mountaintop temple suicide

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was outside, probably in front of a tall, white house or a white apartment building. I received news that a person I had formed a relationship on behalf of the business I worked for had committed suicide. The person's name was mentioned, and I heard it very plainly.

I was surprised to hear that this man had committed suicide, and I was sad for him. But I also worried about myself. It seemed like everybody I was forming relationships with for my business was dropping out from the thing they had signed up for, for one reason or another. I wondered how I could have chosen such consistently unstable people.

I imagined that the man had either hung himself or shot himself. While still standing out in front of the building, all by myself, I began to have a lot of white flashes flood my view. I assumed these were the flashes the man saw as he died: something like flares from the impact of bullets, or something like that.

I was now standing outside in the mountains. The sky was starry and dark blue. The ground and branches of the pine trees were covered with snow. There were other people at a certain distance from me, all facing away from me and toward something else, as if they were engaged in some sort of task that I probably should have been a part of.

A man began speaking to me, probably in my head. He was an older man, Chicano, or possibly Native American. He was some kind of worker, possibly a parks worker or a truck driver. He told me that it was getting harder and harder to work here because of the thieves and other kinds of criminals that were around.

I told the man that the best thing to do was probably to head up to the top of the mountain. I now looked over and saw the mountaintop I was referring to. I could see that I was on a kind of plateau, about halfway up the mountain. The mountain then sloped up and went to a very high point. I told the man that high up on the mountain nobody would bother him. I may even have thought of heading up there myself.

I walked toward the crowd. There seemed to be a man at the front of the crowd singing. There was a yellowish light on him or behind him, making the atmosphere around him very warm. The man sat on a stool before a microphone and played an acoustic guitar as he sang. It was kind of like an open mic night at a coffee shop.

I was now inside a bar or a cafe that also served alcohol. The man (or somebody else?) now seemed just to be getting started with his set. I thought I should stay there and hear his set. But now everybody who had been sitting, on stools as well, around the man were getting up and filtering out of the crowd. I was one of the few people left. It didn't seem like the other remaining people were really certain they would stay, either.

I looked around, trying to decide whether I should stay or go, like the crowd had. As I looked around, my eye caught a woman serving drinks to the remaining people. I thought that maybe this "concert" had a two drink minimum. I didn't want to drink any alcohol. But I knew I had to drink something.

I could see that the woman serving drinks had a glass, or a few glasses, or seltzer water. I thought that maybe I could just drink seltzer water.

I saw that the edge of the bar, which was to my right and maybe three meters away from me, had a few glasses of seltzer water on it. I looked over to the wall behind the singer. There was a dark, wooden, shelf-like counter for people to stand and drink at. There was a whole line of glasses of seltzer water. These glasses had been drunk out of. Some glasses were empty. Others were half-empty.

I thought that I really didn't want seltzer water. It didn't have any taste. But I didn't want liquor, either. I walked up to the bar and asked the man behind the bar, "Can I just have a Pepsi?"

The man nodded and was about to pour me a Pepsi. But I then said, "Oh-- no-- wait a minute. Maybe I can get one of those drinks. Those virgin, oh... how do you call it? A Shirley Temple?"

The man kind of laughed at me for ordering a Shirley Temple. But he started making it for me. I walked back toward the audience seating area, feeling a little silly for ordering such a froofy, non-alcoholic drink as a Shirley Temple.

I was then somewhere else, some place like a cafe or a cafe-like restaurant. But I was in some corner of the room, looking at the wall, kind of pointing my view about halfway down between my head and the floor.

Some woman was talking in my head. I knew she was a kind of healthy, but stern and worn-looking, blonde woman. She may have seemed like she was in her late forties, given her worn look and her sombre kind of attitude. But she may really only have been in her early twenties.

The woman told me that the man who had committed suicide had really actually died from something biological. He had either eaten a kind of food he wasn't supposed to eat, or else he had eaten too much of the food. His eating habits had killed him.

The woman said that the man justified his bad eating habits, and the fact that he wasn't able to resist food that he knew would kill him, by saying that life wasn't worth anything anyway, so why should he go to the effort of preserving this worthless life by abstaining from foods he liked. Because of this, it was said that the man had committed suicide.

I suddenly felt a lot better. I had previously thought that the man had committed suicide in a more violent way. If this had been the case, my choice to have started up a business relationship with him would, apparently, have shown my carelessness in discernment of personality. But because the man had only killed himself in a benign way, like eating the wrong foods, I hadn't been such a bad judge of character, after all.