maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was walking along either a sidewalk or a concrete walkway on a bridge at night. The night was really clear, and the sky was blue with moonlight.

A group of girls walked behind me. I don't think I ever saw them clearly. But I had the impression they were all blonde and pretty. I feel like they might have been dressed up in business clothes. But they also might have been in casual jeans, shirts, and jackets.

The girls were all talking about a specific person's love life. They seemed to be trying to get a guy and a girl to hook up with each other. But they were talking about one of the person having too many issues and messing things up. I don't really know if they were talking about the guy or the girl.

The sidewalk curved around somehow and went along the side of some concrete wall. It ramped up, as if leading up to a bridge. There was now a lot of snow on the ground, though the sky was still clear.

Some of the women passed me. They still seemed to be talking about the match they were trying to make. As the girls passed me, I wondered if they hadn't stayed behind me all that time because they'd wanted me to talk to them.

There was still one girl behind me. She said, "You know why I love these new shoes for the snow? Because then I can walk around in the snow, and it's not difficult at all!" I may have thought it was a little nerdy for the girl to brag about her new snow shoes while everybody else was talking about this matchmaking attempt.

The girl went off the left side of the concrete path, onto a bank of snow. She passed me while walking through the bank of snow. She then walked back toward the path, maybe two or three meters in front of me now. But as she approached the path, she tripped. She fell down right in front of me.

Dream #2

I was walking down a kind of lonely sidewalk on a sunny day. I was in a kind of old-looking part of a big town, with cobblestone streets and wide, brick buildings.

There was a really old, Asian man behind me, about twenty meters away. For some reason I had turned around to look at him. A young, black man, not really tall, but kind of broad and muscly, came up to the Asian man. The black man had a big, thick beard that only went around his jaw line. The man wore a big set of headphones and wore a red t-shirt.

The black man said, "Assalamu alaikum" to the Asian man and then quietly started asking the man questions and pointing toward me, as if the questions were about me. But as soon as the black man saw that I had seen him asking questions about me, he stopped talking. He then quickly thanked the Asian man and walked away.

I felt like if the black man had been asking questions about me, he had been following me. So I was going to find out what was going on. I saw the man go into some corner-set brick building that looked like a restaurant. So I headed toward that restaurant.

It was only a few seconds from the time the man went into the restaurant to the time I actually approached the door. But the man was already walking out of the restaurant -- except this time, he didn't have the huge beard around his jawline. He looked at me and pretended not to know me. He rushed past me and crossed a street, toward a block with a huge, grass fille vacant lot.

I followed the man across the street, calling out to him, "Yep! Yep!" As he hurried away, as if to let him know I knew he had been following me all along.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was possibly in a classroom. All the desks were arranged in a circle. The room was lit with kind of dull, greenish, fluorescent light. The class or meeting had ended, and everybody was headed out of the room. The room was empty as I left it.

There was a boy somewhere behind me. He was blonde, well-groomed, with a kind of effeminate bearing and voice. He had said something in class, and now he asked me, "Was I rude when I said that?"

I wanted to say yes, but I thought that would be wrong. So I said, "Well, you work so hard that nobody would think you were just plain rude. But people might think you were defensive."

Dream #2

I was walking along a sidewalk in a residential part of town. It was a sunny day, but there was snow on the ground. The snow had been cleared from the sidewalks and streets, but it was still piled up around the curbs and the grassy areas between the sidewalks and curbs. The snow piles were all wet and slushy from the sun.

I was apparently heading to a dance class (?). But, as I crossed a street and then walked past a glass-walled bus stop, I felt a bad headache and decided not to go to class. The headache was like a hard, concrete-like feeling in the back of my head. My eyes also felt sunken in, and I had a real drop in energy.

But I also felt like if I didn't go to dance class I would teach my teachers and classmates a lesson, as if they had done something to insult me and now I was paying them back.

I was apparently walking a few blocks, up a mild slope, to a train stop, possibly for one of the red trains, maybe the 2-train. I walked past either a college campus with red brick buikdings or a block of very nice, red-brick houses. There were tall trees shading the sidewalks.

A couple of tall, young, beautiful people were walking close behind me. The neighborhood may actually have been moderately busy with people overall. The people were joking about something they had done to a friend or colleague of theirs. They had taken something of his. When he got upset about it, they wondered why he could be so sensitive.

I passed another (or the same?) glass-walled bus stop. I now had in my left hand two bags from fast food restaurants. The first bag was from Dunkin' Donuts. It was a coffee. The second bag was from somewhere else. It was food, maybe even a donut.

I was getting close to the subway station. But suddenly I was in a vehicle like a big minivan. I was in the van with a few other people who acted or looked like subway passengers. The van was driving down concrete ramps that looked somewhat like ramps connecting different platforms in a subway station.

We kept going down. The area we were driving through looked like a mix between a subway station and a mall. There were stores like department stores and drug stores all through the corridors.

A big, muscular, kind of pale, white man who looked like a soldier sat somewhere across from me. But he also seemed, at times, to be driving this vehicle.

He told me and a couple other passengers, "When I'm driving a train, and they tell me we have to be delayed, I let everybody know exactly what's going on. I tell them, we'll be here for 28 minutes, and I countdown, and so on. That way people know.

"Some people like to keep passengers in the dark about what's going on. I think dispatch does, too! But I don't. When people don't know what's going on, they feel like the train will never start running again."

The man stopped the vehicle. We were really deep down by now. I saw the subway train off to the left. The front of it had a side door, like for a semi truck, which was swung open. I understood that the man was going to conduct the train.

I jumped out the left side of the van, but I landed outside on the right side of the van. For some reason I was worried about whether I had jumped out fast enough. I thought if I was too slow, the soldier would be impatient with me.

The area down here was also like a mall, and there were a lot of people lounging around like they would in a mall. I saw two big drugstore-like stores, one of which may possibly have been a bookstore. I thought that I might need to go to the store before I got on the train.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a car with my grandfather (who, in waking life, passed away about two years ago). We were in a parking lot. It was night, probably a cold night. I was in the driver's seat, and my grandpa was in the passenger's seat.

My grandfather told me that he had a disease and that he was going to die in a very short time, maybe as short as seven days. I got very sad to think that my grandfather was going to die so soon. What struck me more than the fact that I would miss him was the thought of him standing so close to the complete uncertainty at that moment of death.

I started to cry. I clenched my throat and grit my teeth as I cried, as if I were trying to stifle the cry. But my tears were also very bitter, as if they were somehow electrified.

I now stood outside of and just in front of the car. There were two trees in front of the car. They were right next to each other, possibly crowding into each other. The tree on the right (as I faced the trees) may have been some kind of evergreen tree. The tree on the left was barren of leafs, with a strange, parallel branching, with the final branches sticking out almost perfectly straight. These branches either had big, red buds on them or else something like Christmas lights.

My grandpa was floating up into the barren tree. I may have been holding on to his hand as he floated (or climbed?) higher up into the tree. The tree was something like the way to heaven. So in this sense, my grandpa was already dying. Eventually I had to let go of my grandpa's hand.

Dream #2

I was in a small house like a log cabin in the middle of the woods. The place was crowded with people, all probably "my family." One man in particular, an older, skinny man, lay on a scanty bed, probably wearing long johns or a tank top and old-looking pajama pants.

It was a really cold day and I needed to get somewhere to check on something, possibly some other house that might be in trouble. The house may have been separated from us by a lake, which was frozen now.

I probably would go across the lake by taking some kind of vehicle -- which, now, seems to have been something like a hovercraft and ski-doo mixed together. But to drive the vehicle, I'd need fuel.

All over the room there were these stumps of wood, stood upright, like columns. On top of the stumps there were upside-down lids for metal garbage cans.

The upside-down lids were filled with some kind of substance. This, I understood, was fuel for the vehicle. The fuel was clear and had a kerosene-like quality to it. But it was in a partly frozen state in all the "pans." It was melting from snow-like blocks into the clear liquid state.

I asked the old man if I could use some of the fuel for the vehicle. The old man asked me about the conditions outside. It had to do with something about the level of the snow outside. I'd been outside only a while ago, and I knew that the conditions were bad. I didn't lie to the old man.

The old man said, "Then, no. You can't use any of the snow. You know what kind of danger you'd be putting yourself in. And in weather like this, the ice on that lake is weak. That vehicle would melt right through the ice, and you'd find yourself inside the pond."

Dream #3

I was out walking with one of my old friends. We were up on the crest of a snowy hill. It was a sunny day, and the sky was clear and blue.

To our left were something like footprints. To me they probably seemed like human footprints, even though, now, they seem to me to have been gigantic footprints.

For some reason, these footprints proved that the snow was pristine, virgin snow, untraversed by other people. This was a relief to me, as I had been afraid this whole time that people had already been climbing this hill, and that sooner or later I'd have to deal with a lot of jerks while I was out hiking.

I looked further down the snowy slope to my left. At the base of the hill was a small town. I think I mostly saw one-story houses, probably from the 1960s or 1970s.

Dream #3

I was "talking" (in my head?) with a few of my family members. They had asked me to stay wherever I was for a little more time. I decided that I would.

My family members then told me that as a reward for staying a little while longer, they would also give me a couple final days all to myself and give me a free trip (or free tickets?) to the beach.

At this point I realized I was in Philadelphia. Apparently Philadelphia had this very short stretch of beach, but it was one of the best beaches in the world.

I now saw this beach as if I were flying over it from a couple hundred feet in a helicopter. I saw how short the stretch of beach was. The water into which the beach receeded also looked a bit murky, greenish black, not the kind of water you'd want to swim in. It also seemed like all sides of the beach were bordered by a rather intimidating fence. I saw people on the beach. It didn't look like a very fun place to go. But I kept telling myself, It's a luxury beach, one of the best.

I felt guilty. I didn't know why my family would feel like they needed to give me such an incentive to stay around a little while longer. They should have just been able to feel like they could ask me without having also to give me something.

Dream #5

I was outside in some kind of semi-suburban area that kind of feels to me now like Princeton, New Jersey. I was out in an area of open, wide, rolling lawns. In the distance were some houses and a short, long structure that was something like a church. There was also, somewhere else, a tall, stone statue of a figure like Christ.

There were a few other people in this environment, men, around my age. At some point, some man blew a bugle or made some general call to everybody. This, I told myself, was a "changing of the guard."

Apparently we had all been playing a game where some people were in charge of the other people. At the "changing of the guard," the people in charge were no longer in charge. I don't think anybody would be in charge at that point. Possibly the game would just be over.

At the "changing of the guard," we all had to go to one specific place, at the top of one of the rolling hills of grass. I was heading to that place. But at some point I saw one of the men in charge.

I had to scurry away in some weird way so that the man wouldn't see me. If he saw me, he'd taunt me or hurt me or make me do something embarrassing. He was allowed to do any of these things, because he was still in charge. And even though the "changing of the guard" had been called, if the man didn't know it, he'd still act like he was in charge. And I, for some reason, would still obey like he was in charge.

Now I was at the top of the hill with the same man, who was apparently an old friend of mine. The game was over, and it was now time to relax. My friend had brought some women with him. The women were naked. They were younger than we; I'm not sure how much younger. They were pale white and had pale red-brown hair.

My friend and I were going to have sex with the girls. Before this time, I now noticed, my friend and I had simply been "having sex" by masturbating and then coming onto torn up pieces of styrofome cups. I was still holding a piece of cup that was the base of the cup with just a little bit of the vessel still rising up off of it. The cup was a kind of pale, blue-green color.

I was just getting ready to come into the cup when my friend pointed out a girl to me. She was mine. My friend immediately got busy with another girl, right in front of me.

The girl who was mine kind of looked at me shyly. I felt bad. She kind of seemed afraid of this whole thing. I told her if she didn't want to do anything, we didn't have to. But if she did want to do something, she should lay down on her back.

So the girl lay down on her back. I think she was lying on a soft, colorful, plaid blanket, instead of on the lawn. I was now naked. I lay down on the girl. I had a little trouble getting aroused, even though it felt good to be on the girl. Eventually, though, I did get aroused, and I finally went inside the girl. It felt good. I asked the girl if she felt okay, too.

Dream #6

I had apparently gotten a new phone. I couldn't figure out how to make something on the phone's internet work. I had typed in a number of addresses for sites I wanted to get to. But none of them had worked. At this moment I wanted to get to some site where I could see some info related to my work. But I couldn't get it.

A woman who works as a coordinator for a volunteer event I go to in waking life said she could figure out the phone for me. So I gave her the phone. She's an older woman, kind of tough, but very nice. She's a little stout, with skin tan from always working in the sun. She has grey hair, which, in the dream was, I think, extremely frizzy.

As the woman figured out the phone's internet for me, I suddenly realized that a lot of the sites I had tried to access on my phone had actually been pornographic sites. I was hoping that the woman would just access the site I needed for work and not see any of the pornographic sites.

The woman now said she had figured the phone's internet for me. She seemed happy at first. But then she stopped, a little grossed out by whatever she had seen. She handed the phone back to me and gave me a disappointed look. I knew she had seen a porn site.

I took the phone, wondering what site the woman had seen. The screen had purple lettering on it saying "Daddy's Little Girls." I thought, Oh god, please don't tell me this porn site is what it sounds like. But I knew that it was exactly what it sounded like.

The background showed the side of a house with a pair of some kind of instruments that looked like something related to whatever I was looking for for work purposes. They didn't look like exactly what I was looking for, but I felt like they were close enough.

So I said to the woman, "Oh, there it is! The product I was looking for. That's the only reason I was looking at this site!"

The woman just continued to stare at me with that grossed-out, disappointed look.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I walked into a museum with a tourist family. Almost directly after the entrance there was a long, wide staircase made of pale, white stone. The family walked down the staircasw ahead of me, talking about how they had to meet another group of people. Once at the bottom of the staircase, the children (a boy and a girl?) sat on a step while the parents made a phone call to the other group.

As I reached the bottom of the steps, the family had ascertained that the other group wasn't coming until later. Either the mom or dad said, "Well, that gives us some time to do a few extra things first."

The family walked into the gift shop, which was a huge, open area in front of the staircase. The gift shop sold all kinds of things like toothpaste, shampoo, etc. I actually picked up some toothpaste and a toothbrush.

I was now in a big mall with my grandmother and some kids (my nephews?). The mall had highb ceilings of glass which revealed the deep blue night sky above. The mall was empty and half-lit, as if it were closed. At some point, we walked past what looked like a closed down, miniature amusement park. I may have seen a ferris wheel and some kind of structure of plastic tubing for kids to climb through.

Later, almost as if we were on a second visit to the mall, we all sat at a table in the food court. Down the corridor to my right I may have seen the mini amusement park, in shadoe. Another group of people sat a couple tables away from us. They spoke as if this mall's food court wasn't very good compared to another mall's food court.

I felt kind of ashamed at that remark, and I was trying to convince myself that I actually was in that other food court.

I was now out carrying logs in the snow. It was a sunny, cold day. The snow was deep, and it was hard to carry the logs. A little while later, I saw things from a third person view. A young boy was working really fast, in an almost cartoony way, carrying logs away from a pile in a shady area near a house into a sunny area. The boy didn't think anybody would ever believe he'd carried all these logs.

The boy dropped a couple smallish, wide logs into the snow. One of the logs was coated in ice. The boy then managed to move two 2-meter-long logs out into the snow. They looked like they were from a beech tree: they had smooth, silvery bark. They lay parallel to each other, a little sunk in the snow.

I now saw from the first person view again. I thought, looking at the two logs, of making some kind of Flintstones car, using the logs as wheels. I stood up onto the logs and tried to roll them with my feet, shouting, "Yabba-dabba-doo!" at the same time. But I probably realized that this wouldn't work, and I figured I needed a motor.

I was now standing on some long, pale-sea-green painted, sheet metal structure that looked like a mix between a gas powered generator and a wood chipper. I thought this would be a perfect engine for the Flintstones car I was making.

Just then, a blue-skinned zombie, possibly in a business suit, came growling and reaching at me. I was really scared. I jumped off the generator and ran toward the logs. I thought to myself, Why is that guy here? Is he being used for some kind of zombie-powered car?

I now had a vision of a commercial, apparently for a zombie car. But the imagery was just a black screen with a bunch of colored lettering advertising some law office. The commercial may have been targeting people who needed legal counsel following problems they may have had with their zombie cars.

The names of the lawyers were all really weird. One lawyer was named Technical Gee, as in Technical Genius. Another was named Society's Destruction. I was bemused, but not terribly shocked, that professionals were getting away with naming themselves things like this.

The final screen of the commercial stayed up, as if someone had just forgotten to turn it off. I now heard one of the lawyers talking about a presentation he was going to give at a conference. He told two other lawyers, in a Slim Shady kind of voice, "You know how I don't usually collaborate with you guys after this point. I just do me. But I got a surprise for you guys this time. This conference presentation, we're doing together."

Dream #2

I had just come from some bedroom, possibly in the house of a good friend of mine. I walked into the kitchen. I sat at the kitchen table.

My friend was taking a shower or something. His girlfriend stood at the counter, posing and mugging in a sexy way before a small mirror on the counter. The girl was really sexy, Asian, with long hair. She wore a little linen outfit that looked like a mix between some kind of lingerie and a baby's overalls-onesie outfit. The shoulder straps were foldy-ruffly. The outfit's bottom was enbroidered with purple roses, intertwined with green vines and leafs.

The girl was obviously posing to turn me on. It was working. But I didn't want to react, because I didn't want to betray my friend. But the girl really seemed to want me. It was exciting.

The girl, not getting a reaction, walked over to another mirror on the counter and began posing again. I walked up to her and said, "What's wrong?" The girl just gave me a pouty face in the mirror. I sat back down and said, "Are you worried that you're ugly? Well, you aren't. You're very pretty."

I thought for sure the girl would think I was into her. I thought shed'd come over and seduce me. I figured that that would be okay. Apparently, if the girl seduced me, the situation wouldn't involve any betrayal against my friend. I still felt a little nervous about the whole thing. But I figured if the girl seduced me, I wouldn't resist.

Dream #3

I was in the bathroom at my mom's ex-boyfriend's house. I was getting ready to take a shower. I was pulling stuff out of my backpack. I found some pot and some other drug that looked like a D-cell battery.

It suddenly occurred to me that someone, possibly my brother-in-law, had put drugs in my backpack. It wasn't good for me to have drugs in my backpack while I was visiting my family. If my brother-in-law got caught with any drugs near him, he'd be sent straight to jail.

It occurred to me that my brother-in-law had hid his own drugs on me while I was in town. I was mad. I didn't want to get in trouble just so he could avoid trouble. But I was also worried. I was wondering where the heck I could throw all this stuff away.

Dream #4

Some very professional looking man was outside on a snowy night. He may have been a weatherman addressing a TV camera. But he also may have been a co-worker of mine, talking to me on a cell phone.

The man was completely surprised that it was snowing. When someone told him the snow wouldn't stop for a while, he was even more surprised. He also seemed to be surprised that it would also be cold for a while after it stopped snowing.

(Good -- um... afternoon, everybody. On the weekdays, I usually write my dreams in the morning, on my subway ride in to work. But this morning I didn't think I remembered any dreams.

Then, sitting at work (really stressing over something, in fact), I suddenly recalled this dream. Weird.

The dream is weird. I'd say at least part of the influence on it is the fact that over the past couple days I've been reading Jack Kerouac's Book of Dreams. In one dream, Kerouac meets Dinah Shore. That dream was so charming, I think I also wanted to have a dream where I met a celebrity. So my unconscious obliged... kinda.)

Susan Faludi was out in the desert doing research on a new book she was writing. The book was similar to The Terror Dream. But this book had less to do with feminism and more to do with some general national conspiracy. I probably identified with Faludi or saw through her eyes.

Faludi had discovered whatever it was she had been trying to discover. She may now have been standing by her car in an empty road in the middle of the desert. Faludi may have slammed down the trunk or hatchback of her car with an air of finality.

She intended to go somewhere. Instead of taking her car, which now may not even have existed, she flew up into the air, possibly by means of a red and white striped parachute.

She flew away to her right, along the road. She knew that she actually needed to head along the road, but in the opposite direction. She flew over a small overpass. This overpass was a landmark telling her she was definitely going in the wrong direction.

The wind was carrying her in this direction, although she "had control" over "her power of flight." She kept telling herself that she would work up the momentum of the wind in order to get swinging around in the correct direction.

But she kept flying and flying in the wrong direction. It was now night. Faludi was in the woods. It was cold and snowing. Still flying along the highway, I/Faludi (I definitely was part of her decision making process here) saw a billboard. The billboard was on a 50-foot tall, steel column.

I knew that if I/she grabbed on to the guard rail in front of the walkway before the billboard, I/she could stop the uncontrolled flight and at least get my/her bearings. So Faludi grabbed the railing and did some kind of elastic flip onto the walkway before the billboard.

The walkway was snowy and lit by a few fluorescent flood lamps. Othewise, everything was snowy, cotton-grey dark. Some pine trees may have reached as high as the billboard.

Faludi huddled behind some weird, clear, plastic rectangle which I figured was some kind of a solar panel for powering the billboard's lights. Faludi thought she could call someone, perhaps her husband, to pick her up here. But it was just so cold, and she felt like it would take forever for someone to get here.

I had a false awakening. I was going about my "daily life" when somebody, possibly my mother, told me that Susan Faludi had died. I was really surprised and upset. I regretted the fact that I'd never gotten to meet her.

But it also seemed weird that Faludi should have died. She had always seemed like such a healthy person to me.

Somehow I saw a photo of her -- possibly on the web. The photo showed Faludi in a motorized wheelchair, like they have at the front of grocery stores, the kind that look almost like cars or scooters with baskets on the front. Faludi was overweight, with short, grey hair. She wore a white t-shirt and black slacks, both of which were sloppy and tight on her.

Again, this didn't make sense. I thought, There's no way Faludi could have changed this quickky. I began to doubt seriously whether Faludi was in fact dead.

(Just one small note on this, from November 14th. After looking at some news images, I realize that the image Susan Faludi is hiding behind in the snow is a teleprompter. I'm not sure why a teleprompter is hanging out on a billboard. And I'm not sure why I thought it was a solar panel.

But, then again, I'm still not sure why this dream involved Susan Faludi. The actions in this dream are completely the opposite of what I feel Falud's actions would be. They're more like what I think my own actions would be. So maybe the dream is saying I wish I was like Susan Faludi, but that I'm just still horribly, embarrassingly like myself. Oh, well.)

Good morning

(I think this is a single dream, because I can't remember waking up at any time. Usually I do remember waking up between dreams.)

I was with a woman about my age. She was my friend. I had helped her out with some kind of work, possibly homework. Now I was walking with her into her workplace.

She took me around the building. The buidling she worked in was some kind of official building, and access to it was somewhat restricted. I had always wanted to see inside. Since I had helped her with her work, my friend took me on a private tour.

We got to some wall-sized window that was as wide as a hallway. It looked out across a small courtyard and across to another wall of the building. It was late afternoon, and the windows on the opposite wall were orange with sunset.

I knelt down, possibly to write something in a notebook. But I soon realized that my friend had to get to work. She had been kind enough to show me around, I thought, and I shouldn't take up any more of her time.

We walked to a big, black-stone, triangular front desk in a huge, glass-walled lobby. My friend worked here as something like a security guard.

I now walked toward the doors, through a moderately busy crowd of business people.

I was outside the building. It may have been early afternoon. The light was a dimmish grey-blue in the shade of the building.

I was waiting for a friend. Now I saw her. She looked like my old friend P. She may have been walking with a tall, handsome, blonde businessman.

My friend and I started talking. We walked into a building adjacent to the one I had just left. The lobby of this building was huge as well, but without any windows. The fluorescent light made everything look a little greenish and dirty.

To my left I saw one of my old co-workers, MD, walking past. I went to catch up and say hi. But when I got up to the person, he turned out to be someone completely different. I greeted him anyway. He said I was confused and walked on.

I went back to my friend and told her that MD always did stuff like that, pretending to be somebody else. I laughed a little.

I was now in a cafeteria. I sat in a small, booth-style seat. A line of people behind my seat, running along the food-serving counter, just kept getting longer and longer. It didn't seem like anybody was getting served.

I heard some man and woman in line talking about a movie called Schizophrenia. I got excited, thinking I recognized the movie. I went to the man and woman and asked, "Were you just talking about Schizophrenia, the movie by Dario Argento?"

(I think I meant the movie Suspiria.)

The man and woman just stared at me blankly, as if they didn't know how to respond, and they didn't want to speak to me, while they also didn't want to be rude. I felt ashamed, so I walked away.

As I was thinking of leaving the cafeteria altogether, a man called out to me, "Hey! You like to movie Schizophrenia?"

I said, "Yeah."

I turned to the man, who was leaning on a trashcan. He was tall, pale, with jaw-length, greying brown hair and a broad face. He wore a tan jacket.

The man started telling me how insane it was to work on the set of the film. He said that people stayed in character all the time. So sometimes you had these disgusting zombies all over the place. It was almost like a horror film itself.

I laughed and said, "I guess it's like those Day of the Dead movies." I lifted up my right leg and scratched it. I pulled up my sock. I felt a little embarrassed having mentioned Day of the Dead. I didn't know if that was a movie that people who liked Schizophrenia thought was cool.

I now had a vision of blue human figures roiling about in tan gravel. It was very disturbing. I thought, This is what the man must have seen.

I was now with a group of friends. We were heading into a McDonalds that was on the second floor of a building. The McDonalds was dark and empty (it was late at night).

I stood at the register with one of my old co-workers, L, who is tall, pale, and overweight. We waited at the register, but no workers came to serve us.

Larry started saying something about this being just the kind of thing you can expect when you're dealing with labor unions. He then stopped himself and said, "I better not say that too loud. They're liable not to serve us. Or they're liable to harm us in some way for talking bad about them."

I thought, wouldn't it be funny if you had to serve yourself at this McDonalds? If that was how bad things had gotten?

I imagined myself in this empty McDonalds, going into the back area and fixinjg all my food. Then I would pay a computerized register for everything.

We seemed now to be driving away from the McDonalds. But I was still imagining things. I imagined that things had gotten so bad that you couldn't even cook your food at the McDonalds anymore. You just had to eat it ice cold.

I could see a frozen Egg McMuffin as part of an ad. Apparently, the ad was trying to make eating frozen-solid food sound desirable, trying to trick everybody into not realizing McDonalds just didn't want to cook their food anymore.

I was now in the bedroom of a big house. I was on a top floor. The walls were brick. I was getting ready for bed.

A woman had told me, before I'd gone into the room, that there was a group of something like fundamentalist Christians on the loose. If they caught you doing anything non-normal, they'd kill you. They could sneak into your bedroom, too.

I pulled all the blankets down on the bed, revealing light-green sheets. I figured I'd lay on the sheets, not under the blankets, and with my head at the foot of the bed. I wouldn't read anything, because reading was considered non-normal. And I would try to keep perfectly still. This way nobody would think I was doing something non-normal. But if they decided to attack me, I also wouldn't be encumbered by my blankets.

My light was still on when I lay down. I heard a sudden laugh from outside my door and down the hall. It sounded like my old friend D laughing and flirting with a girl.

I stood up to go see what was going on. In my mind's eye I could see a yellow latex glove.

I was now outside, in some backyard area at night. It was snowing, and the snow was about six inches deep on the ground. A woman had told me before I'd come out here not to venture outside, because the severe weather conditions would kill me. Now I hoped she wouldn't discover I'd been outside and punish me.

I walked into a small, wooden, shed-like house. The door was wide open. My friend D was inside, lying on his bed, which was near the door. The room was cluttered, but in a comfortable way.

D told me he was going to venture outside. I thought that was a dangerous idea, as the woman might punish us if we went back outside. But D went anyway.

I looked out into the severe conditions (which weren't very severe now -- it wasn't snowing, and the snow on the ground was mostly melted). A few moments later, I'd realized that D had gotten into a dangerous situation.

I rushed outside to help him. He had fallen into a narrow hole just as wide as, and a bit taller than, a human being. D had been in the hole so long in these severe conditions that he was now frozen solid!

I rushed to help him out of the hole. I might have had the help of a woman. D was now a woman. She was tall, with deep-copper skin and long, black hair. She had a slightly large, soft belly and big breasts.

I hugged the woman, crying because I'd thought she'd died.

I stood back from the woman. We were in the desert, with sagebrush all around us. The woman was wearing a horizontal striped shirt of purple, yellow, and black, and a pair of pale blue jeans. I wondered why I was so attracted to this woman. She didn't seem so attractive to me. But I was just so happy to see her alive that I again hugged her and cried deeply.

I was now on the second floor of some building, in an area that looked like a small school cafeteria. I either was Jaden Smith or I was watching a movie in which Jaden Smith played a boy who had been homeless but was now living in a shelter.

The boy ended up needing to save somebody. So I/he decided I/he would. It involved some act like going into a room and shoving either his/my head or whole body into water.

When I did this, I woke up laying face-down in the sand in a box canyon in the desert. I figured I must have done something wrong, because I had no idea where I was.

I looked to my left. I saw the woman I had saved. Behind and beyond her, on either side of the box canyon, were women standing against the walls (which were pretty sheer, and a sun-baked brown). The women were dressed in shimmery, Ancient Egyptian style dressed. They also had wings. They would lift their wings (and arms?) slowly up and then slide them slowly down.

I figured that since something like this was going on, I must have done the right thing. I at first lay back down on the (cool? moist?) sand. But then I got up and started walking through the desert.

Only a small distance away was a small park. It looked like a normal city park: trees, lawn, shade. It didn't look like a desert at all.

I walked up to a group of people who were having a picnic. There was a man in the family who was nitpicking everybody. Finally he may have walked away.

I was in the backseat of a minivan. My dad had driven me and my brother somewhere, possibly to the airport. He let us out. My brother, in the front seat, said goodbye to my dad and went into the building.

I opened the back door, told my dad goodbye, and got out. I could tell my dad was disappointed and a little angry that I hadn't said more to him. It had been so long since I'd seen him. Now I was leaving with few words.

So I got back in the van and said something nice to my dad. He reached back and hugged me.

We got out of the van, which may now have been a car. We went back to the trunk.

I now hugged my dad even more and started crying. I apologized for not being around when my aunt died. I felt horrible. My dad handed me a sheet of paper. Typed on both sides of it were small paragraphs talking about all the ways in which I'd failed my family. At the top of the second side was a paragraph mentioning my not being around when my aunt died. I couldn't read anything very well because I was crying so much.

The piece of paper eventually became a magazine and then something like an online news program. The show I was watching was about the top 10 crimes of the year.

One crime was a person who had killed a police woman when she went to address a 911 call at a house. I now saw a video. It turned out that four family members and the cop had been killed. The video showed the four family members' bodies lying in a field of gravel and patchy grass. The bodies were laid two-by-two. The heads of the one pair were placed against the heads of the other pair, so that the feet faced in opposite directions.

The woman officer had been found buried. The video showed the officer's body unburied, curled up, and covered in dirt.

The video now did all kinds of strange panning moves, as if the camera were all alone in the field, floating around and filming the bodies in an experimental-film kind of way.

I now heard the narrator (?) mention the next crime. My view changed into a tall, pale man wearing a grey sweater and grey cap. He had shaggy hair and a shaggy beard and glasses.

The narrator mentioned that the man was owner of a fetish bookstore. He had molested and killed a number of little girls. The narrator listed his crimes, which ranged from some terrible stuff down to "blocking people with his legs so they couldn't go anywhere."

I saw a view of the man in something that looked like a school hallway, heading into a restroom.