kicked out of apartment; glorified junk mail

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dream #2

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

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

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

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

great grandmother suggests college

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a bedroom on an upper floor of some small building, either a big house or a small apartment building. The room I was in was a rented room or a furnished apartment. Most of my view was taken up by my bed. All the bed had on it was a lot of white sheets. The rest of the room had a lot of white in it as well. But the room was kind of dim, as if only one light were on, somewhere behind me.

I got the feeling that my landlady (possibly an old landlady from my waking life) was coming for me. Possibly I hadn't paid the rent, or possibly I had done something bad in the room that my landlady needed to speak to me about. But I really didn't want to have to face my landlady. So I left as quick as I could, to avoid her.

Now, having walked away from the room, I was out on my great grandmother's lawn. The light was like late afternoon: a kind of cool blue-grey. I was trying to get away from the building (which wasn't there anymore) as quickly as I could. But my great grandma opened the front door of her house and called for me.

I turned around, still thinking that the person I was hearing was my landlady. I looked in through the shade of the doorway and saw my great grandma. She looked younger and healthier than she had been when she died -- maybe like she was in her early seventies, rather than in her late nineties. She was wearing a small, white sweatshirt.

Finally I realized where I was and who I was talking to. I turned (reluctantly?) and walked back toward my great grandma's house. My great grandma had me come inside. She sat me down in the living room. I sat in the chair she usually sat in while she was alive, and she sat in the chair to the right of that chair.

My great grandma asked me how I was, and then started talking to me about my life. She seemed to be suggesting to me that I go back to college. She asked me something like, "Have you ever considered Pace?"

The only Pace I knew of was Pace University in New York City. I hadn't actually considered that school. I didn't think I would ever consider the school, but I didn't want to tell my great grandma that, and seem to be contradicting her. My great grandma may already have seemed a little frustrated with me somehow, possibly because I was definitely being wishy-washy about going back to school.

I now noticed that my bookbag was sitting on the footstool in front of the chair. It had popped wide open. A new package of baby's diapers sat positioned about halfway out of the bag. I knew the diapers were mine -- like I had bought them for myself to wear.

I didn't want my great grandma to see the diapers and know they were for me. I tried to hide them. But now there was another new package of diapers, in a kind of thin, plastic shopping bag, right next to my bag. There were two big, new packages of diapers right in front of me! The package coming from my bookbag was colored red. The one in the shopping bag was green.

I wanted to put the diapers on right now. But I didn't want my great grandma to see me doing so. I was seriously thinking of doing something like hiding behind a chair so that I could change into a diaper without leaving the living room. But I didn't think that would work. I was half-lazily (like in a reverie) and half-frantically trying to figure a way to put a diaper on.

But suddenly I was in my great grandma's bathroom. I figured I must have gotten there by making some excuse to my great grandma about how I needed to go to the bathroom. I had all the bags with me, and I was putting on a diaper.

I looked at my diapered bottom in some (???) mirror. I noticed that the diaper-bottom was torn. It was like the leggings of the diaper were like the stitching around the leggings of panties, and that all the padding of the diaper had pulled away from the legging. Parts of the backing may have been shredding a bit as well, creating a striped or netted look.

I was now in another place. I may have just been with a group of friends, taking care of some task. We were now coming back home, as if we all lived in the same dorm-like apartment. I was rushing down to my room in the basement with a feeling of happiness, the brisk excitement of having been out with friends.

The basement felt full of activity, like there were a number of people who lived down there, and like they all shared some kind of common space like a living room, along one wall of which were the doors to the individual bedrooms. I ran into my room, but I left the door half-open.

I looked at myself in a full-length, kind of narrow mirror on the wall. I realized I needed to change my clothes quick! I couldn't quite believe it, but I was dressed like a girl! I wore a tiny, lavender-colored skirt, a baby blue shirt, and something like white nylons or fishnet stockings. I was also wearing a diaper, which I may have peed in. The diaper was visible from under the skirt. My body may also have been the body of a skinny, teenage girl, even though I was still myself, and a guy.

I knew I needed to change before anybody saw me. (It didn't occur to me that, if I looked like this coming into my room, everybody I was out with must have seen me already.) But as I was changing, my brother may have come into the room. His only reaction to me may have been that I needed to stop screwing around. He was impatient for us to get somewhere. And my slowness was really making him disappointed in me.