(2/18/06) fighting a skinhead with a big house

(Entered in paper journal at 8:49 AM at Muddy Waters coffee shop on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in something like a roadside gift shop. The shop was full of people rushing back and forth. I don't know what I was doing there. Eventually I felt so bullied by everybody that I backed to the left side, near a garbage can and possibly a sales counter. But everybody kept brushing up against me even then, so I walked across the small floor to a painted wooden bench.

A boy (black or Hispanic?) sat by me. I was against the armrest to my left. I had something like a newspaper or a big book in my hands. At first I thought the kid was going to taunt me like everybody else. But he turned out just to be interested in me. I wanted to embrace the boy and read to him from my "book." But I was afraid that if I did this his parents, or any adults nearby, would try to accuse me of having bad intentions.

I was about to embrace him, anyway. But a big, shaved-headed, white man, the boy's father or guardian, sat down between us. The man wore a tan trench coat. He managed to sit so that he smashed my feet, which were now up on the bench. I may have been wearing yellow or pink canvas shoes. The man had pale blue eyes.

The man sat with his back to me so that he faced his child. He would then look over his left shoulder and smirk at me. I knew he just wanted to give me a "half-look" to give me a queasy sense of uncertainty and annoy me.

I just tried to ignore the man. I went back to reading my "book." The man, now seeing that he couldn't annoy me by splitting up me and the boy, smashing my feet, sitting with his back to me, and constantly giving me a queasy "half-look," now kept swinging his arms backwards so he would hit my "book" (which now seems to have been the comics section from a Sunday paper).

I may have taken the comics section and rolled it up and used it to hit the man, or I may have just hit the man with my hands. I swatted him on both his ears.

The man was big. And he looked like a skinhead. I was afraid of him. But I wanted to fight. But the man didn't even look at me.

I yelled at the man, "You know what you're doing! You're responsible for your actions! I'm not trying to bother you! Don't bother me!"

I lost focus, though somehow my tirade continued. The scene slowly changed to a slightly barren wilderness before a white-grey cliff. The man had a small structure that looked like a children's mock-up of an alpine-style, two-story house. I, too, had changed into an old, white man with a balding forehead and crown and long, scraggly, salt-and-pepper hair and beard. I probably wore a too-tight white t-shirt and jeans. I had complained at the man.

Now I was walking back to my home, which was something like a short, thick-trunked, gnarled cherry tree with a full canopy of tiny, synaptic branches the leaf buds of which were like rose thorns (actual thorns, not spiky leaf buds like the buds of beech leafs). I didn't live in the tree -- i.e. I didn't live in a hole in the trunk, in the canopy, etc. Instead, I just stood by the trunk, and that was how I lived at the tree. And I never actually "saw" "myself" (the old man). I just "saw" the tree and "felt" "myself/the old man" walk to the tree. I even "felt" something like a silhouette against the tree.

My statement angered the big white man. He was coming to fight me. I knew I'd have to fight. But I didn't know how I could. The man had a "big house." All I had was this tree. I already felt defeated and pathetic.