(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.

(9/28/06) space age jet plane restaurant; the lotus bend; postcard from brother

(Entered in paper journal at 4:50 AM on 4-train from Utica Avenue in Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I walked through a wide street of tallish buildings in the sunshine and a pale blue sky. I saw a jet plane fly by over the buildings. The jet was white, triangular but somehow sleek, with red edges. Where the air intakes should have been were huge windows.

I was walking with someone. I asked, "How do they always appear so classy in those things?"

Inside what was apparently this passenger plane groups of people sat at nice tables like at a restaurant. There was one attendant per table. All attendants wore black. The attendants would bring food from what looked like a concierge desk. The "restaurant" (from the inside) had an atmosphere like you might expect at the Seattle space needle. I feel like I was expecting a view of a space shuttle through the windows.

Dream 2

It was night. I ran along a street and then turned right, into a field like a vacant lot. I was testing the ease with which this area could be traveled through in order to obtain something valuable to the stock of a company I was researching.

As I ran through the lot of wild grass tufts and gravely soil and I approached a river, the land became soggier and soggier. Finally I headed down to the river at a bend that was stuffed with waterlilies and lotuses. The night was very purple here. I walked across the river, which was not deeper than the height of my shoes.

It was day. I brought someone from the sales team at my work with me. We ran off the street into the open field. Cars could be seen occasionally on a distant road like a rural highway as we ran. We got closer to the river right away. We stopped by some craggy trees and made adjustments to our gear.

We continued running. The ground got soggier and soggier. Finally it started developing puddles. By the time we got to the "lotus bend" the river and the ground were equally deluged.

I told the guy from sales, "Don't worry. Last night I stepped into the river and it was extremely easy to walk through."

I took a step into the river and the water, dirty, waved up below me. I was being carried in rolling waves. So was the person with me. Occasionally a "lotus" would drift past us.

After the waves had carried us back to the trees where we had stopped to change gear they disappeared altogether, leaving us on dry land. My feet were bare. One of my big toes had a big, circular wound on it.

I thought, How could I have gone in such dirty water with that wound on my foot? The salesperson (MJ?) and I were talking about something, but I could only think about the wound on my foot.

My legs were soaked. I looked at my feet again. I was wearing white tennis shoes which were covered in muck. I saw something in a couple of holes in the shoes that made me think the flesh on my feet was rotting away, turning green.

I panicked. MJ (?) asked if everything was alright. I crouched to check out my feet. I wiped all the muck off my shoes. I realized the grossness in the holes in my shoes was just the way the dirty water and muck had stained my socks.

I told MJ, "Everything's okay. I'll be fine."

Dream 3

Something to do with solar power. I stood at a "hotel" desk in a warehouse-like building that was immaculate and filled with gentle waves of yellow, red, and purple light. It was almost like Grand Central Station.

Someone was in line ahead of me. The person behind the desk, an Asian man, spoke to us about something regarding solar power. I handed him a card like a postcard. The man analyzed it, handed it back, and made a judgment on me, like "You have too much OTC to make the night journey."

I read the back of the postcard. It was from my brother. There was only a little writing, in a sloppy hand. As I read it, I thought of how badly I've always treated my brother.

(2/1/10) disaster infection; monument of blood; love takes time

(Entered in paper journal at 6:30 AM on B-train into work from Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I had a view of a field of dense, tall grass in the woods. The view felt very much like grainy television. There may even have been a sage-like scent.

I (or the camera?) moved forward through the field. I may have come upon some clearing, i.e. an area of much shorter grass. The clearing may have been surrounded by short, green shrubs, and there may have been some upside-down vehicle lying in the clearing.

I thought about some place, possibly nearby, where a disaster was occurring. I may have been afraid to go there and be a part of it, as if it were an infection, or I may have known that I needed to go there to stop it.

Dream #2

I rode with my family to a monument. The monument may have been the "Jefferson Memorial." The monument was all by itself in an area wooded around with thick, leafy trees. We arrived after sunset. A band of tan-yellow-orange light rimmed the horizon of the deep blue sky.

The memorial was a stout, wide building of red stone. Floodlights shone onto it at different angles, lighting patches of the structure. The structure looked like a small version of the U.S. Capitol, elongated. The place was open, and there were a number of rooms (maybe three) which could be walked through. The central room, under the cupola, housed a colossal statue of Jefferson, seated.

My family had gotten out of the car. They were wandering around the building in the blue shadows of the evening. There were a few other people around.

I was a little distracted, trying to figure out if this was actually the right monument, the Jefferson monument. I walked away from the monument and looked at the surroundings. The place was secluded, for sure. I remembered that about the monument from previous visits. But I remembered the monument being much different.

Well, I thought, maybe I shouldn't worry about that right now. I was here, after all. I might as well see what this monument, whatever it was, was all about, and not miss out.

I walked toward the monument. My family was seated outside. They may have been afraid to go in. I thought I'd go in and try to figure out why my family were afraid.

As I headed toward the central chamber, I saw that there were a few black boys hanging around the steps in front of the monument. The boys sat on a small staircase opposite a small, concrete walkway from the monument.

The boys obviously wanted to cause trouble. I thought of going into the central room directly, but I felt like the boys wanted me to do that, like it was a trap. So I walked (from the left) to the far right chamber. I knew I could walk into the central chamber, within the building, from the right chamber.

I entered the building. The room had red stone floors and walls. The place was lit by slightly dim track lighting. There were a couple museum exhibits along the wall and on small glass-case podiums throughout the room.

I could hear the boys enter the room. I knew that they were going to follow me and cause trouble. I started walking quickly through the chamber. I walked quickly into and through the central chamber as well, still hearing the boys in pursuit.

This chamber was also dimly lit, with red stone floors and walls. The front of the chamber was a floor, leading up to a few short steps, in a convex half-oval that rose to a short "stage." The statue stood on the stage, against the wall. It was of white stone, not as large as I had expected, maybe twice life-size.

I hurried toward the left chamber. I may have thought my family was outside the chamber, and now that I had been through the chambers, I could take my family safely through them.

(At this point I got off the train. I resumed entering my dream in my paper journal at 9 PM, heading back to Brooklyn via the B-train, after work.)

But I was also still trying to get away from the boys who were following me. Upon entering the left chamber, I found myself in a different space. I was in some place like a mall. The mall's walls seemed black, like the walls of a stage, and the building was enormous, tall, like the "atrium" in the Denver Museum of Natural History (the last time I was there, years ago) or the atrium in the Sony Building.

The atrium seemed to have a balcony running along its walls. The barriers of the balcony were clear, clean glass, railed with chrome rails which gleamed with clean, white light.

I walked onto a downward escalator. The escalator was tall and steep. It was also gleamingly clean. It went toward some kind of exit with which I felt familiar. I was trying desperately to get to that exit, for some reason that I can't remember.

I heard the boys behind me, possibly a couple of stories up from where I had gotten onto the escalator. The boys were taunting me, talking as if they were going to follow me, but also a if I were kind of a doofus and not worth following, because I didn't know where I was going.

The escalator now became more like steps, which became increasingly more difficult to traverse, as if they were getting more and more cluttered with objects like chrome bars and rails.

Eventually there were no stairs. I was jangling almost vertically downward through a frame or three-dimensional lattice of chrome bars. I seemed occasionally to have opened and gone through doors within this 3-D lattice, although much of it seemed to be just empty space, like the skeletal model of a molecule.

I got afraid, wondering whether I would eventually just fall down out of the lattice. But soon I found myself before  door like a fire escape. I opened the door -- just a crack -- it was hard to push in, like there was a strong, elastic, hydraulic resistance on the other side. Pushing in more and more, I managed to be able to stick my head in

The space beyond looked like a fire escape stairwell, with white, fluorescent light and white-painted concrete walls. But something like an IV stand was tipping before my face just beyond the door.

A little plastic item attached to a plastic tube was most plain to my vision. The item was clearish, maybe two inches long, with four cylinders, all draining into (or being drawn from?) the clearish, plastic tube. The device and the tube were filled with blood.

I felt like this was a danger sign, that it meant this area was contaminated. But for some reason I felt like this was where I needed to be. I pushed open the door. Some blood (from the device?) spurted into my face, possibly into my mouth.

I now noticed that there were all kinds of hospital equipment and furnishings strewn about in this stairwell. The majority of them either contained or were dirtied with blood. I walked up the stairs, curving counter-clockwise as I ascended each flight. The walls seemed to have been written on with blood and black markings. More contaminated items lay in my path.

I myself seemed to be dirtied with blood, as well. My mouth was dripping, full of blood, and my skin was smeared with blood.

I finally came to a landing (as large as a large room, I believe) that was overwhelmingly filled with bloody hospital equipment. I myself felt sick, with the contamination of all this blood.

Dream #3

I was in a house which may have been my great grandmother's house. My sister had gone off by herself into a room just off from the living room. She sat with her back against the front of a chest, which seemed to be the "echo" of an easily visible chest (from my vantage point as I stood before my sister) in the living room.

My sister was upset, possibly that nobody believed her about something. It may just have been I who didn't believe her. There were some other people in the living room. The Mariah Carey song "Love Takes Time" came on. I could hear it palpably in my ears. My sister and I began singing along with it.