(10/2/06) shifting lucid mountain range; the deadly trick; friends back together

(Entered in paper dream journal at home in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in a nice house in a mountain town. The front wall was mostly windows, with thin, elegant wood "tracing" or "framing." It was a brisk day, with thin layers of snow in cirrus-like blankets over portions of ground. I looked into the distance, beyond clean buildings and tidy foothills, to a column of stone that looked magnificent.

I wished I could go there. But I felt some engagement was holding me back. But I told myself, No, you can go there! This is a dream. you don't have to stay here. Just go!

I felt awareness and the freshness of lucidity. I opened the door. The landscape kept shifting. I mainly focused on keeping calm and centered. At one moment the weather was rainy, at another it was sunny and cold with snow. At another it was grey and snowy.

The somewhat lonely street before the busy mountain town now became an almost suburban streeet. I tried to keep focus on the mountain town, the hills, and the column. But they got a little jangled.

A few people got in my way. I started running to get where I was going quickly, but then a young running couple cornered me into a limb of a hanging tree. I felt like I was constantly being detoured by these people. I had to get above it all.

In reaction (not conscious) I began flying. I was surprised, but I kept my awareness. I was intensely interested in reaching the column. But as I flew I saw the mountains change. Their tops would become buildings. Sometimes the entire mountain melted down to a tall building. Finally I saw the column's top transforming into a building. I couldn't bear to look.

My location shifted suddenly. I figured even if the column was no longer here I could explore. I landed on a wide hillside of wild bunch grass at the edge of a grove of white birch trees. It was a crisp, sunny day. There was frost on the ground.

Suddenly I was on a street in a suburban neighborhood. It feels like I was at the top of a hill. It was very dark -- night -- and maybe with no streetlights?

My friend R was in a car that was facing me. There was possibly a light on in the car. R said something like, "The dream is over." He handed me a thick document -- possibly mental instructions on the dream I should be having.

I took the document to get away from R. But I thought, No. This is a lucid dream. I should have more freedom than this!

I told myself to fly to a new location. I changed through the air, immediately finding myself cloaked in nothingness -- oblivion.

Suddenly I landed in front of R's car. R said, "See? There's no escape. The lucidity you had is over. Just take this dream and go on."

I got into the passenger seat and began to read the dream.

Dream 2

A show. A woman ("Lucille Ball") was put up by a man (her son?) to try and force a man under her responsibility somehow to sign something. He wouldn't sign.

So the son and her mother made a plan. The woman took the man to a high mountain and went sledding down it with him, to play some romantic game (the man was infatuated with the woman). She pretended to lose her balance on a steep portion of the mountain. Acting exaggeratedly romantically feminine, she rolled out of the sled ( and the rut or the track the sled was in), calling out to the man.

The mother planned for the man to roll out with her, partially to rescue her, but also partially because she'd thrown the sled off balance (on purpose) pretty strongly. The woman would roll around in the snow suggestively with the man, and at the high point of feigned seduction, coerce the man to agree to sign this notice.

But though the woman and the sled had fallen off the track or rut, the man had stayed in the rut. He had the feeling the woman was planning something, or at least that she had been faking something all along. The man was moving much slower down the rut without a sled. He was naked, muscular, and beautiful, with long hair and dark, rich, Native American skin.

Suddenly a male and female couple came rushing in their sled down this steep portion of the mountain. They had been sent by the "Lucille Ball" woman to attack the man if he didn't agree to sign the note.

The "Lucille Ball" woman felt a sharp pang of concern right before the sled struck the man. Would the man be killed?

The man and woman struck the man in the back and knocked him clean off the hillside. His back had been broken. Now he was plummeting down a cliff. He slammed face first to the ground below a waterfall. I knew he was dead. His body shuddered a few times and then relaxed.

I could tell the woman felt bad and wished she hadn't tried to trick the man into signing the note.

Dream 3

I sat with my friend R in an interesting hall -- very much like the sculpture hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. R told me he had finally stopped being angry at his ex-wife and my good friend C. He was inviting her to dinner. I could come as well.

I sat on steps in front of some kind of techie computer kiosk. I looked up the steps. I saw C with short hair and in a black dress. She seemed to be in much better shape than I'd thought she'd be. I stood and joined arms with her. We walked down the steps and down the hallway.

R was talking about how C was okay with R and R's new girlfriend L being together. I thought, Well, then it obviously won't make R feel jealous that C and I are locking arms. I felt proud and happy to have both of my old friends back.

(3/13/08) sloppy hair; zombie art gallery

(Entered in paper journal at 5:45 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I looked at myself in a mirror. My hair was brushed down in a sloppy way. I also looked like I had straight fine hair (in waking life, my hair is kind of thick and curly). My hair was lightish brown with splotches of blonde. I could see my hair was thinning. I pulled my hair back to see my hairline had receded pretty far back.

Dream #2

I was down in the basement of a small house with a friend (probably a woman) and an older man. The basement was emptyish with grey concrete floors, white walls, and pale, incandescent lighting.

At first I thought we were avoiding zombies. If the zombies bit (?) us, we, too, would become zombies. But then I somehow noticed that my friend was a zombie, too. My friend and the old man went into a room and left the door open halfway so I could come in, too. My friend and the old man were looking at a line of small, abstract paintings of all different colors along the left wall.

Either zombies had made these paintings or zombies particularly liked these paintings. There was also a movie or video that zombies liked.

My friend asked me to become a zombie, too. I wouldn't of my own will, though I knew (and was afraid) that a zombie could attack me at any time.

I walked up from the basement, out a back door, and into a backyard. I walked to the front of the house along the left side of the house, which was densely shaded by trees. I was going to escape the house, but I couldn't let anybody know.

I flew up onto the roof, which was slightly sloped, solidly pale-black (???), with tiny metal "antennae" sticking out at random places, almost like random weed-shoots or tree-suckers.

At first I tried to walk very quickly along the roof so I wouldn't make a noise. I thought I was doing pretty well. But now I lay in a thick patch of shade (the roof was only partially shaded), telling myself if I could rest until dark I could escape more easily.

I worried, though, that if I slept in this position after the sun moved, that the sun would burn me pretty bad once I was out of the shade. But then I reflected that I didn't have to worry, after all. The shadow was pretty big. It might not move enough for me ever to be lying outside its boundary. I saw in through a window of the house or apartment building across from me. Some TV show was playing.

I stood in the dark on a park road like the road between the Metropolitan Art Museum and Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park. I looked down at my shadow. It was swirling with red and white patterns. Other shadows around me may have been doing the same thing. I thought this was just a trick of my vision and that it was due to my having been caught unaware and turned into a zombie. I somehow reasoned that this couldn't be true.

I started running down the road to get to some point of safety. The road was pretty well lit with orange streetlamps. I held my winter hat in my right hand. I ran past a police car. I hoped I wouldn't look suspicious.  Again, I somehow reasoned that I wouldn't look suspicious.

I was feeling out of breath. The air might have been slightly chilly. I was getting close to being out of the park. Outside the park was possibly a quiet neighborhood. There would be, I knew, very few streetlights. I wondered if I would be able to make my way.

But already in the park were fewer streetlights. Where there was less streetlamp light I began to notice how brightly the moon lit things. I thought that once I got out of the park the light of the moon would be bright enough to guide me.

(9/4/08) getting home from the met

(Entered in paper journal at 6:11 AM on B-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was out on an open field with my mom and sister and possibly my sister's children (though all the children may have been girls). I was looking down at a hole in the ground that looked like a stairwell made of sand. I may have been digging this hole out even more, and possibly with a big slab of slate that was large and smooth enough to be a headstone.

One of my family members, maybe my sister, asked, "What if we come to sleep with you here?"

I didn't think there was enough space for my family here. And I didn't think the sandy be would be flat enough for them. But now I dug the slate into the ground so it stood upright, like a headstone, in the bed of this stairwell. Suddenly the ground looked flat enough. Now the slate was gone.

I looked before me. The sandy wall was sculpted to look just like a stone wall, just like, I thought, a wall in an underground hallway of a pyramid.

I told my family, "Well, I could do something like this. Come down and see."

We were now in a place that looked like a cinder-walled basement of a house. Nobody seemed to be impressed. I myself wasn't exactly sure what this place was, but I tried to explain to my family (which was now more like a group of Mexican women and girls) that this was a replica of an Egyptian tomb. But I explained that even though it was a replica, there were actual authentic artifacts.

I tried to point out one (or two) of the authentic artifacts in a roundabout way. Between the back of a couch and a wall, two (?) white statues, about ten feet long, lay on their sides, on on top of the other. The statues were of a Pharaoh and his bride. The Pharaoh lay on top. A cloth blanket may have been covering their legs.

But I couldn't quite get anybody focused enough to pay attention to this view. Everybody ran around the space, which was now like a warm-colored version of the scholar's garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There weren't any big sculptures anywhere, possibly just framed paintings on the walls. But I still thought of this space as an exhibition of Egyptian artifacts.

I managed to get a small group of folks together to go into a small side room, which I thought would lead to the Egyptian tomb hallway. But the wall where I thought the entrance to the hallway would be was blocked off by a curtain of blue and white patterned material.

We headed back to the main room. Somewhere I saw the ten-foot-long sculptures again. I wasn't sure anymore that they were genuine.

Now it was like we were being too rowdy and we had to leave.

We were up in some gutted-out structure that resembled a Greek ruin mixed with something like a garage. The ground was very greasy. The ruin looked out over an open, maybe desert-like, area.

There was some blocked-off space like for a large sculpture at a corner of the ruin. We walked up to it. There was some big, rusty machine that looked like a construction or heavy-duty cooking machine, but which we called a fire truck.

A group of rough-looking, white men gathered around the machine. Some of the men may have been using flame throwers. Others were breathing fire. The whole thing smelled awful, like my stomach feels when I get indigestion. The explanation of it all was that these men were putting out a fire. But the fire wasn't exactly here.

We stood around for a while, wondering if the fire truck would ever be through, so it could give us a ride home. Eventually we figured that the firemen simply didn't want to give us a ride home.

We walked to an old, rusty, gutted-out vehicle like a bus at the other end of the ruin. The driver inside waved an instrument like a megaphone at us, gesturing that he didn't want us on his bus. Eventually the megaphone began spouting fire.

The other people in my group were now gone. It was night. I stood with the bus driver and a man who worked with him. This other man and I walked away from the small-building city street. The man was big, fattish, with glasses and shoulder-length hair. He wore jean shorts, a white t-shirt, and a jean vest. He was talking to me about comic books. At first I was interested. But then I started to feel uneasy, like maybe I shouldn't be hanging out with such a weird person.

(5/9/09) time poisoning; protected rather than stolen

(Entered in paper journal at 7:05 AM on Q-train into Manhattan from Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a car with my mom and my brother. I possibly sat in the backseat, on the passenger side. It was a darkish, grey day. We were driving through an area of rolling, lawny hills, like in a cemetery.

On our right was a tall wave of green hill, atop which were structures like crypts. I called these structures buildings and was pointing them out as if they were famous buildings in New York City.

There was one "building" that seemed to have a Greek/Egyptian style and seemed to be made out of gold. The next "building" we passed was very strange and thin. It seemed to be made in two sections. The section on the left was like a half-cylinder, encrusted in dark stones (?) which had an iridescent glaze and may have been broken up somehow, with traces of gilding. The section on the right may have been something like a stone pedestal on which sat a statue of a jackal.

I pointed out this building, maybe to my brother in particular, and said that the building was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But as we passed to the next buildings, I thought back to the museum. It suddenly truck me that this building no longer existed. It used to be the building which housed the museum, in the 1960s. But the museum had been moved to a bigger building. I tried to get my mom to back the car up so we could see the building again.

We were now in a kitchen. My mom was busy with something. The kitchen was smallish, with a lot of wood-tones and earth colors. It was lit with a cold, incandescent light. I had climbed up onto a countertop and was probably pulling big books, like art books, off the top of a cupboard. I was trying to show my brother that we had driven past a building which no longer existed.

(At this point I got off the Q-train and walked over to the Starbucks on 17th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, where I resumed my paper journal entry.)

I was trying to show that we had gone back in time or had been a part of some kind of anachronistic phenomenon. My brother didn't quite understand, or didn't quite seem to be paying attention. I took him back outside to try and illustrate the point.

When we got back outside, I may have had no idea how we were supposed to get back to the museum. We stood before a wide, green field which sloped slightly downward to something like a wide square of concrete, like the floor of a demolished building.

Just beyond that, though somehow obscured, was another building, which looked like a 1970s style building, and which may have had a section like a half cylinder lined with vertical wood slats. I knew that something about this area was also very different from what it "presently" was (wherever that "present" may have been).

I asked my brother, "Don't you recognize that building? Don't you remember what it was, and that it isn't there anymore?"

I now stood back inside the kitchen. My maternal grandmother walked into the kitchen. She looked a little upset. She told me that the son of XXXXX (a mutual friend of my mother and her best friend, though I can't remember her name) had just died. The son seemed to have been doing fine. But one day he drank two glasses of liquid at once and died.

The beverages were like water and chocolate milk. The cause of harm might have been, I knew, drinking two different beverages at once. But it might also have been the fact that the boy (young man, now) had been poisoned, and possibly by his mother.

My grandma had mentioned the boy's death as an explanation for why we would be delayed in getting out of the house and going where we had planned to go (to the museum?). I may have hugged my grandma to comfort her.

We walked through a small but dark hallway at the end of the kitchen and into a wide, emptyish living room lit by a single harsh, cold, incandescent light. There were a few people in the room, all relaxing as if this were one of my mother's holiday parties.

Two large couches sat against the front wall and the wall to my right. My mom's friend sat on the couch to my right. She seemed to be sad but alright. But I thought of the woman as a poisoner. I thought I would have to be careful around her.

Dream #2

I was possibly in an airport. I walked into a buffet-style restaurant. There was a huge, maze-like set of wood railings set up to form a line before the buffet. The place was almost completely empty. The atmosphere was red, as if lit by a red neon light.

I may have been waiting for a friend to arrive, or I may have been trying to figure out what I needed to pick up for a friend's meal. I was walking toward the buffet, possibly cutting through the "maze," when a couple big guys, both like white businessmen dressed business casual, cut in front of me. One of the men may have been a short, Indian man.

I caught back up to the men at the buffet. The men spoke back and forth with one another casually, like they hadn't even noticed having cut in front of me. I did something to bully them so they'd at least have to pay attention to me.

I may have been heading toward a seating area in the restaurant. The seating area apparently had no or very little light in it, lit only by natural light coming into the room from the windows in the concourse outside.

A voice now called over the loudspeaker. There was going to be some kind of fire drill or emergency evacuation drill for the building. The voice (a polite, female voice) said, "We would appreciate it if the customers could also please participate in this drill."

I figured I'd have no trouble participating. But I needed to go pick up my book bag before I did the evacuation. Before I had gone into the restaurant, apparently, I had been reading at a large, circular table, like one might see in the food court of a common area at a university.

The concourse now seemed to be a mostly windowless hallway full of these large, circular tables. I was running to find my bag. I could see the area where I had been sitting, but I couldn't see my bag. I was certain my bag had been stolen. I felt like I wasn't getting to the table fast enough.

I began flying. At some point I may have been pulled backwards. Then, possibly, I had been given my bag back by a security guard, a black woman. I was relieved. My bag had, apparently, been protected rather than stolen. But for some reason I now couldn't believe that this was actually my bag.