Rainy Naked Coffee Dream of Darkness

Dream journal for Monday, May 15, 2023

Written upon waking

Nonfiction

Chris Onstad

-

I’m on a family vacation to Hawaii, to the island we usually visit (Kauai), but the only person I’m really seeing is my father. He’s generally in good spirits. It is sodden and gloomy, nothing like the way our trips there usually feel. I awaken in a thin pile of heather gray gym-type clothing and an undersized blanket, naked, on the dirty gray carpet floor of a very unofficial-looking Starbucks. It seems to have been opened in a large, high-ceilinged, featureless room of a hotel. There is no Starbucks insignia, but I know it is a Starbucks.

As I am first flickering into awareness the room is dark, and two young men, before opening, toil to fill large airpots with the day’s coffee. I struggle to wake for a while, and people eventually begin wandering in for their drinks. I realize that I am naked, but am covered just enough as I lie there on the floor that I don’t think I’m causing a disturbance. I notice what a bad color choice light gray was; years of dribbles and spills have rendered the floor truly filthy.

During a period when the room has no customers my father comes in to get coffees for the family; I stand up, still fully naked, and awkwardly take longer than I want to identify an item that I can wear from the pile of clothing: they are mostly tops. My father neglects to get a coffee for me, then seems to notice his gaffe, but he’s already paid. I’m slightly annoyed, but relieved upon finding a hundred dollar bill in the shorts I finally have on, so I start my order. (Yesterday in real life I had discovered a forgotten fifty dollar bill in my shorts—mother, look how far I have come.)

I ask where their menu is, since it’s not in the usual overhead place, and the polite teenaged boy who is now the sole proprietor of the Starbucks gestures to a nearby wall, which I can now see has a reasonably neatly organized set of laser printer pages taped very carefully to it. They have tried to reduce the Starbucks menu to some kind of unique symbolic logic, but it is needlessly complicated and I say to the boy, “this could be a lot easier.” I know that I am unpleasantly frank, but not to communicate this would be dishonest. I then order a twelve-ounce whole milk latte, even though in real life I always just get drip coffee there. As I turn from the counter I am surprised that the room is suddenly quiet and sophisticated; the filthy gray carpet is now a dark geometric casino-type pattern; the walls have lightly-stained rich oak trim and wainscoting. I get the sense that this change transpires daily.

My father, still in good spirits, says that I should be the one to drive the rental van that day, that he’s already driven “fourteen miles.” He says this like it’s a big deal, and I wonder if it’s a sign he’s getting old, that he thinks fourteen miles is tiring to drive. I assure him I can drive many times that far, that I don’t really even consider driving stressful. We go out to get back to the rooms where the family is staying.

Now I am in the town where I grew up, a small economic backwater in California’s Sierra Nevadas called Twain Harte. I have set a towel down in a sandy lot off of the quiet, pot-holed main street. It is something like a park, but not officially designated. Off one side of the walled-in lot is the entrance to what seems to be a small lumberyard. An unspecific worker man with his convenience store coffee lopes hurriedly through its gate. I am alone in the lot, but across the street I see that an attractive, tanned woman in a pink bikini has set down a towel in a similar type of sandy, beach-like lot, and she is bending over in a way that shows her very nice rear and legs. This is a relief because I had assumed anyone who was setting up in that sandy lot would be an unfortunate homeless person with upsetting visual details of chronic neglect or advanced disease. I try not to stare. Over the next short while more people, mostly women, start their sunbathing, but they are not as healthy or attractive to me as the first woman.

I realize it’s getting darker, and the air is thick and watery, a spitting downpour that doesn’t actually feel like rain — it’s more like flowing ambient wetness. My towel is soaked to the near-black sand, and my nondescript possessions are in a soupy sandy mess next to it, so I gather them onto the towel and wrap them up like a filthy, sodden dosa. (I had been watching a lot of Indian street food cooking videos last night, in real life.)

As I take the towel and walk to leave the lot, a tiny pixie-like girl child, maybe two years old and a foot-and-a-half tall, appears by my side, at a good trot, but seems to float. I wave at her, and she smiles, and I ask her how old she is, and am happy that I have had the presence and boldness to be kind and interesting to this innocent and unfamiliar child. She says a number I don’t remember and I think to myself how small she is for someone with such smooth and even locomotion.

I don’t see her parents, and as we near the curb and the street, I worry she will actually wander into it. By this time she is no more than an inch or two tall. She makes a beeline right into the street, which isn’t busy at the moment, but I grow terrified that the worst will happen. She has become hard to see on the dirty old discolored and patchy concrete; making matters worse is that one of my eyes has something in it that makes it blur and tear up a little. I am anxious, and I see cars starting to head our way. I wave so that they will stop, and they seem to, but I am suddenly distracted by three men who have emerged from a nearby shop. They seem to do technical work, and are dressed like they might be mechanics or photocopier repair-type guys, but from a Star Wars set. They have dark hair and mustaches. One’s hair has been buzzed to look like he is wearing large headphones, but wrapped around the back of his head instead of over the top, and the earmuff part of the “headphone” is above each ear. Another one, their boss, listens when I say that there is a tiny little girl lost in the street. Immediately and to my relief he looks at the stopped cars, then lays on his belly on the curb to scoop a little gutter water into his mouth. He does this in a couple fast motions, and I understand that he has scooped up the tiny girl into his mouth for safekeeping. For some reason it was important to keep this rescue a secret from onlookers.

Relieved, I thank the drivers of the vehicles that had been approaching; they are walking single-file past me now, three UPS deliverymen, businesslike but I think also annoyed, as they have to carry large loads of packages the distance they were not able to drive. The technical men go back into their shop and I am sure things will be fine.

-

Now in real life I awaken. It is 6am. It’s too cold because we left the ceiling fan on last night: it had been the first genuinely hot night of the year. I’d been sleeping just under a thin sheet, which I am not used to yet; I miss the reassuring weight of the bedspread. I become annoyed that, as a side-sleeper, I have no good way to place my arms for rest. This is always a problem. I turn the fan off and listen as the cats scamper in the hall outside the door.

I decide to get up and write this down because I have just actively resumed my writing discipline. Well, I have been writing all along, but that was a book of short stories, and also about 4/5 of a novel that measures 92,286 words, or about 370 pages. It’s about a robber baron who experienced an accidental single incident of time travel, but really it’s about what happens when we try to meddle outside of our pay grades as mortals. I stopped on it in November when it was time to open the holiday merchandise shop and spend all day upstairs packing and shipping. I had begun writing it in response to the Netflix Great Outdoor Fight project cancellation in May 2022, and also the June 2022 Oni publishing collapse that took the Achewood anthology series down with it*, when I decided to just go back to working for myself.

Now that I have the comfort of the Patreon, I can devote time to finishing that novel, which tickles me to no end. There is probably a way to say that with more gravitas, but now it’s 6:55am and I want to go make a coffee, so "tickles me to no end" may be the last sentence I ever write, if I have a heart attack on the way to the coffee machine. 

(The aforementioned book of short stories I will be sharing here, month by month. Catching Up With Charlie Brown was the first installment.)

It was deeply cathartic to just get up and type for an hour straight. Dreams come out fast, because you can’t edit them, and you don’t have to make anything up, or else you’re lying, and people will be able to tell that you are deceiving them. This makes me wonder: did anyone have the sense this was written with the aid of AI? (It wasn’t.) I just realized that dreams have that surreal confabulation which AI can somewhat emulate; I suspect, though, that the throughline or intellectual watermark of genuine human inner workings is discernibly inefficient and irregular for software to emulate convincingly, like how we can still tell a human face from a Dall-E “portrait,” through the latter’s (increasingly microscopic) over-symmetries and (decreasingly overzealous) perfections.

Journal entry over. 

C

*I’ll tell these stories here too.