(4/1/08) the city had changed; the psychotic killer wins

(Entered in paper journal at 4:50 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a toy store. It had an oldish feel to it, like a cheapish toy store from the 1980s. I must at first have thought it was a novelty shop.

I sat near the checkout stand, looking at the aisles and thinking of some kind of lingerie outfit I wanted to buy. But then I saw people coming in and buying toys. I took a walk through one of the nearby aisles. I thought, This place won't have the lingerie I was looking for, anyway. But I also thought there was something I did need to buy from here: something like a board game or an electronic device like a calculator.

I turned back toward the checkout stand and saw it was full of people asking where certain things were. I thought, I don't have enough time to wait here to find out where the thing I need is. I decided I would just go to the novelty shop, which was nearby, and buy the lingerie I was looking for.

I could see the novelty ship in my head. It looked very rundown and seedy, like an Eighth Avenue porn shop. I thought about how much things in New York City had changed over the years.

In my head I asked my sister if she thought the city had changed. She said, "I don't know. I live in a building in the middle of Central Park. Nothing much has been touched there."

I now stood in a building, a house that seemed to be one gigantic living room. It had a circular floor plan and walls sloping up to a roof. The floor was of concrete. The walls may have been of wood. The place was lit with natural light. I saw the front door and knew that outside was an enormous valley of green and orange grass, like the vast valleys of the Valles Caldera in New Mexico.

Dream #2

I was in something like a movie. I was a man in his forties, bald, a little fattish. I had probably been a mafia-type gangster. Now I was trying to stop a young man from also becoming a gangster.

We were in a park-like area of an apartment complex during the day. The young man was walking away from me, past a sandbox. I noticed the young man had a gun. He was planning to shoot three men.

I chased after the young man to confiscate the gun. Three gangsters stood behind me and a ways back. I caught up to the young man and grabbed the gun, which the young man held upside down and at a backward angle. My view of the gun was very close, as if I were on my knees.

The gun went off. It shot a little boy (who was among two other little boys) on a swingset. The boy hunched over, dead. I thought, Well, now he (the young man) is doomed to a life of crime. The young man had wrestled away from me.

Now my view was as if I were seeing from the young man's point of view, though I was still the older man. The young man was on his knees, pointing the gun at the older man/me. The older man/I stood with (my) back to a white, 1970s-style car.

The young man kept making threats at (me) with the gun. I thought if I kept letting the young man threaten me he'd see he could trust me.

But, really, the young man was somehow slowly hypnotizing me. The young man had convinced me to put the gun in my mouth and pull the trigger. At the moment the older man (no longer I?) died, the white car exploded. The young man was now completely psychotic, but he would, it was somehow implied, have power to do whatever he wanted. This was apparently a good thing.

The "movie" must now have been over, because a "song by Radiohead" was playing, as if it were the song for the ending credits. The Radiohead song was a particularly spoiled-brat-psycho kind of song, which I actually "remembered" liking when I'd heard it in the past.

I was now standing in the scene as myself, eating a box of Little Debbie Nutty Bars. I wondered how a movie could have an ending with such a nasty character winning and yet also seem to be promoting the ending as a positive one.