(10/9/04) feminine schizophrenic; san mateo ice cream shop; be strong for me; scary giant and sexy twelve-year-old; defending the deformed; charge failed

(Entered in paper journal at 4 AM at home in Albuquerque.)

Dream 1

Man with split personality. 120 seconds/100 minutes, brushing leafs off bed.

Dream 2

M (? -- not sure who this could be) tells me to go to corner, gives me partial ride home, streets get weird, I go to ice cream store, piss off girl, fly over flowers.

Dream 3

Drive in car with Mom, brother, and sisters. CD disagreements. Ninja, XXXXX (Redman?), Gay Male. Sister said, How is he successful with that name? I say, I don't know -- Eminem did it. Mom starts to cry. Tell brother to support her. I know not even to touch her.

***

(Daytime paper journal entries.)

I kind of don't even want to write down my dreams today. I left the Ghost Book at home on accident and now feel like Dumbo without a feather. Ha! Emily Dickinson says hope is a thing with feathers, and Dumbo's flying fetish was a feather.

Anyhow, three of my dreams from last night were written in brief (finally!) form there. I can remember two of those three without the Ghost Book and probably would remember the third (actually first) if I could just see the first few words in the Ghost Book. I'll write these "unwritten" ones down first, and if I have time tonight I'll write a fuller account of the first dreams.

Dream 4

I'm not exactly sure where I was. It was strangely like an Asian temple, though it was lit with yellow light, like incandescent light. I think the floors were large stone slabs and the walls were thick plaster (?) with thick, dark, wood columns. The room was tall, empty, and wide. And yet it wasn't a temple. It was something more like an office complex or a place like a business product demo area.

I, with some other workers, had finally cleared everybody out of the place. But for some reason I had to go outside to clear people out of the building as well (?). It was early evening, the light being dark, dim, cobalt blue-grey.

I walked out onto a wide, carved stone patio. At the end of the patio was a four-walled structure of tarp-like fabric supported by aluminum poles. In front of me a wall section had a split which I could fold open to enter the structure. I did so.

Inside was something like a giant. At first I didn't quite understand what it was. It was twenty feet tall -- or at least I "knew" this thing was twenty feet tall. It seemed to be made out of soft, shiny, silky, thin material. It looked like baggy, hoody, male blue jeans, an orange shirt of the same hoody bagginess, and a large, puffy, black afro on top. It was in the far right corner, wandering aimlessly and about to turn toward me.

(HA! just remembered first dream!)

I dropped the fold of fabric and stood back outside the structure. I tried to understand what I was seeing. Obviously it was a man on stilts, right? Just a man with a huge costume around him. But, I tried to assure myself, I'd see that his head was just the same size as mine if I were to look at him again.

I pulled up the fold again and saw the thing now walking toward me. It looked like a large person, not a person, but a living doll of a stereotype of a black man, actually more like a gigantic version of that stupid puny doll in those dumb-ass Sprite ads they used to show before the movies in the theaters.

I saw it, but I also couldn't quite see it. Not that it wasn't there or that it was transparent or translucent or ghostly. Instead, I looked and didn't look, or, ratherm I looked and was so freaked out by seeing a living, twenty-foot-tall humanoid that I couldn't quite "admit" that I saw it.

As it came closer to me my feeling of dread became greater. At last I dropped the fold and ran back into the building, yelling, "ML! ML!"

This time I had to run through two sets of glass doors. ML now came up to me. I told him what I had seen in the structure. He walked out with me to see.

Now twenty people were scattered around in the large area. They were all black, guys and girls, about my age, all in a good mood. They told ML, "We're a bunch of acrobats." (?) "We dress up in these costumes. It's meant to scare people. But they shouldn't act scared. You gotta be pretty cowardly not to see through the illusion."

Now ML and I were helping the folks with something. Now the setting changed. But we were still helping.

We were in a bedroom in a basement. It was a nice, upper-middle-class bedroom, but cluttered and disordered. The walls were lined in dark wood at portions. And in the wood lining things came out like headlights and small cylinders with glass faces and needles against numbered circles, like instruments used to measure humidity or air pressure. But mostly it was the headlights. An Hispanic girl stood up with her back to a corner and faced a column of those headlights.

ML and I knelt to the floor, picking up piles of clothes and junk. As ML stood up to take his load away the girls said, "Well, you may think it's an impossibility, Preemie. But I've read the medical books, and they say that the human body does have an organic system that can support a growth of up to twenty feet."

I felt bad and stupid for having thought that was an impossibility, but I also felt even worse now for having been such a coward in my encounter with the giant.

Now none of us was wearing pants. The Hispanic girl was gone, but there were now two black girls. ML wore plain underwear. I wore white cotton panties, which fit me so loosely they were like an old man's briefs. One girl, young, wore navy blue panties with pink horizontal stripes. Another girl, about my age, wore stonewashed-like, denim-like panties.

The younger girl was thin and pretty. I honestly couldn't tell her age. She may have been seventeen, she may have been twelve. But I liked her a lot. But she liked ML, I was pretty sure. Not that ML would have done anything with her, as he respected the fact that she was a minor.

Now they both walked out of the room, up a dark, short hallway, up a small flight of stairs, and up a long, dark hallway. As they did I followed the girl. Her bottom was so tight and nice and her legs and back so thin, even through her dark blue sweater, that I wanted her in quite an animal way.

I told the girl at some point, "Your panties are cute." But she didn't hear me. It was like I wasn't quite in the same place as she and ML. Now I realized if either ML or the girl saw how I lusted after the girl they'd think and talk badly about me, if not actually turn me into the authorities for being sexually attracted to a minor.

So I quickly turned around and rushed back to the basement bedroom, to the girl who was my age. She was fattish, not too pretty, and a little dull. Her panties hung as loosely to her body as mine did to mine. She was at a tall dresser, playing with some clothes in one of the top drawers. She turned to me and asked me something, but I really have no idea what it was. I had lost all sexual desire and now sat on the floor, not paying attention to much of anything.

Dream 5

I was in a grey, small, old-timey office, like an office you'd see in a 1980s version of a 1950s-style detective movie. I don't know if I was there, but I saw the door of the office, as if I were inside. The door had one of those translucent windows of jangled plastic that distorted everything and made it all misty and vague, just watery shapes and color and movement.

"Someone" said, "He'll be coming in here to make the delivery. When he does, XXXXX." (Something like, "Don't let him in?") "He's XXXXX." (Green, mottled, deformed, XXXXX.) This series of adjectives was used regularly, like a cliche, to describe this certain kind of deformed person. I was slightly afraid to see the person.

Now the person came quickly toward the door. He wore a beautiful business suit, purplish grey and blue, I think. But his entire body, including his face, was, I could see, even through the door-window's distorting plastic, as if it cleared its wrinkles (yet kept its fogginess) just for him, wrinkled and mottled and bent and deformed, as if the man had been through a horrible, flaying fire. The man only had a tuft of hair on his sloping head. His eyes, though almost unseen for the shadow of his brow, were bright green.

The man sensed as he stood by the door that I in my terrible fright was chanting to myself the cliched string of adjectives. His whole face filled with an awful anguish. He stepped backward about thirty feet, to an elevator bank. I could see all of this clearly, as if seeing through the door. He fell back and half sat, crumpled in depression.

He now burst out moans through pursed lips, as if trying to stop a flood of complete, unstoppable despair. I thought to myself, How can anybody ever help him?

And now, two more of these deformed men came rushing down the hallway. They wore green jumpsuits, like they were movers or people who brought refrigerators to houses. In fact they had come to bring some equipment to this floor.

Seeing the other man moaning by the elevator bank, the men stopped their cheerful conversation. They immediately knew what had happened. They both bolted toward my door.

One of them, in a beautiful, clear, manly voice, shouted out the cliched string of adjectives and said, "You wanna call people that, eh? You think it's fun to hurt people that way, do you? Well some of us won't take it!"

And with that they bolted through the door.

Dream 6

I grabbed my phone off the dresser. It was plugged into the charger. I pulled the cord out of the wall. The phone made a dismal, low-toned beep. I looked at the LCD screen. It said "Charge Failed." I plugged the cord back in. The LCD screen lit up for a second, then low-toned again, went off, and said "Charge Failed."

I thought to myself, Christ. I cannot have this cord fail me now, now that I'm heading back to New York City tomorrow. I need the phone to be fully charged for my train trip.

Dream 1

I was in a place like a workshop. It was dim, kind of old-looking, like a wood carver's shop. There were a few old men at some counters like science lab counters. There were also beds everywhere. The old men were like mild-mannered mechanics or electricians. They kind of exchanged some rude jokes with each other, but basically were rather kind, though always cheerful.

Every once in a while some young men and women would show up. The old men kind of regarded me suspiciously, as if they sensed that I thought myself better than they.

At one point an old man came in. He was one of the regulars. But he wasn't quite sane. At first he spoke in a weird voice, high-pitched, almost like a male trying to sound female, but crackly, like he had a scorched, wrecked throat. I could sense he thought he was a female.

I looked to see him: a tallish, bellied, balding, wrinkly man, in a wide, pale blue, button-down sports shirt with two wide, white vertical stripes and a pair of pale, loose, denim slacks.

I was unsettled by this man. Even his wide, watery, blue eyes seemed masculine. But he so violently thought that he was feminine.

The old men all chuckled among themselves as they watched my reaction to the man. They said of me, "Look at him now. He's afraid of one of our best friends."

The man sat on a bed beside the two beds (right together) that I sat on. He continued speaking in the high voice and then suddenly spoke regularly.

Now one of the old men indirectly let me know, "Our friend has a split personality. He can't control it. But it doesn't mess things up for him, and it makes neither him nor us uncomfortable."

But they all, sensing my discomfort, decided to tease me anyway. The man even pretended to be the high-voiced personality again, just to upset me. But I ignored him. There were some dried leafs on my bed. I worried about them and brushed them as well as I could into the minuscule crack between the two beds.

But now the man became quite serious (I can't remember why). He said, "Isn't it interesting how one hundred seconds can seem like one hundred twenty minutes when you reflect upon it a while later?"

I understood this, somehow, to be a schizophrenic kind of statement. But I also felt a degree of truth to it, which matched my own personal experience. I told him something of my own experience, to let him know I agreed. But I wasn't quite telling him. I was kind of telling someone like my friend R, who stood a ways away, knowing that "R" seemed to have much better communication with this old man.

Dream 2

I really can't remember the beginning. But I was now getting a ride home from the Balloon Fiesta. It had been my second night of work. My co-worker M and her husband were going to drive me home.

But somehow the streets all got messed up. They seemed to curve around and shift their curves even as we drove on them, like they were snakes. Now even the fences grew up out of the ground, restricting our movements and leading us into dark alleys.

Thinking it would make things easier, I just had M and her husband drop me off on the roadside. Apparently this was San Mateo. They drove off.

I walked through a tangled area of old fence and up some ditch-like hill and across a street to a very small yet classy strip mall. the only store open this late at night was an ice cream store.

I don't know for sure but I think that even though I didn't see them, M and her husband were also in the store. I was afraid at first to go in because I didn't want them to see me and think that I just hadn't wanted to ride with them. But I went in anyway.

The place was a mess, not dirty, but filled with counters, machinery, and all kinds of store items and food. I went to a bar that had trays of ice cream and ginger snap cookies. This was the free samples bar. I was so hungry from not having eaten all day that I took a free sample of a ginger snap cookie and some white ice cream with mini M&Ms in it. The ice cream might have been colored a cinnamon-tan.

As I walked out the door a lady behind the counter said, "Aren't you going to buy something?" I said, "No. I just came in for a free sample. I was just a little hungry." I could hear her disgust.

I walked outside, down a small lawn, and onto a parking lot, thinking, Well, crap! I've bought things here before, haven't I? So why does she think I'm a cheapskate?

Dream 3

Don't remember beginning. It was daytime. I was in a car with my mom, brother, and sister. I don't know or remember where we were. But it was pretty much like downtown Denver and Albuquerque rolled into one. The buildings were all a pale, soothing, tan concrete or stucco.

My mom drove along. At some point we stopped. My mom was upset. She got out of the car. My sister showed me two checks our dad had given her. My mom was upset about this. There had been some argument, in which my sister had made my mom feel pretty stupid, in the car.

We were now on our way to the movie theater. My mom, to calm down, put some music on. She asked me if I liked it.

Annoyed beyond belief, I yelled, "No! It sucks! Take this shit off!" She did. I could tell my mom had now been pushed too far. She was hideously depressed but terribly silent.

We drove (along a sidewalk?, like the concrete path in between the De Vargas Center shopping mall proper and the Albertsons in Santa Fe, even with the stucco arch between the two buildings, although the place felt classier and more full of shops, all of which were trendy).

As we drove I asked my sister what kind of music she liked. I asked her about a particular style or group, which I can't remember now.

She said, "Oh, no, I can't stand that. But I like rap, like XXXXX, XXXXX," (Redman?) "and Gay Male." (?) "Gay Male's pretty cool. But I always wondered, how is he so successful with a name like that?"

I said, jokingly, thought I didn't exactly know why it was a joke, "Well, Eminem didn't name himself Gay Male, but he certainly did the Gay Male thing for a while, and he was incredibly successful." My sister laughed.

We were all now, somehow, walking along the concrete path, the left (i.e. "Albertsons") side of which was actually a movie theater, like the Century Rio, with poster cases, all of which were jet black and glossy, solid, with no posters inside, apparently.

We came to a little niche in the wall. My mom crumpled against it. we were right by the glass doors into the theater. My mom was trembling, about to burst into tears.

My sister said, "Oh, God, I knew Mom was upset about these checks. But she was just holding it all in. I hate seeing this."

My mom squinted her eyes till they were pools of black shadow, and opened her mouth narrowly to match the watery anguish in her eyes. Her breath quivered, trembled, heaved, shook. She clenched her fists and her arm trembled stiffly.

Finally it all shook loose. She bellowed to my brother, "Please. Stand in front of me. Be strong for me. Don't leave me. I'm about to collapse. Please. Grow up for me and be stable for me. Everybody else has -- !"

She now melted into profuse tears. My brother stood in front of her. He held her.

I walked up to my mom. I wanted to touch her, even just touch her right arm, to let her know I loved her. But I knew that what I had done to her was so bad that if I even touched her she would fall apart and act violently toward me.

So I just stood there. And yet, even as I stood there feeling hideous, I also felt like this was just a desperate ploy by my mother to keep me here at home instead of going back to XXXXX.

(10/15/04) i'm not really your mother

(Dream only entered in daytime paper journals. No time/place info given.)

Dream 1

I was going to a movie with my friend ML. We apparently hadn't decided on a movie yet. The movie theater box office was like a patio covered with saffron, vermilion, and golden sheets and standing thinly at the top of a pinkish tan desert cliff. It was a warm, lightly breezy, dry day. It seems like as well as being outside the theater was inside.

We walked up to the ticket booth. There was a list of three or four movies. I chose one, which it seems like ML wasn't too pleased to see. But he didn't say anything, so I guess we were planning to see it.

But I got a buzz on my cell phone, as if I had a buzzer when the ringer was off. I seem to have walked away, in front of a curving, grayish, wide, concrete building. There were areas for gardens in front of the building, sloping up and down in between sidewalks and concrete dividers. But there was no garden, just flat sections of deep brown, barren, somewhat overturned earth. The area was huge and I walked all around the sidewalks.

I listened to the phone message. My mom sounded very upset. She told me to call her as soon as I could because she finally had to tell me something she should have told me a long time ago. At first I was annoyed that my mom would bother me. But then I figured that she sounded worried.

I called her up. Crying, she told me, "I'm not really your mother. I never wanted to tell you. You were adopted. It was when you were a child. You had been taken away from your real mother."

(At this point I saw a baby in a dark room, very starkly lit in grey, dim daylight from almost nowhere, like this was a dungeon, and with two redneck-looking men somewhere off in the background. The baby seemed to be being dipped into a clay pot like the Egyptian glyph.)

"Something terrible had been done to you. Two men hurt you. They XXXXX. And your mom allowed this to happen. She stood to the side and watched it. But she wasn't to blame. and the men meant no harm. They were just two gay men."

At this point I tried to get information from my mom as to where my biological mom was. I also tried to get information about what had been done to me. But everything my mom said suddenly became jangled and misshapen.

(1/16-17/05) i was a scout; may the force be with super kmart

(Entered in paper journal at 11:25 PM, 1/16/05, at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

Entire battled carried out in room as if one person stood for many troops. I was a scout.

(Entered at 6:15 AM, 1/17/05, at home in Harlem.)

Dream 2

I went to a movie with one of my friend R's gay male friends. I sat there before the movie started, acting upset that R and others hadn't showed up. They hadn't showed up, I now knew, because they had hoped the guy would hit on me. Then R sat in the seat in front of  me. I couldn't see him. I couldn't see over the seats. I was as short in them as a five-year-old.

My foot was in the crack of the seat. R said something weird about getting my foot out of Virginia. Everybody around me laughed. I felt stupid, especially at having that be R's greeting to me.

Everybody around me shouted a similar phrase back at R, but mumbling, as if they weren't sure it was a good idea to do so. R got upset. I, normal height now, tapped R on the slope between his neck and his left shoulder and laughed a gentle laugh.

We were suddenly walking through a Super Kmart-type store that sold clothes, groceries, etc. I passed a black and red, wide-mesh crocheted (knit?) outfit.

I thought of how much I wanted it. But I wondered what everybody else would think of me if I took it.

I then saw a feminine, shawl-style poncho with a hood (?!), made of wool, grey with pink, thin, wide, square designs, fall off a display shelf and onto the ground. I grabbed this and put this on, hoping not to look feminine, but to look like Obi-Wan Kenobi in his first scene in Star Wars. I walked up to R, who stood in the checkout line. I said something like, "May the Force be with you." He just smiled slightly.

I walked around the store. A guy I thought was a serious businessman who'd kick my ass because of the way I looked just laughed and said, "Good for you, Force!"

I walked down a frozen food aisle. There were two samples-tables. I walked to the first one and said my Force thing. I now was wearing a huge, brown robe and yellow, thick, dirty, leather gloves. The man at the table asked me if I wanted to try a sample. He said the first sample, some kind of beef (?) on a Ritz cracker, was too messy. He got me crab salad on a Ritz cracker instead. I took off my gloves to grab the cracker. The table guy was taking all this seriously, as if I were actually the wizard I was pretending to be.

Now I was trapped in some house. I was I was but not I. I kept addressing myself form outside myself as Tom. I had discovered something here and now had to get out and tell people. But I couldn't get out or figure out why.

A dog, possibly my friend R's dog, kept sniffing at the crack between the door and the floor. I thought something like, Just like usual. When she wants to go out, she treats me like I'm being mean. But I'm not being mean. As soon as I get all this taken care of I'll take her out.

I fainted. After this there may have been some strange scene in which I realized something beautiful about Hitler in an almost religious ecstasy.

(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.

(10/3/05) tick theather

(Entered in paper journal at the Muddy Cup coffee shop on Staten Island.)

Dream 1

I was in the lobby of a movie theater. I was sad because my friend R and his girlfriend L hadn't come to see a movie with me. But at some point R came in. I had apparently been crying. I was trying to hide my face and act like I didn't care even about the movie.

There was a balcony-like upper-level with black-pole railing and black-pole-framed chairs and tables. I walked up there and noticed out of the corner of my eye as I looked at a poster that I had a tick on my right tricep (my arm was bare). I looked away and thought, This can't be a tick. That would make me sick (i.e. with Lyme disease), and that would be too inconvenient.

I looked back down at my arm. It wasn't a tick, just some kind of beetle. I was relieved. But now it was a tick again. I brushed it off. As it fell away I wondered whether I had brushed it all the way off or if the head was still in my flesh. Then I wondered whether it had been a tick after all.

(10/6/05) helping on the TOEFL

(Entered in paper journal at 6:25 AM at my friend R's house in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was in a movie theater, in a row near the front, with my friend R, his girlfriend L, and TP, one of my senior coworkers from my Americorps NYC Parks program. It was like we were all sitting on a couch. The theater was huge and full of people.

I think I had gone out and come back in at one point and, while out, saw an Asian woman who looked like Maggie Cheung. Now the movie was over and previews were playing.

The final image of the last preview was an overweight guy on a front lawn. TP said, "Ha! Look at how fat that guy is!" I hadn't expected TP to say something like that. I looked at TP (R, L, and TP all sat to my right) and noticed, actually, how much weight he had lost.

When the preview ended my three friends stood up immediately and left. TP might now have become my friend CV. He slung on a yellow backpack and walked away. Nobody had said anything to me. They were already far away.

I sat there determined, since I was already alone, to hang out until the theater cleared a little. The couch was now like a plush booth surrounding a little dinner table. A lot of people were clearing out now.

I saw the Asian woman again. She was very thin, with long, straight, silky hair, a pale turquoise shirt, and black pants. She had two kids. I saw the kids and figured the woman was married. But I caught her eye and smiled at her. She smiled at me and walked closer.

The woman asked me something, but through the mild noise of the crowd I couldn't quite make it out. I asked her to repeat when she got closer. She asked, "Have you passed the TOEFL?"

I said, "I've never taken the TOEFL. English is my first language. But if you need help I can help you."

She pulled out a binder of stuff. There were some typed sheets and some handwritten sheets. One typed sheet was a test. It was folded so I couldn't see the whole thing. It was like there were rows and rows of multiple choices of jumbled up numbers.

The woman said, "Just look the test over. This is my homework. Once you see what it's about and you can think of a way to help me, call this number." On her homework she wrote part of a number and then broke off to squiggle something around it

which she broke off again, I'd suppose to write the rest of the number.

As I woke, it was like I was walking around a corner on this dream, like it was still happening, but I was walking around the corner from it and into a quiet hallway.

(4/14/06) brokeback basketball

(Entered in paper journal at 9:35 AM at Starbucks on Astor Place.)

Dream 1

I walked through a movie theater lobby (like the Wirock in Albuquerque) and to a theater with an open door. I was afraid to go inside: I saw so many families, especially children. I wanted to see this movie. But I didn't want to be thought of as a kid. I also didn't want to be thought of as some kind of pervert that hangs around kids.

Now I was watching a film like Brokeback Mountain, except that the ranchers were now gold miners. The Heath Ledger charcter just kept going on and on about gold, about some mine that had a vein of gold that if he could just get funding for it, would just produce and produce.

As the speech progressed, I melded into the man, and the mountain scene faded into a location like a bus stop near a set of apartments I'd lived in in my last year of college. I sat on the right end of the bench, with a female coworker to my left and a male coworker to her left.

I finished up the speech and kind of broke myself out of my daze or spell to discover where I was. I heard my two coworkers laughing about a third coworker.

The coworker had participated in a basketball game with some other workers. He had come back to work telling people about it -- or else my coworkers were talking about how he would come back to work talking about it.

My coworkers knew the third coworker wasn't any good at basketball but that he had bragged (or would brag) about how well he had done. The coworkers started laughing and saying the things he had said or would say.

It actually sounded like the third coworker was right there, joking about himself. There were two statements that were made that sounded like business quotes, like "I really helped drive our earnings growth," and "The team says I had good synergistic strategies."

I was laughing so hard imagining this guy saying all this stuff that I was almost doubled over. I now realized there was a black iron lamppost to my right.

(11/4/06) sex in the movie theater; approaching an angry man

(Entered in paper journal at 8:54 AM at an Ozzie's coffee shop in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I sat down in a movie theater with a woman to watch the second part of a movie. The woman had tan skin and brown hair and was very pretty. It had surprised me that the movie had a second part. It was like going to a double feature.

When I sat down by the woman I had come with, a blonde woman sat by me. It was suddenly like I was in a different row from the first woman, though in a back area with just a few seats. The movie theater itself was beautiful, like an 18th century French theater.

The blonde woman and I got naked and started having sex. But as this progressed my mom sat down beside us. I straightened up into a normal sitting position in my chair. The blonde woman got upset and walked away to find someone who would have sex with her. I got up to look for her.

Dream 2

I stood on a valley that may have had a shallow river running through it. There was thin, short, pale tan and green grass. It was a sunny day.

There may have been a lot of people that I knew around. But at a distance was man I needed to contact. He was big, fat, bald, pale, and white. He was upset to the point of violence by something I had done or said.

I had needed to calm the man down, and now I had made my task even more imperative. The man was in a nervous, jittery stupor, like a wild animal. He threw a tree limb at me like it was a javelin. I avoided it. I kept heading toward him. He began throwing rocks at me.

I was maybe about thirty feet away from him when he threw whole showers of small stones at me. As I got closer he threw big rocks at me, some of which looked carved. One of these may have hit me in the head and knocked me out.

(10/12/07) bergman's submarine sisters

(Entered in paper journal at 5:35 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I walked into a movie theater. The lights were still on. A man stood up front, giving a brief discussion of the film that was about to play. I had come in from the left side of the theater. I walked across in front of the front row and over to the right side. I headed out the door. I was looking for the ticket-taker. I wanted to get my ticket torn, but the movie was about to start.

As I walked out the door, I saw a black man. I was about to hand him my ticket: I assumed he was the ticket-taker. But I saw that he was heading in to watch the movie as well. The man had his son, a ten-year-old boy, with him. The father was discussing the importance of Ingmar Bergman to the history of cinema. Apparently the movie Cries and Whispers was showing, though I may have called the film Smiles of a Summer Night.

I walked up a short stairway outside the door and looked left and right for a ticket-taker. The father called to me, "I don't think we give our tickets. I think we just head on in."

I said, "Oh. Okay." I turned back toward the door. The man and son were gone. A ticket-taker, tall, white, with a broad, bald forehead and wearing a suit like a security guard might wear, stood before the door. He took my ticket. I went into the theater.

The theater was now dark. I ran as quickly as I could to the front row -- my favorite area for sitting in a movie theater -- while the theater was still dark, hoping not to impede anybody's view by searching for a seat after the movie came on. I also hoped that once I found a seat, nobody would come along later and accuse me of stealing a seat that they had somehow saved for themselves. But then I remembered (?) that I had sat my stuff in a seat in the front row before I had headed out the right door. I sat beside and older man and woman.

The movie began. Liv Ullmann was walking beside a huge, black-hulled ship with a man and possibly another woman. The time period of the movies was probably the 1970s. The man was olive-skinned, tall, with dark black hair. He looked strong and suave. He wore a long, tan peacoat. Liv Ullmann was fattish and wore a blue, velvet-like (terry cloth?) jumpsuit. Her hair was frizzy and bright and enormous.

The man was telling Ullmann why she wasn't good enough for him. He said she was afraid of everything and that she could never go anywhere with him. Ullmann couldn't take the criticism. She ran of the end of the dock. The man would get on his ship and leave her, I knew. Then Ullmann would go with her sisters somewhere.

I thought, I don't remember this film (Cries and Whispers) being set in modern times. But, I thought, perhaps the village where Ullmann visits her sisters still observes traditions from the older days. Perhaps that's why I remember the style of the movie being that of an older time.

At another part of the docs a person in a huge, thick, old-style diving suit climbed up a ladder and out of the water. Having undone the spherical, metallic diving-helmet, the diver now revealed herself as Bibi Andersson. Andersson was "the tough sister" of the film, with the job of being an underwater explorer. She had come here to meet Ullmann so the two of them could go to the village together.

But now both sisters were in the water together. Ulmann looked a little healthier, less pale. She had short hair (like Andersson's typical short hairstyle), and her hair had a more subdued tone. Neither Ulmann nor Andersson had put their diving helmets on yet.

Near the sisters was a glass sphere. This was the exploration vehicle they would use. Apparently Bibi always took Liv on "one last exploration" before the sisters went to the village together.

The water was murky and brownish. There were a couple large vessels surrounding the sisters and the exploration vehicle. Liv had looked down into the water and was afraid. She had seen a large creature. She asked Bibi (both sisters still treading water) what the creature was. Bibi said, "I'm not sure. It didn't look like a shark or a whale. I guess we'll find out." In my mind's eye, I saw the silhouette of a shark passing over the silhouette of a whale in murky, brown water.

Liv got even more afraid now and started hyperventilating a little. I wondered if she would even get into the exploration vehicle.

(10/26/07) theatrical training; didn't care after all

(Entered in paper journal at 5:21 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I stood in a blue room with an older couple and a man about my age. The older couple stood to my left. The man stood before me. The older couple looked somewhat wealthy. The man my age was tall, heavyish, pale, wearing a t-shirt (pinkish-beige?). Behind him may have been a bookshelf or a closet.

The man my age told me about some stage plan like for a theatrical production. I imagined a sparse blueprint.

I saw the man again. He told me we would use the things I made as a reference for later work I would apply for. He mentioned some other training I would go through.

The man showed me books that stood on a shelf over the door frame. The books were tall and thick and had old, dark blue, faded, cloth covers.

I now saw as if I were in a separate place. I heard the older couple and the man talking to me They couldn't afford to get me a really great suit -- it wasn't in the budget. But I would look good in whichever suit I got, they said. They suggested that at some point I get an all-white suit.

Dream #2

I sat in a movie theater with my old friend R. The movie was playing, but the theater was still half-lit and dim orange. R kept crowding into my view and putting his hand in front of important characters or things on the screen. When people in the movie would say important things R would interject loudly so I couldn't hear.

I got mad and told R, "This is what you do that makes me not want to hang around with you!"

R said, "So?" He laughed. I noticed how short R's hair was.

I said, "So I'm telling you because you told me to."

R said, "Yeah, well, I guess I really don't care if I'm upsetting you, even if you tell me."

(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.

(4/11/09) graveyard/shooting; lone men and mobs

(Entered in paper journal at 8:31 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

It was daytime. I was in a car with my family. The blue sky was possibly webbed over with thin clouds, dimming the overall light. My mom was probably driving the car. We were driving down a mountainside road, into a small valley between two mountains. The valley was part of a range that extended far in the distance to my left. We were arguing about where we were, as if either this landscape wasn't a certain kind of landscape or as if we were heading in the wrong direction.

 We now approached the valley. At the base of the slope opposite us were tallish headstones, all of orange-tan stone, mainly shapes like square columns with smaller spheres on top. I made some comment about this place being a cemetery, as if that proved we were or weren't in the right place.

We turned right and drove through the valley. I looked to the right (I had been in the backseat on the driver's side, but I wasn't quite there now) to see monumental, white headstones. There were gigantic heads springing out of columns like flowers; headstones of double-men, from the torso up, reaching out and looking forward; and other similar headstones, all in a style like an Art Deco imitation of Hellenistic sculpture.

The size and odd style of these headstones gave me an ominous feeling, as if where we were was a prophetic indication of something bad that would happen to us.

We now drove among headstones. We drove past (to our right) a tall headstone of greyish stone, like a pedestal displaying a large sculpture of a man, not unlike the torso-men, driving a chariot carried by two horses. The sculpture almost seemed alive to me.

Now, along both sides of our car, a group of "horses" ran up from behind us, then running ahead of us, turning a slight left, as we would, with the road, toward a tallish, arched, pale tan-orange stone gate.

The horses were pale slate colored, with a deepening grey on their sides, and with their sides dappled with black spots. Their legs were, however, long and spindly, so that their bodies stood perhaps ten feet above the ground. They were ridden or guided by a group of people who may have been wearing yellow and red silk clothing. I again thought that all of this was ominous.

There was now a view, of which I was, at first, not necessarily a part, of a man giving a speech to a large audience. The speech the man gave was like an Oscar acceptance speech. But it was also supposed to be like a political speech.

The man was about six feet tall, a little heavy, wide-faced, slightly balding on the forehead, but distinguished looking, with red hair, a short, red beard, and glasses. The man wore a nice, pale coffee colored suit with a cream colored shirt. Behind the man was a satiny, purple curtain. The man stood behind a podium.

Suddenly, someone shot the man. Now it was like I was the man. In a series of reveries (like I was in a half-waking state, rather than a dream state) I wondered to myself how bravely I'd act if I really were shot. I wondered whether I'd flinch or maybe scream in a high-pitched voice.

I thought that perhaps I'd take the shot alright, but that if I fell and the person who had shot me were to proceed to attack me physically, I might, in my death throes, thrash about and flinch like a weakling. I also thought that if I were attacked, and the person who shot me were straddling me and pummeling me physically, I might sit up and attack him with all my strength.

But I thought that even then, I'd lose my realistic consciousness, like the police officer (Bannerman?) did in the Stephen King novel Cujo, and imagine that I was fighting on, while really I had fallen back down and was rolled onto my left side, dying.

I, as the man, was lying down. My head had been shot. I was lifted onto a stretcher and into a bunh of material like a gauzy blanket. The people who carried me may have been Mexican boys or young men.

I was carried into an "operating room," which looked more like a run-down barber shop. It had purple-painted walls and unpainted, uncovered, concrete floors. I sat in a barber's chair, possibly before a mirror, though I couldn't see my face.

All this time people had been telling me not to move but to stay awake. They may also have been telling me not to speak. I had also not been allowed to be part of a certain aspect of all the action that had been taking place around me.

But now the group of people had placed on my head a wrapping of gauze as thick as a helmet. With this "helmet," which went over the crown and sides of my head and under my chin, with a strap across the middle as well, to go over my nose, the people now told me, "Okay," as if I were now "allowed" to be fully conscious of all the events around me.

I could feel blood gushing down from the crown of my head and down along my left ear. The blood felt cold, but it was like a fresh gushing, like it had just begun.

I was placed in a wheeled chair, something like a cross between a wheeled hospital bed and a dentist's chair. There were people carting me along, people carting things like IV bags along, and people walking backwards before me. We walked toward a doorway to an "operating room" (?).

The people walking before me kept telling me to stay awake. They kept asking me questions to keep me talking. I wondered why they were making such an effort to keep me awake. I thought, I'm doomed, anyway. I might as well lose consciousness now, and either die or wake up with irreversible brain damage.

Dream #2

I was with my brother in a "movie theater lobby," which was a lot more like a cafe, except with the dim lighting of a bar, and the feeling that this room was in a much larger building, like a big shopping mall or an airport. The light was dim orange-yellow, like candlelight.

I was in the ticket-taker's line. I noticed my brother was over at the "concession stand." I walked over to him, awkwardly, like I'd suddenly realized I should be with my brother, although I still actually wanted to stay in the ticket-taker's line.

I looked into a cafeteria-style glass case displaying desserts. There were a lot of things that looked like brownie squares with layers of some kind of pale brown "chocolate" cream in them. Some of the brownie squares had their top layers out of shape like they were stale, so that the old brownie layer was bending upward at the corners. Some of the brownie squares, however, looked very fresh and appetizing. I couldn't decide what I wanted.

A man who was black or Hispanic, or both, stepped between me and my brother. The man was about my height, wiry-muscular, with a tight face. He had shaggy, curly, pale brown hair, that was kind of long, but not quite down to his shoulders. He wore a tan cap and blue-reflective sunglasses. He had a mustache. He wore a beige windbreaker.

The man started making weird comments to me about how tough it was for someone like him to come here and see movies. He then made a comment like, "It's really tough when there are all these fags here, isn't it?"

I thought the man was half-thinking I'd agree with what he said, but that he also half-thought I was gay and that I'd stand up for myself and other gay people by starting a fight with him. I just backed away from the man, figuring that other people had heard him, and not wanting other people to think that I was with this guy or that I agreed with what he was saying.

I had stepped backward and out of the line for the "concession stand." But I thought, I didn't really need to eat anything, anyway. I'll just wait for my brother. I ended up standing behind a table that held one or two tallish, cylindrical, chrome coffee makers and a couple baskets of different-colored tea-packets. I even ducked behind it.

But now the man turned in my direction and shouted out, "But what's even worse than that is the spics, isn't it?"

I knew there were a lot of Hispanic people here, and that I had to stand up against the man's racial slur about Hispanics.

I stood up as tall as I could. My head peeped up about halfway over the coffee makers. I said, "Oh, yeah?!"

I thought I'd say something else. But I looked around to see that all the Hispanic people in the place were staring at me, like I was also responsible for what the man had said. Everybody, disappointed in me, may simply have dropped me from their minds.

The people now turned and ran out of the place, as if the man had run out before them and they were now chasing him. I ran along with everybody else, trying to prove myself to them.

We all ran through a series of balconies, like the indoor balconies in an office building or hotel. The balconies had red carpet and light-colored, wood railings. There were stairways going up and down. Balconies randomly turned and intersected.

The group of people stopped in their chase while heading up a small staircase. I was at the back of the group. As the group started moving forward again, a black man, tall, wide, wearing black jeans, a black, leather jacket, a backward cap, and slightly tinted, round eyeglasses, jogged down the steps.

As the man went past me (I stood still, like a straggler), he swung his arm out and grabbed my right leg, around the calf, skimming and swinging along on it like it was a handrail, to annoy me. He hustled off confidently, thinking I'd do nothing.

I turned and ran off after the man. I was going to catch up with him and fight him. But he was now ahead of me and apparently running himself. He ran along a balcony and then into a glass-walled corridor that ran alongside the balcony he'd just run through (so that he'd run in a hairpin curve). I followed him through the corridor, which was kind of stuffy and fluorescent-lit.

The man then turned down a narrow, grey-walled, fluorescent-lit hallway. I was about to follow him down this hallway, but I saw that he was heading into a doorway on the left wall. The door was automatically locking, with a number punch-code fixture over the knob. Another person, a tallish, thinnish, black man wearing a red polo shirt, let the man in.

I could tell this was the back entrance for a restaurant. The man was coming to work. I knew that I probably wouldn't be able to get past the locked door. But even if I got past the door, I thought, I'd have to deal with a whole group of men ready to fight me, instead of just the lone man.

(1/30/10) space attack - brazil!; family on east side; fruit punch pop-tarts

(Entered in paper journal at 8:35 AM at Sit & Wonder cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

A view of a space shuttle lifting up into the sky. The view was grainy film footage. The shuttle was viewed, from perhaps one hundred meters away, lifting up through a blue sky and then into a thin layer of scattered, tan and white clouds. The shuttle left huge, tightly billowing clouds trailing behind it. There may have been only a tiny bit of propulsive flame visible under the shuttle -- it may have had a raspy flare to it, like fireworks. The boosters never came off the shuttle.

My view of all this may have started from below, as if from the ground. From there it may have pulled up to a level with the space shuttle, traveling along with it up into the clouds.

As the shuttle traveled, I heard a news reporter talking about how a crazy man had been stopped from getting onto the shuttle and sabotaging it. I couldn't quite keep in my mind that the man had been stopped. I kept feling like I was watching the shuttle moments before the man sabotaged and destroyed it.

The news report now played a recording of the man who had aimed to sabotage the shuttle. He was a kind of crazy-looking, older, Japanese man. He spoke in a distracted, grating, slighlty high voice.

The man first spoke about having come from Hawaii. Then he spoke about why he chose to sabotage the shuttle. He explained it in an analogy, a joke about a New Jersey dentist, or a joke about a dentist told to him by a friend of his from New Jersey?

As the man told this joke, the shuttle topped over the layer of sunrise pink and tan clouds. The shuttle began flying horizontally. The trail of smoke behind the ship was dark grey. The view stoppped moving along with the shuttle. The shuttle cruised forward into the distance. The view, which may eventually have become me, personally, flying, continued moving slowly forward, eventually descending through the clouds again.

I tried to figure out how the shuttle was going to get to space while traveling horizontally. I figured that somehow the shuttle would go tangentially with the earth, winding out into space that way.

I heard the news report discussing how the crazy man's origins were being tracked. The man was, I believe, going down somewhere in South America, although I think the report said he was going to Portugal. There apparently was some kind of overall conspiracy in the location where the crazy man had come from.

I was now descending toward land. The ground below me was a thin, patchy field of grass and dusty soil. It seemed to be slightly rolling and rounded. There may have been a couple children playing on a kind of barren playground. An apartment complex may have stood in the distance.

When I landed I was in some South American city. I stood in a narrow, European-looking street full of shops. The weather was very warm and sunny. I walked down the narrow street, which was positioned in shade, toward a wider, sunny street running crosswise to this one.

As I walked I could sense that two tough men, possibly wearing beige trenchcoats, were following me from about a block away. I could even hear them discussing me, their voices as close and intimate as if they were right over my shoulder. I may have felt like they were following me to prevent me from finding the origins of the crazy man.

I tried to walk nonchalantly, figuring I'd go about my business, whatever it was, and lose the two men somehow. I approached the sunny street. It was full of shops, and it seemed lively, though there weren't many people around.

I turned right and faced a dead end at the head of which was a wide, stout, cobblestone building with brand new-looking windows. The building looked like it used to be a hotel, though it now seemed to be closed down.

I turned around to head in the other direction. But I came to a side street on my right hand side. I turned down the street. The street was dim. I approached another sunny street, which seemed to have a couple of dead ends. I ended up wandering through a maze of streets in this fashion. The place I was in seemed less and less like a city and more like a courtyard in a castle or passageways within or behind a complex of buildings.

Finally I came upon an apartment complex. It was kind of modern: a lot of "raw" concrete and concrete-and-pebble designs. The levels over each other were sloped and jangly. Walking through the place I barely saw any sun, though the ground level felt open to the air and light somewhere.

I could hear families, mostly children, with some mothers, and not too many men, running around, talking, and playing. I was trying not to be noticed. I felt like some or all of the people here would inform on me or even attack me if they saw me.

I was trying to get out  of this place. But, I thought, once I got out, how would I know where I was? I thought I should get a good vantage point, so I could see where I was and where I should head. I started floating upward, in the narrow gaps between the staircases, still avoiding being seen by people.

I ended up in a complex of stairways and balcony-like walkways that were much more exposed to sunlight and sky, and seemed to stand before a downward hill slope and, possibly, over a somewhat large complex of apartments. The sunlight was bright, pale, possibly cold, like winter light in the afternoon.

I walked, across a black-painted, metal walkway?, toward the hill. As I did, I was called to by a boy and his father. The boy asked me why I was here. Somehow I slowly came to understand that I was in Brazil. I spoke with the boy and his father, mainly the boy, about where I was and what I was doing.

We walked through a narrow set of staircases that seemed like staircases in a playground playset. The stairs kept going higher and higher, tracking up the hill, but also towering more and more over the ground of the hill. We were approaching the top of the hill. I thought I would have a good vantage point from the top of the hill.

We continued walking. The boy may have spoken a lot of Spanish and a little English. The father spoke neither. The boy translated for the father, either into Portugese, or into a native Brazilian language. As we spoke, I could see the Brazilian flag in my mind's eye. The flag seemed to lie rumpled on the ground.

I had to speak with the boy mostly in Spanish. I said very basic things. I tried to express myself plainly with the Spanish I could muster. My Spanish was rudimentary, but passable. Upon waking, I could even remember what I'd said, thought I can now no longer remember it.

We approached the top of the hill. We stood on the ground. The ground was red, patched, and clumped with grass and possibly even yucca. I looked out across the field, which spanned out shallowly before me. At the other end of the field was an apartment complex. There may have been a few tiny groups of people dotting the field, people out playing around and lounging around.

This scene may have felt familiar to me. But it seemed very different from the city through which I had been walking and to which I was trying to return. I felt slightly discouraged and burdened, like I would in waking life when I go on a long, random walk and find myself somewhere where I know I'll have to do a lot of walking and back-tracking to get to a subway or some reference point from which I can easily get home.

Dream #2

I was walking down a city street at night. I turned right. I walked down a street that became increasinly dark. The darkness even seemed to plunge into my ears, possibly even against my skin, giving me a feeling of being deep under a blanket in the midst of a sickness. The feeling became even more intense, so that I felt like I was losing my equilibrium

Now I was walking out on a street which was very dark but which had a couple of streetlights, as wells as the slight, deep blue glow of sky to illuminate some things. A brambly tree or shrub crowded over me at first -- a barren tangle of what seemed to be pale, brittle, thorny branches.

I continued along. I saw that I was in a neighborhood full of single-family homes and well-spaced yards. I was surprised to see such a neighborhood in New York, especially Manhattan -- which was apparently where I was.

I even wondered whether the darkness weren't distorting my vision altogether, making me think that I was seeing single-family homes where there were really multi-family buildings. But then, I told myself, this was the East Side, the Far East Side, and there was a lot more space out here. People kind of didn't even want to come out here, I told myself.

I noticed that the houses were small. But, I told myself, the space in these houses would be enough for me. Plus, I would have a yard and a lot of separation from my neighbors.

I had been looking at houses on the right side of the street. I may even have stopped and looked straight at one of the houses. I now turned and looked to the left side of the street. There seemed to be a thick layer of darkness, then a long yard, at the end of which I saw the back end of a tall house.

I wandered through the yard and ended up before windows that looked down into the low-set first floor of what felt like a playhouse or guest house near the larger house which I had previously seen. It might have been early morning.

I looked into the window. The lights were on. My brother was inside, possibly sitting wrapped under a pile of blankets. The room seemed like a very large living room, cluttered all over with blankets and sheets.

My brother looked up and saw me. He may have called out to me, but he also called out to my mother and possibly also my sister. He said to them, "Hey, guys, it looks like Preemie came here after all, after such a long time."

I was now inside the house. It was my whole immediate family -- my mom, my brother, my sister, and myself. We were possibly supposed to go to the large house. But we were waiting for something. At some point in time, my great grandmother may have come into the room.

Everybody was happy to see me. But everybody was kind of holding back emotionally from me, trying to keep me from feeling intruded on and upset. I was acting polite, but I didn't exactly want to be here. I was especially uneasy about having to wait before going to the larger house. I really felt like we wouldn't ever be able to go there after all.

Dream #3

I was with a group of people in the line for the concession stand at a movie theater. The people may have been a group of high schoolers, with some teachers. I may have been there in the role of a volunteer.

I, and some of the students?, decided to head into the theater ahead of the group. We went into the theater, which looked more like a university auditorium than a movie theater. The lights were bright, fluorescent white with a slight tinge of green. The floors were carpeted in a pale pink-tan, very thin carpet. The rows of seats were very wide, with more than enough space for seats and desks, and a lot of leg room. The aisles were also wide, with wide, small steps.

The place hadn't yet filled up. I was walking down the right aisle. At first I thought I was by myself. But as I turned my head left to look for a good row of seats, I noticed that three of the students, some black boys, probably in their late teens, were behind me.

I was about to walk down to the very front of the theater, where I usually like to sit, but the boys turned down a row about halfway up the aisle. I wanted to be accommodating to the boys, so I turned down the row, too. I said, "Got it! Let's get our seats!" like I was pretending to be some kind of cartoon military person. As I said this, I wondered if I sounded confident.

I walked along the edge of the row, which now seemed like a broadly curving ledge, maybe six feet down to the lower row of seats. I may have been afraid I might fall.

I thought that if I had sounded too confident as I had given my pretend command, the adults (a bunch of squeamish white men and women) would think I was challenging their authority. The adults would then all try to pile into this row -- which the boys and I were trying to stake our for our entire group. So I now tried to sound very meek.

The boys took seats. I was going to sit by the boys to talk with them. But I saw that the boys all sat a few seats apart from each other. I realized they were doing this to save seats for the whole group. So I did the same thing, sitting near the aisle.

I watched the screen, which was set high above the "stage" area at the front of the room. The screen must have been enormous. The room itself seemed enormous. The room seemed to be filling up now.

I was watching advertisements on the screen. They all seemed to be for Pop-Tarts. There was a weird trivia series: two slides, the first of which mentioned Pop-Tarts' "classic" SGGB campaign, and the second of which said what the letters in the acronym stood for.

The acronym may have been SBBG, now that I think of it. The first three letters, I'm certain, stood for strawberry, blueberry, and bland. The last letter stood for some special "multi" kind of flavor, the pastry of which was also flavored to match the weird, tropical (?) fruit of the filling and frosting.

The trivia question about this "classic" advertising campaign probably filled me with nostalgia. After the trivia slides came either some slides or actual video commercials about new Pop-Tarts, which were, in some ways, a lot like the "multi" Pop-Tarts. These Pop-Tarts were, I gathered from the commercials, marketed toward young women in the business field.

The commercials showed youngish women dressed in suit-dresses walking through clean, but crowded, city streets in glimmering sunlight. The women were athletically fit, strong, healthy. In one of the ads, a woman sat at a bench like at a bus stop while eating the Pop-Tart. The whole campaign was supposed to provide a sense that these Pop-Tarts provided health for women with an active lifestyle.

The Pop-Tarts, including the pastry, were colored in pastel, "feminine" colors, like purple and pink. The entire Pop-Tart was one solid color, so that it looked like some kind of Easter candy. The women would hold the Pop-Tarts in weird ways -- loosely, by the corner, as if they were cigarettes or newspapers. This product line had a weird name, like Fruity Punches. The flavors were also odd, mixed-tropical-fruit flavors.