(11/15/07) five year plan; fire escape; shell game

(Entered in paper journal at 5:15 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I sat in an audience. My view was partly like I was there and partly like I was looking at a photograph. The audience was to see something like the presentation of the new five-year plan for China. This presentation was in China. The auditorium was modern, softly lit, and had white, scalloped "panel" ornamentation on the ceiling. I noticed a lot of blonde, white people in the crowd. I thought, They like the Chinese culture, so they move over here. Then they get involved with the policy, like they're part of Chinese society.

 A group of Chinese officials, maybe three men, sat down at a table on stage to begin. A woman in front of me began singing. At first I thought the sound came from somewhere else. Then I saw the woman singing. She looked white, with long, red-brown hair with streaks of grey in it, like my mom's hair. She had a strange look, like she was tall and skinny, but also fat. I could never see her face.

At first I thought the woman was singing a Chinese song to begin the ceremony. But the song soon became raucous, like an American country song. I thought the woman was disrupting the presentation as a protest and that she would be arrested. But now everybody was standing up, as if standing to revere the song.

The auditorium was all dark except the stage, which was lit very harshly. The woman moved to my left. As she did, a black businessman, in my row, came up to me from my right. He wanted me to move, but he wasn't asking to be excused, or saying anything at all, really. I moved forward, but he edged me out of my seat. I thought that was fine. Maybe he just really needed to get away from the woman's singing. (I didn't consider that he had moved left, in the same direction as the woman.)

There was an empty seat just to my right. With telekinesis, I moved my bags over to this seat and the bags in this seat over to where I had previously been sitting (as if the businessman had now disappeared). I thought, Now the Chinese officials are going to think I'm Falun Dafa because I've used telekinesis. They'll persecute me.

We were all sitting. The auditorium was greyish, with wood seats and lit with bland light or daylight through dirty windows. A tallish, slightly overweight, bald, Chinese man with blue jeans and a too-big striped shirt spoke. At first he stood in the front row. Then he stood a few rows back from me.

The man said, "We are purposely losing the bank money. We want the bank to feel a loss of five billion dollars now so they will be prepared for the loss of ten billion dollars in the future. We are purposely doing bad jobs to make this happen."

Dream #2

There was a fire announcement at my office. I didn't quite understand it at first. When I finally reacted to it, two people (my co-worker SV and another person) were already running down the fire escape stairwell. They yelled up to me, "Can't you smell the fumes? It's dangerous!"

I yelled for them to come back, that we all needed to leave together. But they continued running away. I did smell fumes, as if the danger were some gas being released in the air from some structural breaking or disintegration in the building, not from fire.

I ran around on my floor, trying to get some people together so we could get out of the building. The floor looked a little bit nicer than usual and was lit very nicely. The people I saw weren't paying any attention to me. But eventually everybody was in offices, with their curtains pulled. I ran around, not panicked, but trying to get people organized, yelling for them to come out of their offices.

I was in a lobby that for some reason looked like a department store.

Dream #3

I stood in an old, dark-wood-walled room with an old, fattish, tired-looking man. The room was small and emptyish, but it felt dirty and dusty. It felt like a high-up floor in an old Manhattan apartment. The carpet was probably deep green.

The man told me about a woman who led some organization, which perhaps we both worked for. At some point during the man's talk, the woman (who looked like my psychiatrist A) moved in and out of the room, carrying items like old wood boxes in and out, and also into and out from a hole in the wall behind either a set of shelves or a grandfather clock.

The man said, "Do you smell that?" He breathed in. I did, too. There was a dusty smell. The old man continued, "Don't fool yourself. It's part of what she doesn't want to tell you about. They have a whole system down there, and they do bad things. Have you ever wondered what she does on her trips to XXXXX?" (Some tropical place.)

At this point the woman (A?) was working behind a curtain dividing this room from another room, to our right.

The man said, "They take boxes there. And, going in, the boxes look very innocent. But do you know what they do with those boxes?"

A interrupted. We now stood near her, possibly as if she had pulled open the curtain between the two rooms. A said, "Do you know that these boxes are just the right size to fit old Turks who don't know how to keep their mouths shut? Maybe books can fall out of one box and a Turk can fall into it -- and then fall underground! -- if he doesn't shutup."

The old man was shocked into silence. I watched A stack old magazines into the dark wood box on the table before us. The box was large enough to fit a person. I was fascinated by all the old, beautiful magazines.

We now stood at something like a bar in a big, empty, dark wood room which was dim and quiet. It was me, A, and my co-worker MD. We were looking at seashells, which may have been in an open drawer before me. I pulled out one seashell that had a narrow, spiral shape. It had stripes of maroon accented with stripes of bright pink.

MD and A commented on a shell that had the shape of a river cobble. The shell was white and smooth. It had red material like glitter all over it, punctuated by little diamonds. (So... white and smooth, eh? How so?) MD and A wanted me to take the shell. But I thought touching the shell would do something bad to me.

MD said, "It's not dirty. It's clean and smooth. Touch it." So I did.

I was at the end of a long hallway, heading back to the room where MD and A were. I held two small shells. The shells were all white, but on the inside of the shells were things written in blue and green magic marker. The shells were thin. I kept trying to hold the shells in the right like so the magic marker wouldn't show through. But I couldn't.

I could hear MD and A talking about where they had found the big shell. Now I was back with them. I had an interesting though about one of the shells, but I didn't say anything: I didn't want A and MD to think I was obsessed with the shells.

I now saw a shell, also like a big river cobble, which had been drawn over with a picture of flowers blooming below a blue sky. The drawing was a gift from the people at the New York City taxi-cab art project called Gardens-in-Transit. When I touched the drawing I got paint (?) from the picture all over my fingers.

(4/3/08) between china and america; you can't just think he's alright

(Entered in paper journal at 5:19 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I may have been in a nice ballroom with a lot of other people. I heard that a ship was in danger nearby and wasn't being allowed to dock. The whole situation struck me as very sad.

I could see the ship on tumultuous waves. The ship must have been large. I could tell that the passengers were Chinese. They weren't aware that they weren't going to be allowed to dock.

I was now on the ship. I was trying to be as cheerful as possible, to make the news less harsh when it was finally discovered.

We were now all on a bus (? -- still felt like we were walking in the cabin of a ship) in China. I asked someone a question like, "Have you ever read any Chinese law?"

Someone said, "Oh, yes. The five-year plan. Everybody reads that."

The bus stopped in front of a structure like a tollbooth mixed with a library desk. We had arrived back in China, having had to turn back from the United States because of some danger. But now that we had arrived in China, we were heading back to the US.

But something had happened to our passport, which was a piece of paper shaped like a foot. I got out of the bus to see if the women at the desk could issue us a new paper. I pulled our old one off the dry, dusty ground, as if the thing had fallen out of or off the bus.

When I handed the paper to the women and requested a new paper, the women convened among themselves. They told me they would get back to me soon. I knew they wouldn't. There was something my group had done to break the rules. My group was now not going to be allowed to leave China.

We were told to wait. We all milled around in a big living room that was probably lit with fluorescent light. Soon there were only a few people, all of whom were probably American.

One woman stood before a Chinese map (brown and tan, showing something like provinces) and spoke about the Falun Dafa. She said that at first the protests were very impactful. But now they had gone too far. The woman didn't feel bad that the Falun Dafa were no longer allowed in China.

The woman then told the story of the man who had organized the bus trip. I turned and saw the man behind me. He was tallish, of average build, maybe in his thirties, possibly of Asian descent. He wore a white t-shirt and glasses and stared straight forward, as if thinking of something great.

The man had arranged yearly trips for impoverished people in China, possibly for them to visit family members in the United States. The trips had been running smoothly for years. But now the man had to fight to keep them going.

I thought, Well, he should be able to do that. I remember working with him in the very beginning, when he had to fight tooth and nail to get the project off the ground at all. I thought back to then. I had been a kid. The man had been very skinny.

Now the man's daughter ran into the room. She was maybe a teenager, dark-brown skinned, with long, black hair. The man laughed and said to her, "You probably won't remember him" (me) "It's been such a long time since we've worked together."

Dream #2

I stood in a bedroom with grey carpet and natural light. "My psychiatrist" lay on an enormous, messy bed, at the foot of which I stood. "My psychiatrist" may have been an old, pale, fattish, woman. She shifted beneath the covers of her (pale pink?) blanket in a kind of slimy way. I was trying to tell "my psychiatrist" things. But eventually I felt like I was talking to no purpose.

"My psychiatrist" started telling me really awful, ugly, stupid things. I got mad and began yelling at her like crazy. She now wrote in a notebook and showed me the page. She now looked like my psychiatrist A. She said, "We can't work together anymore. I have to find someone else to work with you."

The page A showed me was a list of requirements for my new psychiatrist. The page was full, written in smallish, very precise lettering. There were some small drawings or diagrams. The ink was blue, and wide, like from a gel-pen.

The only requirement I remember being written on the page was something like, "He's very intelligent and requires intelligent work. He may seem alright, but he's not. You can't just think he's alright and let things go. He will explode in a rage if you do."