(2/23/05) testing grandfather's cancer medicine; bigfoot-man super-sizes it

(Entered in paper journal at 5:45 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I, one of my NYC Americorps coworkers (possibly MG), and one other male were all with my grandfather on the edge of some park in early fall. The park seemed to slope down from a high point to a wide field very evenly set and well manicured. The whole scene was bordered in massive, shady trees, and the lawn was flecked with yellow, orange, and red. At the beginning the slope was on the wide north end of the park. Then at some point it was on the wide south end.

We young men were there as guinea pigs to test my grandpa's new cancer medication. The medication was, as I can see now, a huge, white pill, not at all able to be swallowed, maybe as large as a hand, with a sweet, powdery external feeling. This pill would have all the same burning and sickening effects of intravenous chemotherapy, but it would not have those effects, and thus my grandpa was interested in it.

I was afraid to take the cancer medicine. But I didn't show my fear, because I figured we were doing something good for my grandpa. I also didn't want to show my fear because I didn't see any fear in MG's or XXXXX's face.

We had to take the pill and then eat medicine that basically looked like a hollow, synthesized version of a healthy brown bag lunch. We were then to go down onto the field and compete against each other in track and field-like events. We were testing if the medicine a) made us nauseous, b) affected our ability to perform up to our current athletic standard, and/or c) affected our ability to compete against each other wholeheartedly.

We were now on the field. The events skipped over the pill-taking. Then they skip-reversed to before the pill-taking. Then they skipped to some other moment where we stood in front of my grandpa. I was trying to figure out what point this was and if  had to go through the nerve-wracking medicine-taking and competitions again.

Now my grandpa may have said he had decided not to take the medicine after all.

Dream 2

I stood either with my friend PD or my friend and NYC Americorps crew mate KB at night at the edge of a chain link fence that bordered either a park or a vacant lot. I think it was a park because it feels like a small creek ran through it.

At the far end of this land was a man walking with a hamburger in his hand. The hamburger was wrapped in a fast-food joint's square wax-paper wrapper. The man walked with an uncanny floppiness, like in the videos purportedly capturing a view of Bigfoot. He also didn't seem  to have much of a head -- just a tiny, floating, black dot.

KB said, "Ah... there's someone who's obviously been super-sizing it." By this KB meant the man was obese. But I didn't think the man was obese.

But as the man got closer and closer, he appeared taller and fatter. He wore an untucked, maroon shirt with a white t-shirt underneath and either khaki pants or jeans.

(4/24/05) grandfather and airport; a little joke about hoes like her

(Entered in paper journal at 7:10 PM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I was in a living room with my mom and sister. It was small and cluttered, like an apartment living room, with brown and tan shag carpet. Yellow, sticky light came in through the windows. I sat almost cross-legged on the floor. My sister (?) sat in front of me while my mom (?) sat to my left on a couch.

We all spoke about going to visit my grandfather. I thought that would be a fun visit. But suddenly I remembered I had to catch my flight back to New York. I'd incorrectly remembered my departure hour.

I interrupted the conversation and said, "Could one of you drive me to the airport? Do you think we could get there by 8:00?"

My mom said yes, though she was a little taken aback. I produced my trip itinerary, which had all the flight times highlighted. My departure time was 9:20.

Dream 2

I was with a group of friends or some fellow classmates. We had been doing some strange project involving a vat of boiling frying grease. Now one of my friends had a mannequin. My friend was black, young, a bit fat, with a round, smart aleck expression, and dressed like a chef. The mannequin was headless, female shaped, white, slender, wearing a white satin and lace teddy.

My friend said, "So that VT's" (my crew mate) "got you down? Well, here's a little joke about hoes like her. They let themselves get dipped in too many times and..."

He dipped the mannequin into the vat of frying grease all the way up to its bellybutton and pulled back up. The legs were pretty much gone. But I couldn't see that: my friend had lifted a black, plastic bag up with the mannequin. The bag was around the mannequin's waist, covering whatever remained of the legs.

I did think the joke was a little satisfying. But I didn't dislike VT so much that I'd want something like that to happen to her. And I didn't want to stand for her being so insulted. So I just said, "Whatever," an turned away, walking into a room which people sat in like in a waiting room.

All the chairs were lined along the walls, but some groups of people had turned in their chairs to sit around TV dinner-style folding tables with trays with flowers in them. I walked to the one on the back wall. One person  had a flower in his lap. It was a yellow marigold. It had a little title card, like a green 3 x 5 card with a stake-point going into the soil.

The printed card read:

Pot Marigold

Kot (XXXXX) "Ninja" Ninjaiensis

I can't remember what word was in the parentheses. 

(11/1/06) one of the most beautiful of all places; lying to prove innocence; moldy feet; clean dirty face

(Entered in paper journal at 5:34 PM on Q-train from 57th Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan to Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in an airport. I was supposed to pick up luggage which my maternal grandfather had sent. I would send the luggage to him so he could go on a flight. The pickup room was wide, small, grey, with grey carpet and full of folding tables. It was busy, but I didn't have to stand in line.

The worker (behind a folding table) gave me three bags. He said, "So I see your grandfather is going to XXXXX." (Czechoslovakia? The Czech Republic?)

I was surprised by this. I said, "It couldn't be."

I looked at the tags on my grandpa's luggage. Each tag named a place my grandpa had been approved to go to. One piece had a tag saying Russia. Another had a tag saying Prague. The one in the middle had a tag saying, "One of the most beautiful of all places." I was happy that my grandpa got to go there. I also thought when I saw the Prague sticker, Well, there you are -- XXXXX (the Czech Republic?) after all.

The worker told me, "It seems like you waited too long for this -- look at the dates."

One of the tags had my grandpa approved for travel for November 22nd. I realized that it wa November 23rd or that I wouldn't be able to get the bag to my grandpa until November 23rd.

I was in a large area or hallway full of restaurant tables. A wide window showed a few airplanes. I fell backwards, possibly over a seat, full of grief that I had missed the shipment date for my grandpa's luggage. I thought, There still has to be a way he can go.

Dream 2

Somebody at work had done something bad. The only or the key way to prove it was by using my acquaintance with my co-worker AB as evidence. So AB and I had to act like we didn't know each other.

We were in a big, empty room like a classroom, with hard, concrete floors and a bleachers-style stepping up of concrete towards the back wall. I sat on the steps.

Our department director JS walked in to investigate. AB came up and introduced herself to me as if we had met for the first time. When she did this, JS was satisfied. She walked out, excusing whatever bad thing had been done.

Dream 3

I got out of the show and saw my ankles were covered in a dark, dull, pine-green mold. I couldn't believe it. I looked again. A lot of places on my feet were patched with quarter-sized spots of this mold. I wondered how I could let myself get so dirty.

Dream 4

I sat on a weird, tall couch with my co-worker FA. I was flirting with her. She was going to let me seduce her. But when I looked at her again, her face was somehow very dirty -- it was like she had acne, but the acne wasn't really there. Her face wasn't dirty -- but it was.

(1/12/08) lesbian doll sex; seduced by old friends; steamhippie

(Entered in paper journal at 8:45 AM at Flying Saucer cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a helicopter or watching a man in a helicopter. He was talking about how he was flying a plane. The helicopter was very small, maybe the size of a VW Beetle. When the man got to a certain height he said he would now make his descent.

I now saw from the man's point of view. I had wondered how something was filming (or taping) him from the air. Now I "saw" (where?) a jet of some sort, which I assumed was the vehicle on which the camera was positioned.

I now saw as if I were piloting the helicopter. I was descending much more quickly than I thought a helicopter should descend. I descended over a green field which seemed also to have some construction activity on it. I knew I was going to crash. The helicopter crashed.

I stood before a bus bench on a gritty city sidewalk. The helicopter was crashed, lodged between the bench and a small tree. The helicopter was like an oversize toy, maybe a couple feet wide and a few feet long. Its blades were stubby. They were still spinning around, stutteringly. The helicopter, which had been white, was now charcoaled over with smoke and burns.

My family stood behind me, talking. It was my grandfather, my mother, my great grandmother, and a couple other people. I knelt before a reddish-pink, velvety armchair that stood out on the sidewalk.

There were two dolls. They were crudely made, like third-rate Barbie dolls with almost Raggedy-Ann type heads.They had no clothes on. The doll on the left had no limbs.

I wanted to imagine the dolls as lesbians. I wanted to see them having a lesbian relationship. Bu I didn't want to move them with my own hands -- it seemed like that would make them "not really lesbians."

But then I noticed that the doll with limbs was geared. It could make simple movements if switched on or wound up. I may possibly have wound the doll up by spinning a white, toothed wheel which stuck out of its back, saw-wheel-style. It now rolled its head right and forward, as well as possibly shifting its whole body onto its right side and then back onto its back.

I sat the limbed doll right next to the limbless doll and propped the limbless doll on its left side. In this way, it looked like the limbed doll was purposely kissing the limbless doll and then moving its body up against the limbless doll's body. I was turned on by this.

My family was all heading into a building just off from the sidewalk. They got my attention so I could leave, too. My nephews were there, too. I realized these toys might have belonged to one of my nephews. I felt bad for having played such an obscene game with the toys.

As my grandfather walked past me he saw the toys in their movement. He suspected I had made the toys make these movements, but he wasn't sure. He looked at me with a slight disgust. I felt even worse than I had before. I tried to think how I could cover my act.

I walked toward the doorway. It was like a doorless entry, very small, like for a bedroom doorway. It was set in a kind of rundown building. The inside was, by my view from the outside, very dark. I could hardly see my family members once they entered.

Dream #2

I was in a large, dim bedroom with my old friend R and his fiancee L. We might have finished watching a movie on TV. I lay on one bed and R and L lay on another.

We were now getting ready for bed. I felt very tired and grainy-eyed. R got out of bed to turn something (the TV?) off at the other end of the room.

L sat up, kneeling in a way so her knees faced me. She wore a red, shimmery camisole or dress that looked too dressy for being pajamas. She had it pulled up enough on her legs so I could see the crotch of her panties, which were lavender and satiny. She looked at me to let me know she had let me see her panties on purpose.

When that didn't turn me on enough to make me go for her, L lay stomach-down on the bed, facing away from me and toward R. She pulled her "dress" up so that her whole bottom was exposed to me.

I knew L was trying to seduce me, and I was turned on. But I didn't really want to be with L. I also knew that if I was with L, I'd have to be with R, too. I didn't want that.

It was now like we all lay on the same bed. This is the way it had to be when I spent the night. The lights were probably all off. I lay on the left side of the bed, my head to the head of the bed. R and L lay with their heads to the foot of the bed, to my right. R lay next to me, and L to R.

I could tell that R was trying to seduce me. R thought that if I lay in the same bed as he, he still had a chance at seducing me. But I did my best to stay laying opposite R and L and to avoid touching them as much as possible.

Now I lay with my body entirely against the headboard. Something seemed very strange about the bed. It was like R and L were coiled around each other in an elliptical hollow on the bottom half of the bed. (The image in my head now reminds me texturally of the "Thou affrightest me with dreams" drawing in Blake's Job series.)

Dream #3

I sat near a booth-like shop on a small chunk of sidewalk (like Astor Place) in a downtown-like area. It was a sunny, but possibly cold, day. I sat on a bunch of blankets. I may possibly also have been covered in blankets. I was very bleary-eyed.

The shop-booth, to my right, was hung with random (motley) fabrics, which gave it a rundown, but very warm, look. There might have been steam coming from outside the shop, which made sitting outside it very pleasant in the cold weather.

I was, or was suspected of being, either a crackhead bum or an undercover cop posing as a crackhead bum. I may alternately have been myself and a young, black man. To my left, in the sunny street, was a big van, which might have been a police van. I tried not to appear to be associated with the van. I looked back behind my head. There was a tall building of green, reflective glass.

At first there was some shady activity going on between two black people in front of the motley shop. I tried not to pay attention to it. Now a black man, kind of strange-looking, like a hippie wearing a biker jacket, was asking something to the people in the shop, who were Chinese. The man produced a camera from his pocket. I understood the man just wanted someone to take a photo of him in front of this shop.

The man turned first to hand his camera to an Asian man or woman, who sat, like me, in front of the shop, covered in blankets. The Asian person was fattish, slightly worn out, with thickly scraggly hair. He/she wore a black biker jacket. But he/she could hardly hold the camera, let alone snap a photo: his/her fingernails were long and curled so that his/her hands were pretty much useless.

The man handed the camera to someone else, maybe to me. The person took a digital photo of the man bending over some kind of product, behind strips of curtain-fabric hung with globes. Steam might have been coming up around his face. The man wore a bandanna which I thought was mystical. He posed as if he were smelling and enjoying the steam.

The picture had been taken. I saw the image on the camera-back's screen. Seeing the photos, and how the man obviously took this experience to be so mystical and important, I really liked the man. I didn't want to get too close to the man, still, because I was pretty sure if I showed too much of my personality. I maintained a servile attitude toward the man.

I now saw one of my nephews, possibly my oldest nephew, but maybe from when he was five years old. He sat on the blanket by me. I thought, I need to act stronger in front of my nephew. I need to make him feel secure. So I did my best to act as cheerful and confident as possible.

(1/20/08) art-books-feces; psychology: earth, cults, flying saucers

(Entered in paper journal at 8:28 AM at Flying Saucer cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was with my grandfather and a couple other family members in a room, like a small museum. I was looking out the window. The scenery outside was moving, like I was in a car. The scenery was like a cemetery. My family members and I were talking about how the exhibit we had seen was disappointing because it didn't employ the principles of recycling. Because of this, we argued, the exhibit lacked feeling.

We "passed" a hill that looked cut-away or sectioned so we could see the roots of the grass and a nearby tree. Something like a red glob or ball rolled along the hill, then merged into the ground. This, my grandfather said, was the one work of art he liked, because it employed the principles of recycling. The ball reappeared from the sectioned area of the hill and rolled down the slope and across the road, as if it were willfully coming toward the building, and toward me in particular.

We all looked away from the window. My grandfather said we were getting ready to leave. I now sat on a tall chair like a swivel chair that was as tall as a library or ladder, with rollers or wheels at the bottom. The room was warm and warm-colored.  In the corner of the room sat an old man who looked like the old version of the Tim Roth character in Youth Without Youth. He was like the curator of the museum.

The room was small but very elegant, modern. It was understated, except that on the walls were all kinds of art works and artifacts. A lot of them had the appearance of geode slices: the glassy, ringed, vivid-colored look. There were also a couple of tall, thin bookshelves along the walls.

Everybody else had pretty much left. I was following them. But I had to linger to see some of the items on the wall. There was something about their ordering which didn't seem completely satisfactory. But the pieces themselves were quite beautiful. Nevertheless, I felt bad liking the pieces because my grandfather had just commented how the pieces had no artistic quality.

I was still moving through the room on the tall chair. I went out the door, which was apparently tall enough to allow the tall chair through! I turned back before closing the door. I told the man in the corner of the room, "Goodbye, and thank you, Dr. Neuman." The man might have been reading a book. He waved very slightly, but kindly.

The door closed as I thought, Is that man's name really Neuman? I now saw a green and brass (?) nameplate on the door that said "Dr. Ed Neuman." I rolled (on the tall chair) down a ramping hallway to catch upp with my family.

I was now in a basement with my mother. I was standing on the floor, no longer sitting in the tall chair. My mom and I were heading toward a front door, but we were waiting for one or two more members of our family to catch up with us. In the meantime we were picking up and reorganizing a bunch of books that were on the floor.

I held some one-word-titled book by Mario Puzo. The cover was black, Puzo's name was lettered white, and the title (beginning with the letter "c"?) was lettered red.

My mom and I were talking about my grandfather, who sat upstairs, as if he were now sitting in Neuman's place. My grandpa was too sick and tired to see us out of the building, but he had been very happy to see us. After seeing us, he even felt like he had more energy.

My mom said, "We should tease him and tell him that if he has so much energy he should come down here and help us rearrange these books! No, I'm just kidding. We don't want him to feel bad or obliged. If he did come down here, the physical work would really hurt him."

I sat on a couch piled with books. Before me were books. I held a book in my hand. My mom may still have been talking. I looked at the book's binding. The top gave the last name of the author: Ligasa or Lisaga.

A band below the name showed a painting of a woman like Liberty in Delacroix's painting of the French Revolution. The woman was charging forward and carrying a flag. But she was looking backward, as if calling the troops, instead of looking forward like in the painting.

I looked at the back of the book, mainly because I somehow caught the name "Freud" on the back or the binding of the book. Apparently the book was by a Latin American author, and was thus acclaimed. The description of the book went something like, "A Native American is wounded in the war" (World War I?) "and looks back on his life. The works of Sigmund Freud have put forward the idea that a person's experiences of his past are not linear but move back and forth through different time periods."

A boy who was supposed to be my second oldest nephew sat to my left. He was a black boy, maybe ten or eleven years old. My mom said something like, "He's finally having less trouble going to the bathroom."

My nephew told me, "I go to the bathroom every morning. I know the pieces of poop when they come out of me. I even know their names. But I'm not like other people. I know their names before they come out of me. I meet them at night. I see them, and I know what shape they'll be. I tell them, 'XXXXX, you aren't going to stay in me! You are going to get out!'"

I could tell my nephew was afraid about having to do this, but that he was proud that he was able to do it. He seemed to need urgently to tell me about this.

We all headed out into a hallway which (now) led to the front door. The hall was white, perhaps with marble floors and walls and a red carpet.

Somewhere there might have been a weird, futuristic-looking altar-type structure, very tall, made out of an aluminum-like substance. The legs were tin rods that supported a wide "bowl" topped with a flat disk that had a hole in its center. This "bowl" was filled with my nephew's feces, as if each piece he had gotten rid of were saved here and treated as sacred.

Dream #2

I was looking through a list of courses to take at a college like a community college. There was a specific philosophy class I wanted to take because it seemed to discuss issues I had currently been involving myself in. But I saw that there was a prerequisite course to this course. I thought, Why should I have to take a prerequisite? I'm not taking this class to get a degree. I'm just interested.

But I looked at the prerequisite course anyway. It was called "Psychology: Earth." It was a short course and was done by video. I now saw that after this course I'd have to take even another course before I could take the philosophy course I'd wanted. This other prerequisite course was called "Psychology: Cults and Flying Saucers." It was also a video course.

(5/25/09) damaged gift; man-eating bug; mexican gunmen; grandpa's dazed spirit

Dream #1

I stood before a large house, like the house my family lived in with my mom's boyfriend when I was nine years old (we called this house the "mansion" because it was bigger than any place we'd lived in before -- or after!). It was either early morning or early evening, and the sky was dark.

I walked into the house. I stood in a dark room just inside the doorway. The room was shallow, but wide, almost like a "covered porch" might be. The room opened to what looked like a small, run-down kitchen or dining room or pantry area. A light was on in the kitchen. The entry room had no light. It was very dark, as if the kitchen's light couldn't even penetrate the room.

I stood on or just behind the threshold between rooms. To my left was a wall, behind which I may have half-hidden. My old co-worker JR stood in the kitchen. I held up a bench, which I was giving to someone from the job I'd just gotten let go from as a gift. When I showed it to JR, he just chuckled to himself, as if I was silly to think I could give something like that as a gift. The sentiment, JR implied, was so half-hearted.

I took a look at the bench. It was about six feet long. It looked like it was made out of material that would usually go into making a cheap office desk: veneered plyboard, chromed metal, and some thin, black metal or plastic for legs.

But now I noticed (I held the bench upside-down and diagonally, so that an end was near my head) that the right leg of the bench (the end near my face) was missing. I realized I was about to give someone a broken bench as a gift. I also felt like I was in trouble: JR would definitely spread a bad word about me because of what I'd done.

I walked away from the kitchen (and possibly out of the house altogether). I thought of giving another co-worker, BT, a call on my cellphone, to put in a few kind words and show myself as being a good person, in hopes that my own good words could buffer opinion against the words of bad opinion that JR, I feared, would soon be sending out.

Dream #2

I was in an office with a man and a woman. The man was in a managerial position. The woman and I were about on the same level professionally. We all stood in a thin hallway. All around us were walls the bottom half of which were wall and the top half of which were window-walls, opening to views of "offices."

The views may sometimes have been of areas like manufacturing areas or loading areas. The areas looked empty, porbably shut down, as if the working shifts were through for the day.

The man then pointed out a couple "offices" which were more like strange areas full of canisters with no lids. The tops of the canisters were covered with a white, thin, softish, plastic material, under which things, which were apparently alive, were moving, like piles of worms. Either the man said or I understood that the things in these canisters would probably devour a human being if one fell into their environment.

The three of us stepped outside the office building, almost unintentionally, as if the momentum of our movement down the small hallway couldn't be stopped. We stood outside, by a fire escape door, on  wooden landing at the top of a wooden staircase. It was night.

As if realizing that we had come outside, we walked back into the building through the door, which was still open. The man walked far ahead of the woman and me. The woman walked a few steps ahead of me.

I looked into another "office." This was also a storage area of canisters. The canisters in this room had no lids or tops at all. There were organisms in these canisters like snake-sized meal worms. They had a brownish-red color, very dry and rough looking.

I was slightly disappointed. I thought that being eaten by these organisms would be far less "smooth" (and, thus, far less enjoyable) than being eaten by the organisms under the white covers.

But then it occurred to me that the organisms under the white covers might be the same as these organisms, or even, that it was possible  that the canisters with the white tops no longer existed. I thought, Then if one is going to be devoured, it would have to be by these organisms. This seemed awfully disappointing to me.

But, I thought to myself, I probably won't be devoured. The man, I now recalled, had mentioned his disappointment with the woman's job performance. Whoever performed poorly would likely be the one to get eaten. So I assumed the woman would be eaten. I was relieved.

But I also felt bad. How petty of me! I didn't just feel relieved: I felt smugly satisfied to think of the woman being eaten. I even thought, with pleasure, of her falling down into the room of open canisters.

Dream #3

I stood out in an open area. It was a slightly hazy, blue day, with the sun glowing white in the sky. The land was mostly barren, like a dirt parking lot, except with thin patches of small grass and weeds. I walked to the foot of a hill which was all of barren, tan soil. I looked up the hill. Near the crest were a few smallish, sandstone-like rock formations, one of which was like a natural arch.

Two Mexican men stood near the rock formations. Both looked like Indians: they had coppery-tan skin, were shortish and stoutish, and they wore blue jeans and t-shirts. The man on the left stood near the natural arch. He had a squarish face and hair waving down to just below his shoulders. He wore a tight, nicely colored, but faded, purple t-shirt.

I had probably planned to climb the hill. But when the two men noticed me, they sent out a definite signal that they didn't want me around, or even looking at them. They were calm and composed, but something in their body language indicated that they were already harboring violent intentions toward me. I turned and walked away from the hill.

I stood now in an area with a field-office trailer on my left side and a freight trailer or shed-trailer on my right side. A few other people stood around me. They were dumpy-looking, official-looking workers.

The Mexican men on the hill could still see me easily. I knew they were planning on opening fire on me soon. I was trying to get out of their sight, hoping that they would forget about me if I stayed out of sight and out of attention long enough.  I decided to hide behind the shed-trailer, which was now more like a simple wall of thick, corrugated metal, probably painted grey-white.

But as I hid, one of the workers started talking to me. He stood before/beside the shed-trailer, so that he was in plain view of the Mexican men. I thought, His talking like that is only going to keep the Mexican men aware of my presence. Then soon they'll open fire.

But, I thought, relieved, they'd probably open fire on the worker instead of me, just hoping that they'd be able to attack somebody. I felt ashamed about this, but I almost felt a grimy pleasure to think of the worker being shot full of holes instead of me. Finally, I thought, I'd see a sucker get what was due to him.

Dream #4

I stood in a busy room. The room was full of activity, people rushing around, taking care of business.  I was and was not in the room. It was like I was watching a past that someone, or some television show, was telling me about.

The room was tall, with pumpkin-colored walls. There were windows high up on the walls, letting in plenty of grey-white daylight, although incandescent lights also lit the room. The room was a tall, but narrow square. It was probably a room in some kind of TV studio. I stood near one wall. I saw a doorway on the opposite wall and a doorway on the wall to my right. The doorway to my right was possibly ten or twelve feet tall.

 I suddenly saw my maternal grandfather (who, in waking life, had died a little more than six months before this dream). He sat on the shoulders of a very thin, tall man. My grandpa looked like he did before he got cancer. But he was wearing a cowboy hat, which I don't remember him doing very often in waking life.

I "remembered," or heard a narrator say, that my grandfather had been a cast member of some local children's show in Colorado. He did this in addition to being some kind of executive businessman. His work on the TV show was something like a charitable activity. He did it for free. The TV show itself was somehow a means of gathering funds for a charity. Nevertheless, my grandfather was something of a star among the local children who watched the show.

This whole scene had been "shown" to me to not only to prove that my grandfather had been a lot more professionally active than I had known or would acknowledge, but also to illustrate that he was more active in the community, did more things with his free time, cared about people more, and had more artistic ability, than I had ever acknowledged.

My grandfather had a really vacant, smiling look on his face, as if he were blissfully close to being brain dead. I realized my grandpa's role in the show had been that of a gentle, good-natured, stupid clown-villain character. But my grandpa's vacant expression was too genuine. It didn't look like he was acting. It looked like this stupor was his real condition.

As part of the comic act, though none of this was being filmed -- or even on stage! -- the tall man walked through the doorway, and my grandpa, just tall enough, knocked his head softly (although it was supposed to be perceived as a rough bump) against the top of the doorway. The tall man then backed up and gave my grandfather a few seconds to utter his catch phrase, which, I knew, was, "I'll get you yet!"

But my grandpa said the catch phrase very softly and vacantly, half like he was playing a gentle character, but half like he no longer had enough brain power to say anything with any sort of emotion or character. The tall man then walked my grandfather through the door without my grandfather knocking his head against the doorway-top.

I saw my grandfather a few moments later. He was walking back into the room I stood in. He walked with a group of businessmen who were all about his age, i.e. around seventy years old. My grandpa was obviously a part of the group, and he walked within the group. But he wasn't attending to the group at all: his eyes drifted off vacantly into space. He still wore a gentle, brainless smile, partly like he was playing his clown role and partly like he was genuinely brainless. I felt very uneasy watching him.

(10/1/09) grandpa visits from beyond; floating head art gallery

(Entered in paper journal at 7:45 AM at Sit & Wonder cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I walked down into a dark basement and into a bathroom. The basement itself was dirty, as if long unused, and almost completely dark. I was afraid to go in, but I did, closing the door.

My vision was, at first, all purple-white eye-static color in the dark. Then I saw or imagined a stretched-out sideways version of a classic grey alien's face, as if the alien were lurking in the shower to capture me.

But my vision cleared, and I actually could see some of the bathroom, as if it were lit by faint moonlight pouring in from some distant window. As I went to the bathroom I thought that, just beyond the wall against which the toilet backed (this wall now no more, apparently, than a couple of plyboards slapped up so on layered over the other), there was a room or a deeper basement, unfinished, skeletally "divided" into rooms, which was turned into a "classroom," -- or, basically, just a small, old school desk.

This place, I knew, was where my brother studied, my mother having taken my brother out of school. (I saw an image of my brother crouching down before a wind of my old high school building.) I thought that something seemed cruel about pulling my brother out of school. It was cruel the way my mother locked my brother so far away from people.

I was now in an enormous living room. The windows let in grey light, probably from a rainy day outside. I stood between a couch (of maroon leather?) and a small, wide table with a television on it. The carpet was pale grey. The living room seemed to stretch on, at least fifty feet on each side.

The television showed a rainy scene in front of a church in Venice (?). The TV announcer, probably a woman, was talking about the rain, but she might also have been mentioning a service at the church, possibly a funeral.

I now stood in a hallway or foyer area. The walls were almost all made of glass, giving me a pretty full view to the rainy area (Venice?) outside, although there were some structures, columns or wall, made of pink stones, obstructing my view.

I saw, somehow framed by the metallic skeleton of beams holding up the wide, glass panes, a very modern-looking, American-style church. The front of the church was A-shaped, made of gold-yellow bricks. It had a large circle of stained glass in the center, near the top, with an A-shape of arched-rectangle windows tapering down under that. I thought of the church as a Methodist church.

Just to the left of that church I could see the corner of another red-stone church, which was Catholic and, it seemed, more of the traditional Venetian style (?). I knew tha tthis area of Venice had nothing but churches all over the place.

(The area felt to me like an outskirts of the Denver suburbs, just a couple wide streets away from a main highway.)

To my right, the wall before me all red stone, was a doorway with a heavy wood (?) door open just a little. I assumed that beyond the door was a sanctuary. A priest (?) in a black robe with a white collar stood before the door. He may have told me that the event I had come for wasn't actually happening today. He then walked into the room and closed the door.

I now looked to my left. In another room that was all empty and walled and ceilinged with windows, stood my grandfather, who had died about a year previously in waking life. My grandfather had his hands clasped casually behind his back. He was looking out the windows. He turned away from the windows to face me.

He looked different. He was huge, at least six feet tall, and, proportionally, wider than he had been. His skin was patchy-dry and red-pink, like the skin of someone who smoked way too much. He had a strange bowl-cut of red-gold hair, which almost looked like a wig. He wore a beige-olive suit jacket and slacks and probably a deepish blue shirt and a tie.

He didn't look like he was completely alert mentally. But he recognized me and walked toward me. His eyes were almost vacant, like those of Frankenstein or a zombie. He may have been carrying an empty or almost empty, black duffel bag in his left arm. As he continued walking toward me he said, vacantly, "I've been meaning to ask you, Son, are you okay? Have you been having a rough year?"

My grandpa was now in front of me. But he kept trudging forward. I walked up to him and squeezed both of his hands, which were folded together before him, just above his bellybutton. I told him, "Yes. It's been a really awful year."

My grandpa kept walking forward, off to my right side. He said something like, "Well, keep up your hope."

My grandpa walked through the heavy, wooden door and let it close behind him. I understood that I wasn't supposed to follow my grandpa past the door. But, like I might doo when suddenly remembering I needed to tell one of my bosses something important, I rushed up to the door and pushed it open.

Before me was something like the living room of a Pennsylvania Dutch house. My grandpa was already across that "living room" and into an area like a largely columned, medieval interior (of a castle?) mixed with a parking lot.

I called out to my grandfather, telling him something like I loved him or I thought about him a lot. I couldn't stand thinking that our exchange had only been about how I had been doing. I wanted to let him know that I cared about him.

My grandpa turned toward me. In some sense or another it was like he stood outside, in a well-lit (with white, halogen lights) parking lot at night. He faced me at a quarter-turn, so that I saw him almost full on, but with a left profile. He looked normal now, not all distorted like he had looked before. He wore a beige, windbreaker-type jacket, khaki slacks, a blue, button-up shirt, and a hunched hat. He may have had his hands in his pockets.

As I spoke, two people sitting at a table in the Pennsylvania Dutch living room began speaking, telling me something about how the event I was looking for wouldn't happen today. The director for the event hadn't showed up. They kept on speaking so that my grandpa could never hear what I said.

It also seemed like there was a huge wind blocking my voice from my grandpa's ears. My grandpa kept calling out, "What? What?" Finally he said he couldn't hear me and that he had to go. He walked away into the night.

I looked down to the two people at the table. I was somehow concerned about them, now, and interested in what they were saying. They were two children, one boy and one girl. They wore stereotypical old-European peasant clothing. They sat at a thinnish, wooden table.

Both children had their faces painted. The boy, blonde, may have had his face painted a ghostly white with black circles for eyes. The girl, wearing a yellow kerchief over her hair, was made up so that she looked like wood. Her entire body, in fact, wherever it showed out from under her clothes, looked like the painted feathers on a wooden decoy duck. The girl also, when she first spoke, didn't even look like her lips were moving. But as I looked at her longer, her lips did begin to move.

(As I later reflected on this, I thought that my shock at how wooden the girl looked actually broke my connection with my grandpa, at which point my grandpa said he had to leave.)

I sat down at the table, across from the boy and girl, who sat side by side. The girl told me that she and the boy were here for something like an audition or else to be extras in a movie. But the director hadn't shown up and wasn't likely to show up.

A girl, who I now thought of as my grandpa, walked up to us from the nighttime parking lot as I told the boy and girl not to give up hope, that there was still time for the director to show up. The girl/my grandpa sat down to the wood-painted girl's right.

The new girl looked to be maybe in her late teens or early twenties. She was tallish and white with slightly tanned skin. She had blue eyes and chesnut brown hair pulled back and up into a ponytail She wore a green t-shirt, which she tucked into white jean-shorts that extended to just below her knees.

At some point I stopped thinking of the new girl as my grandfather and just started thinking of her as some girl I knew (?). The new girl was cheerful. She agreed with what I'd previously told the children, even bringing, I think, some evidence that the director was, in fact, coming.

Even thought I no longer thought of the new girl as my grandpa, I did know that she was, like my grandpa, dead, a ghost, if only because she'd come from the same place toward which my grandfather had departed. In fact, I thought of the girl now as the spirit of a boy who had died.

I could see the boy in the dark. He had longish, bowl-shaped, blonde hair, and he was wiry and thin, looking a little like a punk rocker in the toughness of his face. The boy seemed terribly upset. Then he was dead.

Now the new girl said she had come extremely prepared for the audition. She pulled out a notebook and pen and began writing down, in outline, all the steps she took to get ready for things, mostly to illustrate to the boy and girl, who were like good-hearted, but somewhat clueless, directionless, and unmotivated peasants from out of town, that they shouldn't give up hope and that they should keep fighting for their dreams.

As the new girl kept on writing her stuff out, I realized how incredibly bright and motivated she was. But he's dead!, I told myself. This boy's dead, and he's still working like this! It all seemed so absurd and yet so joyful that I suddenly broke out in a joyful cheer. I screamed, "Yeah! This girl! This is who I love!"

I stood and walked around the table to embrace the girl. I may have been able to embrace the girl. But I think something happened that made the girl inaccessible, as if she were walking back through the nighttime parking lot, up to a chain link fence, or possibly already beyond it.

Dream #2

I walked down a wide sidewalk in some part of a big city full of one-story warehouses. It was a cold afternoon. The sky was pale tan-blue, as if the sun were finally below the horizon.

I heard two men across the street. I recognized one voice as that of my old friend R. I looked across the wide, empty street to see two white men in grey, hooded sweatshirts, each man having the hood over his head.

The men spoke in a casual, sports-like, but also business-like, tone. But it sounded like they were talking about the next time they'd meet, to go out on a date, in somewhat sexual and romantic terms.

The building the men stood in front of, another one-story warehouse, was white, the paint job looking rough, like stucco, with a gate drawn entrance and the walls lightly misted in a pale, faded, blue graffiti.

I looked more attentively at the men and saw that one of them definitely was R. I called out to him. He at first looked shocked to see me, as if he'd been caught engaging in an extramarital affair. The other man had walked away casually.

I crossed the street to meet R, making nothing of the situation I'd just seen. R asked, a little suspiciously, what I was doing here. I couldn't quite place where "here" was. This place could have been Red Hook, Brooklyn. But it didn't seem quite right. We were at the top, it seemed, of a long, shallow hill. And I knew there were other long, shallow hills full of wide-stretched warehouse blocks like this beyond us.

But eventually, as we briskly walked toward the corner of this block, I settled on the idea that we were on Smith Street and Ninth Street in Brooklyn, I told R that it was coincidence that we met here. I always walked down around here.

We decided to cross the bridge together. Somehow, though, we walked on the suspension beams of the bridge. These beams must once have been copper: they were now corroded to a bright Statue of Liberty green. The beams, I saw, octagoned up, flat, and down, repeating along the length of the bridge.

I was surprised we had taken this route, but I knew R had chosen it as a test of how honest I was being regarding my accidentally having seen him in this neighborhood (and having caught him with that man).

As we ascended the bridge I looked out at the cityscape, seeing how monumental everything looked: we were so high; the bridge was so tall; the buildings and building tops so vast. I remembered that I'd had this kind of vision and feeling in dreams about riding trains across bridges in the city, but I couldn't remember the dreams I'd had.

R and I walked down one of the beam slopes and into an enormous, white-walled, wood floored loft. The walls were at least thirty feet tall. The room was probably one hundred by one hundred feet. The wall opposite us was one big window, looking out over the river.

All throughout the room, gigantic plastic (?) boards bearing the heads of famous Disney cartoon characters were suspended from the ceiling by white rope or thick, white twine, the heads suspended about three feet above the ground, and the heads themselves maybe six feet tall. There may also have been occasional abstract plastic models, also large, through the room. There were one or two other people in the room. One of the people was, I think, a curator.

We walked through the gallery of Disney heads. R asked me, as if, again, to test my innocence, what I knew about these cartoons, or how involved I felt with these cartoons. I may have said something.

We were now in a different exhibition room. The room was rectangular, versus square, with ceilings as high, white walls, and wood floors, maybe slightly smaller (or larger?) than the other room. Heads hung from the ceiling again, though not through the entire room -- just in the lower left area of the room; beyond the "quadrant proper," though, so that the display took up a little more than half the room.

The heads were also more varied, being not only Disney heads but also anime character heads and the heads of real-life celebrities, both "cartoonized" and taken from photographs of the celebrities. This room was dim, as if it were now dark outside (if this room even had a window), and as if the room were lit with just a few watery, incandescent lights, like track lighting from the ceiling.

R and I were alone at first, although eventually there may also have been an old man, who kind of looked like Orville Redenbacher, and who was the curator for this gallery.

I may have been kneeling or sittin gin front of one of the heads. I noticed that R, who stood to my left, was talking to a woman. I looked to my left to see R engaged in a flirting conversation with a woman who was in a place where a head had been.

The woman was cluttered around with a couple wooden boxes. The woman wore chunky, frizzy, knit wool clothes. She had frizzy, long, blonde hair, smooth, clear, tan skin, and pale, blue eyes. She may have been bound, either bound standing or bound to a chair. The woman's responses to R were cheerful, but almost robotic, as if the woman were a program, something made to be part of the exhibition.

I thought, R figured something out. He learned how to speak to the hanging heads and bring them to life. I thought I would try to do the same thing R had done.

I looked to the head before me, which was from a photograph (black and white, or sepia and white, the pixels (?) very visible with the enlargement of the photo) of a great composer. I asked the composer a question, like, "Can you speak, too?"

The composer, first as the large head, then as the composer "himself," standing before me, responded, "Of course I can speak to you, you idiot. What do you think I am? What do you think this is? You already saw him speaking to the girl? Why would you think I couldn't speak to you? God. Why'd I have to get stuck talking to you? I thought I'd get some good questions."

(Once the composer had become real, he took on the appearance of a white man with slightly pinkish skin. He was tall, thin, older, with a loosely wrinkled, but dignified face. He had a full head of pure white, soft hair, which glowed under the soft lights here. He wore a nice, grey suit with a white shirt and a tie.)

I was ashamed for having spoken to the composer. I looked away from the composer, at least hoping that I could console him for my dumb question by not talking to him at all.