Tag: Dreams

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)

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.

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.

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”

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.

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.

Oct. 7th, 3:05 AM (a filmic dream)

Men in uniform appear to be making a fake video/film showing someone blowing up. The explosion is real, and the person who dies is not part of the fascist conspiracy.

The scene changes to reveal a small boy looking at public mailings. The brochures and fliers have no text or photos and are just white paper. “It must mean something,” he says, taking them and throwing them on a shiny floor. One of the explosion conspirators picks up a few. He and the boy notice each other, so feeling exposed, the conspirator exits towards the camera. As fills in the camera frame, everything goes white.

Camera zooms out of a white screen and reveals an extreme close up of a man in a suit with no face. He has a white hole there instead. As the camera continues to pull away, the figure stands in the middle of a city street. Another uniformed man runs just in front of the camera, looking behind him as he shoots a cross-bow arrow at the blank-faced man. The arrow disappears in to the white emptiness of his face, so the soldier quickly reloads his crossbow for another try. As the blank-faced man begins to run towards the soldier, the second arrow launches. The blank-faced man runs faster, putting both his hands in together in front of him, and the arrow pierces his hands. Sparks fly in a close up shot of the man’s pierced hands.

A pencil flies away from the camera, revealing Tom Cruise in uniform, standing on a decorated stage in front of a huge, fascist-looking cross symbol. The uniformed man siting in the front row was the main conspirator in the explosion propaganda film. Other faces in the crowd seem familiar.

I am backstage at a Phish concert, which has the stage set up at the top of a ski resort mountain. A large, Atlas-like statue stands about 30 feet above the main stage, with the figure’s arms holding a smaller stage above its head. Trey, Mike, and Page, along with a frightened Stephen Colbert, ascend the platform above Atlas’ head. Four other people are on the stage, and the band and Colbert climb on top of one of them and, in a row, begin to do choreographed movements. As they move, Colbert does not lean over the edges like the others do. He’s too scared. Of the Phish members, Trey has the most courage, looking precarious at times as he reaches over the person he’s on top of and over the edge of the small stage.

They end their movements and then grab notched rope that let’s them descend beyond the stage-level and all the way down to the bottom of the mountain where the ski lodge sits. As they make their Batman-like exit, the audience roars in hilarious approval.

The scene shifts and I am back in time just before the show starts. Still backstage, but at the lodge-level of the mountain, I see an old hippie looking a bit lost. He holds a piece of paper and shuffles up to a door that opens to a stairwell leading up to the stage-level. He mumbles something about the audition being fake, and then opens the door and climbs the stairs.

I walk through a dark, dingy nightclub somewhere in New Orleans. Bad dixieland plays as I find myself quite sober at the exit, trying to avoid tipping the players. I have to step on a series of small sets of squares to get out of the club. and into the parking lot. I see someone from my Alma Mater tailgating in the lot, which makes me want to call J. B. I haven’t spoken to her in years, so we chat and decide to have lunch in NOLA. Making a lunch date leaves me hungry, so I walk over to a shopping center in hopes of finding food. I find a store full of Star Wars toys instead, and end up standing with two people and having a drink with them. The woman makes me feel uneasy, and when I nervously look at her from out of the corner of my eye, she blinks, revealing a third eye. She grins as the third eye, with cat-like slit and off-white color, stares through me.

I wake up groggy and disoriented, not knowing where I am. My vision blurred, and fear hitting me, I start making up jazz scatting to try to ground. I hum fun melodies, not sure if I am singing in my mind or out loud in the now-focusing surroundings. I stand up and try to look around, staggering like a drunk, and begin to see that I am in an empty floor of an office building. Cubicles stand silent in the semi-darkness, and I finally see things clearly. I begin to walk around, picking up a plastic cup and pretending that it is a Star Wars light saber. Pretending that I am Darth Vader, I pretend battle through the office and come to a glassed wall with a door. A security guard exits the door towards me.

“Luke, give in to the Dark Side and we will rule the Empire… together!” I say to the guard.

Laughing, he says “here’s the latest copy of Wizards. You might enjoy it,” and he throws the magazine on the desk in front of me.

Another guard walks towards us from the direction I had walked. The two of them discuss a woman who is not doing too well in another part of this reality.

“Where am I?” I ask. They don’t answer.

“Why am I here?” I ask. “You assaulted a woman with a cup,” the friendly guard tells me.

“I want to leave here,” I tell them.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he replies.

“Can I at least get something to eat? I’m hungry.”

“Yeah. I’ll get you something,” the friendly guard says.

…

I am wide awake in this present reality, with the woman’s third eye haunting me as I try to go back to bed. (This dream woke me at 3:55am; an unusual time for me to dream.)

An accident has caused a young man’s forehead to cave in. It collapsed like a paper bag when he stood up too fast in the woods and hit his head on a woman’s musical instrument case. Other than looking freakishly odd, he seemed fine after the incident. Smitten over the man, a woman showed her desire by going to the Monument, a hill that their community deems sacred, and stripping it of human-made structures. She wonders what the Blue Bottle would say about that, as she feels a strong urge to restore the Monument to a pre-human condition.

After the man’s cave-in incident, friends are strangely moved by his look, so they put a stocking cap on his head to hide the huge dent in his forehead. They all walk through the woods to attend an odd tennis match, and the man stays in the trees as his friends play below. His hat comes off, and while no one is surprised at his looks, he becomes the focus of everyone’s attention. A woman asks him if he has seen the Blue Bottle about his condition, and he says “No.”

The story pauses, and the scene changes to my driving a car in my small hometown. The roads are oddly marked (like I am in a future version of the town) so I miss a left turn. I drive on and make a dangerous u-turn, and eventually arrive to a future/alt version of my father’s business. In the shadowy rooms, I hear music, and go over to turn it off. It is a collapsible frame with speakers, wires, and buttons. The off switch doesn’t turn it off, but another janky switch does.

The man with the crushed forehead finds himself on the Memorial mound. Something drives him to strip away the human additions to the area. While he pulls a large piece of plastic out from under the duft of the trees, a woman shows up. “Have you visited the Blue Bottle yet?” she asks. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?! No.” “Well, I happen to be his house mate and we live just down the trail over there. Do you want to meet him?” “Sure,” the man answers.

While walking to the house, the man asks the woman why he is called the Blue Bottle. “Have you ever tried heroin?” she replies. “Uh, no,” he responds. “Well, it he’s called the Blue Bottle because of that.”

They approach the house, which bustles with activity. They walk through rooms of people preparing things for a feast and ritual, eventually leaving the main house through another door and into a courtyard. A man sits at a table and welcomes them with a smile. He asks the man with the caved-in forehead to sit.

While chatting, the Blue Bottle places a large round piece of leathery-looking bread on the table. He tells the man that he needs to eat the bread, so the man with the caved forehead picks it up. Parts of the loaf flak away, so the man breaks off the thin parts and pushes them into a small pile on the table. A bearded man walks up to the table, saying nothing, grabs a handful of the flakes, and eats them. He walks away, and the Blue Bottle replies “now that it looks like a buffalo, you should eat it.”

The man with the caved forehead breaks off a piece of the bread, laughs, and exclaims “now it’s shaped like a bicycle saddle!” He eats the piece, and then is shown to another outlaying building. He walks through a room that holds a long row of industrial stoves and ovens. A crowd of people work the ovens, while he walks by and exits out a screened-in door.

He exits out into a large field full of people preparing and congregating around bonfires. He looks back at the screened-in door and sees a sousaphone player exiting into the field with other brass band members. That must be the only entrance into this field the man with the caved-in forehead muses.

Whatever the loaf of bread is, the man does not feel any different. He finds himself by a fire, using his depressed cranium to make noises that mimic prehistoric animals. The crowd stops and listens to his sounds and slowly begin to grow weary of these realistic noises. Somewhere deep in their ancient homo sapien brains, a fear and flight trigger switches on. They’ve had enough of these scary sounds, which make them feel hunted.

Just a fragment remembered: A pain hits the skin just near the lower left side of my mouth. Feels like a pimple, with the sharp pains that nerves release when one is forming. I put my left hand to the spot near my mouth and slightly pinch it. Yes, probably a pimple, but what is the deal with these course hairs? Several of them are coming out of the area and it hurts to pull on them.

I then feel a clenching in my throat, like I’m coughing up something that I didn’t swallow correctly. Suddenly, I am coughing up a foreign object, and it appears to NOT want to exit out of my mouth. As I retch, a pointed tip exits through the “pimple” in the side of my mouth. I continue to evacuate the object and a full-length, sharpened, yellow No. 2 pencil comes out of the wound! After it comes out, I feel relief and happiness. I wake from this dream (there was more before the “pimple”) slightly laughing at the image. What a great start for a Thursday.

A prominent female journalist has died. Instead of going to the funeral, I stay outside with J. and help her bake cookies. A circus troupe pulls up and begins a show, so I get distracted with the baking and watch the performance. J. gets upset and cries. An A/V tech person checks on us and wants us to tune in to the journalist’s funeral. “It’s at 12,” he says. The circus troupe perform acrobatics on a prop that looks like a tree. I speak to a woman about to go on with the tree, but she ends up doing a great trick: standing sideways and then doing a back flip off a bench onto the ground. The troupe uses an effect that involves pepper spray, so the audience ends up taking their jackets off. I am not effected.
——-
Earlier, I dreamed that I was at a larger circus with a troupe performing on a suspended platform. One of the performers wanted to take me home with her. I also guessed their finale correctly, chalking it up to my carny experience.
——-
I also dreamed a fragment of an old photo of me walking in a funeral. I have bushy sideburns and a big hoop ring in my right earlobe. I am part of an important funeral procession.