Dream Log: May 18, 2002

I am in the dark living room on the ground floor of the house, expecting a call from my girlfriend. My phone rings. I climb the staircase towards the light and privacy of the bathroom. Inside, facing a mirror I answer the phone. It's not for me but for my mom. I give her my phone so she can talk to whoever it is.

Now I have to use the bathroom but my mom is occupying it. I go outside to a public toilet. It is in a squat, brown building, that looks just like the Paradiso nightclub. After I'm done, as I leave my mom comes up to me and returns my phone and goes in to the public toilet. But now I am lost. How do I get home? All of the streets are unfamiliar. I wish I had asked my mom before she went to the bathroom.

At home I try to call my voice-mail but some Asian woman answers. It's obviously the wrong number. She gets upset, says something incomprehensible, and hangs up on me. I look at the number I had auto-dialled and see that it is a 900 (commericial, high-toll) number not the voicemail number at all. Someone must have changed it. I am having trouble seeing the display on my phone. The black leather phone case keeps getting in the way. I try to push it out of the way, adjust it somehow but it's just no use. It must not be my phone case.

I am pretty upset by all of this and ask my brother how this number got on my phone. He doesn't know. There is a stack of Japanese bondage films stacked on a table in the dark living room. He picks one up and suggests that the number may have come from the movie credits down at the bottom of the box. He hands me the box so I can see. But it's an old video and the writing on the box has faded and is now blurry beyond recognition. I tell him the box is useless. But it must have been he who changed the number as these are his films. He denies owning them, saying that he's not interested in old films like these. But I see some newer films and even some Japanimation, which he loves, in the stacks. I know he must be lying and the films are his.

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NOTE: Please follow the hardlinks for possible symbol interpretations.

I was sitting in my Sign Language class, and the whole day had been completely typical. We had finished our lesson,so I decided to sleep for the rest of class. Suddenly, my pants came alive and dragged me around the classroom. I was screaming, but no one turned around to help, if they had even noticed. My pants had then dragged me into the hallway, where I had collided with a water fountain.

On The Shore Of The Infinite

• Jerry Garcia's been on my mind, so his spirit kindly pays me a visit. We're on stage in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park; the whole Grateful Dead family is there along with thousands of Deadheads. We jam Fire On The Mountain till the sun goes down.

• With Allen in a futuristic amalgamation of UC Santa Cruz and a multi-level shopping mall. Both of us are having a very lucid dream, calling objects, people, events and architecture into being by a simple act of will. We play a game of improvisational reality creation, weaving a continuous narrative flow like a childhood game of pretend--except our fantasies bloom instantly to flesh and blood. I have only sense-impressions of our activities, they were so often non-sequiteur and whimsical: lots of flying from rooftops and elaborate social scenarios into which we'd drop magical events to astonish everybody. Temporarily bored with the game, I fly to the edge of the landscape where ocean waves are crashing against the rocky shore under a starry sky. Fully awake inside the dream, I ponder my existence. This body, these sharp rocks, those constellations...there is no hazy "dreaminess" to be found here--just soft flesh, solid earth and clear light. How can I possibly assign the word "reality" to that mundane world into which I will soon awaken? Looking out to sea, where the rolling waves retreat into the lightless depths, I start to get The Fear. The ocean represents the cosmic infinite to which I will inevitably return at death. Yet I can sit here, in a body made of my own imagination, watching it churn and crash. I know it is watching me; I know it wants me to dive into it now. But even though I have no fear of bodily harm, it is the fear of losing my own small self in the infinite depths of the great Self that holds me back. "I'm sorry. I'm just not ready yet." I turn my back and return to the reality game.