(4/16/05) this seat taken

(Entered in paper journal at 5:20 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I was in some lobby area or an exhibit area for some museum. The room was wide, tall, polygonal, with window ceilings. To my back and left were a group of children in seats looking up to a cashier's desk or a podium, all so incongruous (even dim, where the rest of this lobby area was lit by window light) with the lobby area that it itself seemed like a museum exhibit or a movie set.

In the rest of the lobby area were black and white photographs blown up and printed on thick pieces of display board ranging from three to ten feet tall. Each photo had a state name titled into its side. These photos were from some book remembering a certain important area from the viewpoint of all these states. The only picture I remember at all is Arizona's. It looked like a model of an atom or molecule mixed with a cell dividing or the early processes of the human life cycle.

I saw somewhere a yellowed newspaper photo of a speaker who had become extremely successful at something. He was a short man, rather plain, with a Gerardo hairstyle and mustache and in a suit and tie that looked about twenty years out of date.

Now I was in the audience of one of his lectures. The auditorium was huge and packed. The stage was some kind of white, polished material, barren except for the guy. I was in some seat a few rows from the front.

Now I was at the back of the stage, as if seats went all around the stage and the stage was circular, with steps down all the way around, all of that white, shiny material. I sat on one of the steps and folded my arms on the stage and my chin on my arms. There was some technical gear back her, as well as a makeshift aluminum stand for lights.

Some woman near me and to my right remarked jokingly how the speaker stuttered so awfully, as if that was a mark of his true character, and not all the stuff he lectured about. Some guy up on front stage and to my left and the lecturer's left said, "Don't talk about our respectable lecturer that way! Don't you know the power he has?"

But the lecturer turned back to the woman and said, "Don't worry about making jokes. I think it's kind of funny, too." I thought, Of course he'd say something like that. He's so kind and generous.

Now, for some reason, I felt ashamed to be this close to the stage, like I was hogging the stage. So I found a seat in the back area abut four or five rows from the stage and all the way on the right.

But one of the NYC Park Rangers, GR (who in the dream looked like a grizzled, pale, white mountain man with boiled blue eyeballs), and MS (who was also a little unshaven and crazy-looking) walked up to me and said that I was in their seats. They walked right up to me, almost against me, like they were planning to sit even while I was still sitting in the seat.

Trying to be polite, I said, "Oh, I didn't realize these seats were reserved for you. Here. Let me move. But I was so intimidated that I actually fell out of the chair (tipping the chair) and stood and walked away even as I said all this stuff.

I was now in the front row, which was all a bunch of high, backed wooden stools. I turned around and almost sat in one. Then I realized there was something in it. I stood, turned, and looked. It was a purplish piece of something like wax paper with a scrawled message like, "THIS SEAT TaKeN."

So I got up and looked for another stool in the front row, walking from right to left. I thought maybe I'd just sit up by the stage, stage left this time. But I thought again how rude that was.

Every chair in the front row had that same wax paper. and at the top of the wax paper was some iridescent, rainbow colored, piece of plastic, like a charm for girls, and maybe a pencil with colorful painting around its barrel.

(1/19/06) rescuing my mom; laundering my panties in public

(Entered in paper journal at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue. No time info given.)

Dream 1

I was in a house which may have started out as a large building like a party area or an auditorium. I think there were a fair amount of people there at first. But at some point something bad happened.

The auditorium became more like a house and then more like a huge, exaggerated version of the house my family lived in when I was in my late junior high and early high school years. The lights were all out, and something bad was in the house. The rooms were like mazes.

I felt mom's presence somewhere, "seeing" her trapped by a stage. I ran either to help her or to escape the house. I f I ran to escape, I stopped at getting outdoors, to the "carport." A bolt of electricity smashed something down to the ground. The clouds were thick and dark, and yet far enough away and dry enough to make the windy, rolling atmosphere feel like an enormous room or warehouse.

I told myself, It's too dangerous to go this way. My mom can't be helped.

I now felt a surge of courage or simple muscular energy. I ran back into the house to help my mom. I got to the stage of the auditorium (or perhaps I just "saw" it).

Another charge of electricity smashed the ceiling down in front of my mom. The house was dark and quiet, and I was somewhere else inside. I may still have been searching for my mom. But I was really unfocused.

The house was smashed. I was definitely trying to escape. The bad thing was somewhere, and I had no idea what it was like or what condition it was in, or how it was tracking or lying in wait for its prey. Pretty soon I got lost in thoughts about whether I was a coward.

Then I felt people coming in from the carport door. I ran into the living area, which was now much less exaggerated and which had nice, incandescent lighting. I leaped at the doorknob just as an Asian couple opened the door. They complained to me that I shouldn't be here and that they had reserved this place for themselves.

As they fumbled and slid past me, I tried to yell them out of the house. They had "broken the mood" and changed the house back to normal. Now, since my fears were gone, I had no more chance to vindicate myself and prove myself not to be a coward.

Dream 2

I was in a busy laundromat. I went to a dryer to pull out my clothes. I saw that I had a lot of panties in my laundry. I was ashamed to pull the clothes out of the dryer.

A couple of unknown "friend" guys stood by dryers near me. But I was really worried about my mom, who was only a short way behind me.

Someone, possibly even my mom, though it also feels like my friend ML, said, "If doing your laundry in public makes you so nervous, why don't you just do your laundry at home?"

I realized I had a washer and dryer at home. I thought, It's so easy. Why didn't I realize before that I had that option?

(9/21/09) bathroom painting; sharks and whales

(Entered in paper journal at 7:51 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in an auditorium, at least halfway back in the rows of seats. The lights over the seats were off. The lights over the stage were coldly bright. I'm not sure I could see the stage. The seats were about average height, but it also seemed like they were too high for me to see over.

The audience was milling around, getting into their seats, the auditorium only half full and not populated in any orderly fashion. The row I sat in was taken by a group of people of which I was a part.

To my left, either right next to me or one seat removed, was a black woman, probably in her early or mid twenties, with straight, blonde-brown hair. The woman told me that this meeting was a rally against cancer. This excited me, and I expressed my approval, after having previously thought we were here for something silly.

But when I expressed my approval, the man sitting to my right, who looked like one of my old Americorps co-workers, SC, told me, "Hey, why don't you go to the bathroom? Didn't you say you needed to go?" I knew the man was just doing this because I had just connected with the girl. The man was jealous of me and wanted to get me out of the picture.

But I acquiesced and went to the bathroom. For a moment I was in the bathroom by myself. The bathroom was kind of run-down, possibly painted in somewhat vivid sea-green and tan-orange, and lit by incandescent light. I may have urinated in a urinal the base of which was on the floor and the body of which extended up the wall to about chest height.

I was now in a room with my psychiatrist A. The room was like an artist's studio. The floor was concrete. The walls were greyish white and maybe thirty feet tall. There were two large paintings: one, lying propped against the wall in front of me; the other, hung high up on the same wall.

A stood on a big, thick, wooden ladder, level with the painting that was hung on the wall. The painting may have had a lot of reds and oranges in it, as well as some purples. A was pointing to the painting and asking me something.

I kept worrying that A would fall off the ladder. The rungs of the ladder seemed wobbly, like bicycle pedals or buckets (?) on the wheel of a watermill. It didn't look like they'd be easy to stay balanced on. I felt bad that A should put herself at such risk just to show that she had this kind of artistic sensibility, and that she was doing this all just to show that she cared about my emotions and what I said.

Dream #2

I stood out on some cliff overlooking a beach. The sky above may have been a buzzy grey, with low, warm, pale clouds. The whole place felt very lonely. There was some kind of storm happening, even though it wasn't raining. But now the level of the sea rose greatly, almost overtaking the cliff I stood on.

I may have seen a weird sea creature swim, belly-up, in the water. I may have thought of the creature as a shark or a whale. But its flesh was all torn and pink, like that of a mutilated animal.

I may now have been in the water, looking back at the cliff, which was a wedge of boulders. The cliff looked like it shouldered above the water pretty well now.

The water was grey and slick. Waves would surge up and slam over me. The waves seemed large in the distance. But by the time they got to me, they seemed much smaller. But each wave that hit me seemed to be larger than the last. The last wave that hit me was just as large as it had been in the distance. I was very scared watching the wave loom over me.

I now stood in some futuristic room, looking out a bubble window at the night sea, possibly from a vantage point near a port. A pretty, blonde woman, a little taller than I, stood to my right. She was talking about the fact that people had been seeing a lot more creatures in the sea lately. As she said this, a whale's back humped up above and then back down below the surface of the water.

I said to the woman, "Look! A whale!"

The woman said, "Yes, I know. I've seen them before."

The whale's tail now broke above the water, coming straight up, then flapping back down, almost on the window.

"The same" whale now jumped out of the water, maybe twenty feet above the surface of the water, revealing itself to be a killer whale. It didn't make sense to me that this could be the same whale. The whale we'd seen before had been much larger than this killer whale.

We looked down into the water, as if the bottom half of the bubble-window were now below the surface of the water. We saw a shark. Another shark, which looked like a small whale, swam up to the window -- as if the whole window were now underwater! The shark laughed at us in a human, high-pitched voice, to scare us.

Another shark, with lobed shapes along its body, in shadow (?), swam straight up the window and beyond -- as if we were now deep below the surface of the water. I called this last shark a hammerhead. This shark also laughed a very scary, human-sounding laugh as it passed us. This laugh was a hunting tactic, used to scare prey out of hiding, perhaps.

The woman and I were now speaking about something, possibly about the killer whale and the sharks and something about differentiation.

I was now scuba diving underneath a futuristic sea vessel or submarine. I was with three other people. all of whom were ahead of me. The floor of this part of the sea was just below us, and the underside of the vessel was just above us. I swam with my belly up toward the vessel.

I was still speaking, somehow, with the woman. I said something about being able to prove the differentiation we'd been speaking about. Just then a shark that looked like a small killer whale floated over me. I thought, That proves it. But I was also afraid that the shark had passed so close to me. I thought, But if you aren't afraid of the sharks, aren't the sharks nice to you? Don't they even play with you sometimes? But now the shark was gone.

I swam forward, looking down to the floor of the sea. I knew that the person directly ahead of me was an older man, thin, tall, with longish, grey hair and pale, blue eyes, possibly wearing glasses as well.

We were now all apparently swimming down here without oxygen tanks. The man ahead of me was running out of air, but he didn't want to make this known to the two people ahead of him: a woman (maybe the one I'd been speaking with) and a young, black boy.

The man said he had to go back and check on something. But I knew he was going back to the entry hatch to get some air. I saw that before he turned around he stuck his mouth to a white and yellow device that looked like a water fountain.

The man was now gone. But I was now running out of air. I turned to head back to the hatch. As I did I saw the device the man had used. It was basically an "oxygen fountain." When a person stuck their mouth to the device and released a valve, the device would release oxygen, which the person could then breathe in. I noticed that these little valves were placed at pretty even intervals along the bottom of the vessel, so that oxygen could be obtained as needed.

But looking at these fountains, which were like white, plastic shields or basins with yellow, plastic nozzles, I noticed that they were dirty, grimy looking, or grown over with algae. I thought, I'm not going to stick my mouth around that! I thought I'd go back to the entry hatch and try to find something that would enable me to preserve my oxygen so I wouldn't need to use these oxygen sources.

For instance, I remembered a packet the old man had: a metallic-pink, thin, square package, like the shape of the wrapper for Pop-Rocks candy. The man had opened this package and pulled out a pink tissue that looked like a wet-nap napkin. He had then chewed this tissue like gum, I remembered. This tissue had then either produced oxygen or allowed the old man to preserve the oxygen already in his system.

I thought that using this tissue was kind of like cheating on the man's part. But I also thought it was reasonable. I wondered if I couldn't find something like that to use. But I also wondered how the woman and boy could just keep on going and going without needing oxygen. Why were they so good? Or what was wrong with me?

I was now in the entry hatch, which looked somewhat like the stairwell up from the basement at the house my family lived in when I was in my last three years of high school (and when I was seven and eight years old), except that it was painted in a warm, tan-orange color.

I looked around for a while for oxygen tanks. I couldn't find anything, and I felt like even I actually did find oxygen tanks, I'd probably feel to guilty and ashamed to wear them, anyway. I thought that I'd look for some of that oxygen gum, or smaller "devices" like that. If I couldn't find anything like that, I'd at least wander around here for a little while and catch a few breaths before going back into the water.

I wandered into a messy kitchen. There were a few people, mostly young kids, in the kitchen. A motherly woman sat before the stove with a young, black boy. There was some kind of barrier, almost like police tape, around the stove and the area where the woman sat and the boy stood. The boy sat in a wooden chair, his feet against the door of the oven. On the front right burner boiled a pot of chocolate. The chocolate was being prepared for fudge.

The woman, who might now have been my mother, and the boy both looked at me as I entered the room. Another small, white child placed, possibly in a crib, near my right leg. I knew the woman and boy knew me. I waved at them. The boy just looked at me like I was a piece of shit that didn't deserve his attention. He looked back to the stove.

I was so scared by the boy's look that I shyly walked past the boy and the woman. I thought to myself, Great. Now I can't even come to see my mother without some black guy getting in my way. (???) I walked through the kitchen, to the other doorway, which would probably have led to a living room or dining room.