(9/10/07) drinking the undrinkable; ang lee's silk stalkings; my neighbor is harassed

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

Dream #1

I was in a bedroom with a little, Mexican boy and his father. The room was almost empty but cluttered near the center with a pale grey box and some papers. On the box may have been some cups of water.

The father was trying to explain to me how the child was trying to get water from me. I had cups of water that looked non-potable -- brownish, with a weird, sweet smell. But the father told me this was fine for the boy to drink: he just needed water: he had gone so long without it.

I realized with shame how comfortable my life must be. I was willing to withhold perfectly fine water to a child who was desperately in need of water, just because I thought the water was, in a sense, vulgar.

Dream #2

I was in a movie theater lobby. I stood before a console like an arcade video game which was playing a "preview for" the new Ang Lee movie.

To my right were three cut-out, cardboard displays, each about six feet tall. The one second to my right caught my attention. It had a diorama-like display fronted with clear cellophane. The display was of tiny "film strips" made out of cardboard. Each strip advertised a different movie.

One ad showed a woman's high-heeled foot standing on a map. Something was written about fighter jets. But something else was written, like Silk Stalkings. I couldn't see how either of these film programs (fighter jets or "Silk Stalkings") could be at this theater (not sure why...). Then I realized the ad-strips in these displays were for different movie theaters.

Dream #3

I stood on the ground level in a courtyard of an apartment complex. It was night. I looked up to my right, to a second- or third-floor balcony. The front door of one of the apartments on the balcony was half-opened, with some incandescent light peering through the crack. I knew that this was the apartment building of the old man who had been my neighbor when I'd lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2004.

People in the complex, I knew, had been trying to break into the old man's house because they didn't like him, possibly because he was Jewish. (He had, in fact, in waking life, come from Israel a couple decades previously.) There was silver graffiti on the old man's door. The message was pretty clearly anti-Semitic. I was afraid for my neighbor.