For a review of some of the images from these dreams, please visit this entry in my blog preemie: my life's (a) dream.
Dream 1
I was in a nice department store with a group of people. We may all have been young. We may also all have been dressed in 1980s clothes. We were all looking for clothes. We may have broken up into groups. I may have floated around alone for a while -- not walking, but floating around a few inches off the ground. At some point I may have ended up in front of a row of four mannequins in nice, satiny, lacy lingerie.
Dream 2
I walked, probably with an old woman, toward the back end of what was apparently a video rental store. The walls and floors were dark grey. And I don't remember whether there were any video display shelves up against the wall.
The old woman and I were probably talking about a room we were looking for. It basically had all the really graphic horror movies.
I found the door to the room, on our right. I opened the door, probably holding it for the woman. The woman thanked me, said she needed to be going, and walked away from the doorway, back the way we had come. It didn't make sense to me that she'd just up and walk away after we'd gone to such trouble looking for the room. But I was kind of relieved. I didn't want the old woman to see what kind of movies I liked.
The room was kind of big. There were only a few shelves of movies scattered throughout the room. I walked up to one shelve that stood against a grey, cinder block wall.
I could barely see what the movies were. But I started to get a weird, eerie feeling. I felt like if I got too close to these horror movies I'd unleash some sort of demon or monster in the room. But I didn't know what to do. I felt like I at least needed to get some movie. I may have started to think that if I grabbed the right horror movie, I wouldn't unleash a demon.
I walked to a set of shelves off to my left and looked there for a second before turning around and walking toward a set of shelves in the middle of the room. By this point I may simply have been looking over my shoulder the entire time, waiting for some kind of monster to come out and attack me.
Dream 3
I may have been in some city like Venice or Verona, but in modern times. I was in some place that felt like it was entirely made of polished stone or marble, like the dining area in Grand Central Station or some mall-like area in one of the Las Vegas resorts. The place was crowded with people in business suits running here and there.
I stood off to one side of a walkway. Caddy corner from me was a table where some people sat. The table may have been low, like a coffee table. And the people may have sat in all kinds of chairs -- a big, leather chair, smaller garden chairs, etc.
A businessman, probably a bit older, maybe in his late forties or early fifties, walked up. He probably said something I thought was horribly stiff and cheesy. I knew the man was a salesman. But because of his cheesy joke, I probably was immediately annoyed by him.
The salesman may have started, even while he was standing, giving some sort of sales pitch. I thought the sales pitch was hideous! The seated people invited the man to sit.
As the salesman sat, I either saw through his eyes or was now he. The people around the salesman were kind of a mixed group. They mostly looked like upper-mid-level business people, especially a blonde woman with short hair and a deep tan who wore a black skirt suit. But some of them looked a bit more relaxed, kind of like tough guys who had gotten fat as they'd aged.
The people were eating from a huge plate of pasta. One of the tough guys told the salesman to grab a plate. The salesman grabbed a plate and piled on some pasta. The pasta was just long spaghetti noodles, plain, apparently, with lots and lots of mozzarella cheese on top. The salesman shoveled the pasta into his mouth, holding the plate at mouth- or maybe even eye-level.
At some point the salesman started giving his sales pitch again. I still (even though I was seeing from the salesman's eyes) hated the pitch. But time started to fade forward. And I knew, even though the conversation was blurring out, that everybody the salesman spoke with had decided to buy what the salesman was selling.
Having witnessed the salesman's success, I immediately changed my mind about him. I knew that I'd probably never like the salesman's personality. But whatever steps he'd taken to get to the deal's close, I knew he'd done the right thing.
I thought through the steps I hadn't liked (whatever the cheesy beginning was) and the steps I'd been uncomfortable with (having to randomly eat a lot of food) and figured I'd have to really integrate a lot of this stuff into my own approach, because it worked.
My view was separated from the salesman's again. I was in a room with the salesman and a young woman who was probably the salesman's apprentice. I stood maybe three or four meters away from them.
We seemed to be in some weird sort of control room or something. The wall behind the woman and salesman was black, with a white screen, like a projector screen, and possibly, but maybe not, some sort of sci-fi-esque control panel underneath it. But off to my right (the salesman's left) was some orange, translucent wall, which I feel was the back side of some back wall in something like a display diorama in a museum.
The man started to explain the process of the deal I'd just seen with the young woman. As the man began to explain, my view faded to white. Then lines started to get scribbled out, like old drafting lines in a Leonardo sketch. The lines started to form some garden chair, which, I knew, was the chair the man had sat in when he'd made the deal (even though I was pretty sure he'd previously sat in one of the big, leather chairs).
The drawing sketched out more and more. The view of the drawing may also have rotated a bit. At some point, the drawing sort of faded into a real view of the area again.
I may have gotten a feeling that the lesson from this whole drawing moment was that even the manner of fabrication of the chair the salesman had sat in while making the deal was a part of the salesman's process. This seemed a bit outlandish to me. I hoped we would just get to the actual elements of the closing process.
Dream 4
I was in some large, dark room with a group of people. The people may have been young. Many or all of them were black. The walls and ceiling were probably black. The floor may have been concrete.
Set up around us were something like modular walls. But the walls made something more like a maze with room-like areas than a series of rooms. These modular walls were all screens. Bright, monochrome imagery probably played on the screens. There may also have been some kind of music or sound.
We were all part of some research project, probably for some conceptual art piece we were creating. This place may have been the installation we were making. But it was also probably something like a library or research area.
A few folks were on the ground, working on something like a computer but also like some machine for effects for the conceptual art piece. One of the people, a young, black man, asked me to look into some specific artists whose work or personality we were referencing in the piece.
I felt like I knew exactly who the young man was speaking about. I may even have said so. But I wasn't quite sure of everything I was saying. So I knew I'd need to double-check it with some additional research.
Another young, black man asked me if I knew that I was looking for information on a specific group of people (probably Sly and the Family Stone). I said yes. The man asked me if I'd like some help getting some specific information on them. He probably knew exact moments from history the other young man had been looking for. I said yes and was really appreciative.
The man may have asked me to come along with him to another room. But then he must instantly have been in that other room. I had to walk through the maze of screen walls. But I got to the room. It was a big, square room with an upright projector screen standing in the center above something like a small structure, like a small set of shelves or some kind of small, mechanical device.
The man may have been in the room when I was there. But he may already have been gone. He may have vanished only an instant after I'd seen him in the room. He may have been upset that it had taken me so long to get here. Or he may have waited for me to enter the room, let me know the information I'd needed to see was queued up to show on the screen, and then walked out of the room.
I watched the program. It was something like a Marvel movie. I clearly saw a character like Iron Man. I may have seen some other characters. The view was from a high, but not directly overhead, viewpoint, like a camera was at a steep angle, almost a right angle, that would eventually quickly swoop down to meet the characters (maybe including The Incredible Hulk?) face-to-face.
This whole program, however, was also an historical document. This was real film, from some real event that had happened, probably in the late 1960s. I'd learned whatever I'd needed to learn about the people I'd been sent to study. So now I headed back to discuss the information.
But when I got back to the first young man, I felt like I had taken way too much time. The young man may not have been annoyed by my slowness. But I may have felt like he noted it and would probably trust me less to run research projects in the future.
To justify my work, I tried to express what I'd learned -- probably, again, about Sly and the Family Stone. It took me a little bit of effort, but I started seeing what I'd seen on the screen in the other room. I planned to say everything to the young man as I re-saw all the imagery.
But I really don't think my mind was comfortable with the imagery at all. The imagery looked like computer graphics. The characters were all shiny, like they'd been made in the 1990s or 2000s. And everything just looked so comic book-like that I couldn't find anything in it like the type of historical gravity that would make me assume it was real.
I really started questioning whether I had seen what I'd needed to see after all. Had I seen the truth? Or had I just been queued up to watch a comic book movie?
Dream 5
(This dream occurred after I'd woken up, turned off my alarm, started recalling my previous dreams, and fallen back to sleep.)
I faded out of a memory of the dark room with the screen showing the historical imagery. Again, it all looked like a computer graphics comic book movie rather than an historical moment. So I just felt really weird. It was like I was trying to remember what I'd actually seen. I kept trying to look deeper into the imagery in order to see the real images.
But as I tried to do this, I may have been speaking about everything I'd seen. The more I spoke, the more my view faded, first into a white-out, and then into a huge office space.
The office space was enormous, like a giant trading floor for some large financial institution. It was vast and wide, filled with long rows of connected desk spaces, as opposed to cubicle farms. The room was huge. But the ceilings were kind of low, maybe only three meters high.
The only other person in this space was a young woman, my coworker, who sat directly across from me. She was white, with blonde-brown hair. I had apparently been telling her about my memory, which I may have known to have been a dream.
But even though it was a dream, it was also a reality. It was like something we did, maybe our job, maybe our hobby, maybe something related to our job but only peripherally, may have been related to exploring these alternate spaces, like the one I'd just explored, that were dreams, but were also real.
The discussion may have come back around to Sly and the Family Stone. The woman may have asked me if I knew who they were. I said yes. I may have thought she didn't know who they were, possibly because I couldn't figure out why she would have asked me that question.
So to give an example of a Sly and the Family Stone song, I started to sing "Everyday People." For the first few notes (really, just the "I" part), I sounded just like Sly Stone. But when the notes descended (the entire "am everyday people" part???!!!), I went way off key.
I knew I'd somehow made the melody unrecognizable. And, for sure, my coworker didn't recognize the song at all. I said I'd try again. It was one of the most popular pop songs around. She'd recognize it if I could just sing it right.
So I tried -- embarrassingly! -- a few more times. Every time, I would sound just like Sly Stone until a certain part in the descending notes. Then I'd just get everything horribly off key.
I thought that I realized that where I was making a mistake was in that descending part. I somehow wasn't going low enough. So now I tried to go really low. I sang the melody again. The melody was recognizable. But now I slid really, really low, so that I probably sang the words "everyday people" an octave lower than I'd needed to.
But I thought that maybe this was right. After all, I remembered some song I really liked where the melody got really low, in a way that had seemed both inventive and irreverent at the same time. Maybe "Everyday People" had been that song.
During all this time, my vision had probably faded back into darkness, like I was in some dark area between the office space and the dark room with the video playing -- maybe with my face close to one of the screen walls.
But now my view snapped back to the office space. My coworker said that the screen maze and the historical imagery that had played reminded her a lot of the work of some recent (French?) philosopher -- someone whose name was like Georges Sumner.
I knew who my coworker was talking about before she'd said his name. So I may have tried to say his name before my coworker did. But I don't think I could quite say it. I think I may have felt a little defeated because of this, like I was just getting nothing right today.
My coworker said I'd really like the philosopher's works (even though I was pretty sure I'd already read them). She handed me two of his books.
The books themselves looked and felt nice. They had that slightly grainy feel, like the covers of the Vintage International Faulkners from the 1990s. But the art on the covers was a bit more abstract. The imagery had a handmade, collage-like feel, so that, by contraries, I got the sense that the books were probably theory or philosophy about the high-tech media age. So even though I was pretty sure I'd already read the books, I was kind of eager to read them again.
I probably sat down at this point. I probably also had the feeling that the fact that my coworker shared these books with me probably demonstrated that we were pretty good friends and colleagues. This probably made me happy, even though I was still embarrassed about not having been able to get anything right at all in our conversation just now.
Showing posts with label making sales call. Show all posts
Showing posts with label making sales call. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Saturday, January 12, 2013
international engineering schools; cat shit; old BS; emotional sales call
Good morning, everybody.
Dream #1
I can't quite remember where I was at first. I had been having a conversation with a group of people, probably including my mother. Those people then went away. We had all been together at one location. But now we were split apart.
I may have been trying to figure out how to get back to some of the people, at least my mother. But the people were all so far away. It was like I was in the mountains and they were somewhere else, maybe in a completely different mountain range, and that my only means of getting to that other place would imply a lot of trudging and tediousness.
I was probably still in the mountains -- a sunny slope of copper pine-needle-strewn, dusty soil, with thin-trunked trees here and there around me. Before me were two women who I may have thought of as being from India. They were mother and daughter, both skinny, wearing shirts like modern t-shirts and skirts like colorful, traditional Indian skirts.
The women had explained to me either how the daughter or the daughter's lover, a beautiful, strong, young man, was going away to school in Mexico. Either the mother or both women were now trying to figure out where to live in order to be closer to the school, so that a visit to the school could be made on a somewhat frequent basis, like once a month or once a week.
I explained to the women that if they lived in India, they could take a sailing passage down straight through to Mexico. This didn't quite make sense to me (even in my dream, where usually anything makes sense!).
I was now floating over either a map of the world or the world itself. I was only getting very tight views, which were never quite in alignment with exactly what I wanted to see. But I did get the idea from everything that there was a channel of water that connected, through India, around Eastern Europe, then down under Southern Europe, then alongside the northeastern edge of South America, which was apparently where Mexico was located. Some parts of the map blinked colors like a bruisy red, indicating key locations along the journey. One of these points was the location of the university in Mexico.
One land mass struck me as very interesting. It was a large island. I thought it should have been a country itself, it was so large. But I couldn't think of what country it could be. Somehow I made my view flash the names of all the countries I was seeing. This large island still had no name over it.
But something, some words flashing over it, made me realize that the island was either the property of a number of nations or a neutral zone that was the property of no nation. But either one or a number of nations were using this island as a place for military tests, or else it struck me personally that this island would be a good place for military tests.
As I tried to figure out more about this island, to figure out exactly where it was, the mother began speaking again. She told me that the daughter's father (?) had gone abroad for university as well. I imagined the father in a black and white photo, with kind of pale skin, a broad, square jaw, wavy hair combed back a bit, and thin, pudgy eyes. The mother spoke about the father not as if he'd ever been her husband, but as if he'd been a fairy tale male figure in the life of some other, fairy-tale-like woman the mother had known, possibly a woman very much like the mother saw the daughter as being.
The mother told me that the father had gone to the XXXXX School for Electrical Engineering. She said it almost apologetically, like there was some stigma of a lower level of education or lower cultural class from a school devoted only to electrical engineering. The school had, actually, struck me at first as not being a great school. But I wanted to defend the mother's emotions and let her think that the school was good.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the school was probably a very good school. It was the school, I now reflected, of electrical engineering for the entire nation of XXXXX. In the United States, I knew, we had schools for electrical engineering for entire states, such as, I told myself, the XXXXX School for Electrical Engineering.
My view was now of the mountain slope and the two women again. I tried to tell the mother about the XXXXX School for Electrical Engineering in the United States. But I didn't express very well what a prestigious school it was. The mother said there was another school like it. I thought of MIT, though I couldn't remember what the acronym stood for. I told the mother that MIT was a good school, and that the people from there were known for being highly cultured as well as very proficient at electrical engineering.
The mother now told me a story about the father -- now, possibly, as if the father actually had been the mother's husband. But the mother now looked a lot different. She was square-framed, possibly overweight, with baggy, turtle-like skin, saggy, pale eyes, and pale red-brown hair. She wore a pink-tan or orange-tan t-shirt that somehow didn't fit her very well, like it was skewed or crooked on her body.
The mother told a story about postcards, and possibly letters, the father would send back home. The letters were apparently diligent and romantic. But they may also have had some comic, eccentric element to them. The father's method of sending the postcards may also have been eccentric somehow.
The mother kept using the word "she" when she spoke about the father. It was like she wasn't very good at English. She would say "she" when using the pronoun in the nominative sense. But when using a possessive pronoun referring to the father, she'd said "his." Occasionally she may have mixed things up even further by switching up and saying "he" and "her."
The mother may have been slightly aware of her mistake. She may even have tried to apologize for it at some point. But it became clear that she was moving through her story as quickly as she could, and struggling hard to state everything else as clearly as she could in English, and still only achieving a halting relation of her story. So she simply couldn't take the time to get every pronoun's gender correct. I did my best to listen to the mother without showing any sign that I was even aware of her mistakes.
Dream #2
I was laying on a couch in a big living room. The couch was all done up as a bed, with sheets, blankets, etc. My head lay on one of the arms of the couch. The couch was probably near a window, through which moonlight probably shone.
A cat was now on the couch with me. And instead of laying with my head on the arm of the couch, I was curled up in some strange position, so that my head was near the center of the couch, but my arms and legs were both pointed toward the same arm of the couch. I was probably also leaning against the back of the couch.
The cat had been sitting on my legs and arms. It now stood up and defecated on my hands. It just kept crapping and crapping. Before long, a few long, warm pieces of crap were piled on my hands. The cat then jumped off the couch and walked away.
I either stood up or figured I would have to stand up soon. I knew I'd need to clean the crap off my hands and the couch. But I also had to do something to the cat itself. I may have needed to clean the cat, so as, somehow retroactively, to clean the feces that had come out of the cat. I may also have thought I'd need to teach the cat to use a litter box. This also would have some kind of retroactive effect on the feces already on the couch. I may also have thought I'd need (or want?) to punish the cat by hitting it hard.
Dream #3
I was in a room that was like a living room or a bedroom in a suburban house. The room was probably unfurnished. The walls were white. The floor was white carpet. There were some windows high up on the wall letting in stark, white sunlight -- though the light may somehow have been blocked by gauzy curtains or by some kind of fabric around my own head. I sat all wrapped up in blankets on the floor. I was leaning against something like the bottom of an overturned armchair, pressing myself against a black, mesh-like fabric.
I was listening to a conversation in a conference room. BS, my old boss from a few years ago, was speaking with some other person. The other person was telling BS how some young man had done a really good job on some project. The young man had put a lot of effort into the project, and the project had, apparently, made a lot of money for the company. So the other person felt it was only right to give the young man a raise.
But BS -- who may not even have worked for the same company as the young man and the other man! -- didn't feel that was right. BS was obviously feeling greedy for money and glory, and didn't want to portion any of it out to any other person -- especially a young man. This was all obvious in some initial, non-verbal, grunts and moans BS gave in reaction to what the other man had said. Then BS started trying to give an intelligent-sounding reasoning for why the young man deserved neither a raise, a promotion, nor recognition.
This all sounded horribly characteristic of BS to me. I felt like I needed to call BS on his creepy demeanor this time around -- if not to defend myself against what I felt he had done to me, then at least to defend another person from being victim to the same thing that had been done to me. But I may have realized, at some point, that BS and the other man had been speaking about me.
I now saw that behind the black, mesh-like fabric against which I was pressing myself (which was now at the bottom of something more like a kitchen chair than an armchair) was a Polycom conference call phone unit. I had been hearing the conversation via this unit. I also realized that my line wasn't muted. So I could speak into the room and be heard.
So, right in the middle of BS' speech on why the young man shouldn't be granted anything, I simply called out, "Ah... Old BS!" I pronounced his whole name, slowly, like an old radio announcer.
BS immediately recognized my voice. He was angry that an eavesdropper had caught him in a conversation. But he was infuriated that I personally was the eavesdropper. He shouted in rage, his shout increasing sharply in intensity.
Dream #4
I was in a room like a basement living room. There were some other people, probably young men and women, in the room. But the room was mostly dark, and I really couldn't see the other people. The other people sat close to each other. But I was kind of separated from them. We may all have been sitting on the floor, under blankets, though I may have been standing at first. The only light coming into the room was from the top of a stairwell. It was natural light, but only a few slivers of light came down into the room.
This room may have been "my office." But it may also have been some place where I and the rest of the group -- probably my co-workers -- were having some get-together or party, maybe even a slumber party. But I was still working, even though we were at this party. It may have been that we were all just waking up after the night of the slumber party, and that I was now trying to catch up on a little bit of work.
I was on an iPhone, speaking to a person in some company. I was trying to locate the head of the company, so I could make a sales pitch to that person. I was speaking with a woman who was, at first, something like the receptionist for the company.
But as I continued speaking with the woman she became something more like the daughter of the head person in the company, or possibly even one of the head people in the company herself, though she was probably still devoted to the head person as if the head person were her father. The woman, I knew was a young, black, pretty, but very stable, solid-bodied, and professional woman.
The woman at first began by acting as if she didn't have time for me and didn't want to pass me along to anybody else within the company. But as I continued my pitch and continued asking for a higher-level person within the organization, the woman got more upset. It was like I was somehow playing with her emotions in a bad way.
Somehow the family relations within this company were in disarray. It became apparent that the woman couldn't discuss the higher-level person because it made her unbearably sad. She was now so dazed by her sadness that she couldn't even carry on a coherent conversation. She told me that she had to get off the phone and that, if she felt the need to do so, she'd get back to me.
I hung up the phone. The iPhone's face was full of icons and had a lava-red background. I now stood closer to the rest of the people in the basement. I felt a little ashamed. They'd obviously just heard my whole conversation. I was a little ashamed, first of all, that I'd been caught working at a time like this, when everybody else was either sleeping or having fun. But I also felt a little ashamed that I'd been caught putting the woman on the phone into such a bad emotional state.
Now the woman called back. She was still audibly rattled by whatever emotions my sales pitch had drawn up in her. But she had put a mask of order and professional retaliation over her distress. She was speaking to me about something -- perhaps about how nobody in her company would be interested in speaking to me. But something about what she was saying also made it sound like the woman had actually gotten in contact with her lawyers, in order to press charges against me for the emotional turmoil I'd put her through.
I may have tried to justify my actions to myself, to prove to myself that there was no way the woman could bring any charges against me. But I may not have been able to do so. I may have thought that, in my carelessness, I had done something, some little thing that was now slipping my mind, that would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was guilty of wrongly injuring this woman emotionally.
Dream #1
I can't quite remember where I was at first. I had been having a conversation with a group of people, probably including my mother. Those people then went away. We had all been together at one location. But now we were split apart.
I may have been trying to figure out how to get back to some of the people, at least my mother. But the people were all so far away. It was like I was in the mountains and they were somewhere else, maybe in a completely different mountain range, and that my only means of getting to that other place would imply a lot of trudging and tediousness.
I was probably still in the mountains -- a sunny slope of copper pine-needle-strewn, dusty soil, with thin-trunked trees here and there around me. Before me were two women who I may have thought of as being from India. They were mother and daughter, both skinny, wearing shirts like modern t-shirts and skirts like colorful, traditional Indian skirts.
The women had explained to me either how the daughter or the daughter's lover, a beautiful, strong, young man, was going away to school in Mexico. Either the mother or both women were now trying to figure out where to live in order to be closer to the school, so that a visit to the school could be made on a somewhat frequent basis, like once a month or once a week.
I explained to the women that if they lived in India, they could take a sailing passage down straight through to Mexico. This didn't quite make sense to me (even in my dream, where usually anything makes sense!).
I was now floating over either a map of the world or the world itself. I was only getting very tight views, which were never quite in alignment with exactly what I wanted to see. But I did get the idea from everything that there was a channel of water that connected, through India, around Eastern Europe, then down under Southern Europe, then alongside the northeastern edge of South America, which was apparently where Mexico was located. Some parts of the map blinked colors like a bruisy red, indicating key locations along the journey. One of these points was the location of the university in Mexico.
One land mass struck me as very interesting. It was a large island. I thought it should have been a country itself, it was so large. But I couldn't think of what country it could be. Somehow I made my view flash the names of all the countries I was seeing. This large island still had no name over it.
But something, some words flashing over it, made me realize that the island was either the property of a number of nations or a neutral zone that was the property of no nation. But either one or a number of nations were using this island as a place for military tests, or else it struck me personally that this island would be a good place for military tests.
As I tried to figure out more about this island, to figure out exactly where it was, the mother began speaking again. She told me that the daughter's father (?) had gone abroad for university as well. I imagined the father in a black and white photo, with kind of pale skin, a broad, square jaw, wavy hair combed back a bit, and thin, pudgy eyes. The mother spoke about the father not as if he'd ever been her husband, but as if he'd been a fairy tale male figure in the life of some other, fairy-tale-like woman the mother had known, possibly a woman very much like the mother saw the daughter as being.
The mother told me that the father had gone to the XXXXX School for Electrical Engineering. She said it almost apologetically, like there was some stigma of a lower level of education or lower cultural class from a school devoted only to electrical engineering. The school had, actually, struck me at first as not being a great school. But I wanted to defend the mother's emotions and let her think that the school was good.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the school was probably a very good school. It was the school, I now reflected, of electrical engineering for the entire nation of XXXXX. In the United States, I knew, we had schools for electrical engineering for entire states, such as, I told myself, the XXXXX School for Electrical Engineering.
My view was now of the mountain slope and the two women again. I tried to tell the mother about the XXXXX School for Electrical Engineering in the United States. But I didn't express very well what a prestigious school it was. The mother said there was another school like it. I thought of MIT, though I couldn't remember what the acronym stood for. I told the mother that MIT was a good school, and that the people from there were known for being highly cultured as well as very proficient at electrical engineering.
The mother now told me a story about the father -- now, possibly, as if the father actually had been the mother's husband. But the mother now looked a lot different. She was square-framed, possibly overweight, with baggy, turtle-like skin, saggy, pale eyes, and pale red-brown hair. She wore a pink-tan or orange-tan t-shirt that somehow didn't fit her very well, like it was skewed or crooked on her body.
The mother told a story about postcards, and possibly letters, the father would send back home. The letters were apparently diligent and romantic. But they may also have had some comic, eccentric element to them. The father's method of sending the postcards may also have been eccentric somehow.
The mother kept using the word "she" when she spoke about the father. It was like she wasn't very good at English. She would say "she" when using the pronoun in the nominative sense. But when using a possessive pronoun referring to the father, she'd said "his." Occasionally she may have mixed things up even further by switching up and saying "he" and "her."
The mother may have been slightly aware of her mistake. She may even have tried to apologize for it at some point. But it became clear that she was moving through her story as quickly as she could, and struggling hard to state everything else as clearly as she could in English, and still only achieving a halting relation of her story. So she simply couldn't take the time to get every pronoun's gender correct. I did my best to listen to the mother without showing any sign that I was even aware of her mistakes.
Dream #2
I was laying on a couch in a big living room. The couch was all done up as a bed, with sheets, blankets, etc. My head lay on one of the arms of the couch. The couch was probably near a window, through which moonlight probably shone.
A cat was now on the couch with me. And instead of laying with my head on the arm of the couch, I was curled up in some strange position, so that my head was near the center of the couch, but my arms and legs were both pointed toward the same arm of the couch. I was probably also leaning against the back of the couch.
The cat had been sitting on my legs and arms. It now stood up and defecated on my hands. It just kept crapping and crapping. Before long, a few long, warm pieces of crap were piled on my hands. The cat then jumped off the couch and walked away.
I either stood up or figured I would have to stand up soon. I knew I'd need to clean the crap off my hands and the couch. But I also had to do something to the cat itself. I may have needed to clean the cat, so as, somehow retroactively, to clean the feces that had come out of the cat. I may also have thought I'd need to teach the cat to use a litter box. This also would have some kind of retroactive effect on the feces already on the couch. I may also have thought I'd need (or want?) to punish the cat by hitting it hard.
Dream #3
I was in a room that was like a living room or a bedroom in a suburban house. The room was probably unfurnished. The walls were white. The floor was white carpet. There were some windows high up on the wall letting in stark, white sunlight -- though the light may somehow have been blocked by gauzy curtains or by some kind of fabric around my own head. I sat all wrapped up in blankets on the floor. I was leaning against something like the bottom of an overturned armchair, pressing myself against a black, mesh-like fabric.
I was listening to a conversation in a conference room. BS, my old boss from a few years ago, was speaking with some other person. The other person was telling BS how some young man had done a really good job on some project. The young man had put a lot of effort into the project, and the project had, apparently, made a lot of money for the company. So the other person felt it was only right to give the young man a raise.
But BS -- who may not even have worked for the same company as the young man and the other man! -- didn't feel that was right. BS was obviously feeling greedy for money and glory, and didn't want to portion any of it out to any other person -- especially a young man. This was all obvious in some initial, non-verbal, grunts and moans BS gave in reaction to what the other man had said. Then BS started trying to give an intelligent-sounding reasoning for why the young man deserved neither a raise, a promotion, nor recognition.
This all sounded horribly characteristic of BS to me. I felt like I needed to call BS on his creepy demeanor this time around -- if not to defend myself against what I felt he had done to me, then at least to defend another person from being victim to the same thing that had been done to me. But I may have realized, at some point, that BS and the other man had been speaking about me.
I now saw that behind the black, mesh-like fabric against which I was pressing myself (which was now at the bottom of something more like a kitchen chair than an armchair) was a Polycom conference call phone unit. I had been hearing the conversation via this unit. I also realized that my line wasn't muted. So I could speak into the room and be heard.
So, right in the middle of BS' speech on why the young man shouldn't be granted anything, I simply called out, "Ah... Old BS!" I pronounced his whole name, slowly, like an old radio announcer.
BS immediately recognized my voice. He was angry that an eavesdropper had caught him in a conversation. But he was infuriated that I personally was the eavesdropper. He shouted in rage, his shout increasing sharply in intensity.
Dream #4
I was in a room like a basement living room. There were some other people, probably young men and women, in the room. But the room was mostly dark, and I really couldn't see the other people. The other people sat close to each other. But I was kind of separated from them. We may all have been sitting on the floor, under blankets, though I may have been standing at first. The only light coming into the room was from the top of a stairwell. It was natural light, but only a few slivers of light came down into the room.
This room may have been "my office." But it may also have been some place where I and the rest of the group -- probably my co-workers -- were having some get-together or party, maybe even a slumber party. But I was still working, even though we were at this party. It may have been that we were all just waking up after the night of the slumber party, and that I was now trying to catch up on a little bit of work.
I was on an iPhone, speaking to a person in some company. I was trying to locate the head of the company, so I could make a sales pitch to that person. I was speaking with a woman who was, at first, something like the receptionist for the company.
But as I continued speaking with the woman she became something more like the daughter of the head person in the company, or possibly even one of the head people in the company herself, though she was probably still devoted to the head person as if the head person were her father. The woman, I knew was a young, black, pretty, but very stable, solid-bodied, and professional woman.
The woman at first began by acting as if she didn't have time for me and didn't want to pass me along to anybody else within the company. But as I continued my pitch and continued asking for a higher-level person within the organization, the woman got more upset. It was like I was somehow playing with her emotions in a bad way.
Somehow the family relations within this company were in disarray. It became apparent that the woman couldn't discuss the higher-level person because it made her unbearably sad. She was now so dazed by her sadness that she couldn't even carry on a coherent conversation. She told me that she had to get off the phone and that, if she felt the need to do so, she'd get back to me.
I hung up the phone. The iPhone's face was full of icons and had a lava-red background. I now stood closer to the rest of the people in the basement. I felt a little ashamed. They'd obviously just heard my whole conversation. I was a little ashamed, first of all, that I'd been caught working at a time like this, when everybody else was either sleeping or having fun. But I also felt a little ashamed that I'd been caught putting the woman on the phone into such a bad emotional state.
Now the woman called back. She was still audibly rattled by whatever emotions my sales pitch had drawn up in her. But she had put a mask of order and professional retaliation over her distress. She was speaking to me about something -- perhaps about how nobody in her company would be interested in speaking to me. But something about what she was saying also made it sound like the woman had actually gotten in contact with her lawyers, in order to press charges against me for the emotional turmoil I'd put her through.
I may have tried to justify my actions to myself, to prove to myself that there was no way the woman could bring any charges against me. But I may not have been able to do so. I may have thought that, in my carelessness, I had done something, some little thing that was now slipping my mind, that would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was guilty of wrongly injuring this woman emotionally.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
something i don't know; family sickness
Good morning, everybody.
Dream #1
I was at an office desk, on the phone. I was staring down at the grey base of the phone. I had just started a sales call with someone. The person on the other end of the phone was some business manager. He told me, "I already know the basics of your product. I don't have time for you to tell me all the stuff I already know. Tell me something I don't already know."
I knew there were a few little things I could tell the man that he didn't know. But I also knew that it was protocol, for the company I worked at, to give the basic overview of the company. I was bound to do it. I thought, however, that I would shorten the overview for the person.
So I started the overview, beginning with the date and the reason of the company's founding. But as soon as I'd started that little overview, I could hear the man sigh and then hang up the phone. I called out, "Hello? Hello?" hoping the man was still there. But he was gone.
Dream #2
I was in a hospital or doctor's office with my mother. We had just finished taking care of something, either for my mom or my sister. My sister had been with us, but now she was out in the car. My mom and I walked out of the building and into the bright, calm, yellow daylight.
I had been a little upset that my sister had gone out to wait in the car. I felt like she'd gone out there either because she was annoyed that she'd had to wait so long for the thing we'd been doing, or else because something either my mom or I had done had annoyed her.
But my mom told me that, really, my sister was just upset at the gravity of the situation, and that she couldn't stay within that situation for very long without feeling overwhelmed. The way my mom was talking, I felt like my sister's anxiety may have had more to do with an illness my sister had, rather than with an illness my mother had. (In waking life, my family is currently dealing with the fact that my mom is having some serious, though temporary, physical problems.)
I approached the family vehicle. It was like a van, but the cabin's floor seemed really low to the ground, and the ceiling seemed to extend 30cm or so higher than the ceiling of a normal van. My sister sat in the front passenger seat. For some reason I may now have felt like my mom was gone. Maybe she'd stayed in the hospital. My mom had driven my sister out her. But now I had to drive my sister back somewhere, probably back to her house.
Looking at my sister as she sat in the car, I could see that she was sick, as my mom had told me. My sister looked very strange, overall. She was so tall her head almost hit the ceiling. She also seemed much dumpier and more overweight than usual -- but extremely pear shaped, so that her head looked grotesquely thin. Her complexion also had a greenish pale pallor.
Dream #1
I was at an office desk, on the phone. I was staring down at the grey base of the phone. I had just started a sales call with someone. The person on the other end of the phone was some business manager. He told me, "I already know the basics of your product. I don't have time for you to tell me all the stuff I already know. Tell me something I don't already know."
I knew there were a few little things I could tell the man that he didn't know. But I also knew that it was protocol, for the company I worked at, to give the basic overview of the company. I was bound to do it. I thought, however, that I would shorten the overview for the person.
So I started the overview, beginning with the date and the reason of the company's founding. But as soon as I'd started that little overview, I could hear the man sigh and then hang up the phone. I called out, "Hello? Hello?" hoping the man was still there. But he was gone.
Dream #2
I was in a hospital or doctor's office with my mother. We had just finished taking care of something, either for my mom or my sister. My sister had been with us, but now she was out in the car. My mom and I walked out of the building and into the bright, calm, yellow daylight.
I had been a little upset that my sister had gone out to wait in the car. I felt like she'd gone out there either because she was annoyed that she'd had to wait so long for the thing we'd been doing, or else because something either my mom or I had done had annoyed her.
But my mom told me that, really, my sister was just upset at the gravity of the situation, and that she couldn't stay within that situation for very long without feeling overwhelmed. The way my mom was talking, I felt like my sister's anxiety may have had more to do with an illness my sister had, rather than with an illness my mother had. (In waking life, my family is currently dealing with the fact that my mom is having some serious, though temporary, physical problems.)
I approached the family vehicle. It was like a van, but the cabin's floor seemed really low to the ground, and the ceiling seemed to extend 30cm or so higher than the ceiling of a normal van. My sister sat in the front passenger seat. For some reason I may now have felt like my mom was gone. Maybe she'd stayed in the hospital. My mom had driven my sister out her. But now I had to drive my sister back somewhere, probably back to her house.
Looking at my sister as she sat in the car, I could see that she was sick, as my mom had told me. My sister looked very strange, overall. She was so tall her head almost hit the ceiling. She also seemed much dumpier and more overweight than usual -- but extremely pear shaped, so that her head looked grotesquely thin. Her complexion also had a greenish pale pallor.
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