(Entered in paper journal at 8:15 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I walked into a library. The library was tall, with a sloping ceiling. It was like a small community library: it was one story tall, with an open feeling, with some short bookshelves, studying tables, and a back area of taller bookshelves.
I walked into a room in a small hallway to my left. The room either was or was set up to be like a movie theater. There were around fifty people sitting in the room. The movie had already started. It was The Darjeeling Limited. There was no sound. The movie was about halfway through.
As the movie neared the end, most of the audience cleared out. The lights may also have turned on in the room. Now, before the movie had even ended, it was turned off at the image of something like a pink sea-animal or a pink skirt with little, sphere-like tassels. Some of the audience was leaving by an upward stairwell to my right.
I stood up and walked back into the main room of the library. I was going to complain about the movie having been shut off before it had finished. Before I'd gone into the movie room, the library's checkout counter had been along the left wall, where the hallway into the room was. Now the checkout and customer service center were at the front of the room.
I tried to speak with a couple people (one of them a woman) at the counter. But nobody would listen to me. Finally I spoke with a woman who sat at a low desk. The woman was typing at an old, green-screened computer. I made my complaint to the woman.
Suddenly I was sitting down before a long-haired, bearded man. The man sat in a tall swivel-chair. I sat in a low chair. The man wore square eyeglasses, and his hairline had receded quite a bit from his forehead. He might also have alternately been an overweight man with short, grey hair and a round, tan face.
I had gone from making my complaint to trying to tell the man when the movie had been turned off. The man asked if it hadn't been at the very end of the movie. Then he asked if it hadn't been really early on. I told the man no both times.
I now tried to explain the scene. At first I started to say, "Do you remember when Bill Murray was in a Speedo?" But I realized that that sounded funny, and not like the image I had in my mind (which was of Billy Murray in his blue diving suit, which is called a Speedo in The Life Aquatic, I'm pretty sure).
I then said, "Do you remember the scene where Bill Murray is standing out remembering the plane crash? I now had an image of a tall, flatly mounded, wave-soaked rock under a blue sky. I said, "That was where Bill Murray's" (wife? mother?) died and Bill Murray had to learn to live on his own."
As I tried to explain this, the man (at this point the version of the man with short, grey hair) kept on interjecting roundly, like he was trying to one-up me on movie knowledge, saying how much he enjoyed this or that detail of the scene or this or that following scene of the movie.
I kept trying to redirect the man to the point I was speaking about. But now he (now the long-haired version of the man) was asking me exactly how and when I'd come into the movie theater. I tried to explain to the man how I'd wanted to see the movie for the previous few days, but how on this day I'd gotten sidetracked by some reading I was doing at a cafe across the street.
I could now see the cafe, like I was looking into the windows from the street as I would see them as approaching the sidewalk corner. The cafe was in a nice town, on a clean street, at the top of a gentle slope. The cafe itself looked spacious, with a darkly decorated interior, very comfortable, moderately busy. I could then see myself, in the cafe, possibly sitting sideways in a chair or sitting at a table, reading from a white page, possibly tapping the page against my hand.
I tried to explain to the man that I was so interested in what I'd been reading that I'd had to finish it. I'd gotten into the movie late. (I could now see the scene I'd seen as I'd entered: a scene of the Adrien Brody character running in slow motion to catch a departing train.) I tried to explain all this to the man. But it wasn't quite getting through to him.
I now had to fill out a strange sheet of paper which supposedly had a bunch of fill-in-the-blank questions which would help the library pinpoint exactly what kind of offense had been committed, and exactly at what point in the movie it had been committed. All the "questions" had to do with very visual aspects and moments of the film.
But there were no blanks to fill in: the sheet (or sheets?) was (were) just a lot of three-line descriptions. I had to cross out the descriptions and re-write them correctly. But the more I did this, the less real my memory felt.
I started questioning whether I had actually gone into the movie at all. I realized that my experience in the movie theater had actually only been a dream. I wasn't even quite in the library anymore. I thought, I hope I didn't actually fill out that complaint form while I was at the library. I'd have a really bad reputation with the workers there if I'd complained about them because of a dream I'd had.
But now I thought about the whole experience. I realized that the cafe experience had also been a dram. I thought that was extremely interesting. I could remember my cafe experience very clearly. I could "feel" the time I'd spent there. I could even remember details about what I'd been reading.
I thought, How interesting that I remembered and felt all of that so well in a dream. But also, how interesting that I had such a "dually structured" (not exactly how I thought of it) dream, where I was in the cafe first and the movie theater next. I may also have thought that the role time played in my dream was very interesting in its realistic feeling of cause and effect, i.e. how I'd been late to the movie because I'd spent such a long time in the cafe.
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