(3/20/05) gay tools

(Entered in paper journal at 7:20 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I headed to an amusement park. I was now before a ride -- a tall, thin, metal, spidery, hourglass-shaped frame, off the spinning top of which hung long wires to swing set-like seats that almost touched the ground. The top would spin enough so that the strung seats would whirl about parallel to the ground. The seated people could then control their seats somehow to spin around and move higher or lower. I think at first the seats looked like painted, glittery, rocket-like capsules, but that they changed.

It was my turn to ride. I got on the swing set seat. The top only turned slowly. I was barely going up. I tried to turn myself around or lift my seat up some more. But I couldn't find any controls.

I heard someone somewhere say, "The last batch of folks was brave enough to have a good ride. Too bad you got stuck with this batch of folks."

Now my crew mate MG came by and saw me on the ride. He thought it looked like fun.

Now I was able to control the ride. I spun the top faster and cranked some springy string-control so that I was way high in the air, at about ten degrees from only slowly. (This ride was in something like a vacant, dusty lot. I don't know where the other rides were.)

Now Max and I and some interesting older woman were inside a shed-like area. The place was tight, with thick, wood beam frames and no walls, and a few, naked incandescent bulbs lighting the clutter of close-packed tools and boxes. We went to a red truck which had tool compartments dense along its sides.

MG was talking impressively to the woman -- something about a job he had or would have soon. The woman gave an intellectual-sounded response. I felt left out. I thought, grabbing a tub of tools I felt were necessary for the task at hand, At least I know how to work, how to put myself to work. At least I can interact with folks that way.

But now MG and the woman grabbed a huge board or case of tools out of the compartment. They tried to move forward. They'd have to move through a tight frame of wood beams. The tub of tools was blocking the way.

MG and the woman stared at me. I asked, "Wasn't I supposed to bring out these tools?"

They said, "No. We're only using these tools."

I tried to get the tools out of their way. But as I grabbed the but, MG and the woman impatiently bashed the case of tools against me. I felt and saw tools crash all around me and bright light everywhere. All this time the conversation between MG and the woman was still going on. I could hear them now talking about something about homosexuality.

My sight was now of some black and white photos, as if I were holding a coffee table book close to my face. Another voice, like a female narrator, took over for MG and the woman and gave some details about the subjects (probably artists) of these photographs, which were taken by a woman in the 1970s.

One picture I focused on was of a party at a woman's apartment, probably in New York. It was a small living room, with a couch and a woven rug and some thin shelves taking up most of the space. But there were plants everywhere. There were maybe fourteen or fifteen (small and medium) pots of plants. There were even two pots under the couch.

There were about ten people in the photograph. The only woman I noticed was the one who threw the party. She had on black leather pants and some tight-knit sweater with a v-neck. She was thin and delicate, yet somehow blunt-faced, and she had a thin yet long pile of frizz-curly hair about her head and shoulders. Everybody else was male, as far as I noticed. They were all gay, except for the girl and her boyfriend, who stood beside her.

I thought, I can't believe I've been invited to this party. I don't want to be hit on by guys all night. Not that I'm turned off by the thought of being with a guy. But all these guys look like assholes.

I now saw two guys with their arms around each other's shoulders: a normal friendship pose. But these guys were lovers. They were both Latino, though I thought at first that the smaller guy was white. The bigger guy was very dark.

At first the guys both had roundish, wide-eyed faces. But the closer I looked the more I saw that they both actually looked Native American: thin-eyed, with broad, flat sharp faces. Their dress was very 1970s Navajo-style -- very cowboy-like, with tight shirts over compactly bulging stomachs like water canteens. I was actually kind of disappointed that two guys like this would be gay.

Now I stood with another older woman. She was tall, thin, and had the same intellectual attractiveness I find in Diane Arbus. We stood in a smallish apartment that felt like it was in some city in the desert. The place was empty and the light was grey-sky light soaking in through yellow-thick curtains, into off-white walls and a dirty pine green carpet.

The woman was telling her her plans about how to flower this place. The place was something like a public center, a park or garden (though it was just an apartment).

On a ledge in front of the front window was a wide pot full of grey and white and black speckled gravel with a couple sprigs of green sprouting up into a couple white and pink flowers. But behind this pot crept a viny stalk that hugged its way around from the right to the left and stalked up independently on the ledge a couple inches to the left of and behind the wide, pinkish, plastic pot. The stalk was a tropical green that faded up into a tropical green-yellow before flowering in a cardinal-red spike tighter than a thistle-head, combed together like the wet hairs of a thick paintbrush.

I told the woman I liked this flower very much. She said, "Yes. MH," (one of my Americorps crew mates) "found this flower all the way down that way."

When the woman said this I noticed the vine, which I saw circling around and behind the right side of the pot, actually climbed farther right, low along the wall in one green and yellow strand down a hallway, to a point in a boiler room where MH had made the discovery.

The woman continued. "MH found it when she picked a quarter off the flower." (I now saw a quarter by the vine behind the right side of the pot.) "I was about to wring her neck, because she spread this invasive species just so she could pick up a quarter. But MH told me that the quarter was for a man who was diabetic and who needed every last bit of his money for his diabetes medication.

"So I said, 'Well, that's okay then. But you have to be very careful, because this vine thrives very well around these small blossoms. But I like that vine, too.'"

(10/12/07) bergman's submarine sisters

(Entered in paper journal at 5:35 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I walked into a movie theater. The lights were still on. A man stood up front, giving a brief discussion of the film that was about to play. I had come in from the left side of the theater. I walked across in front of the front row and over to the right side. I headed out the door. I was looking for the ticket-taker. I wanted to get my ticket torn, but the movie was about to start.

As I walked out the door, I saw a black man. I was about to hand him my ticket: I assumed he was the ticket-taker. But I saw that he was heading in to watch the movie as well. The man had his son, a ten-year-old boy, with him. The father was discussing the importance of Ingmar Bergman to the history of cinema. Apparently the movie Cries and Whispers was showing, though I may have called the film Smiles of a Summer Night.

I walked up a short stairway outside the door and looked left and right for a ticket-taker. The father called to me, "I don't think we give our tickets. I think we just head on in."

I said, "Oh. Okay." I turned back toward the door. The man and son were gone. A ticket-taker, tall, white, with a broad, bald forehead and wearing a suit like a security guard might wear, stood before the door. He took my ticket. I went into the theater.

The theater was now dark. I ran as quickly as I could to the front row -- my favorite area for sitting in a movie theater -- while the theater was still dark, hoping not to impede anybody's view by searching for a seat after the movie came on. I also hoped that once I found a seat, nobody would come along later and accuse me of stealing a seat that they had somehow saved for themselves. But then I remembered (?) that I had sat my stuff in a seat in the front row before I had headed out the right door. I sat beside and older man and woman.

The movie began. Liv Ullmann was walking beside a huge, black-hulled ship with a man and possibly another woman. The time period of the movies was probably the 1970s. The man was olive-skinned, tall, with dark black hair. He looked strong and suave. He wore a long, tan peacoat. Liv Ullmann was fattish and wore a blue, velvet-like (terry cloth?) jumpsuit. Her hair was frizzy and bright and enormous.

The man was telling Ullmann why she wasn't good enough for him. He said she was afraid of everything and that she could never go anywhere with him. Ullmann couldn't take the criticism. She ran of the end of the dock. The man would get on his ship and leave her, I knew. Then Ullmann would go with her sisters somewhere.

I thought, I don't remember this film (Cries and Whispers) being set in modern times. But, I thought, perhaps the village where Ullmann visits her sisters still observes traditions from the older days. Perhaps that's why I remember the style of the movie being that of an older time.

At another part of the docs a person in a huge, thick, old-style diving suit climbed up a ladder and out of the water. Having undone the spherical, metallic diving-helmet, the diver now revealed herself as Bibi Andersson. Andersson was "the tough sister" of the film, with the job of being an underwater explorer. She had come here to meet Ullmann so the two of them could go to the village together.

But now both sisters were in the water together. Ulmann looked a little healthier, less pale. She had short hair (like Andersson's typical short hairstyle), and her hair had a more subdued tone. Neither Ulmann nor Andersson had put their diving helmets on yet.

Near the sisters was a glass sphere. This was the exploration vehicle they would use. Apparently Bibi always took Liv on "one last exploration" before the sisters went to the village together.

The water was murky and brownish. There were a couple large vessels surrounding the sisters and the exploration vehicle. Liv had looked down into the water and was afraid. She had seen a large creature. She asked Bibi (both sisters still treading water) what the creature was. Bibi said, "I'm not sure. It didn't look like a shark or a whale. I guess we'll find out." In my mind's eye, I saw the silhouette of a shark passing over the silhouette of a whale in murky, brown water.

Liv got even more afraid now and started hyperventilating a little. I wondered if she would even get into the exploration vehicle.

(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.

(4/1/08) the city had changed; the psychotic killer wins

(Entered in paper journal at 4:50 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a toy store. It had an oldish feel to it, like a cheapish toy store from the 1980s. I must at first have thought it was a novelty shop.

I sat near the checkout stand, looking at the aisles and thinking of some kind of lingerie outfit I wanted to buy. But then I saw people coming in and buying toys. I took a walk through one of the nearby aisles. I thought, This place won't have the lingerie I was looking for, anyway. But I also thought there was something I did need to buy from here: something like a board game or an electronic device like a calculator.

I turned back toward the checkout stand and saw it was full of people asking where certain things were. I thought, I don't have enough time to wait here to find out where the thing I need is. I decided I would just go to the novelty shop, which was nearby, and buy the lingerie I was looking for.

I could see the novelty ship in my head. It looked very rundown and seedy, like an Eighth Avenue porn shop. I thought about how much things in New York City had changed over the years.

In my head I asked my sister if she thought the city had changed. She said, "I don't know. I live in a building in the middle of Central Park. Nothing much has been touched there."

I now stood in a building, a house that seemed to be one gigantic living room. It had a circular floor plan and walls sloping up to a roof. The floor was of concrete. The walls may have been of wood. The place was lit with natural light. I saw the front door and knew that outside was an enormous valley of green and orange grass, like the vast valleys of the Valles Caldera in New Mexico.

Dream #2

I was in something like a movie. I was a man in his forties, bald, a little fattish. I had probably been a mafia-type gangster. Now I was trying to stop a young man from also becoming a gangster.

We were in a park-like area of an apartment complex during the day. The young man was walking away from me, past a sandbox. I noticed the young man had a gun. He was planning to shoot three men.

I chased after the young man to confiscate the gun. Three gangsters stood behind me and a ways back. I caught up to the young man and grabbed the gun, which the young man held upside down and at a backward angle. My view of the gun was very close, as if I were on my knees.

The gun went off. It shot a little boy (who was among two other little boys) on a swingset. The boy hunched over, dead. I thought, Well, now he (the young man) is doomed to a life of crime. The young man had wrestled away from me.

Now my view was as if I were seeing from the young man's point of view, though I was still the older man. The young man was on his knees, pointing the gun at the older man/me. The older man/I stood with (my) back to a white, 1970s-style car.

The young man kept making threats at (me) with the gun. I thought if I kept letting the young man threaten me he'd see he could trust me.

But, really, the young man was somehow slowly hypnotizing me. The young man had convinced me to put the gun in my mouth and pull the trigger. At the moment the older man (no longer I?) died, the white car exploded. The young man was now completely psychotic, but he would, it was somehow implied, have power to do whatever he wanted. This was apparently a good thing.

The "movie" must now have been over, because a "song by Radiohead" was playing, as if it were the song for the ending credits. The Radiohead song was a particularly spoiled-brat-psycho kind of song, which I actually "remembered" liking when I'd heard it in the past.

I was now standing in the scene as myself, eating a box of Little Debbie Nutty Bars. I wondered how a movie could have an ending with such a nasty character winning and yet also seem to be promoting the ending as a positive one.

(6/1/08) my ancient friend; rescued from cannibals

(Entered in paper journal at 9 AM at Starbucks on 29th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was near the edge of a tall plateau that overlooked the ocean. A black dog sat before me at the very edge of the plateau. I was afraid the dog would attack me, but I walked up to it anyway.

There was somebody, possibly a woman, possibly my mother, standing down at the foot of the slope. The person called up to me, yelling something disparaging about my interaction with the dog. The person wore a strange costume, multicolored, like Chinese or Caucasian dress, with a triangular headdress of some kind.

Possibly out of defiance, I knelt and put my right arm around the dog and pet the dog. The dog was like a Black Labrador. It was very friendly. Suddenly I realized the dog was mine or had been a friend of mine.

I was now somewhere like the kitchen in my great-grandmother's house. I was still petting the dog. I grabbed the dog's left foreleg. Something about the leg seemed sickly thin.

I felt the presence of people, possibly Ancient Egyptians, behind me. I may have realized that the dog and I had had a relationship in Ancient Egypt, as if it were a court dog and I were its caretaker, or as if I were some member of the court and the dog had been mine.

Dream #2

I was a woman. I was with two other women. We three were all beautiful and blonde. We probably wore sundresses. We were investigating a house. The people who lived in the house were suspected of doing something bad.

The house was all or mostly basement-level. We had gotten down into the house, into the living room. It seemed like there was nobody there, although we could see that the table was set for dinner. The food seemed to be orange: maybe orange-colored blossoms and oranges or peaches.

Somehow I had gotten separated from the other two women. I was in a dark bedroom. The living room, which I could see through the half-closed doorway, was also dimmer than it had been.

I knew that the other two women had been caught by the people living here and were either dead or being prepared to be killed. I knew now that the people in the house were cannibals and had trapped us to kill and eat us. I knew that the people who lived here were home now, with guests. I had an idea that I could get out of here if I left the bedroom and moved through the living room at just the right time.

But now the man and woman who lived here came into the room. They turned on the lights. The couple were older. They looked like a couple in their fifties might have looked in the 1970s. The husband looked like Larry Tate from the TV show Bewitched.

I knew that the couple had had me trapped in the bedroom this whole time, though I hadn't suspected it before, and that I couldn't have left, even if I'd been given time to try.  A few of the guests also funneled into the room. They all stood around like this was just part of the dinner party.

The husband produced a book, which he opened in order to show me pictures. The book was like a 1960s style cookbook, with photos in black and white and line-drawings (like in CPR manuals) of people preparing food.

But the whole book was on preparing human body parts for being eaten. One series of photos showed an arm being chopped in pieces. It may have been the arm of the woman preparing the food in the photos and line-drawings. The woman may have been cutting her own arm, while it was still attached to her body.

The husband now took on an angry demeanor. He yelled at me for invading his space. He told me something about how all the people around me would eat me sooner or later, and how I would never be able to rescue my friends.

The lights were off again. It was like I was by myself again. But I could still hear the husband. He may have been in the room. He told me to read the book, and that if I started getting hungry I could just start cutting pieces off my own body and eating them.

I now saw, as if I were watching the situation as a movie, a stone-floored outdoor area, possibly near a building. There was a square hole leading to an underground cell. I knew my two friends were in that cell.

Suddenly a group of people like ninjas ran into the scene. They were dressed in thick, navy blue fabric. Their bodies were covered completely except their eyes. Their head coverings were wrapped in layers, more like Arabian turbans (except around the head and face) than like a ninja's small face mask.

The ninjas ran quickly, making windy, shuffling sounds with their clothing. They all slid down a pole or rope and into the cell. They were here to rescue my friends.

(9/27/08) the story of my boss' career

(Entered in paper journal on Q-train.)

Dream #1

I was in a big room. It might have been a mod-fashion type of room, like in a lot of movies about the 1960s and 1970s, with bright-orange walls and lots of big, white blocks everywhere for furniture. But there might also have been other objects in the room, such as small aircraft.

I stood in front of a small, blonde woman who sat on a piece of furniture. I was trying to tell the woman about the career of my boss BS. But as I got to a point where I was talking about when he began working for our company, BS walked past and corrected me. He said, "I began twenty-nine years ago." BS continued walking on and talking about his time at the company. I also continued talking to the girl about BS' time at the company, though I now felt a lot less confident about what I was saying.

The scene soon faded. I could still hear BS talking about his life. But I was now seeing as if I were floating along myself, to my right, before some docks, or along a shore. I first saw a large ship which kind of looked like a battleship and a large yacht combined. Then (at a specific point in BS' story) I saw a ship submerged so that only its bow stuck out of the water, flatly, almost even with the water. The bow itself was flat, like a wood for or a bowling lane.

(11/29/08) escape from the barber

Dream #1

I was in a barber shop. I sat down at a chair and an older, fattish man with bronzed skin and darkish, blonde hair got me ready. He brought out a big tub of shaving cream. He used a large brush to spread some of the shaving cream across my face. I really didn't want to have a shave. But I thought that since the barber had already started, it was just as well.

The shaving cream was tan colored, with little flecks of green in it. It smelled like seaweed. The man began to shave me, but only cut the top part of my left sideburn. He might have sensed a bit of my hesitance. He got angry and stood me up. He said this wasn't the right room for cutting people's hair.

We walked into another room. The previous room had been run-down, with concrete floors and green-painted, concrete walls, with only one barber chair and a dirty mirror in front of it. But this room was even worse. The walls were dark wood. The room was very small. There might have been a worn-out bed and a thin, worn-out, dark wood chair.

The man was grumbling violently to me about how bad I was for not letting him do his job. He mad some angry complaint about how people like me were all alike (rich people, people from a certain place or of a certain race, etc.), and how he hating having to do anything for them at all.

The man pulled me into a couple other rooms, which may possibly have been getting deeper into this building. Finally we stood in a small room. I may not have had shaving cream on my face anymore.

The old man pulled out his blade and said, "This blade isn't good at all for shaving people. It's good for killing them."

The man grabbed me, but I got loose. He chased me through the building and into an area like a courtyard garden.

Right at the doors into the garden the man was caught (by a middle-aged, Latin man and woman, a couple, who may have been dressed in blue or purple nurses' scrubs?). The captors held the man as he violently struggled with them and screamed and barked after me.

The courtyard was square. The garden was complex, like a medieval garden, but it looked worn down and neglected. There might even have been rusty junk, like old wheelbarrows, in the garden. The walls of the building may have been stucco. There was a wood-columned, patio-like, covered walkway along the walls. I ran through the garden and at a set of wide, old, greying wood doors (like for a horse stable).

I was now in a car, driving very slowly through a suburban street. I was with the Americorps crew with whom I had worked in New York City in 2005. We were in some neighborhood like far out in Queens, a very quiet, suburban neighborhood with houses and yards.

I knew we were coming to a house number that was the same as the number of the house I had last lived in with my family. I didn't really care -- it didn't seem too special -- there must have been tons of houses with that same number. But I new my crew mates would be interested. But I also didn't want to tell them my old house number. I felt uneasy about giving away even the slightest details about my family's past or present whereabouts. But it was like my crew already knew.

We parked at the curb of a dark-tan-bricked house, the yard of which had a slight upward slope. The house number was written out in big, black-iron, cursive characters to the left (my right) of the doorway. The door was open.

The crew had brought me here as a kind of surprise. They knew either that I had lived here or that the house number made this house very much like the house I had lived in. My crew had arranged for me to come in to get a glimpse of my "old days." Some other people were also slowly trickling into the house. There was a whole houseful of people inside, all relaxedly mingling with each other.

The house itself was huge on the inside. The interior decoration was very much like that of a house of the late 1960s or early 1970s. It was dark carpeted, with mostly dark-toned furniture. There seemed to be a layering of rooms -- the rooms were divided from each other not by walls but by successive flights and sometimes by small bars. Something about the bars or walls may have had a stony quality. The space was altogether expansive, though the dark colors made it feel somewhat closed in.

The people all looked like middle-aged people from the late 1960s or early 1970s. They were dressed semi-formally. I met up with some of the people and was walking down a flight, to the main buffet table.

Suddenly I remembered the incident with the barber. I started telling the story to the man to my left. The man was probably in his late thirties, white, tan, with a bowlish haircut, a thick, white, turtleneck sweater, and a black blazer. I told the man that the barber hadn't gotten very far along at all in cutting my hair. I then thought how disappointing that was. I knew how shaggy my hair was. And now my sideburns probably looked all lopsided, too.

(4/1/09) public broadcasting spies

(Entered in paper journal at 8:15 AM at Starbucks at 17th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was out in some rural area, near a road and a series of buildings like gas stations. I had walked up to some place with a chain link fence and noticed that someone was following me. The person, I now remembered, was a thin, tall, black man wearing a tan leather jacket, a button-up shirt, slim jeans, and big sunglasses.

The person tried to get a couple steps ahead of me but ended up running into the fence. I didn't know how to escape from the person.

The person faced away from me. The person was now a woman, taller than the man, slim, with nice legs and a nice bottom. She wore dark jeans and a dark blue sweater. She now walked away from the fence. She told me to come with her, as if we were working on some project together.

We got into the backseat of a big, 1970s-style car. I sat on the driver's side; she, on the passenger's. We now rode along as the woman explained things to me.

The backseat was full of the woman's things -- bags, mostly -- which had to do with our business. One of the things was a black tote bag saying with the word "VOLUNTEER" or "DONATE" on it. It looked like it was made on behalf of some public broadcasting station.

It was night. We were driving through a small town, through a tight road lined with what looked like beige, cinder block buildings. There might have been soldiers or police in the streets. The woman was explaining how we would cheat our way past a barricade ahead by pretending we were executives for some fictitious public broadcasting station.