Wednesday, April 18, 2012

hands off my smartphone

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a McDonald's, probably during the late afternoon. The sunlight streaming in through the windows was a really intense, raspy yellow. I sat at one of the long booths against a wall. Nobody else was in the booth with me, all the way along the wall. But I probably felt like I was with other people, a group of people, maybe teenagers, who were kind of annoying to me, even though they may have liked me. I may have been trying to eat something chickeny or fishy, like a chicken strip or something.

I was now on a bus. But the bus' seating was almost like the seating for a large airplane. There were three rows of seats, at least. I sat near the back, near the right hand side of the bus. The atmosphere of the bus was grey, with grey seats that had reddish patterns on them. Whole TVs (I guess) were inset into molded fixtures that jutted down from the ceiling of the bus.

I was typing out a dream on my phone. The format for the blog I was posting onto was kind of weird. It looked like a form. There were a number of different, small blanks. I may have had to fill different parts of my dream into the different blanks.

I was remembering my dream as I wrote it down. I had been thinking of a dialogue I'd had in the dream with some woman. I'd mostly been writing the dialogue as a discussion of what we'd said, rather than the actual speech. But now I remembered that I had actually heard something the woman had said. So I decided to quote it.

I erased a part of the text that I'd entered into one of the small form-blanks. I tried to replace the text with the statement "Then she said, '". But I messed up somehow and entered a capital B, then the opening quotes. I tried to erase this and redo it. But I may have messed up again.

A kind of tall, fat, white man sitting to my left began grabbing at my phone. The man had a short, stubble-scraggly beard and kind of messy red-brown hair. He wore a black, leather jacket and small, rectangular lensed sunglasses. He said something like, "What are you doing there, writing a blog?" But he said it in a kind of mocking way. It was plain he just wanted to take my phone and screw around with it, just to mess with me.

I fumbled away from the man, almost dropping my phone. The man wouldn't stop coming at my phone, though. He reached at me and said stuff in a kind of mocking tone about how I wasn't any good at manipulating the format of the blog.

I got mad at the man and told him to leave me and my phone alone. The man wouldn't really listen to me. I was a little scared by the guy constantly reaching at me. This was stopping me from getting very loud. But the bus was full of people. I figured that if I could yell, I could attract the attention of other people, who might try to stop the man, or at least stare at him until he was too ashamed to continue bugging me.

So I managed to get my emotions together and haltingly shout out, as if I were addressing the other passengers more than the man, "Get your hands off my phone!"

Everybody looked back at me. They seemed to be more shocked that I had the audacity to shout on a crowded bus than they were that somebody would be lunging at my phone. But I was encouraged by having gotten their attention. So I continued yelling "at the man." I made my statement a little more of an offensive statement against the man this time. The only reaction it got from the other passengers, though, was a few chuckles.

The man kept coming at me. He really wanted to take my phone and mess around with it. He just kept grabbing and grabbing at me.

I stood up now, frustrated as hell. I wasn't counting on the other passengers to help me. But I yelled anyway, in hopes that they would help me. But again my shout was violent: "If you don't stop grabbing at me, I'm gonna give you a black eye!"

The crowd all laughed loudly now. It was like they actually approved of everything the man was doing to me. I really wanted to hit the man. But I didn't know if I could hurt him. And if I did hurt him, I thought, everybody on the bus would just turn against me and blame me for being violent.

I sat back down. But as soon as I did, the man started grabbing at me again. Finally, an Asian man sitting across the aisle from the man grabbed the man and shook him by his left shoulder. The Asian man was kind of clean-cut, possibly wearing business clothes. He was apparently the fat man's friend. But while shaking the man, he shouted in an annoyed voice, "Come on man, stop it! I told you already. It's twenty!"

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