dreamstate writing 1 May 2018

This dream occurred sometime in the early hours of this morning.

A dark-haired boy and what appeared to be his father were sitting next to a water-filled channel running across the descending edge of a sand dune. Beyond and below them was a flat beach upon which a few dozen bathers lounged. As I was walking up the mound toward them the boy climbed onto the rim of the channel, which collapsed, sending him tumbling head over heels into a trough of water at the bottom of the dune. I yelled at the father to alert him of his son’s plight, but he never turned to look, instead sat facing away from us the whole time. Swallowed instantly by the trough’s quicksand-like substrate material, the boy disappeared until only the very top of his head was showing.

Clawing into and digging away at the golden liquid sand, my efforts hampered by freely-flowing water, I managed to free the boy’s head, then finally after more frantic excavations his whole body. His eyes were closed and his face and neck were turning blue from lack of oxygen. Gathering his rag-doll body into my arms, I picked him up so that his head rested to the right of mine and his limbs draped around the right side of my torso. Standing up, I shouted down to the lounging bathers, who seemed unable to understand me. I tried different languages, saying things like Police, Polizei, Polisi, call for help, ayudame, rufe einen Krankenwagen, and tolong sakit.

Then, the scenery changed and I was ascending a tall tower of glass and steel, still holding the unconscious boy, mounting flights of stairs and riding upward in elevators, climbing ever and ever higher into the sky. Upon reaching some sort of top-floor control center packed with blinking computer terminals and walled in with slanted slabs of glass, I was approached directly by a small blond woman who finally offered to help me revive the unconscious child in my arms.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

dreamstate writing 15 June 2017

A female companion and I went into a towering house of glass to play her favorite game. Its top two floors had metal siding on them but the stories below them, where her game was located, had glass walls. We slid along glass-bottomed and rainbow-walled sky ramps in time to the game’s music while I struggled to read along with the conversations transcribed onto a LCD screen tethered to our face. My companion then flipped on her back and cranked the game’s speed up so fast that everything on the screen went blurry. I shot off the track and fell past many loops of sky ramp before hitting the forcefield at the bottom of the gaming chamber, which looked like an onyx expanse of outer space but was really a big, bouncy net.
 
While my companion was racing along the sky ramps, I explored an area below the central chamber that was walled off with tall glass panels. Various computers and screens were set up there, with different games loaded onto them. Into the area’s far wall, this one made of drywall, was built a control booth in which two men sat monitoring screens. They glanced at me when I came in but didn’t say anything as I walked around looking at the other games on offer. One of them featured a black-haired woman clad in black leather who was fighting hordes of football-sized scrabbling aliens with a complex and heavy-looking pistol in each hand. Finding little of interest, I went outside.
 
It was daytime and I was standing on a slope of grass. Behind me was the towering house of glass. To my left across a flat, fenced-in field the size of a football pitch was a sinkhole that had recently opened into a low hill, a circle of reddish-orange soil full of large rocks. In front of me, but on the other side of the chainlink fence, was a building bisected by an old carriage run, a portal from which a group of screaming schoolchildren came running. One child, a girl wearing a puffy jacket and scarf of dark colors, ran over to the sinkhole and started kicking at snowdrifts that had accumulated there. I saw then that both the field and the slope were covered with what looked like a thin layer of frost, or ice. At that point I realized that some of the children had made it as far as where I was standing, and that one boy had in fact grabbed my right leg and was yanking it toward him. Surprised and shocked, I kicked, sending him flying. I watched him hit the slope, bounce, and come to rest in a clump of arms and legs. He was groaning and complaining but not seriously injured.
 
He kept talking but I started to back away from him, rounding the towering house of glass until it was between me and the frost-covered slope. Looking up I discovered that most of the glass was gone and that the sky ramps had rusted badly, their rainbow walls and glass bottoms gone. At that point I entered a door at the bottom of the tower to my right. I found myself in the darkened basement of the tower and immediately started to climb a central flight of stairs. The walls and stairs seem to have been recently painted white, and bags of white rags or clothing littered every step and platform, with only a small area cleared through them. I reached a higher storey and went through the white door. Inside, I started hitting buttons on what looked like waiting elevators but what turned out to be the light-switches for a row of gleaming walk-in showers set deep into the darkened walls. I was heading for the next flight of stairs when I awoke.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

sentimental value changes

Cradling the sawed-off baseball bat in her arms, 68 year-old grandmother-of-six Djieudee Bast-Hernandez remembered the day she had received the tire-thumper as a gift from the deputy mayor of Los Angeles. Standing on the corner of Vermont and Leeward Avenues, in the middle of Koreatown and smack-dab in the heart of territory controlled by the MS-13 gang, Ms. Bast-Hernandez shifted the bat to her right hand in one swift motion, dodging slightly to the side and striking with an upward thrust at the left temple of the urban youth standing in front of her, whom she guessed was no older than her youngest grandson. Ignoring the disbelieving gazes of the few people who had paused to watch her get robbed, Djieudee gingerly retrieved her purse from the young man's limp hands, kicked his knife down a storm-drain, straightened her patterned-silk blouse, checked her hair in the window of a nearby storefront, and slipped the bat back into the fold of her hand-knitted sweater.

Controlling the adrenaline-shakes and waiting to cry until she was inside her apartment and had locked the door, Djieudee allowed herself two whole minutes of stress-induced emotional release before going into the kitchen to make tea. Sitting at her favorite chair by the window and watching the afternoon clouds caress the top of the towers Downtown, Ms. Bast-Hernandez began to clean the bat while embedding the day's violent turn of events firmly into her long-term memory, where they settled in nicely.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit