Category Archives: dreams

bizarre, brain injury, dreams

i had a really weird dream last night

i had a really weird dream last night. before my injury, i had bizarre, vivid dreams pretty regularly. since my injury, i have had less than a dozen dreams i could remember, and none of them have been as bizarre or vivid as they were before my injury.

i miss those dreams… 😢

nevertheless, the dream i had last night is another dream i have had in a long series of dreams, starting before my injury, that have involved a “house” that i have “lived in”, usually in the past, but sometimes, temporarily, in the present. it is an old, not very well maintained house, with victorian architecture, that has been “updated” at least once, in the past, before i lived there the first time. the “house” has at least 5 floors (sometimes many more than that), which include the sub-basement, the basement, the first, or ground floor, the second floor, and the third floor, and each floor above ground is more rickety and more falling-apart than the previous one. even under the best of circumstances, the house is an “abandoned” house, which, when it was first built, was a large, fancy house, but lost most of its “fanciness” a very, very long time ago.

last night, i was staying in the “house” with a bunch of my friends from cirque de flambé/fremont players, including one person — simon neale — who died a few years ago. in the dream, i know he had died, so i figured it must have been a “flashback” or something like that. at first, i was on the third floor with a bunch of random people (and at least 2 more floors above, which is why the “house” is so weird), and one of them wanted to move some large boxes down to the ground floor, and asked me if they could take the elevator. i told them that the “old” elevator still sort of worked, but that it was scary, because i remembered that, in another dream involving the “house”, i took the old elevator up, and it just kept on going up, and didn’t stop, once it reached the top floor of the house. i recommended the “new” elevator, which was in the front of the house, and had been installed comparatively recently, but which didn’t go up beyond the third floor, or down below the ground floor, but, because of the “house” being in general disrepair, i was skeptical that there was a path to the “new” elevator that would support the person AND the large, heavy boxes that they wanted to move.

then, i was on the ground floor, moving my stuff into a vacant room which i was going to occupy temporarily. i looked out the window, towards the back of the “house”, which was on an alley that i recognised as being in downtown seattle, in the early ’70s… in fact, it was one of the large, victorian houses on the opposite side of the same street that “The Monestary” (a gay disco club that was torn down in the ’90s) was on. there was someone backing a pickup truck into what looked like a parking space, directly behind the “house”, but which i knew was actually the buried roof of the basement, which was very definitely NOT designed to hold up a pickup truck… the truck went backwards, hesitantly, until it fell through the roof, and the whole back side of the “house” collapsed. i managed to find my way out of the “house”, which is where i ran into simon, who was dressed in his “captain hook” costume, from the panto “peter pan”. i mentioned to him that the house had collapsed because someone drove a truck into the back yard, but simon was having trouble with his “hook” prop, and said that i should find another way in.

it was at that point that someone sent me a text-message which caused my tablet to emit its characteristic “clown horn” noise, which woke me up. it turned out that the text message was from one of my friends from the cirque de flambé/fremont players, which confused THE HELL out of me for several hours afterwards.

dreams, medication, mushrooms

🍄

.25 g 🍄 @ 08:00

i had a dream that i could remember, which is VERY unusual. AND it was really frustrating. there was a party at our house, which wasn’t our house, but it was, in the dream. i was in my office, hiding from the majority of the party, as i frequently do. there were a bunch of kids, with their parents, that were part of the party, and one little girl decided that it would be funny to film me with her tablet, when i was working on my computer, but the app that she was using to film me was one that steals your passwords and suchlike, and ships them off to russia without your knowledge, which, of course, she didn’t know, because she was a kid. i found out about this after she had filmed me entering MY password to somewhere, and i confronted her father, who said that i could have her tablet to try to delete any information that it had stolen, but, because of the fact that it wasn’t MY tablet, everything was set up differently, and i couldn’t figure out how to do it… and then they decided that they had to go home, and wanted her tablet back… 🤬

bizarre, blasphemy, dreams, gulf oil spill, i am a terrorist, jeezis, links, rants

another week closer to the eschaton…

Crabs provide evidence oil tainting Gulf food web – oil spill? what oil spill? wasn’t that two weeks ago? 8/

and, while we’re on the subject of oil, 2,487.5 mpg! Catchy headline unneccessary – “We find it incredibly thrilling to report mpg ratings that require a comma so we’re going to write it again: 2,487.5 mpg. Wow.” that’s right, they’re talking about two “prototype” internal combustion, gasoline powered cars, in measured competition one got 437.2 miles per gallon, and the other got 2,487.5 miles per gallon… detroit is still hyping their 20 – 25 mpg cars as “energy efficient”, “fuel saving”, and other preposterous blather, despite the fact that mileage on my cars hasn’t changed significantly in over 30 years. apparently, we “umayrakins” are swallowing it hook, line and sinker, and begging for more. it’s my understanding that you can’t sell a car in europe these days that doesn’t get at least 40 mpg… what do we have to do to get these “prototype” cars into mass production?

oh, and by the way, Senior U.S. scientist rescinds previous claim that ¾ of oil from spill is gone, says most is still there and Top Expert: Geology is “Fractured”, Relief Wells May Fail … BP is Using a “Cloak of Silence”, Refusing to Share Even Basic Data with the Government – what? were they really thinking that we would believe that they could clean up two months worth of oil spill in less than a month? and once they got the well plugged up, the first thing BP did was go back to it’s habit of not sharing information with anyone again… it all goes back to that link that i found a couple weeks ago, where the guy was claiming that the BP gulf disaster may have triggered a ‘world-killing’ event…

Time To Terminate Western Civilization Before It Terminates Us – right on! its about time somebody said it! it’s about time we all get down to learning at least Ten Reasons to Become Self-Sufficient and Ten Ways to Get There

It’s time to presume the web is guilty – it’s an interesting way to look at it, but i think he may have something there. especially considering that Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash – when i was a software tester, there was this thing called “good enough” which was a state where the software still had bugs, but it was “good enough” to release to the public, because the bugs that it had were small, inconsequential, difficult to show, or inconsistent enough that there wasn’t an immediate need to fix them. there were exceptions to the “good enough” rule, which included software on which peoples’ life depended, such as avionics, medical software, and that kind of thing, but when i was a software tester, the concept of a virus that spread through email was something that had only recently been realised and hadn’t been around for more than a couple of years, and most of what appeared on the web was presumed to be innocent. now we’ve gotten to the point where software testers can’t assume that “good enough” really is good enough any more, and even when it is completely bug-free, software may be vulnerable to a specifically designed attack. moral: your computer is suspect. be wary of anything it tells you, and watch your back at all times.

cardinal francis george, head of the u.s. conference of catholic bishops, has gone on record regarding proposition 8, saying no court of civil law has the authority to reach into areas of human experience that nature itself has defined. he obviously hasn’t seen this video, shot at the honolulu zoo on november 11, 2004, of a chimp raping a frog. that’s about as natural as it comes, and if nature intended for a frog to provide oral pleasure to a chimp, then two people of the same sex having the right to marry, or an individual’s choice to use cannabis shouldn’t be far off, right?

Church Vows to Burn Qur’ans Without Fire Permit – the church said they were going to burn qur’ans, but the gainsville fire department said that they can’t burn books without a fire permit (shades of Fahrenheit 451, anyone?). now the church says, permit or not, they’re going to go ahead with their “protest”, because islamic law “is totalitarian in nature,” islamic teaching contains “irrational fear and loathing of the west” and that the qur’an teaches that jeezis “was NOT the son of ‘god'”. again, i would ask, is "christianity" that much different? change “irrational fear and loathing” to the east, and remove the negative from the last statement, and i would say that the similarities are striking…

there are a couple of things from LiveScience – One Common Ancestor Behind Blue Eyes and Age Confirmed for ‘Eve,’ Mother of All Humans – that i’d be willing to bet are going to be abused massively and frequently by “christians” who will say that they just prove that “eve” exists, even though it’s only about 196,000 years older than the “young earth creationists” claim, and even though both of the articles specifically say “this doesn’t mean she was the first modern woman”… it’s just a matter of time before they latch on to this and try to twist the meaning of the words to fit their own schemes…

How Can You Control Your Dreams? – i have never seen, and probably will never see inception but lucid dreaming has always held a great deal of interest for me.

Simon’s Cat – that is all.

bizarre, brain injury, dreams, forward into the past, pictures

dream

map

i was sick yesterday, and spent all day sleeping and watching teevee because i didn’t have the energy to do anything else. i feel a lot better, although not back to 100% yet, today. my ears and sinuses are still plugged up. nevertheless, i had a very bizarre and very vivid dream last night, which was another one where it was so strange that i actually woke up, thought about how strange it was, and then went back to sleep and continued in the same dream, which is very rare indeed.

front elevation

i was walking in downtown seattle, looking for an apartment. it was as though i was walking downhill, towards northlake, and i ended up at the level of lake union, but as it is in most of my dreams, things weren’t exactly like they are in reality. i saw a building in which i remembered renting an apartment many years ago (1984-1985?) that had a for rent sign in the window, so i decided to check it out. i went into the ground floor office, which had been some sort of office associated with a railroad, years ago, but the railroad, and most of the buildings surrounding it, had gone out of business years ago, and the other buildings had been knocked down, so there was an enormous vacant lot surrounding the buidling. the whole place had been a combination railroad/shipping waystation, or something like that years ago. in the ground floor office of the building, there was a strange machine that had strips of perforated tickets hanging out of it, that was built into the ceiling, an old, worn, wooden desk, and a free standing sink which was incorporated into the stairway to the second floor, which i didn’t remember seeing when i had lived there previously.

bottom floor

the whole dream was permeated with that familiar feeling that i knew exactly where i was, and had known exactly where i was for a long time. i climbed up the staircase, over the sink, and continued over several wooden boxes that had been stacked on top of the sink, to the second floor, where the apartments were. i wondered about how they could get away with making the staircase in such an unstable fashion, which was definitely not “up to code” – the staircase went up to the level of the sink, then there were narrow wooden boxes stacked on top of the sink, which weren’t secured or anything, and i almost sent the whole stack of boxes tumbling down before i got to the top of the staircase.

top floor

when i had lived there previously, there were two other guys that lived in the other apartments, ludwig and olympia. i noticed that ludwig’s name was still on one of the doors. the bulk of the weird machine was on this floor. it was very old and dusty, and had huge wads of different kinds of perforated tickets crammed into it. i went into the apartment that i had lived in previously, which was the one that was for rent, remembered what it had been like to live there previously, and figured it would be a good place to live again. then ludwig (who bore an uncanny resemblance to someone i know from bellingham, reinholdt lockinvar) showed up, and remembered me immediately. he had been a piano player when i knew him previously, and he was currently working as a pianist and organist. he asked me if it would disturb me if he practiced, and i said no, so he left and soon i could hear him practicing some organ piece on the grand piano that i knew he had in his apartment. i was looking around and came across a bunch of artwork that had apparently been left by the previous tenant, who was apparently a graphic designer. looking through the artwork, i discovered that some of it was actually art that i had done – business cards and logos and suchlike – and i also found a toque almost exactly like the one i have now, except that it was darker colours and had different buttons on it, which i remembered from when i had lived there previously.

i was really interested in what had happened to the neighbourhood since i had lived there previously, which i figured was fifteen to twenty years ago, and i talked with ludwig (reinholdt) and olympia for a long time, going downstairs (over the boxes again) and back up several times. it was also a really strange building, because although ludwig’s apartment was in the front, and my apartment was in the back, there were windows in my apartment that looked out on both the front and the back of the building. also i’m not sure if there were two or three doors in the hallway outside the apartments, because it kept changing, although it didn’t seem to affect me that much when it was happening.

bellingham, bizarre, brain injury, dreams

i am a bellinghamster

DREAM – i was in bellingham, but it was weird bellingham, that was older and/or newer than real bellingham. at first, i was on my bike, travelling from the north side to the south side, but i was going down high street/indian street from the university, and i had to go by fred meyers on lakeway before heading to the south side, but the further down indian street i got the less like actual bellingham it was. i noticed this and went 1 block north to high street, and i found houses i recognised, so i went back one block south, and found myself in the middle of an office complex that hadl, from the look of the architecture and the age of the trees, been there for at least 50 years. indian street was gone, and it was as though the university had expanded to take over part of sehome hill to jersey street and east all the way to chestnut or holly street. there was also a weird part that was sort of like a dream that i had a while ago (i’m not sure whether or not i actually wrote about it), where i was on my bike in bellingham and going from the madhouse by my friend eric’s house on mason street, but there was a railroad track, a much bigger freeway and this strange lighting effect that made everything look as though it had been filtered through something that removed all the colour and made it look like antique photos. also the store at potter and humboldt was in a different place, right next to the railroad track and closer to lakeway.

anyway, travelling along the back of one of the long buildings along where indian street used to be, i discovered this strange thing that was kind of like an aqueduct, but was now more like a sewer, sunk into the ground and covered with brickwork that was broken in parts, so part of it was open to the air, and the further toward chestnut i travelled, the more broken the brickwork became, until it was more like a brick-lined ditch with broken bricks, a little water, and a bunch of grass and weeds growing in it. there were also large brick buildings that looked like they had been there for at least 50 years, surrounding a big, open space with massive trees and pathways criscrossing the neatly manicured grass. eventually i left my bike somewhere, for some unknown reason, and headed back up the hill towards the university. i actually went through some of the buildings, because i could. inside they were more like hospitals: a lot of people wandering around with drip sets and posts with drip bags on wheels, butts sticking out from ill-fitting hospital gowns and such-like. it must have been an older hospital, though, because there were no automatic doors or ramps, it was all stairways, manual doorways between levels, and hallways going off at bizarre angles. at one point i realised that i had forgotten my bike, and went back, ostensibly to get it, but i didn’t get far because a huge crowd of people were getting in my way, almost as if the classes were changing or something: one minute there were just the people that looked like they should have been in a hospital, and the next minute there were all these people that were all going different places all at once. they didn’t realise they were getting in my way, but there were more of them than i could deal with, and i realised that i had forgotten where my bike was anyway, so i proceded back the way i had been going to begin with. there was a part where i went up a stairway to a door that came out the back of the hospital-like building, with a bike rack along the back of the building. the hill continued up, but i noticed that this was the highest point you could get to on the paved pathways, and if it hadn’t been for the huge trees below, there would have been a great view.

eventually i got to what had been the end of jersey street, where it goes into sehome hill, and i remember thinking that, at one time, i had gone up to sehome hill by the same route when i did the blessing before my son was born, and i thought about how different it was now, with all of the buildings and neatly trimmed grass.

bizarre, brain injury, dreams

very weird dream

4 Comments

i was at a chinese restaurant in downtown seattle, near the king street station, eating with moe and several other people i don’t know. when we finished, we went out onto the street by way of this weird little tunnel that went below the street and let us out on the other side of the street from the restaurant, which is where things started getting really screwy. the tunnel came up in another restaurant, or possibly in an across-the-street extension of the restaurant that we had been in, and it was full of people and bicycles. we had the dogs with us (in a restaurant?) and half the people in the restaurant started complaining about a dog in the restaurant and half of them wanted to eat zora. i wouldn’t stand for it and demanded to see the manager, who told me that it would be best if we all left the restaurant through the back door, which meant going past all the people in the restaurant, through a door into the kitchen and down a little hallway to the street. when we finally made it to the street, i knew that i had parked the car exactly one block from the restaurant, so i knew that it couldn’t be more than one block in any direction from where i was standing, but i went one block and suddenly found myself in the middle of a large black gang rally where i was the white person. they didn’t want me there, and made their intentions known, so hastily i kept going another block, in a straight line, away from where the other people at the restaurant were standing, and somehow i found that i had gone around 2 sides of a triangular block, and was approaching the place i just left. when i got back to where i started from, i apologised to the people for making them stand around, but the car wasn’t where i expected it to be. it was then suggested that i go the opposite direction, back the way i came, and the car might be there. so i headed back, and found myself on the edge of a manufacturing yard with a whole bunch of metal rails on stands, and a number of railroad spurs, surrounded by a fence. i started to head across the yard when a whole bunch of workers showed up and started singing “When You’re A Jet” from West Side Story, and encouraging me to join in with them. at first i was in too much of a hurry, but then i couldn’t help joining in, eventually taking up one of the minor lead roles. i noticed that they had changed from workers to a tough-looking puerto rican street gang, but they seemed friendly and were impressed with my singing and ability to play hand rhythmns on the various barrels and rails that were sitting around in the yard (which i have been unable to do in reality since my injury: the left hand works the way its supposed to, but the right hand just wobbles, shakes violently, or, at best, is significantly slower). when the song was over, i was even more in a hurry to find the car than i was before, but my right leg had started to get tired, so i was skipping instead of running, and suddenly i started to fly. it was a little disturbing at first and i slowed down so that i would lose altitude, but then i realised that i could spot the car from above a lot easier than i could on the ground, so i went up again and almost immediately ran into overhead wires (i always run into overhead wires in my flying dreams! it’s SO annoying!) and got tangled in them. i noticed that the alaska way viaduct was right next to where i was, and that i was in a part of seattle that had random, triangular shaped blocks and was 2 or 3 blocks away from the water. i somehow managed to get free of the wires, and i came back to earth in another manufacturing yard, which was very muddy. the puerto rican street gang was there, although now they had changed into the cast from Welcome Back Kotter (which i have never watched – even one episode), and they told me that i should get out of the way if i didn’t want to get wet. just about that time, i noticed that the mud was getting soupier, and from across the yard, a whole bunch of water was coming towards me, so i started flying again and almost immediately got tangled in the overhead wires again, this time i actually broke one of the wires and had it wrapped around my right leg, which was now almost useless for walking. i worried about what would happen if it bridged the gap between two other wires while it was wrapped around my leg, but when it did so i was not injured in any way.

depression, dreams, family of origin, ptsd, the bobs, x-mas

merry x-mas… 8/

2 Comments

i had a really depressing dream: i was in downtown seattle for something, but i was living in a homeless shelter and had practically nothing. the shelter was a big warehouse that had been divided up into “camps”, with walls about 4 feet high, so you could see over them fairly easily. the shower was a tiny space that was barely big enough to turn around in, and the plumbing was falling apart, so that if you adjusted the showerhead, the whole thing fell apart. i had just returned to the shelter from whatever it was that i was doing, and there was nobody there, which i figured would be an ideal time to take a shower, but as i was getting into the shower, a whole bunch of people that i didn’t know showed up and so i had to take a shower in the open, in the presence of a whole bunch of people that i didn’t know… and, of course, that was also exactly the same time that i discovered the fact that the shower plumbing was falling apart, so all the other people got wet and irritated with me.

moe and i went to see The Bobs at the Kirkland Performance Center last night, and some time between the time that we arrived and the time that the bobs took the stage, something (i suspect that it was the fog machine) invaded my throat and irritated it enough that it was difficult to swallow. it lasted most of the night, which didn’t help the dream any at all, and the result was that i woke up in a lousy mood this morning. it also didn’t help that we are going to portland today for x-mas with the in-laws. usually x-mas is a mellow time that we can get away from the normal, dismal miasma that we live in, but the fact that i woke up in a lousy mood today does not make me enthusiastic about going to visit moe’s extremely horrendously dysfunctional families, regardless of how mellow they are when they’re all together. i have developed the opinion that the in-laws base their lives on some sort of twisted television situation comedy, except that, as far as i’ve been able to tell, they don’t watch sit-coms on TV to begin with, and even if they did, the “comedy” writers for their show are on drugs or something, and their comedy isn’t anywhere near as funny as it would have to be to be tolerable as an actual family. the only thing that makes x-mas with the in-laws even remotely acceptable is that it’s not my own family.

the bobs put on an excellent holiday show, which was titled “Too Many Santas”. in spite of the title, it wasn’t an exact reproduction of their “Too Many Santas” CD, and actually contained a number of songs that i have never heard before, including “Imaginary Tuba” which was outrageous, and described my childhood quite accurately. it was really awesome to see matt in his venue, doing his stuff, rather than seeing him in my venue while i was doing my stuff, and i also got the chance to talk with richard and amy for a little while.

as i’m going to be in portland tomorrow, there’s a good chance that i won’t get the opportunity to post anything, but if the occasion presents itself, i’ll try to post something.

bizarre, dreams

the 2nd time i’ve had this dream this week

i was in a house that felt like my own house, except that it was on a higher hill and had a view from all around. this guy i didn’t recognise came driving up to the house, and i recognised his car as being from a dream i had a couple of nights ago (which is one of the reasons i find this dream particularly significant). he was an indian guy (from india, not a native american), and he started talking to me about his interpretation of ganesha. i was very interested in what he was saying, and listened intently (although i can’t remember, now, exactly what he was saying). while he was talking, a number of other people drove up to the house, and one of them had a stand, like the one i created at the punk rock flea market last weekend. the guy who was doing most of the talking was a guru for the other people who showed up, and the other people were very impressed with what he was saying. i, on the other hand, was skeptical, and kept asking him questions, most of which he answered in a logical and straightforward manner. he was tall, thin, and clean-shaven, with dark skin and black hair that came down to his shoulders and a big smile. he seemed very friendly and personable, despite the fact that the other people were in awe of him and kept a respectful distance. i don’t remember why, but i decided that this guy was representing a cult (i don’t remember which one) that i was not interested in joining, although i seemed to agree with most of what they were saying. when i informed the guy that i was not going to join his cult, the other people started drifting off and the guy with the stand started packing up. i did say that i wanted to buy an earring from him, which was a silver statue of ganesha with rudrakhsha seeds. i hung it from my 1″ ear tunnel, which the guru thought was extremely funny.

bssb, dreams, ganesha the car, philharmonic, swastikas

random bits of this and that

last night was the Sousa Bash, in honour of John Phillip Sousa‘s 153rd birthday, and, coincidentally, it was also Antoine-Joseph Sax‘s 193rd birthday. it went well, in spite of the fact that the west seattle bridge was closed for 3 hours, immediately prior to our concert, which made everybody, including a significant portion of the band, late. it was held at Kenyon Hall (formerly “Hokum” Hall), which, despite the fact that i actually lived in west seattle for a year or so, and have driven past it so many times i have lost count, i have never heard of it. it’s a good thing i know were it is now, however, as we apparently have the hall scheduled for the next 2 tuesdays in a row for recording.

it also makes me interested in talking to lou (the proprietor) about scheduling the fremont philharmonic there at some point…

<weird dream>
i was in this hotel in a big city somewhere, lots of glass, modern architecture, doing something, when these three guys with automatic weapons came in and started screaming and spraying bullets everywhere. fortunately i was off to the side, so i wasn’t a direct target, but also the shots that i did take were, apparently, fairly low velocity, and they were buckshot about the size of a dust-speck, so they stung, but they didn’t actually injure me – it was frightening, none the less, and everybody was cringing and trying to convince the guys to let them go. somehow i managed to find my way to an elaborate laundry chute which lead to the basement, but the guys were not letting anyone escape that way – despite the fact that there were three or more people that jumped down the chute that i saw. when i was getting ready to jump, one of the guys waved a gun in my direction and told me to stay put, so i didn’t jump, but i continued to work my way towards the exit, and i eventually managed to escape into the parking garage. at this point, i realised that moe had been there as well, but instead of going back for her, or notifying the police or something like that, i decided to get out of town by the most direct means possible and not tell anybody about the fact that this hotel was being held up, or that my wife was in danger. towards the end of the dream, when i was going out of town, it vaguely resembled 5th ave., in downtown seattle, except the buildings were all different, and if it was 5th ave. then the hotel that i was coming from would have been approximately where the westlake mall is, except that it was backwards, and a hotel instead of a mall.
</weird dream>

i also got another email from the 2008 art car calendar people, indicating some vague interest in knowing more about the swastika, and the meaning of my car, which, on the surface, sounds like i may have made an impression on them. i’m not holding my breath, however, because one of the questions they asked was answered in plain, clear language, in the blurb i sent them about the car originally, which makes me wonder if they even bothered to read the blurb in the first place, or they just had a knee-jerk reaction to the swastika.

bizarre, dreams

dream from last night

1 Comment

i’ve been thinking about this all day, and getting the details straight, because in spite of the fact that it was fairly dark (most of the dream took place underground), there were a lot of details, and a very specific order to them that is an important part of the dream:

i was in bellingham, and i was freight-hopping to seattle because i was supposed to meet moe and someone else (male, familiar, not micah, more like bruce borntraeger. if it was him, it would be really bizarre), so that the three of us could freight-hop somewhere else (california? oregon?), but i missed my train.

i decided that since i couldn’t catch my train, that i would take a “short cut” through the balmer yards (the freight train yard in south seattle, near the sodo district). somehow i took the short cut that leads from the train tracks just south of bellingham, and connected up with the freight yard south of seattle, although when i was in bellingham, i was headed south, somewhere in between i ended up in the south part of seattle, headed north.

i was supposed to meet moe and my other friend near the freeway, at the south-west corner of capitol hill, so i figured that i could cut through the balmer yard.

the balmer yard was a much bigger place than it is in reality, and much of it is in what is the seattle “underground” – long intersecting train tunnels with a switch-yard, miscellaneous interconnected buildings of different sizes, a “hump” and a tower, and long sections of track for making up trains. there were a lot of people and freight cars around, and i figured it would be easier for me to “sneak” through without being noticed if i was dressed like everyone else, so i stole a raincoat and a pair of rain pants with suspenders, and a hard hat from an employee locker. i was already wearing freight-hopping clothes, with rain boots and leather gloves, and with the rain pants, coat and hard hat i looked like everybody else at the yard – the perfect disguise.

a lot of my journey involved cutting through stationary trains, or jumping on slow moving trains, moving to the other side of the car, and jumping off, but most of the other people – the ones who were supposed to be there – were doing the same thing, so i got quite a way without being noticed at all. at one point i got off a moving car and encountered a couple of “employees” who were talking about keeping clean, and one of them was complaining because he had to buy a new rainsuit because his other one had been stolen. i was convinced that this meant that they knew who i was, so i took off in a different direction, and eventually found my way to an “employee” lunchroom. i knew that if i crossed the lunchroom, the path i wanted was on the other side, but just as i was going in to the lunchroom, an “employee” mentioned to me that the rules were that you had to clean up before entering the lunchroom. i was already covered with grime and sticky goo from the trains – which is a fairly common occurrance when you hang around with freight trains – so i said “yeah, i know”, but i immediately exited the lunchroom through another door than the one i wanted because i was convinced that, if the “employee” had said something to me, that “they” were probably keeping an eye on me. unfortunately, because the door wasn’t the one i wanted, i was headed into a part of the underground that i wasn’t familiar with.

despite the fact that things hadn’t been going very well – missing my train, being paranoid about getting caught, getting lost and so forth, i was upbeat and enthusiastic about continuing with my journey. i found my way to a swich yard and had to get out of the way, because they were “humping” cars. i saw a caboose(!) rolling down the hump, and they had swiched the track so one of the caboose’s trucks went down one track, and one went down an adjacent track, so the caboose was crossways across two tracks, but it had not derailed.

eventually i found my way to the north end of the yard, and walked out onto the alley that the “employees” parked along, which was between the freeway and the waterfront. there were hundreds of people along the alley, and along the freeway, and this HUGE helicopter was touching down at harborview hospital. i asked somebody what was going on, and they said that the helicopter had been shot down in iraq a few days earlier. there was also an elevated train track that ran along side the freeway, coming out of the yard.

brain injury, dreams

1068

this is a two part dream: the first part was out in a very rural area somewhere near place where a rural road split off and crossed a river. i lived somewhere relatively close, because i had walked there. the road ran parallel to the river and split off at right angles, where it crossed the river at right angles, over a bridge that was basically like a hill that went up, turned into a bridge and crossed the river, and then went down again, without any superstructure over the bridge, and the land around the river crossing was swampy, except for one place where there was a fairly modern building, with a parking lot. the building was some kind of spy organisation, and there were a lot of people there, both men and women, working busily. outside the building looked relatively small and normal, but inside it was a maze of corridors with offices and rooms on several floors, but i was only allowed to see the rooms on the ground floor. a lot of the people were speaking in code or using very specific technical jargon that i couldn’t always understand, and laughing about the fact that i couldn’t understand it. they said that if i told anybody about the fact that it was a spy organisation, i would be sorry, but at the same time, they gave me a very specific coded message that i was to give to somebody verbally. it was complex enough that i couldn’t remember all of it (and i can remember none of it now). i left on my “mission”, walking toward the river, and thinking how the only person that i could hope to tell all of this to was randy, who i knew to have been dead for at least 15 years, so it didn’t matter what they said about my being sorry, but at that exact same moment, i was attacked by three teenagers – or somebody on skateboards – dressed as ninjas, with machine guns, and i ran to the other side of the bridge and hid in the bushes.

when i emerged from the bushes, everything had changed. the one building on the other side of the river was now a sprawling industrial park, although the one building was still where it had been, now it was part of a lot of single-level buildings that were all connected together. randy was there, and we talked as though he had never died. we walked back across the river towards the industrial park, and i noticed my car, ganesha, parked in the parking lot next to the spy headquarters, so i decided to show him what i had been talking about. but the closer we got, the more suspicious i got that the people were really spies or something, and so when we got to the building, next to my car, we walked into the spy headquarters, and then turned the corner and walked out again, through a different door that lead to a kind of courtyard between the buildings. some of the people in the spy headquarters recognised me and commented that i shouldn’t have brought somebody else there, but they didn’t make a fuss about it when we immediately walked out again, although i did feel rather nervous about the whole thing, and i remember commenting to randy that they were all dangerous spies in this place.

we walked through the courtyard, which ran parallel to the river, behind the building complex, and eventually came to a place where there was a real agarbathiwallah – a guy who sold incense – at first he didn’t appear to be indian, but the more we talked to him, the more indian he appeared, although i was still convinced that he was somehow connected with the spy headquarters, and i was very suspicious about him for a long time. when i told him that i ran an incense business online, he told me that he wouldn’t sell incense to me because it was too “electrical and complex”. he did, however, sell incense to randy – really exotic, bulk incense for $4.50 a kilo – and i watched as randy wrote him a check, and he signed with his signature which i remember being exactly like the signature that randy signed when he was alive. more people came into the agarbathiwallah’s shop, who were apparently related in some way to the owner; an old man with a beard, and a young kid. the agarbathiwallah had a thing that looked like a shoe, only made out of wood, and he started doing something with some incense and a thing that looked like a pestle, also made out of wood, which he set on fire until it was smoldering and then ground the incense in the bottom of the shoe-like thing. i finally convinced him to sell me some incense: three large boxes and three small boxes of “pitha” incense. The Stars And Stripes Forever was playing on the piped in music thing in the store, and now i’ve got that march stuck in my head.

also another dream that i had yesterday, which was very short:

i dreamed that i was running an indian import business in the basement of a corner building in an old part of town – somewhere (possibly bellingham?). the basement was completely lined with wood, on the floor, on the ceiling, on the walls, and there was a huge wooden beam that supported the roof in the middle of the room. there was also what used to be a stairway to the upper floor, that was at least 100 years old, and was no longer a stairway, but was a bin for holding firewood. somehow this all came out of a previous dream in which i was selling indian imports at something like the oregon country fair: i remember a huge booth with flashy, twinkly lighted toys and doodads at the close of the fair, after everyone had left, but i don’t remember the context. anyway, i was in the process of moving (back?) into the basement store, and going around the store making sure everything was as it should be. one of my suppliers had an aqua imac that was having some difficulties, and i said i could fix it for him, but it had an operating system with which i am not familiar on it, and a whole bunch of obsolete software and stuff that was interfering with the process of getting it back to “normal”, and i was getting more and more frustrated with it.