(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.

(11/11/09) dinner crashers

(Entered in paper journal at 7:58 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I walked through a place like the road in Prospect Park heading up from Center Drive to Prospect Park West. I may have been walking with someone like my old friend V, or talking with him in my head.

I told V how I had been invited to dinner by my old friend R, and how R had made the dinner sound a lot like it would just be he and I, as if in apology for the way he'd acted toward me. Then, as the days passed, I found out that R's wife L's older sister had cancer.

I may now have been walking through a city area, like an old business area in a small city, still speaking with V. I told V how I found out that L's sister had been cured or that she was going to be cured. But she now needed money. So, I learned, R was having a dinner thrown for L's sister at R's house, a kind of split between a congratulations party and a fundraiser. The fundraiser dinner was going to be on the night R had invited me to dinner.

As I thought about this I may have seen, in my mind's eye, L's sister dressed in a purple shirt with a line-drawing in white of a diaper, and some slogan, written in white cursive, about being an adult baby mommy. (In waking life, I had seen a woman wearing this on an internet photo.)

V and I now sat in some big cafe that was full of people. We sat next to a window through which poured a lot of bright sunlight. I tried to explain that R had planned to spring this whole thing on me as a surprise, and he would have, had I not found out about the whole thing on my own.

I knew the conflict R would try to create. He'd try to make it so I was mad as soon as I saw so many people. Then, when I was out of earshot, and with nobody having explained anything to me, he'd make some speech to everybody to make himself look like a really conciliatory person, but also making me look bad, selfish, like I knew what this thing was all about, but that I'd just decided to be nasty about all the people here anyway.

I told V, "Now that I know what's going on, I'll be cheerful, happy to see everybody. But it really upsets me that R would try to play this game on me in the first place. He always tries these underhanded things for starting conflict."

V said he had to go to the bathroom. He got up and walked away. I looked out the window, possibly to a scene like a wide parking lot or road and a small building like a fast food restaurant or auto repair shop in the distance, under the white-yellow haze of sunlight.

Suddenly a man and woman sat down beside me in my and V's booth. The woman was maybe around my age, worn-out looking, but attractive. The man was perhaps in his forties, smallish but muscly, with dark-copper skin that almost looked like he wore makeup, tightly curled, short hair that was light red-brown, and a square, muscly, sour-looking face. He wore a white polo shirt that looked square and ill-fitting on him. The woman sat next to me. The man sat across from the woman.

The man and woman both had menus in front of them, and they'd probably brought stuff to the booth with them, like backpacks or duffel bags. The man had said, to annoy me, "Let's sit here. Man, I'm hungry. Aren't you, honey? Let's sit right here and eat our breakfast."

I looked around the cafe, which was very busy and full, trying to see if there wasn't some empty place for this couple to sit. I couldn't see anything.

I told the man, "We're sitting here. You have to find your own space."

The man said, "No we don't. I can do this if I want. It's allowed."