(Entered in paper journal at 5:54 PM at Starbucks on 57th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan.)
Dream 1
I was beside my friend R, to his right. R said a lot of annoying things to me until at last I got angry at him. I jumped up and bashed him in the head. He fell down. I stomped on his head.
I stomped until a sign appeared before me -- it looked like an email or a technical error screen on a computer. It said that I could not push any further because the system I was pushing had been crushed to death.
I couldn't believe I had killed R. I didn't believe it. I stopped stomping on R's head, hoping that he was only "almost dead" and that my stopping would give him a chance to come back to life.
I thought about how awful jail would be.
Showing posts with label brain damage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brain damage. Show all posts
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Friday, February 17, 2017
(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.
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.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
(7/27/08) store without workers; safety lesson; take it with you?
(Entered in paper journal at 7:45 AM at Starbucks on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I was in an enormous grocery store all by myself at night or in the very early morning. The store had a few different sections, all of which were large, but some of which felt like convenience store aisles, small-town grocery store aisles, health-food store aisles, or regular grocery store aisles.
I was near the back of the store. There were wide window walls looking out at a black, empty parking lot. This section of the store had a strange shape, trapezoidal, almost, and there were checkout lanes set at an odd angle facing the window wall.
There were no workers at any of the checkout lanes. I wondered how I could buy the food I wanted. I walked up to one of the lanes and looked onto its conveyor belt. A couple folds of cash and receipts had been left on the belt. I figured people must have paid by leaving their money here for the workers eventually to pick up.
I threw some of my own money on the belt, as if I were paying for the food. Then I picked the money up again, hoping I could find somebody in here to pay, or not wanting to be accused of shoplifting if I'd walked out of the store after having left my money in the wrong place. I'm not sure I even had any merchandise with me at that point.
I wandered through another area of the store, through some dry goods shelves and past a packaged meat cooler. I was now holding a few items, including a bottle of Gatorade.
I was now outside the store, in the big parking lot. The parking lot was empty. I saw a fully lit grocery store. I walked toward it. I hadn't left any money for my merchandise. I thought that the lit storefront was the front part of the store I had just been in. There were people inside: I could see them. I figured I could pay them.
But it didn't quite make sense to me. The store I'd been in, it seemed, was on the other side of the parking lot. Plus, the piles of money I'd seen on the conveyor belt seemed to be payments left by people who'd been in the store before me. Nevertheless, I wanted to pay an actual person, so I would have a witness in case anybody tried to accuse me of not paying.
When I got to the front of the store I saw one kind of small checkout lane a few feet back from a metal detector. The store itself was huge, clean, and harshly white-lit. Everybody at the checkout lane was from the company I worked at.
One of the liaisons between the Sales department and the Research department, MA, stood leaning against the shoplifting scanner and facing the doorway. I said hi. He began complaining about things at our company, and possibly particularly about the bad quality of our company's research.
Dream #2
I was with a group of folks in the mountains. We were being educated on safety for some big project that used heavy machinery. It was day. We lay stomach-down with our heads over a steep cliff.
Our teacher mentioned people who weren't being safe. She told us the consequences those people would suffer. As an illustration an enormous tractor-shovel came tumbling over the cliff to our left. We watched as it crashed down below. The cab of the vehicle was dull silver. The shovel was dull blue. The cliff was rocky, with ledges or shelves coated lightly in snow.
Now another giant tractor shovel fell off the cliff. Our instructor spoke about in the first vehicle there had been no survivors. The second crash hadn't been so bad.
I saw one of the people in the first vehicle. He was a bald, white man, kind of punk-looking, very tough and fleshy. He might have been laying in the cab, covered in blood. He didn't look quite dead to me, even though it had been understood that all the people in the first vehicle had died immediately.
Now I was rushing through a hallway with a group of people, alongside a bed carrying the man. The bed and the man were very clean. The man may have been wearing an oxygen mask. His eyes were open. I thought, Perhaps what the instructor meant was that the man died not too long after having gotten to the hospital.
The man started nodding his head. I could hear the instructor say, "The man's brain was so damaged that he could respond to every stimulus only by nodding his head. He was in this frenzied condition until he died." For some reason I couldn't believe this was so. It seemed to me like somehow he was regenerating.
The hospital hallways were wide and elegant, with tan, polished, gravel-patterned (?) floors, glass-green walls, and slanted, glass ceilings. I stood in the hallway as the man was wheeled into a glass-walled room just out of my sight. Before me were windows warm with sunlight. Outside was a view like an enormous airstrip in the wintertime.
Dream #3
I was walking in a place that half looked like a backyard and half looked like an area around a building like a church or a small community center. I may have been speaking on my cell phone with my mom.
People started filing out of the building. They all looked like business people. I noticed that one of the people was Mayor Bloomberg. He wore a black polo shirt and whitish khakis. I was pretty impressed and turned as he passed me, thinking I might go say hi to him.
(Oddly enough, a very similar thing happened to me in waking life one early morning in the winter of 2011, right in front of Radio City Music Hall. In waking life, Mayor Bloomberg was, of course, wearing a suit, and he'd come out of a black SUV, accompanied by a small retinue of attendants.)
I turned around. In the group of people was another famous person I couldn't quite place. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it, since I thought that would make me look suspicious somehow. So I just kept walking.
I was now in an enormous building which may have been a loading dock or an airplane hangar. Warm sunlight flowed into the building, giving the whole place an airy, yellowy feel.
Before me and at a small distance was a pile of boxes and furniture. I recognized this as being all my possessions. One of the boxes was broken open. Inside were books. Looking at the books I realized I was interested in a lot of them. I had originally packed this stuff away thinking I didn't want it anymore. Now I thought I did.
I thought I would try to carry all this stuff with me wherever I was going. But I knew that if I even took time getting everything all put back together I'd risk being late wherever I was going. If I tried to carry this stuff with me (and likely it would break and scatter all over the place as I was going), I would definitely be late and miss my flight or whatever was taking me wherever I was going.
I was talking with my mom on my cell phone again. My mom told me there was a post office or UPS right near where I was (I was at an airport). I could take all this stuff to the post office and they would box it (?) and send it to wherever I was going.
This plan didn't make sense to me. It seemed like I'd be wasting time trying to pack the stuff up and leave it here or trying to pack the stuff up and carry it with me. Nevertheless, I figured I would end up doing what my mom told me to do.
Dream #1
I was in an enormous grocery store all by myself at night or in the very early morning. The store had a few different sections, all of which were large, but some of which felt like convenience store aisles, small-town grocery store aisles, health-food store aisles, or regular grocery store aisles.
I was near the back of the store. There were wide window walls looking out at a black, empty parking lot. This section of the store had a strange shape, trapezoidal, almost, and there were checkout lanes set at an odd angle facing the window wall.
There were no workers at any of the checkout lanes. I wondered how I could buy the food I wanted. I walked up to one of the lanes and looked onto its conveyor belt. A couple folds of cash and receipts had been left on the belt. I figured people must have paid by leaving their money here for the workers eventually to pick up.
I threw some of my own money on the belt, as if I were paying for the food. Then I picked the money up again, hoping I could find somebody in here to pay, or not wanting to be accused of shoplifting if I'd walked out of the store after having left my money in the wrong place. I'm not sure I even had any merchandise with me at that point.
I wandered through another area of the store, through some dry goods shelves and past a packaged meat cooler. I was now holding a few items, including a bottle of Gatorade.
I was now outside the store, in the big parking lot. The parking lot was empty. I saw a fully lit grocery store. I walked toward it. I hadn't left any money for my merchandise. I thought that the lit storefront was the front part of the store I had just been in. There were people inside: I could see them. I figured I could pay them.
But it didn't quite make sense to me. The store I'd been in, it seemed, was on the other side of the parking lot. Plus, the piles of money I'd seen on the conveyor belt seemed to be payments left by people who'd been in the store before me. Nevertheless, I wanted to pay an actual person, so I would have a witness in case anybody tried to accuse me of not paying.
When I got to the front of the store I saw one kind of small checkout lane a few feet back from a metal detector. The store itself was huge, clean, and harshly white-lit. Everybody at the checkout lane was from the company I worked at.
One of the liaisons between the Sales department and the Research department, MA, stood leaning against the shoplifting scanner and facing the doorway. I said hi. He began complaining about things at our company, and possibly particularly about the bad quality of our company's research.
Dream #2
I was with a group of folks in the mountains. We were being educated on safety for some big project that used heavy machinery. It was day. We lay stomach-down with our heads over a steep cliff.
Our teacher mentioned people who weren't being safe. She told us the consequences those people would suffer. As an illustration an enormous tractor-shovel came tumbling over the cliff to our left. We watched as it crashed down below. The cab of the vehicle was dull silver. The shovel was dull blue. The cliff was rocky, with ledges or shelves coated lightly in snow.
Now another giant tractor shovel fell off the cliff. Our instructor spoke about in the first vehicle there had been no survivors. The second crash hadn't been so bad.
I saw one of the people in the first vehicle. He was a bald, white man, kind of punk-looking, very tough and fleshy. He might have been laying in the cab, covered in blood. He didn't look quite dead to me, even though it had been understood that all the people in the first vehicle had died immediately.
Now I was rushing through a hallway with a group of people, alongside a bed carrying the man. The bed and the man were very clean. The man may have been wearing an oxygen mask. His eyes were open. I thought, Perhaps what the instructor meant was that the man died not too long after having gotten to the hospital.
The man started nodding his head. I could hear the instructor say, "The man's brain was so damaged that he could respond to every stimulus only by nodding his head. He was in this frenzied condition until he died." For some reason I couldn't believe this was so. It seemed to me like somehow he was regenerating.
The hospital hallways were wide and elegant, with tan, polished, gravel-patterned (?) floors, glass-green walls, and slanted, glass ceilings. I stood in the hallway as the man was wheeled into a glass-walled room just out of my sight. Before me were windows warm with sunlight. Outside was a view like an enormous airstrip in the wintertime.
Dream #3
I was walking in a place that half looked like a backyard and half looked like an area around a building like a church or a small community center. I may have been speaking on my cell phone with my mom.
People started filing out of the building. They all looked like business people. I noticed that one of the people was Mayor Bloomberg. He wore a black polo shirt and whitish khakis. I was pretty impressed and turned as he passed me, thinking I might go say hi to him.
(Oddly enough, a very similar thing happened to me in waking life one early morning in the winter of 2011, right in front of Radio City Music Hall. In waking life, Mayor Bloomberg was, of course, wearing a suit, and he'd come out of a black SUV, accompanied by a small retinue of attendants.)
I turned around. In the group of people was another famous person I couldn't quite place. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it, since I thought that would make me look suspicious somehow. So I just kept walking.
I was now in an enormous building which may have been a loading dock or an airplane hangar. Warm sunlight flowed into the building, giving the whole place an airy, yellowy feel.
Before me and at a small distance was a pile of boxes and furniture. I recognized this as being all my possessions. One of the boxes was broken open. Inside were books. Looking at the books I realized I was interested in a lot of them. I had originally packed this stuff away thinking I didn't want it anymore. Now I thought I did.
I thought I would try to carry all this stuff with me wherever I was going. But I knew that if I even took time getting everything all put back together I'd risk being late wherever I was going. If I tried to carry this stuff with me (and likely it would break and scatter all over the place as I was going), I would definitely be late and miss my flight or whatever was taking me wherever I was going.
I was talking with my mom on my cell phone again. My mom told me there was a post office or UPS right near where I was (I was at an airport). I could take all this stuff to the post office and they would box it (?) and send it to wherever I was going.
This plan didn't make sense to me. It seemed like I'd be wasting time trying to pack the stuff up and leave it here or trying to pack the stuff up and carry it with me. Nevertheless, I figured I would end up doing what my mom told me to do.
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