(9/18/07) the expansion of central park

(Entered in paper journal at 6:15 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I rode through a suburban street at night with my mom and sister. As we passed one intersection one man walked diagonally through a corner yard to our left. We continued on. My mom drove. I sat in the passenger's seat. My sister sat in the back seat, on the driver's side.

I said, "That's why I like being out at night: nobody ever comes out."

My mom said, "I wish nobody even had to live in these houses. That way no lights would even be on."

I thought, Why would you want no lights to be on? You wouldn't be able to see the different kinds of houses.

The houses were lit brightly, as if there were lights pointed all over the houses and yards. For some reason this reminded me of Christmas.

At the end of the block the road curved left. Facing the curve was a tall, wide house. It had a wide, triangular, solid roof with a longer slope on the left than on the right. The wood of the house seemed to be as polished as in a Greene & Greene interior. The front of the building had some grid design in the wood. One vertical strip of the house-front was rough like the trunk of an enormous tree, but it was colored red and blue.

We drove into a massive tunnel or "garage" on the left side of the house. The tunnel also, like the house-front, had polished wood walls with grid designs. The tunnel turned left. At the turn was an enormous bench, maybe twenty feet tall, built into the wall, with seat and back cushions proportional to the height of the bench. (I think the only thing the bench could fit would be the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial.)

We continued, as if floating along, though perhaps no longer in a car (my vision was a lot more mobile), through a room full of books. I told my mom that this was a library I knew. The room was intimate. The walls were lined with books, and there were books all over the tables.

We continued floating/driving into a much bigger room which was just as full of books. Both rooms were very nice and comfortable, but they were both simply piled and piled with books.

I lay on a couch. My mom and sister sat in two chairs behind me. They were reading. My mom had a wide but thinnish book which, I thought, was probably an interesting picture book.

I turned forward. In front of me was a big, thick, dark, rectangular, wooden table piled with books. I pulled a large, pale blue-covered book off a pile. I was slightly disappointed to find that I had chosen a picture book on the history of Central Park. I had wanted something with subject matter a little "weightier."

I looked through pictures about how (some time in the 1950s?) the park had been expanded. There was a map of the park "as it is today." The park was long, oval-shaped with uneven edges. The parts of the park that existed before the expansion were in color. The parts of the park that came into being after the expansion were in black and white.

But if this book was right, then before the expansion the park was in two sections which, given the size of the park, were quite separated. I thought, How could people have called these separate sections one park? What's more, how could they have called these sections "Central Park" if the sections were so far apart?

I then saw that the two parks had been connected by a walkway, at the midpoint of which was an oval-shaped rest area. For some reason this made things a little more sensible.

(I imagined that, before the expansion, the area between the two parks was really like vacant dirt lots,, just barren, pale, dry soil, not streets, buildings, or anything implying a city. There may even have been patches of trees out on these vacant lots.)

As I justified the name of Central Park to myself, my psychiatrist A stomped into the room from a doorway to my right and beyond my feet (i.e. beyond the direction of my feet as I lay on the couch). A shouted, "What in the hell are you doing in my place? You don't just come into people's places like this!"

I was caught off guard by A's surprise, shocked by how mean A could be. I stammered to say A's name, but I couldn't. I looked at a page in the book. There was a photo of a Hindu snake woman from Erich Neumann's The Great Mother. Below the photograph were three numbered paragraphs, each of which described a title. The first two were titled "Snake" and "Religion." The third was a word I didn't understand.

I tried again to call out A's name. But all I could think to say, as if it wanted to burst out as a revelatory speech, was, "Snake!"

A looked pale and worn-out. She wore big, smoky-lensed sunglasses which made her face look like that of a classic grey alien. At some point A stood half-straddling me, so her right leg knelt by my left side while her left leg stood, on the floor to my right, before the couch.

I muttered, "B-but w-we, we weren't saying a single word."

A said, "I don't give a damn what you were saying. You don't go into places when you aren't invited."

I said, "But I was invited. I have it in writing." I felt like this was true. But I also felt like A wouldn't care about that. She was too mad.

(10/27/07) slot-machine street views; innocent brownies; caligari's alien; weeding the museum garden

(Entered in paper journal at 9:46 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was at my office. I answered the phone. Even while I was trying to take a message, my boss BS, sitting to my right, on the edge of my desk, was making loud comments, trying to make me do something. I hung up the phone and tried to type a message. But BS was beings so demanding that I finally had to look at him. I lost the last name of the client from whom I was trying to take a message.

I suddenly yelled at BS, "You say you value clients. But why did you just make me forget the one who called?"

BS stood up, upset, and walked away. I tried to recall the client's name. Her first name was Pamela, I thought.

I was now looking at a storage device like a BlackBerry. The device had three screens on it, like slot-machine windows. Below these three screens was a larger screen. The three screens gave three possible "names" for the client -- though these "names" were actually titles for museum or art exhibits.

I thought, That's what the client did -- she was a social artist. I thought that if I could find the correct museum or gallery, I would remember the client's name. The exhibit, I thought, may have been in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh.

I looked at the screen below the three screens. The image on the screen was of an empty city street. The image was greenish, like an oldish computer image. I knew I could "steer" through these streets, like on a GPS map program (or like Google Street View, though I'm not sure (???) that was around in 2007), to find each listed museum.

I started steering through the streets. They were all empty. The streets were cobbled, not asphalt. The buildings were mostly redbrick. The day was clear. I steered through a few blocks.

My view faded into a view more like one I inhabited than like one I was looking at on a screen. In the middle of one block there was a huge pool of a clearish, thickish liquid which I called water. I knew that if I touched it, something bad would happen to me. But I was moving automatically, as if the "computer program" were still running me. I knew I would probably touch the poison water sooner or later.

Dream #2

I walked into a grocery store, or I had been there for a while. I had my arms full of food. I was looking for some more food, possibly some meat. I walked into an area like the frozen foods section.

There was a family like a group of European tourists. I had to walk in front of them. I tried to act as mild as possible to prove to the family that I wasn't a hooligan -- not because I felt like I threatened them, but because I didn't want them to start threatening me.

I looked at a non-freezer rack of packaged meats and cheeses. Some of the lunchmeats looked very good, but they had holes, like Swiss cheese. I was looking for just the right meat.

All of the family except one person had walked farther down the aisle. The one who remained was a little scary. He was older, maybe in his late fifties. He was tallish, big, with a bulky stomach. He had dull, grey hair and wore clunky "dress clothes." I had heard him speaking with the rest of the family. His voice was thick and unintelligible. He seemed to me like an "innocent" (???!!!) who could suddenly become dangerous.

I looked at the food. Now it was bagels and desserts like brownies. I tried not to attend to the big man. I was trying to figure out what I wanted. I felt like I was trying to get full, like I needed to eat, but like I had eaten so much already that if I ate any more, I would get fat. Nothing looked like it would fill me up without getting me fat.

The big man moaned something unintelligible. He swung a big, grey cane or walking stick against one of the clear, plastic bagel cases. There was something like a grabber at the end of the man's stick. He grabbed two brownies and then swung the stick over so that the brownies got near my face. It was like the big man had swung the brownies in front of my face in a gesture of offering them to me.

I regarded the brownies and thought, That's what I want, but it's not what I need. But I was kind of afraid to deny the big man. I didn't want him to hurt me.

Dream #3

Black and white film like an old German Expressionist film. An alien with a fat-looking, pale, bulbous head and big, black eyes. The alien wore a big, black robe. The alien's body might have been thinner than its head.

The alien walked down along an inside balcony in a dark apartment complex. Now I only saw the stairwell, which may have been lit from a floor below. I watched some shadows move quickly across the guardrails. I thought, If a natural light was causing those shadows, then time must be moving more quickly than normal.

I felt like there might have been a woman hiding by the stairwell, on the floor below me (the lit floor). I felt like the woman was hiding from the alien.

The "movie" now started over. I saw the woman almost emerge from behind a door, which the woman had slowly opened by only a crack. The woman looked out the crack. her eyes gave off a weird, cat-like glow. At first I thought I was looking at the alien. Then I discerned the woman's face.

I realized the woman was looking at the alien, who was out of my view. The woman was frightened. It seems plain now that the woman knew the alien and was already engaged in some kind of struggle with it.

The woman was now gone. She had either gone to hide from the alien, or else the alien had already taken her away somewhere.

Dream #4

I walked up to a garden, which I was going to weed. The garden (did I realize this?) was indoors. I was pulling, at first, mugwort-like weeds that grew between thin, woody plants like pine saplings.

The place now seems to me (i.e. when I wrote entered the dream in the paper journal) like some kind of museum exhibit. The garden, which was supposed to be a wild, natural area, also took only a corner or half (?) of this exhibit-like room. The rest of the room was silvery, plasticky floor, walls, and ceiling, with gentle, modern-feeling, fluorescent lighting.

The thin "pine-shoots" grew thicker toward the corner until they were too dense to penetrate. I couldn't get into them to weed out the mugwort. But it also seemed like in that section the growth of the "pine-shoots" had actually managed to "beat out" the growth of the mugwort.

So, having finished weeding that area, I moved to the area farther down. This area was full of woody growth, the foliage and flowers of which looked like rabbit brush or rattlesnake weed. This growth was very thick and either needed to be completely eradicated or just trimmed back. It was thick and dense, but some shoots grew so thin that they were green, like herbaceous growth, like aster stalks.

There seemed to be a cliff of black stone like schist somewhere. As I took care of this area I could hear a memory of a co-worker, like my co-worker TC, telling his wife how nice this place was, but in an ironic way. TC's wife was somewhere else, and TC was jokingly pretending like the lousy weather where his wife was was better than the weather here.

I had trimmed a fair amount of the vegetation. I reclined on some stumps and against the trunks of some still standing growth. I looked at the area I had taken care of. It looked pretty nice. The "rabbit brush" growth that stood looked like trees, with plenty of space between each plant. I thought, I couldn't have done all that needed to be done. It was too easy. The soil between the trees was rich and brown.

I saw a rabbit. It skirted around me, but it stopped to regard me. It was small but healthy, with soft fur. It had big, round, pure black eyes. I hoped it wasn't threatened by me, that it didn't feel like I was invading its space.

I looked forward again. Now rabbits climbed up on me. There were two or three of them. They had emerged from the trunk on which I sat, as if the trunk were now as wide as the trunk of a tree like a maple tree that was around ten years old.

I didn't know if the rabbits were going to attack me or if they just liked me. One of them nestled against the left side of my neck. I didn't know whether it would bite me.

(10/28/07) sprung springs; death of a jumpsuit kitty

(Entered in paper journal at 9:25 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I woke up in the dark. I rolled over in my bed. I knocked against metal wire which stuck out of my mattress. I got panicked and lifted up my head to look at the wire. the wire was like repeated s-shapes, thin, sticking out of the bed in two spans at 45-degree angles from the mattress.

I thought springs must have broken in my mattress. I was afraid that without my having been aware of it, another spring had pierced through my midsection or skull and that I would die as soon as I discovered it.

Dream #2

I woke up in the dark. I lay on the top bunk of a bunk bed. To my left, on the wall along the bed's left side, was a window. Trees in close, tangled growth were lit (by a building wall-light?) so I could see them pretty well. There was a lot of tangled vegetation but not a lot of foliage. One leaf I saw was big and rough-green with crinkly, brown edges. It had the shapes of a maple leaf and a tuliptree leaf mixed together, but it was probably about twelve inches long.

I called the leaf a sycamore maple leaf. But when I looked at the tree trunk nearest me, it was much smoother than that of a sycamore maple would be. I thought, Well, is it a silver maple? But there were cherry-like striations on the bark. I thought, Is it a birch tree?

I then figured that the leaf I saw clearly was from one of the tree trunks behind this front one. I looked higher up the trunk to see if I could spot any leafs. In tangled, brownish vegetation I saw yellow and brown leafs shaped like elm leafs and lit from above by a wall-light so their colors glowed softly.

I felt an animal stirring around my head. At first I thought it was a rat. I panicked and almost rolled out of bed. I thought, You can't flinch like that! You'll fall out of bed and hurt yourself!

I looked at the animal. It was a cat that lived in this house. I loved it and was happy to see it. It was daylight now. I sat up on the bed, playing a little with the cat.

There were a couple cat care magazines on the bed (which was full of different sheets and blankets). The magazines were different issues of the same magazine, but at some point the magazine had changed its title. The issue with the changed title was the first issue I had seen with the changed title. I can't remember the original title. The changed title was Fandango's Pop.

There was now also a little, grey kitten, almost just born, in a little, blue jumpsuit or covered in a blue blanket. Both cats were just lying near me.

I flipped an outside advertisement flap on the new magazine to see the actual front cover. There was some photo of a fluffy, white cat. I closed the magazine and pulled it up to shift it a little out of my way. Somehow I managed to knock the little kitten off the edge of the bed.

I tried to catch the kitten, but I couldn't. I stuck my left leg out, in front of the bunk bed's ladder, possibly to catch the kitten on my foot. But it just rolled down my leg and off my foot. The little kitten thunked down on the ground. It writhed a little. I thought it had hit the floor pretty hard for a newborn cat and that it was probably injured or dead.

I scrambled down the steps. I knelt over the kitten. It still writhed. It had fur like a full-grown cat (grey and dusty white with black, watery stripes), but the kitten was only about three inches long. The kitten's eyes were shut tight, like the kitten was in extreme pain. I picked up the kitten. It looked like a newly hatched bird. It had greyish-peach skin and blue, round eyes. It still writhed in its pale blue jumpsuit or blanket. I was sure it was in its death throes.

I lifted it up to the other cat, which may have had orange fur. I hoped the other cat would be able to care for the kitten or let me know by some instinctual reaction that the kitten was okay. The orange cat began writhing like the little kitten. But then it began pushing the kitten away, getting more and more annoyed with the kitten.

I now realized that my thinking had been wrong. Since the orange cat wasn't the grey kitten's mother, it couldn't take care of the kitten like a mother would. And it couldn't be worried about the kitten's pain if it couldn't take care of the kitten.

I thought, Well, if the kitten is still moving, it might be alright. I picked the kitten back up. I thought I would need to find the kitten's mom.

The room I was in was messy, full of junk and unopened moving boxes that were strung over with clothing and fabric. I walked into the hallway, which looked the same. The whole house, apparently, was full of boxes and junk. And it was glowing with golden sunlight.

I looked down at the kitten. Its grey head was now red, as if the kitten had sustained a head injury after all and was now hemorrhaging. The kitten shook its head back and forth, looking at me urgently. The kitten's face was almost human, like the face of a classic grey alien with blue eyes and a cat nose.

To see that the kitten understood what was happening to it was too much for me. I began to call out. But I was so uncertain of whether I should call out for my own mother or for the kitten's mother that my cries were just like groans of voice before the word is formed. I kept making this sound and getting more and more panicked.

I walked into the bathroom, which was also full of junk and boxes. I must have thought that either the mother cat or my own mother was in the bathtub. I thought that if I laid the kitten in the tub I would either know for sure that the kitten was going to die, and that it was my fault, or that the kitten would be taken care of.

(12/30/08) the lion dance; roach apartment; elephant alien

(Entered in paper journal at 7:15 AM, on B-train from Brooklyn into Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I walked down into a stairway into a basement. The basement may have had red walls and may have been lit with incandescent light. Before me at the foot of the stairs was a weird feature like a bottomless pit. The pit was rectangular and was bounded on three sides by "mattresses." The fourth side (the long side opposite me) was the wall. Set into the wall was a square in which sat some kind of shrine, including (?) a clear, rounded vase full of colorful flowers with rose-like petals.

I leaned my elbows atop the long side's barrier and stood watching, as if I were watching a pendulum swing. I thought of a legend of a man (maybe Asian) who had practiced a certain dance. But before the dance it was generally customary for the person dancing to give thanks to a god who excelled at the dance.

This man was a great dancer and did not think he needed to give thanks to the god. So the god came down to earth and challenged the man to the dance. But the god's dance soon became an attack, and the man was either frightened out of the challenge or killed.

I thought that I should give thanks to the god before I began the dance.

I stood in a different part of the basement now, not far from where I was before. The room L'd off to become narrower, and in the narrow space stood a bunk bed. I was right at the corner of the "L."

On the wall to my left, opposite the bunk beds, and on the same wall as the bottomless pit shrine, was another shrine in a square setting. Before me and just to my right, in the corner of the wall, was a "closet space." The closet was made of cheap wood. The shelves were full of all kinds of clothing, but on the top shelf was a TV. Just to my right may have been a doorway into a concrete-floored room like a laundry or storage room. Sunlight may have shone through a window in the storage room.

My propitiation to the god was to play some kind of video on the TV -- something like an anime adventure with a sexy girl swinging around and fighting people. My mom yelled down the stairs to me to shut that show off -- she could hear it all the way upstairs. I shut the show off, like I was clicking off one program on a computer.

There was another show playing "below" this program. This show was like a live-action porno or torture show, shot crudely in a green-walled room. I may have been ashamed that I had been watching this show, and I may have shut it off as well.

My mom told me something about putting some sort of laundry in the wash. I couldn't believe I was back in a situation where my mom was controlling my life like this. I walked out of a room like the the laundry room. I now stood in some room like a common room at a homeless shelter.

There were some boys, black and Hispanic, sitting on the floor, on chairs, and on taller items like ladders. Two white men, dressed nicely and looking like men from the 1950s, had been giving some kind of positive lecture to the boys, who had just entered the shelter.

One of the men left, out a door to my left, possibly because he was going to get something useful for the boys. He might also have made a comment on exiting that he thought the chances were small that he and his colleague could help the boys think positively about this place.

I looked at the windows to this place. It was night. The windows were dark. The windows were about five feet tall and three feet wide, grid-paned, maybe three panes across and four panes tall. The remaining man was continuing his speech to the boys.

I saw how words had been written on the windows, like finger markings in condensation. The statements were positive. I now watched the condensation and markings change color. According to the mood of the statement, the pane on which the statement was written would change to a bright color while the words would change to another bright color. The colors were like shimmery acrylic paint.

I had the idea that the boys had written the statements on the window and that they had colored them. This was part of an art project. Once it was complete, it was thought, the mood produced by the windows would be so positive that the boys would love to live here.

But the boys had lost their inspiration.

The other man may now have been gone as well. Some of the boys were planning an escape. But nobody, even the really violent and rebellious ones, were sure if they would be doing the right thing.

I hadn't really been in the scene, and maybe I still wasn't. But I was knelt on the floor. A big, black boy sitting on a tall stool looked down, at me, I thought, and said, "What do you think, little girl? Should we stay or should we go?"

I now realized the boy had been speaking to a small, Hispanic boy sitting in a chair before me and just to my left. The boy had a bowl-shaped haircut and wore small, round-rimmed glasses and a big, puffy, navy blue jacket. I knew this boy was smart and sensitive, and was recognized for being so, but was always made fun of (like being called a girl) for being so obedient.

I was now being held, romantically, on one of the boy's laps. We were in front of all the boys, in the open space of the common room. The boy whose lap I sat on was black, masculine, but pretty looking. He asked me, "Don't you like this?" My head was tilted backwards. The boy was bringing down three fingers to touch my head.

I thought, I don't like this. I shouldn't be attracted to this boy. But I am.

Suddenly I was all alone. I sat on the floor in a room like the common room. It was dark, with a spotlight or spotlights shining on the floor. The carpet was hard and grey. The room had a classy feel, like in a museum.

Before me was a shrine -- also a clear vase full of flowers, maybe including orchids with white edges that faded into deep-pink centers -- which was spotlighted. There was ornamentation around the shrine, including strewn flower petals and two lion statuettes, one on each side of the shrine. The statuettes may have been green and made of wax.

The statuette to my right may have turned into a real lion. It jumped to attack me. I became horribly afraid. The lion again became the green statuette (i.e. maybe one foot long), but was still attacking me. I knew this fight was nothing but a performance, although if I lost, I would actually die.

The green lion and I wrestled. I threw it off me at one point. It flew down a small set of stairs (three or four steps, in a semicircle, like in the minerals and gems section of the American Museum of Natural History). I may have crawled or slid to the steps. The lion pounced again from the bottom of the steps. I grabbed it and flung myself backwards, to hit the lion's head against the floor.

I was now sitting up. I heard a woman's voice somewhere, maybe in my head, talking about an actress like Sarah Jessica Parker. The voice was talking about how reckless the actress was in public life and how sh'ed eventually just become annoying.

Beside me was a weird, boxlike device which may have held an opium pipe. I was smoking something. Along a ridge of the box-device were scattered tiger's-eye-colored shards, which I knew were the legs of a spider which had been killed.

The voice continued, explaining that in the profession the actress was in (it may have been acting or equity research), there was no need to be such a prima donna. After all, there wasn't as much pressure as say, that involved in rocket science.

I stood up and walked down the steps. I thought to myself, I should actually look into rocket science. I've been wanting to design rockets for a long time now.

I walked into the deep blackness beyond the spotlights. I pushed open a heavyish, metal door with a circle window in the top, like a door in a restaurant or hospital.

I walked into a fluorescent-lit room. Before me stood a group of men, mostly black. I felt like they were looking at me as if they wanted to bully me. I walked away to the left. I heard some people talking somewhere. I thought they were talking about me.

I walked up a long stairway with white, close walls and grey carpeting. I now thought I heard people laughing at me. I tried hard to hear the conversation, to see if it was about me.

At times I felt like I was drifting up the stairwell, as if on an escalator. Along the walls, on my left side, were occasional windows, behind which teams of doctors sat, usually two doctors per team, the doctors mainly being black. The doctors were usually laughing.

I heard the conversation better. It was like a senior co-worker of mine, and the guy who acted as a liaison between the research and sales departments at my company, JB, was talking to one of the doctors as part of a radio interview. JB was speaking, in his usual mellow voice, about the economy.

I reached the top of the stairwell. I walked through one metal door into a tiny "foyer," then out onto a sidewalk through another metal door.

The sky was fully clouded over, but it was colored dim blue, like the color of early morning. There was an orange streetlamp overhead. The ground was wet, as if it had just rained. The wall of the building was white-painted concrete. It felt like I was coming out of the side exit of a movie theater or playhouse.

I held the door open still because I thought I wouldn't be able to hear JB's talk if I shut the door. But then I realized there was a speaker right above me, playing JB's speech. I let the door shut as I heard JB say conditions hadn't been this tough since 1912 or 1913.

Dream #2

I was in a dim bedroom that was lit only by natural light coming from some other room at the end of a long hallway. I was with a group of friends.

One of my friends, maybe my girlfriend H, saw a roach crawl across the wall. She panicked. I was ashamed, but also upset, that roaches were back in my house again, after I'd gotten rid of them. They'd been gone for so long.

But now I looked out into the hallway. It seemed justified for roaches to be here: the floor of the hallway was so dirty it looked like a wet asphalt road.

Dream #3

I lay on "my bed." The head of my bed was positioned so I could turn left to see down the hallway. There were a couple rooms along the right wall and one room at the very end of the hallway. The doors for all the rooms may have been opened. Fluorescent light was coming out of some (?) of the rooms.

I saw two rats run into one of the lit rooms on the side wall. I was so upset to see rats in my house that I called out, "No... no... no!"

I thought I would have to get up right away and kill the rats. But now I saw, as if I were a camera (and all the lights were now off -- only the streetlights from outside providing light), how there was some strange activity happening in my closet. The rats changed (first into mice, then into lions?). I thought, I can't kill an animal that big. Then I saw the head of an elephant emerge from the closet.

I was back in my bed. I thought, It couldn't possibly be an elephant. I thought it would be terrifyingly irrational. But out of the closet walked a roughly six-foot-tall creature, walking upright on two legs, having the body shape of a human (thought the creature was naked and had the skin of an elephant) and an elephant's head, which was huge in proportion to the body. The elephant may have had black eyes like the eyes of a classic grey alien's eyes, except round, not almond-shaped.

The elephant man walked toward me. I thought, It can't come near me. It would be too frightening. But it walked all the way to my bedside. It stood at my left (?) side, as if my bed were now in its regular place. Its breathing seemed very fleshy and real. I was so frightened that I began whimper/screaming. (In fact, I may actually have been crying out loud, the sound of which may have woken me from the dream.)

(10/1/09) grandpa visits from beyond; floating head art gallery

(Entered in paper journal at 7:45 AM at Sit & Wonder cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I walked down into a dark basement and into a bathroom. The basement itself was dirty, as if long unused, and almost completely dark. I was afraid to go in, but I did, closing the door.

My vision was, at first, all purple-white eye-static color in the dark. Then I saw or imagined a stretched-out sideways version of a classic grey alien's face, as if the alien were lurking in the shower to capture me.

But my vision cleared, and I actually could see some of the bathroom, as if it were lit by faint moonlight pouring in from some distant window. As I went to the bathroom I thought that, just beyond the wall against which the toilet backed (this wall now no more, apparently, than a couple of plyboards slapped up so on layered over the other), there was a room or a deeper basement, unfinished, skeletally "divided" into rooms, which was turned into a "classroom," -- or, basically, just a small, old school desk.

This place, I knew, was where my brother studied, my mother having taken my brother out of school. (I saw an image of my brother crouching down before a wind of my old high school building.) I thought that something seemed cruel about pulling my brother out of school. It was cruel the way my mother locked my brother so far away from people.

I was now in an enormous living room. The windows let in grey light, probably from a rainy day outside. I stood between a couch (of maroon leather?) and a small, wide table with a television on it. The carpet was pale grey. The living room seemed to stretch on, at least fifty feet on each side.

The television showed a rainy scene in front of a church in Venice (?). The TV announcer, probably a woman, was talking about the rain, but she might also have been mentioning a service at the church, possibly a funeral.

I now stood in a hallway or foyer area. The walls were almost all made of glass, giving me a pretty full view to the rainy area (Venice?) outside, although there were some structures, columns or wall, made of pink stones, obstructing my view.

I saw, somehow framed by the metallic skeleton of beams holding up the wide, glass panes, a very modern-looking, American-style church. The front of the church was A-shaped, made of gold-yellow bricks. It had a large circle of stained glass in the center, near the top, with an A-shape of arched-rectangle windows tapering down under that. I thought of the church as a Methodist church.

Just to the left of that church I could see the corner of another red-stone church, which was Catholic and, it seemed, more of the traditional Venetian style (?). I knew tha tthis area of Venice had nothing but churches all over the place.

(The area felt to me like an outskirts of the Denver suburbs, just a couple wide streets away from a main highway.)

To my right, the wall before me all red stone, was a doorway with a heavy wood (?) door open just a little. I assumed that beyond the door was a sanctuary. A priest (?) in a black robe with a white collar stood before the door. He may have told me that the event I had come for wasn't actually happening today. He then walked into the room and closed the door.

I now looked to my left. In another room that was all empty and walled and ceilinged with windows, stood my grandfather, who had died about a year previously in waking life. My grandfather had his hands clasped casually behind his back. He was looking out the windows. He turned away from the windows to face me.

He looked different. He was huge, at least six feet tall, and, proportionally, wider than he had been. His skin was patchy-dry and red-pink, like the skin of someone who smoked way too much. He had a strange bowl-cut of red-gold hair, which almost looked like a wig. He wore a beige-olive suit jacket and slacks and probably a deepish blue shirt and a tie.

He didn't look like he was completely alert mentally. But he recognized me and walked toward me. His eyes were almost vacant, like those of Frankenstein or a zombie. He may have been carrying an empty or almost empty, black duffel bag in his left arm. As he continued walking toward me he said, vacantly, "I've been meaning to ask you, Son, are you okay? Have you been having a rough year?"

My grandpa was now in front of me. But he kept trudging forward. I walked up to him and squeezed both of his hands, which were folded together before him, just above his bellybutton. I told him, "Yes. It's been a really awful year."

My grandpa kept walking forward, off to my right side. He said something like, "Well, keep up your hope."

My grandpa walked through the heavy, wooden door and let it close behind him. I understood that I wasn't supposed to follow my grandpa past the door. But, like I might doo when suddenly remembering I needed to tell one of my bosses something important, I rushed up to the door and pushed it open.

Before me was something like the living room of a Pennsylvania Dutch house. My grandpa was already across that "living room" and into an area like a largely columned, medieval interior (of a castle?) mixed with a parking lot.

I called out to my grandfather, telling him something like I loved him or I thought about him a lot. I couldn't stand thinking that our exchange had only been about how I had been doing. I wanted to let him know that I cared about him.

My grandpa turned toward me. In some sense or another it was like he stood outside, in a well-lit (with white, halogen lights) parking lot at night. He faced me at a quarter-turn, so that I saw him almost full on, but with a left profile. He looked normal now, not all distorted like he had looked before. He wore a beige, windbreaker-type jacket, khaki slacks, a blue, button-up shirt, and a hunched hat. He may have had his hands in his pockets.

As I spoke, two people sitting at a table in the Pennsylvania Dutch living room began speaking, telling me something about how the event I was looking for wouldn't happen today. The director for the event hadn't showed up. They kept on speaking so that my grandpa could never hear what I said.

It also seemed like there was a huge wind blocking my voice from my grandpa's ears. My grandpa kept calling out, "What? What?" Finally he said he couldn't hear me and that he had to go. He walked away into the night.

I looked down to the two people at the table. I was somehow concerned about them, now, and interested in what they were saying. They were two children, one boy and one girl. They wore stereotypical old-European peasant clothing. They sat at a thinnish, wooden table.

Both children had their faces painted. The boy, blonde, may have had his face painted a ghostly white with black circles for eyes. The girl, wearing a yellow kerchief over her hair, was made up so that she looked like wood. Her entire body, in fact, wherever it showed out from under her clothes, looked like the painted feathers on a wooden decoy duck. The girl also, when she first spoke, didn't even look like her lips were moving. But as I looked at her longer, her lips did begin to move.

(As I later reflected on this, I thought that my shock at how wooden the girl looked actually broke my connection with my grandpa, at which point my grandpa said he had to leave.)

I sat down at the table, across from the boy and girl, who sat side by side. The girl told me that she and the boy were here for something like an audition or else to be extras in a movie. But the director hadn't shown up and wasn't likely to show up.

A girl, who I now thought of as my grandpa, walked up to us from the nighttime parking lot as I told the boy and girl not to give up hope, that there was still time for the director to show up. The girl/my grandpa sat down to the wood-painted girl's right.

The new girl looked to be maybe in her late teens or early twenties. She was tallish and white with slightly tanned skin. She had blue eyes and chesnut brown hair pulled back and up into a ponytail She wore a green t-shirt, which she tucked into white jean-shorts that extended to just below her knees.

At some point I stopped thinking of the new girl as my grandfather and just started thinking of her as some girl I knew (?). The new girl was cheerful. She agreed with what I'd previously told the children, even bringing, I think, some evidence that the director was, in fact, coming.

Even thought I no longer thought of the new girl as my grandpa, I did know that she was, like my grandpa, dead, a ghost, if only because she'd come from the same place toward which my grandfather had departed. In fact, I thought of the girl now as the spirit of a boy who had died.

I could see the boy in the dark. He had longish, bowl-shaped, blonde hair, and he was wiry and thin, looking a little like a punk rocker in the toughness of his face. The boy seemed terribly upset. Then he was dead.

Now the new girl said she had come extremely prepared for the audition. She pulled out a notebook and pen and began writing down, in outline, all the steps she took to get ready for things, mostly to illustrate to the boy and girl, who were like good-hearted, but somewhat clueless, directionless, and unmotivated peasants from out of town, that they shouldn't give up hope and that they should keep fighting for their dreams.

As the new girl kept on writing her stuff out, I realized how incredibly bright and motivated she was. But he's dead!, I told myself. This boy's dead, and he's still working like this! It all seemed so absurd and yet so joyful that I suddenly broke out in a joyful cheer. I screamed, "Yeah! This girl! This is who I love!"

I stood and walked around the table to embrace the girl. I may have been able to embrace the girl. But I think something happened that made the girl inaccessible, as if she were walking back through the nighttime parking lot, up to a chain link fence, or possibly already beyond it.

Dream #2

I walked down a wide sidewalk in some part of a big city full of one-story warehouses. It was a cold afternoon. The sky was pale tan-blue, as if the sun were finally below the horizon.

I heard two men across the street. I recognized one voice as that of my old friend R. I looked across the wide, empty street to see two white men in grey, hooded sweatshirts, each man having the hood over his head.

The men spoke in a casual, sports-like, but also business-like, tone. But it sounded like they were talking about the next time they'd meet, to go out on a date, in somewhat sexual and romantic terms.

The building the men stood in front of, another one-story warehouse, was white, the paint job looking rough, like stucco, with a gate drawn entrance and the walls lightly misted in a pale, faded, blue graffiti.

I looked more attentively at the men and saw that one of them definitely was R. I called out to him. He at first looked shocked to see me, as if he'd been caught engaging in an extramarital affair. The other man had walked away casually.

I crossed the street to meet R, making nothing of the situation I'd just seen. R asked, a little suspiciously, what I was doing here. I couldn't quite place where "here" was. This place could have been Red Hook, Brooklyn. But it didn't seem quite right. We were at the top, it seemed, of a long, shallow hill. And I knew there were other long, shallow hills full of wide-stretched warehouse blocks like this beyond us.

But eventually, as we briskly walked toward the corner of this block, I settled on the idea that we were on Smith Street and Ninth Street in Brooklyn, I told R that it was coincidence that we met here. I always walked down around here.

We decided to cross the bridge together. Somehow, though, we walked on the suspension beams of the bridge. These beams must once have been copper: they were now corroded to a bright Statue of Liberty green. The beams, I saw, octagoned up, flat, and down, repeating along the length of the bridge.

I was surprised we had taken this route, but I knew R had chosen it as a test of how honest I was being regarding my accidentally having seen him in this neighborhood (and having caught him with that man).

As we ascended the bridge I looked out at the cityscape, seeing how monumental everything looked: we were so high; the bridge was so tall; the buildings and building tops so vast. I remembered that I'd had this kind of vision and feeling in dreams about riding trains across bridges in the city, but I couldn't remember the dreams I'd had.

R and I walked down one of the beam slopes and into an enormous, white-walled, wood floored loft. The walls were at least thirty feet tall. The room was probably one hundred by one hundred feet. The wall opposite us was one big window, looking out over the river.

All throughout the room, gigantic plastic (?) boards bearing the heads of famous Disney cartoon characters were suspended from the ceiling by white rope or thick, white twine, the heads suspended about three feet above the ground, and the heads themselves maybe six feet tall. There may also have been occasional abstract plastic models, also large, through the room. There were one or two other people in the room. One of the people was, I think, a curator.

We walked through the gallery of Disney heads. R asked me, as if, again, to test my innocence, what I knew about these cartoons, or how involved I felt with these cartoons. I may have said something.

We were now in a different exhibition room. The room was rectangular, versus square, with ceilings as high, white walls, and wood floors, maybe slightly smaller (or larger?) than the other room. Heads hung from the ceiling again, though not through the entire room -- just in the lower left area of the room; beyond the "quadrant proper," though, so that the display took up a little more than half the room.

The heads were also more varied, being not only Disney heads but also anime character heads and the heads of real-life celebrities, both "cartoonized" and taken from photographs of the celebrities. This room was dim, as if it were now dark outside (if this room even had a window), and as if the room were lit with just a few watery, incandescent lights, like track lighting from the ceiling.

R and I were alone at first, although eventually there may also have been an old man, who kind of looked like Orville Redenbacher, and who was the curator for this gallery.

I may have been kneeling or sittin gin front of one of the heads. I noticed that R, who stood to my left, was talking to a woman. I looked to my left to see R engaged in a flirting conversation with a woman who was in a place where a head had been.

The woman was cluttered around with a couple wooden boxes. The woman wore chunky, frizzy, knit wool clothes. She had frizzy, long, blonde hair, smooth, clear, tan skin, and pale, blue eyes. She may have been bound, either bound standing or bound to a chair. The woman's responses to R were cheerful, but almost robotic, as if the woman were a program, something made to be part of the exhibition.

I thought, R figured something out. He learned how to speak to the hanging heads and bring them to life. I thought I would try to do the same thing R had done.

I looked to the head before me, which was from a photograph (black and white, or sepia and white, the pixels (?) very visible with the enlargement of the photo) of a great composer. I asked the composer a question, like, "Can you speak, too?"

The composer, first as the large head, then as the composer "himself," standing before me, responded, "Of course I can speak to you, you idiot. What do you think I am? What do you think this is? You already saw him speaking to the girl? Why would you think I couldn't speak to you? God. Why'd I have to get stuck talking to you? I thought I'd get some good questions."

(Once the composer had become real, he took on the appearance of a white man with slightly pinkish skin. He was tall, thin, older, with a loosely wrinkled, but dignified face. He had a full head of pure white, soft hair, which glowed under the soft lights here. He wore a nice, grey suit with a white shirt and a tie.)

I was ashamed for having spoken to the composer. I looked away from the composer, at least hoping that I could console him for my dumb question by not talking to him at all.