mx. tozka writes

I love finding post box toppers!

📍 Chichester, United Kingdom - March 2026

I used to have very vivid, memorable dreams all through my early 30s-- I'd wake up the next morning and have tons to write about in my dream journal. And then some time in the last 5 years I stopped being able to remember my dreams except MAYBE once a month, and even then it's not as detailed as it used to be.

I'm assuming there's a correlation between starting to travel full-time and having other things to focus on than my own internal life, but maybe also there's some aging thing happening? As my brain changes, so too do my dreams? Not sure.

Sooooo, since I can make polls and I'm nosy AF, here's one for y'all to answer:

( Under here )

Feel free to share this around with friends so they can vote, too. It's anonymous, though you do have to be registered on DW to vote.

And if you have tips for remembering your dreams, please share them in the comments!

This is one of those niche 90s songs that if you missed it when it first came out you probably haven't heard it since then-- I'd still be in the dark, myself, except it was played on BBC Radio 2 the other day before an interview with Baz Luhrmann and it was so weird I had to look it up on Wikipedia and then listen to it again a few more times.

Crossposted to onesongaday

First book: Adventure in Zanskar by Amy Edelstein, a travel memoir with a heavy Buddhist spirituality slant, about a 20-something hiking a mountain range in far-north India in the 1980s.

I actually really enjoyed reading this; I generally enjoy travel memoirs of women doing adventurous things PLUS I love travel memoirs that take place before cell phones. That, plus the author really had a great time on her trip and loved meeting local people, and the introspection stuff that's typical of a 20-something trying to figure out what to do with her life wasn't as annoying as it might've been because it was tempered with Buddhist philosophies.

Downside is she falls heavily into the "things are so much better for this primitive uneducated society because they don't have technology or money" mindset which is very surface-level, tbh. Maybe they're truly happy, maybe they're just showing you, an outsider, a positive face.

Second book: Peregrinations of a Pariah by Flora Tristan, translated by Jean Hawkes, another travel memoir but this time from the 1800s. It's basically about a French woman traveling to Peru to try and get some family inheritance, and then getting caught in a civil war.

She's an excellent writer (and the translator did a great job) but she definitely has the old-school traveler mindset of "everything but my home country is horrible"-- she hates the food, the people, the location, etc. Her personality is quite funny, though; she kept saying she could run the country if only she could find the right man to partner with, but she couldn't even convince her miserly uncle to part with any money for the 9+ months she lived with him. Ha!

Civil war coverage was a slog and took up a good 1/3 of the book-- which was edited down even more from the original, actually-- and while it was interesting to read about 1800s Peru the fact that the author hated nearly everything about it made for rough reading. I WOULD read her other books, though, one of which is about traveling to England (The London Journal of Flora Tristan, 1842) and another about labor reform in France (not sure if this was translated into English).

Welcome back to another Community Thursday! Original Community Thursday info here, if you're interested and want to participate, too.

Posted/Commented

• Rec'd a Star Wars fic for fancake's January theme of "crack treated seriously"
• Also voted for next month's theme in fancake

New-to-me Comms

• vkotd -- Visual Kei of the day! A song-sharing comm focused on Japanese rock bands
• fanmix_monthly -- recently-opened fanmix community
• pkmnkinkmeme -- a new Pokemon Kink Meme comm!

Interesting Comm Posts

• goals_on_dw is doing a slightly more formal Community Thursdays thing this year