(Entered in paper journal at 7:30 AM at Starbucks on 57th Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan.)
Dream 1
Two teenage boys were on a bus at night. One, the younger, was in the driver's seat. He said something to the older boy in the seat right behind him. The older boy said something like, "We should get going." The younger boy hunched over to his right, heaved a couple sobs, then straightened up and began driving the bus. The bus pulled down what looked like the main street of a small town. "I" saw it from about ten feet in the air.
"I" saw the boys one more time, like they were sitting in seats in the middle of the bus now. They imagined/saw themselves as older, though the people they saw were kids who didn't even look like them and were dressed in older people's clothes and wore fake beards.
One of the boys said something like, I guess it's a bit sooner than I'd like to go. But life is nothing more than a block of flats. I thought to myself, Block of flats? What's that supposed to mean? The phrase kept repeating in my head.
I was now looking at a cemetery on a hill down a side street from the main street. Down the center, there was green lawn. But on either side of the hill-dome were tall, shaggy thickets of phragmites. In the lawn were headstones of various heights.
I thought, Are these the flats the person (woman?) was talking about. But none of the headstones here are actually the flat ones. I took the meaning though, and for some reason knew I had to leave the town.
(Dream entry continued at 8 AM, at my job, apparently, according to the address I gave.)
The streets were full of zombies. Everybody, hopefully, on the bus was alive and were escaping the zombies. As long as you didn't touch the zombies you were fine. But if you touched them, they'd lure you in and attack you. I tried to stay out of their field of attention altogether.
I thought of a TV show where people were talking about some zombie movie where the zombies keep going to the malls. All these zombies were walking around like they were leading normal, dull lives. The only time they'd attack you is when you'd get into their attention. Some would veer toward me as I walked to the edge of town, like they wanted to be attracted into attacking. But they'd never get close.
As I got to the edge of town I thought to the boys again. I hoped neither of them would fall asleep on the bus because the zombies would also attack people who were asleep. In fact, I wondered if I wasn't actually in one of the boys' dreams as his physical body was being destroyed.
The edge of town faded into a vast lawn hillside. I moved smoothly, gliding down the hill (one or two trees, but otherwise just the vast ramp of lawn) as a zombie here or there would come up the slope, dressed up and with nice hair, as if heading to church.
But soon this view faded into a dim, scary, windowless corridor in an airport. I went down a gradual, white-tiled slope with strips of gritty traction. There were more zombies here. These ones were more drawn to me. The zombies mainly looked like 1970s-style businessmen and were in worse states of decay than any other zombies I'd seen yet. Some were hardly bodies These ones would rush at me to surprise me or pop out of doors and try to grab me and scare me.
With these ones I had to keep calm. If I let them scare me they would overcome me and eat my brains. In fact, with one of these guys, if I saw them starting to rush at me to scare me, I'd rush at them and touch them on the shoulder or arm to show myself I didn't have anything to be afraid of.
Slowly the airport changed into a hospital, so slowly I wondered if it hadn't always been a hospital. The zombies were less offensive again. But now they knew I was here, and while they went slowly about their business they stared at me.
I could see the hallway's end: a white wall. I kept waiting for a fade-out into some new place. A "nurse" zombie stood on the right side of the hallway, talking on a payphone. Either she or a male "doctor" zombie was hacksawing into a full-size tin of "ham," which was actually a human brain.
The "nurse" on the phone said things like, "Yes, we're trying to capture him right now, and we know he wants it. We're operating and we'll get it to him right away."
I now directly faced the wall. I felt zombies waiting to attack me, maybe even beginning their attack. But the fade to a new location wouldn't come.
Finally the nurse said to me, "We need you to take this to him. Will you take it?" I said yes.
I had the tin in my arms. It was simultaneously a brain, a huge chunk of ham, and some little crumbles of greay meat like well-done chorizo. I was taking it to a "live" man, not a zombie, who was the priest of a cult that was turning people into zombies. I thought there was something I could do to "catch" this man or stop him from eating at least this one brain.
I was now a woman, something like the wife of this priest. I walked through a maze-like "hallway" of wood frames and sheer curtains in golden light. I walked into an all-wood sanctuary, up onto the octagonal platform, on which there was a rectangular, narrow, two-foot-high altar.
I lay a tin on the altar.It was something fake, not the actual tin I had been given. Somehow when the priest ate this he would be compelled to confess his guilt, of which I could not yet be sure, and then he would be easier to defeat.
"I" (the woman) heard the priest call, "Is it ready yet?" "I" thought he was down the hallway. But now I saw him sitting in one of the wooden folding-chairs of the sanctuary. He had seen my movements. I was sure he knew I'd planted a decoy.
I walked to the priest. he sat at the very left edge. He was a thick, but maybe short, black man with golden- or yellow-irised eyes. He had a predatory look on his face, which "I" just took to be anger that he'd been betrayed.
I don't know where "I" was now, but "I" felt like "I" was being chased. There was a chance, I realized, that this priest wasn't alive at all but that he was a zombie and was just making himself up to look alive.
Now I "was him," though I still felt "my" (the woman's) fear of being chased. "I" (the priest) jumped out of the chair and onto the platform. The back "wall" was a huge, sheer curtain billowing in the breeze.
"I" called out a saying having to do with the power "I" had gained through "my" evil acts, and how "I" was still alive with them, as if the empty sanctuary were full of "my" disciples. Then "I" continued "my" momentum (?) and jumped through the curtain to an enormous tree at the top of a vast, grassy hill among vast, grassy hills.
"I" (the woman) was almost relieved. "I" knew that if the priest made it into the tree he would stay there for it was the symbol of ultimate attainment of power. But I (the priest) only jumped high enough to brush my fingers against the hedge-manicured underside of the canopy, the limbs and branches and leafs of which looked like those of a Zelkova tree. So, failing to reach the canopy, I flew back into the sanctuary.
I ran after the woman now, demanding to know why she ahd set a bad sacrifice before me. I was now watching both the woman and the priest, though I was still feeling the woman's emotions as if I were still a part of her or identifying with her. The woman was being shoved and thrust against the wall. Now she was naked. The priest threw her back and told her that she would have to sit naked suring the service.
The woman sat in a back row, a row of wooden chairs with very ornate cushions, while everybody else, a half-zombie crowd, sat in the very front rows. The woman (I still feeling her emotions) admired the artistry of the chairs, until it dawned on her that these chairs didn't exist.
The woman moaned in desperation. She knew she had been knocked out or hypnotized or caught asleep. While she had been asleep the priest manipulated her dream to seem very real. She was still in that dream, and her body was up on the altar.
The crowd of half-zombies looked back at the dream-woman and laughed. The woman's dream-body was in the physical sanctuary, and the woman knew it, even though she was mainly perceiving the dream.
She/I looked as intently as she/I could to the altar, to see what they were doing to the physical body. But what I saw was three women on a bed, wrestling with the woman, alternately trying to seduce her and beat her into unconsciousness or death with rolling pins. Some of the women were naked, some were not. There may have been blood. The crowd below laughed at the woman, like she had clumsily gotten herself into an embarrassing situation.
Meanwhile I/the priest stood at the back of the sanctuary. I looked down some steps into a basement, where I could see piles of meat. I called for something to be fetched from down there.
I/an old, nun-like woman, came from somewhere and told the priest, "We don't have any more water from the XXXXX containers." (Something like white plastic or white-coated cardboard.)
The priest said, "It's okay. Just use the water downstairs in the XXXXX containers." (Like cone-shaped paper cups of cardboard color, except as huge as barrels.) "Nobody can tell the difference, anyway.
I'm not sure if I/the nun or I/the pries actually said the container names. We may just have seen them through each other. When the priest mentioned the second type of container, I/the nun could actually taste the delicious, cold water.
Showing posts with label dream within dream. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dream within dream. Show all posts
Sunday, February 26, 2017
Friday, February 24, 2017
(1/21/06) we have so little time together; still a dream; pigeons; suddenly everything felt very real
(Entered in paper journal at 3:37 PM at home in Brooklyn.)
Dream 1
It was night. I came out of an elementary school with my friend BC. We walked away from the school on an asphalt path that was a huge circle around a grass field -- but more like a footpath than a road. There was a fence on our left, on the other side of which was a sharp slope.
We walked past a group of folks dressed up like performers, to our left. One person looked like a scarecrow; another, like a skeleton. They seemed to be African-American. I hurried to get past them, hating to be scrutinized.
We got past the group -- they seem to have been practicing juggling with bowling pins. I told the story of how I'd seen before. I remembered it was with one of my park ranger supervisors, TA, from my Americorps NYC Parks project. TA had been nice to the folks, and we had actually all ended up having a good time. I now felt stupid for having just now been so threatened by the group, whom I'd taken to be bums.
By now we had flipped around
on a path that went on the other side of the fence and down the hill. I thought we should go back to the people. But then I thought, But we're already going downhill. We were also jogging.
Now my oldest nephew D, not my friend BC, was to my right. D said, "Okay, now we're racing. When I say go. And I'm going to toast you."
But then he changed his mind. There was a path leading back up the hill that forked off the path we were on about halfway down and climbed steeply. At the top was a little "cliff" of outcropping. At the bottom of the slope I could see "my" car.
D said, "I'm gonna go up that hill. Then you can start from here. When I say go, we both start running. And I'll beat you. That's how I'm going to toast you."
I didn't want D to do that hill because I didn't want to wait for him to climb it. I said, "No. Let's just race from here."
Now we were at the bottom of the hill and D sat on a boulder or outcropping of granite. We hadn't even started racing. D said, "But" (Uncle) "Preemie."
I looked at him. His face was sad. I understood him to be trying to say, Can't you loosen up? We have so little time together.
I felt sad. I put my left arm around D and said, "Oh, D, don't worry."
(Entry begins again at 8:58 AM, at Flying Saucer Cafe in Brooklyn.)
Dream 2
I left a group of friends and walked into a fancy-looking hall that was also something like a coffee shop. The walls were wood, and there was a balcony or mezzanine on the left. There may have been large, opulent paintings on the right wall. On the right wall at the back was another doorway. On the back wall was an enormous chalkboard, taking up about half the wall from the top, right corner.
I "saw" it in my head first, as a memory, and then physically saw it in the present.
My "memory" of it was that it had pale, blue scribbles all over it: scribbles and scribble words. But now there were a few large, yellow words on the otherwise immaculate slate. Both the pale blue and the yellow messages meant something to me. But I was upset to see the blue scribbles gone.
For some reason I ran and jumped at the back wall. I went high. I kicked a sidekick and then spun to my left, apparently to execute another kick. But I threw myself off aim. I flew backwards. I landed and stumbled backwards.
I landed and stumbled backwards onto the left side of the room, into a big, oldish, white man. I didn't want him to be offended, so I explained myself. He just chuckled a bit.
Now I stood in the center of the room as my friend ML and some woman sat at a table to my right. They may have been talking about my talents.
I was now practicing my skills. I jumped up and kick my legs out, both at once.
But without noticing it I had actually put so much force into it that I was laying myself flat about seven feet in the air
and floating for a while.
When I finally realized what I was doing, I told myself, Well, now do make yourself float for a long time. But instead I managed to do a really slow back flip, once again not immediately realizing it. When I noticed, I thought, So this is how people do it. It's easy, if you believe.
But as I was about to land, i.e. execute my first "perfect" back flip, I stopped moving normally and floated slowly downward. I didn't land before I looked at my hands. As I stared at my palms I "woke up."
I now sat or stood by ML and the girl. I thought something like, I need to tell them my dream. But ML started talking to me like a scientist. He asked me about my progress and training and experiences.
I thought, No, no, this is still a dream. I "pulled" myself out of the dream, like through a warping tunnel of vision, and "woke up." But when I "woke up," two policemen that weren't quite human told me to tell them everything I saw in my dream. (They were standing right by bed.)
I thought, No, no, you're dreaming again, and I pulled myself through the tunnel of vision again. Then I saw an image of a scarab, except coppery brown, like a roach, like a painting, haloed in green before a black background.
I told myself, You're dreaming again! I struggled and wrestled mentally to wake up.
Dream 3
I was in a car with my mom. We were in a desert of red, sandstone-chip hills. We had driven off a paved road, which seems to have gone along a very green, black-soil mountainside. I looked at how vast and expansive the dirt road trail was before us.
My mom made reference to a pile of money or a big billfold with money that was either in the backseat or in between us in the front seat. The billfold was black, shiny fake leather. My mom said something like, "That's all I have to give you. And that won't leave me with a lot of money for our trip."
I knew my mom meant we couldn't take the "Chinle" (?) road (it may have been a word-hybrid of "Chinle" and "Lummis") back to town. Even though it was a "shortcut," it was long, on rough, almost nonexistent, "dirt" roads, and the cost of the repairs for the toll the trip would take on my mom's car would be more than the money we'd save on gas and the time we'd save by taking this road instead of the paved road.
I said, "That's okay. I actually think you're right." I was relieved my mom had spoken her mind and that we had decided to take the paved road instead. I looked out at the sandstone desert and thought, I'll get back here someday anyway.
But my mom kept driving on the "shortcut." I wanted to ask her when we were going to turn around and get back to the paved road.
But then -- first I (seem to have seen) another billfold in the road. Then I saw a bird in the sky. From way high it looked like a hawk or even a golden eagle. But when it landed I saw it was a large raven, maybe two feet tall, muscular and round. I was certain this meant death.
I asked my mom when she was going to turn around. She gave me some vague answer about driving in general. But we drove between two small hills that opened on the other side to a downward, curving slope, very lonely and desolate.
A gang of huge burds, no more than ten, stalked along the road. They were huge, maybe four feet tall, though possibly not at first. Possibly at first the birds were like regular vultures. (But possibly at first this desolate, steep slope was also flat, open land.)
But as I noted the birds and looked closer, they definitely were huge, almost featherless, with scales on their necks and heads. Their beaks were long and gross, like fingernails that haven't been clipped, with dirty, black tips. Their eyes were wide and round.
I told my mom, "We need to turn around and get out of here. These birds mean nothing but death. They kill and eat, but they kill because they like being mean. We need to pull out before they get any ideas."
My mom said she'd drive forward to get through them. I said, "No. If you drive forward they'll pop our tires. Then we'll never get anywhere. We need to drive backwards."
We drove backwards for a moment or two. We were in the wide, open plain again. But a couple of the "vultures," one of which was now as tall as an ostrich, and another one (this one away with the others) as stout as (though longer, much longer, than) a gila monster, crinkle-clawed up to our windows.
We were now rolling forward again. I wondered why. We were heading down the hill. The "vultures" were walking along, following us slowly. But I saw a suburban neighborhood butting up against the bottom of the slope.
I couldn't figure it out. We were on a road that was supposed to take us into the heart of the desert -- it was supposed to be so long that my mom couldn't afford to take the trip! But we had gone less than a mile before driving up behind a suburban neighborhood which may well have been home.
But I didn't judge the situation too harshly. I was glad to get away from the "vultures." The only problem was that there were no roads into the neighborhood: just small, narrow, cobble footpaths leading from the backyards to the "road" in the desert.
As we approached the neighborhood I thought, We'll just have to drive on past and keep being pursued by the "vultures." There's no way into the neighborhood. But my mom just drove onto one of the cobble paths, then through a backyard and into a front yard, and onto a clean, black asphalt road.
Slowly I felt awful about having "escaped" the desert. Then I felt really awful. I thought of the birds' heads, especially that of the "gila monster bird."
I saw a couple of small birds on a front lawn that sloped up from the road. The birds were like the desert birds. I told my mom, "The birds in the desert, they weren't vultures. They were -- I can't remember their name. I just saw two!"
I was now in the driver's seat, though I think my mom, in the passenger seat, was still driving.
I said, "Like those!" There were two more birds walking along the edge of a lawn that was raised from the sidewalk by a concrete wall. The first birds had walked in the same direction that our car drove. These birds were now walking against it.
I almost had the name of the birds. I said, "Something with a 'P.'" The birds fanned out their tails. I said, "Oh, no. Not those. Those are peacocks. They symbolize pride. These were not prideful birds. Dad had a ceramic sculpture of one! It had a blue head! It starts with a 'P!'"
I noticed as the car passed that these "peacoks" weren't blue but brown. They shimmered like dachshunds, not like birds.
I now saw the disgusting "vultures" limping along the desert slope in the distance between the two houses, trying to find a way into the suburbs. They were huge, and they were altogether flesh-colored, though they were all scales.
I said, "I have it! They were --"
A couple little girls (there were three little girls suddenly in the backseat. Only two spoke.) said, "Water pheasants!"
I said, "Yes. That's what I was about to say." I felt stupid that the little girls beat me to saying the name of the birds. I said, "How could I have been afraid of little, old water pheasants?" But, I thought, the birds I saw in that first front yard looked like different birds, not pheasants. Like some kind of bird I know and see every day, except not tan.
I turned to my mom and said, "They were vultures, weren't they?"
My mom nodded and said, "Yes."
I may even have been steering -- driving. But my mom was still really driving. I desperately tried to explain why I had felt so threatened. I was trying to justify myself. But now I was also trying to justify myself for also not having been able to come up with the term "water pheasant."
Dream 4
I may have been walking out of a castle in the daylight (silver blue sky) with my friend R and his cousin J. J had been telling us about a haunted castle and a Scottish town that had been destroyed by the plague and then rebuilt over. I asked J some vague questions. Then he asked me some vague questions. J and R were never seen, and they slowly disappeared behind me.
I walked down a steep series of white marble (veinless, more like opaque quartz) steps that clung to a black cliff face. Then each step or group of three or so steps was blocked by short, iron fences with spikes.
I needed to prove to R and J that I wasn't afraid to jump over these fences. So I jumped. But I noticed that each step had iron strips of spikes. I had to position my feet as I landed so my feet kept in between the strips of spikes.
As I jumped down farther and farther, the barriers got worse and worse, iron fences and spikes tangling like vines and shrubs in the woods. I actually landed on one set of steps full of green and beautifully red-pink-leafed ivy.
I don't know if I was tired or just overcome with the increasing difficulty of these steps. But I finally just hunched down, squatted, and huddled tightly, facting out toward the cliff and looking slightly back up the steps.
I told myself, I'm not afraid of this. I'm not afraid.
Now I stood in a driveway at night. The pop singer Beck stood to my left. Beck was now right in my face. He was all shaggy. The purple of the night sky created an aura around him.
Beck said, "Sometimes the songs just come to me. I don't even make an effort. Other times, nothing. And when I try to write something I feel dragged along, like an umbrella on a string."
I thought, What the hell is that supposed to mean? Like a kite? Or a puppet?
Beck now had a rough, thin piece of twine in his right hand, which led to an umbrella stuck under a garbage truck. I understood the image now.
Beck said, "I told my analyst about it, and she just told me XXXXX." (Something really vague and platitudinous, harmfully cheap.)
Now Beck was my friend ML. He said, "I told her, 'Your help is worthless, and I'm not going to let you rip me off like that.' She paid me back $60 of the $100 I paid. But I wanted all of it and more. I got all my $100 back, plus sixty. And you know why? All because of this! And it's our little secret."
He walked away. He wore grey boxer briefs and a grey, tight tank top. He walked up onto the back of the garbage truck, onto a weird platform by the "ladder up." He shouted out something triumphant from the ladder and got onto the platform. The garbage truck was more like an oil tanker with a weird area, lit like a copy machine's glass plate, on the right side.
ML got into the area and stuck his upper body over something like a plastic shelf, where the light was coming from. He pressed some button. At first the shelf lifted him up, with the rest of this strange side area. I had an idea what the thing was going to do. It was going to crush him, like trash gets crushed in the back of a garbage truck.
I stood there and said, "ML, what are you doing? What are you doing?" But I had a good idea of what he was doing.
I tried to convince myself I didn't believe ML was going to crush himself. But, really, I was pretty sure he was going to crush himself. And I wanted to watch. I think I had an inkling that this was a dream, and I wanted to "predict" something bad. I felt bad just watching ML kill himself. But I was really interested.
Now the shelf was smashing ML into the upper part. ML looked at me for a moment, and then the pain became so strong that he put his hands to his head like he was trying to block out a loud sound.
Suddenly everything felt very real. I said, "ML, what are you doing! ML, get out of there! ML, what's going on?!"
I was terrified. Now ML's head was smashed. As it popped open, it looked like the head of a dead baby bird. Blood and flesh popped out of his nose and mouth like spaghetti sauce and stringy chicken flesh.
I screamed, "ML! ML! ML!" In the last scream I extended ML's name and sounded like a coyote howling at the moon.
Dream 1
It was night. I came out of an elementary school with my friend BC. We walked away from the school on an asphalt path that was a huge circle around a grass field -- but more like a footpath than a road. There was a fence on our left, on the other side of which was a sharp slope.
We walked past a group of folks dressed up like performers, to our left. One person looked like a scarecrow; another, like a skeleton. They seemed to be African-American. I hurried to get past them, hating to be scrutinized.
We got past the group -- they seem to have been practicing juggling with bowling pins. I told the story of how I'd seen before. I remembered it was with one of my park ranger supervisors, TA, from my Americorps NYC Parks project. TA had been nice to the folks, and we had actually all ended up having a good time. I now felt stupid for having just now been so threatened by the group, whom I'd taken to be bums.
By now we had flipped around
on a path that went on the other side of the fence and down the hill. I thought we should go back to the people. But then I thought, But we're already going downhill. We were also jogging.
Now my oldest nephew D, not my friend BC, was to my right. D said, "Okay, now we're racing. When I say go. And I'm going to toast you."
But then he changed his mind. There was a path leading back up the hill that forked off the path we were on about halfway down and climbed steeply. At the top was a little "cliff" of outcropping. At the bottom of the slope I could see "my" car.
D said, "I'm gonna go up that hill. Then you can start from here. When I say go, we both start running. And I'll beat you. That's how I'm going to toast you."
I didn't want D to do that hill because I didn't want to wait for him to climb it. I said, "No. Let's just race from here."
Now we were at the bottom of the hill and D sat on a boulder or outcropping of granite. We hadn't even started racing. D said, "But" (Uncle) "Preemie."
I looked at him. His face was sad. I understood him to be trying to say, Can't you loosen up? We have so little time together.
I felt sad. I put my left arm around D and said, "Oh, D, don't worry."
(Entry begins again at 8:58 AM, at Flying Saucer Cafe in Brooklyn.)
Dream 2
I left a group of friends and walked into a fancy-looking hall that was also something like a coffee shop. The walls were wood, and there was a balcony or mezzanine on the left. There may have been large, opulent paintings on the right wall. On the right wall at the back was another doorway. On the back wall was an enormous chalkboard, taking up about half the wall from the top, right corner.
I "saw" it in my head first, as a memory, and then physically saw it in the present.
My "memory" of it was that it had pale, blue scribbles all over it: scribbles and scribble words. But now there were a few large, yellow words on the otherwise immaculate slate. Both the pale blue and the yellow messages meant something to me. But I was upset to see the blue scribbles gone.
For some reason I ran and jumped at the back wall. I went high. I kicked a sidekick and then spun to my left, apparently to execute another kick. But I threw myself off aim. I flew backwards. I landed and stumbled backwards.
I landed and stumbled backwards onto the left side of the room, into a big, oldish, white man. I didn't want him to be offended, so I explained myself. He just chuckled a bit.
Now I stood in the center of the room as my friend ML and some woman sat at a table to my right. They may have been talking about my talents.
I was now practicing my skills. I jumped up and kick my legs out, both at once.
But without noticing it I had actually put so much force into it that I was laying myself flat about seven feet in the air
and floating for a while.
When I finally realized what I was doing, I told myself, Well, now do make yourself float for a long time. But instead I managed to do a really slow back flip, once again not immediately realizing it. When I noticed, I thought, So this is how people do it. It's easy, if you believe.
But as I was about to land, i.e. execute my first "perfect" back flip, I stopped moving normally and floated slowly downward. I didn't land before I looked at my hands. As I stared at my palms I "woke up."
I now sat or stood by ML and the girl. I thought something like, I need to tell them my dream. But ML started talking to me like a scientist. He asked me about my progress and training and experiences.
I thought, No, no, this is still a dream. I "pulled" myself out of the dream, like through a warping tunnel of vision, and "woke up." But when I "woke up," two policemen that weren't quite human told me to tell them everything I saw in my dream. (They were standing right by bed.)
I thought, No, no, you're dreaming again, and I pulled myself through the tunnel of vision again. Then I saw an image of a scarab, except coppery brown, like a roach, like a painting, haloed in green before a black background.
I told myself, You're dreaming again! I struggled and wrestled mentally to wake up.
Dream 3
I was in a car with my mom. We were in a desert of red, sandstone-chip hills. We had driven off a paved road, which seems to have gone along a very green, black-soil mountainside. I looked at how vast and expansive the dirt road trail was before us.
My mom made reference to a pile of money or a big billfold with money that was either in the backseat or in between us in the front seat. The billfold was black, shiny fake leather. My mom said something like, "That's all I have to give you. And that won't leave me with a lot of money for our trip."
I knew my mom meant we couldn't take the "Chinle" (?) road (it may have been a word-hybrid of "Chinle" and "Lummis") back to town. Even though it was a "shortcut," it was long, on rough, almost nonexistent, "dirt" roads, and the cost of the repairs for the toll the trip would take on my mom's car would be more than the money we'd save on gas and the time we'd save by taking this road instead of the paved road.
I said, "That's okay. I actually think you're right." I was relieved my mom had spoken her mind and that we had decided to take the paved road instead. I looked out at the sandstone desert and thought, I'll get back here someday anyway.
But my mom kept driving on the "shortcut." I wanted to ask her when we were going to turn around and get back to the paved road.
But then -- first I (seem to have seen) another billfold in the road. Then I saw a bird in the sky. From way high it looked like a hawk or even a golden eagle. But when it landed I saw it was a large raven, maybe two feet tall, muscular and round. I was certain this meant death.
I asked my mom when she was going to turn around. She gave me some vague answer about driving in general. But we drove between two small hills that opened on the other side to a downward, curving slope, very lonely and desolate.
A gang of huge burds, no more than ten, stalked along the road. They were huge, maybe four feet tall, though possibly not at first. Possibly at first the birds were like regular vultures. (But possibly at first this desolate, steep slope was also flat, open land.)
But as I noted the birds and looked closer, they definitely were huge, almost featherless, with scales on their necks and heads. Their beaks were long and gross, like fingernails that haven't been clipped, with dirty, black tips. Their eyes were wide and round.
I told my mom, "We need to turn around and get out of here. These birds mean nothing but death. They kill and eat, but they kill because they like being mean. We need to pull out before they get any ideas."
My mom said she'd drive forward to get through them. I said, "No. If you drive forward they'll pop our tires. Then we'll never get anywhere. We need to drive backwards."
We drove backwards for a moment or two. We were in the wide, open plain again. But a couple of the "vultures," one of which was now as tall as an ostrich, and another one (this one away with the others) as stout as (though longer, much longer, than) a gila monster, crinkle-clawed up to our windows.
We were now rolling forward again. I wondered why. We were heading down the hill. The "vultures" were walking along, following us slowly. But I saw a suburban neighborhood butting up against the bottom of the slope.
I couldn't figure it out. We were on a road that was supposed to take us into the heart of the desert -- it was supposed to be so long that my mom couldn't afford to take the trip! But we had gone less than a mile before driving up behind a suburban neighborhood which may well have been home.
But I didn't judge the situation too harshly. I was glad to get away from the "vultures." The only problem was that there were no roads into the neighborhood: just small, narrow, cobble footpaths leading from the backyards to the "road" in the desert.
As we approached the neighborhood I thought, We'll just have to drive on past and keep being pursued by the "vultures." There's no way into the neighborhood. But my mom just drove onto one of the cobble paths, then through a backyard and into a front yard, and onto a clean, black asphalt road.
Slowly I felt awful about having "escaped" the desert. Then I felt really awful. I thought of the birds' heads, especially that of the "gila monster bird."
I saw a couple of small birds on a front lawn that sloped up from the road. The birds were like the desert birds. I told my mom, "The birds in the desert, they weren't vultures. They were -- I can't remember their name. I just saw two!"
I was now in the driver's seat, though I think my mom, in the passenger seat, was still driving.
I said, "Like those!" There were two more birds walking along the edge of a lawn that was raised from the sidewalk by a concrete wall. The first birds had walked in the same direction that our car drove. These birds were now walking against it.
I almost had the name of the birds. I said, "Something with a 'P.'" The birds fanned out their tails. I said, "Oh, no. Not those. Those are peacocks. They symbolize pride. These were not prideful birds. Dad had a ceramic sculpture of one! It had a blue head! It starts with a 'P!'"
I noticed as the car passed that these "peacoks" weren't blue but brown. They shimmered like dachshunds, not like birds.
I now saw the disgusting "vultures" limping along the desert slope in the distance between the two houses, trying to find a way into the suburbs. They were huge, and they were altogether flesh-colored, though they were all scales.
I said, "I have it! They were --"
A couple little girls (there were three little girls suddenly in the backseat. Only two spoke.) said, "Water pheasants!"
I said, "Yes. That's what I was about to say." I felt stupid that the little girls beat me to saying the name of the birds. I said, "How could I have been afraid of little, old water pheasants?" But, I thought, the birds I saw in that first front yard looked like different birds, not pheasants. Like some kind of bird I know and see every day, except not tan.
I turned to my mom and said, "They were vultures, weren't they?"
My mom nodded and said, "Yes."
I may even have been steering -- driving. But my mom was still really driving. I desperately tried to explain why I had felt so threatened. I was trying to justify myself. But now I was also trying to justify myself for also not having been able to come up with the term "water pheasant."
Dream 4
I may have been walking out of a castle in the daylight (silver blue sky) with my friend R and his cousin J. J had been telling us about a haunted castle and a Scottish town that had been destroyed by the plague and then rebuilt over. I asked J some vague questions. Then he asked me some vague questions. J and R were never seen, and they slowly disappeared behind me.
I walked down a steep series of white marble (veinless, more like opaque quartz) steps that clung to a black cliff face. Then each step or group of three or so steps was blocked by short, iron fences with spikes.
I needed to prove to R and J that I wasn't afraid to jump over these fences. So I jumped. But I noticed that each step had iron strips of spikes. I had to position my feet as I landed so my feet kept in between the strips of spikes.
As I jumped down farther and farther, the barriers got worse and worse, iron fences and spikes tangling like vines and shrubs in the woods. I actually landed on one set of steps full of green and beautifully red-pink-leafed ivy.
I don't know if I was tired or just overcome with the increasing difficulty of these steps. But I finally just hunched down, squatted, and huddled tightly, facting out toward the cliff and looking slightly back up the steps.
I told myself, I'm not afraid of this. I'm not afraid.
Now I stood in a driveway at night. The pop singer Beck stood to my left. Beck was now right in my face. He was all shaggy. The purple of the night sky created an aura around him.
Beck said, "Sometimes the songs just come to me. I don't even make an effort. Other times, nothing. And when I try to write something I feel dragged along, like an umbrella on a string."
I thought, What the hell is that supposed to mean? Like a kite? Or a puppet?
Beck now had a rough, thin piece of twine in his right hand, which led to an umbrella stuck under a garbage truck. I understood the image now.
Beck said, "I told my analyst about it, and she just told me XXXXX." (Something really vague and platitudinous, harmfully cheap.)
Now Beck was my friend ML. He said, "I told her, 'Your help is worthless, and I'm not going to let you rip me off like that.' She paid me back $60 of the $100 I paid. But I wanted all of it and more. I got all my $100 back, plus sixty. And you know why? All because of this! And it's our little secret."
He walked away. He wore grey boxer briefs and a grey, tight tank top. He walked up onto the back of the garbage truck, onto a weird platform by the "ladder up." He shouted out something triumphant from the ladder and got onto the platform. The garbage truck was more like an oil tanker with a weird area, lit like a copy machine's glass plate, on the right side.
ML got into the area and stuck his upper body over something like a plastic shelf, where the light was coming from. He pressed some button. At first the shelf lifted him up, with the rest of this strange side area. I had an idea what the thing was going to do. It was going to crush him, like trash gets crushed in the back of a garbage truck.
I stood there and said, "ML, what are you doing? What are you doing?" But I had a good idea of what he was doing.
I tried to convince myself I didn't believe ML was going to crush himself. But, really, I was pretty sure he was going to crush himself. And I wanted to watch. I think I had an inkling that this was a dream, and I wanted to "predict" something bad. I felt bad just watching ML kill himself. But I was really interested.
Now the shelf was smashing ML into the upper part. ML looked at me for a moment, and then the pain became so strong that he put his hands to his head like he was trying to block out a loud sound.
Suddenly everything felt very real. I said, "ML, what are you doing! ML, get out of there! ML, what's going on?!"
I was terrified. Now ML's head was smashed. As it popped open, it looked like the head of a dead baby bird. Blood and flesh popped out of his nose and mouth like spaghetti sauce and stringy chicken flesh.
I screamed, "ML! ML! ML!" In the last scream I extended ML's name and sounded like a coyote howling at the moon.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
(4/3/09) dream of an unfinished film
(Entered in paper journal at 8:15 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I walked into a library. The library was tall, with a sloping ceiling. It was like a small community library: it was one story tall, with an open feeling, with some short bookshelves, studying tables, and a back area of taller bookshelves.
I walked into a room in a small hallway to my left. The room either was or was set up to be like a movie theater. There were around fifty people sitting in the room. The movie had already started. It was The Darjeeling Limited. There was no sound. The movie was about halfway through.
As the movie neared the end, most of the audience cleared out. The lights may also have turned on in the room. Now, before the movie had even ended, it was turned off at the image of something like a pink sea-animal or a pink skirt with little, sphere-like tassels. Some of the audience was leaving by an upward stairwell to my right.
I stood up and walked back into the main room of the library. I was going to complain about the movie having been shut off before it had finished. Before I'd gone into the movie room, the library's checkout counter had been along the left wall, where the hallway into the room was. Now the checkout and customer service center were at the front of the room.
I tried to speak with a couple people (one of them a woman) at the counter. But nobody would listen to me. Finally I spoke with a woman who sat at a low desk. The woman was typing at an old, green-screened computer. I made my complaint to the woman.
Suddenly I was sitting down before a long-haired, bearded man. The man sat in a tall swivel-chair. I sat in a low chair. The man wore square eyeglasses, and his hairline had receded quite a bit from his forehead. He might also have alternately been an overweight man with short, grey hair and a round, tan face.
I had gone from making my complaint to trying to tell the man when the movie had been turned off. The man asked if it hadn't been at the very end of the movie. Then he asked if it hadn't been really early on. I told the man no both times.
I now tried to explain the scene. At first I started to say, "Do you remember when Bill Murray was in a Speedo?" But I realized that that sounded funny, and not like the image I had in my mind (which was of Billy Murray in his blue diving suit, which is called a Speedo in The Life Aquatic, I'm pretty sure).
I then said, "Do you remember the scene where Bill Murray is standing out remembering the plane crash? I now had an image of a tall, flatly mounded, wave-soaked rock under a blue sky. I said, "That was where Bill Murray's" (wife? mother?) died and Bill Murray had to learn to live on his own."
As I tried to explain this, the man (at this point the version of the man with short, grey hair) kept on interjecting roundly, like he was trying to one-up me on movie knowledge, saying how much he enjoyed this or that detail of the scene or this or that following scene of the movie.
I kept trying to redirect the man to the point I was speaking about. But now he (now the long-haired version of the man) was asking me exactly how and when I'd come into the movie theater. I tried to explain to the man how I'd wanted to see the movie for the previous few days, but how on this day I'd gotten sidetracked by some reading I was doing at a cafe across the street.
I could now see the cafe, like I was looking into the windows from the street as I would see them as approaching the sidewalk corner. The cafe was in a nice town, on a clean street, at the top of a gentle slope. The cafe itself looked spacious, with a darkly decorated interior, very comfortable, moderately busy. I could then see myself, in the cafe, possibly sitting sideways in a chair or sitting at a table, reading from a white page, possibly tapping the page against my hand.
I tried to explain to the man that I was so interested in what I'd been reading that I'd had to finish it. I'd gotten into the movie late. (I could now see the scene I'd seen as I'd entered: a scene of the Adrien Brody character running in slow motion to catch a departing train.) I tried to explain all this to the man. But it wasn't quite getting through to him.
I now had to fill out a strange sheet of paper which supposedly had a bunch of fill-in-the-blank questions which would help the library pinpoint exactly what kind of offense had been committed, and exactly at what point in the movie it had been committed. All the "questions" had to do with very visual aspects and moments of the film.
But there were no blanks to fill in: the sheet (or sheets?) was (were) just a lot of three-line descriptions. I had to cross out the descriptions and re-write them correctly. But the more I did this, the less real my memory felt.
I started questioning whether I had actually gone into the movie at all. I realized that my experience in the movie theater had actually only been a dream. I wasn't even quite in the library anymore. I thought, I hope I didn't actually fill out that complaint form while I was at the library. I'd have a really bad reputation with the workers there if I'd complained about them because of a dream I'd had.
But now I thought about the whole experience. I realized that the cafe experience had also been a dram. I thought that was extremely interesting. I could remember my cafe experience very clearly. I could "feel" the time I'd spent there. I could even remember details about what I'd been reading.
I thought, How interesting that I remembered and felt all of that so well in a dream. But also, how interesting that I had such a "dually structured" (not exactly how I thought of it) dream, where I was in the cafe first and the movie theater next. I may also have thought that the role time played in my dream was very interesting in its realistic feeling of cause and effect, i.e. how I'd been late to the movie because I'd spent such a long time in the cafe.
Dream #1
I walked into a library. The library was tall, with a sloping ceiling. It was like a small community library: it was one story tall, with an open feeling, with some short bookshelves, studying tables, and a back area of taller bookshelves.
I walked into a room in a small hallway to my left. The room either was or was set up to be like a movie theater. There were around fifty people sitting in the room. The movie had already started. It was The Darjeeling Limited. There was no sound. The movie was about halfway through.
As the movie neared the end, most of the audience cleared out. The lights may also have turned on in the room. Now, before the movie had even ended, it was turned off at the image of something like a pink sea-animal or a pink skirt with little, sphere-like tassels. Some of the audience was leaving by an upward stairwell to my right.
I stood up and walked back into the main room of the library. I was going to complain about the movie having been shut off before it had finished. Before I'd gone into the movie room, the library's checkout counter had been along the left wall, where the hallway into the room was. Now the checkout and customer service center were at the front of the room.
I tried to speak with a couple people (one of them a woman) at the counter. But nobody would listen to me. Finally I spoke with a woman who sat at a low desk. The woman was typing at an old, green-screened computer. I made my complaint to the woman.
Suddenly I was sitting down before a long-haired, bearded man. The man sat in a tall swivel-chair. I sat in a low chair. The man wore square eyeglasses, and his hairline had receded quite a bit from his forehead. He might also have alternately been an overweight man with short, grey hair and a round, tan face.
I had gone from making my complaint to trying to tell the man when the movie had been turned off. The man asked if it hadn't been at the very end of the movie. Then he asked if it hadn't been really early on. I told the man no both times.
I now tried to explain the scene. At first I started to say, "Do you remember when Bill Murray was in a Speedo?" But I realized that that sounded funny, and not like the image I had in my mind (which was of Billy Murray in his blue diving suit, which is called a Speedo in The Life Aquatic, I'm pretty sure).
I then said, "Do you remember the scene where Bill Murray is standing out remembering the plane crash? I now had an image of a tall, flatly mounded, wave-soaked rock under a blue sky. I said, "That was where Bill Murray's" (wife? mother?) died and Bill Murray had to learn to live on his own."
As I tried to explain this, the man (at this point the version of the man with short, grey hair) kept on interjecting roundly, like he was trying to one-up me on movie knowledge, saying how much he enjoyed this or that detail of the scene or this or that following scene of the movie.
I kept trying to redirect the man to the point I was speaking about. But now he (now the long-haired version of the man) was asking me exactly how and when I'd come into the movie theater. I tried to explain to the man how I'd wanted to see the movie for the previous few days, but how on this day I'd gotten sidetracked by some reading I was doing at a cafe across the street.
I could now see the cafe, like I was looking into the windows from the street as I would see them as approaching the sidewalk corner. The cafe was in a nice town, on a clean street, at the top of a gentle slope. The cafe itself looked spacious, with a darkly decorated interior, very comfortable, moderately busy. I could then see myself, in the cafe, possibly sitting sideways in a chair or sitting at a table, reading from a white page, possibly tapping the page against my hand.
I tried to explain to the man that I was so interested in what I'd been reading that I'd had to finish it. I'd gotten into the movie late. (I could now see the scene I'd seen as I'd entered: a scene of the Adrien Brody character running in slow motion to catch a departing train.) I tried to explain all this to the man. But it wasn't quite getting through to him.
I now had to fill out a strange sheet of paper which supposedly had a bunch of fill-in-the-blank questions which would help the library pinpoint exactly what kind of offense had been committed, and exactly at what point in the movie it had been committed. All the "questions" had to do with very visual aspects and moments of the film.
But there were no blanks to fill in: the sheet (or sheets?) was (were) just a lot of three-line descriptions. I had to cross out the descriptions and re-write them correctly. But the more I did this, the less real my memory felt.
I started questioning whether I had actually gone into the movie at all. I realized that my experience in the movie theater had actually only been a dream. I wasn't even quite in the library anymore. I thought, I hope I didn't actually fill out that complaint form while I was at the library. I'd have a really bad reputation with the workers there if I'd complained about them because of a dream I'd had.
But now I thought about the whole experience. I realized that the cafe experience had also been a dram. I thought that was extremely interesting. I could remember my cafe experience very clearly. I could "feel" the time I'd spent there. I could even remember details about what I'd been reading.
I thought, How interesting that I remembered and felt all of that so well in a dream. But also, how interesting that I had such a "dually structured" (not exactly how I thought of it) dream, where I was in the cafe first and the movie theater next. I may also have thought that the role time played in my dream was very interesting in its realistic feeling of cause and effect, i.e. how I'd been late to the movie because I'd spent such a long time in the cafe.
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