(1/27/08) building theories of color and skating

(Entered in paper journal at 6:30 AM.)

Dream #1

I walked through a chain link gate opening into a conference event that was set up under tents in a large area like a parking lot. The conference was something like a homebuilding industry conference.

There were some middle-aged women under a small tent before the large tent. They had a bunch of flyers in bins and on the table.  Some flyers were actually just huge name and address lists for homebuilders across the nation. I picked up one of the flyers.

I walked toward the entrance of the large tent, wondering whether I had enough money to go inside, or if I even wanted to spend the money to go inside. To my left was the tent I had just come from. To my right were a bunch of milk crates full of stuff as if at a garage sale. The aisle between these two areas was maybe only three or four feet wide.

I looked into the milk crates. The crates were full of used books. Three books in particular caught my eye. One was a flat-colored, thickish book with a depiction of something like church communion on it. The book might have had a title related to the Catholic church. Another book was a paperback. The cover had coloration like an overexposed photo of a sunset. It was titled something like A Word on Kerenyi.

The third book was a large picture book. It was apparently an essay on color by a modern philosopher or artist I liked a lot. The cover photo was very dark, with just glows of bright color, as if a photo of a window were being taken from inside a dark house.

I was very interested in this book. I picked it up and looked through it. The photos were all somehow very normal. One photo in particular might have been of a girl in a bikini on the beach. The photos all had a weird, but not extremely weird, coloration.

I couldn't see what these photos were teaching about color. But I felt that if I looked closely enough at the photos for a while I might understand. I decided I would buy the book instead of (?) going into the conference. The book cost $23.50. The conference cost $21.

I was inside a building, in an area like the third-floor ballroom-like area in the Brooklyn Museum of Art except smaller, more polished, and lit by candlelight. I was skateboarding through the room. I heard my brother telling me how another person (a long-haired, Hispanic man) had taught him how to skateboard better than I'd taught him.

It was now like I was skating like, or even in the identity of, the other person. I/he was skating smoother than I had ever skated. I was jealous of the other man for having been able to teach my brother so well.