(3/1/09) venus and mercury linked; outed as gay

(Entered in paper journal at 8:35 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I walked through the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library. I was at the north end of the north wing. The overhead lights (?) were all turned off, and it was dark outside, but some or all of the table lamps were on, giving off a pale light, almost like the lights of a flashlight or headlights. People were shuffling around a lot.

I saw a senior co-worker, BF, getting ready to sit down. Instead of looking like his normal, handsome self, he was in disarray. His hair was somewhat well organized, as usual, but it was maybe twice as long as usual. BF wore a big, black, puffy, hooded jacket -- something I'd never see him wear in waking life. BF's face looked dry and wrinkled, as if he were made up to resemble an aged man.

I waved at BF, not knowing whether he would recognize or even like me. He waved back, slowly, with an exaggerated, O-mouthed smile, as if he were pantomiming happiness, although I felt like he was genuinely happy to see me.

I may have sat down in a seat somewhere. For some reason I was now mad at some young man who sat a few tables in front of me. In front of his table was a big structure -- not like the usual central area of the reading room, but a big stone wall with something on it.

I was trying to make the young man understand who I was (???). The young man sat in a chair while I knelt on both knees to his left and crouched over the table with my full arms and elbows, like a child coloring in a coloring book.

I had been yelling sweat-brainedly at the man. But my angry attempts to show the young man why he shouldn't be bothering me kind of faded away. I was now crouching over the floor, drawing with chalk. It was like the table, from the portion I had knelt at and all the way to the left, had vanished, leaving the floor, which was like concrete, wide open.

I drew two images. Both were rectangles, around six feet long and three feet wide. They both had solid backgrounds with stringy line-designs in one or two colors, outlined with one or two colors. One rectangle had a yellow background with green and white designs. The other had a white background with blue and red designs.

I can't remember the design of the yellow rectangle. But the white triangle had something like two Venus signs (or two Mercury signs, or a Venus and a Mercury sign) linked together, with shapes, like line-pentagrams, scattered throughout.There might also have been words.

When the young man saw this, he understood.

Dream #2

Some presentation, possibly for work, had just finished. Everybody was in an auditorium. We were all funneling out. I may at first have been walking in a crowd of people along the right wall, heading up toward the back of the auditorium. I was now walking along the left wall. I was with a group of friends.

We got to the back wall, on which may have been a cork board bulletin board on which was a grid of photos with tidy, little paper rectangles with captions below each photo. I had been listening to a conversation everybody around me was having, possibly about girlfriends and boyfriends.

My co-worker NF stood right behind me. She was much skinnier and better looking than she had been the last time I'd seen her in waking life (in 2007). She asked me, "How's your boyfriend doing, Preemie?"

I thought, Boyfriend? I don't have a boyfriend. But NF said, "Don't be shy. Everybody knows you're gay."

I thought, Is that what everybody thinks about me? I didn't seem to worry about it too much. If everybody thought that was the case and they had been treating me just fine all along, it didn't matter if somebody said it out loud.

(3/19/09) no suicide attempt; library creepsters

(Entered in paper journal at 9:15 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I sat in a presentation room with a group of co-workers. The room was dimly lit with effusive, yellowish light. The walls were white. The room was full of folding chairs.

My superior co-worker RLC got up to give a presentation. Both of his legs were in a cast, and he had a bandage on his head. He had been sitting in a chair at the front of the room, to the right of the room, and he'd had to be helped up. As he crutched his way to the podium, he was telling everybody how it looked like he'd attempted suicide, but that he really hadn't, and that he was fine.

Dream #2

I sat in a library like the Rose Main Reading Room in the Schwarzman branch of the New York Public Library, except with thinner reading tables and something of a college library feel. I was reading books that were big and colorful, like children's picture books.

Two youngish, white boys sat down, one on either side of me. They had a hip look -- clean, but with wool caps, pea-green coats, button-up shirts tat were unbuttoned, and t-shirts. The boys spoke back and forth over me, to annoy me.

At one point, the boy to my right asked a question like, "You know what would be good...?"

I turned my head and yelled, "You know what would be good? If you sat somewhere else to talk to your friend!"

The boys seemed hurt. They stood up and walked away. I might have gotten up and walked somewhere else, too. I felt bad about having yelled at the boys, who, I now thought, were innocent enough.

(9/27/09) struggle for lucidity; the murakami bug

Dream #1

I opened my eyes in my bedroom. The bedroom was dark, and my vision was a bit staticky. I realized that my lights were off, which wasn't usual for my room. (Due to some problems with paranoia, I'd slept with my lights on from about July of 2009 through about the end of 2010.)

I realized I was dreaming. I became lucid. But I immediately began losing my dream. Everything faded into blackness, as if I had closed my eyes. I told myself to open my eyes again. It took an immense effort. But when my eyes began to open, my dream-vision smeared out before me, as if I were speeding through a tunnel the walls of which were made of my dream-bedroom.

I now had my eyes open in my bedroom, with the lights on. I was awake. (I may actually have been awake at this point.) I lay on my back and looked up to the ceiling, my head half-covered by m blanket. I fell into a numbed state and thought I was probably on the verge of sleeping and dreaming again. At some point the lights may even have gone out in my room.

I told myself, Well, you can't get back to the lucid dream you were having. But perhaps if you're in this state, you can push yourself into another lucid dream, or even an out of body experience, an astral projection. I told myself to concentrate. I "concentrated" intensely, almost viciously.

I felt a rushing (downward or upward?) sensation in my body. I felt like closed-eye purple electrodes had attached to my body to pull me upward. I felt like I was scowling, teeth bared, to pull myself upward, out of my body. I thought, I'm doing it!

Everything went black. (I may have woken up and then gone back to sleep for another dream.) I lay in my bedroom and opened my eyes again. The room was dark, swimming with staticky orgone eyebugs.  I told myself, You're dreaming again. Get up this time.

I was suddenly standing, at the foot of where I had been laying, my blanket crumpled up like a cocoon at my feet. I ma have thought of myself as wearing a grey robe, being all grey myself, and even wearing a head covering, like a woman in a Giotto painting portraying Jesus' life might wear.

I lost my energy or my focus again. My eyes closed. I told myself to open them, not to lose my dream. I succeeded in doing this, but almost immediately afterward, the scene became increasingly staticky, maybe even grey-white, and I lost my dream.

Dream #2

I was in a big room with a couple other people. My mother may possibly have been among the people. The room may have been a mix between something like a hallway in an airport terminal and a nice, wood-walled library in a mansion. Natural light came in from a window to the right, the window possibly almost as tall and wide as the wall itself.

On the left wall was a platform that ran along the entire wall, lifted up maybe three feet from the rest of the floor, with railing -- structured almost like the moving walkway conveyor belts at airports, but, again, with touches of wood, carpeting, etc., that made it look like something in a mansion. I stood on that platform, probably with my mother.

We had found a small bug and were now having to dispose of it. The bug was almost beetle shaped, but with a much more distinct, rounder head, almost half the size of its body. The bug's color was a pale-copper brown, dappled with a pale-brown, almost like a pale version of the color on a sunflower seed's shell. We grabbed up the bug in a napkin and tossed it into (or toward?) a trashcan.

My mother walked away, down the long hallway. In some way, it felt like she was walking from one wing of the NYPL Rose Main Reading Room to the other. The other two women (???) may also have been gone now.

I noticed that the bug hadn't gone into the trashcan after all. I saw it wandering around on the floor. I picked it up (it was maybe three quarters of an inch long) to throw it away. But now, panicked, not wanting to be thrown away, the bug grew thin, green, vegetation-like tendrils out of itself. These tendrils grew long and coiled themselves around. They grew little leafs or thorns, so that the bug almost looked decorated with something out of a work by Takashi Murakami.

I tried to throw the bug into the white trash bag, but I couldn't: the tendrils stuck to me like sticky stalks of weeds. I tried to shake the bug off me. The tendrils now coiled all around my hands, and the "leafs" (if they ever had been leafs) were now soft thorns sticking into my skin. (During all this, I noticed that I was wearing white, latex gloves.) I finally somehow managed to shake the Murakami-bug off my hands.

The bug didn't go all the way into the trash. It clung to the side of the bag, near the mouth of the trashcan, its tendrils sprawling out like uncoiled wire, threatening to spring back out of the can by the energy of their own tension. I thought I'd have to be ready for that.

I now walked down the platform, possibly following after the women. I looked at my hands. I noticed that I had cuts on my hands from where the little thorns had dug in. At first the cuts seemed small, just like little scratches. But then I saw that some of the cuts, especially around the knuckles at the base of my fingers, cut all the way to the bone.

I looked into one of these cuts and saw something beneath that looked like firm, porous tofu. It sickened me to see that, but I told myself not to worry about it. It's fat, I think, I told myself. Your friends have told about seeing that before, when they'd broken their bones or cut themselves really deeply. So don't worry about it.

I may now have met up with a few of my friends, possibly from my old improv comedy team from college. My friends all sat in an airport-like seating area that also looked like part of a mansion. My friends might have regarded me like I was a joke, not to be taken seriously, and then gone back to whatever their conversation had been.