(3/28/06) the boy in the truck accident

(Entered in paper journal at 6:55 PM at Mid-Manhattan Library on 40th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I walked along a sidestreet like up in Inwood near the park. I moved alongside a fence. I think I felt like I should have been somewhere else. Then I "saw" a winter day, snowy, with "Freud" walking on the other side of the fence. I felt a memory of a story of this scene -- which took place before Freud was successful. I felt less like I should be somewhere else.

I walked along the street in the daytime on a summer day. The street was open, with a park on one side and roughly five-story-tall apartment buildings on the other. My thoughts lost their focus but kept plodding along with a verbal memory.

Then I saw a black man run in front of a truck. I think the young man (maybe eighteen years old) fell on his face and lay before the truck. It may have been a dump truck. The boy got ran over. I had screamed at the boy and the truck. But the whole scene happened like it was automated. There was only a feeling of the boy being hurt. He wore a black leather jacket and a black baseball cap.

I walked up to him. Somehow he seemed smashed. There was blood somewhere. He was almost dead, but like a bug he was trying to get up. I told him not to move. I was going to call or had called an ambulance. But the boy wouldn't listen.

The boy was soaked in blood, and his skull was split open. I could somehow see his brains bulging out of his skull. I told the boy his organs were barely holding together and that if he moved he would die.

But now he stood up. He was Hispanic. He wore a grey t-shirt and light blue jeans, both baggy.

There was a school down in the distance. The boy told me, "I need to pick up my kid" (boy? girl?) from school. I have to go."

I was in a car with my mom and other people, possibly my brother and my friend R. We were driving down a block with mid-sized apartments layered on the second floor with scaffolding. The scaffolding walls were painted brown and reflected the sunlight with a mute heat.

One of us was talking about how the boy had escaped, how he was now driving to the school to pick up his child (girl?). In actuality, though, he was just driving erratically and aimlessly all over town to escape us.

But then I or we had thought up a way, a call, to lure him in or at least locate and track him. It was some song he really liked or some sound or promise he loved to hear. So we did it. It affected the boy. He didn't stay still, but he was moving slowly, less erratically, and possibly even coming toward us.

We were in a van. My mom drove. I was in the front passenger seat. We pulled to the end of the block, to a street like a busy street in Staten Island or Jamaica, Queens. The sun made everything seem so golden and beautiful.

I wondered if the man wouldn't discover that we had laid a trap for him. The van now flipped positions at the intersection, from being at the corner to being in the middle of the street and turning in toward the side road.

R was out of the van now. He handed me the boy's skull. I tried to understand how an organ could do so well outside a person's body. It seemed the organ couldn't survive outside the body. Yet here I was with the boy's skull in my hands and people hoping that I could make the boy's brain even better than it had been while it had been in the boy's body.

I noted how swollen out of the skull the brain had become. The brain looked like a mushroom -- soft, dry, smooth, just like a huge mushroom. I thought, Well, it looks nice enough, healthy enough. Maybe it will be fine while I fix it.

(4/18/06) micro-intervention, possession, and hyperventilation

(Entered in paper journal at 6:31 PM at NYPL Mid-Manhattan Library.)

Dream 1

I stood at the open end of a long, black, narrow room that opened into a wider room that was dim but regular, like a living room. At the far end of the narrow room my coworker CB stood before a black, solid altar or pedestal-like structure. On the structure was a small stand which held either a book or a brain or the floating image of a brain.

The room was for a test -- a fun test but a test just the same. The person at the table or stand had to answer a question, and the answer came from a part of the brain that, for you to pass, gave off a specific signal.

CB was trying to get the answer. But time ran out. In front of a floating image of a brain ran  the words "MICRO INTERVENTION" (?). I feel like she knew the answer but that she didn't say it because she didn't want to look smart in front of me.

I stood by the pedestal now. But CB and my mom (my mom had been beside me as I'd watched CB) were both gone. My mind was a blank. I felt alone. I felt like part of the reason I had been left alone was that I had no social skills.

I went to look for BC and my mom. They were in the kitchen, the only place where a light was on in the house. In front of the kitchen was a curtain like a mesh of thin slats of wood, the slats about one-eighth of an inch wide and one-eight of an inch apart.

I couldn't see through the slats, or, rather, I could only see vague shapes moving. I thought to myself, I act autistic. But I'm not autistic. But there must be some reason I act this way. Some people think it's endearing. But I just think it's boring.

I was now looking through slats that were almost the same. I could hear my mother and CB talking about something very important. But looking through the curtain I felt something very frightening. It was like an animal possessing me. I began hyperventilating. I fell back, crouching, against the wall, almost screaming, but still hyperventilating.

My mom came out of the kitchen with genuine interest but a little nonchalance, to attend to me. She spoke cheerfully to CB: "Yeah, I always have to remember that he has these attacks and he needs to be looked after or else he freaks out."