Damaged Dream Journal
Semester 5
Some parts of the journal intentionally left obfuscated.
September
1 Sep, 2025
I love you
I have to stop myself from saying.
This has been happening more and more lately, for the first time in a while.
Instead, I say
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck...
etc.
We are fucking.
She says something in the vein of
, , , , ...
I am bad at sex, I think. Well, not bad, but I can get into my head/out of my body until the sex is bad, I assume, for both of us. There's another thing that feels bad–uncertainty, that unresolved feeling.
I look from her face down to our connecting bodies, which sometimes snaps me out of it, but I'm still in my head. My gaze rests on the smallish, reddish stain on my lower abdomen: the yeast infection.
As far as rashes go, it's not the worst. I think back to being in roughly the same position1 a few days ago on a cot in the UCSF urgent care building. AH is with me, and she's fighting the undead in a fan localization of Mother 3 on my red clamshell GameBoy Advance. I feel bad for thinking about AH playing Mother 3 while I'm having sex with someone I'm starting to love.
I have sort of a bad habit of thinking about video games, say, twenty or thirty minutes into intimacy.2
The doctor is finally in the exam room with me (and AH), and my rash will go away with this ointment in four to six weeks but may start to itch (which, by the time we're fucking, it has; I weigh the risks of scratching at my reddish lower abdomen and decide against doing so). This is acceptable news, partially because it means I'm not terminal due to a rare, Colombian venerial disease or the more genetically likely skin cancer,3 and also because my co–pay is only $2.39, which I pay in coins.
The working theory is that the nonfatal yeast infection is Colombian, but not sexual in nature, because I didn't have sex, I swear up and down, all summer while I waited for V and she WINGDING. Which is whatever. Omitted from the declassified but heavily redacted family & friends version of the yeast infection origin theory is the possibility of transmission via repeated exposure to dirty dancing with members of the opposite sex and American continent, although this hypothesis is also shaky, due to a very male, very critical lack of understanding of how yeast infections work.
I remember I'm almost in love with my almost girlfriend, engaging in that mutual almost love in an empty apartment that's almost mine, and I roll my head up to look at the blank walls and say her name
V
V
V
V
Down, down, down
it echoes
and then I am back in my body for the present moment, like I'm coming up for air, and then I have the thought:
Don't say "I love you,"
don't think about rashes and
don't say the WINGDING
End quote, and that sort of sends off my nervous mind again, and I close my eyes and neither of us is done.
Which is WINGDING, I think.
And I think,
I need to meditate,
and figure this out in therapy.
2 Sep, 2025
Sexuality to me feels like wresting, cajoling a jalopy up to 60 miles per hour along a twisty, fucked up highway.4
Today's the first day of school. V holds a sign that says
1st day of 14th grade!
and a beer.
My history professor asked today,
What is animation?
and someone said,
Make art move,
which I liked.
I'm in the kitchen with V and she asks me if I want to know that I'm the first person to
Besides her?
I ask.
Besides her.
We talk about sex.
I ask if she'll be my girlfriend.
She needs to think about it, she says.
Later:
That's romantic.
It is?
Kind of.
4 Sep, 2025
V told me to wait to ask if she'll be my girlfriend, so I'm waiting.
8 Sep, 2025
My storytelling professor:
Greek tragedies were only when characters didn't get what they wanted,
comedies were when they did.
10 Sep, 2025
(Yu Hua, The Art of Fiction no. 261, Paris Review)
15 Sep, 2025
"Both Eisenstein and Marinetti planned to exaggerate the impact on the spectator[s], Marinetti proposing to literally glue them to their seats (ruined garments paid for after the performance) and Eisenstein setting firecrackers off beneath them."
(Tom Gunning, The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde)
16 Sep, 2025
I'm reading Yu Hua's The Seventh Day. V is cradled in my arm, next to me. She moves my nondominant hand to her boob, which I cup. I try to focus on the book. "Momo's" by Connan Mockasin, with James Blake, is playing.
20 Sep, 2025
We filmed a documentary with a cartoon rabbit.5 I'm thinking about storytelling.
21 Sep, 2025
- Any body in motion will tend to remain in motion until solid matter intervenes suddenly.
- Any body passing through solid matter will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter.
- Certain bodies can pass through solid walls painted to resemble tunnel entrances, others cannot.
- A[n animal] will assume the shape of its container.
- Any violent rearrangement of [lupine] matter is impermanent.
(Passages from Millhauser, Cat 'n' Mouse, p.175)
October
14 Oct, 2025
One of my roommates is watching "Thriller," the original 70s film, subtitled "A Cruel Picture," apparently the most violent movie ever made.
I stumble into our increasingly furnished living room, half awake,6 battling out day three of the most violent headache ever made, and catch probably the ugliest sex scene I've ever seen in a movie. It's full, penetrative, anal sex, a rape, actually, and our eyepatched heroine's ass hole is stretched noticeably wide for all to see into. This makes me more sick.
It's looking like it's going to be one of those movies where women serial kill, like, rapists.
16 Oct, 2025
Narratives professor has just told us to write about
silence, snow, or...
Does anybody have a third one?
I think,
green.
Someone says
grief.
Three people share their writing in quiet, stilted voices, and one person loudly comes up with his words, when he's called on, on the spot.
I admire everyone who reads their work out loud.5
23 Oct, 2025
Narratives professor:
People don't die from a lack of sex,
they die from a lack of love.
A show for the blind my professor went to "see", with actors on the stage, but no lights. When the lights finally did come on and the curtains closed, he realized the person in the seat next to him was a dog, its owner the most beautiful blind man he had ever seen.
31, Oct, 2025
The Halloween party in our home
has just ended someone has just
said
My head will hurt tomorrow
November
1 Nov, 2025
I love you
- Doesn't count when you're drunk.
- Doesn't count when it slips out
first thing in the morning
when the world is still blurry.
15 Nov, 2025
I have been unable to write.
My head is sick.
It feels like I am creating and consuming entertainment
like a stuffed pig & being fucked @ both ends.8
16 Nov, 2025
- I never want to do animation again.
- V is my girlfriend.
- I'm in therapy so I can be a better boyfriend.
-
- I keep having sex instead of meditating, and I keep forgetting my dreams.
- Dreams of...
for others to consume.
Zombies are different in
the movies
17 Nov, 2025
I'm in bed with V, and it's all better. We're both out of it, but I kiss the back of her neck, I breathe her name into her ear. She's really out of it.
Bogotá Dream Journal
Spring 2025 Dream Journal
Fall 2024 Dream Journal
Saltwater Dream Journal
Spring 2024 Dream Journal
Fall 2023 Dream Journal
The back of the journal is the most obfuscated.
1. A dream:
I am laid on my back on a hard wood floor, looking out a cracked, old window. My belly is speckled with goosebumps in the cold mountain air. Past my belly my WINGDING is warm.
My WINGDING is too warm.
I don't enjoy it.
My half-hard WINGDING is in someone's mouth. The warm, pink, bearded mouth of someone who has taken me, during my travels, up into the mountains, from our hostel, it seems, to put my WINGDING in his mouth.
This is only a dream.
There are other parts of this dream.
It's colder outside this old cabin, but it's much warmer in the hot springs. A little too warm. It's a surprisingly comfortable temperature under the waterfall where the idea of "meditating" together was first suggested.
There are other people here. All kinds of groups of people. Friends, families, lovers, elders, more. We are a unique sight. A long, boyish rabbit man and a round, jolly, black shaman.
Incense is burning in here. Jasmine, I think. I know when I smell it again in the future, I will remember this. We smoked, too, and it still sorta smells like that.
I'm not sure if I'm being WINGDING.
The conflict playing out in my head as I slip out of my body is that he did ask, but I do feel mislead, but I guess I did agree to go to the hot springs, but I do not want to be here anymore.
I am not a child, but I am still a Baby Gay. I suppose there are still lots of rules I do not know. Is this one of them?
The difference in our ages is not unheard of. It seems like this happens to a lot of young men I've read about. There's that word, "happens," though. This is tricky to write about.
He says he is a healer, and over the course of his life people have taken advantage of that, like white public school teachers.
We are both from New York, although he was there before either of my parents ever were.
I had thought he was much younger, and he does still sort of have an ageless, msytical quality, something sort of natural. I don't want to say supernatural. His hands are rough, underneath softness, or the other way around, perhaps.
I am spiritually very light, he tells me earlier, walking from the waterfall. I voice my skepticism.
I am looking out the window, still thinking about our lightness and darkness when voices sound outside the closed door. We get up, fast, both of us, like we've been doing something that should be hidden.
We look for a moment like Linus and Charlie Brown leaning on the old windowsill and I open my mouth and he's ducked out of frame. I am looking out the window at the people and he says something I've tried, successfully, not to remember, something murky, like
We haven't WINGDING yet,
and I feel a warmth in my WINGDING that feels a little like a tea stain. I can call this feeling back up at will, and I do, in the coming months, just by thinking about it. My eyes widen and I shiver.
He didn't ask to do that, I think,
He didn't ask, although there is an inevitability, a feeling of a snowball rolling downhill, that I think both of us must feel, that comes up, and we stop, and I imagine a bag of black tea dissipating in a cup of water.
This is a year ago, now. Why now?
Now we walk back down the mountain, passing other travelers, speaking differently as on the way up, and I decide I'm leaving the hostel with the spooky blood on the wall. Later, when I recover my phone from the glove compartment to pay for gas, he remarks,
You're the first person
to do so, which gives me a strange feeling about all this. ↩
2. It's possible I've trained a disassociative response to intimacy into my body, for reasons that may become clear later, now that I'm in therapy.
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3. Or a chronic wasting disease.
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4. I decide to start writing some things in the back of my journal, the things I can't stop thinking about. Most of them are very
5. See: Lyman.
↩
6. See: In a dream, my eyes are glued to the film of my life. In a dream I'm glued to the seat watching the film. I'm turning my head and I'm looking at who's next to me, watching a film on the back of the seat of who's watching their film in front of us. The lights are coming on.
↩
8. I have been thinking about things lately that I once thought were comfortably in the realm of the past. Whether this is the result of therapeutic introspection, a light tolerance break, or my own recent obsessiveness, I don't know. They're weird things, like
9. A dream I have been having for many years.
We're on the floor, in a row, like packaged hotdogs.
This is always the mechanism that starts the dream. Sometimes walking the meat aisle at the supermarket stirs it back up. I have stopped eating meat.
We're all kids, some of us newly high, some of us more used to it. I am not yet used to it. My head will throb tomorrow on the long walk back to my mom's house, and I will throw up a couple times at the end of it. Right now music sounds the best it's ever sounded, spinning at a low hum on a father's turntable, in the dark.
I savor the words I don't remember. Maybe I only savor them in hindsight. I take notes in my head about the record, thinking about how I'd review it. I think about music, writing, my friends, movies, just like this, until at some point it's quiet.
This memory is my first WINGDING.
It's just me and the echoes in my brain for some amount of time. It must be late. My skin is scratchy, smooth, like hairy Jell-O. It's less hairy than it is now. Something touches me.
Somebody is touching me!
I'm nestled in between WING and DING. They're visiting together, from out of town. I don't like to sleep on the outside.
They're perpetually jealous of each other, and they both talk to me about it on the phone. My teenage brain wants to know if they've ever kissed. I feel something on my left, so it's not WING. She made me promise DING and I would never date. My internal monologue babbles right over this.
I feel someone.
A warm someone, rubbing against me. What time is it? Is everyone besides us asleep?
I slowly turn to face this someone, her. What is happening? Warm breath, nervous feeling. Hard ground. WINGDING
If something's happening, it's vaguely wrong, but I feel like some kind of hero. I've heard somewhere nervous and excited are the same thing.
This is the sort of thing I'd journal about, if I could ever journal consistently. Drugs, adult stuff, WINGDING... you know! Drama! I resolve to start writing again after this.
This is the sort of thing I dream about.
I'm not sure if I should touch her back. I could pretend I'm asleep, my eyes are closed. We've entered a dance, one I have to learn if I want to... I want to... what?
What are we doing? Are we doing it?
I waver in and out of my body and time. I slip in and out of sync with her. I bring my lips to hers, our bodies meet. I'm awake and I'm asleep, I'm in a dream, we pitch forward, and I think I'll throw up. I'm partner and parting.
She becomes rigid.
My eyes open.
Her eyes open.
I wake up.
She wakes up.
I had a dream I was out of my body, watching from above as something happened.
I watched a confused girl wake up, startled. I watched a confused boy be pushed off of her.
I watched two children die. I watched their limp, breathless bodies, for a moment.
I watched as they sat up, reanimated, darkly reflected in the whites of each other's eyes.
I watched, helpless, as they went down to the basement.
I keep having this dream where I'm laying flat on my back, and I can't move. And I'm watching myself from above. I'm infected with something.
And I wake up with the tears of a child in my eyes, who's still scared of monsters.
↩