(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.

(4/1/08) the city had changed; the psychotic killer wins

(Entered in paper journal at 4:50 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a toy store. It had an oldish feel to it, like a cheapish toy store from the 1980s. I must at first have thought it was a novelty shop.

I sat near the checkout stand, looking at the aisles and thinking of some kind of lingerie outfit I wanted to buy. But then I saw people coming in and buying toys. I took a walk through one of the nearby aisles. I thought, This place won't have the lingerie I was looking for, anyway. But I also thought there was something I did need to buy from here: something like a board game or an electronic device like a calculator.

I turned back toward the checkout stand and saw it was full of people asking where certain things were. I thought, I don't have enough time to wait here to find out where the thing I need is. I decided I would just go to the novelty shop, which was nearby, and buy the lingerie I was looking for.

I could see the novelty ship in my head. It looked very rundown and seedy, like an Eighth Avenue porn shop. I thought about how much things in New York City had changed over the years.

In my head I asked my sister if she thought the city had changed. She said, "I don't know. I live in a building in the middle of Central Park. Nothing much has been touched there."

I now stood in a building, a house that seemed to be one gigantic living room. It had a circular floor plan and walls sloping up to a roof. The floor was of concrete. The walls may have been of wood. The place was lit with natural light. I saw the front door and knew that outside was an enormous valley of green and orange grass, like the vast valleys of the Valles Caldera in New Mexico.

Dream #2

I was in something like a movie. I was a man in his forties, bald, a little fattish. I had probably been a mafia-type gangster. Now I was trying to stop a young man from also becoming a gangster.

We were in a park-like area of an apartment complex during the day. The young man was walking away from me, past a sandbox. I noticed the young man had a gun. He was planning to shoot three men.

I chased after the young man to confiscate the gun. Three gangsters stood behind me and a ways back. I caught up to the young man and grabbed the gun, which the young man held upside down and at a backward angle. My view of the gun was very close, as if I were on my knees.

The gun went off. It shot a little boy (who was among two other little boys) on a swingset. The boy hunched over, dead. I thought, Well, now he (the young man) is doomed to a life of crime. The young man had wrestled away from me.

Now my view was as if I were seeing from the young man's point of view, though I was still the older man. The young man was on his knees, pointing the gun at the older man/me. The older man/I stood with (my) back to a white, 1970s-style car.

The young man kept making threats at (me) with the gun. I thought if I kept letting the young man threaten me he'd see he could trust me.

But, really, the young man was somehow slowly hypnotizing me. The young man had convinced me to put the gun in my mouth and pull the trigger. At the moment the older man (no longer I?) died, the white car exploded. The young man was now completely psychotic, but he would, it was somehow implied, have power to do whatever he wanted. This was apparently a good thing.

The "movie" must now have been over, because a "song by Radiohead" was playing, as if it were the song for the ending credits. The Radiohead song was a particularly spoiled-brat-psycho kind of song, which I actually "remembered" liking when I'd heard it in the past.

I was now standing in the scene as myself, eating a box of Little Debbie Nutty Bars. I wondered how a movie could have an ending with such a nasty character winning and yet also seem to be promoting the ending as a positive one.