(Dreams only entered in daytime paper journal. No time/place info.)
Dream 1
Don't remember the beginning, except that for some reason I was in an unkempt garden, or, rather, a wild garden, with my brother. We were putting up or pulling down something.
At some point my brother pointed up a stairway either three hundred feet or three hundred steps tall. It was blue-painted, thin metal, and it curved in a spiral. Its landing had no floor attached to it. It was a shaky stairway (I may have called it a ladder). I was afraid to go up it, and I told my brother so.
Then -- (after what?) -- I was climbing up a white-barked "tree" no larger than one inch in diameter. I called the "tree" a rose. It was covered in thorns both long (maybe three inches) and short (maybe one-eighth inch). I may have been climbing up this "rose" in order to take something off its top, which, oddly enough, was a small cone of yellowing leafs. I may have been climbing up the tree to pull or cut the tree down.
But as I continued climbing up the tree I felt the tree being cut down or rotting away from the bottom up, as if the top parts of the tree floated in the air while the lower parts were cut away, rotted and fell away, and/or disappeared altogether. But I knew the top parts, where I was, would fall, straight to the hard ground, as soon as there was no more tree left beneath them, possibly because of my weight.
I looked to my left and saw the stairway beside me. For a moment I was no longer filled with the fear of falling. Instead I was filled with a sense of pride and accomplishment. I had climbed all the way up this "rose," which was just as flimsy as, if not flimsier than, the stairway, and had attained a height of three hundred feet/steps without even having noticed it.
I now felt-saw the last bit of "trunk" rot and fall away beneath me (it looked like a splintered chair leg). Instead of holding onto the "rose" top and falling with it, though, I let go and let myself alone fall to the ground. I assume the "rose" top thus stayed floating in the air.
I myself discovered (guess what...) that I could control my rate of descent. I floated down to the ground, possibly landing on a patch of grass. I looked around and was in awe of the beauty of this wild garden. My mother may have been somewhere.
Dream 2
I was in some dark place. Something may have happened before, but I don't don't remember. In this dark place, which now feels like a tent, I was convinced I had died. I walked, or, rather, crawled, through an opening into an immense, lonely field of grass. I was on a long, wide slope, at the top of which may have been a tree, on the far left side. It was a mostly clear, sunny day.
I was still convinced that I was dead, that I had come into the land of the dead. But I moved around very slowly, as I move when I become aware that I'm dreaming. I saw patches of watery-yellow leafs in the grass, like patches of reverse shadows passing over the green. I told myself, So this is what it's like in the land of the dead. I have a lot to learn here, too.
But then I remembered (!) having seen a lawn in Albuquerque with this same patterning of grass. I tried thinking back to that lawn to remember exactly how it was. Slowly my feeling of being in the land of the dead dawned into a realization that I was actually dreaming.
I calmed myself down as soon as I realized I was dreaming. But I wasn't fully aware of things, not enough to get myself out of an overall daydream-like state. I walked over to a wide, yellow patch of grass and bent down to it, almost laying down on it.
I saw that in between the yellow blades were smallish clusters of old flowers with no petals. The heads were softly greenish-grey. I though to myself, This is what causes the patches to appear yellow -- these petal-less, yellowy flower-heads.
Dream 3
I stood behind a thin barrier erected between the sidewalk and a street. It was morning, kind of cool, very sunny, although everything had a low-sun, reddish-orange tint to it. The street was kind of busy. I waited for (my bosses for my present job) RN and A to show up across the street so I could help them unload things.
I kind of looked away for a second. When I looked back across the street I saw RN and A, each already carrying three or four boxes in each hand, already walking down the sidewalk. I wondered how I could have missed them so completely.
I was now in a camper trailer in the dark. I might have been in a bed. I don't really know. All I know is there was a barrier like a kitchen counter around with RN and A walked, going past me and to the front door.
RN said, "Let's get out of here. This guy is so lazy. He'll never get to work." I couldn't figure out why he'd say that. I just wasn't even aware that RN and A had gotten here yet.
I stood up to go out the door after them. I could feel-see them outside the trailer, walking to a cargo trailer with empty boxes in their hands. They had already started working, and here I was, doing nothing. I was now standing right by the open door. The light outside kept shifting between day and night and early morning. I didn't go outside. I stood in front of an oven.
My sister was behind me, holding a baby in a long blanket. She held it against her so that it was looking over her right shoulder. She was telling me something abut my dad. My dad didn't like the Spanish language or refused to speak it or even works that kind of found their way into the Spanish language. This was something of an annoyance as my sister's baby was Spanish in some way.
My dad would often say "esti" for "this," which bugged my sister, because she said it should have been something else in Spanish, but that Dad was using a Spanish-Italian hybrid word. He also used the word "skepti," the English for which I don't remember now.
I listened to my sister's story, laughed, and would interject things like, "What? He said that?" for a little while as I kept fixed on the stove and the door, wanting to get to work. It seems like a pot of food or perhaps just a pile of food kept appearing and vanishing.
At some point I walked out the door and down the steps. It was daylight. My sister followed me to the doorway and stood in it, continuing to tell me about Dad. It was like she was going on and on in an attempt to make some complete circuit of her argument, but she couldn't find the connections, so she had to keep going.
But I had to leave to get to work. My sister was still talking as I started to walk away. But she was also not talking. But also something like a deep, phantom-like part of her spoke in a demanding voice, "Well, I'll show you what being ungrateful gets you. You're in trouble."
Showing posts with label land of the dead. Show all posts
Showing posts with label land of the dead. Show all posts
Saturday, March 25, 2017
Sunday, November 18, 2012
(5/25/09) damaged gift; man-eating bug; mexican gunmen; grandpa's dazed spirit
Dream #1
I stood before a large house, like the house my family lived in with my mom's boyfriend when I was nine years old (we called this house the "mansion" because it was bigger than any place we'd lived in before -- or after!). It was either early morning or early evening, and the sky was dark.
I walked into the house. I stood in a dark room just inside the doorway. The room was shallow, but wide, almost like a "covered porch" might be. The room opened to what looked like a small, run-down kitchen or dining room or pantry area. A light was on in the kitchen. The entry room had no light. It was very dark, as if the kitchen's light couldn't even penetrate the room.
I stood on or just behind the threshold between rooms. To my left was a wall, behind which I may have half-hidden. My old co-worker JR stood in the kitchen. I held up a bench, which I was giving to someone from the job I'd just gotten let go from as a gift. When I showed it to JR, he just chuckled to himself, as if I was silly to think I could give something like that as a gift. The sentiment, JR implied, was so half-hearted.
I took a look at the bench. It was about six feet long. It looked like it was made out of material that would usually go into making a cheap office desk: veneered plyboard, chromed metal, and some thin, black metal or plastic for legs.
But now I noticed (I held the bench upside-down and diagonally, so that an end was near my head) that the right leg of the bench (the end near my face) was missing. I realized I was about to give someone a broken bench as a gift. I also felt like I was in trouble: JR would definitely spread a bad word about me because of what I'd done.
I walked away from the kitchen (and possibly out of the house altogether). I thought of giving another co-worker, BT, a call on my cellphone, to put in a few kind words and show myself as being a good person, in hopes that my own good words could buffer opinion against the words of bad opinion that JR, I feared, would soon be sending out.
Dream #2
I was in an office with a man and a woman. The man was in a managerial position. The woman and I were about on the same level professionally. We all stood in a thin hallway. All around us were walls the bottom half of which were wall and the top half of which were window-walls, opening to views of "offices."
The views may sometimes have been of areas like manufacturing areas or loading areas. The areas looked empty, porbably shut down, as if the working shifts were through for the day.
The man then pointed out a couple "offices" which were more like strange areas full of canisters with no lids. The tops of the canisters were covered with a white, thin, softish, plastic material, under which things, which were apparently alive, were moving, like piles of worms. Either the man said or I understood that the things in these canisters would probably devour a human being if one fell into their environment.
The three of us stepped outside the office building, almost unintentionally, as if the momentum of our movement down the small hallway couldn't be stopped. We stood outside, by a fire escape door, on wooden landing at the top of a wooden staircase. It was night.
As if realizing that we had come outside, we walked back into the building through the door, which was still open. The man walked far ahead of the woman and me. The woman walked a few steps ahead of me.
I looked into another "office." This was also a storage area of canisters. The canisters in this room had no lids or tops at all. There were organisms in these canisters like snake-sized meal worms. They had a brownish-red color, very dry and rough looking.
I was slightly disappointed. I thought that being eaten by these organisms would be far less "smooth" (and, thus, far less enjoyable) than being eaten by the organisms under the white covers.
But then it occurred to me that the organisms under the white covers might be the same as these organisms, or even, that it was possible that the canisters with the white tops no longer existed. I thought, Then if one is going to be devoured, it would have to be by these organisms. This seemed awfully disappointing to me.
But, I thought to myself, I probably won't be devoured. The man, I now recalled, had mentioned his disappointment with the woman's job performance. Whoever performed poorly would likely be the one to get eaten. So I assumed the woman would be eaten. I was relieved.
But I also felt bad. How petty of me! I didn't just feel relieved: I felt smugly satisfied to think of the woman being eaten. I even thought, with pleasure, of her falling down into the room of open canisters.
Dream #3
I stood out in an open area. It was a slightly hazy, blue day, with the sun glowing white in the sky. The land was mostly barren, like a dirt parking lot, except with thin patches of small grass and weeds. I walked to the foot of a hill which was all of barren, tan soil. I looked up the hill. Near the crest were a few smallish, sandstone-like rock formations, one of which was like a natural arch.
Two Mexican men stood near the rock formations. Both looked like Indians: they had coppery-tan skin, were shortish and stoutish, and they wore blue jeans and t-shirts. The man on the left stood near the natural arch. He had a squarish face and hair waving down to just below his shoulders. He wore a tight, nicely colored, but faded, purple t-shirt.
I had probably planned to climb the hill. But when the two men noticed me, they sent out a definite signal that they didn't want me around, or even looking at them. They were calm and composed, but something in their body language indicated that they were already harboring violent intentions toward me. I turned and walked away from the hill.
I stood now in an area with a field-office trailer on my left side and a freight trailer or shed-trailer on my right side. A few other people stood around me. They were dumpy-looking, official-looking workers.
The Mexican men on the hill could still see me easily. I knew they were planning on opening fire on me soon. I was trying to get out of their sight, hoping that they would forget about me if I stayed out of sight and out of attention long enough. I decided to hide behind the shed-trailer, which was now more like a simple wall of thick, corrugated metal, probably painted grey-white.
But as I hid, one of the workers started talking to me. He stood before/beside the shed-trailer, so that he was in plain view of the Mexican men. I thought, His talking like that is only going to keep the Mexican men aware of my presence. Then soon they'll open fire.
But, I thought, relieved, they'd probably open fire on the worker instead of me, just hoping that they'd be able to attack somebody. I felt ashamed about this, but I almost felt a grimy pleasure to think of the worker being shot full of holes instead of me. Finally, I thought, I'd see a sucker get what was due to him.
Dream #4
I stood in a busy room. The room was full of activity, people rushing around, taking care of business. I was and was not in the room. It was like I was watching a past that someone, or some television show, was telling me about.
The room was tall, with pumpkin-colored walls. There were windows high up on the walls, letting in plenty of grey-white daylight, although incandescent lights also lit the room. The room was a tall, but narrow square. It was probably a room in some kind of TV studio. I stood near one wall. I saw a doorway on the opposite wall and a doorway on the wall to my right. The doorway to my right was possibly ten or twelve feet tall.
I suddenly saw my maternal grandfather (who, in waking life, had died a little more than six months before this dream). He sat on the shoulders of a very thin, tall man. My grandpa looked like he did before he got cancer. But he was wearing a cowboy hat, which I don't remember him doing very often in waking life.
I "remembered," or heard a narrator say, that my grandfather had been a cast member of some local children's show in Colorado. He did this in addition to being some kind of executive businessman. His work on the TV show was something like a charitable activity. He did it for free. The TV show itself was somehow a means of gathering funds for a charity. Nevertheless, my grandfather was something of a star among the local children who watched the show.
This whole scene had been "shown" to me to not only to prove that my grandfather had been a lot more professionally active than I had known or would acknowledge, but also to illustrate that he was more active in the community, did more things with his free time, cared about people more, and had more artistic ability, than I had ever acknowledged.
My grandfather had a really vacant, smiling look on his face, as if he were blissfully close to being brain dead. I realized my grandpa's role in the show had been that of a gentle, good-natured, stupid clown-villain character. But my grandpa's vacant expression was too genuine. It didn't look like he was acting. It looked like this stupor was his real condition.
As part of the comic act, though none of this was being filmed -- or even on stage! -- the tall man walked through the doorway, and my grandpa, just tall enough, knocked his head softly (although it was supposed to be perceived as a rough bump) against the top of the doorway. The tall man then backed up and gave my grandfather a few seconds to utter his catch phrase, which, I knew, was, "I'll get you yet!"
But my grandpa said the catch phrase very softly and vacantly, half like he was playing a gentle character, but half like he no longer had enough brain power to say anything with any sort of emotion or character. The tall man then walked my grandfather through the door without my grandfather knocking his head against the doorway-top.
I saw my grandfather a few moments later. He was walking back into the room I stood in. He walked with a group of businessmen who were all about his age, i.e. around seventy years old. My grandpa was obviously a part of the group, and he walked within the group. But he wasn't attending to the group at all: his eyes drifted off vacantly into space. He still wore a gentle, brainless smile, partly like he was playing his clown role and partly like he was genuinely brainless. I felt very uneasy watching him.
I stood before a large house, like the house my family lived in with my mom's boyfriend when I was nine years old (we called this house the "mansion" because it was bigger than any place we'd lived in before -- or after!). It was either early morning or early evening, and the sky was dark.
I walked into the house. I stood in a dark room just inside the doorway. The room was shallow, but wide, almost like a "covered porch" might be. The room opened to what looked like a small, run-down kitchen or dining room or pantry area. A light was on in the kitchen. The entry room had no light. It was very dark, as if the kitchen's light couldn't even penetrate the room.
I stood on or just behind the threshold between rooms. To my left was a wall, behind which I may have half-hidden. My old co-worker JR stood in the kitchen. I held up a bench, which I was giving to someone from the job I'd just gotten let go from as a gift. When I showed it to JR, he just chuckled to himself, as if I was silly to think I could give something like that as a gift. The sentiment, JR implied, was so half-hearted.
I took a look at the bench. It was about six feet long. It looked like it was made out of material that would usually go into making a cheap office desk: veneered plyboard, chromed metal, and some thin, black metal or plastic for legs.
But now I noticed (I held the bench upside-down and diagonally, so that an end was near my head) that the right leg of the bench (the end near my face) was missing. I realized I was about to give someone a broken bench as a gift. I also felt like I was in trouble: JR would definitely spread a bad word about me because of what I'd done.
I walked away from the kitchen (and possibly out of the house altogether). I thought of giving another co-worker, BT, a call on my cellphone, to put in a few kind words and show myself as being a good person, in hopes that my own good words could buffer opinion against the words of bad opinion that JR, I feared, would soon be sending out.
Dream #2
I was in an office with a man and a woman. The man was in a managerial position. The woman and I were about on the same level professionally. We all stood in a thin hallway. All around us were walls the bottom half of which were wall and the top half of which were window-walls, opening to views of "offices."
The views may sometimes have been of areas like manufacturing areas or loading areas. The areas looked empty, porbably shut down, as if the working shifts were through for the day.
The man then pointed out a couple "offices" which were more like strange areas full of canisters with no lids. The tops of the canisters were covered with a white, thin, softish, plastic material, under which things, which were apparently alive, were moving, like piles of worms. Either the man said or I understood that the things in these canisters would probably devour a human being if one fell into their environment.
The three of us stepped outside the office building, almost unintentionally, as if the momentum of our movement down the small hallway couldn't be stopped. We stood outside, by a fire escape door, on wooden landing at the top of a wooden staircase. It was night.
As if realizing that we had come outside, we walked back into the building through the door, which was still open. The man walked far ahead of the woman and me. The woman walked a few steps ahead of me.
I looked into another "office." This was also a storage area of canisters. The canisters in this room had no lids or tops at all. There were organisms in these canisters like snake-sized meal worms. They had a brownish-red color, very dry and rough looking.
I was slightly disappointed. I thought that being eaten by these organisms would be far less "smooth" (and, thus, far less enjoyable) than being eaten by the organisms under the white covers.
But then it occurred to me that the organisms under the white covers might be the same as these organisms, or even, that it was possible that the canisters with the white tops no longer existed. I thought, Then if one is going to be devoured, it would have to be by these organisms. This seemed awfully disappointing to me.
But, I thought to myself, I probably won't be devoured. The man, I now recalled, had mentioned his disappointment with the woman's job performance. Whoever performed poorly would likely be the one to get eaten. So I assumed the woman would be eaten. I was relieved.
But I also felt bad. How petty of me! I didn't just feel relieved: I felt smugly satisfied to think of the woman being eaten. I even thought, with pleasure, of her falling down into the room of open canisters.
Dream #3
I stood out in an open area. It was a slightly hazy, blue day, with the sun glowing white in the sky. The land was mostly barren, like a dirt parking lot, except with thin patches of small grass and weeds. I walked to the foot of a hill which was all of barren, tan soil. I looked up the hill. Near the crest were a few smallish, sandstone-like rock formations, one of which was like a natural arch.
Two Mexican men stood near the rock formations. Both looked like Indians: they had coppery-tan skin, were shortish and stoutish, and they wore blue jeans and t-shirts. The man on the left stood near the natural arch. He had a squarish face and hair waving down to just below his shoulders. He wore a tight, nicely colored, but faded, purple t-shirt.
I had probably planned to climb the hill. But when the two men noticed me, they sent out a definite signal that they didn't want me around, or even looking at them. They were calm and composed, but something in their body language indicated that they were already harboring violent intentions toward me. I turned and walked away from the hill.
I stood now in an area with a field-office trailer on my left side and a freight trailer or shed-trailer on my right side. A few other people stood around me. They were dumpy-looking, official-looking workers.
The Mexican men on the hill could still see me easily. I knew they were planning on opening fire on me soon. I was trying to get out of their sight, hoping that they would forget about me if I stayed out of sight and out of attention long enough. I decided to hide behind the shed-trailer, which was now more like a simple wall of thick, corrugated metal, probably painted grey-white.
But as I hid, one of the workers started talking to me. He stood before/beside the shed-trailer, so that he was in plain view of the Mexican men. I thought, His talking like that is only going to keep the Mexican men aware of my presence. Then soon they'll open fire.
But, I thought, relieved, they'd probably open fire on the worker instead of me, just hoping that they'd be able to attack somebody. I felt ashamed about this, but I almost felt a grimy pleasure to think of the worker being shot full of holes instead of me. Finally, I thought, I'd see a sucker get what was due to him.
Dream #4
I stood in a busy room. The room was full of activity, people rushing around, taking care of business. I was and was not in the room. It was like I was watching a past that someone, or some television show, was telling me about.
The room was tall, with pumpkin-colored walls. There were windows high up on the walls, letting in plenty of grey-white daylight, although incandescent lights also lit the room. The room was a tall, but narrow square. It was probably a room in some kind of TV studio. I stood near one wall. I saw a doorway on the opposite wall and a doorway on the wall to my right. The doorway to my right was possibly ten or twelve feet tall.
I suddenly saw my maternal grandfather (who, in waking life, had died a little more than six months before this dream). He sat on the shoulders of a very thin, tall man. My grandpa looked like he did before he got cancer. But he was wearing a cowboy hat, which I don't remember him doing very often in waking life.
I "remembered," or heard a narrator say, that my grandfather had been a cast member of some local children's show in Colorado. He did this in addition to being some kind of executive businessman. His work on the TV show was something like a charitable activity. He did it for free. The TV show itself was somehow a means of gathering funds for a charity. Nevertheless, my grandfather was something of a star among the local children who watched the show.
This whole scene had been "shown" to me to not only to prove that my grandfather had been a lot more professionally active than I had known or would acknowledge, but also to illustrate that he was more active in the community, did more things with his free time, cared about people more, and had more artistic ability, than I had ever acknowledged.
My grandfather had a really vacant, smiling look on his face, as if he were blissfully close to being brain dead. I realized my grandpa's role in the show had been that of a gentle, good-natured, stupid clown-villain character. But my grandpa's vacant expression was too genuine. It didn't look like he was acting. It looked like this stupor was his real condition.
As part of the comic act, though none of this was being filmed -- or even on stage! -- the tall man walked through the doorway, and my grandpa, just tall enough, knocked his head softly (although it was supposed to be perceived as a rough bump) against the top of the doorway. The tall man then backed up and gave my grandfather a few seconds to utter his catch phrase, which, I knew, was, "I'll get you yet!"
But my grandpa said the catch phrase very softly and vacantly, half like he was playing a gentle character, but half like he no longer had enough brain power to say anything with any sort of emotion or character. The tall man then walked my grandfather through the door without my grandfather knocking his head against the doorway-top.
I saw my grandfather a few moments later. He was walking back into the room I stood in. He walked with a group of businessmen who were all about his age, i.e. around seventy years old. My grandpa was obviously a part of the group, and he walked within the group. But he wasn't attending to the group at all: his eyes drifted off vacantly into space. He still wore a gentle, brainless smile, partly like he was playing his clown role and partly like he was genuinely brainless. I felt very uneasy watching him.
Monday, November 12, 2012
(10/1/09) grandpa visits from beyond; floating head art gallery
(Entered in paper journal at 7:45 AM at Sit & Wonder cafe in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I walked down into a dark basement and into a bathroom. The basement itself was dirty, as if long unused, and almost completely dark. I was afraid to go in, but I did, closing the door.
My vision was, at first, all purple-white eye-static color in the dark. Then I saw or imagined a stretched-out sideways version of a classic grey alien's face, as if the alien were lurking in the shower to capture me.
But my vision cleared, and I actually could see some of the bathroom, as if it were lit by faint moonlight pouring in from some distant window. As I went to the bathroom I thought that, just beyond the wall against which the toilet backed (this wall now no more, apparently, than a couple of plyboards slapped up so on layered over the other), there was a room or a deeper basement, unfinished, skeletally "divided" into rooms, which was turned into a "classroom," -- or, basically, just a small, old school desk.
This place, I knew, was where my brother studied, my mother having taken my brother out of school. (I saw an image of my brother crouching down before a wind of my old high school building.) I thought that something seemed cruel about pulling my brother out of school. It was cruel the way my mother locked my brother so far away from people.
I was now in an enormous living room. The windows let in grey light, probably from a rainy day outside. I stood between a couch (of maroon leather?) and a small, wide table with a television on it. The carpet was pale grey. The living room seemed to stretch on, at least fifty feet on each side.
The television showed a rainy scene in front of a church in Venice (?). The TV announcer, probably a woman, was talking about the rain, but she might also have been mentioning a service at the church, possibly a funeral.
I now stood in a hallway or foyer area. The walls were almost all made of glass, giving me a pretty full view to the rainy area (Venice?) outside, although there were some structures, columns or wall, made of pink stones, obstructing my view.
I saw, somehow framed by the metallic skeleton of beams holding up the wide, glass panes, a very modern-looking, American-style church. The front of the church was A-shaped, made of gold-yellow bricks. It had a large circle of stained glass in the center, near the top, with an A-shape of arched-rectangle windows tapering down under that. I thought of the church as a Methodist church.
Just to the left of that church I could see the corner of another red-stone church, which was Catholic and, it seemed, more of the traditional Venetian style (?). I knew tha tthis area of Venice had nothing but churches all over the place.
(The area felt to me like an outskirts of the Denver suburbs, just a couple wide streets away from a main highway.)
To my right, the wall before me all red stone, was a doorway with a heavy wood (?) door open just a little. I assumed that beyond the door was a sanctuary. A priest (?) in a black robe with a white collar stood before the door. He may have told me that the event I had come for wasn't actually happening today. He then walked into the room and closed the door.
I now looked to my left. In another room that was all empty and walled and ceilinged with windows, stood my grandfather, who had died about a year previously in waking life. My grandfather had his hands clasped casually behind his back. He was looking out the windows. He turned away from the windows to face me.
He looked different. He was huge, at least six feet tall, and, proportionally, wider than he had been. His skin was patchy-dry and red-pink, like the skin of someone who smoked way too much. He had a strange bowl-cut of red-gold hair, which almost looked like a wig. He wore a beige-olive suit jacket and slacks and probably a deepish blue shirt and a tie.
He didn't look like he was completely alert mentally. But he recognized me and walked toward me. His eyes were almost vacant, like those of Frankenstein or a zombie. He may have been carrying an empty or almost empty, black duffel bag in his left arm. As he continued walking toward me he said, vacantly, "I've been meaning to ask you, Son, are you okay? Have you been having a rough year?"
My grandpa was now in front of me. But he kept trudging forward. I walked up to him and squeezed both of his hands, which were folded together before him, just above his bellybutton. I told him, "Yes. It's been a really awful year."
My grandpa kept walking forward, off to my right side. He said something like, "Well, keep up your hope."
My grandpa walked through the heavy, wooden door and let it close behind him. I understood that I wasn't supposed to follow my grandpa past the door. But, like I might doo when suddenly remembering I needed to tell one of my bosses something important, I rushed up to the door and pushed it open.
Before me was something like the living room of a Pennsylvania Dutch house. My grandpa was already across that "living room" and into an area like a largely columned, medieval interior (of a castle?) mixed with a parking lot.
I called out to my grandfather, telling him something like I loved him or I thought about him a lot. I couldn't stand thinking that our exchange had only been about how I had been doing. I wanted to let him know that I cared about him.
My grandpa turned toward me. In some sense or another it was like he stood outside, in a well-lit (with white, halogen lights) parking lot at night. He faced me at a quarter-turn, so that I saw him almost full on, but with a left profile. He looked normal now, not all distorted like he had looked before. He wore a beige, windbreaker-type jacket, khaki slacks, a blue, button-up shirt, and a hunched hat. He may have had his hands in his pockets.
As I spoke, two people sitting at a table in the Pennsylvania Dutch living room began speaking, telling me something about how the event I was looking for wouldn't happen today. The director for the event hadn't showed up. They kept on speaking so that my grandpa could never hear what I said.
It also seemed like there was a huge wind blocking my voice from my grandpa's ears. My grandpa kept calling out, "What? What?" Finally he said he couldn't hear me and that he had to go. He walked away into the night.
I looked down to the two people at the table. I was somehow concerned about them, now, and interested in what they were saying. They were two children, one boy and one girl. They wore stereotypical old-European peasant clothing. They sat at a thinnish, wooden table.
Both children had their faces painted. The boy, blonde, may have had his face painted a ghostly white with black circles for eyes. The girl, wearing a yellow kerchief over her hair, was made up so that she looked like wood. Her entire body, in fact, wherever it showed out from under her clothes, looked like the painted feathers on a wooden decoy duck. The girl also, when she first spoke, didn't even look like her lips were moving. But as I looked at her longer, her lips did begin to move.
(As I later reflected on this, I thought that my shock at how wooden the girl looked actually broke my connection with my grandpa, at which point my grandpa said he had to leave.)
I sat down at the table, across from the boy and girl, who sat side by side. The girl told me that she and the boy were here for something like an audition or else to be extras in a movie. But the director hadn't shown up and wasn't likely to show up.
A girl, who I now thought of as my grandpa, walked up to us from the nighttime parking lot as I told the boy and girl not to give up hope, that there was still time for the director to show up. The girl/my grandpa sat down to the wood-painted girl's right.
The new girl looked to be maybe in her late teens or early twenties. She was tallish and white with slightly tanned skin. She had blue eyes and chesnut brown hair pulled back and up into a ponytail She wore a green t-shirt, which she tucked into white jean-shorts that extended to just below her knees.
At some point I stopped thinking of the new girl as my grandfather and just started thinking of her as some girl I knew (?). The new girl was cheerful. She agreed with what I'd previously told the children, even bringing, I think, some evidence that the director was, in fact, coming.
Even thought I no longer thought of the new girl as my grandpa, I did know that she was, like my grandpa, dead, a ghost, if only because she'd come from the same place toward which my grandfather had departed. In fact, I thought of the girl now as the spirit of a boy who had died.
I could see the boy in the dark. He had longish, bowl-shaped, blonde hair, and he was wiry and thin, looking a little like a punk rocker in the toughness of his face. The boy seemed terribly upset. Then he was dead.
Now the new girl said she had come extremely prepared for the audition. She pulled out a notebook and pen and began writing down, in outline, all the steps she took to get ready for things, mostly to illustrate to the boy and girl, who were like good-hearted, but somewhat clueless, directionless, and unmotivated peasants from out of town, that they shouldn't give up hope and that they should keep fighting for their dreams.
As the new girl kept on writing her stuff out, I realized how incredibly bright and motivated she was. But he's dead!, I told myself. This boy's dead, and he's still working like this! It all seemed so absurd and yet so joyful that I suddenly broke out in a joyful cheer. I screamed, "Yeah! This girl! This is who I love!"
I stood and walked around the table to embrace the girl. I may have been able to embrace the girl. But I think something happened that made the girl inaccessible, as if she were walking back through the nighttime parking lot, up to a chain link fence, or possibly already beyond it.
Dream #2
I walked down a wide sidewalk in some part of a big city full of one-story warehouses. It was a cold afternoon. The sky was pale tan-blue, as if the sun were finally below the horizon.
I heard two men across the street. I recognized one voice as that of my old friend R. I looked across the wide, empty street to see two white men in grey, hooded sweatshirts, each man having the hood over his head.
The men spoke in a casual, sports-like, but also business-like, tone. But it sounded like they were talking about the next time they'd meet, to go out on a date, in somewhat sexual and romantic terms.
The building the men stood in front of, another one-story warehouse, was white, the paint job looking rough, like stucco, with a gate drawn entrance and the walls lightly misted in a pale, faded, blue graffiti.
I looked more attentively at the men and saw that one of them definitely was R. I called out to him. He at first looked shocked to see me, as if he'd been caught engaging in an extramarital affair. The other man had walked away casually.
I crossed the street to meet R, making nothing of the situation I'd just seen. R asked, a little suspiciously, what I was doing here. I couldn't quite place where "here" was. This place could have been Red Hook, Brooklyn. But it didn't seem quite right. We were at the top, it seemed, of a long, shallow hill. And I knew there were other long, shallow hills full of wide-stretched warehouse blocks like this beyond us.
But eventually, as we briskly walked toward the corner of this block, I settled on the idea that we were on Smith Street and Ninth Street in Brooklyn, I told R that it was coincidence that we met here. I always walked down around here.
We decided to cross the bridge together. Somehow, though, we walked on the suspension beams of the bridge. These beams must once have been copper: they were now corroded to a bright Statue of Liberty green. The beams, I saw, octagoned up, flat, and down, repeating along the length of the bridge.
I was surprised we had taken this route, but I knew R had chosen it as a test of how honest I was being regarding my accidentally having seen him in this neighborhood (and having caught him with that man).
As we ascended the bridge I looked out at the cityscape, seeing how monumental everything looked: we were so high; the bridge was so tall; the buildings and building tops so vast. I remembered that I'd had this kind of vision and feeling in dreams about riding trains across bridges in the city, but I couldn't remember the dreams I'd had.
R and I walked down one of the beam slopes and into an enormous, white-walled, wood floored loft. The walls were at least thirty feet tall. The room was probably one hundred by one hundred feet. The wall opposite us was one big window, looking out over the river.
All throughout the room, gigantic plastic (?) boards bearing the heads of famous Disney cartoon characters were suspended from the ceiling by white rope or thick, white twine, the heads suspended about three feet above the ground, and the heads themselves maybe six feet tall. There may also have been occasional abstract plastic models, also large, through the room. There were one or two other people in the room. One of the people was, I think, a curator.
We walked through the gallery of Disney heads. R asked me, as if, again, to test my innocence, what I knew about these cartoons, or how involved I felt with these cartoons. I may have said something.
We were now in a different exhibition room. The room was rectangular, versus square, with ceilings as high, white walls, and wood floors, maybe slightly smaller (or larger?) than the other room. Heads hung from the ceiling again, though not through the entire room -- just in the lower left area of the room; beyond the "quadrant proper," though, so that the display took up a little more than half the room.
The heads were also more varied, being not only Disney heads but also anime character heads and the heads of real-life celebrities, both "cartoonized" and taken from photographs of the celebrities. This room was dim, as if it were now dark outside (if this room even had a window), and as if the room were lit with just a few watery, incandescent lights, like track lighting from the ceiling.
R and I were alone at first, although eventually there may also have been an old man, who kind of looked like Orville Redenbacher, and who was the curator for this gallery.
I may have been kneeling or sittin gin front of one of the heads. I noticed that R, who stood to my left, was talking to a woman. I looked to my left to see R engaged in a flirting conversation with a woman who was in a place where a head had been.
The woman was cluttered around with a couple wooden boxes. The woman wore chunky, frizzy, knit wool clothes. She had frizzy, long, blonde hair, smooth, clear, tan skin, and pale, blue eyes. She may have been bound, either bound standing or bound to a chair. The woman's responses to R were cheerful, but almost robotic, as if the woman were a program, something made to be part of the exhibition.
I thought, R figured something out. He learned how to speak to the hanging heads and bring them to life. I thought I would try to do the same thing R had done.
I looked to the head before me, which was from a photograph (black and white, or sepia and white, the pixels (?) very visible with the enlargement of the photo) of a great composer. I asked the composer a question, like, "Can you speak, too?"
The composer, first as the large head, then as the composer "himself," standing before me, responded, "Of course I can speak to you, you idiot. What do you think I am? What do you think this is? You already saw him speaking to the girl? Why would you think I couldn't speak to you? God. Why'd I have to get stuck talking to you? I thought I'd get some good questions."
(Once the composer had become real, he took on the appearance of a white man with slightly pinkish skin. He was tall, thin, older, with a loosely wrinkled, but dignified face. He had a full head of pure white, soft hair, which glowed under the soft lights here. He wore a nice, grey suit with a white shirt and a tie.)
I was ashamed for having spoken to the composer. I looked away from the composer, at least hoping that I could console him for my dumb question by not talking to him at all.
Dream #1
I walked down into a dark basement and into a bathroom. The basement itself was dirty, as if long unused, and almost completely dark. I was afraid to go in, but I did, closing the door.
My vision was, at first, all purple-white eye-static color in the dark. Then I saw or imagined a stretched-out sideways version of a classic grey alien's face, as if the alien were lurking in the shower to capture me.
But my vision cleared, and I actually could see some of the bathroom, as if it were lit by faint moonlight pouring in from some distant window. As I went to the bathroom I thought that, just beyond the wall against which the toilet backed (this wall now no more, apparently, than a couple of plyboards slapped up so on layered over the other), there was a room or a deeper basement, unfinished, skeletally "divided" into rooms, which was turned into a "classroom," -- or, basically, just a small, old school desk.
This place, I knew, was where my brother studied, my mother having taken my brother out of school. (I saw an image of my brother crouching down before a wind of my old high school building.) I thought that something seemed cruel about pulling my brother out of school. It was cruel the way my mother locked my brother so far away from people.
I was now in an enormous living room. The windows let in grey light, probably from a rainy day outside. I stood between a couch (of maroon leather?) and a small, wide table with a television on it. The carpet was pale grey. The living room seemed to stretch on, at least fifty feet on each side.
The television showed a rainy scene in front of a church in Venice (?). The TV announcer, probably a woman, was talking about the rain, but she might also have been mentioning a service at the church, possibly a funeral.
I now stood in a hallway or foyer area. The walls were almost all made of glass, giving me a pretty full view to the rainy area (Venice?) outside, although there were some structures, columns or wall, made of pink stones, obstructing my view.
I saw, somehow framed by the metallic skeleton of beams holding up the wide, glass panes, a very modern-looking, American-style church. The front of the church was A-shaped, made of gold-yellow bricks. It had a large circle of stained glass in the center, near the top, with an A-shape of arched-rectangle windows tapering down under that. I thought of the church as a Methodist church.
Just to the left of that church I could see the corner of another red-stone church, which was Catholic and, it seemed, more of the traditional Venetian style (?). I knew tha tthis area of Venice had nothing but churches all over the place.
(The area felt to me like an outskirts of the Denver suburbs, just a couple wide streets away from a main highway.)
To my right, the wall before me all red stone, was a doorway with a heavy wood (?) door open just a little. I assumed that beyond the door was a sanctuary. A priest (?) in a black robe with a white collar stood before the door. He may have told me that the event I had come for wasn't actually happening today. He then walked into the room and closed the door.
I now looked to my left. In another room that was all empty and walled and ceilinged with windows, stood my grandfather, who had died about a year previously in waking life. My grandfather had his hands clasped casually behind his back. He was looking out the windows. He turned away from the windows to face me.
He looked different. He was huge, at least six feet tall, and, proportionally, wider than he had been. His skin was patchy-dry and red-pink, like the skin of someone who smoked way too much. He had a strange bowl-cut of red-gold hair, which almost looked like a wig. He wore a beige-olive suit jacket and slacks and probably a deepish blue shirt and a tie.
He didn't look like he was completely alert mentally. But he recognized me and walked toward me. His eyes were almost vacant, like those of Frankenstein or a zombie. He may have been carrying an empty or almost empty, black duffel bag in his left arm. As he continued walking toward me he said, vacantly, "I've been meaning to ask you, Son, are you okay? Have you been having a rough year?"
My grandpa was now in front of me. But he kept trudging forward. I walked up to him and squeezed both of his hands, which were folded together before him, just above his bellybutton. I told him, "Yes. It's been a really awful year."
My grandpa kept walking forward, off to my right side. He said something like, "Well, keep up your hope."
My grandpa walked through the heavy, wooden door and let it close behind him. I understood that I wasn't supposed to follow my grandpa past the door. But, like I might doo when suddenly remembering I needed to tell one of my bosses something important, I rushed up to the door and pushed it open.
Before me was something like the living room of a Pennsylvania Dutch house. My grandpa was already across that "living room" and into an area like a largely columned, medieval interior (of a castle?) mixed with a parking lot.
I called out to my grandfather, telling him something like I loved him or I thought about him a lot. I couldn't stand thinking that our exchange had only been about how I had been doing. I wanted to let him know that I cared about him.
My grandpa turned toward me. In some sense or another it was like he stood outside, in a well-lit (with white, halogen lights) parking lot at night. He faced me at a quarter-turn, so that I saw him almost full on, but with a left profile. He looked normal now, not all distorted like he had looked before. He wore a beige, windbreaker-type jacket, khaki slacks, a blue, button-up shirt, and a hunched hat. He may have had his hands in his pockets.
As I spoke, two people sitting at a table in the Pennsylvania Dutch living room began speaking, telling me something about how the event I was looking for wouldn't happen today. The director for the event hadn't showed up. They kept on speaking so that my grandpa could never hear what I said.
It also seemed like there was a huge wind blocking my voice from my grandpa's ears. My grandpa kept calling out, "What? What?" Finally he said he couldn't hear me and that he had to go. He walked away into the night.
I looked down to the two people at the table. I was somehow concerned about them, now, and interested in what they were saying. They were two children, one boy and one girl. They wore stereotypical old-European peasant clothing. They sat at a thinnish, wooden table.
Both children had their faces painted. The boy, blonde, may have had his face painted a ghostly white with black circles for eyes. The girl, wearing a yellow kerchief over her hair, was made up so that she looked like wood. Her entire body, in fact, wherever it showed out from under her clothes, looked like the painted feathers on a wooden decoy duck. The girl also, when she first spoke, didn't even look like her lips were moving. But as I looked at her longer, her lips did begin to move.
(As I later reflected on this, I thought that my shock at how wooden the girl looked actually broke my connection with my grandpa, at which point my grandpa said he had to leave.)
I sat down at the table, across from the boy and girl, who sat side by side. The girl told me that she and the boy were here for something like an audition or else to be extras in a movie. But the director hadn't shown up and wasn't likely to show up.
A girl, who I now thought of as my grandpa, walked up to us from the nighttime parking lot as I told the boy and girl not to give up hope, that there was still time for the director to show up. The girl/my grandpa sat down to the wood-painted girl's right.
The new girl looked to be maybe in her late teens or early twenties. She was tallish and white with slightly tanned skin. She had blue eyes and chesnut brown hair pulled back and up into a ponytail She wore a green t-shirt, which she tucked into white jean-shorts that extended to just below her knees.
At some point I stopped thinking of the new girl as my grandfather and just started thinking of her as some girl I knew (?). The new girl was cheerful. She agreed with what I'd previously told the children, even bringing, I think, some evidence that the director was, in fact, coming.
Even thought I no longer thought of the new girl as my grandpa, I did know that she was, like my grandpa, dead, a ghost, if only because she'd come from the same place toward which my grandfather had departed. In fact, I thought of the girl now as the spirit of a boy who had died.
I could see the boy in the dark. He had longish, bowl-shaped, blonde hair, and he was wiry and thin, looking a little like a punk rocker in the toughness of his face. The boy seemed terribly upset. Then he was dead.
Now the new girl said she had come extremely prepared for the audition. She pulled out a notebook and pen and began writing down, in outline, all the steps she took to get ready for things, mostly to illustrate to the boy and girl, who were like good-hearted, but somewhat clueless, directionless, and unmotivated peasants from out of town, that they shouldn't give up hope and that they should keep fighting for their dreams.
As the new girl kept on writing her stuff out, I realized how incredibly bright and motivated she was. But he's dead!, I told myself. This boy's dead, and he's still working like this! It all seemed so absurd and yet so joyful that I suddenly broke out in a joyful cheer. I screamed, "Yeah! This girl! This is who I love!"
I stood and walked around the table to embrace the girl. I may have been able to embrace the girl. But I think something happened that made the girl inaccessible, as if she were walking back through the nighttime parking lot, up to a chain link fence, or possibly already beyond it.
Dream #2
I walked down a wide sidewalk in some part of a big city full of one-story warehouses. It was a cold afternoon. The sky was pale tan-blue, as if the sun were finally below the horizon.
I heard two men across the street. I recognized one voice as that of my old friend R. I looked across the wide, empty street to see two white men in grey, hooded sweatshirts, each man having the hood over his head.
The men spoke in a casual, sports-like, but also business-like, tone. But it sounded like they were talking about the next time they'd meet, to go out on a date, in somewhat sexual and romantic terms.
The building the men stood in front of, another one-story warehouse, was white, the paint job looking rough, like stucco, with a gate drawn entrance and the walls lightly misted in a pale, faded, blue graffiti.
I looked more attentively at the men and saw that one of them definitely was R. I called out to him. He at first looked shocked to see me, as if he'd been caught engaging in an extramarital affair. The other man had walked away casually.
I crossed the street to meet R, making nothing of the situation I'd just seen. R asked, a little suspiciously, what I was doing here. I couldn't quite place where "here" was. This place could have been Red Hook, Brooklyn. But it didn't seem quite right. We were at the top, it seemed, of a long, shallow hill. And I knew there were other long, shallow hills full of wide-stretched warehouse blocks like this beyond us.
But eventually, as we briskly walked toward the corner of this block, I settled on the idea that we were on Smith Street and Ninth Street in Brooklyn, I told R that it was coincidence that we met here. I always walked down around here.
We decided to cross the bridge together. Somehow, though, we walked on the suspension beams of the bridge. These beams must once have been copper: they were now corroded to a bright Statue of Liberty green. The beams, I saw, octagoned up, flat, and down, repeating along the length of the bridge.
I was surprised we had taken this route, but I knew R had chosen it as a test of how honest I was being regarding my accidentally having seen him in this neighborhood (and having caught him with that man).
As we ascended the bridge I looked out at the cityscape, seeing how monumental everything looked: we were so high; the bridge was so tall; the buildings and building tops so vast. I remembered that I'd had this kind of vision and feeling in dreams about riding trains across bridges in the city, but I couldn't remember the dreams I'd had.
R and I walked down one of the beam slopes and into an enormous, white-walled, wood floored loft. The walls were at least thirty feet tall. The room was probably one hundred by one hundred feet. The wall opposite us was one big window, looking out over the river.
All throughout the room, gigantic plastic (?) boards bearing the heads of famous Disney cartoon characters were suspended from the ceiling by white rope or thick, white twine, the heads suspended about three feet above the ground, and the heads themselves maybe six feet tall. There may also have been occasional abstract plastic models, also large, through the room. There were one or two other people in the room. One of the people was, I think, a curator.
We walked through the gallery of Disney heads. R asked me, as if, again, to test my innocence, what I knew about these cartoons, or how involved I felt with these cartoons. I may have said something.
We were now in a different exhibition room. The room was rectangular, versus square, with ceilings as high, white walls, and wood floors, maybe slightly smaller (or larger?) than the other room. Heads hung from the ceiling again, though not through the entire room -- just in the lower left area of the room; beyond the "quadrant proper," though, so that the display took up a little more than half the room.
The heads were also more varied, being not only Disney heads but also anime character heads and the heads of real-life celebrities, both "cartoonized" and taken from photographs of the celebrities. This room was dim, as if it were now dark outside (if this room even had a window), and as if the room were lit with just a few watery, incandescent lights, like track lighting from the ceiling.
R and I were alone at first, although eventually there may also have been an old man, who kind of looked like Orville Redenbacher, and who was the curator for this gallery.
I may have been kneeling or sittin gin front of one of the heads. I noticed that R, who stood to my left, was talking to a woman. I looked to my left to see R engaged in a flirting conversation with a woman who was in a place where a head had been.
The woman was cluttered around with a couple wooden boxes. The woman wore chunky, frizzy, knit wool clothes. She had frizzy, long, blonde hair, smooth, clear, tan skin, and pale, blue eyes. She may have been bound, either bound standing or bound to a chair. The woman's responses to R were cheerful, but almost robotic, as if the woman were a program, something made to be part of the exhibition.
I thought, R figured something out. He learned how to speak to the hanging heads and bring them to life. I thought I would try to do the same thing R had done.
I looked to the head before me, which was from a photograph (black and white, or sepia and white, the pixels (?) very visible with the enlargement of the photo) of a great composer. I asked the composer a question, like, "Can you speak, too?"
The composer, first as the large head, then as the composer "himself," standing before me, responded, "Of course I can speak to you, you idiot. What do you think I am? What do you think this is? You already saw him speaking to the girl? Why would you think I couldn't speak to you? God. Why'd I have to get stuck talking to you? I thought I'd get some good questions."
(Once the composer had become real, he took on the appearance of a white man with slightly pinkish skin. He was tall, thin, older, with a loosely wrinkled, but dignified face. He had a full head of pure white, soft hair, which glowed under the soft lights here. He wore a nice, grey suit with a white shirt and a tie.)
I was ashamed for having spoken to the composer. I looked away from the composer, at least hoping that I could console him for my dumb question by not talking to him at all.
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