(10/1/05) one more jump; money shame; dykes of hazzard; afterbirth cat

(Entered in paper journal at 8:50 AM at the Tea Lounge on Union Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in a plane over a desert. I parachuted out or went out in a very small gliding device. I descended more quickly than I'd thought I would. I descended in front of a skyscraper that was all by itself.  It seemed enormous, incredible. It was metal and glass, black, and relatively plain and boxy.

I landed roughly on the ground. I had been too nervous about the experience to appreciate it, especially the building. I wanted to go again.

There was a soldier- or pilot-like person, helmeted, beside me, tall so that I now feel like I was a child looking up at him. Somehow he "told" me my time here was up and that I had to go back home. I was pretty sure, however, that I had enough time to do one more jump. But then I got a call from my mom.

Dream 2

I was in a back/living room. A teller stood behind a long counter to my right. The teller was tallish, pretty, and blonde. I was trying to impress her, even though I wasn't exactly attracted to her.

I stood before a buffet/dresser. It automatically did transactions or served as a vault which automatically opened to the specific customer's space. I opened my vault. The doors all clanged open. the light in the room was sharp and sour, and the buffet doors all opened sharply and sourly. There were two end spaces that opened like drawers.

The top drawer was the one I focused on. I needed to take out all the money. There were just musty piles of coins and tattered, sticky bits of paper in the drawer. But that's apparently what I wanted. I had to take it out secretively. I didn't want the teller to see I was such a loser. The buffet jolted, though, and the change and mess bounced all over the floor.

An older couple walked up and helped me pick up -- though their "picking up" had nothing to do with the change. Instead, they took everything else out of all the drawers and packed it into a large plastic bag to prepare me for leaving. At first I was offended. Then I just figured, Well, maybe it is time for me to go. I was worried that I hadn't picked up all my money.

Now I was in an office where some pretty, Asian woman had taken me. the change now belonged to a woman, an executive who owned the office I and the pretty, Asian woman were in. It was implied that I had stolen the change, even though I knew I hadn't. I had the feeling the Asian woman had all the money I had lost.

Now the Asian woman sat flirtatiously next to the executive on the leather couch. She gave the executive a whole pile of quarters as a surprise, both for the executive and me. I also realized I had quite a bit of change left on me, that I wasn't as broke as I'd thought.

Dream 3

A comic book featuring two women in a down-south adventure story, like a female Dukes of Hazzard. I tried to figure out whether the women were lovers or just friends. Nothing I could see was really clear.

There was a log cabin. The red-haired woman was throwing an object almost as big as a car. There was a general feeling of dislike for men. One black frame had words on it that told whether the women were gay. But it was very oblique.

Dream 4

There was some reality show following around a man and a woman as the woman gave birth. The woman had the child. Now the man was at his office. He got some bad news about his wife somehow. Now he was pleading with a woman like a secretary to let him use a phone. This was his company, some kind of airline company. But the older secretary, haughtily mild and softly taciturn, would barely let him use the phone. The man was embarrassed to be seen on the reality show, on national TV, using this phone. The secretary was also now embarrassed for having been so petty on national TV.

As the man used the phone, I could see the wive, as if the area around a waist-up shot of the man had been cut out and the hospital room put in instead. The woman lay in a bright yellow room, screaming and moaning. She had had the baby, but now something like an infection was coming out. She yelled to her husband that it might kill her -- it was like a wad of bursting poison which would have been non-toxic had it simply come out immediately as afterbirth.

Even though the woman hoped to live, she said a provisional goodbye to her husband. And now the thing came out. It was a grey cat.

(1/24/06) saving the animals

(Entered in paper journal at 7:03 PM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was in a living room in a small house. It was day, and the light in the house was dim from the windows. I don't know for sure who or what I was in the house for, though I might have been waiting for someone in particular.

I heard a noise from the bathroom. It sounded like a mean animal. I was afraid, but I walked to the bathroom.

Out of the shadows, maybe between the toilet and bathtub, I saw a grey cat. It was a cat from my past. I called out to the cat, "by name," "Grey Cat! Grey Cat!"

I must have knelt. But I was disappointed: the cat didn't show up. I thought I must just have imagined it.

Now a cat crawled up from behind me, onto my back, then around one of my shoulders and onto my face. It did all of this in a cuddling way, to be loving. I "saw" that the cat was cream-colored or white with thick, giraffe-like spots of lemon-yellow or golden yellow. I was still disappointed that this cat wasn't "my old Grey Cat," and that it was instead "Yellow Cat," whom I also knew.

I called to "Yellow Cat" a couple times. I worried briefly about getting a cat disease from the cat having gotten too close to my mouth. The cat hopped off me and walked either into a kitchen or through a (closed?) screen door leading to a backyard.

Now the people were here. There was a small crowd of people. They were some of my coworkers. But there were also some characters from the TV show Arrested Development. My old boss PG led the group.

PG asked me, "Where are all the animals?" I felt like she meant puppies, two to four of them, very small, which this group of people had come to take to the pound. I'm pretty sure PG didn't mean Grey Cat and Yellow Cat.

I now knew I hadn't been able to pull together the money to keep "the animals." But I knew now that I had to keep "the animals," for the sake of Grey Cat and Yellow Cat. So I made one last attempt to pull the money together.

We were all in a room with no windows. Light came into the room only through a doorway just off from the bathroom. I stood over a square, wooden table with a thin top and thin legs. A wide, foolscap-like sheet of tan-white paper lay across almost the entirety of the table. It said, $1,300, which was all the money I had pulled together.

I was about to tell everybody, "This is all I have. What else can I do?"

But one of the people, possibly Michael from Arrested Development, stopped me before I spoke. He said, "Is that all you have? I don't think so. Look down there. We wrote $17,000 on the paper."

I looked down and looked up. I was incredibly relieved. It looked like everybody else was relieved, too.

(7/12/08) field-industry-office; balding; grey cat

(Entered in paper journal at 8:10 AM at Starbucks on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was with a group of people in a foresty area of a city park. We were on a path which might have been asphalt, covered over slightly with soil. The part we were on seemed to be the junction of a number of paths. We had to scrape certain things from the soil and put the scrapings into vials.

I knelt down by a rock and a full grouping of plants with low, wide leafs. The leafs themselves may have been a little muddy. I noticed that the leafs were dotted with large, resting moths. They seemed to be damp, like everything else around us, as if it had just rained. The leafs also had big, dull-black beetles resting on them.

I thought this was a weird sight, so I called everybody else over to take a look. As they everybody came over, I backed away from the situation. I now stood at a distance from everybody else, as if a few steps up a gentle slope. Everybody was having fun collecting samples. But I didn't even have any vials.

The soil everywhere was moist, which apparently made it easier to collect samples. But where I stood, the soil was frustratingly dry. I thought I should go find some vials, but all I could see in my head were old, used vials with the residue of old soil "rusting" the insides.

I walked down to find some vials. Suddenly I was in a house like a lower middle-class suburban house. The house was largely empty. I was in one of the bedrooms with one of my senior co-workers, ER. The bedroom was supposed to be an office, but probably barely even had a desk in it.

I felt awful that I was here instead of out with the group of folks collecting samples. I knew I'd look bad in everybody else's eyes. I was trying to get out of the office and away from ER. I felt like my being in the office with ER was associating me with him -- his laziness, etc.

But suddenly I knew ER was leaving our company. I told ER I'd be sad to see him go. ER told me that he was going to work with a company in the industry he did analysis on. He said he liked being close to the industry itself, rather than on Wall Street, just sitting around in an office all day.

Dream #2

I came from one room where I was with a few people and into another room like a bedroom, where I was all by myself. The bedroom was big, lit with a single bulb, not dim, but almost dim. I stood before a big bed and felt crowded into the room somehow. I looked at the top of my head with a small mirror. I noticed my hair was thinning a lot. I thought to myself, I knew this was happening to me. Now I'll just finally have to accept it.

In fact, my hair looked very different, like the hair of an older man of Indian or Southeast Asian descent -- curlyish, thin, and flat black. My scalp was also tan-copper, and my skull had a roundish, full shape, like that of an overweight, Indian man.

Dream #3

I walked into my bathroom. There was a grey-brown and grey-striped cat in my bathtub, sitting right by the drain. It caught me by surprise.