(2/27/06) death of a tiger cub; neglecting my best friend; the biker's mistake

(Entered in paper journal at 5:31 PM at Mid-Manhattan Library on 40th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

My friend R and I sat by a smallish tiger whose fur was like a stuffed animal's plush fur. It was R's tiger. I was afraid that if I petted it it would surprise attack.

Now the tiger's cub came up. It looked like a miniature version of a full-grown wolf. I put out my hand to pet it or play a game with it. It bit my hand softly but firmly. It kept squeezing down. I tried to shake it off. I knew that right now it was only a game, but that the tiger cub would soon go too far and devour me.

As I considered this I lost focus. I thought about meat and how meat is packaged. I thought how I myself might be killed and processed as meat. I knew that if I didn't want that to happen I had to kill the tiger cub.

I looked around. R and the adult tiger were gone. I was surrounded by empty Styrofoam and cellophane packages for meat.

I looked to my hand. The tiger cub was now just a fleshy skull about half as long as my hand. Its "jaws" felt like weak, dried-out bones from a t-bone steak. I looked at the eyes, hoping they were still alive. But they were dried-out and, though alive, dying and past the point of hope. I felt awful that I had caused the tiger cub to die by losing my focus in thoughts of rage. (???) I tried to convince myself that I could still keep the tiger cub alive.

I thought of the tiger cub as a fish. I thought, It's only this way because it's been out of the water so long. If I put it back in some water, it will live again. But I was pretty sure this was just a hope that I had, not because I necessarily wanted to keep the tiger cub alive for its own sake, but because I wanted to keep it alive so I wouldn't have to deal with the guilt of having killed it.

Dream 2

I sat at a dining table in a small living room. My friend Y's mom sat across from me. Natural light came in from a wide window to my right. I told Y's mom how bad I felt for neglecting Y all this time. Y's mom said, "Well, you should tell her so."

Y was now to my right, by a couch or a couch facing another couch. She sat on the floor in a knees-front, feet-back position

like she was a kid playing with trucks. She caught me (maybe her mom, too) by surprise by talking suddenly about something very interesting.

I either turned to face her or went to her. I asked her questions about what she was talking about. I could feel her anger and sadness toward me. But I could also feel that she didn't want to talk about my having neglected her. She just wanted to be friends again.

Dream 3

(dream?) -- Drifting as I thought of something, which became a dialogue between me as a woman and another woman. Eventually before me flipped a strip-like animation of many different anime-heroine outfits and body types, until one finally locked.

The strip was on the left side of my view. It took up maybe one-sixth of my field of view. The rest of my view was of a woman in a red suit on a motorcycle on a wide track before huge stands of spectators.

I was alternately the woman and the woman talking to her. The other woman was like a floating vision, like a TV-view that was really there. "I/the other woman" told the biker woman I hadn't meant to compete so fiercely and that the advice "I" was now giving her was completely based on her well-being and nothing else.

I was now one of the two women, not sure which, but definitely on a bike. The other biker gave "me" instructions on how to win the race or maybe just get a lot of points, by performing a huge jump.

"I" jumped my bike and ascended. At a certain height, over the enormous, stands, the other biker told me to perform some pull-back maneuver with my handlebars. I did it. But when it was too late to correct my move, I wondered whether I had made a mistake by listening to the other biker. I thought, We'll just have to see how the momentum carries me.

I now saw from behind the stadium, like I was in  a helicopter outside the stadium. The sky was an incredible mixture of deep blues and deep, vivid blues and deep, earthy blues. I saw "my" biker go all the way above the stands. I thought "she/I" was going to make it.

Now I saw a church wall appear behind the two bikers. The wall was soft, pink-brown stone bathed in pink-yellow sunset light. It was a massive wall, in a "house" shape with a hole at the top and in the center, kind of like a distortion of Philip Johnson's AT&T building.

Seeing that building made it clear that "I" had made a mistake by listening to the other biker. I could feel (though I was no longer in "she/I") the bike tipping backward and descending to the ground far below.

(9/7/06) landlady discovers my transvestism; friends don't invite me places

(Entered in paper journal at 7:34 PM at home in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I ran out of my apartment. I was running after my landlady. I believe I had made a complaint about my neighbor always making noise. My landlady sided with my neighbor and decided to kick me out.

It was showering, steel grey, and lighting outside. My landlady headed to a beige SUV in a driveway right by my door. I tried to throw her to the ground, but I myself fell to the ground and pulled on her dress a little.

I yelled, "Look at how things really are!" I said, "I just paid for a month. You can't kick me out now unless you wnat to give me my month back!"

My landlady ran back into my house, which was about twice as big as it was in waking life. She went to my closet (she had originally come into my apartment through a door in my closet (which existed in waking life)). She saw some of my girl clothes.

My landlady grabbed some of my girl clothes. She yelled, "What is this? I didn't know about this when you moved in! I can't let you stay!"

Dream 2

I was in a dining room and then a kitchen in the dark. Somewhere my cell phone was buzzing. Finally I picked it up. But I had missed the call. I felt like the person I had missed would make trouble for me as a payback.

Dream 3

I was in a dim dining room with my friend R. It was a lightless room with a kind of cold light coming from somewhere else.

R was panicking. He had missed a phone call from the members of the improv comedy troupe we'd been in together in college. R told me, "Now I won't be able to go to the show." (The show was some kind of "competition" where they invited people from the audience on stage.)

I started to tell R he could go anyway. But then I realized R was making a big deal of the situation, not because he was worried about being able to go. He seemed pretty sure he would be able to go. Instead, he wanted to call attention to the fact that he had been invited by our friends to go while I hadn't.

I yelled at R for gloating over getting preferential treatment from our friends. R underhandedly responded, "Well, you can go, too. Nobody's stopping you."

(8/23/08) zit as sex toy; i'm a lesbian with my female friend; lured into dead end

(Entered in paper journal at 9:30 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I had three small, dry bumps on my face. I thought they were zits, so I "popped" one of them. It peeled off my face like a film or a dry piece of paper.

There was a hard ball of "pus" inside the film. I pulled it out and looked at it. It grew, became a little gooey, and took on a weird appearance. It was about two inches long, bean-shaped, with prongs coming out of it. The "body" itself had some consistency, but the prongs were soft and flaky. It was almost like a toy, maybe even a sex toy, except that it was gooey, like phlegm or pus.

Dream #2

I walked into a small side hallway (to my left) in some place like a mall or perhaps like the shopping areas in Grand Central. A lingerie shop caught my eye. I looked in as I walked past, trying not to be conspicuous, but interested in seeing if the store's style was something I wanted to wear. But most of it seemed to be things like camisoles, a kind of rigid, fancy style that I didn't like.

The hallway was very small and narrow. A decent amount of people walked through the hallway in both directions, mostly young women. All the shops in the hallway were lingerie shops. I knew I would want to stop into one, and I hoped nobody I  knew would see me.

I turned right, into another dim hallway. I saw a rack of panties, of a cloth, cottony, non-stretching fabric. I thought these panties would be fun to wear, but I realized they'd probably be smallish and awkward on my body, like most feminine-shaped but inflexible articles of clothing always ended up being for me. Plus, I felt too fat to wear those panties.

I grabbed the waistband of my own underwear at the back. I realized I was actually wearing a pair of panties like the ones I had been looking at just now, so that I really didn't need another pair, especially sine this pair already fit less than perfectly.

I now realized that, in fact, all I was wearing were these panties and a matching bra or camisole!

I continued walking down the hallway. The atmosphere alternated between a dimmish, plaster-walled hallway like a hallway in a small, dingy office and a marble-walled hallway, like in a well-built or fancy building.

I turned right, into what may have been the end of the hallway. It was a very clean, white-floored, white-walled lingerie shop that also seemed like an enormous dressing room. There were a lot of girls there, but the place wasn't crowded. The lingerie was all brightly colored, like summer, or like sweetgum leafs in the fall.

I looked at myself in a mirror. I was wearing a pair of vivid pink, almost hot pink, gingham panties and a matching shirt/tank top. I probably looked just like a woman. I might actually have been a woman.

Now I saw KB, an old friend of mine and one of the people I'd worked with on my Americorps program in 2005. I tried to hide myself. But KB didn't seem to mind how I looked. She was more interested in being able to see me after such a long time. But I was still upset to see her while I looked this way.

We were in an adjoining room, which was even more like a fitting room than the last room had been. There was a door outside on the back wall. It seemed to lead out to a foresty area, like around the visitor center at the National Park where I'd done my Americorps program in New Mexico in 2002. The door was open. Bright, comfortable sun flowed in.

KB was sitting on a deep-blue-green couch. The couch was full of girls. I seemed to be having a conversation with KB as myself. But as the girl I also (?) was (?) I seemed to be cuddling with KB and kissing her.

Dream #3

I was walking down a street in a relaxed shopping district type area (which kind of reminds me of some shopping block in Queens). I was on the shady side of the street on a sunny, slightly breezy day. The sidewalk was busy with people, but the overall mood was relaxed.

But I soon found myself constantly having to get out of the way of different groups of people. The first group was a group of white teenage boys, all tan, with golden blonde hair, very cheerful. Then it was two or three tall, smart-looking black men, who were all laughing with each other. I didn't feel stressed out by these people, but I felt overwhelmed, like I was avoiding a tide which would sooner or later carry me away.

These groups of people had been coming toward me. Now I had to get out of the way of a person who was walking in the same direction as I. He was a white man, maybe in his early twenties. He might have been walking with another man who was like him. He carried a bundle of twigs on his shoulder. He had straight, brown-black hair and olive skin, and he wore a dull, navy blue shirt and dull, army green shorts.

The twigs, which the young man might have been carrying for his mother, were supposed to serve the same decorative purpose as cherry blossom twigs or willow twigs. In fact, I even called them willow twigs. The wood was a rich tan color, like on young mulberry trees, and the leafs were compact and vivid green, ridged very tightly, somehow (not completely) like rose leafs.

I had to swerve completely off the sidewalk to avoid this boy, and even as I did this, the edges of the branches still brushed against me, as if the boy were purposely trying to get back in my way.

The sidewalk was now in the sunlight. I walked behind a mailbox and then back onto the sidewalk. I was walking toward a subway entrance (a lot like the PATH train entrance at Hoboken). The building was brick, very clean, topped with a pristine, arching, aluminum or stainless steel structure. The building seemed to back into a grocery store parking lot. This area was even busier, like there were a fair somewhere nearby.

A young boy cut in front of me as I headed down the stair. I got competitively upset and hustled to cut him back off. But as we went down the stairs, which curved to the left, it was very hard for me to walk. It was, in fact, hard for me to move my legs at all.

The young boy and I seemed to be going at the same pace. I thought I could do something like slide down the handrail or even hold onto the handrail and "fly" or "hover" down to beat the boy. The boy seemed to have the same idea. But when I saw he was going to ride the railing down, I decided not to. I decided that riding the rail would be cheating. I could beat the boy, I thought, just by moving quickly, or perhaps by flying.

Nevertheless, I grabbed onto the railing like I was going to ride down it. But it was all covered in brown packing (?) tape. I could feel that, underneath the tape, the railing was broken in a lot of different places. It wouldn't be practical to ride down at all.

Now I was on the right side of the stairwell, where the boy had been. I was sliding down the railign, but the stairway was getting narrower and narrower. The stairway narrowed to a point and became a wall, I saw, before it even reached the actual floor of the subway platform. I'd have to hop the railing to get to the train.

The boy had stopped a few steps up from me, i.e. behind me. His mother had been calling him. He ran back up the stairs to meet her. Originally, I knew, the boy had been heading down the stairs to the train in order to take care of some task for his mother. But now it was like he was an overzealous boy who had headed for the train ahead of his mother, thinking he could be independent of her. Now he was being lightly scolded for having run ahead. The boy would have to go back up the stairs to his mother and then come back down with her.

But I also knew that the boy had run down the stairs to "trick" me. He wanted to rev me up into a competitive state so I'd get stuck in the exact position I was in at this moment -- facing the hallway that narrowed into a  blunt wall. The boy knew well enough to stop ahead of time and head back out of the station, never having had any intention of coming down to the level I was at.

I felt tricked, frustrated. But I still also had to catch the train that was arriving at this station. I was now more concerned with how to get over the railing so I could get onto the train.

(4/2/09) killing the spider; anime library; chasing the ceo

(Entered in paper journal at 8:30 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

It was night. I lay in a wide bed like a hotel bed, with a synthetic-feeling coverlet over me. To my right was a sliding-glass door, which was messy with soild and showed pale, electric blue light, like from a car's headlights, somewhere in the distance (though the door opened to a backyard, not to a front yard with a road).

I looked over the right side of the bed and saw a spider crawl under the bed. The floor was a mess, cluttered with dusty items like cushions and boards. The spider was like a daddy long legs with a metallic, blue-purple body.

I "remembered" my psychiatrist A having told me at our last session, "Now, don't you kill any spiders."  (In waking life, my psychiatrist had actually told me to make sure I didn't get another job until my "inactive" period with my current job -- where I was technically still an employee, though I was already basically laid off and no longer coming into work -- was finished and I was finally unemployed, i.e. about mid-April.)

But for some reason I thought, Well, killing one spider isn't all that bad. I couldn't stand the thought of having a pest in my room. I rolled off the bed and looked under it to see where the spider was. I saw it near the wall, near the head of the bed

I stood up and walked to the bathroom to grab something to smash the spider with. I came out with something, probably an unwieldy, dark square of material (when I'd meant to get a bit of toilet paper).

I turned on my bedroom light. The light was just a table lamp, dim, at the opposite end of the room from me, at the head of my bed, on its left side. Most of the room was still dark. The place was cluttered and dusty. There was another bed to the left of my bed. That bed was cluttered with stuff, including a foam mat that lay half on and off the bed. But the left side of my bed was also cluttered.

I was afraid to step in the space between the two beds. I thought the floor under the left bed was so dirty that mice probably lived under it. I was afraid that if I caused any vibrations in the floor, the mice would come out, which would be really annoying and would dissolve my sense of "having a clean room."

I walked between the beds, anyway. I kneed my way up onto the right bed. I thought the spider would eventually crawl up the wall, at which point i could smash it. But looking at the head of my bed, I now saw that the right pillow, on which I had laid my head, had a blanket of cobweb from its corner to the wall. I knew this cobweb was the spider's web, and that it had been here for a while.

I couldn't stand the thought that I had lived so long with the spider so close to my head while I slept. I thought something like, Well, it's too late now. But I still tried to convince myself that somehow I hadn't slept with my head so close to the spider, and that the web couldn't have been there for very long.

I thought that I should at least pull the web out, now that I saw it. But when I reached at it (parts of it now looked like a web), I noticed that the spider, now smaller and greyish, was posed in the bottom half of the web. I was afraid that by pulling out the web I'd make the spider angry. But I knew I had to do it, anyway, to start to make my room clean again.

I pulled the web off the wall. It now hung down off my pillow. I might have pulled the web the rest of the way off my pillow. But I now saw that the spider was angry. That was enough to scare me. But now I also saw that the spider was thing and long-legged, like before, and that its body was jet black with a red hourglass on it. I thought, It's a black widow!

I stood off my bed and backed away from it. The spider now charged down the bed and onto the floor, coming after me. The spider had stubby legs and a squarish, crab-like body, black with red mottling. It had red jaws and two big, round, black eyes. It was maybe three-quarters of an inch wide. I backed all the way back to the bathroom doorway. The spider and I may then have been at a standstill.

Dream #2

I was in something like a library or bookshop that had a cafe in it. The place had a very "strip-mall" feel -- white-walled, tall, wide, with thin carpet and wide-spaced shelves. The cafe area was just a few tables spread out in an open space among shelves. The place was moderately busy.

I stood at a revolving carousel of books. The shelves were clear and plastic. The carousel was about seven feet high.

My girlfriend H sat at a table with a friend. They may have spoken back and forth in both Japanese and English. They were talking about me and the books I was looking at. I was probably looking at manga novels, though I may also have been looking at anime DVDs.

I was looking, H and her friend said, at some classic manga, but also at some manga that either H or her friend was not familiar with. One of the two began to explain to the other what this anime/manga was all about. The person then sang the theme song, which sounded like a song from a recent (in 2009) anime about a boy who dresses up as a girl so he can go to a girls' school. I was ashamed that H and her friend liked this anime. But H and her friend didn't seem to worried about the fact that I liked the anime.

The top shelf of the carousel had tiny books, maybe two and a half inches tall and one and half inches wide, and maybe a quarter of an inch thick. The rest of the shelves were now filled with DVDs. A couple of DVD cases were patterned with orange and black tiger stripes. These cases were for DVDs of an anime show I really liked.

H and her friend now spoke about this show and how much they liked it, mostly because they wanted to sound like they were interested in me, so I would get interested in them. The more H and her friend spoke, though, the more, I noticed, the DVDs for the show filled the carousel. Now almost all the DVDs on the carousel were DVDs for that show.

At some point H and her friend were discussing specific words in the show's theme song. I felt weird, again, about what the two girls were discussing, as if those particular words would reveal something about me that I didn't want known.

Dream #3

I was in a restaurant with a friend. We sat at a booth table which was like a large car's interior set into a very small bedroom. The room had white walls and a window on one wall, almost the height of the entire wall. There might have been blinds over the window.

The table area had no table, but something like a grouping of gear-shift knobs and levers encased in black plastic and slightly metallic, green imitation leather. The booth seats were like bench seats, although somehow it was also possible to sit and look forward out the window, as if sitting in bucket seats.

I sat across from (or, sometimes, beside) a pretty, young woman who possibly had olive skin and brown hair. We were waiting for guests for a business meal, probably breakfast or lunch. In particular we were waiting for the CEO of the company from which I had recently been laid off.

Through the window I could see beyond the "restaurant's parking lot and across a street to a tan-bricked office building in a business park. There were green mounds of grass before the building and blue sky over it.

I saw the CEO outside the building. I explained something to the woman about how all the guests would be late, but how a lot of them would make it. I was particularly sure that the CEO would make it. I didn't feel like I sounded too convincing. I now sat "forward" in my seat, like I would sit in a bucket seat.

I now saw the CEO walking just outside the window. I said, "Ha! The CEO is just outside! That means he's coming really soon." I got up and ran outside to meet the CEO. I knew he was with a group of tall, young, strong businessmen, who accompanied him just about everywhere.

But when I got outside, I couldn't see the CEO anywhere. I was with a group of people outside. The parking lot was like a strip of asphalt road among dusty desert hills, dirt roads, and chain link fences, all under a clear, blue sky.

We all looked up and down the road for the CEO. Now the CEO came speeding down the road, from our left, heading toward the "restaurant" in a pale, metallic blue, Porsche-like car. We were all happy that the CEO was finally here. We all started walking back toward the building. I may have been at the back of the line of people walking back.

Now the CEO sped away from the building. I realized that the CEO couldn't find a parking space, which was equivalent with not being able to locate where our group was meeting. I ran after the CEO so I could tell him where we were.

But now the CEO's car sped back toward the "restaurant." I ran back to the "restaurant" so I could find the CEO and lead him to where our group was meeting. I ran through the building, which was now like a mix of warehouse space and office hallways.

I opened one of the doors in a hallway. The whole group was sitting at the booth table. I asked everybody if they'd seen the CEO. They said they had, but that he'd walked past this booth as if he hadn't recognized that this was where he should be.

I ran back in the direction I had come from, to catch the CEO before he got back in his car. I ran through a large warehouse space (actually like the loading dock area at the Manhattan Houston Street UPS building, where I worked for a while in 2000 in waking life).

I now saw one of my friends or co-workers running outside the gates. The man was tall and tan, with flowing, red hair and a short beard. He wore a green t-shirt and jean shorts. He was muscular.

The man "told" me (as if he was speaking from just behind me and to my right) something like "I guess we're in this together if no one else wants to look." But I felt like the man was running "with" me only to compete against me. I ran even faster and was now outside. The man was just ahead of me, but I was catching up. But then I really started to lose my breath.

We ran along a dark, black asphalt road. We saw the CEO run or drive over a large, lawny hill before us. The man easily ascended the hill. My lungs felt shot, and my legs were barely controllable. I kept going, just out of determination. But the man easily gained ground over me.

(The next part may possibly be a loose imagination after I woke up.)

The man got up to the top of the hill. A football hit him from the right and knocked him over. I knew that the CEO had thrown the ball from down the hill.

I stopped, still a little distance behind the man. I now heard the CEO joking with the man, saying, "Well, sounds like you couldn't stand being in that meeting, either, huh?"

I felt like the CEO was kind of, but not really, including me in the conversation. After all, I hadn't made it to the top of the hill first. But I also thought, like I was speaking to the CEO, It's not that we couldn't stand being in the meeting. We were looking for you, to try to get you into the meeting!