(11/27/07) nativity in india; looking for photos

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

Dream #1

I was somewhere like the apartment of my old friend R. R had walked away and left a stack of photos nearby so I would see them and look at them. They had been given to him by a group of my friends from college. I had also gotten a stack of photos like this. They were from when my old friends ML and PD visited two other friends BC & SA in India.But when I looked at the photos I recognized that R had gotten a lot more photos from my friends than I had. This is why R had left his photos out -- so I'd see them and be jealous.

The last photo I looked at was of SA and possibly the others working on fixing a building. The building looked like a ruin you might see in a Renaissance painting of the nativity: stone walls crumbled, with wood beam frames in the corners. The ground was all upturned, reddish earth, full of building debris. There were taller buildings in decent shape on either side. In the distance were city buildings like oldish apartment buildings in Greenwich Village.

I thought how similar cities all over the world look. This place, India, was supposed to be so exotic. But it looked a lot like New York City in some ways.

I was in a bedroom with PD. She had gotten undressed and into a pale blue bathrobe. She spoke a little with me before she headed into the bathroom. PD's hair was all frizzy. The bathroom light was off. PD stood in the crack of the half-opened door. Then she walked all the way in and closed the door. I walked to the bed and sat down. I may have started looking at photos.

Dream #2

I was in a drugstore. I may have been a worker there. The light was dim; maybe the only light coming in was from the windows. I had arranged a bucket of photos. There were a worker behind a front counter and two workers in a narrow aisle beside me. The man at the counter was tall, thin, white, oldish. The two workers in the aisle were teenagers or thereabouts, black, short, one boy, one girl.

The man at the counter was pleased that I had arranged the photos. But I was actually looking for photos of my own. I thought the boy and girl might know where I should look, as they seemed to work directly with the photos. But when I tried to speak with them, they defiantly ignored me.

I found a shelf of envelopes of photos. I started shuffling through them. They became big, black cartridges which I was loading onto something that looked like a film projector. A white man stood over me, to my left, as I knelt and loaded the cartridges into the machine. I thought, I shouldn't have to do all this work with other people's photos. I'm just looking for my own photos.

The man standing over my shoulder now spoke about some publicly traded beverage companies, Cott Corporation in particular, and why he thought he was going long on them now rather than shorting them.

I saw a black and white image on a thick sheet of glass. It was like a 1940s family standing in front of a house. The image was very small, maybe one and a half inches square. The sheet of glass was big. Soon I realized it was part of a machine. The body of the machine was made of a thick, greenish metal. The machine was about waist-height and eight feet long. It did something like print film images.

An old woman (like a woman from the old Ozzie's cafe in Park Slope in Brooklyn) stood bent over the glass sheet. I could see a log of coppery gears beneath the glass sheet. A light shone thinly, creating the black and white image on the glass.

The woman said, "I've been using this machine for so long. Now hopefully the thing won't break." But right after she said this, the light went out. It suddenly looked like a cigarette butt.

(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.