Dream 1
It was early morning, deep blue, and I was on a bus that was also an office. There were a lot of seats per row, like on an big airplane. We were waiting for the bus to pull out of the parking lot. I may have thought the bus driver was lazy and didn't want to leave because he didn't want any of us to have to work. I may have been a temp. Some new permanent person "moved in" to the seat beside mine. He looked like my senior coworker DH. He sat to my left.
I had been slouched in my chair. The seat back in front of me had its tray down and a computer screen in the seat back. I had a couple envelopes in my hand. I opened one. It had what looked like a check in it. The check looked like it was for a lot money. I was happy at first, but I realized I didn't any money coming to me.
I lifted the check up from down by my waist into a beam of incandescent light coming from my own or someone's ceiling light near me. The check changed before my eyes to a check-like promotion from some bank, telling me that for just $170.24 (I think) I could start up a professional bank account with them. Something about the check felt old, like a magazine ad from the 1970s.
I put the "check" down and thought, Well, obviously they don't know me, or they wouldn't have sent me an invitation like this. I was sad when I realized I also still owed a ton of money.
The new person to my left seemed to be looking at me. I sat straight up in my seat and tried to look motivated. I thought he could get me, maybe all of us, fired by telling the boss none of us worked. But then I thought, All of us are at the mercy of the bus driver.
I "saw out" of the bus to a building with a couple people in the doorway. They were the higher bosses. I knew the bus driver may have been stopping us from doing work, but that the higher bosses were also not giving us anything to do. I now felt less ashamed of sitting there doing nothing.
Dream 2
I was in some place like the outdoors. I followed a few people, mostly women. They may even have been holding my hand and leading me.
We walked past a short bookcase. I caught sight of a copy of William James's Principles of Psychology. I broke off from everybody else. I wanted to look at the book I figured I could catch up with everybody else later.
The book was on a shelf of similarly bound books. The binding/cover was a cheap, fake leather, marbleized pattern, in red, blue, or green. Principles of Psychology was bound in red. The volumes were all thin at the binding edge, but tall, and with wide pages. I thought about what a pain it would be to carry this copy of the PoP all over the place with me. I was ashamed to look directly at the bookshelf because I didn't want anybody nearby to know I was so interested in such books.
But looking at the bookshelf as I was about to grab the Principles of Psychology, I noticed a very obscure book, bound in blue, by an author with a name like Epictetus. The book was about some strange religious question, some dark, symbolic treatise on Jesus. This book was very attractive to me, even though I felt the quality of the writing might not be as high or challenging as James's writing. I was frightened by the book, and more ashamed of looking at it and being seen.
A man and woman sat on a couch to the right of the bookcase. The man and woman were thin, a little like hippies, cocky, and good humored. I wanted to take one of the books. But I didn't want to carry around such bulk with me, to weigh myself down and take on more clutter than I was already bearing.
But now I looked below the tall volumes and saw a whole collection of small, thin books, half in red binding and half in green binding -- the same kind of cheap, fake leather, marbleized binding as was covering the taller volumes.
There were a lot of incredible titles, all mystical. I figured I could take one of these. They were so small that it wouldn't add much at all to my heavy load. And they were all so ancient and deep -- I was sure I could find what I needed in them.
But as I grabbed for one I looked to my left and saw some stacked containers full of old, pulpy books, all on mysticism. One in particular, a bulky one but with poor quality, newsprint-like paper had a photo on the front of an ancient Middle Eastern city with a purple-maroon afternoon sky behind it and before it a cheesy,touched-up group of two modern people and one "ancient" person (I think) standing close together like in a family portrait.
The title and subtitle of this book again had, like the book by "Epictetus," something to do with Jesus, but in a dark and spooky way, In this case, the book was about some very old, spooky ritual that was directly connected to the powers Jesus had.
The book appealed to me on so many levels. I loved its cheesy look. I loved its cheap bulkiness. And there's always something I love about the 1960s and 1970s style of getting into the deep, scary issues of mysticism -- the way the vapid, blunt American speech wraps itself around that ancient complexity and terror -- or, rather, the way I always wish it would do that.
I picked up the book and flipped it around. The photo on the back was of a green hillside and blue sky in the background before which stood "Jesus" and two modern people, maybe two children, maybe a black boy and a white girl. The back caption once again spoke of the secrets of Jesus's power, though this time much less obscurely and intellectually frightening and more self-help-focused and more obviously centered, not around "the ancient magician" but around Jesus.
I knew if the man and the woman saw the back this book, they'd laugh at me for thinking Jesus was cool. I flipped the book around so the front cover would be visible while I carried it. But I noticed then that even the title on the front was obviously about Jesus being cool and magic. I hesitated over taking the book. I may even have put it away.
To mask my taking the book I walked over to the right of the couch (now inside), where there was a makeshift "book"shelf against the wall. It was full of CDs, DVDs, and videotapes all in security casings. I think there were books behind the lowest level (which was the floor) at first. But as I flipped through the CDs the "books" behind them became videotapes.
There was a theme to all the videotapes, which all had cheesy, cheap, solid-colored boxes. The theme weas that one seriously had to question whether one should work in the mainstream at all, since to do that work would mean to succumb to the evils of the industries. The videos were all stories of these industry evils, how the industries were set to hook people on consumption, and how this consumption resulted in the murder and destruction of many people.
I hadn't been looking for any of that. I just wanted something plain and easy and big enough to cover up the title of the mystical book I wanted to take.
The couple on the couch addressed me. "Remember the old days, Preemie? You sure did a lot of silly things back then." I now pulled out a CD with a picture of me on the cover. I was dressed like I dressed in college. I was knelt down over dusty ground, throwing up.
The couple said something like, "When are you going to give us that CD you promised to give us as a present?"
I pulled out another CD. The cover showed me in the same position, still throwing up. But this time I wore green Nomex pants and a navy blue t-shirt -- the firefighting outfit I'd had while working at an Americorps program near Los Alamos, New Mexico.
I felt a little lost as I looked at this photo. I thought I should feel disappointed. But from the fact that, other than any puking, I looked so good and healthy, I couldn't tell why I should feel so disappointed.
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