(5/4/07) competition with bullies; lagoons

(Entered in paper journal at 6:21 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn into Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I had been up on a high floor of a building and I had walked down a steep staircase. I was now on a balcony or mezzanine level overlooking a wide court on which a symphony was set up and playing.

A crowd of people stood on the "balcony" (which was like a balcony in the mall, about the same width) and watched the symphony. The symphony must have been twenty feet below us, but it also seemed like they were right in front of us and all smashed together into a small space.

They were playing some famous piece which, when I had heard it, had always ended in a way so quaint that I thought it had been tacked on by some conductor who thought he was being smart. But now the symphony was ending, and this quaint, almost nursery-rhyme-like melody played. This time it seemed to fit in with the rest of the piece, as if it had been conceived and played correctly. I thought, So the composer really did put this ending on it.

One of the musicians in the symphony was a 70s-style black man playing an electric bass. I couldn't hear his instrument or see where an electric bass would come into play in the piece. When everything finished we all walked to our left (after facing the symphony) and went down the balcony to a small, fluorescent lit hallway with an elevator.

The crowd was pretty big, and I was trying to work my way through it to get a space on the elevator. I walked past the black man, who was now a little more modern and handsome and was walking with a white girl. I walked into a crowd of businessmen and fell in with them. We got on the elevator together.

I was down in a school hallway. It was mazey. I don't know it I was a teacher or someone who had volunteered to do something for the kids. I was tired. I knew there was a room where I could rest. But I couldn't find it in the maze of rooms. I thought I'd found it, but I walked into a room full of kids.

I walked back out again. The place felt buxy, but I never really saw anybody anywhere. I could feel that there were "adults" watching me from somewhere. I thought they would think I was doing drugs in school. I was afraid of being judged or misjudged.

An unseen person, a black woman who seemed like more of an adult than the other "adults," told me to go into a classroom and use it to rest in, regardless of what anybody said. I was thankful.

(Writing continued at Mangia on 56th Street and 6th Avenue, 7 AM.)

I was in the classroom, which was dim. I sat at the front of the classroom but with my back turned to the teacher's desk. My friend ML may have sat in front of me, and our desks may have been joined. There may have been a teacher giving us a lesson.

ML was fiddling with some piece of paper and making a joke out of it. I realized that the paper had our lesson notes on it, and that I didn't have a paper. I was going to ask the teacher if I could have a paper. But she now stood beside me, scolding me.

The room was light with fluorescent light. I was at a table with (possibly ML and) five or six black and hispanic women. The teacher claimed that I didn't pay enough attention to her and that I thought I was too good for class.

A couple of the women to my right said, "Out of everybody here, he's always so snide and rude. He thinks he's such a big deal, I just want to kick his ass. It's frustrating!"

I looked across the table. There was another table on the other side. Two big, black men sat at it, all sprawled out in their chairs, silently, menacingly glaring at me. And yet I felt less threatened by them than I did by the women.

Another woman came up to me. She was dark, with short hair, about medium height and build. She wore a red shirt with cut-off sleeves. She made a comment about how I treated women and how I thought of them as sex objects.

She said, "Well, how do you like this?" She grabbed my head and shoved it under her shirt. She rubbed her hand on her crotch and then shoved it in my face. She shook me around and said, "How do you like that? How do you like the smell of that? What do you think off what you said now?"

I thought it was absurd that she was doing this to hurt me. I actually liked all of it, including her smell. I kept waiting for the smell to get bad. But it didn't.

I had a vision of a black girl in an empty classroom, standing over a small, basin-shaped water fountain -- almost like the eyewash stations in workplaces.

I was outside. It was a sunny day. I walked on a sidewalk that was met immediately on my right with a steep hill which made the front yard of houses high up on the hill (like in Staten Island). The "front yard" I walked in front of now had a stone fence as its front and a concrete staircase leading up to the building, which was actually some kind of grocery store. The street to my left was wide, wide enough to have been a parking lot. It also seemed like in front of me was a parking lot, until another hill heaved upward with lawns and houses on it.

A man with a large dolly with boxes on it rushed up from behind me and to my left. He was heading from the staircase to my right. I was trying to get ahead of him so he wouldn't box me in when he turned to go up the staircase. But he rushed even faster and twisted his dolly to skew me into the stone fence.

I stopped quickly and backed up. I thought I would just walk behind and around the man, into the street and in front of him. But his dolly was now a weird, curving contraption of aluminum and yellow plastic, maybe even of cord and police tape. The man pushing it was Asian, but he also seemed black and Hispanic. He had me completely trapped. The only way I could get out was by lifting up some of the cords and police tape, which meant jangling some of the merchandise we had on the dolly.

As I walked away the man yelled at me, in a black man's voice, "Hey! What the fuck are you doing? Why don't you watch where you're going? You just walked through all my stuff!" I could feel that the man had been bullying me the whole time by trying to corner me and trap me. And now he was trying to bully me by making me feel guilty for getting out of his trap.

I was on a bicycle. I was pedaling up the hill. Two white kids came up from behind me on bikes. They were annoying me in some way. They passed me up, but they never got very far ahead of me. It was harder and harder for me to pedal up the hill. The asphalt and concrete were also breaking up, so that it seemed absurd that my bike should still be upright. I was barely going forward on my bike.

The three of us were at the top of the hill now. we were in a strange place that seemed like a strip mall or shopping plaza blended with the Acropolis or some kind of classical structure. Everything was in ruins, not like time had aged it, but like everything had been torn up in an earthquake.

The road or ground was lifted in huge chunks, maybe six feet wide, as thick as asphalt road. Its surface was very colorful, like it had been some mosaic of sparkling tiles, depicting a landscape from on high (like a map or a satellite photo) or some classical story scene.

The buildings were all heavy stone, smooth, with columned fronts. But in certain places I could see or feel huge neon signs like on Route 66 roadsides in the desert or in shopping plazas from big desert towns. The light was dimmish, pale blue and silver like late afternoon. The air was very cool.

The two guys were far less annoying now. But, as it had become almost impossible for me to bike up the hill, it was now getting to be almost impossible for me to walk at all.

Dream 2

I was in a field with my co-workers DE and EB. The sky was a deep, heavy grey, but the light wasn't dim. There might have been a little wind. Before us were two rectangular lagoons down in the ground, surrounded by thick, green and tan grass clumps.

We might possibly have been here to do some kind of research. The lagoons were to our left and before us. One was behind the other, and they faced each other on their long sides. Before us and on our right were three rectangular gardens, one behind the other, facing on their long sides as well. Between the gardens was a tall, thick grass, taller and thicker than the grass between the lagoons, some even going to seed.

I walked along the gardens and saw that all the plants were in metallic, boxy pots. I was disappointed that the grass wasn't allowed to grow in the open ground. But I thought, I guess that's just the best way for things to work in a farm.

I stood on the opposite short side of the rectangles from DE and EB. Someone unseen was talking to us, but possibly directing his comments more to DE and EB. He was on DE's and EB's side, and he might have been to my left. The man was explaining his farming techniques.

The three rectangles were now lagoons full of water. The "field" was like on a plateau that seemed artificial and looked out over the ocean.

At some point EB and DE stood by some kind of flagpole or monument at the end of a porch-like, flagstone walkway that rounded outward before the cliff. We spoke about something for a moment and then walked down a ramp of stone to a place like a boardwalk on the left side of which were building fronts.

EB was talking about security guards. She told a story about a security guard (in my mind I saw a tall, round-headed, slightly plump, black man with dark glasses, wearing a white, button-up shirt and black slacks, with a walkie-talkie clipped to his left (?) shoulder) who took care of some problem on the boardwalk by speaking in to the walkie-talkie without touching it.

I said, "He didn't touch the walkie-talkie and it still turned on?"

She said, "Yes. They're made that way so all you have to do is turn your head and speak into it."

We now stood inside, before some kind of security supply closet made of polished panels of wood. EB may have stood in the closet. She had a device attached to her waist. There were a couple of red lights on it. Some cord and headset went up to her shoulders. But the device on her waist also had a speaker. She turned it up so we could hear the funny things it was saying. But then a woman, the head of security, got onto the speaker and told us we should be ashamed of messing with the device in this way.

(5/6/07) getting worse and worse at throwing

(No time/place entry record.)

Dream 1

I was in a baseball field or an open field/lawn on a sunny morning. I threw a baseball to a man who stood down the field a somewhat far distance. The man was a little fattish and wore sunglasses and a baseball cap. I was surprised that I had thrown the ball all the way to the man.

I threw the ball again but somehow I messed up. I tried to throw the ball again, but I hesitated. I was sure I wouldn't make the throw again. I called to the man, "I didn't get the right swing behind the throws!"

I was afraid to throw and fail. I was almost paralyzed. I cocked my arm to throw, but my hand went completely numb. I looked down to the ground to my right (I had been using my right hand to throw). I saw the ball. I tried to pick it up. I couldn't. I looked at my hand and was surprised by the whole thing.

(5/7/07) vertical cloud tunnels; what kind of gift do you think this is?; sweet drinks and trashy rooms

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

Dream 1

A man speaking about some calculations or other secrets the government was working to keep terrorists from knowing. These calculations would allow a space shuttle to land on an aircraft carrier as well as allow it to launch from a cargo jet. As the man told me (and someone else) about this I saw grainy, black-and-white footage of a space shuttle landing on an aircraft carrier.

I now saw that the three of us were flying. At first I thought we were flying in a cargo jet. But then I saw we were flying beside the jet. I thought it was a Lockheed plane, but I couldn't remember the name. I asked if that was the one the shuttle would launch from. But I was interrupted by the man on purpose. He didn't want me to ask any specific questions.

The man pointed out the left window (the cargo plane was on our right), to a very modern-looking city below us. All the buildings seemed to be made of rings.

The city looked very small and like it was still under construction.

I tried to ask once again about the cargo plane, but it accelerated and gained altitude quickly. For one moment I felt like I was holding onto it or touching it before it flew away. It flew straight up into the sky. I cheered. But now we, too accelerated and gained altitude. We were traveling pretty much vertically.

The sky was clear and blue. Then it turned yellow and gauzed over with some greyish webs of clouds. As we continued upward, four fighter jets sped downward, vertically, beside us. Three weere sleek and black. I thought of them as SR-71s. I looked back to them, but I couldn't see them.

I might have been all by myself now, though I called to the man who had been speaking with us before. I felt like I was strapped into a "fighter" jet like an SR-71 or an X-15. I had been afraid to look back and see the ground disappearing below me at such a rate. But I thought, You're here now. Just go through with it.

Again four jets flew vertically down beside me. I couldn't tell if the three sleek jets were SR-71s. The sky was very grey and dark. I was heading for a tunnel of clouds, for a tube walled in layers of dark and light grey. At the end I could see the sun.

I told myself, I have to get to a certain height. If I get past this tube of heavy clouds, I'll be flying under clear, blue sky again. So even though I was afraid of what might happen, I just went with it. I passed through some of the clouds that made up the tube, as if they stuck out from the "walls." I felt them thudding against the jet like they were actually substantial. Everything got darker and darker.

I was outside of the jet, possibly just floating.

I was in a room that seemed to be made of clouds.

(Continued writing at Mangia, on 57th Street and 6th Avenue, at 6:34 AM.)

There was an incandescent light on the ceiling, and there were television sets encircling the walls.

I thought, I should be getting back. I need to get back to New York by XXXXX o'clock, and it's already --. I couldn't remember.

Each column of TV screens had a city name over it in gold lettering. I found New York over one of the columns, perhaps more than one column. Half the circle of televisions was turned off, and some of those columns may have had duplicate city names.

I saw that it was a certain time in New York, whatever time it needed to be for me to be back there. I thought, Still, it will be difficult for me to get back, simply because I was so high in the air, and I wouldn't be guaranteed I could direct myself down to the right location. Plus, it might have been storming and dark.

I could see my jet waiting for me somewhere. It was like an SR-71.

As I headed down to some small downward passage in the cloud room I saw a reflection of myself in a turned off television screen. I was a pretty, brunette girl, in the 50s pinup style, with pink, boy-short-like panties and a green bra. I stood looking at myself admiringly but also wondering how I was going to get back down to earth looking like this.

Dream 2

My grandpa had come to visit my house. I was saying goodbye to him when I remembered I had gotten him a gift. This whole time I had forgotten, but that was mainly what he had come here for.

I ran to the fridge and got the gift. It was two slices of some kind of "brownie" dessert and a plastic container with a tiny bit of some chicken and peppers in it. I thought this couldn't possibly be what I had gotten him, but I couldn't remember what else I could have gotten him. I thought there might have been a bottle of gin. I thought something about juniper berries.

I brought this all to my grandfather, who said, "You know what's happening to me. And all you bring me is this?  What kind of gift do you think this is?"

Dream 3

I was in my house, which I might have been sharing with my mom. The room I was in was empty. The light was off. There was a light from somewhere in the apartment, possibly from the hallway, like the door to the hallway had been left open and that was the only light coming into the house.

On one wall of the room was an opening, like a window, to another room, the floor of which was about three feet higher than the floor of the room I was in. This was apparently my friend R's dog's room. It was narrow and empty as well. But it was dirty. There was caked dust all over the place and scraps of paper. A white mouse lay dead and petrified on the floor. My friend's dog may have been there for a moment, but now she was gone. I thought, I need to clean this place.

I could hear my mom talking. I went to find her. She was in the kitchen (the lights were on there as well) speaking with a couple other people. We had all been drinking a sweet drink like coffee. I had finished mine.

The visitors were leaving. Someone, possibly my mom, had left a cup of the drink on the counter. It was in a deli coffee cup and only about one-fourth of the drink was left. Plus, the drink looked to be of worse quality than the one I had just finished, and it was already cold.

I took the drink anyway and walked into the dining room (which may just have been my bedroom), embarrassed with myself. As I did, I passed a line of garbage cans, all filled with trash. My mom said to the visitors, "I really have to take care of this trash today." She saw the visitors out the door. I stood at the dining table. I sat the drink down. There were garbage bags all over the place.

(5/8/07) a slam-dunk pig-roast

(Entered in my paper journal at 6:41 AM at the Starbucks on 56th Street and 6th Avenue.)

Dream 1

I had gone away from my boss BS and my co-worker DE (?) who were fighting against each other as some martial arts training. They would speak really quickly and then really slowly so that I could never understand them.

I had gone somewhere and was now coming back. BS and DE (who looked more like father and son) were playing basketball, but for the same kind of training as before. They were still talking fast then slow.

I thought I would get in the game by doing a slam dunk and showing BS and DE how good I was. But I jumped from way far back. I was at first uncertain whether I could sustain my leap. But I soon grew concerned whether I would be able to pull myself down in order to perform the slam dunk (with what ball?).

I floated way over the hoop, with BS and DE watching, up to the top of some evergreen tree. My toe touched the end of one of the branches, and I "leapt" from off that, to take a weird, curving route into a side yard (apparently we were in front of a house). The house and yard were enormous.

I landed and leapt again. I "leapt" in a squiggly pattern, following around, in the air, dishes of food that lay on the ground. A family who was "barbecueing" on the lawn suspected me of trying to eat their food. I was trying to convince them in my flight that I didn't care about their food.

I was sitting in a pit in the ground. It was dug in a cylinder. Some other people sat in there with me, possibly my mom or my friend PD. We were taking pieces of sandstone/flagstone, about six inches wide, roughly triangular, i.e.

and laying them on the bottom of the pit.

The pit must have been deep or it must have had deep holes in its floor. We had already laid layers of flagstone over the pit's holes. But the floor was not as tight as we needed it. Smoke rose through the floor and through the cracks beneath the flagstone. This meant that when water was poured in the pit it would fall through the floor and ruin the whole project. For some reason I felt like a roasted pig.

(5/9/07) what my life would have been like

(Entered in paper journal at 6:40 AM at the Starbucks on 56th Street and 6th Avenue.)

Dream 1

I was outside, on a wide road before a boxy, sheet-metal-looking building. The road made a wide, open curve to the left and up a small  hill to another building in the distance. The day was brightish and grey.

A large group of soldiers (in white uniforms?) marched down from the back building. Possibly some heavy vehicles were also in the procession. I had been walking toward the back building. I walked on the right side of the road (on the edge of some lawn at the other edge of which was a fence) to avoid the troops.

A vehicle like an SUV drove by with the first lady (Nancy Reagan?) in the front passenger (?) seat. I stood back and saluted. I then decided to hold my salute for everybody that passed.

A female soldier walked up to me and asked who my general (?) was. I stumbled and fumbled with my words before saying I wasn't in the military. She said, "Then relax! Don't salute. It doesn't make sense."

The soldier was now a slightly overweight girl, blonde, nice, still a soldier. We walked with everybody else into the boxy building, through a loading-dock-like opening at the bottom of a small slope. Inside was a broken up museum. Most of the relics were musty and dusty. Just a few of us were here.

A pretty, blonde girl rushed past me and the other girl rudely. The other girl had been trying to set me up with this blonde girl, but the blond girl had been very shy. It was now like we knew each other, and she had gone somewhere where I couldn't reach her.

Eight years had passed. I saw (was not in) a tech room of some sort. It had an old, bluish feel to it.

A tall, strong soldier sat in a chair and said something like, "I'm engaged to her, you know."

A young man with long hair stood up (from somewhere near the soldier's chair, as if from the same chair?) and said, "Oh -- I'm, sorry."

The soldier faded away, first into black and white, then stretching out of view like an old TV turning off.

The long-haired man stood at a desk, packing boxes. Two other young men who were clean-cut but looked like the long-haired man stood at another desk, packing boxes as well. They were each putting shoes (more like fire boots) into the boxes.

The long-haired man poured shredded boots, shredded into tiny bits, into his box. He said, "Eight years. That makes a lot of shoes. But I guess we had to go some time." Apparently the three men had to leave their jobs, or had made the decision to do so.

But one of the men, folding a boot to fit around the rest of the stuff in his box, said, "So -- what are we going to do tomorrow? Where are we going to go, after work, I mean?"

The long-haired man understood that his friends weren't leaving or planning on going anywhere. They were planning on living their regular lives, which included him, and getting stoned.

The long-haired man sat down in his desk, overwhelmed by how much of a child he had remained. He cried, "If I had only gone after her, how would my life have been different?"

The world faded to black. Now I was the man, in a trashy gym full of technical equipment. Strips of cloth were streaming everywhere, and the room would flash with a thick, blue-white light.

I was supposed to imagine three different scenarios. I had gone through the first. Now I was doing the second. I went after some skinny, bald man in a pink shirt. I wwas to see what life would have been like if I had spent my life with him.

I "woke up" in a house I owned. I thought, I'm still doing well in life, but I'm still immature. This isn't who I wanted to go after. I wanted to go after her, and see what my life would have been like.

(5/10/07) strawberry-flavored art criticism

(Entered in my paper journal at 6:40 AM at the Starbucks on 56th Street and 6th Avenue.)

Dream 1

I stood before a painting. R and L stood behind me and were talking about going to see the double-feature movie Grindhouse. I was happy that they would finally go see a movie I wanted to see.

I was painting on the canvas now, painting on black lines in between thick patches of color, browns, tans, etc. R and L complimented my work. I stood back and tried to explain what I had found incomplete in the painting.

The room was wide and empty, comfortably light and dim with natural light. L sat in a lovely velvet chair which had its back to me and which faced the painting. She crouched toward its back to look at me while she explained why she liked the artist of the painting.

I felt very complimented and relieved that L finally liked an artist that I liked. But I decided to stay tactfully quiet instead of screwing up the situation by annoying L with one of my insights.

The painting became one brown canvas. Then there was a Monet-like view of an ocean at sunset, just the ocean and the sky, with an orange profusion at the center of the horizon, and roiling greens, golds, yellows, pinks, oranges in both the ocean and sky.

I looked at L. Her face was being crawled over by little kids. I sat on the floor to L's left as she sat forward in the chair. She wasn't really sitting: her back was partly leaned over the back of the chair as little kids climbed all over her top.

One of the kids, an Asian girl, about two years old, was putting her fingers on a painting, which seemed to be a Caravaggio-style still life, but possibly of modern vases and candy dispensing machines.

I thought to tell the girl not to touch the painting, especially as her fingers seemed so sloppy. But I saw that she was pulling strawberries out of the painting, and this was how she got her food. The girl walked up to me (I was still sitting) and handed me a strawberry. It was small and narrow, almost rectangular. It felt rough and mineral in my hands and tasted both gardeny and sugary-sweet.

After I swallowed I threw both my  arms in the air and cried, "Stronger!" in a cartoony fashion. I thought this would make the girl want to eat more strawberries. She looked at me calmly for a second, like I had made a very good point. She then walked away from me, possibly back to the painting.

There was a table to my right. I sat by one of its thin, dark, brittle legs. At the bottom of the leg was a denim wrapping, like thick cuffs on jeans. A hole had been torn in the denim. I lay on my left side to look at it. The hole was bursting with strawberries. This is where the girl stored her food to eat later.

(5/11/07) disney's buddhist ways

(Entered in my paper journal at 6:40 AM at the Starbucks on 57th Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan before I went to work)

Dream 1

I was walking down a street while a guy who looked like a scraggly version of my co-worker SK followed me. The guy spoke on a cell phone. He made it obvious by what he said that he was following me.

I walked faster, but the guy stayed close behind me. He would make fun of me to the person on the phone because I was trying to escape.

I turned quickly into a building, then ran into an elevator. The man went with me. We were in some stairwell, trying to escape the notice of some security guard-type person. We were by the door to the stairwell. The door was old, musty wood. The whole stairwell was in awful shape, and all the crevices seemed caked like with salt or some smelly residue.

We had to keep the door slightly open or keep it unlocked somehow. We wanted to go down the stairs (to find a way out?), but we were afraid the door would lock and we would be trapped if this was the wrong way.

I found a toilet brush. The man stuck it between a thick layer of door frame on the floor and the door. I said, "Will this really hold?" The man was now a child, possibly an Asian boy. He said it would hold.

Time passed. I was an Asian girl in some nonexistent place, telling a group of people how I had figured out how to find the Asian boy again after so long of not having seen him.

As I spoke I saw a pretty girl (not me) playing something like tarot cards in a huge, warehouse-like building. She sat in a thin, wide puddle and lay the cards on the puddle, as if the cards floated flat on the surface of the puddle.

I told the people that if the boy was six when I knew him, I knew that XXXXX years (six years?) had passed, and he would thus be at one place where his life had been planned, and if he was thirteen when I knew him, then XXXXX (thirteen?) years had passed since I'd seen him, and he'd be at another place where it had been planned for him to be.

I "saw myself" speaking this in a pew in a cathedral-sized, wooden church, which was a "Buddhist temple."

The boy, now tall, with strange, blue eyes and a shaved head, wearing black pants and a black robe and a white undershirt, came up past some candle-covered altar and greeted me/the Asian girl.

The boy walked away. I watched as he developed as a monk. He grew slightly fatter as an adult. He walked in a room full of dark, wooden columns. He walked up a tall staircase and may have been youngish and thinnish again. He became some kind of showy white person, and the staircase became a Broadway-style staircase.

Then the view became a weird Pixar-style view, full of characters, all of which were strange, globby, multicolored characters like globs of toothpaste and shaving cream. They sped all over a Gumby-type world of toy-like objects on a white floor with an eternal white-walled atmosphere.

I thought something like, They've taken the Buddhist ways and changed even them into something like Disney.