(Entered in paper journal at 8:15 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I walked into a library. The library was tall, with a sloping ceiling. It was like a small community library: it was one story tall, with an open feeling, with some short bookshelves, studying tables, and a back area of taller bookshelves.
I walked into a room in a small hallway to my left. The room either was or was set up to be like a movie theater. There were around fifty people sitting in the room. The movie had already started. It was The Darjeeling Limited. There was no sound. The movie was about halfway through.
As the movie neared the end, most of the audience cleared out. The lights may also have turned on in the room. Now, before the movie had even ended, it was turned off at the image of something like a pink sea-animal or a pink skirt with little, sphere-like tassels. Some of the audience was leaving by an upward stairwell to my right.
I stood up and walked back into the main room of the library. I was going to complain about the movie having been shut off before it had finished. Before I'd gone into the movie room, the library's checkout counter had been along the left wall, where the hallway into the room was. Now the checkout and customer service center were at the front of the room.
I tried to speak with a couple people (one of them a woman) at the counter. But nobody would listen to me. Finally I spoke with a woman who sat at a low desk. The woman was typing at an old, green-screened computer. I made my complaint to the woman.
Suddenly I was sitting down before a long-haired, bearded man. The man sat in a tall swivel-chair. I sat in a low chair. The man wore square eyeglasses, and his hairline had receded quite a bit from his forehead. He might also have alternately been an overweight man with short, grey hair and a round, tan face.
I had gone from making my complaint to trying to tell the man when the movie had been turned off. The man asked if it hadn't been at the very end of the movie. Then he asked if it hadn't been really early on. I told the man no both times.
I now tried to explain the scene. At first I started to say, "Do you remember when Bill Murray was in a Speedo?" But I realized that that sounded funny, and not like the image I had in my mind (which was of Billy Murray in his blue diving suit, which is called a Speedo in The Life Aquatic, I'm pretty sure).
I then said, "Do you remember the scene where Bill Murray is standing out remembering the plane crash? I now had an image of a tall, flatly mounded, wave-soaked rock under a blue sky. I said, "That was where Bill Murray's" (wife? mother?) died and Bill Murray had to learn to live on his own."
As I tried to explain this, the man (at this point the version of the man with short, grey hair) kept on interjecting roundly, like he was trying to one-up me on movie knowledge, saying how much he enjoyed this or that detail of the scene or this or that following scene of the movie.
I kept trying to redirect the man to the point I was speaking about. But now he (now the long-haired version of the man) was asking me exactly how and when I'd come into the movie theater. I tried to explain to the man how I'd wanted to see the movie for the previous few days, but how on this day I'd gotten sidetracked by some reading I was doing at a cafe across the street.
I could now see the cafe, like I was looking into the windows from the street as I would see them as approaching the sidewalk corner. The cafe was in a nice town, on a clean street, at the top of a gentle slope. The cafe itself looked spacious, with a darkly decorated interior, very comfortable, moderately busy. I could then see myself, in the cafe, possibly sitting sideways in a chair or sitting at a table, reading from a white page, possibly tapping the page against my hand.
I tried to explain to the man that I was so interested in what I'd been reading that I'd had to finish it. I'd gotten into the movie late. (I could now see the scene I'd seen as I'd entered: a scene of the Adrien Brody character running in slow motion to catch a departing train.) I tried to explain all this to the man. But it wasn't quite getting through to him.
I now had to fill out a strange sheet of paper which supposedly had a bunch of fill-in-the-blank questions which would help the library pinpoint exactly what kind of offense had been committed, and exactly at what point in the movie it had been committed. All the "questions" had to do with very visual aspects and moments of the film.
But there were no blanks to fill in: the sheet (or sheets?) was (were) just a lot of three-line descriptions. I had to cross out the descriptions and re-write them correctly. But the more I did this, the less real my memory felt.
I started questioning whether I had actually gone into the movie at all. I realized that my experience in the movie theater had actually only been a dream. I wasn't even quite in the library anymore. I thought, I hope I didn't actually fill out that complaint form while I was at the library. I'd have a really bad reputation with the workers there if I'd complained about them because of a dream I'd had.
But now I thought about the whole experience. I realized that the cafe experience had also been a dram. I thought that was extremely interesting. I could remember my cafe experience very clearly. I could "feel" the time I'd spent there. I could even remember details about what I'd been reading.
I thought, How interesting that I remembered and felt all of that so well in a dream. But also, how interesting that I had such a "dually structured" (not exactly how I thought of it) dream, where I was in the cafe first and the movie theater next. I may also have thought that the role time played in my dream was very interesting in its realistic feeling of cause and effect, i.e. how I'd been late to the movie because I'd spent such a long time in the cafe.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
(4/4/09) empty psychiatric office; mae marsh in color and sound
(Entered in paper journal at 8:21 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I walked up an outside stairwell for a small apartment complex in a lonely, dirt parking lot. It was a sunny day. The complex had white siding in horizontal strips. The stairwell was white.
I walked into an apartment on the second floor. The first room was like a kitchen, though it didn't have much in it besides a counter. The floors and walls were white. They looked yellow in the sunlight. I may have seen "my backpack" somewhere.
I walked through a doorway to my left, into a room like a psychiatrist's visiting room, which was, like the kitchen, empty. The carpet was darkish blue and looked unkempt, worn down.
I was here to meet my psychiatrist A. But she wasn't here. I then remembered I was supposed to meet her here at 3:15 PM instead of our usual, later, time. I walked back into the kitchen and saw that A had left something like a business card that was also a letter.
The letter explained that A had left when she hadn't seen me. She'd had to leave. The letter also said something about my backpack, which I'd left here for some reason, like safety. The letter asked me to take my backpack home.
Dream #2
I was watching a "D.W. Griffith movie." One of Griffith's key actresses, possibly Mae Marsh, was walking through a long promenade and plaza, and also possibly along some beautiful, farm-like countryside full of floers. The sun took all different levels in the sky.
The film was in color, which surprised me. The color was realistic, but it felt applied, not colorized, but something more like an extreme version of a William Eggleston photo. It was all very beautiful, and Mae Marsh looked beautiful in color.
Mae Marsh was walking past something like covered booth-tables along the garden plaza. The booths seemed to be set into the stone of a cliff or hillside. Their tops would be exposed, but they were covered over with something like wicker mats. The light was the deep blue of evening. All the booths were candlelit, lighting Mae Marsh's face as she walked past them. Mae Marsh now had curly, black hair and a tan robe. She may also have carried a dark shawl with her.
Now the film took on sound. Mae Marsh's voice was lowish, musical, but slack, like Chloe Sevigny's voice. I thought of how many actors lost their careers when films began being produced in sound, because of their voices. I hoped that Mae Marsh's career hadn't been ruined. I didn't think her voice was spectacular, but I also didn't think it was awful.
Dream #1
I walked up an outside stairwell for a small apartment complex in a lonely, dirt parking lot. It was a sunny day. The complex had white siding in horizontal strips. The stairwell was white.
I walked into an apartment on the second floor. The first room was like a kitchen, though it didn't have much in it besides a counter. The floors and walls were white. They looked yellow in the sunlight. I may have seen "my backpack" somewhere.
I walked through a doorway to my left, into a room like a psychiatrist's visiting room, which was, like the kitchen, empty. The carpet was darkish blue and looked unkempt, worn down.
I was here to meet my psychiatrist A. But she wasn't here. I then remembered I was supposed to meet her here at 3:15 PM instead of our usual, later, time. I walked back into the kitchen and saw that A had left something like a business card that was also a letter.
The letter explained that A had left when she hadn't seen me. She'd had to leave. The letter also said something about my backpack, which I'd left here for some reason, like safety. The letter asked me to take my backpack home.
Dream #2
I was watching a "D.W. Griffith movie." One of Griffith's key actresses, possibly Mae Marsh, was walking through a long promenade and plaza, and also possibly along some beautiful, farm-like countryside full of floers. The sun took all different levels in the sky.
The film was in color, which surprised me. The color was realistic, but it felt applied, not colorized, but something more like an extreme version of a William Eggleston photo. It was all very beautiful, and Mae Marsh looked beautiful in color.
Mae Marsh was walking past something like covered booth-tables along the garden plaza. The booths seemed to be set into the stone of a cliff or hillside. Their tops would be exposed, but they were covered over with something like wicker mats. The light was the deep blue of evening. All the booths were candlelit, lighting Mae Marsh's face as she walked past them. Mae Marsh now had curly, black hair and a tan robe. She may also have carried a dark shawl with her.
Now the film took on sound. Mae Marsh's voice was lowish, musical, but slack, like Chloe Sevigny's voice. I thought of how many actors lost their careers when films began being produced in sound, because of their voices. I hoped that Mae Marsh's career hadn't been ruined. I didn't think her voice was spectacular, but I also didn't think it was awful.
(4/6/09) room 430; lost luggage; asking for a book
(Entered in paper journal at 8:10 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I was outside a large apartment complex. I had been sent out to get something for my mother. I was now trying to get back to the apartment as soon as possible. I ran to a glass door (like a hall-end entrance door at a hotel) and hit a buzzer button, probably buzzing my mom's apartment. My mom buzzed the door open.
I knew the room I was looking for was number 430. But I was in a hallway with rooms numbered in the 200s. The rooms all had their numbers engraved on large, oval, gold or brass plaques on the doors. I ran down this hallway to get to the hallway numbered in the 400s. I ran through the 300s hallway.
I thought I'd wasted time by coming in through the 200s hallway. I also wondered why my mother had let me into the 200s hallway instead of telling me to go to the correct hallway.
I now ran into a large atrium or lobby-like area. A few different hallways converged here. There were some little garden- or fountain-triangles set into raised brick-structures. The ceiling was glass, and gentle daylight flowed through. Some apartments stood within this area. I could see room 430 just beyond and between two garden triangles.
I saw my co-worker BT walk away from the apartment, as if he'd possibly just left the room. I didn't say anything to him -- I was too hurried. I approached the door.
Dream #2
I stood on a two-sided subway platform. I may have had a lot of baggage with me. A train pulled in on the other side of the platform. I suddenly realized this was the train I was supposed to catch. I ran across to catch the train. But I realized I had left all my baggage on the other side.
I was trapped in the train door, half turned out of it. The train doors opened. I ran to where my baggage had been. It wasn't there. I thought of it. It was now like another train had come on this side, and like my baggage had somehow gotten on that train.
I thought, Now I have nothing. There's no way I'll get all that stuff back. People have probably stolen it by now. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I now had nothing. I looked at my BlackBerry to try and figure something out.
A group of subway workers, black men and women, were joking about me, how stupid and lost I looked now that I had nothing, and how stupid I was for thinking that I'd get anything back. But they might also have been saying that if I looked serious or honest or skillful enough, they might help me. They may even have had my baggage, so that they would give me a piece back as I successively (not successfully) proved my identity.
I looked in my book bag to see if there was some way I could either get started back up in life without all my missing baggage or else prove my identity to the subway workers.
But now I thought, Wait -- I have my BlackBerry. I have my book bag. I have access to my money. I hae my identification. Everything else is just extra stuff I don't need. Why was I thinking I had nothing?
Dream #3
I was in an office space. I walked into an office, behind which my old co-worker IA stood. His desk was cluttered. Before the desk stood a woman who looked like my old boss JT, except that she looked thinner and had blonde streaks in her hair. IA was trying to impress JT professionally (he would have had no need to do so in waking life, JT being a supervisor over people other than IA) by showing her how organized he was.
I had come in to get a set of books like a mix between the FINRA Series 86 course material and some kind of large numbers-book like a book full of market data. I had done this, partly, to help IA n a project in a very important way. When IA handed me the book he was quick and curt, but also polite.
I walked out of the office, back into the larger office space, which was like a bunch of tall filing cabinets and short, wide work spaces that could be used for things like stapling documents together.
As soon as I left the office, I could hear IA talking bad about me to JT. IA said something like, "See the silly kinds of demands he makes? What kind of a person needs a book?"
I now realized either that I was finished with this book already or else that this wasn't the correct book. I knew I'd have to take the book back to IA right away so I could start getting the work done as soon as possible. But I was also afraid to go back into the office. I didn't want to give IA another reason to talk bad about me behind my back.
Dream #1
I was outside a large apartment complex. I had been sent out to get something for my mother. I was now trying to get back to the apartment as soon as possible. I ran to a glass door (like a hall-end entrance door at a hotel) and hit a buzzer button, probably buzzing my mom's apartment. My mom buzzed the door open.
I knew the room I was looking for was number 430. But I was in a hallway with rooms numbered in the 200s. The rooms all had their numbers engraved on large, oval, gold or brass plaques on the doors. I ran down this hallway to get to the hallway numbered in the 400s. I ran through the 300s hallway.
I thought I'd wasted time by coming in through the 200s hallway. I also wondered why my mother had let me into the 200s hallway instead of telling me to go to the correct hallway.
I now ran into a large atrium or lobby-like area. A few different hallways converged here. There were some little garden- or fountain-triangles set into raised brick-structures. The ceiling was glass, and gentle daylight flowed through. Some apartments stood within this area. I could see room 430 just beyond and between two garden triangles.
I saw my co-worker BT walk away from the apartment, as if he'd possibly just left the room. I didn't say anything to him -- I was too hurried. I approached the door.
Dream #2
I stood on a two-sided subway platform. I may have had a lot of baggage with me. A train pulled in on the other side of the platform. I suddenly realized this was the train I was supposed to catch. I ran across to catch the train. But I realized I had left all my baggage on the other side.
I was trapped in the train door, half turned out of it. The train doors opened. I ran to where my baggage had been. It wasn't there. I thought of it. It was now like another train had come on this side, and like my baggage had somehow gotten on that train.
I thought, Now I have nothing. There's no way I'll get all that stuff back. People have probably stolen it by now. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I now had nothing. I looked at my BlackBerry to try and figure something out.
A group of subway workers, black men and women, were joking about me, how stupid and lost I looked now that I had nothing, and how stupid I was for thinking that I'd get anything back. But they might also have been saying that if I looked serious or honest or skillful enough, they might help me. They may even have had my baggage, so that they would give me a piece back as I successively (not successfully) proved my identity.
I looked in my book bag to see if there was some way I could either get started back up in life without all my missing baggage or else prove my identity to the subway workers.
But now I thought, Wait -- I have my BlackBerry. I have my book bag. I have access to my money. I hae my identification. Everything else is just extra stuff I don't need. Why was I thinking I had nothing?
Dream #3
I was in an office space. I walked into an office, behind which my old co-worker IA stood. His desk was cluttered. Before the desk stood a woman who looked like my old boss JT, except that she looked thinner and had blonde streaks in her hair. IA was trying to impress JT professionally (he would have had no need to do so in waking life, JT being a supervisor over people other than IA) by showing her how organized he was.
I had come in to get a set of books like a mix between the FINRA Series 86 course material and some kind of large numbers-book like a book full of market data. I had done this, partly, to help IA n a project in a very important way. When IA handed me the book he was quick and curt, but also polite.
I walked out of the office, back into the larger office space, which was like a bunch of tall filing cabinets and short, wide work spaces that could be used for things like stapling documents together.
As soon as I left the office, I could hear IA talking bad about me to JT. IA said something like, "See the silly kinds of demands he makes? What kind of a person needs a book?"
I now realized either that I was finished with this book already or else that this wasn't the correct book. I knew I'd have to take the book back to IA right away so I could start getting the work done as soon as possible. But I was also afraid to go back into the office. I didn't want to give IA another reason to talk bad about me behind my back.
NOTEBOOK 20 - 4/11/09 to 5/30/09
This dream journal was finished in a relatively short period of time. Given the fact that there was, actually, an almost two-week gap in my dreams, from mid-April to the end of April, it would appear that the dream entries account for about four weeks of writing.
The gap in dreams was probably due to the fact that at that time I was really focused on actually writing out the first, handwritten, draft of my screenplay. It didn't take me long to write out the first draft of my screenplay.
The screenplay had, up to this time, taken a considerable amount of my time. I had plenty of time to give. I'd been let go from my job, for all intents an purposes, in January of 2009, though I was still on the company payroll until about the same time that I began this dream journal. I had been making decent money at my job. So I decided to take the time I needed to study for and write my screenplay.
My screenplay ended up going nowhere, unfortunately. I took it to a very good script coach, who didn't understand it. She said it was too poetic and philosophical to be a screenplay. She gave me a few pointers on what movies should be like. She gave me a list of mainstream movies to watch.
My script coach had me start from scratch, bringing in my screenplay to her bit by bit, as I rebuilt it. She never told me what to put in my new screenplay. She only told me when I was falling off the mainstream movie path.
But this process took a number of months. In that time, I ran out of the money I'd saved up. I took on a temporary job, which ended up being horrible. I left that job and had enough time to make one final push to finish my screenplay. I basically finished it right before I started my next permanent job at the end of 2009.
But my script coach wanted me to make two final changes to the script. One had to do with making the language of one character a bit more stately, the other had to do with giving a character a long monologue. For some reason these changes seemed like too much to me. I'm not really sure why that was. Besides, I was happy to have a permanent, serious job again. And I was eager to devote myself to it. So I left the final two changes, and, consequently, my whole screenplay, behind me and started my job.
So I guess this dream journal comprises the time that I finished my first wave of studying for my screenplay, finished receiving paychecks from the job I'd been laid off from, began writing the first version of my screenplay, and began typing and revising the first version of my screenplay.
Some of my dream journal writing occurred in Brooklyn and some in Manhattan. A lot of times, I'd wake up in the morning, walk from my house up to and across either the Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridge, then up to a cafe in Manhattan, where I'd write until the New York Public Library opened up. Then I'd go to the library and study. I thought I'd done this more often than not. But I saw a lot of Brooklyn entries while I was transcribing this journal. So I must have been in Brooklyn more often than I'd thought.
One interesting thing to see is that there isn't any mention of Sit & Wonder cafe, which ended up being one of my favorite cafes in New York City from 2009 to 2012. I didn't know about Sit & Wonder until June of 2009.
In June of 2009 I did a Habitat for Humanity event on Atlanic Avenue and Eastern Parkway. Before the event I stopped for some coffee at Sit & Wonder, which I'd never been to before. I liked it a lot, so I started going back. I eventually went there quite often.
But this must all have happened while I was not having dreams or entering my dreams in a journal -- or, as I'm starting to think nowadays, it may have happened while I was entering my dreams in a journal that I, in the middle of something like a nervous breakdown, threw my dream journal away. I'm not sure.
(4/11/09) graveyard/shooting; lone men and mobs
(Entered in paper journal at 8:31 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
It was daytime. I was in a car with my family. The blue sky was possibly webbed over with thin clouds, dimming the overall light. My mom was probably driving the car. We were driving down a mountainside road, into a small valley between two mountains. The valley was part of a range that extended far in the distance to my left. We were arguing about where we were, as if either this landscape wasn't a certain kind of landscape or as if we were heading in the wrong direction.
We now approached the valley. At the base of the slope opposite us were tallish headstones, all of orange-tan stone, mainly shapes like square columns with smaller spheres on top. I made some comment about this place being a cemetery, as if that proved we were or weren't in the right place.
We turned right and drove through the valley. I looked to the right (I had been in the backseat on the driver's side, but I wasn't quite there now) to see monumental, white headstones. There were gigantic heads springing out of columns like flowers; headstones of double-men, from the torso up, reaching out and looking forward; and other similar headstones, all in a style like an Art Deco imitation of Hellenistic sculpture.
The size and odd style of these headstones gave me an ominous feeling, as if where we were was a prophetic indication of something bad that would happen to us.
We now drove among headstones. We drove past (to our right) a tall headstone of greyish stone, like a pedestal displaying a large sculpture of a man, not unlike the torso-men, driving a chariot carried by two horses. The sculpture almost seemed alive to me.
Now, along both sides of our car, a group of "horses" ran up from behind us, then running ahead of us, turning a slight left, as we would, with the road, toward a tallish, arched, pale tan-orange stone gate.
The horses were pale slate colored, with a deepening grey on their sides, and with their sides dappled with black spots. Their legs were, however, long and spindly, so that their bodies stood perhaps ten feet above the ground. They were ridden or guided by a group of people who may have been wearing yellow and red silk clothing. I again thought that all of this was ominous.
There was now a view, of which I was, at first, not necessarily a part, of a man giving a speech to a large audience. The speech the man gave was like an Oscar acceptance speech. But it was also supposed to be like a political speech.
The man was about six feet tall, a little heavy, wide-faced, slightly balding on the forehead, but distinguished looking, with red hair, a short, red beard, and glasses. The man wore a nice, pale coffee colored suit with a cream colored shirt. Behind the man was a satiny, purple curtain. The man stood behind a podium.
Suddenly, someone shot the man. Now it was like I was the man. In a series of reveries (like I was in a half-waking state, rather than a dream state) I wondered to myself how bravely I'd act if I really were shot. I wondered whether I'd flinch or maybe scream in a high-pitched voice.
I thought that perhaps I'd take the shot alright, but that if I fell and the person who had shot me were to proceed to attack me physically, I might, in my death throes, thrash about and flinch like a weakling. I also thought that if I were attacked, and the person who shot me were straddling me and pummeling me physically, I might sit up and attack him with all my strength.
But I thought that even then, I'd lose my realistic consciousness, like the police officer (Bannerman?) did in the Stephen King novel Cujo, and imagine that I was fighting on, while really I had fallen back down and was rolled onto my left side, dying.
I, as the man, was lying down. My head had been shot. I was lifted onto a stretcher and into a bunh of material like a gauzy blanket. The people who carried me may have been Mexican boys or young men.
I was carried into an "operating room," which looked more like a run-down barber shop. It had purple-painted walls and unpainted, uncovered, concrete floors. I sat in a barber's chair, possibly before a mirror, though I couldn't see my face.
All this time people had been telling me not to move but to stay awake. They may also have been telling me not to speak. I had also not been allowed to be part of a certain aspect of all the action that had been taking place around me.
But now the group of people had placed on my head a wrapping of gauze as thick as a helmet. With this "helmet," which went over the crown and sides of my head and under my chin, with a strap across the middle as well, to go over my nose, the people now told me, "Okay," as if I were now "allowed" to be fully conscious of all the events around me.
I could feel blood gushing down from the crown of my head and down along my left ear. The blood felt cold, but it was like a fresh gushing, like it had just begun.
I was placed in a wheeled chair, something like a cross between a wheeled hospital bed and a dentist's chair. There were people carting me along, people carting things like IV bags along, and people walking backwards before me. We walked toward a doorway to an "operating room" (?).
The people walking before me kept telling me to stay awake. They kept asking me questions to keep me talking. I wondered why they were making such an effort to keep me awake. I thought, I'm doomed, anyway. I might as well lose consciousness now, and either die or wake up with irreversible brain damage.
Dream #2
I was with my brother in a "movie theater lobby," which was a lot more like a cafe, except with the dim lighting of a bar, and the feeling that this room was in a much larger building, like a big shopping mall or an airport. The light was dim orange-yellow, like candlelight.
I was in the ticket-taker's line. I noticed my brother was over at the "concession stand." I walked over to him, awkwardly, like I'd suddenly realized I should be with my brother, although I still actually wanted to stay in the ticket-taker's line.
I looked into a cafeteria-style glass case displaying desserts. There were a lot of things that looked like brownie squares with layers of some kind of pale brown "chocolate" cream in them. Some of the brownie squares had their top layers out of shape like they were stale, so that the old brownie layer was bending upward at the corners. Some of the brownie squares, however, looked very fresh and appetizing. I couldn't decide what I wanted.
A man who was black or Hispanic, or both, stepped between me and my brother. The man was about my height, wiry-muscular, with a tight face. He had shaggy, curly, pale brown hair, that was kind of long, but not quite down to his shoulders. He wore a tan cap and blue-reflective sunglasses. He had a mustache. He wore a beige windbreaker.
The man started making weird comments to me about how tough it was for someone like him to come here and see movies. He then made a comment like, "It's really tough when there are all these fags here, isn't it?"
I thought the man was half-thinking I'd agree with what he said, but that he also half-thought I was gay and that I'd stand up for myself and other gay people by starting a fight with him. I just backed away from the man, figuring that other people had heard him, and not wanting other people to think that I was with this guy or that I agreed with what he was saying.
I had stepped backward and out of the line for the "concession stand." But I thought, I didn't really need to eat anything, anyway. I'll just wait for my brother. I ended up standing behind a table that held one or two tallish, cylindrical, chrome coffee makers and a couple baskets of different-colored tea-packets. I even ducked behind it.
But now the man turned in my direction and shouted out, "But what's even worse than that is the spics, isn't it?"
I knew there were a lot of Hispanic people here, and that I had to stand up against the man's racial slur about Hispanics.
I stood up as tall as I could. My head peeped up about halfway over the coffee makers. I said, "Oh, yeah?!"
I thought I'd say something else. But I looked around to see that all the Hispanic people in the place were staring at me, like I was also responsible for what the man had said. Everybody, disappointed in me, may simply have dropped me from their minds.
The people now turned and ran out of the place, as if the man had run out before them and they were now chasing him. I ran along with everybody else, trying to prove myself to them.
We all ran through a series of balconies, like the indoor balconies in an office building or hotel. The balconies had red carpet and light-colored, wood railings. There were stairways going up and down. Balconies randomly turned and intersected.
The group of people stopped in their chase while heading up a small staircase. I was at the back of the group. As the group started moving forward again, a black man, tall, wide, wearing black jeans, a black, leather jacket, a backward cap, and slightly tinted, round eyeglasses, jogged down the steps.
As the man went past me (I stood still, like a straggler), he swung his arm out and grabbed my right leg, around the calf, skimming and swinging along on it like it was a handrail, to annoy me. He hustled off confidently, thinking I'd do nothing.
I turned and ran off after the man. I was going to catch up with him and fight him. But he was now ahead of me and apparently running himself. He ran along a balcony and then into a glass-walled corridor that ran alongside the balcony he'd just run through (so that he'd run in a hairpin curve). I followed him through the corridor, which was kind of stuffy and fluorescent-lit.
The man then turned down a narrow, grey-walled, fluorescent-lit hallway. I was about to follow him down this hallway, but I saw that he was heading into a doorway on the left wall. The door was automatically locking, with a number punch-code fixture over the knob. Another person, a tallish, thinnish, black man wearing a red polo shirt, let the man in.
I could tell this was the back entrance for a restaurant. The man was coming to work. I knew that I probably wouldn't be able to get past the locked door. But even if I got past the door, I thought, I'd have to deal with a whole group of men ready to fight me, instead of just the lone man.
Dream #1
It was daytime. I was in a car with my family. The blue sky was possibly webbed over with thin clouds, dimming the overall light. My mom was probably driving the car. We were driving down a mountainside road, into a small valley between two mountains. The valley was part of a range that extended far in the distance to my left. We were arguing about where we were, as if either this landscape wasn't a certain kind of landscape or as if we were heading in the wrong direction.
We now approached the valley. At the base of the slope opposite us were tallish headstones, all of orange-tan stone, mainly shapes like square columns with smaller spheres on top. I made some comment about this place being a cemetery, as if that proved we were or weren't in the right place.
We turned right and drove through the valley. I looked to the right (I had been in the backseat on the driver's side, but I wasn't quite there now) to see monumental, white headstones. There were gigantic heads springing out of columns like flowers; headstones of double-men, from the torso up, reaching out and looking forward; and other similar headstones, all in a style like an Art Deco imitation of Hellenistic sculpture.
The size and odd style of these headstones gave me an ominous feeling, as if where we were was a prophetic indication of something bad that would happen to us.
We now drove among headstones. We drove past (to our right) a tall headstone of greyish stone, like a pedestal displaying a large sculpture of a man, not unlike the torso-men, driving a chariot carried by two horses. The sculpture almost seemed alive to me.
Now, along both sides of our car, a group of "horses" ran up from behind us, then running ahead of us, turning a slight left, as we would, with the road, toward a tallish, arched, pale tan-orange stone gate.
The horses were pale slate colored, with a deepening grey on their sides, and with their sides dappled with black spots. Their legs were, however, long and spindly, so that their bodies stood perhaps ten feet above the ground. They were ridden or guided by a group of people who may have been wearing yellow and red silk clothing. I again thought that all of this was ominous.
There was now a view, of which I was, at first, not necessarily a part, of a man giving a speech to a large audience. The speech the man gave was like an Oscar acceptance speech. But it was also supposed to be like a political speech.
The man was about six feet tall, a little heavy, wide-faced, slightly balding on the forehead, but distinguished looking, with red hair, a short, red beard, and glasses. The man wore a nice, pale coffee colored suit with a cream colored shirt. Behind the man was a satiny, purple curtain. The man stood behind a podium.
Suddenly, someone shot the man. Now it was like I was the man. In a series of reveries (like I was in a half-waking state, rather than a dream state) I wondered to myself how bravely I'd act if I really were shot. I wondered whether I'd flinch or maybe scream in a high-pitched voice.
I thought that perhaps I'd take the shot alright, but that if I fell and the person who had shot me were to proceed to attack me physically, I might, in my death throes, thrash about and flinch like a weakling. I also thought that if I were attacked, and the person who shot me were straddling me and pummeling me physically, I might sit up and attack him with all my strength.
But I thought that even then, I'd lose my realistic consciousness, like the police officer (Bannerman?) did in the Stephen King novel Cujo, and imagine that I was fighting on, while really I had fallen back down and was rolled onto my left side, dying.
I, as the man, was lying down. My head had been shot. I was lifted onto a stretcher and into a bunh of material like a gauzy blanket. The people who carried me may have been Mexican boys or young men.
I was carried into an "operating room," which looked more like a run-down barber shop. It had purple-painted walls and unpainted, uncovered, concrete floors. I sat in a barber's chair, possibly before a mirror, though I couldn't see my face.
All this time people had been telling me not to move but to stay awake. They may also have been telling me not to speak. I had also not been allowed to be part of a certain aspect of all the action that had been taking place around me.
But now the group of people had placed on my head a wrapping of gauze as thick as a helmet. With this "helmet," which went over the crown and sides of my head and under my chin, with a strap across the middle as well, to go over my nose, the people now told me, "Okay," as if I were now "allowed" to be fully conscious of all the events around me.
I could feel blood gushing down from the crown of my head and down along my left ear. The blood felt cold, but it was like a fresh gushing, like it had just begun.
I was placed in a wheeled chair, something like a cross between a wheeled hospital bed and a dentist's chair. There were people carting me along, people carting things like IV bags along, and people walking backwards before me. We walked toward a doorway to an "operating room" (?).
The people walking before me kept telling me to stay awake. They kept asking me questions to keep me talking. I wondered why they were making such an effort to keep me awake. I thought, I'm doomed, anyway. I might as well lose consciousness now, and either die or wake up with irreversible brain damage.
Dream #2
I was with my brother in a "movie theater lobby," which was a lot more like a cafe, except with the dim lighting of a bar, and the feeling that this room was in a much larger building, like a big shopping mall or an airport. The light was dim orange-yellow, like candlelight.
I was in the ticket-taker's line. I noticed my brother was over at the "concession stand." I walked over to him, awkwardly, like I'd suddenly realized I should be with my brother, although I still actually wanted to stay in the ticket-taker's line.
I looked into a cafeteria-style glass case displaying desserts. There were a lot of things that looked like brownie squares with layers of some kind of pale brown "chocolate" cream in them. Some of the brownie squares had their top layers out of shape like they were stale, so that the old brownie layer was bending upward at the corners. Some of the brownie squares, however, looked very fresh and appetizing. I couldn't decide what I wanted.
A man who was black or Hispanic, or both, stepped between me and my brother. The man was about my height, wiry-muscular, with a tight face. He had shaggy, curly, pale brown hair, that was kind of long, but not quite down to his shoulders. He wore a tan cap and blue-reflective sunglasses. He had a mustache. He wore a beige windbreaker.
The man started making weird comments to me about how tough it was for someone like him to come here and see movies. He then made a comment like, "It's really tough when there are all these fags here, isn't it?"
I thought the man was half-thinking I'd agree with what he said, but that he also half-thought I was gay and that I'd stand up for myself and other gay people by starting a fight with him. I just backed away from the man, figuring that other people had heard him, and not wanting other people to think that I was with this guy or that I agreed with what he was saying.
I had stepped backward and out of the line for the "concession stand." But I thought, I didn't really need to eat anything, anyway. I'll just wait for my brother. I ended up standing behind a table that held one or two tallish, cylindrical, chrome coffee makers and a couple baskets of different-colored tea-packets. I even ducked behind it.
But now the man turned in my direction and shouted out, "But what's even worse than that is the spics, isn't it?"
I knew there were a lot of Hispanic people here, and that I had to stand up against the man's racial slur about Hispanics.
I stood up as tall as I could. My head peeped up about halfway over the coffee makers. I said, "Oh, yeah?!"
I thought I'd say something else. But I looked around to see that all the Hispanic people in the place were staring at me, like I was also responsible for what the man had said. Everybody, disappointed in me, may simply have dropped me from their minds.
The people now turned and ran out of the place, as if the man had run out before them and they were now chasing him. I ran along with everybody else, trying to prove myself to them.
We all ran through a series of balconies, like the indoor balconies in an office building or hotel. The balconies had red carpet and light-colored, wood railings. There were stairways going up and down. Balconies randomly turned and intersected.
The group of people stopped in their chase while heading up a small staircase. I was at the back of the group. As the group started moving forward again, a black man, tall, wide, wearing black jeans, a black, leather jacket, a backward cap, and slightly tinted, round eyeglasses, jogged down the steps.
As the man went past me (I stood still, like a straggler), he swung his arm out and grabbed my right leg, around the calf, skimming and swinging along on it like it was a handrail, to annoy me. He hustled off confidently, thinking I'd do nothing.
I turned and ran off after the man. I was going to catch up with him and fight him. But he was now ahead of me and apparently running himself. He ran along a balcony and then into a glass-walled corridor that ran alongside the balcony he'd just run through (so that he'd run in a hairpin curve). I followed him through the corridor, which was kind of stuffy and fluorescent-lit.
The man then turned down a narrow, grey-walled, fluorescent-lit hallway. I was about to follow him down this hallway, but I saw that he was heading into a doorway on the left wall. The door was automatically locking, with a number punch-code fixture over the knob. Another person, a tallish, thinnish, black man wearing a red polo shirt, let the man in.
I could tell this was the back entrance for a restaurant. The man was coming to work. I knew that I probably wouldn't be able to get past the locked door. But even if I got past the door, I thought, I'd have to deal with a whole group of men ready to fight me, instead of just the lone man.
(4/13/09) an unpopular dinner party
(Entered in paper journal at 10 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I had come in from some area like a mall parking lot. I was now in a building like a big-box store that had been converted into an office space. The entrance foyer or lobby was like a small corridor of cheap, greyish, plaster walls, with a couple of glass doorways.
I now walked into a large room like a meeting room. The room looked cheap and only half-built, like a makeshift room for exhibition. The room had a strange, almost pentagonal shape (something like a pentagonal version of the room housing Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum of Art). The walls didn't reach all the way up to the ceiling. They were grey-white.
Throughout the room long folding tables were set up, possibly with an outer triangle or pentagon of tables set up around the other tables. This was a "meal party" set up for New York Cares volunteers or team leaders. The tables already had plates of food set on them. The food didn't look very appetizing. It looked like brown mole poblano sauce and some small discs of food.
There was a front table near the door by which I entered. A tallish, pale-skinned, frumpy-looking, red-haired woman sat at the table, apparently signing everybody in. I walked up to her. She may have been wearing a floppy, black, knit, beret-style (but large) hat. For some reason the woman stuck me as someone I just didn't want to speak to at all.
The woman asked me what I thought about something, possibly the quality of events, etc. I may have said something nice.
The woman told me about how events like this one had such low turnout nowadays. I looked around the room. Barely anybody was here. I thought, If we keep getting low turnout like this, we'll have to stop having this kind of event.
Dream #1
I had come in from some area like a mall parking lot. I was now in a building like a big-box store that had been converted into an office space. The entrance foyer or lobby was like a small corridor of cheap, greyish, plaster walls, with a couple of glass doorways.
I now walked into a large room like a meeting room. The room looked cheap and only half-built, like a makeshift room for exhibition. The room had a strange, almost pentagonal shape (something like a pentagonal version of the room housing Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum of Art). The walls didn't reach all the way up to the ceiling. They were grey-white.
Throughout the room long folding tables were set up, possibly with an outer triangle or pentagon of tables set up around the other tables. This was a "meal party" set up for New York Cares volunteers or team leaders. The tables already had plates of food set on them. The food didn't look very appetizing. It looked like brown mole poblano sauce and some small discs of food.
There was a front table near the door by which I entered. A tallish, pale-skinned, frumpy-looking, red-haired woman sat at the table, apparently signing everybody in. I walked up to her. She may have been wearing a floppy, black, knit, beret-style (but large) hat. For some reason the woman stuck me as someone I just didn't want to speak to at all.
The woman asked me what I thought about something, possibly the quality of events, etc. I may have said something nice.
The woman told me about how events like this one had such low turnout nowadays. I looked around the room. Barely anybody was here. I thought, If we keep getting low turnout like this, we'll have to stop having this kind of event.
(4/25/09) building on fire; confronting rude man; boss draws my dreams; message from interviewer
(Entered in paper journal at 8:20 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I was in a car with a woman like DK (a director of the department I worked in at the job from which I had been laid off in waking life). I may have been laying in the seat somehow, while DK drove. We were driving through a large city full of skyscrapers. I could see up to the sky as if through the roof of the car. It was early morning. The sky looked dim blue, like just a skein of grey clouds were floating below it. The sky was visible in small sections between the buildings.
We were talking about the weather. DK mentioned the forecast, which was somewhat at variance with what I was currently seeing. But then the sky grew deeply clouded. I wondered how the sky could get so cloudy so quickly. It worried me a little.
We then passed a building maybe "seven or eight stories" tall (i.e. there seemed to be seven or eight window-rows, though the building may have been more than seven or eight stories tall. The building was on fire, or, rather, there were huge stacks of black smoke erupting from certain windows. But through the other windows I could see people walking around through undamaged, undisturbed work spaces. The people may actually have been worried, but they seemed to be taking care of their business, anyway.
The office building was maybe hexagonal or octagonal or oddly four-sided and was build on a smaller base. Its top sloped out mildly, so the whole thing was almost cup-shaped, like something Eero Saarinen (?) might have built, but also like a black building I was familiar with from my trips to Boston (???). But I could see everybody in the building as if they were in a row house or a small shop on a small town's main street.
The smoke that came out of the building was quickly making the sky as black as night. We drove past the building.
I noticed that the other buildings were also on fire, in the same sporadic, smoky way as the first building, though fire was visible in some of these other buildings. The streets somehow seemed filled with panic, with people rushing around. The air was filled with smoke, to the point where we couldn't see in front of us. The smoke was tinged orange, as if lit by streetlamps. I got panicked and wondered if the whole city were going to be destroyed.
We drove down another street, like a pristine office park. There were wide, redbrick plazas all around us, lit as if from sparkling white ground lights. The sky was black as night. People were also bustling around in this part of town, though less people were around.
DK turned left (she may actually have turned right onto one of the redbrick plaza walkways) to drop me off at an office. I said, "How can people be working right now? Who knows what's causing these fires? The whole city could be under siege. We don't know what building is going to get it next!"
But DK didn't seem like she was listening to me at all. She was still driving to drop me off.
Dream #2
I was walking down a hallway with a man and a woman. We had come from another hallway and had turned left into this one. The hallway was somewhat wide, somewhat short with dull, white walls, grey floors, and fluorescent lights.
The woman was like an older authority figure. The man was a slightly scruffy, medium-height man. He may have been Indian. He had a stuffy face and short, tightly disarranged hair. His body was a little wide. He wore jeans, a pale tan blazer, and a red and pink, button-up shirt.
The man made some comment about how incompetent I was at my job. The woman made a slight comment, not really regarding the man, to let me know I was alright. The man had turned and walked back down the hallway, as if by walking away after his comment he could make it irrefutable.
I rushed down the hallway after the man, to force him into a confrontation. I caught up to him. He turned away from me whenever I tried to face him. He was almost to the end of the hallway, about to turn down it, which would somehow mean I'd lost the argument with him. So I grabbed the man and forced him to face me.
The man gave me a sour-looking face, like a constipated person might show. I thought the man looked like an idiot. I made whatever comment I'd needed to make to justify myself. The man kind of smirked in acceptance.
The woman, the man, and I were again walking up the hallway. We were heading to a celebration or convention. We walked up to a large event room. There was a cluttering of people near the entrance to the room, like a disorganized group of people trying to get in. I stood near an older woman who seemed to have a huge sense of propriety, who lightly regarded me, like I was an idiot.
I now got into the celebration. At first it was just a large, harshly fluorescent-lit event room lined with folding tables, with people at the tables passing out literature. Large groups of people flocked at all the tables. At one of the tables I saw my old co-worker JM, a person whose intelligence I admired greatly. JM was wearing a light brown suit which fit his slim body a little too loosely, and a cream-colored, button-up shirt. JM was with an Asian woman who was his wife, but not his waking-life wife EC.
I tried to catch JM's attention. But JM walked away from the table, almost as if he were trying to avoid me. I followed JM closely, trying to tag him to get his attention, so I could say hi, but apparently also talking on and on as if JM had already acknowledged me.
We walked through a series of rooms that were organized like a museum exhibition, though they felt more like mock-ups of rooms in a cheap apartment. There were tables everywhere. The tables were cluttered with paper and with people trying to hand out literature.
At one point I may have given up on JM. I walked, possibly with someone with whom I was talking, into another exhibit room. This artwork in this exhibit room was a sculpture of two gigantic books, opened lying pages-down, one loosely piled on the other. The books were maybe six feet long, three feet wide, and one and a half feet thick, with chunks like little cheese wedges, carved out of the pages at certain points. This may have reminded me of something else, which I may have mentioned to the person I was walking with.
Dream #3
I was trying to explain the burning building (from my first dream) to my old boss BS, who was then trying to draw the building. BS was drawing on a horizontal surface, which was alternately a chalkboard and a cardboard or brown-paper surface. BS wasn't quite understanding my spatial description of the building. At one point I may have tried to draw the building for BS. But I realized I couldn't get it quite right, either.
Dream #4
I was working on a computer. Apparently I had a bunch of visual-artistic programs opened. I saw an email from BT, (a person I'd interviewed with for a job in waking life a couple months previous to this dream). I saw the email as if it were on my BlackBerry.
I tried to open the email, but my BlackBerry's screen suddenly started getting flooded with the artistic programs I had open. I had to plow through all the programs to get to the email. I'd close the files but I wouldn't exit from the program. I plowed and plowed through the screens, slowly feeling more and more like I'd never actually get back to BT's email.
Dream #1
I was in a car with a woman like DK (a director of the department I worked in at the job from which I had been laid off in waking life). I may have been laying in the seat somehow, while DK drove. We were driving through a large city full of skyscrapers. I could see up to the sky as if through the roof of the car. It was early morning. The sky looked dim blue, like just a skein of grey clouds were floating below it. The sky was visible in small sections between the buildings.
We were talking about the weather. DK mentioned the forecast, which was somewhat at variance with what I was currently seeing. But then the sky grew deeply clouded. I wondered how the sky could get so cloudy so quickly. It worried me a little.
We then passed a building maybe "seven or eight stories" tall (i.e. there seemed to be seven or eight window-rows, though the building may have been more than seven or eight stories tall. The building was on fire, or, rather, there were huge stacks of black smoke erupting from certain windows. But through the other windows I could see people walking around through undamaged, undisturbed work spaces. The people may actually have been worried, but they seemed to be taking care of their business, anyway.
The office building was maybe hexagonal or octagonal or oddly four-sided and was build on a smaller base. Its top sloped out mildly, so the whole thing was almost cup-shaped, like something Eero Saarinen (?) might have built, but also like a black building I was familiar with from my trips to Boston (???). But I could see everybody in the building as if they were in a row house or a small shop on a small town's main street.
The smoke that came out of the building was quickly making the sky as black as night. We drove past the building.
I noticed that the other buildings were also on fire, in the same sporadic, smoky way as the first building, though fire was visible in some of these other buildings. The streets somehow seemed filled with panic, with people rushing around. The air was filled with smoke, to the point where we couldn't see in front of us. The smoke was tinged orange, as if lit by streetlamps. I got panicked and wondered if the whole city were going to be destroyed.
We drove down another street, like a pristine office park. There were wide, redbrick plazas all around us, lit as if from sparkling white ground lights. The sky was black as night. People were also bustling around in this part of town, though less people were around.
DK turned left (she may actually have turned right onto one of the redbrick plaza walkways) to drop me off at an office. I said, "How can people be working right now? Who knows what's causing these fires? The whole city could be under siege. We don't know what building is going to get it next!"
But DK didn't seem like she was listening to me at all. She was still driving to drop me off.
Dream #2
I was walking down a hallway with a man and a woman. We had come from another hallway and had turned left into this one. The hallway was somewhat wide, somewhat short with dull, white walls, grey floors, and fluorescent lights.
The woman was like an older authority figure. The man was a slightly scruffy, medium-height man. He may have been Indian. He had a stuffy face and short, tightly disarranged hair. His body was a little wide. He wore jeans, a pale tan blazer, and a red and pink, button-up shirt.
The man made some comment about how incompetent I was at my job. The woman made a slight comment, not really regarding the man, to let me know I was alright. The man had turned and walked back down the hallway, as if by walking away after his comment he could make it irrefutable.
I rushed down the hallway after the man, to force him into a confrontation. I caught up to him. He turned away from me whenever I tried to face him. He was almost to the end of the hallway, about to turn down it, which would somehow mean I'd lost the argument with him. So I grabbed the man and forced him to face me.
The man gave me a sour-looking face, like a constipated person might show. I thought the man looked like an idiot. I made whatever comment I'd needed to make to justify myself. The man kind of smirked in acceptance.
The woman, the man, and I were again walking up the hallway. We were heading to a celebration or convention. We walked up to a large event room. There was a cluttering of people near the entrance to the room, like a disorganized group of people trying to get in. I stood near an older woman who seemed to have a huge sense of propriety, who lightly regarded me, like I was an idiot.
I now got into the celebration. At first it was just a large, harshly fluorescent-lit event room lined with folding tables, with people at the tables passing out literature. Large groups of people flocked at all the tables. At one of the tables I saw my old co-worker JM, a person whose intelligence I admired greatly. JM was wearing a light brown suit which fit his slim body a little too loosely, and a cream-colored, button-up shirt. JM was with an Asian woman who was his wife, but not his waking-life wife EC.
I tried to catch JM's attention. But JM walked away from the table, almost as if he were trying to avoid me. I followed JM closely, trying to tag him to get his attention, so I could say hi, but apparently also talking on and on as if JM had already acknowledged me.
We walked through a series of rooms that were organized like a museum exhibition, though they felt more like mock-ups of rooms in a cheap apartment. There were tables everywhere. The tables were cluttered with paper and with people trying to hand out literature.
At one point I may have given up on JM. I walked, possibly with someone with whom I was talking, into another exhibit room. This artwork in this exhibit room was a sculpture of two gigantic books, opened lying pages-down, one loosely piled on the other. The books were maybe six feet long, three feet wide, and one and a half feet thick, with chunks like little cheese wedges, carved out of the pages at certain points. This may have reminded me of something else, which I may have mentioned to the person I was walking with.
Dream #3
I was trying to explain the burning building (from my first dream) to my old boss BS, who was then trying to draw the building. BS was drawing on a horizontal surface, which was alternately a chalkboard and a cardboard or brown-paper surface. BS wasn't quite understanding my spatial description of the building. At one point I may have tried to draw the building for BS. But I realized I couldn't get it quite right, either.
Dream #4
I was working on a computer. Apparently I had a bunch of visual-artistic programs opened. I saw an email from BT, (a person I'd interviewed with for a job in waking life a couple months previous to this dream). I saw the email as if it were on my BlackBerry.
I tried to open the email, but my BlackBerry's screen suddenly started getting flooded with the artistic programs I had open. I had to plow through all the programs to get to the email. I'd close the files but I wouldn't exit from the program. I plowed and plowed through the screens, slowly feeling more and more like I'd never actually get back to BT's email.
Saturday, November 24, 2012
(4/26/09) tangled forest and street; flying over the park
(Entered in paper journal at 8:10 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
It was night. I was in some building like a house. I ran out of the building and into a corridor of thick trees. There were small slivers of light, possibly like moonlight, shining through the trees. But the light got darker and darker, and the trees bordering the corridor got thicker and thicker. Even the ground became harder to run on, and it took on a gross feeling.
I knew I was reaching something like a wall of tangled, gnarled branches, and that I would have to reach my hand into the wall. But I got to a point where I couldn't see anything anymore. I thought that if I went all the way to the end of this corridor, I'd have to come all the way back without any light, and with the environment around me becoming filthier all the time.
I stopped running and was pulled backward. I was pulled all the way out of the corridor. I was now possibly on a city street. I was moving forward again, but I knew that since I hadn't gone all the way through the corridor I'd not be able to achieve what I'd needed to achieve on this street.
Dream #2
I was running through a valley of low, rolling hills between two forests of trees with orange, red, and yellow leafs. It was just before sunrise. The sky was pale, tannish, purple-blue. The air was crisp. As I continued to run along, the valley curved around and then opened up quite widely. I was in a large city park. This enormous valley was near the entrance to the park.
Along one of the slopes to my right was a naked woman with short, blonde hair doing "yoga." She was pulling herself up from a splits position. Her clothes lay before her and beside her. I smiled at her, but then I realized that since she was naked, she would probably think that I was a peeping tom for looking at her.
I looked away quickly. The woman may have started putting on her clothes: maybe a sleeveless, grey shirt and a pair of dark grey jeans. I thought that when the woman had her clothes back on I'd come back to let her know that I hadn't smiled at her for any bad reason, but only because I'd wanted to be her friend.
I now began flying. I flew very high in the air, so that I could see whole tracts of wooded areas in the park. I thought of telling the woman about this, about how easy it actually was to fly.
Some wooded areas were colored yellow, red, and orange, and their topography rolled along, showing hills. But other areas were whitish, as if covered by snow. The whitish color soon became slate grey, or milky-colored and then slate grey. The milky color may have seemed reasonable to me because sunrise light and shadow coloring the snow might make a similar color. But the color of the snow soon looked to me more like mold. It disgusted me.
Dream #1
It was night. I was in some building like a house. I ran out of the building and into a corridor of thick trees. There were small slivers of light, possibly like moonlight, shining through the trees. But the light got darker and darker, and the trees bordering the corridor got thicker and thicker. Even the ground became harder to run on, and it took on a gross feeling.
I knew I was reaching something like a wall of tangled, gnarled branches, and that I would have to reach my hand into the wall. But I got to a point where I couldn't see anything anymore. I thought that if I went all the way to the end of this corridor, I'd have to come all the way back without any light, and with the environment around me becoming filthier all the time.
I stopped running and was pulled backward. I was pulled all the way out of the corridor. I was now possibly on a city street. I was moving forward again, but I knew that since I hadn't gone all the way through the corridor I'd not be able to achieve what I'd needed to achieve on this street.
Dream #2
I was running through a valley of low, rolling hills between two forests of trees with orange, red, and yellow leafs. It was just before sunrise. The sky was pale, tannish, purple-blue. The air was crisp. As I continued to run along, the valley curved around and then opened up quite widely. I was in a large city park. This enormous valley was near the entrance to the park.
Along one of the slopes to my right was a naked woman with short, blonde hair doing "yoga." She was pulling herself up from a splits position. Her clothes lay before her and beside her. I smiled at her, but then I realized that since she was naked, she would probably think that I was a peeping tom for looking at her.
I looked away quickly. The woman may have started putting on her clothes: maybe a sleeveless, grey shirt and a pair of dark grey jeans. I thought that when the woman had her clothes back on I'd come back to let her know that I hadn't smiled at her for any bad reason, but only because I'd wanted to be her friend.
I now began flying. I flew very high in the air, so that I could see whole tracts of wooded areas in the park. I thought of telling the woman about this, about how easy it actually was to fly.
Some wooded areas were colored yellow, red, and orange, and their topography rolled along, showing hills. But other areas were whitish, as if covered by snow. The whitish color soon became slate grey, or milky-colored and then slate grey. The milky color may have seemed reasonable to me because sunrise light and shadow coloring the snow might make a similar color. But the color of the snow soon looked to me more like mold. It disgusted me.
(4/27/09) brain surgery patients
(Entered in paper journal at 7:45 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I wandered through a series of hallways, possibly in an office building or hospital. I finally came to a room like a large operating room. There were maybe ten beds in the room.
On each bed lay a naked man. Each man was white, bald, maybe in his late thirties or early forties, of medium build, with his body sagging slightly, as if each man had just begun to get out of shape. The men differed slightly in the degree of physical conditioning, as well as in some other things, such as height and penis size.
The men all had small markings, in ink that looked like tattoo ink, on their skulls and possibly on their shoulders and arms. The small markings were all shapes like right angles and "T" shapes. I knew these men were all here for brain surgery, possibly as a treatment of insanity. I was also scheduled to undergo brain surgery.
Dream #1
I wandered through a series of hallways, possibly in an office building or hospital. I finally came to a room like a large operating room. There were maybe ten beds in the room.
On each bed lay a naked man. Each man was white, bald, maybe in his late thirties or early forties, of medium build, with his body sagging slightly, as if each man had just begun to get out of shape. The men differed slightly in the degree of physical conditioning, as well as in some other things, such as height and penis size.
The men all had small markings, in ink that looked like tattoo ink, on their skulls and possibly on their shoulders and arms. The small markings were all shapes like right angles and "T" shapes. I knew these men were all here for brain surgery, possibly as a treatment of insanity. I was also scheduled to undergo brain surgery.
(5/1/09) detained after defending; naked at the florist jeweler's; greedy buffet
(Entered in paper journal at 8:08 AM at home.)
Dream #1
It was a sunny day. I was out on a small lawn, like a lawn between buildings on a college campus. The lawn was slightly rolling. I may actually have been standing on a wide, concrete walkway near the lawn. I may have stood before a small, wood-framed bulletin board.
Two young men stood down the lawn from me, menacing another young man. The two young men were tallish, heavy, thuggish, either black or dark-skinned Hispanic. The two young men held guns on the other young man, who was probably Hispanic, about normal sized, and a little dumb-looking.
The two men were yelling at the young man about a gun he'd had, as if he had personally and purposely gotten it to attack the two men. The young man kept saying it wasn't so, but he was too sheepish to explain his situation.
I remembered the situation (it may actually have been an earlier part of the dream). I yelled at the gunmen, "Leave him alone! He's right!" I told the gunmen how two other men had come along and forced the young man at gunpoint to take the gun.
The gunmen listened to me and let the young man go. But they now walked up to me and stood before me with their guns drawn. They told me they wanted to see my ID. Then they told me to put my hands in the air (or behind my head?). They then made me lie face down on the concrete walkway (or on an unfolded cardboard box that lay on the concrete?).
I may have handed the gunmen my ID while I stood, but now, as I lay down, I also handed the gunmen my ID. The gunmen, who had previously seemed to me like thugs, now, without any change to their dress seemed to me like police officers.
I thought about having guns pointed on me. I had always thought I'd be really afraid. But now, even though I felt like I could be killed at any moment, I also felt calm and composed. I did what I had to do for the men. I thought compliance would get me out of this situation more quickly.
We were now in some place like an airport or bus station hallway. The place was full of people. It had a concrete-grey and window-green atmosphere. I lay on the ground while one of the men (or maybe the two men were now only one man?) sat against a wall just beyond my feet. I had a bunch of things -- papers, backpacks, etc. -- all laid around me.
The man was now lighter skinned, maybe black, Hispanic, or Italian. He was dressed in ragged clothes, a big, black, puffy jacket, and a baseball cap, which he had tilted at a sloppy angle. He was reading a paper copy of my screenplay. He got to a really wordy metaphysical passage. He read about halfway through it, then laughed lightly to himself. He told me, "Okay, you can go now."
I pulled some of my stuff together, then stood up to leave. The man also stood up. We were both about to leave through a wide, sliding-glass door, like the automatic exit doors to the covered parking areas at Denver International Airport. But right before we exited, the man said, "Only, could you tell me where you did the research for your book?"
There was a cheapish looking, office-style desk before the door. On the desk was a white, cardboard box. I took something like a Rolodex card out of the box to write down the places where I'd done research for my screenplay.
But I found it difficult to explain. Everything in the screenplay, I thought, was a hybrid of different sources. And some of the more metaphysical passages, which may have been the man's chief area of concern, were largely based on things I'd picked up over the years, or through texts related only little, if at all, to the subject matter of my screenplay.
I then thought that the man was only trying to stall me or distract me. He had no intention of letting me go. He was just trying to buy time while he was thinking of a way to keep me.
Dream #2
I was naked, floating down a cobbled street, like in Tribeca, Manhattan, on a misty, grey day. I may have been in a "bad neighborhood," but all the buildings looked clean and freshly painted. The buildings were like taller than normal row-houses, with their entrances right off the sidewalk instead of elevated atop a stairway.
I saw the buildings to my left, as I floated along, down a slight slope. Some of the buildings to my left had shops in them. To my right, the road may have been wider than usual, with the right side of the street bearing the backs of tallish, wide, brick buildings, like small factory buildings or warehouses.
I noticed a couple women standing out in front of the shops. I hoped the women wouldn't see me flying around naked. To make things even more embarrassing, I had a huge erection. I tried hurriedly, floating past the buildings, to remember which one I was supposed to go into. I wanted to get inside as soon as possible. But none of the buildings looked familiar to me.
At some point I thought, elliptically, how the paint jobs on these buildings reminded me more of England than America.
I looked into some of the buildings. Inside, they looked like run-down, kind of scuzzy, apartments. I figured they looked like the kind of place where I was supposed to be, but that they weren't the actual, specific place. I got frustrated, suddenly thinking I had gone down the wrong block. But all the blocks looked so similar here, it was only natural that I'd make a mistake like this.
I was at the bottom of the block. The slope leveled off, and the road widened out, taking a circular shape, in which was an octagonal or circular building, quaint-looking, with large windows from about two and a half feet up to the roof of the building and red brick from two and a half feet down. The roof was black shingles, sloped up to a point or a weather vane.
As I floated past the building a black woman, young, in shape, with straight, brown-blonde hair, ran after me. She, too, may have been naked, or she may have been dressed in a business style pantsuit of purple material.
The woman yelled at me that my appearance had distracted her, that it had kept her from thinking of something very important to her job, which she had to go to right now. I felt like the woman was accusing me of sexual harassment. I didn't want to be seen as that kind of a person, so I turned to speak with the woman and try to clear up the issue.
But the woman had gone into her workplace, which was the quaint-looking building. I opened the door and looked inside, not wanting to come all the way in, since I was naked. The woman and another pretty, black woman stood behind a cash register. The place looked like a jeweler's and a florist's shop.
I tried to ask the woman how I had offended her, and I tried to say I really hadn't meant to cause any discomfort because of my appearance. But I wasn't saying that at all. Instead I was stutteringly asking confused questions about the nature of this shop.
The woman wasn't listening to me. She was visibly eager for me to leave. But the second woman was very kind. She kept inviting me in, though I kept saying I couldn't come in. She also kept telling me all sorts of things about the shop. She asked if that was what I'd had in mind when I'd asked my questions.
Dream #3
I walked into a large, dim room, like a convention room or a high school gym with little or none of its lights turned on. I had a big, green stick of bamboo, which I was eating.
I looked at a cross-section of the stick, as if my teeth had cleanly hacked the stick in a straight line. The inside was a tan circle, like a tree's wood, with three kidney-shaped cavities evenly distributed at the circle's edge. The cavities were filled with a speckled, yellowish substance which I may have called marrow. I licked this substance. It was sweet.
I thought, This is what the koalas eat bamboo (?! - not eucalyptus?) for -- the sweet marrow, not the leafs. I tried to pull the marrow out of the shoot so I could eat eat alone. I pulled a big chunk out by using my fingernail. The chunk was solid and had the consistency of a candy bar. It was vanilla yellow, with speckles in it like chopped nuts.
I nibbled the pieces. It was only mildly sweet. I was somewhat disappointed. But I suddenly felt worried. What if this marrow was actually poisonous to humans? I thought, It couldn't be poisonous: it tastes so good.
I imagined myself as a koala in the trees, eating bamboo.
Now there were other people in the room, maybe twenty or thirty people. But the people all huddled in one small part of the room, an entrance area which had a much lower ceiling and much tighter space, but which was actually lit (by incandescent light).
I walked over from where I was (it now seemed like a few rows of long, church-style pews) to be with the people. They looked like a church group. They were of varying ages, but all dressed nicely.
Everybody in the group held paper plates filled with food. They motioned for me to go get some food. I walked over to a kind of cluttered, smallish buffet table. There were serving trays filled with different kinds of food. But for some reason I felt like I had been "assigned" to one plate which already had food on it.
As I approached the plate a boy, maybe in his early teens, light-skinned, black, thin, with close-cut hair and wide eyeglasses, also approached the plate. The boy looked mild and gentle, but I could tell he was just waiting for a chance to annoy me.
I tried to start eating from my plate, but the boy now started reaching for anything I'd reach for. I now understood that the boy and I had been "assigned" to share this plate. But any time I'd reach for anything the boy would quickly grab it first. The only thing I could grab was something I didn't want: a bland, white fold of a corn or wheat flour tortilla. The boy may have been eating, but he was also occupied in piling at least some of the stuff he grabbed (eggs, cheese, bacon) all on top of each other in a little wedge-shaped area, which he protected closely.
I looked around and realized there was food in serving trays all around me.I didn't have to eat from this one plate. In fact, I now wondered why I had been so focused on just this one plate. I thought, I'll distract the boy. I'll make him so proud of his little pile of food that he doesn't pay attention to me while I go get food of my own.
The boy's pile of food now just looked like a warm, greasy wedge of eggs and cheese. I told the boy something like, "Wow, that's a lot of food. Are you really going to eat all of that? Have you started eating any of it yet?"
The boy made some comment about how he didn't really care about the food and how he really didn't want to talk to me, either.
Dream #1
It was a sunny day. I was out on a small lawn, like a lawn between buildings on a college campus. The lawn was slightly rolling. I may actually have been standing on a wide, concrete walkway near the lawn. I may have stood before a small, wood-framed bulletin board.
Two young men stood down the lawn from me, menacing another young man. The two young men were tallish, heavy, thuggish, either black or dark-skinned Hispanic. The two young men held guns on the other young man, who was probably Hispanic, about normal sized, and a little dumb-looking.
The two men were yelling at the young man about a gun he'd had, as if he had personally and purposely gotten it to attack the two men. The young man kept saying it wasn't so, but he was too sheepish to explain his situation.
I remembered the situation (it may actually have been an earlier part of the dream). I yelled at the gunmen, "Leave him alone! He's right!" I told the gunmen how two other men had come along and forced the young man at gunpoint to take the gun.
The gunmen listened to me and let the young man go. But they now walked up to me and stood before me with their guns drawn. They told me they wanted to see my ID. Then they told me to put my hands in the air (or behind my head?). They then made me lie face down on the concrete walkway (or on an unfolded cardboard box that lay on the concrete?).
I may have handed the gunmen my ID while I stood, but now, as I lay down, I also handed the gunmen my ID. The gunmen, who had previously seemed to me like thugs, now, without any change to their dress seemed to me like police officers.
I thought about having guns pointed on me. I had always thought I'd be really afraid. But now, even though I felt like I could be killed at any moment, I also felt calm and composed. I did what I had to do for the men. I thought compliance would get me out of this situation more quickly.
We were now in some place like an airport or bus station hallway. The place was full of people. It had a concrete-grey and window-green atmosphere. I lay on the ground while one of the men (or maybe the two men were now only one man?) sat against a wall just beyond my feet. I had a bunch of things -- papers, backpacks, etc. -- all laid around me.
The man was now lighter skinned, maybe black, Hispanic, or Italian. He was dressed in ragged clothes, a big, black, puffy jacket, and a baseball cap, which he had tilted at a sloppy angle. He was reading a paper copy of my screenplay. He got to a really wordy metaphysical passage. He read about halfway through it, then laughed lightly to himself. He told me, "Okay, you can go now."
I pulled some of my stuff together, then stood up to leave. The man also stood up. We were both about to leave through a wide, sliding-glass door, like the automatic exit doors to the covered parking areas at Denver International Airport. But right before we exited, the man said, "Only, could you tell me where you did the research for your book?"
There was a cheapish looking, office-style desk before the door. On the desk was a white, cardboard box. I took something like a Rolodex card out of the box to write down the places where I'd done research for my screenplay.
But I found it difficult to explain. Everything in the screenplay, I thought, was a hybrid of different sources. And some of the more metaphysical passages, which may have been the man's chief area of concern, were largely based on things I'd picked up over the years, or through texts related only little, if at all, to the subject matter of my screenplay.
I then thought that the man was only trying to stall me or distract me. He had no intention of letting me go. He was just trying to buy time while he was thinking of a way to keep me.
Dream #2
I was naked, floating down a cobbled street, like in Tribeca, Manhattan, on a misty, grey day. I may have been in a "bad neighborhood," but all the buildings looked clean and freshly painted. The buildings were like taller than normal row-houses, with their entrances right off the sidewalk instead of elevated atop a stairway.
I saw the buildings to my left, as I floated along, down a slight slope. Some of the buildings to my left had shops in them. To my right, the road may have been wider than usual, with the right side of the street bearing the backs of tallish, wide, brick buildings, like small factory buildings or warehouses.
I noticed a couple women standing out in front of the shops. I hoped the women wouldn't see me flying around naked. To make things even more embarrassing, I had a huge erection. I tried hurriedly, floating past the buildings, to remember which one I was supposed to go into. I wanted to get inside as soon as possible. But none of the buildings looked familiar to me.
At some point I thought, elliptically, how the paint jobs on these buildings reminded me more of England than America.
I looked into some of the buildings. Inside, they looked like run-down, kind of scuzzy, apartments. I figured they looked like the kind of place where I was supposed to be, but that they weren't the actual, specific place. I got frustrated, suddenly thinking I had gone down the wrong block. But all the blocks looked so similar here, it was only natural that I'd make a mistake like this.
I was at the bottom of the block. The slope leveled off, and the road widened out, taking a circular shape, in which was an octagonal or circular building, quaint-looking, with large windows from about two and a half feet up to the roof of the building and red brick from two and a half feet down. The roof was black shingles, sloped up to a point or a weather vane.
As I floated past the building a black woman, young, in shape, with straight, brown-blonde hair, ran after me. She, too, may have been naked, or she may have been dressed in a business style pantsuit of purple material.
The woman yelled at me that my appearance had distracted her, that it had kept her from thinking of something very important to her job, which she had to go to right now. I felt like the woman was accusing me of sexual harassment. I didn't want to be seen as that kind of a person, so I turned to speak with the woman and try to clear up the issue.
But the woman had gone into her workplace, which was the quaint-looking building. I opened the door and looked inside, not wanting to come all the way in, since I was naked. The woman and another pretty, black woman stood behind a cash register. The place looked like a jeweler's and a florist's shop.
I tried to ask the woman how I had offended her, and I tried to say I really hadn't meant to cause any discomfort because of my appearance. But I wasn't saying that at all. Instead I was stutteringly asking confused questions about the nature of this shop.
The woman wasn't listening to me. She was visibly eager for me to leave. But the second woman was very kind. She kept inviting me in, though I kept saying I couldn't come in. She also kept telling me all sorts of things about the shop. She asked if that was what I'd had in mind when I'd asked my questions.
Dream #3
I walked into a large, dim room, like a convention room or a high school gym with little or none of its lights turned on. I had a big, green stick of bamboo, which I was eating.
I looked at a cross-section of the stick, as if my teeth had cleanly hacked the stick in a straight line. The inside was a tan circle, like a tree's wood, with three kidney-shaped cavities evenly distributed at the circle's edge. The cavities were filled with a speckled, yellowish substance which I may have called marrow. I licked this substance. It was sweet.
I thought, This is what the koalas eat bamboo (?! - not eucalyptus?) for -- the sweet marrow, not the leafs. I tried to pull the marrow out of the shoot so I could eat eat alone. I pulled a big chunk out by using my fingernail. The chunk was solid and had the consistency of a candy bar. It was vanilla yellow, with speckles in it like chopped nuts.
I nibbled the pieces. It was only mildly sweet. I was somewhat disappointed. But I suddenly felt worried. What if this marrow was actually poisonous to humans? I thought, It couldn't be poisonous: it tastes so good.
I imagined myself as a koala in the trees, eating bamboo.
Now there were other people in the room, maybe twenty or thirty people. But the people all huddled in one small part of the room, an entrance area which had a much lower ceiling and much tighter space, but which was actually lit (by incandescent light).
I walked over from where I was (it now seemed like a few rows of long, church-style pews) to be with the people. They looked like a church group. They were of varying ages, but all dressed nicely.
Everybody in the group held paper plates filled with food. They motioned for me to go get some food. I walked over to a kind of cluttered, smallish buffet table. There were serving trays filled with different kinds of food. But for some reason I felt like I had been "assigned" to one plate which already had food on it.
As I approached the plate a boy, maybe in his early teens, light-skinned, black, thin, with close-cut hair and wide eyeglasses, also approached the plate. The boy looked mild and gentle, but I could tell he was just waiting for a chance to annoy me.
I tried to start eating from my plate, but the boy now started reaching for anything I'd reach for. I now understood that the boy and I had been "assigned" to share this plate. But any time I'd reach for anything the boy would quickly grab it first. The only thing I could grab was something I didn't want: a bland, white fold of a corn or wheat flour tortilla. The boy may have been eating, but he was also occupied in piling at least some of the stuff he grabbed (eggs, cheese, bacon) all on top of each other in a little wedge-shaped area, which he protected closely.
I looked around and realized there was food in serving trays all around me.I didn't have to eat from this one plate. In fact, I now wondered why I had been so focused on just this one plate. I thought, I'll distract the boy. I'll make him so proud of his little pile of food that he doesn't pay attention to me while I go get food of my own.
The boy's pile of food now just looked like a warm, greasy wedge of eggs and cheese. I told the boy something like, "Wow, that's a lot of food. Are you really going to eat all of that? Have you started eating any of it yet?"
The boy made some comment about how he didn't really care about the food and how he really didn't want to talk to me, either.
(5/2/09) the irksome gurus
Dream #1
I was in a hallway at a place that was supposed to be the office for my job before I was laid off. (In waking life, in the month or so before I got laid off, our offices had been moved to the building of the offices of the company we had just been merged with. The main reason, but probably not the only reason, for my having gotten laid off, was my company's merger with this other company.)
I stood at one end of the hallway, before a door accessible through magnetic card. I was turned to face the other end of the hallway. About halfway down the hall, to my left, a wider hallway intersected with this hallway. That hallway "felt" like it had a copier and some reams of paper scattered near its end.
From the hallway a woman came walking on her hands. Her legs were twisted behind and over her in some "yoga" position. She was the company's yoga teacher. She thought she would show off by walking into the offices in a yoga posture. She was short, skinny, black, with pale skin and a loosely curled head of grey and black hair. She wore a white sweatshirt, sweatpants of a slightly darker color, a beige, billed cap, like a hiker's cap, and blue, reflective sunglasses.
The woman hopped toward me. I knew that this woman had "always struck me" as someone who wanted to make people feel like she was unapproachable, that she couldn't be spoken to. I usually let myself give in to that feeling, and I would shy away from the woman.
But today I felt like the woman was being so absurd that I just had to defy her by greeting her cheerfully. I said, "Hello! How are you doing today?"
The woman ignored my greeting. She stopped before me. She was waiting for me to open the door so she could go in when I went in. I was about to open the door. In fact, I may actually, or at least in my mind's eye, have seen the door open a crack.
But I thought, I'm not going to do her a good turn if she's not even going to regard me. I pretended to swipe my security card against the magnetic sensor that would unlock the door. Since I hadn't really swiped my card, the door didn't unlock. I then said, "Oh, it looks like my card doesn't work anymore. Oh, well."
I walked away from the door, down the hallway, to a door to my right, which also went to the offices I wanted to go to. Someone may possibly just have walked into the offices. The door seemed to be slightly open, but closing. I caught it and pushed it open.
I walked into the offices. I walked to a wide table of desks, which may have been supposed to be desks on a trading floor. The table was a square, more like a desk setup for elementary school kids than a trading floor desk.
A little celebration was being held, possibly in my honor. I only realized after a moment of talking with everybody that this celebration was for me. The people at the celebration were mostly people at the same professional level as I. I especially noticed my co-workers MS and CP. We had a red cake with white frosting.
Everybody asked me if something in my life had been difficult to deal with lately. I said no and tried to play off the difficulty I had felt. But now I either saw my old boss BS coming along or I felt that he was just around the corner. I hoped everybody would put the cake away. I knew that if BS knew everybody was celebrating me, BS would do whatever he could to stop them or make the celebration all about him.
I was in a hallway at a place that was supposed to be the office for my job before I was laid off. (In waking life, in the month or so before I got laid off, our offices had been moved to the building of the offices of the company we had just been merged with. The main reason, but probably not the only reason, for my having gotten laid off, was my company's merger with this other company.)
I stood at one end of the hallway, before a door accessible through magnetic card. I was turned to face the other end of the hallway. About halfway down the hall, to my left, a wider hallway intersected with this hallway. That hallway "felt" like it had a copier and some reams of paper scattered near its end.
From the hallway a woman came walking on her hands. Her legs were twisted behind and over her in some "yoga" position. She was the company's yoga teacher. She thought she would show off by walking into the offices in a yoga posture. She was short, skinny, black, with pale skin and a loosely curled head of grey and black hair. She wore a white sweatshirt, sweatpants of a slightly darker color, a beige, billed cap, like a hiker's cap, and blue, reflective sunglasses.
The woman hopped toward me. I knew that this woman had "always struck me" as someone who wanted to make people feel like she was unapproachable, that she couldn't be spoken to. I usually let myself give in to that feeling, and I would shy away from the woman.
But today I felt like the woman was being so absurd that I just had to defy her by greeting her cheerfully. I said, "Hello! How are you doing today?"
The woman ignored my greeting. She stopped before me. She was waiting for me to open the door so she could go in when I went in. I was about to open the door. In fact, I may actually, or at least in my mind's eye, have seen the door open a crack.
But I thought, I'm not going to do her a good turn if she's not even going to regard me. I pretended to swipe my security card against the magnetic sensor that would unlock the door. Since I hadn't really swiped my card, the door didn't unlock. I then said, "Oh, it looks like my card doesn't work anymore. Oh, well."
I walked away from the door, down the hallway, to a door to my right, which also went to the offices I wanted to go to. Someone may possibly just have walked into the offices. The door seemed to be slightly open, but closing. I caught it and pushed it open.
I walked into the offices. I walked to a wide table of desks, which may have been supposed to be desks on a trading floor. The table was a square, more like a desk setup for elementary school kids than a trading floor desk.
A little celebration was being held, possibly in my honor. I only realized after a moment of talking with everybody that this celebration was for me. The people at the celebration were mostly people at the same professional level as I. I especially noticed my co-workers MS and CP. We had a red cake with white frosting.
Everybody asked me if something in my life had been difficult to deal with lately. I said no and tried to play off the difficulty I had felt. But now I either saw my old boss BS coming along or I felt that he was just around the corner. I hoped everybody would put the cake away. I knew that if BS knew everybody was celebrating me, BS would do whatever he could to stop them or make the celebration all about him.
(5/3/09) receiving instruction; sweet leftovers
(Entered in paper journal at 9:05 AM at Connecticut Muffin.)
Dream #1
I walked into a classroom. The walls of the classroom may have been sea green. The classroom felt very closed in, but comfortable, as if it were closed from bad weather outside. The students seemed engaged, in the middle of something, with a lot of papers on their desks (the desks were in the standard "grid" pattern). I had a fuzzy feeling, like the comfortable warmth one feels at the end of a sickness.
I wasn't sure I was supposed to be here. But the teacher, a serious looking male, wide-bodied, in a suit and with spectacles, like in an anime, motioned me to a desk, as if I were late. The teacher then instructed me on something. Apparently he had also been walking through the class, instructing other students in the same way.
Dream #2
I was in a university dining hall. The room seemed small, possibly more like a meal-lounge in a hotel or office building. The walls were white, and the room was somewhat brightly lit by fluorescent lights. A continuous line of people were walking into the room. Everybody in the room was about college age.
The room was full of circular tables, maybe six feet in diameter, with fake-wood tops. All the tables were occupied, though maybe not full. I sat at a table near the back, left corner of the room, near the entrance to the room.
The table I sat at may have been able to seat eight people, though it was likely there were just three of us sitting there right now. The other two people sitting at my table were a man and a woman. The woman sat either one seat removed from me to my right or directly to my right. The man sat to my left, removed by either one or two seats.
There had sat, on our table, a cake that had been almost as wide as the table. It had been flat, like a cookie-cake, and red, like a red velvet cake, with white frosting. But someone had just recently come by and lifted the cake off the table, leaving just a white outline of frosting on the table.
A tall, thin, red-haired girl with pale skin and pale blue eyes now walked up (as if from the entrance?) to the woman at my table, who may have looked a lot like the standing girl. Actually, I think that at first the sitting girl was about medium height, thin, with a nice body, tan skin, brown eyes, and long, soft, brown hair, wearing a dark green sweater and probably a black, knee-length skirt. Then, later, she took on the red-haired girl's appearance.
As the standing girl began to speak with the sitting girl, I, trying not to feel left out of the conversation, but also trying not to intrude on the conversation, began to pick at the white outline of frosting, thinking that if I hadn't gotten any of the cake before they took it away, I could at least have some of the frosting. I picked a whole line of it off the table. It was a line broken by little circle designs.
I folded the line I had picked, so it would fit better into my mouth. But then I worried that if I ate this frosting, I'd be thought of as a slob: first, for eating leftover frosting (like leftover pizza cheese, clinging to the bottom of a cardboard pizza box); second, for eating something I'd played with so much.
The standing girl said to the sitting girl, "Hey -- you know what I thought as I saw you sitting here in these clothes? And I was even all the way across the room, with my friends." I thought to myself that the standing girl was now going to deliver an insult, just given the tone of her voice. But the standing girl said, "I thought, Wow, that girl's hot. She looks good in that outfit."
The girls spoke back and forth. I thought the standing girl was trying to make romantic advances on the sitting girl. I was jealous but I didn't really want to care. I also didn't want to intrude.
So I turned to the boy and started having some conversation with him. The boy may have been wearing a suit and tie. We may have started talking business. I really wasn't engaged in talking to the boy at all. When the standing girl walked away I stopped talking to the boy.
The sitting girl, who now definitely looked like the standing girl, turned to me and said, "Did you see how the girl looks in those new stone shoes?" I could see that the standing girl wore low-heeled, buckle-strapped shoes, which would normally be made of shiny, black leather. (I must have been thinking of Mary Janes.) The sitting girl said, "She looked good. She looked really good."
Dream #1
I walked into a classroom. The walls of the classroom may have been sea green. The classroom felt very closed in, but comfortable, as if it were closed from bad weather outside. The students seemed engaged, in the middle of something, with a lot of papers on their desks (the desks were in the standard "grid" pattern). I had a fuzzy feeling, like the comfortable warmth one feels at the end of a sickness.
I wasn't sure I was supposed to be here. But the teacher, a serious looking male, wide-bodied, in a suit and with spectacles, like in an anime, motioned me to a desk, as if I were late. The teacher then instructed me on something. Apparently he had also been walking through the class, instructing other students in the same way.
Dream #2
I was in a university dining hall. The room seemed small, possibly more like a meal-lounge in a hotel or office building. The walls were white, and the room was somewhat brightly lit by fluorescent lights. A continuous line of people were walking into the room. Everybody in the room was about college age.
The room was full of circular tables, maybe six feet in diameter, with fake-wood tops. All the tables were occupied, though maybe not full. I sat at a table near the back, left corner of the room, near the entrance to the room.
The table I sat at may have been able to seat eight people, though it was likely there were just three of us sitting there right now. The other two people sitting at my table were a man and a woman. The woman sat either one seat removed from me to my right or directly to my right. The man sat to my left, removed by either one or two seats.
There had sat, on our table, a cake that had been almost as wide as the table. It had been flat, like a cookie-cake, and red, like a red velvet cake, with white frosting. But someone had just recently come by and lifted the cake off the table, leaving just a white outline of frosting on the table.
A tall, thin, red-haired girl with pale skin and pale blue eyes now walked up (as if from the entrance?) to the woman at my table, who may have looked a lot like the standing girl. Actually, I think that at first the sitting girl was about medium height, thin, with a nice body, tan skin, brown eyes, and long, soft, brown hair, wearing a dark green sweater and probably a black, knee-length skirt. Then, later, she took on the red-haired girl's appearance.
As the standing girl began to speak with the sitting girl, I, trying not to feel left out of the conversation, but also trying not to intrude on the conversation, began to pick at the white outline of frosting, thinking that if I hadn't gotten any of the cake before they took it away, I could at least have some of the frosting. I picked a whole line of it off the table. It was a line broken by little circle designs.
I folded the line I had picked, so it would fit better into my mouth. But then I worried that if I ate this frosting, I'd be thought of as a slob: first, for eating leftover frosting (like leftover pizza cheese, clinging to the bottom of a cardboard pizza box); second, for eating something I'd played with so much.
The standing girl said to the sitting girl, "Hey -- you know what I thought as I saw you sitting here in these clothes? And I was even all the way across the room, with my friends." I thought to myself that the standing girl was now going to deliver an insult, just given the tone of her voice. But the standing girl said, "I thought, Wow, that girl's hot. She looks good in that outfit."
The girls spoke back and forth. I thought the standing girl was trying to make romantic advances on the sitting girl. I was jealous but I didn't really want to care. I also didn't want to intrude.
So I turned to the boy and started having some conversation with him. The boy may have been wearing a suit and tie. We may have started talking business. I really wasn't engaged in talking to the boy at all. When the standing girl walked away I stopped talking to the boy.
The sitting girl, who now definitely looked like the standing girl, turned to me and said, "Did you see how the girl looks in those new stone shoes?" I could see that the standing girl wore low-heeled, buckle-strapped shoes, which would normally be made of shiny, black leather. (I must have been thinking of Mary Janes.) The sitting girl said, "She looked good. She looked really good."
Thursday, November 22, 2012
(5/4/09) bathroom flood
(Entered in paper journal at 7:41 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
It was night. I was probably in my apartment alone. But then I was in my apartment with my girlfriend H. I was in the bathroom. I was possibly sitting on the toilet at first. But then I was standing before my bathtub. The light in my bathroom was off. The shower curtain was open just a little.
I saw a couple little, black shapes darting around in the bathtub. I thought they were roaches. I was upset that I possibly had roaches in my house. But I wasn't sure what I had seen. So I pulled back the shower curtain.
There were little, black shapes darting around in the bathtub, some apparently two inches long, others of smaller size, down to tiny specks. These shapes didn't seem like roaches at all, now. They were formless, little blots. I thought they were products of my own sight, physical perturbations on my own eyes.
But I thought that, regardless of what the visions were, I had let my bathroom get too dirty. I thought that if I didn't clean my bathroom, real roaches eventually would show up. So I started sweeping my bathroom floor. As I cleaned, I could hear H talk about how she couldn't study unless her house was clean.
Some of the dust seemed caked on the floor or sticky. There was now sudsy water washing up and down the floor, around the toilet. It started sloshing back and forth so violently that I had to back out of the bathroom.
It seemed to be lightning and thundering outside. There didn't seem to be any lights on in the house. The water sloshed back and forth through about half the length of the bathroom.
H may have said something, worrying about the water staying or attracting more roaches. I said, "Don't worry. We just have to wait for it to drain away."
I could now see a drain-grate. Water was sucking down into that grate, leaving milky foam behind. The water made a foamy, violently gurgling sound as it went down the grate. I felt ashamed that this mess was keeping H from studying, or that it might keep her from studying if she were to stay at my place.
Dream #1
It was night. I was probably in my apartment alone. But then I was in my apartment with my girlfriend H. I was in the bathroom. I was possibly sitting on the toilet at first. But then I was standing before my bathtub. The light in my bathroom was off. The shower curtain was open just a little.
I saw a couple little, black shapes darting around in the bathtub. I thought they were roaches. I was upset that I possibly had roaches in my house. But I wasn't sure what I had seen. So I pulled back the shower curtain.
There were little, black shapes darting around in the bathtub, some apparently two inches long, others of smaller size, down to tiny specks. These shapes didn't seem like roaches at all, now. They were formless, little blots. I thought they were products of my own sight, physical perturbations on my own eyes.
But I thought that, regardless of what the visions were, I had let my bathroom get too dirty. I thought that if I didn't clean my bathroom, real roaches eventually would show up. So I started sweeping my bathroom floor. As I cleaned, I could hear H talk about how she couldn't study unless her house was clean.
Some of the dust seemed caked on the floor or sticky. There was now sudsy water washing up and down the floor, around the toilet. It started sloshing back and forth so violently that I had to back out of the bathroom.
It seemed to be lightning and thundering outside. There didn't seem to be any lights on in the house. The water sloshed back and forth through about half the length of the bathroom.
H may have said something, worrying about the water staying or attracting more roaches. I said, "Don't worry. We just have to wait for it to drain away."
I could now see a drain-grate. Water was sucking down into that grate, leaving milky foam behind. The water made a foamy, violently gurgling sound as it went down the grate. I felt ashamed that this mess was keeping H from studying, or that it might keep her from studying if she were to stay at my place.
(5/5/09) the penguin was also trying to do research
(Entered in paper journal at 7:45 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I was in a house with my family. I was in a hallway between two or three bedrooms. The bedroom doors were all open, and the bedrooms were harshly lit with white daylight. The bright living room was just down the hall to my right. I was trying to get into a bedroom right in front of me, on the right side of the hall (facing away from the living room). But there were a couple of people in the doorway, including my mom.
I was trying to get into this room to do research on something. There were magazines and a computer with data that I wanted to look at. But my mom (possibly talking with her best friend) stood in the doorway and wouldn't let me in. She said that she was getting ready to have a meeting in here. She acted like I was being really annoying by wanting to be let in. I tried to explain that there were images and data I needed to see in there.
My mom through a computer bag (my computer bag?) out into the hallway. Something like a sketch pad may also have tumbled along with it. The laptop may also have been something like a video game system, probably a Famicom.
My mom said, "There! That has all the data you need in it, doesn't it? And you can take it anywhere, so you don't need to stay here!"
I disagreed. I thought I'd try to explain that I still needed to see all the magazine images. But I figured it was useless to try and argue. I left.
I was on a hilltop in some kind of desert wilderness. It may have been late afternoon. The sky had an orange and purplish, silvery tinge to it. The landscape was like basalt boulders, maybe six feet in width for most of them, piled on each other like outcroppings. The boulders were all fringed with a whitish material like salt.
I was probably in an oldish car which was full of junk (like the car I drove was full of junk when I lived in the southwestern United States and worked for the Park Service in waking life). I was trying to work on my research.
There was a penguin in the backseat. Apparently the penguin was also trying to do research. The penguin looked a little strange. He had a silvery sheen, and he had silvery rings around his eyes and silvery "eyebrows" that were thick, but long and limber, like cat's whiskers.
There was a group of girls on the rocks. They all called to me to let the penguin out of the car. The girls said the penguin would be happier out in nature, and that a lot of female penguins would come to be with him.
I opened the back, passenger side door (not sure how, seeing how I was sitting in the driver's seat) to let the penguin out. The penguin was now a tallish, slightly overweight, grey-haired man (like some version of my aunt M's husband). The man got out of the car and stood in the road.
The car door was now closed. But the man was speaking with me (and I could hear him clearly, just like I'd heard the girls clearly, through my closed door and window). As the man spoke he shrunk and transformed back into a penguin.
I had been looking at the man/penguin through the passenger side window from my vantage point of the driver's seat. The man had now shrunk completely out of my view. I knelt over onto the passenger seat to look out the window for the penguin.
The penguin was clucking and warbling, almost like I would expect a rooster to do, except a little more gently, "lipidly." I knew that a flock of female penguins would soon gather around him.
Dream #1
I was in a house with my family. I was in a hallway between two or three bedrooms. The bedroom doors were all open, and the bedrooms were harshly lit with white daylight. The bright living room was just down the hall to my right. I was trying to get into a bedroom right in front of me, on the right side of the hall (facing away from the living room). But there were a couple of people in the doorway, including my mom.
I was trying to get into this room to do research on something. There were magazines and a computer with data that I wanted to look at. But my mom (possibly talking with her best friend) stood in the doorway and wouldn't let me in. She said that she was getting ready to have a meeting in here. She acted like I was being really annoying by wanting to be let in. I tried to explain that there were images and data I needed to see in there.
My mom through a computer bag (my computer bag?) out into the hallway. Something like a sketch pad may also have tumbled along with it. The laptop may also have been something like a video game system, probably a Famicom.
My mom said, "There! That has all the data you need in it, doesn't it? And you can take it anywhere, so you don't need to stay here!"
I disagreed. I thought I'd try to explain that I still needed to see all the magazine images. But I figured it was useless to try and argue. I left.
I was on a hilltop in some kind of desert wilderness. It may have been late afternoon. The sky had an orange and purplish, silvery tinge to it. The landscape was like basalt boulders, maybe six feet in width for most of them, piled on each other like outcroppings. The boulders were all fringed with a whitish material like salt.
I was probably in an oldish car which was full of junk (like the car I drove was full of junk when I lived in the southwestern United States and worked for the Park Service in waking life). I was trying to work on my research.
There was a penguin in the backseat. Apparently the penguin was also trying to do research. The penguin looked a little strange. He had a silvery sheen, and he had silvery rings around his eyes and silvery "eyebrows" that were thick, but long and limber, like cat's whiskers.
There was a group of girls on the rocks. They all called to me to let the penguin out of the car. The girls said the penguin would be happier out in nature, and that a lot of female penguins would come to be with him.
I opened the back, passenger side door (not sure how, seeing how I was sitting in the driver's seat) to let the penguin out. The penguin was now a tallish, slightly overweight, grey-haired man (like some version of my aunt M's husband). The man got out of the car and stood in the road.
The car door was now closed. But the man was speaking with me (and I could hear him clearly, just like I'd heard the girls clearly, through my closed door and window). As the man spoke he shrunk and transformed back into a penguin.
I had been looking at the man/penguin through the passenger side window from my vantage point of the driver's seat. The man had now shrunk completely out of my view. I knelt over onto the passenger seat to look out the window for the penguin.
The penguin was clucking and warbling, almost like I would expect a rooster to do, except a little more gently, "lipidly." I knew that a flock of female penguins would soon gather around him.
(5/6/09) annoying a fetish girl; you better be careful, casanova
(Entered in paper journal at 7:41 AM at home.)
Dream #1
I was at "my office." I had been fired by the head of my department, MR. I walked through a floor of trading desk tables. The area was empty, lit with dim, greyish fluorescent light. To my right was a grey wall. To my left were the desks. AT the left end of the rows of desks was another wall, with offices set into it. As I walked along, I thought about having been fired.
I now sat in the far left corner of the floor. There were a few other people around. I sat in a chair while a girl knelt before me. We were talking about something. The girl was short, pale, with a cute, roundish body, and brown hair, probably in a layered style. The girl had pale blue eyes. She wore a fancy, black dress, the top of which seemed a little sparkly while the bottom seemed somehow layered or frilly.
I was apparently wearing dress clothes, but I was also trying to take off a little lingerie miniskirt, which I had apparently been wearing. (This was a skirt I actually had as part of my transvestite collection: a tiny, turquoise-colored, satin miniskirt with a sheer, pink fringe around the bottom.)
There were a couple guys working near me, to my left. The were big and maybe dressed a little roughly. Another man, a big, tough-looking businessman, walked up and spoke with me and the girl. When he saw that I was taking the miniskirt off, he tried to ignore me and keep talking. But he made a grunting or throat-clearing sound to show his annoyance. He walked away.
I was ashamed to thing what the girl would think about me having worn this lingerie. But the girl seemed attracted to me because of my transvestism. She stood me up, possibly taking me by the hand, and led me into an office.
The girl sat down in the chair behind the desk. I knelt before her. She whispered something into my ear which seemed to me to mean that she would like to see me in lingerie. She seemed to be inviting me to her house so I could dress up fro her.
But the girl was saying everything in an obscure way, and her words themselves were somehow very hard to understand. I asked the girl to repeat what she'd said. She did so, but I still couldn't understand. I asked her again. I could tel that she was now getting annoyed.
Dream #2
I was in an office. I had probably just gotten fired. I walked through aisles of trading desk tables. The floor was mostly dark, as if only faint lights from somewhere else lit the room. There were two aisles of table desks. I stood in the left aisle.
In the right aisle, a couple rooms ahead of me, my co-worker NN sat with some other administrative assistants, talking about one of the heads of our department. The head was a woman who had recently become gay or come out as being gay.
NN was showing internet photos to the other assistants: pictures of a man like the director of our department, MR, swinging on something like a strip-club pole and wearing nothing but a diaper-like object made out of gold, red, green, and white striped wrapping paper.
NN said that the newly-outed department head had always engaged in sexual activities like the one pictured with her husband (who may have been another departmental head at the company), so that everybody thought guys turned the woman on, but just in a weird way. But then the woman had come out as gay, and that struck everybody as being even weirder.
I now stood in a large, marble lobby. The floors, ceiling, walls, and columns were all a pinkish-tan, polished marble. I stood on a second level. Down a level from me (to my right, and down by escalator) was the main lobby or entrance for this building. There may have been window walls for the entrance, letting in a lot of natural light.
To my let was a wall (perhaps a tan, unpolished stone, not marble?) with two arched doorways (or, perhaps, at first, just one doorway) in it. This floor was like a mezzanine balcony. It was maybe fifty feet wide and moderately busy with people. Someone stood before me and down a ways. The person looked like a security guard, but he was accomplishing basically the same task I was.
Cars would come from my right (possibly having come up the escalator?) and pass into the doorway to my left. I was overwhelmed with anxiety from having the cars constantly passing so close to me. I was probably here waiting for somebody or waiting for a certain time to pass, and I didn't want to be bothered by the cars. So I backed away a bit, to the second doorway.
Now it was like the entrance way through which the cars passed was one large square, like a theatrical proscenium. The cars passed across a shallow, dim hallway, like a hallway at the Schwarzman branch of the New York Public Library, and then through an arched doorway.
There were a right and a left doorway. The cars had to pass through the right doorway. I stood over at the far left end of the proscenium, trying to stay away from the cars. At the right end was the security guard, who now also stood by a little booth and had an automatically rising gate-post beside him.
At first, the cars kept going through the right doorway, like they should have. But they then began veering as close to me as they could. I felt like they were veering toward me because they didn't like something about my looks. They wanted to intimidate or annoy me by driving close to me. They all understood that they had to go through the right doorway, and that the left doorway was no good for them. But they all drove as far left as possible, to get as close to me as possible.
The cars were all small, possibly made by an Italian manufacturer. Inside, driving, were mature, tough businessmen, like the businessmen in Italian films from the 1960s.
I thought, Well, they'll only be hurting themselves by driving through the left door. To prove this to myself I followed one car as it drove through the doorway. The car immediately hit a downward staircase (wide, tan, marble). It couldn't stop. It stayed upright, but it comically tumbled down the steps.
I now thought it would be fun simply to lure cars into the left doorway, through their anger at me, and watch them destroy themselves. I lured another car in. Then I lured another car in and followed it. The staircase was now a thin escalator, a little grimy, like an escalator down to a lower subway. The hallway was thin.
The car, like a longish, roundish car from the 1930s (my drawing doesn't do it justice), sped onto the escalator and almost immediately flipped over, then toppling over to the left side of the escalator. A wall may have saved it from toppling over the side. But I had a bad feeling the car was going to explode. I may also have seen the second car stalled somewhere near the third car.
I ran back out to the mezzanine. I felt awful: I'd actually caused physical danger by playing an awful mind game with people. I needed to go get help before the car exploded.
The building was now somehow like a movie theater. I flew toward the escalator down to the lobby. I was with two girls. I flew down, slightly ahead of them and over the escalator, while they rode the escalator down. There were bright lights and colors somewhere, possibly coming from some large display. I could somehow see that it was night outside.
I was still apparently rushing out to get help, but I was also with these girls, who had just come from watching a movie. The girls were making some kind of gossip talk about movie stars. I thought, Don't these girls realize what a dangerous situation we're in? I stood on the ground and pushed the door open.
I now sat in a Mexican restaurant with three women. To my left sat a girl like my friend KB. We sat across the table from two other girls, one of whom was intellectual but girly, and the other of whom may have been more tough and solid, like KB.
The restaurant was tall, like it was two stories in height, with the second story as just a balcony running along the walls. The place was empty except for us. We sat at a long row of booth tables before the large square bar which stood at the center of the restaurant. It was night, and the restaurant was dim, with no light on over us and only some incandescent lights over a small area of booth tables which led back to the kitchen to my left.
The girls were all talking gossip talk, possibly about lesbians or about being lesbians. I didn't feel too engaged in the conversation. I might now have been sitting to KB's left.
A waiter walked up to me. He was Mexican, of medium height, but gaunt, bony, and bald, so that he appeared to be tall. He wore an all-white uniform and was pushing a cart, like a cart full of bussing trays and dinnerware for cleaning. The waiter spoke as if he was to get the whole order for my party from me alone. I told him something. He began to walk away.
I may have turned forward, but I then felt a strong hand forcing my head to the left, so I was turned almost 180 degrees in my seat. I broke out of the hold violently and was about to sit forward, when I noticed that the person who had turned me around was the waiter. I thought, Well, I'd better be nice to him. I don't want anybody spitting in my food.
I looked politely at the waiter. The waiter looked very concerned. He bent down and whispered in my ear, "You better be careful, Casanova." It took me a second to understand what the waiter had said, as if the words had been all garbled.
The restaurant seemed a little more populated now. There seemed to be red neon light filling the area. There may have been music playing.
I thought, Why would the waiter have called me Casanova? I then realized it was because I was the only guy sitting with three girls. I thought, If the waiter only knew that these girls were all lesbians, he might not be so worried.
Dream #1
I was at "my office." I had been fired by the head of my department, MR. I walked through a floor of trading desk tables. The area was empty, lit with dim, greyish fluorescent light. To my right was a grey wall. To my left were the desks. AT the left end of the rows of desks was another wall, with offices set into it. As I walked along, I thought about having been fired.
I now sat in the far left corner of the floor. There were a few other people around. I sat in a chair while a girl knelt before me. We were talking about something. The girl was short, pale, with a cute, roundish body, and brown hair, probably in a layered style. The girl had pale blue eyes. She wore a fancy, black dress, the top of which seemed a little sparkly while the bottom seemed somehow layered or frilly.
I was apparently wearing dress clothes, but I was also trying to take off a little lingerie miniskirt, which I had apparently been wearing. (This was a skirt I actually had as part of my transvestite collection: a tiny, turquoise-colored, satin miniskirt with a sheer, pink fringe around the bottom.)
There were a couple guys working near me, to my left. The were big and maybe dressed a little roughly. Another man, a big, tough-looking businessman, walked up and spoke with me and the girl. When he saw that I was taking the miniskirt off, he tried to ignore me and keep talking. But he made a grunting or throat-clearing sound to show his annoyance. He walked away.
I was ashamed to thing what the girl would think about me having worn this lingerie. But the girl seemed attracted to me because of my transvestism. She stood me up, possibly taking me by the hand, and led me into an office.
The girl sat down in the chair behind the desk. I knelt before her. She whispered something into my ear which seemed to me to mean that she would like to see me in lingerie. She seemed to be inviting me to her house so I could dress up fro her.
But the girl was saying everything in an obscure way, and her words themselves were somehow very hard to understand. I asked the girl to repeat what she'd said. She did so, but I still couldn't understand. I asked her again. I could tel that she was now getting annoyed.
Dream #2
I was in an office. I had probably just gotten fired. I walked through aisles of trading desk tables. The floor was mostly dark, as if only faint lights from somewhere else lit the room. There were two aisles of table desks. I stood in the left aisle.
In the right aisle, a couple rooms ahead of me, my co-worker NN sat with some other administrative assistants, talking about one of the heads of our department. The head was a woman who had recently become gay or come out as being gay.
NN was showing internet photos to the other assistants: pictures of a man like the director of our department, MR, swinging on something like a strip-club pole and wearing nothing but a diaper-like object made out of gold, red, green, and white striped wrapping paper.
NN said that the newly-outed department head had always engaged in sexual activities like the one pictured with her husband (who may have been another departmental head at the company), so that everybody thought guys turned the woman on, but just in a weird way. But then the woman had come out as gay, and that struck everybody as being even weirder.
I now stood in a large, marble lobby. The floors, ceiling, walls, and columns were all a pinkish-tan, polished marble. I stood on a second level. Down a level from me (to my right, and down by escalator) was the main lobby or entrance for this building. There may have been window walls for the entrance, letting in a lot of natural light.
To my let was a wall (perhaps a tan, unpolished stone, not marble?) with two arched doorways (or, perhaps, at first, just one doorway) in it. This floor was like a mezzanine balcony. It was maybe fifty feet wide and moderately busy with people. Someone stood before me and down a ways. The person looked like a security guard, but he was accomplishing basically the same task I was.
Cars would come from my right (possibly having come up the escalator?) and pass into the doorway to my left. I was overwhelmed with anxiety from having the cars constantly passing so close to me. I was probably here waiting for somebody or waiting for a certain time to pass, and I didn't want to be bothered by the cars. So I backed away a bit, to the second doorway.
Now it was like the entrance way through which the cars passed was one large square, like a theatrical proscenium. The cars passed across a shallow, dim hallway, like a hallway at the Schwarzman branch of the New York Public Library, and then through an arched doorway.
There were a right and a left doorway. The cars had to pass through the right doorway. I stood over at the far left end of the proscenium, trying to stay away from the cars. At the right end was the security guard, who now also stood by a little booth and had an automatically rising gate-post beside him.
At first, the cars kept going through the right doorway, like they should have. But they then began veering as close to me as they could. I felt like they were veering toward me because they didn't like something about my looks. They wanted to intimidate or annoy me by driving close to me. They all understood that they had to go through the right doorway, and that the left doorway was no good for them. But they all drove as far left as possible, to get as close to me as possible.
The cars were all small, possibly made by an Italian manufacturer. Inside, driving, were mature, tough businessmen, like the businessmen in Italian films from the 1960s.
I thought, Well, they'll only be hurting themselves by driving through the left door. To prove this to myself I followed one car as it drove through the doorway. The car immediately hit a downward staircase (wide, tan, marble). It couldn't stop. It stayed upright, but it comically tumbled down the steps.
I now thought it would be fun simply to lure cars into the left doorway, through their anger at me, and watch them destroy themselves. I lured another car in. Then I lured another car in and followed it. The staircase was now a thin escalator, a little grimy, like an escalator down to a lower subway. The hallway was thin.
The car, like a longish, roundish car from the 1930s (my drawing doesn't do it justice), sped onto the escalator and almost immediately flipped over, then toppling over to the left side of the escalator. A wall may have saved it from toppling over the side. But I had a bad feeling the car was going to explode. I may also have seen the second car stalled somewhere near the third car.
I ran back out to the mezzanine. I felt awful: I'd actually caused physical danger by playing an awful mind game with people. I needed to go get help before the car exploded.
The building was now somehow like a movie theater. I flew toward the escalator down to the lobby. I was with two girls. I flew down, slightly ahead of them and over the escalator, while they rode the escalator down. There were bright lights and colors somewhere, possibly coming from some large display. I could somehow see that it was night outside.
I was still apparently rushing out to get help, but I was also with these girls, who had just come from watching a movie. The girls were making some kind of gossip talk about movie stars. I thought, Don't these girls realize what a dangerous situation we're in? I stood on the ground and pushed the door open.
I now sat in a Mexican restaurant with three women. To my left sat a girl like my friend KB. We sat across the table from two other girls, one of whom was intellectual but girly, and the other of whom may have been more tough and solid, like KB.
The restaurant was tall, like it was two stories in height, with the second story as just a balcony running along the walls. The place was empty except for us. We sat at a long row of booth tables before the large square bar which stood at the center of the restaurant. It was night, and the restaurant was dim, with no light on over us and only some incandescent lights over a small area of booth tables which led back to the kitchen to my left.
The girls were all talking gossip talk, possibly about lesbians or about being lesbians. I didn't feel too engaged in the conversation. I might now have been sitting to KB's left.
A waiter walked up to me. He was Mexican, of medium height, but gaunt, bony, and bald, so that he appeared to be tall. He wore an all-white uniform and was pushing a cart, like a cart full of bussing trays and dinnerware for cleaning. The waiter spoke as if he was to get the whole order for my party from me alone. I told him something. He began to walk away.
I may have turned forward, but I then felt a strong hand forcing my head to the left, so I was turned almost 180 degrees in my seat. I broke out of the hold violently and was about to sit forward, when I noticed that the person who had turned me around was the waiter. I thought, Well, I'd better be nice to him. I don't want anybody spitting in my food.
I looked politely at the waiter. The waiter looked very concerned. He bent down and whispered in my ear, "You better be careful, Casanova." It took me a second to understand what the waiter had said, as if the words had been all garbled.
The restaurant seemed a little more populated now. There seemed to be red neon light filling the area. There may have been music playing.
I thought, Why would the waiter have called me Casanova? I then realized it was because I was the only guy sitting with three girls. I thought, If the waiter only knew that these girls were all lesbians, he might not be so worried.
(5/7/09) jet maneuvers; ring of baldness; apocalyptic home improvement
(Entered in paper journal at 9:09 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
A view of a B-52-like plane carrying along a whole school of SR-71-like jets, all tethered to the B-52 by something like metal cords. The B-52 led the SR-71s through a series of maneuvers like for an air show, darting back and forth through the sky.The sky was a darkish, purplish blue, dotted by occasional white clouds, behind which the planes might fly.
I wondered how the planes could all be tethered to the B-52 while going through the maneuvers and manage not to get all tangled up -- especially the SR-71s. As I had this reflection, the SR-71s might have changed into old, World War I style biplanes, painted a purplish blue.
After more maneuvers the planes landed. One of the pilots of the tethered planes stepped out of his plane -- which was now like a somewhat modern, very small private plane. The man was tall, white, a little heavy, with a broad forehead and pale blue eyes. He may have been balding, with short, pale grey hair. He looked exhausted. The right side of his face may at some point have been a little grey, dry, and cracked.
The man was talking about the rigors of these training flights. He spoke about how his thumb (on his right hand?) had gotten smashed or otherwise somehow injured. He said he'd be okay. He had to go up for one more flight, but he could make it. As the man spoke, he looked more and more exhausted. He almost looked like he was dying or becoming a zombie.
I saw the man's injured hand. The thumb was smashed almost flat at the nail. It was all normally colored, though: no bruising or anything. But the thumb was flat, and there was a bloody mass around the sides and top. The man pulled at the thumb, so that the top part of the thumb flapped away from the bottom part a little.
I knew the man normally used this injured hand to manipulate one of the plane's control knobs. I wondered how the man could possibly use the hand. But I also thought that if he did use the hand, the same conditions which caused his thumb to get smashed the first time around would injure his hand even more.
But all the pilots, I knew, had to take the planes up one more time today. They were each taking a child on the flight. The children were special in some sense. Most likely they were terminally ill children, part of a "Make a Wish" type program.
The man now put a thin, blonde girl, maybe nine or ten years old, into the passenger seat of his plane. The girl wore a 1970s style, flowery dress of muted colors, with a white shirt underneath.
The girl requested that the man not do too many rough stunts. The girl was either afraid or too sick to sustain too much force. The man assured the girl that he would take it easy. The flight pattern assigned was very gentle, planned specifically for this special group of children.
The man then put a "helmet" on this girl. The "helmet" looked like a chain-link basket of thin-spun metal links, like the biggest bottom "bowl" in a ceiling-hung series of tiered, mesh-metal "bowls," used in kitchens sometimes to hold fruits or plants or other things.
Dream #2
A man got angry at me. He was either very short or bent down, or else I was standing on a slightly higher level than he. I could see the top of the man's head. The very top and center was bald in a circle maybe one and a half inches in diameter.
The man got madder at me and asked me why I thought I should be so interested in his head. I looked at the man's head again. The circle had a bit of longish, thin hair in it now, leaving only the edges, a ring of baldness. This was something of a relief to me. I had thought that the man's baldness was a sign that I myself would become bald.
Dream #3
I was in the living room of the house my family lived when I was eleven to fifteen years old. Some of my family and friends were also there. It was night. The room was lit with incandescent light. The front door was open.
Something was happening in the neighborhood, maybe even throughout the world, like an attack of killers or zombies. We had to take care of something on the roof, which was sloped and made of tin or some other sheet metal. We were (or I was) afraid to do this. It would likely call the attention of the killers/zombies and put us at great risk.
Dream #1
A view of a B-52-like plane carrying along a whole school of SR-71-like jets, all tethered to the B-52 by something like metal cords. The B-52 led the SR-71s through a series of maneuvers like for an air show, darting back and forth through the sky.The sky was a darkish, purplish blue, dotted by occasional white clouds, behind which the planes might fly.
I wondered how the planes could all be tethered to the B-52 while going through the maneuvers and manage not to get all tangled up -- especially the SR-71s. As I had this reflection, the SR-71s might have changed into old, World War I style biplanes, painted a purplish blue.
After more maneuvers the planes landed. One of the pilots of the tethered planes stepped out of his plane -- which was now like a somewhat modern, very small private plane. The man was tall, white, a little heavy, with a broad forehead and pale blue eyes. He may have been balding, with short, pale grey hair. He looked exhausted. The right side of his face may at some point have been a little grey, dry, and cracked.
The man was talking about the rigors of these training flights. He spoke about how his thumb (on his right hand?) had gotten smashed or otherwise somehow injured. He said he'd be okay. He had to go up for one more flight, but he could make it. As the man spoke, he looked more and more exhausted. He almost looked like he was dying or becoming a zombie.
I saw the man's injured hand. The thumb was smashed almost flat at the nail. It was all normally colored, though: no bruising or anything. But the thumb was flat, and there was a bloody mass around the sides and top. The man pulled at the thumb, so that the top part of the thumb flapped away from the bottom part a little.
I knew the man normally used this injured hand to manipulate one of the plane's control knobs. I wondered how the man could possibly use the hand. But I also thought that if he did use the hand, the same conditions which caused his thumb to get smashed the first time around would injure his hand even more.
But all the pilots, I knew, had to take the planes up one more time today. They were each taking a child on the flight. The children were special in some sense. Most likely they were terminally ill children, part of a "Make a Wish" type program.
The man now put a thin, blonde girl, maybe nine or ten years old, into the passenger seat of his plane. The girl wore a 1970s style, flowery dress of muted colors, with a white shirt underneath.
The girl requested that the man not do too many rough stunts. The girl was either afraid or too sick to sustain too much force. The man assured the girl that he would take it easy. The flight pattern assigned was very gentle, planned specifically for this special group of children.
The man then put a "helmet" on this girl. The "helmet" looked like a chain-link basket of thin-spun metal links, like the biggest bottom "bowl" in a ceiling-hung series of tiered, mesh-metal "bowls," used in kitchens sometimes to hold fruits or plants or other things.
Dream #2
A man got angry at me. He was either very short or bent down, or else I was standing on a slightly higher level than he. I could see the top of the man's head. The very top and center was bald in a circle maybe one and a half inches in diameter.
The man got madder at me and asked me why I thought I should be so interested in his head. I looked at the man's head again. The circle had a bit of longish, thin hair in it now, leaving only the edges, a ring of baldness. This was something of a relief to me. I had thought that the man's baldness was a sign that I myself would become bald.
Dream #3
I was in the living room of the house my family lived when I was eleven to fifteen years old. Some of my family and friends were also there. It was night. The room was lit with incandescent light. The front door was open.
Something was happening in the neighborhood, maybe even throughout the world, like an attack of killers or zombies. We had to take care of something on the roof, which was sloped and made of tin or some other sheet metal. We were (or I was) afraid to do this. It would likely call the attention of the killers/zombies and put us at great risk.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
(5/9/09) time poisoning; protected rather than stolen
(Entered in paper journal at 7:05 AM on Q-train into Manhattan from Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I was in a car with my mom and my brother. I possibly sat in the backseat, on the passenger side. It was a darkish, grey day. We were driving through an area of rolling, lawny hills, like in a cemetery.
On our right was a tall wave of green hill, atop which were structures like crypts. I called these structures buildings and was pointing them out as if they were famous buildings in New York City.
There was one "building" that seemed to have a Greek/Egyptian style and seemed to be made out of gold. The next "building" we passed was very strange and thin. It seemed to be made in two sections. The section on the left was like a half-cylinder, encrusted in dark stones (?) which had an iridescent glaze and may have been broken up somehow, with traces of gilding. The section on the right may have been something like a stone pedestal on which sat a statue of a jackal.
I pointed out this building, maybe to my brother in particular, and said that the building was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But as we passed to the next buildings, I thought back to the museum. It suddenly truck me that this building no longer existed. It used to be the building which housed the museum, in the 1960s. But the museum had been moved to a bigger building. I tried to get my mom to back the car up so we could see the building again.
We were now in a kitchen. My mom was busy with something. The kitchen was smallish, with a lot of wood-tones and earth colors. It was lit with a cold, incandescent light. I had climbed up onto a countertop and was probably pulling big books, like art books, off the top of a cupboard. I was trying to show my brother that we had driven past a building which no longer existed.
(At this point I got off the Q-train and walked over to the Starbucks on 17th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, where I resumed my paper journal entry.)
I was trying to show that we had gone back in time or had been a part of some kind of anachronistic phenomenon. My brother didn't quite understand, or didn't quite seem to be paying attention. I took him back outside to try and illustrate the point.
When we got back outside, I may have had no idea how we were supposed to get back to the museum. We stood before a wide, green field which sloped slightly downward to something like a wide square of concrete, like the floor of a demolished building.
Just beyond that, though somehow obscured, was another building, which looked like a 1970s style building, and which may have had a section like a half cylinder lined with vertical wood slats. I knew that something about this area was also very different from what it "presently" was (wherever that "present" may have been).
I asked my brother, "Don't you recognize that building? Don't you remember what it was, and that it isn't there anymore?"
I now stood back inside the kitchen. My maternal grandmother walked into the kitchen. She looked a little upset. She told me that the son of XXXXX (a mutual friend of my mother and her best friend, though I can't remember her name) had just died. The son seemed to have been doing fine. But one day he drank two glasses of liquid at once and died.
The beverages were like water and chocolate milk. The cause of harm might have been, I knew, drinking two different beverages at once. But it might also have been the fact that the boy (young man, now) had been poisoned, and possibly by his mother.
My grandma had mentioned the boy's death as an explanation for why we would be delayed in getting out of the house and going where we had planned to go (to the museum?). I may have hugged my grandma to comfort her.
We walked through a small but dark hallway at the end of the kitchen and into a wide, emptyish living room lit by a single harsh, cold, incandescent light. There were a few people in the room, all relaxing as if this were one of my mother's holiday parties.
Two large couches sat against the front wall and the wall to my right. My mom's friend sat on the couch to my right. She seemed to be sad but alright. But I thought of the woman as a poisoner. I thought I would have to be careful around her.
Dream #2
I was possibly in an airport. I walked into a buffet-style restaurant. There was a huge, maze-like set of wood railings set up to form a line before the buffet. The place was almost completely empty. The atmosphere was red, as if lit by a red neon light.
I may have been waiting for a friend to arrive, or I may have been trying to figure out what I needed to pick up for a friend's meal. I was walking toward the buffet, possibly cutting through the "maze," when a couple big guys, both like white businessmen dressed business casual, cut in front of me. One of the men may have been a short, Indian man.
I caught back up to the men at the buffet. The men spoke back and forth with one another casually, like they hadn't even noticed having cut in front of me. I did something to bully them so they'd at least have to pay attention to me.
I may have been heading toward a seating area in the restaurant. The seating area apparently had no or very little light in it, lit only by natural light coming into the room from the windows in the concourse outside.
A voice now called over the loudspeaker. There was going to be some kind of fire drill or emergency evacuation drill for the building. The voice (a polite, female voice) said, "We would appreciate it if the customers could also please participate in this drill."
I figured I'd have no trouble participating. But I needed to go pick up my book bag before I did the evacuation. Before I had gone into the restaurant, apparently, I had been reading at a large, circular table, like one might see in the food court of a common area at a university.
The concourse now seemed to be a mostly windowless hallway full of these large, circular tables. I was running to find my bag. I could see the area where I had been sitting, but I couldn't see my bag. I was certain my bag had been stolen. I felt like I wasn't getting to the table fast enough.
I began flying. At some point I may have been pulled backwards. Then, possibly, I had been given my bag back by a security guard, a black woman. I was relieved. My bag had, apparently, been protected rather than stolen. But for some reason I now couldn't believe that this was actually my bag.
Dream #1
I was in a car with my mom and my brother. I possibly sat in the backseat, on the passenger side. It was a darkish, grey day. We were driving through an area of rolling, lawny hills, like in a cemetery.
On our right was a tall wave of green hill, atop which were structures like crypts. I called these structures buildings and was pointing them out as if they were famous buildings in New York City.
There was one "building" that seemed to have a Greek/Egyptian style and seemed to be made out of gold. The next "building" we passed was very strange and thin. It seemed to be made in two sections. The section on the left was like a half-cylinder, encrusted in dark stones (?) which had an iridescent glaze and may have been broken up somehow, with traces of gilding. The section on the right may have been something like a stone pedestal on which sat a statue of a jackal.
I pointed out this building, maybe to my brother in particular, and said that the building was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But as we passed to the next buildings, I thought back to the museum. It suddenly truck me that this building no longer existed. It used to be the building which housed the museum, in the 1960s. But the museum had been moved to a bigger building. I tried to get my mom to back the car up so we could see the building again.
We were now in a kitchen. My mom was busy with something. The kitchen was smallish, with a lot of wood-tones and earth colors. It was lit with a cold, incandescent light. I had climbed up onto a countertop and was probably pulling big books, like art books, off the top of a cupboard. I was trying to show my brother that we had driven past a building which no longer existed.
(At this point I got off the Q-train and walked over to the Starbucks on 17th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, where I resumed my paper journal entry.)
I was trying to show that we had gone back in time or had been a part of some kind of anachronistic phenomenon. My brother didn't quite understand, or didn't quite seem to be paying attention. I took him back outside to try and illustrate the point.
When we got back outside, I may have had no idea how we were supposed to get back to the museum. We stood before a wide, green field which sloped slightly downward to something like a wide square of concrete, like the floor of a demolished building.
Just beyond that, though somehow obscured, was another building, which looked like a 1970s style building, and which may have had a section like a half cylinder lined with vertical wood slats. I knew that something about this area was also very different from what it "presently" was (wherever that "present" may have been).
I asked my brother, "Don't you recognize that building? Don't you remember what it was, and that it isn't there anymore?"
I now stood back inside the kitchen. My maternal grandmother walked into the kitchen. She looked a little upset. She told me that the son of XXXXX (a mutual friend of my mother and her best friend, though I can't remember her name) had just died. The son seemed to have been doing fine. But one day he drank two glasses of liquid at once and died.
The beverages were like water and chocolate milk. The cause of harm might have been, I knew, drinking two different beverages at once. But it might also have been the fact that the boy (young man, now) had been poisoned, and possibly by his mother.
My grandma had mentioned the boy's death as an explanation for why we would be delayed in getting out of the house and going where we had planned to go (to the museum?). I may have hugged my grandma to comfort her.
We walked through a small but dark hallway at the end of the kitchen and into a wide, emptyish living room lit by a single harsh, cold, incandescent light. There were a few people in the room, all relaxing as if this were one of my mother's holiday parties.
Two large couches sat against the front wall and the wall to my right. My mom's friend sat on the couch to my right. She seemed to be sad but alright. But I thought of the woman as a poisoner. I thought I would have to be careful around her.
Dream #2
I was possibly in an airport. I walked into a buffet-style restaurant. There was a huge, maze-like set of wood railings set up to form a line before the buffet. The place was almost completely empty. The atmosphere was red, as if lit by a red neon light.
I may have been waiting for a friend to arrive, or I may have been trying to figure out what I needed to pick up for a friend's meal. I was walking toward the buffet, possibly cutting through the "maze," when a couple big guys, both like white businessmen dressed business casual, cut in front of me. One of the men may have been a short, Indian man.
I caught back up to the men at the buffet. The men spoke back and forth with one another casually, like they hadn't even noticed having cut in front of me. I did something to bully them so they'd at least have to pay attention to me.
I may have been heading toward a seating area in the restaurant. The seating area apparently had no or very little light in it, lit only by natural light coming into the room from the windows in the concourse outside.
A voice now called over the loudspeaker. There was going to be some kind of fire drill or emergency evacuation drill for the building. The voice (a polite, female voice) said, "We would appreciate it if the customers could also please participate in this drill."
I figured I'd have no trouble participating. But I needed to go pick up my book bag before I did the evacuation. Before I had gone into the restaurant, apparently, I had been reading at a large, circular table, like one might see in the food court of a common area at a university.
The concourse now seemed to be a mostly windowless hallway full of these large, circular tables. I was running to find my bag. I could see the area where I had been sitting, but I couldn't see my bag. I was certain my bag had been stolen. I felt like I wasn't getting to the table fast enough.
I began flying. At some point I may have been pulled backwards. Then, possibly, I had been given my bag back by a security guard, a black woman. I was relieved. My bag had, apparently, been protected rather than stolen. But for some reason I now couldn't believe that this was actually my bag.
(5/10/09) wishing for hidden rooms
Dream #1
I was in an empty apartment. The apartment was railroad-style, with four rooms. It was filled with natural light. The walls were a clean white. It was my new apartment.
For some reason, although I was happy with the place and all the rooms, I was trying to find different rooms or find a way to change the rooms. I wanted both my bedroom and my study room to be hidden within the other rooms, so nobody else could ever see my studying or sleeping in my house. I figured if I kept those two activities hidden from sight, the people in the apartment upstairs from me would never bother me.
I imagined that the back room and either the front room or the second room from the front each had a room like a closet, completely windowless, with a door which would close off from the outside room. (Interestingly, either there wasn't a kitchen or a bathroom or else I wasn't paying attention to them.) I figured one room (the back?) would be my bedroom, while the other (the front?) would be my study room.
I was in an empty apartment. The apartment was railroad-style, with four rooms. It was filled with natural light. The walls were a clean white. It was my new apartment.
For some reason, although I was happy with the place and all the rooms, I was trying to find different rooms or find a way to change the rooms. I wanted both my bedroom and my study room to be hidden within the other rooms, so nobody else could ever see my studying or sleeping in my house. I figured if I kept those two activities hidden from sight, the people in the apartment upstairs from me would never bother me.
I imagined that the back room and either the front room or the second room from the front each had a room like a closet, completely windowless, with a door which would close off from the outside room. (Interestingly, either there wasn't a kitchen or a bathroom or else I wasn't paying attention to them.) I figured one room (the back?) would be my bedroom, while the other (the front?) would be my study room.
(5/11/09) maxed out by useless items; mouse mess
(Entered in paper journal at 8:44 AM at Starbucks at 29th Street and Park Avenue.)
Dream #1
I was in a store that felt like it could have been a department store, like the hardware section of a Sears, in a mall. I stood before a cashier. The cashier was a tallish man, a little pot-bellied, possibly wearing a thinly plaid shirt and a sleeveless fleece jacket. He was white, a little red-faced, and bald.
The cashier stood behind a lowish counter, probably just below waist-height. The counter was made of some crude material, like plyboard, and seemed to give the feel of a bait shop or a tool shop. There may also have been a computer (as a new cash register) to the man's right.
The man had charged me on my credit car for something which may have cost me nine hundred dollars. The thing might have been used to take care of some problem I had caused, possibly on my computer. (I said this because I couldn't remember for sure, and the day previous to this dream, in waking life, my sister had told me about some computer problems she'd been having.)
I wasn't sure I wanted the thing I'd been charged for. I might even have asked for a refund, at which point I may have been told that it would take a while for the refund to hit my charge card.
The man now set me up for some kind of special product, which he would usually try to "pitch" to people, but which struck me as completely useless. The product cost nine hundred dollars. I thought, Nine hundred dollars for the first product and nine hundred for the second. That's eighteen hundred dollars! My credit card will be overdrawn!
The man had hardly even told me he had put the charge on my card, like it was something of little importance. I told the man, "Don't you dare! Don't put that charge on my card!"
The man said, "I already did."
I said, "Then take it off! Take it off immediately!" I explained to the man that there was no way my card could handle the charge.
I looked at my credit card. It was broken, all the way across the card, following the bottom of the magnetic strip. The bottom piece and the top piece still clung together, but the card could now bend back and forth at this break, like the card was hinged.
Dream #2
I was in a big room with a group of people. We were all probably engaged in some task together. The room was emptyish and wide, like a somewhat uncared-for elementary school classroom.
We noticed some kind of mess on the floors. The mess seemed to panic people, like it was contaminated and exposure to it could lead to disease. We tried to figure out the cause of the mess.
I looked up to the ceiling. The ceiling was a thin steel grid-frame with fiberboard (?) paneling. Some of the paneling was missing, revealing the deeper space above, with heating vents, etc. I noticed a few mice scurrying around in the space, runing to the edges of the paneling, along the thin steel grid, etc.
I called out to everybody, "Up there! There's mice!" I may have been ashamed, as if this place was my home, and I had let mice get into it.
Dream #1
I was in a store that felt like it could have been a department store, like the hardware section of a Sears, in a mall. I stood before a cashier. The cashier was a tallish man, a little pot-bellied, possibly wearing a thinly plaid shirt and a sleeveless fleece jacket. He was white, a little red-faced, and bald.
The cashier stood behind a lowish counter, probably just below waist-height. The counter was made of some crude material, like plyboard, and seemed to give the feel of a bait shop or a tool shop. There may also have been a computer (as a new cash register) to the man's right.
The man had charged me on my credit car for something which may have cost me nine hundred dollars. The thing might have been used to take care of some problem I had caused, possibly on my computer. (I said this because I couldn't remember for sure, and the day previous to this dream, in waking life, my sister had told me about some computer problems she'd been having.)
I wasn't sure I wanted the thing I'd been charged for. I might even have asked for a refund, at which point I may have been told that it would take a while for the refund to hit my charge card.
The man now set me up for some kind of special product, which he would usually try to "pitch" to people, but which struck me as completely useless. The product cost nine hundred dollars. I thought, Nine hundred dollars for the first product and nine hundred for the second. That's eighteen hundred dollars! My credit card will be overdrawn!
The man had hardly even told me he had put the charge on my card, like it was something of little importance. I told the man, "Don't you dare! Don't put that charge on my card!"
The man said, "I already did."
I said, "Then take it off! Take it off immediately!" I explained to the man that there was no way my card could handle the charge.
I looked at my credit card. It was broken, all the way across the card, following the bottom of the magnetic strip. The bottom piece and the top piece still clung together, but the card could now bend back and forth at this break, like the card was hinged.
Dream #2
I was in a big room with a group of people. We were all probably engaged in some task together. The room was emptyish and wide, like a somewhat uncared-for elementary school classroom.
We noticed some kind of mess on the floors. The mess seemed to panic people, like it was contaminated and exposure to it could lead to disease. We tried to figure out the cause of the mess.
I looked up to the ceiling. The ceiling was a thin steel grid-frame with fiberboard (?) paneling. Some of the paneling was missing, revealing the deeper space above, with heating vents, etc. I noticed a few mice scurrying around in the space, runing to the edges of the paneling, along the thin steel grid, etc.
I called out to everybody, "Up there! There's mice!" I may have been ashamed, as if this place was my home, and I had let mice get into it.
(5/12/09) goodhearted envious pervert
(Entered in paper journal at 6:50 AM at home.)
Dream #1
I was at R and L's apartment. It was night, and all the lights except a dim night light were shut off. The apartment was a long, railroad-style apartment. It felt a little cluttered, possibly like clothes or some kind of fabric, or even wads of cotton-like material, lay all over.
I was here to watch R's dog. I hadn't been asked to feed the dog; I just wanted to, because I liked the dog, and I liked to do things for it. But I didn't want to feed the dog while R and L were around. I didn't want them to see me and think I wanted them back in my life.
I walked out of the apartment before feeding the dog. I felt like I was getting too close to the time when R and L would be coming back home. I thought it would be better to leave instead of being caught feeding the dog.
I stood out in the corridor, which was like a wide balcony from which came down a few stairways, or even ramps. The balcony turned at a right angle to my right and ran in front of a couple other apartment entrances. The whole area was wide and airy, with white walls but a somewhat plain and unkempt feeling.
But now I thought it would be better to be brave and risk being caught if it meant I could do something nice for the dog, like feed it, one more time. I went back inside. I don't think I even physically fed the dog. Instead I walked back through the darkness and found myself at the end of the apartment, in a lit kitchen. The kitchen was very plain and was lit either with a colorless incandescent bulb or a fluorescent bulb.
I found a door, which I opened. This door led to the back exit of the apartment. I looked down a drab, fluorescent-lit stairwell that looked like a fire-exit stairwell. I thought, Now I could escape this way, so that even if I leave right when R and L come home, they'll never come across me.
But I again thought, Why be so timid? If R and L are going to see you, they're going to see you. Why try to find all these ways around it?
I exited through the front. I thought, Well, nobody's going to see me after all. But then I heard L walking up the stairs. I started walking down the stairs. I met L. I told her what I'd been doing. L told me something about a party she and R were having, as if to scold me for having come too early for the party.
We were now downstairs, in some lobby area set up for gatherings. The floor was sunk in in a pentagonal (?) shape, stepping down to make a wide, couch-like pit. Around us was an odd-shaped room with white (stucco-paint-style, really bumpy?) walls and a pale incandescent light. The place felt very much like a living room from the 1970s.
We were among a few friends. There were a couple random things to eat and drink. Nobody sat or stood very comfortably, though everybody seemed to be relaxed. I sat on the floor. R sat near me somewhere. L sat behind me on a couch.
Now R and L were bragging, to annoy everybody, about their child, a boy, who did incredible things and for whom R and L did incredible things.
I saw R and L's boy, though he was slightly obscured from my view by a person sitting to my right. The boy lay on his back on an animal-skin rug, with his legs crossed. The boy was about seven or eight years old, fair-skinned, but slightly tanned, with blue eyes and sandy blonde hair in a loose bowl-cut style.
The boy had a long cylinder pressed to his lips. He blew on it and fingered it like a flute. (This whole image struck me, upon waking, as being like an image of Kokopelli.) I tried to see what the boy's instrument really was.
I stood and got a closer view of the boy as L continued bragging, now bragging about how she (or she and R?) made the instrument themselves. I was struck with a twinge of jealousy because the instrument was so well-made.
The instrument was a very long cylinder, soft, so its walls didn't hold up, woven of a soft, leather-like material. The instrument was blue. But as time went on it became yellow. It may have been fringed at the edges, like a Southwestern-style beaded change purse or pair of moccasins. It was remarkably large and well-woven.
L spoke about how she and R made the thing so they could pipe it out a window on one floor and into a window on the floor below. I knew that even now this instrument was piped out a window. I also knew that a music lesson for this instrument was apparently the most fashionable kind of music lesson a child could receive these days.
I stood on my head on the couch L sat on. I was facing L. I was wearing, under my jeans, a pair of yellow, cotton (?) panties. I had ejaculated in the panties. I could feel the wet semen on my lower abdomen. I thought I should stand or sit regularly before all the semen dribbled up my stomach, above the waistline of my pants. If everybody saw the semen leaking out of my pants they'd surely think I was a pervert.
I saw L's older sister. I may have been sistting upright now. I asked L's sister how she'd been. She answered that she'd been doing fine.
Dream #1
I was at R and L's apartment. It was night, and all the lights except a dim night light were shut off. The apartment was a long, railroad-style apartment. It felt a little cluttered, possibly like clothes or some kind of fabric, or even wads of cotton-like material, lay all over.
I was here to watch R's dog. I hadn't been asked to feed the dog; I just wanted to, because I liked the dog, and I liked to do things for it. But I didn't want to feed the dog while R and L were around. I didn't want them to see me and think I wanted them back in my life.
I walked out of the apartment before feeding the dog. I felt like I was getting too close to the time when R and L would be coming back home. I thought it would be better to leave instead of being caught feeding the dog.
I stood out in the corridor, which was like a wide balcony from which came down a few stairways, or even ramps. The balcony turned at a right angle to my right and ran in front of a couple other apartment entrances. The whole area was wide and airy, with white walls but a somewhat plain and unkempt feeling.
But now I thought it would be better to be brave and risk being caught if it meant I could do something nice for the dog, like feed it, one more time. I went back inside. I don't think I even physically fed the dog. Instead I walked back through the darkness and found myself at the end of the apartment, in a lit kitchen. The kitchen was very plain and was lit either with a colorless incandescent bulb or a fluorescent bulb.
I found a door, which I opened. This door led to the back exit of the apartment. I looked down a drab, fluorescent-lit stairwell that looked like a fire-exit stairwell. I thought, Now I could escape this way, so that even if I leave right when R and L come home, they'll never come across me.
But I again thought, Why be so timid? If R and L are going to see you, they're going to see you. Why try to find all these ways around it?
I exited through the front. I thought, Well, nobody's going to see me after all. But then I heard L walking up the stairs. I started walking down the stairs. I met L. I told her what I'd been doing. L told me something about a party she and R were having, as if to scold me for having come too early for the party.
We were now downstairs, in some lobby area set up for gatherings. The floor was sunk in in a pentagonal (?) shape, stepping down to make a wide, couch-like pit. Around us was an odd-shaped room with white (stucco-paint-style, really bumpy?) walls and a pale incandescent light. The place felt very much like a living room from the 1970s.
We were among a few friends. There were a couple random things to eat and drink. Nobody sat or stood very comfortably, though everybody seemed to be relaxed. I sat on the floor. R sat near me somewhere. L sat behind me on a couch.
Now R and L were bragging, to annoy everybody, about their child, a boy, who did incredible things and for whom R and L did incredible things.
I saw R and L's boy, though he was slightly obscured from my view by a person sitting to my right. The boy lay on his back on an animal-skin rug, with his legs crossed. The boy was about seven or eight years old, fair-skinned, but slightly tanned, with blue eyes and sandy blonde hair in a loose bowl-cut style.
The boy had a long cylinder pressed to his lips. He blew on it and fingered it like a flute. (This whole image struck me, upon waking, as being like an image of Kokopelli.) I tried to see what the boy's instrument really was.
I stood and got a closer view of the boy as L continued bragging, now bragging about how she (or she and R?) made the instrument themselves. I was struck with a twinge of jealousy because the instrument was so well-made.
The instrument was a very long cylinder, soft, so its walls didn't hold up, woven of a soft, leather-like material. The instrument was blue. But as time went on it became yellow. It may have been fringed at the edges, like a Southwestern-style beaded change purse or pair of moccasins. It was remarkably large and well-woven.
L spoke about how she and R made the thing so they could pipe it out a window on one floor and into a window on the floor below. I knew that even now this instrument was piped out a window. I also knew that a music lesson for this instrument was apparently the most fashionable kind of music lesson a child could receive these days.
I stood on my head on the couch L sat on. I was facing L. I was wearing, under my jeans, a pair of yellow, cotton (?) panties. I had ejaculated in the panties. I could feel the wet semen on my lower abdomen. I thought I should stand or sit regularly before all the semen dribbled up my stomach, above the waistline of my pants. If everybody saw the semen leaking out of my pants they'd surely think I was a pervert.
I saw L's older sister. I may have been sistting upright now. I asked L's sister how she'd been. She answered that she'd been doing fine.
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