(1/21/06) we have so little time together; still a dream; pigeons; suddenly everything felt very real

(Entered in paper journal at 3:37 PM at home in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

It was night. I came out of an elementary school with my friend BC. We walked away from the school on an asphalt path that was a huge circle around a grass field -- but more like a footpath than a road. There was a fence on our left, on the other side of which was a sharp slope.

We walked past a group of folks dressed up like performers, to our left. One person looked like a scarecrow; another, like a skeleton. They seemed to be African-American. I hurried to get past them, hating to be scrutinized.

We got past the group -- they seem to have been practicing juggling with bowling pins. I told the story of how I'd seen before. I remembered it was with one of my park ranger supervisors, TA, from my Americorps NYC Parks project. TA had been nice to the folks, and we had actually all ended up having a good time. I now felt stupid for having just now been so threatened by the group, whom I'd taken to be bums.

By now we had flipped around

on a path that went on the other side of the fence and down the hill. I thought we should go back to the people. But then I thought, But we're already going downhill. We were also jogging.

Now my oldest nephew D, not my friend BC, was to my right. D said, "Okay, now we're racing. When I say go. And I'm going to toast you."

But then he changed his mind. There was a path leading back up the hill that forked off the path we were on about halfway down and climbed steeply. At the top was a little "cliff" of outcropping. At the bottom of the slope I could see "my" car.

D said, "I'm gonna go up that hill. Then you can start from here. When I say go, we both start running. And I'll beat you. That's how I'm going to toast you."

I didn't want D to do that hill because I didn't want to wait for him to climb it. I said, "No. Let's just race from here."

Now we were at the bottom of the hill and D sat on a boulder or outcropping of granite. We hadn't even started racing. D said, "But" (Uncle) "Preemie."

I looked at him. His face was sad. I understood him to be trying to say, Can't you loosen up? We have so little time together.

I felt sad. I put my left arm around D and said, "Oh, D, don't worry."

(Entry begins again at 8:58 AM, at Flying Saucer Cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream 2

I left a group of friends and walked into a fancy-looking hall that was also something like a coffee shop. The walls were wood, and there was a balcony or mezzanine on the left. There may have been large, opulent paintings on the right wall. On the right wall at the back was another doorway. On the back wall was an enormous chalkboard, taking up about half the wall from the top, right corner.

I "saw" it in my head first, as a memory, and then physically saw it in the present.

My "memory" of it was that it had pale, blue scribbles all over it: scribbles and scribble words. But now there were a few large, yellow words on the otherwise immaculate slate. Both the pale blue and the yellow messages meant something to me. But I was upset to see the blue scribbles gone.

For some reason I ran and jumped at the back wall. I went high. I kicked a sidekick and then spun to my left, apparently to execute another kick. But I threw myself off aim. I flew backwards. I landed and stumbled backwards.

I landed and stumbled backwards onto the left side of the room, into a big, oldish, white man. I didn't want him to be offended, so I explained myself. He just chuckled a bit.

Now I stood in the center of the room as my friend ML and some woman sat at a table to my right. They may have been talking about my talents.

I was now practicing my skills. I jumped up and kick my legs out, both at once.

But without noticing it I had actually put so much force into it that I was laying myself flat about seven feet in the air

and floating for a while.

When I finally realized what I was doing, I told myself, Well, now do make yourself float for a long time. But instead I managed to do a really slow back flip, once again not immediately realizing it. When I noticed, I thought, So this is how people do it. It's easy, if you believe.

But as I was about to land, i.e. execute my first "perfect" back flip, I stopped moving normally and floated slowly downward. I didn't land before I looked at my hands. As I stared at my palms I "woke up."

I now sat or stood by ML and the girl. I thought something like, I need to tell them my dream. But ML started talking to me like a scientist. He asked me about my progress and training and experiences.

I thought, No, no, this is still a dream. I "pulled" myself out of the dream, like through a warping tunnel of vision, and "woke up." But when I "woke up," two policemen that weren't quite human told me to tell them everything I saw in my dream. (They were standing right by bed.)

I thought, No, no, you're dreaming again, and I pulled myself through the tunnel of vision again. Then I saw an image of a scarab, except coppery brown, like a roach, like a painting, haloed in green before a black background.

I told myself, You're dreaming again! I struggled and wrestled mentally to wake up.

Dream 3

I was in a car with my mom. We were in a desert of red, sandstone-chip hills. We had driven off a paved road, which seems to have gone along a very green, black-soil mountainside. I looked at how vast and expansive the dirt road trail was before us.

My mom made reference to a pile of money or a big billfold with money that was either in the backseat or in between us in the front seat. The billfold was black, shiny fake leather. My mom said something like, "That's all I have to give you. And that won't leave me with a lot of money for our trip."

I knew my mom meant we couldn't take the "Chinle" (?) road (it may have been a word-hybrid of "Chinle" and "Lummis") back to town. Even though it was a "shortcut," it was long, on rough, almost nonexistent, "dirt" roads, and the cost of the repairs for the toll the trip would take on my mom's car would be more than the money we'd save on gas and the time we'd save by taking this road instead of the paved road.

I said, "That's okay. I actually think you're right." I was relieved my mom had spoken her mind and that we had decided to take the paved road instead. I looked out at the sandstone desert and thought, I'll get back here someday anyway.

But my mom kept driving on the "shortcut." I wanted to ask her when we were going to turn around and get back to the paved road.

But then -- first I (seem to have seen) another billfold in the road. Then I saw a bird in the sky. From way high it looked like a hawk or even a golden eagle. But when it landed I saw it was a large raven, maybe two feet tall, muscular and round. I was certain this meant death.

I asked my mom when she was going to turn around. She gave me some vague answer about driving in general. But we drove between two small hills that opened on the other side to a downward, curving slope, very lonely and desolate.

A gang of huge burds, no more than ten, stalked along the road. They were huge, maybe four feet tall, though possibly not at first. Possibly at first the birds were like regular vultures. (But possibly at first this desolate, steep slope was also flat, open land.)

But as I noted the birds and looked closer, they definitely were huge, almost featherless, with scales on their necks and heads. Their beaks were long and gross, like fingernails that haven't been clipped, with dirty, black tips. Their eyes were wide and round.

I told my  mom, "We need to turn around and get out of here. These birds mean nothing but death. They kill and eat, but they kill because they like being mean. We need to pull out before they get any ideas."

My mom said she'd drive forward to get through them. I said, "No. If you drive forward they'll pop our tires. Then we'll never get anywhere. We need to drive backwards."

We drove backwards for a moment or two. We were in the wide, open plain again. But a couple of the "vultures," one of which was now as tall as an ostrich, and another one (this one away with the others) as stout as (though longer, much longer, than) a gila monster, crinkle-clawed up to our windows.

We were now rolling forward again. I wondered why. We were heading down the hill. The "vultures" were walking along, following us slowly. But I saw a suburban neighborhood butting up against the bottom of the slope.

I couldn't figure it out. We were on a road that was supposed to take us into the heart of the desert -- it was supposed to be so long that my mom couldn't afford to take the trip! But we had gone less than a mile before driving up behind a suburban neighborhood which may well have been home.

But I didn't judge the situation too harshly. I was glad to get away from the "vultures." The only problem was that there were no roads into the neighborhood: just small, narrow, cobble footpaths leading from the backyards to the "road" in the desert.

As we approached the neighborhood I thought, We'll just have to drive on past and keep being pursued by the "vultures." There's no way into the neighborhood. But my mom just drove onto one of the cobble paths, then through a backyard and into a front yard, and onto a clean, black asphalt road.

Slowly I felt awful about having "escaped" the desert. Then I felt really awful. I thought of the birds' heads, especially that of the "gila monster bird."

I saw a couple of small birds on a front lawn that sloped up from the road. The birds were like the desert birds. I told my mom, "The birds in the desert, they weren't vultures. They were -- I can't remember their name. I just saw two!"

I was now in the driver's seat, though I think my mom, in the passenger seat, was still driving.

I said, "Like those!" There were two more birds walking along the edge of  a lawn that was raised from the sidewalk by a concrete wall. The first birds had walked in the same direction that our car drove. These birds were now walking against it.

I almost had the name of the birds. I said, "Something with a 'P.'" The birds fanned out their tails. I said, "Oh, no. Not those. Those are peacocks. They symbolize pride. These were not prideful birds. Dad had a ceramic sculpture of one! It had a blue head! It starts with a 'P!'"

I noticed as the car passed that these "peacoks" weren't blue but brown. They shimmered like dachshunds, not like birds.

I now saw the disgusting "vultures" limping along the desert slope in the distance between the two houses, trying to find a way into the suburbs. They were huge, and they were altogether flesh-colored, though they were all scales.

I said, "I have it! They were --"

A couple little girls (there were three little girls suddenly in the backseat. Only two spoke.) said, "Water pheasants!"

I said, "Yes. That's what I was about to say." I felt stupid that the little girls beat me to saying the name of the birds. I said, "How could I have been afraid of little, old water pheasants?" But, I thought, the birds I saw in that first front yard looked like different birds, not pheasants. Like some kind of bird I know and see every day, except not tan.

I turned to my mom and said, "They were vultures, weren't they?"

My mom nodded and said, "Yes."

I may even have been steering -- driving. But my mom was still really driving. I desperately tried to explain why I had felt so threatened. I was trying to justify myself. But now I was also trying to justify myself for also not having been able to come up with the term "water pheasant."

Dream 4

I may have been walking out of a castle in the daylight (silver blue sky) with my friend R and his cousin J. J had been telling us about a haunted castle and a Scottish town that had been destroyed by the plague and then rebuilt over. I asked J some vague questions. Then he asked me some vague questions. J and R were never seen, and they slowly disappeared behind me.

I walked down a steep series of white marble (veinless, more like opaque quartz) steps that clung to a black cliff face. Then each step or group of three or so steps was blocked by short, iron fences with spikes.

I needed to prove to R and J that I wasn't afraid to jump over these fences. So I jumped. But I noticed that each step had iron strips of spikes. I had to position my feet as I landed so my feet kept in between the strips of spikes.

As I jumped down farther and farther, the barriers got worse and worse, iron fences and spikes tangling like vines and shrubs in the woods. I actually landed on one set of steps full of green and beautifully red-pink-leafed ivy.

I don't know if I was tired or just overcome with the increasing difficulty of these steps. But I finally just hunched down, squatted, and huddled tightly, facting out toward the cliff and looking slightly back up the steps.

I told myself, I'm not afraid of this. I'm not afraid.

Now I stood in a driveway at night. The pop singer Beck stood to my left. Beck was now right in my face. He was all shaggy. The purple of the night sky created an aura around him.

Beck said, "Sometimes the songs just come to me. I don't even make an effort. Other times, nothing. And when I try to write something I feel dragged along, like an umbrella on a string."

I thought, What the hell is that supposed to mean? Like a kite? Or a puppet?

Beck now had a rough, thin piece of twine in his right hand, which led to an umbrella stuck under a garbage truck. I understood the image now.

Beck said, "I told my analyst about it, and she just told me XXXXX." (Something really vague and platitudinous, harmfully cheap.)

Now Beck was my friend ML. He said, "I told her, 'Your help is worthless, and I'm not going to let you rip me off like that.' She paid me back $60 of the $100 I paid. But I wanted all of it and more. I got all my $100 back, plus sixty. And you know why? All because of this! And it's our little secret."

He walked away. He wore grey boxer briefs and a grey, tight tank top. He walked up onto the back of the garbage truck, onto a weird platform by the "ladder up." He shouted out something triumphant from the ladder and got onto the platform. The garbage truck was more like an oil tanker with a weird area, lit like a copy machine's glass plate, on the right side.

ML got into the area and stuck his upper body over something like a plastic shelf, where the light was coming from. He pressed some button. At first the shelf lifted him up, with the rest of this strange side area. I had an idea what the thing was going to do. It was going to crush him, like trash gets crushed in the back of a garbage truck.

I stood there and said, "ML, what are you doing? What are you doing?" But I had a good idea of what he was doing.

I tried to convince myself I didn't believe ML was going to crush himself. But, really, I was pretty sure he was going to crush himself. And I wanted to watch. I think I had an inkling that this was a dream, and I wanted to "predict" something bad. I felt bad just watching ML kill himself. But I was really interested.

Now the shelf was smashing ML into the upper part. ML looked at me for a moment, and then the pain became so strong that he put his hands to his head like he was trying to block out a loud sound.

Suddenly everything felt very real. I said, "ML, what are you doing! ML, get out of there! ML, what's going on?!"

I was terrified. Now ML's head was smashed. As it popped open, it looked like the head of a dead baby bird. Blood and flesh popped out of his nose and mouth like spaghetti sauce and stringy chicken flesh.

I screamed, "ML! ML! ML!" In the last scream I extended ML's name and sounded like a coyote howling at the moon.

(7/3/07) a driving emergency

(Entered in paper journal at 5:56 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

Am image of my own face, up close, in slight shade. My face very scraggly, some crust of dead skin barely hanging off my chin.

I heard a TV (?) news announcement, a woman speaking, saying that different cities had been making emergency plans. It might have been announced that Washington DC had driving routes out of buildings and possibly out of town.

The emergency became a man who had driven into "a wife and son." A certain policeman was investigating this. But now the policeman was the man who had hit "his wife and son." The son, in my mind's eye, looked like a girl -- long, blonde hair. The son may also have been wearing a dress. He had huge, blue eyes.

I saw the car. It was tipped over in front of a house. The house looked like it was on a stage, but also like just behind it and on its right were the rushing remnants of an elevated train or highway. I thought, and hoped, a little, that I would see the crash in replay. I thought I would get some meaning, some answer, if I could see the death.

I felt like the man was around here. I thought he might have killed himself in the crash. I also thought he might have been getting ready to kill himself, possibly by slicing his throat while he was in the house. I hoped that if that were the case I might at least be able to see it, if not the car crash.

(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.

(9/22/07) phantom and suicide; lesbians exiled in space; annoyed into improvement

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

Dream #1

I sat in a car like a limo with an Indian man. I sat in a seat the back of which was to the back of the front seat. I faced the Indian man as he sat in the normal back seat. We both sat on the passenger's side. I was exploring something business related to the man. I spoke in a mildly (not overtly) condescending way which I found annoying but which I couldn't control. At some point I finally managed to break off my annoying speech.

Outside, over a deserty sprawl of short building roofs along a wide road sped three smallish, sleek jets painted white with blue and red stripes. I called out to the Indian man to look. The man missed them, having barely looked for them. But now three more sped by. This time the man saw them. But he didn't seem impressed. He said something like, "Yeah, I've seen that before. Interesting."

But I was still excited. I said, "They have an Air Force base down there!" I pointed back over my left (?) shoulder. I might have called the base Kirtland.

The man might have said something like, "Yeah, I know. They fly the XXXXX there." I imagined the top half of a silvery craft. I tried to determine what it was. I settled on an F-4 Phantom.

I might now have been driving the car. I was on a high stretch of highway that curved around to the right, probably as it went over the ocean.  could see the ocean sky, but none of the ocean.

I was a man who was going to kill himself. I had been through some ordeal which I may have visualized as I drove. Everybody thought I had put myself through the ordeal expressly so I could kill myself at some point during it. But I hadn't killed myself. Now everybody, even I, thought I wasn't going to kill myself.

But I now sped off the road, which simply ran straight forward and out into the ocean. The car hit and sank into the water, but my view stayed just above the water. The white title "FINE" might have come up before my view of the water.

Dream #2

There was a preview for some black and white movie on TV. The view was just of one set. The set was like a miniature model of a mountain range. I'd suppose it was supposed to be the landscape of a foreign planet. People in Lost in Space style outfits hid behind the mini-mountains and would pop out as the narrator mentioned them or parts of the story related to them. Most of them also held "laser-guns," the barrels of which ended with two wholes which faced away from one another.

The holes had lights coming out of them as if a shiny, reflective, metal disc were in each hole. Even though the preview was black and white, I knew one light was green and one was red.

The narrator said the movie was about a young boy who was killing everybody on this island (?). The people had to find out who the boy was before he killed everybody. Even though they all knew him, and likely knew he was killing everybody, they didn't know who he was. The narrator said, "But imagine their surprise as they slowly discover that everyone in the group... is an exile!"

Even though I had been watching this preview on TV, I now felt the boy pointing his gun at me. One color was good, and one color was bad. I felt the light of a color on me, but I couldn't tell which color it was. I hoped it wasn't the bad color.

I was now outside a house with a group of people. The land before the house (and possibly as far as the eye could see) was barren, turned soil, probably a deepish red. The sky was misty white. We were all something like shipwreck survivors washed up on this island.

We were doing well, obviously well enough to have built regular houses. We were now working on a wall-sized grid of shelves, like bookshelves. Something facing the shelves allowed me to climb up and watch people as they sat on shelves, somehow working on those shelves.

At or near the top of the shelves were two women. One was a black-haired woman with tan skin. She wore a black leotard and grey sweatpants. She was known for being in excellent shape, but I thought she was a little heavy. I looked closer at her body and though, Well, maybe she's just muscly. The woman sat with her legs together and straight out in front of her. She had her head down to her knees.

The other woman, middle-aged, fattish, blonde, stood over the brunette, behind her, massaging the woman's back. I thought at first that the women were lovers. But the brunette kept talking about some man she wanted to be with. The blonde woman would say slightly encouraging things to the brunette but not mean any of it. I could tell that the blonde woman was in love with the brunette and was trying to keep the brunette from ever finding love -- unless the brunette found love with the blonde woman.

I descended before the shelves. I saw how some of the shelves were of fake wood, while others were of glass, like coffee table glass. I stood behind the shelves, before the house, looking through the shelves and out at the land. There were other people working nearby. Somewhere out in the distance was the grey sea.

I thought more "exiles" were coming. I thought, It seems pretty obvious we're all exiles. That's how each new person is introduced to the group. He can't help it. Why did the narrator say it would come as such a shock? It may have occurred to me then that the shock would be, not to us, but to a group of city dwellers who lived, we would soon find, on another part of this island.

Dream #3

My old friend R and I had gotten in a fight. He placed himself in a situation where I woudn't be able to find him. I didn't care. I was leaving.I walked out of some building. I was then walking out of a forest and onto a highway on a flat, wide, open field. The lanes into and out of the forest were divided by a grassy median.

I was eagerly heading out of the forest when, somehow, R, on the lanes heading into the forest, caught my attention. R sat on a big, wide motorcycle parked on the left side of the road.

I was annoyed that just as I was getting away, R ad come back. I knew I couldn't leave R out here alone, and obviously his motorcycle was broken. He needed help. I crossed to the other lanes on some connecting path paved with asphalt.

I was now down in an underground passageway like a subway. Some passages were regular sized. Other passages were so narrow I had to crawl through them. Eventually I got to a stairway which appeared to go up above ground.

All this time I heard R and me having a conversation. I asked R why his fiancee L had to pick on me all the time. R said, "Well, didn't it inspire you to do better things?"