maboroshi

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.

Dream #1

I may have been flying through a neighborhood like the neighborhood I lived in as a teenager. It was a partly sunny, partly grey day. I landed in a backyard like my great grandmother's backyard.

I started walking along the side yard, toward the front of the house. My old landlady, Ms. U, was walking up from the front of the house, on my right side.

Ms. U still looked old, maybe in her late sixties. But she seemed to be in better shape, and to have a slightly smaller frame. She wore dark jeans and a dark green shirt, as if she were out gardening.

I waved to Ms. U. She reluctantly waved at me. It was like she didn't really want to talk to me. I knew why. It was obvious to her, like it was to me, that I wasn't going to be able to pay my rent soon. She didn't want to talk to me because she was disappointed in me.

Ms. U was now behind me. She met up with one of her friends. They were both going to walk down to the supermarket together. They were walking behind me. I turned right, as they did, and walked down the sidewalk, to the corner of the block.

As I walked, I thought that maybe I would be able to pay my rent, after all. Maybe I would get a job. Then Ms. U wouldn't be so disappointed in me. So, if all that was going to happen, and I could believe it, why could't Ms. U? Why did Ms. U have to not talk to me?

At the same time, I got the feeling that maybe Ms. U wasn't very disappointed in me. Maybe she would talk to me, if I'd just slow down and walk with Ms. U and her friend.

The sidewalk was gone. But we weren't walking on the lawns of the front yards. We were walking on grass like grass that edges vacant lots. The grass was dry, tan, rough, and clumpy. There was a wooden fence to my right at one point. At another point there was at least one orange traffic cone. I kept feeling like I was going to lose my balance and fall into the road.

Dream #2

I was sitting in a restaurant. My table was basically all by itself, in a space that looked like the hallway of a house. It was dark, lit by a dim, blue light, like candlelight in a blue, glass holder. My table was in a little, doorway like niche in the wall. I sat so I faced the restaurant's front door, which was barely visible to me from where I sat.

I knew that there were a lot more tables in another room. The room was somewhere off to my right, i.e. down the hall, and around to the right through another hall.

People kept coming by, apparently angry or jealous of me for having this table all to myself. Some of them started trying to do things like leave their stuff on my table.

One person had a huge, black, wire-cart, like for laundry or groceries. She tried to slide it in between the unused chair of my table and the wall. I stood up and said, "Don't put your stuff in that space!" I moved the cart right out of the way. I may have stuck it in some dark corner just off from the niche I sat in.

I decided that people were jealous of me because they thought I had this space all to myself. So I tried to make it look like I wasn't alone. I laid my bookbag and my jacket on the opposite seat, like somebody else was sitting there. I then pushed the seat far back, so that nobody would try to sit anything behind it. I also figured I'd act like I was waiting for someone to come back.

Time passed. I was now being sternly lectured by a Meryl Streep-like business woman in a white blouse and long, beige skirt. The woman demanded to know why I had been away from my seat for so long.

I vaguely remembered that I had had to go out the front door of the restaurant to help people who were loading something out of a semi-truck's trailer. It had, I remembered, seemed really important for me to have done this. If I had sat here instead of gone out to help, I suspected that this woman would have been yelling at me for that, instead.

The woman told me, "Don't you know we have an important client coming to visit us today? How long were you runnning around outside? Do you even know? Even if it was just a few minutes, the client could have come inside while you were missing. He could be wandering around lost in the restaurant right now. And we wouldn't even know it!"

Dream #3

I woke up. I pulled my blanket off of myself and looked at the upper right corner of my bed. My bedroom light was off, but my hall light was on, and it lit my room a bit. My blankets and sheets were brown.

There was a fly crawling across the corner of my bed. This kind of disgusted me, as if it were a far worse insect than a fly. I brushed the fly off and started worrying about bugs.

I stood up and walked down the hallway -- possibly (I'm not sure), because I heard a strange noise coming from my bathroom.

I got to the bathroom. The lights were on and were really bright. The shower was running, which was odd in itself. But after a moment of focusing, I realized that the shower itself was acting weird. The water was rushing way stronger than usual, and the nozzle seemed to be spraying out in a few different, weird directions.

I looked closer at the shower pipe. I now saw that it didn't even have a head! No wonder it was spraying all weird. I decided to shut off the shower water and figure out how to solve this problem.

I turned off the water. But now there was a strange rumbling in the bathroom. The walls seemed to shake. Suddenly the portion of the wall just beside and below the shower pipe began spouting out water through little holes! The force of the water I'd shut off was so strong that it had burst through the wall in little, fountain-like holes!

I stood back from this and watched it all. I knew that this kind of plumbing problem was much more than I by myself could handle. I'd have to call in my landlord.

I really didn't want to have to call in my landlord. I knew he was already against me for a number of reasons. I didn't want him wandering through my house, peering aroud like he thought he'd find some sort of incriminating evidence about me. But I knew, regardless of the inconvenience to me, that I'd have to call the landlord.

But now, suddenly, the wall over the side of my bathub also burst open with little fountains of water! These fountains of water were either bright pink or else left bright pink stains on the wall. The fountains of water were also more like jets -- they blasted in a flat, sideways pattern, along the wall, almost like sheets of water pouring down a sidewalk on a rainy day.

And then all new things came out of the wall! I thought of these things as leaks and water. But they weren't water: they were steel. They were like surgery or dentistry implements, stainless steel devices, attached to steel cords, like the ringed cords on receivers for payphones.

Some of these cord may have had robotic, or even white-gloved, hands attached to them, holding the implements. The number of cords, hands, and implements springing out of the wall seemed to be increasing and increasing, cluttering up the whole top of the wall.

Dream #4

I was with a couple of men, one of whom may have been my brother. The other man was something like an ex-Marine. He was tall and muscular, slightly tanned, with blue eyes and pale-blonde hair in a buzz cut.

We were in some kind of suburban area. It was possibly early morning, just before sunrise. We may have started out at a house or a small shop. We were loading things into a truck. These things were either items for security systems on houses, or else they were nuclear bombs.

We drove in a pickup truck to some place. As we did, I thought about what we were doing. The man may have been talking to me about it as well. I knew we were definitely installing security systems on houses. But we also had nuclear missiles in our truck, and we were definitely concerned, in some way or another, with a slightly touchy situation regarding nuclear deterrence.

We drove into and through a big parking lot, to a small, one-story building, possibly with white walls and a flat, steel-siding-like, blue roof.

Somehow I now saw as if I were now twenty or thirty meters behind the truck. Missiles were being pulled out of the back of the truck. There were probably two missiles. I only saw their tail ends. They looked like the tail-end of an X-15 manned rocket, not a missile.

I now stood just inside the building with the man. There were a few other people about, including a few little, Latino children, apparently. The inside of the building felt completely unused. There were no lights on, though there may have been some dusty office equipment. The front window may also not have had a glass pane in it.

The man and I were talking (somehow -- telepathically?) about some woman who had had some sort of difficulty in her professional life.

As we were talking about this, I kept hoping I'd just say the right thing. I felt like the military and government had me under suspicion. My appearance alone, I knew, marked me as suspicious. If I said the wrong thing, I'd be detained for sure.

I wandered down a front deck and onto the parking lot, toward the Latino children. I was still "speaking" with the military man. The kids were looking at a hole in the parking lot. It was a rectangular hole, about three meters long and two meters wide. It seemed to go down a long way.

As I looked into the hole, it began to appear as if it held something inside, like a gigantic birthday cake. The cake was covered in frosting that was colored with brilliant swirls of blue, turquoise, green, and white. Tropical fish, either plastic or sugar, also adorned the cake.

I was now "speaking" to the military man about how the woman we had been discussing was probably suffering from an animus possession. She was letting the male side of herself dominate her personality. It was making her overly aggressive, so that nobody could work with her.

As I "spoke" of this, it now became my task to scrape frosting off the cake. I was scraping huge, huge globs of solid green, solid blue, and solid white frosting off the cake. Occasionally I'd also scrape off a few fish.

The scraped-off frosting all went into some deeper part of the pit. It was now like the cake was L-shaped, so that the upper left quadrant (as I faced it) of the rectangle was left free for this deep pit, this extra space for the frosting.

But I noticed that as I scraped off the frosting, it became kind of mushy and unappealing. It still looked very sweet. But on the cake it had been firm, which would, I assumed, add to the pleasure of the taste. Off the cake it was just sickly sweet and mushy.

I wondered why the frosting had to be scraped off the cake, anyway. Someone apparently thought there was excess frosting on the cake. But I didn't. I thought the frosting was good, and that there was just enough.