maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in the back seat, passenger side of a car, riding through a town with Mitt Romney. Romney was in the front seat, on the passenger side. I didn't see who the driver was. The day had a strongly yellow light to it. The area we drove through seemed to be a downtown area, with lots of tall buildings.

Romney and I were talking back and forth. But suddenly I saw something in between the two seats. It was like a little stand-up paper display that are place on tables in restaurants to advertise specials or desserts. This one had three sides. It was colored a dull, brownish copper.

Instead of advertising food, though, this thing seemed to be a political pamphlet. I couldn't see all the sides. The side near me was trying to convince people to hold back a bill that was going through Congress at the moment.

The pamphlet argued that the bill would cut much-needed funds out of community budgets. The pamphlet used the figure of $800,000 as an example. It said this cut money could have been used for things like extra members of the police force.

The pamphlet then tried to argue that the bill was part of a larger conspiracy, and that Romney was a part of this conspiracy.

The main goal of this bill, the pamphlet said, was to get police off the street. That way, people would act irresponsibly and violently. The government would wait for a crisis, then come in and take even tighter control of everything.

I didn't believe in the conspiracy theory, but I was affected by the message and tone of the pamphlet. Romney could see this, and for a moment, thinking I had been won away from him by the alarmists, he stopped talking to me.

But somehow he got started talking again. He was talking about the comedy shows that used him as a subject. There was one show, kind of like Saturday Night Live, that used him as a subject in a lot of their sketches. Romney imitated the actor that imitated Romney, imitating Romney.

I reflected on what a bad job of imitation the actor really did. But Romney was catching a lot of the actor's mannerisms. I told Romney he imitated the actor better than the actor imitated Romney.

The car had stopped. We were now walking outside, in a kind of plaza area with a concrete or stone ground and a big, stone fountain in the center. Romney rushed off ahead of me. He had to head to some meeting. I wasn't sure I'd see him again. But I felt like he was no longer suspicious of me and angry at me.

As I was walking in Romney's direction, a dissheveled-looking guy in old, brown, tattered pants, shirt, and overcoat walked up to me in something of a hurry. He stopped me with the force of his agitation. He began speaking to me about the conspiracy theory I'd seen on the pamphlet in the car.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

My female friend H and I were in a mall at night. We were in one of the department stores. I think we wanted to head out of the mall.

We knew the exit we were at didn't lead to the section of the parking lot where our car was. But we didn't know what exit of the mall would lead us to our car.

But for some reason we were heading for the exit at the end of this department store, anyway. We walked out a double set of sliding glass doors.

As we passed between the two doors, a policeman, not a security guard, passed in front of us. He was a couple inches taller than I, kind of muscly, black, with lightish skin, and very short hair. He seemed to be trying to bully us or hustle us a little as he passed us.

The cop passed through the second set of doors, and we followed. After the cop got a couple meters away from the exit he turned around and did something like a sly, little look at us -- at me in particular, like he thought I was some sort of troublemaker.

I thought, Oh, god, I'm getting singled out all over again. The cop walked away. But I felt like I was going to get targeted for more harrassment.

I knew H and I had walked out the wrong exit of the mall. I knew the easiest thing to do would be to go back into the mall, straight through the mall, and to the correct exit.

But I felt like if the cop already had me singled out as a troublemaker, he'd probably either head back into the mall and harrass me or contact his cop friends and have them harrass me, if he saw me head back into the mall. So I figured the smartest thing to do would just be to walk all the way around the outside of the mall until H and I found our car.

Dream #2

I was sitting at a table in a food court area that kind of looked like the dining section at the student union of my old university. But this food court was either part of a mall or an airport -- or both.

There was one big area of seats, then a wide walkway, then another big area of seats. Both seating areas and the walkway were busy with people, all rushing all over the place.

I sat at a table full of people, mostly adults in their forties or fifties. But, off to my left, I saw somebody, maybe one of my old psychiatrists, sitting at another table.

I didn't want her to get up and hurry away before I got to talk to her. So I ran to her table. But when I got to the table, she was gone. But I felt like she was probably going to return. It was now like we were scheduled to meet. So I figured I'd sit here and wait for her -- so this time I wouldn't miss her.

But I realized I'd left my backpack (a huge, tall backpack!) at the previous table. So I got up and ran over to pick that up.

For some reason, I was now kind of wandering around in the seating area. I seemed to be upset with my most recent psychiatrist. I had feelings about her that were the same as IWL -- I felt like she neglected my deeper psychological issues all the time, always looking for a quick fix and easy way out -- to save herself the trouble of work.

For some reason, I felt like I finally needed to just complain to somebody about her. For a moment I may have complained to the psychiatrist I'd seen sitting at the table -- somehow. But that psychiatrist was now gone.

But now I saw my most recent psychiatrist's "boss," sitting in an armchair in a section of hallway after the seating area across the walkway from me. I went up to this woman and either sat in an armchair right next to hers, or knelt beside the woman's armchair.

The woman looked like Susan Seaforth, who played Julie Horton on Days of Our Lives, from around the time period of the late 1970s.



I either told the woman that I wanted to complain about my psychiatrist, or I just began complaining to her about my psychiatrist.

The woman listened to me for a moment. She then said that she understood what I was talking about. But she had to go take care of some business. When she got finished, she'd come back to me. I could tell her the rest of my story. And she could figure out what to do in response.

But I think this woman's "business" was to catch a flight. I'm pretty sure she even had luggage with her. It didn't register with me then -- but -- how long was I supposed to wait?

Dream #3

It was daytime. I was out on a wide, shallow, stone staircase with a lot of people. We all stood up near the top, near a whole wall of glass doors that looked in on a comparatively dark lobby. It was like we were all assembled out here for a photo.

I was playing some kind of important part in whatever proceedings we were all a part of. But there were these two really hot, young women right next to me. One of them, even though she was a really hot, young woman, may have been one of my friends' mothers.

The two hot girls began kissing each other. First they were just giving each other mild, quick, closed-mouth kisses. But then, either because I wasn't reacting much or because I actually was paying attention to them, they began to give each other slower kisses.

I was pretty aroused by this. The two girls kind of fed on my arousal and began giving each other open-mouthed kisses. They even kind of sunk down a bit, almost kneeling on the ground with each other. They may have been wearing wedding dresses, as if they were going to marry each other.

Now the young women opened their mouths slightly and began slowly sliding their tongues back and forth into each others' mouths. This was too much for me to handle.

The girls stood back up and were almost right in my face. So, even though I didn't want to start kissing my friend's mom, I just crept my face a bit closer. I began working my tongue in there a bit.

I was trying to get my tongue in there in the least intrusive way that I could. I was really turned on by the girls' lesbian kissing. I didn't want it to turn into straight kissing. I just wanted to get a little bit of the lesbian erotic energy on my own tongue.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was daytime. I was out on a street somewhere, probably in Brooklyn. There were a lot of people out on the street. I was apparently really focused in on something I was doing. But some person, maybe an older, kind of fat, white man, was talking to me.

The man told me that there had been some huge thing having to do with guns just down the road. There may have been a small gunfight. But the really big deal about it was that there were a whole lot of people all gathered together, and they all either had or were making a lot of guns.

The street the man was talking about was just down the block and around the left corner. It suddenly occurred to me that I needed to go down that block. The person who had been talking to me told me not to go down that block. But I didn't have a choice. I needed to go.

I was now walking down the block. It was as bright and sunny there as on a summer day. To my left was some kind of tall, chain-link fence, like might be around a school. Beyond that, farther down the sidewalk, were some brownstone row-houses and some narrow, shortish apartment buildings.

But to my right, the street, just down the way from me, was filled with cars. The cars looked like 1970s cars, more like Cadillac style than hot-rod style. They were all parked at odd angles, right in the middle of the street.

There were people sitting and standing among the cars, as well as on the stoops of brownstones on the right side of the street. I think the people were mostly white, kind of overweight, with hair in a kind of buzz cut. They may have worn black t-shirts.

I could see that all these people were either making guns or cleaning up their guns. I knew that whatever they were doing, it was horribly illegal, and that I was probably walking through the middle of a really bad situation.

I just tried to act like I didn't see anything. A few guys on my side of the street were helping out the gun guys somehow. They seemed to be suspicious of me, wondering why I was walking around here. But my nonchalant attitude made them less worried about me.

I had realized -- at some point -- that I was here because I used to live here. I'd moved to a different place a long time ago. But for some reason, some of my mail was still being delivered here. I had to come back here and pick up some of my mis-delivered mail.

I walked up to one of the narrow, short apartment buildings. The door of the building was glass with bars behind it that looked like chrome bars, which just glared in the summer-bright light. This was where I used to live.

There was a circus-peanut orange colored card in the door, somehow, as if the card were sticking out of the bars -- even though the bars were *behind* the glass of the door!

I pulled the card out and looked at it. It was some kind of postal service request card, stating that all mail should be delivered to my new address. The address was the exact address of where I live nowadays IWL, except, perhaps, without the apartment number.

I still needed to get my old mail. So I walked into the apartment. Inside, the place looked like the interior of a nice brownstone row-house. There was a nice first floor hallway area, which, it seemed to me, led to a spacious living area, probably where my old landlady would have lived.

There was a staircase along the right wall. I walked up the staircase. The staircase ended with a doorway that opened into a hallway. Along the right wall of the hallway were rooms. People would rent the rooms and then share the bathroom and kitchen on this floor.

My old room had been the room closest to the doorway at the top of the staircase. The door to the room was wide open. The room was empty. It was like nobody had moved in there since I'd left. I think I was now questioning whether I hadn't left this place only very recently, and not a long time ago, like I'd thought before.

I went into the room. There was a bed that took up most of the room. On the left side there was a weird niche in the wall, like a closet. But the shelf in the closet was low: waist-high, so that it almost looked like it could be used as a writing desk.

The place was all dusty. Some of the dust in the corners and on the surfaces of things was so old and caked up that it was starting to get gummy.

Something about the fact that this place felt so abandoned, so quiet and empty, made me feel like I should move back here. I was starting to feel like I couldn't live in my new place anymore, anyway. So maybe I would see about moving back here.

I walked back down to the front door of the apartment. But as I was leaving, my old landlady was walking up to the front door. I had been hoping that I could get into and out of the house without her ever knowing I was here. I'd felt like if she saw me, she'd harrass me about something.

I opened the door for my landlady. I greeted her. I walked outside. But instead of going out into the neighborhood I'd just been in, I walked into a big front patio of a house, which had been converted into a sun-room. It had grass-green, plasticky-feeling carpeting. Beyond the sun-room, the neighborhood also looked much nicer.

My old landlady looked about the same, except that she was a bit heavier nowadays. She wore a white, long-sleeved shirt. She told me that I still owed her my last week's rent. She'd thought that maybe that was why I was here.

I told my old landlady that I didn't owe her the money. I'd paid her everything when I'd left. I saw an image of my hands with a handful of bills. I was visually counting out everything I'd paid my old landlady before I'd left. I was even starting to think that I'd paid my landlady too much, and that she owed me some money.

But I knew it would be tough enough just to convince my landlady that I didn't owe her any money. I was trying to get my thoughts clear enough so that I could make the right argument. I didn't know if I could do it. It kept feeling like I was losing my train of thought.

As I was trying to pull my arguments together, my old landlady walked back toward the front door of this sun-room patio. My old landlady was talking to me about something, like she was still annoyed with me, but was trying to be friendly.

My old landlady spread out her arms, like she was taking in the sun. I noticed that the sides of my landlady's white, long sleeves had black designs on them.

The designs were very much like the flame-like emblems of the "tribal" genre of tattoos. But they also had a kind of "vintage," Ed Hardy kind of look. For some reason, seeing these tattoo-like designs on my old landlady's shirt made me wonder if my old landlady actually had tattoos.

Good morning, everybody.

Last night I surprised myself by having a minor bit of dream control. I didn't control my dream. But I kind of determined the subject.

Kaomea had posted a few cool songs in her dream journal a few days ago. So I wanted to share one song in particular, too. But I would only do it, I told myself last night, if I had a dream about the song or artist.

The first dream is the result. But I guess -- you can see that it's not very good control at all, though.

Here is the video. It's by the Malaysian rock singer Monoloque.



Dream #1

It was a grey-white, partly cloudy day. I was in a car with some other guy. The guy was driving us through some kind of downtown area of a city. We must have been on the outskirts of the downtown area. It felt pretty quiet and desolate.

There were a lot of warehouses and small factory buildings on either side of the streets. The warehouses either looked closed down or vacated. Their gates were all pulled down. On a lot of the buildings' walls and gates, there were also a lot of posters advertising, I suppose, either rock concerts or movies.

We had driven up a slope, then around a block, then back down another small slope. We were -- or at least I was -- looking down the streets for something. I don't know if we were lost.

The man was talking this whole time about how arrogant the singer Monoloque was. It occurred to me from this that we were looking for the location where we were supposed to pick up Monoloque. We were either going to take him somewhere else, or spend the day with him, like we were collaborating with him on some project.

But the man was really not looking forward to picking up Monoloque. He thought Monoloque was really arrogant.

As an example of this, the man said, "One time Monoloque told me, 'A man hasn't really done anything with his life until he's directed a film.' As if anybody who hasn't directed a film really isn't a man! Well -- this was only right after he'd directed his first film!"

I think I may have seen a tall-spired, stone church in the distance, down the block on the left side of the car. I looked at some of the posters on the wall again. I realized that they were all for Monoloque's film. They were done in a kind of psychedelic, 1960s style, with block printing, big, chunky letters, and a swirly circle of color in the center.

Dream #2

I was in a bedroom. I stood before a dresser. I think I had just pulled something out of it or put something into the top drawer. I was now closing the drawer.

I must have been getting ready to go somewhere, although it turned out that I wasn't going to the place I'd really wanted to go to. My mom was taking me wherever I was now going. And she'd told me she wasn't taking me to the other place.

I looked to my right, to the doorway. The living room, apparently, was right outside this bedroom. There was a couch against the wall opposite from the bedroom door. A young Muslim woman wearing a head covering sat quietly and patiently on the couch. On the wall behind the woman was some beautiful, possibly iridescent, piece of artwork.

I walked out of the bedroom. I was frustrated that my mom wasn't taking me where I wanted to go. But the Muslim girl was so gentle-acting that I tried to mask all my frustration, and just smile gently, as I walked past her.

I was now in some kind of warehouse. The warehouse was huge -- maybe as huge as an airplane hangar. Where I was standing, it seemed like there was a living room set all laid out, with a bunch of stage lights cluttered around it.

My mom stood off to my right, about thirty meters or so away. She seemed really impatient for me to get started with something. She was being really insistent and mean -- almost like my mom had her spirit combined with one of my old shithead co-workers. My mom also seemed a lot skinnier than she is IWL.

I was frightened into doing whatever it was I was supposed to be doing. I turned around. There was something like an entertainment center -- it looked more like a TV and a bunch of other junk all piled up randomly on a cheap desk.

But over that stuff there was a huge tangle of old TV-top antennas. I knew I was supposed to be doing something with these TV-top antennas. But I couldn't reach them from the front of the "entertainment center." I had to go around.

I walked around to the back of the "entertainment center." I walked into the thick of all these old antennas, as if I might have walked into the center of a tall, brambly shrub.

I must have tried to arrange some of the antennas or something. But suddenly some of the antennas started throwing off fountains of sparks! I thought the antennas must all be catching on fire. I was really afraid. But, like an idiot, I think I grabbed a paper cup full of water and actually threw it on the sparking antennas!

Things were really a mess. My mom, madder than ever, called me out to the front area again. The living room, I now saw, also had one setup on either side of it. These setups were like cheap offices: there were a desk, a computer, and a kind of flimsy desktop bookshelf. There may have been a man working at each station.

Things were a big mess. In some weird clutter of technology surrounding the office on my right side, another fire, or some other kind of malfunction, was raging. Whatever I'd done in the antenna-nest had probably started this mess, too.

The person working at that station looked like one of my old co-workers. He seemed to be just about as mad at me as my mom was. My mom may have been standing behind him and on his right side.

I turned around, backwards and clockwise, to face the office station that had been on my left side. The office worker here was just as panicked. He looked like the 1980s actor Andrew McCarthy. He had shoulder-length hair and wore a pale-blue, button-up shirt.

This guy was on the phone with someone. But he was also dealing with some major computer issue he was having. I knew that all this was probably my fault, too.

Finally the guy started slamming his mouse against the desk, as if he were trying to aim it against something. It was like whatever the problem was with his computer, it had turned real and left the computer. The guy was trying to smash it and kill it, or poke it back into the computer, or something. He really seemed to be raging.

Good morning, everybody.

Happy holidays! The icy Dream Views logo is really fun. And the Santa Claus flying through the moon is cool, too.

Dream #1

It was night. I was either getting into or out of a car with my sister and my brother-in-law. The car was probably my sister's. It was a kind of short car, and it was packed all around by some bigger SUVs.

My sister was drunk, but she was trying to act like she wasn't. She was trying to act nice for my sake.

We now all got out of the car. The parking lot the car was in was in some downtown-like area. There was a really big, ominous-looking, tan-brick building right at the edge of the lot.

We walked out to the road, which felt very old and run-down. This place was like one of those downtowns that shut down completely at night. We were all alone here. The streetlights seemed like in a horror movie -- the light was all grainy, almost sepia-colored.

My sister was now not able to control her drunken appearance at all. She even asked, "Hey, isn't there some place we could pick up some booze?"

I knew there was a store somewhere -- maybe even just across the street and around the corner. I could even see the store, still open, like a chain drug store, its greenish fluorescent lights shining out through a window-wall in a stately, stone building.

But I figured I'd do what I could to keep us from going to that store. I think my brother-in-law felt the same way.

Somehow we decided we needed to go to the bathroom. I knew where there was a free public bathroom. We walked off to our right, toward some park-like area, then along a nice, stone walkway.

The light was just becoming blue with early morning, and there were already tourists out here -- it mostly looked like mothers and daughters.

We went to some area that looked like a fast food restaurant. It had the same color scheme as Dunkin Donuts, but with a lot more brown. And it was shaped like a wide, low public restroom in a park.

I knew that this bathroom had either been sponsored by the restaurant or was the restaurant itself. I probably thought the restaurant was McDonald's or Burger King. I think the restaurant itself was closed, but that the bathroom was always open.

I think we first walked through the restaurant's seating area, which was huge, but completely empty of people. I think we then walked through a concrete-floored, cinder-block-walled hallway that felt like it was a bridge over a road, between two buildings.

The three of us were now in the bathroom, which was a wide, concrete-floored, cinder-block-walled bathroom, like a really nice public bathroom in a park. But it may have had a Dunkin Donuts color scheme.

My sister was still drunk -- kind of wandering around randomly. But I myself was now really distracted. Eventually I decided I needed to use the bathroom. I went to a stall, so I could take a crap.

But I was having trouble closing the stall's door. It wouldn't stay closed. I was also trying to close it by twisting the little doorknob using a huge, wadded up piece of toilet paper. It was like I was afraid to touch anything in the restroom. So I was protecting my hands with toilet paper. But it was really hard to do anything with the amount of toilet paper I had in my hands.

Then, at some point, I felt some kind of erotic feeling. It related to the feeling of taking a crap. I thought I was going to do something really bad and gross in the stall. And it turned me on sexually. But I didn't want to get caught doing it.

Then a mother and daughter came into the restroom. I was kind of annoyed. I knew that if a couple of tourists were coming in, then that meant that a whole bunch of people would soon be coming into the bathroom. Everybody would know I was here, and they'd all start harrassing me. So I might as well leave now.

I might have walked back out of the stall, passed the mother and daughter, found my brother-in-law and sister, and walked back out into the long corridor.

Dream #2

It was a nice, sunny day. I was probably in the backyard of the house where my family lived while I was in high school. But the backyard was now three or four times as big as it was IWL, and it was filled with flowers. It was an incredibly huge, English-style garden! Where our garage had been, there was some big, shady kind of pagoda-like structure made of greyish, dark wood.

There were some little kids running around and playing in the garden. I thought of these kids as something like my friends or siblings. They were all angelically beautiful, like the golden-haired children of storybooks. I feel like they were all involved in some task. But I can't remember what it was.

My attention was caught by the huge, stalk-like plants near me. I couldn't put a name to them. They seem, now, to have looked like hollyhocks or foxgloves. But they weren't those flowers, either -- I'm pretty sure. They had a kind of fuzzy look. And some of them had bud-like centers: tight, green bulbs, inside a collar of thin, peach petals.

I was suddenly laying on my back. Our old dog, a cocker spaniel, was standing over me, vigorously licking, or "kissing," my lips. She was actually licking off a bunch of honey that I had on my lips.

Some voice in the distance (or in my head?), probably a child's voice, asked me either if my dog liked honey, or if my dog liked to kiss me.

Whatever the question was, I answered, "No, she's just getting the honey off my lips. She's really excited to go traveling. She loves to go places in the car. In fact, when she ----- (can't remember) -----, we'll probably get a nice car for her. Then she'll be happy to go!"

I now had an image in my head of a white, horse-drawn carriage, like a nineteenth century carriage. But the carriage was very short, proportioned, it seemed, to fit small children or dogs. And there was no top to the cabin of the carriage. It was flat and open, kind of looking like an ornate, white Radio Flyer wagon.

A man in a suit and top-hat sat in a small front area and drove the carriage. He may also have been holding a white, lace parasol.

I could see that there was a main seating area: a small square. But there was also a smaller, back rectangle, which, I now guess, could normally be used for luggage.

But I guess my dog was now dead, because she was stiff and motionless, and we had laid her in the back area, as if it were some kind of coffin for her, or a space that would have fit a coffin for her.

But I'm pretty sure the carriage wasn't taking my dog to a funeral, but to a wedding. And I may have been a part of the wedding. This was probably whatever I'd been referring to when I'd spoken to the voice. But I'm pretty sure this image didn't have anything to do with what I'd actually said.

Dream #3

I was in some kind of huge place, something like an old, French palace, mixed with a museum, mixed with an old, run-down, slummy apartment. The place was filled with all kinds of clutter -- boxes, junk, all over the place.

There were no lights on, and it was night. The only light coming into the place was extremely dim, orange light from the streetlamps outside.

There were a few other men in the structure with me. They were all in one room. The place was huge, but we were all sitting in just one room, which had a bunk bed and a computer desk in it, but which was so filled with junk that we could hardly fit ourselves into the room.

The men may have been Latino, and they may have spoken very little English. They seemed to be in their late thirties or early forties. They were short, a little overweight, and a little tough-seeming.

The men were being nice or indifferent to me. But I had a feeling that, as time wore on, they'd probably start annoying or harrassing me.

My mom now came into the room. I was happy just to have someone familiar to me in this environment. It kind of diluted the bad emotional sense I was beginning to get from these guys.

My mom looked a bit different. She was skinnier, and she had shorter hair. She sent me off to some other room. She told me that we were both getting up early tomorrow morning to take care of some task. She stressed the importance of getting up on time.

I was excited about the event. And even though it was already late, and that I wouldn't get very much sleep at all if I wanted to get up on time, I was really happy and determined to get up on time.

I lay down in bed and closed my eyes. Almost immediately, I re-opened them. I realized that I had woken up an hour late!

I ran out into the hallway to find my mom. It couldn't be true, could it? Had I overslept for the thing I was so excited for?

My mom was at the other end of the hallway. She said, "Yep, you overslept. But I wasn't going to wake you up."

I could tell my mom was disappointed in me. I felt horrible. But my mom now said something like, "Hurry up. If you just get your shit together and get out the door right now, we can still probably make it on time."

I was back in the room with the Latino men. Some of them were sleeping on the bunk bed. One was still up, sitting at the computer desk. The light was still dark. It was still very early morning, before sunrise.

I crouched before the bunkbed and began arranging something on the cuff of my right shirt sleeve for some reason. It was like I was peeling back my cuff and then twisting it back and forth. It felt like I was trying to put some kind of steel band around my wrist.

But I realized that I was just wasting my time doing this. My mom was probably out in the car, waiting for me. If I didn't hurry up, my mom would either leave me, or else she'd wait for me and we'd both be too late to make it to our task.

I stood up to get my shit together and go downstairs. But I was so unfocused. I really couldn't remember what the hell I needed to do. I didn't really know what I needed in order to get the hell out of here. And the Latino men didn't help. It was just like they were waiting for an excuse to distract me.

I now found myself in a car, an old, clunky station wagon, like the one I drove IWL when I lived out in the desert for a couple of years, working for the Park Service. The car was inside -- in one of the rooms of the house. I sat in the driver's seat. One of the Latino men stood just outside the door, looking in.

The car only had AM radio (IDL and IWL ). I had a plastic tub -- like the plastic tubs you get for various purposes during hospital stays -- filled with little, plastic knobs, each about 2cm in diameter. I had to put all of these plastic knobs onto various parts of the radio's face. Only after that would my shit be together enough so that I could leave.

But I couldn't fit all of these knobs onto the radio face! I think I managed to find ways to fit some of them onto the volume and tuning knobs. I also popped some of them onto the set-station buttons. And I may have tried to stick some onto the actual station indicator plate. But I was running out of space. And I had a ton of knobs left!

I was now by myself in a large hallway, probably inside an apartment. It was night, and the hallway was pretty dark.

I stood near the front door. The door was made of old, worn-out wood. I could feel something like a gentle wind whispering past the door. I knew it was some kind of presence. I partly thought it was a ghost. But I also thought it was some person -- or, a person coming, not a person who was actually there yet.

I knew that I was still a bit early. But as long as I kept aware of the situation, I'd see the person. Then I could meet the person just outside the apartment. I may actually have just thought of this person as only a breeze of wind.

I was now looking out through my door through a small, square window that was maybe 30cm directly above the doorknob. Looking out, I saw the dark sapphire sky of morning. I could see that out there was something like a brambly yard, which may have been something like a big, nice garden.

I was telling myself something very soothing, like the person who was coming to me was a very nice person, and that I had nothing to worry about or be afraid of.

I watched one or two people crossing my field of view. They were walking along some path, I think, that crossed between the garden and some much wider field. They were a man and a woman. A man may also later have crossed by himself.

I told myself, "See? See how nice they are? When they come for you, they'll treat you nicely. You have nothing to fear."

I was now outside. It was a bright, sunny morning. I was drifting up a very, very slight slope, on a long, wide lawn that led up to a sidewalk and an asphalt road.

I saw a man and a woman walking along the road, heading from the right to the left side of my field of view. The man and woman both looked like they were in their late thirties. But they wore clothes and had hairstyles like from the late 1970s. The man's hairstyle was particularly chunky and bowl-shaped.

The man and the woman seemed to be in a kind of peevish argument with each other. It scared me a little bit. I felt like if I got into their field of influence, they'd probably start getting all peevish and annoying with me.

But they were walking pretty quickly. And they were already away from me by the time I got up to the sidewalk.

Now that I was on the sidewalk, I noticed a few handfuls of people, all adults, walking toward a building. I realized that I was near a university campus.

The campus neighborhood reminds me now of my occasional visits to the Princeton campus. But the university building, which I saw off to my left, looked more like an elementary school mixed with a modern, suburban church building.

All the people walking toward the building seemed to be in their thirties and forties. There were men and women. Sometimes people were in groups, talking with each other. Other times they were walking alone.

Some of the people wore suits or formal attire. Others were wearing caps and gowns, like they were attending a graduation ceremony.

I also noticed that a lot of the women had very masculine faces. Some of the women were definitely women, just with very hard, squarish faces. But some of the people dressed as women may have been men.

As I got to the actual building, I realized that it was more like an elementary school. The adults I'd seen funnelling toward this area were actually teachers. They were all now dispersing toward different parts of the building: to their classrooms, I assumed.

I was in a square, concrete-floored courtyard of the building. There were a lot of kids running all about, rushing, I supposed, to get to their classes.

There were some adult women posted here and there, apparently to make sure that nobody was getting out of hand. I figured I'd ask one of these women either where I was, or where I was supposed to be. I didn't really know the answer to either of those questions.

I saw a woman posted just under the covering of the building, at the back, right corner of the courtyard. I figured I'd approach her and ask her what I was here for.

As I walked toward that woman, a girl wearing a pale pink sweater ran through the courtyard with a clear, plastic bottle of water.

One of the other women admonished the girl for some reason or another. The girl thought she was being really grown-up and helpful for doing something. But she was also using her task to avoid having to do some thing that all the girls her age needed to do. She knew this. So when the teacher admonished her, she listened.

But as I was about to reach the woman, some kind of alarm went off. The alarm was the prayer bell. Wherever you were, whatever you were doing, when the prayer bell went off, you had to stop, crouch down on your knees, bow your head to the ground, and start praying to god.

The ritual seems to me now to be Islam-influenced. But the prayer was more like a Christian prayer mixed with something like the United States Pledge of Allegiance.

I bowed, too, because I at least knew what all this meant. I was near a stairwell. A girl wearing a Muslim-style head-covering bowed near me.

As I looked at the floor, I noticed it was tiled in meter-square tiles looking like flecked granite. But this tile was all chipped away in a corner, so that almost a quarter of the tile was chipped into an oily blackness.

During the prayer-pledge, the girl in the pale pink shirt ran out of the doorway of a classroom near me. She had the water bottle again, and she was about to rush off somewhere. But the woman I was trying to approach told the girl to kneel down and pray, like everybody else.

The girl said something like, "Oh, yeah. Right." She didn't kneel down, though. She just sat, in some kind of athletic pose, with her back to the wall, and waited for the prayer to finish.

Something about the girl's face made me think she might have Down's Syndrome. But the girl was really smart and active. I liked her a lot.

When I got up from the prayer-pledge, I approached the adult woman. I had a feeling now that I was here for some kind of volunteer project with New York Cares. So I asked the woman if she knew where we volunteers were meeting. The woman pointed to the stairwell behind me and said that New York Cares was meeting up on the second floor.

But before I could go upstairs, a little girl grabbed my hand and told me to help her with her spelling. She dragged me over to something that looked like folding gym mats stood up on one side and w-folded, to look like a gym-mat version of Chinese screens.

Before the Chinese screen was a long, school-like table that was only 25cm or so above the ground. Both the little girl and I had to kneel to sit at the table. The table had a long sheet of paper across it. The paper was filled with items like multiple choice questions.

For each number, there may possibly have been questions, probably ridiculously inane questions, like, "How do you spell -----?" as if a kid wouldn't know how to spell a word he was looking right at. But there were no answers in the multiple choice spaces. It was just A, B, C, D, with no answers beside the letters!

I think what the little girl actually had to do was choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D, and then correctly spell the word in the space beside that letter. I think the little girl may actually have explained this to me herself.

The little girl was probably learning impaired. But she seemed really smart, as well. She seemed to be doing well enough spelling for herself. And maybe she just wanted me around for the heck of it while she was doing her work.

But every once in a while I'd have to help her with spelling. At some point, I even chose, and circled?, the letter "C" on one of her questions. I also remember something about one of us writing in cursive.

Then the little girl's brother came up. He was also, apparently, learning impaired, though not as much as his sister. He may have been a bit younger than the girl. He was climbing all over both me and the little girl, though he mostly seemed to be climbing all over me. He really wanted my attention, and he wanted to prove, I think, that he was smarter than his sister.

At some point I stood up, as if my lessons for the little girl and boy were over. I told them they'd both done a good job.

But the boy wanted to see my cell phone for some reason. I was pretty sure that that was not a good idea, because I think I'd been looking on some sort of fetish website before I'd come here. The boy didn't need to be seeing any of that kind of stuff.

I then saw my phones screen, as if it were flickering on, like a TV would, with a bit of vertical hold striping a black screen, as the TV is getting started up and getting a hold of itself. The striping was yellow -- so it seemed to me that this was "effect" for a production, not real vertical hold striping.

There was then, probably, some kind of video, maybe starring Hyde from the j-pop band L'Arc en Ciel. But I can't remember anything about it.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was walking out on a street like in the neighborhood I lived in as a teenager. It was daytime. I was walking along one of the main roads. A lot of cars were zooming by to my left. To my right were the parking lots for shopping centers and gas stations.

There were a surprising number of people out walking on the street. I was in a hurry to get somewhere, and I was impatient with the people around me, as if they were blocking me.

A group of older, Chinese men walked up behind me. They were all speaking in Chinese. One of the men edged up really close to me and then passed me. The man's two or three friends were just about keeping pace with me. But the man himself was blasting ahead.

I thought that it would be weird of me if I let this guy pass me by so much, seeing how I'd been so annoyed at everybody I'd had to pass up just a few moments ago. So I tried to catch up with the man. But I couldn't. He'd already blasted away through some gas station and around a corner.

Now a white woman walked past me. She also passed me quite easily and headed around the corner to the right.

I was feeling pretty bad about myself. I'd thought I was a fast walker. But now people were constantly passing me.

I was now at the corner. I went straight and crossed the street, to a block with an enormous parking lot for a huge shopping center. I walked toward some small mound of lawn bordering the parking lot. I figured I'd just cross over the lawn and go into the parking lot.

But now the woman who'd passed me a couple moments ago was now crossing up and in front of me again, from the right. I thought she must have been waiting just around the corner, trying to get an idea of when I'd be passing, so she could sneak up on me and pass me again.

I was now sitting on an L-shaped couch with a couple of "friends," whom I don't recognize now. One was a woman, maybe in her late teens or early twenties. She sat directly to my right. To the woman's right, possibly on the other edge of the L-shaped couch, or maybe right in the corner, sat a young boy.

The woman and the boy had a backpack between them. The backpack was apparently mine. The woman and boy were joking about some girl who was attracted to me. I wasn't really attracted to her, and my woman "friend" knew it. So she teased me a lot about how much this girl liked me.

The woman now said something about, what if she took my backpack to the girl, so she could really show the girl what I was like? My clothes were in the backpack. And, by what she'd said, the woman meant that she was going to pull my clothes out of the backpack and show them to the girl.

The woman illustrated how she was going to do this by pulling some clothes out of the backpack. But a pair of my underwear, some black boxer briefs, popped right out, before everything else. The underwear had a big glob of semen, still wet, right on the inside and front, just below the waistband.

At first the woman seemed a bit disgusted by this. Then she thought of it only as a reason to tease me even more. She made fun of my personal hygiene, for just throwing a dirty pair of underwear in my backpack. She wondered what the girl who liked me would think of that.

I was now sitting in a car, in the backseat, on the driver's side. It was daytime. My mom sat in the front seat of the car. She seemed to have her seat moved back as far as possible. I felt pretty smashed in the backseat.

But somehow I felt comfortable. I was myself, as an adult. But back here, smashed into the seat, I felt comfortable, like I was a little kid all over again.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in some place like a restaurant. It may have been on the second floor of a bulding. The wall to my right had a couple windows, which may have had thin, white curtains over them. I sat at a small, round table. There was a larger, round table in front of mine.

My family sat down at the larger table. Somebody, possibly my mom, sat down with her chair pulled slightly out and to the side, so she kind of faced me.

My oldest nephew, as he looked when he was young, maybe nine or ten years old, crept up and hid behind the woman's body. I saw him do it. I was pretty sure he'd wanted me to see him, like he was only acting shy so I'd come right up and talk to him.

So I stood up and walked behind the woman. I may have started talking to my nephew.

Dream #2

I was in the driveway of "my family's house." The driveway was on the left side of the house, unlike IWL. My sister had a huge SUV. She and her kids were already inside it. My sister was apparently going to take me somewhere, possibly home or to a hotel. But she asked me to go get some keys out of the house for her.

At first it seemed like these keys may have been for the car, or for some car I was being taken to. We couldn't leave without them. But I may have found these keys.

At some point I was in the hallway, probably on a threshold to a room, talking with my mom. My mom may have seemed to be a lot taller than I, as if she were a giant or I were a kid.

I may have gone back outside to have my sister send me back into the house again. This time my sister needed keys for something for one of my nephews.

My nephew apparently needed to go to the doctor. But the keys were necessary for something regarding either the doctor's office or my nephew's actual body.

I went back into the house. I may have gone into the basement. It seemed like it was taking me a really long time to find the keys. I may have decided to give up and tell my sister that maybe she should look.

But then I was in the kitchen. I opened a drawer and found the keys inside, laying on a blank pad of sketch paper. There were three keys on a ring. They may have been inside a clear, plastic baggie.

Dream #3

I was at some theatre. At first I was in some part of the lobby. I was getting ready to watch some performance like a college or high school performance. Some kids who'd be performing were in the lobby, talking with each other. One of them was a tall, black boy.

Now I was in the theatre with my friend H. We sat in the very front row, on the very left end. The stage seemed normal, though slightly elevated. It was all black, and a blue spotlight shone on it. There may have been something like a wooden-barred cage on the stage.

Something about this performance may have had to do with Kiyoshiro Imawano and, possibly, Ryuichi Sakamoto. My friend H seemed to be really excited about this. But I got mad at her. I told her, "I've seen Kiyoshiro Imawano and ----- (possibly Ryuichi Sakamoto) performing here before!"

I was so mad at H for once more forgetting the details of my life that I had her twisted sideways, down on my lap. I had her head twisted up at a really painful angle toward the stage.

Now the play began. A bunch of kids kept coming out and introducing themselves. The play seemed to be about a bunch of cool, artistic kids all living together. As each kid took introduced him or herself, he or she would take a spot somewhere on stage.

A few black boys walked out and introduced themselves. I recognized one of them as one of the kids talking in the lobby. The stage was now low and bowed out in a kind of wide U-shape. I felt like the stage was smashing against my knees.

I remembered that my friend H had said she didn't have time to come to the show, and how she'd see me to the show and then leave. But, I happily remarked, H had come in and sat down with me. Now the show had started, and H still hadn't tapped my shoulder or anything to let me know she was leaving. She must have wanted to stay!

But I now looked over to H's seat. H was gone. She had left without telling me. She may have left a book in her chair.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in the living room of a really nice apartment, sitting on the couch with a really pretty Indian woman. The couch and floor may have been white. There was an entertainment center just across the floor from the couch.

The woman was showing me something on the screen. The screen was black, but divided into sections by white lines. There may have been six sections. In each section were a few letters and numbers. The screen would occasionally pull down.

The woman was showing me this, but I was actually controlling it, using either a keyboard or a joystick. I realized this was some sort of data processing system that was connected to a company's database. People could work from home, from their TVs, by entering data for this database.

As the woman stood up and walked toward the dining room, off to our left, I told the woman, "I always thought this would be a good idea."

The dining room was gone. A window was in its place. And it was like I was in a house rather than an apartment. The woman was just outside the window. I stood up and walked to the window.

I continued, "In fact, I've always thought working from home would be the way a lot of people worked, eventually. I was thinking of writing a science fiction story about it, where everybody works from home, on their computers."

The woman stood out in an area full of trees. She may have kept moving farther and farther back -- without walking, until she had disappeared in the trees altogether. But I was still talking to her.

I continued, "Everything -- the world, gets greener again. The population rate goes down. But people are happier. So many things are controlled by robots. And a lot of people work from home."

Now I was looking out the window to a normal suburban front yard. Two of my old friends, M (a man) and P (a woman) walked up to the window, which was maybe a meter or so higher than their heads.

M told me he and P were going somewhere. When they were done they'd come back and pick me up to take me to the airport so I could go back home. I was a little panicked. I said that my flight was probably leaving pretty soon. I needed to get to the airport.

M told me not to worry. Besides, M told me, I had some task to take care of, possibly involving a car, and that I wouldn't be able to leave until I took care of that, anyway. M asked me for the car keys so he and P could leave. I gave them to him.

M and P were gone. I walked out of this house through a door opposite the window. I walked through another yard that looked like a front yard and up into the front door of another house. This was my mom's house.

My mom was just inside, sitting at a table in front of the front window. When she saw me she stood up and started walking through the living room. There was a couch set right in the center of the living room. My mom started telling me something. But I can't remember what it was.

Dream #2

I was in a bedroom. The room was dim and blue. I had been listening to some conference call and taking handwritten notes on notebook paper. I may have been at a desk. But now the call was over.

I heared a kind of squeaky-raspy voice from another room. I had been looking off to my left. But now I looked over to my right, to the door of the bedroom. A beige-orange light came from under the crack of the door.

The voice said a few things. Then the person got up, apparently from a room behind me, and left, walking away down the hallway that was just outside the door. I now realized I was sitting on the floor, using a bed as a desk.

I understood that I had left my job. This was the office for my job. For some reason I was back -- maybe just to help out on a short-term project, maybe just for one day.

The guy the squeaky voice had been the guy who'd replaced me. It was 5 PM, and the guy was leaving. This, I thought, was kind of lazy, since there was still a ton of work to do. I thought that maybe I'd impress my boss by staying for a long time tonight.

But, right while I was lost in this thought, my boss burst in the door. I must have looked like I was just doing nothing. My boss rushed up to my bed-desk and began flipping through my notebooks.

I knew I had just taken notes on some conference call. I wanted my boss to see the notes. But now he wasn't finding them. Instead he flipped to a page I'd made of sketches of the famous cartoon character Strongbad.

My boss pointed to one of the drawings and said, "I want to see less of this," as if he thought all I did all day was draw sketches of strongbad. He actually even flipped to another page that was also full of Strongbad sketches!

I was trying to figure out how I could explain this to my boss. I did a lot of work. But sometimes, while I was listening to calls or trying to think through a problem, I'd start sketching.

Dream #3

I was pulling a car I had (when I was in high school!) out of a long driveway for a house set up at the end of a long, gated yard. When I got to the end of the driveway, I had to close the gate. I pulled off to the side of the road and got out of the car. I was also thinking something about the difficulty of driving backward.

When I got out of the car, my sister was there. She told me, "Don't forget, while you're taking care of the car, to wash the back windows. That's really important, and C (one of my old friends) did it all the time."

I told my sister, "I was just planning on doing that once I got home." Apparently I was planning on taking my car back home after visiting my family -- although I was also planning on taking a plane home.

I was now in the living room of a house with my mom, grandpa, and probably some of the other members of my immediate family. My grandpa and mom were standing. My grandpa was getting ready to leave.

I was going back to my car as well. My grandpa was going to drive me. So we left the house together.

It was dark outside. My mom stood in the doorway. We were in a long block full of houses, possibly with some kind of median in the center of the wide road. My grandpa's car was parked halfway up on and off of this median.

My grandpa and I got in the car. My door was still open, and I was holding on to some kind of hard door-strap, as if I were going to pull the door shut.

My grandpa said, "I didn't invite you guys to my house because I didn't know what schemes your mom might have. She could sue me because on of the kids suffocated themselves on the floor or one of the kids suffocated themselves on the ceiling."

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I may have started out on a subway train. Eventually I was hanging on to the outside of a train as it rode above ground. It was daytime, and the sky was clear blue. The train eventually ran through a weird sort of tunnel, which was nothing more than iron beams creating a frame where a tunnel would have been. The tunnel seemed to run through and over a body of water, which seemed to stretch off to the left forever.

The train became a series of black, chain-link, metal fence cages. The cages were each big enough to hold one person comfortably, although I think I saw a few of my "friends" (random dream characters?) in one cage-car. A lot of the cage-cars may actually have been empty.

I found out somehow that the train was powered completely by electricity. This was supposed to be really great and innovative. I was really excited about this innovation -- electric trains. But these cage-cars (I was still "riding" by hanging on to the outside of one) looked really shoddy and worn-down. I was afraid that the electricity powering the train would travel along the outside of the walls and electrocute me.

I saw the train speeding away, apparently with me still on it, as if my view had left my body.

Dream #2

I was in an office. The office space was kind of small, drab, and grey. I sat in some corner of a wider space like a common area for three or four private offices. Across from my was a receptionist's desk. The receptionist's desk was big and made out of wood. Whatever I was sitting in felt very small -- almost like a plastic chair and desk for a little kid. I saw from a very low angle.

A female co-worker of mine from two jobs ago, AC, walked into one of the offices. My female friend H was in the office. AC gave H some work to do. It had to do with the companies Research in Motion and Red Hat, as well as a couple other mobile communications companies. H was now going to be working on getting information about these companies.

AC walked out of the office with a female co-worker. She told her co-worker, "I always thought ----- (some name that may have had the word "Bubble" in it) was one of my favorite companies. But it doesn't look like it's going to be a success, at least not for a while."

AC and her co-worker left. I wondered how it was that H had managed to get a job doing my old job. (It must actually have been my old boss' job, since she was sitting in an office, not a cubicle.)

I was now outside with H. We were standing outside "her car," all the doors of which were open. The car was full of junk, all kinds of paper stuffed in the front and back seat. H was panicked and complaining bitterly about how she thought she wasn't going to make it in school, and how she wasn't going to get her Ph.D.

I told her that she had nothing to worry about. She was doing a lot of great stuff with her studies. And she had a steady job. So even if she didn't make it in school, she'd have a steady income. I couldn't figure out why H was complaining so intensely all the time.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was with a couple of "friends." One of the friends looked like a person who has attended a lot of the anime events I've gone to IWL. He's white, kind of pale, tall, with jaw-length, brown hair and eyeglasses. This friend was organizing some kind of theatre event. He had gotten me and my other friend to volunteer.

We had first been discussing the details of this event in some bar. The bar hadn't seemed very well-lit, and it also seemed a bit empty. Then we were discussing the details out on some hilltop, out on the driveway of a house in a residential part of town, probably in the kind of early morning.

The theatre friend said, "We'll have a lot to do. We'll barely have time to go home and go to bed at 11 AM, before we have to wake up at 1 PM and do the second show."

As I realized how much work my other friend and I had volunteered for, I saw, probably in my mind's eye, dark grey clouds rolling overhead. I told the theatre friend, "I don't think we can do both shifts. At least my friend can't. We didn't realized we'd be going all the way through 11 AM. And we already signed up to volunteer at another event. Your second show will overlap with that event. At least my friend has to go to this event."

At this point the friend I was defending may have been my brother.

I was now in a small theatre. It was either before or after a show. The theatre was only half lit. The stage didn't have any light on it at all. The area felt like a cafeteria in an elementary school's basement. The walls may have been sea green. The seating area was made up of folding chairs. There were a good amount of people sitting in the chairs. Some people were also milling around in the empty space behind the seating area.

I sat near the back row of seats and near the aisle. So I turned myself around to look at the people milling around in the back area. Most of the people looked pretty normal. But there were a couple of older black women wearing very flashy, dressy outfits. They stood out from everybody else and seemed to demand being treated in a very special way. They each sat in chairs against the very back wall, at some distance from each other.

One of the women wore a turquoise dress and hat. The dress seemed almost to have been made out of a crepe material. The hat had a big, round, kind of floppy brim. My theatre friend immediately came up to the woman and started saying all kinds of nice things to her. But I could tell he was trying to get something out of her. So I telepathically told her to watch out for the man.

We were now watching a movie which was supposed to be Back to the Future. There were a few scenes, kind of randomly put together, which gave the feel that the movie was more about a group of kids working together to create a time machine than anything having to do with Doc Brown or Marty McFly.

One of the scenes showed Amy Irving, like she looked in the Brian DePalma version of Carrie. The view was of the girl's face, framed in a misty circle, looking up toward some kind of blue, moonlight, garden light and singing some kind of rock song. The girl's eyes glowed bright blue or green. I liked the girl's glowing eyes and the rock song a lot.

There were also a couple of scenes, apparently from the future, showing some kind of time travel bridge being built. The scenes were all in some kind of way overexposed, really pixellated video. The coloring was almost black and white. But it was more like the sky was all colored brownish-grey, while all the solid bodies were pure black silhouettes.

The bridge was somehow being built backwards. I watched (maybe through time lapse?), the "tracks" (?) of the bridge being built backwards through a frame of standing columns. It seemed to be in a mountain setting. I then watched a similar process near an ocean shore. This bridge had a sign over it, kind of in an old, Coca-Cola-esque style. It said something like "B-Way Bridge" or "B'Way Bridge."

I then woke up in my room. I stood up and looked down at the floor. Something seemed not quite right about my room. I walked really slow. I could hear my breathing rushing though my head, like I was wearing a space helmet.

Something seemed really weird about my floor, like it was made out of grey-painted concrete, especially where the floor met the wall. I then saw that my table was pushed away, at least 33cm away, from my wall. I thought it was possible that I could have pushed my table away from the wall. But not that far away.

I looked up and noticed that the walls in my room were now painted green. Some of the walls were a dark, pine green, while at least one of the walls was a slightly lighter shade.

I told myself, "Well, obviously I'm dreaming. My walls aren't green in waking life."

I figured since I was dreaming I would try to fly out of my house and out and around my neighborhood, to see what kind of views I could gather. But I must not have been totally lucid. I went flying toward my bedroom "window," which was actually a thick, ornate, wooden wall. This didn't seem to register with my "lucid" mind at all.

I was about to penetrate through the wall when something stopped me. A very polite woman's voice spoke to me through telepathy. It said, "We're sorry, but at this moment we cannot access the outdoor scene you would like to experience. Would you like to have a Gothic lucid dream instead?"

I said, "Oh, well, yeah, okay. That sounds nice." But I didn't want to have a Gothic lucid dream. I just wanted to go outside, into my neighborhood and gather data on the environment. I think I was thinking that I was having an out of body experience as well as a lucid dream, and I really wanted to gather some hard evidence of it. So I was disappointed that I couldn't get out there.

Dream #2

I stood inside a room, looking out to some area like a dock on a river. It was a nice, sunny day. The dock area was all a kind of beige-white concrete. A man was out working in front of two cars. The two cars themselves seemed to be junked. They also seemed to be wrapped up in coppery brown garbage bags, or in adhesive tape with the coppery brown color of VCR cassette tape.

The cars were parked one in front of the other. Either the hood of the front car was open, or else the windshield of the front car was completely missing. A huge object like a leather suitcase, possibly also all wrapped up in tape, was jutting out.

The suitcase-like object was open, revealing the snout and tip of the jaw of what appeared to be a gigantic lizard. Just given the size of the snout and jaw, the head of this creature must have been taking up the entire interior of this car! The jaw had leathery-looking, brown scales all over it.

I was now outside, near the cars, even though I could no longer see the dragon's head. I was with another man, but not the man who had been working outside while I had been inside. That man had been like a dock worker. This man was a wealthy business man. He was really tall and strong. He carried himself well. He wore a nice suit and a clean, beige overcoat.

I came to understand that the dragon had been killed. The cars were used as containers for transporting the dragon's body. Nobody had thought dragons existed. But this dragon had been discovered by accident. Possibly it had emerged from the sea.

Luckily the dragon had been killed before it could kill anybody. But people were (or I was?) worried that there were a lot more of these dragons, and that it wouldn't be so easy to kill them every time they posed a threat.

I told the man that this whole thing seemed to have been foreseen in a science fiction book written by a Russian man. I tried to tell the man the author's name. It was something like Gogol or Sergei. Finally I settled on one of the author's names, possibly his first name, being Selkei.

I saw a view of the book I'd bought (which seemed to have the name Selkei as the second name). The book was paperback. The cover was kind of glossy. There were a lot of swirly, black and white stripes all over the front cover and on the first few pages of the book.

The author was apparently either from the early twentieth century, like from the 1920s, or else his life was so impoverished in the late twentieth century that it was like he lived during the 1920s. But his sci-fi writings had a lot of subversive political content, and a lot of it seeemed to have been really prescient.

The man with me may now have been closer to me. We were still out on the dock -- or out on some shore cliff -- but we stood behind some kind of screen-like display, like a big text display at a museum. The man told me, "You just go into places, like bookstores and libraries, and you seek out these guys, don't you? You don't know who they are. But you know what you're looking for. And you find them.

"But people think, when they see you with all this stuff, that you've stolen it somehow. They don't understand the work you've made to discover it. They just think you've stolen it all.

"This book, for instance --" The man and I turned toward some kind of black, basalt cliffside as the man opened up a wide, short book full of pages that looked like coloring book bages. The pages were all colored in. They had drawings on them reminiscent of Henry Darger. But they were apparently supposed to have been by William Blake.

One drawing showed a little girl, colored pale peach and in a pale yellow dress, against a maroon-colored hillside. The drawing looked kind of crude, and the girl seemed very lonely, especially in the context of a Darger-like drawing such as this.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was leaving "my mother's house." It may have been a grey day, and there may have been snow on the ground. I stood right outside the front door. My mom stood just inside.

I told my mom I loved her. I gave her a hug. My mom seemed really short. When I hugged her, it felt like I was breaking her spine, or like I had hugged her in such a way as to feel a part of her spine that had already been broken.

I walked to the car. As I did, I thought about a small cup of ice cream I had in the back seat of the car. It was like I still had the taste of the ice cream, or even some actual ice cream, in my mouth.

In my mind's eye, I saw the ice cream sitting in the back seat. The ice cream was kind of melted and creamy, and it had some kind of big, marshmallow-shaped, but colorful and jelly-like, things in it. The spoon in the cup seemed to be coated with the melted ice cream.

Apparently my grandmother was driving me to the airport. But the car we were taking was more like one my mom would drive. It was a small hatchback, kind of old looking. It was messy on the inside and the outside. The outside was kind of grimy and greasy. The inside was full of old garbage and fast food containers and stuff.

I was kind of disgusted that I'd kept my ice cream in the messy back seat. I thought it might not be a good idea for me to eat the ice cream.

I walked up to the driver's side of the car. My grandma was still standing outside the car, with the door wide open. As I walked up to my grandma I either thought to myself or asked out loud if I'd showed my mom well enough that I cared about her.

I was in the car, on the passenger side, riding through a kind of busy part of a suburban town, with either my grandma or some man driving the car. It was now black night.

The driver told me, "You showed your mom you cared about her. And the fact that you're worried about it shows that you care a lot more than a lot of people do nowadays."

We got stuck in traffic on some kind of quaint-looking, Main Street type area that was all decked out in lights, as if for Christmas. We kind of inched through the traffic and then ended up turning right on a side street and up a hill into something like a residential area.

As we were doing this, the driver, now most likely a man, continued, "That reminds me of a project I was reading about. People were making Christmas cards to send to the soldiers. But a lot of the people making the cards thought it would be good to send cards with anti-war messages on them.

"And that's what I mean about care. The people over there don't need to hear somebody telling them 'NO WAR.' They need us to tell them, 'We're thinking about you, and we hope you're doing well.'"

We had gotten up to the top of the hill and were now sitting on the right end of a long conference table. We were apparently inside a room. The room had fluorescent lighting. There was also a wall-sized bookshelf that I was looking straight at.

But it was also somehow like we were in a cafe with a big window, or as if we were actually floating out over the top of the hill, looking down to the Main Street area. It was like, even as I was looking straight at the bookshelf, I also saw the town below.

The man had gotten onto the topic of two books. Both books were about economics. One book was written by someone I didn't know. The other was written by Warren Buffett. The man seemed to be talking more about the book by the other guy. He then ended up talking about something extremely interesting and insightful (which, of course, I forgot).

As the man spoke about the really interesting stuff, I realized how nice he looked. He was white, with well-groomed, white hair. He wore a nice suit with a tan jacket, a subdued blue shirt, and a somewhat colorful (peach? pink?) tie. His skin was deeply tanned. His face was kind of thin and angular. But his complexion mesmerized me. It was perfect!

I then asked the man, "Who did you say made that comment? Did you say it was Warren Buffett or the other guy?"

The man said, "No. That was from Warren Buffett's new book."

I thought to myself that I needed to get Buffett's new book. I seemed to keep getting Buffett somehow confused with Alan Greenspan. But I could see the cover of Buffett's new book. It kind of looked like a modern cover of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

The book wasn't an autobiography. It was actually a book on economic theory. I thought, "This is exactly what I've been looking for!" The man and I spoke back and forth for a bit on how odd it was that everybody didn't know about this book. It apparently wasn't selling much at all.

I looked down and to my left. I could see the conference table. But, again, I could "see through" the table and the room, outside and down the hill, to the lit-up Main Street area.

As I looked at the table, I was kind of hunched down and over some sheet (or pad?) of notebook paper. I scrawled on the piece of paper, in a very sloppy version of cursive, either the word "Feed" or the word "Feel."

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was possibly with my brother and sister at night. It was pitch black outside.

We may have been driving a car around, possibly a black SUV. But we may have needed another car, which my mother may have had. We may have been angry or impatient with our mom because she wasn't bringing the car.

We got some call from or about our mom on one of our cell phones. Our mom was either sick or injured. I suddenly felt very worried and sad, but also ashamed that I could have been so impatient about my mom when she had actually been injured all along.

Dream #2

I was with my friend H. We had been attending some kind of lecture. Now it was over. We were standing in some side room, off to the side of the lecture room.

The lights were mostly off in the lecture room and the side room. A little bit of fluorescent light seemed to be coming from somewhere else. The lecture room was kind of big and square, like a dance rehearsal area, but with low ceilings and full of folding chairs.

The side room was much smaller. It had something like two workshop tables in it. On each of the tables, long sheets of paper were rolled out, more than one sheet per table.

H and I stood in the side room with a white man with red hair and a red beard. The man was something like a professor. The man's hair was kind thinning back from his forehead. He may have worn blue jeans and a sweater with dull green, yellow, and red striped and designs on it.

The professor had given a lecture on something like Buddhist mandalas. The papers all rolled out on the table were Buddhist mandalas. But they were all laid face down.

H was talking with the professor, asking a few questions about Buddhist art. I got a little distracted from their conversation, and I was wandering around at the other end of the side room.

At some point H and the professor decided it was time to go. They started heading out the door and told me they were ready to go. For some reason I told them that I would just be a second, that I just needed to put my shoes on.

As he walked toward the door, the professor began telling a story, apparently directed toward me, about how he did research on certain monkeys using certain chemicals. The chemicals might often create certain blood conditions in the brain, like hemorraging.

The professor said, "Of course, the monkeys run around and play all happy. But they have no idea that if the chemicals make the blood conditions in their brains, I'll have to make them fall asleep." The professor then explained that he would then sell the affected brains to the researchers.

The professor and H had walked out a door, into the next room (a stairwell exit?) which was lit with fluorescent light. I stood there for myself for a second. For some reason, it took me this pause to realize that the professor was purposely infecting these monkeys, then killing them, cutting open their skulls, taking out their brains, and selling their brains to interested parties.

I may have tried to get the professor's attention (he and H were still within earshot) to ask him if this was really what he was doing.

Dream #3

I was possibly walking back home. It was late afternoon and a clear day. The air was cool and pleasant, and the sunlight was dim, pale gold.

I turned left and walked down a sidewalk bordered by lawn. It seemed like I was either at the boundaries of some park, or possibly the lawn of a complex of very tall apartment buildings. The road, to my left, was wide, but it wasn't very busy.

The whole setting seemed very clean. But I wasn't familiar with it, and it didn't feel like my neighborhood at all.

Somehow I now needed to cross the street to get to the sidewalk on which I had already been walking. There were two black boys, about ten years old, one of whom may have been sitting on the metal housing for a transformer.

The kids saw me crossing the street. I passed the kids. One of the kids stayed where he was. The other kid kind of followed me. I had a feeling that the kids were going to try to jump me or steal something from me. But I wasn't too worried. The only thing I had with me was a CD version of Philip Glass' opera Akhnaten (why?).

The kid who was following me kept edging up, as if he were going to walk in front of me, then falling back. I just kept ignoring him.

But now I saw a big group of black kids walking down the street. The kids were maybe in their late teens. There were seven or eight of them -- enough to block up the entire walkway and small strip of lawn by the curb. The kids looked like trouble. So I decided to just cross the street right away, to get out of their range.

But, crossing the street, I saw a huge fence, maybe 6 meters tall, possibly bordering another lawn-type space. On top of that fence there sat an even bigger group of black kids. They were already looking at me, and they looked ready to jump down from the fence and attack me as soon as I passed them.

I veered to the right, to head back toward the road I had been on before turning onto this road. I could tell that that road was much more populated, and that a lot of cars ran down it. I figured it would be better for me to just hang out on that road and avoid these gangs of kids.

But, for some reason, I was really flustered that I had to do this. I felt like things hadn't been like this before, or like in the neighborhood I thought of as my neighborhood things weren't like this. I wondered why things were like this now or here.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was with my family in some kind of parking lot in the mountains. It was early morning, with pastel blue and pale gold light of dawn and cold dew still coating everything.

The parking lot was set in two levels. But the levels were separated by a big hill. My motheer had driven me, my brother, and my sister here. We were apparently waiting for something else to happen before we left the parking lot.

But somehow I was now in another car, driving around in the upper parking lot while the rest of my family was driving around in the lower part of the parking lot. For some reason, I felt like this whole thing had been dreamt, and that I was now awake and out of that dream.

I rehearsed the elements of that dream in my head while I looked down at my family. My family drove past some kind of small path which had a little foot-bridge that went across a tiny stream.

Dream #2

My mom was driving me through some neighborhood at night. My mom was probably taking me to the airport. But we ended up driving in some weird pattern that took us up into some totally wrong area and then back to where we'd started from.

My mom mentioned something about six hours, like it would take us six hours to get to the airport, or like my flight didn't leave for another six hours. My mom stopped at a fast food restaurant. I may have stayed in the car while she went in to grab the food.

Dream #3

My friend H and I had been driven to some place by a man, possibly my old friend D. The place seemed to be a cabin or shack out in the middle of a huge lot of barren soil, possibly somewhere in the mountains. The sky was grey, and the air was chilly and damp.

H and I were in a bedroom in the cabin. We were in bed. We'd just arrived here, but the man was thinking of taking us out somewhere, either for a fun dinner or to pick up some stuff we needed. But now H wanted to have sex with me.

I was already laying on H, making sexual motions with her. But I told her we couldn't just up and have sex while the man was waiting outside for us.

I was now outside, by myself. I realized that H was still inside. The man was now somebody like H's old boyfriend, C. I realized that H could be mad at me for not having sex with her. She could end up convincing the man to have sex with her, just to spite me.

I was walking on some kind of line that had been drawn on the soil between the two cars. The line was a double-line, like the yellow lines in the center of a road.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was at a table with an old friend. The table may have been wide. Possibly we were each actually sitting at two round tables. I was showing my friend some drawings. One of the drawings was of a tyrannosaurus being attacked from all around by a bunch of smaller dinosaurs, like velociraptors.

For some reason, I felt like I had unconsciously taken elements from a story my friend had written and put them into my drawing. I tried to explain to myself how I hadn't done that, and how my drawings were original.

My friend and I, still sitting at the table(s), were now at the back end of some audience watching a performance at some bandshell. It was night. My friend began telling me about a series of lectures. There were apparently ten lectures. They all had to do with the monolith (like from 2001). Each lecture took place in some different level of some location.

I saw the program for the lectures. Each lecture had its own page-long description. Each page was made to look like a blue night sky full of stars.

My friend tried to explain to me where the lectures were located. It was somewhere in New York City that I should have been pretty familiar with. I said the name of some place out loud. My friend looked at me, disappointed that my knowledge was so lacking regarding New York City that I would think that was the location he'd meant.

Dream #2

A narrator spoke about some secret test performed by the military. A view showed a group of people like zoo workers releasing a rhinoceros into a lake in some kind of dusty, deserty area in the wild.

The rhinoceros walked out into the lake and began swimming. Once the rhinoceros was at a certain distance, one of the zoo workers shot something at it, right at the bridge of its nose. The narrator explained that this was a radioactive bullet that would penetrate the rhinoceros' brain.

The rhinoceros now looked more like a hippopotamus. The place where the bullet had entered didn't even have a scar. It was like the bullet had been extra small. But the hippo was already beginning to feel the effects of the radiation. It was getting incredibly angry. It started roaring and snorting.

As the hippo swam to shore, the narrator explained that the radiation was already beginning to eat away at the "rhinoceros'" brain tissue, making it uncomfortable and uncontrollably aggressive.

The hippo was now ashore. But it was now a gorilla. It lay on its back, roaring in anger and writhing. The narrator explained that now the "rhinoceros" was completely paralyzed. But the decay process in its brain would now slow down a lot. The rhinoceros would lay there paralyzed and decaying for forty days before it would finally die.

Dream #3

I was watching some Melissa Etheridge video that was apparently from the 1980s. The song was a kind of post-war style song in a 1980s style. The video was very stagey, with a pinkish orange backdrop, before which different thin elements would shift back and forth, depicting scenes such as the home, the office, and driving.

The song and video all related to different girls Melissa Etheridge had been in relationships with. One scene showed Ethedridge at a computer (which may have been on the hood of a 1950s car) while a really pretty office girl fawned over her. But then a really pretty black girl came up and started kissing Etheridge. Etheridge and the black girl walked away. The office girl looked heartbroken.

In another scene, the office girl was leaning over the hood of a 1950s style car. A few other pretty girls were by this car and another car. Etheridge walked into the scene. All the girls were vying for Etheridge's love, but it was somehow implied that Etheridge wouldfall in love with the office girl.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

There were a woman and man in some dark area at night. The area seemed to be inside, like in some dark, abandoned factory.

The woman and man were both strong and sexy in a comic book sort of way. They were both very pale. The woman had red hair and wore some kind of small outfit. The man may have had pale blonde hair and probably wasn't wearing a shirt.

The woman was the leader of a gang of killers. Most of the members of the group were women. And, mostly, the aim of the gang was to kill men. The man may have led a group of men.

The man had done something wrong, possibly to betray the woman in some slimy, underhanded way. The woman was very poweful. She had the man in her grip. She was strangling him and drowning him in some pool of water.

Eventually the man went limp. The woman may actually even have cut off the man's head by the force of her grip.

But I now saw that the man had just feigned death so the woman would let him go. He fedll deeper and deeper into the water, as if this were a big river in some city. He had his head. He had been falling with his back down. Now he twisted around so his stomach faced down. He swam away. I knew he was going to gather people to fight against the woman.

There were two women in a car in a dark, deserted, alley-like street in the city. Both women were part of the gang of killers.

One woman had gotten out of the car. She had been in the driver's seat. She walked around to the passenger side and got the other woman's attention somehow, letting her know she should get out of the car.

The first woman knew that the woman in the car was young and naive. The first woman was taking the second woman to the leader. Apparently the second woman had done something wrong and was now going to be punished, probably killed.,