old friend and joyce carol oates

Good morning, everybody. This dream was written in the morning, but I wasn't able to post it until now.
Dream #1
I was in a living room with my old best friend Y and possibly my brother. My view of the room was very close in, like all I could see was the couch. The room felt very bright and warm, but also very crowded. The couch may have been made of thick, brown fabric, maybe in a plaid pattern.

I hadn't seen Y in a long time. I was really happy to see her again. She looked just like she did when we were in college. But she wore a backwards baseball cap.

We planned to have a sleepover this night, like we would occasionally do in college. Y, who had apparently just gotten into town, suggested I get some movies (maybe VCR cassettes?) from my place. I might have been thinking of a movie for us to watch. But Y suggested one, one that I didn't care for too much, but which I'd go get anyway, just to make Y feel comfortable and welcome.

I walked down the hallway to get the movie. Apparently my room/house was just down the hallway and up the stairs. As I was walking, Joyce Carol Oates caught up to me and started walking with me. We may have spoken, either verbally or mentally, but not about anything in particular.

My mother's bedroom was now just to my right. This was where my videotapes were. The plan was to get my movies and then head up to my room (and/or to Oates' house?) to meet Y. Before, I think the plan had been to get the movies from my room then go meet Y somewhere else, wherever she was staying.

Oates came into my mom's room with me. She looked around and maybe asked questions. My mom was sitting at a desk, listening to something through big headphones like for control towers. My mom seemed to be in bad shape, like she was extremely depressed or going insane. The desk was cluttered and almost looked like a bed.

I answered some of Oates' questions. Oates may even have reminded me of what movies I was supposed to be taking. I picked up the movie for Y, as well as some other movies, and walked toward the door. Oates may already have been out the door.

But my mom, who had been either unaware or dismissive of my presence before, now made some move which intentionally or unintentionally got my attention. I got close to my mom. I could hear, through the other side of my mom's headphones, some kind of official sounding transmission.

My mom responded to the transmission out loud with a couple of short sentences. My mom's statements were brief, but gritty and curmudgeony. I had the feeling I was actually hearing paranoid ideation in my mom's head.

I worried that my mom was receiving transmissions about my involvement with something evil and that she was now resolved to kill me because of these perceived evil connections.

The transmissions did, in fact, seem to be of some revolutionary news show. The news being stated was not directly related to me. But I felt like, if one listened hard enough, one could see how the news implied bad things about me personally.

I probably started worrying about how to get on my mom's good side, so she wouldn't do anything bad to me. I may have walked out into the hallway. Oates may have told me not to worry about anything.

little round house

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in some place like a small cafeteria or eating area that was at the edge of a larger floor, like in some kind of school or administrative building. The floor had a wide staircase or escalator bank at the other end of it, leading upward. The floor I was on felt like the second floor. Off to my right was a door to something like a huge auditorium, even though I couldn't see it.

My co-worker KB was standing in front of me as I sat at a table. KB had been speaking with me about something. Now I was talking about one of my past jobs, and one of my old bosses, DO. We then got talking about how the housing market downturn had been predicted as early as November of 2005.

I got really excited, talking about one person who'd predicted this. I was trying to explain everything I knew. But I felt like KB was only half-listening to me or half-believing everything I was saying. I was trying to keep a focus on everything I was saying while contending with the overall atmosphere of distraction I was beginning to feel.

A group of ladies, apparently all KB's friends, came up to get KB. They took KB toward the auditorium. KB told me to come along. So I went.

We ended up in a place like a seating area before an airplane gate. KB and the ladies sat with their backs toward the window, at the last row of seats away from the window. They were all watching a TV that hung down from a lip of wall that curved all the way around the seating area in a crescent shape. For some reason I was laying curled up on the floor, facing the TV.

The TV was showing something about the history of the housing market. On the screen was a chart of something, maybe the homebuilders stock index or new housing starts. But it started somewhere in mid-2005, just perfect for demonstrating what I was talking about.

I started calling out to the ladies that if you looked, you could see how the call about November of 2005 being the top of the market was just a bit too early. The market, I showed, had gone down a bit, then bounced back up a bit, before finally plunging downward. But the ladies weren't really listening to me. They were all watching the TV.

Now the screen went from static to moving. The chart scrolled forward, moving along to show what had happened after the housing market had completely bottomed. There was apparently some sort of history the TV announcer was giving, about how there had been ups and downs. But the chart just basically kept looking flat.

The announcer may have mentioned that there had been another downturn in the market. Or he may have mentioned that there may have been an upturn in the market. The ladies listened sympathetically. But now the chart went even lower. The line of the chart now became a glowing red. It was like the line of the chart actually traveled below the axis of the chart. The red line divided into a crack, with silver-grey fading away from it. In the crack below the axis, computer-graphic houses and buildings appeared.

The announcer now spoke about people beginning to live underground. It may have been that this was actually the end times. Livfing underground may have been due to something like a nuclear attack. The chart sped along even still. But it finally reached a point, freezing, with words in the blank space of a chart, like words in an old arcade game, saying, "HOUSING AS THE END OF THE WORLD?"

But the chart was now apparently some movie. All I could see of the movie was an empty road, as if the camera had the view of a car traveling down it. One of the ladies, who was now apparently my friend, was telling me about the movie. It was some kind of cartoon-like, mystical movie. The central character was a woman who was visited in her head by spirits. The spirits all revealed themselves to the woman to different degrees.

The woman told me about one spirit that barely revealed itself at all, so that the audience hardly knew anything about it, all through the story. The movie was an adaptation of a book. I wondered what kind of forethought would need to go into writing a character that revealed very little of itself. I wondered how much more could be revealed -- on purpose, for the audience -- through implication, if the writing were planned out correctly.

The lady told me to stay and watch the rest of the movie. But I felt like I couldn't. I looked up. Parked right by my head was something like a flight attendant's cart. But it was all done up to look like some kind of beach bar, with shaggy, wooden planks, palm fronds, and so forth.

As I looked at the cart, I realized that the name of the book was Little Round House. I saw the cover of the book. It was lavender with purple dots, with a white shape in the center. There were two cartoon children facing each other. They looked like the Precious Moments children. They had their heads bowed, as if in prayer.

Something about the weirdly quaint attitude of this book's cover made me want to stay and watch the movie. I wanted to see how something that started out so normal could end up being as weird as to include the imagery on the front of the book. But I still felt like I needed to go. So I probably wasn't going to watch the movie.

driving to texas; movie-concert work farewell; hotel policeman

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I had just been part of some situation where somebody had been trying to tell someone else how far away one point in Texas was from another point. The person telling this had been lazy and wrong. I thought to myself that all he'd had to do was show a couple of points on a map and figure out things that way.

I was now figuring out the distances between the towns myself. One town was in south central Texas. The other town was on the east border of south Texas. I was looking at these two towns from a map. But the map took up my entire field of view. It felt like I was flying over the map, looking down on some actual landscape, even though it looked just like a map.

I kept flying over the border of Texas, spotting three towns that lay right on the border. One was San Martin. I forgot the name of the second one, which was farther south. The one farthest south was named Moon.

I was now with somebody else, a young man, tall, roundly muscular, with a mostly-shaved head. We were apparently driving to the town on the border of Texas. I knew that the town was 683 miles away.

We spoke about driving. As we did I saw our destination, or one of our destinations, in the distance. It was a small down at the distant end of a straight highway. The sky behind the town was purple and dim from sunset. There also seemed to be some kind of stone bluff that was taller than any building in the town. Or else this stone bluff may actually have been the hotel building where we were staying.

We were now in the hotel. It must have been night. We didn't have many lights on in the bedroom of the hotel. Only light from the bathroom shone into the bedroom. We were probably getting ready for bed or getting up and getting ready for the day.

But now a man from the hotel came in. He was tall, thin, with longish, blonde-brown hair and a receding hairline. He wore a white shirt and a red vest. The man told us that he needed us to move out of this room into another room. There were some kind of important people, the man explained, who needed the room we were in.

He told us that people had either moved out of or been kicked out of the other room. Everybody else in the hotel thought, because of the people who'd been in that room, that the room was really bad. But, the hotel man said, the room was really the best room in the hotel. The man was keeping this secret for us, if we would be so kind as to move.

The man I was with didn't have a problem with moving. But I did. Apparently I had to go somewhere for work. I was actually getting ready to go there right now. I had to be to a meeting at 10 AM. And that was right in the middle of the time when I needed to be to the meeting.

I was slinging on a suit jacket as I thought to myself that, after all, the man I was with could move all our stuff into the other hotel room. Or the hotel people could do it. But I didn't trust things either way. As long as I couldn't be here to see things getting moved, I couldn't trust that something wouldn't get lost. I really didn't want to move, even if we did get a better room.

Dream #2

I was at a movie theatre. It was gigantic. It was all dark, with almost a feeling that we were outside on a dark night -- possibly just because the place was so huge. The seats of the theatre were all set, in huge sections, at different angles. My section was set so that my left side faced the movie screen.

I had probably just finished watching one movie. Now another movie was set to begin. I didn't have a ticket to watch this movie. But I figured that if I just stayed in my seat, I could watch the second movie without getting caught.

Now it was like the second movie was a movie I had been here to see all along. I was really excited for it. But as I sat waiting, two women came into my row of seats and sat down to my left. The two women were maybe in their thirties, kind of attractive, but a little worn out looking, and a little boisterous and crude.

The women may have been talking about the show. Apparently the show was either a concert or a movie about a concert. The band "in concert" was some new rock band that the women were in love with. The band had a punky but smart sensibility. I didn't like that type of music. But I think I convinced myself I liked them. Otherwise, I reasoned, I wouldn't be here.

The woman closest to me tossed a bunch of boxes into the seat between her and me. The boxes were bulky and blocked my view of the screen. But the woman didn't seem satisfied with that. She began pushing the boxes -- and something on top of the boxes -- at me, crowding me out of my own chair.

I moved away. I sat on my seat's armrest. I think I even moved over to the next seat to my right. But by that time, I may have been to the aisle. I couldn't go any farther.

I figured this was enough. I was tired of being crowded out by the women. I was going to leave. I was now walking away. I was outside, on a long, straight road through a small town in the desert. It was daytime. There were a lot of cars out on the road. Now I was regretting not having stayed for the show. I remembered that maybe, after all, the band was good.

I could now hear the beginning of the movie, as if I were still close enough to the theatre to hear the movie. The band had just come out on stage. They said they were going to do a cover version of the Beatles song "Love Me Do."

The person who had introduced the band onto the stage said something like, "Oh, that's actually one of the hardest Beatles songs to cover. Good luck, guys."

But I remembered that the band had done the cover pretty well. I could now hear the song in my head. It sounded like "Love Me Do," but with the soft-punky sound of the band. I thought it was okay.

I was walking for just a moment through the neighborhood I'd lived in when I was in high school. I may have been looking at my phone. My sister was asking me a lot of personal information. I didn't want to give it to her. I felt like she would use it in bad ways.

I had then come into an office building. I was in a big hallway that seemed to curve around some large auditorium. The hallway was white with grey carpeting and fluorescent light. It felt like a hallway inside a new church building to me.

At some point a man told me that I'd better get ready, because everybody was going to be moving out of this building pretty soon. Possibly a tall, slim, black woman told me the same thing. The woman was like some kind of important secretary. The man, whom I saw somewhere, was an IT person. He was tallish, fattish, and bald, with red-brown hair on the sides of his head and a red-brown mustache.

I curved around into some slanted area like a coat closet that actually connected the hallway I was in to another hallway. I turned right down that other hallway, walked down, and found myself in some kind of lobby area with a group of office workers.

I had been thinking about what the IT man had said. A lot of these guys were IT guys. They spoke to me about where the IT operations for the company were going to move. Most of it, they said, would be in a building different from the building I was going to. They mentioned some cities.

I asked about a couple IT people, as if I were trying to confirm that they'd done something for me in the past. But the others said I had the wrong people. They told me the name of the man who had actually helped me. They then told me either that that the man was no longer with the company or that he was going to be moving really far away.

Dream #3

I had come from somewhere else and had now arrived in a hotel room, which was also set up as an office. The "office" side of the room was just a wall-length desk with two computers on it. The room was mostly dark, with just the glow of the computer screens and the incandescent light from some other room lighting the place.

I was probably working here with a pretty, black woman. But right while we were in the middle of some project, "my boss" came in. He was an old man, kind of gruff looking, with blonde hair and a mustache.

The man began giving us some speech which implied that he suspected me of something. He thought I was a bad person who was waiting for just the right moment to do something bad. I think he was just waiting for a reason to get rid of me.

The man now began giving us some kind of justification for his feelings. He said he'd worked for years as a SWAT team member or some kind of special operations guy. He got to know the signs of a bad person.

The man then began telling us stories of how he'd have to talk down people who'd finally gone bad. The man said that he'd really been aiming to shoot the people dead all along. But you had to go through a whole protocol before you could finally kill the guy.

The man stood before us, re-enacting a scene. It now seemed like the man was wearing heavy SWAT team gear. He seemed to be a bit younger, but also a lot more wrinkled and worn out. His hair was a whole lot thinner, but a lot longer. And his eyes were frantic and bugged-out. He may have been holding a rifle.

The man told us how he'd balance legal phrases intended to calm down the target with a manner of speech calculated to frighten the target and make him jumpy. The man said, "I'd keep telling the creep, 'Put down your gun! You're alright! Put down your gun!' But, really, I was just egging him on. I wanted him to lift his gun, so I could blow his head off!"

The man seemed so frantic by this point in time that I could hardly bear looking at him. But now there was the sound of sirens. I turned around and looked toward the curtained window of the hotel room. I could see full, grey daylight coming in dimly below the bottom fringe of the curtain. I was waiting to see the flashing lights accompanying the sirens.

The man or the woman may have said that the cops were finally here, that the man had been planning all along to have me arrested, and that I'd now finally given him a reason to have me arrested.