(5/2/06) you got something to say?; the big joke

(Entered in paper journal at 5:51 PM at Starbucks on 57th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I stood by "my door" in "my bedroom." I looked through the peephole. A roommate, a black man with long dreads and a mean look,  walked toward my door. At first he seemed unaware of me. Then he looked straight at me. I thought, Fine. If he knows I'm looking at him, let him know. I'm tired of ihm thinking he's got everybody scared.

The man walked straight toward me as if there were no door. Then there wa no door. He had been changing into a woman as he approached me, even though "she" was still a "man." "She" looked at me with an ugly face. "She" was somewhat dark, round, with thin, eyes, a white tank top, and a palish blue, denim skirt.

"She" asked me, "Why are you staring at me? You got something to say?"

I told "her," "Yes. You always make all this noise when everybody else is going to bed. It's rude and mean and you need to stop."

We now stood before a doorway outside like at a suburban house with a front yard. She told me, "I've been proud of you for making it this long through all the noise. It's a type of lesson for you. are you complaining about your lessons?"

I didn't feel defensive or threatened. But I did try to justify myself.

Somehow both the woman and I got sidetracked and had a conversation about something outside.

Dream 2

I was on my bed. I heard my landlord in the hallway outside. The landlord was getting ready to leave.

I sat up, jumped off the foot of my bed, and opened my door. My room and the hallway both had an opulent wood and gold glow in the morning sunlight. The hallway was enormous, with plush, green carpet and thick wood walls. The ceilings were high. A stairway went down to another visible level and then back up, like this.

My landlord was on the lower level, but I could see him. A few people, all black, hung around the hall, telling the landlord there were no problems and he could go home.

I yelled at the landlord, "P! P! I have a complaint! Everything's not okay!"

Everybody looked at me, angry. I ran down the steps. It occurred to me this guy's name was PR XXXXX. I couldn't remember his last name. It struck me I might not be able to contact him if I didn't have his last name.

I yelled at him, "The man in this room" (I pointed to a room on the lower level) "makes noise all night long. I'm tired of nobody doing anything about it."

I knew that I was putting myself in danger for what I was doing. But I had to do it.

The landlord said, "He's just a poor Hispanic." (Or Mexican?) "You can't just get mad at him after one incident."

I took the landlord's statement to heart. But I couldn't figure out why I did so. First of all, the man was big and black. He wasn't a poor Hispanic. He wasn't a poor anything. And he had done mean things to me ever since I'd gotten here.

It was night. I was in bed. Suddenly my door was bashed in. Two short Mexican men burst in. I jumped to the foot of my bed, which was now tall.

The second Mexican man pulled a shaving razor

on me, yelling, "You got my friend in trouble! He's just a Mexican" (?) "who can barely speak English!"

The men weren't trying to get sympathy. This was all just another part of their big joke. But when the second man shoved his razor at me I grabbed the man's wrist and then the razor. I pulled the razor out of the man's hand. But when I tried to slash the man I was somehow ineffectual.

(10/1/16) angry spying neighbors; superman & helicopter crash; wedding bridges

(Entered in paper journal at 5:45 AM at home in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I sat in a huge but incredibly messy house (possibly my mom had given it to me while she was away). I tried to eat. But someone saw into the place from a window above me, i.e. through the window from a high floor in an apartment. The person started yelling and screaming nasty things at me, making me afraid to eat.

I ran through a cavernous, cluttered house until I got to the bedroom. The bed was high-stacked with mattresses. I tried to eat again, but the person from high up saw me through another window and shouted nasty, scary things again.

I sat down, possibly somewhere else, lay down, shielded myself on the floor with a bunch of clutter so I couldn't be seen, possibly also behind a very thin strip of wall. I thought, now I can relax.

I pulled out a report of some kind (perhaps a 10-K, the financial report publicly traded companies publish yearly). I read a few pages. I was so relaxed I almost fell asleep.

I thought, If I'm going to fall asleep, I should go to the bedroom. But, taking every sheltered path I could back to the bedroom, I knew I had to make the bedroom different from the room where the people could see in through the window.

Dream 2

I was on a lawn by a bridge. I was with some other people. I knew an airplane was going to crash. I stood up and got away. Nobody would come with me. A helicopter crashed to the ground, right where I had been sitting/laying. I thought, I guess I knew after all. I thought, I guess I knew after all.

I ran back to my spot. I thought, You coward. Why did you just run away from the helicopter after it crashed? Were you afraid it would explode? It will explode. But there are people inside that you need to rescue! I ran away from my sitting spot and back to the helicopter (as if now the helicopter had crashed away from the spot I had been sitting at).

I was now Superman. I pulled open the doors to the (blue?) helicopter and pulled out a man and a woman. I super-sped them back to where I'd been sitting.

Dream 3

At first there wasn't enough money for a wedding to occur. Now a man announced amid everybody in a scrappy living room that there was.

I saw the man a while later as everybody was prepping for the wedding. The man had now become Willem Dafoe's character from The Life Aquatic. His back was against the wall and he was breathing rapidly. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.

I saw into a special room of the man's -- full of chopped-off heads cured and hanging on the wall. I thought, Is this what he does to people at weddings?

I walked downstairs with someone videotaping the house as the man stood against the wall. I saw through the camera as the cameraman panned counterclockwise. There were beautiful walls and doorways. I wanted to see the pan again.

Someone told me, "The cameraman will only go so far with you. He won't go all the way into the next country." I thought, I wasn't asking him to.

I saw a gothically tall bridge in a tall city at night. The night was a dark purple-orange city night. The bridge streamed with the white light of cars.

I was walking on a planky bridge in the daytime. A man stood to my left, his back against a chain link fence. I had water on the sole of my right shoe. I knew that made me not quite ready for the mission I must take with the man.

I saw a trail of wet footprints crossing mine. On my right was a nice wood fence with a paper cup of water nailed to it. It was my cup. Someone had put something beside water in it. I wondered who would have done that.

(11/25/07) the one-bedroom two-bedroom; my mom's law

(Entered in paper journal at 9:05 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

It was bright day. I stood on the roof of a tall, white apartment building. The roof was a little tiered and covered with gravel or small stones. I walked down a little tiered area to meet my real estate agent, CH. CH was going to show me a new apartment.

As I approached CH, my psychiatrist A came from my right. A called, "I need to go to the bathroom! I need to go pee!" To my right was now another apartment, the door opening directly to a toilet. I thought, Well, if A isn't using the one I'm looking at, I may as well go in.

The apartment I was going to be moving into was a two-room, I had been told. I was going to find a roommate. I wondered if A was supposed to be my roommate. The place was more expensive, but I almost thought I could still afford to live here by myself.

The first room I walked into was a bathroom. The second was a kitchen. The third was a bedroom. The fourth and fifth were another bathroom and kitchen. All five rooms were in a straight line with each other. I wondered where the second bedroom was.

I walked back into the bedroom. When I got there, something made me think I had walked through the second bedroom without having paid attention. I turned around and walked back. But all there were were the second kitchen and second bathroom again.

At the end of the second kitchen (the last room) was another door. It was a thin, fake wood door. There were little stickers on it, showing words in different "cool-girl" styles and colors. One word may have been the name "Tony" in a thick, pink cursive. The door had a tiny slide-lock on it. The door was unlocked.

I opened the door. It looked like another apartment, probably with a family of a mother and children living there. The place was littered slightly with papers and things.

I closed the door. I wanted to believe that this place was also mine, but I knew it wasn't. These were my neighbors. I thought I had escaped having neighbors like these people, who would probably make me miserable with all their noise. And I still had only one bedroom!

I couldn't insulate myself from the noise of these neighbors. It struck me as odd that the door was unlocked from my side. That meant the people in the next apartment had probably been running around in this apartment. Since the new place was practically mine, I locked the door.

I walked to the front door. As I got to the front door I was once again certain that I had seen a second bedroom, or perhaps a living room, without having paid attention to it.

Dream #2

I lay in a living room with my mom and my brother. My mom sat on a couch and my brother lay somewhere beyond my bed. To my right was a buffet, on top of which was a TV, probably turned on. The room was dim.

My brother asked my mom, "Don't we have to get to XXXXX?" (This place was something like a city council meeting.)

My mom said, "Oh, no. I don't feel like going."

My brother said, "But they're going to propose your law today!"

We now stood out on a familiar road near the house where my family lived during my last years of high school. To our right, along the road, was a blocks-long bake sale.

My brother said, "You made all that fuss to get them to put the law in. Now you don't want to go support it up to the next level?"

I stood looking at a bunch of weirdly frosted cupcakes -- they all had white frosting on the centers, but other frosting (like chocolate) on the outsides. They looked like they would be disappointing.

I got mad at my mom. She had made the law? And now she was too lazy to care if it failed? I told my mom, "You are an idiot! I've been able to hold it in for a long time. But this is so stupid, what you're doing now."

I stood in a courtyard. The ground was redbrick. The walls and columns were redbrick. The place had a spacious but intimate feel. I was apologizing to a woman my age, as i what I had said to my mom had been said to this woman instead. I wasn't physically speaking. It was like I was walking around by myself in the courtyard, remembering the apology while also letting bad thoughts about my mother work through my head.

I now embraced a woman who looked like MH, a colleague from New York Cares. I held MH close and realized how good it felt. Now it was like I had said all the bad things about a nearby friend of MH. MH's friend was very severe. MH and I were standing, arms around each other, saying apologies as MH's friend approached us from a distance, as if we were preparing what we should say to MH.

(8/16/08) seeing old co-workers; yelling at walls

(Entered in paper journal at 8:28 AM at Flying Saucer cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a big area like the second floor of a big warehouse building (or possibly like a big building in TriBeCa that had been converted into an artist's studio). It was like an event or presentation had just ended. Everybody was just milling around, talking with each other.

I saw someone who had worked at a company I had done temporary work for (and which later on became the company I was currently working for, at the time I entered this dream into my paper journal). I shook the man's hand and said hi.

Another man, a big man in a pea-colored polo shirt, walked up behind me and seemed to be annoyed with me, as if I were planning to do something annoying to him. But I recognized him, too -- also from the time I'd done temporary work. I tried to say something to calm the man's apprehension. But all I could say was the address where the three of us had worked.

Now I knew the man's name: BV. But I might have called him by the wrong name, a Russian name, because I thought he looked Russian. But now BV recognized me, too, and said, "Yeah, yeah, how are you doing." He smiled a little, more as if to say, "You can't be that surprised at our meeting, can you?"

Dream #2

It was daytime. I stood in my bedroom. People in the apartment next door and in the apartment above me started making a lot of noise. I got mad and started making lewd hand gestures toward and yelling obscenities at the wall and ceiling.

(5/10/09) wishing for hidden rooms

Dream #1

I was in an empty apartment. The apartment was railroad-style, with four rooms. It was filled with natural light. The walls were a clean white. It was my new apartment.

For some reason, although I was happy with the place and all the rooms, I was trying to find different rooms or find a way to change the rooms. I wanted both my bedroom and my study room to be hidden within the other rooms, so nobody else could ever see my studying or sleeping in my house. I figured if I kept those two activities hidden from sight, the people in the apartment upstairs from me would never bother me.

I imagined that the back room and either the front room or the second room from the front each had a room like a closet, completely windowless, with a door which would close off from the outside room. (Interestingly, either there wasn't a kitchen or a bathroom or else I wasn't paying attention to them.) I figured one room (the back?) would be my bedroom, while the other (the front?) would be my study room.

(5/24/09) broken ceiling

(Entered in paper journal at 8:12 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

It was daytime. I was in my bedroom. The people upstairs from me started making a lot of noise on my ceiling. I got really angry and grabbed one of my bed-frame rods (in waking life, my bed-frame rods stood against my wall; I never assembled my bed frame) and slammed it against the ceiling. Each time I did this I got weaker and weaker, so that I would hit the roof more and more softly.

I lay down on my bed and looked up at my ceiling, which was full of marks where my slamming against the ceiling had pushed in the sheet-rock board.

The noise from upstairs started again. For a moment I thought I couldn't bang on the ceiling anymore. I'd just caused too much damage already. But the noise got worse and worse, until I no longer cared about the damage.

I grabbed the bed-frame rod and slammed it against the ceiling. This time I slammed it so hard that it crushed the ceiling upward. A section of the ceiling (the ceiling was now painted grey (?)) curved inward in a roughly triangular shape. The gypsum inside bloated out thickly, as if it were more like insulation.

I tried to figure out how I would justify my broken ceiling to my landlord. I thought I could possibly justify it by saying how awful my upstairs neighbors were and how angry they finally made me.