(9/4/08) getting home from the met

(Entered in paper journal at 6:11 AM on B-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was out on an open field with my mom and sister and possibly my sister's children (though all the children may have been girls). I was looking down at a hole in the ground that looked like a stairwell made of sand. I may have been digging this hole out even more, and possibly with a big slab of slate that was large and smooth enough to be a headstone.

One of my family members, maybe my sister, asked, "What if we come to sleep with you here?"

I didn't think there was enough space for my family here. And I didn't think the sandy be would be flat enough for them. But now I dug the slate into the ground so it stood upright, like a headstone, in the bed of this stairwell. Suddenly the ground looked flat enough. Now the slate was gone.

I looked before me. The sandy wall was sculpted to look just like a stone wall, just like, I thought, a wall in an underground hallway of a pyramid.

I told my family, "Well, I could do something like this. Come down and see."

We were now in a place that looked like a cinder-walled basement of a house. Nobody seemed to be impressed. I myself wasn't exactly sure what this place was, but I tried to explain to my family (which was now more like a group of Mexican women and girls) that this was a replica of an Egyptian tomb. But I explained that even though it was a replica, there were actual authentic artifacts.

I tried to point out one (or two) of the authentic artifacts in a roundabout way. Between the back of a couch and a wall, two (?) white statues, about ten feet long, lay on their sides, on on top of the other. The statues were of a Pharaoh and his bride. The Pharaoh lay on top. A cloth blanket may have been covering their legs.

But I couldn't quite get anybody focused enough to pay attention to this view. Everybody ran around the space, which was now like a warm-colored version of the scholar's garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There weren't any big sculptures anywhere, possibly just framed paintings on the walls. But I still thought of this space as an exhibition of Egyptian artifacts.

I managed to get a small group of folks together to go into a small side room, which I thought would lead to the Egyptian tomb hallway. But the wall where I thought the entrance to the hallway would be was blocked off by a curtain of blue and white patterned material.

We headed back to the main room. Somewhere I saw the ten-foot-long sculptures again. I wasn't sure anymore that they were genuine.

Now it was like we were being too rowdy and we had to leave.

We were up in some gutted-out structure that resembled a Greek ruin mixed with something like a garage. The ground was very greasy. The ruin looked out over an open, maybe desert-like, area.

There was some blocked-off space like for a large sculpture at a corner of the ruin. We walked up to it. There was some big, rusty machine that looked like a construction or heavy-duty cooking machine, but which we called a fire truck.

A group of rough-looking, white men gathered around the machine. Some of the men may have been using flame throwers. Others were breathing fire. The whole thing smelled awful, like my stomach feels when I get indigestion. The explanation of it all was that these men were putting out a fire. But the fire wasn't exactly here.

We stood around for a while, wondering if the fire truck would ever be through, so it could give us a ride home. Eventually we figured that the firemen simply didn't want to give us a ride home.

We walked to an old, rusty, gutted-out vehicle like a bus at the other end of the ruin. The driver inside waved an instrument like a megaphone at us, gesturing that he didn't want us on his bus. Eventually the megaphone began spouting fire.

The other people in my group were now gone. It was night. I stood with the bus driver and a man who worked with him. This other man and I walked away from the small-building city street. The man was big, fattish, with glasses and shoulder-length hair. He wore jean shorts, a white t-shirt, and a jean vest. He was talking to me about comic books. At first I was interested. But then I started to feel uneasy, like maybe I shouldn't be hanging out with such a weird person.