f-zero-mph

Dream 1

It was a bright, sunny day was out on a huge highway, possibly just floating over the highway, or possibly in some sort of floating vehicle that was just like the chassis of a car, but with no wheels, just floating over the highway. There may have been other gigantic highways in the distance, winding over and under the one I floated along.

I may have had an image in my head of a local politician, JP, with whom I may have been scheduled to have some sort of conversation. I may also have seen or imagined the image of JP on some sort of small screen, like a TV screen that was set into the dashboard of some vehicle I was imagining.

Now that I'd seen/imagined this image of JP, I knew I really needed to start driving. Suddenly a shell of a vehicle snapped down around the chassis-like vehicle I was floating in. The shell of the vehicle may have been either silver or black. It may have looked like the body of a nice car, maybe a Mercedes, except just a little bit more flattened out, rounded out, and futuristic. And the car was still a floating car.

It was now like I was racing another car, possibly even the car owned by JP. If I drove the black car, JP drove the silver car, and vice versa. But it may also have been like I was simply following the other car, which may have been driven by JP, but was more likely driven by one of his staff members, so I could get to the meeting with JP. But it may also have been like I was simply aware of the car's existence, like I was somehow following some path it may once have taken, so I could get to the meeting with JP.

I sped up and was going down the highway really quickly. The highway had been in some sort of shallowly ascending, plateau-like stretch of arc. But now I turned a sharp left, and the highway started descending somewhat steeply.

At this point I lost control of the vehicle. It just kind of slowly veered down the ramp of highway, down to something like an intersection on a regular stretch of road. The crossing of the intersection was another highway-like road. High above the intersection, maybe 30 meters up, was another gigantic arc of highway. And beyond the intersection were blocks of warehouses or small factory buildings, some of them made of red brick.

The car slumped to a stop, possibly dropping from its hovering position down to the ground, on the left corner of the street. I may have called someone to pick me up or to help the car get started back up. I may also have been wondering how long it would now take me to get to the meeting. If I had to walk it would take me forever.

I probably also thought that JP would now think I was totally unreliable and not worth paying attention to. I couldn't even keep my car in shape long enough to get to this one single meeting on time. Maybe I wouldn't even get there at all!

not-so-sharp-dressed man

Dream 1

I was probably in front of a mirror in some room that looked like a changing room with a bed in it. Some of the sheets may have lain sloppily off the bed, even spilling down onto the floor. The bed may also have been set up on a platform, like a display platform for a department store.

I was changing into some new clothes. I was putting on baby blue slacks and a baby blue button-up shirt. The breast pocket and the collar, and maybe other parts, of the shirt were lined with some rainbow-striped fabric.

At first I thought I looked good: very stylish and unique. But then I started to wonder about the shirt. It seemed kind of big, and I wasn't sure whether I should tuck it in or leave it untucked. I thought that it must be the style of shirt that you leave untucked. But I also thought that it looked sloppy untucked. But I thought that if I tucked it in to look less sloppy, it would look all huge and fat, which would be just as bad.

But I hadn't put on my slacks all the way yet. I thought that I'd want to at least wait and see how I looked with my slacks all the way pulled up and buttoned before I decided whether I needed to tuck in my shirt.

But when I looked at myself in the mirror with my baby blue slacks and shirt I thought I looked sort of awful. The blue was so bright and garish that I looked sort of hilarious. I may have noticed that the material of the slacks and shirt was like some kind of thin velvet.

I may have thought that I needed to change out of this outfit. But I may have wondered if I had anything else to change into. I had changed so I would look nice. And this was the outfit I had chosen. Were there any other outfits? Should I just go with this one? Was I just wasting my time worrying about outfits at this point? Had I wasted my time altogether by getting into this outfit?

the mystery of the broken vase

Dream 1

A view looking across a street. I'm not sure if I was physically there or if I just sort of had a floating view of the scene. The street was the street in front of the property my mom's boyfriend JT lived at while I was growing up.

My view floated across the street, first toward a couple of people, maybe a mother and a son wrapped up in a blanket, who sat in some tall grass near a small irrigation ditch. But then it floated off toward the right, perhaps like it was following the irrigation ditch along the road.

As my view floated across the street, I could hear (and maybe see, somewhere else), Donald Trump talking about some mystery. Apparently the mystery ended with a shattered vase. The vase was made of some green-painted porcelain that was lined either with gold or with gold-painted porcelain.

Donald Trump said, maybe to TV reporters or some audience being filmed for TV, that he didn't understand what people's problem with his presidency was. After all, he was giving them all kinds of exciting mysteries, like the mystery of the broken vase, wasn't he?

As my view floated along the ditch, I thought to myself that, yeah, the broken vase mystery was fine. The broken vase was kind of interesting in itself. And it was harmless. And maybe if things just stayed at stuff like a broken vase mystery, people would have fun with Trump's presidency. But he was actually ruining lives. And there was no good perspective from which to look at that fact.

wrong way in circles; mom on a limb; grocery theater

Dream 1

I was out on a road, probably in a mountain town, like a residential neighborhood in a forest. I was probably trying to get somewhere fast. I was probably in a car, though I may possibly have been on foot, running. The road may have had a few other cars on it.

I knew the road I was on was a big circle, like some kind of circle made specifically for whatever residential community had been developed out here. I had probably been traveling along the road clockwise at first. But now I was going counterclockwise. I was trying to take the quickest way to get off of this circle and onto the main highway, so I could get wherever I was going quickly.

But just as I was approaching the base of the circle, where the forest became a lot less dense, and where there were more houses, and maybe even something like a strip mall or shopping center, I realized that the road had recently been turned from a two-way to a one-way street. So, even though I was now relatively close to the main highway, I would now have to turn around and go clockwise, almost the entire length of the circle, to get to where I could legally get onto the main highway.

I was discouraged. I may already have felt like I was late. And now I'd lost even more time and would have to spend even more time getting myself in the right direction. I probably felt like I had basically failed at getting wherever I was supposed to be. But I turned around, anyway, and started heading clockwise on the circular road.

Dream 2

I was outside, in front of a tall house. It was probably early evening, just after sunset. The atmosphere was a dim, cool blue.

I could see over the roof and behind the house. I may actually somehow have been floating above the roof. The roof was probably flat, though tiered, and maybe made out of some kind of silvery or white material. There was a big tree, maybe like a London Plane Tree, just behind the house, so that the top of the tree's canopy went above the roof, and maybe even touched the roof a little.

My mom was on the roof, probably with a couple other people, probably including her old friend, TH. Everybody was spaced widely apart on the roof. But they all seemed to be walking toward the canopy of the tree.

My mom was really close to the tree. She was, in fact, going to walk along the limbs of the tree. Even though the tree was completely barren of leafs, it had a few big, round globes of fruit, maybe like Osage-orange fruit, hanging from the limbs and branches. My mom was going to pick the fruit. We may have thought of the fruit as pears.

I didn't want my mom out climbing these tree limbs. My mom thought the limbs were sturdy. But I knew they were weak. They were also really high in the air. I was certain that if my mom went out on the limbs, the limbs would break, and my mom would fall to her death. I could see that TH, who was kind of big and heavy, was also planning to climb the tree. I knew for sure that if both my mom and TH were on the tree, the tree would break and send my mom crashing to the ground.

I yelled at my mom not to climb the tree. But she already seemed to be doing it. She seemed to be fine. But she hadn't gotten to the really narrow limbs yet. She called for me to help her pick the fruit. But I wasn't going to encourage her to climb the tree by going out there as well.

I wasn't going to stick around to watch this. I yelled at my mom that I was going to go to the movie theater and watch a movie. I could see, from my floating viewpoint, myself walking down the block (sort of like the block we used to live on when I was in high school).

My mom called after me, somehow implying -- not with anything she said, but more like with the tone of her voice -- that if I didn't come back she'd actually try to fall from the tree and die. But I could see myself still walking away -- my view looking down on myself while it still floated in front of the house, just above the roof.

I thought to myself that I wasn't going to let my mom stop me. I told myself to face the possibility that when I got back home I would find the tree canopy broken and my mom dead on the ground. If that's what I found when I arrived back home, I'd just have to accept it. I wouldn't let myself feel guilty about my mom's choices, even if she'd made them expressly to spite me.

Dream 3

I was at a movie theater, probably with either my family or some friends. We stood in line at the ticket booth, which was in a small lobby at the front of the building. The lobby mostly had window-walls that looked out onto a sidewalk and parking lot, which was probably part of some strip mall.

There was something weird about the situation, like maybe we were coming to see the movie at an odd time of day, like ten o'clock in the morning, when the movie theater would normally not be open; or like we were here at a normal time of day, but maybe on a strange day when the movie theater would usually be closed; or maybe even like we had come to the theater when it was under construction, but we were being allowed to go in anyway, for a special screening or something.

I may have been myself, but I may have been really short, like I was a child. I may only have come up to the waist of my friends/family and all the other people in line. Or I may have been my normal height, just about the same height as everybody else, but the ticket booth or counter may have been really tall.

Nevertheless, I was also sort of like the leader of my group for this event. I knew everything that was going on with this unique situation and was helping everybody else through it. But everybody else may also have been a little skeptical of the situation, or at least of my ability to handle it. But I tried not to notice their skepticism.

The woman at the ticket booth may have started telling me about something bad that had happened here. The night before, someone had busted one of the windows that fronted the main lobby, right near the far end of the main lobby, and had gotten into the lobby and either vandalized or stolen something of high value. The woman explained that now the theater would be mostly concerned with fixing that issue, not with screening movies.

But we were here for a special screening, and the woman let us in. I may have felt bad. I was really excited to see this special screening. And I knew that now the screening would probably not look so great, as the projector folks wouldn't be very focused on the screening. But I hoped they would be focused on the screening, even though I knew that hope was kind of selfish.

My family/friends and I walked into the main lobby, which was wide and long, with tall ceilings, like a big lobby for a large hotel or even a convention center.

As we walked in, a few Hispanic ladies were walking in front of us. One of them chuckled boastingly that she'd gotten a good deal out of the movie theater. Apparently her company had been assigned to fix whatever the problem was. And she'd made a good $150 (?) off of the project.

It may even somehow have been implied that the woman's friends or company had made the problem themselves, so they could profit off of it. I thought that was kind of shady and underhanded. But I didn't say anything. I felt like the woman may have said all of this in front of me so I would hear her and criticize her. She wanted to start a fight with me. So I'd just ignore her and hope she'd leave me alone.

I, the Hispanic ladies, and probably my family/friends were all now at the end of some long black bench that backed against the wall, which was lined with black-painted metal lockers, like high school lockers, all the way to the long, black counter of the concession stand. We all may have had to do something like take off our shoes, as well as maybe put something on that looked like virtual reality goggles or weird, visor-like sunglasses, before we headed into the movies.

We finished whatever we had to do and walked past the wall and into a dark, black-walled hallway. My family/friends were now like an Hispanic family.

Almost immediately, the hallway became like the hallway for a small mall. We were all headed to our specific theater. But eventually we may have forgotten about the theater altogether.

The mall corridor was crowded, busy, and lively. I kept looking at all the storefronts. We passed one storefront which was actually a grocery store that had just gone out of business. The storefront gave a full view of the store. The entire floor was emptied out. But all along the three walls, the shelves (and maybe refrigeration walls and meat counters) were filled with items. There were handmade signs near the tops of the walls, advertising 15% to 20% off on a lot of items.

I was with a lot of young, Hispanic girls. One of the girls giggled and said how stupid it was for the grocery store to be advertising such a big sale on their items, especially as they were closing. But I couldn't figure out why it was bad to advertise the sale. Was it because all the goods had already gone bad?

I looked away from the storefront. The mall hallway was now the inside of a big grocery store, maybe like a Super Walmart or Super Target. There were a lot of people in here, too, though this place may also have been sort of hollowed out, like it was going out of business and shelves were just being removed as all the inventory on the shelves was being bought. However, my group and I may have been looking for the checkout area, so we could buy whatever we were looking for (maybe like it was just waiting for us at the checkout stand???) and leave.

the cornell experiment

Dream 1

I had come into an office, probably as a temporary receptionist or something. I sat down at some cubicle. It was the beginning of the day. The office floor was dim, like there were no lights on, but blue daylight was coming through some window walls in the distance, and maybe from some window-walled alcove behind me.

I may have felt a little impatient that it was just the beginning of the day. I may already have felt annoyed at having to sit at this cubicle desk all day long, doing nothing and probably being treated nicely but sort of condescendingly by the other people in the office.

I was probably myself. But I may also either have been a really sexy, girly woman wearing sexy office girl clothes without really noticing it. I may also simply have been wearing the sexy office girl clothes without noticing it. Or I may have been wearing some scrapped-out girl clothes (the ones I sometimes wear for my masturbation fantasies in waking life) without noticing it.

I was probably thinking about the path my professional life had taken. I was disappointed with myself. I had worked a lot and done a lot of great things. But somehow I'd thrown it all away and was back at the start again, working as a temporary receptionist. I may have wondered if there wasn't some quick way I could get myself back to where I'd been.

I looked off to my left. Beyond some glass walls was another room that may have looked like a library or a set of book stacks. I probably felt like whatever was in those books related to some kind of strong interest I'd had in my previous professional work. I decided to go there, so I could look into my old professional interests, just for my own sake.

As I walked into the room, I saw, beyond a few rows of bookshelves, MM, someone from one of the first professional positions to start my serious career life (back in 2005), sitting at something like a microfiche machine. MM looked up from her machine and saw me, too.

I maybe walked behind one of the bookshelves, possibly thoughtlessly, but possibly on purpose. I may have seen a desk, like a receptionist's desk, that I thought I needed to sit at. It was like my job now took place in this room instead of the other room.

MM called out to some other folks. She said she'd spotted me. She told the people that they should follow me and try to get me involved in whatever project they were working on. She said I was the kind of person that, once people had me on their team, they would just start winning all the time.

But I was now laying in a bed in between one of the book stacks and a window wall looking into the other office area. I wasn't wearing a shirt. And the only thing I wore around my lower body was a skirt-like item of clothing I use for my masturbation fantasies in waking life and maybe a pair of panties.

I hoped neither MM nor the people she was calling to would pursue me. I didn't want them to see me like this. I especially didn't want MM to see me like this, as I was pretty sure she'd been romantically attracted to me when we'd worked together.

Two men came in through a glass door and stood beside the bed. It was like this space -- still almost the exact same office/library space it had been before -- was now either my bedroom or some hospital room. The men may have looked like stereotypical detectives from a 1940s movie.

I was embarrassed to have the men here, because of the shameful way I was dressed. But the men also seemed menacing, like they were part of some weird governmental group that was just taking people away from their lives for reasons nobody understood.

Once the men were at the head of the bed (it may really have felt like a hospital bed, with an elevated head, at this point), they were both suddenly under dark blue (like a dull, navy blue, but with just a tinge of a dark, forest green to the blue) blankets. The sight of these men just standing stock-still was creepy and unsettling. The men intended it to be so.

The men were now both out from under the blankets. But they stood in some weird position, like one of them had manage to get behind the headboard of my bed (which was now like a regular bed, in a low, wooden frame with a bookshelf-like headboard), while the other one stood close to the first one, but just beside the bed.

The man behind the bed was carrying a license plate or some kind of stiff piece of paper that looked like a license plate. He may possibly have been carrying this thing the whole time. The "license plate" indicated that it came from Cornell, i.e. the university, as if the university were a place you could reside in, like a state, and get a license plate from.

The two men may have taken turns telling me about a project they were working on. It was called something like COM, or Cornell-COM, or Cornell-MOC. It may possibly have been some sort of military project or government project in cooperation with Cornell. Or it may have been a project that Cornell was working on alone that seemed a lot like it would or should be a government or military project.

The project may have sounded interesting to me. But I wasn't quite sure I wanted to be a part of it. I actually wasn't sure what my involvement was supposed to be. I felt like these guys may have been trying to lure me into a situation where I'd actually be tortured by them as part of some twisted government or university experiment.

But even if I had completely trusted the men and their program, I still wasn't sure I'd want to join. If I joined I'd have to go with the men right now. But I knew I wouldn't want to do that. As soon as I got out of bed they'd see that the only clothing I was wearing was a tattered skirt I used to masturbate in and maybe a pair of equally worn-out panties.

they were still watching me; disappointing van ride

These dreams are from two nights ago. But I got really busy yesterday morning and couldn't post them.

Dream 1

I was in some kind of mountain area with a group of people. We were all working together on some project, probably to do something like destroy or avoid an evil force.

But all the people I was with didn't believe anything I said about how we needed to get things done. Some of them may even have been antagonistic toward me, trying to stop the things I said needed to get done from getting done, and maybe even trying to get me removed from the group, if not even killed altogether.

But at some point, probably as we headed down some grassy slope into a grassy valley, the evil force caught up with us. I, and maybe another group of people that had come from some other place, fought off the evil force.

But as we fought off and destroyed the evil force, all the people I was with were revealed to be bad, too. They all fell down some deep crevice at the edge of the grassy valley. Some of them may have tried to pull me down as well.

As I watched the people fall down the pit (I don't know if they really fell: their faces may have stayed frozen in one spot a few meters down the pit), I couldn't help feeling a little smug. These people had tried to destroy me for so long. And I knew I should have felt bad that they were dying now. But I kind of felt happy.

I may have felt a little strange about being happy that my teammates had all died. I felt like if they knew I was happy, they'd try to make something bad happen to me. I tried to hide my happiness.

As I was walking away from the crevice, I came to understand that there was some new problem that had to be taken care of. I walked through the valley and up another grassy slope, which was probably bordered along the right side with a rocky outcropping. I walked with a group of people, though we were all scattered out pretty widely along the valley and slope. I may have asked (maybe by my thoughts) one of the people I was walking with what sort of problem we had to face now.

As I walked up the slope, the setting shifted into some kind of office building. The lighting was sort of grey-green-blue, like a representation of fluorescent lights in some edgy sci-fi movie. I walked through a lobby and then up some sort of ramped area. And even though this ramped area went up along the floors of the building, I was probably trying to find an elevator to go up.

I was probably being followed by a group of guys, maybe like mafia guys, or maybe just a bunch of trouble-making guys. The guys were all a bit older, maybe in their thirties. They were all olive-skinned. And they all wore dark suits. I was trying not to head into an elevator while I felt like they had their eyes on me, because I didn't want them to know where I was going.

I somehow ended up in a hospital room. My mom was on the bed. It was pretty clear she was going to die. She started telling me about her foster kids. She was really proud of how well she'd taken care of them. And she felt like they had turned out to be really good kids. I agreed.

My view drifted away from my mom and toward some other place within this hospital/office building. As it did I started to feel really sad. It wasn't just that my mom was dying. It was that I felt like she deserved so much more out of life. She deserved a lot of success. And she even deserved to stay alive to see her foster kids be successful. So it just didn't feel fair to me that she had to die.

I was heading up to some conference room to meet my mom. I walked up a ramped hallway with glass walls. The glass walls of the hallway gave a view through the glass walls of the conference room. So as I ascended, I could see, at an angle, more and more of the conference room.

I saw my mom, probably in some kind of peach gown like a hospital gown, sitting in a center chair on the long side of a conference table. I then saw the bunch of guys who had been following me walk into the room. They all looked down at me and laughed. They wanted to convey to me that they'd known I was going to meet my mom here and that they had come ahead of me to make both me and my mom miserable.

I entered the room. There was an older man sitting at the table, probably across from my mom. The man looked weird. He, too, may have been wearing a hospital gown. He was bald, with a kind of withered and shriveled face. He may have worn some kind of strange, gauzy covering over his head. And his body was all round. But at the same time, he may have been like the head of the mafia that the younger guys were a part of.

The guys were already starting to be a bother. And almost instantly I was enraged. I tried to keep my temper. I didn't want to make the mafia boss mad at me. But I began picking up all the guys and throwing them down at the floor so I would smash their heads into the floor. I was probably either killing or gravely injuring these guys. But I still thought I was keeping up a good appearance before the mafia boss, so he wouldn't try to retaliate against me.

At some point, the mafia boss asked my mom about the guys. My mom said, in an almost mafioso voice herself, that she wanted all the guys out of the room. The mafia boss told the guys to get out. The guys all left. But they kind of looked after me as they left the room, to let me know that they'd still find a way to get at me.

I watched after the guys. My view kind of tracked them as they left the room and walked down another ramped hallway. The guys headed downward, but kept their faces turned up toward me, to let me know they were still watching me.

I looked away from the guys. I looked back toward the conference room. But my view had wandered downward, maybe through the ramped hallway?, so that I was maybe a floor or more from the conference room. I might have seen or gotten the sense from my weird angle that my mom and the mafia boss were talking by themselves about whatever business we'd arranged to discuss.

Dream 2

I stood next to a maroon minivan. Someone, maybe an older woman, was in the driver's seat. My mom approached the van, then sat into the front passenger seat. She closed her door. The window was rolled down. The back door of the van may still have been open. Some kids may have been sitting in the backseat.

My mom told me something about how she needed to catch a ride in this van. The van was hers. But she was also having someone drive her somewhere in it, like the van was actually the other person's and not hers.

My mom was saying how she needed to have a ride somewhere, just in case her van broke down. But it was like her van was already broken down and she needed either to go pick it up or go pick up some cheap replacement car she'd bought. But it may also, or instead, have been like she was being driven to her van, and she knew her van was about to die, but she wanted to drive it until it totally died, so she could then go buy another cheap vehicle.

I was probably mad at my mom for not taking care of her cars. I was probably supposed to get in the backseat of the van so I could go wherever everybody was going. But I didn't want to get into the van. I didn't want to have to depend on someone else for a ride. And I didn't want to put my mom in a position of power while she was demonstrating she was doing something I found so disappointing.

long sales presentations; criminal heroes

Dream 1

I was in a big, open room, maybe something like a preschool classroom mixed with an office floor. Some of the stuff in the room, like maybe the carpets and some of the furniture, was brightly multicolored, like in a preschool classroom. But the lighting was pale fluorescent, and there were office machines and some drab- or pale-colored office furnishings around, too.

I stood against a wall with two other people: a coworker who may have been a friend, and my old boss and mentor AB. One of the two, probably AB, may have been sitting against the wall, directly to my right/in front of me (I think my right shoulder leaned against the wall) on a high chair, like a baby's mealtime highchair without the table-like front. The other person may have been standing to AB's right or sitting, maybe on a filing cabinet or something.

This was some kind of company. And AB had come in just to see how everything was going, just because he cared about the people here, not because he had anything to do with the operations of the company.

My coworker probably said that things were going well. And I agreed. I only felt one thing was wrong, which was that some of the salespeople were always insisting on giving really long sales presentations. They were boring as hell, and I felt like it negatively impacted sales. But it may also have been something either that I no longer had to deal with, as I was in a separated position now, or that had naturally kind of stopped happening a while ago.

But I still wanted to complain about this, apparently. And I tried to say it. But maybe I didn't say it the right way. AB listened to me, but didn't quite get what I'd said. He said either that he didn't think salespeople doing long presentations was a bad thing, or that he would teach me later on how to do long sales presentations, because he now apparently thought that's what I wanted to do.

This whole issue, which I'd previously brought up only in an attempt to bring up some problem, so I wasn't acting like everything was perfect, now became for me some dire attempt to prove to AB that something actually was wrong with the company.

I now managed to pull AB around a corner, into a long, unlit hallway cluttered along the walls with office machines and furniture, and at the end of which was another huge, fluorescent-lit room, this one full of cubicles.

I had pulled AB pretty close and was speaking in a low voice, like I was trying to convey a really important and dire secret about the company. I was writing on some piece of paper with some printed out lines or grids on it. The paper may have been taped to the wall.

I tried to explain again to AB how bad it had been for sales that the salespeople always insisted on giving long sales presentations. But AB only said that he understood, and that he would teach me as soon as he could how to give long sales presentations. He even seemed to indicate that he would talk to management, to make sure that everybody started giving much longer sales presentations from now on.

I was now totally upset and worried. But AB walked back out into the preschool-like room, just a meter or so away from the entrance to the unlit hallway. I followed him.

All the way across the room, one of my recent acquaintances, KW, walked in, from the left corner of the room. He stood in front of a low set of bookshelves, like children's bookshelves.

AB saw KW and waved to get his attention. KW waved back. I could tell that AB liked KW a lot. But now I remembered that KW was the person who had given the really long sales presentations.

But now I also remembered that KW had actually stopped giving the really long sales presentations quite some time ago. But I had let myself get so caught up in trying to explain a situation that had already passed that I had made it sound like it was still a big problem.

I now started to worry about whether AB would go complain to KW or about KW because I had said his sales presentations were too long. I, like AB, liked KW. In fact, I'd just made friends with him. I thought it would be really stupid of me if I had just gone to such pains to discuss an old problem that I would now make KW think I didn't like him.

I may have thought that I should now start talking to AB about how the problem with long sales presentations really didn't exist. But I may possibly have hesitated about doing that. I'd seen how complaining about the long sales presentations had backfired on me. I may possibly now have been afraid that saying anything else would backfire on me even worse.

Dream 2

There may have been a news report that two gay activists in town had been assassinated. The news spoke about how they'd been assassinated. But then the news immediately started talking about how the activists were criminals. The news had probably implied they'd been involved in some sort of extortion activity. Where only a short while ago the two gay activists had been positioned as heroes, they were now being positioned as villains who'd deserved to die.

I couldn't quite believe what the news was saying. Yet I couldn't totally discount it. If it was true, I would be really disappointed. But it seemed a little too convenient, given how, I felt, sentiment was changing and shifting against gays recently, that these two gay activists should be assassinated and that immediately thereafter the news should start positioning them as criminals. It only seemed to fit in with what I thought were ill-intentioned trends.

I may have seen an image, like on a television, of a crowd of people all clamoring to get into some sort of mass-transit vehicle like a trolley on a pale-grey asphalt or concrete street. The trolley-like vehicle (hooked to overhead wires, running on a track, etc.) was painted white. There was a huge crowd all around the trolley. But the sidewalks nearby were also crowded, like this was in some huge, busy town. The imagery was all blurry, like a modern image trying to mimic the wavy, distorted quality of 1980s color TV.

the women in red and blue

Dream 1

I was in a nice-looking restaurant. The restaurant was softly lit but not dim. I was in a narrow room that had kind of slim, wooden tables along the walls.

I walked up the narrow aisle between the tables, toward a tall, attractive blonde woman. The woman wore a red dress that may have been made of vinyl. The dress had a section along the midriff made of clear vinyl.

The woman said something and then either pulled her dress up (at the clear vinyl part?) or down, so that her breasts were exposed. This probably seemed a little strange to me. But I may have tried to figure out how the woman's actions fit in with the situation.

There was some strange shift that I can't remember very well. The woman was now wearing a blue dress of similar material. And she was probably a different woman now, though she was also still tall, blonde, and attractive.

But I also saw from the viewpoint of the first woman. I looked down and saw the woman's exposed breasts and the red dress. But I wasn't the woman. And I thought that the woman needed to pull her dress back up over her chest. The woman may have done this as I thought about it.

I was now myself, but I was either in the body of the woman with the red dress or else I was wearing the red dress myself. I walked down a couple of steps and into another room of the restaurant. The room looked a lot like the room I'd just been in except that it was probably a bit wider and a bit longer. Also, the wall I faced may have been only a half-wall, opening to another, much larger room of tables.

The restaurant was now a Chinese food restaurant. I was meeting my family here. We came separately, but we all must have arrived at the same time. As soon as I sat down at the table, everybody else was there, sitting down, too.

I sat at the head of the table. I don't know whether I was the woman or just wearing her dress. But I felt kind of weird looking this way in front of my family. I figured that if anybody noticed that I looked different, I'd try to come up with some explanation on the fly.

vertiginous friendship

Dream 1

I was by myself on one of the top floors of a skyscraper. At first I may have been indoors, near some glass walls that were shaded, like with grey-brown UV coating. But I probably kept going upwards, maybe like I was in an elevator.

At some point I was on the top floor, or on the roof, of the skyscraper. I may have still felt like I was indoors. But I also felt like I was outside, exposed to the chance of falling from the building. I could barely stand up, I was so dizzy with a fear of heights. Yet I knew I had to keep going upward.

There was a staircase, maybe ten or fifteen steps, that led up to the highest point of the building. I knew I had to climb this staircase, even though I really didn't want to. I went up the staircase, probably crawling up, as I was too weak-kneed to stand.

I reached the top of the staircase and looked down toward the "roof" of the building. Just beyond the edge of the roof I could see the landscape of this city. But it was kind of blurry.

I knew I needed to look through some kind of glasses or lenses to see down to the very streets of the city. I really didn't want to. I was scared and shaky right now. If I looked through the glasses and saw all the way down to the streets, I'd be terribly unsettled. But I knew I needed to do it.

So I did, for only a fraction of a second. I didn't see very much at all. And I had the feeling I should really look again, so I could get a good idea of what I was looking at.

But now, down at the bottom of the steps was a group of people. Some of them were my friends, from the art world. They were all milling around. They might have been on some kind of field trip. Or they might have come up here to convene before they headed off to do something.

Some of my friends caught sight of me and may have chatted with me for a second. I think that as I chatted with them I decided to come down from the steps. I was still dizzy and afraid, but not as much as I had been. Now that I was talking with my friends I could at least stand up straight.

Everybody now seemed to be heading out to do their thing. I didn't know whether I was supposed to come along. One of my art world friends, MB, stopped for a second and spoke with me a little bit more. I tried to make sure as I spoke with her I didn't say anything stupid that would make her not like me. I also tried not to let on that I was terribly afraid of being up here on the roof.

I seemed to drift back up toward the top of the steps. MB sort of drifted away, maybe toward some structure that was now like an elevator bank. We were still doing something like chatting, though all the conversation may now only have been in my mind. MB was also really blurry, like I was looking at her through mostly closed eyes, like she was just a swimming glint in a sun-soaked, mote-dotted circle. But my eyes were wide open.

I may now have tried looking through the glasses again to get a clear view all the way down to the streets. But suddenly I knew that there was another staircase I needed to climb, or another elevator I needed to take, or some other way in which I needed to get to an even higher level of the building. I probably got really afraid and shaky at this point.

(Dream from 6/9/18) -- Little girl kisses me

This dream is from two nights ago. But I got really busy yesterday morning and couldn't post it.

Dream 1

I was probably in a living room, sitting under a blanket or sheet with a little girl. The girl was blonde. She may have been one of my little nieces. There may have been a couple of women in the living room, sitting on a couch. They may have been relatives of mine, like cousins. But I didn't see them: I only remembered them or knew they were there.

The little girl was laying on my lap, like I was cradling her. She wasn't wearing a shirt. I started to stroke her chest, rubbing her left nipple. She seemed to be comfortable, even aroused. I bent my face down toward hers, to kiss her. She grabbed my head and quickly pulled me closer. She darted her tongue into my mouth.

diapered j-pop idol

Dream 1

I was watching a J-pop idol in concert. She was wearing a short, green skirt. At one point during the song, she did a handstand. Her skirt slipped down, to reveal she was wearing a big diaper. I was kind of surprised by this. And I wondered afterwards what it meant about her sexuality.

running on rooftops; little hockey girls

Dream 1

I was walking through a strange area at night with a woman. The area was like an aqueduct, but above the ground, not dug down into it. We may simply have been walking along the "floors" of some U- or L-shaped concrete structures that had been set up on the ground. This structure was in an area crowded with homes.

The woman and I spoke. But then I tried to ask her how to say something in German. I was trying to say "me, too," in German. But I didn't know how to say either word, though I was pretty sure I almost knew how to say "me."

I may have stuttered out some word, like "ich," or "mein," or "mich" a few times. But now the woman pretended like she couldn't understand what I was saying at all. She started speaking German, like she only spoke German and didn't speak any English. Plus she started acting really naive and chirpy, as if to confuse me even more.

I may actually have started trying to speak in other languages, including Spanish. But I really couldn't say a single word in any of those languages. I could only almost say words that I was pretty sure I almost knew.

Eventually I ended this whole game. I knew the woman spoke English. And I knew the only reason she was pretending she couldn't understand me was because I'm Hispanic and she wanted to pretend that I only spoke Spanish, so she couldn't understand me.

I said in English that I was trying to say something about how tall something was. I made a motion toward the concrete wall and said something about how something was so tall.

I then compared my hand and the woman's hand and said something about how tall our hands were. We both had our hands held out in my field of view. I was kind of surprised, because our hands were both kind of short and stubby looking, maybe also a little dirty looking.

As we looked at our hands we passed out of the concrete structure. We were before a kind of dense and cluttered set of thin homes or row houses. I motioned up toward one of the buildings -- a kind of modern looking home with yellow-painted, metal walls, ridged a little bit like a shipping container, which contrasted against a stormy, staticky, purple sky.

I again made some sort of comment about how tall the building was, hoping the woman would finally tell me how to say this phrase in German. I saw my brother (into whom the woman may have transformed?) walking somewhere near the top of the building. He may have been on the roof of the building. Or he may have been on a concrete path on a hill that was so steep that it almost reached the roof of the building.

I decided to follow my brother, maybe by running up the concrete path, or maybe by flying up onto the roof.

I may have run along some roofs like the roof of the modern house. But then we ran along a strange roof. It was like the roof was made up entirely of spires like spires of Japanese temples. We ran up and over these spires, which may all have been shingled with old wooden shingles and fronted with red-painted wood.

We eventually ran toward some proscenium- or shrine-like square-arch structure that signaled the end of the spire section of the roof. As we approached this area, some older, white man, kind of overweight, with a big belly, chased after us. It may now have been me, my brother, and a couple other boys.

The man started asking us what we were doing up on the roof. It felt like he was thinking of calling the police on us. I didn't think he would be right to call the police on us. But I was still afraid he would.

We decided we'd just leave the roof. We ran past the square-arch area, down a few wide roof slopes that were like big steps. We were still up on a roof (it was like we were just on some enormous complex of roofs). But now the roof was more like asphalt, like a road.

At this point, my brother, or maybe both of us, may have been black. We kind of stopped at one area of asphalt that seemed to be lifting or peeling up in a strip from the rest of the asphalt. The man asked us if we lived here. I said we did. I wasn't sure whether the man would believe us, or whether this would stop the man from calling the police on us.

Dream 2

I was in some huge room like the backstage of a theater. There were a lot of people around, and a lot of stuff was going on. The atmosphere was very brown, like everything was made out of wood: the walls, ceilings, fixtures, etc. I probably stood near a man who was like a boss or a mentor.

I could see all the way through the room, to a wide, tall opening into another room. The next room was like a gym. There also seemed to be a lot of stuff going on in there, like a lot of young girls, maybe junior high school girls, were playing around or practicing sports or something.

I wanted to throw a ball. It may have been a baseball or something that looked like a baseball but was made out of some soft, rubbery  material, maybe like a dog's chew toy. Or it may just have been a wadded up piece of paper. I needed to prove how far I could throw the ball. I felt like I needed to throw the ball all the way through this room and through to the end of the gymnasium.

But I was worried about throwing the ball. I didn't know whether I'd be able to angle the ball well enough to get under the entrance from this room into the gym. If I angled the ball too high, it would hit the doorway and stay in this room. But if I angled the ball too low, it would start falling as it entered the gym and maybe hit one of the girls.

I couldn't decide what to do or how to throw. This made me feel weak. I didn't know how to throw the ball the right way. And so I couldn't prove myself. The man near me may have sensed my awkward feelings. He may have told me not to worry about it one way or the other.

But now I saw one of the girls in the gym throw a ball. She was little, kind of pale, and skinny, like a little dancer girl. She may have been all made up, and her hair may have been pulled back in a bun like dancer girls generally do for recitals. Her throw was perfect. It flew up sharply into the air and probably traveled all the way to the end of the gym.

I felt kind of bad about myself now. How could I not even know how to throw a ball, yet this cute, little girl could throw the ball perfectly? I knew that I should take this as inspiration at least to try and throw the ball.

But now there were young girls all over the gym. I didn't want to hit any of them because of my bad aim. I decided that I needed to get farther through this room and closer to the gymnasium so I could angle my throw better and not hit any of the girls.

But as I walked closer to the gym, the gym became an ice rink. The girls were all now wearing ice skates and white figure skating outfits with cute, fluttery, white skirts. But the girls were all playing ice hockey. They had huge hockey sticks. And apparently they were playing a really good game!

I wanted to see the hockey match now. I didn't even care about throwing the ball. I walked from the backstage room and into the hockey area. The backstage area opened directly into a small, white, plastic structure which was like a little kids' playhouse.

There was a window opening to a view of the game before me, and a window opening to a view of some benches where girls sat who were waiting to go into the game. There were tons of little girls out on the ice. But there were also tons of girls on the benches.

I kind of sat myself up on the windowsill that opened onto the benches. I looked over at the girls. I may have looked at their bottoms as they did something like stretches or warmups or something. The their uniform bottoms peeked out from under their white skirts. The bottoms may have been satiny and shiny. Some of them may have been gold. I was kind of turned on to see the girls' cute bottoms.

Now two older girls or young women walked into the little playhouse. They'd seen that I'd gone in here. They'd thought I'd come to watch the game -- though I no longer knew whether I was here to see the game or just to look at the little girls.

But the women thought they'd be able to get my attention by watching the game, too. Both women started talking about the game, showing off how much they knew about hockey, possibly trying to get me to take interest and talk to them.

One of the women stood up near the window looking onto the game. The other woman stood near the window I was sitting in, trying to get close to me. I thought I should probably pay attention to this woman. I could make her feel good about herself. And if she liked me, that would be nice for me, too. But I suddenly became terribly shy and frozen and had no idea what to do.

very expensive restaurant

Dream 1

I was at a restaurant. The restaurant was busy, probably full. I sat on a tall chair at a tall, round table that may have been pretty wide and made of thick wood. The table may have been cluttered with some stuff.

A waiter may have brought a menu. I may have looked over the menu and ordered something. The food I ordered came to something like $100. So the waiter took my order but also told me that I needed to order something else, or maybe he just put this other item on my order. But the total for my food, I now knew, would be $353.

I started to worry. $353 for food was way more than I could afford right now, while I was in between jobs. But the waiter brought the food I'd paid $100 for. I ate it, partly because I was hungry, but also partly because I didn't want to look like I was too poor to pay for the food.

In the middle of my meal, the waiter brought the check, which was probably this huge, yellow piece of paper, like the yellow page of a carbon paper receipt, except as big as paper from a large drawing pad. The check had the $100 item and the other item scrawled out in huge letters, probably in a huge, lined check grid.

I now understood that the other item I'd paid for that had brought my total to $353 wasn't actually food or even a product. It was just something I paid for, because the waiter had brought it up and I'd agreed to pay for it. The waiter smiled at me.

I may have been alone again, eating my food. I thought that it had been really unwise for me to pay so much money for an expense that I'd actually receive nothing from. Plus, now that my total bill was $353, it was really going to eat into the money in my bank account. I started to get afraid that I wouldn't be able to pay for this month's living expenses, including rent.

But I kept on eating. I knew I couldn't turn back on the bill now. So I figured I might as well keep on eating the food. The food may have been some huge plate of stew like goat stew with chickpeas or something in it.

huge roller coasters

Dream 1

It was a bright, sunny day. I was at an amusement park.

I saw a few huge roller coasters. One of the roller coasters did something like just go straight up. Another coaster may have been elevated pretty high in the air, and it would shoot the cars up and down on a U-shaped track, like a roller coaster version of a sea dragon ride. Another coaster did something where you were upside down a lot.

I thought to myself how I wouldn't want to ride any of these coasters. Nowadays my heart is so bad that they might kill me. But I was also just afraid.

I walked to the edge of the park. It was just a couple of huge lawns, crossed by some concrete footpaths and edged along the left side with a couple of small, wooden food stands.

But at the edge of the park were a few more roller coasters. They were enormous, with shining bright white tracks. One of them had a weird, vertical shape. The other did a corkscrew-like series of loops.

At first I thought I might be able to do the looping coaster. But then I realized how big it was. I said, "No, no, no, no, no." I may have been with a friend at this time.

But then I realized that these roller coasters at this end of the park were all under construction, anyway. So I wouldn't have to ride them. This whole part of the park may actually have been under construction.

clean your toilet

Dream 1

I stood before a toilet with a kind of tall white man who may have been in his late twenties or early thirties. The man was sort of muscular, with a slightly stubbly face and somewhat well-groomed and slicked hair.

The man's son, a little boy maybe five or six years old, was nearby. The man was keeping the boy away from the toilet, calling, "Stay away. Don't look in there!"

The man's statement to the boy was as much a reprimand to me as it was a warning to the boy. The man may actually even have told me, "Clean your toilet."

I looked at the toilet bowl. It was disgusting. It was like the entire thing was coated in something like nacho cheese, except that the nacho cheese was somehow rusted. I may have flushed the toilet. A little bit of the gunk caking the toilet lifted away from the porcelain of the bowl like a flap of skin.

I thought to myself that it might take a while for me to clean this thing.

sales karate

Dream 1

I was in some space like a lobby for a hotel or theater, or possibly some fancy, old restaurant where there are various levels separated from each other by a few stairsteps. The atmosphere was calmly bright and active. A lot of people may have been milling about.

I was with my oldest nephew. But he was young, maybe only five or six years old. He was either practicing martial arts or else giving an acting performance about the martial arts. He stood at the top of a staircase, facing away from the steps. A man stood facing my nephew, a couple meters away. The man was probably tall, bald, white, and wiry.

Apparently the story was that the man facing my nephew would come at him. But my nephew would somehow cause the man, who was much bigger than he, to fall down the steps. Possibly this performance had been done before. But my nephew may have been attacked that time, or may simply have managed to make the man fall down the steps. So now my nephew was worried he wouldn't succeed. But I was sure he'd been fine.

I tried to figure in my head how exactly my nephew would get the man thrown down the steps. I thought he might throw the man. But then I realized he might just step out of the way at the right moment and let the man fly down the steps on his own momentum.

Now I was in my nephew's place. But I wasn't my nephew. My nephew was still around. But it was like I stepped in for him, possibly to make sure the man fell down the steps.

The man came at me. I'm honestly not sure what happened next. I may have caught the man and used his momentum to throw him. Or I may have just let him fall.

But whatever I did, the man flew up in the air, like he'd been thrown. He flipped over, so that his head was pointed straight down. Then he descended straight down, either onto the floor or onto the last step before the floor. He landed on his head. He bounced, then landed on his back a few meters away. I knew the man had likely broken his neck. I wasn't sure I'd meant things to end like that.

I ran down the steps to meet the man. He was surrounded by a bunch of people now. His feet may have been at the very edge of a platform for a train, like a train was pulling up directly into this restaurant- or hotel-like area.

I looked at the man. I may have held his head in my hands. The man looked up through woozy, slitted eyes. I could tell the man was either paralyzed or at the brink of death.

I was now in some dark area that was like an indoor area of a hotel, with a lot of elevated planters filled with plants and some separated, gazebo like areas that people could sit in. The area was mostly dark. But lights shone on some of the structures, possibly because people were using those structures at the moment.

I was carrying something that was supposed to be work-related papers. But it was actually a woman's blouse, or some kind of top. It was a dull blue, possibly with paisley designs on it. It was probably sleeveless. It had a satiny feel. And it may have been stained with something like chocolate.

I walked up to two old coworkers from a job I left in March. One was one of the tech leads: an older, white woman, overweight, her face a little worn out, with darkish blonde hair. The other was the head of sales: a bald, white man about my height, but wider and more muscular.

I may have realized at this point that my "work papers" were a sales pitch. I may have come down to this area to practice my sales pitch. I'd run into the tech woman and sales guy by accident. This was inconvenient. I didn't want them to start paying attention to me and stop me from taking care of my task.

But I may also have had to take care of some other task with the tech woman and sales guy. So I may have thought I'd just take care of it now, while they were in front of me. As I approached them, possibly to present my "work papers," I had an edge of the blouse crammed in my mouth, and I was sucking and slobbering on it.

The tech woman may have taken some actual papers from me. Or she may have acknowledged that I'd brought the papers. But she sort of made it clear that she didn't really want to talk to me. And as soon as she could, she started hurrying away, possibly saying something to shove me off onto the sales guy.

But the sales guy didn't want to talk to me, either. He noticed that I had my "work papers" in my hands. He remembered that I was studying a sales pitch. He may have said at some point (i.e. before the dream) that he'd help me study the pitch. But he hadn't really wanted to, and I hadn't really wanted him to.

The sales guy apologized to me for not having helped me learn my pitch. I possibly didn't say anything in return, not wanting the guy to gauge any of my reactions in a way that would make him want to help me.

But then the sales guy may have asked me for my "work papers." I didn't want to give them to him -- possibly because I didn't want him to take away the sales pitch before I learned it (he'd probably wanted to stop me from learning it); but also because I really did know that I was just holding a slobbery, chocolate-stained blouse in my hands, and I didn't want the sales guy to notice this. So I didn't know what I should do.

lingerie mannequins; video store monster; venetian sales techniques; video library; everyday people

For a review of some of the images from these dreams, please visit this entry in my blog preemie: my life's (a) dream.

Dream 1

I was in a nice department store with a group of people. We may all have been young. We may also all have been dressed in 1980s clothes. We were all looking for clothes. We may have broken up into groups. I may have floated around alone for a while -- not walking, but floating around a few inches off the ground. At some point I may have ended up in front of a row of four mannequins in nice, satiny, lacy lingerie.

Dream 2

I walked, probably with an old woman, toward the back end of what was apparently a video rental store. The walls and floors were dark grey. And I don't remember whether there were any video display shelves up against the wall.

The old woman and I were probably talking about a room we were looking for. It basically had all the really graphic horror movies.

I found the door to the room, on our right. I opened the door, probably holding it for the woman. The woman thanked me, said she needed to be going, and walked away from the doorway, back the way we had come. It didn't make sense to me that she'd just up and walk away after we'd gone to such trouble looking for the room. But I was kind of relieved. I didn't want the old woman to see what kind of movies I liked.

The room was kind of big. There were only a few shelves of movies scattered throughout the room. I walked up to one shelve that stood against a grey, cinder block wall.

I could barely see what the movies were. But I started to get a weird, eerie feeling. I felt like if I got too close to these horror movies I'd unleash some sort of demon or monster in the room. But I didn't know what to do. I felt like I at least needed to get some movie. I may have started to think that if I grabbed the right horror movie, I wouldn't unleash a demon.

I walked to a set of shelves off to my left and looked there for a second before turning around and walking toward a set of shelves in the middle of the room. By this point I may simply have been looking over my shoulder the entire time, waiting for some kind of monster to come out and attack me.

Dream 3

I may have been in some city like Venice or Verona, but in modern times. I was in some place that felt like it was entirely made of polished stone or marble, like the dining area in Grand Central Station or some mall-like area in one of the Las Vegas resorts. The place was crowded with people in business suits running here and there.

I stood off to one side of a walkway. Caddy corner from me was a table where some people sat. The table may have been low, like a coffee table. And the people may have sat in all kinds of chairs -- a big, leather chair, smaller garden chairs, etc.

A businessman, probably a bit older, maybe in his late forties or early fifties, walked up. He probably said something I thought was horribly stiff and cheesy. I knew the man was a salesman. But because of his cheesy joke, I probably was immediately annoyed by him.

The salesman may have started, even while he was standing, giving some sort of sales pitch. I thought the sales pitch was hideous! The seated people invited the man to sit.

As the salesman sat, I either saw through his eyes or was now he. The people around the salesman were kind of a mixed group. They mostly looked like upper-mid-level business people, especially a blonde woman with short hair and a deep tan who wore a black skirt suit. But some of them looked a bit more relaxed, kind of like tough guys who had gotten fat as they'd aged.

The people were eating from a huge plate of pasta. One of the tough guys told the salesman to grab a plate. The salesman grabbed a plate and piled on some pasta. The pasta was just long spaghetti noodles, plain, apparently, with lots and lots of mozzarella cheese on top. The salesman shoveled the pasta into his mouth, holding the plate at mouth- or maybe even eye-level.

At some point the salesman started giving his sales pitch again. I still (even though I was seeing from the salesman's eyes) hated the pitch. But time started to fade forward. And I knew, even though the conversation was blurring out, that everybody the salesman spoke with had decided to buy what the salesman was selling.

Having witnessed the salesman's success, I immediately changed my mind about him. I knew that I'd probably never like the salesman's personality. But whatever steps he'd taken to get to the deal's close, I knew he'd done the right thing.

I thought through the steps I hadn't liked (whatever the cheesy beginning was) and the steps I'd been uncomfortable with (having to randomly eat a lot of food) and figured I'd have to really integrate a lot of this stuff into my own approach, because it worked.

My view was separated from the salesman's again. I was in a room with the salesman and a young woman who was probably the salesman's apprentice. I stood maybe three or four meters away from them.

We seemed to be in some weird sort of control room or something. The wall behind the woman and salesman was black, with a white screen, like a projector screen, and possibly, but maybe not, some sort of sci-fi-esque control panel underneath it. But off to my right (the salesman's left) was some orange, translucent wall, which I feel was the back side of some back wall in something like a display diorama in a museum.

The man started to explain the process of the deal I'd just seen with the young woman. As the man began to explain, my view faded to white. Then lines started to get scribbled out, like old drafting lines in a Leonardo sketch. The lines started to form some garden chair, which, I knew, was the chair the man had sat in when he'd made the deal (even though I was pretty sure he'd previously sat in one of the big, leather chairs).

The drawing sketched out more and more. The view of the drawing may also have rotated a bit. At some point, the drawing sort of faded into a real view of the area again.

I may have gotten a feeling that the lesson from this whole drawing moment was that even the manner of fabrication of the chair the salesman had sat in while making the deal was a part of the salesman's process. This seemed a bit outlandish to me. I hoped we would just get to the actual elements of the closing process.

Dream 4

I was in some large, dark room with a group of people. The people may have been young. Many or all of them were black. The walls and ceiling were probably black. The floor may have been concrete.

Set up around us were something like modular walls. But the walls made something more like a maze with room-like areas than a series of rooms. These modular walls were all screens. Bright, monochrome imagery probably played on the screens. There may also have been some kind of music or sound.

We were all part of some research project, probably for some conceptual art piece we were creating. This place may have been the installation we were making. But it was also probably something like a library or research area.

A few folks were on the ground, working on something like a computer but also like some machine for effects for the conceptual art piece. One of the people, a young, black man, asked me to look into some specific artists whose work or personality we were referencing in the piece.

I felt like I knew exactly who the young man was speaking about. I may even have said so. But I wasn't quite sure of everything I was saying. So I knew I'd need to double-check it with some additional research.

Another young, black man asked me if I knew that I was looking for information on a specific group of people (probably Sly and the Family Stone). I said yes. The man asked me if I'd like some help getting some specific information on them. He probably knew exact moments from history the other young man had been looking for. I said yes and was really appreciative.

The man may have asked me to come along with him to another room. But then he must instantly have been in that other room. I had to walk through the maze of screen walls. But I got to the room. It was a big, square room with an upright projector screen standing in the center above something like a small structure, like a small set of shelves or some kind of small, mechanical device.

The man may have been in the room when I was there. But he may already have been gone. He may have vanished only an instant after I'd seen him in the room. He may have been upset that it had taken me so long to get here. Or he may have waited for me to enter the room, let me know the information I'd needed to see was queued up to show on the screen, and then walked out of the room.

I watched the program. It was something like a Marvel movie. I clearly saw a character like Iron Man. I may have seen some other characters. The view was from a high, but not directly overhead, viewpoint, like a camera was at a steep angle, almost a right angle, that would eventually quickly swoop down to meet the characters (maybe including The Incredible Hulk?) face-to-face.

This whole program, however, was also an historical document. This was real film, from some real event that had happened, probably in the late 1960s. I'd learned whatever I'd needed to learn about the people I'd been sent to study. So now I headed back to discuss the information.

But when I got back to the first young man, I felt like I had taken way too much time. The young man may not have been annoyed by my slowness. But I may have felt like he noted it and would probably trust me less to run research projects in the future.

To justify my work, I tried to express what I'd learned -- probably, again, about Sly and the Family Stone. It took me a little bit of effort, but I started seeing what I'd seen on the screen in the other room. I planned to say everything to the young man as I re-saw all the imagery.

But I really don't think my mind was comfortable with the imagery at all. The imagery looked like computer graphics. The characters were all shiny, like they'd been made in the 1990s or 2000s. And everything just looked so comic book-like that I couldn't find anything in it like the type of historical gravity that would make me assume it was real.

I really started questioning whether I had seen what I'd needed to see after all. Had I seen the truth? Or had I just been queued up to watch a comic book movie?

Dream 5

(This dream occurred after I'd woken up, turned off my alarm, started recalling my previous dreams, and fallen back to sleep.)

I faded out of a memory of the dark room with the screen showing the historical imagery. Again, it all looked like a computer graphics comic book movie rather than an historical moment. So I just felt really weird. It was like I was trying to remember what I'd actually seen. I kept trying to look deeper into the imagery in order to see the real images.

But as I tried to do this, I may have been speaking about everything I'd seen. The more I spoke, the more my view faded, first into a white-out, and then into a huge office space.

The office space was enormous, like a giant trading floor for some large financial institution. It was vast and wide, filled with long rows of connected desk spaces, as opposed to cubicle farms. The room was huge. But the ceilings were kind of low, maybe only three meters high.

The only other person in this space was a young woman, my coworker, who sat directly across from me. She was white, with blonde-brown hair. I had apparently been telling her about my memory, which I may have known to have been a dream.

But even though it was a dream, it was also a reality. It was like something we did, maybe our job, maybe our hobby, maybe something related to our job but only peripherally, may have been related to exploring these alternate spaces, like the one I'd just explored, that were dreams, but were also real.

The discussion may have come back around to Sly and the Family Stone. The woman may have asked me if I knew who they were. I said yes. I may have thought she didn't know who they were, possibly because I couldn't figure out why she would have asked me that question.

So to give an example of a Sly and the Family Stone song, I started to sing "Everyday People." For the first few notes (really, just the "I" part), I sounded just like Sly Stone. But when the notes descended (the entire "am everyday people" part???!!!), I went way off key.

I knew I'd somehow made the melody unrecognizable. And, for sure, my coworker didn't recognize the song at all. I said I'd try again. It was one of the most popular pop songs around. She'd recognize it if I could just sing it right.

So I tried -- embarrassingly! -- a few more times. Every time, I would sound just like Sly Stone until a certain part in the descending notes. Then I'd just get everything horribly off key.

I thought that I realized that where I was making a mistake was in that descending part. I somehow wasn't going low enough. So now I tried to go really low. I sang the melody again. The melody was recognizable. But now I slid really, really low, so that I probably sang the words "everyday people" an octave lower than I'd needed to.

But I thought that maybe this was right. After all, I remembered some song I really liked where the melody got really low, in a way that had seemed both inventive and irreverent at the same time. Maybe "Everyday People" had been that song.

During all this time, my vision had probably faded back into darkness, like I was in some dark area between the office space and the dark room with the video playing -- maybe with my face close to one of the screen walls.

But now my view snapped back to the office space. My coworker said that the screen maze and the historical imagery that had played reminded her a lot of the work of some recent (French?) philosopher -- someone whose name was like Georges Sumner.

I knew who my coworker was talking about before she'd said his name. So I may have tried to say his name before my coworker did. But I don't think I could quite say it. I think I may have felt a little defeated because of this, like I was just getting nothing right today.

My coworker said I'd really like the philosopher's works (even though I was pretty sure I'd already read them). She handed me two of his books.

The books themselves looked and felt nice. They had that slightly grainy feel, like the covers of the Vintage International Faulkners from the 1990s. But the art on the covers was a bit more abstract. The imagery had a handmade, collage-like feel, so that, by contraries, I got the sense that the books were probably theory or philosophy about the high-tech media age. So even though I was pretty sure I'd already read the books, I was kind of eager to read them again.

I probably sat down at this point. I probably also had the feeling that the fact that my coworker shared these books with me probably demonstrated that we were pretty good friends and colleagues. This probably made me happy, even though I was still embarrassed about not having been able to get anything right at all in our conversation just now.

lyme disease airbnb

For a discussion of some imagery from this dream, please visit this post in my blog preemie: my life's (a) dream.

Dream 1

I was walking or running or driving down a busy street, possibly in Denver, but possibly also in Houston. The light was an icy blue, like it was early morning, possibly in early spring or late winter. The road went down a long, moderate slope.

I knew I was in a hurry to get somewhere. I may have been in a hurry to get to some airport. But if I was walking, I knew I'd have to walk for a long time to get to the airport. And if I was driving, I knew I'd have to drive out of the city, through the desert mountains, for four hours before I got to the town with the airport.

I was going to some convention, possibly with my coworker RO. The first event of the convention was going to start soon. I had no idea how I'd travel for four hours, get on a plane, fly (to Houston?) and still be on time for the first event of the convention. Plus I still had to check into my hotel.

I suddenly realized I was on a baby blue Vespa scooter. This would make things a lot easier for me. I was driving the Vespa along on the sidewalk.

I stopped at an intersection. I looked around the corner, to my right. I saw a hotel like a Hampton Inn. It was a cheap hotel. But it looked nice, made out of heavy, peach-pink stone and with some sort of arched-out colonnade in front.

Suddenly I knew I was already where I needed to be, probably Houston. I may even have wondered why I'd thought I'd needed to do so much travel to get here. I knew this wasn't the hotel everybody who was going to the conference was staying at. But I figured I'd stay here. I'd stayed here before, probably with RO, on another business trip.

I went inside. There was a woman worker near the door, possibly sitting in a window well or sitting at a table, doing some kind of work, maybe computer or paper work, or maybe clipping her nails. She greeted me cheerfully but maybe somewhat distractedly.

I went to the front desk to check in. I thought the woman who'd greeted me would check me in. But another woman came out. She wasn't as nice to me. As she checked me in she said a few snide things to me.

I couldn't tell whether the woman behind the counter didn't like me because of the way I'd acted or something I'd said. So I decided to try and act nice and innocent. I said something about my suit for the convention and how I'd need to get it pressed after my trip here.

The woman said she had a room ready for me. I was expecting something in the building. But now we were in her car. She was driving me to the room.

We drove along a highway that overlooked some small neighborhood, like in some small town in the desert mountains. It looked like early winter here, too. There was frost everywhere. Finally we drove up into a neighborhood street, through a bunch of houses that looked a little like trailer homes.

I was sort of worried at this point. I thought I was staying in the hotel building itself. It would have been easy for me to walk to the convention from there. But I didn't have a car. It had been a far enough drive for us to get here. How was I going to unpack everything, walk to the convention, and still get to the first event on time?

The woman now drove through the house, through a living room, and then through a long room like a bedroom. There were lots of beds. But we stopped in a part of the room with three beds. The room was bright. It may have had a bit of a girly feel, maybe with a dollhouse somewhere. But it also felt sort of rundown and dingy.

The woman and I stood outside of the car. The woman pointed at a bed and said this was my room. I looked around. At first I thought I'd been put into some sort of dormitory or hospital room or mental hospital. But the place definitely looked like someone's house. I thought, All I wanted was a hotel room. Did she put me into an Airbnb?

The woman started walking back toward the front door, probably telling me some final things I'd need to know about my stay. We walked through some weird curtain that divided this room from another room full of beds. The curtain was like strips of fabric hanging down from the ceiling. They barely blocked the view of one room from the other.

The next room had three hospital beds. The hospital beds had hospital trays nearby. And some of the trays looked recently used. There may have been a cigarette lighter and an ashtray on one of them.

I asked, "Uh... Do I have this place to myself? Or will the people who live here also be sleeping here tonight?" This was totally not what I'd been looking for when I'd booked a room at the hotel.

The woman said, "Well, it's an Airbnb. People live here, you know. I mean, they said they were doing something else."

A woman who was older-looking and sort of tough-looking, with thick, square eyeglasses and short, unkempt hair, came up and said, "My surgery is happening this afternoon. That should keep us busy for a while."

The hotel woman said, "She got Lyme disease."

I may have noticed that the house woman had no hands, and maybe no forearms. But I also feel like the woman may have been wearing a long coat. So I may not have noticed this.

I was a little scared by the house woman. It felt like I was a little kid and she was maybe half my height taller than I. I turned to my right. Apparently this room of beds opened, along a wide wall (?), directly into the kitchen. The kitchen was wide, with a kitchen island in the middle. But it was dim and sort of rundown and cheap looking.

Some older adults were milling around in the kitchen, maybe preparing some food, smoking some cigarettes, etc. One of the adults was a balding man with a round head and face and probably a pretty big gut. He may have been wearing a kind of tight, white t-shirt that was worn out almost to translucency.

The adults started telling me about the surgery. Apparently the person getting the surgery was a young girl. Everybody was really worried about her. But they were all doing their best to act cheerful and optimistic.

I felt guilty. Here I'd been complaining and complaining about this hotel room or Airbnb or whatever it was. But the people who lived here were all really worried about this girl having to go into surgery. They were trying to be nice to me. And I hadn't been sympathetic at all. Couldn't I just stop being selfish and just try and be nice for a change?

I looked back toward the hotel woman, maybe to tell her that I'd take the room. She was also probably way taller than I, too -- again, like I'd somehow become a child or taken on a child's height.

The tough-looking woman walked back up to me. The hotel woman said, "She's seventeen."

I realized that the tough-looking woman, who'd told me earlier she was having surgery, was actually the girl everybody had been talking about. She was only seventeen years old. But whatever was afflicting her -- if it was Lyme disease (which I may have doubted) -- had impacted her so badly that she now looked really old.

The girl looked down to me and reached out her arm. I realized she wanted to shake hands with me. I suddenly didn't know what I would do. She didn't have any hands. But of course I would shake with her.

But I didn't know -- was I brought here to become the girl's boyfriend? Was I brought here to make the girl feel like she was still attractive?

I figured that right off the bat I would tell the girl I thought she was beautiful. And from then until the girl left for surgery, I would flirt with her. That way the girl would feel like someone thought she was cute.

shiho ochi's cellphone; breathless shopping mall

Dream 1

I was at a concert given by singer Shiho Ochi from the J-pop group Superfly. It was in a small area, like a basement cafeteria or recreational room in a university or high school. But the area was packed with people. Everybody must have been seated in stackable chairs. I sat off kind of near the stage, but more toward the right corner.

The room was almost completely dark, except for a spotlight that shined on Ochi. Ochi sat on a stool and played an acoustic guitar. She had long hair and probably wore some kind of wide-brimmed hat.

At one point, Ochi stopped singing right in the middle of a song. She pulled out her cellphone and started fumbling around with it. She may even have spoken directly to someone on the cellphone. She then probably apologized to everybody and started up the song again. I'd thought this was weird.

But now the situation happened all over again. Ochi started singing this song I'd never heard before. It may have had some Valentine's theme or some theme that made me think it would be really good on Valentine's Day.

But as soon as Ochi started in on a part I thought was really interesting, she pulled her cellphone out of her pocket. I hadn't heard the cellphone. So I thought that maybe the phone had buzzed instead of rang.

Ochi apologized to everybody in the crowd. She looked at her phone's screen. It was blazing pretty brightly. It looked like an old LCD screen, except that it seemed to be glowing yellow and purple instead of the standard green-yellow and black.

Ochi told everybody that her boyfriend had texted her, asking her how the concert was going. She asked everybody if they would like to know more. All the girls in the audience started screaming excitedly. So Ochi turned on her cellphone's speaker. Now everybody could hear Ochi's boyfriend's voice. The girls in the audience started screaming again.

I was really annoyed by all of this. I turned away from the stage. Ochi was asking questions of the audience. We were supposed to raise our hands if we agreed or if we wanted to hear more about what Ochi was saying. But I refused to raise my hand. I tried to even ignore the fact that Ochi was saying anything at all.

But then Ochi said something that made me think Ochi was really happy about her boyfriend and that this whole experience right now was somehow really important and validating for her. I realized I should probably stop being such a selfish jerk and start raising my hand whenever Ochi asked a question. So now I was frantically raising my hand, possibly not even sure what I was raising my hand for.

Now Ochi was asking everybody if we wanted her to pass around her cellphone so everybody could do something... maybe see her boyfriend's texts more closely or hear her boyfriend better or say hello to her boyfriend from closer up or something.

Now all the men in the crowd were raising their hands and cheering. They all wanted to hold Shiho Ochi's cellphone. So they were really excited.

I looked around the crowd. I noticed that there was one entire section of the crowd, directly off the right side of the stage, that was completely turned away from Ochi. Their seats were turned away entirely. It was like they had been seated that way the entire time. But they were fans of Ochi. And even though they still had their backs turned on her, they were wildly raising their hands, hoping to be able to pass around Ochi's cellphone soon.

Dream 2

I had probably just walked outside a shopping mall. I needed to get somewhere, to some place that wasn't a part of, but was spatially related to, the mall. I started walking, knowing that I needed to get myself off the mall property -- basically off of the mall's parking lot -- at some point. But I needed to get off the property wherever I would get a straight shot toward whatever place I was headed to.

I felt like wherever I was headed was close. But it felt like with all the walking I'd have to do, especially while on the mall's property, would make it feel like a really long distance.

I started walking in a counterclockwise direction around the mall. But I wasn't really sure this was what I should be doing. Outside a main entrance to the mall was some event, maybe a little arts and crafts or flea market kind of fair. There were a lot of people looking around. Everybody seemed to be happy.

I thought I might look around at the stuff on display. But instead I decided to walk into the mall through the nearby entrance. I thought I might be able to cut some time off my walk by going straight through the mall.

I wandered around in the mall for a few moments. The mall may have been slightly busy. There was orange tiling everywhere, it felt like. And there was probably a lot of vegetation everywhere.

At some point I may have felt hungry. I suddenly wanted some pizza. I may also have started to feel really short of breath, like walking was becoming harder and harder.

At some point I may have spotted a mall directory map. But it wasn't like the usual standalone kiosks with a mall map on one side. Instead, it was sort of like a bulletin board. It somehow stood over a little river sort of fixture. You had to walk onto a bridge over the river to get a good look at the map.

It was getting harder and harder for me to walk. My legs felt like heavy weights. They may actually have hurt, too. And with each step I took, I was more and more out of breath, until I felt like I couldn't even breathe anymore.

I walked up and over a small ramp and then onto the small bridge. I couldn't even get all the way onto the bridge. I had to stop and rest at a corner, because I couldn't breathe. Also, I was afraid of getting all the way onto the bridge. I felt like if one of the other shoppers saw me standing on the bridge they'd want to come up and hog up all my space to show me that I couldn't just stand anywhere I wanted.

I still couldn't get a direct look at the directory map. But I knew there was a pizza place in the mall. I probably saw an image of an entire pizza, maybe in my imagination, but related to an ad for the place, or maybe as part of an ad that was actually right on the directory map.

I knew that if I went to the pizza place, that would put me at the mall exit I needed to be at, so all I'd need to do would be head in a straight line toward whatever my destination off the mall property was. So I could get a slice of pizza, which I was still hungry for, and be a lot closer to my destination.

But it still felt like, even then, it would be such a long walk. It seemed like such a pain. And I wasn't quite sure I could even walk anymore. My legs hurt. And I was almost completely unable to breathe.

jogger with baby; cold calling chakras; candy landscape

For a review of some of the images from these dreams, visit this post in my blog preemie: my life's (a) dream.

Dream 1

I was probably out jogging in a park during the daytime. There were people nearby, maybe just slightly behind me. I was friendly with them but may not have known them. I may have been telling them about how I was jogging, like I was a tour guide or like I was giving a tutorial.

A guy came jogging up from behind me. I had to beat this guy at jogging in order to prove myself to the people I was talking to.

There was a tall, steep, narrow hill that rose just beside us in the park. The guy started jogging up the hill. I started jogging after him. The path we jogged up may have been extremely steep. But it may also only have been a moderate incline.

I was having a hard time catching up with the guy. It seemed like he was always just ahead of me. I wanted to get ahead of him, but I didn't want to run too fast. I was supposed to be jogging. This wasn't supposed to be an effort for me. But even now I was probably out of breath. I may have been wondering how long I'd be able to keep up with the guy.

The guy may have been carrying a baby or pushing a baby stroller. This may have made me feel even worse about myself. How could this guy be carrying or pushing a baby up this steep hill and just be jogging and still beat me?

My vision may have faded to black, possibly like I was passing out. The situation may have started over again, maybe from the point where we started jogging up the hill. But this time it may have been like the man disappeared early on.

I may have thought that the man had disappeared because he couldn't handle the pace anymore. Or I may have thought that he'd disappeared because he'd only meant to beat me for a second, so he could make me feel bad about myself, and then leave.

Dream 2

I was in some room, maybe like a grey, dingy bedroom. Apparently I was cold calling people, like for phone sales, for some kind of audience. I don't think I was teaching them, but it was like I was giving a how-to, but less for their edification and more so I could prove myself to them.

I'd called one woman (whom I may have imagined in my head to be like a blonde, short-haired, ringleted 1930s movie star) and was pretty successful on my call. That was reassuring. I loosened up with the crowd a bit and spoke with an almost flippant confidence.

I now called a man. The man gruffly answered the phone. I kind of lazily said, "How's it goin'?" The man didn't answer. I could feel his annoyance through the phone.

I quickly lost my confidence, became serious again, and tried to explain why I was calling. But the man grew impatient, said he had no time for this, and either hung up on me or left me no option but to end the call with him politely.

I could tell that the audience's opinion of me had dropped sharply after that call. I tried to recover by giving an explanation of what had happened during the call. I may have done this even as I was moving onto the next call, hoping to cover up the mistakes of the previous call.

As I did this, I may have seen a strange image in my head: something like a chakra diagram, but all in a very abstract, simplistic, and blocky black-line style. The body, probably a woman's body, was laid on its side. And the "chakra" circles weren't placed on or over the woman's body, but alongside it, so that it almost felt like this was a subway map rather than a chakra diagram.

Something weird was also happening with the chakra circle -- like I was imagining them being filled with a phone image once I'd made a phone call, or maybe like I was imagining them being plugged with some kind of headphone jack, maybe like an old telephone operator would use.

Dream 3

Possibly after some other stuff had happened, I ended up in a large landscape. The landscape may have been meant to mimic a natural mountain vista. But it rolled up and down and around more like a football stadium.

But this entire landscape was made out of packages of candy. The packages of candy were all supposed to be "bite size" or "fun size." But they were actually probably about the size of a human. The candy inside the packages (I didn't open any of the packages) was also gigantic.

The candy was all probably supposed to be popular name brand candy. But I think it was actually different -- like strange candy that was even sweeter, gooier, and more chocolaty than the name brand candy was.

I knew, like I remembered having been told, that there were 1 billion packages of candy in this landscape. I stood up on the crest of a candy hillside. Near me there was a doorway, just a white doorway standing up all alone.

I may have had some task to take care of here. I may have been trying to avoid some sort of dark force, such as weird, gross, bird-like creatures or something that had caused the landscape I was previously in to become diseased and was now threatening to do the same thing here. Or I may just have had a sense of this impending disease. This strange sense may have prevented me from opening the packages and trying the candy.

Instead, I jumped up in the air and began soaring along the candy package hillsides. I flew around before the slopes, darting along maybe just 50cm or so above the ground.

the rite aid resort; hollow leg anemone; out-of-body acne; apartment building stalker

For a review of some of the images from these dreams, please visit this post in my blog preemie: my life's (a) dream.

Dream 1

I was driving around in a different town. I may have been on vacation or on some kind of leisurely group trip. I was staying in a hotel that was at the top of a huge hill.

I may have driven up to the hotel once. Then I was driving around town again. But now I decided I needed to go back to the hotel for the night. But I thought that before I went back to the hotel I should pick up some food.

I wanted to get back to the hotel quickly so I could go from there to pick up some food and then get back inside the hotel before it was too late (even though -- I don't think it was any later than maybe early afternoon).

I drove up a road, remembering the road and thinking that I wouldn't get back to the hotel quickly enough. But then I found a tunnel. I drove into the tunnel. My car accelerated a lot. The slope inside the tunnel got steeper and steeper. It was almost like I was driving straight up.

I didn't feel like the tunnel was heading in the right direction. But then it let out right at a road I knew was just around the corner from the hotel. I drove around the road and up into the hotel parking lot. The hotel was more like a big, Spanish-style resort. But in the parking lot adjacent to the hotel was some sort of two-story strip mall.

Two guys spotted me in my car. I knew that now they'd want to follow me around to figure out why I was here. If they found out I was staying at the hotel, they'd want to cause trouble for me there. So I decided to drive into the strip mall parking lot instead of the hotel parking lot and hang around there until I lost the guys.

I noticed that there was a Rite Aid in the strip mall. I thought they should probably have some food there. So I went in. The guys probably followed me in. The Rite Aid was really cramped. It may have been a small space that took up two floors. But then it may have been all on just the second floor.

It seemed like the Rite Aid sold nothing but cheap, second-rate consumer wellness goods, not quite medical supplies, but things you'd have around the house to use for whenever you got sick or injured or uncomfortable. There may have been a little girl in the store, possibly with her dad. She may have been lifted up onto some stack of boxes.

I looked around a little more. The only food I could find was bags of something sort of like chips -- just a couple bags, and way high up on some rack that made it so I didn't want to go through the trouble of getting them.

I was tempted for a second just to buy a lot of chips and have them for dinner. But I didn't want to eat just chips for dinner. I wanted to have a real meal. So I left the Rite Aid.

I was out in the parking lot. I knew I'd have to drive somewhere else now so I could find some real food. But I thought that was a good thing. The two guys had followed me back out of the store. I knew that it would be best if I went somewhere else before going to the hotel. If I left the area, maybe the guys also would. Then when I got back, I could just head into the hotel without anybody following me.

Dream 2

I was standing out in front of a comic book or zine shop with someone else, maybe my brother, maybe a female friend. We were probably waiting for the store to open for the morning. We may have been speaking with each other about the shop as if it was the first time here for one of us, and maybe also as if we'd just met each other for the first time.

Now the owner of the shop came up. He was a white man, kind of tall, round, and heavy, with a scraggly, grey beard and shaggy, but balding hair. He wore small, squarish sunglasses. He greeted us cheerfully. He seemed happy to see that people were eager to get into the store.

The owner opened the door and led us in. He proudly chatted a little bit about the store. But he walked quickly in front of us and was soon gone.

It may now have been like there was a group of us here. The place looked like a big record store on the inside. There were bins and bins of items on tables all around us. The store had a set of steps in the back leading up to another floor of items.

There was a doorway on the wall to my right. I walked through, into a smaller room of wooden shelves and racks for magazines or comic books or zines. I saw a lot of stuff that I wanted -- items that were apparently books, like novels, but were also zines, drawn in a very thin, liney style. The themes of these stories may have been a little perverted. They were just what I'd been looking for.

I may have been walking around here by myself. But I said to someone else, almost in my head, or almost as if I were in another place at the same moment -- maybe inside or near a tour bus, which I could maybe see through a blinded window as I stood in the store -- that this was what I'd wanted to experience the entire time I'd been in this city. I said that I'd really love to just immerse myself in the experience of these books for the rest of the time we were here.

The person said that if that was the case, I should just buy a ton of the books I wanted and take them with me to the airport. I could do nothing but read them at the airport and on the plane.

I thought what the person said was a good idea. But I knew it wasn't quite what I'd meant. Nevertheless, I knew I'd want to buy some of these books. But I probably wouldn't want to buy a lot. I imagined what a pain it would be to haul so many books along with me to the airport.

We may all now have been getting ready to leave. We were all in a room, just sitting around. We were like a group of schoolkids, though at least some of us may actually have been adults. One may have been Denver's current city council president.

As we all chatted away about something, I realized I needed to take care of an issue I was having with my leg. I had apparently cut open my left leg, possibly along the shinbone. It was kind of hollow inside, with bone, veins, artery, and some other tissue. But what mainly took up the inside of the leg was this peach material that looked like sea anemone tentacles.

I knew this peach material was kind of clogging up my leg, so that it was taking too much energy for me to walk. I knew that if I could just remove some of this stuff I'd be in a lot better shape. So I took some surgical instrument, maybe scissors or a knife, and just began cutting away at some of this stuff.

The fringes or tentacles were connected to a fleshy base. I was pretty sure the fleshy base was fine, and that I just needed to cut off the fringes. But I also felt like, at least for the time being, I didn't need to cut off all the fringes. I just needed to cut off enough to make it easier for me to walk again.

So I cut away at a kind of big clump of fringes. I had cut away quite a bit of the fringes. But they were still connected to the fleshy base by just a little flap of flesh. It was really hard to cut that last little flap -- the flap was so gooey that it just wouldn't snap off. So I decided just to pull and pull until I tore the fringes away from the fleshy base.

Finally I managed to pull this clump of fringes off altogether. Apparently I closed my leg back up. There was a black, metal shell for a computer's CPU. I looked inside it. It was mostly empty, except for a tangle of red and blue wires and maybe one or two other things. I knew I was supposed to stick my leg in here. This was sort of like my shoe, or another natural part of my leg, or something to protect my leg while it healed. I would stick my leg down into the CPU. My foot would stick out a square hole in the bottom.

But I may actually have had problems doing this. Or I may have forgotten altogether to do it, maybe even as soon as I'd started doing it. Then, as soon as I'd forgotten to do it, I may have wondered why I hadn't done it. And I may have wondered whether my leg would be protected, now that I hadn't stuck it into the old CPU shell. I may also have wondered whether I'd even closed up my leg at all, after having pulled out all the stuff.

And now that I thought about all the stuff I'd pulled out of my leg, I wondered after all whether I should have done that. Wasn't the stuff in my leg supposed to be there? Had I just pulled stuff out of my leg that actually made my leg work?

The person next to me asked me if I was okay. I said I was okay, but that I was just wondering whether I may have overdone it on the whole leg thing. But I said that I probably hadn't overdone it. I said I'd probably just been surprised to see my leg so hollow. But, I said, I supposed that a lot of the body is pretty hollow, anyway. And if it's not hollow, and you have all that stuff clogging it up, that's when you start running into problems.

Dream 3

I probably saw that I had a lot of acne sprouting up on my face. I don't know whether I was looking in a mirror or using my phone camera as a mirror. I may actually have seen my face as if I were outside of my body, looking at my face from a low, kind of oblique angle.

I may not have been myself, either. I may have been a blonde man with kind of golden skin, blue eyes, and hair that was loosely curly and frizzy at the edges, like there were a lot of split ends or something.

I think one cheek had small bumps of acne sprouting up all over. The other cheek had a different kind of acne, but it was just as bad and widespread.

Dream 4

I may have been trying to escape some killer or stalker or something. I may have been using a stairwell to escape. But I kept on almost running into the killer.

There may have been a point where I was trying to use an elevator, too. But either people got on the elevator with me who were linked with the killer/stalker or the killer/stalker also got on the elevator with me, or the killer/stalker saw me get on the elevator. So I needed to pretend like I was going to a different floor, so the killer/stalker wouldn't know what I was really doing.

The building was like a huge skyscraper. And there were times when it felt like an office complex -- maybe mainly when I was in the elevator, which I think had (dirty, grimy) glass walls and looked out over an atrium all the way down to the ground level. But most of the time it probably felt like a residential building.

But I think for me it also felt like some sort of daycare center. It may have been like a prison, too. It may have been that people who'd done something bad had been sent here to be treated like they were in a daycare for kids for a really long time. Or it may simply have been a children's daycare center, and I may mistakenly have been put here. Or it may have been a place that was being morphed into a children's daycare center by some bad person, and I was trying to stop that from happening.

But in order for me to succeed and escape, I had to prove that I was grown up, that I wasn't one of the children. But I didn't have to prove this to the bad person who was stalking me. In fact, I couldn't get around that person, or I might actually be turned into a child. I didn't actually have to prove my adulthood to anybody. I just needed to prove myself by keeping my adult identity until I escaped the building or accomplished whatever I was supposed to accomplish.