(1/22/06) the vessel loses oxygen; nuclear attack

(Entered in paper journal at 10:53 AM at Ozzie's coffee shop on Garfield and 5th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was on a boardwalk on a river. There were huge battleships or other military ships traveling down the river. They all started sinking, or falling, into some kind of pit. I had to take care of it somehow, or I had to tell somebody in charge about it.

Along the boardwalk were shops. I was now all the way at the end of the shops. The buildings were cream-yellow stucco. The shop I was by may have been an office for some magazine publishing group. I had been given a task. I now had to take care of it.

I walked back down the boardwalk to where I had been before. As I passed along (the "boardwalk" was like cobbles wept with sand, like this elevated walkway by a river was actually a walkway right off a beach) I passed by groups of young men "playing sports." Many stood by tables and had the ball of their sport and were passing it around with each other. I felt menaced whenever I passed the men.

As one table, where the guys were "playing football," as I approached, all the guys backed far away from the table out of dislike for me. One guy stayed close to the table and hassled me a little as I passed. I noticed on the table a big, plastic cup of Pepsi and ice. The Pepsi was of a lighter color, from having been diluted by the ice.

I now came up to the only group of white people I'd seen so far. There were men and women, all, apparently, really smart. They were playing with an orange Hacky Sack. They fumbled it out of their circle, which had an empty space in it.

I didn't want to take the Hacky Sack back to the people because I felt like I was unworthy to be in their presence. But I took it up to them anyway. I kicked it to one of them. Everybody was impressed with the way I kicked.

They somehow involved me in their game, even though I kept trying to leave, feeling I was stupid and athletically inept. Even though I always missed or messed up, they kept involving me in the game.

Once the Hacky Sack came at me high. I bounced it off my left shoulder and kicked it with my right foot. But the kick went way off. But the guy to my left said something like, "Wow, that was really good technique." I still kept trying to back out.

Now the "coach," a woman who liked like SS, the director at my work, came up and said, "Okay, now everybody break up into your four groups and head out for the competition." I knew now that everybody had been using their practice to get comfortable passing to their particular teammates. Since I had just passed to anybody, I hadn't caught on to that, either.

Everybody was now in the ocean, divided into their four groups (of four?) and using the Hacky Sack like a ball. I saw there was no team I could fit into.

I started to tell the coach. But she interrupted me. She said, "I know. You and I both know you can't stay here, and you really didn't want to, anyway. Which is why I wondered why you didn't just leave before everybody started liking you. They don't understand that you can't stay. But I can't let you stay. I don't even want to. What am I supposed to tell them?"

Their game or motto was called something like "The Rug," which didn't make sense to me.

I was floating back to the end of the shops again, disembodied this time. I flew along all the shop signs and saw that the second to last shop was called The Rug. I saw how the last shop sign was just clear plastic with a target-bracket-style

design near its bottom. I saw the word "RUG" appear in the bracket field.

I thought, They can't move into that shop -- their sign would look all skewed. Then I realized the transparent plastic was some kind of monitor. The

was a space that got graphics from a computer inside the shop and which could be manipulated (from inside) to the center of the screen. I thought, Oh -- well, then, the sign won't look so bad.

Now I was back where I'd begun. The ocean was a river again.

-- No.

I was floating back, too fast, even: because I saw three ships, all military, two smaller than the one enormous one, sinking into the water. They were like huge "Battleship" game pieces, even with the pegs for the holes. They got washed over with water, tides of it. I wanted to slow down so I could see exactly what was happening.

Now I was back to where I'd started. There was a huge mouth for an underwater tunnel. Apparently I went down. There was a big vessel down there, more like a spaceship than a battleship. I had gone down to it it rescue some people who were trapped when the machine malfunctioned. The people were in an air-supply compartment that was about to be corroded and destroyed.

The first time I went down there, everybody except one woman was dead, and somehow I even messed up rescuing her. She may have dissolved when I touched her.

I stood on the walkway, looking at the bridge and tunnel-mouth again. It was like the first time had and hadn't happened now. Now the vessel down below was malfunctioning. Somehow I had been briefed (maybe even by myself) on the circumstances.

Suddenly I was being pulled or sucked headfirst and backwards down into the tunnel. I remembered having come up the tunnel the first time. The tunnel was a tall, wide slope of steel rails, coppery tinted by age and shadows and walls.

I now plunged below water and shot down to the vessel, which was lodged in some maze-like tunnel. Off to my right (I was right side up now. As I had been traveling I may have been a girl. But I was myself again now.) was a -- some kind of reef or deep-sea tunnel.

We were deep below the water. The vessel was for exploration. I opened the hatch to the airlock, apparently where the last air was. I had been holding my breath all this time, I realized.

I got into the airlock. There was woman there. At one moment the woman was beautiful, tall, thin woman I'd never met before. At another she was my cousin, AH, though I still didn't know.

I knew there was barely any chance I could save the woman. The water was so deep. The woman would have to hold her breath all the way to the top. she'd already been breathing less air than she'd needed.

The woman was a naked anime cartoon girl. I put her (she was barely awake) on a red disc. She floated upward through crystal blue water and vanished like on a teleporter beam. I knew the water was now not so deep as I had thought.

I turned back to the vessel. The water was black and dark again. I swam up through the airlock, which was now filled with water. I swam up through a little hallway, to another door, and into a hallway locked off from the water. The hallway was much larger, like a hallway on the spaceship in Aliens.

I was soaking wet. I was tired. I knew this was it. I was going with the ship. I couldn't make it back through the water.

To the left was some mild, fluorescent light and possibly a museum display hallway. There were other people, possibly a lot of them, in this area of the ship, all preparing to die, or, maybe, to leave the ship.

I was now in the "apartment" or "cabin" of two friends. It was small but nice. Nothing seemed quite level, like the ship was tilted, so everything inside was tilted. There was a sliding glass door (?) behind a longish, oval dining table. It had loose, vertical blinds that were an orange-tan color.

The two friends were husband and wife. The husband was in some other room. The wife, Hispanic (?) with long, straight, full, black hair and a very lovely body, was in the adjoining living room. (By the living room was a kitchen with a breakfast bar, then a dark hallway to one or two other rooms.)

I looked through the blinds. Down a floor or two was a square of yard strewn with oak leafs. Something about it looked like a display in a museum. But it was snowing.

The woman said, "Look. The climate system is so messed up that it's actually snowing inside the ship."

I thought, recalled, that the husband and wife were scientists. The "yard" was actually some kind of ecological or horticultural experiment. The husband and wife were two of the more interesting scientists on this ship, though they had less to do than most of the other scientists with the  subjects of the actual exploration.

The ship probably was an ocean vessel, some kind of submarine. But it was also possibly some kind of spaceship. The ship had malfunctioned and crashed and was running out of oxygen. Nobody was going to live, and everybody was facing the facts.

But this thin sprinkling of "snow" seemed to cheapen the wife's experiment plot. I held the wife and said, "I know, I know." I was glad that, if I couldn't escape, I could at least be here for my friends.

Dream 2

I was at a house that was also like a bar. I sat at the bar and watched the television. Some news channel caught two of George W. Bush's closest aides in two cities in the Middle East, where they were shown conspiring, on Bush's behalf, with Osama bin Laden, for the next terrorist attack. We all knew we were pretty much doomed.

Bush, who, the news made obvious, planned all of this, wasn't being investigated at all. So nothing was really changing. It was like the news had just pointed out the crime as another item of gossip. A lot of people even thought the attack wouldn't happen for a long time, like Bush wouldn't let it happen.

Everybody (six or seven people) in this place got ready for something. I went into the bathroom. I "knew" this place was a complex or compound for scientific research. There were hallways all of us could use to get out of the compound. I tried to figure out what was possible.

I heard and felt one explosion. I knew the attack had started, and that this time it was nuclear missiles we were being attacked with. But I still tried to think of how to escape.

A second explosion rocked the compound, though both explosions might have been far off. I came out into the living room. Behind the couch were huge windows looking out at a bunch of trees over which nothing could be seen.

I stood to my friend R's left. R told me, "They've already begun the attack!" He started crying, raging, "How could they" (he may have meant me) "let them attack so soon?"

All I could do was embrace him and say, "I know. I'm sorry. This really sucks."

(7/10/06) floods and nuclear bombs; deadbeat and bloody mouth; lifting up my friend

(Entered in paper journal at 7:25 PM on 4-train from Union Square in Manhattan to home in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I drove in a car down a mountain to a place like a headquarters or a visitor center. It was a sunny day. I was in the car with someone like my brother. We were halfway through some task. Down by the visitor center we spoke of approaching nuclear bombs.

Then the land was suddenly flooded, as if out of nowhere. Only vegetative stalks were above the ground. But it was still the same same calm, sunny day, and my brother and I were still talking about the encroaching nuclear bombs.

Then I heard my friend M from my Americorps NYC Parks program as if I was talking with her on the phone. M was joking with friends about going "up the river" (to prison?). Then the joke was serious. M asked me why I didn't call her after finding out she had gone "up the river," or why I didn't write her letters or say prayers for her.

I saw a piece of notebook paper with a blue crayon drawing of a wood post fence in the corner of some writing. Then the fence was purple. Then it was some kind of opal or clear color with diamonds or sequins hanging off it.

Dream 2

I was in a trailer home like at my Americorps position at Bandelier National Monument. I may have been a woman. There was some projection of a cartoon figure against the door. I wasn't quite looking at it.

The cartoon figure may have been voiced by the man I was in love with. The voice was explaining why the man was nowhere to be found. He was kind of a good-for-nothing. Now someone else was explaining that this guy had better fall back in line. His job wasn't one of the ones people needed when times got tough and when lazy people got laid off.

I realized the people were talking about me. I was now me/the woman. I looked at the cartoon projection, which was some kind of extra furry Yogi Bear face. I realized I may be out of a job as soon as tomorrow.

Something in my sinuses cracked. A pool of blood poured out of my mouth and onto the table I sat at. Two pieces fell out into the pool of blood. One, like a hook-shaped earring back

and the other like a metallic pill with writing on it.

I felt great relief in my sinuses and more worry about my job than about the blood.

Dream 3

I was on a park hilltop with my friend KB. KB was at a picnic bench doing work. She was ranking tests. Somehow scores in the high 600s were good, then nothing was really good until scores got down into the mid-200s, which, to my surprise may have been slightly better (or worse) than the scores in the high 600s.

KB told me she was through ranking the tests. We walked toward steps down the hill as she told me she had put off a report until now. Did I think that was bad?

I said, "No. It's only a three-hundred-word report, and tomorrow she'd still have one and a half days to do it."

I was now holding her, like I was hugging her and arching my back to lazily lift her enough so that her feet wouldn't touch the ground. We walked through

(For some reason my writing just stops.)

(9/24/06) bomb in the desert; lighthouse post office; videotaped beatings

(Entered in paper journal at 9:15 AM at Ozzie's coffee shop on Garfield and 5th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

A huge crowd of people stood before something like a desert at the edge of a city of enormous buildings. The people were separated from the "desert" by police barricades. But I was in the desert. In some place behind me a nuclear bomb was going to go off or be dropped.

I hurried to and behind the barricades, into the huge crowd of people. I had been blind with frenzy. But even now, on the side of the people, I was terrified. I had no idea how everybody thought just standing behind the barricade would save them from a close blast whose destruction would span for miles and miles.

I knew I had to get to a bomb shelter in one of the buildings. I ran through the streets, against the flow of everybody who ran to the barricades to see the blast. I was trying to get as deep into the city as I could. Then I would go down in to a shelter. I could see the deep blackness of the shelter.

Dream 2

It was a stormy afternoon, dark grey. I ran up a hill to a lighthouse (?).

There was a house, a "post office," at the base of the lighthouse. I had sent a FedEx package through this office. I wanted to make sure it reached its destination (which, apparently, was this post office).

I came in out of the rain, soaked. Someone (?) was with me. A nice, oldish, fattish "fisherman's wife" kind of woman sat at a desk in this homey, cluttered, office space. One of us wore a yellow raincoat.

The post office woman handed me a big, thick FedEx package. I tore it open. I believe if there was someone with me, I didn't want that person to see the contents of the package, which (she?) would try to steal.

But it turned out this wasn't the package I was looking for after all, but a package I had sent myself. I wondered if the package I was really looking for (i.e. the one I had sent myself) wasn't being kept from em by both the person with me and the post office woman.

Dream 3

A TV show interviewing a woman who had been severely beaten by her boyfriend. The woman wanted videotapes her boyfriend had of her having been beaten. At first the TV show host and "we viewers" thought she wanted the tapes for evidence during the trial (which was already stacked against the man completely). But then the woman said a whole list of videotapes she wanted from the man, things from before she even knew the man.

The list of videotapes came up on a television screen somewhere in the studio. There was a whole outline of things the man had done to the woman. It was suddenly clear, and the TV show host said so, that the woman wanted all these tapes because the bad things the man had done in the past really turned her on. In fact, the videotapes of the woman being beaten also turned the woman on.

Looking at the list of the man's acts, I couldn't believe the only thing this TV show spoke about was the man beating up this woman. The man had done a lot of awful things.

The TV show host (a woman?) was chastising the woman for getting aroused by videotapes of herself being beaten. But now the woman was a man (?) and was talking about a disease that bent his penis into a Z-shape. There was a view of the virus (?) that caused this disease. Then there was a view of the man's penis, which looked like a white straw bent into a Z-shape.

(11/3/06) pretty girl steals toilet paper; message on the bomb; the hill of life in the land of death

(Entered in dream journal at 7:19 AM at Starbucks at Borough Hall.)

Dream 1

I went into my bedroom in a somewhat big but dirty house. I had moved in with my landlady and a bunch of other people. They had stuck me in a gross room. I tried to make the most of it. I went to my bed to get some rest.

A window was at the head of my bed. I pulled aside a sheet-like curtain to see the "window" was a big hole in the wall covered by a screen hung loosely over it like a big curtain. There might have been a sectioning of the screen in the top center.

The breeze would blow the screen in and out. I knew anybody could get into my room. I felt cheated -- to be in such a dirty room that anybody could get into.

I saw a young woman walking down a path to the front door. She had walked into the house and was now in my room. She opened my closet and pulled out six rolls of toilet paper. As she did this I tried to muster up the courage to tell her she shouldn't take our toilet paper if she didn't live here. She was very pretty, with soft, brown skin and brown hair and pretty brown eyes. She looked at me like her prettiness allowed her to do anything.

Dream 2

I looked up into the murky blue sky to see a fighter jet I thought as a Joint Strike Fighter jet. But the more I looked at it the more I saw the jet had a clunky triangular shape. It seemed to be partly cloaked in shade, with only an edge shining white in the sun --- I don't know how, because there were no or few clouds in the sky, and the jet seemed to be facing the sun directly.

I saw something which I at first thought was another jet just showing up. But I realized it was really a missile sent out by the jet. I watched it travel a while. It was now a nuclear bomb. I didn't want to believe the bomb was finally being dropped -- I was going to die before I had taken care of all my business. I thought, Well, at least hopefully I'm in another country so it won't be dropping in America.

To make sure, I flew up to the bomb as it dropped. From down below the bomb looked black. From above (just above, traveling down with it) it was yellow with red fins (?). I saw it from behind.

The colors made me think the bomb was being dropped by China and that this definitely was America. There was a message written on the back of the bomb -- something like, "I don't care where you came from or which way you go."

Dream 3

Part of some altar ritual on a hill -- one person began singing about the hill of life in the land of death.

(11/20/07) celebrity assistant; blackbird lucid

(Entered in paper journal at 5:20 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I walked through the lobby of a nice, modern building with an Asian woman. The woman was pretty, but a little overweight. She told me she worked with my company's economist, ML. I thought that was neat. Suddenly I remembered a news article or TV story saying ML had often had the sole audience of the former Fed chairman.

The woman and I stood in the elevator. We were going up. I asked the woman, "Doesn't it ever seem weird to be working with such a famous person? Do people ever treat you weird?"

The elevator opened on the woman's floor. The woman giggled and shook her head. She walked out. I thought I had probably said something kind of dumb to the woman. I had wanted to be friends with her. Now she probably just thought I wanted to advance my career.

Dream #2

I got onto a bus with a line of people. I sat in the second row of the bus. A man who had been in front of me in line sat in the front row. He was black, with lightish skin. He was tall, with a scraggly beard and wide, frizzy hair. He looked mean. The second row felt tight, like the seat back from the first row was pushing into my space.

The bu drove along a river or wide body of water (to our left). Before the river were small warehousing or industrial areas. I sat a jet like an SR-71 Blackbird glide over the water. It moved slowly. It came closer and was now large in my view.

I didn't know the man in front of me. I was pretty sure he didn't like me. But I knocked on the seat-back and said, "Blackbird! Blackbird!"

The man said, "I don't want to see it. I don't want to know what's happening if something like that is flying again."

The Blackbird was pointed at maybe seventy-five degrees, its underside facing us. It may have been only one hundred feet above us. It had a weird, thin, twisted shape. There was a lot more red lining on it than I was familiar with there being.

The Blackbird lifted slowly in the air and then clattered down onto its back in one of the industrial lots. I thought the man meant, when he said he didn't want to know why a Blackbird was flying, that he didn't want to know that a nuclear war was approaching. I thought, seeing the Blackbird lying on its back (the Blackbird having skidded across the lot as if it were just a hollow shell), that if it had a nuclear bomb on board, the crash might have agitated the bomb so that the bomb would go off soon.

I looked away almost flinchingly. But by then we had pretty much passed the jet. I thought, It's strange, isn't it?, that I should see something like that. This is a dream.

At first I couldn't believe it: everything felt so real. But I thought, To see if it is a dream, I should just shout out that it is. I pounded on the seat back and window and yelled, "This is a dream! This is a dream!"

I decided to control my own actions. I would go back to the plane. I stood up. Everything faded out, as if I were waking up or going out of the dream. I tried to keep myself aware. I walked to the back of the bus. I couldn't see where I was going. I couldn't tell whether I was dreaming or just imagining.

I got to the back of the bus. Right behind the bus, I knew, was an SR-71 Blackbird that was being towed along on a truck. I moved through the back of the bus (i.e. through the material of a door that was in the wall of the back of the bus, then kick-pushed off the back of the bus, like a swimmer would kick-push off a wall, to fly/swim to the hatch for the cockpit of the jet.

(10/13/09) blackbird and flying saucer crash

Dream #1

It was a hot night in a big city. The grid of the city was lit with yellow, orange, and red. The lights made the city look like it was on fire.

A flying saucer and an SR-71 crashed over the city. The flying saucer and the SR-71 were enormous, large enough to smash a couple buildings below them.

The SR-71, besides being much larger than usual, didn't look much different from a normal SR-71. The flying saucer had white plates all around its body, like heat tiles on a space shuttle.

The two craft lay tilted toward each other, making a shallow V-shape. I could see as if I were floating between the two craft and facing the cockpit of the SR-71. The cockpit was lifted just slightly. From under the cockpit pulsed a red light. There was a pulsing sound, possibly coming from both craft.

I knew that there was some danger with the SR-71, either that it had a nuclear bomb on board or that it was itself a nuclear bomb. Now that the two craft had crashed, the nuclear bomb was activated. The city was doomed.