(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.
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