(Entered in paper journal at 7:30 AM at Starbucks on 57th Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan.)
Dream 1
Two teenage boys were on a bus at night. One, the younger, was in the driver's seat. He said something to the older boy in the seat right behind him. The older boy said something like, "We should get going." The younger boy hunched over to his right, heaved a couple sobs, then straightened up and began driving the bus. The bus pulled down what looked like the main street of a small town. "I" saw it from about ten feet in the air.
"I" saw the boys one more time, like they were sitting in seats in the middle of the bus now. They imagined/saw themselves as older, though the people they saw were kids who didn't even look like them and were dressed in older people's clothes and wore fake beards.
One of the boys said something like, I guess it's a bit sooner than I'd like to go. But life is nothing more than a block of flats. I thought to myself, Block of flats? What's that supposed to mean? The phrase kept repeating in my head.
I was now looking at a cemetery on a hill down a side street from the main street. Down the center, there was green lawn. But on either side of the hill-dome were tall, shaggy thickets of phragmites. In the lawn were headstones of various heights.
I thought, Are these the flats the person (woman?) was talking about. But none of the headstones here are actually the flat ones. I took the meaning though, and for some reason knew I had to leave the town.
(Dream entry continued at 8 AM, at my job, apparently, according to the address I gave.)
The streets were full of zombies. Everybody, hopefully, on the bus was alive and were escaping the zombies. As long as you didn't touch the zombies you were fine. But if you touched them, they'd lure you in and attack you. I tried to stay out of their field of attention altogether.
I thought of a TV show where people were talking about some zombie movie where the zombies keep going to the malls. All these zombies were walking around like they were leading normal, dull lives. The only time they'd attack you is when you'd get into their attention. Some would veer toward me as I walked to the edge of town, like they wanted to be attracted into attacking. But they'd never get close.
As I got to the edge of town I thought to the boys again. I hoped neither of them would fall asleep on the bus because the zombies would also attack people who were asleep. In fact, I wondered if I wasn't actually in one of the boys' dreams as his physical body was being destroyed.
The edge of town faded into a vast lawn hillside. I moved smoothly, gliding down the hill (one or two trees, but otherwise just the vast ramp of lawn) as a zombie here or there would come up the slope, dressed up and with nice hair, as if heading to church.
But soon this view faded into a dim, scary, windowless corridor in an airport. I went down a gradual, white-tiled slope with strips of gritty traction. There were more zombies here. These ones were more drawn to me. The zombies mainly looked like 1970s-style businessmen and were in worse states of decay than any other zombies I'd seen yet. Some were hardly bodies These ones would rush at me to surprise me or pop out of doors and try to grab me and scare me.
With these ones I had to keep calm. If I let them scare me they would overcome me and eat my brains. In fact, with one of these guys, if I saw them starting to rush at me to scare me, I'd rush at them and touch them on the shoulder or arm to show myself I didn't have anything to be afraid of.
Slowly the airport changed into a hospital, so slowly I wondered if it hadn't always been a hospital. The zombies were less offensive again. But now they knew I was here, and while they went slowly about their business they stared at me.
I could see the hallway's end: a white wall. I kept waiting for a fade-out into some new place. A "nurse" zombie stood on the right side of the hallway, talking on a payphone. Either she or a male "doctor" zombie was hacksawing into a full-size tin of "ham," which was actually a human brain.
The "nurse" on the phone said things like, "Yes, we're trying to capture him right now, and we know he wants it. We're operating and we'll get it to him right away."
I now directly faced the wall. I felt zombies waiting to attack me, maybe even beginning their attack. But the fade to a new location wouldn't come.
Finally the nurse said to me, "We need you to take this to him. Will you take it?" I said yes.
I had the tin in my arms. It was simultaneously a brain, a huge chunk of ham, and some little crumbles of greay meat like well-done chorizo. I was taking it to a "live" man, not a zombie, who was the priest of a cult that was turning people into zombies. I thought there was something I could do to "catch" this man or stop him from eating at least this one brain.
I was now a woman, something like the wife of this priest. I walked through a maze-like "hallway" of wood frames and sheer curtains in golden light. I walked into an all-wood sanctuary, up onto the octagonal platform, on which there was a rectangular, narrow, two-foot-high altar.
I lay a tin on the altar.It was something fake, not the actual tin I had been given. Somehow when the priest ate this he would be compelled to confess his guilt, of which I could not yet be sure, and then he would be easier to defeat.
"I" (the woman) heard the priest call, "Is it ready yet?" "I" thought he was down the hallway. But now I saw him sitting in one of the wooden folding-chairs of the sanctuary. He had seen my movements. I was sure he knew I'd planted a decoy.
I walked to the priest. he sat at the very left edge. He was a thick, but maybe short, black man with golden- or yellow-irised eyes. He had a predatory look on his face, which "I" just took to be anger that he'd been betrayed.
I don't know where "I" was now, but "I" felt like "I" was being chased. There was a chance, I realized, that this priest wasn't alive at all but that he was a zombie and was just making himself up to look alive.
Now I "was him," though I still felt "my" (the woman's) fear of being chased. "I" (the priest) jumped out of the chair and onto the platform. The back "wall" was a huge, sheer curtain billowing in the breeze.
"I" called out a saying having to do with the power "I" had gained through "my" evil acts, and how "I" was still alive with them, as if the empty sanctuary were full of "my" disciples. Then "I" continued "my" momentum (?) and jumped through the curtain to an enormous tree at the top of a vast, grassy hill among vast, grassy hills.
"I" (the woman) was almost relieved. "I" knew that if the priest made it into the tree he would stay there for it was the symbol of ultimate attainment of power. But I (the priest) only jumped high enough to brush my fingers against the hedge-manicured underside of the canopy, the limbs and branches and leafs of which looked like those of a Zelkova tree. So, failing to reach the canopy, I flew back into the sanctuary.
I ran after the woman now, demanding to know why she ahd set a bad sacrifice before me. I was now watching both the woman and the priest, though I was still feeling the woman's emotions as if I were still a part of her or identifying with her. The woman was being shoved and thrust against the wall. Now she was naked. The priest threw her back and told her that she would have to sit naked suring the service.
The woman sat in a back row, a row of wooden chairs with very ornate cushions, while everybody else, a half-zombie crowd, sat in the very front rows. The woman (I still feeling her emotions) admired the artistry of the chairs, until it dawned on her that these chairs didn't exist.
The woman moaned in desperation. She knew she had been knocked out or hypnotized or caught asleep. While she had been asleep the priest manipulated her dream to seem very real. She was still in that dream, and her body was up on the altar.
The crowd of half-zombies looked back at the dream-woman and laughed. The woman's dream-body was in the physical sanctuary, and the woman knew it, even though she was mainly perceiving the dream.
She/I looked as intently as she/I could to the altar, to see what they were doing to the physical body. But what I saw was three women on a bed, wrestling with the woman, alternately trying to seduce her and beat her into unconsciousness or death with rolling pins. Some of the women were naked, some were not. There may have been blood. The crowd below laughed at the woman, like she had clumsily gotten herself into an embarrassing situation.
Meanwhile I/the priest stood at the back of the sanctuary. I looked down some steps into a basement, where I could see piles of meat. I called for something to be fetched from down there.
I/an old, nun-like woman, came from somewhere and told the priest, "We don't have any more water from the XXXXX containers." (Something like white plastic or white-coated cardboard.)
The priest said, "It's okay. Just use the water downstairs in the XXXXX containers." (Like cone-shaped paper cups of cardboard color, except as huge as barrels.) "Nobody can tell the difference, anyway.
I'm not sure if I/the nun or I/the pries actually said the container names. We may just have seen them through each other. When the priest mentioned the second type of container, I/the nun could actually taste the delicious, cold water.
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