#their backyard is orientated differently to the rest of the street so it's perpendicular

[david-watts]

cannot wait for everyone else to get their shit together so we can get my curtains ready (would do it myself but I have to concede that I'll need help on this one) so I don't have to hear the obnoxiously loud convos and child screams from next door

[blue-opossum]

Electrical Woes

        3 minutes to read.

        Friday morning, 9 December 2022.

        Electrical Woes

        Dream #: 20,444-02.

        Minutes before my dream:

        While briefly awake in bed, my need to use the bathroom is not urgent, and I drift back to sleep.

        My dream places me in the wrong bathroom to prevent associations with consciousness:

        I find myself in the Cubitis house's bathroom (irrelevant since 1978), but my dream self mistakenly considers it part of my current home. I do not feel the need to go. I hear a noise outside the door and investigate.

        I open the door to an incorrect change of setting. Instead of the Cubitis house's hallway (in Florida), which had only one level, it is the second-floor hall of the King Street mansion (in Wisconsin).

        My oldest daughter (protoconsciousness, often becoming a RAS personification when I open a door to another dream segment rather than waking up) is looking up, where unlikely convoluted plumbing features several large pipes. (I have no in-dream recall that she has never been to America.) One has become detached, and water is pouring out.

        My somatosensory phasing response to REM atonia (and spontaneously seeking tactility to achieve more self-awareness while sleeping - as a precursor to waking) initiates:

        I reach up and push the pipe into another with an open end (which would be impossible in a real-world scenario - both reaching that high and putting the end of a metal pipe into another to fix it).

        The narrative builds upon "contrived convenience." At first, the large pipe with water cascading out is solidly fixed to the rest of the plumbing, facing north. When I reach up, it is smaller in diameter and oriented in the opposite direction. The open pipe I put the first one into is perpendicular to the rest of the plumbing, so it would be impossible to connect in this manner.

        My daughter tells me that the large pipe detached from a different area. I remove it and put it into a feature that serves as a pipe cap, oriented north again. At one point, the rendering is so ambiguous that the ceiling seems below head level.

        I hear a sizzling sound and see water pouring down the steps from a different pipe. I am still in the hall of the King Street mansion, looking south toward the back of the house.

        I decide it is dangerous to keep the electricity on with all the water reaching the house's wiring, so I go outside to turn it all off.

        When I go outside, the side of the house is the north side of the Stadcor Street house in Wavell Heights (in Australia). It is nighttime. This setting is the second mistaken change.

        I open the electrical box. Beyond the backyard; to the east; I hear an unseen man yelling, "AP broke the law." (This statement is a pointless reference to AP Motorworks, with which I have no real-world associations.) A neighbor from my current real-world home (contradicting the current setting's implication) goes into his backyard to see where the other man is.

        I try to turn the electricity off several times, but it does not seem to be working, as some power is still going into the house. I go back into the residence, and it transforms back into the King Street mansion. I go into the northwest room where Zsuzsanna is standing. (She and our children have never been to America, though I never occupied this room when I lived here.) The television is on (facing west) but with a fuzzy superimposed image in the bottom third of the screen. I reason it is because only some electricity is going into it.

        Lights continue to go off and on with my efforts. There is now a surreal feature of miniature power lines going from the electrical box to another location (a curious in-dream confusion with utility poles and power lines but linking to the next stage of wakefulness). (Again, it has turned back into another wrong setting - the north side of the Stadcor Street house again.) I have a slight concern about getting a shock.

        Such an ambiguous transition in navigating low-level liminality is common in my dreams. Electricity has to do with achieving consciousness while also denying the false "wakefulness" of the dream state.

        Dreams build pathways for coming to my senses to resolve and achieve real-world consciousness and getting my memories and mind-body connection back. People who cannot understand this lack basic thinking skills to an extent I find unfathomable and uncomfortable.

[whenanerdfindsjapan]

Hagashimurayama

Part of our orientation included us taking a walk around the city and doing a little bit of journaling on what we saw. So I was very uncertain of exactly where Higashimurayama city limits are but boy, did I see a large variety of things packed into this place. Firstly, I think it’s worth mentioning that I ended up going out to wander the city on particularly gloomy day yet still found remarkable beauty in it. I constantly found myself trying to contrast this place with my hometown, and found the largest difference being the way the streets are set up. In my hometown, as with many American cities I have been to, the streets sort of run on a perpendicular pattern. That is obviously not true for every street but generally there are a bunch of streets that run horizontally, a bunch that run veritcally, and then a ton of intersections in between. Here, streets just seem to go off in whatever direction they please. I couldn’t tell you the amount of times I found myself wandering the same way I had just came because I somehow got turned around. Higashimurayama itself seems to be a rather popular place for individuals to come and go. The seibu-yuenchi station (which happens to be basically in my host family’s backyard) appears to get a lot of parents and children coming to the amusement park. Oh, did I forget to mention that this city has an amusement park about ten minutes walking from the station? Crazy. I didn’t actually go into the amusement park but there were plenty of people wandering around in the park, even though it was rather crummy weather. Then about a few blocks over, there is this gorgeous park. Once the trees are in full bloom and the sky decides to stay sunny, that place will be marvelous. I wandered through just the edge of it and found myself lost in its nature. Japan is really great in preserving natural gardens and parks that really make me forget the rest of the world exists. Overall, the city, which is packed full of houses, is rather exciting. The set up and contents of what I originally believed to be a small city has actually turned out to be rather robust. It’s quite a different atmosphere than the main-city vibes we’ve been experiencing in Takadanobaba and Ikebukuro, yet it still has all the excitement. It’s not at all what I was picturing when I came here, and there is definitely more for me to explore as the time goes on. As for now, I am glad to have been given the chance to call Higashimurayama my Host-Home.