(8/12/05) can't hide my perversion; weightlifting toilet humor; rose of sharon

(Entered in paper journal at 5 PM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was outside, possibly at night, at the foot of a very small slope, like the small slope up to train tracks. Some friends, among them my friend R, were up on the top of the slope. I sat, legs folded lazily under me, amid a bunch of white, wadded up art tissue paper and piles of pornography magazines.

Now the friends came over the slope so they could see me. I tried desperately to hide all the pornography. But R saw me and was disappointed.

Possibly the scene changed to a bedroom, in which I was just barely hiding. I may have been trying to dress up in women's clothing. I had mirrors all around me. Once again R came into the room. He ridiculed me, not only for my perversion, but for hiding it so clumsily.

Dream 2

A weird weightlifting contest. People sat on something like a toilet and lifted something like dumbbells that were attached to pulleys. I'm pretty sure the people didn't do curls, but rather lifted laterally, with their shoulders and then their elbows. I sat or crouched on their left sides.

About five or six guys were in the contest. Each guy was strong but kind of dorky looking. The last guy looked Hispanic. He "was" a good friend. He had a backwards hat on and possibly long hair and a mustache. As he began to lift I said some inside joke and made him laugh and mess up.

Someone got mad at me for slowing things down. I tried to duplicate the joke. I only made things more awkward.

Dream 3

I was out doing some tree census work with my NYC Americorps coworker VT. It was early evening. The sky was dark blue. We were on a road that curved long

with the concave side facing a long, steep slope. The left side of the street had only a few trees. I let VT take that side, since it was easier.

I walked up to the first tree on my side. It was a Rose-of-Sharon, with wide, soft petals.

(8/10/07) narcissistic toilet

(Entered in paper journal at 5:45 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a building like a hotel. My mom, who may have worked at the same place as I, had called me back to work when she saw that I had filled out some internet form incorrectly. I could "see" my mom up in some top level, a smallish area like an apartment, with thin, plywood walls, like in a double-wide trailer. My mom sat on a high stool and typed on a computer that stood on a narrow table.

I went up floors through different levels of the hotel: a nice mezzanine, some kind of fire escape area, and finally a lovely series of floors like dormitory or apartment halls.

I found a bathroom on one floor. I went in. I needed to defecate. There were three toilets. I felt like since there were three toilets, and all three were currently unoccupied, at least one must have been left "sabotaged" by someone.

So I checked the toilets. The one farthest from me was a wide stall, like the handicap-equipped stalls. I didn't want to go in there. The second one looked fine at first glance. But when I walked in I saw that it was a stall within a stall, i.e. you needed to open two doors to get to the toilet. Something about this seemed discomforting, so I walked out of the stall. The third stall was almost regular. I sat down on the toilet.

I began defecating. I looked down into the bowl of the toilet. My feces was orange-brown. And it just kept coming and coming out of me. I thought, This much shit, of this strange color, can't be good.

I saw, in the reflection of the water, the feces coming out of my anus. I thought, So this is what my anus looks like. I felt I shouldn't look at the reflection too long: I might get depressed by the carnal aspect of my existence, or else become morbidly drawn in to, mesmerized by, the "dirty parts" of my own body.

I looked away, but somehow I could still see the reflection, not as if in my mind's eye, but as if, though I was looking upward, forward, another part of me, physically, were still looking downward.