(11/21/04) the cat liked me; hiding all my clothes; the saffron conversation

(This dream entry comes only from my daytime journal, not from my dedicated dream journal. There is generally (for some stupid reason) no time/place info for my daytime journal entries.)

Two dreams from last night. Also possibly a fragment.

Dream 1

I lay on a couch in a kind of plain and somewhat empty living room. There was a sharp, incandescent light shining hotly, although it was more like midnight. The couch was a blue (divan?), and a wooden frame in the shape of a couch with a blue mattress on it. The couch frame could be flattened so that it and the mattress resembled a bed. But at the same time it seemed like a bit, thick couch of the same color. I couldn't see much of the room. I lay on the couch facing the back.

A cat jumped onto the back of the couch. I knew the cat and was grateful that it had come to lay by me. But it couldn't quite stay perched on the couch's back. The mattress had kind of slid out of shape so that the cat couldn't balance It slid off and kind of went away.

I got off the couch for a sec and slid the mattress back up. The cat now had a lot more space. It came back, but this time it lay on the "seat" part of the couch, by me. But now it was like the couch had been flattened to make the bed.

The cat was at about arm's length from me. I reached out to it, very pleased that it had decided to come back. I though that I should put my blanket over it as well. But I just petted it. It looked very content to be petted.

I wondered how long the cat would stay, how long until it got bored with me. The cat was an ashy grey mixed with a lowish, shallow orange-brown and undertones of tufted white like old, worn-out hair. The hair was short and the cat seemed thin and lazily wiry.

Dream 2

I walked into some clothing store as if through a side wall or a mall entrance. There were no lights on, so the store was only lit by the wealth of grey-blue, cloud-covered daylight coming in through the tall wall windows. The store was grayish and grayish blue. It was huge and full, with a fair amount of people quietly milling about. I may have worked there or worked for the store in some peripheral way.

As I walked in I heard a voice behind me, a nice, mature woman's voice saying. "I need you to take your XXXXX" (shirt?) "off the rack. It's just kind of old and worn out. It won't make a good impression on the people who are coming in here to buy for the special event."

So I walked down to some rack. But now I was looking for the lingerie section. I saw that a column had been changed into a lingerie display and that all the lingerie had been set behind a glass counter square which fortified the column-square lingerie display. All the panties looked rough and more like boys' underwear than women's underwear.

I thought, Ah, all the more feminine stuff has been moved into a guarded area to protect the attendants from being embarrassed by perverts like me. But I felt like there was more lingerie somewhere. So I walked on.

But now I had the ugly (shirt?) in my hand as well as a couple pieces of lingerie. I walked to the back of an enormous line of people. I tried to hide everything I had: the ugly (shirt?) because it wasn't good for image; and the lingerie because I didn't want anybody to ridicule me for being a pervert.

Some guy came up to me and asked me a question. But I couldn't think about the question. All I could think about was whether he saw what I was hiding.

Dream 3

The fragment is all messed up.

I was walking down the street, possibly, with a tall, black, hippie-looking woman. We may have been going up a hill. We spoke about some notable guy who hesitated at doing something and things turned out okay but then he didn't hesitate at something and things went well. There may have been something to do with my NYC Americorps program.

I may have, at this point, "woken up" to write down my dream. I "saw" myself writing it while my mind reeled off words too fast for my hand to keep up -- but then the whole thing was complete, then incomplete, etc.

I discovered I wasn't writing but that I only thought I was writing. So now I had to write the dream. But I had to think about it.

I got an image of a baby, naked, possibly, climbing to, and possibly up, a strip or drape of saffron fabric curved parabolically

like a chute or slide. In the folds were bolts and pieces of small machinery. Then the strip was flattened out.

All of this imagery indicated the decisions the man had made. This was, in fact, the conversation.

After this -- I really honestly don't know when I was awake and when I was asleep during this whole strange "dream" -- I "woke up" again and thought I was writing again and figured out I wasn't and actually wrote again. But I never wrote in The Ghost Book (what I titled my dream journal at this time) last night. All pretty confusing.

(8/5/07) my new leotard; the owl man

(Entered in paper journal at 8:20 AM at Ozzie's cafe -- not sure which -- in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I went into a women's clothing shop. It was dim inside. A Hispanic man and woman worked there. The man may have helped me pick some lingerie.

I sat in a room of a (the previous?) women's clothing shop, on a couch in the center of the room, like a couch in the center of the room of an art museum. I looked into another room. The other room was dark and closed off by a locked glass door.

I remembered one of my female friends telling me how the shop was so exclusive that it stays closed except for when people come to buy stuff. Then it opens almost automatically. I thought the clothes must be very expensive.

I headed back into the (first?) women's clothing store. The clothes I had gotten before didn't work for me at all.

This time the woman helped me find some lingerie. She got me a couple nice things. Then she picked out something like a pink leotard with tiny sleeves, like the outfit a dancer might wear, with tights over her legs, for practice. It was just what I wanted.

I sat on the train. A white man and woman sat across from me. The man was saying, angrily, but not out of control, "I've got enough to do dealing with her!"

Apparently the man thought that since I had bought women's clothing I was trying to hit on him (not sure how that connection was made, either by him or me...). The man brought up the woman next to him, apparently his girlfriend, as proof that he had his hands full with his girlfriend and that he liked women, not men, anyway.

Dream #2

I was on a street corner at night. The blocks around me were all massy, roughly fifteen-floor apartment buildings of brick and stone, like buildings on Park Avenue. The sky was grey and stringy and murky, maybe hung with a yellow moon.

Caddy-corner from me (?) I saw what I thought to be a large bird perched atop the walk signal. I thought it was an owl. I walked across the street to approach it. The walk signal had transformed into a ten-foot-tall, black metal box.

The bird wasn't a bird after all, but a man dressed in white, robe-like clothing, with long, silvery-grey hair and a long, silver-grey beard. He crouched away from me, his legs bent so his knees were to his chest, as if he were imitating a bird.

I tried to get a view of the man's whole face, but I was afraid that the man was crazy, and that if I looked directly at the man's face the man would become afraid or angry and run away or attack.

Somewhere nearby I ran into my friend R. This place was far away from R's home. R was out walking his dog. I asked R, "What are you doing all the way out here?" I thought R was stalking me.

R said, "I had to come all the way out here. I had to take my dog to the vet."

We were now standing in the vet's office. I knelt down beside R's dog, who stood to my right side and faced R as he stood at the reception desk. I asked, "Is your dog having another one of her..." (I knew it was a skin problem, but I wanted to be delicate about the issue) "... things?"

R got angry, thinking I had forgotten about his dog's illnesses. R said, "Skin issues. She's having more of her skin issues."

I petted the dog and noticed that a lot of her coat was very thin. It was also brown and white in these patches, instead of black, her normal color.