(11/15/07) five year plan; fire escape; shell game

(Entered in paper journal at 5:15 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I sat in an audience. My view was partly like I was there and partly like I was looking at a photograph. The audience was to see something like the presentation of the new five-year plan for China. This presentation was in China. The auditorium was modern, softly lit, and had white, scalloped "panel" ornamentation on the ceiling. I noticed a lot of blonde, white people in the crowd. I thought, They like the Chinese culture, so they move over here. Then they get involved with the policy, like they're part of Chinese society.

 A group of Chinese officials, maybe three men, sat down at a table on stage to begin. A woman in front of me began singing. At first I thought the sound came from somewhere else. Then I saw the woman singing. She looked white, with long, red-brown hair with streaks of grey in it, like my mom's hair. She had a strange look, like she was tall and skinny, but also fat. I could never see her face.

At first I thought the woman was singing a Chinese song to begin the ceremony. But the song soon became raucous, like an American country song. I thought the woman was disrupting the presentation as a protest and that she would be arrested. But now everybody was standing up, as if standing to revere the song.

The auditorium was all dark except the stage, which was lit very harshly. The woman moved to my left. As she did, a black businessman, in my row, came up to me from my right. He wanted me to move, but he wasn't asking to be excused, or saying anything at all, really. I moved forward, but he edged me out of my seat. I thought that was fine. Maybe he just really needed to get away from the woman's singing. (I didn't consider that he had moved left, in the same direction as the woman.)

There was an empty seat just to my right. With telekinesis, I moved my bags over to this seat and the bags in this seat over to where I had previously been sitting (as if the businessman had now disappeared). I thought, Now the Chinese officials are going to think I'm Falun Dafa because I've used telekinesis. They'll persecute me.

We were all sitting. The auditorium was greyish, with wood seats and lit with bland light or daylight through dirty windows. A tallish, slightly overweight, bald, Chinese man with blue jeans and a too-big striped shirt spoke. At first he stood in the front row. Then he stood a few rows back from me.

The man said, "We are purposely losing the bank money. We want the bank to feel a loss of five billion dollars now so they will be prepared for the loss of ten billion dollars in the future. We are purposely doing bad jobs to make this happen."

Dream #2

There was a fire announcement at my office. I didn't quite understand it at first. When I finally reacted to it, two people (my co-worker SV and another person) were already running down the fire escape stairwell. They yelled up to me, "Can't you smell the fumes? It's dangerous!"

I yelled for them to come back, that we all needed to leave together. But they continued running away. I did smell fumes, as if the danger were some gas being released in the air from some structural breaking or disintegration in the building, not from fire.

I ran around on my floor, trying to get some people together so we could get out of the building. The floor looked a little bit nicer than usual and was lit very nicely. The people I saw weren't paying any attention to me. But eventually everybody was in offices, with their curtains pulled. I ran around, not panicked, but trying to get people organized, yelling for them to come out of their offices.

I was in a lobby that for some reason looked like a department store.

Dream #3

I stood in an old, dark-wood-walled room with an old, fattish, tired-looking man. The room was small and emptyish, but it felt dirty and dusty. It felt like a high-up floor in an old Manhattan apartment. The carpet was probably deep green.

The man told me about a woman who led some organization, which perhaps we both worked for. At some point during the man's talk, the woman (who looked like my psychiatrist A) moved in and out of the room, carrying items like old wood boxes in and out, and also into and out from a hole in the wall behind either a set of shelves or a grandfather clock.

The man said, "Do you smell that?" He breathed in. I did, too. There was a dusty smell. The old man continued, "Don't fool yourself. It's part of what she doesn't want to tell you about. They have a whole system down there, and they do bad things. Have you ever wondered what she does on her trips to XXXXX?" (Some tropical place.)

At this point the woman (A?) was working behind a curtain dividing this room from another room, to our right.

The man said, "They take boxes there. And, going in, the boxes look very innocent. But do you know what they do with those boxes?"

A interrupted. We now stood near her, possibly as if she had pulled open the curtain between the two rooms. A said, "Do you know that these boxes are just the right size to fit old Turks who don't know how to keep their mouths shut? Maybe books can fall out of one box and a Turk can fall into it -- and then fall underground! -- if he doesn't shutup."

The old man was shocked into silence. I watched A stack old magazines into the dark wood box on the table before us. The box was large enough to fit a person. I was fascinated by all the old, beautiful magazines.

We now stood at something like a bar in a big, empty, dark wood room which was dim and quiet. It was me, A, and my co-worker MD. We were looking at seashells, which may have been in an open drawer before me. I pulled out one seashell that had a narrow, spiral shape. It had stripes of maroon accented with stripes of bright pink.

MD and A commented on a shell that had the shape of a river cobble. The shell was white and smooth. It had red material like glitter all over it, punctuated by little diamonds. (So... white and smooth, eh? How so?) MD and A wanted me to take the shell. But I thought touching the shell would do something bad to me.

MD said, "It's not dirty. It's clean and smooth. Touch it." So I did.

I was at the end of a long hallway, heading back to the room where MD and A were. I held two small shells. The shells were all white, but on the inside of the shells were things written in blue and green magic marker. The shells were thin. I kept trying to hold the shells in the right like so the magic marker wouldn't show through. But I couldn't.

I could hear MD and A talking about where they had found the big shell. Now I was back with them. I had an interesting though about one of the shells, but I didn't say anything: I didn't want A and MD to think I was obsessed with the shells.

I now saw a shell, also like a big river cobble, which had been drawn over with a picture of flowers blooming below a blue sky. The drawing was a gift from the people at the New York City taxi-cab art project called Gardens-in-Transit. When I touched the drawing I got paint (?) from the picture all over my fingers.

(1/3/08) telekinetic lights

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

Dream #1

I was in the basement apartment of a house. It must have been late afternoon. I was writing, kneeling over a bed or couch that was lit by the grey light of a window above me. The bed/couch was cluttered with all kinds of things.

I sat my pen down. I motioned at the pen, but didn't touch it. The pen flew against the back of the (couch?). I was amazed that I could do something like that. It seemed like telekinesis.

I lifted up my hand. The pen stood, again without my touching it. I dropped my hand. The pen fell. I lifted up my hand and thought for the pen to come to me. It flew into my hand.

A woman like my psychiatrist A, with big, dark glasses, was looking in through the window. I thought she was spying on me and would report me if she knew I was practicing telekinesis. When I caught A's face in the window, A hurried away, toward a fence, keeping her back to me, and trying not to look suspicious.

Hoping to cover my trail, I now tried to act like I hadn't been performing any telekinesis.

Suddenly I noticed how dark this room was. There was a specific light in the room I thought should be turned on. I walked around, but I couldn't find it. Other lights in the room turned on. But they weren't the one I was looking for. They all lit the room in portions or only in shifts or blinkingly. I was looking for a solid light. It must have been completely dark outside by now. A lot of lights had beautiful, Rococo-style ornamentation around them.

I heard a conversation in my head between me and A, who was now something like my landlady. The conversation may have been about the lights. But I felt the conversation was mostly fabricated by me, to make A forget that she'd seen me perform telekinesis.

(8/24/08) dream telekinesis; hiding new friendships

(Entered at 8:38 AM at Starbucks on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I lay in a folding couch-bed with my mom. We lay under a bright pink and white quilt with shapes like paisley patterns on it.

We were talking kindly for a little while. But then my mom got out of the bed. She stood over me as I hung over the left edge of the bed, looking down at the floor. She was saying something mean to me to make me get up. It hurt. But then she wasn't there.

I was looking out (still hanging over the edge of the bed) at the wooden frame of something, like the turned over legs of a desk or nightstand. Behind it was a pink, motorized truck toy, about eighteen inches tall. I may have thought of it as a Barbie SUV. The back end of it was open, and I saw a couple AA batteries.

I stretched out my arm. The truck was maybe six or seven feet away from me, way out of my reach. I tried, through telekinesis, to pull one of the batteries toward me. Nothing was happening. I was getting pretty frustrated. For a second I seemed to lose hope. But I still held out my hand.

I closed my eyes for a second, like I was blacking out. I opened my eyes, and, surprisingly, the battery flew straight into my hand. I thought something like, Oh, well, it's a fluke, anyway.

Dream #2

I was standing with my old friend R at an intersection, on something like a grass island between lanes. It was dark grey-blue outside, like it was raining. We were waiting for the light to change so we could cross.

I looked to our left. I saw MN (one of the people who volunteered a lot at one of the New York Cares events I ran during this time period in waking life) walking up the street toward us. I hoped the light would change before MN got to us. I didn't want R to see that I was friends with MN and ruin the relationship I had with him.

The light changed, apparently, and R and I crossed -- though I feel like the sign may still have been an orange hand. R and I walked up a steep staircase that was covered over by a tangle of dark tree canopy.

(11/24/08) shouting down the walls

Dream #1

I was in a bathroom in a basement. The lighting in the bathroom was dim. The wall tiles were clean and egg-brown colored. Somebody was beside me. I was practicing something like shouting in a mirror. I may have been a beautiful, blonde, naked woman.

I may have seen a wall break nearby. I wasn't supposed to have broken the wall. I was only supposed to have done something like bend a mirror or a wall by my shouting. The shouting was really just a means of getting up my mental energy for use in moving or affecting matter. I shouted again and heard a crash in another room.

I went out of this room. The entire basement seemed like a wide, unfinished, dark area of columns and pipes and occasionally more rooms like bathrooms.

I went into another one of these rooms and found that I had completely destroyed one of the walls. I may have shouted again. I went into another room and found that I had destroyed another of the walls. I knew this wasn't what I was supposed to be doing. I was only supposed to be bending the walls. But I thought it was very gratifying to be breaking the walls. I wanted to keep on doing it.