This dream journal was finished in a relatively short period of time. Given the fact that there was, actually, an almost two-week gap in my dreams, from mid-April to the end of April, it would appear that the dream entries account for about four weeks of writing.
The gap in dreams was probably due to the fact that at that time I was really focused on actually writing out the first, handwritten, draft of my screenplay. It didn't take me long to write out the first draft of my screenplay.
The screenplay had, up to this time, taken a considerable amount of my time. I had plenty of time to give. I'd been let go from my job, for all intents an purposes, in January of 2009, though I was still on the company payroll until about the same time that I began this dream journal. I had been making decent money at my job. So I decided to take the time I needed to study for and write my screenplay.
My screenplay ended up going nowhere, unfortunately. I took it to a very good script coach, who didn't understand it. She said it was too poetic and philosophical to be a screenplay. She gave me a few pointers on what movies should be like. She gave me a list of mainstream movies to watch.
My script coach had me start from scratch, bringing in my screenplay to her bit by bit, as I rebuilt it. She never told me what to put in my new screenplay. She only told me when I was falling off the mainstream movie path.
But this process took a number of months. In that time, I ran out of the money I'd saved up. I took on a temporary job, which ended up being horrible. I left that job and had enough time to make one final push to finish my screenplay. I basically finished it right before I started my next permanent job at the end of 2009.
But my script coach wanted me to make two final changes to the script. One had to do with making the language of one character a bit more stately, the other had to do with giving a character a long monologue. For some reason these changes seemed like too much to me. I'm not really sure why that was. Besides, I was happy to have a permanent, serious job again. And I was eager to devote myself to it. So I left the final two changes, and, consequently, my whole screenplay, behind me and started my job.
So I guess this dream journal comprises the time that I finished my first wave of studying for my screenplay, finished receiving paychecks from the job I'd been laid off from, began writing the first version of my screenplay, and began typing and revising the first version of my screenplay.
Some of my dream journal writing occurred in Brooklyn and some in Manhattan. A lot of times, I'd wake up in the morning, walk from my house up to and across either the Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridge, then up to a cafe in Manhattan, where I'd write until the New York Public Library opened up. Then I'd go to the library and study. I thought I'd done this more often than not. But I saw a lot of Brooklyn entries while I was transcribing this journal. So I must have been in Brooklyn more often than I'd thought.
One interesting thing to see is that there isn't any mention of Sit & Wonder cafe, which ended up being one of my favorite cafes in New York City from 2009 to 2012. I didn't know about Sit & Wonder until June of 2009.
In June of 2009 I did a Habitat for Humanity event on Atlanic Avenue and Eastern Parkway. Before the event I stopped for some coffee at Sit & Wonder, which I'd never been to before. I liked it a lot, so I started going back. I eventually went there quite often.
But this must all have happened while I was not having dreams or entering my dreams in a journal -- or, as I'm starting to think nowadays, it may have happened while I was entering my dreams in a journal that I, in the middle of something like a nervous breakdown, threw my dream journal away. I'm not sure.
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