(11/21/04) the cat liked me; hiding all my clothes; the saffron conversation

(This dream entry comes only from my daytime journal, not from my dedicated dream journal. There is generally (for some stupid reason) no time/place info for my daytime journal entries.)

Two dreams from last night. Also possibly a fragment.

Dream 1

I lay on a couch in a kind of plain and somewhat empty living room. There was a sharp, incandescent light shining hotly, although it was more like midnight. The couch was a blue (divan?), and a wooden frame in the shape of a couch with a blue mattress on it. The couch frame could be flattened so that it and the mattress resembled a bed. But at the same time it seemed like a bit, thick couch of the same color. I couldn't see much of the room. I lay on the couch facing the back.

A cat jumped onto the back of the couch. I knew the cat and was grateful that it had come to lay by me. But it couldn't quite stay perched on the couch's back. The mattress had kind of slid out of shape so that the cat couldn't balance It slid off and kind of went away.

I got off the couch for a sec and slid the mattress back up. The cat now had a lot more space. It came back, but this time it lay on the "seat" part of the couch, by me. But now it was like the couch had been flattened to make the bed.

The cat was at about arm's length from me. I reached out to it, very pleased that it had decided to come back. I though that I should put my blanket over it as well. But I just petted it. It looked very content to be petted.

I wondered how long the cat would stay, how long until it got bored with me. The cat was an ashy grey mixed with a lowish, shallow orange-brown and undertones of tufted white like old, worn-out hair. The hair was short and the cat seemed thin and lazily wiry.

Dream 2

I walked into some clothing store as if through a side wall or a mall entrance. There were no lights on, so the store was only lit by the wealth of grey-blue, cloud-covered daylight coming in through the tall wall windows. The store was grayish and grayish blue. It was huge and full, with a fair amount of people quietly milling about. I may have worked there or worked for the store in some peripheral way.

As I walked in I heard a voice behind me, a nice, mature woman's voice saying. "I need you to take your XXXXX" (shirt?) "off the rack. It's just kind of old and worn out. It won't make a good impression on the people who are coming in here to buy for the special event."

So I walked down to some rack. But now I was looking for the lingerie section. I saw that a column had been changed into a lingerie display and that all the lingerie had been set behind a glass counter square which fortified the column-square lingerie display. All the panties looked rough and more like boys' underwear than women's underwear.

I thought, Ah, all the more feminine stuff has been moved into a guarded area to protect the attendants from being embarrassed by perverts like me. But I felt like there was more lingerie somewhere. So I walked on.

But now I had the ugly (shirt?) in my hand as well as a couple pieces of lingerie. I walked to the back of an enormous line of people. I tried to hide everything I had: the ugly (shirt?) because it wasn't good for image; and the lingerie because I didn't want anybody to ridicule me for being a pervert.

Some guy came up to me and asked me a question. But I couldn't think about the question. All I could think about was whether he saw what I was hiding.

Dream 3

The fragment is all messed up.

I was walking down the street, possibly, with a tall, black, hippie-looking woman. We may have been going up a hill. We spoke about some notable guy who hesitated at doing something and things turned out okay but then he didn't hesitate at something and things went well. There may have been something to do with my NYC Americorps program.

I may have, at this point, "woken up" to write down my dream. I "saw" myself writing it while my mind reeled off words too fast for my hand to keep up -- but then the whole thing was complete, then incomplete, etc.

I discovered I wasn't writing but that I only thought I was writing. So now I had to write the dream. But I had to think about it.

I got an image of a baby, naked, possibly, climbing to, and possibly up, a strip or drape of saffron fabric curved parabolically

like a chute or slide. In the folds were bolts and pieces of small machinery. Then the strip was flattened out.

All of this imagery indicated the decisions the man had made. This was, in fact, the conversation.

After this -- I really honestly don't know when I was awake and when I was asleep during this whole strange "dream" -- I "woke up" again and thought I was writing again and figured out I wasn't and actually wrote again. But I never wrote in The Ghost Book (what I titled my dream journal at this time) last night. All pretty confusing.

(7/4/08) frank sinatra duet; the grey finger; a beautiful tree

(Entered in paper journal at 8:51 AM at Flying Saucer cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a dim cafe or bar. The area was moderately full with people sitting in folding chairs. The people were gathered around a duet that was playing saxophones. One man was black. The other man may have been Frank Sinatra. I seemed to be sitting amid a group of old women.

At some point I got up and walked outside the bar. Then I came back in. The audience seemed less full now. I stood in front of the Frank Sinatra man. The man's saxophone looked like a brass instrument combined with an electric keyboard.

The Frank Sinatra man stopped playing at some point and said something like, "We monitor people very closely. We need to see how serious they are about things before we just start teaching them."

I was outside, on a hill in a desert area during the daytime. I was with a group of people. We were walking down a wide, stone stairway (maybe granite?). I was near the front of the group, my old friend R and I slowly bringing some large, wheeled items like strollers down the steps.

At some point, a woman behind me commented how well I brought the items down the steps. I said something like, "I learned my technique from R."

But now the steps were becoming increasingly shallower (i.e. for foot length, but still staying wide breadth-wise) and increasingly taller. I had to slow down just to get my balance so I could let the thing down to the next step. I started feeling vertigo. I looked ahead. R was ahead of me by a few steps. He didn't seem to be having any problems. I was worried what all the people behind me would think.

But now I was losing balance that the thing and I were floating in the air in front of a step. I had a feeling I would fall hard if I didn't soon find solid ground at my height.

I floated to my right and grabbed onto the branch of a barren tree. It might actually have been the trunk of a limbless tree hunched over the edge of the stairway. I climbed to my right, over to the hillside beside the stairway.

As I did this, someone, possibly my mom, was talking to me about how sick Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was, and how sad it would be when she died. I thought I should tell the person that Jackie O was already dead. But now I couldn't remember whether that were actually true.

I dropped a few inches to the ground and stood on dry soil, maybe cinders, with dry, tan clumps of grass and colorful flowers around me. There were a few people on the staircase around my level.

I might have climbed back onto the staircase. But now I was climbing out from a shady area that had been carved into the staircase. I climbed out from behind a tombstone that stood before the space and continued walking down the steps.

Dream #2

I sat in a movie theater with a woman who sat to my left. The movie theater was full and the movie had begun. The woman was visibly annoyed and finally told me why. I looked at her. A big, grey hand kept poking the back of the woman's neck (the woman's neck being bandaged all the way around, in a thin strip, like in the stories of the woman with secretly severed and barely reattached heads).

I was very afraid. By the looks of the hand, the man annoying the woman must have been huge. But I grabbed the finger and held it still. I told the man to stop poking the woman.

I looked behind the woman. It was now like dim light was on in the theater. The man was now copper-skinned, a little worn-out looking, middle-aged, and fattish. He wore sunglasses. He was less threatening-looking than the dark-grey monster he had seemed to be before. But I was now somehow afraid to approach him at all.

Dream #3

I was walking or in a vehicle on a sunny day. I passed by a beautiful tree. The tree was bare but budding. The branches were a deep, smooth crimson. The buds were profuse. They were big and fuzzy, like magnolia buds. But they were a pale, rich beige. The tree glowed against the deep blue sky.