(9/17/07) can't volunteer; data dormitory; rude waiter; conspiracy redacted; lightning love; snapped cable

(Entered in paper journal at 6:10 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I stood out on some lawn, which was bordered by a pine forest on one side and a large, brick building on the other. Somewhere a video had been playing about certain monkeys in a rain forest. The monkeys had white and black fur. The worry was that these monkeys weren't getting enough rain water in the treetops. I thought I would go work to help them in that situation.

The video may have been playing in the redbrick building, as if the building were a visitors' center for a park. The video must have ended. I called into the building, through one of the windows, for the video to be turned back on.

As the video was beginning again, my co-worker JN, in a corner area of the building, in a kitchen, yelled, "You can't do this stuff here! It's too loud!" I knew my hopes of volunteering in this project were gone.

I lay on the floor of a ratty department store. The shelves of the aisle I lay in were almost barren. The aisle itself was maybe twice as wide as usual. I stared up at the ceiling.

I felt completely hopeless. I had no volunteer work to look forward to, and I had nothing in this place, either. And it was all because nobody wanted me wherever I was! I began heaving sobs. I was then crying so hard that I had to sit up straight to keep from shaking.

Dream #2

I sat to the left of my co-worker JM as he gave a presentation among people at a (square?) table. At one point JM forgot some data. He stuttered, trying to remember it.

I whispered, "Do you need me to get the data out of your room for you?"

JM said, "Yes. Go get me a book called 'Open Fiction.'"

I was in a stairwell. I planned to jump straight down to the center of it. I jumped up and bounced off of two walls, ricocheting down into the center, which may have been no wider than my body. I may have passed some man, possibly a janitor, who looked at me as if I were going to cause some trouble.

I landed in a basement of rooms like college dormitories. The carpet was blue, with designs. I had to get to the other end of this hallway and then go up another staircase. I jumped, and in a couple of "ricochet" bounces of the walls was I was at the next staircase. The center of this well was even narrower, but I managed to jump up straight through it.

There was another hallway dormitories. The second door on the right was JM's. It was inside a corner and beside another door. The door was open and in front of it was a yellow foam bed bad. Weird instructions were written on the pad in different-colored magic marker (mostly purple). There was a little smell of urine. I knew part of the instructions spoke about JM moving. I didn't read any of the instructions. I just went in to get the book.

But now I thought that maybe all of this was a trap, that someone would find me in here and hurt me. I looked all around for books, but there were no books. There were only CDs. I now thought, Perhaps I've gone to the wrong place. Maybe JM has all his books at the new place.

Dream #3

I sat at a round table in a restaurant with my mom and my grandma P. I sat across from my mom and grandma. Behind them was a little railing and landing, and to their right was a three-step staircase leading up to the landing, which was the front of the restaurant. There might have been eight spaces set for the table.

A waiter, a white man, snobbish, though definitely a kid, saw a strip of purple cloth, like a table-runner, running under my plate and reaching down to touch the floor. The kid stuck his foot on the cloth to pull at my plate. He cleared his throat a couple times and tugged at the cloth as he did so.

The waiter walked away. I knew he'd messed with the purple cloth to make me angry. So I stood up and followed after him to confront him. But he hurried away through a busy rush of people. I sat back down.

My grandma said, "He acted the same way to us. He made some rude remark. But when we asked him what he meant he just mumbled and said, 'Well, if you'll excuse me, ladies.' He's a coward." I realized everybody on the restaurant staff was a coward.

Now some fattish, Hispanic man was trying to push me and my family out of the restaurant. He said, "We're closed. We're leaving. You need to leave, too."

My mother, grandmother, and I got up to leave. But as we got to the door, the man exited, closed the door behind him, and locked it. We were locked inside.

Dream #4

"We" (who were we?) were in a classroom that may have been a visitors' center for a national park. There was some conspiracy theory that a male teacher was trying to show us. The man was saying that this conspiracy was plainly stated in the documents, even in displays on the walls of the visitors' center.

The man led us to a display of black squares on the wall. He was going to show us the text. But when we got to it, we saw that all the text the man had told us to look for was gone. The man said, "It's been blacked out! Against the black background, it looks like it's never been there in the first place!"

The man's manager walked into the room. The man suddenly became very secretive and withdrawn. He somehow made it known to all of us that we were supposed to act like he hadn't mentioned the conspiracy at all.

Dream #5

I was walking along a suburban street. There may have been a high school field to my left. I had come up a slope. Now the street was curving to the right. The sky was grey and heavy.

Suddenly, lightning burst on the horizon before me: tremendous orange and white flashes immediately accompanied by thunder. It wasn't stopping. It just kept going.

A tall, strong, mature businessman stood to my left. I said, "Obviously the lightning is close -- the thunder comes right with it. I wonder if I can get home alright."

The man chuckled and said, "I doubt it, considering how far you have to go."

I said, "Well, then, would you mind if I stopped at your house?" I may have secretly hoped that the man would let me stop at his house, and that that would lead for an opportunity for the man to have sex with me.

Dream #6

Some show about a building that had been affected by the 9/11 attacks, but which nobody had really paid attention to. There was footage of the firefighters who had been killed in the events. Firefighters were repelling up the building by a thick, black cable.

Suddenly the cable broke. The firefighters fell four or five stories and onto a small, metal and glass structure like a foyer. Somehow the metal was electrified. The firefighters were electrocuted.

There was now another group of firefighters repelling up and using a black cable. These firefighters were up almost to the window from which the cable was linked. Through the window was the orange-yellow glare of a blazing fire. But, other than the fire in the window, the building looked fine.

The cable snapped. The firefighters fell down onto another glass and metal structure. They fell onto a pile of other firefighters' bodies. The pile of bodies was almost as tall as the glass and metal structure itself -- maybe twelve feet tall. Some of the firefighters were dead as they hit the pile. Others were still in the throes of death, and they died in a few final sharp, painful thrashes.

(4/25/09) building on fire; confronting rude man; boss draws my dreams; message from interviewer

(Entered in paper journal at 8:20 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a car with a woman like DK (a director of the department I worked in at the job from which I had been laid off in waking life). I may have been laying in the seat somehow, while DK drove. We were driving through a large city full of skyscrapers. I could see up to the sky as if through the roof of the car. It was early morning. The sky looked dim blue, like just a skein of grey clouds were floating below it. The sky was visible in small sections between the buildings.

We were talking about the weather. DK mentioned the forecast, which was somewhat at variance with what I was currently seeing. But then the sky grew deeply clouded. I wondered how the sky could get so cloudy so quickly. It worried me a little.

We then passed a building maybe "seven or eight stories" tall (i.e. there seemed to be seven or eight window-rows, though the building may have been more than seven or eight stories tall. The building was on fire, or, rather, there were huge stacks of black smoke erupting from certain windows. But through the other windows I could see people walking around through undamaged, undisturbed work spaces. The people may actually have been worried, but they seemed to be taking care of their business, anyway.

The office building was maybe hexagonal or octagonal or oddly four-sided and was build on a smaller base. Its top sloped out mildly, so the whole thing was almost cup-shaped, like something Eero Saarinen (?) might have built, but also like a black building I was familiar with from my trips to Boston (???). But I could see everybody in the building as if they were in a row house or a small shop on a small town's main street.

The smoke that came out of the building was quickly making the sky as black as night. We drove past the building.

I noticed that the other buildings were also on fire, in the same sporadic, smoky way as the first building, though fire was visible in some of these other buildings. The streets somehow seemed filled with panic, with people rushing around. The air was filled with smoke, to the point where we couldn't see in front of us. The smoke was tinged orange, as if lit by streetlamps. I got panicked and wondered if the whole city were going to be destroyed.

We drove down another street, like a pristine office park. There were wide, redbrick plazas all around us, lit as if from sparkling white ground lights. The sky was black as night. People were also bustling around in this part of town, though less people were around.

DK turned left (she may actually have turned right onto one of the redbrick plaza walkways) to drop me off at an office. I said, "How can people be working right now? Who knows what's causing these fires? The whole city could be under siege. We don't know what building is going to get it next!"

But DK didn't seem like she was listening to me at all. She was still driving to drop me off.

Dream #2

I was walking down a hallway with a man and a woman. We had come from another hallway and had turned left into this one. The hallway was somewhat wide, somewhat short with dull, white walls, grey floors, and fluorescent lights.

The woman was like an older authority figure. The man was a slightly scruffy, medium-height man. He may have been Indian. He had a stuffy face and short, tightly disarranged hair. His body was a little wide. He wore jeans, a pale tan blazer, and a red and pink, button-up shirt.

The man made some comment about how incompetent I was at my job. The woman made a slight comment, not really regarding the man, to let me know I was alright. The man had turned and walked back down the hallway, as if by walking away after his comment he could make it irrefutable.

I rushed down the hallway after the man, to force him into a confrontation. I caught up to him. He turned away from me whenever I tried to face him. He was almost to the end of the hallway, about to turn down it, which would somehow mean I'd lost the argument with him. So I grabbed the man and forced him to face me.

The man gave me a sour-looking face, like a constipated person might show. I thought the man looked like an idiot. I made whatever comment I'd needed to make to justify myself. The man kind of smirked in acceptance.

The woman, the man, and I were again walking up the hallway. We were heading to a celebration or convention. We walked up to a large event room. There was a cluttering of people near the entrance to the room, like a disorganized group of people trying to get in. I stood near an older woman who seemed to have a huge sense of propriety, who lightly regarded me, like I was an idiot.

I now got into the celebration. At first it was just a large, harshly fluorescent-lit event room lined with folding tables, with people at the tables passing out literature. Large groups of people flocked at all the tables. At one of the tables I saw my old co-worker JM, a person whose intelligence I admired greatly. JM was wearing a light brown suit which fit his slim body a little too loosely, and a cream-colored, button-up shirt. JM was with an Asian woman who was his wife, but not his waking-life wife EC.

I tried to catch JM's attention. But JM walked away from the table, almost as if he were trying to avoid me. I followed JM closely, trying to tag him to get his attention, so I could say hi, but apparently also talking on and on as if JM had already acknowledged me.

We walked through a series of rooms that were organized like a museum exhibition, though they felt more like mock-ups of rooms in a cheap apartment. There were tables everywhere. The tables were cluttered with paper and with people trying to hand out literature.

At one point I may have given up on JM. I walked, possibly with someone with whom I was talking, into another exhibit room. This artwork in this exhibit room was a sculpture of two gigantic books, opened lying pages-down, one loosely piled on the other. The books were maybe six feet long, three feet wide, and one and a half feet thick, with chunks like little cheese wedges, carved out of the pages at certain points. This may have reminded me of something else, which I may have mentioned to the person I was walking with.

Dream #3

I was trying to explain the burning building (from my first dream) to my old boss BS, who was then trying to draw the building. BS was drawing on a horizontal surface, which was alternately a chalkboard and a cardboard or brown-paper surface. BS wasn't quite understanding my spatial description of the building. At one point I may have tried to draw the building for BS. But I realized I couldn't get it quite right, either.

Dream #4

I was working on a computer. Apparently I had a bunch of visual-artistic programs opened. I saw an email from BT, (a person I'd interviewed with for a job in waking life a couple months previous to this dream). I saw the email as if it were on my BlackBerry.

I tried to open the email, but my BlackBerry's screen suddenly started getting flooded with the artistic programs I had open. I had to plow through all the programs to get to the email. I'd close the files but I wouldn't exit from the program. I plowed and plowed through the screens, slowly feeling more and more like I'd never actually get back to BT's email.

(2/2/10) new and old friends at bar

(Entered in paper journal at 6:30 AM on B-train into work from Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a bar, possibly with my co-workers. The bar was spacious, lit slightly dimly. There were a moderate amount of people inside. I had been wandering around for a while and was about to leave.

I saw my old friend R. He had kind of shaggy hair and was wearing a green t-shirt with a yellow design. At first R ignored me when I tried to greet him. I was relieved. I didn't really want to speak with him.

I decided to grab my book bag so I could leave. My bag was behind the bar, for some reason. The bartender, who looked like a senior co-worker, JM, handed me the bag. One or two of my co-workers may have seen that I was getting ready to leave. They themselves left.

I wandered back through the bar one more time, to see if there were any co-workers I needed to say goodbye to. It seemed like everybody was gone. So I walked back toward the door. The space before the door had dark wood floors and white stucco walls and kind of looked like a church. On the wall o my right was a mirror.

My friend R confronted me, not angry, but a little put off, asking me questions, possibly like why was I here, and why hadn't I spoken with him in so long?

I looked at my face in the mirror. I had a big pimple on the left side of my face, near my nose. I felt like I looked horrible. I may have walked toward the exit.