a hill of beanbags

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was with a group of young adults or teenagers on an enormous stage. The stage may have been part of some game show which may or may not have been televised. The stage seemed to be in some place like a high school gymnasium. The stage, besides being enormous, may have been elevated about two or three times as high as usual above the audience.

An announcer, a young man in a suit and with a kind of showy, sharp hairdo, led us to our next contest. We had to climb, apparently, up some really steep object. At first I may not have been able to discern what the object was. But then I saw that the object was something like a gigantic, cylindrical beanbag. It wasn't standing quite erect, because of the odd clumping and shifting of the stuffing.

I watched a couple of my teammates, probably boys in their late teens, try and fail at climbing up the side of the beanbag. They would get up close to the top, then cling to the top, or as close as they could to the top, and then try to pull themselves up onto the top. But they wouldn't be able to pull themselves up, and they'd fall down.

My view of the gigantic beanbag shifted from the right to the left. I now saw that the beanbag was part of some larger complex, almost a small hill's worth, of beanbags. We had to run up to the top of this whole complex!

It was now my turn. At first I'd been worried. But now I really wasn't. I had the feeling that I knew how to get up the beanbag slope. I just had to get up enough momentum to blast myself up the slope. That way I wouldn't have to pull myself up by my arms. The people before me hadn't done enough running up the slope. I, however, would.

I charged past the announcer, who'd been standing right next to me, and up the slope. As I ran up it, it seemed a lot less steep than it had looked. It also seemed to have slide-like grooves in it. I was running up one of those grooves.

I lost a little of my steam as I reached the top. I was a little afraid at first that I wasn't going to make it. But I got to the top. I now saw the way up the rest of the hill of beanbags.

I kept running. I knew everybody down below was a little amazed, maybe even scared or annoyed. Nobody else had even gotten up the first slope, though I felt like some of my teammates had, somehow, continued along the course. I, however, hadn't just gotten up the first slope: I was making a charge to conquer the entire hill! But even I started to wonder about myself. Was I being too obsessed?

I felt my running speed slacken. I really felt like I was losing momentum. But I found myself at the top of the hill. The top of the hill was a wooden playground. The beanbag hill had been the first part of an obstacle course. This was the second part. But the playground really just seemed to be nothing more than a wooden playground, except that it may have been a few tiers high. It seemed to be more fun than anything else.

I ran around until I found a hole for a covered slide. I could see that the slide was really steep, just a straight shot down. But this was part of the obstacle course: you had to be brave enough to withstand the steep slide.

I was afraid, but I jumped down the hole. But I was kind of surprised to find that the slide, though steep, was made of a plastic that wasn't very slippery. So even though I was going straight down, I was never able to get up very much speed. I was disappointed. I had really wanted to test my courage against a straight drop.

The slide ended in a basement. The basement was like a museum. I was in a narrow hallway. I could tell that somewhere nearby was an exhibit of very colorful ceramic or sculpture of some kind. I could also hear two older women in some room talking about some exhibit, maybe an exhibit having to do with Star Wars or some other kind of science fiction.

I may still have felt like I was on the obstacle course. Regardless, I felt like I needed to hurry somewhere. I didn't feel like running was fast enough. I started to fly in some kind of awkward, almost upright way, and close to the ground.

I flew past some room with an exhibit playing either Star Wars or some other sci-fi movie or maybe news about some kind of missile attack. I flew past the reception desk, which was enormous and opulent, and at which sat a beautiful, young woman speaking on the phone.

I flew into the elevator bank and into one of the elevators, where I landed. The elevator doors closed. I knew the elevator was taking me up to a floor which housed one of the companies I worked for. I was a little worried about what my old boss, BS, would think of me once he saw me there.

serpentine midwife

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was sitting on a bed in a room that was barely bigger than the bed itself. A dim, incandescent light shone down on the bed.

There was a snake on the bed with me. I may even have been holding the snake in my hands. It was a dull green snake with a white underbelly and beady, black eyes. The snake was maybe 60 or 70 centimeters long.

The snake was apparently giving birth or laying an egg like a chicken egg. It was doing so by making the egg come out of its mouth. This seemed to be really hard on the snake.

The snake finished laying her egg. But I knew there were more eggs to lay. I needed to check on the progress of the second egg. I had to grab the snake's head and open her jaws. The snake was poisonous, and I was afraid of being bit, but I knew I had to check. But even as I opened her jaws, the snake didn't seem very violent at all. She seemed gentle, drained.

I looked down into the snake's throat. I saw the second egg, a little way down. I let the snake go. I thought she would lay the second egg presently. But she just lay there limp. I figured she had lost so much energy in having her first egg that she needed to rest before having the second egg.

I stood up and walked out of the room. I thought I would come back closer to the time when the snake was ready to have her second egg. I was now in a dim room like a basement living room. The area had low ceilings, and even though it was long, it felt so cluttered with stuff that it felt tight and cramped.

At some point a kind of old, overweight woman with short, square, blonde hair and a peach-pink shirt walked into the room. She was still "asleep": she may have been sleepwalking. It was like she was recovering from a bad illness which had sent her either into unconsciousness or delirium.

I walked down toward the end of the room and met up with a group of young women. I myself may have been a young woman. All the women (including myself?) were pregnant, or else they were in need of a midwife's assistance for some other women they knew nearby who were about to have babies.

Apparently the old woman was the midwife all the women were looking for. We saw the woman again. She was walking around like she was in a drunken stupor. The woman walked over to the wall and then flopped down onto some spot like a counter or a desk top as if it were a bed.

It was clear the old woman needed more rest before she could take on the tasks of a midwife. But the women were all going to approach the old woman anyway. Each of the women, like me, had a snake. The snakes were all giving birth to eggs. And the old woman was the only one who could help with the births. The old woman still needed to recover a lot, but she was probably well enough to be midwife to the snakes, even though it would drain her energy.

The women all tittered to each other about how childlike they'd appear, all coming to the old woman at once, asking her for help. The girls all joked that they'd seem like little girls, asking, "Help my snake? My snake? My snake?"

But behind the joke was the sentiment that the women really did need the old woman to help with the snakes. And behind that sentiment was a fear. The snakes were something like a buildup. The women really needed the old woman's help giving birth to their own babies. But the women were afraid to bring up the topic. They were afraid the old woman would still be too ill to deliver the babies when the time came, or that the old woman would simply refuse. So the young women became overly, though jokingly, focused on the snakes, and how much they needed the old woman's help with the snakes.

white tiger reconstruction

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was daytime, a sunny-cloudy day, with clouds skeining across the sky and making the atmosphere all kind of yellow. I had walked outside of a big house with white siding. I hadn't been outside for very long, and I'm pretty sure I hadn't done anything, but I felt like I'd been out for a while.

It started pouring rain. I was hoping to get back inside before I got soaked. But I had to take a "hike" around the big front yard of this big house. Plus, before the house, two white tigers were lying asleep at the trunk of a (barren? headless?) tree. I knew that if I approached the house's front door directly I'd wake the tigers, who would get angry and attack me.

So I walked in a counter-clockwise square around a portion of the yard. The yard was large, but I didn't walk around the whole thing. I maybe only covered a hundred square meters, but I felt like I'd walked quite a bit more. I walked around two huge beasts that were as big as elephants but had faces more like rhinoceros faces, but with narrow, tapered snouts.

The beasts lay on a shallow slope that slightly obscured my vied of the tigers. But just before I crossed down in front of the huge beasts, I saw that the pouring rain was waking at least one of the tigers. The tiger was yawning lazily. But I could tell that once the tiger got all its senses back from sleep, it would be annoyed by being woken and soaked by the rain. If the tiger saw me, it would take out its annoyance on me, attacking me.

I reflected on the huge beasts as I passed before them. They may have been dead, or they may also have been asleep. But I wasn't afraid of them. I knew that if they weren't dead, and if the rain woke them, they wouldn't be as violent as the white tigers would. They would be gentle, and probably just wander off.

I was hoping to work my way far to the right side of the house, then sneak around to the front door. But even as I was heading up the small, shallow slope on which the huge beasts lay, one of the tigers was charging at me. The tiger jumped on top of me and knocked me to the ground, flat on my back.

Right before I was knocked over I began hearing my own (???) voice narrating, as if I were, somewhere, watching a documentary about myself having been attacked by the tiger. As I landed on my back, the view around me may have been of a new subway train, with the white interior.

My narration said that the tiger weighed five thousand pounds. When I heard that, I became afraid. I didn't want the tiger's entire weight bearing down on me: it would be too painful! But the tiger must already have been bearing fully down on me. The narration said that I hadn't felt the weight of the tiger: the pressure hadn't been as painful as I'd expected. This, I realized, was true.

But the tiger was tearing at me, probably with its claws and teeth. I knew the tiger was tearing my body apart. And now the documentary (wherever it was playing, wherever I was watching) was moving to the second part, which was how the person -- no longer me, but more like a young version of Jackie Chan (???)  -- had had large parts of his body torn apart and had to go through reconstructive surgery.

At first I saw a photo of the young man after his reconstruction. It turned out, however, that the young man didn't want a normal reconstruction. He didn't want the doctors to put him back to normal. Instead, he simply wanted to be made functional, and to keep the mauled portions of his body as mauled-looking as he could, as a kind of "lesson" to his attackers, but also as a kind of artistic statement. The photo of the man's face, in fact, looked like the leathery face of a long dead person, or even of a shrunken head.

I now saw the young man, as if on film or video, speaking to the camera and documentary crew. The man was in something like the control room of a very small TV station. The lights were warm and incandescent, and the walls were brick, but all lined with tall cabinets full of TV studio control systems and monitors. The monitors may all have been playing imagery of spaceflight and missiles, which may have had something to do with recent news events, maybe with some impending war.

The man, I now saw, had been reconstructed to look really strange. He had all kinds of dull grey, coathanger-like wires stuck through his body. Some reconstructed portions of his flesh were raw and slimy. Other portions, such as a couple of his fingers, looked more like raw fat or ligament than flesh. And other portions of him looked more like random pieces of plastic or machinery. His head was crowned or haloed with a band of wire, which stuck into his raw skull at certain points.

The man began showing the camera and crew the work he did around the studio. Apparently, like the phantom of the opera, the man isolated himself in his work. He was a genius at his work, and he wasn't as antisocial as the phantom, but he bitterly isolated himself in his work, again as a "lesson," apparently, to the tigers that had mauled him.

But as I watched the man at work, I realized that all of his reconstruction was also like an augmentation. His wire/plastic/technology hands allowed him to process data and punch buttons in the cabinets at an incredible speed. And the man seemed to be able to operate an incredible number of machines at once!

But as I focused on the man's fingers operating on one interace at immense speed, I realized that the man could be driving himself too hard. His brain and body, it seemed to me, may not have been fully healed -- maybe because the man had chosen to have such an incomplete, strange reconstruction.

The man may have been driving himself to cause his incompletely healed portions to break down. And maybe the breakdown was desired by certain parts of the man's body. It may have been that certain artificial elements of the reconstruction wanted more of the original elements of the man to die, so that more artificial elements could join the artificial elements already in place. But, I thought, it may also have been possible that a breakdown would shut down even the artificial parts of the man's body.

grandma mudslide

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a hallway of a hospital. The hallway was sterile, with bare, white walls and greenish-white, fluorescent lighting.

I was probably at the hospital for my grandmother. She had probably just died. I'm not sure I was there to see my grandma: it may have been more like I was there just to acknowledge the fact that she'd died.

My mom sat in front of the door to my grandmother's room. I looked into the room. I didn't quite feel like I could go in. I kind of felt like my mom was blocking the door, even though she wasn't.

But now my grandma started moving. My grandma actually wasn't dead yet. It was like she had been on a respirator, but like she had just recently gotten the tube taken out, so that she could breathe on her own. It was assumed that her breathing would naturally get weaker and weaker, and that she would die. But this was all surprising to me: I'd been told my grandma was dead.

In fact, my grandma was breathing just fine. But now she began struggling in her bed. She began hunching and twisting upward, trying to get a good view of me. She was trying urgently to tell me something. But she couldn't speak. Instead, she was just hissing.

I wanted to go into the room to talk with my grandma, or at least stand outside the room and focus on what my grandma was saying. But somehow my mom scared me off from the room. My mom may have been trying to convince me that my grandma was dying and that I just needed to let her die. I didn't believe her, but I was too afraid to argue. I just turned and walked away from my grandma's room. But I had a bad feeling that my grandma was trying to tell me a bad secret about my mom.

I was now standing out on a river bank. My mom sat out on the river bank, possibly at something like a school desk or office desk. I walked away from the river bank. Directly behind it was a steep, muddy slope. There were a good amount of people sitting out on the slope, like they were at the park or waiting for a concert or something. But the slope was extremely steep and muddy: it didn't look like it would be comfortable at all.

For some reason I felt like I needed to scale the slope. I started climbing the slope. It was really difficult, but eventually I was approaching the top.

But now the slope became extremely steep, almost a vertical wall, all mud. I had to struggle to find hand- and footholds, and the mud was slopping all around me. Yet there were also people sitting on the slope near me, like they were just enjoying a day at the park. And there were two pretty, tanned girls with frizzy, blonde-brown hair walking up a cinder path to my right.

I didn't get all the way to the top of the slope (which may have been bordered by a wooded area) when I decided I needed to slide down the slope. But I was afraid that the slope was so steep that I would slide too quickly and start tumbling down the slope and crash to my death.

But I started sliding, anyway. It wasn't so bad. The hardest thing was, that I had with me the book I'm currently reading (Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, by Henry Adams), and that it was hard for me to hold onto it as I slid down the slope.

carnegie's airship

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was probably laying on the floor of a dark living room. My brother, and maybe other members of my family, were also in the living room. A television was on in the room. I couldn't see the TV, but it provided the only source of light in the room.

The TV was playing a documentary about Andrew Carnegie. The documentary's narrator explained that Carnegie had, by modern rules, cheated his way into making a lot of money. Now that Carnegie had made a lot of money, he wanted to build a gigantic airship, which he felt would be of great benefit to humanity.

I saw, somehow, a few views of Carnegie on his airship. The shots were taken with a very old film camera, and they were really grainy and shadowy. The airship, I could tell, was gigantic. It floated slowly through the air like a zeppelin, although I hadn't thought of it as being like a zeppelin at the time.

The narrator now explained that Carnegie had been accused of cheating and theft by his peers. They worked long and hard and managed to get the U.S. courts to convict Carnegie. Carnegie had to give a lot of his money back.

By his own standards, he may now have been broke, even though he was probably still a millionaire. But, the narrator, explained, Carnegie no longer had the money to operate his gigantic airship. This was a bit of a tragedy, because it set air travel back by decades.

I had stood up to go take care of something. Now I had a clear view of the TV screen. The documentary was showing film of the final flight of the airship (the film's view from far above the ship???).

The airship was like a gigantic, flat slab of stone -- like an entire stratum of rock taken out of a mountain! -- atop which was a long, well-manicured park. The airship was like an enormous aircraft carrier, except with park instead of an airstrip. At the stern end may have been some kind of control center, or even a mansion or other kind of estate.

I was so inspired by this airship that I shouted out, "Yes! Look at that thing!" Suddenly it seemed to me that everything Carnegie had done had been right, if it could have led to an achievement like this. It also did seem tragic to me that people took away Carnegie's ability to continue running this monument to humanity.

turtle children

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was standing out on a bridge over a river with my mother and my sister. We were in a pine forest in the mountains. The ground was mostly grey, and the sun was hidden behind the mountains, so that the atmosphere around us was a chill blue-grey. The bridge was hefty and stout, and it stood maybe seven meters above the river. The river was wide, a little shallow, with rushes of water occasionally broken by small boulders.

My mom was talking to me, probably about some family gossip that I really didn't want to hear about. I had turned away a bit and was looking down to the river. I was surprised to see two turtles swimming in the water. They were bigger than any turtles I'd seen in the wild: their shells were about a meter long. The turtles were so big I assumed they must have been sea turtles.

Hoping I wouldn't make my mom think I was trying to change the subject, I cried out, "Look! It's sea turtles!" I was now surprised to see the heads of the turtles. The heads, which were submerged under the rushing water, were a bright, vivid green-yellow, and as round and wrinkle-free as the head of a cartoon turtle.

The turtles' shells were now gone, as if the turtles had gotten out of their shells. I knew my mom wouldn't believe me about the turtles if she couldn't see their shells. But I was more surprised to see how strongly, swimming around in the water, the turtles' bright, green bodies resembled the bodies of human beings.

I was trying to think how I could prove to my mom that the swimming creatures were actually the "sea turtles" I'd seen. But I was more concerned with trying to prove to myself that these creatures were actually turtles. They resembled humans. But, I thought, that's only because they actually are (???!!!) evolutionarily very close to humans. And they weren't wrinkled at all. But, I considered, the wrinkly appearance of turtles only came, after all, from their being stuck in their shells.

Now three turtles stood up onto a wide, flat rock almost directly under the bridge. But the two green turtles were gone, and these three turtles were a pinkish purple, mottled on their backs with black spots like leopard spots, though I may have thought of them as giraffe spots.

The three turtles looked just like three little, naked girls, except that their heads were bald and a little more bulbous than human heads. I may have had the idea that these turtles, or turtles in general, were not just closely related to humans, but were actually a part of some extraterrestrial race.

I probably kept waiting for the two green turtles to show up. And I probably still kept hoping for a turtle to get back into its shell, so I could prove to my mom that I'd seen a sea turtle.

grandma's kitchen

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was with my great grandmother and sister in my great grandma's kitchen (in waking life, my great grandma died about four years ago, and her house was sold). The three of us stood at an inner corner of the counter. The light in the kitchen was filled with gentle, white-gold sunlight.

My great grandma had just fixed some Wyler's cherry juice in a clear, glass pitcher. At first the juice was murky, like the grains of powdered juice mix hadn't dissolved all the way into the water. I was kind of disappointed. But then the liquid began to clarify into a crytsal-clear, sharp red. It looked delicious. I really looked forward to drinking some of the juice.

cemetery security

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was standing out at a mausoleum. It may have been late in the day, after sunset. The sky may have been a dim grey-blue. The mausoleum was a two- or three-story building, with a rectangular, cantilevered design, with a couple staircases made out of porous, white stone. There was a big, tall window in the center of the facade. Two staircases went up the building on either side of the tall window.

All along in front of the building was a plaza, also made of the porous, white stone. There may have been a rectangular pond somewhere along the plaza. Off to my right and left may have been asphalt paths on rolling hills, obscured by smaller structures and manicured, juniper-like shrubs.

My mom now stood out with me on the plaza. She may have been looking for a good place to put the remains of her mother, who had recently died. But my mom was reluctant to put my grandma in any cemetery. Every neighborhood with a cemetery seemed to be a bad neighborhood. My mom was afraid the people in the neighborhood would steal my grandma's remains or vandalize her gravesite.

I tried to convince my mom that this place, however, was good. This cemetery was part of a chain of cemeteries. I'd visited other cemeteries in this chain, maybe even in a forgotten past of this dream. I knew that the cemeteries all had a very good, very covert security system. In fact, I knew, the cemeteries all made a little, pleasant game out of tricking thieves and vandals into thinking they were safe, and then catching them on video, so they could be prosecuted.

I knew that security cameras were all over the building, pointing out at the plaza. I tried to point out some of the security cameras. I knew where they should be, given my inspection of the other cemeteries, which were basically identical. But I couldn't locate the cameras.

The only camera I could find, standing out in the plaza, was a camera on the far back wall of the atrium behind the tall window of the building. It seemed like that camera wouldn't give my mom much comfort: it was so far back that it wouldn't give a very good view of the identity of a thief or vandal.

But I tried to show my mom that the main thing was, a person could see the images put out by the camera at any time, from a computer or mobile device. The person could then alert the cemetery, who would take action against the thief or vandal. But I suddenly had no ability to articulate this, and I was just pointing to my phone, searching for the right words to say.

My mom and I were now inside the atrium, near the back wall. There were a father-like man and one or two other members of the father's family with him, near us. They may just have gotten off a nearby elevator.

Looking out the window, I was able to pull up my phone and pull up an image from the security camera on the back wall of the atrium. I told my mom that she could get images from the other security cameras as well.

Now my view, and the situation, changed. I was floating up into the air at a really fast pace, into a black night sky. But the sky was more like a sound stage, and the land I flew over was more like the landscape of a model train set. I flew higher and higher, until I was in outer space, which may have been some cartoony, blue backdrop of swirls of pure-white stars.

I now began descending back toward earth. The first view I had of the earth was like a cartoon view of the earth. But as I descended, the view became more like that of a model train set again. But all the elements of the landscape were like ragged, slimy toys, like toys that had recently been chewed and otherwise mishandled by children.

I knew there was a crime boss, perhaps of some Asian crime gang, out to get me. I knew something that would prove the crime boss' guilt, and the boss didn't want me to tell it. So he and a couple other gang members were going to trick me, with kindness, into some trap, and then kill me.

As I floated down toward the model of the cemetery, which seemed to be positioned among city buildings and apartment complexes, I started trying to think of nice ways I could address the crime boss and his henchmen, so they would think I liked them, wouldn't inform on them, and, possibly, even had no idea about whatever incriminating fact it was I knew.