(3/29/07) the orange-sailed ship

(Entered in paper journal at 6:42 AM at Starbucks on 56th Street and 6th Avenue.)

Dream 1

I watched a documentary about a man who had filmed some apparently rough situations. One film was of a rooftop in New York in what looked like the 1920s. A gang of very young, white boys in tweed (?) outfits with short-pants and baggyish hats may have been fighting each other.

One child picked up a rock or a piece of building stone and hit another child (kind of unseen) on his left ear, managing to slice the child's ear off in a tremendous gush of blood. The child who had struck held the stone up in his right hand (the stone was drenched in blood) and savagely screamed (the film was silent), his big, brown eyes firing directly into the "camera."

This film was used to prove a crime, and I had been afraid to witness it, both for the gruesome nature of the crime and the harassment that the criminals were giving those who testified as witnesses. I was impressed by the documentarian's fortitude in the face of these threats.

The next film, from the 70s (?), in color, in sound, started in a house by a shore. The view was of one of the filmmaker's tech people holding sound equipment in front of a black man wearing an orange t-shirt and blowing into a long, wooden (?) instrument. They were both beside a sliding glass door which showed that outside was royal blue evening. A warmly white lamp lit them from somewhere in the distance, deepening the blue outside.

Someone from outside called out that everybody should some see something.

We (myself included) were outside on a dock or a bar or rocks that extended into the sound/ocean (?) like a dock. It was late morning, soft, golden sunlight. A huge sailing ship with orange sails came toward us, still maybe a mile or so off. Nobody knew who would still be sailing a ship taht old-looking, and nobody was expecting an arrival. But they all (everyone except myself and the filming crew were black) felt they should welcome the ship.

They all wore orange t-shirts, the same color as the sails in the distance. We went further out to the edge of this rocky bar to meet the ship. It came toward us from right to left and passed by the edge of the rocky bar before most of us got there. I felt like the people (villagers? tribespeople?) had been cheated by the boat passing by. The scene struck me as somehow similar to a scene in Amarcord, and I wondered if I weren't part of the filming of some new Fellini film.

Now I saw why the ship had passed the rocky bar. It had to circle around (an entire island?) while it brought down its sails. While the sails were up, it had too much speed. Now the enormous hulk of a ship came our way, from the right again, driven entirely by men (white, strong, hair trim) rowing. There seemed to be gigantic waves rocking the ship forward and backward.