Dream Log: May 21, 2001

This place was packed with stuff: Totem poles, Native American Art, gems, vintage toys, sculpture, books, oriental carpets & rugs, rare baskets, and strange collections of all sorts, such as camels, chess boards, ships, religious objects and more.

All of these things were in beautiful display cases and as a whole was rather like J.Standley's Ye Olde Curiousity Shop.

I walked up and down the rows of stuff, what fantastic jumble of material possesions, it cover every inch of all the floors (at least three floors)!

Although I admired many of the things there I did not purchase anything, in stead I drifted into another dream of abstract landscape which led me to the surface of consciousness, whereby I awoke.

• It's a new school year at UC Santa Cruz and I am introduced to a couple of freshmen in their Porter College dorm room. They are both experienced guitar players and one of them lets me play his very nice nylon string guitar. I'm about to play when I realize my hands are filthy, so I put the guitar down and head down the hallway towards bathroom. When I what I think is the correct door I find myself in another dorm room. It's a two room double, arranged with living area out here and a bedroom through the open door. There's a sink right in front of me and, from my vantage point, there doesn't seem to be anybody in the bedroom. So I walk over and turn on the water. There's no soap however, so I walk into the bedroom and see some. As I reach for it I realize there are in fact three people in here, two girls and a guy, sleeping away. But the noise from the faucet wakes them up and they are surprised to see me standing in their bedroom. I explain myself truthfully that I mistook it for the bathroom. They are understanding and tell me to go ahead and finish up. I thank them and do so. When I return to the other dorm room I explain my strange experience with the bathroom. Then I pick up the guitar again and solo a little over the other roommate's chords. After knocking the guitar accidently against some furniture I decide to put it away. The freshman shows me how he keeps it in a special holster that hangs from the ceiling. He slips it in, tuning knobs first, and it clicks into place.

• On a hike with friends including Allen and his girlfriend, Nicole. We come to a very narrow bridge, perhaps four feet across, that crosses a stretch of freezing ocean. We decide to crawl across. When we're in the middle, I take the opportunity to urinate, sitting on the edge and peeing into the sea. Strangely, we all know this reality isn't real; we know we can wake up from it anytime we want to. But it's not a lucid dream in the usual sense because I'm not aware that I'm dreaming this from my bed, at home by myself. I think I'm in a room somewhere with these people, all of us intentionally having a shared dream of this hike. So I'm actually two levels down, but think I'm only one. Because of this, we are much more free in our behavior than we would be in waking reality. After all, there's no danger to our bodies and it's also an opportunity to do act free of cultural taboos, morality and the like. As I am finishing peeing in front of everybody, Nicole decides to do the same. She pulls down her pants and hangs her behind over the edge. As a joke I bend down and lick the bottom of her back. She giggles. As I crawl on, Allen comes behind me and feigns mock jealousy by wrapping his arms around me under my shirt (in quite a homoerotic way) and teases that he'll throw me over the edge. We both look down at the churning surf. I say that I'd wake myself up before I hit that freezing water. Allen agrees that that would be a good idea.

• In a similar double dream state, I repeatedly dream and wake, dream and wake, in an attempt to construct an abstract dream sculpture. I have to wake up in order to tweak the parameters then go back to dreaming so the object is rendered and I can analyze it. Very similar to programming 3d graphics: programming then compiling and looking.

• I get picked up by Kim and Rick along with another woman who seems to know my father. She talks about the car she's going to buy with his help and shows me pictures of three red sportscars with with three wheels each. She says she wants the top one, which I see is the most expensive and the least fuel efficient. Rick is driving and he's taking us to UC Santa Cruz from Scotts Valley. The traffic is much worse than normal and Rick considers taking an exit and using backroads. I advise not and we soon see that there's construction going on. The cars in this area are almost stopped but Rick just switches lanes and keeps driving fast. He just misses hitting a construction worker as we speed towards our exit. But there's a wall of cars and he has to quickly veer onto the shoulder to avoid an accident; we hit the edge of the dirt at 55mph and the jeep tilts violently, about to roll over. Dream ends.