(6/23/07) the giant fly; what i never saw; two girls in one; lucid in reality

(Entered on Q-train, but don't know when.)

Dream #1

I lay in bed. I opened my eyes and looked at the wall (to my left). An insect, a small roach, I thought, climbed quickly down the wall. I was disappointed to have a roach in my house. I thought I would get up and kill it. But now I saw two on the wall. I thought I might be seeing things.

I closed my eyes and opened them again. There were lots of insects (flies?) climbing all over my wall. I leaped out of bed, possibly in a straight-bodied roll parallel to the floor and landing in a crouch facing the wall. The wall was full of insects. I wondered what I could do to get rid of the insects. I thought I might have to call an exterminator and leave my house for a little while.

Down on the lower, right section of the wall, or perhaps on the "left foot" corner of my bed, was a fly about the size of my fist. It seemed to call for me, and to control all the other insects so that they, too, would call me. I was afraid, but I got closer. The giant fly made a semi-melodic, buzzing sound, almost like wings beating against a champagne flute. The fly's body was spiny and shine, an orange-green, reflective color. It had orangish wings.

Dream #2

I walked into a nice, big dining room. There might not have been any table. The room was narrow and long. The walls were wood. Some dim, warm daylight came through a yellowish curtain at the other short end of the room. The door I walked in through was at the lower part of the right long wall. A little farther up that wall stood my co-worker and good friend CL. Between us was a chest of drawers.

I walked in and immediately turned to face the chest. CL asked me if I had brought XXXXX (can't remember). I had some green, fleshy-looking sack in my hands. I cut it open and pulled out a "flying saucer." This was something like a silver table ornament or serving tray. It looked like a cake tray with no glass top and with ridges or slots all through it. I put it on the chest.

I thought CL might be trying to hide this object from others, as part of an overall conspiracy. I thought CL might be trying to convince me as well that I hadn't seen the flying saucer. CL very harshly asked me a question insinuating that I had already told my co-worker JB about the flying saucer. I became tense and slightly afraid.

Dream #3

I sat in the front row at some show. The seating was all rows of folding chairs. The floor was white tile. The lights were brightish orange and fluorescent. The place was full of people. The "stage" was level with the floor. On the back wall (a back wall) was a screen against which was projected a karaoke video.

A song started up. The girl to my left, who looked like my co-worker and fellow-Assistant FA, said, "Oh, you should sing this one! You love these guys!" It took me a second before I recognized the song as a Smashing Pumpkins song.

But I couldn't "catch" the words fast enough to begin singing with the music. Plus, the words on the screen weren't the same as the words to the song. And the video would occasionally fade in and out unexpectedly. I  told the girl that I did love this song, but that I didn't know it well enough to keep up.

I began cuddling with the girl. She had nice, dark skin. She wasn't thin, but she had the prettiness of a thin girl.

I was disappointed in myself for being so boring that I couldn't sing a song.

I now sat laying across the girl's chest. The girl now looked like one of my good friends, PD. She was still not thin. She wore a pastel turquoise-green, soft-fabric shirt. Below the collar, squared holes were cut out to look like an Egyptian necklace. The fabric between the holes was also strung in a way to look and feel like beads.

I ran my left finger along this "necklace" collar-piece. I also touched some jewelry on the girl's right upper arm. I felt like a child. I hoped this wouldn't turn the girl off and that we could still have sex. The girl said, "I will miss you very much when I am gone."

Dream #4

I woke up from a dream. I stood out of my bed by the foot of the bed and walked to the wall facing the foot of the bed. There was a wooden ladder folded against the wall. I was going to take it away from the wall, but I hung on one of the steps and looked at my wall. There was a yellowish, chipped substance dirtying the wall.

I didn't remember such messiness. At first I thought, Well, maybe I don't look at this wall well enough to have seen this dirty patch. Then I thought, No. This wall is different in another way: it's missing its little framing decorations: it's just completely smooth.

The discrepancy between this wall and my normal perception of my bedroom wall made me wonder where I was. I told myself, I just woke from a dream. I have to be awake. But I was now getting the strange feeling that life was a dream, and that I could wake into lucidity from waking life just as I would wake into lucidity in dreams.

I did something like what a person would do holding his breath and bracing for a plunge into a swimming pool. I thought, This is exactly what people think can't be done. And I'm trying to do it.

I felt the electric buzz (which, as I'd read in the literature, was a precursor, not for lucid dreams, but for out-of-body experiences). But when lucidity came, I realized that this had all been a dream after all. I wasn't "lucid" in (or ex-) reality. I was only lucid in my dream.

I wanted to explore the lucid dream, but I didn't believe I could imagine anything other than what I was presently seeing: the ladder and the wall. So I told myself, You are going to turn around clockwise. As you complete the turn you will wake back into waking life and you will be back in bed.

But even as I "held my breath, braced," and turned, I thought, Why am I doing this? If I'm lucid I should go exploring. But it was like I couldn't control myself, like I was being controlled by another will and now was in a gravitational spin that I couldn't pull out of.

(11/27/07) nativity in india; looking for photos

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

Dream #1

I was somewhere like the apartment of my old friend R. R had walked away and left a stack of photos nearby so I would see them and look at them. They had been given to him by a group of my friends from college. I had also gotten a stack of photos like this. They were from when my old friends ML and PD visited two other friends BC & SA in India.But when I looked at the photos I recognized that R had gotten a lot more photos from my friends than I had. This is why R had left his photos out -- so I'd see them and be jealous.

The last photo I looked at was of SA and possibly the others working on fixing a building. The building looked like a ruin you might see in a Renaissance painting of the nativity: stone walls crumbled, with wood beam frames in the corners. The ground was all upturned, reddish earth, full of building debris. There were taller buildings in decent shape on either side. In the distance were city buildings like oldish apartment buildings in Greenwich Village.

I thought how similar cities all over the world look. This place, India, was supposed to be so exotic. But it looked a lot like New York City in some ways.

I was in a bedroom with PD. She had gotten undressed and into a pale blue bathrobe. She spoke a little with me before she headed into the bathroom. PD's hair was all frizzy. The bathroom light was off. PD stood in the crack of the half-opened door. Then she walked all the way in and closed the door. I walked to the bed and sat down. I may have started looking at photos.

Dream #2

I was in a drugstore. I may have been a worker there. The light was dim; maybe the only light coming in was from the windows. I had arranged a bucket of photos. There were a worker behind a front counter and two workers in a narrow aisle beside me. The man at the counter was tall, thin, white, oldish. The two workers in the aisle were teenagers or thereabouts, black, short, one boy, one girl.

The man at the counter was pleased that I had arranged the photos. But I was actually looking for photos of my own. I thought the boy and girl might know where I should look, as they seemed to work directly with the photos. But when I tried to speak with them, they defiantly ignored me.

I found a shelf of envelopes of photos. I started shuffling through them. They became big, black cartridges which I was loading onto something that looked like a film projector. A white man stood over me, to my left, as I knelt and loaded the cartridges into the machine. I thought, I shouldn't have to do all this work with other people's photos. I'm just looking for my own photos.

The man standing over my shoulder now spoke about some publicly traded beverage companies, Cott Corporation in particular, and why he thought he was going long on them now rather than shorting them.

I saw a black and white image on a thick sheet of glass. It was like a 1940s family standing in front of a house. The image was very small, maybe one and a half inches square. The sheet of glass was big. Soon I realized it was part of a machine. The body of the machine was made of a thick, greenish metal. The machine was about waist-height and eight feet long. It did something like print film images.

An old woman (like a woman from the old Ozzie's cafe in Park Slope in Brooklyn) stood bent over the glass sheet. I could see a log of coppery gears beneath the glass sheet. A light shone thinly, creating the black and white image on the glass.

The woman said, "I've been using this machine for so long. Now hopefully the thing won't break." But right after she said this, the light went out. It suddenly looked like a cigarette butt.

(2/4/09) i look awful; athletic heroes

(Entered in paper journal at 9 AM at Starbucks at Thirty-seventh Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was sitting in a car in a parking lot that may have been partly asphalt and partly dirt. The parking lot was wide and empty. It was a sunny day. I was on the phone with my old boss and mentor EB, who may have been talking to me about how I needed to shape up in some way or another. I stood out of the car and was walking around, toward the front of the parking lot.

Coming into the parking lot were a few people I knew (and possibly some others I didn't know). At the front of this group was my old friend PD, who looked very good. She was tanned, thin, with good muscle tone and rich, blonde hair. I hoped PD wouldn't recognize me, and that if she did, that she'd think I was awful and want to avoid me. I didn't want PD to mention me to my old friend R.

I thought to myself, Well, thankfully, I do look awful. I looked down at myself. I was wearing an awful, old, orange t-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts (what I, at this time in my life, was wearing for pajamas). I could tell I had lost a lot of weight, and that my hair and beard looked terrible. Continuing my phone conversation, I started scratching my ribs. Looking at my pose in the shadow on the dirt, I was satisfied that I really looked horrible -- I looked just like a drug addict or a diseased person.

I scuttled off toward my left, toward the chain-link fence boundary there, working my way back up toward my car. I was still talking with EB. I got back to my car. I few people I knew, including PD, were gathered around a picnic area near the car, as if we were in a national forest or in front of someone's house. My car, which had previously been exposed to sunlight in the parking lot, was now shaded over by a few trees. People were carrying things into the picnic area.

I had stepped into my car again. I was now ashamed for the appearance of my car (which was a very old Eagle that, in waking life, I'd owned while living in Arizona and New Mexico about seven years previous to this dream). The car looked okay. It was pretty empty. The back seats were pulled down so there was plenty of laying-down space. There was "car-trash" near the edges -- little scraps of paper, old scum, small change.

But I thought of the car as being extremely messy (in waking life, that car did end up being extremely cluttered, even filthy, as, toward the end of my stay in New Mexico, I began living in my car to save up money to get back to New York, and I had no other place to store all of my books, notebooks -- and the piles of cheap lingerie I would compulsively buy). I didn't want PD to see the car and know I lived in such an awful place.

I was somehow able to stand up completely straight inside the car. I now walked back out of the car, still speaking on the phone with EB. I agreed very loudly with something EB had said, so that PD would see I was talking with someone very important, like EB. PD didn't seem to pay me very much attention.

I was now in the back of the car. EB was telling me something about how I should really take better care of my clothing. I agreed with EB. I really wished I could take better care of my clothing.

From one of the hooks or seat-belt fixtures in the ceiling of the car, down diagonally to the window (?) on the left side of the car, were strung a neatly arranged bundle of scarves. The scarves were of different colors, all solid. One scarf was a creamy white. Another was an elegant maroon. The scarves all looked like women's scarves.

I thought I would look better if I wore these scarves, but I didn't think that was practical or reasonable, possibly because I couldn't wear so many scarves, or possibly because the scarves were women's scarves.

Dream #2

I was in a crowded bar with my old boss BS. The bar was a big square in the center of the room. The place might have been a sports bar. The floors, bar, and walls were wood. There might have been a second level around three walls of the fir first floor (?). There were neon signs on the walls and a large television screen covering most of the back wall.

BS and I were walking around the bar counter-clockwise, easily, as if the crowd were there but had none of the "push" of usual bar crowds. I was telling BS about a high school cross country runner who'd been one of my idols when I was in high school. I told BS that the runner hadn't been as famous as Adam Goucher (who actually had been a cross country star and and idol of mine when I was in high school), but how on a number of occasions he'd actually given Adam Goucher a good run for his money.

I could see two runners in a track race. Adam Goucher may have been wearing a red outfit, while the other person wore a blue one. The other person may have had an olive complexion, wavy, brown hair, a little stubble, and a lot of chest hair, and may have been a little more strongly built than Adam Goucher.

I then spoke with BS about Adam Goucher, and how he was really good in college, but how I really didn't know how he ended up professionally. Now the television screen was showing a high school (?) track race in which Adam Goucher was running. At least Adam Goucher, but possibly also a few other runners, had their running shirts' bottoms pulled up over their chests, exposing females breasts.

(9/16/09) old friends and sex; college girls' lingerie

(Entered in dream journal at 7:54 AM at Sit & Wonder cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I walked down a sidewalk of brownstone buildings in the daytime. I was going to meet my old friend R and his wife L. I saw them sitting on a staircase in front of a brownstone. I may have been looking at my BlackBerry as I walked up to R and L. I put my BlackBerry down and then looked up at R and L.

We were now in a large restaurant, somewhat fancy, with tall walls. The walls and fixtures were all made of wood and brass. Natural daylight probably came in through windows. We walked up to a table that had booth seats on one side and chairs on the other, with the booth seats' back serving as booth seats' backs on the other side as well.

I may have been standing there by myself, looking at my BlackBerry. I walked over to a much larger booth table, where a lot of people were sitting. These people were all my friends. R and L may have been among them. Behind the people were two tall windows, letting in a dim view of a tallish, brick row building and a deep, clear, blue sky.

I watched a group of women walk out of the row building. The women were all young adults, with short, pale blonde hair and bronzed skin. They wore tight, sleeveless or tank-top shirts and carried boxes or plastic crates with them, as if they were moving out.

Among the women was my old friend PD, who looked odd with short, pale blonde hair. PD seemed to be looking in through the window and into the restaurant. I waved to PD, trying to get her attention. But she didn't seem to notice. She continued with the girls down to a vehicle, maybe a van.

I told everybody at the table (I was still standing), "That was PD! I tried to get her attention!" I wondered whether PD and the other girls were all lesbians. For some reason their hairstyles seemed lesbian to me. PD was now among the people at the table. The people at the table were all conversing casually.

I walked away, reading my BlackBerry. I was now in a room, which was still in the restaurant. The room was about twelve feet by twelve feet, with gentle, yellowish, natural light coming into the room. But the room felt run-down, like the paint on the walls was chipping and the wood floors were unpolished. Three chairs of tall, old wood stood side by side.

Behind the chairs stood a young, Japanese man. The man held a cloth bag and a black, cardboard box like a shoebox. The box had dimmish, silver-grey writing on it. The bag had a Takashi Murakami flower and logo on it. I realized, from the bag, that I knew the man.

As the man and I conversed laughingly about how we knew each other (by speaking about how we knew Murakami), either R or R and L walked into the room. I thought, If R knows I'm friends with this man, he'll try to destroy the friendship. I walked out of the room.

I was back in the main area of the restaurant. I sat down at a booth seat in a half-booth table, behind which was dimness and a bar up at the top of a roughly seven-foot-tall tier.

A woman sat next to me. She was pretty, maybe ten years older than I, with long, blonde hair and a red dress. We spoke for a while and then were home at the woman's apartment. We were in bed. I was on top of her, moving against her. The woman looked like Cindy Crawford: thin, with dark-tanned skin and brown-blonde hair. She wore black panties and a black bra. As I rubbed against the woman, she opened her mouth in a wide "O" of pleasure.

I was now walking out of a large apartment complex with my old co-worker BK. It was probably early morning, the clear sky a dim silver-blue. BK and I walked under some scaffolding near some tall buildings.

BK told me, "When I was first looking for jobs, I used DO" (an old boss of mine) "as a reference. But I then realized that was a mistake. DO always gives the most restrained, least positive opinion about anybody he has to give a reference for."

BK may then have asked whether I used DO as a reference. I felt bad for telling BK yes. So I went into some long speech about how at first DO had promised me he would give me a good reference.

We were now walking through a wide, vacant lot of asphalt which was worn and cracked, with patches of grass growing through in places. We crossed a street, probably to a large, clean parking lot at the end of which was a clean, tan and pink shopping mall lit in watery, white light. We then crossed the street, back to the asphalt lot. Across the lot was a tall, wide apartment complex atop a tall, torn-looking hill. BK And I walked down the vacant lot, to another set of buildings and scaffolding.

BK started jumping around with excitement, all fluttery, like a girl. He started talking about how excited he was about some party he was throwing. He asked me if I was coming. I may have wondered whether BK was gay. I then began whether I had had sex with the blonde woman or with BK.

Dream #2

It was black night. I walked (counter-clockwise?) around a square of dwellings like very small rooms separated from one another by thin walls. The rooms had ceilings like thatch or wicker. This square of dwellings was in the center of a lawny field.

The rooms were all dimly lit, some with fires, some, probably, with electric light. The rooms were all filled with colorful objects, mainly swatches of fabric for clothing. The rooms were all for college aged people. I didn't see a lot of people (maybe none, at first), although there was an atmosphere of people being around, a feeling of liveliness.

I started looking into each of the room-units. I occasionally saw women's clothes lying on the beds. I took looks through all the clothing, seeing what I might like to come back to and try on. I now came to a room, brighter than the others, lit by electric light, with a few people all lounging around, mostly on the bed. The people may have been members of my college comedy performance group, although I think they may all have been women.

The people told me they knew I'd been looking through all the women's clothing. They told me I'd be welcome to try on anything I liked. I may have spoken with them a little, partly trying to justify my habit, about how I chose the clothing I would try on. I may have seen myself trying on a classical pair of thick, satin panties by the light of a fire.