(11/11/04) trying to get an old friend's attention

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

I really can't remember my dreams from last night. I have only a fragment of one.

Dream 1

I walked outside some large stone building in the forest. The land seemed half-developed, like there was a lawn somewhere that gave way to the old doghair (i.e. dead pine needle covering) on the forest ground.

The stone building was like a college hall or college dorm building. In front of it sat a row of young adults. These folks had grown to some height, just a bit taller than I, as if I was still growing through that phase.

I saw my old high school friend DB. He looked like a woman. I wanted to say hello to him, but I thought he might be mad at me for disappeared from his life without having told him anything. So I thought I'd do something to get his attention so he'd come up to me if he wanted to.

There was some weird metal or aluminum track set up on a stand like a wheel-less version of a chute that might load cafeteria trays from the dining room to the kitchen in a dorm building. It was shining and it curved a bit. There was some other structure by it, like a buffet's glass display windows, but I can't quite remember. There were also people walking around, doing some serious business by the track.

I decided I'd clown around by sliding on my stomach up and down the track while all these people were trying to take care of their business. I was now doing this. I "saw" DB laughing. At this moment he looked like a guy again.

Now he and the other young adults walked down some vague path to the front gate, a stone gate, of this land. I followed after them. DB was now like a woman again. I felt about as tall as a three- or four-year-old.

Now my friend R was beside me, I don't know on what side. We seemed to be changing direction as if reality kept reversing itself. R may have always, regardless of this strange reality, stayed on my left side, although I think there was some time during which he was on my right side.

I didn't want to tell R that I was trying to get to DB. I knew R would stop me and try to steal DB from my life.I just kept trying to wander slowly away. I also hoped that DB would turn around and come to me, although I could tell that he/she was looking back toward me and hoping that I would come up to him/her.

(9/6/05) late for class at the club

(Entered in paper journal at 6:25 AM at my friend R's house in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in a place like a gym that had been converted into a "dance club." the long sides were sectioned with white curtains and the center had white, tall, long tables going down it.

I had come with some friends, maybe from my NYC Americorps program. They walked away, possibly to go get into a fight. I stood in one of the divisions made by the white sheets.

I heard trouble. I wanted to check it out, but I had some misgivings about my friends seeing me and knowing I had come to a dance like this (even though they had just brought me).

Now some Asian girl walked into my section. My friends walked past, but they stopped at some table and yelled at two black men had just been kissing. My friends yelled at them, "Why are you gay?" or "Why didn't you tell us you were gay?" Then they walked off.

There were a lot of people at the dance now. The light was a fleshy red-orange, dim.

I wanted to have sex with the Asian woman, though she looked slightly pudgy and incredibly nerdy. But now she was a Russian boy, maybe twenty-five years old.

We stood in some moonlit cul-de-sac by the dance room. The boy said he was going out to party with everybody. I told him I wasn't coming. I had had a drink or tow and I could feel the weird thoughts coming on.

The cul-de-sac now had the red-orange color of the dance room, the walls like sheets billowing and, where a window was, a curtain or blanket of incredibly soft translucence and texture and thickness.

I told the Russian guy, "Go on. I want to contemplate the colors as they change."

Now I was in a long room like a small lunch room with very low ceilings, bright but soft fluorescent light, lunch tables on the left side.

I was at a lunch table at first. I was drunk, or at least I was tired from staying up all night. I had a 12-inch or 18-inch glass pane that had words on it. The pane was a sign I'd created for a class.

The words were maybe paint, but they looked like chalk. Some of them were flaking and disintegrating into powder. The lettering was a spaced, slender, Art Deco-style, trim lettering. The biggest words were "SUSAN SONTAG" at the top. Then two phrases, two lines each, interposed each other in a confusing way below them. Just above "SUSAN SONTAG" were two words, in smaller lettering than anything else on the sign.

Nobody, I felt, had wanted to talk to me all night, though a couple people would walk over to me after I had left the tables to sit on the floor on the right side.

At some point I realized I was late for class. I ran outside. I was on some campus lawn. There were trees everywhere. The leafs were falling, tan. It was a sunny morning. I ran past a parking meter with a digital clock. The clock read "8:44." I was already late.

(5/2/06) you got something to say?; the big joke

(Entered in paper journal at 5:51 PM at Starbucks on 57th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I stood by "my door" in "my bedroom." I looked through the peephole. A roommate, a black man with long dreads and a mean look,  walked toward my door. At first he seemed unaware of me. Then he looked straight at me. I thought, Fine. If he knows I'm looking at him, let him know. I'm tired of ihm thinking he's got everybody scared.

The man walked straight toward me as if there were no door. Then there wa no door. He had been changing into a woman as he approached me, even though "she" was still a "man." "She" looked at me with an ugly face. "She" was somewhat dark, round, with thin, eyes, a white tank top, and a palish blue, denim skirt.

"She" asked me, "Why are you staring at me? You got something to say?"

I told "her," "Yes. You always make all this noise when everybody else is going to bed. It's rude and mean and you need to stop."

We now stood before a doorway outside like at a suburban house with a front yard. She told me, "I've been proud of you for making it this long through all the noise. It's a type of lesson for you. are you complaining about your lessons?"

I didn't feel defensive or threatened. But I did try to justify myself.

Somehow both the woman and I got sidetracked and had a conversation about something outside.

Dream 2

I was on my bed. I heard my landlord in the hallway outside. The landlord was getting ready to leave.

I sat up, jumped off the foot of my bed, and opened my door. My room and the hallway both had an opulent wood and gold glow in the morning sunlight. The hallway was enormous, with plush, green carpet and thick wood walls. The ceilings were high. A stairway went down to another visible level and then back up, like this.

My landlord was on the lower level, but I could see him. A few people, all black, hung around the hall, telling the landlord there were no problems and he could go home.

I yelled at the landlord, "P! P! I have a complaint! Everything's not okay!"

Everybody looked at me, angry. I ran down the steps. It occurred to me this guy's name was PR XXXXX. I couldn't remember his last name. It struck me I might not be able to contact him if I didn't have his last name.

I yelled at him, "The man in this room" (I pointed to a room on the lower level) "makes noise all night long. I'm tired of nobody doing anything about it."

I knew that I was putting myself in danger for what I was doing. But I had to do it.

The landlord said, "He's just a poor Hispanic." (Or Mexican?) "You can't just get mad at him after one incident."

I took the landlord's statement to heart. But I couldn't figure out why I did so. First of all, the man was big and black. He wasn't a poor Hispanic. He wasn't a poor anything. And he had done mean things to me ever since I'd gotten here.

It was night. I was in bed. Suddenly my door was bashed in. Two short Mexican men burst in. I jumped to the foot of my bed, which was now tall.

The second Mexican man pulled a shaving razor

on me, yelling, "You got my friend in trouble! He's just a Mexican" (?) "who can barely speak English!"

The men weren't trying to get sympathy. This was all just another part of their big joke. But when the second man shoved his razor at me I grabbed the man's wrist and then the razor. I pulled the razor out of the man's hand. But when I tried to slash the man I was somehow ineffectual.

(10/22/06) ruler of the land of chaos; my father's necklace; dimension detectives

(Entered in paper journal at 9:01 AM at Flying Saucer cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

A scene of insects that were smashed. Smashed, they rolled into balls (three) that emitted some kind of acidic gas into ground or carpet, leaving lumpy mounds.

Soon this view shifted into an abstract landscape like a desert made of abstract cutouts. A narrator said the land had become the land of chaos. The ruler of the land of chaos, a weird being like a cutout version of an Atari character, colored red, walked through the landscape (of blue and purple cutouts?) to a character rising from the mounds made by the insect balls. The two of them shook hands.

For some reason I was disappointed that this was what had come of my clear view of the insects, which themselves had been part of some very meaningful activity. The ruler walked into a drawing room or library -- real, not cutout -- and himself became real. I may have become him. I was happy that I at least saw things as real again. But I was still looking for some conclusion or meaning for the poor insects.

The room was beautiful, of dark and heavy wood, but cluttered full of books. As if trying to calm down my worries, "I"/"The ruler of the land of chaos" ran to each man in the room (maybe three men other than "I"/"him"/"us"). The ruler of the land of chaos would hold up his right hand like a wall and run it at the other man as the man held up the thumb of his right hand. The ruler of the land of chaos would make a plane sound ("buzzz!") and crash the hand -- a wall -- into the thumb (a plane).

This only made me angrier -- not only were we now not talking about the insects, but we were making a wall crash into a plane, which was impossible.

Dream 2

I stood beside my mom and sister in a doorway (like the house I lived in during kindergarten) on a sunny day before my dad and brother. It was my dad's birthday. My brother was proud of the present he had given my dad.

I told my brother hello, but before finishing I was distracted by a beautiful necklace my dad was wearing, and I commented on it, something like, "Did that necklace cost $40 to $50?"

My brother walked past me and into the house, upset. I thought I should go after him, and I would, but first I needed to see my father's beautiful necklace.

My dad unclasped the necklace and spoke about it shyly in an almost feminine way. The necklace had beautiful, yellow beads which shone in the sun. They were thick, almost plasticky, warm, and of many different types of circular or elliptical shapes.

My dad tried sheepishly, femininely, to explain how he had gotten the necklace. To explain, he took a bracelet off his right wrist. It was orange with more teardrop-shaped, thinnish beads.

I thought, almost sickened, This is absurd! I didn't ask to see his bracelet. I asked to see his necklace.

I either went to look for my brother or I could sense him behind me, by a desk. He was crying because I had made him feel bad.

Dream 3

I was in a room (bathroom?) full of TVs. A man in a suit stood with his back to me. I could see a little of his eyes by the reflection of a TV screen that was like a rear-view mirror. The man's eyes had the cold, blue ruthlessness of an executive.

The man directed my attention to one of the TVs. At first the show was hard for me to understand. There were two detectives, men, who were also women, but only when something happened to them. This thing drew magic in from another dimension and put it on them. But then it was more like they were always men but in another realm they were always women. A magic mirror would take them into their female existences by accident.

But then it was more like the male detectives had accidentally discovered this magic mirror and gone inside. The female detectives' world was an anime world. The women's dimension/world was very much like the mechanized world of Caves of Steel by Asimov.

There were two women there who were their counterparts. Each had to help the other's female counterpart and each could not look at his own counterpart, or at least could not let his female counterpart know who he was.

The fates of the female counterparts were somewhat determined by the fates of the detectives. But the female counterparts were in their own danger, which the detectives needed to rescue them from. At the same time, the detectives needed to avoid becoming women, although occasionally they did.

 Now it was like the beginning of the first episode of the series. The two detectives were big, fat men. They stood outside some stucco apartment like in California or Florida. One was dressed up in a pale pink sweater and a hot pink skirt. He wore a blonde wig. He looked like Chris Farley. he was going out on a date with a criminal he was trying to catch, a rat-like Latino man.

The second detective asked, "Does he really like girls that look like you? I mean, would he even sit down with you, let alone stay long enough to get caught? He might even just see that you're a man and a detective and kill you on the spot."

The dressed up detective said something like, "Well, let's go back inside. You can help me look so pretty he'll never know the difference."

I knew that what happened next was that the detective went on his date with the criminal and almost succeeded at catching the criminal. But the criminal escaped and jumped through a bathroom mirror into the other dimension. When the detective jumped after the criminal, he found himself in the body of his female counterpart. Eventually the second detective came after him. I don't think he ended up in his female counterpart's body.

It took a while for the counterparts to sort out what happened, and it eventually happened only with the aid of a half-real/half-cartoon character in a black robe and hood (like Star Wars' Emperor, but with no face, just mist). This character had the ability to give the detectives a little more awareness to see themselves in their female counterparts. But he also had the ability to give the detectives physical substance as cartoon bodies in the cartoon world.

When the second detective came into the cartoon world he was almost a specter. Then he was fuzziness that nobody paid attention to or of whom people were very afraid. He was like walking TV static. Then slowly gaining awareness, he was jumbled and melty, and the cartoon people thought he was deformed. When the magic person found the detectives, the second detective had already managed to become somewhat solid, though still a little ugly, and he had been able to find the first detective in the female counterpart and to figure out a way to make the first detecitve aware of himself.

The magic person may have been the one to extract the first detective from his female counterpart. He gave the detectives their complete solidity and awareness in this world. But then he would also give the detectives missions in this world. Sometimes the missions were good, sometimes not good, sometimes just plain silly. The detectives wouldn't do them.

The magic person would react to this refusal by throwing the men into situations where they would be made to see their female counterparts in such a way that the female counterparts almost  understood who they were. Whenever the magic person would give the detectives the silly or bad-spirited missions or throw them into awkward situations, the detectives would wonder whether the magic person weren't really a bad spirit instead of a helper.

Eventually the women came through the mirror (this was few episodes in). The detectives, who may now have been attractive, young men, now had to teach the women, in the same way the men had to be taught in the other world, to become aware and to have physical substance. This, another "trick" of the magic person, was a humorous complication.

All this time, the detectives were still working or solving their mysteries. The women may have become part of the team. They could all travel back and forth with ease eventually. The mirror which had started as a bathroom mirror in a divey restaurant, became a mirror like a door into a weird cornered foyer into an empty, sunny house.

As cartoons, the women looked like anime versions of Alice in Wonderland, except with hair just above the shoulders and pink dresses with less of an outward bell shape to the skirt. But they were invisible in the real world once they got their full solidity.

This is similar to the detectives. As they gained their full solidity in the cartoon world they stopped being visible. When they were fat in the physical world they were identical. But when they became young and attractive in the real world they stopped being visible. It wasn't like they were all really invisible. I just couldn't see them anymore. And, although I could remember all the episodes up to this point, I couldn't remember any of the episodes after this point.

(8/2/07) i then became an even prettier woman

(Entered in paper journal at 7:30 PM at home.)

Dream #1

I looked into a mirror that may have been slightly misted over. I was reflected as a woman. I was blonde and tan with a slightly round face. I smiled at myself and lifted my eyebrows in mock surprise. I then became an even prettier woman.

(10/11/07) waterbed succubus

(Entered in paper journal at 6 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I and my brother were walking out of a white-walled room and into a small hallway, then around a corner and into another room. We were possibly re-enacting a scene where an old man grabbed two little boys' genitals.

But when we got into the second room, my brother had become a woman, probably around my age, but more mature than I. My brother and I may possibly have been naked (and young?) before. Now I and the woman my brother had become were naked. The room was small, rather empty, but somehow cluttered. It was like a pile of something lay or stood under the blanket on the bed.

The woman lured me onto the bed. Suddenly the bed was like a clear bag -- actually like a clear version of a waterbed mattress. Somehow the woman had pulled us inside this bag. There was water, maybe even plant life, in the bag. The woman had pulled me in here to suffocate me.

A couple of times I could see as if I stood outside the bag. I saw the woman inside the bag, beating against it, herself suffocating. The bag was damp on the inside with evaporated and re-condensed water. The woman lay in maybe two or three inches of water. The water looked pure, distilled.

I was back in the bag now. It was now like a white blanket over the two of us. The woman was young, had a smooth face, tan skin, red hair, and thin, blue eyes. I lay as she sat over me. I may have been an out-of-shape man, in a sense too weak to defend himself against a healthy woman.

The woman had set up the bag so that I would suffocate. The whole bag was losing oxygen, but the bottom part lost it more quickly than the top part. The woman could sit over me and watch me suffocate. When she saw I was suffocated she could get out of the bag before she suffocated. She had tricked, not forced, me into this situation.

As I lay dying the woman spoke softly to me. But her comments were somewhat cruel. The woman said that she and a lot of people were jealous of me, and that was why she was doing this to me. She may have started singing a pretty, gentle song to the same effect.

As the woman continued singing I found myself flying through an enormous structure like a dim warehouse constructed of brick and black iron. I flew through "tunnels" consisting of tent-like, greyish, translucent, thin fabric for walls and ceiling and varicolored, mostly purple, pink, orange, and blue, quilts for floors. I hovered only about six inches above the floors. The tunnels may only have been about two feet tall.

As I flew along I saw lifted up flaps along the ceilings of the tunnel. They were exposed to windows which showed high, deep, blue sky. I flew along through sloped tunnels now. The sloped tunnels led up to the ceiling. I thought, If the woman doesn't see me and doesn't suspect, I could fly through one of the flaps and out one of the windows (or out through the ceiling?).

I feel like at one point I flow along over wall-less quilt-floors. I could see down to the floor of the warehouse. I could see all the multicolored" floors filling the warehouse.

(One little thing I think is kind of -- though not extremely -- interesting reflecting on this dream is that, in waking life, about three or so years later, i.e. in about 2010, The American Folk Art Museum, which was at that time located next to the Museum of Modern Art, and was, by then, one of my favorite museums in New York City, went a little quilt crazy, showing an exhibition by Paula Nadelstern, then showing a two-floor exhibition of the history of American quilts, and finally putting on a gigantic show of red and white quilts at the Armory on 66th Street and Park Avenue.)

(4/5/08) the murderer's heroic journey

(Entered in paper journal at 7:42 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

A man, with whom I was possibly identified, had killed another man who had been abusive to the woman the first man loved. This took place in a small town. The killer fled and went on a journey in the woods. Eventually he took on the appearance of an archaic hero. He was engaged in battle against mystical creatures.

At one point the man entered a cavity in a cliff wall. Against the back wall of the cavity was an altar-like structure that was also an oracle or a monster. There was a domed, oven-like structure, atop which were two pots with torches in them. At the back of that was a gigantic sculpture in the image of the top half of a human skull. Inside the oven-like structure was a sword stuck in the floor of the structure and standing before the fire.

The man jumped into the domed structure and somehow managed to defeat the skull. There was a rope before the man. He grabbed it, jumped, and swung down and backward into the oven. He grabbed the sword and tried to pull it out. But he missed.

The man should have been thought of, at this point, as having failed. He hadn't been able to retrieve the sword. But he managed to get another chance, knowing that he was the only one who could pull the sword out of the stone.

The man jumped down into the oven again by means of the rope and pulled out the sword. But this time he couldn't swing himself back onto the domed top. He had to grasp onto an edge and pull himself up very awkwardly. As he did, people could be heard booing him, as if this were all a show like American Idol.

The man stood up, hoping he hadn't been counted as having failed. But he had failed, and he was killed in a strange way -- possibly by being shot out of the cavity and against a tree, and then having some implement fly at him from the cavity and cut his head off.

Through all of this episode, the man had been long-haired, big, and muscular, dressed in a bear-skin chiton or robe. But he now looked much like he had at the beginning, when he had been the small-town murderer: shortish, of medium build, olive skinned, with stubble all over his face and wearing a t-shirt and blue jeans.

The man walked through a particularly beautiful area of the woods, with trees flaring orange. He was heading back to the small town, hoping he could live here, having failed at the heroic test. The man arrived at the outskirts of the town, at an enormous lawn of baseball fields. The man then realized he had left the town because he was a murderer and a fugitive.

At this point I was the man, though at certain moments I still saw from outside the man's body. I hoped that the townspeople would somehow no longer recognize me. But I sat down on bleachers, watching some boys play baseball, with the specific hope that one of the boys, an old friend of mine, would see me and be happy to see me.

The game ended. The boy did see me. But as soon as he saw me, I hoped he would stop recognizing me before he remembered that I was the murderer.

The boy said something like, "You should get out of here or you'll be in trouble."

Another boy, kind of fat, kind of tan, with blonde hair, came up from the other end of the bleachers. He asked the first boy, "Who is that? I feel I should know him from somewhere."

I was now a boy about the age of the other boys. I felt that if the fat kid found out I was the murderer he would bully me and then go tell the police I was in town. But he came around behind me as the other boy said, "Does the name Hanley sound familiar?" The fat boy tried to be mean to me, but he only seemed to be happy now. I was acting defensively and trying not to let on who I was.

But as the fat boy continued talking to me he turned into a pretty girl. Another pretty girl, pale skinned, with pale blonde hair, also walked up toward me. Both girls were so happy to see me that they were hugging each other. The two girls and the first boy were all saying something like, "Hanley's back!"

(8/23/08) zit as sex toy; i'm a lesbian with my female friend; lured into dead end

(Entered in paper journal at 9:30 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I had three small, dry bumps on my face. I thought they were zits, so I "popped" one of them. It peeled off my face like a film or a dry piece of paper.

There was a hard ball of "pus" inside the film. I pulled it out and looked at it. It grew, became a little gooey, and took on a weird appearance. It was about two inches long, bean-shaped, with prongs coming out of it. The "body" itself had some consistency, but the prongs were soft and flaky. It was almost like a toy, maybe even a sex toy, except that it was gooey, like phlegm or pus.

Dream #2

I walked into a small side hallway (to my left) in some place like a mall or perhaps like the shopping areas in Grand Central. A lingerie shop caught my eye. I looked in as I walked past, trying not to be conspicuous, but interested in seeing if the store's style was something I wanted to wear. But most of it seemed to be things like camisoles, a kind of rigid, fancy style that I didn't like.

The hallway was very small and narrow. A decent amount of people walked through the hallway in both directions, mostly young women. All the shops in the hallway were lingerie shops. I knew I would want to stop into one, and I hoped nobody I  knew would see me.

I turned right, into another dim hallway. I saw a rack of panties, of a cloth, cottony, non-stretching fabric. I thought these panties would be fun to wear, but I realized they'd probably be smallish and awkward on my body, like most feminine-shaped but inflexible articles of clothing always ended up being for me. Plus, I felt too fat to wear those panties.

I grabbed the waistband of my own underwear at the back. I realized I was actually wearing a pair of panties like the ones I had been looking at just now, so that I really didn't need another pair, especially sine this pair already fit less than perfectly.

I now realized that, in fact, all I was wearing were these panties and a matching bra or camisole!

I continued walking down the hallway. The atmosphere alternated between a dimmish, plaster-walled hallway like a hallway in a small, dingy office and a marble-walled hallway, like in a well-built or fancy building.

I turned right, into what may have been the end of the hallway. It was a very clean, white-floored, white-walled lingerie shop that also seemed like an enormous dressing room. There were a lot of girls there, but the place wasn't crowded. The lingerie was all brightly colored, like summer, or like sweetgum leafs in the fall.

I looked at myself in a mirror. I was wearing a pair of vivid pink, almost hot pink, gingham panties and a matching shirt/tank top. I probably looked just like a woman. I might actually have been a woman.

Now I saw KB, an old friend of mine and one of the people I'd worked with on my Americorps program in 2005. I tried to hide myself. But KB didn't seem to mind how I looked. She was more interested in being able to see me after such a long time. But I was still upset to see her while I looked this way.

We were in an adjoining room, which was even more like a fitting room than the last room had been. There was a door outside on the back wall. It seemed to lead out to a foresty area, like around the visitor center at the National Park where I'd done my Americorps program in New Mexico in 2002. The door was open. Bright, comfortable sun flowed in.

KB was sitting on a deep-blue-green couch. The couch was full of girls. I seemed to be having a conversation with KB as myself. But as the girl I also (?) was (?) I seemed to be cuddling with KB and kissing her.

Dream #3

I was walking down a street in a relaxed shopping district type area (which kind of reminds me of some shopping block in Queens). I was on the shady side of the street on a sunny, slightly breezy day. The sidewalk was busy with people, but the overall mood was relaxed.

But I soon found myself constantly having to get out of the way of different groups of people. The first group was a group of white teenage boys, all tan, with golden blonde hair, very cheerful. Then it was two or three tall, smart-looking black men, who were all laughing with each other. I didn't feel stressed out by these people, but I felt overwhelmed, like I was avoiding a tide which would sooner or later carry me away.

These groups of people had been coming toward me. Now I had to get out of the way of a person who was walking in the same direction as I. He was a white man, maybe in his early twenties. He might have been walking with another man who was like him. He carried a bundle of twigs on his shoulder. He had straight, brown-black hair and olive skin, and he wore a dull, navy blue shirt and dull, army green shorts.

The twigs, which the young man might have been carrying for his mother, were supposed to serve the same decorative purpose as cherry blossom twigs or willow twigs. In fact, I even called them willow twigs. The wood was a rich tan color, like on young mulberry trees, and the leafs were compact and vivid green, ridged very tightly, somehow (not completely) like rose leafs.

I had to swerve completely off the sidewalk to avoid this boy, and even as I did this, the edges of the branches still brushed against me, as if the boy were purposely trying to get back in my way.

The sidewalk was now in the sunlight. I walked behind a mailbox and then back onto the sidewalk. I was walking toward a subway entrance (a lot like the PATH train entrance at Hoboken). The building was brick, very clean, topped with a pristine, arching, aluminum or stainless steel structure. The building seemed to back into a grocery store parking lot. This area was even busier, like there were a fair somewhere nearby.

A young boy cut in front of me as I headed down the stair. I got competitively upset and hustled to cut him back off. But as we went down the stairs, which curved to the left, it was very hard for me to walk. It was, in fact, hard for me to move my legs at all.

The young boy and I seemed to be going at the same pace. I thought I could do something like slide down the handrail or even hold onto the handrail and "fly" or "hover" down to beat the boy. The boy seemed to have the same idea. But when I saw he was going to ride the railing down, I decided not to. I decided that riding the rail would be cheating. I could beat the boy, I thought, just by moving quickly, or perhaps by flying.

Nevertheless, I grabbed onto the railing like I was going to ride down it. But it was all covered in brown packing (?) tape. I could feel that, underneath the tape, the railing was broken in a lot of different places. It wouldn't be practical to ride down at all.

Now I was on the right side of the stairwell, where the boy had been. I was sliding down the railign, but the stairway was getting narrower and narrower. The stairway narrowed to a point and became a wall, I saw, before it even reached the actual floor of the subway platform. I'd have to hop the railing to get to the train.

The boy had stopped a few steps up from me, i.e. behind me. His mother had been calling him. He ran back up the stairs to meet her. Originally, I knew, the boy had been heading down the stairs to the train in order to take care of some task for his mother. But now it was like he was an overzealous boy who had headed for the train ahead of his mother, thinking he could be independent of her. Now he was being lightly scolded for having run ahead. The boy would have to go back up the stairs to his mother and then come back down with her.

But I also knew that the boy had run down the stairs to "trick" me. He wanted to rev me up into a competitive state so I'd get stuck in the exact position I was in at this moment -- facing the hallway that narrowed into a  blunt wall. The boy knew well enough to stop ahead of time and head back out of the station, never having had any intention of coming down to the level I was at.

I felt tricked, frustrated. But I still also had to catch the train that was arriving at this station. I was now more concerned with how to get over the railing so I could get onto the train.

(9/6/08) boss' communion sex-change

(Entered in paper journal at 9:51 AM at Naidre's cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a building that was like a mix between a public building, like Grand Central Station, and a church, with my boss BS and maybe some other people I know. I stood in a wide, open area.

Before me was a roped-off area. The area was a church altar, but it looked more like a stage in a high school gym. Nobody stood on stage. There was a conglomeration of equipment off to my left, right in front of the stage. It was a pulpit, some kind of ritual table, and sound equipment.

A priest stood before the ritual table, which stood before and just to the side of the pulpit. The priest faced the table and pulpit so that he faced away from me. There may have been other people around me, but only a few, and they walked around in the room like one might walk through the main terminal at Grand Central while they're waiting for something or somebody.

The ritual at the pulpit was something like a baptism or communion. A line of people crowded from the pulpit  to my left and around the sound equipment. As each person's turn came, he would stand behind the pulpit while the priest, before the table, would perform the ritual.

BS was in line. His turn came up. He stood with a woman behind the pulpit. He was given a piece of bread that looked like a small, pillow-shaped sugar cookie. He chewed it and then spit it into a big Ziploc bag. He had bowed down slightly to spit in the bag. I could tell he felt like he was doing something incorrectly or impolitely by spitting into the bag.

When BS lifted his head he was a woman -- although my brain really didn't register the sex change at all during the dream. He/she was shortish, tan-skinned, a little overweight, with long, chestnut-colored hair. He/she wore a sleeveless business shirt.

The priest asked him/her what he/she thought of the bread. He/she said something sprightly and naive-sounding about how he/she liked it. Everybody laughed like BS was really cute for having said that. BS was now afraid of saying other things, for fear both of being thought of as desperately trying to say cute things continuously and of being thought of as unable to say anything that could be taken seriously.

He/she was now saying something as if it were directly to me. In my head I could hear BS' male voice as BS the female spoke. I might also have seen the male BS superimposed over the female BS. BS said that it was good to do this ritual over the weekend, because that way you would be able to do things like have sex on Sunday without having to worry about whether you were sinning.

(10/19/08) the cat in the trap; is my girlfriend a man?

(Entered in paper journal at 4:20 PM at home in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in an apartment, probably not mine. It was night, and all the windows were uncurtained, exposed to the black sky. The apartment may have had two rooms, though it felt somehow cluttered and cramped, like an overstuffed studio. The light inside was dim, yet warm and soft.I was with a couple other people. My old friend H was either in the room or else we were possibly waiting for him to arrive.

I now noticed that in the room down from me, a window along the shared wall (to my left) was actually open. An animal like a squirrel scurried in. I and a woman (?) ran to the room to try to chase the animal out. The animal had become like a small mouse. It was running toward a corner of the room, to my right. As it did it became larger, like a cat, and began moving slowly, almost leisurely.

I had been happy that the animal was running toward the corner of the room, where I knew there was a mouse trap. But now that I saw the animal was a cat, we tried to hurry and get the animal away from the corner so it wouldn't step in the trap.

But we were too late. The cat stepped in the trap. The cat made a nose like a sucking-in sigh combined with a hiss. It turned toward us and walked toward us with a sorrowful, tortured look on its face. I noticed how the cat's tail looked like a different animal's tail -- maybe like the tail of a ringtail or a raccoon. And the face of the animal now looked like that of a bobcat or lynx.

I knew I'd have to take the trap off the animal's foot (its front right foot?). I hoped the animal wouldn't feel more pain as I removed the trap. I didn't want the animal, in greater pain, to react violently toward me. I resolved to be as quick, and, yet, as gentle, as I could.

The trap was now off the animal's foot. The animal now walked toward the window by which it had entered. It hoped the animal would like us now and want to stay with us, since we had done such a nice thing for it. But, although it seemed to bear us no ill will, it now seemed almost indifferent to us. It walked out the window.

Dream #2

I was in a cluttered but very warm-feeling bedroom with my girlfriend H. The walls of the room may have been of dark wood. H and I were on the bed. The bed may have had richly colored, pink sheets. The bed was also probably cluttered with other things.

H and I had worked out way into a strange sexual position. H was almost standing on her head. I was over her, almost floating over her, apparently perpendicular to her, but almost upside-down myself. I had an enormous penis, which I was slowly lowering into H. I had no other point of contact with H, the bed, or anything.

As I slowly lowered into H, she asked me if I loved her. I said yes. But she continued to ask me. As she did, it seemed to me (not that I could necessarily see) that her face was tightening up, becoming smaller, almost like some weird, shrunken version of a man's face. I wondered if H was actually a man.

(4/1/09) public broadcasting spies

(Entered in paper journal at 8:15 AM at Starbucks at 17th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was out in some rural area, near a road and a series of buildings like gas stations. I had walked up to some place with a chain link fence and noticed that someone was following me. The person, I now remembered, was a thin, tall, black man wearing a tan leather jacket, a button-up shirt, slim jeans, and big sunglasses.

The person tried to get a couple steps ahead of me but ended up running into the fence. I didn't know how to escape from the person.

The person faced away from me. The person was now a woman, taller than the man, slim, with nice legs and a nice bottom. She wore dark jeans and a dark blue sweater. She now walked away from the fence. She told me to come with her, as if we were working on some project together.

We got into the backseat of a big, 1970s-style car. I sat on the driver's side; she, on the passenger's. We now rode along as the woman explained things to me.

The backseat was full of the woman's things -- bags, mostly -- which had to do with our business. One of the things was a black tote bag saying with the word "VOLUNTEER" or "DONATE" on it. It looked like it was made on behalf of some public broadcasting station.

It was night. We were driving through a small town, through a tight road lined with what looked like beige, cinder block buildings. There might have been soldiers or police in the streets. The woman was explaining how we would cheat our way past a barricade ahead by pretending we were executives for some fictitious public broadcasting station.

(10/8/09) in the snares of an evil man

Dream #1

I was in a movie. I and a group of friends were up in the woods, in some cabin. An evil person or spirit followed us there. We knew the evil person had committed some crime, and we were going to expose him for it. But now the evil person had killed some people in our group and managed to trap the rest of us in the cabin. The cabin was smallish but well accommodated, with couches, bookshelves, rugs, well furnished rooms, even a desk with a nice computer.

We were trying to escape from the cabin, but we knew the man was keeping a close watch on us and would terrify us as soon as we left the cabin. But even inside the cabin the evil man was beginning to terrorize us. He possessed one of us either to commit suicide or kill someone else in a grotesque way.

Now I was a woman. I think everybody could feel the man's spirit influence. But I particularly could, as if the man were about to possess me and make me do something awful to myself or others. I now saw, from more of a "camera" viewpoint, the woman/I standing before the computer. The woman had been possessed to download something to the computer. This, we were all certain, was a demonic program that would kill the woman.

However, instead of a demonic image, a cartoon image, like from the cartoon Heavy Metal, of a naked man appeared on the screen. A man from among us now stood before the woman. Both the man and woman were naked. The man began kissing the woman's chest and neck. The man and woman were now both like computer-cartoon (Heavy Metal style) characters, almost floating in the air, maybe not quite life size. The man had an enormous penis, which he thrust toward the woman, maybe rubbing it against the woman's belly, but never penetrating her with it.

After the man and woman had passionately kissed, they seemed to return to normal, though they remained naked. I was the woman again. I felt completely fine. I went to sit in a chair. All of us were relieved that nothing bad had happened to the man and me. I felt completely normal -- even fresh, as if I had just woken from a good rest.

But suddenly I got sick to my stomach. I realized that the demon or evil man had poisoned the man's lips. The man had kissed me and I had ingested his poison. I now felt extremely sick. I began vomiting up fountains of white glop like milk and cottage cheese. The vomit tasted a little sweet, like rice pudding. I stopped vomiting. I was now extremely tired.

We all thought how cruel it was of the evil man or demon, to cause me, the woman, to vomit, to lose whatever nourishment I'd had in me, after the evil man or demon had already put me through an energy-sapping ordeal (some ordeal that had occurred outside, before we'd gotten trapped in the cabin). We were sure I, the woman, was now on the brink of death.

I was now myself. Something had just happened in the cabin, possibly the violent death of another person. We decided that we had to leave the cabin once and for all. Our car, some kind of black sedan from the early 1980s, was outside. There was a chance that we could get to the car without the evil man knowing. People were afraid to go, but I convinced everybody we had to do it.

We got in the car and drove away without the man noticing. We were down in a small town like Los Alamos, New Mexico, driving through the parking lot of a multi-building shopping plaza, like the parking lot was a wide path through a blocky maze. It seemed like we were actually managing to escape.

But now the evil man had discovered we'd left the cabin. He tracked us down. He was going to play a trick on us to recapture us. He disguised himself as a demon (or used a demon cohort of his?). The demon was an anime-like figure, a black shroud, almost triangular, with a white, oval mask with just enough slits for eye holes, and no nose or mouth. At first the figure looked like a cartoon ghost. But then the figure looked like a human dressed as a cartoon character, like a good thief who was an awful charlatan, a parody.

The trunk door of our car was half open, unable to close because a TV-sized box was lodged there, unable to fit all the way into the trunk. The figure ran up to the trunk and stole the box, running away with high-kneed strides like he was a caricature thief in a second-rate play for kids.

I knew the figure had stolen the TV just to get us to turn the car around. The TV didn't matter so much, I thought, as long as we got out of here. And as long as we just kept driving, the evil man couldn't catch us, and we could get out of here.

I may have been driving at first, but now I was possibly no longer the one driving. And now the person who may have been driving, a young, slightly overweight man with red hair and a red beard, got angry at the figure and decided to pursue him.

The figure ran into a certain building. We drove into that building and found ourselves in some place like a smallish, vacant warehouse. The car stopped, possibly as if it had been broken, i.e. possessed and self-destructed, by the evil man.

We all got out of the car. The evil man now appeared before us. He may have had a few different aspects. One was a red-haired, red-bearded man, like the person who'd been driving our car. Another was a pale man in his early thirties, dressed in a men-in-black style suit, with greased, combed hair. Another aspect may have been covered in gore. We knew, or at least the evil man tried to make it clear, that we were now done for.