(2/5/06) ghost ants; david bowie and the black man

(Entered in paper journal at 10:05 AM at Starbucks on 57th Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was somewhere like a national park visitor center or some camp center in the woods. I sat with my back against a tree. My legs were bare and bent up against my chest. Some ants, not many, but rather large, maybe two inches long, and colored like a bruising sweetgum leaf in late November, pink and purple, crawled near me and then up onto my legs.

The ants were going through a mating process. I had to gather them up while they were doing this. But I was too fascinated watching them to do anything. But now as they finished they dissolved, or rather deflated like dry husks and then fizzed away. I knew I had missed my chance to take their magic.

There were other ants, and these now crawled up on me. I thought, I have the chance to take the magic again. But I didn't want to touch the ants because I thought they were diseased. Also, these ants were clear, like soba noodles (?). I thought they were like ghosts of the ants that had already mated. These ants would walk up on my knees and "vomit" a thick, yellow glop out of their foreheads. Then they and the glop would fizz and spike violently.

Two "researchers" saw what was going on. They and I took samples of the fizz (this, by the way, was impossible -- the ants vanished in the fizz; the fizz didn't exist afterwards) in to a little, shed-like laboratory. I stood at a weird angle relative to the "researchers," like I was up in a corner of the room, looking down at them.

The researchers stood over a white, square, plastic tub of water. They figured either that the ants fizzed because of a disease or that they fizzed into a disease. If either of these hypotheses turned out positive, I was probably going to die from the disease.

The researchers dropped the fizz into the water. This may have been done by "pinching" water out of something like a plastic thermos-lid-like cup and then sprinkling the "pinched" water into the tub. The fizz created a violent fizzing on a small area in the center of the surface of the water. This really didn't mean anything, one way or the other -- yet.

I couldn't stay in the room any longer. I figured I was just going to die. I went out to find more ants. I wanted to prove they didn't have a disease.

Dream 2

I saw a video of David Bowie and a black man singing at a concert. the black man was large and had his head resting joyfully on David Bowie's left shoulder.

I now saw a newspaper photo of David Bowie being kissed and held by the black man. The black man didn't really want people to know about his relationship with David Bowie, but he also liked him, and they were "awesome" in concert.

Now David Bowie and the black man were singing a catchy song I didn't really like. The stage had a crystal-blue background against which everything looked really nice.

Now a bunch of famous people, mostly black, came out on stage. Some people came out on a long, low, chrome motorcycle. The chorus of the catchy song was repeated over and over. Now I saw it all as if from a far back, way up seat.

(8/4/08) drought-stricken areas; torture tour; muddy road; dangerous work

(Entered in paper journal at 6:37 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1
I stood out in a barren field or a desert with a group of people I knew. In my head I heard someone ask another person why they had been deceived about something.

The air suddenly became very breezy and dusty. I looked to my right and slightly behind me. There were a group of people working on something like a drought-stricken field in China. The earth was very red.

I looked to my left and just behind me. Beyond some rolling hills of sandy, red soil topped with weedy vegetation were another group of people working another field, perhaps in America, perhaps in the Southwest. The earth was also drought-stricken and red.

I thought to myself, The two sides are practically the same.

Suddenly I was struck with the need to find something or to get to some place, possibly because it would help to save the people in the drought.

I ran up a small hill. As I ran, the air became windier and dustier. I got winded. The hill became steeper and steeper. On a couple occasions I thought I had reached the top. But then I would see an even steeper slope. Finally the slope was almost vertical, so that I was even afraid I would tumble down it.

The soil was soft, like sand or cinders, and scarlet-colored There was a big, flat, tan boulder barely protruding from the soil to my left. I put my foot on it and pushed up. I grabbed as far up the slope as I could. I must have grabbed onto something like a ledge. I was certain I had reached to the top. But I still wasn't certain that I would actually make it up onto the top.

Dream #2

I walked up onto the second floor of an apartment (or a brownstone?). I might have been led. There were three rooms. The hallway had green carpet. The three rooms were all empty and very clean-looking. They all had the same plan, with a big bay window opposite the door (!).

These rooms were all torture rooms. I was being brought here to be tortured.

I got angry. I felt like I was being shown such kindness, out of politeness, by being shown the rooms. But, I thought, if I were going to be tortured, I should just be tortured.

Dream #3

I was driving along a highway in a rural area. I turned off onto a small road to my left. It was a side road that would get me where I needed to go.

There were a few cops along the road. Apparently there had been an accident. It was more like a vehicular homicide. I think the road was blocked off, but I got up it anyway.

Along the right side of the road were traffic cones. I tried to avoid driving on that side of the road. But the rest of the road was so muddy, as if a storm had just blasted through this area, that I had no choice but to drive with my right wheels on the blocked-off side.

I thought that my tire tracks would go right over the tracks of the person who had caused the wreck, and that I would now be blamed for the vehicular homicide.

I got up to the top of the slope, which was a parking lot for a National Park's visitor's center. I parked. A ranger and a few other people came up to my car. They were all people I knew, and they had been expecting me.

A young, blonde girl, maybe twelve years old, told me about the recent storm. The girl was doing the watershed work I used to do when I'd worked on an Americorps project in a National Park in 2002. The girl told me, "Now I finally know the meaning of XXXXX."

Dream #4

I saw (as if I were floating in the air) the "top floors of my company's new building," back-lit by a yellow-gold sunset sky. (In waking life, my company had moved to a new building, which was still undergoing the final stages of construction.)

I heard construction workers, like a memory, talking about how people at my company wanted the workers to finish the final floors as soon as possible, but how the workers felt like they couldn't do it. The workers said that if they were pushed too hard, they would just find a way to halt the project altogether.

I noticed that the top floors of the building were like a frame, where the outer walls had pretty much all been put in, while no windowpanes had yet been installed. I saw a group of workers install a whole grid of windows at once.

The work of attaching the windows to the frame was very delicate and dangerous. The workers had just installed a particularly dangerous portion. But the next section they had to install was even more complicated and dangerous. As I watched I got more and more nervous and dizzier and dizzier.

(9/24/08) a trucker in greenburg park

(Entered in paper journal at 6:14 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a semi-truck (though I may have had an out-of-truck view of it at first). It was daytime. The truck driver, who at first may have been like a narrator, was talking about some work that had been done on the engine to make the truck go a lot faster.

We were on a road in a kind of busy part of the mountains. As we passed a small, white gas station (on our left), we noticed a car behind us, rushing to catch up to us and pass us. The truck driver knew tht the car driver was just trying to taunt us, feeling that he had a faster car. But the truck driver pressed on the gas and kept the car behind him.

I got a look at the car's driver. He looked awful. He was fattish, with ugly, long, scraggly hair, a stubbly face, a mustache, and mirrored eyeglasses. The car may have been white. It was towing some kind of small U-Haul trailer.

The car sped up again. We sped up, too. But this time the truck actually lost ground to the car. The truck driver jostled with the car to make the driver lose his nerve. But the car got ahead of us.

But father down the road we saw the car again. It was pulled over, with a cop car beside it, hunged over a smooth, steep shoulder of road. At first I thought the car had been pulled over for speeding. But looking at the car, I saw how its front fender was all mangled up, like the car had gotten into a crash. The driver was also hunched over the wheel.

The truck driver was now like my brother. The truck was like a pickup truck. We veered off to the left, onto a side road. We drove down into a wooded area.

But soon we were climbing trees. We had gotten high up in a dense tangle of trees and were looking down at the landscape. "My brother" said that when you looked from this high, you could figure out what kind of course you should take when you got back on the ground. But there was some kind of trick, he said, to being up here, that would help you know and remember the course you should take on the ground. I felt like I knew that trick as well. I remembered back to my days in the desert in New Mexico.

I continued climbing through all the trees. Some of them seemed skinny as saplings, unhealthy, even dead. I noticed a birch tree with silver bark.

A father  and his sons were at the base of the trees. I could hear them. They were getting ready to climb the trees. It was like this place was now a National Park.

For some reason the trees now seemed a lot weaker and more unstable than before. The boys (two of them? preteen) were now up in the canopy with me and my brother. My brother seemed to be getting along with them.

I wanted to get out of the trees. I felt like they were going to break soon. I was so afraid by now that I was clinging to the limbs and climbing around on my belly. I told my brother I was going back.

As I crawled along, the trees changed into something like a wood-slat bridge, which felt very weak to me. It led to something like a tree house, which was probably a visitor's center for this National Park.

I could hear the kids talking with their father, as if they were also including my brother and me in the conversation. I could also hear myself talk with them or imagine what I might have said to them. They were talking about what a good place this was and how nice it is to find some green space in a world that's been so overdeveloped.

I was crawling (more like slithering) through a doggy door that was really tight for my body. I came into a dirty space like a small landing for a set of steps. It was bright and dingy white. In the corner of the landing was the shell of a "roach" (probably more like a cicada). There might also have been some kind of goo coming out from somewhere.

In my head, one of the boys asked me the name of this park. I said, after thinking about it, "Greenburg."