Shigeru Miyamoto

I stepped into a stairwell and a series of portals appeared before me, all leading to various locations in Bellingham, Washington. I've never been there, so my mental image was really janky. I went through one and walked down a road, with an electric post on my lefthand side. After about a mile, I found Nintendo's headquarters, which was a building surrounded by a moat and huge vegetable gardens.

I checked out the area and dove into the moat, gathering golden coins (arranged in a circle on an underwater platform, of course). Though I tried to take a nap in a secluded corner of the garden (it was evening), Shigeru Miyamoto kicked me out. I remember thinking that he was cool, but an asshole.

I went back to the stairwell and got my friend Margie, who's from Bellingham, to walk through another portal with me. We couldn't find Nintendo, so we ended up at my friend Andrew's house (he actually lives in that town too). After distracting Margie, Andrew and I started having sex (?!). Luckily, I woke up.

Lucid dream failure

After returning home from a very long day involving a very long bike trip, I showered and plopped into bed. Within a few minutes of closing my eyes I was in a white hallway of a house with a small flying lizard creature with sparse blue, red, and yellow feathers. I furrowed my brow and thought deeply about the situation. This was probably not real. At that moment I realized I was in a dream, and since I knew I was in a dream, I could take control and do whatever I wanted. This was very exciting.

My first order of business was to investigate the lizard. I reached into my pocket and got a piece of maple candy to feed to it. The lizard was very disturbed by this and tried to fly away, slamming into the walls. I sprinted after it so it would not escape into the living room. It was now shrieking in a tone slightly deeper than one might expect from such a small lizard creature.

In one final leap I brought my hands together around it, but just as I was about guffaw in victory, the lizard turned into a thick purple cloud. I woke up.

Dinner with Raymond Carver

I was sitting down for a meal at a rectangular table in a diner with what may have been a group of literary dignitaries, although the only person I recognized was Raymond Carver, who was quietly eating across from me. The food had already been served and the men were poking fun at vegetarians as they enjoyed their meaty meals. I told them I was a vegetaerian, but didn't feel like explaining myself at the moment so I left it at that. Someone asked if I believed in god and I told them I was an aetheist. Carver set down his burger and looked at me.

"Do you think saying that makes you brave," he asked and I said no.

There was an uneasy silence that I eventually broke by asking if everyone at the table--all older white men--was Christian, either Catholic or Protestant. Everyone but Carver nodded or said yes.

"Not me," he said. "I'm an aetheist."

After we were done eating two waitresses came over to bus the table. One of them, a Guyanese woman in her late 40s who was dressed like a 16 year old Hot Topic employee, began swooning about something. When our bill was brought, Carver reminded me that Yacki's sister, Sumi, had left us her bag so we could pay for her food. He went through her bag and pulled out a credit card from her wallet, but I told him not to worry about it, I would cover it.

When I went to throw in my money I counted the pot to ensure we had enough for a decent tip and found that someone had paid in Euros. Suddenly I realized that it was the 1950s and it was understandable that people would pay in foreign currency. In a disconnected world pre-globalization you couldn't expect everyone to have the same currency. (Nevermind that the Euro wasn't created 'til 1999.)

Besides the American dollars and Euros, someone had also decided to pay with three playing cards.

- Arv

rough-draught.blogspot.com

Now that I think about it, we must have been inside one of those tech rooms at Stuy. Natalie and I are sitting in the back and Natalie is sleepy. She puts her head down while I flip through magazines -- literally, just flipping because I am actually peeping at my ex-boyfriend who is canoodling this round little asian girl. The girl is wearing this large black t-shirt with a long checklist. My favorite one was, "he f*cks to his ex-gf's picture." oh yes, he does.

Anyway, it's getting late so Natalie and I head out. We get into a taxi but we're not moving and no one says anything. We sit there in silence for ten minutes until I really had to pee. So I went back inside, peed, and came running back out to see Natalie looking around, terrified. For some reason, between the time I left to pee and came back, Natalie's hair exploded into this voluminous fro.

The taxi guy finally asks where we are going and starts moving. We were driving for awhile, heading into Queens, but the taxi guy decides its okay to abandon us by a highway with a motorized wheelchair. Natalie is really sleepy and groggy now. So I had to go find someone who could tell me how to get back to Bayside. Fortunately, that was easy. A woman tells me that I had to make a left from where we were, keep going until we saw the dinosaur, make a right at the dinosaur until we came up to a sandy flight of stairs and I would be able to recognize my way home from there. She offered me a ride, but I insisted that I wanted to drive the wheelchair and claimed I had done it billions of times. So I strap into the wheelchair, tie Natalie to the back, and I drive the wheelchair down the highway towards the dinosaur. It would have sucked if my battery operated wheelchair just stopped in the middle of the highway. Luckily, I see the dinosaur, so I make a right and I'm all excited because the sandy flight of stairs is up ahead. I don't really know why there is so much sand but thank god it was there because as soon as I unstrapped Natalie from the wheelchair, her limp body falls to the ground and she face-plants into the sand. But even then, Natalie won't get up and insists on sleeping there.

Dream-honey

I found a jar of "unfiltered honey" in my kitchen. A warning label told me that I should be wary of bee parts, particularly stingers, and remove them before consumption. Now, in real life I hate honey. I can do without a bunch of pollen suspended in a ton of bee saliva. I do not like the taste or the smell or anything else about it. But something compelled me to eat this dream-honey. I got out a piece of bread and poured some out over it. Compared to real honey, dream-honey is less viscous, lighter in color, and has small grainy brown pieces of I-don't-know-what in it. With no bee parts in sight I took a bite of the sandwich. And it was delicious. It didn't have that weird bee saliva smell or taste. It was just like eating a bunch of sweet wildflowers or something.

I had a similar dream when I was a young kid about the most perfect beverage in the world. I remember living in Manhattan Beach when I had it, so I must have been between 5 and 8 years old. In my dream, the most perfect beverage in the world appeared before me. It was pale blue, sweet, and tasted vaguely of something delicious plus artificial fruit flavor. Last summer at the University of Chicago food court I spotted the dream beverage in real life. The only difference was that it was carbonated, whereas my dream beverage was not because I hated carbonated drinks back then. Carbonation is not a problem for me these days, though. It was one of those "democracy" Mountain Dews called Revolution and I don't think it won. I only ever had one bottle. Maybe fifteen years from now I will find my unfiltered honey somewhere.

Ghosts of bicycles past

I was in a hurry to get somewhere in Manhattan and I had to take my bike to get there. Normally it takes an hour or more for me to bike to the city but this time it was something like 20 minutes. I got my bike out of the basement and paused for a minute on the street. Instead of my Lemond bike, Orville, it was the too-small blue road bike I found at Binghamton on the grass one day in early spring. The brakes hardly worked, the wheels badly needed to be trued, but I was in a hurry! I threw my bag into the oversized basket in front (a new addition since I saw the bike last) and was off. On the way there the bike slowly transformed back into Orville. Midway through the transition I noticed that I was riding the old red Kabuki I bought for $25 at the bike shop on Brighton that was going out of business.

I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, which looked more like the Verazanno Bridge that day. Everything was glowing the way it does after a thunderstorm. My destination turned out to be a weird coffee shop on the corner of a broad empty street downtown. Inside a 60 year old man was speaking at a podium about something very boring. There were three girls with short brown hair at a bench carved into the wall on the far side of the place. I carefully stepped through people seated on the floor listening to the man and sat down with them. I don't remember what we talked about, or what I did after that until the next morning.

I woke up at my house with the intent of making the same trip. I got Orville out of the basement. This time it was mostly the right bike except it was a fixed gear without any brakes. The Brooklyn Bridge was still the Verazzano Bridge. Everything was still glowing. Orville stubbornly remained a fixed gear bike.

Only one of the girls was at the coffee shop that day. As I sat down with her a metal buckle on my bag hit her head. She forced me to "kiss it to make it feel better". I pretended to be nonchalant and friendly about it but I was uncomfortable with this. Her two friends arrived in a white van outside. They honked for us to come out and we did. I started unchaining my bike from the pole. They offered to drive me home. I should have taken them up on it because my ride home was now mysteriously 3 times longer than it should have been, but I said no. I started to pedal away.

Easter with the Reeces

I was all set to go to my boyfriend's family's Easter celebration at his grandfather's house, and we were waiting for his mom to pick us up on a grassy street corner. However, when she got there they left without me.

Somehow I made it to our destination by hitchhiking. A colorful cast of characters, presumably his relatives, were gathering in the distance in the courtyard of a manor similar to the one featured in Last Year in Marienbad. My dream took a cinematic turn, and the camera switched to closeups of them taking group photos.

In the meantime, I awkwardly wandered around a meadow and found myself standing underneath a tree with a PA speaker in its branches. The speaker was transmitting salsa music to no one in particular. Then my boyfriend and his mother finally showed up.

Typical Embarrassing Situation

I bought a yellow and teal bikini with a high-waisted bottom part. I thought I looked totally bangin' but apparently no one else did because they made fun of me, especially Arjun. Only Vincent sided with me, but I suspect it was because I bought him a beige cellphone earlier in the dream.

Television vision

I can only see a television screen. Any area outside the square of vision is black. I am watching a woman being dragged out of her house and strapped to a table with wheels. The table is tied to an ambulance, it is very white. The camera taking the video is clearly from of a chopper, as it is high and to the left of the scene; it is very shaky. It zooms in on her face; she is a white woman, late thirty's, looks plain, looks normal, maybe she is a school nurse. She is crying, red faced, hyperventilating. The ambulance begins to move and the camera follows the table as it is pulled by the ambulance.

The voices begin discussing the alien ants embedded in her brain. I realize they are news casters. They have a scientist discussing how they will begin to remove the ants. Either they can go longways across the top of the head, opening the skull and picking the ants out one at a time. Or they can saw from top to bottom. Opening the face like elevator doors, and allowing the ants to flow out with the blood. The camera zooms in closer on her face, the tears are streaming and the look of terror is total. I watch her slowly her breathing becomes shallow and fast. She grabs her throat and begins gasping. She dies on shaky copter cam, terrified, crying, and breathless from the insects in her head. The camera doesn't move away, which you would think it would. It just shows her lifeless, dragging behind the ambulance on a table with wheels.

I got up and drank three beers, showered and smoked a cigarette.

The Heist

The beginning is hazy, but the first thing I remember is my friend trying to get a contract to steal something extra from a place he was already supposed to rob. The original contract was to steal only one item from a bar/gaming parlor, and this was his first contract of the sort, but he was already making side deals. Later, I was inside the bar having a beer and scouting out the place. A taller me came out of another room with a pool cue and told me to get up. I was surprised to find that I was almost too drunk to walk. Taller me grabbed me by the arm and led me into the other room where he watched me line up pool shots on one of those side tables that are kind of high up at bars. The pool balls could have been in a giant ash tray. I felt really bad about being drunk and how it was effecting my motor skills. Later I was distracted by a sort of ghetto fellow who did not speak very clearly. He told me he wrote on his resume that he does not drink alcohol due to the fact that he took amphetamines (which he mispronounced badly) at the age of fourteen and mumbled something about his father. I was going to tell him that he doesn't have to not drink and he definitely shouldn't put it on his resume, but I was overcome with tiredness. I found myself in a bed, very big and thick, but also shaped like a couch. I was woken up by a girl skipping in slow motion calling my name. She rolled me off the couch and I landed on my back. With huge, flowing, pillowy sheets surrounding me, she dives in and starts kissing me upside down so that her chin touches my nose. She kept asking "Who is your special friend? Am I your special friend?" For some reason I could not grab her. She leaves and taller me comes in and tells me I've botched the robbery, even though the friend I set this up with didn't even show up. He was very upset that I allowed lust to override my previous engagements. Later in the dream, I saw a bunch of people standing behind a high wall so only their heads were showing. They would stare at each other and then turn to me with clockwork regularity. I stole a pack of cigarettes from a pair of pants lying on a nearby bed, but returned it to the owner.

Disorder at the Libertarian Community Center

I alternated between being a 19 year old girl with wavy blond hair and a 19 year old corn fed kid with a buzz cut. Both of these people worked at a libertarian community center (???), which is basically a place that feeds and shelters the needy while indoctrinating them. It also handles campaigning stuff during election time. Most of the details on this are blurry.

There was some kind of very intense drama going on between the staff here. Most of what I remember from the dream was that as I was going back and forth from the perspective of the girl and the boy, they had been murdering other staff and sometimes each other. This was all somehow sequentially sound, as these things often are in dreams. In one instance the girl and the boy were out picking up food for the center with some other staff. It was late out and the boy opened the sunroof to the car to stand up. I was the girl in this scene and I was driving. When we pulled into the center parking lot the boy slumped over and we realized that he was dead. In the next scene I was the boy and somehow back to life. I was freaking out on the girl for having murdered me. She didn't know what I was talking about and was very scared of me. I went into a room and started to write something on a whiteboard in the dark. Then I switched to being the girl, and followed him into the room. Light was coming in from the hallway and I could see that the boy, who was writing on the board, had a pair of fake legs coming out from under his shirt (in addition to his normal legs). They were wearing women's jeans and had the same shoes I did. A fake set of arms were also sticking out from his t-shirt's arm holes. They had on the same shirt that I did. Apparently this was very bad news because I was terrified. The last thing I remember was him slowly turning his head around to give me a cold look.

A few nights ago

On the next block over from my house is an abandoned storefront that I had never noticed. It was snowing outside and I was with some nondescript friends. We followed another group of people inside, and came upon an endless expanse that looked a lot like that salt lake in Bolivia. We were under a big marquee near the door we came through. The floor was made of coarse salt, covered in a thin layer of water that reflected the cloudy sky. Not far from the perimeter of the awning, in every direction, there was 5 feet of salty snow on the ground as far as I could see.

The air was very thin here. My friend gave me a good explanation for why this was but I can't remember it now. The people we followed in plus some others were there too, but no one could make it very far out past the snow. I gave it a try myself. As soon as I got waist deep I felt like I was suffocating. My ears were ringing. I fell to my knees and grabbed at the snow. It didn't feel cold but melted in my hands.

Why I'm trying this

We each must become like fishermen, and go out onto the dark ocean of mind, and let your nets down into that sea.

And what you're after is not some behemoth that will tear through your nets, foul them, and drag you and your little boat into the abyss. Nor are what we looking for a bunch of sardines, that can slip through your net and disappear, ideas like 'have you ever noticed that your little finger exactly fits your nostril' and stuff like that.

What we are looking for are middle-sized ideas that are not so small that they are trivial, and not so large that they are incomprehensible, but middle-sized ideas that we can wrestle into our boat and take back to the folks on shore, and have fish dinner.

And everyone of us, this is what we should be looking for. It’s not for your elucidation, it’s not part of your self-directed psychotherapy; you are an explorer, and you represent our species. And the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.

And so, to whatever degree, any one of us can bring back a small piece of the picture, and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm.

- Our good friend Terence McKenna

This place will likely be teeming with sardines, but I hope to bag some snapper, and maybe a tuna or halibut too.