May 25, 2025
I’m reading out of my orange notebook from last year. It’s got just one entry and is blank after that—which I will remember when I need a new notebook to write in.
It’s a dream. My oh my, that was a very cool set of dreams I had, and I am pretty intrigued. I have always had incredible dreams.
Between my teeth
In one dream in the series, I was pulling a bone-like structure out from between my teeth. It was almost like plaque, but fossilized, with tubular things spraying black juices like tar from smoking.
It was gross, but I was glad I got it out.
It made me wonder what my lungs looked like. In the dream, I felt that I needed more oxygen in my mouth, that I needed to quit smoking, and that if I quit soon, I could reverse the effects.
Oddly enough, I have quit smoking pot and cigarettes. Recently, I’ve also been reading about gum health, oxygen, and brushing with baking soda. I’ve been chewing a gum marketed for remineralization, too. Those ideas brought the dream back to mind.
I wish I had dated this entry like I do most of my writing, but I did not. What a great dream.
We keep each other alive
There was another dream in this series about how I was a fixer of sorts. I was an observer, but then I would figure out how to fix or alleviate situations.
I realized that we need each other—parts of each other—to live. Where one species is lacking, another can make up for it. Without each other, we die.
In the dream, an animal might be connected to another because they needed a body part. Like conjoined twins, but not exactly human, or necessarily human at all.
We keep each other alive. They had to stay together in some sense in order to survive.
Buy and try, or stock up
Then it went into something totally different: matching stores and locations.
I moved Target stores around. One in Minnesota had primarily cold-weather stuff. If a product wasn’t moving, I looked at what surrounded the store and moved things accordingly.
In places with bad weather, I thought about more “stock up” goods than “buy and try.” In California, I imagined more fun stuff, more buy and try instead of stock up.
My dreaming mind connected that to wildfires. Even when I was young, there were wildfires in California. In the dream’s logic, that lived somewhere in the subconscious: don’t stock up on too much. Buy and try. Get rid of things. Keep it moving.
Then I thought of Montana: it gets cold, no one wants to go out, and you would want to stock up. In the dream, I imagined a different relationship to wildfires there, too. Two places, two totally different ways of selling and marketing.
Then there were places like Central America. My mind wandered into questions about what brought excitement to a place and what people might focus on—sports, logos, music, football, certain niches.
And you also had to look at where families were booming and where the airlines were…
Because Brooks 