(1/30/08) they didn't let just anybody stay here

(Entered in paper journal at 6 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a place like a cabin in the woods. It was supposed to be a hotel. I was in the living room with three other people, two of whom were possibly a young woman and an older man. All three were at a longish table sat against the wall on its short side between two bedrooms.

I wanted to be at this hotel. The people told me that they didn't let just anybody stay here. The people who stayed here had to be quiet and studious like them. I sat down at the table and opened my book, hoping that by reading with the people I could prove I was studious.

I stood outside a house in the mountain-suburbs. I was with my family. I walked just inside the front doorway. An oldish woman with long, white hair, blue eyes, a fattish, dumpy look, and wearing a brightly colored, plaid dress, like my mother might wear, sat on a chair or a box in front of me. The woman was talking to me. I thought of her as my great-grandmother on my grandmother's side of the family. Her speech didn't make much sense.

My aunt B led me inside the living room to a box maybe five feet long and one and a half feet deep. There were all kinds of paintings and drawings inside. My aunt B stood to my left. She wore an orange shirt.

My aunt B pulled some of the paintings and drawings out of the box and showed them to me. She told me they were drawings she'd made when she was a child. I was pretty impressed. The styles and subjects were all different.

My aunt B made a comment, possibly about how maybe the pieces weren't all as good as she thought. I patted her on the back and embraced her to encourage her, but I also did or said something that might have made her feel even worse.

We noticed that on the box flaps were huge swatches of green and blue crayon marking. Either I or my aunt B said that one of my cousins, either AH or B, probably made those markings when they were trying to be artistic.

I sat in a dining room table with a few people from my company. The table was longish, oval, and dark. The room was dim, the only light being that which came in from a lit, probably orange-walled, room behind us.

My senior co-worker, and one of the foremost analysts in my company, DC, was to my right. Her hair was undone and straight. Her bangs came straight down over her forehead. DC was telling me how everybody would like to hire me as a first-year analyst, but how I needed to get all my degrees first. DC called into the back room to my boss BS. BS stuck his head in and agreed with DC.

I walked into a big room which must have been lit by daylight. It was a conference room, but there were folding chairs all over the place, haphazardly placed, as if this were just some big, casual living room. The carpet was like the carpet of a living room, thick and grey. There were tall, dark wood columns running through the room. At the front of the room was a folding table. I sat in one of the folding chairs near the middle of the room.

Somebody introduced ML, my company's main economics analyst. ML got up and presented. But I couldn't understand a thing he said. It was like all his ideas kept trailing of.

We now got up, as if it were a break time, or time for some other presentation. Then we came back. I went to the wall first, as if to gather some of my personal belongings before sitting down. I had to explain to somebody that he hadn't heard wrong, that this was another presentation by ML, picking up where ML had left off before.

I might have stayed standing. ML came back. He was now dressed in a light blue spandex outfit and cape, including a mask (?) that was pulled over his face and covered about the top half of his face. ML said that since it was New Year's, and we were all going to the New Year's party dressed up, that ML would just give his presentation dressed up. Nobody thought this made any sense, but I thought it was fine. ML started talking and not making any sense again. I wondered how we were going to get anything out of this presentation.

Now SC, one of the main analysts for the company's mortgage-backed securities division, got up to speak, as if to clarify everything ML had just said. Everybody cheered as SC got up -- not in contrast to ML, but just because he was so famous. But something about the cheering annoyed me. I thought, Can't we just get down to business? Why does everything have to be just showing off or nonsense?