(10/31/04) building overrun by elves; old office politics

(Entered in paper dream journal. No time/place info.)

Dream 1

A large building was being overrun by puny, elf-like creatures of sizes varying from two to twelve inches. All the "normal" people in the building were forced out, though some few people, including a big, strong, shaved-bald man, subdued the elf-like people so that the people who were forced out could come back in.

Somewhere, in the center of a room completely packed with these small, elf-like people, was a column of televisions about six feet tall, three televisions, each of which  were playing different music videos. One was by a childish-looking, skinny, pale, clean-faced, long-haired guy shouting into a big, fuzzy mic like it was an ice cream cone. He sang some song about a woman coming back to him.

Dream 2

I came to Bandelier National Monument on the way to some new position in the area. I was in my old Americorps boss KB's part of the ecology office. There was some third section, opposite the room from the walkway to CA's office. KB had gone in there when I'd come in.

AM (?) sat at a computer. KB was mad at me because I wasn't helping with some project of hers. I tried to explain, either to myself or to AM that I was here to help for the day, but that the project I was going to work on was good and beneficial and hard work in itself.

I looked out the window to some dusty slope that was slightly covered with long tendrils of grey-tan grass made blue by the sunless morning light in the canyon.

KB came in at some point, regarding me friendly but not quite evenly. CA also came in. I think he did something to annoy me. I also think that this entire time I was trying to speak to AM, but that she couldn't hear me, or we weren't in quite the same place.

(9/30/05) not a crackhead; black saint christopher

(Entered in paper journal at 8:55 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was in a big bedroom with IS, one of my roommates from my old rented room in Harlem. IS heard that I had called him a crackhead. He was sad, and he tried to show me that he was really intelligent and that he'd actually never have anything to do with crack.

He impressed me somehow from the very beginning so that I was ashamed to have thought he was an idiot and a drug addict. Now I was trying to be like him, trying to be as knowledgeable and skillful as he. But I felt like I had to do so much to apologize to him.

IS had a case full of thick, thick picture books. They were mainly on world and architectural history. I wanted to look, but I felt like I wasn't entitled.

The sun coming into the room was bright, almost video-buzz-white. IS got a guitar, acoustic-electric, hollow-body, stained cherry red. He began playing, As he sang I could tell that even though he had the upper hand on me and he could make me feel so inferior to him, he always felt like I never thought of him as good enough to be my equal. I felt bad about this, but I was more interested in learning from him how to play guitar.

At some point the guitar strings changed into bass strings. Then IS was on TV, on a music video. I saw IS's guitar first. Then I saw IS. The music played pretty loud. I began singing and playing along, trying to learn the lesson.

Now I walked into the hallway. The hallway was full of unhinged doors, like a maze of flats. A tall, tough, white guy walked out and asked me to stop playing my music. I now realized that I had confided in this guy and that he had told IS my opinion of him.

I was mad. But I was also just trying to find out how to get away from this guy, as if getting away from this white man would reverse events and take away the hurt I had caused IS.

Dream 2

People were crossing a river and into an interior blended half with construction material and half with the actual banks of a river. A couple people crossing (everybody crossed one at a time) were black men, tall and strong. They were all violently angry at me.

Everybody, including me (wherever I was), carried a try-like object over the river. It was thick, couch-shaped, and of solid material.

The material varied -- wood, metal, crystal, etc., from "tray" to "tray." People used these "trays" to carry people across the river, like Saint Christopher would carry the infant Jesus on his shoulder.

The black people were first angry at me because they thought I didn't want them to cross. and then they were angry because apparently I had given them "trays" with the edges cut off, so they could only bring one person across each time. And they thought I did that so that they'd have to take a white person across each time. I looked at one of the cut trays, made of clear crystal, and wondered whether two people couldn't actually fit on there.

(4/13/06) brutal sexuality; the devil in disguise

(Entered in paper journal at 6:02 PM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was in a dark room or outside in the dark by a long picnic table at which a few unidentified coworkers sat. I stood at the left corner of the head of the table, and another coworker stood at the head.

The man offered me a CD. I had been interested in hearing the music. But when I took the CD I saw the cover photo was of a bunch of men laying all over each other and performing fellatio on each other -- even though it now seems like most of the men were clothed in boxer briefs and undone, short-sleeve, button-up, white shirts. The men were Asian, maybe Filipino.

I handed the CD back to my coworker, pretty quickly, mostly because I didn't want anybody at the table to think I was gay. I wasn't disgusted by the coworker or even the idea of being gay. It was more like I didn't want to have that weird, almost brutal, form of sexuality the photo displayed.

But as I handed the CD back I saw an exaggerated drawing of an emaciated, big-eyed, blonde girl standing before a background of murky green, like Hudson River water. The scene was almost like a claymation image.

The girl wasn't just emaciated -- it was like her organs were rotting almost to the point of tearing open her abdomen and splaying outwards. The girl's vagina was a bright red flap that hung down like a uvula. I knew this also meant the girl was rotting.

I wanted the CD again now because I knew that somehow the photo of the girl was a symbol for myself. But I didn't take the CD back because I didn't want to see the photo of the men again.

Dream 2

I was "watching a TV show" -- some music video channel. A set of videos had just ended, all from the 1980s, maybe the late 1980s, and all videos I didn't really like. The last one ended with the image of a huge moon over a house.

Now, during the same image a title appeared for the next program of music videos. It made me realize the videos were going to be old. I heard an old, familiar song in the sound-byte snippets of the preview. I looked forward to seeing that video. But I thought maybe the song was only going to be played by a new group.

Now the image of the moon and house split to reveal a bright stage of pink-red and yellow. This was an old show. I may have thought it was The Lawrence Welk Show. It featured live performances. The "Lawrence Welk" character sang all the songs while an old-style big band backed him up.

The "Lawrence Welk" character finished the first song and started another, "The Devil in Disguise," I believe. I tried to sing along with this song, but for some reason I couldn't. But I kept trying and trying. The camera moved off the "Lawrence Welk" character and showed some of the band members.

(7/17/07) scary music video; red landscape; two museum rooms; lesbians and mother; it all leads to death

(Entered in paper journal at 5:48 AM at Starbucks on 17th Street and Broadway.)

Dream #1

A music video by Gloria Estefan. Estefan's was done up like from the 1940s. The scenes would change from Estefan's standing by herself and singing to the camera to standing and singing in a big, "unfinished"-style bedroom with one or two other women. Estefan's outfits changed, but she generally wore pale colored, satiny, shortish dresses. Estefan's song was to the women, about how she and they always fight and think they're going to break up, but how eventually she gets back together with them.

At "the end" of the video, Estefan was in a dim and small, but elegant-looking bedroom. Estefan wore a black dress. She looked a little fat. She sang about how she could never give up loving so many beautiful girls. She gave a weird, "who me?" troublemaker expression that one might see on an old man in a Fellini film. She reclined on the floor with her hands behind her head. She looked very relaxed. She had a black blanket over her.

From behind Estefan's right shoulder, as if out of the ground, came the head of a Hispanic boy who was somewhat attractive, except that his brow was pulled out a few inches, his eyebrows were very thick, and his mouth awas full of disarranged, misshapen teeth. I saw from the woman's view, i.e. lying on the ground, a man standing over the woman with a machine gun pointed at her.

Now I saw, as if watching a movie, army men in a bedroom with a weird, circular, Asian-style (?) window. The room itself seemed to be ancient, made out of solid, crafted stone. The army men ran at a window, as if the woman had escaped out of it.

The room had gone from being full of men to being empty except a constant "drip" of men (like in an old Nintendo game) appearing just to run at the window. But when the men would jump through the window something awful would happen to them. They would dissolve into a bunch of flying pieces of flesh. I was disgusted, but I tried to look harder at what was happening.

I now stood outside the room, in the dark night. A yellow glow came through the window from the room. The window was key-shaped, with a lattice of intricate, wooden designs in shards at its lower, right edge. Some men would jump through it and become creatures like ravens. Some would jump through and become just clumps of fleshy feathers that fluttered through the air for a moment and then fell scattered all over the ground. Some would jump through and seem fine for a step or two before bloating out into mutated "birdmen" and falling down, dead.

One man didn't even make it through. His top half fell over the outside wall, and he hung there, his back coated in grey-black feathers.

A bunch of soldiers jumped through the window. They stood in a loose formation, facing at a wide, relaxed diagonal to the wall. They held their guns ready to shoot something that may have been up a couple stories.

I was the woman. I stood among the soldiers. Somehow the soldiers didn't see me, but I felt like they would son, and that they would then kill me. I guessed I couldn't escape them. I stood among them, in their loose ranks.

The men were all white, not overly muscular, somewhat red-tanned, most of them with close-cut, darkish blonde hair. I kept waiting for the awful thing to happen to them, like it had happened to the others who had gone through the window, so that they would die before noticing and killing me. I thought, Nobody lasts this long after jumping through the window.

Suddenly the soldiers all grabbed their ears as if they were hearing an awful sound. I thought, It's finally happening. But nothing much happened. One or two of the men may have had some slight melting on their faces. But mostly the soldiers were just made angry by the awful sound. They still didn't see me, but I felt like now, because of the infuriating sound, the men would most certainly kill me if they saw me.

Dream #2

An art work named after a Colorado resort town, possibly Vail or Steamboat. It was a painting like a view from space. The paint was laid on so thick that everything was three-dimensional. It was supposed to be completely realistic, but the "snow" depicted was all red, except at the peaks of some high mountains, where it was actually white. The last name of the artist may have been Burroughs.

I thought the work was very good. I didn't think the work was realistic, per se. But I did think that the red produced a lovely kind of "realistic" atmosphere.

Dream #3

I walked down a hallway with someone, possibly a woman, behind me (and to my right?). The hallway was dim and soothing, but with plain, white tiles and white walls. The hallway ended in a T-shape. At this intersection the walls and floor were black.

Both arms of the T were museum exhibits. I (and probably my friend) had a ticket that would get into both exhibits. The exhibit on the right was the one I had come for: either some unique, colorful sculptures or some kind of photography.

The exhibit on my left caught me totally by surprise: I'd had no idea there was a hall on the left. I wanted to see what it was, even though I thought I would wait to go inside until I had been to the exhibit on the right.

An old man in a security-uniform tie and jacket stood by a clear, plexiglass, turnstile gate to the art exhibit. I didn't want to make the old man think I was trying to get into the left exhibit without showing my ticket, and I didn't see a ticket-taker at this exhibit. So I crept only a couple inches into the exhibit, where the old man could still see me, so I could see the exhibit's name and some of the works on display.

The room was dim, with soft, deep-tan walls. The name of the artist whose works were on display was something like Isamu Noguchi. It might have been more like Tomiguchi.

There was some kind of sculpture in the room. But what mainly caught my eye were silhouette profiles, of black overlaid with cutout, white paper (i.e. the cutout, white paper made the profile seen on the underlying black paper). The profiles were framed very nicely and looked like profiles of nineteenth-century people, mostly children.

The old man cleared his throat at me. I looked back. I sheepishly headed his way. I really desired to show the old man that I wasn't a crook, that I had a ticket, and that I wasn't trying to get into the exhibit without a ticket.

I walked up to the plexiglass gate. The ticket had a barcode. The barcode needed to be ran against a scanner. The waist-high gates would then open. I got nervous about whether my ticket would work at all, or if it would show that I didn't have the right to go into the left exhibit.

I looked into the right exhibit. The walls were black. There were a couple metallic staircases leading up to a short second level. Some blue spotlights slightly glowed amid the overall natural-feeling incandescence, lending tiny, indigo-violet twinkles to the metallic and plexiglass surfaces around me. I felt like I was in some areas from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

Dream #4

Two Asian girls wearing puffy outfits that looked like exaggerations of towels wrapped around their bodies. One girl wore a yellow outfit. The other girl wore a blue outfit. The girls were in a big bedroom that was in an old, Asian style but also had touches like a modern college dorm room.

A (very tall!) woman dressed like the evil mother in Ivan the Terrible came into the room. I don't know if the old woman was a mother to one of the daughters. I don't feel like she was, even though I seem to have thought of her as a mother. The woman was distraught because the two girls were in love with each other and were even planning to marry each other.

The girls knew how distraught the woman was. So, to tease the old mother, they stood in front of her and faced each other. They said to the mother, not regarding her, almost regarding each other, but looking slightly up as if to acknowledge slightly that they were speaking to the mother, "We have decided that we love each other like sisters. Yes, we've decided that we really are like sisters. We need to accept that and be like sisters to each other." The old mother was relieved.

Now my view closed up on the girls as they spoke more and more erotically and got closer and closer to each other. They kissed each other, then held hands and bounded lightly to the door, saying, "But we're still in love with each other, too, and we're still going to get married!"

The girls seemed, by having bounded to the door, to be ushering the old mother to the door, thus telling the old mother to leave the room. The old mother was upset again. Some part of her seemed like an old, bald man.

Dream #5

I sat eating long strips of roast beef. A man walked past me and to a door to my left, perhaps telling me, as he passed, that he was going hunting.

I said something to ridicule the man. I thought, It all leads to death. Killing leads to death. Eating dead things just tears up your insides and kills you faster.

I wondered why I was saying all this to myself if I was sitting here eating meat right now. The meat wasn't roast beef. It was like strips of deer or elk meat. I ate it off something like a stretched skin, like on a drum. Something felt Native American about it. The strips of meat themselves seemed fringed and tassled.

(12/28/09) mallwalker

(Entered in paper journal at 6:30 AM on B-train into work from Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was watching or was in a music video, looking down on the action from a high, acute angle. The music video was by David Bowie. He was dressed in a suit like that of the Thin White Duke mixed with Michael Jackson's Moonwalker suit (especially the hat).

David Bowie walked down some hallway that was kind of like a scarcely lit mall hallway, with islands of fake palm trees in the center of the hallway. A few other people also walked up and down the hallway. Bowie now approached the head of a wide, wooden staircase that was lit strongly by a few golden beams.

As Bowie walked down the staircase, I thought to myself, This video is supposed to be about some alien but extremely classy place. But it's not classy. The place looks like any old hotel.

Bowie now reached the bottom of the steps. He turned right and sat down before a bar which had a green awning over it. A pretty, tan-skinned girl with black hear and a maroon waitress dress stood behind the counter. Something about this situation was supposed to resemble Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.