(10/6/05) all-you-can-eat buffet scuffle

(No time/place info for paper dream  journal entry.)

(10/5 -- I will try tonight to influence my dreams with thoughts of Ghost in the Shell II the anime movie.)

(No dreams were recorded in my dream journal for the night.)

***

(Daytime paper journal entry.)

Dream 1

I can't remember the beginning. I was somewhere with my friends R and Y. It was like we were doing some job outside. I had eaten a burrito that had been wrapped in aluminum foil. Once we finished we walked to the end of a parking lot and stood by something like a gas station. All I remember now is that it was a bright white building. The parking lot was empty. The sun was bright.

I sat or stood against a wall, either in the sun or the shade. R and Y were up by the front of the gas station. Possibly one of them was in or kept walking in and out of the store. One of them was talking on a cell phone. Someone had invited them to a "roller coaster park" or amusement park. I knew they would also invite me, though I didn't really want to go.

I don't really know what happened next. Something about an errand was mentioned. We walked down the parking lot toward a building that looked like a closed Kmart. It was a white building, the doors of which were boarded up with what looked like plywood painted aquamarine.

The errand had apparently become getting lunch. I thought about this with a little dread. I'd already eaten a burrito, and I didn't want to go out for a big lunch. Now I pulled two more burritos out of my back pocket. I definitely didn't want to buy lunch now, now that I had two more burritos.

I thought there was possibly a way for me to get away from these guys. But, seeing some guys opening and closing the aquamarine boards, which I now saw were steel, I knew I was just going to have to go with them.

I was now in some restaurant with them. It was like the cafe at the back end of the old Kmart on Colfax (and Wadsworth?) in Denver. But it was huge, like three or four cafe lines put together. R and Y had gone up to get food from the buffet-like lines. I stood at a table, about to sit down, but looking at my burritos and feeling guilty for even eating these. After all, hadn't one burrito been enough?

But now Y came up and told me to come check out the buffets. Apparently there were three buffet lines, each set up like they were different restaurants, with different styles of food. I walked up to the buffets with Y, telling myself not to buy any food, just to look out of interest.

The buffets were set up so that on the left and right sides were two immense, long buffets, and in the center was a small, pagoda-like buffet with something like soups on it. Y and I went to the left buffet first. It was all sub sandwiches, just a long, stretching bin full of sub sandwiches. The wall behind the buffet was wallpapered with a slightly grainy photograph of a blue sky dotted with puffy, white clouds.

I thought, Well, it's never worth it to spend this much money on a sub sandwich. But maybe I can just get a soda.

I walked away from the buffets altogether, though, back to the seats. I was about to sit down when I heard Y say, "Hey, Preemie! Come check this out!" She was now on the right side buffet, which, I could only barely see, was some kind of exotic food. I ran up through the soup buffet, which, I could only barely see, was some kind of exotic food, to get to the right side buffet.

R stood at the soup buffet. As I ran toward Y, he shoved me with his back and butt and pinned me against the guardrails for the buffet. Holding me there with his back he said, "No you don't. You aren't getting anywhere near Y."

I slipped away but he moved quickly and trapped me again. He was pissed. I tried to struggle against him, but he kept slipping out of my reach.

Trying to figure out something, anything to do to him, I stuck my hands first into a beef mushroom-type soup (kind of a french dip au jus consistency) and then into a guacamole-consistency soup, which I grabbed a hot handful of and flung into R's face.

R backed up (?) and away from me. We now stood by a trashcan by the chairs and tables. R gave me a look that scared (and scares) the shit out of me -- it was like that of a psychopath who finally decided to kill and thus saw his object as already dead, like I was just a stupid fucking absurdity for still choosing even to breathe and talk. It was a blank, petulant stare.

R was pissed that I had gotten him off of me. He was even more pissed that I had gotten a bit of his glasses and his left jawline messy with the guacamole-type soup. But he was most pissed that I had gotten some of the soup on the left side of the collar (?) of his "expensive" shirt, but that if R didn't wipe off his neck, which he wouldn't, he would let the soup get on his shirt. And he wanted that, because for so long he had wanted an excuse to kill me or embarrass me so badly that I would wish I were dead.

I half-apologized. But I mainly told R, "You just have to get off of me when I tell you to get off of me, that's all. Besides, Y's my friend, just as well as you are, and I have every right to talk to her."

He pushed me away and said, "I am going to kill you or embarrass you really bad. You don't ever tell me what to do. You are mine."

Now he was gone. I sat across from Y. She asked where R had gone. I told her he just got a little pissed and decided not to hang around for the rest of the day. She said, "Well, he should just learn to deal with the fact that not everybody in the world is going to do things whenever he wants them to."

Now I sat staring out toward the front of the restaurant, where the Kmart used to be. It was now a skyline, behind a couple skyscrapers and across a river, of what I possibly thought was New Jersey and/or lower Manhattan. It was in pinkish-orange sunset light, the buildings looking orange-purple in their shadows. I sat on the thin tile floor like I was sitting on a hilly lawn, waiting for a concert.

I was trying to think, as my friend ML sat beside me and spoke (Y now gone), how on earth I would make do back in New York if I couldn't stay at R's place. I thought that I should perhaps ask ML to let me stay with him. But right as I was about to ask him, turning up to him and lifting up my arms as if to embrace his chest like I was a fawning girl, he disappeared.

Now, instead of ML to my right, My mom's old longtime boyfriend JT was to my left. I didn't see him, but he was there. The skyline was moving now, from my right to my left, a bridge coming into view, as if we were on a boat.

JT pointed out some smallish, greenish-window-walled building kind of where Battery Park would have been. He told me, "See? That's the Jewish Aquarium Museum" (?) "right there."

I said, "Oh yeah?" first trying to figure out which building JT was talking about, then trying to figure out what made certain aquatic life Jewish.

I don't know how, but things now changed quite a bit. I was in something like an apartment that was the entire floor of a skyscraper. The floor was concrete (?) painted black and with Arabian rugs all over. There were a few nice couches as well.

The walls were either brick or black-painted concrete. There were huge holes for windows. But I don't think the windows had any panes. The window holes were from ceiling to floor and about ten or twelve feet wide, so that the "wall" was more like a wide column between the windows, more than like a wide space of wall between windows.

The space was like an artist's space, or, rather, like a space where artists could just hang out, not work. A few people were there, talking, and I was their friend. But I don't know them, nor could I really see them.

The strangest thing was that the building or the floor was revolving, turning counterclockwise. At first I thought it was just my changing perspective. But even when I held my head still I saw that building tops were "moving" from left to right before my eyes. The city looked clean, new, with buildings made out of red bricks and copper-colored, tan bricks. I was very interested in the views, but I also had a feeling that the turning of the building meant it was going to collapse.

I now heard (Y?) call for me. She told me to look out a "window" to my right. I immediately saw some neighborhood, which I thought was an incredibly beautiful yet dangerous area of Brooklyn. I was enamored with the spooky starkness (even in full, shining daylight!) of these buildings. But I don't remember them now.

I don't know what happened next. But now I was walking to a bedroom after having made an unsuccessful joke to my friend PD. There were no windows in the room. A yellowy, incandescent light shone from the center of the ceiling.

There was something like a couch-like mattress in the center of the floor. I flopped down in it and sighed to ML that PD didn't think my joke was funny. ML just grinned and was about to say something kind of rude and annoying about my sense of humor.

But apparently I predicted what ML was going to say. I butt in as he got a few words in and said something like, "Oh, yes, now it's time for you to repeat some word I characteristically say until you beat me down with a sense of being completely known and understood. You're such an ass."

But ML didn't take my comments too harshly. I don't think I meant them so harshly. He just gave me a lazy, half-dazed smile and rumpled his head under a blanket and made a joke about me.

Now a dog like my friend R's dog ran into the room from a door to my right (I had come in from the left). "She" kind of attacked my right hand, biting it softly but repeatedly.

I said, "Oh, I forgot, you like eating people's hands, don't you?"

"She" said, "Yes, I do, but I also like being petted," in a voice like a 75% feminine, 25% masculine, watery-timbered computer voice. "She" now lay back on my lap and resembled soemthing like a naked boy covered in short, silky, black dog hair. I pet it and it opened its mouth in "pleasure" that looked more like the breathless gasps of a burn victim.

Now someone somewhere said, "Oh, he's coming! Just open the door for him." They meant to use the electric door opener to open the door on the first floor but not to use the buzzer.

My sister said, "Oh, I know how to do that. I've done it before." But before she could get to the door opener the person there buzzed up to us. "My friend's dog," who was now much more, though still not quite, like the dog, sprang from my lap, barking insanely.

I now understood that the man coming up was my mom's new husband, a Japanese man. I got up from a room that wasn't quite the room I had just been in and walked down a dim hallway with a couple doorways to wide, airy, classy rooms and into a "central" room where the front door was located. The light was a rich tan-yellow.

The man had just come into the house. He was about five-foot-five, maybe 150 or 160 pounds, wearing a blue, hefty, knit sweater, slacks (or jeans?), and plastic-rimmed, black glasses. His face was kind of thick. He was wide-lipped and weary-eyed. His hair was alternately thinning greatly and full but obstinately messy. His skin was very dark, almost brown, a dull brown.

He walked toward the kitchen, where my mom was, only half-regarding me. I told him, "Hello, sir, nice to meet you. Can I ask who you are?" He just grunted and kept walking.

I said, "You have no business continuing if you don't tell me who I am." He now said something politely and slowly, but so quiet that it looked like he was on an almost muted television. He kept walking.

I told him, "You cannot continue until you tell me who you are." But he walked past me and almost to the "kitchen," which was now just another dark hallway.

I turned, sternly called to him, then walked up behind him, grabbed him with both arms, and attempted to pull him out of the threshold. It wasn't really working. It was like I had no power of resistance.

But now a son of this man ran up to him and said, "Dad, where have you been?" I now felt like a fool for having tried to stop the man. I had only done so because I wasn't being respected and the rules I had been asked to uphold weren't being respected.

I was now somehow in the kitchen, which was nice, light, airy, and clean. My mom was at the stove, apparently boiling a pot of mussels (?). The steam clung in the air, but it smelled and felt nice. My mom walked to the refrigerator (black and shiny like glass) and opened it as I told her, "I tried to get him to tell me who he was. But he spoke with almost no voice at all and then just kept on walking."

My mom said, "It's okay. He's very understanding. You don't need to worry about having embarrassed anybody."

I saw into a pan in which my mom was frying wide, thin, purplish cuts of sausage with other meats and a lot of green peppers and onions.

I now sensed that this man's wife (!) had arrived, as well as all the other children. The wife was Indian (i.e. from India). The children (maybe three or four of them) were Indian- and Japanese-looking. I was excited to meet them all, because I felt like they were skilled at some kind of mysticism, not consciously, perhaps, but deep down.

They ran around in different rooms. I flew through a dim hallway and into a dim living room. My position was cross-legged, sitting. Dim, cobalt blue light from the dark sky outside poured in through the big window in the living room. The only other light was from some other room, perhaps from the "entry room" or the kitchen. A couple kids and the wife were in the living room. I flew in through the right and flew out through the back, i.e.

Having seen the kids I thought I shouldn't really fly because they might first think I was showing off, and because they might second think I was flying because I guessed, based simply on their racial backgrounds, that they, too, had the ability to fly.

When I got out of the living room I landed. I was in a dark room. I walked into another dark room, the floor of which was littered with JUMP Japanese comic books, all arranged in a horseshoe shape. I think I thumbed through some of these, trying to find an issue that would be interesting to the kids, so I could have something to talk to them about. But I abandoned that idea as well, thinking that their Japanese background didn't exactly mean they'd like manga.

I walked through the hallway and back into the living room. Only the wife was there now. She looked like the mother in Monsoon Wedding, but she also seemed like some kind of businesswoman in her early thirties, American, possibly white, very attractive, with a slight intent to seduce or at least tease me. She was standing and walking in front of the couch, which was an L-shape on a bluish rug on a hardwood floor. (It seems like this apartment was a huge apartment on a high floor in a Manhattan skyscraper.)

The woman came up and asked me, almost furtively, "So... with all that... of yours, then... is that something you're going to keep for real?"

I said, "What of mine? Do you mean then...?" She said, "Yeah, the moving around stuff." (She meant the flying, of course.) She now sat down and was from now on, I think, only like the mother from Monsoon Wedding.

I sat on the floor, flopping my arms up on the couch just to the left of her lap. She told me, "Yeah, we have a friend who practices that stuff. He's even started to make a business out of it, charging people $188.10 to..., so I guess he's..."

She now started crying, not wailing or weeping. Her voice stayed normal, but tears gushed out of her eyes in three, wet, solid streams. She looked forward as she continued speaking, as if preoccupied. I had a feeling she had lost a son.

I asked her if she was alright. She said, "Oh, yes. It's too hot, that's all. Too hot, but it's too cold. I need to change the thermostat."

I got up and walked to the wall with the thermostat. There were two arch-shaped, aluminum bars resting against the wall, stacked against each other. On top of them was a cardboard ad-sign for a thermostat or CD. This confused me at first (!).

When I understood this wasn't the thermostat, I fumbled with the sign to get it out from in front of the thermostat. After I fumbled clumsily for a couple seconds, the wife cluttered up behind me and just grabbed the sign and threw it away.

I looked closely at the thermostat. It was a round one with an orange needle telling what the temperature was set at. By turning the casing, a metallic, pale copper-green plastic, you could move the needle, behind clear plastic, around, to bring the temperature up or down.

I saw that the needle was right at one hundred, which meant that it was neither too hot nor too cold. I showed this to the lady, but she grabbed the thermostat and twisted it. Satisfied she walked back to the couch.

She was incredibly depressed. I wanted to understand who she had lost in her life. I felt like it was a son, who had died in the World Trade Center collapse. But I didn't quite know how to ask her. I did say something. But as she started to respond I woke up.

(3/31/05) the last few steps; who's the fairest

(Entered in paper journal at 3:25 PM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I stepped onto and walked along a concrete top to a brick boundary to a parking lot that was at the top of a slope. The boundary fence reached maybe only two and a half feet up above ground level on the parking lot side, but on the other side it cut down anywhere from five to twenty or so feet.

(Now that I think of it, the description as "top of a slope" seems wrong The fence was a wall along a sloped area, so that the wall, though even on the parking lot side, got taller and shorter as it went along the hill slope side, i.e.)

I walked past some guys who stood at a car a few rows away from the edge of the parking lot. The guys made fun of me because I was walking on the top of the fence like some kind of showoff. I tried to ignore them. Besides, I thought, this isn't even the high point. I passed the high point a long time ago. Where I am now, anybody could walk.

I looked down. The ground seemed to be sloping up on the other side of the fence so that the ground would be level with the fence "top" on both sides in just a few steps. There was a light pole on the fence top. I had to swing around to get to the other side.

I looked down at the ground now. It was far below me, farther than it had been so far. I felt woozy, like I couldn't make it.

There was another telephone pole. Then the fenced curved up, in a J shape, to a stair-bank, so that in no more than ten steps I'd be at an even level on both sides.

But when I got around the second telephone pole I felt that the curving of the fence-top and the steepness of the wall would make me fall down. So I just jumped off on the parking lot side. I was suddenly disappointed in myself for not taking the last few steps.

Dream 2

An old, cartoon-like woman (almost like the witch's beggar-lady disguise in Walt Disney's Snow White) stood before either a beautiful, young, blonde woman or a handsome, thick, dark-haired knight. She asked the person whether she was beautiful.

It turns out this old lady was actually a wizard or sorcerer (male) who practiced changing himself into a female until this point, which he thought was the peak of his skill. But he couldn't see himself. I knew if the person in question spoke honestly the wizard would kill him/her.

Now the person was "I." But "I" was also (somehow) the old lady. "I" (person) hemmed and hawed over my answer. This in itself infuriated the old lady. I felt myself in the old lady's mind, and I knew she was getting infuriated, but "I" didn't feel infuriated.

"I" (old lady) now realized "I" was playing a part in a Shakespeare production. The setting was a room in a spooky mansion. The walls (and door!) were high and tall. I had only presently been given the script, I "remembered," and I'd spent fleeting time memorizing it the best I could before being tossed out on stage.

Now my recording of the old lady's monologue, though gusting and building at first, reached a point of uncertainty, so I struggled and stumbled over every word or phrase. I could feel people looking at me: some critics in the audience, but especially the director, backstage, who all wondered why I and/or they ever thought I was a good actor.

The dream then switched to a similar scene, which I don't remember at all.

(4/12/05) can't go to the show; swimming to my friends

(Entered in paper journal at 5:30 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I sat in something like a waiting room or an airport lobby or some second- or third-floor cafe. It was daytime. Daylight streamed through the window-wall before me. A "familiar"-looking woman sat by me somehow, either at a table or in a close row of chairs. She had puffy, wide pale auburn hair with undertones of black, and a longish, puffy face caked with not-so-smooth makeup. But it was something in her face or in her eyes that made  me think she was familiar.

She asked me if I wanted to go with her to some event or play with which she had something to do, though her going to it had something to do with my friend R and his girlfriend L. I now slowly realized that this person was L, that some kind of trap or practical joke was being laid for me. I didn't let on, though I said I couldn't go.

L's face shifted slowly back to her own as L began telling me all the different good things about this event which had to do with her. She couldn't figure out why this wasn't good enough incentive for me.

Dream 2

I was with a group of folks "my age," which might have been high-school-aged. We were at some kind of wide pond or marsh or wetland of some sort. Two groups were separated by the large body of water, or perhaps one group was not all the way across the water but on an island or bar of land in the middle of the body of water.

Something happened so that I felt obligated, as if against petty jokes about my personal character, to swim across to the island group to make sure they were okay. We were all okay. This was just some fun, day-long project. So I don't exactly know what I meant by "making sure they were okay."

I knew there was an alligator in the water that could swim up and rip my belly open. But I just felt it wouldn't happen.

I reached the island. I now looked back to the shore. I could feel that the first group of people were now making jokes about my personal character because I wasn't swimming over to them "to make sure they were okay."

(6/10/05) jokes about my teeth; heading to el paso; corporate volunteerism; catalpa flowers

(Entered in paper journal at 6:42 AM on uptown-bound 2-train from 116th Street station.)

Dream 1

I heard some people telling jokes about my teeth. I may actually have been one of the people making fun of me. I saw myself in a mirror. My teeth were so covered over with plaque that the plaque was like a strip of orange grime, which I peeled right now.

Dream 2

I got on a train, possibly with my friend ML. I don't know where we were going. The train may have "been" a bus or a train. We may have been heading to El Paso.

A couple people we sat by were weird. We switched cars.

I think at one point I was laying down and looking out the window at the dark blue of late night or early morning and feeling the rolling along of the train.

Dream 3

I was in the back of something like a pickup truck, stomach down, kind of half-on and half-off the bed. My crew mate and friend KB (?) and some other woman sat cross-legged on the bed. They had been making fun of me a little.

I now read in some magazine about a corporation like Walmart that was allowing people to do community service. I said I thought at least the corporation was doing one good thing.

KB and the woman sneered at me. They simply didn't and wouldn't like the corporation. I felt even stupider. I may have started crying.

Dream 4

There was some party in an nice house. I saw RL, one of my ecology supervisors for my NYC Americorps program. I told him that I had seen a catalpa tree in bloom. I said, "The flowers are interesting."

RL kind of interrupted me. He said, "You actually like the look of catalpa flowers?"

I continued, "They look a lot like azalea flowers. That's how you can see a difference between the catalpa tree and the royal paulownia trees: the flowers. But, no, I guess the flowers are not interesting."

Now I was running around the room while RL threw orange dish soap at me. I walked down the hallway now, hoping nobody would wonder why I was so messy.

I was now a transvestite. I walked into a bathroom to see myself in a mirror. I was Asian. I looked good. I posed a bit and thought how I could improve my look.

(8/24/05) games

(Entered in paper journal at 5:20 AM at my friend R's house in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in an apartment, watching a cat (?) for my friend R and his girlfriend L. R and L were there at first. We spoke about some writing competition. I told them I didn't send my writing there because the requirements had been too formal, not in the structure of the writing but in the forms of the scenery we were supposed to write about. In my head I saw a promenade in a park, a stone path with side areas striped with Belgian blocks and soil, with benches and trees along the way.

Now R and L left. I was on the phone, sitting close to a bed (I think -- can no longer read the word) and close to a structure like a fence that made the space feel very small. I could see broken images of a poster of four photos, each of a different band, as if I were bug-eyed, inattentively attentive to the poster as I listened to the person on the other end.

The person was telling me how the concert with XXXXX, some punk-like group, maybe female (and depicted in a black and white photo on the lower right of the poster) was actually sold out, so R and L couldn't go.

I didn't like this group, but R and L did. I said I felt bad. So I called L. As I told her the concert was sold out she said, "I know. I heard everything you said. We were just sitting out in the hallway." Now L and R came in and laughed at me a little, making fun of me because they thought in one way or another I was pretending to like the band.

Now R brought out a plastic-piped "bookshelf" that looked more like a miniature version of a goal-net for soccer. First it looked like

but then it changed to

then

As it did I saw a soccer game being played between a red team and a yellow team.

Now I was in some cafe-like place where there were a bunch of different tables for games, mainly guessing games. I sat at one of the tables. The table was set low. I was wooden and red, with a shape like a bed's headboard.

I had to beat on the sides of the table to make the person guess a phrase I chose at random from a card. I think the person also had to have his hands on the side of the table.

A man walked up. He was tall, with a sort of 19th-century style, with a huge, scraggly beard and slightly receding hairline with brown, electrified-curly hair. As he walked up, he raised his right hand as if preparing himself to channel a spirit. At some point he must have sat down at the table. He humphed and said, "I've got it."

I looked down to the table and thought, Well, he must see how the table looks like the Rosebud sled from Citizen Kane. at first I beat quickly on the table, searching for a theme to play from Citizen Kane. I thought of "There Is a Man." So I started to beat the song onto the table. But I was playing it too fast. I slowed down and tried to play the theme that plays as the camera pans up the tall fence at the beginning.

The man said, "Yes! I've got it." He chuckled lightly, pleased, to himself, and stood up and walked away.

To my right I had a sheet of paper, on which, apparently, I was supposed to write the score of my game. The sheet looked a little like a clean score sheet for the game Yahtzee. The only writing on it was the man's name and the number 24. I was supposed to fill in the info when the man told me what his guesses were. But the man hadn't told me his guesses.

I went to another table and asked about the guy. They told me, "He does that almost every day. He'll come in and sit at all the tables and pretend that he's guessed everything. But then he'll just walk away without saying anything."

(12/29/05) murder by self-defense

(Entered in paper journal at my friend R's house in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was on a field with some young guys who had attacked me with something like clear baseballs. I was close up in the guys' faces. The guys lay on the ground. I had attacked them in return. They now seemed knocked out or dead. But now the guys shouted at me somehow, like they had only been pretending to be out or like they were shouting from outside their bodies. Either way, they were trying to ridicule and frighten me.

Now I looked at a magazine article about a young woman who had, at maybe only nineteen or twenty years of age, gotten the death penalty. A few of the photos in the articles were like videos. Some showed the woman going to the electric chair. One may have showed her dead. A chilling one at the end showed her walking away from one interview -- it was strange to see a picture of her dying or dead right beside one of her before death.

Another series of photos, all squares one-third inch to a side, maybe twelve squares across the top of a page, showed the woman's progression into insanity. In all the photos, the woman wore blue jeans and a magenta, v-neck shirt. She often wore sunglasses.

In an early photo in this series, the woman stood by the bed of a pickup truck. The woman's hair was short and feathered. The woman had a kind of homely, lower class look. She always looked intimidating, but I think I was in love with her. I might have known her personally. As the photos progressed, the woman got skinnier, less intimidating, but more haunting. In one, where she smoked a cigarette, she looked to be about fifty years old.

Now I read or "got" the story. The woman, at the time of the last photo, was attacked by a group of young men and women, each of whom had a deadly weapon. The woman had been holding the receiver of an old, rotary-style, wide-base phone.

The woman used the receiver to relieve every person of their weapon. Then she killed every person with the receiver.

The law ruled that the killings were done maliciously and not out of self-defense. So the woman was sentenced to death.