Frunce

I found that “France” had been misspelled throughout a French translation as “Frunce.” I went through and fixed it all and then when I sent it back to CF to finalize, she said that actually it was correct before, and that “Frunce” was a French-speaking, centrally located province of Canada.

house and snow

I dreamed that I found out that my parents had once lived in the same house we’re in now, with all of their grad school friends, and it explained how weird they were acting about us living here.

I looked out the window and it was snowing. It was only September 20. The weatherstripping had worn off around the windows and snow was blowing into the house from the cracks around the edges. I looked at the snow piled on the grass, in the darkness, lit by the streetlights.

high school

I dreamed I saw my high school boyfriend somewhere and called him by name. He asked me who I was. When I told him, he shook his head. He didn’t remember me at all.

fish toes

I was in a big fancy seaside mansion with Sarah and some other people; it looked a bit like the one in Harold and Maude, and a picture window looked across a road and down California cliffs to the sea. I went outside and was standing in a pool of water… saw some little minnow-like fish swimming nearby, went to poke them with one foot, and they all swarmed up and latched onto my toes and began sucking my blood. I ran out of the water, kicked and scraped, but they wouldn’t let go. It was hideous, and painful; one or two clinging to each toe, and they were bloated to twice their original size with my blood, and they would not let go, even as I scraped them on the ground. Finally they all let go and I limped off into the other room. Sarah was there and I asked her where everyone was. “Oh, they all just got on a bus to scout out where we’re going to do the next bike tour,” she said. I was upset and felt left out, wished I could have gone. There was some reason why I wasn’t as permanent there as everyone else, but I don’t know what it was.

The Goodwill Man

I had been featured in a coffee table book: when I got my advance copy in the mail, I was thrilled to see that there were lots of photos of me shot in grainy 70s style, barefoot and wearing a long, gauzy white dress and my purple puffer jacket, standing in a creek in a sunny forest and spinning on my tamarind Turkish spindle.

The Goodwill guy came to our house and picked up a bunch of junk to take away. As he was about to leave, I suddenly remembered that I had left the coffee table book on one of the bookshelves he had put in his truck, and ran out to ask if I could go and get it.

“Sure,” said the Goodwill guy. He was a burly black guy wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt–purple, I think.

I walked up the ramp into the back of the Uhaul-like truck, and suddenly heard a slam as the Goodwill guy rolled down the back of the truck, trapping me inside, and strode after me, grabbing me, lifting me, slamming me against the wall of the truck to rape me, and I felt suddenly so stupid for having trusted him and gone inside this truck where I was helpless and nobody could hear me scream. I woke up feeling all panicky and awful.

I had another dream last night, but I remember hardly any of it aside from going to pick up Molly so we could go out to dinner at some chain restaurant like Pasta Pomodoro.

Dreams about the past

I dreamed I had an apartment with Wes in Berkeley and had left a bunch of stuff there. I hadn’t thought about it for a while, then realized it had been two years since I’d been back there, and the thought of being inside there seemed so strange. I went in tentatively to grab my things, feeling odd, out of place, alien. I woke up and realized it wasn’t really a dream about him, after all, but about another ex-boyfriend… lay in bed for a while in the morning thinking about some times that seem very distant now, thinking about sleeping night after night in the apartment on Channing, the strange feeling of walking back into my own apartment every now and then, of taking those keys in the parking garage on Haste.

I also dreamed about having to trick a hipsterish guy, one who looked much like Jerel but had blue hair, into thinking I wanted to talk to him because of the band he was in. It was really as a favor to his ex-girlfriend, who needed something. I was following him down a spiral staircase in a hotel, telling him I had heard his music was really great. After asking me about other bands I liked, he laughed and said I was a terrible liar. The alarm clock went off while I was trying to figure out if my scheme had worked.

TG

I dreamed that TG had relocated to Madison, and that Morgan got a hold of me and was trying to recruit me. I showed up at the offices to take a look around, and saw that they had recruited a ton of other people I knew, including Hiromi and Shane. Colin was there too. Somehow I was still thinking of them as being in San Rafael and was on the fence about the whole thing, and then when I was talking to Rahul, he pointed out that I really wouldn’t have to commute very far to get to work. I got very interested in the idea.

press “recirculate” to avoid fallout

I was with Rahul and Serena. I had lost Serena in a mall and when I saw her, I ran up and hugged her, but accidentally stepped on her toe. “Are you OK?” I asked her. “No!” she said, and showed me how her little toe was now sideways and bleeding.

“OK, this is going to hurt–hold on,” said Rahul and gripped her toe to pull it straight.  I couldn’t watch.

Serena and CHT and I were in a car and driving fast down a road in late evening. The government was getting ready to test a nuclear bomb, and we had to get away. I pressed the button to change the air to “recirculate” instead of “fresh air,” hoping this would save us from fallout. We could feel a weird tingling in the air, the electric feeling before a thunderstorm, something you could feel aching in your fillings.

Rahul told me that in college, before he met me, he had purchased the services of a prostitute. I was very surprised and wondered why he’d never told me before, why he’d lied about his experiences to me.

painted walls

I was in a game with some teammates and to win, we had to estimate how much paint we would need to cover the walls of a particular house. We walked into our assigned house–a seaside cabin–and I thought, “this will be easy!” The house was plain and square, with no hidden rooms or trickiness.

We were talking to the owner, a youngish redneck white guy, and he said “These are the names of the people I’ve already killed, who came before you.” He fanned out a bunch of slips of paper. Two of them had my name on them.

A great war; ships in their eyes

I was in Madison, biking around by myself. I biked through a little shopping street and left my bike outside the front of a library as I was going through. Realized afterwards that I would have to walk back to get it anyway. I went back inside to get it.

It was a video store. There was a clerk inside who really liked me, and he put his arm around me and started flirting with me. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to do anything with him. He clearly would have liked that. He gave me a job, and it turned out it was some kind of game-related company. His manager, an old, stern librarian-type lady, walked out and said that I seemed to only have TV experience on my resume. I disagreed and started telling her some of my qualifications.

However, at that point, a great war started to take place in the streets. I ended up on the other side as those guys. I was biking around and trying to stay out of danger. At some point, I looked up, and everyone was sitting quietly on a couch. It was over. “What happened?” I asked. Trevor was there, sitting on the couch, and he told me a truce had been signed and the war was finished.

As I was standing there, it came to my mind that I had been reading in a book that many psions are blind. Then, as the war ended, I was told that they can store interstellar spaceships in their eyes, burrowed in like little worms, to hatch and expand when they’re needed, and that was how the war would be resolved. The spaceships of the losing side would be tucked away and expanded in the future, when needed.