(10/6/05) all-you-can-eat buffet scuffle

(No time/place info for paper dream  journal entry.)

(10/5 -- I will try tonight to influence my dreams with thoughts of Ghost in the Shell II the anime movie.)

(No dreams were recorded in my dream journal for the night.)

***

(Daytime paper journal entry.)

Dream 1

I can't remember the beginning. I was somewhere with my friends R and Y. It was like we were doing some job outside. I had eaten a burrito that had been wrapped in aluminum foil. Once we finished we walked to the end of a parking lot and stood by something like a gas station. All I remember now is that it was a bright white building. The parking lot was empty. The sun was bright.

I sat or stood against a wall, either in the sun or the shade. R and Y were up by the front of the gas station. Possibly one of them was in or kept walking in and out of the store. One of them was talking on a cell phone. Someone had invited them to a "roller coaster park" or amusement park. I knew they would also invite me, though I didn't really want to go.

I don't really know what happened next. Something about an errand was mentioned. We walked down the parking lot toward a building that looked like a closed Kmart. It was a white building, the doors of which were boarded up with what looked like plywood painted aquamarine.

The errand had apparently become getting lunch. I thought about this with a little dread. I'd already eaten a burrito, and I didn't want to go out for a big lunch. Now I pulled two more burritos out of my back pocket. I definitely didn't want to buy lunch now, now that I had two more burritos.

I thought there was possibly a way for me to get away from these guys. But, seeing some guys opening and closing the aquamarine boards, which I now saw were steel, I knew I was just going to have to go with them.

I was now in some restaurant with them. It was like the cafe at the back end of the old Kmart on Colfax (and Wadsworth?) in Denver. But it was huge, like three or four cafe lines put together. R and Y had gone up to get food from the buffet-like lines. I stood at a table, about to sit down, but looking at my burritos and feeling guilty for even eating these. After all, hadn't one burrito been enough?

But now Y came up and told me to come check out the buffets. Apparently there were three buffet lines, each set up like they were different restaurants, with different styles of food. I walked up to the buffets with Y, telling myself not to buy any food, just to look out of interest.

The buffets were set up so that on the left and right sides were two immense, long buffets, and in the center was a small, pagoda-like buffet with something like soups on it. Y and I went to the left buffet first. It was all sub sandwiches, just a long, stretching bin full of sub sandwiches. The wall behind the buffet was wallpapered with a slightly grainy photograph of a blue sky dotted with puffy, white clouds.

I thought, Well, it's never worth it to spend this much money on a sub sandwich. But maybe I can just get a soda.

I walked away from the buffets altogether, though, back to the seats. I was about to sit down when I heard Y say, "Hey, Preemie! Come check this out!" She was now on the right side buffet, which, I could only barely see, was some kind of exotic food. I ran up through the soup buffet, which, I could only barely see, was some kind of exotic food, to get to the right side buffet.

R stood at the soup buffet. As I ran toward Y, he shoved me with his back and butt and pinned me against the guardrails for the buffet. Holding me there with his back he said, "No you don't. You aren't getting anywhere near Y."

I slipped away but he moved quickly and trapped me again. He was pissed. I tried to struggle against him, but he kept slipping out of my reach.

Trying to figure out something, anything to do to him, I stuck my hands first into a beef mushroom-type soup (kind of a french dip au jus consistency) and then into a guacamole-consistency soup, which I grabbed a hot handful of and flung into R's face.

R backed up (?) and away from me. We now stood by a trashcan by the chairs and tables. R gave me a look that scared (and scares) the shit out of me -- it was like that of a psychopath who finally decided to kill and thus saw his object as already dead, like I was just a stupid fucking absurdity for still choosing even to breathe and talk. It was a blank, petulant stare.

R was pissed that I had gotten him off of me. He was even more pissed that I had gotten a bit of his glasses and his left jawline messy with the guacamole-type soup. But he was most pissed that I had gotten some of the soup on the left side of the collar (?) of his "expensive" shirt, but that if R didn't wipe off his neck, which he wouldn't, he would let the soup get on his shirt. And he wanted that, because for so long he had wanted an excuse to kill me or embarrass me so badly that I would wish I were dead.

I half-apologized. But I mainly told R, "You just have to get off of me when I tell you to get off of me, that's all. Besides, Y's my friend, just as well as you are, and I have every right to talk to her."

He pushed me away and said, "I am going to kill you or embarrass you really bad. You don't ever tell me what to do. You are mine."

Now he was gone. I sat across from Y. She asked where R had gone. I told her he just got a little pissed and decided not to hang around for the rest of the day. She said, "Well, he should just learn to deal with the fact that not everybody in the world is going to do things whenever he wants them to."

Now I sat staring out toward the front of the restaurant, where the Kmart used to be. It was now a skyline, behind a couple skyscrapers and across a river, of what I possibly thought was New Jersey and/or lower Manhattan. It was in pinkish-orange sunset light, the buildings looking orange-purple in their shadows. I sat on the thin tile floor like I was sitting on a hilly lawn, waiting for a concert.

I was trying to think, as my friend ML sat beside me and spoke (Y now gone), how on earth I would make do back in New York if I couldn't stay at R's place. I thought that I should perhaps ask ML to let me stay with him. But right as I was about to ask him, turning up to him and lifting up my arms as if to embrace his chest like I was a fawning girl, he disappeared.

Now, instead of ML to my right, My mom's old longtime boyfriend JT was to my left. I didn't see him, but he was there. The skyline was moving now, from my right to my left, a bridge coming into view, as if we were on a boat.

JT pointed out some smallish, greenish-window-walled building kind of where Battery Park would have been. He told me, "See? That's the Jewish Aquarium Museum" (?) "right there."

I said, "Oh yeah?" first trying to figure out which building JT was talking about, then trying to figure out what made certain aquatic life Jewish.

I don't know how, but things now changed quite a bit. I was in something like an apartment that was the entire floor of a skyscraper. The floor was concrete (?) painted black and with Arabian rugs all over. There were a few nice couches as well.

The walls were either brick or black-painted concrete. There were huge holes for windows. But I don't think the windows had any panes. The window holes were from ceiling to floor and about ten or twelve feet wide, so that the "wall" was more like a wide column between the windows, more than like a wide space of wall between windows.

The space was like an artist's space, or, rather, like a space where artists could just hang out, not work. A few people were there, talking, and I was their friend. But I don't know them, nor could I really see them.

The strangest thing was that the building or the floor was revolving, turning counterclockwise. At first I thought it was just my changing perspective. But even when I held my head still I saw that building tops were "moving" from left to right before my eyes. The city looked clean, new, with buildings made out of red bricks and copper-colored, tan bricks. I was very interested in the views, but I also had a feeling that the turning of the building meant it was going to collapse.

I now heard (Y?) call for me. She told me to look out a "window" to my right. I immediately saw some neighborhood, which I thought was an incredibly beautiful yet dangerous area of Brooklyn. I was enamored with the spooky starkness (even in full, shining daylight!) of these buildings. But I don't remember them now.

I don't know what happened next. But now I was walking to a bedroom after having made an unsuccessful joke to my friend PD. There were no windows in the room. A yellowy, incandescent light shone from the center of the ceiling.

There was something like a couch-like mattress in the center of the floor. I flopped down in it and sighed to ML that PD didn't think my joke was funny. ML just grinned and was about to say something kind of rude and annoying about my sense of humor.

But apparently I predicted what ML was going to say. I butt in as he got a few words in and said something like, "Oh, yes, now it's time for you to repeat some word I characteristically say until you beat me down with a sense of being completely known and understood. You're such an ass."

But ML didn't take my comments too harshly. I don't think I meant them so harshly. He just gave me a lazy, half-dazed smile and rumpled his head under a blanket and made a joke about me.

Now a dog like my friend R's dog ran into the room from a door to my right (I had come in from the left). "She" kind of attacked my right hand, biting it softly but repeatedly.

I said, "Oh, I forgot, you like eating people's hands, don't you?"

"She" said, "Yes, I do, but I also like being petted," in a voice like a 75% feminine, 25% masculine, watery-timbered computer voice. "She" now lay back on my lap and resembled soemthing like a naked boy covered in short, silky, black dog hair. I pet it and it opened its mouth in "pleasure" that looked more like the breathless gasps of a burn victim.

Now someone somewhere said, "Oh, he's coming! Just open the door for him." They meant to use the electric door opener to open the door on the first floor but not to use the buzzer.

My sister said, "Oh, I know how to do that. I've done it before." But before she could get to the door opener the person there buzzed up to us. "My friend's dog," who was now much more, though still not quite, like the dog, sprang from my lap, barking insanely.

I now understood that the man coming up was my mom's new husband, a Japanese man. I got up from a room that wasn't quite the room I had just been in and walked down a dim hallway with a couple doorways to wide, airy, classy rooms and into a "central" room where the front door was located. The light was a rich tan-yellow.

The man had just come into the house. He was about five-foot-five, maybe 150 or 160 pounds, wearing a blue, hefty, knit sweater, slacks (or jeans?), and plastic-rimmed, black glasses. His face was kind of thick. He was wide-lipped and weary-eyed. His hair was alternately thinning greatly and full but obstinately messy. His skin was very dark, almost brown, a dull brown.

He walked toward the kitchen, where my mom was, only half-regarding me. I told him, "Hello, sir, nice to meet you. Can I ask who you are?" He just grunted and kept walking.

I said, "You have no business continuing if you don't tell me who I am." He now said something politely and slowly, but so quiet that it looked like he was on an almost muted television. He kept walking.

I told him, "You cannot continue until you tell me who you are." But he walked past me and almost to the "kitchen," which was now just another dark hallway.

I turned, sternly called to him, then walked up behind him, grabbed him with both arms, and attempted to pull him out of the threshold. It wasn't really working. It was like I had no power of resistance.

But now a son of this man ran up to him and said, "Dad, where have you been?" I now felt like a fool for having tried to stop the man. I had only done so because I wasn't being respected and the rules I had been asked to uphold weren't being respected.

I was now somehow in the kitchen, which was nice, light, airy, and clean. My mom was at the stove, apparently boiling a pot of mussels (?). The steam clung in the air, but it smelled and felt nice. My mom walked to the refrigerator (black and shiny like glass) and opened it as I told her, "I tried to get him to tell me who he was. But he spoke with almost no voice at all and then just kept on walking."

My mom said, "It's okay. He's very understanding. You don't need to worry about having embarrassed anybody."

I saw into a pan in which my mom was frying wide, thin, purplish cuts of sausage with other meats and a lot of green peppers and onions.

I now sensed that this man's wife (!) had arrived, as well as all the other children. The wife was Indian (i.e. from India). The children (maybe three or four of them) were Indian- and Japanese-looking. I was excited to meet them all, because I felt like they were skilled at some kind of mysticism, not consciously, perhaps, but deep down.

They ran around in different rooms. I flew through a dim hallway and into a dim living room. My position was cross-legged, sitting. Dim, cobalt blue light from the dark sky outside poured in through the big window in the living room. The only other light was from some other room, perhaps from the "entry room" or the kitchen. A couple kids and the wife were in the living room. I flew in through the right and flew out through the back, i.e.

Having seen the kids I thought I shouldn't really fly because they might first think I was showing off, and because they might second think I was flying because I guessed, based simply on their racial backgrounds, that they, too, had the ability to fly.

When I got out of the living room I landed. I was in a dark room. I walked into another dark room, the floor of which was littered with JUMP Japanese comic books, all arranged in a horseshoe shape. I think I thumbed through some of these, trying to find an issue that would be interesting to the kids, so I could have something to talk to them about. But I abandoned that idea as well, thinking that their Japanese background didn't exactly mean they'd like manga.

I walked through the hallway and back into the living room. Only the wife was there now. She looked like the mother in Monsoon Wedding, but she also seemed like some kind of businesswoman in her early thirties, American, possibly white, very attractive, with a slight intent to seduce or at least tease me. She was standing and walking in front of the couch, which was an L-shape on a bluish rug on a hardwood floor. (It seems like this apartment was a huge apartment on a high floor in a Manhattan skyscraper.)

The woman came up and asked me, almost furtively, "So... with all that... of yours, then... is that something you're going to keep for real?"

I said, "What of mine? Do you mean then...?" She said, "Yeah, the moving around stuff." (She meant the flying, of course.) She now sat down and was from now on, I think, only like the mother from Monsoon Wedding.

I sat on the floor, flopping my arms up on the couch just to the left of her lap. She told me, "Yeah, we have a friend who practices that stuff. He's even started to make a business out of it, charging people $188.10 to..., so I guess he's..."

She now started crying, not wailing or weeping. Her voice stayed normal, but tears gushed out of her eyes in three, wet, solid streams. She looked forward as she continued speaking, as if preoccupied. I had a feeling she had lost a son.

I asked her if she was alright. She said, "Oh, yes. It's too hot, that's all. Too hot, but it's too cold. I need to change the thermostat."

I got up and walked to the wall with the thermostat. There were two arch-shaped, aluminum bars resting against the wall, stacked against each other. On top of them was a cardboard ad-sign for a thermostat or CD. This confused me at first (!).

When I understood this wasn't the thermostat, I fumbled with the sign to get it out from in front of the thermostat. After I fumbled clumsily for a couple seconds, the wife cluttered up behind me and just grabbed the sign and threw it away.

I looked closely at the thermostat. It was a round one with an orange needle telling what the temperature was set at. By turning the casing, a metallic, pale copper-green plastic, you could move the needle, behind clear plastic, around, to bring the temperature up or down.

I saw that the needle was right at one hundred, which meant that it was neither too hot nor too cold. I showed this to the lady, but she grabbed the thermostat and twisted it. Satisfied she walked back to the couch.

She was incredibly depressed. I wanted to understand who she had lost in her life. I felt like it was a son, who had died in the World Trade Center collapse. But I didn't quite know how to ask her. I did say something. But as she started to respond I woke up.

(10/8/04) litter patrol; dioramas

(No time/place info given. Assuming dreams written at home in Albuquerque.)

Dream 1

Trashbag, river, rock bank. Try to throw twice. One across then falls in. Then way down river breaks. "Run" after it. Grab what trash I can. River becomes road. People pick up remaining trash, put in can. I take last item, Wendy's Biggie Shake cup, folks say it was too clean inside it, something else going on.

Now I am looking for something missing? Fly, quickly through building in two different ways. People see me only fly second way. Up and down floors, finally up to 25th (or 26th?) floor, to meeting place of Superiors, who are not good people (?).

Dream 2

Looking at dioramas. "Spend much time," my old high school teacher CP says. Now in other room four displays of one girl's dioramas. Now in first town, tell CP where I was. He begins to tell me about old boys of town. Some kid comes in. CP helps kid. Comes back, now is woman. Tells me about old days in Albuquerque. Crickets. Now only empty places are XXXXX, but rock concerts always there.

(10/16/04) snakes on my ass; too young for a car

(Dreams entered only in daytime paper journal. No time/place info for entry.)

Dream 1

I was flying through the clouds on a relatively blue day. I may actually have also been in an airplane, just a small one. I did, however, see down through the floor of the plane, which I feel was some kind of shiny, red, thin plane more like a spaceship than a normal airplane.

I thought to myself something like, If I do this to her, it isn't that bad. I must be able to free myself from my guilty feelings.

Suddenly I was no longer in the plane but simply flying through the clouds. At some point I was holding tight to a woman. She could also fly. We barreled through the clouds, rolling tightly, possibly to preserve the flying height and speed.

But now we were beginning to descend. We dropped down toward a sea in a wide, gradual arc that became sharper. At some point we split apart and turned ourselves around so we could land in the sea feet first.

I was afraid that when I landed I would be smashed by the force of the water. But it turned out that when I "hit," simultaneously with the woman, I, as she, softly but rapidly cleared the water as if falling in from a drop of only a few feet.

We now surfaced, some distance away from one floating platform, but possibly also just to the left of another one. On the platform in the distance was a serious-looking, older man in some kind of ceremonial robe. There may have been an actual spaceship (saucer) above and behind him. We could see that he was angry at us. We may possibly have floated toward him slowly.

Now we were in a room, possibly in the spaceship, though it seemed more like a living room. I and the woman sat on the floor. The man, now possibly an older, thinner man, sat on a tall chair over us. I was now much less conscious of the woman, although I knew she was there.

I had some small, thinly constructed, plastic objects in front of me. They were about the size of Monopoly game pieces, but they were like blue and pink, thinly wired baskets. There may also have been some purplish spheres of plastic, a dusky, grayish amethyst color.

I vaguely thought about moving these plastic objects and found that they were moving as I had been vaguely thinking. I now practiced willing them a little more to move. I noticed that I wasn't quite as able to move the objects, though they were still moving.

I now "remembered" (?) having been in a swamp full of snakes, many of which were trying to attack me. I thought now in this room that I figured upon reaching the swamp's pale green, mossy shores that I had escaped all the snakes. But I now felt pain all over my ass. Small, black "snakes" about one and a half inches long and maybe an eighth of an inch wide were attached to me and biting me and sucking my blood. I began picking them off my ass. I knew that their attack had hindered me from continuing my studies of telekinesis.

Dream 2

I was on some kind of fence or some thin platform, holding an aluminum pole and working on some tarp material that served as a ceiling. This wasn't in a parking lot, but some kind of asphalt lot or dirt lot in the middle of the wilderness.

A lot had happened before this. But now I was talking to some fat kid with curly blonde hair. I was telling him, as I worked on the ceiling, about a few different models of cars. They weren't quite cars -- I could see them in my head. But they were something new that everybody wanted, in the same way that people want cars.

I spoke chiefly of the prices. I started with a couple really expensive models. Then I spoke of one model that was almost as good as the other models but was only $1,995 (?).

As I said this I was hammering something through the tarp and into one of the ceiling corner poles. The kid had been on a pole beside me. But now he had hurried off and away from the "tent" to go tell his mom about the good price for this "car." He ran off to some building in the distance. It was a short, tight, dusty, brick building.

I went after the kid, who hadn't exactly run into the building. I thought, I have to stop him. He needs to know he isn't old enough to get these kinds of things yet. He can't ask his mom to give it to him.

Instead of heading to the building, though, I headed toward a cheap, white hatchback about fifty feet from the building. The kid sat in the car, at the driver's seat. Another kid sat beside him. They were both looking at magazines.

The kid told me (though a closed window) that he was waiting in the car for his mother. It wasn't necessarily to ask for a "car."

The hatchback the kid now sat in was something like one of these "cars," as if the kid had had one all along. I now, though, felt like it was certain that the kid's mother would be very judgmental toward me. I was ashamed, but I also wanted to hide the shameful thing I had done, whatever it was. I now somewhat "melded" with the kid, taking a backwards-glancing interest in the magazine a kid was holding, as if that would stop the mother from being disgusted with me.

(10/21/04) get up, you idiot

(This dream entered only in daytime paper journal. No time/place info for entry.)

One dream vaguely remembered from last night.

Dream 1

Don't remember the beginning or the premise of the beginning.

I was fly-jumping up a hill of dormant, dry, tan, and purplish-pink grass on a grey day, trying to catch up with some man (my friend R?) and an artist woman. I wasn't quite able to fly up the hill as well as I could fly-jump over a flat surface.

I was afraid that I was losing my ability to fly-jump at will. But now -- the landscape changed to something indoors, like a smallish museum or a business or hotel building with a sculpture garden in it -- I was back to jump-flying regularly.

R and this unknown artist lady, who looked like the leonine math teacher in Fellini's Amarcord in a black dress, were now standing somewhere on a second or third level with me. R mentioned sculptures to the art lady as if they were my sculptures.

I don't remember what happened after this. Now I stood by some long, messy table at which R sat, either at the side or at the head. The table was kind of smashed up and covered over with papers, but it at least used to be classy.

We were in a smallish room like an apartment bedroom. It felt a little cold, as opposed to the rest of the "museum hotel," which, though resembling nothing more than a series of tiers and floors of living rooms and living room-like lobbies connected by stairways, like a suburban MC Escher, felt very warm and welcoming throughout.

Both R and I were anticipating the visit of R's girlfriend Y. But once she got there R seemed distant and consumed by whatever work was on the table.

I hung out for a second or two before telling Y she had to come see the sculptures in this place, one in particular, a fountain sculpture of a young girl. The sculptures were now the work of the artist woman.

Y and I walked out into the main area, walking along something like a balcony which overlooked some tiers and stairways. I began fly-jumping again. At first, once again, I didn't quite believe I could do it. But something in me loosened up. Y kept up with me somehow, though she wasn't fly-jumping. In fact, she was impressed by the fact that I could do this.

We came to either a ripped-out, torn-out section in the balcony or else a large, long stairway down and then back up in the middle of the balcony. I thought to myself, This is the big test whether I can really fly-jump. I jumped across the gap, barely making it.

But we weren't finding the sculptures. we weren't heading down onto the first floor (or basement?) even though that's where the sculptures were, because we didn't want to go down until we came right to the sculpture I was looking for.

Sculptures had started filling the lower levels, standing on pedestals, hidden behind strange, carpet-covered walls, standing in the center of hexagonal couch arrangements, guarded round by fences, standing all alone. They were all black, perhaps some kind of lead. They were done in a quaint, lovely early twentieth century style, or actually more like the early style of Rodin. Most of the sculptures were busts, especially busts of men.

At some point we two decided we had to go down to the lower levels to find the sculpture of the girl. We mazed around through there until we finally reached the sculpture (? -- I can't say for sure if we reached it. It may have been that as we searched I was never quite able to envision the sculpture to know exactly what to search for, and then that I at least could envision the sculpture).

But as soon as this happened we two were in some kind of small basement bedroom. At first the warm incandescent light was on. There was a bed against the long wall opposite the closed bedroom door. Over the bed was a window covered by blinds. I don't think there was anything else in the room.

Somehow Y and I were now laying in bed together. We were just friends, and we were just hanging out, talking about something. But I now managed unconsciously to have put my arm around her.

Y laughed at me as we lay there and said something like, "So even you were only pretending not to be sexually attracted to me. It kind of gets troublesome after a while."

Now the lights were out. Y and I were holding hands in some way so that my arm was still under and around her but was bent up at the forearm and perpendicular with her arm, which was also perpendicular.

It seemed to be thundering and raining outside. I cracked open a view between two slats of the blinds. The window was dotted with smattering raindrops. The sky was a streetlamp-orange purple. We were right next to a bridge like the Brooklyn Bridge, except skinnier. It was the middle of the night.

One solitary man walked past the window, saw into the window, and hurried his walk. I knew he was one of R's employees, and that he would now tell R what he had seen. I tried to get Y out of bed. But she kept pulling me back down and laughing, still holding my hand.

Now the lights were back on. There were now two beds in the room -- in an upside-down L shape, or a 7 shape. By the lower bed, which lay at the foot of the bed we had been laying in, was my backpack.

Y rolled out of bed, possibly covered by the blanket. She crawled toward the door, laughing a little. We could hear R laughing bitterly from some distance down what I "saw" as a dark hallway.

I now rolled out of bed. I had all my clothes on, but I also didn't have all my clothes on. I was looking for my clothes. I crawled, dramatically, desperately, yet in slow motion, toward my backpack. I must have stood at one point.

I heard R say something at some point. Y said to me, "Well, he's going to find us. We've been caught in the act."

I now collapsed over my backpack. I was upset of course, that I'd betrayed my friend and was about to hurt his feelings so bad. But I was also afraid, literally weak in the knees, because I knew R could kick my ass.

Y was still chuckling, as if this was all kind of fun and exciting. She told me something like, "Oh, get up. come on. Get up, you idiot."

(10/26/04) my friend's dad doesn't want me around

(Entered in paper journal at 3:15 AM at my friend R's house in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

Take plane to Denver, make fun of movie at my friend R's house night time, dad angry, I must leave house.

Next morning waiting for ride away, girl at bus, help with pigtails, Grandma P and cousin AH in car take us. Take girl to bus stop.

Ride somewhere, family house, but family gone. R (?) gets keys -- becomes John Stamos, all we go inside, house full of people.

My Aunt M there, tells me of being existentialist, some existentialist church, were they stopped a record.

Now driving or hovering under tall bridges with trains with fan wheels. Tons of bridges.

Now in locker (?) eating ice cream at a restaurant booth with R. Tells me my estimations of him are correct in a very meaningless or minor way, makes some metaphor he thought I would make.

***

(Daytime paper journal entry.)

I'm writing down the dream remembered from last night only because I want it to be a bit more coherently written.

Dream 1

R and I took a plane from XXXXX to Denver, although it looks now more like we were on a train or in a car. We stayed at R's dad's house. Apparently R's dad lived all by himself, as opposed to being married to my best friend Y's mother, as he is in waking life. it was now nighttime.

We watched some movie in the living room. The television faced a U-shape of three couches. I lay on my right side on the couch facing the television. Somebody in the movie said something for which I had a smart alec comment.

I don't really know where R and his dad had been. But suddenly R's dad peered over the couch and, cheerfully-angrily, said that I had no right to disrespect this movie and that if I thought I was so clever I could find my own place to stay.

I decided just to head back home the next day. At some point I realized that I did, after all, have family here. I could get help from them.

So now it was morning. I had called my grandma P. She was coming for me. But I just went along with washing up, acting like I was just going back home, to XXXXX. I knew that if it were known that I was staying in Denver for this vacation time, things would be ruined for me.

But there was also a little girl here now. She was about eight or ten, blonde, very serious. Her hair had been done up in pigtails but now it was ratty and messy. I knew I had to take her with me when my grandma came for me. So I did her pigtails. She had two on each side of her head. I don't know exactly how I was doing them. It looked like some reverse form of making dreadlocks.

Before I was done, maybe about when I was halfway done, my grandma drove up. I came out of the house. My cousin AH was also in the car. I don't know where I sat in the car. We drove along and at some point dropped the girl off. There were actually two girls now, an older one and a younger one. I walked them onto a bus and sat them in two front seats.

(At some point after this (?) my grandma and AH and I went to a restaurant. At some other point I seem to have donated blood and to have run in terror from the experience.)

Now we were driving through some pretty heavy rain. My grandma couldn't keep me at her house. But she knew my aunt M's (?) house was empty. She had a key. AH had become Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen.

R sat in the back seat with me. We were all kind of chuckling at what a surprise this would be, when I was still here in spite of R's dad kicking me out of the house. But I personally was afraid of the war this would start between me and R's dad, and possibly even between me and R.

Now R had managed to take over the situation completely. He was the one in charge of getting us into the house, as if it were his house. He had also (!) changed into John Stamos.

We pulled up to the house, which seemed to curve or angle around a driveway, patio, and yard in such a way that the front door wasn't readily visible to us. The house was painted a dirty sky blue.

It was still raining. We were in the house now. everybody except my grandma and I were now vague. The house had two stories, but the second story wasn't set directly over the first. It was set behind, at the top of a shortish staircase, with the hallway between a left room, a right room, and a bathroom in the middle, having more of an open, airy balcony.

The house was wide and large, very spacious, but dim, with only natural light from the dreary day outside, and dirty, not cluttered, but littered here and there with piles of clothes or rags, and no furniture but things like buckets or construction materials. There may have been no carpet, only a concrete floor.

I walked to and up the stairs. As I walked up the stairs the house changed a few times. I was now on the second floor. I had received the good news that everybody was home after all. All the lights were on. I stood in the hallway. Everywhere was messy with clothes. People were in every room, like this was some kind of day care center.

My aunt M walked up to me. She was much shorter than I, as if I had grown considerably and become quite mature. I wore the t-shirt with the logo of my college improv comedy team on it.

I worried that my aunt would think I wasn't dignified because I was wearing such a shirt. Instead she told me something like she had become an existentialist, and that she was now going to some existentialist church. At one service the pastor (?) stopped a record in the middle of its playing. It was, I think, some kind of sad record, with a style like from the late 1960s.

I now drove (!) along some highway on a gently blue, dryly breezy, sunny, warm day. I drove under at least three bridges. Trains ran across all the bridges, passing just as I passed under the bridges. The undersides were some kind of whitish beige, slightly meshed, plastic material through which the undersides of the trains could be seen.

The trains didn't have wheels on the sides: they ran by huge, whirling, white-bladed, plastic fans on the undersides. It was almost as if I were flying over the car now, and as I passed under each bridge and the trains passed over each bridge, I could feel the warm, soft gusts blasting down from the undersides of the trains.

Now I was in some locker room, eating ice cream at a table with R. R told me my estimates of him were correct, but only in a minor or useless way. He then made a metaphor he thought I would make. The metaphor didn't apply to me at all, but it showed me what a powerless person R thought I was.

(11/7/04) communion; flying over the parkway; rich guys' party friends; lingerie i'd like to wear

(No time/place info for paper journal entry.)

Dream 1

I knelt before a small altar of wood, more like the edge of a barrier between steps and the actual altar behind which a priest stood. Some unknown friend knelt beside me. The priest put a communion wafer into my mouth. Before or after this I told him how I didn't know something.

Dream 2

I walked with some unknown friends from a parking lot into a restaurant. The restaurant was like a flashy Asian restaurant, apparently with something like red sequined wallpaper and wood trim everywhere. I walked all through the restaurant, alone, I think, though crowds of people were all around.

I called the Adecco staffing agency. I asked to speak directly with my agent NE. The person who answered said NE was really busy. I said I'd hold. After about a minute NE came on the line. I just started yelling at her for not getting me a job after four weeks. At some point she shrugged me off and hung up.

I was now outside, "flying" through the parking lot to a parkway median like on Eastern Parkway. I now dipped my hands into soil that was part dry and part wet, but increasingly wet. I explained something to someone at this point. I went down steps like into a subway. The steps were increasingly covered with this wet soil. At the bottom was a huge, long, black cave.

Dream 3

I don't know exactly know how I was involved in this dream. A bunch of rich guys had to get some partying friends out of their house before their parents came home. I saw one rich guy all the way back at a friend's house, showing the friend all the way into the house.

Now we were back at the rich guys' house, which was even more full of partiers. We walked down a wooden hallway, like wooden slats all painted turquoise.

Some old men walked out of an adjoining hallway, followed by two young children. They were all in towels, like they had come from a sauna. we walked past a group of old men, whom I stopped by as they said, "He made all these casts-iron signs himself." I knew they were making reference to one of the old men, who, it was now understood, owned the house, but who was also, apparently, one of the young men.

I turned and looked. The wall was brown wood with niches for brown wood benches There were a bunch of thin, wide, badge-shaped signs of steel, painted yellow and cast-iron black, about twelve by twelve inches each.

Dream 4

Some guy walked me into a bedroom to show me some lingerie he'd bought for his girlfriend. He opened the closet. the lingerie was a black, sheer camisole and black, sheer, lacy boy shorts. I thought I, too, would like to wear those. I saw my body and liked the way it looked. By my face and beard looked stupid.

(11/13/04) verbal trick; the bad comedian; the skull comedian; soccer mountain; pimples won't go away; i couldn't stop peeing

(Entered in paper journal at 6 AM, likely at my friend R's house in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

Stood in front of house, possibly went into house and stole things. Drove or walked away, realized left DVD or CD playing. Drove back to house, by my mom's best friends son TYM home, knew I stole (?), tried to play verbal trick on me while he watched DVD in kitchen.

Dream 2

"Bad" performer at bar becomes worse on purpose. Sings weird songs and makes crazy jokes. I get it after a few seconds and laugh. Everybody else (possibly my improv comedy team from college?) gets angry. I stand up for the guy.

Now something like a magic show. Lights dimmed to red. Man pulls white rope off of huge bottle. Says he's going to take white rope home. Everybody shouts, "No! It's Stan's! It's Stan's!"

Next trick. we all have candles. We're supposed to light them. I llight match at back of table to help people around me. Candle never come. I bring up match. Burns my finger. I pick up other matches. Some are made of iron.

Dream 3

Trapeze show can't remember. Then flaming, large, golden, skull outside on steps. Now like that didn't happen, trapeze show ends, huge golden skull drops from ceiling about ten or twenty feet. Everybody afraid. large candle hovers in front.

Skull begins to speak. Serious at first. Then funny. Everybody laughs. Old comedian. But something wrong happening.

Outside. I walk down steps. Lots of pretty girls walking away, having been gathered around something.

Place like Times Square now. I walk across street, float over grease spot on sidewalk, keep floating over telephone booth.

Think about Pylon. Wonder, What was the third story Faulkner was to put in that novel? Try to remember even an anecdote.

Dream 4

Friend PD chasing orange soccer ball up and down green field in front of lawny mountain. She...

(Paper journal entry.)

Six dreams (fragments) remembered from last night. I'll get down the "last three" first, as I don't have them written in The Ghost Book.

Dream 4

My friend PD kicked an orange (?) soccer ball up and down a short field at the very foot of a mountain the facing slope of which was like somewhat craggy yet sharply demarcated lawns. She got a very good workout from it. I watched from above. She would move into and out of sight.

PD was my boss. She now let "us" go for lunch. I saw a few people. coworkers, in the distance, walking up the slope. I may have seen them right before I "knew" PD called lunch, and I may have wondered why they had gone off before lunch was called.

I now started down the slope I was on to walk up and over the tall mountain, the peak of which was a blue-grey stone capped thinly with snow. I thought, Oh, this workout won't impress PD. She's still running up and down the field. She'll think I'm pathetic.

Dream 5

I looked at my face in the mirror. I had a couple flesh-colored, cystic pimples on my right cheek. I was very tan, and so was my acne. I looked away, thinking something like, It's not XXXXX (can't read the word any longer), so they'll go away and I'll forget about them. I now looked back and saw that I had maybe six or seven pimples. These all wouldn't go away. They would only increase.

Dream 6

I was peeing. I couldn't stop. There were people all around me in other rooms, sleeping. The toilet bowl was huge, so huge it sloped up like a urinal. My urine was clear, and it jetted out of me, though I'm not sure I could see my penis or myself at all. I was really beginning to panic. But suddenly I thought something strange like, Oh, yeah I forgot I drank so much water. This isn't unusual.

***

The first three dreams seem pretty well written  in the Ghost Book. I'll just note some things.

***

Dream 1

The house was tall, with pale- or white-painted siding, in a really calm, suburban neighborhood. The blue of the day now seems all strangely diffused, almost polarized or negativized. The lawn was short, scraggly, dry grass, though it felt nice and clean, although (!) there were chunks of paper and trash sparsely littering it. I think this is what I was stealing.

The inside of the house was nice, like the big house my dad lived in in San Diego when I was in high school, or like the house my friend Y's mom lived in when I'd first met Y in college. But it wasn't quite the same. It felt tight or confined, like the townhouse R, Y, BR, and I lived in in my last year of college.

TYM sat on some stool in the kitchen. The "verbal trick" was some kind of trap game having to do with the DVD or CD playing. I had thought that if I could switch the DVD or CD at some smooth moment, I would be able to mask over the fact that I had been in the house and that I was in the house right now. But if I switched the DVD or CD at my old time there would be some kind of jump in the transition, and it would be obvious to TYM that someone other than he was in the house. It would be obvious that it was I because the DVD or CD that was playing was something that only I would watch. Thus it would be obvious also that the person who changed the CD or DVD had been in here before, to set up the CD or DVD.

TYM knew, though, before I had even come back, that I had been in his house, simply because of the CD or DVD playing. His "verbal trick" was trying to get me to admit it. It was actually more like taunting.

I heard our conversation all through the house as I tried to get out, though TYM stayed in the kitchen. The house got darker and darker.

Dream 2

The bar was dim and clean, classy, shiny, and very lonely feeling. The bar went all the way around three walls. Liquor lined all three walls on shelves extending from beautifully polished mirrors illuminated from below by beautifully wafting, yellowish, incandescent light.

My improv team (?) as an audience sat along the bar along the right wall. Now by some point I had gotten off my seat and sat on the wide, spacious, clean, black floor, even rolling around at some point. At another point I walked to the left bar and looked at the liquor, which was displayed almost like in the finest of china hutches, or rather in the quietest museum cul de sac of cases displaying Egyptian charms and artifacts.

When the lights dimmed I was back with the audience, who were still giving the comedian a hard time, even though I stood up for him. The white rope was around a Grand Marnier-type bottle that was about three feet tall. the rope was around it like a wide-meshed net. When the man took the rope off, it was like the rope was floating in the same shape, though it also seemed like the rope was completely and/or partially limp.

The table in the center of the room may have been covered with an elegant, white tablecloth. The only light now was candlelight from candles somewhere on the table.

The iron matches were like polished, black-grey, steel toothpicks or old tools you might find in a Swiss Army knife. One in particular had a shape like this:

where the top was like a densely bristled brush, though the whole thing wasn't taller than one and a half inches.

All the pieces were hot, as if they had all been lit, but had all burnt out before the candles had reached the people. But I knew if I was going to light people's candles I had to get over the burning sensation of matches when they get close to the skin.

Dream 3

The place where the show was was enormous, tall. It reminds me of the coliseum where they hold the circus (?) in Denver. The light was mainly red and a golden incandescent.

The skull was about six or seven feet tall and a deep gold with real-looking eyeballs in the sockets. The accident had to do with the performer basically boiling up inside the skull due to some kind of heat as opposed to electricity that drove the skull's actions. In the performance, the skull dropped and hung from the ceiling just low enough to hover right in front of the upper levels of crowd. It was also over by the crowd, not in the center or near the stage.

I heard at some point and from somewhere a voice lilke a TV announcer (like Bob Costas) saying that some kind of water or liquid casing or pool had been made for the comedian in the skull, so as to buffer him from most of the heat from the internal flame driving the skull. But I think the candle which descended to hover in front of the skull had not been accounted for. The skull may even have started to melt. I don't really know what happened, if anything happened.

Outside, I walked down steps like the steps for the post office at Penn Station. Something had smashed into, or else something smashed had been placed at, the left corner at the foot of the stairs.

A bunch of beautiful girls in outfits that looked like lingerie with skirts were walking away from this unseen thing. The only girl I can remember now was brownish-blonde with golden-tan skin. She wore a black lace bustier with pink fringes and XXXXX (can no longer read this word) and a black miniskirt.

I walked caddycorner across the street. The only building I remember now is a theater building with rows and rows of smaall, incandescent bulbs and red bulbs as outlining and lettering along the enormous, clunky overhang/awning (?). I hovered just below the underside of this overhang.

The scenario about Pylon, and I "saw/read" this as an actual interview with William Faulkner, was that Faulkner had written three stories which were supposed to intertwine to make Pylon, but that the "third" story had taken up too much space. So he'd clipped that one out, expanded it, and made it into another novel. But I couldn't get that story straight, somehow.

I kept trying to find the third story in my mind. Then I tried to find (i.e. remember) even the second story. I even tried to do this by remembering page numbers and paragraphs. Now it all seemed to be just one story, and I wasn't sure whether the anecdote I was thinking of was about Faulkner at all.

(12/28/04) double-date apocalypse

(Entered in paper journal at 6:45 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I believe I was in an Adecco temporary staffing agency office in New Mexico. I sat between a man and a woman. We had all applied for an Americorps position. A couple woman in their thirties were behind a small, enclosed counter like a pharmacy booth, talking about us. From what they said, I felt that they might have found me a better job.

I walked into some strange side room with a black-plastic-lined pedestal in the middle. My dress shirt, pants, and tie were all now in a "fashionable" disarray. I held a pose. I felt like I was about to wet my pants.

In the other room the woman felt she was being looked over for any good job. So she tried to talk to the "agents" like she was smart. But she messed up what she was saying, laughed at herself, and sat down, feeling even more deserted than before.

Now TY (from the Albuquerque office I'd actually worked through) walked into the room I was in. She sat me down in a chair and said something like, "Well, congratulations. Get all your stuff ready to go back to New York. You're going to work with them." I was let down. "Them," in New York, meant my NYC Americorps program.

They gave me a little more info. She then said, "I still don't have the contact number for your arbiter yet." I asked if the arbiter was the Americorps representative. She said she didn't know. I said it may be one fo the really wealthy folks who help fund my stipend. But I thought that was a "patron."

Now (?) I was on a dark subway train. No lights. I might have been there with my brother. The train may have pulled out of a lit station. It was a shuttle train. It passed into a dark, dark platform with dim,green columns.

I opened the doors (as if they were swinging bedroom doors) just a crack to see the stop. I closed the doors quickly. If you let any light out or let anybody see you at that stop you were bound to be mutilated, murdered, and possibly eaten. I knew the shuttle train was heading to Times Square (although the image "in my head" was of Grand Central) and that it would get there quickly. So we'd be safe.

At some point my brother and I were walking through a log house in the dark. It may have been an empty house that we used to live in.

But now we were back on the train, once again in the dark. I opened the door. Now the dangerous area didn't even look like a platform. It was like the tracks had sunk into a building skeleton twenty feet or so below platform level. It was like an unfinished building inside a mine shaft. I quickly closed the door. This time I had felt the presence of people/demons.

I thought we were safe. But then I realized I had been shining a flashlight the whole time to see out into what otherwise would have been total darkness. I thought about the Times Square stop, hoping we'd get there quickly. But now I felt like I was no longer in the train but flying on my back, my head pointing toward Times Square, with a dim light shining over me.

I then "narrated," "I shouldn't have been surprised that I got my leg mutilated by the demons that day. The day began simply enough, with a double-date. Everybody was way too nervous upon seeing each other."

Now there was a visual, something like in this shape,

so that the heads of "six" people could be seen. All I know now is that the central figures were gloppy, clearish, bluish ghosts, one possibly with a human wrapped around it. Also one set of top and bottom figures were supermen. The other set I don't remember. They were all quivering like electrified jelly because they were so excited to be going out with one another.

(1/6/15) you kept me on the outside on purpose

(Entered in paper journal at 6:35 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I watched some yellow-sepia-toned scene of a sword fight in an eighteenth century house in what was supposedly the movie Anchorman. Will Ferrell fought Owen Wilson, who, possibly unlike Ferrell, was in an old military outfit.

I thought this scene would tickle my friend R, given its incongruity with the rest of the movie and the simple fact that there was a silly sword fight. But something else I forget now, too -- some very humorous nuances to the fight scene.

I showed this movie to my R in a dining room, possibly the same dining room in the movie. He talked and talked through the whole movie and hardly even looked at the movie screen (I also can't remember exactly where the movie screen was.)

But when we got to the sword fight scene I told him, "Look. This is what I thought you'd think was funny."

He looked at the "screen" and laughed, "Ha! Ha! A sword fight! This is great!" Then he went back to talking and talking and ignoring the movie. He didn't even pay attention to the humorous sword movements I was hoping he'd pay attention to.

There was another scene, which seemed to be projected more obscurely somewhere else, like beneath the bottom of a cupboard hanging from a ceiling. Oddly, this kitchen space might have been the scene from the movie. In this scene, Will Ferrell was drunk and all gnarled up and sweating. He wore a bathrobe. Jennifer Connelly stood right beside him, listening to his slow, depressed, depressing ramblings.

When I think of it, I couldn't even hear what R was saying. All I know is that he distracted me and he wouldn't pay attention himself.

We were now in a movie theater that was maybe twice the size of a normal AMC 25 stadium theater. The light was on and warm. The seating was maybe only one-tenth filled. The seats were all a warm, tan brown. R's girlfriend L was with us. Possibly the movie had ended. But it seems like we were also waiting for a movie to start. I had to get up to do something. I left a bunch of stuff on my seat.

Now I had done whatever it was I had gone to do -- I don't remember what it was. But now I was walking through the hallways to the theaters again. I saw a door to a theater showing a movie I had really wanted to see. There was no title on the title display over the door -- instead, there was just some strange, jungle-like border. I thought that border would mislead people into thinking the movie playing was Jurassic Park. (The movie may actually have been some movie about Vietnamese kids.)

I decided to sneak into the movie. I looked around to make sure nobody was watching before I pulled open the thick but light door and walked in. Since there had been no title on the display, I kind of figured the movie had already started. But when I went in everybody was still waiting for the movie.

All the people in the theater were dressed nicely. Some looked like professors. Others looked like students. It seemed like this was going to be a panel-lecture or symposium rather than a movie.

I jumped down some steps from the top of an aisle staircase. I thought that instead of going down the steps one step at a time, it would be easier to jump out far enough that you begin to float and descend only slightly, keeping your trajectory such that the slope of your descent is less than the slope of the staircase. In this way, I thought to myself, I have mastered flight. But I have not yet mastered flight beyond the floating and slight descent.

I floated over the heads of the audience. I thought to myself, If only they knew how easy this is. I'm hardly breaking any physical laws at all.

But I was floating over to a ticket man. He was dressed up nicely. I keep seeing the sign like the Ancient Egyptian crook hieroglyph

in relation to the ticket man.

He asked me if I had a ticket. I said something like "Come on. I was just sampling a few minutes. The movie hasn't even started. I probably wouldn't have been able to see any of it. I have to get to my own movie, where all of my stuff is."

Now we were at the back and top of the theater. Two other folks were there with us. One looked like some nondescript ticket man in a blue uniform with white fringes. The other was a pretty woman in her late thirties or early forties and in a very nice business suit. She told me I wasn't taking this situation seriously enough and that I could find myself in a lot of trouble, maybe even with jail time.

I'd had enough of her talk. I jumped in the air about seven or eight feet. I darted down, grabbed her head with both hands, and, still floating, I pressed my thumbs into her eyes. I didn't press her eyes out. I just wanted to show her that I could if she didn't shut up. I descended, happy, yet also afraid that what I had just done could get me in more trouble.

The woman moaned and screamed something like, "Don't you know who I am? Don't you know what I can do to you?" She was really about to start tearing into me.

I jumped up again. This time I descended on her, even as she continued prattling, and gouged my thumbs into her eyes entirely. But her eyes wouldn't come out, or they wouldn't seem to have come out. I took my thumb away from the sockets a couple times. There were nothing but bloody holes. But at the same time the eyes were still there. I even told myself so.

Now some voice said, "Wait! The possessive demon is here."

The lights all went out. A big, grey box or hollow, plastic cube spun toward and against the back wall. There was a priest somewhere. I could also see or sense that the demon was the little girl from The Exorcist. She may have been there, but now she "suddenly disappeared." The voice said, "It's seeking a body."

Now the ticket woman disappeared and reappeared behind the box, possessed by and half looking like the demon. She growled loudly at me, "You thought you'd overpower me? Now look at all the powers I have! You'll wish you were dead!"

I was standing outside a bar with a dog, possibly R's dog, on a leash that I held. It was a clear, winter day. The door was a little half-hexagon intruding in at the right of the front full-wall window. R was inside, talking to one of his friends. I was watching the dog.

A guy came out behind me: short, stout, rough looking, old, with stubbly, grey and dark grey hair. He stood, actually huddled aggressively, behind me and against my shoulders, possibly hoping to move me as I stared into the window wall. All the time the man spoke with a silent, unseen friend about publishing some new book.

Now I was walking into another bar with R. It was bigger and more like a restaurant. It was also rather empty, as if closed, except for a bartender behind the bar a little way off.

R told me something like, "I'm sorry I was in there for so long. I just got caught up in this conversation, you would have found it really fascinating, with Chuck Bassey." (Chuck Bassey was apparently a really famous person.) "And then his son Bobby Bassey came in."

I knew R knew I liked Chuck and Bobby Bassey, and I got really angry that he hadn't invited me in once he'd started talking with them. I had either  a glass bottle or a metal can in my hand. I began tapping it against R as if I meant to hit him with it.

I told R, "You kept me outside the bar because you didn't want me to impress those people more than you impressed them. You wanted to have something to brag about to make me jealous. That's why you didn't come and get me."

R said, "No. I just know... you don't like those pretentious bar situations."

I said, "Bullshit! It was Chuck Bassey, R! You know how much I like him! You could have just said, 'Come inside for a second, Preemie.' But you didn't. You kept me on the outside, on purpose. I'm not going to pretend like you're innocent of this stuff anymore."

The conversation seemed to stop as we passed in front of the bar and bartender. There was a row of booths, all wood, with a side wall barrier between them and the walkway in front of the bar, which walkway also served as the entrance, exit, and cashier line. A couple people had funneled in now. R was a little bit off in the distance.

I wanted to test my "flying skill." I jumped and hovered in a jump-sidekick position. I hovered in a wobbly way just over the four-and-a-half-foot-tall side wall barrier and landed, still wobbly. A couple people had been standing around, talking. I thought, If I fought them I couldn't use the flying techniques. That's cheating.

I tested my regular jump-sidekick over the barrier but didn't kick until my feet had almost landed back on the ground. I landed by a businessman who pointed to the ground, implying I hadn't done a good job. I went to try it again. A couple people were talking about the challenges of getting height and distance on jump-sidekicks. I tried again and did a slightly better, at least passable, kick.

(1/11/05) world quality films; kate winslet's flying wing

(Entered in paper journal at 7:25 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I sat in a living room with my friend R. It was daytime. The house was a poor, suburban house with a big front window and plenty of natural light. The front door was probably open. R and I sat at a buffet chest, at the back side of it, the front facing a dining room (?). We played a video game or looked at a computer.

R started complaining about his ex-wife Y again. I didn't really agree with what R was saying, but I didn't tell R so. Instead I said, "Well, her films weren't even that great."

R stopped using the computer. He pondered a second. He said, "Well, no. I don't think you're right."

I felt caught off guard. I mumbled, "Oh, well, I guess -- There are a lot of her films that I don't like. But a couple of them, are of national quality if not --" (I couldn't bring myself to say "world quality.")

Dream 2

A beautiful woman who looked like Kate Winslet climbed to the top of a wing of an enormous bird (if there was a bird and not just a wing) as it flew upward into an orange, pink, and golden sky.

(1/24/05) staircase chases and christmas lights

(Entered in paper journal at 7:20 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I was in a long basement hallway that was full of doors that were widely spaced. I came to a woman who was peering in, either through a door or a wide window like the one outside the room for just-delivered babies. The woman was tall, thin, and Hispanic, with long, curly hair.

The woman asked if she looked good enough to please XXXXX, who wasn't her boyfriend. I got mad that she'd cheat on her boyfriend. I told her I didn't approve. I walked away. She yelled after me, "Okay! Just tell me if I look good in general!"

I headed up some stairs. I kept waiting for XXXXX to come beat me up now that I had insulted the woman. I got up to some flight on the staircase. I white man, kind of thin, balding, walked to the stairs, passed me by, leered worthlessly at me, and passed on. I caught up with him just as he started going down.

Somehow I was now on a different staircase. I had to get to the bottom and the front door before the white man, who was still using the first staircase, to show him I wasn't worthless. The staircase was weird, with wood walls lined with turquoise paint.

I eventually jumped whole twisting flights of stairs, speeding down the staircase. But I was afraid that if the white man found out I was doing this he'd learn to do it, too, and beat me.

I was now at the very bottom, which I thought was one floor too low. But somehow I did get outside. But the person I was now waiting for was my crew mate KB. She had done something almost heroic, maybe also a bit defiant, in a sexy way. I was jealous of her.

I flew up the wall of the building a couple floors, just to below a window, and hid right against the concrete surface. Now it seemed that I was partly KB, or that I had taken her rebel qualities. I crooned out all about not caring about anybody and just wanting booze and pot all the time.

There was a fire truck below me. Someone walked around the corner of the building. Thinking this was someone I didn't want to see, I flew away. I went to a front yard with a strange couple of shapes made of Christmas lights. One shape was all colored lights. The other was all white lights.

Two ladies stood talking in the yard by the light shapes. They were saying things to discourage me, possibly because I could fly and/or I wasn't a lady. I kept flying around and into the lights, doing flips and loops, thinking some secret would be revealed in the lights.

I was trying to show the ladies that I wasn't bad. But I was also trying to hide from the ladies so they couldn't take my power of flight away.

One of the ladies may have been my mom. At some point I thought all of this was very reminiscent of Fellini.

(3/5/05) escape from the doctor's office

(Entered in paper journal at 7:15 PM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I was in a doctor's office. I wanted to see my doctor, but nobody would let me. I got mad. I filled out (or had filled out) a bunch of forms which I now handed to a line of receptionists, most of whom were young, tall, and handsome, but scraggly, men. I now found out that all these men were doctors who kept coming at me to prevent me from seeing my doctor, who didn't want to see me because I made him feel less intelligent. But I was coming to see him so he could help me help my brother.

I kept being forced right as I lost more and more forms to other doctors. One of the doctors found a stray scrap of paper on which I had written something nasty.

It was now determined that I was to see a certain doctor, young, tall, with a huge, frizzy head of hair. I handed him my papers and yelled at him that I wouldn't see anybody but my own doctor. He said okay, but I knew he had power to make me see him instead.

I ran out of the office. At first I just wanted to get as far away from it all as possible. But then it was like it suddenly didn't matter anymore.

It was dark, dry, and cool outside, like a late spring night in Flagstaff, perhaps. The building I came out of had a large lawn surrounding it that touched a road that seems now like a somewhat rural road. There were some buildings and a good amount of people, but it seemed like just a row, a longish stretch off road pulling together all the aspects of a high-class, small-town neighborhood without actually pulling itself out of a surrounding of lonely fields and forests of massive, leafy trees.

I felt incredibly happy as soon as I'd left the building a few steps behind. I took four or five steps before jumping and hovering four or five steps. I realized I was about to fly. I told myself to relax the next time I jumped, just to allow my body to float of its own accord. I flew up about thirty feet in the air.

People didn't seem to notice me. Everybody was happy, free, and easy, but unconcerned with anything except getting where they needed to go.

I knew I, too, was going somewhere. I followed this road as it all turned to tall, leafy trees. I knew this was a town I was familiar with. But I couldn't discern what town.

I hoped I wasn't dreaming. I thought, It would be such a letdown if all this flying hadn't really amounted to anything, not even an out-of-body experience.

I said, "No, you couldn't possibly be dreaming. You're going somewhere, aren't you?"

Now the forest road quickly ended in a "T" intersection, the road perpendicular to me, i.e. the top part of the "T,"

being something like a small town's main street strip lit up for the night.

I descended involuntarily only to discover that I was actually in a restaurant not unlike Casa Bonita in Denver, with mazes and corridors of seating areas ramping and plateauing and staircasing into each other.

I said, "Well, shit. I'm pretty sure this is a dream after all. I couldn't be in a restaurant like this today. That's not where I'm going, anyway."

Now a group of "my friends," they looked like the cast from The Life Aquatic, passed me and sat down at a table. There were about seven of them. They told me to sit down. But I had to get where I was going. They pointed me up a ramp (I had long ago forgotten that I was in a dream).

I was leaving, but I kept hearing some conversation from the table that made me want to go back. I kept seeing the image of work gloves with split-in-diameter cylinders of bamboo inside to cradle the fingers. When I got back, the Angelica Huston "friend" was talking about how she had been assigned to serve fifteen years in prison but how a friend had gotten her out in only fourteen.

(3/7/05) the 110-vcr deal

(Entered in paper journal at 5:55 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I was in a large house that looks (now) more like a warehouse full of stacks of towels stacked maybe five to twenty feet high. Each stack was a single color, but there were all different colors. I was walking over all these stacks toward a side room that was about half the size and height of this room and dim. The shower was here.

My friend R's girlfriend L ran either to or from the shower and told me she'd be just a moment. She was wearing only a tiny, sea-green outfit, like a tiny bra and panties strung together along her sides. I looked down for a moment, embarrassed. Then I looked back up, thinking, No. If we're living on equal terms, I can't get embarrassed by her normal instincts. But then she was gone.

I stood by some counter that looked like a ticket booth, at the "warehouse" edge of the dim room. I grabbed a towel from a small stack.

Now I was watching some TV commercial as if it were on a movie screen far off. A man stood in the center of the screen, a shoulder shot with a panorama of mountains on either side. He said how if i signed up for this new cell phone deal (which I knew I could not afford) I could get a "VCR." He produced from his pocket something about the size of a 110-film camera with a futuristic, blue-metal casing and a circle of smooth nouveau-style buttons.

I now held one -- possibly I had gotten the deal. I looked into square no bigger than a small camera's viewfinder and saw, far off in the distance, a square on which a movie played. I thought, This'll kill a person's eyes. The movie slowly got closer, until it encompassed me altogether.

I was in a seat the legs of which were beamed together by a wooden board with a rusted metal strip in the middle. I was up in the air, being towed along over a dirt road in a rural farm area by a pickup truck to which I was tied by a rough, thin rope.

(9/28/05) world record children

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

Dream 1

A couple kids were flying in some small ship like a detached car from an amusement park ride. They must have crashed down, but they also possibly managed to achieve some world record. I had a hard time believing this, mainly because I felt threatened by the fact that the ship wasn't big, the people were kids, and the pilot was girl.

Now we were in a "bus station" and waiting. I don't know if I was really there. The children were waiting for their mother, or else their mother was there at first and then gone.

Some old man knew the children had done something wrong and he wanted to expose them. But he was afraid of the children's power, which was now something like psychic power. To the man and to me the children seemed like bloodthirsty savages.

Now the kids were all by themselves among strangers. They were poor, homeless, in tattered clothes. The girl wore a shawl.

Somebody, either to alarm the children out of malice or honestly, to alert everybody in the bus station, made a huge announcement that he had spotted people with a quick and deadly form of hepatitis, and that he had also spotted rats who had died of it.

I was now one of the children. We had to find our mother. but we were afraid that even if we found her she'd be too poor to help us.

Everybody was planning to get out of the bus station (though nobody was moving), and therefore they were safe from the people and rats with hepatitis. But we children couldn't make plans to leave until we'd found our mother.

We found the old man again. But for some reason we couldn't make contact with him. I stared at the door out of the bus station. It looked like it opened into a shopping mall, right in front of some escalators. I didn't know why we couldn't leave.

(11/12/05) epidemic rats; rip taylor renovation; fruity beer; judgmental interview

(Entered in paper journal at 7:40 AM at my friend R's house in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

It was a rainy day. I was in a courtyard of building with people like my family, who may have been dressed like nineteenth century European peasants. The courtyard was square, entirely enclosed by the tall, wide-sided building. The building itself was thin, like the outline of a square. The courtyard was in bad shape, the cobbles knotting up everywhere.

There was some kind of epidemic, and now it seemed my "family" had caught it. But my "family" may also not have been my family, but a group of people who were trying to accuse me of having the disease with a trick involving them claiming they had the disease. But I knew the disease was loose in this building.

There were rats hiding. I could tell. I had to escape to a place in the building the rats had not yet reached. I "flew" along the walls, like I was walking an air-staircase which spiraled up.

The brick (?) walls were sloppily painted in strips of black and swatches of white. I made a couple huge steps near the top and at the ceiling came to an office that looked like an exaggerated rooftop stairway shelter of modern, silvery alloy and glass. It was some environmentalist office.

I went inside, hoping to find someone I knew, just to communicate on the same level with, to escape the feeling of my "family" below. But the place was a mess, huge, with tons of space, but with old stacks of paper everywhere. I thought the rats must either be here or not far from here, since they loved dirty places like this.

Now RL, one of my senior coworkers from my NYC Americorps program, walked out from a hallway lined with posters like the Central Forestry division's posters of different garden flowers. We spoke, but I was always focused on some calendar showing pictures of the mountains.

Dream 2

I was at a performance with a female friend, who sat to my right. The theater was dark and large. A man somewhere was talking about how the place was finally being reopened. He was now at the left end of the theater, by an exit and a tall iron tech stairway. He stood on some white pedestal that moved upward slowly. He looked like a bald version of Rip Taylor. He said he'd always hated how the elevator in the old place never worked, but he thought now he'd be just fine.

The podium was so high now that the man's head hit the ceiling in the center of a white bull's eye. The podium bounced down a bit. The man said something like, "Whoops! I guess I haven't gotten it quite figured out yet." Everybody laughed.

Finally I realized the whole "reopened theater" thing was part of the act, not real.

Dream 3

I sat in a room of a big house and heard my friend R and his girlfriend L talking as they made breakfast. R was going on and on about how he didn't think anybody should admire workers from the old days. He didn't think their work situations could have been all that touch. And even if they were tough, he said, he could have handled them better than they had. So people should really admire him for his job.

I walked into the kitchen. I told R, "I'm so tired of hearing how incredible everything you do is. Just because you work at ConEd doesn't mean the people in the old days didn't struggle. And it doesn't mean they weren't really good workers. They do deserve admiration because they went through a lot and they did it for everybody."

I had a plate in my hand, full of some starchy, cheesy substance which I was soaking up with vegetables. I reached into the fridge, grabbed a Coors Light, popped it open, and began drinking it. It tasted like a fruity soda.

R said, "I was unaware I said the workers didn't deserve admiration. Why are you blaming me for saying it?"

I said, "Don't play the getting indignant trick so I ask your forgiveness for the asshole thing you said."

I was going to continue about the workers, but R said, "Ah -- ah -- stop it. I get it. I get it. You know that trick too well now."

I walked to the table. I sat the beer down on some videocassette. I wondered why I was drinking a beer for breakfast and why it tasted fruity. I wobbled my beer and made some gestures at R like, Isn't it weird I'm drinking a beer for breakfast? But I didn't say anything, partly because my mouth was full of food and partly because I didn't want to say anything and be condescendingly interrupted by R again.

Dream 4

I stood before a goldenrod, velvety curtain, possibly in a dim living room. I heard my friend and old NYC Americorps coworker KB like I was talking on the phone with her. She said, "I told the people you'd be interviewing with that you were a brilliant person but that you get very nervous around judgmental people because you feel you deserve bad judgment. But when I told my mom, who hates you, that I told the interviewers that, she yelled at me and told me to stop giving you help all the time."

As KB spoke, someone was pulling up red bands around my legs. It was a harness, like the harness you use when you go rock climbing.

(12/4/05) road rage; flying is faster

(Entered in paper journal at 9:45 AM at some Starbucks.)

Dream 1

There were two cars at a suburban intersection. The front one was to the left of the back one. The front car was very vague, but junky. The back car was very nice, like a mint condition Dodge Duster painted black with a thick, white stripe going down the center of the top of the car. There was a man in the front car and a woman in the back car.

A woman stood by the passenger side, front door of the front car. She was looking at the back car. A license plate was lying on the woman thought the license plate belonged to the back car. A lot of wire looped around and frayed from holes on the left and right of the license plate. The woman thought it was a good sign that the plate had fallen off the back car.

On each side of the car were posts bars in right angles with slopes of bunched wire rounding the inside corners.

Somehow the front woman communicated with the back woman. The back woman had no idea where the license plate came from. She was also annoyed that she couldn't get through this intersection.

The front woman (who was now also me somehow) opened the door to the front car so she could get in. She knew before the back woman even began revving her engine angrily that the back woman would be annoyed that the woman didn't just step aside and let her through instead of opening the door and blocking the way even longer for the back woman. But part of the reason the woman did it was to prove that the back woman couldn't tell her what to do all the time. But now the back woman was revving the engine so fiercely that I/the woman got afraid and closed the door and stood beside the front car.

I was also partly the man in the front car, and I felt ashamed for not defending my female friend, who might also have been my daughter. The back car throttled forward now and screamed around the corner clockwise, stopping after turning the next corner.

We could see it. It just stopped there at the edge of a vacant lot and sat there. But I think both of us/them/I were afraid even to move because we didn't want the thing to start revving and screaming any more.

Dream 2

It was a sunny  day. I walked with a male and female who were older business people, who were my bosses. I was short like a child. We walked in a suburban area full of vacant lots, but it felt like the city was here or just a couple steps away all the time.

My bosses were mad at me because I took them on a walk that was longer than I'd thought it would be. My bosses were now late to and hurried for a meeting.

I tried to make them happier by walking faster, but they were still mad. So I grabbed their hands, and we all walked up into the air. Once we got about fifty feet up in the air, we moved a lot faster and cut corners and blocks. But neither of my bosses quite new they were flying. I decided it was better to let them think what they wanted to think.

Now it was just the woman and I. We flew over some nineteenth century London-style buildings and into a dumpy yard made by the hind ends of some dirty buildings. We were going to meet the man there.

I told the woman, "Now you'll see how much faster my flying was, and you'll be less disappointed in me."

But as soon as we landed, the woman, who was now my boss PG, forgot that we had been flying. The man (now George Bluth from the TV show Arrested Development) walked out in an undershirt. He, too, forgot that we had flown. I tried to prove it.

I said, "Look at the time. Now, when did we leave XXXXX? It's not too long after that, is it? And we even had a meal at XXXXX." (Some restaurant.) "Doesn't that mean something to you? How fast we got here?"

I couldn't say anything more. I didn't want directly to tell the man and woman that they had flown. I did want to show them I did get them here soon enough to show up for their meeting. But they were both, the male more so -- the woman was kind of dissolving -- sullen, and now they didn't want to go to the meeting. Neither of them even believed we had gone to a meal.

I said, "I'll show you." We held a meeting. There were rows of tables before a television.

The people were now kids. But the "meeting" was now on a television.

The male stood up and said, "Where was I at XXXXX time?"

A little girl stood up and said, "You were having breakfast at XXXXX."

The male was very disappointed. He cried, even, and said, "I've been wrong. I'm sorry. I should have believed you had things under control."

(12/23/05) floating to the blank canvas

(Entered in paper journal at 9:45 PM at Hotel 6 at 6th Avenue and Wadsworth Boulevard in Lakewood, Colorado.)

Dream 1

Someone called me or said something concerning me from outside a shop I stood in. I ran out looking for the person, maybe a young man. I got down a few storefronts along a trendy shop-road, then turned to go back to where I came from.

I floated up a little into the air, then made some karate-style stance preparation move with my arms, like making chopping a chopping gesture with my hand and holding one arm so the hand was close to my hip and the other outstretched, with that hand facing palm-up. I may have done this because I'd seen an Asian man and had wanted to impress him with my levitation skills.

I moved myself through the air. I was inside a tall, dim, fancy room. I levitated up to a wall overhanging the room.

On the wall was a wide, tall canvas that was blank. I floated to the bottom edge of the canvas and fidgeted a little with it. I was either trying to come up with something to paint on it or I was trying to make the painting that was supposed to have been on the canvas appear there.

(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.