maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was night. My mom, one of my nephews, and I stood outside under some kind of shelter, like the shelter over a gas pump island at a gas station. But this shelter was lower, and it seemed a lot brighter underneath, like it was lit with incandescent lights.

There was a lot of stuff under the shelter, like stuff out of a house. The shelter also seemed to be connected either to a house or to a grocery store.

My mom and I had probably come from whatever place the shelter was connected to. I was probably getting ready to leave the shelter altogether, maybe because I felt I needed to.

But now a car like my little brother's car came driving toward me from the building, as if it had been inside the building. The car stopped. It may actually have been driverless. The doors opened. Something like a gust of cold wind may have come out of the car.

I suddenly got the feeling that my actions were hurting somebody's feelings. It may have been my brother. But it may have been a woman, possibly a relative of mine.

I started shivering. Then I started getting a really weird feeling, like I was melting inside. My emotions and my sensations all began quivering and getting really weird. I was shuddering and rubbing my arms. Then I collapsed.

People, probably including my mom, may have helped me up. They may have walked me into the building, which was now a grocery store, although it was supposed to be a hospital.

I was laid down on a hospital bed that was partly walled-off from the grocery store by a hospital room privacy curtain. The space I was in was cluttered.

I had been told that I had gone through the weird physical moment because I had been dehydrated. I knew that my being dehydrated had something to do with the car.

I don't think I felt terribly tired or bad. I may even have been standing up and walking around. But I had been told I had to stay at the place because the doctors were still observing me, making sure I wasn't suffering anymore of the effects of being dehydrated.

At some point a doctor may have come in to see me. The doctor may have been a woman. Or, possibly, after a male doctor had seen me, a female nurse may have come in to see me.

Whoever the woman was, at some point she was so close to me that it was like she was embracing me. She began telling me something about how some other woman, another doctor or another nurse, was either jealous of the woman or jealous of me.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a museum with enormous rooms. The paintings were also enormous. The walls of the rooms may have been twenty or so meters tall. The paintings were just as tall.

I may have been with a group of people, possibly a school group. But I had broken off from them for some reason or another, and I was now walking around by myself.

But I was afraid to go into any of the rooms very far. The paintings on the walls were so gigantic. I was afraid they'd fall on me and smash me. So I could barely go beyond the threshold into rooms.

One room was kind of dimly lit, like from a dirty set of windows in the ceiling. I saw a pair of paintings in the room. The paintings were, I told myself, either by Goya or El Greco.

The paintings had the same subject: a young man in rich attire, something like pink, satin pants and a white shirt. The paintings stood opposite each other in a kind of side niche in the room. I wanted to examine the paintings closer, but I was too afraid of them falling on me.

I left this room -- I think -- and went into another room. The paintings were also huge in this room. But I may have been getting braver about being around the paintings, and I may have stepped quite a few meters into the room.

But now I looked up and saw that there were also paintings in the ceiling, the rest of the ceiling being made out of thick, ornate wood, like in the Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library. I was now afraid of the ceiling paintings falling on me. They seemed like they'd be heavier than the wall paintings.

Dream #2

It was a greyish day. I was either treading water in a river, moving backwards slowly in a small boat, like a rowboat, in a river, or standing on a walkway through or at the edge of a river.

I may at first have been with a group of older, well-off people, like a tour group. But I'd broken away from the group a bit. The group were all walking along the walkway.

The river was wide, and at the other end of it was a big, kind of square, building. The building faced the river directly, starkly: it may even have been a bit cantilevered over the river.

The building was made of some kind of white stone, but the front of it, or the side facing the river, was of slightly tinted glass. This windowed section curved around the sides of the building as well, giving the white stone of the building a kind of backwards "C" shape.

I knew that the building was an art museum. It was the Art Museum of Mexico or the Mexico Museum of Art. It was a very good and nice museum. But it was also used -- especially the enormous room overlooking the river -- by drug cartels for arranging certain deals.

People liked to visit the museum. But people who went there were always afraid. You always had to be careful not to hear things, or at least not to act like you heard things. And you couldn't offend any person in any way. If you offended someone or acted like you'd overheard some drug deal being arranged, you could be killed.

But for some reason I was feeling defiant. I was going to go into the museum and I wasn't going to act afraid at all. Besides, it was the Mexico Museum of Art. It was full of great works of art. I'd be really disappointed in myself if I didn't see the art works there.

Dream #3

I was in some building. I was near a staircase. Apparently I'd always come here to this place to read. Other people did, too. But I'd come to have a favorite spot for reading on the staircase. And I'd read there all the time.

There were some guys who'd decided to follow me around. They thought I was really smart. They were jealous of me. They wanted to figure out everything I was doing and studying. They thought if they read everything I read, they could get smarter than they thought I was.

One of these guys was an old, kind of tall, white man with a big belly. He wore nice slacks and a nice button-up shirt. He saw I was heading toward the staircase to read. So he either took the place I always took or took a place a few steps higher than my place. Wherever he sat, his plan was to look down at what I was doing, so he could do it, too, and hopefully beat me at it.

I tried to figure out what to do. I didn't really care if people knew what I was doing. I tried to be open about that. But I felt annoyed. I may have thought I'd hide whatever I was doing, just to annoy the man back a little. Or I may have thought I'd just act unperturbed, like the man didn't bother me, or didn't exist at all.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a big, empty room. The room had a grey, concrete floor. There was natural light coming in through a window somewhere.

A brown blanket lay in the center of the room, on the floor. The blanket was made up of small squares. For some reason, I was now cutting the lower squares off the blanket. But I was leaving a couple of the central squares in one of the lower rows attached to the upper rows. So now the blanket looked like a square with a bit of a lip at the bottom.

As this was going on, a movie was playing against the back wall. It was black and white. The film was old and scratchy. There were also four or five straight lines that ran vertically, up through the center of the frame.

The movie looked like an Abbott and Costello movie. But Costello was a kind of serious character, and the other guy was a young, kind of bright, but shy guy.

The Costello character was telling the man something like, "I don't think your idea for using the edges of the film-frame and putting sound on them is such a great idea. I don't think people will like it. It's too bothersome."

I now realized that the lines running up the center of the frame were the soundtrack lines that Costello was referring too. I thought that they were bothersome -- if they had to be right in the center of the frame like that!

But then I realized that those were the lines for this film. The film the man had made had the lines on the outside of the frame, where they weren't visible.

I understood that Costello's criticism of the man's use of a soundtrack in his films wasn't valid. But I somehow knew that Costello knew this as well. In fact, I knew, Costello even thought the use of soundtracks in film was a good idea.

But Costello didn't want to let the young man know he thought it was a good idea. He didn't want to support the young man's development. Costello felt that the young man was smart enough as it was, and that the young man would be so successful eventually, that he shouldn't have to support him in his efforts.

I thought that this was a terrible sentiment on Costello's part, and that the young man was probably in dire need of help.

Dream #2

I lay in bed, on my back, in an otherwise almost empty room. It was almost completely dark in the room. The bed was set next to a wall, which was to my right. The bed itself was rather narrow.

I looked out to my left, across the room. On the wall at the head of my bed was a window. It was pretty heavily curtained, but it let in, at the far end, a tiny corner of orange streetlamp light.

I noticed, in the corner of the room that was dimly lit by the streetlamp light, three statues. The statues were all Egyptian busts. They were all set on square pedestals, but they were arranged in a really haphazard way.

I knew somehow -- maybe from some narration in my head? -- that the busts were all supposed to be of the boy Pharaoh Tutankhamen. But all the busts were wearing the ubiquitous headdress of Nefertiti. And one of the busts, the lowest one, facing me most directly, was of a really chubby boy or man!

Dream #3

I was out on a beach. It was a nice, sunny day. There were a decent amount of people out on the beach, but not too many.

For some reason, I suddenly felt like I had to leave. I turned to my right and began heading away.

But as I left the beach, people began giving me troubles. I'm not sure what these troubles were now. But I think people just constantly kept getting in my way, even though there weren't a whole lot of people on the beach.

I may finally have thought I'd counter the problem by flying. I may have started flying a couple meters above the ground.

Now I was moving through an area of the beach with orange sand. Two enormous, black guys now came charging down the beach. It looked like they were just trying to start trouble. They had huge, long dredds and black, Oakley-style sunglasses, with silver rims on the tops.

I may possibly have stopped flying. I may possibly have thought if these guys saw me flying, they'd just pull me down and pummel me. But once these guys passed me, I knew that I had to get out of here once and for all. Soon there wouldn't be anything here but trouble.

I may possibly have gotten onto a bike like the bike I rode in junior high school. Or I may still just have been walking.

I ended up on a concrete path in a park. I took this park to be a park from my high school years IWL. It was kind of like a trail on a small greenbelt running through a suburban residential area. It seemed like the path descended from here and went under a bridge.

Either on foot or on bike, I descended under the bridge. Once I got beyond the bridge, I was in a much more forest-like, tree covered area. The path may now have been dirt, rather than concrete. There was a river on my right side. Trees also seemed to be growing up out of the river.

I suddenly noticed a gigantic bullfrog sitting on the stump of one of the river trees. The bullfrog must have been 60cm tall! It looked pretty intelligent, too. It seemed to register my presence and be a bit worried about whether I wanted to hurt it.

I acted calm and walked forward, trying not to regard the frog at all, so it would feel less worried. But now, up the way only twenty or thirty more meters, I saw another one of these huge frogs!

I decided to get off this trail. I think I was afraid of the frogs. But I also think that I thought that if I kept having to act like I didn't see or care about every frog that worried as I passed it, I'd get bored as hell pretty quick.

But also -- the trail itself may also simply have just ended: being cut off by the merging of a small creek on my left with the river on my right.

I saw that if I jumped across the small creek on my left, I could land on the opposite bank. The bank was steep, but short, dry, and grassy. I could easily climb up it and out of this park altogether.

But as I turned left to face the opposite bank, I noticed another huge frog! This one was also kind of worried about me. I was now in between two huge frogs that were all shifty and nervous. And I was afraid that if I jumped, my motions would be so fast and scary to them that they'd have heart attacks!

I wondered how I could jump without scaring the frogs. The only thing I could think to do was close my eyes and jump. This way, the frogs would see that I wasn't looking at anything at all, and so I couldn't be jumping because I was trying to attack them.

I closed my eyes. But I couldn't remember what the bank looked like. I didn't want to hit something bad. I tried to open my eyes again to get a good memory of the bank. But when I opened them, they were all groggy and grainy. It was really hard for me to focus on anything.

Finally, the frog off to my right said, in something like a female voice, "There's actually a good patch right up around here."

I looked up to the frog. I went to where the frog directed me. I jumped across the little creek and landed on the bank. I started climbing up the bank.

All this time, the frog was still talking to me, in that kind of female voice. She was kind of friendly, like a really smart scientist, or a librarian. But I had the idea that the frogs really weren't comfortable with my presence here.

At the top of the bank, I turned around to look back down at the river. The river wasn't there anymore. I was just facing a red brick building, which seemed to be set a meter or so down into a sandy trench. I was out on a road, it seemed, on the outskirts of a very small town in the desert.

But this didn't even register with me. Down at the base of the building I saw a rectangular slat of an opening in the wall. Two sets of female eyes looked back out at me. I knew these two women were the frogs I had just jumped past on the river.

I felt bad for not having spoken to them. So I did want to say something to them. But I also felt a little shy, like somehow these frogs were of a higher station than I was, and would thus be put off by my acting too familiar with them. So I wanted to keep whatever I said short.

I said, "Yeah, I'm sure I'll come back here. So if I do, I'll talk to you guys again. I used to ride my bike up through this park all the time when I was a kid."

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a dark restaurant. The restaurant had a lot of small, black, two-person tables in the main area. I sat at a table there. Off to my left there were some bigger booth tables. Multicolored neon lights seemed to reflect off many of the dark surfaces in the bar.

The two-person seating area was pretty full. A business man sat next to me, at the table to my right. He may have been Asian American, maybe in his late thirties or early forties. He wore square glasses and a kind of plain suit. He had a gentle, easygoing, but mature-sounding voice.

The man asked me why I had left my previous job. I began to list off a whole bunch of complaints about my former boss. The complaints just got worse and worse, and I just got more and more agitated as I listed them. I think the main complaint was that my boss wanted me out of the office, and that he just neglected me and tortured me until I left.

I now noticed that my boss was sitting up in one of the booths off to my left. Red, white, and green light was playing off his face, like a rotating neon sign (or a barber shop pole) was shining on him.

My boss was sliding a grey iPad back into a case. It was almost like the iPad was the thickness of a VCR cassette and that the iPad case was like a VCR cassette sleeve.

I could tell that my boss had heard everything I'd said about him. I was a little ashamed of myself for having spoken bad about him. But I was also glad that he'd heard it. I hoped that it would sink in somehow, and that he'd feel bad.

But I also felt bad for complaining. The business man may have been thinking about hiring me. Now that I'd complained so much, maybe he just thought I wouldn't be a good employee.

My boss was now standing just beside me, on my left. He said, "Hey, I need to talk to you for a second."

I stood up with him and walked toward the center of the restaurant. There was a wide pillar there, around which was a chest-high counter that had a bunch of computer screens (maybe cash registers?) on it. My boss stopped there and spoke to me.

He said "You know, I've been getting the feeling lately that you think I didn't treat you right while you were working for me. And that's just not true. I have a feeling you've been telling people stuff like that. And I really don't want you to."

The way he was saying all this made it sound like he had just come to these conclusions all by himself -- like he hadn't heard me speaking at all just now, and the idea had just popped into his head. I knew he was just trying to impress me by making himself sound insightful enough to guess my moves. But I'd seen him listening to my conversation.

I told my boss, "I saw you sitting there, listening to everything I said! I knew you were there, and that's why I said it! I'm not sorry I said it! You treated me like garbage while I was there!"

(EDIT: I forgot to say that there was also some point where I was even making fun of my boss' voice, doing some kind of high-pitched, flat squealing, with a sheep-like, bleating rhythm. I may have been standing or crouching over my boss while he was laying on the ground. I may even have had his left (?) arm pinned to the ground.)

I was now standing out near the dugout of a baseball field in a park. I was with my boss momentarily, still yelling at him. But my boss eventually changed into my old friend R.

We were actually standing with a group of people, maybe twelve or fifteen of us, all straggled out along a fence that went along from third base to home plate. R and I were standing just beyond third base. At this point, the fence was separated from the diamond by about twenty meters of lawn, and it went up a small slope.

I knew that I had been yelling at R just like I had been yelling at my old boss. But suddenly I felt like R was in control of something in my life. I didn't like R very much, but I felt like I should apologize to him and be nice to him, so that he would stop controlling whatever it was he was controlling in my life, and make things okay for me again.

There had been a little bit of a game going on on the ball field, a game between two semi-competitive teams, maybe teams of little kids. But now the kids were all just milling around the field, clearing off the field.

There was some sort of ceremony that was now being held on home plate. A kind of tall, kind of fat, bald man in a grey suit, white shirt, and reddish tie was presenting somebody to give a speech. The person was another old friend of mine, E.

I only heard one particular phrase from E's speech. I can't remember what it was. But it struck me as attempting to be "folksy," something that would be understood by and sympathized with by all the "common people" around him.

I was kind of sickened by this. When I'd first met E, he was a kind of intellectual guy. He struck me as being a genuinely good person. But the older he got, the more he enjoyed cheating and taunting people. But he still tried to carry off the act of being a good guy. By now, it was all just a horrible charade to anybody who knew him. And his speech was an awful example of it.

Nevertheless, when E finished his speech, I went after him, to go talk to him. I figured that since he'd done something important like give a speech, and be introduced by a man in a suit, that he might be an important guy now. He might be able to help me out in my own difficulties.

E walked over toward the fence, toward a section closer to home plate. I hurried down toward him. I may have reached him and started talking to him, in a really shameful kiss-up kind of way.

Dream #2

I was in some place like a house or a mansion. I was in what looked like a big living room. But I may have been sitting on the left edge of a bed. The room was all made of dark wood. There were no lights on. But a lot of natural light was coming through a doorway, probably a wide doorway into a bathroom.

The bed didn't have any blankets on it, just a white sheet around the mattress and a white sheet over that. The bed may actually have been a hide-a-bed, the kind that pulls out from under the cushions of a couch.

Just off to my right, a guy stood talking. It was as if he were in a commercial, or in some kind of "special features" style mini-documentary for a movie. He, and everything around him, had a gauzy haze, like I was already watching the documentary, and the view from the camera lens, which was in some kind of soft focus.

The guy was some famous director. He looked like he was from the late 1970s or early 1980s. He was kind of skinny, with hair down just below his shoulders. He wore roundish, black-rimmed glasses and some kind of nerdy-looking suit.

The director had a kind of high, but full voice, so everything he said sounded a little pompous, and a little more like singing than talking.

The director was talking about his future plans. But he didn't really seem to have any. He may have mentioned that he'd done a lot of work already, and that he now planned to just spend time with his family, to re-charge a little.

The director said that the thing that ruined a lot of creative people nowadays was letting themselves get too overrun by taking on too many tasks. Their work was cheapened, and the artists would get burnt out. The director said that he was going to try not to let this happen to him.

I stood up and walked toward the bathroom, still hearing the director, as if he were speaking directly into my head. The director may have started talking about the French filmmaker Francois Truffaut's career as an example of burning out. I may have seen some black and white photos of Truffaut, intercut with solid views of lavender color.

I now stood in the bathroom, looking down into the bathtub. I was thinking of taking a shower. But there was a little reddish dirt or grime ringing the side of the tub and dusting up the floor of it.

I was kind of grossed out by this. I wondered how a bathtub could be so poorly taken care of in such a rich house as this. I may have thought I'd clean the tub. But I also may have thought that I just wouldn't take a shower.

Dream #3

I was in a house with my sister. I was in the living room, and my sister was in the kitchen. Both rooms were small, so even though we were in two rooms, it felt like we were hanging out together. The living room had no lights on, but light came into it through the kitchen.

I had been sitting on the couch, probably watching a movie on a TV that stood on an entertainment center just off to my left. But now I stood up and walked into the kitchen. My sister was sitting at the kitchen table, doing something -- maybe writing, or coloring in a coloring book, or doing something on her phone.

At some point my sister may have turned into a blonde girl I knew in high school, though she may have been college-aged.

I told my sister that I was going to take a shower. She said okay. But she then mumbled something about the university I'd attended. I didn't understand what my sister had said. So I asked her to say it again. Again my sister just quickly mumbled something about the university I'd attended.

It was like my sister was giving me news about the university. But it was more like she was sharing her reactions to the news with me. She already expected me to know what the news was. And if I didn't know the news, she would just figure I was pretty stupid.

This was even more the case -- at least in my mind -- because my sister had been told the news by a man that she was attracted to.

This man was maybe ten years older than I. He was big and strong and probably involved in business in some way or another. If this man could outdo me with his knowledge, through my sister, my sister -- I thought -- would feel like she didn't need to respect me, or even treat me nicely, anymore.

So after I'd determined that my sister had really mentioned something about news regarding the university I'd attended, I just said something really non-committal, like, "Yeah, it's pretty crazy, right? I can't believe it," and then walked to the shower.

I walked down the dim hallway and into the dark bathroom. I didn't turn any lights on. I closed the door. I must have stripped out of my clothes, too. I now figured I would look at my phone, try to get whatever news I could about my old university, and, while I was showering, think up some responses to give my sister.

When I turned on the news, though, I found a web page that said that the house of famous actress Barbara Steele had caught fire. Apparently Barbara Steele (an actress famous for her roles in Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 and David Cronenberg's Shivers) nowadays lived in my old university town.

The news article showed a picture of Steele's house. But the photo was from the roof of the house. The roof, actually, took up almost all the photo. And the main focus of the photo seemed to be a small array of solar panels that now seemed to be sinking down through the roof.

There may also have been snow on the roof, and there were a few men on the roof, apparently in the middle of putting out the fire. The house seemed like it was just a regular, suburban house in a regular, suburban neighborhood, not a big mansion one would expect a movie star to live in.

The news article said that Barbara Steele had been in the fire, and that she'd been rushed to the hospital. It seemed to imply that she'd died. But I couldn't really determine whether that was true.

I figured this must have been the article my sister had been talking about. My sister would know how much I loved Barbara Steele. So she probably would have wanted to discuss with me any news she'd heard about her. I started thinking of responses to give my sister about the article.

But now I could hear (and maybe even see, in my mind's eye) my sister and the older man talking with each other. My sister was telling the older man that I seeemed to be going through some sort of difficulty. My sister even seemed to imply that I'd lost or was lacking something, as if the older man might help me get a replacement.

I was a little upset that my sister had told the man all of this, especially since my sister and the older man already seemed to be planning with each other how they could make me feel less intelligent than they were.

But I was also relieved. I knew I was missing something. And maybe the man could help me find it. I figured that once I got out of the shower I'd approach the man very humbly and ask him to help me.

But now I saw a strange image. It was a cartoon, or a comic book. A little girl had knocked on a door (her own front door?). A man, maybe the girl's dad, had answered the door. The man let his wife know that the girl was at the door.

But something about what the man said made me realize that the man and girl were going to have sex. They had probably already had sex in the past. It was like the man and the little girl were in love with each other.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was somewhere with a boss I worked for IWL until 2009. He might have been talking to me about coming back to work for him.

I was then in another room, maybe the next room over from where I was with my old boss. The room was kind of unfinished. The floors may have been grey concrete. The walls may have been bare drywall.

There was a beautiful woman, maybe in her late twenties, off to my left. She may have been leaning her back against a wall. Off to her right there was a window.

The woman may have been considering whether to give me a job. As part of showing the woman my qualifications, I was lifting a piece of drywall onto the wall in front of me. I was setting it into a framing of widely-spaced brackets. The brackets were like copper-colored nails with their ends bent up at 90-degree angles.

I wasn't actually, for myself, completing this task in order to get the job, even though I knew the woman was trying to determine whether she wanted me for the job. And I didn't want my old boss to think that I was going for this job. If he did think that, I believed, he'd start messing around and playing mind games with me.

I suddenly noticed, as I lifted the sheet of drywall, that I was naked. My penis was erect, and it must have been touching against the drywall, which hurt.

Now, instead of lifting a piece of drywall into the frame, I was lifting a white, drywall-sized towel into the frame. The towel was soaking wet. I wasn't sure how I was going to be able to get this towel into the frame. It was supposed to go into the frame just like the drywall would.

I spent a while justifying the possibility of a limp, wet towel doing something like this. Eventually I could even see the limp wet towel in my mind's eye, acting just like a hard sheet of drywall.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was somewhere outside, standing before a small building like a cottage. I stood before the door, which split in half so it could open on the top and stay closed on the bottom. I probably leaned on a counter-like ledge topping the bottom half of the door.

Inside were my family members and a guy I know from a cafe I go to. The interior of the cottage felt very plain and empty, almost as if it were a children's play-cottage with no decorations in it.

I was talking to the guy about stocks. Apparently the guy had been talking about some Chinese stock that was really great. He was even thinking of buying it.

There may have been a business man somewhere in the cottage. I may have been trying to impress the business man by showing how much I understood the guy. I asked the guy, "What's keeping you from buying the stock? Or..."

Here I seemed to start having trouble getting words into my head as I spoke. "Rather... what is it that is keeping your... joy... about this... company... from becoming 100%... unmitigated?"

The guy then began talking to me about stuff like Chinese economic policy, which I didn't understand. The guy made reference to a few key people in China. I now saw them on a TV screen.

The guy continued to talk to me, but we were now both on a bed outside the cottage. The guy sat on the left edge of the bed, watching a TV in an entertainment center that stood against the cottage wall. I was crouched up in a weird position, like a little kid, behind the guy.

The Chinese political figures were still on the TV. The guy had explained a lot to me. Now he said some quote that apparently some famous investor had made, like, "Why invest in the country's companies, when you can just invest in their currency?"

I thought the guy meant he was going to invest in Chinese currency instead of the company he'd mentioned. But now he mentioned a completely different company he was going to invest in.

The business man now sat on the bed. The guy was now my little brother. But it was like my brother wasn't there. My mom was somewhere around. The business man had been impressed by everything my brother had said.

The business man told my mom, "We need to hire someone new for our firm. We need somebody intelligent, somebody who can give our firm some direction.

"And we're open for all different kinds of people. Duncan Jansen (???) was our CEO." (I knew that Duncan Jansen was a black man.) "We need people who are willing to work, and can have good, new ideas."

I assumed that the man meant, by what he had just said, that my little brother was a good worker, while I was not. I sat up from the bed. I was a little groggy-eyed, as if I'd just woken up from sleep.

I knew I had some sort of data project I had to take care of. I hoped that if I just went and took care of my project, the business man would see that I, too, could work hard.

My office was apparently down a flagstone path, past a few other cottages with fenced yards. After a few cottages, I "knew," I'd turn right.

But as I started going down the flagstone path, the business man mentioned some propecy he'd read, which he now thought was related to my brother. The business man mentioned something about a heavenly choir singing at the announcement of this prophecy.

At the same time, a singing group, which I may have organized, was getting ready for their daily practice. I thought to myself that I might mention to the man that I considered holding singing practice every day to be of great importance.

The group sang a song that had the words "Angels and spirits sing on high." This line kept repeating. It was more like a chant than a song. But it sounded beautiful.

On either side of the flagstone path was lawn, in which were random, wild beds of irises. But the blossoms of most of the irises were way past their prime. Purple and white petals, in different stages of browning, barely clung to the stems.

Dream #2

I saw from the viewpoint of a spaceship in outer space. The spaceship was, apparently, approaching the planet Venus. The planet, though, looked silvery, almost cloud-grey, from our approach.

We seemed to be very close to Venus at first. The upper left quadrant (?) of the sphere had taken up almost all my view. But then we were a ways back, far enough back to see the whole planet and a good deal of the surrounding space quite easily.

At some point the beautiful voice of a woman asked us, in a very professional, almost computerized voice who we were and what our business was.

A man on board the ship may have mentioned that the planet Venus required permission before allowing people to land on her. Suddenly I realized that the voice I'd heard hadn't been from a person on Venus -- it had been the voice of the planet herself!

A spherical shield like glittering gold dust went up around the planet. I knew that this shield could keep anybody off the planet.

The man must have begun interacting with Venus again. This time, though, as Venus spoke, she turned different colors. It was like her surface was banded, like Saturn's surface, but with neon orange, green, and pink. And these bands would shift up and down, like computer lights, as Venus spoke.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dream #2

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

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

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

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

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

Dream #3

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a "Quentin Tarantino movie." I think it was supposed to be like Inglourious Basterds, like in the final scene between the young man and the young woman in the film booth.

I was some kind of spy. I may have been a man in my forties, with a big, curly moustache. I may have a tiny bit overweight, and I may have been wearing an overcoat and a fedora.

I was sneaking through some building, trying to find and kill some woman, but also trying to escape her so she couldn't kill me. I went through a series of rooms like rooms in a mansion, even though this building was a multi-floor building, like some kind of museum.

I eventually found the woman working in a room like a film booth. The woman had her back turned to me. I may have been supposed to kill her. But I suddenly realized that I had to get out of here before she noticed me and started chasing me, to kill me.

I knew that there really wasn't any way out of this building, or at least no secret way that the woman wouldn't be able to get to long before I did. But I still went running away through the building, not looking for a way out, necessarily, but at least looking for a way to put distance between me and the woman.

But, for some reason, I almost purposely walked myself into a series of rooms that weren't just a dead end, but were a very short series of dead ends. I walked through one bedroom-like area, well-lit with natural light, then down a case of red-carpeted stairs. I ended up in a very small bathroom.

The bathroom barely had enough space for me to turn around in. The light was dim and incandescent, and most of the room seemed to be coated in yellow-beige tiles that faded into a dark brown at their edges. There was also a turquoise-colored towel.

I knew I had absolutely walked myself directly into a dead end. I knew the woman would catch up to me any time now. Yet I thought I would hide in the bathroom forever, or until the woman had gotten past me.

I knew that wouldn't work, though, and that the woman could easily find me. I just decided to leave the bathroom and face the woman.

I walked out of the bathroom. About halfway up the steps I noticed that the woman was standing over the top of the steps, off to their side, leaning over a waist-high railing bordering the staircase.

The woman looked young, maybe in her early twenties. She was pale skinned, with an oval-shaped, soft face. She had light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, pale blue eyes, and eyeglasses. She wore a green sweater and blue jeans. She actually seemed kind of nice and nerdy. But she was levelling a pistol at me.

At first, out of fear from having the gun pointing straight at me, I backed down a couple steps, like I was going back to the bathroom. But I realized that everything was over for me, and that I should at least be brave enough to face my fate. So I started walking back up the steps.

The woman seemed ready to shoot me. She didn't really want to wait until I got up the steps. She said, "Where do you want it? In the stomach?" She pointed the gun toward me stomach. "Or in the chest?" She pointed the gun toward my chest.

For some reason I "kind of" thought about my back, and how I thought the most efficiently killing shot would be one that went through "my back." But I couldn't quite get the concept of "my back" through my head. But I did think that my chest was close enough to "my back" to give me a pretty efficient death.

I told the woman to go ahead and shoot me in the chest. So she levelled the gun at my chest. I spread my chest out, so I could take the shot bravely, hopefully without flinching.

The woman shot me. I flew up into the air. I may have been falling down the stairs. But it really felt like I was just floating in the air, in a kind of "laying on my back" position, except with my head and maybe my legs bowed down a little bit, so I wasn't completely flat.

The woman said, "Well, that's all over, then. Thanks for being so cooperative about letting me get this over with!" She cheerfully walked toward the exit of the room.

I replied, "Oh, no problem. Thanks for being so nice and giving me a choice of where I could be shot."

Dream #2

I was standing in a hallway of a house. The house was kind of short, just a little alcove really, between a few rooms and the living room. The hallway was lit with incandescent light. To my right was the living room. The living room wasn't lit at all.

I was examining some papers in my hands when I heard some weird noises. It was like jangling glass and metal, like people were shuffling some stuff around or breaking stuff. But it sounded a little bit far away, like maybe one or two rooms separated from the living room.

I wondered if someone was breaking into this house. I was kind of afraid to go check, even though I knew I'd probably have to.

But then I looked out into the living room, to a computer out on a desk. The computer was playing some kind of show or visual program. It looked like a bunch of papers shuffling around on some kind of classical desk.

I could now tell that the sounds were coming from the computer. It seemed kind of weird to me that the visual program of papers shuffling on a desk would be accompanied by the sound of glass breaking and metal bars jangling and shuffling around.

But I think I figured that if I got closer to the computer, to see what the visual program was really all about, it would probably all make a lot more sense to me.

Dream #3

I sat in something like a conference room, at the right side a long, oval or rectangular table. I sat positioned directly across the table from the door into the conference room. To my left sat a woman who kind of looked like Camille Paglia, except taller and heavier.

The woman's hair was in a really bad fashion, about six inches long, but feathered all around her head like a bowl. She was probably wearing a terrible outfit -- some kind of circus-peanuts-orange blouse, a silver pendant with a black stone in the middle of it, and some kind of chunky, tweed skirt.

I had at least one notebook and a bunch of papers. I was sharing ideas about companies with the woman. I don't think the woman worked with corporations. But I think she worked a lot with ideas in general. So I wanted to throw my ideas about companies out to her as being just about ideas in general.

Suddenly a tall, overweight, pale, bald businessman came walking into the room. He was apparently my boss -- even though I didn't have a job anymore. The woman left for some reason or another. The man eyed the woman and me with jealousy.

I felt like I shouldn't have been sharing my ideas with this woman. Instead, I should have been sharing them with my boss (or ex-boss). I got all sheepish, panicky, and stuttery. I stood out of my chair and pulled up one of my notebooks.

I told my (ex-)boss, "Y--y--you see, I was just talking to her about Lockheed Martin. You see, I've pulled some ideas together about the company." (I may have said "LMT," and not "Lockheed Martin.")

When I mentioned Lockheed Martin, the man made a kind of impressed, humming-grunting sound. Encouraged, I went on. I flipped through a few pages in my notebook, explaining some stuff about Lockheed Martin that I don't remember at all anymore.

Most of the pages were written in black ink. But I got to one page where I'd written on three themes regarding "LMT." Each theme was written in a different color. There was a red section, then a blue section, then a green section.

Each section was separated from the next by a line, which may have had the title for the next section or theme. This line may have always been written in red ink.