(No information on time or place of entry into paper journal.)
Dream 1
I went back for a walk through a mountain area where I had just been. I had come back to prove I knew some trees or plants as well as just to walk. But the weather had been dry and time was getting toward night and winter. All the leafs were changing color, even the pine needles, which were a bright blood red.
I was ashamed that I presumed in front of my friends to know everything about the plants in this area. Looking around now at the different colors, I realized I knew nothing. I insisted on walking through the forest, though, more than before, to vindicate myself.
Some of my friends tried to stop me, but they hesitated, then ended up encouraging me instead. They felt like, even though I was now refusing to say so, that I felt like not knowing the forest anymore opened me up to a lot of dangers. For instance, now, furiously rushing through the woods, I could see that many of the trees had decayed and were about to fall. I often rushed just under them before they fell.
Now I was in a car with BA, the leader of my Americorps NYC Parks program. BA was driving me down the road to a spot where I could walk back. It was pretty late. I worried that I wouldn't have enough time to enjoy the walk before it got dark. I also worried that I wouldn't have walked enough to have burnt off all the food I'd eaten.
I tried momentarily to figure out how I thought I'd have enough time for such a long walk before. Now BA and I drove through a small mountain "lodge" town. I knew BA was just going on one errand before he dropped me off.
We stopped at one place. Now we went to pick up one of my crew mates, KA. I was reading a book "by Faulkner" as we drove to KA's. Her place was a brown-painted, fake-wood townhouse. KA stood in the doorway, ready to go. She walked to the car.
Each page on the Faulkner book had at least one "line" where the words were in some way decorative. either they were a strange font or they were pictures or else sometimes the line was just a photograph.
When I finally realized this I looked up to see that in the window by KA's front door there were a photo-painting of Alanis Morissette and another of some other celebrity. The painting was like a silkscreen, and the skin and hair were different colors.
We pulled away from the house and circled past an old-timey gas station. One page of the book had a line where the letters were like wood slats on a fence, and they said something like "UP WITH THE GOOD OL' SOUTH," as if to ridicule Northerners.
Another page had a photo of people in the South engaged in some exclusivist activity. Now the photo was like a TV image. It was inside a police station or an army headquarters office in a small town. A guy wandered through small offices. He was big. He was hilding up the building and he was going to kill the people in it.
The "show" flashed back to a moment when the man had first gone crazy. He made out with some friend of his who was as huge and fat as he was.
Now "I" was one of the cops. I had a machine gun. I walked into the office where the man was holding his hostages. I had worried that he'd notice me before I got within firing range. But now I stood next to him, to his right. I lowered the gun (I had been holding it nose-up) right as he finally noticed me. I knew I had to fire now or he'd kill me.
Dream 2
I was crossing 20th Street at Depew, on the border, I suppose, of Lakewood and Edgewater in Colorado (i.e. essentially a road separating two suburbs not very different from each other, though one of them is my hometown/family town).
As I crossed the street a young businessman came up behind me and said how much he disliked the dryness of the Southwest. It was like he said the dryness was vulgar, and that the Northeast was more dignified by having humid weather.
I didn't tell the man I was actually walking to my mother's house. I told him I, too, lived in New England. He said he was on business. I now saw the man. He stood to my left. He was very tall, skinny, gaunt, with longish, ringed hair. He wore dark, grey-blue clothes.
We walked through the empty parking lot, past a wild patch of rabbit brush, which was very bright, even in the dim atmosphere. I said something like I was on business. He asked if I had come for the same thing he had come for, some big get-together or retreat in the woods.
We now walked on a thin trail in the woods, between stark walls of boulders. The man told me that at this retreat he was going to meet someone one more time and see if what he felt for that person was real. I thought this guy was too sentimental.
We now came to a nice cabin where some peers of mine sat. We had a conversation which I don't remember but which largely involved me, for shame, not mentioning any true facts about myself in front of the New Englander.
Now the New Englander was gone, and I was by myself in the woods. But now I was on the outskirts of some retreat. A group of loud, obnoxious people stood by a camp-style obstacle course. The retreat was some romantic getaway for gay people. In the distance was some big, fat, stubbly, bald guy that everybody made fun of because the guy thought everybody hated him, and because he was so lazy.
Now a guy walked away from a tree and went and took the man by the hand and walked him in front of everybody. The man told the big guy, "Now this time we're going to do it, okay? And if you aren't going to do it, tell me now, because I don't want to be hurt by you one more time."
The big guy said, "No, I'll do it, I'll do it. I'm ready."
They walked off to my right. As I turned to watch them I saw a lady beside me. She waited until they were out of earshot, then she laughed.
It wasn't until now that I realized the big guy was the New Englander, and that this was the person he had been talking about meeting "one more time." But somehow underlying the whole thing was a feeling of derangement. The big guy had almost no wits. He was slimy and gross and stupid and lazy and stubbly and fat, and yet he thought he was some kind of dainty, little thing, and everybody let him believe he was. It was like a cult mindset.
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