Dream #1
I was in a grocery store. I was possibly near the back end of the store, on the left side of the store (as a person would face the store from front to back). The aisles near me seemed to be in disarray, like they were being rearranged, or like new stock had come in and was being added to the shelves.
There were a few workers in the area that was disorganized. One of them was a tall, white man, probably young, even though his face looked a little worn-out. This man was probably the manager. I had probably been afraid of interacting with the workers. They seemed really boisterous, and I was afraid that they'd start making fun of me if I got too close to them.
But the manager walked up to me. He said, not as if he was saying it to me, but as if he were saying it to his friends, but loud enough that I could hear, "Weird Al loves this place." I knew that the manager meant the comedy singer "Weird Al" Yankovic. I didn't think it could be true that Weird Al even came to this grocery store, let alone that he could love the store. So I thought that somehow the manager had found out that I liked Weird Al, and that he was just saying this to impress me.
But the manager motioned me to come along with him to the back room. The back room was really small, for a grocery store. The man told me that he seriously meant that Weird Al came to this store a lot, and that he really loved the place.
I was now a worker for the store. Perhaps I had been this whole time. The manager brought me back out into the main area. We were all alone in the side aisle now. The place was still cluttered up. There were even big boxes running across the aisles, slanted diagonally from the floor of one side of the aisle to the top of the other side of the aisle. The boxes were thin, like they might have carried poles or fluorescent bulbs in them.
The manager was walking backward as I walked forward. He was speaking to me excitedly. He said, "In fact, Weird Al is just now coming back from a concert tour. He'll be coming in here one of these nights. We already have a cake made for him."
In my mind's eye I could see a round, white cake with red words on the top. I had to walk either under or over one of the tall, slanting boxes that took up the aisle. As I did so, a bright flash of light probably filled my view.
The man continued, asking me, "What else do you think Weird Al would like? What do you think he would like to hear from us?"
We were now at the front of the store. The window walls of the store probably showed that it was dark outside. The store was basically empty of customers. There was a long expanse of checkout lines. The manager stopped at the registers nearest us. A couple of blonde girls had a couple of registers, and the manager needed to check in on the girls.
I walked down a few registers. There was another blonde girl. But her hair was shorter, and she looked less girly, more tomboyish, than the other two girls. I was a little attracted to her. She seemed to be wearing a kind of dumpy uniform, more like the 1980s style of uniform for Burger King than a modern uniform for a grocery store.
I don't know whether we talked, but we seemed to have some kind of interaction. I may have stood into the register beside her, as if I were going to start working that register. But then I walked away again. I had a big, fat book in my hand. I lay it down, probably on the woman's register, but possibly on my own.
I turned around and walked back toward the registers where the manager had been seeing to the other girls. Apparently a shift change was occurring. Some girls were counting the money in their registers, while other girls were putting their own new cash tills into the cash registers.
One of the blonde girls ran up from behind me to tell the manager that she was only sixty-five cents off on her register. She seemed really happy about this, as if, for all the time she'd been working here, she'd never been able to balance her register so well.
I had been -- at some point! -- carrying a paper coffee cup, like from a coffee shop. But now all I was holding was the heat-protector sleeve. I wanted to get rid of it. So I tore it up into tiny pieces. I walked past a thin column in the store. There was a small, white, plastic garbage can, like for use at an office desk. I tossed the shreds of paper in there. But when I looked, the garbage bag was empty, other than my shreds of paper and a ten dollar bill!
I thought that one of the cashier girls must have dropped ten dollars out of their register. I thought that somebody's register would come up really short. I thought that somebody would definitely get in trouble for that. But I didn't call attention to the ten dollars. I'm not sure why. I just noted it, looked up, and kept walking.
I walked back up the aisle I had come from. But now the aisle was clear, with no clutter or boxes. I walked all the way to the back of the store, then turned to walk toward the right side of the store. But as I walked, I realized I probably needed to head back to the registers. I have left my book -- which I now knew was Jim Marrs' Trillion Dollar Conspiracy -- laying on the woman's cash register conveyor belt. I couldn't just leave my book sitting there. I needed to go back for it before I could continue walking around the store.
Dream #2
I was in an apartment. The apartment unit was on the ground floor, but it may actually have been two stories tall. But the apartment was also something more like a hotel. It was obtained only for short periods of time. Either I had gotten the hotel, or some other person had gotten it and was having me watch the place, since I had nowhere to live.
It was night. The photo and video artist Laurel Nakadate had just entered the apartment. We stood just in front of the door, in a space between the living room and a dining area. I was probably holding blankets and a pillow. Nakadate was kind of tall. She was wearing a tight, black tank top and tight, brown pants, maybe of some kind of suede-like material. Her hair was a little bit disheveled.
Nakadate had probably come here for the night. She knew I had this place, and I'd probably told her she could use it. But I was trying to keep the details of the place, and of my life overall, secret from her. I didn't have a job anymore, and this place was only temporary. In fact, I didn't know what I would do once I had to leave this place. I didn't want Nakadate to know any of this about me. I felt like, if she knew, she'd reject me as a worthless person.
Nakadate and I had a conversation about something I can't remember. It was a very calm and natural conversation, but I can't remember what it was about. But all through the conversation, I did my best to conceal my situation and to act like everything was just fine.
We agreed that Nakadate would go take care of something, maybe taking a shower?, and that we'd then meet in the bedroom just past the living room. I could see the light on in the bedroom. I walked through the living room and into the bedroom.
My ex-girlfriend H, who had taken the place of Nakadate, was sitting on the bed, waiting for me. The bed was set along the back wall. H was watching a TV, which was set along the opposite wall. The bed H sat on was like a bed that had a second, pull-out bed in its underside. The lower bed was pulled out just enough so that H could use it either as a seat cushion, like the bed was a couch, or like a footrest, with the top mattress being used as a seat cushion. The rest of the room was completely empty.
I sat down beside H. She may have been eating a cup of ramen. I "watched TV" with H, even though I'm not sure I actually saw a TV at all. I may just have been staring at a blank wall. H and I began having some conversation, which may also have had to do with my living arrangements.
My thoughts drifted into a woman talking about the living arrangements she and her husband had. The woman seemed to be a 1950s kind of woman, even though I'm not sure what time period she really lived in. The woman and her husband both had very similar professions. And whatever the man and woman did, they liked to travel while doing it. They especially liked living in the mountains.
So, the woman explained, the man and the woman opted to get a kind of extremely modular house. The houses were cheaper than normal houses. They were also much smaller than normal houses. But the man and woman didn't like having a lot of space. They preferred having freedom. The houses were good for this. They could be picked up or dropped off by the buyers very easily, wherever they needed to go.
However, the woman had lately found that the couple's finances weren't stable enough for the couple to afford the modular houses. So the woman was having to take her modular house back to the modular house store. All she did, actually, was get on a bicycle, to the front of which was attached the modular house, and pedal it down a mountain road. The house was so light that the woman could just pedal it away.
The woman rode along a beautiful, undulating mountain road that was lined with pine trees and fields of yellow flowers. The sky was blue, marbled with wisps of white cirrus clouds. The woman was pale, and she wore a pale, rusty-tan dress, in the 1950s style, very understated, with thin buttons running down the blouse, and the skirt belling out just a bit, going down all the way to the ankles. The woman's red-brown hair was done in a short, elegant style.
The woman was "narrating" over this view. She said that this wasn't unusual for her and her husband. They would often take their modular houses back to the store when they felt they couldn't afford them. (I'm not sure what they did when they didn't have houses. Did they camp?) But, eventually, the husband would start to feel good about his life and finances again. Then the couple would go out and get another modular home. After a while, the woman would see that the couple's finances could no longer support their having a modular home. And the couple would take the modular home back to the shop.
The woman looked very cheerful. And her narration had a cheerful tone. But it was evident that the woman was distressed about the couple's financial situation. The woman probably wished that the husband would find some way of being more responsible.
I now got a better view of the modular home. It didn't look like much of a home at all. It was a wooden structure, like it was made out of old shipping pallets, or out of rough-hewn, wooden boards. I don't think I could make out much of a house-like structure to the construction. And it looked really small, maybe not more than three meters long and wide, and not more than a meter or a meter and a half tall.
Nevertheless, it still looked really heavy. I wondered how the woman could just bike it all the way down to town, especially on a mountain road like this. The woman, in "narration," cheerfully answered that most of the ride was downhill anyway, that the modular home was small and light, and that the modular home actually was even lighter than it already looked.
I watched the woman from the crest of a hill. As the woman seemed to be coming round a bend, something happened. I could tell ahead of time that the woman was going to crash. She did. The bike and the modular home wound off onto the shoulder of the road. The woman flew off the bike and landed face down in a patch of pink flowers. I thought the woman was dead. But apparently she was alive. I probably heard the woman, in narration, explaining why the crash hadn't hurt so much. But she hadn't stood up yet.
My view panned up the slope. I drifted along the road, back up to the spot where the modular home used to be. But the modular home was still there. I now heard the husband's voice in narration. But it was like the husband's voice was my voice as well, or, actually, more like my thoughts and feelings were controlling the husband's voice, which was a lot more dignified than my voice. I could also see an image of the husband in my mind's eye: a 1940s style photo of a handsome young man in military dress uniform.
The husband/I was explaining how he/I wasn't planning on getting rid of the modular home. The wife had always been anxious about finances. But the husband/I had a feeling that the couple's finances would be fine soon enough. The husband/I felt like everything was going to be okay, so there was no reason to get rid of the modular home.
The modular home was built on a square deck of wood. At each corner of the square stood a wooden pillar, kind of like a tower. In the center of the wooden deck stood the house itself. The house was rather small, almost like a child's playhouse. Its walls were square, but its roof may have been rounded, or teardrop-shaped. The whole thing was made out of rough-hewn wood. The design may have reminded me of a miniature version of the Taj Mahal.
I may have thought that this little place was definitely not big enough for me an H (or for me and Laurel Nakadate?). I thought that I would definitely want to keep the modular house. But I would probably want to change the model for one that used the space of the plot a little bit better, i.e. one that incorporated more of the deck space into the interior of the house.
I may have heard the woman's narration again, or I may have heard some other woman's voice in narration. It was like the woman was acting as a real estate agent, or a modular home sales agent. She was supporting all of my feelings regarding keeping the modular home and possibly trading into a new home.
Dream #3
I stood out in some mountain landscape, in a valley full of golden grass. The golden grass was filled in places with pockets of white snow. I had apparently journeyed a long way to get here. I still had a great deal of journeying left to do. I may have remembered a conversation I'd had with an old man before I'd started this journey. The man may have been tall, slim, bald, dressed in an old-fashioned pinstripe suit of very dark material.
Dream #4
I had been discussing a number of images with an old man. It was like I was in a dream, trying to rehearse all the elements of the dreams I'd had over the course of the night. I reached the end of the sequence of images, and I was kind of surprised by them. There was some sort of unity to them I hadn't expected. I think this unity had to do with celebrities.
But the dream images all clouded over -- like they had been drawn over with heavy amounts of crayon! It was like a succession of images piled over the images I'd just organized in my head. A chain-link fence clouded over everything: the chain-link fence being shaded all through with opaque browns, greys and greens. Then a man's head, also colored with heavy, dark colors, appeared before the chain-link fence. Then another chain-link fence. Then another man's head.
***
UPDATE: A discussion of some of the images in these dreams can be found at this entry of my dreamday journal.
UPDATE 2: Added two drawings to second dream, July 25, 2012, 3:18 PM, Mountain Standard Time.
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