(4/29/08) threat and consolation

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

Dream #1

I was outside on a clear day, looking out over a group of small buildings across a wide street. I was near the back of a group of people. From the buildings I could hear some kind of music playing. I thought I recognized it and called out that I liked it. Then I realized it was a Prince song. I said that I did't like it that much, after all.

I noticed that the people all around me (except one or two friends) were high school students and black or Hispanic. They grumbled defensively at my comment.

I said to my friends, as if trying to sound spontaneous, hopefully to make the students feel less offended, "Well, I guess Prince wrote some pretty awesome songs, now that I think of it."

The students now grumbled, "Oh, look at the white man pretending to like black music now that he feels bad."

I said, "I actually don't see why I have to feel bad. If you were to say you thought a song by a white person was bad, you'd feel like that was a perfectly fine and natural thing to say."

One of the female students said, "That's right. Don't make him feel bad about what he said."

I now stood in a long hallway with the students. It was a ramped hallway like in a hospital. I was worried about something else. One of the male students consoled me over this other thing, putting his hand on my shoulder and saying, "Don't worry about it. Everything will be fine." The student was black, taller than I by at least a head, and dressed like a skater.

We were all walking somewhere. I felt an increasing scrutiny around me, like I was the target of students who were going to hurt me regardless of whether I was an adult.

Suddenly someone pushed down on my shoulders. I thought they were trying to steal my backpack. I was pushed all the way down so my face was against the ground.

Everything went black. When I stood up, the hallway, which had been dim before, was even more pronouncedly dim, as if half the building had broken down.

I saw a couple white kids, either boys or girls, sitting on a barrier on the right side of the hallway. The kids were dressed in an exaggeratedly grungy style. I accused the kids of having stolen something from me. The kids just laughed.

An adult came up. I tried to explain that the children had stolen my bag. But the children had tumbled over the barrier to hide. I ran to the barrier and grabbed at something like a dog kennel. I pulled it up, thinking that the children would be inside. But there were only blankets.

I looked over the barrier and saw a child hiding under a chair. I pulled him out, but he may have disappeared or become a pile of clothes. I may have seen a student and become very violent toward him or her.

I was now walking toward a subway station entrance in the daytime. A young man cut me off. We headed down a long stairwell. As we did I ran up to him and cut him off and then started arguing with him.

I was now speaking instead with an Indian woman who was maybe in her forties. She was calming me down. I felt ashamed for having been so petty and violent with the young man.

When we got to the bottom of the steps the woman said that she had forgotten something upstairs. She had to go back up. I told her I would go with her.

I asked the woman something about her job. We stood at the foot of a down escalator (i.e. down from a level above us and ending at our level). The steps glittered, like they were wet, or like they were made of mercury.

We walked over to an up escalator. This escalator was like a thin sheet of metal that drew passengers upward. It was a side, somewhat steep, strip.

As we went up the strange escalator, the woman asked me about my job. I tried not to be boastful.  also realized that the woman would know a lot about my job -- maybe more than I did -- given her own job.

At first, instead of simply standing on the escalator, the woman was at first walking along a half-wall that was weirdly shaped. Then she went to standing on the escalator.

We kept going up, into a dark sky. I looked down and saw that below us was a strange, desert planet or landscape, like in a Salvador Dali painting. The land was greyish-tan, featureless, with orange and red, plasticky figures on it like cacti or barren vegetation. A few sparse people wandered aimlessly through the landscape. Light seemed to crackle against the sand, as if somewhere fireworks were going off.