(4/23/06) unfamiliar food; truck crash is my fault

(Entered in paper journal at 10:45 AM at Starbucks on 1st Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I walked into my room late at night. The room was big but a little like a hospital room. My bed was a lot like a hospital bed. The floor had a black and white octagon tile design (like in the bathroom of a place I'd lived in in waking life Harlem in 2005). I had a sink at the back end of the room -- like a hospital sink.

I wanted to go to bed. I kicked my foot against my fridge. It popped open. It looked disgusting, but not as disgusting as I'd thought it would. Plus there was food in it, packaged food, mostly like plastic bottles in which one might find milk or yogurt drinks.

I closed the fridge but then thought I'd open it again to see the food, none of which, on reflection, was anything I remembered having gotten recently. But I opened a fridge to the left of the first fridge. This was a tall fridge with two vertical doors, like my mom's fridge.

I had thought before that someone had come into my room and put weird food in my fridge. In the tall fridge was a note, written in capital letters with red marker, explaining everything. The note said that my landlord had brought this new stuff into my room because he didn't want me to leave. He wanted me to feel more comfortable right here.

I couldn't believe it. I reached into the fridge to see if it -- and the food -- was real.

Dream 2

It was daytime. I was out by a huge road. The road curved away to the right. On either side of the road were big, mangled-looking buildings. In the center of the road ran a concrete barrier.

Big vehicles, enormous trucks, mostly, sped by, going at a frightening pace. But I needed to get across the road. I need to deliver something from my bosses on one side of the road to a boss on the other side. There was a smart, safe way to do it. But the trucks scared me, so I wanted to get past my fears by going straight through the traffic.

I got to the barrier, maybe even straddled it, when something bad happened with the trucks. Either they crashed with each other or they crashed into buildings. I had failed and caused this crash by not doing the safe thing.

One building across the street could no longer be used for work -- it may have been being built, close to being done, but now it would take much longer to finish. One of my previous bosses, PG, was very angry.

A woman to my right, walking with me back across the now empty street, told me not to worry, that the present building was fine for at least another year or two. We were now inside the building, which had a tall atrium. We walked from one side to another and then back to the front of the lobby, to a reception desk.

As we went around the told me that we would be covering (doing investment research on) a new sector -- something to do with hospitals. I said, "Oh, isn't RO in that sector? He's a pretty smart guy, and pretty cool. But for some reason he's always scared me."

I sat down in the reception desk. There were stacks of books and journals and papers all over. I knew I had a lot of studying to do.

(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.