(7/10/06) floods and nuclear bombs; deadbeat and bloody mouth; lifting up my friend

(Entered in paper journal at 7:25 PM on 4-train from Union Square in Manhattan to home in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I drove in a car down a mountain to a place like a headquarters or a visitor center. It was a sunny day. I was in the car with someone like my brother. We were halfway through some task. Down by the visitor center we spoke of approaching nuclear bombs.

Then the land was suddenly flooded, as if out of nowhere. Only vegetative stalks were above the ground. But it was still the same same calm, sunny day, and my brother and I were still talking about the encroaching nuclear bombs.

Then I heard my friend M from my Americorps NYC Parks program as if I was talking with her on the phone. M was joking with friends about going "up the river" (to prison?). Then the joke was serious. M asked me why I didn't call her after finding out she had gone "up the river," or why I didn't write her letters or say prayers for her.

I saw a piece of notebook paper with a blue crayon drawing of a wood post fence in the corner of some writing. Then the fence was purple. Then it was some kind of opal or clear color with diamonds or sequins hanging off it.

Dream 2

I was in a trailer home like at my Americorps position at Bandelier National Monument. I may have been a woman. There was some projection of a cartoon figure against the door. I wasn't quite looking at it.

The cartoon figure may have been voiced by the man I was in love with. The voice was explaining why the man was nowhere to be found. He was kind of a good-for-nothing. Now someone else was explaining that this guy had better fall back in line. His job wasn't one of the ones people needed when times got tough and when lazy people got laid off.

I realized the people were talking about me. I was now me/the woman. I looked at the cartoon projection, which was some kind of extra furry Yogi Bear face. I realized I may be out of a job as soon as tomorrow.

Something in my sinuses cracked. A pool of blood poured out of my mouth and onto the table I sat at. Two pieces fell out into the pool of blood. One, like a hook-shaped earring back

and the other like a metallic pill with writing on it.

I felt great relief in my sinuses and more worry about my job than about the blood.

Dream 3

I was on a park hilltop with my friend KB. KB was at a picnic bench doing work. She was ranking tests. Somehow scores in the high 600s were good, then nothing was really good until scores got down into the mid-200s, which, to my surprise may have been slightly better (or worse) than the scores in the high 600s.

KB told me she was through ranking the tests. We walked toward steps down the hill as she told me she had put off a report until now. Did I think that was bad?

I said, "No. It's only a three-hundred-word report, and tomorrow she'd still have one and a half days to do it."

I was now holding her, like I was hugging her and arching my back to lazily lift her enough so that her feet wouldn't touch the ground. We walked through

(For some reason my writing just stops.)

(11/12/07) museum flood; brother stabbed; superfriends jealousy; housecleaning lover

(Entered in paper journal at 5:30 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in some place like a monastery. My brother had come into the room I was in. He had come from outdoors. I walked outdoors. I wore a robe like a monk's robe. I walked out into a large, covered walkway of sandstone. The walls (especially at the corners, which were like towers or guard-stations) were thick, with wide "windows" showing a desert-like area of tan hills beyond. I was barefoot and the stone chilled my feet. The light was blue like late afternoon or early morning.

I turned left at a corner. I was afraid of a mountain lion attacking. Something strange was happening on the walls -- it was like Roman figures began to appear in relief.

At another corner I made a left turn. I walked into an inside room. It was a "museum exhibit." But the walls and floor were strangely shaped, as if we were inside a cave. The place was red-brown, like sandstone and clay. On the lumps, mounds, and columns on the floor were art works like frescoes and mosaics, all in a Roman style.

I became afraid, as if a spirit were materializing in this room. I started running. I ran through glass doors and into another "exhibit" room. This room was modern but dark. All the art pieces, which hung from ceilings, stood on weird stands coming out of the floor, or stood at weird angles to each other,were closely but elegantly lit by one light. There was a jeweled feeling to it all.

I was even more afraid of the spirit materializing, so I ran out of this room, too, through another series of doors. This area, I knew, was the front area, the visitors' center (as if this were a national park). Other workers would eventually show up, and then I wouldn't feel alone and afraid.

The room was large, with twenty-foot-high, white walls, red-tile floors, and two aisles of long document-display cases on either side of the front door. Before the front door, to my right, was a long, black mat that led to the front desk, which was to my left.

Two people walked in. The one in front was a Hispanic woman, maybe twenty-five years old, with a green shirt, black pants, and long, black hair. The other person was a tall, white man, rather nondescript. I figured the two people were together. I thought, These people must have some questions for me. Let me answer them. But when I faced the woman to ask how I could help, she turned into my grandmother P. The man vanished.

My grandma was a little rude and impatient. She asked, "Where do I have to stand from here to see the Hudson?"

I said, "This is the East Side. You can't see the Hudson from here."

I showed my grandma a map of where we were. Seeing the map, and how the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers was near here, I said, "Well, I guess technically you can see the Hudson."

My grandma said, "That's what I meant -- where the Hudson drops into the East River. Which way do I have to stand outside to see it?"

I said, "You'll see a big ship outside. Go stand by that. Turn left."

(At this point in my journal, I got off the train in Manhattan. I resumed writing from the Starbucks on 56th Street and Sixth Avenue at 6 AM.)

My grandma went outside. After a second I followed here. It was dark outside. The whole area outside was like a dock. It floated up and down with the waves. A large, white ship, like a cruise ship, stood in the distance.

I looked to my left. The woman (?) stood near the edge of "the dock." The full moon stood about twenty-five degrees in the horizon. I thought I should warn the woman about the waves. They sometimes submerged the dock entirely. Something bad might happen to a person who went too far underwater with "the dock."

The dock started going underwater. At first I ran toward the dock to warn the woman. But then I had to swim. I grabbed the woman. The woman was like an empty shell.

I swam back to (what was now) "the house." The house looked like a small, suburban house. I pulled myself and the woman up a staircase like a staircase out of a swimming pool.

My brother opened the door. There was a good light inside. I could only see my brother's silhouette against the light. I wondered whether the house would even survive. As the waves rose, they seemed to be pulling everything under.

Dream #2

It was late night. I was possibly coming out of a restaurant. I got a call from my brother. He told me he was finishing up at some arcade. He wanted me to pick him up. He implied that he wanted me to give him cab fare to get home.

I told my brother (assuming that he lived around Houston Street in Manhattan), "I can meet with you and give you a subway ride when we get down into the station together. But I'm not taking a cab home and I'm not giving you cab fare. So do you want me to meet you?"

There was no answer. I said, "Yes or no?" Still no answer. I thought, Oh, you jerk. Don't try to intimidate me. I hung up the phone.

I was now close to the arcade. The street was dark and close, but there were stores with bright, fluorescent light and sharp, white walls. I walked into one of the stores when I saw a troublemaker kid who might have known my brother. He stood at a shoddy, white desk, speaking with a security guard. The kid was short, fattish, possibly Mexican. He wore a pale blue (Denver Nuggets?) jersey with a white t-shirt underneath.

From the kid's rude comments to the security guard I could tell that my brother had been stabbed and was hurt pretty bad. The kid was either trying to get help form my brother or was bragging about how his (the kid's) friends had hurt my brother.

I ran to some other place, then through a long, white-walled (walls thin like scaffolding) tunnel to a bright, white-walled room like a waiting room for a cheap office. The whole place felt grimy and messy. There was another security guard's desk.

My brother lay on the ground. He held a pair of child scissors (green handles) in his left hand. He had been stabbed in his right breast with the scissors. Then he'd had the scissors put in his own hands, to look like he had stabbed himself. Two shortish, fattish, Mexican boys knelt over my brother's legs. The boys were either my brother's friends or the people who had stabbed him.

The hole in my brother's chest wasn't very bloody or very big. I thought, At least he wasn't stabbed in the heart. But, still, he lay as if he were dead. I thought, This was going to happen sooner or later. Why did he always put himself into situations where this would happen?

I knelt by my brother's head and called either the police or my mother. As soon as I had finished dialing, my brother opened his eyes. He tried to sit up. I held him back down. I said, "You'll hurt yourself even more if you try to move."

At this point I might have seen this room completely dark, except with a fire-ring built where my brother had been. An older Mexican/Indian boy sat, with his younger brother to his left, before the fire. Both boys were wrapped in robes or blankets, almost like women.

Dream #3

I stood on the roof of a tall building. The sky was dark blue, like at very early morning. Most of the buildings around me were on fire. Some buildings were falling. I flew over the city, seeing its grid of charred ruins.

Now, on the ground, I saw things as if I were in an old SuperFriends cartoon. Five characters stood at the foot of an escalator: a Superboy/Robin character, a Superman/Lex Luthor-Robot (???) character, a long-haired Superman character, and a Superdog character.

Something thoughtless the Superboy character had done had caused all the destruction. The Superboy character felt very bad. But he now said, "Well, what will our mission be next week?" (As if even the heroes understood that these episodes occurred weekly.)

I thought, Next week? How stupid do they think kids are? The whole city's destroyed. What are they going to save next week? Or is the city going to be magically rebuilt?

One of the Supermen said, "I hope you learned your lesson."

The Superboy said, "I have. If I had't let my jealousy of your relationship" (with Wonder Woman?) "get out of hand, none of this would have happened."

The whole team now did their characteristic exit, up the escalator, which moved them through the air, along the upper levels of corridors of (now intact) skyscrapers, and then through some weird "interdimensional portal." The credits were rolling during this exit scene.

Dream #4

I was in "my bedroom" with a woman. I was naked except for a pair of panties. The woman pulled out a vacuum from a closet and started cleaning my bedroom. She cleaned of a heater by the window. It had roach droppings all over it.

The woman pulled open the curtains. It was dark outside. There was a huge, wide building across the street. We must have been up on the fifteenth floor of this building. I hid behind the bed so nobody in the building across the street would see me, a boy, dressed only in panties.

I asked the woman if she would close the curtains. She said, "Not while I'm cleaning house." I was a little annoyed about that. Nevertheless, I felt thankful that the woman was cleaning the house, and that she was not afraid or ashamed to touch the parts I had let get too dirty.

(3/16/09) killer double; cave museum; stalked, framed, and institutionalized

(Entered in paper journal at 7:50 AM at home in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

An image of a large man in a black and white leather biker's outfit. The man may have been white, tan, with long, blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. He may have worn tan and white makeup in haphazard fashion, and he may have had all kinds of random things attached to his outfit. He looked like a cartoon, like something out of the anime of Akira. I thought (possibly after waking) that this was a double that could attack the people who were after me.

Dream #2

I stood out with my family on a road somewhere. It was a hot, sunny day. We stood before a car at the top of a hill, looking down to a flat city in a desert (?). I may have seen from a very low view with most of my vision on the front, driver's side tire.

I now stood before a view that was real and "in action," but was frozen like a photograph. A group of at least five "buffalo" emerged from a cave. The "buffalo" were enormous and white, with long, shaggy coats, like the coats of mountain goats. The "buffalo" may even have had the faces of mountain goats. They were all frozen in their emergence (though the event was "still happening") in a close grouping, some running along the ground, some jumping through the air.

I now saw a view from far back and high up of the cave's surroundings. The land was almost entirely covered with snow. But the cave mouth was set into a face of black, snowless cliff. There might have been a marshy lake somewhere as well, with green waters and a surface glinting gold in the sunlight.

I was now underground in a cave which was a museum. There might have been windows on the upper parts of some of the walls, letting in some natural light to add to the soft, incandescent light. I walked into one exhibit room. There were colorful murals on the wall and spaces for old exhibit cases and insets that were now gone. The murals were about using geological strata to calculate time periods and the age of the earth.

A small man stood at the other end of the room. He was skinny with a slight belly, bald with a round head, a round nose, a thick mustache, and round, plastic-rimmed glasses. He wore a brownish cardigan, a yellowish shirt, and khaki slacks.

The man was telling me how the museum was getting rid of this room. It was beautifully designed, but it was entirely based on an approach to calculating geological periods that was now obsolete. The approach may have been too linear. I thought it was really silly to get rid of such beautiful, colorful murals just because some new theory (which probably wasn't that great, anyway) had come along.

But now the room was filling up with water, as if the museum people were going to flood the room to empty it out. The water was about halfway up to my knees. I walked out. The other man still stood in the room. I walked into another room that adjoined to the hallway. It was empty, with black cave-rock walls and dirt floors. High on the wall to my left was a window letting in light from a pale blue sky.

Dream #3

I was wandering through a town like a desert town. It was a sunny, winter morning, possibly with frost still glazing surfaces. I wandered through different buildings and areas, through the front areas of small "auto-shop" stores, under canopies of gas stations, through tunnel-like walkways for places like motels.

I noticed an Hispanic man was following me. I turned slightly and reached around me, almost over my own head, to grab his head. I tried to smash his head, or to hurt the man in some way. I told the man, "I know you're following me! Why are you following me?!"

The man didn't answer. There was now another Hispanic man. I thought, Well, I can't get rid of both of them. If they want to follow me, let them.

We all stood in a foyer area that was also like a telephone booth. I had some Greek books from the Loeb Classical Edition. But I knew I had left some Latin books behind somewhere, as well as having left behind my bicycle.

I told the men, "Wait here for me. I forgot all my stuff. I'll be right back." The men liked me and took me at my word. I ran back for everything. I ran through something like the grounds for a flat, multi-winged high school (like the high school I had attended).

I was trying to remember the path I had first take through the school grounds. I thought, If I go exactly backwards I should be able to find everything. I wondered now why the Hispanic men weren't following me. I thought it had been too easy to get rid of them.

I ran through a long hallway and into a main area joining three or four hallways. A couple of white men, one older, one in his late twenties, both probably teachers, sat at a desk off to the side of the large room, as if they were waiting to sign in a group of folks who would be arriving for some fun event.

I had a pretty good idea of where I needed to go to get my bike back, but I told the men, "Tell me a room number. I'm looking for my bike. If you tell me a room number, I know my bike will just show up there."

The younger man said, "Okay. 158."

I knew that room 158 was in a certain wing, but I ran into a different wing. I opened a big, heavy door to a clunky-looking room like a maintenance or repairs room or garage. On the other side of the room from me was a large opening (like a garage door opening) to the outside. There were a lot of workers in here, mostly Hispanic or Native American, all joking around and acting a little rowdy.

There was a row of lockers along the wall to my left. The lockers were dull orange and yellow. They were all in bad shape. Some weren't even standing upright against the wall. They had numbers scrawled onto them, probably in pencil.

One of the locker doors had the number 158 written on it. I opened that locker up but didn't find anything. The workers might have thought I was acting suspiciously. I said, "I thought I'd find my bike here."

I was now somewhere else, possibly in a long corridor of college dorms. I knew someone was planning to get me blamed for something I didn't do. I saw in a girl's room. The girl lay in a relaxed fetal position on her right side. She slept half under the covers, on white sheets. Near the girl's feet the left corner of the bed had the sheets pulled up. Someone had written on the bed in lipstick "LIVE AIDS."

This bed-vandalism was now being blamed on me. I was being called into the room with two cops. The lights were still off. Nobody had woken the woman. The cops showed me the words. I said, "I didn't know anything about them."

Someone turned the lights on. I tried to prove my innocence by showing the cops my legs. I had shaved my legs, I told the cops, because I'd gotten a few weird scars that wouldn't heal, or would always get infected, while I had hair on my legs. The hair was just now growing back. I pointed out the old, healed scars to the cops. I told them, "It even causes me to walk a little strange."

The cops told me, "Go out into the hallway and let us see how you walk." I went out into the hallway and walked for the cops. As I did, the cops spoke with one another (I heard them as if I were standing right beside them). They said I probably was innocent of this crime, but that I was obviously mentally unstable, and that they should probably take me to a mental hospital.

(9/21/09) bathroom painting; sharks and whales

(Entered in paper journal at 7:51 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in an auditorium, at least halfway back in the rows of seats. The lights over the seats were off. The lights over the stage were coldly bright. I'm not sure I could see the stage. The seats were about average height, but it also seemed like they were too high for me to see over.

The audience was milling around, getting into their seats, the auditorium only half full and not populated in any orderly fashion. The row I sat in was taken by a group of people of which I was a part.

To my left, either right next to me or one seat removed, was a black woman, probably in her early or mid twenties, with straight, blonde-brown hair. The woman told me that this meeting was a rally against cancer. This excited me, and I expressed my approval, after having previously thought we were here for something silly.

But when I expressed my approval, the man sitting to my right, who looked like one of my old Americorps co-workers, SC, told me, "Hey, why don't you go to the bathroom? Didn't you say you needed to go?" I knew the man was just doing this because I had just connected with the girl. The man was jealous of me and wanted to get me out of the picture.

But I acquiesced and went to the bathroom. For a moment I was in the bathroom by myself. The bathroom was kind of run-down, possibly painted in somewhat vivid sea-green and tan-orange, and lit by incandescent light. I may have urinated in a urinal the base of which was on the floor and the body of which extended up the wall to about chest height.

I was now in a room with my psychiatrist A. The room was like an artist's studio. The floor was concrete. The walls were greyish white and maybe thirty feet tall. There were two large paintings: one, lying propped against the wall in front of me; the other, hung high up on the same wall.

A stood on a big, thick, wooden ladder, level with the painting that was hung on the wall. The painting may have had a lot of reds and oranges in it, as well as some purples. A was pointing to the painting and asking me something.

I kept worrying that A would fall off the ladder. The rungs of the ladder seemed wobbly, like bicycle pedals or buckets (?) on the wheel of a watermill. It didn't look like they'd be easy to stay balanced on. I felt bad that A should put herself at such risk just to show that she had this kind of artistic sensibility, and that she was doing this all just to show that she cared about my emotions and what I said.

Dream #2

I stood out on some cliff overlooking a beach. The sky above may have been a buzzy grey, with low, warm, pale clouds. The whole place felt very lonely. There was some kind of storm happening, even though it wasn't raining. But now the level of the sea rose greatly, almost overtaking the cliff I stood on.

I may have seen a weird sea creature swim, belly-up, in the water. I may have thought of the creature as a shark or a whale. But its flesh was all torn and pink, like that of a mutilated animal.

I may now have been in the water, looking back at the cliff, which was a wedge of boulders. The cliff looked like it shouldered above the water pretty well now.

The water was grey and slick. Waves would surge up and slam over me. The waves seemed large in the distance. But by the time they got to me, they seemed much smaller. But each wave that hit me seemed to be larger than the last. The last wave that hit me was just as large as it had been in the distance. I was very scared watching the wave loom over me.

I now stood in some futuristic room, looking out a bubble window at the night sea, possibly from a vantage point near a port. A pretty, blonde woman, a little taller than I, stood to my right. She was talking about the fact that people had been seeing a lot more creatures in the sea lately. As she said this, a whale's back humped up above and then back down below the surface of the water.

I said to the woman, "Look! A whale!"

The woman said, "Yes, I know. I've seen them before."

The whale's tail now broke above the water, coming straight up, then flapping back down, almost on the window.

"The same" whale now jumped out of the water, maybe twenty feet above the surface of the water, revealing itself to be a killer whale. It didn't make sense to me that this could be the same whale. The whale we'd seen before had been much larger than this killer whale.

We looked down into the water, as if the bottom half of the bubble-window were now below the surface of the water. We saw a shark. Another shark, which looked like a small whale, swam up to the window -- as if the whole window were now underwater! The shark laughed at us in a human, high-pitched voice, to scare us.

Another shark, with lobed shapes along its body, in shadow (?), swam straight up the window and beyond -- as if we were now deep below the surface of the water. I called this last shark a hammerhead. This shark also laughed a very scary, human-sounding laugh as it passed us. This laugh was a hunting tactic, used to scare prey out of hiding, perhaps.

The woman and I were now speaking about something, possibly about the killer whale and the sharks and something about differentiation.

I was now scuba diving underneath a futuristic sea vessel or submarine. I was with three other people. all of whom were ahead of me. The floor of this part of the sea was just below us, and the underside of the vessel was just above us. I swam with my belly up toward the vessel.

I was still speaking, somehow, with the woman. I said something about being able to prove the differentiation we'd been speaking about. Just then a shark that looked like a small killer whale floated over me. I thought, That proves it. But I was also afraid that the shark had passed so close to me. I thought, But if you aren't afraid of the sharks, aren't the sharks nice to you? Don't they even play with you sometimes? But now the shark was gone.

I swam forward, looking down to the floor of the sea. I knew that the person directly ahead of me was an older man, thin, tall, with longish, grey hair and pale, blue eyes, possibly wearing glasses as well.

We were now all apparently swimming down here without oxygen tanks. The man ahead of me was running out of air, but he didn't want to make this known to the two people ahead of him: a woman (maybe the one I'd been speaking with) and a young, black boy.

The man said he had to go back and check on something. But I knew he was going back to the entry hatch to get some air. I saw that before he turned around he stuck his mouth to a white and yellow device that looked like a water fountain.

The man was now gone. But I was now running out of air. I turned to head back to the hatch. As I did I saw the device the man had used. It was basically an "oxygen fountain." When a person stuck their mouth to the device and released a valve, the device would release oxygen, which the person could then breathe in. I noticed that these little valves were placed at pretty even intervals along the bottom of the vessel, so that oxygen could be obtained as needed.

But looking at these fountains, which were like white, plastic shields or basins with yellow, plastic nozzles, I noticed that they were dirty, grimy looking, or grown over with algae. I thought, I'm not going to stick my mouth around that! I thought I'd go back to the entry hatch and try to find something that would enable me to preserve my oxygen so I wouldn't need to use these oxygen sources.

For instance, I remembered a packet the old man had: a metallic-pink, thin, square package, like the shape of the wrapper for Pop-Rocks candy. The man had opened this package and pulled out a pink tissue that looked like a wet-nap napkin. He had then chewed this tissue like gum, I remembered. This tissue had then either produced oxygen or allowed the old man to preserve the oxygen already in his system.

I thought that using this tissue was kind of like cheating on the man's part. But I also thought it was reasonable. I wondered if I couldn't find something like that to use. But I also wondered how the woman and boy could just keep on going and going without needing oxygen. Why were they so good? Or what was wrong with me?

I was now in the entry hatch, which looked somewhat like the stairwell up from the basement at the house my family lived in when I was in my last three years of high school (and when I was seven and eight years old), except that it was painted in a warm, tan-orange color.

I looked around for a while for oxygen tanks. I couldn't find anything, and I felt like even I actually did find oxygen tanks, I'd probably feel to guilty and ashamed to wear them, anyway. I thought that I'd look for some of that oxygen gum, or smaller "devices" like that. If I couldn't find anything like that, I'd at least wander around here for a little while and catch a few breaths before going back into the water.

I wandered into a messy kitchen. There were a few people, mostly young kids, in the kitchen. A motherly woman sat before the stove with a young, black boy. There was some kind of barrier, almost like police tape, around the stove and the area where the woman sat and the boy stood. The boy sat in a wooden chair, his feet against the door of the oven. On the front right burner boiled a pot of chocolate. The chocolate was being prepared for fudge.

The woman, who might now have been my mother, and the boy both looked at me as I entered the room. Another small, white child placed, possibly in a crib, near my right leg. I knew the woman and boy knew me. I waved at them. The boy just looked at me like I was a piece of shit that didn't deserve his attention. He looked back to the stove.

I was so scared by the boy's look that I shyly walked past the boy and the woman. I thought to myself, Great. Now I can't even come to see my mother without some black guy getting in my way. (???) I walked through the kitchen, to the other doorway, which would probably have led to a living room or dining room.