maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in an alien spacecraft. The interior of the craft was very nice. It had molded, rounded walls colored cream-white and eggshell-brown. The room was round, with a round, central column, which may have served as some kind of control center.

There may have been a window somewhere, which I may have been looking out of at some point. We were probably at some high elevation, though still in the atmosphere of whatever planet we were on, probably Earth.

I was remembering some conversation or having some conversation in my head. It had something to do with aliens. There was some kind of idea that aliens were taking or duplicating people's identities or else using people for their identities in order to do something.

Something about the whole argument which had been made to me regarding the aliens didn't make sense. I tried to express the idea.

I now saw a room of cars -- kind of like one of the prize-display stages for the TV game show The Price Is Right. There were three cars of different sizes and quality. I was making an argument using cars as a metaphor for identities. I was trying to make a point that aliens wouldn't use human bodies for identities, since they'd easily be able to a lot more with their own, much more advanced, bodies.

But I also seemed to be trying to make some argument that aliens were actually using cars' identities in some way, instead of using people's identities. Some cars weren't cars. They were actually aliens disguised as cars.

At this point, the interior of the alien spacecraft, instead of being all smooth walls, had a number of rooms like the room with the cars in it. I don't know if all the rooms had cars in them.

(Side notes: Yesterday I went to the Museum of Modern Art and watched documentaries for -- well, from 1:30 PM until 10 PM.

One showing had two documentaries: one about the history of General Motors destroying the trolley car industry so it could artificially create demand for cars in the United States; the other about General Electric's nuclear weapons business and the effects it had on an upstate New York town.

The General Motors documentary struck me deeply because, growing up as a suburbanite in America, a car was just a thing I had to have once I became 16. It was part of my identity. But, in addition, I feel very strongly that I identify with cars in my dreams. Cars stand for my identity in my dreams.

But -- if you look at Bruno Bettelheim's book The Empty Fortress, for example, the autistic children identify with cars or identify cars as beings that can care for them and nurture them as children.

So, it seems like, despite the demand for cars being pretty nefariously and artificially created by a small group of rich men, cars also came to stand, rather quickly, for human identity.

The second documentary outlined the role General Electric played in the arms race, how it carelessly dealt with its nuclear waste, and how it then tried to hide all this stuff from the public. The story reminded me, oddly, of all the stories of UFOs in the United States and the stories of government conspiracies to cover up the truth about UFOs.

Well, I don't think it's anything new to assert that a lot of the fervor around UFOs and conspiracy theories regarding UFOs was, at least some of the time, derived less from actual UFOs and more from the collective understanding in the United States that the government, military, and corporate structure were doing things without telling us about it, and that we probably wouldn't approve of these things if we knew about them. You can read Jim Marrs' books to get more of an idea about that.

So I think my dream combined these issues, which are somewhat large, emotional issues for my little, squirrely brain, and fashioned them into my dream.)

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was driving through a town. I was probably in the car with my family, and my mother may have been driving.

The town was centered somehow around some kind of mining operations, or else it had been in the past. I may have had some "memories" of looking at photos of the town or watching a video about the town.

At some point we drove past a young man in a business suit. The man was white, very tall, and very thin, with hair down to about his jaw line. He looked very professional, but also very haggard and tired, almost to the point of a nervous breakdown.

My mom drove the car into a parking lot for an apartment complex. As we drove into the lot, I commented how nice and clean this town seemed, but how it had such a lonely, spooky quality, like in a ghost story.

Dream #2

I had just finished some kind of task with a group of people. The people were all at the other end of a huge, fenced in field, like a lawn for a number of soccer fields. It was a sunny day.

I may have been walking away from the field. But I got distracted. I noticed that I had a bunch of humongous hairs in my nose. I began pulling them out. But there were so many.

I walked back into the field and frantically began pulling the hairs out of my nose. A man who looked, and wore clothes, like Orlando Bloom in Pirates of the Caribbean was nearby. I didn't want him to see me pulling all these hairs out of my nose. So I walked between two stone walls, like the walls for outdoor racquetball courts.

The Orlando Bloom guy followed me. So I hurriedly walked away from the stone walls. I gifigured I would just leave the field altogether.

I was still pulling hairs out of my nose. I had a handful of hairs. They were all about 4cm long.

As I approached the gate, the Orlando Bloom guy came up behind me and said he needed to talk to me. He said he was having the same trouble I was, and that he was going to "contact the lady" about it. Apparently the lady had told the guy she could solve his problem. But she hadn't solved it yet.

I knew that everything the guy had just spoken about was in regards to the long hairs growing out of my nose.

I went into a park bathroom, possibly to was my hands. I was now exiting the bathroom. The bathroom was big, made out of concrete and cinder blocks, and had dimmish, fluorescent lighting.

As I approached the door, I could hear the guy talking to somebody on the phone. I could tell from the guy's voice that he was no longer Orlando Bloom, but some guy I had known in college, JP.

The guy was telling the person, who I knew was a pretty, blonde girl, that his cover had almost been blown. It turned out the guy had been at the field either to follow me or to keep me out of the way while something bad happened. But since I had put the guy in a position where he'd had to talk to me, the position had been messed up. Somehow all of this was the woman's fault.

I stood before the door, not yet opening it. I felt betrayed by the guy. I thought he'd been trying to sympathize with me or be my friend.

I lifted my hands up before my face. The backs of my hands were cracked in a few small places. In the cracks was a hard, ambery and red substance, which I took to be scabs.

I went to open the door. But the guy, having finished his phone conversation, pushed open the door, almost knocking me over. He now definitely looked like JP. He was tall, with pale olive skin and short, slightly spiky hair.

The guy was slightly surprised by having run into me, but he greeted me kindly, in a way I now understood as being completely fake. I greeted him in a fake-friend way too, just wanting to get out of thr bathroom and away from the guy altogether.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a car with my sister. We were out in the driveway of her house, although it feels now like we were also in some kind of dirt parking lot for a fairgrounds. My sister was talking to me about and showing me some kind of pictures of a place that she and some of her children were planning to go to.

I had to go to some other car to get something for my sister's trip. I went to the other car with my brother-in-law. It was a few rows away in the dirt parking lot.

The trunk or hatchback of the car was open, and my brother-in-law and I were looking inside. I had my computer opened up in the back of the car. I asked my brother-in-law to look up something on YouTube. It had to do with some pop-culture figure or figures, but it also had something to do with homosexuality.

My brother-in-law looked the thing up. I was now walking away from the car. I was now worried that somehow my brother-in-law would think I was trying to make some comment on my own sexuality by showing him that YouTube clip. (In waking life, even though I wouldn't say I'm gay, my sexuality is absolutely not normal. But I try to act as normal as possible when I'm in front of my family.)

I was back to sitting in the car with my sister. My sister now said that she was too sick, after all, to go to the event. For some reason, the whole family was now going, instead of just my sister, brother-in-law, and some of their kids. I was also going. Now only my sister wasn't going.

I felt bad, like maybe we shouldn't go at all if my sister wasn't going.

Dream #2

There may have been some situation where I had to take care of some task for a group of professionals. But I had messed it up somehow.

Later on, I was running from zombies. The zombies were pale white, with rotting faces. Most of the zombies wore button-up shirts, ties, and slacks.

I was running from the zombies through big corridors like mall-sized corridors that looked like hallways in a hospital. Everything was white, lit with greenish-white fluorescent light. Occasionally I would find myself in larger rooms.

Zombies would pop up everywhere and surprise me. They would almost catch me, and then they'd chase me through the corridors. I may also have been shooting some of them with a gun I had.

Eventually I found some way to jump way high, up to some high-up window. The window was swung open from its top. I floated down through the space. I found myself in some greenish-white-lit place that looked like a mix between a bowling alley and a hospital.

From all different places, a bunch of normal humans came into the bowling alley. Many of them were carrying guns. Some of them were wearing what I thought of as hunters' outfits -- beige vests and caps, flannel shirts, and khaki-like slacks. Many of the people were wary, on guard, waiting for more zombies to just spring up.

I was about to go to all the people. I thought I had found a group of people that I could be safe with. But as I approached them, they became suspicious of me, almost violent toward me. It was obvious that I wasn't a zombie, just like it was obvious that they weren't zombies. But they didn't care. They just didn't like me, and they didn't want me around.

So I walked away from them before even approaching them. I may have started walking down one of the bowling lanes, thinking I'd find a sneaky way to get through the building at the end of the lanes.

Suddenly I was fighting something, possibly zombies. There were gunshots everywhere. Explosions were blowing up the wood of the bowling lanes. I was turning back and shooting at whatever I was fighting.

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 was in a car with my mother, nephews, and niece. It was a warm, sunny day. I was in the back, in the center seat. My niece sat in between my knees or on my knees. The front seats were bucket seats, so my niece could reach forward and look through them. My niece was bald for at least part of the dream.

My niece was really calm, but kind of inquisitive about everything going on outside the car. She usually had a reputation for being hyper and a little mean. I thought, vainly, that my being around her was helping to make her calmer.

We were now outside, walking up a couple of blocks to my mom's house. We had to walk uphill for a couple short blocks then turn left and walk up another hill to the house. A couple of guys in front of a house on our left called out to my mom. They sounded friendly, but we kept walking. A couple of them may have followed us, calling out at my mom.

I couldn't tell whether the guys were being rude or just funny. At some point my mom explained something to me to let me know the guys were just being rude. My mom or sister had gotten on the guys' bad side somehow. Now the guys were always harrassing them.

I thought that I might have to protect my family if things got bad. I really couldn't worry about the things people say. I'd just have to ignore that. But would I be able to handle things if they got violent?

I was now if the house with my sister and a female friend of hers. I didn't know the friendm She may have been a new friend of my sister's. She was Hispanic, pretty, wearing a kind of baggy t-shirt. I never saw my sister or her friend right on. It was always like they were in another room adjacent to the room I was in (the living room?) and blocked by some piece of furniture, like a big set of dressers.

I heard my sister and her friend talking. The friend may have been sitting on a couch while my sister was in the kitchen, making lunch.

I walked around in some cluttered room and found an envelope with my name on it. It was a W-2, for filing my taxes. I wondered how it could have ended up at my mom's house. I figured I must have dropped it somehow. But then I also saw that it was open. I saw that it was easy for people to see the contents of the envelope, including the pay information printed on the form.

I also saw that the form had come from a company I haven't worked with for two years. I wondered how this could be. Then I thought, Well, I was working with them at the beginning of last year. So of course they'd send me a tax form for this year. I looked at my pay info. It seemed to correspond with the time I'd spent working for the company.

My sister handed me a plate full of something like grits with pieces of yellow corn floating in it. As I started eating, I heard my sister talk about how hard it was for her and my brother-in-law to take care of their children on their salaries. I felt bad when I heard this, but I couldn't really do anything about it. I was trying to take care of myself.

I stood before some kind of broken down entertainment center or dresser that was piled over with all kinds of clutter. I began pulling change out of my pocket. I just kept pulling change out of my pocket and piling it up on some flat surface. I was amazed by how much change I had. And it was quarters, too! Not just small change.

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 morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was telling somebody how the Notorious BIG "could actually write," by which I meant to say that he had very good literary skills. I had apparently known this from letters or messages I'd received from him. I'd also, apparently, had a few conversations with him, and I remembered his voice sounding very gentle and distinguished. At some point Biggie may have been sitting near me, wearing a white t-shirt and sunglasses.

Dream #2

My boss was in some very dim space, before a white wall which, in the dim light, looked faintly purple. It almost looked like the room was lit by a fish tank light.

My boss began throwing up some blackish substance that looked like a mix between dog feces and those ash-worm "fireworks." The substance was small and came out slowly. My boss may even have pulled it out of his mouth. My boss seemed to be extremely uncomfortable and a little afraid.

Dream #3

I was in some room of an apartment with my boss and a couple other people. There were no curtains on the windows, so plenty of light came into the room. It was a bright summer day. The room seemed pretty empty, but the people in the room and our mood made the place seem really stuffy.

The apartment was probably my apartment. My boss or someone else was on the phone with someone, trying to get me moved out of my neighborhood. Apparently something bad had happened here, either to or around me, and the people in my life decided that they needed to get me out of here as soon as possible.

Suddenly my boss seemed jealous of all these people talking about how I had recently had such a hard time in my neighborhood. My boss said, "Well, you know, I live in a pretty tough neighborhood myself. Right now."

As my boss continued his speech, it was like we were driving down some side road in a rolling area full of tall, tan grass. We came to a "T" in the road at the bottom of a short, steep slope and probably turned left.

My boss continued, "My house is just a refurbished house. It used to be a crack house. In fact, when we moved into our place, we found a whole bunch of drugs that the cops have forgotten to clean out. I'd say that's a pretty tough neighborhood!"

Good morning, everybody.

The endings of the first and third dreams were lucid. The first three dreams happened between 1:30 AM and 3:30 AM. The fourth dream happened between 5 AM and 5:45 AM.

Dream #1

I was with a couple of my nephews in a car that was driven by my grandmother. I may have been getting a ride back to the airport after my visit back home. It was a nice, sunny day.

My grandma asked me where I'd like to eat. I may have felt like a little kid at this point. I didn't want my grandma to have to pay for a big meal, so I said, "Oh, just Burger King will be fine."

We began driving up a winding hill, the face of which was brownish rock. My grandma said, "No. We're going to go to a sit down place to have some food. Let's go to Denny's."

We were at the top of the hill, in some kind of parking lot. Behind my grandma, from a view out her window, down the slope of parking lot and across some street, I could see a Denny's. Out my window and slightly up the parking lot's slope, I could see the car my mom was driving.

My grandma said, "You go tell your mom we are going to Denny's, and that she is coming, too. Don't let her make any excuses. Tell her I'm paying for all of you."

I was at my mom's vehicle, looking in from the passenger-side window. The vehicle was tall, like a tall van or SUV or pick-up truck. My mom sat at the wheel, giving me an almost dead look. I understood she was almost scorning me for thinking she'd go to Denny's with my grandma.

Somehow I was in my mom's car, riding down the hill, possibly to Denny's. I was trying to keep my mom's emotions under control.

We were now at my family's house. My mom and sister and I were playing with a little boy and a little girl, "my niece and nephew." We were all sitting on the floor, which was kind of cluttered with toys and clothes.

The little boy was doing something cute, but the little girl got really jealous. She did something mean to the little boy, hurting the little boy, and then started crying herself. Either my mom or my sister started comforting the little girl. They fed her a bottle which had a fleshy look to it, like a bottle-shaped breast.

The girl seemed to have a weird-shaped head and weird shaped eyes. The head and eyes got weirder and weirder as I looked at the girl eating. I stood up and walked toward the kitchen.

There were a mattress, some blankets, and some other stuff strewn on the floor right before the doorway to the kitchen. I stepped over all that stuff to get into the kitchen. But among that stuff, I saw that there was a little baby boy who had been forgotten under a bunch of blankets.

I knelt down and uncovered the little baby boy. It looked like a white-furred monkey with black eyes. It was swaddled in a blanket. I picked it up. I felt there was something meaningful, almost psychological, about my having found this baby boy and having started to care for it.

My sister and mom knelt near me. My sister took the baby. As I handed it to her, I felt like I needed to see it again, as if I couldn't believe I'd seen it at all. But now it was a "cell phone," which looked more like a blue, plastic alarm clock with green-lit punch keys on the underside.

My sister handed me the phone. I started talking with my sister on the phone. It was like she was no longer in front of me..

My sister said, "Yeah, it's probably not a good idea to tell F (my oldest nephew) about some of the things you did. It makes him think it's okay for him to do them. I mean, you think it's funny, and I think it's funny. But mom thinks it's just destructive in her house."

I replied, "Yeah, that's cool. We just come from different generations, I guess."

As I was saying this stuff, I found myself in another room, "my bedroom," which was more like a big room in a museum. The room was gently lit with warm, white-gold light. I wasn't on the phone. I was laying on something like a bed, on my left side.

I was looking at a huge painting, maybe 5 meters long and 3 meters tall. It was of Jesus, just his head, before a blue sky. His hair flowed as if blown by the wind, like you sometimes see happening for female anime characters.

Jesus had blood on his head and face, from the crown of thorns. The blood was also blowing in the wind. The blood then turned into red and orange leafs blowing in the wind. There might have been canopies of red and orange leafed trees in the background.

For some reason, this fall-themed crown of thorns painting made a lot of sense to me. I began to wonder why there wasn't a fall-related holiday relating to the life of Christ.

I rolled onto my back and then onto my right side. The room was dark. I was looking at another huge painting, this time winter-related. It had something to do with Jesus' footprints in the snow.

But there was something weird about the snow. It actually looked like boot-tracks on the moon. I realized Jesus wasn't in this painting at all. It was just a painting of boot-tracks on the moon. Yet it seemed so mystical to me that I reached up my arm (a child's arm?) parallel to the tracks.

Suddenly I realized I was dreaming.

I sat up. I was on the floor. I stood slowly. The room was dim, almost completely dark. The painting which stood before me was now even larger. The only detail I could see on this painting was near the lower left (my left) corner of the painting. It was the back of an almost naked person. The back was huge, muscular. But I couldn't tell iif it was male or female.

Next to the painting was an enormous (maybe 1.5-2 meters tall), metallic vessel, probably silver, on a stout, white pedestal and under a plexiglass display cube. The "bowl" of the vessel had a weird, nest-like tangling of metal, as tangled and fine as moss, which was incredible, considering how big this vessel was. The "neck" was smooth and polished.

Walking around, I kept feeling myself fade out of the dream. I tried to keep calm and hold onto the dream as long as I could. But eventually everything went black and I woke up.

Dream #2

I was in some big room like a school cafeteria on the second floor of a building. There were a lot of long tables with bench seats. The light was nice, incandescent. I sat at a smaller table with my friend T and a friend of hers, who I at first thought was Japanese.

T's friend and T were here to study. I had helped T with some kind of study project. I was apparently here to hand off a paper with my revisions. But now T took out a copy of a screenplay I'd written, with a lot of revisions on it.

The screenplay seemed to have been printed on 11x17 paper, so that two pages showed on each side. The first page was covered with pencil-revisions, in a really nice, narrow cursive hand. I understood that the rest of the screenplay was just as full of revisions.

At some point, T's friend reached over and scribbled something in the margins between the two pages. It said something about how T was my girlfriend. The T's friend said something out loud, and I realized T's friend was actually Chinese.

I felt odd about the implication that T was my girlfriend. But right after that T may have called me her boyfriend. I may have been happy about that.

Dream #3

It was night. I was walking down a sidewalk in front of some apartment buildings. A young, black man in a bright red hooded sweatshirt, black bubble-jacket vest, and jeans ran into an apartment building. Seeing me, the guy slowed down and gave me a kind of suspicious glance. He then ran the rest of the way into the building.

I knew somehow that the guy had been planning to kill me for a while. Now that I had just gone past his building, he figured he might as well shoot me now.

I saw him, through some windows, run up a stairwell, then run back down it. I knew he had just gone into his apartment to pick up his gone, and that he was now coming back for me.

I didn't walk any faster or try to get away. I figured if it was going to happen, I couldn't avoid it, even though I'd probably be really afraid once things really started happening.

I was now walking through a long hallway in a dorm building or apartment complex. The hallway was kind of dumpy, with white walls and stark, fluorescent lighting. There was somebody following me. But it now felt like an older, white man rather than a young, black man.

I came to a door, which I knew was for the apartment of the man who lived in the apartment directly above my apartment. I knocked on the door, thinking I'd finally take him up on his invitation to come up and hang out some time. I figured this way, I could throw the stalker off my trail.

The door was a really weak wood. I knocked. The door was now a heavy door with a thin window on the left side. Through the window, I saw a small hallway and the another door. A college-aged girl opened the far door. She waved me in.

I thought the door was locked. But as soon as I pushed on the door, there was a buzzing, and the door opened. I walked into the smaller hallway. The woman was gone, which struck me as strange. I realized I was all alone. This struck me as odd.

Suddenly I realized I was dreaming. I almost lost the dream right there. But I calmed down.

I told myself to keep walking, and just to explore the space. I walked past the small hallway. There was another small hallway. The walls here had wooden drawers set into them, like old library card catalog drawers, except that they looked really light and cheap. I thought this was an interesting place, full of files or something. But I kept going.

I walked through another door. I was now in a very small room with a small, grey-painted metal stairway and second level and a bunch of grey-painted, metal lockers. Below the balcony of the second level, the room seemed to twist off into a much smaller corridor. The staircase also had a metal-railed gate in front of it. The place kind of reminded me of small rooms in the Intrepid aircraft carrier.

I was surprised that I was all alone, and I kept on gurad for a person, who I assumed would probably not be very kind. I remembered that in my last long lucid I had met a really crazy person.

I had two options for exploring. I chose to go up the staircase instead of around the curve on the first level.

I floated over the gate. I almost floated up the staircase. But I felt like the floating was actually causing me to lose my dream-control. So I grabbed the railings of the staircase and forced myself to walk up.

I had a weird feeling through the rest of this dream. I felt very closed in. I could hear my breath, like I was wearing a space suit.

I felt very warm. Walking up the steps, to my left, I saw a clothing rack full of old, pale blue and white button-up shirts. It looked like they were for a somewhat old man. Above that, there was a shelf piled with upside-down, round-brimmed, straw hats. I picked one up and fiddled with it a little. It looked like it was in bad shape.

I got up to the balcony. There were more lockers. It looked at first like I couldn't go anywhere else from here. But then I realized that there was a hallway or something off to the right.

In waking life, my computer made a loud noise. I woke up.

Dream #4

I had been in space, flying some kind of space vehice. I barely remember anything. I remember being high up in the sky, coming back down, around sunset, when the sky was a vivid purple.

I was now taxiing an airplane (?) into an airport with my mother. We were "parked." My mom went into the airport to take care of something before we went home.

I sat in the backseat of a car, outside a metal-walled building like some staff building at an airport. I was still waiting for my mom. The sky still had a deep-blue-purple post-sunset look. It was kind of cold.

I could imagine what was going on between my mom and the people she was talking to. The people were something like military people. I could see, in particular, one tall, older, white man who kind of looked like a very thin Stan Lee, wearing a green military uniform for formal occasions.

My mom was asking the military man what he would do now that she'd told him about the weird adventures I'd been through, which were undeniable fact.

The military man said, "I'll do the same thing I do to every mother and son who comes in here telling me stuff like this. I'll tell them to get out. I had money to pay attention to this kind of stuff the first few times it happened. But now it's happening all over the place and -- you mothers and kids are bleeding me dry!"

I was sitting in the trunk of the car, with the trunk opened just a crack. I thought of getting out of the trunk and telling the military man something about my experience that was so unique that he wouldn't want me to go away. Plus. I would tell him, I didn't want his money. I just wanted to tell my story.

I thought to myself (why?) that this was a lot like a Joyce Carol Oates story (which it wasn't).

I opened the trunk all the way and sat out of it to see one of my female cousins, A, walking down the tall stairway of another metal-walled building. She came my way. I could tell she would be mad at me for not having spoken with her for a long time.

By the time she got to me, my mom was there, too. I was standing by the car. There seemed to be a miniature living room surrounding the car as well.

I was trying to explain something to my cousin about how I couldn't include her on something my mom and I were doing. As I did so, I was kneeling by a small bookshelf and going through some items.

I stood up to see my cousin kneeling on the opposite side of the bookshelf. My cousin now had weird, plasticky, shiny, black hair, like an anime character. She was also wearing some kind of red and yellow uniform that reminded me of an anime character.

My cousin gave me a half-mad, half-disappointed look. I tried to make her less mad by saying something half-heartedly interesting about anime.

(Note, evening, Dec. 17: I think the "crown of thorns" image in my third dream is influenced by a set of images from a photo slideshow I saw yesterday on the US version of Reuters.com. The slideshow was just the normal "editor's choice" picks of global photos, I think.

But it showed a lot of images of people in England, Greece, Turkey, and other countries, involved in some form of protest. A lot of the photos showed people who had sustained head injuries during the protests. What really struck me was that these people were still protesting, even after having been hurt.

So I don't think the "crown of thorns" image is entirely about Christ.

Also I thought at first that the metal vessel in the first dream was just a really big symbol for the male, uh... parts. I still think that's the case. The painting of the man's or woman's backside and the giant... parts right next to each other seems like an image readily supplied by the unconscious.

However, I also think the image stands for a couple other things. First, I think it's an upside-down version of a brain and neck. In my fourth dream I also have an upside-down head (the hats) near a torso (the shirts). I don't know why the head and neck have been important in my dreams lately. But they have.

Second, I think the vessel is like a jet or rocket engine: a bunch of fine, intricate pipes and valves, ending in a big propulsion valve. Anyway, I guess jet engines can be phallic or intestinal, depending on how you look at them.

None of this is a big deal. I just write it down to help me focus.)

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was near "my car" in the woods. It was almost night. The sky was a dull, dark blue. I was all alone.

I may have been planning to sleep in my car for tonight and, perhaps, for a number of nights. I may not, though, have thought this was the right place to sleep. I may have been planning to drive my car somewhere else.

At some other point I remembered one of my male friends talking about living in some other town. He was complaining about what a boring town it was to live in.

He said, "The thing is, it doesn't have a road that leads directly out of town, up to the mountains. You have to take all these roads that wind around town. It's really hard not to stay stuck in town. And that gets really boring.

"Not like Boston. Boston has a road that leads right out of town! It's easy to get out of town and have fun."

At some point I saw a view of "Boston:" a town at the base of some deep-green mountain range, with its "main road" running along the side of the town and a little bit up the slope of mountains. There may have been houses lining one side of the road.

I thought how I didn't quite agree with my friend. I thought the town I was thinking of sleeping or spending some time in was fine. But I didn't want to disagree with my friend and look uncool (even though my friend wasn't really around, and I was just "remembering" a conversation with him).

I may now have been standing on the outskirts of a pretty big mountain town. I stood in the parking lot of some hotel. The hotel building looked kind of like a restaurant building.

(I've seen a building very much like this, in a space very much like this, in at least one other dream.)

Dream #2

I was in some bookstore. The bookstore was huge and mazelike. After winding my way through a few areas, I found myself at a manga section.

There were two thin, Japanese men shelving some books near the manga section. They both had a mild intellectual look, with casual, short haircuts, big eyeglasses, and nice, button-up shirts. They spoke back and forth with each other in Japanese.

I didn't want the guys to think I was just another American who only knew about Japanese culture through manga and j-pop. But I was also really curious about what manga the store had. In particular, I was looking for a copy of Tezuka's Phoenix series.

When I got over to the manga shelves, I heard the men laugh back and forth with each other. I "understood" their Japanese. They were basically saying exactly what I didn't want them to think about me. I got ashamed and thought I would leave the section. But I figured if I was already here, I might as well stay.

But I got bored pretty quick. It was all a lot of new manga. I had been looking for some really old, classic manga. Some of this stuff didn't even look like manga. It looked like airbrushed versions of American comic books with medieval European themes. Some of the books were tall, thin paperbacks with really glossy covers.

(Good morning, everybody. This is a really long entry. Sorry.

I remember three dreams from last night. The first two dreams happened sometime between midnight and 5 AM. The third dream was between about 5:30 AM and 7 AM.

I became lucid in the third dream, and sustained my lucidity for quite a while. But I think it was mainly because I “conserved my energy” and didn’t really try anything out of my normal range of dream-activity.)

Dream #1

I was coming back to “my apartment.” I was walking through a building that itself was as big as a small neighborhood. I walked through one area, a huge room with tall ceilings and wood walls.

As I walked through the area, I went past a young man and woman who were possibly standing outside the door to the woman’s apartment. The door may have been pale blue.

The woman was very pretty, with copper-colored skin and long, straight, black hair. The man was handsome, white, tall, with blonde hair about down to his shoulders. He wore a grey, wool cap and some winter clothes.

The man was telling the woman that he would make sure her move went smoothly. She was apparently moving to another place, and she was nervous about it. I gathered, from the man’s speech to the woman, that the man would make sure she didn’t experience the same harassment she’d experienced at her present apartment.

But as I was walking past the couple (I didn’t actually get very close to them, and I had to exit via another door into another room in order to get to “my building”), the man and woman expressed some kind of concern that I was going to get them in trouble. It was as if, as well as the woman experiencing harassment from some group of people, the man and the woman had themselves been accused of causing trouble in their neighborhood. They thought I was the kind of person who would get them in trouble again.

I walked softly and quickly through the door, trying my best to give an impression to the man and woman that I was nice, that I wouldn’t harass the woman, and that I wouldn’t get the man and woman in trouble – in other words, that I would just mind my own business.

I walked into the next area, which was like a mix between some completely forgotten room or corridor in an enormous mansion and a back alley. A light shone from high above, and at the heights of the room, it was dark as night, though it was light enough near the floor. The walls were wood, and the floor had a pale, blue-grey carpeting. But there was junk everywhere, like tattered cardboard boxes, wadded up pieces of wrapping plastic, and other garbage. There seemed to be turns and staircases here and there, leading up to other “apartment buildings.”

I walked toward my building, which didn’t even have a front door, just a staircase leading up to a winding ramp into darkness. My landlord, an older, black man or woman, stood at the top of or on one of the curves in the ramp. He/she apparently knew I was coming home, so he/she was waiting to welcome me back. I may have been away for a few days, doing something like visiting my family.

I didn’t realize, but the young man had followed me all the way here. My “building,” it turned out, was the building that the young woman would be staying in. I thought that for sure the man would now be panicked. He and the woman had been so afraid to begin with that I would get them in trouble. And now it looked like I had “reverse followed” him all the way to the woman’s new residence.

I tried to act natural and cool, to make the man understand I wasn’t going to do anything mean to him or the woman. I spoke a little bit with the landlord, in a kind of easy, happy tone. I then said I was going to head on in to my room and get a little rest.

As I headed toward my room, through a door along a dim balcony facing at an odd angle to the ramps and the long alley-corridor, I heard the landlord now speaking with the young man. I thought, Why not prove that I’m a good guy, and let the young man see inside my room? Once he sees how lived-in my place is, he’ll know I’ve been here a few years, I’m a decent guy, and that I won’t do anything rude or mean to the woman or him?

So I called attention to the landlord and the young man. I had them come over to my room. I opened the door to my room. The room was humongous and dim. But I could tell, just by glancing inside, that the room was a complete mess – a disaster! Plus, the place just let out a horrendous smell, like tons and tons of socks that hadn’t been washed for months!

I quickly closed the door and told the landlord and young man nevermind, that I must have forgotten what I wanted to tell them. They walked away, kind of disappeared.

I suddenly felt suspicious of the young man. I felt that, now that he’d seen even just a little into my room, and he’d seen where I live, that he’d try to break into my room. I closed my door. I walked slowly away, as if I was trying to put on some kind of show that I didn’t really live in this apartment.

I suddenly recognized that, just beyond my door, the wall to my room only went up to about the middle of my chest. You could see inside the room just by standing out on the balcony. I looked inside, hoping that nothing of value would be easily spotted, prompting the young man to break into my house and steal things.

All I could see, though, anywhere, was a bunch of clutter and garbage. I felt like there was no way I could have left my place this way when I’d left. Had I been that neglectful of things? Or had I been gone so long that my place just kind of dissolved into these shambles of itself?

I walked around the corner of the balcony, now facing some dim corner of the alley-corridor directly, but still having a good view into my room.

Down below, in my room, I saw a huge, pale-blue, L-shaped couch. It was completely torn up. The stuffing of the couch was bloating out of the cushions, and a black, metal frame jutted out the edges.

Suddenly, my mother burst out from the inside of the couch. She scrambled out of the couch cushions. She then rabidly twitched and scratched against the couch, tearing it even more to pieces. She looked terrible, like she’d become some kind of wild animal.

I was terrified by this. But I quickly became indignant. Who had allowed my mother into my apartment? I ran down the balcony to find someone to complain to.

I ended up on some dark hilltop, under a small tree. It was pitch black night, but I could see, as if a car from somewhere were shining its lights on the scene. There were a few people wandering around, possibly Hispanic.

I found my father, who was almost cartoonishly wide. He was also dressed somewhat like a clown, in red clothes with pink and orange polka-dots. He may even have worn a clown-nose.

I yelled at my dad, “Why did you let my mom into my apartment?”

My dad gave me some kind of excuse that sounded half-hearted but official, so that I couldn’t really argue against it.

Dream #2

I was in a subway station, waiting for the train to come. I was in a far-off, unfamiliar neighborhood, and I had been doing some kind of activity that made me tired and ready to go back somewhere familiar.

The subway station was more like the lobby for a building like a hospital. I sat at a table in an area that looked like a makeshift café. The serving counter may have been in a small room, off to my right. Behind me, there may have been the main lobby area, large and bright, with a lot of sunlight flowing through the window-walls.

To my left was a wide doorway, through which I could see one subway platform. Through a kind of dim, plasticky window at the opposite end of the room and in front of me, I could see another subway platform.

I pulled out a book, crossed my legs, slumped in my chair, and started reading. A couple of teenage boys sat down a couple of tables away from me. They were making jokes with each other, pretty relaxed. They seemed cool. But for some reason, I didn’t want them to notice me. I thought they might start trouble.

Suddenly I could see, from some kind of reflection, that the train on the platform to my left was coming. It seemed to be coming without warning and very quickly. In a rush, the boys and I stood up from our tables and ran to the platform.

But I didn’t want the boys to know I got on this train. I felt that if they knew this about me they could hurt me somehow. So I tried to act like I wasn’t getting onto this train.

But when I got out to the platform (which was huge, wide, with tall ceilings, nothing like in NYC), the train wasn’t there. I heard the rushing of a train to my left. I looked and saw, down the platform, and up at the top of a tall staircase, a different train arriving at another platform. Was it just that train I’d heard? But I could have sworn I’d seen the train arrive on this platform, as well as heard it.

I looked down into the well for the train and tracks for my platform – and was terribly shocked! Instead of tracks, the floor was completely empty, trackless, and painted a bright yellow. There were no tracks! No train could ever have arrived here! But I was sure this was where the train was supposed to be – where I had actually seen it arrive!

I felt terribly foggy all of the sudden, as if I had fallen into a different world.

I heard the train on the second platform, off to my right, arriving. I thought I’d take that train. But I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere close to where I wanted to go. I knew I’d just have to take this train, at this platform, whenever it came, no matter how long it took.

So I went back into the café area to go back to reading my book.

Dream #3

I was in my great-grandmother’s house. I had apparently been there for a long time. The place looked nothing like it had looked while my great-grandmother was alive: it was dim, grey-blue, and strewn garbage, household items, and even streams of toilet paper.

I walked around in the kitchen and dining room, possibly picking up and eating and drinking pieces of food and drink that had been left out for a long time on dirty plates and in dirty, grimy cups. There may also have been dirty, rusty knives, or something like that, somewhere.

I walked back into the living room. I felt like I had isolated myself in my great-grandmother’s house for so long. It had been days. Here I’d been, back home all this time, and I hadn’t visited my mother once!

I thought I’d give her a call and let her know I was at my great-grandma’s house, and that she could come visit me or maybe even pick me up so we could go somewhere to visit with each other. But I hesitated – I now felt so guilty having neglected my mother for all these days, that I knew just calling her would cause me a lot of heart-breaking pain.

I was suddenly in “my bedroom” at “my house.” The room was clean, a little barren. Nice sunlight flowed in through the window. It was cheerful enough. But it felt somehow lonely – not just lonely, but sterile, padded.

Something about this feeling made me realize I was dreaming. I realized I was now lucid. I told myself to keep calm and just go exploring this place as if it were a real environment.

(Oddly enough, when I became lucid, I may have “transformed” into a tallish, white, young man with tanned skin, blue eyes, and short-shaved, blonde hair. I have no idea why.)

I walked out of the bedroom and into “my living room.” I was in a suburban house. The house looked small and nice. But it was completely empty. It had thick, brown carpet.

I walked very slowly, to keep my emotions calm. I was heading for the front door. This was a kind of challenge for me, and I knew (even in my dream-state), that I had to keep calm in order to do this. I knew, I remembered (the truth, not a false memory – I mean, insofar as etc., etc.) that when I’d become lucid indoors in the past, my lucidity would end as soon as I walked outside, as if I hadn’t believed my imagination could “create” an outdoor space.

I got to the door. It had a strange bolt-lock on it, which I thought was kind of over-doing things. I worked the lock out and pulled open the door.

It was a bright, sunshiny day in a suburban neighborhood. I told myself to remain calm, remember this was all a dream, and just explore the place like it was a real environment.

My front yard was a tangle of flowery vegetation and rough, dark shrubs. There was a driveway off to my right, with a big, brown, 1970s-style car.

A blonde man, very tan, with a long tangle of hair and beard, was messing around near “my car.” He looked crazy, and I was afraid of him. But I was also pissed that he was messing around my car. So I yelled at him, “Hey! Hey! What are you doing?”

The crazy man hunched up (he never really stood) and turned toward me. He shouted and growled and barked all kinds of weird things at me and started rambling toward me violently. For some reason, he was holding a Panini and a paper plate in his hands, as if he had been eating a Panini when he’d seen my car and decided to vandalize it or rip it off.

It seemed as if the crazy man were going to try to invade my home. So I yelled at him, “Don’t you come near!”

The neighbor from the house to my left, an Asian man, in his late 30s or early 40s, wearing glasses, a pink-red polo shirt, and khaki shorts, walked out of his house and into my yard. He’d heard the commotion and was coming to help me.

I yelled again at the crazy man to back off and not to come anywhere near my home. But I also tried to make it seem to my neighbor like I had the situation under control. I felt like this crazy man was somehow important to whatever I was supposed to learn from this lucid dream. So I had to keep him at a distance without scaring him away entirely. I also wanted to make sure my neighbor didn’t scare away the crazy man.

Off to my right, in my garden, I saw a strange plant that looked like a Cleome topped with a cabbage. The cabbage was pink and white, like Cleome flowers.

Somehow, either my yelling my neighbor’s yelling had finally scared away the crazy man. He ran off. I, and possibly my neighbor, ran after him.

He ran down toward a chain link fence that ran along the crest of a kind of tall, kind of steep, cliff-like hill. I was calling to the crazy man to stop. I wasn’t trying to do him harm. But my neighbor was running faster than me, and he was chasing the crazy man quite violently.

The crazy man found a bent-up part of chain-link fence and crawled under it. I followed. I saw the crazy man run down the steep, brown hill-face, jumping into a shallow, muddy river or creek at the bottom.

My neighbor was still ahead of me, intent on capturing the crazy man. But once the crazy man was in the water, he did something to himself so that my neighbor could no longer see him. He had changed his wild, blonde hair into a weird, pink, green, and white, spiky flower style, looking like a hairdo-mix of a Cleome and a lotus. He ducked down low in the creek so that only his head was above water.

But I could still see that it was the crazy man. I wondered why my neighbor couldn’t. Nothing was different about the crazy man’s face: it was just his hair that looked like a lotus floating on the water.

I could see that the crazy man was drifting toward a group of copper-skinned, black haired children who were playing and splashing about near the creek’s banks. I thought that it might be a good idea to get the crazy man away from the children. He had gone over to them to blend in with them until we left. But I had a feeling that if he suddenly went crazy again, he could hurt the kids.

But now the crazy man and my neighbor were gone. I stood in some rocky area, looking down to the kids playing in the creek. At some point I looked over to my right and saw that there was a subway station, just jutting in a platform out of the hill, as if it were half-finished, forgotten. But it also looked new, clean, modern, even futuristic. And it was functional.

I saw some kids, maybe pre-teen or teenage, playing around near the platform, waiting for the train. I was up near the top of the hill now (which, instead of being muddy or earthy, was now rocky). I was at a pretty level view with the platform and with the kids. I hoped they wouldn’t notice me, because I didn’t want them to start trouble with me.

My emotions got so unstable that I felt my lucidity fading away.

But instead of the dream continuing, not lucid, everything blacked out. I told myself, you’re losing your lucidity. You’re waking up altogether. Go back to being in the dream, and being lucid.

So now I was back in the dream, lucid. I lay, stomach down, over some ledge of rock, looking down to some of the kids playing in the creek. They may have been a boy and a girl. They noticed me and started handing me toys to play with with them. One of the toys was a plastic horse.

I played around with the horse a little bit, then handed it back to the kids, who went back into the water.

I walked into the subway station. Inside, it seemed like it had become night. The station was lit gently with a kind of street-quality, greenish, fluorescent flood-lamp. The walls were a brownish stone, and the floors were some kind of granite-like grey. There was a downward staircase in the center of the lobby-area, and there were a few different corridors leading off from the main lobby-area.

I walked down one of the corridors off to my right. I heard a bunch of teenage kids who sounded like they were joking and having a good time. I decided that I should probably talk with the kids instead of being nervous and shy around them. This was a dream, and I was here to explore whatever I ran into.

So I saw the kids. They were a group of white boys and girls, dressed in kind of loose baggy sweaters and wool caps. They were making a bunch of jokes which struck me as intelligent and funny. I thought I’d talk to them. But they really didn’t pay any attention to me. So, rather than trying to hard to get their attention and getting hostile attention, I walked down another corridor.

But now I heard somebody calling for me. I wound around through the corridors, back to the area where the kids had been. It had definitely sounded like one of the boys, calling me back to be part of the group.

But when I got back to the area – something like a lobby, with a long, wooden counter at the front of the room, and a tall, nice painting on the cinder-block wall to my left – there were no kids, only two women. The women were both naked. They walked toward me, side by side.

The woman on the right was very tall, maybe a foot taller than I (or “I” in the dream). She was naked, but she wore a dark-blue plume of feathers as a headdress and a spray of dark blue feathers around her waist and back. She looked like a burlesque performer.

The woman on the left was still taller than I, maybe by an inch or two. She was pale, with long, curly, light-red hair. The women were both offering themselves to me for sex. I chose the shorter woman.

The woman stood right in front of me, almost to the point of pressing up to me. I asked her a question, and she replied. Satisfied, I began kissing her body.

We had sex in two or three different positions. But in one position I realized I was just doing a terrible job, and that I must just be making a weird situation for the woman, even though she did at least appear to be having fun. Regardless, I got so ashamed of what I perceived as being my stupid clumsiness that I woke up.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in the backseat of a car full of people, probably women ranging from my age down to about 13. The driver may have been one of the girls' mothers, and she may have acted as a mother-figure for me as well.

I think I was going to an airport. But since I had a little time before I had to catch my flight, I was going to walk through the cemetery first.

A couple of girls had gotten out of the car to let me out. The car was a big, wide, 1970s-style sedan, probably pale beige colored. We stood in a dusty parking lot that felt like it was in the middle of a construction area, like for a small business park that was just being constructed.

I was now in a tall mansion, up in a room on the second or third floor, reading. I sat in a big, heavy wood chair at a big, heavy table made of dark wood. The room was small, crammed full of all kinds of books. The floors were probably some kind of dark wood. A decent amount of daylight came in through a window.

I looked up to see that one of the women (whom I recognize as a woman who works at a bookstore I frequent in waking life) was sitting across the table from me, reading. I was surprised that she had come to read as well.

Now a couple other girls bustled into the room. They said it was time for me to go to the airport. We left the room. We walked down a tight, steep stairwell.

I kept trying to ask the woman what book she had been reading. But the other women kept dissuading me, as if we didn't have time for me to ask such a question.

We were now outside the mansion, walking down a tight, narrow, stone staircase that ran from the porch, down a steep hill of lawn and past a tall stone wall, down to the curb where our car was.

As we descended beyond the stone wall, we passed a few cluttery stacks of old-looking books. I may have heard the woman who had been reading with me telling me (through telepathy?) things about the book she had been reading. Either she or I had been reading a book having something to do with Irish culture, possibly the Celtic aspect of it.

Good morning, everybody. I remember two dreams from last night.

Dream #1

I was, or was seeing through the eyes of, a pretty girl. The girl had a face like Alyssa Milano, but she was short and very thin.

The girl was at a beach house. Out the back of the house, she saw one her female friend in the water, about up to her waist in waves. The girl thought that her friend was hurt, not as if she were drowning, but as if something about the water was making her friend ill. So she ran out to help her friend.

The scene now seemed to repeat itself. Except now I was watching it from a 3rd person view, as if I were watching a movie. Now the woman in the water was the Alyssa Milano-type girl I had just been. She was a transgendered woman, now, too.

The woman who ran out of the beach house to save the woman in the water was now an Asian woman, slightly overweight, and a little ditzy looking, like the girl from the live action Cutey Honey movie.

The ditzy woman now had the other woman on the shore. The ditzy woman wanted to make sure the other woman was still breathing. She pushed the other woman's thin, pink tank-top down below her shoulders, even below her small chest. The woman had pink glitter or pink, glittery coverings, on her nipples.

I now saw this scene from inside the beach house, as if I were myself looking out to the beach. I turned away from the scene. My friend, a girl or a transgendered girl, thin, with blonde and brown hair, and wearing a thin, zebra-striped tank-top and skirt, sat in a big, leather chair, her legs curled up into the chair as well.

I laughed and said to my friend, "I forgot how in love she (the ditzy woman) is with her (the woman who had been in the water)."

My friend asked me why I cared so much about those two girls. She seemed hurt. She then looked at me in a sexy way. I realized she'd been wanting me to pay attention to her and play around with her a lttle. I didn't know if I wanted to. I couldn't quite remember if she was a woman or a man. But I started feeling really attracted to her, anyway.


Dream #2

I was out in what looked like a driveway made out of smooth river pebbles. It may have been on the right side of a house. I stood by a car with a couple of my family members, whom I don't recognize now.

We were in some town that people usually think of as a tourist destination. We had taken care of some task, and now we had some time left over. I hadn't anticipated this. So I told my family members they could go spend a couple hours doing the fun things this town had to offer. I figured I'd have some fun, too.

I went into the house. I went down into the basement. I was now sitting at a very cramped, dirty bar with an old, very overweight man.

The man was talking to me about how, if you went into the military, you didn't always have to carry a gun. He said, "I knew people who, they went into the Army, and the only thing they ever touched the whole time was a gib!"

I couldn't quite figure out what a gib was. I just smiled and nodded. But I somehow gathered that the man meant that his friend had worked on some kind of maintenance crew. I started talking about (and making hand motions indicating) a table saw. The man waved me off, almost as if saying I was too young or naïve to understand.

We were walking back up the stairs now. I figured I still had a couple hours to hike in the mountains of this area before meeting up with my family members. Maybe I'd even hike to our meeting point, which was now, somehow, deep in the woods.

But the old man invited me to have dinner with him. The first floor of this house was actually a fine Italian restaurant (even though it basically looked like a living room full of tables). The guy sat at a table right next to the side door.

I figured that since this old guy had taken such a liking to me, I'd go ahead and eat with him and have some more conversation. But I knew this would basically take away all the time I had left for doing anything fun.

I got a huge plate of spaghetti and meatballs with thick noodles and a lot of sauce. I saw a long table full of family members. I went and sat down with them, on the opposite side of the room from the man.

It now seemed to be night, from what I could see through the windows. At some point the room became windowless and dim, with sea-green walls.

I had forgotten about the man. I looked over my left shoulder. I saw another table, a round table, about half full of more of my family members. The man was just now sitting down at that table. One of my family members had invited him over.

I looked way back in the dim room, to where the man's table had been. The room was mostly empty, bare. But by the door, a lot of older, tough-looking men (who I thought of as Croatians) sat along a big, dark bench. They all seemed to be heavily dressed up in winter clothes. They were talking in a different language, moderately but happily.

I looked forward again as a young, female family member to my right began saying a prayer in a different language. I was about to tell her to stop praying that way -- the old men would think she was making fun of them. But she said something like, "This is a very sacred prayer in their language. They appreciate the fact that I know it."

Everybody was talking and joking and eating. I looked across the table and to my left. A few seats down, I saw my great-grandmother. She was alive! She was as small as a child, and she wore a gauzy, crepe-like, pink dress and a broad-brimmed, pink hat.

I looked away for a moment. I now remembered part of the task we had been here for. I also remembered that we were actually in Washington, DC. My great-grandma had apparently died. We took her to DC for the funeral, because she'd wanted to go there and we had planned a vacation there.

When we'd gotten there, I remembered, my great-grandma had been so touched by how much we loved her that her body had come back to life. I remembered seeing her in the casket, her eyes blinking open.

I now looked at her sitting at the dinner table. She was talking with everybody and helping herself to some food. Her hands looked stubby, and she seemed to be wearing a yellow dress. I knew that she could only keep her body alive for a little while longer. I was thankful for the time she had given us.

(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 everybody. I remember two dreams from last night. I wrote them down late, so my day memory might be clouding them up a little.

Two side notes: the bowling alley in the first dream comes from an msn.com photo article I read about huge mansions. Almost every mansion had a movie theatre and a bowling alley.

Also, the cops coming to my house is from my waking life. My upstairs neighbors always slam and slam on the floor. I feel like it's done to hurt me, like they don't want me around. It's been going on for a long time. I've finally called the police, because it's gotten so constant, loud, and violent that I'm afraid to come home. I feel terrible for calling, because I've never wanted to be the kind of person who calls the police on people. But I also have a fear of the police.

Dream #1

I was in a car with my old friends D and Y, riding through the parking lot of a bowling alley. It was probably night time. D was probably driving the car.

We let Y out, probably to run in and get a lane. For some reason, the car now seemed to be gone. D and I were walking away from the bowling alley, as if we had finished the game and were walking to the car.

I really wasn't happy to have to hang around with D, and I think I was making that known to him. At some point it became dark, like at night. D was wearing a shiny, black leather jacket. I asked him how his life was. He broke down and started crying about how his mother had died.

It was daytime again. I felt really bad for D, and I tried to comfort him. He kind of brushed me off and told me it was fine. Apparently his mother had had a terminal disease which acted very quickly on her. D told me something his mother had told him before she died, which made him feel better about the whole thing. It made me think of toothpaste for some reason.

We had been wandering through the first few rows of the parking lot, more like we were waiting for Y to arrive with the car again, although it was also like we were trying to find the car. But now we were walking back toward the bowling alley.

The parking lot had been asphalt. But now it was dirt. The dust was floating up into the blue sky, as if there were a lot of traffic or wind in the parking lot, even though I couldn't see any activity.

Some old friends of ours came up to me and D. They started saying a lot of teasing things to D. But I got really angry and threatening with them, telling them to leave D alone, he'd had to deal with enough already. Everybody said sorry and left D alone.

We were all walking back toward the bowling alley. We were close to the building, but the actual entrance now felt so far away. I somehow got separated from the rest of the group. I walked all by myself, in a stretch of dirt road between the building-front's sidewalk and a long strip of concrete island.

The ruts in the ground looked like horse carriages ran through it. I thought to myself, Of course they do. That's how things worked in the Old West. And that's where I am.

I wondered where the heck the car was. I couldn't remember if I was going into the bowling alley or going home. But if I was going home, I wanted to get in the car and go. And if I was going into the bowling alley, I wanted to take the car to get there quicker.

But I thought to myself, No car is ever going to come pick you up, dummy. This is the Old West. We didn't have cars back then.

Dream #2

I had called the police because the people upstairs from me were slamming and slamming on the floor again. It was morning, and the light in my bedroom was grey and slightly dim. The police knocked on my door.

I opened the door. There was just one officer: a short, slightly overweight, black woman in her late 40s or early 50s. She told me that I had called the police so many times that I was now under investigation myself. She would have to search my house.

I said fine. I let her in. I just let her go wherever she wanted in my house. I went back to my bed and lay down. I figured that I wouldn't follow the officer around. That would look suspicious, like I had something to hide, which I didn't.

But I slowly realized that my apartment was actually very large (which it is definitely not in waking life). I realized I had a lot of rooms, and that as soon as the officer saw how many rooms I had, she'd get jealous of me and try to find some reason to arrest me.

So I started running through the house, trying to find the officer. I figured that I'd explain how much room I had in this house by telling the officer that my mother also lived here with me.

I was actually surprised by how many rooms I had in the house. I hadn't realized this place was so big. But a lot of the rooms were done up in such a hyper-girly way, with pink and purple colors, stuffed animals, and fluffy, lacy bed covers, that I felt like someone other than I had to have been living here. I gradually became convinced that my mother was in fact living here with me.

Now, confident that my story was the truth, I felt like I could confront the officer with my story, preventing her from getting jealous and throwing me in jail for some made up reason.

I found the officer in a hyper-girly room, sitting on the bed. She started talking to me about something, but I can't remember what. All I remember is that she seemed to be very sad.

Good morning everybody. I remember two dreams from last night. But my memory of both is a little fuzzy. I took some NyQuil last night because I have a cold.

Dream #1

I had just gotten off a plane. I got into an old, baby blue VW Beetle, which was in something like an underground parking lot. I'm not sure exactly what I did in the Beetle, because I didn't move the car.

I walked up into some kind of terminal corridor at the airport. There were very few people around. The place looked old and dim. I walked though this terminal and into another parking garage.

I was walking through this parking garage as if I were just going to walk straight out of the airport. But then I remembered that I had a car in this parking garage, and that I needed to drive it home. It was actually my mom's car. It was a Cadillac, like from the 1970s.

I turned around and walked back in the direction I had come from. I may have been able to see back into the terminal, which may now have looked like a big, empty living room with a big concession stand in it.

I found the Cadillac parked so it faced a concrete wall. I got in and began to pull it out of the parking space. I figured this would be a fine car to drive back to my mom's house.

But then I remembered that I already had my mom's other car, the VW Beetle, parked in the parking garage on the other side of the airport and way underground.

I stopped the Cadillac, trying to figure which car I should drive back to my mom's house. I hated the Beetle. But it was my mom's car, and I would have to bring it back to her. I couldn't figure out how I could get both cars home. I also couldn't figure out how I'd gotten both cars here in the first place.

I pulled the car back into the parking space. Something about that action felt so good that I did it again and again. I couldn't quite get the car between the lines of the parking space.

I began imagining myself as a businessman from the 1970s: a tall, white, handsome man with blue eyes, a silly kind of permed hair-do, and a full but well-trimmed beard. The man's hair was brown but greying a little. The man wore a very slim grey suit with a pale blue shirt.

Dream #2

A man and woman in their 40s or 50s were trying to escape from some group of people. The man and woman ended up in a room in a building like a mansion. In this room, you would perform some kind of ritual and it would do something like make you immortal.

The man had gotten the woman to undergo this ritual before the people had come. The view had been from outside the room, so I couldn't see what had happened inside the room.

Now it was like everything had started all over again. The man and the woman went to a few different places. Then they ended up being pursued by people who didn't want them to do the ritual.

The man and woman were on the run. They were back at the mansion. They stood inside a dim, wood-walled room. They were trying to unlock and open a huge, heavy wood door. There was a feeling of urgency, as if the people pursuing the man and woman could be here at any moment. The lights in the room were flickering on and off, as if it were thundering inside.

Finally the man and woman got the door open. Beyond the door there was a lot of flashing. I was really curious what this whole thing was about, and I didn't want this "movie view" from outside the room. I really wanted to see what happened in the room.

I now identified with the man. I was him. I stood in the room. The room was wide and square, and it was almost entirely taken up by a strange pool. The pool seemed to be filled with clouds rather than liquid. The clouds may also have been flashing, as if with lightning. I now understood that this pool was some kind of portal to another dimension.

The man and woman knew the people were coming. So they had to jump in the pool. The man/I decided to go first this time. I jumped out really far and did some kind of twirling diver move.

I began descending through the clouds. There was white light and a calm, but almost electric, feeling all around me.