Dream Log: August 17, 2001

Back to dream-logging after a big hiatus. Yeah, I need more of this. I want to remember my dreams and this helps me in a big way.

Anyway.

I was at one of those porn fairs, you know like E3 or something similar but you get porn stars and not Microsoft. I guess it was one very popular here, held in La Farga de l'Hospitalet, called... well, it escapes my mind.

What was I interested in? You might be asking. Jenna Jameson, live shows, live nude... aw! forget it! No! I was at a record sale there! Apparently I was interested in sex! (yeah! right!) I was going through a big lump of The Cardigans cd's; bootlegs, singles, rares... There were tons of cd's there I was missing (most non-existent, I guess) and I was building a pretty large pile of them to buy.

So... The Cardigans are better than sex? Well, I guess no. Just a Freudian sign, I hope. Sure, Nina Persson is hot :)

I told TUX to fuck itself around 2 am and hit the couch. At 4:19 am I got up to see if it came yet.

Some of my dreams are semi-repeating. They'll often stay in the same place; they have a regular cast, none of whom I've met IRL; sometimes there is continuity, sometimes not. In extreme cases, my dreams will present a puzzle to be solved that builds up over multiple session (over many nights). In those cases it keeps going until the collected data is forming in my concious memory and I'm analyzing it in the shower. When I figure it out, all the memory bleeds out like a microchip is pulled from my William Gibson-esque socket.

I sleep a lot when I can. It's usually more entertaining than the movies.

Tonight I was in a recent invention. There's this chinese restaurant somewhere - if it's IRL, I've never seen it. They know me. I have hot&sour soup in my hands *seconds* after entering, standing up, waiting for a table. Sometimes sooner -- they are set back inside a multi-unit, multi-floor building, and after simply entering the building I am met in the foyer by a waitress with my drug, who dispatch from the comforts of the restaurant much like volunteers in some kind of chili-garlic & vinegar Red Cross leaving their home and families for 3 years to serve the Greater, Spicier, Good.

Like I said, they know me there. I still haven't figured out how, but I'm working on it. But I am expected to accomplish precisely *no* social graces. Silent? That's cool. Grungy after an all-night hack run? No matter, they're happy to see me.

Actually, the latter has a side effect. They have a private room upstairs, with shower. It strikes me as more than a little odd, but even more so now that I'm awake and thinking about it with all my wierdness radar active. I didn't want to use it; this sort of intrudes on the public-private border. But I was goaded -- they steer me with cups of hot&sour, like one steers a cow with an electrified prod.

But, you know, in the good way.

I don't like waking up from this one. It sounds really wierd, but think of it as Case saying "I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep."

Oh, and TUX still isn't unfucked. Ingo, that Red Hatted Bastard, must use every SGML tool in creation just to write some simple HTML.

It's 7 am. I wish I had some soup.

• As this night wears on, I move through progressively more powerful meditation techniques. Perhaps I'm activating my chakras one at a time. Meanwhile, a dream unfolds in my mind. As this night wears on, I slip back and forth between awareness of my meditation and awareness of the dream story. While in the former state, I see the cover of the book I'm reading, Spiritual Nutrition and The Rainbow Diet by Gabriel Cousens. In the morning I realize that the meditation was a hypnagogic dream and the unfolding story was a dream within a dream.

• I'm with August, his family, and my friend Allen. Aug's brother and sister are much younger than in the waking world, and they look different--rounder faces and blonder hair. We are all traveling into the Siskiyou mountains near Shasta, on our way to the wedding of two mountain folk, friends of August's parents. First we stop at the family house and run around playing games with the kids. Then we continue on up the mountain road, the view of the valley below growing progressively better and more panoramic. We arrive at the family's other house and I'm surprised that it looks exactly the same as the first. We play a tag game where those tagged are added to the team of taggers. Both houses have a strange room that is sunken into the ground like a pit in the middle of the house. You can get into it by going downstairs elsewhere and walking down a hallway, or you can just jump down from the floor above. On leaving at last for the wedding, I notice August's brother, Rocky, has rigged an interesting device onto his shoulder to keep him cool in the hot weather: a bottle of water is siphoned slowly into the fabric of his t-shirt.

  We arrive at the mountain peak lodge where the marriage will take place. I am introduced to all the mountain people who August and has family have known for years. The situation changes as it appears that the bride (who I haven't seen) is in labor back in the dressing room and going to give birth. While we wait to hear the outcome, I sit on a bench outside, admiring the view. In my mind I watch an internal movie with voiceover showing me who the bride and groom are and their respective life stories. I am surprised to see the bride is an Asian woman since most people in these parts are caucasian. I see the large open wooden building in which she works, a dairy or some kind of animal farm. The groom is a stereotypical mountain hippie: long hair, long beard, marijuana farmer. I realize that I'd just met him inside the lodge, a real nice guy, but hadn't known he was the groom since he was dressed informally like everyone else. At last the news arrives from the rear of the lodge that the baby was stillborn. I wait around while only people she knows go back to be with her, including August and his family. When August returns, he says it's time to go home.