Mortality Blog

I was doing some computer work for an asian family (vietnamese, maybe) just up on SE Foster where it splits off from Powell. They seemed nice enough, and considerate enough to stay out of my way while I worked. They lived in a trailer home type thing, a spacious one, but still just a line of rooms all the way to the back. I’d driven my broken down black jeep over to their place, and it’d died just as I reached their street - I managed to push it up next to their trailer before going in.

I wasn’t the only one doing some work for them - they’d hired a group of three other guys to fix some other mechanical and plumbing stuff in the back of the vehicle. I saw them as they walked past, and didn’t think much of it - until one of them started kicking the father guy. Just beating the shit out of him, knocked him to the ground, then kept going, standing above him and kicking him over and over.

“Hey, what the fuck are you doing?” I yelled, on my way over to help - but one of the guys, a big black guy (possibly the actor who played john coffee in that green mile movie) - stepped up to me and asked me what my problem was.

“What is this shit?” I tried to say, but he was already throwing punches at me, which I was trying to catch in my hands and push away, but I’m really no good at fighting, just good at being pretty dogged about staying concious despite pain.

But at least fighting with me distracted them from the family, who had three kids, a grandmother, and the father and mother, all living there. The kids were screaming, and despite everything, I managed to tackle the guy who turned towards them after saying he was going to make them shut up. I guess I passed out at some point, though, because when I woke up, I think I was at burger king or something, and mom was there. I couldn’t tell if it’d really happened or not - I wasn’t hurt or anything, but I ran back to the house, not really sure if I wanted it to have been real or not. My car wasn’t out front at the house - but I had woken up at a fastfood place not to far from where it all happened, so it couldn’t be fake, right? A dream within a dream?

There were police up the block, surrounding the smoldering remains of a burned down building - the parents were out front at their trailer, and the kids were up the street, playing foursquare in a park. I wandered over to join them.

“Did you know those other guys?” One of the kids asked me.

“Nope, I just happened to be there at the same time.” I said.

I was way better at foursquare than they expected.

… and that’s it. WEIRD! This was kind of a super immersive dream, pretty specific stuff happened, and it had that whole aspect of re-waking up and still being in the dream. maybe I was close to waking up AFK at the same time as I was blacking out in the dream?

It’s worth recognizing that Toby’s apartment and the HoytHouse are now each constant locations featured in my dreams (as The Apartment and The Hill House respectively) - that is, I have recurring dreams that take place in those environments. As with most of my dream locations, they’re only somewhat allegorically related to their real world counterparts.

In my dream last night, I’d already moved away from The Apartment. It’s a small, odly-laid-out space, the result of walling off some living area from the midst of the utilities and support infrastructure that take up the rest of the ground floor of the building. Above is a series of condos, which are accessible via stairwell and elevator - but if you walk past those in the lobby, and through a double doorway, you come to a long dingy hall. There are janitorial supplies and fuse boxes and various other things needed in the upkeep of the building… but there’s also a rickety stairway, built out of two-by-fours. It leads up to what could almost be the ‘one-and-a-halfth-floor’ - a dark collection of rooms that squeeze inbetween the air conditioning and plumbing and electrical lines and whatever else is up there.

And now I find myself in an interesting position - by merit of its relative obscurity, this little living space has become a secret hideout, a haunt, more or less. Technically, I’m squatting - I don’t pay any money for it anymore. When I lived there before, the landlord let me have it cheap, off the books, took money under the table for it - so when he died and a big real estate management company took over, no one really knew that I lived there. I mean, I’m sure people recognized me - I’d walked in alongside much richer looking people in the lobby plenty of times, giving them a friendly smile before walking off up the hall. I guess that they assumed I was part of the help, you know? And the actual ‘help’ probably either assumed the same thing, or didn’t even think to assume in the first place.

So my weird little apartment continued to open to my key, continued to power the refrigerator and the stove and the TV, continued to blow hot and cold air, but ceased to draw money from my account. Even though I now live at The Hill House, I still have The Apartment as a hidden hideaway. I was tempted to occasionally bring people there, but I wanted it to be my little secret. Only Ryan and Andrew, my current house mates, and Toby, my previous one, knew about it.

This was a lot of setup for the action of the dream, which featured three main parts. I headed downtown, parked in the building parking lot, and wandered in through the doors, expecting as usual that this time would be the time that they’d noticed, and that my key would no longer work. But it opened as easily as usual. I strolled through the lobby, around through the maintenance hall, up the stairs, and into The Apartment - I was planning to paint the stairs outside for some reason, in retrospect I’m not sure if it was smart, since keeping a low profile was what was keeping that space available to me. Anyway, I grabbed a drink out of the fridge, peeked out of the dingy curtains and watched the people walking by on the sidewalk (although the rooms were sort of on floor 1.5, as I said, somehow the windows came out at basement level on the sidewalk, so I could see people’s feet and shins as they walked past.)

I picked up the cans of paint I had left by the door, then went about my work, painting the steps bright red, the supporting beams blue, and adding white wherever I felt it was appropriate. Somehow in the midst of that I switched from the brush to just finger painting. And that’s when i came across the little stray cat that had hung around the building, and had occasionally followed me into the lobby and been let into my apartment before. It was dead, a little black cat, lying underneath the stairs. I wasn’t sure what to do… but I knew it needed to be buried, and there didn’t really seem to be any place appropriate around the outside of the building, since it was all urban highrises and stores and whatever - and there was no way I could get away with burying a dead cat in the grass on the sidewalk.

So I called up Andrew, and Matt Allen, both of whom agreed to come with me to my parents’ house  and bury the cat, although this necessitated letting the other Matt in on my secret abode.

… and that’s it. Here’s where I think all this came from. First off, I didn’t get enough sleep the night before, and I went to bed early, then woke up for some reason around 5:30 - so I was still in the midst of dreaming when I started waking up. Earlier in the day I’d seen both Andrew and Ryan, naturally, and Andrew had mentioned talking to Toby and Seth, both of whom I lived with in the real life apartment downtown. Matt Allen was playing XBOX Live, I noticed, as Andrew and his brother were doing some multiplayer Borderlands action earlier. The cat… ah, my aunt and uncle had a cat that just died. My parents’ house is my parents’ house, I don’t think it needs much of an excuse to make an appearance, although it’s worth nothing that it appeared exactly the same as in real life, as far as I remember, probably because conceptually it’s been insurmountably anchored in my mind as looking that way ever since I was born. Not sure where the paint came from.

Part one - the big basketball game. It lasts 3 days, and it’s in a big stadium/amphitheatre that I’ve seen in my dreams before - more like a theatre than a stadium, but somehow it worked. I was there with a bunch of friends who were actually interested in watching basketball - I was just along for fun. Somehow we didn’t get seats, though, and ended up having to just stand court-side, dodging foul balls and trying not to get run over by tall people. At night, we slept outside in tents - interesting parallel to the Sasquatch music festival. At night, while peeking out of my tent, I saw a couple of guys, brothers I assume, since they both looked sort of the same (indian features) arguing. One of them, the older one, kept asking the younger one to go get him some water. The younger one finally agreed, stipulating that it’d be one dollar. The older brother agreed - and I watched as the younger one slid out from their tent, walked over to a water spigot, and filled a glass. He hesitated for a second, then unzipped, and squirted a bit of piss into the water.

“On second thought, the first one is free,” he informed his brother.

I stopped watching at that point.

Part two - the gothic castle! After the weekend of basketball and camping, we were wrapping up by going to a friend’s costume party, in the top of their scary towering castle thing. I decided to be the king - robe, crown, et cetera. We were on our way there, up a winding mountain road, then looked down to the river below - where an ancient looking clock tower was being impossible transported up the river on a boat. The huge clocktower was so tall that it ought to have sank the boat right there - it was at least tall enough to brush the bottom of the bridges that criss-crossed the chasm. Those, at least, obeyed the laws of nature, and crumbled - so in effect, it was destroying the only way to leave. I knew that the clock tower was there for a dark purpose.

… but that’s it. So - basketball and sasquatch, pissing in water glasses, a costume party, and a very castlevania-esque setting. Those all sound like reasonable dream things, right? ha ha.

Apparently my dream-center wasn’t feeling like generating any new content last night - so it mashed up a bunch of old stuff.

I went to CMD, to either drop something off or pick something up, and noticed a big long table sitting outside, which people were beginning to set with food. I went in through the front doors of CMD, and although the decor and the people were the same, the layout was a lot more like another web agency (I forget what it was called) - there was no lobby or elevator, just a stairway going up to an overlooking second-floor, where all the people were currently in a meeting.

I snuck in like a cat, making no sound, only briefly knocking into something with my backpack - above me, someone (I think it was Jeremy) glanced down, noticed me, but grinned and nodded, and didn’t report me - he was on my side. After I did whatever I was there for (don’t remember what) I left. Outside, the parking lot was  like a weird combination of three places: the real CMD parking lot, the playground and field outside of Richmond Elementary (where I went to K-5th) and the Gorge Amphitheater - so a field, some pavement, a fence around the whole thing, except for an entire border made of a huge jagged canyon cliff.

For some reason I noticed that there were a bunch of fence peices in the dumpster - big red slats with points on top, nailed into two cross beams, with posts at either end. I was considering taking them for firewood, or maybe to give to my parents to use in their backyard, but I couldn’t seem to pull them out, and get them on my car. But I kept trying it - I suddenly realized it was dusk, and just starting to get dark.

Behind me, I heard a bunch of people shouting - I turned around, and saw fireworks going off, and a crowd of people gathered around the tables I’d seen earlier. I ran over, and found - ready for this? It was Harry Potter’s birthday party! None of his wizard friends were there - it was just him, a bunch of people more or less my age, and suddenly, I was there too. I don’t know if Harry knew who I was, or actually if he’d noticed that I was there, but I wasn’t told to leave or anything, so I just joined in, eating, talking to the random people around me, occasionally shouting “Happy Birthday” in chorus with my fellow party-goers.

Then, the party started to wrap up - the lights dimmed, people drifted away, and Harry sort of hooked up with a girl that was there - I was spying on them as he convinced her to let him give her a kiss, and I suspect they would’ve done more, except that it was a false ending to the party! The lights suddenly came back on, and dance music was pounding! Some skinny black guy in tight jeans and an open shirt bounded over, and pulled Harry into a little synchronized dance routine, which we all tried to copy. Yay! Dance Party!

… the end. (I had some other facet of this dream that involved an amusement park, which I think I’d dreamt about before, running around between the stalls, the rides, the tents and RVs where the staff lived while they were running it… but I barely remember it.)

Let’s think about what we’ve got here. CMD is where I used to work (and where I’ve been told I’m actually not allowed to b re-hired,) Richmond is my old elementary school, the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington is where I’ve gone for three years now to see the Sasquatch Music Festival. CMD is usually on my mind in some way or another, since I liked working there, and my two roommates (and lots of my friends) still work there. I’m not sure about Richmond, but last night I was looking at the list of acts I’d enjoyed at Sasquatch, so that’s where that’s from.

The big red fence slats that I wanted for my parents back yard were in fact the fence that used to be in their back yard - I remember it as a kid. It was rotting and falling apart. It got torn down, but my parents have been having trouble with the neighbors’ kids coming into their backyard and messing stuff up, so I wanted to put the fence back to stop that. Possibly the reason that I couldn’t get the fence to move is because I couldn’t when I was a kid either - it was too strong to break apart, and I know I played around with doing that back then.

I just had a birthday party, and I was just watching this thing about Harry Potter in a rap battle with Voldemort - see, there he is, and there’s the black guy, and there’s all the people who aren’t his wizard friends, but who like him nonetheless.

So it’s a bunch of random stuff that I had bouncing around in my head, and my brain was like, “I can make a cool remix out of this!” Iiiinteresting.

I don’t remember all of it, but here’s what I do remember: I was on my way up a windind road to a church. There was a residential community situated amongst the hilly area surrounding a higher bluff, and that’s where the church was - very dramatic. Everything was sort of quasi-wild-west, broken down, chipping and fading paint, boards and bricks sort of looking. I don’t know why I was going to the church - and in fact, once I got there, it was time for me to go home. It was getting dark, and it was cold, so I walked hurridly down the sloping lanes, twisting my way through the hills towards the highway below.

Then, in front of me, I noticed a man, standing, staring back behind me. I realized that his face was lit by an orange glow, and as I came closer to him, I glanced back over my shoulder, and saw a gout of flame. The church was on fire! It was on fire, and it was throwing this orange light everywhere. I commented to the stranger that it was weird that it was burning so brightly, and he pointed to the moon - which was huge, and a deep reddish orange as well.

I continued down to the freeway, realizing that it was too late to get home the way I’d planned (whatever that was) and I’d have to choose between walking one direction along the highway back to the city, or across the highway and up to a camping station where I could rent a cabin for the night. However, as I reached the bottom I noticed that the man from before was following me - a little freaked out, I kept me hand on the knife in my pocket as I continued along the highway. Eventually, as I came around a bend I saw red and blue lights flashing - an abulance, and some police cars. Someone had been hurt. I run to see what’s happened, and so does the silent stranger - it’s a heavyset man, soaked in blood, lying on the ground. He looks familiar, but I can’t think where I know him from. The man I met before is inconsolable, however - he obviously knew the victim. He crouches and cradles the man’s head in his hands - and then looks up at me.

Nightmareishly (although in my dream I wasn’t at all scared) his face starts to bleed, red fluid squirting from his eyes, and nose, and mouth, running out of his ears, from underneath his fingernails, and everywhere else, I assume. He dies horribly in front of me, lying in a spreading puddle of blood, draped across the body of the other man.

I don’t know how I get home (to my parents’ house, not the HoytHouse) - but I’m pretty shaken up my the whole experience.

The next day, my family is standing outside their house, watching my brother James ride up and down the street on his little razor scooter - and somehow we’re all holding pistols. Dad has a shoulder holster, and he asks me if I’ve found a good holster for mine yet. I show him my leather hip holster, and he approves. Just then, a female police officer appears, and asks James to see his firearm permit. He doesn’t have one, of course. Next she asks to see mine - I obligingly reach into my back pocket for my wallet, and start flipping through the cards. After I’ve gone through one stack of cards without coming up with it, she gets impatient, grabs my arms, and starts pulling me over towards her car, parked across the street. I protest, trying to pull away, which of course counts as resistance, and she slaps a pair of handcuffs around my wrists. She throws me into the car (into the driver’s seat, for some reason) as I try to explain that if she would just look in my wallet, which is now lying on the sidewalk, she would find the card.

She walks back across the street, but rather then looking at my wallet, she takes my whole family inside, then walks right back to me. She tells me to start the car, but I can’t drive it - the front passanger-side wheel is completely busted. The tread is torn off, the little pole that sticks into the middle of the wheel to turn it isn’t even inserted correctly. The hub cap is lying in front of the car. She’s pissed, and goes back inside my house - I manage to open the car door, and circle around to look at the tire. I try to put the peices back together, when suddenly my mom is there - “Why are you helping her?” she asks. I try to explain that I’m attempting to expediate my release, when the police woman comes back outside - but before she reaches the car, a couple of young black guys skate up on their roller blades.

“Is this po-lice bitch giving you trouble, dog?” asks one, circling around. “This is how you deal with the po-lice.”

Abruptly, he pulls out a huge handgun, with some sort of attachment on the bottom of the grip resembling the battery on a cordless power drill, and plugs the officer with several rounds.

“Yeah, bitch, that’s what you get! You’re free now, dog!” he yells to me, skating past her body and collecting the handcuff keyes, then throwing them, along with the weird gun, into my lap. It goes off and fire a bullet into the dashboard of the police car.

So now I’m sitting in a beat-up police car with my mom, with a murder weapon in my lap and my own pistol still holstered at my waist, and a dead police office lying in the street. An ambulance pulls up (just like in Grand Theft Auto, they always seem to know when someone is dead) and the attendant walks cautiously up to the window of the car - I hold both my hands high in the air, and tell him to take the gun off of my lap, and out of my hip holster. He looks scared of me.

So that’s how that dream went. Big and long. Totally referencial too - I was recently chased by a slightly unreasonable cop, I’ve fired a gun before, used a power-drill with a battery attachment like that, I’ve dreamt about the landscape around the crumbling town in the hills and the freeway below before (which would’ve eventually linked into my underground open-car mass transit startion and the secret underground enterance / LARPing dungeon that leads into OMSI) - and I have a knife in my pocket. It was like an adventure. Some of my dreams are almost fairly straight forward ‘what if’ senarios, where I sort of put myself in a situation then work out how I’d respond to it. Is that escapist, or something else? When we get truly immersive virtual reality, I hope there’s a ‘lucid dream simulator’ feature.

So I woke up from a dream, early this morning, and after a bit of thought (and not being able to fall back asleep), here’s what I realized: in the dream, one of the people told me about something that I had forgotten - and after they told me, I remembered it. This is weird to start out with, since the person in the dream was obviously in my own head to begin with - and if they remembered it, why didn’t I? But it was even weirder because this person is a real person that I know, and the even they were referring to involved other people I know, but the actual even itself happened in a different dream that I had a month or so ago! So not only did this person in my head remember more then me, but they remembered my own dreams better then me. What’s up with that?

The only way I could imagine that working is if some portion of my mind was filtering everything else going on and sort of ‘managing’ what showed up in my dream - so that inconsistencies didn’t arrise. In this case, I ‘remembed’ the event, but my dream self hadn’t yet, so it had to be related by the dream version of this other person, and then the ‘manager’ part of my brain allowed my ‘dream self’ to remember it.

Anyway, it was striking and weird and worth relating. And now it’s like 8, and my eyes hurt, and I can’t fall back asleep. I’ve decided to listen to some old ‘classical’ music - Beethoven, Mozart, and Vivaldi to start with.

Last night I was adrift in a flood of vivid dreams. I didn’t know that they were dreams, but I had complete control over myself - they were a lot like real life. In one, I was sitting at a computer in the public library, along with some friends from CMD - in the ‘conference room’ adjacent, there was a speaker giving a lecture.

We heard him say, “Sometimes little jack and jill have to be told that there just isn’t any money for college, and they’re just going to have to deal with it!”

Thorin, my boss when I was at the agency, objected - “So basicly you’re saying that my upwardly-mobile daughter has no opportunity for vertical growth?”

After their argument somehow got carried out of the conference room and into the main section of the library, everyone was paying attention. After several rounds of accusations and defense, the man said indignantly, “I suppose you want everything to be however you want it, don’t you?”

Before Thorin could answer I jumped up and declared, “We want a life full of comfortabilitity [sic], or none at all!”

Not quite sure what to make of the statement, everyone looked on bemusedly.

Later that day, we went to a party at a huge house - somehow, I found my way back into an unused room, which turned out to be where you had to fight the boss (not Thorin, this was a boss in the video game sense). I don’t remember how I beat him, but I managed it, and then somehow won the right to use that room as my bed room. I moved all my stuff in, set up my bed, then lay down to sleep - but I couldn’t fall asleep. I knew that if I rolled over and looked at the outlet next to my bed, I would see something scary.

Unable to take the suspense, I looked - and there was the boss’ face, instead of the outlet, with cords stuffed in his mouth. As I stared, its eyes suddenly flipped open and stared back at me. Suddenly I was caught by a sort of air-current, like there was a strong win blowing me closer and closer to the face, which was shifting to resemble my own! My vision blurred, there was a roar in my ears, and just before I got too close, I woke up (in my dream), thrashing around in a tangle of sheets. It had only been a dream… within a dream.

So - faces of people I defeated which suck me in, and ‘an uncomfortable life is not worth living’. Weird. The experience with the face felt similar to when I tried Salvia, especially the weird air current / invisible force pushing against me, which was nearly identical. It also felt a little like that Call of Cthulu computer game, the way my vision distorted and sort of pulsated as my attention was fixated on the face.

The computers in the library are probably a childhood throw back of some kind, as I definitly spent time on the library computers when I was a kid, waiting for mom to get off work, or there with my classmates on a school trip. Thorin has a daughter - I guess he would be defensive of her given the opportunity, but I can’t think of anything in particular this relates to. My mispoken sentiment (’comfortabilitity’ is not a word) isn’t even a true one - I would rather live any life then no life at all, rather be uncomfortable for the rest of my life then lose it. So not sure what that’s about.

Dreams are so much fun.

Last night I dreamt that I was living in a weird little village - mostly basic shacks, quasi-colonial-style houses, lots of dirt and gravel roads, but there were a lot of industrial infrastructure elements too - big pipe junctions, areas where the air was thick with power cables, a field of solar panels outside the village, et cetera.

I was friends with three other kids there, and one day while we were exploring the various buildings of the village, we ran across some sort of huge machine, with knobs and levels and dials and blinking lights, which we decided to play with. We changed the settings to see what would happen - and it started to heat up, setting off alarms, threatening to explode. We quickly changed everything back, and it was okay again.

Then, for some reason, we made it into a game - over the next few days, we would return, and see how close we could let the thing get to overloading without it actually happening. We had no idea what would actually happen if we messed up. We let it get closer and closer, but never too close.

Until the night that I snuck in by myself. I turned everything up to full, then stood watching all the readouts go up, flash red, and the alarms go off. I watched the impending overload entranced - until I snapped out of it as I suddenly realized that it had gone too far, and was past the point of no return!

I ran, taking dark hallways down under the ground, closing big heavy steel-and-concrete doors behind me as I went, trying to find a place to hide, not only from the blast, but from what I’d done. Finally, I hit a dead end - it was a damp room, with loose plastic covering the floor and walls, which were dirt. The room was rocked by what seemed like an earthquake, and I heard a roar as the machine exploded - a tiny puff of smoke woofed out from the crack between the floor and the door.

Everything was quiet. After several minutes, I started retracing my steps, opening door after door, avoiding hanging wires and pipes venting steam, until I reached a door that was melted shut. I found a ladder to crawl up, leading to an access hatch in the solar power field. As I stepped outside, I realized I had come out too soon - towering above me was a growing mushroom cloud, and a fog bank of smoke was climbing the hill towards me. I knew it was too late for me too - I already had radiation poisening, I felt my skin start to itch…

What is this one - fear of natural disasters? Repressed guilt? I don’t think I feel guilty about anything right now… hmm. Well, other then the things I always feel guilty about, and I think I’ve more or less dismissed them over the years - oh well.

Last night, I dreamt I was wandering aroud the basement level of the art institute - but like most dreams, it was a sort of amalgamation of all the things I associate with the non-school-areas of AIPD: industrial decor, twisting pipes and hanging wires, valves with little luggage tags on them, scuffed poured concrete floors.

I was taking a shortcut to get outside after class, when this security guard found me. He told me I wasn’t supposed to be there - then immediatly started shouting at me to get down on the ground or he would shoot me. He was holding a gun on me, and I really thought he was going to shoot me no matter what - I was crying, I was so scared. He took my cellphone and my camera, and I tried to protetest, but he had that gun. Finally he asked for my wallet, and I tried to really slowly pull it out of my pocket in a completely non-theatening way. He pulled out my ID and looked at it.

Meanwhile, class had let out, and there were at least a couple dozen students walking past - but they weren’t doing anything to help me. Most people pretended to ignore me, like nothing was happening.

Finally, the guard accepted the fact that I was a student, and let me go, but refused to apologize or admit that he’d done anything wrong.

I guess the dream touched on a few key elements - my school, the cool industrial decor, my aversion to authority, fear of guns, and recent upswing in reports of abuse of power by people in positions of authority.

It’s weird, having sexual dreams about people that I wouldn’t normally be especially attracted to - in particular, right after waking, because I almost feel like if the door busted open and there they were, I would be in to it. So is the dream a reflection of an attraction that exists, but that I don’t allow myself to explore? Because I wasn’t just, you know, going along in the dream, I was having a really good time.

So now the question is - do I feel a little more flexible sexually towards those two because of the dream, or have I always and now I’m allowing myself to acknowledge it?