Sunday, August 12, 2012

for and against clients; life towels

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was possibly in an office. The office was dim, lit mostly by colored spotlights, like a stage or a dance club. There was some special event going on to honor the members of a company. It was like the company was the client of the company I was working for. But we weren't celebrating the company just because they were our client, but because they had passed a serious milestone in their history.

I sat in a cubicle in a central area of the room. I had a computer, and probably some boards of technical controls. Before me was a wall. But most of the wall was cleared away, like it was supposed to be a window wall. I could see another cubicle on the other side of the wall. I could possibly see another few cubicle. It was like I sat in a column of cubicles in the center of this office-like room, like this central column was a supporting pillar for the building.

Along the walls of the room were booth-seats. People sat in the booth seats. These people were more important than the people in the cubicles. Another man sat in a cubicle to my right. He was giving a big toast, mentioning everybody in the company he thought had really contributed to the company's great achievement. He would say a person's name, then give a brief description of the person, either what kind of person the person was or what the person had done for the company.

I knew there was one woman in particular, a blonde woman in her late forties, who I felt deserved a lot of praise. She was one of the company's co-founders. I felt she should have been among the first to receive praise. But the man listed a few more people, then conspicuously stopped. I realized he really wasn't going to mention the woman. I looked at the man's face (apparently I had an open wall to my right, now, too). He was glowering bitterly at the woman.

I had a feeling the man had just blown off the woman because he didn't like the fact that she as a woman was so powerful in business. I felt like I needed to stand up for the woman. But the man who had been announcing things was a key figure in the company. So he was also a client, and therefore not subject to criticism.

But I couldn't help myself. I stood up and called out, "You forgot to honor somebody, didn't you? You forgot to honor her. Why don't you say a few words about her at least?"

Everybody in the room gasped. I knew I had done something stupid. If I made this guy mad, he could pull out his business. We could lose our client. But I still couldn't help feeling like it was right to have ignored the woman.

I went about my work like nothing had happened, even though everybody now seemed to be staring constantly at me. I went into some other cubicle and began hooking up a computer system. The cubicle had no lights on, but a grey-white fluorescent light was shining through a window-like space. I had to set a CPU in a specific place, then loop the cord around the edge of a desk. This seemed like a really clever technical task to me.

I then stood up. I walked to where the woman was sitting. I asked her to come with me. I was going to force the man to say something about the woman by having the woman stand face to face with the man. I was pretty angry, but I tried to hide my anger. I tried to make the woman feel good about herself. I asked her, "What's it like, you know, watching this thing go from a little baby into a fifty billion dollar company?"

As we passed my desk, and I threw a white towel on it, the woman replied, "Oh, it's pretty surreal. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that we actually did it."

We walked around into the man's cubicle, which was now completely dark. But when I approached the man and demanded he say a few words to the woman, a purple spotlight appeared on the man's face.

The man set his jaw tightly in anger and said, "I see you in the future, going to another business, making a quick 4.5 grand," (which meant $4.5 billion) "but not without a good amount of debt. But even after the debt, you'll be in good shape. You'll probably spend the rest of your life with that money..." the man then mentioned something he thought the woman would do, something the man thought was absurd, like donating to charity or art funds, or even becoming an artist herself.

I walked back to the booth seats with the woman. I thought to myself that that idea had backfired on me. I'd tried to get the man to say something nice to the woman. All he did was imply a few indifferent and negative things about her.

The room of booth seats was now filled with natural light, like there were windows over the seats and it was daytime. The room also had a hazy feel to it, like I was very bleary-eyed. I saw my old boss CR off in a booth seat to my right, talking and laughing with a couple clients. The woman sat down. I sat down to the woman's right. The woman seemed upset. I couldn't blame her.

The man now came and sat to my right. He was wearing a white, beach-style shirt with multicolored floral prints and khaki shorts. I thought he was going to say something nasty to me. But he muttered in my ear, "Hey, man, tell your boss he's gotta watch his hair. Otherwise he's going to start poking the people around him."

I wondered what the man could be talking about. I looked over to my boss. I saw that he had run his fingers through his hair, and that thick, swirled, spiky locks of hair really were coming about one or two inches off from his head. I realized the guy was trying to joke with me, even though he had sounded a bit sullen when he'd made the comment.

The man started talking to me a little more freely about the company. But something about his attitude, maybe the fact that he still wasn't regarding the woman, made the woman stand up and walk away. I sat frozen, not really knowing how to react.

The man said, "Do you feel like going after her? You want to defend her. I can tell. Do you like her? Would you like to be with her? I think she'd be with you, if you wanted. She might like you, too."

I started feeling a little shy. I hadn't realized the woman liked me, and I hadn't really thought about whether I might like her.

Dream #2

I was out in some open area, near the top of a hill, with my mom. The area around us was like a dirt lot, or like land that had been cleared for development. The sun was shining behind some thin clouds, giving the sky a silvery-white appearance.

We had just departed from my grandfather (who died about four years ago IWL) and my step-grandmother. They were down at the bottom of the hill. They were both getting in a car to drive away. They may have been planning to go back home. I think my step-grandma was driving. She may have gotten into the car first.

Before my grandpa got into the car, he called to me, "When you get over to my house, you'll see a huge pile of dirt in the yard. Make sure you shovel all that dirt to the very front of the driveway, so people in the neighborhood know they can have the dirt. Also, give your aunt a call and let her know that she can have some of the dirt if she wants it."

My mom and I turned and walked away from the slope. We may have been heading to a car of our own. I was thinking that I really didn't want to have to talk to my aunt. But I knew I had to listen to my grandpa. I wondered how I'd get around this problem.

My mom and I were now in my grandpa's house. We had a huge load of pale green towels. We were going to take them to the laundry. Each of the towels had its own name. Each name had the word "life" or "living" in it.

We were now in a laundry room. The room was all white, with bright, white sunlight pouring in through the windows. The washing machine was in one section of the room. My mom and I were in another section of the room. The two sections were divided by a wall that seemed to be made out of wooden beams and transparent, but foggy, plastic.

A Latina woman stood before a huge washing machine. My mom and I spoke with the woman around a doorway. The woman offered us some towels, like they were towels she found had gone missing from our last load of laundry.

We traded her the towels we had for the towels she had. But one specific towel, which was meant for my mom, was goldenrod-colored. This towel had the name "think." I thought it was weird that my mom had gotten a "think" towel instead of a "life" towel. But I didn't worry about it too much. We did have a few goldenrod towels in the load of towels the woman had just given us. But the majority of our towels were still green "life" towels.

Friday, August 10, 2012

split slacks; my apartment isn't mine

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was at "my family's house," sitting right in a doorway between a bedroom and the living room. My mom and my brother also sat in the doorway: my mom to my right and my brother to my left. The doorway was wide, with a folding door that would run across it. The bedroom was dark, and the living room was lit.

My mom and my brother were having an argument, possibly about my brother borrowing money. Both my mom and my brother were smoking cigarettes. The argument reached a level of intensity where my mom stood up and left, not wanting to listen to anymore. She also may have had somewhere to go.

My brother was mad that my mom had just stood up and left. He blew smoke in my face and stood up to follow my mother -- maybe she was taking him somewhere. But I had gotten so frustrated over the arguing, and I was so mad that my brother had blown smoke in my face, that I stood up and got right into my brother's face, telling him, "Stop doing this kind of crap, man!"

My brother acted mad at first. Then his face got really sad. He just said, "Come on, just leave me alone," and walked out the door. I felt really bad for having gotten angry with my brother. I knew he was emotionally unstable, delicate, and insecure. I didn't want to make him feel even worse about himself. I was also afraid that, now that he was mad at me, too, he might pull some kind of bad prank on me.

I was now sitting on the floor in the living room. My nephews and niece may have been running around the living room and playing. My brother was now in the living room. It was like he had come back from wherever my mom had taken him. I stood up to talk to him.

He was wearing some weird items of clothing. One item was like a tie. The other was like suspenders on his left shoulder. But the material then ran around his waist at a right angle to the "suspender." The material was black and dotted with little, green frogs and some other design I can't remember.

I wanted to apologize to my brother for my behavior before. But my brother could sense that I was sorry. He acted like it was no big deal.

My brother pointed to the ceiling and said, "I get so frustrated with these kids sometimes. My dress pants were hanging on a hanger up there. They were a really nice brand. They were grey slacks, made of really nice fabric, and they had pinstripes running down them. Then one day I came home, and the kids had torn the pants in half. You know how? They were swinging off of them -- using my pants as a swing -- until they got torn from the hanger."

In my mind's eye I could see the pants being split up the crotch, as if the slacks, instead of being folded over the hanger, were "straddling" the hanger.

Dream #2

I had just moved into a new apartment. My mom's ex-boyfriend was there with me. I think he was there because he'd known about the place -- like he'd owned or rented it before -- and he wanted to check it out to make sure it was okay before I moved into it. It all seemed to be okay. Everything was really dusty. But other than that, it was good.

My mom's ex-boyfriend was gone. I was walking around the apartment by myself. I walked into the next room, the kitchen. There was a broom there. I think I thought my mom had left the broom for me. When she'd seen this place, she'd noticed how dusty it was. She'd thought it was neglectful of me not to have swept. So she'd left this broom for me.

I took the broom with me and entered the next room. I walked into another room. Suddenly I realized -- both the rooms I'd walked through after the kitchen were huge! They were both tall and spacious, with the back walls being beautiful, wood-framed window-walls. And they were both well-furnished and decorated: almost as well as a room in a mansion-like museum, like the Morgan Library or the Frick Collection in New York.

The next room was to the left of this room. Now the rooms came one after another in the opposite direction. I walked through one huge room into another huge room. A massive, wooden table in this room had a small, bronze sculpture of a buffalo atop it.

I began to feel extremely lucky. I was trying to remember how I'd actually managed to get into this place. I was paying rent for it, but barely anything -- $650 a month -- for something of this size and beauty. I wondered if the upstairs neighbors would be noisy. But with this much space, and these high ceilings, I doubted it.

I couldn't figure how I was being allowed to live here. The only thing I could guess was that I'd promised to keep the place clean -- which was something I thought I would have no problem doing. I was so excited and happy about getting to live here!

I walked into the next room, which may have been the living room, and which also served as the entry to the apartment. The daylight had been blue, cool, and crisp in the other rooms, but here it was golden and warm, like a sunny morning after snow.

I could see out the window that people were coming up to the door. It looked like one or two wealthy, white families. They walked into the house with no problem, like they had a key of their own. I didn't know who they were. But I think they were talking about buying the apartment.

There were two older men and two older women. I don't know if they were present, but a young man and young woman were also being spoken of, as if they were the son of one family and the daughter of another, getting married. The men may have been joking about how irresolute the son often was, even though he was really handsome and really smart, and may already have had a really good job.

Nobody was paying any attention to me. I still didn't quite know what they were here for, even though I think the families were buying this apartment for the couple-to-be. I wondered whether I was going to have to leave this place soon. I'd just gotten settled in, and already I was being forced out. But I resolved that, until I knew for sure what was going on, I'd just get to work on cleaning the house and act like this was where I was going to be living for a while.

I didn't want to leave the living room while the family was here. I had a bad feeling that if I left while they were here, they'd make some kind of nasty plans against me. So I sat down on the couch, broom still in hand, and acted like I was just taking a rest.

The older men started talking about other stuff, maybe business in general. They decided that they'd like to have some coffee and maybe muffins while they were here. So one of the men sat down on the opposite end of the couch from me. The other man may have tried to sit in the middle section of the couch.

But suddenly I found myself getting very tired. I stretched out over my section and the middle section of the couch, maybe even knocking into the man sitting at the opposite end of the couch. At this point my dream faded into waking life, and I was stretching out in the same weird way in my bed.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

where i lived; naked in public; movie theater backpack; bon voyage, family

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a small room, like the concession stand of a movie theater, but in its own little room. There were a lot of mirrors in the room, and the room had a mostly blue color scheme, with strings of clear incandescent lights flashing everywhere.

I was sitting up on one of the counters, talking with somebody else in the room, probably a young woman. The woman was asking me about my old careers. She asked me something about the work I did in New York for Americorps. She asked me something like, "Didn't they really respect you and look up to you there?"

I replied something about how it definitely seemed that I was looked at as one of the best performers in the programs I worked in, but how, when it came to living situations, I still got stratified out. I said how, when it came to living situations, the whites went with the whites, the browns went with the browns, and the blacks went with the blacks.

"Except me," I said. "For some reason, when I lived in New York, I mostly lived in West Indian neighborhoods."

A man now came walking in through the door. He was a young, good looking business man. He was blonde and tan with blue eyes. He wore a business suit with a tan or pea-colored trench coat over it. He said he'd heard what I'd been speaking about. He wondered if I could come somewhere with him and speak with him a little bit more.

Dream #2

I was out with my sister in some residential neighborhood. My sister was leaving me here to take care of something. But I may have been set to meet her somewhere else later on.

My first task, apparently, was to take a shower. So I walked a couple blocks down the road, to a big, classical looking fountain that just stood in the middle of the street, and took a shower.

When I got out of the shower, I put on an orange t-shirt. I started walking along the road, when two teenage girls standing in a front yard began laughing at me. I looked down to see that I wasn't wearing any pants or underwear -- just my t-shirt!

I knew I had brought some clothes with me when I'd left my sister. They were probably in a backpack. But where had I put that backpack? I thought I'd brought it with me when I'd walked over to the shower. But maybe I'd left it at the point where my sister and I had split ways.

I tried running back to that point. But I couldn't remember exactly where it was. The neighborhood now looked different, too. The houses were all small and cheap, and the yards were barren and full of garbage. I looked to my left down one block to see a couple of guys moving some stuff out of a house. The whole block seemed to be full of cellophane and packing foam.

I may have begun to think that my sister was getting revenge on me for something by having taken my backpack back home with her. Maybe she thought I'd done something perverted to her. So now she was making me feel perverted by leaving me out on the street with no clothes.

But I finally found the block where I thought I'd departed from my sister. I was certain I could find the yard my sister and I had been standing in, and that the backpack would be right there. But there were two old men standing out and talking in one of the yards. I had to sneak past them. I knew if they saw me in this neighborhood they'd think I was a thief.

Dream #3

I walked into a movie theater. The theater was big, and I was the only one in there so far. I had a backpack with me. I sat it down on the left side of the center aisle, a few rows forward from the back row.

I then felt like I needed to leave the theater for a moment. So I left the theater. But standing out in the hallway, I realized I'd left my backpack. I needed to go grab it. I couldn't let it sit in there. Somebody would steal it.

So I ran back into the theater to grab the backpack. But now I couldn't find it. I couldn't remember exactly what row I'd been sitting in. I went through a number of the rows, but I couldn't find the right row. Now a few more people were filtering into the theater. I told myself that it was odd I'd chosen a back row, anyway. Usually I choose a front row.

Dream #4

I was on a thin, wooden platform with my two oldest nephews. The platform was suspended over some kind of dirty body of water. The platform was long. But something about it felt very uncertain, and it was hard for my nephews to stay on it.

My second oldest nephew actually fell off the platform. But I managed to grab hold of him as he fell off. He was now just hanging by my hands. Then my oldest nephew fell off the platform. Somehow both of my nephews were holding onto me. I had slipped off the platform, too, and was just holding on by one hand.

We were now all three in the water. Now it was like it had just been a game. But I was really upset. I was yelling at my second oldest nephew, telling him that if he'd just paid attention to something and done it the way I'd told him to, that we wouldn't have had any problems staying up on the platform.

Now we were involved in some kind of speed-swimming game. Our bodies sped through the water, as if we were boats, or as if we were actually gliding just above the surface of the water. We had to swim through a big body of water, then through a smaller, adjoining body of water, and finally into a small pool of water. The small pool of water was divided, by muddy walls, into two sections. Then we had to turn back and return to the starting point in the big body of water. This whole circuit somehow described a figure eight.

I went through once by myself and managed to get some time like eighteen seconds. I next went through with my oldest nephew. It now appeared that in the two small pools of water there were fish-like zombie creatures. My oldest nephew somehow got injured by one and had to go to the doctor.

I went through the circuit again with my second oldest nephew. We got to the small pools as well. But as my nephew was coming out of the second small pool, he got stabbed in the left arm by one of the zombie fish. He showed me the stab wound. It looked like it had been made by a straight, tubular device, almost like an old TV antenna.

My nephew was wearing a white t-shirt, which now had pinkish lines of blood flowing down it. My nephew was worried. He knew that once you got injured by a zombie, you were most likely going to become a zombie.

My nephew was now gone, most likely getting medical help. I now floated around in the second body of water, looking back toward the small pools of water. I knew that there were zombies in every part of these waters. They could attack you anywhere. But they seemed to be really nasty in the small pools. And, even though this was just a game, if a zombie attacked you, you could really die or become a zombie.

I now had a vision like a high-score screen on an arcade wildlife shooting game. I heard some guys talking in the background, not like they were talking, but like they'd typed out comments on some online forum, and now they were being read back to me, in narration, in the guys' voices.

One guy said he had given up on the game because it was truly impossible, and that the game was just made to cheat people. Another guy said he'd also given up on the game. But he was trying to point out some secret tips that are given to you in the game.

The main tip had to do with the color scheme of some segmented pattern that surrounded some words at the top of the high-score screen. The guy said that if you look at how each color is distributed through the segments, you'll have a good idea of how many of each kind of zombie there are in the game.

I now turned around and looked over my left shoulder. Beyond a window, I saw my little niece playing around in a set of trees in a small garden. I realized that I was at some sports center. I had been here with my family, playing in the pool. Everybody else had gone to take a shower. But I was still in the pool, for some reason.

My family was all getting ready to leave. My niece and her older brothers were playing around in the little garden while waiting for my mom, and possibly my sister and brother-in-law, to come outside. But my niece, now seeing my mom and getting the idea that the family was going to leave without me, asked them to wait for me.

I didn't know whether my family would wait. But I got out of the pool and headed out of the sports center without even taking a shower. I may have seen my niece for a second. But now it was like everybody was gone. My family had to go on some big cruise, so they headed out to some big cruise ship. My niece had wanted my mom to wait so she could say goodbye to me before heading on the cruise. My mom had decided that they would wait for me near the cruise ship. I could say goodbye there.

I got to the cruise ship. There was a big rope-maze line leading up to the cruise ship. I may have seen my family for a second as they were working there way through the line. But the line was virtually empty, and my family must have gotten through it rather quickly.

I now stood before the ship with my grandmother, my mom's mom. We looked up to the deck of the ship, which was far above us, trying to spot my family. I may have said something to my grandma about not having been able to see my family and say goodbye. My grandma may have replied, but I can't remember what she said.

But now I was up in some cruise ship. I was in a gigantic room that looked kind of like a library. But the room was full of tables that stood rather high, maybe about shoulder level for me. The seats for the tables were also rather tall. The tables and seats were arranged today to face one end of the room, which felt like the back end of the room, even though the entrance door was on the same wall. Every seat was probably filled for the event taking place. I sat near the front row, on the left side.

Jennifer Lopez walked into the room. She may have had a new movie coming out, so she was going to give an interview to everybody in this room. But she said she only had a limited amount of time. She could only take nine questions.

She took the first question from somebody in one of the farther back rows. The guy's question was really long-winded. It was basically asking why Jennifer Lopez could only take nine questions. But it was working all kinds of weird symbolism into the question, involving the numbers three and six. Eventually Lopez just got annoyed and asked the guy to ask his question directly. The guy asked why Lopez could only take nine questions. Lopez gave an answer I can't remember.

Then Lopez walked right up to my table and playfully slammed on it, saying, "Okay. Now, you! I want to hear a question from you!"

I was kind of shocked. I didn't really know much about Jennifer Lopez. I'd just come here because I thought it would be interesting to see the event. But if Lopez wanted me to ask a question, I figured I'd better do so. I thought hard about it for a second. I remembered I'd just seen a movie with Lopez in it, and that it had had a scene that had made me kind of curious.

I asked Lopez, "You know, in that cartoon movie you just did a voice for, there's a scene where you're a little girl, and you're on a ship, getting ready to say goodbye to a little boy who you had a crush on, but who's now leaving on the ship. And I was just wondering, is that from real life? Cause it seemed like a really personal scene. And if it was from real life, could you tell us anything about that boy?"

Lopez was back up in her own seat at the front of the room, possibly flanked by a couple of guys who looked like bodyguards. She laughed and said something like, "Oh, I knew you would ask a question like that! Yes, the scene is from real life. And yes, I did like that boy. We were from the same neighborhood. And we never saw each other again."

Lopez went on to the next question, like she had given a sufficient answer to my question. I could tell she was glossing over a lot of the more personal issues I thought would have been interesting to hear. I think the details may have been a little embarrassing to her. I figured I wouldn't push the issue, and I'd just leave my question at that.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

i kiss lady gaga; tunnel in the sky; hard-boiled birthday

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I had written a short story which had a very brief passage in it mentioning Lady Gaga. I wanted to make sure Lady Gaga was okay with this passage -- even though I think I'd already published the story on a website or Smashwords or something.

Somehow I'd managed to get a hold of Lady Gaga on the phone. But even as we started talking, Lady Gaga appeared right next to me. Lady Gaga looked surprisingly normal. She had platinum blonde hair in a kind of round style, down to just below her shoulders. She wore black sunglasses, a black, leather jacket, a tank top, short, denim jeans, and maybe some black nylons.

We were sitting in a wide car seat, like the backseat of a car from the 1970s. But we weren't really in a car. We were in a room filled with stuff like colorful toys and stuffed animals, cluttered all around us. We were talking for a while, but I can't remember what we were talking about.

Then Lady Gaga asked me if I wanted to kiss her. I didn't feel like I was incredibly attracted to her. But she kind of had a hypnotic power over me. Plus, she was a big celebrity, and she was being so nice to me. I thought I'd better kiss her.

I slowly moved toward her. I think Lady Gaga's lips were bubblegum-pink. And up close, her cheeks looked a little chubby and cute. We kissed softly on the lips for a few seconds. It felt kind of magnetic. It felt really nice.

Then I was standing off of the car seat. It was like Lady Gaga was driving away, though I still don't think the car seat was in an actual car. Lady Gaga said, "Yeah, your story's fine. I have to go take care of some stuff now. Maybe I'll come back here when I'm done. Will you be available if I come around?"

I think I told her I'd be available. I think I looked around the toy-cluttered room and tried to figure out what the heck I was supposed to be doing here anyway.

Dream #2

I was laying out on a high school football field. It must have been late afternoon. The sun had gone down. The clouds all had a strange tinge of raspy, aluminum-pale orange. The air had the same kind of color. But I could see just behind the first layer of orange clouds was another layer of really dark grey-black clouds. I knew there was going to be a big thunderstorm.

I turned my head and told the football coach (?) that there was going to be a thunderstorm. I was kind of afraid to be laying out here like this. A huge tunnel opened up in the sky. The walls of the tunnel were made of orange clouds and grey-black clouds, interwoven. The tunnel seemed to work its way high up into the atmosphere, maybe even all the way into outer space. I may have seen large rocks floating through or falling through the tunnel.

I got really afraid of the impending thunderstorm. I stood up and walked to the edge of the field. At the edge of the field the grey-black clouds seemed to be a lot less potent. I figured I stood much less chance of being struck by lightning if I stood over here.

Dream #3

I was in the living room of a small apartment. The living room was bright white with daylight. I knelt before a couch, on which a little girl sat. Just to the right of the couch was the kitchen, in which the mom may have been working. There may have been one or two more kids in the apartment.

Now a little boy came running in through the front door of the apartment, off to my left. He ran all the way through the living room and into the hallway, saying, "Daddy's coming upstairs right now!"

The little girl on the couch got upset. She asked, "What do you mean he's coming home right now? He wasn't supposed to come home until later! That doesn't give us any time to prepare his surprise birthday party!"

The father came into the house. He was tall, pale, muscular, and attractive, with wavy, brown hair done in a square-swept, almost 1950s style. He wore a white t-shirt and blue jeans. He said hello as he walked in.

The mother called from the kitchen, saying that the family hadn't expected the father home so soon today. The mother hinted to the father, trying not to let on to the girl that she was hinting to the father (even though I think the girl knew), that the girl had planned on him coming home later so she could have a surprise party ready for him.

The father looked a little inconvenienced, knowing that he'd have to go back outside so everybody could put his party together. But he figured he'd do it, if it made the little girl happy. So he said, "Oh, you know, I forgot I have to go pick up this thing. It's gonna take me a while. But I'll be back in a bit."

As soon as the father got out the door, the little girl stood up. She said, "Okay. Now we really have to get working to make the surprise party." The little girl turned to me and said, "You help me make the hard-boiled eggs."

The little girl and I were now in the kitchen, which was different from the kitchen the mother had been in. This one wasn't open to the living room, and it ended directly in front of the front door to the apartment. The counter was all cluttered with all kinds of food. There was a television set at the right end of the counter. Some show was blaring away on it.

The little girl had been preparing some eggs for me. Apparently, making hard-boiled eggs was a two-step process. I was the second step, which was boiling the eggs. The little girl, who may now have been my sister, at her age in waking life, now left the kitchen. She was heading out with a few other people. I think everybody was going out to get items for the party.

I looked at the eggs my sister had left me with. I knew she had done something to prepare them so I could boil them. But, I thought, I had to get them into the pot as soon as possible. I picked up one of the eggs. It crumbled in my hands. It was like there hadn't even been anything inside the shell.

I looked down at the eggs. They were all on a plate, or maybe on an upside-down lid for a Tupperware container. One of the eggs looked cracked and buckled in all the way around. The cracks looked all rusty. I tried to pick up another one of the eggs. But when I did, it uncoiled, like it was a peeled potato/egg that had been re-spooled to look unpeeled, but then came all unwound as soon as I'd touched it.

I felt like maybe I'd waited too long to put the eggs in the pot. Or maybe I'd mishandled them all in some way. Whatever had happened, these eggs were no good. I'd have to prepare a new batch of eggs for boiling. I didn't think I knew how to do it. I'd have to ask my sister. But my sister wouldn't be back for a while. So I'd have to figure out for myself how to prepare the eggs.

It may have occurred to me that what I really needed to do was take raw eggs, boil them, and then run them under cold water. I may have gotten ready to do this.

But now I was distracted by the image on TV. It was some movie from the 1980s. A bunch of hot high school girls were all getting together for the night for a slumber party. They were all wearing skimpy lingerie and frolicking around in some girl's bedroom. I had my eyes glued to some girl laying on her stomach on the floor, cuddling with some big, soft pillow. She wore an almost see-through pink negligee. Her bottom was really turning me on.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

antique orgasm; wild animals, little girls, and dessert

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was sitting out in some kind of plaza area at night. I sat on the ground, possibly leaning my back against the seat of a bench. My sister may have been there, too. We had some stuff with us: a couple of bikes and some other personal belongings.

A little boy and an older man came and sat down by us. The little boy had olive skin and dark black, straight hair. He wore tiny, tan, corduroy shorts and a little, white t-shirt that made him look a little bit like a girl. The little boy was attracted to me. Even though he didn't know me, he came down and sat on my lap. He sat right so his bottom was on my crotch, and he kept bouncing up and down.

The little boy eventually transformed into a Latino young man who was dressed up as a girl. He was dressed in a frilly, lingerie-esque black tank top with red, lacy fringes and a pair of really short, denim shorts. His hair was black, with streaks of pale brown dyed in, and done up in loose ringlets. He also seemed to have big breasts.

I had actually had an orgasm at some point in time because of the bouncing up and down. So the Latino young man figured I was attracted to him. He told me he'd give me his phone number. I wasn't wearing any shoes. The young man wrote his phone number on my right foot, starting at the joint where the big toe meets the foot and going all the way down past my ankle, an inch or two up my leg.

The young man wrote the number in red and black. The boy's handwriting looked very much like graffiti. The boy would write the red part first, then do a little outline in black to made it look like a shadow. I looked at the boy's pen. It was just one pen, with one tip, and no switching buttons. But it was putting out red ink or black ink, whenever the boy wanted. I told the boy, "You have really good handwriting."

The young man finished and stood up. I suddenly realized that he and the older man were together. The older man hadn't noticed the boy having sat down on me and rubbed against me until I came. And he didn't seem to think anything of the boy having given me his phone number. The older man just thought the young man was only in love with him. The two of them got on either a motorcycle or a bicycle and rode away.

My sister was either already gone or had left just now, telling me she'd meet me wherever she was going. I now felt like I'd been sitting around here way too long. I needed to get to wherever my sister was!

So I stood up, turned to my left, and walked along the concrete or cobblestone path along which ran the bench that I'd been sitting against. It was a pleasant evening, and there were a lot of people out. Suddenly reflecting on the people all walking around here, I knew I had to sit back down! I'd just come. Would the wetness of my cum be visible on my clothes?

I looked down. I was wearing some hideous, fluorescent yellow shorts. The fabric was really thin, and, just as I had suspected, the wetness of my cum had soaked through. I covered myself up. There was one spot I first noticed as I'd looked, kind of right on the front and center of my shorts, a couple inches below the waist line. I tried to wipe it off and dry it off.

I think I managed to get the spot to a point where I felt it was tolerably unnoticeable. But now I noticed another mess! This one was coming out of my right pocket. It seemed like almost all my cum had flowed into my right pocket. It was clear and goopy and gross. But it wasn't white. It was clear. And it was cold, not hot.

I didn't think I'd be able to stand up for a long time. But out of the crowd came a kind of prissy-looking old man, carting a clothes rack full of either women's outerwear or women's lingerie. The styles seemed kind of stale, something very much like what I thought the prissy, old man would like. But the man stopped at me and said, "You! Get up! You haven't done everything you were supposed to do with these clothes yet!"

I had a feeling I'd done something, either messing up the clothes or committing to buying them and then breaking my commitment, that had basically made the responsibility for the clothes all mine. Even if they stayed in the prissy man's store, I still had to take care of them. So, regardless of my fear of being seen in my cum-stained shorts, I stood up and went to the clothes rack.

Slowly other elements of a shop were dragged out into the crowd, I'm not sure by whom. There were glass display cases of items and items on pedestals. The interior of an antique store had basically been drawn out onto this walkway!

A second old man now came up to me. He had a few antiques, some of which looked like music boxes. But one antique which drew my attention was a sphere-shaped object. The man let me look at it. Most of its surface was some deep, polished color, like a deep blue or brown. On some part of its surface was a little clock face. The middle of the orb and the boundary of the clock were ringed with gold. The middle of the orb may actually have been hinged, so it could open, like an Easter egg.

As I was inspecting the object, the old man was talking about the store. The way he was talking about things, it sounded like the prissy man had talked the old man into being a part of this store, almost against the old man's wishes. It sounded like it was a little bit of a pain to work with the prissy man, simply because the man's prissiness sometimes got to be a real bore.

I dropped the orb. It almost crashed to the ground. But I flinched a few times, and all my flinches were luckily positioned so that I kept almost catching the orb, until I finally caught the orb. But now, when I looked at the orb, it may have had a surface of gold and crystal, with the clock face inside the crystal portion of the egg, tilted at about a 30-degree angle.

The old man suggested I give the orb back to him. The orb was pretty expensive, and the man didn't want me holding onto it if I was going to be so clumsy with it. But he wasn't mad at me. In fact, it seemed to open the old man up to telling me a bit more of his story. As the old man told me the story, the store materialized around us. We were in one room full of antiques. In another room was a perfume counter and more antiques. The prissy man may have been working at the perfume counter.

The old man said how he, like a couple other old men, had owned their own stores. All the old men's stores specialized in certain kinds of antiques. The old man's particular store may have specialized in antique clocks or antique perfumes -- or both! But the old man, like a couple of his friends, was discovering that the specialty antique shops were no longer able to survive on their own.

The old man and his wife (who may have appeared somewhere in the shop) had to sell their shop. Some of their friends had to sell their shops, too. But the prissy man suggested to the old man (and, possibly, to other old men) that the old man let the prissy man sell the old man's antiques in his shop. The prissy man's shop was bigger and more comprehensive.

The old man said, "Yeah, it's hard for antique shops of any kind to survive anymore. In this town, all up and down along this road, you'd see tons of antique shops. Now they're all closing up, one by one. Nobody visits them anymore. That's why it's lucky I'm working with him." (The prissy man.) "His store isn't an antique shop. And it has so many different kinds of things, people will always be coming to the shop."

But when I looked around the shop, all I could see were antiques. I thought, This place must be an antique shop! And it must be doomed, just like all the other antique shops! My vision focused on some people lifting up a painting from behind some massive, golden posts. The painting was tall and wide. It was on some thin, stiff board. It seemed to be an early evening lake scene, done in pale blues and tans.

I now noticed that all around that area were golden objects. There may even have been a statue of a standing Pharaoh, his headdress, skirt, beard, and staff all done in gold, or painted gold, and his body done in black stone.

Dream #2

I was out in the wilderness with my sister on a hot, clear day. We stood on some ridge where we could see out over an expanse of green, but dry and craggy, slopes. My sister had to go do something. She walked away behind me.

I think I knew that I'd eventually have to turn around and head to wherever my sister had gone as well. But I think I was also hoping my sister would come back. Out here in the wilderness all alone, I felt unprotected, scared.

The slope before me was now all made of plowed-up soil. It was like a construction crew was coming through this wilderness, turning it up to make some new development. The slope now lipped up before me, so that it crested above my head. I had to climb up it to see beyond it. But when I climbed up it, I decided to walk down the other side. I think I was hoping I could walk out of all this plowed-up area and into some pristine wilderness.

At the bottom of the plowed-up slope was a dirt road. Across the dirt road was another plowed-up slope. I knew that beyond that slope there would be pristine wilderness. But now I looked to my right, up the dirt road. In the distance maybe four hundred meters was a wild animal. It looked like a coyote, but I thought (or hoped) it could be a bobcat. It had been trotting lightly across the road. But now it stopped and looked at me.

I didn't really want to go any farther in the wilderness. I'd never had any trouble with coyotes, or any wild animal, really, in the past. But I had a weird feeling that this summer, because of the heat (or drought?), the wild animals were really hungry, and that they'd even try to eat humans. I didn't want to be out here alone and defenseless against a hungry animal. So I turned around and headed back up the slope.

Now the slope was extremely steep. I didn't know whether I'd be able to make it back up the slope. But, surprisingly, I was actually bounding up the slope. I would jump upward from one foothold to another. It didn't even seem to cause me any effort. It was kind of fun!

This whole time I thought that I needed to keep the idea of fear out of my head. If a wild animal sensed fear, it would attack me. I thought that perhaps the coyote/bobcat would see my jumping and think I was too hard to catch, not worth its time. But then I thought that maybe the motion of my jumping would be so tantalizing that the coyote/bobcat would find me a very appetizing meal indeed.

But I soon reached the top of the slope. I hopped over the lip of the slope, thinking that I must have gotten up and out of sight before the coyote/bobcat could see me. But now I saw the coyote/bobcat stalking across the opposite slope. The crest of the opposite slope was now very close to the crest of this slope. I could plainly see the animal, which was a coyote. And the coyote could plainly see me.

The coyote jumped from its crest to my crest. But when it reached me, it just slowly passed me, looking me over, trying to determine whether I was an enemy or a friend, but then just becoming seemingly indifferent towards me and stalking away to my right and behind me. I was still afraid. Since the coyote was behind me, did that mean it was just playing a game on me, and that it would soon attack me from behind?

But now I saw a second animal on the opposite slope. This time the animal was a bobcat! But the bobcat's face looked a little weird, like it was real, but like its real (not drawn) features had been scribbled into existence by a little child's crayon drawings.

The bobcat didn't even wait to climb to the crest. It hopped from mid-slope to mid-slope, then climbed up and over the crest. When it got to me, it bared its teeth and made some kind of hissing sound. Its teeth seemed like needles to me. The bobcat then stalked off to my left and behind me.

I now felt like I was in too much danger out here by myself. I turned around to go back to wherever I'd come from. I was now slouch-laying sideways in a huge, padded chair in a big house like a luxury cabin in the woods. The living room was huge, calm, and filled with natural light. At the other end of the living room two girls sat in either one or two big chairs. One girl seemed to be about nine years old. The other girl seemed to be about twelve.

The nine-year-old girl hopped out of her chair and walked toward me. She was really skinny and wore slim blue jeans and a slinky, striped, long-sleeved shirt. She was pale, and she had long, stringy, pale brown hair. She hopped up onto my chair and flopped down, laying on top of me. We were now covered in a blanket. I ran my hands along the girl's sides and hips.

The little girl was now gone, or possibly standing off to the side and somewhere behind me. The twelve-year-old girl stood up and seemed to be coming toward me, even though I was kind of wishing the nine-year-old girl would come back. The twelve-year-old girl wore tiny, white shorts, a tiny, white t-shirt, and a white baseball cap, which was backwards. She was a bit more plump than the younger girl.. She had a tan, and her chestnut-brown hair was just a little shorter than shoulder-length.

But before the girl even reached me, another young girl sat down beside me in my chair. At my feet there was now another chair adjacent to and at right angles with my chair. Both chairs were less puffy and just a little smaller than my previous chair had been, and both were upholstered with some rough kind of yarny, tan, dark blue, and pale blue fabric.

We were no longer in the living room. We were now in a gigantic cafe. The cafe may have been a Starbucks. But it was out in the woods and it was done up like a ski lodge. There were a lot of people in the cafe. But everything was so well spaced that nobody seemed to be getting into anybody else's space.

The little girl (or boy?) who'd sat down next to me really wanted to be close to me and cuddle with me. But the guy who'd sat down in the other seat made both the girl (or boy) and myself afraid to do anything. I'm not sure what the guy's relationship was to the child. The guy was tall, young-looking, and pale, with blue eyes and a little bit of stubble on his cheeks.

The guy began talking to me, like he was trying to be cool and friendly with me. He had a bit of an athletic tone to his voice, which made me feel like he was being genuine. I didn't know how to put that same athletic tone of voice into my own speech. But I tried to talk like I was cool with the guy as well. But I didn't like the guy very much, and I kind of thought it was an inconvenience to have to deal with him.

The guy then mentioned that my mom was coming soon with all the food. I must have been a little surprised by this. The guy said, "What? Didn't you know your mom was here as well? I met her in line. She told me to sit with you. She and the others would be here soon."

I sat up straight in my chair. I don't know where the child had gone. I saw that there were two additional chairs. The chairs were all arranged around a little white cube which would serve as our table. Now my mom came up and sat in a chair. The others, probably a couple of my nephews, would be showing up soon.

Now a waiter, like a stereotypical thin-mustached, French waiter, wheeled out a huge, shelved, steel cart of desserts and drinks. All the food had some kind of mango-flavored theme to it. The waiter sat item after item of mango desserts and drinks onto the white cube.

In particular I remember seeing mango-flavored pies, and some weird mango smoothie-like item in a clear glass. The mango smoothie was all clumpy, so that the gunk in the glass wasn't evenly distributed. In the empty spaces I could see some green, ropy material, like a snake mixed with a green bean, coiling upward.

Monday, August 6, 2012

emotional drawing; i owe $283,000???

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

My view was floating somewhere, maybe over the passengers of a kind of large tour bus, maybe from the front of the bus to the back of the bus. My mother and I may have been on the bus somewhere, although I may have been a pretty, young, copper skinned woman with black hair.

I was hearing a discussion in my head between myself and a woman, possibly my mother. We were talking about how, when you draw characters, if you draw characters using a grey cloak, you don't have to give them any personality. This didn't just have to do with the color grey. It was like the character was actually wearing some kind of cloak of grey that zipped over its entire body. I thought this cloak made drawing easier, because it erased personality and emotion from the character.

But I then realized I was wrong. The grey cloak didn't erase any personality or emotion from the character. No matter whether I drew the characters in full color or with the cloak over them, I still had to use personality and emotion.

Dream #2

I walked into a place I supposed was a movie theatre, even though it looked like a really big classroom. The room was dark, but maybe with disco ball stars spinning around the room. At the front of the room, high up on the wall, was a rectangle of light, coming from a projection room high up on the back wall.

There were a lot of rows of desks. And all the desks seemed to be filled with old friends of mine. At the back of the room was some long table that sold items related to the event taking place: maybe some kind of film festival. A lot of people still seemed to be coming into the room and filtering up into the desks.

I had read the program for the event. A lot of films by Pedro Almodovar were going to be shown. I was excited about that. I pointed out the fact to one of my female friends. My friend said, "Oh, yeah. Almodovar is one of the top three directors ever in Spain."

My friend named some director I'd never heard of as being the best director in Spain. The director had worked alongside Almodovar in the 1980s, and his films from that time period were apparently incredible.

I was walking up, trying to find a seat. Somebody up ahead of me mentioned the third director in the group. Even though I hadn't seen any films by the director, I at least knew his name. So I called it out, something like "Ittryia" or "Attyra."

I was already ashamed that I hadn't known the first director. So I just pretended to know about Ittryia. I said a fact I'd known about him: that he'd worked as a kind of assistant to Almodovar on a number of films in the 1980s, but that he'd then gone on to make his own films. I then mentioned one of his films, which was playing here, and even though I'd never seen it before, I went off on how good it was.

Even still, I wasn't happy with myself. People knew Almodovar, and people who knew film adored the first director. But Ittryia was really obscure and not of great interest to many people at all. So, even lying about what I knew, I knew I wasn't really impressing anybody, or even giving them information they'd wanted.

I now sat down in one of the seats and began talking with some of my friends. But my view suddenly shifted. I was laying on my back in bed. Somebody like a combination of a police officer and a postal worker barged into my room. He threw an envelope at my stomach, said that I'd better pay attention to it, and stomped away.

I picked up the envelope and looked at it. Through the cellophane window on the front of the envelope I could see that the contents were a bill that actually looked something like a paycheck. The right side of the bill had the figure of $750 on it.

I could faintly remember owing that amount of money. Maybe I'd had to go to the hospital for something, like I'd been taken into the hospital because I'd been too drunk (which happened to me in 1997 and 2006). Or maybe I'd even been arrested for something that I couldn't remember.

I could faintly remember a police officer telling me that people often get stuck with fines because, even though their crime or stupid action wasn't bad, they needed to pay a lot of money to remember never to do something like that again.

But now I looked over to the left side of the window. As I passed along the window, I'd gotten the feeling that I'd actually owed the $750 for a while now, and that I was now getting in trouble for never having paid it. On the left side of the window was another figure: $283,000.

$283,000? How could that be? For some reason, something about the figure reminded me of the speed of light. It was too much money! But the sum came, I knew, from interest fees as well as exorbitant fines that the police put on late payments -- ostensibly with the goal of getting people to pay.

But I couldn't pay. And I think the police counted on that in most of the cases like mine. The letter was really a subpoena, so that I'd have to appear in court regarding the $283,000 I owed. And I'd probably be sent to jail.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

stalkers and john malkovich; a lesbian duck?; the greatest of all time; afraid of love

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was night. I was probably in a huge pickup truck that my mom was driving. We'd come from out in the country, and we were driving through rolling fields of grass.

I don't know what we'd been doing out in the country. But my mom was now telling me how she used to take my nephews out to this area with their sheep -- apparently the family used to own sheep. The family would actually take cows and sheep down to this area. The cows were sold as food.

The sheep actually carried the cows on their backs. I saw in my mind's eye how this was done. A cow would be cut open and have its guts hollowed out. Then the empty carcass of the cow was sat over the sheep's back, so that it looked like the sheep was giving the cow a ride. It would have looked playful, had the cow not been all bloody.

Something about the sheep was also sold, but I don't know what. The main thing my mom spoke about regarding the sheep was how my family had gotten the sheep to eat so well. The sheep must originally have had a hard time grazing while they were out in the country. But my family got the sheep trained to eat out on the rolling pastures, and to eat the grass in such an orderly way that they'd create huge, even, smooth-lined squares of eaten grass.

I had been noticing a big, green pickup truck following our truck for some time. I could see the guy in the truck: he was a young, blonde man who looked like he lived in my apartment complex. I told my mom that that man had been set on me to follow me in the past. He had now been set on following me again today.

Somehow the green pickup truck got in front of us. There were three big, white semi-trucks in front of us. The green pickup wedged itself in between the second and third semis. So there were two trucks in front of the pickup, one truck behind it, and then my mom's pickup.

I told my mom, "Now watch. The truck didn't mean to get in front of us. But now that it did, it will find the perfect opportunity to get back behind us. It's been following me all day today. I have people following me all the time."

Without my noticing it my mom and I shifted into a public bus. We sat side by side in a seat. The bus was relatively empty. The daylight in the bus seemed a bit brighter and whiter than usual. The light inside the bus may actually have been bright and white.

I told my mom, "The same thing used to happen in Brooklyn. People used get set on me, to follow me around. It's just a different set of people. Out here in Denver they have a group of blonde haired, blue eyed guys following me around. People set these kids on me, to follow me wherever I go."

Suddenly some guy sitting in front of us looked back. He was sitting in some weird way, either like he was in a sideways seat, or like he was crouched on the floor, facing so that his right profile faced me and my mom.

But now that he looked straight at us, I could see that he was John Malkovich. But he was all done up in camouflage. He wore a mainly white, tan, and brown camo design on his pants, shirt, and even on a woolen skullcap. He had the design painted onto his face and hands as well. His eyes were also bugging out, like he was insane.

John Malkovich asked me something about the stalkers. He then took one or both of my hands with both of his hands and began stroking them while he made a weird kind of blowing "O" with his mouth. He started giving me some advice about the stalkers. But he then ran back to the back of the bus.

The back of the bus tiered up into a platform of seats. In the first row on that platform was an Hispanic man who looked drunk and passed out. Malkovich sat beside that guy and started almost cuddling his head against him. He then began telling the man about me, like Malkovich was actually a stalker himself, and like he was passing off information to the man, who was only pretending to be drunk and passed out.

Malkovich then ran back to me and started telling me things about stalkers. It all sounded kind of crazy, and I don't remember any of it.

Dream #2

A woman had been taking care of a white swan, which I probably called a duck in my dream. The woman was a really beautiful, copper skinned woman with dark black hair. At first when the woman had cared for the duck, the duck would always bite the woman. The duck may have bit the woman all over her body, but I think one place the duck always bit the woman was on the mouth. It would hurt really bad. The woman even got to a point where she wanted to kill or get rid of the duck.

But then the woman taught the duck how to read and write. The duck had apparently been biting the woman because she didn't know how to communicate with the woman. But now that she could read and write, her life was a lot more open and free and a lot more frustrating.

The duck was now writing something on a pad of paper and showing it to my view, as if my view were actually a camera filming some kind of documentary. The view may have been set in a small bathroom, where the duck and the woman were standing close together. The duck may have been up on some kind of pedestal, so that her head was even with the woman's head.

The writing pad said something about how grateful the duck was to the woman, and how the duck would show her gratitude to the woman by giving her a kiss. So the duck stretched out her neck and "kissed" the woman by biting her softly on the upper lip.

This shocked the woman. It hurt her a little bit, though not as much as the previous bites had hurt. But the woman started to wonder whether the duck was getting violent again. She had given only a soft bite this time. But what if the bites got harder and harder? The woman would be in pain all over again.

My view panned down toward the bottom of the duck, then down toward the top section of the pedestal, where it kind of halted, just looking at the blank space of the pedestal. I was a little worried, as well, about the sudden biting of the duck. But I also considered the fact that the duck had "kissed" the woman. What it the kisses between the duck and the woman got more passionate? Would the duck and the woman eventually become lesbian lovers?

Dream #3

I was at some job which was like a mix of my most recent job with the duties of a lot of my past jobs. I had been set on some task. But I was wearing really dirty clothes. I may also have been wearing women's clothes, maybe even just women's lingerie. I really needed to change my clothes before I got to work on my task.

So I walked into the living room of some townhome or ground level apartment unit. The living room was small and well furnished, but also cluttered with a bunch of neglected belongings. I had a backpack full of clothes.

I began trying to pull clothes out of the backpack. But every time I began to pull something out, I'd hesitate. I had pairs of men's underwear, but they all seemed to be dirty and sour in really gross ways. Some may even have been hard with filth. I had a bad feeling I'd just have to wear one of these pairs of dirty underwear. I'd hope nobody would smell or see or notice in some other way how disgusting my underwear was.

My emotions or focus shifted, and suddenly I was just getting ready to walk out the door, like I was fully dressed and ready to go. I slung my backpack over my right shoulder. As I headed toward the door, opened it, and looked down at some turned-off lamp on an end table next to the door, I had some conversation in my head.

The conversation seemed to be partly me talking to myself about a conversation and partly the actual conversation, which involved a group of people who studied mysticism with Carlos Castaneda. These people were saying that Castaneda was the greatest magician of all time. But that qualification would get mixed up with saying that Castaneda was the greatest Research Analyst of all time. And that statement would get mixed up with my co-workers saying that I was the greatest Research Analyst of all time.

Dream #4

I was looking at a catalog that was kind of done up like a porn magazine. But it was really something like a monthly who's who of sex and fetish in every state in the United States. The pages were a brick red kind of color, and there were grids of photos on each page. Most of the photos showed attractive women wearing lingerie or bikinis. The women were usually sitting, but in very seductive poses. Below each photo was a description of the woman and her particular fetish. At the top of each page was yellow, script-like writing in a kind of "California cool" style.

I flipped to the Colorado section, hoping to find a woman who would be into transvestites or adult babies. But, for some reason, the more I looked through the Colorado section, the more afraid I got. I felt some sense of danger regarding the women. I can't remember what the sense of danger came from. I may have seen or thought that some of the women were actually men dressed as women.

But there was something else I was afraid of -- like contacting any of these women would lead either to my personal information being stolen, or to scandalous information about me being shared on a wide scale. I even began to feel like just looking at the pictures of the women and men would somehow "transmit" my information to whatever place was ready to hurt me.

I quickly flipped to some other section of the catalog. I think I allowed myself to feel attracted to the girls in this section of the catalog. But I think that after a moment, I may have become bored with the catalog and put it away.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

diaper change; a desert of ideas; where's grandma?; family dollar buyout; pepsi distributor buyout; japanese contrasts

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in "my bedroom" at night. The light in my bedroom was on, and the door was open. I was sitting on the edge, looking out the hallway. The hallway was dark and had a deep blue color. The hallway extended a little bit, then turned off to the left. I feel like there were a lot of bedrooms in the house.

A little girl walked down the hallway and toward my room. She was only wearing a diaper. She asked me to change her diaper. Just as she asked me, an older woman's voice told the little girl to get back to bed. The little girl stood in my doorway and pulled off her diaper. I could see that her diaper was a little messy.

Dream #2

I stood out on some desert road on a hot day. I must have been in a small town. I stood across a road from a wide dirt parking lot, at the end of which were two buildings like small factory buildings. I panned my gaze from the right to the left, moving my view off to the left of the buildings.

As I did this, I heard the guy from the PBS Idea Channel on YouTube winding up another one of his "here's an idea" segments. I can't remember what he was talking about, but it seemed to vindicate something I was thinking of. I think in my mind's eye I had a view of yellow and black tiger stripes, kind of like the pattern of Lum's clothes in Urusei Yatsura, except with a fading to white toward the bottom.

My view continued to the left, scanning through a vacant field, mostly of dirt, with a few green weeds here and there. The Idea Channel guy continued talking, but now referencing a totally different idea, like he was on another episode. His voice became really small and grainy -- it was like he was dealing with a subject he was a little unsure of, so he wasn't quite confident, while at the same time the "reception" (???) for the program was fading out.

My view continued to the left, where I may have seen an asphalt parking lot and a multi-story office building in the distance, beyond another vacant dirt lot. The Idea Channel guy may have been mentioning some kind of art project that had been funded by a bank. But one of the guys who'd responded to the guy's statements was now speaking directly.

I could see the guy in my mind's eye. He was tall and pale, and he wore clunky, square glasses. He had a kind of high, very whiny voice. He mentioned something about "the Citibank project," as if the art project in question, being funded by Citibank, was generally known by the bank's name.

Dream #3

I was in a car with my mom and possibly some other family members. We had dropped my brother-in-law and some of the kids off at some place like a recreation center, probably where the kids were taking lessons in some sport, maybe bowling. Apparently my mom and I were going to wait in the car while everybody was inside.

But now my mom suggested that we take the car and go take care of a few errands. I think she had to okay something about taking the car with my brother-in-law. It was like my brother-in-law would have to confirm with my mom that he was going to stay with the kids. If he was going to stay with the kids, then we could take the car.

My mom was thinking that we'd go see her mom, check in on her, make sure she was okay. But I think she was having a hard time remembering the directions to her mom's house. We had to determine directions by using some nearby McDonald's as a reference point. I think I was getting a little impatient. I think I felt like I had better things to do with my day than get lost driving around some McDonald's with my mom.

Dream #4

I was apparently the manager of a Family Dollar store. I was in some really big room like a break room. It was kind of dim, with just some natural light coming in through a high-up window.

A woman stood across from me at a long break table. She had come to talk to me because she heard that ----- was buying out Family Dollar. (I know this company was a specific, "real" company at the beginning of the dream, but I can't remember what it was. The company changed to Sav-a-Lot at the end of my dream. I'm pretty certain it was not Sav-a-Lot at the beginning.)

I knew that ----- was buying out Family Dollar. The woman had only reminded me of the fact, which I now knew was really important (???). The woman asked me whether I was going to tell the employees anything about it. I said I would. I told the woman to get all the employees of this Family Dollar together, and we'd have a talk about everything.

So everybody got together. There were crowds and crowds of people, all apparently working for the one Family Dollar I was the manager of, gathered in something like a plaza area. The plaza area was mainly a stone plaza amid some rolling, green lawns. But there were also balcony-like levels over the edges of the plaza area. Those balconies were also crowded with people from the Family Dollar.

I stood in an empty space near, but not quite at, the front of the crowd. There were other management members with me in this space. I wasn't quite paying attention to anything. I was kind of looking at the ground and fiddling with my hands or some piece of thin rope that may have bounded off the management speaking area. At this point I may have been an overweight, pale white man with a bald crown and grey hair on the sides of my head and wearing a black business suit with a white shirt.

I may have assumed I'd be introduced or given the floor. But before I was given a chance to speak, some person from the back of the crowd asked some question of a lower-level management person who stood up on one of the balconies. The question had something to do with logistics, making the logistics of work a bit easier. The man and the management person got into a long discussion. After this discussion another group of people had another discussion regarding some element of administration at the Family Dollar.

After this discussion, there was a bit of a pause. I had kind of begun to assume that I'd just walked into a normal meeting of the Family Dollar employees, and that, since I didn't have any concerns that needed addressing, I didn't need to say anything. It seemed, too, like nobody else had anything to say. So everybody assumed this meeting was over. They all began shuffling out of the meeting area.

But a management woman behind me and to my right whispered in my ear, "The buyout! You needed to talk to them about the buyout!"

I suddenly remembered that that was what this meeting had been called for. I said, "Oh, yeah! Stop them before they all leave!"

About a quarter of the crowd was already gone. But somebody had called out to the rest of the crowd to stay here, that this meeting had been called to address a concern they all had regarding the acquisition of the Family Dollar. The person said that I, the store's manager (and I think I was myself again), would be giving a presentation to everybody, so they'd see there was nothing to worry about.

Most people seemed inconvenienced. The people who thought everybody was going to get laid off "already knew" that everybody was in trouble. The people who thought everybody was fine "already knew" that everybody was fine. So why did I need to make a speech to them? I thought to myself, Well, then, they're basically right. So I'll need to give them a little new information, a little bit of unique information, that will make them feel like they didn't waste their time here.

For some reason, even though everybody was annoyed and in a hurry to get back to work, I decided I needed to make a big, showy entrance. So, as the person introducing me -- he had a voice like the Chicago Bulls announcer -- said my name, I came running up from the area directly behind the manager's speaking area.

This area was (now, anyway) a stone square with a pool or fountain of water on its left side. The pool was only about ankle deep at its edges. I ran through that pool, making a ton of splashes. I thought, Everybody who knows me will know I like water. So I'm sure they'll all think my running out here through a pool of water will be a really characteristic touch. It'll be endearing.

I now stood up on a black-painted metal railing, locking my feet into some of the lower bars of the railing and pressing my knees against a higher bar. The crowd was packed, from the railing, out as far as I could see. Off to my right was a huge sign, kind of like the light-up menu sign at a McDonald's, mixed with an LED  TV screen. I had a PowerPoint presentation playing on the screen.

I said, "I know you all know that Sav-a-Lot has announced that they are going to buy out Family Dollar. And I know that many of you are thinking, 'What's going to happen to me?' Well, let me assure you, you'll be fine. The business footprint of Sav-a-Lot is far different from the business footprint of Family Dollar. In fact, Sav-a-Lot planned to buy Family Dollar in order to expand its business footprint."

I also had an argument that Family Dollar was better run than Sav-a-Lot, so that if anybody was going to get let go, it would probably be the people from Sav-a-Lot first.

I now went through -- or tried to go through -- slides showing how Sav-a-Lot's business was so widely different from Family Dollar's business that there were no worries about efficiency-related layoffs. But I was having a hard time saying anything. I was comparing business segments and product lines for both companies. But it was so hard for me to keep focused on all the specifics. Plus, I wasn't sure I was telling the crowd something they didn't already know.

And now the slides started going really fast. And the more the slides progressed, the more the slides actually started to look like items off of a McDonald's menu. I remember looking at one slide that apparently was comparing a lineup of fruit-flavored smoothies at Sav-a-Lot with fruit-flavored smoothies at Family Dollar.

And, what was worse, I was even forgetting the name of the company acquiring Family Dollar. There was even one slide with three or four different names for the company acquiring Family Dollar. I knew that all the names except one were subsidiaries of the main company. I couldn't remember, now, whether Sav-a-Lot was the main company or just a subsidiary. But I didn't want to say "Sav-a-Lot" if Sav-a-Lot was only a subsidiary. It would make me look like I didn't even know anything about the company acquiring us.

Eventually I think I did just say "Sav-a-Lot" again when referencing the company, figuring that, if anybody gave me grief for it later on, I'd just tell them that everybody knew the company, anyway, as Sav-a-Lot, and that nobody thought of it by the main company's name.

Dream #5

I was in a room that kind of looked like a students' chemistry laboratory at a university. I stood at a long table with my old boss from a few jobs back, BS, one of my co-workers from that job, another unrecognized person, and a black man who was my boss' boss, the Director of our department.

The Director mentioned the acquisition of a Pepsi distribution company by some larger company that wasn't Pepsico. I can't remember the subtleties of the argument now, but the idea was that somehow this acquisition was either signaling bad sales on the part of Pepsi, or that it would signal bad sales for carbonated soft drinks in general, which would mean bad news for all the soft drink companies like Pepsi and Coke.

The Director was getting direct calls from clients voicing concerns over this potential bad news. He was coming to my boss to ask my boss' opinion on all of this. My boss didn't seem to have anything to say at first, and my co-worker jumped in. He said something to show that the issue wasn't actually a big deal at all. I can't remember what the argument was -- again! --, but it didn't seem to the point, in my opinion.

I had an idea that was more to the point, in my opinion (?????). The company that had been acquired mainly manufactured soda syrups for private label companies that operated out of Latin America. There may have been something about sugar cane involved in my argument. In my opinion, the acquisition may possibly have signaled bad news for the Latin American soft drinks market and for the companies that had been acquired and that made the acquisition. But globally, I probably didn't think the problem was very big.

I was about to mention this, but my boss finally told the Director, "It's not a big issue. I was actually writing a report on the whole thing right now, saying it's not a big deal. You should see that report within the next 24 hours." I knew that since my boss had spoken, there was nothing else for me to say.

Dream #6

A grainy, black and white image showing some young, pretty, Japanese women. The women looked mierable. They were probably victims of either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombings, or else they had somehow been displaced by the whole thing. They were very depressed, and they felt like they had no hope for life.

This image faded into a color image of the same young, pretty, Japanese women -- who may now have been the Japanese pop group Perfume! They were in the present time, and they all looked extremely happy, well-off, and full of hope.

This sequence of images may have been an advertisement for some kind of foundation that helps people. But I can't remember.

Friday, August 3, 2012

domestic drama in space; almost run over twice; use the phone!; i fail to protect

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was on another planet, and I may have been in communications with the spaceship I'd come from. But, really, it felt like I was just standing on a sidewalk outside an apartment building at night and talking with people up in an apartment. It was pitch black outside, and all the windows of the apartment building were blood red.

I was now "inside the spaceship," which was just one of the apartments. I was looking at a dining table, at which sat four people. The dining table was under a hanging incandescent lamp. The rest of the room -- maybe the rest of the apartment -- was dark. The window was open, showing the pitch black night outside.

Two of the people at the table were unknown to me. The other two sat at the far end of the table, near the window. On my left was Leonard Nimoy. On my right was Miss Piggy. Miss Piggy may have been supposed to be my mother.

Miss Piggy was rebelling against some idea. Leonard Nimoy was trying to convince Miss Piggy that the idea was good. Miss Piggy got really nasty. Everybody else left the table. Miss Piggy probably now became my mom. She may have looked at me and asked me for advice about the situation.

Dream #2


I was out on a road near the house I lived in in my last three years of high school. I was walking down the quiet, empty road. Parked on the left (my left) side of the road, just a few houses down from my house, was a big truck, like a semi-truck without a trailer, or like a really big tow truck.

I had possibly seen a car come driving up the road. To avoid the car I walked over into the gutter of the left side of the road -- though, for some reason, I didn't get up onto the sidewalk. But the car, instead of traveling along the regular area for driving, veered into the gutter to come after me.

Of course, the big truck was parked right in the gutter. But somehow the car had managed to wedge itself in between the passenger side of the truck and the curb. It was like the truck hadn't parked flush with the curb, and the car was now managing to wedge into, and widen, that gap. The car was doing all of this in order to come after me.

I remained calm. I knew the car had seen me in the distance and had wanted to taunt me somehow. When I'd gotten out of the way, the car just looked for a new way to get into my way. He'd found it. Now he was trying to scare me. But I would just remain calm.

I got past the car -- I'm not sure how. I have an image in my mind of a black iron structure, kind of in the lattice pattern of space scaffolding. I was now on the driver's side and tail end of the truck, looking back up at the truck.

There were a couple of guys standing outside the truck, watching the guy in the car. The car was now on the driver's side, slamming his car right up against the back end of the front wheel. I could now see the guy driving the car. He was an older man, maybe in his sixties. He had long, grey hair with a balding forehead.

The guy had actually managed, by pushing on the back end of the front wheel, to move the truck forward. The truck shot forward by a couple of houses. The guy probably stayed in his car. But he addressed the two other guys. He told them that he could move any vehicles like that, if they were obstacles in their way.

The other guys, who were probably thirty or forty years old, thought the guy was crazy. But they humored him and told him okay. Apparently, I understood, the guys had been doing some kind of work around here. But the truck had appeared to be in the guys' way. So the old man, without even having been asked, decided he'd come up and push the truck away. The guys hadn't really asked for it. But now it was done, they were kind of pleased.

The old man said, "Yeah, and you can make money off of this kind of stuff, too. For instance, I don't know who owns this big truck. So we can't do anything with it.

"But there's another big truck down the road." (I had an image in my mind's eye of a huge, black pickup truck down about a block and a half, on the other side of the road.) "That car's just been sitting there for years. If I moved it for you guys, you could make tons of money.

"I know the guy who used to own it. He died a few years back." The old man explained how the dead man's family either didn't know about the vehicle or didn't care about it and would rather let it sit there and rot than figure out what to do with it. Apparently this kind of gross neglect made the vehicle anybody's property -- if they could move it. The old man was familiar with these laws and he could move the vehicle. But the two other guys weren't interested in the old man's proposition.

The old man may have driven away. I walked away. I quickly found myself in a structure like a horse stable. But the structure was only a few houses down and across the street from where I'd been before. It didn't have a ceiling, and it was made of fencing rather than solid walls. The fencing was horizontal boards, maybe a foot wide and six feet long, painted white. The floor of the stable was cluttered with blankets.

My aunt was driving a car that looked almost exactly like the head of the Super Mario Brothers video game character Yoshi. She was pulling the car backward. I was right behind the car. But my aunt didn't care. She would happily have backed right over me. She almost did back over me. But somehow I missed getting hit. I was flustered that my aunt almost killed me -- without even seeming to care!

I didn't see any exit in the stable. But somehow my aunt managed to back up, twist to her right, and pull forward out of the stable. After exiting the stable, my aunt stopped the car. My aunt could tell I was upset. She shouted back at me, "If you really cared about your life, you'd have looked at me backing up, and you'd have gotten out of the way!" My aunt then probably drove away.

Dream #3

I was with my ex-girlfriend H. We were on a train, like the Metro North, heading up to some water park (which I called "Water World") in upstate New York or out on Long Island.

H and I were in our seats. We sat on the left side of the train. But we got a little bit anxious. We had been out on this trip a year ago. I thought I'd remembered what train stop we were supposed to get off on. But now I was less and less sure of it. We couldn't miss our stop. If we did, we'd have to get off in the middle of nowhere and wait -- maybe hours! -- for another train.

I had my phone in my hand. But I wasn't using it to find directions, which would have been simple. Instead, H and I stood out of our seats to get nearer to the exit door of the train. We'd look out the door at every stop. We'd read the sign to see what each stop was. If the sign looked familiar, or if the stop sounded familiar, we'd get out there and hope we were right.

As we got out of our seats, I noticed that the train car was really big, almost like the passenger cabin of a huge airplane. There were our aisle of seats, a central aisle, which had a lot of seats, and a third aisle of seats, next to the opposite windows. But the train still felt tight and crowded. Every seat was filled.

But as we walked forward, toward the exit door, the train car became gigantic. It was actually like a waiting room for a train -- or even like a departure gate at an airport! There were people sitting in chairs, people standing up near assistance desks, people sitting on the floors with their luggage, and people sitting, near windows, in seats that actually looked like regular train car seats.

H had also transformed. Instead of being Japanese, she was now a white woman with brown hair. She looked a bit like one of the girls I'd looked up to in high school as being well-organized and smart.

We had a direct view to the exit doors as they opened. As we read the signs, we got a bad feeling that we may have gone too far. I thought that maybe we were supposed to go too far. Maybe what we'd forgotten was that we'd had to go too far, then take another train and backtrack to where we wanted to go. That's why we weren't seeing the final stop. But I couldn't remember what the connecting point would be, either.

H thought we should ask somebody for directions. We walked around the gigantic car, asking the masses of people if they knew how to get to the water park. Some people thought they might know, but they didn't give a really clear answer. Other people had forgotten, just like us. Other people were going to the water park, too. But they were certain that the train had deliberately skipped that stop so that nobody could go to the water park.

H finally found some man, a tall, muscular, well-put-together, white man, who seemed to know where we should go. He gave H some directions.

But suddenly I saw a stop that sounded familiar to me. I ran out the door and rushed along the platform. I was assuming that we had to run quickly to catch the connecting train. I also assumed that H was with me. I rushed down a set of steps, against a flow of people.

But about halfway down the steps, I stopped. I suddenly realized that this was only a stop that had struck me  as interesting during last year's trip. I still had a number of stops to go.

As if to confirm this, I looked down at a slip of paper in my hand. The slip was white with red writing. It was a timetable for the train. It listed all the stops, including the one I'd need to get off on. I think it was right then, too, that I realized that all this time I could just have looked at my phone for directions. But now it seemed too late for something like that.

And now I also realized that H hadn't gotten off the train with me. She'd stayed on. She must be wondering where I was. I had to get back onto the train, and back to H!

I ran back up the steps and toward the train. But, still some distance away from the train, I could see that it was already pulling away. I kept running after it, though, hoping against hope that I would be able to get back on it.

Fortunately, the train did stop. I was still a ways away from the doors. They opened and closed quickly. It seemed that the train was going to start moving again. But it didn't. The train doors opened again. A young, white man in a business suit threw himself into one of the doors as it closed, jamming the rest of the doors. The doors re-opened and I quickly slid inside.

I was back on the train, but I was only relieved for a moment. I had no idea where H now was. I also had a bad feeling that I hadn't really gotten back onto the train I'd gotten off of, but that I'd gotten onto a train that had followed the train I'd originally been on. If that were the case, H would be alone on the other train.

I had to find out if H was okay. But I couldn't think of any way to do this. Finally, after some rigorous concentration, I figured out that I could probably text H on my phone, figure out where she was, and figure out whether we were on the same train. If we weren't on the same train, I could at least figure out how and where we could reunite with each other.

Dream #4

I was out in the woods, but near some place like a small town or a resort or something. It may have been the future, far enough in the future for the American legal system to have been changed in weird ways.

There was a group of pretty nasty criminals, maybe four guys. Their crimes had been proven. But the crimes hadn't been bad enough to send them to jail or execute them. Instead, as punishment, the men were all being exiled to another location.

They may not even have been told that their crimes had been discovered, proven, and submitted for sentencing. They were simply being contained by a group of people and being kept calm and happy until they were moved. The place they were being moved to wasn't very different from this place. And they would be kept calm and happy there. But as punishment for their crimes, they simply had to be moved out of their present location.

I was among the group of people containing the men. We had all split up. The four men were also probably split up. We didn't really have to encounter the men. But if we did encounter them, we had to act like nothing was wrong. If the men knew they'd been convicted of crimes, they'd become terribly violent. We had to act like we didn't even know they'd committed a crime.

But I personally felt like the crime the men had committed had been too nasty to get off with such a light punishment. I'd do my job of simply containing the men. But I was bitter about it. And I wished that something would happen that would justify my killing the men -- especially their leader.

I then stumbled upon the leader. He was maybe in his late forties or early fifties. He was rough looking. He was bald and had an olive complexion. He had big, brown eyes and cheeks mossed over with dark, black stubble. He seemed intelligent, but not very cultured. He probably wore a well-fit, black sweater and black slacks. He was carrying a big, clear, blue glass jug. It had apparently had alcohol in it. But it may now have been empty.

I tried to follow protocol and act calm with the man. But he immediately became violent with me. I resisted the strong temptation I had to fight with the man. But the man smashed his jug on the ground. He still had a handle on the jug. But now it was broken into a huge, sickle-shaped and cylindrical shard. The man overpowered me, even though he didn't have me pressed to the ground, and walked me backwards, constantly jamming the sharp glass at my throat.

I was managing to push the shard away from me by pressing against the semi-cylindrical back curve. But the man was stronger than I. It was only a matter of time before he'd manage to get at me.

I reached up to the top of the shard and broke off a fragment (???). I then flailed out of the man's grip and lunged at the man. I sliced at the man's throat. I managed to cut into the man's throat, but only lightly. Just a thin trickle of blood ran out of the scrape, which stretched along a three-inch expanse in the center of the man's throat.

The man suddenly calmed down. He stared at me and aspirated a soft, little chuckle. He said, "But, no. Of course you wouldn't do that. You wouldn't kill me. You wouldn't even try. You just aren't that kind of a person."

The man was now getting ready to walk away. His three cohorts had come to this spot as well. From here, they were going to go off somewhere else. They hadn't all gotten close to each other. But I could see them all at different corners of the woods.

The man couldn't see for himself that his throat had been cut. I knew that if the cohorts told the man that his throat had been cut, the man would become terribly angry. The only reason he hadn't stayed angry was that he'd thought I was being my "usual" gentle self with him.

In fact, the man was still walking close to me, mumbling on and on about how I'd never try to slit his throat. The man had gone from being clothed in well-fitting, all black clothes to being clothed in the tattered rags of a business suit. At this point, as if to prove that he'd go crazy if he ever found out I'd tried to kill him, the man dropped his pants and walked around with his pants around his ankles.

Time passed, and I was now much closer to the resort. The man had, after all, found out that I'd tried to kill him. Now he was getting ready to retaliate. His method was that he was going to infiltrate the resort. He was going to act as an operative and incite a rebellion among the young people within the resort.

By inciting a rebellion among the young people, the man would cause the younger generation to lose their rights. The older generation would then take over. Somehow this would give the man the upper hand -- even though I'm not sure what good it would do him. He'd still most likely be transported out of this place.

But, having gotten information on the man's plans (how???), I knew I needed to stop the man. I was in a huge, but kind of cheap and run-down looking, room which looked kind of like a library but which served as the first room of entrance to the resort -- like the woods outside the resort, where I'd been before, wasn't really the proper resort area itself.

The man came into the room. He wasn't disguised, necessarily. But he had something with him, something like credentials, which gave him the "official identity," regardless of his external appearance, of being somebody who was okay for being inside the resort.

The person who handled the entrance and exit of people -- a kind of young, inexperienced person -- accepted the man. The man was simply allowed to go into the resort. I had to stand by and watch. If the person was accepted by the person in charge of accepting people, I simply couldn't do anything about it.

Time passed again. I was on an outdoor balcony level of the main building of the resort, looking down over some concrete courtyard. The balcony I was on was wide and open, pleasant for large groups of people, and had been a favorite hangout for the young people.

But just recently the young people, incited to rebellion by the criminal leader, had gotten into a fight with some officials on the balcony. The young people had been forced down from the balcony and into the courtyard. A whole riot crew -- bulletproof vests, black helmets, night sticks, and all -- had been assembled and was approaching the courtyard, unbeknownst to the young people in the courtyard.

Now the riot crew attacked. The young people, who were basically dressed in t-shirts and jeans, were pretty much powerless against the riot crew. The riot crew proceeded to pummel any young person they could get their hands on. I knew the criminal leader was behind all this. I knew if I could stop him, I could stop the attacks.

A man in his thirties walked up into the courtyard. He was a white man with red-tanned skin, strawberry blonde hair, and chiseled, muscular features. He wore a beautiful business suit, spectacles, and a long, pea-colored trenchcoat. He was carrying a briefcase with him. It was obvious he had just come from a business trip and was just now arriving back at the resort.

The riot crew turned toward the business man. He looked young enough to attack. But when the riot crew saw who the man was, they immediately stopped and backed away from him. He was not fair game. The business man walked up a stairwell at the edge of the courtyard.

I now knew the criminal leader was approaching. I had to confront him and defeat him, even if my orders were not to do so. However, I knew as I was walking away from where I'd been standing, that I was leaving a little girl without my protection. The little girl lay on a mattress on the floor of the balcony. She was being tended to by a very old man or woman. But the fate of the resort hinged on the health and safety of the little girl.

I walked down along the balcony, to where there seemed to be a lot more activity, like people consulting with one another regarding what to do about the unrest in the courtyard. I may have missed the criminal leader -- or I may have watched him walk right past me, as if he didn't quite exist while I was watching him! But I must have seen him again -- I remember seeing him in his black outfit.

There seemed to be fires and explosions. And then suddenly everything seemed to have calmed down. I don't know what the result of the conflict was. But I think some mutual understanding was arrived at between the people who had revolted and the people who had set the riot crews on them.

But I knew, even as I headed back to my post, that the criminal leader had approached the little girl. I assumed that if he had approached her, he had most likely killed her. I needed to make sure the little girl was safe.

I was now rushing back to my post to check on the welfare of the little girl. I was terribly distraught. But as soon as I approached the little girl's mattress, the scene would start over again. I'd be a little distance from the mattress, not able to see the girl. I'd rush up to the mattress and just get a glimpse of the girl. Then the scene would start again.

I think I saw the scene three times. The first time, I'm pretty sure, I discovered that the girl had been killed by the criminal leader. I felt horribly guilty. The second time, the girl may have been attacked, but still alive. The third time, the girl may have been very sick, suffering from some kind of a fever, and possibly in grave danger, but untouched by the criminal leader.

***

UPDATE: Added drawing to dream #2, August 3, 2012, 2:15 PM, Mountain Standard Time.