dancing missile complex; texas cather library; citibank semi-lucid

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I "woke up" dancing in a dark room. There may have been music playing, some kind of deep, throbbing music. The room was mostly dark, with maybe a dim, red light. A strobe light may have flashed behind me occasionally, showing my shadow on the wall. As I first woke, a couple of people may also have walked behind me.

I didn't know why I was dancing. My moves were all really aggressive and angry. I thought I may have been preparing for some kind of fight.

At one point my shadows looked like coiled up snakes, like they were all somehow slithering down for the wall. I tried to change this appearance in some way, to make my shadow look more rigid and human. But I didn't like something about the new moves. So I went back to the snakelike moves.

I remembered the people who walked behind me. I felt like I needed some kind of approval for them. Maybe they'd laughed at me when they'd seen me dancing. But I felt like I needed to follow them, to get some kind of approval from them.

They'd walked up some steps along the right wall. I walked up those steps as well. The staircase was wooden and narrow. It was hard to see through the railing, up to the next floor. I barely saw a light in a bedroom. I went up to that bedroom.

In the bedroom it was now day. There were two women, both possibly Hispanic, in the room. One of the women was supposed to be my mother. But neither woman looked like my mother. They both looked alike. They were a bit short, kind of skinny, maybe in their mid-forties, and kind of worn-out looking. They had long, straight, pale hair, and they wore big eyeglasses.

The women may have been talking about me being Hispanic. But my mom was saying that I was actually half Native American. I didn't think my mom could prove that, even though I seemed to wish it was true. I wondered if I'd ever be able to track down my dad and findo out whether I actually was Native American.

I expressed something like this to the women while I was looking out the bedroom windows, which seemed to be close together, near the corner of the room.

I was now out in a car with my mom. My mom was driving. It was daytime. We were driving through some mountainy area that seemed to be developing into a suburban area. We drove up a road on a steep, grassy slope.

Along the slope were little fixtures in the ground, almost like ceiling-hung security cameras, except planted upside-down. The fixtures now started firing little missiles out of them, with bright, papery flashes. The frequency of the flashes became more and more intense.

We drove into an area full of apartment complexes. The apartment complexes were all relatively new. But the missile launchers were even here, too.

I figured that somehow this place we were driving through had gotten into a nuclear war, and that the place was just going into an all-out attack before it got attacked. But it was also like my mom and I had been sent to find these missiles, like we were somehow supposed to stop their production. The apartment complex was new. It may have been built just as a cover-up for the missile complex.

My mom and I, as well as my sister, now pulled in through a huge parking complex at night. It was like an airport parking complex. But we found ourselves in a hotel parking lot that seemed to be on the edge of the woods. The hotel was a Meridien. We went into the restaurant.

We were supposed to be meeting someone here. But I didn't have a job. I was really poor. I didn't know how I could afford any food in this place. I may also have been wearing really terrible clothes.

The decor of the restaurant was really nice and modern. It all somehow seemed familiar to me. I wondered how this could be. Then I remembered that I had actually applied for a job here, as a waiter.

One of the waiters walked past me. I recognized him from my interview. I wanted to acknowledge him. But I didn't want him to think I was some crazy guy, just here to stalk him because I still thought I stood a chance of getting a job here.

Dream #2

I was in a car, probably. I was driving somewhere. But I was also in a conversation with somebody -- maybe my mom, or maybe some women from work -- about Texas. There was a location we were trying to get to, on the west side of Texas. Or we may have been tracking someone like a criminal, and we may have suspected that the criminal was going there.

I was now in some place like a library. I had been talking with somebody about an art show I'd been wanting to see. But I'd been avoiding it for some reason, maybe because it was at my old university or run by somebody from there, and I didn't want to bother anybody from my old school.

I was walking away, trying to get out of the building, I think. I saw into a kind of dim room. The room seemed like some kind of narrow amphitheatre. There were a bunch of professional people inside, talking with each other like they had just finished the meeting.

Among those people I saw the old head of my theatre department. But the person was a woman instead of a man. I tried to remember the person's name. But I could only think of a man's name. I wanted to avoid the person. So I left the building. I figured I might go to that art show after all.

I was walking outside for a little while, out on a concrete path on a college campus. But I found myself not too long afterward in a big library, like the Rose Reading Room at the Schwarzmann branch of the NYPL.

Instead of having long tables through the room, the library had either short tables or individual desks. The room was mostly empty, except for three young, black women who were studying under the watch of an older, black, female teacher.

The young women were all spaced well apart from each other. As I walked into the library, one of the women was speaking out something to the teacher, who stood behind her left shoulder. The girl had a really nice voice. But what she was reading sounded really simple, almost silly. I couldn't figure why the girl, who seemed really smart, was reading such a simple text.

But the girl was really pretty. So I wanted to impress her. I began walking around the library with my chest all puffed out, like I was really smart. The young woman wore a dress of almost pastel colors -- yellow and green.

As I walked around the library I noticed that the other two young women also wore pastel colored clothes. The clothes seemed to me very well suited to the desert, which was apparently where we were. The colors also reminded me of something that the characters in the novels of Willa Cather might wear.

I walked toward the left side of the library. I was looking for books for myself. But I was also getting a bit nervous. I felt like sooner or later another guy would come into the library. When he saw how I was alone in this room with four women, he'd get jealous of me and start doing all kinds of things to annoy me.

Dream #3

I was in "the Citibank building," a huge skyscraper that was apparently located in Manhattan. I was here for an interview. I was on a high up floor, maybe even a floor that was still under construction.

I was really poorly prepared for the interview. I looked terrible, and I didn't exactly have any talking points prepared. Plus, I may have been interviewing for some position for which I had no experience.

I sat in big conference room for a bit with a tall, white, skinny man who looked young, even though he was probably in his mid thirties. The room was full of windows and filled with dim gold of late afternoon sunlight. But I felt really low in my seat, much shorter than the man, and it seemed really hard to see up and out of the windows.

The man eventually told me that he didn't think this job was a good fit for me. He may have told me he hadn't thought this job was a good fit for me, even before I came to the interview. He may have wondered why I'd come here at all. But he said this all in a really gentle way, like he was concerned for me, like I was a special child that he wanted to help.

The interview was over, and I was walking around the building. I was up on a floor where construction workers were still working. The floor had walls, but a lot of the floors and ceilings were still in a raw state.

I knew I was really high up over the city. I really wanted to look out the windows, to see the city below. But I suddenly realized that this was a dream, and that I could just fly out the window. I ran as fast as I could. I started flying, even before I got to the window.

As I saw the cityscape outside the window I told myself to focus. I knew that in the past I'd panicked with moving into outside environments in lucid dreams. I told myself to stay calm and just believe I could get outside.

I got through the window, but the enviroment changed. The building was much lower than it had been. And the landscape below was just trees and lawn, like I was in some kind of office park, rather than in the middle of Manhattan.

I stopped flying, for some reason -- maybe because I'd wanted to fall, to see what it was like to jump out of a building. I slammed down on the lawn on my stomach. I pulled my head up to look at the building. It looked like a pretty tall building, and it gleamed in the afternoon light.

I tried to stand myself up so I could look around and explore this dreamworld. But as I did, it changed from day to night. I thought I must haved woken up. But it scared me to think I'd woken up out on a lawn in the middle of the night. I had no idea how I'd gotten here. Had I been sleepwalking? Was I going crazy?

I could hear my labored breathing, like I was breathing inside a spacesuit. I walked or stumbled a little ways in the darkness. I thought that maybe I was still dreaming. But I couldn't be lucid, I told myself, because this world was so close to the world of my bedroom (???). I told myself I must be right on the edge of waking. I heard my breathing get louder and louder, until I woke up.

a raise from my old boss; seinfeld paperwork

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in an office. I sat at a desk that had a huge shelf or barrier right beside it. The barrier felt more like the back end of a filing cabinet, topped with some small set of metal shelves. My desk was part of a narrow but pretty long area, like a number of tall filing cabinets had all been lined up near a wall, with desks set behind them.

My old boss, CR, walked up in front of my desk from an aisle made between two of the filing cabinets. He seemed to be thinking I was planning to leave this job. He didn't want me to leave, and he was thinking of ways to keep me.

Finally he told me something like, "You know, things are finally going to be okay. We're going to start making money. I'll be making more money. And I'm going to see to it that you get a raise."

Somehow in all of this it may have been implied that my boss was going to leave his job for another job, and that he was going to take me with him. Or it might have been that we had already gone to another job, and that things were going to be better here than my boss had first thought.

My boss walked away, and I watched after him. I then sat down, thinking about my raise.

Dream #2

Something like an episode of Seinfeld. The main characters all sat against some run down wall, on a bench that was either part of the wall or built onto the wall. They all sat kind of slouched and lazy.

The guys were all somehow annoying Elaine. Some of them may have been making annoying sounds. But what they were really doing that was really annoying Elaine had to do with some kind of work they were either not doing or doing in some kind of really annoying way.

The view now focused on Jerry, who sat at the far right (my right, as I viewed it) end of the bench. Jerry now called attention to the fact that all this time he hadn't been half as annoying as the other guys, and that he had quietly been doing his work. He continued his work. This may have inspired everybody else to do their work.

Now one of the guys had some kind of paperwork to fill out. This was like a tax form, except it had more to do with getting employment. There were two columns of questions, with an answer column beside each question column.

Two questions toward the bottom of the page, maybe the last and the third to last questions, were in boxes filled in with a blue background. At least one of these questions was an eliminating question. It may have had something to do with Texas.

It was now like I was filling out this form for the person who needed the process related to this form taken care of. The answer box next to the very important question may already have been a lot of small writing, maybe typing. But I had to write in a zero. I crossed through the circle of the zero to clarify that it was a zero and not an "o."

Something about the process of filling out this box may have repeated. It may have been like the first time I'd done the filling out I hadn't known what I was doing, and that, as I learned what the box really meant, I'd have to re-do and re-do the box.

driving to texas; movie-concert work farewell; hotel policeman

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I had just been part of some situation where somebody had been trying to tell someone else how far away one point in Texas was from another point. The person telling this had been lazy and wrong. I thought to myself that all he'd had to do was show a couple of points on a map and figure out things that way.

I was now figuring out the distances between the towns myself. One town was in south central Texas. The other town was on the east border of south Texas. I was looking at these two towns from a map. But the map took up my entire field of view. It felt like I was flying over the map, looking down on some actual landscape, even though it looked just like a map.

I kept flying over the border of Texas, spotting three towns that lay right on the border. One was San Martin. I forgot the name of the second one, which was farther south. The one farthest south was named Moon.

I was now with somebody else, a young man, tall, roundly muscular, with a mostly-shaved head. We were apparently driving to the town on the border of Texas. I knew that the town was 683 miles away.

We spoke about driving. As we did I saw our destination, or one of our destinations, in the distance. It was a small down at the distant end of a straight highway. The sky behind the town was purple and dim from sunset. There also seemed to be some kind of stone bluff that was taller than any building in the town. Or else this stone bluff may actually have been the hotel building where we were staying.

We were now in the hotel. It must have been night. We didn't have many lights on in the bedroom of the hotel. Only light from the bathroom shone into the bedroom. We were probably getting ready for bed or getting up and getting ready for the day.

But now a man from the hotel came in. He was tall, thin, with longish, blonde-brown hair and a receding hairline. He wore a white shirt and a red vest. The man told us that he needed us to move out of this room into another room. There were some kind of important people, the man explained, who needed the room we were in.

He told us that people had either moved out of or been kicked out of the other room. Everybody else in the hotel thought, because of the people who'd been in that room, that the room was really bad. But, the hotel man said, the room was really the best room in the hotel. The man was keeping this secret for us, if we would be so kind as to move.

The man I was with didn't have a problem with moving. But I did. Apparently I had to go somewhere for work. I was actually getting ready to go there right now. I had to be to a meeting at 10 AM. And that was right in the middle of the time when I needed to be to the meeting.

I was slinging on a suit jacket as I thought to myself that, after all, the man I was with could move all our stuff into the other hotel room. Or the hotel people could do it. But I didn't trust things either way. As long as I couldn't be here to see things getting moved, I couldn't trust that something wouldn't get lost. I really didn't want to move, even if we did get a better room.

Dream #2

I was at a movie theatre. It was gigantic. It was all dark, with almost a feeling that we were outside on a dark night -- possibly just because the place was so huge. The seats of the theatre were all set, in huge sections, at different angles. My section was set so that my left side faced the movie screen.

I had probably just finished watching one movie. Now another movie was set to begin. I didn't have a ticket to watch this movie. But I figured that if I just stayed in my seat, I could watch the second movie without getting caught.

Now it was like the second movie was a movie I had been here to see all along. I was really excited for it. But as I sat waiting, two women came into my row of seats and sat down to my left. The two women were maybe in their thirties, kind of attractive, but a little worn out looking, and a little boisterous and crude.

The women may have been talking about the show. Apparently the show was either a concert or a movie about a concert. The band "in concert" was some new rock band that the women were in love with. The band had a punky but smart sensibility. I didn't like that type of music. But I think I convinced myself I liked them. Otherwise, I reasoned, I wouldn't be here.

The woman closest to me tossed a bunch of boxes into the seat between her and me. The boxes were bulky and blocked my view of the screen. But the woman didn't seem satisfied with that. She began pushing the boxes -- and something on top of the boxes -- at me, crowding me out of my own chair.

I moved away. I sat on my seat's armrest. I think I even moved over to the next seat to my right. But by that time, I may have been to the aisle. I couldn't go any farther.

I figured this was enough. I was tired of being crowded out by the women. I was going to leave. I was now walking away. I was outside, on a long, straight road through a small town in the desert. It was daytime. There were a lot of cars out on the road. Now I was regretting not having stayed for the show. I remembered that maybe, after all, the band was good.

I could now hear the beginning of the movie, as if I were still close enough to the theatre to hear the movie. The band had just come out on stage. They said they were going to do a cover version of the Beatles song "Love Me Do."

The person who had introduced the band onto the stage said something like, "Oh, that's actually one of the hardest Beatles songs to cover. Good luck, guys."

But I remembered that the band had done the cover pretty well. I could now hear the song in my head. It sounded like "Love Me Do," but with the soft-punky sound of the band. I thought it was okay.

I was walking for just a moment through the neighborhood I'd lived in when I was in high school. I may have been looking at my phone. My sister was asking me a lot of personal information. I didn't want to give it to her. I felt like she would use it in bad ways.

I had then come into an office building. I was in a big hallway that seemed to curve around some large auditorium. The hallway was white with grey carpeting and fluorescent light. It felt like a hallway inside a new church building to me.

At some point a man told me that I'd better get ready, because everybody was going to be moving out of this building pretty soon. Possibly a tall, slim, black woman told me the same thing. The woman was like some kind of important secretary. The man, whom I saw somewhere, was an IT person. He was tallish, fattish, and bald, with red-brown hair on the sides of his head and a red-brown mustache.

I curved around into some slanted area like a coat closet that actually connected the hallway I was in to another hallway. I turned right down that other hallway, walked down, and found myself in some kind of lobby area with a group of office workers.

I had been thinking about what the IT man had said. A lot of these guys were IT guys. They spoke to me about where the IT operations for the company were going to move. Most of it, they said, would be in a building different from the building I was going to. They mentioned some cities.

I asked about a couple IT people, as if I were trying to confirm that they'd done something for me in the past. But the others said I had the wrong people. They told me the name of the man who had actually helped me. They then told me either that that the man was no longer with the company or that he was going to be moving really far away.

Dream #3

I had come from somewhere else and had now arrived in a hotel room, which was also set up as an office. The "office" side of the room was just a wall-length desk with two computers on it. The room was mostly dark, with just the glow of the computer screens and the incandescent light from some other room lighting the place.

I was probably working here with a pretty, black woman. But right while we were in the middle of some project, "my boss" came in. He was an old man, kind of gruff looking, with blonde hair and a mustache.

The man began giving us some speech which implied that he suspected me of something. He thought I was a bad person who was waiting for just the right moment to do something bad. I think he was just waiting for a reason to get rid of me.

The man now began giving us some kind of justification for his feelings. He said he'd worked for years as a SWAT team member or some kind of special operations guy. He got to know the signs of a bad person.

The man then began telling us stories of how he'd have to talk down people who'd finally gone bad. The man said that he'd really been aiming to shoot the people dead all along. But you had to go through a whole protocol before you could finally kill the guy.

The man stood before us, re-enacting a scene. It now seemed like the man was wearing heavy SWAT team gear. He seemed to be a bit younger, but also a lot more wrinkled and worn out. His hair was a whole lot thinner, but a lot longer. And his eyes were frantic and bugged-out. He may have been holding a rifle.

The man told us how he'd balance legal phrases intended to calm down the target with a manner of speech calculated to frighten the target and make him jumpy. The man said, "I'd keep telling the creep, 'Put down your gun! You're alright! Put down your gun!' But, really, I was just egging him on. I wanted him to lift his gun, so I could blow his head off!"

The man seemed so frantic by this point in time that I could hardly bear looking at him. But now there was the sound of sirens. I turned around and looked toward the curtained window of the hotel room. I could see full, grey daylight coming in dimly below the bottom fringe of the curtain. I was waiting to see the flashing lights accompanying the sirens.

The man or the woman may have said that the cops were finally here, that the man had been planning all along to have me arrested, and that I'd now finally given him a reason to have me arrested.