18-12-17 Humble creature that I am, but emboldened by the recent return of musculature, it would seem, I asked Dr. Robin Kimmerer to be the faculty advisor for my senior/master’s thesis via Facebook messenger. It had to do with a fusion of Indigenous and Western perspectives on nonhuman animal health, especially regarding broken bones.
Further exposition:
15-12-17 I may start writing these differently, as practice for different styles thereof. Anyway.
Pleasantly sunny interiors and some carefree artistic squirrelry heralded a hangout with P, who had recently produced a short film involving Legos.
Further exposition:
13-12-17 Below a handy laminated poster about how not to eat monkeys was a cardboard fruit box containing a few scampering guinea pigs, one of which was basically a fuzzy miniature Komodo dragon who was very keen on being adopted. Drifting away from the dimly lit room, I explored the rest of what was likely a convention center backstage converted into a rudimentary apartment, noting the carpet on the walls and ceiling. I then answered a knock at the door only to be knocked back by their forced entry.
Further exposition:
12-12-17 I wish I knew what was going on here. As it is I'm mystified. Some madness had enticed most members of my immediate family, as well as an unspecified friend of mine, to use a military-grade helicopter and its mounted machine gun to shoot a number of wild beehives out of several trees in my dad’s backyard. After taking a turn in the driver’s seat, I was instructed to keep myself safe from stings by crawling into a giant plastic bag. Of course. My sight became increasingly occluded by bees, and soon afterwards found myself on the forest floor with a small-caliber pistol, knocking down small pieces of hive. We all then took a little scenic trip flying just above train tracks in a reconfigured early-autumn Goldstream Valley, even flying beneath power lines. A final scene returned us to the backyard and the errand of my dad’s up to the house I was joyfully running.
Further exposition:
10-12-17 With characteristically cinematic but problematic self-aggrandeur was I to be found a prodigal Sherlock-Holmes-alike at a rather futuristic academy.
3-12-17 lock-in featuring Cliff
27-11-17 dock beside river, morph to indoor catwalk, Swimming down submerged staircase
Fort Yukon driving past new houses bathroom before performance/flight
25-11-17 two elusive women ; bar-soir-sojourn cure
24-11-17 driving with friends on warm dark summer night
23-11-17 biking, endless airport, Former classmates
22-11-17 A and me construct a child
21-11-17 L and me ate cereal out of knitted bandannas clinging to our faces, somehow avoiding making a mess, before running madly through a forest. Then, following scenes of an interesting but dim house, I was to be found flying over rocky and mildly mountainous terrain, admiring small turquoise bodies of water.
Further exposition:
19-11-17 Mrs. H, A B
13-11-17 Aadoo Seek’sawe
10-11-17 Food Factory
7-11-17 bike trip to (White majority) delta-junction-equivalent north of Fairbanks
3-11-17 Indian friends visiting
semi-nightmares, academy of murder
1-11-17 Another possible mnemonic device for my relationship with agency. #Homework . I say so because the dream was once again mostly cyclical, and more importantly it never occurred to me to try to break the cycle. It began biking on the lovely smooth stone floors of a Middle-Eastern airport that seemed to go on forever, and which also housed its own academic institution and shopping mall. I stopped at the former to use their shower after hiding under a bridge during a tank battle in the courtyard, and one of my numerous circuits through the latter was differentiated by a tear in the space-time continuum of a wall, out of which Chaos Space Marines were leering, and into which an Orc battle wagon quickly plunged.
E and me then had some fun hanging and walking by our hands, over the suddenly droopy and styrofoam-consistency walls, between the bathroom and the garage.
Further exposition:
29-10-17 A cyclical sequence concerned a concerted escape from a planet in the context of a number of college dormitories and surrounding forest. I arrived at a run in a courtyard surrounded by such modular buildings, apparently to collect stuff from one of them, and thereafter, possibly following further running through the forest, returned at dusk to the now water-filled courtyard, this time to collect friends on the way to a waiting spaceship. We may have been followed.
Further exposition:
25-10-17 Possibly employed as captain of a sailing vessel, I was singing myself the story of our upcoming journey using the unrecognizable leftover food scraps on my plate; pushing them around with my spoon, really getting into it. Then suddenly several of the crew came into my immediate vicinity and, apparently deciding that the show must go on, finished my saga at a hum. It was a beautifully awkward.
Further exposition:
24-10-17 Ah, the cruel fate of being left behind at a sushi restaurant. Seemingly in something like an attractive yet somehow sleepy city, I sat at a table in a sushi restaurant with the knowledge that my friends, whoever they had been, had left without my knowledge. Forgetting that my fear had really been only that I would be unable to get out of my chair, I got out of my chair and struck up a lively conversation with one of the employees, who it now seemed was one of my housemates. They were really cool. Having lived there for some time thereafter, it seemed, we then moved to an apartment just down the road. One of them said "let's hear some Russian!", and having obliged them, to their delight, I awoke.
Further exposition:
22-10-17 Wandering through an endless and rather drab high school at lunchtime, I may have been searching for something.
17-10-17 Despite its creepy ugliness, I ended up playing “Santiago” with a seeming flashmob of musicians in the basement of something like a summer camp dormitory for criminals. And, of course, it was hot.
Later, I had apparently developed an armpit slime problem. At least I was lifting my arms.
And yet later, an unknown partner and I found ourselves slowly rappelling down a communications/data-security tower as if doing a hardware integrity inspection. This quickly turned into a bad spelunking trip as we found ourselves underground, still in our harnesses, faced with a procession of eclectic monster-like characters, which we alternately lassoed out of our way or simply observed until we rappelled past them.
Further exposition:
13-10-17 Around the smallest of the small-town fairgrounds I was carrying J T, or at least the person of that name I recall from high school.
Beyond that, possibly in the same town, I was an unwilling tourist at a museum of warfare art. Aside from the usual self-righteous nationalistic content, I may have awoken after a long fall over an unsecured banister.
Further exposition:
11-10-17 Probably on some crazy quest, I stepped into an ice cave to behold a giant hibernating cartoon-line-faced apricot in the frozen pond beneath a 3m-wide packed-snow tetrahedron with a polar bear sleeping on its broken top.
A rogue AI was featured next, almost perpetually reinventing its physical form as it did all manner of horrible things to a major metropolitan area, until it became the adversary of a Black family of exceptionally powerful elemental mages, to whom the AI was a mere nuisance. Later, perhaps during a peace negotiation, the now android-incarnated AI’s true goal was revealed as, in fact, another artificial intelligence still under development by humans. The latter was represented rather abstractly as a solid black stone table with Jungle’s eponymous album art on top.
Before a brief third scene, as I recall, I had awoken to see E disappearing into the bathroom. Well, having fallen asleep immediately thereafter, I then dreamt that he had come into my room to exercise only to have a sleepily playful M talk him back to bed. 30 seconds later, I awoke to E (re)entering my room, and I regaled him with the tale.
And lastly, I was a privileged guest at a future Christmas gathering, running excitedly between the tree and the kitchen for more cookies, before finally settling on my stomach almost beneath the former, all the while listening to Kamasi Washington’s “Magnificent Seven” in the background.
Further exposition:
10-10-17 At the first-floor landing-juncture between UAF’s theater and music departments, I beheld a great number of face-painted and costumed women moving in and out of doors and up and down the stairs.
5-10-17 Not sure which caused the other: weird dreams or bad sleep. Among many rather disturbing vignettes, I recall sequentially inhabiting at least two copies of A T’s body (forgetting the name of whom for at least an hour added to my distress) as they wandered through and outside of something like a polar research station, until they caught sight of each other through a frosty door window and began to scream in fright. In another unrelated scene, I wandered through an eerily quiet version of the mask building in Pioneer Park until I arrived at a small ensemble rehearsing in the back of the theatre, at which point my body began making a loud clicking noise and I was asked to leave.
Further exposition:
30-9-17 I began the evening's phantasms swimming in warm and shallow gravel pits, seemingly those beyond the Fairbanks international airport, but then somehow morphing into a flooded and sandy-bottomed but nevertheless inviting laboratory.
I was then transported to a festival in Fort Yukon, at which a friendly stranger dropped me off in early-morning darkness, and which quickly transformed into a beautiful spectacle of giant nested glass bell jars catching the sun reflecting off the nearby snow and comprising the outer and inner walls of the festival’s convention center. I ended up bumping into B F and giving her an excited hello, to which she responded with distress at the state of my musculature.
Further exposition:
29-9-17 P M had some kind of secret freezer project going on. At first I saw the autumnal north side of his reconfigured house in a disembodied fly-by, then, in winter, I ran in the deep snow alongside a deeper square hole that marked the entrance to the subterranean freezer. I then fell through the snow to the ground at the very edge of the hole, and peeking through to the 2m drop to my left, fretted. This first sequence was somehow soundtracked with Tokimonsta feat. MNDR’s “Go With It”.
The next sequence, no less mysteriously soundtracked with PHOX’s “Satyr and the Faun”, concerned myself and an unknown woman attempting to catch a small brown pond’s only fish behind something like a forest-bound dormitory.
Further exposition:
28-9-17 Driving somewhere on a fictitious Alaskan back road in mid-winter with a characteristically grumpy dad, we stopped at an LED-lit building as the sky grew dark.
23-9-17 As a witness of and participant in a dystopian virtual-reality timestream, I beheld a number of cyclical sequences, seemingly of a job and a commute home in the evening to my lovely smart transgender artist-partner, whose uniqueness seemed almost metahuman in magnitude. Near the end of one of the day-sequences, they and I spoke at length about some sinister regime of the governance of the vertical city we were living in.
Further exposition:
11-9-17 Glass had been added to the list of materials accepted at the Fairbanks central recycling facility.
8-9-17 in a beautiful twist of fate, I was given the honor of showing people around E’s future secret-passage-riddled house, intoning conspiratorially over my shoulder at one point, “he thought of everything”, as we entered a closet leading to a secret underground cavern. Possibly upon departure from which I found myself on a 60-mile run back home on a knob-rooted trail between vegetable fields, somewhere in the Matanuska-Susitna valley, and heavens was I ready for it. The accessibility of the fields seemed to suggest that their contents where open for gentle harvest by hungry pedestrians.
Further exposition:
7-9-17 Ah, what delicious quoi-thematic weirdness! In what appeared to be in the relatively distant future, architecture had taken a turn for the personal. It seemed to have become culturally accepted that an architect, still within certain albeit wide parameters, could make their buildings look and feel any way they wanted to and not be held accountable for the mental states of their occupants, since it simultaneously seemed to have become impossible for anyone on the planet to not receive love, warmth, and extensive training in metacognition and emotional intelligence starting from birth. Yoga too, probably. Therefore, anyway, I was only surprised in hindsight to find myself on the bottom floor of a UAF Wood Center greatly enlarged and remodeled the point that I felt as if I were instead at the bottom of a deep cavern whose ceiling was its mouth to the surface, and whose sparse LED fixtures were merely for showing off the natural artistry of its stonework, not for assisting my eyes or my mortal quest. But the latter, to my delight, was to be in a large ensemble performance of “Chega de Saudade”. With I! We sat close together on a 3m wall overlooking the rest of what was apparently the percussion section, comparing our timbale and vibraphone parts, until we hopped down to search for the other sections. Their discovery yielded a series of vignettes in which I, now humbled with a sense of conductorhood, entered the metaphorical headspace of each section, observed the dramatized dynamics and struggles of their group behavior in their specific context, and provided some form of alteration which allowed them to join the larger ensemble. Only one example remained intact enough for recollection: as I approached the flute section, I was teleported into their pocket universe in which they were competing fiercely for possession of something as they flew through a moonlit forest on broomsticks. It may have been a wand, since I recall giving all three a new one.
Further exposition:
2-9-17 Wandering around holding up my middle fingers. Whoop-de-doo.
1-9-17 I was chased around a partially destroyed castle for no apparent reason.
29-8-17 As part of a sound check in an old beat-up common area / recording studio, I loafed unconcernedly across dirty couches and mismatched cushions.
??-8-17 I was the rather vainglorious owner of a lint-consistency weed bud.
??-8-17 Something about wandering through a theatre-house, and an incorporeal departure.
21-8-17 One orange and one green overpowered and seemingly indestructible entity was fighting the other, possibly on the surface of the sun. Meanwhile, I may have been made of living metal.
20-8-17 In something like Mr. H's old room at West Valley High School, an impassioned young Black teacher was engaging an introduction to “intersectional feminism / popular anthropology / treating others with respect” class.
Further exposition:
18-8-1 in Fort Yukon, still helping to clean the house apparently, our task suddenly became not at all fun upon discovery of a basement bunker full of secret WWII supplies and a multiply embodied AI under orders to protect its contents at all costs. We would succeed in destroying one, for instance, only to have it download its programming into a new chassis. We spent the rest of the dream in evasion mode.
Further exposition:
??-8-17 Quasi-utopia? In a futuristic and lightly snowed-upon Seattle, I was to be found running into and out of a very old high school for reasons unknown, over and around which a colossal city-scale Amazon steel-endoplasmic-reticulum-like transportation network curved and arched.
Further exposition:
??-8-17 I was trying to prevent people stealing the still-living heads of extraterrestrials out of buckets in a dingy laboratory. Don't ask me.
4-8-17 As a kind of preview, I beheld the track listing for Newen Afrobeat's eponymous album in the Notes application immediately before awakening myself with a helpful but totally involuntary spinal readjustment. I was then comfortably stargazing on my back in the snow in the valley-plain forest of another massive UAF campus. Apparently I was so comfortable that I dozed off and in-dream dreamt of H and a weird set of upright wagon-wheel-spoke-looking chimes she may have been chastising me for being unable to play. I then awoke and walked up and over a smaller hill to a large postal building at the base of the main campus hill. Inside, the upholstery was Christmas-festive, and somewhere within the adventure of a set of stairs leading to a 10m drop-off down which one was supposed to drop one’s packages into buckets at the bottom, I saw and chatted with M, who seemed to work there.
Further exposition:
2-8-17 I offered a choice of crappy food or vegetables to a person I sang the 1812 overture to.
23-7-17 Mom was looking to lodge complaints about sexism in a possibly fictional middle-eastern country, I following in the hopes of learning something about diplomacy.
I was then doing an activity with some kind of activist student group at West Valley high school, with males on the western stairwell and females on the eastern stairwell.
Further exposition:
20-7-17 I sure have a lot of dreams. This one concerned a benevolent twist on the Matrix movies plots. In the "real world", others and I were using various origami figures to help people in the simulated spaces learn how to stretch and do yoga. Later we even screened content that people in the simulated spaces had flagged as nationalistic.
Further exposition:
3-7-17 In a house full of living and dead family, I was nimbly avoiding a very distant cousin and his sycophant in their attempt to collect and take me somewhere. Eventually I relented, and upon getting in their pickup truck and beginning to pass through checkpoints, realized that I was on a stormy and techno-futuristic dystopia of a world.
Further exposition:
1-7-17 Denmark suddenly had lots of hills, with large metal sculpture art on many hillsides, and on our way to a super cheap run-down and generally unattractive short-term apartment, I heard dad complaining about Emma Watson for some reason. Turning to engage in the conversation, I saw her in a Victorian-style dress close by a grassy abandoned gas station. Later, we explored the bridges and towers above and between the treetops of a large and floridly beautiful wildlife sanctuary.
Further exposition:
27-6-17 Once again I found myself as a woman, this time middle-aged, and with succinct and rather frightening poesy narrating my experience of late-21st-century psychological problems through a series of visual vignettes. (Nothing strictly clinical: as functions of humans’ changing relationships with technology, they seemed to be common enough for everyone else.) First of all I was aware that I had raised children and seen them grow to independent maturity, but that some detail of technological assistance with them had left me emotionally unhealthy and struggling to cope with their absence. Next came confusion and uncertainty regarding solar vehicles (this dream may have taken place in Australia).
A final disconnected scene was of a vague rescuer/captor dynamic.
Further exposition:
26-6-17 I was traveling with an unknown family, possibly as a suitor of their daughter, and inhabited interiors of recollection include an old Italian self-recompiling house undergoing reconstruction and a trail to a cave bordered by bushes of enormous gooseberries, one of which, when split open, resembled a heavy fur utility kilt.
Further exposition:
24-6-17 In this particular phantasm, I was apparently very good at basketball. I wove, ran, and dodged my way back and forth across the dimly lit court, accruing points, and for my efforts was awarded a medal so cumbersome it was effectively a straightjacket. In fact I was told I would have to see a doctor to have it removed. Thereafter I wandered through a rather attractive clinic, the architectural style of which seemingly borrowed from that of Shinto arches, until I arrived at the right doctor’s office and climbed up 10 feet of shelving to find the appropriate paperwork. It consisted of a stack of 8.5x11 sheets, color-coded according to what two or three letters were at their bottoms: I had to circle letters and stack their sheets in the appropriate order, and thereby very tediously make a sentence of my problem (something like “please remove this medal”). Having at last done so and seen the doctor for the briefest of moments, I was told to wait again. And apparently I waited millennia. I blinked slowly several times, realizing that the lights had all gone out, then stood to look down the now-crooked hallway at a beam of bright sunlight shining through a breach in the upper stories. Rather alarmed, I turned around to behold a fractured planetscape, jagged chunks of earth loosely orbiting below and beyond my view.
Further exposition:
16-6-17 Someone and me, probably B, were driving south through an early Maine morning. The sky was still deep blue and black, and we were nervously aware of large hovercraft occasionally swooping over the highway, capable of seamlessly rerouting traffic onto them and hypnotizing their passengers into driving Subarus.
Further exposition: dreams, man.
7-5-17 colossal Rasmusson library, KJL flashmob
5-5-17 detached crumbling barn powers stone being
2-5-17 running from building to building sans coat in winter
slightly futuristic trade school, dispelled feelings of awkwardness, short green reptilian humanoid? in warehouse with tall instructor, assembling spacegoing necessities
23-4-17 house of eccentric mates, sock in mouth, Victor Wooten lookalike, “Let Me Be the One”
20-4-17 collecting and arranging souper bowl bowls in fifth Avenue mall in anticipation of mom arriving
?-4-17 driving an electric utility cart up slanting shale, weird abandoned summer camp with wooden outdoor urinals
14-4-17 bright Valley country of five semi-magical disciplines
11-4-17 high school friends inside disaster shelter, wish me luck on Sojourn beyond
Russian apartment building
5-4-17 P and T have two more brothers, congregation with other hooligans, Long walk along trails, cross Ballaine Road, steep embankment, escape of diseased farm animals, being chased by a giraffe, late for second of three-semester Summer music classes from K, Shame
M. An enormous building of long hallways occasionally of collapsing paper, doppelgängers behind doors, Black electric blue sky outside
Catching a chicken
23-3-17 S asked me out on a date, whereat I can't remember, because we happened to be on Coruscant, and I seemed unable to stop wondering what the weather and gravitational stability would be like on a planet with no molten core or tectonic activity.
Further exposition:
17-3-17 dad’s new survivalist badass partner-friend
foggy performance of second suite in F for military band, playing others’ parts
14-3-17 Bioshock Andrew Ryan’s empty office swimming
8-3-17 low-g existence as trident-wielding woman, boarded by enormous white men, white woman skin, black eyes
7-3-17 elite percussive group, feeling out of place
6-3-17 Maine! How did i know it was Maine?! Oh dreams.
The adventure began in the Chick Wick Hotel, a structure which despite its tacky exteriors and generally decrepit state had a packed concert hall. They were in for a show: not only had the orchestra, seemingly, never rehearsed together before, but the roof, under rainy skies, also kept opening and shutting like a roll-top desk, though no one seemed to pay this any attention. Behind cue I rushed forward to perform a glockenspiel solo and found my music stand covered in plastic-wrapped rain-spritzed bundles of chives, and by the time I had removed them the roof had closed, I had missed my entrance, and it was time for one of my section-mates to crash their cymbals into an incongruous silence, soliciting a glare from the conductor. Then I escaped. The hotel sat at the edge of a similarly unattractive little hamlet, and now suddenly on horseback on a sunny afternoon behind what seemed to be a member of the F-S family, we climbed slowly into the lovely forested hills, I becoming increasingly excited at seeing familiar landmarks. Somehow I knew I had made it to the east coast.
Further exposition:
5-3-17 Doctor and friends start a pay-as-you-can clinic, emptying calendar ending, Live second-person credits,
Further exposition:
1-3-17 There was a hot spring in the middle of a forested campus! A lovely inviting one bordered by grass and with a couple of big rocks and a family or two in the middle. I made my way past earlier in the day and returned just before dark with my mom in her old white Toyota Tundra, she apparently having been tasked with retrieving a six-pack of beer from the bottom of the hot spring. I remained in the passenger seat as she did so. Upon reappearing at the driver-side door we both discovered that her seat had been taken by a mother with a child on her lap, and having gotten them both into the back seat and begun driving away, the child very naturally hung their torso out the open back door.
Further exposition:
15-12-17 I may start writing these differently, as practice for different styles thereof. Anyway.
Pleasantly sunny interiors and some carefree artistic squirrelry heralded a hangout with P, who had recently produced a short film involving Legos.
Further exposition:
13-12-17 Below a handy laminated poster about how not to eat monkeys was a cardboard fruit box containing a few scampering guinea pigs, one of which was basically a fuzzy miniature Komodo dragon who was very keen on being adopted. Drifting away from the dimly lit room, I explored the rest of what was likely a convention center backstage converted into a rudimentary apartment, noting the carpet on the walls and ceiling. I then answered a knock at the door only to be knocked back by their forced entry.
Further exposition:
12-12-17 I wish I knew what was going on here. As it is I'm mystified. Some madness had enticed most members of my immediate family, as well as an unspecified friend of mine, to use a military-grade helicopter and its mounted machine gun to shoot a number of wild beehives out of several trees in my dad’s backyard. After taking a turn in the driver’s seat, I was instructed to keep myself safe from stings by crawling into a giant plastic bag. Of course. My sight became increasingly occluded by bees, and soon afterwards found myself on the forest floor with a small-caliber pistol, knocking down small pieces of hive. We all then took a little scenic trip flying just above train tracks in a reconfigured early-autumn Goldstream Valley, even flying beneath power lines. A final scene returned us to the backyard and the errand of my dad’s up to the house I was joyfully running.
Further exposition:
10-12-17 With characteristically cinematic but problematic self-aggrandeur was I to be found a prodigal Sherlock-Holmes-alike at a rather futuristic academy.
3-12-17 lock-in featuring Cliff
27-11-17 dock beside river, morph to indoor catwalk, Swimming down submerged staircase
Fort Yukon driving past new houses bathroom before performance/flight
25-11-17 two elusive women ; bar-soir-sojourn cure
24-11-17 driving with friends on warm dark summer night
23-11-17 biking, endless airport, Former classmates
22-11-17 A and me construct a child
21-11-17 L and me ate cereal out of knitted bandannas clinging to our faces, somehow avoiding making a mess, before running madly through a forest. Then, following scenes of an interesting but dim house, I was to be found flying over rocky and mildly mountainous terrain, admiring small turquoise bodies of water.
Further exposition:
19-11-17 Mrs. H, A B
13-11-17 Aadoo Seek’sawe
10-11-17 Food Factory
7-11-17 bike trip to (White majority) delta-junction-equivalent north of Fairbanks
3-11-17 Indian friends visiting
semi-nightmares, academy of murder
1-11-17 Another possible mnemonic device for my relationship with agency. #Homework . I say so because the dream was once again mostly cyclical, and more importantly it never occurred to me to try to break the cycle. It began biking on the lovely smooth stone floors of a Middle-Eastern airport that seemed to go on forever, and which also housed its own academic institution and shopping mall. I stopped at the former to use their shower after hiding under a bridge during a tank battle in the courtyard, and one of my numerous circuits through the latter was differentiated by a tear in the space-time continuum of a wall, out of which Chaos Space Marines were leering, and into which an Orc battle wagon quickly plunged.
E and me then had some fun hanging and walking by our hands, over the suddenly droopy and styrofoam-consistency walls, between the bathroom and the garage.
Further exposition:
29-10-17 A cyclical sequence concerned a concerted escape from a planet in the context of a number of college dormitories and surrounding forest. I arrived at a run in a courtyard surrounded by such modular buildings, apparently to collect stuff from one of them, and thereafter, possibly following further running through the forest, returned at dusk to the now water-filled courtyard, this time to collect friends on the way to a waiting spaceship. We may have been followed.
Further exposition:
25-10-17 Possibly employed as captain of a sailing vessel, I was singing myself the story of our upcoming journey using the unrecognizable leftover food scraps on my plate; pushing them around with my spoon, really getting into it. Then suddenly several of the crew came into my immediate vicinity and, apparently deciding that the show must go on, finished my saga at a hum. It was a beautifully awkward.
Further exposition:
24-10-17 Ah, the cruel fate of being left behind at a sushi restaurant. Seemingly in something like an attractive yet somehow sleepy city, I sat at a table in a sushi restaurant with the knowledge that my friends, whoever they had been, had left without my knowledge. Forgetting that my fear had really been only that I would be unable to get out of my chair, I got out of my chair and struck up a lively conversation with one of the employees, who it now seemed was one of my housemates. They were really cool. Having lived there for some time thereafter, it seemed, we then moved to an apartment just down the road. One of them said "let's hear some Russian!", and having obliged them, to their delight, I awoke.
Further exposition:
22-10-17 Wandering through an endless and rather drab high school at lunchtime, I may have been searching for something.
17-10-17 Despite its creepy ugliness, I ended up playing “Santiago” with a seeming flashmob of musicians in the basement of something like a summer camp dormitory for criminals. And, of course, it was hot.
Later, I had apparently developed an armpit slime problem. At least I was lifting my arms.
And yet later, an unknown partner and I found ourselves slowly rappelling down a communications/data-security tower as if doing a hardware integrity inspection. This quickly turned into a bad spelunking trip as we found ourselves underground, still in our harnesses, faced with a procession of eclectic monster-like characters, which we alternately lassoed out of our way or simply observed until we rappelled past them.
Further exposition:
13-10-17 Around the smallest of the small-town fairgrounds I was carrying J T, or at least the person of that name I recall from high school.
Beyond that, possibly in the same town, I was an unwilling tourist at a museum of warfare art. Aside from the usual self-righteous nationalistic content, I may have awoken after a long fall over an unsecured banister.
Further exposition:
11-10-17 Probably on some crazy quest, I stepped into an ice cave to behold a giant hibernating cartoon-line-faced apricot in the frozen pond beneath a 3m-wide packed-snow tetrahedron with a polar bear sleeping on its broken top.
A rogue AI was featured next, almost perpetually reinventing its physical form as it did all manner of horrible things to a major metropolitan area, until it became the adversary of a Black family of exceptionally powerful elemental mages, to whom the AI was a mere nuisance. Later, perhaps during a peace negotiation, the now android-incarnated AI’s true goal was revealed as, in fact, another artificial intelligence still under development by humans. The latter was represented rather abstractly as a solid black stone table with Jungle’s eponymous album art on top.
Before a brief third scene, as I recall, I had awoken to see E disappearing into the bathroom. Well, having fallen asleep immediately thereafter, I then dreamt that he had come into my room to exercise only to have a sleepily playful M talk him back to bed. 30 seconds later, I awoke to E (re)entering my room, and I regaled him with the tale.
And lastly, I was a privileged guest at a future Christmas gathering, running excitedly between the tree and the kitchen for more cookies, before finally settling on my stomach almost beneath the former, all the while listening to Kamasi Washington’s “Magnificent Seven” in the background.
Further exposition:
10-10-17 At the first-floor landing-juncture between UAF’s theater and music departments, I beheld a great number of face-painted and costumed women moving in and out of doors and up and down the stairs.
5-10-17 Not sure which caused the other: weird dreams or bad sleep. Among many rather disturbing vignettes, I recall sequentially inhabiting at least two copies of A T’s body (forgetting the name of whom for at least an hour added to my distress) as they wandered through and outside of something like a polar research station, until they caught sight of each other through a frosty door window and began to scream in fright. In another unrelated scene, I wandered through an eerily quiet version of the mask building in Pioneer Park until I arrived at a small ensemble rehearsing in the back of the theatre, at which point my body began making a loud clicking noise and I was asked to leave.
Further exposition:
30-9-17 I began the evening's phantasms swimming in warm and shallow gravel pits, seemingly those beyond the Fairbanks international airport, but then somehow morphing into a flooded and sandy-bottomed but nevertheless inviting laboratory.
I was then transported to a festival in Fort Yukon, at which a friendly stranger dropped me off in early-morning darkness, and which quickly transformed into a beautiful spectacle of giant nested glass bell jars catching the sun reflecting off the nearby snow and comprising the outer and inner walls of the festival’s convention center. I ended up bumping into B F and giving her an excited hello, to which she responded with distress at the state of my musculature.
Further exposition:
29-9-17 P M had some kind of secret freezer project going on. At first I saw the autumnal north side of his reconfigured house in a disembodied fly-by, then, in winter, I ran in the deep snow alongside a deeper square hole that marked the entrance to the subterranean freezer. I then fell through the snow to the ground at the very edge of the hole, and peeking through to the 2m drop to my left, fretted. This first sequence was somehow soundtracked with Tokimonsta feat. MNDR’s “Go With It”.
The next sequence, no less mysteriously soundtracked with PHOX’s “Satyr and the Faun”, concerned myself and an unknown woman attempting to catch a small brown pond’s only fish behind something like a forest-bound dormitory.
Further exposition:
28-9-17 Driving somewhere on a fictitious Alaskan back road in mid-winter with a characteristically grumpy dad, we stopped at an LED-lit building as the sky grew dark.
23-9-17 As a witness of and participant in a dystopian virtual-reality timestream, I beheld a number of cyclical sequences, seemingly of a job and a commute home in the evening to my lovely smart transgender artist-partner, whose uniqueness seemed almost metahuman in magnitude. Near the end of one of the day-sequences, they and I spoke at length about some sinister regime of the governance of the vertical city we were living in.
Further exposition:
11-9-17 Glass had been added to the list of materials accepted at the Fairbanks central recycling facility.
8-9-17 in a beautiful twist of fate, I was given the honor of showing people around E’s future secret-passage-riddled house, intoning conspiratorially over my shoulder at one point, “he thought of everything”, as we entered a closet leading to a secret underground cavern. Possibly upon departure from which I found myself on a 60-mile run back home on a knob-rooted trail between vegetable fields, somewhere in the Matanuska-Susitna valley, and heavens was I ready for it. The accessibility of the fields seemed to suggest that their contents where open for gentle harvest by hungry pedestrians.
Further exposition:
7-9-17 Ah, what delicious quoi-thematic weirdness! In what appeared to be in the relatively distant future, architecture had taken a turn for the personal. It seemed to have become culturally accepted that an architect, still within certain albeit wide parameters, could make their buildings look and feel any way they wanted to and not be held accountable for the mental states of their occupants, since it simultaneously seemed to have become impossible for anyone on the planet to not receive love, warmth, and extensive training in metacognition and emotional intelligence starting from birth. Yoga too, probably. Therefore, anyway, I was only surprised in hindsight to find myself on the bottom floor of a UAF Wood Center greatly enlarged and remodeled the point that I felt as if I were instead at the bottom of a deep cavern whose ceiling was its mouth to the surface, and whose sparse LED fixtures were merely for showing off the natural artistry of its stonework, not for assisting my eyes or my mortal quest. But the latter, to my delight, was to be in a large ensemble performance of “Chega de Saudade”. With I! We sat close together on a 3m wall overlooking the rest of what was apparently the percussion section, comparing our timbale and vibraphone parts, until we hopped down to search for the other sections. Their discovery yielded a series of vignettes in which I, now humbled with a sense of conductorhood, entered the metaphorical headspace of each section, observed the dramatized dynamics and struggles of their group behavior in their specific context, and provided some form of alteration which allowed them to join the larger ensemble. Only one example remained intact enough for recollection: as I approached the flute section, I was teleported into their pocket universe in which they were competing fiercely for possession of something as they flew through a moonlit forest on broomsticks. It may have been a wand, since I recall giving all three a new one.
Further exposition:
2-9-17 Wandering around holding up my middle fingers. Whoop-de-doo.
1-9-17 I was chased around a partially destroyed castle for no apparent reason.
29-8-17 As part of a sound check in an old beat-up common area / recording studio, I loafed unconcernedly across dirty couches and mismatched cushions.
??-8-17 I was the rather vainglorious owner of a lint-consistency weed bud.
??-8-17 Something about wandering through a theatre-house, and an incorporeal departure.
21-8-17 One orange and one green overpowered and seemingly indestructible entity was fighting the other, possibly on the surface of the sun. Meanwhile, I may have been made of living metal.
20-8-17 In something like Mr. H's old room at West Valley High School, an impassioned young Black teacher was engaging an introduction to “intersectional feminism / popular anthropology / treating others with respect” class.
Further exposition:
18-8-1 in Fort Yukon, still helping to clean the house apparently, our task suddenly became not at all fun upon discovery of a basement bunker full of secret WWII supplies and a multiply embodied AI under orders to protect its contents at all costs. We would succeed in destroying one, for instance, only to have it download its programming into a new chassis. We spent the rest of the dream in evasion mode.
Further exposition:
??-8-17 Quasi-utopia? In a futuristic and lightly snowed-upon Seattle, I was to be found running into and out of a very old high school for reasons unknown, over and around which a colossal city-scale Amazon steel-endoplasmic-reticulum-like transportation network curved and arched.
Further exposition:
??-8-17 I was trying to prevent people stealing the still-living heads of extraterrestrials out of buckets in a dingy laboratory. Don't ask me.
4-8-17 As a kind of preview, I beheld the track listing for Newen Afrobeat's eponymous album in the Notes application immediately before awakening myself with a helpful but totally involuntary spinal readjustment. I was then comfortably stargazing on my back in the snow in the valley-plain forest of another massive UAF campus. Apparently I was so comfortable that I dozed off and in-dream dreamt of H and a weird set of upright wagon-wheel-spoke-looking chimes she may have been chastising me for being unable to play. I then awoke and walked up and over a smaller hill to a large postal building at the base of the main campus hill. Inside, the upholstery was Christmas-festive, and somewhere within the adventure of a set of stairs leading to a 10m drop-off down which one was supposed to drop one’s packages into buckets at the bottom, I saw and chatted with M, who seemed to work there.
Further exposition:
2-8-17 I offered a choice of crappy food or vegetables to a person I sang the 1812 overture to.
23-7-17 Mom was looking to lodge complaints about sexism in a possibly fictional middle-eastern country, I following in the hopes of learning something about diplomacy.
I was then doing an activity with some kind of activist student group at West Valley high school, with males on the western stairwell and females on the eastern stairwell.
Further exposition:
20-7-17 I sure have a lot of dreams. This one concerned a benevolent twist on the Matrix movies plots. In the "real world", others and I were using various origami figures to help people in the simulated spaces learn how to stretch and do yoga. Later we even screened content that people in the simulated spaces had flagged as nationalistic.
Further exposition:
3-7-17 In a house full of living and dead family, I was nimbly avoiding a very distant cousin and his sycophant in their attempt to collect and take me somewhere. Eventually I relented, and upon getting in their pickup truck and beginning to pass through checkpoints, realized that I was on a stormy and techno-futuristic dystopia of a world.
Further exposition:
1-7-17 Denmark suddenly had lots of hills, with large metal sculpture art on many hillsides, and on our way to a super cheap run-down and generally unattractive short-term apartment, I heard dad complaining about Emma Watson for some reason. Turning to engage in the conversation, I saw her in a Victorian-style dress close by a grassy abandoned gas station. Later, we explored the bridges and towers above and between the treetops of a large and floridly beautiful wildlife sanctuary.
Further exposition:
27-6-17 Once again I found myself as a woman, this time middle-aged, and with succinct and rather frightening poesy narrating my experience of late-21st-century psychological problems through a series of visual vignettes. (Nothing strictly clinical: as functions of humans’ changing relationships with technology, they seemed to be common enough for everyone else.) First of all I was aware that I had raised children and seen them grow to independent maturity, but that some detail of technological assistance with them had left me emotionally unhealthy and struggling to cope with their absence. Next came confusion and uncertainty regarding solar vehicles (this dream may have taken place in Australia).
A final disconnected scene was of a vague rescuer/captor dynamic.
Further exposition:
26-6-17 I was traveling with an unknown family, possibly as a suitor of their daughter, and inhabited interiors of recollection include an old Italian self-recompiling house undergoing reconstruction and a trail to a cave bordered by bushes of enormous gooseberries, one of which, when split open, resembled a heavy fur utility kilt.
Further exposition:
24-6-17 In this particular phantasm, I was apparently very good at basketball. I wove, ran, and dodged my way back and forth across the dimly lit court, accruing points, and for my efforts was awarded a medal so cumbersome it was effectively a straightjacket. In fact I was told I would have to see a doctor to have it removed. Thereafter I wandered through a rather attractive clinic, the architectural style of which seemingly borrowed from that of Shinto arches, until I arrived at the right doctor’s office and climbed up 10 feet of shelving to find the appropriate paperwork. It consisted of a stack of 8.5x11 sheets, color-coded according to what two or three letters were at their bottoms: I had to circle letters and stack their sheets in the appropriate order, and thereby very tediously make a sentence of my problem (something like “please remove this medal”). Having at last done so and seen the doctor for the briefest of moments, I was told to wait again. And apparently I waited millennia. I blinked slowly several times, realizing that the lights had all gone out, then stood to look down the now-crooked hallway at a beam of bright sunlight shining through a breach in the upper stories. Rather alarmed, I turned around to behold a fractured planetscape, jagged chunks of earth loosely orbiting below and beyond my view.
Further exposition:
16-6-17 Someone and me, probably B, were driving south through an early Maine morning. The sky was still deep blue and black, and we were nervously aware of large hovercraft occasionally swooping over the highway, capable of seamlessly rerouting traffic onto them and hypnotizing their passengers into driving Subarus.
Further exposition: dreams, man.
7-5-17 colossal Rasmusson library, KJL flashmob
5-5-17 detached crumbling barn powers stone being
2-5-17 running from building to building sans coat in winter
slightly futuristic trade school, dispelled feelings of awkwardness, short green reptilian humanoid? in warehouse with tall instructor, assembling spacegoing necessities
23-4-17 house of eccentric mates, sock in mouth, Victor Wooten lookalike, “Let Me Be the One”
20-4-17 collecting and arranging souper bowl bowls in fifth Avenue mall in anticipation of mom arriving
?-4-17 driving an electric utility cart up slanting shale, weird abandoned summer camp with wooden outdoor urinals
14-4-17 bright Valley country of five semi-magical disciplines
11-4-17 high school friends inside disaster shelter, wish me luck on Sojourn beyond
Russian apartment building
5-4-17 P and T have two more brothers, congregation with other hooligans, Long walk along trails, cross Ballaine Road, steep embankment, escape of diseased farm animals, being chased by a giraffe, late for second of three-semester Summer music classes from K, Shame
M. An enormous building of long hallways occasionally of collapsing paper, doppelgängers behind doors, Black electric blue sky outside
Catching a chicken
23-3-17 S asked me out on a date, whereat I can't remember, because we happened to be on Coruscant, and I seemed unable to stop wondering what the weather and gravitational stability would be like on a planet with no molten core or tectonic activity.
Further exposition:
17-3-17 dad’s new survivalist badass partner-friend
foggy performance of second suite in F for military band, playing others’ parts
14-3-17 Bioshock Andrew Ryan’s empty office swimming
8-3-17 low-g existence as trident-wielding woman, boarded by enormous white men, white woman skin, black eyes
7-3-17 elite percussive group, feeling out of place
6-3-17 Maine! How did i know it was Maine?! Oh dreams.
The adventure began in the Chick Wick Hotel, a structure which despite its tacky exteriors and generally decrepit state had a packed concert hall. They were in for a show: not only had the orchestra, seemingly, never rehearsed together before, but the roof, under rainy skies, also kept opening and shutting like a roll-top desk, though no one seemed to pay this any attention. Behind cue I rushed forward to perform a glockenspiel solo and found my music stand covered in plastic-wrapped rain-spritzed bundles of chives, and by the time I had removed them the roof had closed, I had missed my entrance, and it was time for one of my section-mates to crash their cymbals into an incongruous silence, soliciting a glare from the conductor. Then I escaped. The hotel sat at the edge of a similarly unattractive little hamlet, and now suddenly on horseback on a sunny afternoon behind what seemed to be a member of the F-S family, we climbed slowly into the lovely forested hills, I becoming increasingly excited at seeing familiar landmarks. Somehow I knew I had made it to the east coast.
Further exposition:
5-3-17 Doctor and friends start a pay-as-you-can clinic, emptying calendar ending, Live second-person credits,
Further exposition:
1-3-17 There was a hot spring in the middle of a forested campus! A lovely inviting one bordered by grass and with a couple of big rocks and a family or two in the middle. I made my way past earlier in the day and returned just before dark with my mom in her old white Toyota Tundra, she apparently having been tasked with retrieving a six-pack of beer from the bottom of the hot spring. I remained in the passenger seat as she did so. Upon reappearing at the driver-side door we both discovered that her seat had been taken by a mother with a child on her lap, and having gotten them both into the back seat and begun driving away, the child very naturally hung their torso out the open back door.
Rehearsal then occurred, with lengths of time between playing apparently long enough that my set of drums was interspersed with a large number of LEGOs.
And in a brief final scene, on an otherwise solid bridge overlooking vehicles parked below, I preceded an older white fellow in clambering onto some jank wooden portions before slipping sideways and falling onto a car.
Further exposition:
28-2-17 I had a good bit of fun swimming through a large underwater facility, whether it had been submerged long ago or was the domain of industrious mer-folk i’m unsure, until i was beset by low-danger squid-like enemies.
Further exposition:
19-2-17 I was working as a teleporter in a warehouse, the floor of which was literally lava. The top level of the industrial-scale shelving units was the walkway by which people of varying business-esque descriptions made their way to and from work, and it was my job to safely teleport them across the gaps. During a break in work I seemed to have missed a meeting, as a function of which I got the vague impression that I felt a bit of dissatisfaction about the monotony of my job.
A different scene found myself as a vaguely female tripod-entity (something like a semi-porcelain gynoid in a futuristic birthing center) experiencing a bit of anxiety about my state of relative immobility. I tottered into an inviting but empty hallway beyond my room in search of help.
I then briefly lived a post-disaster existence in and between large buildings on an early foggy summer morning.
Further exposition:
16-2-17 In a tiny derelict log structure afloat in snow and sunshine, I had what seemed to be a therapy appointment with S. We sat across from each other on the benches of opposite walls, our knees occasionally touching, exchanging questions to an uncertain but decidedly helpful end.
Further exposition: #Clairvoyance
11-2-17 In an auditorium with the slope of Reichardt’s and the brightly wooden hues of the Davis Concert Hall, a rehearsal/performance/dress-rehearsal was underway. I seemed to be a stagehand and brought K B a new pair of mallets to replace one that they had just broken.
Further exposition:
7-2-17 I got a few inspirational texts from S.
6-2-17 West Valley high school now had multiple mutually inaccessible second stories, through the windows of which i searched in vain for someone.
Further exposition:
5-2-17 I seem to have rehearsed the memories of these dreams as i had them, which practice lent itself to the feeling of being in something like a series of extended time loops.
One sequence involved emerging from a large commercial building in the midst of a group of friends, chatting animatedly as we squeezed ourselves into someone’s battered but durable old vehicle in the dark parking lot. The second or third rendition differed on at least two points: one being that the car was already occupied by a group too large and antisocial to accommodate both for transportation, and another that i pleasantly surprised our group just before exiting the building. Perhaps another was that my ride through what was apparently Anchorage was rather tortuous and overcomplicated by miscommunication with the driver.
Another sequence concerned being pursued by a disfigured fleshy entity i’m choosing to forget. It moved rather slowly, giving me time to run to temporary safety in an isolated cloister of a bookstore and find a book to aid my knowledge of my enemy. It appeared, however, that i was unable to open or otherwise access it without the proprietor’s assistance, and he being engrossed in an intense portion of a game he was playing and apparently anosmic to my plight, i grumpily laid a large black book over his screen and made steps for the exit. Luckily for us both i calmed down quickly, and finding another book of relevance to his game troubles i set it over the previous one as a shy peace offering.
Further exposition:
4-2-17 That old fiefdom again, images of which seem to have recurred. On an Alaskan birch-forested property was a rather massive house, seemingly a pastiche of 766 Spudwood and Yak Estates. I awoke on a mattress on the floor in dim light to see L doing the same a few feet away, and a number of LEGO models scattered between us. I then did some serious wandering: first to a second-story deck overlooking a large garden, then to something like a square roughly wooden Russian Orthodox church directly atop an empty Girih-style-mosaic-bottomed pool (and upon approaching the entrance of which was shyly and perfunctorily greeted by a white guy in a tie), then to the homely abbey-scale kitchen. There were whole cow calves in the freezer. In another smaller freezer, I helped myself to a frozen yogurt drop and shortly thereafter met a cook who told me to help myself.
In another sequence I sat in the tiny backseat of a red older-model Toyota pickup truck as we accelerated to 90 miles an hour driving onto a highway out of the country. We passed a busy convention center outside of which a couple of arrests were being made, and the spirited attendees of which seemed to indicate that the current event involved cannabis and alcohol.
Yet later, I entered an odd bathhouse-bar, somewhere in a snow-clad Alaska, the stalls of the toilets of which had their own doors in them.
Further exposition:
31-1-17 I caught up with L! She seemed to have a child, and we were interrupted at intervals by two stern women about a fault that was not hers.
Later, superimposed against a vague background of ancient Egyptian iconography, I beheld a lion and parrot falling through a jungle canopy on a moonlit night.
Further exposition:
?-?-17 E and M had a new apartment, somewhat isolated by something like elephant grass and nevertheless Alaskan raspberry bushes, sitting calmly in the sunshine as I approached on a fatbike.
Further exposition:
30-1-17 Having possibly arrived via low-orbit drop-pod, I wandered through the deserted fairground, livestock showing barns, and commercial areas of an eerily ethnically homogenous community. They were white and only walked in groups, shoulder to shoulder.
Further exposition:
28-1-17 I played footsie with S as we sat across from each other at small desks.
23-1-17 In the snow, a fox and owl were snuggling. It may have been the cutest thing I've ever seen.
Later, on a Europe trip, I mingled and spoke with fellow lodgers at something like a hostel, possibly involving helping resolve a dispute. The devil then appeared, steel-blue of skin and black of garb, and I seemed to confuse them with my sudden river of questions.
Further exposition:
21-1-17 I beheld a Chinese wizard’s house, before and throughout a house party, full of curios that each seemed to draw me into their immersively thrilling tales as i laid eyes on them: a demon flattened into a rug, a copper mirror in the floor, and a gnarled-branch-inspired arbor being memorable. One tale i certainly recall becoming however briefly immersed in was that of a nameless hero on a journey to recruit the aid of a fickle stone golem.
Further exposition:
16-1-17 A woman with Dia de los Muertos facepaint.
14-1-17 Scenes of myself psychologically dominating, but at the same time being physically dominated by, old middle-school acquaintances bookended friendlier, warmer, more frolicsome scenes of a slowly re-lit music room. At first only J, S, and me sat in a small triangle of chairs slightly off the room’s center, J apparently rehearsing from a handful of papers by the light of several illuminated doorways. Soon, however, lights came on and our trio disbanded in favor of joining others in cutting capers around the room to exciting and sourceless music.
Further exposition:
5-1-17 In a sunlit urban house a child packed their yogurt for school.
3-1-17 Dr. E gave me a readjustment in E’s living room, at some point during which removing a number of colored stones from my body.
Further exposition:
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