Dreams: Octopus, Roadtrip, Shadows

A monster lurks in a building. Only later the monster turns out to be an octopus. Confused, it refuses to come through the door and hides under furniture instead. In the second dream, babies (or siblings) are discovered hiding with the octopus.

………

On a road-trip, in the back of a station wagon and trying to sleep. Catch glimpses of cityscapes, foggy landscapes, and so decide to get up and crawl into the passenger seat. We enter north, to brown overcast skies. The driver aggressively navigates traffic, almost driving us off a kudzu-covered embankment.

……….

I walk with a group around the edge of a wooded area. We feel a strong force. Is it held in the larger box-like structure? The cables stretched through the trees. We walk into a theater and go on stage. Feeling the force we begin to move, casting our bodies’ shadows on a large screen.

May 13, 2011

2002 Dream: A Passenger’s Story

Two men, one dark-skinned and the other white, drive through the rain in a light-weight Toyota truck. They have already broken down once, and the passenger worries that it’ll happen again in the rain. The truck approaches a bridge without railing. Entering the structure, they hit a patch of standing water. The truck lurches left then swings right, barely reaching the road on the other side. It then spins around and slides into a field. A back corner of the truck crunches into an embankment. The passengers are lucky; no one is hurt.

While trying to pull the truck out of the muddy bank, the passenger finds a cold, dark spot in the forest. Spirits of brown-skinned natives exist in this spot. The passenger also sees three blonde-haired children with the spirits. One of the children approaches the passenger (who is light-skinned).

“You’re afraid of us. You haven’t crossed the property line.”

A native spirit sits down among the children and kisses the outspoken child with an open mouth. The truck passenger crosses the line and embraces the children.

…..

The truck passenger rides a horse on a small road that goes along a marsh at the edge of a forest. He feels the same dark, cold space, so dismounts and walks into the woods. He sees a small house, approaches it and goes inside. Inside, the truck passenger finds the children, the spirit that kissed one of them, a large dark man, and my actual friend M.

The spirit pulls out a gun, exclaims that he is real, and leaves the house. The large dark man gets a phone call and says he has to go back to jail. M. stands at the end of a table and takes his pants off. The truck passenger leaves the house and walks into the forest.

He walks by a hollow tree and the spirit is in there with the gun. The passenger goes back into the house, grabs a gun, and hides behind a bar counter. The spirit uses the large dark man as cover and approaches the house. The passenger peeks around the counter, sees the large man, and then wishes that he’d placed mirrors on both sides of him.

11/23/2002

DREAM: Are You Afraid?

A one-story Dutch hotel sits in the countryside and is a popular place to stay. I check in and have some problems finding my room. The hallways seem to wind and turn like they would on a cruise ship. Cup-holders line the walls in the hall and they have smoothy drinks in them. The drinks are either smart drinks that enhance drug trips or they have drugs mixed in them.

Walking down the hall, I meet a couple who live in the hotel. They’re friendly. The man cracks open a smoothy, puts something in it, and gives it to me. I leave them, put the drink in a holder on the wall, and open a door into a dark room. I stick my head through the doorway and it disappears completely. I appear in a room where fleshy, stringy stuff hangs all over the place. A pretty woman in a blue bikini walks towards me from the opposite side of the room.

“Are you afraid?” she asks.
“No,” I reply.
I disappear and reappear outside the hotel on the lawn. I go back inside, find my smoothy and bags and leave the hotel.

Three people, two men and one woman, have just checked into the place. They found a large amount of money in their room and are trying to figure out how to deal with it. The woman goes to the same room I walked into and opens the door. She walks in and disappears.

Days pass until the men find the woman on a door stoop in front of the hotel. She looks horrible and tells them that she wandered in the woods, unable to eat for 8 days. She finally kept some food down and made it back to the door stoop.

They pull their new truck up to load their things and get the hell out of there. A policeman arrives. They take him into their room and explain the pile of cash. They then coax the cop to check out the strange room. He sticks his head into the dark room and it disappears. Then his body vanishes.

The cop sees stringy flesh all over the room as the beautiful woman appears, walking down the wall opposite the policeman.
“Are you afraid?”
“Yes,” he answers.

She suddenly appears next to him, blurs and quivers like TV static and gets sucked into the policeman’s mouth. Before he can react, he blurs and flickers. His stomach expands and appears to explode.

The woman suddenly stands beside him again, but she is ragged and stringy; distorted and not whole. She walks towards the cop and puts her huge, exaggerated lips close to his. He becomes ragged and stringy and his lips protrude towards hers. He wants to scream but he cannot.

The two men and woman drive away.

…. Dec. 3, 2002

Dream: Zombie Magician (Nov. 2002)

I am a powerful wizard in a world that is similar to this one, yet full of magic and witchcraft. I have become a zombie, or perhaps a partial zombie. I can tell because my irises have turned white and my pupils are shaped like a cat’s pupils. I have pale skin and I am eating someone’s brains.

Startled from this dream within a dream, I wake up… chewing on a severed hand. Disoriented, I look around my room. It is large and ornate, so I must be a successful wizard. I realize that I am not at my house but am a guest at a friend’s mansion. I help them prepare for a party, and a powerful witch stops by. She seems startled when we meet on the porch. “Maybe it is my eyes,” I wonder.

I nonchalantly put my hands to my face. I am holding something. Looking down, I see the severed hand from my dream!

I get sent on a party errand. After walking past dark pools and hot tubs, I head down a dirt road. A person stops me and tells me “I know a way to cure your zombie-ism.” He unfolds a large piece of newspaper. One side has text and graphics laid out like a movie poster.

The poster has a large photo of a zombie’s head. While looking at it, waiting for the cure, another passerby says “I can cure your zombieness.” He takes out a pen and colors in the pupils and iris of the zombie in the poster. He and his buddies laugh at this.

The man holding the large piece of paper flips it over. The other side shows voodoo and shamanistic items with dotted lines around them (so they can be cut out). I see a necklace, ankle rattles, wrist rattles, etc. They are supposed to be worn by a human. Text for spells and directions for usage surrounds all the items on the page.

………….

Another flash of the dream shows me standing in the mansion next to my friend. I am needed for something, so I climb out a window and over a fence to go to another house.

Recorded: 11/25/2002 Whittier, CA

Dream: A Domestic Zombie

We live in a world where the government ruthlessly hunts and kills zombies. Helicopters fly over, searching for them with powerful lights and shooting them up with huge guns. One male zombie has found an empty part of a group apartment to hide in. He stays in part of the apartment that is behind the fridge and separated by large pieces of plywood. At one point, during a party, the plywood falls over. The zombie gets up and adjusts it into its right position.

He eventually befriends some of the men that live in the apartment. He seems to think on a child-like level, and does not appear to be hungry for brains. They offer him human food, which he takes. When the government discovers this zombie, and go after him, he is protected by the humans. Not human, yet not a pet either, the zombie relies on the humans for protection and safety.

They wonder if he might be a new evolutionary species of zombie. One that can live among humans in peace.

Recurring Dream

Two young brothers live on a ship with their distant parents (the parents never physically appear in the dream). Much of the dream concerns the oldest boy’s issues with reality. Are he and his brother being haunted by a girl and a boy on the ship? Or are they alive? The older brother must look at his sanity as he has to get more violent with the ghosts. First, he throws the girl off the ship without any reaction from his parents. Then he throws large monkey wrenches at the boy ghost, knocking him in the head and forcing him overboard. The younger brother must deal with the horror of what looks like death/murder of their tormentors. During this, the parents seem like selfish voices concerned with not being interrupted from their sleep or eating. The final scene shows the two boys trying to crack on glow sticks they found in a box. “They’ve all expired,” one brother says. They then try to plug in a string of pink “Christmas” lights, but they don’t work either. The boys walk over to a stairwell, with bannisters that have small, hydraulic pumps, and nod to what sounds like a clunking washing machine. The sound comes up from the deck below them.

Dream: Man on an Island

Far below the clouds, a kingdom rolls along the hils of a distant land. From a bird’s eye, we descend into the kingdom and see a large walled castle. This isn’t a typical castle, for most of its inside area is covered with an enchanted lake. Flying closer, a grey dot appears in the center of the water. Closer still, the dot turns into a piece of land large enough for an adult human to recline and sleep on the hard surface. And on that island, a young man awakens.

He has been dreaming of another place where he has a bed and parents who love him. Here on the island, he has no food and no shade. In the sun’s glare, he looks across the impassable pool and sees the familiar patch of dirt that stands before a large, armored gate. The gate suddenly swings open. Two leering guards half-drag a beautiful lass. She tries to hide her fear of the men, but he can see it in her deep green eyes all the way on his island. An older man walks behind them, slouched and frowning. The guards drag the lovely woman to the edge of the water and then force her down on her knees.

“Tell me the secret!” the sniveling man yells out into the open expanse of the castle lake. On the small island, the young man scrunches his face and yells back “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Don’t tell them! Please don’t tell them!” the woman shouts. A guard grabs her wavy brown hair and jerks her back. She screams.

“Please don’t hurt her!” he pleads.

“Then you’ll have to tell me the secret!” the old man snorts.

“I don’t know any secrets worth telling!”

The guards drag the screaming woman back towards the doors. The slumped man follows.

“Tomorrow you tell me or she’ll really start hurting!”

The gates slam.

Night falls the prisoner has a dream. Instead of the city by the ocean, he dreams that he is flying. What an exhilarating experience. The lake drifts away as he swoops through clouds and seems to dive into the starlight. But he hears crying, so flies back down towards the castle where the beautiful woman is held. The crying seems to be coming from a tall tower, so the man comes to the only window that opens into a small, dark room.

“Hello?” he asks.

“Oh, you found me! Now you can remember. You must remember, so that you can save me and save yourself. Remember the secret!”

He looks into the window and sees the lovely woman, her face wet with tears of sorrow and now joy. He then looks down at the island and sees a serpent-like dragon curled up where he should be sleeping.

With a crack of wakefulness, the man comes out of his dream and finds himself back on the island. Instead of feeling hopeless, he feels a sense of possibility. He looks around and then finds himself about ten feet above the island! He’s flying. Without hesitation, the dragon darts straight to the tower. She awaits him with smiles and laughter.

“I knew you’d remember,” she says as she hugs his feathery face. She climbs on his back and pats his neck.

“Time to leave the miserable place.”

(a dream I had in the early 1990s)

Dream: Skin on His Face

A murderer has somehow walked past CCTV cameras and tight security to leave an enclosed compound. It appears that he has taken someone’s skin, taken it off their face, and put it over his own to hide his identity. He escaped because he wasn’t recognized. I go out to an area on the grounds that contain a few pieces of rotting, weedy office furniture. A desk is crooked so I prop up a leg with a rock to make it more stable. I notice a cat walking by so, remembering my childhood cat followings, decide to see where it goes. I follow it to an opening in the perimeter’s security fence! Holes appear everywhere, opening into beautiful vistas of flowing creeks and rolling hills. I follow the cat and walk by people in rags, living on the edge of the fence. Barely getting by it seems. I begin to see small pieces of paper and recall that the murderer had similar pieces of paper in his hands in the CCTV video. Maybe he just dumped these thinking that no one in their right mind would pass through the perimeter after him. I go back to my grown over furniture and dig out some rusty paperclips to pick up the paper and not spoil the evidence with my fingerprints. Back in the building, others confirm that these items belonged to the killer. They have his prints and know who he is. Another person holds one of the pieces and traces out the patterns that adorn it. As he cuts them out I realize that this is the template for the killers skin-parts. Each shape kind of fits on parts of the face. I am told that the killer had a few bloody places on his face in the video because the skin dried too fast and wasn’t on correctly. To take it off and re-apply, the murderer tore some of his own skin in the process.

Dreams: Blades and Bodies

Nov. 22 Dream

I am at Burning Man, standing by a table full of arguing Asian men. They all sit on chairs made from sharp blades. As their argument becomes more intense, I go find a Ranger and tell him that I am afraid that they will start throwing knives at each other. The Ranger calms down the fight and then takes me to a party. He hoists me up above the crowd so that I can crowd surf. I am having a great time up there! First time I have ever crowd surfed.

Nov. 23 Dream

Someone is killing people in a village just outside a deep-wooded area. I am visiting the village after a long hike and I see systematic holes cut into a wall. The investigators allow me to look into some of the holes and I see what appears to be people’s items. They are set up like shrines. A serial killer has been killing people and creating these hidden collections of their things. They think that the killer might be a rich, well-off judge who lives in the area.

Oct 23rd Dream :: A Flooded Warehouse

My old friend P.H. is moving out of a warehouse space, so I have accepted his offer to move in. Rent is cheap and a screen and print shop runs presses during the daytime in the bay next to mine. M.C. arrives in town and is looking for places to rent for work purposes. P. says goodbye and the day slowly turns into a mess of chaos.

A big downpour of rain begins as I walk over to the print shop. A man there starts telling me a story about buying a press he cannot afford for $3,000 and how his wife did not approve. He seems to be a printing press nerd who hopes to make money off of his hobby. I walk over to a screen print press and an employee wants me to approve the screens he’s burned and the test prints for a college-branded towel. I tell him he might be confusing me for someone else and he then shows me a burned screen with dozens of tiny images on it. We discuss the techniques for printing with that screen. I make a note to call P. to tell him that he might need to approve those screens and then walk back to my bay.

Continue reading “Oct 23rd Dream :: A Flooded Warehouse”

Oct. 9th Dream :: Neal, Jack, and the Head

I have dreamed about the Head freak before. This person is just a head with two withered feet. He usually ends up falling over after being delicately placed somewhere. And he sticks his tongue out, trying to push up off the floor to get upright again. In this dream, a woman running a day-care center takes care of the Head. She happens to be Jack Kerouac’s mother, living in North Carolina. She has to leave work, so she asks Jack to watch the Head while she’s gone.

Good ole’ Neal Cassidy shows up in a stolen car and wants Jack to drive to NYC with him. Jack calls his Mom to tell her and she says that he isn’t supposed to leave North Carolina. He decides to go anyway, and absent-mindedly puts the Head in the back window of another car before he goes.

As Neal and Jack drive off, Jack gets anxious about Neal’s stolen car. Then Jack remembers that he left the Head in the other car. “We gotta turn around Neal! ’cause if the Head dies, they’ll arrest my mom for murder!” Neal reluctantly turns around just before they cross a bridge into the woods. He assures Jack that they’ll take care of the Head.

Oct 9th Dream :: Mikvah Mitzvah

I stand with a small crowd inside a beautiful new mikvah (Jewish ritual bath). It looks like the interior of a mosque: tall ceilings with blue and white tiles, Hebrew calligraphy wraps around the upper parts of the walls, and floral patterns shine brightly off of the tile relief. The angles of the space appear to be shaped like a Star of David (also the Hindu symbol of the heart chakra). Eddie B. stands before us, singing a beautiful Hebrew prayer. He appears to be very old, as indicated by a droopy left lower lip. But, excited while singing the prayer, he moves lightly as his words echo through the lofted heights.