joeseph

1. my horse
2. the life of the mind

The first dream was so awesome that I made a huge point of recalling it. Woke up at 6am after it ended, and my intention to recall it was so strong that it might have actually hindered other dreams from materializing.

I was getting on a bart train. Throughout this dream there were lots of themes of fucking around, playing with people a little bit more in order to experiment with other modes of existence. I was wearing a bright purple trenchcoat. I got on the train and sat next to an old woman, who would become my good friend. Keeping with the vow of silence, I decided to show her a text message with my thoughts on it. (I actually sent it to my boss on accident, but it was OK.) Immediately after getting on the train, I realize that I have left my backpack with my slackline in it behind, and it's too late. I meet up with my dad at one of the stations. I ask him to call the Bart line to see if anyone has turned it in---no luck. The bart line goes in a straight line heading down and diagonally to the right, and eventually it loops back around. I'm not sure how this works out physically (I'm not actually concerned), but it does mean that I'm going to get back to the first bart station and get a chance to get my bag back. I suppose it's like the train station in The Matrix; one end meets up with the other, and you come out the other side.

I get back to the first bart station where I departed from, and me and my possee (the old woman, another girl who is way hotter, my dad) start looking around for it. Things are looking grim when I round a bend and...
MY HORSE!!!!! My horse has been tied up at the station, using my webbing and all the gear from my slackline. Poor baby! I'm so sorry I left you alone! My horse!!!!!! There is a massive flash of recognition. It is a tall horse, almost like a hybrid between a giraffe and a horse. I am overcome with emotions; I start to cry I love this thing so much. I untie it and nuzzle up to its head. What a sweetheart. Love and compassion. I even go and tell everybody back at my grandpa's (now sold) house.

Other dream: People were up and about, making breakfast (IRL). I have a false awakening of sorts; I get up and it's still dark, and nobody is even awake yet. Well shit, what's the point of getting up early? I cruise around the house in roller skates (the ones which fold up into the bottom of your shoes, the Skechers ones). Back to sleep. I am a paralyzed black boy in a bed, dreaming. There's not much organization between these different states. It's almost like a 24 Grams, chopped-up cinematic style, and I haven't enough background to piece it all together. I'm walking around Moorpark (the expanded, dream-state version), it's still before dawn. We have plans to meet at Mike Font's house to go swimming. I'm holding onto my phone, and it's buoyant. I hop a fence, floating/bouncing up the side of the hill. There's the pool. This is a setting that I recognize. I float and bounce away, and try for some flying. My reasoning: this phone is buoyant, it is bouncing. Therefore, it must have a bigger force going UP than my weight going DOWN. I can take advantage of this force! I close my eyes and try to actualize it, and I end up floating up a ways, but no real flight.

Eyes closed. This leads to a re-awakening. After opening my eyes briefly and staring at the ceiling of my room, I go back to the dream. I'm the paralyzed black boy again. There's another black man (an uncle?) who wants to take advantage of me and sodomize me. I'm viewing it from third-person, though. At this point this is more narrativized than my attempts at floating, less "me." I am going to die soon. He tries, but is overcome by guilt. Shrug.

I come to a sad realization, as I wake up. There's so much I don't care about. This breakfast that is going to be a lot of effort, but is so unhealthy and so bad. It's all about appearances. It's about wanting to appear like you're doing someone else for something, but really putting minimal effort into it. This is life on the surface level; these people don't dream, not like I do. I live the life of the imagination. The life of the mind.

I'm on Park street, and there's a festival of some sort. There is a group of people doing slacklining/acroyoga/barstarzz, I don't know, for a talent show. I go up there and do my own routine, swinging around on one arm. When I'm done I grab the rafters and swing around like a monkey, transitioning from the pull up bar. There is another girl who does it. We give each other looks, make eye contact.

I'm at a bench, at this point. I have four hot chocolates that I'm pouring from a spout coming out of the table. They're in a tray, but some of the cups in the tray have tears in them, so it leaks through. I realize that I can bring these back to my dad and my family at Austin's house. I have a juicy drink and some candy. She comes up to me, and I ask "So, how long have you been slacklining?" We talk a little bit, and I spill the drinks. "Well, I work at Peet's, so I got these for free."

I am in the desert next. The setting was taken from a commercial for Man vs. Wild / Survivorman, where he loses he shit in the desert. Ingenuity displayed by laying his pitchfork down in the water, so lightning will strike it during a storm, and he'll be safe. Desperation when he chases off a group of two other desert faring men with a musket. "PARDON ME!!!" He runs up behind them but then they turn the situation around on him, pointing their gun at him, forcing him away and on the ground, taking his gun, then running off. So now I am in the desert, with a group of other people. There's a big projector screen of some sort, very vague. I look to the right; there is a girl with no top on complaining to her friends about her body. "It's too... feminine," pointing at her hips. I try to sneak a look at her breasts. Next time I look, she is still conversing, but has covered up a bit with her bra, which she is holding close to her.

I'm sitting in a chill position, watching the screen. I look next to me. "...Slackline girl?" It is. I recognized her eyes, her nose. Waves of satisfaction and recognition and calmness. She is stretching. "Do you do yoga too?" Yes. I do it every night. It's so important, I say, to get to know your own body, to know yourself. Otherwise you end up like her. I point to the girl expressing her insecurities to her friends. Everything is so quiet. The stars are out in the desert. Every time I move around, I can hear tiny cherry tomatoes buried in the sand squish and pop. These tomatoes are endemic to the desert; they grow underground. I breathe, I listen, and I can feel the tiny little bits of resistance give way when they pop open.

We are driving back, to the corner of Otis and Pearl. My friends get out and hit the ground running, since they have to catch a bus at the corner. I pull around to the left, parking the Prius. I'm worried about a street sweeping sign, which should be fine. I'm worried about my parking job, readjusting it two or three times. I look and see that a car has done a horrible job, going into the grass and leaving white dirty residue everywhere, but this isn't my car. Paul comes up; he has parked too. Cops pull up behind him. After a brief chat they roll up to me. I wave and get their attention. "Excuse me!" They roll down the window. "Do I have to worry about street sweeping? Am I good?" They smile, everything is OK. Very friendly interaction. We're all good.

Very nice dream.

The first dream from last night, the only one that I can remember during my big chunk of sleep, started off with me playing videogames with my coworker and his friends. We've made plans to play Street Fighter; this one is Street Fighter 3, nut not 3rd strike like I'm used to. I pick Ken and I do a lot of shoryukens. The graphics are better than 3rd strike, but the gameplay has changed. My 3 friends pick characters that I have never seen. I remark that I haven't played this one, Street Fighter Alpha (something. This was a dreamy mislabelling). I go to play another game, using a really old PlayStation controller, one which doesn't even have analog sticks and the button layout is wider. There's more space between everything. I choose the controller I'm playing on from a menu (apparently this makes a difference, I think. OK then), and the game starts. After an opening cutscene, I'm left alone in a post-combat shootout zone. I go around and try to collect supplies; even though I know what I need is guns to make it to the next part of the game, I start picking up lots of tiny different syringes, full of veterinary medicine. These will definitely come in handy if I ever have to do ghetto surgery later on down the line. But the needles start to come loose from their housing, and prick me in the leg. Austin comes around---I am with him and Alexander. (It's not a game anymore, I've forgotten about that part and moved on in the dream world.) He says "no no no, THIS is what you need," and I can tell his tone is condescending but good-natured. He already has syringes, supplies, etc. I open up my mouth to show him all the syringes I've packed in there. "Ohhh, Joe." They've made my mouth numb, like after going to the dentist, since they've pricked my cheek. I shake them out and there's a deluge of tiny, 2-inch needles that fall out, covered in spit.

We move on. We have salvaged a plane, and Alexander can fly it. But it's not fully functional. We manage to move it over the fence that's blocking us from the next area, then crash land again in some trees. After a small fight with enemy BADDIES (I don't remember if they have guns or not), we get out and start exploring the surroundings. The people who own the property we've landed on are angry; one of them throws a big rock and hits one of Austin's friends (an old friend from Alameda? A teacher?) in the head, killing her. Fury on our parts. They chase us out of their house, which we had been exploring. They offer us some food? The timeline of events gets hazy. The dream ends with the rock incident and the husband chasing me. We try to fly the plane again, which was crash landed in a tree, and it swings around and moves in a disjointed manner, like its continuity as a geometric object has ended. Like when you get too close to a wall in a game and you see the inside of the polygonal shape of your character, where planes extend all around to the edge of the screen because your reference point is now inside, not outside. The plane is not gonna go. The dream ends with the plane out of the picture, perhaps it has flown away, or is trying to, and I'm defending myself in this huge, unclimbable tree against the angry husband, who's trying to get at me with no regard to his own life should he fall.

Dream 2: A brief fragment I had after going back to sleep for another 45 minutes or so. A really cluttered managerie of symbols.

The dream takes on coherence while I'm at my old home in Moorpark. It's raining, really coming down. There are two mexican kids playing in the garden, which is muddy and sopping wet. I notice that there are tons of dead fish in the mud. "What are you guys doing?" I look closer; it's like they're trying to build a little pond. It's cute, in a way, but they're also killing the goldfish! I go inside to ask my parents if this is OK. No discernible response. I come back outside and pull them down from a set of ladders they have stacked against the side of the house. Still raining. One of them must be 3 or 4 years old. He's only like 2 feet tall. I start to play with them, and it's actually a lot of fun. There's an innocence to them that I love, that sets me free. I walk back around to the other part of the backyard. The hot tub is going. It's still raining. Everything is wet. It's like my whole family is there. In and out of the hot tub. Food. There's a little bench on the side of the deck, and I put my hands on it and try to prop up my body on my elbows. (Apparently this is called an elbow lever. Cool.) It's not too hard, so I go for one hand, but there's a part of the hot tub or a sprinkler or something spraying me with warm water. It pivots my body around the one hand that I have planted. My wrists are somehow flexible enough that I just keep going, facing the other way (towards the hot tub instead of away). I fall into the wet, warm grass soon after, doing a somersault. My dad comes up behind me, and I try to squat him. I really, really want to stand up and put him on my shoulders. I'm almost there. I straighten out my legs in real life, moving around in my bed. But I can't quite do it. I ask how much he weighs now; he says "about 215, maybe a scream over." I know he's heavier. Later on, before I move inside, I see him about to kiss my mom, although I know they are divorced. I think "Is it really that easy? Is that what I couldn't do?"

I go back inside. I'm going to take a shower. I'm naked. Two of my coworkers are there. "Oh, you seem to have lost your towel...." "I know." It's alright. Towel back on. Sonny says "I can't tell you how I feel anymore...." And this is SO cute that it makes me incredibly happy. I wake up feeling joyful.

Lots of psychological shit in that last dream. It's also really vivid because it happened about an hour ago. I've only meditated and showered before writing it down. My parents and my family are always in flux and I feel like they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Why not have a little backbone and stick to what you want to do? If you feel something, go ahead with it. Otherwise, why did you get divorced in the first place?!? Alas, it's a really complicated situation. The wetness could be my sexuality, which I also know nothing about. Childhood, growth, developing strength, showing off. But what do I have to look forward to? A convoluted adulthood? Damn, dude

1. marie
2. 007
3. eagle
4. speedboat, apocalypse

I don't remember dreaming until maybe 5 in the morning, when I found myself in a library, looking for a book. It was a book that Marie had written. I was in a car at some point, doing a drive-thru kind of thing in a book store, and asked somebody if they knew of the book I wanted. They did; we went around for a whole other rotation. I find that in addition to that book she had written a guide or agenda book for a school. There was her name, right at the top in the front page. I go to buy the other book, which is in the same section as a Diana Gabaldon book, but it costs too much. I'll just buy it at the library.

I wake up really pissed off. I can only interpret this is seeing the need to "study up" to a relationship, and subjugate myself to a course of study before I can get to know someone. Really tilting concept.

2. Back to sleep, and this one was really clear. It started with a raid on a house. I'm 007 (roughly), and I need to fight against a shaking force that vibrates the whole house and makes lots of noise. This is a weapon; it's blackish brown and changes shape depending on the will of the person wielding it. But it's evil; I can feel it preying on my aggression. I get the feeling that it will consume anyone who uses it, kind of like Venom in spiderman. It makes me hate another member of my crew, and I bully him and beat him up a little bit. Once we beat all the bad guys in the house, and it's clearly time to leave, I backtrack up to the upstairs of the house to try and find it, to see if I can. The vibrating grows bigger and bigger as I approach, and I'm about to open the drawer that it might be in when I decide against it. Back outside.

We end up on a road, running away from amorphous "bad guys" and creatures. Lots of cool chase-scene kind of imagery. There is wildlife and vegetation suffused throughout this road. No cars; I think we were on a motorcycle for most of the time. We get to the end after being chased by a crazy sasquatch, and the moped goes over, but I catch the edge (and the bike too, somehow) and pull myself back up. We gradually make our way back to the middle of the road, where there are more people gathered. This is the safest part. I have reached a new understanding about my role in the dream. I uncover a pillow underneath some sand in the road, and there is lots of FOOD underneath! This is a safe spot, with hidden love. There's almond milk and a bunch of other stuff. I start becoming more aware in my dream, and I reunite with my family. We snuggle up together and watch the beach at night. This is what I wanted.

But this peace doesn't last for long! Soon a gigantic eagle comes out of the sky and begins to chase us. I run ahead of my mom, sister, and dad, doing parkour moves on top of the rooftops, pullups, climbing around, you name it. I'm one of the fittest humans, so I can definitely make this eagle break a sweat. I go higher and higher on the rooftops; the setting becomes almost like an Italian villa, with vines growing everywhere and cobbled streets down below. I'm so caught up in the chase, though, that I stop and notice something. There's a villager walking down below with a hat on. He looks up at the fearsome eagle, nonchalantly, and as it swoops on him he simply averts his gaze back down to the floor and covers his head with the hat. The eagle swoops away. WOW, SO IT'S THAT EASY.... The dream fades.

4. I'm drinking around an ocean-based town (miami???) with my dad and some affluent people he knows. Sunny imagery. I end up saying a lot of silly stuff in the conversation, like recognizing that someone's ringtone sounds like "I HAVE A STRUCTURED SETTLEMENT, BUT I NEED CASH NOW. CALL JG WENTWORTH, 877 CASH NOW!" Noting that this dream is kind of like the beginning of Fast (and Furious) 5. The beach interactions.... I don't know. Asserting myself in a kind of odd way. We speedboat between lunch locations in the canal in the middle of the street, and I am amazed at the degree of control the driver has. We try to jump over some diners, but he pulls back at the last second, in mid-air, and we only very gently bump the side of his table. Very cool.

We get to the next dining spot, which is more indoor, a compartment on a yacht or something. My dad tries to close the door and lock it, but the other side comes undone. I look at it closely and show him that it's only velcro'd to the other side, instead of having hinges, so even though one side locks the other basically just falls off under enough force. Sorry dad, but that's as good as it's gonna get.

The dream changes markedly at this point. Not much continuity, and a whole lot of imagery which means many different things. Too much to piece into much of a solid narrative. There are lines of people indoors, one of them is a girl that I love. However, due to a zombie apocalypse or something catastrophic like that, the owner of the yacht has decided to match us in a predetermined way as to who we can mate with. I get a fat brunette girl who wears a veil over her face. Her name starts with an M. She makes a remark about listening to heavy metal, and I groan... somehow this guy has turned out a ton of blonde clone-y looking women, dying their hair to make them look more ideal (in a superficial way), and I get the odd one out. I start writing on an old computer terminal, narrating the thoughts of the dream, which are also narrated by a voice over loudspeakers. "She was heady alright: headstrsong, heartbreaking, hellish...." Something about that allusion stuck out.

More imagery of being in a classroom, in a position of authority (no narrative link this time). I take a toothbrush and oddly enough give my dick a quick brush, then walk away and finish brushing my teeth (the toothpaste is stale), spit it out, etc. I know that I'm sleeping at this point, in some way, and I tentatively agree to a "blow" with my mom (my dream mom) at a later time. LOOOOL.

Another image of being in Mrs. Fulgham's classroom, discussing different books. One is a Utopian thing set in the future, which she projects up onto the board, a visualization of the novel. In line, a family: a baby in a chair who drinks cow milk straight from the udder, an adolescent in a chair in a running position, then a heavyset dad, depressed and worn down, and a nondescript, unimportant mom. All of the chairs have been made to fit them and cater to their needs; we need to ask the question "Is this better for them?" Someone comes in to the back of the classroom. I suppose he is here to observe. This is high-quality teaching, after all.

I wake up and decide to write these all down.

it's been awhile since i woke up, so idk how much i can remember of this

last night i found myself in a position of endless searching. i was in a room, or a level of some sort, trying to collect all of the boxes. fucking crash bandicoot. it's no wonder those games appeal so much to me; i have to find EVERY box and collect it. except this need switched to my tangible human life. i was going up and down different tiers of a structure, noting all the boxes (which are now merged with possessions that i once owned) and their location, spinning through this mucky lava substance. i stepped through a teleporter, saw a box that i couldn't get, and made note of it for later. at some point later i was in my human body, searching through all of the things that i own or that i've ever owned. i was searching, searching, and i couldn't find all of the things i needed to work. Robert was waiting on me; i asked if mallory could pick up my shift. that was a possibility, but it ended up not working out. austin (my roommate) comes around and helps me sort through all the things. more prevalent images of my things being buried underground, under a bed, dirty, hidden under things. i wondered if i would have to go through all of this shit and throw it all away. maybe that's the only way out. austin starts searching for the thing that i need, the one piece that will make it so i can finally get under way. he looks and confirms that it is, indeed, well-hidden.

clutter everywhere. the dream ends with no resolution and i am still pissed off.

i recently had a prospective relationship that didn't work out, and i can't help but wonder if it was something about my attitude that stopped it. i'm too worried or OCD about piecing everything fully together. there are some things that it feels like i absolutely cannot move on without. and i'm not really sure what that thing is right now. something from the past? some emotional baggage buried deep down? a childhood that i never really felt entitled to enjoy? carefree abandon? it's driving me mad. i wonder if it's the searching that's getting in the way of finding.... continually looking for something else or something "perfect" that makes all else i achieve in life feel worthless or like a dead end, since it feels like it never measures up.

UGH. in the meantime, here i am, awake and alive, and determined to do something with myself (whatever it may be)

The challenge with this dream will be remembering how it started.

I went to see Brendan at his house. I had made an arduous trip to get down there. I showed up at his house with my stuff, my backpack, my cellphone. How's life going. Good, you know. We start playing some videogame and end up smoking weed, with the Tall Man. I'm kind of pressured into it. Of course, Brendan's dad comes in. He's furious. The other kids around the house have decided to hide; they're sticking out of little nooks and crannies like lemmings, poking their heads around corners and ducking back down again. I hide too, lying behind a blanket and underneath some a big teddy bear. It doesn't work though. His dad pokes me on the head, gets me up, and starts to yell. You have to go. Are you kidding me? There's apparently a zero-drug policy in the house. Lame. It figures that the only time I've smoked weed in several months this would happen. I gather up some of my stuff and walk out.

I go to his dad's house, where there are more kids. I've left my phone and some other things over there. Can I go back to get them? Nope. He won't let me. Fuck, then I guess I'll go back home and have Brendan mail me my phone, and just not have it for two weeks.

There are brief intervals of blankness. A recurring image where I try to make a climb up the side of the house, grabbing onto rafters even though my fingers have rips on them, getting up to a higher rafter and throwing a heel over to pull up on to the roof. The house has turned into Jon/Greg's house. It is constantly under repair. As soon as I get onto the roof, they join me up there. Greg seems careless, bouncing around on creaky planks of wood. Watch out dude, that doesn't seem safe. Just weeks ago, Jon says, his cat fell through the roof and fell all the way into the "sauna." He's hurt now. The sauna is this layer of (lair in) the basement, I will soon find out.

I crash through the roof, and there's a hole in the ground that goes through several floors. It was way more than just the roof and the floor below. I fall and feel myself getting hurt, smashing around on the edges of the pit as it goes deeper and deeper, through 5 floors of the house, getting more and more janky, repairman status, with unpolished wood sticking around everywhere. Sawdusty, carpentry. Whoa, what the hell is this. I warp back up to the roof (cuz I don't wanna die); I have to go in for a cleaner ascent to check it out.

I jump down again; Boom, one, two, three, four, five floors. It gets more chaotic. Enter the "sauna."

The sauna is really the Gauntlet, the Final Boss, hidden level of Greg's dad's design. It's the "running hell" of this whole world. I crash down on a beach. I've been here before! This landscape is unreal. There is a gigantic man telling a false story in the corner. There is a midget running around chasing you. There are big boulders flying towards you periodically, slowly. Like somebody shot them out of a cartoon cannon, but it's not hard to avoid. It's a game world. The giant man is trying to lure you in, so you get permanently stuck there, listening to him, like a siren song, or the lotus eaters. I see someone's older brother from Moorpark, a burnout in my mind. He's sitting there entranced. He has been sitting there ever since I last heard of him, I guess. I go over and see some text/dialogue, as in an RPG, and I can remember when the branches you choose in the dialogue will result in a game over, when the giant's story becomes purely fantasy, and you get caught in the falseness. I pull away and look around, at the cliffs, at the ocean. There's a sliding section of a prison wall that you can close to temporarily protect yourself from the flying boulders and the midget (who, as far as I can tell, will actually only annoy you to death if he catches you). I gain my thoughts.

I've been here before. These are challenges. I feel, at least in this moment, that this is a place I used to go to all the time in my dreams, a virtual challenge that I have mapped out, and nearly made it thru. I have different "save files" that I will find later on in the dream. It seems, for now though, that if you die then you have to start it all over from the beginning. This is something that requires perfect play.

So I start to run. I run away from the giant, the myriad of strange other creatures on the beach, from the belligerent midget. I get out of range of the boulders. I take big loping strides, bouncing over the water, but I'm also pleasantly surprised that I can run faster, faster, when I want to. There's no phenomenon of not being able to stick to the ground. I am capable; I am fast. I run past Christie from high school, who is wearing a beautiful turquoise, cream-colored or lavender dress. She looks incredible. As I run past I shout to her "Christie! You're still the best." I'm on my way now, but I can acknowledge the impact she had. She responds: "I know!! You too Joe!" "I love you!" and then I keep going. I'm not sure why she was there. Not an obstacle, definitely. Had I stayed with her I wouldn't have been caught by the midget (he's really tenacious). She is a stage of her own, I guess. But I'm not there anymore. The dream gets less vivid after this. It has almost been consummated at this point. (I used to dream of her sooooo much. She might be the most important dream symbol I have)

More water starts appearing; I have to time my steps to get over it, and see the shallow sections which I can step in without getting stuck. I'm moving. It's always a speedrun, whenever I play, whatever I do. I still feel like I'm not as intimate with this whole setting, with this game, since I haven't explored all the variables which result in me dying. But what will you do? I've got places to go. It feels like I can't really afford to tarry anymore. I have a drive now, which has been continuously pushing me forward. I found myself in this arena by circumstance, and now that there's nothing to do about that, I need to get through it and get out again. I need to play.

It becomes a maze, after I finish jumping over the lakes and the course moves inside. This is definitely more Counterstrike graphics; the hallways, the doors, the angular geometry. The pathways of the labyrinth cut off at right angles, and there is a granular "stone" texture over the walls. It's sick, actually. A voice starts to narrate what I do. "After going through the labyrinth, you must escape and enter a new phase...." Vague stuff. "But not that way!!" I run into a dead end. Stupid voice. I need to backtrack to get to the other door. Luckily, I was far enough ahead of the midget that it didn't really matter. This happens two or three times. After I go through the final door, the environment changes. It's cloudy. I find myself at the end of a rock. The character that I am has transformed. More like Tomb Raider. I have to hookshot to a spot in the water. Things are getting very blurry again. I "die" when I miss and hit the water. FUCK. Well, this is lame. It brings me to the start menu, now that I am more removed from the game; there is less of MY awareness in the simulation. It's third-person now. I peruse my old save files. Where was I? How far have I gotten? This run was about halfway through the gauntlet, 40%. There's another one a little further along. After some more time spent in this realm, which is now really really foggy and indeterminate, I pull back to the real world. I talk to Greg's dad. I've seen that this is his creation; I have a flash of a gigantic server outdoors next to a house. A big clean blue electrical box, running the length of the driveway, pure processing power. This is his friend's house, and she hosts it. People all around the country come to run the gauntlet, however they get to it.

Time skews, or maybe my recollection just isn't as good. I'm back at the house, and I throw a heelhook to the RIGHT this time to get onto the roof. It's easier, after all. It's way lower than the rafter I was hooking to on the left, which left me almost upside down.

I had more dreams but I don't care to decipher them. Plus it's been nearly an hour writing this one out already. I feel like I need to WANT a lucid dream more, instead of merely remembering the intent to write them all down. But I made sure to "remember" the arc of these dreams put together, insofar as it led to the gauntlet, so that worked pretty well. But it's more about discovering myself in my dreams now, as opposed to chronicling it like a book or a movie transcript. You've gotta want it. Lucid living, baby. Let's go

not much from last night

One image stands out in particular. A climactic battle scene between myself (I was a female wizard) and someone else. Voldemort or Gandalf. A nondescript evil magician. Most of this dream was in the Adventure Time aesthetic. We had fought before. A small crooked wizard, kind of scummy and comical, a neutral party neither good nor evil, was about to fight Voldemort. I came to the rescue with my summons. The evil wizard calls upon his gigantic snake, the Basilisk. There's some serious shit about to go down. I raise all of my powers to prepare for battle. The little man (maybe the Ice King) decides suddenly that this spat has escalated too far; he's out of here. He scampers away, down the cliff, and takes off over the ocean.

I guess that's my cue to bail, too! All the conflict isn't really worth it. I take out a garbage bag, fling it up over my head to open it, and jump off the cliff, using it as a parachute on the way down. I land in the water, and make sure to take the garbage bag with me, stuffing it in a pocket or something. After all, TURTLES can't tell the difference between those and jellyfish, and they can eat them and suffocate. I'm all about that environment, ya dig?!?

I start swimming along the side of the cliff, trying to get back to the beach to safety. The water is full of magical denizens. There is another huge snake (probably a different one, of slightly lesser size) in the water, so I hop skip and jump along some cliffs to avoid it, sailing over. It could still probably jump up and strike at me if it wanted, but I do my best to avoid its attention. It's not about the conflict anymore. Back in the water, and I have to do the same thing to avoid a GIGANTIC OCTOPUS. But I do, and I make it back to the beach.

There was one other image: The dog from Adventure Time, talking about the dream. "Now that everything looks like Adventure Time, everything is funny." Check it out: A mental image of the dog transformed into an oven. The same old face with his :3 lips. He's saying "I have a boner." This is funny enough to be captioned and put on a turquoise t-shirt. LMAO

A few good dreams last night. I think I'm just going to start focusing on the most important dreams.

I was outside in a park, pretty close in appearance to the same park of the last couple nights, where I had the big slacklining dream. Buttbouncing from line to line. After awhile it doesn't really matter what's underneath, since you're gonna land anyways! I think I wrote that one down. Not sure. (Edit: guess not.) I set up my slackline between these two posts. There were rodeo setups wayyy up high, with matts TAPED to the bottom of the line. Like that would help if you fall off... couple of geniuses over here. I point this out to somebody. Damn, I'm hilarious.

This is actually a college campus. All around me there are discussions of planned parenthood and pregnancy. I feel bad for these people; one girl is trying to put a positive spin on her newfound pregnancy talking to her mom. But damn, I'm not about to get into all that. It's a foreign topic for me. I do a tiny bit of slacklining. More interesting is the scenery on the top of the hill behind me. There's a little valley full of grass, where mowers come down at top speed to shear it away. There are different kinds of birds. A truck takes off and actually catches air over the top of the hill, landing on the baseball diamond and bouncing another good six feet in the air. I wonder away from my slackline, and start to hang around these people (who may be playing hackey sack) who are having the discussion on planned parenthood. I see Truman playing tennis with DaJuan and Yvonne. Sweet! Truman asks me if I want to play winner with him. Hell yeah I do, that sounds like a lot of fun. I go up to the room to try and find him, which is successful, and it IS a lot of fun. Spikes and such.

I begin to realize, and this is the whole gist of the dream, that I can do whatever I want, so long as I do it with all of myself. That's what faith comes down to. And it's been a really weird process of finding myself. I decide to go to KoC2, which was different in my dream. I'm not entirely sure how I got there chronologically. I began by watching a livestream; a collage of livestreams, rather, since this tournament was supposed to have every single setup recorded with a livestream and player cam. Amazing! There were so many different points of view that I could enter. It started off with Mango and Alex being piss drunk, and the ran into the glass of a restaurant and broke it to make their appearance. Two separate times! Mango first, then Alex. Other images from the tournament: Darrell playing on Kongo Jungle, during a game, with all his heart and soul. He was trying desperately to climb up from the edge, with his actual body, as he did it in the game. Pretty intense! I remember thinking that it might be better for him if he cooled off. Just as I thought that, Zori came up behind him and he turned around and gave her a smooch on the cheek. Heartwarming . He didn't take it that seriously after all. Also during that tournament I played a poker tournament with Arian vs two other good players. We were expected to lose. Isn't that funny? Winning and losing is an attitude to me, not necessarily dictated by skill in a particular field. Arian is supposedly good at poker. We have a shared pot; he goes in on a pair of two 5s even before we see the flop. I don't bet anything, so his 5 thousand dollars is in, but mine's not. We go through the motions and they have a pair with a higher kicker, so we lose. The crowd leaves. But wait, I still have all MY money. Oh well, fuck it. I play a few uninspired hands and then give up in despair and frustration. It was a losing battle anyways.

I start walking around the tournament. It's really hot, and there's a gigantic pool with sticky stuff on top of it, almost like it congealed into the top of a running track. I say "watch this" and I try to run across the whole thing. I make it! Sweet. Lots of tomfoolery like this. Afterwards I start walking around. I have to take a shit. (This happens so often LOL.) There's a strange public bathroom which I have to learn how it works. Folding plastic toilet compartments and everything. I try to figure out something to sit on so I can drop a load, something that isn't dirty and covered in piss. There's a condom station within the plastic apparatus, which unfolds and I rotate it like a rolodex. There are slots for tampons and other stuff too. Super strange. I keep struggling; someone shows me a way to do it. I keep trying. Then I wake up.

As I was walking around the tournament I had a chance of becoming lucid, but it felt like i actually turned it down because I didn't want to risk waking up. I'm gonna wake up earlier and earlier so this doesn't happen again, so I'm not worried about waking up.

Also another dream that came to me from early in the night: in the climax of a book or movie, I'm in a dark environment. Adam and I are trying to sneak into the core of this huge technological thing, Contact style, and he transforms into a silver liquid being. Someone tries to lay down with a black disc on their chest to fool the security camera which is looking at the center; he plans on springing up to vault the other person over the edge to their death. I can't really believe they would go to such lengths, commit such TREACHERY. Also, a brief image again of showing Bobby Scar all my 100% super hard completion Crash Bandicoot files. He ends up starting a new game of Zelda on "Master" difficulty. All these Master Extreme ++ difficulty levels again.

So the dogs kept me up last night, which sucks, but I ended up having a good amount of dreams later on in the morning. Lots that I remembered, lots of imagery. The first two are more minor notes: in one dream we each had to pick a song to sing in front of the class, for a school project. Lots of people went ahead of me. I got an extra day to pick my song, "Prototype" by Outkast, and practice it, but I ended up slacking off anyways. The person who sang their song the best got to have a sing-off with the headmaster of the school, who was really good. (It was a musical school.) I end up singing, and it's pretty good. Not remarkable though.

The other dream involved staying up super late, and the fucking dogs making it impossible to get to sleep. I end up watching something on my phone, and Michelle comes downstairs. "Oh are you watching that too?" She was upstairs watching the same program on TV. Austin bites the bullet, and says that even though he can't get THAT much sleep, it doesn't really matter as long as we're in bed by 2:15 AM. That's his minimum sleep requirement before work.

The other dreams were cooler and more in-depth, involving movement and traversing imaginary landscapes. The first involved me driving back home with my friend Steven to Moorpark; we took a craaaazy back road which went up and down at insanely sharp angles and twisted all over the place. It was overgrown, more of a path in the mountainside than anything. A bicyclist was going behind us, and we almost hit him, but it didn't really matter since our car had broken apart at this point. It was basically two planks of wood strapped together, with wheels. I'm not even really sure how it moved, or how we controlled it. After a thrilling finale, we get back to the house; it dumps us back in my old living room. I owe him some stuff, since I think it's his car that was broken on the drive back home. I start hauling my old couch back over to his house. That should be ok, right?

At some point during the dream we are going over old videogames. This is a really big dream sign for me; old games usually represent the past, and the fun I had as a different kind of person. My childhood, more or less. We look over the different menu options for Super Smash Bros for n64, finding all the hidden "New Game +" options, and extra extra hard modes. I even remark on it, "Man, I'm always dreaming when this kind of stuff happens. I love it." Part of me always wishes there was more of a game to play, whole different modes of the game, more characters, everything. It was the worst with SSBM; I had a really memorable dream one night where I went through several different versions of the game, all with extra stuff.

Back at his house, we start to cook some steak. My mom is there. She's acting kind of strange, as per usual---confrontational and playful at the same time. She's standing over me; I realize I can look up her skirt, but wait, it's my mom. I do anyways (not to sound like a creeper but I wasn't even too sure of the person's identity in the dream), and she's wearing shorts underneath anyways made out of the same dark blue cloth. Crisis averted on that one. We have a toaster oven/refrigerator with different shelves which is doing the job. I throw in another part of the steak, and soon after it begins burning. What the hell?? There's smoke coming out of the fridge, so I open it up only to find that the last one I put on there I put in the ice rack of the fridge. (You know how some shitty small refrigerators have just a shelf that frosts over instead of a separate compartment for the freezer?) So I take it off, put it on one of the other shelves, and soon it's done. We take the steak out and begin to eat, and my dad is there too. It's underdone, though. "Should have put it in the BROILER" I suggest to my mom. She doesn't want to hear it. "It would have been nice and CRISPY if you had BROILED IT." My dad agrees. Fucking women, always going and ruining things

The main dream was really convoluted, lots of plot twists, and throughout the duration of it I was Arnold Schwarzenegger or Goku. As Goku, I've been training left and right. My main training place is this building by a "funhouse" in a fair. Kind of seedy location, but whatever. There's a master who lives there who I train under. I am infuriated at FRIEZA, my sworn enemy. He is at the dojo, and he initiates his final transformation. It's fast (this is DBZ Kai version, where they don't string it out with filler), and after an explanation of how he was forced to do this, and lots of swirly red flames, he becomes the small babylike version. Promptly, I charge my spirit bomb and blast him with it. There are no more flames, no more debris. We are merely slinking around the house at this point, pretending not to see each other. Bulma and Master Roshi, who are accustomed to the sight of Frieza, act as intermediaries. Eventually I leave to go on a drive with my dad, and this is where the dream really picks up. We're in his prius, (not a shitty wooden car) and we start driving away from the fair. We're about to go into the water; but this is OK. I have faith that we will drive on top of it. And we do! We make it across the ocean to Mexico, which is a densely populated place on the beach in my imagination. After a brief stay there, looking at all the RIDES and BOOTHS (everything is a fair to me), we head back. I am nearly superpowered at this point. We drive back towards the water, with the windows down, but the car begins to sink. Oh well, watch this. I roll the windows back up, thinking we'll just through the water instead of over it. It doesn't quite work out that way. I end up throwing the car to safety, or it rolls away back to land on its own, and I bounce along the water the rest of the way. At this point, I am more mad than ever at Frieza. He (or another malicious being of his sort) is surely behind all this. There is a voice in my mind, as I jump and run along the street next to the water. "At this rate, he might as well be flying." So I do; in a powerful surge of energy, the momentum I have from jumping simply ramps up and starts to carry me along the sky. Once I get to the warehouse, there are TRAPS LAID for me. They are poisoned, too. Dogs come in and start to bite me; I have to shoo them off. My friends come in with first aid supplies. I pull a huge glass fang out of my shoulder. Ouch. After this, we plan our daring escape in a very cinematic fashion. Taking the advice of Arnold, we make a break for it in a boat, through the river, making it back out to the ocean (or to the other safe spot). There are boogey-boarders, carnivalgoers, piranha-like fish that we must triumph over. And we do. Everything goes perfectly according to plan. Can you tell I'm sick of writing yet?

I took a two hour (maybe a bit less) nap just now. Early this morning I had pretty decent dreams, but I had to go to the grocery store before work so I didn't get a chance to write them down, so I forgot them. I find that JUST upon waking up, the shock of the real world is so overwhelming that it feels like I didn't have any dreams at all, which is disappointing. Later on, maybe fifteen minutes later or so, I'll remember a little bit better. But they only start to come together as my conscious mind pieces them together in a story. My awareness WHILE dreaming isn't very good yet, and the narratives don't seem apparent while I'm dreaming. *shrug* suppose it's just a matter of consistency.

So I was at Peet's again. This one was on a hill. (It's interesting that the stores in my dream are never the store here in Alameda.) I was bar closing, making drinks, having a fun time. Chatting with customers and whatnot. One customer comes in, I make his drink, and my boss (maybe Nahal) says that I should go back with him. As I'm getting more into the job, I learn more about the customers I suppose. His shop/store/whatever he does lies down the road. We walk down there, and he says "Normally, now is when we vape." As in, smoke weed, which I don't do, so this doesn't apply to me. He goes on to talk about how nice and big the store is, with high ceilings, and how it's easy to live in the space. This place transitions into something else, a different kind of store (super vague on the purpose here), which ends up being a sort of language school. THere's a man pointing at the board and speaking in spanish, but he keeps saying "Float! Float!" as in, float on to the next letter, or float on to the next part of the word, to his student. Apparently they teach foreign languages to CIA operatives for drug stings, or something of the sort. The guy I talked to, who brought me to his "store" front, starts going crazy. Randy is there. Music is playing in the background; this is the onset of divine inspiration. He begins to sing loudly to the soundtrack of the spanish tape, very intensely, even skipping up major thirds and octaves and harmonizing with it in different ways. I wonder if this is inappropriate, but Randy (the curator of such events, I guess) simply holds out his hands. We all join hands to support him. It's a very interesting experience. After this, I leave. There's a front gate (which I see now, as it's a more top-secret kind of operation), but a car hits the button to open/close it right before I get a chance to leave again. This closes the gate for me; I decide to jump over the side, over the fence. Someone shouts something out of the car. I guess it wasn't cool, and was violating the sanctity of the place, but after all I had to get back to work.

When I return, the first thing I see is beer. Interesting! There is a peet's meeting with all the higher-up executives. They're going through a demonstration on the effects of pot on the coffee selling process. Long story short: stoned people are good for business. I make my way to the front of the entryway to get a glimpse in---there's a circle of executives---and I follow suit and grab a beer. Mine fizzes all over the place, soaking one of the higher ups I know. "Thanks, Joe!" I joke with him. But it's ok. He blows into his shirt and puffs it up, drying it from the inside. "Like the movies---all you have to do is blow!" I relax out to the side, stretching out in the space. They speak of the intricate relationship between weed and coffee. Once someone went in to go for 20 cups of coffee; apparently the experience was like reaching a "new level of sobriety." Interesting. Apparently pot and coffee and antithetical, and for that reason they complement each other super nicely. I stretch out again and begin to fall asleep. I notice that another one of the employees has snuck a bottle of cheap vodka by my side, which I have kind of adopted. This might not be chill with the higher ups, but oh well. They laugh. Everybody laughs. I can't help but feeling like i'm the butt of the joke in some ways, but it's not something I mind particularly much.

Analysis: weird commentary on my life situation. I probably drink too much coffee. I'm at a very odd place in regards to my job, I guess, although I enjoy it most of the time. It's interesting to exist in this kind of in-between space with the customers, but it's not something that I want to become integrated into part of my personality. That's why I hate the nickname "Java Joe" SOOOO much. Feelings of skepticism towards certain things, and a strange type of acceptance in the workplace, paradoxically paired with a strange tension, a belief that says this isn't the "real" me.

Pretty good narrative in last night's dreams. I can remember an abrupt shift in continuity, which normally I wouldn't have remembered and it would've been split up into two dreams.

First was another Peet's dream. Pretty unrelated to any others, this might've been before I woke up to go to the bathroom and went back to sleep. We had a shitload of new pastries. I could not remember the names of any of them, for the life of me. We had a lot of new promotional materials, new menus which folded up, with different pamphlets inside, which were touchscreen and I could control by pinching and zooming around with my phone. "I really hate these things," I thought. A customer came up to ask me what "this one" was. I believe it's a cranberry walnut scone. I sold him 2, but tried to find the name of the second one, since I thought they looked different. I went searching through the menu. There were pictures of Peet's employees (home office? some promotional thing? i don't know) in risque poses, girls showing their boobs, but nothing hardcore. They're really getting desperate, I guess. Maya ends up coming in to sort things out. "This is an iron-faced scone." I guess it has a lot of iron? wtf? So those would have to be voided, whatever. My dad and grandpa and other members of my family started to arrive. It's always a really interesting feeling when they visit me at work. We started to eat, I got my grandpa some kind of coffee, there was a scrounge for food. This is where the dream fades. Vague impressions of selflessness, which could lead on to the next one.

I began working at a park, Franklin Park. I was doing the most selfless job of all time, hosting a fair kind of thing for kids to play in. My whole LIFE was about these kids, I swear. I lived in a tent on the field. This was my doing, and it felt pretty good. Ping-pong was happening, frisbee, air hockey, and yet I kept enough space between everything and monitored the energy levels to make sure that everybody could enjoy the park to the fullest. No air hockey pucks went flying off to smack somebody, not on MY watch. I had to chase one kid out of the park for being a dick and picking a fight. I walked up to him and chased him off. After he went through the front gates of the park I jumped highhh in the air, intimidating. "Damn Joe, you can levitate now??" Not really, but it was such a sick jump that it was almost like I could. (Levitating is one of my hallmark dream powers.)

I went back to my tent, but as the day was getting darker the people in the park started to get older. Bigger kids, shady people. They ended up stealing some of the stuff out of my tent. I went to chase after them; one of them was something like a brother to me. He took off in a van, and I ran after him. WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING? He was ruining my altruistic gig here! I caught up to him in an alley way. During the chase, my emotions had gradually escalated towards violence, and I hurled insults at him and might have tried to hit him through the van window. I jumped in the air again, in hot pursuit, and he SHOT me. I was stunned; that was uncalled for! But I wasn't hurt. He apologized and I got in the van. It's time to learn guns, to learn violence. He gave me a tiny gun. "See if you can shoot this .22, five rounds." It was more like a BB gun than anything. Miniscule. It must have been even smaller than my hand as I held it. We graduated on to bigger guns; he had a big collection in the van. I came back to the family eating place (from earlier on in the night), acting sly. I had broken the good-natured identity I presented at the park, but I didn't want to show it. Yet there were guns.

The scenery changed. There's a gap in continuity here. Me and my brother started chasing another pair of brothers through a "level" of some sort. Strains of Crash Bandicoot began to shine through the dream. We finally confronted them in a futuristic-looking room; they climbed into this tank-like object in the center and we began the "boss battle." A thought came to me: this is how the "Nitrous Brothers" were formed. They would be a boss in a later game. After the battle, they were immobilized. I got the feeling that the game was telling me to leave the area, like they were knocked out and it was time to move on, but I didn't want to be responsible for letting them become an evil menace in the future. I climbed around the towering, swiveling tank thing in the middle, and grabbed different chemicals out of indentations in the side. Bleach, ammonia. I poured them in the hole in the top, but it didn't cause a big enough chemical reaction to kill them. Eventually I moved on.

Walking down a hallway, I decided to do extra exploring, and peeked inside of a bathroom. Of course I went inside the girl's bathroom, too, and this is where shit got crazy. There were a ton of easter eggs, places where a different reality emerged. All of the sudden I stumbled upon a tree, or a hole in the ground, and then the transition happened immediately. I WAS crash bandicoot. I bounced along the canopy of this tree, avoiding "holes" where there was no substance in the texture of the game which would take my lives. This was extremely sudden, but I've learned (I guess??) that when you're playing crash bandicoot and a portal to an extra world opens up, you roll with it! So I abandoned the rest of the level, the one of bathrooms with tile and human identities. I bounced along the canopy and made it to the end, where I was warped to an entirely different world.

There were cliffs along the side of this very narrow canyon, with terraced vegetation. I could walk along these parts. ("I" was fully marsupial at this point.) I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had the death spin from Crash 3. It had a different trajectory, but it was cool as hell. I could roll with it. I spun to a tiny cave in the wall of the cliff and collected crystals. Sooo many crystals. There were 3 or so on each level as I jumped down towards the floor, for a total of 5 or 6. Near the bottom there were allll these crystals and gems, although they weren't shining or floating, sticking out of the wall, like they needed to be excavated. The dirt was soft. I spun away at it, or dug away at it with an indistinct tool, and all the crystals and gems fell to the ground. Yet I couldn't collect them; they were still inanimate objects, things not of import to my quest. I checked a strategy guide. They said to do what I had done, to get the extra gems (some were bigger than others, and all of different colors, worth more than one! One was 45 or something). But they weren't animated still. I found on one crystal an "on" switch; once I hit it, it began to vibrate, and the energy that it exuded revived the other gems and crystals. They all came alive, and I watched them with fascination. They had different personalities. One was blue, with a mangled end, and as it started to move I realized that it was actually a mouth! I fed it a few minor gems/crystals, hoping to increase its value but save the important ones. I didn't want it to grow into a monster, either. It was very slow. Some enormous ones splintered up, others merged. After this whole process was done, I managed to "snatch" the crystals (with that beautiful nostalgic sound effect). As I was waiting for them to come up into my inventory, Crash snuck away. (We were two now.) Like a cat, he jumped up into the rocks and tried to hold on. Once he missed, and landed, but the second time he jumped up too high, grabbing on to holds at the very end of his wingspan. Someone else came along (a climber?) and make a quip. "I hope he doesn't try to...." Eventually we went down to the mouth of the canyon, going underground, to the next level, and the dream ended.

Analysis: The most interesting part is probably that I brought about this weird reality by the means of violence. There are opportunities in day to day life to express myself nobly, and try to be super altruistic for the greater good, but the happenings of this dream seem to indicate that it is superficial and shallow, and won't last. Also, I love Crash Bandicoot, and all the imagery that I get from it. I'm GOOD at problem solving in these strange, virtual worlds. It feels good. I don't know, I like it. Strange things might happen, but I'm usually OK, and can exercise my will in different settings, depending on the environment.

More dreams about Alex "The Kid" Mason. A couple times during the night we set up a slackline in the sky, from two crazy points, and I vaguely remember him and another kid friend casing a hill, thinking they could set it up on a slant for extra power, or something like that. 3 to 1 advantage... doesn't make much sense.

There was a dream with a lot of my family. Austin and his family came back; they ended up not being able to fly IN to canada; it cost 1 million dollars to fly into "york" (vs. New York), so they said forget about it. We (all) met up back on a dock/boat kind of thing. I have recollections after talking to them that there was a dolphin or pod of dolphins sliding through the water. They don't usually come that close. At one point I lost a gatorade over the edge of the dock--it was bendable and sloshed down into the water, like it was made of plastic. I dove for the gatorade and got submerged in the water. I was a hero LOL. Somebody pulled me back in.

A brief intermediary stage where everybody gathered up their belongings. I looked at some shit-stained boxers; they weren't mine. After getting everything together, I see that there's a haunted house!!! I open up three or four pairs of sliding doors, pushing them to either side of me, and show my excitement to everyone. "Hey, guys! Everyone. Hey! Let's go in this haunted house!" This domain was really mine alone. I traversed the haunted house with ease this time. I got sucked in to an electric camera, like one of those old-school ones with an elongated rectangular barrel; there was a scream (something like "death!" and I was suctioned in. I came to in a dark pond, where I read (!) that there were electric eels in the water. Ok. I moved out of there fast enough, and found myself walking along train-tracks in the next room. The light had started to return. It seemed almost like twilight streaming through the windows. Three tiers of train tracks. I have to get to one side, but a train is coming. There's mayyybe enough space on the side to stand in while the train passes by, but I decide not to risk it and jump up to the piping running along the ceiling. Some acrobatic shit. After the train passes by I drop down another level for funsies, and when the next train comes I hang on to the very side of the bottom of the tracks with one arm while it passes. This is fun as hell. I get up again and I'm bounding, jumping and running, parkour status, through the rest of the setting. I jump along bleachers and benches. I come again back to the docks; I've found my way. (There are a plethora of different shops and what not on these "docks"; they're just all floating.) I enter via the gym, where my dad is simultaneously working out and drinking a beer. Interesting. I talk about how beer is just empty carbs, etc etc, but I suppose it's better to have the carbs to hit your necessary calorie mark than having NOTHING. Someone quips in the gym about beer. Whatever. We meet back up with the other people---a brief memory here about running along the tops of gigantic crates packed with packaged food, trying to find something "the way mom made it." I'm waiting for everybody else to be ready to go, and so I ask if I can do the haunted house ooooooone more time.... please? Oh, I suppose. I go in again, but this time it's dark. I try to feel around for a bit---I want to try for a different path through---but the imagery is not there. I return to my body a little bit, in that shaking sensation that truncates dreams. It's dark, and I'm just asleep in my bed.

Another one (the main one) involving Alex. We are walking around, I have to meet up with my dad. We're going to cook dinner at some point. We go to
Alex's house, where he lives in the loft overlooking this big open area. I climb up and meet his tiny cat and his tiny lemur-like pet. A "Lemurian" I call it; maybe an aye-aye. The one with the huge eyeballs. He's very friendly, and almost starts quarrelling with the cat for my affection. I end up eating a lot of Alex's food; I'm hungry, after all. His salad and something else. We're going to go to the movies at some point. Toph and my dad and some others must meet up. I get a text from toph, he's dropping off food at brendan's girlfriend's house. (Indistinct character.) So he'll make it later. Dinner never really materializes, although we do go to the movies. This is where the dreams gets pretty vivid. We watch the trailers; there's some film where a family decides to get in a ferris wheel, spinning forwards (like they're attached like a rocket, in a carriage that doesn't swivel around, so they're right-side-up sitting on top of the wheel. They dive downwards.) Maybe it's Ben Stiller. His hair is crazy. The ferris wheel starts spinning as the trailer zooms out; it time-lapses. Maybe he's trying to counteract the spin of the earth and mess with time travel. I don't know. There's another trailer with a very similar premise. My logical mind surmises that maybe it's independent invention after "Looper" came out and the prominent symbol of circularity, the ferris wheel. This next one is more high-tech of a setting though, more sterile whites and black plastic, like Portal. Turns out this is the movie we're seeing. "Aww man, but this looks LAME." The next image I remember, after meeting everybody and becoming acquainted with them (they're all like family members in the film, who i've known for awhile), is a big DOT coming down the aisles. We're seated along different seats in this big ringlike coliseum. It flashes on and off, like pixels, like blocks falling in a game. Except it's a backpack. It goes down one column of "pixels," comes back up again, and moves one over. We have to avoid this. But it's just a backpack. After we duck under it, I show them that there's really just not that much depth to it, and we can simply move to the side. The wonder of 3 dimensions vs. 2. Soon after this, I grab the backpack and start describing it. This has been a backpack sent back from the future. Soon after I begin to discover mysterious backpacks and bags everywhere, relics from the future. (Or, from the past, as the setting begins to wither. I'm noticing details, and the place looks derelict and abandoned.) One is "eric's." More people start to appear. While we are pow-wowed and sitting around trying to decipher what's happening, I grab a tree. I can do a short front lever. I show Alex. He is unimpressed LOL. Another one of them is Mike Hughes. "There's a lot of places to live in this place, maybe twenty. I ask "where do we shit in this place?" There's a bucket underneath this one awning, down by the middle of the bleachers. It's sawdusty down there. This is the bucket. Be sure to cover it back up again with sawdust. OK.

As I sit down to piss, I remember how much I hate the feeling of being unsure whether or not it's OK to piss or not, since I may be dreaming. There's always one way to find out for sure, which is to wake up and pee. The end.

Analysis: As I feel increasingly alienated in my day to day life, I think this shows up in different symbols in my dreams. I'm trying to piece a lot of things together with others, or be inclusive even when it comes to weird stuff. By highlighting my differences--I'm the only one who knows certain things, like in the case of the haunted house or the backpack--I'm able to contribute different things to different people. That (paradoxically) might be the best way to gain inclusivity. Also of note is the importance I place on my own physicality. Won't be giving that up any time soon.

I haven't journalled my dreams in quite awhile, but this one was vivid enough that I thought it warranted logging. I'll try to list off some of my desires for the time being and then relate them to the events in my dream.

I went highlining yesterday, it was fantastic. I realized that you're ALWAYS "doing it"; it's false to think that, as soon as you get up on the line, "now's the time" to start doing what you need to do. There's no difference between walking, between falling, balancing or correcting; for that matter, there's no difference between rigging, waiting your turn, driving out, setting up, or meeting who you need to meet to do what you need to do. It's all part of the process. There's no real distinction between preparation and the act itself---it's all part of the process.

I slept rather poorly from being so beat up and exhausted, plus the outdoors triggered my allergies really badly so I couldn't breathe well during the night. I woke back up at 6am, took a sudafed, and fell back asleep until noon. After waking up and getting a burrito, I came back home and fell asleep again, for another two and a half hour nap. The nap was when I had this dream.

I was at Peet's, doing a bar close, and Robert was the shift lead. People came up to the line, ordering drink after drink, and although I was able to entertain them, the grinder wasn't working, so it was impossible for me to get them what they wanted. First it ran out of beans, then I tried to refill them but I put the hoppers on backwards, and it was just a huge mess. I had an idea of how to make them, but it just never came together. I was able enough to talk to the people waiting in the bench, but eventually they left in impatience. I was distracted, although I can't really remember by what at this point. (Should've written this down earlier!) Vivid images: people waiting in the back of house, (william?) I think Sonny was there, and I was at Franklin park at some point in the dream. I found it really hard to focus. Maybe this is indicative of knowing the things I "should" do, but I prefer a life of distraction. Or I haven't reached a level of lucidity where I'm able to fully discern the important things, and keep focus.

My surroundings are places where I do not especially want to be, but they are adequate. I recall feeling a level of timorousness at Peet's, and I was afraid of the consequences of being inadequate at my job. Eventually I asked Robert for help, but it was too late, and he was mad. He is definitely more accommodating in real life, but I was afraid of him in the dream. The strangest part is that I know I'm good at my job, yet I still have this fear.

I slept SO LONG, and I have so much energy right now. I can't help but feel like I should have done better in some way. I just keep having the image of the line, right below the sun, and taking one step at a time, one at a time. You're always doing it. So applying this lesson to a bigger context: I'm not in "downtime" right now, I'm doing it. I'm doing it.

12-17

Last night's dreams involved a lot of emotional vulnerability. The first dream started out with me at Peet's; I was doing a cross between a literature assignment and closing the store. Ashley Cordero was there; I had to interview her, asking certain questions. I was worried about not getting finished, then packed up and left it for the next day. I vaguely remember looking at a map of New York, analyzing the sections and who lives there. This is just a fragment really, I can't recall the rest of it.

The next dream involved chasing someone around the UCSC campus. We had been tasked with looking after a child, and we let them get away. Two perpetrators came and took the child, or mentally handicapped person, and made a gun gesture from super far away. Me and my posse had to get on after them. We went outside of the enclosure, and I looked to the right and saw the "ramp up to heaven," which was a cool trail that led up into another dream setting, but now wasn't the time to do that, for we had a baby to rescue! I turned back around and went to the Kresge parking garage. I saw one of the perpetrators, who was taking flights of stairs up to the next level; I realized I could climb on the outside of the structure, stepping on top of the tops of the rails for each level like a ladder. This way, I was able to head him off, and I cornered him while my friends came up behind. There was an "aha!" moment of confrontation. Then, I look behind me, after hearing a loud banging noise, and I see people trying to do flips onto a ledge. Another guy tries to go, attempting a gainer, but fails and hits his shin from underrotating, laughing. The same banging noise occurs. I get a good look at everyone standing around in the circle, and realize this is the parkour club. Becky was there, and I look at her and say "I didn't realize you had heterochromia!" One of her eyes was pale green, the other blue, like my grandma. I knew that this was my "in," since I knew the proper name for the term. She opened up, and we had a brief discussion again. Then the dream faded.

Another dream involved repeatedly going to a smashfest and losing my temper. The setting was extremely dark, all around, and the home I had to go back to was a dirty backyard, with wet piles of shit everywhere, and tarp and poles stuck into the wet ground. I went back and forth, each time dealing with different emotions and becoming beside-myself angry. I rode away (on a bike?) one time, but fist-pounded Boback, so I knew he was in solidarity with me, or at least understood/forgave my behavior. This one was really early on in the night, so I don't remember that much of it. I would recount the different reasons that made me angry if I had better recollection.

The most vivid dream, possibly because it happened very recently, involved working at a Peet's across the street from a big 24 hour fitness/gymnasium/haircutting complex, complete with gymnastics, rings, etc. Except I was working more at this sort of stage, learning how to do specific tasks. I go back into the gym complex, and talk to one of the guys at the front desk about getting a haircut. I've wanted a haircut for a long time, and although the last one was thirty dollars, and I was salty about that, I figured that it was time anyways. So the guy directs me to a seat, hands me a bottle of mousse, and then I rub it into my hair. He goes back to the front desk. After awhile, I go back, give him back the bottle, and ask if he's about to cut my hair. He says sure, let me just ring you up first. The haircut is $79.95. I flipped the fuck out! I was so mad! "Are you fucking kidding me?! What the fuck are you trying to pull here? I can't pay this!!" I was broke; I had thirty five dollars to pay for another one, expecting that it would just be a small amount. I storm away. Jonathan Hernandez is there, and he consoles me a little bit. He says that I should indeed just pay for the haircut; the barber does fantastic work! Look at this guy; watch. He goes up to someone working on a strange calf press machine, giving me eyes and subtly pointing at his hair, which is bangs done with a little gel, and says "OK, do this one really fast." Jonathan is in a position of authority, of course. He gets down on his knees to spot the guys legs, which start bobbing up and down with increased speed. "Great job." We walk away, and he says "See that?" He starts to console me, and gives me a 100$ Peet's card (later I would look at it and see that it says "Matt" as the name), and says to go and get it done. I can't though, I can't accept it.

I walk back across the street to my living quarters/the Peet's training facility. The next time we have a training/work get-together, I enter the auditorium, and everyone pulls out alcohol and starts drinking. I can't remember if I partook or not, but that's really irrelevant. It was interesting to see the structured environment of work disappear, and crumble into a mess of irresponsibility and despair. I went back to my room, inconsolable. I'm sulking around in a bathrobe, dirty, and I heard that my mom was coming around. Muffled voices. "You know how he is, he's in his room." I get ready, standing there in the threshold, and the steps stop. My mom comes in, and I give her a big hug.

Analysis:
A lof of these dreams deal with feelings of being trapped, panicked, inadequate, or angry or beside myself. There are examples around, which it seems like I might follow, but nothing that really satisfies me. I had a good deal of trouble falling asleep last night, but the thought that eventually did it was to really feel my own feelings. You ARE your emotions. Own them; they are your experience. So I let up on my defenses, which I think was a good thing, yet I felt very vulnerable in all my dreams.

I am taking the paranoia and unease in my life, which previously manifested in trying to find a concrete set of rules to live by, and converting it into an unshakable, absolute confidence in myself.