(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."

(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.