The Stoning Scene

Two nights of productive, work-adjacent dreams, apparently.

The night before last: I was a college student again. Big social events, parties, the whole texture of that life — and then suddenly there was a Spanish final I was completely unprepared for. Standing in the hallway doing the math of how badly this is going to go. Classic. I wish dream-me had studied more lol.

Last night's were more — sprawling. A lot of scenes. I'm going to try to catch as many as I can before they slip.

It opened somewhere mafia-flavored: a heist, a takeover. Someone we all thought was cool — the "cool fool" — who ended up just taking the car. The kind of betrayal that made sense in hindsight. Then a pivot: family travel. The tone shifted completely, became warmer, looser.

Somewhere in there was what I can only describe as an Argentina feeling — hard to pin down but very present. The cast felt like a One Piece crew. One character resembled Zoro, and the arc was about him standing against injustice — he picked a fight specifically to defend some queer guys who were being targeted. It ended with him publicly stoned. Modern setting: skyscrapers, the whole city watching. The homophobic people were wearing masks and singing — an actual song, performed, to shame the gays. That image is the one that stayed.

But there were so many other scenes. The train scene. The rain scene. One at grandma's place. The harbor island tree. One where I was talking to Jordan about nonsense — I was very animated, trying to explain why communication and precision matter, doing this whole demonstration with "remember what I said in the very first question — exactly how many birds are there? There are 5 birds," and Jordan was just... entertaining me. Fully playing along. That one made me smile when I woke up.

One with my sister. A brief one with Matt — his family owned this open courtyard restaurant near the harbor island. And then the whole dream wound down by rewinding, history going backwards to see what that place looked like in the 1920s or so. The stoning scene had been modern. The rewind was slow. Strange way to end.

Jordan's been nudging me to work more. The unprepared-for-exams dream makes sense — at least that part I can explain. I'm less sure what the rest of it is tracking.