(3/5/05) escape from the doctor's office

(Entered in paper journal at 7:15 PM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I was in a doctor's office. I wanted to see my doctor, but nobody would let me. I got mad. I filled out (or had filled out) a bunch of forms which I now handed to a line of receptionists, most of whom were young, tall, and handsome, but scraggly, men. I now found out that all these men were doctors who kept coming at me to prevent me from seeing my doctor, who didn't want to see me because I made him feel less intelligent. But I was coming to see him so he could help me help my brother.

I kept being forced right as I lost more and more forms to other doctors. One of the doctors found a stray scrap of paper on which I had written something nasty.

It was now determined that I was to see a certain doctor, young, tall, with a huge, frizzy head of hair. I handed him my papers and yelled at him that I wouldn't see anybody but my own doctor. He said okay, but I knew he had power to make me see him instead.

I ran out of the office. At first I just wanted to get as far away from it all as possible. But then it was like it suddenly didn't matter anymore.

It was dark, dry, and cool outside, like a late spring night in Flagstaff, perhaps. The building I came out of had a large lawn surrounding it that touched a road that seems now like a somewhat rural road. There were some buildings and a good amount of people, but it seemed like just a row, a longish stretch off road pulling together all the aspects of a high-class, small-town neighborhood without actually pulling itself out of a surrounding of lonely fields and forests of massive, leafy trees.

I felt incredibly happy as soon as I'd left the building a few steps behind. I took four or five steps before jumping and hovering four or five steps. I realized I was about to fly. I told myself to relax the next time I jumped, just to allow my body to float of its own accord. I flew up about thirty feet in the air.

People didn't seem to notice me. Everybody was happy, free, and easy, but unconcerned with anything except getting where they needed to go.

I knew I, too, was going somewhere. I followed this road as it all turned to tall, leafy trees. I knew this was a town I was familiar with. But I couldn't discern what town.

I hoped I wasn't dreaming. I thought, It would be such a letdown if all this flying hadn't really amounted to anything, not even an out-of-body experience.

I said, "No, you couldn't possibly be dreaming. You're going somewhere, aren't you?"

Now the forest road quickly ended in a "T" intersection, the road perpendicular to me, i.e. the top part of the "T,"

being something like a small town's main street strip lit up for the night.

I descended involuntarily only to discover that I was actually in a restaurant not unlike Casa Bonita in Denver, with mazes and corridors of seating areas ramping and plateauing and staircasing into each other.

I said, "Well, shit. I'm pretty sure this is a dream after all. I couldn't be in a restaurant like this today. That's not where I'm going, anyway."

Now a group of "my friends," they looked like the cast from The Life Aquatic, passed me and sat down at a table. There were about seven of them. They told me to sit down. But I had to get where I was going. They pointed me up a ramp (I had long ago forgotten that I was in a dream).

I was leaving, but I kept hearing some conversation from the table that made me want to go back. I kept seeing the image of work gloves with split-in-diameter cylinders of bamboo inside to cradle the fingers. When I got back, the Angelica Huston "friend" was talking about how she had been assigned to serve fifteen years in prison but how a friend had gotten her out in only fourteen.

(10/1/16) angry spying neighbors; superman & helicopter crash; wedding bridges

(Entered in paper journal at 5:45 AM at home in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I sat in a huge but incredibly messy house (possibly my mom had given it to me while she was away). I tried to eat. But someone saw into the place from a window above me, i.e. through the window from a high floor in an apartment. The person started yelling and screaming nasty things at me, making me afraid to eat.

I ran through a cavernous, cluttered house until I got to the bedroom. The bed was high-stacked with mattresses. I tried to eat again, but the person from high up saw me through another window and shouted nasty, scary things again.

I sat down, possibly somewhere else, lay down, shielded myself on the floor with a bunch of clutter so I couldn't be seen, possibly also behind a very thin strip of wall. I thought, now I can relax.

I pulled out a report of some kind (perhaps a 10-K, the financial report publicly traded companies publish yearly). I read a few pages. I was so relaxed I almost fell asleep.

I thought, If I'm going to fall asleep, I should go to the bedroom. But, taking every sheltered path I could back to the bedroom, I knew I had to make the bedroom different from the room where the people could see in through the window.

Dream 2

I was on a lawn by a bridge. I was with some other people. I knew an airplane was going to crash. I stood up and got away. Nobody would come with me. A helicopter crashed to the ground, right where I had been sitting/laying. I thought, I guess I knew after all. I thought, I guess I knew after all.

I ran back to my spot. I thought, You coward. Why did you just run away from the helicopter after it crashed? Were you afraid it would explode? It will explode. But there are people inside that you need to rescue! I ran away from my sitting spot and back to the helicopter (as if now the helicopter had crashed away from the spot I had been sitting at).

I was now Superman. I pulled open the doors to the (blue?) helicopter and pulled out a man and a woman. I super-sped them back to where I'd been sitting.

Dream 3

At first there wasn't enough money for a wedding to occur. Now a man announced amid everybody in a scrappy living room that there was.

I saw the man a while later as everybody was prepping for the wedding. The man had now become Willem Dafoe's character from The Life Aquatic. His back was against the wall and he was breathing rapidly. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.

I saw into a special room of the man's -- full of chopped-off heads cured and hanging on the wall. I thought, Is this what he does to people at weddings?

I walked downstairs with someone videotaping the house as the man stood against the wall. I saw through the camera as the cameraman panned counterclockwise. There were beautiful walls and doorways. I wanted to see the pan again.

Someone told me, "The cameraman will only go so far with you. He won't go all the way into the next country." I thought, I wasn't asking him to.

I saw a gothically tall bridge in a tall city at night. The night was a dark purple-orange city night. The bridge streamed with the white light of cars.

I was walking on a planky bridge in the daytime. A man stood to my left, his back against a chain link fence. I had water on the sole of my right shoe. I knew that made me not quite ready for the mission I must take with the man.

I saw a trail of wet footprints crossing mine. On my right was a nice wood fence with a paper cup of water nailed to it. It was my cup. Someone had put something beside water in it. I wondered who would have done that.

(4/3/09) dream of an unfinished film

(Entered in paper journal at 8:15 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I walked into a library. The library was tall, with a sloping ceiling. It was like a small community library: it was one story tall, with an open feeling, with some short bookshelves, studying tables, and a back area of taller bookshelves.

I walked into a room in a small hallway to my left. The room either was or was set up to be like a movie theater. There were around fifty people sitting in the room. The movie had already started. It was The Darjeeling Limited. There was no sound. The movie was about halfway through.

As the movie neared the end, most of the audience cleared out. The lights may also have turned on in the room. Now, before the movie had even ended, it was turned off at the image of something like a pink sea-animal or a pink skirt with little, sphere-like tassels. Some of the audience was leaving by an upward stairwell to my right.

I stood up and walked back into the main room of the library. I was going to complain about the movie having been shut off before it had finished. Before I'd gone into the movie room, the library's checkout counter had been along the left wall, where the hallway into the room was. Now the checkout and customer service center were at the front of the room.

I tried to speak with a couple people (one of them a woman) at the counter. But nobody would listen to me. Finally I spoke with a woman who sat at a low desk. The woman was typing at an old, green-screened computer. I made my complaint to the woman.

Suddenly I was sitting down before a long-haired, bearded man. The man sat in a tall swivel-chair. I sat in a low chair. The man wore square eyeglasses, and his hairline had receded quite a bit from his forehead. He might also have alternately been an overweight man with short, grey hair and a round, tan face.

I had gone from making my complaint to trying to tell the man when the movie had been turned off. The man asked if it hadn't been at the very end of the movie. Then he asked if it hadn't been really early on. I told the man no both times.

I now tried to explain the scene. At first I started to say, "Do you remember when Bill Murray was in a Speedo?" But I realized that that sounded funny, and not like the image I had in my mind (which was of Billy Murray in his blue diving suit, which is called a Speedo in The Life Aquatic, I'm pretty sure).

I then said, "Do you remember the scene where Bill Murray is standing out remembering the plane crash? I now had an image of a tall, flatly mounded, wave-soaked rock under a blue sky. I said, "That was where Bill Murray's" (wife? mother?) died and Bill Murray had to learn to live on his own."

As I tried to explain this, the man (at this point the version of the man with short, grey hair) kept on interjecting roundly, like he was trying to one-up me on movie knowledge, saying how much he enjoyed this or that detail of the scene or this or that following scene of the movie.

I kept trying to redirect the man to the point I was speaking about. But now he (now the long-haired version of the man) was asking me exactly how and when I'd come into the movie theater. I tried to explain to the man how I'd wanted to see the movie for the previous few days, but how on this day I'd gotten sidetracked by some reading I was doing at a cafe across the street.

I could now see the cafe, like I was looking into the windows from the street as I would see them as approaching the sidewalk corner. The cafe was in a nice town, on a clean street, at the top of a gentle slope. The cafe itself looked spacious, with a darkly decorated interior, very comfortable, moderately busy. I could then see myself, in the cafe, possibly sitting sideways in a chair or sitting at a table, reading from a white page, possibly tapping the page against my hand.

I tried to explain to the man that I was so interested in what I'd been reading that I'd had to finish it. I'd gotten into the movie late. (I could now see the scene I'd seen as I'd entered: a scene of the Adrien Brody character running in slow motion to catch a departing train.) I tried to explain all this to the man. But it wasn't quite getting through to him.

I now had to fill out a strange sheet of paper which supposedly had a bunch of fill-in-the-blank questions which would help the library pinpoint exactly what kind of offense had been committed, and exactly at what point in the movie it had been committed. All the "questions" had to do with very visual aspects and moments of the film.

But there were no blanks to fill in: the sheet (or sheets?) was (were) just a lot of three-line descriptions. I had to cross out the descriptions and re-write them correctly. But the more I did this, the less real my memory felt.

I started questioning whether I had actually gone into the movie at all. I realized that my experience in the movie theater had actually only been a dream. I wasn't even quite in the library anymore. I thought, I hope I didn't actually fill out that complaint form while I was at the library. I'd have a really bad reputation with the workers there if I'd complained about them because of a dream I'd had.

But now I thought about the whole experience. I realized that the cafe experience had also been a dram. I thought that was extremely interesting. I could remember my cafe experience very clearly. I could "feel" the time I'd spent there. I could even remember details about what I'd been reading.

I thought, How interesting that I remembered and felt all of that so well in a dream. But also, how interesting that I had such a "dually structured" (not exactly how I thought of it) dream, where I was in the cafe first and the movie theater next. I may also have thought that the role time played in my dream was very interesting in its realistic feeling of cause and effect, i.e. how I'd been late to the movie because I'd spent such a long time in the cafe.