(4/23/05) political bobcat cartoon

(Entered in paper journal at 12:10 PM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I stood in some shrubby or bunch-grassy, tan soiled, desert valley under a grey sky. My eyesight wasn't very good. I was at the foot of a somewhat gentle slope. I saw a wildcat run down the slope. The valley seems to have sloped down even more toward the right or to have curved or something. The wildcat was only trotting along, but it was still quickly approaching whatever landscape obscuration occurred.

I couldn't believe I was seeing a wildcat so close without it getting scared. I hoped it was a mountain lion. But I couldn't see it, though I was pretty sure it was a bobcat because of its fuzzy tail.

I grabbed either my glasses or a pair of binoculars from somewhere. When I put them up to my eyes, though, all I saw was some late nineteenth-century style poster in newsprint-like font with two color drawings about two-thirds up the page. The drawings were of dogs or pigs in dress suits and bowler hats. This, too, was slightly out of focus.

I took off the glasses (?), not understanding what I was seeing. For just a flicker while I snapped off my glasses I saw the valley clearly. I put the glasses back on after a few seconds. Once again I saw the newsprint poster.

I told myself, Oh, I'm in a dream. I got the feeling the poster was something important to remember, especially the event-title in tall letters over the drawings. I told myself to focus. The poster got clearer. I concentrated on the title. But even as I read it the letters seemed to change. Still I told myself, Read this title. You might see or hear words like it during the course of your waking day tomorrow.

Finally the words stopped shifting. I memorized the title (though I no longer remember it). It was rather like something written with the French pronunciation/spelling style but of a phrase or title derived from English but now in only a strange, non-lingual, quasi-English form.

(5/17/05) stop the disaster

(Entered in paper journal at 6 PM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I stood along a greenbelt or some park-like area that ran beside a street. Planes filled the sky and began crashing down. I had to dodge one.

Now I was in the backseat of a car. In the driver's seat was Stephen King. There were two or three other people in the car. Everybody except I spoke about this new disaster with the hijacked airplanes.

Suddenly I remembered I had dreamed this and written it in my dream book. I felt frightened of the coincidence and guilty that I had done nothing, with this foresight, to stop the disaster. But I also thought I might be able to do something now that I recognized everything.

I burst out in tears. I tried to tell Stephen King clearly that I had had precognitive knowledge of the disaster. King got upset and told me that psychic phenomena aren't real and are only for novels.

I was ashamed to have been told this by King. But it was also like I hadn't even heard him. I shuffled through my dream book, trying to find the dream in question.