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Dream Journal

Heard the Noon Siren, Many Years Later

Without much input, I’ve been reassigned to a previously occupied 2nd-story corner apartment. It’s not bad actually, though adjusting is a little odd. It’s so unlike anywhere I’ve lived, yet oddly so close — just a building over and a floor down.

I explore how it feels by walking around the chain of rooms, as the place is laid out on a loop. Some of the rooms are still set up with generic prop housewares as if for a real estate listing. I get a strong feeling of fondness here, unexpected acceptence of the new situation. It’s in things like discovering the single long, high bookshelf running across the series of front rooms, already stocked (by whoever lived here last) with good and interesting bond. I feel the same way when I gaze up to the highest part of the ceiling, a peaked triangular glass double window showing gauzy windows to an upper floor mezzanine and abundant houseplants.

The front door is inset from the 90° wraparound walkway outside, so people frequently cut through my little doorway alcove — I sometimes open the door and startle someone walking past. The view is just different enough to be mildly disorienting, almost refreshing at the same time.

Yet, while I look, I see workers from the city chopping parts of a tall tree in the street. There’s some new ordinance or decision, and public lighting can no longer use natural supports — either a lawsuit or some natural preservation thing. So the tree on the sidewalk just outside, the one that the community rigged up themselves, is now having many branches cut out because it’s the fastest way to meet the ordinance. It’s regrettable.

I hear the San Francisco noon siren for the first time in many years. It’s instantly recognizable, but there’s some kind of muffled announcement afterwards. I take it there’s some kind of provocative race angle in it? Something about “the Chinese”? So I’m a bit disappointed, obviously. But I should mention, for the record, that today actually is Tuesday, and I actually was asleep around noon when this would’ve happened.

I find out about a term Google has for a category of tool, from a “lake of hammers”, a colorful metaphor. The manager I’m talking to claims it isn’t fun to say, which I happen to disagree with. Lake of Hammers.

I am surprised to see that the Amanitas mushrooms I forgot about have actually ripened over time. They’re a pleasantly shiny smooth purple on each end, both cap and root.

My wife and I are walking down Market St, and as we cross the crosswalk aggressive sports cars cut close around us. Later we’re riding scooter together up Market when the bike falls over at an intersection. I take a shortcut through a college campus. Only halfway down, where I thought there were ramps, instead there are concrete stairs. Bullshit non accessible bullshit. Instead I exit out through a side door, passing by a plaque memorializing and praising an Italian design course or academy.

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Dream Journal

this should be about rats (but isn’t)

For better or worse, I forgot my dream. I really feel like I could have tried harder, like I almost got it several times. I’m sure that it had something to do with rats. I kept seeing rat images and getting cued up, but nothing came.

It’s odd, because I just fixed this damn dreamkeeper page to work again (you know that’s how I write these dreams everyday, right?) And usually, when I put that much effort in, I’m much better at tuning in. Honestly, it’s part of the practice at this point. Fix the website; use the website more. Not today though.

To be fair, I discovered the thing was broken in new and different ways right after getting up. Seems my fix overwrote a lot of work I had already done. Figures.

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Dream Journal

Orange Bike, Moving Mess, Missed Workshop

Cleaning the orange parts of an orange-accented bike with hydrogen peroxide. It’s very orange, with lovely yellow really grips, and I’m surprised how many scuffs actually come off well. I’m reminded of all the orange Nickelodeon bumpers I watched as a kid.

I ride the bike as I prepare to take a trip to the University Center, parking it outside the garage real quick to run upstairs. It’s like four flights up, unlike the childhood bedroom I had when I was seven, which it resembles.It only feels dangerous to leave the bike outside like that while I’m briefly delayed moving things around on top of a mini-fridge — which is silly of course. The way I’ve lived, I’m constantly on courts and cul-de-sacs and other safe places. That’s what I think in the dream anyway. Before I go, I ask my brother Patrick if he wants anything from the school cafeteria.

I moved into a new, smaller place with my family weeks ago, but all the appliances and boxes are still stacked everywhere. It’s strange looking into the kitchen and seeing the blank, high white walls, knowing that’s where the stuff should really go.The space should be full with shelves and organizers, but instead all that stuff is stacked high in front of it, blocking pathways. Eventually, we forced the unpacking issue a little, asking about a specific oven box. That guy isn’t going to be here for months still, so we just moved it.

I’m sad that I won’t get to see the house with a big basement again. I realized that since it belongs to my landlord, he won’t allow me to buy or rent it at this point. We don’t get along. This was actually another dream that I had, one with a house that had lots of kitchens — there was one specific one with a big island in the center, a few fridges, which I fantasized about turning into my workshop.

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Dream Journal

A Whole Community Summer

Woke up from dreams… a dream of a whole summer of community…

My wife surprised me with a gift. I walk up to the open car door cuz there’s a whole crowd there, marching band even. They’re gathered around the car, and presented on the couch is an elaborately embroidered pair of pants — Chinese or maybe Tibetan patterns, zippers on both sides of the legs and snaps at the bottom so you can take them off quickly.. I found out later there’s snaps at the top so they can be taken off completely like that. There’s a tag reading $1,000… I can’t accept a pair of pants for $1,000, that’s too much responsibility for an item that I’ll actually wear. Looking closer, it seems to have been overwritten with a little orange sticker at… 64 cents!? I actually think this is a bit of joke-y marketing, and the real tag says $40 (which is an incredible price for a pair of pants like this). I don’t think I can stress enough: they’re simply gorgeous.

My cousin Kelly is begging me to tell him how to convince me to let him play a new PS2 game I have, some popular zeitgeist video game moment. But I explained the only thing I want is for him to not play it because I played it and I can tell it wouldn’t be good for him. I had to explain that, since my only goal was for him *not* to play it, there wasn’t any argument he could make to change my mind.

I have a big bag of metal cut-out letters, vintage cookie cutters I think. It’s my personal collection. I’m using it it an project, making text art on an inset wall of shelves. It’s several lines I can’t recall, but the message ends with “luv you cuz”. I end up having to monitor it because it’s super tempting for people to steal the little die cuts. I follow a shrugging gangster-looking guy who I see slip a little heart symbol in his back pocket, stomping his ass when I get him alone, crushing the little stolen heart in his back pocket and bruising his poor thieving ass. Reckon it left a heart-print that wouldn’t seem to jibe with the story of how he got it. I ask him why he would steal something like that… though oddly, I’m not mad, I just want to teach him a lesson.

Walking down a long slope to a beach like some place in Southern California, I see that Nautilus here are able to walk on their thin little tentacles like dogs, cavorting with people’s leashed dogs along the sandy sloped pathway down. I backtrack after I reach the beach wanting to get photo or video of these things, realizing they’re basically only found on that one path for now. They’re very playful, like little dogs, much more fascinating to watch than I can describe.

I’m going to hitch a ride with an expert Captain who pilots her own houseboat, getting to somewhere further away than where I want to go and backtracking closer to where I want to be. She has dramatic trouble turning out of the narrow waterway that is the port, having to perform hard turns a couple times. Something in the boat’s shaky mechanics, or maybe her captaining, is causing the massive and unwieldy houseboat to move unpredictably. After a few hard turns and close calls close (enough to get heckled by a group of vacationing Canadians drinking in lawn chairs) the boat grounds on a tiny gap of sand beach right next to the dock where it started.

Sitting in a crowd. Dara V. is about to depart, but before she does the medical guy she had hired to serve nitrous via a plastic tube (it’s tip covered with a snipped-off condom for improvised protection). He kind of beckons her, gesturing as if to say “I mean you already paid for it”. She kind of goes “ehhhh I mean… I could”. As she’s standing there I have time to study her face, and unexpectedly notice some of the subtle hints of how it’s aging, trying to imagine what it might look like when she’s even older. There’s weirdly nothing as specific as lines around the eyes or something… but I can kind of see it? There’s some distortion too, as I consider how Mar-a-Lago Face impacts visual expectations of age. I’ve been surprised before that she looked older at all — there’s always been a kind of an immortal or ethereal quality to her. Also… I didn’t even know she was into nitrous.

The tube get passed around and, comically, one of the brash younger gay guys in the crowd has a moment choking trying to deep-throat the tube. It’s unclear if this is a prank involving an actual dildo, or whether he intentionally used part of the apparatus *as a dildo* as a reference to not being able to deep-throat.

Two people have been in competition with each other all summer: a portly hip Black guy with a thick beard, and an effusive heavy-set blonde girl barfly-type. They’re dramatically playful, but still honestly trying to beat each other. He’s been trouncing her though, by a long way. He’s regularly working on stuff and has basically been making projects all summer, while she keeps dropping the ball either unluckily or sheer misjudgment. Sitting in a crowd he jokingly confronts her to do a final evaluation of their mutual efforts, which of course she laughs heartily about. He’s the winner and he seems to be bragging, but it’s the nicest way to go about winning for such a situation. She’s failed even on her own terms regardless of luck or anything else.

How does the dream end? I can’t remember. I heard a snippet of landlord outside. Nevertheless, I wrote it down. Tried a new journal app on my phone because the Oneirographer PWA was broken, again. I know these are the kind of life details that you, my dear reader, appreciate so you have proper context for all these. You’re welcome. You’re… you’re me in the future, aren’t you?

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Dream Journal

Bank Visit and Cold Pelo, Cards Console Error

I’m somewhere inside a single story building with different compartments or stores. It’s kind of feels 1970s with the many odd 45° walls and it’s unusually tall, flat ceiling. I enter the wide double doors of a bank, where I need to do some research or perhaps fetch something.

A couple of miscreant bank workers near the front (the room is mostly rows of desks) spot me and try to invalidate my fresh papers — before I’ve even started. I understand this is because they assume whatever I’m reporting will negatively affect one of the bank’s performance metrics. They underhandedly want to game the statistics.

I store the bankers boxes which will be mine, including a smaller one that’s an art kit, under a built-in desk in a corner wall (like the one where I lived in La Paz). I pass by again later and the corner is weirdly cold, as if it were underwater and was recently flooded with a frigid, sluggish injection of water. As I investigate, I find a jar containing a small black-and-yellow gecko-like creature, a type of amphibian called a pelo. It’s been sealed and is motionless surrounded by the front of cold water. My wife says she sealed it up because it was misbehaving, and I’ll have to explain to her that you can’t seal something like that up as it can’t breathe like that.

I’m testing my app in-person on a console. It misidentifies one of my cards as having a syntax problem — there’s text on it containing “cards Cards Cards cArds” etc, which maybe can flex with the name of the cards database? But that shouldn’t be so. I’m reading the actual error message from the console and that’s what wakes me up!

The surprising thing is, I don’t think this incident followed standard rules for text in dreams. I feel like I was actually holding and evaluating a block of text instead of it being rewritten whenever I looked away. The “buffer” was large enough that it was like reading real text. Real enough that it overloaded… something, and woke me up I suppose.

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Dream Journal

Coming Storm, a Gift

There’s going to be a big lightning storm soon. Inside the converted big box store where I live in a community of fringe hangers-on, preparations are being made. So much so that things can go under the radar…

The image of a thunderbolt striking the power substation dominates the attention of many — it’s easy to imagine. Meanwhile, I’m concentrated on the carriage-like antique atop one of the aisle shelves, that’s been there long enough it no longer even has an owner.

Things happen after, but are forgotten. Maybe I steal the carriage. Maybe I ride away in it. Do I cause the thunderbolt? My waking self remembered, but was calm. Many times, I’ve struggled with the responsibility of capturing these dreams. This one just flowed. My morning felt grounded, imperturbable. I hesitate to interpret precisely why. A gift, unquestioned.

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Dream Journal

Going Through the Box of Records

I’m digging in my old bin of records.

One, the sleeve of Carmena Burana, is falling apart and empty. I can’t recall where I got it but it’s time to throw away.

Another is a record asking for privacy, which I put at the front — it’s name actually does spell out some request for privacy.

Then there’s my Intonation record, probably my all-time most played, which I find enclosed with a recording of it. Amazingly, the recording is from pre-2014, before I started listening to it quite frequently. Tucked in with and attached to the recording is an old temporary driver’s license of mine, it’s embossed letters on heavy black plastic looking nicer than my real one.
**”
I didn’t think I remembered any other dreams, but writing those down I remembered fragments of others.

It’s the day after family event, a wedding of my Aunt Therese (who isn’t older than me?). Now I don’t know where to go to join the day-after events, which I was told we’d have. I seem to remember there was to be a reception, on a long cold beach like in Eureka or perhaps the North Sea.

Eating out my wife. Can’t figure where she put her head, though I realize now it’s cuz I had her upside down… and it’s not where her head is supposed to be anyway.

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Dream Journal

Big Art District Failuretown

My wife and I are holed up in something like hotel, or a guest house, waiting excitedly for an planned experience. Our bed is in a room with only three walls, one side open to a shared courtyard or parking lot. On a ledge high in this courtyard a TV is mounted. It shows a roster of custom TV spots, made as lore and instructions for our event, which I eagerly try to absorb. We stay in the guest house overnight, during which time a food truck shows up — then another food truck, which upsets the staff of the first.

The next day we pass through a gift shop before boarding special transit to the actual big cool thing. The glass counter is laid with bright custom-made floral miniatures. I ask if they have natural fennel growing in field (I heard about these specific miniatures somewhere long ago). They show me a mini vase holding cut fennel stems, which somehow sloshes raw water over the edge and also has grainy gel creeping up the stalks. A short rocket ride takes us to what is called Carlas’s Place, supposedly hidden in the center of pointy mountain. This is an attraction and experience somewhat like Meow Wolf, yet also an exclusive gathering space and elite artist venue. Here there are plans plotted; showpieces shown; careers made.

I arrive and I head straight forward down a long massive ramp of scree into a yawning neon underground. I can only make out a little of it as the image of it seem scrawled, broken. Instead my wife pulls me aside and tells me I’m supposed to use the map on the back of the computer mouse visitors are each given. I can then exchange it at the location for a travelling vehicle. Although I somehow missed this tip in all my preparation, I take it as my first task.

The imprinted map shows the district. It is large, while the map small. The place swarms with people and activity, and I figure it must actually be somewhere like a neighborhood (with a normal entrance I just never knew about).

I try to find the indicated dot on my computer mouse map, and come into a giant video arcade with rows and rows of vintage machines. The place is crammed with people actually playing them, all lights and noise and crazy carpet like a casino. There are even big overhead displays which cycle though game screens, showing action happening somewhere on the vast arcade floor.

I leave the arcade far from where I entered. The arched and collonaded high-atrium mall is elegant, rectilinear, easily navigable. So it seems. I pass through the a central plaza (I don’t even look to the side, though the windows — why?) and into a cozier passage of stores and jauntily angled hallways. Some stores are recently set up for Christmas here. Dining outside on a barstool of a cafe, I pass a man I strongly recognize. He notices me noticing him and quickly names a news program, tucking his chin down in acknowledgement; as a new anchor he must get this a lot. So, I take it to this place is a place celebrities sometimes hang out.

I am left wandering the streets, which feel like a city all their own. It is like nowhere quite familiar, exactly. Alaska? Denver? 1940s movie set? There are steep mountains in the near distance. I happen to walk by a building-sized prop, a vast art deco hotel with a detailed façade. Closely inspecting the green tiles of the sweeping rounded corner, I find statues of exquisite alien dancers, their appearance like skinny insectoid bears. The style itself is Pacific Northwest native blended with Balinese temple deities, exaggerated poses and dramatically cut forms. I take pictures of this work from many angles. It is clear, at least, that this place has had a lot of effort put into it.

Suddenly my timer runs out. Was I told this was a timed experience? I’m teleportationally kicked back to normaltown, a 20-part survey immediately plonked in front of me. The first inquiry: I am asked to rate the vehicles I found. I start selecting every vehicle, laying heavy red shapes over them, indulging my impulse to rate them all zero. I’m disgusted and furious, not having even gotten past step one. I realize partway that my “feedback” has no chance to be recognized. For real feedback I have to yell at someone directly. If this has become so developed, if the experience cost so much money, yet they don’t even care if people are actually able to *do anything* of what they are meant to do? If the little survey doesn’t even know what you did? If they think they should even ask? Then, I will find someone to yell at.

I wake up mentally listing the things I will say. The many things.

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Dream Journal

New Country and Surprise Splash

There is a joining of two countries, one in Africa one in French-speaking Europe, a new country beginning with B — Besquiod? Bitsiarritz? Bandofou? Bismillahi? Here, countries are different than how I’m familiar. They are more of a choice of affiliation and a decision of what agency you have to interact with other people. Maybe it’s the future.

Inside a confined space (like a lighthouse or a cargo ship in port), someone has sprayed a wall with droplets — maybe as art, maybe as prank. Over a long exchange inside the lighthouse, a woman becomes mad after she realizes she has essentially been tricked into depriving her pastor. This goes against her morals, she claims.

Riding Splash mountain. I have somehow forgotten that this ride has a gigantic drop at the end, only remembering as it happens. I experience it fresh and find it extra exhilarating. (On waking reflection, I wonder what might’ve been happening in the room or my body that might have contributed to the sudden feeling of weightlessness that I dreamt of as this log ride.)

When I get off on Splash Mountain, two women begin to fight about selling. Someone immediately warns me “[Mrs.] Acuna is here” and so I attempt to block the line of sight — no luck. They fight on a lawn and knock down roses, meanwhile I’m trying to separate them and remind them they’re adults. I manage to pull one of them away, urging them to cross a line of railroad tracks before a train comes so she’ll be physically seperated. She doesn’t make it as she’s not even trying; like she’s not even listening.

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Dream Journal

Fantasy of Home Ownership

Sitting alone at home next to a sunny window. I’m drinking a beer and watching sports, unusual for me, but no one is watching, no one sees me. Weirdly affirming to play normal. An isolated snippet of dream, apparently unrelated to the rest of the night’s.

We’ve bought an overly spacious house far in the country from our current landlord. I consider worrying about him, but realize if anything goes wrong I’ll now be dealing with the bank who gave us our loan — an altogether different beast, thankfully. The only landlord foibles I’ll be dealing with now are his shoddy fixes and poor communication / documentation. For instance, I remember spotting a 1950s fridge shoved in the back corner of a tiled shower room.

Often we have multiple rooms of the same kind — four different kitchens! I fantasize about how I can convert them for various specializations. The largest of the kitchens is an extended hexagon with a large central island, already suited for heavy-duty work, a room I’d obviously love to make my workroom and fill with tools (all in their special place).

There’s another thought, though. Now that I’m no longer under as much pressure for space as in the city, will I actually do this? I got the odd sense there are some rooms I’ll probably forget about. Imagine that! We’ve been living here several days already and still haven’t gone back to the upstairs level; the last time was when we did the inspection. Having a real place of our own is different than I might’ve expected.