(Entered in paper journal at 6:21 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn into Manhattan.)
Dream 1
I had been up on a high floor of a building and I had walked down a steep staircase. I was now on a balcony or mezzanine level overlooking a wide court on which a symphony was set up and playing.
A crowd of people stood on the "balcony" (which was like a balcony in the mall, about the same width) and watched the symphony. The symphony must have been twenty feet below us, but it also seemed like they were right in front of us and all smashed together into a small space.
They were playing some famous piece which, when I had heard it, had always ended in a way so quaint that I thought it had been tacked on by some conductor who thought he was being smart. But now the symphony was ending, and this quaint, almost nursery-rhyme-like melody played. This time it seemed to fit in with the rest of the piece, as if it had been conceived and played correctly. I thought, So the composer really did put this ending on it.
One of the musicians in the symphony was a 70s-style black man playing an electric bass. I couldn't hear his instrument or see where an electric bass would come into play in the piece. When everything finished we all walked to our left (after facing the symphony) and went down the balcony to a small, fluorescent lit hallway with an elevator.
The crowd was pretty big, and I was trying to work my way through it to get a space on the elevator. I walked past the black man, who was now a little more modern and handsome and was walking with a white girl. I walked into a crowd of businessmen and fell in with them. We got on the elevator together.
I was down in a school hallway. It was mazey. I don't know it I was a teacher or someone who had volunteered to do something for the kids. I was tired. I knew there was a room where I could rest. But I couldn't find it in the maze of rooms. I thought I'd found it, but I walked into a room full of kids.
I walked back out again. The place felt buxy, but I never really saw anybody anywhere. I could feel that there were "adults" watching me from somewhere. I thought they would think I was doing drugs in school. I was afraid of being judged or misjudged.
An unseen person, a black woman who seemed like more of an adult than the other "adults," told me to go into a classroom and use it to rest in, regardless of what anybody said. I was thankful.
(Writing continued at Mangia on 56th Street and 6th Avenue, 7 AM.)
I was in the classroom, which was dim. I sat at the front of the classroom but with my back turned to the teacher's desk. My friend ML may have sat in front of me, and our desks may have been joined. There may have been a teacher giving us a lesson.
ML was fiddling with some piece of paper and making a joke out of it. I realized that the paper had our lesson notes on it, and that I didn't have a paper. I was going to ask the teacher if I could have a paper. But she now stood beside me, scolding me.
The room was light with fluorescent light. I was at a table with (possibly ML and) five or six black and hispanic women. The teacher claimed that I didn't pay enough attention to her and that I thought I was too good for class.
A couple of the women to my right said, "Out of everybody here, he's always so snide and rude. He thinks he's such a big deal, I just want to kick his ass. It's frustrating!"
I looked across the table. There was another table on the other side. Two big, black men sat at it, all sprawled out in their chairs, silently, menacingly glaring at me. And yet I felt less threatened by them than I did by the women.
Another woman came up to me. She was dark, with short hair, about medium height and build. She wore a red shirt with cut-off sleeves. She made a comment about how I treated women and how I thought of them as sex objects.
She said, "Well, how do you like this?" She grabbed my head and shoved it under her shirt. She rubbed her hand on her crotch and then shoved it in my face. She shook me around and said, "How do you like that? How do you like the smell of that? What do you think off what you said now?"
I thought it was absurd that she was doing this to hurt me. I actually liked all of it, including her smell. I kept waiting for the smell to get bad. But it didn't.
I had a vision of a black girl in an empty classroom, standing over a small, basin-shaped water fountain -- almost like the eyewash stations in workplaces.
I was outside. It was a sunny day. I walked on a sidewalk that was met immediately on my right with a steep hill which made the front yard of houses high up on the hill (like in Staten Island). The "front yard" I walked in front of now had a stone fence as its front and a concrete staircase leading up to the building, which was actually some kind of grocery store. The street to my left was wide, wide enough to have been a parking lot. It also seemed like in front of me was a parking lot, until another hill heaved upward with lawns and houses on it.
A man with a large dolly with boxes on it rushed up from behind me and to my left. He was heading from the staircase to my right. I was trying to get ahead of him so he wouldn't box me in when he turned to go up the staircase. But he rushed even faster and twisted his dolly to skew me into the stone fence.
I stopped quickly and backed up. I thought I would just walk behind and around the man, into the street and in front of him. But his dolly was now a weird, curving contraption of aluminum and yellow plastic, maybe even of cord and police tape. The man pushing it was Asian, but he also seemed black and Hispanic. He had me completely trapped. The only way I could get out was by lifting up some of the cords and police tape, which meant jangling some of the merchandise we had on the dolly.
As I walked away the man yelled at me, in a black man's voice, "Hey! What the fuck are you doing? Why don't you watch where you're going? You just walked through all my stuff!" I could feel that the man had been bullying me the whole time by trying to corner me and trap me. And now he was trying to bully me by making me feel guilty for getting out of his trap.
I was on a bicycle. I was pedaling up the hill. Two white kids came up from behind me on bikes. They were annoying me in some way. They passed me up, but they never got very far ahead of me. It was harder and harder for me to pedal up the hill. The asphalt and concrete were also breaking up, so that it seemed absurd that my bike should still be upright. I was barely going forward on my bike.
The three of us were at the top of the hill now. we were in a strange place that seemed like a strip mall or shopping plaza blended with the Acropolis or some kind of classical structure. Everything was in ruins, not like time had aged it, but like everything had been torn up in an earthquake.
The road or ground was lifted in huge chunks, maybe six feet wide, as thick as asphalt road. Its surface was very colorful, like it had been some mosaic of sparkling tiles, depicting a landscape from on high (like a map or a satellite photo) or some classical story scene.
The buildings were all heavy stone, smooth, with columned fronts. But in certain places I could see or feel huge neon signs like on Route 66 roadsides in the desert or in shopping plazas from big desert towns. The light was dimmish, pale blue and silver like late afternoon. The air was very cool.
The two guys were far less annoying now. But, as it had become almost impossible for me to bike up the hill, it was now getting to be almost impossible for me to walk at all.
Dream 2
I was in a field with my co-workers DE and EB. The sky was a deep, heavy grey, but the light wasn't dim. There might have been a little wind. Before us were two rectangular lagoons down in the ground, surrounded by thick, green and tan grass clumps.
We might possibly have been here to do some kind of research. The lagoons were to our left and before us. One was behind the other, and they faced each other on their long sides. Before us and on our right were three rectangular gardens, one behind the other, facing on their long sides as well. Between the gardens was a tall, thick grass, taller and thicker than the grass between the lagoons, some even going to seed.
I walked along the gardens and saw that all the plants were in metallic, boxy pots. I was disappointed that the grass wasn't allowed to grow in the open ground. But I thought, I guess that's just the best way for things to work in a farm.
I stood on the opposite short side of the rectangles from DE and EB. Someone unseen was talking to us, but possibly directing his comments more to DE and EB. He was on DE's and EB's side, and he might have been to my left. The man was explaining his farming techniques.
The three rectangles were now lagoons full of water. The "field" was like on a plateau that seemed artificial and looked out over the ocean.
At some point EB and DE stood by some kind of flagpole or monument at the end of a porch-like, flagstone walkway that rounded outward before the cliff. We spoke about something for a moment and then walked down a ramp of stone to a place like a boardwalk on the left side of which were building fronts.
EB was talking about security guards. She told a story about a security guard (in my mind I saw a tall, round-headed, slightly plump, black man with dark glasses, wearing a white, button-up shirt and black slacks, with a walkie-talkie clipped to his left (?) shoulder) who took care of some problem on the boardwalk by speaking in to the walkie-talkie without touching it.
I said, "He didn't touch the walkie-talkie and it still turned on?"
She said, "Yes. They're made that way so all you have to do is turn your head and speak into it."
We now stood inside, before some kind of security supply closet made of polished panels of wood. EB may have stood in the closet. She had a device attached to her waist. There were a couple of red lights on it. Some cord and headset went up to her shoulders. But the device on her waist also had a speaker. She turned it up so we could hear the funny things it was saying. But then a woman, the head of security, got onto the speaker and told us we should be ashamed of messing with the device in this way.
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