(11/9/06) driving to the airport; scaffolding tunnel and golden bead eagle

(Entered in paper journal at 5:49 AM at Starbucks on 56th Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was in the backseat of a car driven by my co-worker MW. MW was driving me to the airport. A few of our co-workers were in the car. I had said a couple stupid things. Everybody in the car was laughing at me.

We drove through a beautiful downtown area like a wide plaza with old stone buildings done up to seem very cosmopolitan. Somewhere was a large poster-ad for Kurt Cobain. Seeing that poster I felt a strong connection to something that made me feel less stupid.

I was in my mom's house. My grandma P was taking me to the airport. We were really late. I asked, "Isn't my mom coming with us?"

My grandma said, "She isn't here, and we can't wait for her."

Dream 2

I was walking down a wide street that feels like it was close at the edge of a big, busy town. On my left was a building under construction, covered in blue scaffolding that created a tunnel over the sidewalk. It was a bright grey morning.

As I got close to the sidewalk tunnel entrance, though staying on the street instead of the sidewalk, a woman bustled quickly past me. From the shoulders and hair I knew it was one of my old Americorps co-workers, KA. Before KA headed into the tunnel, I called to her. She stopped violently and impatiently. She turned around only cursorily.

I called her name and said, "It's me!"

KA turned and couldn't see anybody she recognized. She waved to the air angrily and said, "Oh, hi. I have to go."

I called again, "KA! It's Preemie! I'm right in front of you!"

She looked closely at me and said, "Oh. You've changed."

We talked for a moment. Mostly she spoke. I could feel her speech in my ears.

She said she had gone to a party with friends who had promised her she would be able to get to work on time. But they had lied. Now she was rushing to salvage her time.

As I looked at her I saw how much more mature she looked. Her eyes were a little paler. Her skin was clear but dryish or weathered looking. She looked motivated and strong. But her clothes were dirty. I thought she may have been having hard times financially.

I felt bad standing before KA in my nice clothes. But then I realized, She's wearing old clothes because she runs one of the city's parks. She does works and gets dirty.

I looked at KA again. She wored jeans, a white t-shirt, and a navy blue hoodie. KA looked like she was skinnier -- and it looked nice, especially her legs. her jeans were pale and they had patterns on the fronts of the upper legs. The patterns were made of little, golden, rectangular beads. They might have been eagle patterns.

(11/12/06) living in the business lobby; big roaches; what they had done to this place

(Entered in paper journal at 9:01 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was in a place that looked like the public space in the AT&T (Sony) building, but shorter and stuffier, with no windows and lined with offices on the first floor. I was there with my mom and some co-workers.

My mom took us out on a car ride at night like on a road through some casinos out on a reservation. It was rainy. I and my co-workers may all have been kids.

We got back to the "public space," one of the "offices" of which was my mom's house or a place my mom was letting us stay in.

I thought how much the place looked like Happy Church, a Denver church from my childhood in Denver. I tilted my head back, up, and to the left, to get a skewed view of the ceiling, which was plaster and rectangular but fringed with stone in a jagged, star-like shape. I turned my head forward, still up. The ceiling reminded me of the vaulted ceiling at the NYPL somehow, just its sense of depth.

A bunch of business people, mostly men, were filing into the open area and sitting at the tables. They wore at least shirts and ties, if not also blazers.

The business people looked at me, not knowing who I was. I felt (though they didn't make me feel this way) that I didn't belong because I was dressed somewhat shoddy.

People started sitting in the offices. They were all getting ready for a conference. I realized I was only allowed here at night to sleep, and in the day the place was "my friend's" (R's?) place of work. I tried to find my friend so I could leave with him by my side and not feel as strange and lonely.

Now my co-worker CJ and I were on a plane heading to "the Coinstar conference." The plane lifted off but then came right back down. We almost hit some trees. Then we were on a highway. We were still moving. We heard an announcement that the plane had been grounded as bad weather in the destination was delaying flights.

I could see us driving along the highway, like we were in a bus. We went under a bridge, along a slop of lawn, etc. Cars would pull to the side for us. I thought, They're showing respect because they know we have to keep moving.

I was in a room with my mom and a woman who may have been one of her friends. We were trying to figure out why CJ and I had had our trip to the Coinstar conference canceled.

An old man, pale and mottled with rough age, walked into the room. He was fattish. He gasped like a weakish walrus. he wore a leather jacket and had greased back, dark grey hair. his eyes were almost bulging out of his sockets. But he seemed calm.

The bedroom (like my sister's bedroom in the house we lived in in my junior high school years) was dark except a light coming from the bathroom.

I had been sitting on the bed until the old man came in. Then I stood. I knew the old man was a big man at work and that he could possibly get me and CJ back on the Coinstar trip.

The old man said, "Yes, yes. That does make sense. You guys should be allowed to go. Why, you --" He grabbed my right flank to see how muscular or trim I was. I hoped I wasn't as flabby as I thought I was. He continued, "You seem to be in shape, motivated."

I thought the man was gay. I thought this even more when the man said, "Now where is CJ? I need to see how he looks before I make my final decision."

Dream 2

I was in some corner of a room. It was dim. There was light form some other room. I saw a big roach run over the entry or doorway between this room and a completely dark room. It was a huge roach. I saw another roach in the room with light. I thought, So now the big roaches are here.

Dream 3

I had gone back to an Arizona national monument where I had been a live-in volunteer in 2001 and 2002 with some people from work. A lot of the land had been developed.

It was a sunny, slightly humid morning. I and the people from work walked on some running track that was in awful repair. The field in the center of the track was wild grass. The track itself was like cracked asphalt with patches of grass growing between. The track was higher on one side, sloping down at the curves to the other side. Around the track was a fence, then trees blocking a view to a half-developed area of sloppy, grassy fields and housing communities.

I wore my business clothes. I was making gestures about what things had been here, talking about what a beautiful desert this place had been.

Then I saw JB, a ranger from the monument when I had been there, on the lower side of the track. I pointed JB out to my friends. We were walking in the same direction as JB, counter-clockwise, so we turned around to meet up with her. She appeared nervous because I had pointed at her. She hurried up to meet us.

We reached each other. She was happy to see me.She hadn't recognized me. She said, "I thought you were one of these business people developing this area. This place isn't open to the rangers anymore. I thought you were coming to kick me out. I was just in here to look at things for old times' sake, and to see what they had done to this place."

(11/14/06) pop songs and movie postcards; the driver before the car; no business being here; the living picture; time to prepare

(Entered in paper journal at 5:45 AM at Starbucks on 56th Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was in a store looking for new pants. I wandered through a floor crowded with display racks stuffed with kind of cheesy clothing, including brownish/reddish leather jackets.

I didn't feel like had either money or time to be here. Then I asked myself, Why did I come here at all? I have a pair of pants waiting for me at the dry cleaner.

I was in some big place full of rows of folding chairs. It was dark, like there was a concert getting ready. I found my boss EB. I said, "I wanted to make sure you were signed up and that you had everything you needed for the concert."

A bunch of women were coming up toward the stage through a (now) empty floor area. They were on big, silvery Mylar balls. They wore gold and black outfits which kept changing, from hot pants and gold tank tops to shimmery, gold one-piece jumpsuits with hoods.

A friend (?) to my left said, "Aren't you glad you got to see this?"

I said, "Actually, I've seen the rehearsals for this part a few times. But I've never actually seen the performance. And I can't stay for that."

But now the performance had started. There was some weird rap song. The girls stood on the silver balls, which rolled under their feet. The girls moved and danced as if they stood on solid ground. I thought, Don't tell me they've developed so much that they can move with such ease. It seemed to me somehow paranormal.

Two girls were dancing in some pattern with each other, like go-go dancers. Another pair of girls were acting out some sort of seduction on each other. They were grabbing each other, mostly on the crotch and legs. They wore really ratty clothing, army green and black. They were both rather skinny.

Some other women were performing on platforms they had actually balanced on these rolling balls. These women were dressed in latex that was milky translucent, yellowish gold, with tight latex lacing in revealing places.

One girl spun around on a balanced stool, showing off her bottom, which seemed to get fatter and fatter as she spun it more into my view. A black man to my left was getting more and more violently aroused by the woman, trying to get me to share in his enjoyment of her. But by the end the woman just looked like a slob packed tight in a sack of wet (?) latex.

I crouched on a living room floor with my brother (?) who was to my right. We were watching some kind of mild television show about new popular music. We laughed at one band in particular that was bragging about being the 129th most popular band in California. The band may have been called COT or Constellation.

I said, "Just one state, and they're not even that popular there!" The joke reminded me of a television name was so absurd to me. But I couldn't remember it wwell enough to get the exact humor. I told my brother, "It was something like The Very Best Number One Pop Songs."

Now the show was on. It was a sketch comedy show like Kids in the Hall. Joey Ramone (in a white baseball tee with green sleeves) ran out onto the stage (which was made to look like a classroom) and then ran off.

The desks of the "classroom" were scattered all over. The walls were all uneven, and the blackboard was in some odd corner of the room. A group of kids sat in a cluster of desks at the back of the stage in between a corner of walls.

Someone, a man like Kevin McDonald from Kids in the Hall, played a girl. "She" looked over "her" right shoulder, like she was about to do something bad. She wore a brown sweater and black denim overalls. She pulled down her right shoulder strap, revealing the curve of her right breast, which was covered by her sweater). She held herself that way for a while, then pulled her strap back up, made the "yes!" gesture with her arm, then lay her head down on the desk, and with really big, wide eyes, devoured the sight of her hand almost psychotically completing a math test.

A boy (played by Kevin McDonald as well, apparently) sat behind the girl. he was attraced to her, even more now that she had pulled down her overalls a little. He sat back to back with her. He "had long hair" like "she" did (thought his wig was a lot messier). The boy called, squeaked, over his left shoulder, "Hey, so... uh, what kind of movies do you like to watch... with other people?"

The girl was flustered. She said, "I'm sorry, but I can't go watch any movies with you. And I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention to anybody that you asked me out on a date." She said to herself, "The last thing I need is for all the cute boys to think that I'm only good enough for some dork like him to ask me on a date."

I walked into a "library"/"post office" that was very classical and beautiful, with golden light everywhere, white and wood walls, a balcony, and vaulted ceilings. My friend L met me inside by coincidence. I was here to study. She was here to send something off. I decided I might as well hang out with her since we had run into each other.

L went into another room, a big, long room with the natural light a lot starker and whiter, with a counter across the width of the room, which was lined with registers (?) and scales. L met an attendant at one of the scales.

As L spoke with the attendant, R showed up. He had meant to surprise me by doing so. he thought I'd be more than willing to hang out with L but not with him. He wanted to prove it. But I was going to hang out with both of them.

I went downstairs, maybe to the bathroom. When I came back up, L was finished. But now R and L were gone. I thought they had figured I'd just left when I saw R.

Now I felt bad. But I saw a pair of R's slacks on a counter in the "library" part of the building *by a grey scale like in the "post office" part). I knew R and L were here, in the "library" part, which was now filled with beautiful, exactly arranged, cart catalog cabinets. R and L stepped out of concealment. It was like they had been testing how well they could hide themselves for purposes of stalking people.

R said, "I wanted to show you this before we left. I thought you might enjoy it." R pulled open a card catalog drawer. it was full of postcards. They were all lively and colorful, possibly all of posters and advertisements or movies.

One postcard, not very colorful! -- just black and red, looked like a Maxfield Parrish illustration. it was of a young boy in a sailboat, the sail of which had a face on it. The face, red or in a red shape, was of an old sailor or pirate. The face smiled down mischievously on the boy. I recalled a modern remake of this movie, in which the pirate was made out to be a sensationally evil person, very shallow and lacking in any real character, which reflected the whole style of the movie.

Looking at the old postcard I thought, He called this movie The Ship of the Old Abbey. But "Old Abbey" was him -- Edwin Austin Abbey! He was a villain, but he was also a human. And he wasn't a total villain. The boy in the boat knew it, and the two of them eventually came to work together. I thought, I should give the original movie a chance and not let the remake spoil it for me.

R showed me a postcard which I couldn't see very well. It was a horror film about a cruel, murderous woman. R said, "She's so absolutely cruel. Everything she does is evil. I think she's just like my landlady. My landlady is so evil. You wouldn't suspect it. But she is. I love it."

L (on my left while R was on my right) held a couple postcards, one of which looked like a white take-out menu in green writing and designs. She said to R, "Hey, Honey, doesn't this remind us of the couch we're trying to get for our store?"

L said to me, "We've been working on putting our new store together so much. It's all we think about. That's why we watch TV eighteen hours a day. Don't you ever watch any TV? You don't, do you? That's sad."

I knew L would think I'd disagree with her statement, so I partly didn't want to disagree, just to go against her expectations. But I also genuinely did agree with L. I said, "I agree. I mean, I have my computer. I watch movies on that. But there is something to what they say on Videodrome, about TV patching you into the mixing board of the world."

I was in a big house that probably belonged to my friend PD's parents. I sat (with PD?) on the third floor. It was morning. The house was bright and spacious and rather empty. I took a walk around the house.

It was night. I may have been planning to head away from the house. I had a remote in my hands. I was walking to all of the windows of the house and turning the lights off by remote.

I got to the corner of the house where I could see where I liked to hang out on the third floor. I pressed the remote. There were three lights. The lights didn't turn off: their configuration changed. I pressed the remote again and the configuration changed again. The same thing happened a third time. I walked away thinking (why?), Ah, that did it. You have to press three times. The lamps have three variable settings.

I was up thee now, getting ready (packing?) to leave. All I had to do was turn out the lights. The place was cluttered -- a bunch of my sweaters (?) in a chair. I could hear "the parents" (PD's mom and dad?), who were in this instance like long-time senior colleagues of mine (i.e. they had been my senior colleagues for a couple years).

They said, "Thank goodness for Preemie. He always turns out the lights. Nobody else does that. I suppose everybody does something. For instance, someone turns on the lights. They do that, and Preemie does his thing"

I felt bad for leaving. This time turning off the light meant something different from what they were talking about. It meant going for good. They had no idea, even while they were talking.

Dream 2

It was a bright blue day. I ran down a busy street in a city. At first I was in an area of lots and housing developments. Then I was on a long, straight, flat stretch of road heading into a gigantic, sprawling, shortish urban area.

I may have been running as fast as cars. Then I realized I was pulling a car behind me as I ran. At one point I stopped in jammed traffic. The car didn't lose momentum. It crashed into my back. I thought, I better get into the car. A policeman isn't going to like seeing the car crash into me like that.

But now traffic started moving again. I had to push the car, jump in through the door, and start driving. I pushed the car and tried to jump in, but the car was so full of junk that I couldn't even sit in the driver's seat.

The car was moving fast and was slightly out of control. I was trying to regain control of it while also trying to clear junk out of the driver's seat so I could sit down. I was still hanging halfway out of the car.

Now a cop came. Now I was one of my female cousins, either AR or BR, and I heard "her" narrating to me as the rest of the actions occurred. Something drastic had happened in traffic, and "I"/"she" had crashed right in front of the cop.

Now AR/BR, my sister, and I were sitting in a fast-food restaurant as AR/BR finished her story. She said something like, "I knew then that I had to shape up. And I'm glad I have." She was AR now.

I tried to be attentive and caring. But I really felt what I could feel my sister felt -- annoyance. AR had just come in out of nowhere while my sister and I were trying to have some time together. She had meant to take our time. She didn't want my sister to have it. And now she wanted help, and obviously my sister and I were going to give it to her.

We all stood up to head to (my?) car.

Dream 3

I stood at iron gates opening at the corner of a park like Fort Greene. My boss BS, in a green t-shirt, jogged up and sat at a bench in front of (back to) some iron railings in front of the iron gate.

I was on my cell phone, answering BS's business phone. It was one of our hedge fund clients, AW. I went to tell BS.

I stood behind the iron railing and looked over BS's left shoulder. He looked back at me like I was trash. He was on his cell phone (right ear), and waved me away like I was a bug. He said, "Tell AW I'm taking care of something."

As I replied to AW, I could hear BS gabbing with one of his friends about some "trashy" woman BS had been with. I felt disillusioned.

BS hung up. I tried to pass the message to him that AW had called.

We were in a place like the "computer" floor of the Norlin Library at CU Boulder (when I went to CU Boulder, i.e. in the late 1990s). BS shut the door to "his office" (the big computer room) right as I tried to get in. The door was scarlet, heavy, like in a fine library or mansion.

I backed up. The room I was in had displays of old and interesting literature in glass cases edged with old brass. I leaned my head against one in frustration. The display leaned inward some, like it was spring-loaded, like an animal trap. I leaned back, knowing that I had tripped some alarm.

Two black policemen came into the room. I walked around, looking at other displays in the (increasingly cheap-looking) room.

The policemen said, "Well, someone was right here, and he did touch this display case. We'll find him. He has no business being here."

I was trying to think how I could prove that I did belong here. I worked here. My boss was right behind the scarlet door!

Dream 4

I saw a drawing of a building -- kind of like the New York Palace without a courtyard. The drawing was like a high quality work of architectural draftsmanship. I could see inside. There was a courtyard in the center of the building and a balcony around it on the second floor. Even weirder, I could see different depths as I turned the drawing from side to side. The rendering was maybe only three by three inches, but I felt like I was seeing into the building.

I imagined telling someone, maybe my friend R, about this strange drawing. But now I stood on the balcony, which was long and had a medieval Italian feel to it. I knew the drawing had transported me here.

Dream 5

I say/lay on my bed in my room. It was bright morning. Yellow light came into my room. My window became a doorway with stairs leading down.

A black man in a yellow/goldenrod (dull) hoodie walked in. He stared at me with an expression like he was going to kill me. I knew that was exactly what he was trying to say.

I chuckled once or twice ("heh" or "heh-heh") and said, "Well, you can't get any plainer than that."

The man grinned, satisfied that I understood, and backed away, closing the door, and giving me the definite sense that he was coming back to kill me and that I was only being given time to prepare.

(11/16/06) ripped pants; new wind turbines; fucking ugly sidekick; shakespeare in the park line; how fat does he think i am?

(Entered in paper journal at 4:51 AM on 4-train from Utica Avenue in Brooklyn to 59th Street in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was leaving some nice occasion, possibly a wedding, with a few friends. We sat in a car. I wore my blue slacks. I noticed the right inner thigh had a rip on it. It was small, but it got bigger. I was ashamed, hoping it hadn't been big when  I was at the "wedding."

Someone else in the car realized he had left his pants at the "wedding." We had to go back. I just wanted to get home so I could put on a whole pair of pants. But we turned around.

By the time we got there everybody was already passing around photos of me, laughing. One in particular was me with a big group of people in front of the church. Everybody laughed (as if in narration over the photo), "How could he not have noticed his pants were so ripped?"

But in the photo my pants weren't ripped. I was wearing my tan pants, too, instead of my blue slacks. I kept looking for the rip, but I couldn't find it. My costume was odd -- the top looked like a tuxedo -- black jacket, white shirt, red tie (?). But the tan pants almost looked like horse-riding pants worn by female legs.

Dream 2

Some violent act had been carried out in one country against people who had been there from another country and were trying to set up an international business. I heard this on the radio as I and (a colleague?) drove down a country road in a pickup.

It was a mild, blue morning, but with a wet feeling to it, like it had just finished raining. There was a heavy bar of deep, delicate, grey and white cloud over the horizon. On the left and right sides of the road were green fields -- some kind of crop.

I tried to remember why we were heading to the hostile country. I felt like it was to start up an international business. I was trying to convince myself that wasn't the case, as that would get us killed.

What were we making? I saw a new kind of wind turbine which moved horizontally and close to the ground. it was dark jade green, and the blades of its fan looked like enormous horse-gates. They spun, or rather slowly churned, around a stout, cylindrical column.

My colleague and I were walking up to one on a mountain hill. It was churning counter-clockwise. We were going to walk around its path in front of one of the blades.

Dream 3

I had gotten violent over some topic of conversation the previous night at a party or gathering of people. Some thought I was crazy, in particular a man and a woman who were together.

The next day I was back in my right mind. I was on a subway train that was something like a double-wide trailer on a canyon floor in a forest. It had handrails but possibly no seats. The floor was dusty, white kitchen tile. The doors (or just one door?) were all open.

I had gotten onto the train with one of my friends, possibly male. But I stood away from him, or rather knelt, closer to the man and woman from the party last night. It may have been that I was standing, but that the man and woman were somehow extremely tall to me from my perspective.

I tried to talk to the man and woman about the topic that had driven me crazy the night before. But they wouldn't talk. They got a little creeped out and walked away, closer to my friend. I persisted by talking louder.

We were all about the same height now. They looked queasily, skittishly, over their right shoulders at me, their faces concealed by their arms, which held the rails. Finally they got out, not wanting to be around for my inevitable outrage.

A lot of people were filing out of the train now. It was like the train car had three or four rows of seats and two aisles. They were all heading out toward my right as I faced them, heading out the door in front of me.

My friend, a woman (now) who looked like my cousin AR, walked up to me (very green eyes), and telepathically (?) said, "You see how people don't like it when you push the point? Everybody leaves. Why don't you just act normal?"

I tried to flip her off, but I couldn't hold form or hold my hand (don't know which) correctly. I could barely even see my hand.

Now my friend was my friend R. We stood in the subway car with a couple other people. I was fattish. I wore a school kid uniform that was too tight and made me look even fatter. I think I looked like Andy Richter.

R said, "I always thought of you as that! Ha ha! You're so ugly and fat and dumb that it's easy to make fun of you! That's why I'm this and you're that!"

I jumped at R to beat him up. I said, "I'm not your fucking ugly sidekick! Leave me alone! I'm not your punching bag! I'm not worthless!" I had pulled R down to the ground. I was actually pulling the flesh off his neck.

I looked out the subway car door to my right. In a forest scene, standing by a black cube maybe three inches in dimensions, was "Andy Richter" dressed in a too-tight schoolboy outfit. 

I felt bad about tearing the flesh off R's neck. I hoped I hadn't killed him. But I'm not sure he was even there anymore.

Dream 4

I was in line at some place with my friends R and L. we had been in line for a long time, maybe all night. We had gotten close to the front now. We were in an anormous, tall, long, white room that kind of looked trashy or worn out. I was only here to hang out with R and L while they got what they needed.

I asked L a question. I was feeling happy. But L had her back turned to me and was disregarding me defiantly (ugh, awful language).

R said, "She's ignoring you, isn't she? It makes you feel like garbage, doesn't it? Ha! I love it!"

I stepped out of the line. I was leaving. I couldn't stand being around R and L anymore. But as I was leaving I heard my friend KB call for me. I saw her near the front of the line.(Apparently the line was like for Shakespeare in the Park -- one of those lines NYC people wait in all night to test their endurance and to get a ticket to experience a "big NYC event.")

KB wore a jacket, like it was cold outside and this room was outside. She was very tall, very thin. She looked like a man. She wore a baseball cap -- almost none of her body showed. Her jacked was a "Starter" jacket for the Celtics. But it looked like it was made out of fur lining dyed deep green and pale green and cream in tufts (or else it was made out of furry tufts).

I hoped R and L wouldn't realize I had been called by KB and that I was walking toward her. I awkwardly gave her five. We may have hugged. She was with a bunch of short, fattish, bald guys. I didn't want to hang around. I wanted to leave.

Dream 5

I sat at a clothing store, looking at women's clothing. I took some to try on. Some Mexican guys saw me.

The dressing rooms were closed. I walked around to see if they would open. They didn't. So I was about to leave.

But by the front door was one of the Mexican guys who saw me take the women's clothing to try on. The man stood by a rack of miniskirts or mini-slips. His friends stood around him. I knew he was going to embarrass me by letting everybody knew he had seen me.

He said, "The dressing room's open now. Don't you want to try something on?"

I said, "No, no."

He said, almost kindly, "No. Try something on."

He picked out a miniskirt or mini-slip and threw it at me. I held it and thought, This is enormous! How fat does he think I am?

(11/17/06) computer jet competitions; don't plant where you sink; the smart little girl

(Entered in paper journal at 4:50 AM on 4-train from Utica Avenue in Brooklyn to 59th Street in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was in a house with my mom and my co-worker JM. The house was thin and cluttered but very tall, with tall windows on the front. I may have gloated down to the floor at first. Outside were jets which engaged in potentially deadly contests out in the street -- performing cooperative maneuvers (i.e. with, not against, each other) to test their skill. I had engaged in these contests. But I don't think JM knew this.

JM and my mom stood before an old computer, which may have been wired to the nose of a jet. JM told my mom how he was planning on carrying one of his competitions into space. He wanted me at the computer down here.

My mom didn't want me to go. I wanted to go (even though I don't know what was meant by "go" -- the computer was in this very same house). I was proud to have any connection with the jet fighters. But I was also a little insulted that JM didn't realize I had gone out on jet fighting competitions of my own.

Dream 2

I walked up a hill in a busyish city. It was afternoon, full light, but the sun behind buildings. I saw my friend R run quickly into a store, as if he had been following me and didn't want to be spotted now. The store had something like a Mexican feel to it.

I was watching TV. A reporter spoke about election day in the same town. She urged voters to vote for XXXXX, who was so concerned about air quality that he had torn down a corner building in "Westminster" and put a gas station (?) there.

I was foggily present on the street corner the reporter had spoken about. It was a corridor of tall, red brick buildings which in the short distance dropped to a wide span of smaller buildings. The corner had a few sun rays amply shining through. One hit the wall of the building mentioned. The wall dissolved as if melting through smeary waves of gas convection. Then in the place of the wall, in golden sunlight, was a white, yellow, and red gas station.

The reporter said, "If you'd like more info on this candidate, you can write us. We have plenty to send you. But we also suggest that you go down to this street corner and see his good work yourself."

I was walking up a hill and away from the corner, through an area like the Bronx. I turned left and saw R running into a building again. I wondered if R worked here. Maybe he wasn't following. me.

R ran out of the building and across the street (to my left) into a big fair in the middle of the side street. The fair felt Latin American in some way. All the booths were white and decorated with delicate sheets. The fair was packed with people.

I was walking on a different street. I walked past a gas station and thought, If the candidate cared about air quality, why did he build a gas station?

I was in a house with some of my co-workers. They stood in the hallway while I was kneeling in front of an entertainment center in a bedroom (?). They were to my right. I think DE and JBS were there. They were talking about investing in property. The number 65,000 kept coming up. Neigher of them was sure where exactly that 65,000 should come into their calculations. One of the two, maybe JBS, was against the investment.

As DE and JBS spoke I was arranging a trashy pile of old papers on one of the shelves. Maybe I had a black, obsidian-like (polished) object in my left hand.

JBS (?) said, "The thing to remember is, Don't plant where you sink."

I thought about that. JBS was referring (in an offensive way, I thought) to a town other than New York City, where "nothing was going on" and a person would just live a dumb, boring life compared to what he could live in New York. I thought, Oh, then I better just not make any moves.

I was lying on my left side on a couch. It was day. I was in a bedroom which had a dining table, no bed, an entertainment center, and three large window facing the wall with the couch (as opposed to the previous room, which had no windows and was very dimly lit, maybe by a chendelier). The table was at my head, i.e. on the couch's left side.

Two guys sat at the table, writing cards to girls they liked, one girl for each guy. The guys were J (a short-term Americorps worker who had worked fire at Los Alamos) and his good friend (can't remember his name).

I somehow got a glimpse of one of the guys' cards. It had been written in pencil on a "waxy" (?) surface, so the writing was very pale and uneven. But I could see the guy was making jokes by things he wished he could have here that they only have at home and then reeling off on household products that he didn't care about at all.

I knew that the other guy had made a similar joke. I, too, had made a joke where I listed a ton of items, which eventually became nonsense, for the girl I liked. I thought, Well, I guess everybody writes the same jokes. It's the feeling that counts. And we're all genuine.

I watched out the window. There was a river outside, a desert river, and beyond it a wide, pale chocolate/pink desert landscape under a pale blue sky. A heavy looking, metallic, red and blue sailboat (?) came charging along the river (from right to left). I thought it was going to charge directly in through the right window, it was going so fast and straight. But it continued along with the river, and by the time it moved past the left window, it was drifting rather gently.

With sudden relief of fear the thought came back into my mind, Don't plant where you sink.

I stretched out on the couch. Under my jeans I was wearing a hot pink pair of bikini panties given to me by the girl I liked. The girl would be coming soon, and I had to wear her panties before she got here so when she got here and saw that I had worn them, she'd know I liked her.

But I was afraid the guys would see the panties under my jeans when I stretched. I wasn't aware that I was actually wearing denim women's shorts and a women's tank top as well. I may actually have been a woman.

I had gotten up and was in a room near a kitchen with my co-workers CJ and DMy. CJ showed me a piece of paper with numbers written on it. They were floor numbers at the building we worked at (in waking life). CJ said EB had assigned him to contact sales forces on these floors on a regular basis from now on, as that had been an assignment given to EB during his recent evaluation.

I looked at the papers. I said, "I know people on 31. Lots of people. But I don't know anybody on 2M, or most of these other floors."

CJ said, "Yep. Well -- I'm gonna be getting to know 'em pretty soon"

I sat at a table in a big, dim (boiled-egg-yolk green dim) room. Some people, co-workers, sat in folding chairs that were arranged in a half-circle or circle like at some therapy group meeting. AB sat to my right in a folding chair or couch about fifteen feet away. No windows -- don't know where light came from, some fluorescent light somewhere, behind the group of co-workers.

It was September 11, 20XX. AB said, "Isn't it your birthday?" I thought, It just was my birthday. It can't be my birthday again. I said no, because I really hoped it wasn't. I didn't want the attention, and I didn't want to believe that time had passed quicker than I'd thought.

But AB insisted. She seemed pretty impressed I had made it to (2017?).

Everybody in the "therapy circle" began singing happy birthday.

I had been reading a newspaper. This life was part of a scenario that was also not real at all but the plot for a movie the review of which I was reading in the paper.

There had been a catastrophe. Some huge part of the earth had been blown up -- into an enormous crater. The first movie had been all about the catastrophe. I knew however in this real life/fictional story, that some people had survived. I hoped the second movie would be about their survival, the way they had recovered quickly and used the resources around them efficiently to recover a high degree of life and hope.

I stood in a room like a back room of a shop or an attic closet, long and skinny. It was full of papers, but nothing could be touched (although a good-looking, good-for-nothing cool-guy lilved here and had a bed (like Freud's beautiful couch!) cluttered with stuff that he could touch).

This room was in the area affected by the catastrophe. Everything that had been blasted looked solid and normal. But when you touched it it dissolved into dust. I touched a pile of (blank?) papers. It turned into dust. Just to test again, I touched a box of envelopes. I grabbed some envelopes, pulled them up, and dropped them down. They didn't disappear. I was kind of disappointed that the rules hadn't worked.

I was in a room with all my co-workers again. I was in the "therapy circle," some parts of which were clustered with rows of people. Across from me the seating was very clustered.

Someone led a song in praise of something like the human spirit. But AB (sitting in a chair across froom me on my right, while almost all the rest of us stood (?)) messed up a line and stopped everything up for a fraction of a second.

I listened, a little charmed, as the women started singing again. There were so many foreign women that their accents all blended together to make a single accent that sounded delicate, dignified, and yet a little shy and unsure.

But the charm soon gave way inside of me to a desperate search for an unaccented voice. I tried to convince myself that I couldn't hear an accent. Then each individual accent became distinctly audible. I may also have been a little creeped out by the treatment of the theme of the song.

Dream 3

I got out of a car with my family. We were in the parking lot of a big grocery store. It was late afternoon, with a glowing, dim blue sky clouded lightly by icy grey clouds.

I got out of the backseat driver's side. But the "location" wasn't holding. The car changed body type, flipped around, etc. so that I also, somehow, simultaneously got out of the backseat passenger side of a much taller car.

I looked to my right/left. Crawling on the wheel well like a  rock climber was a girl, maybe two and a half feet tall, skinnyish, wearing a pale purple lavender shirt and purplish/pale blue corduroy pants. She was palish white, with tousled but long and straight blonde and brown hair. She looked cheerful but a little waif-lilke and somehow sad.

My sister said, "This is my new baby. She's so smart. She talks already."

I thought, She talks? That's scary. She's only been here for a couple months. But look at her. She's really developed. She's climbing around with great motor skills.

I tried to figure out why a baby only a couple months old would look like a five-year-old. I thought, Did my sister just adopt?

My sister lifted her baby (an actual two-month-old baby) into her arms. It seemed to be dressed in Christmas clothes, white with red trim.

I thought, What just happened to the girl I saw? We were just about to start talking. I wanted to see how smart she was.

(11/19/06) the comic book artist's housing crisis; afraid to love a boy

(Entered in dream journal at 10:41 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was in a psychiatrist's office with my brother. The psychiatrist was male and may have been black. My brother and I were showing him some abuse we had gone through as children. It manifested as tattoos on our chests and arms. My brother took all his clothes off except his underwear. I did the same.

The tattoos were words or sentences on our pectorals. Then on our sides, just behind our armpits, were names. On my right side was my name. On my brother's left side was his name. On my left and my brother's right sides were other names, one name for me, one for my brother.

The office was glaringly bright, the walls bright blue-grey behind the psychiatrist and mirror-lined by me and my brother. We got up in front of the psychiatrist and were pressing ourselves against each other, stomach to stomach, lifting our arms over our heads so the psychiatrist could see our tattoos.

I sat down in my chair (each of us sat in cheapish, thin, office-like swivel chairs) and looked at my stomach. I was pleased and displeased at how it looked. I was skinnier than I thought. But I lacked muscle tone. I didn't look feminine or masculine. But I didn't look bad.

I wondered if the psychiatrist was getting turned on by seeing me and my brother in just our underwear. I felt violated and turned on. (The room had a weird glittery quality to it, like blue and pink iridescence on the shiny clothes little girls' princess dolls might wear.)

I sat in my psychiatrist RB's office, on the couch. I tried to tell RB something, but in the middle of my speaking RB said, "She's in the next room." I thought she meant I was speaking too loud.

I modulated my voice. I now sounded to myself like I spoke while plugging my own ears. I tried again to tell RB. But she said again, "She's in the next room."

I looked up to the windows between RB's office and the waiting room. I thought RB meant the waiting room, not the office to our right. So I spoke very quietly now, though I heard myself more clearly.

But now the office was dim, as if lit with candles on a chandelier. RB was far away, sitting on a couch, not in a chair.

A blonde woman, pale, heavyish, with a big bottom, wearing black jeans and a black fleece, knelt down to RB's left (facing me, to my right), her torso on the couch, her legs on the ground. She gabbed into a phone, clucking away defiantly. She held the phone to her right ear.

I kept talking. RB would occasionally, distractedly respond. Some other woman or group of people kept running back and forth between us, putting Christmas lights on the high window, stringing lights and ladders between us. The couches were shifted to the adjacent walls. There was only a small lamp to RB's right, on a coffee table. I looked to my left and saw four boxes full of clutter, computer pieces, keyboards, and plastic wrapping.

RB, in the midst of all this noise, was saying, "Excuse me for not attending to you completely. I've got all this stuff going on, as you can see."

I knew this wwas all a lie. All these woman had come into the room to protect RB against me, they had told her. But they had really come in because they didn't want her to have any positive feelings about me or any men. When they were around she was rebellious and inattentive to prove the power she had over me.

But I tried to act like I didn't know all this. I now sat in a swivel chair, right in front of and facing the door, still talking to RB. She was now a man, my older brother (who, in waking life, passed away from AIDS when I was seventeen).

RB turned around and said, "Okay. Now I'm ready to listen to you."

I said, "No! Fuck you! You haven't heard a word I've said, and now the session's almost over!"

We were in the office again. It was like it normally is. RB was herself again. She said, "There! That's just what I wanted to hear, was you telling me off! Now I'm ready to listen. Go ahead."

I knew that this wasn't true, either. RB probably still wasn't going to listen. But I went ahead and started.

I was watching a preview for a movie starring Steve Martin. He was a guy who lived with his wife and son in California. He narrated the preview. "Hi. I'm XXXXX. This is our life, etc."

The man took his son everywhere with him. At one point he brought a comic book drawing into some big office. He narrated, "That's not my art. I just made a delivery." From this it was implied that the Steve Martin character was a comic book artist who never did anything to get his work out there. He did a bunch of odd jobs, including taking fast-food orders and delivering them in some huge office building.

Now the man and his son went down an elevator to his house. Steve Martin was wearing a t-shirt with the logo of some new superhero. He (Steve Martin) was apparently very creative and made a lot of new characters all the time. But once again he narrated, "Nope, that's not my job, either." The camera panned down from the chest and logo to the stomach, which had a square of a cartoony drawing of fruit.

The elevator opened. The man and son walked onto an enormous, covered wooden deck which was a juice restaurant. The elevator let the man and son out right behind the cash register, where the man's wife was working.

He narrated again, "This is my job. My wife and I run a juice shop. It's not much. But we get by."

I couldn't figure how they called such a nice looking place just getting by. I figured he must run the shop while she worked a big job. She hoped that one day he'd put one of his comic books out -- and the movie was apparently about how he actually did do this.

They now both sat in a bed just off from the restaurant, with a wide door that gave a good view of the open, airy (but covered and dim) seating area. I was or was seeing from the point of view of their son, who crawled around on the bed. (Their son had been about seven years old at first. Now, it would seem, he was much younger.)

Steve and his wife spoke with a very professional looking black man who was a real estate agent. I saw a view (panning right to left) of a huge open lot, as big as a corn field, at the feet of a looming, bluish-purple mountain range below a vivid blue sky.

On the right side were houses. In the field, which was filled with sparkling, emerald-green grass (like new-laid sod), were slats of wood spaced unevenly, but grouped together closely where they were stuck in. These were apparently demarcating plots of land the agent was trying to sell. But these plots, as demarcated by the sticks, were maybe ten feet by ten feet at the most.

I thought, That's not even enough land to put a house on! It's barely even enough land to lay down on!

The agent said, "I keep trying to sell you one of these plots, but none of them  ever seems good enough for you. Suzy and I" (Suzy was the agent's wife) "just want you two to have something you think is special."

What I think was meant was that they were all looking for something that Steve would think was good enough to want, so he would snap to it and put out some of his comic books. As things were, he couldn't afford one of the agent's plots.

The agent even spoke to Steve cheerfully, as if he were a terminally ill patient being fed a line about how rosy his future would be, as if everybody was just being as nice and nurturing to him as they could before he died.

"I"/"the boy"/"the boy's view" was on "my" hands and knees and faced a window as the agent spoke of having recently tried to sell a plot to a husband and wife "from out of town."

The agent said, "They just kept giving me this look. You know. That odd look."

I thought, Please, no, not just another movie where the black guy is playing a normal role and then it's suddenly all about him being black. Don't let these guys give him the untrusting, racist look.

I shifted the view to see the man, as if from a foot or two above him. He wasn't as handsome or professional-looking as he had been, though he wore a very nice suit. He was very skinny, palish, scraggly, with a twisted, homeless person's looking in his eye. He sat on the bed. (The right side of the bed. Steve's wife sat on the right and Steve in the middle, close to his wife. The left was empty, or rather, the son crawled around on it.)

The agent said, "They just didn't trust the grey house, you know. Like something was wrong with it. The people inside. Nobody wants to go in because of them."

I saw the grey house, on the far left edge of the vacant lot. It was supposed to be back in the distance, but it seemed huge, too huge to have its structure, just a plain, old square, aluminum-sided house, so that I could only reason that it must have been much closer than I thought.

I knew now that the "crisis" of this movie would be Steve going into that house and meeting the scary (possibly evil) people inside. Some battle or challenge that would ensue would leave Steve emerging with enough confidence to pursue his career successfully. Somehow all of that plot seemed cheap and "Hollywood" to me.

I was back in the bed, where the kid had been. But as myself. I wore a dirty pair of white cotton panties, like I had urinated and ejaculated in the panties over and over. I also wore a girl's shirt. I sat under the blanket on Steve's left, as if I were the little boy.

I didn't want the black man to see me in these dirty clothes. I was worried he would be disgusted or turned on or both. I just didn't want him around me at all.

But I was at least interested in how my body looked. I seemed to be skinny, in shape, but maybe not as in shape as I would have liked to be.

Dream 2

I lay on the floor on my back in a living room. A group of people (five?) sat on a couch, enjoying each other's company. I looked over my feet at them. A few of them were awkwardly androgynous boys. The one on my right was very odd-looking but somehow attractive. The remaining (two) people were older men, forty to fifty years old, gruff-looking. They were the androgynous boys' lovers.

The boy on my far right said a couple things I couldn't avoid thinking were cute. Everybody noticed this. I didn't want the boy to approach me, though, because I didn't want to allow myself to feel love for a boy. But the boy did approach me. He straddled me intimately, sitting up, and sang me a beautiful song. He looked like a horse-faced woman with a beautiful body. Eventually the boy's clothes turned grey and vague like a men's 1980s business suit.

Everybody was leaving for home, leaving me and the boy alone. The living room was now a lot bigger, like a dance practice room, with a piano, wall rails, etc., and littered about with exercise clothes and hoodies.

I sat up, wanting to be with the person on me. She (?) was now a woman.

I asked her, "Well -- well, are you a woman?"

The woman was of Indian or some Southeast Asian descent. She wore robes and a shawl. She was very pretty but a little chubby.

She said something like, "No. Of course I'm not a woman. Do you see any of the female fat" (apparently something like baby fat) "on me?"

Of course I did. But I didn't say anything.

Everybody had turned around to look at me. I knew they were judging me negatively for asking the person if she was a woman. I didn't want to be thought of by them as someone so cruel-hearted that he wouldn't sleep with a boy.

(11/21/06) my pregnant lesbian friend; the same panties that little girls wear; panties and trouble

(Entered in paper journal at 7:40 PM at home in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in a place like a hallway outside of locker rooms, which I may have thought of as a library. It was dim, like the entrance to a theater. I had a card which was charged with credits for computer use. I sat at a computer but may not have been able to use it, even though I did lose some credits. I had to wait until a certain time to use the computer.

I went walking through the mall, in which the library was located (?) I went through a clothing store, which I might have called Sears. I rifled through a bunch of clothing racks, possibly looking for women's clothes to buy.

But I had to get out of the store quick. My card lost credits as I spent more time in the store. I almost didn't have enough credit to buy something, including computer time.

I walked through the hallway of the mall. I was back by the computers, but "the library" was outside, by a white-walled, plastery-looking cottage in wet, thick soil. It was early morning, bright, clear, cold.

I wasn't at a computer. Instead, I was waiting around (in a line?) for my friend KB. The line would have been a line we were both waiting in: a line to get tickets for a concert, etc.) I sat on the ground, the cottage to my left and about ten feet away. KB called to me. She was behind me. When I faced the cottage she was to my left, at the very corner of the cottage.

I ran to KB. She was tall and thin and covered up in a big jacket and a winter hat. We hugged each other. I was attracted to her all over again, even though when she took off her hat her hair was so short that she looked like a boy.

We spoke back and forth and ended up flirting unintentionally. To break this mood (not wanting KB to think I meant to question her lesbianism) I told her she looked very different. I had hardly recognized her.I asked her if she was doing anything to make herself look so different.

Somehow everything I said came off as sounding flirtatious. KB reacted against this by expressing her next sentences very boisterously (even though her statements were true) and running away mischievously. She said, "My boyfriend... got... me... pregnant!" (I could see her boyfriend in my mind's eye -- a shortish, stoutish, grizzled, blue-eyed man that looked gnomish and annoying.)

I followed after KB. Behind the cottage was a juniper-shaped shrub/tree which had no leafs on it but instead a profusion of pink blossoms shaped (somehow) like rusted-out juniper "needles". Some blossoms were wide open like apple blossoms; most were closed.

KB fell to the ground. I embraced her. She may have been hysterically sad. Bust something else about her seemed like she was so happy to have been able to tell me this.

Dream 2

I was half in and half out of a room. My mom and some other people (including my sister?) were in the room.

I stared down at a chair which had a pile of panties neatly stacked on it. I leafed trough the panties. They looked like they were about my size. But their design/fashion seemed to be for young teenage girls, or for even younger girls. Nevertheless I wanted to try the panties on. They aroused me so much. I tried to pick out the "most mature" panties.

Some man behind me commented that I was a real pervert for wanting to wear the same panties that little girls wear.

Dream 3

I was in a store. There were thin, trashy racks of clothing scattered widely all about. Most of the racks held panties. I tried to take some of the panties off the racks. But there were too many people around. I didn't want them to see me taking panties.

Eventually I was laying or kneeling under a rack, playing with the panties from underneath. I thought I'd pick some and take them to the registers, which were very close but crowded with Hispanic people who I didn't want seeing me buying this stuff. I thought, What's the use, anyway? Do I really want these panties?

I walked over to a few aisles of compact discs. There were lots of different Nirvana albums, a lot of which I'd never even heard of before. I wanted to buy some, but I didn't feel like I had the money to do so.

I was outside, on a very busy street on a hill lined with short office and store buildings. It was daytime, possibly late spring or early summer. A black man, palish, with big, frizzy hair and pale, scheming eyes, drove his car in front of me menacingly as I crossed a street. I ran up to the man, grabbing into his window and trying to stop him so he'd fight. He slowed down. His car was junky, pale yellow, clunky, and wide.

The man yelled something like, "I know you're doing this to me just because I'm black!"

I tried to recall if what the man claimed was true. I felt like it was. I felt guilty and ashamed.

I sat in the backseat of the man's vehicle, which was now an SUV. The man dropped me off at my destinatiion, which only seemed a couple blocks down the road, kind of a pointless trip that I'd taken simply so the man wouldn't feel I had been bigoted against him.

Now I was trying to pull all my stuff out of the man's car, out the back passenger door. I had bags full of stuff -- plastic bags, cloth bags, mesh bags -- and loose stuff from cassette tapes to stuffed animals.

The man stood beside the door, behind  me and to my right, and said, patiently annoyed, "Come on, man! Don't you see the longer you stay here, the closer the police get to me?"

I pulled my stuff out faster, but I wondered why I would have taken a ride from someone who was wanted by the police. I thought the man might have planted drugs in my stuff. But I couldn't let myself think that. I didn't want to be a racist.

The man had left his SUV and walked down the hill behind it (to my left as I pulled stuff out of the SUV). I followed the man, possibly to remind him he had a car he was forgetting.

The man was now white, older, with dark, steel-grey hair and a loosely square face. He stood with friends like himself except maybe ten or twenty years older. The men looked across the street to a somewhat lawny-looking hill (compared with all the pavement and rushing cars on our side, it looked peaceful, rustic).

At the top of the short hill -- which was like the level ground between the dipping down and up of the hill on which the road was situated -- was a plain-looking house. there was some kind of trouble there, and the men knew it.

The men turned to me and tried to convince me to go into the house. I didn't know if they were tellin gme for my own good or if they were trying to make me do something bad to myself.

(11/23/06) skin-grease smears on museum display glass; i know i was supposed to say that!

(Entered in paper journal at 10:55 AM at Starbucks on 1st Street and 7th Avenue (?) in Brooklyn.)

I was in an archive for manuscripts. It was just a two-roomed interior, with the second room, which had all the manuscripts, behind glass. I strained to see the documents I had come to see. There were a few glass cases holding a few articles. I wondered how such a paltry collection so inaccessible to the public could ever have gained so much notice.

I continued to the left. A big, glass-cased display blocked about three-fourths of the view to the glass-walled room. The background of it was a wide, tall canvas with a smeary painting like an alien sky. A monstrous, fetal sculpture lay haphazardly in front of it, to my right. All along the canvas were mounted random objects without any definite character.

Somehow, among the objects, I saw one of the documents I was looking for. Even though the canvas stood only two feet into the glass case, I had to squint to see the document mounted on it, like it was either very small or very far away.

I accidentally leaned my forehead against the glass. I pulled my head back. I saw a smear above where my head had touched the glass -- dirty like a child's fingers -- and my forehead print below that.

I saw some weird blown glass structure -- a horizontal span of pods maybe one foot in diameter -- clear glass speckled like toad skin with red and gold.

A black security guard walked up and behind me. He took a razor blade out and cut away the finger smears on the pane of glass. He said, "Ugh. White people. They're so stupid they don't know how to keep their fingers off the glass."

I was indignant at the security guard's statement, but I remembered I had smeared my forehead against the glass, too. So I must be pretty stupid, after all. The security guard walked away to my right.

Dream 2

I stood behind my desk. A co-worker of mind had asked me something about expenses. I was telling him something in response. As I did, my boss, from behind me, nagged to tell me that I should tell my co-worker exactly what I had just told him.

I turned around violently and shouted at my boss, "I know I was supposed to say that! I just told him!"

I stood over my boss like I was very tall. My boss had a very frightened, jittery, violated but angry look in his eyes. I felt very guilty, like I had been a bully.

(11/26/06) my last radio show; broken teeth in kindergarten

(Entered in paper journal at 9:50 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue.)

Dream 1

I was suddenly in a library. It might have been a secret library, some place where I wasn't supposed to be. I think I had gotten there suddenly from a public library. I held a large, blue and white document in my hands, opened before my face.

I was on the outskirts of a city, possibly New York. It was a sunny, muggy day. I stood on a hill bald of vegetation but piled with heaps of antiques and trash. Somewhere in the distance was a barbed fence.

I jumped/flew from one space between heaps to another. I jumped/flew toward another one. But as I did I heard a woman somewhere talking about how I would soon be burnt out from all this flying. I was afraid to jump and fly again.

I was on the top of a tall building in a dense city. I wrote down notes on or made drawings of the tops of the buildings. I saw a black man on one of the buildings. I knew he was spying on me, but I tried not to care.

Many of the buildings were brick. Their tops expanded outward like battlements on armories.

They all had statements wrapping around their tops. Some were about the goodness of commerce. Others were about the strength of the country.

I was in a big, empty building with my friends L and R. R asked me what I thought of this building. I grabbed him and slammed him against the wall. I was friendly, though, somehow.

I said, "If this were your place, I would love to take it."

I realized how awful that sounded. To sound "better" (?) I said, "I would bust down this wall and add two new rooms." This was supposed to show that I didn't come to R's house just because I liked his house.

I was with a group of folks -- my friend ML and possibly a few other people from the improv troupe we'd been in in college -- in a huge, strange, courtyard-like area at night. At first I was near a sound system, broadcasting "my last radio show," telling people how sad I was to go, but how I appreciated everybody for listening.

There had been lights on, tables everywhere, with my friends seated at all the different tables. But now I was all alone in the dark. I was walking along the tables in the purple moonlight. I sat down at a table, possibly with a drink in my hand, which I was too drunk to control.

I sat around, somewhat happy to be alone. But I suddenly noticed that some tables were lit with candles or "electric candles" and had one or two people at them. My table was actually full -- including me and maybe five other people.

Everyone was lit in bluish-purple moonlight and yellow-orange candlelight. But they were all frozen. I couldn't tell if they were real or something like a still from a movie. Apparently, however, they were now moving. I felt like they would all now determine I didn't belong here. Nobody paid attention to me -- it was like I wasn't real to them.

But a man called for me from behind me. Now the place was full of people talking and having fun. I was spilling my drink (wine?) all over the place. The man was tall, white (tanned), with blue eyes and richly blonde hair. He wore a nice business suit. The man started asking me questions about my grandpa, hoping to prove that my grandpa should be here instead of me.

The crowd was loose and moving about, but most of those nearby were attentive to the interaction between me and this man. We may have been in Europe; this may have been something like a medical conference.

I told the man my grandfather's itinerary of trips -- how he had gone from here to some other cities and how he was now heading to Rome. As I explained all this we had walked into a kitchen, as if this whole place had been only a small apartment.

The man was washing up dishes while I was spilling my drink all over the place. I held the base of the glass in the palm of my (left?) hand. Under the base, even more (white) wine was sloching around, as if I had spilled it and cupped it under the glass.

Dream 2

I was in a room like a kindergarten classroom, sitting on the ground with a groiup of my classmates (?). We watched a show about someone's teeth breaking. One of my front lower teeth broke-shattered. I held the pieces in my hand and walked away, hoping I would be able to patch it back together. But I also somehow doubted that my tooth could be broken at all.

(11/28/06) i'm glad to have known you; a ferry to brooklyn; the boy's memorial

(Entered in paper journal at 6:50 AM at Starbucks on 56th Street and 6th Avenue.)

Dream 1

I stood on a road, possibly an intersection looking down toward a squarish, tiered, red brick building at the end of a dusty dirt parking lot. There was a man there who had seen UFOs at some yearly rate, i.e. once every three or four years. Possibly the last time the man saw one was in 1974. This might have been the year 1980.

In my head I heard the man say that I would be the last UFO he saw. It wasn't quite said like that -- it was said so as to make me feel that I would die and he would probably die, too, if I went tom see him. Nevertheless I was going; it was important for me to talk to someone who knew firsthand about UFOs.

I was in the building, trying to get into the man's office. I was in a loading dock area which was converted (?) to have huge window walls looking out over a desert landscape (?). There was a brick wall dividing this area from the man's office, which I could feel was big and open and bright like this "room."

A woman asked me what I was doing here. She looked severe, like Death in Cocteau's Orpheus: pulled-back, dark hair, a dark dress, a teacher-like appearance. I tried to make something up. to tell her I was goin gover into one of the next offices, could she just let me in?

But the woman may have known who I was. She said, "I have this -- from the man you are really here to see." It was a package topped with a letter.

I walked to a fence, before which the "floor" was dusty soil cluttered by old household junk and toys. The room felt different now, as if all the windows were gone, as if this were a sound stage.

I thought the gifts were worthless. I read the letter, which said something like, "I'm glad to have known you. I'm sorry to say goodbye." The gifts were pies.

I said to the woman, who was loading stuff into the bed of a truck, "That was kind! All the time it takes to make things like this."

Realizing I was just letting the woman load the truck on her own, I stood up to help her. But she said she didn't need any help and that she was almost done. The stuff she had was just little, sundry boxes, not big things like I had thought.

My mom (?) and another person were there. The Orpheus woman was gone. My mom said, "How can they sell stuff like this? Does anybody actually buy it?"

I saw on the wall something like an egg-carton lining with enormous apples in each niche. The apples were green and red.

I said, "Oh, no. They're great. I've eaten some before. I'm not surprised they sell."

I may have been helping my mom load the apples into the back of the truck.

Dream 2

My friend R, my friend Y, and I had traveled a little by the subway and were now late for a trip home, or else we were late for a trip somewhere to take care of some business. I had to work to point this out to R, who determined that if we were this late we would just have to take the ferry (to Staten Island). This was what I'd wanted all along.

But as we ran through the ferry station (which looked like a monstrous version of a ski lodge, with ten-foot-wide walkways stories over the main floor) it became clear R was directing us to Brooklyn. I figured perhaps we did need to go to Brooklyn. But I didn't know how we would get there.

R pointed out that there was a ferry to Brooklyn. I saw a ferry outside (this place was all windows and rich, tannish wood beams, and gave a good view to the ferry docked in dark blue, sleet-driving evening).

I thought, No ferry here goes to Brooklyn. That one goes to Staten Island! But then I thought or saw in my mind's eye that the ferry would take us to Staten Island and then we would take a ferry from Staten Island to Brooklyn.

Dream 3

I was in a hotel room during some kind of celebration. A lot of people I knew were in the hotel. I tried to keep my windows sealed up because some people living nearby were trying to taunt or hurt me, and I didn't want them to know I was around. But the blinds on the windows at the head of my bed weren't closing well at all. I was trying to hang something like a curtain over them.

But outside the window (which was a surprise as the window may have been two or three stories up) was a memorial to a boy who had died. The boy was Hispanic and had probably died when he was seven years old. There were white, wedding-like decorations, balloons everywhere, and little dolls. A picture of the boy was in the center of it all (like all this was attached to a long, folding "lunch room" table), as well as a letter lying before the picture, saying something like "We're sorry you had to go. We'll always love you."

I felt awful shuttering up this memorial. But I also felt like it was precisely this boy's family who were torturing and taunting me.

As I worked on the window my mom walked in. She held two white skeins of sturdy, lightly patterned (striped?) silk which covered the two vertical panes of the window. I thought, They look like they're for a wedding.

My mom said, "These are XXXXX." (Some word like lovely or divine, but somehow also implying a sensuality.) "Yes, these will do just fine."

NOTEBOOK 11 - 3/5/07 to 6/23/07

It's hard to tell, but this notebook is title Morning Stars. The title -- I'm pretty sure -- comes from the first dream from March 8, 2007 -- my second entry in the journal, where levitating people are said to gleam like morning stars.

I don't want to guess too much at things. You'll see if you read further that many of the dreams transcribed from this notebook have been transcribed from my dream journals in 2017. But some of the latter ones were transcribed in 2013. In other words, I took a break of almost four years while transcribing this notebook. So not only are these dreams ten years old, but whatever narrative I was creating within these notebook "prefaces" has also been broken up by my taking a four year break in relating the narrative.

Nevertheless, there are some things I will say. There is a lot of sense, I feel, in these dreams of finding a place in my life, and starting to move upward in the world. This was, of course, in 2007, right as the financial markets were starting to collapse. And you can already see in some of the dreams in this journal my forebodings -- not psychic, just reasonable, though at the periphery of my understanding -- about the markets. So, as I think I've mentioned before, this was a strange period of feeling myself moving upward and also worrying about everything collapsing and me moving downward.

You can also see from these dreams -- partly from the settings of the dreams, but also partly from the notes on where I entered these dreams into my paper journal -- that I was still very close with my best friend R. The time period of notebook 12 is when I stopped talking with R. But here there isn't much of a sign of that break with R even being in danger of happening.

In fact, a lot of my dream journal entries from cafes in Brooklyn are kind of near his old house, in Park Slope. In some ways it was my neighborhood as much as it was his, because he was there and I liked him so much. But when we stopped talking I almost never went there again, and the neighborhood became a sort of nightmare neighborhood for me.

Some other things I'd note. Fighter jets and UFOs. I'd like to spend a lot of time going over these two motifs. I was heavily into UFO and psychic literature as well as Jungian literature during this time. And I think a lot of the UFO conspiracy literature I read bled pretty heavily into my dreams.

Fighter jets were also extremely interesting to me at this time. I actually read the SR-71 and X-15 manuals around this time. There was, of course, the allure of these sleek, fast machines. There was the fact that they flew so high. But there was also, for me, the fact that these machines were incredibly intricate, run by fuels that were very dangerous, but were so calibrated and precise and balanced that all of these fuel systems were kept in a working equilibrium. It was fascinating to me. I wanted to learn these systems of equilibrium, memorize them, if I could, so I could somehow create the same sense of equilibrial structure in my own mind.

There is also a relation, for me, between my fighter jet fetish and the works of Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim mentions how some autistic children identify themselves or other people with cars. I thought that maybe they did this because cars represent some sort of balance of forces that create motion. In the same way, for me, this is what jets symbolized. Feeling that I was in some way autistic, I took jets for my identification in the same way that I saw Bettelheim's children taking cars for their identification.

There is also some mention of Euclid in the early dreams, at least, of this notebook. There was a time when I spent my morning train rides memorizing the propositions of Euclid's geometry on the train ride into Manhattan from Brooklyn for work. At one point I had maybe the first four or five books of Euclid memorized, all from memorizing Euclid on the train. Then I stopped. I learned Euclid from the Dover books. I love Dover publishing. And those Euclid books -- I used them and dragged them around with me until they didn't have covers anymore.

One last thing I'll mention -- and maybe I'll come back and edit this and add more detail someday. But in March of 2007 I took a trip to Boston. On my last night in Boston I got horribly drunk and not only puked all over and destroyed a lot of the clothes I was wearing, but I also lost a lot of my belongings when I, in a drunken rage, threw them all over the place. You'll see Boston playing a role in some of the dreams in this notebook. And this is part of the reason.

 I'm pretty sure one of the things I lost was a dream journal holding my dreams from December of 2006 through March of 2007. So it's probably worth mentioning that in January of 2007, I moved to the place I was to stay in in New York City until January of 2012, when I left New York City for good. The place I had been living in from May of 2006 through January of 2007 was broken into. Some of my stuff had been taken out of the house -- but honestly not much. But I'd faced a little harassment in the neighborhood. I felt like people were against me. And so when I had the break-in, I just decided, the very next day, to leave. I found my new place, which also ended up being miserable in a lot of ways, but apparently not bad enough for me not to stay there for five years.

All of these memories are now sort of flowing back to me. But I don't want to put everything down here. So I'll just leave it at that. Enjoy the dreams of this notebook.

(3/5/07) a tiny jet crash

(No time/place information for the paper journal entry.)

Dream 1

I sat in a tall vehicle like a semi truck. I was in a lot of trucks, my truck facing away from the lot. I saw two jets fly from my right to my left in the clear blue sky before me. I semi-consciously thought of the jets as F-11-F Tigers. But I also thought of them as F-104s or X-15s. I strained to get a better view of them. They were gone.

Another jet, with a body like a JSF, but painted green and white, twirled downward from high in the sky. I could tell it was going to crash nearby. I got out of the truck. the jet crashed against the windshield of the truck that had been beside my truck. It was like the jet was small, maybe five feet long at the most.

I panicked and tried to tell a person who was just to my right. But I was getting confused. As I tried to explain I was trying to take something out of my inner coat pocket, probably out of the left side of my coat with my right hand. The person I was trying to explain to smirked at me. He may have been kneeling, pulling something out of a bookbag on the ground.

(3/8/07) they all gleamed like morning stars; this story will be too intense for most

(Entered in paper journal at 6 AM at Starbucks on 56th Street and 6th Avenue.)

Dream 1

I was in a courtyard. There were a few people around, mostly about my age. The courtyard seemed somehow Mediterranean. I clutched something, maybe a metal seat or bench, and flew up into the air.

I was afraid that people would see me levitating and think I was crazy, especially because I was hanging onto a ratty metal chair/bench like this. But then I saw a couple other people levitating. A pretty, blonde girl floated up beside me. She told me it was okay to do this.

I looked out across the horizon. It was dimmish, liquidy pink, like sunrise, with a band of tan below the dark blue dome. People all over this (Mediterranean?) town were rising up in the distance -- there may have been ten or twenty of us. They all gleamed like morning stars.

Dream 2

I read a book given to me or written by my psychiatrist. I read a little of the middle, then I heard (?) my psychiatrist tell me to read the preface. The preface began with a weird apology like, "I know this story will be too intense for most."

She proceeded to tell the story of a young man, a relation of hers, who had killed himself. He had worked for the electric utilities division of some defense company. The division was called ROIC or RROIC. The man was found with a high degree of some ethyl chemical in him. The chemical seemed to have four names all together in one word.

(3/14/07) the importance of the man who...

(Entered in paper journal at 9:15 PM at home in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I stood beside an Hispanic (?) kid in a classroom. We stood by a sink. As I turned (clockwise) away from the sink and toward the kid (who may have been Asian), I saw the kid had a book on Euclid. It was like a Dover book and had a pale blue cover (like the first volume of Dover's Euclid). The book was called The Importance of the Man Who... Something came after the "who," but I didn't read it -- I knew immediately the book was about Euclid.

I showed the kid the book I had in my left hand -- the (second?) volume of Dover's Euclid. The kid was impressed, but he also felt a thankful kinship with me.

Class was beginning. Everybody sat in their desks. I was getting into mine. There were three empty desks.

All the desks in the classroom had two or three specific sheets of paper. I noticed one of the pieces of paper was falling off one of the empty desks. I grabbed the paper just before or after it hit the ground. A thuggish-looking kid with some friends chuckled and said, "He thinks he's God just because he did that."

(3/17/07) i know it wasn't an accident

(No time or place information for this paper journal entry.)

Dream 1

I sat in a cafe lit like a Starbucks but wider and quieter and cleaner. I faced the right wall,  if the door wall were the front wall, and was a table or two away from the wall.

A father and his  son sat at a table against the wall. A girl, who might have been the daughter, sat a table away from them and the wall, with her back to them. She may have been writing or reading. The father was older, with a full head of grey hair and possibly with dimmish glasses on. The son was around nine or ten years old. The daughter seemed to be about the same age, blonde, wearing a nineteenth-century dress.

I was writing. The son got up and walked toward me. Passing me he made a grab for my backpack, which was in the seat across the table from me. I grabbed the top of the backpack, stopping it from falling simultaneously with the tug the boy gave it to make it fall.

The boy had obviously pulled on my bag just to start trouble. But being stopped, he walked a few steps, then turned around and came back. This time I held the bag before he got to it. The boy took a good grab and pulled as hard as he could. But I kept the bag steady until he let go. The boy stomped back to his table.

I knew the boy would be back to start trouble if I didn't take care of things. I walked up to his table. There was a third seat. I sat down (father to my left, son to my right, wall in front of me) and looked at the father, who was huddled behind a mass of coats and bags and was himself wearing a big, grey coat. I was talking to the father, trying to get through to him, but his head was buried under his arms. He wore a grey wool cap. I saw he was a bald, black man. He sneered at me with dirty teeth.

But somehow I managed to connect my words to him. I said, "Your son tried to throw my bag on the floor. He had no reason to: the bag was up on a chair and out of his way. And now I think he's going to do something worse."

Now the father was back to being a rich, white dad, though somehow different looking than the white man from before. The father tried to throw me off guard. He interrupted me and questioned me like a lawyer. He asked, "How are you so sure he was trying to start trouble? How are you so sure what he was doing was intentional?"

The father had asked a couple quick "balance" questions which I answered quickly and surely. But now I took my chance to speak at length. I said, "I know it wasn't an accident. The first time I caught him making a grab for my bag. I stopped him. The second time I held onto my bag in advance. He purposely pulled and pulled until he knew he wasn't --"

The father interrupted me again. His head had been buried in his arms (again) and he lifted it out, regarding me. He had bright white hair, a thin, soft face, and eyes round and jellyish, like fish eyes. They reminded me somehow of lime-flavored hard candy wrapped in white plastic with a quaint picture of limes on it.

The father yelled, "Shut up! Shut up! Just -- Listen a minute! Listen a minute!"

I was so shocked and frightened by the father's appearance and shouting that I stopped talking immediately. I knew the father could tell his son was wrong, but that he still wan't going to give in without a fight.