(8/1/05) stomach exploded; i came because i was turned on; the city of night and darkness; $220 and 99-cent beach

(Entered in paper journal at 12:30 PM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was on the side of a wide highway on a mountain slope with my mom. It was a sunny day. the shoulder of the road seems to have been wide, but when I got out of the car I was almost hit a couple times by semi-trucks coming very close to me. They rushed by quickly and violently enough for me almost to be knocked over by the gusts.

My mom, who, while I couldn't see her, sounded more like my old boss KYB from my Americorps program near Los Alamos, told me to get back in the car. I thought I had been thoughtless to get out of the car.

I turned back to get in. The car (which before was a short, dark blue sedan?) was now a white vehicle like a pickup truck with no doors. I stood outside the truck and right beside my mom.

Another truck rushed by. I said, "It's not surprise that friend of my sister's got a burst stomach when he got hit by that truck."

My mom said, "Well, he did die of that burst stomach, but it may not have been just from the truck, and his stomach didn't burst right when the truck hit him."

(As my mom said the following I figured out that my mom actually knew two people who had been killed by a truck and that the kid I thought of had actually been mixed up with someone else. I also mainly saw my mom, but I also saw in my mind's eye some grey, slightly bloodied, plastic device over a bare sternum.)

My mom said, "I was there when he died. He was doing fine, just talking with people and joking. Some people may say he pulled something out of himself, one of the tubes. But he didn't. His stomach just suddenly exploded. The doctors said it had become very weak over a long period of time, maybe only two (weeks/months?).

"When his stomach exploded, he just became quiet. His eyes got really big, and only a small string of blood came out from the corner of his mouth. Just like the other person I know whose stomach exploded. He tried to speak, to scream, but all that came out was a little, scared sigh."

I now either felt or saw the young boy beside my mom, trying to contact me as a ghost.

Dream 2

I went to a restaurant with one or two female friends who were gay. I may have thought I was just going to a dinner alone with them. But it turned out it was a party. I sat at a huge table with a bunch of gay women. The table was a long, narrow oval, and I sat at the bottom end. My one or two friends were all the way at the top of the table.

All the women made comments about men. They said I had come here only because I was turned on by lesbians.

I looked to my left. My friend KB's friend SF was there, wearing a white t-shirt and pink, sweats-like pants. She was a little fatter than she was when I had seen her before. I was a little dejected. When I'd seen her before, I'd been really attracted to her. But now I was less so.

But, still, despite my lowered attraction, and the fact that SF was gay (like she, and my friend KB, were in waking life) I felt like if I only admitted to her that I was attracted to her, she would be with me. But I also wasn't quite convinced that she wouldn't just point me out as a typical male and an object of ridicule. So I couldn't bring myself to tell her anything. SF got frustrated at my indecision and left.

There was a guy a couple chairs down. I couldn't tell if he was gay. He tried to talk to me, just friendly. But I didn't want to talk to him or anybody at this party. I saw that about half the party had secretly left, anyway, including my two friends. I felt awful to think I had actually let myself believe I could make meaningful friendships with anybody.

Now, apparently, I was drunk. This guy and I were yelling at and making fun of everybody in the restaurant. But at some point I couldn't remember what I had said, and I was afraid I had unintentionally made derogatory comments about gay people.

Dream 3

It was a foggy night. I was walking on a concrete walkway by a concrete or stone building, all very nondescript, yet somehow resembling something old and European. There might have been a canal somewhere.

I turned around. I saw beyond me a city. It almost looked like a movie set of a big city like New York. But the way the fog and darkness surrounded and permeated it made me name it "The Night City" or "The City of Night and Darkness." I felt that if I looked into the folds of fog and darkness I could transport myself to that city. I was mesmerized terrified by the city.

Now I may have woken up. I lay in bed, still half-seeing the city. I saw a series of pathways where I had stood, ramping up in diagonals like ramping driveways in a parking garage or ramping walkways in a stadium.

I told myself, What a vision, and it's a spontaneous imagination, not a dream! if only I could feel myself in the scene.

I told myself, Well, just hold the image in your mind and let yourself fall into the image as a dream state. Now I fell asleep (?) and for a moment I stood staring at the ramping walkways. I tried to look at the city, but I was afraid my imagination couldn't believably construct something so vivid and intriguing.

Dream 4

I was in the backseat, either of a car or a van which my dad was driving. My brother and sister were also there. My dad was taking us to the beach. He had bought some Aloe Vera lotion, which was supposed to be better than sunblock. It was actually like some kind of yogurt, pinkish with strawberry flavor and with greenish jelly-matter in it that was Aloe Vera. I took some and rubbed it all over my stomach.

We had to go into a 99-cent store. I may have bought something. I may have felt guilty for spending money on an item, something like $2.99, especially at a store where things were only supposed to cost ninety-nine cents.

Now we were in a huge parking lot at the beach. The lot was basically empty. The driver was no longer my dad but some blonde guy who looked like a lifeguard or a camp counselor.

I spent a while getting ready to go in the water. I was fumbling around all through the van, in all the seats, picking things up, losing things, changing clothes, getting a towel. Then I was going back and forth between the van and some car at the other end of the parking lot.

My brother and sister had become "a few people I work with," vague people, although I think I may have seen KB at one point taking off her shirt and shorts to reveal a bathing suit.

I fumbled at one point with my wallet. I had a bunch of bills which I was trying to fit into my wallet. I did this right in front of the lifeguard, wondering if displaying my money right in front of somebody was a good idea. Eventually I stuffed all my bills crudely but sufficiently into a surprisingly loose pocket of my wallet.

I now rushed all over the place, looking for my towel. I realized I hadn't brought one and that I'd have to go back to the 99-cent store to buy one for $2.99, which really was more money than I could afford to spend.

But now, rushing once again to the car from the van, I tried desperately to remember whether I hadn't been to the 99-cent store yet today. I knew I had, and that I had bought just what I'd needed. But now I couldn't remember what I needed, even though even now I was looking for it.

I got to the car and realized I had so much to do before I could even get into the water.

I stopped and said, maybe out loud, "It should not take this long to do something as easy as going to the beach!"

Now the blonde leader sat before me in the vehicle, which was now more like a van than a car. He said, "Okay, I've collected today's fee from everybody except you. Once you give me the $220, you're free to go to the beach -- after we go to the dollar store so you can buy a towel."

Now I was even more confused. I knew first of all that I didn't have $220. But I was also trying to remember whether a $220 fee was stated before I'd gotten in the van. I couldn't figure why anybody would pay $220 just to go to the beach for a couple hours. I wasn't convinced I should pay the leader. In fact, I was, probably, more worried about having to go buy a new towel, knowing the trip to the 99-cent store would take a long time.

(4/23/06) unfamiliar food; truck crash is my fault

(Entered in paper journal at 10:45 AM at Starbucks on 1st Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I walked into my room late at night. The room was big but a little like a hospital room. My bed was a lot like a hospital bed. The floor had a black and white octagon tile design (like in the bathroom of a place I'd lived in in waking life Harlem in 2005). I had a sink at the back end of the room -- like a hospital sink.

I wanted to go to bed. I kicked my foot against my fridge. It popped open. It looked disgusting, but not as disgusting as I'd thought it would. Plus there was food in it, packaged food, mostly like plastic bottles in which one might find milk or yogurt drinks.

I closed the fridge but then thought I'd open it again to see the food, none of which, on reflection, was anything I remembered having gotten recently. But I opened a fridge to the left of the first fridge. This was a tall fridge with two vertical doors, like my mom's fridge.

I had thought before that someone had come into my room and put weird food in my fridge. In the tall fridge was a note, written in capital letters with red marker, explaining everything. The note said that my landlord had brought this new stuff into my room because he didn't want me to leave. He wanted me to feel more comfortable right here.

I couldn't believe it. I reached into the fridge to see if it -- and the food -- was real.

Dream 2

It was daytime. I was out by a huge road. The road curved away to the right. On either side of the road were big, mangled-looking buildings. In the center of the road ran a concrete barrier.

Big vehicles, enormous trucks, mostly, sped by, going at a frightening pace. But I needed to get across the road. I need to deliver something from my bosses on one side of the road to a boss on the other side. There was a smart, safe way to do it. But the trucks scared me, so I wanted to get past my fears by going straight through the traffic.

I got to the barrier, maybe even straddled it, when something bad happened with the trucks. Either they crashed with each other or they crashed into buildings. I had failed and caused this crash by not doing the safe thing.

One building across the street could no longer be used for work -- it may have been being built, close to being done, but now it would take much longer to finish. One of my previous bosses, PG, was very angry.

A woman to my right, walking with me back across the now empty street, told me not to worry, that the present building was fine for at least another year or two. We were now inside the building, which had a tall atrium. We walked from one side to another and then back to the front of the lobby, to a reception desk.

As we went around the told me that we would be covering (doing investment research on) a new sector -- something to do with hospitals. I said, "Oh, isn't RO in that sector? He's a pretty smart guy, and pretty cool. But for some reason he's always scared me."

I sat down in the reception desk. There were stacks of books and journals and papers all over. I knew I had a lot of studying to do.

(9/24/08) a trucker in greenburg park

(Entered in paper journal at 6:14 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a semi-truck (though I may have had an out-of-truck view of it at first). It was daytime. The truck driver, who at first may have been like a narrator, was talking about some work that had been done on the engine to make the truck go a lot faster.

We were on a road in a kind of busy part of the mountains. As we passed a small, white gas station (on our left), we noticed a car behind us, rushing to catch up to us and pass us. The truck driver knew tht the car driver was just trying to taunt us, feeling that he had a faster car. But the truck driver pressed on the gas and kept the car behind him.

I got a look at the car's driver. He looked awful. He was fattish, with ugly, long, scraggly hair, a stubbly face, a mustache, and mirrored eyeglasses. The car may have been white. It was towing some kind of small U-Haul trailer.

The car sped up again. We sped up, too. But this time the truck actually lost ground to the car. The truck driver jostled with the car to make the driver lose his nerve. But the car got ahead of us.

But father down the road we saw the car again. It was pulled over, with a cop car beside it, hunged over a smooth, steep shoulder of road. At first I thought the car had been pulled over for speeding. But looking at the car, I saw how its front fender was all mangled up, like the car had gotten into a crash. The driver was also hunched over the wheel.

The truck driver was now like my brother. The truck was like a pickup truck. We veered off to the left, onto a side road. We drove down into a wooded area.

But soon we were climbing trees. We had gotten high up in a dense tangle of trees and were looking down at the landscape. "My brother" said that when you looked from this high, you could figure out what kind of course you should take when you got back on the ground. But there was some kind of trick, he said, to being up here, that would help you know and remember the course you should take on the ground. I felt like I knew that trick as well. I remembered back to my days in the desert in New Mexico.

I continued climbing through all the trees. Some of them seemed skinny as saplings, unhealthy, even dead. I noticed a birch tree with silver bark.

A father  and his sons were at the base of the trees. I could hear them. They were getting ready to climb the trees. It was like this place was now a National Park.

For some reason the trees now seemed a lot weaker and more unstable than before. The boys (two of them? preteen) were now up in the canopy with me and my brother. My brother seemed to be getting along with them.

I wanted to get out of the trees. I felt like they were going to break soon. I was so afraid by now that I was clinging to the limbs and climbing around on my belly. I told my brother I was going back.

As I crawled along, the trees changed into something like a wood-slat bridge, which felt very weak to me. It led to something like a tree house, which was probably a visitor's center for this National Park.

I could hear the kids talking with their father, as if they were also including my brother and me in the conversation. I could also hear myself talk with them or imagine what I might have said to them. They were talking about what a good place this was and how nice it is to find some green space in a world that's been so overdeveloped.

I was crawling (more like slithering) through a doggy door that was really tight for my body. I came into a dirty space like a small landing for a set of steps. It was bright and dingy white. In the corner of the landing was the shell of a "roach" (probably more like a cicada). There might also have been some kind of goo coming out from somewhere.

In my head, one of the boys asked me the name of this park. I said, after thinking about it, "Greenburg."

(9/14/09) exonerated

(Entered in dream journal at 9:41 AM at Whole Foods on Houston and Broadway in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was with a group of people out on a lawn at night. Across the lawn from us was something like a covering for the pump island of a gas station. To our right was a building. We may have actualy stood at the edge of the lawn, possibly on beige gravel. A small amount of whitish light came from somewhere, possibly from the moon somewhere in the sky.

I and some other man were under investigation for the shooting of one of our co-workers, FF. FF had known something about us, some improper thing we had done at work. He was going to report us. So we had him shot. He was shot twice, but he lived.

Now there was a big truck, almost the size of a semi-truck, parked pointed out of the pump island. FF may have been in the truck or on the hood of the truck. He had gotten shot, but he was still alive. My co-worker and I hadn't shot FF; we'd hired someone to shoot him. The police had traced the shooting to the man we'd hired. It was understood (even though we saw him at the pump island) that FF was in the hospital, probably telling the police things.

But now we found out that the man we had hired had gotten shot himself, as the result of having pulled a smart-ass prank on some group of people. With his death, the blame for the shooting had stopped at him. We were let go.

I was riding in a car like an SUV (?) with a woman, possibly my sister, driving. It was dark outside. We may even have been driving with our headlights off. Small ridges of hill-sections (cut to let the road through) passed in deep shadow beneath a purple-black sky.

I suddenly remembered my book bag, which was new. I'd left it back at the lawn. I needed to go back and get it, although I knew that if I returned for it I might again be implicated in the shooting.