(10/19/04) information for the monk

(Dream entered in daytime paper journal only. No time/place info given for entry.)

Dream 1

I was before a door at some nice house with a garden. I had some sheet of paper, some pad of paper, or some small electronic device that stored information. I was here to give up this information to a monk and to become the monk's student.

I knocked on the door and then knelt down with my head all the way to the ground, i.e.

A monk in a yellow (?) robe opened the door. He was kind of surprised because I was so close to the door. I think he had a hard time getting out. I stood up and backed away from the door.

This was the back door, I think. I may have stood by a car. But now I was either by the front door or else another man had come around from the front door. He was like Bill in Kill Bill except he had darker skin and brown hair. He asked me for the information. But I wouldn't give it to him.

Somehow we both were in the house by means of the front door. I don't know why I was there with him. Two black women in dressy casual outfits stood against the wall to my right as I faced the door. The man stood to the left of the door, which was near the right corner.

The concern had possibly strayed from the information. Now the man began insulting the two ladies, implying they were sluts. The girls didn't react too overtly. They kind of just stood there and looked down or over a little. They didn't seem too bothered. But I thought I should stand up for them anyway. The man was trying to dissolve my personal boundaries and prove me a coward. I told him to leave the girls alone.

He came at me with a few fighting moves which I somehow avoided. He said something like, "You're no match for me. Don't give me shit for doing what I want to do."

I yelled something insulting at him. he turned around and said something like "So you need a reason to leave me alone? Here, I'll throw you a few."

He whirled toward me in a smooth fury of spinning kicks and punches. Somehow I defended myself against each blow, deflecting the blows instead of avoiding them. The man stopped, to see if I was afraid yet. I wasn't afraid. I was calmly pleased. But I suddenly became convinced I couldn't do again what I had just done and that I certainly could not throw out my blows myself. I was convinced I would fuck up pretty soon.

(7/7/08) the last bit of cornstalks

(Entered in paper journal at 6:15 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn into Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a house (possibly like my mom's friend TH's house in Arvada, Colorado) with a person (woman?) r a couple of people. I was acting like an interviewer for a job. Someone, possibly my boss BS, walked in through the front door. I walked through a series of rooms to meet him, continuing to make some speech the whole time like I was an interviewer.

BS and someone else and I were all in a living room like at my great-grandmother's house. BS and the other person may have been sitting on a couch. I may have been disembodied, floating over and just behind them. The people were talking about the characteristics of the person we had been interviewing.

My vision shifted to a view of a car driving through the desert. BS (apparently still sitting on the couch) asked, "You haven't heard anything from DE" (my co-worker and teammate on BS' team) "on whether he plans to leave the company, have you?"

I mumbled, "No..." even though I had heard something like that.

The view of the desert road became red. The land on the side of the road was regularly dotted with roads that sat just on the surface.

I was now a person like Uma Thurman's The Bride in the movie Kill Bill. I stood before a cornfield on a steep hill. The cornfield was just a strip of land on the hill, not the whole hill. Some people like criminals were hiding in the cornfield. I had to get to them. They were Mexican.

The cornfield was being erased, almost like it had been mown down in patches without my having been aware of it. From still-standing patches beside the now cleared areas, the "criminals" would run out, running down and beyond the hill.

The soil was brown and rich. The "cornstalks" were more like shrubs: tangled and knotty, almost root-like or wooden near their bases.

Now the cornfield was in a huge room with white or silver walls. I/The Bride was eating the final space (like a very back row) of cornstalks away, with my bare teeth, in huge, absurd bites, like I was a lawnmower or a tractor. The rest of the field was now clean soil.

Suddenly I heard the voice of a person (like David Carradine?) say that he was somewhere nearby. The person may have said that I shouldn't put the effort into trying to find him. I had a feeling that he was in the last bit of cornstalks that I hadn't cleared away yet.

(5/13/09) the uncertain threat; bitter candy

(Entered in paper journal at 7:15 AM at my house in Brooklyn. It's also interesting to note that the dream journal entry following this one was listed as 5/13/09 as well. I'm not sure whether it was a mistake, or whether I'd remembered another couple dreams later on.)

Dream #1

I was in a small movie theater, probably with a couple of my family members, in particular, I believe, my oldest nephew and my brother. The theater felt cramped, almost seatless, as well, as if we all sat on blankets or makeshift chairs. An older, tallish, but flabby, bald man, may have been in charge of the movie projector. The old man was getting ready to play, for my personal enjoyment, the movie Kill Bill.

The movie now started. I hoped everybody else would like it as much as I did. It now seemed like the movie had already been started, like we had previously seen the movie to a previous point: a scene where the David Carradine character had been talking (at a campfire at night?) with Uma Thurman; but that we now had to start the movie from the very beginning.

The scene we had just been watching didn't even seem familiar to me. But I thought if we watched the movie from the beginning I might be able to remember having seen the scene (in my previous viewings of the movie) by the time we got back to it.

But the movie started differently than I remembered. There was a bright opening scene of blue sky with a row of white, lotus-like flowers trailing downward into the distance to the right. The whole view was very overexposed and very colorful. There was a scene after the lotus scene which was dark, probably with some faces slightly fading into view.

This still didn't seem to me like the Kill Bill I could remember, but at least I could now start to remember how to anticipate the plot to this movie. It had something to do with a large group of people who were out to kill the Uma Thurman character. The people were like zombies.

I was in a room. There might have been a man in the room with me at first. But now the man was gone. The room was connected to another room. A hallway joined the two rooms from the outside. The rooms were doth dim, as if lit only by a dim night-light. The hallway was unlit and was very dim.

Both rooms were strewn with fabric, mostly blankets, possibly also clothes.The left room had an old TV, on a TV tray, standing at a crooked angle near the middle of the room.

At first there had been an atmosphere of a dangerous presence, as if the attackers were coming, it was known, and some kind of solid action could be taken against them. But when I (as the Uma Thurman character?) found myself alone in the room, the threat itself became very abstract or ethereal. It was like the attackers lurked in the shadows at the edge of the hallways, or as if the weren't really there right now, but that they would materialize and attack me when I least expected it.

I (or Uma?) began running around in the circle of the two rooms and hallway, possibly determined to fight if need be, but outwardly a frightened wreck, with tears streaming down my face, and crying out to my friends who had disappeared. I didn't want the zombies to approach. But, I thought, the only thing that would drive them off would be a living presence.

I didn't think anybody was around. But I still had the TV. I turned on the TV. The screen blared a bright blue, and a news show came on. I immediately felt comforted, just to have a human presence in the house again.

I was in a similar room. It was morning. There were windows on all the walls, and a glass door on the wall to my right, all revealing a chilly, grey morning of misty clouds outside.

A woman like a nurse or a police officer stood behind a rocking chair in which sat a tall, heavyset woman with shoulder-length, curly black-brown hair, smoke-colored eyeglasses, wearing a grey tweed sport coat and pale blue jeans. The woman at the rocking chair may also have had some blankets on her lap.

At the feet of the woman at the rocking chair lay another woman (the lying woman's head at the rocking woman's feet). The lying woman was short, stocky, with long hair, pale skin and glasses. She was mostly covered over with blankets. I was likely myself at this point.

The nurse, who was probably short, stout, and squarish-bodied, said, "Well... gentlemen, I'll be off then. Have a good morning." She then left.

I knew the nurse had called us all gentlemen out of uncertainty. In the nurses eyes, the two women had such a masculine appearance that the nurse thought they might have wanted to be thought of as men.

I thought of calling after the nurse, "Hey! These are women!" But then I thought it didn't really matter much. The women seemed fine, and the nurse, who looked rather mannish herself, had a good heart.

I now had a slightly clearer view of the woman lying under the blankets. It was an old boss of mine, JK, from an Americorps program I worked on in 2005. I called to JK a couple times, but she didn't seem to wake up. The rocking-chair woman told me, "She's very weak. She's resting to build back her strength."

But now JK seemed to be waking up. I knelt before her. JK turned her face to me. JK's face was bloody inside, like her flesh was just a thin membrane underneath which a thin sheet of blood had pooled. JK seemed a little forgetful, but she seemed to recognize me. We may have spoken a few words back and forth, possibly about JK's injury.

Dream #2

I was in a wide, sparse living room with my girlfriend H. The walls were thin and white. The place was lit with a stark, cold, incandescent light. The floors were carpeted, probably with a tight, dirtyish, dark grey carpet. H sat at a desk against the back wall. I sat on the floor, to H's left, almost all the way on the other end of the room. Behind me may have been some furniture, like an entertainment center or a buffet.

H started talking to me about some stuff she had gotten. She then pulled out a white, plastic bag which had a white box of sesame seed candies in it. H offered me some. The candies sounded good, and I was about to take some.

But before I could take a candy, H told me about how she had gotten these at a party she had gone to the night before. She had told me about this party before. She hadn't really felt like going. At that time she had been thinking of inviting me. But then she told me she wasn't going to go. But she had gone, after all, and she hadn't invited me.

H now told me how she had met her female friend K at the party. H looked at me a little weird. I understood what had happened. H hadn't invited me because she had wanted to meet K at the party by herself. I understood that H was having a romantic relationship with K, and that she didn't want to tell me.

I stood up and said, "Well, I'm getting out of here."

H may have tried to protest my leaving, but I didn't listen. I had an image of the sesame candy in my mind: a long "bar" of sesame seeds caramelized together, broken into rectangles, which were themselves bisected into triangles. I thought about what it would be like to break off a triangle and eat it.