This dream notebook was started about a month after I'd officially finished my Americorps program with the New York City Parks Department and about a month and a half into the work I'd started doing as a temp on Wall Street. I was still a temp at this point, though I became a full-time employee in March.
The dream notebook also takes place during the time frame when I'd moved out of my friend R's house and into a place of my own, a rented room in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. I moved out of R's place in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on Martin Luther King, Jr., day of 2006.
The Fort Greene neighborhood is a great neighborhood in Brooklyn. But this rented room was awful. I was in a brownstone full of rented rooms. There were, I believe, eight rented rooms in the building. Some of the rooms housed multiple people. And we all shared two bathrooms.
In the room next two lived either one or two Hispanic guys who would, just about every single night, bring people over to their place. They would all get drunk, drinking tons of wine each night, rolling the bottles against the floor and into the wall we shared, or banging the bottles or other stuff against the wall.
In another room lived a white man and woman. The white man, kind of tall, bald, not muscular, but tough-looking, would always walk around in the hallways naked. The white woman, who was short and heavy, would also occasionally walk around in the hallways naked. A black man would occasionally come over to their place. He was the white man's friend. But he started having sex with the white woman. Then the white man discovered, and had a huge fight with the black man in the hallway. But that didn't really change anything, and the white man seemed eventually to get used to it.
I almost never saw any of these people. I heard them all the time. And sometimes the racket they made was so loud I just had to see who was making the noise, or try to catch people as they came into or left their rooms. Each of our doors had a peephole. So when I heard people coming into the house, I would watch them. And when I heard the drama, I would watch the drama from the peephole.
There was noise all night long. And I could hear people talking about me. The strange thing was, people said that I was home all the time. It was strange. I would leave home early in the morning and not get home until late at night. I may have been gone from the house between fourteen and sixteen hours a day. But people were saying I stayed home all the time. Weird.
This was the last rented room I'd lived in. And I'll talk about some of my other experiences later on. I'd lived in a rented room in Harlem, two blocks west of Morningside Park, in 2004 and 2005. I lived there because it was affordable. At that time I was working an Americorps program and was making $7.50 per hour for a thirty-five hour week -- even though I definitely worked more than thirty-five hours. That rented room was a nightmare.
Before then, I lived in a rented room in Flatbush. That was actually not bad. And before then I lived in a rented room on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. That space had its ups and downs. But I lived there from September of 1998 to August of 2001, and overall it was great. When I look back on that place, I realize how lucky I really was to have had it.
As I mentioned, I'd moved into the rented room in Fort Greene after having lived in my friend R's apartment, an entire floor of a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I'd lived there as a roommate, paying a portion of his rent. But there were a couple factors leading to me leaving.
I'd been planning to leave all along, as my income situation improved. I'd just finished an Americorps program where, in New York City, I'd been earning $7.50 per hour. My finances were horrible. But now I was earning more money as a temp -- making somewhere around $17 per hour and usually getting overtime. And I had a feeling I'd get hired permanently soon. I wanted a place of my own, of course. I was just trying to get to the point where I could get one.
But I was asked to leave sooner than that. There were really two factors to that. First, my friend R had taken me on as a roommate. But he'd also taken on another of our friends as a roommate. I'm pretty sure that between the two of us, we were paying for all of R's rent. Our other friend moved out. But the landlords, who lived right below R, were kind of sick of R bringing in us guys as roommates, when the place was meant for just one person/family.
But I think the mood overall was that I needed to leave sooner rather than later, even for R. R was developing a closer and closer relationship with his girlfriend L. L was essentially, by this point, living at R's place. She was in graduate school, and so needed to be near her campus to study. But whenever she could, she would stay nights at R's place. And she was really getting sick of R having his friends live with him.
This is totally understandable. And I feel like, from R's perspective, I'd served my purpose, as well. In 2004, R divorced his wife, and my best friend at the time, Y. R had gotten this huge apartment in Park Slope in 2000 so he and Y could live together in New York. When Y left, R was all alone. He essentially asked me to come live with him. I lived with him for a few weeks in 2004, before I left New York for a little while. Then I came back to New York and lived with him again for a couple months, before finding my place in Harlem. At that time, our other friend was also living with him. After I left my place in Harlem, I spend a few weeks house-sitting L's place while she went to Hong Kong, and then I lived in R's place -- I'm guessing from around September of 2005 through January of 2006.
R was the kind of person who just couldn't live alone. So I and our other friend served our purpose for him by being there, living with him, while he was building a relationship with a new girl who could live with him. We were also paying a huge portion of his rent. But when that phase of his life was over, it was time to leave. That still seems totally understandable to me.
But I would say that my angry feelings toward R came from the sense I got, and still have, that he'd sort of created a co-dependent relationship. I dropped out of school in 1998, got on a bus, and moved to New York. I did fine living by myself for my first three years in New York. R and Y moved to New York in mid-2000. And R and Y -- R in particular, seemed to create a sort of relationship where I felt inclined to become dependent on them for space. I fell into the trap. And I've always regretted it. Our whole relationship, though, was built on some co-dependency or another.
I feel that the point where I was asked to leave R's house was the point where our relationship started to fall apart. I don't want to talk about all of this too much right here. But I think there are some dreams where it can be seen that my cathexis is being removed from R and placed onto other people, such as my boss BS. What I always want to emphasize, though, is that R was like a brother to me then. And even though I don't talk to R nowadays, and really would never want to, I still think of R as a brother.
During the time frame of this dream I was just getting past a point where I was experiencing a lot of financial pressure. I'd been working at my new job for about six weeks. So I was past my troubles, from the standpoint of looking forward for money. But, as I'll explain in the preface for notebook 6, I was being hounded by student loan officers. In fact, the last page of this notebook is a bunch of contact info for all the student loan officers I was having to deal with, as well as calculations for how I was going to pay off my student loans. At this point, I still owed $25,000.
So there are some dreams in this notebook that are very concerned with debt, paying off debt, etc. There are also some dreams where I think I'm entering a situation where it will suddenly become very easy for me to pay off my debt, but I discover that I won't actually be able to pay off my debt, so I think that the situation is kind of worthless for me to be in. Sort of funny.
It's been interesting for me to see as I've typed/read my way through notebooks 8 and 9 how reflective my dreams become. As I move more and more into my job on Wall Street, I think back more and more, in interesting ways, to my time in the Americorps New York City Parks program and my devotion to nature, poetry, and art.
In this notebook, there is definitely a lot of reflection on my recently finished Americorps program. But in these dreams, the Americorps program is a lot more immediate. I'm often still in the program -- sometimes painfully so. A lot of the people I worked with there play large roles in my dreams, quite often, too. And a lot of the emotions I'd experienced as I was in Americorps were amplified and brought into my new context of my job on Wall Street -- which sometimes creates some interesting emotional conditions in my dreams.
But there is also a lot of reflection -- to times before my Americorps program. There are, in particular, a lot of desert dreams. I find it so interesting that I reflect my time in the desert as my NYC Americorps program ends, in the same way that I end up reflecting on my time in the NYC Americorps program as my career on Wall Street develops.
I feel like this notebook is a lot less visually rich than notebook 8 was. However, there are some really long dreams and dream sequences. The dreams also seem to be a lot more intellectually involved. I have some really extended and articulated verbal reflections in some of these dreams.
These dreams also seem to focus a lot more on artistic figures -- from pop culture figures like Beck and David Bowie to artistic figures like Charles Rennie Mackintosh and literary figures like William James. Some figures, like Mackintosh, whom I was sure I must have written about in later notebooks, I found, to my surprise, appearing here for the first (chronologically, the last) time.
This dream notebook also has a specific verbal mention of Saint Columba. As I mention in later notebook prefaces, I'd been studying for a screenplay on Saint Columba through 2005 and 2006. Saint Columba and the imagery of saints overall really took up a lot of my thought during this time. But I was really surprised to see such a straightforward mention of Saint Columba in my dream.
There are also other dreams that are expressly about saints. Mysticism plays a large part in other dreams. So does mystical literature. I have a long dream almost entirely devoted to me browsing a bookshelf full of mystical literature.
I find some of the dreams relating to the effects, so to speak, of mysticism interesting, too. For instance, I have some interesting out-of-body dreams. I also have interesting dreams where I sort of become lucid. I have interesting dreams within dreams that take on an almost Ghost in the Shell quality. I have dreams where I'm multiple people at once, where I become different people, where I see from different viewpoints, etc.
Transition plays a huge part in my dreams. Death as transition in notebook 8 is powerful, in the sense that there's this dynamic of death and resurrection. It seems like I'm recognizing my old self dying and a new self being born. In this notebook, however, it seems like the death as transition plays itself out a lot more in terms of suicide. I'm not often, or ever, the one to commit suicide in these dreams. Instead, someone else is committing suicide or dying by an accidental death that almost seems suicidal. So I think it shows the death as transition element in my dreams, but with a lot of uncertainty as to what happens on the other side of the transition.
At the same time, there are dreams where there is an answer to this question. I have a few long "journey" dreams in this notebook. In one of these dreams I keep going down and down and down into this huge, cavernous space which is supposed to be a subway station. I keep wondering how long I'm supposed to go down for, and how hard it will be for me to go back up. But then I end up outside, at my journey's goal, and I realize that this was the path I was supposed to take.
I also found it interesting in notebook 8 how I was constantly telling myself that certain things in my dream "meant something." I don't see this as much in this notebook as I do in notebook 8. But where I do see it, I see it occurring in different ways. So, for instance, I ponder the meaning of a sign for almost an entire dream. I'm not analyzing the sign as a symbol for the dream as much as I'm analyzing the meaning of the sign as a symbol in itself, which, then interpreted, leads me to reflect on my life. But there is still a consciousness of meaning in the dream.
There are also moments when I question what something means. It seems so strange to me that I ask what it means. Again, in notebook 8, I point things out and say they mean something. In these cases, I ask what things mean. So there's a difference. But there's still that search for meaning.
I think, just as I mention in notebook 8, that, while I'm starting to try to find meaning or analyze meaning within my dreams, I'm also creating spaces within my dreams. In this notebook I think that drive shows itself in some dreams where I see myself as an artist, as a creative person. In one dream in particular, I see a blank canvas before me and try to imagine the painting that's supposed to be on that canvas into existence.
Some dream images that stand out a lot in this dream are birds -- some really strange birds sometimes -- and also some birds that morph into other things. In one of these dreams, a bird like an eagle becomes a phoenix, which then becomes a helicopter formed to look like a giant phoenix, inside of which is a casino -- i.e. a place where I can take my chances in order to get rid of my financial problems.
Ants also play a prominent and frightening role in a lot of my dreams. They kind of do things all the time to dissolve my psyche, dissolve my personality, etc. There's one interesting dream where ants start to play that role, and then tarantula hawks -- i.e. ant-like wasps with the name of a bird, finish off the process the ants started.
Drugs play a big role in some of these dreams. Hopefully I'll also get into drug imagery in some of my earlier notebooks. Even though I've done very few drugs in my life, even marijuana, drugs have played a huge role in my life -- destroying, or at least putting some significant roadblocks in the way of the lives of some people very close to me.
Explosives and explosions also play a huge part in some of these dreams. Also oxygen, the lack of oxygen, and suffocation play a big role in some of these dreams. And oxygen imagery continues to play a role in my dreams. And I would say that buses play a prominent role in my dreams, and that the role buses play in these dreams eventually gets taken over in later dreams by aircraft -- fighter jets and UFOs in particular.
The last thing I wanted to discuss for this dream notebook is -- absence. A lot of my mental life is consumed by guilt. Mainly I feel guilty over neglecting my family and friends, my responsibilities, and myself. I also feel a lot of regret in my life, for things that could have been, for things I should have done, and for who I wish I'd been. And I feel a lot of pain in my life because of absence -- either the absence of people who willingly stayed apart from my family life -- like my biological father and then my stepfather -- or the absence of people who left my life but whom I could, through friendship, have brought back into my life, like my friends Y and KB.
I know a lot of people say we should live our lives with "no regrets." "No regrets" is a huge slogan. But regret -- absence -- is what I find so interesting, driving, and defining in my dream life. As Sartre says, being is intertwined with nothingness. Definition is, in my opinion, a matter of absence. The creative element of life depends on the absence of the things created in reality. So, even though I do wish I had nothing to regret in my life, I don't worry about the fact that regret, absence, etc., is what drives a lot of my creative life, dream life, etc.
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