(5/26/08) washing a painting; no idea who i am

(Entered in paper journal at 9:06 AM at Flying Saucer cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was possibly on a dark shore with my mom, my aunt M, and another woman, possibly my cousin AH. The sky was dark, almost brownish. The ground was like mud, or like muddy pools.

My mom and the other woman stood in two different puddles full of muddy water. They were wading their arms into the water as if cleaning something off. They were also searching for something, possibly a painting.

I ended up standing in the water in my mother's place. I may have held the painting. I may have been washing it off with the muddy water. As I was doing so, my aunt was talking about how incompetent my mom was, how she hadn't been able to find the painting.

Dream #2

I stood in a very cramped room with a few people, among whom were my mother, my oldest nephew, and a few other family members. The room was probably a kitchen and was bright with light from a window. My nephew sat by a stainless steel refrigerator. His dull reflection showed on one of the sides of the fridge -- possibly not the side he sat next to, which may, however, have been bright with window-light reflection.

I said to my nephew, "You know that this you" (I pointed to my nephew's reflection) "isn't real, right?" My nephew said yes. I then asked him, "But, now, are you quite sure that this you" (I pointed to him, but toward his lap) "is real?" I could tell that other people in the room were listening to me and thinking that I was trying to teach my nephew a good lesson.

There was now a scene before me -- a McDonald's menu all in red, as if written in some kind of fancy menu card and hung up on a wall. I was working to figure out how McDonald's sales would perform given their new menu.

I now sat in an audience, looking out at a very dim stage, which may have been lit with red-orange light, and which was pretty much level with the front row of seats. There were two men, possibly Asian, who were making some deep statements about something like business or finance.

As the men started speaking, some recording started, music or voice, which was supposed to appear like it came from a device, like a phone or a HAM radio, or a person at a table on the right side of the stage. I thought the double-sound was making a statement on the reality and unreality of everything we say -- as if everything we say is and is not based in reality. The speech of the Asian man became more philosophical than businesslike.

Suddenly one of my senior co-workers, KU, who was sitting behind me and just to my right, got angry at the person sitting behind him. He said, "You'd better apologize and clean that up right now!" I could tell that the person sitting behind KU had spilled something like a chocolate shake on the floor and that it had spilled into KU's row. The person behind KU, I felt, was a young man, pale white, with shaggyish, blonde hair and possibly some scraggly facial hair and wearing jeans and a t-shirt for some heavy metal band.

KU said, "You have no idea who I am, and how much I can mess with your life if you don't apologize!"

The man behind KU now said something like, "I have just as many connections as you have!" He then made some reference to a group of very powerful people in the Private Equity industry.

I had been hoping KU could get this guy to apologize. It had becoming clearer to me that this guy had spilled his drink into KU's space on purpose. I thought KU had been right to stand up for himself. But now I felt despair at the fact that this guy fought against KU in the same way and simply wouldn't apologize.