maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was standing in some place like an art museum. I stood at the edge of two rooms, like I was in a third room or a hallway. The two rooms were separated from each other by a small divider. Both of the rooms were pretty wide and airy. But the walls seem to have been spattered with paint, mostly red, with highlights of yellow.

In the room on my right, hanging right next to the dividing wall, was a long, hanging-scroll type of artwork. I may have thought of it as a Japanese painting. But may have been more like an embroidery, with a lot of gold thread. It showed Buddha on the top of a mountain, meditating.

A little, Asian boy ran up to the artwork and began pushing at it. He was pushing at it so hard that the fabric was stretching, becoming gauze-like, semi-transparent. I was panicked that the boy was going to tear the artwork. But I didn't want to say anything to him.

I now noticed that the artwork hung by something like a paper towel roll, through which ran a little rod like a metal clothes hanger. As the boy was pushing, the paper towel roll kept coming more and more off the rod. I knew the artwork would crumple to the ground.

I still felt shy about talking to the boy. But I went and found an older Asian man, who I figured must have been the boy's father. The man was skinny, with coppery skin, a receding hairline, and a slim, square cut of dark, black hair.

The man seemed to have a little trouble understanding English. But once he understood what I was saying, he went after the boy. By this time the artwork had probably been pushed to the ground. There seemed to be smoke, more like the sweetish-smelling stage smoke, all over the place. I seemed to be standing behind waist-high stacks of boxes.

The man and I now stood in another room, which was like the frame of a burnt-out house. There was smoke or steam everywhere around us. But we may basically have been outside, on a kind of yellowy-pale day.

The woman was upset, possibly because the artwork had been ruined. She was telling me and the man that she would be fine.

I now saw from the woman's viewpoint. I told the man (and somebody else?) that I was going to go home and shoot myself in the heart.

Dream #2

I was in a living room with my old friend R. I sat on the floor. R sat either on the floor or on the couch. The room was kind of dim, and there was stuff, including blankets, cluttered all around us.

I had a huge cookie before me. It was maybe 75cm in diameter. It was white, and it may have had something in it, like walnuts or pecans.

R encouraged me to eat the cookie. He seemed to think I was being a bit too shy about it. So I took a piece off the edge of the cookie and ate it.

R now revealed that he had a huge, brown cookie with stuff in it like chocolate chips, but not quite. R had to unwrap his cookie from a clear cellophane wrapper. He began eating his cookie and bragging about how good it was. Something about this was supposed to make me feel bad, like he'd "tricked" me into eating my own cookie while he got to eat his cookie, which was better than mine.

I decided I'd test out R's cookie, so I grabbed a chunk of it and ate it. R looked at me like he wanted to kill me.

Dream #3

It was night. I was in the back of the car with a guy. I sat on the left side. The guy sat on the right.

The guy was kind of tall, heavy, with a rounding jaw and squarish head. He had a short, square haircut with red-brown hair. He wore a black leather jacket. When he spoke, the guy had an accent that sounded Russian to me.

The guy talked about the Federico Fellini movie La Strada. He mentioned a group of people who were in the movie, but more in a sense like the movie was a real-life environment, of which they were a part. They had come into this place as spies. They may have been from the FBI.

The guy said these FBI spies had had such a great time in La Strada. "If they were having such a good time there, why did they go back to America? Why didn't they stay?"

Something about what the guy said didn't make sense to me. It may have been that I'd thought that of course the guys would want to go home: they'd only been here to spy.

We drove past some building like an auto repair garage. The garage door was all clear plexiglass, and the lights were on in the garage. But a couple of guys were pasting a humongous map of the United States up against the garage door, to block the view inside.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a cafe. The place was big and new-feeling, with white-tile floors and white tables. The ceiling was high and had kind of watery, fluorescent lights, like in a club warehouse. There was a big window wall off to the side, showing the blue light of early evening.

A young woman sat a couple of tables away from me. She may have been working on something. An older woman walked up to the table and talked to the younger woman about something. It may have been to ask the woman if she would move something of hers off the table.

Later, the young woman was gone, and the older woman had a bunch of friends with her. I may have had a better view of the woman now. She may have been kind of short, a little overweight, with pale red hair and pale skin. She may have been wearing a pale-beige beret and dark glasses.

The woman's friends, and possibly the woman herself, all spoke with some kind of accent, maybe Spanish or Portugese. I stood near the people. The people were all complaining about something about the young woman, something about her having left or moved something of hers.

I explained to the people that the young woman had simply moved her artist's portfolio off the table and over to an unused corner of the cafe. To prove this, I ran over to the corner of the cafe that was slightly cluttered with some unused furniture and household items. The portfolio was on top of a record player with a smoky-clear plastic lid. The portfolio itself was really big and made of a greenish-brown leather.

I don't think I picked up the portfolio. I was now back at the table with the older woman. Her old friends were now kind of stepped back from the table, maybe involved in some kind of casual conversation amongst themselves in their own language. The older woman sat at the table while I stood.

The older woman told me she knew that the young woman had put her artist's portfolio over there. The younger woman had asked her to do so. The older woman then said something like, "And thank goodness I didn't have to ask her friend to move her artworks over there as well!"

I knew that the young woman had a female friend who was a sculptor. So I knew the friend's works would be really big and hefty. I imagined a sculpture like the Venus de Milo, life-size, standing atop the woman's portfolio as it rested on the record player. I told the older woman, "No kidding! Imagine what would have happened to the record player's lid! It would have been crushed!"

Good morning, everybody. I slept 11 hours last night. I think I'm finally over my freaking cold. And ready for a new one to get me, I guess. Ugh...

Dream #1

I was in "my bedroom," which was a lot like my waking-life bedroom, except that it had, I think, green walls and really dusty floors. The light in the room was dim, as if some faint light were coming from some other room.

I saw a very skinny roach, about 5cm long, crawl across my floor. It looked all shrivelled up and dry, blackish-grey, not like a "healthy" (eww...) roach at all.

I began to aim for the roach, to kill it. But it darted away. I looked for it and found it again, in an extremely dusty spot between some boxes and a wall. But it got away again.

I had some toilet paper in my hand now. Apparently I was going to smash the roach with toilet paper. I found the roach again. This time it was climbing up a wall.

But I wasn't exactly sure that I was seeing it. I kept squinting and slowly walking closer and closer, to make sure that what I was seeing was actually the roach.

Dream #2

I was sitting in a desk near the front of a classroom. The classroom was lit with a dim, grey light. I sat near the right wall, facing the left wall. Most of the rest of the class was facing the front wall. The room was packed with students.

Everybody was quiet and listening to the teacher. The teacher was a tall, thin, white man, slightly balding, with grey-white hair, and squarish eyeglasses.

The teacher was giving some sort of lecture which may have been on film or some kind of performing art. But I wasn't paying attention. I had a big, fat book in front of me. I was huddled over it, elbows on my desktop, "taking notes" (I.e. scribbling) in the margins.

The teacher lifted the book off my desk and presented it to the rest of the class. I saw that the title of the book was "An Essay on Art and Love," and that it was by Karl Marx. The cover of the book was like a deep blue sky full of stars, with some kind of drawing in a circle in the center of the cover.

The teacher said, "Now, you see, (he said my name) is actually reading a book! Which shows he's paying attention in class! Everybody else needs to pay attention, too."

(I obviously, however, had not been paying attention in class. I don't even remember what the teacher was talking about.)

The teacher had now stopped his lecture and was apparently walking around, checking on how the students were doing. I went back to doing my own thing, a little embarrassed and upset that undue "good attention" to me had been paraded before the class.

The teacher now addressed a young, white man with fair skin and long, brown hair. The boy wore a black, wool cap and a baggy, black t-shirt with some kind of punky, black-and-white photo-print on it. The kid was slouched in his desk as the teacher addressed him.

The teacher said, "(The kid's name, which was the same as my name), I really hope you can learn, sooner or later, to stop making smart aleck comments in class whenever I say something you disagree with. It makes the whole class laugh at me and take your side."

I thought that was an odd argument for the teacher to make against the young man. I actually thought the kid was pretty funny, even though he was kind of distracting.

(Note: I seriously don't think Marx wrote anything about Art and Love. That would seriously cramp Marx' style.

I think this book is a mish-mash of my own thoughts. I've lately been reading the porn-philosophy book Juilette by the Marquis de Sade. A lot of people say the book is just porn and justification for doing all kinds of wacky things.

Reading the book, I kind of disagree, and I've lately thought to myself that the book could be read side-by-side with Karl Marx' Capital and Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is within You. They all three address something about the bipolarity of society.

So my dream life decided, apparently, to take that mish-mash and run with it. And now Marx is a romantic artist somehow... Okay...)

Good morning, everybody.

The endings of the first and third dreams were lucid. The first three dreams happened between 1:30 AM and 3:30 AM. The fourth dream happened between 5 AM and 5:45 AM.

Dream #1

I was with a couple of my nephews in a car that was driven by my grandmother. I may have been getting a ride back to the airport after my visit back home. It was a nice, sunny day.

My grandma asked me where I'd like to eat. I may have felt like a little kid at this point. I didn't want my grandma to have to pay for a big meal, so I said, "Oh, just Burger King will be fine."

We began driving up a winding hill, the face of which was brownish rock. My grandma said, "No. We're going to go to a sit down place to have some food. Let's go to Denny's."

We were at the top of the hill, in some kind of parking lot. Behind my grandma, from a view out her window, down the slope of parking lot and across some street, I could see a Denny's. Out my window and slightly up the parking lot's slope, I could see the car my mom was driving.

My grandma said, "You go tell your mom we are going to Denny's, and that she is coming, too. Don't let her make any excuses. Tell her I'm paying for all of you."

I was at my mom's vehicle, looking in from the passenger-side window. The vehicle was tall, like a tall van or SUV or pick-up truck. My mom sat at the wheel, giving me an almost dead look. I understood she was almost scorning me for thinking she'd go to Denny's with my grandma.

Somehow I was in my mom's car, riding down the hill, possibly to Denny's. I was trying to keep my mom's emotions under control.

We were now at my family's house. My mom and sister and I were playing with a little boy and a little girl, "my niece and nephew." We were all sitting on the floor, which was kind of cluttered with toys and clothes.

The little boy was doing something cute, but the little girl got really jealous. She did something mean to the little boy, hurting the little boy, and then started crying herself. Either my mom or my sister started comforting the little girl. They fed her a bottle which had a fleshy look to it, like a bottle-shaped breast.

The girl seemed to have a weird-shaped head and weird shaped eyes. The head and eyes got weirder and weirder as I looked at the girl eating. I stood up and walked toward the kitchen.

There were a mattress, some blankets, and some other stuff strewn on the floor right before the doorway to the kitchen. I stepped over all that stuff to get into the kitchen. But among that stuff, I saw that there was a little baby boy who had been forgotten under a bunch of blankets.

I knelt down and uncovered the little baby boy. It looked like a white-furred monkey with black eyes. It was swaddled in a blanket. I picked it up. I felt there was something meaningful, almost psychological, about my having found this baby boy and having started to care for it.

My sister and mom knelt near me. My sister took the baby. As I handed it to her, I felt like I needed to see it again, as if I couldn't believe I'd seen it at all. But now it was a "cell phone," which looked more like a blue, plastic alarm clock with green-lit punch keys on the underside.

My sister handed me the phone. I started talking with my sister on the phone. It was like she was no longer in front of me..

My sister said, "Yeah, it's probably not a good idea to tell F (my oldest nephew) about some of the things you did. It makes him think it's okay for him to do them. I mean, you think it's funny, and I think it's funny. But mom thinks it's just destructive in her house."

I replied, "Yeah, that's cool. We just come from different generations, I guess."

As I was saying this stuff, I found myself in another room, "my bedroom," which was more like a big room in a museum. The room was gently lit with warm, white-gold light. I wasn't on the phone. I was laying on something like a bed, on my left side.

I was looking at a huge painting, maybe 5 meters long and 3 meters tall. It was of Jesus, just his head, before a blue sky. His hair flowed as if blown by the wind, like you sometimes see happening for female anime characters.

Jesus had blood on his head and face, from the crown of thorns. The blood was also blowing in the wind. The blood then turned into red and orange leafs blowing in the wind. There might have been canopies of red and orange leafed trees in the background.

For some reason, this fall-themed crown of thorns painting made a lot of sense to me. I began to wonder why there wasn't a fall-related holiday relating to the life of Christ.

I rolled onto my back and then onto my right side. The room was dark. I was looking at another huge painting, this time winter-related. It had something to do with Jesus' footprints in the snow.

But there was something weird about the snow. It actually looked like boot-tracks on the moon. I realized Jesus wasn't in this painting at all. It was just a painting of boot-tracks on the moon. Yet it seemed so mystical to me that I reached up my arm (a child's arm?) parallel to the tracks.

Suddenly I realized I was dreaming.

I sat up. I was on the floor. I stood slowly. The room was dim, almost completely dark. The painting which stood before me was now even larger. The only detail I could see on this painting was near the lower left (my left) corner of the painting. It was the back of an almost naked person. The back was huge, muscular. But I couldn't tell iif it was male or female.

Next to the painting was an enormous (maybe 1.5-2 meters tall), metallic vessel, probably silver, on a stout, white pedestal and under a plexiglass display cube. The "bowl" of the vessel had a weird, nest-like tangling of metal, as tangled and fine as moss, which was incredible, considering how big this vessel was. The "neck" was smooth and polished.

Walking around, I kept feeling myself fade out of the dream. I tried to keep calm and hold onto the dream as long as I could. But eventually everything went black and I woke up.

Dream #2

I was in some big room like a school cafeteria on the second floor of a building. There were a lot of long tables with bench seats. The light was nice, incandescent. I sat at a smaller table with my friend T and a friend of hers, who I at first thought was Japanese.

T's friend and T were here to study. I had helped T with some kind of study project. I was apparently here to hand off a paper with my revisions. But now T took out a copy of a screenplay I'd written, with a lot of revisions on it.

The screenplay seemed to have been printed on 11x17 paper, so that two pages showed on each side. The first page was covered with pencil-revisions, in a really nice, narrow cursive hand. I understood that the rest of the screenplay was just as full of revisions.

At some point, T's friend reached over and scribbled something in the margins between the two pages. It said something about how T was my girlfriend. The T's friend said something out loud, and I realized T's friend was actually Chinese.

I felt odd about the implication that T was my girlfriend. But right after that T may have called me her boyfriend. I may have been happy about that.

Dream #3

It was night. I was walking down a sidewalk in front of some apartment buildings. A young, black man in a bright red hooded sweatshirt, black bubble-jacket vest, and jeans ran into an apartment building. Seeing me, the guy slowed down and gave me a kind of suspicious glance. He then ran the rest of the way into the building.

I knew somehow that the guy had been planning to kill me for a while. Now that I had just gone past his building, he figured he might as well shoot me now.

I saw him, through some windows, run up a stairwell, then run back down it. I knew he had just gone into his apartment to pick up his gone, and that he was now coming back for me.

I didn't walk any faster or try to get away. I figured if it was going to happen, I couldn't avoid it, even though I'd probably be really afraid once things really started happening.

I was now walking through a long hallway in a dorm building or apartment complex. The hallway was kind of dumpy, with white walls and stark, fluorescent lighting. There was somebody following me. But it now felt like an older, white man rather than a young, black man.

I came to a door, which I knew was for the apartment of the man who lived in the apartment directly above my apartment. I knocked on the door, thinking I'd finally take him up on his invitation to come up and hang out some time. I figured this way, I could throw the stalker off my trail.

The door was a really weak wood. I knocked. The door was now a heavy door with a thin window on the left side. Through the window, I saw a small hallway and the another door. A college-aged girl opened the far door. She waved me in.

I thought the door was locked. But as soon as I pushed on the door, there was a buzzing, and the door opened. I walked into the smaller hallway. The woman was gone, which struck me as strange. I realized I was all alone. This struck me as odd.

Suddenly I realized I was dreaming. I almost lost the dream right there. But I calmed down.

I told myself to keep walking, and just to explore the space. I walked past the small hallway. There was another small hallway. The walls here had wooden drawers set into them, like old library card catalog drawers, except that they looked really light and cheap. I thought this was an interesting place, full of files or something. But I kept going.

I walked through another door. I was now in a very small room with a small, grey-painted metal stairway and second level and a bunch of grey-painted, metal lockers. Below the balcony of the second level, the room seemed to twist off into a much smaller corridor. The staircase also had a metal-railed gate in front of it. The place kind of reminded me of small rooms in the Intrepid aircraft carrier.

I was surprised that I was all alone, and I kept on gurad for a person, who I assumed would probably not be very kind. I remembered that in my last long lucid I had met a really crazy person.

I had two options for exploring. I chose to go up the staircase instead of around the curve on the first level.

I floated over the gate. I almost floated up the staircase. But I felt like the floating was actually causing me to lose my dream-control. So I grabbed the railings of the staircase and forced myself to walk up.

I had a weird feeling through the rest of this dream. I felt very closed in. I could hear my breath, like I was wearing a space suit.

I felt very warm. Walking up the steps, to my left, I saw a clothing rack full of old, pale blue and white button-up shirts. It looked like they were for a somewhat old man. Above that, there was a shelf piled with upside-down, round-brimmed, straw hats. I picked one up and fiddled with it a little. It looked like it was in bad shape.

I got up to the balcony. There were more lockers. It looked at first like I couldn't go anywhere else from here. But then I realized that there was a hallway or something off to the right.

In waking life, my computer made a loud noise. I woke up.

Dream #4

I had been in space, flying some kind of space vehice. I barely remember anything. I remember being high up in the sky, coming back down, around sunset, when the sky was a vivid purple.

I was now taxiing an airplane (?) into an airport with my mother. We were "parked." My mom went into the airport to take care of something before we went home.

I sat in the backseat of a car, outside a metal-walled building like some staff building at an airport. I was still waiting for my mom. The sky still had a deep-blue-purple post-sunset look. It was kind of cold.

I could imagine what was going on between my mom and the people she was talking to. The people were something like military people. I could see, in particular, one tall, older, white man who kind of looked like a very thin Stan Lee, wearing a green military uniform for formal occasions.

My mom was asking the military man what he would do now that she'd told him about the weird adventures I'd been through, which were undeniable fact.

The military man said, "I'll do the same thing I do to every mother and son who comes in here telling me stuff like this. I'll tell them to get out. I had money to pay attention to this kind of stuff the first few times it happened. But now it's happening all over the place and -- you mothers and kids are bleeding me dry!"

I was sitting in the trunk of the car, with the trunk opened just a crack. I thought of getting out of the trunk and telling the military man something about my experience that was so unique that he wouldn't want me to go away. Plus. I would tell him, I didn't want his money. I just wanted to tell my story.

I thought to myself (why?) that this was a lot like a Joyce Carol Oates story (which it wasn't).

I opened the trunk all the way and sat out of it to see one of my female cousins, A, walking down the tall stairway of another metal-walled building. She came my way. I could tell she would be mad at me for not having spoken with her for a long time.

By the time she got to me, my mom was there, too. I was standing by the car. There seemed to be a miniature living room surrounding the car as well.

I was trying to explain something to my cousin about how I couldn't include her on something my mom and I were doing. As I did so, I was kneeling by a small bookshelf and going through some items.

I stood up to see my cousin kneeling on the opposite side of the bookshelf. My cousin now had weird, plasticky, shiny, black hair, like an anime character. She was also wearing some kind of red and yellow uniform that reminded me of an anime character.

My cousin gave me a half-mad, half-disappointed look. I tried to make her less mad by saying something half-heartedly interesting about anime.

(Note, evening, Dec. 17: I think the "crown of thorns" image in my third dream is influenced by a set of images from a photo slideshow I saw yesterday on the US version of Reuters.com. The slideshow was just the normal "editor's choice" picks of global photos, I think.

But it showed a lot of images of people in England, Greece, Turkey, and other countries, involved in some form of protest. A lot of the photos showed people who had sustained head injuries during the protests. What really struck me was that these people were still protesting, even after having been hurt.

So I don't think the "crown of thorns" image is entirely about Christ.

Also I thought at first that the metal vessel in the first dream was just a really big symbol for the male, uh... parts. I still think that's the case. The painting of the man's or woman's backside and the giant... parts right next to each other seems like an image readily supplied by the unconscious.

However, I also think the image stands for a couple other things. First, I think it's an upside-down version of a brain and neck. In my fourth dream I also have an upside-down head (the hats) near a torso (the shirts). I don't know why the head and neck have been important in my dreams lately. But they have.

Second, I think the vessel is like a jet or rocket engine: a bunch of fine, intricate pipes and valves, ending in a big propulsion valve. Anyway, I guess jet engines can be phallic or intestinal, depending on how you look at them.

None of this is a big deal. I just write it down to help me focus.)

Good morning, everybody. I'm glad it's the weekend.

I remember two dreams from last night.

Dream #1

I was on the second floor of an art museum. The floors were set up to be wide open, with tall ceilings. The floors were dark concrete. I could see down to the first floor from a weird-shaped cutaway.

The art was all sparsely placed. It was all like sculptures made out of different random items. Some stuff was tall and hanging from the ceiling. Other stuff stood alone on the floor. Other stuff was on the walls.

I don't remember the name of the exhibit, but I remember it struck me as very edgy and interesting, like something about global pop art by some oppressed group of people.

I was then down on the first floor, possibly in front of the cash register at the gift shop. I was with a woman. We were talking to the cashier, a very pretty woman.

She was telling us something about how this exhibit traveled. The way she told us made it sound like Europe, Japan, and the US were all situated in three layers, one on top of the other. I saw all three regions in my mind's eye as pieces of geographically-shaped plastic, one stacked on the other.

Dream #2

I had either taken heroin or had it injected into me. I felt a little warm and dizzy. I walked around in a bedroom and then went out to a living room.

The room was dim and yellowish, as if bright sun from outside were blocked by thick, beige curtains.

I knelt before a bed and rested my arms and head on the bed. A tall, skinny, white man with slightly tanned skin and blue eyes sat on the bed.

He looked down at me and said, "Did you take the heroin? Yeah, I took some, too. Only thing is, now that you've taken it, you'll see that you can't stop. Sure, you feel fine now. But wait till it wears off. You'll be screaming in pain."

I was afraid. I didn't want to be addicted. But I couldn't even remember how I'd gotten the heroin in my system. I remembered some vial of amber colored liquid. It had been injected into the space between my shoulder and neck.

I thought, Well, maybe I won't be addicted. After all, the guy said I'd feel really good and then really bad. But I don't feel really good. I only feel normal, maybe just a little bit warmer than usual.