30-12-16 I wandered through an Asian-merchandise-centric store, vaguely avoiding something. Then i was skipping to a bathroom with a friend at the edge of a gymnasium. Sometime soon thereafter, i came into possession of 20 physical fiat dollars that were somehow trackable. And then i was sorting batteries onto the cargo escalator of an airplane.
Further exposition:
28-12-16 Among a cascade of other details that refused to “clump”, as it were, I recall: receiving a reminder voicemail from S as dad and I drove up to and parked in a drive-thru blood bank; saying "thanks Obama” to Barack Obama after he had helped me with something; and telling E and M about the first sequence as having occurred within another dream that I can't remember while at the kitchen table in Anchorage, and hearing their own dreams.
Further exposition:
27-12-16 Between 1955 (age five) and either 1961 or the end of my life, i seemed to be trapped in a time loop that i hadn’t yet figured out how to resolve. One figment of the mystery involved searching for something in a large pile of sandy gravel: another, somehow driving an old car across the surface of a lake.
Further exposition:
26-12-16 At least two deep-crust explorations appeared to be underway, both from small unassuming surface apertures i may have been involved in patrolling with a news team. On my way to one on the side of an Arizona-esque mountain, i jumped off a cliff and deployed my parachute in time to land safely on a moving forest-bound freight train. Upon arrival i interviewed a woman in a light white dress against the background of the mid-evening-sunlit mountain and what may have been small bioluminescent fungi growing at the mouth of the tunnel.
Further exposition:
23-12-16 A frighteningly zero-sum post-psychological diptych. Beware.
Panel one took place on a dark warm night in a scrupulously clean daytime-spectrum-CFL-lit fairground bathroom with no in- or egress doors. I think my phone was taped to my head, and the voice giving me instructions was oppressively implacable as i feebly protested the runic self-scarification-by-sharpened-paintbrush demanded of me. With that in hand, poised over the skin of my forearm, i was made, very slowly, to approach the second-to-last stall, its eventually discovered vacancy in no way minimizing the mysteriously crippling horror of the situation.
Panel two glitched. Scenes of dingy flickering light in a cream-green-tiled 40s-style public shower/scullery crossover deep underground bled into others of being strictly addressed by a crisply naval-uniformed woman as i stood naked in an unused room of a large public library. Having been dismissed to the atrium and estival sunshine beyond, i felt nevertheless that i was still trapped in the preceding scene.
Further exposition:
22-12-16 At last, a dream about S. On one of those magical mid-autumn mornings, when the hour is early enough that the mist is still heavy between the birch trees but one knows that the sun will be strong soon, we drove slowly in her white car somewhere in the west-of-Ballaine-Road Raven/Sandpiper/Kittiwake neighborhood, lost in new and pleasant conversation. I was supposed to be guiding us to the Pearl Creek playground but had apparently gotten blissfully distracted, and having laughed at that we found ourselves in the promised sunlight, exploring a half-abandoned early-stage multi-story house construction site that had been recently rained upon. We clambered through scaffolding and over puddles and into rafters to a ceramic and partially crumbling roof, still laughingly in dialogue, until i discovered that S had gotten her foot stuck in a hole in the roof, my alarm at which transitioned immediately and rather incongruously to an adjacent scene. On the albeit well-lit bottom floor, above a big grey puddle, a grinning S sat upside-down on an office chair, the wheels of which were likewise affixed, invisibly, to the ceiling. Her loose copper ponytail remained curled over one shoulder, casually defiant of gravity as the rest of her as i fretted over how to get her safely back to earth.
Further exposition:
17-12-16 Others and i were escaping a mysterious humanoid bringer-of-floods within something like an arcology built within and scaled to a snowy polar mountain range. We peeked through safety glass in a securely sealed utility corridor, watching water swirling around the figure in the similarly sealed hallway outside, before fleeing out of sight to a kliks-long trek through the utility spaces to another sector of the arcology.
Further exposition:
15-12-16 From a drone’s-eye view i watched a nondescript someone spreading, spiral-wise, a bag of fertilized ants on a field behind them with a bicycle, and they apparently having had to leave, i finished their task by hand and knocked at the door of a familiar-looking guru-esque character to inform them of a job satisfactorily done. They opened it, revealing weathered and invitingly greenhouse-like piping and wood, and we exchanged thanks, mine suddenly tearfully grateful for the chance to have made contact. We then made our goodbyes and the guru shut the windowed door, i just as sequentially reopening it to find them, as if made of terra cotta, in submerged pieces in a plastic 55-gallon trash can full of water.
I was then to be found biking north with A on a new path to the left of the road on Ballaine Hill. We turned east across the road, i in a sweat to get Apricot out of any of its potential dangers, and found ourselves in someone's yard populated by chickens of every size between bantam and cassowary, all with the feather patterns of Cochins. Going through the yard to a shed, I called A to me as we were about to enter a construction-site-style elevator to a lower field in the sunshine, and having done so another two times at the arrival of unfamiliar puppers, at last gratefully beheld her.
Last in recollection was a vague roadside diner reunion with a few old now-friendly gradeschool acquaintances.
Further exposition:
12?-12-16 The 20m-wide burning body of a crashed airplane (excluding the wings: it was massive) was to be seen on a hilltop as i drove somewhere below it.
Further exposition:
9-12-16 In another Danish-clan powwow, they had all descended on my dad’s wintry sunlit house: memorably, Uncle Hank laughed at the kitchen table while dad simply grabbed a one-kilo wedge of blond spongecake from a bag in the fridge with his hand.
Further exposition:
8-12-16 Denmark-grown family reunion! We were all in an old wooden house on stilts somewhere on the sunny windblown Danish west coast, and past a smiling white-haired oldefar i saw a beach and a boardwalk through an open door.
Further exposition:
23-11-16 A handsome but unknown male friend and i were sitting catching up on the floor of an interesting beach room: perhaps 6x9m and well-lit, a gentle tide came up to our outstretched feet from somewhere in the bottom of a wall, and the floor was thickly sandy. As we sat chatting, H appeared, very unconcernedly comported in a complicated red silk dress, pushing a bike beside her on her way to one of the room’s many doors. Eventually she reappeared in pjs.
Further exposition:
6-11-16 In an unsupervised classroom that opened directly onto a cold cobbled lane, i experienced listlessness, slowly mitigated by my discovery of several small heavy objects on my desk. Later, others and i drove absentmindedly up a campus’ sunny 80º bike path.
Further exposition:
3-11-16 Apparently hell-bent on tent-pitching on a 45º streambed, C T and me set to work on the willow- and alder-bordered sand. We then appeared on her apartment floor, somehow a cross between a midwest-American 1800s-style lodge and a tacky bar-and-ballroom replica thereof. Later, after climbing a few stairs and taking a few turns, i looked through the one-way glass of the bar mirror onto the dance floor.
Further exposition:
2-11-16 Mom was looking to get a cat from someone whose house seemed to be positively jumping with them, and whose bathroom i ducked briefly into.
Further exposition:
30-10-16 I appear to have dreamt of myself singing while playing the guitar before. Hmm.
28-10-16 J lay comfortably on her side on the floor of the spare room, now a small detached building, asking if I wanted to cuddle. I said I'd be right back as I climbed awkwardly backwards out the door and down the insulation and steel beams, joining dad on a path through deep snow back to the main house as he laughingly tried to show me an increasingly illegible packaging label.
Further exposition:
26-10-16 I went walking with M! Beneath her rather fancy high-tech apartment complex were what seemed to be multiple square kilometers of LED-lit parking space, appealingly empty but rather lonesome-feeling, and we seemed to speak at length on important subjects as we walked, eventually coming to identical 4m hills of white landscaping rock with the occasional vine creeper growing through them.
Further exposition:
25-10-16 Some madness had enticed a civilization to house itself in the 50m-wide ravine created by the splitting, from its peak to well below the surface, of an entire mountain. Therein, I made my way to an “in dulci jubilo" concert, David and me instructed by my mom to sit in the left and right sections, ostensibly so we could contrast our different experiences afterwards. The cultural code of this civilization apparently normalized the untuned and somewhat faltering solo a cappella performance by a woman in black, at which I marveled, and having finally arrived at the eponymous phrase a stagehand emerged from stage left and placed a large black hat in the shape of a Burgundian kettle on her head. Meanwhile and thereafter the stage did a bit of its own performing, going from the same level as the audience to something about the height of the Davis Concert Hall.
Having washed my hands of that weirdness, I landed in some more. I had, it seemed, just landed on a sunny green planet on an urgent mission to warn its inhabitants of what was following me, and I wandered agitatedly between several small heavily windowed single-story buildings of a sort of campus before finally looking into one. Happily chattering one-eyed shaggy legless crocodiles and short impossibly rotund brass-skinned people looked back at me. Reeling, I made my way inside in time to see still-happy humanoids emerging from suits, I having apparently been welcomed per tradition, and they directed me down a hallway in search of an elder to whom I could break my news. Doors were complicated that day, it would seem, for I fell to my knees through one into a full classroom.
Further exposition:
Further exposition:
11-10-16 A R stood outside a brightly winter-environed van piloted and recently parked by M, offering me spirited encouragement as i leggy-moosed my way out the front passenger door from a back seat several times.
Further exposition:
10-10-16 Mom, dad, and i were looking for Indian food somewhere along an invitingly ramshackle patch-boarded urban tunnel of a farmer’s market, at one point passing a squash-vending Terry Gross playing “Sunday Candy” to everyone’s benefit.
Further exposition:
6-10-16 Looking through yet more of farmor and farfar’s old photographs, i happened upon a series from a visit of James Baldwin’s to Fort Yukon in the 70s, he clearly having been a good friend and houseguest of theirs.
Further exposition:
2-10-16 Apparently involved in a movie filming (with recollections of the choreography of a face-punch), and faced with our arrival at a time deadline, i convinced the other actors to join me in shooting into overtime. And in a later, unrelated scene, i sat in the class of a “strict” teacher, who had their students’ chairs arranged in a grid.
Further exposition:
27-9-16 During a walk on the albeit reconfigured roads of Skarland-trail territory, i beheld, at intervals, roughly columnar rocks floating in sunny patches of thick unmoving steam. Eventually i came upon a crowd gathered outside a similarly steamy office building, it having apparently just risen from the earth, and through something like a tear in its side i climbed in. I was met by ramped black halls lit by strips of blue light in the floor, walls, and ceiling, and a large male throat-clearing busybody, apparently upset at my intrusion, who seemed to sniff or tut loudly and ostentatiously as he passed me by several times. I then found a room in which a free tabletop vending machine offered me, among other unknown things, a fictional apple-tomato bar.
Further exposition: I intend to invent said fictional apple-tomato bar.
24-9-16 I rode an air-bus around Alaska, it being matter-of-factly bus-like inside and a small airplane outside. At one point I F, there present, made a comment to which I jokingly replied that we would have to “kick you off at Venetie” for, and I recall being distinctly awed and pleased that the punchline to a joke could be an Alaskan village.
Further exposition:
23-9-16 S L with a much younger sister, in a small unlit auditorium, were singing “Dragostea din Tei”. In a nearby classroom I thereafter listened to A and a student of hers exchange jokes.
Further exposition:
Further exposition:
18-9-16 The impossible transpired: mom and dad were living in the same building, albeit at different ends of a massive long-stay hotel. All I clearly remember was walking to me and dad’s apartment, at one point fearful of being followed, then very appreciative of the homely custom-built interiors and skylights.
Further exposition:
17-9-16 H and me appeared to enjoy ourselves pretending to ignore each other in a bookstore: I lay rather haphazardly on the floor of an aisle looking for a book about Wicca while she occasionally flitted past me. We then became separated in the midst of busy preparations for an art exhibit, both having been tasked with finding stuff, but eventually we ended up working side by side cutting paper, and singing Amelia Curran’s “the Mistress” together.
Further exposition: ‘
15-9-16 A brief introductory scene showed a new high-ceilinged wood-paneled school mess hall, at that moment neatly filled with lunchgoers. Later, perhaps in a less-modern classroom of the same school, M was introducing me to a two-foot to-scale model of a prehistoric insect. In its flat abdomen it had apparently made a kind of alcohol for several smaller species of beneficial insects that lived on it.
Further exposition:
Further exposition:
Further exposition:
Further exposition:
Further exposition:
30-8-16 Somehow appearing in AGHM’s house, I was verbally facilitating my calmly awkward exeunt having found the T I had been looking for. We then appeared in my room, she having apparently come to visit, and as we passed each other going in and out of the bathroom, I heard her say, simply, "Your life is a ticking clock”.
Further exposition:
29-8-16 J! In Germany? Texting while spinning while laughing, we seemed to enjoy ourselves in something like a cobblestone-floor garage.
Further exposition:
18-8-16 In what may have been an entrance hall, I was dancing for J to Chega de Saudade, explaining that it was my favorite song and how to find it on YouTube, because she was sitting at a grand piano and wanted to learn how to play it.
Further exposition:
17-8-16 I drove up several snowy hills, possibly on my way to see C, who was fostering kittens as usual.
15-8-16 Apparently of my design, uncertain others and i were being pursued by verminous-fabricant-esque constructs, with initial less-than-scary scenes showing an escape from some sort of laboratory. Later, we sought security on a tiny island in a small boreal lake, only to realize that the constructs were nevertheless walking along its bottom toward us.
Further exposition:
Further exposition:
In further disconnected scenes, i may have been in a classroom sans shirt.
Further exposition:
7-8-16 At yet another lodge, this one winter-night-bound by the side of a mythical Alaskan highway, C, mom, D and me were engaging rooms and settling into an otherwise deserted eatery. Later, in an unassociated scene, an indistinct other and i were sitting idly on a snow pile in the northeast corner of Fred Meyer West’s parking lot. As we watched the morning traffic smogging by (it must have been quite cold), water, rising as suddenly as it froze, surrounded us, putting us in peril of drowning in ice. Spared that fate by a shift in scene, however, i appeared at a surface-level section of a serpentine subterranean motorway during what appeared to be a polar shift, and looking up at an ominous colossally tall black building (the kind which seems so tall as to make its viewers fall over in their neck-craning), i saw fully a third of it slowly fall to earth, like a calving glacier.
Further exposition:
5-8-16 At an original-construction 19th-century lodge somewhere in the midwest US, dad and me may have been enjoying a sturdy breakfast before carrying out some improbably proportioned guns. Mom and me were then to be seen running down a forested hill, eventually sliding down the rusty 45º bed of an abandoned crashed vintage utility truck.
Further exposition:
2-8-16 Anchorage adventures. Perhaps first in a jumble of recollections was A, after something like a loading screen, having literally cleaned and reorganized my brain. It was made of chunky 13-bean hummus and was accessed and observed largely by removing the top “hemisphere": formerly, the view inside had been of an undifferentiated plateau of grey matter with a small trench separating it from the front. It now had neatly labeled and color-coded walls such that it looked not unlike a small hedge maze, and it apparently worked better. Thanks A. This took place during some kind of academia-related trip to a gymnasium, and then all us housemates minus M having piled into a car, we drove through Anchorage, social as ever. In conversation i discovered both that M was gone on a visit and that E had recently delivered someone to Denali National Park.
Further exposition:
30-7-16 Among a seeming infinity of other story-sequences were scenes of an open-air supermarket. Either in search of or brandishing victoriously a long plastic straw, i ran along, repeating to myself as i did so a phrase something akin to “just crank your perception of time way up”, perhaps as a partial explanation of my exceptional velocity. Soon finding myself alone among tall racks of a jumble of merchandise, i heard a buzzing coming from a cheap backpack, and opening it, discovered an odd golf-ball-sized glomerular metal object which i then replaced. Later, finding another such device, i heard two voices from an adjacent aisle; the first explaining the devices’ operation, hidden as they apparently were throughout the store, as reusable self-reassembling grenades. I then threw mine into the air as the terrorist drove away on a shiny hulk of a Harley-Davidson.
Further exposition:
29-7-16 Recalling the darkly looming and seemingly bottomless pits of Portal 2 (along with its arguably more-sinister-at-third-glance elements), an entire square three- or four-story building containing myself, and about 40m to a side, was being slowly and rather gently bashed against another identical building; both suspended from long single cables within a cavernous industrial space, the peripheries and bottom of which were lost in the gloom. My objective, seemingly both bleak and uncertain, involved exploring my unnervingly swinging building while remaining undetected by the unknown malevolent entities i shared the darkness with. At one point i made my way to an upper-story window and beheld, as the other building slowly lost its siding in its incongruent collisions with my own, a figure with its back to me, in what seemed to be the only lighted window in either building. I may have then jumped into the next window that passed.
Further exposition:
27-7-16 M, her siblings, E, and myself were all sharing a cheap apartment, and the general shared-space theme of “hubbub may occur at a moment’s notice” was evident as my in-dream self seemed to be awoken in the midst of a cascade of young people chattering as they entered my room.
Further exposition:
26-7-16 It seems not unlikely that it is simply a distortion of my perception of vertical scale which is responsible for my reports of dreams of immensely tall buildings or cities. Not to take the fun out of it. Anyway.
Scenes of me and E and/or D feeding each other leftovers while fitting a fresh rough block of birch into the uppermost wall of a two-story plant lattice (the operation itself taking place within a larger building) preceded or co-occurred with more urgent scenes of a colossally vertical hotel. Some sort of eerily nefarious decentralized manipulation of its guests was in process. Running through cathedral-sized rooms in my search for something as i was, i passed briefly through a significantly less grandiose common area, the guests therein i jerkily evaded due to their intermittent loss/regain of lips and mouth-openings, and their sudden frighteningly corruptive hostility during the former. I eventually made my way to a room in which a powerful telepath, possibly the subject of my search, had just cut their way through the innumerable stone floors between them and their target as if they were mere paper.
Further exposition: I hereby imbue this dream with intense significance for no apparent reason.
25-7-16 An old scanned-photograph dream. On a very slippery meandering road of grey mud and sand, bordered comfortably by vernal birch trees, dad and me were speeding recklessly on road bikes. Indeed, more than once i recall sliding out, or into a turn, but despite first-person views of crash-worthy angles with the ground, i never lost momentum. We eventually quit our conveyances to observe insects in the road-like streams paralleling the road, appearing as they did to resemble millipedes with tiger beetle wings and elytra superimposed onto them. Not fancying our scrutiny, it seemed, they would dart to safety at our approach.
Further exposition:
22-7-16 A revolver-wielding dual J-I entity was apparently my executioner for a crime of which i’d been wrongfully convicted (or whose punishment i was simply trying to avoid), and between my oddly calm attempts to flee the dingy jail cell, i seemed to behold myself typing the unfolding events onto increasingly bloodied paper.
Further exposition:
21-7-16 Apparently during a low-priority zombie outbreak, or perhaps just a small training exercise therefor, J and others were walking rather merrily along isolated stretches of the Parks highway, and ahead of whom i was biking a distance before waiting for them to catch me up and repeating the process. In later, associated scenes, i may have been co-leading a zombie-defense workshop with M M in something like a gymnasium built around a series of shale tors.
Further exposition:
19-7-16 Ah, rides with friends. H was driving us, in an appropriately familial Subaru-esque vehicle, through something like an unused gravel quarry under gently snowy skies. We spoke idly about nothing in particular as we, with similar lack of surprise, entered a massive subterranean facility in the side of a nearby hill, now in the company of semis under the trailers of which we could safely drive.
Further exposition:
18-7-16 Having emptied all 35 of farfar’s SD cards, i then dreamt rather exhaustingly of a further sum of farmor’s which she asked me to handle.
I then had a nightmare of themes and composition seemingly derived from Bioshock 2, largely consisting of seemingly uncontrollable views of rapidly ADAM-mutating faces, poorly lit.
Further exposition:
17-7-16 Apparently having some troubles, i was late twice to a class i was taking: the first time i loitered dispiritedly outside the classroom door; the second time, preceded by scenes of myself running up and down a grassy frozen hill, i arrived just in time to see the doors open and my classmates pour out. One of them, perhaps a friend, clamped me to their tall side and we strode briskly through the rather austere and dimly lit academy- train-station crossover while i relayed the concepts i’d missed in class. Later, having finally made it to class on time, this time taking place as the sun set on a frozen lake bordered by spruce-treed hills, i lay on my stomach watching the rest of the class gambol about and chatting with two women about further class-related concepts.
Further exposition:
16-7-16 L sang “le Vieux Piano” very well.
15-7-16 At last, a dream in which i was stoned.
10-7-16 In scenes alternating between in- and outside a house, a dinner at a long table sat by many including H S was in progress while i ran uncertain errands up and down some stairs hard by.
Further exposition:
6-7-16 In the fashion of a cheaply produced film of hackneyed themes, others and myself were traipsing around an otherwise-abandoned dilapidated plywood-monochrome amusement park, apparently embroiled in the “close the gate to a demonic dimension” act of a three-part fantasy quest.
Next, M was home! Albeit to a hugely reconfigured W house, but still.
And yet later i attempted very earnestly and unsuccessfully to speak to someone in German.
Further exposition:
Further exposition: A guess at this service’s utility suggested that use of certain emotions might prove more effective than others at recalling finer points of a memory.
3-7-16 An initial scene showed the dingy and interesting back storage areas of something like a Costco, in which I was following someone with whom I was exchanging favors, apparently.
Further scenes concerned an engaging new blue- and black-hued physics-based puzzle game, in which the player controls the movements of a ball through 3-d environments. I ended up taking a jump into a secret area, excitedly apprising E, M, and W of my success (who were somehow rendered in the game).
Further exposition:
30-6-16 Through many wondrous and scherzoid interiors I followed a newly reappeared G M / A M, fittingly attired for the adventure. The night began. as I recall, with her disappearing acrobatically through a wide-barred grate at the top of a wall in a small room into the darkly cavernous mystery beyond. I approached the grate close behind, dubious of my ability to follow her, but having neared the wall and peered up into the moodily lit theatre-esque space, I suddenly seized the bars and effortlessly pulled myself through.
Further exposition:
29-6-16 I was moving among mossy hilly black-spruce forest: slowly at first, and unsure of the state of my body, then faster, running joyfully. Eventually mom joined me, probably on our way to a campsite, and in my elation at being speedy again, I jokingly said something like “let’s go snort another line of coke”, at which she laughed.
Further exposition:
26-6-16 Ah, futurology. On a now massively vertical UAF I was wandering with dad past marine biology lab-displays, as though the research being conducted was on display as it occurred.
Further exposition:
23-6-16 This time, two disaster situations took place aboard an old wooden barge, the memorable of which seemed to involve an attack by a huge pink cantankerous squid, and for defense against which I sped belowdecks for an antique straight-edge razor.
Further exposition:
18-6-16 I was rather un-surreptitiously peeing all over the cheaply carpeted under-stairs area of an apartment building. Scenes of a darkened school may have followed thereafter.
Further exposition:
12-6-16 Somewhere within a vaguely adversarial tower facility, somehow understanding it to be the Death Star of vaguely adversarial tower facilities, and with heaps of fake snow everywhere, I was witness to the installation’s mutagenic power source: specifically, its effects on the workers, cases of which I observed in a heads-up display reality-overlay. I then got a powerfully creative brainwave while listening to Erik Satie’s Gymnopedié no. 1.
Further exposition:
29-5-16 Gardening once again occurred. In one iteration thereof I was some sort of youth leader, leading youth around yet another east-Butrovich-hill garden bed-plot, explaining the behavior of TJ, another leader, with whom the kids had had difficulties. I also gently chastised an anxious tie-attired Chinese boy for threatening others with his small recurve bow, and he hastily apologized. Another version began as D, in one of his older vehicles, drove me crazily and apparently legally across a densely reconfigured UAF: up and down flights of stairs, over icy-snowy grass, and eventually through the doors of a new and unfamiliar building from which I was supposed to be leading a march to a first-planting ceremony.
Further exposition:
22-5-16 On a steeply hilly campus, winter-bound and ashen-skied, I was making my nimble way to a police department at the top of a hill where I had apparently been promised some weed. Upon entering and taking many more stairs back down to its dingy reception desk, I was offered something like a cross between weed and a big globule of dab oil. In either case it produced little effect and I was disappointed. I had a long walk back downhill, eventually through an Escher-esque sunlit stairwell to visit with E B.
Wow. The second and seemingly finale act took place during an international, or rather interplanetary, plane trip, the kind where there are 11 seats to a row, and was deeply saturated with meaning and clarity toward the end, if for unknown reasons. Having apparently boarded “pre-curtain” midway through a southern-latitude sunset, i was peripherally aware of the few other passengers slowly making their way onboard as D and I contrasted the relative merits of luggage storage under one’s own seat versus the seat in front. The leg room being immense, I made my preference of putting my backpack in the former known, as was the case on this aircraft, and D shook his head. He then apparently exited the aircraft while I made a pre-takeoff exploration of a huge three-fixture bathroom. Needing to pee, as I did, I was mightily perplexed by the ambiguity of the plumbing, for each unique unit seemed equally well-equipped to both wash one’s hands and flush wastes of varying descriptions. One appliance in particular drew my attention, being an odd combination of a shoe sizer, a stainless steel diaper changing station, and an automatic car-wash sequence. It gave the impression that one would put one’s baby in the water of the intake at the top and she would emerge from a chute at the bottom having undergone a thorough scrubbing. Post-mystery, I regained my seat and was soon audience to nighttime in orbit over Mars, the dimmed cabin lights adding to the arresting view. Somehow cogent with the scene and what happened thereafter, I was then joined by a young woman, standing on the other side of a small round table at which I was now sitting, who asked me quite seriously, “Why are you so nice?”, and through my shy grin I replied. We then turned back to the windows. A cataclysmic eucharistic transformation of the planet was underway. How we knew that Mars had bones, and that they and Mars’ sand would be converted to something else in a process that would consume the planet, I have no idea: but we watched as colossal plates of dark knobby bone rose up through the rusty sand and swirled across the surface of the planet. Tearing away from this sight, we then began packing our backpacks for further, sadly unremembered, adventures, and in the middle of picking up a handful of pens in a glass mug I had a moment of lucidity trying to perceive the environment of my real body, after which I awoke.
Further exposition: I can’t remember my exact reply, but to have dreamt and recorded the whole exchange seems terribly self-aggrandizing.
21-5-16 A team rescue of an unknown friend from a spacecraft in low orbit was underway, and sans details of its success, we all then dropped overboard to the moon below, its surface covered in train tracks. Having apparently landed on a train and disembarked at a station, we wandered through seemingly endless indoor halls devoted to shopping and restaurants, finally settling for one of the latter, out of the windows of which was an early blue sunrise and a riverbed stretching towards it. Clearly perfect for E and me, it was a cheap quasi-cajun eatery in which others’ leftovers were free, and I recall licking someone’s plate clean with great enthusiasm. At one point, I zoned out staring at the shoulder of E’s newly stained blue coat as he leaned over my plate and hoovered up a mouthful of breading crumbs: that is, until he suddenly chewed and swallowed two TUMS-like tablets of an unknown stimulant from a bottle on the large rough-hewn wooden communal table. Apparently postprandial easy-chew stimulants were a thing on this moon. With my usual caution, I cried that we didn’t know what the stuff was, to which he replied something like “I have to find out.”. Exiting the restaurant en route back to the train station, I eventually lost sight of the others, ending with J G, with whom I exchanged small parting waves.
Further exposition:
18-5-16 I had a lovely time running on hard dirt, and later up an odd snow trench. I excitedly shared this news with someone, and having received a rhetorical “really?”, replied “yes, of -“, and then awoke to finish with a sad “- course . . . .”
Further exposition:
17-5-16 As if playing a role in another’s life, I opened my hands to see them covered in dirty half-healed cuts, somehow aware of my own antisocial and delinquent behavior, as well as the fact that a few of us were recently endowed with telepathic powers. I tried to see if I had any of them by focusing intently on closing my cuts and succeeded only in shooting one of my few adhesive bandages across the large open room. Following a seemingly intense scene or two among some red-leafed bushes by street-lit “Portland Night”, I found myself crouched a few meters from a large SUV, still by night, simply observing a back-and-forth between my confederates overfilling the vehicle and a police officer. At some point during the stressful dialogue, my dad wandered up and threw a loaded flare gun into the open trunk.
Further exposition:
15-5-16 Climbing from the front passenger’s seat to the opposite-side sliding van door, I mentioned to the driver (an older white fellow) that Rachmaninov’s Die Toteninsel was one of my favorite pieces of music, and mimicked its sea-like tossing with my hands. "You need help.", was the driver’s only reply. I then emerged to realize I was on a snowy road trip, making a bathroom stop at an experimental elementary school / veterinary clinic building.
Further exposition:
14-5-16 An uncertain other and I were performing siren deactivations (of the classical-misogynoir archetypal variety), involving something like shouted bits of cognitive-behavioral therapy and aggressive neck massages. Later, we ran through massive dimly lit water-covered internal spaces, membranous walls and ceiling softly glowing in purples and blues and greens, seemingly intended for travel by fast-moving hovercraft. And yet later, I levitated up, from the first floor, to square doors in the second-floor ceiling of a small quaint house.
Further exposition:
12-5-16 An ad-scientific hypothesis: the peri-somnolence thought-slop of the following morning, having reinvestigated this dream’s details, somehow blurred most of its details. They now consist of a few images of and strongly positive feelings toward a reappeared G S J, now immensely muscular, healthily assertive, and about 2m tall. She and I may have been Mrs. W’s teaching assistants.
Further exposition:
5-5-16 In the first of two huge houses, I zoomed busily and immaterially through walls, goggling at its six bathrooms. Later, having wandered physically-wise into the next, more rough-wooden 1800s-style ramshackle house, mom and me were trying to prevent someone’s pets (some highly sororal mice, voles, snakes, and a rat) from escaping. Mom then left, and finding myself lying on my front, chin propped on my hands under a low table in a corner, I discovered that the house was that of M’s parents, and heard them conversing rather sardonically behind a dresser. Further scenes consisted of at least two large two-story common areas, innumerably doored with other smaller rooms, which I calmly explored.
Further exposition:
28-4-16 A tilted wooden floor was involved.
27-4-16 At an appointment with a physical therapist, I was advised to avoid making a certain noise. At the end, it was insinuated that I had accidentally done so.
Further exposition:
26-4-16 Yet more superheroes fighting, this time at night above a very calm sea. Something like a small-forest-sized curved-glass-roofed greenhouse was nearby.
Further exposition:
23-4-16 Though largely forgotten, I recall a massive hall, at a humbly small exit of which I was slowly evading yet another special forces team.
Further exposition:
20-4-16 Another superhero movie. One curious scene involved a hologram stage, around which I and a few not-so-importants were rather elegantly sitting, in the middle of a conference with a “supervillain” who ended up breaking the fourth wall a bit when their image stepped beyond the range of the projector and walked among us. In another scene, at night in a field encampment, I replayed once or twice my vague mission d’espionage. Yet another scene consisted of myself standing in a 6m-diameter dome-ceilinged room, looking up at a floating superhero in the middle of complaining about an incoming enemy. They then shed their heavy scarlet cape onto my face on their flight out to confront the adversary.
Further exposition:
17-4-16 Seemingly saddled by multiple anxieties, a few hundred other UAF students and me were removing possessions from our lockers in a new long hallway in the Wood Center. I then cautiously emerged from the building to a further-reconfigured bike-hitching area and a sunny autumn evening, though its setting was again, somehow, in the east.
Further exposition:
14-4-16 Heavily anthropomorphized versions of a pig, a red liquorice vine, and a cheese stick were in the process of escaping from some kind of processing facility (aesthetically a cross between the Fairbanks International Airport and an industrial slaughterhouse) when the plot quickly swung from a G-rated kids’ adventure show to an R-rated horror film as the pig’s mouth got caught on a meat hook conveyor and it was sawn in half lengthwise. Awful.
Further exposition:
11-4-16 At a dinner consisting solely of fried foods, there was much laughter.
3-4-16 Vignette the first showed a wander through a birch-forest-winter-bound supine-bracket-shaped apartment/house.
The second contained Hillary Clinton, a young woman, a somehow “annoying” native man, and myself in the process of escaping from a high-ceilinged office building by breaking through the carpet-covered cement floor with a maul. I took my turn with the maul first before handing it off to Hillary.
Final in series were views of Christian-typography-decorated high-ceilinged office spaces, the kind which always seem to catch my patience at a bad time, and in which I stood for some time waiting for an appointment. After ample time spent taking in the sights, I was joined by a rather kick-ass suit-clad E A-like ally, and we then made our way into an office. Opposite us was a somewhat pugnacious white fellow in a cheap blue suit who seemed to boast the information that both my health insurance providers had yet to touch a $1 500 USD bill. He demanded that I pay it on the spot, at which demand E and me directed a few sharp words.
Further exposition: Aversive racism strikes again.
28-3-16 Once again, I was trying to get to rehearsal on time, possibly carrying a cloth-cased upright bass on my back, and after quite a few forgotten histrionics, I ended up hanging by my feet in an attempt to get through a door.
I was then running shirtless, still looking for L, in a 2-story observation deck / classroom.
And finally, in a new apartment of mom’s featuring a sloped floor, we were doing some baking with caramelized popcorn.
Further exposition:
27-3-16 Whew weirdness, and probably some uncomfortably human problems. Somehow-contiguous scenes began with a gaggle of black fellows, their laughing and talking faces seeming to hover in a cloud, who were eating my leftover snacks, leaning over me as they did so as I lay calmly on an armchair wing. They faded away as my focus and posture shifted toward a sunrise-lit city facing me through a window opposite the armchair. I then became aware of my place in a pattern of isolated seats between 2m-tall bookshelves, and that to my right, through a gap in the books, were L and C W. Changing scenes, other inhabitants and I of a commune under construction were fighting with animals of a birch forest for uncertain resources. I recall looking up over a little forest cliff, possibly yelling while chewing on something, as if to scare them away. Following a further scene-change, I was walking in the sun-lit completed commune, passing through someone else’s room looking for L.
Further exposition:
26-3-16 On a lovely patch-clouded late-spring day, I was walking east through a huge new UAF Community Garden with M and an unknown third party: my impression was that the entirety of the sledding hill and eastward toward the Patty Center (and possibly even the south-Butrovitch ski park field and corridor) had been converted to 1x3m raised garden beds, all being worked on at the time of our walk. We passed by the bed of a similarly busy T, who jokingly asked, “You really like gardening?”, and I unnecessarily responded in the emphatic affirmative. We then came to a new north-south high-road to the Patty Ice Rink which blocked our progress solidly over what had been the parking lot, and which closely resembled a giant white-sprayfoam-insulated pipe spattered liberally with mud. I nimbly scampered up the side with a big bag of dirt on my back, and rejoined the others heading indoors. Further scenes showed our destination, a hidden blue-lit experimental garden somewhere in a tower, or deep underground.
Further exposition:
25-3-16 I was driving the Saturn a lot, doing errands or something.
Further exposition:
24-3-16 In a vaguely West-Valley band room at the end of a class period, R S, who had apparently joined my section to little fuss, was being sparred with by an unfamiliar teacher while the class looked silently on. It felt terribly awkward and unprofessional. Fortunately the end-of-classes bell chimed at that point, and thereafter I was in what I feel enticed to believe is a formerly unrecorded recurring dream. As soon as the bell rang, I began singing “Chega de Saudade” softly to myself as I climbed the six flights of stairs to my third-floor locker. En route, I passed a girl who smiled broadly and blew a powerfully fresh puff of cinnamon into my face.
Later, in an unassociated scene, I down-spiraled along a view of a fictitious highway off-ramp in Nenana, terminating in a sandy stretch and a squat house. Inside were confused views of some Native Alaskan dudes working absentmindedly on things, and a garage whose floor came off upon reentry.
Further exposition:
22-3-16 In the middle of reading Wikipedia’s synopsis for the film “Teeth”, I came upon a short paragraph which read something like “She then went to snew vaw snaw vew sniw ve vir sne . . . .”, and which style might have continued for the rest of the article had I not awoken.
Further exposition:
18-3-16 These quasi-nightmarish vignettes seem somehow to be connected, perhaps as reversed-order memories. First in recollection, I was running out of places to escape from a special forces unit which was after me for some reason. We were all wandering around rather unprofessionally in something like an enclosed skatepark with a subterranean parking garage, and while only a few events of note occurred, my general sense was that the larger un-noted events progressed atypically, or rather, contrary to the stereotype of a mainstream Hollywood screenplay. At last, I found myself cornered behind a heavy half-open steel door somewhere in the parking garage. We were all then distracted by a white woman who suddenly appeared offering me a hug. Following a brief curtain, the second act showed scenes of an educational/research/museum facility to which my connection was uncertain. I ended up wandering down into a creepy disused basement, matter-of-factly furnished with its own slime pit just after the bottom stair, in the walls and slime of which dead-white human faces thereafter began to emerge. I then began an uncertain mildly fearful avoidance of new people/entities as they explored the facility, and later, one of them followed me to an underwater-access safe space for the “real” people.
Further exposition:
17-3-16 In what my room might look like if she and I swapped, M was sleeping in a dappled column of sunlight, arms folded under her head while I worked at a nearby desk.
Later, I was loitering uncertainly in vague summer weather outside a rear entrance to an internally-reconfigured Randy Smith Middle School. Evidence is still forthcoming as to whether I had been misbehaving. In any case, soon thereafter I beheld a teacher making their ominous way toward me through what seemed to be several sets of double doors, and having turned to flee discovered that I was completely immobilized. Something entices me here to say that I then “reloaded” the experience and successfully entered the building with E, discussing how it had been for “real” this time. Entering near the front desk apparently in the middle of a power outage, E seemed quickly to disappear as I was handed a diagnostic form and an unorthodox pen. I noted the comings and goings of many adults (including C D, who came to visit his girlfriend, who worked in the office, among giggles), as well as a hitherto-unexperienced behavior in dreaming of simply waiting in a space, before I was told I had “bad” handwriting and had my form thrown away. I then wandered over to a cadaver throat they had on display, the action of whose mandible could be manipulated directly via its exposed throat muscles.
Further exposition:
16-3-16 A tupperware container, dark-steel-blue, opaque, and sitting on one of its shorter 20x28cm sides, was singing about a recipe. It had a sort of fuzzy-electronic microtonal voice, and one might have supposed it was singing mockingly as a result, but it was in fact, quite earnestly, using its humble range to sing something like, “You put the stuff in the stuff, and then you put some other things in with the stuff, and then you mix the things, and then you add some more stuff.”
Further exposition: I love to wake up laughing.
14-3-16 Emma Watson and me were on a moving airplane while she showed and told me about an old nonfiction book in which she’d written notes, and which seemed to treat of her shared stories with a friend. After a shuffle of scenes, her friend materialized in a dingy hospital, grinning broadly, saying something to the effect of “Cancer is important”. He may have then put a tight arm around my shoulders and marched us along.
Following intermediate immemorable phantasms, I found myself working at a standing desk in my old room of 909 Ballaine with a young black man. My mom then wandered in and offered us what appeared to be a hot oiled spiral-shaped naan on a paper plate.
Further exposition:
13-3-16 Lying somewhere on my stomach, folding up a piece of perforated paper advertising, I heard mom say she’d found me a fortune-teller.
Further exposition:
12-3-16 Probably a heavy-handed assemblage of meaning, but, with my apologies, they’re pretty cool ideas. A disjointed but contiguous experience began in a very curious concert hall. While the orchestra seemed to be installed in a kind of pit and was inconspicuously if prettily illuminated, as if for an opera, there was no stage above it, and indeed, the room seemed only large enough for the pit and a 2x1m drawer-like cushioned place where a woman and me sat and lay, roughly at the level of the musicians’ heads. I had my head absentmindedly in her green-Carhartted lap in the almost-total darkness, and we occasionally chatted animatedly and with much laughter with the first-chair cellists, violists, and violinists. Suddenly, we then jumped out of the drawer and into a long thin racing watercraft, apparently controlled by the woman, who had landed on the seat in front of me, and we laughed excitedly as we shot oven a sinuous sunlit muddy river, bordered by tall reeds and grass.
Further exposition:
10-3-16 Halfway up a single-flight three-floor stairwell in a four- or five-story log school, I chatted energetically with E B, who was wearing a bright red overcoat. Apparently at her suggestion, I then carried her slowly and carefully down to the ground floor.
Further exposition:
8-3-16 Apparently freaking out a bit about having forgotten to forewarn L that I’d be flying to see her the next day, I enjoyed corn flakes and cow milk through a straw on my wandering way through a new apartment of mom’s.
Further exposition:
3-3-16 Climbing up through a colossal floating porous nest, seemingly formed of inter-twisting roots and rock and immediately comparable to the floating islands of James Cameron’s “Avatar”, I was trying to instigate a fight between the stern-voiced unseen amorphous denizens of the nest and some similarly unknown invading faction. Verdict uncertain.
Further exposition:
2-3-16 First in occurrence was a view of a set, in the middle of a smallish unassuming warehouse, from a horror film I somehow understood to be called “Emma” (sharing most of its themes with the real film “Under the Skin”, apparently). During a long cut in filming, I observed a slowly-revolving unpainted plaster head, the back of which had a hand-like plaster extraterrestrial emerging from it.
As a sort of interlude, I found myself listening to “Live at Electric Lady Studios” versions of tracks from “Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit”.
Later, in a large oddly-familiar lonely-seeming 17th-century-style-apartment-enclosed field of wild waist-high dead grass, under a nevertheless friendly light-grey sky, E H (who seemed to shift identities with E B) was playfully running with a flock of ravens who swooped in low circles over her head as she ran. Approaching one of the disparate corners formed by the surrounding apartments as I and a couple of her female friends made our way to her, the “lead” raven then made a perch of her shoulder, and she saluted it affectionately. E’s friends then began a photoshoot, and I seemed to have trouble avoiding getting caught in the shots.
Further exposition:
1-3-16 A and me were driving into a mid-fall sunset, passing the end of Kittiwake on Ballaine, our destination uncertain.
In another sequence, in just another multi-thousand-level shopping center, I rode a 25º-escalator down a floor, admiring the way the rows of orbs on or in the wall seemed to descend with me. Later, in a garden-patio somewhere on the outside of the building, I unhurriedly made my way over to what looked like an automated teller machine. In the process of withdrawing $20, I had something like a psychoverbal/telepathic exchange with a scammer who wanted $5, and while deciding I’d give them $10, I realized they had a poorly-concealed automatic rifle.
Further exposition:
21-2-16 Apparently on some kind of mission, I was making improbably long jumps between perches in trees near houses along Ballaine Hill. I would then jump down and very solemnly crawl in to investigate short series of window-tunnels, which contained menageries of cobwebs, leaf litter, and dead and hibernating insects. Although it seemed to be mid-spring in the late-light hours, the 5:1 cerulean:chartreuse sunset was in the southeast.
Further exposition:
13-2-16 Dumb semi-nightmares. The first scene showed the I-T-P-D-A crew being felled mysteriously as I walked through my dad’s sun-lit house. The second showed myself, bent backwards by J M who was interrogating me as he held me by the collar, under late-light cloudy autumnal skies on a vast herd-cropped plain, outside of a massive squat arcology inside of which a large crimescene investigation was underway.
Further exposition:
12-2-16 Having gotten into some kind of trouble, I went running (preternaturally fast: I think i had something attached to my feet) through a massive West Valley, flanked by mom and C, in search of wherever I was supposed to go. Finding the new nap room complete with a snoozing S V, I was then directed to go to the “student hallway”, which I somehow understood to be the music wing.
Further exposition:
11-2-16 The Davis Concert Hall was at a 20º downstage tilt and I was late to rehearsal. I E had apparently joined my section with other more familiar percussionists, and he sat on the floor at the doorway of our storage room, which now opened directly onto upstage right.
Further exposition:
8-2-16 In a West Valley band room of redistributed proportions, I was apparently teaching music theory to some elementary school kids, getting frustrated at something as I paced the elongated back hallway.
Further exposition:
7-2-16 Halfway up-house in something like a color-reversed Salisbury Theatre, I was practicing a tympani excerpt displayed on a paper-thin screen, then trying to change the format back to normal from one in which the pitches were represented by colored squares, and for which I apparently lacked the skill of literacy. I then exited the theatre via a door on house right and found myself in a square section of grocery store.
Further exposition:
6-2-16 I had a dope train ride, through many fantastic environments above and below ground (and perhaps underwater too), in a classy 1890s-style dining car the size of dad’s house. At one point I was pleasantly surprised to be joined by A A, who asked me about my hands, which I’d folded on the table to the right of my plate and crystal wine glass. We both apparently sidestepped the question by discussing other matters.
Further exposition:
5-2-16 I interrupted what might have become a nightmare, yay. In what seemed to be a familiar environment of uniformly ascending hills, lightly treed with something like mesquite, I was making improbably large and lazy jumps downhill in search of, well, giant floating spinning gold coins of video-game stereotype. My final jump was onto one of two unremarkable benches, the other sat by a dark-haired black-clad woman with a Bailey’s-esque bottle held on her crossed knees, in an otherwise untouched natural circular area formed by the hills. Turning to her as I settled, I heard her say something like “I try not to drink too much, or I might . . . .”, and before I knew what happening, she had set her bottle down, half-risen from her seat, and bared her new impossibly long bloody teeth at me in a suddenly slit-red-eyed grin.
I closed my in-dream eyes, said, simply, “No”, opened my real ones for a moment, closed them, and reopened my in-dream eyes to see the woman regaining her seat and human countenance.
Further exposition: Sexist bastard.
31-1-16 Having docked at a rather homely space station, I bid farewell to its departing occupant, a friend, who was actually under covert surveillance and who frantically ushered me up a boarding ladder. Finding myself in the main living area, I then found a hiding place in a sort of reading vestibule, sadly lacking cushions. A wide, jolly, caricature of a woman found me soon thereafter.
Further exposition:
28-1-16 Back in Germany, I spent quite some time wandering around in T's reconfigured inner-city dormitory looking for her. I ended up in a large empty room in which the other people in it may have been looking for me, and while not exactly trying to avoid them, I ended up stacking textbooks in a small circular alcove until someone who may have been R P came up and said “I found you!". Loosely connecting the alcove with the sudden idea I got next was the fact that it looked like a rather good place to put a mannequin, or in this case, my uncertainly-sexed self wearing my idea. In the next noncontextualized scene, my idea was revealed to be a rather extravagant dress, its base layer being a simple white strapless short-skirted dress, modest and form-fitting, to which the complicated outer layer was mounted. The outer layer consisted of smooth-edged 3x5cm rectangles of .8cm lath, painted red, green, yellow, and orange at a 6:2:1:1 ratio, arranged snugly in horizontal rings around the inner dress at 4cm intervals, and posable by red connective string in exactly the same way as horizontal window shades. Posed down, I resembled something like a rattling red dragon: posed up, one could see my inner dress and the spiky rows of lath waver as I danced.
Further exposition:
27-1-16 In a two-story ground-floor open space belonging to actors, acrobats, or circus performers, a young woman with a double-sized bottle of Martinelli's cherry sparkling cider was giving me instructions and a goodbye in French, and I replied in kind. I then turned around and, with T, sat on I and offered him consolations and books read aloud.
Further exposition:
23-1-16 Finally a memorable one, if short. Dad and me were arguing tiredly over his gift to me of several liters of Coca-Cola. This may have been preceded by scenes of an elementary school.
Further exposition:
15-1-16 The memorable “free fiction” of the night consisted of a somehow-dire nighttime run through a fall-hued mixed-species forest, on the other side or in the middle of which was our uncertain goal. After deciding that an M1 Abrams tank would be too obtrusive an accomplice, our run was quickly overlaid with scenes of our prior plan-laying. Q and A and several others seemed to be involved, and we may have had heavy automatic weapons. In any case, I was self-doubtfully trying to use the pythagorean theorem to estimate the distance we needed to travel through the forest.
In a brief outtro, I then wandered through a huge south-facing apartment built into the side of a hill. I found mom and many kilos of baking ingredients in a kitchen area.
Further exposition:
2-1-16 In a severe-looking board room peopled by businessfolk of varying descriptions, I, Chell, was testifying with some emotion about the events of Portal 2. Specifically, and to their amazement and my distress, I described in sickening detail my numerous experiences with death and revival, rather more vividly than was shown in E-rated gameplay.
Further exposition:
"At once hysterical and poignant, Bergman's unabashed revelations of his interior world will triple your working vocabulary and solder new connections between your brain's hemispheres. A must-read this holiday season!" -- Booklist
ReplyDeleteWell that's very kind of you, dear quasi-stranger, and wittily humorous meanwhile. I hope to be writing rather more consequentially as soon as my copious free time shows up (it's very tardy), and will do my best to keep you in-looped when it does.
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