Showing posts with label being disregarded. Show all posts
Showing posts with label being disregarded. Show all posts

Sunday, January 6, 2013

(9/6/08) boss' communion sex-change

(Entered in paper journal at 9:51 AM at Naidre's cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a building that was like a mix between a public building, like Grand Central Station, and a church, with my boss BS and maybe some other people I know. I stood in a wide, open area.

Before me was a roped-off area. The area was a church altar, but it looked more like a stage in a high school gym. Nobody stood on stage. There was a conglomeration of equipment off to my left, right in front of the stage. It was a pulpit, some kind of ritual table, and sound equipment.

A priest stood before the ritual table, which stood before and just to the side of the pulpit. The priest faced the table and pulpit so that he faced away from me. There may have been other people around me, but only a few, and they walked around in the room like one might walk through the main terminal at Grand Central while they're waiting for something or somebody.

The ritual at the pulpit was something like a baptism or communion. A line of people crowded from the pulpit  to my left and around the sound equipment. As each person's turn came, he would stand behind the pulpit while the priest, before the table, would perform the ritual.

BS was in line. His turn came up. He stood with a woman behind the pulpit. He was given a piece of bread that looked like a small, pillow-shaped sugar cookie. He chewed it and then spit it into a big Ziploc bag. He had bowed down slightly to spit in the bag. I could tell he felt like he was doing something incorrectly or impolitely by spitting into the bag.

When BS lifted his head he was a woman -- although my brain really didn't register the sex change at all during the dream. He/she was shortish, tan-skinned, a little overweight, with long, chestnut-colored hair. He/she wore a sleeveless business shirt.

The priest asked him/her what he/she thought of the bread. He/she said something sprightly and naive-sounding about how he/she liked it. Everybody laughed like BS was really cute for having said that. BS was now afraid of saying other things, for fear both of being thought of as desperately trying to say cute things continuously and of being thought of as unable to say anything that could be taken seriously.

He/she was now saying something as if it were directly to me. In my head I could hear BS' male voice as BS the female spoke. I might also have seen the male BS superimposed over the female BS. BS said that it was good to do this ritual over the weekend, because that way you would be able to do things like have sex on Sunday without having to worry about whether you were sinning.

Saturday, December 15, 2012

(3/6/09) blow off

(Entered in paper journal at 8:38 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

My old friend ML and I had gone to a cafe together. It was very late at night. We had walked down a suburban sidewalk with houses and small shops alongside it. The sky was pitch black, but everything could be seen, as if the street was lit for a movie. There were a lot of people around, like this was a party night in a college town (or perhaps one of the crowd scenes in a Stephen King novel).

I now sat in the cafe. The cafe was large and decently lit. There were a lot of people in the cafe. The front half may have been higher than the back half by abut a step (around nine inches). There were all kinds of different seating arrangements. Along the right wall was the bar/counter. I sat at a small bar near the front door, on the left wall. To my left was somebody I had come along with.

ML had gone to meet with somebody. I was waiting for his meeting to finish. In the meantime I was writing, hunched over the bar and notebook like a child with a coloring book.

At some point ML came back. He had been longer than I'd thought he would be, and I also felt like he'd been excluding me by not including me in the meeting. ML said something to me. I blew him off, as if I had to finish a thought I was writing. ML walked away.

I finished what I was writing and looked up to my right, where ML had been. I didn't see him. I thought he'd gotten mad and left altogether. But then I saw him sitting over near the middle of the room. I knew that if I didn't make up for how I'd blown him off, he'd really make me pay for it later on. So I went to talk to him.

ML sat on a couch that was tall like a bar stool. His appearance and dress were more mainstream than usual (???). His beard was thinnish and scraggly, but softly so, as if it had been styled. He wore a "worn-out" wool cap, some kind of flannel-style overshirt, and a drab undershirt. His face might have been different -- narrower, with soft skin but sharp cheeks and thin eyes. He may have looked at me like I was nobody and he didn't even care who I was.

(3/13/09) extended leave; flying in an armory

(Entered in paper journal at 8:30 AM at Starbucks on Christopher Street in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I stood at the top of a small stairway and under an arch, like before a large Victorian home that had been converted into a business building. The porch under the arch was dim and felt like heavy stone. The area before the house was sunny and lawny, maybe with a busy street beyond it. But at the bottom of the steps was a trench of stone, like the stone/concrete walkway around the house had been built down into the ground.

At the bottom of the steps stood the woman who (in waking life) took the appointments at the place where I get my haircuts. The woman told me, "I asked you a couple of days ago if you wouldn't mind because the person who'd cut your hair is out on extended leave."

I said, "Oh, yeah. How is she? Is she alright?" But the woman wouldn't answer. I said, "If it's something really bad, I would be happy to give a donation. Or have you guys already put together some flowers?"

The woman looked at me as if she wanted to answer, but she thought she shouldn't.

Dream #2

I was in a room with KP, a representative from a company I worked with at the job from which I'd recently been laid off. I'd been talking with KP about something, but KP really didn't want to listen to me or accept that I might know what I'm talking about or that I would understand what she was talking about.

The room was gigantic, as big as the inside of one of the big, brick armories in New York City. The floors were thick, grey stone. The walls were dark. The ceilings were like some kind of thick, slatted wood, darkish brown. The ceiling itself bent outward, then back inward, to dome shallowly.

I started jumping around the room, having told myself to forget about KP. I was jumping as high as the ceiling and then almost floating. I would push my feet off the ceiling and float to the other end of the ceiling. At some point I may have floated back down to the floor, where I spoke to another woman, who may have been blonde like KP, but was younger, maybe around my age.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

(4/25/09) building on fire; confronting rude man; boss draws my dreams; message from interviewer

(Entered in paper journal at 8:20 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a car with a woman like DK (a director of the department I worked in at the job from which I had been laid off in waking life). I may have been laying in the seat somehow, while DK drove. We were driving through a large city full of skyscrapers. I could see up to the sky as if through the roof of the car. It was early morning. The sky looked dim blue, like just a skein of grey clouds were floating below it. The sky was visible in small sections between the buildings.

We were talking about the weather. DK mentioned the forecast, which was somewhat at variance with what I was currently seeing. But then the sky grew deeply clouded. I wondered how the sky could get so cloudy so quickly. It worried me a little.

We then passed a building maybe "seven or eight stories" tall (i.e. there seemed to be seven or eight window-rows, though the building may have been more than seven or eight stories tall. The building was on fire, or, rather, there were huge stacks of black smoke erupting from certain windows. But through the other windows I could see people walking around through undamaged, undisturbed work spaces. The people may actually have been worried, but they seemed to be taking care of their business, anyway.

The office building was maybe hexagonal or octagonal or oddly four-sided and was build on a smaller base. Its top sloped out mildly, so the whole thing was almost cup-shaped, like something Eero Saarinen (?) might have built, but also like a black building I was familiar with from my trips to Boston (???). But I could see everybody in the building as if they were in a row house or a small shop on a small town's main street.


The smoke that came out of the building was quickly making the sky as black as night. We drove past the building.

I noticed that the other buildings were also on fire, in the same sporadic, smoky way as the first building, though fire was visible in some of these other buildings. The streets somehow seemed filled with panic, with people rushing around. The air was filled with smoke, to the point where we couldn't see in front of us. The smoke was tinged orange, as if lit by streetlamps. I got panicked and wondered if the whole city were going to be destroyed.

We drove down another street, like a pristine office park. There were wide, redbrick plazas all around us, lit as if from sparkling white ground lights. The sky was black as night. People were also bustling around in this part of town, though less people were around.

DK turned left (she may actually have turned right onto one of the redbrick plaza walkways) to drop me off at an office. I said, "How can people be working right now? Who knows what's causing these fires? The whole city could be under siege. We don't know what building is going to get it next!"

But DK didn't seem like she was listening to me at all. She was still driving to drop me off.

Dream #2

I was walking down a hallway with a man and a woman. We had come from another hallway and had turned left into this one. The hallway was somewhat wide, somewhat short with dull, white walls, grey floors, and fluorescent lights.

The woman was like an older authority figure. The man was a slightly scruffy, medium-height man. He may have been Indian. He had a stuffy face and short, tightly disarranged hair. His body was a little wide. He wore jeans, a pale tan blazer, and a red and pink, button-up shirt.

The man made some comment about how incompetent I was at my job. The woman made a slight comment, not really regarding the man, to let me know I was alright. The man had turned and walked back down the hallway, as if by walking away after his comment he could make it irrefutable.

I rushed down the hallway after the man, to force him into a confrontation. I caught up to him. He turned away from me whenever I tried to face him. He was almost to the end of the hallway, about to turn down it, which would somehow mean I'd lost the argument with him. So I grabbed the man and forced him to face me.

The man gave me a sour-looking face, like a constipated person might show. I thought the man looked like an idiot. I made whatever comment I'd needed to make to justify myself. The man kind of smirked in acceptance.

The woman, the man, and I were again walking up the hallway. We were heading to a celebration or convention. We walked up to a large event room. There was a cluttering of people near the entrance to the room, like a disorganized group of people trying to get in. I stood near an older woman who seemed to have a huge sense of propriety, who lightly regarded me, like I was an idiot.

I now got into the celebration. At first it was just a large, harshly fluorescent-lit event room lined with folding tables, with people at the tables passing out literature. Large groups of people flocked at all the tables. At one of the tables I saw my old co-worker JM, a person whose intelligence I admired greatly. JM was wearing a light brown suit which fit his slim body a little too loosely, and a cream-colored, button-up shirt. JM was with an Asian woman who was his wife, but not his waking-life wife EC.

I tried to catch JM's attention. But JM walked away from the table, almost as if he were trying to avoid me. I followed JM closely, trying to tag him to get his attention, so I could say hi, but apparently also talking on and on as if JM had already acknowledged me.

We walked through a series of rooms that were organized like a museum exhibition, though they felt more like mock-ups of rooms in a cheap apartment. There were tables everywhere. The tables were cluttered with paper and with people trying to hand out literature.

At one point I may have given up on JM. I walked, possibly with someone with whom I was talking, into another exhibit room. This artwork in this exhibit room was a sculpture of two gigantic books, opened lying pages-down, one loosely piled on the other. The books were maybe six feet long, three feet wide, and one and a half feet thick, with chunks like little cheese wedges, carved out of the pages at certain points. This may have reminded me of something else, which I may have mentioned to the person I was walking with.

Dream #3

I was trying to explain the burning building (from my first dream) to my old boss BS, who was then trying to draw the building. BS was drawing on a horizontal surface, which was alternately a chalkboard and a cardboard or brown-paper surface. BS wasn't quite understanding my spatial description of the building. At one point I may have tried to draw the building for BS. But I realized I couldn't get it quite right, either.

Dream #4

I was working on a computer. Apparently I had a bunch of visual-artistic programs opened. I saw an email from BT, (a person I'd interviewed with for a job in waking life a couple months previous to this dream). I saw the email as if it were on my BlackBerry.

I tried to open the email, but my BlackBerry's screen suddenly started getting flooded with the artistic programs I had open. I had to plow through all the programs to get to the email. I'd close the files but I wouldn't exit from the program. I plowed and plowed through the screens, slowly feeling more and more like I'd never actually get back to BT's email.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

(5/2/09) the irksome gurus

Dream #1

I was in a hallway at a place that was supposed to be the office for my job before I was laid off. (In waking life, in the month or so before I got laid off, our offices had been moved to the building of the offices of the company we had just been merged with. The main reason, but probably not the only reason, for my having gotten laid off, was my company's merger with this other company.)

I stood at one end of the hallway, before a door accessible through magnetic card. I was turned to face the other end of the hallway. About halfway down the hall, to my left, a wider hallway intersected with this hallway. That hallway "felt" like it had a copier and some reams of paper scattered near its end.

From the hallway a woman came walking on her hands. Her legs were twisted behind and over her in some "yoga" position. She was the company's yoga teacher. She thought she would show off by walking into the offices in a yoga posture. She was short, skinny, black, with pale skin and a loosely curled head of grey and black hair. She wore a white sweatshirt, sweatpants of a slightly darker color, a beige, billed cap, like a hiker's cap, and blue, reflective sunglasses.

The woman hopped toward me. I knew that this woman had "always struck me" as someone who wanted to make people feel like she was unapproachable, that she couldn't be spoken to. I usually let myself give in to that feeling, and I would shy away from the woman.

But today I felt like the woman was being so absurd that I just had to defy her by greeting her cheerfully. I said, "Hello! How are you doing today?"

The woman ignored my greeting. She stopped before me. She was waiting for me to open the door so she could go in when I went in. I was about to open the door. In fact, I may actually, or at least in my mind's eye, have seen the door open a crack.

But I thought, I'm not going to do her a good turn if she's not even going to regard me. I pretended to swipe my security card against the magnetic sensor that would unlock the door. Since I hadn't really swiped my card, the door didn't unlock. I then said, "Oh, it looks like my card doesn't work anymore. Oh, well."

I walked away from the door, down the hallway, to a door to my right, which also went to the offices I wanted to go to. Someone may possibly just have walked into the offices. The door seemed to be slightly open, but closing. I caught it and pushed it open.

I walked into the offices. I walked to a wide table of desks, which may have been supposed to be desks on a trading floor. The table was a square, more like a desk setup for elementary school kids than a trading floor desk.

A little celebration was being held, possibly in my honor. I only realized after a moment of talking with everybody that this celebration was for me. The people at the celebration were mostly people at the same professional level as I. I especially noticed my co-workers MS and CP. We had a red cake with white frosting.

Everybody asked me if something in my life had been difficult to deal with lately. I said no and tried to play off the difficulty I had felt. But now I either saw my old boss BS coming along or I felt that he was just around the corner. I hoped everybody would put the cake away. I knew that if BS knew everybody was celebrating me, BS would do whatever he could to stop them or make the celebration all about him.