enough propeller oil; angry twitter man; city council faux pas

Dream 1

I may have been in a suburban neighborhood in the daytime. I may have been dropped off here by someone, possibly my brother or another family member. The street I was walking down may have been level, but it may also have been at the crest of a steep slope of blocks and blocks of residential houses.

I may have been imagining some sort of conversation I would have with someone about an airplane flight I'd taken. I may just have been dropped off from this airplane flight. Some people had thought that the flight or the plane wasn't very good. But I thought it was, and I was imagining a conversation about why I'd thought it was good. My brother had possibly been the pilot.

I had walked clockwise down one block and then another. I'd ended up in something like a wooded park. I turned right and started walking down a path.

I was still imagining the conversation. But now I had to run. Apparently the plane was waiting for me. I had to catch it before it left. My mother was probably running beside me. We ran down a wide, gully-like path.

The airplane -- a big, silvery plane like from World War II -- was somewhere. Then we were on the plane. I was in the hollowed-out back area, which had no windows. My mom was probably up front, in the pilot's cabin, probably with my brother, who was flying the plane. I was still imagining the conversation I would have with people who didn't think this flight or plane was good.

We lifted up into the air. But it was also still somehow like I wasn't on the plane yet -- maybe even like I hadn't decided whether I wanted to be on the plane.

I could see somehow that the plane's propellers -- this was a prop plane -- were having some kind of trouble.

Some part of my vision was now up in the pilot's cabin. Somehow my brother made it known that some sort of tubes that went to the propellers were either out of or very low on oil. This sounded kind of scary to me at first. But then my brother made it known that there was enough oil remaining to get us to wherever we were headed, but that after we got there, we'd definitely need to put more oil in.

I was still in the windowless back part of the plane. But I could see, either through the windows of the pilot's cabin or from some point of view outside the plane, that we'd lifted up over a tall hill in the park.

I still wasn't sure I wanted to be on this flight. But I knew we were already on our way. So I couldn't get off the plane. But I reassured myself, and the people I was having a conversation with in my head, that everything would be okay. I felt like the oil situation had been monitored well.

Dream 2

I had probably posted something on Twitter about some event, maybe some kind of pop culture convention. I'd probably posted a few tweets about how I was excited for the event or how I had really enjoyed the event. I'd probably then posted a tweet that was just a quote, or my paraphrase of a quote, from one of the people who ran the event, possibly the top person in charge of the event.

The person I'd tweeted about, however, was really angry about my tweet. I imagined the person as a white man, bald on the top of his head, but possibly with long, white hair on the sides of his head and a grey mustache that flowed down into a long, white beard.

I read the man's reactions to my tweet and could feel the anger coming from the man. The man felt I'd misquoted him or totally misrepresented him somehow. He told me I should delete all the tweets related to him and his event. He then implied he was even going to try and get my account deleted.

I was now out on a soccer field during the daytime. A game was going on, probably between teenage boys. But it was way off in the distance, and the boys were all so close to the far goal, so they seemed even farther away. Yet at other times it felt like they were pretty close to me.

I may have been trying to get closer to the game -- not to play, but just to see how it was progressing. But I may also have felt unwelcome in the game. And I also may have felt like the angry man was in charge of the game or playing in the game. So I really didn't want to get too close.

The man's Twitter tirade continued during all of this. Somehow the man had started direct messaging me on Twitter. I may have thought this was weird. I was pretty sure he and I were not following each other.

But the man had also managed to connect our conversation with some young woman who was some head person over at Twitter. This three-way conversation probably took place via direct messaging, though it also seemed to take place over the public Twitter feed.

The man was basically trying to get Twitter to delete my account. The woman was sort of defending me. She couldn't see exactly what I'd done wrong. I hadn't misrepresented the man. I'd quoted him directly. She could sort of see that.

But then the woman responded to the man that a lot of times people on Twitter get super-excited about things and post a lot of tweets about whatever they're excited about. The woman was basically implying that I had posted too many tweets about the event, and that the volume of tweets was getting the man all confused, so that it was sort of understandable that the man would eventually feel misrepresented by my statements.

I felt like the woman was actually still trying to defend me. At the very least, she was trying to get the angry man to back off, simply because she found it annoying that he was trying to make sure shut down someone's account. Nevertheless, it was also clear that the woman wasn't on my side, even if she was defending me, and that she -- and possibly even all of Twitter -- found it annoying that I was posting so much about so many things.

I felt like the woman was already starting to be on the fence about whether she should shut down my Twitter account. I had a feeling that the only reason she hadn't already decided to shut down my Twitter account was because she didn't actually know me -- she couldn't actually see me. If she could actually see me, she'd most likely dislike me and firmly decide to shut my account down.

I was now close to a soccer goal. I didn't see any players. But I could probably feel their presence somewhere around me.

I felt like I needed to make a case for myself, to prove that I had not misrepresented the man, that I hadn't even posted very many tweets about the man's event, and that the tweets I'd posted had all been fact-based -- nothing editorial or based on my own opinions or emotions.

I wasn't looking at my phone at all. But somehow, out walking on the soccer field, I was searching for my tweets about the man's event. I couldn't find them. There was some reason for this -- possibly that I'd posted too many other tweets, so that it was now impossible for me to find these specific tweets; or possibly that the man's event had, after all, been so obscure and ill-attended-to, that it was nearly impossible to find any news about it, including my own tweets.

I was in some black room -- possibly a bedroom (or a baby's nursery, but with adult beds in it, too?), possibly my own bedroom, or possibly a bedroom that had been my bedroom but was now partly vacated, as I'd moved out of this bedroom but was still getting stuff out of it. I was lying on a bed. I may have been looking at my phone at first. But now I'd slung the hand my phone was in up over my head and off the edge of the bed.

I may have found enough tweets to prove to the woman that I'd only tweeted a few fact-based tweets about the man's event. But I may still have been uncertain about tweeting these tweets to the woman.

I was probably now on the floor in the room, laying on my stomach or sitting up in some lazy style. I may have been looking at my phone now. But whatever I was looking at was really hard to see and read. I started feeling like maybe the tweets I'd pulled up were really bad examples of whatever I was trying to prove to the woman. I hesitated about sending the tweets. I knew if they weren't good, the woman would get fed up with me once and for all and decide to delete my account like the angry man had told her to.

Dream 3

I was in some sort of official public space. I was in a kind of big room that was full of people. Earlier on I may have been near a food truck. The food truck may have been outside. But it may also have been in this room. While I was at the food truck I may have seen the president of my city council. I may have gotten what I'd needed from the food truck then turned away.

I was now at a doorway out of the room and into another big, full room. My view may have been partly obscured by the doorway.

My city council president walked up to me. He was angry. He pointed his finger at my chest and told me either that I'd said something to offend him or that I'd offended him by not doing something he'd needed me to do.

I told the president that I hadn't done whatever he'd thought I'd done. It was pretty obvious to me that I hadn't. I just needed to point out the obvious to him. But he wouldn't believe me.

He may now have been gone. I still felt like it would be pretty easy to convince him that I hadn't done what he'd thought I'd done. But as I tried, I found it harder and harder to remember the exact evidence that I actually only done good things for him. This may have gotten more and more frustrating to me, as I may possibly have felt that I couldn't actually move from one room to the next without feeling confident that I could present this evidence to the city council president.

turtle children

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was standing out on a bridge over a river with my mother and my sister. We were in a pine forest in the mountains. The ground was mostly grey, and the sun was hidden behind the mountains, so that the atmosphere around us was a chill blue-grey. The bridge was hefty and stout, and it stood maybe seven meters above the river. The river was wide, a little shallow, with rushes of water occasionally broken by small boulders.

My mom was talking to me, probably about some family gossip that I really didn't want to hear about. I had turned away a bit and was looking down to the river. I was surprised to see two turtles swimming in the water. They were bigger than any turtles I'd seen in the wild: their shells were about a meter long. The turtles were so big I assumed they must have been sea turtles.

Hoping I wouldn't make my mom think I was trying to change the subject, I cried out, "Look! It's sea turtles!" I was now surprised to see the heads of the turtles. The heads, which were submerged under the rushing water, were a bright, vivid green-yellow, and as round and wrinkle-free as the head of a cartoon turtle.

The turtles' shells were now gone, as if the turtles had gotten out of their shells. I knew my mom wouldn't believe me about the turtles if she couldn't see their shells. But I was more surprised to see how strongly, swimming around in the water, the turtles' bright, green bodies resembled the bodies of human beings.

I was trying to think how I could prove to my mom that the swimming creatures were actually the "sea turtles" I'd seen. But I was more concerned with trying to prove to myself that these creatures were actually turtles. They resembled humans. But, I thought, that's only because they actually are (???!!!) evolutionarily very close to humans. And they weren't wrinkled at all. But, I considered, the wrinkly appearance of turtles only came, after all, from their being stuck in their shells.

Now three turtles stood up onto a wide, flat rock almost directly under the bridge. But the two green turtles were gone, and these three turtles were a pinkish purple, mottled on their backs with black spots like leopard spots, though I may have thought of them as giraffe spots.

The three turtles looked just like three little, naked girls, except that their heads were bald and a little more bulbous than human heads. I may have had the idea that these turtles, or turtles in general, were not just closely related to humans, but were actually a part of some extraterrestrial race.

I probably kept waiting for the two green turtles to show up. And I probably still kept hoping for a turtle to get back into its shell, so I could prove to my mom that I'd seen a sea turtle.

cemetery security

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was standing out at a mausoleum. It may have been late in the day, after sunset. The sky may have been a dim grey-blue. The mausoleum was a two- or three-story building, with a rectangular, cantilevered design, with a couple staircases made out of porous, white stone. There was a big, tall window in the center of the facade. Two staircases went up the building on either side of the tall window.

All along in front of the building was a plaza, also made of the porous, white stone. There may have been a rectangular pond somewhere along the plaza. Off to my right and left may have been asphalt paths on rolling hills, obscured by smaller structures and manicured, juniper-like shrubs.

My mom now stood out with me on the plaza. She may have been looking for a good place to put the remains of her mother, who had recently died. But my mom was reluctant to put my grandma in any cemetery. Every neighborhood with a cemetery seemed to be a bad neighborhood. My mom was afraid the people in the neighborhood would steal my grandma's remains or vandalize her gravesite.

I tried to convince my mom that this place, however, was good. This cemetery was part of a chain of cemeteries. I'd visited other cemeteries in this chain, maybe even in a forgotten past of this dream. I knew that the cemeteries all had a very good, very covert security system. In fact, I knew, the cemeteries all made a little, pleasant game out of tricking thieves and vandals into thinking they were safe, and then catching them on video, so they could be prosecuted.

I knew that security cameras were all over the building, pointing out at the plaza. I tried to point out some of the security cameras. I knew where they should be, given my inspection of the other cemeteries, which were basically identical. But I couldn't locate the cameras.

The only camera I could find, standing out in the plaza, was a camera on the far back wall of the atrium behind the tall window of the building. It seemed like that camera wouldn't give my mom much comfort: it was so far back that it wouldn't give a very good view of the identity of a thief or vandal.

But I tried to show my mom that the main thing was, a person could see the images put out by the camera at any time, from a computer or mobile device. The person could then alert the cemetery, who would take action against the thief or vandal. But I suddenly had no ability to articulate this, and I was just pointing to my phone, searching for the right words to say.

My mom and I were now inside the atrium, near the back wall. There were a father-like man and one or two other members of the father's family with him, near us. They may just have gotten off a nearby elevator.

Looking out the window, I was able to pull up my phone and pull up an image from the security camera on the back wall of the atrium. I told my mom that she could get images from the other security cameras as well.

Now my view, and the situation, changed. I was floating up into the air at a really fast pace, into a black night sky. But the sky was more like a sound stage, and the land I flew over was more like the landscape of a model train set. I flew higher and higher, until I was in outer space, which may have been some cartoony, blue backdrop of swirls of pure-white stars.

I now began descending back toward earth. The first view I had of the earth was like a cartoon view of the earth. But as I descended, the view became more like that of a model train set again. But all the elements of the landscape were like ragged, slimy toys, like toys that had recently been chewed and otherwise mishandled by children.

I knew there was a crime boss, perhaps of some Asian crime gang, out to get me. I knew something that would prove the crime boss' guilt, and the boss didn't want me to tell it. So he and a couple other gang members were going to trick me, with kindness, into some trap, and then kill me.

As I floated down toward the model of the cemetery, which seemed to be positioned among city buildings and apartment complexes, I started trying to think of nice ways I could address the crime boss and his henchmen, so they would think I liked them, wouldn't inform on them, and, possibly, even had no idea about whatever incriminating fact it was I knew.

chainworm; i'm sorry mom

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in some vague space, maybe like a common area or a cafeteria for a university. The space may have been white or cream and blue. I wasn't quite there -- it was more like my view was floating through it, while also vaguely being somewhere else.

I had probably taken my FINRA Series 7 test recently. I hadn't done as well as I'd wanted to, but I'd gotten much better than a passing grade. But now AB, one of the heads of the company I currently work for (which doesn't have anything to do with stocks, the subject of the Series 7), told me I needed to take my test. I was a little frustrated. It was like AB was completely unaware I'd already taken my test.

As AB told me this, my view floated downward, through some den- ski lodge-like area, down through the floor of that area, and into a big basement that also looked a little like a common area or study area in a university. I was all by myself here, and I may have felt trapped here somehow. I alternately sat on the floor and before a long, but short, counter.

I had two books before me. Both books were study books for the test. Both books were tall and wide, though not very thick. The book on the right had writing in it, like test questions. The book on the left was full of three-dimensional, geometrical diagrams.

I reflected on these books. I really didn't want to take the test again. But I felt like that was really the only way I convince AB I'd ever taken it in the first place. I felt kind of lazy for not taking the test. I knew if I took the test again, I could do a lot better. AB would be please by that. But I also knew that I'd already, from my previous score, gotten myself into the top ten percent of the people who'd taken the test. Couldn't AB be satisfied with that?

My view was now floating through a suburban street, but only like I was vaguely there. It was like, somehow, I was still, vaguely, in the basement. I was also carrying on a conversation with AB, or remembering a conversation with AB.

I had a tickling in the back of my throat. I coughed, then reached into the back of my throat and pulled out a string of phlegm. I wanted to pull out the whole string of phlegm. It was really annoying. I didn't want more of it to come back up my throat and annoy me more.

But as I continued pulling the string, it became a thin, dull, gold or brass chain. I was a little surprised by this. I knew that the chain was something organic: either something my body had created or a foreign organism that had gotten into me.

As I kept pulling the chain out, it got larger and larger. Pretty soon it was a thick chain, coated in something like black and grey phlegm. I started to get the idea that the chain was actually something like a tapeworm. I wanted to get the tapeworm out of my body altogether. As I continued to pull, the chain may finally have taken on a fleshy appearance, something like my conception of a tapeworm.

Dream #2

My mom was in the hospital. My brother and sister and I, and possibly my grandmother (who, in waking life, has only recently died), were standing around my mom's bed.

I somehow got a look at the back of my mom's head. There was a chunk maybe an inch wide out of the base of my mom's skull. This was the result of some kind of degenerative disease my mom had, maybe something to do with her heart.

Even though everybody else was around, my mom somehow spoke just to me, maybe using a guarded kind of speech, to indicate that the doctors had told her that the disease she was suffering from was about to overtake her. My mom knew she was going to die.

This had all happened rather suddenly. Something about the whole situation may also have been my fault, as if my neglect of my mother had allowed a physical situation to overwhelm my mother, giving the disease a chance to spread rapidly.

My mom knew this, and she gave me a weak, judgmental, but patient look with just her eyes. The rest of her face was blank, as if my mom's mental functions really weren't there anymore, or as if my mom were too sad or resigned to do much more than look me in the eye.

I was overwhelmed with guilt and full of sadness at the thought of my mother's approaching death. I grabbed my mom's right hand. There was some kind of sore or boil on the back of the hand. But I pressed my forehead against my mom's hand and wept deeply.

sex with diapered co-worker

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I walked into a big bathroom like a public restroom and locker room for a gym. The light was bright and green-white fluorescent. I may have felt like there was a smell of urine in the air.

One of my old co-workers FA stood in the restroom. She and I may have been getting ready to go somewhere as part of work or school. But FA was wearing a dress, and somehow the skirt pulled up to reveal that FA was wearing a diaper. FA was now sitting on the ground, her legs spread wide open to show the diaper.

FA was embarrassed. Apparently she liked me (I've always had a crush on her -- she's married now) and she thought that I wouldn't like her if I knew she wore diapers.

I partly wanted to comfort FA and let her know I would like her no matter what. But I was also turned on by the fact that she was wearing a diaper. I put my face closer to FA's diaper. It looked like she'd peed in it a little. I probably then moved myself upward to I could embrace FA. Her dress was pushed up all the way up over her shoulders. I embraced FA's naked chest.

FA was getting hot, but she didn't want to act like she was. She seemed to be a little annoyed by me. I think she didn't want to admit she liked me (this would kind of make sense -- she's tall and beautiful, and I'm short and nerdy.) But she also didn't want to stop me from doing anything.

I stood up and pulled one of FA's legs up. I then straddled her leg and started working my way down FA's leg. I was planning on doing something like scissoring with FA: I was stripped down to just my boxer briefs, and I really wanted to rub my crotch against FA's diaper.

But for some reason I was having so much difficulty just working my way back down into a sitting position. I thought to myself, Man! Scissoring isn't as easy as it looks! FA may have been patient with me, trying not to act like I was being awkward. Or FA may have had not personality at all at this point: she may have been like a doll or mannequin.

I now noticed that off to my right was a half-wall divider revealing a living room. The living room looked like an older woman's living room, and it was dim, with watery, green daylight flowing in through a gauzy-curtained front window.

My mom was in the living room with one or two other people. She may have looked over and called to me, to let me know it was time for us to take care of some stuff. My mom either didn't see the position I was in, or else she wanted to act like she didn't see, so I wouldn't be embarrassed.

worst pinball game ever

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in an arcade with a few other people who were probably around my age or five or ten years younger. We were playing pinball. I was standing near the pinball machine, watching instead of playing. I may have been watching a tall, beautiful, black-haired woman playing.

We then had to go upstairs. We probably went into a movie theater, but I think we were there for some kind of business meeting. A movie may have played.

The meeting was over, but I was now by myself. I took an escalator down from the upper level to the ground floor, where the arcade was. A huge window wall to my left let in a lot of grey light.

I was back down in the arcade. I stood in front of a pinball machine. I may have been surprised by the fact that the pinball machine started up a game without my having put a quarter inside. Somewhere off to my right and behind me, my mom was talking with some other person, maybe about some kind of illness, maybe a mental illness, my mom thought I had.

I started playing. I couldn't figure how to launch the ball out of the side slot and into the game area. But the ball launched itself. The ball bounced around in the game area and then fell toward the hole at the bottom.

The hole wasn't very big, it was located near the side slot, instead of in the middle of the bottom of the game area, and the paddle had the ability to stretch across the hole entirely. But either I couldn't figure out how to use the paddle, or else I was way too slow to use the paddle, and the ball fell right into the hole.

I got another ball, which appeared in the side slot presently. The ball launched into the game area, and somehow I, without even knowing how -- or really whether! -- it happened, got an extra ball.

The ball that had gotten me an extra ball disappeared, and another ball appeared in the side slot. But it launched up the side slot only weakly, then falling back down toward the bottom of the side slot. It actually fell out of the machine altogether, through some hole like a coin-return hole, then tumbled through the floor. I may have picked up the fallen ball and somehow put it back into the machine.

In the meantime, the extra ball I had gained was already bouncing around in the game area. I saw it just as it was falling toward the hole. There was a little bumper near the hole. The ball bounced against the bumper. I thought this would save the ball, or at least give me points or something special. But it didn't. The ball fell down through the hole. I didn't even use my paddle to stop it.

fetish-dress thrift shop; goodbye, grandma

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I walked into a clothing store or thrift shop with my mother. The store was dim, as if no lights were on in the store and the only light was the light coming in from outdoors. The store felt kind of busy with people.

My mom was, I think, heading to a fitting room to try on some clothes. I was following her, but I got distracted by a rack of clothes near the fitting room. There was a pink gingham dress with a belled out skirt, almost like a cosplay dress, on the rack. The rack was tall, so that the knee-length skirt hung just above my eye level. I was really turned on by the dress and I wanted to try it on, but I didn't want my mom to know I liked wearing dresses, especially sissy-style dresses like this one.

But I continued looking through the rack. The rack was long and nearly empty, so that all the dresses were widely spaced. There was another dress with a pink, gingham style. It had a long skirt in back, but the front of the skirt was sectioned away, as if some other piece of clothing were supposed to be placed underneath it. I felt like this dress must have been intended for fetish, as the shortness of the front seemed to imply a sexual readinesss.

I turnes around the end of the rack and walked along the other side, which was closer to the fitting room. One dress caught my eye. It was like a ballet dress, with a top like a spaghetti-strap tank-top and a tutu that spread out flat and wide. This dress struck me at first as being for a little girl. But then it struck me as being more like a fetish outfit, a sissy's outfit.

The last outfit that caught my eye could hardly be called a dress. It was like a couple of hula hoops connected by a thin skein of gauzy, pink fabric. There was a red sphere near the top of the hoops. I had the feeling that this "outfit" was supposed to express something about atomic physics. But it was also supposed to be a girly, sissyish outfit. I couldn't even figure out how to put the outfit on!

Now my boss JE walked out of the fitting room. It was like he, instead of my mother, had been in there the whole time. We began walking toward the exit of the store. I may have worried about what JE would think of me if he knew that I was into wearing the dresses I'd been looking at. I thought that JE must already have seen me looking at the dresses.

Dream #2

I was with my mother and grandmother in a room like a living room or the waiting room of a hospital. The light was dim and warmly yellow. My grandmother and I sat on a couch. I faced my grandma, who sat huddled up in blankets, maybe sitting cross-legged underneath the blankets. My mom sat somewhere behind me.

My grandma was telling me about an operation she was going to have. She was speaking strangely about this operation, as if she had already died during the surgery, or as if it were almost certain that she would die. She mentioned some of the details about the surgery, which would be on her heart, and why death during the surgery was almost a forgone conclusion.

I didn't want to believe that things were that bad. I wanted to believe there was hope. I said some positive things, hoping to get myself and my grandmother to believe that she would survive/had survived the operation.

But my grandmother stopped me. She said her heart was in really bad condition. She may have told me that the left half of her heart was already or nearly dead. She told me that if she awoke during the operation she would tell the doctors, "Give me the milk!" The milk was, apparently, a chemical that doctors would give their patients to help them die.

I now knew that even my grandma wanted to die. She was resigned and calm about the whole thing. But I was still sad. I said, "Oh, Grandma..." and caressed my grandma's face. My grandma tried to comfort me by touching the hand that caressed her face. But now I realized I was caressing my grandma's face with my foot, not my hand!

great grandmother wants to kill me

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was night. I was in front of my great grandmother's house. I may have been sent to check on my great grandma because she was sick. (My great grandma had actually died a few years ago.)

I walked up the steps to my grandma's house. The screen door was closed, but the front door was at least halfway open. My grandma was just inside, kneeling on the floor in some kind of meditative position.

My grandma was so still, I was almost sure she was dead. I thought I had gotten here too late. But then she stood up. I knew, as I think everybody in my family knew, that my grandma was going to die soon.

My grandma was acting weird and saying weird, drifty things. She walked out of the living room and into her bedroom. She returned with a container of Vaseline and a pair of scissors behind her back. I thought she was going to kill me.

I probably ran out of the house in fear. I got to the edge of my grandma's yard and then stopped running. I started talking about how I remembered all the nice stuff my grandma had done with me when I was a child.

I turned around and addressed my grandma, who stood outside her door. I walked back over to my grandma and spoke with her a little more. We were now leaning against the railing of the steps, as if we, or at least my grandma, were the height of a child.

My grandma, I saw, had dropped a blade like a scalpel on the ground. I knew that my grandma actually had been planning to kill me. But our talk had mellowed her anger.

We walked back inside. My grandma went back into her room. But now a few other members of my family were here, including my mom, and probably also my sister. It was like we were all here for my grandma's funeral, or to be with my grandma as she died.

My mom and I walked into the kitchen. My mom gave me a pile of mail which had been directed to me, though it had apparently come to my mom's house. It was a bunch of large-size envelopes. One of the envelopes may have had a post-it note on it saying "FOR YOU?"

I opened a couple of the envelopes. They came from a couple different apartment complexes. They started out as late rent notices, then they became eviction notices. I walked with these envelopes back into the living room.

Some other family member of mine may have addressed me, causing me to turn around. My family members may have been talking about me or my grandma as if one of us were physically or mentally ill.

process drawback informative

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a hospital. I was in a room like a general practitioner's visiting room, except bigger and a little emptier. The room was probably supposed to be something like a waiting room. I was sitting either on the floor or on a chair very low to the floor.

My mom may just have had some operation, maybe on her heart. I'm pretty sure she was out of the operation, even awake. But she was in some other room. She could only take visitors periodically. This probably had to do with her recovery, like while we weren't allowed to visit her, she was going through some recovery process as dangerous as surgery, through which she may not survive.

My aunt was in the room with me. She held some device, kind of like a cell phone, which allowed her to do something like hear into my mom's room, but not exactly. My aunt was acting concerned for my mom, but then she started acting really strange. I had the feeling she'd get violent about my mom. I didn't want her to be around my mom. But then she was gone. I may have seen her leave through the cluttered area of a dim hospital hallway.

I was back in the room, which was now somehow like a narrow laboratory or kitchen. There were no lights on in the room. The room was illuminated dim blue, like from an early morning sky, except that there were probably no windows in the room.

I received a phone call, maybe on a wall phone, from one of the doctors. He was explaining something to me about the operation a second doctor, maybe named Eric, had done on my mom.

The doctor, who had a kind of Asian accent, said he understood if I was a little concerned about the operation that had been done on my mom. As the doctor explained, I was stirring the dregs of something like hot chocolate in a huge, plastic canister, with something like a wooden spoon.

The doctor explained that the operation was some kind of new technique, a "Japanese" technique. The new techniques were all being performed on patients who couldn't afford regular doctors. The techniques were uncertain, so it was understood that I'd be a little annoyed that my mother had had to go through the new procedure.

I was now going in to visit my mom. I crossed the hallway from my room to my mom's room. The hallway may have been cluttered with workers, all pushing around tall carts like meal-tray carts, except that the carts may have had sheets in them.

My mom's room door was open. I was a little shocked to see that there were a couple carts in my mom's room as well. It was like the workers, maybe even the doctors, were using my mom's room as a storage area, with no regard for her status as a recovering patient.

I peered my way around the carts cluttering my mom's bed. I saw my mom. Apparently, now, this was the first time I'd seen my mom since her operation. She wasn't hooked up to any tubes. But she looked really weak, and I thought she was near death.

My mom lolled her head over to look at me. She then sat up. I noticed how my mom's hair had been cut, so that now it was maybe only 20cm long. I thought my mom would be upset to know the doctors had done that to her, even though I knew the doctors had had no choice: they'd had to cut my mom's hair to put brain-monitors on her skull.

My mom now told me how she was upset about something. She virtually hopped off the bed and onto the floor. I winced. My mom had just had her chest cracked open for a heart surgery. Jostling herself around like that would really injure her wound.

My mom reached up onto some shelf (?) over the counter of a table. She pulled down some kind of signature form. She told me that she was really angry at the doctors, and that she was thinking of suing them.

Before the surgery the doctors had made my mom sign this form. Now my mom had read the back of the form, which had something on it called a "process drawback informative." This meant, my mom said, that the doctors were basically given permission, after the first surgery, to conduct more procedures or to determine other elements of the patient's recovery, regardless of the patient's wishes.

a conspiracy of friends

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I sat alone at long, round table in a nice, wood-walled room, like a fancy library or a board room. The doorway to the room was open. Beyond the doorway may have been a hallway in a cheap-looking shopping mall. I may have known that I was set to meet my mother here, though she hadn't shown up yet.

A husband and wife, maybe in their fifties or sixties, walked into the room and sat down to my left. I knew who they were -- a group of friends of my mom's sister -- even though I didn't recognize them. The couple may have explained something to me or asked how I was doing in my life.

My mom now walked into the room. Either as or right after she entered the room another couple entered. My mom sat down across from me and a little to my left. The couple sat just to my mom's right.

I may have introduced one of the couples to my mom, who knew the other couple were friends of my aunt. My mom began to eye me suspiciously, as if I were setting up some sort of trap against my mom on my aunt's behalf. I wanted to assure my mom I had only planned to meet her here: I hadn't known anybody else would be here. But I don't think I said anything.

I now noticed that the second couple were extremely attractive, especially the woman, who, although old, was thin, well-made-up, and rather intelligent, but cheerful-looking. She had short, auburn hair and tan skin and wore a vanilla-yellow sweater.

A third couple, and maybe even more people, all friends of my aunt, and all wealthy-looking people in their fifties or sixties, came into the room. The table now seemed to be full. The door to the room may also have been shut.

One of the men at the end of the table near the door now told my mom that we were all meeting here to come up with some plan to take some kind of action against my aunt. Either my aunt was planning to do something bad to my mom, and we needed to stop her, or my aunt was doing something bad to herself, and we needed to intervene.

teaching tooth brushing; the son's return

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a bathroom with three of my nephews. The only nephew I recognized was my youngest nephew. We were all standing in front the sink. I was apparently teaching my nephews how to brush their teeth.

All of my nephews may have been playing with their toothbrushes in a really messy way. But at least the older two seemed to be brushing their teeth. But my youngest seemed to be really messy. He was running his toothbrush back and forth under the faucet and knocking it against the sink. It was hard to tell whether he was having trouble learning how to rinse his toothbrush correctly or whether he was just having fun being messy.

I backed away from the sink. I seemed to be backing out of the bathroom altogether. I may have started to give up hope on being able to teach my nephews after all. But I stopped at the threshold. I didn't want to put off a feeling of being disappointed in my nephew. So I smiled and said, "My dear, little nephew," so he'd know I loved him.

Dream #2

I was reading a book, probably about some incident that had "really occurred" (at least in the dream world). A young man had gone missing. Most people had given the young man up for dead. But the young man's sister (?) and mother believed the young man was still alive.

The book had some narrative segments in conventional third person. But a lot of the book was, I think, letters between the mother and the sister. The mother kept living, somehow, as if the young man would be found. The sister was often ambivalent. Sometimes she seemed to criticize the mother for being so optimistic about finding the young man.

The conflict between the mother and sister eventually became pretty painful. The mother herself was even starting to wonder whether she was crazy. The conflict was so painful, and the waiting for the son so tedious, that I started flipping through the pages, toward the end of the book.

I must have read this book before. I knew there were one or two final letters from the mother, where she really thought she'd gone too far in her hopes, and where she was finally resolved to give up hope of seeing the young man alive again. I turned to these letters, knowing how beautiful they were, and knowing that the next letter or "article" in the book would reveal that the young man had been found alive.

I knew there was a photo, like from the 1940s, of the young man being escorted out of the car by two policemen, probably because he was too weak to walk.

I knew that there was also a photo of the mother as she had gone to reunite with the young man. The woman was kind of stately, elegant, wearing a white dress and a small hat with a feather on top and a small, net veil coming down from the brim of the hat and down just over the woman's brow.

I knew that there was some part near this climax where the mother had decided to wear this outfit before she'd known the young man had been found. She'd called it her reuinion dress. Now that the young man had been found, the mother felt justified in having worn the dress. This didn't quite make sense to me, given that, just before, the mother had resolved to give up hoping for the young man's return.

mom's hospital arrangements

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was at a hospital or nursing home or rehab center to visit my mother. I may have been there with some other family members. My mom was probably getting moved to some other section of the place. She may have been in the middle of the move, so we couldn't see her.

I went out of the building I'd been in, which was the building my mother had originally been staying in, to find out where my mother would go next. I may have heard, or even received a paper saying, that some other building had information on where my mom would be next.

The outside area was a big, sunny, but kind of dry lawn. There were a few small buildings dotting the edges of the lawn. A lot of people seemed to be out here.

I was reading that there were four different buildings. Each building had something to do with a nationality -- either they spoke that language or helped people from that region or something. The four buildings were Chinese, Japanese, North Korean, and South Korean.

I knew there were language differences between each building. The slip of paper I read illustrated this fact by showing a common word in each of the four languages. I couldn't figure how the North Korean and South Korean languages differed. But I figured I wouldn't ask or bring up the point with anybody. I didn't want to insult anyone.

I may have determined that I had to go to the Chinese building, or else I may have determined that my mom would be in the Chinese building, but that I needed to go to some general administrative building to confirm that.

I was now in a small, kind of rundown hallway of a building. The walls were white but dirty. The place felt a little scary. About halfway down the hallway I saw a nurse and one other hospital worker turning up the hallway from a corridor off to the left.

The nurse seemed to be blind. Her eyes were totally white. I made some kind of singing noise as I passed the nurse, to alert her to my presence. I wondered, as I passed the nurse, how she got by so well as a nurse when she was completely blind. I might have figured that that was a dumb thought, considering how well blind people get along in life in general.

I was now "at home," which may possibly have been where my whole family lived. I somehow knew that my mom was coming back home from the hospital/nursing home. This was kind of a surprise for me, as I'd thought she'd need a bit more time to rest and heal. But now she came walking through the door.

I may have been in the kitchen. My mom may have said that she needed me to help her get some of her things in order. I knew my mom had a bunch of movies in her room. I thought I could arrange her movies. I liked doing that, and, I now remembered, I'd actually arranged movies for my brother in a really neat, orderly way.

My mom's bedroom was right next to the kitchen. I stood in the hallway, often looking into both doorways at once. My mom knelt before her bed. Her bedroom was extremely cluttered. My mom pulled out a clear plastic bin of movies. She explained that the movies were to be arranged for my little niece.

We started arranging the movies. The boxes were like a hybrid of DVD cases and videocassette cases. The setup was different from the setup presented in my brother's collection, so I had to think of a different way of arranging things. I imagined arranging the movies in rows that would run the width of the plastic bin.

old friend and joyce carol oates

Good morning, everybody. This dream was written in the morning, but I wasn't able to post it until now.
Dream #1
I was in a living room with my old best friend Y and possibly my brother. My view of the room was very close in, like all I could see was the couch. The room felt very bright and warm, but also very crowded. The couch may have been made of thick, brown fabric, maybe in a plaid pattern.

I hadn't seen Y in a long time. I was really happy to see her again. She looked just like she did when we were in college. But she wore a backwards baseball cap.

We planned to have a sleepover this night, like we would occasionally do in college. Y, who had apparently just gotten into town, suggested I get some movies (maybe VCR cassettes?) from my place. I might have been thinking of a movie for us to watch. But Y suggested one, one that I didn't care for too much, but which I'd go get anyway, just to make Y feel comfortable and welcome.

I walked down the hallway to get the movie. Apparently my room/house was just down the hallway and up the stairs. As I was walking, Joyce Carol Oates caught up to me and started walking with me. We may have spoken, either verbally or mentally, but not about anything in particular.

My mother's bedroom was now just to my right. This was where my videotapes were. The plan was to get my movies and then head up to my room (and/or to Oates' house?) to meet Y. Before, I think the plan had been to get the movies from my room then go meet Y somewhere else, wherever she was staying.

Oates came into my mom's room with me. She looked around and maybe asked questions. My mom was sitting at a desk, listening to something through big headphones like for control towers. My mom seemed to be in bad shape, like she was extremely depressed or going insane. The desk was cluttered and almost looked like a bed.

I answered some of Oates' questions. Oates may even have reminded me of what movies I was supposed to be taking. I picked up the movie for Y, as well as some other movies, and walked toward the door. Oates may already have been out the door.

But my mom, who had been either unaware or dismissive of my presence before, now made some move which intentionally or unintentionally got my attention. I got close to my mom. I could hear, through the other side of my mom's headphones, some kind of official sounding transmission.

My mom responded to the transmission out loud with a couple of short sentences. My mom's statements were brief, but gritty and curmudgeony. I had the feeling I was actually hearing paranoid ideation in my mom's head.

I worried that my mom was receiving transmissions about my involvement with something evil and that she was now resolved to kill me because of these perceived evil connections.

The transmissions did, in fact, seem to be of some revolutionary news show. The news being stated was not directly related to me. But I felt like, if one listened hard enough, one could see how the news implied bad things about me personally.

I probably started worrying about how to get on my mom's good side, so she wouldn't do anything bad to me. I may have walked out into the hallway. Oates may have told me not to worry about anything.

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.

the house under the radio tower

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was probably a sunny day. I was out with a group of people in front of some tall, steel-framed structure. There was an instructor who was telling us about the structure, which was something like a radio tower.

The instructor was now going to take us up into the tower. I had been the most enthusiastic person in the group to go up to the top of the tower. But the instructor took the rest of the group up first. I was left below, possibly because there wasn't enough room for me. Iwaited down below, possibly resting in the shade of the tower, sitting and with my back leaned against the tower, like one might rest in the shade of a tree.

At some point the instructor may have called to me, via walkie-talkie, that it was now okay to come up. But now I thought how dizzyingly high the tower actually was. I was afraid to come up. I may even have had some excuse, like a technical justification, for not going up the tower.

But now there was a huge storm brewing on the horizon. The storm moved quicly. Soon the sky was filled with dark grey clouds. But the real brunt of the storm was still in the distance. A grey-black cylinder of clouds was spinning around, revealing violent, white flashes of lightning between the clouds.

I knew it wasn't safe to be up on the top of the tower in the middle of a storm like this. I thought I'd radio the instructor and tell him that I definitely wasn't coming up now.

I may have imagined myself being caught up in that lightning cylinder and lifted up to the top of the tower. But, really, I was looking around, near the base of the tower, for a place where I could hide from all the lightning.

It was now really dark and rainy. I found some place under the base of the tower that was like a ledge of concrete with some blankets underneath. I thought it was pretty silly to hide under a metal tower during a lightning storm. I thought the concrete shelter might be a slightly better hiding place. But it still didn't seem too secure.

Without my really noticing it, the shelter changed into a large room in a house. I was still laying in the huge pile of blankets, like I was in the shelter, but now the blankets were all piled up against a wall. The room was dark and calm, with the only light coming from some incandescent outdoor light for a backyard garden.

My mother may also have been in this room. She may have been recovering from some illness or operation. She was probably laying on a couch. But then she was gone. It was like she wasn't actually in the house yet, like she was still heading here from the hospital.

I lay on the couch my mom had (probably) been laying on. It was red, upholstered with some thin, fake-leather material. It was narrow but long. I lay back on the couch.

I suddenly felt sexually aroused. I may have wanted to masturbate. But I may have felt like the ghost of my great-grandmother was in the room. I didn't want my great-grandmother to see me masturbating and be disappointed in me.

I also may have felt like I'd like to wear some women's underwear, maybe even my great-grandmother's underwear to masturbate in. I stood up and walked out into the hallway. I may have wandered around the house a bit.

When I got back to the room my mom and brother may have been in there. My brother was taking care of my mom while she was recuperating. I felt like I was no longer welcome in the room. I may even have felt afraid to enter the room. I felt like something about me, probably my weird sexuality, had made my brother feel like I was not a fit person to be around my mom.

super mario scene; lesbian lawn chairs; toy kitchen guilt complex

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

A dream about Super Mario, in the style of the original Super Mario Bros. Mario slid down some slope, probably of green grass before a yellow sky. He then slung forward, out around a long row of bricks or coins. He then slung back, as quick as a chameleon's tongue, either through the coins or up over the bricks and through a row of coins, and then headed back up the slope. There may have been another scene after this one.

Dream #2

I was sitting out with my mother (or perhaps my great-grandmother?) on a lawn on a sunny day. We were sitting out on a couple of lawn chairs, the long kind, with the reclining legs. The chairs were all white, with thick bands of plastic making up the backing. The lawn and the day felt a little damp, as if this were a warm day in early spring. There were probably other people out on the lawn, enjoying the day, but I wasn't really aware of them.

My mother (regardless of who was really beside me) was speaking about some condition that was kind of considered an illness that lesbians were considered to have. It had to do with either trying to seduce women who didn't like lesbians, or with trying to seduce women who were involved with men who didn't like lesbians. They didn't really like the women they were seducing. They were just compelled to seduce the women. This was considered a real, medical condition, either physical or psychological. My mom was actually worried that a group of lesbians was, right now, trying to seduce my great-grandmother in this way.

I now turned to my mother/great-grandmother, who sat to my right. If the person sitting next to me was my great-grandmother, she was probably wearing a big, round-brimmed, floppy hat and big sunglasses. I started complaining about some girl who was trying to seduce my (now ex-)girlfriend H away from me. In fact, she may already have seduced H away from me, and the two may have come out to me as lovers. H was still my friend. But the other girl just took every chance she could get to annoy me.

If the person sitting next to me was my great-grandma, she may have given me some advice. But I think that now the person sitting next to me was my mother. I really didn't want to complain about this kind of stuff to my mother. I was afraid she'd actually try to do something about it. And I really didn't want my mom involved in any of my business -- especially my romantic affairs. I felt like having my mom involved in my romantic affairs would make them like "kid stuff." And I felt like having my mom involved in my romantic affairs would let her on to my fetishes. And if she were aware of my fetishes, I would feel really creepy.

So I sat forward right away and told my mom that I already had things taken care of. I had a plan in my mind for how I would take care of the whole thing. I would just act friendly to the girl, no matter what, if I had to, and ignore the girl as completely as possible the whole rest of the time. And if I needed to confront the girl about anything else that would come up between us in day-to-day life, I'd confront her like I'd confront anybody else.

As I was saying this, the girl walked up from the far right, from far out on the lawn. She walked up behind me and pushed against the soft back of my lawn chair, nudging me up. She meant to be annoying and mean. But it felt kind of nice, especially on my back, like when a cat rubs up against you or walks on you.

The girl then sat next to me on the lawn chair. We sat rather close. I was determined to ignore the girl at all costs. But I suddenly got the idea that the girl wanted to be friendly with me now. I felt like H was coming soon. Usually the girl would take this opportunity to upset me while H wasn't around. But it seemed like this time she was just trying to be nice. There was a feeling that H wasn't going to be around, anyway, like she would eventually let us know she wouldn't be able to meet us.

I may have been reading a small, hardcover book, like an early-twentieth-century book of philosophy or science. The girl may have been reading a similar book. At some point the girl may have been the only one holding the book, while I may have been looking on. The girl may have rested her head on my shoulder. I remember seeing the girl's knee bent up. The girl was probably wearing shorts. Her leg was really skinny. The girl may have had blankets crumpled around her shins at one point, too.

The girl seemed to cuddle closer and closer to me. It seemed like she really liked me now. I kept my distance emotionally. But I was happy that the girl wasn't being mean and annoying as usual. I thought that if this was the way she'd be in general from now on, I could be pretty happy. The girl and I may have spoken about something in a happy, chatty sort of way.

Dream #3

I was in a bedroom. The bedroom seemed enormous somehow, but it was stark and empty. Everything about the room may have been grey. A door may have been opened to a short hallway, across which was an open door to a bathroom with bright incandescent light and yellow and tan-orange walls. Dim, grey, natural light may have filled the bedroom. The only furniture in the bedroom was one bed (or two beds?) -- really tall and really wide, but probably not soft and comfortable at all, and all grey.

I sat half on the bed with my right leg hanging off the edge. My left leg may have been hanging off a little, too: I was sitting in a strange, sideways, half-reclining/leaning position.

I was probably waiting for a phone call from my mother. There was some event I was going to go to with my mom. It was for either a few of my nephews or just my youngest nephew. I had the imagery of this event half-playing in my head throughout the rest of the dream -- as if I were already at the event I was waiting to head to, participating in the event in real time, simultaneously with my waiting in the bedroom.

The event took place in an equally stark room. The room was huge, with yellow-painted plaster walls. The event was apparently very big. But the only people visible were my little nephew and a tall, kind of old-style, butlery-looking man with oiled hair and mustache and dress clothes -- maybe a red suit jacket (?). My nephew stood before a plastic toy stove. There was no other furnishing in the room.

My mom may also have been in the room. But she may have been at such a remove, even in shadow, that her position was almost exactly the same as my point of view would have been had I been physically in the room.

Sitting on the bed in the bedroom, I started eating some weird kind of food. It was probably a breakfast food. It seemed to be fried. The coating was like lightly fried breading. The inside may have been meat, or it may have been something like eggs or eggs and meat combined, with other stuff mixed in, like vegetables. The plate I ate off of had two of these things on it: each thing about the size of a scone or a piece of fried chicken breast.

I was kind of hungry. But I had really only planned on taking a little bite out of the thing. But one bite was so good that I just wanted more. Before I knew it I had eaten almost an entire piece. The only part left of the piece I'd eaten was a little corner, which I held kind of wrinkled up in my left hand, the piece folded like a towel, like it was nothing more, really, than the fried skin.

I felt a little ashamed. Watching the scene in which my little nephew participated, I knew that what was happening there was some kind of cooking or eating event, and that I would be expected to eat there. I hadn't really understood that before. But I should have known it. But now that I'd eaten the food here in the bedroom, I knew my stomach probably wouldn't be able to handle the food at the event as well.

I had a choice -- either eat at the event, anyway, and make my body miserable, or not eat at the event and look like a snobby jerk in front of my nephew. I knew I'd probably just eat. So I did my best, even though I was really hungry now, to stop myself from eating the second piece of food. But even while I told myself to resist eating the rest of the food, I was trying to justify eating it to myself.

At the event, I now saw my little nephew's toy stove top. Something was actually frying in a blue, plastic pan. It was probably two little pieces of meat in some grease. I had actually made this meat start cooking somehow. But it wasn't actually supposed to have started cooking yet. There was a whole process to the cooking event. Now that the meat had started cooking, the whole process was ruined. Most likely, the process could also not be started over.

I felt horrible about this. I felt like there had to be a way to reverse the process I'd started. Even if there weren't a way to reverse the process, perhaps there was a way to stop the damage at its current point. Besides, I told myself, this was a play stove, anyway. Did real rules apply to play stoves? Even for cooking? Wouldn't there be a way a play stove could reverse the play cooking?

I looked all over the stove (I may have been no taller than my little nephew -- or I may actually have had no body at all!) for some button or set of buttons that would reverse the process. Eventually I found something that seemed helpful, either under the pale blue, plastic pan itself or under some edge of the stove top. There was a little square of buttons, maybe pink, plastic buttons. One of the buttons said "BACK SPACE." I knew this button, like the backspace button of a keyboard, would "erase" the mistake I had made.

In the bedroom, I now received a text message from my aunt. (Recently, in waking life, my aunt had caused a bit of a commotion in my family while my mom was recovering from a pretty serious hospital visit.) The text message was terribly emotional, written in all caps, and just crying out stuff like, "I APOLOGIZE! I APOLOGIZE!" over and over again.

I had a feeling I was going to see my aunt soon. It was like she had also been planning to attend this event with my little nephew. She may even have been planning to come pick me up so that we could both go to the event together. But I may have decided, after my aunt had caused a commotion, that I would keep a little bit of a distance from her. So now she may have been apologizing to me in order to get me to come with her to the event. Or she may have been apologizing in order to smooth things over so that, when we went to the event together as planned, there wouldn't be any tension between us.

I didn't feel like my aunt needed to be so intense about her apology, though. I wondered whether it had been my own severe personality that had made her feel like she needed to be so intense. I told myself that in the future, even starting right now, I needed to project a more relaxed, less severe attitude to people.

At this point I may also have gotten a text message from my aunt's youngest daughter, with whom I haven't spoken in a number of years.

i've never read harry potter

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in some room, staring at the front of a wooden piece of furniture, like a set of cabinets or something. The light of the room may have been bluish grey.

I was talking to a woman or a couple of women about some author. The author, probably a woman, was really cynical and always tried to make herself sound really smart. She may have made fun of something in pop culture that had to do with Harry Potter. But she may also have written a book that was like Harry Potter, even though she may have been claiming it was better.

I thought this was really funny. I said that even I could tell that the woman was using a lot of motifs one would think would come from Harry Potter. I said nobody should make fun of Harry Potter and then try to write like Harry Potter if they weren't at least going to read it.

Then one of the girls asked what I'd read from Harry Potter. I said, "Actually, ... None. I haven't read anything from Harry Potter. And I know it's important, because those books were such a phenomenon. Just the amount of books that were sold. If you want to write a book and have it sell lots of copies, you should probably read Harry Potter. But I haven't."

I was now looking over to my left. Across the pale grey floor from me was a closed door, like a bedroom door, like I was now in a bedroom. I may have been there by myself.

There was a crack under the door that seemed to be only an inch or so tall. But my mom somehow managed to edge three books, all stacked up, under the crack. Only the corners of the books came into the room. But I could see the full spines of the books. They were all old Nancy Drew mystery books.

My mom called out something from behind the door like, "I found these for you. You left your books out in the garage. So I brought them in for you. I know how much you like them. I didn't want you to feel like you were missing them."

I may have been a little ashamed, wondering what the girls I had been/was still talking to would think of me for liking such an old -- and girly! -- book series as the Nancy Drew series.

the vanished woman; old woman charon

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a bedroom of an apartment or of a mutli-story house. The bedroom was dim and small, with dull, wood floors and a small bed that probably had a pink bedspread over it.

I was a strong, young man with olive complexion, dark hair, and a little bit of stubble on my face. I was in the bedroom with a woman who may have been beautiful, though she may have been twice my age. She may actually have been a family member, or the mother of a group of my friends who were downstairs.

I had gotten into an argument with the woman over something, possibly some crime the two of us had taken part in. I felt like the woman was going to get me in trouble by revealing something about the crime. I may have been planning to kill her to get rid of the evidence.

I traced my feet around the bed, moving clockwise around the bed from the head of the bed, down around the foot of the bed, and up just a step or two back toward the head of the bed.

The woman now stepped near the bed. She didn't know -- maybe I hadn't, either! -- that my feet had actually cut into the floor, like in cartoons. The traced area was ready to collapse. I must have had an idea of this, because I'm pretty sure I told the woman not to step any closer.

But the woman did step forward and fall through the floor. The bed, the section of floor, and the woman all vanished through the floor. I looked into the hole. I'd expected to hear a crash or something. But there was nothing. And the hole was shallow, like there was another floor only one or two meters down. Everything had really vanished!

I hurried downstairs, hoping to find the spot where the woman had landed. I met the woman's children, who were probably all about the same age as I/the young man. I don't know whether the family actually was angry at me for letting their mother die, or whether they even suspected me of being involved in it. But I was afraid they were angry. They all seemed kind of savage and capable of really harming me.

I was trying to justify what had happened to the woman. But the conversation between me and the others went to other topics. The hole in the floor, I learned, also had something to do with demons. So perhaps demons had drawn the woman to the hole in the floor. The woman was definitely in danger of demons right now, wherever she was.

Something else I learned from our conversation, which continued as we walked down a big complex of old, institution-style staircases and balconies, was that the woman had actually said something that had tempted fate, or tempted the spirits, to pull her into wherever she now was. She had something that had to do with keeping her distance from spirits, something like always staying two steps or five steps away from something.

As people -- including, now, for some reason, my grandma P -- continued to tell me this story, in an almost pitying tone of voice, I, continuing to walk down the staircase, began playing with the bannister, running my fingers along a knob of white-painted wood.

We ended up down at the bottom of the staircase, in a fluorescent-lit basement. I had expected to find the woman down here. I could even visualize her, laying wrapped up in a blanket, even cluttered on either side by stuff that had fallen with her through the hole in the floor.

Dream #2

I walked out of a living room and into a hallway, at the back of a group of older family members, probably including my mother, my grandma P, and my step-grandmother.

We had all been planning on how to take care of some older woman in our family who was having physical troubles. I had understood that I had been assigned certain tasks, and I had adapted my thoughts to the anticipation of taking care of these tasks.

But now that we were walking through the hallway, I learned that I had been assigned a whole different group of tasks. The responsibility I had accepted, even come to look forward to, was now replaced by a whole different set of responsibilities, which were things I felt could have been assigned to a child. I felt like it was being implied that I was no more than a little child.

I had only found out about these changes as they'd filtered through the conversation my relatives were having with each other. But I found out that my mother had actually been the one to make these changes. She'd made the changes, and she hadn't told me a thing!

We all ended up in a bedroom at the end of the hallway. The bedroom, like the rest of the house, was kind of small, narrow, and flimsy. But something about it also felt like a great library, like the Morgan Library.

The rest of my relatives had kind of dispersed, leaving just me and my mother in the room. My mom may have been trying to have a nice conversation with me. But she may also have been gloating at me, trying to needle me with the fact that she had changed plans on me without telling me anything.

I got extremely angry. Suddenly I was floating a bit above the ground. A book was also floating in front of me. Ostensibly the book was an edition of Dickens' Little Dorrit. But it was much thinner than any edition of Little Dorrit could be. And the covers and all the pages were made of some kind of backing and white fabric. The white fabric was all emroidered with quaint illustrations, giving the book the look of a folk art cushion and a child's book.

As I looked at this book, calmly entranced by its strange, Christmasy beauty, I was think/talk/yelling at my mom. I brought up some instance where a relative, possibly my grandma P, had needed her help. But some decision my mom had made had gone wrong. I yelled at my mom, "You! You really -- fucked -- it -- up!"

I knew that that would hurt my mom and get back at her for her having changed plans on me. But now that I'd done it, I felt bad. I'd gone too far. I worried that I'd permanently damaged my mom's emotions. I felt really terrible.

I was now in an SUV with some co-workers from my present job, probably including MM and SC. I was sitting in a backseat. We were driving through a quaint residential area. We drove up to a property that was fenced around with a solid, white wall of fence that had some kind of green ivy draping over it.

We stopped at the gate. It was understood that I needed to head in and hand a payment to an old woman who lived at the house. This payment was partly something I'd owed from the past. But it was almost like this payment was a kind of rite of passage, something that would make me part of my group of co-workers.

But I either didn't have the money or else was so low on money that paying the fee would really put me in trouble financially. I tried not to let on about this. But somehow SC found out. She, and probably the rest of my co-workers, were a little disappointed in me when they found out. I knew I'd be held in lower esteem because of this mistake I'd made -- not having enough money.

My co-workers, or maybe just SC, who was probably driving the car, may have handed me a twenty-dollar bill, or even a wad of twenty-dollar bills. I now had enough money to give to the old woman.

I was now standing before the door. But, where before the house had been in a kind of tight, wall-fenced place, it now stood out on some wide, sunny lawn, maybe even a wide valley.

Two old women opened the door. One woman stood tall. The other woman may have been very short, or hunched over, or even sitting in a wheelchair. She was kind of fat, very pale, very baggy-faced, with pale blue eyes and thin, white hair. She wore a peach-tan, satiny nightgown. She was the woman I was supposed to give my money to.

The woman didn't really seem concerned with my money. She was talking in a rambling manner that was uncanny and spooky. (I want to say now that it was autonomous or beyond my control -- I'm not sure why, or even what that would mean.)

The woman wanted me to stay to keep her company. She may have been offering me dinner in return. But something about the woman, the degree of her illness, made me realize that it wouldn't be good, either for me or for the woman, for me to stay with her.

I may still have wanted to stay with the woman. But I was now sitting on something like a child's tricycle combined with some (not sure what) aspect of a Radio Flyer wagon. The wagon was being pulled by a yellow and blue rope attached to the front. I was being pulled away from the house and out of the valley.

I kept trying and trying to pull myself back toward the woman. But the rope kept pulling me farther and farther away. Moving through the rolling valley, I was surprised by its vastness. I really felt like things had changed -- for the better (?). I saw a few small groups of beautiful people, mostly beautiful, little girls, playing in the valley.

Getting toward the edge of the valley I now saw that the people who were pulling the rope attached to the wagon were the co-workers who had been in the car with me, in particular SC and MM. They stood on a clear boundary of lands. The area they stood in was more like a pine forest, with trees and dusty, needle-strewn ground. I knew that my co-workers were doing what was best for me. But I still kept reaching back toward the house and the old woman.

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!

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.