Dream Journal

After my last piece, and the dream I just woke up from, I decided these are often absurdly detailed enough to start keeping them in a journal. This will be updated every time I have the detail, memory and mood to record it – a bit like Recent Changes for Starving Completionists. In a general effort to make this site more “human friendly” I’ll dispense with the long winded solipsistic introduction and jump right into it.

6/29/24 – I was traveling in a car with some friends and saw a post that the friend I’ve been calling Sugar Tea was long distance traveling with a friend called Lost. I saw a social media post from Lost that said:

“Just got in the car with Sugar Tea. Love her!”

Sugar Tea does not usually use she/her pronouns but I should probably explain that my wife and I met in the queer art milieux of Los Angeles and LaPorsha regularly uses she/her pronouns to refer to he/him friends in our personal conversations and often appends the -sha suffix to these people’s names.

The car I was riding in parked and Sugar Tea and Lost’s vehicle pulled into the parking lot quite far away on the other side of the lot. I should add that both parties were traveling quite long distances in opposite directions and the meeting was coincidental. No idea from where or to where in either case. Lost lives in Canada. For a long time Sugar Tea and I stared at each other from across the parking lot and then at an invisible signal smiled, advanced toward one another and embraced – I haven’t seen him in many years and a real life meeting would go similarly I imagine.

He was wearing a cream colored sweater with comically large shoulder pads and wavy arms similar to the recent wavy leg denim trend. He also now had one large breast in the center of his chest and although I couldn’t see this through the sweater I knew it had one perfect round pink nipple. We talked for a bit, caught up – I remember no details of our conversation.

When he went to travel on there was a moment of panic regarding locating his vehicle. They had parked at a tiny San Diego style independent burrito shop with a cartoon mouse and slice of cheese motif. This detail is quite obviously derived from a post with a similar drawing I saw last night on Joshua Ploeg’s Facebook advertising vegan grilled cheese sandwiches. He couldn’t find the car but we quickly realized that we were looking at a small sign and speaker for taking drive through orders that was counterintuitively downhill from and behind the restaurant itself.

He found the car at the real cartoon mouse and cheese burrito restaurant and they drove on. I never saw Lost although she is also my friend and I’d like to see her. The parking lot morphed into the Spring Valley Shopping Center parking lot of my childhood (and long stretches of adult life) home. A doughnut shop, something it has never had, appeared in the corner and someone handed me $13 to go get doughnuts.

This place was known for their regular glazed and old fashioned doughnuts and run by an Asian family. A very young girl was at the cash register and I ordered one of each. She entered each item as seven dollars for a total of thirteen dollars (I’m aware the math is wrong) and I was slightly taken aback by the price increase. I handed her all the cash but it had turned into $18 and she handed back the five dollar bill.

She gave me six of each kind of doughnut in two long plastic wrapped tubes but they looked like day olds and unappealing. Unexpectedly things turned into a comedic situation where everybody in this family was trying to eat all the doughnuts before I could. They would jump into the air and start chomping at the empty space like sharks and their teeth became the sharp teeth of sharks as well.

This allowed each chomping person to float in midair and fly forward ten to fifteen feet with their body extended behind them (also quite like a shark). We were in a grassy park now and this all felt very fun and playful. I was trying to run from everybody and shove all the doughnuts in my mouth so they couldn’t eat them at the same time when I fell into a swimming pool and got all my doughnuts wet. The game was called off and they took me back to the doughnut shop.

I was in a basement now looking longingly at wall coolers full of Vietnamese style Soy Milk but the extra five dollars must have blinked out of existence because I couldn’t afford to buy any. One brand came in short cans marked with the logo of White Rabbit milk candy. The prices were written on small pieces of cardboard in the loose but elegant style of shops around Oakland’s Chinatown (mostly Vietnamese) : $1.19 for the short can and $1.29 for the normal Vitasoy glass bottle.

We all looked at a chair with a fine Italian men’s suit laid out on it and the family joked about how I would always come into the shop to hide from Giovanni – my old boss from a Chicago Italian cafe. The mother laughed with her hand over her mouth and told a wholesome story that feels less wholesome in the light of day. One time Giovanni had put on a thigh high leather boot with a high heel and stomped on her eyeballs while her head was on the ground.

It had pushed her eyes into her head a bit and caused them to become bloody but she was still laughing about it and talking about how thankful she was because it caused her to see the world differently. The energy was like one of those scenes in an anime where one character suddenly expresses something about another character that they have long appreciated but never verbally acknowledged. The doughnut shop then shifted into a larger version of Giovanni’s cafe filled with adult wannabe mafia guy sons – in reality he only had a teenage mall goth daughter.

They had various pouches of exotic seeds and herbs that they were trying to swallow to get high – an activity they were trying to convince me to join them in. I declined out of fear of accidental poisoning. In my waking life my wife just started convincing me to take vitamins but I have an irrational fear of Vitamin D poisoning based on an account I read of Arctic or Antarctic explorers dying horrifically from it after eating their sled dog’s livers.

Now I was in junkie mode and had another guy with me who looked like the character Super Hans from the British sitcom Peep Show. We tried to casually climb down some other narrow wooden stairs into a different basement, figuring that as they were mafia types it would be full of drugs, but an adult son put his hand on my shoulder to stop me. Suddenly I got stuck trying to climb back up the stairs and was trying to grab onto the top to stabilize myself. Two ornate Moroccan knives rested on the top edge of the banister and a windowsill.

The scene shifted and I was sitting with Papa Giovanni in the shade on what must have been his private sheep farm (Cremaster 3 again). We were looking at a slanted wooden mechanism that applied reddle (an archaic earthen dye) to his sheep in a manner similar to how I imagine Temple Grandin’s cattle press must work. We discussed Diggory Venn, the reddleman in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, a conversation I held with Joe Preston in real life.

In the dream version of the conversation Papa Giovanni was not familiar with the character and made a rude noise at the prospect of reading Thomas Hardy. I don’t know if he read at all, the only books in the cafe were a phone book and a Bible. I suddenly wondered why we had never cooked mutton at the cafe if he had a private sheep farm. An adult daughter, different from his mall goth daughter, appeared at my side and offered an explanation:

It was her fault – when they slaughtered and dressed a truckload of sheep they had loaded them up with the intestines tied off but not removed. When butchering a carcass you tie off the intestine before removing it to prevent the contents from fouling the meat. All of the different sheep’s intestines had popped at once like a plastic shopping bag full of water balloons. Once again a more unpleasant image to my waking mind than it was to my dreaming one.

It was time to say goodbye. Me and Papa embraced fondly and he checked to make sure he still had my current telephone number. In real life we never exchanged numbers and usually parted with him making disparaging remarks about my presumed sexual orientation and Jewish heritage. I assume he’s actually dead by now.

I turned back. I’d almost forgotten my shoes – an expensive pair of Italian leather loafers. He laughed. He’d been hoping I’d forget the shoes so he might keep them but now returned them in good humor. Presumably we had the same shoe size.

*******************************************