(9/13/06) dangerous pool; sixty poisons; hometown food court

(Entered in paper journal at 7:45 PM at home in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I and a woman (and maybe others) followed a man into a pool. The man was a leader like from a hippie religious cult. We stepped down into the thick water. He said something like, "If people can't handle this they shouldn't go any farther in. If you haven't developed enough, the water may kill you."

I was panicked. I "walked" clockwise in this gelly, sea-green water in the moonlight. We may have been wading because we were now in deep water. But I was still in only to slightly above my bellybutton. I breathed shallowly like the water was cold. But it was warm. I was really breathing shallowly because I was getting sick. I knew this, and was getting more and more worried.

Dream 2

I was with my mom in something like a coliseum for an indoor sports tournament like hockey, basketball, or something like martial arts. My hands were itchy, cracked, and dry, like I had an illness. I was embarrassed to tell my mom what was wrong, but I at least told her my hands were itching.

My mom said, "Well, go get some lotion. In this place, someone must have lotion!"

I walked around the stadium counterclockwise in an aisle near the front row. I asked people for lotion. Nobody really had any. I sat down in a space with five or six empty seats. Some man to my left (who also may have offered me some lotion) moved over to me. I thought he was gay. I didn't want to talk to him because I thought he was trying to pick me up.

For some reason now I was facing away from the game area, like I'd stood and leaned my back against a railing and faced the man in a seat.

The man told me, "The screens are wonderful today. Usually you feel like nobody's even working behind them. But today the images are very human and spontaneous."

I knew the man was talking about the LED digital screens that displayed highlights and scores, etc. I turned to look. The game area was shrouded by a big, black, thick mesh net. But from the right side of it I saw most of a display screen. It was just displaying a pattern of green squares before a black background like a fountains of cards. It wasn't very impressed.

I walked out to the "ticket booth," which was like an admission desk for a museum. A woman was there -- kind of looked like a pale blonde intellectual skater chick -- but she also wasn't there.

I walked behind a desk and found a book like a coffee table or picture book. I read through it. It was about people who had gone insane and done some pretty awful things.

At some point it was like I was watching a documentary of these people on one of the display screens in the stadium. Close to the end I was "inside" the documentary as if I was seeing -- feeling -- through the electric-buzzed world of the camera. I cornered into a room from a hallway and saw a guitar case, opened, on the floor before a bed.

There were subtitles instead of narration. A young man had gone psychotic. He buried his beagle deep underground in a guitar case. This was after he had boiled the dog. But the dog had been dead before the boiling. The young man had poisoned the dog with sixty poisons -- sixty poisons.

(As I woke up and lay in bed I thought, Well, it shows that people in real life still do some of the things Jung noted his alchemists as discussing symbolically.)

Dream 3

I was on a bus tour that stopped in a town just a small way from "my hometown." I wondered if I couldn't just go back. We were in a food court.

I walked outside. The building was rather small, black brick, like a suburban doctors' office complex. I walked on the wide lawn counterclockwise around the building.

(10/27/07) slot-machine street views; innocent brownies; caligari's alien; weeding the museum garden

(Entered in paper journal at 9:46 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was at my office. I answered the phone. Even while I was trying to take a message, my boss BS, sitting to my right, on the edge of my desk, was making loud comments, trying to make me do something. I hung up the phone and tried to type a message. But BS was beings so demanding that I finally had to look at him. I lost the last name of the client from whom I was trying to take a message.

I suddenly yelled at BS, "You say you value clients. But why did you just make me forget the one who called?"

BS stood up, upset, and walked away. I tried to recall the client's name. Her first name was Pamela, I thought.

I was now looking at a storage device like a BlackBerry. The device had three screens on it, like slot-machine windows. Below these three screens was a larger screen. The three screens gave three possible "names" for the client -- though these "names" were actually titles for museum or art exhibits.

I thought, That's what the client did -- she was a social artist. I thought that if I could find the correct museum or gallery, I would remember the client's name. The exhibit, I thought, may have been in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh.

I looked at the screen below the three screens. The image on the screen was of an empty city street. The image was greenish, like an oldish computer image. I knew I could "steer" through these streets, like on a GPS map program (or like Google Street View, though I'm not sure (???) that was around in 2007), to find each listed museum.

I started steering through the streets. They were all empty. The streets were cobbled, not asphalt. The buildings were mostly redbrick. The day was clear. I steered through a few blocks.

My view faded into a view more like one I inhabited than like one I was looking at on a screen. In the middle of one block there was a huge pool of a clearish, thickish liquid which I called water. I knew that if I touched it, something bad would happen to me. But I was moving automatically, as if the "computer program" were still running me. I knew I would probably touch the poison water sooner or later.

Dream #2

I walked into a grocery store, or I had been there for a while. I had my arms full of food. I was looking for some more food, possibly some meat. I walked into an area like the frozen foods section.

There was a family like a group of European tourists. I had to walk in front of them. I tried to act as mild as possible to prove to the family that I wasn't a hooligan -- not because I felt like I threatened them, but because I didn't want them to start threatening me.

I looked at a non-freezer rack of packaged meats and cheeses. Some of the lunchmeats looked very good, but they had holes, like Swiss cheese. I was looking for just the right meat.

All of the family except one person had walked farther down the aisle. The one who remained was a little scary. He was older, maybe in his late fifties. He was tallish, big, with a bulky stomach. He had dull, grey hair and wore clunky "dress clothes." I had heard him speaking with the rest of the family. His voice was thick and unintelligible. He seemed to me like an "innocent" (???!!!) who could suddenly become dangerous.

I looked at the food. Now it was bagels and desserts like brownies. I tried not to attend to the big man. I was trying to figure out what I wanted. I felt like I was trying to get full, like I needed to eat, but like I had eaten so much already that if I ate any more, I would get fat. Nothing looked like it would fill me up without getting me fat.

The big man moaned something unintelligible. He swung a big, grey cane or walking stick against one of the clear, plastic bagel cases. There was something like a grabber at the end of the man's stick. He grabbed two brownies and then swung the stick over so that the brownies got near my face. It was like the big man had swung the brownies in front of my face in a gesture of offering them to me.

I regarded the brownies and thought, That's what I want, but it's not what I need. But I was kind of afraid to deny the big man. I didn't want him to hurt me.

Dream #3

Black and white film like an old German Expressionist film. An alien with a fat-looking, pale, bulbous head and big, black eyes. The alien wore a big, black robe. The alien's body might have been thinner than its head.

The alien walked down along an inside balcony in a dark apartment complex. Now I only saw the stairwell, which may have been lit from a floor below. I watched some shadows move quickly across the guardrails. I thought, If a natural light was causing those shadows, then time must be moving more quickly than normal.

I felt like there might have been a woman hiding by the stairwell, on the floor below me (the lit floor). I felt like the woman was hiding from the alien.

The "movie" now started over. I saw the woman almost emerge from behind a door, which the woman had slowly opened by only a crack. The woman looked out the crack. her eyes gave off a weird, cat-like glow. At first I thought I was looking at the alien. Then I discerned the woman's face.

I realized the woman was looking at the alien, who was out of my view. The woman was frightened. It seems plain now that the woman knew the alien and was already engaged in some kind of struggle with it.

The woman was now gone. She had either gone to hide from the alien, or else the alien had already taken her away somewhere.

Dream #4

I walked up to a garden, which I was going to weed. The garden (did I realize this?) was indoors. I was pulling, at first, mugwort-like weeds that grew between thin, woody plants like pine saplings.

The place now seems to me (i.e. when I wrote entered the dream in the paper journal) like some kind of museum exhibit. The garden, which was supposed to be a wild, natural area, also took only a corner or half (?) of this exhibit-like room. The rest of the room was silvery, plasticky floor, walls, and ceiling, with gentle, modern-feeling, fluorescent lighting.

The thin "pine-shoots" grew thicker toward the corner until they were too dense to penetrate. I couldn't get into them to weed out the mugwort. But it also seemed like in that section the growth of the "pine-shoots" had actually managed to "beat out" the growth of the mugwort.

So, having finished weeding that area, I moved to the area farther down. This area was full of woody growth, the foliage and flowers of which looked like rabbit brush or rattlesnake weed. This growth was very thick and either needed to be completely eradicated or just trimmed back. It was thick and dense, but some shoots grew so thin that they were green, like herbaceous growth, like aster stalks.

There seemed to be a cliff of black stone like schist somewhere. As I took care of this area I could hear a memory of a co-worker, like my co-worker TC, telling his wife how nice this place was, but in an ironic way. TC's wife was somewhere else, and TC was jokingly pretending like the lousy weather where his wife was was better than the weather here.

I had trimmed a fair amount of the vegetation. I reclined on some stumps and against the trunks of some still standing growth. I looked at the area I had taken care of. It looked pretty nice. The "rabbit brush" growth that stood looked like trees, with plenty of space between each plant. I thought, I couldn't have done all that needed to be done. It was too easy. The soil between the trees was rich and brown.

I saw a rabbit. It skirted around me, but it stopped to regard me. It was small but healthy, with soft fur. It had big, round, pure black eyes. I hoped it wasn't threatened by me, that it didn't feel like I was invading its space.

I looked forward again. Now rabbits climbed up on me. There were two or three of them. They had emerged from the trunk on which I sat, as if the trunk were now as wide as the trunk of a tree like a maple tree that was around ten years old.

I didn't know if the rabbits were going to attack me or if they just liked me. One of them nestled against the left side of my neck. I didn't know whether it would bite me.