girl on bus; lightning and stairwell

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

A vision of a girl on a bus during the day. The girl stood near the front of the bus, on the right side, as if she were just getting onto the bus. The girl was young, maybe twelve to fourteen years old, but tall. She was slim and pale. She wore a green shirt with very short sleeves and a wide v-neck that revealed a white shirt over her chest. She wore very short, pale-beige denim shorts. The girl had long brown hair, drawn back in a kind of ponytail, and big eyeglasses.

I saw the girl, first as if in a small picture or a movie on a phone's screen. Then I saw the girl as if I were actually on the bus, watching the girl walk up toward and then past me.

Dream #2

I was in "my family's backyard" with my oldest nephew. My nephew was probably six or seven years old in the dream. He had an armful of toys. He was annoying me somehow by poking me with some of the toys. I told him to stop annoying me. He thought he was funny, so he began poking me with antennas from a couple remote control joysticks he was carrying.

I got really mad and knocked some of the stuff out of my nephew's hands. I was trying to get closer to him, so I could grab him and tell him to stop poking me with stuff. But he was offended that I'd knocked stuff out of his hands. He backed away from me and started whining. He stood under some structure like a porch backing up against the back wall.

I was at the left fence of the backyard now, as if I were going to leave through some gate near me. My oldest nephew and second oldest nephew now confronted me. My second oldest nephew was mad at me for having told my oldest nephew not to poke me. He seemed less like he wanted to stand up for his brother and more like he wanted to have the fun of annoying me by nagging at me. I told him to leave me alone and I walked away.

I was now sitting out on the front porch of "my family's house," which was a red brick or red stone house. The porch was covered over with stone, so it was pretty shady. But it was pretty cloudy outside, so it was even dimmer on the porch. Some of my family members, probably my brother-in-law and some of my nephews, were sitting on the steps.

We were all watching the lightning. A few bolts would come down from the sky at a time. It wasn't raining yet. The air was dry and electric. The lightning flashes were really beautiful. They were pretty far away. But they were so violent, and it felt like they would be getting closer really soon.

Nobody seemed really afraid of the lightning coming closer. But I was nervous. I felt like it would be coming closer soon. I felt like when we got a close strike, it would take us by surprise. I stood up onto the porch, hoping the porch would shield me from the lightning strike. I tried to judge the closeness of the strikes by the flashes and the noises. But the flashes stopped showing up as much, once I focused on them, and the noises were sometimes all alone.

Now a group of guys, maybe with a couple women, walked down the street. They all seemed to be young and cocky, but somehow settled into good lives. They were being led around by a black man, who was one of their friends. The man showed them a house across the street, as if he were recommending that they buy the place. The place was big, for a house, and made of red stone.

I hid from the group of guys. I felt like if they saw me, if they knew I lived here, they'd want to hang around here all the time and annoy me. I tried to hide behind a column on the porch and in the shadows of the porch. But the black man saw me. He started leaning against some black iron gating that came just off of the left side of the stairway. The man did this to annoy me and show me he could lean against my family's property if he wanted. But I tried to justify his actions by saying that maybe the man was a professional guide, and that leaning against the gate was a part of his presentation.

But now it really did seem like the man was giving a presentation. He seemed to be speaking about the house across the way from us as if it were a dorm building for a small university. The man now led the group of people across the street to the dorm. I decided to follow the man. I was curious about this place. But, now that my space had been invaded by him, I felt the need to confront him about it.

I walked into the building. It was now much taller. The lobby looked like the lobby for an old high school. But it was multiple stories tall. The light was a dimmish, greenish fluorescent. The tile floors gleamed thickly with layers of wax.

I was following a group of older people, mostly white women. The people looked like parents for the college kids who would be staying here. The black man was gone. The older people all seemed to be turning right, into an area I knew probably led to the bathrooms.

I followed the people, hoping to get a chance to confront the black man, and also just because I was curious what this place was all about. But the older people all seemed to be women now, and they all headed into a women's bathroom. I stood outside the door. I knew I couldn't go in. Now college-aged girls were also walking into and out of the bathroom. I looked around for a men's bathroom, but I couldn't find one. So I walked out of the area.

I was now walking across the hallway, to a doorway that I thought may have been to hall of dorm rooms. As I did, I still only saw girls here, no boys. I thought this may have been an all-girls college. In that case, I thought, people would think I was really weird for walking around here all by myself.

I got to the doorway, a double doorway, to find that it actually led to a stairwell. The stairwell was wide, like a double-stairwell in a school, but it was so empty and unused feeling that I guessed it was a fire escape stairwell. I walked up the stairs a bit. There was plenty of grey-white light coming in through windows on the landing walls.

After walking up a couple flights, I got the urge, somehow, to go up the stairs faster by pulling on the handrail, then letting go, causing myself to be ejected up into the air. This would throw me up a couple of flights.

I did this a couple times, then somehow messed it up. I landed on my right side on a staircase, looking up toward the floors above me. I was almost up to the top floor. I could see the dim shade of the unfinished, dirty-metal ceiling.

I told myself that if I wanted to go up to the top floor, I could throw myself up there, even in just one throw. I knew this was a dream now. I told myself that if it was a dream, I could throw myself up to any height I wanted. I still didn't quite believe that. I felt like my aim and coordination would still have a lot to do with where I ended up. But I decided to give it a shot.

I threw myself up into the air. I almost got to the top floor. But the whole space of the top floor now seemed to be covered by dark blue sleeping bags. I tumbled down to a lower floor, but I landed on my feet.

I looked down from the landing I stood on. I knew I couldn't get any higher. The whole area was obstructed up there. But I saw that between the windings back and forth of the staircase, there was a little, rectangular corridor. I knew that IWL jumping down that space would be suicide. But in a dream, I could probably aim myself safely down that space.

I jumped down. But, again, I got worried about how good my aim was. I ended up causing myself to tumble back and forth a little roughly between the guardrails of the stairwell. I somehow got tumbled out on one of the floors.

Looking around, I saw I was on something like a balcony over an area that looked like a mix between a library and a cafe. There were book stacks farther back, but the front area was a section of big, heavy, wooden tables that looked like study tables. But people were bringing food to the tables and eating at the tables. There were young men and women.

I thought I would test myself by jumping off the balcony and flying over the space. But as I jumped, some of the male students noticed me. I got shy, and my flying ability faltered. I was descending slowly. But I thought I could prolong my hovering. I descended slowly until I landed on a table. There were only a few people around. Some of them noticed me, but they were ignoring me, like they thought I'd done something kind of silly.

So, just to get somebody's attention, I jumped off the table and, landing before an area of big, comfy chairs, I did some kind of crescent-like kick at or into the face of a woman sitting in one of the chairs. My vision got really blurry at this point.

nuclear saucers; doctoral speech stalker; cherry fire; cherry fire 2

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a house with my family. It was daytime, and the house was filled with yellowish natural light. I may have been in the kitchen. All the surfaces in the room were white, tinged yellow with the sunlight.

I may have heard, or I may have been thinking about having heard, some announcement on the radio that there was going to be a nuclear war. Something about the announcement made it seem like nuclear war was inevitable, and that it was going to happen soon, but that it wasn't going to happen now, and it wasn't going to happen without plenty of warning.

But now my oldest nephew ran into the kitchen. He said, "The nuclear war is beginning! They just made the announcement! The missiles are on their way!" My nephew ran through the kitchen and down a stairwell that led to the basement. My mom was down in the basement,and my nephew was going to give my mom the warning, too.

I thought for a moment. How could we escape the blast of a nuclear bomb? Perhaps just staying in the basement would be a good idea. Maybe the basement was deep enough to shield us. But I didn't feel like that was right at all.

After some more reflection, I decided that if the bomb were to hit, we'd all just be screwed. The best thing wasn't to hide. It was just not to act afraid when the final moments came.

But I kept thinking that maybe my nephew was kidding. Maybe he just wanted to play a game on us and panic us. Or maybe he'd heard the news wrong, or heard a bad piece of news.

I looked out the back window. I looked way down, as if I were in a ten-story building, to a valley in the mountains. The valley was like the backyard for this house. But I could feel now that the house was all by itself.

Down in the valley was a flying saucer. It was silvery, and it looked a bit like computer animation. I knew that my nephew had run down into the flying saucer. He was going to fly it, apparently. This showed me he'd been serious about the nuclear missile attack. He was going to fly away and warn everybody he could about our impending doom.

The saucer floated up into the air, wobbling back and forth a little as it rose. It then rather quickly flew off toward the horizon of the yellow sky. But I suddenly realized that I was controlling the flight of the saucer, either with my thoughts or with a machine, as if I were watching a movie.

I kept on rewinding and playing the flight of the saucer, watching it fly away, then pulling it back. I think I even saw glitchy, little lines in my field of view, as if I were watching a VCR tape and had it on pause. I'd convinced myself through this manipulation that all the panic I'd experienced up to this point was just a movie, nothing more.

Dream #2

I was going to see a friend give a speech. My friend's speech was for her doctorate. I don't know whether the speech was so she could get her doctorate, or so she could get into a class that would get her her doctorate.

The room my friend was to give a speech in was about the size of a small classroom. It was really nice, with tall, narrow windows letting in plenty of yellowy sunlight. The room was packed with professional and academic looking people.

Sometimes my friend stood near me, and sometimes I saw her standing and talking to some people. She looked like Julie Potratz, the star of a couple of films by Laurel Nakadate.

An older, Asian woman may have been in charge of everything going on here. Apparently there were going to be a number of speeches given. It was hard for me to tell whether my friend would actually be giving a speech. It seemed like a lot of people were going to give speeches about her work. And one person was even going to give a speech that had been written by my friend. But I couldn't tell whether my friend was going to give a speech herself.

The first speech had begun. My friend and I were standing at our chairs in one of the rows near the front of the audience. But everybody else was standing, and they all seemed so much bigger than we. It was hard to see the podium. I felt crowded in, hidden from everything.

My friend stood to my left. She seemed to be annoyed at me for some reason. To my right stood an Asian woman. She said to my friend, "I know you wished you could stay here. Too bad you have to go in order to catch your flight. You won't have time enough to give your speech after all, it seems."

Some time had passed, and the event had possibly ended. Everybody was now clearing out of the room. I was either myself or my friend. A young man came into the room and asked me if I knew somebody from my past named MA. I said I did. The young man said that that man was part of a group that had been organized to stalk me. The young man was coming clean with the info. He'd been a part of the whole thing. But now he felt I should stop it, if I could.

Either the man had told me or I had just known that MA, or somebody associated with MA, was out in the hallway. I walked outside, into a lobby-like hallway. Right in the hallway was a small, stage-like platform that was about knee-high.

MA sat on the platform, leaning against a column, with his legs stretched out along the platform. He was totally relaxed and complacent. I confronted him and asked him why he'd been stalking me. He just didn't answer.

I got up on the stage and knelt over MA. I began punching him. But he didn't seem to care. I told him that if he wasn't going to stop stalking me, I was going to destroy him physically, right now.

I was still either myself or my female friend. But now MA also looked a lot like my female friend. But I had bashed her face in. She was totally mutilated. I said something to her like, "See? This is what I can do to you if you don't stop!"

By this time I was no longer mad. It was more like I was illustrating something to MA. I pulled some photos out and showed them to her. They were black and white photos of some blonde movie star with her face completely disfigured. In one case, one of her cheeks was missing, exposing her gums -- most of her teeth were gone -- to the camera.

MA stood up and walked away. I was calling after him, talking to him about the photos. Now that I thought about the photos a little, I hoped that I hadn't actually done anything to MA. I hadn't really had proof that MA had been stalking me. Even if I'd had proof, should I really have done something like that to him?

Dream #3

Something about a fire somewhere. The fire had something to do with the name "le.i. revolution" or "le.i. cherry." A woman had given the news out about the fire. She'd been wearing a lot of mascara. Now her eyes had huge, black circles around them. But it wasn't like she'd been crying. It was more like she'd sustained some injury, and been through some kind of flood of water, that had caused her eyes to act in this way.

Dream #4

I was out on the edge of a lake at night. A fire truck that actually looked like a 1950s-style tow truck, was positioned above the water somehow.

The woman was on the roof of the truck, laying on it, stomach down, and clutching to it. Behind her, in the bed of the truck, were all kinds of old, rusty, metal objects. The woman was the same woman from the previous dream: young, blonde, pale, and kind of punky looiking. Her mascara wasn't running all over the place now, though.

The woman had told some man up above her that the "le.i. cherry" or "le.i. revolution" fire had occurred. It had affected the truck in some way. So now the truck was too damaged to use anymore. In fact, it may even have been possible that the truck itself was going to catch fire at any minute.

So the woman was having the man lower the truck down into the lake. The truck was attached by a thick, kind of rusty chain to some huge crane, which was dropping it into the water. The woman clung to the truck's roof, looking back up to the man and saying goodbye to him. The man was kind of fat and old, with a mustache and stubble. But it was plain the woman loved the man and was telling him goodbye.

I yelled to the woman, "Why do you need to die? Why do you even need to drop the truck into the lake? The truck might still work? Why don't you work on the truck and see if you can fix it, instead of just giving up on it?"

The woman said, "No, no. We don't do that. When a ship's going down, a captain goes down with his ship."

I could now see that both the woman and the man were holding to the top of the truck as it was being lowered into the lake. They were both planning to drown themselves with their fire truck. The fact that both the man and the woman were going to kill themselves made me feel less upset about the whole situation.