(9/24/04) political drive; fear of heights

(Dreams entered in daytime paper journal only. No time/place info given.)

Dream 1

I was watching some television show or else I was actually driving through a big city which was the subject of the show, and hearing narration, which I seem to have forgotten. It was early evening, the sky a dark, dim blue. Most of the buildings were red brick, like buildings in downtown Denver, except by a lake or coast of some sort.

The narration was about the World Trade Center being rebuilt, or at least about the loss of the World Trade Center and some kind of memorial being made. I saw in the open space between two buildings two towers, black, tall and cylindrical.

My mom's voice said, "I think it's just tacky that they're doing that." I think I may then have come to a realization, retroactive, of what was going on, as if the narration may have been senseless speaking that didn't "pull together" until after I saw the buildings and heard my mother's voice.

We drove on -- the "we," by the way, not including my mother, but including some businesslike people and myself. We drove past a building entirely decked in white Christmas lights. This castle of light was supposed to be another monument to the World Trade Center, or possibly even the new World Trade Center, which, so gaudily lit, would now, I thought, be a prime target for anybody wishing to attack America, as if it was actually the time before we were attacked.

I was now in an SUV, driving down some straight, Midwestern road with some politicians who were going to some kind of meeting, possibly a funeral. I can't remember who was there at first. I myself wasn't exactly sitting in any of the seats. I floated or simply shifted physically around like I was no more than two feet tall. The other people never exactly stayed where they were.

I was excited to be around these people, and greatly because I wanted to see how well I could use the terms of respect meant for them. I saw President Reagan. I asked him a question and made sure to call him President Reagan (?). When I asked him this question it was like I was in the back seat and turning just a bit to my left to ask him this question. But as he answered, we both slowly shifted, until he was in the driver's seat, and I was floating over the cup holder in between the two front seats.

I don't remember the question, but I feel it had to do with why some people weren't coming to this meeting.

(I now remember a part of the dream I had forgotten -- after seeing the light building I heard the narrator mention how for many ages nude sculptures on buildings were outlawed and detested. But now a building was being unveiled in Canada that showed some kind of "three ages" scene, and in the center of this sculpture was a naked woman whose eyes were hidden behind a big cloth. Some lower part of her was also hidden, below the waist, or at least including space above the waist, so that the only real nakedness was the breasts. She came out of a shield-like oval with some ornamentation on the bottom and top. Some small pictures were now shown. These were political figures who came to support this new sculpture. One of the figures there was the Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards. His smile was bright white.)

Reagan tried to "explain" an answer to me. But he really didn't want to broach the subject. He thought it was "below him" to have to answer such small people as I on questions so controversial as this. So he picked at some "sticker fuzz residue" on the face of the cup holder console, telling me something about a separation of things, possibly such as toilet paper rolls, and not really even coming to any conclusions about that. This may have been in response to the question of whether "President George Bush Senior" was going to come to this meeting, since he wasn't in this car. I know I did ask this question, but I don't know when.

I was now sitting right in front of the person in the passenger seat, John Edwards, facing him. He had a plastic block, like a cooler, on his lap -- it might actually have replaced his legs altogether. I called him "Mr. Edwards," as opposed to "Senator Edwards." I then asked if he was coming to the meeting. I said, "Because I  really have felt excited about you being there." I immediately felt like a fool for having said that.

Dream 2

I don't remember the beginning. I was in some restaurant, I believe, having gone through some ordeal, and sat next to an Asian woman. We were with some friends, by whom I felt threatened. We all walked out a door.

Now the scene was on some strange bridge, like a multi-layered bridge over a wide river. I thought it was the Brooklyn Bridge. I don't know what the scenario was. Either we had just arrived after a long travel or else we were immigrant laborers coming home after work.

We stood, just an Asian woman and I (not the same woman) among a bunch of unknown people, along one white-painted steel girder. To our left was a pole with a ladder leading up to a next level. In front of us, beyond about two feet of open space leading a couple hundred (?) feet down to the river, and up about three or four feet, was a plastic or fiberglass beam along which people walked. The beam led to a platform at which the bridge was wide and solid and led across the river and down to solid ground. Behind us and beyond the beam as well were tons of steel beams in triangular shapes, above us and below us as well, like a maze of beige- and white-painted steel beams.

A steady crowd of people, mainly dressed in nice clothes (though the people were generally poor, and possibly immigrants), walked along the plastic beam. People on the steel beam waited for a spot and then leaped up onto the beam, or else they went to the right or left, to where a ladder post was and climbed up to higher levels, where there were fewer people on that level's fiberglass beam.

But I was afraid to move. The beam was shaky. The jump to the fiberglass was precarious (though everybody else did it just fine). And the climbs up to the next levels were possibly at intervals of fifty or one hundred feet, at which point the beams were even shakier than they were at this level. To keep my balance, or rather, to keep my morale, I leaned against a ladder-less post.

The Asian woman and I were two of the few people now left on this steel beam. The Asian woman wore a multicolored, tight, modern sweater and blue jeans. I wore my regular clothes. The Asian woman was kind of laughing at me, that I was afraid to move. But she was also impatient with me, because she had wanted to take one of the ladders a long time ago.

She sighed and leaned hopelessly against me. I looked away from her, jumped up onto the fiberglass or plastic beam, which wasn't shaky at all, and was quite easily reached, so easily reached that I was upset at myself for having waited this long to get to it. The beam was depressed in the middle, with a straight line, like a track, i.e.

I walked to the platform, still slightly afraid but now mostly regretful that I hadn't gone up one of the ladders.

I reached the platform. The first area, the only one I saw, was just a six foot by six foot square of concrete, walled with thin, ridged, beige-painted sheet metal. Its right side opened to a wider platform which was open to the air and went down in a slight slope. Nobody was in this room, but I could tell that somebody, some man, was nearby to ridicule me for having been afraid.

In the corner, by the door, was a short, small table with two books on it. One book was a modern book, I don't remember what, although I now feel it was some book about being afraid of heights. I don't know what it was, but I did then. The other book was a Bible. I'm pretty sure it was highlighted in many passages which, I believe, were also supposed to discuss my fear of heights.

I felt like I was already being teased and judged, and I started to form defenses against accusations of cowardice, trying to make myself believe these accusations. (Or did I mean "make myself believe these defenses?")

***

(Another entry regarding this dream was made in my daytime paper journal from 9/27/04)

BEFORE I SAY ANYTHING ELSE --

In the dream I had where I was on a bridge and had to jump onto a fiberglass beam: the book beside the Bible on the table in the corner of the room before the concrete, outdoor platform was How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It may also have had the Dr. Strangelove prefix, like in the title of the book (actually, the title of the film, not the book) in waking life. But the "Stop Worrying..." part was definitely there. I have remembered this for days, now, intending to write it down, but I always forget.

(10/6/05) all-you-can-eat buffet scuffle

(No time/place info for paper dream  journal entry.)

(10/5 -- I will try tonight to influence my dreams with thoughts of Ghost in the Shell II the anime movie.)

(No dreams were recorded in my dream journal for the night.)

***

(Daytime paper journal entry.)

Dream 1

I can't remember the beginning. I was somewhere with my friends R and Y. It was like we were doing some job outside. I had eaten a burrito that had been wrapped in aluminum foil. Once we finished we walked to the end of a parking lot and stood by something like a gas station. All I remember now is that it was a bright white building. The parking lot was empty. The sun was bright.

I sat or stood against a wall, either in the sun or the shade. R and Y were up by the front of the gas station. Possibly one of them was in or kept walking in and out of the store. One of them was talking on a cell phone. Someone had invited them to a "roller coaster park" or amusement park. I knew they would also invite me, though I didn't really want to go.

I don't really know what happened next. Something about an errand was mentioned. We walked down the parking lot toward a building that looked like a closed Kmart. It was a white building, the doors of which were boarded up with what looked like plywood painted aquamarine.

The errand had apparently become getting lunch. I thought about this with a little dread. I'd already eaten a burrito, and I didn't want to go out for a big lunch. Now I pulled two more burritos out of my back pocket. I definitely didn't want to buy lunch now, now that I had two more burritos.

I thought there was possibly a way for me to get away from these guys. But, seeing some guys opening and closing the aquamarine boards, which I now saw were steel, I knew I was just going to have to go with them.

I was now in some restaurant with them. It was like the cafe at the back end of the old Kmart on Colfax (and Wadsworth?) in Denver. But it was huge, like three or four cafe lines put together. R and Y had gone up to get food from the buffet-like lines. I stood at a table, about to sit down, but looking at my burritos and feeling guilty for even eating these. After all, hadn't one burrito been enough?

But now Y came up and told me to come check out the buffets. Apparently there were three buffet lines, each set up like they were different restaurants, with different styles of food. I walked up to the buffets with Y, telling myself not to buy any food, just to look out of interest.

The buffets were set up so that on the left and right sides were two immense, long buffets, and in the center was a small, pagoda-like buffet with something like soups on it. Y and I went to the left buffet first. It was all sub sandwiches, just a long, stretching bin full of sub sandwiches. The wall behind the buffet was wallpapered with a slightly grainy photograph of a blue sky dotted with puffy, white clouds.

I thought, Well, it's never worth it to spend this much money on a sub sandwich. But maybe I can just get a soda.

I walked away from the buffets altogether, though, back to the seats. I was about to sit down when I heard Y say, "Hey, Preemie! Come check this out!" She was now on the right side buffet, which, I could only barely see, was some kind of exotic food. I ran up through the soup buffet, which, I could only barely see, was some kind of exotic food, to get to the right side buffet.

R stood at the soup buffet. As I ran toward Y, he shoved me with his back and butt and pinned me against the guardrails for the buffet. Holding me there with his back he said, "No you don't. You aren't getting anywhere near Y."

I slipped away but he moved quickly and trapped me again. He was pissed. I tried to struggle against him, but he kept slipping out of my reach.

Trying to figure out something, anything to do to him, I stuck my hands first into a beef mushroom-type soup (kind of a french dip au jus consistency) and then into a guacamole-consistency soup, which I grabbed a hot handful of and flung into R's face.

R backed up (?) and away from me. We now stood by a trashcan by the chairs and tables. R gave me a look that scared (and scares) the shit out of me -- it was like that of a psychopath who finally decided to kill and thus saw his object as already dead, like I was just a stupid fucking absurdity for still choosing even to breathe and talk. It was a blank, petulant stare.

R was pissed that I had gotten him off of me. He was even more pissed that I had gotten a bit of his glasses and his left jawline messy with the guacamole-type soup. But he was most pissed that I had gotten some of the soup on the left side of the collar (?) of his "expensive" shirt, but that if R didn't wipe off his neck, which he wouldn't, he would let the soup get on his shirt. And he wanted that, because for so long he had wanted an excuse to kill me or embarrass me so badly that I would wish I were dead.

I half-apologized. But I mainly told R, "You just have to get off of me when I tell you to get off of me, that's all. Besides, Y's my friend, just as well as you are, and I have every right to talk to her."

He pushed me away and said, "I am going to kill you or embarrass you really bad. You don't ever tell me what to do. You are mine."

Now he was gone. I sat across from Y. She asked where R had gone. I told her he just got a little pissed and decided not to hang around for the rest of the day. She said, "Well, he should just learn to deal with the fact that not everybody in the world is going to do things whenever he wants them to."

Now I sat staring out toward the front of the restaurant, where the Kmart used to be. It was now a skyline, behind a couple skyscrapers and across a river, of what I possibly thought was New Jersey and/or lower Manhattan. It was in pinkish-orange sunset light, the buildings looking orange-purple in their shadows. I sat on the thin tile floor like I was sitting on a hilly lawn, waiting for a concert.

I was trying to think, as my friend ML sat beside me and spoke (Y now gone), how on earth I would make do back in New York if I couldn't stay at R's place. I thought that I should perhaps ask ML to let me stay with him. But right as I was about to ask him, turning up to him and lifting up my arms as if to embrace his chest like I was a fawning girl, he disappeared.

Now, instead of ML to my right, My mom's old longtime boyfriend JT was to my left. I didn't see him, but he was there. The skyline was moving now, from my right to my left, a bridge coming into view, as if we were on a boat.

JT pointed out some smallish, greenish-window-walled building kind of where Battery Park would have been. He told me, "See? That's the Jewish Aquarium Museum" (?) "right there."

I said, "Oh yeah?" first trying to figure out which building JT was talking about, then trying to figure out what made certain aquatic life Jewish.

I don't know how, but things now changed quite a bit. I was in something like an apartment that was the entire floor of a skyscraper. The floor was concrete (?) painted black and with Arabian rugs all over. There were a few nice couches as well.

The walls were either brick or black-painted concrete. There were huge holes for windows. But I don't think the windows had any panes. The window holes were from ceiling to floor and about ten or twelve feet wide, so that the "wall" was more like a wide column between the windows, more than like a wide space of wall between windows.

The space was like an artist's space, or, rather, like a space where artists could just hang out, not work. A few people were there, talking, and I was their friend. But I don't know them, nor could I really see them.

The strangest thing was that the building or the floor was revolving, turning counterclockwise. At first I thought it was just my changing perspective. But even when I held my head still I saw that building tops were "moving" from left to right before my eyes. The city looked clean, new, with buildings made out of red bricks and copper-colored, tan bricks. I was very interested in the views, but I also had a feeling that the turning of the building meant it was going to collapse.

I now heard (Y?) call for me. She told me to look out a "window" to my right. I immediately saw some neighborhood, which I thought was an incredibly beautiful yet dangerous area of Brooklyn. I was enamored with the spooky starkness (even in full, shining daylight!) of these buildings. But I don't remember them now.

I don't know what happened next. But now I was walking to a bedroom after having made an unsuccessful joke to my friend PD. There were no windows in the room. A yellowy, incandescent light shone from the center of the ceiling.

There was something like a couch-like mattress in the center of the floor. I flopped down in it and sighed to ML that PD didn't think my joke was funny. ML just grinned and was about to say something kind of rude and annoying about my sense of humor.

But apparently I predicted what ML was going to say. I butt in as he got a few words in and said something like, "Oh, yes, now it's time for you to repeat some word I characteristically say until you beat me down with a sense of being completely known and understood. You're such an ass."

But ML didn't take my comments too harshly. I don't think I meant them so harshly. He just gave me a lazy, half-dazed smile and rumpled his head under a blanket and made a joke about me.

Now a dog like my friend R's dog ran into the room from a door to my right (I had come in from the left). "She" kind of attacked my right hand, biting it softly but repeatedly.

I said, "Oh, I forgot, you like eating people's hands, don't you?"

"She" said, "Yes, I do, but I also like being petted," in a voice like a 75% feminine, 25% masculine, watery-timbered computer voice. "She" now lay back on my lap and resembled soemthing like a naked boy covered in short, silky, black dog hair. I pet it and it opened its mouth in "pleasure" that looked more like the breathless gasps of a burn victim.

Now someone somewhere said, "Oh, he's coming! Just open the door for him." They meant to use the electric door opener to open the door on the first floor but not to use the buzzer.

My sister said, "Oh, I know how to do that. I've done it before." But before she could get to the door opener the person there buzzed up to us. "My friend's dog," who was now much more, though still not quite, like the dog, sprang from my lap, barking insanely.

I now understood that the man coming up was my mom's new husband, a Japanese man. I got up from a room that wasn't quite the room I had just been in and walked down a dim hallway with a couple doorways to wide, airy, classy rooms and into a "central" room where the front door was located. The light was a rich tan-yellow.

The man had just come into the house. He was about five-foot-five, maybe 150 or 160 pounds, wearing a blue, hefty, knit sweater, slacks (or jeans?), and plastic-rimmed, black glasses. His face was kind of thick. He was wide-lipped and weary-eyed. His hair was alternately thinning greatly and full but obstinately messy. His skin was very dark, almost brown, a dull brown.

He walked toward the kitchen, where my mom was, only half-regarding me. I told him, "Hello, sir, nice to meet you. Can I ask who you are?" He just grunted and kept walking.

I said, "You have no business continuing if you don't tell me who I am." He now said something politely and slowly, but so quiet that it looked like he was on an almost muted television. He kept walking.

I told him, "You cannot continue until you tell me who you are." But he walked past me and almost to the "kitchen," which was now just another dark hallway.

I turned, sternly called to him, then walked up behind him, grabbed him with both arms, and attempted to pull him out of the threshold. It wasn't really working. It was like I had no power of resistance.

But now a son of this man ran up to him and said, "Dad, where have you been?" I now felt like a fool for having tried to stop the man. I had only done so because I wasn't being respected and the rules I had been asked to uphold weren't being respected.

I was now somehow in the kitchen, which was nice, light, airy, and clean. My mom was at the stove, apparently boiling a pot of mussels (?). The steam clung in the air, but it smelled and felt nice. My mom walked to the refrigerator (black and shiny like glass) and opened it as I told her, "I tried to get him to tell me who he was. But he spoke with almost no voice at all and then just kept on walking."

My mom said, "It's okay. He's very understanding. You don't need to worry about having embarrassed anybody."

I saw into a pan in which my mom was frying wide, thin, purplish cuts of sausage with other meats and a lot of green peppers and onions.

I now sensed that this man's wife (!) had arrived, as well as all the other children. The wife was Indian (i.e. from India). The children (maybe three or four of them) were Indian- and Japanese-looking. I was excited to meet them all, because I felt like they were skilled at some kind of mysticism, not consciously, perhaps, but deep down.

They ran around in different rooms. I flew through a dim hallway and into a dim living room. My position was cross-legged, sitting. Dim, cobalt blue light from the dark sky outside poured in through the big window in the living room. The only other light was from some other room, perhaps from the "entry room" or the kitchen. A couple kids and the wife were in the living room. I flew in through the right and flew out through the back, i.e.

Having seen the kids I thought I shouldn't really fly because they might first think I was showing off, and because they might second think I was flying because I guessed, based simply on their racial backgrounds, that they, too, had the ability to fly.

When I got out of the living room I landed. I was in a dark room. I walked into another dark room, the floor of which was littered with JUMP Japanese comic books, all arranged in a horseshoe shape. I think I thumbed through some of these, trying to find an issue that would be interesting to the kids, so I could have something to talk to them about. But I abandoned that idea as well, thinking that their Japanese background didn't exactly mean they'd like manga.

I walked through the hallway and back into the living room. Only the wife was there now. She looked like the mother in Monsoon Wedding, but she also seemed like some kind of businesswoman in her early thirties, American, possibly white, very attractive, with a slight intent to seduce or at least tease me. She was standing and walking in front of the couch, which was an L-shape on a bluish rug on a hardwood floor. (It seems like this apartment was a huge apartment on a high floor in a Manhattan skyscraper.)

The woman came up and asked me, almost furtively, "So... with all that... of yours, then... is that something you're going to keep for real?"

I said, "What of mine? Do you mean then...?" She said, "Yeah, the moving around stuff." (She meant the flying, of course.) She now sat down and was from now on, I think, only like the mother from Monsoon Wedding.

I sat on the floor, flopping my arms up on the couch just to the left of her lap. She told me, "Yeah, we have a friend who practices that stuff. He's even started to make a business out of it, charging people $188.10 to..., so I guess he's..."

She now started crying, not wailing or weeping. Her voice stayed normal, but tears gushed out of her eyes in three, wet, solid streams. She looked forward as she continued speaking, as if preoccupied. I had a feeling she had lost a son.

I asked her if she was alright. She said, "Oh, yes. It's too hot, that's all. Too hot, but it's too cold. I need to change the thermostat."

I got up and walked to the wall with the thermostat. There were two arch-shaped, aluminum bars resting against the wall, stacked against each other. On top of them was a cardboard ad-sign for a thermostat or CD. This confused me at first (!).

When I understood this wasn't the thermostat, I fumbled with the sign to get it out from in front of the thermostat. After I fumbled clumsily for a couple seconds, the wife cluttered up behind me and just grabbed the sign and threw it away.

I looked closely at the thermostat. It was a round one with an orange needle telling what the temperature was set at. By turning the casing, a metallic, pale copper-green plastic, you could move the needle, behind clear plastic, around, to bring the temperature up or down.

I saw that the needle was right at one hundred, which meant that it was neither too hot nor too cold. I showed this to the lady, but she grabbed the thermostat and twisted it. Satisfied she walked back to the couch.

She was incredibly depressed. I wanted to understand who she had lost in her life. I felt like it was a son, who had died in the World Trade Center collapse. But I didn't quite know how to ask her. I did say something. But as she started to respond I woke up.

(11/15-16/04) crypt on a cliff; hiding toenails from george w bush; i heard an explosion

(NOTE: As I mention in future entries, by this point I was not recording all of my dreams in my dedicated dream journals. So some of my dreams would be recorded only in my daytime journals. Another complication is that my dreams are not recorded on a daily basis, i.e. I don't always record my dreams punctually, the day after the night I have them. Instead, I might record two or three days' worth of dreams in one daytime journal entry. This is the case below. Where this is the case, and I don't have any dream journal entries to connect my daytime entries to, I will put all the dreams recorded in the daytime journal in one entry and note in the entry header what days the entry documents.)

(Journal entry actually from 11/17/04)

I wrote down the dreams remembered from last night in the Ghost Book. I have a couple other dreams, two from two nights ago and one from -- somehow I just now forgot the one from Sunday night. Nope. There we go.

(11/16/04)

Monday night.

Dream 1

A woodcut, like an illustration on a page. A temple or "vault"/"crypt" on a tall rock-cliff surrounded by other, much taller, cliffs. The ink was greenish, a deepish blue-green. The texturing was very stylized yet naturalistic. The "crypt" was rectangular, tall, narrow, with a triangular roof set on top, with a circle in the center.

Dream 2

I walked into some living room with either a friend or my mother. The room was long and wide, though really tacky, almost like a ski-lodge version of an old trailer home. At the back was a huge, wide, tall window and in front of the window a smallish, round dinner table.

George W. Bush sat at that table, his back to the window. To his right stood some woman who was possibly supposed to be his wife. Bush was also accompanied by a few other folks, some of whom feel like they were security.

I walked up to them, having been brought because I was a "funny guy" or for some strange reason. I sat down beside Bush and said something that immediately set him at ease.

I knew now that Bush wanted to give me some kind of important position. I suddenly realized I had no socks or shoes on. My toenails were all unclipped and ugly. I thought, If I start the job and look like this I'll be ridiculed by everybody.

I had somehow switched seats with Bush. I tilted my feet so I could curl and conceal my toes in the plushy, cheap, grey carpet. I thought of refusing Bush's offer.

Bush suddenly grabbed both my hands and held them up to his forehead, crying. He said something like, "How could they have lost it for me? We're all going to lose it. I've already lost. I can tell."

(11/15/04)

Sunday night.

Dream 1

I may have been driving a car through the city. At some point I saw a diagram of the World Trade Center towers with a tunnel under them. In the tunnel was a lavender-colored, card-shaped rectangle upright and with a purple circle in its center.

The WTC towers had been attacked, but it was also like they hadn't been attacked. But now some women's group was going to "finish the job they had started twenty years ago." Some demands had not been met. They were going to set off the device. I saw a pixelated expansion of lavender and purple squares boggling upward through the outline diagram of the towers.

I, now, driving through the town, had to do something, but I can't remember exactly what. I may have wanted to jet out of there. I may have wanted to go to the women's group and prove that I wasn't at fault so they would not blow up the towers (as if I were in the towers right then). I may have wanted to travel down and disarm the bomb. And I may have wanted to convince myself (and the whole "material" world, somehow) that the bomb hadn't really been set and that nothing was going to happen to the towers.

Then I heard an explosion.