(Entered in paper journal at 5:37 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was in a house, alone. I lay in a bedroom that was probably a mess. Bright sun came in through the windows. I was happy to be by myself.
I felt a presence. I knew it was my mother. I went into the hallway. My co-worker EB stood in the hallway, possibly with my mom back in the distance, and behind a lot of clutter, possibly bikes. I wondered how I was going to get out of this place with so much stuff in the way.
It was night. I flew over treetops and possibly small rows of shop buildings in a small area of New York City or a small town.
I heard or remembered a conversation I'd had with my boss BS about how I had made the logistics of a date too difficult for the woman to want to do on the date again. First of all, we'd gone out to some restaurant at the outskirts of (this part of?) town. Second we'd had to walk all the way there.
I flew over an open road at night. I then stood beside a steep slope of wall, almost like a huge pane of solar paneling. It was early morning. BS stood beside me. We seemed to be crowded into a narrow trench near the wide wall by trees and a deep cliff behind us. BS asked me why I didn't work hard to improve the way I presented myself to women.
It was a bright day. I stood on a stone walkway that curved around and around a section of a stone building. The walkway and the building were greyish-peach colored. This building was part of an historical park or campus.
I think part of the walkway was blocked by a plywood board standing on its side, maybe with a wide sheet of paper hanging off it. I might have thought I wasn't allowed up. But I saw a few people, two couples, probably, walking down the path from behind the barrier, coming in my direction.
Now I had flown up to the top of this building. I looked down on the park/campus. I was very high up. The land around me must have been tall, rolling hills.
I heard a narrator discussing the old times, when Thomas Jefferson had founded this place. I saw the place alternately in black and white, like an old film, and in color, like my regular view.
The narrator's speech focused on a monument, like the Thomas Jefferson Memorial monument in Washington, DC. I was sure it couldn't be the Jefferson Memorial: I wasn't in the right place. I thought I would fly down to it and see what the monument was. I felt like there was a dark metal (bronze?) figure inside.
I couldn't stop looking at the the monument, even though I kept trying to look in other places. The land around the monument slowly got soggier and soggier, like a barren field, once lawn, after a heavy rain.
I yelled to the film that was being narrated, "Stop looking at the monument! I want to see other things!"
I now heard narration of a documentary which I was actually enacting. I was floating down the side of a building and landing momentarily in columned openings in the building. Eventually I was at the base of the building, possibly at the foot of a tall hill.
The narration had been about a man who had gone insane and thought he could hop down the side of a building. But, I thought, I did just do that!
I looked back up to the top of the building.
Monday, February 25, 2013
(7/23/07) ill-timed illness; hotmail at work; radio interview; changing flight; slow liftoff; variations on jk rowling
(Entered in paper journal at 5:50 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I lay on a couch in the dark. I was covered in blankets. I spoke on the phone with someone who asked if I could cover the phones for the Analyst MH as well, since he would be out. I saw his extension, 3431 or 2431, in my had. The person said, "MH got sick at a really bad time. When he gets back in, we'll have to have a disciplinary discussion with him.
My boss BS and another Analyst, SM, stood at my feet, on my left, i.e. facing the couch. They walked around to my right and then up past my head. They pulled open some blinds and let in a lot of daylight.
Dream #2
I was in the office, which was different from waking life. The entire floor was only half-lit. There were two aisles of cubicles that went in long rows of six or seven cubicles. Beside that were probably more aisles of cubicles. At the end of the aisles was a little bit of empty floor space and then a brightly lit, tiny elevator bank. My cubicle was at the front right corner, facing the elevator bank.
I turned my computer on. Then I remembered I had an appointment with my psychiatrist A this morning. I told my boss BS, "I know it's spur of the moment notice, but can I leave?"
BS' face turned kind of weak and muttery. BS said, "Well, yeah, go..."
I said, "It's on the spur of the moment, I know. So said no if I can't go."
BS said, "No. I'd rather you didn't go. I'm gonna need you here today."
BS walked away as I said okay.
I spoke with a couple people and then went back to my desk. I had vines like grapevines growing over my desk. My computer was a laptop. It was only about halfway open. I saw Hotmail up on my screen. I couldn't figure why that would be there: employees weren't allowed to use personal email accounts, like Hotmail, in the office.
I tried to shut the Hotmail off. BS walked by and asked what was wrong. I said, "Somehow Hotmail came up on my screen."
Dream #3
I sat in a brightly lit basement. It was a radio station. I was going to be interviewed as a part of my job. At present some outside correspondent was doing something like a traffic report. In the station, we may have seen the man or the stuff he was talking about on a TV screen. The view was of a straight road in a green field on a grey day.
I thought, Am I going to be late doing this interview? It was as if, on some level of reality, I wasn't really in the studio yet.
Dream #4
I stood before the counter at an airport. The counter and room looked more like an old, cozy hotel. A tall, gaunt, white, bald man with a grey mustache and heavy eyebrows stood behind the counter. The man said, "I don't recognize you. Do you have ID?"
I showed the man my ID and said, "You can ask people if you like. I come here all the time. All I'm trying to do is see if I'm late for my flight. I was scheduled to leave at 12:20 PM. And now it's --" (I craned my neck forward to look around at the man's computer screen) "-- 1:02 PM?! Oh, no!"
I started crying. I said, "I missed my flight! Is there any way I can get a ticket for a different flight?"
Two or three people, maybe two guys and a girl, roughly twenty-five years old, walked around the old man cheerfully. They spoke happily about my problem and how it could probably be fixed. They walked away. The old man started wandering off.
I asked, "Aren't you going to see about getting me a new flight?"
The man said, "We have other things to do. We'll get to you." He left.
The young men and woman were now bringing out plates of food from a bar and grill that was off to my left. One of the plates was big chunks of meat covered in sauce that looked like ranch dressing.
Dream #5
Black and white, grainy view like old film footage. A narrator spoke about the first space flight, which had been made by the Russians.
I watched a "space shuttle" launch, then travel parallel with the ground, maybe only a couple hundred feet above the ground. The "shuttle" looked like a sci-fi spacecraft, or a child's drawing. It was like two cylinders in the back which ended in rockets and which joined in the front to one cylinder which pointed at the front.
The craft began lifting as it flew over the ocean. It lifted so slowly I at first thought that it was getting ready to lose control and crash. The view was momentarily from behind it as it rose above a patchy plane of clouds. I knew now that the craft wouldn't crash. But watching it rise (view from in front of the craft, looking back at it) so slowly, at such a gentle angle, I doubted the craft could ever actually leave the earth.
The craft slowly increased its angle and speed. I now wondered if the view was going to catch the craft traveling so quickly and steeply. I didn't think the view would actually be able to travel with the craft.
Dream #6
I was in a bedroom (?) with a few people of different ages (probably up to my age). Everybody was in a slighty frenzy, not angry, just unsettled. They were all talking about the new Harry Potter book. At the same time they were passing around the previous Harry Potter books. The covers of these books looked weird, like cheap second editions -- or rather like the old sensational film posters (i.e. L'enfant de Paris) that were (at the time I entered this dream in the paper journal) on display in the MoMA film center.
I got a good enough look at all the volumes, as they were rapidly passed from hand to hand, that when someone called out, "It's too bad we don't have all seven volumes right here," I could shout out, "But we do!"
Someone yelled at me, "No, we don't!"
I said, "Yes, we do! Look!" As I pointed to each book as it transferred from hand to hand, I counted out the volumes. "One, two, three, four, five, six. And there's seven!"
I now saw a copy of the book like a wide-opening coffee table book. The right half of the cover was the cover of the new Harry Potter book. As I "heard" some TV or magazine story about J.K. Rowling my view slowly moved to the left side of the cover.
I thought, I've heard a lot of people talk about how much of a bitch (???!!!) J.K. Rowling is. I wondreed what she looked like. On the left side of the cover was a photo of Rowling. She looked like an Italian mother from Brooklyn -- black hair, blue sweater, kind of no-nonsense expression. In the photo, "Rowling" was painting some huge, abstract mural, looking back and smiling at the camera.
Now there was a view of her (not on the book, but like in life) standing behind a glass-paned front door. The view was in front of the door, to catch the glass' reflection of a field of flowers, bands of color -- yellow, purple, and white, with a vague green band -- and a feeling of mountains and sky in the distance.
In this view "Rowling" looked a lot older. Her hair was cut short and was reddish-brown, very tough. "Rowling's" face was round; her nose, nubby; her eyes, pale blue. I think I felt a wish in her that she could become young again.
Dream #1
I lay on a couch in the dark. I was covered in blankets. I spoke on the phone with someone who asked if I could cover the phones for the Analyst MH as well, since he would be out. I saw his extension, 3431 or 2431, in my had. The person said, "MH got sick at a really bad time. When he gets back in, we'll have to have a disciplinary discussion with him.
My boss BS and another Analyst, SM, stood at my feet, on my left, i.e. facing the couch. They walked around to my right and then up past my head. They pulled open some blinds and let in a lot of daylight.
Dream #2
I was in the office, which was different from waking life. The entire floor was only half-lit. There were two aisles of cubicles that went in long rows of six or seven cubicles. Beside that were probably more aisles of cubicles. At the end of the aisles was a little bit of empty floor space and then a brightly lit, tiny elevator bank. My cubicle was at the front right corner, facing the elevator bank.
I turned my computer on. Then I remembered I had an appointment with my psychiatrist A this morning. I told my boss BS, "I know it's spur of the moment notice, but can I leave?"
BS' face turned kind of weak and muttery. BS said, "Well, yeah, go..."
I said, "It's on the spur of the moment, I know. So said no if I can't go."
BS said, "No. I'd rather you didn't go. I'm gonna need you here today."
BS walked away as I said okay.
I spoke with a couple people and then went back to my desk. I had vines like grapevines growing over my desk. My computer was a laptop. It was only about halfway open. I saw Hotmail up on my screen. I couldn't figure why that would be there: employees weren't allowed to use personal email accounts, like Hotmail, in the office.
I tried to shut the Hotmail off. BS walked by and asked what was wrong. I said, "Somehow Hotmail came up on my screen."
Dream #3
I sat in a brightly lit basement. It was a radio station. I was going to be interviewed as a part of my job. At present some outside correspondent was doing something like a traffic report. In the station, we may have seen the man or the stuff he was talking about on a TV screen. The view was of a straight road in a green field on a grey day.
I thought, Am I going to be late doing this interview? It was as if, on some level of reality, I wasn't really in the studio yet.
Dream #4
I stood before the counter at an airport. The counter and room looked more like an old, cozy hotel. A tall, gaunt, white, bald man with a grey mustache and heavy eyebrows stood behind the counter. The man said, "I don't recognize you. Do you have ID?"
I showed the man my ID and said, "You can ask people if you like. I come here all the time. All I'm trying to do is see if I'm late for my flight. I was scheduled to leave at 12:20 PM. And now it's --" (I craned my neck forward to look around at the man's computer screen) "-- 1:02 PM?! Oh, no!"
I started crying. I said, "I missed my flight! Is there any way I can get a ticket for a different flight?"
Two or three people, maybe two guys and a girl, roughly twenty-five years old, walked around the old man cheerfully. They spoke happily about my problem and how it could probably be fixed. They walked away. The old man started wandering off.
I asked, "Aren't you going to see about getting me a new flight?"
The man said, "We have other things to do. We'll get to you." He left.
The young men and woman were now bringing out plates of food from a bar and grill that was off to my left. One of the plates was big chunks of meat covered in sauce that looked like ranch dressing.
Dream #5
Black and white, grainy view like old film footage. A narrator spoke about the first space flight, which had been made by the Russians.
I watched a "space shuttle" launch, then travel parallel with the ground, maybe only a couple hundred feet above the ground. The "shuttle" looked like a sci-fi spacecraft, or a child's drawing. It was like two cylinders in the back which ended in rockets and which joined in the front to one cylinder which pointed at the front.
The craft began lifting as it flew over the ocean. It lifted so slowly I at first thought that it was getting ready to lose control and crash. The view was momentarily from behind it as it rose above a patchy plane of clouds. I knew now that the craft wouldn't crash. But watching it rise (view from in front of the craft, looking back at it) so slowly, at such a gentle angle, I doubted the craft could ever actually leave the earth.
The craft slowly increased its angle and speed. I now wondered if the view was going to catch the craft traveling so quickly and steeply. I didn't think the view would actually be able to travel with the craft.
Dream #6
I was in a bedroom (?) with a few people of different ages (probably up to my age). Everybody was in a slighty frenzy, not angry, just unsettled. They were all talking about the new Harry Potter book. At the same time they were passing around the previous Harry Potter books. The covers of these books looked weird, like cheap second editions -- or rather like the old sensational film posters (i.e. L'enfant de Paris) that were (at the time I entered this dream in the paper journal) on display in the MoMA film center.
I got a good enough look at all the volumes, as they were rapidly passed from hand to hand, that when someone called out, "It's too bad we don't have all seven volumes right here," I could shout out, "But we do!"
Someone yelled at me, "No, we don't!"
I said, "Yes, we do! Look!" As I pointed to each book as it transferred from hand to hand, I counted out the volumes. "One, two, three, four, five, six. And there's seven!"
I now saw a copy of the book like a wide-opening coffee table book. The right half of the cover was the cover of the new Harry Potter book. As I "heard" some TV or magazine story about J.K. Rowling my view slowly moved to the left side of the cover.
I thought, I've heard a lot of people talk about how much of a bitch (???!!!) J.K. Rowling is. I wondreed what she looked like. On the left side of the cover was a photo of Rowling. She looked like an Italian mother from Brooklyn -- black hair, blue sweater, kind of no-nonsense expression. In the photo, "Rowling" was painting some huge, abstract mural, looking back and smiling at the camera.
Now there was a view of her (not on the book, but like in life) standing behind a glass-paned front door. The view was in front of the door, to catch the glass' reflection of a field of flowers, bands of color -- yellow, purple, and white, with a vague green band -- and a feeling of mountains and sky in the distance.
In this view "Rowling" looked a lot older. Her hair was cut short and was reddish-brown, very tough. "Rowling's" face was round; her nose, nubby; her eyes, pale blue. I think I felt a wish in her that she could become young again.
(7/25/07) control of the pole
(Entered in paper journal at 5:45 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I stood in a misty landscape, possibly moving as if on a train, in the dim evening. I heard a woman talk about how much it cost to live in this area. I saw a figure like $612,000 per year in my head. The woman spoke, probably about this figure, as if she had gotten a good deal. I thought, Why is it so expensive to live here?
I stood in a tall, wide building like an emptied warehouse with a handful of desks in it. There may have been no glass in the windows -- the building mostly open to the bright morning air. The walls gave off a bluish tint. They were like rough, unfinished concrete.
My co-worker MW sat at a teacher's desk at the "head" (more like the side) of the room, giving the Sales department a presentation on research his team had done on housing prices. The members of the Sales department sat in students' desks.
I had left my copy of MW's printed presentation over the blackboard, off to the right of the sales force. I reached up and grabbed it.
The presentation may have been over now. I walked up to a young man in the back row who may have been sleeping. (The seats were now arranged perpendicular to how they had been before, facing now to the left of the building instead of the right half of the back wall. The seats were also rows, long tables, instead of single desks.)
The young man, white or Hispanic, had a thug-like look to him. He wore a big, baggy, white jacket with blue designs on it. When he looked up at me from under the hood of his jacket it was like he was looking out from under a rock. I was afraid -- like I was afraid of telling the young man something he didn't like. But all I wanted to do was tell the young man that the presentation was over and that we were all leaving.
I was in a hallway of a smallish suburban house. I was walking into "my bedroom" (?), which was to my left. I had to grab some notebooks to get ready for a presentation. I was embarrassed by how shaken up I had let the young man's mean gaze get me. But I tried to convince myself that I wasn't shaken up at all.
When I grabbed some notebooks out of a wicker basket high up on a bookcase, two or three other notebooks started slipping down. I tried to hold them in place, but they became unmanageable and slid down to the ground. I knew that I couldn't control the notebooks because I had let myself become jittery and clumsy -- because the young man's mean gaze had shaken me up.
I got angry, indignant, and stomped out of the room. I walked along a flagstone path. The house I'd been in was now down a short but steep slope off to my right. To my left was a vista of desert mountains.
I stood huddled against a pole, or possibly a phone booth. I looked over my left shoulder, behind me. I thought, I'm so bored with my life, my job. I wish I could get out of here.
I looked out over the vista of desert mountains. One mountain I saw was, on the far right, mostly green with trees. In the center it had a vertical striation of basalt-like maroon stone and tan stone that spread out into wide stripes at the base. This section of the mountain had new cookie-cutter house on the slope and the base.
The far left section of mountain was like a mountain that had been covered in geometric, fluorescent plastic. In some patches it was green and in some patches it was orange. There were houses on the mountain here, too. The houses were also plasticky, like the mountains.
(At this point I got off the train and headed into work. I resumed the paper journal entry at 6:14 PM, after work, and after a visit to my psychiatrist A, I believe. I wrote at the Starbucks on 29th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.)
I had finished dealing with a group of bullies who were being verbally abusive. They had stopped I was now standing on a porch. Now one of the bullies came at me with physical threats. The bully was a scrappy, black boy with a black sweat-hoodie jacket, black t-shirt, black jeans, and a squarish, red baseball cap with the bill tilted rakishly to the right side of his head.
At first I thought I would avoid the boy by getting away from the porch while he calmed down. But as I left the porch the landscape became harder to traverse: it was slowly cluttered with broken pieces of scaffolding, metallic fragments like off of large pipe-seals or caps. I walked until i had to jump from stable piece to stable piece. I worked my way counter-clockwise around a huge boundary of standing blue scaffolding-wall.
At the same time I heard the boy's friends say, "If he doesn't face him," (i.e. if I didn't face the bully) "he" (the bully) "will just think he" (I) "is a chicken shit, and he'll keep attacking."
I got around the final bend of the scaffolding, knowing I'd have to face the bully. I was ready. He stood maybe twenty-five meters away, across a span of scrap wood and metal, like the debris of a house that had been hit by a storm.
The boy swung a long, red pole at me. The pole was like plastic-coated metal. The red "plastic" was ribbed, almost like the ribbing on the hose of a vacuum cleaner at a car wash. I grabbed the pole. The boy swung the pole with me at the end of it. He was trying to throw me off it so he could hit me with it.
But I was slowly gaining an understanding of how the boy was using the pole. I was about to turn the tables, to use my understanding to leverage the boy's actions against him.
The boy dropped his end of the pole, thinking I would fall with the pole, flat on the ground. But I was ready for this move. I landed on my feet, and I now had complete control of the pole. I was about to begin hitting the boy with the pole.
Dream #1
I stood in a misty landscape, possibly moving as if on a train, in the dim evening. I heard a woman talk about how much it cost to live in this area. I saw a figure like $612,000 per year in my head. The woman spoke, probably about this figure, as if she had gotten a good deal. I thought, Why is it so expensive to live here?
I stood in a tall, wide building like an emptied warehouse with a handful of desks in it. There may have been no glass in the windows -- the building mostly open to the bright morning air. The walls gave off a bluish tint. They were like rough, unfinished concrete.
My co-worker MW sat at a teacher's desk at the "head" (more like the side) of the room, giving the Sales department a presentation on research his team had done on housing prices. The members of the Sales department sat in students' desks.
I had left my copy of MW's printed presentation over the blackboard, off to the right of the sales force. I reached up and grabbed it.
The presentation may have been over now. I walked up to a young man in the back row who may have been sleeping. (The seats were now arranged perpendicular to how they had been before, facing now to the left of the building instead of the right half of the back wall. The seats were also rows, long tables, instead of single desks.)
The young man, white or Hispanic, had a thug-like look to him. He wore a big, baggy, white jacket with blue designs on it. When he looked up at me from under the hood of his jacket it was like he was looking out from under a rock. I was afraid -- like I was afraid of telling the young man something he didn't like. But all I wanted to do was tell the young man that the presentation was over and that we were all leaving.
I was in a hallway of a smallish suburban house. I was walking into "my bedroom" (?), which was to my left. I had to grab some notebooks to get ready for a presentation. I was embarrassed by how shaken up I had let the young man's mean gaze get me. But I tried to convince myself that I wasn't shaken up at all.
When I grabbed some notebooks out of a wicker basket high up on a bookcase, two or three other notebooks started slipping down. I tried to hold them in place, but they became unmanageable and slid down to the ground. I knew that I couldn't control the notebooks because I had let myself become jittery and clumsy -- because the young man's mean gaze had shaken me up.
I got angry, indignant, and stomped out of the room. I walked along a flagstone path. The house I'd been in was now down a short but steep slope off to my right. To my left was a vista of desert mountains.
I stood huddled against a pole, or possibly a phone booth. I looked over my left shoulder, behind me. I thought, I'm so bored with my life, my job. I wish I could get out of here.
I looked out over the vista of desert mountains. One mountain I saw was, on the far right, mostly green with trees. In the center it had a vertical striation of basalt-like maroon stone and tan stone that spread out into wide stripes at the base. This section of the mountain had new cookie-cutter house on the slope and the base.
The far left section of mountain was like a mountain that had been covered in geometric, fluorescent plastic. In some patches it was green and in some patches it was orange. There were houses on the mountain here, too. The houses were also plasticky, like the mountains.
(At this point I got off the train and headed into work. I resumed the paper journal entry at 6:14 PM, after work, and after a visit to my psychiatrist A, I believe. I wrote at the Starbucks on 29th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.)
I had finished dealing with a group of bullies who were being verbally abusive. They had stopped I was now standing on a porch. Now one of the bullies came at me with physical threats. The bully was a scrappy, black boy with a black sweat-hoodie jacket, black t-shirt, black jeans, and a squarish, red baseball cap with the bill tilted rakishly to the right side of his head.
At first I thought I would avoid the boy by getting away from the porch while he calmed down. But as I left the porch the landscape became harder to traverse: it was slowly cluttered with broken pieces of scaffolding, metallic fragments like off of large pipe-seals or caps. I walked until i had to jump from stable piece to stable piece. I worked my way counter-clockwise around a huge boundary of standing blue scaffolding-wall.
At the same time I heard the boy's friends say, "If he doesn't face him," (i.e. if I didn't face the bully) "he" (the bully) "will just think he" (I) "is a chicken shit, and he'll keep attacking."
I got around the final bend of the scaffolding, knowing I'd have to face the bully. I was ready. He stood maybe twenty-five meters away, across a span of scrap wood and metal, like the debris of a house that had been hit by a storm.
The boy swung a long, red pole at me. The pole was like plastic-coated metal. The red "plastic" was ribbed, almost like the ribbing on the hose of a vacuum cleaner at a car wash. I grabbed the pole. The boy swung the pole with me at the end of it. He was trying to throw me off it so he could hit me with it.
But I was slowly gaining an understanding of how the boy was using the pole. I was about to turn the tables, to use my understanding to leverage the boy's actions against him.
The boy dropped his end of the pole, thinking I would fall with the pole, flat on the ground. But I was ready for this move. I landed on my feet, and I now had complete control of the pole. I was about to begin hitting the boy with the pole.
(7/31/07) the time of scarcity following the war
(Entered in paper journal at 6:30 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I sat at a long, wood desk that reached halfway across the room. The room was like a classroom. The lights were off, and dim, mid-day, natural light came in through the windows. I was writing out or drawing a spreadsheet. I was trying to find people in a specific area, maybe Texas.
I may have stood up, turned around, and brought the spreadsheet in to my boss BS. I then walked into a place like a construction workshop. A lot of women were working in the shop. The shop was smallish and full of pipes and columns.
I had the memory of a conversation about making cars. The conversation may have been with an older man. The man may have said something like, "It's easy to make one half of the car and to make the other half and to put them together. But the whole car is only made by people who care."
As I remembered this, and felt like I agreed with it, most of the women funneled out of the workshop. I worried for a moment that I had offended the women with my thought; after all, I reflected, they were working to make cars.
One woman, an Asian woman, was still working. She stood as if on a stool or platform, to reach the top of a wooden table that was maybe six feet high, almost like the top bunk of a bunk bed.
Under the table was an arrangement of hoses and pipes. All the pipes were black and had a clean, plasticky, but lusterless, look about them. Some of the pipes, tubes, and hoses were even and straight; others coned outwards and then back inward for a portion; others had accordion-like portions.
The pipes were all of varying sizes. Some of the larger pipes, tubes, and hoses extended from under the table and out along the rest of the workshop. I walked to the left end of the workshop, looking down at the pipes.
The woman told me, "We aren't done yet. We still have to paint this set of pipes yellow." I saw that some of the pipes, pretty much one coherent line of interwound pipes, were now painted yellow. The woman continued, "We even have to paint the engine parts."
I didn't quite understand the woman's statement. I asked, "So suppose I wanted to paint blue the series of pipes that connect to the air conditioning system?" I imagined or saw a series of pipes now painted blue. The first pipe that came out from the under the table was shallowly "J" shaped and nestled in a metal vessel like a bedpan, which was also painted blue.
I continued, asking, "Would I also --"
The woman picked up on my statement and continued it, " -- the engine parts blue as well. But blue isn't a color we use for that part of the system." (She may actually have said, "Blue isn't a color we use very often.")
The woman stood on the ground, where I had been standing while looking at the yellow and blue pipes. I stood across the workshop from the woman, with my back to a long writing desk. To the woman's left was a black pipe that had been painted white. The woman was speaking about painting this system of pipes white.
I heard a man talking. My view changed into reading. I read as I heard the man speak. The man spoke about how he would have done things differently in his youth if he could have. He said he would have run, played football, and skied.
At first I thought the man was speaking about all these activities in a demeaning way, as if he were doing them now and they made him an animal. But now I understood that these were activities of the leisure class, the highest class.
The man said, "I would have gone for any of the very few positions that everybody was scrambling for at the time of scarcity following the war."
Dream #1
I sat at a long, wood desk that reached halfway across the room. The room was like a classroom. The lights were off, and dim, mid-day, natural light came in through the windows. I was writing out or drawing a spreadsheet. I was trying to find people in a specific area, maybe Texas.
I may have stood up, turned around, and brought the spreadsheet in to my boss BS. I then walked into a place like a construction workshop. A lot of women were working in the shop. The shop was smallish and full of pipes and columns.
I had the memory of a conversation about making cars. The conversation may have been with an older man. The man may have said something like, "It's easy to make one half of the car and to make the other half and to put them together. But the whole car is only made by people who care."
As I remembered this, and felt like I agreed with it, most of the women funneled out of the workshop. I worried for a moment that I had offended the women with my thought; after all, I reflected, they were working to make cars.
One woman, an Asian woman, was still working. She stood as if on a stool or platform, to reach the top of a wooden table that was maybe six feet high, almost like the top bunk of a bunk bed.
Under the table was an arrangement of hoses and pipes. All the pipes were black and had a clean, plasticky, but lusterless, look about them. Some of the pipes, tubes, and hoses were even and straight; others coned outwards and then back inward for a portion; others had accordion-like portions.
The pipes were all of varying sizes. Some of the larger pipes, tubes, and hoses extended from under the table and out along the rest of the workshop. I walked to the left end of the workshop, looking down at the pipes.
The woman told me, "We aren't done yet. We still have to paint this set of pipes yellow." I saw that some of the pipes, pretty much one coherent line of interwound pipes, were now painted yellow. The woman continued, "We even have to paint the engine parts."
I didn't quite understand the woman's statement. I asked, "So suppose I wanted to paint blue the series of pipes that connect to the air conditioning system?" I imagined or saw a series of pipes now painted blue. The first pipe that came out from the under the table was shallowly "J" shaped and nestled in a metal vessel like a bedpan, which was also painted blue.
I continued, asking, "Would I also --"
The woman picked up on my statement and continued it, " -- the engine parts blue as well. But blue isn't a color we use for that part of the system." (She may actually have said, "Blue isn't a color we use very often.")
The woman stood on the ground, where I had been standing while looking at the yellow and blue pipes. I stood across the workshop from the woman, with my back to a long writing desk. To the woman's left was a black pipe that had been painted white. The woman was speaking about painting this system of pipes white.
I heard a man talking. My view changed into reading. I read as I heard the man speak. The man spoke about how he would have done things differently in his youth if he could have. He said he would have run, played football, and skied.
At first I thought the man was speaking about all these activities in a demeaning way, as if he were doing them now and they made him an animal. But now I understood that these were activities of the leisure class, the highest class.
The man said, "I would have gone for any of the very few positions that everybody was scrambling for at the time of scarcity following the war."
Sunday, February 24, 2013
(8/1/07) poison-fangs and needles
(Entered in paper journal at 6:30 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I floated through a house that looked like the house my family lived in during my last years of high school. There was clutter everywhere, whole mountains of chairs, boxes, and other stuff, making the moving space very crowded.
I saw a spider walk across the floor. At first I thought the spider was a scorpion. But I looked closer. The insect looked like a white crab with a flat shell about six inches in diameter and with two cylinders sticking off the top. The cylinders would lift up, rotate, and drop down. Something inside them could clatter-shunk down, like the sound from an aerosol-spray can, except heavier. These cylinders were fangs. I floated farther and now saw a tiny scorpion run across the floor.
I had floated almost to the back end of the room. I now floated toward the front, toward the door. I was trying to get out of this place as soon as possible. I felt a poisonous insect floating near me. I thought that all the clutter was so close that even if there weren't any floating insects, one of the walking insects could easily jump off the clutter and onto me. I was also afraid that my feet floated low enough off the ground that a crawling insect might be able to jump up and poison me.
I saw a man and woman before a pink screen. It was like the man and woman were on TV. The woman stood on the left side; the man, on the right. The woman had black hair done up in a bob. The woman was overweight. She had a homey (not homely) look about her. The man was tallish, skinnyish, maybe in his fifties. His long, scraggly hair was pulled back. He was deeply tanned and wore a sleeveless, grey shirt.
The woman said, "Being in Atlanta, I never thought I could find someone to do heroin with me. But then I found him. He not only does it; he shoots it into his neck. And he shoots it into himself. I never thought I would find anybody like that!"
The man now brought up a syringe, the cylinder of which was maybe six inches long, with a needle just as long. The plunger of the syringe pressed downward into the cylinder. I watched the man stick himself with the needle and then inject himself with the substance in the syringe.
I was afraid to watch. I couldn't bear to think how it would feel for me. I also didn't watch as the drugs took effect and the man's mind became deranged.
Dream #1
I floated through a house that looked like the house my family lived in during my last years of high school. There was clutter everywhere, whole mountains of chairs, boxes, and other stuff, making the moving space very crowded.
I saw a spider walk across the floor. At first I thought the spider was a scorpion. But I looked closer. The insect looked like a white crab with a flat shell about six inches in diameter and with two cylinders sticking off the top. The cylinders would lift up, rotate, and drop down. Something inside them could clatter-shunk down, like the sound from an aerosol-spray can, except heavier. These cylinders were fangs. I floated farther and now saw a tiny scorpion run across the floor.
I had floated almost to the back end of the room. I now floated toward the front, toward the door. I was trying to get out of this place as soon as possible. I felt a poisonous insect floating near me. I thought that all the clutter was so close that even if there weren't any floating insects, one of the walking insects could easily jump off the clutter and onto me. I was also afraid that my feet floated low enough off the ground that a crawling insect might be able to jump up and poison me.
I saw a man and woman before a pink screen. It was like the man and woman were on TV. The woman stood on the left side; the man, on the right. The woman had black hair done up in a bob. The woman was overweight. She had a homey (not homely) look about her. The man was tallish, skinnyish, maybe in his fifties. His long, scraggly hair was pulled back. He was deeply tanned and wore a sleeveless, grey shirt.
The woman said, "Being in Atlanta, I never thought I could find someone to do heroin with me. But then I found him. He not only does it; he shoots it into his neck. And he shoots it into himself. I never thought I would find anybody like that!"
The man now brought up a syringe, the cylinder of which was maybe six inches long, with a needle just as long. The plunger of the syringe pressed downward into the cylinder. I watched the man stick himself with the needle and then inject himself with the substance in the syringe.
I was afraid to watch. I couldn't bear to think how it would feel for me. I also didn't watch as the drugs took effect and the man's mind became deranged.
(8/2/07) i then became an even prettier woman
(Entered in paper journal at 7:30 PM at home.)
Dream #1
I looked into a mirror that may have been slightly misted over. I was reflected as a woman. I was blonde and tan with a slightly round face. I smiled at myself and lifted my eyebrows in mock surprise. I then became an even prettier woman.
Dream #1
I looked into a mirror that may have been slightly misted over. I was reflected as a woman. I was blonde and tan with a slightly round face. I smiled at myself and lifted my eyebrows in mock surprise. I then became an even prettier woman.
(8/3/07) what makes people want this job; catching boxes from the sky; hook, line, and walking papers
(Entered in paper journal at 6 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I sat at a desk on an office floor that looked like a living room. The "office" was dim. In an office room, my co-worker DE was on the phone. There may have been a small, fluorescent light on in DE's office.
DE was praising a few people for always staying late. I felt ashamed for not always staying late.
One of the people DE praised was a tall, fat woman with pale blonde hair. Her name may have been Diana. She sat in the office next to DE and was an Administrative Assistant. DE listed a number of things she did, the last of which was, as DE said, to, "Yell a professors I wish I could yell at."
DE said, "In short, she does everything that makes people want to do this job in the first place."
Dream #2
It was a sunny day. I stood out with a group of people at the top of a wide, lawny hill. There were some office-type objects on the lawn. The group had been performing a task, which I may have had a hand in devising. Now we ran to a different part of the hilltop to perform a different task. I may have been angry that we dropped my project, but I tried not to show my anger.
The leader of the group said, "If everybody doesn't like doing this one task, each person can choose his own task." Some of us went back to our original task, which had something to do with catching boxes from the sky. Others did other things.
I was afraid to go back to my original task: I didn't want my boss to think I was a spoiled sport. But then I felt like she was okay with me doing whatever I genuinely wanted to do, so I stood at "my position" to catch boxes from the sky.
But a woman called out to me, "Watch out if you're standing here that you don't let the boxes fall on me." I looked down to the ground. A blonde woman in cream-colored exercise pants and a backless, black leotard was in a stretching position in which her legs stretched out on either side of her at right angles. The woman had her back straight, parallel to the ground, and her face almost flat against the ground. Even though I couldn't see the woman's face, I could tell it was really pretty.
I was about to step away, but I think the woman said, "You don't have to move; just watch out for me."
I suddenly realized I was really turned on by the woman's healthy, sexy body and her stretching position.
Dream #3
I was in a dim bar, getting drunk with my co-worker CJ and some other people. CJ and I had gotten so drunk that we were now wandering the streets.
CJ had a rusty hanger, probably bent out of shape, into something more like a prong, with a sharp end. CJ would put one end of the hanger in his mouth and then swing the rest of the hanger around by wiggling his head. Then he would take the hanger out of his mouth and throw it down the street. I was worried, each time CJ threw the hanger, that the hanger would hit somebody.
The street was lovely, clean, clean-bricked, and softly lit, all under a dark black sky. We walked some more, then found ourselves in a circle in some suburban-looking area. The circle felt like a street for cars, but it was probably paved with tan-colored cobblestones that seemed to me to be more fit for a walking path.
It was now broad daylight. CJ had a straight, metal rod, rusty and thin, like the hanger had been. CJ was still sticking this rod in his mouth and throwing it around. He laughed, like this was a really liberating activity. I still kept worrying that the projectile would stab somebody.
Now CJ wanted me to throw the rod. I decided that this was the wrong place to be.
I saw a crystal-white, almost fairy-like airplane high in the air. It was diving almost straight downward. It had crystalline contrails streaming back behind it. I thought the craft would crash.
I backed away from CJ. I stood in front of a small shop. I looked into the window. The shop looked like a barber shop. It looked very nice, like very rich people were inside, relaxing before a weekend morning haircut. I didn't want the people inside to think I was some bum, so I walked away from the window. I caught a glimpse, looking down to my right, of a quaint, tree-lined street.
I walked back to the circle. I heard CJ had been fired. I may have been in a dim room and standing behind a nice couch.
Dream #1
I sat at a desk on an office floor that looked like a living room. The "office" was dim. In an office room, my co-worker DE was on the phone. There may have been a small, fluorescent light on in DE's office.
DE was praising a few people for always staying late. I felt ashamed for not always staying late.
One of the people DE praised was a tall, fat woman with pale blonde hair. Her name may have been Diana. She sat in the office next to DE and was an Administrative Assistant. DE listed a number of things she did, the last of which was, as DE said, to, "Yell a professors I wish I could yell at."
DE said, "In short, she does everything that makes people want to do this job in the first place."
Dream #2
It was a sunny day. I stood out with a group of people at the top of a wide, lawny hill. There were some office-type objects on the lawn. The group had been performing a task, which I may have had a hand in devising. Now we ran to a different part of the hilltop to perform a different task. I may have been angry that we dropped my project, but I tried not to show my anger.
The leader of the group said, "If everybody doesn't like doing this one task, each person can choose his own task." Some of us went back to our original task, which had something to do with catching boxes from the sky. Others did other things.
I was afraid to go back to my original task: I didn't want my boss to think I was a spoiled sport. But then I felt like she was okay with me doing whatever I genuinely wanted to do, so I stood at "my position" to catch boxes from the sky.
But a woman called out to me, "Watch out if you're standing here that you don't let the boxes fall on me." I looked down to the ground. A blonde woman in cream-colored exercise pants and a backless, black leotard was in a stretching position in which her legs stretched out on either side of her at right angles. The woman had her back straight, parallel to the ground, and her face almost flat against the ground. Even though I couldn't see the woman's face, I could tell it was really pretty.
I was about to step away, but I think the woman said, "You don't have to move; just watch out for me."
I suddenly realized I was really turned on by the woman's healthy, sexy body and her stretching position.
Dream #3
I was in a dim bar, getting drunk with my co-worker CJ and some other people. CJ and I had gotten so drunk that we were now wandering the streets.
CJ had a rusty hanger, probably bent out of shape, into something more like a prong, with a sharp end. CJ would put one end of the hanger in his mouth and then swing the rest of the hanger around by wiggling his head. Then he would take the hanger out of his mouth and throw it down the street. I was worried, each time CJ threw the hanger, that the hanger would hit somebody.
The street was lovely, clean, clean-bricked, and softly lit, all under a dark black sky. We walked some more, then found ourselves in a circle in some suburban-looking area. The circle felt like a street for cars, but it was probably paved with tan-colored cobblestones that seemed to me to be more fit for a walking path.
It was now broad daylight. CJ had a straight, metal rod, rusty and thin, like the hanger had been. CJ was still sticking this rod in his mouth and throwing it around. He laughed, like this was a really liberating activity. I still kept worrying that the projectile would stab somebody.
Now CJ wanted me to throw the rod. I decided that this was the wrong place to be.
I saw a crystal-white, almost fairy-like airplane high in the air. It was diving almost straight downward. It had crystalline contrails streaming back behind it. I thought the craft would crash.
I backed away from CJ. I stood in front of a small shop. I looked into the window. The shop looked like a barber shop. It looked very nice, like very rich people were inside, relaxing before a weekend morning haircut. I didn't want the people inside to think I was some bum, so I walked away from the window. I caught a glimpse, looking down to my right, of a quaint, tree-lined street.
I walked back to the circle. I heard CJ had been fired. I may have been in a dim room and standing behind a nice couch.
(8/4/07) supermarket closet; give your friends a break
(Entered in paper journal at 4:50 PM at Barnes and Noble bookstore at Union Square in Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was in a bedroom with my boss BS. BS asked me to look through some old issues of the trade rag Supermarket News for a piece of data. The issues were in a closet. BS stood inside the closet. I stood outside the closet. The room was dimly lit with greenish, natural light. The closet had an incandescent bulb deep inside it. It was like there were two roughly two-foot-deep sections of the closet partly divided from one another by little section-walls.
There was a huge pile of junk in the closets. The magazines, the old issues of Supermarket News, were scattered and piled throughout the junk. BS wanted me to help him get them. I was afraid, though, that if I did, we would run across some pornographic magazines I had in there.
I also saw a strange and lurid magazine or picture book about black men who beat up white men. I hoped that BS wouldn't find this publication and think it turned me on in the same way that porno mags did -- I was pretty sure it didn't.
I tried to dissuade BS from looking into the pile. But BS wouldn't stop. So eventually I went in and started helping him.
Dream #2
I was in the office of my co-workers DE and EB. (In waking life, DE and EB, the replacement for our old Associate Analyst ES, shared the same office. I sat just outside their office in a cubicle as, at that time, most of the Assistants and first-year Analysts did.)
I was angry at DE for something. He was fighting against me a little, but I was definitely bearing down on him. I finally tore a book out of DE's hand. I accused DE of having done something against me. EB just sat in her seat, watching.
DE choked up a little bit and grew pale. He then burst out crying. I realized I had been too severe, especially with all that was going on with DE's family at that time. (In waking life, from 2007 through 2009 -- though I was hardly sensitive to the issue -- narcissist that I am -- DE's mother and father both experienced some very serious health issues.)
I grabbed DE's left hand and held it with both my hands. EB rushed over and stood by us. DE became less pale. DE was yelling at me, asking me why I couldn't ever just give him a break.
Dream #1
I was in a bedroom with my boss BS. BS asked me to look through some old issues of the trade rag Supermarket News for a piece of data. The issues were in a closet. BS stood inside the closet. I stood outside the closet. The room was dimly lit with greenish, natural light. The closet had an incandescent bulb deep inside it. It was like there were two roughly two-foot-deep sections of the closet partly divided from one another by little section-walls.
There was a huge pile of junk in the closets. The magazines, the old issues of Supermarket News, were scattered and piled throughout the junk. BS wanted me to help him get them. I was afraid, though, that if I did, we would run across some pornographic magazines I had in there.
I also saw a strange and lurid magazine or picture book about black men who beat up white men. I hoped that BS wouldn't find this publication and think it turned me on in the same way that porno mags did -- I was pretty sure it didn't.
I tried to dissuade BS from looking into the pile. But BS wouldn't stop. So eventually I went in and started helping him.
Dream #2
I was in the office of my co-workers DE and EB. (In waking life, DE and EB, the replacement for our old Associate Analyst ES, shared the same office. I sat just outside their office in a cubicle as, at that time, most of the Assistants and first-year Analysts did.)
I was angry at DE for something. He was fighting against me a little, but I was definitely bearing down on him. I finally tore a book out of DE's hand. I accused DE of having done something against me. EB just sat in her seat, watching.
DE choked up a little bit and grew pale. He then burst out crying. I realized I had been too severe, especially with all that was going on with DE's family at that time. (In waking life, from 2007 through 2009 -- though I was hardly sensitive to the issue -- narcissist that I am -- DE's mother and father both experienced some very serious health issues.)
I grabbed DE's left hand and held it with both my hands. EB rushed over and stood by us. DE became less pale. DE was yelling at me, asking me why I couldn't ever just give him a break.
(8/5/07) my new leotard; the owl man
(Entered in paper journal at 8:20 AM at Ozzie's cafe -- not sure which -- in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I went into a women's clothing shop. It was dim inside. A Hispanic man and woman worked there. The man may have helped me pick some lingerie.
I sat in a room of a (the previous?) women's clothing shop, on a couch in the center of the room, like a couch in the center of the room of an art museum. I looked into another room. The other room was dark and closed off by a locked glass door.
I remembered one of my female friends telling me how the shop was so exclusive that it stays closed except for when people come to buy stuff. Then it opens almost automatically. I thought the clothes must be very expensive.
I headed back into the (first?) women's clothing store. The clothes I had gotten before didn't work for me at all.
This time the woman helped me find some lingerie. She got me a couple nice things. Then she picked out something like a pink leotard with tiny sleeves, like the outfit a dancer might wear, with tights over her legs, for practice. It was just what I wanted.
I sat on the train. A white man and woman sat across from me. The man was saying, angrily, but not out of control, "I've got enough to do dealing with her!"
Apparently the man thought that since I had bought women's clothing I was trying to hit on him (not sure how that connection was made, either by him or me...). The man brought up the woman next to him, apparently his girlfriend, as proof that he had his hands full with his girlfriend and that he liked women, not men, anyway.
Dream #2
I was on a street corner at night. The blocks around me were all massy, roughly fifteen-floor apartment buildings of brick and stone, like buildings on Park Avenue. The sky was grey and stringy and murky, maybe hung with a yellow moon.
Caddy-corner from me (?) I saw what I thought to be a large bird perched atop the walk signal. I thought it was an owl. I walked across the street to approach it. The walk signal had transformed into a ten-foot-tall, black metal box.
The bird wasn't a bird after all, but a man dressed in white, robe-like clothing, with long, silvery-grey hair and a long, silver-grey beard. He crouched away from me, his legs bent so his knees were to his chest, as if he were imitating a bird.
I tried to get a view of the man's whole face, but I was afraid that the man was crazy, and that if I looked directly at the man's face the man would become afraid or angry and run away or attack.
Somewhere nearby I ran into my friend R. This place was far away from R's home. R was out walking his dog. I asked R, "What are you doing all the way out here?" I thought R was stalking me.
R said, "I had to come all the way out here. I had to take my dog to the vet."
We were now standing in the vet's office. I knelt down beside R's dog, who stood to my right side and faced R as he stood at the reception desk. I asked, "Is your dog having another one of her..." (I knew it was a skin problem, but I wanted to be delicate about the issue) "... things?"
R got angry, thinking I had forgotten about his dog's illnesses. R said, "Skin issues. She's having more of her skin issues."
I petted the dog and noticed that a lot of her coat was very thin. It was also brown and white in these patches, instead of black, her normal color.
Dream #1
I went into a women's clothing shop. It was dim inside. A Hispanic man and woman worked there. The man may have helped me pick some lingerie.
I sat in a room of a (the previous?) women's clothing shop, on a couch in the center of the room, like a couch in the center of the room of an art museum. I looked into another room. The other room was dark and closed off by a locked glass door.
I remembered one of my female friends telling me how the shop was so exclusive that it stays closed except for when people come to buy stuff. Then it opens almost automatically. I thought the clothes must be very expensive.
I headed back into the (first?) women's clothing store. The clothes I had gotten before didn't work for me at all.
This time the woman helped me find some lingerie. She got me a couple nice things. Then she picked out something like a pink leotard with tiny sleeves, like the outfit a dancer might wear, with tights over her legs, for practice. It was just what I wanted.
I sat on the train. A white man and woman sat across from me. The man was saying, angrily, but not out of control, "I've got enough to do dealing with her!"
Apparently the man thought that since I had bought women's clothing I was trying to hit on him (not sure how that connection was made, either by him or me...). The man brought up the woman next to him, apparently his girlfriend, as proof that he had his hands full with his girlfriend and that he liked women, not men, anyway.
Dream #2
I was on a street corner at night. The blocks around me were all massy, roughly fifteen-floor apartment buildings of brick and stone, like buildings on Park Avenue. The sky was grey and stringy and murky, maybe hung with a yellow moon.
Caddy-corner from me (?) I saw what I thought to be a large bird perched atop the walk signal. I thought it was an owl. I walked across the street to approach it. The walk signal had transformed into a ten-foot-tall, black metal box.
The bird wasn't a bird after all, but a man dressed in white, robe-like clothing, with long, silvery-grey hair and a long, silver-grey beard. He crouched away from me, his legs bent so his knees were to his chest, as if he were imitating a bird.
I tried to get a view of the man's whole face, but I was afraid that the man was crazy, and that if I looked directly at the man's face the man would become afraid or angry and run away or attack.
Somewhere nearby I ran into my friend R. This place was far away from R's home. R was out walking his dog. I asked R, "What are you doing all the way out here?" I thought R was stalking me.
R said, "I had to come all the way out here. I had to take my dog to the vet."
We were now standing in the vet's office. I knelt down beside R's dog, who stood to my right side and faced R as he stood at the reception desk. I asked, "Is your dog having another one of her..." (I knew it was a skin problem, but I wanted to be delicate about the issue) "... things?"
R got angry, thinking I had forgotten about his dog's illnesses. R said, "Skin issues. She's having more of her skin issues."
I petted the dog and noticed that a lot of her coat was very thin. It was also brown and white in these patches, instead of black, her normal color.
(8/7/07) hot dog stand and coffee pot; my sister's birthday
(Entered in paper journal at 5:30 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I walked under a wooden door-frame and into a plaza or hallway full of nice-looking, but cheap, mall-like storefronts, mostly for restaurants. Most of the places were closed. I knew from this that this area wasn't getting as much business as had been expected for it when it had first been developed.
One place was open. I went inside. It was like an old hot dog stand at Coney Island: all the surfaces of stainless steel, etc. A father and his twelve-year-old son worked there. The father stood behind the counter and the son beside the front door. (To get into the place I probably had, once again, to crouch under a half-door-frame in a "wood" wall like the wood-pattern siding on the outside of a double-wide trailer.)
I was offered breakfast -- some candies like peanut butter cups. I took them, figuring I wouldn't know where else to get food.
I stood outside at night. I was in a suburban neighborhood. The land, even the pavement, was rolling with roughly four-foot-tall mounds like a carpet with stuff hucked underneath it. I stood by a sleek, black SUV. I stood with some other people, my mom probably among them.
I had a cream-white (ceramic?) coffee pot with a polished silver top. Inside the pot was something like liquid nitrogen. I had to pour the substance on or in some pipe in the SUV's engine to get the engine running.
But I had just run out of the substance. Someone, possibly my mom, took the coffee pot to go fill it again. I stood with the other people by the SUV. I told them that somehow it seemed like we shouldn't need that second pot after all.
Dream #2
I stood with my mom before an electronic piece of machinery. I had to twist some knobs or gears to manipulate the quality of metals. There may have been construction workers nearby, watching us. I think I had done something wrong, and that people were now laughing at me.
I was riding in an SUV with my mom and my sister. We drove on a bridge like the Manhattan Bridge. The sides of the bridge were mostly covered by orange, mesh material, making the bridge feel like an interior. I may have been sitting in the front passenger's seat. I didn't see as myself. I saw as my sister and sometimes as my mother. Either I or my sister sat in the backseat on the passenger's side.
My mom told my sister why this day (my sister's birthday?) was so good. My mom gave a lot of flattering reasons. I, as my sister, giggled shyly while looking at the dashboard. My mom (I seeing as her) said, "But I love this day most of all because I knew" (I seeing as my sister again) "that Preemie was not in New York City during the World Trade Center attack."
I stood out on the bridge. My mom and sister were in the SUV, which was stopped and facing me.
I stood on the right side of the road, before some electronic equipment like an old record player. One knob in particular, which looked like a coppery version of the base of a record needle's arm, was my focus. I had to thumb down a tiny switch inside to make a change to copper. I thumbed the switch down. I heard a sound somewhere like distorted church bells.
Dream #1
I walked under a wooden door-frame and into a plaza or hallway full of nice-looking, but cheap, mall-like storefronts, mostly for restaurants. Most of the places were closed. I knew from this that this area wasn't getting as much business as had been expected for it when it had first been developed.
One place was open. I went inside. It was like an old hot dog stand at Coney Island: all the surfaces of stainless steel, etc. A father and his twelve-year-old son worked there. The father stood behind the counter and the son beside the front door. (To get into the place I probably had, once again, to crouch under a half-door-frame in a "wood" wall like the wood-pattern siding on the outside of a double-wide trailer.)
I was offered breakfast -- some candies like peanut butter cups. I took them, figuring I wouldn't know where else to get food.
I stood outside at night. I was in a suburban neighborhood. The land, even the pavement, was rolling with roughly four-foot-tall mounds like a carpet with stuff hucked underneath it. I stood by a sleek, black SUV. I stood with some other people, my mom probably among them.
I had a cream-white (ceramic?) coffee pot with a polished silver top. Inside the pot was something like liquid nitrogen. I had to pour the substance on or in some pipe in the SUV's engine to get the engine running.
But I had just run out of the substance. Someone, possibly my mom, took the coffee pot to go fill it again. I stood with the other people by the SUV. I told them that somehow it seemed like we shouldn't need that second pot after all.
Dream #2
I stood with my mom before an electronic piece of machinery. I had to twist some knobs or gears to manipulate the quality of metals. There may have been construction workers nearby, watching us. I think I had done something wrong, and that people were now laughing at me.
I was riding in an SUV with my mom and my sister. We drove on a bridge like the Manhattan Bridge. The sides of the bridge were mostly covered by orange, mesh material, making the bridge feel like an interior. I may have been sitting in the front passenger's seat. I didn't see as myself. I saw as my sister and sometimes as my mother. Either I or my sister sat in the backseat on the passenger's side.
My mom told my sister why this day (my sister's birthday?) was so good. My mom gave a lot of flattering reasons. I, as my sister, giggled shyly while looking at the dashboard. My mom (I seeing as her) said, "But I love this day most of all because I knew" (I seeing as my sister again) "that Preemie was not in New York City during the World Trade Center attack."
I stood out on the bridge. My mom and sister were in the SUV, which was stopped and facing me.
I stood on the right side of the road, before some electronic equipment like an old record player. One knob in particular, which looked like a coppery version of the base of a record needle's arm, was my focus. I had to thumb down a tiny switch inside to make a change to copper. I thumbed the switch down. I heard a sound somewhere like distorted church bells.
(8/8/07) disappointing goodbye card; disappointing special occasion
Dream #1
I sat on a couch. A woman sat to my left. She was tall, blonde, pretty. I was saying goodbye to her. I brought her a goodbye card, which was actually just a piece of yellow notebook paper I had torn off a larger piece. I had stuck it inside a book I was reading. I now gave the woman the goodbye card. I could tell the woman was disappointed.
Dream #2
I was with a group of people. We went up a flight of steps on the left side of a tall room with big windows that let in yellowy sunlight. The walls were white. The steps were white tile.
All the people with me were my superiors. I had arranged a lunch for a group of children. The superiors were going to inspect how well I'd arranged things.
The upper floor was like a mezzanine overlooking the first floor. I had set up three folding tables along the railing of the mezzanine. The near two tables had scraps of paper on the table before each chair. This was intended as some sort of decoration.
I was ashamed of myself for having thought that simple scraps of paper -- apparently just torn right out of a notebook! -- would be sufficient decoration for such a special occasion. But, still, I asked my superiors if this was a good enough decoration. The superiors didn't answer.
I walked to the far table. The two tables that had been nearer me had been covered by cheap tablecloths, one of which was darkish purple. But, as if that hadn't been thoughtless enough, the third table was only covered with a long sheet of white paper. And the sheet of paper was all old and wrinkled. It looked dotted, as if from spatters of grease from a frying pan.
I was again ashamed that I could use such shoddy materials for such a special occasion.
I sat on a couch. A woman sat to my left. She was tall, blonde, pretty. I was saying goodbye to her. I brought her a goodbye card, which was actually just a piece of yellow notebook paper I had torn off a larger piece. I had stuck it inside a book I was reading. I now gave the woman the goodbye card. I could tell the woman was disappointed.
Dream #2
I was with a group of people. We went up a flight of steps on the left side of a tall room with big windows that let in yellowy sunlight. The walls were white. The steps were white tile.
All the people with me were my superiors. I had arranged a lunch for a group of children. The superiors were going to inspect how well I'd arranged things.
The upper floor was like a mezzanine overlooking the first floor. I had set up three folding tables along the railing of the mezzanine. The near two tables had scraps of paper on the table before each chair. This was intended as some sort of decoration.
I was ashamed of myself for having thought that simple scraps of paper -- apparently just torn right out of a notebook! -- would be sufficient decoration for such a special occasion. But, still, I asked my superiors if this was a good enough decoration. The superiors didn't answer.
I walked to the far table. The two tables that had been nearer me had been covered by cheap tablecloths, one of which was darkish purple. But, as if that hadn't been thoughtless enough, the third table was only covered with a long sheet of white paper. And the sheet of paper was all old and wrinkled. It looked dotted, as if from spatters of grease from a frying pan.
I was again ashamed that I could use such shoddy materials for such a special occasion.
(8/10/07) narcissistic toilet
(Entered in paper journal at 5:45 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was in a building like a hotel. My mom, who may have worked at the same place as I, had called me back to work when she saw that I had filled out some internet form incorrectly. I could "see" my mom up in some top level, a smallish area like an apartment, with thin, plywood walls, like in a double-wide trailer. My mom sat on a high stool and typed on a computer that stood on a narrow table.
I went up floors through different levels of the hotel: a nice mezzanine, some kind of fire escape area, and finally a lovely series of floors like dormitory or apartment halls.
I found a bathroom on one floor. I went in. I needed to defecate. There were three toilets. I felt like since there were three toilets, and all three were currently unoccupied, at least one must have been left "sabotaged" by someone.
So I checked the toilets. The one farthest from me was a wide stall, like the handicap-equipped stalls. I didn't want to go in there. The second one looked fine at first glance. But when I walked in I saw that it was a stall within a stall, i.e. you needed to open two doors to get to the toilet. Something about this seemed discomforting, so I walked out of the stall. The third stall was almost regular. I sat down on the toilet.
I began defecating. I looked down into the bowl of the toilet. My feces was orange-brown. And it just kept coming and coming out of me. I thought, This much shit, of this strange color, can't be good.
I saw, in the reflection of the water, the feces coming out of my anus. I thought, So this is what my anus looks like. I felt I shouldn't look at the reflection too long: I might get depressed by the carnal aspect of my existence, or else become morbidly drawn in to, mesmerized by, the "dirty parts" of my own body.
I looked away, but somehow I could still see the reflection, not as if in my mind's eye, but as if, though I was looking upward, forward, another part of me, physically, were still looking downward.
Dream #1
I was in a building like a hotel. My mom, who may have worked at the same place as I, had called me back to work when she saw that I had filled out some internet form incorrectly. I could "see" my mom up in some top level, a smallish area like an apartment, with thin, plywood walls, like in a double-wide trailer. My mom sat on a high stool and typed on a computer that stood on a narrow table.
I went up floors through different levels of the hotel: a nice mezzanine, some kind of fire escape area, and finally a lovely series of floors like dormitory or apartment halls.
I found a bathroom on one floor. I went in. I needed to defecate. There were three toilets. I felt like since there were three toilets, and all three were currently unoccupied, at least one must have been left "sabotaged" by someone.
So I checked the toilets. The one farthest from me was a wide stall, like the handicap-equipped stalls. I didn't want to go in there. The second one looked fine at first glance. But when I walked in I saw that it was a stall within a stall, i.e. you needed to open two doors to get to the toilet. Something about this seemed discomforting, so I walked out of the stall. The third stall was almost regular. I sat down on the toilet.
I began defecating. I looked down into the bowl of the toilet. My feces was orange-brown. And it just kept coming and coming out of me. I thought, This much shit, of this strange color, can't be good.
I saw, in the reflection of the water, the feces coming out of my anus. I thought, So this is what my anus looks like. I felt I shouldn't look at the reflection too long: I might get depressed by the carnal aspect of my existence, or else become morbidly drawn in to, mesmerized by, the "dirty parts" of my own body.
I looked away, but somehow I could still see the reflection, not as if in my mind's eye, but as if, though I was looking upward, forward, another part of me, physically, were still looking downward.
(8/11/07) shopping mall ballroom; pink panty panic; pinto bean stew; having friends over
(Entered in paper journal at 7:45 AM at Ozzie's Cafe on Seventh Avenue and Lincoln Place.)
Dream #1
I walked down a "main street" like block of shops. A woman was moving things out of a moving truck. I felt like I knew the woman, but I wasn't sure, so I didn't say anything. I helped the woman move a table into a house. Now there were a bunch of women helping us. I still felt really bad for not telling the woman I thought I knew her.
In the room there was a square column, maybe six feet tall, with a TV set into a hole in its top. Previews for movies were playing.
One preview was for an old-looking movie. In one scene of this old-looking movie a square-faced, aging woman was on the phone. She was covered with something like tar, as if she had been in an explosion. She said something like "I would do anything for you, even die in an explosion." The scene cut to the woman the first woman was talking with on the phone. This woman had black hair and was, like the first woman, square-faced and aging.
Another preview started with a city skyline at night. I myself was now on a building-top, looking down at the skyline. I sat on the ledge of the building. I decided to climb down the building. I did so by scaling down the curtains, which were outside the windows.
I got down to a certain level, maybe the first floor. In the window I could see a ballroom. A woman stood before a table of drinks. She looked like a 1980s-style politician. She wore a red suit-dress and had a wide, hairsprayed hairstyle.
I was now inside the ballroom. Suddenly I felt so free that I flew all over the room, up to the high ceiling and back down. The ceiling had an oval design like framing for a fresco or mural. The light in the ballroom was golden and warm. The room was pretty empty overall, with only a few people inside.
I flew into a hallway like a shopping mall corridor. I was thinking about buildings as I flew. I wondered which building I had scaled down. I couldn't remember the building's name. It had seemed to be one of the highest buildings in the city. I thought it had been designed by Louis Sullivan (?). I now imagined a modern-looking, green-glass building.
As I saw and thought this, I flew down a side hallway, where there were no shops. When I got close to the end of the hallway I landed, then jumped up, hit my feet against the right wall -- which was a weird, rough, plasticky, tan material -- and flew in a u-turn back toward the main corridor.
As I flew over a handicap-accessible ramp, a mall worker, a long-haired Hispanic man in a janitor's uniform, walked up it. The man looked at me. I thought he was going to bully me.
I almost lost my power of flight. But there was a huge structure like a confession box to my right. I jumped, grabbed onto the box, pulled myself up onto it, and stood on top of it.
I was now flying down the main hallway. I landed in front of a Victoria's Secret store. I went inside, where a woman helped me find some lingerie.
Dream #2
I was presently living at my grandmother's (my grandmother P's?) house. It was late at night. I was just coming back home, just entering the house. My grandmother had also gone out for the evening. She hadn't yet returned.
I went into a big bedroom. I had a few bags in the bedroom. I pulled a dress and panties out of one bag. I put the dress and panties on. I got aroused and masturbated, then fell asleep.
In the morning I woke up. I realized I had fallen asleep with my bedroom door wide open. I knew the door of my grandma's bedroom was right across the hallway from the door to my bedroom. It would, then, have been easy for my grandma and the man she had picked up and brought home to have seen me as I slept! I was ashamed, especially since this man, whom I imagined to be some kind of sleazy guy, didn't know me and obviously, therefore (?), wouldn't have any sympathy for my sexual abnormalities.
I lifted up the blankets to get out of bed. I had ejaculated in my panties and worn them to sleep, even though they were soaked with my semen. There was a pink, wet patch on my white sheets, as if the semen had soaked through my panties and, soaking through the panties, transmitted the color of the panties to the sheets. But the panties were actually a faded, peach-pink gingham pattern, while the pink of the semen-patch was a shocking, vivid pink.
The whole house was full of natural, golden-white morning light. Somehow it was now like my grandma and the guy she'd picked up had actually never come home. I could see through the very short hallway into the big, white-carpeted living room.
A patch of light on the floor indicated that the front door of the house was wide open. I sensed that someone had just recently walked into the house. I tried to cover myself up, especially the front of my semen-soaked panties. But I knew the person was coming toward this room, and that I couldn't possibly get fully dressed before the person reached the room. I wouldn't be able to hide the fact that I was wearing women's clothes.
I grabbed the dress I had put on the night before. It was like a blue sundress. I wadded it up and covered up the front of my panties with it.
A pretty, Hispanic woman walked in. The woman didn't seem to be aware of my shameful appearance at all. She told me, "I'm looking for a XXXXX." (Hotel? Doctor? I can't remember.) "Can you help me find one?"
I knew I had a phone book in my (???) kitchen, so I went with her into the kitchen. I no longer held the dress in front of my panties.
We got into the kitchen. I had a whole train (or something like Stephen King's "book snake") of phone books in the kitchen. They piled about four feet tall and sprawled all the way out into a long, dark hallway. I was trying to find the correct phone book. All the other ones were out of date.
I was now dressed in my regular boys' clothes. My grandma had come home. The man was also with my grandma. It was now like the man and my grandma had lived together for a little while. And now the room I had spent the night in was a room used by the man's son. The man's son had now also, apparently, arrived back at the house. My grandma and the man asked me if I could clear out my bags so the son could come in and sleep.
The bed was now in the center of the room, against the back wall, as opposed to previously, when it had been against the right wall and moved a few feet away from the back wall. There was also now a dresser with a mirror against the front wall. It may all have been this way from the time the pretty woman (who was now gone) had walked into the room.
I now realized that the messy spot of pink semen was still on the underside of the blanket. I panicked, trying to figure how I could the son from getting into the bed.
Dream #3
A naked woman walked around in a room the floor of which was some weird material like brown turtle shells. The wall had pipes coming out of it. The pipes were maybe twelve inches in diameter and blew out billows of steam, which I thought of as "industrial gases."
I (? - wherever I'd come from) walked into the next room, which was like a room in an abandoned house. The floor was brownish-red, like clay. The walls were sloppily painted with sea-green paint. There was a cafeteria-style counter against a wall. In the distance was a stairwell filled with natural daylight and leading to an upper floor.
I felt a haughty feeling toward the woman in the room with the steam-pipes, as if I felt that, since the woman hadn't shown up in this room, she couldn't show up for her job.
A woman behind the cafeteria counter called for me. This woman was oldish and fattish. She asked me what I'd like for lunch. I looked down and chose some roast pork, plantains, and pinto bean stew.
Dream #4
A lot of my friends were walking through rooms in my house. My friends might have been getting ready to stay with me for a while. I was happy to have so much space in this place (which was full of rooms) that I could have a few of my friends stay with me.
Dream #1
I walked down a "main street" like block of shops. A woman was moving things out of a moving truck. I felt like I knew the woman, but I wasn't sure, so I didn't say anything. I helped the woman move a table into a house. Now there were a bunch of women helping us. I still felt really bad for not telling the woman I thought I knew her.
In the room there was a square column, maybe six feet tall, with a TV set into a hole in its top. Previews for movies were playing.
One preview was for an old-looking movie. In one scene of this old-looking movie a square-faced, aging woman was on the phone. She was covered with something like tar, as if she had been in an explosion. She said something like "I would do anything for you, even die in an explosion." The scene cut to the woman the first woman was talking with on the phone. This woman had black hair and was, like the first woman, square-faced and aging.
Another preview started with a city skyline at night. I myself was now on a building-top, looking down at the skyline. I sat on the ledge of the building. I decided to climb down the building. I did so by scaling down the curtains, which were outside the windows.
I got down to a certain level, maybe the first floor. In the window I could see a ballroom. A woman stood before a table of drinks. She looked like a 1980s-style politician. She wore a red suit-dress and had a wide, hairsprayed hairstyle.
I was now inside the ballroom. Suddenly I felt so free that I flew all over the room, up to the high ceiling and back down. The ceiling had an oval design like framing for a fresco or mural. The light in the ballroom was golden and warm. The room was pretty empty overall, with only a few people inside.
I flew into a hallway like a shopping mall corridor. I was thinking about buildings as I flew. I wondered which building I had scaled down. I couldn't remember the building's name. It had seemed to be one of the highest buildings in the city. I thought it had been designed by Louis Sullivan (?). I now imagined a modern-looking, green-glass building.
As I saw and thought this, I flew down a side hallway, where there were no shops. When I got close to the end of the hallway I landed, then jumped up, hit my feet against the right wall -- which was a weird, rough, plasticky, tan material -- and flew in a u-turn back toward the main corridor.
As I flew over a handicap-accessible ramp, a mall worker, a long-haired Hispanic man in a janitor's uniform, walked up it. The man looked at me. I thought he was going to bully me.
I almost lost my power of flight. But there was a huge structure like a confession box to my right. I jumped, grabbed onto the box, pulled myself up onto it, and stood on top of it.
I was now flying down the main hallway. I landed in front of a Victoria's Secret store. I went inside, where a woman helped me find some lingerie.
Dream #2
I was presently living at my grandmother's (my grandmother P's?) house. It was late at night. I was just coming back home, just entering the house. My grandmother had also gone out for the evening. She hadn't yet returned.
I went into a big bedroom. I had a few bags in the bedroom. I pulled a dress and panties out of one bag. I put the dress and panties on. I got aroused and masturbated, then fell asleep.
In the morning I woke up. I realized I had fallen asleep with my bedroom door wide open. I knew the door of my grandma's bedroom was right across the hallway from the door to my bedroom. It would, then, have been easy for my grandma and the man she had picked up and brought home to have seen me as I slept! I was ashamed, especially since this man, whom I imagined to be some kind of sleazy guy, didn't know me and obviously, therefore (?), wouldn't have any sympathy for my sexual abnormalities.
I lifted up the blankets to get out of bed. I had ejaculated in my panties and worn them to sleep, even though they were soaked with my semen. There was a pink, wet patch on my white sheets, as if the semen had soaked through my panties and, soaking through the panties, transmitted the color of the panties to the sheets. But the panties were actually a faded, peach-pink gingham pattern, while the pink of the semen-patch was a shocking, vivid pink.
The whole house was full of natural, golden-white morning light. Somehow it was now like my grandma and the guy she'd picked up had actually never come home. I could see through the very short hallway into the big, white-carpeted living room.
A patch of light on the floor indicated that the front door of the house was wide open. I sensed that someone had just recently walked into the house. I tried to cover myself up, especially the front of my semen-soaked panties. But I knew the person was coming toward this room, and that I couldn't possibly get fully dressed before the person reached the room. I wouldn't be able to hide the fact that I was wearing women's clothes.
I grabbed the dress I had put on the night before. It was like a blue sundress. I wadded it up and covered up the front of my panties with it.
A pretty, Hispanic woman walked in. The woman didn't seem to be aware of my shameful appearance at all. She told me, "I'm looking for a XXXXX." (Hotel? Doctor? I can't remember.) "Can you help me find one?"
I knew I had a phone book in my (???) kitchen, so I went with her into the kitchen. I no longer held the dress in front of my panties.
We got into the kitchen. I had a whole train (or something like Stephen King's "book snake") of phone books in the kitchen. They piled about four feet tall and sprawled all the way out into a long, dark hallway. I was trying to find the correct phone book. All the other ones were out of date.
I was now dressed in my regular boys' clothes. My grandma had come home. The man was also with my grandma. It was now like the man and my grandma had lived together for a little while. And now the room I had spent the night in was a room used by the man's son. The man's son had now also, apparently, arrived back at the house. My grandma and the man asked me if I could clear out my bags so the son could come in and sleep.
The bed was now in the center of the room, against the back wall, as opposed to previously, when it had been against the right wall and moved a few feet away from the back wall. There was also now a dresser with a mirror against the front wall. It may all have been this way from the time the pretty woman (who was now gone) had walked into the room.
I now realized that the messy spot of pink semen was still on the underside of the blanket. I panicked, trying to figure how I could the son from getting into the bed.
Dream #3
A naked woman walked around in a room the floor of which was some weird material like brown turtle shells. The wall had pipes coming out of it. The pipes were maybe twelve inches in diameter and blew out billows of steam, which I thought of as "industrial gases."
I (? - wherever I'd come from) walked into the next room, which was like a room in an abandoned house. The floor was brownish-red, like clay. The walls were sloppily painted with sea-green paint. There was a cafeteria-style counter against a wall. In the distance was a stairwell filled with natural daylight and leading to an upper floor.
I felt a haughty feeling toward the woman in the room with the steam-pipes, as if I felt that, since the woman hadn't shown up in this room, she couldn't show up for her job.
A woman behind the cafeteria counter called for me. This woman was oldish and fattish. She asked me what I'd like for lunch. I looked down and chose some roast pork, plantains, and pinto bean stew.
Dream #4
A lot of my friends were walking through rooms in my house. My friends might have been getting ready to stay with me for a while. I was happy to have so much space in this place (which was full of rooms) that I could have a few of my friends stay with me.
(8/12/07) dream analysis by stock analyst; my name is preemie
(Entered in paper journal at 8 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was on the phone with my boss DO. He was with my psychiatrist A. I "saw" that they were in a room like my great grandmother's living room. DO had rushed to the phone when I had come on. He told me he had read the letter I had given to my psychiatrist.
Trying to help me somehow, as if everybody were panicked about my condition, DO said, "I see what the Dark Girl and the girl with black eyes mean." I "saw" that the Dark Girl was a Mexican or Native American girl with very dark skin. The girl with black eyes was like classic grey alien, except maybe only waist-height, and somehow childlike.
DO said, "The Dark Girl means you want to control things. The girl with black eyes means you have no knowledge of history."
Dream #2
I walked into a gigantic, K-Mart-like store with my family. AN, a temporary assistant at my company, was with us. We all went our separate ways, but AN kept following me. I was trying to shake him off. He was trying to gauge where I really wanted to go, but he was acting like he wasn't trying to follow me at all.
AN said, "I'm going up to the electronics section." So I walked up there with him to put him where he said he wasted to go and thus "oblige" him to stay there and not follow me.
When we got to the electronics section, in the back of the store, I said, "I don't have any interest in electronics. I'm leaving." I headed off toward the left wall of the store. I felt like AN was still following me. I ran faster and faster and wove in and out of aisles to throw AN off my trail.
A kid pulling a cart stacked almost to the ceiling (maybe fifty feet high?) with boxes got in my way. I jumped and flew over the boxes and onto the top shelf of what looked like an aisle of "big-box" warehouse shelves. I ran along the top shelf toward the entrance of the store and the cash registers.
When I got to the end of the aisle I could see down (way down) to the entrance and cash registers. This whole area was moderately busy with people. AN ran, crouched, from behind a display case island, like a counter of watch displays, and hid behind one of the unused cash registers. I could tell, by the way AN was moving and hiding, that he was waiting until he saw me come back around to this part of the store so he could start following me again.
I leapt down to the cash register. I pulled AN out from behind the register. I yelled, "Why are you following me?!"
AN ignored my question. He was about to call out to some partners of his who weren't necessarily following me but were lurking around, just in case they needed to help AN with stalking me.
But before AN could call out to his partners, I covered his mouth and nose. I held AN's mouth and nose for so long that AN died.
AN was now my brother. I held him in my arms. I carried him through the store, trying to find my family. The store was now a restaurant set up as some kind of beach bar. It was humongous. The place was full of people. Some people sat on couches.
I couldn't believe I had killed my brother. I also didn't want to be accused of it -- even though I was obviously guilty!
I got to a completely dark corner of the bar-like area. There were still, apparently, people sitting in this corner of the bar. For a moment I thought I could see the faces of the people. But when I got up to the people I couldn't see anything at all.
I called, "Is my family still here?"
The people all replied. They all sounded young, like they were in their mid-twenties. They said, "No, not here." I turned around. I still couldn't see anything. The people called, "Hey, wait a minute. Who are you? We don't even know who you are to help you."
I said, "M... m... my name is Preemie."
Dream #1
I was on the phone with my boss DO. He was with my psychiatrist A. I "saw" that they were in a room like my great grandmother's living room. DO had rushed to the phone when I had come on. He told me he had read the letter I had given to my psychiatrist.
Trying to help me somehow, as if everybody were panicked about my condition, DO said, "I see what the Dark Girl and the girl with black eyes mean." I "saw" that the Dark Girl was a Mexican or Native American girl with very dark skin. The girl with black eyes was like classic grey alien, except maybe only waist-height, and somehow childlike.
DO said, "The Dark Girl means you want to control things. The girl with black eyes means you have no knowledge of history."
Dream #2
I walked into a gigantic, K-Mart-like store with my family. AN, a temporary assistant at my company, was with us. We all went our separate ways, but AN kept following me. I was trying to shake him off. He was trying to gauge where I really wanted to go, but he was acting like he wasn't trying to follow me at all.
AN said, "I'm going up to the electronics section." So I walked up there with him to put him where he said he wasted to go and thus "oblige" him to stay there and not follow me.
When we got to the electronics section, in the back of the store, I said, "I don't have any interest in electronics. I'm leaving." I headed off toward the left wall of the store. I felt like AN was still following me. I ran faster and faster and wove in and out of aisles to throw AN off my trail.
A kid pulling a cart stacked almost to the ceiling (maybe fifty feet high?) with boxes got in my way. I jumped and flew over the boxes and onto the top shelf of what looked like an aisle of "big-box" warehouse shelves. I ran along the top shelf toward the entrance of the store and the cash registers.
When I got to the end of the aisle I could see down (way down) to the entrance and cash registers. This whole area was moderately busy with people. AN ran, crouched, from behind a display case island, like a counter of watch displays, and hid behind one of the unused cash registers. I could tell, by the way AN was moving and hiding, that he was waiting until he saw me come back around to this part of the store so he could start following me again.
I leapt down to the cash register. I pulled AN out from behind the register. I yelled, "Why are you following me?!"
AN ignored my question. He was about to call out to some partners of his who weren't necessarily following me but were lurking around, just in case they needed to help AN with stalking me.
But before AN could call out to his partners, I covered his mouth and nose. I held AN's mouth and nose for so long that AN died.
AN was now my brother. I held him in my arms. I carried him through the store, trying to find my family. The store was now a restaurant set up as some kind of beach bar. It was humongous. The place was full of people. Some people sat on couches.
I couldn't believe I had killed my brother. I also didn't want to be accused of it -- even though I was obviously guilty!
I got to a completely dark corner of the bar-like area. There were still, apparently, people sitting in this corner of the bar. For a moment I thought I could see the faces of the people. But when I got up to the people I couldn't see anything at all.
I called, "Is my family still here?"
The people all replied. They all sounded young, like they were in their mid-twenties. They said, "No, not here." I turned around. I still couldn't see anything. The people called, "Hey, wait a minute. Who are you? We don't even know who you are to help you."
I said, "M... m... my name is Preemie."
(8/16/07) my sister the care bear
(Entered at 6:15 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
It was a clear day. I was on a footbridge over a large body of water, possibly a river like the Hudson, although it seemed as vast as an ocean. I was in single file with other people who were around my age. The footbridge was like squares of board bound together and floating on the water, with handrails built on for balance. I may have been the second to last person in the line, with a woman behind me.
A small ship came up to us. The ship barely reached out of the water. It had a flat look, like a garbage barge, but its sides had (paneless) windows or portholes and it was plain that nothing was to rest on its tops. The ship was rusted all over. It headed at one spot in the bridge where there was a gap of a couple feet.
I thought the ship's pilot thought the boat could get through that small space. But when I got past that spot and the boat shifted its course to follow us, I knew it was just trying to scare us.
The ship hit the bridge at a spot we had just passed. It lifted up a fair section of the bridge. I told the woman behind me, "Get ready to get wet!"
The part of the bridge I had pulled up now recoiled deep into the water, pulling the nearby sections down with it. I was carrying a backpack. My cell phone was inside. As we were pulled down, about waist-deep, I worried about my phone getting water damage.
The ship had passed. I thought the woman behind me would ask me how I knew the bridge would be pulled underwater. It seemed like nobody but I had seen the ship. I thought of how I would explain the ship to the woman.
I was now walking on a nice, cobbled path in a shaded corner of an area like a zoo or a botanical garden. The trees shading the path were like thin pines. My sister walked behind me. A few people walked around nearby.
I was angrily engaged in telling my sister how rude the ship's pilot had been, first to choose to go under a bridge that nothing could go under anyway, and second to make it clear that it wasn't just choosing any place to hit the bridge, but that it chose to hit right near the line of people walking.
As I continued explaining this, turned us off one path to go onto a path behind a chain link fence. We had to walk over a small mound made up of soil and old fence parts to get in. Now the fence was on our left, and some small, long building was on our right.
A black man with long dreads followed us. I felt like the man was a security guard. I was trying to explain something, possibly having to do with the physics of the bridge's movement, to my sister. I now tried to do it in an obvious way. I wanted to show the man by my speech that my sister and I were doing nothing to break the law. Plus, I didn't want the man following us around.
At a certain distance the fence curved to join with the building, making a dead end. We had to turn around. But the fence had old chain link fence, and old, red-painted slats and wire fence, piled up against it pretty evenly.
I ran up the piled up stuff, acting like I would jump over, maybe even thinking I would jump over. But when I got to the top, I hesitated. But the man who'd been following me and my sister ran aggressively up the side and may even have jumped over the fence, thus no longer following my sister and me.
During all this, my sister had asked me a question (about the physics of the bridge?). I, having been so frustrated with the man following us, got angry at the question and answered in a snide way. I felt bad: I could feel my sister was sad because I'd treated her rudely.
We walked past the entry and toward the doorway of a house-like building. I went inside. My sister went out to a stone bench just to the right. I only went a step or two into the doorway. In the room were adults, mostly Mexican men. One in particular had a big mullet hairdo. I felt like a child. I may have felt scared of the men. But something about them all was amusing .
I realized I hadn't patched things up with my sister yet. I went out to the stone bench. A weird figure like a plasticky, one-foot-long panda bear doll lay face-down on the bench. The stuffed animal was my sister. It was covered in big, purplish ants. Some of the ants had embedded themselves in my sister, as if they had melted and molded the plastic to encase their bodies.
I knew the ants had all bitten my sister and that she, allergic to the ant bites, was now either dead or in a coma. I called to my sister, moaning and crying. I brushed all the ants off her body. I couldn't believe there were so many. I thought, How could I have left my sister alone where I knew there were so many ants? I wandered down a slope in the sunlight. My sister still lay on the bench.
Now some of the adults (I still saw them as adults while I saw myself as a child). I was in a small living room. The adults, maybe four or five of them, all Mexican, were trying to draw me all the way into the room. I stood behind a corner of wall and a TV on a stand.
The adults told me, "Look -- she's alive again. We fixed her!" I thought, That's impossible. She's dead.
Now a Care Bear stood into a small portion of my field of vision. Its face had a strangely human look. The face, too, was more male than female. The bear could only stand, walk, wave, and smile. I didn't know how they thought this Care Bear could fool me. It didn't look like my sister. It wasn't alive. It was just a robotic stuffed animal.
Dream #1
It was a clear day. I was on a footbridge over a large body of water, possibly a river like the Hudson, although it seemed as vast as an ocean. I was in single file with other people who were around my age. The footbridge was like squares of board bound together and floating on the water, with handrails built on for balance. I may have been the second to last person in the line, with a woman behind me.
A small ship came up to us. The ship barely reached out of the water. It had a flat look, like a garbage barge, but its sides had (paneless) windows or portholes and it was plain that nothing was to rest on its tops. The ship was rusted all over. It headed at one spot in the bridge where there was a gap of a couple feet.
I thought the ship's pilot thought the boat could get through that small space. But when I got past that spot and the boat shifted its course to follow us, I knew it was just trying to scare us.
The ship hit the bridge at a spot we had just passed. It lifted up a fair section of the bridge. I told the woman behind me, "Get ready to get wet!"
The part of the bridge I had pulled up now recoiled deep into the water, pulling the nearby sections down with it. I was carrying a backpack. My cell phone was inside. As we were pulled down, about waist-deep, I worried about my phone getting water damage.
The ship had passed. I thought the woman behind me would ask me how I knew the bridge would be pulled underwater. It seemed like nobody but I had seen the ship. I thought of how I would explain the ship to the woman.
I was now walking on a nice, cobbled path in a shaded corner of an area like a zoo or a botanical garden. The trees shading the path were like thin pines. My sister walked behind me. A few people walked around nearby.
I was angrily engaged in telling my sister how rude the ship's pilot had been, first to choose to go under a bridge that nothing could go under anyway, and second to make it clear that it wasn't just choosing any place to hit the bridge, but that it chose to hit right near the line of people walking.
As I continued explaining this, turned us off one path to go onto a path behind a chain link fence. We had to walk over a small mound made up of soil and old fence parts to get in. Now the fence was on our left, and some small, long building was on our right.
A black man with long dreads followed us. I felt like the man was a security guard. I was trying to explain something, possibly having to do with the physics of the bridge's movement, to my sister. I now tried to do it in an obvious way. I wanted to show the man by my speech that my sister and I were doing nothing to break the law. Plus, I didn't want the man following us around.
At a certain distance the fence curved to join with the building, making a dead end. We had to turn around. But the fence had old chain link fence, and old, red-painted slats and wire fence, piled up against it pretty evenly.
I ran up the piled up stuff, acting like I would jump over, maybe even thinking I would jump over. But when I got to the top, I hesitated. But the man who'd been following me and my sister ran aggressively up the side and may even have jumped over the fence, thus no longer following my sister and me.
During all this, my sister had asked me a question (about the physics of the bridge?). I, having been so frustrated with the man following us, got angry at the question and answered in a snide way. I felt bad: I could feel my sister was sad because I'd treated her rudely.
We walked past the entry and toward the doorway of a house-like building. I went inside. My sister went out to a stone bench just to the right. I only went a step or two into the doorway. In the room were adults, mostly Mexican men. One in particular had a big mullet hairdo. I felt like a child. I may have felt scared of the men. But something about them all was amusing .
I realized I hadn't patched things up with my sister yet. I went out to the stone bench. A weird figure like a plasticky, one-foot-long panda bear doll lay face-down on the bench. The stuffed animal was my sister. It was covered in big, purplish ants. Some of the ants had embedded themselves in my sister, as if they had melted and molded the plastic to encase their bodies.
I knew the ants had all bitten my sister and that she, allergic to the ant bites, was now either dead or in a coma. I called to my sister, moaning and crying. I brushed all the ants off her body. I couldn't believe there were so many. I thought, How could I have left my sister alone where I knew there were so many ants? I wandered down a slope in the sunlight. My sister still lay on the bench.
Now some of the adults (I still saw them as adults while I saw myself as a child). I was in a small living room. The adults, maybe four or five of them, all Mexican, were trying to draw me all the way into the room. I stood behind a corner of wall and a TV on a stand.
The adults told me, "Look -- she's alive again. We fixed her!" I thought, That's impossible. She's dead.
Now a Care Bear stood into a small portion of my field of vision. Its face had a strangely human look. The face, too, was more male than female. The bear could only stand, walk, wave, and smile. I didn't know how they thought this Care Bear could fool me. It didn't look like my sister. It wasn't alive. It was just a robotic stuffed animal.
(8/19/07) i can't live with you guys!; embarrassing pink t-shirt
Dream #1
I woke up in a house I was living in with my family. I realized this first night I had spent with them would be only one of many nights. I didn't know how I had let myself lapse into living with my family again.
In panic I got out of bed and ran into my mom's room. All the rooms in the house were messy and had a half-fashioned feel to them. My mom slept on a low bed, perhaps like one mattress on a floor. Someone else slept on a similar "bed" beside her. The "beds" were at an odd angle to one another.
I yelled at my mom, "This is it! I can't do it! I can't live with you guys! I'm moving out today!"
Dream #2
I was in a car with my mom and my brother. It was night. We were driving around in a white-lit parking lot, possibly just after or at the end of a rainfall. My mom was driving. I may have been sitting in the backseat. I may possibly even have been playing with toys. I was the size of a child. I may have been a child. But I thought and spoke like an adult.
We were trying, by driving, to get into a botanical garden. My brother was getting a little frustrated. He was saying snide things about my mom's sense of direction. I said something like, "Well, she knows what she's doing. We'll be okay." We parked in a pace. We got out and walked toward a big fence that looked like fencing and scaffolding outside a construction area.
In a big, open space of parking lot, a black girl who was maybe about twelve years old was breakdancing. She wore a white t-shirt and pink dancing pants like sweatpants. The girl finished with a long series of barrel-roll bounces off the ground. A mother and another woman, both fat, stood by a car, watching the girl.
We continued our walk toward the gate. My brother and I may both have been adult-sized again. My brother said, "I need to go back to the car. I forgot my XXXXX."
I held my hands close to sternum, like I was cold, or like I was talking cute. I said, "That's a good idea. I need to go, too. I need to take off this shirt." I was wearing a girls' pink t-shirt with tiny sleeves.
My brother said, "It's about time. I was wondering when you were going to take that off. You look embarrassing."
I told my mom (who hadn't been visible this entire time, and still wasn't visible) that my brother and I were going back to the car.
I woke up in a house I was living in with my family. I realized this first night I had spent with them would be only one of many nights. I didn't know how I had let myself lapse into living with my family again.
In panic I got out of bed and ran into my mom's room. All the rooms in the house were messy and had a half-fashioned feel to them. My mom slept on a low bed, perhaps like one mattress on a floor. Someone else slept on a similar "bed" beside her. The "beds" were at an odd angle to one another.
I yelled at my mom, "This is it! I can't do it! I can't live with you guys! I'm moving out today!"
Dream #2
I was in a car with my mom and my brother. It was night. We were driving around in a white-lit parking lot, possibly just after or at the end of a rainfall. My mom was driving. I may have been sitting in the backseat. I may possibly even have been playing with toys. I was the size of a child. I may have been a child. But I thought and spoke like an adult.
We were trying, by driving, to get into a botanical garden. My brother was getting a little frustrated. He was saying snide things about my mom's sense of direction. I said something like, "Well, she knows what she's doing. We'll be okay." We parked in a pace. We got out and walked toward a big fence that looked like fencing and scaffolding outside a construction area.
In a big, open space of parking lot, a black girl who was maybe about twelve years old was breakdancing. She wore a white t-shirt and pink dancing pants like sweatpants. The girl finished with a long series of barrel-roll bounces off the ground. A mother and another woman, both fat, stood by a car, watching the girl.
We continued our walk toward the gate. My brother and I may both have been adult-sized again. My brother said, "I need to go back to the car. I forgot my XXXXX."
I held my hands close to sternum, like I was cold, or like I was talking cute. I said, "That's a good idea. I need to go, too. I need to take off this shirt." I was wearing a girls' pink t-shirt with tiny sleeves.
My brother said, "It's about time. I was wondering when you were going to take that off. You look embarrassing."
I told my mom (who hadn't been visible this entire time, and still wasn't visible) that my brother and I were going back to the car.
Monday, February 18, 2013
(8/20/07) bad business and crystal balls in a lingerie boutique
Dream #1
I was in a women's clothing store at night. I was looking at some panties that were on sale. Some panties looked really affordable.
A couple women behind the counter asked if I needed help. I got embarrassed and panicked and picked out something for my friend R's fiancee L. I thought, I'll come back later for the stuff I want to wear.
As the cashier was ringing the piece up, she told me what a shame it was that business was so slow. The cashier said that the world had become so business-oriented that nobody thought about doing fun things like wearing sexy lingerie anymore.
I was afraid that if I told the cashier I hadn't really come in to get this thing for L, but that I'd come in to get something for myself, she would think that I, too, was trying to make business bad. She'd think that I was using transvestism as a ploy, a way to disgust any customers who might come into the shop, to scare them off.
The cashier finished ringing me up. I went back over to the table of panties, thinking again that I might pick up something for myself. I also walked over to some central display of decorative items like glass globes.
I was in a women's clothing store at night. I was looking at some panties that were on sale. Some panties looked really affordable.
A couple women behind the counter asked if I needed help. I got embarrassed and panicked and picked out something for my friend R's fiancee L. I thought, I'll come back later for the stuff I want to wear.
As the cashier was ringing the piece up, she told me what a shame it was that business was so slow. The cashier said that the world had become so business-oriented that nobody thought about doing fun things like wearing sexy lingerie anymore.
I was afraid that if I told the cashier I hadn't really come in to get this thing for L, but that I'd come in to get something for myself, she would think that I, too, was trying to make business bad. She'd think that I was using transvestism as a ploy, a way to disgust any customers who might come into the shop, to scare them off.
The cashier finished ringing me up. I went back over to the table of panties, thinking again that I might pick up something for myself. I also walked over to some central display of decorative items like glass globes.
(8/22/07) cameras in my room; sci-fi research report; a better position
(Entered in paper journal at 5:45 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
A man was arranging my family within a wide and mostly empty room, which was apparently my apartment. There was a big, almost featureless rug on the floor. The man would gather my family into groups, usually along three spots, on one of the long ends of the rug.
There were video cameras in one of the side walls. The man also spoke directly to me about a camera that would be in the room. I couldn't figure how the cameras in the wall would be of any use, or why someone would put a camera directly into my place.
Dream #2
I sat in a big room like a high school cafeteria. Two fat, scraggly men stood or sat near me. They had just learned that I had skill as a science fiction writer.
But now the men also saw that I was reading some reports from my job. The men were interested in my job. One of the men began pointing out things I should pay attention to in one of the reports I was reading. One part in particular was a sub-article in a shaded square on one of the pages.
Dream #3
A girl had been living with me or spending time with me because I had been giving her money. At one point the girl and I were decorating Christmas trees, maybe two trees. We were tying strings of green apples around the trees. The strings of apples got thicker and thicker.
Everything seemed like a blur to me, like my vision was sped up or smeared, like film projected at an unusual speed.
I now stood in a close, warm, kind of bright room with the girl. The girl was tall, blonde, very clean and orderly and healthy, but somehow a little boxy-faced.
The girl told me about all the Christmas trees we had made. She showed me photos. The trees were like ceramics or some kind of pastry dough. Some of the trees were more abstract than others. Some had gaps in them while others were whole.
I sat behind some desk as the girl and I spoke about something else. I was afraid my co-worker DE would come up and make the girl more interested in him than she was in me. I thought, Well, get a better position at work and maybe the girl will like you more than she likes DE.
I was walking down a hallway in a shopping mall. It was like a side hallway leading to the main hallways. It was somewhat dim, but full of people. I was on the phone with my mom. I told my mom, "It looks like they're finally talking about giving me a good position."
I now walked into the main hallway, which somehow had an atmosphere like that of a plaza at an amusement park. At the far end, I believed, the hallway opened directly to the outdoors.
I told my mom, "I mean, they're actually being serious and telling me they are going to do this for me." I may have thrown something into a nearby trashcan while saying this.
Dream #1
A man was arranging my family within a wide and mostly empty room, which was apparently my apartment. There was a big, almost featureless rug on the floor. The man would gather my family into groups, usually along three spots, on one of the long ends of the rug.
There were video cameras in one of the side walls. The man also spoke directly to me about a camera that would be in the room. I couldn't figure how the cameras in the wall would be of any use, or why someone would put a camera directly into my place.
Dream #2
I sat in a big room like a high school cafeteria. Two fat, scraggly men stood or sat near me. They had just learned that I had skill as a science fiction writer.
But now the men also saw that I was reading some reports from my job. The men were interested in my job. One of the men began pointing out things I should pay attention to in one of the reports I was reading. One part in particular was a sub-article in a shaded square on one of the pages.
Dream #3
A girl had been living with me or spending time with me because I had been giving her money. At one point the girl and I were decorating Christmas trees, maybe two trees. We were tying strings of green apples around the trees. The strings of apples got thicker and thicker.
Everything seemed like a blur to me, like my vision was sped up or smeared, like film projected at an unusual speed.
I now stood in a close, warm, kind of bright room with the girl. The girl was tall, blonde, very clean and orderly and healthy, but somehow a little boxy-faced.
The girl told me about all the Christmas trees we had made. She showed me photos. The trees were like ceramics or some kind of pastry dough. Some of the trees were more abstract than others. Some had gaps in them while others were whole.
I sat behind some desk as the girl and I spoke about something else. I was afraid my co-worker DE would come up and make the girl more interested in him than she was in me. I thought, Well, get a better position at work and maybe the girl will like you more than she likes DE.
I was walking down a hallway in a shopping mall. It was like a side hallway leading to the main hallways. It was somewhat dim, but full of people. I was on the phone with my mom. I told my mom, "It looks like they're finally talking about giving me a good position."
I now walked into the main hallway, which somehow had an atmosphere like that of a plaza at an amusement park. At the far end, I believed, the hallway opened directly to the outdoors.
I told my mom, "I mean, they're actually being serious and telling me they are going to do this for me." I may have thrown something into a nearby trashcan while saying this.
(8/25/07) at the air force base
Dream #1
It was daytime. I flew a jet through a flat desert in a clockwise, square route. I flew up from the ground to a large plane. I turned right, descending all that time, to another point. I then turned right again, possibly descending and landing.
I walked into a bedroom like a hotel suite (?). It was a little messy, with clothes slung all over. It was also a little dim.
I could hear, as if in my memory, my (Commanding Officer?) telling me that I had done a good job for my first run. I had flown to XXXXX feet at three hundred miles per hour. I was slightly disappointed that I had done only that small amount, even if it was only my first run.
A woman walked in. She was dressed kind of nice, like a hip girl from a Jean-Luc Godard film. The woman may have been my roommate. The woman said she didn't think she'd be able to make it in to work today. I said I'd call in for her.
I walked into our office, which was right outside my room's door. There were three or four desks. They looked like receptionist's desks. There were tall plants in pots everywhere. The light from the ceiling was a glimmering, watery white. Two girls sat at their desks.
I walked to the back of the office, where it kind of felt like a hair salon, and then back up to the front. I headed back into my room.
The two girls, who may have been Asian, and who were dressed nicely, like the girl who had come into my room, stared at me, or glared at me, as if they were getting ready to expose me for covering up for my roommate.
I stood in a small bathroom. I looked at myself and talked to myself in the mirror. As I did, I saw how I looked more and more like a woman, namely, like my co-worker FA. I wore a white blouse with a slightly frilly collar and short sleeves and a black skirt. I pulled my blouse down to expose my shoulders and chest. I either had no breasts or I couldn't see them.
I sat on a bench built into a wall by a window in my room. I sat there with a man. I was myself again but maybe as a child.
The man and I looked out the window, through the slits in the blinds, to see a man walking across the street. It was a bright, sunny day outside. I knew that this place was the Air Force base.
I wondered how boring and unaccommodating the base would be for people who lived here. But now I saw a shop like a deli or a bodega. It had no front wall, and there seemed to be nothing but candy inside the shop. I thought, You have everything you want!
I looked down and saw on the bench, between me and the man, a clear, plastic container of chocolate chip cookies. The man and I were taking turns eating a cookie. I was making weird noises as I took the cookies and saying silly things like, "One for you, one for me."
I thought, How can I think I"m able to work with the Air Force when I'm doing all this immature stuff?
It was daytime. I flew a jet through a flat desert in a clockwise, square route. I flew up from the ground to a large plane. I turned right, descending all that time, to another point. I then turned right again, possibly descending and landing.
I walked into a bedroom like a hotel suite (?). It was a little messy, with clothes slung all over. It was also a little dim.
I could hear, as if in my memory, my (Commanding Officer?) telling me that I had done a good job for my first run. I had flown to XXXXX feet at three hundred miles per hour. I was slightly disappointed that I had done only that small amount, even if it was only my first run.
A woman walked in. She was dressed kind of nice, like a hip girl from a Jean-Luc Godard film. The woman may have been my roommate. The woman said she didn't think she'd be able to make it in to work today. I said I'd call in for her.
I walked into our office, which was right outside my room's door. There were three or four desks. They looked like receptionist's desks. There were tall plants in pots everywhere. The light from the ceiling was a glimmering, watery white. Two girls sat at their desks.
I walked to the back of the office, where it kind of felt like a hair salon, and then back up to the front. I headed back into my room.
The two girls, who may have been Asian, and who were dressed nicely, like the girl who had come into my room, stared at me, or glared at me, as if they were getting ready to expose me for covering up for my roommate.
I stood in a small bathroom. I looked at myself and talked to myself in the mirror. As I did, I saw how I looked more and more like a woman, namely, like my co-worker FA. I wore a white blouse with a slightly frilly collar and short sleeves and a black skirt. I pulled my blouse down to expose my shoulders and chest. I either had no breasts or I couldn't see them.
I sat on a bench built into a wall by a window in my room. I sat there with a man. I was myself again but maybe as a child.
The man and I looked out the window, through the slits in the blinds, to see a man walking across the street. It was a bright, sunny day outside. I knew that this place was the Air Force base.
I wondered how boring and unaccommodating the base would be for people who lived here. But now I saw a shop like a deli or a bodega. It had no front wall, and there seemed to be nothing but candy inside the shop. I thought, You have everything you want!
I looked down and saw on the bench, between me and the man, a clear, plastic container of chocolate chip cookies. The man and I were taking turns eating a cookie. I was making weird noises as I took the cookies and saying silly things like, "One for you, one for me."
I thought, How can I think I"m able to work with the Air Force when I'm doing all this immature stuff?
(8/26/07) spoiling the candy tray
(Entered in paper journal at 6:15 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was flying over an enormous courtyard of grey flagstone. It was early morning. The sky was grey-blue. I flew to the front end of the courtyard and down some steps. The courtyard might have been for the campus of a university. It was empty except for two or three people in a group.
As I flew over I heard a woman in the group tell a man in the group, "That's him! That's the one XXXXX was talking about. He can do drawings for our show. Go talk to him."
I had now landed on the stairs and was walking down the steps, to a small corridor and another courtyard. Some time had passed, but nobody had approached me. I thought, I could have volunteered my help. After all, I'd heard them talking about me. I walked back up the stairs.
(Now that I think about it (i.e. upon entering this dream into the paper journal), there might have been three open areas and two staircases, and while hearing the people speak I had flown through the first and second areas.)
I now flew up to a tunnel after (instead of before) the first area. On the wall to my left was a bulletin board. There was a weird character drawn on the board. He may have been depicting an Italian man with a big mustache and a tall top-hat. The drawing was done almost haphazardly. It was for either a play or a restaurant called Rice.
I thought, If this drawing is what the people were talking about, then I've missed my chance. If not, then I need to find those folks and talk to them.
I walked back down the steps and to the steps to the lowest level. As I descended the steps to the lowest level, a woman like KG, a head person at a New York City park I'd worked at during my Americorps program, called for me.
I turned to look up at KG. She was carrying a big tray of desserts. She walked down to meet me. We walked, in the golden morning sunlight, down the steps to a walkway like a red-cinder running track with lawn on either side.
KG told me, "I made" (or got?) "these new desserts. Try one. I figured I'd give you one to try that's the same kind as the one I try."
KG handed me a little white circle with a brownish, jellybean-like object at its center. KG then handed me the entire tray of candies and rushed ahead.
I wanted to try what KG had given me. But, looking at the tray -- a lightweight, ornate, silver tray, almost circular, with all the candies slid and piled awkwardly to one side, I can't remember which -- I saw a chocolate candy like the one KG had given me. I ate that candy instead of the one KG had given me.
The candy was weird. It had a thin skin that burst open, letting out chocolaty goo. I looked at all the other candies. I wanted to try more, but I couldn't remember whether the candies were each specifically needed for some special event. I now worried that, by eating the candy off the tray instead of eating the candy KG had handed me, I had messed up KG's event.
I thought about making up an excuse. I thought, I'll eat the candy KG gave me, as well. That way KG will at least know I ate the proper candy, even if I also ate an improper piece of candy.
I was now down on the red-cinder track. The track had somehow filled up with people who were jostling me this way and that.
I now thought I could excuse myself for missing one of the pieces of candy by saying that I had gotten knocked about so much on the track that I may have accidentally lost one or two pieces of candy. I thought I would throw away a couple more pieces of candy, just so the situation would seem "more realistic." The first things I thought I should throw away were a couple of pretzel sticks.
Dream #1
I was flying over an enormous courtyard of grey flagstone. It was early morning. The sky was grey-blue. I flew to the front end of the courtyard and down some steps. The courtyard might have been for the campus of a university. It was empty except for two or three people in a group.
As I flew over I heard a woman in the group tell a man in the group, "That's him! That's the one XXXXX was talking about. He can do drawings for our show. Go talk to him."
I had now landed on the stairs and was walking down the steps, to a small corridor and another courtyard. Some time had passed, but nobody had approached me. I thought, I could have volunteered my help. After all, I'd heard them talking about me. I walked back up the stairs.
(Now that I think about it (i.e. upon entering this dream into the paper journal), there might have been three open areas and two staircases, and while hearing the people speak I had flown through the first and second areas.)
I now flew up to a tunnel after (instead of before) the first area. On the wall to my left was a bulletin board. There was a weird character drawn on the board. He may have been depicting an Italian man with a big mustache and a tall top-hat. The drawing was done almost haphazardly. It was for either a play or a restaurant called Rice.
I thought, If this drawing is what the people were talking about, then I've missed my chance. If not, then I need to find those folks and talk to them.
I walked back down the steps and to the steps to the lowest level. As I descended the steps to the lowest level, a woman like KG, a head person at a New York City park I'd worked at during my Americorps program, called for me.
I turned to look up at KG. She was carrying a big tray of desserts. She walked down to meet me. We walked, in the golden morning sunlight, down the steps to a walkway like a red-cinder running track with lawn on either side.
KG told me, "I made" (or got?) "these new desserts. Try one. I figured I'd give you one to try that's the same kind as the one I try."
KG handed me a little white circle with a brownish, jellybean-like object at its center. KG then handed me the entire tray of candies and rushed ahead.
I wanted to try what KG had given me. But, looking at the tray -- a lightweight, ornate, silver tray, almost circular, with all the candies slid and piled awkwardly to one side, I can't remember which -- I saw a chocolate candy like the one KG had given me. I ate that candy instead of the one KG had given me.
The candy was weird. It had a thin skin that burst open, letting out chocolaty goo. I looked at all the other candies. I wanted to try more, but I couldn't remember whether the candies were each specifically needed for some special event. I now worried that, by eating the candy off the tray instead of eating the candy KG had handed me, I had messed up KG's event.
I thought about making up an excuse. I thought, I'll eat the candy KG gave me, as well. That way KG will at least know I ate the proper candy, even if I also ate an improper piece of candy.
I was now down on the red-cinder track. The track had somehow filled up with people who were jostling me this way and that.
I now thought I could excuse myself for missing one of the pieces of candy by saying that I had gotten knocked about so much on the track that I may have accidentally lost one or two pieces of candy. I thought I would throw away a couple more pieces of candy, just so the situation would seem "more realistic." The first things I thought I should throw away were a couple of pretzel sticks.
(8/31/07) las vegas taco bell; mute phones; pressure helmet; acquisition; cartoon aircraft; lesbian bergman; i look fat
Dream #1
I heard someone talk about some financial project to rebuild Las Vegas. My view descended to the left and down a steep dune of sand in which were embedded signs for casinos, like in the (at the time I entered the dream in my paper journal) new Resident Evil movie ads. I thought, That makes sense. Las Vegas is ready for a change.
I now saw a Taco Bell restaurant. It stood alone in a parking lot. It may have stood slanted. Its sign was shredded like it had been a tarp-like or awning-like sign hanging on the building. The inside had a weird, torn-to-pieces look as well, like the glass doors and windows were busted and swirling around.
I heard a narrator say, "All the work that went into creating this one store was destroyed in a very short time by the angered workers." I thought that this one store meant a lot to the operations of the overall company. Now it was gone.
I stood in line at a Taco Bell with my co-worker CJ. The line was all tall, white, overweight businessmen in suits. CJ was preparing a speech he would give when we got to the front of the line. I was hoping the speech wouldn't anger the workers or the people standing in line. CJ assured me it wouldn't. It was possibly about the need to rebuild the torn-to-pieces restaurant now that it had been destroyed.
The store in which we stood was dim. There seemed to be no seating area: the front area was entirely taken up by a belt-strap line-maze. The only other area was the cashier counter and the food-prep area. Dim natural light came in through the window. The cashiers stood on a platform maybe two feet in front of us. In front of us was a platform elevated maybe a foot from floor-level. CJ stood on that platform to give his speech.
Dream #2
I sat in a kind of dank, yellowish presentation room on a high floor of "my office building." A lot of people from "my work" were there. I sat somewhat in the back, toward the right wall. For some reason, maybe because I was slouching (or lying down?), I couldn't see to the front of the room.
A very important person, who worked for our company but who came from a different location, had come to speak. One of my senior colleagues from a different department of my company, maybe BSi, brought the man up to speak. The person may have had shaggy, red hair and a shaggy, red beard.
BSi said something to the effect of how much progress we'd made in our work. Someone's voice came on over the phone/intercom and made a snide comment about the internet, implying something about our company. BSi asked, "Could everybody listening in please mute their phones?"
The person on the phone/intercom interrupted, "No. We won't mute our phones. I'm not going to be quiet now." The person continued ranting. I was trying to figure out who he was. I knew I knew him, but I couldn't figure out who he was. He sounded laid back, not angry, but definitely like he was going to stand his ground.
I had the image in my mind of a tall, brown-haired frat-boy I knew in college. I told myself the person on the phone couldn't be this boy, because I didn't work with him nowadays. The person had to be someone I currently worked with.
A couple of my friends must have known who the person one the phone was. They stood up, walked toward me, somehow signaled they were going to the guy's desk office to stop him before things got worse, and left the room. I heard the man continue ranting. The last thing he said had to do with police putting handcuffs on him.
Dream #3
I sat on the floor and beside either a table or the back of a couch. I was speaking with someone like my old friend ML about preparations for some aircraft like an SR-71. Some man stood near me. I was saying things in hopes of impressing him. The man and I were in a room like a dining room. It had a messy feel somehow. ML stood just beyond a wide doorway into another room.
ML told me I had forgotten something for the pilots' helmets. I started fiddling with some criss-crosses of transparent tape on the tablecloth or sofa covering that seemed to be attached to black velvet. I asked what help the forgotten additions would be, anyway.
ML angrily said, "They'd help the pilots fly more comfortably!"
I could now see in my mind's eye that I had forgotten to add a seal to the helmet. This seal would make the helmet and the rest of the pressurized suit continuous and closed. The helmet and the suit may both have been black.
I got mad at myself. All this time I had tried to act smart to impress the older man, who was like a General or an esteemed inventor. But now I turned to him and said, "Why do I always forget things like this?"
The old man said, "Don't worry about it. You just need more experience. I had similar troubles when I was younger."
Dream #4
I sat out in a wooded area, on a folding chair before a folding table like a TV-dinner table. I got a phone call. One of my boss BS' clients asked me about one of the companies we did research on. BS wasn't around, and I didn't want the client to go away empty-handed.
I put the client on hold. I didn't know whether anything new was happening with the company in question, though I knew the question had something to do with another company, a company called Northwest XXXXX (can't remember), possibly with them wanting to buy the company in question. But I couldn't turn on my computer to see what price the stocks for the two companies were trading at.
I just picked the phone back up and started speaking. I hoped I would know what I was saying. The client asked me more questions.
Now there were two men standing by me. They were both tall, in shape, maybe in their late thirties. They asked me more questions.
We were now in a car, driving in a suburban, residential area to a meeting with (the men's client? possibly a meeting with Northwest XXXXX?). I sat in the backseat. I was telling the men about how the difference between the first company in question and Northwest XXXXX was only marginal and how a deal with the two companies would only be of little benefit to Northwest XXXXX.
The clients said something like, "You're giving us a lot of information we normally wouldn't get from your boss." I felt flattered by the comment.
We pulled up to a (vanilla-yellow colored?) house. This was the office where our meeting would take place. I said, "I'm sorry I'm not dressed up." (I was just wearing jeans and a t-shirt.) "I wasn't expecting to do a meeting like this. You caught me off guard." I might have sounded apprehensive, or even a little annoyed. But I was really excited about the whole situation.
Dream #5
Some cartoon-like description of an aircraft. At some point the aircraft could fly on its own. There was an image of five aircraft below the main aircraft somehow being vaporized -- even with a "POOF!" caption. This would be the first time that the craft had flown on its own.
Dream #6
I read or heard something about photos that celebrities in the 1940s and 1950s didn't want people to see. I opened a book or turned a page to see one of the photos. It was of Ingrid Bergman in a Fallingwater-style house, in a hot tub with a blonde woman, getting ready to kiss the woman. Both women were fully dressed, and their clothes were completely dry. This photo was so shocking and scandalous to me that I slammed the book shut.
Dream #7
I stood in an aisle of a store like a K-Mart. I stood before a display of women's two-piece bathing suits. I tried on one of the bathing suits. I realized that the rule was to wear your underwear when you tried on bathing suits. I'd brought a pair of pink panties with me -- just in case I'd wanted to try anything on. I put the panties on.
There was a woman standing behind a desk, possibly in a place like the electronics department. She was watching me. I knew that was okay. She was just making sure I didn't steal anything. But I was hoping I would finish up before any customers came by and saw me.
I looked down at my body. I was disappointed. I looked a little fat.
I heard someone talk about some financial project to rebuild Las Vegas. My view descended to the left and down a steep dune of sand in which were embedded signs for casinos, like in the (at the time I entered the dream in my paper journal) new Resident Evil movie ads. I thought, That makes sense. Las Vegas is ready for a change.
I now saw a Taco Bell restaurant. It stood alone in a parking lot. It may have stood slanted. Its sign was shredded like it had been a tarp-like or awning-like sign hanging on the building. The inside had a weird, torn-to-pieces look as well, like the glass doors and windows were busted and swirling around.
I heard a narrator say, "All the work that went into creating this one store was destroyed in a very short time by the angered workers." I thought that this one store meant a lot to the operations of the overall company. Now it was gone.
I stood in line at a Taco Bell with my co-worker CJ. The line was all tall, white, overweight businessmen in suits. CJ was preparing a speech he would give when we got to the front of the line. I was hoping the speech wouldn't anger the workers or the people standing in line. CJ assured me it wouldn't. It was possibly about the need to rebuild the torn-to-pieces restaurant now that it had been destroyed.
The store in which we stood was dim. There seemed to be no seating area: the front area was entirely taken up by a belt-strap line-maze. The only other area was the cashier counter and the food-prep area. Dim natural light came in through the window. The cashiers stood on a platform maybe two feet in front of us. In front of us was a platform elevated maybe a foot from floor-level. CJ stood on that platform to give his speech.
Dream #2
I sat in a kind of dank, yellowish presentation room on a high floor of "my office building." A lot of people from "my work" were there. I sat somewhat in the back, toward the right wall. For some reason, maybe because I was slouching (or lying down?), I couldn't see to the front of the room.
A very important person, who worked for our company but who came from a different location, had come to speak. One of my senior colleagues from a different department of my company, maybe BSi, brought the man up to speak. The person may have had shaggy, red hair and a shaggy, red beard.
BSi said something to the effect of how much progress we'd made in our work. Someone's voice came on over the phone/intercom and made a snide comment about the internet, implying something about our company. BSi asked, "Could everybody listening in please mute their phones?"
The person on the phone/intercom interrupted, "No. We won't mute our phones. I'm not going to be quiet now." The person continued ranting. I was trying to figure out who he was. I knew I knew him, but I couldn't figure out who he was. He sounded laid back, not angry, but definitely like he was going to stand his ground.
I had the image in my mind of a tall, brown-haired frat-boy I knew in college. I told myself the person on the phone couldn't be this boy, because I didn't work with him nowadays. The person had to be someone I currently worked with.
A couple of my friends must have known who the person one the phone was. They stood up, walked toward me, somehow signaled they were going to the guy's desk office to stop him before things got worse, and left the room. I heard the man continue ranting. The last thing he said had to do with police putting handcuffs on him.
Dream #3
I sat on the floor and beside either a table or the back of a couch. I was speaking with someone like my old friend ML about preparations for some aircraft like an SR-71. Some man stood near me. I was saying things in hopes of impressing him. The man and I were in a room like a dining room. It had a messy feel somehow. ML stood just beyond a wide doorway into another room.
ML told me I had forgotten something for the pilots' helmets. I started fiddling with some criss-crosses of transparent tape on the tablecloth or sofa covering that seemed to be attached to black velvet. I asked what help the forgotten additions would be, anyway.
ML angrily said, "They'd help the pilots fly more comfortably!"
I could now see in my mind's eye that I had forgotten to add a seal to the helmet. This seal would make the helmet and the rest of the pressurized suit continuous and closed. The helmet and the suit may both have been black.
I got mad at myself. All this time I had tried to act smart to impress the older man, who was like a General or an esteemed inventor. But now I turned to him and said, "Why do I always forget things like this?"
The old man said, "Don't worry about it. You just need more experience. I had similar troubles when I was younger."
Dream #4
I sat out in a wooded area, on a folding chair before a folding table like a TV-dinner table. I got a phone call. One of my boss BS' clients asked me about one of the companies we did research on. BS wasn't around, and I didn't want the client to go away empty-handed.
I put the client on hold. I didn't know whether anything new was happening with the company in question, though I knew the question had something to do with another company, a company called Northwest XXXXX (can't remember), possibly with them wanting to buy the company in question. But I couldn't turn on my computer to see what price the stocks for the two companies were trading at.
I just picked the phone back up and started speaking. I hoped I would know what I was saying. The client asked me more questions.
Now there were two men standing by me. They were both tall, in shape, maybe in their late thirties. They asked me more questions.
We were now in a car, driving in a suburban, residential area to a meeting with (the men's client? possibly a meeting with Northwest XXXXX?). I sat in the backseat. I was telling the men about how the difference between the first company in question and Northwest XXXXX was only marginal and how a deal with the two companies would only be of little benefit to Northwest XXXXX.
The clients said something like, "You're giving us a lot of information we normally wouldn't get from your boss." I felt flattered by the comment.
We pulled up to a (vanilla-yellow colored?) house. This was the office where our meeting would take place. I said, "I'm sorry I'm not dressed up." (I was just wearing jeans and a t-shirt.) "I wasn't expecting to do a meeting like this. You caught me off guard." I might have sounded apprehensive, or even a little annoyed. But I was really excited about the whole situation.
Dream #5
Some cartoon-like description of an aircraft. At some point the aircraft could fly on its own. There was an image of five aircraft below the main aircraft somehow being vaporized -- even with a "POOF!" caption. This would be the first time that the craft had flown on its own.
Dream #6
I read or heard something about photos that celebrities in the 1940s and 1950s didn't want people to see. I opened a book or turned a page to see one of the photos. It was of Ingrid Bergman in a Fallingwater-style house, in a hot tub with a blonde woman, getting ready to kiss the woman. Both women were fully dressed, and their clothes were completely dry. This photo was so shocking and scandalous to me that I slammed the book shut.
Dream #7
I stood in an aisle of a store like a K-Mart. I stood before a display of women's two-piece bathing suits. I tried on one of the bathing suits. I realized that the rule was to wear your underwear when you tried on bathing suits. I'd brought a pair of pink panties with me -- just in case I'd wanted to try anything on. I put the panties on.
There was a woman standing behind a desk, possibly in a place like the electronics department. She was watching me. I knew that was okay. She was just making sure I didn't steal anything. But I was hoping I would finish up before any customers came by and saw me.
I looked down at my body. I was disappointed. I looked a little fat.
(9/3/07) mercury-chrome yellow; nonsexual; pissy at the mall; sweet red cups
(Entered in dream journal at 8:45 AM at Ozzie's cafe on Seventh Avenue and Lincoln Place in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I was in a big structure like a warehouse. The place was mostly empty, but one area had tall stacks of boxes. A small, Asian boy sat amid the stacks of boxes. He was drawing something very important. He was missing yellow crayon (or colored pencil). I told him I would go get it for him.
I had told the young boy I would tell the whole school about what he was doing. He asked, "Will you tell the whole world?" I laughed a little and fumbled with my words. I didn't know how seriously the whole world would take the boy's work.
I saw two shades of yellow in my mind. One was a pale lemon yellow; another was a deep yellow. The two shades may have been positioned one on top of the other, like in a Rothko painting.
I felt a huge rush to get the right color, as if whatever was to be drawn would help defend us against an enemy. Now I was in the place of the child. I flew upward, toward the top of a column of boxes.
I heard (as if in my head) the voice of a male anime character with long, blonde hair. The character said, "Just draw what you have to draw! You don't have to find anything else to start! You already have everything you need!"
As I heard this I was back on the ground, kneeling before a box, writing Chinese (?) characters on a blank piece of paper. The pencil I used left silver, mercury-like traces on the paper. I looked at the pencil. The lead was like chrome.
The pencil may have changed into a regular pencil. I looked for the mercury-tipped pencil and wondered if I'd actually ever had it.
Dream #2
There were two girls who were together. Later I was alone in a room with one of the girls. The girl was a little shorter than I, a little heavy, with dark skin and long, full, brown hair.
The girl said she wanted to tell me something. The girl was acting like it would be an unpleasant surprise. I thought I would "guess" it -- the obvious, that she was gay -- so that she would stop trying to needle me and just leave me alone.
I asked the girl, "Do you like giving men massages? Do you like touching men's backs?" The girl shook her head. I said something like, "That's understandable. I guess I'd be fine with it. But I don't necessarily go for it."
I then asked the girl, "Do you like touching girls' backs?"
The girl shook her head again. She said, "I kind of don't like any of it." This was surprising to me.
Dream #3
I had been working in a park. I had just finished constructing a path. I felt proud of myself. The park was something like the National Mall, except small; and, for some reason, it feels (i.e. when I entered this dream in the paper journal) like it had an indoor atmosphere. The sky was grey, almost an electric, or TV-static-like purple-grey.
I walked on a white marble barrier (?) coming up out of the ground. The barrier was maybe six feet tall and one and a half feet wide. It was beside the dirt path I had just finished.
As I walked along on the barrier, people kept getting in my way. Finally I got mad. I had left the new path free for people to walk on. But now, since I was on the barrier, everybody else went out of their way to walk in my way on the barrier!
I thought, I've just done a heck of a lot of work! I'm not just some nobody! People shouldn't just feel like they can get away with doing this to me!
I charged into the next group of people who got in my way. It was a black father and his two daughters, all three blocking the barrier with their bicycles. Seeing me rushing toward them, the three of them got out of my way, politely, without any fuss. I now got mad at myself for having passed through them so rudely.
I was in a basement that was like the visitors' center for the park. There were a man and a woman. The woman was pretty. The man was kind of ugly -- fattish, pale, with shaggy, red hair and a shaggy, red beard. The man sat on a couch facing the front door and window. The woman stood near the front of the room, holding her bike up. The man also had a bike somewhere. The man was all pissy, like someone had made a really stupid mistake by which the man was now forced to be inconvenienced.
I had given the woman directions she and her boyfriend could use to get somewhere -- maybe by using my newly constructed path. I asked the man, not the woman, if I had given the wrong directions. I felt ashamed for not having asked the woman, but it was the man who had been acting all pissy: I felt like I needed to justify myself to him more than to the woman.
The man, noticing my conciliatory attitude, lightened up a little and saw, "Aw... no. The directions look like they'll work out fine. It's just the fact that it's starting to rain now. The weather's going to mess everything up."
Dream #4
I saw into a structure like a fish tank. There was a thickish stick that branched out into three longish prongs.
I watched a man's hand pull some plant (with yellow flowers?) off the branch. The man then replaced the plant with a vine-like plant. The plant had think talks from which spiked thin leafs almost like the needles on a spruce. Along the vines were occasional, cup-like, sweet-red flowers.
The man explained something about bringing in the new life.
Dream #1
I was in a big structure like a warehouse. The place was mostly empty, but one area had tall stacks of boxes. A small, Asian boy sat amid the stacks of boxes. He was drawing something very important. He was missing yellow crayon (or colored pencil). I told him I would go get it for him.
I had told the young boy I would tell the whole school about what he was doing. He asked, "Will you tell the whole world?" I laughed a little and fumbled with my words. I didn't know how seriously the whole world would take the boy's work.
I saw two shades of yellow in my mind. One was a pale lemon yellow; another was a deep yellow. The two shades may have been positioned one on top of the other, like in a Rothko painting.
I felt a huge rush to get the right color, as if whatever was to be drawn would help defend us against an enemy. Now I was in the place of the child. I flew upward, toward the top of a column of boxes.
I heard (as if in my head) the voice of a male anime character with long, blonde hair. The character said, "Just draw what you have to draw! You don't have to find anything else to start! You already have everything you need!"
As I heard this I was back on the ground, kneeling before a box, writing Chinese (?) characters on a blank piece of paper. The pencil I used left silver, mercury-like traces on the paper. I looked at the pencil. The lead was like chrome.
The pencil may have changed into a regular pencil. I looked for the mercury-tipped pencil and wondered if I'd actually ever had it.
Dream #2
There were two girls who were together. Later I was alone in a room with one of the girls. The girl was a little shorter than I, a little heavy, with dark skin and long, full, brown hair.
The girl said she wanted to tell me something. The girl was acting like it would be an unpleasant surprise. I thought I would "guess" it -- the obvious, that she was gay -- so that she would stop trying to needle me and just leave me alone.
I asked the girl, "Do you like giving men massages? Do you like touching men's backs?" The girl shook her head. I said something like, "That's understandable. I guess I'd be fine with it. But I don't necessarily go for it."
I then asked the girl, "Do you like touching girls' backs?"
The girl shook her head again. She said, "I kind of don't like any of it." This was surprising to me.
Dream #3
I had been working in a park. I had just finished constructing a path. I felt proud of myself. The park was something like the National Mall, except small; and, for some reason, it feels (i.e. when I entered this dream in the paper journal) like it had an indoor atmosphere. The sky was grey, almost an electric, or TV-static-like purple-grey.
I walked on a white marble barrier (?) coming up out of the ground. The barrier was maybe six feet tall and one and a half feet wide. It was beside the dirt path I had just finished.
As I walked along on the barrier, people kept getting in my way. Finally I got mad. I had left the new path free for people to walk on. But now, since I was on the barrier, everybody else went out of their way to walk in my way on the barrier!
I thought, I've just done a heck of a lot of work! I'm not just some nobody! People shouldn't just feel like they can get away with doing this to me!
I charged into the next group of people who got in my way. It was a black father and his two daughters, all three blocking the barrier with their bicycles. Seeing me rushing toward them, the three of them got out of my way, politely, without any fuss. I now got mad at myself for having passed through them so rudely.
I was in a basement that was like the visitors' center for the park. There were a man and a woman. The woman was pretty. The man was kind of ugly -- fattish, pale, with shaggy, red hair and a shaggy, red beard. The man sat on a couch facing the front door and window. The woman stood near the front of the room, holding her bike up. The man also had a bike somewhere. The man was all pissy, like someone had made a really stupid mistake by which the man was now forced to be inconvenienced.
I had given the woman directions she and her boyfriend could use to get somewhere -- maybe by using my newly constructed path. I asked the man, not the woman, if I had given the wrong directions. I felt ashamed for not having asked the woman, but it was the man who had been acting all pissy: I felt like I needed to justify myself to him more than to the woman.
The man, noticing my conciliatory attitude, lightened up a little and saw, "Aw... no. The directions look like they'll work out fine. It's just the fact that it's starting to rain now. The weather's going to mess everything up."
Dream #4
I saw into a structure like a fish tank. There was a thickish stick that branched out into three longish prongs.
I watched a man's hand pull some plant (with yellow flowers?) off the branch. The man then replaced the plant with a vine-like plant. The plant had think talks from which spiked thin leafs almost like the needles on a spruce. Along the vines were occasional, cup-like, sweet-red flowers.
The man explained something about bringing in the new life.
(9/4/07) ice volcanoes; liberty crane; space shuttle replacement
(Entered in paper journal at 7:20 PM at home in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
A man "told me" (I heard the man's voice in my head) a story about his family, in particular his wife, as I flew upward, ascending mountain peaks. I ascended three peaks, the second higher than the first, but the third possibly lower than the second. All the peaks and mountainsides were blanketed in snow. The peaks of the mountains (or three peaks of one mountain?) crowned as if they had been cracked open, and snow-dusted ice lay inside.
As I descended the mountainside after reaching the third peak, it was like I was skiing, not flying. There were people all over, lounging around and practicing skiing.
The man's story, which I still heard in my head, mainly had to do with how good his wife was at what she did (skiing?), but how she was now somehow disabled from doing it, though she continued to put up an appearance of being able to do it in front of people who counted on her (her children?).
Dream #2
I stood overlooking a big river or an ocean with some co-workers. It was day and the sky was clear blue. Near us, the body of water seemed to be cluttered with vessels. Off to the right was a massive, brick building, which must have been where I worked (as if my co-workers were just my friends, and I didn't work with them). I could see images of parts, the head and a foot, of the Statue of Liberty -- as if they were lying in cubby-holes of brick in some brick structure floating in the air off to my left.
I was telling my friends that I could reconstruct just about any part of the Statue of Liberty. My boss BS then asked, "Then couldn't you reconstruct the whole Statue of Liberty?"
I thought to myself that I could construct an entire statue resembling the Statue of Liberty, but that I wasn't skillful enough to create a replica. I could even imagine the flaws that would inevitably creep into my reproduction: particularly a boxiness to Liberty's face and an awkward triangularity in the gown.
I replied, "I could, I suppose. But why would anybody want a whole Statue of Liberty? Unless the one we have is going to break."
We all now stood (as if we had always been standing) on the top of a vehicle like a shipping-crate crane that floated all by itself on the water. The crane was enormous. Its purpose was to move the Statue of Liberty for repairs. It was just the "crane" on a floating platform, the base of the structure being a dark grey (kind of like a garbage barge) and all the rest a white-grey, almost plastic material.
We floated toward a clutter of vessels as tall as ours. Amid this tangle of vessels stood the Statue of Liberty.
But before we could pick up the Statue of Liberty, one of our group said, "The French ship Beauregard is nearby!" Everybody agreed this was a pretty important sight to see. We steered our vessel in that direction.
Our vessel quickly cruised through the water, passing much smaller vehicles. As we moved, someone else explained that the Beauregard was the famous French sailing ship used in the XXXXX (French Revolution?).
As we glided along, we passed a snail-shaped, aluminum-colored vessel. The "curl" of the "snail-shell" was hollow. The vessel was, I somehow saw, property of Japan. I could tell that this was a Japanese space vehicle and that it was either preparing for launch or else that it had just landed after a flight.
I now walked down a road with my brother (who may also have been my friend R). We may have been walking toward a place like NASA.
I saw a black jet twirl up above a building in the distance. I said, "It's an SR-71!" But that didn't quite make sense to me, as SR-71s were, I thought, out of commission, no longer flying. I couldn't tell for sure, though: the jet's spinning (and my fear of the vehicle) made it hard for me to discern the jet's shape.
At last, though, the jet flipped so I could see its back end. The jet, first of all, was deep blue, not black like an SR-71 usually (or always?) is. The craft also had two close exhaust jets in the center of the back side, with wings fanning outward from the jets and two vertical fins coming up from in between the two jets -- very different from the SR-71.
I shouted, "It's an F-14!"
My brother (or my friend R?), who walked about five feet behind me, said, "That's not an F-14."
I was angry at being contradicted. I wanted to vindicate myself. The jet now "crashed" right beside us. The jet was just like a hollow, die-cast hulk of plastic, maybe ten feet long and in the shape of a jet. On its side was a label saying "YF-14."
I shouted, "See? I said it was an F-14!"
Dream #3
I was telling my friend R about how I had seen an advanced jet. R answered, "Oh, yeah? Well, have you seen the XXXXX?" (Some name like CP-1 or CP-9.) "It's the new jet that can go into space."
I tried to figure what R was talking about. I now saw, in my mind's eye, an aircraft carrier with greyish, plastic-looking jets that had an almost space-shuttle look to them but which were also very sleek. The jets were grey with red stripes.
I thought, Now I do remember these! Although, was it actually decided that these vehicles would be used to replace the shuttle?
(It's interesting, nowadays, to see how this vehicle would resemble, at least in its body, the Dreamchaser of Sierra Nevada Corporation, or the experimental spacecraft made by Boeing. I believe I knew of the SRS retirement in 2007 -- it was talked of in NASA white papers on the new moon exploration projects. And SNC must have been on the drawing board, if nowhere else, by 2007.
So a craft like this could easily have filtered into my subconscious through some media channel or other. But it's still interesting to see how the vehicle cropped up before the relative fame it's been experiencing over the past two or so years.)
Dream #1
A man "told me" (I heard the man's voice in my head) a story about his family, in particular his wife, as I flew upward, ascending mountain peaks. I ascended three peaks, the second higher than the first, but the third possibly lower than the second. All the peaks and mountainsides were blanketed in snow. The peaks of the mountains (or three peaks of one mountain?) crowned as if they had been cracked open, and snow-dusted ice lay inside.
As I descended the mountainside after reaching the third peak, it was like I was skiing, not flying. There were people all over, lounging around and practicing skiing.
The man's story, which I still heard in my head, mainly had to do with how good his wife was at what she did (skiing?), but how she was now somehow disabled from doing it, though she continued to put up an appearance of being able to do it in front of people who counted on her (her children?).
Dream #2
I stood overlooking a big river or an ocean with some co-workers. It was day and the sky was clear blue. Near us, the body of water seemed to be cluttered with vessels. Off to the right was a massive, brick building, which must have been where I worked (as if my co-workers were just my friends, and I didn't work with them). I could see images of parts, the head and a foot, of the Statue of Liberty -- as if they were lying in cubby-holes of brick in some brick structure floating in the air off to my left.
I was telling my friends that I could reconstruct just about any part of the Statue of Liberty. My boss BS then asked, "Then couldn't you reconstruct the whole Statue of Liberty?"
I thought to myself that I could construct an entire statue resembling the Statue of Liberty, but that I wasn't skillful enough to create a replica. I could even imagine the flaws that would inevitably creep into my reproduction: particularly a boxiness to Liberty's face and an awkward triangularity in the gown.
I replied, "I could, I suppose. But why would anybody want a whole Statue of Liberty? Unless the one we have is going to break."
We all now stood (as if we had always been standing) on the top of a vehicle like a shipping-crate crane that floated all by itself on the water. The crane was enormous. Its purpose was to move the Statue of Liberty for repairs. It was just the "crane" on a floating platform, the base of the structure being a dark grey (kind of like a garbage barge) and all the rest a white-grey, almost plastic material.
We floated toward a clutter of vessels as tall as ours. Amid this tangle of vessels stood the Statue of Liberty.
But before we could pick up the Statue of Liberty, one of our group said, "The French ship Beauregard is nearby!" Everybody agreed this was a pretty important sight to see. We steered our vessel in that direction.
Our vessel quickly cruised through the water, passing much smaller vehicles. As we moved, someone else explained that the Beauregard was the famous French sailing ship used in the XXXXX (French Revolution?).
As we glided along, we passed a snail-shaped, aluminum-colored vessel. The "curl" of the "snail-shell" was hollow. The vessel was, I somehow saw, property of Japan. I could tell that this was a Japanese space vehicle and that it was either preparing for launch or else that it had just landed after a flight.
I now walked down a road with my brother (who may also have been my friend R). We may have been walking toward a place like NASA.
I saw a black jet twirl up above a building in the distance. I said, "It's an SR-71!" But that didn't quite make sense to me, as SR-71s were, I thought, out of commission, no longer flying. I couldn't tell for sure, though: the jet's spinning (and my fear of the vehicle) made it hard for me to discern the jet's shape.
At last, though, the jet flipped so I could see its back end. The jet, first of all, was deep blue, not black like an SR-71 usually (or always?) is. The craft also had two close exhaust jets in the center of the back side, with wings fanning outward from the jets and two vertical fins coming up from in between the two jets -- very different from the SR-71.
I shouted, "It's an F-14!"
My brother (or my friend R?), who walked about five feet behind me, said, "That's not an F-14."
I was angry at being contradicted. I wanted to vindicate myself. The jet now "crashed" right beside us. The jet was just like a hollow, die-cast hulk of plastic, maybe ten feet long and in the shape of a jet. On its side was a label saying "YF-14."
I shouted, "See? I said it was an F-14!"
Dream #3
I was telling my friend R about how I had seen an advanced jet. R answered, "Oh, yeah? Well, have you seen the XXXXX?" (Some name like CP-1 or CP-9.) "It's the new jet that can go into space."
I tried to figure what R was talking about. I now saw, in my mind's eye, an aircraft carrier with greyish, plastic-looking jets that had an almost space-shuttle look to them but which were also very sleek. The jets were grey with red stripes.
I thought, Now I do remember these! Although, was it actually decided that these vehicles would be used to replace the shuttle?
(It's interesting, nowadays, to see how this vehicle would resemble, at least in its body, the Dreamchaser of Sierra Nevada Corporation, or the experimental spacecraft made by Boeing. I believe I knew of the SRS retirement in 2007 -- it was talked of in NASA white papers on the new moon exploration projects. And SNC must have been on the drawing board, if nowhere else, by 2007.
So a craft like this could easily have filtered into my subconscious through some media channel or other. But it's still interesting to see how the vehicle cropped up before the relative fame it's been experiencing over the past two or so years.)
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