Sunday, September 9, 2012
wasurete/divorce; tempting garbage; handbox; murder-ring a suicide
Dream #1
I was with a woman. The woman may have been my girlfriend. We were moving through a series of locations, something like rooms in a museum. But each location had to do a different rock song, maybe always a Japanese pop song. The locations were all mostly dark, with electronic imagery spreading through the darkness.
In one location, the woman and I were sitting in seats like movie theater seats and listening to a song ("Wasurenai kara?") by the artist Gack't. Overhead spanned a dark beam, like the underside of a bridge. In the distance was a red city skyline.
I found the scene very beautiful, but I wondered whether the woman was feeling bored. Maybe this kind of journey wasn't her thing. Maybe the woman found me boring and resented the fact that she had chosen me for a boyfriend.
I suddenly realized that I may have had to attend some sort of class. I stood up and turned toward the woman, who remained seated. I told the woman not to worry, that I'd be right back. I had to go check whether I needed to take a class right now. But, I told the woman, if I needed to take the class, I'd make sure to come back and get her, so that she could be in the class with me.
I walked down a dark hallway to a lit room where a class was in progress. Most of the people in the class were women. They were all talking in a semi-irreverent, exaggeratedly down-to-earth way. The class was basically a class on how to carry out a divorce most effectively. I was mainly coming to this class because I was trying to help someone through the divorce process.
As I listened to the teacher, who was the most exaggeratedly down-to-earth of all the people, I realized that the woman I'd been journeying through the locations with would think this class was really helpful. So I went to look for her.
But as I was looking around in ----- (the red zone, with the movie seats?), I heard the voice of JS, one of my professional seniors and a person I consider to be a mentor and role model, calling, "Preemie. Preemie! Preemie, wherever you are, get your rear end down here!"
I was so panicked on hearing JS sounding so insistent and disappointed in me that I floated downwards through the floor and down through a huge room, like a fancy bar, where JS sat at a couch and coffee table with a number of other women. JS, seeing me float downward from the high ceiling, asked, "Do you have your divorce report finished? Everybody would like to see it."
I landed and knelt on the ground before the coffee table. I pulled out a stack of papers and began working through them. All the ladies gathered around me, looking over the papers I'd pulled out. I could feel that JS now felt bad about being overly insistent, and that she was now trying to make up for it by being gentle and attentive to my report. I felt like I had put a lot of effort into the report, and I felt like JS could see that.
Dream #2
I was with my mom. We were on something like a bicycle, riding down a slope inside a concrete structure that looked like a mix between a parking lot and the underpass of a highway. We were trying to get to a final destination, but we may have been finding the going pretty difficult.
We were now behind a garbage truck. My mom told me, "If we latch onto the back of the truck, we can let it carry us down the slope. That will make the effort a lot easier on us."
I tried to argue with my mom that latching on the back of the truck, especially while we were going downhill, would only put us in danger. For instance, if the truck stopped, we wouldn't be able to control ourselves, and we'd crash right into the truck.
I could tell my mom was upset about the arguments I was making. But thankfully I didn't have to make them anymore. The garbage truck curved around a stairwell and drove away along some flat stretch of concrete. I knew that my mom and I needed to go down the stairwell. So we wouldn't be able to follow the garbage truck.
I lifted the bicycle up onto my left shoulder and began walking down the steps. The concrete floor had been strewn with some kind of fragmented, glass-like litter. But the steps were even more cluttered with this litter, and the litter was kind of grimy.
I didn't pay it much attention, though. I began speaking to my mom, who I thought was behind me. I told my mom that she'd find she was much happier now that we'd done things the right way. We may have put in an extra effort. But I was shouldering most of the effort for her. I asked her, was she feeling overstrained?
But my mom didn't answer. I realized my mom wasn't behind me. I had no idea where she was. I got to the bottom of the steps and into another huge, concrete room. My mom was standing a few meters away, looking at furniture. There were furniture and rugs all laid out, well-spaced, in this huge room, like exhibits in a museum.
I walked up to my mom and asked her something. She may have asked me something as well, like asking me to remember to do something for my family on her behalf.
Dream #3
I was sitting in a sandbox as big as a public swimming pool. My second oldest nephew sat outside the edge of that sandbox, flinging sand from the edge further in, as if he were splashing water in a pool. My nephew may have been speaking to me about something.
A friend of my nephew now came up. My nephew introduced me to his friend. The friend came into the sandbox. I shook the boy's hand. When the boy took back his hand, he seemed a little panicked. I began to wonder whether my hand had been bleeding and I'd gotten blood on the boy's hand. I felt like this must have been what had happened to make the boy skittish.
I asked the boy what was wrong. He acted like nothing was wrong. But he then showed me a few bruises and healed cuts on his hand. I understood that the boy thought highly of these wounds, so I treated them like they were a really big deal. I realized I also had wounds on my hand, so I showed them to the boy.
The boy began talking about people's hands. He mentioned how some people's hands have an extra little nub of flesh on them. The boy himself may have had this extra nub of flesh. I knew I did. The boy began talking about the different shapes the extra flesh could take on a hand. He mentioned one type which was very much like chicken skin. I thought that must have been my type. I began to feel very ashamed of myself.
Dream #4
I walked into a room with my mom. My second oldest nephew was in the room, holding a flower. My nephew, upon seeing me, got a little teary-eyed and complained to me about how I don't spend as much time with everybody as I should. I felt really bad about this, and I avoided my nephew's eyes.
I looked at the flower. Like an onion, it was bulbous, purple at the base and white at the top. But it also seemed to be folding open into slender, almost orchid-like, but thick, petals.
I was now walking up through the stairwell of a big building. I reached some high up floor. I went up into an apartment which was temporarily mine. It was like I was on some kind of extended business trip or project, and that I'd been given the apartment during the project. Possibly my mom had gotten this apartment for me. I had just come back from a business meeting. This was the first time I'd actually seen the apartment.
There was a huge industrial vent right in the room, near the door. The vent pointed toward the wall, away from the rest of the room. I knew the vent was connected, under the floor, to a much larger system in a small room on the other side of the wall from my apartment.
I knew this larger system at least partly served as a chiller. I had the idea that if the chiller exploded, it would blow open the wall of my apartment. It could possibly even kill me. I wondered whether it had been a bad idea for me to be put into this apartment. I even wondered whether I'd been put into the apartment on purpose, so I would be in constant danger. But I eventually dismissed the whole thing as not being so dangerous after all.
There were huge windows all along the left wall of the apartment. I knew all the windows had been closed while I was away. But now I looked over and saw that one of the windows was open. I couldn't quite believe my eyes at first. But I looked again to see that the window was open.
I went over to the window to close it. But looking out the window, where before I'd just seen a city skyline, I now saw that something like a garden embedded in concrete connected this floor of my building to the corresponding floor of the building next door. The windows in that apartment were open as well. The garden connecting the two buildings was mostly filled with desert soil and plants.
I now began to wonder -- did somebody from across the way come into my apartment? If they did, did they take anything? Or were they still in my apartment? Had they been sent, perhaps, to hurt or kill me?
I reflected that I couldn't really do much about the lack of security before this moment. But right now I could take steps to secure my apartment. I would close and lock my windows right now. I looked down along my wall of windows. I now realized that almost every single window along the wall was open! Somebody must have come in here!
I went into a reverie. I began hearing two people speak. Both of the people were Equity Research analysts. I may have known one of them as CU, an analyst I'd been friends with at my last research job. The other analyst asked CU whether he'd had his report out yet. CU said he hadn't, but that it was basically ready.
The other analyst asked whether he'd read the other reports put out by the other analysts so far. CU said he hadn't, but that his report was probably pretty up-to-date anyway. CU said he could show the other analyst what he had so far.
I now saw what CU had: a whole stack of blue and red construction paper. On each piece of paper was pasted a white piece of paper with black, psychedelic-wavy-style lettering printed all the way down it. This "report" was giving some sort of eulogy for a fellow analyst who had been found dead -- maybe in the very apartment in which I was currently staying.
The thing was, and I could see this as I read CU's "report," that CU was giving very broad, general information about the analyst's death. Not only was the information about the analyst and his death so general that it wouldn't be telling anybody anything they hadn't already heard; it had also missed some of the latest developments surrounding the investigation into the death, so that it was even misleading. I thought this report was almost insulting to the analyst who had died.
I thought that CU must have known the analyst personally. But now, reading the report, I had my doubts. CU's report spoke kindly of the man. But it almost seemed to disavow that CU had ever known the man personally. The details of the man were like details out of a press release.
Apparently the man had also had a little fantasy of being a movie star. He'd even had some little roles in a few movies. The role for which he was most famous was a bit role, where he was carrying a box of Marlboro cigarettes on his right shoulder as he walked down the street. The man was a tall, blonde man with muscular features and a deep tan. The man had a very 1950s style about him.
The joke of the scene was, apparently, that the man, as he walked down the street, past a woman (the main character of the film) who was sitting on the curb, commented about how wonderful and delicious Marlboro cigarettes were. This was a joke because the industry the analyst had covered was the Food, Beverage, and Tobacco industry. So he was basically pushing his own industry.
But CU's report made it seem like this joke was actually some kind of noble effort. The analyst, the report said, had been standing up for one of the best companies he covered. And he covered that company well. The company deserved great coverage, the report seemed to say, because it was one of the world's most noble companies.
I thought that was going a bit overboard. Besides, I could think of a more independent film in which the analyst had had a much larger role, and in which he'd performed much better. But I couldn't remember the name of the film, or even what had happened in it. I only remembered it being very dark.
Now, looking along my windows, I wondered how the man had died. Early reports had been that the man had been murdered. But now I saw in my mind's eye a Facebook-like grid of photos. Early reports implied that these photos were of people who, possibly through a social media platform, had organized to carry out the murder of this analyst.
But now reports were going back on this previous opinion. One headline I saw in my mind's eye said, "Murder-Ring Now Considered a Suicide." So the man had not been murdered, but had committed suicide. The other analysts knew this, and their reports reflected it. But CU's report still did not reflect this fact. In fact, CU's report spoke very assuredly of the analyst having been murdered. I thought this was kind of silly on CU's part.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
ten cent porn; trash files; juice boss; cooking too much?; secretly following; hitting hitcher; blackmail cupcakes
Dream #1
I was on some form of public transportation, maybe a bus, but probably more like a train or a subway. We were moving along above ground. The sky outside may have been deep blue-grey, as if it were late afternoon or early morning and cloudy. I sat in seats that edged their sides against the window. In front of me was a row of seats that edged their backs against the window. There may actually have been another row of seats in front of that first row.
I was looking at my phone. A man now sat in the seats in front of me. He was skinny, with dark skin and dark, wavy hair done up in a square cut. He wore a button-up shirt and nice slacks. He smiled at me and said something like, "You looking at porn?"
I was kind of shocked. I wasn't looking at porn. But I knew I could have been at some other time. In conjunction with my shock, we may have passed over some big bump. I dropped my phone. It scuttered under the row of seats the man was sitting in.
The man didn't seem to notice that I had dropped my phone. I didn't want to act like I'd dropped my phone. I thought if I acted worried, the guy would definitely think I had been looking at porn, and he'd definitely want to look at my phone. I didn't want to ask the guy for help in getting my phone.
I was trying to figure out the best way for getting my phone. I couldn't reach for it from where I sat. It had fallen all the way to the other end of the row. So I had to get up and get it. I stood up and went for it. I knelt in front of the row of seats.
It was a little harder than I'd thought it would be to get to it. The row of seats in front of this row was so close that it was like I had to crawl under this row just to get to the back row. Instead of the man sitting there, there may now have been a Hispanic woman, maybe with one or two little kids.
I noticed that down here the seats were all dusty, too. I could see my phone (except now it may just have been a dime) at the very end of a corner formed by the row of seats and the wall. I crawled back and reached for the phone, rubbing myself up against all the dust of the seats so that I could squeeze my arm in to where the dime was.
I pulled the dime out and looked at it. I may have been sitting straight up, still under the seats, though before I'd had to do a pretty short crawl to get here. Now that I'd actually retrieved my dime, I no longer thought it had been worth all the trouble I'd gone through.
Dream #2
I was at my office. I was looking down into the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. The drawer was all full of clutter. I may have been panicked, trying to figure out how to take care of all this clutter.
I may have heard my boss' voice from behind me, talking to our office manager, BL. My boss told BL, "You'll see. We can do without him. Anybody can do his job, really."
Dream #3
I was in some place like a break room. It seemed to be at the back of a big grocery store. The break room was kind of narrow. A big, circular table with a fake wood top took up most of the room. I sat at the table. The lights in the room were all off. The only light was the fluorescent light from the store, which came in through the open door of the break room.
My boss walked in. He said something like, "You're still here? We got rid of you, didn't we? We have your replacement and everything."
I may have tried to explain something about my being here, like there were one or two things that still needed to be taken care of. But my boss said something to ridicule everything I said. He said everything in a really pissy yet nonchalant tone that made it clear he was trying to insult me as much as he could in the most tactful way possible, so that he could prove how little he felt he needed me without actually getting himself in trouble for insulting me.
I was so angry that I shouted something back at him. It was pretty violent, but I can't remember what it was. My boss didn't take what I'd said seriously at all. So I began to laugh. I told him if he didn't think I was serious, he could just wait and see. I began to laugh louder and louder.
I laughed so loud that I "woke myself up" -- somewhere. I was walking around in the grocery store, I believe. I could hear two women talking to me from somewhere, maybe from inside my head. I could tell that the two women were Hispanic. Maybe they'd been attractive before. But now they were kind of worn-out and dumpy-looking.
The two women were telling me that when I'd been laughing in my sleep, I'd been laughing so hard that I'd woken them up. They said my laugh had been an evil laugh, and that it made them afraid for my boss. I don't know how they knew I was laughing about my boss.
I myself was really surprised I could have given such an evil laugh. When the women told me that my laugh was evil, I began to worry about myself. Was I okay? Did I need psychological help?
I was now walking along the back wall of the grocery store. There was a door along the back wall. I knew that behind that door was my boss' bedroom. He was asleep in that room. It may have been like a dorm room. My boss may actually have been sharing that room with the guy my boss had hired in my place. My boss and the guy may both have been asleep.
I knew my boss had fallen asleep because he thought there was nothing to worry about from me. I was going to show him. I had a plastic bottle in my hands. Actually, the bottle in my hands kept changing. First it was a small, 600ml plastic bottle. Then it was a big plastic juice bottle, maybe around two liters. There may also have been times when I held more than one bottle in my hands. The bottles may usually have been full of orange juice. I don't think any of them were ever completely full.
I planned to sneak into my boss' bedroom while he was asleep and pound him on the head with these bottles until his skull was smashed and he died. But as I was walking up to the door of the room, two tall, very muscular, bronze-skinned men walked up from behind me. The men wore tight, dark grey or black t-shirts and maybe dull green or grey pants, also kind of tight, maybe made of denim. They had short, wavy brown hair, and square, but kind of babyish, faces.
I had a bad feeling that these guys were trying to break into my boss' bedroom. They seemed to want to steal some of the stuff in the bedroom. Apparently the bedroom was also like a storehouse for some of the most valuable stuff in the store.
I didn't want the store to get stolen from, so I began watching the guys very closely. I decided not to go into the room. The room had a sliding door with a small, inward notch of a handle, painted the same pale-tan as the rest of the door. I didn't want the two men to see how easy it was to get into the room. They'd only be more encouraged to go in.
So either I got friendly with the guys or the guys got friendly with me. We began talking, walking past the room, all of us acting like the room was of no importance to us at all. We turned right and headed down an aisle with rather large shelves, more like shelves in a huge discount warehouse than in a normal grocery store. We were talking about something that I seemed to be engaged in with a kind of childlike enthusiasm.
I got the feeling, as we continued walking, that the guys had decided they were going to protect me. But I didn't know if that was just an act. So I kept all my conversation away from anything having to do with my boss or the bedroom door.
Dream #4
I was in some restaurant. I probably worked there. The restaurant had a long, narrow eating area and a small kitchen, most of which was visible from behind a counter. The restaurant was closed at the moment. But we were apparently preparing, so we could open up for some big party later in the day. The party may have been planned to be a multiple-day party. It may also have been the case that we had just closed down for the day, but that we now had to prepare all of our food for the next day.
Most of the workers seemed to be hanging around in the eating area, toward the back, at a couple of tables. It seemed like they, in general, really didn't have anything to do with the cooking, or maybe even the serving of the food. It seemed like they were all some kind of bosses, more concerned with the administrative aspects of the restaurant. There were one or two cooks behind the counter.
I'm not sure exactly what my job was. But somehow, I was keeping track of the amount of food made. I was also somehow involved in determining how much food needed to be made. At some point I had concluded that we didn't need to make a whole lot. We probably hadn't had much business the day before, and it looked like things weren't going to be any more active the next day. Plus, with the kind of food we made (some kind of fish?), it was much better to cook too little and have the food be fresh and good, than to cook too much and have food go bad.
The cook or cooks took my advice and began cooking only a little bit of food. I think I saw the preparations -- something like sheet pans with circular items, like biscuits, except made of fish, laid out on them.
But now I heard from the front door that the next day of the party was going to be really busy. There would probably be a lot of people here. And, in fact, a large group of people might even have made a reservation specifically for this restaurant.
I was excited. I ran back to the cooks and told them that we now needed to cook a lot of food. We were going to have a full house. Suddenly the cooks had all kinds of big fillets of fish, all being fried and laid out on pans everywhere. There were all kinds of pans of greasy, still-bubbling, fried fish -- everywhere.
I walked away from the cooks' counter and back toward the back of the store, where the other guys sat. I suddenly had a bad feeling that I'd told the cooks to make way too much food. The place would probably not be busy enough to serve all that food. If it were busier than the other days, we'd be kind of okay. But we'd still have too much food. But if it were only as busy as the other days, we'd have a whole lot of food and waste on our hands. We'd have wasted a lot of money.
Dream #5
It was probably a fresh, crisp morning. I was out walking around some place like a small town or a college town or campus, leading a small group of new students in some kind of orientation program. Everybody seemed cheerful and relaxed, even though I think we had gotten to some place where I really didn't know where I was going. We were walking along some grey flagstone path in between some large lawns, at the end of which were large, stately buildings.
A group of guys came walking our way from the other direction. They were all a lot taller and stronger than I. One of the guys, a black man with a shaved head, asked if we knew where we were going. I probably walked up to the guy and mumble-whispered something like, "I don't know where we're going. Do you think you could show us the way -- but without letting on that I don't know what I'm doing?"
We stood before a black iron gate (on my right side) that was hinged on either side with a maybe 2 meter tall stone post. The gate was already partly open. The man opened the gate the rest of the way for us. We all cheerfully walked in. After the gate was a flagstone path that led directly up to one of the big, stately buildings.
The man pointed out a stack of textbooks on the right side of the flagstone path. The top book may have had a yellow cover. The book may have been a mathematics textbook.
The man said, "I think somebody left their textbooks on the path." I knew that this was the way the man was justifying having given me directions for where to go. If he opened the gate and pointed out the books, it would just look like he was pointing out the books, not pointing out the direction I was supposed to take.
I may have replied that the person who owned these books (maybe some female student?) wasn't here, but that I'd make sure to get the books to her. I probably went to pick the books up.
Dream #6
It was morning. I was out with some young, black man on a road, probably in a neighborhood full of fenced parking lots and warehouses. It may have been like I was going to work. It may have been a hot, kind of smoggy morning. The sky was a sour yellow, with the sun just coming up over the horizon.
There were a decent amount of cars in the street, all heading to some warehouse yard to start work. The boy and I seemed to be in a hurry, even though I don't think either of us was too keen to start work.
The boy suddenly had an idea that to get to work quicker we could "hitch a ride." But this hitching a ride didn't necessarily mean getting permission to ride with somebody and getting into their car. The boy told me, "Come on!" He ran up to some van that may have been full of young people, like college students or recent college graduates in something like an intern program. The boy seemed just to jump onto the back or the side of the van and hold on as the van drove away.
I knew that the boy was doing this less because he was in a hurry to get to work and more because he simply didn't feel like walking the rest of the way to work. But I was in a hurry to get to work, and, even though I didn't like the boy's idea, I thought it seemed smart enough that I'd better do it. So I jumped onto a van, possibly not the same van as the boy had jumped onto.
But as I was jumping onto the van I noticed that at one intersection, at which we had just turned left, there was so much traffic that everything had come to a standstill. I was now somehow inside the van. All the young people seemed to make me feel welcome. There may have been a pretty, little, skinny white girl with big, blue-green eyes and her brown hair back in a loose ponytail.
At some point I may have decided that it would be easier just to get out and walk. But suddenly an accident occurred. We'd been moving forward, when we'd hit my friend who'd jumped on the other van. Apparently he'd gotten off the van -- maybe he'd been thrown off of it. But we'd actually driven right over him. It was obvious that he was dead -- crushed. But I didn't want to believe it.
I think I'd gotten out of the van I was in, as if that would reverse my friend's death. I was walking to work. But then at some point I was driving in a car -- a yellow taxi-cab, actually -- with my mom. My mom was driving. I sat in the front passenger seat.
We turned right and drove through an open gate. We were heading along a wide road through a wide lawn. Up ahead was a big, stately building, like a college building. But I looked up ahead and to my left and saw that there were people out here training to be astronauts. Some people may even have been wearing full astronaut outfits for spacewalks.
Suddenly, from nearby, on the left side of the road, there were two people: a boy and a girl. I'm not sure what happened to the boy. He may simply have run off into the field. But the girl ran directly in front of our car. My mom had to step on the breaks really quickly. Even then we barely missed hitting the girl.
The girl was a beautiful, tall, skinny, black girl with long, loosely curly, black hair. She wore a schoolgirl's outfit, with a tartan skirt and overall-blouse and a white button-up shirt. But she was a college student, or at least preparing to become a college student.
The girl looked terribly panicked. She gave me and my mom a look, like she knew she'd forced us to stop, but that she'd had to do it. She quickly ran around to the back passenger side of the car and got in. My mom had the understanding that we needed to just keep driving and get the girl to the same place as we were going.
The girl said, in an ominous tone, "I really feel sorry for you guys." I could tell that the girl knew something bad that was possibly going to happen to me and my mom. It probably had something to do with the young man who got hit by the van. But it was also connected to the girl in some way, like whatever the girl was trying to escape was whatever was coming after me and my mom, too.
I asked the girl, "What do you mean, you feel sorry for us?" I looked in the rearview mirror at the girl. I could tell the girl was too distressed to talk. I asked, "Do you just not want to tell me right now?" The girl pursed her lips in fear and shook her head. She may have been clutching a teddy bear tightly in her arms.
Dream #7
I was in some place like a Starbucks. But it was much larger than a normal Starbucks. The cashier's counter was also set at some strange angle to the rest of the store. The area around the counter was set up in a cluttered kind of way, too, with the glass display cases set at odd angles to the counter. And, behind a door behind the counter was, apparently, a really big food prep area, like this place was actually a restaurant rather than a cafe or a Starbucks.
I had ordered and had been sitting down. But now I'd stood up and come back to the counter. I may have been planning to leave. But the man behind the counter, a tall, kind of muscular black man with a bit of a feminine attitude, had either given me or sold me some extra items, so that now I felt like I should stay at the cafe to finish my items. This probably wasn't so bad, as I probably had stuff I wanted to read or write.
But now the man offered me even more food. This time it was some kind of cupcakes with a thick layer of pale brown chocolate frosting. The cupcakes looked really good. But I knew I probably shouldn't have them. But the man told me to take one.
There was some woman behind me and just to my right now. She may have been with me.
I told the man that I really couldn't take anything else. I'd probably had enough with the first stuff I'd gotten. With the second batch of stuff the guy had given me, I probably had too much. The cupcakes would make it way too much.
I was about to walk away. But now the man brought out a huge tray of some kind of sweet breads that were coated in some kind of sweet syrup. The man told me something like, "Now, you really can't resist these."
I was actually going to try and resist them. But the man actually told me something weird, like, if I didn't take one of these little cakes with me, he was going to tell everybody some dirty,little secret of mine. So I decided to take one of the cakes. They actually did look really, really good. And now I was even tempted to take one of the cupcakes with the chocolate frosting, too. I really did want to know how that frosting tasted.
*****
Update -- you can find info on images I think are related to this dream (and some others) in this entry of my dream-day blog.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
writing someone else's report; rogemmstein
Good morning, everybody.
Dream #1
I was in some place like a living room with some friend, possibly my old friend R. My friend knew that I was about to go meet with some man who wrote papers.
My friend wanted me to approach the writer to see if the writer would write a paper, or parts of a paper that my friend had been assigned to write. My friend may possibly have thought that if the man at least wrote some of the difficult passages, it would be easy for my friend to finish the rest.
I was now in a different room, also like a living room, with the man. I was about to ask the man if he would be able to write the report, or the passages in the report, for my friend, even though I felt bad about asking something like this.
But before I could ask, the man started talking about something, probably about how busy he was on some project. I knew this meant the man would not be able to help write anything for my friend. In fact, I felt like I was here to help the man, not to ask favors of him.
Dream #2
There may have been some kind of accident or disaster involving buildings in some town. Someone may have needed to write a report about the incident. But I knew that the report was still missing a lot of details. Nevertheless, I knew that most of the report could just be written with stock material, and that the actual details could be filled in later.
Now I saw a street corner in the downtown area of some city. I was looking at a three- or four-story, white-painted concrete building. There was a wooden sign over the door with a name like "Rogemmstein" burned into it. The name Rogemmstein was a condensation, I knew, of the names Rogers and Hammerstein. There may have actually been one more name condensed in there.
Some bad incident had occurred in this building. It may have been something like a single or multiple murder, or it may have been something like an accident with the material of the building or a natural disaster.
I knew a report needed to be written on the incident. But there were still a lot of details missing regarding the incident. But I knew that I could write most of the report from standard stock material. Then, when the details of this incident started coming in, I could fill in the blanks of the report with these details.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
driving to texas; movie-concert work farewell; hotel policeman
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.