(8/11/08) dismembered aircraft; filthy shower; lottery CEO

(Entered in paper journal at 6:16 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

A group of people were all working along a forest hillside. The hillside was, or appeared to be, charred. There were three groups, all of which had a strange vehicle like the neck of a crane which flew along the hillside.

One of the men in one of the groups had gone crazy and dismembered his own vehicle. He may also have been dismembering the other groups' vehicles. I heard the man talk, as if he had been recorded after all this had happened, possibly in a psychiatric hospital or right before he killed himself.

Dream #2

I may have been visiting my mom's house or living with my mom again. I was in the bathroom. The shower looked awful. The shower head was sprawled along the tub. The drain cover was removed. It looked like there were two drain covers in the tub. Some other metallic items were in the tub. The whole thing was also coated in a slight film of dirt.

I knew I would have to take a shower the next day for work. I wondered if I would be able to. I knew my mom was planning to fix the shower. But I didn't know if she would be able to do it the next day.

Dream #3

A TV show about people who had won the lottery. A couple of them had starred in movies. The movies were basically romantic comedies, vehicles to exploit these people, and centered around the winner, who generally played a character who had undergone a similar twist of fate.

The second winner's real-life story actually began with a scene from the exploitative movie she'd been in. The  woman was in a car in the dark of night. A light played across the woman's face. The woman was on a cell phone, speaking in a somewhat frenzied tone.

I thought, Maybe this film is different, after all. Maybe it's something like a spy film. But then I heard what the woman was saying. It was basically about how she'd won something or had some good stroke of luck. I realized that this movie was also a romantic-comedy vehicle. I was disappointed.

The woman's real-life story went on. Originally the woman had worked for some company in New York, possibly in an assistant position. But when the woman won the lottery, she quit her job. After she finished up her movie (and a couple other things?), however, the woman was asked to come back to her job, except this time in a higher position.

The biography showed the woman walking into her new office, smiling, and closing the door behind her, leaving the camera crew outside, as the narrator explained that the woman had become a CEO of some division of the company.

I wondered how the woman could have the title of CEO, mainly because the nameplate on her door didn't match the title. The nameplate, which was blue plastic, with white writing, like the plate on a bathroom door, said "KO." I tried to figure out what kind of title "KO" was. The title also had the image for a wheelchair just to its left.

The camera was now inside the woman's office. I was interested to see what kind of job the woman was performing. The woman was on the phone, but all she was talking about was how great it was that she had won the lottery.

(3/2/09) lingerie over my pants

(Entered in paper journal at 8:33 AM at Starbucks on 29th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a building that was supposed to be the offices of my old job. I'd been up on a floor, probably with a group of my co-workers. I had gone down to the first floor, possibly having even left the building. I had come back into the building now. The walls were blue marble with white veining. The ceilings were very high. The place felt like a fancy restaurant. The room was long and rectangular.

I was alone in the room. I may have been hovering swiftly, maybe about one foot above the ground. I wore a sweater and jeans (the sweater maybe horizontal stripes of various colors). Over the jeans I wore a woman's half-slip.

I turned left into another room, which was like this room. At a nearby set of tables to my left were executives from my job, including the CEO K. They all looked over at me. I could tell they thought I was weird because I was wearing a half-slip.

I turned right and went up a thinnish, curving staircase. I thought, But can't the executives see I'm not just wearing this half-slip? I'm wearing jeans underneath. And besides, even if I look weird, aren't the executives impressed that I'm flying instead of walking up the stairs?

I was on an upper floor which was a cavern of walls of green marble with white veining. I couldn't remember what floor I was actually supposed to go to.

I was back at the first floor again. I may have stood in front of some computer kiosk, which was just a keyboard and a screen on a thin pole. I had to enter my name or user ID and password to get past this point in the building. But the computer would tell me what floor I was supposed to go to. But I was drawing a complete blank. I couldn't remember my password at all.

(3/9/09) blackberry confiscated; transvestite work meeting

(Entered in paper journal at 8:29 AM at Starbucks on 29th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a place like an airport terminal, in one of the joining areas between concourses or hallways. There was a small crowd of people, all watching a group of executives from my old company giving a presentation or press conference. I stood at the back of the crowd. The area I stood in was open and somewhat bright, with light coming from a large window-wall.

Closer toward the stage area, the ceiling got lower and the lighting got darker. The executives all stood in a somewhat constricted area, like a small seating area for special passengers, behind waist-high, plexiglass gates. One or a few podiums lined up at the front of this area, before the crowd.

The company's CEO stood at the podium, possibly with a moderator-like person. The CEO was trying to justify something about my company's business.

I was trying to justify it myself at the same time. I started looking up articles on my BlackBerry to prove that my company wasn't bad. I did a Google search, using my company's name and then some specific type of business (can't remember what).

As I did this -- noticing that someone just to the right of me was using a smaller model of BlackBerry than the one I was using -- the CEO interrupted himself and said, "I am confiscating all handheld devices." The reason, I knew, was that the CEO thought we (I?) were trying to trade the company's stock instantaneously with the news the CEO was giving.

A black man, a few inches taller than I, round-headed and somewhat round-bodied, wearing a nice, black suit jacket and slacks and a muted, maroon or red shirt and tie, came up to me and took my BlackBerry right out of my hands. He didn't touch the other person's phone.

The presentation or conference continued on for a couple more minutes. The man had walked over to a wall to my left. He had put my BlackBerry in the left breast pocket of his suit jacket.

The conference cleared out a little. Most of the executives had headed out. This was, I thought, a break time between presentations. I thought I could wait for the next set of presentations. But I was so upset that the man had taken my BlackBerry, and I was so nervous that he wouldn't ever give it back, that I wanted to leave right then and there, just so I could go up to the man and get my BlackBerry back.

But I was afraid to go up to the man at all. I was pretty sure his intention had from the beginning been to steal my BlackBerry, and that now he'd find all kinds of excuses to keep it from me.

I thought, If only one of the executives could help me. I looked at the stage area. Of the few people who remained there I recognized only one: MB. MB sat in a comfortable chair, holding a bottle of water and stretching out his legs. I was pretty sure he wouldn't even recognize me.

Dream #2

I walked into an office. The office was maybe twelve feet by twelve feet. It was really dumpy. The light was an almost green fluorescent.

The person whose office this was (my old boss BS?) sat in a desk that was set maybe two-thirds of the way back into the room, and oriented so that the back of the person seated at the desk would face the door.

A black man sat across the desk from BS (?). The man was supposed to be a transvestite or a drag queen. But he just looked like an effeminate man. He was dressed in regular clothes, although they were possibly casual, like a grey t-shirt.

I sat down to the left of the man. The man and I spoke with BS. Another person walked in. I hoped this other person wouldn't think that I was a transvestite, too, just because I was getting along with this other guy so well.

(4/2/09) killing the spider; anime library; chasing the ceo

(Entered in paper journal at 8:30 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

It was night. I lay in a wide bed like a hotel bed, with a synthetic-feeling coverlet over me. To my right was a sliding-glass door, which was messy with soild and showed pale, electric blue light, like from a car's headlights, somewhere in the distance (though the door opened to a backyard, not to a front yard with a road).

I looked over the right side of the bed and saw a spider crawl under the bed. The floor was a mess, cluttered with dusty items like cushions and boards. The spider was like a daddy long legs with a metallic, blue-purple body.

I "remembered" my psychiatrist A having told me at our last session, "Now, don't you kill any spiders."  (In waking life, my psychiatrist had actually told me to make sure I didn't get another job until my "inactive" period with my current job -- where I was technically still an employee, though I was already basically laid off and no longer coming into work -- was finished and I was finally unemployed, i.e. about mid-April.)

But for some reason I thought, Well, killing one spider isn't all that bad. I couldn't stand the thought of having a pest in my room. I rolled off the bed and looked under it to see where the spider was. I saw it near the wall, near the head of the bed

I stood up and walked to the bathroom to grab something to smash the spider with. I came out with something, probably an unwieldy, dark square of material (when I'd meant to get a bit of toilet paper).

I turned on my bedroom light. The light was just a table lamp, dim, at the opposite end of the room from me, at the head of my bed, on its left side. Most of the room was still dark. The place was cluttered and dusty. There was another bed to the left of my bed. That bed was cluttered with stuff, including a foam mat that lay half on and off the bed. But the left side of my bed was also cluttered.

I was afraid to step in the space between the two beds. I thought the floor under the left bed was so dirty that mice probably lived under it. I was afraid that if I caused any vibrations in the floor, the mice would come out, which would be really annoying and would dissolve my sense of "having a clean room."

I walked between the beds, anyway. I kneed my way up onto the right bed. I thought the spider would eventually crawl up the wall, at which point i could smash it. But looking at the head of my bed, I now saw that the right pillow, on which I had laid my head, had a blanket of cobweb from its corner to the wall. I knew this cobweb was the spider's web, and that it had been here for a while.

I couldn't stand the thought that I had lived so long with the spider so close to my head while I slept. I thought something like, Well, it's too late now. But I still tried to convince myself that somehow I hadn't slept with my head so close to the spider, and that the web couldn't have been there for very long.

I thought that I should at least pull the web out, now that I saw it. But when I reached at it (parts of it now looked like a web), I noticed that the spider, now smaller and greyish, was posed in the bottom half of the web. I was afraid that by pulling out the web I'd make the spider angry. But I knew I had to do it, anyway, to start to make my room clean again.

I pulled the web off the wall. It now hung down off my pillow. I might have pulled the web the rest of the way off my pillow. But I now saw that the spider was angry. That was enough to scare me. But now I also saw that the spider was thing and long-legged, like before, and that its body was jet black with a red hourglass on it. I thought, It's a black widow!

I stood off my bed and backed away from it. The spider now charged down the bed and onto the floor, coming after me. The spider had stubby legs and a squarish, crab-like body, black with red mottling. It had red jaws and two big, round, black eyes. It was maybe three-quarters of an inch wide. I backed all the way back to the bathroom doorway. The spider and I may then have been at a standstill.

Dream #2

I was in something like a library or bookshop that had a cafe in it. The place had a very "strip-mall" feel -- white-walled, tall, wide, with thin carpet and wide-spaced shelves. The cafe area was just a few tables spread out in an open space among shelves. The place was moderately busy.

I stood at a revolving carousel of books. The shelves were clear and plastic. The carousel was about seven feet high.

My girlfriend H sat at a table with a friend. They may have spoken back and forth in both Japanese and English. They were talking about me and the books I was looking at. I was probably looking at manga novels, though I may also have been looking at anime DVDs.

I was looking, H and her friend said, at some classic manga, but also at some manga that either H or her friend was not familiar with. One of the two began to explain to the other what this anime/manga was all about. The person then sang the theme song, which sounded like a song from a recent (in 2009) anime about a boy who dresses up as a girl so he can go to a girls' school. I was ashamed that H and her friend liked this anime. But H and her friend didn't seem to worried about the fact that I liked the anime.

The top shelf of the carousel had tiny books, maybe two and a half inches tall and one and half inches wide, and maybe a quarter of an inch thick. The rest of the shelves were now filled with DVDs. A couple of DVD cases were patterned with orange and black tiger stripes. These cases were for DVDs of an anime show I really liked.

H and her friend now spoke about this show and how much they liked it, mostly because they wanted to sound like they were interested in me, so I would get interested in them. The more H and her friend spoke, though, the more, I noticed, the DVDs for the show filled the carousel. Now almost all the DVDs on the carousel were DVDs for that show.

At some point H and her friend were discussing specific words in the show's theme song. I felt weird, again, about what the two girls were discussing, as if those particular words would reveal something about me that I didn't want known.

Dream #3

I was in a restaurant with a friend. We sat at a booth table which was like a large car's interior set into a very small bedroom. The room had white walls and a window on one wall, almost the height of the entire wall. There might have been blinds over the window.

The table area had no table, but something like a grouping of gear-shift knobs and levers encased in black plastic and slightly metallic, green imitation leather. The booth seats were like bench seats, although somehow it was also possible to sit and look forward out the window, as if sitting in bucket seats.

I sat across from (or, sometimes, beside) a pretty, young woman who possibly had olive skin and brown hair. We were waiting for guests for a business meal, probably breakfast or lunch. In particular we were waiting for the CEO of the company from which I had recently been laid off.

Through the window I could see beyond the "restaurant's parking lot and across a street to a tan-bricked office building in a business park. There were green mounds of grass before the building and blue sky over it.

I saw the CEO outside the building. I explained something to the woman about how all the guests would be late, but how a lot of them would make it. I was particularly sure that the CEO would make it. I didn't feel like I sounded too convincing. I now sat "forward" in my seat, like I would sit in a bucket seat.

I now saw the CEO walking just outside the window. I said, "Ha! The CEO is just outside! That means he's coming really soon." I got up and ran outside to meet the CEO. I knew he was with a group of tall, young, strong businessmen, who accompanied him just about everywhere.

But when I got outside, I couldn't see the CEO anywhere. I was with a group of people outside. The parking lot was like a strip of asphalt road among dusty desert hills, dirt roads, and chain link fences, all under a clear, blue sky.

We all looked up and down the road for the CEO. Now the CEO came speeding down the road, from our left, heading toward the "restaurant" in a pale, metallic blue, Porsche-like car. We were all happy that the CEO was finally here. We all started walking back toward the building. I may have been at the back of the line of people walking back.

Now the CEO sped away from the building. I realized that the CEO couldn't find a parking space, which was equivalent with not being able to locate where our group was meeting. I ran after the CEO so I could tell him where we were.

But now the CEO's car sped back toward the "restaurant." I ran back to the "restaurant" so I could find the CEO and lead him to where our group was meeting. I ran through the building, which was now like a mix of warehouse space and office hallways.

I opened one of the doors in a hallway. The whole group was sitting at the booth table. I asked everybody if they'd seen the CEO. They said they had, but that he'd walked past this booth as if he hadn't recognized that this was where he should be.

I ran back in the direction I had come from, to catch the CEO before he got back in his car. I ran through a large warehouse space (actually like the loading dock area at the Manhattan Houston Street UPS building, where I worked for a while in 2000 in waking life).

I now saw one of my friends or co-workers running outside the gates. The man was tall and tan, with flowing, red hair and a short beard. He wore a green t-shirt and jean shorts. He was muscular.

The man "told" me (as if he was speaking from just behind me and to my right) something like "I guess we're in this together if no one else wants to look." But I felt like the man was running "with" me only to compete against me. I ran even faster and was now outside. The man was just ahead of me, but I was catching up. But then I really started to lose my breath.

We ran along a dark, black asphalt road. We saw the CEO run or drive over a large, lawny hill before us. The man easily ascended the hill. My lungs felt shot, and my legs were barely controllable. I kept going, just out of determination. But the man easily gained ground over me.

(The next part may possibly be a loose imagination after I woke up.)

The man got up to the top of the hill. A football hit him from the right and knocked him over. I knew that the CEO had thrown the ball from down the hill.

I stopped, still a little distance behind the man. I now heard the CEO joking with the man, saying, "Well, sounds like you couldn't stand being in that meeting, either, huh?"

I felt like the CEO was kind of, but not really, including me in the conversation. After all, I hadn't made it to the top of the hill first. But I also thought, like I was speaking to the CEO, It's not that we couldn't stand being in the meeting. We were looking for you, to try to get you into the meeting!