(7/15/07) gold-mining area; valley of the shadow; the yellow hummer

(Entered in paper journal at 8 AM at Starbucks on Ninth Street and Second Avenue.)

Dream #1

It was a clear day. I stood atop a hill of piled soil. A female friend was with me. We were talking with a man who may have been a boss of ours. We were in some gold-mining area. We were discussing a weird semantic issue. It made me think I needed to get rid of my idea of obtaining gold from this area.

I walked down the ridge of the hill to a certain height and then jumped the rest of the way (ten feet, I told myself) to the ground.

Dream #2

It was a sunny day. A man stood on a park lawn, possibly looking out on a river. The man may have been standing with other people, talking with them. Behind them was a man who looked like Adam Sandler, except maybe a little skinny. This man was supposed to be me. The man was autistic.

The man said, "Do you remember when you didn't let me watch the show XXXXX?" The man got more upset about it, muttering and muttering.

I saw (as if I stood in front of everybody facing away from the river and toward them) how the "Adam Sandler" man's figure was becoming dimmer and tinted with deep orange. I couldn't figure out what was happening -- if it was something with my vision or something "unreal." But I saw how the man had worked himself into such a panic that he was pulling himself out of the world completely. His figure became like a black hole from a cutout of reality.

Now that black shape pixelated, became vague, made a fluttery, electronic, popping sound, and disappeared. I saw the man standing by himself in a similar lawn. He was in a world by himself. He knew, to some degree, that he had pulled himself out of the world of interaction with others by having gotten so upset. The man spoke, as if speaking to his caretaker, trying to acquiesce in some way regarding the TV show he'd missed, as if speaking to the air in this other world would get the message through.

The man "woke up" and was standing, some time later, in the park again. He was now a skinny, tall, white boy with long, frizzy-curly hair and blue eyes. He stood facing and edging into a leafless shrub. Two guys stood on either side of him, at an awkward angle to the shrub, possibly throwing a ball to each other. They had to throw the ball over the shrub in some weird way.

Dream #3

I floated over a computerized map, possibly of the whole world. The land was in tan. Clouds were in pink. I descended down below the clouds. Below the clouds it was like the clouds were hard, flat panels. The land forms were canyon-like slopes broken up by networks of rivers. The rivers looked real. Everything else looked like computer animation. There was no vegetation. It only seemed like a few hundred feet, at most, between the rivers and the clouds.

I told myself I was in Asia. I was looking for the particular boss of some company. I flew around a building, the only building in this whole landscape, a tall, shimmery building with a parking garage as its base. The garage was just a simple structure of concrete columns, ramps, and platform-levels. The garage was, I could see, only sparsely populated with cars.

On the top level, at the base of the actual structure (as one would think of it) of the building, at least two cars were parked so they were actually propped up, leaning against the building. One of these vehicles was a yellow Hummer.

(11/25/07) the one-bedroom two-bedroom; my mom's law

(Entered in paper journal at 9:05 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

It was bright day. I stood on the roof of a tall, white apartment building. The roof was a little tiered and covered with gravel or small stones. I walked down a little tiered area to meet my real estate agent, CH. CH was going to show me a new apartment.

As I approached CH, my psychiatrist A came from my right. A called, "I need to go to the bathroom! I need to go pee!" To my right was now another apartment, the door opening directly to a toilet. I thought, Well, if A isn't using the one I'm looking at, I may as well go in.

The apartment I was going to be moving into was a two-room, I had been told. I was going to find a roommate. I wondered if A was supposed to be my roommate. The place was more expensive, but I almost thought I could still afford to live here by myself.

The first room I walked into was a bathroom. The second was a kitchen. The third was a bedroom. The fourth and fifth were another bathroom and kitchen. All five rooms were in a straight line with each other. I wondered where the second bedroom was.

I walked back into the bedroom. When I got there, something made me think I had walked through the second bedroom without having paid attention. I turned around and walked back. But all there were were the second kitchen and second bathroom again.

At the end of the second kitchen (the last room) was another door. It was a thin, fake wood door. There were little stickers on it, showing words in different "cool-girl" styles and colors. One word may have been the name "Tony" in a thick, pink cursive. The door had a tiny slide-lock on it. The door was unlocked.

I opened the door. It looked like another apartment, probably with a family of a mother and children living there. The place was littered slightly with papers and things.

I closed the door. I wanted to believe that this place was also mine, but I knew it wasn't. These were my neighbors. I thought I had escaped having neighbors like these people, who would probably make me miserable with all their noise. And I still had only one bedroom!

I couldn't insulate myself from the noise of these neighbors. It struck me as odd that the door was unlocked from my side. That meant the people in the next apartment had probably been running around in this apartment. Since the new place was practically mine, I locked the door.

I walked to the front door. As I got to the front door I was once again certain that I had seen a second bedroom, or perhaps a living room, without having paid attention to it.

Dream #2

I lay in a living room with my mom and my brother. My mom sat on a couch and my brother lay somewhere beyond my bed. To my right was a buffet, on top of which was a TV, probably turned on. The room was dim.

My brother asked my mom, "Don't we have to get to XXXXX?" (This place was something like a city council meeting.)

My mom said, "Oh, no. I don't feel like going."

My brother said, "But they're going to propose your law today!"

We now stood out on a familiar road near the house where my family lived during my last years of high school. To our right, along the road, was a blocks-long bake sale.

My brother said, "You made all that fuss to get them to put the law in. Now you don't want to go support it up to the next level?"

I stood looking at a bunch of weirdly frosted cupcakes -- they all had white frosting on the centers, but other frosting (like chocolate) on the outsides. They looked like they would be disappointing.

I got mad at my mom. She had made the law? And now she was too lazy to care if it failed? I told my mom, "You are an idiot! I've been able to hold it in for a long time. But this is so stupid, what you're doing now."

I stood in a courtyard. The ground was redbrick. The walls and columns were redbrick. The place had a spacious but intimate feel. I was apologizing to a woman my age, as i what I had said to my mom had been said to this woman instead. I wasn't physically speaking. It was like I was walking around by myself in the courtyard, remembering the apology while also letting bad thoughts about my mother work through my head.

I now embraced a woman who looked like MH, a colleague from New York Cares. I held MH close and realized how good it felt. Now it was like I had said all the bad things about a nearby friend of MH. MH's friend was very severe. MH and I were standing, arms around each other, saying apologies as MH's friend approached us from a distance, as if we were preparing what we should say to MH.