soldier's complaint; table of contents; hello family; big mac sandwich

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was daytime. I was standing outside some building like a short, brick school building. I was in line with a bunch of other people. There may have been a few lines of us, all heading toward the doors of this school-like building.

I was with a friend, possibly a woman about my age or a bit younger. My friend and I were talking about something, possibly whatever it was we were in line for. But suddenly I realized that whatever we were in line for was about to start. I needed to hurry through the line!

I hurried through the line. But it wasn't like I was pushing through the line. Instead, it was like the line was just some kind of long, disorganized grouping in front of the doors. I was just walking through this group of people. They didn't even seem to notice me.

There were two sets of doors. I got through both. I was now in the lobby of the building. Just inside the lobby were security guards or police officers doing security inspections on people. With the security activity and the bustling about of people in the lobby, the lobby seemed really busy with people.

A black security officer stopped me. He asked me to open my bag. Apparently I'd been carrying some canvas bag on my shoulder. After looking through my bag, the man asked me to come with him.

The man walked me over to some area just past the lobby, where there was a lot less activity. The man was now Hispanic. He was heavyset and he had graying hair and eyebrows. He was wearing an Army uniform that looked like it was from a few decades ago. The man had a helmet that had netting over it. And he had a rifle with a bayonet on it.

The man took off his helmet. He scratched his hair and played with his helmet -- somehow doing something with his bayonet, maybe scratching his hair with it or hanging his helmet on it. The man then started complaining to me about his boss. His boss was some beautiful, business-like woman. But she was so concerned about something, maybe costs. It was really starting to weigh down on everything everybody was doing here.

The man's boss walked up from behind me. The man, seeing the boss coming, asked me not to tell the boss about how the man had just been complaining.

Dream #2

There was some sort of sketch comedy show or humorous book. The theme of the book was how some politician was messing everything up. The sketches were mainly supposed to be funny. But they all dealt with subject matter that the author felt was very serious. So the sketches were eventually supposed to work up to having really serious, kind of dark overtones.

I was looking at something like a table of contents for all these sketches. It seemed like there were two main kinds of sketches. The sketches may have been about two different political themes or about two different political candidates. It looked like, within these themes, there were a whole bunch of sketches.

I looked closer at the sketches. I followed the development of the sketches for one of the themes in the table of contents. For some reason I started toward the end, or maybe the middle, of the table of contents and worked my way backwards.

I saw, as I worked backwards, that a lot of the earlier sketches didn't actually exist. They simply referred the reader (or the performer of the sketches?) to the later sketches. But the later sketches also referred to later sketches.

As I continued reading backwards, I saw how the table of contents was something more like a path of logic or classification. The sketches weren't all supposed to be performed together. They were supposed to be performed for given situations. So if a performer saw that a certain political situation had occurred today, the performer would consult the table of contents. The table of contents would lead him through certain classificatory steps to determine exactly what sketch he should perform.

But all of the earlier sketches were referring to later sketches. And all the later sketches, I eventually noticed, were referring to only one sketch. So, really, for this entire theme, for which there appeared to be so many sketches, there seemed to be really only one sketch.

I stood back from the table of contents. I now saw how many of the "chapters" in the table of contents were really nothing more than one-line commands for someone to refer to another "chapter," then another "chapter," before reaching the single sketch.

The same idea may have applied to the second theme of the book. I may have tried to figure out whether it did. In doing so, however, I may have caught a glimpse of some other pages in the table of contents.


It appeared that I'd only looked through the first half of the table of contents. It seemed like in the second half, the table of contents became a lot more varied and interesting. The "sketches," though, from what I saw, looked somewhat like mathematical formulae or computer programs, sometimes.

But, for some reason, after having come to such an interesting and cynical conclusion about the first half of the table of contents, I couldn't quite accept that the second half was actually so much better. I think I had come to believe I was smarter and more creative than whoever had created this book.

Now that I saw the second half actually looked varied and interesting, I didn't want to look. I didn't want to have to refashion my ideas about what kind of person had created this book. So I didn't look closely at the second half. I may actually even have shut the book and turned away from it.

Dream #3

I may -- possibly -- have been in a car with my mom. I may have been crouched down in the back seat, on the passenger side, with my back laid on the seat bottom and my head curled up on the seat back. My knees may have been crunched up against the back of the seat. We may have been driving through (?) a warehouse. We may have been trying to avoid someone, maybe cops, maybe criminals.

I was now walking into my family's house. A couple of my nephews were inside. My brother was also there, laying curled up in a big, padded chair. When my nephews saw me walk in, they cheerfully greeted me. My brother looked up and said something like, "Oh, hey, how's it going?"

Dream #4

A documentary about a woman who had done something kind of revolutionary, but in a very kind of homey, middle-America way. Whatever she'd done probably had something to do with saving the environment.

Now the documentary crew was in the kitchen of the woman's house. The woman was standing behind a breakfast bar, and the camera was filming the woman with a shot that started from before the breakfast bar, then worked around the breakfast bar and got into a closeup of the woman's face from inside the kitchen.

The woman had been asked what kind of food she ate, or maybe what kind of food she fixed for her family. She said, "Red meat."

A quiet voice off-camera could be heard to ask, a little incredulously, "Red meat?"

The woman said, "Yeah. People are always surprised by that. They think that, because I did such an environmental thing, I'm supposed to be this big vegetarian. But I'm not. I feed my family red meat a whole lot of the time. In fact, the meal I'm making today is one of my favorites. And it has red meat in it. It's called Big Mac Sandwiches."

The camera showed a microwave that appeared to be suspended over the stove. The front of the microwave was black. The microwave had finished cooking. The woman opened the door of the microwave and pulled something out. It may have looked to me like a clear, glass mixing-bowl full of raw beef.

The woman then sat a tray down on the kitchen table. The tray had green salsa and sour cream on it. The tray sat next to a bunch of homey stuff that cluttered up the table in a comfortable, not messy, way. One or more of the documentary people sat down at the table.

The woman now sat the glass bowl down on the table. I could now see that the bowl was full of something like noodles and pasta sauce. The noodles were flat, wide, and short. The pasta sauce was mixed all around the noodles, so that the whole thing had a reddish tint to it.

I was seeing from the camera's angle still. But I think I also had the feeling that I was sitting at the table. The woman showed the documentary people how you scooped some of the pasta onto a hamburger bun. I assumed that you were then supposed to scoop some sour cream and salsa onto the bun and then close the bun. But the woman didn't do this.

The woman then said, "This is what I call the Big Mac Sandwich." I then realized that "Big Mac" was a joke. It was a play on the word "macaroni," since pasta, or macaroni, was used in the sandwich. "Big Mac Sandwich" really meant "Big Macaroni Sandwich."

***

UPDATE: A discussion of some of the images from these dreams can be found at this entry of my dreamday journal.


UPDATE 2: Added drawing for dream #1, July 10th, 2012, 9:47 AM Mountain Standard Time.