Monday, December 31, 2012

can i borrow $250?

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was a bright, sunny day. I was walking out in an area that felt busy like a city street but which was probably out in some vacant dirt lot, possibly in a desert or mountain town. There were a lot of cars around, all parked in a row like they were parked along a curb. Everybody in the crowd was probably dressed really nicely. A distant shadow felt like the shadow that would be cast by a skyscraper on a sunny day.

I was talking on a cell phone with a former head of a department where I worked and a person who is still a mentor of mine. I was in trouble with money and was racking my brain trying to figure out how I could just push myself above the level where I was in trouble. Finally I decided to ask my mentor for money. I said, "Can I borrow $250?"

My mentor was frustrated that I'd asked that question. She said, "Yes, you can. But I can never do something like this for you ever again!" She wasn't mad at me. But she was a bit frustrated that I hadn't been able to get my life back to a stable point by now.

I felt bad about having to ask for the money. But I also felt like I didn't need to be judged so harshly. After all, since I'd hit my really bad point, a few months ago, I'd gone from a place where I thought I was doomed so bad that I was going to die to a point where all I needed to push myself through the next few weeks was $250. I felt like if I kept going along this trajectory, I actually would be stabilized pretty soon.

Sunday, December 30, 2012

the global education center

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I had probably been involved in some crime. I was probably partners in crime with another man, possibly my brother. The crime may have been something conventional, such as stealing something or harming somebody. But it may rather have been something more unconventional and just, like a crime of civil disobedience. I had been blamed for this crime only recently. I was now on the run from the people who were pursuing me to arrest me.

I was running through a gigantic tunnel underpass, like a huge tunnel that might pass under a river or a mountain. The walls of the tunnel were green and flat, like the background of an old comic book style cartoon series. I was running on a ledge or walkway that looked out over the traffic in the tunnel. There were four or five lanes of cars, all with the traffic heading in the same direction.

I saw my partner in crime driving in one of the lanes. He may have known I was attempting to flee. He may have brought his car here in order to help me flee. He hadn't been helping me before. In fact, I felt like he had done something to shift the blame for the crime off of him and onto me. But for some reason he was helping me now.

My partner's car looked like a cartoon version of the Batmobile. I somehow jumped from the ledge and toward the car, which was at least ten meters away from where I stood. I descended through a slot-like hole in the top of a bubble-like dome that went over the passenger seat of the car.

Landing in the car, I slid as far down in the seat as I could, so that it would look like there was nobody in the passenger seat. I knew there were police on the lookout for me everywhere. I imagined two or three police cars up ahead, monitoring all the cars that passed for any trace of someone who looked like me.

The tunnel was packed with traffic. But we seemed to be moving steadily. My partner, most likely my brother, began talking to me about where we were going. As he spoke, we seemed to be accelerating. We also seemed to be moving down a slope.

My brother said that we had both been called to a place where we were going to learn how to fly SR-71 Blackbirds. The place we were going to was called the Global Education Center. We had been chosen to train as some kind of special agents at this place because of our unique abilities.

My brother and I were now before an instructor at the Global Education Center. The instructor told us all the stuff we would learn in order to be SR-71 pilots. One of the things we would learn was how to handle the button that would drop a nuclear bomb from the jet. I imagined a red, missile-shaped button amid a black configuration that must have been a keyboard but that looked like the nose of an SR-71.

I told the instructor that I didn't want to know how to drop a nuclear bomb. I didn't want to have anything to do with nuclear bombs. I asked him if I could take all the rest of the training and fly the SR-71 in some capacity other than that of a potential bomb dropper. The instructor was probably disappointed in me. He may have told me no, that if I wasn't going to learn all the aspects of the SR-71, that I couldn't learn any of them.

I had the feeling that the instructor was getting ready to kick me out of the Global Education Center. The instructor may have been getting ready to do something even worse to me, such as imprison me as a person who now "knew too much" to be allowed back among civilians. He may even have been planning to erase my memory or even kill me.

But I was less concerned about all of this than I was about being thought weak by my instructor. I started justifying my thoughts, proving to myself that my desire not to drop the bomb hadn't been weak. And I started convincing myself that my instructor really did like me, and that he really did have plans to use me in some other capacity at the Global Education Center.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

the mud-bodied dog

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was standing out, possibly on a sidewalk, behind a backyard. A chain-link fence surrounded the backyard. The ground was mostly covered in deep green grass, though muddy patches showed through in a lot of places.

I feel like there was another person, maybe my brother, somewhere nearby, maybe in the yard, or maybe behind another side of the fence from the one I was on. But I never quite saw the person.

There were two little dogs in the yard. One was white and shaggy. The other was brown, maybe a dachshund. The white dog seemed to be a little friendly with me. But the brown dog was really mean and only wanted to bite me. Somehow the dog, even though it was behind the fence, was managing to get close to biting me. Maybe it had even bitten my pants.

I was still behind the fence. But I was also now inside the yard, which was a lot muddier than it had been before.

I had decided that if the brown dog was going to be mean to me, I was just going to ignore it. I was playing around with the white dog. I was hoping to make the brown dog jealous. If it got jealous and wanted to play with me, it would have to be nice.

It seemed like the brown dog actually was going to get nice and start playing with me. But every time it got close to me, it started barking wildly. I just decided to give up on the dog and ignore it altogether.

But now I noticed that the brown dog had a really weird body. It was like mud, compacted mud, with little, occasional blades of grass poking out of it and smashed sideways into it. The dog's body also had some imprint of small diamonds on it, like the imprint of the sole of a shoe, like someone had kicked or stepped on this mud-bodied dog.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

bugs in bed; united nations movie

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a bedroom with my brother. I had been laying on a few sheets that lay on the ground. I may have been sleeping. My brother may have been sitting up in a chair.

I rolled over, as if I thought I was going to get up. But as I faced down toward the floor and pushed myself upward, I saw a strange bug, maybe a spider, crawling across the sheet. I was a little afraid of the bug, and I wondered how it had gotten there.

The bug may then have been a ladybug. I was interested in watching the ladybug, though I couldn't actually believe the bug was something as harmless as a ladybug.

I was about to get up out of bed when I saw another bug. This bug was like a flying ant, except a lot longer, maybe an inch long. It also had a little bit of a weird coloration, like the coloration of meat and fat in strips of bacon. I may have been worried that this bug would hurt me. But I may also have been worried that this bug would hurt the ladybug.

Dream #2

I was in a movie theater, watching a movie starring Leonardo diCaprio. The images were all kind of dark, like the characters were in the dark, with just a bit of spotlight thrown on them. There were also undertones of yellow-green, though this possibly may only have been for the ending credits.

The movie was like Catch Me If You Can, except darker. It was about how the Leo character, a crook of some kind, was being pursued by a good detective. The good detective knew the Leo character was good. He wanted to put him on a good path in life, so he could do some really great things.

I knew that the story would end positively, because the person in the film was an actual historical figure. But the film seemed to end with the Leo character having been put in a really compromising position. It was like he had been framed, set up, by the good detective.

It seemed like the Leo character would be able to get out of his trouble. But it also seemed like he'd be bitter against the detective for framing him, and like he'd commit himself even more to a life of crime, rather than going straight.

But now, as the credits were rolling, a series of titles showed, explaining that the Leo character went on to become a leadership figure within the United Nations. There were a few black and white, grainy photos of him that felt like they were from the 1960s. They showed the man, with white hair and glasses, a checked (?) button-up shirt, and khaki slacks, giving what seemed like lectures, one at a podium, and one at a kind of high stage, in front of a long blackboard.

The lights came up in the theater. The theater looked a lot different. Before, the theater had been like a normal theater. I had been about halfway back in the audience. Now the theater was like a lecture hall. The movie screen was high up on the wall. A group of panelists stood by a folding table on the left side of the room. And I was now sitting at the front of the room, near the left side of the room.

I still didn't know how it was possible for the Leo character to have become a leader at the UN, after having been so committed to crime. I figured I'd ask the panelists that question, or that they might even explain things without my having to ask.

I stood up and walked to the table, as if I were now one of the panelists, or as if I were assisting the panelists. The panel presentation had already started. The panelists were all speaking in a joking way. There were probably three panelists, all men.

The panelist to the far left was my old friend R. Even though I'd almost been standing directly in front of him, we hadn't noticed each other. Now we noticed each other. I wished there were a way I could reverse that recognition. I really didn't want to speak with R. But I knew there was no way to avoid it. So I got behind the mic with him and started making jokes.

The Leo character in the film had the first name Joaquin. I kept on joking, pronouncing the name in a stereotypically American incorrect way, like "Joe-uh-kwin," instead of "hwa-keen." But soon I realized that nobody in the room, even R, realized I was joking. They all thought I was mispronouncing the name as a personal assault against his culture.

As I tried to justify myself regarding my joke, the view faded into a steep hill in a suburban neighborhood on a sunny day. I was heading down the hill, either in a car or on foot. At the bottom of the hill, which intersected with an even longer slope, I stopped, about to turn right, as if to head down the longer slope.

I was now talking with someone, maybe my brother. I may at first have been trying to justify the Joaquin joke. But then I was talking about something else altogether. I may have handed my brother something, maybe a piece of rotten wood, like a broken off piece of railroad tie, that was about a foot long.

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

the sixth child; adult baby and the fetish church

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was night. I was out in some place like an empty dirt lot, like a parking lot for a desert fairgrounds. But something about it also felt like it was indoors, like we were in a living room or a waiting room with a lot of couches.

I was with a group of kids. They may have been young children, or they may have been teenagers with the mentality of young children. We had all finished up with some kind of project. Now we were headed away.

But for some reason we all stopped. I felt like our having stopped would probably lead to some of the kids getting impatient. We'd all gotten through our task well. I, as the leader or organizer of this event, didn't want to have people get impatient and start having bad memories about our task. But I also felt like one of the kids might probably start feeling bad, thinking it had been his fault that we had stopped.

I turned around to find the boy I thought might feel bad. The light all around us was now dim green and blue, like dim lights, like fluorescent lights from over building doors, were shining from somewhere nearby.

The boy stood bathed in the light. He was doing some weird move with his face, where he was kind of juggling his eyeglasses on his face, kind of balancing them on his nose. I now understood that we'd all stopped because some of the other boys had noticed this boy doing this trick. The boys had wanted to point out, possibly to me, if not simply just to point out in general, that the boy had this talent.

But for some reason I felt bad about the boy performing like this. I felt like maybe the boy was performing only to make me less impatient, like I'd acted frustrated because we'd stopped and I personally had needed something to divert me from my frustration.

But now the other boys were showing their talents. All the boys' talents were similar to the first boy's talents. The boys were all juggling or swinging or swirling things about. One boy had some black glop he was juggling around on his face. Another boy had a thin, multicolored, neon string that he swung around.

One of the boys pointed out something like the fact that everybody has a talent, and that times like this, waiting times, when motion has stopped, are great times to practice talents. But something still made me feel like these talents were all being shown to me as a way of keeping me personally from getting impatient while our movement was stopped.

Now we were by a building, or at least by a tall, wide wall. Green fluorescent lamps hung from the wall. My brother-in-law sat with his back against the wall. My view of him was obstructed by some of the boys, who were running around, practicing their talents almost as if they were part of some dance or religious ceremony.

My brother-in-law was talking about his kids' homework. He then jokingly asked if I thought he should be extra diligent with making sure ----- got her homework done. I didn't quite catch what my brother-in-law said, and I only half-responded to it.

My brother-in-law saw that I didn't get his joke. He seemed a little ashamed that I hadn't gotten it. He might have thought I was angry with what he'd said, or he might have thought I hadn't cared enough to listen to what he'd said.

But now the spaced between us was clearing out. I could see my brother-in-law clearly. I thought he'd tell the joking comment again. But he didn't: he just explained who the subject of the joke was. The subject was a little girl, just a baby, and my sister's and brother-in-law's youngest child. My brother-in-law was, in fact, holding the little baby in a swaddling blanket in his arms.

I now saw the joke. The baby obviously didn't have any homework. My brother-in-law had just joked that, while he was being so diligent with all the other kids, he might go overboard and even make the little baby do homework as well.

But I was still a little confused. I didn't know where this little baby, which would have been my sister's and brother-in-law's sixth child, had come from. I definitely couldn't remember the baby girl's name.

Dream #2

I was in a car, going down the road at night. I may have been driving the car, but I may have been in the passenger's seat. I was riding along a rut in the right side of the road, constantly almost veering off the road and onto a shoulder of brown-red, desert soil.

I either knew about or was having a conversation (either in my head or with someone -- my mom? -- who sat in the driver's seat) about a church that accepted gay people. The church may actually have had the phrase "Gay Church" in its name.

I started thinking about this Gay Church. It occurred to me that the church wasn't just for gay people. It was a church, a Christian church, that actually celebrated all kinds of alternative sexualities. I had the feeling that it was actually a fetish church rather than a gay church.

I began visualizing the sanctuary of a church my family had attended when I was nine or ten years old. The sanctuary was huge. I visualized all kinds of people dressed up to represent their various fetishes. Some people were dressed normally. But other people were in things like full-body-and-head latex suits, and other people were on leashes.

I thought how it might be fun for me to go to church as an adult baby. I could dress up as a baby and wear a diaper. Maybe I could even be pushed into the church by my Mommy (whoever that would be...) and suck on a pacifier.

But I kind of got turned off by the idea. I wondered if I wouldn't just look stupid. Something about the clothes I visualized myself wearing looked girlish, but clunky, boyish, and cheap -- stupid and shameful. I didn't want to dress up as a baby if that was the best I could do!

I also worried about who would push me in. If a boy had to be my AB parent, I didn't want to do it.

I also worried about what other people would think of me. Even though the church accepted all kinds of fetish, maybe people just looked down on adult babies and thought they were gross. If so, I didn't want to go in and be seen that way by people.

But it now seemed to me that I didn't have much choice. I may have been getting driven to the church right now. I may also have been dressed up as a baby, ready to get pushed into the church of fetish. I may no longer have been driving the car. I may have been in a car seat, sucking on a pacifier, while my AB Mommy or Daddy was driving the car.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

matchmaker casino; communion baby

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in some place like a fun center or a casino. It was probably daytime. It seemed like most of the light in the room came from natural light from tall window walls at the front of the place. The carpets were probably grey-blue. There were rows and rows of touchscreen arcade games or gambling games. The room tiered up on the right side to another level of machines.

I had probably just walked down a little staircase from the top tier. I was walking with determination, as if I were involved with some task that I no longer remember.

I turned to my left and walked up an aisle of gaming machines. Most of the machines were taken by people. But a couple of the end machines and another machine farther up, which I probably thought of as machine number three, possibly because it was the third from the opposite end of the row, were empty.

I went toward machine number three, feeling like that machine was specifically related to my task. As I did, a tall, white, bald man wearing a pale blue, button-up shirt and dark pants (jeans?) rushed up from behind me. It seemed like he'd noticed me going for number three, so now he wanted it, and he was going to cut me off from it.

But I threw out my arms and blocked the man from heading toward the machine. I had to use some pretty good force to hold him back. I may have felt bad as I approached number three's screen. I felt now that possibly I had been the one to block the man, and that I had done it because I had seen him going for the machine first. I may possibly not have known now whether I had needed to use number three in order to accomplish my task.

The game on the screen was apparently a matchmaking game. The matchmaking decisions you made in the game may have been made in real life for the people who were represented in the game.

At first it seemed like the game dealt with large images of a few people, maybe even only one man and one woman. But when I got excited about the real life aspect of the game, which really seemed to be driven home by the large images, the game changed.

Now there were a bunch of Rolodex-style contact cards on either side of the screen, with a lot of blank, pale blue space in the middle. One line of cards had men; the other, women. The player was supposed to scroll the cards up or down until he found a good woman-man match. The man and woman were supposed to meet each other across the midsection of the screen.

I scrolled up and down through the cards. But something about the control of the cards was really difficult. There was something random about it, like the spinning of the images in a slot machine. And one of the sides may have been completely out of my control. I think finally a match may have occurred. But it wasn't the perfect match I'd thought it would be.

Dream #2

I don't really remember where I was. I was probably with a large group of people. We were probably kneeling, as if part of some devotional ceremony. But I'm pretty sure we weren't in church. We were set at an odd angle to something else. And the space had the feeling of an office space or an arcade space.

Somewhere there may have been a priest. He may have had a long, cape-like article of clothing, which he may have swept over me and the people around me.

The priest, or possibly someone else, or possibly nobody in particular, grabbed up a bunch of communion wafers from us. I visualized these wafers floating up like a bunch of cookies in a grid, like they'd all slid up from a cookie sheet. They now floated before a blue-green background. Each cookie had Jesus' face on it, just like the face on the shroud in El Greco's painting.

Some person -- I probably heard the person in my head -- said, "We're taking the cookies away. Instead of eating the cookies, you will be eating a real baby." I visualized a naked baby laying on its back. I understood that the baby was going to be killed and eaten by us.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

i've never read harry potter

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in some room, staring at the front of a wooden piece of furniture, like a set of cabinets or something. The light of the room may have been bluish grey.

I was talking to a woman or a couple of women about some author. The author, probably a woman, was really cynical and always tried to make herself sound really smart. She may have made fun of something in pop culture that had to do with Harry Potter. But she may also have written a book that was like Harry Potter, even though she may have been claiming it was better.

I thought this was really funny. I said that even I could tell that the woman was using a lot of motifs one would think would come from Harry Potter. I said nobody should make fun of Harry Potter and then try to write like Harry Potter if they weren't at least going to read it.

Then one of the girls asked what I'd read from Harry Potter. I said, "Actually, ... None. I haven't read anything from Harry Potter. And I know it's important, because those books were such a phenomenon. Just the amount of books that were sold. If you want to write a book and have it sell lots of copies, you should probably read Harry Potter. But I haven't."

I was now looking over to my left. Across the pale grey floor from me was a closed door, like a bedroom door, like I was now in a bedroom. I may have been there by myself.

There was a crack under the door that seemed to be only an inch or so tall. But my mom somehow managed to edge three books, all stacked up, under the crack. Only the corners of the books came into the room. But I could see the full spines of the books. They were all old Nancy Drew mystery books.

My mom called out something from behind the door like, "I found these for you. You left your books out in the garage. So I brought them in for you. I know how much you like them. I didn't want you to feel like you were missing them."

I may have been a little ashamed, wondering what the girls I had been/was still talking to would think of me for liking such an old -- and girly! -- book series as the Nancy Drew series.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

the vanished woman; old woman charon

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a bedroom of an apartment or of a mutli-story house. The bedroom was dim and small, with dull, wood floors and a small bed that probably had a pink bedspread over it.

I was a strong, young man with olive complexion, dark hair, and a little bit of stubble on my face. I was in the bedroom with a woman who may have been beautiful, though she may have been twice my age. She may actually have been a family member, or the mother of a group of my friends who were downstairs.

I had gotten into an argument with the woman over something, possibly some crime the two of us had taken part in. I felt like the woman was going to get me in trouble by revealing something about the crime. I may have been planning to kill her to get rid of the evidence.

I traced my feet around the bed, moving clockwise around the bed from the head of the bed, down around the foot of the bed, and up just a step or two back toward the head of the bed.

The woman now stepped near the bed. She didn't know -- maybe I hadn't, either! -- that my feet had actually cut into the floor, like in cartoons. The traced area was ready to collapse. I must have had an idea of this, because I'm pretty sure I told the woman not to step any closer.

But the woman did step forward and fall through the floor. The bed, the section of floor, and the woman all vanished through the floor. I looked into the hole. I'd expected to hear a crash or something. But there was nothing. And the hole was shallow, like there was another floor only one or two meters down. Everything had really vanished!

I hurried downstairs, hoping to find the spot where the woman had landed. I met the woman's children, who were probably all about the same age as I/the young man. I don't know whether the family actually was angry at me for letting their mother die, or whether they even suspected me of being involved in it. But I was afraid they were angry. They all seemed kind of savage and capable of really harming me.

I was trying to justify what had happened to the woman. But the conversation between me and the others went to other topics. The hole in the floor, I learned, also had something to do with demons. So perhaps demons had drawn the woman to the hole in the floor. The woman was definitely in danger of demons right now, wherever she was.

Something else I learned from our conversation, which continued as we walked down a big complex of old, institution-style staircases and balconies, was that the woman had actually said something that had tempted fate, or tempted the spirits, to pull her into wherever she now was. She had something that had to do with keeping her distance from spirits, something like always staying two steps or five steps away from something.

As people -- including, now, for some reason, my grandma P -- continued to tell me this story, in an almost pitying tone of voice, I, continuing to walk down the staircase, began playing with the bannister, running my fingers along a knob of white-painted wood.

We ended up down at the bottom of the staircase, in a fluorescent-lit basement. I had expected to find the woman down here. I could even visualize her, laying wrapped up in a blanket, even cluttered on either side by stuff that had fallen with her through the hole in the floor.

Dream #2

I walked out of a living room and into a hallway, at the back of a group of older family members, probably including my mother, my grandma P, and my step-grandmother.

We had all been planning on how to take care of some older woman in our family who was having physical troubles. I had understood that I had been assigned certain tasks, and I had adapted my thoughts to the anticipation of taking care of these tasks.

But now that we were walking through the hallway, I learned that I had been assigned a whole different group of tasks. The responsibility I had accepted, even come to look forward to, was now replaced by a whole different set of responsibilities, which were things I felt could have been assigned to a child. I felt like it was being implied that I was no more than a little child.

I had only found out about these changes as they'd filtered through the conversation my relatives were having with each other. But I found out that my mother had actually been the one to make these changes. She'd made the changes, and she hadn't told me a thing!

We all ended up in a bedroom at the end of the hallway. The bedroom, like the rest of the house, was kind of small, narrow, and flimsy. But something about it also felt like a great library, like the Morgan Library.

The rest of my relatives had kind of dispersed, leaving just me and my mother in the room. My mom may have been trying to have a nice conversation with me. But she may also have been gloating at me, trying to needle me with the fact that she had changed plans on me without telling me anything.

I got extremely angry. Suddenly I was floating a bit above the ground. A book was also floating in front of me. Ostensibly the book was an edition of Dickens' Little Dorrit. But it was much thinner than any edition of Little Dorrit could be. And the covers and all the pages were made of some kind of backing and white fabric. The white fabric was all emroidered with quaint illustrations, giving the book the look of a folk art cushion and a child's book.

As I looked at this book, calmly entranced by its strange, Christmasy beauty, I was think/talk/yelling at my mom. I brought up some instance where a relative, possibly my grandma P, had needed her help. But some decision my mom had made had gone wrong. I yelled at my mom, "You! You really -- fucked -- it -- up!"

I knew that that would hurt my mom and get back at her for her having changed plans on me. But now that I'd done it, I felt bad. I'd gone too far. I worried that I'd permanently damaged my mom's emotions. I felt really terrible.

I was now in an SUV with some co-workers from my present job, probably including MM and SC. I was sitting in a backseat. We were driving through a quaint residential area. We drove up to a property that was fenced around with a solid, white wall of fence that had some kind of green ivy draping over it.

We stopped at the gate. It was understood that I needed to head in and hand a payment to an old woman who lived at the house. This payment was partly something I'd owed from the past. But it was almost like this payment was a kind of rite of passage, something that would make me part of my group of co-workers.

But I either didn't have the money or else was so low on money that paying the fee would really put me in trouble financially. I tried not to let on about this. But somehow SC found out. She, and probably the rest of my co-workers, were a little disappointed in me when they found out. I knew I'd be held in lower esteem because of this mistake I'd made -- not having enough money.

My co-workers, or maybe just SC, who was probably driving the car, may have handed me a twenty-dollar bill, or even a wad of twenty-dollar bills. I now had enough money to give to the old woman.

I was now standing before the door. But, where before the house had been in a kind of tight, wall-fenced place, it now stood out on some wide, sunny lawn, maybe even a wide valley.

Two old women opened the door. One woman stood tall. The other woman may have been very short, or hunched over, or even sitting in a wheelchair. She was kind of fat, very pale, very baggy-faced, with pale blue eyes and thin, white hair. She wore a peach-tan, satiny nightgown. She was the woman I was supposed to give my money to.

The woman didn't really seem concerned with my money. She was talking in a rambling manner that was uncanny and spooky. (I want to say now that it was autonomous or beyond my control -- I'm not sure why, or even what that would mean.)

The woman wanted me to stay to keep her company. She may have been offering me dinner in return. But something about the woman, the degree of her illness, made me realize that it wouldn't be good, either for me or for the woman, for me to stay with her.

I may still have wanted to stay with the woman. But I was now sitting on something like a child's tricycle combined with some (not sure what) aspect of a Radio Flyer wagon. The wagon was being pulled by a yellow and blue rope attached to the front. I was being pulled away from the house and out of the valley.

I kept trying and trying to pull myself back toward the woman. But the rope kept pulling me farther and farther away. Moving through the rolling valley, I was surprised by its vastness. I really felt like things had changed -- for the better (?). I saw a few small groups of beautiful people, mostly beautiful, little girls, playing in the valley.

Getting toward the edge of the valley I now saw that the people who were pulling the rope attached to the wagon were the co-workers who had been in the car with me, in particular SC and MM. They stood on a clear boundary of lands. The area they stood in was more like a pine forest, with trees and dusty, needle-strewn ground. I knew that my co-workers were doing what was best for me. But I still kept reaching back toward the house and the old woman.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

wearing diapers to the store; one-legged chase scene

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was night. I was up in some apartment on the second or third floor of an oldish, Village-style, brick apartment.I was in a bedroom. Everybody else was in some other room. The bedroom was cluttered and little with a bright, but kind of pale, incandescdent light.

The apartment wasn't mine. I may have been here because of a party that was going on, though the party may not have been happening right then. I may also have been here because I was going to watch the place for the people who lived here, though they weren't gone yet.

I was looking at myself in a mirror. I saw that I was wearing a Pampers Baby Dry diaper. I was planning to go downstairs and out to some grocery store or music store (or a grocery/music store?) that was right near the apartment building.

I wanted to go down there wearing my diapers. But I wanted to make sure they were visible, so that everybody I walked by knew I was wearing diapers. I may have hoped that somebody would be turned on by my wearing diapers and want to hit on me.

I grabbed a pair of very low rise blue jeans from somewhere. I put them on and looked at how the waistband of the diapers flapped over the waistline of the jeans. I looked at the Sesame Street character on the waistband.

The waistband seemed to flop down a bit too much. I was also worried that once I actually got walking around, the waistline of the jeans would snug up around the waistband of the diapers, obscuring the diapers. I really wanted people to see me in my diapers! I wondered whether I couldn't just go down to the store wearing only my t-shirt and diapers.

I looked out the window. The neighborhood was busy with young people who were out having fun. But across the street from me, standing next to a gate like the gate around St. Mark's Church in the Village, were two kind of scuzzy-looking men. They looked like they could either be forty-five or twenty-five. One was white, the other Hispanic. They wore cheap clothes.

I knew these men were actually stalking me. I knew they'd been waiting for me all this time. If I went downstairs while they were down there, they'd follow me all over the place. I didn't mind other people seeing me in diapers. But I didn't want these men to see me in diapers. And I really didn't want them following me around. I tried to think of how to avoid the men.

My brain must have skipped over this problem entirely. I was now down in the grocery/record store. I walked around, having a little fun feeling myself in a diaper. I remember wondering about the back of my diaper, wondering whether that wasn't also visible, wondering whether I couldn't do anything to make it more visible.

The store was as large as a regular grocery store. But it had a kind of old, run-down feel to it, like an old Chinese vegetable store. The light was dingy fluorescent. The linoleum floors were coated in a patina of eternal dust. There were wood-crate like stands everywhere, holding merchandise. Toward the right side of the store were rows and rows of record or CD stands.

I must have bought something. I now stood before the cashier, whose counter was higher than my head. I had to reach up to hand the cashier my money. The cashier was a blonde girl, kind of short and young-looking, with slightly tanned skin, pale, blue eyes, and frizzy-wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a faded, purple or blue t-shirt.

Dream #2

It was a hot, summer day. I had just walked away from some big outdoor event I'd been attending. The event may have been a parade or a fair. The event had probably been held to benefit people with some sort of physical problem. I felt like I had had fun and been able to support a good cause.

But now some black man began chasing after me. He was tall, very skinny, and very dark, also really sweaty or greasy. He wore really dark, but reflective, sunglasses. He was trying to bamboozle me into giving him money. But I barely had any money myself.

The man wouldn't leave me alone. I began running away from him. But apparently I had no left leg. I began hopping on my right leg, as fast as I could, to get away from the man. My hops became huge leaps. I was almost floating through the air between hops. I even seemed to be accelerating.

But the man was still behind me. I had gotten out of the busy part of town and was now on some sun-yellow, concrete-and-dust outskirts of the downtown area. I saw a grocery store off to my right. I thought if I went into that place, I'd be protected from the man. Out on the street, anybody could bother anybody. But in a store, you had to obey the store's rules.

I also thought I might have been able to evade the man by hiding in the store. But the man was still close enough to see where I was heading. He had gotten onto a bike, which he was now peddling with only his right leg. He, now, apparently, had only his right leg, while I had both my legs. I wondered how someone could possibly pedal with only one leg.

I went into the store through a set of automatic doors. The store was really old-looking and run-down. It looked like barely anybody ever came here. Everything looked kind of stale. There were no lights on, but plenty of dim natural light, green as a hard-boiled egg yolk's skin, came in through the front window.

I saw the man run into the store. Somehow I acted like I was walking through the store, looking for stuff to buy. But as soon as I saw that I'd gotten the man to walk far back into the store, so that I was out of his line of sight, I ran out of the store.

I turned around the right corner of the store and ran up the sidewalk, to a pedestrian bridge that ran over some wide road. I was pretty sure I had now evaded the man.

But now I was having thoughts of some conversation with my mom. The conversation got so heavy that I stopped running about halfway along the chain-link-fence-domed bridge. I began fumbling with something, maybe an electronic device, while I looked down and continued the imaginary conversation with my mother.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

angry semi-lucid dream

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was night. I was at my family's house, in the kitchen with my brother. My mother had just left the house. Now that my mother was gone, my brother was trying to find ways to annoy me.

My brother lit up a cigarette in the house. At first I thought he was going to walk outside with it. Almost everybody in the family smokes. But nobody smokes in the house, because my nephews have lung problems. But my brother didn't walk outside. Instead, he walked to and closed the side and front doors, staring at me defiantly the whole time he did it.

I got mad and yelled at my brother. I walked out of the house and into the night, thinking I was going to do something, maybe head back to my own apartment, maybe find my mother -- even though I may also have thought that my mother was never coming back.

I wanted to come back into the house. But now my brother had shut and locked all the doors on me. I tried to get back into the house. But there was no way in.

Suddenly I decided to jump downward, right through the ground and walls, into the basement of the house. I did this, in anger, without even thinking of how strange it had been for me to do it.

I was down in a basement bedroom. The lights were all off, but I could see with a grainy vision, like I was looking through infrared goggles, or like I was watching a black and white film with dim, stark lighting.

I told myself that there was no way I could have done what I'd just done under normal circumstances. I may have realized that I was dreaming. But I probably thought instead that I was having an out of body experience.

I was kind of afraid to move from where I was. I didn't really think I could. I thought I would de-stabilize and stop being in whatever state I was in. But I then thought that I had to move, if only to confront my brother.

I reached for the doorknob of the bedroom. I quickly opened the door. The view tilted, like a camera shot, about fifteen or twenty degrees to the left. I was a little disoriented, but for some reason the shock of the change cleared my mind a little.

I walked out into the hallway, which was actually sloped. It hadn't been my view that was tilted. The hallway was actually sloped. I walked up the dark, starkly dim-lit, black and white hallway. A feeling of clarity and real presence washed over me. I got very excited, thinking, I'm really moving through this environment!

Sunday, December 16, 2012

something i don't know; family sickness

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was at an office desk, on the phone. I was staring down at the grey base of the phone. I had just started a sales call with someone. The person on the other end of the phone was some business manager. He told me, "I already know the basics of your product. I don't have time for you to tell me all the stuff I already know. Tell me something I don't already know."

I knew there were a few little things I could tell the man that he didn't know. But I also knew that it was protocol, for the company I worked at, to give the basic overview of the company. I was bound to do it. I thought, however, that I would shorten the overview for the person.

So I started the overview, beginning with the date and the reason of the company's founding. But as soon as I'd started that little overview, I could hear the man sigh and then hang up the phone. I called out, "Hello? Hello?" hoping the man was still there. But he was gone.

Dream #2

I was in a hospital or doctor's office with my mother. We had just finished taking care of something, either for my mom or my sister. My sister had been with us, but now she was out in the car. My mom and I walked out of the building and into the bright, calm, yellow daylight.

I had been a little upset that my sister had gone out to wait in the car. I felt like she'd gone out there either because she was annoyed that she'd had to wait so long for the thing we'd been doing, or else because something either my mom or I had done had annoyed her.

But my mom told me that, really, my sister was just upset at the gravity of the situation, and that she couldn't stay within that situation for very long without feeling overwhelmed. The way my mom was talking, I felt like my sister's anxiety may have had more to do with an illness my sister had, rather than with an illness my mother had. (In waking life, my family is currently dealing with the fact that my mom is having some serious, though temporary, physical problems.)

I approached the family vehicle. It was like a van, but the cabin's floor seemed really low to the ground, and the ceiling seemed to extend 30cm or so higher than the ceiling of a normal van. My sister sat in the front passenger seat. For some reason I may now have felt like my mom was gone. Maybe she'd stayed in the hospital. My mom had driven my sister out her. But now I had to drive my sister back somewhere, probably back to her house.

Looking at my sister as she sat in the car, I could see that she was sick, as my mom had told me. My sister looked very strange, overall. She was so tall her head almost hit the ceiling. She also seemed much dumpier and more overweight than usual -- but extremely pear shaped, so that her head looked grotesquely thin. Her complexion also had a greenish pale pallor.

Friday, December 14, 2012

museum anxiety; diapered spoiled sport

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was walking around in some area full of museums. I had just gotten out of one museum and was walking to another museum. Something special was going on in the museum, like a grand opening or the opening of an exhibit.

The museum was a really beautiful building. It felt small on one side, like the Smithsonian museum for Asian art in Washington, DC. But it seemed to have a long wing expanding from the left side, like a wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The walkway was all made of black stone, with a long, rectangular fountain of black stone on it.

But, despite the museum's kind of classical look, the museum was really some kind of museum for sex or sleaze or something. There was an exhibit there that I wanted too see, though I felt it may have been too intense or explicit. I may have been worried that I wouldn't be able to take it.

Somebody let me know somehow (as far as I can remember, I was all alone on the plaza) that the people who ran the museum were standing out near the entrance, giving people something as a gift for coming to the museum on this special occasion.

I turned to go see the people who ran the museum. They were all tall and beautiful. There were at least one man and a couple of women. The man I noticed had red-tan skin and curly, dark blonde hair. His face looked a little worn out, even though he may still have been young. He wore a corduroy jacket and maybe some jeans. The women all seemed really well dressed and sexy.

I was afraid of the people. They all seemed so much better and more beautiful than I. I didn't want to go near them. I didn't want them to look down on me. I walked past them.

I could hear the people talking about something interesting and enjoying themselves. They may have been trying to include me in their conversation. But I was too afraid to join them. I even decided that, rather than go through them to get through the entrance, I'd just skip going to the museum altogether.

Dream #2

I was in a living room, sitting on the couch with someone, probably with a woman or girl who was my girlfriend. The couch sat against one of the long walls. We looked across a large, almost completely empty room to a wide niche at the corner that held something like a dresser.

On the wall to the left of that niche was a doorway. Some girls, and maybe boys, kept running out of the doorway and up to the dresser. Either the girls were bringing diapers with them or they would grab diapers off the dressers. They would then put the diapers on. They might have put more than one diaper on at once. They would then run back into the hallway.

I could see a little bit of the hallway. It seemed like a mess. There was some closet with a lot of shelves. There may have been a lot of diapers on the shelves. There were also a whole bunch of blankets piled in front of the closet.

The girls (and boys?), I knew, were playing some kind of game having to do with putting on and taking off diapers, and possibly messing the diapers. But I don't think it was how many diapers they could put on, or anything like that. When the girls took the diapers off, they would throw them in or near the closet. So there were a lot of diapers over there.

Then some new girl came into the game. She either didn't like the idea of putting on diapers, or else she was so bad at the game that she didn't want to play it or to let anybody else play it. So she was trying to make it clear that she could get everybody else, including me, in trouble for taking part in this game.

Somehow the girl's attitude began causing chaos among the rest of the girls. At least one of the girls was now out in front of the dresser, pulling diaper after diaper out of a pack and throwing the diapers all over the floor. I knew that in the hallway, girls were just throwing diapers all over the place as well. I felt like this was a really bad waste of new diapers, and I was hoping the girls would just start wearing the diapers again.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

grandma comes to my house

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in my apartment. My grandmother was at the door. I knew my grandma wasn't supposed to be there. She was supposed to be staying at home, because she was sick.

I didn't want to let my grandma into the apartment. I thought that if my mom found out I had let my grandma into the house she would get mad at me for having encouraged my grandma to be too active while she was sick. But my grandma barged her way into my house, anyway.

My grandma slowly walked through my kitchen and into the bathroom. I really did not want my grandma to see my apartment. My place wasn't dirty. I kept everything picked up. But it was largely empty of furniture, devoid of anything that would make the place feel comfortable. And I hadn't vacuumed in a long time.

My grandma looked at something in my shower stall. It was like there may have been a medicine cabinet inside my shower stall. My grandma may have put some medicine into the cabinet or pulled out some medicine or some kind of soap or shampoo or made some comment about how I needed some kind of medicine.

My grandma may then have tried to go into either my living room or my bedroom. But I really didn't want her to see either of those places. Somehow we managed to stop back on the threshold of the kitchen. My grandma held up a piece of paper, like a medical record. She accidentally dropped it. I watched it fall to the ground.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

following the stalker devil

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was watching a Stephen King movie or reading a Stephen King book. Then I was inside the situation. There was a man, maybe in his twenties or thirties. He seemed to be the proprietor of some place in the mountains, like a ski lodge. The man was tall and strong, with an olive complexion and wavy, black hair. He wore jeans and a dark tan jacket.

The man was in a small room, packing up something like rolls of wrapping paper into some kind of bag with a closeable top. There were something like mystical secrets among these rolls of paper. The man then left the room.

The man seemed to be getting ready to leave this place. He felt like he was being sought after by dark forces because of the mystical secrets. The forces probably wanted the secrets so that they could do something terrible to the world.

I may not actually have been in the scene before. But I was here now. There were a couple rolls of wrapping paper remaining in the room. I was playing with one of them. The roll may have been pink.

A young man walked up into the doorway. He had pale skin, a kind of square, but somehow feminine, face, and black, wavy-curly hair that went down to just above his shoulders. He wore a dark sweater and dark pants. I knew this man was the evil force after the first man. I may even have thought of this man as the devil.

The man didn't come into the room I was in. He stayed in the hallway. But he must have thought I was the man he was after. He asked me if I owned this place.

I didn't know how to respond. I thought for a moment that perhaps I was the man. Maybe we'd switched characters somehow. But I still didn't want the evil man to know this, and I didn't know whether it was true. So I told the evil man something like, I worked there, but in a really vague way that didn't give any clue to what my position was.

The evil man tried to stay calm and patient, but he gave me a sharp, peering look. He then told me to come with him. He said he had some secrets to show me.

We walked quickly -- almost ran -- almost flew -- through a hallway and down a staircase of dark wood. We were now down in a bright, white living room, like in a big, suburban house. We ran or flew over a couch, a coffee table, and a mantle.

The coffee table and mantle were all decorated with little ornaments. The ornaments were made out of some white, stone-like (or ivory or shell?) material and brass or gold. They all were all strange juxtapositions of Asian deities, especially Buddha, with formless monsters or beasts like octopuses. I tried to linger over these forms and get a better look at them. But the evil man was already far ahead of me. I had to catch up.

I ran outside and found myself on a slope of thin grass, a wide field where only this house stood. I wandered up to some small, ramp-like or bridge-like structure where a few people in their forties and fifties stood or sat. The people, men and women, all looked a bit unhealthy and a bit worn out by life. I now got the idea that I was at some kind of retreat, like a mental therapy retreat or a Christian education retreat.

The people may have asked me a question, but I may have found it hard to answer. My throat seemed to be clogged. I may have told the people that I was beginning to catch a cold.

But I was also worried that I had cancer in my throat. I didn't tell anybody that. But I named some strange disease and pointed to the back of my windpipe, on both sides of my windpipe, maybe curling the fingers of my hand softly around my windpipe (?).

The evil man was sitting on one of the railings of the ramp structure. He said to me, "Are you having a pain in your throat? Here. Feel this."

The evil man was about to heal me, to show me the power he could give me if I would just give in to him. But I somehow stopped the evil man from healing me. We were possibly standing around a bunch of people at a Christian retreat. I didn't want to worry them by showing them the power of evil.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

rehearsals

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was probably in a bedroom with my mother. The room had a bright incandescent light on the celing. But some grey-blue daylight came in through the windows, making the incandescent light feel pale and weak.

The two of us may have been practicing something together, like some kind of drama or presentation. But my mom got caught up in something she thought was funny. My mom was wearing a blanket, which she took to be a cape. She wrapped the cape all the way around me.

I was on my knees, underneath the blanket. I flew into a panic. My mom opened up the cape. The incandescent light now seemed to be a lot warmer and brighter. I screamed up at my mom, "Don't you ever remember what I've told you about how I get when I'm covered up with things?!" (In waking life I've never made any such comment to my mom.)

Just to prove my point -- that I hated being covered up with things -- I fell over onto my right side. There was a pillow on the floor. I half lay on the pillow and went into something like a fit of convulsions. I thought I was faking the convulsions. But they may have been real.

My mom just stood calmly by and watched. She was collecting all the strange behavior I exhibited. I knew that once she had collected enough instances of my strange behavior she would try to prove that I was insane, so that she could get control over me.

I was now in a bedroom with my old friend Y. The room felt larger than the room my mom and I had been in. The light was off. The only light coming into the room was grey light from the windows. My friend Y sat on a bed, maybe a bunk bed, but maybe a normal bed with the mattress just above waist height.

I had been watching something like YouTube for a while. I thought I was doing something creative or preparing to do something creative by watching YouTube. But Y wanted me to focus on something else. It seemed like we had been memorizing lines, like for a play, and now Y wanted to go over them with me.

But I couldn't remember the lines, and I had to look at the pages Y had with the lines on them. Y's pages were actually pages of sheet music, with certain passages of music highlighted in yellow. Y may also have had a musical instrument with her, maybe an electronic keyboard.

I searched through the sheet music for my lines. Y still held all the pages, so I had to look at them from an odd angle, seeing whatever snatches of pages I could as Y flipped through them.

Finally I got so frustrated by all of this that I told Y I wasn't doing it anymore. I either told Y or thought to myself that I had been doing something creative on my own, before she'd come here, and that I was going to continue to do it.

Y was offended that I wasn't interested in doing the lines anymore. She stood up and left the room, probably taking her keyboard with her. She said that she'd come back for me, and that when she did, I'd better be ready to practice the lines with her, otherwise she'd find a way to really embarrass me.

I knew that I was headed to some place like a festival, maybe like a festival for an Asian holiday. I knew that I was going to be involved in something creative there, maybe a performance.

I knew that if Y was still mad at me, she'd break into the middle of whatever the creative event was and call me out, saying something bad about me that would embarrass me in front of everybody.

I knew I had to work hard to avoid all of this happening, possibly (not really sure) because if I was really prepared and solid during my performance, Y wouldn't be able to find a place to break in and start calling me out.

But I ended up sitting at a chair before either a small desk or the edge of the high bed. There was now no light from the bedroom or window. The light came from the door Y had left open. The door opened to a hallway like in a college dormitory.

I started watching some YouTube program on a laptop. The program was educational, about science or history. Some cheerful young woman was giving the presentation.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

switch-clippers; dog and wrench; old boss' advice

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a bedroom with two or three other guys. We were all probably dressed the same way: in jeans, but no shirts. I lay back on a bed. One man probably lay on another bed, at right angles to me. But sometimes I may have been laying next to the man, not at right angles to him. Another man may have been somewhere off to my right, though I may never have seen him.

Another man was just walking out of the room. He was tall, wiry, but with a kind of worn-out looking body, and bald, with a young yet old face. He looked a little crazy, though he either masked or tried to mask that look with a glance of calm or serenity in his blue eyes.

The man had just bragged about something he'd done. I had called out, in a lazy voice, that I didn't believe he'd actually done the thing. The man gave me a serene, almost playful, look, groan-laughed something at me, and walked out the door. I could tell the man was really offended by what I'd just said. I myself couldn't believe I'd said it.

But now the man walked back into the room. He had a "switchblade" pulled out -- actually, it was just the nail file/nail cleaner implement on a normal pair of nail clippers. He still had the serene look in his eyes. But he also had the look of a killer. He came at me, obviously angry, and told me that he'd show me that what he'd said was true.

The man stood over me, maybe holding me down. He was running the "switchblade" around my nipples, as if he intended to cut them off. He was also running it around my stomach in a horizontal oval, as if he were searching for the correct spot to plunge the "switchblade" into my flesh. He was working himself into a greater frenzy, eventually shouting that he'd show me what he'd said was true.

I didn't struggle against the man, or if I did struggle, my struggles were weak. I figured I was probably going to die. But then the other two (?) men in the room jumped up and pulled the man off of me. The man may still have been holding onto me: I seemed to come with him as the other two men pulled him to the door.

Now I had broken free and stepped away from the man enough so that I felt like I could get enough reaction time to defend myself against him. I grabbed the man (he was like some meter-long, scrunched-up, capsule-shaped version of a man now) and threw him against the wall. I may have been hoping to smash him or break him. I shouted that now it was my turn to show him something.

I felt ashamed for brutalizing the man. I was trying to get back a feeling of strength, of being able to protect myself. But, I knew, the only reason I was now able to do this stuff to the man was because he was in an extremely weakened condition. The two other men had gotten the man to this point. If the man were still at his full strength, I wouldn't be able to treat him the way I was treating him right now. But I tried to put those thoughts out of my mind, and just convince myself that I was being strong by beating this man right now.

Dream #2

It was a brisk morning, with the sunlight probably dimmed and made pale by some wisps of clouds in the sky. I was out walking in a suburban residential area. I came to a street corner which joined with the corner of a house's backyard. There may have been a broken chain link fence bordering the backyard, with a lot of gaps in the fence. Or there may have been no fence, only a few occasional steel poles marking where the fence used to be.

A white and grey, scruffy-haired dog, maybe about knee-high, came running up through the backyard to bark at me. The dog seemed to want to get even more violent with me, maybe even attack me. But then the two owners came walking up from the front end of the back yard. The husband came from the left side of the yard; the wife, from the right. The dog, seeing the two owners, stood back from me.

There was a gigantic water dish (or an old tire filled with water?) at my feet. The dog stopped at the water dish, as if it only wanted to drink the water. But it didn't even look down at the water. It just kept barking at me.

The wife stayed at a distance from me. But the husband, though never reaching me, always seemed to be advancing and approaching. The wife seemed young and pretty, with an athletic, strong body and luxurious, blonde hair. The husband looked a little older, a little more worn, and kind of prissy-faced, like a guy who took too much pride in being "fine" and "intellectual."

The husband may have said something to me about how the dog would never attack me. But something about what the man said made me think that he had given me justification, if the dog got too violent with me, to get violent with the dog.

I now had a gigantic wrench in my right hand. I was planning on swinging it at the dog. But I couldn't figure out how to step back to get enough distance to swing the wrench at the dog without hitting the dog. I didn't want to injure the dog unless I absolutely had to. But I felt like the only way for me to calm the dog down was by doing something like showing it how violent I could get and how I actually could hurt the dog. So I wanted to swing the wrench.

I was sick of hearing the dog bark. I was starting to feel like it might be good to hit the dog with the wrench, after all. The husband, still approaching me, but still distant, was talking about how the dog was just acting violent, and how he'd never hurt anybody. The man was now saying things in a way to make me feel like I should be more patient with the dog.

But now I grabbed the dog with one hand by his muzzle. The dog's muzzle was all wet, as if the dog had been drinking from the water dish. I held the dog's mouth shut, so it couldn't bark. The dog may have been struggling, but it may also, finally, have been afraid.

I probably began tapping the dog on the skull with the huge wrench, letting the dog know, somehow, that if it didn't calm down pretty soon, I'd start swinging harder and harder, until I finally began smashing the dog's skull.

Dream #3

I was walking along a stone or concrete path in a riverside park. The river, which was like the Hudson River, was on my right. On my left was a lawny area. There was an occasional tree just to the left of the path. I had probably walked out onto this path after having just crossed under a small bridge.

Just after the bridge there was a chestnut tree. The tree looked normal, but at least one of its limbs drooped all the way to the ground. The branches of this limb twisted along the ground like a grapevine or creeping ivy. The leafs of the tree looked like flowers, somehow, and a pink, coral-like network of stems and blossoms came out from the center of the leafs.

Something about these flowers may have worried me. I may have thought they were poisonous. But I recognized the characteristic look of the leafs of this tree: the palmate, five-leafed structure seemed to me to be that of a chestnut. But I couldn't tell for sure if this was a chestnut or some kind of poisonous tree that I shouldn't be anywhere near.

I called my old boss from a few years ago, BS, on my cell phone. As I spoke with BS I continued walking along the path, far past the tree, and, apparently, not coming up on any trees like that tree.

I tried not to sound worried. I simply told BS that I had forgotten whether five-leafed trees were chestnuts or whether they were something else. But BS could tell I was worried. He asked me if I was calling because I was worried about something poisoning me. He told me something like, "I'll give you the answer to this question. But, really, you have to start remembering that not everything is poisonous to you. Not everything is going to kill you."

I walked around a curve that ran to the left. There seemed to be a little more activity in the distance, like people out on a pier, putting some event together, or people sitting out on a plaza and enjoying the day.

BS was still talking to me. He began to get a little excited. He started talking about my work habits. He mentioned what had set me back, emotionally, while I was working with him, and how he felt that had hindered my chances of making it through the layoffs at my company. He then spoke about the emotional mistakes I had made at my following job, and how they could have been alleviated by a little less paranoia and a little more trust.

BS was still talking, but my phone was breaking up. I was losing reception. Finally my phone hung up altogether. I looked around. I was headed down into a tunnel. I said, "Oh, I'm going down into a tunnel, I'm going to lose you," as if I were still talking to BS and I were giving him the courtesy warning.

Now I was actually in a car. I was heading quickly down into the tunnel. At first the tunnel just looked like some long airplane hangar, with tall corrugated-steel walls and ceilings. I could even see light peering through from the cracks between the walls and the ceiling. But as we plunged deeper and deeper downward, at a faster and faster rate, the walls became thick and solid, like heavy concrete. I may eventually have plunged into total darkness.

I now stood in a huge, stately, but somewhat worn-down or neglected, train station. I stood near a row of tall-backed, hefty, wooden benches. The floors and the tall walls were made of heavy stone. Windows lined the tops of the walls, letting in a bit of pale, blue-grey light. There was no other light in the station.

I knew I was now back where I could get some phone reception. I thought I would call BS back. I pulled out my phone, which may have looked like an old BlackBerry. As soon as I looked at the screen, a new email message popped up. It may have been popping up "in real time," like I was actually watching it as it was being typed by BS.

The message looked crazy. The typing was wild, with all kinds of frenetic expressions and strange uses of punctuation to accentuate a feeling of excitement and importance. I may possibly have thought that BS was writing me this wild email because he had lost contact with me and he was now worried that I hadn't wanted to listen to his ideas in the first place.

Instead of reading the message, I decided to call BS, like I had originally planned. But, possibly, before I had even picked up the phone, BS may have been on the phone. I told BS something like, "I lost reception. But I have it now. So I can listen to you again."

BS started talking to me again about how I needed to be more trusting and less paranoid. But it seemed like the context of the conversation had changed somehow. I no longer felt like the context BS was using applied to me anymore. He wasn't really talking about my working situation. And that, I think, was what I really wanted to hear about.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

tractor beam roller coaster; justifying my job

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a car with a male relative of mine, maybe my cousin or my brother, on a hot, sunny road. The road looked like Second Avenue just above Houston Street in Manhattan, except that the street was a lot wider. The sky was so sunny it may almost have been yellow. My cousin/brother was probably in the driver's seat. I was in the passenger's seat.

Our car was stopped probably in the middle of a block. We may have ostensibly been stopped at a traffic light or stop sign, though it (now) seems like we were way too far from the end of the block to have done something like that. There weren't a lot of other cars on the street, but the cars near us were also stopped.

It seemed like we had been stopped a long time. My cousin/brother and I were talking about something, maybe to keep our minds off of the boredom of being stopped. Or, possibly, my cousin/brother may have been talking about how bored he was while we were stopped and waiting, while I was trying to distract him and make him a little more patient by talking about other stuff.

Suddenly, a fighter jet flew in front of us. It was only a hundred meteres or so up in the air, and it only seemed to be a few blocks away. It flew at a normal position for a moment, then twisted onto its right side to make a turn. Either my cousin/brother or I called out the jet.

I tried to get a better look at the jet, to determine what it was. At first I thought it was an F-35. But something about its shape didn't seem quite right. I almost knew what the jet was, but I couldn't quite think of the name.

The jet flew around to our right, seeming to get closer and closer. I could see it through my windows, just over the building tops. As the jet got closer, it took on more of a triangular shape, like the wings had become long and sleek, clinging tightly to the sides of the jet. I really had no idea what the jet was, now. I got a view of the underside of the jet, which somehow reminded me of a mix between a fighter jet and a commercial airliner.

The jet flew around the back side of our car. I turned to see the jet through the back window. t seemed to be descending. I may have had the ominous feeling that the jet was actually looking directly at my car. I may have wondered if the jet hadn't been sent to follow me as a potential criminal. Possibly to shake off the ominous feeling, I turned around and looked forward, possibly even hoping to clear the thought of the fighter jet out of my memory altogether.

But now the jet flew over the car and began to land maybe twenty or thirty meters away from the car. It was hovering and descending like a helicopter would. The jet was huge. Its back end was kind of strange, with maybe four jets coming off the back end, in a horizontal row. The jets were like rounded rectangles.

The jet released one huge blast of air from its jets. I thought -- I may even have "explained" to my cousin/brother! -- that the blast was like a little cushion of air to help the jet land softly. But the blast was so strong that it actually began pushing the car backwards. The few cars around us didn't seem to be affected.

The car kept moving backward. It didn't seem like it would stop. I now knew that the jet had made the blast of air expressly to get this car moving, and that it would probably keep the car moving. The jet, which may have stayed landed, was now also above us.

The jet again blasted us with air, causing us to move backwards under its direction, maybe even taking a few turns along the road. Other cars around us -- there were a lot more, now -- were driving forward, in a normal flow of traffic, not unaware of us, but not more aware of us than they would be of any other cars on the street.

The jet now somehow lifted us up off the road. We may have been lifted with a blast of air. But the blast of air, I thought to myself, if it was a blast of air, was now acting like a tractor beam. The car was flown over some buildings, then over a densely packed area of buildings that were maybe four or five stories tall. It was like all the roads were gone, and like now all there were were buildings. But I felt like I was just in some "back area," like an alleyway, or a secret entrance area for all these buildings.

At some point during all of this, the car began moving forward instead of being pulled backward. The jet may now have been gone. My brother/cousin may also have been gone, or I may simply have been less aware of him.

I was directed to a building-sized hole set into a cluster of buildings. Something about this hole reminded me of a multi-story parking garage. But it was very dark and shadowy, and something about its edges seemed more like the walls of a demolished building, or the gaping maw of a monster. Red-painted metal tracks, like the tracks of a modern high-speed roller coaster, came twisting up out of the abyss. My car was directed to and then linked up with the tracks.

I knew, or at least assumed, that the tracks would lead down into some government building. As I'd suspected, I thought, the government had brought me here. I coasted along the twists and turns of the track, always heading toward the black abyss, but never seeming to reach it.

I was a bit apprehensive. I reflected that I didn't know whether I was being brought here by the government for a good or bad reason. Did the government want me because they felt I had some kind of special talent? Or did they want me because they felt like I was involved with some kind of heinous crime. I knew that if they thought I was involved with a crime, they'd probably torture me.

Even though I knew I hadn't been involved with anything bad, I assumed I was probably being brought here to be tortured. I wasn't afraid of the pain as much as I was afraid that, in pain, I would embarrass myself by acting weak and screaming and crying.

Dream #2

I was sitting at "my office," which was a big, unfinished room filled with natural light. The room felt like the side room of a large house, or like some long, narrow room in a basement. The floors were probably linoleum tile. The walls were really tall, tall as walls in a mansion. But they had a cheap look to them. Windows ran all along the top of the wall to my left, letting in dazzling beams of white-gold sunlight.

I sat at the left corner of a long table. The table was like a mix between a trading desk and a lunchroom table. My computer -- possibly an old, clunky, 1980s style computer, and possibly a phone, were the only things on the desk.

I sat before the computer and spoke on the phone. I was probably running down some sort of call list that I had on my screen. I had just managed to get a hold of some insurance agency that was listed at the bottom of my screen. The insurance agency's name was the same as the last name of the owner. Something about that name seemed really familiar to me.

A woman picked up the phone and answered with her name. I recognized the woman's first name and the woman's voice. She was MM, a client of mine from a job I'd been laid off from four years ago. She had simply taken on her married name while she was working at this insurance office, which she and her husband ran together.

Happy to speak with MM again, I said who I was, asked MM if she remembered me, and asked how she was doing. I never really heard MM's voice responding to me. But I knew she had now probably asked why I was at the job I was at, and what kind of work I was doing.

I pushed myself backward, away from my desk, and then forward and off to my right, toward the exit from this room, on something like a mix between an office chair and a skateboard. All this time I was still talking on a phone, which may have been a cord-bound, landline phone.

I kind of skirted the issue of why I was working at this new job, though now that MM had brought up the question of why, I now felt a little ashamed of the fact that I was working here. Instead, I explained what the job was.

Apparently, I was something like the first line of attack in a collections agency, or something like that. When people were in financial trouble with a company that had loaned them money or given them credit, the people were sent over either to me or to my company. I then had the job of calling these people and telling them that their credit was in trouble.

This, I'm pretty sure, was all I was supposed to do. The people who had been notified and who had accepted the information were then routed to some kind of credit repair or debt collection place. Somehow I earned money for each person I'd spoken with who had accepted the fact that they needed to start work on the first stages of whatever process they would then be put through.

I had an image of a call list for my job. It seemed to be like an Excel spreadsheet. But it seemed to be written on paper, in bright, red crayon, and possibly in a childlike scrawl. I tried to explain to MM that felt like this was a really good business to be in, and that I could make a lot of money from it, even though I myself was beginning to have doubts about that.

As I continued speaking with MM, I was wheeling myself into a different room, with cheap wood-paneled walls and thin, grey carpet.  I wheeled myself up to a long, wooden desk, like the sales desk of some old merchandise shop, and then out into a larger, office-like area of the room, through a waist-high, swinging door.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

lesbian cheerleader office

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a big den or living room area with a group of co-workers. There were a lot of people in the room other than the people in my group. There were a number of couches in the room. I sat at one of four couches that were near the center of the room.

Eventually, the other people in my group began mingling with the other people in the room. One of the women, who stood with a small group of people off behind me and to my right, was talking about something like the pressures of work or school. One of the men, who sat with one or two people on a couch at the other end of the room, was talking about his personal working process and why he thought it was good.

Now a few of us stood up to head somewhere else. I'm not sure why I stood up and went. But when I met with a couple of the other people standing up to leave, they asked me, "Oh, is it time for all of us to leave already?" as if I were their leader. Now everybody in my whole group of co-workers stood up to leave.

We headed toward a stairway that went down into a basement. I felt like we were here for some kind of class. The class was probably down in the basement. We had taken a break in this upstairs room. Now we were headed back to class.

We passed a group of young, cute girls who all stood in a line performing cheerleader routines. The girls were all wearing white terry cloth hoodies and micro skirts with fluttery pleats. They may have been wearing baby blue panties, the bottoms of which may have been visible when the girls did certain moves.

Just as most of us had started walking down the stairs, one of my female co-workers ran back up the stairs. She patted one of the cheerleader girls -- a really cute one with cinnamon skin and silky, black hair -- on either the back or the bottom. My co-worker then headed down the stairs and jumped back in line with my group.

I somehow knew that my co-worker had learned that the cheerleader liked her. My co-worker wanted to let the cheerleader know as soon as possible that she liked her back. So she patted the girl's back or bottom. I thought this was pretty bold. I wished I had the boldness to do something like that.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

ohio city

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I went with my step-grandmother to Ohio. Apparently we were on vacation together. Ohio may just have been one big city, or else we may have been in one big city in Ohio.

My step-grandma and I walked around together for a while. The sky was dark, but the city was lit well. The city actually looked like a stage version, or even a comic book version, of a city. The buildings were large, but they all looked boxy, bright and fake.

We passed some large, stately, stone building that looked like a McKim, Mead and White building. Something about that building felt hollow. Maybe the doors were barely hanging on the hinges, or maybe they felt fake, somehow. We then may have gone into a restaurant that was almost totally empty of furniture.

My step-grandma then had to go off on some task. She may have been heading to a meeting or conference. She gave me the job of finding a hotel.

I thought I was finding a hotel for just myself, and that I would meet my step-grandma the next morning. I didn't have a car, so I'd have to walk everywhere. I wanted to get a hotel close to all the sights I wanted to see tonight and close to where I assumed I'd meet my step-grandma the next day. This seemed to be some spot in the middle of town.

I opened a big, paper map showing the town (or all of Ohio). The town looked a lot like Manhattan, except that its bottom end spread outward into a huge land mass. But the upper part of the town was just like Manhattan, even with little extensions coming off the west and east sides to show shipping piers.

I knew the name of the hotel I wanted to stay at. It was one of a chain of famous luxury hotels. The name was familiar to me, and was possibly a real name from waking life, but I can't remember it now.

The land on the map was a solid orange, with very few features, maybe just a few lines for major roads. The map also had little circles with letters. The circles were also orange, though they may have been outlined in blue. The letters were probably white. Each circle pointed out a hotel. A little legend gave the name of the hotel corresponding to each letter.

I knew the hotel I wanted to stay at had the letter C. I looked for the letter C and found it, I thought, at the bottom of the map, way in the section of land mass that flowed out of the main part of town (or of Ohio).

I knew that was way too far for me to walk. I couldn't stay there. But then I looked closer. The letter was really Cb, not C. Apparently, this hotel had two chains. The main hotel for this chain, the regular C, I found, was just about in the middle of the main part of town. So I could stay there.

I was now sitting on a wide, enormous, stone staircase with my step-grandma. As I looked up, the staircase seemed to be indoors: the staircase was bordered by stone columns and had a ceiling from which glowed a bright, incandescent light. But when I looked to my right, toward my step-grandma, we seemed to be outside, able to see all the buildings and the dark sky.

My step-grandma told me she was going to stay at the hotel with me. I hadn't thought about this before. But now that she mentioned it, it made a lot of sense to me.

I was relieved. It had seemed inconvenient for me to stay at the hotel alone, maybe because of the cost. But now I had the idea that my step-grandma would pay for the hotel. This made staying at the hotel a lot more convenient.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

the sinister force; mashed potatoes; cliffhanger

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

A group of people (I may have been among them, or I may have been in the scene, but passively viewing it, like watching a movie) were in some desert building. The building may have been some kind of bunker or military building from the 1940s, or it may have been an old, desert house.

The people were some kind of official workers. They were here on an investigation. They were trying to get beyond one door, possibly a door leading down to a basement. The door was probably in the kitchen, which was bright with natural light.

The men finally decided to blow up the door using a large amount of explosives. They set up a canister as big as an oil barrel against the old, thick, wooden door. The canister may have had the force of 620 XXXXX (something I can't remember).

The men went outside the house during the blast. They crouched behind a wooden structure built like a mix between a horse trough and a well house. The men may all have been wearing leather trench coats an old style gas masks for protection.

The explosion occurred. It was supposed to have been intense, but I don't remember it at all. The men may have been expecting to uncover some dangerous criminal, or the things he'd stolen. But they'd released something much worse: some kind of sinister, demonic force.

I had a view of this force rising through the surrounds like a green gel or a green light, which then subsided back to the ground.

The men were all still standing around outside. They knew that the demonic force, though its eventual goal may have had to do with attacking all of society, was first concerned with attacking one specific woman. The men needed to protect the woman. But they couldn't, for some reason, tell her they were protecting her.

The woman was here among the men. She was a glamorous, 1940s style woman. She was so elated that the door had been open that she said she was going to run all the way somewhere, maybe all the way to the nearest (small) town. The woman ran away along a ridge of rocky soil that rose a couple meters above the flat ground.

The men thought this might be convenient. If the woman ran fast enough, she might be able to evade the spread of the sinister force. And if she stayed in town, the sinister force couldn't attack her. Then the men wouldn't have to explain anything to her.

But now the woman had turned around and was running back toward the house. It turned out that she had only been kidding. She wasn't actually going to run off anywhere.

The men now knew the woman was in danger of being attacked by the sinister force. I thought she may already have been attacked by it. Her running off and then coming back, apparently out of joy, seemed a little strange to me. I thought her actions might really have been due to the fact that the sinister force was already infecting her mind.

Dream #2

I walked into a house through a side door. I walked into a kitchen that was kind of small and dim and dirty.

There was a pot of potatoes to my right, either on the counter or on the stove top. The potatoes were in a mixture of water and butter. The water wasn't boiling, but the butter was melted and mixed in with the water like the water was boiling.

A young woman, kind of average looking, a little heavy, but pretty, stood just out of my sight somewhere in the kitchen. The woman and I probably lived together, and we were probably lovers.

But the woman had now started having a relationship with some other woman. She was talking to me now about this other woman, not saying right out that she was having an affair with this woman, but saying nice things about the woman to kind of hint that she might be attracted to her.

I had a feeling that the woman was partly trying to conceal the relationship and partly trying to make me jealous of it. Either way, it was annoying. I decided to ignore the woman. Anyway, I thought, if the woman left me, it would be kind of a relief. I didn't like the woman that much, anyway.

I turned my attention to the potatoes. They were really soft. I grabbed a spoon and began fumbling around with some of them. They were all still in their skins, but they were cut in half.

I spooned into some of the potatoes, scooping out all the insides, then mashing them while keeping them in the water. I thought to myself how much I liked eating potatoes like this, especially when they were soaked in butter, like these potatoes were.

I think the woman was still talking, on and on, about the other woman. When the woman noticed I wasn't paying attention, she might have started yelling at me.

Dream #3

It was a grey, cool day. I was riding a bike down some path in the mountains. I was all alone on the trail.

I had come from a pretty far distance in the mountains, and from a pretty high elevation. But now I was heading home. I was just about to hit the edge of the deep moutains. But I still had a ways to go, through the foothills and the city, before I got home.

I rode down a narrow section of path that ran between two tight cliffs of tan stone. At the bottom of that slope was a trail which, I knew, I'd take off to the right. But below that trail another slope went down to a river, which also flowed off to the right.

I got off my bike and went down to the slope. I'd taken off all my clothes except my boxers (in waking life I never wear boxers -- only boxer briefs). I now got into the river. I had a feeling that I could just lay back and let the water carry me downstream. It could carry me, I thought, almost all the way back home.

But I reflected on all of this. It didn't make sense. First of all, the water was really cold. By the time I got to the end of the river, I'd be sick from the coldness of the water. Second, the river wouldn't take me all the way home. I wouldn't have my bike with me. So I'd have to walk. The walk home would make the whole trip a lot longer than it would have been just taking my bike down the path.

So I got out of the river and headed back up toward my bike. After all, I now told myself, I had only gone down to the river to get a little washed up.

But now, for some reason, I'd climbed up a steep rock outcropping to get back up to the trail. There were a few large boulders that took me a lot of effort to scale. After scaling two black boulders I had to scale a really tricky tan-orange one. I could see my bike just over this boulder.

But I was either having a hard time or pretending to have a hard time climbing this boulder. There were a few ledges I kept seeming to swing off of or arch myself forward or backward to reach.

At some point I almost fell from the ledges. I realized that I was actually really high up, and that if I slipped, I'd fall and die. But I was still wet and slippery, and the boulder was, somehow, just as wet and slippery as I.

I slipped and suddenly found myself hanging from a ledge. I knew I was in trouble. But I also felt like I could save myself if I remained calm.

Monday, December 3, 2012

john waters at the movie theater

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

My mom may have dropped me off at the side of a road. It was a warm, grey day. I walked down a grassy slope and into the parking lot for a shopping plaza.

At the edge of the shopping plaza was a movie theater where I was planning to go watch a movie. The entrance to the theater was at the corner of a shopping plaza. The sidewalk bordering the plaza was under a porch-like covering.

I looked at the movie showings, which were listed on some orange, plastic sign over a ticket booth that kind of columned out near the corner of the building. None of the movies looked like anything I wanted to see, and all the times seemed inconvenient. Plus, the movie price seemed way too high. So I decided not to see a movie, after all.

I was about to walk away from the theater when I noticed, to my right, a cluster of people standing around the filmmaker John Waters. Waters was wearing a suit, which was all covered up by a blue velvet bathrobe. He was relaxedly talking with all the people around him like they were all involved in some creative project.

I remembered having seen Waters before, at some other movie theater where I'd decided not to watch a movie. But at that theater Waters had been wearing a red bathrobe. I thought it was interesting to see John Waters, but I didn't know what I would say to him, so I didn't go near the group of people surrounding him.

Now a few people were filtering back behind the movie counter -- like this covered walkway had blended somehow with the interior of the movie theater, so that, even though we were still outside, we were also inside.

A woman who looked like one of my co-workers, VP, was standing beside me and talking with one of the people behind the counter. VP worked here. She and the woman behind the counter were complaining about some other woman who, as usual, hadn't showed up for work.

I got the idea that I could fill in for the woman, not for any money, but just to help out. Seeing that John Waters was standing behind the counter, just within earshot of the conversation, I thought I could impress him with my offer. But I didn't really want him to hear me making the offer.

So I kind of made the offer to VP low, under my breath, but still loud enough for Waters to hear me if he was listening. But I said it in a weird way, something like, "Have you ever thought of having people work some of these shifts on a volunteer basis?" But VP said that that wasn't necessary. Everybody who was here could pick up the slack and fill in for the missing girl.

Since I didn't want to watch a movie, and since I wasn't going to help out the people at the movie theater, I decided to head away, maybe to walk home. I had somehow been inside the movie theater at this point. I walked out the front door. I walked along a wide, uncovered sidewalk leading away from the building.

But then I remembered that I had left the book I'd been reading on the table I'd been sitting at (???) inside the theater lobby. I had to turn around and get it. So I turned around. I was kind of annoyed. I quietly said, "Fuck!" and gave an angry facial expression.

Just as I did that I noticed that John Waters was out on the curb, still in his bathrobe, fumbling through a bunch of cardboard boxes. I didn't want Waters to think I was coming back to the movie theater because I wanted to hover around him all the time. I thought his having seen me annoyed at having to come back to the movie theater might illustrate that. But I also wondered if he'd thought I'd been annoyed because I'd seen him out here.

Now Waters stood up and began walking toward the movie theater. But he was purposely walking very quickly, and he was heading toward a private entrance about halfway along the left wall of the theater. I could tell that Waters was doing this because he thought I was following him, and that it was creeping him out a little.

I went back into the theater lobby, to a tall, long table where, apparently, I'd just been sitting with a group of friends, all of whom were working on this movie theater project. We'd all had a little meal party before the work shift started.

I saw my book sandwiched between two empty, dirty plates. I quickly snatched it up, hoping I could just make a quick dash out of the movie theater so I didn't freak out John Waters anymore.

But now VP saw me and asked me some question. It was obvious she wanted to start a conversation with me. I didn't want to let her down. So I sat down with her to have a conversation. The conversation may have ended up being about some annoying person at work.

But right in the middle of our conversation, VP grabbed some little candle off the table, used it to light a cigarette, and walked away, saying she was heading outside to smoke, but that if I held my thought, she'd be right back. As the smoke from VP's cigarette lighting cleared, a tall, heavyset man across the table from me, whom I may also have recognized as someone from work, said, "Isn't she annoying? She does that kind of stuff to people all the time."

Sunday, December 2, 2012

packed runway; aunt and stalkers; gap in the wall; mother in hospital

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was probably in the cockpit of a small airliner, taxiing down the runway. The runway seemed to be in some kind of military base. The runway may have been cluttered, or it may have been bordered by a lot of clutter. I was involved with whatever operations took place at the base. I was in the cockpit with someone else who worked at the base. This person may have been piloting the airplane. I was acting as more of a passenger.

We were trying to get up to a part of the runway where we'd be able to lift off. But there was some delay up ahead. I felt kind of inconvenienced, but I tried not to. I knew that the delay up ahead was being caused by something I'd normally be in awe of.

We now approached what I thought may have been the cause of delay. It was a gigantic aircraft. The gigantic aircraft moved along on an awkward set of wheels that looked like stilts made out of chrome bars, like the chrome frames of a hospital bed, at the bottom of which were smallish (for such a large aircraft) wheels. The body of the aircraft was beautiful: like a mix between an F-117, a B-2, and an SR-71. But it was a gigantic craft.

At first I thought we were going to taxi our airliner underneath the aircraft. I was a little afraid to do this, but I also wanted to do it. But we turned off to the right and worked our way over to a runway that almost sent us back in the direction we had come from.

As we taxied away, I heard or understood that the gigantic aircraft was an F-XXX (can't remember the number, maybe something like 149). I was a little surprised. I'd thought the craft was a B-2. I was a little ashamed of myself for having thought the craft could have had the name "B-2." I really thought the craft was what I knew as a B-2, and that I had just mistakenly concocted the name "B-2." I couldn't believe I had gotten the model name so wrong.

We may eventually have ended up flying. While in the air, we may have seen one or two other strange aircraft. We then landed. I, as well as a number of other pilots who had been out flying today, was walking through a hallway like a school hallway, to get to a classroom where I, and the others, would apparently review the day's flights.

I walked into the classroom, holding a few photos with me. I may have been disappointed in myself. Perhaps I hadn't remembered certain aspects of my flight. Perhaps I had gotten so afraid at one point during my flight that I'd closed my eyes or blocked my perception out in some other way. Whatever had happened, I felt like I had missed some aspect of my flight, and I was disappointed. But I was also trying, somehow, to prove that I actually hadn't missed anything from my flight.

I shuffled through the photos in my hands. The photos were glossy and about the size of a standard sheet of paper. Either I had taken the photos or the photos had been taken from the airplane I had been in. The photos were of an X-15 rocket.

The photos mainly showed the X-15 right as and just after it had lifted off the ground (although, in actuality, X-15s, as far as I know, never lifted off the ground but were dropped from the wings of a larger plane at about 45,000 feet altitude, where they would begin flying on their own).

I was disappointed with myself for having been so close to an X-15 in action but either not having remembered it or having been so afraid of whatever flight patterns my own craft was going through that I had blocked out all my perception, including my perception of the X-15. I may have looked closer at the photos, hoping to see something that would spark a living memory in my head.

But now I began to doubt that the vehicle in the photos was even an X-15 at all. It had a strange shape for an X-15. It was broad and triangular instead of thin and stub-winged. It actually reminded me of (what I would have recognized in waking life as) an F-35. But I began to justify the shape to myself, saying that, of course, I'd only seen the X-15 from a couple different angles and that, at angles I wasn't familiar with, the X-15 might look kind of awkward to me.

Dream #2

I was in an office. I had come into this part of the office to take care of some kind of work that I usually didn't have to take care of. The part of the office I was first in may have been dim and grey, like all the lights were off and the only light was coming from a window in a separate room or a part of this room that was blocked off from my part of the room by a big partition.

Some guy, or a few guys, in the office had always been following me around, trying to prove that I was doing something illegal. But this place was an area I didn't usually go to. The guys following me didn't expect me to come here. I was all by myself in the room for a moment. But soon I could feel the guys coming after me, to stalk and skulk around behind me. I got the image of the guys being little, bug-eyed semi-humans enshrouded in trench coats and massive fedoras.

Feeling followed again, I immediately decided to walk somewhere else, at least to throw the guys off my trail for a moment or two. I was also hoping that, if I went somewhere totally unusual and the guys were following me even to that place, that I could really prove to myself that I was being stalked. I could then hopefully do something about it. But, more than that, I just simply wanted to throw the guys off my trail and be by myself.

I was outside, walking on a sidewalk like the sidewalk that runs along a street along the top of the slope outside my old elementary school. My aunt M was there, putting a little baby and her car seat into the front seat of a shiny, red SUV.

When my aunt saw me she called to me, insisting that I take a ride with her. I really didn't want to take a ride with her. I was afraid that since she smoked her car would smell like smoke, which was kind of disgusting to me. I also wasn't too interested in listening to my aunt M talk during a car ride.

I tried to make up some polite excuse for not riding with my aunt. But as I approached her car, she continued to insist that I ride with her. She was even already moving the baby and car seat out of the front seat and into the backseat.

I resigned myself to the fact that I'd have to ride with my aunt. I got into the car and tried to act happy, hoping there was something happy and distracting I could immediately get talking about with my aunt, in order to mask the fact that I didn't want to be here at all.

Dream #3

I was in "my bedroom," possibly with one or more of my family members. My bedroom may have had two cheap-looking beds in it. The room was, otherwise, pretty barren. I lay on my left side on the floor, looking underneath my bed while my family member(s) probably sat in a chair (or chairs).

A man came into the room. He had been here to check out some problem I'd been having in my house. Immediately he went to the wall next to the bed I was facing. The man pointed out a big gap running along the bottom of the wall and said, "Oh. Yep. I knew it. There it is, right there."

The gap looked like an even strip of space that normally would have been covered up by something, maybe a floorboard. It was like it was customary for the drywall of the wall ended about half an inch from the floor, and that a strip of floorboard -- or something else -- was customarily installed to cover up the gap. But whatever had been there was now gone, either torn off, worn away, or something.

The man said, "Yep. That's just what the mice are getting through." I now had a vague memory of having suspected, without actually having seen, mice in my room. But now the man confirmed it with me. I had a mouse problem. I looked for some other evidence of this. In the shadows under the bed I searched for mouse droppings. I thought I saw a little sliver of something that could either have been a scraping of dirt from my shoes or a (very large) mouse dropping.

The man somehow (the bed was still, as far as I know, pushed flush against the wall, so that nobody could get between the bed and the wall) ran his finger along the wall, pointing out the gap. He said, "I had a suspicion, because your next door neighbor is also having mouse problems. And, you see, the mice come in through the walls. Then they use this gap, on both sides, to go into your place and his."

I tried to see how my room was connected to my neighbor's room by this gap. I thought I should be able to see into my neighbor's room if both our rooms were connected. But I couldn't see into his room. Instead, just beyond the gap was another layer of drywall that went securely down all the way to the floor, thus sealing off my room from my neighbor's room.

Dream #4

I was in physical therapy room in a hospital, watching my mom do physical therapy. My mom had recently gotten done with some kind of operation. But she seemed to be progressing well. Her performance during physical therapy, though it wasn't phenomenal, seemed to show that she would be able to get released from the hospital and go home soon.

I walked out of the physical therapy room and down the hallway. I may possibly have been planning to meet my mom in her hospital room. I may even have been planning to get my mom ready to be released and go home.

The room my mom was in may have seemed a lot like an intensive care room in a hospital, cluttered with a lot of life support and monitoring machinery. The room may have held two beds, with a curtain separating one bed area from the other.

I was surprised to find my mom's bed empty. I had been expecting my mom to get back to the room before I did. I had a bad feeling that this meant something wasn't good with my mom's health and that my mom wouldn't be able to get out of the hospital today.

Now a group of doctors and nurses rushed my mom into the room and laid her on her bed. My mom looked pale and sweaty. Her hospital gown was almost hanging off her chest, almost exposing her right breast. I had a bad feeling about my mom, like she had suddenly taken a turn for the worst.

The doctors and nurses left the room. The room also changed a bit. My mom's bed was the only bed in the room. The bed was almost in the center of the room. The bed was turned so the head faced the door. My mom was in a half-sitting position on the bed, so it was like her back was to the door. The room was a lot dimmer than before. The only light coming into the room was hallway light that came in from a window to my mom's left. The window was shaded by half-turned Venetian blinds.

My mom must have felt like she was going to die. She began reflecting on her life, talking to me about the things she felt she should be proud of. She felt that the way she had lived her life was very unique. The uniqueness came, my mom felt, from the fact that she had made choices with her heart, because she had cared about people.

My mom then said, "And I'm the only person in my whole family who graduated from high school. Nobody else did that." That statement kind of scattered my brains for a moment. After reflecting for a moment, I knew that my mom meant that between herself, her sister, her father, and her mother, my mom was the only one to have graduated from high school.

I considered my mom's life for a moment. I thought that, given all her life's difficulties, she actually had been able to do a lot of things that she should be proud of.