(Entered in paper journal at 7:20 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn into Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was walking with my old friend R, who may have looked like my co-worker CL, in the lobby of a big and modern, but old-looking, movie theater. R was talking about some cartoon, like a Don Bluth cartoon, that he was going to use as a part of some community meeting he was going to attend later this afternoon.
R asked me if I was going to come along with him. I said I didn't think so. He said he thought I had told him yes before. I felt bad, and I tried to remember if I had told him yes.
We were in the theater now. The theater was dark. Even the movie screen seemed to be dim. The place was full. R had been walking with me, but now he was gone. I turned and saw he had headed into one of the rows quickly, to throw me off guard. The row was far back from the screen, where I wouldn't be able to see. I knew that R had also done this on purpose. I walked into the row. There were three seats open. R took the one in the center. I knew he took it so I couldn't sit by his wife L. I took the seat to R's left.
There was either a preview or a fake preview playing (or possibly just the beginning of the film). A big, muscly man with oiled skin, long, rocker-style hair, and wrestling shorts, was sliding down some kind of ice-passage on a snowy mountainside, like the luge. He may have pulled himself up onto the edge of this thing. He grabbed a man who was now in the slide with him. He threw him out. The man fell to the snowy ground, ten or fifteen feet below.
I started laughing. It was like I wasn't even in my chair now, bu kneeling on the floor by R. I said, "This is just like the fake preview they had in that other movie! This is a serious movie, but it's just like the fake preview in..." I couldn't remember the name of the movie. I said, "In... not Tropic Thunder. What was that movie?"
R said, "Blind Ticker."
I said, "Yes!" and started laughing again.
We were now sitting at a table like in a pizza restaurant. The lighting in the area was very red-pink, and there were mirrors on the wall. I sat on the edge seat. R sat to my right. A man, who looked like an oldish military man but who may have been wearing only a diaper, came up and spoke to R in a friendly, relaxed tone about some business the two of them had to take care of together. The man now stood in his military outfit, which was of a pale sea-green color, and shook R's hand.
I had been picking wax out of my ear with my right hand. The man, saying goodbye to me, offered me a high five. He apparently hadn't noticed that I had been picking my ear. I tried to wipe off my hand quickly and without the man noticing.
But when the high five was done, the man wiped his hand and looked at me with a little polite disgust. He told me something like I should wash my hands carefully before getting into social situations with people. I bashfully agreed.
Another man came up and shook hands with me. Again, I was afraid that the man would be put of by my hands. But he didn't seem to notice. This man was younger, with a greyish military suit, wavy, black hair, and an olive complexion.
I now sat as if by myself at a table full of people. A group of kids came in and sat at the row of tables across from us. At first the kids were teenagers. They were all slightly rowdy. It was obvious they had just come from some kind of educational event.
The group of kids in the table to the right started making fun of one of the people they saw. They called him a "transsexual, transgender, cross-gender, or whatever." I now noticed one of the boys, who was maybe twelve or thirteen years old, and was small but very beautiful. He had straightish, flowing, black hair, and smooth, olive skin. He wore a nice, grey pea coat.
The children all seemed now to be six or seven years old. I sat at the far left end of a booth/bench now, instead of a table. A group of people my age sat to my right. We were like a volunteer group. The kids still sat at the table, like we were at the pizza place. But the red-pink light was gone, replaced with white fluorescent, and the atmosphere was like a Mexican food restaurant in the East Village.
The kids all seemed to be having some kind of mental problem or some weird manner of speaking to each other. Or perhaps they were playing a game. Many of them held overshirts or knit jackets over their heads like shawls. They were all mumbling to each other, almost whispering. But then they would point out a couple people in particular and say they were whispering, as if that was a point of their character showing they should be either pitied or treasured. The volunteers all looked on in a cherishing, pitying way.
The girl currently pointed out was a Mexican girl with dark skin and long hair. She wore a green shirt with black stripes and black jeans. Somehow I caught the girl's attention. She was singing and somehow crawled across her table, onto the bench, then onto my lap.
It was now like a lot of the volunteers and students were gone. I asked the girl how to sing a song in Spanish. I hummed and thought I was humming a Gloria Estefan song. But I was actually humming the Norah Jones song "Don't Know Why." The girl sang the song in Spanish.
We had a blanket pulled over our heads. I rocked the girl back and forth. I thought of the girl as autistic, and I thought, I'm really making a breakthrough with her!
Now some skinny, but bully-like, Mexican man with very short hair and a bushy mustache, wearing tan clothes or a military outfit, was sitting to my right, right next to me. He smiled and said, "Beautiful song. Gloria Estefan, isn't it?" By the way the man was smiling I could see that he was trying to take the girl's attention from me.
I saw a very pretty woman off to the left, at the front of the store, behind a cash register. I thought, Is this man sticking close to me because he wants to take this girl's attention away from me or because he doesn't want to seduce the cash register girl while I'm not looking? I wished that if the latter were true, the man would just go talk to the woman and leave me alone. I didn't care about that stuff -- I was trying to heal somebody! But the man did get up and walk over to the woman.
The girl lay down to my left, on some weird structure. Her head was on a wooden box, like a cigar box or a small food box. She was singing a different song in English now. She had a different look, like an Hispanic girl in Victorian costume. She looked like she was going to die. But her song was very powerful. It may have ended in Spanish.
The girl may now have been the first girl again, in the green shirt and black jeans. She may have gotten up to stand with the Mexican man and woman. I stood up, probably to leave. I saw a small newspaper stand to my let, just beside a small cooler for drinks. The stand held the New York Times.
There was a cartoon on the front page. It was in an Orozco-esque style, with very drab colors. There were two priests, probably from two different Christian denominations. One of them held a big, white cross between them. Both priests had scars and stitch-marks on their necks, like they had been decapitated and had their heads sewn back on. Behind the men and to the right was a gigantic white cross that lay down, almost completely smashing a house. The ground was barren and brown. The sky was black.
The newspaper article below the cartoon was accusing Wall Street of a ton of awful things. The article claimed that the crimes everybody on Wall Street had committed were tantamount to murder, and had, in fact, led to many people's deaths. The article also accused people on Wall Street of being some kind of cultic priests.
I felt ashamed, like I didn't want anybody to know I had worked on Wall Street. But I also thought the article was ridiculous. I thought, Nobody's as bad as this. This is obviously written by somebody on the outside, who immediately thinks everything that happens on the inside is strange and evil.
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