(1/20/05) house of flying daggers 2

(Entered in paper journal at 7 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I was in a small consultation room with my old psychiatrist from Santa Fe, GR. There was a big window that let in a view of a tight staircase with a handrail overrun by dark vegetation. But the sunlight still came through and helped to give the small room an open feel. GR sat facing away from the window and a small desk and facing toward me.

I was telling GR something that was really worrying me. he was only half-engaged. At some point his phone or beeper rang. He picked up the phone and then walked out the door, telling me there was a slight emergency, but that he'd be right back.

After "a few minutes" I got up to leave. A weird guy blocked the doorway. He was dressed all sloppy, with three or four hideous shirts, a head of undone, long hair, and a shaggy, thick beard. He was simultaneously too skinny, and a little potbellied.

The man asked me where I was going. I told him something simple, like GR ad up and left, and that I didn't have any more time to wait. The weird guy suddenly spoke with great acumen and diction. He said something like, "You over-homoeroticize both the things you hear and the thing you say."

He continued a small, "sound-byte" analysis, maybe ten seconds long, that was so stunning and direct that I, having walked back into the room, now collapsed back into my chair. I felt that what he said was so sever that it had to be true.

The man now did a little bit of talking that sounded a bit boring and lazy. But I had to give him a chance, since what he said at first seemed so true. -- That isn't quite it. -- I also think I felt trapped, without any choice over where I could go. At the least, my choice was slightly restricted. So I tried to stay positive.

Now we were in a long, wide, dark room like a movie theater entrance with no lights. It was full of enormous standing cutout movie advertisements and arcade games. I don't think the weird guy was even analyzing me anymore. I kept hoping he would, all the while fearing that I'd have to face something really frightening or shameful about myself.

"He" pointed out a beautiful, tall cutout advertisement with a huge, moonlit, blue mansion and Zhang Ziyi in a blue outfit, I think Zhang curved her left arm over her head, had a sword in her left hand, and put her right hand in front of her with her two first fingers sticking up and together. then there were strange clumps of computer-style numbers ghosting very isolated and sporadic into the whole scene.

The "weird guy" (who was now fat and possibly a woman) said, "Oh, did you  know House of Flying Daggers 2 was coming out?"

I thought that was cool. But I was also getting impatient. I could tell our analysis session had suddenly turned into nothing more than the old "take the poor kid out to the zoo" approach to psychology. But I tried to stay enthusiastic.

There was either a video game or cutout stand that was a huge, tilted-back couch hung from the ceiling by thick, black ropes on each corner to float the couch about three feet above the ground. Then somewhere were large, black, canister-like cylinders with watery lenses a few inches inside. These were screens. We looked inside and either controlled a game or watched a preview that looked just like a video game.

I went to sit beside the "weird guy," who was now an overweight, round lady with an enormous beard. I also knew now that she really had no psychoanalytic or psychiatric knowledge. But I jumped up on the couch wither her anyway, thinking, Oh, well. Maybe she'll seduce me and prove once and for all that I'm gay.

(9/10/07) drinking the undrinkable; ang lee's silk stalkings; my neighbor is harassed

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

Dream #1

I was in a bedroom with a little, Mexican boy and his father. The room was almost empty but cluttered near the center with a pale grey box and some papers. On the box may have been some cups of water.

The father was trying to explain to me how the child was trying to get water from me. I had cups of water that looked non-potable -- brownish, with a weird, sweet smell. But the father told me this was fine for the boy to drink: he just needed water: he had gone so long without it.

I realized with shame how comfortable my life must be. I was willing to withhold perfectly fine water to a child who was desperately in need of water, just because I thought the water was, in a sense, vulgar.

Dream #2

I was in a movie theater lobby. I stood before a console like an arcade video game which was playing a "preview for" the new Ang Lee movie.

To my right were three cut-out, cardboard displays, each about six feet tall. The one second to my right caught my attention. It had a diorama-like display fronted with clear cellophane. The display was of tiny "film strips" made out of cardboard. Each strip advertised a different movie.

One ad showed a woman's high-heeled foot standing on a map. Something was written about fighter jets. But something else was written, like Silk Stalkings. I couldn't see how either of these film programs (fighter jets or "Silk Stalkings") could be at this theater (not sure why...). Then I realized the ad-strips in these displays were for different movie theaters.

Dream #3

I stood on the ground level in a courtyard of an apartment complex. It was night. I looked up to my right, to a second- or third-floor balcony. The front door of one of the apartments on the balcony was half-opened, with some incandescent light peering through the crack. I knew that this was the apartment building of the old man who had been my neighbor when I'd lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2004.

People in the complex, I knew, had been trying to break into the old man's house because they didn't like him, possibly because he was Jewish. (He had, in fact, in waking life, come from Israel a couple decades previously.) There was silver graffiti on the old man's door. The message was pretty clearly anti-Semitic. I was afraid for my neighbor.