(12/3/05) microwave smoke; the living wine containers

(Entered in paper journal at 9:25 AM at Starbucks on 1st Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in a small apartment with a bunch of "coworkers." We were "preparing" some holiday meal. I was in a bedroom/office with my boss, a pretty, blonde woman. We were looking for a place to put some food, maybe turkey, which was in tall, plastic containers.

I walked out into the living room. Some girls skittered back and forth, having fun. I couldn't tell if they knew we were preparing, they were having so much fun. I decided not to tell them, to keep the preparation secret if they didn't already know, to make them look silly when I was prepared and they weren't.

I looked in a bookcase for space to put the food into. Then I opened the microwave. Something had been burnt in there. The smell penetrated the room.

All the girls started laughing at me like I had made the smell. My boss came out and was going to tell the girls that the smell was actually lingering from when one of them put something into the microwave. But instead she pulled me aside and made some gesture of our secret friendship. Then she spoke more about finding a spot for the food.

Dream 2

My friend R and I were preparing a meal, or, rather, R was making the meal, and I was getting wine for him. The wine was in the building where I worked, but it was also in the building where he worked, as if the buildings were separate and together, or -- as if my building was also his building, even though his building was actually somewhere else.

On the way to the building I looked at some other building. Somehow I felt my sight was being seen by R and that if he saw me seeing the building I worked in, he would go to my work every day and try to ruin my life.

I had to look at some building, though. So I looked at a small, grey-painted, brownstone-like building. But I thought, How could R think worked in that building? It doesn't even look like offices could fit in there. But I looked "closer" (like I flew up a couple flights or was now walking on a bridge a couple flights tall) and I saw lights extending deeply inward from the windows, like the building was a tunnel of offices. I was satisfied with the building.

Now I was inside "my" building. I had to go down into the basement, into a place like a preschool or after-school or daycare center. The wine was brewing in a huge pot there. I was to bring two containers home with me.

As I walked down the steps, the containers, which (now) I had been carrying with me "all along" were getting very awkward. Both were clear glass. One was a wine bottle shape. The other was an octagonal shape.

They both felt like they were getting heavier, and they would slip almost out of my hands, as if they had a will of their own. I was stumbling and slipping all the way down the stairs, just trying to control the bottles.

When I got down to the basement and fumbled the door open, I got angry -- I could see R's office just down the way. R asked me to do this and made it seem like there was no way he could do it. But he was right down there, just down the hallway -- I could almost see him sitting in his office. I could see the corner of his desk. He had told me to call him when I got the wine and then to carry the wine home and he'd meet me there, too, like I wasn't even allowed to meet him in this building.

I saw a Crock-Pot, like two Crock-Pots, one stacked upside-down on the other. Whatever was inside was burning and making a smell. The outside of the Crock-Pots were caked over with whatever was inside the pot and had exploded out a bit. I couldn't believe that was the wine.

But now I looked to my right and saw a machine like an eight-foot-tall, all-plastic automatic mixer and mixing bowl, except that instead of mixers coming out o fthe part hanging over the bowl, there was a "blower" shooting a stream of wine into the bowl (which was maybe three feet deep). The bowl was yellow. The rest was white.

I felt like the wine was sweet, almost like Kool-Aid.

In front of the wine-maker was a wooden table. I tried to sit the bottles on the table, but they kept moving off, once again as if by their own will. Eventually the wine bottle-shaped container dissolved from my consciousness. The other container became a small, pail-shaped, plastic container. It crept along the table and fell to my feet defiantly.

But then I realized the wind was actually causing all this movement. I sat the container much closer in toward the center of the table. The container stopped moving.

I had to get the wine into the container(s). I thought I would just dip the containers into the huge bowl. But I think I thought that was too messy.

I lost track of things. I was now looking around the room, trying to figure out what kind of school took place here. A TV was playing. At first it was like whatever was on the TV was a program for the school.

I looked out a window, in front of which was a bookshelf decorated with paper letters that looked like colorful refrigerator magnet letters. I was up, I saw, on the fifth or maybe even the tenth floor of this building.

The TV said, "If you need help, please call ER at extention 6622." (ER was one of my senior coworkers, another VP-level analyst in the department, like my bosses were.)

In a square on the screen was an image of a man lounging at a desk and talking on the phone. Now in another corner another square popped up with another person, and his phone extension. Once again I worried. I thought, I have to stop seeing all this. R's watching everything I see.

The squares on the TV started showing ads for a movie about a woman I really liked. It looked like the movie Barabarella, starring Jane Fonda, but it was "about" some dignified, Victorian society.

(11/21/08) playing with food; jewelry and drinking water

(Entered in paper journal at 6:56 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn into Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a big house. The house was bright and airy, with tall, wide, white walls. I had just walked away from a group of people. I felt very relaxed walking around by myself. I walked past a number of small (six inches by six inches) face mirrors that seemed to be floating from the ceiling and which swayed back and forth like items on a mobile.

I looked into a few of the mirrors. Behind me, I saw, was a hallway with doorways opening to smaller rooms. I started getting afraid that if I looked into the mirrors long enough I would see a ghost appear in one of the smaller rooms. But I told myself not to be afraid and to keep on looking.

I was now crouched and sitting on the floor of the kitchen, which was also large and airy and which probably opened directly out to the large room I had just been in. My boss BS and my co-worker DE were in the kitchen with me, messing around with some sort of cheese like parmesan, which, when heated, would melt like a creamy cheese. They were putting it into the microwave and taking it out. Then they said that this wasn't good enough.

BS and DE pulled a take-out-style aluminum "plate" covered with a disc of white paper out of the fridge. The plate had all sorts of things in it, including an aluminum-foil-wrapped sandwich, all covered in a white cheese sauce.

BS and DE were both laughing as they dumped the parmesan into the plate. They knew they were making something really gross. Apparently all this food belonged to BS' wife. BS and DE thought it was hilarious to screw up all this food. But they also didn't want to get caught by BS' wife.

I thought about how if they put all this stuff in the microwave, it might explode because of all the metal. I particularly thought of the sandwich.

Dream #2

I sat in a restaurant with my co-worker SB and someone else from my job. The restaurant was dimmish, with heavy, rough, wood walls. The place was slightly busy. We seemed to be having a good time and also seemed to be discussing business.

Suddenly SB got up and told us to follow him. We went into "the bathroom," which was more like a locker room and a bedroom combined. I handed out mail to everybody. Apparently we were all on a trip, and I was having our mail forwarded to each destination we reached.

But SB, shuffling through his mail and siting by a small window (which looked out at a dark sky), started yelling at me that I hadn't forwarded his mail to this place. I felt bad at first. But then I realized that SB actually was getting his mail. I told SB he had no reason to get mad at me.

I walked out of "the bathroom" and back to our table. SB and the other person followed me. But our table was now taken (or being taken as we approached) by a few Latino people. In particular there was a slightly heavy but incredibly sexy woman in a short, soft, elegant, white mini-dress.

I thought, It was pretty obvious we had this table, wasn't it? But I thought it might be a good idea for us to share the table. It seemed like a pretty easy thing to do. I hoped the two people I was with wouldn't start acting annoying to the other people at the table.

When we sat down, the place changed. We now sat in an enormous, white room. We sat on the floor, which might have been red tile carpeted with a beautiful rug. The room opened out to a deck-like area. Nearby us were also a small table and possibly some boxes or chests.

I was loosely encircled by a group of women who might have been from either Mexico or India. The women's ages ranged from early twenties to late fifties. Some sat on the floor. Others sat in chairs. The women wore modern-cut dresses like skirts, but with fabric that was very old or traditional. Some of the older women may have been wearing traditional robes.

The women were all working at crafts. Some were making necklaces. A woman sitting in front of me made a necklace of purplish, opalescent beads. She finished the necklace and handed it to me. Now the necklace was of small, dark blue (lapis lazuli?) beads, occasionally broken by bands of gold. The necklace was thick with these beads.

The woman smiled to me. I put the necklace on. I showed myself to all the women, asking how I looked. I thought I must look slightly awkward, since I was wearing this traditional necklace against my modern clothing. But I also didn't know whether the necklace itself was just a fake. I was trying to ascertain the authenticity of the necklace through the women's reactions to me.

The women didn't seem too impressed by me, but they all said, "Oh, good, good."

One woman said, "You look okay, not good." Another woman, an older one, told that woman that she shouldn't have said that.

I looked behind that older woman and now saw someone familiar. This person was an older woman, maybe in her fifties. At first she looked Indian or Mexican. But as I looked at her again, she looked like a modern Mexican American woman. She didn't look like she was taking very good care of herself. But she was happy to see that I was getting along with all the younger women.

I stood up to talk with this woman. I was here, after all, to take care of some specific business. But I couldn't tell if the woman was actually trying to cheat me. (???)

We walked out onto the deck. The woman said, "If only my husband were here to see you. He'd be proud to see how you look. But he's away on business."

I walked over to a table. The woman was behind me. She became engaged in talking to some younger people. I walked along the deck. It was wide and long. the flooring was of gravel set in concrete. It looked out over a forested area.

I felt like this place was some kind of special high school. I walked to the farthest edge and stood by myself by a sloping, white, concrete wall. I started to hear some popular music from the 1980s. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. But now I looked down and saw it came, somehow, from the outside (?) of a school building below me. I thought, They always pump music through the halls of the school, and you can even hear it outside. (As if this school were a grocery store.)

I looked out at the forest landscape and thought I was in India. I now walked through a humid forest, just on the outskirts, I would assume, of a small town. I used a big stick for walking. At some point I was walking through a very shallow stream with coppery soil. The trees around me were in awful shape, all thin and scraggly, so that plenty of patches of light flowed down to me.

I saw (in my mind?) a small native boy in a brown robe walking through the river. I heard someone talking about the awful quality of the water, as if I were watching a narrated film. I knew that even though the water was awful, people were still drinking it. I wondered what kind of water I would drink.

I knew I was part of the Peace Corps. I was now some weird kind of miracle worker. It was night. I stood on a land ledge, looking down as a large group of people worked in a pit of soil below me. All the people may have been white, very modern-looking, but with something scary-looking about them, too, like they were prisoners. They were the "natives" of this land.

The people all now stood out of the pit. I did something, called out some words, and raised my arms. The pit exploded. Earth and rocks and possibly construction materials all flew into the air, maybe even so high that they dissolved into the atmosphere. People thought I had performed magic. Even I thought I had performed magic. But then I realized that I had, earlier on, set something like explosives into the soil.

The pit was now a smooth-walled cube set in the ground. The pit began filling up with water. As it did, the walls and floor of the pit became tiled. A light turned on in the pool of water.

I thought, Now this is the place where people can get their drinking water. At first the water was murky and dirty. But it was slowly clearing and becoming cleaner. At the opposite end of the pool from me it now seemed there was an enormous, but dimly lit, white palace.

I jumped into the pool. The water was still a little cloudy. I thought, What the hell? Wouldn't you just expect something like this? For an idiot white person to make a drinking water pool and then to go swimming in it like some college partier? But now I actually wasn't sure whether I'd intended to make a drinking water pool or a swimming pool.