Comment Policy Announcement

Hello! Here is a picture of my breakfast:

German bread is so good. Also German jam. The peanut butter is American.

Now that that's out of the way: it has come to my attention that some readers of this blog wish to comment but are unable to because they do not have blogger accounts and don't want to set one up. So, in the interest of getting feedback from a wider range of my readership, I have adjusted the comment policy to allow anyone to comment.

All I ask is this: please put your name on your comment! There is a drop-down menu by the comments where you can select "Name/URL" and type in your name, or you can just select "Anonymous" and include your name in the text of your comment. I just wanna know who you are!


Now: Dream Journal!

I dream almost every night here in Berlin. Last night I had a double-whammy of especially bizarre nocturnal visions, and they stuck with me when I woke up. As is my habit on this blog, I include a couple photos (all from Hamburg, as it turns out) to lighten things up.

The Garbage Room bar. The great thing about copyright infringement is you can show Oscar the Grouch smoking the big smelly cigars you know he was always puffing away on off-camera. All that's really missing is like a tallboy of cheap malt liquor.

Last night I dreamed that I was walking around Berlin with my friend Phil and checking out this extensive system of canals. (Berlin does have a few canals--very filthy, flowing slowly through concrete trenches, all little manmade offshoots of Berlin's crappy little river, the Spree--but these dream canals represented a much more extensive, city-on-stilts sort of ordeal.) There is a big boat that has like a system of underwater pens or cages attached to its hull, and inside these pens there is a wide variety of sharks, and for some reason these sharks are released from time to time. The water is crystal clear so I can see all of this very well. The sharks are cartoonish and anthropomorphized, like kind of bulbous and very expressive, though they still have those hard, black eyes. I show one shark a stuffed penguin I have with me and it gets very excited and starts swimming in tight little circles.

"Nichts" means "nothing" and this man is sawing himself in half neatly down the middle.

The second dream was one of those journey dreams, where you start off with some kind of destination in mind but you never get there, and the journey just gets more and more involved as you go along. Oftentimes these are anxiety dreams for me--I am late, I can't get there, where am I, I am late--but this one was much more laid back. From what I recall, a group of friends and I are at a restaurant or a bar in Berlin and we decide to take a trip to the aquarium. (Again with the sea life.) I get into the back seat of a car that is bigger on the inside than on the outside, like 8 people fit comfortably in the back. (That definitely happened in Harry Potter.) We start driving at night, in the city, in a sedan, and gradually it is daytime and we are riding through a mountainous forest road on a triple-long flatbed big rig truck. My friend Elliott is driving and making all of these impossible turns across narrow bridges and around a lot of mountain road construction. Sometimes I get an overhead view, like I'm in a helicopter, and I can see the truck slithering and sliding through the trees. My friend Sam Walker is in the front seat wearing a knit sweater that looks like one of the uniforms from Star Trek. Many more people are sort of sprawled across the flatbeds. Very weird, oddly peaceful.

This was a very well-lit roller coaster. Also pretty impressively large for a carnival of this size.

Strange, no? Feel free to leave your interpretations in the comments.

I had another bicycle adventure yesterday and took some neat photos, but describing those dreams has taken the literary mickey out of me. Will start a new post tonight, shoot to publish tomorrow.