8/23/2023 -
I'm looking at this low budget horror film that everyone's raving about and I think it's absolutely fucking terrible. I mean, it's just a guy panning his black and white camera around his back yard. In one shot you can even see the shadow of one of his friends that was supposed to be cut out of the shot. Or is that thing that's obviously just a person in the shadows supposed to be the monster or whatever? Whatever it is, it's crap.
And yet for some reason, despite me not liking this stupid movie at all, I'm now shown the creator's earlier work for context, which is supposedly an action movie. But what the hell am I even looking at here? I walk over to a cliff and realize that the cliff is made up of all these hollow black line drawing people standing on top of each other. So it's like I'm standing on top of all these pencil drawn people who are forming this white cliff, and they're all kind of yelling at one another. I do not understand what I'm looking at really or how this is supposed to be an action movie at all but this doesn't matter as I've now somehow transitioned into the classic high rise condo recurring dream scenario.
I don't truly remember a lot of what happens in this high rise sitch but whatever it is, it somehow leads me to going lucid. With this lucidity, I immediately decide I'm a super hero and start swinging around the city with the grappling hooks that extend from my arms. What's super odd about this process is that it's like a part of me understands that this would never work in the waking world and that part of me makes it only sort of work in this imaginal scenario. As much as I can shoot grappling hooks out of my arms and swing from building to building, it actually only goes smoothly some of the time. There is no ease to it and it's clunky as hell, mainly because I know this wouldn't actually work in waking life.
But I'm still having fun doing it and it leads to this ridiculously long experience where I'm traversing an astral cityscape that's being spontaneously designed by an unconscious part of me. The city is half modern and half like it's been bombed to high heaven. There are concrete older buildings that are half rubble everywhere, right in the midst of incredibly modern skyscrapers. Here are some things of note that happen during this extended sequence.
At one point I'm supposed to be meeting up with friends but they turn on me and somehow become my super villain antagonists. This initiates a battle sequence on the half rubble streets, but in the middle of it I realize that I don't give a shit or feel like fighting, so I just stop. I apathy my way out of this conflict. Like, nah, I'm dreaming and I just don't give a shit about fighting y'all. Sorry. This works.
Rather than fighting, I spend a lot of time at this bar that's on I'd say roughly the 10th floor of this old school building that's been blown in half. The bar is on the functional side and it's got a great view of the rest of the city. The most memorable sequence here is when I realize I have to get home eventually (wherever that is), but I realize I want to at least have one drink before I do. So I order a beer and am disappointed I only have time for one beer but then I realize, wait a minute, super powers. So I do the Dr. Strange thing where I keep refilling the frosty beer glass every time I finish it. This leads to an amazingly awesome and surreal experience where I'm just wandering around the bar, enjoying both the people watching and the fantastic high rise views while chugging beers.
I go outside to the porch area, which is on the side of the building that's been blown to bits. It straight up looks like a bomb hit directly by the outdoor deck area where I'm standing and I just sit there, staring, sucking down beers while enjoying what I absolutely know to be a dream environment.
I can even mildly feel the intoxicating effects of the booze but it's definitely more muted than it would be in waking life, particularly considering I'm really sucking down the limitless refill beers. Eventually I tire of this and go to the bar to return my glass before leaving but make sure to do the fun parlor trick where I keep refilling it while it sits on the counter, amusing several of the patrons.
As I leave to go outside I for some reason decide to sit on the opposite side of the table of this woman who seems to be about my age with curly shoulder length dishwater blonde hair to wait for my friends. We strike up a conversation and eventually her friends show up so we head back into the bar and I sit at a table chatting with them for quite a bit. The woman has become very flirty the more alcohol she's consumed and I'm thinking of asking for her number but it'd be awkward in front of her friends. So I wait until she heads to the bathroom and I get up with a plan of intercepting her on the way back to the table but as I'm standing up and people watching I decide:
"Nah, just let it go."
This experience extends for a very long time and the only other thing I can really remember is that at some point I ditch the friends who do eventually show up to meet me at the bar. They're sort of annoyed with me when we get back to our pad (which is an odd variation of the bar) but I'm like:
"Y'all are a couple. I was just trying to not be the third wheel."
Eventually I realize I have to go home/wake up and so my friend thinks I need a ride and I'm convinced I can just grapple my way there. My friend is concerned and doesn't think I should be doing this with all the magick beers I just drank. I'm not convinced but as I try to traverse the city with my grappling hook arm extensions, I'm remembering how this process doesn't actually work very well. I make it to right by the water in South Lake Union and understand that it's going to take quite a while to get back to Ballard. Then I wake up.
8/24/2023 -
More dream vignettes:
- I'm watching a slightly overweight black man wearing a white tank top propose to his girlfriend in their shared living room and it's weird because the girlfriend is in like another room upstairs or something. Anyway, in addition to an engagement ring, he's giving her a fancy iced out and bejeweled belt buckle which sort of looks like a Cadillac logo. This is considered very romantic.
- I'm wandering through a futuristic video game dungeon type environment with a lot of grocery store style automatic doors. I wander for a while and eventually I'm face to face with this pretty thin white woman with thick dark hair parted down the middle. She's wearing dark orange 70's style casual pants with a yellow T-shirt, standing in front of one of those inflatable red sitting balls. Her whole office is decked out in a fairly 70's style and she gets up off her red ball chair and says:
"Since I'm your attorney in an official capacity, should we really be doing this?"
I don't know what she's talking about but it either seems romantic or I want it to seem romantic because she's a total smokeshow.
- My wife has brought home a box of fancy boutique cupcakes and put them on the kitchen counter. My initial reactions to this is:
"Oh my god. I haven't had donuts or cupcakes or anything like that since I started working from home 3 years ago."
So I grab one and start walking away. Now I'm thinking that I probably should have grabbed one with more fancy frosting on it. I think about going back and swapping it out but decide against it. I've already committed.
-We have to take my car in to get repaired and the place is way up north on Aurora avenue. We get there and for whatever reason they can't get to it at the moment so we have to leave it up there. But for completely unknown reasons we decide the best place to leave it is in the parking lot of the church I used to go to when I was growing up in Ohio. None of this makes any sense but when we pull into the parking lot, we somehow narrowly avoid plowing into two old women. But we do park the car and then proceed to take the bus home.
While on the bus, I notice that they've now put grab rails on the outside of the thing and there are several people just hanging on out there in the wind, even though the bus isn't even full. I'm quite surprised by this but even more surprised when this 30 something white woman with shorter blonde hair wearing light blue jeans and a white short sleeved shirt showing off a few arm tattoos just hops off without the bus even stopping. I mean, it slowed down for sure but WTF.
8/24/2023 -
This all falls into the "it's not that you don't remember, it's that you can't understand" category and once again, my inability to comprehend has to do with my limited ability to understand expanded timespace mechanics. Here it's some sort of a time loop scenario specifically. I'm looking at this swirling living cosmic dream entity from the outside. The circling portal swirl in the center is of course what prevents me from putting the experience on the inside into something fully digestible to the waking mind.
The one thing I do remember is that the plot involves some sort of wedding or similarly huge party/gettogether and there is a broader goal that's supposed to be accomplished here. I'm sitting in the grass outside with a bunch of other attendees when this bland looking slightly balding white dude wearing almost all beige starts doing what's almost like a toast but isn't. It's like a comedy song. This is the first wedding he's been to where he basically doesn't know anybody so he's singing a comedy song about that experience while picking random people from the crowd out and working them jokingly into the lyrics. It's one of those things that's sort of funny but also not that funny, you know? Like, I'm not annoyed that he's doing this but I'm not super amused either.
But somehow not long after I'm now walking down the hill the guy's standing on and it's right before he's about to break into his song-y thing. I can see him getting ready to go into it but wait a minute. He already did this and last time I was sitting down in the grass slightly below the hill he's on, not on the hill walking down toward him. So there's some time loop action afoot and I'm once again looking at this living narrative with a circular vortex in the center. My impression from all of this would be that the time loop represents a rehearsal. We practice this thing until we get it goddamn right. The pieces all have to fit together perfectly. That's not always going to happen on the first go through.
Now the vision of two surrealist godlike women with blonde hair looking in on each side of a rectangular glass fishbowl cage. They're outside the narrative vortex staring in. Then the voice in my head:
"Please don't tap on the glass!"
While you're here, do you like psychedelic industrial noise rock? Of course you do.
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