(2/12/06) my sister is going to stab me in the back of the skull

(Entered in paper journal at 9:10 AM at Starbucks at 1st Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

It was night. I was in an apartment building, at least ten floors up, I'd guess, with my sister (?) and "her husband." They were doing something suspicious. At first I couldn't tell what it was. Then I figured out that they were shooting heroin.

For some reason I had gotten the idea that my sister and "her husband" were having a hard time taking care of their kids. Now I only wanted to expose them so their kids could find safety.

My mom came to pick me up. My sister and I were out in the parking lot. At first I wasn't going to say anything. We were getting into my mom's vehicle (which looked more like my sister's SUV in waking life, except a little smaller). My sister got into the backseat. Something about her seemed a little bit like my friend R.

Now I felt like I absolutely had to tell my mom about my sister's and brother-in-law's heroin use. But as I was telling my mom I could feel that "R/my sister" was going to stab me in the back of the skull.

(10/8/06) driving a double-decker bus; jackass of death

(Entered in dream journal at 8:09 AM at my friend R's house.)

Dream 1

I was in a double-decker bus. A man had been driving it, taking me and my (sister/friend AL) somewhere where we would "receive instructions." We drove down side roads very much like in Lakewood, Colorado. The man got out and went to a car. We would meet him at a restaurant. My sister/AL drove. The road was very much like Wadsworth Boulevard in Denver, going south from Colfax.

I was happy. I thought we were going to make it. But my sister drove erratically, and we ended up meandering uncontrollably in a big, grassy lot by the road.

My sister told me I was messing her up somehow. I could see as if I were inside her. I felt like there was a third person in the bus.

My sister told me we were on Flatbush (in Brooklyn) and that we had to get to an address that was deceptively close -- it was close, but the roads to get there were very maze-like, indirect. My sister said the address, something like 2860.

Dream 2

Excerpts from the show Jackass. The guys all lined up and got shot in the face. Then the guys all lined up to have lions jump out of boxes to attack them.

(10/10/16) sister & junkyard; natural, real, serious, and sane

(Entered in paper journal at 8 PM at home in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I was with my sister (?) in a junkyard. It was supposed to be a place where planes took off. but nothing was running today (?). My sister was disappointed that I had pointed out a bus and a "plane" -- both mangled and burnt-looking. The "plane" was actually just the controls in a cockpit, twisted and gnarled and red and meaty like Brundle at the end of Cronenberg's version of The Fly.

Dream 2

There was some talk about a little girl causing big problems. I walked into a living room. I realized in some way or another that I was dreaming. I jumped over a couple couches and floated over them to a window.

There was a cube of candles hanging on strings. They were in weird shapes, monocolor (???), like ridged rectangles wrapping around a smooth cube. One candle was purple. Possibly another was orange. There were others.

I turned to the right and saw other candle-like ornaments on a white set of shelves. At first the room was small, cluttered, dirty, scary. Then it was bright and open but still cluttered. I jumped over the couches.

Now I was in a huge room. The room was a mess, like an opulent living room gone to decay. There were tall, tall walls on which the turquoise paint was chipping. The floor was hard. Where couches had been, there was now a lot of space, and then rows of folding chairs. There were two paintings on the left wall. One "painting" on the wall I face was inside a box at the top of a tall column like the face on a grandfather clock. But the clock was tall, tall, high in the air. There may have been a tall mantle over a tall fireplace.

I flew up to the paintings on the left wall. One was in a classical British (?) style. They were portraits, maybe turquoise-themed.

I hit my feet against the wall. I flew to the grandfather clock. I looked inside. I saw the painting for an instant. Then it shifted to a piece of box art like a work by Joseph Cornell except somewhat tacky. There was a paper image of a figure collaged into in the work -- a D.D. Home-like man in black and white, and almost crumpled up. There was random junk all over the scene of the work. I shook the grandfather clock, trying to get the beautiful picture back.

I sank to the ground as two women (vague) came into the room. They were talking to me as if this were my my cell or dormitory in an insane asylum. I tried to prove I was not insane and that I could do things like fly. There was a loud TV somewhere in the room. I jumped up and flew like I was back-floating (naked except for grey briefs?) over chairs.

I couldn't fly very well or very far. But the two women said something like "That's the result of that yoga stuff he does."

I jumped up in the air to fly again, to prove (why?) that I wasn't doing yoga or being crazy, but that I was simply being natural, real, serious, and sane.

(7/4/07) tinted window; orange sparks

(Entered in paper journal at 8:35 AM at Ozzie's cafe on Seventh Avenue and Lincoln Place in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I sat on the floor in a living room. My sister sat on the right end of a couch to my left. I may have been sitting with my back against the right end of the couch, so my sister was directly to my left and above me. We both wrote in a notebook. We were writing a plan or a structured report, but it had to do with something mystical.

I stopped in the middle of writing (my sister and I were writing the same thing at the same speed, and we both stopped at the same time). I looked to the wall to the right. There were two roaches. I went to the wall. My sister stood behind me.

I said, "Well, we can just kill these roaches." But now I saw a lot of tiny, tiny roaches on the wall. It was like clouds of gnats. I didn't know what to do.

I saw out a window on the left side of the room. I was far from the window. The room was dim. The window must also have been tinted: it looked like full day outside, but the sky was a heavy, thick, though vivid blue. There were some redbrick building tops before the sky, and something like a heavy, steel beam over the top view just outside the window.

Dream #2

I stood under something like a bridge and saw orange curtains of thick sparks flow down before a sea-green sky like orange sun gleams on the crests of rolling waves in a river.

(8/7/07) hot dog stand and coffee pot; my sister's birthday

(Entered in paper journal at 5:30 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I walked under a wooden door-frame and into a plaza or hallway full of nice-looking, but cheap, mall-like storefronts, mostly for restaurants. Most of the places were closed. I knew from this that this area wasn't getting as much business as had been expected for it when it had first been developed.

One place was open. I went inside. It was like an old hot dog stand at Coney Island: all the surfaces of stainless steel, etc. A father and his twelve-year-old son worked there. The father stood behind the counter and the son beside the front door. (To get into the place I probably had, once again, to crouch under a half-door-frame in a "wood" wall like the wood-pattern siding on the outside of a double-wide trailer.)

I was offered breakfast -- some candies like peanut butter cups. I took them, figuring I wouldn't know where else to get food.

I stood outside at night. I was in a suburban neighborhood. The land, even the pavement, was rolling with roughly four-foot-tall mounds like a carpet with stuff hucked underneath it. I stood by a sleek, black SUV. I stood with some other people, my mom probably among them.

I had a cream-white (ceramic?) coffee pot with a polished silver top. Inside the pot was something like liquid nitrogen. I had to pour the substance on or in some pipe in the SUV's engine to get the engine running.

But I had just run out of the substance. Someone, possibly my mom, took the coffee pot to go fill it again. I stood with the other people by the SUV. I told them that somehow it seemed like we shouldn't need that second pot after all.

Dream #2

I stood with my mom before an electronic piece of machinery. I had to twist some knobs or gears to manipulate the quality of metals. There may have been construction workers nearby, watching us. I think I had done something wrong, and that people were now laughing at me.

I was riding in an SUV with my mom and my sister. We drove on a bridge like the Manhattan Bridge. The sides of the bridge were mostly covered by orange, mesh material, making the bridge feel like an interior. I may have been sitting in the front passenger's seat. I didn't see as myself. I saw as my sister and sometimes as my mother. Either I or my sister sat in the backseat on the passenger's side.

My mom told my sister why this day (my sister's birthday?) was so good. My mom gave a lot of flattering reasons. I, as my sister, giggled shyly while looking at the dashboard. My mom (I seeing as her) said, "But I love this day most of all because I knew" (I seeing as my sister again) "that Preemie was not in New York City during the World Trade Center attack."

I stood out on the bridge. My mom and sister were in the SUV, which was stopped and facing me.

I stood on the right side of the road, before some electronic equipment like an old record player. One knob in particular, which looked like a coppery version of the base of a record needle's arm, was my focus. I had to thumb down a tiny switch inside to make a change to copper. I thumbed the switch down. I heard a sound somewhere like distorted church bells.

(8/16/07) my sister the care bear

(Entered at 6:15 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

It was a clear day. I was on a footbridge over a large body of water, possibly a river like the Hudson, although it seemed as vast as an ocean. I was in single file with other people who were around my age. The footbridge was like squares of board bound together and floating on the water, with handrails built on for balance. I may have been the second to last person in the line, with a woman behind me.

A small ship came up to us. The ship barely reached out of the water. It had a flat look, like a garbage barge, but its sides had (paneless) windows or portholes and it was plain that nothing was to rest on its tops. The ship was rusted all over. It headed at one spot in the bridge where there was a gap of a couple feet.

I thought the ship's pilot thought the boat could get through that small space. But when I got past that spot and the boat shifted its course to follow us, I knew it was just trying to scare us.

The ship hit the bridge at a spot we had just passed. It lifted up a fair section of the bridge. I told the woman behind me, "Get ready to get wet!"

The part of the bridge I had pulled up now recoiled deep into the water, pulling the nearby sections down with it. I was carrying a backpack. My cell phone was inside. As we were pulled down, about waist-deep, I worried about my phone getting water damage.

The ship had passed. I thought the woman behind me would ask me how I knew the bridge would be pulled underwater. It seemed like nobody but I had seen the ship. I thought of how I would explain the ship to the woman.

I was now walking on a nice, cobbled path in a shaded corner of an area like a zoo or a botanical garden. The trees shading the path were like thin pines. My sister walked behind me. A few people walked around nearby.

I was angrily engaged in telling my sister how rude the ship's pilot had been, first to choose to go under a bridge that nothing could go under anyway, and second to make it clear that it wasn't just choosing any place to hit the bridge, but that it chose to hit right near the line of people walking.

As I continued explaining this,  turned us off one path to go onto a path behind a chain link fence. We had to walk over a small mound made up of soil and old fence parts to get in. Now the fence was on our left, and some small, long building was on our right.

A black man with long dreads followed us. I felt like the man was a security guard. I was trying to explain something, possibly having to do with the physics of the bridge's movement, to my sister. I now tried to do it in an obvious way. I wanted to show the man by my speech that my sister and I were doing nothing to break the law. Plus, I didn't want the man following us around.

At a certain distance the fence curved to join with the building, making a dead end. We had to turn around. But the fence had old chain link fence, and old, red-painted slats and wire fence, piled up against it pretty evenly.

I ran up the piled up stuff, acting like I would jump over, maybe even thinking I would jump over. But when I got to the top, I hesitated. But the man who'd been following me and my sister ran aggressively up the side and may even have jumped over the fence, thus no longer following my sister and me.

During all this, my sister had asked me a question (about the physics of the bridge?). I, having been so frustrated with the man following us, got angry at the question and answered in a snide way. I felt bad: I could feel my sister was sad because I'd treated her rudely.

We walked past the entry and toward the doorway of a house-like building. I went inside. My sister went out to a stone bench just to the right. I only went a step or two into the doorway. In the room were adults, mostly Mexican men. One in particular had a big mullet hairdo. I felt like a child. I may have felt scared of the men. But something about them all was amusing .

I realized I hadn't patched things up with my sister yet. I went out to the stone bench. A weird figure like a plasticky, one-foot-long panda bear doll lay face-down on the bench. The stuffed animal was my sister. It was covered in big, purplish ants. Some of the ants had embedded themselves in my sister, as if they had melted and molded the plastic to encase their bodies.

I knew the ants had all bitten my sister and that she, allergic to the ant bites, was now either dead or in a coma. I called to my sister, moaning and crying. I brushed all the ants off her body. I couldn't believe there were so many. I thought, How could I have left my sister alone where I knew there were so many ants? I wandered down a slope in the sunlight. My sister still lay on the bench.

Now some of the adults (I still saw them as adults while I saw myself as a child). I was in a small living room. The adults, maybe four or five of them, all Mexican, were trying to draw me all the way into the room. I stood behind a corner of wall and a TV on a stand.

The adults told me, "Look -- she's alive again. We fixed her!" I thought, That's impossible. She's dead.

Now a Care Bear stood into a small portion of my field of vision. Its face had a strangely human look. The face, too, was more male than female. The bear could only stand, walk, wave, and smile. I didn't know how they thought this Care Bear could fool me. It didn't look like my sister. It wasn't alive. It was just a robotic stuffed animal.

(9/11/07) my dad the murderer; gnear thalk; we really want to talk

(Entered in paper journal at 6:30 AM on B-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

My dad may have been accused of a murder. He was now coming to take me, my brother, and my sister to dinner. I lived in my own house, so they would pick me up. I sat in a room of my house, which was empty except a little clutter, a box of which I sat on.

I spoke on the cell phone with my mom. I told my mom, "I can't sit in a restaurant with that guy! Everybody'll be staring at us and asking us questions the whole time!" I imagined big, fat faces crowding all around my dad, my brother, my sister, and I at the restaurant. The faces all looked like obese versions of a mid-twentieth-century, cruel stereotype of Chinese faces.

I pulled the phone away from my left ear. The display was so colorful and bright. The main colors were blue.

My mom (or sister?) asked through the phone, "Your phone hasn't worked in all this time. Why is it working now that you need to tell us you don't want to see your dad?"

I thought to myself, Wow. They're right. How did my phone start working again?

Dream #2

A woman had gone missing, and two men had found that she had killed herself. They found her in a vacant lot of pale tan soil on a clear, blue day. She was a black girl, tall, thin, with brown skin and shortish, spiky, dark-blonde hair. she had slit her throat and lay in a big pool of blood. She lay in a fetal position on her right side.

The men now stood before a camera (still in the lot, still on a blue day) talking about how it was to find the body. The men were both oldish, a little dumpy, white, with big, round eyes.

The scene of discovery happened again, like for the first time. This time the woman was completely decapitated, her head lying three or four feet from her body. The view panned back up to the two men, who said, "Imagine our shock. Even if she had survived, what kind of life would that have been? Her arms were chopped to the elbows, her legs were gone..."

I now crouched in a library, in between a shelf and a wall. The space was narrow, about three feet wide at most. I had a big book held directly in front of my face. I crouched, relaxed, with my knees against my chest. My sister sat to my left, leaning against my legs.

My oldest nephew came walking from right to left along the aisle and stomped on my sister's legs. It hurt my sister.

I felt helpless to retaliate on behalf of my sister. But I didn't want it to happen to her again. So I told her to sit a special way. She sat pretty much the same way as before, but now she was naked.

I heard a weird story narrated now, by my sister -- not voiced from her physical body, but from a narration in my head. My sister said, "I wouldn't let anybody kiss my boobs before him. But this was very important to him." I had a feeling that the "him" was me. I thought, How could that be? Why would I do something like that to my sister?

My view floated all around the library, slowly, as if some disembodied I were walking around the library.

I heard myself and a friend, like my old friend R, speaking in my head. We were trying to decipher a phrase: "gnear talk." It was in a series of new phrases young kids were using nowadays. I saw the list of new colloquialisms before my mind's eye for a moment.

I thought, Well, "thalk" is a hot walk -- so hot it thaws you. And "gnear" is what you say when a girl is so close you can feel her loveliness. It's as if you were saying, "Gee, she's near," or "g-near," to make "gnear" (except that the "g" was pronounced hard, not soft).

Dream #3

I had a dinner or a breakfast at a place that was supposed to be the apartment of my old friend R and his fiancee L. We sat at a huge table that was littered with items like vases. Everything seemed very disordered. I was surprised to have been here. I thought, These guys aren't mad at me anymore! I felt relieved.

L said, "Come back soon. We really want to talk with you again."

I couldn't tell whether that were true. I looked at R. He looked unpleasantly surprised to see me here. I could tell he was already trying to find a way to keep me from coming back.

(9/18/07) the expansion of central park

(Entered in paper journal at 6:15 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I rode through a suburban street at night with my mom and sister. As we passed one intersection one man walked diagonally through a corner yard to our left. We continued on. My mom drove. I sat in the passenger's seat. My sister sat in the back seat, on the driver's side.

I said, "That's why I like being out at night: nobody ever comes out."

My mom said, "I wish nobody even had to live in these houses. That way no lights would even be on."

I thought, Why would you want no lights to be on? You wouldn't be able to see the different kinds of houses.

The houses were lit brightly, as if there were lights pointed all over the houses and yards. For some reason this reminded me of Christmas.

At the end of the block the road curved left. Facing the curve was a tall, wide house. It had a wide, triangular, solid roof with a longer slope on the left than on the right. The wood of the house seemed to be as polished as in a Greene & Greene interior. The front of the building had some grid design in the wood. One vertical strip of the house-front was rough like the trunk of an enormous tree, but it was colored red and blue.

We drove into a massive tunnel or "garage" on the left side of the house. The tunnel also, like the house-front, had polished wood walls with grid designs. The tunnel turned left. At the turn was an enormous bench, maybe twenty feet tall, built into the wall, with seat and back cushions proportional to the height of the bench. (I think the only thing the bench could fit would be the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial.)

We continued, as if floating along, though perhaps no longer in a car (my vision was a lot more mobile), through a room full of books. I told my mom that this was a library I knew. The room was intimate. The walls were lined with books, and there were books all over the tables.

We continued floating/driving into a much bigger room which was just as full of books. Both rooms were very nice and comfortable, but they were both simply piled and piled with books.

I lay on a couch. My mom and sister sat in two chairs behind me. They were reading. My mom had a wide but thinnish book which, I thought, was probably an interesting picture book.

I turned forward. In front of me was a big, thick, dark, rectangular, wooden table piled with books. I pulled a large, pale blue-covered book off a pile. I was slightly disappointed to find that I had chosen a picture book on the history of Central Park. I had wanted something with subject matter a little "weightier."

I looked through pictures about how (some time in the 1950s?) the park had been expanded. There was a map of the park "as it is today." The park was long, oval-shaped with uneven edges. The parts of the park that existed before the expansion were in color. The parts of the park that came into being after the expansion were in black and white.

But if this book was right, then before the expansion the park was in two sections which, given the size of the park, were quite separated. I thought, How could people have called these separate sections one park? What's more, how could they have called these sections "Central Park" if the sections were so far apart?

I then saw that the two parks had been connected by a walkway, at the midpoint of which was an oval-shaped rest area. For some reason this made things a little more sensible.

(I imagined that, before the expansion, the area between the two parks was really like vacant dirt lots,, just barren, pale, dry soil, not streets, buildings, or anything implying a city. There may even have been patches of trees out on these vacant lots.)

As I justified the name of Central Park to myself, my psychiatrist A stomped into the room from a doorway to my right and beyond my feet (i.e. beyond the direction of my feet as I lay on the couch). A shouted, "What in the hell are you doing in my place? You don't just come into people's places like this!"

I was caught off guard by A's surprise, shocked by how mean A could be. I stammered to say A's name, but I couldn't. I looked at a page in the book. There was a photo of a Hindu snake woman from Erich Neumann's The Great Mother. Below the photograph were three numbered paragraphs, each of which described a title. The first two were titled "Snake" and "Religion." The third was a word I didn't understand.

I tried again to call out A's name. But all I could think to say, as if it wanted to burst out as a revelatory speech, was, "Snake!"

A looked pale and worn-out. She wore big, smoky-lensed sunglasses which made her face look like that of a classic grey alien. At some point A stood half-straddling me, so her right leg knelt by my left side while her left leg stood, on the floor to my right, before the couch.

I muttered, "B-but w-we, we weren't saying a single word."

A said, "I don't give a damn what you were saying. You don't go into places when you aren't invited."

I said, "But I was invited. I have it in writing." I felt like this was true. But I also felt like A wouldn't care about that. She was too mad.

(10/16/07) where the new building was; emergency party; like a worm made out of brains

(Entered in paper journal at 5:50 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I watched, from the back passenger seat, a car pass a field with trees like cherry trees. Somehow I thought this was where my company's new building would be (in waking life, my company was in the final planning stages for moving into a new building -- we would be fully moved in, if I remember correctly, by about July of 2008 -- only to be moved into another building in January of 2009!)

I thought, This would be a nice area to take runs. There was a path running through the field. We passed along a creek or river at the bottom of a slope of rocks. The creek itself was rocky. An empty boat, with two paddles, clanked along some of the rocks.

I thought, But this is New York City. The roads are bad on (my boss) BS' knees. We really couldn't come up with a running route that would be good for BS. I also thought of asking my co-worker CJ if he wanted to run.

We passed another river, which ran at the bottom of a waterfall. The waterfall gushed over huge, round, coppery rocks and flooded the river.

We passed a building that was built in three sections. I saw it from the back. The two back sections were roundish with green, metallic framing for the windows. The front section rose slightly above the back sections and was octagonal, probably of pink stone, with a shallow, a-frame roof. It was in a field of dry, yellow-tan and orange-tan grass.

Now it was like I sat backwards, looking out the back window, in the backseat and on the driver's side. My mom was driving the car. My brother and sister were also in the car. We drove on a straight road, through slightly rolling stretches of flat plains -- yellowy-tan grass with some hints of green and orange and some glimpses of rich (?), brown soil beneath. There were occasional, thin clumps of trees, the green of their leafs as pale as floating clouds.

Then I saw a white tree. It was de-limbed, so all it was was a white trunk with four limb-stumps coming off of it. It looked like a wild, raging horse to me.

I thought my mom would be impressed by how much I liked looking out the window. I asked my mom some question relating to telling her about the things my siblings and I had done. My mom surprised me by answering something like, "I don't care. Don't tell me anything." I tried to change that statement into something more positive in my mind.

We passed a stand of thin aspen trees that edged before some tall, redbrick buildings like apartment complexes.

Dream #2

I sat in my desk at work. There was an alarm. A man's voice came on over the alarm's intercom speaker. The man announced a party (?) in XXXXX's office.

When the alarm had first come on, I had been afraid, wondering if the announcement would be for an actual emergency. I had worried whether I would do everything alright and help everybody effectively through the emergency. Now I was a little disappointed. It was just a birthday party?

For some reason I wasn't wearing shoes. But my shoes were sitting right next to me. I picked up my shoes and walked to the cubicle in front of the office where the party was. The party was, somehow, both in the office and down the hall.

The party was for one of my co-workers, AR, who was, like myself, an Administrative Assistant. Someone told AR, "You could be head of GM (i.e. Global Markets) one day! You throw parties so well!"

I was disappointed. Hadn't my old co-worker and mentor ES, now herself an Analyst like my (and, before, her) boss BS, said to me once, "You could be CEO of this company one day"? (I'm pretty sure that in waking life ES never told me that, although she has always complimented me on my "abilities" -- whatever those abilities are/were!)

I now reflected, Maybe you just said all that stuff to kind of puff up your assistants, make them feel more important than you really think they are, just so you can keep them working. How else, I thought in my jealousy, could someone make such a kind statement about AR, who, I peevishly thought, scarcely worked as hard as I worked?

I didn't even want to go into the room now. I was too ashamed. I took my time putting on my shoes.

AR called, "Preemie, get in here!"

I said, "I'm coming."

She said, "I've been making decisions to be nice. But pretty soon I'm going to have to stop making decisions!"

I thought, Nobody's going to talk to me that way!

But now both AR and ES were out in the cubicle with me. They were both saying nice things to me.

Dream #3

I sat watching a movie. I walked out and then back in. I walked up to my seat as the movie was ending. There were shots of blue sky and power lines, vistas of plains, and other shots I loved. The narrative of the film ended, a song began playing, and the credits began to roll.

But as the song started, a voice (of some Hispanic boy?) called out, "Hey, uh... The film is pretty much ended, everybody. We would appreciate it if you got up and left."

I was in a front row. I had my stuff sitting against the railing in front of me. I stood to pick it up. I had forgotten that I had brought a coat. I had actually brought a lot more than I had remembered.

I walked out into the hallway, which was like the hallway in a city building, just off from the reception lobby. I stood in a weird junction of hallways and right by a garbage can. I stood talking with two black girls.

The girls mentioned a young man, one of their co-workers (they all worked at this movie-house), who did a lot of other stuff. I wasn't sure what the "other stuff" was. I asked, "Does he work somewhere else, too?"

The girls got upset, like I had insinuated that all the boy could do was work in places like this. One of them said, "No. He goes to school. He's studying to be a scientist."

We talked a little more. Then I had to leave. One of the girls walked with me out into the dark, blue-grey evening. The girl smiled and said, "I've always wanted to see the car you drive."

We stood in a mostly empty shopping mall parking lot. The movie-house was now more like a restaurant. I saw my car in the distance. It was an old, beat-up car, like one I drove in my last year of high school -- except that the paint job on the car was now all new and shiny.

I thought, I can't let the girl see that thing. Besides, this girl wasn't the girl I wanted. Both girls were pretty. But the girl I liked, the other girl I'd been talking with in the movie-house hallway, had rounder eyes, not thin eyes like this girl.

The girl with me stopped to talk with a mother and her kids, who stood by a van. I thought, While the girl's not paying attention I can drive away. That way she won't see my awful car.

I turned to tell the girl goodbye. But I saw her from behind and was too surprised to say anything. The girl was now short, ugly, and poor-looking (???!!! -- I'm sometimes shocked by the things I've said!). She wore a blue t-shirt and tight blue jeans which showed off her big bottom. Her big bottom really turned me off.

A black man who was about my height and a little bigger than I, smart-looking, with thin-rimmed eyeglasses, walked past me. I must have thought this was the friend the two women had been talking about in the movie-house hallway.

I thought, Now's my chance to prove I don't think the girls' friend is capable only of working in a movie theater. I apparently thought I could do this simply by making small talk with the man in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. I said, "Hey, man, we'll see you later."

The man walked past me without even regarding me. I thought, Okay -- you show kindness and it isn't returned!

I walked toward my car. My mom walked beside me and to my left. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. The phone (a regular, old-style flip-phone -- as I remember it from waking life, a black Nokia) was cracked. I thought, Maybe it's just cracked on the surface. But I opened it to see that the crack ran across all its surfaces. I looked at the sides. They were messed up, too.

I almost started crying. I thought, What did I do to make this happen? Can't I take care of anything I own?

It was now more like daytime. The car was by the entrance to the mall. My mom and I were at the end of the parking aisle, maybe twenty feet from the car. We passed a needle-leafed tree in a planting island.

I had been speaking with my mom and barely attending the stout tree. But, reflecting on the tree after we'd passed it, it struck me that the tree had weird, tiered, pink and white flowers on it. I told my mom, "Let's go back. That tree looks weird."

We went back. I looked at the branches. There were strange, but somehow sensible, tan-brown, brittle, cone-shaped things standing atop the thin branches. I thought, Maybe I just mistook these things for flowers.

But then I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the pink and white flower. I hadn't seen the flower because it was on the periphery of the tree, not in the center, where I had focused my gaze.

The trunk of the tree seemed to end about two feet up from the ground. From the top of the trunk came an agave-like plant with spiny, yellow, purple, and green leafs. I said, "That's what I thought I saw! Isn't it odd?"

I reached out to touch the plant, to make sure I was seeing leafs and not more cones. The plant felt odd. And when I pulled my hand back, I noticed the top leafs moving, as if of their own volition. I thought, That can't be real. I have to be seeing things.

My mom and I were walking away. But the plant really bugged me. I had to look at it again. I told my mom, "Something else didn't make sense." I didn't want to tell my mom what didn't make sense -- namely, that the plant seemed to be moving on its own.

We went back to the tree. Now I saw that the plant grew out of a hollow in the top of the tree trunk -- although it was a part of the tree. I saw steady, directed movement from within the trunk. I knew the movement wasn't volitional, but that it was growth -- life.

I saw a spiky (like a sea-cucumber), worm-like appendage emerge from beneath the leafs. I shouted to my mom, "See?! I wasn't imagining! This thing is growing quicker than normal!"

The thing emerged, as huge as a boa constrictor, and wove its way through the thin branches of the tree. It was like a worm made out of brains, with a head like a gigantic breast. It hung over a branch above us. I knew if it touched us it would incorporate us.

I told my mom, "Run to the car!" We ran and got in.

The thing was growing. It had taken over the tree and spread toward us through the parking lot. I didn't know if we could get started and drive away quickly enough.

I saw a car coming from an underground parking garage to the left of the tree. Now the parking garage was like a car wash. It sprayed water all over the car. Jets of water flew outside the garage. They hit the plant-thing. As soon as they did, the thing dissolved into yellowy, thickish, soapy-looking water.

I hoped that more cars would come through the garage to get washed. The thing was dissolved now, but I felt like it would regain its consistency. I thought that more water needed to hit the thing before it would lose its ability to re-stabilize.

(2/3/08) mcdonald's wedding dress; drug dealer's name; fast food snow shoveling

(Entered in paper journal at 8:15 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a clothing store, looking at a rack of panties. The panties were either used panties or bargain panties. I knelt right in front of them. I might have been with a group of people I knew. They were off in some other area of the store.

There was a thuggish-looking man working somewhere nearby. I didn't want him or the people I was with to know I wanted to wear the panties I was looking at. But this was just a small room of the store. In the bigger, main part of the store was a section with newer, nicer lingerie. I was more interested in that lingerie.

I was in a conference room. There were a few big tables. The lighting of the room was bland and fluorescent. The tables were pale peach. The room was empty except for me and PD, one of the heads of the company division of my department was a part. PD stood far to my right, by a dark doorway.

Other people were coming to the room for a meeting. They were probably already nearby. PD spoke as if she were already speaking to all the attendees. She was talking about something being some place other than where we'd thought it would be. She may have been talking about lingerie. I thought about some place PD mentioned, as if I were talking about it in my head with another man.

I stood out on a dark city sidewalk like in front of a closed-down McDonald's, like the McDonald's on 57th Street, near Sixth Avenue, in Manhattan. The man with whom I'd been speaking in my head now stood somewhere near me. I opened the door to the store while saying something joking to him.

I walked into the store. It was just like the closed-down McDonald's. But then it was like a dim, rundown version of some house I'd lived in during my childhood.

I went down into the basement. Sunlight came in through the windows of a bedroom I'd walked into. The bedroom was like a bedroom I'd had in my last year of college, when I'd lived off campus with some friends. I sat on the floor before a set of shelves in a closet (where my bookshelf would have been in my college bedroom). The shelves were piled with all kinds of girls' clothes.

I felt like my family or friends would come back soon. I wanted to have fun with these clothes before everybody returned. I shuffled through the stuff. I eventually came upon a wedding dress. It was white and lacy, but there were one or two little places on it upper parts decorated with pink and green, flower-like designs.

Dream #2

I was on my cell phone somewhere. Someone was telling me that  people in my neighborhood had confused me with a Jewish boy who was a drug dealer. They said that at some point I had something about my last name that made the people think my last name was the name of the Jewish boy. I told the person what my last name was. But the person said, "I think it's too late. It doesn't matter now. Nobody's going to believe you."

Dream #3

I stood outside in front of my great-grandmother's house. It was a snowy night. A lot of snow had already accumulated. At the very front of my grandma's yard there were steps down to the sidewalk (this was not so in waking life).

On the sidewalk my sister, and possibly someone else, were shoveling snow. I had a shovel, too. I pushed it all the way from the front of the house to the steps leading down to the sidewalk. But when I reached the steps, I was suddenly where the other person had been. The other person was now gone.

I might have been standing in this position with a shovel, but I wasn't moving. I was listening, in my head, to some stock-analysis discussion on the Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) chains, like McDonald's.

I realized that only my sister was shoveling. I thought, I'm the man. Shouldn't I be helping my sister shovel, or should I be shoveling for her? But here she's shoveled so much already. In some way, though, I didn't feel bad. I knew I was doing some kind of work, after all.

I stood at the top of the stairs. The stairs were pretty much shoveled, but chunks of ice still clung to the steps. I chipped these chunks with the edge of my shovel.

My co-worker JBS stood to my left (in the snow of the yard!) and spoke about QSR chains. I was pretty annoyed. I wanted to focus on my job of chipping the ice. But I also felt bad and thought I should listen to JBS out of kindness.

(2/15/08) dog in the maze; lizard on my arm

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

Dream #1

I was off the side of some on a hillside, possibly with my mom and sister. There was something like a maze of concrete or wood walls set up. Somewhere in this maze was a black dog. The grass all around us was tall and thick. It was a warm, bright, blue-white day.

Dream #2

I stood in the doorway of some ground-level apartment with my mother and sister. I was telling them that in this place you see certain animals. Looking across the way I saw a lizard climbing onto the porch of an apartment door. I walked over to it. At first it looked smallish, dry, green, like an anole.

I let it climb up onto me. It might have seemed very weak at first. It climbed up onto my right (?) arm. It now grew grew and became stronger. It was colored black, orange, and yellow. Its scales were sleek, like those of a snake. I showed my mom and sister. There was something else about the situation that I wanted to tell them about. But I just couldn't find the words to express it.

We stood before a TV in the living room. A Latino man, possibly with long hair, glasses, and a backward baseball cap, turned on something like a pay-per-view show for us about lizards. The show was either sixteen minutes long or in 16mm film. The man walked into the hallway and out of our sight. He said, "Now that you've started watching this movie you can't switch to anything else."

(2/20/08) treasury and fed; nwne; the shawmut; waiting for mom; duane reade

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

Dream #1

I was in a dark place, maybe inside a house and then out on a lawn at night. I heard about my old friend R killing someone. R was now threatening to kill me because I worked for the US Treasury.

I walked through some concrete area with dead or dormant weeds spiking up along the walls. I was thinking to myself how I might start working somewhere else, maybe the Federal Reserve. But I needed to give myself time to make the move.

Dream #2

I was in a house with my mother, my sister, and probably my brother. The weather was a little wintry, but tornadoes were causing destruction nearby. The tornadoes were in the northwest of the city. We were in the northeast. I saw in my mind a diagram of quadrants, with the northwest and northeast quadrants labeled.

I told my mom we should get out of here. I sat on the floor by my sister. My mom stood over us. My mom said, "There's nothing to worry about. The storms are in the northwest."

I said, "But they'll move!"

My mom said, "Alright, alright. Everybody into the car."

I was in the kitchen. I slung a small, plastic bag of something over my shoulder. Some animal like a rabbit pulled the whole thing into its mouth. I turned around and pulled the animal off the bag. The animal was now like a cocker spaniel. The dog scurried around violently. I knelt down. I may have been wearing shorts. I had bare legs. The dog was biting my legs.

All around us were empty boxes of food, like cereal boxes. I knew the dog was hungry. I tried to find it some food. Only one box still had food in it. The food was like Froot Loops, but it was like someone had already poured milk on them and the milk had dried, leaving the cereal all caked together. I knew that food probably wasn't good for anything to eat. But I was still trying to get it out of the box to feed the dog.

Dream #3

I was in a hotel room in Boston. I might just have come back in after having been out for a couple hours. The room was dimmish. I stood before the door. The cleaning lady knocked and then came inside. She said she was sorry if she was bothering me. I said it was no big deal.

I walked over and sat on the bed. The bed was undone, the blankets in a heap. I saw a used Band-Aid on my bed. i knew it wasn't my Band-Aid, and that I had laid in bed all night with my feet touching somebody's used Band-Aid.

I turned on the TV. I thought about my old co-worker and mentor ES or my boss BS having once said they weren't particular about the hotel they stayed in. They could even stay in the hotel I was in right now -- the Shawmut.

Dream #4

I was at "my dad's house," which was somewhere in the woods. We were getting ready to go, possibly to a movie in a nearby city. But we realized that my mom had taken all the keys for the cars. (This is odd -- we all had handfuls of sets of keys. It was more like the cars were all gone.)

I was angry that my mom could leave us stuck like this without leaving us any idea of when she would be back. My sister and I tried to call my mom on her cell phone, but my mom wasn't answering. Finally I said, "I can get out of here myself. I don't need a car. I can walk."

I imagined a few trails running through a mountain meadow. My only fear was that my mom would come after I'd started walking and make me look like a fool for having been impatient to leave.

Dream #5

(Vision?) I stood before a mirrored wall with a Duane Reade sign and doorway around it.

(3/22/08) airport; sister's wedding

(Entered in paper journal at 9:41 AM at Starbucks on Astor Place.)

Dream #1

It was night. I walked into a building that was an airport. I knew I had missed my flight, but I hoped I could get another. The front counter looked like the ticket counter at a bus station.

Dream #2

I was in a smallish house with my biological father's side of the family. My younger sister from my biological dad's family was sad and asked why I hadn't come to her wedding.

I walked from the kitchen into the living room. The living room was dim, lit only by the light from the kitchen.

(4/27/08) elevator mission; spy-play

(Entered in paper journal at 7:55 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn into Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in an office building. The building's interior was dim, with dark walls. It was night or early morning. I had been with a group of people, probably older, wealthier people.

I got into an elevator. The floors were chosen by pressing numbers into a keypad. I must not have pressed anything when I first went in. The elevator car plunged downward. I knew I was quickly descending through underground levels. I didn't want to go too far down. I didn't want people to think I was sneaking around down here. But I also didn't know if the actual speed of the descent might kill me.

I typed "18" into the keypad. The elevator car ascended at first. But then the walls became like windows. The elevator car floated over a large body of water. The sky was a dim, pastel blue, like at dawn.

The elevator car lost speed and height. I soon fell into the water. I tread water. It was daytime, bright, with a cloudless sky. The water was murky green.

A woman tread water with me. We looked around, as if we were here on some kind of spy mission. On either side of us, possible four hundred meters away on either side, were rolling, pale, tan, deserty hills dotted with tall shrubs like junipers and pinons. Along the hills, but fixed in the water, were enormous construction cranes.

We were trying to swim to a certain part of the shore. I hoped we could avoid being directly under the cranes. Each crane held a gigantic sack of something like gravel and bricks. It looked like the cranes could drop the sacks at any time.

We were now on a shoe, walking up to a shallow cave or a tall cavity in the side of a hille. There was a woman working on an oldish looking, heavy piece of equipment.

We had to get information from her without letting on that we were spies. I looked around the area. It looked like it had been made in the hillside by the people who were carrying out all the construction on the landscape. There were steel beams against the wall. It was like the beams were propping up the walls and ceiling. There were heaps of asphalt and rubble all over.

The machinery woman was pretty but tough-looking. She was saying stuff to show off and try to attract the woman with me. The woman with me did actually seem to be attracted to the machinery woman.

The machinery woman now had us carry out a task. Whereas the cavity had just been fully open to the air, there was now a big, wooden door or gate in front of at least half of it, on our left as we faced the cavity front. We had to pull a hose through a hole at the bottom of this wooden door.

As we were drawing the hose into the cavity, I worried that I was doing a bad job and that the machinery woman would point out my inability as a reason why the woman with me shouldn't be attracted to me. But, I thought, I've done stuff like this before. I should be doing a good job.

There was a little resistance on the hose every now and then, but I seemed to work through it, which made me feel good about myself. But then the hose got really resistant. Instead of pulling hoses, the woman and I ended up pulling in two blue, wax cylinders, maybe eight inches in diameter and twelve feet long.

I stood the cylinders up before the machinery woman. The cylinders seemed to have stuff like Styrofoam cups in them. The machinery woman said something about how she liked the cylinders because they were phallic. The machinery woman said that liked to think that I was giving her my phallus, i.e. that I was having sex with her.

I was relieved by this statement. I had thought the machinery woman was a lesbian. I was jealous of the machinery woman, and afraid that she'd try to make the woman with me like her instead of me. But now it appeared that the machinery woman was actually attracted to me!

Dream #2

I stood with a woman like my sister outside a door to a plain, cheapish apartment. My sister and I had been spying on people. We had been into one other person's house just before. It had been a real challenge to get the needed information from the person, who had been quite hostile toward us. I was ready for this place to be just as much of a challenge. But my sister knocked on the door and told me she'd take care of this mission.

The door opened. The man who opened the door was my brother (though he might have looked like Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack character). Without saying anything my brother let my sister enter the house, as if she owned the place. My brother closed the door on me, as if he hadn't even seen me.

I stayed patient, realizing that I, too, would be able to enter easily. I drank a red, sticky, sweet fluid out of a long, thin, clear glass. It was just one swallow, like the dregs in a glass.

My brother opened the door, looked at me, and closed the door softly again. He then re-opened the door without appearing in the doorway.

I walked in. The apartment was empty. There were white walls and whitish carpet. Daylight came into the apartment, but it was dim and kind of sour. The front room was adjoined by a breakfast bar to the kitchen. Back from the front room was the living room. The only piece of furniture in it was a television. My brother stood to my left, just out of my sight, but very close to me.

I asked my brother questions, but very soon he understood that I was trying to get hidden information from him. He stopped talking and sat in front of the television.

My brother was a child now, around twelve years old. The TV was blaring. My brother was playing with neon green toys like the old, two-inch-tall M.U.S.C.L.E. wrestling figures and with some grey, plastic fighter jets. Some of the men were arranged randomly. Others were arranged in a straight line ending in a triangle shape.

Some of the men also stood on the wings of the jets and around the jets.

(9/4/08) getting home from the met

(Entered in paper journal at 6:11 AM on B-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was out on an open field with my mom and sister and possibly my sister's children (though all the children may have been girls). I was looking down at a hole in the ground that looked like a stairwell made of sand. I may have been digging this hole out even more, and possibly with a big slab of slate that was large and smooth enough to be a headstone.

One of my family members, maybe my sister, asked, "What if we come to sleep with you here?"

I didn't think there was enough space for my family here. And I didn't think the sandy be would be flat enough for them. But now I dug the slate into the ground so it stood upright, like a headstone, in the bed of this stairwell. Suddenly the ground looked flat enough. Now the slate was gone.

I looked before me. The sandy wall was sculpted to look just like a stone wall, just like, I thought, a wall in an underground hallway of a pyramid.

I told my family, "Well, I could do something like this. Come down and see."

We were now in a place that looked like a cinder-walled basement of a house. Nobody seemed to be impressed. I myself wasn't exactly sure what this place was, but I tried to explain to my family (which was now more like a group of Mexican women and girls) that this was a replica of an Egyptian tomb. But I explained that even though it was a replica, there were actual authentic artifacts.

I tried to point out one (or two) of the authentic artifacts in a roundabout way. Between the back of a couch and a wall, two (?) white statues, about ten feet long, lay on their sides, on on top of the other. The statues were of a Pharaoh and his bride. The Pharaoh lay on top. A cloth blanket may have been covering their legs.

But I couldn't quite get anybody focused enough to pay attention to this view. Everybody ran around the space, which was now like a warm-colored version of the scholar's garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There weren't any big sculptures anywhere, possibly just framed paintings on the walls. But I still thought of this space as an exhibition of Egyptian artifacts.

I managed to get a small group of folks together to go into a small side room, which I thought would lead to the Egyptian tomb hallway. But the wall where I thought the entrance to the hallway would be was blocked off by a curtain of blue and white patterned material.

We headed back to the main room. Somewhere I saw the ten-foot-long sculptures again. I wasn't sure anymore that they were genuine.

Now it was like we were being too rowdy and we had to leave.

We were up in some gutted-out structure that resembled a Greek ruin mixed with something like a garage. The ground was very greasy. The ruin looked out over an open, maybe desert-like, area.

There was some blocked-off space like for a large sculpture at a corner of the ruin. We walked up to it. There was some big, rusty machine that looked like a construction or heavy-duty cooking machine, but which we called a fire truck.

A group of rough-looking, white men gathered around the machine. Some of the men may have been using flame throwers. Others were breathing fire. The whole thing smelled awful, like my stomach feels when I get indigestion. The explanation of it all was that these men were putting out a fire. But the fire wasn't exactly here.

We stood around for a while, wondering if the fire truck would ever be through, so it could give us a ride home. Eventually we figured that the firemen simply didn't want to give us a ride home.

We walked to an old, rusty, gutted-out vehicle like a bus at the other end of the ruin. The driver inside waved an instrument like a megaphone at us, gesturing that he didn't want us on his bus. Eventually the megaphone began spouting fire.

The other people in my group were now gone. It was night. I stood with the bus driver and a man who worked with him. This other man and I walked away from the small-building city street. The man was big, fattish, with glasses and shoulder-length hair. He wore jean shorts, a white t-shirt, and a jean vest. He was talking to me about comic books. At first I was interested. But then I started to feel uneasy, like maybe I shouldn't be hanging out with such a weird person.

(3/3/09) bigger on the inside; the big apple; surprising porn fees

(Entered in paper journal at 8:18 AM at Starbucks on Christopher Street in Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a house with my mother and possibly also my sister. The house was my dad's house. It was daytime. No lights were on in the house, but plenty of daylight flowed through the windows. I was going to stay with my dad. He apparently had a smaller house behind his house. I was going to stay there.

The main house was pretty big, with a wide layout for the front rooms, like the living rooms, etc., of the house. I couldn't see much. There was a lot of clutter in my field of view, as if I were staring down at a pile of laundry.

At some point I looked out a back door, a sliding glass door, to a small structure across the backyard. The structure was about the size of a shed, but it had grey siding and even windows (with white trim?), so that it looked stable, like a house. I could tell (as if, in my mind's eye, I saw inside the house) that the house was very spacious inside. Nevertheless, I didn't necessarily want to live there. I felt like if it were such a nice place, perhaps my brother could live there.

Dream #2

I was standing in front of a huge apple. I stood with a woman, possibly my mother. we were in a living room. The room was dim, as if the only light were natural light from an uncurtained window in an adjacent room, like a kitchen, while the windows in this room were curtained. The apple took up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. There may have been a bite taken out of the bottom part of the apple.

The woman may have been telling me about how there were a few different items of food that had been enlarged like this apple.

Dream #3

I was looking at a television screen which was showing a bill, probably for a hotel stay that I was just finishing up. I may also have been talking with either one or two women, who, wherever I was, were also looking over my left shoulder at the screen. (I may have been sitting on a hotel floor, leaning against the foot of the bed, while the women stood to my left and just a bit behind me.)

I had been expecting to pay a certain amount for my bill, maybe seventy dollars. I was surprised to see that the bill was either one hundred dollars or else one hundred dollars more than what I'd expected it to be. I looked through the bill on the screen by scrolling through a grid with white lettering and gridding and black background.

I realized before I'd seen the whole bill that I'd watched some pornographic stuff on the internet, which was linked to the television. I hoped that the bill wouldn't actually show the type of material I'd been watching. It didn't. Instead, it gave number codes for different kinds of internet usage, from low-cost (which was coded with a "1") to high-cost (coded "5").

In the grid square that showed my internet charges, I had an "E5." I laughed and told the women, "Oh, yeah. I forgot I'd watched the internet last night. I must have left it on."

I was disappointed in myself. I had spent a lot more money than I should have, on something that I'd had absolutely no use for.

(3/22/09) the imminent alligators; off the payroll; the grand tour

(Entered in paper journal at 8:45 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I stood out in front of my great grandmother's front yard, which was all muddy. The mud curled up in huge waves toward the sidewalk and sloped down from the house to the feet of the waves. In this little hollow there might even have been water.

Out of the mud or water sprung two alligators. They were orange-red with black stripes and, possibly, white bellies. They looked a little distorted, like they were plastic and their faces were narrower than usual, possibly even bulbed somehow. The alligators climbed up onto a little bed of mud to the left of the yard. I knew this was a dangerous situation, and that I should either fight the alligators or call somebody to come take care of them.

Now two more alligators crawled out of the mud. These were much more like regular alligators: large, wide-bodied, blunt-nosed, but still orange-red with black stripes. These alligators looked so dangerous that I thought that if they even saw me they would kill me.

I went into the house to call the police. I sat somewhere near my great grandmother. She told me she'd suspected something dangerous was going to happen when the alligators had come into the house -- which had apparently happened a while ago. I was shocked to hear that the alligators had first been inside the house.

My great grandma told me she had gotten even more suspicious when she would find scratches on her bedroom door and broken patches on her walls. (I could see these things in my mind's eye.) I was even more shocked to hear that so much had gone on in my great grandma's house without my great grandma having called the police.

Dream #2

I was in a cafe that was also something like a cabin in the woods. The place was full of gentle, grey daylight. The door was near the bar (which was on the "back" wall, from my view) and on the right wall. But it was somewhat obscured by a little divider. There was a tall, white man behind the bar. He owned the cafe. I was talking with him as if I were working at the cafe.

Now either my old boss BS or one of my department heads, MR, burst into the cafe. The person said, "Now I've got you! You've been working here, haven't you?"

I thought that that was correct, that I'd been working here one or two days a week. BS/MR said, "You've been getting paid while you were still on our payroll But now I've caught you, and I'm taking you off the payroll!" (In waking life, I'd been laid off from my job; but, though I was no longer to come into the office, I was still kept on the payroll for a little while longer, as a part of my severance package. But the terms of my staying on the payroll were that if I took another job, I'd be taken off the severance package payroll.)

I tried to think of some way out of this situation, or some way to justify what I had done. But I couldn't. I thought, It sucks that I should get in trouble for working only one or two days a week. But those are the rules.

Dream #3

It was a sunny, warm, cloudless day. My brother-in-law was driving himself, my sister, and me to their new house. We rode in an old, wide-bodied car with a pale interior. My sister and I sat in the backseat. My sister and I sat facing each other and were relatively close to each other, as if we were hugging each other, or close enough to be hugging each other. I sat on the driver's side, and my sister sat on the passenger's side.

My brother-in-law and sister took turns speaking to me about how good their new place was. When my sister would talk, she'd say things as if she were also gesturing with her hands to illustrate. But her gestures were actually just reaching into my pants and grabbing me. The first time she did it, she pinched my penis a little, as if I barely had a penis, so that she had to pinch only a little.

I was too shocked by my sister's actions to do anything about it. I hoped she hadn't meant to do it. But then she did it again, this time fingering the underside of my testicles.I had a view of something like a frame of wire-hangers before my mind's eye.

I told my sister (trying not to say exactly what she was doing, so as not to let my brother-in-law know what was going on), "Uh... I think your gestures might need to be away from that place." My sister backed off quickly, as if it were quickly understood that I wasn't interested.

We now pulled up to the new place, which was something more like a multi-story townhouse than a regular single-family house. The front of the house, including the framing and trim, was all a pale coffee color, bordered on top, in my view, with a band of blue sky.

I was slightly disappointed in the place. I had been told that the place was a house, and that it was huge. But this looked like it would be more like a small apartment.

My brother-in-law asked, "Does it seem okay?"

I could tell that my brother-in-law and sister really wanted to impress me. I said, "Yeah, It's great."

My sister took me inside. The place, my sister and brother-in-law had told me, was two stories. But I only saw one story. The place was wide, with a few "main rooms" that were open to one another, providing a wide-open feel. The place was dim. The walls were thin, cheap plaster. The floors were all linoleum, like kitchen floors, and they were dirty.

My sister led me to the left. She showed me two decent-sized rooms that may have seemed run down and too dirty to live in. She showed me another room, which she expressly said was to be a bedroom. It was as small as a closet, and its floors were caked with a rusty, grainy grime. I thought of the grainy grime as rat droppings. I thought that that would really have to be cleaned before anybody could use this place as a bedroom.

My sister led me into a large room which was the master bedroom. She pointed just over and behind us, to a bathroom. It was long, with the toilet at one end and the shower far at the other end. I said, "This is a huge bathroom! Everybody will be happy with this!"

But then I realized the bathroom was attached to the master bedroom. This meant that the bathroom could only be used by the person who stayed in the master bedroom. This would probably be my mom. (The first two rooms I'd seen, or at least one of those rooms, may have been for my sister's children.) I was disappointed that only one person could use such a big bathroom.

My sister then took me into a room which would be the kitchen. It was lit by a wide window. We walked back into one of the "main area" rooms. We walked toward the right side of the room.

The "main area" room gave way to a slightly narrower room that also looked large enough to be a common room. Along the left wall were two bedrooms. Against the back wall was a small bed with a small window over it, high up on the wall. The bed had a small quilt on it.

My sister explained that during the day the room would be used as something like a living room, but that at night my mom would sleep here, to be near my sister's children's rooms. I thought, But weren't the children's rooms on the other side of the house?

(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.

(11/11/09) dinner crashers

(Entered in paper journal at 7:58 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I walked through a place like the road in Prospect Park heading up from Center Drive to Prospect Park West. I may have been walking with someone like my old friend V, or talking with him in my head.

I told V how I had been invited to dinner by my old friend R, and how R had made the dinner sound a lot like it would just be he and I, as if in apology for the way he'd acted toward me. Then, as the days passed, I found out that R's wife L's older sister had cancer.

I may now have been walking through a city area, like an old business area in a small city, still speaking with V. I told V how I found out that L's sister had been cured or that she was going to be cured. But she now needed money. So, I learned, R was having a dinner thrown for L's sister at R's house, a kind of split between a congratulations party and a fundraiser. The fundraiser dinner was going to be on the night R had invited me to dinner.

As I thought about this I may have seen, in my mind's eye, L's sister dressed in a purple shirt with a line-drawing in white of a diaper, and some slogan, written in white cursive, about being an adult baby mommy. (In waking life, I had seen a woman wearing this on an internet photo.)

V and I now sat in some big cafe that was full of people. We sat next to a window through which poured a lot of bright sunlight. I tried to explain that R had planned to spring this whole thing on me as a surprise, and he would have, had I not found out about the whole thing on my own.

I knew the conflict R would try to create. He'd try to make it so I was mad as soon as I saw so many people. Then, when I was out of earshot, and with nobody having explained anything to me, he'd make some speech to everybody to make himself look like a really conciliatory person, but also making me look bad, selfish, like I knew what this thing was all about, but that I'd just decided to be nasty about all the people here anyway.

I told V, "Now that I know what's going on, I'll be cheerful, happy to see everybody. But it really upsets me that R would try to play this game on me in the first place. He always tries these underhanded things for starting conflict."

V said he had to go to the bathroom. He got up and walked away. I looked out the window, possibly to a scene like a wide parking lot or road and a small building like a fast food restaurant or auto repair shop in the distance, under the white-yellow haze of sunlight.

Suddenly a man and woman sat down beside me in my and V's booth. The woman was maybe around my age, worn-out looking, but attractive. The man was perhaps in his forties, smallish but muscly, with dark-copper skin that almost looked like he wore makeup, tightly curled, short hair that was light red-brown, and a square, muscly, sour-looking face. He wore a white polo shirt that looked square and ill-fitting on him. The woman sat next to me. The man sat across from the woman.

The man and woman both had menus in front of them, and they'd probably brought stuff to the booth with them, like backpacks or duffel bags. The man had said, to annoy me, "Let's sit here. Man, I'm hungry. Aren't you, honey? Let's sit right here and eat our breakfast."

I looked around the cafe, which was very busy and full, trying to see if there wasn't some empty place for this couple to sit. I couldn't see anything.

I told the man, "We're sitting here. You have to find your own space."

The man said, "No we don't. I can do this if I want. It's allowed."

(12/27/09) home in the woods; follow that mom!

(Entered in paper journal at 8:24 AM at Sit & Wonder cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was with someone, maybe my brother, in the woods. We were near our/my car, which was stopped on a dirt road. The weather was cold. It was nearing night.

Now the night had passed. I had spent the whole night here, in a tent. The other person had "gone back." I stood near the car and looked at the woods around me. I was proud for having camped here all night.

Now I had to go hiking through the woods. But the light was still dark blue-grey, pre-sunrise light. I felt afraid to go into the deep woods in the darkness, or even in the light. I worried that a wild animal would attack and eat me. The area around me was grassy with the occasional shrub or pine tree dotting the landscape, and edged by a deep forest of pine trees.

Suddenly I noticed a coyote hiding behind a shrub and looking at me. I got afraid and made some aggressive kicking move at the coyote, scaring the coyote out of the shrub, which was maybe fifty feet away from me. The coyote trotted away, looking at me shyly. I felt bad, thinking I'd scared away a perfectly innocent coyote. I may have seen a domesticated dog off to the left as the coyote wandered off to the right. I may also have seen another, unrecognizable animal.

I was now back "at home," which was a house like a double-wide trailer at the head of the trail I'd taken into the woods. I stood with a group of people in my family, including my Aunt B and Uncle M. I stood at eye level with a tangled bunch of different, tall-stalked wildflowers. The morning was bright, sunny, and kind of warm, and the flowers and stalks glittered with dew.

Somewhere in a little clearing amid these flowers, I knew, a tent stood up on an oval of lawn. My little cousins (even though in waking life they are no longer little) had camped there the night before. Either my Uncle M or Aunt B was telling me that the kids had camped out here for a little while, but that they had gotten scared or cold and that Uncle M had to bring them in.

Dream #2

I was riding in the backseat (?) and passenger side of my grandma P's car.  My grandma P drove, and either my brother or sister was also in the car. It was a golden, sunny day. We were driving up a steep hill in a residential neighborhood, but we were also near either a busy road or a highway.

Suddenly my mom pulled up from behind us to our right. She yelled out her window at us that she had to go to XXXXX (either a hospital or a jail or both), possibly to see my brother, and that she couldn't stop, she had to keep driving there. So, she said, she would meet us back at home, but she didn't know when, maybe not even today. She said it in such a nonchalant and yet urgent manner that I at first thought all was completely fine.

But suddenly I realized I was headed for the airport, to go back home to New York, pretty soon. I had to get back home. But my mom had all my luggage, including my airplane ticket, in her car. We were going to meet at her house so she could give me all that stuff. But now she wanted to have all of us sit there and wait while she went off and did whatever! I knew the only reason she was doing this was to make me miss my flight.

I told my grandma, "Follow my mom's car! We're going wherever she's going. I'm getting my ticket and getting out of here!"

My mom was already out of sight, but I think we had an idea of where we were going. We drove toward some facility, hoping we were going to the right place. But I wasn't sure we were.