(1/30/09) a portrait of the lennons; screwed and loving it

(Entered in paper journal at 8:30 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a very grimy and messy, unfinished basement, like the basement of the house my family lived in in my last three years of high school. I was coming out of the basement as if I were coming back from a long trip. I walked through a plastic (?) curtain to get into the stairwell. The stairwell was also grimy, like the basement, but had white walls and white-tiled stairs (with reddish and brownish grime all over the place) and was yellowed with sunlight from a door-window at the top of the stairs.

As I walked up the stairs I said, as if speaking to a camera, "I know I'm being watched, so I'd better behave." I may have turned around to see a small surveillance camera on the wall over the doorway at the foot of the stairwell. I might have been or thought of myself as a pretty girl with dark, tan skin and long, black hair.

I was now somewhere upstairs with my mom. She had gotten me a camera, since I had expressed my frustration over not having been able to take photos of things recently. But, she told me, the camera had only a XXXXX memory, so I could only take (five? ten?) photos at a time. But the medium was also film, not digital memory. So I knew I'd have to get the photos developed. The photos were also only in black and white, although they apparently had the most desirable resolution quality imaginable.

I saw a few photos that had been taken, as if I were holding onto them crookedly, in a disordered pile, as if I couldn't put them in order at all in my hands. The photos looked like crime scene or car crash (or punk rock) photos: very jangled, with people lying or standing in awkward, wild poses, with their mouths wide open, and with objects scattered all over, maybe broken.

I then saw a photo of John Lennon and his family, possibly standing in Central Park. There were a lot of people in the photo. The photo stood before all my vision, as if I were seeing it on a movie or television screen. At first I could only see a small fragment of it, like pant legs, then a section of face. But eventually the whole photo became clear to me.

Julian Lennon, as a boy, caught my attention first. He looked exactly like John Lennon. He wore a pea coat that went down to his knees. He stood just about in the center of the photo, a little to the left. Just to the left of him and behind stood Yoko Ono. Farther to the left and farther back stood John. He and Julian may have been making the same kind of expression: a complacent, but somehow sad, tucking upward of the right corner of the mouth, with a bright, but blank, almost depressed, look in the eyes.

Farther to the left stood people like my brother and sister. To the right of Julian, beside him, stood one or two of his brothers/sisters by John and Yoko. The children were all the same height, and they looked somewhat the same, thought the brothers/sisters may have looked like children who had more "personality."

Behind Julian stood a tallish, blonde, teenage girl. Whereas everybody so far (except John and Yoko?) had a kind of dressed-up casual, late 1960s look, this girl looked like a fashionable casual girl from the 1980s. She wore a patterned sweater and had short, loosely curled, blonde hair. She was looking to the right, to a woman who looked just like her, except that she was more formally dressed, though still in the 1980s style. This was the girl's mother, who was also (i.e. at the same time as Yoko) John's wife.

To the girl's immediate right were a couple of the girl's brothers/sisters, who were slightly shorter than she, and were dressed more in the 1960s style. I may have been in the photo as well, somewhere far to the right.

Dream #2

I was in an office, which actually looked more like a theater or auditorium, talking with my boss BS about my having gotten fired. The place was bright and grey with window light -- probably high windows on a sunny day. The place was also full of young people, mostly men, who were very active and happy. They all looked like business people, but they were dressed in t-shirts and jeans.

One of my friends caught my attention. He had let his seat move back into its upward position. He then sat on its edge and moved back and forth on it. He said something like, "Now I can feel what our company did to us is really like!" This was supposed to mean he felt that we had gotten screwed. But then he said, "It kind of feels good. I can tell by your look that you think it feels good, too. Don't tell me you're one of those guys who likes it up the ass."

I looked away and I thought, It couldn't be. I thought the swaying back and forth on the seat edge was fun. But could that mean I liked anal sex? I then moved away from my chair, not standing, but crouching. I let the seat cushion spring back up, like a normal seat in an auditorium or movie theater might do. I then started scratching my back against the seat edge. Everybody around me said, "Now that's a great idea!"

The guys were all starting to act rowdy. They were all scratching their backs against their seat edges, but they were also standing and joking with each other, having a lot of fun. I had previously felt like they were making fun of me. Now I realized that all their joking had been to make me laugh, and that they were largely looking for my approval.

(10/11/09) inconvenient dinner; temple of respect

(Entered in paper journal at 8:19 AM at Sit & Wonder cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was at the house of my old friends R and L. It looked like a small version of their previous place. The lights were off, except in a room off to the side. I stood with R, who had, apparently, invited me to dinner.

L showed up from one of the dark rooms. She said she hadn't expected me for dinner. She hadn't made anything yet, but she could go out and buy something.

It was getting late. I thought it would be really inconvenient to wait while she or we went out to get something and then cook it. It also seemed like L didn't really want me here to begin with. So I didn't feel like accepting the offer. But I accepted.

Dream #2

I was with a group of students touring through something like a giant mansion. We had gone through a number of rooms and were finally on something like the top floor. The room we were in was small and tiled, something like a small, run-down kitchen. To my right and before me were two doorways. From the doorway to my right came a golden beam of sunlight. The doorway before me led to something like a dining room, furnished in an older style, with a big, wooden table in the center.

Everybody walked around the kitchen, talking casually. I looked above the doorway to the dining room. The space between the doorway's top and the ceiling was only a couple inches. There were half-rotted, white tiles in the space. The tiles had words printed on them in blue. One of the last words printed was "respect." Some of the tiles were so rotted that I couldn't read them.

I was suddenly inspired. I tried to take a photo of the word "respect." I now knew that I was involved in some film project. At some point in the film's narrative, the character (that I played?) looks at the front of some temple, and sees a statement written on it about respect. I thought that if I could film the word "respect" on this tile closely enough, I could make it look like it was actually on the front of the temple of the film. This temple probably stood in one of the rooms downstairs.

I had a camera, but not a film camera. I walked into the dining room and sat at the table to think about how I was going to get back downstairs in order to get my film camera. A lot of the others sat down at the table with me. I sat either at the head or on the right side of the table.

It must have been cold in the room: we were all wearing big coats. I kept having to blow my nose, using brown paper towels. I kept on using and using and wadding up paper towels until I had a big, shaggy, mostly dry ball of paper towels before me.

From another doorway on the wall opposite the wall to the kitchen, a woman walked into the dining room. The woman was tallish, with a large, matronly figure. She wore warmly colored, knit wool clothes. She had tan-red skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair. Her voice was flattish and no-nonsense, but nice and motherly.

The woman told us, as if we were all high school students (and I felt like everybody except for me was), that our lunch break still wasn't for another twenty or thirty minutes, so we shouldn't sit down and take a break yet. She then became gentle and told us that she understood. It was cold, we were bored, and, besides, could high school students really be expected to take all this stuff in?

I suddenly remembered that I should be taking care of filming the word "respect." I really needed to be thinking seriously about that. I then realized that I had left my camera in the kitchen. I stood up quickly and went into the kitchen. I may have been looking for my camera when everybody else began walking into the kitchen.