(Entered in paper journal at 4 AM at home in Albuquerque.)
Dream 1
Man with split personality. 120 seconds/100 minutes, brushing leafs off bed.
Dream 2
M (? -- not sure who this could be) tells me to go to corner, gives me partial ride home, streets get weird, I go to ice cream store, piss off girl, fly over flowers.
Dream 3
Drive in car with Mom, brother, and sisters. CD disagreements. Ninja, XXXXX (Redman?), Gay Male. Sister said, How is he successful with that name? I say, I don't know -- Eminem did it. Mom starts to cry. Tell brother to support her. I know not even to touch her.
***
(Daytime paper journal entries.)
I kind of don't even want to write down my dreams today. I left the Ghost Book at home on accident and now feel like Dumbo without a feather. Ha! Emily Dickinson says hope is a thing with feathers, and Dumbo's flying fetish was a feather.
Anyhow, three of my dreams from last night were written in brief (finally!) form there. I can remember two of those three without the Ghost Book and probably would remember the third (actually first) if I could just see the first few words in the Ghost Book. I'll write these "unwritten" ones down first, and if I have time tonight I'll write a fuller account of the first dreams.
Dream 4
I'm not exactly sure where I was. It was strangely like an Asian temple, though it was lit with yellow light, like incandescent light. I think the floors were large stone slabs and the walls were thick plaster (?) with thick, dark, wood columns. The room was tall, empty, and wide. And yet it wasn't a temple. It was something more like an office complex or a place like a business product demo area.
I, with some other workers, had finally cleared everybody out of the place. But for some reason I had to go outside to clear people out of the building as well (?). It was early evening, the light being dark, dim, cobalt blue-grey.
I walked out onto a wide, carved stone patio. At the end of the patio was a four-walled structure of tarp-like fabric supported by aluminum poles. In front of me a wall section had a split which I could fold open to enter the structure. I did so.
Inside was something like a giant. At first I didn't quite understand what it was. It was twenty feet tall -- or at least I "knew" this thing was twenty feet tall. It seemed to be made out of soft, shiny, silky, thin material. It looked like baggy, hoody, male blue jeans, an orange shirt of the same hoody bagginess, and a large, puffy, black afro on top. It was in the far right corner, wandering aimlessly and about to turn toward me.
(HA! just remembered first dream!)
I dropped the fold of fabric and stood back outside the structure. I tried to understand what I was seeing. Obviously it was a man on stilts, right? Just a man with a huge costume around him. But, I tried to assure myself, I'd see that his head was just the same size as mine if I were to look at him again.
I pulled up the fold again and saw the thing now walking toward me. It looked like a large person, not a person, but a living doll of a stereotype of a black man, actually more like a gigantic version of that stupid puny doll in those dumb-ass Sprite ads they used to show before the movies in the theaters.
I saw it, but I also couldn't quite see it. Not that it wasn't there or that it was transparent or translucent or ghostly. Instead, I looked and didn't look, or, ratherm I looked and was so freaked out by seeing a living, twenty-foot-tall humanoid that I couldn't quite "admit" that I saw it.
As it came closer to me my feeling of dread became greater. At last I dropped the fold and ran back into the building, yelling, "ML! ML!"
This time I had to run through two sets of glass doors. ML now came up to me. I told him what I had seen in the structure. He walked out with me to see.
Now twenty people were scattered around in the large area. They were all black, guys and girls, about my age, all in a good mood. They told ML, "We're a bunch of acrobats." (?) "We dress up in these costumes. It's meant to scare people. But they shouldn't act scared. You gotta be pretty cowardly not to see through the illusion."
Now ML and I were helping the folks with something. Now the setting changed. But we were still helping.
We were in a bedroom in a basement. It was a nice, upper-middle-class bedroom, but cluttered and disordered. The walls were lined in dark wood at portions. And in the wood lining things came out like headlights and small cylinders with glass faces and needles against numbered circles, like instruments used to measure humidity or air pressure. But mostly it was the headlights. An Hispanic girl stood up with her back to a corner and faced a column of those headlights.
ML and I knelt to the floor, picking up piles of clothes and junk. As ML stood up to take his load away the girls said, "Well, you may think it's an impossibility, Preemie. But I've read the medical books, and they say that the human body does have an organic system that can support a growth of up to twenty feet."
I felt bad and stupid for having thought that was an impossibility, but I also felt even worse now for having been such a coward in my encounter with the giant.
Now none of us was wearing pants. The Hispanic girl was gone, but there were now two black girls. ML wore plain underwear. I wore white cotton panties, which fit me so loosely they were like an old man's briefs. One girl, young, wore navy blue panties with pink horizontal stripes. Another girl, about my age, wore stonewashed-like, denim-like panties.
The younger girl was thin and pretty. I honestly couldn't tell her age. She may have been seventeen, she may have been twelve. But I liked her a lot. But she liked ML, I was pretty sure. Not that ML would have done anything with her, as he respected the fact that she was a minor.
Now they both walked out of the room, up a dark, short hallway, up a small flight of stairs, and up a long, dark hallway. As they did I followed the girl. Her bottom was so tight and nice and her legs and back so thin, even through her dark blue sweater, that I wanted her in quite an animal way.
I told the girl at some point, "Your panties are cute." But she didn't hear me. It was like I wasn't quite in the same place as she and ML. Now I realized if either ML or the girl saw how I lusted after the girl they'd think and talk badly about me, if not actually turn me into the authorities for being sexually attracted to a minor.
So I quickly turned around and rushed back to the basement bedroom, to the girl who was my age. She was fattish, not too pretty, and a little dull. Her panties hung as loosely to her body as mine did to mine. She was at a tall dresser, playing with some clothes in one of the top drawers. She turned to me and asked me something, but I really have no idea what it was. I had lost all sexual desire and now sat on the floor, not paying attention to much of anything.
Dream 5
I was in a grey, small, old-timey office, like an office you'd see in a 1980s version of a 1950s-style detective movie. I don't know if I was there, but I saw the door of the office, as if I were inside. The door had one of those translucent windows of jangled plastic that distorted everything and made it all misty and vague, just watery shapes and color and movement.
"Someone" said, "He'll be coming in here to make the delivery. When he does, XXXXX." (Something like, "Don't let him in?") "He's XXXXX." (Green, mottled, deformed, XXXXX.) This series of adjectives was used regularly, like a cliche, to describe this certain kind of deformed person. I was slightly afraid to see the person.
Now the person came quickly toward the door. He wore a beautiful business suit, purplish grey and blue, I think. But his entire body, including his face, was, I could see, even through the door-window's distorting plastic, as if it cleared its wrinkles (yet kept its fogginess) just for him, wrinkled and mottled and bent and deformed, as if the man had been through a horrible, flaying fire. The man only had a tuft of hair on his sloping head. His eyes, though almost unseen for the shadow of his brow, were bright green.
The man sensed as he stood by the door that I in my terrible fright was chanting to myself the cliched string of adjectives. His whole face filled with an awful anguish. He stepped backward about thirty feet, to an elevator bank. I could see all of this clearly, as if seeing through the door. He fell back and half sat, crumpled in depression.
He now burst out moans through pursed lips, as if trying to stop a flood of complete, unstoppable despair. I thought to myself, How can anybody ever help him?
And now, two more of these deformed men came rushing down the hallway. They wore green jumpsuits, like they were movers or people who brought refrigerators to houses. In fact they had come to bring some equipment to this floor.
Seeing the other man moaning by the elevator bank, the men stopped their cheerful conversation. They immediately knew what had happened. They both bolted toward my door.
One of them, in a beautiful, clear, manly voice, shouted out the cliched string of adjectives and said, "You wanna call people that, eh? You think it's fun to hurt people that way, do you? Well some of us won't take it!"
And with that they bolted through the door.
Dream 6
I grabbed my phone off the dresser. It was plugged into the charger. I pulled the cord out of the wall. The phone made a dismal, low-toned beep. I looked at the LCD screen. It said "Charge Failed." I plugged the cord back in. The LCD screen lit up for a second, then low-toned again, went off, and said "Charge Failed."
I thought to myself, Christ. I cannot have this cord fail me now, now that I'm heading back to New York City tomorrow. I need the phone to be fully charged for my train trip.
Dream 1
I was in a place like a workshop. It was dim, kind of old-looking, like a wood carver's shop. There were a few old men at some counters like science lab counters. There were also beds everywhere. The old men were like mild-mannered mechanics or electricians. They kind of exchanged some rude jokes with each other, but basically were rather kind, though always cheerful.
Every once in a while some young men and women would show up. The old men kind of regarded me suspiciously, as if they sensed that I thought myself better than they.
At one point an old man came in. He was one of the regulars. But he wasn't quite sane. At first he spoke in a weird voice, high-pitched, almost like a male trying to sound female, but crackly, like he had a scorched, wrecked throat. I could sense he thought he was a female.
I looked to see him: a tallish, bellied, balding, wrinkly man, in a wide, pale blue, button-down sports shirt with two wide, white vertical stripes and a pair of pale, loose, denim slacks.
I was unsettled by this man. Even his wide, watery, blue eyes seemed masculine. But he so violently thought that he was feminine.
The old men all chuckled among themselves as they watched my reaction to the man. They said of me, "Look at him now. He's afraid of one of our best friends."
The man sat on a bed beside the two beds (right together) that I sat on. He continued speaking in the high voice and then suddenly spoke regularly.
Now one of the old men indirectly let me know, "Our friend has a split personality. He can't control it. But it doesn't mess things up for him, and it makes neither him nor us uncomfortable."
But they all, sensing my discomfort, decided to tease me anyway. The man even pretended to be the high-voiced personality again, just to upset me. But I ignored him. There were some dried leafs on my bed. I worried about them and brushed them as well as I could into the minuscule crack between the two beds.
But now the man became quite serious (I can't remember why). He said, "Isn't it interesting how one hundred seconds can seem like one hundred twenty minutes when you reflect upon it a while later?"
I understood this, somehow, to be a schizophrenic kind of statement. But I also felt a degree of truth to it, which matched my own personal experience. I told him something of my own experience, to let him know I agreed. But I wasn't quite telling him. I was kind of telling someone like my friend R, who stood a ways away, knowing that "R" seemed to have much better communication with this old man.
Dream 2
I really can't remember the beginning. But I was now getting a ride home from the Balloon Fiesta. It had been my second night of work. My co-worker M and her husband were going to drive me home.
But somehow the streets all got messed up. They seemed to curve around and shift their curves even as we drove on them, like they were snakes. Now even the fences grew up out of the ground, restricting our movements and leading us into dark alleys.
Thinking it would make things easier, I just had M and her husband drop me off on the roadside. Apparently this was San Mateo. They drove off.
I walked through a tangled area of old fence and up some ditch-like hill and across a street to a very small yet classy strip mall. the only store open this late at night was an ice cream store.
I don't know for sure but I think that even though I didn't see them, M and her husband were also in the store. I was afraid at first to go in because I didn't want them to see me and think that I just hadn't wanted to ride with them. But I went in anyway.
The place was a mess, not dirty, but filled with counters, machinery, and all kinds of store items and food. I went to a bar that had trays of ice cream and ginger snap cookies. This was the free samples bar. I was so hungry from not having eaten all day that I took a free sample of a ginger snap cookie and some white ice cream with mini M&Ms in it. The ice cream might have been colored a cinnamon-tan.
As I walked out the door a lady behind the counter said, "Aren't you going to buy something?" I said, "No. I just came in for a free sample. I was just a little hungry." I could hear her disgust.
I walked outside, down a small lawn, and onto a parking lot, thinking, Well, crap! I've bought things here before, haven't I? So why does she think I'm a cheapskate?
Dream 3
Don't remember beginning. It was daytime. I was in a car with my mom, brother, and sister. I don't know or remember where we were. But it was pretty much like downtown Denver and Albuquerque rolled into one. The buildings were all a pale, soothing, tan concrete or stucco.
My mom drove along. At some point we stopped. My mom was upset. She got out of the car. My sister showed me two checks our dad had given her. My mom was upset about this. There had been some argument, in which my sister had made my mom feel pretty stupid, in the car.
We were now on our way to the movie theater. My mom, to calm down, put some music on. She asked me if I liked it.
Annoyed beyond belief, I yelled, "No! It sucks! Take this shit off!" She did. I could tell my mom had now been pushed too far. She was hideously depressed but terribly silent.
We drove (along a sidewalk?, like the concrete path in between the De Vargas Center shopping mall proper and the Albertsons in Santa Fe, even with the stucco arch between the two buildings, although the place felt classier and more full of shops, all of which were trendy).
As we drove I asked my sister what kind of music she liked. I asked her about a particular style or group, which I can't remember now.
She said, "Oh, no, I can't stand that. But I like rap, like XXXXX, XXXXX," (Redman?) "and Gay Male." (?) "Gay Male's pretty cool. But I always wondered, how is he so successful with a name like that?"
I said, jokingly, thought I didn't exactly know why it was a joke, "Well, Eminem didn't name himself Gay Male, but he certainly did the Gay Male thing for a while, and he was incredibly successful." My sister laughed.
We were all now, somehow, walking along the concrete path, the left (i.e. "Albertsons") side of which was actually a movie theater, like the Century Rio, with poster cases, all of which were jet black and glossy, solid, with no posters inside, apparently.
We came to a little niche in the wall. My mom crumpled against it. we were right by the glass doors into the theater. My mom was trembling, about to burst into tears.
My sister said, "Oh, God, I knew Mom was upset about these checks. But she was just holding it all in. I hate seeing this."
My mom squinted her eyes till they were pools of black shadow, and opened her mouth narrowly to match the watery anguish in her eyes. Her breath quivered, trembled, heaved, shook. She clenched her fists and her arm trembled stiffly.
Finally it all shook loose. She bellowed to my brother, "Please. Stand in front of me. Be strong for me. Don't leave me. I'm about to collapse. Please. Grow up for me and be stable for me. Everybody else has -- !"
She now melted into profuse tears. My brother stood in front of her. He held her.
I walked up to my mom. I wanted to touch her, even just touch her right arm, to let her know I loved her. But I knew that what I had done to her was so bad that if I even touched her she would fall apart and act violently toward me.
So I just stood there. And yet, even as I stood there feeling hideous, I also felt like this was just a desperate ploy by my mother to keep me here at home instead of going back to XXXXX.
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