(12/1/04) mucous rock star; acne mash

(Entered in paper journal at 6:30 PM at the Tea Lounge on Union Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I had a white, mucous-like substance forming bumps on the skin of my forearms. I went up and sang with a rock and roll group on some small stage with plain, white lighting. The stage was barely elevated from the floor.

I forgot the words to the song. I left the stage. I sat in a huge, puffy chair with someone, some girl I knew. The chair was velvet and purple.

The bumps had stopped on my arms. But now they came back.

I was in my mom's garage. It was daytime. I saw how the whitish, milky, translucent bumps sank back down into my pores and created huge sinks and pits. I knew the worry was over. I did something else in the garage, but I don't remember it now.

Dream 2

I was in a dim room at a small, dark, wood table with my friend R and his friend KZ. We were playing cards. I made some joke to KZ. He didn't really get it. I walked away and sat on the floor with R, who was just suddenly there. He said something about how he liked my jokes.

The room faded into a pastoral setting a hillside with trimmed grass and a few thick trees. I don't know what two people I was now sitting with. But I got up and walked quickly away when a bee came toward me. It was kind of rough and golden brown yellow. I tried not to act too worried, like I was just going for a short walk.

I walked along the edge of a square that was thickly packed with trees. I walked along a wide strip of short, trampled grass and stones. i went up a slight incline before turning right and walking on a flat surface.

As I walked I heard a strange conversation, which seemed to have been given by two early twentieth-century psychologists. They spoke of a young woman who had acne. One psychologist had determined this acne was psychosomatic, but not in the usual way. The woman chose to eat foods, to force herself into situations where she had to eat foods, which caused acne. The two main foods were green olives and white, dry, crumbly cheese like feta. I'm not sure whether this food physically caused acne or whether this food caused a separate psychosomatic reaction.

I now came to another right turn in this square walk. A much wider, road-like path with a large, green traffic sign went off to my left as I faced the third side of this square. I think I rejected that path because I didn't want people to think I had gotten lost. I got back to the beginning of the square, which was in the center of the fourth side, i.e.

I was now a son for a father who had come to visit. My brother and sister were there. The place was a dark, stage-like room now. My dad was an attractive, healthy, blonde man with blue eyes. He was making arrangements for us to stay at a hotel. I was conciliatory and cheerful. I flopped sideways into a tall, plush, purple velvet chair.

My mom was there. I made some lighthearted joke to her about "my dad." She said something like, "I get that joke. But don't say it too loud. You know how sensitive your dad gets."

I now stood up quickly, like I had been asleep in a room full of friends and had suddenly realized the absence of one of them. I turned around. R's friend SM was there. We had been watching a movie. I felt R had left. I thought I had told some joke R had found insulting and that he'd left. Then I realized I was wrong. I asked SM, "Is he taking out the dog?" She said yes.

Now R came in with the dog. We all turned to watch the TV, which played some episode of M*A*S*H. The view was of a foot that had been blown off the leg of one of the main characters.

We tried to remember, before the reveal, which character had lost a foot. I said, "Maybe Captain XXXXX." This was apparently one of the older men on the show. I wasn't even sure I'd gotten his name right.

Now it was no longer certain whether the man had only had his foot blown off or if his whole body except for this bloody foot on the bed had been vaporized.

(7/22/06) accepting m&m's; downloading van gogh; metamorphosis of a rock star; waiting outside with the dog

(Entered in paper journal at 11:20 AM at Starbucks at 1st Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in a dark "living room" with my boss EB. We stood by a door. EB kept handing me M&M's. At first I didn't feel like I should take them, so somehow I kept dropping them accidentally.

The room was dark. EB and I stood in some dim blue light. EB got stern with me. He told me something like, "I'm giving you these things! Don't drop them like you don't deserve them! It's ungrateful!"

Now EB put more (peanut) M&M's in my right hand. Almost all the M&M's were blue, though a couple were green. I ate some. A couple still fell out of m hands and rolled on the floor, through the crack under the door and under the couch.

EB seemed less disappointed now. But now he was drifting back, into the darkness.

Dream 2

I sat before a computer in a busy office space. I was showing somebody something. But I was also loading a painting (reminds me of Picasso's dance crowd painting except with tons of blue and peach) onto my screen via a website like Mark Harden's Artchives.

EB came up behind me and asked me what I was working on. I showed him, but I also showed him the painting, which I thought of as (but didn't call) a van Gogh. EB laughed and said, "Oh, you sure are crazy about van Gogh!"

Dream 3

I was talking with an older man about how a rock group (like Stone Temple Pilots) had gotten too soft over the last couple years.

The man said (as if speaking about a single female rock star), "It's actually a good thing, what you're talking about. She's submerging right now. She's healing a little. But she's also changing. And after she's made her metamorphosis she'll emerge better than ever."

Dream 4

I stood outside with a big, light-chocolate, boxer-like dog while someone (my friend R?) went into a classy Chinese restaurant.

(1/19/08) burning the woman/monster; ritz-carlton service; coppola's generous man; sawyerpunk

(Entered in paper journal at 9:40 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and Third Avenue.)

Dream #1

I was in a place that looked like a living room but which must also have been something like a space station. I watched two people closed into a bedroom in a dark hallway. Of the two people in the first bedroom, one closed the other into a small closet. I couldn't see this; I just knew it. The one then tortured the other. I sat out in this living room area, which was also dim and was set so it was to the back of the (three) bedrooms and opposite the hallway.

I sat with a person I could not see and listened to the "other" person being tortured. The person sitting next to me said, "You better not think anything bad is happening in there."

I thought about it for a minute and convinced myself I hadn't heard anything. But then I heard the tortured person scream. I knew I needed to stop that person from being tortured.

The person who had been sitting by me was now somewhere else, possibly in the hallway. The person shouted, "You think it's going to be easy to think that person's being tortured? Now you'll have to deal with me! Or are you afraid?"

I snuck around the corner and into the hallway to find the person, who, I assumed, had transformed into a monster. I had some sort of weapon like a sword. But now it was like I was back in the dark room and heading toward the hallway.

Something happened in the hallway, an encounter with the person/monster, maybe even with the tortured person. Now I needed to go back to the hallway and fight the person/monster again.

I had a severed head, which I attached to a thick rope and lit on fire. I whirled this head around clockwise, on my right side, as I walked around the corner and back toward the hallway.

The person/monster was in the hallway, yelling about how afraid I was. I managed to use the severed head to catch the person/monster on fire. The person/monster and I stood face-to-face in a lit living room up near the corner of the bedroom in which, apparently, were the tortured person and torturer.

The person/monster still wasn't quite a person yet. But now "it" was a woman, like Rachel in Blade Runner. The person/monster wore a red, velvety night robe, which was lit with flames, as if a film of flammable material coated the robe, so that it was burning instead of the robe.

The woman said something like I hadn't gotten rid of her yet, nor would I want to get rid of her if I wanted everything to be alright with the people I was trying to save, as if by killing her I'd offend her so she would want to hurt the people even more than she did now.

The woman opened her robe. She was naked underneath. Her body was white, delicate, elegant, completely unburnt. I was angry. I swung the flaming at at the woman again, trying to catch her body on fire. I might have succeeded.

Dream #2

I was in a hotel room, possibly at a Ritz-Carlton. It was my boss BS' room, but there were a few people in the room, as if there were some work-related task going on.

BS told me he needed me to stay at the hotel. I said okay. I looked out a door. As I backed out the door and sat the door close in front of me, I noticed how that room had been wide and tall, ornate, like a French seventeenth-century (?) room. The "bed" I would sleep on was just a mattress, maybe eight feet by eight feet by six inches, set into a niche in the floor. The bed was the last thing I saw as the door closed.

I was now in a room all by myself. The other room seemed to have been lit by natural light, as if by a large window. This room had no windows and was lit by a light like a soft museum light. The room was smaller, but still spacious, with soft green walls. It was like an entry room, like a little foyer. The front door was to my left as I faced the door to the larger room.

I was on the phone with room service. I may have been trying to get a meal. But room service didn't want to help me. They thought I was just a nobody. I might have told them that if they didn't help me I was going to let BS know. Room service suddenly changed their attitude and were willing to help me. I told them to bring the meal at a certain time. I was still upset that room service wouldn't help me out of common courtesy.

I walked out the front door. The day was snowy. It was like we were in the mountains or the wilderness somewhere. I was now driving. I was by myself out on a road like a road on the outskirts of a suburban area. It was late afternoon, with a heron-grey sky and paper-yellow band of horizon. I thought I would need to turn left, onto and across a wide, slightly snowy field, to get to someplace where I should have been or was scheduled to be.

I turned left and drove up onto the sidewalk and partly onto the field. But then I thought, What am I doing? I don't need to go this way. I might no longer have been sure of where I was going after all. I might have turned back out onto the road so that I was driving back to where I had been driving from.

Dream #3

I sat onto the hood of a car, on the passenger side. I lay back against the windshield. The street the car was on was like a suburban street, but it was busy, and down at the end of it was a street as bright and busy as Times Square. I could even see a movie theater, old style, right at the intersection. Cars and people passed in front of the theater. The day was warm and sunny.

My brother walked up to me, on my right side, from behind. He aid he was getting ready to go to my dad's house pretty soon. I think I was kind of planning to go along. But then I decided not to. I wanted my brother to have all my dad's attention. I wanted my brother to feel like he was liked the best. My brother may have told me about going to see a movie with my dad. I told him I hoped they would have fun.

I thought about a new movie by Francis Ford Coppola. It began in black and white, like a silent film, but all the people in it were modern. A lot of people piled onto a silver train. They were all packed in so much together that people were being pushed partway out windows.

I liked watching as the train pulled away. It was just one long shot. It was interesting to see the different people through the windows (very small windows, like on airplanes) and how all the different people were observing and reacting to their surroundings as the train pulled away.

Now the train had arrived at something like a rest stop. A waiter came along the outside of the train and passed beer and soda in to people as they would pass money out to him.

I now saw inside. The view was now more like real life than like a silent movie. A man in his twenties or thirties, very put-together and handsome, was pulling some soda in through the window. He sat on a tall stool in a bar-like area.

A family -- an oldish, fattish, baldish man and some young children, maybe blonde girls -- had missed their chance to pass their money out the window for some soda. The young man said, "Oh, it's no problem. You can have some of mine."

The older man said, "Are you sure? We really couldn't."

The younger man said, "Please. I have too much for just myself." He poured soda from a big pitcher into smaller glasses.

Dream #4

I walked into a big room like a high school gymnasium. Daylight came in through the windows. There were about fifty people around an elevated stage on which a rock band was playing. The crowd and the rock band may have been mostly or all women. At first I thought the singer was a man. The song had been about trying to get a girl. But now I saw the singer was a girl.

Now it seemed like there were a whole lot of people in the band. The band members had a grungy, but well-made-up look, very clean, but somehow tough and plain. Their clothes were mostly black and very dark, dull green. Even their instruments seemed to have a clunky but fashionable look, like they were made out of a lot of black-coated cords. I liked it.

The crowd intimidated me. I thought they'd think I was here just because I thought I could hit on girls -- the crowd was, except for me, all girls. I was afraid they'd try to discourage me from what they'd thought I was here for by showing me that they were all gay. But I didn't want to hit on the girls. I was here for the music, which I was really enjoying.

I walked away, back away and to the left of the crowd, to a little side room with a folding chair, a guitar, and an amp. I picked up the guitar and noticed it was actually a bass. The strings were coated in black plastic, like electrical wires or amp cords. But they were all thinner than the fattest bass string. The guitar body was also small for a bass -- maybe guitar-sized instead of bass-sized. The body of the guitar was shaped almost like a Les Paul guitar. It was gold-glittery with a white pick-guard.

I thought this guitar was incredibly cleverly made. It must have been owned by someone who was here right now. It simply proved, I thought, what a talented bunch of people were here right now.

I held the guitar as if I were playing it a little. Some girls toward the back of the crowd looked at me, visibly annoyed. They thought I was only playing the guitar to impress them, so I could hit on them once I got their attention.

To defend myself I cried out, "It's the guitar! Isn't it cool? It's a seven-string bass! Isn't that witty?"

But the girls just kept looking at me like I was an idiot.

I thought I would try to find a friend and talk to him about the guitar. I thought that would prove that I wasn't trying to share my excitement with the girls simply to get their attention and then hit on them. I yelled out for a high school friend of mine. "JW! JW! He has to be here. Nobody else could own a bass this witty."

I stood out on an empty, industrial street corner at the top of a hill. It was a hot day. A man, probably JW, sat on a plastic and metal chair, playing the bass, which sounded a lot like a guitar the way Woody Guthrie might play it.

JW was looking at me suspiciously. He knew I'd been playing his guitar. He thought I'd been trying to steal it. To prove I hadn't been trying to steal the guitar I began singing lyrics along with JW's Woody Guthrie-esque playing. The song was a "funny" blend of old-style, back-hills music and modern topics and objects.

As I sang I walked in the gutter, which was littered with all kinds of garbage, mostly wet and slimy. I started singing about Tom Sawyer. I noticed I was barefoot. I walked carefully around wet, slimy piles of grainy material like litter-box filling. I got back up onto the sidewalk. I was worried that something disgusting had seeped into my skin from the dampness of the street near the piles of cat-litter.

Now JW and I were both singing the song about Tom Sawyer. it seemed as we sang the song that I had an image of the cover of the Norton edition of Roughing It before my eyes.