23 Dream).

I wake up in bed, feeling entirely rested and somehow cleansed, after having had the darkest, most depressing, angriest and horrible dream I can ever recall having.

Getting up out of bed, I sit on my computer chair. I don’t make coffee or even have a cigarette. I don’t turn on the laptop. I just stare off into space, stunned, disgusted, horrified, just marinating in the dark, quiet, still sort of emptiness it had left in me.

Everything in me wanted to believe that the dream didn’t come from me, but from somebody else Eventually, I pushed myself to write it down, but it was difficult, and I couldn’t do it all at once

In the dream, I’m looking at the back of some guy, who feels as though he is an older brother. He’s sitting at my desk and using my desktop. I’m angry at him and he’s acting as if I have no right to be. Either he broke the computer or I want to break it so he can’t use it, I’m not sure which, but I comfort myself by thinking to myself how at least I’ll still have my laptop.

In the next scene, I’m in a van with my family. My mother and father are up front, with my father driving, and other siblings are in the middle seats. I’m in the back seat with my younger brother, who is wrapped up in a tan blanket. From beneath the blanket he reveals three items, all of which are from my past but which I had entirely forgotten about, which he then gives to me. The only item I can remember specifically is an old book at least partially on the subject of UFOs.

There is then some tense conversation between my mother and I in which I prove her wrong about something, though she is unable to admit to it. Rather than cowering and backing down, despite being terrified of her and her power over me, I keep pushing the issue. Doubling down, though through a teasing kind of humor. A part if me is trying to get her to admit to it, though I know it’s unlikely; a greater part of me simply wants to anger her and give her a small sample of how she makes me feel all the time.

We all walk into the lobby of an apartment complex or hotel, where I see the unoccupied table for the receptionist. On the desk I find old photocopies I’d made during high school of the MJ-12 documents. I pocket them.

Later, in a dark apartment or hotel room, I keep pushing it, pushing my mother to admit she’s wrong about whatever it was she said in the van.

“The holidays are coming up,” she tells me. “There’s consequences.”

I follow her out into the equally dark hallway, where I confront her with what I suspected all throughout my youth.

“You never wanted to have me.”

“No shit,” she snaps back, not missing a beat, showing not the slightest hint of empathy with me or love from her, and it confirms what I’d always felt in my youth: I am an unwanted burden to her. I am worthless to her.

I am nothing, and I am hated.

Later, at my parent’s house, I’m in the kitchen making coffee, though the filter and the filter basket is huge, like it is at work. In the distance, I think I can hear my parents talking, and I don’t feel as though I’m welcome here. There’s this horrible feeling in my chest. As I’m scooping the grounds into the filter, my younger brother enters the kitchen, comes up to me and tells me that my parents are “cutting me off.”

Abruptly, the dream shifts to the next scene. I’m walking down my parents long driveway towards the house with the family and some other guy. He walks just beside me, with a coat that makes me think he’s a cop or an FBI agent, and he’s holding a long gun. He’s talking as if he’s trying to creep me put, assert power over me subtley through instilling a sense of terror through words that seem playful only on the surface. I suspect he intends on murdering me. As he’s talking about the gun and proper gun safety, I finish his sentence for him.

“… and always keep the safety on.”

In a swift moment, I quickly turn around, grab the gun, aim it at him and fire.

It all goes black.

I don’t see the act itself, all is still black, but I know that I then shot my mother as well, then chopped her up in pieces I then rolled up in bedsheets. I then see a flash, like a still image, of the blood stained white sheets wrapped around severed body parts.

I wake up in bed utterly fucking horrified, but also calm, rested, and cleansed, as previously mentioned. This painful and finally gruesome horror story that played out in my head somehow served as catharsis, and it has made me really concerned about myself all day.

After getting over the horror of the dream, as well as the guilt and shame I felt in the wake of this dream, I was able to look back on the dream symbolically.

My mother had looked younger — which is to say as she did when I was a kid and I still hated her for how she treated me. She also carried the same vibe she did back then: always angry at me, dismissive of me, desperate to maintain power over me and unwilling to accept any ignorance or wrongdoing.

This notion was reinforced by the fact that, in the dream, she was unwilling to accept that she might have been wrong about something: to her, this would mean her sense of superiority would be diminished, and she couldn’t have that.

“The holidays are coming up,” she had told me. “There’s consequences.” What the hell did that mean?

Holidays are a break from the routine, robot life, in which you commune with family and friends — those with whom you have the most enduring connections. She was threatening to abandon me, and this notion was reinforced when, after my confrontation with her. during which she confirmed that she had never wanted to have me, my younger brother approached me in their kitchen to tell me that my parents were “cutting me off,” or severing ties with me.

That’s what it meant. My fear of abandonment. My trust issues.

I think that the matricide may represent my intense desire to rid myself of the ill emotional effects my mother had on me in my childhood. For years I would have spontaneous memories and chronic daydreams about arguing with her, often trying to make her feel as small and unwanted as she made me feel. After my mother and I made amends, my old boss, Connie, took over the role in my head, and it still happens. Connie treated me pretty much like my mother treated me growing up, so it makes sense that I would try to distance myself from my issues with my mother as she had been by using Connie as a sort of stand-in. This dream just returned me to the source material, I guess.

The act of killing her in the dream may represent my effort to eliminate those old feelings and their present effects on me, but the chopping-up part still seems like the most extreme, literal form of overkill.

Honestly, the end of the dream still bothers me, still leaves me disgusted with and horrified by myself.

As for the rest of the family, I hardly noticed my father or sisters in my dream. Though I know they were there, they served only as backdrops here. Present, yes, but otherwise ultimately irrelevant. My older brother was only highlighted in what I remember being the opening scene, but I think he was also there throughout the rest of the dream, though after that initial scene only as a member of the backdrop population. My younger brother played a fairly active role, of course.

I have no brothers in real life, though, only two sisters, so what was that all about?

Brothers are clearly not you, yet are related to you, and so if you’re a man and have no brothers in real life, in dreams it would make sense that they would reflect aspects of you and your relationship with those aspects, and perhaps those in your life which you project them and your relationships with them upon.

What does the older brother in the opening scene symbolize? I’m not at all sure. Given that it dealt with me being angry at him using my desktop computer, however, I do have some initial thoughts, what you might call potential interpretations.

An older brother may represent what I fear I might become. As for the desktop he’s hijacked? To me, computers, as well as the internet – which today is more or less synonymous with computers, let’s be frank – represents my ability to explore what I wish to explore and express how I think and feel, be it under my own name or, if I prefer, anonymously.

A desktop, to me, seems more sedentary, rooted in the stable home base – the Jungian persona, if you will – which is to say something I can step away from but for now must come back to. A laptop or a cell phone, I feel, is more nomadic in nature, is something I can always carry with me, something I certainly can yet need not escape from, wherever I may roam.

So maybe the older brother, representing future-me, comandeering my desktop, represents my fears of ruining myself, my name, my Jungian persona in the eyes of those I care about in the future, and the comfort I still have in thoughts of my laptop represent the fact that I can start again under different names, different faces, or even keep it all private – it is something I can take with me, and which no judgements of others can take away from me.

If he broke the desktop, perhaps my fear is that I will render my persona in this lifetime unsalvagable. If I broke the desktop so he couldn’t use it, perhaps that suggests I’m determined to interrupt the current trajectory.

It may be a hell of a stretch, but that’s all I’ve got.

A younger brother in a dream, however, at least one that you don’t have in real life, it is said, may represent yourself as you were when you were younger. And this makes a good deal of sense to me, at least in the context of this particular dream, and for several reasons.

In the scene in the van, for instance, he sat next to me in the back seat, essentially hiding under a blanket — a tan blanket, like the one I always liked to have on my bed when I was between maybe seven and ten and we lived in our first house. As children (at the very least) we tend to hide under blanket because it provides some semblance of comfort and security in our feeble attempt to hide ourselves from what we fear out there in the darkness of our bedroom. I did a lot of hiding from the monsters of my youth behind doors, in closets, beneath beds, and under blankets such as that tan one, so that tracks,

If he represented a younger aspect of myself, it is perhaps telling that he was hiding not just from the rest of the family occupying the van but also from me. Perhaps he represents some aspect of myself I dissociated from my conscious personality as a child out of fear, and so he became stunted in that child-state for that reason, and so manifests that way in this dream. To carry this interpretation further, I can’t help but notice that from beneath the blanket he had given back to me those three items from my childhood that I’d forgotten about. This could suggest that this compartmentalized, childlike aspect of my consciousness was releasing some contents of my past, formerly unconscious, back into consciousness.

The only item out of the three that I managed to recall from the dream, however, was a book dealing with UFOs. Given the sightings and encounters I’ve had throughout my life and the flashbacks of those creatures I had when I was a teenager of encounters I’d had when I was even younger, this is also consistent with the notion of unconscious contents from childhood rising to consciousness.

The UFO subject was again referenced when my family and I entered the lobby of the hotel or apartment complex, however, so this subject was reinforced in particular.

Hotels are said to suggest one is a transformational or transitional period in their life, and a receptionist suggests a need for assistance or guidance. Though I saw no receptionist, I did see the table, upon which I found photocopies of the MJ-12 documents. I had actually made such photocopies as a teen when I found them in one of the countless books I was reading in efforts to build up a context through which to better understand my experiences.

While the issues with my mother were similar in that they were unconscious contents that arose in this dream, I’ve been uncertain as to how it relates to the UFO issue more directly, but I think I may understand now. I think I may understand the meaning and purpose behind this haunting dream as a whole.

As a whole, perhaps the dream reflects my fears of expressing my true thoughts and feelings and memories because I fear that in doing so I will be judged harshly, whether I am truly understood or not, and subsequently abandoned by the world at large, particularly those I care about. It probably also references the people-pleasing habits of keeping my mouth shut and hiding those parts of myself out of that fear — and the guilt I feel when I’ve expressed myself nonetheless. Perhaps, in a symbolic effort to overcome these fears and regain myself, I had to symbolically kill this fear at the roots, and those fears originated in how my mother treated me in my youth.

So Sick of This Dream Theme (5/1/23 Dream).

It’s dark outside. I park the truck in what seems like an alleyway and begin walking towards the house some distance away, passing by some people outside, clearly members of the birthday party already well underway. A short distance away, I see Lilly near the door, and just as her eyes meet mine I realize I had forgotten my hat, and tell her I’ll be right back before turning around. Before I make it back to the truck, however, I realize that my hat is on my head. I feel like a fool, quietly and intensely hoping that Lilly — my friend, the birthday girl — didn’t notice it.

After being at the party for a short time, my parents and sisters show up, and we sit with Lilly at a big, wooden table. I feel embarrassed and confused as to why I woukd elect to meet up with my family here, and my sense of how awkward this is just grows and grows.

Lilly eventually leans in close to the side of my face and whispers in my ear. The essence of what she said is that they’re going to smoke pot, so I might not want to have my family around. With that, I kindly escort them out without revealing why.

After they leave, I remain at the party for a short time before that familiar feeling of overstaying my welcome and being too socially awkward overwhelms me and I elect to leave as well.

Once leaving the party, however, I can’t find my truck. Its not where I was sure I had parked it. Then begins an enduring period of wandering around the town, with its elaborate alleyways, houses, yards and buildings, still unable to find my truck and now having not the faintest clue as to how I could even make it back to the party if I wanted to.

It suddenly occurs to me that this is remarkably akin to dreams I had periodically in my childhood and began having more frequently the last year or two. The town in question is always different — as a kid, it always used to be the same, desert town that gave off Old West vibes, where I’d either be running around on foot or riding a bicycle, trying to escape something that was chasing me. Nowadays it was a modern town, though always different, and I was always lost in it, looking for something — usually my vehicle. In either case, it always seems to be a labyrinth of a town and I feel frighteningly lost, frantically trying to find the vehicle as I wander through houses, buildings, yards and alleyways, just as I found myself doing now.

At some point I run into my father, who had apparently moved the truck for some reason, but then he leaves and somehow I manage to lose the truck again, so my wandering continues for what increasing seems like an utterly absurd amount of time.

Now it’s getting light out and my frustration has elevated to a mixture of panic and rage. While I slowly begin to realize I’m actually dreaming, I’m determined to stay in the dream and find the truck before awakening, as I always seem to wake up before doing so. I suddenly cry out to the sky while in some alleyway something along the lines of: “I’m so fucking sick of these dreams where I’m lost and can’t find my truck!”

Then I let myself wake up.

This is the most I’ve been able to remember of a dream for the last week or two, though I have recalled remnants.

In a dream I had on April 22nd, I’m Cassidy, the character off of the television show, Preacher, though I’m not a drug-abusing vampire. I’m sneaking around a building, hiding in various places — at one point, in some guys bedroom, where I smoke a cigarette.

In another dream, I’m driving the truck up a hill, but it won’t go fast enough, so I somehow reach out my hands in front of the truck to claw at the road and pull the truck up it faster. Suddenly, the truck is gone and I’m just walking and clawing my way up the hill alongside others, all of us wearing Depression-era clothing.

In the dream I had on the 23rd, though I don’t know if I’m the main character in the dream, it deals with this middle-aged, worn-out looking Secret Service guy who’s job it is to protect the president. I had a vision of him, hair and slight beard graying, sitting on a chair, smoking a cigarette and loking very tired and worn out. I also remember something about a pond or a lake.

Most recently, however — maybe a day or two ago — I had this elaborate dream about visiting some structure like a hotel that was either right by the ocean or atop the ocean like an oil rig. At the end I leave with others on a huge boat, though we leave some people behind. My ex-girlfriend, Claire, was a central character in this dream, and it’s been some time since I’ve recalled a dream of her. In terms of character she seemed very young, almost child-like.

Now my dream recall was returning again, and even within the context of the dream I was getting annoyed with the recurring themes. I know it’s because I’d failed to motivate myself to get a new job, and that I’d failed to find a new apartment. If I don’t by the end of May, my rent will increase by 200 fucking dollars and I’ll be stuck paying it every month for another year.

So I’m stuck with these dreams of being “lost” and not being able to find my “drive.” Of that part of the dream — of so many dreams the last bunch of months — the meaning is clear.

I need to get accessed for ADHD, and soon. If I have it, maybe it’ll give me the focus, the direction, the motivation, the drive I need to get my life in order.

Your God is Poison, Cuz.

In the arena of the intellect, there are undoubtedly a great many reasons not to believe in the existence of a god, so far as I have found, and no good reasons to believe — particularly with respect to the Biblically-based concepts. But why stop there?

After all, there are damn good moral or ethical reasons to think it’s all bullshit, too.

Someone who I care about very much once told me that she should’ve died in that car crash she’d been in, and that someone was clearly watching over her, and when I asked her who specifically that someone she referred to was, her answer was: god.

(Relax. Stay calm. Take a deep, deep breath. Now exhale: completely).

So let me get this straight, I wanted to say.

All of those dehumanized and oppressed under slavery? All the victims of the Holocaust? Each and every child dying from cancer or AIDS? All the African girls who have had to endure female genital mutilation between infancy and their teens?

All the casualties of war? Torture of every fucked up form and flavor? Kids raped and physically abused and neglected and utterly abandoned by their parents?

Starvation and suffering and disease and devastation and agonizing death in a quadrillion-plus different ways all throughout human history?

And that’s just our species. That’s only on our Island Earth. Pains beyond our imagining may be hidden from us, horrors we could barely conceive of, histories of terror spread throughout the cosmos.

In any case, you mean to tell me that your god — your omniscient, omnipotent, all-loving, Jesus’s-mother-fucking god — he sleeps through all these local and universal alarms on his cosmic fucking cell phone, snoozing away peacefully, but you, you get in a car wreck, and he jumps into action immediately, in an abrupt sense of urgency, without so much as a stretch and a yawn and a sip from his morning coffee, and saves you from corporeal expiration?

Really? Fucking really?

Do you realize how arrogant one has to be to swallow that line of self-aggrandizing bullshit and believe you rank as so insanely special in his infinite, all-seeing eye? The eye of the supposed creator of this goddamn universe?

If your god exists, fuck him. He’s an asshole of truly epic proportions.

And furthermore, fuck you for pledging allegiance to such a cosmic-scale monster. For reals.

And anyway, if what you believe is true, wasn’t it your god that made you get in that car wreck in the first place? Wasn’t it your god who orchestrated the whole shit-show to begin with?

Given “his” only limitations would necessarily be self-imposed, couldn’t that blessed being that spared you from the tragedy “he” created have simply not created that tragic fucking circumstance to begin with?

Look, I know you told me this between three and four decades ago, but your insipid belief bothers me as much now as it did then, and perhaps even more so.

After all, I’m an avid people-watcher. People-listener, people-feeler. My involuntary empathy is not badge of honor, either, please understand; to be honest is sucks big, floppy, dirty donkey dick, because I’m nearly always left hopelessly caring, worrying too much and being utterly powerless to do anything to actually help matters but can only listen like a useless fucking ear and draw it all in and stew over it like an incompetent fucking fool.

Having said that, I’ve met some good fucking people in my time. Good people who, like you, have had hard lives they didn’t deserve. Negligent and/or abusive parents which ultimately lead – coincidence? I think not – to negligent and/or abusive relationships later in life, on towards their deaths.

Some crumble beneath the weight of their lives. Others grow strong, yet still have to constantly bear the weight of their past and at the same time endure the relentless onslaught of tragedy after tragedy, horror after horror, misfortune after misfortune, no matter how strong they remain, no matter how hard they try, no matter how determined they are to overcome.

I can’t imagine what they could have done in this life or a past one – and I know you don’t believe in past lives, but I remember at least three of my own (fragmented, puzzle-piece memories, but they’re there nonetheless), so you can spare me your fucking bullshit religious Christian garbage – that could have earned them this heartache, this emotional torture, this ongoing circumstantial and physical trauma.

So spare me. Knock it off. Fuck the fuck off.

Just today, a young, teenage girl I know who has a negligent and addicted mother, and a father addicted to the aforementioned negligent and addicted mother, she spoke to me again. Recently, she had her tax refund stolen – her identity stolen – from what, I gather, is most likely “family friends” (from her mothers side), possibly the mother herself, and to top it all off this wonderful, strong girl now has a disturbing cough and a pain in her chest that I (and her, at some level) fears may be serious.

I worry for her at multiple angles. Its fucking killing me.

Just today, a manager at work and friend of mine I’ve called Marjie, she had a great outing with her father, they went to the bars in town and had a great time, but her father got black-out drunk and started insulting her for liking men who bear a particular skin pigmentation, and using a historically emotionally-charged word to express that prejudice of his, which prompted her to fling at him some aggressive words, which in turn inspired his drunk, blackout self to start swinging at her face, leading to a wound just above her eye that she came in to work today, on her day off, just to see if she could find butterfly stitches in our first aid kit because there wasn’t any at the local fucking dollar store.

Evidently, when he saw her face after he sobered up, he realized what he had done, cried, and hugged her, which at least at some surface level she accepted as a sincere and heartfelt apology, but still.

Really? This is your god’s plan, cuz?

I love you. I truly do. But fuck your god.

Fuck that fictitious bastard hard, in the ass, without lube, and into the depths of your mythological hell, with a hearty slap on the ass for good measure.

By using this illusion to make yourself feel special, your implying so many others are less so, and I can’t accept that.

Your insipid fucking belief is poison.

Your god is poison.

Alien Chicken Man & the Abandoned Milkshake.

4/24/23

Wavering from side to side, leaning on one foot, now the other, the guy is clearly whacked out on some hard drug. His eyes are glazed over with lids evidently as heavy as lead, and while he’s looking in my general direction, he shows not the faintest glimmer of awareness regarding my presence or my increasingly persistent voice.

“Sir,” I say again, “this is your drink.”

Back and forth, back and forth, hardly capable of maintaining dimly-lit awareness yet paradoxically maintaining his grip on his plastic grocery bag of beer, which is swinging like a pendulum at his side. He’s standing a few feet away, and I echo my line again, like I’m stuck in a goddamn time loop, speaking louder — though careful at the same time to not sound impatient or angry — as I try in vain to break through his drug-addled trance state, yet he remains unaffected.

Turning around, I walk towards Marjie, who’s putting together orders behind me, and speak to her in a low voice.

“I’d call the cops,” I recommend. “He’s not going to leave.”

She had alerted me to his presence a seeming lifetime ago, telling me in a similarly low voice how she’d informed him his order was waiting for him on counter, but he said it wasn’t his and continued to wait. Although she had referred to him at the time as “the drunk guy in lobby, just standing there,” this clearly wasn’t alcohol at work here, and what he was doing was far more akin to rhythmically waddling in place like a lobotomized penguin than “standing there.”

I try again to get his attention, and eventually he walks in a meandering fashion towards me, just the counter between us now, only to mumble something entirely incomprehensible. I inform him as politely as I can that I can’t understand what he’s saying, but that this chocolate milkshake between us? It’s his.

He mumbles a bit more, and I can make out that he thinks he ordered a sandwich, maybe a meal. I ask to see his receipt, that crumbled wad of paper he’s been stress-balling in his hands. He hands it to me. I smooth it out a bit and read it.

One chocolate milkshake. That’s all.

“This is all you ordered man,” I say. “Do you still want it?”

More incomprehensible gibberish, and then he abruptly loses interest and turns his gaze away, proceeding to waddle to and fro at the counter now, booze bag in his grip still following his swinging lead.

Now frustrated to high hell, I walk into the dining room to go clean a table with a mostly-empty fry carton and two straw wrappers on it, because human beings have evidently lost the capacity to clean up after themselves. The lady in the next booth, she comes in nearly every day with a guy who could be her husband, could be her brother for all I know. He’s quiet and shy and she is everything but. They’re both kind people, though, and know me by name.

She asks me about him. He’s another one of the homeless guys around town with severe mental issues, I tell her. He’s been in here before and I don’t like the way he talks to my fellow coworkers. One day, maybe a year ago now, he had an outburst where he accused the girl at the register for selling him, and I quote, an “alien chicken” sandwich.

Like me, her concern was focused on the two young girls who had been at the register earlier and seemed understandably unnerved by him. She asks me if I think he’s drunk, and I tell her it’s not alcohol. He’s clearly whacked out on a drug of some kind. She said she didn’t think it was booze, either.

“That’s fentanyl,” she tells me confidently. “Did you guys call the police?”

I wasn’t sure, so I went to ask Marjie. She said hadn’t yet, but picked up her phone and began to just then.

I go back up to him, ask him again if he still wants the milkshake, and he mumbles about his order he never ordered. I sigh. He mumbles to me, go ahead, call the cops.

“They’re on the way,” I assure him.

Within moments, he walks out the door, hangs outside by the window for a moment, walks back in, wobbles at the register like he’s about to order something, and then exits the door again, doing his waddling-in-place act by the window.

Shortly thereafter, through the window, I watch as the police cruiser pulls up. The cops never waste time getting here, it’s like a second home to them. The guy with black hair steps out of the driver seat, straight posture, and familiar to me from the overdoses we’ve had in the bathroom. He immedeately starts talking to Alien Chicken Guy.

The other cop comes in through the door, same posture, but much younger, and with blond hair. Clearly wet behind the ears, as he doesn’t seem cynical enough yet. He asks Marjie what happened, she talks for a bit and then motions towards me, and I talk for a bit, and he says what he can do is essentially ban the guy from here. If he comes back, he goes to jail.

I stop leaning and walk away, as I’m no longer needed, and proceed to take out the trash.

Years of working in this town serves the same purpose as those “scared straight” programs they used to run, where they would take troubled youth to jails and prisons and the prisoners would scare the living hell out of the kids to put them on a more law-abiding path.

The process in this town is more enduring, and though I’ve never done coke, meth, heroine, or fentanyl, nor had any interest in doing any of them, putting a gun to my head in the attempts to make me try them wouldn’t be enough to move me at this point.

Furry Sex Parties & Other Flavors of Weird.

4/24/23

On Saturday, my parents came down for a visit, and while we were waiting on our order at Chili’s, I enlightened my mother to the existence of the ‘furries’ subculture and their sex parties. Thankfully, this seemed to amuse her greatly. My father made the comment that it probably wouldn’t surprise me to see something like that in the town I live in.

Thing is, I actually have. Or close enough.

One time a guy with a choke-collar came in with a huge briefcase and sat in the back. As I was cleaning, he went to the bathroom and the suitcase fell open. From inside, out from a diverse collection of kinky items, a wolf’s mask stared back at me.

I also told them about a girl I worked with who came to her interview wearing a clip-on tail. Despite the repeated protests of the managers, she continued to wear it to work until she quit, was fired, they called animal control — I can’t quite remember.

Then I told them about the time I was outside smoking before work and saw two guys in ape costumes coming up the sidewalk, slowly followed by a police cruiser, and then proceeded to order food inside. I had to ask them. Apparently it was a sociological experiment for college.

What I forgot to mention, however, was an incident a few weeks back when, right before we closed, a door dasher came in the door. It was a cute girl, maybe in her twenties, probably more than a little stoned, and she was wearing an Eeore onesie.

And while it’s not entirely related, just today two kids casually walked in and ordered food while wearing bright red clown noses. No one stared. No one behind the counter or in the dining room even seemed surprised.

This town, it has a way of acclimating you to the strange.

I often think: a saucer could land in the parking lot and a herd of Gray aliens and their Mantis overlords could march out of a hatch, through our doors, and order a large vat of liquid nutrients at the counter, and you know what? I’m not sure I’d bat an eyelash.

Point is, dad’s right. I’m not sure much at all would surprise me anymore. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. It’s as if the universe is saying:

“Sure, you’re weird, Tim, but there’s many flavors of weird here. Maybe even weirder than you. So no need to feel weird about it.”

Evil Yoda Lives.

4/11/23

T’was a long time ago, back in the days when I had significantly more hair on my head and significantly less on my face. In period of my life where I rarely slept, subsisted on a strict diet of coffee and Ritz crackers, and my hygeine, to put it mildly, left a lot to be desired.

It was an era in which I was occasionally dating a girl from California with pink hair who looked remarkably like Claire Danes off the show My So-Called Life. When I drove a Chevrolet Celebrity, a massive vehicle that my friends affectionately and appropriately referred to as The Boat.

That was when I worked at a convenience store in a small town not twenty minutes from my parents’ house, where I lived at the time. It was the second job I ever had. I was the stock boy, janitor, and general bitch of the place, and the boss was a vile, vertically-challenged corpse of a lady. A mean-spirited, narcissistic, power-hungry and tabloid-reading twat I came to refer to as Evil Yoda.

Amazingly, her rather quiet husband was the kindest old man you’d ever hope to meet, and her daughter and her husband were also pleasant and easy-going.

I came to detest Evil Yoda more and more, however, and when she demanded that I stay after my scheduled work hours one evening for no other reason than that she wanted to assert her power over me and make my life miserable, I just up and left.

I had just walked in the door of my parents’ house, where dad was busy working on the door to the food closet, when the phone rang. I knew who it was before I picked up.

The angry gremlin on the other end told me that this was important work, and that I shouldn’t bother coming in tomorrow.

Pompous bitch fired me less than half an hour after I quit.

Interestingly, the poofy-haired gargoyle of a woman crossed my mind a few days ago while driving home from work, and I thought to myself: That bitch, she’s got to be dead by now.

Fast forward to this morning. I awaken from a dream and find a text from my mother on my phone.

Did I remember that old lady I used to work for? She’s still alive, mom told me. Still driving.

There’s been a lot of odd “coincidences” again the last few weeks, but I could’ve gone without this one. I don’t know how she could still be breathing. She looked like she had a foot and four toes in the grave last I saw her, and that was over two decades ago.

In any case, if you needed further evidence there’s no justice in the universe, there you go, my friends: Evil Yoda lives.

Of the Campus & My Dream Guide (4/12/23 Dream).

I’m on some enclosed, concrete porch just outside a building on a college campus, with others around me, as if we’re just hanging around or waiting for a bus. From the distance, a guy with sunglasses and the kind of posture and clothing that clearly conveys he thinks he’s some kind of cool badass just walks up to me, punches me in the shoulder a few times, then walks away.

This very thing had happened earlier, too — a stranger coming up to me, punching me on the shoulder wuthout saying anything, and then just casually walking away — and while I had gotten good at enduring the punches and felt rather proud of that fact, what I really want is for it to stop. I think to myself how I need to learn how to punch.

At some other point, I’m inside a building on campus and no one seems to be around, so for some reason I take off my shirt and ballcap. I think I may have spilled something on my shirt, but I can’t recall. After a few moments, however, I notice my pastey skin and beer belly and suddenly I feel exposed, embbarrassed, self-conscious, so I quickly throw back on a black shirt and my cap.

I then go outside, where I meet up with my friend, who I think was a woman, but who in any case serves as a kind of guide. I have a vague recollection of her driving me to campus at some point earlier in the dream. In any case, I’m standing outside of the building, on a concrete (but this time, not enclosed) porch with my friend and guide, and my plan is to find a woman who I had seen on campus earlier who had been selling a book on atheism. I had failed to purchase it but now decided I wanted to buy it after all.

At the urging of my friend and guide, I walk up to a cute girl a short distance away from the building and ask her if she had seen the girl selling the atheist books. While she doesnt really answer my question, she responds by telling me that she herself has plenty of books on atheism. In retrospect, it seems this may have been her subtley hitting on me, and my guide may have sent me to her with the intent of trying to hook up with her, but neither of these things struck me at the time. I just told her that I did as well, but I wanted to get my hands on this one specifically.

She then asked me if I had been inside earlier with my shirt and hat off, and I said I had and gave her the reason I had done so. She makes a comment regarding the fact that I’m bald, and my friend adds, “and he has blond chest hair.”

For the record, I do not have blond chest hair.

In what was perhaps a different dream entirely, I’m in my apartment with someone and we’re watching a movie on my laptop.

In real life, I’ve been using my laptop since the power outage, when the monitor for my desktop stopped working.

When we had to pause the movie for a moment, perhaps because my friend wanted to use the restroom, I for some reason decided to hook up my monitor to see if it worked. I vaguely recall my friend and guide from campus being the one to suggest it. To my amazement, it did. Though I was eager to use it and the screen was much bigger than my laptop monitor, I reasoned it would be too difficult to find the movie and the right point in it on my desktop, so I decided that we’d just continue watching on laptop anyway.

With Abbey at an Apocalypse Airport (4/9/23 Dream & Synchronicities).

I’m hiding with Abbey in a cluttered room at an abandoned airport during the apocalypse. There are a lot of people at the airport, a lot of commotion, but we found this small area with what appears to be seats out of a car or plane up against the wall, where we lay next to one another for awhile, escaping the chaos. We pass the time talking and occasionally peeking out the narrow window situated just above. At some point it strikes me that this circumstance seems strangely familiar, and I confess to her that I swear all of this had happened before.

Later, I’m alone outside on the runway and I see a plane in the sky, apparently attempting to come in for a landing, but it’s nose turns upward, it’s belly facing me, and eventually it crashes in an enormous explosion.

Shortly thereafter, I see a bunch of people floating down from the sky with parachutes and I instantly feel dread. Somehow I know these are bad people, likely violent, convicted criminals. I imagine them taking over the airport and doing violent or unsavory things to us and that they wouldn’t be the kind of people we could sway or negotiate with. I feel certain that if we encounter them things will not end well.

I’m frantically trying to weigh whether it would be better if Abbey and I were to continue trying to hide here at the airport or quickly gather up our things and try to make a run for it.

As usual, there was more to this dream, but I’ll be damned if I can remember the rest of it.

Dreams about the apocalypse, about a doomsday scenario, are said to reflect fears and insecurities regarding how unprepared we feel over a chapter in our life coming to an end. The nature of my fears are likely represented by the fact that I’d taken up residence in an abandoned airport, as this is where planes take off and land, a place where people pass through on their way to and from other places, and so represents a period of transition. Given it was abandoned, it probably represents being stuck in an area in my life.

The airplane crash may symbolize my unsucessful attempts at changing, or my fears of failing to stick the landing in my present, ongoing attempts to change my life: specifically my desire to get a new, well-paying job and move closer to my family.

The violent convicts that came down in parachutes following the crash probably represent the aggressive, dark, violent emotions within me that I fear escaping me in the wake of my failures and taking over everything as I’m stuck in the period of transition — emotions that I’ve judged as dangerous and fear facing, as I consider myself too weak and unprepared to deal with them. My uncertainty regarding whether I should run or hide from them, I feel confident, requires no explanation.

So all of that makes sense. When it comes to the presence of Abbey in the dream, however, I remain confused.

For a short while a recurring theme in my dream was the presence of actors on television shows I’ve watched, or more specifically the characters they’ve portrayed, but this is the second instance in which a woman from my past who I haven’t dedicated much thought to in awhile has suddenly played a role in my dreams. First Jane, the sister of Melany, an old friend of mine from before high school, and now Abbey, who I haven’t seen in years.

Dreams about old friends can apparently deal with how the relationship you had with that person (and perhaps how it ended) relates to a similar circumstance in your life at present. Abbey and I were lying beside each other in the dream, and her and I did have some brief, intimate encounters in real life at one point. In the dream, I vaguely recalled at some point that something may have come between us and we went our separate ways, but I can’t be sure. If so, this would echo the actual circumstances between her and I.

Though I’ve tried all day to remember what the nature of the argument between us in real life was, I still cannot recall, which bothers me. Nor do I know how this could relate to any present relationship or person in my life.

Instead, she could represent qualities I saw in her that I wish to have in myself, or aspects of our friendship that I feel I need back in my life. I do miss having that sort of close, intellectual relationship with a girl I’m simultaneously attracted to. Still, I have my doubts regarding any of these potential interpretations.

The issue is that the rest of the dream has consistent elements — my fears that I’m unable to change and my fears of failing in my ongoing attempts to do so. It’s hard for me to believe Abbey doesn’t symbolize something consistent with that theme.

I kept thinking about her and what she meant for the first two and a half hours of my ten hour shift today, coming up with nothing. I thought on how I had met her, how I almost got a relationship or at least a fuck-buddy friendship going on with her — until I felt bad because Eva was fixated on her and was still a closet lesbian at the time. I eventually backed off and Eva and Abbey got together.

I considered writing about it in detail, but I knew I’d have to talk about the weird telepathic experiences Eva and I had, and I try not to post about my strange and paranormal experiences in this blog. I have another blog for that in a vain attempt to compartmentalize aspects of my life. And this dream didn’t seem to involve anything paranormal, anyway. It would make the post — this post — needlessly cumbersome and unfocused, and I have enough of a problem with that, anyway.

When I finally got out of the stock room and went up front, Natalie, an assistant manager, told me it was her sister’s birthday today and she was going skydiving for the first time today, so when her mother texted “he has risen,” since it’s Easter, she texted back that her sister “has fallen.” Stranger, she added, someone had fallen at the church across the street. Ambulances had rushed there and carried a lady out on a stretcher. I laughed, and as I went outside for a smoke it hit me.

Skydiving. Parachute. Just like in my dream.

An interesting synchronicity.

For at least the last few weeks I had been noticing odd little “coincidences” like that, and finally started writing them down a few days back. So as I smoked, I typed it out in the word processing app on my phone. When I was done, I opened up Facebook, and the first thing I saw was a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon from a group I belong to. In it, Calvin is explaining how he’s constructed a kit so that he’ll be prepared for anything.

In the last panel, he mentions his umbrella can double as a parachute.

Later, Natalie’s sister came up with her boyfriend after she did her skydiving. I was tired, caffeinated, anxious and weird, but I met her, and she’s fucking beautiful. I was a bit too nervous fir my own good and probably came across as a fucking buffoon.

I should mention that Abbey isn’t the real name of the girl in my dream, but a pseudonym I chose for her long, long ago. I go out of my way never to use anyone’s real name when writing about my personal experiences, but I have to make an exception here, for something struck me as I was writing this. Natalie’s sister?

Her name is Abigail.

Kind of weird.

Into the Twilight (4/8/23 Dream).

In the dream, I’m walking on the third floor hallway of my apartment complex, but it’s pitch black, like when the power went out almost a week ago. I can barely see my hand in front of my face. I’m standing before what I think is my apartment door, but the number on the door is gone, as is my welcome mat. I open the door, and it’s just as dark inside. I’m still not confident I’m in the right apartment.

Then there is suddenly a bright white flash of light that seems to come from outside the dream, and I immedeately open my eyes in bed. All seems strangely still. Eerily peaceful and clear. It’s early morning, twilight, and I can hear the birds chirping outside.

I close my eyes, fall into the dream space again, but just for a moment before my eyes pop back open. This happens a few more times before I get up out of bed, walk the short distance to my bathroom, and, with the light still off, have a cigarette.

It’s six thirty and I still have two hours until my alarm goes off. Why am I awake? Was that light just part of my dream?

After considering where this might have come from, my mind goes back to a recent conversation I had with an old classmate on social media. He had responded to a meme I’d posted, and essentially suggested that I was miserable because I was following a pathway leading toward darkness and that I should instead turn towards the light. He opened this recommendation quoting text from the Bible, of course, and this wasn’t the first religious conversation I’d had with him.

I responded by saying that I tried not to see things through that sort of absolutist, black-or-white kind of lens, even when “the light” wasn’t seen as representing a creator god and “the darkness” wasn’t seen as representing the so-called adversary. Instead, I saw it as a spectrum, and though a spectrum certainly has extreme ends, I saw the spiritual end-goal as the reconciliation of the opposites within me, a sense of wholeness or totality where I turned by back on neither the darkness nor the light within me. Though I freely confessed that I was suffering from imbalance, the target, as I saw it, was to achieve twilight.

Then, today, I was awakened from a dream of literal darkness by a blinding light into the peaceful, still, balanced, literal twilight of the morning — a rather perfect experiential metaphor for what I had previously expressed in words.

Jane, Alternate Personalities, & An Ever-Tightening Hug (4/6/23 Dream).

I’m outside in the daytime, standing on a cement walkway, and there’s other people and moderate activity around me. Just outside a doorway there is a woman who I think may have been painting the outside of the door. It suddenly strikes me that I know her. It’s Jane, the older sister of my old friend Melany, from before high school.

Jane and I somehow get to talking and after a very short while she becomes incredibly open with me. I believe she told me her therapist recommended she be more open with people about her condition, which is apparently Dissociative Identity Disorder. Though she doesn’t mention the disorder by name, she informs me that she has countless personalities because of some trauma she experienced in the past.

While I find myself suspicious of her announcement, I’m also very curious about it, given that she actually has the disorder. I know the initial question that popped into my mind was as to how she discovered she had the condition; following that, I was curious as to how she managed to integrate them, if indeed she managed to do so to any degree at all.

I’m not confident I even managed to ask the first question, however, before she suddenly gets angry and goes on the defensive, accusing me of judging her. For some reason — I don’t recall if it was upon her request or just me following through with a sudden impulse — I begin hugging her. I don’t want her to feel uncomfortable, so I consider ending it, but she almost demands that I not only continue, but hug her tighter and tighter and tighter still. I do, and she returns by hugging me tighter and tighter, and it feels good, borderline blissful.

Suddenly I’m brought out of the dream by a spam call on my cell phone, which immedeatly angers me. I can still feel the pressure and energy of the hug, and it feels extremely good, almost cleansing. I wished it could have continued and the deam could have been brought to its natural conclusion.

Though I didn’t know her too well, Jane lived with Melany and her parents in a trailer within walking distance from my house, and I spent a lot of time over there, especially during the summer months. She may have moved in and out of the trailer once or twice, and she always seemed rather reserved. She had a boyfriend who had died, I think by his own hand, and it had left her traumatized. She often seemed depressed and was prone to bouts of rage.

I can’t at present figure out why she would have suddenly arisen in my dream, nor why the issue of multiple personalities would have come up in association with her. All I can figure is that as a dream character she represented some aspect of myself, dissociated from consciousness, and therefore constituted a sort of “multiple personality” in that context. My curiosity as to how she re-integrated her personalities may have been answered in our ever-tightening hug — an act of willingly, openly embracing that divorced aspect of my mind and re-establishing a connection with it.