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.

color me innocent; phone tapper; dirty pink diaper; acting strange

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I had to prove something to somebody, possibly that somebody was innocent. But I did this by laying erect, balanced on the arm of a couch, so that my feet pointed up and my head pointed down toward the seat cushions, and drawing or coloring in a coloring book. I may have been a little boy or girl.

Dream #2

It was daytime. I stood out on a road full of big, white buildings. The buildings all felt abandoned, and the road wasn't very active at all.

I was speaking with my old friend R on my cell phone. R and I seemed to be getting along alright, even though we hadn't spoken in a while.

But now R may have said something like, "Now I'll show you what I can do." The phone hung up. Then the phone -- which was still a cell phone, but looked like a long, corded phone -- began ringing wildly. I picked up the phone and heard R speaking. But the phone kept ringing wildly.

R said, "Now I'll make it stop." The ringing stopped. R said, "See how I control things?"

R told me he'd been tapping my and my family's phones, listening to all our conversations. Something one of my family members, maybe my sister, had done, had insulted R. Now R was going to make us pay for it. And there was nothing we could do to stop R. R was just too well in control of the situation.

The conversation was now over. I stood out on the road, wondering what R would do. I saw my sister riding a bicycle down the road. I felt sorry and afraid for my sister. I wished I could tell her something to stop what was going on. But I couldn't think of what to tell her.

Dream #3

I was in some house. There were a lot of other people here. We were all maybe in our twenties and thirties. We all probably lived in the house. The situation didn't feel cramped. Everybody was pretty easygoing.

Some other guy and I were trying to create a disposable diaper that really looked like a baby's diaper but could be worn by adults. We hadn't succeeded, but I needed to leave the house to take care of something.

I grabbed a pack of baby diapers to put on as I left the house. The diapers were like Pampers Baby Dry diapers. But they were all pink, and they felt even softer than Baby Dry diapers. I put on a pair and headed out of the house.

I walked out into a road like a narrow stone road between tall, white buildings, like in a small, European village. Something about the road may have felt like a run-down garage.

I walked back toward the house, worried about something about the diaper, like it would leak, or like people would think I was a pervert for wearing diapers and no pants in public.

But when I opened the door to the house, I saw my mom inside. I didn't want my mom to see me in diapers, not because she didn't know -- it was probably pretty obvious to her that I wore diapers -- but because I didn't want her nose in my business. But I may have thought things would be less awkward if I could ask my mom for some Pull-Ups diapers instead of Baby Dry diapers.

I walked away from the house, not having gone in. I was still wearing the pink diapers. I walked up toward some water which seemed to be flowing up toward the road from some large body of water, like a large river or a sea.

I thought about how much fun it would be to wade in the water in my diaper. I thought it would be nice to get the diaper all soaked. But I also thought the water was probably really dirty somehow, even though it was clear. A little diaper like this wouldn't keep me from being contaminated with whatver made this water so dirty.

Dream #4

It was daytime. I was walking through a long parking lot in an apartment complex. I was upset or angry about something and making dirty faces because of it. Some person I couldn't see very well walked past me.

I tried to disregard the person. But she caught my attention. I looked up to see that the person was NB, a girl who works in the landlord's office at my apartment complex. I felt bad for having tried to ignore NB. NB looked concerned for me, like I was acting very strange.

kicked out of apartment; glorified junk mail

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a boarding house full of rented rooms. The building was built on the same kind of plan as a brownstone, but it was a lot bigger. The walls, floor, and stairs were all made out of old, but well-kept and polished wood.

The place was packed full of rented rooms. The rooms were all so crammed together that many of them didn't even feel divided from each other. The rooms themselves also appeared to be a mess, with crooked walls, bunk beds in disarray, and clutter everywhere.

I lived in one of these rooms. But at the moment I was on the ground floor, speaking with a couple of people who acted as superintendents or supervisors for the operations here. They were both young men, tall, white, kind of muscular, with shaggy hair, and wearing t-shirts and jeans.

The young men told me that I had to leave the building. I got the sense that the men themselves didn't like me, and that they had gotten permission from their manager to kick me out of the building. But the excuse the young men were giving me was that since I had "brown skin," the rest of the guys in the building, who were white, didn't like me and were planning to cause trouble for me. The two young men suggested that my neighbors might even break into my room and take my stuff, just because they didn't like me. I was told that I had to leave the building by the end of the day, if not sooner.

I didn't think it was right that I had to leave my building just because I wasn't white. But I didn't see how I could argue against the young men. It seemed like, even though they didn't like me, they were thinking about my safety. So I prepared to leave. Somehow my room was now the same room that I had been in with the two young men. It now just looked like a bedroom, my bedroom, with all my belongings in it.

As I was preparing to leave, I started hearing a conversation with a lawyer in my head. The lawyer was telling me that I was protected, and that if I wanted to sue this building for kicking me out based on my race, I definitely could. I thought that I probably would sue the building. I took a little bit of pleasure in this thought. The two young men had thought they were really pulling one over on me by kicking me out and making an excuse for doing so. But now I had the ability to get back at them.

I had been doing something like folding clothes or blankets at my bed. Now I was standing at a table that was full of clutter, trying to sort through it all. A lot of the clutter may have been cigarette packs.

One of the young men came into the room. He said he was leaving for the evening. It was 5 PM (even though it looked black as night outside -- though I don't know how I knew this). I told the young man that I was still working on packing. He was already walking out of the room and down the hallway.

I called after the young man, telling him that I'd do my best to be out of here in two hours. The young man replied, in a kind of pitying tone, like he was sorry for what I'd been put through, that I could take as long as I wanted to get out of the place. I could tell that the young man meant I could even stay here overnight.

I wondered why the young man was feeling so sorry all of the sudden. I figured that he had already been contacted by my lawyer. In that case, the young man now knew that he and the other management people in the building were in trouble. The young man would then be trying to make up for his part in the acts against me by giving me extra time, maybe even indefinite time, in the building. But I also had the idea that maybe he'd realized what he'd done and that he now truly felt sorry for it.

Dream #2

I was outside my apartment building, heading to get my mail. The mail was in big boxes that were stacked high and wide on metal poles that stood about waist-high. I went to my box. The box, it seemed had been left unlocked. It was open just a tiny bit. I was worried that someone had gotten into my mail.

I opened my box and pulled out my mail, expecting to see a copy of a weekly newspaper I receive, the Denver Business Journal. The newspaper wasn't there. But there was a big, hefty envelope of documentation. I pulled the envelope out of my mailbox.

I walked around the large unit of mailboxes clockwise, looking at the package. I thought it must have been special, and that I must have been special for receiving it: it was hefty, full of documentation, and labeled with a very official looking U.S. Postal Service label.

But somehow, seeing into other people's mailboxes, I saw the same kind of envelope. I understood that everybody, actually, had received an envelope like this. Far from being special, this envelope really wasn't anything other than glorified junk mail.

dancing missile complex; texas cather library; citibank semi-lucid

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I "woke up" dancing in a dark room. There may have been music playing, some kind of deep, throbbing music. The room was mostly dark, with maybe a dim, red light. A strobe light may have flashed behind me occasionally, showing my shadow on the wall. As I first woke, a couple of people may also have walked behind me.

I didn't know why I was dancing. My moves were all really aggressive and angry. I thought I may have been preparing for some kind of fight.

At one point my shadows looked like coiled up snakes, like they were all somehow slithering down for the wall. I tried to change this appearance in some way, to make my shadow look more rigid and human. But I didn't like something about the new moves. So I went back to the snakelike moves.

I remembered the people who walked behind me. I felt like I needed some kind of approval for them. Maybe they'd laughed at me when they'd seen me dancing. But I felt like I needed to follow them, to get some kind of approval from them.

They'd walked up some steps along the right wall. I walked up those steps as well. The staircase was wooden and narrow. It was hard to see through the railing, up to the next floor. I barely saw a light in a bedroom. I went up to that bedroom.

In the bedroom it was now day. There were two women, both possibly Hispanic, in the room. One of the women was supposed to be my mother. But neither woman looked like my mother. They both looked alike. They were a bit short, kind of skinny, maybe in their mid-forties, and kind of worn-out looking. They had long, straight, pale hair, and they wore big eyeglasses.

The women may have been talking about me being Hispanic. But my mom was saying that I was actually half Native American. I didn't think my mom could prove that, even though I seemed to wish it was true. I wondered if I'd ever be able to track down my dad and findo out whether I actually was Native American.

I expressed something like this to the women while I was looking out the bedroom windows, which seemed to be close together, near the corner of the room.

I was now out in a car with my mom. My mom was driving. It was daytime. We were driving through some mountainy area that seemed to be developing into a suburban area. We drove up a road on a steep, grassy slope.

Along the slope were little fixtures in the ground, almost like ceiling-hung security cameras, except planted upside-down. The fixtures now started firing little missiles out of them, with bright, papery flashes. The frequency of the flashes became more and more intense.

We drove into an area full of apartment complexes. The apartment complexes were all relatively new. But the missile launchers were even here, too.

I figured that somehow this place we were driving through had gotten into a nuclear war, and that the place was just going into an all-out attack before it got attacked. But it was also like my mom and I had been sent to find these missiles, like we were somehow supposed to stop their production. The apartment complex was new. It may have been built just as a cover-up for the missile complex.

My mom and I, as well as my sister, now pulled in through a huge parking complex at night. It was like an airport parking complex. But we found ourselves in a hotel parking lot that seemed to be on the edge of the woods. The hotel was a Meridien. We went into the restaurant.

We were supposed to be meeting someone here. But I didn't have a job. I was really poor. I didn't know how I could afford any food in this place. I may also have been wearing really terrible clothes.

The decor of the restaurant was really nice and modern. It all somehow seemed familiar to me. I wondered how this could be. Then I remembered that I had actually applied for a job here, as a waiter.

One of the waiters walked past me. I recognized him from my interview. I wanted to acknowledge him. But I didn't want him to think I was some crazy guy, just here to stalk him because I still thought I stood a chance of getting a job here.

Dream #2

I was in a car, probably. I was driving somewhere. But I was also in a conversation with somebody -- maybe my mom, or maybe some women from work -- about Texas. There was a location we were trying to get to, on the west side of Texas. Or we may have been tracking someone like a criminal, and we may have suspected that the criminal was going there.

I was now in some place like a library. I had been talking with somebody about an art show I'd been wanting to see. But I'd been avoiding it for some reason, maybe because it was at my old university or run by somebody from there, and I didn't want to bother anybody from my old school.

I was walking away, trying to get out of the building, I think. I saw into a kind of dim room. The room seemed like some kind of narrow amphitheatre. There were a bunch of professional people inside, talking with each other like they had just finished the meeting.

Among those people I saw the old head of my theatre department. But the person was a woman instead of a man. I tried to remember the person's name. But I could only think of a man's name. I wanted to avoid the person. So I left the building. I figured I might go to that art show after all.

I was walking outside for a little while, out on a concrete path on a college campus. But I found myself not too long afterward in a big library, like the Rose Reading Room at the Schwarzmann branch of the NYPL.

Instead of having long tables through the room, the library had either short tables or individual desks. The room was mostly empty, except for three young, black women who were studying under the watch of an older, black, female teacher.

The young women were all spaced well apart from each other. As I walked into the library, one of the women was speaking out something to the teacher, who stood behind her left shoulder. The girl had a really nice voice. But what she was reading sounded really simple, almost silly. I couldn't figure why the girl, who seemed really smart, was reading such a simple text.

But the girl was really pretty. So I wanted to impress her. I began walking around the library with my chest all puffed out, like I was really smart. The young woman wore a dress of almost pastel colors -- yellow and green.

As I walked around the library I noticed that the other two young women also wore pastel colored clothes. The clothes seemed to me very well suited to the desert, which was apparently where we were. The colors also reminded me of something that the characters in the novels of Willa Cather might wear.

I walked toward the left side of the library. I was looking for books for myself. But I was also getting a bit nervous. I felt like sooner or later another guy would come into the library. When he saw how I was alone in this room with four women, he'd get jealous of me and start doing all kinds of things to annoy me.

Dream #3

I was in "the Citibank building," a huge skyscraper that was apparently located in Manhattan. I was here for an interview. I was on a high up floor, maybe even a floor that was still under construction.

I was really poorly prepared for the interview. I looked terrible, and I didn't exactly have any talking points prepared. Plus, I may have been interviewing for some position for which I had no experience.

I sat in big conference room for a bit with a tall, white, skinny man who looked young, even though he was probably in his mid thirties. The room was full of windows and filled with dim gold of late afternoon sunlight. But I felt really low in my seat, much shorter than the man, and it seemed really hard to see up and out of the windows.

The man eventually told me that he didn't think this job was a good fit for me. He may have told me he hadn't thought this job was a good fit for me, even before I came to the interview. He may have wondered why I'd come here at all. But he said this all in a really gentle way, like he was concerned for me, like I was a special child that he wanted to help.

The interview was over, and I was walking around the building. I was up on a floor where construction workers were still working. The floor had walls, but a lot of the floors and ceilings were still in a raw state.

I knew I was really high up over the city. I really wanted to look out the windows, to see the city below. But I suddenly realized that this was a dream, and that I could just fly out the window. I ran as fast as I could. I started flying, even before I got to the window.

As I saw the cityscape outside the window I told myself to focus. I knew that in the past I'd panicked with moving into outside environments in lucid dreams. I told myself to stay calm and just believe I could get outside.

I got through the window, but the enviroment changed. The building was much lower than it had been. And the landscape below was just trees and lawn, like I was in some kind of office park, rather than in the middle of Manhattan.

I stopped flying, for some reason -- maybe because I'd wanted to fall, to see what it was like to jump out of a building. I slammed down on the lawn on my stomach. I pulled my head up to look at the building. It looked like a pretty tall building, and it gleamed in the afternoon light.

I tried to stand myself up so I could look around and explore this dreamworld. But as I did, it changed from day to night. I thought I must haved woken up. But it scared me to think I'd woken up out on a lawn in the middle of the night. I had no idea how I'd gotten here. Had I been sleepwalking? Was I going crazy?

I could hear my labored breathing, like I was breathing inside a spacesuit. I walked or stumbled a little ways in the darkness. I thought that maybe I was still dreaming. But I couldn't be lucid, I told myself, because this world was so close to the world of my bedroom (???). I told myself I must be right on the edge of waking. I heard my breathing get louder and louder, until I woke up.