(9/8/07) drama on an aircraft carrier

(Entered in paper journal at 7:50 AM at Ozzie's cafe on Seventh Avenue and Lincoln Place in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I sat outside a house (in the woods?) with my co-worker ES. ES told me that a woman who had just been by had really impressed her, but that ES felt like she must not have been impressive to the woman. I listened as I sat on a four-foot-long log. There were a few other logs lying around. The day was calm and grey.

ES walked behind me and off to my right, where there may have been a couple vehicles like old Ford Broncos. ES continued speaking about the beautiful girl (whom I saw in my mind's eye as tall and blonde). ES said, "She just has everything: she's beautiful, she's smart, she's nice. I hope she knows how much I appreciate that." It suddenly dawned on me that ES was in love with this woman.

I stood at a lawn in front of a building like a long house or like my old high school. The day was still grey, though now it was a little windier. There were a lot of people outside with me. Most were men. It was like people were coming out of a movie.

A little verbal conflict started and finished quickly between two short, Mexican men and a tall, white man. Now everybody was gone. I stood by myself thinking, Those two kids are going to come by to find that man and make him pay for fighting with them. I couldn't remember now whether I was the white man. It felt eerie outside all alone in the grey breeze waiting, presumably, for some carload of kids to come by and shoot me.

I stood inside an almost empty house. The house was like the house I lived from about my sixth grade to ninth grade years of school. I was in the living room. Off to my back and right the room seemed to have opened into a hallway for a larger building like a community building or a large church which could also serve as a community building. In front of the front window of the living room stood a table with a lot of food on it.

I milled around the room, possibly waiting for a woman to get finished at a presentation or a movie. I was still afraid of the two kids and their friends coming after me. But I was also disappointed that I had "pulled" myself out of the range of their fire (apparently by shifting scenes).

I looked a little through the food on the table. Some cups on the windowsill caught my attention. I felt like there was a sweet, warm liquid in them. That was what I wanted. But as I grabbed the cup I felt like maybe I shouldn't take it, that maybe people were watching me and my taking food would only confirm to them what a "waster" or "grubber" I was.

I took the cup anyway, but when I looked inside I saw that all there was was some thin layer of grimy, pale-brown, translucent, sludgy material dotted with little, white, goopy chunks. It smelled almost too sweet. I thought, This isn't what I was looking for.

I thought I had picked up something diseased. I worried whether touching the cup would also make me diseased. But now I looked back in the cup. The material inside was just dry, powdered hot chocolate with tiny, dry marshmallows. I thought, Oh, it was just hot chocolate mix after all. Still, it wasn't the drink I'd wanted.

I sat in a room with my friend R, his fiancee L, and a couple other people. The room was large, and the table we sat at took up most of it. It was low to the ground, circular, and made of dark, dark wood. We sat on various items, but not regular chairs, which would have been too tall for the table. We all spoke about something that made me ashamed. It may have been about work or about me leaving work.

I stood on the deck (?) of an aircraft carrier. I stood before two men, both of high rank (for the Navy?). One stood directly in front of me; the other before me and to my right. To my left was a grey aircraft which, as I looked at it, I tried to identify by sorting through aircraft images in my mind. Finally my mind locked on something like an SR-71.

The man in front of me waved his right arm toward the craft and told me that everybody felt I should be the one to make the last flight of this craft. I felt honored in a very relaxed, understated way.

The jet was now in a small space that seemed to have been formed to fit only this craft. The space matched the contours of the jet and extended out only a few feet on all sides. The surrounding material seemed to be thick stucco or concrete, round, like the walls of a Spanish building or catacombs (?), not like the inside of an aircraft carrier (?).

The two high-ranking Navy men and I stood before the jet. The two men were joking about some movie, which I didn't figure out until later was Top Gun. I now knelt, as the men kept joking about the "unreality" of the movie, by the left underside of the craft, near the wing.

I stuck my head into the small gap between the undercarriage of the jet and the wall of the space. I turned my head in a strange way and, trying to pull my head back out of the gap, found I couldn't. I was panicked for a moment. But then I turned my head and came back out of the gap with no trouble. As I was doing this the two men were joking about some place name, something that started with a "B" but was always mistaken "in the movie" to start with a "G."

I could see the glass (?) dome of the cockpit, which had tan pieces of tape holding white, washer-shaped, paper circles to the window.

I may have tapped (somehow -- I wasn't in the cockpit) on the glass and remembered the flip-off scene from the beginning of Top Gun.

Now the jet pilot was getting ready to fly. I heard some people talking to the pilot as I (disembodied?) looked out over brightly rolling waves underneath a hot, blue sky. The waves would surge in a white blaze of sun reflections and then trough in fading, brilliant, deep blue.

One man told the pilot, "I never thought anything yo did was ridiculous. I was just a little jealous. But now that you're making this flight," (which was now going to keep the pilot away from home for a long, long time) "I want you to know how you important I think it is and how good it is that you are doing it."

I could see that the jet was going to launch from a hole in the front and midsection of the aircraft carrier.

I may have been flying with another person. We flew through a bunch of clutter floating on the water. We were near a tall wall of concrete, like at the edge of a river.

As we flew past one piece of clutter, a yellow, metal, rectangular "box," maybe fifty feet long, probably lying on a waterlogged, wooden barge, the person I flew with said something like, "Perhaps while you're there, they'll even let you open the research box." I knew the research box was this yellow box. It was stuffed with a grimy, smelly, sludgy matter. It was like decomposed garbage, I thought. I thought, Why would I want to open something like that?

I stood on a ledge of the tall wall. The front of the aircraft carrier faced an end of the ledge. The pilot and other people could load into the carrier from the ledge. A lot of other people were on the ledge, which may have been about twenty feet wide. The people were having a sort of "bon voyage party" for the pilot. The only person I could pick out in the crowd was a skinny, brown-haired girl.

A young man, maybe in his early twenties, though he seemed to be only about three feet tall, came up to me and in a panic cried, "I'm going to do it! I'm going to do this to myself!"

I recognized the young man from somewhere, possibly as one of the people who had been milling around after the movie earlier on. I knew that I had known the man (from wherever) as a self-centered boy who generally requited no attention, although he felt like he always had it, and that that produced an uneasy sensation in people, so that, he felt, people generally stayed away from him.

The young man had been engrossed in some mechanical science project. But now everybody was watching this pilot go off, and the young man had to accept that nobody was paying attention to him. This fact put the young man in a suicidal frenzy, apparently. The young man came to me with a screwdriver and a chain like the thin chain of a cheap, backyard swingset. The chain was black. The screwdriver, Phillips-head, had a clear handle with red markings in the grip ridges.

The young man made it clear he was going to kill himself, and that he would try with the second instrument he held if he didn't succeed with the first. (The screwdriver may have been the first instrument.) The young man may have been trying to run into the launch area to do this to himself.

I grabbed the young man and yelled, "Don't you know you have no right to do this right now? Everybody is here to give this man support! He is going somewhere and leaving everything he knows behind for a very long time! For years! And we are all trying to support him  in a moment that is probably very scary and sad for him!"

The young man lost his frenzied look about halfway through my speech. He then took on an aghast look, which broke into a lost look of regret, like the young man couldn't believe he'd acted so selfishly. Then he broke down crying, in sympathy with the man for the scariness and loneliness of the journey he would be going on. The man might at this time have had a face like that of a classic grey alien.

(10/10/09) foolish at the farewell party

(Entered in paper journal at 8:30 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was at a party with a group of friends, possibly co-workers. We were at a smallish apartment which was lit by a slightly cold-feeling, incandescent light. The party was quiet and calm. We might have been saying farewell to one of our co-workers, who looked like my old co-worker CT.

CT was at the other end of the room from me, possibly with a group of other people. I was upset with her because she'd made me feel like she liked me romantically, but now she'd somehow made it clear either that she liked someone else more or that she altogether didn't like me romantically. I felt like I had been made a fool of in front of everybody.

I tried to act like I didn't care about CT, almost like I didn't even know she was at the party. I began walking around the whole periphery of the main room, counter-clockwise. I figured that I'd go around the whole periphery (the room was now much larger), and then either leave or find that CT had left. This way I would prove, I thought, that I could ignore CT as much as she could ignore me.

But when I was almost all the way around the room (I imagined a map, like a floor plan, that showed the room to be large enough even to include a library), I realized that CT was not only still here, but that she was having a good time with everybody else. CT had even started to follow my idea of walking around the periphery of the room.

I thought that now I was for sure going to leave. I may have seen an old, rich-looking, white-haired, beautiful man by the door.

Somehow I got sidetracked by a male friend of mine who convinced me to sit in a different room with him. We were going to discuss something very important to me. We went into an unlit room that was joined to the main room by two open glass doors. The room was narrow and appeared to be something like a library, with a few wall-height bookshelves, some armchairs, and some unopened boxes. There was also a desk with a computer on it.

The man sat us down in two folding chairs before the doorway to another room, which may have been a bedroom but which looked like some kind of classroom half full of folding chairs. The light was on in that room, and the walls may have been a warm color, like orange.

As the man and I began to discuss things, CT went into the bedroom with a man and a few other friends. The man had told CT earlier on in the party, I now remembered, that he would draw her portrait. Now CT sat in one of the folding chairs in the back of the room. The man sat in a chair in the row before CT and turned the chair a bit to his left so he could twist around to see and draw CT. The friends sat around CT and the man.

CT And the man began discussing something, possibly something I'd done but shouldn't have done, but how I couldn't be blamed because I really hand't known any better.

I now realized that this party was a funeral for a young man we'd known. The man had been Latino, tallish, thin, with a closely shaved head of hair, and maybe a little stubble on his chin.

I now stood outside on a city street. It was a grey, slightly cool morning. I could see my breath, mostly because of the humidity, not the cold. I stood next to a brown velvet rope barrier that went along the edge of the sidewalk, leading, toward my left, to what was either the loading dock for a big building or the back of a semi-truck's trailer. A few other people stood along the velvet rope. A couple people stood inside the loading dock area, apparently waiting to carry out the coffin of the man whose funeral it was.

As I stood waiting, I began to think that the people who also stood along the rope were beginning to look at me funny. I started to remember having done something distasteful at the party last night, something along the lines of being completely drunk and shouting out how awesome I thought the deceased young man was.

Apparently the young man was now still still alive. I could see a black and white photo of him. He looked like my cousin N. I knew he was going to walk out from the loading dock at any minute. I also worried that, at any minute, somebody in the groups of people by the rope and in the loading dock would make a loud comment about my foolish behavior, and that everybody else would laugh me to shame.