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Dream journal entry #9
03/29/2014 06:32 p.m.
I remember three dreams from last night, each of which was utterly banal and uninteresting. I remembered them by reciting only one word apiece whenever I awoke: jackknife, tobacco, and electrician. So, I guess they were fairly vivid and came to me with suitable titles. Which I'll use.

1) Jackknife

It's wintertime and I'm standing in the driveway of the house where I spent my teenage years. Where I'm standing is at the top of a small hill and I'm looking down on a car that is pulled most of the way into the driveway, but not quite; it's blocking the sidewalk, and either the front or tail end is sticking out into the street (this changes back and forth every time I look). There is no driver; the car is parked and has apparently been here all night. It's early morning and I can't shovel the driveway unless I move the car. I seem to know who parked it here and I curse them, but I have the keys so I climb into the car, intending to park it in the street against the curb to my right. When I get in, the nose is now facing the street, so I pull out, turn left, and then begin backing it into the place where I want it parked, which, incidentally, would leave the car facing the wrong direction for the side of the street on which I'm parking. But as I shift into reverse, I look in my rearview mirror and see that I'm now backing a fifty foot trailer which is jackknifing in the wrong direction. Because, you know, backing a trailer is counterintuitive, especially when you're looking in a rearview mirror. Especially when you don't realize you're pulling a trailer or that instead of a car, you're driving a freight truck. Seeing my mistake, I overcorrect, which not only brings the trailer over to the side of the street I want it on but also jacks it into a neighbor's yard, stopping just short of hitting their house. But this was good enough for me, so I leave the truck where it is--blocking several other driveways in the process--and proceed to shovel my own.

2) Tobacco

I'm working in a convenience store, quite a bit younger than I am now, about 25. It's an old store, cluttered with merchandise, and the walls are painted an ugly shade of green. The light is such that it feels like it's night time. There's two or three of us young guys working here, along with an older guy (the owner, I suppose) who's standing behind a counter at the cash register. We're not actually working though, just sitting around talking, feeling bored. The owner isn't paying any attention to us; he's just staring listlessly out the window, looking just as bored as the rest of us. There are no customers. The youngest guy among us wants to buy some rolling tobacco, but he can't decide which brand he should purchase. So I start explaining the difference between a dry loose leaf brand like Top and a moist shag brand like Drum. We decide that he'd probably be happier buying the shag, but now the owner finally speaks up and says, no, you should buy a loose leaf brand. I turn, look him in the eyes and begin explaining how much experience I have with rolling tobacco and why my opinion is much better informed than his own. At which point, he shrugs and then gestures toward the guy who wanted to buy tobacco in the first place. I turn back to look at him and see that he's filling a water pipe full of ice and water, preparing to stuff its bowl with the tobacco I had recommended. So I said, oh, I guess it was pipe tobacco that you wanted.

3) The electrician

This time I'm in my childhood home, in the basement. It's just as I remember it--one side finished with wood paneling, a wet bar, and carpeting; the other side unfinished, with concrete walls, a workbench, and plenty of room for storage. A wall divides the two sides, with a single door providing access to the unfinished portion at the stairwell end of the basement. Though this is my childhood home, I'm not a child. In fact, I'm the same age as I am now and I own the house. But I don't think of this as the house I grew up in; it's just my house. At the furthest end from the door in the storage area of the basement, I'd rigged up a very clever bit of wiring that allowed certain electronic devices to work on the finished side. But these devices (I don't know what they are) were no longer working. The way I'd wired it, though, was designed to operate through a couple of cartridge fuses I'd intalled in the box--two of them, one for each circuit. But before I could check the fuses, my wife Nancy came down stairs and told me she'd hired an electrician to take care of the problem. And then, there he was, wearing a tool belt and going through the door into the unfinished side of the basement. I want to explain to him how I'd rigged the wiring in the first place, and the reasons why, but he isn't interested and gets right to work. When he finishes, I know he'd just returned the wiring to its original state, completely ruining my innovations and, thus, rendering the electronic devices that rely on my wiring useless. The electrician doesn't care about any of this and doesn't want to hear anything about it. Then my wife pays him and he leaves. When I open the electrical box to see what I could salvage from this "repair," I notice that the cartridge fuses are gone. This alarms me because without the fuses--which were very rare and expensive--I can never return this circuitry to the state in which I want it to be, and I can never again use the electronic devices on the other side of the wall. So I curse the electrician, open up my toolbox, and get to work, trying to figure out a new innovation. Something that won't burn down the house ...

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