(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.

(11/5/05) sued for mercury poisoning

(Entered in paper journal at 12:15 PM at Starbucks on 30th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was in a huge, darkened gym with a strobe light flashing. At the end of the gym was a small place like a shock. A person lay against the shack, maybe seen in silhouette against a shaft of kitchen-like fluorescent light coming from a swinging door.

A person like JK, one of my Americorps NYC Parks supervisors, "narrated" to me that one of my coworkers, Sekwet (???), was dead, that she had handled a lot of poison in her new job, that it had actually splashed up on her. Now she was alive and was suing for having been injured.

Sekwet had been handling a block of some kind of metal. A boss had told her neither the metal nor the vat of mercury-like metal she had to drop the metal into was toxic. But when she dropped the block into the "mercury" it splashed up on her and she was poisoned. She felt like the boss had misled her because she was black.

Now I felt like I was the boss who had misled Sekwet. I kept trying to hide my shame and actual guilt from "JK," who was with me, not in the gym, but either in a remembered space or in an anticipated space.

(9/19/07) the community meeting place

(Entered in paper journal at 6:45 AM at Starbucks on 57th Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was on a cell phone with my brother. I stood in a building like a community meeting place. I told my brother that when I first looked into the place, from outside the doorway, I thought the interior of the place would be intricate and of Asian design. My first view had been of an Asian screen or barrier which was black, possibly lacquer, not solid, but branching out and around in cloud patterns. The black might have been lined with or accented by gold.

But when I had gotten inside I saw that the screen simply enclosed an empty, open space. I told my brother, "It's kind of modern inside. The walls are white plaster. There's a small folding table at the front of the room. A couple people are sitting at it." The people were, I think, a Native American mother and her children.

The front of the room (the back of the building) was like a speaking area: some design (?) on the wall made this fact understood. Three was no platform or elevation of the floor: just this design on the wall.

I looked to my right and told my brother, "There's even a TV." It was like I was trying to convince my brother to come to this place, but he was afraid that the place wasn't modern enough, that it might be boring.

The TV was a little TV. It looked a few years old. But now I saw a big, plasma-screen TV. I told my brother, "Wait. There's two TVs!" But now I looked again and saw three TVs. I couldn't say anything. I was hoping the TVs wouldn't multiply anymore.

I faced toward the back of the room (front of the building). The people behind me were now my co-workers. They were talking and having a good time. Before me and maybe ten feet away was another folding table.

From about twenty feet away and to my right, my co-worker RJ walked in front of me and sat at the table. RJ spoke as she walked and sat, saying something about how she and I had been planning to take trips (probably separately) to some place like Connecticut. RJ asked me if I would like to start going to the gym with her. I sat near RJ's feet, in front of the table. I was putting shoes on RJ's feet.

It was a winter day outside. It was a vacation day for us, as if we were in college. I suggested we go in the morning, and then we could do something like eat breakfast. RJ said, as if I should have realized, that that idea wouldn't fit her schedule. She suggested we do something in the afternoon instead.