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.
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