Showing posts with label 1800s style. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1800s style. Show all posts

Saturday, March 11, 2017

(4/23/05) political bobcat cartoon

(Entered in paper journal at 12:10 PM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I stood in some shrubby or bunch-grassy, tan soiled, desert valley under a grey sky. My eyesight wasn't very good. I was at the foot of a somewhat gentle slope. I saw a wildcat run down the slope. The valley seems to have sloped down even more toward the right or to have curved or something. The wildcat was only trotting along, but it was still quickly approaching whatever landscape obscuration occurred.

I couldn't believe I was seeing a wildcat so close without it getting scared. I hoped it was a mountain lion. But I couldn't see it, though I was pretty sure it was a bobcat because of its fuzzy tail.

I grabbed either my glasses or a pair of binoculars from somewhere. When I put them up to my eyes, though, all I saw was some late nineteenth-century style poster in newsprint-like font with two color drawings about two-thirds up the page. The drawings were of dogs or pigs in dress suits and bowler hats. This, too, was slightly out of focus.

I took off the glasses (?), not understanding what I was seeing. For just a flicker while I snapped off my glasses I saw the valley clearly. I put the glasses back on after a few seconds. Once again I saw the newsprint poster.

I told myself, Oh, I'm in a dream. I got the feeling the poster was something important to remember, especially the event-title in tall letters over the drawings. I told myself to focus. The poster got clearer. I concentrated on the title. But even as I read it the letters seemed to change. Still I told myself, Read this title. You might see or hear words like it during the course of your waking day tomorrow.

Finally the words stopped shifting. I memorized the title (though I no longer remember it). It was rather like something written with the French pronunciation/spelling style but of a phrase or title derived from English but now in only a strange, non-lingual, quasi-English form.

Saturday, March 4, 2017

(8/21/05) violent hygiene

(Entered in paper journal at 9:30 AM at Ozzie's coffee shop on Garfield Street and 5th Avenue.)

Dream 1

It was a bright, hot day. I was in a desert landscape full of mounds, each of different materials. I may have been working with "my NYC Americorps crew."

Now I sat in something like a hospital waiting room and/or restaurant. I sat in a chair, but I think next to me was a pale green vinyl booth. It seems to have been smashed up against or into another booth or circle of wood chairs like mine. My coworker DO sat in the first booth.

My backpack, all dirty and dusty, lay by my chair, slumped into the other "booth." A Spanish family sat in that "booth." A really pretty girl sat in the chair where my backpack was slumping over. The girl was grossed out and scooted over a bit.

DO said something ilke, "That's not good hygiene, Preemie. Did you think a girl would want to sit by your backpack with all that salt-grime on it?"

I now remembered the mound I had been working on was of huge salt crystals. I thought, Well, maybe the girl should be turned on by the fact that I worked hard in a strange place like that. But I moved the backpack away and felt ashamed of my sloppiness.

I don't know what happened next. Then, for some reason, I and someone, maybe DO, were following someone, maybe a doctor (?), through the hallways of this place. Whereas the "waiting room/restaurant" had been cheerily enough lit with natural light, the hallways were dim.

We opened one door. A doctor stood somewhere, possibly unseen, like against the wall and to the left of a doorway. Also to the left of the doorway was a tall, shrubby plant with vines (?) growing out of it. A patient stood just in front of the doorway. Some of the flower-dotted vines crept over him. We had the door open only about halfway, the opening to the left, i.e.


The unseen doctor went on and on about not knowing exactly what species of plant this was.

The patient brushed the vines off and told the doctor, "I don't care what species the plant is. I didn't come here for that." I shut the door, feeling like by standing there I, too, was holding up the man from his purpose.

We walked to another room, which may not have had a door. The room was dimmer than the hallway. It was sort of long and wide. In the middle was something like a conveyor belt or really long examination table. All along it were small shrubs or trees with wide, fragrant, purple-red, heart-shaped leafs. A couple "doctors," male and female, were walking around the room, discussing things I couldn't understand.

My friend (now PD?) and I walked close to the plants. The smell overpowered me. Without thinking, I grabbed the leafs and shoved them in my mouth. The leafs were thick, as thick as five leafs stacked, and they tasted like sweet apples. I thought to myself, This is a redbud tree. Do all redbud trees have leafs like this? Am I supposed to be eating these leafs at all?

Suddenly I felt like an idiot in front of the scientists. With my mouth and hands full I ran out of the room in search either of a room with a plant that was definitely a redbud or else a place outside where I definitely knew a redbud had been planted. But I couldn't remember any place where I had seen a redbud.

I stood in a room, in front of a tree. But something distracting was happening, or maybe I didn't want to be "caught in the act" (i.e. I didn't want people to catch me acting weird with these leafs), and I couldn't focus effectively on examining the tree and seeing if it was a redbud and eating the leafs.

Now it was either late night or early morning. It may have been cool and drizzly. I was outside, in a residential neighborhood and between two tall, steep hills. My friend/coworker KA drove up and picked me up. As we drove the headlights made the drizzle look silvery.

KA said we had been planning to pick up my friend/coworker KB, but that KB had been late. I was spitefully glad we weren't picking up KB. I said something like, "It's unusual that she'd do something like this, but I don't think it's out of character."

KA looked at me suspiciously, as if wondering why I'd want to undermine things with KB. I myself wondered that. Now KA was blaming me for some mistake that had gotten us off track.

Now it was daytime. We were on some mountain/plain roadside, or perhaps just some grassy area with no road. The grass was fiery yellow, green, and orange, as if the grass were changing color, going dormant for the fall. Some other cars were parked here, kind of widely spaced. We two were here to work.

We walked up to KA's car, toward a tall, black man with dreads. The man stared at me. When I got up to him, he pulled something out of his pocket like it was a switchblade and then shoved it toward me and shouted out a "boom!" at me. I flinched. Then I looked down and saw the object was just a straw. The man laughed, self-satisfied that he had scared me.

Everything seems reversed now. Instead of walking


I walked like this.


But now I turned around to face the man again. I was a little afraid. But when I got up to him I mock-congratulated him for scaring me. Then I laughed and laughed in his face. I wasn't afraid now. I wanted to beat the shit out of this guy.

The man walked away slowly, trying to act like he wasn't threatened. But I didn't want him to walk away. I called him back, telling him he was the real coward if he wouldn't fight me, and that only cowards scare people for no reason, anyway.

Now he was running down some hill of grass and pine trees. I ran after him.

It was night. Somebody sat on the slope. I thought it was the man. I ran up, yelling that now he was going to face me once and for all. I grabbed the person's shoulder. The person turned around. She was an older woman. She looked at me pathetically. I felt bad and tried to explain myself.

But now I was walking into a tightly spaced cafe. The place was all dark, heavy, rough wood. There was plenty of natural light, but the darkness of the wood still gave the place a classy kind of dimness. The place was like a corner or "L," with a round column on the inner corner,


and two tables very close to the column and each other.

I sat at a table with a "woman" I didn't pay much attention to, and my coworker SC, who was reading the paper. In the other table was some 19th century-style man with a round face, a bowler hat, and a puny mustache.

SC spoke with the "woman" about the article he'd just read. he said something like, "I could belive that they're all related. It doesn't seem strange to me."

Now the "woman" spoke in a gaudy, deep voice. I realized the "woman" was a transsexual. I was disappointed. I looked at the "woman." She looked terribly mannish. I wanted to ignore her completely, but the way the man at the other table scrutinized me made me feel bad. I spoke directly to SC.

I looked at the article. Apparently the article claimed that six children had been conceived by an alien and born of an earthling woman. There were six photos, and the children all had a Nosferatu-like look, though some children had a bit bigger eyes or more robust bone structure.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

(3/23/08) machine gun trampoline; suicidal woman; seeing old friends; zombie city fair

(Entered in paper journal at 9:08 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

Possibly a vision of a man in a car. The man may have had no hands. Then a man on a ship, possibly talking on the phone about making a shipment of gold. The scene switched to the man on the other end of the line. He made some comment like, "You better make this shipment snatchy."

The man looked like a white crook from the 1970s. He wore a multicolored, striped suit. He was in some kind of crowded area, like a small warehouse. Behind him was a thin man at a desk, facing the wall, his back facing the man. The man at the desk wore an outfit like a policeman's uniform. He had close-cut, black hair. He may have been "played by" Tom Hanks. The first man and the Tom Hanks man were both cops on an undercover mission.

The first man hung up the phone and walked over to the Tom Hanks man, who said something in a gruff voice. I was impressed that Tom Hanks was using a voice so different from his natural voice.

The scene switched. The Tom Hanks man was now (also?) the man with the missing hand. The man was now only missing one hand, not two. A crocodile had bitten off the missing hand. The man was in a room which had water up to about knee-depth. The crocodile was swimming around in this room.

The man had a machine gun. He found the crocodile and fought it, yelling things like, "You want to try and take my other hand? Take this!" The man shoved the machine gun into the crocodile's mouth and began shooting.

There was now a scene like at a circus. There were two large trampolines. A clown was jumping on the left trampoline. He was doing "difficult tricks," which were mainly just jumping and twirling, no flips or anything.

The Tom Hanks man said, "Now they" (the people who funded the circus?) "want to make the trampoline fabric even thinner. But it's barely wide enough to prevent accidents even now!"

I looked at the trampolines. Instead of the fabric being the entire circle, there was just a thin stretch of fabric in the center. The rest of the circle was just a frame of springs.


The jumping clown landed just off the mat and fell in the springs. He untangled himself from the springs and stood on the ground. I knew that the clowns were already learning how to jump on fabric this thin and could actually learn how to jump on even thinner fabric.

Dream #2

It was the late 1800s or early 1900s. I stood before a woman like the main woman from the Francis Ford Coppola film Youth Without Youth. I held the woman's hands in mine. The woman's eyes seemed enormous somehow. The woman told me she wanted to kill herself.

Dream #3

I was at the house of my friend R and his wife L. We stood with something between us, something like a model of a spacecraft from a science fiction movie or even a long ship like a Viking vessel. I hadn't wanted to come to R and L's house, and I especially hadn't wanted to meet with R and L, but I'd had to retrieve something I'd left at their place.

I was speaking with R and L and acting cheerful. But I was upset that I'd even had to start speaking to them. I was leaving now. I walked down a straight, long flight of steps that got dimmer and dimmer, lit only by the light of R and L's apartment. Either R or L told me they hoped I would come back soon. I knew my feelings of obligation would probably make me come back.

Dream #4

I was traveling with a group of people. There were a few carloads of us. Zombies had overtaken America, presumably. We were driving from town to town, avoiding zombies as well as we could.

It was dark night. we were in an abandoned town. We were running low on supplies, but apparently we would take new supplies from each town. And even though we were running low on supplies, our cars were full of things we needed.

Some of us found the setup of a city fair. Some people in the group managed to turn on a lot of the rides. I stood outside the whole thing with a couple other people, watching the people ride the rides. The place was full of warmth and color. I thought, Let them have their fun. Things have been fun. They'll probably just get tougher. Let these people have fun while they can.

Suddenly jets flew at us from he horizon. The military spotted all our lights and thought we were zombies trying to lay some kind of strange trap. they dropped bombs on us. I didn't see the bombs. Instead I saw as if I were facing two people watching the bombs drop. I could tell the bombs had hit one or two of our cars. I felt a wave of despair. Not only did we just lose some of the things we needed; we also lost one or two of our only transportation sources.

Another series of bombs dropped. They hit the city fair. A final series of bombs destroyed a house from which we had hoped to gather supplies.

It was now daytime. We were driving through an abandoned (?) large city. We drove through an office park, past a long lawn-island, and through a multiple intersection of roads and building parking lots. We approached a building which may possibly have had an old courthouse look to it, though it may also have partly been a modern office building.

I thought about a police officer we had been dealing with -- a "Mr. (?) Simms." He might have been a zombie. But somehow we were also working with him to prevent ourselves from being thought of as zombies. I knew there would actually be trouble if we kept dealing with him.

I thought back to the last time we'd seen the officer. We'd dropped him off at a building like the courthouse. He'd been in a very weird state, almost like drunkenness. I was sure now that he had in fact then been becoming a zombie.