(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.

(3/18/09) tranny attraction; safety not proven; rescuing truck drivers

(Entered in paper journal at 9 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I sat in a restaurant with three other people. The restaurant was like a run down living room. The walls had chipping, white paint, with maybe some orange paint somewhere as well. There were benches or booths that were also made of plaster, like the walls. There might not have been any tables. I sat on a bench. The other three people sat across the aisle from me.

One of the three people didn't really enter my field of vision. The other two were "women." At first they seemed really pretty. But then they started talking about having to get made up. As they spoke about this, I had a closer and closer view of their faces. One "girl" was white. "She" may have worn a blonde wig. The other "girl" was tan, maybe black. "She" wore a pale brown wig.

As I saw the "girls'" faces more closely, I realized how much like men they looked, especially the white "girl." They both spoke about how they needed to shave. I now saw that they both had hair growing above their upper lips.

I had at first wanted to flirt with the "girls." Now I wanted to avoid them. But now they were moving over to my bench and were flirting with me, or trying their best to act attractive.

Now a third girl walked in. She was tiny, Asian, with a tight body and slightly curly, black hair that went down just below her shoulder blades. She wore a tiny, white shirt with blue designs on it and pale blue jeans. I never saw her face. We started mingling our legs.

Dream #2

I walked out onto a platform at night. The night sky was colored a low blue-violet. I may have been looking out at some kind of air force or air base scene.

I was thinking about something I needed to tell people: how some operation, possibly a space flight operation, would work, despite some people's doubts. To prove (to myself?) that it would work, I stood out on this platform, which was stories high and which stood before a series of tall pipes that were something like propulsion instruments.

I jumped off the platform, to grab onto one of these pipes. But the pipes were now extremely thin, maybe three-quarters of an inch in diameter, like the pipes on household water heaters. I grabbed a couple or a few of the pipes. Some of them were black, and some were orange. They felt like plastic. They swayed under my weight.

I may have thought, before having jumped, that by grabbing onto the pipes I would be able to fly. But now I realized I would not be able to do this. I was swaying back and forth on the slender pipes, high in the air. I was very afraid.

The pipes somehow managed to swing back to the platform. I grabbed onto the platform, which was like a concrete sidewalk. I hung from the platform, then pulled and climbed back up onto it. I now lay on my stomach on the platform.  On the other side of the platform from me was something like a living room, lit in incandescent light. I crawled on my stomach toward the living room.

I was hesitant to crawl into the living room. But I was also afraid of being out on the high platform. It now even seemed like there were gaps in the platform. I may have seen down through the gaps, which may have revealed a glowing, blue light. The gaps made me feel even more unstable. I wanted to get off the platform as soon as possible.

Dream #3

It was a winter morning. A semi-truck had crashed into something like a river or an aqueduct. The water in the river or aqueduct was video game blue with streaks of white, and it may have had some ice in it. The truck was pitched over on its side.

A woman who had been in the truck was now out of it, possibly on a raft in front of the truck, trying to drag the truck along. I had seen all of this as if from a helicopter. The truck had now passed just under a small bridge. I was on the right side of the river.

I was with a small group of people. Our task was to rescue the (three?) people who had been in the truck when it had crashed. But the first goal may have been to rescue the woman. We wanted to do this, apparently, because she was outside of the truck and was now in danger of drifting away. It was like everybody thought the woman had fallen out of the truck or been thrown from it, as opposed to having gotten out of the truck by her own will so that she, herself, could rescue the other two people inside.

But I thought it would be smarter for me just to jump into the truck to rescue the people inside. The other people in my group thought, when I had done this, that I had made a mistake, and that I, too, was now in danger.

Somehow we had managed to pull the truck over to the left side of the aqueduct. At first, the cabin of the truck had seemed huge, as if the cabin and the trailer were all connected to make some kind of living space. The interior had been all black.

But now that we were on the banks and I was making the actual rescue, it was like the actual truck (the engine, cab, etc.) was all just a busted shell, like a purple Pokemon toy sprung and busted open. The cab was something like a tight, leather case, which I had to unzip to pull out the two remaining victims.

The woman, I'd heard, had drifted off on her raft when the rope broke. I felt stupid, like I shouldn't have worried about the truck after all. But there may have been a chance that the woman was actually fine.

I unzipped the leather bag. A middle-aged black man's face emerged from the unzipped area, like a boll of cotton might puff out from its pod. The man's face was round, and bullish. The man wore a black, wool cap and square, gold-rimmed eyeglasses.

I worried that the man was dead. I thought that the leather bag had been such a small space for a person to be trapped inside of. I knew there was also a little boy trapped in there. I wondered how both the man and the boy could have been trapped in that small space. I doubted that I would even find the boy.

I was now in the trailer of the truck, which was again continuous with the cab, so that I could see from the trailer into the cab. The man was awake, sitting behind the driver's wheel. I stood amid shelves of ancient vases, which might have been colored white and red and fashioned in animal- and human-like shapes.

I asked the man what all these things were. I knew that these objects belonged to the woman, who was apparently a scientist. I asked the man what kind of science the woman practiced. The man said something like, "I don't know any of that stuff. You'll just have to ask her about it."