Comotopia

Back pain caught up to me throughout the week; a combination of sitting at a desk most of the day with negligent posture, and an accumulation of items in my man bag (books, sweater, hat, Chicago Readers) weighing down on my shoulder during my commuter trot. By Friday it was a distraction. So I distracted myself with a hot shower, lathered up my back with an herbal alternative to Icy Hot, and then sat in my lazy boy recliner with my massaging heat pad I got last Christmas. It put me in a trance. I kind of sat there all catatonic, with my mouth open, just looking at things, for possibly a couple of hours. 

I then decided to fill the void in my sedated brain with hours of videos on YouTube about conspiracies surrounding The Secret Space Program. I was kind of hoping when I'd drift off to sleep that I'd get to lucid dream explore old structures on the Moon left behind by the ancients. There's this one video on YouTube called Aliens Come From Hell that showed pretty convincing footage of an Apollo Space crew exploring some Moon ruins. Supposedly top secret leaked footage. My catatonic Friday energy suspended my disbelief for the evening and so I sauntered around outside for a few minutes hoping to look at the Moon in awe and think about that place haunted by aliens but it was cloudy. 

I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore and went to bed but I didn't have these trippy Moon dreams. I think I dreamed I was in a traveling theatre troupe stopping off in my mom's town of Lexington, MI and my dream's super-objective was getting my mom to cook some very heavy feast. And I think she did, which put me into a mini coma in the dream and I didn't remember any other dreams after that.

Prophetic Push Down the Train Tracks

Last night I had a dream that I dusted off the screenplay I wrote based on my book Whiskey Pike and decided to go make it. I rounded up some of my XIII Pocket actor friends, assembled a team, and went about scouting locations. Focusing on a dilapidated look, I trounced around old abandoned farms and train tracks. Once everything was ready to go, I went up on hill to think about my first establishing shot. I became interested in a weedy train yard and started down to check it out. To get there I had to cross what was once a metal platform, now more or less wobbly scraps. A train screamed by, rattling all of the connected platforms, including the one I stood on. It shook me like trampoline ready to tear in an earth quake. I lost my grip and was flung up, and up, my stomach felt the uneasy tickle...and then I woke up.


My demise there is symbolic of the process of making a movie. It fucks you up. But yet, that image and visceral belly gnarl has left me excited and craving the course of the bad things things that fall on your lap while making a feature length movie. Maybe I've played life too safe. Time to go down the path of most resistance? Crash and burn, but its possible the charred remains will be a memorable creation. And this reminds me how much a sense of destruction is integral to the process of creation. Looking around at nature; it's violent and angry, the far reach of space is icy cold. Pain is part of it all. If it weren't for meteors crashing into the crust and flinging lava around, the planet would not be what it is today. We might not be taking in breaths of fresh air.

Subtle Sway

I'm a product of my environment. I've watched plenty of TV and suffered through and enjoyed commercials of different varieties. When I was younger we used to tape movies off TV. Our old VHS of a taped Ghostbusters contains grainy nostalgic doses of old Pillsbury Doughboy commercials, Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chips, Pizza Hut ads spreading word about the Land Before Time puppet giveaways with meals. That tape has been worn to shit. A few years back I watched it and felt just at home with those old commercials as the classic movie itself. 


It had a dream like quality for me, and dreams are the best way to sway me on a product. If a brand can dunk itself far enough into my subconscious to bob as a staple in my dreamland, then I'm pretty close to convinced. 


A few weeks back I had a dream I was driving around back in my hometown of Auburn, ME. It was snowing. Through the blinding white hitting the windshield I hunted for sight of a Dunkin Donuts. In fact, this quest for a Dunkin Donuts; a hot cup of coffee and a few chocolate glazed donuts was the through-line of this REM adventure. When I awoke, I made a stop soon after to the donut destination. It convinced and stirred a hankering better than any commercial. But the dream's successful sway can give credit to the year's of accumulated memories revolving around late night visits to 24 hr Dunkin Donuts for warm cups, glazed indulgences, or something to do at an odd hour.  The experience stays and reinforces. 


A few dreams of KFC have fucked up my arteries in consequence.


The other night I had a dream of a different display of propaganda. Rahm Emmanuel put forth an initiative for Chicago's poor, and wealthy. In a gargantuan, vacant warehouse on the west side he "sought" to fight hunger and paucity by enlisting dozens of food vendors to donate to a pop up grocery store. He invited all of Chicago's residents to stop by over the course of the day, and one cart per household was welcome to fill up with foodstuffs, at the city's expense. Now, when one got to the warehouse to push their cart around for an easy one time break from hunting and gathering, they were also immersed in a pseudo museum showing historical photos from famous casinos, such happy faces playing games! Murals spanned walls with child like renditions of wonderful times at the slots! The initiative to slow hunger was also a campaign to get all the citizens excited about the potential Chicago casino coming our way. And what a perfect demographic to spike the hope of a lucky win; the lower class. And middle and upper class. 


All were invited to fill up their carts. 


All were invited to see the glory of the gamble.

Cake Frosting Tear Drops

I've been watching a lot of space documentaries lately. The Universe is in my Blockbuster queue. It's made me thing about how creative and destructive space is at the same time; black holes engulfing, stars ejecting fused elements, clouds condensing to become stars, meteors smashing bits of dust off of a m0on, which later becomes another planet's moon, etc. Indeed it has inspired me to incorporate a bit of destruction in my own writing process. In fact, the process of revising my novel is very destructive, stuff being chopped, sentences being bashed and rearranged. 


I started writing a new novel this week. I had been wanting to since the summer, an idea brewing since then. But I waited because the summer was busy, and then I moved. And then I thought I should wait until I have my current novel finalized. But really I need to spew down this new prose. My current novel is at a point where its feeling like a destructive process, as mentioned above. In a good way, maybe. But I felt the need to get this new idea in pen. I'm writing it all free hand, in a notebook. This excites me because computers are starting to remind me of business, and I start thinking of e-mails to follow up on, etc. I like the unplugged feeling of writing by hand. I like getting to a feverish point where my hand hurts. I also like the feeling of exploration that comes to me when jotting shit down with pen and paper. Which is what I feel like a first draft of a novel should be; an exploration, not a final product. When I did more acting, it used to frustrate me when directors treated rehearsal performances like it should be the final show. It's not. It's rehearsal. It should be about exploration. 


I feel like my revision process is a black hole right now. And my new writing project is the white hole.


I could go on and on about space. I almost had a mini panic attack in the bathroom at work this morning when I tried to think about what existed before the big bang. Certainly something other than a super dense primordial atom. Can something really be created from nothing? Which leads me to think that the big bang may be the off shooting matter from some other universe. No beginning? The ancient gets more ancient. The thought makes me dizzy. I had dreams last night that hinted at some absence of matter. Black space, small specks of things happening. My brain had no framework to compare it to reality other than a planetarium with a dim bulb. 


I also had a dream that I was at my high school reunion. I stepped in some cake frosting that had fallen to the floor and everyone pointed out that it looked like crusty cum had smeared on my shoe. It was humiliating. Cake frosting tear drops. I woke up depressed. Are such embarrassing events really that depressing in comparison with planets out there getting ripped apart by magnetars? It gives me hope that getting made fun is really actually a chill time. 

Rock Opera for the Digesting

Last night we went to a 2nd Thanksgiving dinner party thrown by my girlfriend's good group of friends. After a week of digesting turkey & an assortment of leftover carbs, we did it again. A good problem to have no doubt. Any food, an overwhelming amount of feast food, is a good food, nothing to complain about. I will say though my body has been "de-energized" since digging in a little over a week ago into the traditional foodstuffs. Some talk about the fact of tryptophan making us sleepy as only a myth, but some recent scientific studies talk on tryptophan being enhanced by the sheer amount of carbs in the typical Thanksgiving feast, thus making such a meal more coma inducing than a turkey sandwich at the local deli. Whatever the science may be, the sheer amount and variety of food items is certainly causing a load on the digestive tract. Particularly this variety. You have thick potatoes, green beans, french fried onions, turkey meat, gravy fat, stuffing, cranberry sauce, sugary pie, etc, all of which digest at different rates. And being eaten in conjunction with one another makes for a strange fight to sneak ahead of the acid line to be broken down at it's ideal speed. Yet the pie you ate at the end of the meal, breaks down quicker, due to the sugars, than the meat hunks ahead, so the sugar sits there for a bit, gets impatient. This big belly party exhausts the guts.


A colleague of mine once brought up the diet theory of eating all food groups separate from one another. So you eat your meats in one meal, wait a good couple of hours, then eat your pasta. Then a few hours later eat your fruit. This allows for an ease in digestive flow. And it makes sense. You don't want that fruit to rot while it waits behind the sirloin steak. I've yet to commit to such an eating standard. And clearly Thanksgiving breaks the rules of this diet. Though I'm thankful to be privileged enough to enjoy pounds of food and indigestion. Again, these are good problems to have. 


After the massive feast last night, I was quick to desire bed when we got home. I drifted into intense dreams derived from the images of outer space my girlfriend and I have been subjecting ourselves to in watching The History Channel's: The Universe in our Blockbuster queue. One of these dreams started out with swimming through space, hopping from asteroid to asteroid, until I swam from the depths of this black vacuum to crawl up the shores of some European country, looked perhaps a bit like Portugal. The outer space behind was indeed just some big black ocean waters. Once on the shore I stepped on a snail, and this I could feel in my dream, a vivid slime ooze between my toes. I wound up starting my own small business refurbishing apartments. During the course of one project I kept ordering food from a diner. The owner himself delivered the food and we developed a good friendship. After this project I decided I was going to swim back out into space, and so I went to say good bye to the diner owner. I stopped in at the diner and he laughed at me, telling me I couldn't go! He was retiring and liked my business sense and wanted me to take over! I resisted, but then he asked me to follow him into the kitchen. He led me through the kitchen, into another larger, seemingly unused kitchen. Gates made of jagged spikes closed off one section of it. He told me to wait to the side. He wanted to show me something special locked inside a secret tomb, but he had to go in and disarm the booby traps first. I watched him dodge swinging blades and dropping spikes to disappear through a sliding glass door, down a long dark tunnel. He was gone awhile. Then he returned, on fire, playing the electric guitar, singing! I wasn't sure if this was his doomed body from the detriment of a booby trap, or if this is what he wanted to show me. But the rest of this dream took on the feel of a rock opera. 

Tailored Pants

I dreamt last night that I was visiting my mom and her house, in this subconscious world, had two campers parked to the side against tall hedges. I explored them. They were dusty. Small animals skittered off, breaking windows as they went. She had a barn, high up in the rafters hung several canoes. I was very excited about these canoes. I rigged a pulley and climbed up to sit in one of them, just hanging. High up. From the rafters I made my way to a hatch, to the roof, and found myself joining up with a gaggle of young children playing tag on a series of slanted rooftops well into night fall. 


I then found myself in India, staying in an antiquated hotel. A friend talked me into getting tailored pants made in a small shop in the grand, ornate hotel lobby. At one point, the newly stitched pants were on me, and I lay on an ironing board while an East Indian gentleman ironed the fabric, the heat seeping through to my skin. But I was okay with this as I was sipping on legitimate Absinthe & puffing opium from a hookah. 

Liquid Dreamy

One could say I had a wet dream last night. Not the pervy kind, no. I was boarded up in a cabin with a wailing hurricane outside. Couldn't run to the outside, so I had to pee in a metal pale. Unfortunately it splashed up and out onto the floor and I had to do some serious cleaning. Luckily I actually didn't pee in my sleep. Which is wonderful. When I was young kid I would sometimes have a "bedtime issue" and wet the bed here and there up until 7 or 8 years old. I'm not usually forthcoming with such personal history, as it's certainly embarrassing. Around the age of 7 my parents tried out a "wet alarm" in my bedding to alert me to any liquid setting it off. I would usually sleep through it. Which was most likely the problem. I was such a heavy sleeper in my younger days that my body wouldn't awake when it had to pee. The shame I would feel from this eventually turned me into a light sleeper, and ever since those early days my body isn't shy about pulling me from my slumber when piss calls. Yet every now and then I can feel myself peeing in my dreams, and I freak for a moment when I awake later and remember such a dream fragment. I feel around the bed spreading for any dampness yet am relieved at the dry touch. And I find this strange. Doesn't urban legend say that if you pee in your sleep it tells your mind to pee in reality? I ain't complaining. I'm okay with peeing in my dream world as long as this physical disconnect is maintained. 

There was such a weird shame that I totally forgot about until I pondered this now. I can recall a sleep-over at friend's where I wound up wetting my sleeping bag. The next morning his dad took it upon himself to roll up my sleeping bag and he called me out on the fact that it was wet. I clammed up. He must have sensed but covered up any accusations of pissing and asked me if I had spilled anything. I said I got up for a glass of water and bumped it later in the night. One time my brother's friend Mike was in my bedroom and curiosity poked him to peel the masking tape I had over the label of my "wet alarm" to cover up what it was to any visitors. So it could appear as some weird alarm clock without time reading on it. He asked me what was up with this wet alarm. I told him it was in place because I had a spilling problem with knocking water onto my bed and it was to alert me when I did this. Ha! Spilling problem. What bullshit I had spouted. Turns out later in high school I did have a spilling problem for a short time and spilled beverages by pure accident on friends 3 times within a week. Turns out I don't have very good control over my body. 

My most embarrassing moment of bed wetting was playing house with a neighbor girl and we crawled into my bed together to play husband and wife at nighttime. I had forgot to tell my mom about my little bladder mishap, so we hadn't changed the sheets yet, and it was very wet. This neighbor girl was grossed out and asked, more less shrieked, why was it so wet! I told her I sweated a lot the night before. I think I got away with that cover up. This was after all in the thick of summer. 


For shame, for shame. I remember feeling such shame at this and tried confessing to a friend through a joke about wetting the bed. He took it as a joke, and joked further, making me feel even more fearful of coming clean and clarifying the truth behind the joke. 


The good news is I haven't wet the bed in 20 some years. And because of this I feel okay mentioning in a blog about this little soggy past of mine. I'm sure the suppressed embarrassment has affected my confidence in subconscious ways. It is time I come forth and acknowledge this dirty gem of personal history, let go of it, laugh it off, and grow up/gear up from the coming of my 30s in 2013. 

Self Centered Sweat-shine

Last night I dreamt that I was in High School. I was trying to be a big shot on the baseball team. I had a handicapped friend with severe cerebral palsy whom I was responsible for helping get around the school. In order to go to the baseball tryout I had to leave my handicapped friend in the locker room all by himself. I had to put him in a closet room to make space. I came back after the tryouts to find him missing. After panicking, the coach startled me as he emerged from a side closet within the closet. He reamed me for leaving my friend abandoned. He assured me that he was in a safe place, but he desired to teach me a lesson and that I needed to reach new moral grounds before he would have me a star on his team.

I awoke drenched in sweat despite the AC on full blast.

This morning on the bus an old lady got on, swiped her card. It flashed an insufficient value and the bus driver tried calling her back. The old lady waddled to her seat. The driver called over that she still owed a dollar on her fare. The old lady didn't hear. Finally the driver got the old lady's attention and she rose to swipe her card again only to be badgered by the bus driver. I searched my wallet for bills to help her out of this demeaning situation but had no bills. A lady sitting near the old lady retrieved a wallet to help the old lady but the bus driver told her not to because the old lady just didn't want to pay and didn't deserve the help. The old lady wound up riding without being forced to pay the dollar but certainly had to persevere death glances from the driver. I felt the bus driver's attitude unnecessary but didn't have the guts myself to tell her to knock it off.

Snot Seizure

This week I've been fighting a harsh summer cold. I caught the common cold. I flew back into Chicago from Minnesota after a trip to visit family, and I suspect the combination of recycled air on the flight with the delayed flight, putting me back in town very late and little sleep before the next prior workday, is what did me in. It got progressively worse throughout the week with long work days and several live Wood Sugars shows late into the night. It crescendo-ed Friday morning when I lost my voice completely. I took a sick day for the first time in a long, long time. Last night I took some NyQuil for a deep sleep. At one point I awoke to use the bathroom and could barely muster the coordination to get out of bed. It was as though the sleep paralysis feature of REM sleep hadn't worn off yet. Discombobulated I stepped out of bed and walked with jarred steps like a seizure gripped me. I reached for my water glass on my bed stand and pulled it to my lips. I didn't time it right. I turned it down much before my lips hit and rushed water down my chest and legs and on the floor and my feet slipped a little bit walking over the spill. I continued to walk like a cripple to the bathroom and peed sitting down to minimize more messes in this state.

I had a vivid dream in which I was training for an ice skating competition but was practicing upon the wood tiles of a basketball court. And I skated boarded home in a dream but in a similar discombobulated, nonfunctional, spasmodic, non-coordinated struggle as my journey to the bathroom.

Hysteria on the Hill

I had this one dream image stick with me this morning. A big kid stood clutching a bicycle screaming at the top of his lungs on the top of a hill. He proclaimed he wanted to be like his daddy. A crowd gathered around. A little kid poked his head through some people and realized it was his bike! The big kid up there had stolen his bike. But the big kid was wailing and screeching, a fine hysteria. No one attempted to correct the injustice. No one was quite sure what would happen next, the hysteria continued. Would the kid ride the bike down the hill and off and away? He continued to proclaim his need to be like his dad. A rumor, or a fact circulated through the crowd that the big kid's father was currently serving time for Grand Theft Auto.

The hysteria continued. People got bored. I snuck up around the back of the hill to try to talk some sense into him. He rode off when I gently touched his shoulder.

Tube Image

Sometimes I'm a sucker for those self help deep relaxation tapes. Cheesy as it may be, I have a tape that really does the trick for me after long day, and especially if my mind is still active when I crawl into bed. So I was listening to it last night and it got me to a good point where I was slightly hallucinating behind my eye lids, which I enjoy, and a good relaxation listen will do this for me. I started to see myself from a third person omniscient, cartoon-like! I was wearing some colourful, frilly, Beatles-esque band uniform. My hair was parted a bit like the flat top character from Dick Tracy. So the cartoon me jumped into a big tube from a platform high in the sky. The tube networked with other tubes, and down I slid like a wacky water park rider. Yet I got deep into this network and the tube took me not to an opening at the end where I'd slide back out to fresh air, but to a dead end where my feet stopped me with a thud.

A tingle of claustrophobia. To shimmy back up the long, long, long tube was to be my escape.

I said to "hell with that." I took a deep breath, and exhaled away the cartoon imagery, and rolled over to welcome restful slumber.

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Sometimes I get ideas or images in my head that I feel compelled to write down, and if for whatever reason I'm not able to write it down right away, and I wind up forgetting it, I get really frustrated and upset with myself. I had a realization late last night, a sort of zen to put myself at peace for the fizzling of a "gem" idea. I began to look at the formation of ideas not only from a materialistic, put em down onto paper approach...but the experience of the idea is just as important, and that if it doesn't stick as hoped, well, it was probably a little wave.

Gunned Down! Bang Dream!

Last night I dreamt that I was on my way from swimming at a strange overheated, overcrowded local pool house. A black SUV drove by a house and fired away! Just ahead of me. Some folks ducked for cover. A woman emerged from a garage bleeding from the head, a bullet nicked her temple. The SUV came around again for another round of shooting. I made the mistake of giving these punks the bird. They started firing away at me! I ran and ducked for cover underneath a pile of leaves in a backyard, but they drove around to the street on the other side which exposed me and they fired at me as I darted away again to hide in a trash can. I got some bullets to the back.

This morning as I was getting ready for the day, groggy as hell because the vivid dream, or nightmare, must have sapped a lot of adrenaline (I'm certain the brain still fires synapses to gear up the adrenal glands while in deep REM sleep), I thought a little bit about these jerks who gunned me down in my subconscious. I thought about if this were to happen in real life...if I was in a moment of "there's no way out of this" I'd be sure to get a good look at their faces. So I would know who to come back and haunt like crazy. Like throw plates at their head and pull their hair and push them while they're using the bathroom. Retribution can be a bitch. I'd be a petty ghost I think.

Lake House by the Shoddy Seaport

I dreamt the other night that my girlfriend and I were at a point we were looking to raise a family, and so, we were looking at houses. I looked at one incredible gem of property set on a lake. Three stories plus a basement, which was part underground, part ground level due to an incline. There was a little bar/cafe on the ground level section which we could either utilize for our own pleasure or rent out to another business, although the owner of the property looking to lease it forewarned that no business would stick there so might as well enjoy it for our own. His asking price was $1899 a month! A steal for this, dare I say it again, gem of property, right on the waterfront with a dock and boat ramp! The owner, a middle aged bespectacled man with thinning grey hair warned me of "the haunt." This he mumbled, and when I asked him to clarify he cleared his throat and said "a demon." Which wasn't too surprising because now my dream had shifted the surrounding neighbor to an abandoned seaport.

We leased the property anyway and had one hell of an adventure trying to calm down a boy's demonic spirit throwing a temper tantrum. A phantom roller coaster erected itself as a vapor around our property. We had to chase his apparition around its twists and turns.

Kentucky Derby for Beer Bucks

Last night I dreamt I was at work. Making sales from a large office set up like stadium seating, an exaggerated lecture hall configuration. The whole thing flowed like a bizarre game. Make a sale, pop a crumbled piece of paper into a basket at the front of the room. Make it in there. Then wiggle out from the seat and slide down to the next row via a dry slip and slide aisle. This continued until finally one made it out of the front row, towards the door, and on our way home. Pretty symbolic of life, of careers if you ask me. I continued to wiggle on my belly along the median of Lake Shore Drive on a slimy slip and slide all of the way home, while shifting slivers of paper out from my pockets, leaving them behind to the drift of cars to my sides.

Yesterday was the Kentucky Derby! I'm not usually intense about sports but Animal Kingdom's sprint to the finish stirred my blood. It was a neat turn of events for that team of horse, jockey, trainer, owner. I thought about my Dad quite a bit yesterday (he passed away from a battle with cancer in 2002). He had fervently made his way to the Kentucky Derby for many (30 some?) years to partake in the debauchery of the infield. He began his venture there in his early college days by hitchhiking down there, clothes in a brown grocery bag. I've often heard stories from him while listening to ball games on the radio during a hot summer night's ride in the car, and recently my Mother found a folder of his writings - memoirs of his experiences at the Derby. These are quite educational. My coworker Andrew actually went to the Derby this weekend. I've been meaning to make my way down there one of these days, carry on my father's tradition. Maybe next year I'll finally do it. Andrew offered to place a bet for me. I passed on the offer as I'm not necessarily in the financial position to be betting on horses.

But the urge did come to me. When I was 8 at we lived in Pittsburgh my Dad would often take us to a "Downs" outside the city and place bets for us. This was something I got quite into, and overly passionate about. When my horse did not do well, I'd be in angry tears. I liked winning some dollars and the fast paced announcement of the hard trotting positions. So this weekend I devised a betting system with my girlfriend. We'd each write down our picks for places 1, 2, 3. We'd compare our first place picks with the final results, whoever finished best, got 3 points. We'd do the same for our second place picks for 2 points. And the same for third for 1 point. Whoever had the most points got to drag the other to Binny's and choose up to $20 of liquor. Despite my best pick placing 8th (Stay Thirsty, I picked in homage to my hero, the Most Interesting Man in the World) I won! So next weekend I will be redeeming for some tasty craft beers. Or maybe some Mint Juleps to keep the taste in my mouth.

The Float Down

Last night I had many vivid dreams, yet the one that stuck out the most involved a climb into outer space. My memory of this dream segment began with me floating down from an orbiting space craft, through the deep blue atmosphere, diving slowly, downward, immune to the normal scorch of objects screaming down toward earth. My space friend, also wrapped in thick space garb floated down with me, impenetrable, keeping me company, to see me down safely. Both of us still tethered to space craft.

Once upon the ground, he coiled back upward, wishing me luck.

I entered into an old battered building, looking to be an old factory, although quite tall, possibly 80 stories. I made my way up through the deteriorating floors, through stairways and winding lofts, still dragging behind me the long long tether. People entered the building and watched and cheered me on.

Eventually I made my way to a small house built upon a sprawling floor on the top story. Old rocking chairs and junk were piled on top of its flat roof leading up to a hatch that opened up to the blue sky. I climbed this treacherous pile, balancing wonderfully. People still cheered. I made my way up to hatch, opened it, and waded with my arms back up to the sky, slowly, gracefully, as through water. The tether continued to trail me.

I came to the brink of the Earth's atmosphere, into outer space. The space craft trickled by. A new tether was lowered to me. I hooked onto it, released the old. It fell back to the Earth like a quick swift dart. I trailed behind the space craft in a soothing free float.

What was most interesting to me about this dream as I reflected on it when I got up at 4am to pee was how real it felt, and looked. Perhaps much more vivid than the lens through which I have been seeing everyday life as of late. And the feeling of weightlessness, how weird. What an overwhelmingly cool feeling. I never felt anything remotely close to that, not even floating around in a calm pool.

Perhaps far fetched, but I do wonder if while we dream, we visit other planes of existence, the spirit realm. I have been reading a book lately about ancient fermentation in research of the pre-industrial brewing methods to add more layers to my Whiskey Pike feature length screenplay. I find it very interesting how mindful ancient tribes were of the spirit world, in plants and even in inanimate objects. Nowadays with our pre-occupation with materialism and dismissal of the "gods" in things, life kind of takes on a bland coating. Things are just objects. Plants are just there, making oxygen for us. Studies show that talking to plants aid in their growth. Science can explain it as the exchange of carbon dioxide. But what if plants, like people, needed attention, for emotional growth which bleeds into physical growth? We really have no relationship with plants. We eat them. We breath them. We take them for granted. There seems to be a magical thinking in the days of ancient yore. I can't help but think how finely tuned their imaginations must have been in seeing a god in a flower or a bug. Our imaginations seem to be growing stale, atrophying a bit. We trade books for screens, less exercise for the imagination. The spirits may be abandoning us. We control the day with the ticking clock, with deadlines for production, for commerce. Nature, which has its own clock, we no longer listen to.

This space dream I found incredibly cathartic. As though I got to take a break from gravity, maybe even from my body? Astral projection theories often describe a string of sorts trailing the body...was this my space suit tether? The climb through the intricacies of the old factory perhaps resemble wafting through mental gunk of the day to day operations of being a person.

I've had a space dream before, floating outside of a space station. This was awhile back, but also incredibly vivid both visually and to the touch. One of my favorite dreams, like a favorite movie?

SHOUT!

I had a dream last night in which I was on a business trip, on some leadership building retreat of sorts at a resort. A large group of us were gathered around the outdoor pool for the first day of this conference. Of course the session began with a round of introductions coupled with "something interesting about yourself." I was picked to introduce myself first. I began with my name. The people on the far end of the pool could not hear me over the wind. So I had to SHOUT my name over the wicked breeze.

This morning my girlfriend informed me that I had shouted in my sleep...I had shouted "JEFF!"

Porter Hut

Quite exhausted today. Many vivid dreams. One involved being on a documentary film crew and trouncing across snow covered golf courses and finding a hut where a coffee infused porter was being brewed. When I woke up my body felt as though I had drunk a lot of it.