(9/2/05) joyless euphoria

(Entered in paper journal at 7:15 AM at Starbucks on 86th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was in a bedroom, half of which was more like an empty, sheet metal-walled warehouse. The bedroom part was bedroom-sized, and the warehouse part was warehouse-sized. There were five or six couches close together, heaped and draped with disheveled blankets. At first I sat on the floor, legs folded lazily under me.

My friend R, somewhere, possibly walking behind the couches, said how when he had gone out last night with some of our mutual friends from college, that BMC had (to R's delight) played out some personal joke to the point where everybody was yelling at him to shut up.

I thought this was funny at first. But then I realized that I hadn't been told anything about our friends planing to hang out. In fact, R had asked me earlier in the day if I had any plans for later on. I had told him no. He asked me if I could, then, stay home (to watch his dog?) and I said yes. So he had tricked me to stay at home instead of going out with our friends.

R was now sitting on a couch, covered in some blankets. I told him, "You know you did that to me! You asshole!" R just sneered and chuckled and didn't look at me, as if he didn't have to.

I told him, "Don't ever do that again or you'll regret it."

R said, "I'll never regret anything."

I got right in R's face (although now he was something like a sort of pretty woman dressed as a Monty Python parody of an old woman) and I pointed at "him" and yelled, "I'll punch you in your face! I'll bust your goddamn eyes! I'll do it right now! You deserve it right now!"

"He" still didn't even look at me. "He" said, ""You'll regret that, if you do that."

I screamed and pulled "him" off the couch. It was like I was mostly grabbing blankets. Then I threw some naked person onto the ground. It was like a face-down version of me. But it "was" "R's mom."

I yelled, as if screaming in R's ear, that I was going to fuck his mom now that I had kicked his ass. I had flipped the person over. It was now something like a headless version of a boy or a girl. But in some sense it was a beautiful woman about my age. I straddled the "woman" (who I think was now facing down again).

The room was all living room now. It was small and bright, with one couch and one TV.

I hesitated over penetrating the "woman," going into her vagina as she lay stomach down with her legs closed. The tip of my penis hurt. I felt like I had warm goo all over me from my inner thighs up to my bellybutton. Then I had an orgasm. I pulled myself out I sat at the "woman's" feet. There were two stomach-down bodies now. I was in between them.

Now some black and white photo of a red-haired, crew-cut, redneck-looking bully appeared before me. A voice asked me something about my violent behavior. It compared me to (Eminem?) and said the name strangely.

I was still feeling the joyless euphoria of orgasm, which also contained some undertones of a savage blood lust. It was like I was a murderous animal listening to the seemingly meaningless speech of a human.

The voice repeated the name again and again. As it did I became more and more aware of myself. Something in the photo changed as well, as if an invisible camera swipe were slowly being lowered over it. I thought the photo would take on color. But it stayed black and white.

The more the name repeated, the more aware of myself I became, the more I was ashamed of what I had done. But I also felt more and more of a surge toward orgasm again -- once again, no pleasure, just that insect-like euphoria.

Now I was fully aware, almost as if I had woken from a dream, and I ejaculated, almost terrified that now I'd never be able to change who I was.

(7/4/07) tinted window; orange sparks

(Entered in paper journal at 8:35 AM at Ozzie's cafe on Seventh Avenue and Lincoln Place in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I sat on the floor in a living room. My sister sat on the right end of a couch to my left. I may have been sitting with my back against the right end of the couch, so my sister was directly to my left and above me. We both wrote in a notebook. We were writing a plan or a structured report, but it had to do with something mystical.

I stopped in the middle of writing (my sister and I were writing the same thing at the same speed, and we both stopped at the same time). I looked to the wall to the right. There were two roaches. I went to the wall. My sister stood behind me.

I said, "Well, we can just kill these roaches." But now I saw a lot of tiny, tiny roaches on the wall. It was like clouds of gnats. I didn't know what to do.

I saw out a window on the left side of the room. I was far from the window. The room was dim. The window must also have been tinted: it looked like full day outside, but the sky was a heavy, thick, though vivid blue. There were some redbrick building tops before the sky, and something like a heavy, steel beam over the top view just outside the window.

Dream #2

I stood under something like a bridge and saw orange curtains of thick sparks flow down before a sea-green sky like orange sun gleams on the crests of rolling waves in a river.

(8/7/08) pushed out of unused desk; lingerie roach

(Entered in paper journal at 6:25 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn into Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was at my desk at work. I was watching something like an earnings presentation on my mini-DVD player. My old boss DO walked around on the floor. I suddenly felt like I wasn't working hard enough. I tried to concentrate on the earnings presentation even harder.

Suddenly the angle I was sitting at was is if I were sitting at my co-worker (on DO's team) MD's desk at the building we'd previously worked at. (In waking life, my company had recently moved from one building to another building.) I wondered if DO might stop by and say hi to me.

I felt someone pushing down on my left elbow. It was MD, wearing a casual, white button-up and some khaki shorts. It was like he was trying to elbow me out of his chair.

Dream #2

I was in "my bedroom." I was pulling some nice dresses out of a bag. One dress was white with pinkish-red designs. I was going to hang it in my closet.

I walked to my closet and noticed how easily I could see up to my top shelf. (In waking life, the top shelf of my closet was a few inches above the top of my head.) There weren't many articles of clothing there. (In waking life, the top shelf of my closet was where I horded all of my lingerie and women's clothing -- mostly cheap articles I'd bought from discount stores.) I thought something like, I'm really cleaning up!

But something toward the wall caught my eye as I was looking away. I looked back. The thing was a "roach." It was maybe two inches long, and fat. Its back end was covered in white, as if it were casting off skin or as if it were developing a shell around itself to undergo metamorphosis. I couldn't tell whether the thing was dead or alive.

(12/11/08) spider in my room

(Entered in paper journal at 6:35 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in "my bedroom." I may have had a black or grey blanket on my bed. The room was dim with light coming only from the hallway or a different room. I may have been thinking gladly to myself how my room was free of bugs. I might have been afraid of that changing.

As I lay down for bed, something jumped off the wall, onto my blanket (which was all crumpled up on my bed). The thing was some kind of bug, but it looked like a little piece of trash. It moved around. It appeared to be all legs. At first it may have "had"/"been" only six or four legs. The legs were one-eighth of an inch long and translucent, with spherical tips. They seemed more like fangs than legs to me.

As the spider moved along, it "opened out," its legs now being long, black and white striped, thin, and half an inch long. The previous "legs" had coalesced into a sort of body.

I was trying to get the spider off my bed, but I didn't want to kill it or touch it. I would try to blow it off my bed, but it would constantly hold its place.

At some point I may have succeeded in getting the spider off my bed. I may then have chased it around the room, trying to get it even farther away from me, until it ended up, somehow, back on my bed.

At last I may have smashed the spider with a shoe or a book or something flat, like a board or a stiff piece of paper. But even then all that happened was that the spider was no longer there. It may have been gone, or it may have hidden under a fold, just as easily as it may have been smashed.

(12/19/08) so many books

Dream #1

I had brought one or a few friends into my house. It was a grey day. I showed my friends my "bedroom."

I was surprised by the room -- I had so many books! Piles of books lined all the walls. Most of the piles were about two feet high or shorter, though some were about four feet high.

At some point I saw all of this as if I were laying on my side.

(5/10/09) wishing for hidden rooms

Dream #1

I was in an empty apartment. The apartment was railroad-style, with four rooms. It was filled with natural light. The walls were a clean white. It was my new apartment.

For some reason, although I was happy with the place and all the rooms, I was trying to find different rooms or find a way to change the rooms. I wanted both my bedroom and my study room to be hidden within the other rooms, so nobody else could ever see my studying or sleeping in my house. I figured if I kept those two activities hidden from sight, the people in the apartment upstairs from me would never bother me.

I imagined that the back room and either the front room or the second room from the front each had a room like a closet, completely windowless, with a door which would close off from the outside room. (Interestingly, either there wasn't a kitchen or a bathroom or else I wasn't paying attention to them.) I figured one room (the back?) would be my bedroom, while the other (the front?) would be my study room.

(5/24/09) broken ceiling

(Entered in paper journal at 8:12 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

It was daytime. I was in my bedroom. The people upstairs from me started making a lot of noise on my ceiling. I got really angry and grabbed one of my bed-frame rods (in waking life, my bed-frame rods stood against my wall; I never assembled my bed frame) and slammed it against the ceiling. Each time I did this I got weaker and weaker, so that I would hit the roof more and more softly.

I lay down on my bed and looked up at my ceiling, which was full of marks where my slamming against the ceiling had pushed in the sheet-rock board.

The noise from upstairs started again. For a moment I thought I couldn't bang on the ceiling anymore. I'd just caused too much damage already. But the noise got worse and worse, until I no longer cared about the damage.

I grabbed the bed-frame rod and slammed it against the ceiling. This time I slammed it so hard that it crushed the ceiling upward. A section of the ceiling (the ceiling was now painted grey (?)) curved inward in a roughly triangular shape. The gypsum inside bloated out thickly, as if it were more like insulation.

I tried to figure out how I would justify my broken ceiling to my landlord. I thought I could possibly justify it by saying how awful my upstairs neighbors were and how angry they finally made me.

(9/23/09) ashamed of masturbation

(Entered in paper journal at 8:52 AM at Sit & Wonder cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

It was daytime. I was in smallish, cluttered bedroom. I knelt on the foot of the bed, which stood in the corner of the room. The bed had one window at its head and one at its right side. There were probably clothes scattered all over the bed. The blinds on the windows were open, revealing a blue sky and somewhat dense, bright canopies of trees outside.

I was getting ready to masturbate while pretending I was a woman. I had a big, clear, plastic dildo in my hand. I thought I would lay on my back and, wearing some kind of lingerie, run the dildo against my crotch as if I were a woman being made love to by another woman wearing a dildo. I imagined myself as a woman, possibly Hispanic, with pale olive skin, a thin figure, long, crimped-curly hair, and a thin, high-cheeked, cat-eyed face.

But instead of rubbing the dildo against my crotch and pretending I had a vagina, I began tipping the dildo against my anus. I didn't want to admit it at first, but I liked it. Before I knew it, I had slid the dildo up my anus. I knew I would masturbate like this until I came.

But I now realized that all my windows were open and that the neighbors might see me masturbating. So I began pulling the blinds down or closing them. As I did this, though, I noticed that the blinds were in really bad shape, and that even once they were all the way closed, they would not conceal my room entirely. If my neighbors were looking, they would see, at least a little bit, into my room while I masturbated.

(12/30/09) psychiatrist needs payment

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

Dream #1

I was in my bedroom, standing up and talking on the phone with my psychiatrist A. A told me that she needed to pay her rent very soon, so she would need me to pay off my bill for my psychiatry sessions. I told her okay.

I looked down at the floor and tried to figure out how I would be able to pay A and still have money for the following weeks. I may then have gotten a phone call from my girlfriend H.

(1/29/10) one of the lesbians

(Entered in paper journal at 5:01 PM on Q-train heading back to Brooklyn from work.)

Dream #1

A movie, probably Just One of the Guys. A scene of two girls and at least one other person, maybe a guy, in a smallish bedroom. The room was bright, with natural light against pale walls. The two girls were the main character and her best friend. The scene was the scene in which the main girl decided to dress up as a guy.

Something was implied in the scene, either hints being dropped in conversation or else a kind of physical tension between the two girls, that made me think the girls were actually in love with each other, and that the main girl secretly didn't mind becoming a guy because that meant she would be able to be with her friend sexually without anybody asking questions.

I wondered about this relationship. I felt like there had been some scene efore this one where the girls were flirting with each other and where they'd almost admitted their attraction to each other, but were interrupted right at the crucial moment.

I now saw the previous scene. It was in the same bedroom. The girls were alone in the room. The main girl had just gotten out of the shower. She had a white cloth, either a towel or a terry-cloth robe, wrapped very loosely around her. Her friend sat on the bed. She looked admiringly at the main character.

Somehow the main character's breasts became exposed. At this moment, both girls suddenly felt a deep attraction toward each other. They didn't say anything to each other; they just began romping around "for fun"  on the bed.

They ended up so that the friend lay on her back under the main girl, who also lay on her back, laying across the friend's torso.The main girl was almost naked, the cloth barely wrapping around her hips. The friend began fondling the nipple of the main girl's left breast with the index and middle finger of her left hand.

The friend said something like, "I like your body a lot." She may have said, "I like your breasts a lot."

The friend may now have started fondling other parts of the main girl's body, including her bellybutton. The two girls were very quiet and yet passionate. They were about to kiss, when the other friends interrupted the situation. I knew that this was the beginning to the scene I had originally been watching.