(10/21/05) up with the good ol' south; new englander cult retreat

(No information on time or place of entry into paper journal.)

Dream 1

I went back for a walk through a mountain area where I had just been. I had come back to prove I knew some trees or plants as well as just to walk. But the weather had been dry and time was getting toward night and winter. All the leafs were changing color, even the pine needles, which were a bright blood red.

I was ashamed that I presumed in front of my friends to know everything about the plants in this area. Looking around now at the different colors, I realized I knew nothing. I insisted on walking through the forest, though, more than before, to vindicate myself.

Some of my friends tried to stop me, but they hesitated, then ended up encouraging me instead. They felt like, even though I was now refusing to say so, that I felt like not knowing the forest anymore opened me up to a lot of dangers. For instance, now, furiously rushing through the woods, I could see that many of the trees had decayed and were about to fall. I often rushed just under them before they fell.

Now I was in a car with BA, the leader of my Americorps NYC Parks program. BA was driving me down the road to a spot where I could walk back. It was pretty late. I worried that I wouldn't have enough time to enjoy the walk before it got dark. I also worried that I wouldn't have walked enough to have burnt off all the food I'd eaten.

I tried momentarily to figure out how I thought I'd have enough time for such a long walk before. Now BA and I drove through a small mountain "lodge" town. I knew BA was just going on one errand before he dropped me off.

We stopped at one place. Now we went to pick up one of my crew mates, KA. I was reading a book "by Faulkner" as we drove to KA's. Her place was a brown-painted, fake-wood townhouse. KA stood in the doorway, ready to go. She walked to the car.

Each page on the Faulkner book had at least one "line" where the words were in some way decorative. either they were a strange font or they were pictures or else sometimes the line was just a photograph.

When I finally realized this I looked up to see that in the window by KA's front door there were a photo-painting of Alanis Morissette and another of some other celebrity. The painting was like a silkscreen, and the skin and hair were different colors.

We pulled away from the house and circled past an old-timey gas station. One page of the book had a line where the letters were like wood slats on a fence, and they said something like "UP WITH THE GOOD OL' SOUTH," as if to ridicule Northerners.

Another page had a photo of people in the South engaged in some exclusivist activity. Now the photo was like a TV image. It was inside a police station or an army headquarters office in a small town. A guy wandered through small offices. He was big. He was hilding up the building and he was going to kill the people in it.

The "show" flashed back to a moment when the man had first gone crazy. He made out with some friend of his who was as huge and fat as he was.

Now "I" was one of the cops. I had a machine gun. I walked into the office where the man was holding his hostages. I had worried that he'd notice me before I got within firing range. But now I stood next to him, to his right. I lowered the gun (I had been holding it nose-up) right as he finally noticed me. I knew I had to fire now or he'd kill me.

Dream 2

I was crossing 20th Street at Depew, on the border, I suppose, of Lakewood and Edgewater in Colorado (i.e. essentially a road separating two suburbs not very different from each other, though one of them is my hometown/family town).

As I crossed the street a young businessman came up behind me and said how much he disliked the dryness of the Southwest. It was like he said the dryness was vulgar, and that the Northeast was more dignified by having humid weather.

I didn't tell the man I was actually walking to my mother's house. I told him I, too, lived in New England. He said he was on business. I now saw the man. He stood to my left. He was very tall, skinny, gaunt, with longish, ringed hair. He wore dark, grey-blue clothes.

We walked through the empty parking lot, past a wild patch of rabbit brush, which was very bright, even in the dim atmosphere. I said something like I was on business. He asked if I had come for the same thing he had come for, some big get-together or retreat in the woods.

We now walked on a thin trail in the woods, between stark walls of boulders. The man told me that at this retreat he was going to meet someone one more time and see if what he felt for that person was real. I thought this guy was too sentimental.

We now came to a nice cabin where some peers of mine sat. We had a conversation which I don't remember but which largely involved me, for shame, not mentioning any true facts about myself in front of the New Englander.

Now the New Englander was gone, and I was by myself in the woods. But now I was on the outskirts of some retreat. A group of loud, obnoxious people stood by a camp-style obstacle course. The retreat was some romantic getaway for gay people. In the distance was some big, fat, stubbly, bald guy that everybody made fun of because the guy thought everybody hated him, and because he was so lazy.

Now a guy walked away from a tree and went and took the man by the hand and walked him in front of everybody. The man told the big guy, "Now this time we're going to do it, okay? And if you aren't going to do it, tell me now, because I don't want to be hurt by you one more time."

The big guy said, "No, I'll do it, I'll do it. I'm ready."

They walked off to my right. As I turned to watch them I saw a lady beside me. She waited until they were out of earshot, then she laughed.

It wasn't until now that I realized the big guy was the New Englander, and that this was the person he had been talking about meeting "one more time." But somehow underlying the whole thing was a feeling of derangement. The big guy had almost no wits. He was slimy and gross and stupid and lazy and stubbly and fat, and yet he thought he was some kind of dainty, little thing, and everybody let him believe he was. It was like a cult mindset.

(9/13/06) dangerous pool; sixty poisons; hometown food court

(Entered in paper journal at 7:45 PM at home in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I and a woman (and maybe others) followed a man into a pool. The man was a leader like from a hippie religious cult. We stepped down into the thick water. He said something like, "If people can't handle this they shouldn't go any farther in. If you haven't developed enough, the water may kill you."

I was panicked. I "walked" clockwise in this gelly, sea-green water in the moonlight. We may have been wading because we were now in deep water. But I was still in only to slightly above my bellybutton. I breathed shallowly like the water was cold. But it was warm. I was really breathing shallowly because I was getting sick. I knew this, and was getting more and more worried.

Dream 2

I was with my mom in something like a coliseum for an indoor sports tournament like hockey, basketball, or something like martial arts. My hands were itchy, cracked, and dry, like I had an illness. I was embarrassed to tell my mom what was wrong, but I at least told her my hands were itching.

My mom said, "Well, go get some lotion. In this place, someone must have lotion!"

I walked around the stadium counterclockwise in an aisle near the front row. I asked people for lotion. Nobody really had any. I sat down in a space with five or six empty seats. Some man to my left (who also may have offered me some lotion) moved over to me. I thought he was gay. I didn't want to talk to him because I thought he was trying to pick me up.

For some reason now I was facing away from the game area, like I'd stood and leaned my back against a railing and faced the man in a seat.

The man told me, "The screens are wonderful today. Usually you feel like nobody's even working behind them. But today the images are very human and spontaneous."

I knew the man was talking about the LED digital screens that displayed highlights and scores, etc. I turned to look. The game area was shrouded by a big, black, thick mesh net. But from the right side of it I saw most of a display screen. It was just displaying a pattern of green squares before a black background like a fountains of cards. It wasn't very impressed.

I walked out to the "ticket booth," which was like an admission desk for a museum. A woman was there -- kind of looked like a pale blonde intellectual skater chick -- but she also wasn't there.

I walked behind a desk and found a book like a coffee table or picture book. I read through it. It was about people who had gone insane and done some pretty awful things.

At some point it was like I was watching a documentary of these people on one of the display screens in the stadium. Close to the end I was "inside" the documentary as if I was seeing -- feeling -- through the electric-buzzed world of the camera. I cornered into a room from a hallway and saw a guitar case, opened, on the floor before a bed.

There were subtitles instead of narration. A young man had gone psychotic. He buried his beagle deep underground in a guitar case. This was after he had boiled the dog. But the dog had been dead before the boiling. The young man had poisoned the dog with sixty poisons -- sixty poisons.

(As I woke up and lay in bed I thought, Well, it shows that people in real life still do some of the things Jung noted his alchemists as discussing symbolically.)

Dream 3

I was on a bus tour that stopped in a town just a small way from "my hometown." I wondered if I couldn't just go back. We were in a food court.

I walked outside. The building was rather small, black brick, like a suburban doctors' office complex. I walked on the wide lawn counterclockwise around the building.