(10/12/05) shitting at the breakfast table in the library

(Entered in paper journal at 7:51 AM at Starbucks at 98th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I stood on a roof with a group of people like actors in a color movie from the late 1950s about New York City, except that the actors also seem to have changed to how they'd look nowadays. The building stood below a modern building something like a mix between  60 Wall Street and the Woolworth Building (which is what someone in the dream actually called the building), but with rich, red bricks bordered with rusticated, rich, tan blocks. The day was sunny and free, and yet it felt like everything surrounding us was on stage

An old/young lady to my right said, "Now you'll have to watch this part in the movie again, really to understand how we should feel as we give our performance." But I didn't want to see it again, especially this close.

A plane flew down low and then nosed up or down so as to hit the Woolworth building with either its belly or its back. The building had a hole smashed in it, but there was no fire or explosion. Yet it was like the building had been completely destroyed. The plane flipped over, away from the building, and headed nose-down toward our building before dipping steeply down and crashing into the street below. We could hear the explosion and feel the shaking.

The lady said, "Now we have to practice living in our building." We or I went down into a series of very nice apartments and offices. We were supposed to be sorrowful about what happened, but we were also supposed to be unaware, as if nothing happened, as if it were going to happen to us.

At one point I stood by a sort of opaque window that was almost wall-sized and divided by a modernistic iron design. It may have been in a corner. I cried, with and without feeling.

Somehow the events had receded into the background. I was more interested in the building, and I may have gone around exploring it with my brother.

Now I was by myself. I was in a huge room like a library in a mansion. There were thin windows that went almost from floor to ceiling. There were a few desks. The place was ornate but also a bit ruffled and unkempt. I found a toilet just inside this room. It felt like this toilet had invisible walls around it, a whole feeling of being a restroom unto itself.

A man in a beige bathrobe walked into the "library." There was a dining table. The man set a glass of juice on it, then looked at me and chuckled and walked away. I knew that soon the whole family would be coming in for breakfast.

Now the wife came in. She wore a red bathrobe. She, like her husband, looked young and attractive in a late-1980s, upper-class, and fashionable, but not gaudy, sort of way. Now a little son and daughter came in, both in red bathrobes.

I felt silly for having decided to use this toilet and not looking for the other, more private one, which a sensible person might have found. But the little girl, who had silvery-blonde hair, said something to me that made me feel like less of an idiot.

I defecated. I could tell my feces was sticky. I finished. I finished. I flushed the toilet, but I watched as a particularly nasty, nutty piece of shit stuck in some weird, tray-like compartment of the toilet bowl. I tried to flush it away again, hoping the family wouldn't see me acting so weird, but pretty sure they would.

Now I was in another library, by myself. The room was much smaller, maybe twenty feet by ten feet, and it was filled with a clutter of old paperbacks: classics and pulps. I was looking for a particular classical science book. I didn't find it. I found a patch of other interesting science paperbacks, maybe by Sir Isaac Newton.

I walked farther and saw on one of the lower shelves, which were stuffed full of paper backs, some plays by Shakespeare, one of which may have been The Merchant of Venice. The spine of this book had a contemporary and popular look to it, like the No Fear Shakespeare series books, mixed with the style of a children's horror novel.

I sat down with my back to the shelves. I may have picked out a couple books to read.