after nearly two decades of skating i still find myself having skate dreams all the time.
i had a really strange one last night actually, in which i wasn't the actual person skating, for once - or maybe i had been at some point, but at the point i remember, i was only being a passive pile checking instagram (thereby also marking the first time i remember social media popping up in my dreams ; maybe a sign i should take a break from those), scrolling through everybody's skate clips in my feed. and out of the blue i stumble upon this fucking insane minute-long edit of dudes all skating the same plaza, but that plaza was the sketchiest, shittiest spot you could think of - to the point where it wouldn't even qualify as skatable in real life (and trust me, i have low standards in that department). floor was a mix of unpolished, rough red bricks and patterns of random rugged tiles, half of which were broken, literally blown out, and there also was this weird mix of a 2-block, double set and planter which looked just as terrible. and the dudes in the clips (locals ?) were stringing together insanely fast lines there, magically avoiding all the holes and cracks and traps my brain was conceiving with effervescent malice - it looked like a brand new style of skating. one of the guys kept doing the sketchiest 360 nollies out of a frontside grinder on the planter thing at some point, hauling ass, shattering debris. funniest part of the whole thing though was the instagram caption of the clip, for not once did it ever mention anything extraordinary about the state of the spot or how uniquely the guys were skating - instead it was something generic along the lines of, "@averagedude @johnsmith @joemcfuckingdoe random plaza routine. fun times ! :cameraemoji:'. overall effect was quite similar to the jacob harris atlantic drift edit at the st. paul cathedral, just 100 times fiercer, if that's even conceivable. and the vibe felt like an adrenalin vid. anyway, waking up this morning i actually wasn't quite certain whether or not i had dreamed it all up (i regularly have that with skate stuff), but i would have loved to be able to dig it up and watch it again.
i've learned tricks in my dreams before successfully applying them to real life, too. most notable one was nollie b/s lipslide shove-it on ledges a long time ago (can't even do them anymore). i had just learned nollie b/s lips in real life then (2008 ?), but the thought of adding a shove-it out really had never even occured to me, it was a completely foreign idea, then i had a dream in which i was doing one by accident and of course, when i tried them the next day, i could do them. the spontaneity of the thought process behind this one actually intrigued - as well as confused - me for the longest time.
another one - not long after watching questionable for the first time as a kid, i caught that dream where i could flip all kinds of wild shit on flat on the road in front of my parents' house - sketchy varial kickflip late backside double whatever and everything i felt like on command - but could never actually land the trick, always missing landing on the board by an inch, or slipping out... i remember it feeling so frustrating. probably the skate equivalent to the typical little kid nightmare where some type of monstruousity is coming after you, yet your legs keep giving away for some reason.
yet another one, when i was a kid, our local little meet-up spot & wannabe plaza became a bust, complete with agro neighbors and cops showing up several times a day, to the point where they even set up a surveillance camera up on the roof of one of the small buildings nearby, just to watch for any potential skaters, which i thought was a really cheap, low blow. not long after that, i had a dream in which i was somehow being confronted for skating that spot, and upon pursuing the same old mindless arguing routine, at some point the person confronting me mentions surveillance cameras on the roof so i look up, and sure enough, 40+ surveillance cameras of different styles, sizes, shapes and forms are lined up all alongside the edge of the top of the building, pointed at me ; a scene which obviously wouldn't be complete without a decorative extra such as a shitload of random antennas & other tech-looking features in the background, just sitting there. that woke me up, and the shame of having dreamed up something so stupid haunted me for a while after that.
finally, my best and favorite skate dream ever was when i was around 17, 18. roll forever had just come out and out of the blue, on one shitty rainy week night i caught the dream that i was having a full-on day-long session at my favorite spots downtown, flowing casually for what felt like hours, occasionally hitting random 5-feet-high wallies on straight walls - and everything, everything i was doing in that hell of a dream was perfectly orchestrated to the song in darrell stanton's roll forever part. i didn't even like darrell stanton all that much, but i guess my brain had a thing with that blackalicious track, so much that it kept flawlessly reciting me the tune like a thousand times on repeat, all the while my dream skating certainly wasn't missing a beat. i remember going to class in the rain at 7 the next morning, feeling as though my body had taken the abuse of an actual, physical skate session (i could definitely feel a comparable endorphins rush, despite not having skated in days). my mind had definitely been sessionning, the song remained stuck in my head for ages and to this day, 'as the world turns' still is on my mp3 player, just like it's been on every player i've had since, and most everytime i go to sleep, part of me always kind of wishes i could have this sort of dream again.
oh and there isn't one girl i have slept with that i haven't also dream kickflipped (the jolt-out-of-sleep-whilst-kicking-a-preferably-inanimate-usually-hard-object kind), in the shins or worse. i even remember having to move my bed away from my wall when i was around 13, 14, for otherwise i would keep waking myself up stubbing my toes, unconsciously slamming my right foot (i'm goofy) into said wall as soon as the early hours of the morning, several times a week, due to my first desperate attempts of the forementioned dream kickflip - which were probably mobbed, too. but that really doesn't beat the backside boneless twist on that common phenomenon someone else just reported experiencing above this wall of text
tldr : koichiro uehara & julien stranger's offspring meet a post-apocalyptic EMB-styled spot with holes everywhere in it, surveillance cameras galore, and darrell stanton
Topic: Skate dreams are made of this, who am I to disagree? (Read 36988 times)