(4/29/08) threat and consolation

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

Dream #1

I was outside on a clear day, looking out over a group of small buildings across a wide street. I was near the back of a group of people. From the buildings I could hear some kind of music playing. I thought I recognized it and called out that I liked it. Then I realized it was a Prince song. I said that I did't like it that much, after all.

I noticed that the people all around me (except one or two friends) were high school students and black or Hispanic. They grumbled defensively at my comment.

I said to my friends, as if trying to sound spontaneous, hopefully to make the students feel less offended, "Well, I guess Prince wrote some pretty awesome songs, now that I think of it."

The students now grumbled, "Oh, look at the white man pretending to like black music now that he feels bad."

I said, "I actually don't see why I have to feel bad. If you were to say you thought a song by a white person was bad, you'd feel like that was a perfectly fine and natural thing to say."

One of the female students said, "That's right. Don't make him feel bad about what he said."

I now stood in a long hallway with the students. It was a ramped hallway like in a hospital. I was worried about something else. One of the male students consoled me over this other thing, putting his hand on my shoulder and saying, "Don't worry about it. Everything will be fine." The student was black, taller than I by at least a head, and dressed like a skater.

We were all walking somewhere. I felt an increasing scrutiny around me, like I was the target of students who were going to hurt me regardless of whether I was an adult.

Suddenly someone pushed down on my shoulders. I thought they were trying to steal my backpack. I was pushed all the way down so my face was against the ground.

Everything went black. When I stood up, the hallway, which had been dim before, was even more pronouncedly dim, as if half the building had broken down.

I saw a couple white kids, either boys or girls, sitting on a barrier on the right side of the hallway. The kids were dressed in an exaggeratedly grungy style. I accused the kids of having stolen something from me. The kids just laughed.

An adult came up. I tried to explain that the children had stolen my bag. But the children had tumbled over the barrier to hide. I ran to the barrier and grabbed at something like a dog kennel. I pulled it up, thinking that the children would be inside. But there were only blankets.

I looked over the barrier and saw a child hiding under a chair. I pulled him out, but he may have disappeared or become a pile of clothes. I may have seen a student and become very violent toward him or her.

I was now walking toward a subway station entrance in the daytime. A young man cut me off. We headed down a long stairwell. As we did I ran up to him and cut him off and then started arguing with him.

I was now speaking instead with an Indian woman who was maybe in her forties. She was calming me down. I felt ashamed for having been so petty and violent with the young man.

When we got to the bottom of the steps the woman said that she had forgotten something upstairs. She had to go back up. I told her I would go with her.

I asked the woman something about her job. We stood at the foot of a down escalator (i.e. down from a level above us and ending at our level). The steps glittered, like they were wet, or like they were made of mercury.

We walked over to an up escalator. This escalator was like a thin sheet of metal that drew passengers upward. It was a side, somewhat steep, strip.

As we went up the strange escalator, the woman asked me about my job. I tried not to be boastful.  also realized that the woman would know a lot about my job -- maybe more than I did -- given her own job.

At first, instead of simply standing on the escalator, the woman was at first walking along a half-wall that was weirdly shaped. Then she went to standing on the escalator.

We kept going up, into a dark sky. I looked down and saw that below us was a strange, desert planet or landscape, like in a Salvador Dali painting. The land was greyish-tan, featureless, with orange and red, plasticky figures on it like cacti or barren vegetation. A few sparse people wandered aimlessly through the landscape. Light seemed to crackle against the sand, as if somewhere fireworks were going off.

(10/11/09) inconvenient dinner; temple of respect

(Entered in paper journal at 8:19 AM at Sit & Wonder cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was at the house of my old friends R and L. It looked like a small version of their previous place. The lights were off, except in a room off to the side. I stood with R, who had, apparently, invited me to dinner.

L showed up from one of the dark rooms. She said she hadn't expected me for dinner. She hadn't made anything yet, but she could go out and buy something.

It was getting late. I thought it would be really inconvenient to wait while she or we went out to get something and then cook it. It also seemed like L didn't really want me here to begin with. So I didn't feel like accepting the offer. But I accepted.

Dream #2

I was with a group of students touring through something like a giant mansion. We had gone through a number of rooms and were finally on something like the top floor. The room we were in was small and tiled, something like a small, run-down kitchen. To my right and before me were two doorways. From the doorway to my right came a golden beam of sunlight. The doorway before me led to something like a dining room, furnished in an older style, with a big, wooden table in the center.

Everybody walked around the kitchen, talking casually. I looked above the doorway to the dining room. The space between the doorway's top and the ceiling was only a couple inches. There were half-rotted, white tiles in the space. The tiles had words printed on them in blue. One of the last words printed was "respect." Some of the tiles were so rotted that I couldn't read them.

I was suddenly inspired. I tried to take a photo of the word "respect." I now knew that I was involved in some film project. At some point in the film's narrative, the character (that I played?) looks at the front of some temple, and sees a statement written on it about respect. I thought that if I could film the word "respect" on this tile closely enough, I could make it look like it was actually on the front of the temple of the film. This temple probably stood in one of the rooms downstairs.

I had a camera, but not a film camera. I walked into the dining room and sat at the table to think about how I was going to get back downstairs in order to get my film camera. A lot of the others sat down at the table with me. I sat either at the head or on the right side of the table.

It must have been cold in the room: we were all wearing big coats. I kept having to blow my nose, using brown paper towels. I kept on using and using and wadding up paper towels until I had a big, shaggy, mostly dry ball of paper towels before me.

From another doorway on the wall opposite the wall to the kitchen, a woman walked into the dining room. The woman was tallish, with a large, matronly figure. She wore warmly colored, knit wool clothes. She had tan-red skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair. Her voice was flattish and no-nonsense, but nice and motherly.

The woman told us, as if we were all high school students (and I felt like everybody except for me was), that our lunch break still wasn't for another twenty or thirty minutes, so we shouldn't sit down and take a break yet. She then became gentle and told us that she understood. It was cold, we were bored, and, besides, could high school students really be expected to take all this stuff in?

I suddenly remembered that I should be taking care of filming the word "respect." I really needed to be thinking seriously about that. I then realized that I had left my camera in the kitchen. I stood up quickly and went into the kitchen. I may have been looking for my camera when everybody else began walking into the kitchen.