(7/9/06) weak brutality; my brother's fun house; the construction task; the eagle lands

(Entered in paper journal at 10:23 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I lay in "my bed." It was deep night and raining outside. I sat up. I had a window wall that looked out to a front boardwalk area overlooking a river across which were the lights of a tall city. A small car was parked outside: a tiny, boxy, European-style car with a green hood and white roof.

I couldn't see well -- my glasses were wet. I wiped them off as I thought about GS, the star of my high school cross country team. I told myself I had to stop being angry at him and to stop thinking that the things he did to the team sometimes were annoying. I put my glasses back on. I thought, GS was just doing what made sense to him, what he thought would make people like him.

I now saw a group of kids. The kids were black. They looked like troublemakers. The got out of the tiny car. I tried to lay down quickly so they wouldn't see anybody in the house. I thought, Why did I leave my windows open? I couldn't lay down. But I thought at least it was dark.

The kids flashed on the car lights. As soon as they saw me inside the house they bashed open the door, which I had left unlocked by accident, and ran through, right behind the head of my bed, to another door.

I reached around to catch one of them before they left the house. I wanted to show them they couldn't just barge into anybody's house like this. I had a baseball bat. I had they guy in my grasp. I swung the bat. But I swung so weakly that the bat barely even touched the guy.

I was in a living room in the daytime. The place was full of black people. I was very small somehow. People were slung over couches and the floor, lazy and making tons of noise. I had a baseball bat. I tried to hit people. But slowly I got weaker and weaker. Instead of holding a baseball bat, I was now holding something like a small toy bowling pin made out of hollow plastic.

I finally swung at a woman and hit her hard. I thought, Now I can swing and hit! I had a baseball bat in my hands. I thought I had to hit a man now. Hitting a woman didn't prove anything. It was really the men who needed to be taught a lesson.

I stood over a man. Just as I was swinging down at him, he said, "Psst, pssht," like what I was going to do didn't even matter. I lost all confidence and suddenly the bat was just soft, hollow plastic and was so "heavy" in my arms that I couldn't get any speed behind it. It just kept flapping against the guy's face like a piece of paper.

Dream 2

I was in a stairwell with a man and woman. The stairwell was like in a multi-story house: carpeted, with wood railings and pictures on the walls. The man, woman, and I were investigators. A bad person was in the basement. The basement was completely dark. As far as the other floors, I couldn't see them.

A man burst up from the basement. But now somehow he was still in the basement. I said I would go after him. The other two investigators, just sitting on the steps, were suspicious of me but just let me go anyway.

Only a few steps down the steps became a hole about six inches in diameter, lined about three feet down with metal, then opening into the basement. I lowered myself onto the head of a ceramic (?) sculpture of a Chinese lion, white with a green and yellow man and a long, long body.

The light in the basement was dim maroon. I realized now that my brother was down here. In one sense this maze-basement was a kind of terror trap where "the killer" would hunt and kill you.

But in what was becoming more of a reality, this was all just a fun house set up by my brother to impress people. So I went through the maroon into a scary machine room that I had to climb through on my hands and knees. The next room was supposed to be the scariest. But it was just like an enormous tent, with dim blue lighting and a laser pointer shining along the floor. I couldn't wait to see my brother and tell him how good and scary this place was.

I walked into a cafeteria with metal tray counters and glass displays of tons of really good looking Mexican food. I was all alone. A TV played, talking about how important it was to eat healthy. I must have pulled some food together for myself.

I wondered where my brother was. I "spoke with" my mom, asking her where my brother was. I wanted to tell him how good his fun house was. My mom "said" something like, "Oh, don't worry about that. He didn't make up half this stuff anyhow."

Dream 3

I was on the roof of a tall building. It was night and raining. Some people were with me. They sent me to the edge of the building to take care of some construction task which involved moving things from three concrete bins into a shovel at the top of a huge crane.

I moved what were like pieces of garbage into the plastic, white mouth of the "shovel," keeping my stomach to the gravely roof surface the whole time. At one point the "shovel" lifted so I'd have to stand and reach out over the ledge for it. I stood but was suddenly far in on the roof, looking at the concrete bins and crane.

I heard a woman. She and I spoke about my being afraid and about what this whole project really meant.

Dream 4

I lay on a hillside with some friends. It was a sunny day. We all lay on beach blankets, or, rather, knit blankets of bright, gentle colors. The hill was tall, wide, and grassy, with a gentle river at the bottom.

I saw a bald eagle. I called it out to everybody. Everybody treated me like an idiot, saying, "Well, of course that's a bald eagle."

The eagle then flew right up to us and landed. I asked, "Well, it landed right here beside us. How often does that happen?" Nobody answered.

I pet the eagle and spoke a little to it. It wandered away into everybody else's attention. Soon it became a woman, some kind of scientist, who chastised me for not acting as intelligently as my friends had.

(5/5/09) the penguin was also trying to do research

(Entered in paper journal at 7:45 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a house with my family. I was in a hallway between two or three bedrooms. The bedroom doors were all open, and the bedrooms were harshly lit with white daylight. The bright living room was just down the hall to my right. I was trying to get into a bedroom right in front of me, on the right side of the hall (facing away from the living room). But there were a couple of people in the doorway, including my mom.

I was trying to get into this room to do research on something. There were magazines and a computer with data that I wanted to look at. But my mom (possibly talking with her best friend) stood in the doorway and wouldn't let me in. She said that she was getting ready to have a meeting in here. She acted like I was being really annoying by wanting to be let in. I tried to explain that there were images and data I needed to see in there.

My mom through a computer bag (my computer bag?) out into the hallway. Something like a sketch pad may also have tumbled along with it. The laptop may also have been something like a video game system, probably a Famicom.

My mom said, "There! That has all the data you need in it, doesn't it? And you can take it anywhere, so you don't need to stay here!"

I disagreed. I thought I'd try to explain that I still needed to see all the magazine images. But I figured it was useless to try and argue. I left.

I was on a hilltop in some kind of desert wilderness. It may have been late afternoon. The sky had an orange and purplish, silvery tinge to it. The landscape was like basalt boulders, maybe six feet in width for most of them, piled on each other like outcroppings. The boulders were all fringed with a whitish material like salt.

I was probably in an oldish car which was full of junk (like the car I drove was full of junk when I lived in the southwestern United States and worked for the Park Service in waking life). I was trying to work on my research.

There was a penguin in the backseat. Apparently the penguin was also trying to do research. The penguin looked a little strange. He had a silvery sheen, and he had silvery rings around his eyes and silvery "eyebrows" that were thick, but long and limber, like cat's whiskers.

There was a group of girls on the rocks. They all called to me to let the penguin out of the car. The girls said the penguin would be happier out in nature, and that a lot of female penguins would come to be with him.

I opened the back, passenger side door (not sure how, seeing how I was sitting in the driver's seat) to let the penguin out. The penguin was now a tallish, slightly overweight, grey-haired man (like some version of my aunt M's husband). The man got out of the car and stood in the road.

The car door was now closed. But the man was speaking with me (and I could hear him clearly, just like I'd heard the girls clearly, through my closed door and window). As the man spoke he shrunk and transformed back into a penguin.

I had been looking at the man/penguin through the passenger side window from my vantage point of the driver's seat. The man had now shrunk completely out of my view. I knelt over onto the passenger seat to look out the window for the penguin.

The penguin was clucking and warbling, almost like I would expect a rooster to do, except a little more gently, "lipidly."  I knew that a flock of female penguins would soon gather around him.