joeseph

fun dreams last night... it's like they were coming in and out of focus, fractals coming together when i put more attention in. it's like you gotta WANT them dream, and then a cognizant narrative will materialize (or you will materialize inside of it).

two of them stand out as important. i was at a beach resort, and i had met this girl. the conversation was going well, as i was sitting across from her at a table, and i realized it was time to ask her name. "Allison." (or another A name... i remember later on I forgot what it was with 100% certainty, but I re-labeled her Allison.) We were at a beach, her on the sand and me in the water. There was a pretty steep embankment, and the waves were big. I felt riptide currents pulling at me from underneath the water, grabbing at my ankles. But I carried on the conversation. The water is cold. Always cold.

It pulled me out at one point, but I remembered to swim to the side, and not against it. I got back to where she was waiting pretty easily, never out of eyesight, and I climbed back up onto the wet sand after a couple of tries. This has been a really common image for me, climbing up a sandy hill where I can't get any purchase. It used to be on climbing holds, which would crumble away because they were too sandy. Anyways, I made it back up. I was so happy to be WARM. "Let's just lie in the sun." She lies down close to me, touching. I'm so happy to just relax. The ocean is cool too, but it's dangerous. Relax. You are comfortable, you are the man that they want. Relax. It was almost like a dropping of pretensions; I didn't have to try to come off as brave. Our whole sides are touching. I try to grab her butt... she laughs and brushes me away. Oh well.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT WAS THAT AN ALLIGATOR?!? An enormous alligator rushes past us and flies into the ocean. We see him bobbing up and down in the surf. Jesus, he must be 12 feet long. A swimming tank. As we turn around another one comes out of the swamp behind us. He almost BITES me, but then goes into the water. Here's another one... He's smaller, and I GRAB his head before he can bite my hands. It's hard to hold his jaws shut (despite what they tell you in the nature shows); it still takes a lot of grip strength. I go back and show the people running the resort. What's the idea with THIS? "I almost got BITTEN by one of these things, it must've been 14 feet long!!" Soon, I am only holding his head. He has shrunk and shrunk. His tail fell off, like a lizard's when they get caught by a bird. Soon, it's just his neck and his head. The last part behind his neck detaches, and he's dead. We're going to eat him--it looks like fish, like the trout I cooked last night (IRL). I look at the bone structure and the flesh. Very interesting. Smells fishy, too. After I'm sure that the head won't move--it looks like one of those trophies you see put on the wall in creepy voodoo houses in New Orleans--I discard it.

Later I'm in a car, going up what seems to be East Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz. I point this out... These settings don't really mesh. Pretty cool that I knew it was changing, that's a good sign for lucidity. I want to go and meet back up with the girl, but we're getting farther and farther away. We come down the hill on the other side into a city. William is in the car. What the fuck man? I grab the wheel and crash the car in a fit of laughter. I don't give a fuck about this car ride! This ain't real! i get out and start to explore the city. One main priority is finding a place to shit. (Maybe I'll just take this as a sign and try to wake up and fart every time this happens from now on.) Walking around, different shops, different clothes. Some of them are cool, others not. There are some that are really sexy (and I could be getting this image mixed up from another dream I had later in the night), but I pull them off the rack and they're the same brand that I have already, or there's a color scheme that I don't like where only the sleeves are that nice color, and the rest is white. No dice.

I go back into a cafe kind of thing, it's a walk-through shop. The space is limited so they've made it like a museum. The bathrooms are at the end. There's no stall, only a toilet at the end. Oh well, I don't really care. I can do my business here I guess. I wake up.


The dream earlier in the night is going to be harder to reconstruct. (I hope I haven't jinxed myself with that statement.) In the future I'll probably go in the opposite order, since the more recent dreams tend to come back more easily. I remembered the title: "hot air balloons." That's a trick I use to remember a dream--I'll give it a title after dreaming it (sometime during the night), and the connotations are usually enough to help and bring it back. It was me and my sister. We started off in the clothes store, and we walked outside onto the roof. We were going on a great adventure. Our socks were full of prickles, and we had to take them all out. It came from stepping on the grass. Once on the roof I believe we took a ride in a hot air balloon; a distinct image of falling, falling, and opening up the chute (the balloon catching the air) once we were down low. It was barely enough time. Later the same thing happened, the same trip up, the same fall. Except this time the balloon didn't open up. We hit the floor. That's when we came to, dazed and sober on the roof. We took the prickles out of our socks. We had been hiding from somebody, we had a small object, like a ball of power that enabled us to live this lifestyle. Maybe it was just money we had borrowed from somebody. We were in an attic kind of place, and had been living there for a while. We had to give the money back. I found a one dollar bill and a five dollar bill. I gave the one dollar bill back, and kept the five jokingly. Then me and the person whose roof it was switched back, then he gave me the five and let me keep it. Swell. A cityscape underneath us. The narrative is gone; it's just a jumble of images.

Lots of waiting. Another dream: I am rooming with Emilio. Like it's the last year of college, again. But I've got somewhere else to go. I'm alternately sleepy or waking up. We want to play videogames, street fighter, but it's late. I'm moving on, man. I'm not trying to stay up late until 2am every night like I used to. Wandering around. It's either the twilight in the morning time or late at night, alternately. I've got somewhere else to go. My soul isn't here. But I check my phone, right as i'm leaving, and I'm disappointed, because he sent me a text: "Every time I need some reliable quiet energy, I can count on Joe "

HMMM.


I definitely feel like I'm at a turning point. I've been thinking a lot about the unconscious mind and understanding it, aligning it, since watching a hypnosis video the other day. Meditating on it, alternating between higher consciousness and the steamy subconscious underneath, letting it out with the out-breath and cooling it with the colder, crisp external world during the in-breath. There are things I'm gonna have to drop, obviously. Situations I will have to take myself out of because they aren't me anymore. That's the message of that in-between dorm dream, which is clear enough.

As for the alligators?? I have no idea what they mean. The ocean is clear enough--quit frontin'. To have one conversation on the surface level, with my head above the water, and then have different forces pulling at me from underneath--forces which I'm scared of and don't want to show to anybody else--that's a bad sign. Just get out of it. Get warm, get comfortable. Go for it and don't be sorry.

BUT THOSE ALLIGATORS THO