an oddity of my recent dreams is that i see full names of human beings, names that are new to me or which mean nothing to me. Miguel Figueroa rose up from the phantasmagorica last week, a name which seems to be assigned to a wide range of human beings. I can’t remember the other name at this moment, the name from last night’s dream, but it was also hispanic-sounding. i wrote that name down but now i can’t think of it. the dream itself was strange: this mystery person of the fully-spelled-out name was in my bedroom to make a cash withdrawal from my RAID. he got the money, and left his receipt on the floor. the receipt had his full name printed in large letters. Wish I could think of the name now, but I looked it up and found no one on the public Intertubes by that name, though both the first and last names are common enough.
after he made the cash withdrawal from my RAID (an impossibility, by the way), it appeared that something was amiss with the hardware, and its connection to my brain. there was a wireless connection between the RAID and my brain, a connection which powered the ATM transactions and made them possible. The connection buurned a wire, or something, because it was burning inside my brain. Before finding the way out of the dream by forcing mnyself awake i thought my head was aflame inside, and the discomfort would lead to visible burn marks around my eyes and ears.
not wanting to spontaneously human-combust i woke up, screaming good and loud, either in an attempt to scare away the RAID or get the guy who made the cash withdrawal from the RAID to come back and clean up after his messy transaction.
…..
the matter of these full names rising up from my dreams is somehat puzzling, and even mysterious, even to one such as myself, who regards dreams as garbage of the day, and not foreshadowings or omens.
my mother spoke for years about a full name, and a mysterious word, which appeared in a couple of her dreams during the 1970s. the dreams were nothing except for the words, and those words were:
VOLUSIA
and
PALMER STILES
at the time she had no idea what Volusia meant, but the word rose up to haunt us all after our father left us and, after a series of apartments and temporary living arrangements, he wound up spending the last 30+ years of his life in Volusia County, Florida. he may have known about mother’s dream, if not before he moved there then certainly she would have mentioned it to him after. she would have mentioned how odd it was that this word had floated in her conscious mind for about 15 years, a word unknown to her and (evidently) she never looked it up. or if she did look it up she may have found that Volusia was a name of a county in Florida, but she probably dismissed that as meaningful when what she really wanted to know was what the word *meant*.
i do not know what it means, but i felt that same sense of transcendental dread when i flew to Daytona Beach in 2003, to meet dad’s estate attorneys and get a handle on the nature of the trust. the first clear memory i have of the meeting was when the lawyers plopped a binder full of materials on the desk, and among other words which appeared on the cover of that binder was the word VOLUSIA, therewith used in reference to the attorney’s place of practice. i remembered my mother’s dream, the strangeness of the word, and her comments about the word appearing in her dreamspace over a decade before any of us had reason to know of it.
the other words which rose up cyrystal clear but with equal mystery was the name PALMER STILES. this connectoin took longer to make, but sometime in the late 1990s i discovered that someone named Palmer Stiles had some connection to the auto racing scene in Daytona and other places. what made the Palmer Stiles/Daytona connection especially odd was that it appears this individual may not even have been born yet when the name appeare din my mother’s dream. Or, perhaps, his name surfaced in her mind when Palmer Stiles was born. He is about 36 now.
In grade school I wrote stories in which Palmer Stiles was the protagonist. The name was always in my mind as a child, because my mother so frequently mentioned it as a puzzlingly clear full name that appeared from nowhere to headline a dream.
i was thinking about full names recently, in the context of public life, and drive-by recognition of online nemeses.
On many apartment buildings around here you will see listings of the full names and apartment numbers of every resident therein. the US Postal Service requires that names be posted on individual mailboxes for mail to be delivered therein, but i know not what bit of bureaucracy mandates that the full names of every resident of an apartment building be available for casual public inspection.
it was in this spirit of happenstance that i happened past a small apartment building on which was posted the full names of at least one human being per each apartment. one of those names i recognized as an Internet troll who masturbated all over online communities and comment boards with useless vitriol and an anger that was only boring.
i would never have sought this person out by picking up a phone book or otherwise trying to track them down to their street address, but the incidental manner in which this oaf’s domicile was made known to me added to the drama, to the plot, to the ways in which this individual’s vulnerabilites (already made obvious by his confrontationless confrontations) undercut his delusions of grandeur. i could throw stones at his window whilst he spewed stupidity into a chat room, or i could print out his flamebait troll posts and wipe my ass with them, leave the asswipings on his doorstep, all without a digital trace of having stalked his home location.
i think these apartment-building-front listings of residents therein will disappear soon. some scenario like the aforementioned will occur, a random attack or stalking based on either accurate or mistaken identity from a name seen on an apartment building façadel, connected to the mental tangle of idiotic Internet trolling, and leading to real-world violence.
haha, i should write a short story about this, using Palmer Stiles as the name recognized on the apartment building… the VolusiaApartment Building.
it is a serviceable story idea.
i had a similarly serviceable story idea via a dream from a few months ago. that story was unpleasant at first, and it still is, but it does not concern me any more, its apparently autobiographical dysfunctions.
…..
i got a new oven yesterday. yay. now i need a new kitchen table. i got a Monitor Stand, which is basically a riser with a drawer, and it is surprisingly hungry at gobbling up desktop detritus — in particular my unscanned receipts, which tend to pile up uglily.
now i am on the hunt for another monitor stand, for the other monitor, and for a printer stand. yeah. home office furnishings! yeah!
i have been lightly miffed to shop for one of those fancypants rolltop desks with a billion drawers and other cool things, only to find that said desks are simply not suited for modern use. i don’t know how ttthat style of desk could be adapted to thhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
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