(11/12/07) museum flood; brother stabbed; superfriends jealousy; housecleaning lover

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

Dream #1

I was in some place like a monastery. My brother had come into the room I was in. He had come from outdoors. I walked outdoors. I wore a robe like a monk's robe. I walked out into a large, covered walkway of sandstone. The walls (especially at the corners, which were like towers or guard-stations) were thick, with wide "windows" showing a desert-like area of tan hills beyond. I was barefoot and the stone chilled my feet. The light was blue like late afternoon or early morning.

I turned left at a corner. I was afraid of a mountain lion attacking. Something strange was happening on the walls -- it was like Roman figures began to appear in relief.

At another corner I made a left turn. I walked into an inside room. It was a "museum exhibit." But the walls and floor were strangely shaped, as if we were inside a cave. The place was red-brown, like sandstone and clay. On the lumps, mounds, and columns on the floor were art works like frescoes and mosaics, all in a Roman style.

I became afraid, as if a spirit were materializing in this room. I started running. I ran through glass doors and into another "exhibit" room. This room was modern but dark. All the art pieces, which hung from ceilings, stood on weird stands coming out of the floor, or stood at weird angles to each other,were closely but elegantly lit by one light. There was a jeweled feeling to it all.

I was even more afraid of the spirit materializing, so I ran out of this room, too, through another series of doors. This area, I knew, was the front area, the visitors' center (as if this were a national park). Other workers would eventually show up, and then I wouldn't feel alone and afraid.

The room was large, with twenty-foot-high, white walls, red-tile floors, and two aisles of long document-display cases on either side of the front door. Before the front door, to my right, was a long, black mat that led to the front desk, which was to my left.

Two people walked in. The one in front was a Hispanic woman, maybe twenty-five years old, with a green shirt, black pants, and long, black hair. The other person was a tall, white man, rather nondescript. I figured the two people were together. I thought, These people must have some questions for me. Let me answer them. But when I faced the woman to ask how I could help, she turned into my grandmother P. The man vanished.

My grandma was a little rude and impatient. She asked, "Where do I have to stand from here to see the Hudson?"

I said, "This is the East Side. You can't see the Hudson from here."

I showed my grandma a map of where we were. Seeing the map, and how the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers was near here, I said, "Well, I guess technically you can see the Hudson."

My grandma said, "That's what I meant -- where the Hudson drops into the East River. Which way do I have to stand outside to see it?"

I said, "You'll see a big ship outside. Go stand by that. Turn left."

(At this point in my journal, I got off the train in Manhattan. I resumed writing from the Starbucks on 56th Street and Sixth Avenue at 6 AM.)

My grandma went outside. After a second I followed here. It was dark outside. The whole area outside was like a dock. It floated up and down with the waves. A large, white ship, like a cruise ship, stood in the distance.

I looked to my left. The woman (?) stood near the edge of "the dock." The full moon stood about twenty-five degrees in the horizon. I thought I should warn the woman about the waves. They sometimes submerged the dock entirely. Something bad might happen to a person who went too far underwater with "the dock."

The dock started going underwater. At first I ran toward the dock to warn the woman. But then I had to swim. I grabbed the woman. The woman was like an empty shell.

I swam back to (what was now) "the house." The house looked like a small, suburban house. I pulled myself and the woman up a staircase like a staircase out of a swimming pool.

My brother opened the door. There was a good light inside. I could only see my brother's silhouette against the light. I wondered whether the house would even survive. As the waves rose, they seemed to be pulling everything under.

Dream #2

It was late night. I was possibly coming out of a restaurant. I got a call from my brother. He told me he was finishing up at some arcade. He wanted me to pick him up. He implied that he wanted me to give him cab fare to get home.

I told my brother (assuming that he lived around Houston Street in Manhattan), "I can meet with you and give you a subway ride when we get down into the station together. But I'm not taking a cab home and I'm not giving you cab fare. So do you want me to meet you?"

There was no answer. I said, "Yes or no?" Still no answer. I thought, Oh, you jerk. Don't try to intimidate me. I hung up the phone.

I was now close to the arcade. The street was dark and close, but there were stores with bright, fluorescent light and sharp, white walls. I walked into one of the stores when I saw a troublemaker kid who might have known my brother. He stood at a shoddy, white desk, speaking with a security guard. The kid was short, fattish, possibly Mexican. He wore a pale blue (Denver Nuggets?) jersey with a white t-shirt underneath.

From the kid's rude comments to the security guard I could tell that my brother had been stabbed and was hurt pretty bad. The kid was either trying to get help form my brother or was bragging about how his (the kid's) friends had hurt my brother.

I ran to some other place, then through a long, white-walled (walls thin like scaffolding) tunnel to a bright, white-walled room like a waiting room for a cheap office. The whole place felt grimy and messy. There was another security guard's desk.

My brother lay on the ground. He held a pair of child scissors (green handles) in his left hand. He had been stabbed in his right breast with the scissors. Then he'd had the scissors put in his own hands, to look like he had stabbed himself. Two shortish, fattish, Mexican boys knelt over my brother's legs. The boys were either my brother's friends or the people who had stabbed him.

The hole in my brother's chest wasn't very bloody or very big. I thought, At least he wasn't stabbed in the heart. But, still, he lay as if he were dead. I thought, This was going to happen sooner or later. Why did he always put himself into situations where this would happen?

I knelt by my brother's head and called either the police or my mother. As soon as I had finished dialing, my brother opened his eyes. He tried to sit up. I held him back down. I said, "You'll hurt yourself even more if you try to move."

At this point I might have seen this room completely dark, except with a fire-ring built where my brother had been. An older Mexican/Indian boy sat, with his younger brother to his left, before the fire. Both boys were wrapped in robes or blankets, almost like women.

Dream #3

I stood on the roof of a tall building. The sky was dark blue, like at very early morning. Most of the buildings around me were on fire. Some buildings were falling. I flew over the city, seeing its grid of charred ruins.

Now, on the ground, I saw things as if I were in an old SuperFriends cartoon. Five characters stood at the foot of an escalator: a Superboy/Robin character, a Superman/Lex Luthor-Robot (???) character, a long-haired Superman character, and a Superdog character.

Something thoughtless the Superboy character had done had caused all the destruction. The Superboy character felt very bad. But he now said, "Well, what will our mission be next week?" (As if even the heroes understood that these episodes occurred weekly.)

I thought, Next week? How stupid do they think kids are? The whole city's destroyed. What are they going to save next week? Or is the city going to be magically rebuilt?

One of the Supermen said, "I hope you learned your lesson."

The Superboy said, "I have. If I had't let my jealousy of your relationship" (with Wonder Woman?) "get out of hand, none of this would have happened."

The whole team now did their characteristic exit, up the escalator, which moved them through the air, along the upper levels of corridors of (now intact) skyscrapers, and then through some weird "interdimensional portal." The credits were rolling during this exit scene.

Dream #4

I was in "my bedroom" with a woman. I was naked except for a pair of panties. The woman pulled out a vacuum from a closet and started cleaning my bedroom. She cleaned of a heater by the window. It had roach droppings all over it.

The woman pulled open the curtains. It was dark outside. There was a huge, wide building across the street. We must have been up on the fifteenth floor of this building. I hid behind the bed so nobody in the building across the street would see me, a boy, dressed only in panties.

I asked the woman if she would close the curtains. She said, "Not while I'm cleaning house." I was a little annoyed about that. Nevertheless, I felt thankful that the woman was cleaning the house, and that she was not afraid or ashamed to touch the parts I had let get too dirty.

(5/22/09) shemale superhero

(Entered in paper journal at 7:43 AM at Red Horse cafe in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was in a hallway like in a run-down apartment. An Asian woman was with me. The hallway probably had brown-painted wood walls and uncared for wood floors that were probably caked with dust.

The Asian woman was about six inches shorter than I. She had dark skin, long, silky, black hair, round, black eyes, and a small, healthy, roundish body. She wore a silvery outfit, possibly a tank-top and shorts made of spandex.

I was taking the Asian woman somewhere, possibly from one of the rooms of this apartment, where a party had been held, to another room. For some reason I felt I needed to pass into my room first.

It was night. The hallway was lit by softish, incandescent light. At first I could see into my room, like the door  was wide open, from slightly down the hallway. My room was lit by a slightly brighter incandescent light. The walls may have been a sea green color, with the paint possibly chipping. My room was even more unkempt than the hallway.

As the woman and I walked toward the room, I noticed I had a large pornographic magazine in my right hand (or alternately in my right, then left, hand?). The magazine was maybe as large as, and of the same paper quality as, an old Life or Vogue magazine.

I had been waving my hands to gesture while I had been talking to the woman. Now I realized that this whole time the woman must have seen that I had this huge porn magazine in my possession. I tried to be more discreet with my gestures, hoping to keep the magazine hidden as I walked.

When we reached the door to my room, it was closed. I opened it. We were here so I could show or give the girl something. My room was run-down and a mess. I even had a pile of stuff on the bed, possibly even an entire set of shelves.

We walked in a shallow arc through my room. As we walked pat the bed I saw (possibly on the set of shelves) a stack of for or five large magazines titled SHE-MALE (which is, or was, a real magazine), all in clear plastic envelopes and tiered down so that the title showed for each magazine. I hoped that the woman wouldn't notice the magazines.

I didn't know how the magazines had gotten here. I had always been interested in the magazine, I had thought. But I had actually never bought one. I knew one of my friends, maybe my old friend R, had snuck into my room and laid out these magazines, which he'd bought, so that they'd be in plain sight, just to embarrass me in a situation like this.

The woman saw the magazines and rolled her eyes, as if annoyed that I liked that sort of thing. Our talk kind of fell flat. The woman must have gotten whatever she'd needed. She walked back out into the hallway.

In a little section of the hallway, something like an inset large enough to fit a little cabinet or phone table, the woman now sat or stood with a man. The man was Asian, short, with coppery skin that was lighter than the woman's darker brown skin. The man had thin eyes, a square, solid body, thin lips, and short, gelled, spiky hair. He wore a baby blue t-shirt and khaki shorts.

The man and woman sat or stood amid a bunch of clutter, broken shelves, etc. They were giggling quietly to themselves about me. It was just loud enough that I thought they intended me to hear their ridicule. They were laughing about my having the SHE-MALE magazines in my possession.

I was in my room. The door to my room was now closed. I'm not sure whether I had closed it. Daylight may now have been streaming in through windows over which raggy, tattered, patchwork sheets had been stretched.

I thought, Why should I be ashamed of having the SHE-MALE magazines? I thought to myself, with anticipation, how each issue also included a piece of cheap lingerie with it. I looked back to the magazines. The plastic wrappings were now much bulkier. I thought that the wrappers must have been bulky because the lingerie was stuffed into them underneath the magazines.

But I unwrapped one of the magazines to find that underneath it was, instead of lingerie, a strange, thin, plastic version of a male superhero's outfit. It may have been a Superman outfit. I unwrapped another magazine and found another superhero outfit -- one that I couldn't figure out at all.

I was a little disappointed. I had been hoping to find some lingerie that I could wear. I thought, Well, there are female superheroes as well. Perhaps I'll find one of their costumes.

I unwrapped a costume which at first looked like the Wonder Woman costume. But now it had pant legs on it. Seeing pant legs on the Wonder Woman costume made me less interested in it. I tossed the costume on the stack of other costumes.

I may have opened another costume before thinking, Wait! The Wonder Woman costume was a female costume, after all. I pulled it back out. But the costume now looked like a female version of the Captain America costume. I wasn't interested in it at all.

But now I unwrapped an article that was like a woman's black, one-piece bathing suit. I thought I should at least try this on.

I was now (different dream?) flying over a big city at night. The night was very dark, with little amber specks of light set into all the shadowy skyscrapers below me. I may have been flying by my body alone, and simultaneously flying in some small vehicle. Someone else, a man, was also flying with me, just behind me and to my right or left, probably my left.

There were structures attached to the roofs of, or the top parts of the sides of, certain skyscrapers. These structures were "cylinders," like tireless wheels, made of white plastic, maybe thirty or fifty feet in diameter, lit from behind in amber incandescent light, stuck into the building to look like an "entranceless" tunnel into the building.

These fixtures were docking areas for ourselves or our vehicles. We couldn't land safely without landing via one of these docking areas. We needed to land, however, either because we were running out of the ability to fly or because we were chasing a badguy who himself had landed and had thus required us to land in order to continue chasing him.

I almost docked at one area but somehow missed it, as if the buildings, and not I were moving, and my job, to time my attachment to the moving building, had not been performed accurately. I apologized to the other person. I felt inadequate for failing, and slightly worried that I'd never adequately attach to a docking area, that both I and the other flyer would crash and die because of me.

I found another docking area, which seemed easier to land in because it came out of the top of a building. But I probably didn't make it into this docking area, either. We flew low over the ground now, through an outside area that looked like an indoor employee lounge at a grocery store or fast food restaurant, except that it was, of course, outdoors. Concrete columns, like highway overpass pillars, ran alongside the room.

A young, black man, light-skinned, tall, stringy, but strong, wearing a tan sweatshirt and some kind of baseball cap, with a gaunt face and dull, tiny eyes, sat in a booth across from a white man who may have been in uniform as a policeman or firefighter.

As I flew past the men, the black man laughed at me. He said how crazy I was to think I could fly, and how crazy I was to think I was part of anything special. I was going to ignore the man's negative comments. But I let myself get too angry. I turned back and faced the man (almost as if I sat or crawled on the tabletop before him or stuffed myself on top of him, between him and the table).

The floor around the booth table was now littered with something like crumbs and popcorn. I yelled something at the man about how I thought he was really cool and he was doing really good things, and that I didn't make fun of him, so why did he have to make fun of me for doing something that actually was pretty important?

I then yelled about how I could show him danger, if he really wanted to see it, that I was holding some danger away from him in my fights, but that if he'd rather I didn't act crazy and fight, I could go ahead and let the danger loose on him.

The man looked a little taken aback and slightly ashamed and afraid. The policeman/firefighter may have been on guard, thinking I was acting a little dangerously, and that I should be watched. The two men got up and walked away.

I now realized that the young man was actually a firefighter in training and that he probably was a really good guy. I felt bad for acting so strangely toward such an innocent person.

The men had walked down a hallway that turned right and away at the "back" of this "room." I got the young man's attention again. The young man was now taller and thinner. He now wore a black baseball cap and a maroon sweatshirt.

I gave the young man a gift, something like a big gook. I apologized for having acted weird. The young man may have taken the book. But he didn't pay me much attention beyond that. He had gone back to regarding me as kind of crazy and not really worth any thought.