(8/12/05) can't hide my perversion; weightlifting toilet humor; rose of sharon

(Entered in paper journal at 5 PM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was outside, possibly at night, at the foot of a very small slope, like the small slope up to train tracks. Some friends, among them my friend R, were up on the top of the slope. I sat, legs folded lazily under me, amid a bunch of white, wadded up art tissue paper and piles of pornography magazines.

Now the friends came over the slope so they could see me. I tried desperately to hide all the pornography. But R saw me and was disappointed.

Possibly the scene changed to a bedroom, in which I was just barely hiding. I may have been trying to dress up in women's clothing. I had mirrors all around me. Once again R came into the room. He ridiculed me, not only for my perversion, but for hiding it so clumsily.

Dream 2

A weird weightlifting contest. People sat on something like a toilet and lifted something like dumbbells that were attached to pulleys. I'm pretty sure the people didn't do curls, but rather lifted laterally, with their shoulders and then their elbows. I sat or crouched on their left sides.

About five or six guys were in the contest. Each guy was strong but kind of dorky looking. The last guy looked Hispanic. He "was" a good friend. He had a backwards hat on and possibly long hair and a mustache. As he began to lift I said some inside joke and made him laugh and mess up.

Someone got mad at me for slowing things down. I tried to duplicate the joke. I only made things more awkward.

Dream 3

I was out doing some tree census work with my NYC Americorps coworker VT. It was early evening. The sky was dark blue. We were on a road that curved long

with the concave side facing a long, steep slope. The left side of the street had only a few trees. I let VT take that side, since it was easier.

I walked up to the first tree on my side. It was a Rose-of-Sharon, with wide, soft petals.

(9/10/05) rose arches; pornographic bookmark; whatever god blesses will be blessed; broken cell phone; revenge of the pirates

(Entered in paper journal at 9:15 AM at the Tea Lounge on Union Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

It was night. I was walking with my friend and NYC Americorps coworker KB along a street in a busy part of a desert town. The street was on a hill, sloping up to the street where we were, and sloping up from either side of the street we were on to the point where we stood. We were getting ready to leave "work" for the day, but I wanted to cross the street.

KB and XXXXX (some male coworker) ha dgone to a restaurant I thought was special. I was kind of sad they hadn't invited me. But I looked across to where they had gone. It was just a small place with a white plastic sign, backlit by fluorescent lighting, saying "First Avenue XXXXX." There may have been a rose shape on the sign.

I said, "Oh, it was only there? I don't need to go there." So we turned around.

Before we went home, KB had to show me something on the other side of the hill. As we went down I saw the tops of the arches of an old McDonald's building.

All the lights were off, and the arches might have been smashed.

Dream 2

I was in a room with my friend R. It may have been night. A light was on. R showed me some porno magazine. He showed me the girl he liked. At first I didn't want to see it. I didn't want R to think I liked pornography. But then I looked.

R showed me how he had the page saved with a strand or a few strands of long, metallic-purple hair bound about three-quarters of an inch up by a small string of beads, tan and brown, in an austere pattern.

Dream 3

I walked into a church with my mom. We met a nun who was going to read and pray about a screenplay I had written. The manuscript was huge. I don't think my mom approved of it. The nun was pretty, though old, and a tiny bit pale and chubby-faced.

The nun took my manuscript. We walked along with her through a maze of domed and columned rooms both large and small. The place was dark, but dazzling images like moving stained glass windows were playing against the walls and our bodies. The images were mostly white, grey, blue, and purple, and seem mainly to have featured doves.

My mom kept telling me and the nun how she didn't think she thought the screenplay was very godly and how she would do what she could to make religious people agree. I kept telling her and the nun things like, "We're here to see what God says about my screenplay. If God like it, then this is one time you won't be able to hinder my success."

My mom appealed solely to the nun now. I said to the nun, "It doesn't matter what my mom convinces you about. Whatever God blesses will be blessed, and you will be the messenger of that blessing."

The nun took my statement as pride and said, "Well, I haven't prayed to God yet, so watch how you treat me." She walked away to pray.

I now realized I had given the nun the wrong manuscript. The manuscript I had given her was a novel of the plot, not a screenplay. I had taken the story too seriously in the novel, and it had turned out petty and boring. The screenplay was much more fun. I didn't want the nun to think that I had made such a big deal out of such a bad work.

Dream 4

I was outside during the day. Maybe on some tall bridge. I got a call on my cell phone from my Aunt P. She spoke in a very low and gravelly voice. She said something like, "Since you never call me, I decided to call you. I know you don't care about me and you don't want to hear from me." I was about to tell her that wasn't true and that I loved her. But my phone broke.

I walked to a car where my NYC Americorps crew chief SM sat. My phone was broke in half, like the only thing that had held it together were two black wires which were now snapped.

SM saw my phone and said, "You shouldn't have a nice phone like that! Let me see it." I gave him the phone.

The car SM sat in was short and full of trash and blankets, so that SM seemed to be hiding from everything. I looked away from the car, as if standing below the car door. Like the door opened upward instead of outward.

I saw a T-Mobile store across a parking lot. I could feel the rest of my Americorps crew somewhere. I thought, This time I'm taking my phone directly to the T-Mobile store, and I'll exchange it for something free right there.

SM was doing something I didn't like on my phone. I told him to give me my phone back. He gave me my old phone back. It was broken in half, but it worked. But I wanted my new phone. Somehow I got it.

I checked my bill on my old phone. I was surprised, having gotten my new phone, that my bill wasn't enormous. But I saw that T-Mobile had put the charge on a deferred payment plan. I scrolled down to see what the changes would be for the next few months.

Now I had my new phone. I walked through a street with tall buildings close on either side. I read two text messages I had received, one from my mom and one from my grandfather. The messages were both like goodbye messages.

The one from my mom made it sound like I was dead. It said something like, "I am glad I had the time with you up until 9/10/05, and I'll always remember how you loved us all." I was really upset that my mom thought I was dead. I wanted to call her back, but now I had no reception on my phone.

I was now part of some movie about a young man who was a fashion brat and who only wanted to hurt people.

Dream 5

A movie or TV show of which I was somehow a part, in which a group of pirates or criminals were trapped in some brown-metal, mushroom shaped building and stalking out of the ocean. "I" handed the people some kind of sweet food through prison bars. They may not have received it, or they may have dropped it.

Now the focus was on a canal-filled town in the "17th" (18th?) century. A group of rich people were on a big ship just outside the town. The air and sky and water all had a coppery tinge. The prisoners had escaped, and they were all coming on a rowboat to attack the ship. They would succeed if they reached the ship. They were all dressed in rich, beautiful clothing, and that showed they had been mistaken as something lower than they were by being kept captive. They were coming to avenge themselves.

But "I" knew some of us on the ship had actually done something to help them. If I could convince them of that before they attacked, I might be able to save us all. I didn't know if i could. Their plan was to begin killing as soon as they got on board.

(8/4/07) supermarket closet; give your friends a break

(Entered in paper journal at 4:50 PM at Barnes and Noble bookstore at Union Square in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a bedroom with my boss BS. BS asked me to look through some old issues of the trade rag Supermarket News for a piece of data. The issues were in a closet. BS stood inside the closet. I stood outside the closet. The room was dimly lit with greenish, natural light. The closet had an incandescent bulb deep inside it. It was like there were two roughly two-foot-deep sections of the closet partly divided from one another by little section-walls.

There was a huge pile of junk in the closets. The magazines, the old issues of Supermarket News, were scattered and piled throughout the junk. BS wanted me to help him get them. I was afraid, though, that if I did, we would run across some pornographic magazines I had in there.

I also saw a strange and lurid magazine or picture book about black men who beat up white men. I hoped that BS wouldn't find this publication and think it turned me on in the same way that porno mags did -- I was pretty sure it didn't.

I tried to dissuade BS from looking into the pile. But BS wouldn't stop. So eventually I went in and started helping him.

Dream #2

I was in the office of my co-workers DE and EB. (In waking life, DE and EB, the replacement for our old Associate Analyst ES, shared the same office. I sat just outside their office in a cubicle as, at that time, most of the Assistants and first-year Analysts did.)

I was angry at DE for something. He was fighting against me a little, but I was definitely bearing down on him. I finally tore a book out of DE's hand. I accused DE of having done something against me. EB just sat in her seat, watching.

DE choked up a little bit and grew pale. He then burst out crying. I realized I had been too severe, especially with all that was going on with DE's family at that time. (In waking life, from 2007 through 2009 -- though I was hardly sensitive to the issue -- narcissist that I am -- DE's mother and father both experienced some very serious health issues.)

I grabbed DE's left hand and held it with both my hands. EB rushed over and stood by us. DE became less pale. DE was yelling at me, asking me why I couldn't ever just give him a break.

(1/2/09) looking at porn and doing the wrong work

(Entered in paper journal at 8:54 AM at Flying Saucer cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a room with my brother. The room was like a living room, but I may have been thinking of it as an office. The room had a wood frame around it, like the framing for a loft bed. There may only have been two solid walls, while the other walls were like the section of frame where the walls would eventually be put up. The floors were piled under with multicolored quilts and blankets.

My brother sat or lay on his stomach before an entertainment center which had two or three bright-screened computers on it. I thought, I shouldn't check what he's doing. I'll get in trouble for not working. I looked at the computer screen.

I knew that my brother was typing a lot of random-seeming, almost humorous, words into an internet search engine to pull up pornographic websites showing fat, black women in lingerie. I could see a page like this in my mind's eye: photos of women dispersed throughout a white page, with faded borders around them. But when my brother actually pulled up the web page, it displayed a photo of a few really beautiful, black women, skinny, wearing really elegant lingerie.

I was now "upstairs," on a floor of desks like a trading floor. Only about a quarter of the lights on the floor were on. It was night. I was walking toward "my desk." I was trying to remember the user ID and password for my computer.

I was going to do some work. But I thought to myself, What kind of work am I supposed to be doing? I thought I would pull some earnings conference call transcripts off the internet, to keep my mind fresh on how companies were doing. I wondered whether this would be considered work or whether this would be considered something I wasn't supposed to do.

(5/22/09) shemale superhero

(Entered in paper journal at 7:43 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a hallway like in a run-down apartment. An Asian woman was with me. The hallway probably had brown-painted wood walls and uncared for wood floors that were probably caked with dust.

The Asian woman was about six inches shorter than I. She had dark skin, long, silky, black hair, round, black eyes, and a small, healthy, roundish body. She wore a silvery outfit, possibly a tank-top and shorts made of spandex.

I was taking the Asian woman somewhere, possibly from one of the rooms of this apartment, where a party had been held, to another room. For some reason I felt I needed to pass into my room first.

It was night. The hallway was lit by softish, incandescent light. At first I could see into my room, like the door  was wide open, from slightly down the hallway. My room was lit by a slightly brighter incandescent light. The walls may have been a sea green color, with the paint possibly chipping. My room was even more unkempt than the hallway.

As the woman and I walked toward the room, I noticed I had a large pornographic magazine in my right hand (or alternately in my right, then left, hand?). The magazine was maybe as large as, and of the same paper quality as, an old Life or Vogue magazine.

I had been waving my hands to gesture while I had been talking to the woman. Now I realized that this whole time the woman must have seen that I had this huge porn magazine in my possession. I tried to be more discreet with my gestures, hoping to keep the magazine hidden as I walked.

When we reached the door to my room, it was closed. I opened it. We were here so I could show or give the girl something. My room was run-down and a mess. I even had a pile of stuff on the bed, possibly even an entire set of shelves.

We walked in a shallow arc through my room. As we walked pat the bed I saw (possibly on the set of shelves) a stack of for or five large magazines titled SHE-MALE (which is, or was, a real magazine), all in clear plastic envelopes and tiered down so that the title showed for each magazine. I hoped that the woman wouldn't notice the magazines.

I didn't know how the magazines had gotten here. I had always been interested in the magazine, I had thought. But I had actually never bought one. I knew one of my friends, maybe my old friend R, had snuck into my room and laid out these magazines, which he'd bought, so that they'd be in plain sight, just to embarrass me in a situation like this.

The woman saw the magazines and rolled her eyes, as if annoyed that I liked that sort of thing. Our talk kind of fell flat. The woman must have gotten whatever she'd needed. She walked back out into the hallway.

In a little section of the hallway, something like an inset large enough to fit a little cabinet or phone table, the woman now sat or stood with a man. The man was Asian, short, with coppery skin that was lighter than the woman's darker brown skin. The man had thin eyes, a square, solid body, thin lips, and short, gelled, spiky hair. He wore a baby blue t-shirt and khaki shorts.

The man and woman sat or stood amid a bunch of clutter, broken shelves, etc. They were giggling quietly to themselves about me. It was just loud enough that I thought they intended me to hear their ridicule. They were laughing about my having the SHE-MALE magazines in my possession.

I was in my room. The door to my room was now closed. I'm not sure whether I had closed it. Daylight may now have been streaming in through windows over which raggy, tattered, patchwork sheets had been stretched.

I thought, Why should I be ashamed of having the SHE-MALE magazines? I thought to myself, with anticipation, how each issue also included a piece of cheap lingerie with it. I looked back to the magazines. The plastic wrappings were now much bulkier. I thought that the wrappers must have been bulky because the lingerie was stuffed into them underneath the magazines.

But I unwrapped one of the magazines to find that underneath it was, instead of lingerie, a strange, thin, plastic version of a male superhero's outfit. It may have been a Superman outfit. I unwrapped another magazine and found another superhero outfit -- one that I couldn't figure out at all.

I was a little disappointed. I had been hoping to find some lingerie that I could wear. I thought, Well, there are female superheroes as well. Perhaps I'll find one of their costumes.

I unwrapped a costume which at first looked like the Wonder Woman costume. But now it had pant legs on it. Seeing pant legs on the Wonder Woman costume made me less interested in it. I tossed the costume on the stack of other costumes.

I may have opened another costume before thinking, Wait! The Wonder Woman costume was a female costume, after all. I pulled it back out. But the costume now looked like a female version of the Captain America costume. I wasn't interested in it at all.

But now I unwrapped an article that was like a woman's black, one-piece bathing suit. I thought I should at least try this on.

I was now (different dream?) flying over a big city at night. The night was very dark, with little amber specks of light set into all the shadowy skyscrapers below me. I may have been flying by my body alone, and simultaneously flying in some small vehicle. Someone else, a man, was also flying with me, just behind me and to my right or left, probably my left.

There were structures attached to the roofs of, or the top parts of the sides of, certain skyscrapers. These structures were "cylinders," like tireless wheels, made of white plastic, maybe thirty or fifty feet in diameter, lit from behind in amber incandescent light, stuck into the building to look like an "entranceless" tunnel into the building.

These fixtures were docking areas for ourselves or our vehicles. We couldn't land safely without landing via one of these docking areas. We needed to land, however, either because we were running out of the ability to fly or because we were chasing a badguy who himself had landed and had thus required us to land in order to continue chasing him.

I almost docked at one area but somehow missed it, as if the buildings, and not I were moving, and my job, to time my attachment to the moving building, had not been performed accurately. I apologized to the other person. I felt inadequate for failing, and slightly worried that I'd never adequately attach to a docking area, that both I and the other flyer would crash and die because of me.

I found another docking area, which seemed easier to land in because it came out of the top of a building. But I probably didn't make it into this docking area, either. We flew low over the ground now, through an outside area that looked like an indoor employee lounge at a grocery store or fast food restaurant, except that it was, of course, outdoors. Concrete columns, like highway overpass pillars, ran alongside the room.

A young, black man, light-skinned, tall, stringy, but strong, wearing a tan sweatshirt and some kind of baseball cap, with a gaunt face and dull, tiny eyes, sat in a booth across from a white man who may have been in uniform as a policeman or firefighter.

As I flew past the men, the black man laughed at me. He said how crazy I was to think I could fly, and how crazy I was to think I was part of anything special. I was going to ignore the man's negative comments. But I let myself get too angry. I turned back and faced the man (almost as if I sat or crawled on the tabletop before him or stuffed myself on top of him, between him and the table).

The floor around the booth table was now littered with something like crumbs and popcorn. I yelled something at the man about how I thought he was really cool and he was doing really good things, and that I didn't make fun of him, so why did he have to make fun of me for doing something that actually was pretty important?

I then yelled about how I could show him danger, if he really wanted to see it, that I was holding some danger away from him in my fights, but that if he'd rather I didn't act crazy and fight, I could go ahead and let the danger loose on him.

The man looked a little taken aback and slightly ashamed and afraid. The policeman/firefighter may have been on guard, thinking I was acting a little dangerously, and that I should be watched. The two men got up and walked away.

I now realized that the young man was actually a firefighter in training and that he probably was a really good guy. I felt bad for acting so strangely toward such an innocent person.

The men had walked down a hallway that turned right and away at the "back" of this "room." I got the young man's attention again. The young man was now taller and thinner. He now wore a black baseball cap and a maroon sweatshirt.

I gave the young man a gift, something like a big gook. I apologized for having acted weird. The young man may have taken the book. But he didn't pay me much attention beyond that. He had gone back to regarding me as kind of crazy and not really worth any thought.