(9/8/06) the mutant bear-fish's soda commercials

(Entered in paper journal at 8:20 AM at home.)

Dream 1

I was out in a plaza area that seems somehow like a carnival. I saw my boss EB in a black suit jacket and slacks, black tie, white shirt, black sunglasses, talking with a young man sitting on a stool -- like EB was an FBI agent trying to recruit a new agent. But the things EB said sounded like he was interrogating the young man. I thought, I hope the kid isn't afraid he's guilty of something  and end up running off.

My focus faded away toward something like a structure for a merry-go-round. I heard EB say something like "Don't worry. I'll be back. I just have to convince this guy. But he'll come around pretty easy."

I was in "my" bedroom. The room had thin wood walls and thin carpet, but an overall familiar and nice feel. I was happy to be back. But I saw a toy of mine (?), something like a motorized car-toy with big, nubby wheels and a thin, shoe-like, grey white, and yellow body laying on the floor instead of on the coffee table where I'd left it.

I was nervous, worrying about who had been in my room.

I walked into another room, which was "the same room," and saw papers I had left scattered on my bed. The papers were like my thoughts on some creative work I was trying to piece together. I was happy to see it all. I sat down on the bed and tore into the papers.

I was on a lake shore or rather a little bar of land that went into a vast lake. It was trashy, barren land. The lake was kind of dirty. I was with a group like a church group. I felt alone and a little dirty, unkempt.

I saw something weird in the water (I believe we had been looking for weird fish in the water). I walked by myself to the water's edge, to the weird animal. It was like a huge fish with weird "bear lips" sticking out of the water. I backed up and shouted to a suited group-leader (also a "friend"). I was more and more confused and afraid, as if the "bear lips" on the fish body became a shaven "bear head."

The fish was now a bear. It emerged from the lake decomposed and gnarled -- its hair green, its eyes skull-like, its body emaciated. It called (telepathically?) to me, Why are you afraid? Aren't you supposed to be the one close to me? Aren't you supposed to understand me?

It walked toward me and past me. I caught up and followed it like a friend, talking in a puppy-like way, like a twerp would talk to a cool kid.

We were in a small, very private apartment living room. The bear was "filling out" two "advertisements," which kind of looked like SEC reports with a ton of blanks, and empty space between the paragraphs. As you filled in, by deduction, the blanks of these forms/"advertisements," you were informed -- almost downloaded with -- the advertising message of the company. The companies were Pepsi and Coke. The bear liked one, and I agreed -- the messaging hidden in the blanks was much wittier and yet much more easily obtainable.

I and a couple people "continued" our tour through this "beverage museum." We were now in a mock-up of a fast-food restaurant. The person behind the counter (orange counter, garish orange, pink, and purple everywhere, with some flooring and surfaces of a wood-like-textured tile or plastic material) was monotonously blabbing about advertisements on TVs over her head.

I saw one of the advertisements, and yet it was like it was happening right beside me and deep within my mind. People were rushing to a self-serve fountain to get abundances of soda in a quick time. One person filled a flimsy, plastic, 32-ounce cup to overflowing (so the plastic lid kept bubbling and brimming off) with flattish, orange soda.

This weird soda race wasn't a contest or a promotion -- rather, the beverage company was just trying to get people "into the spirit" of drinking more soda more quickly than everybody else they knew, basically to drive sales. The mock-up restaurant was a Dunkin' Donuts, which had been purchased by a big company like Coke or Pepsi.

The next commercial was playing on the "homestyle" attitude of the company (?). The tour guide behind the coutner said, "This is the ad that made the phrase 'Take an hour off' famous."

The ad showed two guys, a manager and an employee, in the back area of a Dunkin' Donuts (which was more like a machine sled or a barn or a garage). The manager knew the employee had his girlfriend outside, waiting. He told the kid, "Go to lunch. And you know what? You can take an hour off."

I knew the really famous part of the commercial was coming up -- though I couldn't remember how it came up. In the famous part, the manager said, "Take two hours off." This was supposed to show, I "remembered," how Dunkin' Donuts's products and practices embodied the sentiment of taking things easy and enjoying the good things in life. I knew what a cheap lie that was. It kind of creeped me out.

I watched the commercial. The manager stood by the door a second after the employee exited. Then he walked out. He saw the employee kissing his girlfriend. He shouted, "Hey!" like he was mad.

The employee turned, shocked and afraid.

The manager said, "Matter of fact, take two hours off. It's on me."

The view cut to a wide shot of the girl, boy, and manager standing in front of a wall of a "red barn," an the manager standing in an open doorway.

(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.

(12/21/08) L's sick mother; the land of mutated children

(Entered in paper journal at 12:08 PM at girlfriend H's apartment.)

Dream #1

I was inside an apartment. It was smallish, with grey carpet and pale lighting. It might have been early morning or late afternoon. I might have been all alone in the apartment.

My friend R's wife L walked in. Apparently the apartment belonged to R and L. I might have been in there, trying to get something while neither of them were there. But now L saw me. She went in and sat on her bed, which was (apparently) in the living room. The bed was all messy.

I asked L how she was doing. She seemed very mellow, almost depressed. She said she was fine. I asked her how her mom and dad were doing. She said, "Oh, my mom..."

I saw a picture in my head of a cartoon dad and mom at the very top of a greyish-green screen.

The mom popped out of the picture. I understood that this meant that L's mom was having health problems, or maybe that she had cancer.

I had to leave. L didn't want me to go, but, as bad as I felt for L's mom, I didn't want to have or start anymore contact with L or R.

I walked out the door. I wore both my shoes, but my right foot was also wrapped in a brown, plastic bag. I walked down a long, grey-painted, wooden stairway to a small parking lot/road that was bordered by a slightly wooded area. I knew R would be coming around soon. I wanted to be gone before he got here so I wouldn't have to see him. I may have walked another road.

Dream #2

I got onto a small airplane. The seats of the plane were arranged like a bus. The pilots got in. They sat in a seating area like bus drivers might sit in.

The plane began speeding up. The light outside was greyish like on a cloudy day. We coated past a landscape of full, green trees.

As the plane began taking off, I looked to my right, i.e. toward the front of the plane. The light outside was deep blue, like late afternoon, almost night. I saw through the pilots' windows. I thought, I've never been in a plane where you could actually see through the pilots' windows like this!

We passed through two sets of trees, which were arranged on either side of us like gates. We would scrape against the trees as we passed them. The trees may have been half-barren, not full. The horizon was a band of pale purple.

It was now daytime. The pilot was talking to some passengers in the front row as if he were a bus driver. I looked around. We were flying barely above street level, above a highway, following the highway's source. Then the plane was actually driving along on the highway. Finally, the plane had transformed into a regular bus, driving along the highway.

I thought, Well, maybe this is just for the first leg of our trip. I remembered having taken a bus once from Newark Airport to Allentown, Pennsylvania. I thought, Well, once we get to our next place we can take an actual airplane.

I was now skateboarding down the highway. The highway had a weird appearance, like it was smaller or cleaner than usual. The day was warm and bright. There was also a feeling along the highway like it was passing under bridges or just within range of barriers or enclosures, though there were grass slopes on either side of the road all the time. There were no cars. Instead there were kids, maybe teenagers, playing all through the street.

I tried to keep off to the left shoulder of the road. The shoulder was lined with tan bricks. My skateboard kept moving without any effort from me: I was going down a slope the whole way.

I was trying to avoid the kids because I didn't want to interrupt their fun, but also because I didn't want them to think I was a kid, too, and have them start bothering me. But eventually some kids did start to notice me. I skated over to the right shoulder of the road in hopes of avoiding them. But they followed me.

I got off my skateboard. I walked up onto the grass slope. Here, too, were kids in small groups, like picnic groups, playing here and there under the wide shade of the sparse trees.

I reached the top of the slope. The space was empty of trees, completely open to the clear, blue sky. All around me I saw rolling hills of grass, with small groups of kids playing everywhere.

I was being followed again by a group of kids who walked with a zombie-like slowness and will-lessness. I tried to avoid the kids. I walked to my right, toward a rocky cliff. Three zombie children cornered me at the cliff. They all looked like average, slightly troublemaking, white teenage boys. One wore a brown t-shirt.

I knew if I jumped off the cliff I'd die. I hadn't been afraid of the kids before: I just didn't want to be bothered by them. So I figured there was no use being afraid now. I might as well just see what they were planning to do.

But the kids didn't reach me. They may have stopped. The head of one of the zombie kids suddenly re-shaped. It puffed out into a grotesque circle, like out of a Garbage Pail Kids card. The kid seemed to be doing this in order to make me afraid. But I still wasn't afraid. Another kid expanded his head so that it grew a leg and an arm, both of which had a gross, rubbery appearance. I was trying to figure out what kind of disease these children had that was making their bodies do this.

I was now in a house or an apartment. This place may have been underground. The place was only half-lit, as if a few random lights in unseen rooms were throwing into the main room the only light the room had. The place was sparsely furnished but seemed cluttered nonetheless. There was a lot of activity, maybe from a lot of children running around. The place seemed more like a mental hospital than an apartment or house or even a school building.

At first I was floating, as if I were coming down a stairway and into the main room. I tried not to attract anybody's attention. I thought if anybody saw me and tried to connect with me, they'd give me whatever disease they had.

I floated through the main room (over an air-hockey table?) and into a very small, lit hallway. A couple kids ran out of a doorway to my left. As they ran past me they mutated themselves. One added limbs to his head the way the other had done. Another added bubbling lumps, two or three times the size of his actual head, to the back of his skull. A little girl came out and mutated her head so that it looked like a short body attached to a tall body at the neck, with the tall body in a pink dress and the short body in a blue dress.

Finally a woman came out of the room. She looked like Daryl Hannah's Pris character in the movie Blade Runner. She was very sexy and sleek. She wore a black and white striped tights costume and had spiky, pale blonde, almost white, hair. She herself was a mutation. But she was known as the "mother" of all these children. She had hypnotized them to be mischievous. But she was like a role model to them, so even if they weren't hypnotized, they probably would still be mischievous, if that was how she told them to be.

The woman touched me. I knew that since she touched me, I, too, would probably also start acting mischievously.