(3/14/08) x-acto knife parking lot

(Entered in paper journal at 5:45 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a mall, possibly with a woman. We got somewhere and then got out of the building through what must have seemed like a regular door at first but was then like a chain link fence crowded over with asphalt. We pushed through the fence. Now we stood out in the night air on a vast parking lot and just outside the small lot we had just exited. (???)

The woman and I stood in a circle with a group of people, probably my boss BS and my co-workers DE and EB. I may have been explaining to BS, DE, and EB that the woman and I hadn't (?) gone through the lot (through which we had, in fact, just gone) because there was a puddle on the other side of the fence.

A black, homeless man now approached us for money. Everybody else softly told the man we weren't interested. But I loudly yelled at the man to go away. Then another man, a tall, pale white man with long, black hair and a long, grey overcoat came up and asked us for money. He might have been more aggressive than the black man had been. I yelled at this man, too.

The man pulled out a yellow-handled X-Acto knife and then dropped it. Either he or I picked it back up. He put it in his pocket and walked away. He yelled back over his right shoulder at me that I shouldn't think I was safe, that he would kill me. He may have been a drug dealer who was trying to lure us into taking drugs. I had stopped him before he succeeded.

I told EB, "People tell me things like that all the time."

EB told me, "You should give me a list of names of people who tell you that. I've been looking for people to kill. You'd be giving me an excuse."

We were all walking across the parking lot and over to another mall. We walked down a couple of steps as we approached the other mall.

DE was talking about having different personalities. Each personality was a different mask. One mask was a veil. Another one was something like a butterfly-shaped piece of cardboard that DE would place over his nose. Another was purple face paint with silver accents and deep, long, black markings over the eyes.

As DE revealed his last mask, we were sitting in something like a restaurant (like a Denny's) overlooking a mall parking lot. It was around breakfast time. DE was making weird, tiny, chirpy, little noises. I realized that each mask DE wore was worn so DE could try to make me like him by showing how weak-charactered he was.