~*~ 2026 | 05 | 14 ~*~
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this is just a journal of the dream i had last night. i don't really remember the sequence of this dream clearly, but i know the general structure of it went something like this:
it began with me looking down the long interior of a tall, abandoned building i was exploring, running my eyes over debris & detritus & rusty metal staircases going up the multiple floors of the concrete place. it was still daytime, & by reaching the top floor (accompanied for some reason by my mother & friend marcus as exploration-buddies?) we had reached a point where we no longer needed torchlight to see, & all looked around through the empty voids where the windows once were, admiring the skyline as reward for scaling up through such a treacherous place. as i was inspecting the horizon, i fixed my eyes on the distant rooftop air conditioning systems of what i knew to be a hospital. within a few moments, a thin, white smoke crept from the vents, & then the ground shook, wobbling the building beneath our feet. the smoke darkened from grey to black as everybody else noticed it, & either i or my mother called out, "the blood bank's caught fire!" as if there was some way for whoever noticed it to see through walls & know that happened. i believe the blackness of the smoke was how this was communicated, but it still made no sense to me. i stood there pondering whether such a thing had really happened, whether all of that stored-up blood could somehow catch fire & produce a thick, black smoke, picturing what would happen if blood was boiled on the stove long enough to catch fire, or dropping an element dense & hot enough to cause a fire when dropped through the plastic sheathe of a bloodbag. it was a strange consideration, especially being unsure whether it was myself or my mother who actually said it.
regardless, it wasn't long after that until the next dream sequence took over the setting. this time it was a wood-paneled log-cabin lodge, & my mother wasn't there, but i was still accompanied by my friend marcus. it seemed we were at some kind of organised event or party - there were a bunch of people around, all chatting & laughing & drinking, making a bunch of noise. me & marcus were kind of just sitting there out of place, we had a 20-or-so inch CRT taking up some space on a milk crate on the floor, under which was where we had some tapes stacked up & a deck, safe within the crate so that they didn't get knocked around by any guests' feet. the TV was turned off & completely blank. i don't recall much of what happened at this party, or if i went around & mingled or spoke to anybody, i just know that at one point the setting was as such. afterwards, the setting changed again, back to the more familiar concrete, urban-industrial, multi-level building style. again, marcus & i were at a party, bringing around our combination CRT, VHS player & tapes with milk crate combination. at this party our sideshow was much more popular - the TV was on & many many people were coming up to us & commenting on the setup, remarking on their trite nostalgia & memories, asking us which tapes we had & being almost every time surreptitiously disillusioned & disappointed by the gimmicky & now-unfamiliar nature of using this old technology in 2026 being in their faces at what was, as far as i could assume, supposed to be a party for cool people. one thing i noticed is that everybody at this party was my dad's age or older - they were usually white-haired old people trying to live some kind of penultimate hurrah in early retirement, too old to hike around & do physically-active stuff, but too young not to try to drink or party. they were all quite literally of the baby boom generation, & had no idea how to handle or gague two offbeat thirty-somethings lugging around an old TV & some tapes for the sake of art, so they would often be quite taken aback or puzzled at the suggestion that we had dedicated time & effort into what they saw as a shitty, inconvenient & unproductive thing. their memories of that time were special, but the technology itself was as carefree & throwaway to them as it ever was. after speaking to people, marcus & i both sort of clued in on their befuddlement, & it eventually became difficult to stifle laughs in front of them, especially as people became predictable & repeated the things previous onlookers had already said. an old guy would come up, prattle on about television & how it was in black & white when he was a kid, & then basically call us out of touch for investing in it & saunter or strut off back into the rabble, & marcus & i would just look at eachother with an eyebrow raised & laugh. it was becoming increasingly ridiculous to us how quickly nostalgia turned to sour disillusionment for this crowd.
at a certain point, marcus had the idea to put on a certain tape which he was sure would get a reaction. i had doubts, because the entire gimmick seemed to be a flop, but he seemed to know that even if this particular tape wasn't appreciated, it would still make some kind of impression or get a reaction from the onlookers. he pulled the tape out of his backpack - it was one that he didn't even put under the milk crate for regular rotation. it had a lime green cover with black pinstripe hand-painted font, & two straight lines for a vertical & horizontal margin, as if it were the cover of a book or similar. i never quite caught the name of the tape, but when he put it on, a lot of the movie resembled the front cover. it was usually a single colour background of one of those colours that you tend to see being picked by artists of traditional mediums who had to select their own paints or inks from a brick & mortar store, just a decade or two before digital art was more readily available to people. i'm not sure if that's a real category of colour that makes sense to anybody, but the colours i can recall were like lime green again, vermillion, lavender, scarlet, banana yellow. my brain is trying to fill in more of them & make up a balanced rainbow of sorts for this fake dream artists' palette, but i honestly don't think i saw more than three or so colours. the stuff drawn onto the foreground was just black paintbrush work, usually there was just a single black line for the "ground" & then a little shape rolling along it. i think all the characters were just different shapes with different voices. one of them was a spiky ball, there was a classic pentagon, circle & square. i think there was a guy who looked like an hourglass but the top of it was round like a letter D turned sideways. the movie was european or something - i believe it was all voiced in french. if it wasn't this that made it particularly unpopular with the attendees of the event, it was the strange & uneventful pacing of the film. every scene only features a single "character", always positioned on the left side of the screen & only ever moving as far as the centre. they would appear, make some european-sounding gibberish noises & move around, & then every 4 to 8 seconds or so, the background colour would change & a new "scene" would begin. i remember thinking this clearly must have been some sort of production error, because there were scenes that seemed to intend to have two characters on opposite sides of the screen to engage in dialogue, but because the characters were only ever on the left side of the screen, they would overlap eachother, making it confusing which character was speaking & when. it seemed to give the impression that this very earnest & serious artwork was bungled in production, resulting in something that appeared poorly-made & lazy.
the crowd really didn't like it. they had even less respect for it than the previous material. at that point, if the tapes we had on before were making people walk up, comment a thing or two & then become quickly disillusioned & leave, this strange european cartoon seemed to invoke ire from people just passing by & onlookers from a distance. there was an audible reaction to one scene where two characters were overlapped & both speaking over eachother whilst one of them bounced up & down & rotated on the screen - the chitter chatter of party conversation grew to a defiant grumble, beginning to sound more like angry protestors or a pissed off sports crowd. "what the fuck is this?" "turn that shit off!" "come on, what the fuck?" "nobody asked to see this!" "get that weird shit outta hre!" were some of the things i can remember people shouting. as much as they were protesting, nobody actually did anything to try to change the entertainment, & marcus & i just let the whole thing play out whilst we giggled & smoked weed by the TV. it was only a 40-minute or so feature, & it was bringing us a lot more satisfaction than just showing boomers robocop or halloween or whatever. i don't recall how this part of the dream wrapped up, but there was indeed another segment.
it was very breif, but the last part of the dream was just marcus & i sitting down at my mother's house. we were quietly just kind of sitting there, my mother was accross the room at a computer desk. i watched my mother's partner walk into the room & immediately walk over to her & start complaining, so infuriated that he was twitching & gesticulating wildly & at times squeaking or squawking his words. i tuned in, looking at marcus, & heard that he was actually complaining that our weird little CRT art thing was so effective. "it's not fair! they just walk in & put a stupid fucking TV there & everybody reacts! meanwhile i spend HOURS going to PAINSTAKING EFFORTS to create things that nobody gives a damn about! i get ignored! it's not fair! why can they just walk in & get to make such an impression?". i thought it was pretty funny, but marcus just shrugged at me, & that's the last thing i recall before waking up.
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