(9/24/05) a woman i didn't like; jumping down steps; girl with red-blonde hair; the institute of pagan sciences

(Entered in paper journal at 9:10 AM at the Tea Lounge on Union Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

There was a woman I didn't like. I was walking past an assembly of desks or school tables. I noticed each table had three compartments underneath (its writing surface?). I thought this solved some organization problem a lot of "students" had been having lately. I thought it was a clever idea and wondered who'd had it.

I walked to the back row (I think I passed from row to row by straddling the desks) and saw the woman, a black, very thin woman who looked like a transvestite, hiding her face shyly behind a sci-fi (?) novel. I felt bad I had made her feel excluded.

Dream 2

I walked up some tall hill or something. Now I was coming back down. I came down a path of steps that was alternately like a winding mountain road and a staircase of metal painted red. As I headed down more and more high school kids headed up.

I wanted to go down the steps my own way, which was to leap a few steps at a time. But it took a lot of focus and I thought the kids would wreck it and trip me up if they thought I was doing something cool.

But I still jumped down the steps, even thought on some level I thought I wasn't doing it. I jumped down four or five steps at a time at first. Then toward the (bottom?) I made a jump of about twenty steps.

Dream 3

A pretty, bronze-skinned girl with thin eyes and red-blonde hair and a pink shirt was flirting with me. I thought she looked a tiny bit heavy, but I was just happy that somebody wanted me. So I asked if I could take her home.

Dream 4

I was in something like a canyon mixed with a suburban street. The floor of the "canyon" was at first a wide road and then a wide asphalt footpath. I looked in front of me to see a cathedral. I only had a partial view of the cathedral. But even that portion seemed huge. I knew the cathedral must be enormous. I could even sense, feel, the immensity of the whole cathedral.

I was afraid to look at the cathedral. But I forced myself to look. The cathedral seemed to grow as I looked higher and higher up. It had a very pointed and thin, spire-like effect, like Imre Markovecz's churches, except it was made out of some new, cheap concrete, grey, painted white and maroon. During the whole dream I feared the cathedral would fall on me.

To the left and right were annexes, just as tall and much wider (like canyon walls), but rather plain, modern, and nondescript. The annex to the right housed a rather ordinary religious complex, possibly a religious high school, around which I felt nervous and unacceptable. The annex to the left, slightly more decorative than the annex to the right, was for a place called The Church of Pagan Institutes or The Institute of Pagan Sciences. I realized the church had demarcated spaces for many religions.

At some point one of my friends (R?) said, "Yeah, I let Americans think this church is big. But the religious centers like this in Europe are colossal."

I then heard or saw something which made me walk toward the front cathedral.

I was now "somewhere off to the side," looking at a bunch of wooden models, life size, set up in a square, or like on a chess board, of different Asian characters and animal representations. At first it was like they were behind glass. But now I wandered among them.

I stared into the right eye of a very ornate house and was about to see whether a male character was a soldier or a god when I saw a couple boys carrying a guitar like somehow they were going to use it to taunt me. But when I headed to see them they were gone, and the guitar was "left" leaning against some entertainment center or case for audio tech equipment.

I picked up the guitar, an acoustic-electric with a purple-stained wood body. I slung it over my shoulder (right shoulder?) and walked into a room to my left. The room was a cross between a guitar store and a CD store.

I was looking for the spot this guitar had come from. But I was also looking for a guitar I could actually play on. I told myself, This place is like a Guitar Center. Isn't it kind of awful that even in this religious place the Guitar Center looks exactly the same as all the other Guitar Centers?

(8/21/08) instructor of the flying building

(Entered in paper journal at 6:05 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

It was daytime. I was in a flying building. I might have been a kid, with a couple other kids, or myself at my age, with a couple other people my age. An instructor or guide was with us.

The building was flying all over an enormous city like New York, as if it were giving us a tour. They daylight was golden, and the city seemed to expand forever.

We went past one building I found particularly beautiful -- it must have been enormous, larger than all the other buildings around it. It had a sleek shape, and its glassy walls had a metallic, purple, pink, orange, and gold iridescence to them.

After a while, the building started to go into a spin. I thought we were going to crash. We seemed to regain control, and we were now floating over the outskirts of the city. But it was still like we were going to crash.

We floated over a baseball field which I called Ebbets Field. We descended down to one of the top rows of seats, twisted around, and slammed into some kind of netting which stood at the end of an aisle. This was our crash -- and apparently our building was now small enough for this all to be possible.

For one moment I stood down on the field, looking up at the bleachers. They didn't seem to rise very high.

Now I stood in a big, dim, grey room. I stood in an area that was slightly divided from the rest of the room. The floor between men and the rest of the room rose up (like a step) about six inches, then made a platform about six feet wide. On the platform were possibly a few glasses with thick, figure-eight shapes with yellow and green fluid in them.

In the main area of the room were a group of people who were around my age. We were all waiting for our instructor to arrive. I made a comment about how if she was this late she might never arrive.

Now our instructor was here. The glasses were all replaced (or smashed?), each by three six-inch by six-inch squares of pale wood, the top square of which was painted a slatey grey on its top surface.

There was a comic-book-style drawing of the woman on the platform between the piles of wood. The drawing was of the woman looking over her shoulder, back at the spectator. The drawing was mostly in black and white, with some shading in a pine green.

I looked up. The woman stood before me in almost the same pose as in the drawing. The woman had a tough look about her. She wore a black tank top and green pants. Her skin was olive-toned, her eyes were greenish blue, and her hair was dark red-brown. The woman said something to me about how I shouldn't have thought she would never arrive.