maboroshi

(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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(I think I meant the movie Suspiria.)

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

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

I said, "Yeah."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(This dream was actually from two nights ago. I don't remember any dreams from last night.)

I was in the belltower of a building like a mission-style church, with adobe or stucco walls. I saw a crowd of people below. Some were milling around. Some may have been looking up at me. I told myself at some point that I was in Korea.

While in the tower, I may actually have been conversing (mentally? non-verbally?) with a man down on the ground. The man was shortish, mediun-build, slightly balding Korean man wearing eyeglasses, a pale polo shirt and pale jeans. The man may have been a family member of mine.

In the middle of our "conversation," I looked up to the sky and pointed. There was a sudden atmosphere of panic. Then a huge, white jet flew into our view.

The jet was so long, narrow, and white, that I at first thought it was a nuclear missle. It had two fin-like objects prtruding from its nose. But then, as the object sped over me, I could see that it was just an enormous, very thin, white jet with thin, squarish wings.

The jet made a lot of noise and then passed out of view of the church. I may have feared the jet was going to crash once it was out of view. I'm not sure whether the jet crashed.

I was now writing a review of this whole thing, as if writing about an air show for an online newspaper.

I was now a little girl. I was writing (actually, more like thinking out my article or "remembering" the article "I had written) about the man with whom I had been conversing as if he were the organizer of this show.

I was giving the man a bad review. In the middle of the review, however, the man stopped me. He was now my (the little girl's) father. He was white, tall, strong, with tan skin and blonde hair. He sat on steps (leading up to the bell?) and grabbed my arms gently.

He shook me a little and asked me to tell him why I had said those things about him. I don't know why I wasn't answering -- maybe I felt like being rude. He then started asking me about the big jet, and what kind of jet I thought it was.

I told him (it was now like I was looking out from the belltower or some balcony) that it wasn't a --, because I had actually seen stealth bombers flying over New York City on a number of occasions. I corrected myself, thought slowly, and said, "No. I mean Blackbirds."

I don't know whether the man/"my daddy(which is what I called him -- daddy)" believed me, but he took me to a big area full of jets. I figured that now I'd be able to point the Blackbird out to him.

We drove through what looked like a vast parking lot full of jets. The place seemed to be completely void of people. There might have been some huge structures around, the walls or building-top bridges of which occasionally shaded the parked jets.

We curved counter-clockwise into another aisle of parked jets. I saw a jet that looked a little like a Blackbird. So I pointed it out to the man as a Blackbird.

But it wasn't quite right. It looked too small. It looked plasticky. And it also looked flat, as if the jet had been flipped upside-down or had its top shaved off. It seemed to have three rectangular holes in it, too, like it was a jet-sized light switch.

We were driving down the parking lot. I may have seen more jets that almost looked like Blackbirds. The man and I were driving toward some area that seemed to have a small, rickety, metal staircase going up the side of it. I could feel the warmth of the sun.