(12/11/04) garden columns; no new word

(Entered in paper journal at 9:30 AM at the Tea Lounge on Union Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was parked in a car or van with some other people, one of whom was a long-bearded, tallish, pudgy man who showed the rest of us some kind of map. The car was parked behind a column in something like a courtyard or a public garden. There was a sidewalk and a long row of columns on each side of the sidewalk. The columns were all concrete, squared, with something that looked like a leaf bud on top and a short crossbar at the top part of the column. The vegetation was all thick, green, and rough, like some kind of classical garden overrun by time though preserving its classical dignity.

Dream 2

I stood behind a juniper overlooking a lake. Two people were with me. One was a male, a boss or leader or teacher of some sort. The other was my peer, either male or a female.

My peer and I had been given a spontaneous assignment. For the last question we had to give a newly learned word, the word's definition, and a sentence in which the word applied.

I and my peer had always worked together. But, for this question, though I'd asked to cooperate with my peer at first, I now didn't want any help. I wanted to show that my word power was great. But when I looked down at the paper I realized that though I knew a ton of words, I hadn't learned any new words lately.

I ran through a couple words in my head that may have been new words I could use. But they seemed more like already simple words which served as titles for scientific concepts I had recently learned. Yet I could also hear a couple new words sliding back and forth somewhere. I just couldn't grab onto them.

I looked down to the ground. There was a strangely shaped pan, made of material like that of a paint roller's paint pan. It was red on top and blue on the bottom. Its shape was like a wide, short rectangle funneling off into a pointless triangle on the lower left side, like a McDonald's fry scooper, except with the texture and material feeling of a paint roller pan.

I was sure the "teacher" would think I was lazy and stupid.

(12/3/05) microwave smoke; the living wine containers

(Entered in paper journal at 9:25 AM at Starbucks on 1st Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in a small apartment with a bunch of "coworkers." We were "preparing" some holiday meal. I was in a bedroom/office with my boss, a pretty, blonde woman. We were looking for a place to put some food, maybe turkey, which was in tall, plastic containers.

I walked out into the living room. Some girls skittered back and forth, having fun. I couldn't tell if they knew we were preparing, they were having so much fun. I decided not to tell them, to keep the preparation secret if they didn't already know, to make them look silly when I was prepared and they weren't.

I looked in a bookcase for space to put the food into. Then I opened the microwave. Something had been burnt in there. The smell penetrated the room.

All the girls started laughing at me like I had made the smell. My boss came out and was going to tell the girls that the smell was actually lingering from when one of them put something into the microwave. But instead she pulled me aside and made some gesture of our secret friendship. Then she spoke more about finding a spot for the food.

Dream 2

My friend R and I were preparing a meal, or, rather, R was making the meal, and I was getting wine for him. The wine was in the building where I worked, but it was also in the building where he worked, as if the buildings were separate and together, or -- as if my building was also his building, even though his building was actually somewhere else.

On the way to the building I looked at some other building. Somehow I felt my sight was being seen by R and that if he saw me seeing the building I worked in, he would go to my work every day and try to ruin my life.

I had to look at some building, though. So I looked at a small, grey-painted, brownstone-like building. But I thought, How could R think worked in that building? It doesn't even look like offices could fit in there. But I looked "closer" (like I flew up a couple flights or was now walking on a bridge a couple flights tall) and I saw lights extending deeply inward from the windows, like the building was a tunnel of offices. I was satisfied with the building.

Now I was inside "my" building. I had to go down into the basement, into a place like a preschool or after-school or daycare center. The wine was brewing in a huge pot there. I was to bring two containers home with me.

As I walked down the steps, the containers, which (now) I had been carrying with me "all along" were getting very awkward. Both were clear glass. One was a wine bottle shape. The other was an octagonal shape.

They both felt like they were getting heavier, and they would slip almost out of my hands, as if they had a will of their own. I was stumbling and slipping all the way down the stairs, just trying to control the bottles.

When I got down to the basement and fumbled the door open, I got angry -- I could see R's office just down the way. R asked me to do this and made it seem like there was no way he could do it. But he was right down there, just down the hallway -- I could almost see him sitting in his office. I could see the corner of his desk. He had told me to call him when I got the wine and then to carry the wine home and he'd meet me there, too, like I wasn't even allowed to meet him in this building.

I saw a Crock-Pot, like two Crock-Pots, one stacked upside-down on the other. Whatever was inside was burning and making a smell. The outside of the Crock-Pots were caked over with whatever was inside the pot and had exploded out a bit. I couldn't believe that was the wine.

But now I looked to my right and saw a machine like an eight-foot-tall, all-plastic automatic mixer and mixing bowl, except that instead of mixers coming out o fthe part hanging over the bowl, there was a "blower" shooting a stream of wine into the bowl (which was maybe three feet deep). The bowl was yellow. The rest was white.

I felt like the wine was sweet, almost like Kool-Aid.

In front of the wine-maker was a wooden table. I tried to sit the bottles on the table, but they kept moving off, once again as if by their own will. Eventually the wine bottle-shaped container dissolved from my consciousness. The other container became a small, pail-shaped, plastic container. It crept along the table and fell to my feet defiantly.

But then I realized the wind was actually causing all this movement. I sat the container much closer in toward the center of the table. The container stopped moving.

I had to get the wine into the container(s). I thought I would just dip the containers into the huge bowl. But I think I thought that was too messy.

I lost track of things. I was now looking around the room, trying to figure out what kind of school took place here. A TV was playing. At first it was like whatever was on the TV was a program for the school.

I looked out a window, in front of which was a bookshelf decorated with paper letters that looked like colorful refrigerator magnet letters. I was up, I saw, on the fifth or maybe even the tenth floor of this building.

The TV said, "If you need help, please call ER at extention 6622." (ER was one of my senior coworkers, another VP-level analyst in the department, like my bosses were.)

In a square on the screen was an image of a man lounging at a desk and talking on the phone. Now in another corner another square popped up with another person, and his phone extension. Once again I worried. I thought, I have to stop seeing all this. R's watching everything I see.

The squares on the TV started showing ads for a movie about a woman I really liked. It looked like the movie Barabarella, starring Jane Fonda, but it was "about" some dignified, Victorian society.