snowy airport; the crumbling model city

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was with my family in a car. It was a cold, grey day. A lot of snow had accumulated on the ground. It may still have been snowing a little bit. The clouds hung thick and low.

I may have been in the backseat, on the driver's side, but I may also have been in the driver's seat. We were driving to the airport so I could catch a flight out of town (and "back home" to New York?).

I was also going to meet a friend of mine, probably my old friend Y, at the airport. Both Y and I seemed to be coming to this airport from another airport. We had scheduled our layovers together, and we were both heading into the same city as a final destination, but we may not have been taking the same plane into the city.

But now I was, due to some delays from my family, feeling like I wasn't going to get to the airport on time. I felt like I was going to miss seeing Y during the layover. But something made me think that maybe this wasn't right. If Y was getting into the airport during bad weather like this, chances were her plane would be delayed.

As I thought about this stuff and spoke to my mom about it all, I looked out the window. My view had subtitles at the bottom, in both English and Chinese, or maybe in English and Japanese.

We were just now pulling into the parking lot of the airport. But it looked like a parking lot for a Walmart. A lot of cars were in the parking lot. There were also huge drifts of snow everywhere, where the snow plows had piled up the shoveled snow.

I started to worry a little about my plane departing on time. The weather was really bad, and the airport appeared to be packed. Were there going to be delays on everything?

Now the thick, grey clouds, which had hung very low before, dropped even lower. The top of the airport was obscured by the clouds. But the clouds dropped even lower, until there was no visibility only a meter or so above the roof of the car.

This was very strange and disturbing, but also exciting, in a way. I made a joke about it to my family, saying that we had no visibility at six feet. But, really, I was now more panicked than ever about my flight. I feared that the fog would come all the way to the ground. But it seemed to be holding steady, if not lifting up a bit, now.

Dream #2

I was in a room with an older, Asian man. The room was very tall. Along the walls was a structure like scaffolding. This structure was the beginning of some new building, or even some new city. The man spoke to me about an earthquake he'd felt recently. I hadn't been here to feel it.

The man now had to leave. He would return. I was put in charge of watching or developing the scaffolding structure while he was gone.

I had gone up to a balcony level of this building to do some studying. The balcony looked directly over the tall room where the scaffolding structure was. The balcony faced the wall against which the scaffolding structure stood. On the left wall of the tall room was some other tall structure, made of something else and done in a different style.

The balcony area was like a bedroom, with a bed, a desk, and an entertainment center. I probably lay on the bed with a book, preparing to study.

But just then an earthquake hit. I looked over the balcony to see the scaffolding structure -- which now had little facades of pale wood in between each square of scaffold skeleton -- crumble and fall to the ground.

I had suspected this would happen: the structure had been in the early stages of development. It wasn't yet strong enough to withstand an earthquake. Still, it was a terrible inconvenience that the structure had crumbled completely.

I also watched a TV fall off the structure on the left wall and crash to the ground. The TV fell on its face. I hoped the TV wouldn't break.

I now sat back in the room. I had a TV in this room now. It was playing some video starring a man like George Takei. The man was explaining the reconstruction of something after a disaster.

My view faded into a huge apartment in New York City. The apartment seemed to be as large as an entire building floor. But it was cluttered with junk and not very well taken care of. There seemed to be a party going on here. I recognized a lot of my old friends from college.

I walked up to the kitchen, where I saw my old friend ML at the sink. Over the sink was a wooden board, on which lay either a slab of cooked pork or else an entire roast pig. I grabbed some chunks of the pork and began eating it. It had a good barbequed taste.

ML mentioned that my brother had actually cooked this pork. I now remembered that my brother had made a hobby of mastering the cooking of pork. He had become known among my friends for it, as well, actually. ML told me a story of how my brother had roast an entire pig.

Now another friend, MV, walked up and told me how he had been surprised at how good the pork cooked by my brother had tasted on another occasion. MV had been surprised: my brother had always seemed to lack motivation. But he had a real passion for cooking pork.

MV told me, "I asked your brother, 'Hey man, how'd you learn to cook your pork so good?' And your brother replied, 'Goth, man, goth.'" This was a joke that was, apparently, characteristic of my brother. I laughed really hard at the joke.

I pulled up another piece of pork (the meat was really dark red, and it had a fish-like, ribbed texture). As I ate the pork I thought I really had eaten too much meat, and that I'd need to stop eating. My stomach would be in bad shape if I kept eating like this.

little round house

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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