angry semi-lucid dream

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was night. I was at my family's house, in the kitchen with my brother. My mother had just left the house. Now that my mother was gone, my brother was trying to find ways to annoy me.

My brother lit up a cigarette in the house. At first I thought he was going to walk outside with it. Almost everybody in the family smokes. But nobody smokes in the house, because my nephews have lung problems. But my brother didn't walk outside. Instead, he walked to and closed the side and front doors, staring at me defiantly the whole time he did it.

I got mad and yelled at my brother. I walked out of the house and into the night, thinking I was going to do something, maybe head back to my own apartment, maybe find my mother -- even though I may also have thought that my mother was never coming back.

I wanted to come back into the house. But now my brother had shut and locked all the doors on me. I tried to get back into the house. But there was no way in.

Suddenly I decided to jump downward, right through the ground and walls, into the basement of the house. I did this, in anger, without even thinking of how strange it had been for me to do it.

I was down in a basement bedroom. The lights were all off, but I could see with a grainy vision, like I was looking through infrared goggles, or like I was watching a black and white film with dim, stark lighting.

I told myself that there was no way I could have done what I'd just done under normal circumstances. I may have realized that I was dreaming. But I probably thought instead that I was having an out of body experience.

I was kind of afraid to move from where I was. I didn't really think I could. I thought I would de-stabilize and stop being in whatever state I was in. But I then thought that I had to move, if only to confront my brother.

I reached for the doorknob of the bedroom. I quickly opened the door. The view tilted, like a camera shot, about fifteen or twenty degrees to the left. I was a little disoriented, but for some reason the shock of the change cleared my mind a little.

I walked out into the hallway, which was actually sloped. It hadn't been my view that was tilted. The hallway was actually sloped. I walked up the dark, starkly dim-lit, black and white hallway. A feeling of clarity and real presence washed over me. I got very excited, thinking, I'm really moving through this environment!

friends' basement; the guido routine

(I apologize for the technical error -- this dream post was supposed to have been posted on November 29. But I somehow managed to save it as a draft, rather than publish it.)

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I had somehow gotten into the basement of an "apartment" that I knew was the apartment of my old friend R and his wife L. I was at the foot of two sets of stairs that faced each other. The stairs and the floor of the basement were made out of white tile, and the section of the basement I was in felt very bright.

I knew that neither R nor L were home. I'm not sure why I was in the house, but I didn't want R or L to see me. I probably wanted to get out of the house as soon as possible.

But now I heard footsteps walking toward the head of one of the staircases. I quickly walked around the other staircase, hiding behind one of the white basement walls. But I was wearing a winter jacket that made a lot of zippy sound as I moved. I thought my sounds had revealed my presence. I didn't want to move around and make any more noise.

The person walked down the steps and was now in the basement. The person walked around the corner of the wall I was hiding behind. I didn't move.

The person, a kind of short woman with pale skin, pale, red-brown hair, and pale, blue-green eyes, saw me. But she didn't seem very surprised by me at all. She seemed to think I was just some friend of R or L's and that I had stopped by without any previous notice.

The woman said something to me to make me feel I needed to be involved in what she was doing, which was the household laundry. I got the understanding that the woman had come here to watch the house for R and L, as if R and L had gone on vacation.

We walked over to the laundry room. The woman put some clothes in the washing machine as she told me that L was still upstairs, sleeping. The woman seemed to imply that R wasn't around. I wondered where he could be.

The washing machine was kind of strange. It had a thick, disc-like device, like a hot rod's air filter, in the center column of the drum. And there was a secondary device, like a basin, placed inside the drum, spanning the entire circumference of the drum, and maybe only two or three inches deep. I didn't know how the whole load of laundry would fit into that tiny basin.

Dream #2

I had put together some songs for the acoustic guitar. The songs were kind of upbeat, kind of heavy, but definitely meant for the acoustic guitar. I may possibly have thought of them as having an Elliott Smith style.
I was now looking for a way to publicize my songs. I was out with a group of friends, walking along a city street that looked like a Main Street in a small town but was as packed and bustling as a big city street during rush hour. But everyone out here seemed to be heading out to have fun.

I was with a group of friends. I knew that my friends had been involved, on small and large scales, with promoting and selling their performance art. I thought to myself of everything my friends had been through in order to get their work out their and to become successful artists. I wondered why I hadn't put the same effort into my life.

But I was happy to have my friends. I could, at the least, ask my friends to help me promote my work. They'd probably make fun of me for not having done what they'd done as early as they'd done it. And some of them might not help me at all. But maybe some would help me.

We were now walking toward a rock or music club that was in the basement of a building. I knew this would be a good place for me to get a gig. If I got a gig here, I could display my new set of songs. I was sure people here would like my songs. I'd probably get a record deal.

I even thought I could do it without having to ask my friends for help. If I could just hang around with the people they hung around with, then get to know the important people and make a good impression on them, I might be able to get my music out through them. I felt bad for using my friends in that way. But I didn't feel like what I would be doing would be so bad.

I imagined the basement club being a narrow space crammed with people. I was now down in the basement, which was actually a wide, crowded area with a small stage at the front. The seating area crowded all the way around the stage. The audience area almost had the smoky, hazy feel of the audience at a boxing match.

On stage were two black women. One was maybe in her twenties or thirties. The other was old enough to be the first woman's mother. She may actually have been the first woman's mother. Both women were a little heavyset, with long hair done in tight braids and pale, blue-green eyes. They both wore flowing, purple dresses.

The women, mostly the younger woman, were speaking about a trip they'd taken to Africa. The younger woman was explaining how she'd thought before the trip that her mind was really open and aware of the ways people get through hardships and succeed in spite of hardships.

But being to Africa showed the younger woman just how naive she'd been. She said that she felt like she thought white people must feel in America when she interacted with the African people in Africa.

The younger woman said that she then came back to America and felt that she was now seeing life more like a white person would than like a black person would (???). The older woman and younger woman discussed this for a bit.

The younger woman wanted to illustrate how she felt by what she'd actually told herself. She hesitated at first. But then she said, "I told myself, I'm really like a Guido now."

Everybody in the audience was a little stunned to hear the woman use this term. I didn't mind it so much. In fact, I thought it was funny.

I now noticed that my mother and brother were sitting just to my right. My mom laughed silently at the woman's statement. That eased my own tension -- I had been afraid to laugh at first, because of the audience's stunned behavior.

I now gave a genuine, but odd-sounding, back-of-the-throat whine-laugh. My laugh was so genuine and awkward that everybody laughed at it. This seemed to loosen up the tense attitude that had taken over the audience.

who will marry her?; bookstore rearranged; water table; quantum leap ripoff

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

There were two men. Each man ran a laundromat. But each man had a different personality. One man was very serious and businesslike. The other was very lazy and easygoing. But I think both of the men were either Asian or of Asian descent, and that they both had dark, copper-colored skin. The businesslike man wore a black suit. The lazy man wore sweats and a backwards baseball cap.

The two men possibly wanted to marry the same girl. I never saw the girl or the girl's viewpoint. I think I mostly saw from the father's viewpoint, even though I wasn't the father. I think the father was a rather tough guy. I don't know if he really liked either of the young men. And I think I was hoping for the father to make a choice and be kind, at least to one of the guys.

My view during much of this was some weird set of shapes, like two rectangles set side by side. The two rectangles were bright yellow. Sometimes the rectangles would become spaces like three sides of a box, and something about the men, maybe the men themselves, would be inside the boxes. I think this was some method the father used for measuring his options.

Dream #2

I was probably at "my family's house." I was in a room that was cluttered with blankets. I was in the room with a slim, attractive woman who may have been supposed to be my sister. I had just gotten off the phone with somebody. I learned that we were supposed to be heading somewhere, probably due to either a family emergency or for something good that had happened to the family.

Before we headed out, I wanted to get a book. So I headed to the used bookstore I always went to. I had gone there only two days previously. But I wanted to get a whole new book for this trip.

The used bookstore may have just been opening, or it may actually have been still a few minutes away from opening. But the door was unlocked, so I went in.

As soon as I stepped in, the wife in the couple who owns the store said, "Well, hello, darling." She was nowhere in sight. There was no way she could have seen me. But she somehow knew that it was I who had come in. I looked to where I'd heard the voice. There was a little room, like a coat check room, full of books. Apparently the owners were in that room, sorting newly arrived books.

I said hello and walked further into the store. The store was huge. It was all made of wood: the floors, furniture, and walls. The space went from a small, lobby-like area with the cashier counter, into a much larger main area. The main area was two stories tall, with the second story being something like a balcony that ran along the walls. There were a lot of display areas full of books.

A few more people had come into the store and were already at the cash register. The wife was now behind the cashier's counter, which was cluttered with books and big, canvas bags that almost looked like laundry bags. The wife told me something about a book I'd been looking for. It was possibly that they'd gotten it, but then that somebody else had bought it, so they didn't have it anymore. Or that a book that had been there that I'd been interested in was no longer there. I said it wasn't a big deal.

I went to my favorite section of the store, which I reached by turning left and going all the way through the main area. At the end of the main area was a doorway to a smaller room. This room, I knew, had all the philosophy, which I was apparently really interested in. Reaching the room, I again felt kind of silly for having come to the bookstore twice in three days. I thought the owners of the store would think I was weird.

I was familiar with the arrangements of the shelves. And, at first, when I looked at the shelves, it was like I saw everything, all the subjects (philosophy, history, and film were some of the subjects I remember knowing were here) in the right order.

But at some point -- maybe when I tried looking directly at a single book? -- the subjects got all mixed up. The subjects I was interested in suddenly had a lot fewer books in them. And there were whole sections of bookshelves that were empty. There were also huge, empty cardboard boxes filling up some of the shelves. I looked for the philosophy section now and couldn't even find it. All I could find was film and something else.

I now realized that the owners had completely redone this back area. By the looks of things, they may have been planning to get rid of this back area altogether. Maybe they were planning on moving the philosophy section out to the main area -- or even on getting rid of the philosophy section altogether! I wondered if the wife had been trying to tell me this before, when she had mentioned to me whatever she'd mentioned.

I may have walked back out to the front lobby of the store, preparing to leave. There were now a lot of people at the cash register, waiting to get rung up. For some reason, I thought they were all there because I was there, like they wanted to get rung up before I got rung up, or before I even got in line, so they could feel like they'd been ahead of me.

The wife may have asked me if I was upset to be walking out of the store empty-handed. I may have replied that I wasn't upset, that I didn't know whether I was going to find anything I liked today, anyway.

But there also seemed to be a second ending to this dream, where I disappeared out of the back area of the store altogether. The owners wondered where I'd gone. I imagined explaining to them later on that sometimes I disappear out of buildings altogether and end up immediately in whatever the next place is that I'm supposed to be. I imagined explaining that it happened without my really knowing how.

Dream #3

I was part of a small group of people, mostly women. We walked down into a basement. One of the women may have been leading the group and holding a caged electric light over her head like a torch.

At the bottom of the stairway, we walked through a small curve of darkness. We then turned left into a pink room. The room was completely lit with electric light. But it looked a little run-down. It was empty. The floors and walls were concrete. The paint on the walls may have been chipping. The bottom third of the walls may actually have been painted beige with thin, black stripes running horizonally, maybe four black stripes creating three thick, beige bars.

The woman explained something about the water table. Apparently, some people concerned with this building were worried about the water table, like it would make the building very prone to flooding. But the woman pointed out a marker for the water table at the bottom of one of the walls. She said that that was proof that the building had been constructed with the water table in mind, and that the building would never flood, because the highest the water would ever get would be the mark at the bottom of the wall.

Dream #4

A commercial for a TV show. At first a closeup on a man and a woman, the man on the right and the woman on the left. The man was thin, kind of wiry-faced, with tan skin, pale brown hair, and cold, blue eyes. The woman looked like Marilyn Monroe: pale, round face, pale, blonde, shoulder length hair, heavily lashed eyes.

As the view pulled slowly away from the man and woman, an artificially, mechanically blue sky could be seen flowing behind the pair. An announcer began talking about how the man and the woman were involved in some time travel experiment. This time travel experiment ended up putting the man and the woman in some situation where the woman was in the body of Marilyn Monroe. The announcer said, "Marilyn Monroe!" like it was some big surprise.

As the announcer finished saying, "Marilyn Monroe!" The camera's pull-away was complete. The man and woman were seen to be standing on a grey pile of rubble, like piles of blasted-out concrete.

I thought to myself that it was kind of silly for the announcer to say, "Marilyn Monroe!" like the plot concept of a time traveler ending up as Marilyn Monroe was so new and fresh. I remembered that the TV show Quantum Leap had its main character meet Marilyn Monroe in one episode. (Actually, I believe that the Scott Bakula character ended up as Marilyn Monroe in that episode.)

***

UPDATE: First of all -- I was wrong. Just looking at the IMDb, Scott Bakula ends up as Marilyn Monroe's chauffer, not as Marilyn Monroe, in the Quantum Leap episode.


Also -- a discussion of some of the images from these dreams can be found at this entry in my dreamday journal.

calling my niece a b---h

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was down in the basement of my family's house. I had just come down the steps. My mother had come ahead of me. She had headed into her bedroom. I was following my mom into her bedroom for something.

But my niece had been trying to get our attention as we'd been coming down the steps. She was being really annoying about it. I'd just been trying to ignore her. But now that we were heading down into my mom's room, my niece decided that she'd follow us.

I was really annoyed. My niece isn't allowed into the basement. She was disobeying rules just so she could come bug me and my mom. I yelled up to my niece not to come downstairs. But she'd run all the way down the stairs before I'd even finished what I'd said.

My niece was already heading past me and toward my mom's room. I had a crystal clear glass of water. I was going to splash some of the water on my niece, to shock her away and back upstairs, like someone might spray water at a cat. But I couldn't pour the water. For some reason my body was all locked up and dizzy and twisted around. I couldn't even move forward until my niece had gotten into my mom's bedroom.

I was so frustrated by what my niece had done that I muttered under my breath, "Ugh, you little bitch." As soon as I'd said it I felt bad. I never thought I'd call my niece a bitch. But, fortunately, I thought, since my niece was so far away from me, she probably wouldn't have heard me.

I walked through my mom's room. At the end of her room, on the right wall, was a doorway to a bathroom. My mom was getting whatever she had for me out of there. My niece had run in there as well.

Now I had to get my niece and take her back upstairs. I had calmed down a bit. Now I wanted to be nice to my niece, to show her I loved her. I picked her up out of some cluttered area near the doorway to the bathroom.

I turned around and carried my niece back out of my mom's room. My niece was still about the same age as she is IWL -- about four years old. But she was as small as a little doll. I bounced my niece up and down in a loving fashion, cooing a little song to her and being tender. But I was also holding her at arms length.

But now my niece began crying. She said, "I know you called me a bitch. Wait until I tell my mom... that you really hurt my feelings!"

I felt really bad. I hadn't thought my niece had heard me. I wouldn't have wanted her to hear me. But she did. And I felt even worse when I thought of how my sister would yell at me when she'd found out I'd called one of her kids a bad word.

flying over lake

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was daytime. I was flying over a lake, as a part of some task. There were two other people around me. They were probably in a small boat. At first they were probably a man and a woman I knew as friends or colleagues. But then they probably became my mother and my sister. An old man, probably a wizard-like man with a long, white beard and a pointy hat, was also somewhere, possibly high overhead in the sky, watching over my progress.

The way I was flying was by holding something over my head. The thing would catch wind, then lift me up into the air. I would often have to drop myself back down to the lake, which I did by closing or dropping or shifting the thing over my head, so that it no longer caught wind. I probably stopped descending when I got to a point where I was just floating above the surface of the water.

The thing I held over my head changed a few times. Once it was something like a parachute. Another time, it may just have been a grocery bag or some garbage. Finally I "found" a device that was supposed to help me a lot. It was like a thin, wooden pole with a square of some kind of metal mesh, like a door's screen, attached to it. It looked like a metallic version of a flag or pennant.

This device could help me control my flight really easily. To move up, all I had to do was flip the flag around one way. To move down, I just flipped the flag the other way. I don't know how I "found" this device: every device I'd used had just appeared in my hands while I was flying over the lake. But I was still proud of having "found" this device, and I looked to the people in the boat for some approval, which they probably gave me.

I now felt like I had to prove myself in some other way. Flying was too easy with this device, and I didn't really know whether I deserved the device. I flew along the lake until I found myself in some kind of basement area inside some apparently large building. The area I was in was tall but narrow. Along the right side was a black, chain-link fence. On the left side was a white-painted, stone wall.

This area was full of boxes and other stuff. But I knew it had been even more packed with stuff just a short while ago. But my sister had cleaned out a lot of the place. Now there was something down here I had to find and confront. It was something like a demon, or at least I was afraid of it because I thought it was a demon. I had to fly up and down and search through all the stuff. But I was afraid of finding something in one of the high boxes. I'd often drop myself quickly back to the floor.

I could hear, or else I was imagining, two people standing on the ground near the back of the room, by the fence. The people were an old man and a young woman. The old man looked like some kind of noble from the Medieval Italian days. He wore a big, dark headdress and a rich, dark robe. He was some kind of magician. I didn't see the young woman very well. But she didn't seem very young sometimes. She was too scheming.

The man and woman were talking about something, probably about making wine. They had commanded a much more innocent, younger woman to help them make the wine. The young woman had apparently helped them in the past. But she was afraid to do so. If she didn't find the right elements for making the wine, the man and the first woman would then make what they called "Diana's wine." This was the blood of the second young woman.

I couldn't figure whether Diana had to find some fruit for making wine, or whether she herself had to go find blood for making wine. I didn't know if there was also some kind of cannibalistic ritual involving the wine, if it were always blood-wine. I didn't know, at first, how Diana could have survived after having given away her blood for wine. Then I realized it was just like a transfusion. Diana didn't give away more blood than she'd give in a transfusion. And she'd regenerate it all.