Dream 1
Some view, comic book-like, of a man lying on the ground while people poked thumbtacks into him. Only three or four thumbtacks would be in at one time and they'd all be arranged according to certain points, on the body, e.g. two near the hips and one at the belly button. The man was green-skinned, with heavily inked lines for his musculature. The hands and arms of the (three or four?) people reaching to put the thumbtacks into him were red and blue.
Sometimes people would put other objects on the man's body, like charms. At the end they put three green apple cores across the man's collarbone, even spaced. At this point the man picked up a thumbtack and put it into his left (?) nipple.
All the time I thought I would not do what the man was doing to himself, even though it was some mystical ritual. But now I was definitely disgusted and afraid, and a little ashamed, of the cowardice that held me back from being willing to do it.
Dream 2
I walked into a department store in a mall, following after my NYC Americorps coworkers DO and SC, whom I thought I had upset. I walked past a female clothing section and tried not to act interested in wearing what I saw, just in case DO and SC were around and could see me.
Then I saw them. I was walking away from an elevator bank while they were walking toward it with a group of men of different races. They saw me, and as I continued walking, they followed me to talk a little more.
But DO was grabbed by one or two of the men and told to stop clowning around. DO was apparently getting married to the sister of one of these men, so he was trying to act good. SC and I headed after them to prove we, as DO's friends, were also good people. But the elevator door closed as we reached it.
We took another, hoping to follow the group down (to the basement?). But the elevator we got into was going up first. The elevator had about five or six people in it, including me and SC. As we went up the elevator got faster and faster. It changed into a tattered, faceless, metal lift in a somewhat wide, metal shaft with plenty of light and rust everywhere, so the wall and cords almost looked fleshy or organic.
People disappeared, as if straight out of memory, as we ascended. I was afraid to look down the shaft. I thought I'd be sucked out of the lift.
When we got to the top floor only SC and I were left in the elevator. Slowly the elevator changed again, into what I thought then was two airplane cockpits. But they both look now like theaters, with beige, pleather seats and a meager supply of flight controls at the front.
One, which appeared where the shaft had been, had two television screens by the flight controls. The two screens showed the inside of an airplane in some television drama. The left screen had an old, thin, female flight attendant, who seemed to be staring straight at me.
This cockpit was the down elevator. SC got into it as I thought that there was something reassuring about the flight attendant's stare, lilke it gave this whole strange experience a feeling of reality.
Now that whole area went black -- just faded out. I thought I had something to do with that, like I was making the surroundings predictable by making SC disappear as the rest of the people in the elevator had disappeared. I now sat in the larger cockpit, which had up at the front a movie screen. I sat in one of the back rows.
I was possessed, but I didn't realize it, perhaps through the rest of the dream. I wrote with my left hand into a torn piece of pinkish-purple, fibrous paper. There were some things already on the paper, like figures or sketches or small math problems. But I (writing and yet not aware) watched words appear on the page in wide, sloppy scrawl.
In the writing, something was being explained, I think, about how people had been killed or tortured. I thought a ghost was writing these words. It made me sick to think that what was writing these words had done the disgusting things people were now talking about, and that this "ghost" was right next to me, treating me as a friend.
Then "it"/"I" flipped over the paper and wrote something like, "Next week I will be in full contact with you," or, "I will be in full contact with you for one full week." I knew what this meant and I knew it was something I had wanted, but I now knew it was something disgusting, and now I didn't want it.
But now I realized (even though I still didn't know that my hand was writing) that I had been possessed by this thing. I could feel it climbing around in my chest. I threw up in two tiny spurts, each about half the size of a fist.
Dream 3
I went into what I think was an antique store. I was looking for a crystal ball used by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychic Leonora Piper, whom I think I called Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Alta Piper.
The store owner involved herself in my search and then concluded that she no longer had Alta Piper's crystal ball. I hadn't told the store owner that I couldn't buy the ball, anyway, and that I was just looking to be around it to see if it did in fact have any magical powers or feelings surrounding it.
The woman showed me some silvered crystals in a box and then two necklaces, one with sea-greenish, milky, translucent stones
and the other with a ruby in the center outlined by gold and with a large plate of diamonds around it.
I touched the sea-green stone necklace and felt an electric surge of pain. I dropped it back onto the table.
I really wanted the necklace now (and I really did not want it as well -- I was afraid of it), and the storekeeper could tell I wanted it. But I couldn't even afford this necklace, which was maybe one-third the price of what the crystal ball's would have been. I was ashamed to tell the woman I really couldn't afford anything in her store.
