Dream #1
I was cleaning a recently vacated hotel with a young woman. The hotel room was really big. It looked more like a big living room in a house. But it was kind of dim and run down. It was cluttered with all kinds of personal belongings, more like you'd expect in a home. The room was on the ground floor. The front door was open, letting in a bit of bright summer light.
I stood on the far side of the bed, in a small space between the bed and the wall. The young woman stood on the other side of the bed, possibly rifling around through papers on a desk or something. I noticed that on the right (my right) wall there was a little niche, with a little space created for a wet bar. On the bar was a tray with tall glasses full of liquor. The liquor, I knew, was Johnny Walker. But it had been dumped into something like chocolate milk.
I grabbed one of the glasses and started to drink the liquor. Either the young woman or I myself may have started to wonder whether I should really be doing that. I didn't know if I should really be drinking any liquor right now. But I also didn't know whether it was considered stealing if I drank stuff that people had left out after they'd vacated the place.
Dream #2
I was down in the basement area of a big building. I was walking through an area with a lot of janitorial supplies. The light was a very dim, very green fluorescent. As I was about to reach a doorway into another room, someone called from behind me.
I turned around to see who it was. It was a very skinny, frightened looking person. He was all bundled up, so at first I couldn't see who he was. But then I realized it was Michael Jackson. But he was in disguise. I don't even think he wanted me to know it was him.
Michael asked if I could lead him to some place, I can't remember where. I said I could. We walked through the doorway. I started thinking about leading Michael Jackson around. I was pretty excited. But I didn't want to show that I was excited. I didn't even want to show that I knew it was Michael.
I was also a little worried that I'd act like a big know-it-all, which is a major fault of mine when I'm leading groups. Usually it turns out that I don't know anything at all. I didn't want to act like a know-it-all in front of Michael Jackson. And I didn't want to turn out not knowing anything at all in front of Michael Jackson. So I was just trying to be as careful as possible with everything I did.
Dream #3
I had been walking around in some town for a little while. But now I had sat down for a moment to take a rest. It was a nice, sunny day. I was on the downside of some steep slope, looking across the street at a block of small shops. There were a decent amount of people walking up and down the slope.
I had kind of lost myself in thought -- possibly coming up with an idea for a story to write, or something like that. But now I realized that I'd been sitting in one place for too long. If you did that, I thought, people would start to think you were a vagrant. They'd get the police after you.
So I stood up and walked down the slope. I knew that I was headed somewhere in particular. Wherever I was going, money would be needed. I had to grab my money, ID, and phone out of my purse (???) or bookbag.
But when I pulled my bag around in front of me and began rifling through it, I heard somebody marching up from behind me with a very violent-sounding step. I thought that someone saw I had money and that they were going to mug me. So I turned all the way around and walked off the sidewalk, so I could get a clear view of the person.
The person was a black woman, maybe in her early forties, with short hair done in a squarish cut, with flowing curls. She was wearing clothing that somehow indicated she was in the military. I realized that the woman's walk was just a brisk, military-style walk. But the woman also realized that she had frightened me with her walk. She gave me a little apology. I told her not to worry about it.
I felt the need to follow the woman. She headed toward a building that was only a few steps away from us. It was, I knew, some kind of military building. The woman was a building inspector for the military.
As soon as we reached the building, the woman began her inspection. Before we even got in the door, the woman found a fault. The doors were automatic doors, the old swinging-door kind, like in old grocery stores. But there was some sort of issue with the caulking somewhere on the ground in front of the doors.
The woman groaned a bit and said something like, "Oh no. Already?" I don't think she liked giving places bad reviews. But I think she knew she'd have to give this place one.
As we walked through the automatic doors, I was trying to get a closer look at the woman. I was trying, I think, to find out what branch of the military she was in. But now she was wearing a black jacket with yellow lettering on the back. It seemed only vaguely related to the military. I was pretty sure she was wearing a military uniform. So I thought if I could just look at her front, I could tell from her uniform what branch she was in.
But as soon as we got inside the center, the woman quickly bustled away. The center had the same kind of atmosphere as an old, run-down post office. But it was almost completely empty. At the back of the room were some counters with plexiglass window-walls to protect the workers who dealt with the customers. And at the front of the room may have been a wooden bench.
The woman called out to someone at the back of the room that she was here for the inspection. The person acknowledged the woman. The woman walked to the opposite wall of the room and went in through a door over there.
I figured I'd wait for the woman. Just inside the room, just to the right of the automatic doors, was a TV. The TV hung from the ceiling, which was maybe three and a half meters high. Three old people stood huddled together, watching the TV. I think it was two women and a man. Something about the old people being here made me think that this place was a center for military veterans. It was like a place where they came to pick up their benefits, or else have some sense of community.
The TV reception was really bad. But the old people must have been watching the TV, because I'm pretty sure they were mumbling back and forth with each other about the show they were watching. But when the reception got so bad that the screen was nothing but a bunch of liquidy static, I turned off the TV. Apparently I was holding the remote control for the TV. I thought the old people would much rather have the TV off than have it all staticky.
The old people didn't reproach me for turning off the TV. They simply started mumbling among themselves about how they'd really been looking forward to some TV show. Feeling kind of bad, I turned the TV back on. I began flipping through the channels, trying to find one for the old people that wasn't all staticky.
But somehow the old people made me understand that I wasn't supposed to find a channel that wasn't staticky. I was supposed to fix the TV so that the channels generally wouldn't be staticky. The remote control was some kind of bulky box. It had wheel-knobs on it. I was supposed to spin those to adjust the reception and control of the TV image.
I must have gotten to a point where the image was alright for basically any channel. It was night outside. It may even have been snowing. Something about the light in the center may even have felt like Christmas lights.
I asked the old people what they wanted to watch. They all said they'd been watching a cooking show with some famous chef. They just kept telling me, in a kind of half-hearted, mumbly way, "Find us the channel where the chef is cooking liver."
I flipped through a few different channels. One channel was a cowboy movie. There were a few cooking show channels. Then I finally found a channel where someone was cooking liver. The "liver" was two wide, flat pieces of meat bubbling in a frying pan full of grease. The meat looked like seared pieces of Spam. But it was also a little grainy-looking, like the grease it was cooking in was accumulating on the surface of the meat.
The old people were trying to figure out if this was the correct show. One of them said, "Does the liver look scrumbly?" "Scrumbly" was apparently some nonsense word that meant cute, even cuddly, but in a way directly related to food.
Another old person said, "Oh, yeah. That looks scrumbly. He's cooking the food really scrumbly."
"Then this is the right show, if the food looks scrumbly."
I watched the liver frying in the pan. I may have been watching the show really closely by this time, just trying to figure out, I think, how the heck you determined whether food looked "scrumbly."
Dream #4
I walked into some big room. I had come from a back area, possibly a back hallway or a room full of supplies. The room was like a big convention room in a hotel. But it may have felt like it opened directly outside.
The room was being used, at least for today, as something like a coffee shop. There was a line of folding tables set up across the back of the room. The tables would be coffee-serving areas. But there may also have been other items on the tables, such as t-shirts. I was apparently one of the people who'd be working this event, serving people coffee and so forth. The event hadn't started yet. We were still getting everything set up.
I was standing behind the table, working with a young man. The young man was white, kind of pale, and skinny. He was either working fast or giving the appearance of working fast. There was a young woman, whom I eventually may have thought of as my old friend Y, in front of the table. She was kind of like the manager of this event.
The young man told us how, earlier that day, he had seen some really big celebrity. I can't remember if the young man had been excited at all. But we somehow got talking about being excited around celebrities, but not really showing it.
I said, "The only celebrity I think I'd get really giddy around -- and I just couldn't avoid it -- would be... Janet Jackson."
By this time the young man was no longer paying attention to the conversation. I got the impression that he'd really only mentioned his celebrity sighting to impress our manager, because she was a girl.
I tried to explain to the manager how I really had a crush on Janet Jackson. So if I saw her, I probably wouldn't be able to hold back about my crush on her.
I continued, "For instance, today I met --"
I suddenly didn't want to say out loud in front of everybody that I'd met Michael Jackson. But, thankfully, the manager (as if she were trying not to pay attention to the conversation), walked into the back area. The manager was the only person I wanted to tell. So I followed her into the back area.
The manager had walked behind a couple of wheeled garbage cans and was standing between a floor-level mop sink and a regular, metal-basin sink. I followed the manager to that point. I myself kind of felt like a woman now. I felt like I was wearing all kinds of clothing, like a head covering and everything. I had my hands folded together like I was praying. And I was quivering with the girlish pleasure of gossip.
I told my manager, "Just today, I met Michael Jackson. He needed help getting somewhere. And I knew it was him. But he was disguised. He was trying to act like he really wasn't Michael Jackson. But I had to lead him somewhere. But I just acted really calm about it."
My manager said, "Yeah... What I'd tell you is that... if someone is all disguised and they're trying to act like they're not somebody, then you have one of two possibilities. One possibility is that they really are that person, and that they're just disguised. The other possibility is that they really aren't that person, and they're just trying to act like they are."
I understood that the manager meant that, in the case of Michael Jackson, there were so many rumors about him walking around disguised, that people had started walking around in "Michael Jackson disguise" disguises. So if you met someone you thought was Michael Jackson in disguise, it was probably just a Michael Jackson impersonator.
I asked the manager, "So... in this case..?"
The manager said, "In this case, I'd say it was definitely not Michael Jackson."
***
UPDATE: Added drawing for dream #2, July 16, 2012, 2:11 PM, Mountain Standard Time.
No comments:
Post a Comment