Salting gloves. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm in an elementary school classroom, sitting crisscross apple sauce in a column of other seated adults. We all face forward. An old boss from a restaurant I used to work at passes around a bucket full of pairs of mitten and glove socks. (These are mittens and gloves that go up the arms.)

I see the girl behind me select a pair, then change her mind and put them back. I used to take a gym class with her when I was in high school. I take the mittens she rejects. They're made of a thin, stretchy, sage green material.

We put on the mittens and pick up grains of salt with them. We place the salt on our tongues and leave them there for about seven seconds, sitting quietly, observing the sensation. We do this several times, contrasting the feeling of salt vs. no salt.

Then I go out into the mall with a small group of friends. One of my wise friends suggests that we will want to have full calorie, full-fat ice cream. It will keep us full. Some of our group go looking for it. But I'm worried about parking.

I go outside to look for a place to park my big, yellow, school bus. I pick it up in my hands and struggle to get it to the first spot that looks good to me on the edges of a desert circle. There's a confusing sign on the white-painted parking spot. It says something about "No Parking." I can't tell which spot it's referring to. Does it mean both of the two parking spaces? The sign is really close to both of them.

I go across the desert circle to another, elevated pair of parking spaces. The same "No Parking" sign is there, but it's a little clearer. If I got towed, I could argue that the sign is in a different place than the spot where I parked.

I put my bus down in there. The bus has shrunk to about 25% of its original size.



INTERPRETATION

I think this is a mishmash of things I do these days. It's winter, so I wear mittens and gloves. I think about going back to meditating these days (the salt exercise is a little like mindfulness). I've been thinking about calling the wise friend. The full fat ice cream is how I want to get back on Keto. And I'm always worried about parking.

School busses are especially confusing, because what if they stop on the opposite side of traffic on a busy road? I guess you still have to stop. I've never encountered that situation myself, but I've seen other people have to deal with it. What if I just don't notice the bus driving on the opposite road? I hate it. I hate driving. I hate that a momentary lapse in judgment can result in thousands of dollars of essential, daily equipment being ruined, or it can result in metal and glass shards slicing through my face and body, or it can even result in a child or an elderly person getting killed. But driving is the only way to survive here.

Dating someone after burning a bridge. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

I had a dream last night. I'm fuzzy on the details, but in the dream, I bumped into this guy who (in real life) cut ties with me when my ex-roommate started a smear campaign against me. (I assume she was running a smear campaign because of the way I was treated by the other theater people after the falling out.) I stayed quiet for a while. I didn't see the point in indulging gossip. But after she got me fired from an acquaintance's film, I posted about it on Facebook. In response, this guy left a fairly cryptic, public goodbye message for someone on Facebook (I assumed it was me), and I assume that he decided to cancel a 10-minute play of mine that his small theater troupe was going to do, because he never contacted me again about when or where I could see them perform it. 

I don't think he's a bad guy. This was just the judgment call he felt pressured into making.

So in the dream, I was back in my hometown and I saw this guy. I thought it would be awkward, but we hit it off pretty well. We started talking. We started going to the park. After a while, he asked if we should date. I agreed to it, but I felt super weird about dating him. And at first, it was hard for me to tell if I felt weird because we burned a bridge a long, long time ago, and he might abandon me again, or if I would feel weird dating anyone at this point. After trying to feel it out for a while, I decided that mainly, I was uncomfortable dating anybody again. I'd forgiven him, and I felt as though could move beyond all of that. But I had been done bothering with doing the labor of trying to maintain a relationship and now this was throwing me for a loop.

I think the only reason I'm thinking of this guy again is because someone on LinkedIn reposted something he had posted. He referenced a video he had made which was getting a lot of views, so I went to see his channel for myself. It's kinda weird to look up someone you left behind in life, but I did it, and sure enough, it gave me weird feelings.

I guess this dream mainly lets me know that I've settled down into being single and wouldn't look forward to starting a new relationship. It also lets me know that I've forgiven this person. But another possible message from this dream is that you can forgive someone, but you'll probably always have the memory of what they're capable of (or not capable of).

The second volume of my dream diaries is now available in paperback form! (news)

Image by Midjourney

Hello, all!

I've had some free time recently, so I've created a paperback edition of my second dream diary. It took a lot more work than my lazy self thought it would! Even though I already had an eBook cover and an eBook manuscript, it still took about 1.5 days of concentrating pretty hard to put together something for a 1st edition paperback. (And I always fail to catch mistakes or change my mind about decisions I made for a book, so there will probably be subsequent editions one day. But I think that the quality of this edition will be decent. I ordered a proof and thumbed through it. There aren't a bunch of large mistakes as far as I can tell.)

There are a couple things about the paperback that frustrate me already though. One is the length. This book is over 600 pages long. I tried to save on paper by having new dreams appear on both the left and right pages. In the first dream diary, new dreams only appeared on the right.

The other big thing that bothers me is the price for the paperback. It costs $24.99. I wish I could bring that price down, but I only get a little over $1 in royalties for every copy sold at this price. The royalties can't get much lower than that. The book just costs a lot to print, and Amazon's cut is so large that it's quite expensive to produce the book. 

But the eBook is much cheaper at $6.99, so that's still an option.

It's much more economical to purchase and produce eBooks, but some people really prefer paper. And at least for me, the author, paperbacks have their advantages in spite of the expense. Paperbacks are really nice to have at live, in-person events. They're good for readings and they're good for selling at a table. I also like to drop off paperbacks at the free little libraries in town. It's easier and more satisfying to gift physical books to interested friends. And I can sign paperbacks.

So! In summary, if you are a paper person, and you like my dream diary posts, this is now an option. 

Thank you for your attention.

Link to the book: https://www.amazon.com/Back-School-Naja-Tau-ebook/dp/B0BZXNMMMQ.

How I've been using AI in my creative works. (rants)

Image by Midjourney

AI is such a contentious topic right now that I feel as though it would be good to be transparent about how I use AI with the works connected to Naja Tau, and outline why I use it the way I do. Because I, personally, am not interested in reading AI creative writing. So I wouldn't blame you if you were also not interested. So if an author is copying and pasting medium to large chunks of text from AI, I don't want to read it. I wouldn't mind reading non-fiction articles that clearly state that the article was copied and pasted from AI (it would be a big bonus if a human expert had read the article and validated what it was saying). But I'm not interested in reading stories and fantasies from a non-biological entity.

I write because I have something to say. I don't want a piece of software to override what I want to say and how I want to say it. However, I will use AI to tell me about facts, rules (legal, grammatical, formatting, and structural), and I will sometimes copy and paste the descriptions of my books into AI and ask the software to analyze it and give recommendations for improvement. Sometimes, the AI will tell me I need to add a stronger hook, or a call to action. And I'll rewrite the description and ask it to analyze the changes I made. I'll keep doing that until I feel good about the description. I did this for the most recent description of Naja Tau's Dream Diary 2.

Sometimes, the AI will suggest that words in a sentence swap place or it will recommend the use of a more active voice rather than a passive voice. And in those cases, I might accept the exact wording of a recommended change. I did this with the description of Satyr Plays 2. 

I have also asked AI to generate lists of things. Lists of words that rhyme. Lists of words that mean x-and-such. Lists of fun, tropical recipes (for Satyr Plays 1). 

I have also copied and pasted legal disclaimers about copyright, and changing names, locations, and places, and the fragility of human memory.

I'm not interested in copying and pasting actual passages of fiction or creative non-fiction from AI. I don't ever plan to do that. Could some weird advancements in AI change the way I do things? I guess so. You never know. But this is what I've been doing with AI since it started to get good in about 2022. 

Of course, there's also the matter of using AI-generated art. Under most of my square images in my blog, I say, "Image by Midjourney." Midjourney is an AI art generator. I also use my Midjourney subscription for a lot of YouTube thumbnails. I have also used Midjourney to generate the cover images for Satyr Plays 1 & 2, and Megachurch Versus Tattoo Studio. 

Although I use AI art, I use AI art because I'm poor. Would I rather pay a human artist that can crank out nice art really, really fast? I would. It just leaves one with a warmer feeling to know that human hands and a human mind created art. But before Midjourney, I wanted to have art on the blog, and it's just too expensive and time consuming to do. There just weren't any images at all on my blog--or I might have occasionally grabbed them from Morguefile.com or Unsplash.com. 

I like having AI images though, because it creates a nice separator between blog entries, and it creates a visual anchor for remembering whether or not you've already read a post. 

I think that the arguments for whether or not using AI-generated art is acceptable change depending on whether or not the AI is grabbing artists' images and slightly changing them and reselling them as its own, or if it's thoroughly remixing a bunch of artists' images and creating something new. Because this is how we evaluate whether or not people are doing something unethical with other people's art. If a person grabs a JPG of my drawing of a macaw and puts it on merchandise and sells it (which has happened to me), that's stealing. But if a person looks at my drawing of a macaw on the internet, gets inspired by that image, and looks at other images of macaws, and blends them all together into something new, that's just how the human brain works. That's how new art gets made. Humans see images that inspire them, then blend it all up in their brains and create something different out of everything they've seen. Why are we holding our robots to a higher standard than we could hold a person to in this case? 

I was concerned that Midjourney was just copying artists' images, so I started doing reverse image searches on my YouTube thumbnails. So far, there aren't any similar images to the ones Midjourney generates for me.

Also, if Midjourney uses hundreds of millions of images to train on, and we decided that all of the people who made those images should get paid for that, do we really think that every time Midjourney generates an image, a person should get a hundred millionth of ten cents (assuming that an image Midjourney makes will generate ten cents for the company)? I guess that would add up. And maybe one day, those artists will be identified and can sue for that. Sure. But there's no way to hold humans accountable for doing this with far fewer images in their "database" (brain). Should humans be held accountable in that way if they can be? I don't think so. 

So that's where I'm at right now with using AI for the stuff connected to Naja Tau. 

Dreaming about writing. (dreams)

Image by Midjourney

I had a funny dream last night. I was watching a middle-aged woman who just looked so tired and done with it all, and she was writing a document on a computer in kind of a NaNoWriMo (now renamed Novel November) style. You know what I mean--there's a daily quota and a schedule, and it has to be adhered to or else. 

As I watch this woman type and click, I can feel how she just wants to get her "work" for the day over with.

That woman kinda represents me! I want to enter my writing into a contest with a deadline, so I worry that if I don't make consistent, disciplined progress on the piece every day, I won't have anything to submit. But I have a hard time staying consistent and disciplined and focused on personal projects sometimes. I have more writing projects that I've started and not finished than I would like. Having a bunch of projects left hanging scatters the attention of my unconscious mind. Some part of my brain will wish it was working on a brand new mermaid project. Some part of my brain will want to brainstorm short story ideas for the third Satyr Plays. Some part of my brain will wish it was revising the third Dream Diary. Another part of my brain is wondering when I'm going to get back to working on my goal of making 100 YouTube videos. Etcetera. 

So there's a kind of drudgery in the writing I'm working on right now. It's not a passion project. I just want to have something to submit. I wonder if this is going to wind up being a high-quality piece of writing if it's kind of a joyless experience to create it. 

I feel as though that uncertainty shouldn't stop me though. You never know the outcome of your actions. You can only do the work. 

It seems as though it's getting harder and harder to plan for the future right now. So much unemployment/underemployment. So much economic uncertainty. AI. Policy changes. But artists have always faced tremendous uncertainty and poor odds about the outcome of their efforts. So you'd think I would be used to all this by now. 

Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? (8th conversation starter video) (news)

Today's philosophical question is: does absolute power corrupt absolutely?

This question is from https://www.conversationstartersworld.com. 

The original phrase was from Lord Acton (1834-1902): "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." It was a cry to raise the standards of accountability for leadership.

I'm going to stop spamming my own blog with notifications about new videos. I've added a "YouTube" tab to the top of this blog, and you can check out my progress towards my goal of posting 100 videos at that link. And I hope you do check it out! I have a lot of fun answering these discussion questions and it would be nice if someone watched my videos. 

https://youtu.be/WmmfdaY8i60

Where do you find meaning in your life? (7th conversation starter video) (news)

Today's conversation starter question is: where do you find meaning in your life? In this video, I talk a little bit about my personal experience with looking for meaning, and I also talk about finding meaning more generally. 

I've got a couple of job interviews coming up, so my life might change pretty dramatically soon. I might have to slow down the videos, but I do hope to keep going until I get to 100. Will I go past 100? Eh. I dunno. It's too early to say.

This question is from https://www.conversationstartersworld.com. 

https://youtu.be/uDQbhptWzNs

Would you want to feel no pain? (6th video in a series of conversation starters) (news)

This a video of my answer to the question: would you want to permanently feel zero pain if given the chance? 

This question is from https://www.conversationstartersworld.com. 

Please leave your answer in the comments!

https://youtu.be/KYD2hoIq5dY

Is free will real or just an illusion? (5th video in a series of conversation starters) (news)

I watched a clip of Mr. Beast saying that no one will watch your first 100 videos. That really makes me want to make 100 videos to see what happens next! Do you think I can do it? That would be about four months of almost-daily videos! That's a lot of videos...

In this video, I give some of my thoughts about the question: is free will real or just an illusion? 

This question is from https://www.conversationstartersworld.com. 

In my experience, this topic can get a little spicy! Everyone has an opinion about it. I'd like to read your opinions in the comments!

https://youtu.be/blpmXbbAs4A

Is the meaning of life the same for animals and people? (4th video in a series of conversation starters) (news)

My previous conversation starters were hypothetical questions, but this one is a philosophical question! Is the meaning of life the same for animals and people? Click the video to hear my opinion, and to leave your own answer in the comments!

This question is from https://www.conversationstartersworld.com. 

 https://youtu.be/b4GMV2ce0u4

What if everyone's thoughts appeared over their heads? (3rd video in a series about hypothetical questions) (news)

I'm on a roll! I'm really enjoying these conversation starters from https://www.conversationstartersworld.com. Here's a video of my thoughts about the question: would you want to live in a world where everyone's thoughts appeared as text above their head?

Please feel free to leave your own answer in the comments!

https://youtu.be/rqffl4JAC7U

2nd video in a series of hypothetical questions. (news)

I went to the website https://www.conversationstartersworld.com and chewed on the following hypothetical question: if you could implant one false memory in the minds of everyone in your country, what would that memory be? 

Click the video to see my thoughts and commentary on this topic, and to leave your own thoughts and comments. 

 https://youtu.be/d_Yy9SB9sI0

First YouTube video in a very long time! (news)

Hello readers,

I just posted my response to the conversation starter question: what would you do if you were suddenly given world class hacking knowledge and ability? (This question is from https://www.conversationstartersworld.com.) 

I had planned to play The Sims 4 at the same time, but I was too busy talking! (As an introvert, it's really good for me to exercise that talking muscle!) Maybe I'll actually create a new Sim in the next video.

 Check out the first in the series of videos exploring hypothetical questions:

https://youtu.be/Dd-XvpRxay8

Oh, melatonin. (dreams)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm at home thinking about my deceased mom. Then, all of a sudden, my memories of her lying in bed with her jet black hair pouring out behind her become real. My mom is there in the room talking to me. At first, I think it's a dream, but she persists throughout the day, giving advice and saying kind, wise things. It's an unbelievable miracle!

Then I'm called by a school bus driver to manually remove my cat, because she's fighting with another cat. I do pick up the cat and put her down somewhere else. 

Then I meet a girl who I think is great. She's very friendly and supportive. I walk barefoot across a beach city downtown in California to drop off a resume. The girl walks in sandals doing the same thing. I return across the board walk. There's broken glass everywhere now and it hurts my feet. 

I return to a TV show. In this TV show, the girl who used to be so kind and supportive is cruel, and I find out that my mother is actually a commercialized attempt to bring back people from the dead. 

I remark afterwards that it went from a 4 star movie to a 2 star movie. The girl thinks I'm crazy. She thinks the show was great! 

The director of the movie comes out and begins to mocks me relentlessly. I try to escape, but he and the cast keep following me, imitating me as though I'm a jerk. I don't know why they can't see why I'm upset. 

Then I realize I'm in a time loop, forever destined to relive these moments in a haze of confusion, never to fully understand. Forever destined to believe my mother is alive as a supernatural miracle, only to find out she's a Frankenstein's monster.

INTERPRETATION

I've only just stopped taking a medication that was giving me horrible anxiety and insomnia, so I've been giving myself a little boost with melatonin at night. I think I had such a deeply offensive and upsetting dream because melatonin dreams are just weirder. I've also had some really nice, fun dreams on melatonin recently, like a dream in which I was in college, and everyone in the class had to make a fun YouTube reels type of short video as an assignment. The five or so people I watched and experienced what they experienced were so creative. 

I very much so wish that my mother was still alive. When she was alive, I always knew that someone out there would support me, no matter what. I no longer have that. 

I think the time loop is panic that the pain in life will never end. 

501 Creative Writing Prompts: Prompt #5 - Maurice the Mole Finds a Tunnel (creative writing exercise)

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 Prompt #5: Maurice the Mole Finds a Tunnel

Maurice the Mole had made himself a cup of blueberry coffee first thing in the morning. His claws clinked lightly against the ceramic cup as he picked it up off of the Keurig. He measured out a couple of tablespoons of monk fruit (he was watching his triglycerides) and watched them disappear beneath the brown liquid. Then he poured his cream and sipped the bulging surface.

Today, he wanted to meet with his best friend, Margot the Mole. They didn’t have a specific time planned. Just… eventually.

He had used up almost all of the monk fruit, so he had to go down to the basement to refill his jar.

Maurice lived by himself, and it scared him to go down to the basement. You had to go in a way before you could reach the chain that turned the light bulb on and off. He opened the door.

“...Hello?” he called out at the top of the stairs. The whiskers on his snout shook. He wanted to give anybody who was secretly living in the basement the opportunity to be friendly.

He carefully felt his way down the stairs with his slippered foot. He tripped and fell straight into the shelf with the monk fruit at the bottom of the steps.

“Ouch!” he said, rubbing his arm. He glared at the shelf. Then he noticed something odd. He had knocked over a couple bags of rice and beans and shaken the dirt from the wall quite a bit, and behind all of that was the faint outline of a sealed tunnel.

He took the rest of the items off of the shelf and pulled it away from the wall. It was definitely a sealed tunnel.

Digging was Maurice’s favorite pastime, so he dug into the crusty earth with his long claws and reopened the tunnel. 

The tunnel ended up being quite elaborate. It took him up and down and east and west.

Finally, he came to an ending that seemed very abrupt. He decided to keep digging. When he saw the light again, he was in front of something: a small stack of dishes.

“Hello?” he said. “Hello?!”

The door on the cabinet opened.

“Margot!” he exclaimed.

“Maurice! What are you doing in my kitchen cabinet? And so early in the morning!”

“I’ve been meaning to come see you!” he said. “Is this a bad time?”

Margot thought for a moment. “No. But I’m in my pajamas.”

“I don’t mind,” said Maurice. “Actually, so am I!”

“Would you like some lemon cookies?” Margot asked.

“That sounds delightful. I haven’t finished my coffee yet!”

“Well, you can have some here!”

Margot went to another cabinet and placed a small stack of cookies on the plate in front of Maurice. She went to her percolator and measured out the coffee before pouring a pot of water into it.

“What are your plans for the day, Maurice?”

“Well,” he said, between mouthfuls of cookie, “my plan for the day was to come see you! But now that I’ve done this, I suppose I need new plans.”

“Ms. Peeper’s tadpoles just hatched over in the pond. I’ve been meaning to go say hello to the new little ones.” Margot sat down at the kitchen table and began consuming some of the lemon cookies.

“Could I join you?” asked Maurice.

“I was hoping you would!”

I have to decide whether to be a cop or a firefighter. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I pass by a desk. A cop and a firefighter are relaxing on either side. I have to pick which job I want to have. I pick cop, because fire fighters are too nice to be me. I watch myself as I train, and there's something different about me that makes me stand out among the others. It's in my personality. A depression. But it's a part of me and I see from this outside vantage point that it's endearing. 

I'm watching Paul Blart 2, and there are some pretty cliche scenes. "These movies really follow a formula!" remarks a coworker who majored in film for a while. But I actually like parts of it. In particular, I like this one lady who runs around sleeping with everyone but the balding office dork. She saves the planet by kissing an alien and giving it herpes. 

Then, I'm on a starship with Captain Jean Luc Picard. He's allowed an alien species on his ship, but they've stolen his droids, like R2-D2 and C-3P0. He learns that there's a price to pay for being too open and free with his friendship as he scrambles to get the droids back (and does).

INTERPRETATION

I think the first part of the dream points out how self-esteem can impact where you end up in life. I was fine training as a cop versus a firefighter, but that self-esteem issue had an influence. I don't know what to make of the fact that in the dream, my depression was something lovable. Maybe that's connected to the theme of self-esteem. I think it's very easy to feel unloved when you're depressed, but that's not necessarily the fuller picture. 

I liked how in the part with the lady who sleeps around, we're laughing at this nature she has to be very sexual, but it also ends up being the thing that saves us. 

I think there's a similarly mixed message at the very end of the dream. Yes, there's a price to pay for being too trusting too fast, but he also had the inner resources to manage the situation so that everything turned out okay in the end. 

A dream too random to title. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

I've been having some dreams that I just haven't taken the time to write down right away upon waking up, so I'll typically forget all the details. Some of them had the potential to be pretty cool in written form. There was the dream about Spider-Man in which the twist was that he was a very thin woman. There was the dream that I was on a team which was responsible for training the new Emperor. The new Emperor had spent his whole life on a farm, and he was a humble, hard-working, likable kid in his 20s. And now, he had a lot to learn about being a public figure. And then there was the dream that I went to a gym with the softest leather couches. And we would hold these bath-bomb-like, scented things that had to be electronically charged with an extra-large USB-C outlet as a meditative practice.

But last night's dream is just plain random. I had decided the night before to write down the dream regardless of what it was though, so here it is.

DREAM

I see a boy monkey with a crush on a white, girl monkey in a high school. I wonder what their story would be like if they made it to the cuddling on the couch stage, but no farther. So I put them in that scenario and watch. I can't decide if he should be at her house, or if she should be at his.

I slip out of my bunk bed the next morning and put on some clothes I want to show off on social media.

My father and I pile into a car. It looks like we're in a really, really crowded, dystopian urban area. Punks on bikes cross the street rapidly, but I manage to cross the street in my car and not hit anyone.

Pretty soon, the car has a dad (who has switched from being my dad to being one of my professors) seeking to find his lost or kidnapped daughter in it. He exits the car in an alley.

I see that I have an apartment. There's an old lady who says they don't know who's in that apartment, but I know it's me. I don't say anything. The walls are vertically striped in baby blue and pastel pink and there's a tight spiral staircase in the center.

Then we see a diorama of a place. The father bumps into someone in the alley who he says just wants to see his son walk to school from Greenland. He says this with judgment.

We get back in the car and the diorama becomes a music video. I arrange the clips like a midi maker. A guy comes out and tries to sell us his H.R. Giger alien/Barbie/Buddha barbeque diorama accessories. He pitches it like he's making a profound fashion statement. I feel powerful when I decline, but he seems to be handling the news badly. He's confused about why I declined. Now that I see he's hurt, I realize I probably shouldn't have gotten wrapped up in getting annoyed by his audacity. All art needs audacity. Probably all sales too.

INTERPRETATION

You know, I typically see how the events of my real life are reflected in my dreams, but this dream seemed almost completely random. The most I can say about how this dream connects to my real life is that I do feel powerful when I decline offers (and I recently declined a large offer), and I do believe that the professor/father in the dream cares a lot about his daughter in real life, and sometimes when I'm driving, it really does seem like these random pedestrians crossing the street have a death wish and I really need to get where I'm going without hitting them. 

I'm left out of the youth group film project. (dream)

Image by Midjourney 

DREAM

I'm heading into a store. Times are kind of rough in the world. So going into this store feels luxurious, even though it's just a large chain store with that same underlying warehouse feel that chain stores have. There are at least expensive items for anyone to look at and touch, even if they can't afford to buy them. 

I see a display, and I pick up a book about plants and cooking from a small stack of them. I know this is a hot book right now, and I don't think everyone here in this store appreciates what a catch it is. I think rather smugly to myself, The fools! There's no malice in this feeling though. I'd just like to show other people what they're missing. I'm excited. I try to start up a conversation with someone else at the display, but the conversation doesn't go anywhere. 

Then I realize I might have made a mistake. This is last month's hottest new book. Maybe that book over there is this month's. I stop my hubris and take the time to actually check the dates much more carefully. Maybe buying this book isn't as great an idea as I thought it was just a couple of seconds ago. 

I wander out of the store into the mall that it's a part of. I bump into someone who I know is an indie filmmaker. We chat for a little bit. He's filming something today on the upper levels. Then I bump into a group of people from my youth group. We exchange a quick, "Hi," but I notice where they're heading, and I notice that they didn't invite me to join in the fun on the film crew. I'm hurt. 

INTERPRETATION

That pain of being left out is very old, and very familiar. I used to feel left out of my youth group very often when I was a preteen. 

I have been going through something for the past three weeks. Every morning, I wake up to painful feelings in my stomach and a tumble of negative thoughts reminding me of my past mistakes and regrets. Or maybe the negative thoughts are repeatedly telling me that my future is going to be a catastrophe. Or they just tell me that I'm a really bad person. I'm just in a lot of pain these days. I didn't have a relationship go bad. I'm not sick. I'm doing things I would ordinarily like. Nothing significant is going wrong in my life. Yet I'm in the grip of something very dark. So I'm not surprised that these old, painful feelings are being thrown back up in my face in a dream. 

What's more of a mystery to me is the first part of the dream. Could that just be how I always feel like I need to check things a second time? I have been reading code documentation for a library I am not familiar with, so I've definitely had to go over things multiple times recently, checking and rechecking my assumptions. I've also been considering how everyone has a reason for the hurtful things they do. And maybe it's worth trying to go back over those memories to figure it out. If you really understood where they were coming from, wouldn't that lessen the amount of hurt you feel? 

501 Creative Writing Prompts - Prompt #4: The Museum of Love (creative writing exercise)

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Prompt #4: The Museum of Love

Carl had fallen asleep at the wheel and woken up tumbling after the car had fallen off of a winding mountain road. He hovered over his mangled body as an explosion rocked the car. Fire began to consume his body, but it didn’t matter to him. He was watching, and he felt fine. He was dead. There was no other explanation for being free from that body in the burning car.


At first, he was concerned for his teenaged kids, but he was shown that his kids would go on to live a full life without him. And so he let go.


He shot up into the air, up into outer space, and he suddenly found himself in a small outdoor theatre watching the most vivid projections he could imagine. He would end up spending what felt like years reviewing all the mistakes he’d made. Every thought and feeling was replayed and relived. And every time he’d done something that resulted in someone else’s harm, his memory of the event was replayed alongside the memories of the person he’d hurt. He could feel their pain and see them going on to do harm to themselves or others.


In particular, he’d treated a boy very sternly in his classroom, and now he felt all of the anxiety and the trauma he’d caused. The boy felt pain in his stomach whenever he did an assignment in school and the boy would fear the responses he would get from teachers after he was in Carl’s class–all the way into college when his anxiety caused him to drop out.


But all of this embarrassment occurred while he felt the most profound feeling of being loved and cared for–just for existing. There were deceased friends and family beside him watching these mistakes too. But he could allow himself to feel the others’ pain, because he knew that there was love for him in spite of his mistakes. The love in the afterlife was a love unlike anything he’d ever known during his lifetime–even from the people who had cared for him the most. He bathed in it.


When the review of his mistakes ended, an Asian man walked down an aisle in the back of the garden-theatre. His smile and calm composition radiated compassion. “I’m Mukti,” he said. “Let me take you to the museum I curate,” he said.


They flew through the sky to a building that looked like a library. He entered. They passed several people looking through the shelves. Mukti went up to a computer kiosk with a large screen and passed Carl a headset that floated in the air.


Carl took it. He put the headset over his eyes. A memory played–just like the memories of all the mistakes Carl had made in his lifetime. But this was different. The memories were just as vivid and just as inclusive of others’ memories, but instead of being embarrassing, this was pure bliss.


He heard Mukti say, “This museum includes a collection of all the times you treated people or animals kindly, with love in your heart. You can revisit any of the events of your life, but this is your highlight reel! All you have to do is think of this collection to know how to come here.”


Carl smiled. He played the first memory. His son was excited to come see him after a long day of work. Carl had stopped by the grocery store and while he was there, he bought his son a little Easter present: a yellow plastic chicken that laid eggs. He saw how much joy his son got out of the surprise and knowing that his dad cared about him. He saw all the joyful moments his son had playing with that chicken right up until a leg broke off and he was tired of it and threw it away.


“Are these in any particular order?” asked Carl.


“Just watch. You’ll get used to summoning them in any order you feel like.”


Carl smiled. And just as he had spent many years reliving the harm he had caused, he spent many years reliving the love that he had put into the world. He had a lot to learn in this new life, but one thing was clear. Possessions didn’t matter. Status didn’t matter. Competition didn’t matter. All that had ever mattered was love. And it was eternal. He was at the very start of his journey into eternity.

501 Creative Writing Prompts: Prompt #3 -- The Place Where You Grew Up (creative writing exercise)

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Prompt #3: The Place Where You Grew Up

This is the church where someone betrayed you. Where he kicked you out into your car on the night of a winter’s storm when your father was out of his mind, wide eyed and talking about spaceships that would take him up for 1,000 years. 

This is the parking lot where you slept that night. There’s no public restroom in the store.

This is the pet store where you had shopped 100 times. The manager told you you’re a job hopper and they don’t want an employer-employee relationship with you. 

This is the fast-food restaurant where the drug addicts from Texas worked. One of them threw a hot oil poker like a spear at his most loyal friend–who didn’t want him to be fired afterwards. 

This is the university where they allowed you to drown in hopelessness and anxiety. Where they allowed you to be discriminated against for the mental illness you were self-diagnosed with. 

This is the mental health clinic where they sent you to the hospital against your will, where they trapped you and treated you cruelly, called you names and charged thousands of dollars to not give any help. 

This is the house where your ex-roommate spread rumors about you like she did with everyone else behind their backs. She got you fired from that indie filmmaker’s set. 

This is a place of one bad memory after another. They say you can’t run away from your problems, but leaving this place really set the reset button.

501 Creative Writing Prompts: Prompt #2 - The FBI has my crush. (creative writing exercise)

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Prompt #2: The FBI has my crush.

It was hard to believe that this was their prime suspect: a 5ft tall female in her mid-30s pulling all of this off with no partner. But this was her house. And if there was going to be any evidence connecting her to the murders of forty-one prostitutes whose bodies were dumped along highways in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, they’d find it here. 

Agent Knight was ready for surprises and hidden connections behind pedestrian objects, but he knew what would help the prosecutor: fentanyl, footprints, DNA, and that laptop on the messy desk. And he wanted to help the prosecutor. He wanted to be wrong, but he knew by now that his coworkers were rarely wrong by the time they’d reached this stage. 

He turned on his UV light and pointed it towards the laptop. It lit up immediately. It was time to get out the first chemical test that would detect leftover traces of blood: Luminol. 

***

Duncan had run some water through his hair at the McDonald’s he’d stopped at just before coming to Tiffany’s house, and he felt clean and excited after arriving back home from a case in LA. He’d gotten himself a cheeseburger and Sprite and Tiffany had asked for a salad and an iced coffee. He’d had such a big crush on her from 3rd through 6th grade! He never imagined she would reach out to him on LinkedIn 30 years later. This would be the third time this month they would hang out, and things were going so smoothly. He had been single for a long time and seriously hoped that these hangouts would evolve into official, romantic dates, but so far, they’d spent most of their time reminiscing about elementary school and discussing hypothetical legal situations that were a little outside his scope of expertise as a patent lawyer. They sometimes discussed her job as a freelance life coach for women. 

He supposed that in the back of his mind, he knew that something was probably going very wrong with Tiffany’s life for her to contact him out of the blue the way she had. Freelance life coach didn't stand out to him as a stable job. But when he pulled up to her house and saw several unmarked police cars outside running their lights, his heart sank. 

501 Creative Writing Prompts - Prompt #1: The Shadow (creative writing exercise)

I just bought a book called 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts: 501 Prompts to Unleash Creativity and Spark Inspiration, and I thought I would try out some of the prompts and post the results. I won't post the actual prompts for copyright reasons--just what I myself type out in response after about 20 minutes of working on it. 

Here's the first one.

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The Shadow

“Meow! Meow!”

Chelsea woke up to the sounds of her cat crying. The crying went on for what felt like a long, long time before the fog of sleep lifted enough for guilt to kick in. The room was pitch black save for the faint, white impression Snowball left. Chelsea stood and the blood rushed from her head, making her dizzy. She reached out blindly and braced herself against the wall. The meowing and little cat gurgles got more excited. She could see Snowball's pale radiance trotting out of the bedroom door. 

She flipped on the light switch and something immediately startled her. In the quiet and the calm that followed, she had to think about whether or not she really saw what she thought she did. She thought she saw a copy of her shadow dart away from the wall out the bedroom door. 

Heart thumping, she turned on the lights to the hallway. She saw it again: the copy of her shadow pressed against the wall. But this time, it didn’t run. It snuck very carefully into the living room, merging once again with the dark. 

Chelsea went through the first story of the house, turning on every light switch. When she got to the kitchen, Snowball was anxiously awaiting his midnight snack. But she also saw her shadow on the wall. And it appeared to be holding the hand of another shadow: the distinct outline of a little girl. Her shadow seemed to be having a conversation with it.

Chelsea stood in front of the pair of them. They seemed to ignore her. She moved her own shadow in front of the two of them. When the two shadows locked, she had a warm, falling sensation, and suddenly, she was in a place of white light, experiencing the conversation her shadow was having with... herself as a little girl. Now, with a sudden new download of information, it was as though this conversation had been inevitable. She could see how everything in life had brought them to this point.

Journaling because I feel sad. (rants)

I was feeling down this morning, and my friend encouraged me to do some journaling. I did some journaling in private using pencil and paper and didn't feel as though it was enough. So here's some more journaling (unrelated to dreams). If you want to know what I'm dreaming about, it's related to this song about Sonic:

The following questions are from this Medium article: https://medium.com/bouncin-and-behavin-blogs/20-journal-prompts-for-deep-thinking-and-reflection-503fd5630157 

If I had all the money and time in the world, what would I be doing?

I would be earning a PhD in physics, but I honestly don't know if there's an easy enough program for me to complete it! I would want to have the time to balance that with creative writing and acting classes. What I'm doing right now is going down a similar path, so when I think about it, I guess I'm pretty happy with what I'm doing. I'm just anxious about what I'm doing because I don't have all the time and money in the world.

What do I need to stop doing and start doing?

I need to stop allowing stress to keep my fight or flight systems triggered--especially for long stretches of time. I need to start recognizing stress and responding to it by unclenching my body and taking deep breaths. I did a meditation by Declutter the Mind for anxiety, and it suggested labeling anxious thoughts as a separate entity with its own name. I've started using my imagination to do that exercise. 

What does “success” mean to me?

Success to me means having warm memories to reflect on in the quiet times.

A woman struck by lightning develops a psychic soul tie to a dolphin. (dream)

I fell asleep to this video about a woman being struck by lightning, which must have partly inspired this dream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQhOb63E_do). 

DREAM

I'm with a small group of friends at an outdoor encampment. One friend is doing the dishes. I don't like what I see. A huge, expensive, copper pot I've brought with me looks deformed as my friend scrubs the exterior. It was perfect when I brought it here. I choose not to say anything. I come back later as she's drying the pot and I see that the metal lid has warped, and there are patches of melted and soldered metal on the bottom. I laugh, in spite of the expense. Because it's my friend. This just seems to be the kind of mess she'd get into.

Then I see a map of four small towns in Alaska. I see roaring, green-gray water in one corner. A patch of fireweed in another.

Then I'm in one of the towns--a town of lavender. I see a field of wildflowers demonstrating the town's natural beauty.

A tall, middle aged woman with brown hair has been struck by lightning. When this happened, it created an intense psychic connection to a big, long, white dolphin who is now like a soulmate. I see the dolphin cut in half alongside the woman.

The woman and her dolphin are in an icy bay. A rope runs from the dolphin's head and drags the woman, who stands on an ice floe in her tank top and shorts.

The dolphin swims up to me with a small, furry, brown animal in its mouth. I get the dolphin to open its mouth, and I pull the animal up onto the snow. It's my cat, Peaches. She's half dead. I can't help but feel that it's the dolphin that almost killed her, and I'm angry at it. But I know the dolphin is a precious, perhaps sacred animal, and I know it is still just an animal itself.

The dolphin returns to the woman across the bay.

I breathe through a fine mesh for a tent, like a mosquito net. It's quiet. Meditative. The mesh doesn't impede my breath. The veil is almost refreshing.


INTERPRETATION

I think there's an acceptance of both the nature of the dolphin and the nature of the friend who warped my pot and injured my cat. I think there's an acceptance of the whole situation of warping and damage and injury.

The state my cat was in in the dream reminded me of just how sick my cat was in real life a couple days before we put her to sleep. I think there's an inclination to cling to every moment with a sick pet or loved one, and in my past, there's been a scrambling to blame others for their deaths--as if it wasn't natural, inevitable, and their time. The hospital gave them pain killers and that hastened their death. The cat would have survived another couple weeks if we'd just kept chasing her down and stabbing her with a needle for subcutaneous fluids while she cried the most confused, pained cries.

I don't just see this tendency in myself. I recently recognized this same exact pattern of desperate searching for causes and blaming and feelings of guilt in a friend who called me about some deaths in her life. I think I want to let go of that inclination towards denial and blame in the face of serious illness and death.

I have a pet right now. The last time I took him to the vet, they called him a senior. I don't want to be as confused and blindsided as I was with Peaches when it's his time. I don't want to be confused and blindsided when it's my own time. Or when my friends and loved ones get sick.

Injury and deformation are a natural part of this life. In the case of my friend deforming the pot, there can even be something joyful in understanding and contemplating the story of it all.

3rd dream diary? (news)

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Last night I dreamed that I started going to Harvard for Computer Science. It was already really hard on the very first day!

But I'm not here to talk to you about a dream I had. I'm here to talk to you about a collection of dreams I've had.

I've finally gotten through the first edit of my third dream diary collection. Will it come out in a couple months? Will it come out in a couple years? I don't really know the timeline. But I think there are enough dreams that are interesting enough to release as an eBook on Amazon eventually! But I have a lot of editing to do. So stay tuned. 

I am a soldier because I can't afford my cozy lifestyle. (dream)

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DREAMS

I'm a soldier in a slightly different, slightly futuristic world, and I'm being shipped for deployment. I find a place to sit near the rear opening of the truck. One soldier has to hang out of the back, holding on to bars on the door. 

After driving for a while, a woman who's an officer tells us we need to be extra quiet along this stretch of the trip. (We're passing a Walmart and I assume we need to be quiet because it's respectful.) The guy hanging out the back was causing the most noise with his struggles to stay on the truck! Now he has to stay silent on top of it. His feet morph into metal frog feet that attach securely to the bar on the back. 

We switch vehicles. Now we're in an open jeep with a large truck bed. We sit in there. We go into a tunnel. After a while, I see some bullets spraying from further back in the tunnel. A group of rebel hooligans has broken into the troops' transport system with guns. 

The guy who was hanging out of the back of the truck has a gun, and he fires beside me at the advancing group of rebels, but I don't have a weapon. One of the hooligans is clearly targeting me. My guy fires at him, but green, holographic armor blocks each shot. The hooligan shoots me repeatedly in the stomach. I know I won't survive.

There's a nice funeral for me at the house I used to live in before I became a soldier. It's fall, and there are leaves drifting in the yard. There are friends and neighbors visiting inside. It was very cozy and comfortable living the life I did, but I didn't have the finances to stay there forever. I see how I would have paper doll outfits that I would wear, like trout-patterned dresses. I see how I would have grumpily cared for five german shepherds had I survived into old age in that lifestyle.

Then I wake up. I pee and I give the cat a 3 a.m. snackie. 

Then I'm squatting next to a pond. The person in charge of the pond explains that they're going to solve all of their problems with this: a small tube full of tiny snails. I have a good feeling about this.

Time passes, and I'm attending a church service. And the guest speaker is talking about how the greatest danger of our time is the snail. According to her, we think we're solving all our problems with food by breeding these giant snails for meat, but they completely take over ecosystems and destroy all other aquatic life. I have a feeling of correctness about what she's saying.

But I think back to when I was at the pond. I had the same feeling about what they were doing too. And the current warning here at church doesn't make me think the owner of the pond was doing anything bad. They were doing what they had to to survive. But both can be true at the same time: the pond owner needed the meat, and the snails take over aquatic ecosystems. 

INTERPRETATIONS

The first dream is a metaphor for how I feel like I can't afford to live the life I would prefer to live: staying at home cooking and entertaining guests. Wearing my cute little outfits. But instead, I have to prepare for battle with a ruthless world. And I know good people with struggles of their own will try to help me, but the lifestyle will kill me anyway. 

(I'm sure that this metaphor is an exaggeration of my fears.)

In the second dream, it seems to me like that's just the scenario we're constantly finding ourselves in as we navigate social media and even traditional, legacy media like newspapers. One group of people tries to profit off of the message that there's an awesome new technology and it has the power to revolutionize all of our lives. Another group tries to profit off the the message that we must beware this new technology that "they" are all trying to get us to adopt, because there are consequences that "they" aren't talking about. 

Well, isn't the truth almost always somewhere in the middle? We adopt new technology like new medication because we had a problem that needed solving, but there are usually risks, side effects and possible unforeseen consequences. 

There are too many algorithms that reward hyperbolic, grandiose stories instead of thorough, neutral, accurate teaching.

The stern, Halloween photoshoot. (dream)

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DREAM

I'm looking in a thrift store window at some used clothing on mannequins. Some of the clothing is a little too fancy for me, but then I see a Christmas sweater with a kitten on it and it looks comfortable and cozy and it's in good condition and I love it. So I head to the store. 

I go inside the store, and it's a huge warehouse full of racks of clothing. I look through the racks. Some of this stuff looks too big, but then I move to a different size section and see some jeans that look like they're exactly the right size for me. The design is a little bold and quirky. There's a big, black blob sewn onto one side, and there are tears in the legs. But I think they won't look bad on me at my current size. 

If I were larger, my insecurity about being big would just combine with insecurity about the unconventional style and those insecurities would build on top of each other and amplify each other, like matching frequencies on a negative wave. 

I'm with a group of newer friends, but I feel comfortable hanging out with them all day. We dress in Halloween clothing like witches' hats, capes, bat and cobweb prints, and black and orange. We go out to eat in LA, then we decide that we want to do a photoshoot with a friend of one of the group leaders. We're running around on the street, having fun. We have fun in the car. I see our car trip being expressed as a toy 3D model. Then we arrive at the photographer's house. It's decorated for Halloween. 

I watch a friend twist her head sideways against a pot of witch's brew. The photographer points his digital SLR at her and sternly tells her to keep her head upright with her chin held low. I'm surprised that he's being that severe with us. We're just doing this for fun. I don't think there's any money being exchanged between the two of our parties. 

I watch his assistant put a purple pie on a Halloween poster on the floor, and I'm surprised she's giving us such a nice, professional experience when I, for one, haven't given her any money. 

INTERPRETATION

This dream is a combination of three experiences I've had. 

My clothes are getting too big and baggy. I reached my arms up to change the sugar water in my hummingbird feeder, and my pants and my underwear both fell down. I ordered some new clothes online and when I received them, they were all way, way too big. So I shipped those back and went to Walmart where I could use the dressing room. I picked up some jeggings and a flannel shirt that  actually fit me. 

Then I had an experience once with a professional cinematographer who was very stern with me. 

And I'm currently having an experience with a new friend group that I like hanging out with, and we do what feels like a lot together in spite of no money being exchanged for participation in this sort of club. I feel lucky because I mean... they have to charge something eventually!

Going dip net fishing in the back yard. (dream)

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DREAM

There's a very artistically-tasteful circus being run on a huge, modern stage by a single mom. Her sons assist (with slightly negative, slightly surly attitudes). But what the circus does is showcase the most beautiful woman in the world. 

The most beautiful woman is very fit, but not overly muscular. She poses on stage in a handstand, demonstrating her strength. She reminds me of Penelope Cruz in terms of the way she looks. 

The single mother is capable of doing exactly the same handstand. And she is just as beautiful and has the same level of fitness. Realistically, she could just as easily be showcased as the most beautiful woman in the world, but she's not. And she's angry and jealous about that while also understanding that it's the other woman that pulls in a crowd and puts dinner on all their tables. So she holds it all in. 

She devises a plan to blow off some steam. She thinks about creating a dip net fishing stream in the back yard. As she wrestles with various ideas, they come to pass. She imagines a deep stream in the yard space between the houses where the rain drips off the roof. She imagines a body of water so large that it's as tall as the ceilings, and we can't see out the windows anymore except to see fish swimming by. She buys a dip net that has a plastic cover over the top--to really seal in those fish. 

A girl who competed on a modeling TV show comes in through the window in hip waders. I wonder if I should buy hip waders when I wake up. The model listens to the jealous mom blow off some steam then says, "I'm going to go now, so I don't stink up the house!" 

I marvel at this sentence, because she dragged a bunch of mud in the house. Does the mud stink? She just seemed to want to leave.

INTERPRETATION

There have been times in my life when I've thought, "Why not me? Why didn't I get selected? Why don't I get a chance to test out what I can really do? Why am I not going far when they are?" This is like the jealousy and anger of the woman who doesn't get to perform on stage in the circus. And I think I compensate for this by... just cruising along, working on projects to amuse and distract myself (the creation of the dip net fishing in the yard). I think I can sense that other people are a little off-put by the negative energy of this kind of jealous mindset (the girl, who is a peer... a model... doesn't want to listen and leaves).

I have more than one opportunity in my real life that brings up these types of feelings right now. I could get my chance to perform and do just as well as the next person, or I could drop the ball. I'm not as confident about my skills in comparison to others in real life. There's often a very good reason why I'm not picked in reality. 

PewDiePie takes care of my cat (and loses him). (dream)

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DREAM

I go across town with my mother. We're traveling together in a strange land. It looks like British Columbia. There are lots of quaint local restaurants, and it's a small to medium-sized town. 

Then I'm on my own. I wind up spending the night at a suburb with a lot of condos with PewDiePie as my neighbor. I go over to his house. He lives in a large house with about four or five other guys. He's about 23 and utterly charming. And very impulsive. Everything he does seems so unpremeditated and and wild. I leave my cat in his care. I have very conflicted feelings about this decision. He seems really trustworthy while also seeming like he just does the first thing that pops into his head.

He drives off (very, very slowly) in a jeep with his friends, and immediately loses the cat. The cat jumps out of the vehicle. PewDiePie doesn't go back for the cat, but the cat voluntarily makes his way back to him. PewDiePie has got some kind of magic to him such that nothing bad happens to him no matter what he does (or doesn't do).

INTERPRETATION

I've been considering trying to make videos for YouTube again. I've tried making book reviews before, and I've also tried making math and physics videos. I recently picked up three ebooks about social media crafting for $0.49-$0.99 each. I've been learning some interesting stuff. 

The Guide to Going Viral by Brendan Kane emphasizes that it's the "effect on viewer" that's one of the most important metrics to evaluate when considering what factors made a video perform better than other videos. What emotion did you intend for the viewer to experience? This is very different from what I've learned in a college about making legacy forms of artistic expression. It doesn't conflict with what I learned, but it just wasn't a part of what I was taught. 

What I learned in theatre classes lets me know why PewDiePie was successful. He's completely in the moment. He's running completely on impulse without going up into his head in his videos. It feels completely natural to watch. It's like we're just watching someone without an agenda in the privacy of their own world. Impulsivity isn't exactly a great trait in real life though. We associate that with reckless choices and irresponsibility (losing the cat). But PewDiePie is more than just unpremeditated on camera. He has a good sense of agreeableness and what is going to be tolerated by a crowd and what isn't. I think that's the sense of magic protection in the dream.

Personally, my favorite videos are by the creators who are fun to watch because they react really impulsively without thinking. I enjoy feeling like I'm playing video games with my best friends and we're having the time of our lives. (I mentioned my penchant for let's plays to a creative writing professor and she asked if they make me feel less lonely. I do think so.) I think that the book I'm reading by Brendan Kane is more about creating videos like Mr. Beast's or Veritasium's, where the effect on the viewer is highly calculated. And that tactic is extremely successful, even though it's not my first preference as a viewer.

So I think this dream is just me trying to process some of the new information I'm getting about why some people get numbers while doing YouTube and some don't. I do think it's more than luck, but I'm not sure everyone has what it takes. (And by "everyone" having what it takes, I mean me.)

Audacious customer asks for a 90% discount... maybe. (dream)

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DREAM

I'm trying to shoot a short film. This is for love. It's not for an assignment. Somehow, I rope a family I don't really know into playing the parts. They're confused about what's happening though. I haven't really sold my project to them, and it's visible in how aimless they feel about playing their parts. There's no drive or ambition. But they do surprisingly well anyway, and I'm thankful to them. I even feel like they're my new friends now. 

Years later, one of the girls in the family finds a job at a pet store. I go into the store and prepare to ask her and her family for another favor. 

I hear the phone ring. The phone is a very old-fashioned landline. It looks like something from the 1940s. I pick up. The person on the other end wants to purchase something for like... around $40. I don't know exactly what she said she wants to buy though, so I just write down my understanding of what she said on a sticky note. I take the message to the manager, who is wrestling an octopus away from a squid in one of the aquariums. The octopus is the aggressor. It looks like it wants to kill and eat the squid. They're about the same size. I note that the octopus is a pinkish color and say, "Oh! I wonder if the person on the phone wanted to buy the octopus!" 

I look up the price of the octopus in the store's price list, and it's something around $200-$400. I cringe. It's yet another unlikable customer trying to garage sale their way through life. Such a lowball offer that would be! Then I see a small box with 6-packs of pink sparkling water and wonder if I've misjudged the situation, and the drinks are what the customer was actually asking for.

The manager gets the octopus untangled from the squid, and puts it on the counter. Then she puts it in a separate aquarium. 

I try to persuade the girl and call her family members on the phone to do another film with me. They are, once again, very neutral. But they seem to feel well enough towards me to indicate that they'd feel good about doing it again. It's a huge relief.

INTERPRETATION

I think this dream deals with rather subtle emotions arising out of situations that I am still not comfortable with even 20 years later. Everyone in the dream was confused. These are emotions that can confuse and stun me and the people I partner with. 

These are the situations the dream simulated:

1) Being the one and only leader of a team for an independent project, like a film crew. In the dream, I was very anxious for everyone to like me. I was also pretty aimless. I have been a manager and a group project leader many times before, but I had the backing of the organization (and I had accountability to the organization). And the desperation to be liked always simmers beneath the surface. The fear of being unable to depend on anyone else to back me up or bounce ideas off of has never left me. 

2) Being the one to have to approach people for partnerships. When I was a child, I loved roping other kids into playing my "let's pretend" type of games. I don't know what happened as an adult. Now, it's scary. I think I've had several bad collaborations since growing older and trying to get more serious about artistic and business projects. That's put some anxiety into me about partnering with others as an adult. 

3) Selling things to people. I absolutely hate when people try to argue with me about pricing to get a discount. There's a type of person who will sell their likability and trustworthiness to argue for a ten percent discount on a $20 meal, and I just find it appalling. 

Those are the main uncomfortable feelings from this dream, but there are a lot of other uncomfortable feelings I haven't resolved in the dream. Talking to someone on the phone and not hearing or understanding what they have to say. Passing along an incorrect message. Getting an order incorrect. The girl in the pet store was someone I asked in real life to stay in contact after our class ended, and she declined. Even sparkling water tastes just a little bit uncomfortable. 

Gen Alpha tears down the existing structure. (dream)

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DREAM

I'm with a friend who's an elementary school teacher. He's sick of what he's been seeing in the world. So he goes into the bowels of the school--narrow passage ways, to protest. I join him. 

After winding through the black curtains and narrow halls, I emerge at a desk that's still in the bowels of the school. A former child is with me. He's a young man now. His education was stunted because of all the political upheaval surrounding undocumented immigrants. So he has to start his education now that a lot of time has been lost. I feel bad for him, and I also think that it's such a waste of potential. How much further along in life would he be if he could've just concentrated on educating himself when he was younger? I start a new round of my education now as well. We write in pencil on black paper. Someone comes to take the papers.

Then I get up to try to find my friend further in the bowels. I hadn't meant to come this far or for so long. For me, this was supposed to be temporary. I'm going to tell my friend that I'm leaving soon. I can't find him, so I follow some other people who are disenfranchised with the system. Suddenly, we're outdoors in a crowd with a ton of Gen Alphas. They're going to tear down a balcony where someone is being oppressed. 

They find the balcony and tear it down with their bare hands. A mother says angrily, "What did you kids do?! When I buy you a house, Ashley..." She says it in warning tones. The kids don't care at all. Their work is done, and they go back to school. A parent in the crowd--a woman who looks like she's from the 1980s says. "I'm a sigma!" Over and over again. "Don't mess with me. I'm a sigma." But she's very sad when she makes this declaration. 

Then, I'm back in the narrow passageway of the school. I could get caught at any time, and being here makes me feel nervous. I decide to take a left turn. It takes me into a pitch black area. Finally, it opens into the music concert stage. Orchestral music plays. I see the head of the music department. I walk, trying to blend in. Trying to hide. My friend is taking the opposite tactic. He's smiling at the head of the music department like he's just seen a celebrity. He wants to be seen and acknowledged, so he can notify her of his protest, but I don't trust that going through her will help anything.

INTERPRETATION

I don't usually like to get political, but this is kind of a political dream. I am very concerned with what I see in my corner of the world (the United States). The "Big, Beautiful Bill" just passed, and I've looked at comments from both the left and the right. I lean left, but I'm willing to listen. Frankly, I do not believe that this is a measure that's going to benefit everyone who works a job--as if that would excuse wishing ill for people who are too sick or elderly to work a job. And I don't believe there's this massive group of people who could work a job, but would rather play video games all day, so they pretend to need disability and live this comfortable, easy life. 1) You're not going to live comfortably on disability. It might not even pay the rent. 2) That's just not human nature. People aren't built to want to do nothing. If you're young and able bodied, yet sit around playing video games all day and don't have some sense of purpose in your day to day life, you probably do have depression or some kind of mental illness.  

Also, people have a bias towards thinking they work harder than average when that's not what objective measures show. 

Also, I don't know if you've noticed, but there just isn't as big of a need for workers as there used to be even when I was young. And advancements in AI will probably only exaggerate this more and more. A lot of Gen Z and new graduates can't even get a foot in the door to entry level jobs. That's one way I can see an able bodied/sound minded person giving up and playing video games all day: if it just becomes very obvious that they're not going to get anywhere no matter what they do to try to break in to the workforce. We're not doing anything to address this issue with our policies, and it's starting to disturb me.

Ultimately, I think this is a bill that makes life even more difficult for people who were barely hanging on. There is no spiritual justification for allowing this to happen. I don't think that the goodness of God shouldn't work through the government, and should only work through the Christian church. I think the loving nature of the universe can and should express itself through the everyday actions we all take, including what we do collectively as a group. 

I have chronic illness myself, and I depend on a lot of societal support to get by. Trust me, just on a practical level, you do not want a bunch of homeless schizophrenics who cannot get access to their medication or therapists running around. You should want them to sit at home writing silly short stories, cleaning the toilet, and learning new algorithms in Python. It's quite a step up from running around on the streets in a panic accusing random people of doing horrible things to me (which, I'm very sorry to say, was exactly what I was doing before I got help).

In the dream, I'm reeducating myself. I think that because of the way I was raised (and also due to the fact that education is expensive here and there was no health insurance for waitresses when I was young), I wasn't given a good head start in life. It impacts me even into middle age. I can only imagine how much worse it would be for someone whose parents have been detained by ICE and sent to prison in another country. 

I just wonder when some of these barriers to all people having a good quality of life are going to be taken down. Because I don't see a lot of technical reasons for these barriers. I mainly see a beliefs and opinions reason for these barriers. 

I listen to an astrologer on YouTube who goes by Astrolada. I can't remember which of her videos I saw this in, but I remember watching a video in which she thought that Gen Alpha is going to be the generation to fix this mess we've gotten ourselves into in which our core social systems are basically sociopathic. In the dream, the mob of Gen Alpha operates based on humanitarianism. And they don't care what the older generations have to say about it. Something about the Age of Aquarius. 

That would be nice. I am very skeptical of horoscopes while loving to listen to them at the same time though. I listen to them because they're often so optimistic that I wish they were true. It makes me hope that something good is around the corner. So even if they're not true, they motivate me to keep working on my hopes and dreams--even though I so rarely see any kind of payoff. My horoscopes are extremely optimistic this month. So we'll see.

Frustrating.