(1/8/10) jumping in the hay: a novel

(Entered in paper journal at 6:30 AM on B-train into work from Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was walking down a street in a city which was probably supposed to be New York. The streets were clean and calm, though there were a moderate amount of people walking along them. The whole area had a small town feel. It was afternoon, and the sky was a placid silver-blue.

I had been walking from a place far uptown -- possibly 125th Street -- and possibly even across a bridge. I was now down on what was supposed to have been 86th Street. I was looking for a place to have coffee. I was going to have coffee and write or read for a little while, then head back uptown. It was like I had gotten some kind of break time from a large training event or conference.

I found a coffee shop in a building hat looked very small-town like. I walked inside. There was a lot of space. The floors and tables were of pale wood. The tables were as wide as dining tables. The place had two areas. The "back" area, to my left, was set slightly lower than the "front" area.

I thought I would sit in the cafe and read for a while. But for some reason I felt pressed for time. I worried either that I would have to get out of here before sunset or that I would have to get out of here in time to get back to the event uptown. I thought to myself that it would be much smarter for me, in the future, to walk down somewhere, have coffee there, and then walk back uptown (as if that were different from what I had just done!). That way I could avoid getting out of here after sunset.

The place was empty except for two old, heavyish ladies with square, grey haircuts. The ladies sat across from each other at a table near a divider-screen which set apart the back area from the front area. The ladies wore slightly oversized t-shirts, probably blue and red, and pale jeans. They spoke like two grandmothers, with a deadpan, but patient and cheerful tone of voice.

I had to squeeze past the two ladies to get into the back area, where I thought I'd sit because it had so much space. I may have seen two more people enter the shop: a man and woman about my age. This may have made me a little anxious.

I wanted to buy some coffee or tea, but I hadn't seen a cashier yet. I saw a stairway that went down to a basement. It was narrow, with clean walls and pale wood steps. It looked newly built. I knew the cashier was actually in the basement.

I went down into the basement. It was huge, like three or four living rooms put together. The place itself seemed to be set up like three or four different living rooms. The whole place was cast in a bluish light, which I think came from the ground-level windows, high up on the walls. The floor was covered in thick, white shag carpet or rugs of the same material. There were couches everywhere. There were square pillars of dark wood near the center of the room. There were other household items, like bicycles, etc., scattered about.

Bookshelves lined most of the walls. All the books on the shelves looked like popular novels. What mostly caught my attention as I gazed at the bookshelves from the center of the room were books whose spines looked like those of the old V.C. Andrews books.

I saw the cash register, but nobody was there. I knew the cashier was in the restroom. I tried to be quiet, almost invisible as well. I was afraid that if I was too "forward" about my presence, I would cause the cashier to dislike me, which would, I feared, make my future visits here really stressful.

I pulled back my personality so much that I became like a ghost. I "walked," moving my legs, but not moving because I was moving my legs. I was actually moving by cruising forward while floating about an inch above the floor. I crept-floated around the corner of a pillar and possibly squeezed between the space between the back of a chair or couch and the pillar. I floated toward a bookshelf and reached out for a book.

The cashier walked out from the bathroom, which, I saw, was near a smallish, concrete-floored laundry room. The cashier was a tallish, skinny man with a slight, stubbly, black beard and glasses. He may have worn a wool cap.

The cashier, seeing me, at first seemed hesitant to interact. Then he said, "Beautiful night."

I said something in response, but my words were drowned out to me by my thoughts about what I should say. I knew the man had said what he'd said because he didn't want to go through the whole "how are you doing" or "how can I help you" kind of thing.

But I thought that since he'd said it was a beautiful night, I'd sound like I was an idiot if anything I said implied I would be staying inside reading. I thought I'd say something about the long walk I'd just taken to show that I hadn't wasted the beauty of the day by being inside.

I may have asked the man about a book to read. The man told me that I should read XXXXX (can't remember). I thought to myself, Who does that guy think he is, telling me what book to read? I won't read it!

I walked up to a bookshelf to the right (as I faced it) of the cash register. This bookshelf had previously been along the back wall, but now it was on the right wall. I looked up at one of the top shelves, to a row of Stephen King books with the "new style" white bindings with blocks of color across the bottom of the page, where the titles are. I focused on one book called something like Jumping in the Hay.

(1/21/10) the ghost and the murderess

Dream #1

I walked down a city sidewalk, on the left side of the street. It was early morning, dark, with a deep blue sky overhead. I came up to a taped-off area of sidewalk. To my right, behind the tape, was a big, heavy tower of something like scaffold. I looked up and saw a heavy load of something like thick boards or thick, metal plates hanging from a cord, as if the top of this tower were a crane.

I was afraid that the load would fall on me. I didn't cross the tape. I walked into the street, past the tower, then back to the sidewalk. But now I saw that there was another tower before me. I was still afraid that the load behind me would fall and crush me. But now I was also afraid that the load before me would crush me.

I flew up into the air. I was now level with the loads. The towers around the loads were like makeshift floors of wooden boards. The place felt very much like an active construction area. I floated between the two towers. Both towers seemed, now, to be set flush against the face of the building. The second tower stood near the corner of the building.

A tall, strong, round-bodied, round-headed, black man wearing overalls (no shirt?) walked around the corner. When I saw him, I started yelling things at him, things that I thought would make me sound like a ghost or a demon. I thought that I was invisible, but that I could still be heard. I was trying to scare the man, as if to pay him back for his having scared me.

The man seemed either not to hear me or to hear me only slightly. He stopped and looked forward, as if trying to figure out whether he actually was hearing something.

I was now in a kind of small, slightly shabby bedroom. The room was lit somewhat brightly by incandescent light. I was with someone else, possibly a woman. We were shuffling through a loose scattering of papers and pamphlets which lay on the bed. We either stood before or sat on the bed.

The papers and pamphlets were all about grotesque events, probably all murders and serial murders, and possibly all about one woman who had committed these murders. I looked through a number of these pamphlets. The text and margins were blue or red and looked like Chinese take-out menus or old Christian pamphlets for witnessing.

I picked up one pamphlet. A photo on the front showed a dead person's face. The face was black with decay. The skin of the face was shrunken with decay, but it also seemed to be stuffed into the mouth of the face. The head had a few strands of almost colorless, but not pale, blondeish hair.

I turned through the pages. Another photo showed a bone that had been broken in half and placed into a clear, crystal glass of water. The glass had a thick base of cut, niched crystal. I either read or knew that the murderess would take the bones of her victims and put them in water to clean off all the flesh, which the woman possibly thought of as the only evidence of her guilt.

I turned to another photo. It was of the woman. She, too, stood over a bed. She looked like a woman from the early twentieth or late nineteenth century. Her dress was very plain, long-sleeved, tight around the woman's top, with the skirt curtaining slightly outward. The woman's hairstyle was close, but "bunned" outward. The woman had a pale, oval face and wide, pale, severe eyes.

The woman started talking and moving. She was pointing to something on the bed, possibly the dead body the face of which was the subject of the first photo. The woman yelled something about how I'd discovered her and how I wasn't supposed to discover her.

I was suddenly afraid. I felt like I was in the woman's house right now, and like she was now sneaking around to get ready to kill me. But I was also afraid that, since I had seen so much about the woman, that the  murderous impulse would also infect me, and that I would soon be like her.