(7/12/05) thumbtack ritual; elevator possession; mrs. piper's crystal ball

(Entered in paper journal at 6:15 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

Some view, comic book-like, of a man lying on the ground while people poked thumbtacks into him. Only three or four thumbtacks would be in at one time and they'd all be arranged according to certain points, on the body, e.g. two near the hips and one at the belly button. The man was green-skinned, with heavily inked lines for his musculature. The hands and arms of the (three or four?) people reaching to put the thumbtacks into him were red and blue.

Sometimes people would put other objects on the man's body, like charms. At the end they put three green apple cores across the man's collarbone, even spaced. At this point the man picked up a thumbtack and put it into his left (?) nipple.

All the time I thought I would not do what the man was doing to himself, even though it was some mystical ritual. But now I was definitely disgusted and afraid, and a little ashamed, of the cowardice that held me back from being willing to do it.

Dream 2

I walked into a department store in a mall, following after my NYC Americorps coworkers DO and SC, whom I thought I had upset. I walked past a female clothing section and tried not to act interested in wearing what I saw, just in case DO and SC were around and could see me.

Then I saw them. I was walking away from an elevator bank while they were walking toward it with a group of men of different races. They saw me, and as I continued walking, they followed me to talk a little more.

But DO was grabbed by one or two of the men and told to stop clowning around. DO was apparently getting married to the sister of one of these men, so he was trying to act good. SC and I headed after them to prove we, as DO's friends, were also good people. But the elevator door closed as we reached it.

We took another, hoping to follow the group down (to the basement?). But the elevator we got into was going up first. The elevator had about five or six people in it, including me and SC. As we went up the elevator got faster and faster. It changed into a tattered, faceless, metal lift in a somewhat wide, metal shaft with plenty of light and rust everywhere, so the wall and cords almost looked fleshy or organic.

People disappeared, as if straight out of memory, as we ascended. I was afraid to look down the shaft. I thought I'd be sucked out of the lift.

When we got to the top floor only SC and I were left in the elevator. Slowly the elevator changed again, into what I thought then was two airplane cockpits. But they both look now like theaters, with beige, pleather seats and a meager supply of flight controls at the front.

One, which appeared where the shaft had been, had two television screens by the flight controls. The two screens showed the inside of an airplane in some television drama. The left screen had an old, thin, female flight attendant, who seemed to be staring straight at me.

This cockpit was the down elevator. SC got into it as I thought that there was something reassuring about the flight attendant's stare, lilke it gave this whole strange experience a feeling of reality.

Now that whole area went black -- just faded out. I thought I had something to do with that, like I was making the surroundings predictable by making SC disappear as the rest of the people in the elevator had disappeared. I now sat in the larger cockpit, which had up at the front a movie screen. I sat in one of the back rows.

I was possessed, but I didn't realize it, perhaps through the rest of the dream. I wrote with my left hand into a torn piece of pinkish-purple, fibrous paper. There were some things already on the paper, like figures or sketches or small math problems. But I (writing and yet not aware) watched words appear on the page in wide, sloppy scrawl.

In the writing, something was being explained, I think, about how people had been killed or tortured. I thought a ghost was writing these words. It made me sick to think that what was writing these words had done the disgusting things people were now talking about, and that this "ghost" was right next to me, treating me as a friend.

Then "it"/"I" flipped over the paper and wrote something like, "Next week I will be in full contact with you," or, "I will be in full contact with you for one full week." I knew what this meant and I knew it was something I had wanted, but I now knew it was something disgusting, and now I didn't want it.

But now I realized (even though I still didn't know that my hand was writing) that I had been possessed by this thing. I could feel it climbing around in my chest. I threw up in two tiny spurts, each about half the size of a fist.

Dream 3

I went into what I think was an antique store. I was looking for a crystal ball used by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychic Leonora Piper, whom I think I called Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Alta Piper.

The store owner involved herself in my search and then concluded that she no longer had Alta Piper's crystal ball. I hadn't told the store owner that I couldn't buy the ball, anyway, and that I was just looking to be around it to see if it did in fact have any magical powers or feelings surrounding it.

The woman showed me some silvered crystals in a box and then two necklaces, one with sea-greenish, milky, translucent stones

and the other with a ruby in the center outlined by gold and with a large plate of diamonds around it.

I touched the sea-green stone necklace and felt an electric surge of pain. I dropped it back onto the table.

I really wanted the necklace now (and I really did not want it as well -- I was afraid of it), and the storekeeper could tell I wanted it. But I couldn't even afford this necklace, which was maybe one-third the price of what the crystal ball's would have been. I was ashamed to tell the woman I really couldn't afford anything in her store.

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

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

Dream #1

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dream #2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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