(Entered in paper journal at 6:13 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I stood at the top of a slight hill, on a street corner in a residential suburban neighborhood. It was a winter night, and snow lay on the street and sidewalks.
A small firetruck, like a pickup truck, drove down the hill, to my right. I watched it or heard it lose control. I looked down after it. It had crashed into a barren, even limbless tree, in front of "my mom's house," which was apparently the house my family had lived in during my last years of high school.
The driver got out of the truck. He was a bald, black man. He radioed or phoned someone at his station that he had crashed.
I remembered that the tree in front of my mom's house had been rotting from the inside because of wood-wasps. I ran down the street to warn the fireman that the tree could fall on him if he stood in front of it, now that it had been hit so hard. The snow in the street was knee-deep. I slightly hesitated in warning the man -- I was afraid he'd do something bad to me or accuse me of having done something bad and arrest me.
About halfway down the street I turned around to look back up the hill. At the top of the hill may have been a car with the doors left open. I thought it might be easier for me to get into the car and drive down to warn the man.
I suddenly realized the air was warm. I thought, Wasn't it summer and sweltering hot (in waking life) today? How is it snowing now? And why is the warmth not melting the snow?
I realized I was dreaming. The orange-streetlight atmosphere became tinged with a raspy white light as well. I was excited to realize I was dreaming and almost immediately began losing awareness. Things started going black.
I calmed myself down very slowly and regained my vision. I was now in something more like a really big front yard. I couldn't hold off the loss of awareness by just thinking. So I grabbed a handful of snow. The cold shocked me back into awareness. I packed the snow into a ball. It soon became a warm material, like Styrofoam or cotton.
I began to lose awareness again and fell to my knees. I had to fight to keep awareness. I grabbed onto the branches of some vegetation near me. I had sight again. The vegetation around me was dimply lit with a raspy, white, electric light.
The shrub I held onto had thin branches of greenish yellow, like on a Mormon Tea shrub. I looked closely at the shrub and moved to my right, clinging closely to the vegetation. I came upon another shrub. It had thin branches lightly covered in clover-like leafs which were pale burgundy colored with a thin fringe of dark, dull green.
The sun was now rising and the atmosphere was a dim grey. A bird began calling in a flat, shrill voice. At first I thought the call was from a catbird. But then the bird that had called flew out of the vegetation. The bird was small, like a chickadee. It kept calling shrilly. I realized I had startled it. I had come very close to it and its nest.
The bird flew into a pinon tree behind me. I stood up and looked at the pinon tree. Behind the tree the sky was rippled with silver and white clouds shining chrome-like with sunlight and edged with a metallic orange.
There was no snow on the ground. I was somewhere like a big backyard. I could hear another bird, possibly the first bird's mate, calling a reply, as if to say it would come to protect the nest as well. I kept walking, trying not to cause a fuss, trying to get away from the nest so that the birds would no longer feel like they were in danger.
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