(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.
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