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The chair, a simple four-legged wooden one the kind I sat on for most of my youth, dragged me all the way over the thick carpet in the office to Rosario Dawson’s cluttered cubicle. I hadn’t brushed my teeth yet so I felt a bit embarrassed about just having woke up while she had already been on the job.

The heat and humidity had been suppressing just about any initiative to make good on all the ideas I had been accumulating, and even with my subconscious prodding me to complete the one about the chair we saw while walking to the store, it took the return of a few cooler nights before I finished the page in his journal—not that he’d notice; my hope was that it’d inspire him to make the time in his busier schedule to commemorate moments like these, however regular.

Took an early nap while the boy reveled with the Minions, maybe in the hope that my subconscious would pervert them to my liking, but all I got were short BLM-looking guys who could travel, in trios, along the surface of a golden vase and survive being bombed but were otherwise cold and impersonal.

So the long-awaited adaptation arrives with a DC logo but none of the familiar characters in the original run, Mister Miracle, Etrigan, Wesley Dodds Sandman; Constantine they keep, and make her an impeccably dressed scoundrel as only the girl of my dreams could play? It worked on Doom Patrol and Titans (at least until Batman actually showed up), but that was when both were on the Universe.

First, some domestic scene-setting: Tony had plastic surgery to resemble キムタク and I was serving oranges that grew increasingly unlike ones I’d pick at the grocer, the last so much larger and hideous it had to be a saggy grapefruit. A cabbage in the fridge had a purple streak in the center that also indicated its past-best state. Then I was part of an outdoor procession returning home from a protest gathering and a young woman walking beside me looked dejected, so I took hold of her hand, which seemed to pick up her spirits. This platonic gesture caught the eye of my boyfriend, former co-worker Fred (to whom I apologize, my field isn’t what it used to be), whom I pointed out and neither of them was pleased. When we reached the tall carved double doors of the place I shared with him, I bid farewell to her and she turned my way with a Ruth Wilson smile under her hood, which all but sealed my fate with my current relationship. We retreated to our indoor pool with a third man, who joined us in a game where I threw a football at a target at the other end, but my partner remained distant. The living room hid the water under a retracting floor like the one at the host’s in The Party, and as well as we were doing, I knew it was time to divvy it all up.

Cursory keyword search tells me I may not have mentioned it yet, though dreams like this happen often enough that my recollections of them ought to convey the real emotional or intellectual impact from such self-inflicted scenarios. (I shall never forget one where I met 할머니 years after her passing and was overcome with sorrow that we didn’t have more time together, feeling it even after I woke.) But jealousy is for more passionate, primitive minds—I recall a recent opportunity to experience it when the wife took a younger lover, which left me nonplussed—and my simulation only produced resentment, a reminder of immature wardens.

I looked through the doorway and saw a young person’s bare arm suspended unnaturally high above the room, undulating slightly and the fingers wiggling to show that someone unseen was behind it. Suddenly I was attacked by a dozen gray fists, but I fought them back, defiant and insistent that they weren’t getting to me, even as the image of my aggressor in the back changed shape and color.

In quite the change of setting to an anime convention, my friend and I (I think it was Frank Hsu, because he was tall, thin and decked out in motorcycling leathers) were admiring the life-sized mechs on display, and when we learned we could actually climb inside one for photos, queued up thinking that we were first in line. Turned out it already stretched around the display and the others were full-on cosplaying as sentai pilots, so the Shoei or Arai helmet and riding gear looked philistine in comparison. Nearing the end of our wait, a woman with a baby approached and we let her cut ahead of us, but she then tried chaining in a fat relative who waddled up and we objected vehemently. I don’t remember taking any pictures because the very next thing, my buddy looked more like that fucker Steve Bannon and was thanking me; such an abrupt edit in my timeline frightened me that Alzheimer’s had struck and this was how my perception would continue, jumping from one moment to another, unaware of what happened between them.

It’s how I reconcile Severance and Navillera. (Although the former will probably be revealed to be mad science like Dr. Brain, the Trojan Horse implant that has to be “macrodata’d” to override memory or willpower conflicts.) Bread-winning aside, what good are we to our loved ones if we don’t know who they are anymore? What good are we to ourselves?

Another common disability I face in dreams is finding myself bereft of even the most basic of driving skills, a simple turn requiring power-assisted Herculean strength, the car speeding or veering out of control on eerie traffic-free freeways, and spacious lanes closing in on hundreds of dollars in deductible cosmetic damage, as it was last night, where I struggled to pull the Xterra’s yellow mirrors away from the concrete walls of a parking garage incline.

After that momentary predicament, I was on my feet but they were frozen with the rest of my body as I was approached by two back-lit figures from whose outlines I could make out were from Planet X, but they reminded me more of the aliens who beset the boys in one of the Gamera movies, squeaky voices and all.

I lie on my side but unlike Akio above I wasn’t fortunate enough to escape the encounter with only a shaved head (which frankly I’d thank them for, as of late), but a sore rectum—there was a loud banging on the door, which woke me to check the app if the camera caught anything, but it was probably just the boy in his adjoining room—might the psychosomatic pain, too, have had a more immediate source, a test of my receptivity to a different kind of pleasure?

Fortunate enough to be in attendance at a grand opening (or re-opening) event of a classic arcade, so when the announcement was made for a Street Fighter competition, I rushed to make it to the machine to beat the crowd. The custom console had four sets of six-button controls and one of them was unoccupied, but I wasn’t up to putting my skills to the test on this live-streamed event. Shortly thereafter—so short that the game was over and I was almost immediately outside, looking at the place from a distance leaning against a railing with my companions, a fair significant other and our cheery but comparatively frumpy friend. A life-sized fighter jet painted Black and Navy was parked in front, but it was a light-weight plastic model, which stretched and bounced on an exaggerated number of wheels exposed when flipped over. My girlfriend was unhappy with disparaging remarks I had made about our third wheel, hand-written on pre-printed forms, including one about his appearance, specifically his choice of clothing in sweats. So much that it dawned on me I had lost her to him, and my mind wandered to the availability of another Filipina (?) of her caliber.

The server I’d left behind years ago and have only occasionally posted a .GIF to since was suddenly active with a smooth-voiced DJ welcoming visitors and even had someone streaming FFXI, though in painfully low resolution. One of my old online friends was happy to meet me in person and rested his weary head in my cradled arms, where he confessed he made up the story about losing his brother in Iraq with images from memes. Rajeev Gantela, looking very much like he did when I last saw him—interesting how memory is at once corrupted by time and unaffected by it—came out of the crowd and joined us on our bench to consult my legal opinion of an idea he came up with as a mathematician: he proposed that stores give discounts based upon their customer’s travel distance, so the further away they live, the less they have to pay, as reward and incentive to make the trip. The algorithm would have to take into account multiple locations (not to mention the privacy concerns), I thought, but I told him it could be patented.

The country continues to prove the lives of innocents are less important than the guns that are supposed to be helping save them, while I dream of firing upon the approaching enemy with only my fingers and pew-pew sounds when war broke out; they, however, looked armed with working weapons and didn’t fall to my playground rules, so I fled with my comrades. We reached an empty elevator where, just my luck, I found a loaded shotgun, whose sliding stock was strangely located on the opposite side of the trigger but the Resident Evil games otherwise left me familiar enough to yield. And wouldn’t you know, the threat became zombies, which eased my conscience about using it, though I remained concerned that I might be stopped by any authorities we encountered, for its barrel would have been awkward for me to hide in my hoodie’s sleeve. Still, I was now the heavy hitter in my troupe and we drove toward the front line to escort others making their escape from a building behind the main one, which my knowledge of the Austin campus I identified as the “Robert Patterson.” On our way there, we could see some of them walking toward freedom single-file on a ledge.

It was the second season of a Squid Game/Severance love child and I was one of the employee/contestants, waiting in a spacious modern lobby with all the others for our first assignment. There was an announcement and a rush of people to the elevators, who then returned with forms they were furiously completing, filling in shapes with their №2 pencils, presumably as part of the next series of tasks. What I immediately noticed, however, was that all of them were women and the four or five of us fellas still lounging on the couches didn’t seem too interested in participating. Instead, we went downstairs to a seat-less auditorium where in place of a stage was a towering window covered by a flexible lattice. I joined one of my colleagues trying to climb it to freedom, but a tsunami raged outside with such force that we were swung off by the rising water.
I actually enjoyed the series last month, despite my niggling issue with co-opted business terminology; wouldn’t “balancing” (as in work-life) have conveyed a more favorable impression of the fanciful procedure? But who am I to know the discarded ideas and ultimate plans of successful people. While the premise shouldn’t be too far beyond my experience to have come up with, maybe I’ve been preoccupied with mitigating the frustration of corporate bureaucracy and organizational dysfunction on a short-sighted personal level, after hours or no, rather than exploring how it might be done away with once and for all.

I was hanging around with a group of friends, hoping one of them would give me a lift home; seems no app can overcome this subconscious weakness after a lifetime of unreliable transportation. Really, however, I was waiting on my love interest to return and give me the opportunity to end the night with her in the driver’s seat. In the meantime, I was preoccupied producing crumpled currency from my mouth, like that gag with the eggs, surprisingly dry and pocketed each wad for as long as they came. A ten-dollar bill I had found earlier was left in a bowl of dirty plumbing water, ordinarily a questionable place for paper with any intention of reuse, but I presumed it could be dried; when I retrieved it, the ink ran and the color was reduced to an almost transparent outline. (Reminded me of the counterfeit plot at the beginning of the 살인자의 쇼핑목록 drama I’ve been watching; it’s no Koo—then again, neither was the finale of Killing Eve—but there’s a bevy of cuties including AOA alumnus Seolhyun.) Inside the bathroom the door opened and there she was… my wife, hair tied back and makeup-less, sorrow in her large eyes that she was delayed by being invited to the Beatles concert, which I then realized was the reasonable explanation that had eluded me. In my self-absorbed distress, I had failed to appreciate her.