(7/20/07) a view of the monument

(Entered in paper journal at 5:37 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a house, alone. I lay in a bedroom that was probably a mess. Bright sun came in through the windows. I was happy to be by myself.

I felt a presence. I knew it was my mother. I went into the hallway. My co-worker EB stood in the hallway, possibly with my mom back in the distance, and behind a lot of clutter, possibly bikes. I wondered how I was going to get out of this place with so much stuff in the way.

It was night. I flew over treetops and possibly small rows of shop buildings in a small area of New York City or a small town.

I heard or remembered a conversation I'd had with my boss BS about how I had made the logistics of a date too difficult for the woman to want to do on the date again. First of all, we'd gone out to some restaurant at the outskirts of (this part of?) town. Second we'd had to walk all the way there.

I flew over an open road at night. I then stood beside a steep slope of wall, almost like a huge pane of solar paneling. It was early morning. BS stood beside me. We seemed to be crowded into a narrow trench near the wide wall by trees and a deep cliff behind us. BS asked me why I didn't work hard to improve the way I presented myself to women.

It was a bright day. I stood on a stone walkway that curved around and around a section of a stone building. The walkway and the building were greyish-peach colored. This building was part of an historical park or campus.

I think part of the walkway was blocked by a plywood board standing on its side, maybe with a wide sheet of paper hanging off it. I might have thought I wasn't allowed up. But I saw a few people, two couples, probably, walking down the path from behind the barrier, coming in my direction.

Now I had flown up to the top of this building. I looked down on the park/campus. I was very high up. The land around me must have been tall, rolling hills.

I heard a narrator discussing the old times, when Thomas Jefferson had founded this place. I saw the place alternately in black and white, like an old film, and in color, like my regular view.

The narrator's speech focused on a monument, like the Thomas Jefferson Memorial monument in Washington, DC. I was sure it couldn't be the Jefferson Memorial: I wasn't in the right place. I thought I would fly down to it and see what the monument was. I felt like there was a dark metal (bronze?) figure inside.

I couldn't stop looking at the the monument, even though I kept trying to look in other places. The land around the monument slowly got soggier and soggier, like a barren field, once lawn, after a heavy rain.

I yelled to the film that was being narrated, "Stop looking at the monument! I want to see other things!"

I now heard narration of a documentary which I was actually enacting. I was floating down the side of a building and landing momentarily in columned openings in the building. Eventually I was at the base of the building, possibly at the foot of a tall hill.

The narration had been about a man who had gone insane and thought he could hop down the side of a building. But, I thought, I did just do that!

I looked back up to the top of the building.

(8/4/07) supermarket closet; give your friends a break

(Entered in paper journal at 4:50 PM at Barnes and Noble bookstore at Union Square in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a bedroom with my boss BS. BS asked me to look through some old issues of the trade rag Supermarket News for a piece of data. The issues were in a closet. BS stood inside the closet. I stood outside the closet. The room was dimly lit with greenish, natural light. The closet had an incandescent bulb deep inside it. It was like there were two roughly two-foot-deep sections of the closet partly divided from one another by little section-walls.

There was a huge pile of junk in the closets. The magazines, the old issues of Supermarket News, were scattered and piled throughout the junk. BS wanted me to help him get them. I was afraid, though, that if I did, we would run across some pornographic magazines I had in there.

I also saw a strange and lurid magazine or picture book about black men who beat up white men. I hoped that BS wouldn't find this publication and think it turned me on in the same way that porno mags did -- I was pretty sure it didn't.

I tried to dissuade BS from looking into the pile. But BS wouldn't stop. So eventually I went in and started helping him.

Dream #2

I was in the office of my co-workers DE and EB. (In waking life, DE and EB, the replacement for our old Associate Analyst ES, shared the same office. I sat just outside their office in a cubicle as, at that time, most of the Assistants and first-year Analysts did.)

I was angry at DE for something. He was fighting against me a little, but I was definitely bearing down on him. I finally tore a book out of DE's hand. I accused DE of having done something against me. EB just sat in her seat, watching.

DE choked up a little bit and grew pale. He then burst out crying. I realized I had been too severe, especially with all that was going on with DE's family at that time. (In waking life, from 2007 through 2009 -- though I was hardly sensitive to the issue -- narcissist that I am -- DE's mother and father both experienced some very serious health issues.)

I grabbed DE's left hand and held it with both my hands. EB rushed over and stood by us. DE became less pale. DE was yelling at me, asking me why I couldn't ever just give him a break.

(3/14/08) x-acto knife parking lot

(Entered in paper journal at 5:45 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a mall, possibly with a woman. We got somewhere and then got out of the building through what must have seemed like a regular door at first but was then like a chain link fence crowded over with asphalt. We pushed through the fence. Now we stood out in the night air on a vast parking lot and just outside the small lot we had just exited. (???)

The woman and I stood in a circle with a group of people, probably my boss BS and my co-workers DE and EB. I may have been explaining to BS, DE, and EB that the woman and I hadn't (?) gone through the lot (through which we had, in fact, just gone) because there was a puddle on the other side of the fence.

A black, homeless man now approached us for money. Everybody else softly told the man we weren't interested. But I loudly yelled at the man to go away. Then another man, a tall, pale white man with long, black hair and a long, grey overcoat came up and asked us for money. He might have been more aggressive than the black man had been. I yelled at this man, too.

The man pulled out a yellow-handled X-Acto knife and then dropped it. Either he or I picked it back up. He put it in his pocket and walked away. He yelled back over his right shoulder at me that I shouldn't think I was safe, that he would kill me. He may have been a drug dealer who was trying to lure us into taking drugs. I had stopped him before he succeeded.

I told EB, "People tell me things like that all the time."

EB told me, "You should give me a list of names of people who tell you that. I've been looking for people to kill. You'd be giving me an excuse."

We were all walking across the parking lot and over to another mall. We walked down a couple of steps as we approached the other mall.

DE was talking about having different personalities. Each personality was a different mask. One mask was a veil. Another one was something like a butterfly-shaped piece of cardboard that DE would place over his nose. Another was purple face paint with silver accents and deep, long, black markings over the eyes.

As DE revealed his last mask, we were sitting in something like a restaurant (like a Denny's) overlooking a mall parking lot. It was around breakfast time. DE was making weird, tiny, chirpy, little noises. I realized that each mask DE wore was worn so DE could try to make me like him by showing how weak-charactered he was.