(3/9/05) pathetic in cafe; two negligees; vindicators 3 and 4; shaved mustache

(Entered in paper journal at 5:25 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I must have been looking around before for some person, possibly a male. Now I walked into a restaurant that was full and bustling and had an air to it like a cafe in Jules and Jim but with the colors of a cafe in Un Coeur en Hiver. There was just a tight space of aisle. I walked toward the back of the cafe. Everybody turned and stared at me. I feel like everybody was saying things like, "How pathetic! He's looking for XXXXX at this point in time! And in those clothes!"

Dream 2

I was possibly a famous writer. I had been involved recently with an exchange of letters setting up encounters with a few of my admirers/peers during a writing conference of some sort.

Now I was walking around a huge complex, outside, up and down stairs and along balconies and lawns and courtyards, in nice, gentle sunlight. I saw one woman walking down a set of stairs from a glass-fronted area that looked like the main conference area. She looked at me, wondered if I was who I was, then continued on when I didn't speak some code I was supposed to speak to a woman of her description. I didn't want to avoid her -- it was just that I suddenly wondered if speaking with her wouldn't lead to trouble.

I was now walking along a concrete balcony behind a second woman. She had long, straight, blonde hair, pale tan skin, a ribbed, black tank t-shirt, and a long, folding-type skirt that was pale purple and white like a tie-dye, stippled like granite with flecks of black. She had a tight waist and a round bottom.

I didn't even know if she was one of the people I had arranged to meet with. (These meetings, by the way, were only supposed to be for discussions on writing.) I just wanted to talk with her so I could get her in bed. But as I advanced I grew more and more cautious. Then the girl's bottom just kept getting flabbier until I finally just turned away.

Now I was in some apartment/office, changing into lingerie: a sheer, purple camisole. I must have been about to put on panties. But I didn't. I saw a girl I knew by description. She wore the same camisole, as a skirt-dress, with no panties. She was tan, bronze-blonde, with a twiggy, muscular figure and a nice, round bottom.

As soon as I saw her I left the apartment, with some lingerie in my hand, and walked up to her. I said, "Are you who I think you are?"

She looked at me and said, "You're holding two negligees, just like you said."

She was now shocked by sexual attraction. She ran off. She said, "Please wait here. I have to change. I'll be right back."

I myself thought I should go change.

Dream 3

A woman came into some apartment/office where I sat at a computer. She gave me three disks. I had asked her for them, but now I couldn't remember what they were -- programs to install or files to download.

I looked at the disks. The first said "VINDICATOR #1;" the second, "VINDICATOR #2;" the third had "VINDICATOR #3" over "VINDICATOR #4."

I had "mentally" asked the woman what the disks' contents were. But she hadn't answered me yet -- it was actually like her functionality or presence had evaporated. And I just sat there thinking, What a fool she must think I am.

Dream 4.

I looked in the mirror. I had shaved my mustache. I kept noticing pimples along where my mustache had been until I had counted out eight cysts and large blemishes. I told myself, This is what you get for shaving your face. Now you'll just have to be patient until the hair grows back.

(11/29/08) escape from the barber

Dream #1

I was in a barber shop. I sat down at a chair and an older, fattish man with bronzed skin and darkish, blonde hair got me ready. He brought out a big tub of shaving cream. He used a large brush to spread some of the shaving cream across my face. I really didn't want to have a shave. But I thought that since the barber had already started, it was just as well.

The shaving cream was tan colored, with little flecks of green in it. It smelled like seaweed. The man began to shave me, but only cut the top part of my left sideburn. He might have sensed a bit of my hesitance. He got angry and stood me up. He said this wasn't the right room for cutting people's hair.

We walked into another room. The previous room had been run-down, with concrete floors and green-painted, concrete walls, with only one barber chair and a dirty mirror in front of it. But this room was even worse. The walls were dark wood. The room was very small. There might have been a worn-out bed and a thin, worn-out, dark wood chair.

The man was grumbling violently to me about how bad I was for not letting him do his job. He mad some angry complaint about how people like me were all alike (rich people, people from a certain place or of a certain race, etc.), and how he hating having to do anything for them at all.

The man pulled me into a couple other rooms, which may possibly have been getting deeper into this building. Finally we stood in a small room. I may not have had shaving cream on my face anymore.

The old man pulled out his blade and said, "This blade isn't good at all for shaving people. It's good for killing them."

The man grabbed me, but I got loose. He chased me through the building and into an area like a courtyard garden.

Right at the doors into the garden the man was caught (by a middle-aged, Latin man and woman, a couple, who may have been dressed in blue or purple nurses' scrubs?). The captors held the man as he violently struggled with them and screamed and barked after me.

The courtyard was square. The garden was complex, like a medieval garden, but it looked worn down and neglected. There might even have been rusty junk, like old wheelbarrows, in the garden. The walls of the building may have been stucco. There was a wood-columned, patio-like, covered walkway along the walls. I ran through the garden and at a set of wide, old, greying wood doors (like for a horse stable).

I was now in a car, driving very slowly through a suburban street. I was with the Americorps crew with whom I had worked in New York City in 2005. We were in some neighborhood like far out in Queens, a very quiet, suburban neighborhood with houses and yards.

I knew we were coming to a house number that was the same as the number of the house I had last lived in with my family. I didn't really care -- it didn't seem too special -- there must have been tons of houses with that same number. But I new my crew mates would be interested. But I also didn't want to tell them my old house number. I felt uneasy about giving away even the slightest details about my family's past or present whereabouts. But it was like my crew already knew.

We parked at the curb of a dark-tan-bricked house, the yard of which had a slight upward slope. The house number was written out in big, black-iron, cursive characters to the left (my right) of the doorway. The door was open.

The crew had brought me here as a kind of surprise. They knew either that I had lived here or that the house number made this house very much like the house I had lived in. My crew had arranged for me to come in to get a glimpse of my "old days." Some other people were also slowly trickling into the house. There was a whole houseful of people inside, all relaxedly mingling with each other.

The house itself was huge on the inside. The interior decoration was very much like that of a house of the late 1960s or early 1970s. It was dark carpeted, with mostly dark-toned furniture. There seemed to be a layering of rooms -- the rooms were divided from each other not by walls but by successive flights and sometimes by small bars. Something about the bars or walls may have had a stony quality. The space was altogether expansive, though the dark colors made it feel somewhat closed in.

The people all looked like middle-aged people from the late 1960s or early 1970s. They were dressed semi-formally. I met up with some of the people and was walking down a flight, to the main buffet table.

Suddenly I remembered the incident with the barber. I started telling the story to the man to my left. The man was probably in his late thirties, white, tan, with a bowlish haircut, a thick, white, turtleneck sweater, and a black blazer. I told the man that the barber hadn't gotten very far along at all in cutting my hair. I then thought how disappointing that was. I knew how shaggy my hair was. And now my sideburns probably looked all lopsided, too.

(10/14/09) facial hair blues

(Entered in paper journal at 7:48 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I stood before the mirror, trimming my mustache. I may first have been looking at myself, bringing my lower lip closer up to my mustache, and noticing that my mustache was way too long, because my hair would kind of chomp against my lip. So I trimmed my mustache. My mustache now looked pretty clean.

I may then have been in some kind of social situation. I realized that I had forgotten to trim the rest of my facial hair. I imagined that it must have been as long (proportionally) as my mustache had been. I thought I must look really silly, with a clean mustache and the rest of my facial hair all shaggy. I was afraid the people around me would start staring at me.

(3/4/10) shave your face!

(Entered in paper journal 6:15 AM, on B-train into work from Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I sat in an office room. The room was small, unlit, with a little daylight coming through a window, from which I was separated by a tall, bookshelf-like partition between desks. There may have been four desks in the room, in pairs, the pairs partitioned by these tall, desktop "bookshelves." The space was cluttered with papers, and it all had an old feeling to it, like the old back office at a National Park.

I sat angled (in a swivel chair?) so that I could see the door. Through the door and across a fluorescent-lit hallway was a smaller room. In that room, my boss CR (?) stood talking with an old boss of mine, PG. I was surprised and happy to see PG here, and I hoped she would come talk to me.

She finished talking with CR and came over to talk with me. She looked a little different: her hair was paler than its usual dark red-brown. And somehow she looked larger than before. She sat down and spoke with me for a moment. I was so happy to be able to show her I'd gotten this far along in my career. PG stood up and walked past my desk, toward the windows.

A man now walked into the room. He was tallish, wide-framed, fattish, with a wide, bald head tufted with a grey and white cloud bank of hair on the sides. He either sat down or stayed standing and addressed me. He  handed me a big pocketknife. The knife was maybe six inches long. The handle/case was some kind of wood-colored plastic or stone material, capped at the ends with metal.

I pulled out one of the blades in the case. It was an old-fashioned shaving razor. The man told me, "Now use it! Shave yourself! Shave your face!" He told me to do so as if that was what the next phase of my career depended on.