The book of mars

dreamBirthday Party

I’m in the car with Pehry. He’s driving pretty recklessly with someone else in the front seat telling him to slow down. We take a sharp turn into my dad’s auto shop. The parking lot is full of tiny cars for children but exact versions of their bigger counterparts. I keep saying I want one, and then remember that I “have” one, a tiny tan minivan. It’s parked out back.

We get out and go into my dad’s shop. It’s a party inside; it’s my birthday! My family and friends are all inside. No one pays too much attention to me, but in my dream world this isn’t strange and I am content just walking around looking at the things in the shop.

I walk over to my Nana who is sitting around a turntable. There are old nursery rhyme records all stacked on it. I go through it and each one is colored and decorated with story elements: one is green with a frog, one is red with a pony, one is blue with a bear, etc.

My mom comes over to me and gives me a little ticket. It says “dunk house” and I interpret this as a ticket for me to go into one of those dunk booths at the fair. I quickly give it back to her, and she explains that my Nana is in the dunk house at the fair this year and with this ticket I can dunk her no matter if I hit the target or not.

Everyone keeps doing their thing at this mini-party and Autumn comes in from somewhere. She has her school bag, and I “know” that the door behind me connects to a few classrooms. Because she’s really big, everyone gets nervous and kind of moves towards the middle of the room to make room for her (she’s not THAT big).

She comes over to me and talks about missing a certain project that she’ll have to re-do.

“What? No, that project was that we had to listen to records in class. Why would you have to do that out of school? It’s so easy and dumb,” I say. She has her usual bad attitude and just shrugs her shoulders and says mean shit about everyone around us.
Someone outside is driving a specially-made car.

“Isn’t that the car Marty made that runs off blood instead of gasoline?” I say.

“Yeah I know about Marty,” Autumn retorts as if it’s “cool” to know Marty and she wanted to make sure I knew that she knew about him. We talk about how the problem with the car is that the blood soaks through the seats and stuff so your clothes get bloody and you can’t keep papers on the seats and stuff like that.

Fragment

I walk into a really small classroom. There’s a substitute teacher (who is an actual teacher at a school I went to) and a chocolate cake sitting on the only table in the room.

“Fuck yeah!” I say as I come in and sit down. The kids behind me are excited too: cake and a substitute. I have déjà vu (or perhaps I dreamed this before, or perhaps a dream memory) that I had been to this class and had cake before.

I get a little embarrassed because I don’t know how to sit without being too close to anyone. Kate (a…friend of mine) is here. We all take big slices of cake and talk about dumb things.

We have a project to do in class: listen to a few certain records. The teacher changes from the substitute to my old U.S. History teacher.

Fragment

Jack, Heather and I are looking through a big dumpster of metal scraps, looking for good pieces to put into a trash compactor. We are having a lot of fun doing this.

Fragments of Fragments

• A room made of zebra print. Not painted over or wallpapered, but the structure is the patterns of zebras.
• I check a letter written to Morpheus, looking for a response. I go through sheet after sheet, looking for markings.
• I go downstairs and make myself toast.

Shared Dreaming

Halloween Party

Heather, Tyler and I live in my old house. It’s early morning, like three a.m. or so. Tyler and Heather decide to go outside for a walk and a little adventure. I am getting some layers on because it’s cold out but they’re already out the door. I yell at them and they don’t stop, so I have to run up to them to catch them.

We are walking around and it seems to be Halloween. There are kids everywhere and a stop sign has a plastic decorative ghost-stop sign decal taped over it. I want to make the O of it into an eyeball, so I take a permanent marker out of my pocket and “grow” tall enough to vandalize it quickly. I can’t “ungrow” so I’m tall for a long time. (Heather dreamed that there was a person that was very tall all throughout her dream).

We discuss which way to go and we think about downtown which in my dream-mind’s eye looked how it does when I dream of it, as if the area is semi-static on the dream plane.

There is no transition that I remember, though both of these fragments "feel" as if they are part of the same dream.

I am dumpster diving behind Tyler’s apartment with Marilyn Manson as a teenager. We go through one of the back doors of the restaurants that line the brick wall of dumpsters. On the other side is a big house party. I feel completely lost among Marilyn Manson fans and gothic kids. I walk around the place and the living room is Heather’s living room.

Heather is laying on her couch taking up two spaces; Adam is sitting on the third space. I go over and lay on Heather, so relieved to have her here when I thought I was alone. She gets red and starts getting up, pushing me off of her. She’s embarrassed to be with me in front of Adam.

I’m sick of that feeling so I walk into the kitchen and start eating cupcakes. Dylan, my ex-boyfriend is at the party. I decide to take revenge on Heather by telling him we can go out again. He is ecstatic, to a point where I am annoyed. It’s not worth it. The whole time I am at the party, he’s trying to say things to me to make me really love him again.

I take him outside, where it’s still dark out (though hours have seemed to pass).

“I can’t two-time Heather like that,” I say. I try to break up with him and it’s really difficult, only because I know that he will feel like shit after I do. I realize he’s in college and get weirded out for some reason, so it’s easier. I break up with him again and go back into the party.

It’s mostly over, as if I had been gone for a long time and it’s now morning. Almost everyone’s gone. Marilyn Manson is yelling at his mom, and I give her a sympathetic glance. I “know” that he used to be nice to her but started to be mean as his persona grew.

I walk over to the second living room (not Heather’s). There are giant seats that sink in a lot. I sit in one and find a gold key that Heather wears. Instantly, I know that Heather made out with Adam in this chair. I text her “found your key”, which will let her know that I know what she did. I’m upset.

I look around the room. Everything is being picked up. A girl is throwing these giant cellophane carrots away. An extremely young version of my grandmother is picking up most of the trash and stuffing it in a trash bag.

She gets really upset that the girl is throwing the carrots away and starts yelling at her because they are full of “goodies”. I remember that my grandmother is a highly spiritual person and wonder why she is getting so upset, losing her temper over a trivial thing. She goes into another room to clean up there.

A few guys sitting around the breakfast table are talking about the newspaper mascot, Happy. It’s a black dog who is severely depressed.

“Never try to make Happy happy. Everyone knows he’s sad so it’s insulting to him,” one of the guys says. He gives me a page of the newspaper. I held the paper out about a foot in front of me. An article had been strangely bolded and unbolded and when you can see all of the words, the boldness of the letters reveals a black ink dog made of words. His tail was the darkest part.
I throw it into the trashbag. I see a few Jenny Lewis calendar posters, really quality black and white, thick paper. I start taking them out. A woman sitting in one of the deep comfy chairs starts talking to me about Waterville’s mascot, a parrot named Waterlou. (Heather had a dream about mascots.)

My grandmother walks out of the room and smiles at me. I see that her temper was very in the moment and she was easily brought out of it.

A Sizable Strawberry



My mom’s driving her car. I’m in the middle of the backseat, Holden’s next to me and his little sister Sarah who is incredibly fat in my dream is on my right. Holden and I discuss selling strawberry chips, just like potato chips but sliced and fried strawberries instead. I see why we were discussing this: up ahead, there’s a giant strawberry! Not the size of a house or a mansion or even a plane, it’s the size of an airport!

My dad is in the front seat now. Instead of parking our car in the big sea-side parking lot (the strawberry is right next to the sea), we just drive up it. This scares me quite a bit because once we get the car on the strawberry, we are almost completely vertical. I ask if we could flip over and my dad reassures me that’s impossible. I close my eyes until the car stops on top of it.

We all get out and are given little green baskets to put our pickings in. I don’t see how this is going to work until I look down at the surface of the strawberry: it’s covered in little yellow tags. Each one is attached to the flowering part of a seed, which can be pulled and a perfect cube of strawberry comes out. I start pulling a few and walk over to where my dad is.

He’s on a little lake on the strawberry. It’s not too big, maybe 12 x 12 feet and full of murky strawberry-sea-water and long stems. He’s pulling huge cubes from around the edges of it and I help him out, pulling them and putting them in his basket.
Walking on it isn’t difficult, it’s plushy and kind of fun if I don’t look down: we are quite a ways up. I walk around and see that everyone is going into a little observatory room on the top most point of the strawberry. Inside, everyone’s standing kind of far back from the main window. Kayla, my ex-boyfriends new girlfriend, is by the window really close. My mom, my dad and Holden and I walk towards the window too to see.

Suddenly, the floor beneath the window lets go like a trap door and we tumble out of it. I don’t remember falling, only hitting the water. My leg is somehow attached to something big so when I start sinking, I feel like I’ll die here (though I didn’t feel exactly hopeless or bad: I just knew I could, possibly, die). My dad comes swimming at me and unhooks my leg. Kayla is still under somewhere, so my mom looks for her. When she comes up from the depths, she kind of nudges me back down and I hit my leg on a really weird smooth rock section. It happens twice but we finally make it back to the shore.

My dream repeats. Everything is the same until we are in the observatory. I change the dream so all of us are kind of next to the window but not that close, so when the trap door drops, only Kayla goes down. My mom saves her. It wasn’t malicious of me, I just didn’t want to be scared again and I had no control over Kayla.

Visiting Space

My parents and I are going to visit outerspace. Its night time and we’re in a family car traveling to the space station. We stop at McDonalds and while they’re inside, I get into my space suit. It’s a stretchy black mesh material and on each side of me I have some control pads for my hands.

When they come out, we eat and drive over to the station. Every family or visitor has their own cube inside a building (I don’t remember the building, just being in the cube). It’s a big wooden box with a wheelchair access incline inside of steps that lead into the center of the room. We get into place and I guess we rocket off!

At first, we’re all nervous and doing our jobs stabilizing the cube in space and tracking ourselves to our destination. Then we settle down and my mom starts ice fishing, because there’s an empty hole in the bottom of the cube to the right side. I look into it and there’s just black black water, as if the water was over the blackness of space (and then floating beneath our cube?) The fish are mechanical but also organic in a way that they grow the mechanical parts of themselves. My dad is playing with fishing line and hooking little beads together on it and stringing it around the cube in a decorative way.

I don’t remember landing, but we all are on stable ground now. I was unengaged with what my parents were doing for most of the trip and when I go over to them now that we’re here, I realize they’re fighting. They speak something about a lady that my dad meets here, or maybe a guy that my mom meets here. I don’t care! Let’s go explore!

All of the cool parts are lost in memory. My mom is somewhere, and I’m with my dad. We are about to go into a museum for something. The world around us is the same as Earth, just more exciting because it’s NOT Earth. It feels like I’m in an amusement park, and everything could be mundane but still not that bad.

Inside, the museum is a multi-tier building that stacks on top of itself. The biggest room is the first, and then you walk up stairs to a smaller room, etc until the last room which is an observatory. My dad and I are in the last room. Instead of peering out of the glass windows, I look at the display case in the center. There are a lot of crystal rock art sculptures. I’m amazed at one of them: It’s all solid clear crystal with a fist coming out of one side. I’d assume that it was carved to look that way, but so much of it seems to be natural. I am on another planet, so I don’t question it. I put it in my jacket after pondering about video cameras watching us and hoping they just aren’t around.

We walk out and no one notices me or questions me. Outside, we have to go through a gate with a guard who’ll direct us to our next attraction. The big rock has slipped down my pant leg, settling kind of near my shoe. The exterior of the museum looks like my old neighborhood.

On a tree there’s a hand painted sign that says “Give me one instant chocolate Reece’s cake mix and I’ll trade you a FREE TOILET!” That’s dumb, I think. No one wants a toilet. I have the conclusion that the guard we’re about to see put that sign up for everyone to see who comes from the museum, hoping someone has one of the cake mixes.

He looks at me and my dad and doesn’t question my bulging pant leg. We’re directed to the cubelot, where we meet up with my mom. She’s mad at my dad and I see a voluptuous lady with a thousand blonde curls wave at my dad. I see! We get into the cube and start going home.

Half-way through space, we stop at a little planet to get some food. It looks kind of like the other McDonalds. My dad meets his friend and tells us about some new information they found out about Earth.

“They took apart all the walls on Earth and on the light switches they found hind markings. E.T. did it when he was having his stay on our planet! Whenever a light turns green, I puke.” My dream self thought this made sense: he implied that all the walls of Earth, as if there were walls on the “outside” of our planet, were inspected for residue of the infamous E.T. (the movie dude in my dream was an actual alien who visited for a little while). The light switches he spoke of were what made the traffic lights work. The word “hind” was a kind of sexual term that implied he tried to have sex with them.




Fragment
It’s the last two days of the world. Everything has been ending and I am alive for these last days. I jump between the layers of my potential realities, but it’s all over…

Dream Graduation

It’s the first day of my senior year. Most of the student body is sitting on a giant multi-tier bench system that isn’t quite bleachers. It’s in the middle of a giant intersection downtown. All of us are seated by popularity, with the most popular at the bottom with no one in front of us so we can see the “show” that’s going to happen. I happen to be in the very front row (though I was never that popular). From where the benches are, we can see upper main street which trails off and turns a corner. It’s sloped quite a bit more than usual.

The “show” starts. All of the “really really cool” fashionably dressed kids come out and use main street like a runway. The first is this big black guy who was never dressed nicely at all, but he was wearing some classy clothes (classy in dream terms: truthfully it was quite wacky). A few more people trickle out of some building passed the curve of the street. None are girls!

As the fashion students strut around downtown, the whole world turns, or at least the benches we are on. If one starts walking down the street instead of up, all of us lean toward that end of the street. I am so scared that I’m going to fall off the bench which would be really embarrassing. Whenever the benches turn, I grab onto the girl next to me: a girl I know in waking life, Hilary. Behind me, my ex-boyfriend Dylan is sitting. In my dream, they are dating, so it’s awkward that I’m holding onto his new girlfriend pretty tightly.

Once the show is over, all the fashionably dressed popular students are allowed to look around main street alone; we are all here to visit the new shops on the first day of school. I realize that we will be able to join them row by row and I’m in the first row. I panic because that means all the still-sitting students will watch what I look at. My row is dismissed.

I walk around kind of hazily and embarrassed for a few minutes, waiting to see someone I know on the street and for the rest of the rows to come join us. Eventually they do but I can’t find anyone I know. I decide to spend my time as I should: looking at the new places.

The first place I see is a new tattoo shop right next to our older one. It’s called Astral Tattoos and it isn’t an actual store, it’s a pink and green painted wooden booth. They’re selling body modification, tattoos and henna tattoos. I don’t pay attention to what else or what specifically the tattoos are, but I imagine they’d be interesting.

I find my brother Holden (who doesn’t go to my school) and follow him around until we are all brought into the big building at the end of the street. It’s the high school (not where it usually is, it also looks very different).

Inside, we are all wearing our caps and gowns now. Everyone’s color is maroon; it’s our school colors (not in waking life). I follow a few students who are in front of me, because we are arranged alphabetically. Steven and Jamal are before me and Adam is in back of me, although all of them have last names that are in back of where I would have been. I’m really nervous and walk into the bathroom for a moment, look at myself and walk back out. We are led into the auditorium of the school which is absolutely huge and decorated with maroon everything.

I sit down in my row with Steven next to me. Jamal isn’t here so there’s an empty seat. As the students are being shuffled in, I question where I am.

“Is this a dream?” I look around but make up a history to make sense of where I am: yes, the graduation memory that comes to mind is actually when I graduated junior year. Now it’s senior year, so this is real life. Wasted dream check.

Behind me, Martin who is a junior but is sitting with the seniors is handing out camera kits for us to use. I go to grab one but realize that I don’t talk to him a lot and that would be weird and he’d want someone he knows to have them.

While I sit and wait for the ceremony to start, I look at a pamphlet that I have in my hands. It has a bunch of activities we were supposed to do while downtown. They include things like woodworking, pottery, volleyball, etc. I didn’t sign up for anything. I wake up.


Fragment

Heather invites me to her house. It’s a huge place and her room is the size of a usual upstairs area in a normal sized house. We go passed her room which is quite barren. We seem to be in the attic. In back of her room she has a big stage that’s halfway on the house, halfway on the roof with wide glass windows containing a backstage area. She begins to dance with life-sized puppets as her back up dancers. The music plays and she steps into the darkness about half-way on the stage, the dancers follow, and everyone glows in the dark.


Fragment 2

I remember eating a lot of maple sugar through a straw out of this tiny dollhouse. I drained it of maple sugar and felt sick. I could see all the sugar particles in my thigh which was where I would gain the weight if I didn't start running. The radio started to play and a commercial was discussing weight gain.

"Usually when people eat fatty foods, they will gain weight. However, some people have a large amount of bridges in their body which distributes the fat evenly, so they don't gain any weight." I knew I had a lot of "bridges" in my body and didn't worry.

The Glowing Forest and a Coaster Ride



I am in a really junky part of Maine, although like always, it’s beautiful. This time its exceptionally pretty: the car I’m in is traveling through a dark forested area on an old road. The moss on the great redwood trees illuminates our way enough so we don’t have to use our lights. Little glowing worms and luminescent animals scurry around. I see a moose with glowing green antlers in between the giant trees. In the car, my mom and I are discussing how much money the houses here cost.

“About the same price as living in the library,” my mom says. I nod as if this makes sense. It does in dream world I suppose.
Our friend Alice Louise is taking us to appraise a house for a guy and his daughter. Along the way she points out some noticeably pretty houses. Most of them have been built into the surrounding landscape; some are carved into trees, some are half sunken into muddy swamplands. One that she points out she’d like to live in seems too small, perhaps the size of a fairy house but a fairy mansion.

We turn into the driveway of a pretty normal trailer; one of the only normal houses in the area. It’s unfortunate that this is what we came to see, not one of the prettier houses. We meet the father and the daughter. The daughter is Abby (an acquaintance in waking life). All of us step into the sunroom which is attached to the side of the trailer. Suddenly it moves, detaching itself from the trailer, and rotates all around it to the other side. This was the “appraisal” that we came here for with Alice Louise. We’re ready to go.

Strangely, when we leave, it’s just Alice and I. She’s driving and I’m in the passenger seat. We’re in the country now, surrounded by low green fields and a big blue sky. The occasional farm passes by my window and there are silos on the horizon. In front of us there’s a guy running manically. He has long scraggly black hair and barely anything on except skin tight white running shorts. If he had a shirt on, I don’t remember. He seems to be running for fitness comically. We kind of catch up to him and slow down for some reason. He comes to the window.

“This is still Washington even though it’s not snowing,” he says, leaning into the window on Alice Louise’s side. She nods and they keep talking about how we are in the very middle of Washington where there is never snow or rain. He gets a little aggressive when he speaks, as if we aren’t particularly welcome right now. We drive off and he begins to run again.
Now the country road we were on has a four lane high-way coming the other way.

“See, we’re not even in the country anymore. We’ll be home soon,” Alice says.

The scraggly-haired man is ahead of us again. We see that he’s throwing sandbags on the road! That will definitely stop the Jeep we’re in. We dodge one but the next is in the center of the road and our front right wheel hits it dead on and we come to a stop. Now the only way home is to use…the roller coaster that is running along the road on the shoulder.

We each get into one of our own coaster cars on the ride. They are cartoon dinosaur heads; you step into its mouth, with the eyes and the nose above you as a roof. Mine’s blue, Alice’s is red. They not only run forward on the roller coaster track, but turn 360 degrees with inertia. I don’t like this. There’s a big hill that we are going up. In front of me, I see other coaster cars. They are jumping from track to track; we are on a similar four lane high-way but this side of the road is a roller coaster. I want to jump tracks like those cars, so I do. It’s easy with intent. When I jump, the coaster car does a flip mid-air and lands on the next track. Sometimes, the cars jump over other cars. It’s kind of a nice sight.

I realize we are going uphill faster than I expected and I don’t want to feel the fall. Although I like roller coasters, this hill is steep: twice Superman, if you will. I close my eyes and forget the dream. I become aware of my sleeping body. Yes, still asleep, not on a roller coaster, not about to fall…

I become aware of my dream body again once I am at the bottom. Alice Louise is gone from my dream. I am now in a gift store: the final destination of the coaster cars. There are a few wooden racks of hand-knitted things. I look at a pair of mukluks that my brother Holden had (dream memory, not in waking life) and remind myself to ask him to buy them for me. A girl comes over and looks at a rack of facial creams. They all have a certain element to them, but I forgot what it was specifically. She debates if one of the creams has that common element with the store clerk.

Kayla (a girl I know in waking life) is buying a pretty unique pair of gloves. They have the fingers cut off hobo-style and are black with Nightmare Before Christmas things sewn onto each finger. The back of the hand part of the gloves have a big skull sewn onto them. She is dressed all gothic-esque and has an air of “I don’t give a shit if I’m retreating back into this style.” (She dressed the same way years and years ago). I lose the dream.



Lucid Beach

I am on a beach with Heather. There’s a ton of people all taking up the shore space, but we find a little sand-muddy area. It’s not particularly nice, but it is the beach (and its winter in Maine, so its pleasant to dream of). Heather starts having an anxiety attack because of the people so we go to the “next” beach, a few feet from this one. They are distinctly not the same beach, but are very close. On this one, there are no people. We have sex, but it doesn’t really work out and we end up laughing and leaving.
There’s a sign on the beach that says there’s a sale going on at “B♠N”. What a weird name for a store I say to myself! We look up and B♠N is right in front of us. In the parking lot area of the store, which is all sandy and car-less because of how close it is to the beach, my mom’s kind of disembodied voice begins to talk about Zelda. Heather responds by saying she’s played all of them, which she has (in dream life, not waking life). I feel weird because I introduced her to the series and still haven’t played all of them (I have in waking life). I become lucid thinking of the name of the store. Jack and someone else are with Heather and I now and we all go into the store. I retain my lucidity but simply watch the events and notice the surroundings. In the store Heather says something about dreaming.

“This IS a dream actually!” I try to convince her and she laughs and kind of “knows” that it is, and I keep pestering her about it. I touch her and really feel her skin.

“It’s weird how I can actually feel your skin,” I say. I’m not amazed about the act of feeling it, but at this point I’m thinking of how my mind is either creating the feeling of her skin, which is an exact representation of the feeling in waking life, or I really am feeling it…on the dream plane. My cat jumps onto my sleeping body and I wake up.


An Anonymous Gift

I’m in my high school. For some reason I take my pants off and put them on the janitor’s cart. I have my white long johns under them though, so I don’t look too strange. I begin walking to my class. Someone in the rotunda says my mom is embarrassed in her classroom (she doesn’t work here in waking life) so I go see her first. Her room is where my 11th grade English class was. It’s set up the same way. She tells me I have a package in the office and I should get it soon. I don’t remember to ask why she was so embarrassed.

I go into the bathroom. Heather is here. Somehow, she ends up out the window, trying to crawl back inside from two stories below on one of those fair game ladders that twist and turn as you climb them (usually horizontally). She’s crying manically and saying the ladder is slippery and she’s going to fall. I somehow manage to take all her limbs and with the help of the janitor who comes in to clean, we get her inside. She’s really distraught.

I leave the bathroom and Heather is now Autumn. We go into our classroom. My 5th grade teacher is our teacher now. Lynn, a friend of ours, laughs when we enter the class an hour late. The teacher is really upset with me in particular and tells me to go get a late pass if I have a good excuse for my tardiness. I leave but have no excuse; I just want to be gone from the room.
I walk downstairs and take a drink at the fountain. My teacher had been following me to see if I was going to the office to get a late pass or not. I casually stroll into the office. I don’t like being in trouble, so I intend it to be the end of the day so I can get off the hook. The bell rings and all the kids scurry out of their classrooms. I sneak into the back area of the office and call UPS from the office phone and tell them not to deliver my package if it’s going to be late. I don’t know why I do this, since my package is already here. It’s nicely wrapped and has a stamp with my name on it.

I bring it upstairs to the benches and open it. It’s a pair of goggles, like steampunk-esque but modernized. They’re red with orange accents. I close the box and leave the school.

My mom picks me up and we begin to drive on back country roads. It’s raining pretty hard, but I’m having a nice conversation with my mom and we don’t mind it. I show her my goggles and she likes them. Neither of us know who got them for me or where they came from. We arrive at this old trailer that I used to know in waking life. In my dream, it’s where Heather lives. Without getting out of the car, my mom somehow knocks but no one comes to the door. I know Heather is home. We just leave.

I am in a store with Heather and Tyler. I upset Heather for whatever reason and end up walking around by myself. I search for the book section in the store and take an astrology book to a picknick table to read. It's specifically on Leos for 2011. At the table, a boy sits down next to me, reading the same book but for Libras. We exchange a glance that has some friendly emotion behind it as we notice we're reading similar books. Another boy comes and sits in front of me. He starts handling some things of mine which I set on the table (though don't remember doing so). One is a little metal squirrel (which I had in my pocket that day) and one is a coin.

"What coin is this," he asks. I take it from him quite angrily.

"A fifty cent piece, obviously. Look at Kennedy," I say. I look at it and am suddenly embarrassed; it's not a fifty cent piece. On one side, there's a big piece of an engraved deep purple stone set into it. The other has the face of a man who I don't know. My dream-mind knows this is an Atlantean coin.

I get “dropped off” in a town (I’m just suddenly in the middle of the road in a foreign town. Perhaps this was the beginning of a dream.) There are a few cars but no people and the setting has an eerie loneliness to it, as if it was a toy town or a set up. It feels “off” like I’m being tricked. I walk onto the sidewalk in front of me. There’s a big sign with a dancing lady advertising burlesque dancers or something. Proceeding, I see a door that says “For Farting Only”. The door has a lock and is obviously for the “management” behind this fake town. I’m bored of looking around so I enter the next door I see.

It’s an office building. There are typical cubicles full of busy workers and shelves stuffed with folders and papers separating the people. In the back of the first room there’s a clear window-wall with an archway. I have a “destination” in mind I’m not conscious of it. I don’t care about anyone in the room and no one cares about me, so I get into the second room easily. I see a girl who’s working and tell her to come with me. She does so without much thought.

Outside, I look into the sky and see a short distance away a little movie theater. As we begin walking toward it, we pass a field that people are setting something up in. I know (or am told, somehow- no detail) that it’s a religious banquet for the town. We walk passed it for now. On a wooden fence in front of us there’s a sign for the movies. 2 people=x amount of money, but 2 girls=a discount. I’m pretty excited that I can get in for less money because I’m gay, and the movie suddenly has a “date” quality to it.

The movie theater is inside a building that, on the outside, looks like a mesh between my high school and my junior high school. There’s a big pavilion (like junior high) hanging over the side of the building, but the actual building is my high school. Beneath the pavilion, there’s an old guru/monk who’s taking people’s money and giving them tickets. I ask for two tickets for two girls and he giggles at me. He gives me the tickets and my change back, but instead of the right amount he gives me two 268 dollar bills. For a moment my mind questioned or was at least surprised that these bills existed, but no lucidity. He said “just kidding” and took them back, giggling.

We didn’t go to the movies (or I don’t remember it) and just walked back into the same little section of town. I have something I want to do now: I plan to make food for the banquet but put “evil” devil food things on the inside of seemingly good dessert meals. I don’t remember if the girl comes with me anymore, but I at least forget about her existence. The office building is no longer the same place, but it’s in the same place and I re-enter it.

It’s now someone I know’s house, but I don’t know who. Heather, Tyler and Jack are there. Tyler comes up to me and starts whispering something about her teeth. She got her braces off (she didn’t have braces in real life). Her upper front teeth all blend together and look like two giant teeth and my dream self “knows” that this is because she had braces on the upper teeth before. Now she got her lower braces off, and those teeth all blend together now too, so she has three giant teeth on the bottom row. We laugh about it and she’s embarrassed to show Heather.

We all begin to work on making the evil dessert. First everyone makes regular mixes for cakes and brownies, but we pour them into trays with the center’s hollowed out. To make the “evil” food, we all spread across the floor and little crimson red glowing strings weave between all of us, making a big cross-hatch pattern of “evil”. Somehow we form this into an edible red mix and put it in the center of all the food. We like making things, so I also make chips and dip using regular potato chips and a mix of strange salsas all put together into a bowl. Henry is there and he keeps eating them and I remind him it’s for the religious banquet.

Tribal Imposter

I am watching a movie about an anthropologist who is living with a native tribe. Jake comments on the scene where, after eating the native spicy food, the anthropologist has to take a huge shit. He washes his hands in a regular bathroom and there is a girl who also comes out of a stall and washes her hands. They join the tribe in the circle around a fire.

Suddenly, I am part of the tribe. Whether I am "part" of it or not, I'm not sure because while they are all black, I am still white and also have no relationship with them. We get a message from a lady somehow informing us that there is a huge storm coming and we must all walk to the safe weather house. We're all kind of disappointed as if we've been there before and really don't want to go. It doesn't take us long to walk there and its only just beginning to rain. Its dark out but I can make out the details of the area. There are a ton of trees, we are in a forest, but the path to the house has been cleared. It's muddy but none of us mind.

The house itself doesn't look like it should for a weather safety house. Its a usual wood building with chipped paint, it looks pretty old and out of the norm in the woods. I wonder to myself why the tribe would let modern man come into the forest so easily, but I don't apply the fact that this building is old and therefore the expansion must have happened quite a long time ago. To enter the house, we don't go through the main door. We all step through a fake painting on the outside of the house. It looks like a black and white framed painting, but its actually silk flaps that we can walk into.

Inside, against one wall there are little cubby holes for each of us. Some are built for two people, and the couples go into them, as if all was pre-set for us (or as if we've been here before, recently). I run to the last one, half knowing its where I belong and half thinking if I don't get a cubby to stay in, I won't have one. We all get settled in. Mine is relatively empty, as is all the others, though some have blankets and pictures on the walls. Everyone starts talking to eachother in their usual dramas and friendships.

The lady who called us in here is really nice. She might be an anthropologist herself, perhaps thats why she is taking care of us tonight and runs this building. She calls attention to us and on a huge chalkboard on the opposite wall she has written the alphabet. Everyone is bored with it but we are handed little chalkboards and try to write it down. She explains the letters and then in a strange yet understanding way she explains the song behind the "alphabet song", the accents on each letter when you sing and how they relate to other sounds you can make, and how "big" or "little" the sound is. A few of the tribe people understand this completely and laugh at her elementary way of explaining things. My conscious dream mind daydreams of the thought of musically inclined people.

I come back to the dream and start drawing the letters but remember that I am an educated person and don't want to be "found out", so I draw them with my left hand. The lady comes over to me and she has a little see through plastic page with black lettering. Its an astrology chart. I ask about the Chinese horoscope and she says this one is the Zodiac. I talk to her about it and she asks if I'm a leo. I say yes, and she says she is too, that she was born on August first. We begin talking about the tribe. I leave behind me the notion of "fitting in" with them, and talk about how its like having your own soap opera always with you because of the intricate dramas always happening. While we talk, the tribe people are all just talking, fighting, laughing, etc.

I wake up and it looks like lightening is illuminating my room. Not just light-wise, but everything in my room is highlighted by lightening streaks and the windows are completely white. I do a reality check, I seem to be awake, and wonder if this is just more of the winter thunder storms that has happened. I go back to sleep.

Everyone has left the building or something, and I am outside in the darkness gliding/running very very fast across muddy hills. I see a modern house and hear a voice that tells me "they are inside" and so I glide to it. On the porch, I'm welcomed in by a black lady who has a motherly aura. We go into the kitchen and she's making dinner. I lean on the counter and we discuss how one of the tribes people, a 20 something woman, is living here and is trying to fit into modern society. She has wrecked her life somehow, getting into drugs and prostitution and lacking any education. Her memory comes to mind. On her chest, she has one of those microdermal implants. It's a circle with a piercing in the middle, and a sun tattooed around it. Her whole face has piercings and dot tattoos. I wonder how she fits in with the people of this area and age. The motherly woman asks if she can move in with me because she needs a place. I tell her she is my sister, even if we are very different and of course I will take her in.

Book Thief

I am with Autumn and her parents and another man and we go to a gift store (which is where Goodwill is in waking life). Inside I begin to look at the books and everyone scurries off into their own directions. On a rack I find a book by the same author as a Series of Unfortunate Events (I can tell not by the name but by the artwork/similar appearance). The title amazes me: How To Be A Lucid Dreamer! I have a dream memory of wanting this book very badly, ritually looking up reviews and prices online.
I don't have any money with me though, so I carry it around and intend to steal it. My mom comes to look at the books and I tell her I brought this book into my life and we both celebrate a little before I walk away. I start looking at little zebra sculptures that are for sale on one wall and daydream of a dream memory: I am asking Autumn to put a zebra sculpture in her bag for me to take it because I am too nervous. I feel bad about it and the guilt hits my "present" dream self, so I stop daydreaming. I walk over to a mini train that is running on a track circling a platform. I sit on the platform and go through the pages of my book. An electronic tag falls out, the kind that make sensors go off if you take it without paying, so I carry it around separately. I don't throw it away immediately because I know the techie who is in charge of that kind of thing in this store is somewhere near by.

I go back to the main part of the store and there is a giant dunk tank and folding chairs placed to watch it. Everyone in the store save a few shoppers are sitting down watching, so I do too. They say they are dunking all the people who steal from the store. I wonder how many people there are, but realize its one man who is representing all of the thieves. He has a disgusting mutilated Halloween face mask on and a belly shirt. His stomach is huge and over stretched. They dunk him, and the water makes his stomach rise and fall in slow motion. Everyone is laughing at how fat he is, but this is part of the act and he doesn't take offense. I really don't want to watch this idiotic scene anymore, so Autumns family leaves, though Autumn isn't with us.

Before we leave, I am simultaneously in the back seat of the car and inside the store. I ask the man driving if I can have four dollars so I can buy the book. The Dalai Lama is in the passenger seat and turns around and tells me "you're really getting into something". My heart jumps at recognition from such a high being. I don't pay for the book, we just leave, and that seems to be part of the driver's joke he quietly has with me. I give him back the money. He gives me back the same amount of bills, but its 3 one dollar bills and 1 one hundred dollar bill. I laugh and give it back to him: I don't need it.


Frag

I am in the back seat of Jacks car. Jack is driving and Andrew is in the passenger seat. We are going around the highway looking at dead animals. We see an orange cat in the middle of the road and a fox on the shoulder. I get a text from Heather and she asks me to come over, I say sure and tell Jack to drop me off. I get worried about her seeing Jacks car. My POV switches to upstairs in Heathers house (usually she lives in a one story house) and looking out the window, seeing the car. I tell Jack to drop me off at the beginning of the driveway, but its really snowy so I know that wont work. I dont know what to do.