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Dream Journal

Roads of San Francisco

I’ve taken charge on handling an absurdly tall Victorian mirror (measuring over 8 meters) which I gently lay on a long sheet. I’m in what appears to be my parents old bedroom in the house I grew up in. While I’m very careful and never break it, it’s so long that it flops about end-to-end like a giant semi-stiff ribbon. I imagine the kind of Great Hall where such a mirror might even fit; a grand old San Francisco mansion on a hill perhaps. Echoes of another dream: a house of tall rooms curving along the outside, a slight hill, flowerbeds and iron fencing, perhaps converted to a hostel.

Using an unfamiliar route through a posh neighborhood of large homes, I notice two particular large buildings. My eyes are lead upward as I appreciate their distinct old timey theme and quaint names carved on the outside. Though one is clearly meant British one Frenc, they fly opposite flags. Perhaps what were once embassies have become private homes and the eccentricities of wealth. The street becomes more crowded just a little ways on, with tourists. I realize I’ve become turned around and am headed north toward the bay and I’m near Fisherman’s Wharf. I conclude that the buildings are now explicitly to service the hordes of visitors, though in what way I don’t know.

When driving down a roadway I become trapped in a line of cars which must turn around due to an unlabeled street closure. Very useless and frustrating. When I finally make my way out I find an official riding a horse and inquire/complain. The portly bald private contractor (I remember looking at his face) says the city allowed them many more horses than signs, which is why he’s riding a horse. There is no further explanation.

I have to take a road through a poor neighborhood where we once considered getting an apartment. I spot the place, with its janky plywood hillbilly door still exactly as it was, a scraggly old punk character smoking a cigarette outside. The neighborhood is just like this. It’s what they’ve allowed to be built here. The only thing you can get to across the street is a cheap FoodsCo market — which has very similar plywood scaffolding draped over it’s entrance. The place feels crowded and neglected at the same time. The most efficient way to leave this part of town is actually with a shortcut through a private parking lot. And, as you’d expect, they can decide to close the gate or restrict access whenever they like. Truly, what a shitshow this place is.

I’m diverted down a rural route through the hilly and less developed middle of SF. I pass a row of square little slope-roofed cabins which are rented out by the zoo like Airbnbs. Beyond a frail chainlink fence they sit on stilts above a slow marshy creek under eucalyptus. This is the first time I’ve actually seen them, and I immediately decide I would one day like to rent one out, maybe have a trip weekend there.

Riding in the backseat of the family SUV with my dad and brother in the front, we park in a dirt lot in a little isolated development on a side road in the boonies. I’m consulting my map hoping we can get a brief walkthrough, but I declare that I’m not sure there is a path through the private property fence… just as a girl in black sunglasses and dark hoodie strolls past, rather demonstrating I’m wrong (and that my research is ineffectual). Shortly after, while clambering over rocks I realize that I’ll need shoes. My legs are so dirty though from some mud earlier, I figure I’ll have to find a place to rinse if I have any hope of keeping my shoes clean. I’m afraid now it’ll be a whole thing.

[[Unexplained note: wife 4 guys, Corey B. 6 guys, but when is there time for me?]]

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Dream Journal

Mall Empty, Different Owners

Over visiting someone else’s place, a rental. I run across the landlord in the downstairs garage, with his tools out, fixing some old Victorian equipment. I quickly get buddy-buddy with Mr. Landlord since I seem to understand what he’s working on. The light in the garage / front room has a gauzy look from being filtered through dusty windows.

An aquarium sits on its side such that I can dip my fingers through where the front glass would be. Working out how to get a filter to work, I flip it back and forth over different surfaces of the water. The water remains cloudy and dirty, despite that I’m confident the filter is now working. It will just take a while to clear.

I walk all the way down the ramp of a mall lined with storefronts. Then back up. During the time I walked down many stores have closed, and the place feels much emptier. Maybe like SF’s Chinatown.

Across a mall parking lot (different from above, I suppose) there’s an abandoned store which is poorly renovated. The owners perception was it just seemed any good buyer would consider it dated. I think it looked fine, warm and nostalgic even, but they insisted on renovating it for whatever fad they imagine business owners want this year.

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Dream Journal

No-name Town Stop on a Journey

While on a cross-country journey with a pack, we travel through an unfamiliar rural neighborhood. Though remote it’s packed on a grid like a city — yet I don’t know if it even has a name. It could be somewhere northerly, pine trees and scattered brush. We’re all riding motorcycles and have to find a bathroom for my sibling, Patrick. We come across an unusually empty old Victorian painted all one boring color and sneak through a window. The dream proceeds from there but is forgotten.


A man demands the expensive and decadent early California dish, Hangtown Fry. In fact he orders four at a time. I idly think: well it’s a stupid way to spend your money but I suppose this is how innovation happens.

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Dream Journal

Cheap but Familiar Dreams

Kid is happy to eat replicated (irradiated) mammoth meat. There’s a feather in a shotgun, the kid mistakes it to mean it’s for him to control and change things. It’s just a gift! Next stage in this game is little stars or circles in a form that get bubbled in.

In an unfinished wood building, I live with four other adults in a 20 x 20 room split four ways lengthwise. Aislinn is there. We mostly pretend we have our own spaces, but one day I blurt out how absurd and frustrating it is that the landlord has split it like this. Outside in the hall there’s a poster framed in plastic mounted to the floor. I’m usually complaining about it because I think it’s dumb since it routinely gets slippery when it rains.

A hotel / food counter up a winding hill. Strangely Victorian and Modern. Go there with friends (Ais, Reecy) but I remember it from long in my past. I order a big plate of various fried food served in styrofoam to-go container. Before I leave I return a distinctive flat clock I took from a stairway when I was very small — back then I didn’t understand it probably broke off from something. But I immediately recognize things when I came up the grand entry stairway which, Victorian/Modern again, had an odd ’70s green shag carpet paired with Golden Age woodwork. This is an odd reason, but I think this dream happened because I smelled a bizarrely familiar apple body cleanser at a Korean beauty store — like something I played with when I was very small.

(Messy remembrance, I got woken up a few times.)

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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.