(7/18/07) bed of a truck

(Entered in paper journal at 8:13 PM at home.)

Dream #1

I was in a van with a group of people. The van was white or pale, with a wide, work-van (emptyish, metallic) feel. We were just starting to drive, trying to get somewhere. But something was making us hesitant, possibly that we hadn't found some members of our group.

Two young men walked past the van. At first we might have thought we should let them in. Then someone in the van said, "No. They're cops. You can always tell, the way they try to dress like they're cool. But they're not."

One of the men was very close-shaven and wore a baseball cap, had a wiry, gaunt look, and was very pale white. The other had tight-to-the-head dreads, down about to the level of his jaw, and a little stubble. He was pale-brown, maybe Black Hispanic, with green eyes.

It somehow became somewhat obvious to me that these guys were cops. I thought, "But then everybody in the van must think I'm a cop, too!"

It was a nice, clear day. I stood in the bed of a truck. We drove down a back road on either side of which were narrow strips of grass bordered by tall trees or farmland. The bed of the truck had no walls and no roof, just barriers on the sides and L-shaped, metal poles in the corners. The bed didn't seem to be even, either: it seemed to step up in halves or quadrants. Everybody must have been in what I still thought of as the "van," which was probably now the cab of this "truck."

The truck was driving forward, as normal, and I stood at the back end of the bed, looking out toward the back of the truck, but I watched the road pass below me and the scenery pass beside me like I was at the front of the truck looking forward.

Somehow we had stopped or slowed down enough to let a tall, skinny, middle-aged, black man approach the car. He had close-cut, salt& pepper hair and beard, brown skin, and wore a brownish-green shirt and shorts. I thought, Why are they letting this guy on? He's a druggie and he wants to corrupt us all.

We were moving again, the truck probably moving forward from the front (in my perception as well as physically). I sat on a bench on the left side of the bed, watching a (white?) man, one of my crew members, talking with the black man while sitting on a bench on the right side of the bed.

Against my instinct, I was making an effort to be polite and listen to what the two men were saying. They tried to include me in the conversation. As I tried to respond, I heard a conversation in the back of my head. The conversation in the back of my head took over. It became a script, outlined with presentation-style headings and formats, on paper in a three-ring binder.

The black man sat to my left on the bench. I was pointing out different parts of the script as I heard it in my head. But it may also have been like we were speaking it out with each other.