21 Dreams).

Just in case the title didn’t give it away, too much information lies ahead.

Proceed at your own risk.

There were three dream scenes I recalled upon awakening.

In one, I was talking with two or three writers from Rick and Morty, who were sitting across a table from me. I was asking them if the first episodes of season 5, as I suspected, weren’t the Rick and Morty we usually follow, but ones from an alternate universe. I cited Rick’s lack of using his portal gun until recently as suggestive evidence, as well as him drinking out of a champaign glass rather than his typical flask (though I’m not sure this one is accurate). They all seemed to be checking out the episodes on the same laptop after I said this, as if they were curious themselves — as if, despite being writers for the show, they didn’t know, either, and wanted to know if I was telling the truth.

In an even shorter scene, I’m walking to a convenience store dressed in a monk’s robe, but as I do so my pants, from beneath my robe, begin falling down to my ankles.

It was the last dream scene that I found most curious, however.

Looking out the second-story window of my old room at my parent’s house, I see the big pond in our front yard that we used to swim in (which doesn’t actually exist), which in turn makes me think of a bigger and better swimming area just a short distance away (which also doesn’t exist).

Suddenly, in the tall grass and bushes down below and between the pond and our house, I see something moving. Its a monkey. Somehow it sees me, too, and then it comes up to my window impossibly quick and stares at me through the glass. For a moment I think its going to start masturbating, which for some reason made me consider masturbating, but instead it just continues to stare at me with this ambiguous expression and uses one hand to open what turns out to be a door in its chest. Inside, there is a circular mouth of sharp teeth.

The monkey image sort of hung around with me, perhaps only because of my desire to draw it, and it took me a few days to take the time to try and interpret this dream scene.

Water often signifies emotions and the unconscious aspect of ourselves and, at least on a personal note, there are also associations with sex. Then there is the matter of the monkey, which, given what I thought he was about to do at the window and the phrase “beating the monkey,” likely was symbol for masturbation itself — associated with sex, clearly, and as a consequence also emotions and the unconscious as well.

This might make even more sense given I’ve been kind overdoing it in that department as of late.

Instead of masturbating, as I anticipated, the monkey opens up a door in its chest; instead of a heart, it has a circular mouth with sharp teeth targeted inward. As for the teeth and the chest, they’re supposed to be symbols of power and aggression — showing teeth, pounding one’s chest. An open mouth, on the other hand, is seen as a symbol of openness and receptivity, and this seems to resonate with the alleged meaning of an open door — being open or receptive to new opportunities. The window is also said to suggest new opportunities, or perhaps just a new perspective.

So the chest is power and agression; inside it, an open mouth, which is receptivity and openness… but within the mouth, sharp teeth: again, power and aggression.

Like the monkey was a goddamn Russian doll of dualities, a Chinese box of polarities.

And though it only struck me long after, there’s the presence of a mouth in place of a heart. Especially given that it was such a sharp-toothed, inhuman mouth, this struck me as a little unnerving in retrospect.

Even so, the image of the monkey at the window as a whole doesn’t necessarily suggest something bad. It may just imply that behind the aggressive masturbation I’ve been engaging in is a deeper, heart-centered hunger that I may still have the opportunity to satisfy.

I feel a bit uncomfortable writing that, but that’s honestly how I would interpret this dream image if it were someone else’s dream.

This may be even more relevant due to something I’ve been writing lately, a blog post I’ve constantly been putting off finishing. Which leads me to wonder: are my dreams heckling my blog posts before my procrastinating ass even gets the chance to finish them?

A Broken Nap of Sleepless Dreams (7/18/21 Dreams).

In the twilight state of consciousness, I see a vision of a single person standing in the distance to the right. To the left is an overturned bicycle, with one tire in my line of sight. From outside my field of vision comes an inhuman arm — greenish, I think, and it has no wrist or hands, just slender fingers positioned on the front and side of it’s arm in the general area where hands would be. It moves slowly, touching the tire, and though I can’t see the rest of it, I feel certain it is watching the person, who is none the wiser.

I wake up and decide to make a rough sketch of it, as I felt it might be something cool to draw later on, after I awoke from my nap.

I then went back to sleep, but again awoke briefly in the twilight state when I heard the sound of wind rushing in my ears. This is often the prelude to an out of body experience, though this isn’t always the case. Feeling too tired and comfortable to awaken and write it down, I let myself slip back into slumber.

Suddenly I find myself walking through my dark bedroom towards the equally dark bathroom. I reach inside and flip the switch on the wall, but the light doesn’t come on. I flip it a few more times in succession. Nothing. I turn to walk away when it hits me that all the bulbs shouldn’t be burnt out, so maybe a fuse blew, or perhaps the entire apartment complex lost power. I listen carefully to see if I can notice the humming of any machines, but I hear nothing. Still turned away from the bathroom, I reach my hand and flip the other switch, the one for the fan. For a moment there’s no response, but then I hear the fan grumbling and growling to life. When I turn to look back into the bathroom, the light is suddenly just on.

I’m confused for only a moment before I wake up in bed. I then close my eyes and drift off again.

Next, I’m walking from the kitchen down a dark hallway. I feel a subtle fear of the dark, too, and I don’t know why, but it arouses my curiosity. I think its at this point that I suddenly have the urge to get drunk, but I see that a digital clock in the darkness shows that its around 3 o’clock. I initially assume its the AM, but ultimately relax when I realize I had taken my nap early in the day, so it must actually be PM. Eventually I come to my open bedroom door, to the left. I put my hand inside to flip the light switch, but when I do, nothing happens.

I wake up again. I grab my notebook, write it all down, and try and drift back to sleep.

At some point I realize I’m staring at my cellphone in my hands, and just passed it I can see details of the room I’m in, but I’m not just awake this time — I know that I’m dreaming. It crosses my mind that at least in this place the blue light won’t hit my eyes and fuck with my melatonin and sleep cycles. I then take a moment to appreciate, to be in utter awe over how utterly indistinguishable all this is from so-called waking reality.

As I do so and try to stabilize myself there, I hear this “womp, womp” sound that might be the blood rushing in my ears, but in any case, it feels as though this increases the instability of the environment and ultimately sends me tumbling back.

I again wake up in bed, but this time its a false awakening. Much like the hallway scene, this also isn’t my actual room, my actual apartment. My bedroom is dark, and someone I know comes in and sits on the chair by the desk against the wall opposite the wall my bed is against. There’s some talking between us, but I’m still groggy, and then one or two other people come in.

As they’re talking, I see a large notebook beside me on the bed where I’ve scribbled my dreams in the hurried and messy way one does in the dark when frantically trying to record a dream before the details fade. As I see it, I remember the cell phone incident and desperately try to screen out their conversation as I write it down.

I also remember writing down the dream scene about Rose, though upon awakening for real I also remember this dream scene occurred after this false awakening, not before, so I’m rather confused at this point.

From what I recall, after writing that shit down Rose either enters the room or was already among the three people talking. We both walk out of the room, strollimg down a long, dark hallway, and she puts her arm around me as she walks beside me.

“Good,” she tells me, “now we have fifty minutes alone together.”

Immediately a part of me gets excited about the prospect of having sex with her, but I tell myself that this is a ridiculous assumption, and just because she wants to be alone with me doesn’t mean she’s eager to jump my bone.

I then wake up, either for real or into the false awakening formerly described.

Its difficult to convey how different these kind of dreams are from ordinary dreams, but there is a definite difference. The environment is vivid, indistinguishable from ordinary reality, and while I’m awake within them, I’m not always aware that I’m dreaming. Some memories from my ordinary life seems accessible in this state, but I don’t notice the differences — such as the fact that my apartment isn’t the same. It fascinates and perplexes me. When I finally awake from them and into ordinary reality, I’m always left in this strange mood.

It really does seem like a parallel reality to me, and I’ve gotten to the point where I really don’t care how fucking crazy that sounds.

Light at the Window (7/2/21 Dreamlet).

I’m in the living room of my apartment with someone, standing nearby the window. Its dark outside and I suddenly notice someone shining their flashlight in from just outside the window — disturbing, as I live on the third floor and there’s no balcony.

In terror and disbelief, as adrenaline shoots through my system, I find myself yelling aloud, “What the fuck?”

For a moment I try to rationalize it — is someone climbing the walls of the apartment building? Are they on an absurdly tall ladder? I frantically pull aside the curtains and lean closer to the glass for a better look. I see nothing. Looking down toward the parking lot, I can make out no movement, just cars in the darkness. As my eyes fall on the vehicles below, I suddenly hear a car alarm begin to go off, but it only gets two honks in before I’m jolted awake.

I got up and quickly wrote it down in my phone. I hadn’t been asleep for fifteen minutes, and my hopes of taking a nap were now pretty much shot to shit, as the adrenaline was still coursing through me. I’ve been drinking too much this week, so what minimal sleep I’ve gotten hasn’t been restful, healthy sleep, so perhaps this was due to that REM rebound effect. Regardless of the cause, it was an incredibly vivid and realistic dream or dreamlet and I haven’t the foggiest clue what it means.

Of Chronic Daydreaming & the Evolution of Insomnia.

Most of my time is spent daydreaming — subjecting memories to analysis, playing with ideas, fantasizing in this internal simulator of mine — and this is the case regardless as to whether I’m loafing or engaged in some physical activity. I suspect this is what my last psychologist, who I saw back in college, meant when he said I was “very cerebral.”

I’ve been like this for as long as I’ve been myself. My mother always explained me as that stereotypical kid in the classroom who wasn’t paying attention in class, but rather looking out the window, mind wandering freely. I even daydreamed at night, which may stretch the definition — it was in the evening, after all, and so couldn’t technically be daydreaming — and I remember this especially being the case when I got my own bedroom.

What I called insomnia when I became a teenager wasn’t something altogether new, I realized at some point. I’m just nocturnal, it seems. There were differences, however, and this is when I came to distinguish “passive insomnia” and “active insomnia.”

Passive insomnia is what I did as a young child: I’d remain beneath the covers atop the loft bed in a dark roo., contemplating, remembering, and fantasizing for hours on end. Only in my teen years did I shift to active insomnia: turn the lights on in my room, fuel myself with caffeine, and begin engaging in activities — watching a movie, documentary or show, but often enough drawing or writing, where I could put my chronic daydreaming to some use in the external world.

While I don’t produce artwork as often as I used to, and despite the fact that I write I write less than I did in my 20s and 30s, I still daydream like mad. And I sure as fuck engage in it at work, too — almost 80% of my day, I’d say — and this is one of the few true benefits of being a detail maintenance man stuck in a shitty fast food job at 42 years of age.

Short of acquiring money through doing creative things I’m actually passionate about, this kind of job may actually allow the greatest amount of subjective freedom available. Maybe.

So as pathetic as my lack of ambition is, as deep as my hatred of this job has grown… there is that.

Of Moody Minds & Altered State ID’s.

When I’m depressed, life is agony, my mere existence is almost unbearable, and I feel like I’m moving through the thick, hungry mud of some grueling swamp. Though I would never allow myself to do it, the depression often reaches such depths that ending it all seems like a far more rational, merciful course of action than continuing to force myself to endure this self-evidently wretched corporeal existence, to keep dragging my feet through this empty, ultimately meaningless life. There is this feeling of certainty that things will never get better, and that even if they did, I surely wouldn’t deserve it, and in any case it wouldn’t last anyway — life would be lifting me up for a single, solitary, and purely malicious reason: to set me up for the inevitable descent. The higher you climb, after all, the harder you fall, and life is so determined to fuck me so hard in the worst way possible that it is willing grant me that temporary reprieve if it means it will ultimately be able to use it as a means of exacerbating my torture.

Then I get some sleep, take a hit from my vape pen, watch one of my favorite stand-up comedians, or have a deep, meaningful exchange with a friend and the impossible happens: the dark, heavy stormcloud lifts. I’m fine again and I can hardly wrap my mind around the dismal fellow I was just a short time ago.

When I’m anxious, this unbearable tension grows inside me. I imagine pulling back on a bow, but rather than releasing to let the arrow soar towards a target the hand keeps drawing it back further and further until I feel certain it can go no further — and then it goes further still. I can’t understand how I can bear the inner tension, how it doesn’t rip me apart and drive me irreversibly and unquestionably insane.

In this state of profound anxiety, the world, to paraphrase Jordan Peterson, becomes a dragon, a monster of inconceivable size, a powerful and malicious animal hungry to devour me, to squash me, and so I collapse into myself, feeling small, powerless, defenseless against it.

Anxiety attacks take generalized anxiety and then crank it up several notches: it’s like a relentlessly painful process of dying without the sweet release that comes with the finality of death.

Hot flashes wash over me in waves. My mouth is dry as a desert, my throat as narrow as a straw. Too much energy seems to be residing in my eyes, which are feel dry and cracked despite their watering. I’m blinking with decreasing frequency, too — its like my ocular highbeams are on. Every inch of my skin seems laminated in cold sweat and my entire body feels like a white-knuckled fist. My jaw is clenched like a goddamn vice and when I walk or move it feels jerky and stiff, as if all my joints need oiling. If I have to speak, I feel as if I have to physically push out the words and my voice, its all over the map, as wild and unpredictable as a runaway firehose.

Only when I’m pissed. angry, enraged, it appears, does my full-spectrum hypersensitivity vanish and this venomous insensitivity rush in to fill the vacuum. Confidence, or perhaps simply not giving a fuck, enable me to push away my baseline empathy, send my inner restraint home for the day, fire my fear of guilt and walk the sadistic fuck off the property. Consequences be damned: I become viscious, ice flowing in my veins and red staining my eyes, poisonous filth flowing ceaselessly from my mouth before I even realize what I’m saying — if indeed I do at all, as memory always seems so spotty in retrospect. In verbal fights I’ve had, I can’t always remember clearly how things went down or what I said, and at least on occasion, as with my one or two semi-physical fights, I’ve blacked out entirely.

When I’m drunk, I’m happy but hopelessly stupid. Its an escape from the ego, from the inhibitions that typically hold me in chains, and that is liberating. Ideas that seem great while drunk, however, reveal themselves to be utterly insipid when sobriety returns.

When we used to go out barhopping in the college town on the weekends, I’d often call or text people apologies for my behavior when memories of the goings-on crept back into consciousness. Now when I get drunk, typically at home and alone in my apartment, I feel just as embarrassed about comments or YouTube music videos I shared on Facebook while under the influence and have developed the habit of promptly deleting them when possible once sobriety returns. Even if I might have said or done these very same things while stone cold sober, often enough the mere fact that I did them while drunk fills me with embarassment, shame, guilt and self loathing.

Almost every girl I’ve had sex with, fooled around with, or has merely made me horny has commented on how I look angry when I’m horny. I’ve had to explain that its just the aggression I feel, the intensity of the state, and I am anything but angry. This state is the easiest way to become focused and absorbed, to become simple and singleminded. How I wish I could access those qualities in other states…

When I’m high on cannabis, at least nowadays, I feel happy and comfortable, inspired and entrigued, absorbed and peaceful — so long as I have control of the set and setting. At work, a hit or two from a joint or a vape pen lifts my mood, though too much can trigger self-consciousness and anxiety. This is due to being in an environment that isn’t my own, that I don’t control, at least to some degree, but its also due to the presence of other people. I become too concerned regarding how they perceive me, too paranoid about revealing how weird I really am. When I’m in my one-bedroom apartment, when its nighttime and I need not fear anyone knocking on my door (which almost never happens), I am entirely at ease. In my experience, the altered state of consciousness that marijuana delivers you into is one in which your focus becomes amplified: if you are anxious, it will exacerbate your anxiety; if you are experiencing pleasure, it will enhance your pleasure; if you are interested, it will amplify your curiosity. It elevates that which you draw your attention to, and it begins to work for you once you realize this, even if its not at an entirely conscious level. Once you start using it to amplify your enjoyment of things you already enjoy, you condition where you tend to place your attention while stoned and you can, as a consequence, then carry that conditioned enjoyment into other contexts.

That’s my working hypothesis, anyway, at least with respect to personal experience.

What I’ve called my dark moods are the most difficult to explain. These occur once a certain type of weirdness arises in my life once again. I feel very inside of myself, very still and hyper-aware, and the external world seems overcast, yet crisp, vivid, clear. I am in a state of fear, awe, and a strange kind of powerlessness. Immedeate affairs seem laughably trivial; only the big picture matters. The birds eye-view looks down at my worm self and the rest of the worms and finds our lives and perspectives so silly, so primitive, so utterly childish. It feels as if we are part of a far greater context than we could ever hope to imagine — and yet the details elude me.

Finally, there are moments of happiness, of joy, which come all to rarely. When it happens, the universe appears indescribably beautiful. I’m in the moment, rooted in the here and now, and feel connected and grateful to be alive. This has happened in the rare, deep and meaningful relationships I’ve had with certain women, it happened during a particularly intense out-of-body experience in which I found myself floating in space before the earth, and also during the first night I ever tried MDMA.

Its amazing how our outlook on the world and ourselves can change so dramatically given nothing more than a shift in mood, in a change in our state of consciousness. Not only do we more easily remember things when we are in the same mood in which we originally learned them, but mood alters the way in which we interpret our memories. Similarly, our outlook on the world in real-time and our interpretation of it also changes, specifically in a manner that tends to reinforce the mood in question. Most unnerving, however, is the fact that our personality can change, either moderately or drastically, which is to say that we can have state-specific or mood-dependent identities: state IDs, if you will.

Each mood, each state: a new world, a new altered state ID.

Once you throw in the fact that some moods or states — such as anger, for instance, or the dream state — can also involve amnesia, you begin to suspect we all have the psychological ingredients that, if combined and baked in the right way, could lead to Dissociative Identity Disorder.

With this crowd in the broken mirror, where could the true, inner self reside — the soul, or whatever you wish to call it? The closest thing I’ve experienced to it is that state I’ve had but a taste of in the midst of meditation, that place within us some have called The Witness, where you look upon all your bodily sensations, all your thoughts and emotions, as some spectator from a third person perspective.

It may constitute the pure inner light that is broken up into the spectra of states or moods through the prism of the mind, and how I wish I could anchor myself there…

Day Residue & Issues of Trust & Control (4/29/21 Dream).

Its the closing scene of an enduring dream.

The van stops outside of a building, the door opens, and my two companions get out and go inside. There are people walking by and I get the sense that we’re just outside of some concert, though it was never established in the dream what band is playing. As they open the door, I realize that I forgot my hat at home, though this bothers me only fleetingly.

Alone now, I sit, feet outside the door, as I struggle to put my shoes on. I also want to bring books, notebooks, and other things with me — things that in waking life I’d typically put in my bookbag, but for some reason in this case decide to put inside plastic bags that I intend to place over my feet once I get my shoes on and tie tightly around my ankles.

As I’m in the midst of working on one foot, a girl comes up to my other shoe, which is just laying on the curb beside me, and asks, “You want this?” She says it in a way that implies she intended to steal it, so I just look at her very seriously and say, simply, “I do.” Then she leaves it there and just walks away.

I accomplish getting both shoes on and tying the bag to my left foot, but can’t get the right one to work. It won’t tie tightly enough, but in the midst of my struggling I remember I only intended to do this to one foot and so abandon the effort.

As is often the case recently, it was after writing down the dream that I realized there was a song playing in my head. It was Mr. Brightside, by The Killers.

In terms of what the dream may have been attempting to communicate through symbol:

The van may suggest that I need more space as I move forward in life and bring things and people (like the two people in the van) along with me. Much the same could be said of the shoes, which alone have associations with moving forward, and given the bags full of my possessions, it resonates with the van symbol even more. Shoes also have associations with identity, however (“to walk a mile in your shoes,” for instance), particularly one’s persona or social mask, given they cover the foot like the persona covers the ego in Jungian psychology. In this sense, the shoes also share similarities with the hat that I’d forgotten, as hats are decorative and a means of protection for the head, so perhaps also serve as a symbol for the persona. The sense that I was just outside a building in which there was a concert — which is said to symbolize harmony, enjoyment, energy and music — may suggest that if only I’d let go of things (my hat and the stuff in my shoe-bags) I could find community, energy, and enjoyment in life.

This dream reminds me of two things.

The first thing it reminded me of dealt with the symbols used in the dream, and how it related to events that happened yesterday — little things.

For instance, yesterday morning, as always, the pair of shoes that had been gifted to me awhile back were a bitch to put on. After my shift ended, I had driven a drunk coworker to a nearby Circle K to get more beer, and he wasn’t wearing the hat he almost always wore. The zipper on my bookbag had also broken and my book and papers had fallen out as I strolled from the truck to my apartment security door.

All incidents that may have been cherry-picked for useful symbols with which to weave the dream. In other words, this may suggest the dream was in part constructed of “day residue” that was reorganized or appropriated by my unconscious in the dream’s construction — which does not me essarily contradict its symbolic meaning.

Second, the message of the dream reminds me of my attempt to relax myself through self-hypnosis last night in an effort to get to sleep. I finally articulated to myself what has been a consistent problem with me: I can’t entirely relax or let go because I always seem to be on guard, sleeping with one eye open, afraid of being caught unaware and controlled, or taken advantage of. This applies to my perhaps-paranormal-related fears during meditation and sleep, but also more broadly across my mundane life.

Its disturbingly all-encompassing, as a matter of fact.

Everybody Knows That You’re Insane (4/15/21 Dream).

“I have been lost
down every road I follow,
out in the dark,
on my way home…”
— Queens of the Stone Age, Everybody Knows That You’re Insane.

The house I live in, where I believe I live with others, is built very close to the neighboring houses, almost as if they’re all part of a small strip mall. When I exit the house and get into my truck, I appear to be in a parking lot akin to my local Circle K, with a lot of cars and trucks coming in to park and backing up to leave.

In the process of backing up myself, I suddenly realize that whatever my reasons had been for leaving were flawed, that I had been absent minded and that I didn’t need to leave at all, so have to park the truck again. At this point, my anxiety flares up. The parking lot is so busy that I’m afraid of being thought of as a fool and pissing off others in the lot by pulling back into my space and just generally getting in the way. In any case, I stop and then either pull back into my space or park the truck right where I am — needless to say, in an area of the lot that didn’t constitute a parking space.

Upon trying to reenter the house I discover that I’ve locked myself out. Presumably the back door was still open, though in order to access it I had to somehow get into my backyard, which I could only get to through the neighbor’s yard. In the process of trying to get into my neighbor’s yard, however, I somehow end up inside my neighbor’s house instead. Worse, I can’t find a way out, into their yard or otherwise, and was getting increasingly worried about getting caught.

I do get caught, too, though by the neighbors children. There are three girls, all very young, and they are busy playing when I step into the room. Rather than lie, I go with honesty, and ask them if they could do me a favor and point my way out. Two of them seem willing to help me, but the remaining one, which I believe is the middle child, seems suspicious of me and very close to screaming for their parents. I then add that I was trying to get next door, where I live, but had gotten lost and accidentally gotten into the wrong house somehow. After telling her this, she seems to relax. She then directs me to go upstairs and provides me with further directions.

Eager to get out of there, I walk up the steps onto an exposed hallway that only leads to my right, into the darkness. As I proceed down the hallway, I think I see one of their parents walk into the room below, just out of my peripheral vision. I immediately sense that they see me, too, but that they are confused and not yet alarmed. I manage to get out quickly, and from inside, as I leave, I overhear the father say to the mother, rather dismissively, “Oh, you don’t still think they’re stealing our power next door, do you?” By now I’m outside, and while I can’t hear her response clearly, it does seem clear that she still believes this.

Despite now being outside, I am somehow not in their backyard, certainly not in mine, and I find myself wondering if the little girl had intentionally given me the wrong directions. I walk around a grassy area outside of a vacant, fenced-in field, trying to get back out front, still uncertain as to where I am.

I eventually get out front and walk passed this open garage or overhang where I see a car and truck parked incredibly close to one another, side by side. The truck backs up and somehow hits the car in the process, and for a moment I wonder if whoever is in the truck is just going to drive away. Instead it stops and an old man that I somehow know is the driver gets out — but he exits from the passenger side of the truck, and I believe it was the back seat, too. In any case, my hopes are that he’s going to be honest and inform the owner of the car what happened.

Shortly after writing down the dream, I realize that the Queens of the Stone Age song, Everybody Knows That You’re Insane, is playing in my head.

Water & Bloated Ceilings (3/31-4/3/21 Dreams).

3/31/21

I’m in the stock room at work, by the stainless steel sink where we clean dishes, though here it was just one large sink instead of three. Intending to clean the sink, I fill it up with this fluid that was incredibly pink, akin to Pepto Bismol.

4/2/21

I had a hangover and kept falling in and out of sleep. Right before I finally decided to get out of bed, with my face down in the pillow and this piercing feeling in my one eye, I had an incredibly vivid, animate image of staring down into this clear, blue, peaceful water, rippling slightly and reflecting sunlight on the surface. It was considerably beautiful.

4/3/21

In the dream, I was in my bedroom, which appeared to be modeled after the room I had when I still lived with my parents. As it was with my old bedroom as well as my current apartment, the ceiling was of the type that had those circular splotches of white paint.

It suddenly came to my attention that a part of the ceiling looked swollen, which is to say there was a large bump, as if fluid from above had formed a pool that had bent part of the ceiling downward and would eventually burst. Curious and concerned, I stood on my bed and poked at it with my finger. I found that it was incredibly soft and when I pushed my finger into it just slightly, it tore a hole through which I could see the attic, and furthermore see sunlight coming into the dark attic through a window. I then remember informing my father.

Water is supposed to symbolize emotions; the color pink, love and femininity. Given this, the sink might suggest my need to cleanse my emotions; the clarity of the blue water in the second dream may have represented that goal.

Ceilings are supposed to represent limitations, or maybe the barrier between one’s ego and higher self — perhaps further suggested by the fact that once I poked the hole I could see the dimly-lit attic above. While there was no water in the last dream, it was initially what I thought caused the bloated part of the ceiling. Could this suggest that the emotional barrier I have between my ego and higher self is thinning, weakening, or is that just a blindly optimistic interpretation?

A Pulled Tooth, MJK, & a Political Argument (3/29 & 3/30/21 Dreams).

After a few days of agony and a few days of moderate relief due to using every home remedy I could come across online, I finally secured an appointment with the dentist to get the wretched tooth yanked out of my jaw. The days of agony had left me sounding like a frantic and frustrated pregnant woman, screaming, “GET THIS FUCKING THING OUT OF ME,” and I knew if I didn’t get this taken care of pronto that pain would return. So despite my fear of driving, lack of any sense of direction, and anxiety over going to the dentist, I got up extremely early and, incredibly sleep deprived, got lost but ultimately found the place, filled out the stupid paperwork, and just marinated in anxiety in the waiting room.

Thankfully, that turned out to be the worst part of my experience there. The guy numbed up the area and got the tooth out in what seemed like thirty seconds. The whole experience was like heavy foreplay and intense sexual buildup followed by a pathetic and unsatisfying climax — only in this case it wasn’t sex but dental pain and anxiety, and for the pathetic climax I was eternally thankful.

Being told not to smoke for five to seven days was laughable. I knew I’d just have to be careful. The issue is that I don’t have a moderate bone in my body; every aspect of me is extreme. I take hard drags off a cigarette. I brush my teeth and gargle with intensity. Now I just have to be very mindful until this bloody hole in my jaw heals.

The rest of the recommendations — don’t suck through a straw, drink through a bottle, or spit — that was a pain in the ass, but manageable. Eat soft foods, and don’t eat spicy foods? This was kind if an issue, as almost everything I eat is spicy. I had to go shopping after work for soft foods, as I was incredibly hungry and there were no soft foods at work or at home, so I bought a tub of cheap ice cream and two boxes of stovetop stuffing.

So that wasn’t bad at all. Pretty awesome, actually.

I was out sweeping the lot at work when a strange thing happened. I’ve had this odd synchronicity popping up again lately where I think of something and it happens, or I think of someone and I bump into them. Well, I had been thinking of Donny, the morning maintenance man who has been out because he has prostate cancer. He’s been in and out of the hospital and I hadn’t heard about his current state in awhile, and so was thinking how I should ask someone.

On my way inside, I see his wife, Mickey. She’d gone through drive through and they’d screwed up her sandwich. I’m polite enough to her, but she’s truly one hell of a gossiping, controlling, high-and-mighty bitch, to be honest. I don’t miss working with her much at all.

I asked her how Donny was, and she said he was in the car, so I went out to see him. He’d lost weight and seemed weak, but it was good to see the guy. He said he probably wasn’t coming back, and I told him I couldn’t blame him; I wouldn’t, either. He should enjoy his retirement and, once he got stronger, spend his time engaging in his passion, woodworking. He agreed, and said that’s what he planned to do after he recuperates from the last surgery he was scheduled to have in the coming months.

Talking with him, I almost felt guilty for my internal bitching concerning my tooth pain and the rules I was expected to follow post-extraction.

After getting off at work at six in the eve and doing some shopping, I ate and watched some shit on my computer and then decided to get a little sleep. Upon awakening, I remembered part of a dream.

3/29/21,
11:47 PM.

I was cleaning out and organizing some house, presumably one I had been living in, with none other than Maynard James Keenan, the lead singer of what is perhaps my favorite band, Tool, as well as A Perfect Circle and Puscifer. As we engaged in this activity, I was also doing something that made me feel pathetic and embarrassed immediately upon awakening: I was constantly trying to impress him or forge a bond by offering suggestive clues concerning who I was in “accidental” ways. It was less like overt advertizement, you could say, and more like product placement.

It was likely far less subtle than I intended, though he never called me out on it. While I would say things to him indirectly suggesting who I was and what we might have in common, what I recall most clearly is laying down a stack of papers of mine nearby him, where they would be in his direct view, the top paper of which revealed something specific I wanted him to know.

I was picking up and sorting a whole bunch of change on the floor at one point and he had just stepped out of the open doorway. There was this young, skinny, sort of feeble-looking kid beside him, maybe just barely a teenager, who he introduced as his friend, Jim. He mentioned him and I were very much alike, and he specifically pointed out the fact that we were both introverted.

Then I awoke with another new song by Chevelle playing in my head, perhaps my favorite song on the album that I’ve heard so far: So Long, Mother Earth. Though I don’t know if the specific song bears any meaning associated with the dream, it is true that Chevelle has been compared to Tool in the past — in fact, their song, Clones, was evidently inspired by these accusations.

I also know that MJK’s actual first name is James, or Jim, perhaps suggesting that the kid represented his younger self. Though its not my name, “Jim” bears some associations with my actual name, so perhaps this was another manifestation of my belief in the dream that MJK and I had similarities and I wanted to befriend him — though perhaps this was the dream’s way of suggesting I had more in common with who he was as a naive child as opposed to who he is now, as an adult.

I do work in a town he used to live in when he was younger, which may be another factor.

In any case, I woke up, ate some more, watched some more YouTube and at least two episodes of The X Files, took my sleeping pills and went back to sleep. Later I awoke, remembering aspects of yet another dream:

3/30/21,
10:11 AM.

I’m in the parking lot at work, talking with Mickey. In the midst of the conversation, she starts complaining about Biden, and I decide not to hold my tongue, as I so often tend to do. I ask her why I never heard a single complaint from her the last four years regarding Trump, and then I start tearing into that orange nightmare — and I don’t hold back.

Not. At. All.

I tell her that while I’m not a big Biden fan, Trump was clearly, infinitely worse. My verbal attack on him comes out of my mouth in a constant, aggressive stream, and I refuse to back down or yield to her in the least. All of this enrages her. She keeps trying to be superior, trying to be an authority, trying to instill fear in me, acting as if she can say anything and its my duty to take it but that I should have to shut my mouth out of some deep respect for her and her insipid political persuasions. I sense that she feels that if I don’t that at the very least I should feel guilty, particularly because she’s doing things for us.

I guess I’m part of a group of people, presumably from work, that are taking a trip out of the country, and she has various gifts that she’s giving to each of us before we go. I remember people gathering around in a circle, where these gifts were being given, I believe inside of a bar. I enter into it late, with someone there catching me up on what the things are.

When I eventually get on the plane, I go to sit at the very back, but I find that Channing, my friend from high school, is laying down on all the seats in the isle, on his back and seemingly asleep. Before I quickly go to find a seat a few rows up on the other side, he opened his eyes a crack and saw me. Once I take my seat on the otherwise vacant plane, I wonder to myself if this is first class, and if so, am I in the wrong area, maybe even on the wrong plane? It would be my first time flying, and I wasn’t certain how all this worked.

It was then, while sitting there., that I realized that I never told my parents I was leaving the country, and I was suddenly afraid they’d be upset. I decided that I’d just have to call them when I got there.