(12/8/04) snobby zombies; trailer park cruise

(No time/place info for paper journal entry.)

Dream 1

A prison scene. People came in who were dressed in some strange way, almost like people who have reached middle age but who decide to keep wearing punk clothes, except the clothes were all bright colors, especially pink. These people were either zombies attacking the prisoners or people coming to attack the prisoners who, it had been discovered, were zombies. The prisoners, it seems now, wore dark blue police uniforms.

The prison was a smallish, dust floored, plaster walled cafeteria or courtyard room with balconies and hallways with barred doors for cells. The front door was barred, though it also seems to have been a revolving door, like the gates on the subway. Plenty of sunlight came into the place. It felt like it was in the desert.

Somehow nothing happened for this first sweep through of people. Now there was a second sweep through. This time it was like the "prisoners" were cops or just plain, old civilians and the people coming in were zombies. But though they still dressed strangely, like old bikers who decided to look like Malibu beach bums, they apparently "blended in" with everybody else and thus could attack them easily. I (wherever I had been) now recognized this. Now the zombies really did look regular, except just a bit too good-looking and clean-cut.

They chased me, perhaps as if I were the last one to be taken. I ran through one of the cast iron "subway gate" revolving doors and down a series of steps to a constrictive, winding basement.

One man and one woman followed after me, laughing. I could feel them trying to attract me and hypnotize me. They needed me to allow them to attack me and they could do so by attracting me or hypnotizing me with charm. The whole time I ran I kept throwing off the attraction by shouting (audibly again), "I do not opt control to you!"

Now the basement was no more than a tallish storage hole. I fumbled through some boxes to work my way into a long, dark tunnel-vent which went to a big room. But when I climbed into the vent the zombies caught my foot and began pulling me back.

Now "I" or some person (I either saw through his eyes or saw him from another viewpoint) was in a wooden, shed-like area that was small and missing a front wall. "I" was organizing things, rudimentary tools, on wooden tables and shelves smothered in and surrounded by hay.

I almost felt like "I" was incapable of anything other than this demeaning labor, which was just saving time for the two zombies, who were something like snobbish business people. But I saw how "I" or "he" had been hypnotized to act the way "XXXXX" was acting and to believe "XXXXX" was unable to do better with "himself."

The zombies were just hypnotizing "the man" to submit to more and more demoralization until he was so worn down he would just surrender to being slaughtered and eaten. So I tried to put a stop to it. I went up to this man, who was now a thin, short, rough skinned, squint-eyed, bald man in what looked like faded denim prison clothes. He was making scratches on some cardboard surface that looked like the lid to a box. He may have been making markings, long lines, with a crayon.

I got right to his right (?) ear and whispered, "This is only a dream. You must treat this all as a dream. This is not who you really are. You are much better than this. I am going to wake you up on the count of fourteen and you will see all this is a dream." I then began counting in a strange fashion and also with a voice that echoed off itself like some kind of distortion for a disco song.

I now stood over by the two zombies. They mentioned something about the man in the prison clothes. They laughed. I wondered why he hadn't woken up. I hoped the zombies hadn't caught me trying to release the man from his spell.

The zombies now talked about some expensive alcoholic drink. It revolted me. I saw in their hands some weird, football-shaped, organic lumps like organs or shark embryos. I knew they drank the blood out of these organic lumps. I thought something like, God! I can't even have a casual conversation without them revealing their repulsive, cannibalistic tendencies.

They must have felt my disapproval because they now changed the story. The organic lumps were some kind of expensive glasses. The drink inside was more like a Courvoisier. "But," the zombies said, "We almost never drink this anyway. It's far too expensive. In fact, we mainly bought these only to show you what they looked like and how unreasonably expensive they are." The zombies stood in front of some nice, silver SUV.

Dream 2

Mostly unremembered. I went on some long trip, possibly on a boat, and possibly with people from my NYC Americorps program. One guy in particular was there.

The room we two walked into, some kind of main cabin where all of us could meet, was wide, yet short and cheap looking. It had thin, green carpet, and thin, "trailer park" walls like fake wood panels. But these walls were muted, almost looking like the gravel colored press board backings often seen in big, cheap warehouses. There was a "couch," on which the other guy sat, which, other than having a small, green cushion somewhere, was in fact this gravel-colored press board fringed in tan plywood striping. The guy spread himself out on the "couch" like he didn't even care.

I tried to be cool. I walked into the bathroom, saying something about how I was sorry I hadn't been able to make the room look very cool and that I wasn't really a dork. The guy  said, "Oh, it's no big deal. We'll have these walls plastered with rap star posters in no time. Especially the bathroom walls."

I now looked up to the walls, as if I were a five-year-old child, to see two calendar/posters, which, though of apparently abstract and almost featureless design, were "of" two very famous rap stars. I thought something like, "Oh, I'm not sure I wanted this, after all."

(4/1/08) the city had changed; the psychotic killer wins

(Entered in paper journal at 4:50 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a toy store. It had an oldish feel to it, like a cheapish toy store from the 1980s. I must at first have thought it was a novelty shop.

I sat near the checkout stand, looking at the aisles and thinking of some kind of lingerie outfit I wanted to buy. But then I saw people coming in and buying toys. I took a walk through one of the nearby aisles. I thought, This place won't have the lingerie I was looking for, anyway. But I also thought there was something I did need to buy from here: something like a board game or an electronic device like a calculator.

I turned back toward the checkout stand and saw it was full of people asking where certain things were. I thought, I don't have enough time to wait here to find out where the thing I need is. I decided I would just go to the novelty shop, which was nearby, and buy the lingerie I was looking for.

I could see the novelty ship in my head. It looked very rundown and seedy, like an Eighth Avenue porn shop. I thought about how much things in New York City had changed over the years.

In my head I asked my sister if she thought the city had changed. She said, "I don't know. I live in a building in the middle of Central Park. Nothing much has been touched there."

I now stood in a building, a house that seemed to be one gigantic living room. It had a circular floor plan and walls sloping up to a roof. The floor was of concrete. The walls may have been of wood. The place was lit with natural light. I saw the front door and knew that outside was an enormous valley of green and orange grass, like the vast valleys of the Valles Caldera in New Mexico.

Dream #2

I was in something like a movie. I was a man in his forties, bald, a little fattish. I had probably been a mafia-type gangster. Now I was trying to stop a young man from also becoming a gangster.

We were in a park-like area of an apartment complex during the day. The young man was walking away from me, past a sandbox. I noticed the young man had a gun. He was planning to shoot three men.

I chased after the young man to confiscate the gun. Three gangsters stood behind me and a ways back. I caught up to the young man and grabbed the gun, which the young man held upside down and at a backward angle. My view of the gun was very close, as if I were on my knees.

The gun went off. It shot a little boy (who was among two other little boys) on a swingset. The boy hunched over, dead. I thought, Well, now he (the young man) is doomed to a life of crime. The young man had wrestled away from me.

Now my view was as if I were seeing from the young man's point of view, though I was still the older man. The young man was on his knees, pointing the gun at the older man/me. The older man/I stood with (my) back to a white, 1970s-style car.

The young man kept making threats at (me) with the gun. I thought if I kept letting the young man threaten me he'd see he could trust me.

But, really, the young man was somehow slowly hypnotizing me. The young man had convinced me to put the gun in my mouth and pull the trigger. At the moment the older man (no longer I?) died, the white car exploded. The young man was now completely psychotic, but he would, it was somehow implied, have power to do whatever he wanted. This was apparently a good thing.

The "movie" must now have been over, because a "song by Radiohead" was playing, as if it were the song for the ending credits. The Radiohead song was a particularly spoiled-brat-psycho kind of song, which I actually "remembered" liking when I'd heard it in the past.

I was now standing in the scene as myself, eating a box of Little Debbie Nutty Bars. I wondered how a movie could have an ending with such a nasty character winning and yet also seem to be promoting the ending as a positive one.

(5/20/08) awning ad awning; hypnotized by fulfillment; johnny's rotten house

(Entered in paper journal at 6:40 AM at Starbucks on 41st Street and Broadway in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

It was a grey day, warm and breezy. I was in a parking lot with my mom and my brother. We sat in a car. We may have been in a parking lot for a mall, although we were in front of a grocery store. My mom was talking about possibly going into the store. My brother or my brother and I may have been complaining about having to wait for my mom.

The store had a gigantic, multicolored (probably vertical stripes of purple orange, and green) awning before its top half. The entire awning was an advertisement for an awning-advertisement company. There was some slogan on it like, "OUR AWNING ADS WILL BRING CUSTOMERS INTO YOUR STORE." I thought, These ads obviously don't work: nobody's coming to this mall or the grocery store.

I got out of the car. The wind got stronger. I ran into the wind, down the parking lot aisle. I realized I could float by jumping upwards in a strong gust and getting caught in the wind. I did so. At first I flew about ten feet in the air. I flew in the direction in which I'd been running, not in the direction of the wind.

I could hear my mother and brother arguing about something. I floated counterclockwise around a small planting-island that had small pine trees in it. I noticed I was floating only a few feet above the ground. I was disappointed that I hadn't been able actually to fly.

I landed on a wide spread of pine branches that were dotted with loose-lying, small pine cones. I was on the opposite side of the parking island and just down the way from my mom and brother. Despite my distance from them, I could still hear my mom and brother arguing.

I thought if I could develop my technique a little better I would be able to jump into the wind just the right way to fly instead of just float like I had just done.

Dream #2

I was in a dark house. There was a weird female monster. Someone else, probably a man, was in the house with me. I had managed to throw the monster off our track once. I thought I had defeated the monster. I left the other person in a lit room while I walked through some surrounding dark rooms. It may have been that the electricity was slowly going out in the house.

I could see the monster woman in the lit room, creeping up behind the man, out from a shadowy doorway. The woman had a beautiful face, but her body was coated in certain patches with silverish-greenish scales. The woman was bald, and her fingers ended in claws.

The female monster had the ability to hypnotize a person with promises of granting their desires. By getting her victims stuck in an atmosphere of their own desires, she would make them into something like zombies. Either she was most powerful when the electricity was out, or, as her power rose, the electricity would go out.

I may have thought that the man in the lit room was doomed. In order to protect myself I may have started trying to keep myself from falling into the illusions of the fulfillment of my own desires.

Dream #3

I saw a newspaper article talking about a home owned by Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. The home may actually have been an entire apartment building, all owned by Johnny Rotten. The building was in a rundown part of town. All the buildings looked grey and sooty.

I stood in the entrance to the building. I heard a woman, who may have been the author of the newspaper article, say something like, "He calls this place a fixer-upper in an up-and-coming neighborhood. But he always leaves it in disarray. It's a real dump."

I stood in an orange room with a couple other people. We walked into a much larger room full of light from windows. The paint on the walls was chipping. The floors were stripped and spattered with dirt and paint.

I walked toward another room and looked in on a weird, black-iron structure which I thought of as a bathtub. As I looked at the structure, I said to somebody else in the group, "I was looking forward so much to taking a bath after the long trip. But I didn't realize this place was so disgusting. Oh, well. Nevermind."

I walked into another room, which was also barren and in disrepair.