maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a car with my mom and another woman. It was a grey day, probably a little drizzly. My mom and the woman were driving me somewhere, probably to the border of Holland. We drove under some small, arched stone bridge, like an arched bridge walkway in park.

As we drove to and under the arch, I realized that I really wouldn't be able to get into Holland. I didn't have a passport! I must be in Europe, I thought, if I was close enough to drive to the border of Holland. How did I even get here in the first place, without a passport?

I looked straight up to the underside of the bridge. It was rounded, like the roof of a tunnel. It may have been covered with bricks, or it may have been rough, grey stone.

When we got to the other side I saw a huge obelisk, like the Cleopatra's Needle obelisk in Central Park. But this one was so big I could barely see around the base, and I definitely couldn't see up to the top.

My mom and the woman must have been getting ready to drop me off. But I knew I couldn't go without a passport. But I was ashamed to admit to my mom that I didn't have a passport.

But finally I got up the courage to tell my mom. I was standing out on some wheelchair ramp, like I was in front of a building. When I told my mom, I actually started crying, sorrowfully, as if I was telling my mom something that had to do with some sadness or problem I'd carried with me all my life.

My mom and the woman probably walked hurriedly over to me to hug and console me.

Dream #2

I was in a gigantic, white building with my mom. The building was something like a museum. But it felt more like some kind of big box store, like a Sam's Club. But it seemed to be humongous, as big as a convention center. The walls were white, and the ceiling may have been glass.

My mom and I were probably here with a group of people, probably including our family members. But we were separated from them. We may have been looking for them or waiting for them. In the meantime, we decided we'd check out some of the exhibits.

I went into a small room off to the right. It was kind of dim. Along the walls were the museum-style diorama wildlife displays. I walked a ways into the room, all by myself, before actually looking at any of the displays.

I turned around, toward the entrance. One of the displays to my left caught my eye. It was apparently a display of some animal like an antelope. The antelope stood in some desert-like area at night -- the background sky was painted dark blue and purple.

But beside the antelope was a long, fallen tree-limb. And writhed around this tree limb was an enormous snake. The snake must have been ten meters long! But it wasn't scaly: it was slightly furry, like a short-hair cat.

I couldn't believe my eyes. So I got closer to the display. I was kind of afraid to: I thought the snake might actually be alive. The snake's skin didn't seem to be as pronouncedly furry as I'd thought. The snake was red, with occasional large, white spots, which may have had black outlines around them.

The snake also didn't seem to have eyes, or even much of a mouth. Its head was pointed down menacingly, but it almost looked like a sock puppet.

But what seemed really to have struck me about the snake was how vividly it was posed. It seemed menacing, alive, because it had been posed in such a dynamic way.

I looked at another display (which I can't remember now). I was again struck by the dynamism of the display. I began to get the idea that this room was all about displaying animals in dynamic, "action packed" situations. This was supposed to be a draw for kids, who had lately been neglecting the parts of the museum with the animal displays.

I thought this was a bad idea. In my opinion, the display I'd just been looking at was so dynamic, you could barely see the animal. And the purpose, I thought, of these displays was so you could really get a good idea of the animal's anatomy. So sometimes a still view was better.

I walked to another display. This one was lit. But it was even more dynamic and "action packed." It was apparently showing some desert wildcat attacking its prey. But the view was some kind of absurd bird's eye view.

The view showed the cat jumping toward some unseen prey. But the cat was posed so that it was almost perpendicular to the "ground" (which, in the case, would have been the back wall, although it seemed to be tilted down somehow). So all you could really see of the cat was its head and paws.

There were also some cacti, like the big, stereotypical saguaro cacti, in the view. Their tops burst imposingly out toward the glass. They seemed more dynamic and "3D"-like than anything else in the scene. But everything in the display looked distorted and hard to see. I didn't think it was very effective.

I walked over to another display. This one was also lit. It was toward the back of the room, just around a curve in the room that went off to the left, as I faced away from the entrance.

This display barely showed an animal at all. The animal was, in fact, just a grey blur coming around the right side of a huge plant. I'd guess, from the size and color of the blur, that the animal was something like a big lemur with grey and black fur. But it may have been some kind of small wildcat.

The plant itself was maybe two or three meters tall. It may have been something like a yucca or an agave. But it was full and round, almost like a gigantic artichoke.

I walked out of the room, possibly because my mom had asked me if I was ready to go. But I didn't go with my mom. Instead I walked out to "catch up" with the friends I'd come with. I walked through a huge open space with a lot of people.

I headed into a room off to the right. The room was something like a roller skating rink. I found "my friends" there -- a few white men, maybe college students, tall, kind of big, wearing sweaters and baseball caps. The had a kind of arrogant look.

The men were all standing outside the rink, leaning against the barrier and looking toward the rink. One of the men said we were waiting for somebody to get back from somewhere. Once he got here, we'd leave.

The guy started talking about a ride in some other room. I now recalled, coming into this room, seeing in to some other room that had some kind of big amusement park-like ride in it. I may have seen a little Asian girl on the ride. It may have been something like a slide. It looked fun.

The ride now sounded so interesting to me that I asked the guy if he wouldn't mind if I went and did the ride while we were waiting for the other guy. The guy shrugged, kind of annoyed that I'd ask for permission. He said, "Do whatever you want, man. I'm not your boss."

I left the room in a hurry, ashamed for having annoyed the guy by asking his permission to do something. The room with the big ride was, I knew, off to the left. But I turned to the right, almost instinctively, to head toward the bathroom.

I passed a little dividing area that was waist high and had a swing-door near the right wall. The bathrooms were in a kind of empty space, just beyond which may have been a much bigger area like an amuseument park for little kids, possibly with some kind of ferris wheel in the center of it all.

Dream #3

I was "at work," sitting at a desk. My old co-worker, DC, came up to me from my right. He sat a chocolate cookie on my desk and said, "Here, you want a cookie?"

I looked at the cookie. It had a thin layer of hard, white frosting on it, like is sometimes on ginger cookies. The cookie looked good, but I knew I shouldn't eat it. So I shyly told DC, "Oh, no. I can't. But thank you."

DC was kind of offended that I'd declined his offer. He laughed and said, "Oh..." as if to let me know he thought I was being pretty arrogant, and that he'd do something sooner or later to put me in my place.

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.