I was on a gigantic stairway with a group of people. The steps were wide and shallow, probably carpeted in red. The light was warm and incandescent. We were all using some kind of joystick or remote to control either a character in a video game or a machine in an area like the one we were in. A teacher was telling us how to use the machine.
I got up to a point where the stairs turned left. The steps continued up to a nice hallway with chandeliers. I turned around, to look back down the steps. The teacher told me not to turn my head too quickly, as that would make the thing I was controlling lose its balance.
I could now see as if I were looking at a screen through the video game character's/machine's eyes. The machine looked like a machine from Star Wars, with two log legs and a box-like cabin on top. It was silvery grey, maybe as tall as a person. Its purpose was to wander through this space in search of some kind of secret or special material.
The machine got to the foot of the steps. It turned right, possibly around the corner of a stone wall, and faced a bridge (still inside this building) which was wide and made of flat, yellowish stones. All along the entrance to the bridge were yellow and blue poker chips. I knew they were the secret material and they stood for money.
I bent down (as if I were in the game and was now a person and not a machine) and put my hands on top of the chips. As I did, they disappeared. I told myself not to pick up all the chips, because I couldn't slow myself down. There would be plenty of other opportunities to get more chips during my travels.
I now saw a thinnish, Asian man walk around a corner to a quiet area with cobbled floors and a brick wall. The cobbles were reddish and uneven. The man had grey and black hair and wore a flannel shirt and a tan vest. He sat down on the ground and started playing with something, possibly cards.
Now I was where the man had been, and I was playing with the cards. I had laid the cards face-down, some on the ground, and some on a box. I was now turning them face-up. After having turned up one or two cards, I began trying to guess what each next card would be before I turned it up. But I kept guessing incorrectly.
The cards were like playing cards, but the patterns of their pips were very strange. For instance, one card had a very thin rectangle in its center and in the rectangle were three red shapes, like spades (?) or diamonds. This was either an ace or a three -- I didn't really know which!
A couple men walked out through a door behind me and to my left, then past me on my right. One of them might have been my boss BS. One of them commented, "You're trying to tell your future?"
I felt ashamed because it did look like that was what I was doing. I looked down to the cards. They now looked like tarot cards, except the images were very vague, as if they were showing pink clouds or green sea.
I said something like, "Well, if I am, it isn't working! I haven't gotten anything right!" This was supposed to show that I didn't believe anything like tarot cards could be real.
I stood up to follow the men. We walked out to a place that looked like the outdoors, with cobbled sidewalks and maybe some building fronts, possibly on a muggy, sunny day. There was only one man now. He looked like JH, one of my bosses from an Americorps project I did in 2002. The man kept drifting farther and farther away from me.
The man said some weird quote that sounded vaguely, but not quite, like a common quote, like "Trust the enemy; he's your boss." This quote was apparently pretty widely employed as a cap to conversations made regarding things not going smoothly at work or in the government, etc.
I thought the man's statement was cheesy, but I said something sarcastic to sound like I cynically agreed, like, "Well, that always gets us by pretty good, doesn't it?"
The man chuckled as he disappeared into the distance.
I stood in a suburban neighborhood on a summer day. I was at the top of a slightly sloped road. I walked down the slope as I "recalled" a group of people talking about an organization that claimed to have been against the Vietnam War but that did things which on further investigation actually supported the war.
I got to the bottom of the slope, the corner of the block, and turned right. There was a house just down the way and on my right. I could see the people inside, as if they were sitting in a playhouse.
I "recalled" how the people called the organization in question a word which was a derogatory combination of two words which would mean "to support" and "to denounce." The word began with either "gr" or "ga."
I turned the possible ways of combining the two words as I walked into a small, plastic playhouse. The walls of the playhouse were yellow. There might have been a plastic jack-o-lantern sitting on a brown, plastic table in front of me and to my left, right by the front door. I could see a dense curtain of leafs outside a small window to my left.
One or two people stood outside the house and closed me in. I was pretty sure the people had locked me in. But I hadn't been able to stop them: I'd been too preoccupied with getting the combinations of the two words in my head in the funniest and most derogatory way.
Dream #2
I was in the bedroom of what seemed to be a modern apartment in a city like New York. The carpet was grey, and the walls were white. There was one window stretching along the wall to my left. I sat on a wide and disheveled bed.
A weird animal caught my attention. At first it seemed like a little mouse. Then it was more like a fake (but living) animal made out of cotton balls or big tufts of polyester padding coated in patches of brownish paint. It was about as big as a rabbit and had black eyes.
The animal ran backward when it saw I was looking at it. It sood by a heating vent by the window-sill/wall. I patted on the bed, beckoning the animal to come near me. I didn't think the animal was cute, by any means, but I felt like it was intelligent. So I felt like I should treat the animal as if it were a cute domestic animal, so it would feel good about itself.
The animal jumped up on the bed with me. It became black-grey. It was telling me some kind of story about why it preferred not to be free to run around the house.
I now stood over a roughly four-foot-tall, gold-barred, domed birdcage in which the animal sat, as if crouched and defensively opposed to me. The floor of the cage was messy with paper and cloth.
I now stood on the other side of the room. I was on the right side of the bed. The cage had probably been on the left side. A woman, like my friend R's wife L (?) looked out a small window and was telling the story of how she and my friend R had picked up a cat that they really liked. As L told this story, an orange cat bit my right index finger harder and harder.
L said they had picked up one cat before, but that it had been no good. Then one night, in the pouring rain, as L and R were driving along, there was a black cat wearing white satin gloves on its forelegs. The cat looked like it was barely alive. It was emaciated and heaved long breaths, like it was having trouble breathing. As L told the story, I imagined a cat as tall as a human.
L said, "The cat looked so pathetic, almost like a pathetic human being. So we just had to take it home."
I noticed the orange cat, still biting my finger, was laughing at the story. L started laughing. too, about how pathetic the black cat had looked. At first I thought the cat was just laughing to mimic L's actions. But I was astounded to find that the cat could understand what L was saying.
The cat was laughing silently, in little, sneeze-like chuckles, and had loosened its grip on my finger. Then the cat stopped laughing. It had teary eyes, as if it had been laughing at a good memory of a dear, departed friend.
The cat then said, "I do love L's sense of humor, and I used to love being around her because of it. But then her dark side started showing. It really overtook her. It became too much for me to stay around her and watch her hurting herself all the time like this."
I looked for what the cat meant. I pulled the blanket off from the head of the bed. There was a tangle of clear, plastic tubes and brightly colored, plastic clips. I knew all this was a kind of drugging and torture system R used on L. At first L had just taken part in the drugging and torture game to please R. But now she was addicted to it. And now she wanted to get me addicted to it, too.
Dream #3
I stood naked in a house, before a curtained, sliding-glass door. The thin, white curtain billowed gently in the breeze, as if the door were open. I walked toward the curtain. A shortish, Hispanic or Asian woman pulled the curtain back to come into the house. It was dark outside.
I was ashamed of my nakedness. I hid myself behind the curtain. I tried to get the woman to go back outside so she wouldn't be offended by my nakedness and so I could go put on some clothes. I shouted something stupid like, "No! No! Go! No clothes! No clothes!" as if this woman could only understand very simple, halting English.
The woman just giggled and said something like, "No, no, come, come." She took my hands and pulled me toward a bedroom. As we got to the threshold, the woman, walking backward into the room, turned to her left (my right) so I couldn't see her. She kept hold of my hands. I might have thought that the woman was going to dress me herself.
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