(Entered in paper journal at 8:15 AM at Ozzie's cafe (not sure which) in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
Some people called to a group of us who were in another room in an office floor. They said, "Come look how your boss BS is standing."
We went into the office, which was a huge, empty room. We looked out the window to tall, tall rooftops that nevertheless seemed to be about twenty stories below us. People who looked like BS stood on occasional rooftops. I couldn't figure out which one was the real BS. Eventually I did.
The atmosphere outside as orange with sunset. Inside it was a dimmer orange.
Showing posts with label boss BS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label boss BS. Show all posts
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Monday, February 25, 2013
(7/20/07) a view of the monument
(Entered in paper journal at 5:37 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was in a house, alone. I lay in a bedroom that was probably a mess. Bright sun came in through the windows. I was happy to be by myself.
I felt a presence. I knew it was my mother. I went into the hallway. My co-worker EB stood in the hallway, possibly with my mom back in the distance, and behind a lot of clutter, possibly bikes. I wondered how I was going to get out of this place with so much stuff in the way.
It was night. I flew over treetops and possibly small rows of shop buildings in a small area of New York City or a small town.
I heard or remembered a conversation I'd had with my boss BS about how I had made the logistics of a date too difficult for the woman to want to do on the date again. First of all, we'd gone out to some restaurant at the outskirts of (this part of?) town. Second we'd had to walk all the way there.
I flew over an open road at night. I then stood beside a steep slope of wall, almost like a huge pane of solar paneling. It was early morning. BS stood beside me. We seemed to be crowded into a narrow trench near the wide wall by trees and a deep cliff behind us. BS asked me why I didn't work hard to improve the way I presented myself to women.
It was a bright day. I stood on a stone walkway that curved around and around a section of a stone building. The walkway and the building were greyish-peach colored. This building was part of an historical park or campus.
I think part of the walkway was blocked by a plywood board standing on its side, maybe with a wide sheet of paper hanging off it. I might have thought I wasn't allowed up. But I saw a few people, two couples, probably, walking down the path from behind the barrier, coming in my direction.
Now I had flown up to the top of this building. I looked down on the park/campus. I was very high up. The land around me must have been tall, rolling hills.
I heard a narrator discussing the old times, when Thomas Jefferson had founded this place. I saw the place alternately in black and white, like an old film, and in color, like my regular view.
The narrator's speech focused on a monument, like the Thomas Jefferson Memorial monument in Washington, DC. I was sure it couldn't be the Jefferson Memorial: I wasn't in the right place. I thought I would fly down to it and see what the monument was. I felt like there was a dark metal (bronze?) figure inside.
I couldn't stop looking at the the monument, even though I kept trying to look in other places. The land around the monument slowly got soggier and soggier, like a barren field, once lawn, after a heavy rain.
I yelled to the film that was being narrated, "Stop looking at the monument! I want to see other things!"
I now heard narration of a documentary which I was actually enacting. I was floating down the side of a building and landing momentarily in columned openings in the building. Eventually I was at the base of the building, possibly at the foot of a tall hill.
The narration had been about a man who had gone insane and thought he could hop down the side of a building. But, I thought, I did just do that!
I looked back up to the top of the building.
Dream #1
I was in a house, alone. I lay in a bedroom that was probably a mess. Bright sun came in through the windows. I was happy to be by myself.
I felt a presence. I knew it was my mother. I went into the hallway. My co-worker EB stood in the hallway, possibly with my mom back in the distance, and behind a lot of clutter, possibly bikes. I wondered how I was going to get out of this place with so much stuff in the way.
It was night. I flew over treetops and possibly small rows of shop buildings in a small area of New York City or a small town.
I heard or remembered a conversation I'd had with my boss BS about how I had made the logistics of a date too difficult for the woman to want to do on the date again. First of all, we'd gone out to some restaurant at the outskirts of (this part of?) town. Second we'd had to walk all the way there.
I flew over an open road at night. I then stood beside a steep slope of wall, almost like a huge pane of solar paneling. It was early morning. BS stood beside me. We seemed to be crowded into a narrow trench near the wide wall by trees and a deep cliff behind us. BS asked me why I didn't work hard to improve the way I presented myself to women.
It was a bright day. I stood on a stone walkway that curved around and around a section of a stone building. The walkway and the building were greyish-peach colored. This building was part of an historical park or campus.
I think part of the walkway was blocked by a plywood board standing on its side, maybe with a wide sheet of paper hanging off it. I might have thought I wasn't allowed up. But I saw a few people, two couples, probably, walking down the path from behind the barrier, coming in my direction.
Now I had flown up to the top of this building. I looked down on the park/campus. I was very high up. The land around me must have been tall, rolling hills.
I heard a narrator discussing the old times, when Thomas Jefferson had founded this place. I saw the place alternately in black and white, like an old film, and in color, like my regular view.
The narrator's speech focused on a monument, like the Thomas Jefferson Memorial monument in Washington, DC. I was sure it couldn't be the Jefferson Memorial: I wasn't in the right place. I thought I would fly down to it and see what the monument was. I felt like there was a dark metal (bronze?) figure inside.
I couldn't stop looking at the the monument, even though I kept trying to look in other places. The land around the monument slowly got soggier and soggier, like a barren field, once lawn, after a heavy rain.
I yelled to the film that was being narrated, "Stop looking at the monument! I want to see other things!"
I now heard narration of a documentary which I was actually enacting. I was floating down the side of a building and landing momentarily in columned openings in the building. Eventually I was at the base of the building, possibly at the foot of a tall hill.
The narration had been about a man who had gone insane and thought he could hop down the side of a building. But, I thought, I did just do that!
I looked back up to the top of the building.
(7/23/07) ill-timed illness; hotmail at work; radio interview; changing flight; slow liftoff; variations on jk rowling
(Entered in paper journal at 5:50 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I lay on a couch in the dark. I was covered in blankets. I spoke on the phone with someone who asked if I could cover the phones for the Analyst MH as well, since he would be out. I saw his extension, 3431 or 2431, in my had. The person said, "MH got sick at a really bad time. When he gets back in, we'll have to have a disciplinary discussion with him.
My boss BS and another Analyst, SM, stood at my feet, on my left, i.e. facing the couch. They walked around to my right and then up past my head. They pulled open some blinds and let in a lot of daylight.
Dream #2
I was in the office, which was different from waking life. The entire floor was only half-lit. There were two aisles of cubicles that went in long rows of six or seven cubicles. Beside that were probably more aisles of cubicles. At the end of the aisles was a little bit of empty floor space and then a brightly lit, tiny elevator bank. My cubicle was at the front right corner, facing the elevator bank.
I turned my computer on. Then I remembered I had an appointment with my psychiatrist A this morning. I told my boss BS, "I know it's spur of the moment notice, but can I leave?"
BS' face turned kind of weak and muttery. BS said, "Well, yeah, go..."
I said, "It's on the spur of the moment, I know. So said no if I can't go."
BS said, "No. I'd rather you didn't go. I'm gonna need you here today."
BS walked away as I said okay.
I spoke with a couple people and then went back to my desk. I had vines like grapevines growing over my desk. My computer was a laptop. It was only about halfway open. I saw Hotmail up on my screen. I couldn't figure why that would be there: employees weren't allowed to use personal email accounts, like Hotmail, in the office.
I tried to shut the Hotmail off. BS walked by and asked what was wrong. I said, "Somehow Hotmail came up on my screen."
Dream #3
I sat in a brightly lit basement. It was a radio station. I was going to be interviewed as a part of my job. At present some outside correspondent was doing something like a traffic report. In the station, we may have seen the man or the stuff he was talking about on a TV screen. The view was of a straight road in a green field on a grey day.
I thought, Am I going to be late doing this interview? It was as if, on some level of reality, I wasn't really in the studio yet.
Dream #4
I stood before the counter at an airport. The counter and room looked more like an old, cozy hotel. A tall, gaunt, white, bald man with a grey mustache and heavy eyebrows stood behind the counter. The man said, "I don't recognize you. Do you have ID?"
I showed the man my ID and said, "You can ask people if you like. I come here all the time. All I'm trying to do is see if I'm late for my flight. I was scheduled to leave at 12:20 PM. And now it's --" (I craned my neck forward to look around at the man's computer screen) "-- 1:02 PM?! Oh, no!"
I started crying. I said, "I missed my flight! Is there any way I can get a ticket for a different flight?"
Two or three people, maybe two guys and a girl, roughly twenty-five years old, walked around the old man cheerfully. They spoke happily about my problem and how it could probably be fixed. They walked away. The old man started wandering off.
I asked, "Aren't you going to see about getting me a new flight?"
The man said, "We have other things to do. We'll get to you." He left.
The young men and woman were now bringing out plates of food from a bar and grill that was off to my left. One of the plates was big chunks of meat covered in sauce that looked like ranch dressing.
Dream #5
Black and white, grainy view like old film footage. A narrator spoke about the first space flight, which had been made by the Russians.
I watched a "space shuttle" launch, then travel parallel with the ground, maybe only a couple hundred feet above the ground. The "shuttle" looked like a sci-fi spacecraft, or a child's drawing. It was like two cylinders in the back which ended in rockets and which joined in the front to one cylinder which pointed at the front.
The craft began lifting as it flew over the ocean. It lifted so slowly I at first thought that it was getting ready to lose control and crash. The view was momentarily from behind it as it rose above a patchy plane of clouds. I knew now that the craft wouldn't crash. But watching it rise (view from in front of the craft, looking back at it) so slowly, at such a gentle angle, I doubted the craft could ever actually leave the earth.
The craft slowly increased its angle and speed. I now wondered if the view was going to catch the craft traveling so quickly and steeply. I didn't think the view would actually be able to travel with the craft.
Dream #6
I was in a bedroom (?) with a few people of different ages (probably up to my age). Everybody was in a slighty frenzy, not angry, just unsettled. They were all talking about the new Harry Potter book. At the same time they were passing around the previous Harry Potter books. The covers of these books looked weird, like cheap second editions -- or rather like the old sensational film posters (i.e. L'enfant de Paris) that were (at the time I entered this dream in the paper journal) on display in the MoMA film center.
I got a good enough look at all the volumes, as they were rapidly passed from hand to hand, that when someone called out, "It's too bad we don't have all seven volumes right here," I could shout out, "But we do!"
Someone yelled at me, "No, we don't!"
I said, "Yes, we do! Look!" As I pointed to each book as it transferred from hand to hand, I counted out the volumes. "One, two, three, four, five, six. And there's seven!"
I now saw a copy of the book like a wide-opening coffee table book. The right half of the cover was the cover of the new Harry Potter book. As I "heard" some TV or magazine story about J.K. Rowling my view slowly moved to the left side of the cover.
I thought, I've heard a lot of people talk about how much of a bitch (???!!!) J.K. Rowling is. I wondreed what she looked like. On the left side of the cover was a photo of Rowling. She looked like an Italian mother from Brooklyn -- black hair, blue sweater, kind of no-nonsense expression. In the photo, "Rowling" was painting some huge, abstract mural, looking back and smiling at the camera.
Now there was a view of her (not on the book, but like in life) standing behind a glass-paned front door. The view was in front of the door, to catch the glass' reflection of a field of flowers, bands of color -- yellow, purple, and white, with a vague green band -- and a feeling of mountains and sky in the distance.
In this view "Rowling" looked a lot older. Her hair was cut short and was reddish-brown, very tough. "Rowling's" face was round; her nose, nubby; her eyes, pale blue. I think I felt a wish in her that she could become young again.
Dream #1
I lay on a couch in the dark. I was covered in blankets. I spoke on the phone with someone who asked if I could cover the phones for the Analyst MH as well, since he would be out. I saw his extension, 3431 or 2431, in my had. The person said, "MH got sick at a really bad time. When he gets back in, we'll have to have a disciplinary discussion with him.
My boss BS and another Analyst, SM, stood at my feet, on my left, i.e. facing the couch. They walked around to my right and then up past my head. They pulled open some blinds and let in a lot of daylight.
Dream #2
I was in the office, which was different from waking life. The entire floor was only half-lit. There were two aisles of cubicles that went in long rows of six or seven cubicles. Beside that were probably more aisles of cubicles. At the end of the aisles was a little bit of empty floor space and then a brightly lit, tiny elevator bank. My cubicle was at the front right corner, facing the elevator bank.
I turned my computer on. Then I remembered I had an appointment with my psychiatrist A this morning. I told my boss BS, "I know it's spur of the moment notice, but can I leave?"
BS' face turned kind of weak and muttery. BS said, "Well, yeah, go..."
I said, "It's on the spur of the moment, I know. So said no if I can't go."
BS said, "No. I'd rather you didn't go. I'm gonna need you here today."
BS walked away as I said okay.
I spoke with a couple people and then went back to my desk. I had vines like grapevines growing over my desk. My computer was a laptop. It was only about halfway open. I saw Hotmail up on my screen. I couldn't figure why that would be there: employees weren't allowed to use personal email accounts, like Hotmail, in the office.
I tried to shut the Hotmail off. BS walked by and asked what was wrong. I said, "Somehow Hotmail came up on my screen."
Dream #3
I sat in a brightly lit basement. It was a radio station. I was going to be interviewed as a part of my job. At present some outside correspondent was doing something like a traffic report. In the station, we may have seen the man or the stuff he was talking about on a TV screen. The view was of a straight road in a green field on a grey day.
I thought, Am I going to be late doing this interview? It was as if, on some level of reality, I wasn't really in the studio yet.
Dream #4
I stood before the counter at an airport. The counter and room looked more like an old, cozy hotel. A tall, gaunt, white, bald man with a grey mustache and heavy eyebrows stood behind the counter. The man said, "I don't recognize you. Do you have ID?"
I showed the man my ID and said, "You can ask people if you like. I come here all the time. All I'm trying to do is see if I'm late for my flight. I was scheduled to leave at 12:20 PM. And now it's --" (I craned my neck forward to look around at the man's computer screen) "-- 1:02 PM?! Oh, no!"
I started crying. I said, "I missed my flight! Is there any way I can get a ticket for a different flight?"
Two or three people, maybe two guys and a girl, roughly twenty-five years old, walked around the old man cheerfully. They spoke happily about my problem and how it could probably be fixed. They walked away. The old man started wandering off.
I asked, "Aren't you going to see about getting me a new flight?"
The man said, "We have other things to do. We'll get to you." He left.
The young men and woman were now bringing out plates of food from a bar and grill that was off to my left. One of the plates was big chunks of meat covered in sauce that looked like ranch dressing.
Dream #5
Black and white, grainy view like old film footage. A narrator spoke about the first space flight, which had been made by the Russians.
I watched a "space shuttle" launch, then travel parallel with the ground, maybe only a couple hundred feet above the ground. The "shuttle" looked like a sci-fi spacecraft, or a child's drawing. It was like two cylinders in the back which ended in rockets and which joined in the front to one cylinder which pointed at the front.
The craft began lifting as it flew over the ocean. It lifted so slowly I at first thought that it was getting ready to lose control and crash. The view was momentarily from behind it as it rose above a patchy plane of clouds. I knew now that the craft wouldn't crash. But watching it rise (view from in front of the craft, looking back at it) so slowly, at such a gentle angle, I doubted the craft could ever actually leave the earth.
The craft slowly increased its angle and speed. I now wondered if the view was going to catch the craft traveling so quickly and steeply. I didn't think the view would actually be able to travel with the craft.
Dream #6
I was in a bedroom (?) with a few people of different ages (probably up to my age). Everybody was in a slighty frenzy, not angry, just unsettled. They were all talking about the new Harry Potter book. At the same time they were passing around the previous Harry Potter books. The covers of these books looked weird, like cheap second editions -- or rather like the old sensational film posters (i.e. L'enfant de Paris) that were (at the time I entered this dream in the paper journal) on display in the MoMA film center.
I got a good enough look at all the volumes, as they were rapidly passed from hand to hand, that when someone called out, "It's too bad we don't have all seven volumes right here," I could shout out, "But we do!"
Someone yelled at me, "No, we don't!"
I said, "Yes, we do! Look!" As I pointed to each book as it transferred from hand to hand, I counted out the volumes. "One, two, three, four, five, six. And there's seven!"
I now saw a copy of the book like a wide-opening coffee table book. The right half of the cover was the cover of the new Harry Potter book. As I "heard" some TV or magazine story about J.K. Rowling my view slowly moved to the left side of the cover.
I thought, I've heard a lot of people talk about how much of a bitch (???!!!) J.K. Rowling is. I wondreed what she looked like. On the left side of the cover was a photo of Rowling. She looked like an Italian mother from Brooklyn -- black hair, blue sweater, kind of no-nonsense expression. In the photo, "Rowling" was painting some huge, abstract mural, looking back and smiling at the camera.
Now there was a view of her (not on the book, but like in life) standing behind a glass-paned front door. The view was in front of the door, to catch the glass' reflection of a field of flowers, bands of color -- yellow, purple, and white, with a vague green band -- and a feeling of mountains and sky in the distance.
In this view "Rowling" looked a lot older. Her hair was cut short and was reddish-brown, very tough. "Rowling's" face was round; her nose, nubby; her eyes, pale blue. I think I felt a wish in her that she could become young again.
(7/31/07) the time of scarcity following the war
(Entered in paper journal at 6:30 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I sat at a long, wood desk that reached halfway across the room. The room was like a classroom. The lights were off, and dim, mid-day, natural light came in through the windows. I was writing out or drawing a spreadsheet. I was trying to find people in a specific area, maybe Texas.
I may have stood up, turned around, and brought the spreadsheet in to my boss BS. I then walked into a place like a construction workshop. A lot of women were working in the shop. The shop was smallish and full of pipes and columns.
I had the memory of a conversation about making cars. The conversation may have been with an older man. The man may have said something like, "It's easy to make one half of the car and to make the other half and to put them together. But the whole car is only made by people who care."
As I remembered this, and felt like I agreed with it, most of the women funneled out of the workshop. I worried for a moment that I had offended the women with my thought; after all, I reflected, they were working to make cars.
One woman, an Asian woman, was still working. She stood as if on a stool or platform, to reach the top of a wooden table that was maybe six feet high, almost like the top bunk of a bunk bed.
Under the table was an arrangement of hoses and pipes. All the pipes were black and had a clean, plasticky, but lusterless, look about them. Some of the pipes, tubes, and hoses were even and straight; others coned outwards and then back inward for a portion; others had accordion-like portions.
The pipes were all of varying sizes. Some of the larger pipes, tubes, and hoses extended from under the table and out along the rest of the workshop. I walked to the left end of the workshop, looking down at the pipes.
The woman told me, "We aren't done yet. We still have to paint this set of pipes yellow." I saw that some of the pipes, pretty much one coherent line of interwound pipes, were now painted yellow. The woman continued, "We even have to paint the engine parts."
I didn't quite understand the woman's statement. I asked, "So suppose I wanted to paint blue the series of pipes that connect to the air conditioning system?" I imagined or saw a series of pipes now painted blue. The first pipe that came out from the under the table was shallowly "J" shaped and nestled in a metal vessel like a bedpan, which was also painted blue.
I continued, asking, "Would I also --"
The woman picked up on my statement and continued it, " -- the engine parts blue as well. But blue isn't a color we use for that part of the system." (She may actually have said, "Blue isn't a color we use very often.")
The woman stood on the ground, where I had been standing while looking at the yellow and blue pipes. I stood across the workshop from the woman, with my back to a long writing desk. To the woman's left was a black pipe that had been painted white. The woman was speaking about painting this system of pipes white.
I heard a man talking. My view changed into reading. I read as I heard the man speak. The man spoke about how he would have done things differently in his youth if he could have. He said he would have run, played football, and skied.
At first I thought the man was speaking about all these activities in a demeaning way, as if he were doing them now and they made him an animal. But now I understood that these were activities of the leisure class, the highest class.
The man said, "I would have gone for any of the very few positions that everybody was scrambling for at the time of scarcity following the war."
Dream #1
I sat at a long, wood desk that reached halfway across the room. The room was like a classroom. The lights were off, and dim, mid-day, natural light came in through the windows. I was writing out or drawing a spreadsheet. I was trying to find people in a specific area, maybe Texas.
I may have stood up, turned around, and brought the spreadsheet in to my boss BS. I then walked into a place like a construction workshop. A lot of women were working in the shop. The shop was smallish and full of pipes and columns.
I had the memory of a conversation about making cars. The conversation may have been with an older man. The man may have said something like, "It's easy to make one half of the car and to make the other half and to put them together. But the whole car is only made by people who care."
As I remembered this, and felt like I agreed with it, most of the women funneled out of the workshop. I worried for a moment that I had offended the women with my thought; after all, I reflected, they were working to make cars.
One woman, an Asian woman, was still working. She stood as if on a stool or platform, to reach the top of a wooden table that was maybe six feet high, almost like the top bunk of a bunk bed.
Under the table was an arrangement of hoses and pipes. All the pipes were black and had a clean, plasticky, but lusterless, look about them. Some of the pipes, tubes, and hoses were even and straight; others coned outwards and then back inward for a portion; others had accordion-like portions.
The pipes were all of varying sizes. Some of the larger pipes, tubes, and hoses extended from under the table and out along the rest of the workshop. I walked to the left end of the workshop, looking down at the pipes.
The woman told me, "We aren't done yet. We still have to paint this set of pipes yellow." I saw that some of the pipes, pretty much one coherent line of interwound pipes, were now painted yellow. The woman continued, "We even have to paint the engine parts."
I didn't quite understand the woman's statement. I asked, "So suppose I wanted to paint blue the series of pipes that connect to the air conditioning system?" I imagined or saw a series of pipes now painted blue. The first pipe that came out from the under the table was shallowly "J" shaped and nestled in a metal vessel like a bedpan, which was also painted blue.
I continued, asking, "Would I also --"
The woman picked up on my statement and continued it, " -- the engine parts blue as well. But blue isn't a color we use for that part of the system." (She may actually have said, "Blue isn't a color we use very often.")
The woman stood on the ground, where I had been standing while looking at the yellow and blue pipes. I stood across the workshop from the woman, with my back to a long writing desk. To the woman's left was a black pipe that had been painted white. The woman was speaking about painting this system of pipes white.
I heard a man talking. My view changed into reading. I read as I heard the man speak. The man spoke about how he would have done things differently in his youth if he could have. He said he would have run, played football, and skied.
At first I thought the man was speaking about all these activities in a demeaning way, as if he were doing them now and they made him an animal. But now I understood that these were activities of the leisure class, the highest class.
The man said, "I would have gone for any of the very few positions that everybody was scrambling for at the time of scarcity following the war."
Sunday, February 24, 2013
(8/4/07) supermarket closet; give your friends a break
(Entered in paper journal at 4:50 PM at Barnes and Noble bookstore at Union Square in Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was in a bedroom with my boss BS. BS asked me to look through some old issues of the trade rag Supermarket News for a piece of data. The issues were in a closet. BS stood inside the closet. I stood outside the closet. The room was dimly lit with greenish, natural light. The closet had an incandescent bulb deep inside it. It was like there were two roughly two-foot-deep sections of the closet partly divided from one another by little section-walls.
There was a huge pile of junk in the closets. The magazines, the old issues of Supermarket News, were scattered and piled throughout the junk. BS wanted me to help him get them. I was afraid, though, that if I did, we would run across some pornographic magazines I had in there.
I also saw a strange and lurid magazine or picture book about black men who beat up white men. I hoped that BS wouldn't find this publication and think it turned me on in the same way that porno mags did -- I was pretty sure it didn't.
I tried to dissuade BS from looking into the pile. But BS wouldn't stop. So eventually I went in and started helping him.
Dream #2
I was in the office of my co-workers DE and EB. (In waking life, DE and EB, the replacement for our old Associate Analyst ES, shared the same office. I sat just outside their office in a cubicle as, at that time, most of the Assistants and first-year Analysts did.)
I was angry at DE for something. He was fighting against me a little, but I was definitely bearing down on him. I finally tore a book out of DE's hand. I accused DE of having done something against me. EB just sat in her seat, watching.
DE choked up a little bit and grew pale. He then burst out crying. I realized I had been too severe, especially with all that was going on with DE's family at that time. (In waking life, from 2007 through 2009 -- though I was hardly sensitive to the issue -- narcissist that I am -- DE's mother and father both experienced some very serious health issues.)
I grabbed DE's left hand and held it with both my hands. EB rushed over and stood by us. DE became less pale. DE was yelling at me, asking me why I couldn't ever just give him a break.
Dream #1
I was in a bedroom with my boss BS. BS asked me to look through some old issues of the trade rag Supermarket News for a piece of data. The issues were in a closet. BS stood inside the closet. I stood outside the closet. The room was dimly lit with greenish, natural light. The closet had an incandescent bulb deep inside it. It was like there were two roughly two-foot-deep sections of the closet partly divided from one another by little section-walls.
There was a huge pile of junk in the closets. The magazines, the old issues of Supermarket News, were scattered and piled throughout the junk. BS wanted me to help him get them. I was afraid, though, that if I did, we would run across some pornographic magazines I had in there.
I also saw a strange and lurid magazine or picture book about black men who beat up white men. I hoped that BS wouldn't find this publication and think it turned me on in the same way that porno mags did -- I was pretty sure it didn't.
I tried to dissuade BS from looking into the pile. But BS wouldn't stop. So eventually I went in and started helping him.
Dream #2
I was in the office of my co-workers DE and EB. (In waking life, DE and EB, the replacement for our old Associate Analyst ES, shared the same office. I sat just outside their office in a cubicle as, at that time, most of the Assistants and first-year Analysts did.)
I was angry at DE for something. He was fighting against me a little, but I was definitely bearing down on him. I finally tore a book out of DE's hand. I accused DE of having done something against me. EB just sat in her seat, watching.
DE choked up a little bit and grew pale. He then burst out crying. I realized I had been too severe, especially with all that was going on with DE's family at that time. (In waking life, from 2007 through 2009 -- though I was hardly sensitive to the issue -- narcissist that I am -- DE's mother and father both experienced some very serious health issues.)
I grabbed DE's left hand and held it with both my hands. EB rushed over and stood by us. DE became less pale. DE was yelling at me, asking me why I couldn't ever just give him a break.
Monday, February 18, 2013
(9/4/07) ice volcanoes; liberty crane; space shuttle replacement
(Entered in paper journal at 7:20 PM at home in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
A man "told me" (I heard the man's voice in my head) a story about his family, in particular his wife, as I flew upward, ascending mountain peaks. I ascended three peaks, the second higher than the first, but the third possibly lower than the second. All the peaks and mountainsides were blanketed in snow. The peaks of the mountains (or three peaks of one mountain?) crowned as if they had been cracked open, and snow-dusted ice lay inside.
As I descended the mountainside after reaching the third peak, it was like I was skiing, not flying. There were people all over, lounging around and practicing skiing.
The man's story, which I still heard in my head, mainly had to do with how good his wife was at what she did (skiing?), but how she was now somehow disabled from doing it, though she continued to put up an appearance of being able to do it in front of people who counted on her (her children?).
Dream #2
I stood overlooking a big river or an ocean with some co-workers. It was day and the sky was clear blue. Near us, the body of water seemed to be cluttered with vessels. Off to the right was a massive, brick building, which must have been where I worked (as if my co-workers were just my friends, and I didn't work with them). I could see images of parts, the head and a foot, of the Statue of Liberty -- as if they were lying in cubby-holes of brick in some brick structure floating in the air off to my left.
I was telling my friends that I could reconstruct just about any part of the Statue of Liberty. My boss BS then asked, "Then couldn't you reconstruct the whole Statue of Liberty?"
I thought to myself that I could construct an entire statue resembling the Statue of Liberty, but that I wasn't skillful enough to create a replica. I could even imagine the flaws that would inevitably creep into my reproduction: particularly a boxiness to Liberty's face and an awkward triangularity in the gown.
I replied, "I could, I suppose. But why would anybody want a whole Statue of Liberty? Unless the one we have is going to break."
We all now stood (as if we had always been standing) on the top of a vehicle like a shipping-crate crane that floated all by itself on the water. The crane was enormous. Its purpose was to move the Statue of Liberty for repairs. It was just the "crane" on a floating platform, the base of the structure being a dark grey (kind of like a garbage barge) and all the rest a white-grey, almost plastic material.
We floated toward a clutter of vessels as tall as ours. Amid this tangle of vessels stood the Statue of Liberty.
But before we could pick up the Statue of Liberty, one of our group said, "The French ship Beauregard is nearby!" Everybody agreed this was a pretty important sight to see. We steered our vessel in that direction.
Our vessel quickly cruised through the water, passing much smaller vehicles. As we moved, someone else explained that the Beauregard was the famous French sailing ship used in the XXXXX (French Revolution?).
As we glided along, we passed a snail-shaped, aluminum-colored vessel. The "curl" of the "snail-shell" was hollow. The vessel was, I somehow saw, property of Japan. I could tell that this was a Japanese space vehicle and that it was either preparing for launch or else that it had just landed after a flight.
I now walked down a road with my brother (who may also have been my friend R). We may have been walking toward a place like NASA.
I saw a black jet twirl up above a building in the distance. I said, "It's an SR-71!" But that didn't quite make sense to me, as SR-71s were, I thought, out of commission, no longer flying. I couldn't tell for sure, though: the jet's spinning (and my fear of the vehicle) made it hard for me to discern the jet's shape.
At last, though, the jet flipped so I could see its back end. The jet, first of all, was deep blue, not black like an SR-71 usually (or always?) is. The craft also had two close exhaust jets in the center of the back side, with wings fanning outward from the jets and two vertical fins coming up from in between the two jets -- very different from the SR-71.
I shouted, "It's an F-14!"
My brother (or my friend R?), who walked about five feet behind me, said, "That's not an F-14."
I was angry at being contradicted. I wanted to vindicate myself. The jet now "crashed" right beside us. The jet was just like a hollow, die-cast hulk of plastic, maybe ten feet long and in the shape of a jet. On its side was a label saying "YF-14."
I shouted, "See? I said it was an F-14!"
Dream #3
I was telling my friend R about how I had seen an advanced jet. R answered, "Oh, yeah? Well, have you seen the XXXXX?" (Some name like CP-1 or CP-9.) "It's the new jet that can go into space."
I tried to figure what R was talking about. I now saw, in my mind's eye, an aircraft carrier with greyish, plastic-looking jets that had an almost space-shuttle look to them but which were also very sleek. The jets were grey with red stripes.
I thought, Now I do remember these! Although, was it actually decided that these vehicles would be used to replace the shuttle?
(It's interesting, nowadays, to see how this vehicle would resemble, at least in its body, the Dreamchaser of Sierra Nevada Corporation, or the experimental spacecraft made by Boeing. I believe I knew of the SRS retirement in 2007 -- it was talked of in NASA white papers on the new moon exploration projects. And SNC must have been on the drawing board, if nowhere else, by 2007.
So a craft like this could easily have filtered into my subconscious through some media channel or other. But it's still interesting to see how the vehicle cropped up before the relative fame it's been experiencing over the past two or so years.)
Dream #1
A man "told me" (I heard the man's voice in my head) a story about his family, in particular his wife, as I flew upward, ascending mountain peaks. I ascended three peaks, the second higher than the first, but the third possibly lower than the second. All the peaks and mountainsides were blanketed in snow. The peaks of the mountains (or three peaks of one mountain?) crowned as if they had been cracked open, and snow-dusted ice lay inside.
As I descended the mountainside after reaching the third peak, it was like I was skiing, not flying. There were people all over, lounging around and practicing skiing.
The man's story, which I still heard in my head, mainly had to do with how good his wife was at what she did (skiing?), but how she was now somehow disabled from doing it, though she continued to put up an appearance of being able to do it in front of people who counted on her (her children?).
Dream #2
I stood overlooking a big river or an ocean with some co-workers. It was day and the sky was clear blue. Near us, the body of water seemed to be cluttered with vessels. Off to the right was a massive, brick building, which must have been where I worked (as if my co-workers were just my friends, and I didn't work with them). I could see images of parts, the head and a foot, of the Statue of Liberty -- as if they were lying in cubby-holes of brick in some brick structure floating in the air off to my left.
I was telling my friends that I could reconstruct just about any part of the Statue of Liberty. My boss BS then asked, "Then couldn't you reconstruct the whole Statue of Liberty?"
I thought to myself that I could construct an entire statue resembling the Statue of Liberty, but that I wasn't skillful enough to create a replica. I could even imagine the flaws that would inevitably creep into my reproduction: particularly a boxiness to Liberty's face and an awkward triangularity in the gown.
I replied, "I could, I suppose. But why would anybody want a whole Statue of Liberty? Unless the one we have is going to break."
We all now stood (as if we had always been standing) on the top of a vehicle like a shipping-crate crane that floated all by itself on the water. The crane was enormous. Its purpose was to move the Statue of Liberty for repairs. It was just the "crane" on a floating platform, the base of the structure being a dark grey (kind of like a garbage barge) and all the rest a white-grey, almost plastic material.
We floated toward a clutter of vessels as tall as ours. Amid this tangle of vessels stood the Statue of Liberty.
But before we could pick up the Statue of Liberty, one of our group said, "The French ship Beauregard is nearby!" Everybody agreed this was a pretty important sight to see. We steered our vessel in that direction.
Our vessel quickly cruised through the water, passing much smaller vehicles. As we moved, someone else explained that the Beauregard was the famous French sailing ship used in the XXXXX (French Revolution?).
As we glided along, we passed a snail-shaped, aluminum-colored vessel. The "curl" of the "snail-shell" was hollow. The vessel was, I somehow saw, property of Japan. I could tell that this was a Japanese space vehicle and that it was either preparing for launch or else that it had just landed after a flight.
I now walked down a road with my brother (who may also have been my friend R). We may have been walking toward a place like NASA.
I saw a black jet twirl up above a building in the distance. I said, "It's an SR-71!" But that didn't quite make sense to me, as SR-71s were, I thought, out of commission, no longer flying. I couldn't tell for sure, though: the jet's spinning (and my fear of the vehicle) made it hard for me to discern the jet's shape.
At last, though, the jet flipped so I could see its back end. The jet, first of all, was deep blue, not black like an SR-71 usually (or always?) is. The craft also had two close exhaust jets in the center of the back side, with wings fanning outward from the jets and two vertical fins coming up from in between the two jets -- very different from the SR-71.
I shouted, "It's an F-14!"
My brother (or my friend R?), who walked about five feet behind me, said, "That's not an F-14."
I was angry at being contradicted. I wanted to vindicate myself. The jet now "crashed" right beside us. The jet was just like a hollow, die-cast hulk of plastic, maybe ten feet long and in the shape of a jet. On its side was a label saying "YF-14."
I shouted, "See? I said it was an F-14!"
Dream #3
I was telling my friend R about how I had seen an advanced jet. R answered, "Oh, yeah? Well, have you seen the XXXXX?" (Some name like CP-1 or CP-9.) "It's the new jet that can go into space."
I tried to figure what R was talking about. I now saw, in my mind's eye, an aircraft carrier with greyish, plastic-looking jets that had an almost space-shuttle look to them but which were also very sleek. The jets were grey with red stripes.
I thought, Now I do remember these! Although, was it actually decided that these vehicles would be used to replace the shuttle?
(It's interesting, nowadays, to see how this vehicle would resemble, at least in its body, the Dreamchaser of Sierra Nevada Corporation, or the experimental spacecraft made by Boeing. I believe I knew of the SRS retirement in 2007 -- it was talked of in NASA white papers on the new moon exploration projects. And SNC must have been on the drawing board, if nowhere else, by 2007.
So a craft like this could easily have filtered into my subconscious through some media channel or other. But it's still interesting to see how the vehicle cropped up before the relative fame it's been experiencing over the past two or so years.)
Sunday, February 10, 2013
(10/16/07) where the new building was; emergency party; like a worm made out of brains
(Entered in paper journal at 5:50 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I watched, from the back passenger seat, a car pass a field with trees like cherry trees. Somehow I thought this was where my company's new building would be (in waking life, my company was in the final planning stages for moving into a new building -- we would be fully moved in, if I remember correctly, by about July of 2008 -- only to be moved into another building in January of 2009!)
I thought, This would be a nice area to take runs. There was a path running through the field. We passed along a creek or river at the bottom of a slope of rocks. The creek itself was rocky. An empty boat, with two paddles, clanked along some of the rocks.
I thought, But this is New York City. The roads are bad on (my boss) BS' knees. We really couldn't come up with a running route that would be good for BS. I also thought of asking my co-worker CJ if he wanted to run.
We passed another river, which ran at the bottom of a waterfall. The waterfall gushed over huge, round, coppery rocks and flooded the river.
We passed a building that was built in three sections. I saw it from the back. The two back sections were roundish with green, metallic framing for the windows. The front section rose slightly above the back sections and was octagonal, probably of pink stone, with a shallow, a-frame roof. It was in a field of dry, yellow-tan and orange-tan grass.
Now it was like I sat backwards, looking out the back window, in the backseat and on the driver's side. My mom was driving the car. My brother and sister were also in the car. We drove on a straight road, through slightly rolling stretches of flat plains -- yellowy-tan grass with some hints of green and orange and some glimpses of rich (?), brown soil beneath. There were occasional, thin clumps of trees, the green of their leafs as pale as floating clouds.
Then I saw a white tree. It was de-limbed, so all it was was a white trunk with four limb-stumps coming off of it. It looked like a wild, raging horse to me.
I thought my mom would be impressed by how much I liked looking out the window. I asked my mom some question relating to telling her about the things my siblings and I had done. My mom surprised me by answering something like, "I don't care. Don't tell me anything." I tried to change that statement into something more positive in my mind.
We passed a stand of thin aspen trees that edged before some tall, redbrick buildings like apartment complexes.
Dream #2
I sat in my desk at work. There was an alarm. A man's voice came on over the alarm's intercom speaker. The man announced a party (?) in XXXXX's office.
When the alarm had first come on, I had been afraid, wondering if the announcement would be for an actual emergency. I had worried whether I would do everything alright and help everybody effectively through the emergency. Now I was a little disappointed. It was just a birthday party?
For some reason I wasn't wearing shoes. But my shoes were sitting right next to me. I picked up my shoes and walked to the cubicle in front of the office where the party was. The party was, somehow, both in the office and down the hall.
The party was for one of my co-workers, AR, who was, like myself, an Administrative Assistant. Someone told AR, "You could be head of GM (i.e. Global Markets) one day! You throw parties so well!"
I was disappointed. Hadn't my old co-worker and mentor ES, now herself an Analyst like my (and, before, her) boss BS, said to me once, "You could be CEO of this company one day"? (I'm pretty sure that in waking life ES never told me that, although she has always complimented me on my "abilities" -- whatever those abilities are/were!)
I now reflected, Maybe you just said all that stuff to kind of puff up your assistants, make them feel more important than you really think they are, just so you can keep them working. How else, I thought in my jealousy, could someone make such a kind statement about AR, who, I peevishly thought, scarcely worked as hard as I worked?
I didn't even want to go into the room now. I was too ashamed. I took my time putting on my shoes.
AR called, "Preemie, get in here!"
I said, "I'm coming."
She said, "I've been making decisions to be nice. But pretty soon I'm going to have to stop making decisions!"
I thought, Nobody's going to talk to me that way!
But now both AR and ES were out in the cubicle with me. They were both saying nice things to me.
Dream #3
I sat watching a movie. I walked out and then back in. I walked up to my seat as the movie was ending. There were shots of blue sky and power lines, vistas of plains, and other shots I loved. The narrative of the film ended, a song began playing, and the credits began to roll.
But as the song started, a voice (of some Hispanic boy?) called out, "Hey, uh... The film is pretty much ended, everybody. We would appreciate it if you got up and left."
I was in a front row. I had my stuff sitting against the railing in front of me. I stood to pick it up. I had forgotten that I had brought a coat. I had actually brought a lot more than I had remembered.
I walked out into the hallway, which was like the hallway in a city building, just off from the reception lobby. I stood in a weird junction of hallways and right by a garbage can. I stood talking with two black girls.
The girls mentioned a young man, one of their co-workers (they all worked at this movie-house), who did a lot of other stuff. I wasn't sure what the "other stuff" was. I asked, "Does he work somewhere else, too?"
The girls got upset, like I had insinuated that all the boy could do was work in places like this. One of them said, "No. He goes to school. He's studying to be a scientist."
We talked a little more. Then I had to leave. One of the girls walked with me out into the dark, blue-grey evening. The girl smiled and said, "I've always wanted to see the car you drive."
We stood in a mostly empty shopping mall parking lot. The movie-house was now more like a restaurant. I saw my car in the distance. It was an old, beat-up car, like one I drove in my last year of high school -- except that the paint job on the car was now all new and shiny.
I thought, I can't let the girl see that thing. Besides, this girl wasn't the girl I wanted. Both girls were pretty. But the girl I liked, the other girl I'd been talking with in the movie-house hallway, had rounder eyes, not thin eyes like this girl.
The girl with me stopped to talk with a mother and her kids, who stood by a van. I thought, While the girl's not paying attention I can drive away. That way she won't see my awful car.
I turned to tell the girl goodbye. But I saw her from behind and was too surprised to say anything. The girl was now short, ugly, and poor-looking (???!!! -- I'm sometimes shocked by the things I've said!). She wore a blue t-shirt and tight blue jeans which showed off her big bottom. Her big bottom really turned me off.
A black man who was about my height and a little bigger than I, smart-looking, with thin-rimmed eyeglasses, walked past me. I must have thought this was the friend the two women had been talking about in the movie-house hallway.
I thought, Now's my chance to prove I don't think the girls' friend is capable only of working in a movie theater. I apparently thought I could do this simply by making small talk with the man in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. I said, "Hey, man, we'll see you later."
The man walked past me without even regarding me. I thought, Okay -- you show kindness and it isn't returned!
I walked toward my car. My mom walked beside me and to my left. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. The phone (a regular, old-style flip-phone -- as I remember it from waking life, a black Nokia) was cracked. I thought, Maybe it's just cracked on the surface. But I opened it to see that the crack ran across all its surfaces. I looked at the sides. They were messed up, too.
I almost started crying. I thought, What did I do to make this happen? Can't I take care of anything I own?
It was now more like daytime. The car was by the entrance to the mall. My mom and I were at the end of the parking aisle, maybe twenty feet from the car. We passed a needle-leafed tree in a planting island.
I had been speaking with my mom and barely attending the stout tree. But, reflecting on the tree after we'd passed it, it struck me that the tree had weird, tiered, pink and white flowers on it. I told my mom, "Let's go back. That tree looks weird."
We went back. I looked at the branches. There were strange, but somehow sensible, tan-brown, brittle, cone-shaped things standing atop the thin branches. I thought, Maybe I just mistook these things for flowers.
But then I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the pink and white flower. I hadn't seen the flower because it was on the periphery of the tree, not in the center, where I had focused my gaze.
The trunk of the tree seemed to end about two feet up from the ground. From the top of the trunk came an agave-like plant with spiny, yellow, purple, and green leafs. I said, "That's what I thought I saw! Isn't it odd?"
I reached out to touch the plant, to make sure I was seeing leafs and not more cones. The plant felt odd. And when I pulled my hand back, I noticed the top leafs moving, as if of their own volition. I thought, That can't be real. I have to be seeing things.
My mom and I were walking away. But the plant really bugged me. I had to look at it again. I told my mom, "Something else didn't make sense." I didn't want to tell my mom what didn't make sense -- namely, that the plant seemed to be moving on its own.
We went back to the tree. Now I saw that the plant grew out of a hollow in the top of the tree trunk -- although it was a part of the tree. I saw steady, directed movement from within the trunk. I knew the movement wasn't volitional, but that it was growth -- life.
I saw a spiky (like a sea-cucumber), worm-like appendage emerge from beneath the leafs. I shouted to my mom, "See?! I wasn't imagining! This thing is growing quicker than normal!"
The thing emerged, as huge as a boa constrictor, and wove its way through the thin branches of the tree. It was like a worm made out of brains, with a head like a gigantic breast. It hung over a branch above us. I knew if it touched us it would incorporate us.
I told my mom, "Run to the car!" We ran and got in.
The thing was growing. It had taken over the tree and spread toward us through the parking lot. I didn't know if we could get started and drive away quickly enough.
I saw a car coming from an underground parking garage to the left of the tree. Now the parking garage was like a car wash. It sprayed water all over the car. Jets of water flew outside the garage. They hit the plant-thing. As soon as they did, the thing dissolved into yellowy, thickish, soapy-looking water.
I hoped that more cars would come through the garage to get washed. The thing was dissolved now, but I felt like it would regain its consistency. I thought that more water needed to hit the thing before it would lose its ability to re-stabilize.
Dream #1
I watched, from the back passenger seat, a car pass a field with trees like cherry trees. Somehow I thought this was where my company's new building would be (in waking life, my company was in the final planning stages for moving into a new building -- we would be fully moved in, if I remember correctly, by about July of 2008 -- only to be moved into another building in January of 2009!)
I thought, This would be a nice area to take runs. There was a path running through the field. We passed along a creek or river at the bottom of a slope of rocks. The creek itself was rocky. An empty boat, with two paddles, clanked along some of the rocks.
I thought, But this is New York City. The roads are bad on (my boss) BS' knees. We really couldn't come up with a running route that would be good for BS. I also thought of asking my co-worker CJ if he wanted to run.
We passed another river, which ran at the bottom of a waterfall. The waterfall gushed over huge, round, coppery rocks and flooded the river.
We passed a building that was built in three sections. I saw it from the back. The two back sections were roundish with green, metallic framing for the windows. The front section rose slightly above the back sections and was octagonal, probably of pink stone, with a shallow, a-frame roof. It was in a field of dry, yellow-tan and orange-tan grass.
Now it was like I sat backwards, looking out the back window, in the backseat and on the driver's side. My mom was driving the car. My brother and sister were also in the car. We drove on a straight road, through slightly rolling stretches of flat plains -- yellowy-tan grass with some hints of green and orange and some glimpses of rich (?), brown soil beneath. There were occasional, thin clumps of trees, the green of their leafs as pale as floating clouds.
Then I saw a white tree. It was de-limbed, so all it was was a white trunk with four limb-stumps coming off of it. It looked like a wild, raging horse to me.
I thought my mom would be impressed by how much I liked looking out the window. I asked my mom some question relating to telling her about the things my siblings and I had done. My mom surprised me by answering something like, "I don't care. Don't tell me anything." I tried to change that statement into something more positive in my mind.
We passed a stand of thin aspen trees that edged before some tall, redbrick buildings like apartment complexes.
Dream #2
I sat in my desk at work. There was an alarm. A man's voice came on over the alarm's intercom speaker. The man announced a party (?) in XXXXX's office.
When the alarm had first come on, I had been afraid, wondering if the announcement would be for an actual emergency. I had worried whether I would do everything alright and help everybody effectively through the emergency. Now I was a little disappointed. It was just a birthday party?
For some reason I wasn't wearing shoes. But my shoes were sitting right next to me. I picked up my shoes and walked to the cubicle in front of the office where the party was. The party was, somehow, both in the office and down the hall.
The party was for one of my co-workers, AR, who was, like myself, an Administrative Assistant. Someone told AR, "You could be head of GM (i.e. Global Markets) one day! You throw parties so well!"
I was disappointed. Hadn't my old co-worker and mentor ES, now herself an Analyst like my (and, before, her) boss BS, said to me once, "You could be CEO of this company one day"? (I'm pretty sure that in waking life ES never told me that, although she has always complimented me on my "abilities" -- whatever those abilities are/were!)
I now reflected, Maybe you just said all that stuff to kind of puff up your assistants, make them feel more important than you really think they are, just so you can keep them working. How else, I thought in my jealousy, could someone make such a kind statement about AR, who, I peevishly thought, scarcely worked as hard as I worked?
I didn't even want to go into the room now. I was too ashamed. I took my time putting on my shoes.
AR called, "Preemie, get in here!"
I said, "I'm coming."
She said, "I've been making decisions to be nice. But pretty soon I'm going to have to stop making decisions!"
I thought, Nobody's going to talk to me that way!
But now both AR and ES were out in the cubicle with me. They were both saying nice things to me.
Dream #3
I sat watching a movie. I walked out and then back in. I walked up to my seat as the movie was ending. There were shots of blue sky and power lines, vistas of plains, and other shots I loved. The narrative of the film ended, a song began playing, and the credits began to roll.
But as the song started, a voice (of some Hispanic boy?) called out, "Hey, uh... The film is pretty much ended, everybody. We would appreciate it if you got up and left."
I was in a front row. I had my stuff sitting against the railing in front of me. I stood to pick it up. I had forgotten that I had brought a coat. I had actually brought a lot more than I had remembered.
I walked out into the hallway, which was like the hallway in a city building, just off from the reception lobby. I stood in a weird junction of hallways and right by a garbage can. I stood talking with two black girls.
The girls mentioned a young man, one of their co-workers (they all worked at this movie-house), who did a lot of other stuff. I wasn't sure what the "other stuff" was. I asked, "Does he work somewhere else, too?"
The girls got upset, like I had insinuated that all the boy could do was work in places like this. One of them said, "No. He goes to school. He's studying to be a scientist."
We talked a little more. Then I had to leave. One of the girls walked with me out into the dark, blue-grey evening. The girl smiled and said, "I've always wanted to see the car you drive."
We stood in a mostly empty shopping mall parking lot. The movie-house was now more like a restaurant. I saw my car in the distance. It was an old, beat-up car, like one I drove in my last year of high school -- except that the paint job on the car was now all new and shiny.
I thought, I can't let the girl see that thing. Besides, this girl wasn't the girl I wanted. Both girls were pretty. But the girl I liked, the other girl I'd been talking with in the movie-house hallway, had rounder eyes, not thin eyes like this girl.
The girl with me stopped to talk with a mother and her kids, who stood by a van. I thought, While the girl's not paying attention I can drive away. That way she won't see my awful car.
I turned to tell the girl goodbye. But I saw her from behind and was too surprised to say anything. The girl was now short, ugly, and poor-looking (???!!! -- I'm sometimes shocked by the things I've said!). She wore a blue t-shirt and tight blue jeans which showed off her big bottom. Her big bottom really turned me off.
A black man who was about my height and a little bigger than I, smart-looking, with thin-rimmed eyeglasses, walked past me. I must have thought this was the friend the two women had been talking about in the movie-house hallway.
I thought, Now's my chance to prove I don't think the girls' friend is capable only of working in a movie theater. I apparently thought I could do this simply by making small talk with the man in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. I said, "Hey, man, we'll see you later."
The man walked past me without even regarding me. I thought, Okay -- you show kindness and it isn't returned!
I walked toward my car. My mom walked beside me and to my left. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. The phone (a regular, old-style flip-phone -- as I remember it from waking life, a black Nokia) was cracked. I thought, Maybe it's just cracked on the surface. But I opened it to see that the crack ran across all its surfaces. I looked at the sides. They were messed up, too.
I almost started crying. I thought, What did I do to make this happen? Can't I take care of anything I own?
It was now more like daytime. The car was by the entrance to the mall. My mom and I were at the end of the parking aisle, maybe twenty feet from the car. We passed a needle-leafed tree in a planting island.
I had been speaking with my mom and barely attending the stout tree. But, reflecting on the tree after we'd passed it, it struck me that the tree had weird, tiered, pink and white flowers on it. I told my mom, "Let's go back. That tree looks weird."
We went back. I looked at the branches. There were strange, but somehow sensible, tan-brown, brittle, cone-shaped things standing atop the thin branches. I thought, Maybe I just mistook these things for flowers.
But then I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the pink and white flower. I hadn't seen the flower because it was on the periphery of the tree, not in the center, where I had focused my gaze.
The trunk of the tree seemed to end about two feet up from the ground. From the top of the trunk came an agave-like plant with spiny, yellow, purple, and green leafs. I said, "That's what I thought I saw! Isn't it odd?"
I reached out to touch the plant, to make sure I was seeing leafs and not more cones. The plant felt odd. And when I pulled my hand back, I noticed the top leafs moving, as if of their own volition. I thought, That can't be real. I have to be seeing things.
My mom and I were walking away. But the plant really bugged me. I had to look at it again. I told my mom, "Something else didn't make sense." I didn't want to tell my mom what didn't make sense -- namely, that the plant seemed to be moving on its own.
We went back to the tree. Now I saw that the plant grew out of a hollow in the top of the tree trunk -- although it was a part of the tree. I saw steady, directed movement from within the trunk. I knew the movement wasn't volitional, but that it was growth -- life.
I saw a spiky (like a sea-cucumber), worm-like appendage emerge from beneath the leafs. I shouted to my mom, "See?! I wasn't imagining! This thing is growing quicker than normal!"
The thing emerged, as huge as a boa constrictor, and wove its way through the thin branches of the tree. It was like a worm made out of brains, with a head like a gigantic breast. It hung over a branch above us. I knew if it touched us it would incorporate us.
I told my mom, "Run to the car!" We ran and got in.
The thing was growing. It had taken over the tree and spread toward us through the parking lot. I didn't know if we could get started and drive away quickly enough.
I saw a car coming from an underground parking garage to the left of the tree. Now the parking garage was like a car wash. It sprayed water all over the car. Jets of water flew outside the garage. They hit the plant-thing. As soon as they did, the thing dissolved into yellowy, thickish, soapy-looking water.
I hoped that more cars would come through the garage to get washed. The thing was dissolved now, but I felt like it would regain its consistency. I thought that more water needed to hit the thing before it would lose its ability to re-stabilize.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
(10/27/07) slot-machine street views; innocent brownies; caligari's alien; weeding the museum garden
(Entered in paper journal at 9:46 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was at my office. I answered the phone. Even while I was trying to take a message, my boss BS, sitting to my right, on the edge of my desk, was making loud comments, trying to make me do something. I hung up the phone and tried to type a message. But BS was beings so demanding that I finally had to look at him. I lost the last name of the client from whom I was trying to take a message.
I suddenly yelled at BS, "You say you value clients. But why did you just make me forget the one who called?"
BS stood up, upset, and walked away. I tried to recall the client's name. Her first name was Pamela, I thought.
I was now looking at a storage device like a BlackBerry. The device had three screens on it, like slot-machine windows. Below these three screens was a larger screen. The three screens gave three possible "names" for the client -- though these "names" were actually titles for museum or art exhibits.
I thought, That's what the client did -- she was a social artist. I thought that if I could find the correct museum or gallery, I would remember the client's name. The exhibit, I thought, may have been in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh.
I looked at the screen below the three screens. The image on the screen was of an empty city street. The image was greenish, like an oldish computer image. I knew I could "steer" through these streets, like on a GPS map program (or like Google Street View, though I'm not sure (???) that was around in 2007), to find each listed museum.
I started steering through the streets. They were all empty. The streets were cobbled, not asphalt. The buildings were mostly redbrick. The day was clear. I steered through a few blocks.
My view faded into a view more like one I inhabited than like one I was looking at on a screen. In the middle of one block there was a huge pool of a clearish, thickish liquid which I called water. I knew that if I touched it, something bad would happen to me. But I was moving automatically, as if the "computer program" were still running me. I knew I would probably touch the poison water sooner or later.
Dream #2
I walked into a grocery store, or I had been there for a while. I had my arms full of food. I was looking for some more food, possibly some meat. I walked into an area like the frozen foods section.
There was a family like a group of European tourists. I had to walk in front of them. I tried to act as mild as possible to prove to the family that I wasn't a hooligan -- not because I felt like I threatened them, but because I didn't want them to start threatening me.
I looked at a non-freezer rack of packaged meats and cheeses. Some of the lunchmeats looked very good, but they had holes, like Swiss cheese. I was looking for just the right meat.
All of the family except one person had walked farther down the aisle. The one who remained was a little scary. He was older, maybe in his late fifties. He was tallish, big, with a bulky stomach. He had dull, grey hair and wore clunky "dress clothes." I had heard him speaking with the rest of the family. His voice was thick and unintelligible. He seemed to me like an "innocent" (???!!!) who could suddenly become dangerous.
I looked at the food. Now it was bagels and desserts like brownies. I tried not to attend to the big man. I was trying to figure out what I wanted. I felt like I was trying to get full, like I needed to eat, but like I had eaten so much already that if I ate any more, I would get fat. Nothing looked like it would fill me up without getting me fat.
The big man moaned something unintelligible. He swung a big, grey cane or walking stick against one of the clear, plastic bagel cases. There was something like a grabber at the end of the man's stick. He grabbed two brownies and then swung the stick over so that the brownies got near my face. It was like the big man had swung the brownies in front of my face in a gesture of offering them to me.
I regarded the brownies and thought, That's what I want, but it's not what I need. But I was kind of afraid to deny the big man. I didn't want him to hurt me.
Dream #3
Black and white film like an old German Expressionist film. An alien with a fat-looking, pale, bulbous head and big, black eyes. The alien wore a big, black robe. The alien's body might have been thinner than its head.
The alien walked down along an inside balcony in a dark apartment complex. Now I only saw the stairwell, which may have been lit from a floor below. I watched some shadows move quickly across the guardrails. I thought, If a natural light was causing those shadows, then time must be moving more quickly than normal.
I felt like there might have been a woman hiding by the stairwell, on the floor below me (the lit floor). I felt like the woman was hiding from the alien.
The "movie" now started over. I saw the woman almost emerge from behind a door, which the woman had slowly opened by only a crack. The woman looked out the crack. her eyes gave off a weird, cat-like glow. At first I thought I was looking at the alien. Then I discerned the woman's face.
I realized the woman was looking at the alien, who was out of my view. The woman was frightened. It seems plain now that the woman knew the alien and was already engaged in some kind of struggle with it.
The woman was now gone. She had either gone to hide from the alien, or else the alien had already taken her away somewhere.
Dream #4
I walked up to a garden, which I was going to weed. The garden (did I realize this?) was indoors. I was pulling, at first, mugwort-like weeds that grew between thin, woody plants like pine saplings.
The place now seems to me (i.e. when I wrote entered the dream in the paper journal) like some kind of museum exhibit. The garden, which was supposed to be a wild, natural area, also took only a corner or half (?) of this exhibit-like room. The rest of the room was silvery, plasticky floor, walls, and ceiling, with gentle, modern-feeling, fluorescent lighting.
The thin "pine-shoots" grew thicker toward the corner until they were too dense to penetrate. I couldn't get into them to weed out the mugwort. But it also seemed like in that section the growth of the "pine-shoots" had actually managed to "beat out" the growth of the mugwort.
So, having finished weeding that area, I moved to the area farther down. This area was full of woody growth, the foliage and flowers of which looked like rabbit brush or rattlesnake weed. This growth was very thick and either needed to be completely eradicated or just trimmed back. It was thick and dense, but some shoots grew so thin that they were green, like herbaceous growth, like aster stalks.
There seemed to be a cliff of black stone like schist somewhere. As I took care of this area I could hear a memory of a co-worker, like my co-worker TC, telling his wife how nice this place was, but in an ironic way. TC's wife was somewhere else, and TC was jokingly pretending like the lousy weather where his wife was was better than the weather here.
I had trimmed a fair amount of the vegetation. I reclined on some stumps and against the trunks of some still standing growth. I looked at the area I had taken care of. It looked pretty nice. The "rabbit brush" growth that stood looked like trees, with plenty of space between each plant. I thought, I couldn't have done all that needed to be done. It was too easy. The soil between the trees was rich and brown.
I saw a rabbit. It skirted around me, but it stopped to regard me. It was small but healthy, with soft fur. It had big, round, pure black eyes. I hoped it wasn't threatened by me, that it didn't feel like I was invading its space.
I looked forward again. Now rabbits climbed up on me. There were two or three of them. They had emerged from the trunk on which I sat, as if the trunk were now as wide as the trunk of a tree like a maple tree that was around ten years old.
I didn't know if the rabbits were going to attack me or if they just liked me. One of them nestled against the left side of my neck. I didn't know whether it would bite me.
Dream #1
I was at my office. I answered the phone. Even while I was trying to take a message, my boss BS, sitting to my right, on the edge of my desk, was making loud comments, trying to make me do something. I hung up the phone and tried to type a message. But BS was beings so demanding that I finally had to look at him. I lost the last name of the client from whom I was trying to take a message.
I suddenly yelled at BS, "You say you value clients. But why did you just make me forget the one who called?"
BS stood up, upset, and walked away. I tried to recall the client's name. Her first name was Pamela, I thought.
I was now looking at a storage device like a BlackBerry. The device had three screens on it, like slot-machine windows. Below these three screens was a larger screen. The three screens gave three possible "names" for the client -- though these "names" were actually titles for museum or art exhibits.
I thought, That's what the client did -- she was a social artist. I thought that if I could find the correct museum or gallery, I would remember the client's name. The exhibit, I thought, may have been in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh.
I looked at the screen below the three screens. The image on the screen was of an empty city street. The image was greenish, like an oldish computer image. I knew I could "steer" through these streets, like on a GPS map program (or like Google Street View, though I'm not sure (???) that was around in 2007), to find each listed museum.
I started steering through the streets. They were all empty. The streets were cobbled, not asphalt. The buildings were mostly redbrick. The day was clear. I steered through a few blocks.
My view faded into a view more like one I inhabited than like one I was looking at on a screen. In the middle of one block there was a huge pool of a clearish, thickish liquid which I called water. I knew that if I touched it, something bad would happen to me. But I was moving automatically, as if the "computer program" were still running me. I knew I would probably touch the poison water sooner or later.
Dream #2
I walked into a grocery store, or I had been there for a while. I had my arms full of food. I was looking for some more food, possibly some meat. I walked into an area like the frozen foods section.
There was a family like a group of European tourists. I had to walk in front of them. I tried to act as mild as possible to prove to the family that I wasn't a hooligan -- not because I felt like I threatened them, but because I didn't want them to start threatening me.
I looked at a non-freezer rack of packaged meats and cheeses. Some of the lunchmeats looked very good, but they had holes, like Swiss cheese. I was looking for just the right meat.
All of the family except one person had walked farther down the aisle. The one who remained was a little scary. He was older, maybe in his late fifties. He was tallish, big, with a bulky stomach. He had dull, grey hair and wore clunky "dress clothes." I had heard him speaking with the rest of the family. His voice was thick and unintelligible. He seemed to me like an "innocent" (???!!!) who could suddenly become dangerous.
I looked at the food. Now it was bagels and desserts like brownies. I tried not to attend to the big man. I was trying to figure out what I wanted. I felt like I was trying to get full, like I needed to eat, but like I had eaten so much already that if I ate any more, I would get fat. Nothing looked like it would fill me up without getting me fat.
The big man moaned something unintelligible. He swung a big, grey cane or walking stick against one of the clear, plastic bagel cases. There was something like a grabber at the end of the man's stick. He grabbed two brownies and then swung the stick over so that the brownies got near my face. It was like the big man had swung the brownies in front of my face in a gesture of offering them to me.
I regarded the brownies and thought, That's what I want, but it's not what I need. But I was kind of afraid to deny the big man. I didn't want him to hurt me.
Dream #3
Black and white film like an old German Expressionist film. An alien with a fat-looking, pale, bulbous head and big, black eyes. The alien wore a big, black robe. The alien's body might have been thinner than its head.
The alien walked down along an inside balcony in a dark apartment complex. Now I only saw the stairwell, which may have been lit from a floor below. I watched some shadows move quickly across the guardrails. I thought, If a natural light was causing those shadows, then time must be moving more quickly than normal.
I felt like there might have been a woman hiding by the stairwell, on the floor below me (the lit floor). I felt like the woman was hiding from the alien.
The "movie" now started over. I saw the woman almost emerge from behind a door, which the woman had slowly opened by only a crack. The woman looked out the crack. her eyes gave off a weird, cat-like glow. At first I thought I was looking at the alien. Then I discerned the woman's face.
I realized the woman was looking at the alien, who was out of my view. The woman was frightened. It seems plain now that the woman knew the alien and was already engaged in some kind of struggle with it.
The woman was now gone. She had either gone to hide from the alien, or else the alien had already taken her away somewhere.
Dream #4
I walked up to a garden, which I was going to weed. The garden (did I realize this?) was indoors. I was pulling, at first, mugwort-like weeds that grew between thin, woody plants like pine saplings.
The place now seems to me (i.e. when I wrote entered the dream in the paper journal) like some kind of museum exhibit. The garden, which was supposed to be a wild, natural area, also took only a corner or half (?) of this exhibit-like room. The rest of the room was silvery, plasticky floor, walls, and ceiling, with gentle, modern-feeling, fluorescent lighting.
The thin "pine-shoots" grew thicker toward the corner until they were too dense to penetrate. I couldn't get into them to weed out the mugwort. But it also seemed like in that section the growth of the "pine-shoots" had actually managed to "beat out" the growth of the mugwort.
So, having finished weeding that area, I moved to the area farther down. This area was full of woody growth, the foliage and flowers of which looked like rabbit brush or rattlesnake weed. This growth was very thick and either needed to be completely eradicated or just trimmed back. It was thick and dense, but some shoots grew so thin that they were green, like herbaceous growth, like aster stalks.
There seemed to be a cliff of black stone like schist somewhere. As I took care of this area I could hear a memory of a co-worker, like my co-worker TC, telling his wife how nice this place was, but in an ironic way. TC's wife was somewhere else, and TC was jokingly pretending like the lousy weather where his wife was was better than the weather here.
I had trimmed a fair amount of the vegetation. I reclined on some stumps and against the trunks of some still standing growth. I looked at the area I had taken care of. It looked pretty nice. The "rabbit brush" growth that stood looked like trees, with plenty of space between each plant. I thought, I couldn't have done all that needed to be done. It was too easy. The soil between the trees was rich and brown.
I saw a rabbit. It skirted around me, but it stopped to regard me. It was small but healthy, with soft fur. It had big, round, pure black eyes. I hoped it wasn't threatened by me, that it didn't feel like I was invading its space.
I looked forward again. Now rabbits climbed up on me. There were two or three of them. They had emerged from the trunk on which I sat, as if the trunk were now as wide as the trunk of a tree like a maple tree that was around ten years old.
I didn't know if the rabbits were going to attack me or if they just liked me. One of them nestled against the left side of my neck. I didn't know whether it would bite me.
Friday, February 8, 2013
(10/31/07) squirrel nest; love handles
(Entered in paper journal at 5:30 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I stood in some open, public area with my friend KB and someone else, possibly KB's girlfriend. We looked up at some immense pole that stood atop some structure like a small building or ship which had the feeling of being sunk into an empty public pool. Atop the pole was a round-bottomed "net" of metal, like a domed jungle-gym turned upside-down.
KB mentioned that XXXXX (squirrels?) were making their nest in the net. She said, "It doesn't seem right. They'd fall right through the holes."
I said, "No. There must be something solid up there inside the thing that they use for support."
We had gone and gotten food. Then we climbed up the pole. We sat on some concrete platform an watched people in the public area below. We were supposedly feeding the squirrels, but we were the ones who were eating. We spoke a little more about how squirrels would make their nest.
At some point I figured I needed to leave. But I was worried whether I would be too afraid to go down the pole to get all the way down.
Dream #2
I was somewhere, doing some kind of work. My boss BS implied that I was lazy and that I didn't do a good job. I felt like BS was right. I was disappointed in myself.
I went into the bathroom. It was like I was in a cheap but modern house in the woods. The bathroom was small. It may have had dark orange walls.
As I stood urinating my head was just to the left of a small window with a frosted-style pane. The window was open just a crack, giving me an eye-level view of forest floor and some vegetation, as well as bright grey light, as if the window opened right at ground level.
Somehow I now saw myself from behind. I was a little fat. My lower back, especially around my hips, looked very wide. I also had stubble on my back, like I had shaved my back after it had gotten very hairy. I had a big ass, too. I thought, I guess my ass looks like a woman's ass. This was supposed to be a good thing.
My thoughts may now have turned to some "eighteenth-century play" in which a man spoke about a woman who had once been thin but was now fat. The man was mockingly pretending still to love the woman. The man said something about the woman's love being so ample that he needed two large handles on her back to hold onto it.
Dream #1
I stood in some open, public area with my friend KB and someone else, possibly KB's girlfriend. We looked up at some immense pole that stood atop some structure like a small building or ship which had the feeling of being sunk into an empty public pool. Atop the pole was a round-bottomed "net" of metal, like a domed jungle-gym turned upside-down.
KB mentioned that XXXXX (squirrels?) were making their nest in the net. She said, "It doesn't seem right. They'd fall right through the holes."
I said, "No. There must be something solid up there inside the thing that they use for support."
We had gone and gotten food. Then we climbed up the pole. We sat on some concrete platform an watched people in the public area below. We were supposedly feeding the squirrels, but we were the ones who were eating. We spoke a little more about how squirrels would make their nest.
At some point I figured I needed to leave. But I was worried whether I would be too afraid to go down the pole to get all the way down.
Dream #2
I was somewhere, doing some kind of work. My boss BS implied that I was lazy and that I didn't do a good job. I felt like BS was right. I was disappointed in myself.
I went into the bathroom. It was like I was in a cheap but modern house in the woods. The bathroom was small. It may have had dark orange walls.
As I stood urinating my head was just to the left of a small window with a frosted-style pane. The window was open just a crack, giving me an eye-level view of forest floor and some vegetation, as well as bright grey light, as if the window opened right at ground level.
Somehow I now saw myself from behind. I was a little fat. My lower back, especially around my hips, looked very wide. I also had stubble on my back, like I had shaved my back after it had gotten very hairy. I had a big ass, too. I thought, I guess my ass looks like a woman's ass. This was supposed to be a good thing.
My thoughts may now have turned to some "eighteenth-century play" in which a man spoke about a woman who had once been thin but was now fat. The man was mockingly pretending still to love the woman. The man said something about the woman's love being so ample that he needed two large handles on her back to hold onto it.
(11/1/07) losing job; seduced in panties; cloud race and lesbian wedding; split aztec circle
(Entered in paper journal at 5:22 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I got into an elevator with some of my co-workers. We went down. As we did, one of us (my boss BS?) commented on how six or seven analyst groups in my department had been fired. BS said that might be all the cuts, as far as analysts' whole teams went, but that some workers on the lower levels (strangely named levels, such as CDSs, CSDs, or CSAs?) were probably going to lose their jobs. I worried that I would lose my job. This was even more upsetting to me because I had taken so long just to get to the low level I was at.
All the time in the elevator my eyes kept shutting and my mind kept blanking out. I had to keep re-focusing myself to force my eyes open and keep my mind alert. I missed a lot of the exact details that BS was giving, though I strained to hear them.
We got out of the elevator. On the floor, we passed AT, one of the Directors of my department. I feared that I had once said something unbecoming around her.
Dream #2
I was in a house that was also a lingerie store. I wore a bra and panties, probably with realistic flower patterns. A pretty, blonde girl with short hair was attending to me.
I got an erection, which went upward, not outward, and then pushed the underwear out near the panty-waist. I walked away, into a bedroom, which had display racks of lingerie on the wall. I didn't want the girl who'd been attending me to see my erection and feel violated by how aroused I was around her.
But the girl walked into the room. The tip of my penis stuck out over the waistband of the panties. I told the woman, "Oh, don't look at me yet. I have to calm down."
The woman said, "No, no. Let me see you."
By now my penis was huge and stood a lot out of the underwear. The girl trembled and sighed. She was trying to hide her excitement. She pressed against my penis and stomach and sat me down on the bed. She said, "Here, Let me take care of this." She knelt down and put her face close to my penis.
Dream #3
I watched as two men raced in a weird environment. It was like all around them was deep blue sky. There were puffy, white tufts of clouds dotting the lower part of this sky-land. Over the clouds were occasional bright, white squares. The two men raced by hopping along from square to square.
One of the men was like me, except maybe stronger, more mature. The other was black, wearing only white shorts or underwear. At one point I may have become the man who was like me.
The black man said something (we conversed as we raced). The man's voice had an electronic sound and clattered over itself, as if it were sent through a sound system on short echo. But something about this also slowed his voice down, not to sound deeper, but just to slow the delineation of the words.
I told the man, "I forgot that when you appear by XXXXX" (something like "dimensional holograph") "your speech is delayed. But you run faster."
The man bolted ahead of me, leaping from square to square. I managed to get ahead by jumping on special "booster" squares which rocketed me along. I jumped up onto a high platform. I hit a column-like, greyish "booster." The man was still keeping pace. The floor of this platform was like purplish tile. The floating squares we jumped on were clear. Each time I would jump on one I would shout, "Diamond Square!"
Things faded away. I sat at my desk at work. A guy standing to my right said, "Yeah, she doesn't believe in work efficiency at all. She thinks being asked to be efficient is a violation against her. And if she sees anybody being efficient she'll try to get them in trouble for violating her. That's why she plays those internet games all the time. And she tries to get others to do it, too." (I felt like the "internet game" was a computer distortion of the cloud/diamond square race game I had just experienced.)
A smallish, Hispanic woman now came up to us. The male co-worker stopped talking, as if he were afraid this woman would report what we'd said to the slacker woman, or as if this woman herself was the slacker woman.
Now a lot of women had come into the area. There were a few really cute, short girls, Asian and Hispanic. I couldn't quite see or keep focus on the girls. I knew some of the women were defiantly lesbian, and that they tried to force or convince all the other women also to be defiantly lesbian.
Now the crowd cleared so I could see one of the really cute girls (her friends had moved away). All the girls were aww-ing, as if to say, "Isn't this so cute?"
A medium-sized, medium-build, blonde, Hispanic woman held the cute girl's hand. She asked the cute girl to marry her. The cute girl accepted. This, in effect, meant they were now married. The cute girl was extremely happy. She hugged the Hispanic girl tightly.
Dream #4
An iron (?) relief in a circle, like an Aztec astrological circle. A woman said something about which I had ambiguous feelings. The circle now split. The right half was still the Aztec figure. The left half was now bright blue, sparkling water, almost like a video-intensified image of water. I didn't know whether this was good or bad.
Dream #1
I got into an elevator with some of my co-workers. We went down. As we did, one of us (my boss BS?) commented on how six or seven analyst groups in my department had been fired. BS said that might be all the cuts, as far as analysts' whole teams went, but that some workers on the lower levels (strangely named levels, such as CDSs, CSDs, or CSAs?) were probably going to lose their jobs. I worried that I would lose my job. This was even more upsetting to me because I had taken so long just to get to the low level I was at.
All the time in the elevator my eyes kept shutting and my mind kept blanking out. I had to keep re-focusing myself to force my eyes open and keep my mind alert. I missed a lot of the exact details that BS was giving, though I strained to hear them.
We got out of the elevator. On the floor, we passed AT, one of the Directors of my department. I feared that I had once said something unbecoming around her.
Dream #2
I was in a house that was also a lingerie store. I wore a bra and panties, probably with realistic flower patterns. A pretty, blonde girl with short hair was attending to me.
I got an erection, which went upward, not outward, and then pushed the underwear out near the panty-waist. I walked away, into a bedroom, which had display racks of lingerie on the wall. I didn't want the girl who'd been attending me to see my erection and feel violated by how aroused I was around her.
But the girl walked into the room. The tip of my penis stuck out over the waistband of the panties. I told the woman, "Oh, don't look at me yet. I have to calm down."
The woman said, "No, no. Let me see you."
By now my penis was huge and stood a lot out of the underwear. The girl trembled and sighed. She was trying to hide her excitement. She pressed against my penis and stomach and sat me down on the bed. She said, "Here, Let me take care of this." She knelt down and put her face close to my penis.
Dream #3
I watched as two men raced in a weird environment. It was like all around them was deep blue sky. There were puffy, white tufts of clouds dotting the lower part of this sky-land. Over the clouds were occasional bright, white squares. The two men raced by hopping along from square to square.
One of the men was like me, except maybe stronger, more mature. The other was black, wearing only white shorts or underwear. At one point I may have become the man who was like me.
The black man said something (we conversed as we raced). The man's voice had an electronic sound and clattered over itself, as if it were sent through a sound system on short echo. But something about this also slowed his voice down, not to sound deeper, but just to slow the delineation of the words.
I told the man, "I forgot that when you appear by XXXXX" (something like "dimensional holograph") "your speech is delayed. But you run faster."
The man bolted ahead of me, leaping from square to square. I managed to get ahead by jumping on special "booster" squares which rocketed me along. I jumped up onto a high platform. I hit a column-like, greyish "booster." The man was still keeping pace. The floor of this platform was like purplish tile. The floating squares we jumped on were clear. Each time I would jump on one I would shout, "Diamond Square!"
Things faded away. I sat at my desk at work. A guy standing to my right said, "Yeah, she doesn't believe in work efficiency at all. She thinks being asked to be efficient is a violation against her. And if she sees anybody being efficient she'll try to get them in trouble for violating her. That's why she plays those internet games all the time. And she tries to get others to do it, too." (I felt like the "internet game" was a computer distortion of the cloud/diamond square race game I had just experienced.)
A smallish, Hispanic woman now came up to us. The male co-worker stopped talking, as if he were afraid this woman would report what we'd said to the slacker woman, or as if this woman herself was the slacker woman.
Now a lot of women had come into the area. There were a few really cute, short girls, Asian and Hispanic. I couldn't quite see or keep focus on the girls. I knew some of the women were defiantly lesbian, and that they tried to force or convince all the other women also to be defiantly lesbian.
Now the crowd cleared so I could see one of the really cute girls (her friends had moved away). All the girls were aww-ing, as if to say, "Isn't this so cute?"
A medium-sized, medium-build, blonde, Hispanic woman held the cute girl's hand. She asked the cute girl to marry her. The cute girl accepted. This, in effect, meant they were now married. The cute girl was extremely happy. She hugged the Hispanic girl tightly.
Dream #4
An iron (?) relief in a circle, like an Aztec astrological circle. A woman said something about which I had ambiguous feelings. The circle now split. The right half was still the Aztec figure. The left half was now bright blue, sparkling water, almost like a video-intensified image of water. I didn't know whether this was good or bad.
(11/2/07) dirty bathtub; wes anderson's mother movie; fired and buying stock
(Entered in paper journal at 5:15 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was in "my house" with a couple friends. The house was big, but it was very dim, as if light were always coming from some other room. The ceilings were high.
I heard my bathtub start gurgling. I knew my upstairs neighbor was making the water screwy in his apartment to send dirty water down into my bathtub.
I walked into the bathroom. The light was on. The "bathtub" was a wide, flat, rough surface, like a public shower. I thought, This place is so big and nice. It's almost just right. Why does my neighbor have to come in and screw it all up?
The floor of the "bathtub" was all dirty.
Dream #2
I (I might have been a woman) was in a bedroom with a woman who might have been my mother. The mother sat in bed in a soft, thick, white nightgown. She had thick, white blankets pulled up to her stomach. She had red hair. I knew I was a part of a movie. I, as this woman, was trying to get away from the mother. But the mother kept playing games to keep me close.
I looked around this room and thought, Wes Anderson pays such attention to detail, doesn't he? And he's so original. The wallpaper (mostly on a purple, blue, and tan scheme) was like William Morris' style. There were flowing leafs and flowers in stylized, wide forms, making intertwining patterns. But there were also geometric divisions of the patterns, especially a cross-like window pattern which abruptly displayed (???) other patterns.
I thought, Wes Anderson has taken the old and added something new to it.
I turned around and took in the room. There wasn't really a shape to the room. It was like the whole house was a big maze. I now saw into the bedroom (though not quite seeing as the daughter) as if through a billowing, gauzy, white curtain separating the two rooms (and maybe an additional small, dim space).
The movie now seemed to have been made by a different director, possibly Stephen Daldry, the person who directed The Hours. I thought, Well, maybe my old friend R would like this movie, anyway. After all, there is a strange emotional twist to the movie.
The mother was reaching out for the daughter. The whole atmosphere had a plasticky feel to it, as if the characters were plastic toys or robots, not humans.
Dream #3
I sat in some place like the basement of an office building. We all got news that we had been fired. I was outside, trying to figure out what I would do now. I thought perhaps I could practice buying stock and eventually make a living that way. I thought I would start by buying Seporcor.
I walked back down into the basement. The room was full of computers, all at long desks. I found my old computer. I logged in in some way or another. There was a statement about how I no longer worked here, but how I could access information if I wished. I thought of some conversation I had or needed to have with my boss BS.
Dream #1
I was in "my house" with a couple friends. The house was big, but it was very dim, as if light were always coming from some other room. The ceilings were high.
I heard my bathtub start gurgling. I knew my upstairs neighbor was making the water screwy in his apartment to send dirty water down into my bathtub.
I walked into the bathroom. The light was on. The "bathtub" was a wide, flat, rough surface, like a public shower. I thought, This place is so big and nice. It's almost just right. Why does my neighbor have to come in and screw it all up?
The floor of the "bathtub" was all dirty.
Dream #2
I (I might have been a woman) was in a bedroom with a woman who might have been my mother. The mother sat in bed in a soft, thick, white nightgown. She had thick, white blankets pulled up to her stomach. She had red hair. I knew I was a part of a movie. I, as this woman, was trying to get away from the mother. But the mother kept playing games to keep me close.
I looked around this room and thought, Wes Anderson pays such attention to detail, doesn't he? And he's so original. The wallpaper (mostly on a purple, blue, and tan scheme) was like William Morris' style. There were flowing leafs and flowers in stylized, wide forms, making intertwining patterns. But there were also geometric divisions of the patterns, especially a cross-like window pattern which abruptly displayed (???) other patterns.
I thought, Wes Anderson has taken the old and added something new to it.
I turned around and took in the room. There wasn't really a shape to the room. It was like the whole house was a big maze. I now saw into the bedroom (though not quite seeing as the daughter) as if through a billowing, gauzy, white curtain separating the two rooms (and maybe an additional small, dim space).
The movie now seemed to have been made by a different director, possibly Stephen Daldry, the person who directed The Hours. I thought, Well, maybe my old friend R would like this movie, anyway. After all, there is a strange emotional twist to the movie.
The mother was reaching out for the daughter. The whole atmosphere had a plasticky feel to it, as if the characters were plastic toys or robots, not humans.
Dream #3
I sat in some place like the basement of an office building. We all got news that we had been fired. I was outside, trying to figure out what I would do now. I thought perhaps I could practice buying stock and eventually make a living that way. I thought I would start by buying Seporcor.
I walked back down into the basement. The room was full of computers, all at long desks. I found my old computer. I logged in in some way or another. There was a statement about how I no longer worked here, but how I could access information if I wished. I thought of some conversation I had or needed to have with my boss BS.
Thursday, February 7, 2013
(11/8/07) lesbian kissing joke; bowling green jacket; the shortest bio; brother's suffocation
(Entered in paper journal at 5:15 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
A movie preview. Two women kissing in dim light, outdoors, possibly in a courtyard or near a pool. One woman was blonde; the other, brunette. The blonde woman eventually started up a relationship with some big man, whom I dont think I ever saw directly.
The kissing scene started over, except now this was where the man first met the blonde woman. The blonde woman was kissing the brunette and then waved over the brunette's shoulder (still holding the brunette's hands -- they seemed to be kneeling and holding hands while kissing.)
In another scene the blonde woman was in a swimming pool with the brunette, convincing the brunette that the relationship with the man would soon be revealed as a joke.
I sat (on a trunk or a box?) in a bedroom filled with grey natural light. Against the wall facing me was a desk. On the right wall, the near the wall facing me, was a doorway to a big movie theater full of people.
I could hear the music for the preview for the movie Walk Hard. I thought a point would be coming up soon where everybody would laugh. But only a few people laughed. I thought, Oh -- well, the big laugh must be coming soon.
Dream #2
I walked out of some place like a subway stop and into a grey, cold day. There were people rushing all over. The area was all torn up, like the construction area around Bowling Green.
I was cold. I pulled a black jacket out of the back pocket of my book bag. It suddenly occurred to me that I had had my jacket in there for a long time. I was afraid to put on the jacket -- I didn't want my boss BS to think I was a wimp for wearing a jacket so early in the cold season.
I walked along torn up sidewalk and a wall (to my right) of scaffolding. People even seemed to be walking in the street. Two people walked past me -- first, a woman on crutches missing her left leg; second, a man on crutches, possibly using both of his legs to walk.
Dream #3
I sat at a pale, wood table. I sat across from my boss BS. He sat a little to my left. I was resting my head on the surface of the table. The wood was thick but not very dense. It was polished, but there seemed to be little, grey nicks all over the surface.
I was explaining to BS that I had actually lived alright while I was in the Americorps volunteer programs I had been in, regardless of having made around six dollars an hour at the most recent position and -- (I tried to mention the position I'd had in New Mexico, but I got sidetracked somehow).
BS decided that he and I should have a contest of who could write the shortest bio.
Dream #4
I was in an empty room with my psychiatrist A. The room was white with pale wood floors. A sat against a wall. I sat just right and forward of the center of the room. We both probably sat in folding chairs. A may also have been my mother. We were discussing some day-to-day activities.
My brother lay before A now and pulled a big, clear, plastic bag over himself. He stuck it up like a tent. Even though he said very little, he made it clear he would try to suffocate himself. He was seriously trying to get our attention. I could feel my brother dying at points, but I simply hoped he would be alright. A/my mom seemed also to be doing a good job of ignoring my brother.
We stood up and walked out the door, now plainly talking about day-to-day activities, as if to show my brother we weren't worried about him at all. We walked down the hall. A/my mom lay on a couch. I headed toward the front door.
I saw my brother had now laid himself on a basket full of used, white towels. The basket was small, so my brother, fitting in the basket, must have been small as well. My brother held the plastic bag over himself again, as if he were going to suffocate himself.
Dream #1
A movie preview. Two women kissing in dim light, outdoors, possibly in a courtyard or near a pool. One woman was blonde; the other, brunette. The blonde woman eventually started up a relationship with some big man, whom I dont think I ever saw directly.
The kissing scene started over, except now this was where the man first met the blonde woman. The blonde woman was kissing the brunette and then waved over the brunette's shoulder (still holding the brunette's hands -- they seemed to be kneeling and holding hands while kissing.)
In another scene the blonde woman was in a swimming pool with the brunette, convincing the brunette that the relationship with the man would soon be revealed as a joke.
I sat (on a trunk or a box?) in a bedroom filled with grey natural light. Against the wall facing me was a desk. On the right wall, the near the wall facing me, was a doorway to a big movie theater full of people.
I could hear the music for the preview for the movie Walk Hard. I thought a point would be coming up soon where everybody would laugh. But only a few people laughed. I thought, Oh -- well, the big laugh must be coming soon.
Dream #2
I walked out of some place like a subway stop and into a grey, cold day. There were people rushing all over. The area was all torn up, like the construction area around Bowling Green.
I was cold. I pulled a black jacket out of the back pocket of my book bag. It suddenly occurred to me that I had had my jacket in there for a long time. I was afraid to put on the jacket -- I didn't want my boss BS to think I was a wimp for wearing a jacket so early in the cold season.
I walked along torn up sidewalk and a wall (to my right) of scaffolding. People even seemed to be walking in the street. Two people walked past me -- first, a woman on crutches missing her left leg; second, a man on crutches, possibly using both of his legs to walk.
Dream #3
I sat at a pale, wood table. I sat across from my boss BS. He sat a little to my left. I was resting my head on the surface of the table. The wood was thick but not very dense. It was polished, but there seemed to be little, grey nicks all over the surface.
I was explaining to BS that I had actually lived alright while I was in the Americorps volunteer programs I had been in, regardless of having made around six dollars an hour at the most recent position and -- (I tried to mention the position I'd had in New Mexico, but I got sidetracked somehow).
BS decided that he and I should have a contest of who could write the shortest bio.
Dream #4
I was in an empty room with my psychiatrist A. The room was white with pale wood floors. A sat against a wall. I sat just right and forward of the center of the room. We both probably sat in folding chairs. A may also have been my mother. We were discussing some day-to-day activities.
My brother lay before A now and pulled a big, clear, plastic bag over himself. He stuck it up like a tent. Even though he said very little, he made it clear he would try to suffocate himself. He was seriously trying to get our attention. I could feel my brother dying at points, but I simply hoped he would be alright. A/my mom seemed also to be doing a good job of ignoring my brother.
We stood up and walked out the door, now plainly talking about day-to-day activities, as if to show my brother we weren't worried about him at all. We walked down the hall. A/my mom lay on a couch. I headed toward the front door.
I saw my brother had now laid himself on a basket full of used, white towels. The basket was small, so my brother, fitting in the basket, must have been small as well. My brother held the plastic bag over himself again, as if he were going to suffocate himself.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
(1/19/08) burning the woman/monster; ritz-carlton service; coppola's generous man; sawyerpunk
(Entered in paper journal at 9:40 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and Third Avenue.)
Dream #1
I was in a place that looked like a living room but which must also have been something like a space station. I watched two people closed into a bedroom in a dark hallway. Of the two people in the first bedroom, one closed the other into a small closet. I couldn't see this; I just knew it. The one then tortured the other. I sat out in this living room area, which was also dim and was set so it was to the back of the (three) bedrooms and opposite the hallway.
I sat with a person I could not see and listened to the "other" person being tortured. The person sitting next to me said, "You better not think anything bad is happening in there."
I thought about it for a minute and convinced myself I hadn't heard anything. But then I heard the tortured person scream. I knew I needed to stop that person from being tortured.
The person who had been sitting by me was now somewhere else, possibly in the hallway. The person shouted, "You think it's going to be easy to think that person's being tortured? Now you'll have to deal with me! Or are you afraid?"
I snuck around the corner and into the hallway to find the person, who, I assumed, had transformed into a monster. I had some sort of weapon like a sword. But now it was like I was back in the dark room and heading toward the hallway.
Something happened in the hallway, an encounter with the person/monster, maybe even with the tortured person. Now I needed to go back to the hallway and fight the person/monster again.
I had a severed head, which I attached to a thick rope and lit on fire. I whirled this head around clockwise, on my right side, as I walked around the corner and back toward the hallway.
The person/monster was in the hallway, yelling about how afraid I was. I managed to use the severed head to catch the person/monster on fire. The person/monster and I stood face-to-face in a lit living room up near the corner of the bedroom in which, apparently, were the tortured person and torturer.
The person/monster still wasn't quite a person yet. But now "it" was a woman, like Rachel in Blade Runner. The person/monster wore a red, velvety night robe, which was lit with flames, as if a film of flammable material coated the robe, so that it was burning instead of the robe.
The woman said something like I hadn't gotten rid of her yet, nor would I want to get rid of her if I wanted everything to be alright with the people I was trying to save, as if by killing her I'd offend her so she would want to hurt the people even more than she did now.
The woman opened her robe. She was naked underneath. Her body was white, delicate, elegant, completely unburnt. I was angry. I swung the flaming at at the woman again, trying to catch her body on fire. I might have succeeded.
Dream #2
I was in a hotel room, possibly at a Ritz-Carlton. It was my boss BS' room, but there were a few people in the room, as if there were some work-related task going on.
BS told me he needed me to stay at the hotel. I said okay. I looked out a door. As I backed out the door and sat the door close in front of me, I noticed how that room had been wide and tall, ornate, like a French seventeenth-century (?) room. The "bed" I would sleep on was just a mattress, maybe eight feet by eight feet by six inches, set into a niche in the floor. The bed was the last thing I saw as the door closed.
I was now in a room all by myself. The other room seemed to have been lit by natural light, as if by a large window. This room had no windows and was lit by a light like a soft museum light. The room was smaller, but still spacious, with soft green walls. It was like an entry room, like a little foyer. The front door was to my left as I faced the door to the larger room.
I was on the phone with room service. I may have been trying to get a meal. But room service didn't want to help me. They thought I was just a nobody. I might have told them that if they didn't help me I was going to let BS know. Room service suddenly changed their attitude and were willing to help me. I told them to bring the meal at a certain time. I was still upset that room service wouldn't help me out of common courtesy.
I walked out the front door. The day was snowy. It was like we were in the mountains or the wilderness somewhere. I was now driving. I was by myself out on a road like a road on the outskirts of a suburban area. It was late afternoon, with a heron-grey sky and paper-yellow band of horizon. I thought I would need to turn left, onto and across a wide, slightly snowy field, to get to someplace where I should have been or was scheduled to be.
I turned left and drove up onto the sidewalk and partly onto the field. But then I thought, What am I doing? I don't need to go this way. I might no longer have been sure of where I was going after all. I might have turned back out onto the road so that I was driving back to where I had been driving from.
Dream #3
I sat onto the hood of a car, on the passenger side. I lay back against the windshield. The street the car was on was like a suburban street, but it was busy, and down at the end of it was a street as bright and busy as Times Square. I could even see a movie theater, old style, right at the intersection. Cars and people passed in front of the theater. The day was warm and sunny.
My brother walked up to me, on my right side, from behind. He aid he was getting ready to go to my dad's house pretty soon. I think I was kind of planning to go along. But then I decided not to. I wanted my brother to have all my dad's attention. I wanted my brother to feel like he was liked the best. My brother may have told me about going to see a movie with my dad. I told him I hoped they would have fun.
I thought about a new movie by Francis Ford Coppola. It began in black and white, like a silent film, but all the people in it were modern. A lot of people piled onto a silver train. They were all packed in so much together that people were being pushed partway out windows.
I liked watching as the train pulled away. It was just one long shot. It was interesting to see the different people through the windows (very small windows, like on airplanes) and how all the different people were observing and reacting to their surroundings as the train pulled away.
Now the train had arrived at something like a rest stop. A waiter came along the outside of the train and passed beer and soda in to people as they would pass money out to him.
I now saw inside. The view was now more like real life than like a silent movie. A man in his twenties or thirties, very put-together and handsome, was pulling some soda in through the window. He sat on a tall stool in a bar-like area.
A family -- an oldish, fattish, baldish man and some young children, maybe blonde girls -- had missed their chance to pass their money out the window for some soda. The young man said, "Oh, it's no problem. You can have some of mine."
The older man said, "Are you sure? We really couldn't."
The younger man said, "Please. I have too much for just myself." He poured soda from a big pitcher into smaller glasses.
Dream #4
I walked into a big room like a high school gymnasium. Daylight came in through the windows. There were about fifty people around an elevated stage on which a rock band was playing. The crowd and the rock band may have been mostly or all women. At first I thought the singer was a man. The song had been about trying to get a girl. But now I saw the singer was a girl.
Now it seemed like there were a whole lot of people in the band. The band members had a grungy, but well-made-up look, very clean, but somehow tough and plain. Their clothes were mostly black and very dark, dull green. Even their instruments seemed to have a clunky but fashionable look, like they were made out of a lot of black-coated cords. I liked it.
The crowd intimidated me. I thought they'd think I was here just because I thought I could hit on girls -- the crowd was, except for me, all girls. I was afraid they'd try to discourage me from what they'd thought I was here for by showing me that they were all gay. But I didn't want to hit on the girls. I was here for the music, which I was really enjoying.
I walked away, back away and to the left of the crowd, to a little side room with a folding chair, a guitar, and an amp. I picked up the guitar and noticed it was actually a bass. The strings were coated in black plastic, like electrical wires or amp cords. But they were all thinner than the fattest bass string. The guitar body was also small for a bass -- maybe guitar-sized instead of bass-sized. The body of the guitar was shaped almost like a Les Paul guitar. It was gold-glittery with a white pick-guard.
I thought this guitar was incredibly cleverly made. It must have been owned by someone who was here right now. It simply proved, I thought, what a talented bunch of people were here right now.
I held the guitar as if I were playing it a little. Some girls toward the back of the crowd looked at me, visibly annoyed. They thought I was only playing the guitar to impress them, so I could hit on them once I got their attention.
To defend myself I cried out, "It's the guitar! Isn't it cool? It's a seven-string bass! Isn't that witty?"
But the girls just kept looking at me like I was an idiot.
I thought I would try to find a friend and talk to him about the guitar. I thought that would prove that I wasn't trying to share my excitement with the girls simply to get their attention and then hit on them. I yelled out for a high school friend of mine. "JW! JW! He has to be here. Nobody else could own a bass this witty."
I stood out on an empty, industrial street corner at the top of a hill. It was a hot day. A man, probably JW, sat on a plastic and metal chair, playing the bass, which sounded a lot like a guitar the way Woody Guthrie might play it.
JW was looking at me suspiciously. He knew I'd been playing his guitar. He thought I'd been trying to steal it. To prove I hadn't been trying to steal the guitar I began singing lyrics along with JW's Woody Guthrie-esque playing. The song was a "funny" blend of old-style, back-hills music and modern topics and objects.
As I sang I walked in the gutter, which was littered with all kinds of garbage, mostly wet and slimy. I started singing about Tom Sawyer. I noticed I was barefoot. I walked carefully around wet, slimy piles of grainy material like litter-box filling. I got back up onto the sidewalk. I was worried that something disgusting had seeped into my skin from the dampness of the street near the piles of cat-litter.
Now JW and I were both singing the song about Tom Sawyer. it seemed as we sang the song that I had an image of the cover of the Norton edition of Roughing It before my eyes.
Dream #1
I was in a place that looked like a living room but which must also have been something like a space station. I watched two people closed into a bedroom in a dark hallway. Of the two people in the first bedroom, one closed the other into a small closet. I couldn't see this; I just knew it. The one then tortured the other. I sat out in this living room area, which was also dim and was set so it was to the back of the (three) bedrooms and opposite the hallway.
I sat with a person I could not see and listened to the "other" person being tortured. The person sitting next to me said, "You better not think anything bad is happening in there."
I thought about it for a minute and convinced myself I hadn't heard anything. But then I heard the tortured person scream. I knew I needed to stop that person from being tortured.
The person who had been sitting by me was now somewhere else, possibly in the hallway. The person shouted, "You think it's going to be easy to think that person's being tortured? Now you'll have to deal with me! Or are you afraid?"
I snuck around the corner and into the hallway to find the person, who, I assumed, had transformed into a monster. I had some sort of weapon like a sword. But now it was like I was back in the dark room and heading toward the hallway.
Something happened in the hallway, an encounter with the person/monster, maybe even with the tortured person. Now I needed to go back to the hallway and fight the person/monster again.
I had a severed head, which I attached to a thick rope and lit on fire. I whirled this head around clockwise, on my right side, as I walked around the corner and back toward the hallway.
The person/monster was in the hallway, yelling about how afraid I was. I managed to use the severed head to catch the person/monster on fire. The person/monster and I stood face-to-face in a lit living room up near the corner of the bedroom in which, apparently, were the tortured person and torturer.
The person/monster still wasn't quite a person yet. But now "it" was a woman, like Rachel in Blade Runner. The person/monster wore a red, velvety night robe, which was lit with flames, as if a film of flammable material coated the robe, so that it was burning instead of the robe.
The woman said something like I hadn't gotten rid of her yet, nor would I want to get rid of her if I wanted everything to be alright with the people I was trying to save, as if by killing her I'd offend her so she would want to hurt the people even more than she did now.
The woman opened her robe. She was naked underneath. Her body was white, delicate, elegant, completely unburnt. I was angry. I swung the flaming at at the woman again, trying to catch her body on fire. I might have succeeded.
Dream #2
I was in a hotel room, possibly at a Ritz-Carlton. It was my boss BS' room, but there were a few people in the room, as if there were some work-related task going on.
BS told me he needed me to stay at the hotel. I said okay. I looked out a door. As I backed out the door and sat the door close in front of me, I noticed how that room had been wide and tall, ornate, like a French seventeenth-century (?) room. The "bed" I would sleep on was just a mattress, maybe eight feet by eight feet by six inches, set into a niche in the floor. The bed was the last thing I saw as the door closed.
I was now in a room all by myself. The other room seemed to have been lit by natural light, as if by a large window. This room had no windows and was lit by a light like a soft museum light. The room was smaller, but still spacious, with soft green walls. It was like an entry room, like a little foyer. The front door was to my left as I faced the door to the larger room.
I was on the phone with room service. I may have been trying to get a meal. But room service didn't want to help me. They thought I was just a nobody. I might have told them that if they didn't help me I was going to let BS know. Room service suddenly changed their attitude and were willing to help me. I told them to bring the meal at a certain time. I was still upset that room service wouldn't help me out of common courtesy.
I walked out the front door. The day was snowy. It was like we were in the mountains or the wilderness somewhere. I was now driving. I was by myself out on a road like a road on the outskirts of a suburban area. It was late afternoon, with a heron-grey sky and paper-yellow band of horizon. I thought I would need to turn left, onto and across a wide, slightly snowy field, to get to someplace where I should have been or was scheduled to be.
I turned left and drove up onto the sidewalk and partly onto the field. But then I thought, What am I doing? I don't need to go this way. I might no longer have been sure of where I was going after all. I might have turned back out onto the road so that I was driving back to where I had been driving from.
Dream #3
I sat onto the hood of a car, on the passenger side. I lay back against the windshield. The street the car was on was like a suburban street, but it was busy, and down at the end of it was a street as bright and busy as Times Square. I could even see a movie theater, old style, right at the intersection. Cars and people passed in front of the theater. The day was warm and sunny.
My brother walked up to me, on my right side, from behind. He aid he was getting ready to go to my dad's house pretty soon. I think I was kind of planning to go along. But then I decided not to. I wanted my brother to have all my dad's attention. I wanted my brother to feel like he was liked the best. My brother may have told me about going to see a movie with my dad. I told him I hoped they would have fun.
I thought about a new movie by Francis Ford Coppola. It began in black and white, like a silent film, but all the people in it were modern. A lot of people piled onto a silver train. They were all packed in so much together that people were being pushed partway out windows.
I liked watching as the train pulled away. It was just one long shot. It was interesting to see the different people through the windows (very small windows, like on airplanes) and how all the different people were observing and reacting to their surroundings as the train pulled away.
Now the train had arrived at something like a rest stop. A waiter came along the outside of the train and passed beer and soda in to people as they would pass money out to him.
I now saw inside. The view was now more like real life than like a silent movie. A man in his twenties or thirties, very put-together and handsome, was pulling some soda in through the window. He sat on a tall stool in a bar-like area.
A family -- an oldish, fattish, baldish man and some young children, maybe blonde girls -- had missed their chance to pass their money out the window for some soda. The young man said, "Oh, it's no problem. You can have some of mine."
The older man said, "Are you sure? We really couldn't."
The younger man said, "Please. I have too much for just myself." He poured soda from a big pitcher into smaller glasses.
Dream #4
I walked into a big room like a high school gymnasium. Daylight came in through the windows. There were about fifty people around an elevated stage on which a rock band was playing. The crowd and the rock band may have been mostly or all women. At first I thought the singer was a man. The song had been about trying to get a girl. But now I saw the singer was a girl.
Now it seemed like there were a whole lot of people in the band. The band members had a grungy, but well-made-up look, very clean, but somehow tough and plain. Their clothes were mostly black and very dark, dull green. Even their instruments seemed to have a clunky but fashionable look, like they were made out of a lot of black-coated cords. I liked it.
The crowd intimidated me. I thought they'd think I was here just because I thought I could hit on girls -- the crowd was, except for me, all girls. I was afraid they'd try to discourage me from what they'd thought I was here for by showing me that they were all gay. But I didn't want to hit on the girls. I was here for the music, which I was really enjoying.
I walked away, back away and to the left of the crowd, to a little side room with a folding chair, a guitar, and an amp. I picked up the guitar and noticed it was actually a bass. The strings were coated in black plastic, like electrical wires or amp cords. But they were all thinner than the fattest bass string. The guitar body was also small for a bass -- maybe guitar-sized instead of bass-sized. The body of the guitar was shaped almost like a Les Paul guitar. It was gold-glittery with a white pick-guard.
I thought this guitar was incredibly cleverly made. It must have been owned by someone who was here right now. It simply proved, I thought, what a talented bunch of people were here right now.
I held the guitar as if I were playing it a little. Some girls toward the back of the crowd looked at me, visibly annoyed. They thought I was only playing the guitar to impress them, so I could hit on them once I got their attention.
To defend myself I cried out, "It's the guitar! Isn't it cool? It's a seven-string bass! Isn't that witty?"
But the girls just kept looking at me like I was an idiot.
I thought I would try to find a friend and talk to him about the guitar. I thought that would prove that I wasn't trying to share my excitement with the girls simply to get their attention and then hit on them. I yelled out for a high school friend of mine. "JW! JW! He has to be here. Nobody else could own a bass this witty."
I stood out on an empty, industrial street corner at the top of a hill. It was a hot day. A man, probably JW, sat on a plastic and metal chair, playing the bass, which sounded a lot like a guitar the way Woody Guthrie might play it.
JW was looking at me suspiciously. He knew I'd been playing his guitar. He thought I'd been trying to steal it. To prove I hadn't been trying to steal the guitar I began singing lyrics along with JW's Woody Guthrie-esque playing. The song was a "funny" blend of old-style, back-hills music and modern topics and objects.
As I sang I walked in the gutter, which was littered with all kinds of garbage, mostly wet and slimy. I started singing about Tom Sawyer. I noticed I was barefoot. I walked carefully around wet, slimy piles of grainy material like litter-box filling. I got back up onto the sidewalk. I was worried that something disgusting had seeped into my skin from the dampness of the street near the piles of cat-litter.
Now JW and I were both singing the song about Tom Sawyer. it seemed as we sang the song that I had an image of the cover of the Norton edition of Roughing It before my eyes.
Saturday, January 26, 2013
(1/30/08) they didn't let just anybody stay here
(Entered in paper journal at 6 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was in a place like a cabin in the woods. It was supposed to be a hotel. I was in the living room with three other people, two of whom were possibly a young woman and an older man. All three were at a longish table sat against the wall on its short side between two bedrooms.
I wanted to be at this hotel. The people told me that they didn't let just anybody stay here. The people who stayed here had to be quiet and studious like them. I sat down at the table and opened my book, hoping that by reading with the people I could prove I was studious.
I stood outside a house in the mountain-suburbs. I was with my family. I walked just inside the front doorway. An oldish woman with long, white hair, blue eyes, a fattish, dumpy look, and wearing a brightly colored, plaid dress, like my mother might wear, sat on a chair or a box in front of me. The woman was talking to me. I thought of her as my great-grandmother on my grandmother's side of the family. Her speech didn't make much sense.
My aunt B led me inside the living room to a box maybe five feet long and one and a half feet deep. There were all kinds of paintings and drawings inside. My aunt B stood to my left. She wore an orange shirt.
My aunt B pulled some of the paintings and drawings out of the box and showed them to me. She told me they were drawings she'd made when she was a child. I was pretty impressed. The styles and subjects were all different.
My aunt B made a comment, possibly about how maybe the pieces weren't all as good as she thought. I patted her on the back and embraced her to encourage her, but I also did or said something that might have made her feel even worse.
We noticed that on the box flaps were huge swatches of green and blue crayon marking. Either I or my aunt B said that one of my cousins, either AH or B, probably made those markings when they were trying to be artistic.
I sat in a dining room table with a few people from my company. The table was longish, oval, and dark. The room was dim, the only light being that which came in from a lit, probably orange-walled, room behind us.
My senior co-worker, and one of the foremost analysts in my company, DC, was to my right. Her hair was undone and straight. Her bangs came straight down over her forehead. DC was telling me how everybody would like to hire me as a first-year analyst, but how I needed to get all my degrees first. DC called into the back room to my boss BS. BS stuck his head in and agreed with DC.
I walked into a big room which must have been lit by daylight. It was a conference room, but there were folding chairs all over the place, haphazardly placed, as if this were just some big, casual living room. The carpet was like the carpet of a living room, thick and grey. There were tall, dark wood columns running through the room. At the front of the room was a folding table. I sat in one of the folding chairs near the middle of the room.
Somebody introduced ML, my company's main economics analyst. ML got up and presented. But I couldn't understand a thing he said. It was like all his ideas kept trailing of.
We now got up, as if it were a break time, or time for some other presentation. Then we came back. I went to the wall first, as if to gather some of my personal belongings before sitting down. I had to explain to somebody that he hadn't heard wrong, that this was another presentation by ML, picking up where ML had left off before.
I might have stayed standing. ML came back. He was now dressed in a light blue spandex outfit and cape, including a mask (?) that was pulled over his face and covered about the top half of his face. ML said that since it was New Year's, and we were all going to the New Year's party dressed up, that ML would just give his presentation dressed up. Nobody thought this made any sense, but I thought it was fine. ML started talking and not making any sense again. I wondered how we were going to get anything out of this presentation.
Now SC, one of the main analysts for the company's mortgage-backed securities division, got up to speak, as if to clarify everything ML had just said. Everybody cheered as SC got up -- not in contrast to ML, but just because he was so famous. But something about the cheering annoyed me. I thought, Can't we just get down to business? Why does everything have to be just showing off or nonsense?
Dream #1
I was in a place like a cabin in the woods. It was supposed to be a hotel. I was in the living room with three other people, two of whom were possibly a young woman and an older man. All three were at a longish table sat against the wall on its short side between two bedrooms.
I wanted to be at this hotel. The people told me that they didn't let just anybody stay here. The people who stayed here had to be quiet and studious like them. I sat down at the table and opened my book, hoping that by reading with the people I could prove I was studious.
I stood outside a house in the mountain-suburbs. I was with my family. I walked just inside the front doorway. An oldish woman with long, white hair, blue eyes, a fattish, dumpy look, and wearing a brightly colored, plaid dress, like my mother might wear, sat on a chair or a box in front of me. The woman was talking to me. I thought of her as my great-grandmother on my grandmother's side of the family. Her speech didn't make much sense.
My aunt B led me inside the living room to a box maybe five feet long and one and a half feet deep. There were all kinds of paintings and drawings inside. My aunt B stood to my left. She wore an orange shirt.
My aunt B pulled some of the paintings and drawings out of the box and showed them to me. She told me they were drawings she'd made when she was a child. I was pretty impressed. The styles and subjects were all different.
My aunt B made a comment, possibly about how maybe the pieces weren't all as good as she thought. I patted her on the back and embraced her to encourage her, but I also did or said something that might have made her feel even worse.
We noticed that on the box flaps were huge swatches of green and blue crayon marking. Either I or my aunt B said that one of my cousins, either AH or B, probably made those markings when they were trying to be artistic.
I sat in a dining room table with a few people from my company. The table was longish, oval, and dark. The room was dim, the only light being that which came in from a lit, probably orange-walled, room behind us.
My senior co-worker, and one of the foremost analysts in my company, DC, was to my right. Her hair was undone and straight. Her bangs came straight down over her forehead. DC was telling me how everybody would like to hire me as a first-year analyst, but how I needed to get all my degrees first. DC called into the back room to my boss BS. BS stuck his head in and agreed with DC.
I walked into a big room which must have been lit by daylight. It was a conference room, but there were folding chairs all over the place, haphazardly placed, as if this were just some big, casual living room. The carpet was like the carpet of a living room, thick and grey. There were tall, dark wood columns running through the room. At the front of the room was a folding table. I sat in one of the folding chairs near the middle of the room.
Somebody introduced ML, my company's main economics analyst. ML got up and presented. But I couldn't understand a thing he said. It was like all his ideas kept trailing of.
We now got up, as if it were a break time, or time for some other presentation. Then we came back. I went to the wall first, as if to gather some of my personal belongings before sitting down. I had to explain to somebody that he hadn't heard wrong, that this was another presentation by ML, picking up where ML had left off before.
I might have stayed standing. ML came back. He was now dressed in a light blue spandex outfit and cape, including a mask (?) that was pulled over his face and covered about the top half of his face. ML said that since it was New Year's, and we were all going to the New Year's party dressed up, that ML would just give his presentation dressed up. Nobody thought this made any sense, but I thought it was fine. ML started talking and not making any sense again. I wondered how we were going to get anything out of this presentation.
Now SC, one of the main analysts for the company's mortgage-backed securities division, got up to speak, as if to clarify everything ML had just said. Everybody cheered as SC got up -- not in contrast to ML, but just because he was so famous. But something about the cheering annoyed me. I thought, Can't we just get down to business? Why does everything have to be just showing off or nonsense?
(2/20/08) treasury and fed; nwne; the shawmut; waiting for mom; duane reade
(Entered in paper journal at 6 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was in a dark place, maybe inside a house and then out on a lawn at night. I heard about my old friend R killing someone. R was now threatening to kill me because I worked for the US Treasury.
I walked through some concrete area with dead or dormant weeds spiking up along the walls. I was thinking to myself how I might start working somewhere else, maybe the Federal Reserve. But I needed to give myself time to make the move.
Dream #2
I was in a house with my mother, my sister, and probably my brother. The weather was a little wintry, but tornadoes were causing destruction nearby. The tornadoes were in the northwest of the city. We were in the northeast. I saw in my mind a diagram of quadrants, with the northwest and northeast quadrants labeled.
I told my mom we should get out of here. I sat on the floor by my sister. My mom stood over us. My mom said, "There's nothing to worry about. The storms are in the northwest."
I said, "But they'll move!"
My mom said, "Alright, alright. Everybody into the car."
I was in the kitchen. I slung a small, plastic bag of something over my shoulder. Some animal like a rabbit pulled the whole thing into its mouth. I turned around and pulled the animal off the bag. The animal was now like a cocker spaniel. The dog scurried around violently. I knelt down. I may have been wearing shorts. I had bare legs. The dog was biting my legs.
All around us were empty boxes of food, like cereal boxes. I knew the dog was hungry. I tried to find it some food. Only one box still had food in it. The food was like Froot Loops, but it was like someone had already poured milk on them and the milk had dried, leaving the cereal all caked together. I knew that food probably wasn't good for anything to eat. But I was still trying to get it out of the box to feed the dog.
Dream #3
I was in a hotel room in Boston. I might just have come back in after having been out for a couple hours. The room was dimmish. I stood before the door. The cleaning lady knocked and then came inside. She said she was sorry if she was bothering me. I said it was no big deal.
I walked over and sat on the bed. The bed was undone, the blankets in a heap. I saw a used Band-Aid on my bed. i knew it wasn't my Band-Aid, and that I had laid in bed all night with my feet touching somebody's used Band-Aid.
I turned on the TV. I thought about my old co-worker and mentor ES or my boss BS having once said they weren't particular about the hotel they stayed in. They could even stay in the hotel I was in right now -- the Shawmut.
Dream #4
I was at "my dad's house," which was somewhere in the woods. We were getting ready to go, possibly to a movie in a nearby city. But we realized that my mom had taken all the keys for the cars. (This is odd -- we all had handfuls of sets of keys. It was more like the cars were all gone.)
I was angry that my mom could leave us stuck like this without leaving us any idea of when she would be back. My sister and I tried to call my mom on her cell phone, but my mom wasn't answering. Finally I said, "I can get out of here myself. I don't need a car. I can walk."
I imagined a few trails running through a mountain meadow. My only fear was that my mom would come after I'd started walking and make me look like a fool for having been impatient to leave.
Dream #5
(Vision?) I stood before a mirrored wall with a Duane Reade sign and doorway around it.
Dream #1
I was in a dark place, maybe inside a house and then out on a lawn at night. I heard about my old friend R killing someone. R was now threatening to kill me because I worked for the US Treasury.
I walked through some concrete area with dead or dormant weeds spiking up along the walls. I was thinking to myself how I might start working somewhere else, maybe the Federal Reserve. But I needed to give myself time to make the move.
Dream #2
I was in a house with my mother, my sister, and probably my brother. The weather was a little wintry, but tornadoes were causing destruction nearby. The tornadoes were in the northwest of the city. We were in the northeast. I saw in my mind a diagram of quadrants, with the northwest and northeast quadrants labeled.
I told my mom we should get out of here. I sat on the floor by my sister. My mom stood over us. My mom said, "There's nothing to worry about. The storms are in the northwest."
I said, "But they'll move!"
My mom said, "Alright, alright. Everybody into the car."
I was in the kitchen. I slung a small, plastic bag of something over my shoulder. Some animal like a rabbit pulled the whole thing into its mouth. I turned around and pulled the animal off the bag. The animal was now like a cocker spaniel. The dog scurried around violently. I knelt down. I may have been wearing shorts. I had bare legs. The dog was biting my legs.
All around us were empty boxes of food, like cereal boxes. I knew the dog was hungry. I tried to find it some food. Only one box still had food in it. The food was like Froot Loops, but it was like someone had already poured milk on them and the milk had dried, leaving the cereal all caked together. I knew that food probably wasn't good for anything to eat. But I was still trying to get it out of the box to feed the dog.
Dream #3
I was in a hotel room in Boston. I might just have come back in after having been out for a couple hours. The room was dimmish. I stood before the door. The cleaning lady knocked and then came inside. She said she was sorry if she was bothering me. I said it was no big deal.
I walked over and sat on the bed. The bed was undone, the blankets in a heap. I saw a used Band-Aid on my bed. i knew it wasn't my Band-Aid, and that I had laid in bed all night with my feet touching somebody's used Band-Aid.
I turned on the TV. I thought about my old co-worker and mentor ES or my boss BS having once said they weren't particular about the hotel they stayed in. They could even stay in the hotel I was in right now -- the Shawmut.
Dream #4
I was at "my dad's house," which was somewhere in the woods. We were getting ready to go, possibly to a movie in a nearby city. But we realized that my mom had taken all the keys for the cars. (This is odd -- we all had handfuls of sets of keys. It was more like the cars were all gone.)
I was angry that my mom could leave us stuck like this without leaving us any idea of when she would be back. My sister and I tried to call my mom on her cell phone, but my mom wasn't answering. Finally I said, "I can get out of here myself. I don't need a car. I can walk."
I imagined a few trails running through a mountain meadow. My only fear was that my mom would come after I'd started walking and make me look like a fool for having been impatient to leave.
Dream #5
(Vision?) I stood before a mirrored wall with a Duane Reade sign and doorway around it.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
(3/14/08) x-acto knife parking lot
(Entered in paper journal at 5:45 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was in a mall, possibly with a woman. We got somewhere and then got out of the building through what must have seemed like a regular door at first but was then like a chain link fence crowded over with asphalt. We pushed through the fence. Now we stood out in the night air on a vast parking lot and just outside the small lot we had just exited. (???)
The woman and I stood in a circle with a group of people, probably my boss BS and my co-workers DE and EB. I may have been explaining to BS, DE, and EB that the woman and I hadn't (?) gone through the lot (through which we had, in fact, just gone) because there was a puddle on the other side of the fence.
A black, homeless man now approached us for money. Everybody else softly told the man we weren't interested. But I loudly yelled at the man to go away. Then another man, a tall, pale white man with long, black hair and a long, grey overcoat came up and asked us for money. He might have been more aggressive than the black man had been. I yelled at this man, too.
The man pulled out a yellow-handled X-Acto knife and then dropped it. Either he or I picked it back up. He put it in his pocket and walked away. He yelled back over his right shoulder at me that I shouldn't think I was safe, that he would kill me. He may have been a drug dealer who was trying to lure us into taking drugs. I had stopped him before he succeeded.
I told EB, "People tell me things like that all the time."
EB told me, "You should give me a list of names of people who tell you that. I've been looking for people to kill. You'd be giving me an excuse."
We were all walking across the parking lot and over to another mall. We walked down a couple of steps as we approached the other mall.
DE was talking about having different personalities. Each personality was a different mask. One mask was a veil. Another one was something like a butterfly-shaped piece of cardboard that DE would place over his nose. Another was purple face paint with silver accents and deep, long, black markings over the eyes.
As DE revealed his last mask, we were sitting in something like a restaurant (like a Denny's) overlooking a mall parking lot. It was around breakfast time. DE was making weird, tiny, chirpy, little noises. I realized that each mask DE wore was worn so DE could try to make me like him by showing how weak-charactered he was.
Dream #1
I was in a mall, possibly with a woman. We got somewhere and then got out of the building through what must have seemed like a regular door at first but was then like a chain link fence crowded over with asphalt. We pushed through the fence. Now we stood out in the night air on a vast parking lot and just outside the small lot we had just exited. (???)
The woman and I stood in a circle with a group of people, probably my boss BS and my co-workers DE and EB. I may have been explaining to BS, DE, and EB that the woman and I hadn't (?) gone through the lot (through which we had, in fact, just gone) because there was a puddle on the other side of the fence.
A black, homeless man now approached us for money. Everybody else softly told the man we weren't interested. But I loudly yelled at the man to go away. Then another man, a tall, pale white man with long, black hair and a long, grey overcoat came up and asked us for money. He might have been more aggressive than the black man had been. I yelled at this man, too.
The man pulled out a yellow-handled X-Acto knife and then dropped it. Either he or I picked it back up. He put it in his pocket and walked away. He yelled back over his right shoulder at me that I shouldn't think I was safe, that he would kill me. He may have been a drug dealer who was trying to lure us into taking drugs. I had stopped him before he succeeded.
I told EB, "People tell me things like that all the time."
EB told me, "You should give me a list of names of people who tell you that. I've been looking for people to kill. You'd be giving me an excuse."
We were all walking across the parking lot and over to another mall. We walked down a couple of steps as we approached the other mall.
DE was talking about having different personalities. Each personality was a different mask. One mask was a veil. Another one was something like a butterfly-shaped piece of cardboard that DE would place over his nose. Another was purple face paint with silver accents and deep, long, black markings over the eyes.
As DE revealed his last mask, we were sitting in something like a restaurant (like a Denny's) overlooking a mall parking lot. It was around breakfast time. DE was making weird, tiny, chirpy, little noises. I realized that each mask DE wore was worn so DE could try to make me like him by showing how weak-charactered he was.
Monday, January 21, 2013
(4/23/08) helping and neglecting; patient and doctor; strange, beautiful UN scandal
(Entered in paper journal at 6:13 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)
Dream #1
I was in an area like an office reception area combined with an empty department store. It was pretty quiet. None of the lights were turned on. Only natural light lit the building, from tall windows on a wall to my right.
A few people stood in front of a long "reception desk" that seemed more like an airport check-in counter or a nurse's station. I walked past this station.
Someone behind the counter told me he couldn't figure out some sort of billing statement. I thought, Well, I can figure it out. But I don't want to be mistaken for working here. Nevertheless, I went behind the counter and took a look at the receipt, since somebody, I knew, was waiting for it.
There were two receipts: a yellow, carbon-copy-like one that was maybe three inches by five inches, and a small, white printout that was maybe three inches by one inch. There were two longish numbers on the receipts. These numbers needed to be checked, to make sure they matched on the two receipts. If the numbers matched, a phone number was then to be called. The number dialed would provide more information.
As I was getting ready to call the phone number, the phone rang on another line. I let that phone ring a couple times, hoping the person I was trying would pick up, and that I could then put him on hold to answer the other call. But after a few rings I had to answer. I walked over to a big control board on the window-wall side of the "reception-desk" and flipped a lit purple switch. My call was put on hold.
I answered the other line. It was one of my boss BS' clients. She sounded very angry. She said, "Don't you know who I am? How dare you keep the phone ringing so long?" She started asking me a research question.
BS walked past me. I thought I would hand the call over to him. But I hesitated. I considered that I would probably get in trouble for having kept a client call ringing on the phone for so long.
Dream #2
In a stone basement a man was going to perform an operation on another man. I was the patient. But I was also the doctor. The patient was an older man, like the professor in The Blue Angel, but a little more wrinkled and with less hair. The doctor was alternately a man like the patient and a younger man, tall and attractive, but with kind of scraggly hair.
I (patient) lay on a kind of dingy hospital bed. The light all around was dim. I might have been falling asleep. I might have been partly cut open already. I knew was was going to have a new kind of graft -- a piece of my intestines would be used to replace one of the vessels of my heart.
I (doctor) walked down stone steps into the basement. My vision was very blurry. There was a third man in the room. Both he and I worried that I wouldn't be able to see well enough to do such a precise operation. But then I remembered that I used another instrument for this operation.
Without telling the third man what I was doing, I walked into a nearby room and pulled out a large, rolling frame with a wide, flat-screen TV on its top. I pulled it close to the patient. Everything was now magnified perfectly. I saw a very thin, needle-like instrument poking over some yellow matter that was apparently intestines.
Dream #3
I had been out walking and had seen a lot of strange and beautiful things. I saw now walking around to the front of a beige-bricked building that looked like an area of the United Nations building. In front of it was a railing like the handrail mazes for amusement park rides. The sun was warm and golden, but warm shadow covered the front of the building.
I told myself to remember everything I'd seen today: it had all been so beautiful and strange.
I walked into the building, which was like a fast food restaurant, except that there were "pull-belt" mazes as the line and all the cashiers were behind counters topped with plexiglass windows, like in a bank.
I called to one of the cashiers, a black woman with shortish, reddish hair who wore a green shirt. I told the cashier I would like a XXXXX and a ham and egg breakfast sandwich. I had to wait a moment, for some reason.
I stood by the far right register and read a paper like The Onion, which had a weird photo of a man and woman swinging in darkness and cloaked in a swooping cloth of bright colors and white. These two people were celebrities involved in some scandal.
Dream #1
I was in an area like an office reception area combined with an empty department store. It was pretty quiet. None of the lights were turned on. Only natural light lit the building, from tall windows on a wall to my right.
A few people stood in front of a long "reception desk" that seemed more like an airport check-in counter or a nurse's station. I walked past this station.
Someone behind the counter told me he couldn't figure out some sort of billing statement. I thought, Well, I can figure it out. But I don't want to be mistaken for working here. Nevertheless, I went behind the counter and took a look at the receipt, since somebody, I knew, was waiting for it.
There were two receipts: a yellow, carbon-copy-like one that was maybe three inches by five inches, and a small, white printout that was maybe three inches by one inch. There were two longish numbers on the receipts. These numbers needed to be checked, to make sure they matched on the two receipts. If the numbers matched, a phone number was then to be called. The number dialed would provide more information.
As I was getting ready to call the phone number, the phone rang on another line. I let that phone ring a couple times, hoping the person I was trying would pick up, and that I could then put him on hold to answer the other call. But after a few rings I had to answer. I walked over to a big control board on the window-wall side of the "reception-desk" and flipped a lit purple switch. My call was put on hold.
I answered the other line. It was one of my boss BS' clients. She sounded very angry. She said, "Don't you know who I am? How dare you keep the phone ringing so long?" She started asking me a research question.
BS walked past me. I thought I would hand the call over to him. But I hesitated. I considered that I would probably get in trouble for having kept a client call ringing on the phone for so long.
Dream #2
In a stone basement a man was going to perform an operation on another man. I was the patient. But I was also the doctor. The patient was an older man, like the professor in The Blue Angel, but a little more wrinkled and with less hair. The doctor was alternately a man like the patient and a younger man, tall and attractive, but with kind of scraggly hair.
I (patient) lay on a kind of dingy hospital bed. The light all around was dim. I might have been falling asleep. I might have been partly cut open already. I knew was was going to have a new kind of graft -- a piece of my intestines would be used to replace one of the vessels of my heart.
I (doctor) walked down stone steps into the basement. My vision was very blurry. There was a third man in the room. Both he and I worried that I wouldn't be able to see well enough to do such a precise operation. But then I remembered that I used another instrument for this operation.
Without telling the third man what I was doing, I walked into a nearby room and pulled out a large, rolling frame with a wide, flat-screen TV on its top. I pulled it close to the patient. Everything was now magnified perfectly. I saw a very thin, needle-like instrument poking over some yellow matter that was apparently intestines.
Dream #3
I had been out walking and had seen a lot of strange and beautiful things. I saw now walking around to the front of a beige-bricked building that looked like an area of the United Nations building. In front of it was a railing like the handrail mazes for amusement park rides. The sun was warm and golden, but warm shadow covered the front of the building.
I told myself to remember everything I'd seen today: it had all been so beautiful and strange.
I walked into the building, which was like a fast food restaurant, except that there were "pull-belt" mazes as the line and all the cashiers were behind counters topped with plexiglass windows, like in a bank.
I called to one of the cashiers, a black woman with shortish, reddish hair who wore a green shirt. I told the cashier I would like a XXXXX and a ham and egg breakfast sandwich. I had to wait a moment, for some reason.
I stood by the far right register and read a paper like The Onion, which had a weird photo of a man and woman swinging in darkness and cloaked in a swooping cloth of bright colors and white. These two people were celebrities involved in some scandal.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
(5/7/08) tarot drones; the pathetic cat; "no clothes! no clothes!"
Dream #1
I was on a gigantic stairway with a group of people. The steps were wide and shallow, probably carpeted in red. The light was warm and incandescent. We were all using some kind of joystick or remote to control either a character in a video game or a machine in an area like the one we were in. A teacher was telling us how to use the machine.
I got up to a point where the stairs turned left. The steps continued up to a nice hallway with chandeliers. I turned around, to look back down the steps. The teacher told me not to turn my head too quickly, as that would make the thing I was controlling lose its balance.
I could now see as if I were looking at a screen through the video game character's/machine's eyes. The machine looked like a machine from Star Wars, with two log legs and a box-like cabin on top. It was silvery grey, maybe as tall as a person. Its purpose was to wander through this space in search of some kind of secret or special material.
The machine got to the foot of the steps. It turned right, possibly around the corner of a stone wall, and faced a bridge (still inside this building) which was wide and made of flat, yellowish stones. All along the entrance to the bridge were yellow and blue poker chips. I knew they were the secret material and they stood for money.
I bent down (as if I were in the game and was now a person and not a machine) and put my hands on top of the chips. As I did, they disappeared. I told myself not to pick up all the chips, because I couldn't slow myself down. There would be plenty of other opportunities to get more chips during my travels.
I now saw a thinnish, Asian man walk around a corner to a quiet area with cobbled floors and a brick wall. The cobbles were reddish and uneven. The man had grey and black hair and wore a flannel shirt and a tan vest. He sat down on the ground and started playing with something, possibly cards.
Now I was where the man had been, and I was playing with the cards. I had laid the cards face-down, some on the ground, and some on a box. I was now turning them face-up. After having turned up one or two cards, I began trying to guess what each next card would be before I turned it up. But I kept guessing incorrectly.
The cards were like playing cards, but the patterns of their pips were very strange. For instance, one card had a very thin rectangle in its center and in the rectangle were three red shapes, like spades (?) or diamonds. This was either an ace or a three -- I didn't really know which!
A couple men walked out through a door behind me and to my left, then past me on my right. One of them might have been my boss BS. One of them commented, "You're trying to tell your future?"
I felt ashamed because it did look like that was what I was doing. I looked down to the cards. They now looked like tarot cards, except the images were very vague, as if they were showing pink clouds or green sea.
I said something like, "Well, if I am, it isn't working! I haven't gotten anything right!" This was supposed to show that I didn't believe anything like tarot cards could be real.
I stood up to follow the men. We walked out to a place that looked like the outdoors, with cobbled sidewalks and maybe some building fronts, possibly on a muggy, sunny day. There was only one man now. He looked like JH, one of my bosses from an Americorps project I did in 2002. The man kept drifting farther and farther away from me.
The man said some weird quote that sounded vaguely, but not quite, like a common quote, like "Trust the enemy; he's your boss." This quote was apparently pretty widely employed as a cap to conversations made regarding things not going smoothly at work or in the government, etc.
I thought the man's statement was cheesy, but I said something sarcastic to sound like I cynically agreed, like, "Well, that always gets us by pretty good, doesn't it?"
The man chuckled as he disappeared into the distance.
I stood in a suburban neighborhood on a summer day. I was at the top of a slightly sloped road. I walked down the slope as I "recalled" a group of people talking about an organization that claimed to have been against the Vietnam War but that did things which on further investigation actually supported the war.
I got to the bottom of the slope, the corner of the block, and turned right. There was a house just down the way and on my right. I could see the people inside, as if they were sitting in a playhouse.
I "recalled" how the people called the organization in question a word which was a derogatory combination of two words which would mean "to support" and "to denounce." The word began with either "gr" or "ga."
I turned the possible ways of combining the two words as I walked into a small, plastic playhouse. The walls of the playhouse were yellow. There might have been a plastic jack-o-lantern sitting on a brown, plastic table in front of me and to my left, right by the front door. I could see a dense curtain of leafs outside a small window to my left.
One or two people stood outside the house and closed me in. I was pretty sure the people had locked me in. But I hadn't been able to stop them: I'd been too preoccupied with getting the combinations of the two words in my head in the funniest and most derogatory way.
Dream #2
I was in the bedroom of what seemed to be a modern apartment in a city like New York. The carpet was grey, and the walls were white. There was one window stretching along the wall to my left. I sat on a wide and disheveled bed.
A weird animal caught my attention. At first it seemed like a little mouse. Then it was more like a fake (but living) animal made out of cotton balls or big tufts of polyester padding coated in patches of brownish paint. It was about as big as a rabbit and had black eyes.
The animal ran backward when it saw I was looking at it. It sood by a heating vent by the window-sill/wall. I patted on the bed, beckoning the animal to come near me. I didn't think the animal was cute, by any means, but I felt like it was intelligent. So I felt like I should treat the animal as if it were a cute domestic animal, so it would feel good about itself.
The animal jumped up on the bed with me. It became black-grey. It was telling me some kind of story about why it preferred not to be free to run around the house.
I now stood over a roughly four-foot-tall, gold-barred, domed birdcage in which the animal sat, as if crouched and defensively opposed to me. The floor of the cage was messy with paper and cloth.
I now stood on the other side of the room. I was on the right side of the bed. The cage had probably been on the left side. A woman, like my friend R's wife L (?) looked out a small window and was telling the story of how she and my friend R had picked up a cat that they really liked. As L told this story, an orange cat bit my right index finger harder and harder.
L said they had picked up one cat before, but that it had been no good. Then one night, in the pouring rain, as L and R were driving along, there was a black cat wearing white satin gloves on its forelegs. The cat looked like it was barely alive. It was emaciated and heaved long breaths, like it was having trouble breathing. As L told the story, I imagined a cat as tall as a human.
L said, "The cat looked so pathetic, almost like a pathetic human being. So we just had to take it home."
I noticed the orange cat, still biting my finger, was laughing at the story. L started laughing. too, about how pathetic the black cat had looked. At first I thought the cat was just laughing to mimic L's actions. But I was astounded to find that the cat could understand what L was saying.
The cat was laughing silently, in little, sneeze-like chuckles, and had loosened its grip on my finger. Then the cat stopped laughing. It had teary eyes, as if it had been laughing at a good memory of a dear, departed friend.
The cat then said, "I do love L's sense of humor, and I used to love being around her because of it. But then her dark side started showing. It really overtook her. It became too much for me to stay around her and watch her hurting herself all the time like this."
I looked for what the cat meant. I pulled the blanket off from the head of the bed. There was a tangle of clear, plastic tubes and brightly colored, plastic clips. I knew all this was a kind of drugging and torture system R used on L. At first L had just taken part in the drugging and torture game to please R. But now she was addicted to it. And now she wanted to get me addicted to it, too.
Dream #3
I stood naked in a house, before a curtained, sliding-glass door. The thin, white curtain billowed gently in the breeze, as if the door were open. I walked toward the curtain. A shortish, Hispanic or Asian woman pulled the curtain back to come into the house. It was dark outside.
I was ashamed of my nakedness. I hid myself behind the curtain. I tried to get the woman to go back outside so she wouldn't be offended by my nakedness and so I could go put on some clothes. I shouted something stupid like, "No! No! Go! No clothes! No clothes!" as if this woman could only understand very simple, halting English.
The woman just giggled and said something like, "No, no, come, come." She took my hands and pulled me toward a bedroom. As we got to the threshold, the woman, walking backward into the room, turned to her left (my right) so I couldn't see her. She kept hold of my hands. I might have thought that the woman was going to dress me herself.
I was on a gigantic stairway with a group of people. The steps were wide and shallow, probably carpeted in red. The light was warm and incandescent. We were all using some kind of joystick or remote to control either a character in a video game or a machine in an area like the one we were in. A teacher was telling us how to use the machine.
I got up to a point where the stairs turned left. The steps continued up to a nice hallway with chandeliers. I turned around, to look back down the steps. The teacher told me not to turn my head too quickly, as that would make the thing I was controlling lose its balance.
I could now see as if I were looking at a screen through the video game character's/machine's eyes. The machine looked like a machine from Star Wars, with two log legs and a box-like cabin on top. It was silvery grey, maybe as tall as a person. Its purpose was to wander through this space in search of some kind of secret or special material.
The machine got to the foot of the steps. It turned right, possibly around the corner of a stone wall, and faced a bridge (still inside this building) which was wide and made of flat, yellowish stones. All along the entrance to the bridge were yellow and blue poker chips. I knew they were the secret material and they stood for money.
I bent down (as if I were in the game and was now a person and not a machine) and put my hands on top of the chips. As I did, they disappeared. I told myself not to pick up all the chips, because I couldn't slow myself down. There would be plenty of other opportunities to get more chips during my travels.
I now saw a thinnish, Asian man walk around a corner to a quiet area with cobbled floors and a brick wall. The cobbles were reddish and uneven. The man had grey and black hair and wore a flannel shirt and a tan vest. He sat down on the ground and started playing with something, possibly cards.
Now I was where the man had been, and I was playing with the cards. I had laid the cards face-down, some on the ground, and some on a box. I was now turning them face-up. After having turned up one or two cards, I began trying to guess what each next card would be before I turned it up. But I kept guessing incorrectly.
The cards were like playing cards, but the patterns of their pips were very strange. For instance, one card had a very thin rectangle in its center and in the rectangle were three red shapes, like spades (?) or diamonds. This was either an ace or a three -- I didn't really know which!
A couple men walked out through a door behind me and to my left, then past me on my right. One of them might have been my boss BS. One of them commented, "You're trying to tell your future?"
I felt ashamed because it did look like that was what I was doing. I looked down to the cards. They now looked like tarot cards, except the images were very vague, as if they were showing pink clouds or green sea.
I said something like, "Well, if I am, it isn't working! I haven't gotten anything right!" This was supposed to show that I didn't believe anything like tarot cards could be real.
I stood up to follow the men. We walked out to a place that looked like the outdoors, with cobbled sidewalks and maybe some building fronts, possibly on a muggy, sunny day. There was only one man now. He looked like JH, one of my bosses from an Americorps project I did in 2002. The man kept drifting farther and farther away from me.
The man said some weird quote that sounded vaguely, but not quite, like a common quote, like "Trust the enemy; he's your boss." This quote was apparently pretty widely employed as a cap to conversations made regarding things not going smoothly at work or in the government, etc.
I thought the man's statement was cheesy, but I said something sarcastic to sound like I cynically agreed, like, "Well, that always gets us by pretty good, doesn't it?"
The man chuckled as he disappeared into the distance.
I stood in a suburban neighborhood on a summer day. I was at the top of a slightly sloped road. I walked down the slope as I "recalled" a group of people talking about an organization that claimed to have been against the Vietnam War but that did things which on further investigation actually supported the war.
I got to the bottom of the slope, the corner of the block, and turned right. There was a house just down the way and on my right. I could see the people inside, as if they were sitting in a playhouse.
I "recalled" how the people called the organization in question a word which was a derogatory combination of two words which would mean "to support" and "to denounce." The word began with either "gr" or "ga."
I turned the possible ways of combining the two words as I walked into a small, plastic playhouse. The walls of the playhouse were yellow. There might have been a plastic jack-o-lantern sitting on a brown, plastic table in front of me and to my left, right by the front door. I could see a dense curtain of leafs outside a small window to my left.
One or two people stood outside the house and closed me in. I was pretty sure the people had locked me in. But I hadn't been able to stop them: I'd been too preoccupied with getting the combinations of the two words in my head in the funniest and most derogatory way.
Dream #2
I was in the bedroom of what seemed to be a modern apartment in a city like New York. The carpet was grey, and the walls were white. There was one window stretching along the wall to my left. I sat on a wide and disheveled bed.
A weird animal caught my attention. At first it seemed like a little mouse. Then it was more like a fake (but living) animal made out of cotton balls or big tufts of polyester padding coated in patches of brownish paint. It was about as big as a rabbit and had black eyes.
The animal ran backward when it saw I was looking at it. It sood by a heating vent by the window-sill/wall. I patted on the bed, beckoning the animal to come near me. I didn't think the animal was cute, by any means, but I felt like it was intelligent. So I felt like I should treat the animal as if it were a cute domestic animal, so it would feel good about itself.
The animal jumped up on the bed with me. It became black-grey. It was telling me some kind of story about why it preferred not to be free to run around the house.
I now stood over a roughly four-foot-tall, gold-barred, domed birdcage in which the animal sat, as if crouched and defensively opposed to me. The floor of the cage was messy with paper and cloth.
I now stood on the other side of the room. I was on the right side of the bed. The cage had probably been on the left side. A woman, like my friend R's wife L (?) looked out a small window and was telling the story of how she and my friend R had picked up a cat that they really liked. As L told this story, an orange cat bit my right index finger harder and harder.
L said they had picked up one cat before, but that it had been no good. Then one night, in the pouring rain, as L and R were driving along, there was a black cat wearing white satin gloves on its forelegs. The cat looked like it was barely alive. It was emaciated and heaved long breaths, like it was having trouble breathing. As L told the story, I imagined a cat as tall as a human.
L said, "The cat looked so pathetic, almost like a pathetic human being. So we just had to take it home."
I noticed the orange cat, still biting my finger, was laughing at the story. L started laughing. too, about how pathetic the black cat had looked. At first I thought the cat was just laughing to mimic L's actions. But I was astounded to find that the cat could understand what L was saying.
The cat was laughing silently, in little, sneeze-like chuckles, and had loosened its grip on my finger. Then the cat stopped laughing. It had teary eyes, as if it had been laughing at a good memory of a dear, departed friend.
The cat then said, "I do love L's sense of humor, and I used to love being around her because of it. But then her dark side started showing. It really overtook her. It became too much for me to stay around her and watch her hurting herself all the time like this."
I looked for what the cat meant. I pulled the blanket off from the head of the bed. There was a tangle of clear, plastic tubes and brightly colored, plastic clips. I knew all this was a kind of drugging and torture system R used on L. At first L had just taken part in the drugging and torture game to please R. But now she was addicted to it. And now she wanted to get me addicted to it, too.
Dream #3
I stood naked in a house, before a curtained, sliding-glass door. The thin, white curtain billowed gently in the breeze, as if the door were open. I walked toward the curtain. A shortish, Hispanic or Asian woman pulled the curtain back to come into the house. It was dark outside.
I was ashamed of my nakedness. I hid myself behind the curtain. I tried to get the woman to go back outside so she wouldn't be offended by my nakedness and so I could go put on some clothes. I shouted something stupid like, "No! No! Go! No clothes! No clothes!" as if this woman could only understand very simple, halting English.
The woman just giggled and said something like, "No, no, come, come." She took my hands and pulled me toward a bedroom. As we got to the threshold, the woman, walking backward into the room, turned to her left (my right) so I couldn't see her. She kept hold of my hands. I might have thought that the woman was going to dress me herself.
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