(6/28/05) annoyed to see me; balding; restart

(Entered in paper journal at 6:30 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I walked along a road that seems to have been half outside, as if along a country hillside, and half inside, like in a long apartment hallway. By a wood post fence I met my friend ML and one of his friends. ML had a bike. He saw me coming and thought about getting away. I reached him, though, before he could. I could tell he was annoyed to see me, so I just said hello and goodbye. As I walked away I could hear him telling his friend how annoyed he was that he hadn't gotten away fast enough.

Now I met up with my old friend JS. He looked older, maybe forty years old. He had a friend who looked like him except at another age. JS was also annoyed to see me.

Dream 2

I looked in the mirror and could see all the way over my head to the top back portion, to see that I was balding in a rough circle around a patch of hair in the center.

Dream 3

I was in a dark room. I pulled a laptop out of a bunch of computer supplies and cases that cluttered the whole living room. I turned on the computer, which came on with a screen that should have come after the startup process. I got worried that I'd jolt the computer and wreck it by proceeding from that screen. I cringed, perspiring, and shut the computer off to start it all over again.

(3/9/06) lucid touchscreen cruelty

(Entered in paper journal at 8:02 PM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I sat up in my bed. I could hear people from my work talking, and I physically reacted as if they were there -- i.e. I "actively felt" the heard conversation, not moving per se, but "actively feeling."

My old boss PG started calling me a name that sounded like a stock analyst with whom I should have been familiar. A laptop rested on my bed-stretched legs. I typed frantically, trying to get out of one screen and into another. The present screen was peach (?).

Suddenly a woman appeared at the lower right-hand corner of the screen. She was a computer drawing, shown from the shoulders up.

I told myself, This isn't what I'm familiar with at all. Ah... I see. I'm dreaming.

I was lucid. But, I wasn't very surprised by this (as I usually would be on becoming lucid in a dream). It was very easy to relax, so that I would keep my lucid dream stable.

I touched the woman's picture, hoping to "get a message" or "perform some magic." The woman turned into a sharp, crystal-metal skull. I pulled away, trying to avoid the unsavory image and meaning.

I no longer had a body. The computer sat "before" me on the empty bed, at an angle so if I were on the bed, I'd be curled up against the wall.

I tried to make my surroundings change. But the only thing I did was turn the computer screen into a video of a loose classroom of kids who may have been in third grade. The video panned left to right and then right to left. Before it even showed, I knew what it was going to be.

I wanted to be cruel. I swiped my finger across the screen, right where I knew a girl's neck would appear. I hoped my finger would slice the girl's neck. I figured it would, since I was in a lucid dream. But it only made a weird, blood-like impression on the screen when the video turned on.

But I knew I could do something. I stared at the children as the video panned. I focused on making each one so sick he or she would die. And sure enough, by the time the video finished panning from left to right, children were crumpling up with sickness. And as the video panned from right to left, some children were collapsing, falling to the ground. One girl in particular looked at me pleadingly before she fell to the ground.

(1/4/08) a burger king bathroom; communications and death

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

Dream #1

I was walking down a hill of a small street at night. I was looking for a place to go to the restroom. There was a Burger King to my right. The whole street was dark, no lights, except a small sliver of light from the Burger King sign. The Burger King was part of some long row of shops in a stout, decked, wooden building that somehow reminds me of the Old West.

I walked into the Burger King through a side or back door. The place was only half-lit. I was in a small cul-de-sac to the right of the main dining area. In the dining area were a couple workers, probably a man and a woman. I hoped they wouldn't notice me. I had no intention of buying anything. I just wanted to use the restroom.

I went into the restroom. It was kind of barren and trashy. I might have started using the urinal. (At this point I may have woken up. The feeling of anxiety about the workers potentially thinking I was a creep because I hadn't bought anything was still with me. But now I thought, It was just a dream. You get that one for free.)

Dream #2

I sat before a computer, probably in a dark room. To my right, about ten feet away, were some friends of mine, possibly both girls.

My computer might have had two screens. On the bottom right corner of the right screen was a little grey "button" logo that had a right-facing triangle on it, like a "play" button. On the rest of the screen was something like a control panel with lots of virtual touchscreen buttons. The panel was grey like steel, but all over it, and the background of the screen, was a strange iridescence. The background was probably iridescent in bright colors. The left screen may have been much like this.

I believe I had been conducting business on my left screen when I heard a voice come (as if from the play button) from the right screen. It was a woman's voice. The woman said, "Hello?"

I looked down at the play button. I knew this play button was part f some new internet fad, where people spoke to each other by recording short messages via this touchscreen button and then sending them. Sometimes you could send to random people. Sometimes you could receive from random people.

I didn't quite know how to work the system. I pressed the button and said, "Hello. My name is Preemie." But before I could finish my message, I got the "Hello?" again.

I pressed the button and asked a short question. But as soon as I sent the message I got another message back. The woman said, "My name is Maya. I'm a teacher at Princeton University. I can't talk much with you now. I have to get to my next class."

I thought, Are all messages pre-recorded? This woman hasn't yet responded directly to any of my messages. I sent a message again, like, "I hope you have a good day at classes."

My friends in the distance giggled at me. They said, "Don't you know you don't talk to people on things like this? Who knows what kind of wacko that person really is?"

I thought, Well, that's true.

(At this point in my journaling, I got off the train in Manhattan. I resumed entering my dreams in my paper journal at 6:40 AM at the Starbucks on 57th Street and 7th Avenue.)

I was pulling away from the building, backwards, as if I were in a car. It was night, on a smallish business street that was fairly well lit. I had to pull all the way around three or four stopped cars, one of which was a police car. I pulled around and then behind them.

I then realized that the two non-police cars had been in a wreck. I slowly pulled up beside one car, on its right side. I had to stop there, as if the cops had the road blocked. I might no longer have been the one driving the car I was in.

Beside the passenger window were a group of middle-aged ladies. The ladies were kind of fat, with feathery, blonde hair. They were talking about the victims of the wreck. I couldn't tell if these women were the victims' mothers or police practicing telling the mothers about their children when the mothers arrived.

I looked out the driver's side window, as if I were looking past someone who sat in the driver's seat while I sat in the back, passenger's side seat. It looked like the black car had been smashed up, crumpled like a can, with its roof torn off.

There were three women in the backseat of the black car, and maybe other people in the front seat. Everybody in the car was dead. But it looked like the women in the backseat were just sleeping. The woman in the passenger's-side backseat was most easily visible. She was palish white, with dark hair.

I thought, This is my first time seeing freshly dead bodies. I felt like I should be ashamed for actually wanting to see the dead bodies. But I also felt like I would put myself in a dangerous situation by looking at the bodies for too long. I thought, Well, regardless, I'll have plenty of time to look at them. We aren't going anywhere for a while. The cops won't let us move.

(1/2/09) looking at porn and doing the wrong work

(Entered in paper journal at 8:54 AM at Flying Saucer cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a room with my brother. The room was like a living room, but I may have been thinking of it as an office. The room had a wood frame around it, like the framing for a loft bed. There may only have been two solid walls, while the other walls were like the section of frame where the walls would eventually be put up. The floors were piled under with multicolored quilts and blankets.

My brother sat or lay on his stomach before an entertainment center which had two or three bright-screened computers on it. I thought, I shouldn't check what he's doing. I'll get in trouble for not working. I looked at the computer screen.

I knew that my brother was typing a lot of random-seeming, almost humorous, words into an internet search engine to pull up pornographic websites showing fat, black women in lingerie. I could see a page like this in my mind's eye: photos of women dispersed throughout a white page, with faded borders around them. But when my brother actually pulled up the web page, it displayed a photo of a few really beautiful, black women, skinny, wearing really elegant lingerie.

I was now "upstairs," on a floor of desks like a trading floor. Only about a quarter of the lights on the floor were on. It was night. I was walking toward "my desk." I was trying to remember the user ID and password for my computer.

I was going to do some work. But I thought to myself, What kind of work am I supposed to be doing? I thought I would pull some earnings conference call transcripts off the internet, to keep my mind fresh on how companies were doing. I wondered whether this would be considered work or whether this would be considered something I wasn't supposed to do.