(10/1/05) one more jump; money shame; dykes of hazzard; afterbirth cat

(Entered in paper journal at 8:50 AM at the Tea Lounge on Union Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in a plane over a desert. I parachuted out or went out in a very small gliding device. I descended more quickly than I'd thought I would. I descended in front of a skyscraper that was all by itself.  It seemed enormous, incredible. It was metal and glass, black, and relatively plain and boxy.

I landed roughly on the ground. I had been too nervous about the experience to appreciate it, especially the building. I wanted to go again.

There was a soldier- or pilot-like person, helmeted, beside me, tall so that I now feel like I was a child looking up at him. Somehow he "told" me my time here was up and that I had to go back home. I was pretty sure, however, that I had enough time to do one more jump. But then I got a call from my mom.

Dream 2

I was in a back/living room. A teller stood behind a long counter to my right. The teller was tallish, pretty, and blonde. I was trying to impress her, even though I wasn't exactly attracted to her.

I stood before a buffet/dresser. It automatically did transactions or served as a vault which automatically opened to the specific customer's space. I opened my vault. The doors all clanged open. the light in the room was sharp and sour, and the buffet doors all opened sharply and sourly. There were two end spaces that opened like drawers.

The top drawer was the one I focused on. I needed to take out all the money. There were just musty piles of coins and tattered, sticky bits of paper in the drawer. But that's apparently what I wanted. I had to take it out secretively. I didn't want the teller to see I was such a loser. The buffet jolted, though, and the change and mess bounced all over the floor.

An older couple walked up and helped me pick up -- though their "picking up" had nothing to do with the change. Instead, they took everything else out of all the drawers and packed it into a large plastic bag to prepare me for leaving. At first I was offended. Then I just figured, Well, maybe it is time for me to go. I was worried that I hadn't picked up all my money.

Now I was in an office where some pretty, Asian woman had taken me. the change now belonged to a woman, an executive who owned the office I and the pretty, Asian woman were in. It was implied that I had stolen the change, even though I knew I hadn't. I had the feeling the Asian woman had all the money I had lost.

Now the Asian woman sat flirtatiously next to the executive on the leather couch. She gave the executive a whole pile of quarters as a surprise, both for the executive and me. I also realized I had quite a bit of change left on me, that I wasn't as broke as I'd thought.

Dream 3

A comic book featuring two women in a down-south adventure story, like a female Dukes of Hazzard. I tried to figure out whether the women were lovers or just friends. Nothing I could see was really clear.

There was a log cabin. The red-haired woman was throwing an object almost as big as a car. There was a general feeling of dislike for men. One black frame had words on it that told whether the women were gay. But it was very oblique.

Dream 4

There was some reality show following around a man and a woman as the woman gave birth. The woman had the child. Now the man was at his office. He got some bad news about his wife somehow. Now he was pleading with a woman like a secretary to let him use a phone. This was his company, some kind of airline company. But the older secretary, haughtily mild and softly taciturn, would barely let him use the phone. The man was embarrassed to be seen on the reality show, on national TV, using this phone. The secretary was also now embarrassed for having been so petty on national TV.

As the man used the phone, I could see the wive, as if the area around a waist-up shot of the man had been cut out and the hospital room put in instead. The woman lay in a bright yellow room, screaming and moaning. She had had the baby, but now something like an infection was coming out. She yelled to her husband that it might kill her -- it was like a wad of bursting poison which would have been non-toxic had it simply come out immediately as afterbirth.

Even though the woman hoped to live, she said a provisional goodbye to her husband. And now the thing came out. It was a grey cat.

(9/24/06) bomb in the desert; lighthouse post office; videotaped beatings

(Entered in paper journal at 9:15 AM at Ozzie's coffee shop on Garfield and 5th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

A huge crowd of people stood before something like a desert at the edge of a city of enormous buildings. The people were separated from the "desert" by police barricades. But I was in the desert. In some place behind me a nuclear bomb was going to go off or be dropped.

I hurried to and behind the barricades, into the huge crowd of people. I had been blind with frenzy. But even now, on the side of the people, I was terrified. I had no idea how everybody thought just standing behind the barricade would save them from a close blast whose destruction would span for miles and miles.

I knew I had to get to a bomb shelter in one of the buildings. I ran through the streets, against the flow of everybody who ran to the barricades to see the blast. I was trying to get as deep into the city as I could. Then I would go down in to a shelter. I could see the deep blackness of the shelter.

Dream 2

It was a stormy afternoon, dark grey. I ran up a hill to a lighthouse (?).

There was a house, a "post office," at the base of the lighthouse. I had sent a FedEx package through this office. I wanted to make sure it reached its destination (which, apparently, was this post office).

I came in out of the rain, soaked. Someone (?) was with me. A nice, oldish, fattish "fisherman's wife" kind of woman sat at a desk in this homey, cluttered, office space. One of us wore a yellow raincoat.

The post office woman handed me a big, thick FedEx package. I tore it open. I believe if there was someone with me, I didn't want that person to see the contents of the package, which (she?) would try to steal.

But it turned out this wasn't the package I was looking for after all, but a package I had sent myself. I wondered if the package I was really looking for (i.e. the one I had sent myself) wasn't being kept from em by both the person with me and the post office woman.

Dream 3

A TV show interviewing a woman who had been severely beaten by her boyfriend. The woman wanted videotapes her boyfriend had of her having been beaten. At first the TV show host and "we viewers" thought she wanted the tapes for evidence during the trial (which was already stacked against the man completely). But then the woman said a whole list of videotapes she wanted from the man, things from before she even knew the man.

The list of videotapes came up on a television screen somewhere in the studio. There was a whole outline of things the man had done to the woman. It was suddenly clear, and the TV show host said so, that the woman wanted all these tapes because the bad things the man had done in the past really turned her on. In fact, the videotapes of the woman being beaten also turned the woman on.

Looking at the list of the man's acts, I couldn't believe the only thing this TV show spoke about was the man beating up this woman. The man had done a lot of awful things.

The TV show host (a woman?) was chastising the woman for getting aroused by videotapes of herself being beaten. But now the woman was a man (?) and was talking about a disease that bent his penis into a Z-shape. There was a view of the virus (?) that caused this disease. Then there was a view of the man's penis, which looked like a white straw bent into a Z-shape.

(7/7/08) the last bit of cornstalks

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

Dream #1

I was in a house (possibly like my mom's friend TH's house in Arvada, Colorado) with a person (woman?) r a couple of people. I was acting like an interviewer for a job. Someone, possibly my boss BS, walked in through the front door. I walked through a series of rooms to meet him, continuing to make some speech the whole time like I was an interviewer.

BS and someone else and I were all in a living room like at my great-grandmother's house. BS and the other person may have been sitting on a couch. I may have been disembodied, floating over and just behind them. The people were talking about the characteristics of the person we had been interviewing.

My vision shifted to a view of a car driving through the desert. BS (apparently still sitting on the couch) asked, "You haven't heard anything from DE" (my co-worker and teammate on BS' team) "on whether he plans to leave the company, have you?"

I mumbled, "No..." even though I had heard something like that.

The view of the desert road became red. The land on the side of the road was regularly dotted with roads that sat just on the surface.

I was now a person like Uma Thurman's The Bride in the movie Kill Bill. I stood before a cornfield on a steep hill. The cornfield was just a strip of land on the hill, not the whole hill. Some people like criminals were hiding in the cornfield. I had to get to them. They were Mexican.

The cornfield was being erased, almost like it had been mown down in patches without my having been aware of it. From still-standing patches beside the now cleared areas, the "criminals" would run out, running down and beyond the hill.

The soil was brown and rich. The "cornstalks" were more like shrubs: tangled and knotty, almost root-like or wooden near their bases.

Now the cornfield was in a huge room with white or silver walls. I/The Bride was eating the final space (like a very back row) of cornstalks away, with my bare teeth, in huge, absurd bites, like I was a lawnmower or a tractor. The rest of the field was now clean soil.

Suddenly I heard the voice of a person (like David Carradine?) say that he was somewhere nearby. The person may have said that I shouldn't put the effort into trying to find him. I had a feeling that he was in the last bit of cornstalks that I hadn't cleared away yet.