(4/23/08) helping and neglecting; patient and doctor; strange, beautiful UN scandal

(Entered in paper journal at 6:13 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in an area like an office reception area combined with an empty department store. It was pretty quiet. None of the lights were turned on. Only natural light lit the building, from tall windows on a wall to my right.

A few people stood in front of a long "reception desk" that seemed more like an airport check-in counter or a nurse's station. I walked past this station.

Someone behind the counter told me he couldn't figure out some sort of billing statement. I thought, Well, I can figure it out. But I don't want to be mistaken for working here. Nevertheless, I went behind the counter and took a look at the receipt, since somebody, I knew, was waiting for it.

There were two receipts: a yellow, carbon-copy-like one that was maybe three inches by five inches, and a small, white printout that was maybe three inches by one inch. There were two longish numbers on the receipts. These numbers needed to be checked, to make sure they matched on the two receipts. If the numbers matched, a phone number was then to be called. The number dialed would provide more information.

As I was getting ready to call the phone number, the phone rang on another line. I let that phone ring a couple times, hoping the person I was trying would pick up, and that I could then put him on hold to answer the other call. But after a few rings I had to answer. I walked over to a big control board on the window-wall side of the "reception-desk" and flipped a lit purple switch. My call was put on hold.

I answered the other line. It was one of my boss BS' clients. She sounded very angry. She said, "Don't you know who I am? How dare you keep the phone ringing so long?" She started asking me a research question.

BS walked past me. I thought I would hand the call over to him. But I hesitated. I considered that I would probably get in trouble for having kept a client call ringing on the phone for so long.

Dream #2

In a stone basement a man was going to perform an operation on another man. I was the patient. But I was also the doctor. The patient was an older man, like the professor in The Blue Angel, but a little more wrinkled and with less hair. The doctor was alternately a man like the patient and a younger man, tall and attractive, but with kind of scraggly hair.

I (patient) lay on a kind of dingy hospital bed. The light all around was dim. I might have been falling asleep. I might have been partly cut open already. I knew was was going to have a new kind of graft -- a piece of my intestines would be used to replace one of the vessels of my heart.

I (doctor) walked down stone steps into the basement. My vision was very blurry. There was a third man in the room. Both he and I worried that I wouldn't be able to see well enough to do such a precise operation. But then I remembered that I used another instrument for this operation.

Without telling the third man what I was doing, I walked into a nearby room and pulled out a large, rolling frame with a wide, flat-screen TV on its top. I pulled it close to the patient. Everything was now magnified perfectly. I saw a very thin, needle-like instrument poking over some yellow matter that was apparently intestines.

Dream #3

I had been out walking and had seen a lot of strange and beautiful things. I saw now walking around to the front of a beige-bricked building that looked like an area of the United Nations building. In front of it was a railing like the handrail mazes for amusement park rides. The sun was warm and golden, but warm shadow covered the front of the building.

I told myself to remember everything I'd seen today: it had all been so beautiful and strange.

I walked into the building, which was like a fast food restaurant, except that there were "pull-belt" mazes as the line and all the cashiers were behind counters topped with plexiglass windows, like in a bank.

I called to one of the cashiers, a black woman with shortish, reddish hair who wore a green shirt. I told the cashier I would like a XXXXX and a ham and egg breakfast sandwich. I had to wait a moment, for some reason.

I stood by the far right register and read a paper like The Onion, which had a weird photo of a man and woman swinging in darkness and cloaked in a swooping cloth of bright colors and white. These two people were celebrities involved in some scandal.