(8/3/06) the lawyer in the cave; i got quartz in me

(Entered in paper journal at 5:57 PM on N-train from 57th Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan to 7th Avenue and Flatbush in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

Something like a television show where a woman went down into a deep cave (an "ethanol plant") to help workers fight for their rights (?). None of the men could believe the woman had come down here. She was a woman and a lawyer. The men didn't expect women in these situations. They also didn't expect white collar people like lawyers to come down here.

I saw a few views of men behind weird veils of subterranean formations like beaded curtains. There were stalactites and stalagmites everywhere. The whole view was fuzzy like a TV with bad reception.

The woman got older and a little more eccentric as she walked farther. It became clear she was tough and talented at fighting for people in these situations.

The woman encountered one "miner" who bashed open a bubble-like stone formation to reveal a cauldron full of some fizzy, acidic, black, warm liquid. The miner said this was some kind of dissolving fluid that helped to make the "ethanol," but that close contact with the liquid would dissolve living organisms. Nevertheless, the man reached his arms down into the liquid to pull out something like a pelt.

The woman was in a room (still deep in the cave), sitting on a table with her legs stretched out. She had a shawl over her legs. She was desperately pulling the shawl all over her body.

I (in the room now?) was afraid and disappointed because the woman might have been getting sick. A lot of the miners came in now and spoke to the woman about the cause of their lawsuit. I saw (in pictures) that a beagle had been killed by the dangerous liquid. I wondered if this was the only reason for the lawsuit. It didn't seem like enough.

The beagle lay on its side on the floor at the woman's feet, like it had just carelessly been thrown or left there. It looked preserved -- stuffed -- almost salted somehow.

Dream 2

It was a sunny day. I had come to a river in a big city, like the Hudson in New York, to pick up a little boat for a trip I was probably taking for work. I walked with an old man who looked like a fisherman on something like a boat or a platform on the water. The platform was white, plastic-like, and thick, but hollow feeling, like the lid of a Coleman cooler. It was huge and featureless.

We got to the edge, near the underside of an enormous bridge overlooking the city shore. The man pointed out a pedal boat (like the boats at Central Park or at lakes at amusement parks -- flat, plastic, square devices you pedal to move along the water). The pedal boat was half-submerged in the water.

This was apparently my boat. I thought, I didn't expect the boat to be so flimsy and wet. I tried to figure how I could fit my backpack into the boat so it wouldn't get drenched in one of the seemingly unavoidable puddles of dirty water in the boat.

I said I'd take the boat. We walked back toward a cabin that was on steadier footing.

The man now had an assistant who told me something I couldn't understand. I asked the man to repeat. He said, "The boss says you have to take the 3:15 AM ferry back. That's the latest one. But you have to take it, because you have to have the boat back at 6:30 AM (?)."

There were a lot of people, all (?) of whom I knew, mingling around the cabin, which was wood-paneled and like a new cabin on a nice yacht. I hemmed and hawed about taking the ferry. I would be working until late at night, and then I'd have to take this awkwardly late ferry.

At some point I was walking by a railway, in a thin depression. The depression became a space before wide windows in a house.

I hit my toe and got a big sliver of glass in it. I pulled the sliver out. It was now a one-inch-long quartz crystal with a point and even, solid facets. It was veined, almost marbled, with my blood.

I was panicked. I thought I would get a disease from this piece of glass (which I also still held in my hand, i.e. along with the quartz). But then I thought the crystal (I didn't call it quartz yet) was mystical, that somehow I would get some kind of power from it.

But then the panic came over me again. I stood up and hurried to some man in the distance, saying, "Quartz! I got quartz in me!" in a jittery, repulsed, quivering tone.