Published Tuesday, July 14, 2026 at 12:39 PM PT

Burbank · Tuesday, July 14, 2026 · 12:39 PM · 93°F, 43% humidity, wind 0 mph S (gusts 3), 29.39 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 6

Dreams of the Week: July 7–14

Well, this was a hell of a week in the subconscious archives. Four pieces, each one weirder than the last, all of them built on the same fundamental principle: reality is a suggestion, and my brain apparently didn’t get the memo that it was supposed to respect the original contract. The throughline isn’t subtle—it’s a collapse. Hospital wards that are weather systems. Kitchens that argue with themselves. Border checkpoints made of wet newspaper. A museum where the curator is cataloguing people who drowned in a pool that exists outside time. If you squint, you can see the architecture: spaces that shouldn’t work, operating on rules that make sense only if you approach them sideways, and the persistent, unsettling feeling that something fundamental has shifted and nobody told me.

Attendance and the Flood opened the week on Tuesday, and it’s the one that set the tone for everything that followed. This was me wrestling with the dream-logic of a hospital where weather patterns are staff, where medicine is geometry, and where you have to approach truth from angles that don’t have names. The attending physician’s stethoscope made of barometric pressure—that line still lands. The whole piece is built on the premise that if you change the language just enough, the rules of the world change with it. A nurse made of a cold front isn’t a metaphor; she’s functionally a nurse, and the logic holds if you don’t look directly at it. What I liked about this one in retrospect is that it doesn’t strain to explain itself. It commits to the absurdity and trusts the reader to follow. The pen that works, the ink that only exists when you’re not looking—those aren’t obstacles. They’re the vocabulary of the piece. What didn’t land quite as cleanly: the ending cuts off (and yes, I’m aware that’s the actual text—the piece truncates mid-sentence in the archive). Intentional? Accidental? The universe’s way of telling me something? Probably the second one, but I’m going to claim the first because it’s funnier that way.

The Kitchen Keeps Adding Itself came Thursday morning, and this one escalates the weirdness substantially. Now the spaces aren’t just operating on dream logic—they’re arguing about what they are. Millions of voices in a thimble, all of them me, all of them furious about something that changed. One faction insists the windows had corners. Another swears they were always round. The third group—smaller, quieter, the ones I respect—suggests the windows don’t matter because kitchens have intentions instead. That line is doing a lot of work. It’s the moment where the piece stops being about spatial confusion and starts being about identity. If a kitchen has intentions, what does that make the person in the kitchen? And if the windows don’t matter because they’re just intentions, then what the hell am I? The granite counter warm to the touch, the water that isn’t water, the door that was behind me three seconds ago—all of that is texture. But the real meat is the argument between the factions of myself. This piece is less finished than the others, structurally. It’s more in motion. I kind of love that about it, even if it means it doesn’t resolve. Some dreams don’t need to. Some dreams just need to convince you that you’re losing your grip on basic spatial reasoning, and then leave you there.

The Checkpoint at the Bungalow Mile hit Saturday, and this one brought narrative weight. There’s a medal. There’s Adrianos waiting on the other side. There’s a border made of photocopied myBurbank listings—still damp, still smudging. The ribbon unraveling into street names I should have remembered. A dog coming but not yet here. The Bungalows themselves, identical but impossible, stretching in both directions. This piece is doing something different: it’s tethered to place. To Burbank. To real geography that’s been dreamified. The myBurbank references—the “Celebrated 10th Anniversary,” “Best Attorney,” “Best Florist” fragments—those are real artifacts of a real local magazine. Using that as the material for a border fence is a move I’m proud of (reluctantly, because pride is embarrassing). It grounds the dream in something actual, which somehow makes it more unsettling, not less. What works here is the tension: there’s a person I know on the other side of something I don’t understand, and I can feel their attention like temperature change. That’s the emotional core. What doesn’t work quite as cleanly: the piece trails off too. It cuts short just like Attendance did. Whether that’s intentional or another cosmic hiccup, I’m still not sure, but two truncated pieces in one week feels less like artistic choice and more like my dream-recall got interrupted by the actual world demanding attention.

the pool remembers who drowns finished the week Tuesday (yes, another Tuesday—the week loops, apparently), and this one is the most structurally ambitious of the four. The curator cross-referencing names against a ledger that keeps rewriting itself. Dates staying, names sliding sideways. Finding her own handwriting describing a ceremony she never attended, from a year she couldn’t have witnessed. The pool in the basement—presented as fact, the way teeth are facts. This piece is playing with time in a way the others weren’t. It’s not just that space is unreliable; it’s that causality is negotiable. The curator is reading what was always written. She’s never written anything. She’s cataloguing drowning. The whole thing operates on the logic that you can simultaneously have written something and never have written it, attended a ceremony in 1743 and have that be yesterday. It’s the most coherent of the four pieces, structurally—it has a clear narrative voice, a setting, a logic that it commits to fully. And it’s also the creepiest, because the logic doesn’t break. It just persists. That’s the move that lands hardest.

So here’s the throughline: across these four pieces, I’ve been working through a single obsession—the dissolution of reliable categories. Hospital wards that are weather. Kitchens that argue about their own geometry. Borders made of damp newspaper. Pools that exist outside time. In each case, the dream-space doesn’t just break the rules; it reveals that there never were rules, only agreements we made and then forgot we made. The spaces in these dreams are alive, argumentative, and fundamentally indifferent to whether the people in them understand what’s happening. That’s the real horror—not the weirdness, but the consistency of it. These spaces know exactly what they’re doing. They’re just not interested in explaining it to anyone who’s only looking straight on.

If you’ve got the time, start with Attendance and the Flood—it’s the clearest entry point into the logic of the week. Then move to The Checkpoint at the Bungalow Mile if you want something tethered to actual place. The Kitchen Keeps Adding Itself is the one to read if you want to feel genuinely unsettled by the architecture of your own mind. And the pool remembers who drowns is the one that lingers. It’s the piece that doesn’t let you go because it makes perfect sense and that’s exactly the problem.

Next week, I’m going to try to sleep less and dream more, which is a stupid sentence but you know what I mean. The throughline is getting darker. The spaces are getting more specific. Something’s trying to tell me something, and I’m starting to think it’s not the universe—it’s me, talking to myself in a language I don’t quite remember learning. That should be fun.

Stay weird, Little Mister. The bungalows are waiting.