(2/3/08) mcdonald's wedding dress; drug dealer's name; fast food snow shoveling

(Entered in paper journal at 8:15 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a clothing store, looking at a rack of panties. The panties were either used panties or bargain panties. I knelt right in front of them. I might have been with a group of people I knew. They were off in some other area of the store.

There was a thuggish-looking man working somewhere nearby. I didn't want him or the people I was with to know I wanted to wear the panties I was looking at. But this was just a small room of the store. In the bigger, main part of the store was a section with newer, nicer lingerie. I was more interested in that lingerie.

I was in a conference room. There were a few big tables. The lighting of the room was bland and fluorescent. The tables were pale peach. The room was empty except for me and PD, one of the heads of the company division of my department was a part. PD stood far to my right, by a dark doorway.

Other people were coming to the room for a meeting. They were probably already nearby. PD spoke as if she were already speaking to all the attendees. She was talking about something being some place other than where we'd thought it would be. She may have been talking about lingerie. I thought about some place PD mentioned, as if I were talking about it in my head with another man.

I stood out on a dark city sidewalk like in front of a closed-down McDonald's, like the McDonald's on 57th Street, near Sixth Avenue, in Manhattan. The man with whom I'd been speaking in my head now stood somewhere near me. I opened the door to the store while saying something joking to him.

I walked into the store. It was just like the closed-down McDonald's. But then it was like a dim, rundown version of some house I'd lived in during my childhood.

I went down into the basement. Sunlight came in through the windows of a bedroom I'd walked into. The bedroom was like a bedroom I'd had in my last year of college, when I'd lived off campus with some friends. I sat on the floor before a set of shelves in a closet (where my bookshelf would have been in my college bedroom). The shelves were piled with all kinds of girls' clothes.

I felt like my family or friends would come back soon. I wanted to have fun with these clothes before everybody returned. I shuffled through the stuff. I eventually came upon a wedding dress. It was white and lacy, but there were one or two little places on it upper parts decorated with pink and green, flower-like designs.

Dream #2

I was on my cell phone somewhere. Someone was telling me that  people in my neighborhood had confused me with a Jewish boy who was a drug dealer. They said that at some point I had something about my last name that made the people think my last name was the name of the Jewish boy. I told the person what my last name was. But the person said, "I think it's too late. It doesn't matter now. Nobody's going to believe you."

Dream #3

I stood outside in front of my great-grandmother's house. It was a snowy night. A lot of snow had already accumulated. At the very front of my grandma's yard there were steps down to the sidewalk (this was not so in waking life).

On the sidewalk my sister, and possibly someone else, were shoveling snow. I had a shovel, too. I pushed it all the way from the front of the house to the steps leading down to the sidewalk. But when I reached the steps, I was suddenly where the other person had been. The other person was now gone.

I might have been standing in this position with a shovel, but I wasn't moving. I was listening, in my head, to some stock-analysis discussion on the Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) chains, like McDonald's.

I realized that only my sister was shoveling. I thought, I'm the man. Shouldn't I be helping my sister shovel, or should I be shoveling for her? But here she's shoveled so much already. In some way, though, I didn't feel bad. I knew I was doing some kind of work, after all.

I stood at the top of the stairs. The stairs were pretty much shoveled, but chunks of ice still clung to the steps. I chipped these chunks with the edge of my shovel.

My co-worker JBS stood to my left (in the snow of the yard!) and spoke about QSR chains. I was pretty annoyed. I wanted to focus on my job of chipping the ice. But I also felt bad and thought I should listen to JBS out of kindness.