up I start saying odd things in an affected strange voice, which reverberates through the drain pipe. Zooming into his dream I appear there as a semi-distorted subway announcer — ignored, as most subway train announcements usually are. I notice other characters from our cartoon have been animated in his dream as more realistic adult humans — stylized and shapely enough to evoke sexual lust, innocently but not incidentally. Rule 34 on hot double-dreamt cartoons.

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Dream Journal

Interesting TV! Twin or Doppelganger?

We have a few aquariums, arranged in an L shape, and I’m taking care them. The small one (the oldest) is packed with fish and plants, like one currently in our actual kitchen. The other two are big ones savaged from the streets of Chinatown (maybe 55 gallons each) but hold only a single beloved fish each. As I go about their maintenance, I realize we’ve had them a while and at this point they’re probably underutilized. The personable pufferfish living there gets scritches as I consider what company to get him.

A few potted plants have been on automatic watering for a while, and I decide to check on them. At the base of a stem rests a big moss ball that’s somehow been watered only on top and bottom. I take care to soak the entire thing, knowing that I’m still in time to rescue the almost dirt-brown middle.

On TV, I randomly discover that SNL now has a department making short Public Service Announcements for kids. Tough subject matter, too; the one I catch is on understanding and dealing with horrible traumas from the news like genocide and death. There’s one shot in particular that really sticks out for being so well done: small plastic toy horses filmed from below in black and white. Inexpensive to make, as I also appreciate.

Idly watching a show starring Jon Hamm (as a Don Draper character) who has a twin he didn’t know about. There’s some discussion over whether the twin is a doppelganger. Intrigued, I rewind to before he found out. Karen Gillan is filling a role similar to Peggy on Mad Men, serving also as a judge/mediator. There’s such a strangely amusing dragged-out scene where Don is standing in front of a mirror where his twin is visible, but he keeps looking downward or elsewhere in the room. The tension and entire situation are so oddly surreal, and I watch having no idea if I rewound even close to the pivotal reveal.

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Dream Journal

Diachromazita

Projecting movies on a TV screen. A big group, of freedom fighters or friends, or something else.

A child is born in an unusual store. I view a gigantic turtle in a swim tank, bigger than Archelon, alongside its human trainers/companions.

Diachromazita” — a name/term out of a dream the night before, the only surviving fragment of it, and interesting enough to be worthy of naming something after.

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Dream Journal

Cymbal Sounds and Buried Glass

Watching TV in master bedroom of old family house, I’m aged as I am presently but with my family relationships as they were when I was in high school, maybe. I’m watching TV, a refreshing change as it’s been so long. I note that it’s like scrying, you don’t know what you’re going to get when you flip channels. I add 100 to whatever’s on and end up seeing part of an interview by someone named Leon Turkas, or Leone Turkes, some older funk-era black musician I remember to have one song by (note: no such artist was found upon waking).

From a viewpoint floating above San Francisco, I see that there are many more repurposed or semi-abandoned military buildings than I realized before. I spot one in particular, cracked wood and partially overgrown with spiky vines, lying between a major road and a parking lot for two other buildings — just out there, waiting to be explored.

Hanging out with my family, my little brother Chris (who is maybe 7-10 in this dream?) asks if I will let him practice massage. Lying on my back, he works on something he calls “windowpanes”, which are my upper pectorals. This goes on a while; he stops, someone says something to the effect “you should be good”, “you’ve gotten enough”, etc.

Now at an outdoor pool near the ocean, I rant at my brothers about the kind of people who make palindromes. They’re the kind of people who need something to occupy their minds, holding and manipulating multiple simultaneous variables, running an excessively complicated algorithm just to burn CPU cycles on their head-computer. Fucking untrustworthy mentats who don’t want to be alone with themselves. Well, I thought the rant was funny.

One of us brothers makes the sound of a cymbal with his mouth, a clean shhhhhhimm-m-m sound, as a comment during conversation. Chris follows it with a sound like sh-sh-sh-sh-sh, which my Dad says doesn’t sound like a cymbal at all. I come to his defense, saying it’s a cymbal with a lot of shimmer on it, which I feel somehow proud to understand and point out.

I wander away from them for a bit to explore. The pool and the beach are a bit like the ruins of Sutro Baths. In the middle distance I see what looks like smoke rising from a low, rocky outcrop. A few others notice it too. On the way to investigate I notice a dead whale on the beach, upside down, with spotty fur and ears. It has fuzzy white tufts over it, and I realize the smoke in the distance is actually steam, and it’s so cold outside frost has begun to form.

Satisfied there is no danger, I practically trip over an odd-shaped item half-buried in the grey-ish/brown-ish beach sand. I pull it out and it’s an elaborate sealed glass container, radially symmetric with alternate bulges and necks and ridges, inexplicably filled with what looks like a mixture of seawater and beach sand. There are a few intact ones I pull out before reaching some broken pieces underneath, which (since I’m already wearing gloves) I set aside to be disposed of properly. A family with small kids pass by as I’m working on this and the little girl in pigtails (maybe 5-6 years old) reaches out to feel the glass objects, though I warn her not to touch the broken ones. She defiantly rubs her hand on them anyway, and I look up and realize it’s a black family. They pointedly don’t react. I’m left wondering whether there must’ve been some black/white dynamic even from a kid that age, some “no white man gonna tell me what to do” aspect.


Woke up with “Mr. Blue Sky” as covered by Pomplamoose in my head. Surprised my wife by playing it in the living room remotely before I joined her in the living room. Ha!

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Dream Journal

Paul Addis on SNL

Paul Addis is hosting SNL. He has a lot of comedy chops, but it’s still a rough show.


Exploring the far west side of Palm Springs, near where I grew up, huddled around the side of the mountain, a building from the 1700s — something similar to the 16th century fort of Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida.

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Dream Journal

Crash at Monterey.com/’91

Jon Snow has been killed off. He’s brought back (necromancy) and now has magic powers. Guards rush at him standing on stone steps, and the visual effects are lame-looking drawn on stars, four of them, which fly out and teleport the guards about to attack him. Looks like the flag of Chicago. Ugh, the show really stopped trying.


Watching motorbikes race in a slope-walled mud course — reminds me of running the hose when playing in the sand as a kid. One scooter-looking motorbike driving round a curve gets it’s throttle stuck; the rider loses control and it jumps the fence into the neighborhood nearby. It runs up a hill street and hits a couple cars along the way, smashing into the side of one, which causes the Buick behind it to flip backwards down the hill. Seems expensive, and I’ve no idea who will pay for it. I read the web address monterey.com/’91 (with the apostrophe) and understand this to be a historical event at Monterey, California.


A circular redwood half-height room with Lynae lying in a bathtub in the center. I’m telling a story of some kind.

Fixing the glue on some top floor gutters, trying not to get caught by landlord. Watching buildings next door tumble into place. Buying four oranges out of a vending machine with quarters for someone else, before a trip. Serving a pie baked with a top layer of elegant crinkled-edge blue felt.

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Dream Journal

Bigfeet, Submarines with Screen Doors: A Multitude of Amusing Dreams

The house on Kemper court has been torn down and replaced with a huge ornate Victorian abomination. I remember carved wooden Africanesque statues piled outside (one of Socrates), dirty glass picture windows set in a wall looking into an empty garden, Chris’ old remote control toy truck under a layer of dust at the end of the driveway, rain leaking like a sieve in the vast empty garage. In the garage I film a little kid (my brother Chris) who knows how to skate impressively. Later, everything in my parent’s bedroom is oddly pastel (vaporwave, I now realize), and I sit in front of an old CRT TV that previously played a specific… song? Mantra? Now it displays a number to dial.


A jar one mixes with salt, a substance Lynae doesn’t have access to, with which one can access the seraphim.


Bill O’Reilly show is taping in an elegant narrow San Francisco TV studio, so narrow that only the camera, computer, and host fit in the dusk-lit back room. Crew and visitors (me) sit along benches in main room. Cozy, intimate. Afterwards, in the backyard behind the Queen Anne building, I’m floating/flying above what appears to be a miniature forest of small bushes while a fan of mine fawns for my contact info.


Piloting a covert submarine, my team runs into an unfortunate problem… the underside of the bow has clearly been fitted with a pair of flyscreens. Ridiculous. The gathered Sub Team leave our “elite yurt” as new romantic couples, leaving only two big girls who depart proudly arm-in-arm, in good humor, to cries of “Fat Girl Solidarity!”

Near the compound with the yurt, which has a storage facility/Looney Toons vibe, I espy the face of a Bigfoot, which reveals, with continued peering, a multitude of Bigfeet eyes — an entire tribe. They line up single file along the forest hillside and play a game of passing balls with their feet in both directions, the goal of which is not to get stuck anywhere.

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Dream Journal

Dream of Stephan Colbert’s House

Stephan Colbert is a teacher, has a golf course house on a hill. The house has streetcar tracks leading up to it. Then old tracks are buried due to the very steep slope. His neighbors, who live on opposite hills like in the Palm Springs mountains, shoot golf balls at him. But the golf balls are actually small fighter jets that get shot down by his fighter jets. If you think normal aviation is expensive, try repairing ridiculously tiny planes that have been shot at, in mid-air.

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Glot

Unfinished Symphony

Damned metaphor; too accurate. How does Oliver Twist end, anybody know? No, you don’t. And so despite impressive storytelling, populated with well-imagined characters and a fascinating mythology, the last episode of Carnivàle totally sucked.

Well, let me rephrase: the last five minutes of Carnivàle totally sucked. Too many loose ends. Yes, it’s a TV show. I don’t watch TV — except when I do watch TV, like if I can watch a cultish-ly popular HBO series released on DVD. It’s an intriguing, overarching storyline of the good-vs-evil sort set in the great depression. HBO signed up for three “books,” of two seasons each. And yet I just finished watching season 2… damned thing up and got cancelled. We, the fans, are left high and dry, with no more quaint antediluvian dialect to entertain (am I a fan? right I am. but what fer cryin’ out loud is a fandom?) Sure, you can go and read the collected Wikipedia spoilers the writers have admitted to planning, but that feels like cheating cuz, y’know, it is. Even then, they don’t make sense and there’s so many other open questions that complicate and tantalize. I guess all that’s left to do now is watch all seven seasons of Buffy: Vampire Slayers.

…lolz j/k