(3/4/06) we're millionaires; the owl means something; ridiculous $400K

(Entered in paper journal at 8:41 PM at Starbucks on 1st Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I walked into an office. It was wide with long desks and it looked out over a larger office space. The desks were all messy. The place was cluttered and bright but felt comfortable. One of my senior coworkers, BK, stood at the front desk. Someone sat to his right. The few people in the room were all talking and joking.

BK saw me walk in and joked a little louder so I would hear and involve myself. He then shouted, "I'm a millionaire!" He didn't say it in a forced way. He was comfortable and happy.

Finally I did it, too. I could feel the words in my chest and throat. Everybody was surprised I said it too. I felt like maybe I shouldn't have said it. But nobody was angry. They were just surprised.

Dream 2

I was walking along an asphalt path in a lawny (?) park. A young girl walked by, to my right. I spoke with her about nature.

A hawk (?) flew overhead. As it flew off in front of us from right to left I told the girl, "It's a hawk! Now watch carefully for which tree it lands in." (There were sparse rows of pine trees on each side of the lawn.) "We'll go to the tree and get a closer look."

The "hawk" perched. We went to the tree. Now I saw that the bird was really a hawk-sized owl. I told the girl, "This means something! I've never seen this before!"

But before I could make sure the bird really was an owl, it flew from the pines on the left side to the pines on the right. As it flew over us I saw it had something really sharp and thin to its appearance -- a bit unusual for an owl.

We walked to the right side now and searched for the owl. All the trees on this side were small and thin, almost like deciduous saplings in winter.

I spotted the owl. It was now as small as a saw-whet owl. I told the girl I'd spotted the owl. She said, "I can't see it."

I said, "It's on the low limb on that small tree. And look to the tree to the owl's right. It's a green parrot!"

The girl may have seen now. I told the girl again how special this was, even though I was slightly disappointed that the owl was so small. And it didn't quite look fluffy or fat enough to be an owl.

But now a whole flock of owls flew down and landed on the lawn before me and the girl -- all with that same thin, sharp look to them.

I felt a little overwhelmed with a feeling of meaning. But I also felt a disgust at seeing so many birds, and a disappointment that the birds were all that weird, small kind of owl.

Dream 3

I sat in a room/forest that was dark blue with night. I sat on the floor/ground in front of a desk, at the left corner, peering around the left side of the desk, to see my coworkers DE and CJ.

I had a notebook and was writing down figures -- my anticipated salary over the next few years. DE and CJ were -- I had the feeling -- that somehow they were -- ridiculing me.

But I continued writing the figures, trying to show them how I hoped the next five years of work would help make me secure for the rest of my life. The figures for each year were $40K, $60K, $80K, $100K, $120K. I realized this was $400,000. If I lived off the interest from that for the rest of my life, that would be about $20K per year.

(7/12/08) field-industry-office; balding; grey cat

(Entered in paper journal at 8:10 AM at Starbucks on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was with a group of people in a foresty area of a city park. We were on a path which might have been asphalt, covered over slightly with soil. The part we were on seemed to be the junction of a number of paths. We had to scrape certain things from the soil and put the scrapings into vials.

I knelt down by a rock and a full grouping of plants with low, wide leafs. The leafs themselves may have been a little muddy. I noticed that the leafs were dotted with large, resting moths. They seemed to be damp, like everything else around us, as if it had just rained. The leafs also had big, dull-black beetles resting on them.

I thought this was a weird sight, so I called everybody else over to take a look. As they everybody came over, I backed away from the situation. I now stood at a distance from everybody else, as if a few steps up a gentle slope. Everybody was having fun collecting samples. But I didn't even have any vials.

The soil everywhere was moist, which apparently made it easier to collect samples. But where I stood, the soil was frustratingly dry. I thought I should go find some vials, but all I could see in my head were old, used vials with the residue of old soil "rusting" the insides.

I walked down to find some vials. Suddenly I was in a house like a lower middle-class suburban house. The house was largely empty. I was in one of the bedrooms with one of my senior co-workers, ER. The bedroom was supposed to be an office, but probably barely even had a desk in it.

I felt awful that I was here instead of out with the group of folks collecting samples. I knew I'd look bad in everybody else's eyes. I was trying to get out of the office and away from ER. I felt like my being in the office with ER was associating me with him -- his laziness, etc.

But suddenly I knew ER was leaving our company. I told ER I'd be sad to see him go. ER told me that he was going to work with a company in the industry he did analysis on. He said he liked being close to the industry itself, rather than on Wall Street, just sitting around in an office all day.

Dream #2

I came from one room where I was with a few people and into another room like a bedroom, where I was all by myself. The bedroom was big, lit with a single bulb, not dim, but almost dim. I stood before a big bed and felt crowded into the room somehow. I looked at the top of my head with a small mirror. I noticed my hair was thinning a lot. I thought to myself, I knew this was happening to me. Now I'll just finally have to accept it.

In fact, my hair looked very different, like the hair of an older man of Indian or Southeast Asian descent -- curlyish, thin, and flat black. My scalp was also tan-copper, and my skull had a roundish, full shape, like that of an overweight, Indian man.

Dream #3

I walked into my bathroom. There was a grey-brown and grey-striped cat in my bathtub, sitting right by the drain. It caught me by surprise.

(4/26/09) tangled forest and street; flying over the park

(Entered in paper journal at 8:10 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

It was night. I was in some building like a house. I ran out of the building and into a corridor of thick trees. There were small slivers of light, possibly like moonlight, shining through the trees. But the light got darker and darker, and the trees bordering the corridor got thicker and thicker. Even the ground became harder to run on, and it took on a gross feeling.

I knew I was reaching something like a wall of tangled, gnarled branches, and that I would have to reach my hand into the wall. But I got to a point where I couldn't see anything anymore. I thought that if I went all the way to the end of this corridor, I'd have to come all the way back without any light, and with the environment around me becoming filthier all the time.

I stopped running and was pulled backward. I was pulled all the way out of the corridor. I was now possibly on a city street. I was moving forward again, but I knew that since I hadn't gone all the way through the corridor I'd not be able to achieve what I'd needed to achieve on this street.

Dream #2

I was running through a valley of low, rolling hills between two forests of trees with orange, red, and yellow leafs. It was just before sunrise. The sky was pale, tannish, purple-blue. The air was crisp. As I continued to run along, the valley curved around and then opened up quite widely. I was in a large city park. This enormous valley was near the entrance to the park.

Along one of the slopes to my right was a naked woman with short, blonde hair doing "yoga." She was pulling herself up from a splits position. Her clothes lay before her and beside her. I smiled at her, but then I realized that since she was naked, she would probably think that I was a peeping tom for looking at her.

I looked away quickly. The woman may have started putting on her clothes: maybe a sleeveless, grey shirt and a pair of dark grey jeans. I thought that when the woman had her clothes back on I'd come back to let her know that I hadn't smiled at her for any bad reason, but only because I'd wanted to be her friend.

I now began flying. I flew very high in the air, so that I could see whole tracts of wooded areas in the park. I thought of telling the woman about this, about how easy it actually was to fly.

Some wooded areas were colored yellow, red, and orange, and their topography rolled along, showing hills. But other areas were whitish, as if covered by snow. The whitish color soon became slate grey, or milky-colored and then slate grey. The milky color may have seemed reasonable to me because sunrise light and shadow coloring the snow might make a similar color. But the color of the snow soon looked to me more like mold. It disgusted me.