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.
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