(1/9/06) the ant colony; re-destined; ride to the airport

(Entered in paper journal at 5:52 PM at Flying Saucer Cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in a park. There were groups of children playing different types of games. One group may have had a kite or kites. Another group may have had a ball that was deflating. I tried to prove myself to each group, running from group to group. At the last group, I (?) managed to get the ball lost. I had to chase after it, still pretending I knew what I was doing. A woman to my right was watching me.

The park lawn gave way to a forest. I "had to" jump over some small depressions. I may have seen a tree fall into one of the depressions. I had to jump over or onto the fallen tree to get across the depression. The tree lay down into the shallow crevice.

I jumped onto the tree, not knowing whether that was a mistake. The bark crumbled completely and ants flushed out everywhere. They all fell to the floor of the depression. I quickly ran to the other side. The ants were after me.

After running some distance I stopped and looked back. I saw my mom's backyard and house. I knew I had made a mistake. I had broken up the ant colonies in her house.

I saw streams of tarantula hawks flying into my mom's house through the roof. I knew the tarantula hawks were going to break down the roof and basement, and that if anybody even moved in the house, the tarantula hawks would attack.

I tried to take back what I had done. I hoped for my family's safety.

Dream 2

My oldest nephew D sat on a car, somewhere near its front. I stood in front of him, telling him why he shouldn't drive the car or ride in the car. The hood to the car may have been open, though I wasn't looking inside but "seeing" the engine with my imagination.

I explained that some connection had been broken. An engine hose was gone between a supply area and a receiving area. The supply area wasn't very affected: it just stopped supplying. But the receiving area, instead of vacuuming in the supply material, was now pulling in air. The air would not only cause a strong reaction with the other chemicals in the engine, but it, being lighter, would be drawn in quickly and flood the engine. Basically, as soon as the car turned on, there would be an explosion.

I could "see" and feel that D was going to start the car and be blown up. I tried to stop him, and he seemed to listen. But it was also like he kept forgetting what I'd told him, or like he was constantly being re-destined to be blown up in the car.

Dream 3

I was in an office or some housing for office people. I had to catch a flight that left at 10 AM. I had been talking about the flight all morning long, but I had never paid attention to the time. It was 7 AM. I needed to get going. I asked a few people if they could give me a ride to the airport. But nobody would, or else they wanted to wait a long time before they would give me a ride.

(3/4/09) the crumbling edifice; uncle steals my phone; where we really wanted to go

(Entered in paper journal at 8:42 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

It was night. I was with a group of people from "my job" (i.e. the job I'd just gotten laid off from). The group of people may have been my boss BS, my teammate DE, and someone else.

We had just gotten out of a meeting, and we were probably going to go to another one in just a little while. Both of the meetings were possibly with the same person: a tall, pretty, blonde woman. The woman may have suggested that there was a place in the building where we could get some good coffee. But for some reason BS wanted to go outside the building.

The building faced something like a vacant lot, as if the building were somewhere in a desert or an undeveloped business complex. The sky was black and flashing as if with lightning. But we could see everything around us, as if it were lit for a movie. It may have started raining a little. The building was as big as a New York skyscraper.

We got to a corner (we had turned right going out of the building) and turned right. We now walked up a slight slope. We were under a structure like the walkway overhang seen on some shopping plaza buildings (and on some skyscrapers). The columns were square and may have been made of a conglomerate material, like concrete full of round pebbles. The ceiling was concrete.

We had gone a long way, just to find some coffee, and now our meeting would start in just a short while. BS now said we should go back to the place the woman had suggested to get some coffee. But I knew that by the time we got back there, it would almost be time for the meeting to start. We wouldn't have time to get the coffee. We were about to emerge from the overhang. We'd have to run through the rain to get to the next overhang.

But now the ceiling of the overhang cracked. I heard it and looked up. The ceiling was divided into large squares. The square directly over us had a crack through the center. The square in front of us, the last square of the overhang, now cracked very loudly. A few cracks in it caused that section of the ceiling to sag downward. It looked like there was earth above the concrete. I don't now how thick the concrete was. Possibly not very thick at all. I called to everybody to get away from the building altogether because the whole thing was going to go down.

I ran up the slope and across the street or into the street. I looked down to the overhang. There were a lot of people there, all people I knew from work. In particular I saw my senior co-worker, mentor, and friend ES, who may have been wearing a vivid, darkish blue, v-neck sweater with a white undershirt. I yelled to ES in particular to get away from the building. But everybody, including ES, was standing still under the overhang, as if they were waiting for the rain to stop.

At some point the building may have collapsed. Everybody was huddling over by the (other?) building, sitting, maybe, under blankets. It may not have been raining, or else the rain may not have mattered.

ES sat somewhere to my left -- or I simply may have heard/felt her in my head. ES said something like, "Even when you were gone, we all knew, It'll be like this with Preemie: buy side, buy side, bam, Preemie right here on the sell side." As ES said this I saw glowing rectangle outlines (like gun-sights in a video game). As ES spoke, it was like she was referring to rectangles farther and farther to the left.

Dream #2

It was night. I was in a house with my family. It was more than just my immediate family. There were members from my dad's side of the family as well.

The house was dark. There may have been some light somewhere, but not much, and I couldn't make out the source (possibly outdoor streetlamp light coming in through curtained windows). It was like this place was on a floor in an apartment building. The apartment may have been very large.

The main room, the living room, was very large, maybe thirty feet by thirty feet. There were occasional chairs and other pieces of furniture. But most or all of the space was taken up by people, my family members, sleeping under sleeping bags and blankets on the floor. It seemed like most everybody was asleep.

I was walking through the room, as if I had just gotten into it, as if I had just come to whatever this gathering was. There were a few people awake, some in the center of the room, kind of arranged as campers might be around a fire (except with just empty floor between them, and not fire) and some people standing at the other end of the room, as if in the doorway for a kitchen.

As I walked through the center of the room, a man, my uncle R, called to me. He asked me what my phone was. I told him it was a BlackBerry. He asked me if he could see it. I handed it to him.

Someone from the doorway to the kitchen was also talking, either to me and my uncle or just to my uncle. The people around my uncle all lay around talking about things, possibly technology. There may have been small lights before them, like the lights from small electronic devices.

I now stood in the room in the daylight. There were still blankets and sleeping bags throughout the room, where everyone had slept. But now there was nobody around.

I walked to the circle of blankets where my uncle R had been, so I could grab my BlackBerry. I knelt down and picked the BlackBerry out of a messy pile of electronic devices. I now saw that my BlackBerry was missing its back, and that the battery was also gone.

I was panicked. I had trusted my uncle and let him look at my phone, and now he'd taken stuff out of it. I tried to see if the SiM card was still in it, but I didn't have enough composure. I sifted though all the other stuff on the ground, but I couldn't find either the back or the battery.

I now got pissed off. I turned around and yelled toward the kitchen, to someone, to my mom or anyone, "Somebody took the battery out of my BlackBerry! If anybody sees my battery and back lying around, let me know!"

On the wall to my left was the front door of the apartment. (Just to the left of that door?) was a small hallway to a couple of bedrooms. My uncle now ran out of that hallway. He had the battery, which was hooked directly to a thick, coiled cord, as if the battery were being charged directly instead of through the device.

The charger wasn't mine, but my uncle hurriedly handed me both the battery and the charger. He had obviously stolen my battery. Now he wanted to get rid of it as soon as possibly, even if that meant losing the charger as well.

My uncle looked worn out, dried out. He may have had purple sacks or even pale bruises under his eyes. He was trying to explain something to me, either how he'd made a mistake in taking the battery, or how he had taken the battery to charge it for me as a favor. I could tell just by the way he was acting (and by the condition in which he'd handed me my battery) that he was lying. I was't even trying to listen to what he said.

Dream #3

I had driven to some place with my mother and brother. It was dark outside, but we could see everything fine, as if it were lit for a cartoon or a movie. We were in some place like an asphalt lot with a cinder block wall, which was directly before us, and a chain-link fence, with barbed wire on top, which was to our right. We stood outside the car, which may have been something like an old Ford Gran Torino, maybe goldish colored.

We spoke about directions to where we really wanted to go. I may have "seen" something in the wall, like a display rack of red clothing, up about ten feet on the wall. We knew we had to turn around.

(1/21/10) the ghost and the murderess

Dream #1

I walked down a city sidewalk, on the left side of the street. It was early morning, dark, with a deep blue sky overhead. I came up to a taped-off area of sidewalk. To my right, behind the tape, was a big, heavy tower of something like scaffold. I looked up and saw a heavy load of something like thick boards or thick, metal plates hanging from a cord, as if the top of this tower were a crane.

I was afraid that the load would fall on me. I didn't cross the tape. I walked into the street, past the tower, then back to the sidewalk. But now I saw that there was another tower before me. I was still afraid that the load behind me would fall and crush me. But now I was also afraid that the load before me would crush me.

I flew up into the air. I was now level with the loads. The towers around the loads were like makeshift floors of wooden boards. The place felt very much like an active construction area. I floated between the two towers. Both towers seemed, now, to be set flush against the face of the building. The second tower stood near the corner of the building.

A tall, strong, round-bodied, round-headed, black man wearing overalls (no shirt?) walked around the corner. When I saw him, I started yelling things at him, things that I thought would make me sound like a ghost or a demon. I thought that I was invisible, but that I could still be heard. I was trying to scare the man, as if to pay him back for his having scared me.

The man seemed either not to hear me or to hear me only slightly. He stopped and looked forward, as if trying to figure out whether he actually was hearing something.

I was now in a kind of small, slightly shabby bedroom. The room was lit somewhat brightly by incandescent light. I was with someone else, possibly a woman. We were shuffling through a loose scattering of papers and pamphlets which lay on the bed. We either stood before or sat on the bed.

The papers and pamphlets were all about grotesque events, probably all murders and serial murders, and possibly all about one woman who had committed these murders. I looked through a number of these pamphlets. The text and margins were blue or red and looked like Chinese take-out menus or old Christian pamphlets for witnessing.

I picked up one pamphlet. A photo on the front showed a dead person's face. The face was black with decay. The skin of the face was shrunken with decay, but it also seemed to be stuffed into the mouth of the face. The head had a few strands of almost colorless, but not pale, blondeish hair.

I turned through the pages. Another photo showed a bone that had been broken in half and placed into a clear, crystal glass of water. The glass had a thick base of cut, niched crystal. I either read or knew that the murderess would take the bones of her victims and put them in water to clean off all the flesh, which the woman possibly thought of as the only evidence of her guilt.

I turned to another photo. It was of the woman. She, too, stood over a bed. She looked like a woman from the early twentieth or late nineteenth century. Her dress was very plain, long-sleeved, tight around the woman's top, with the skirt curtaining slightly outward. The woman's hairstyle was close, but "bunned" outward. The woman had a pale, oval face and wide, pale, severe eyes.

The woman started talking and moving. She was pointing to something on the bed, possibly the dead body the face of which was the subject of the first photo. The woman yelled something about how I'd discovered her and how I wasn't supposed to discover her.

I was suddenly afraid. I felt like I was in the woman's house right now, and like she was now sneaking around to get ready to kill me. But I was also afraid that, since I had seen so much about the woman, that the  murderous impulse would also infect me, and that I would soon be like her.