11.07.24

Some other folks and I were in an open-air market... a middle-aged man had bought a new stall in the area. He was making flavored iced treats (?) with rat parts in them. I tried futilely to convince him that this was a terrible idea. When his stall opened, many people lined up to sample the iced treats. I had a lime green one. Could not taste or perceive the rat parts in the icy flakes I sampled, but still felt disgust.

Somehow got more food, very dubious in nature. I ordered a "#2," a spaghetti dish cooked in motor oil and electrical wiring. It tasted very peppery. The #2 was better than what my dream friend ordered, some less flavorful variety of noodle. Very disconcerting. (I think this is all because I had homemade cacio e pepe with friends last night, and the dish had a lot of black pepper in it.)

11.06.24

I slept through the entire day. So many dreams:

Overnight: trying to check into a conference at a hotel. Stray vendors everywhere. The registration table was outside a large warehouse that gave the impression of being very temporary. Check-in required an ID that I didn't have (later supplied by a friend). Making and sharing large quantities of food in our accomodations... pizza and pasta cooked in appliances that looked like they could also be (adjacent to?) washing machines. Very distasteful. My family was there, distantly...

Some forgotten dream in between.

Late afternoon nap: a small gathering in a room understood to be mine. T was there. So were some other friends (H and J, two other amiable folks who seemed to be T's friends). T was going to be meeting with a board game publisher. Asked about his game and he waffled when responding; my lack of prior knowledge felt like a failure. Hugged everyone goodbye after a while. A dispersal... something about the empty room feeling unsettled. Lots of movable black steel-framed furniture. Shelves crammed with books. Mobile desks blocking doors. Went outside and saw strange creatures: blue heron-shaped nesting birds wielding snakes (?) to snatch flies out of the air. The birds had long needle-like appendages protruding from their mouths. I tried to take a photo on my phone to send to T: "crazy symbotic relationships." I zoomed in from far away because the herons and snakes looked quick and venomous. Another party was walking around in the area; one of them was dressed in pink catgirl attire. They were also dawdling around taking photos. Their presence put me at ease.

11.05.24

I was in San Diego with my high school friend F. I was going to be driving my brother's car back to our hometown. F waited patiently in the parking lot while I tried to find my way out of the labyrinthine hotel we'd been staying at. Lots of elevators, some of them moving sideways. Floor numbers that didn't make sense. Improbable hallways spilling into strange rooms. (Connection to old dreams: dorm rooms, old buildings, architectural shifting, wood-paneled seminar rooms, the sense of being late for something, hotel rooms with glass panels and bathtubs...) A phone app with a hyperrealistic satellite view told me how to leave the hotel. I used it while driving... I was on the road; it was both scary and easy to drive home... I ended up at two sisters' joint bridal shower (?). One was wearing a dress of bright pink; the other, a dress of deep purple. Both held hydrangeas in their respective dress colors. I kept thinking that the drive was so short, shorter and easier than I'd expected. Woke up feeling stiff again...

11.04.24

I was on the verge of failing an assignment for a high school/college math class. Wood-paneled walls. A dark room. I'd chosen to answer a homework question based on "my own interpretation" (emotional, relational) instead of referring to the given data table and equations. (The equations looked very complex; there were too many variables for me to parse.) Because I'd ignored the parameters of the question, I couldn't visually interpret the data. I chose to copy what the person next to me had done. He had made very specific drawings on his paper, so I imitated them shoddily. He yelled at me ("How could you have gotten this solution without cheating? Show me your work"). I got very defensive. I told him that he had no right to view my assignments and held the papers close to my chest. Eventually I took out some measuring tape (?) and tried to do the assignment myself. I woke up with my muscles painfully clenched.