(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.

(4/16/06) a family of prostitutes; my lesbian manager

(Entered in paper journal at 8:12 AM at Starbucks on 1st Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was with a family. We were in a confused apartment complex, out on the balconies, walking to "our new apartment." I was with the kids, but I wasn't quite a kid. I feel like I was just a spectator, immaterial.

But then I was "hanging over the shoulder" of a man like Michael Bluth from the TV show Arrested Development. The man watched two male adults leading the two children. The two men may have looked like Gob and Tobias.

The two men stood before the new apartment. One of them had a strap-on dildo and led the other into the apartment. He told "Michael/me," "Keep an eye on the kids. He and I have some business to take care of.

I was in a dark room lilt only with a deep blue light. The two kids sat on the floor. There were a boy and a girl. The girl was younger than thirteen but was very tall and emaciated. She wore trashy clothes and had a life-worn despair in her eyes. The boy wasn't much more than a vague entity. The boy and girl sat across from each other, playing a game like cards, using chips for counters.

I walked through a dark hall to find the two men, to see if they had finished their business. I saw them in another dark blue room, getting ready to have sex. I walked out, making some deadpan "Michael Bluth" remark. The dildo, by the way, was glow-in-the-dark. As I headed back I thought momentarily, Why would two men need to use a dildo for sex?

I arrived back in the kids' room. I realized now that all the members of this family were prostituting themselves -- the children probably at least a little against their will. The men had moved away from the old apartment because they needed to find newer, less trashed-out customers. I was disgusted by it all.

I now stood out on another apartment complex balcony, talking with someone I didn't see. He asked me, "But if Michael Bluth was living with these guys now, where is his family, and why don't they visit him?"

I (as Michael Bluth) said, "Don't you see? It's dramatically feasible because each member of the family is paralleled by each member of this family."

I stood by myself in front of the family's old apartment. A man with huge, frizzy hair walked up the long staircase to me. He smiled and said something like, "Hi! What are you doing right now?" The guy looked strung out.

The guy thought that by standing here I was making myself available for sex. I was about to tell him no. I wanted to get angry and yell. But I was so afraid and disgusted by everything that I didn't even want to acknowledge the existence of any of it.

Some man walked up from the left. He had to go down and then up a flight of steps. He said to the guy, "You have the wrong place. This guy doesn't do the kind of business you're looking for. Come with me and I'll help you out."

The second guy looked at me and smiled genuinely. He was clean-cut, but a little sunburned and hardened. He acted slightly effeminate.

Dream 2

I was in something like a gondola riding down a suspension track into a tall, sparkling city at night. I was like an invisible spectator. A woman, maybe twenty-five years old, sat next to a younger woman, maybe a girl between seventeen and nineteen years old. The older woman was trying to hit on the younger woman.

The women had seen a lesbian who was kind of on the ugly side. The older woman asked the girl questions about the ugly woman to make the girl say she thought the older woman was pretty, even sexually attractive. When the girl finally said something like that, the woman said, "Well, I think you're even prettier and more attractive than that."

The girl knew where this was heading now. But she was going along with it. Part of her felt like she shouldn't. But mostly she was rather malleable. The girl's appearance was now like a doll, a two-or-three-foot-tall, Victorian-style, porcelain doll with huge, blue eyes. I was kind of jaded and disappointed by the whole scene. I had hoped I would be able to be with the girl.

I was a worker in a cafe in the enormous town. It was a dim, elegant place made of wood, like a bar. We may also have sold ice cream.

My coworkers were talking about the new manager. She was apparently a tall woman, athletic, and incredibly beautiful. She was a lesbian, possibly the woman on the gondola. The coworkers, all guys, were all genuinely talking about what a genuinely good manager the woman was. I was flustered. I didn't want to hear that a woman, especially a lesbian who took a girl I was attracted to, was such a good person and manager.

I tried to make some qualifications to the guys' statements as I swept the floor and wiped off the bar with a wet dishcloth. But the guys kept refuting me and saying, "No. She's really good. She's made a million improvements on XXXXX already."

Now as I was sweeping under a table by some mirror walls, the new manager walked in. She said something really nice to all of us, also implying good-naturedly that she knew I had expressed my doubts. I kept silent. But, a little against my will, I thought, Actually, I guess she is pretty cool!

(1/31/08) flying roach software; dirty dancing to the future

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

Dream #1

It was night. I lay in bed. I looked down at my blanket. There were two roaches climbing down around my feet. I wanted to think at first that they weren't there. I got up and smashed one of them. The other one still climbed around on my blanket. I didn't have anything to smash it with.

I found something and came back. The roach now leaped to avoid me. The roach also seemed capable of using long, sharp, curving antennae (?) to defend itself. I went after the roach again. The roached jumped onto the wall. I could hear someone telling me the flying roach had a poison in its antennae that could kill you.

I now sat in a dark restaurant with a group of people. It was like we had been talking about the flying roaches. The nighttime scenery outside was moving, as if we were on a train.

TB, one of my friends and a worker for the company that sold consumer data to my research team, sat in front of me. To her left was a kind of tomboyish woman. This woman spoke about roaches as it they were some sort of software program. She was talking about how she used the software program nowadays. She had pirated the software and was using it at work. This could get her in trouble. But she said she didn't care.

I could tell the tomboyish woman was trying to impress TB with a kind of "lawbreaker" behavior, and that she was trying to show that she'd be a better lover for TB than I would.

Dream #2

I saw a film like Back to the Future. The Michael J. Fox character was being goaded into action by the modern-day (1980s) Biff character.

I now sat in a room, watching the movie with TB. TB had been sick recently. Her stomach was still a little upset. TB wore red pants made of a fabric like corduroy. I began rubbing TB's legs. We stood up and started dancing erotically together.