little dog bites; punk club and fast food; guitar chords

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was daytime. I was with my brother in some outdoor area like a stone plaza dotted with small garden planters. A lot of the planters had nothing growing, or very little, growing in them. My brother crouched in front of a planter a few meters away from me. I crouched in front of one of the planters that had only a few flowers growing in it.

I was playing with a few small dogs. There were two or three dogs on my left and one dog on my right. I was letting the dogs wrestle around with my hands. Then the dogs started biting my hands. I didn't mind it very much. They seemed to be biting me as hard as they could, but it wasn't really hurting me at all.

My brother told me I shouldn't let the dogs bite me like that. He said the situation could get out of control, and I could end up getting hurt. I didn't listen to my brother. I seemed to be too happy seeing the dogs having fun to want to think about caution. Another two small dogs ran up to me. They looked like puppies rather than full grown dogs. They were all white, except for a patch around one of their eyes and one of their ears, which were a brilliant blue.

The dog on my right, a poodle-like dog, now began biting me really hard. I could tell I was just keeping my skin from being broken and my fingers from being bitten all the way through. But I couldn't hold back for long. I was trying to pull my finger out of the dog's mouth. But the dog had its teeth clamped down so hard on my fingers that I couldn't even move them.

I grabbed the dog's muzzle with two hands (I'm not really sure how that's possible...) and began prying the dog's mouth open. It was really hard, and I was afraid that the dog would find new strength and snap back down on my fingers, chomping them right off. But now I noticed that the dog actually hadn't had any of my fingers in its mouth. I had actually had my fingers curled around the dog's muzzle, so that it only looked like I'd had my fingers in the dog's mouth (???).

The scene shifted a bit. I was now sitting at the edge of the garden plaza, in some kind of porch-like area that also almost felt like horse stables made out of stone instead of wood. My brother and I were sitting close together, and there were small dogs playing all around us.

A woman, maybe in her late twenties, stood near us. She was like our guardian or supervisor. It was almost like, even though my brother and I were probably our current age, we were also kids. My brother had done something wrong, possibly having injured or killed one of the dogs.

The woman wasn't acting angry toward my brother. She may have been afraid to show her anger. She may have felt like my brother was dangerous, so that showing anger toward my brother might lead my brother to react toward the woman with violence. But the woman was planning to eliminate my brother from this situation somehow, or at least to limit his action in the situation, so that the woman would feel like my brother was less of a threat.

I knew my brother hadn't purposely done anything wrong. He may actually not have done anything wrong at all. I was trying to comfort my brother. At this point a dog, either the dog the woman thought my brother had injured or killed, or a dog very like that dog, came running up to us and playing around with us and the rest of the dogs. I thought that I should probably point this out to the woman, to vindicate my brother.

Dream #2

I was sitting on the floor at the front end of a punk rock club. My brother-in-law sat near me, leaning up against a wall. He looked weird. He had olive colored skin, instead of his usual golden-tan skin, and he had really shaggy, black-brown hair. He was also kind of leaning over to the left a lot of the time, so that his head was almost parallel to the ground. And he may have been sitting huddled under some beige or tan blanket.

The area my brother-in-law and I sat in was lit with a bright, but dingy, incandescent light. The walls were dirty. They looked almost like old stucco. The real activity of the club was behind us. There was a dark area full of people. Some kind of performance, either music or stand-up comedy, was also going on. I felt like my brother-in-law and I were being excluded from the activity in the club.

My brother-in-law may have been telling me how he felt excluded as well. As he spoke, my vision wandered off to my left, to a part of wall near the entrance to the club. There was a marker drawing along the wall, drawn perpendicular to the floor, of a few cartoony figures who represented either famous band members or famous club patrons from the 1970s.

My brother-in-law told me that in the 1970s this place had a real reputation for being a hardcore club for punks. People could come in here and be weird and wild and innovative. But nowadays the club was really a punk club in name only. The music was never very heavy. Sometimes they even did stand-up comedy. And the clientele were all very mild. If anybody -- such as my brother-in-law or myself -- looked like they might be wild, like people in the 1970s were, they were immediately shunned.

My brother-in-law seemed to be taking this exclusion harder than I was. I tried to console him. I said maybe we should go somewhere else. There still were, I said, places where wild people hung out. We just had to wander around and find them.

We were now outside in the dark night. The streets were lit only by very dim, orange streetlamps. I was separated from my brother-in-law by at least a few meters. I may also have been floating through the air, probably bodiless.

We went through a block full of small, kind of old-style shops. We went past some fast food restaurant. It was like an old-style burger joint. The building had a huge red roof that sloped almost all the way to the ground.

In front of the building were rows and rows of tables like picnic tables. The tables all seemed to be full of people. The people all scared me a little. They seemed like drug addicts, gangsters, and troublemakers. But I felt like this was the place where my brother-in-law and I should hang out. So I decided to act calm and friendly toward everybody here. I told my brother-in-law that this was a really cool place.

I now remembered another cool thing about this place. Late at night, the owner of this hamburger stand, a middle-aged man of Southeast Asian descent, would turn the front of the inside of the building into a kind of mini-bazaar. There he would sell all kinds of Southeast Asian merchandise. Other Southeast Asian people in the community would come to the hamburger stand and buy the merchandise. I told my brother-in-law that this was really cool, and that we should check it out.

I was now walking around, probably without my brother-in-law, inside the building. The front of the building now felt like it was just a frame-booth with sheets or tarps for ceilings and walls. It was very spacious. It was empty of people, almost like it was shut down -- or incredibly unpopular!

There were a lot of tables, all piled up with Southeast Asian merchandise. Each table bore a different kind of merchandise. It was even darker in the "building," though, than it was outside. It was hard for me to see the merchandise.

I walked around a corner to my left, into a kind of back area of the "bazaar" that few people knew about. In this back area was a table with a bunch of religious books. Even in the dark I could see that all of the books had colorful, intricate designs on their covers. The books seemed to be about a religion like Hinduism or maybe Buddhism.

But suddenly I had a flash of apprehension. I had a feeling that the man who owned this store was really a violent person. I had a feeling that this whole bazaar was a front for some kind of violent activity the man was staging. I had a feeling that if the man found me in here, I'd become a target for whatever kind of violent activity he was planning. The fact that I was looking at the religious books seemed like it could put me into even more trouble with the man.

I felt like the man could be just around the corner, waiting to do something like stab me. So I walked back around the corner, just to make sure the man wasn't there. The front area was still empty. I felt a little more secure. I turned and walked back toward the religious books, still a little afraid, though, that the man might come attack me.

Dream #3

I was in a bedroom with my brother. My brother sat on the bottom bunk of a bunk bed. I stood very close to my brother, playing a guitar, probably an acoustic guitar. I was playing a song I thought was an original song, or even a song I was making up right then and there.

I really enjoyed the song I was playing. But at some point I lost track of the song. It was either like I had forgotten what chord progression I was using or like I had lost track of where I was in the song altogether. For a moment I was strumming blindly along, trying to find the right sounds for the song, while also hoping that the "wrong" sounds I was currently making weren't too horribly wrong.

Now my brother pulled out a sheet of notebook paper. He held it on his lap, but at a kind of odd angle, so I had to focus really hard to make out what was written on the paper. I saw a series of chords written down, kind of in verse and chorus form, like a series of blocks or grids going down the page.

I remember G and C being one combination, and possibly G and D and G and F. But I can't remember the order of these progressions. There may also have been a sharp somewhere, maybe on the F. I began playing as well as I could according to the chord progressions on the page. I may have been pretty satisfied with the music, like I was nearly, but not quite, playing what I'd been playing before. I may also now have begun singing along to the tune.

"i just won't eat"

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was walking outside in some area that looked like a Main Street area of some small town. It was a really sunny day, so sunny the sky seemed yellow. I felt like I was on the crest of a high hill. The buildings all felt really low somehow. There were a lot of people out walking on the street.

I may have been trying to figure out what to get for dinner -- even while I was already eating something like a sesame seed bagel that was two or three times the size of a normal bagel. But everything seemed so expensive. I didn't want to buy anything. I didn't feel like I had enough money.

I suddenly realized that I could go down to some place nearby and file for food assistance. I was employed, but I was making so little money at my current job that I still qualified for food assistance.

I was already walking into the place for filinf for food assistance. The place kind of looked like a post office. It was divided into two rooms. The room on the right had some tables and forms. You filled out a form and took it into the room to the left, where you would be processed and given a meal. From then on you could receive meals from this place.

I felt that maybe I wasn't so bad off that I should use the system. It didn't feel honest. It felt like I was cheating the system, especially since, even now, I had a huge bagel in my hand.

But I justified all this to myself by remembering that for the entire time I'd been unemployed, I hadn't filed for unemployment or food assistance or anything. I'd simply lived during that time off of the money I'd saved up in the bank. So, now that I was working and felt I needed a little help to supplement my wages, it wouldn't be so bad, every now and then, to come to this place for a free meal.

I took the form and got in line. The line spilled over a little bit from the left room into the room I was in. But I was soon in the left room. The left room was dark. The only light came from behind the counters. The counters were along the right wall. The counters were plexiglass-windowed, with little slots at their bottoms for passing things back and forth between the workers.

There were two or three workers taking care of everybody. I was now up to the front of the line. I could see that the worker at the far end had just finished helping someone. He was walking away.

I knew I should walk up to the worker so I could get helped. But I lost my focus for a moment. It took a moment before I could make myself walk up to the worker. By that time the worker was looking over her counter, looking through the window at me impatiently.

I knew that the workers were actually supposed to put a light over their counters to show when they were ready to serve another person. But, I knew, this worker was too lazy to do that. She expected people just to come up to her counter as soon as they saw she wasn't helping anybody. When people didn't follow her unspoken rule, I knew, she decided they were disrespecting her. So she would give them bad service.

I dreaded meeting the woman. But I walked up to her counter and smiled at her politely. She had brown skin and kind of frizzy, reddish-brown hair. She was heavy, round-bodied, and she wore a uniform like a postal worker's uniform.

I handed the woman my identification and some other card. The woman was already looking for ways not to help me. She said that something was wrong with my application. She may have said something like, "You have a job. You make money. Why are you here?"

I might have tried to explain that I was trying to get the assistance for people with jobs that didn't pay enough for them to live on. But I was already wondering if I was cheating the system.

The woman may have told me something about some part of the form I'd filled out, or about some form I hadn't filled out. I needed to fill this thing out. It was for exceptions, like the one I was looking for. I could see a back page and bottom end of a form in my mind's eye. I knew this was what I needed to fill out. I wondered if the woman would wait while I filled it out, or if she'd send me to the back of the line.

I finally got so frustrated that I told the woman, "This is too much. I don't really need to go through all of this. You don't want to help me? Fine. I just won't eat." I knew my situation wasn't this bad. But I wanted, somehow, to make a point to the woman that this situation was much more important, for all the people in line, than she had been making it seem.

I was looking down. Apparently some time had passed. The woman had walked away for some reason. I thought it may have been to get me a form or to talk with someone to see whether I could get an exception.

A man now came up to the counter. I thought that maybe this was the woman's boss, and that he was going to talk to me about getting some exception. The man was shortish, kind of slim, probably Hispanic, with short, salt and pepper hair, eyeglasses, and a small, trim mustache. His hairstyle may have changed at some point to be more of a buzz cut.

The man began telling me that, according to entries on my application, I had recently been bitten by a dog. (This was true IWL.) He said that records indicated I had not been taken to the hospital after the bite.

The man, I now knew, was actually a worker assigned to getting medical help for people who came through this center. The man was now telling me all sorts of standards and regulations regarding what needed to be done to a person once it was discovered they needed medical help. My case, the man explained, was completely urgent and involved. I had a bad feeling I was going to be here for a long time.

The man still kept talking and talking. All the time I was just waiting to explain to the man that the bit hadn't been bad. I'd contacted animal control and the paramedics immediately. Both had told me I was okay and didn't need to go to the hospital.

So I was okay. I wasn't looking for some kind of crazy health care runaround. All I wanted was to get some dinner. But the man was still talking to me, giving me all kinds of discussion about protocol.