(1/6/15) you kept me on the outside on purpose

(Entered in paper journal at 6:35 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I watched some yellow-sepia-toned scene of a sword fight in an eighteenth century house in what was supposedly the movie Anchorman. Will Ferrell fought Owen Wilson, who, possibly unlike Ferrell, was in an old military outfit.

I thought this scene would tickle my friend R, given its incongruity with the rest of the movie and the simple fact that there was a silly sword fight. But something else I forget now, too -- some very humorous nuances to the fight scene.

I showed this movie to my R in a dining room, possibly the same dining room in the movie. He talked and talked through the whole movie and hardly even looked at the movie screen (I also can't remember exactly where the movie screen was.)

But when we got to the sword fight scene I told him, "Look. This is what I thought you'd think was funny."

He looked at the "screen" and laughed, "Ha! Ha! A sword fight! This is great!" Then he went back to talking and talking and ignoring the movie. He didn't even pay attention to the humorous sword movements I was hoping he'd pay attention to.

There was another scene, which seemed to be projected more obscurely somewhere else, like beneath the bottom of a cupboard hanging from a ceiling. Oddly, this kitchen space might have been the scene from the movie. In this scene, Will Ferrell was drunk and all gnarled up and sweating. He wore a bathrobe. Jennifer Connelly stood right beside him, listening to his slow, depressed, depressing ramblings.

When I think of it, I couldn't even hear what R was saying. All I know is that he distracted me and he wouldn't pay attention himself.

We were now in a movie theater that was maybe twice the size of a normal AMC 25 stadium theater. The light was on and warm. The seating was maybe only one-tenth filled. The seats were all a warm, tan brown. R's girlfriend L was with us. Possibly the movie had ended. But it seems like we were also waiting for a movie to start. I had to get up to do something. I left a bunch of stuff on my seat.

Now I had done whatever it was I had gone to do -- I don't remember what it was. But now I was walking through the hallways to the theaters again. I saw a door to a theater showing a movie I had really wanted to see. There was no title on the title display over the door -- instead, there was just some strange, jungle-like border. I thought that border would mislead people into thinking the movie playing was Jurassic Park. (The movie may actually have been some movie about Vietnamese kids.)

I decided to sneak into the movie. I looked around to make sure nobody was watching before I pulled open the thick but light door and walked in. Since there had been no title on the display, I kind of figured the movie had already started. But when I went in everybody was still waiting for the movie.

All the people in the theater were dressed nicely. Some looked like professors. Others looked like students. It seemed like this was going to be a panel-lecture or symposium rather than a movie.

I jumped down some steps from the top of an aisle staircase. I thought that instead of going down the steps one step at a time, it would be easier to jump out far enough that you begin to float and descend only slightly, keeping your trajectory such that the slope of your descent is less than the slope of the staircase. In this way, I thought to myself, I have mastered flight. But I have not yet mastered flight beyond the floating and slight descent.

I floated over the heads of the audience. I thought to myself, If only they knew how easy this is. I'm hardly breaking any physical laws at all.

But I was floating over to a ticket man. He was dressed up nicely. I keep seeing the sign like the Ancient Egyptian crook hieroglyph

in relation to the ticket man.

He asked me if I had a ticket. I said something like "Come on. I was just sampling a few minutes. The movie hasn't even started. I probably wouldn't have been able to see any of it. I have to get to my own movie, where all of my stuff is."

Now we were at the back and top of the theater. Two other folks were there with us. One looked like some nondescript ticket man in a blue uniform with white fringes. The other was a pretty woman in her late thirties or early forties and in a very nice business suit. She told me I wasn't taking this situation seriously enough and that I could find myself in a lot of trouble, maybe even with jail time.

I'd had enough of her talk. I jumped in the air about seven or eight feet. I darted down, grabbed her head with both hands, and, still floating, I pressed my thumbs into her eyes. I didn't press her eyes out. I just wanted to show her that I could if she didn't shut up. I descended, happy, yet also afraid that what I had just done could get me in more trouble.

The woman moaned and screamed something like, "Don't you know who I am? Don't you know what I can do to you?" She was really about to start tearing into me.

I jumped up again. This time I descended on her, even as she continued prattling, and gouged my thumbs into her eyes entirely. But her eyes wouldn't come out, or they wouldn't seem to have come out. I took my thumb away from the sockets a couple times. There were nothing but bloody holes. But at the same time the eyes were still there. I even told myself so.

Now some voice said, "Wait! The possessive demon is here."

The lights all went out. A big, grey box or hollow, plastic cube spun toward and against the back wall. There was a priest somewhere. I could also see or sense that the demon was the little girl from The Exorcist. She may have been there, but now she "suddenly disappeared." The voice said, "It's seeking a body."

Now the ticket woman disappeared and reappeared behind the box, possessed by and half looking like the demon. She growled loudly at me, "You thought you'd overpower me? Now look at all the powers I have! You'll wish you were dead!"

I was standing outside a bar with a dog, possibly R's dog, on a leash that I held. It was a clear, winter day. The door was a little half-hexagon intruding in at the right of the front full-wall window. R was inside, talking to one of his friends. I was watching the dog.

A guy came out behind me: short, stout, rough looking, old, with stubbly, grey and dark grey hair. He stood, actually huddled aggressively, behind me and against my shoulders, possibly hoping to move me as I stared into the window wall. All the time the man spoke with a silent, unseen friend about publishing some new book.

Now I was walking into another bar with R. It was bigger and more like a restaurant. It was also rather empty, as if closed, except for a bartender behind the bar a little way off.

R told me something like, "I'm sorry I was in there for so long. I just got caught up in this conversation, you would have found it really fascinating, with Chuck Bassey." (Chuck Bassey was apparently a really famous person.) "And then his son Bobby Bassey came in."

I knew R knew I liked Chuck and Bobby Bassey, and I got really angry that he hadn't invited me in once he'd started talking with them. I had either  a glass bottle or a metal can in my hand. I began tapping it against R as if I meant to hit him with it.

I told R, "You kept me outside the bar because you didn't want me to impress those people more than you impressed them. You wanted to have something to brag about to make me jealous. That's why you didn't come and get me."

R said, "No. I just know... you don't like those pretentious bar situations."

I said, "Bullshit! It was Chuck Bassey, R! You know how much I like him! You could have just said, 'Come inside for a second, Preemie.' But you didn't. You kept me on the outside, on purpose. I'm not going to pretend like you're innocent of this stuff anymore."

The conversation seemed to stop as we passed in front of the bar and bartender. There was a row of booths, all wood, with a side wall barrier between them and the walkway in front of the bar, which walkway also served as the entrance, exit, and cashier line. A couple people had funneled in now. R was a little bit off in the distance.

I wanted to test my "flying skill." I jumped and hovered in a jump-sidekick position. I hovered in a wobbly way just over the four-and-a-half-foot-tall side wall barrier and landed, still wobbly. A couple people had been standing around, talking. I thought, If I fought them I couldn't use the flying techniques. That's cheating.

I tested my regular jump-sidekick over the barrier but didn't kick until my feet had almost landed back on the ground. I landed by a businessman who pointed to the ground, implying I hadn't done a good job. I went to try it again. A couple people were talking about the challenges of getting height and distance on jump-sidekicks. I tried again and did a slightly better, at least passable, kick.

(7/12/05) thumbtack ritual; elevator possession; mrs. piper's crystal ball

(Entered in paper journal at 6:15 AM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

Some view, comic book-like, of a man lying on the ground while people poked thumbtacks into him. Only three or four thumbtacks would be in at one time and they'd all be arranged according to certain points, on the body, e.g. two near the hips and one at the belly button. The man was green-skinned, with heavily inked lines for his musculature. The hands and arms of the (three or four?) people reaching to put the thumbtacks into him were red and blue.

Sometimes people would put other objects on the man's body, like charms. At the end they put three green apple cores across the man's collarbone, even spaced. At this point the man picked up a thumbtack and put it into his left (?) nipple.

All the time I thought I would not do what the man was doing to himself, even though it was some mystical ritual. But now I was definitely disgusted and afraid, and a little ashamed, of the cowardice that held me back from being willing to do it.

Dream 2

I walked into a department store in a mall, following after my NYC Americorps coworkers DO and SC, whom I thought I had upset. I walked past a female clothing section and tried not to act interested in wearing what I saw, just in case DO and SC were around and could see me.

Then I saw them. I was walking away from an elevator bank while they were walking toward it with a group of men of different races. They saw me, and as I continued walking, they followed me to talk a little more.

But DO was grabbed by one or two of the men and told to stop clowning around. DO was apparently getting married to the sister of one of these men, so he was trying to act good. SC and I headed after them to prove we, as DO's friends, were also good people. But the elevator door closed as we reached it.

We took another, hoping to follow the group down (to the basement?). But the elevator we got into was going up first. The elevator had about five or six people in it, including me and SC. As we went up the elevator got faster and faster. It changed into a tattered, faceless, metal lift in a somewhat wide, metal shaft with plenty of light and rust everywhere, so the wall and cords almost looked fleshy or organic.

People disappeared, as if straight out of memory, as we ascended. I was afraid to look down the shaft. I thought I'd be sucked out of the lift.

When we got to the top floor only SC and I were left in the elevator. Slowly the elevator changed again, into what I thought then was two airplane cockpits. But they both look now like theaters, with beige, pleather seats and a meager supply of flight controls at the front.

One, which appeared where the shaft had been, had two television screens by the flight controls. The two screens showed the inside of an airplane in some television drama. The left screen had an old, thin, female flight attendant, who seemed to be staring straight at me.

This cockpit was the down elevator. SC got into it as I thought that there was something reassuring about the flight attendant's stare, lilke it gave this whole strange experience a feeling of reality.

Now that whole area went black -- just faded out. I thought I had something to do with that, like I was making the surroundings predictable by making SC disappear as the rest of the people in the elevator had disappeared. I now sat in the larger cockpit, which had up at the front a movie screen. I sat in one of the back rows.

I was possessed, but I didn't realize it, perhaps through the rest of the dream. I wrote with my left hand into a torn piece of pinkish-purple, fibrous paper. There were some things already on the paper, like figures or sketches or small math problems. But I (writing and yet not aware) watched words appear on the page in wide, sloppy scrawl.

In the writing, something was being explained, I think, about how people had been killed or tortured. I thought a ghost was writing these words. It made me sick to think that what was writing these words had done the disgusting things people were now talking about, and that this "ghost" was right next to me, treating me as a friend.

Then "it"/"I" flipped over the paper and wrote something like, "Next week I will be in full contact with you," or, "I will be in full contact with you for one full week." I knew what this meant and I knew it was something I had wanted, but I now knew it was something disgusting, and now I didn't want it.

But now I realized (even though I still didn't know that my hand was writing) that I had been possessed by this thing. I could feel it climbing around in my chest. I threw up in two tiny spurts, each about half the size of a fist.

Dream 3

I went into what I think was an antique store. I was looking for a crystal ball used by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychic Leonora Piper, whom I think I called Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Alta Piper.

The store owner involved herself in my search and then concluded that she no longer had Alta Piper's crystal ball. I hadn't told the store owner that I couldn't buy the ball, anyway, and that I was just looking to be around it to see if it did in fact have any magical powers or feelings surrounding it.

The woman showed me some silvered crystals in a box and then two necklaces, one with sea-greenish, milky, translucent stones

and the other with a ruby in the center outlined by gold and with a large plate of diamonds around it.

I touched the sea-green stone necklace and felt an electric surge of pain. I dropped it back onto the table.

I really wanted the necklace now (and I really did not want it as well -- I was afraid of it), and the storekeeper could tell I wanted it. But I couldn't even afford this necklace, which was maybe one-third the price of what the crystal ball's would have been. I was ashamed to tell the woman I really couldn't afford anything in her store.

(4/18/06) micro-intervention, possession, and hyperventilation

(Entered in paper journal at 6:31 PM at NYPL Mid-Manhattan Library.)

Dream 1

I stood at the open end of a long, black, narrow room that opened into a wider room that was dim but regular, like a living room. At the far end of the narrow room my coworker CB stood before a black, solid altar or pedestal-like structure. On the structure was a small stand which held either a book or a brain or the floating image of a brain.

The room was for a test -- a fun test but a test just the same. The person at the table or stand had to answer a question, and the answer came from a part of the brain that, for you to pass, gave off a specific signal.

CB was trying to get the answer. But time ran out. In front of a floating image of a brain ran  the words "MICRO INTERVENTION" (?). I feel like she knew the answer but that she didn't say it because she didn't want to look smart in front of me.

I stood by the pedestal now. But CB and my mom (my mom had been beside me as I'd watched CB) were both gone. My mind was a blank. I felt alone. I felt like part of the reason I had been left alone was that I had no social skills.

I went to look for BC and my mom. They were in the kitchen, the only place where a light was on in the house. In front of the kitchen was a curtain like a mesh of thin slats of wood, the slats about one-eighth of an inch wide and one-eight of an inch apart.

I couldn't see through the slats, or, rather, I could only see vague shapes moving. I thought to myself, I act autistic. But I'm not autistic. But there must be some reason I act this way. Some people think it's endearing. But I just think it's boring.

I was now looking through slats that were almost the same. I could hear my mother and CB talking about something very important. But looking through the curtain I felt something very frightening. It was like an animal possessing me. I began hyperventilating. I fell back, crouching, against the wall, almost screaming, but still hyperventilating.

My mom came out of the kitchen with genuine interest but a little nonchalance, to attend to me. She spoke cheerfully to CB: "Yeah, I always have to remember that he has these attacks and he needs to be looked after or else he freaks out."

(10/8/09) in the snares of an evil man

Dream #1

I was in a movie. I and a group of friends were up in the woods, in some cabin. An evil person or spirit followed us there. We knew the evil person had committed some crime, and we were going to expose him for it. But now the evil person had killed some people in our group and managed to trap the rest of us in the cabin. The cabin was smallish but well accommodated, with couches, bookshelves, rugs, well furnished rooms, even a desk with a nice computer.

We were trying to escape from the cabin, but we knew the man was keeping a close watch on us and would terrify us as soon as we left the cabin. But even inside the cabin the evil man was beginning to terrorize us. He possessed one of us either to commit suicide or kill someone else in a grotesque way.

Now I was a woman. I think everybody could feel the man's spirit influence. But I particularly could, as if the man were about to possess me and make me do something awful to myself or others. I now saw, from more of a "camera" viewpoint, the woman/I standing before the computer. The woman had been possessed to download something to the computer. This, we were all certain, was a demonic program that would kill the woman.

However, instead of a demonic image, a cartoon image, like from the cartoon Heavy Metal, of a naked man appeared on the screen. A man from among us now stood before the woman. Both the man and woman were naked. The man began kissing the woman's chest and neck. The man and woman were now both like computer-cartoon (Heavy Metal style) characters, almost floating in the air, maybe not quite life size. The man had an enormous penis, which he thrust toward the woman, maybe rubbing it against the woman's belly, but never penetrating her with it.

After the man and woman had passionately kissed, they seemed to return to normal, though they remained naked. I was the woman again. I felt completely fine. I went to sit in a chair. All of us were relieved that nothing bad had happened to the man and me. I felt completely normal -- even fresh, as if I had just woken from a good rest.

But suddenly I got sick to my stomach. I realized that the demon or evil man had poisoned the man's lips. The man had kissed me and I had ingested his poison. I now felt extremely sick. I began vomiting up fountains of white glop like milk and cottage cheese. The vomit tasted a little sweet, like rice pudding. I stopped vomiting. I was now extremely tired.

We all thought how cruel it was of the evil man or demon, to cause me, the woman, to vomit, to lose whatever nourishment I'd had in me, after the evil man or demon had already put me through an energy-sapping ordeal (some ordeal that had occurred outside, before we'd gotten trapped in the cabin). We were sure I, the woman, was now on the brink of death.

I was now myself. Something had just happened in the cabin, possibly the violent death of another person. We decided that we had to leave the cabin once and for all. Our car, some kind of black sedan from the early 1980s, was outside. There was a chance that we could get to the car without the evil man knowing. People were afraid to go, but I convinced everybody we had to do it.

We got in the car and drove away without the man noticing. We were down in a small town like Los Alamos, New Mexico, driving through the parking lot of a multi-building shopping plaza, like the parking lot was a wide path through a blocky maze. It seemed like we were actually managing to escape.

But now the evil man had discovered we'd left the cabin. He tracked us down. He was going to play a trick on us to recapture us. He disguised himself as a demon (or used a demon cohort of his?). The demon was an anime-like figure, a black shroud, almost triangular, with a white, oval mask with just enough slits for eye holes, and no nose or mouth. At first the figure looked like a cartoon ghost. But then the figure looked like a human dressed as a cartoon character, like a good thief who was an awful charlatan, a parody.

The trunk door of our car was half open, unable to close because a TV-sized box was lodged there, unable to fit all the way into the trunk. The figure ran up to the trunk and stole the box, running away with high-kneed strides like he was a caricature thief in a second-rate play for kids.

I knew the figure had stolen the TV just to get us to turn the car around. The TV didn't matter so much, I thought, as long as we got out of here. And as long as we just kept driving, the evil man couldn't catch us, and we could get out of here.

I may have been driving at first, but now I was possibly no longer the one driving. And now the person who may have been driving, a young, slightly overweight man with red hair and a red beard, got angry at the figure and decided to pursue him.

The figure ran into a certain building. We drove into that building and found ourselves in some place like a smallish, vacant warehouse. The car stopped, possibly as if it had been broken, i.e. possessed and self-destructed, by the evil man.

We all got out of the car. The evil man now appeared before us. He may have had a few different aspects. One was a red-haired, red-bearded man, like the person who'd been driving our car. Another was a pale man in his early thirties, dressed in a men-in-black style suit, with greased, combed hair. Another aspect may have been covered in gore. We knew, or at least the evil man tried to make it clear, that we were now done for.