maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was "at home" with my mom and possibly a couple other family members. The house had two floors and probably a basement. The stairway up to the second floor was near the back of the house.

There was a policeman in the house. He was tall, white, with reddish-tan skin, blue-green eyes, a balding head of red-blonde hair, and a mustache. I saw him in my mind's eye, but I'm not sure if I ever saw him physically.

The cop hurried out the backdoor of the house at some point. He may have had some kind of goodbye scene with some of my family members.

I then realized that the cop was on the run. He had murdered another cop (who may have looked exactly like him, except pale white). The other cop's body, I knew (seeing it in my mind's eye) lay sprawled on the final few steps and the floor of the basement.

I felt like my family should have done something not to let the cop get away. I also felt like I should go after the cop or help the other cops find him. But I was too afraid to do so. I thought the cop would probably kill me.

At some point I realized that I had also murdered somebody, so that if I informed on the cop, I would only be letting the cops know where I was, so they'd come after me, too.

Dream #2

Some woman dressed as a ballerina with a tan, fluffy skirt and a black leotard-top was trying to get away from a killer. But at some point she had fallen from some height and broken her legs.

She was panicked. She now pretty much knew she was going to die. The killer, who may have been some kind of ghost-hag woman, would catch up to her and toture her to death.

Good morning, everybody. The last two dreams definitely came from my last hour in bed.

I think the third dream is partly influenced by the picture Caden posted on Dreamviews yesterday of the zombies walking into the diner in a big city.

Dream #1

I was at a movie theatre. I had finished watching a movie. I was probably going to watch a second movie. I left all my stuff in the theatre and went outside.

I may have gone to a K-mart in a big shopping center. I may then have gone across the parking lot, to a McDonald's. At some point (after the McDonald's?) I was looking out the front windows of the K-mart. Big flakes of snow were falling and the sky was a heavy grey.

I went back to the movie theatre. I may have been talking with a female friend of mine right outside the theatre doors, in the dark hallway.

I then went into the theatre. The lights were on. The theatre was brighter than a theatre would usually be. The floors and seats were all a tan-brown. Everything looked dirty. I was upset that I'd left my stuff among all this filth.

I picked up my stuff (I had a lot of bags, for some reason) and headed toward the door again. I'd decided I didn't want to stay for the second movie, amid all this garbage.

(I have some memory somewhere (possibly here, even though it seems out of context) of being at the ticket counter, right at the corner to the long hallway down which were all the doorways to the movie theatres. I was probably standind there thinkng about whether to buy a ticket to the second movie.)

At the back of the theatre, I sat my stuff down, as if to arrange it properly, put my coat on, etc. As I did, the theatre dimmed to a usual level. The chairs and floor were now a vivid red, almost glowing. I thought, This place looks a lot cleaner when the lights are out.

At some point I may also have thought of a worker coming in and asking for my ticket to the second movie, which I didn't have. I also thought of how the workers would be disappointed that I wasn't staying for the second movie, after they'd watched my stuff while I'd left it at my seat during the break between movies. I think I had been the only person to leave my stuff.

Dream #2

I was on my cell phone, talking to my mom. It was daytime. The sky was clear and blue. I was walking through a small parking lot that was adjacent to another small parking lot for a fast food store that sold tacos.

My mom was telling me something important that I should do to ensure my health. I said I would do it, but in a half-hearted tone so that we both knew I actually probably wouldn't. My mom sounded patient, but disappointed.

I looked into the taco restaurant. The walls were all windows. The floors were white tile. Almost everything else was a bright yellow. The store wasn't opened yet. It was empty, and it looked so sparkling-clean and spacious.

I turned away from the restaurant and walked down a slight slope of parking lots, toward a busy street.

Dream #3

I was out with something like a tour group. We were looking at NYC from downtown (from an angle that seems now to have been from the deck of a ferry, out on the water).

Our tour guide was a tallish, skinny, white man with fuzzy hair down to about his jaw-line, an equally fuzzy mustache, and stubbly cheeks. He probably wore a dingy, white t-shirt.

The tour guide was pointing our view all the way up to Midtown, to the Empire State Building, which looked kind of small and old. The guide said that in the days when this building was created, people didn't care about the size of the buildings. They just wanted to make places for people to work.

The tour guide now pointed out some buildings near us, in the financial distritct. Compared to the far-away Empire State Building, they looked huge. The guide now said, "When people built these buildings, size was of the utmost importance. Each new building had to be the tallest."

The guide now pointed to a building at the top of which were clear windows, revealing an enormous board room. The guide said, "You even started getting features like that, where the people in the taller buildings could look down and gloat at the people in the shorter buildings next to it."

I seemed to float upward with my view. I was flying among these buildings. I was then suddenly inside a buiding. I was in a huge conference room with a gigantic table. The place was empty and quiet, and the light coming in was gentle.

There was a balcony somewhere that apparently looked all the way down to the ground floor of the building. It made me dizzy to think of. I was crawling around on my belly, partly because I was too dizzy to stand up, and partly because I had come into work late and didn't want to be noticed.

I saw, beyond the huge conference table, and probably beyond the balcony, a gigantic window to another huge conference room. The conference room was in another building, but it felt like both buildings were in the same, larger building.

The huge window was framed in heavy, beautiful wood, fringed with beautiful American Arts-and-Crafts style squares. I was really captivated by the pattern of this window frame. As I concentrated on it, it seemed to change into a different pattern, or to develop a second layer of patterning.

Dream #4

I came "back home." "My home" was like a small, suburban house. When I came in, I noticed that there was a set of papers on a chair right by the front door. The papers were my lease.

I understood that, somehow, my landlord had gotten into the house and put a new copy of the lease renewal in a spot where I'd be sure to see it. Apparently I'd taken too long sending back the first lease renewal he'd sent me.

As I opened up the lease, I walked around my place. The living room was very small. The whole place was dirty. There were toys and clothes all over the place, and the walls seemed smeared with stuff. I then realized that my family was in town, and that they'd been staying at my place while visiting.

I knew, before opening the lease, that my landlord had seen all this evidence of other people in my house. I knew he'd just assume the people were living here permanently, and that he'd charge me extra rent to account for the extra people. I hoped I'd be able to convince the landlord of the truth: that there was nobody else staying with me.

I opened the lease, and, sure enough, the lease was now made out for six people. The rent specified was some unbelieveable amount. I closed the lease and walked around the house, looking at all the stuff my family had left lying around.

(Note, evening of Dec. 16: Not like it's a big deal, but, regarding the third dream, I should say that in waking life the Empire State Building was not made only with the concern of having a place for people to work.

The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were both in a race to be the tallest building in the world. It was definitely a size and status thing. I'm pretty sure that's common knowledge.

I'm not exactly sure why the tour guide gave the story about how trying to build tall buildings simply to be taller than other buildings wasn't a motivation for developers until later on.)

Good morning, everybody. I slept about 12 hours last night, in hopes of getting over my cold. I recall three dreams from last night. They're all pretty fragmented, and I'm not even exactly sure what order they came in.

Dream #1

I stood out on some concrete balcony or ledge (like at the head of a concrete wheelchair ramp) a couple meters higher than the road. It was daytime, and I was in a big town, in some area that looked like SoHo in NYC. The streets were cobblestone. The place was empty.

I was looking across the street to a place that looked like a bank next door to a fast food restaurant. I was playing around on my phone. I was trying to look into my bank account to see how much money I had. I may have been out on some trip to a different city or country, and I may have been trying to figure out exactly how much more money I could spend on this trip.

But I couldn't remember the name of my bank. I went over the names of banks (probably not real names) in my head without locating the name of my bank.

At some point I may have figured out the name of the bank, only to discover, contrary to my previous insistence, that it was precisely the bank across the street from me.

I now noticed that there were a lot of cosplayers going into the fast food restaurant next door to the bank. I was curious about these cosplayers.

I was now in the fast food restaurant. The place was packed with cosplayers. Some of them may actually have been dressed up as clowns, like Ronald McDonald, rather than being in cosplay.

Dream #2

I had come down to Mexico with my mom. I was now walking around town by myself. It was daytime, a warm day. I walked down a quiet, narrow street.

I probably went into one store, the floor for which was at the bottom of a few short steps. I may have walked around in the store for a few minutes.

I was now back in the house where my mom was. It was like a house that belonged to "one of our family members" in Mexico. I was in a completely empty bedroom. It may have been later in the night or early the next morning.

My mom came into the bedroom and sat down across from me on the floor. She insinuated that some people had mistaken me for a narc while I'd been walking around the city. Now I was kind of in trouble with these people.

My mom told me, "They say here that a narc is like a dog on a leash, except they say he has a coat-hanger attached, too."

This saying gave me a picture in my head like a chalkboard drawing of a sillhouette-man walking a sillhouette-dog on a leash. The dog also had a coat-hanger sticking up from its back.

I understood the "coat-hanger" to be a symbol for the nice clothes that narcs wore (???).

My mom and I were now downstairs in the living room, which was also empty. My mom told me we had to be very careful now, walking around town, as all these drug dealers would now be looking out for us.

I wondered why on earth people would think I was a narc. I knew that if I even slightly resembed a narc, I wouldn't be coming down to Mexico at this point in time.

But now I remembered that "the cousin of mine," whom my mom and I were down here to visit, actually was a narc. So even if the drug dealers figured out I wasn't a narc, I'd still be hunted down and under suspicion for visiting a known narc.

I now wondered why in the hell my mom had chosen to come down here at this point, when all this dangerous stuff was going on.

Dream #3

I stood behind a tall, thin, young man. The man had a pale complexion and red-brown hair in a squarish, tall haircut. He wore a grey jacket. We may have been in some kind of small, crowded room, having just finished some kind of meeting for young adults.

The young man spoke, and for some reason I said aloud that it was obvious the man was Scottish, given his accent and his manner of expression.

The man turned around. Rather than being annoyed with me, he seemed to assume my observation meant that I had something in common with him.. He asked me what I was.

I said, "All three," which the man took to mean Irish, English, and Scottish (???).

The man said, "Oh, right, right. I wonder why they don't say all four and include the Welsh?"

I responded (or tried to respond?) with the thought that perhaps they were separated by language (???), so that everybody thought of the Welsh as different from "the other three."

(Note, December 13th: I forgot to mention that in waking life I've been reading The Judge, by Rebecca West. Rebecca West is a writer who was active from the 1920s through the 1980s. She's really cool. One thing that really struck me about her is that she is Irish and English on her father's side and Scottish on her mother's side. I took this "Irish-English-Scottish" aspect of West and identified myself with it -- for some reason -- in the third dream.)

Good morning, everybody. I remembered three dreams from last night. But I lost one between waking up and starting this entry.

The "new bacteria" dream is influenced by the NASA announcement about that newly discovered Mono Lake microbe that survives on arsenic instead of phosphorous. I also don't know why I thought in my dreams that bacteria aren't alive. I'm pretty sure it's viruses that are technically not alive or only half-alive.

Dream #1

I was at "my office," which was like the living room of a small house or cabin that might have been located in the woods. There were a few big windows on the walls, letting in plenty of light, possibly through thin, gauzy curtains. The day was probably cold and light grey.

My desk was near the center of the room. I was standing back from it a little bit at first. The desk was cluttered with all kinds of papers and things that looked like mechanisms for gathering data for ecological surveys.

The front door opened and either "my boss" or "a colleague of mine" walked in. He may have been a white man, strong-looking, with a big stomach and a huge beard. He may have been wearing some kind of plaid shirt, suspenders, and a broad-brimmed hat.

I had the understanding that I was probably going to be fired because I was doing a terrible job. I sat down at the desk and grabbed my lunch. I probably shouldn't have been eating at this time, but I decided to eat right now, and to eat like a pig, in defiance of whoever was going to fire me.

My lunch may not have looked much like food. It may have looked like machine parts, or, rather, just one small but chunky, metallic machine part. It was in a clear, Tupperware container about 35cm long, way too big for whatever the small lunch was. I may have been trying to eat the machine part with chopsticks.

I decided that if I was going to get fired for being lazy, I might as well be even lazier while I was waiting to get fired. I saw some kind of "mechanism" that looked like the metal-wound cord for payphone receivers. It may have been partly buried under a pile of papers.

I probably started whining and complaining about something that would prove I wasn't thinking about doing my job at all. I might have complained about some porn website that I couldn't get onto or some rock song that I wasn't able to turn on really loud. (But, now that I think about it, I may not even have had a computer at my desk.)

Dream #2

A view of various "bacteria." It was like seeing a lot of purplish, purple-blue, and pinkish, spidery or web-like shapes stuck in clear cubes like novelty plastic ice cubes.

The "cubes" were being moved before my eyes as if they were being displayed as part of a presentation. But they would often overlap, as if they were just random cubes of ice jangling about with each other in a glass of water.

I heard a voice talk about the bacteria and how they were a new kind of bacteria. They weren't really alive, or they were only half alive. But they had the ability to reproduce.

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

Dream #1

I was in a big airplane, either in the cockpit or near it while its door was open. In the plane were just me, the pilot, and one of my male friends. The sky outside was grey and wet.

We were taxiing down a runway. We picked up speed, as if we were going to take off. But we weren't getting up enough speed, in my opinion.

I could see from outside and just above the plane. The runway we were on looked way too short for our plane to get up enough speed to take off.

We taxied around the runway roads, clockwise, trying to loop back around and hit the long runway again with a little bit of momentum so we could build up enough speed to take off.

But somehow we ended up (as if we had been travelling counterclockwise) driving the plane outside of the airstrip and onto a strip of road before a large, Victorian-style house. The house was adjacent with the chain-link fence bordering the airport.

A military man in camouflage stood beside the airplane, talking with the pilot, as if he were just standing beside the window of some bus, not a huge airplane. The military man was older, white, tanned, with shortish, square-cut, white hair.

The military man said that the town in which this airport was located was being evacuated soon, anyway. Once it was evacuated, nobody would mind us using the public streets as a runway. That way we could easily get up enough speed to take off.

The military man said, "Heck, maybe even some of the people we evacuate out of the town would like to fly some planes with you!"

Somebody, maybe I, suggested that we get "some of those little planes" (in my mind's eye I saw cone-shaped planes maybe 3-4 meters long, painted white with red triangles pointing away from the nose). The "little planes" could easily get up enough speed to take off from a small runway like this.

We drove the plane away. The military man said he'd order some of "those little planes." He may even have started talking with a younger military man about the order.

It was now night. I stood before the Victorian house, in some little niche set between the wall and the staircase up to the front door. In the niche was an old-style, wooden podium. The podium may have held a big book.

I was probably here to talk to the military man regarding the little planes. I wasn't trying to speed up the order. I was actually trying to figure out what the planes were, to see if they were the right things to use. But I figured my being here to ask about the planes would make me look impatient, and that I'd get on the military's bad side because of it, if I didn't do things the right way.

Somebody came out to talk to me. He was a younger soldier, in formal dress, even a hat (which kind of looked like a Nazi hat). He explained a few things to me about the higher-ups' names. I tried to keep it all in mind.

The man saluted me. I was so surprised that I saluted back, with tears in my eyes (for some reason). Somehow I could see the man reflected in my tears, as if the tears were the surface of sunglasses.

I was alone again. I turned to the book in a frenzy. I had just forgotten everything the man had told me. The high-up military man's name was Wellinghoff. Or was it Norris? I couldn't remember. And I couldn't remember the correct titles of all the higher-ups, either.

Dream #2

I was in a bookstore or library. It had an old feel to it. It was all made of wood. It was open, with a ground level and probably a balcony level running along the walls. The ceilings were very high. The center of the store was mostly small, wide tables with books displayed on the. The walls were lined with shelves.

I saw, from high up, a couple of my female friends. One of them was aw woman I haven't seen since college. I decided to go say hi to them.

To get to them I began climbing down a wooden pole about 20cm in diameter. I was climbing down the pole head first for a way. Then I did some weird kind of fllip move so that I was climbing down feet first.

I ended near some small, tight, spiral staircase, for which this long pole may have served as a support column. The pole seemed to end a couple meters above the ground. I had to jump the rest of the way down. The two women were right nearby.

I slowly, flexibly reached away from the pole. I relaxedly leapt away from the pole, almost as if I were floating away from it. I landed very softly on my feet.

Thinking that the women would think I was showing off with all I had just done (I wasn't exactly sure myself how I had done it), I started talking naturally to act like nothing had happened.

I began fumbling through a couple of books and even something that looked like a mix between a woman's wallet with a tiny mirror on the front. The wallet may have been a dark blue suede, and it may have had some black and white photo of a famous actress or famous work of art on it.

Dream #3

I was in a department store. The store looked kind of cheap and run-down. I was now at the counter, getting my stuff rung up. The person ringing me up was a woman, but I don't know if she was older or younger.

Something went wrong, and the woman needed to wait before she charged me. I decided to walk around the store some more.

Off to the left of the cash register and a little ways away was a rack of really cheap-looking lingerie. For some reason, I decided to look through it. I took a few items off the rack, as if I were either going to buy them or try them on.

At some point, I came to the conclusion that I was in a Victoria's Secret.

I looked down into a plastic tub (?) which had a few stray pairs of panties inside. I figured that if I was buying or trying on the lingerie, I'd also need to try on some panties. So I tried to pick some out.

I remember one pair of panties that was like a thong, pale yellow, with a cottony back and a sheer, net-like front with flower designs on it. Another pair was like briefs. The material was blue like denim. But it had a weird, scaly look and feel.

Just to my left was a window wall. Just beyond the wall was another rack of lingerie. A big, tall, black man in a black t-shirt and sunglasses was fingering through the lingerie. I could see that he was also looking for articles of lingerie to try on.

Dream #4

I was in "my shower," which was a shower-only stall. It was set into the end of the narrow bathroom.

Either my shower curtain had broken or I had decided I'd needed to adjust it somehow. I took the curtain off the rod. Then I tried to put it back on.

I suddenly realized that by taking the curtain off the hook I'd screwed everything up. The curtain was actually just a gigantic plastic bag, like an enormous version of a grocery bag. The bag had been folded around the rod and against the wall (even into holes in the wall?) in so many weird ways that I likely couldn't replicate it.

I figured I'd do my best and try to re-do things. I was up on the wall, looking down on the shower curtain. I don't know how I was up there -- possibly by holding myself in place by doing the splits and holding each foot against the wall? I began working on the gigantic plastic bag.

Good morning, everybody. I recall three dreams from "last night" -- although these dreams all come from about the last hour that I was in bed.

Dream #1

I was in "my house," which was a two-floor house. I was in a bedroom on the second floor of the house. The curtains were pulled back. Outside, the sky looked grey and cold.

I may have just moved into this house. I was kind of surprised that I had so much space. I'd never had this much space in my life. Still, the place wasn't huge. It was two floors, but it was rather narrow.

Nevertheless, as I walked down the stairs to the first floor, I thought that people would see a guy like me living in a place like this, and, getting jealous, they'd try to break into my place.

I tried to think of what I could do to prevent a break-in. I thought I would never use anything I owned while sitting near a window on the second floor. That way nobody would ever see that I actually owned anything.

I thought that the only thing I would do on the first floor would be to watch TV, even though I thought that would be dangerous, too. But I figured that everybody owned a TV. So why would anybody want mine, too?

I considered what I would watch on TV. I wondered if I had cable TV. I hadn't owned a TV in quite some tiime. Maybe everybody got cable TV nowadays. Or maybe, I thought, this place was like a hotel. And all hotels had cable TV. I may have considered watching some porn.

Dream #2

I was in a living room of an apartment with a group of friends, none of whom I recognize. The friends were all young, pretty cool. The living room was a little dim, as if it were lit only from a light in the hallway, around a corner.

I sat on the floor before a coffee table that was set against the wall. A stereo stood on the coffee table. Cluttered before the stereo were huge binders full of lists of karaoke songs.

I had one book open and was flipping through the pages, trying to find a particular song. But the book was full of pictures instead of titles. Each page may have had two or three CD-sized pictures on each side. One picture I remember of a person (man?) standing over a dark landscape under a purple sky.

There were so few pictures per page and so few pages in this book, that I thought the chances were slim of my song being in this book. And I couldn't figure out how the songs were arranged: not in alphabetical order, but in some kind of picture order -- if they were, in fact, in any order at all.

I concluded that my song wasn't in this particular book. Somebody may have taken the book from me. I shuffled through some of the other books. I may now not even have been able to remember what song I wanted to sing.

The covers of the binders were all really awesome. They had all kinds of flaming designs of people,guitars, and monsters. Each binder held song lists for a specific genre of music, and the picture on the front represented the genre. Sometimes the picture actually had the name of the genre written above it in fancy lettering.

I finally chose a certain binder, figuring this was the genre of music I wanted to sing, so that the song I'd been looking for all along would probably be in this binder.

Dream #3

I was at "my house," an apartment on the upper floor of a big building. The apartment probably had a living room and two or three bedrooms.

The apartment was busy with a few other people, probably all older than me, some of them somewhat older. There weren't a lot of people in the apartment, but the craziness of their actions made it feel like the place was stuffed with people. The living room was bright, frenetic, and totally messy.

The apartment was all mine, but the people who were here right now were trying to move in and stay here. For some reason, I really wasn't doing much about it.

Just off from the living room was a small, bright hallway. At the end of the hallway was a little niche, in which was set a white, wood chest of drawers. The chest was a little more than a meter tall, and maybe 2/3 of a meter wide.

Some old, short, fat, white man with a balding head, scraggly, grey hair, and a loose, stubbly face, had one of the drawers open and was crowding me away from it. I was fighting the man, trying to get him out of my stuff. This was my chest, and the man had no right messing around with it.

But the man kept shoving me off. He was pouring stuff into the top drawer from out of a garbage bag. The old man himself may have been wearing a weird outfit that looked like a mix between a potato sack, long underwear, a mattress, and a garbage bag.

I looked into the drawer. It looked like there were a bunch of small, empty,glass vials inside. It looked like vials that had once held drugs. I got really mad. Was this guy pouring garbage bags full of drugs and drug paraphernalia all over my house?

Good morning, everybody. My dream recall has been terrible over the past couple days. It's probably because I've spent hours each night watching all the different versions of RC Succession's Transistor Radio on YouTube. Hitto kyoku!

So these entries will be pretty fragmented.

Dream #1

I was watching a scene like a theatre production or a large-scale movie as if I were actually in the environment without participating in it.

The scene focused on a woman who stood atop an enormous, colorful temple, which was somehow inside a much larger building. The temple was as colorful as a Buddhist or Hindu painting. It was decorated to the last inch with beautiful flowers in plates and vases. There may even have been colorful foods decorating the tables.

The woman walked out of a room at the top of the temple, turned right, then sat on her knees on a cushion, facing the wall to the left (her left) of the doorway. (The doorway and the top room looked more like in a Mayan temple, not a Hindu or Buddhist painting.) My view was from behind, above, and just to the left of the woman.

The woman didn't look normal. She was probably a dark blue. She probably didn't have a complete form. Her body may have had a stony look, like Jack Kirby's version of the Fantastic Four's The Thing, except with a feminine figure. She may also have had chakra markings delineated on her somehow.

The woman was breaking some kind of law or rule by meditating. Apparently meditation was forbidden. So now there was a group of high officials heading out to capture and arrest the woman. But there was also a group of men who had taken it upon themselves to protect the woman. She was a hero to them, possibly because her meditation had some kind of power.

I was now among the group of men, acting as a part of the group, not just watching. The men looked big and tough. One of them may have looked like Russell Crowe.

We stood at the bottom of the temple, before a beige-colored stone gate. But it also felt like we were standing in a messy living room.

I was happy to be helping the men. But I was also afraid. I was afraid of getting hurt by the officials. But I was also afraid of looking stupid with my usual clumsy actions. I may have said something regarding all this. The man who looked like Russell Crowe may have looked at me in disgust.

Dream #2

I was in my great-grandmother's living room. The room was filled with dim, yellowy light. The floors were strewn with sheets and blankets.

I was with a few other people, possibly co-workers. We had just finished some task. Now we had to go to another task. But we had to change our clothes first. We were all running around to different rooms, as if playing a game, looking for the new clothes to wear.

I was in my great-grandma's guest room (which us kids would sleep in when we'd spend nights at her house). I was taking off my pants or putting new pants on when I noticed that C, a guy from my work, was in the living room. I could see him from the bedroom because the walls now, apparently, only went up to about my waist.

I thought C was going to accuse me of not doing any work because I was in the middle of changing my pants. I thought I would explain to him that changing my pants was actually a part of my job.

But suddenly a cat with a black body and white belly and paws jumped down through the circle my arms were making with the pants. C was amazed by what the cat had done. I was amazed, too. It seemed so random that the cat would jump down through my arms like they were a hoop.

Either I or C may have wondered if the cat had been trained to do that.

Dream #3

I was out on a street corner across the street from "my apartment building." It actually looked like the street corner at the beginning of Youth without Youth, except with really wide streets, as if the streets were somehow an entire horizon.

There were a lot of young men and women out on the street with me. They were all beautiful and well-dressed.

I had thought that this might have been a bad time for me to go out and do whatever it was I needed to do. Either it had been too early or the sky had been too dark due to clouds or else the clouds in the sky had been presaging a storm.

But now I looked up into the sky to watch it clear smoothly into wispy, white clouds. I was amazed. But I also had that inconvenienced feeling, like when you realize that you now have to do something for sure, no excuses. I thought that if everybody knew how lazy I was about getting moving, they'd dislike me.

I was about to cross the street with everybody else. But the sky suddenly clouded over heavily. It looked worse than rain: it looked like a terriible storm.

I crossed the street back toward my house instead of heading in everybody else's direction (which would have been crossing to the corner caddy-corner from my house). It was already beginning to rain.

I thought something like how lucky I was to be so close to my place, especially because I hadn't brought an umbrella with me. My building was a beautiful, peach-colored, stone building.

I remembered that there was a woman who lived in my apartment with me. I knew she was planning to go outside for something she had to do. I thought I would warn her not to come out. The sky was almost black. It looked like the storm would be terrible.

But I knew the woman would go out anyway to do her thing. I may have thought that I would at least offer her my umbrella.

(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 coming to see the birth of a baby. I had apparently seen the mother give birth before (possibly in an earlier part of this dream). I hoped I wasn't late this time.

It was day, and I was running toward the house. I seemed to be coming at the house from the back. The house was very small, white, and in a rural setting.

I noticed that the land behind the house had become a huge pool of water, apparently right from the backdoor. I stood at the edge of this pond, looking toward the backdoor.

A group of men and women about my age all exited the backdoor. A woman stayed in the house. She handed the newborn baby to a tall, skinny, slightly bearded man. The man may have dunked the baby in the water. This was the baby's birth.

I jumped in the pool (I was wearing a backpack, for some reason). I swam toward the group of people. I wanted to be part of the birth process so much.

I thought to myself that I've always worried about seeing a baby still covered in everything right after birth. But now the baby would be clean. I was disappointed and relieved at the same time that I wouldn't have to see the baby right after birth.

Everybody was now carrying the baby toward the far back end of the pond. I had to swim all the way over there to reach them now.

I got to the group of people. It may now have been all women. They were all talking with each other in cooing voices. I tried to be a part of whatever they were doing. But I couldn't see the baby anywhere.

I may have seen somebody carry the baby, now wrapped in swaddling cloths, over the edge of the pond. The pond was bordered by a ledge of flat, grey stone. I clumsily hoisted myself, in my wet clothes, onto the ledge. Beyond the ledge there was a slight drop down to some bare, dusty soil. I jumped.

When I landed, I was reminded of my backpack. I thought of how wet it must be. Then I remembered that my computer was in my backpack! It must be soaked right through!

I walked around the right side of the pond, heading back toward the house and the spot where I'd jumped into the water. I was trying to convince myself that my computer really wasn't soaked all the way through. I'd had it in its case after all, right? But I knew that was a lousy argument. The case wasn't waterproof. I knew I'd have to test it.

I got back up to the edge of the pond, then I turned around and walked back toward the back end, but up on the ledge instead of down in the dirt area.

I may have encountered my old friend K or my mom. I explained my problem with my computer. K/my mom asked me why I jumped in the pond with my backpack on. I replied that seeing the baby was so important that I didn't care what I was wearing.

I now had my computer sat on the ledge, opened, and turned on. I said, "See? It doesn't work. I'm just getting this one program you always get when your computer doesn't work. It's like a sign from the company that your computer is broke."

The program was some yellow and green colored video game that reminded me of an Atari 2600 video game.

My view may have changed to a dark office, where I was all alone.

Dream #2

I was in my great-grandmother's house. I sat near the front door. I sat on one of my great-grandmother's stools and ate some kind of sandwich.

I was probably by myself in the house, waiting for other people to arrive. The lights in the house were all on, and it was warm.

Some of my family had gone to the hospital with my great-grandma. She may now have been dead. Regardless of that, the doctors had done a bad job on her.

I recalled one particular statement made by a doctor. My great-grandmother had had something like a stroke. The doctor said that my great-grandma's brain would heal itself, so that there was so need for treatment.

I laughed to myself, thinking that they all should have realized there was a lot more damage than they'd thought, and that my great-grandma had actually needed a lot more help, especially since she was so old.

I tried to remember something about what the doctor had said. It had something to do with the electrical patterns in the brain, how they travelled in circles. I could feel the electricity in my brain, travelling counter-clockwise in my skull.

I remembered that the doctor said that if you have an electrical anomaly, such as a minor stroke, you could often wait for the electricity to come back around and reset the messed up part of your brain.

Now I had an electrical anomaly in my brain. I was having trouble speaking, as if my tongue were way too thick for me to talk with. I wondered if my mouth were just too full of food. In panic I pulled whole chunks of tomato out of my mouth. They looked like the upper palates, like for braces.

I tried to speak again, but my tongue still wasn't getting words out. I was pacing around the house, in a bit of panic. I convinced myself that it would just take time for my tongue to heal.

Just then my sister and great-grandmother walked in the door. I knew I couldn't speak, so I just kept quiet, trying to show by my facial expression how happy I was to see my great-grandmother.

My sister sat me and my great-grandma down on a red, plasticky couch (very unlike the couch my great-grandma had). My great-grandma seemed to be a lot livelier than she'd been in a long time. But I still was unable to speak!

My great-grandma (wearing a grey, tweed coat) said to me, "Aren't you going to say anything? Here I've come all this way to say hello. Aren't you going to be grateful and talk with me?"

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 morning everybody. I remember one dream from last night. It feels a little fragmented.

I was at my great-grandmother's house. The house was lit by grey daylight coming through the windows. My great-grandma was either close to dying or else she had just died (although in waking life she died about a year ago). A lot of the family was at her house.

I had been wearing a red flannel jacket, which reminded me of a red flannel jacket my great-grandma wore. But I had taken it off.

Some people, probably including my mom and sister, had started doing the laundry. They might have started doing everybody's laundry, because we had been at my great-grandma's house for so long.

Now my sister had a red flannel jacket. She was looking all over the house for it, but she couldn't find it. Some other family members, probably including me, were trying to help her find the jacket. My sister was probably also blaming other people in the house for having taken the jacket. They knew how much it meant to her, because it either was or was like the jacket my great-grandma always wore.

At some point, I was laying on my stomach on the floor in the living room. Before me, just to the left (my left) of the TV, was a laundry basket full of clothes. The basket was full of all kinds of random clothes, including either a bride's gown or a bridesmaid's gown. I could tell the clothes were still dirty. It was like my mom and sister had planned to do laundry but then just left the job.

I could see a red flannel jacket or sweater at the bottom of the basket, under all the dirty clothes. I knew it was mine. At last I'd found it! So I took it and put it on.

I was now walking through a store that feels now to me like a mix between a grocery store and the perfume department at Macy's. It may have been night. There were other people in the store.

I walked around in the red flannel jacket. I wondered if it was good to wear a jacket that had been sitting at the bottom of a basket of dirty clothes, some of which had been quite smelly.

I reached my hand into one of the pockets. I pulled out an eyeglass lens, probably for the right eye. The lens was big, for really big, old eyeglass frames. I knew it was a lens for one of my great-grandmother's eyeglass frames.

I now remembered, as if it had happened in some earlier part of the dream, how one of the lenses had popped out of my great-grandma's glasses, and how my sister had been panicked looking for the lens.

As I walked through the grocery store I thought how it was only natural that the lens would end up in the jacket pocket. After all, the lens must have popped off near the jacket. Then the jacket had been buried in the laundry basket where nobody could find it.

Dream #1

I was in a big house. The house was set up so that it stretched along narrowly. I don't know where any of the rooms were, The place just seemed like one big corridor.

The house was dim, with perhaps only one light in the place, and that a dullish, watery fluorescent light.

I had left my bookbag on the floor, probably strewn with a lot of other stuff that wasn't mine, like blankets. I now came back to my bookbag to discover that my laptop was missing from it.

There were a bunch of kids in the house. They were all pre-teens, maybe not even 10 years old. I don't think I ever actually saw them. But I was pretty sure they had stolen my computer.

I ran all through the house in panic. I was looking for my mom, who was apparently in charge of the kids or who had done something like take them into her house out of kindness. I figured my mom could make the kids give me my computer back.

But I was also looking through some other backpacks that were lying on the floor, strewn in with a bunch of other stuff, like blankets. I thought I might just find my laptop and take it back.

I was really angry now. I was running at an unbelievable speed. I could tell it was lightning and thundering outside.

I wondered what would happen if I beat up the little kids. But I figured it would be no use. I wouldn't get my laptop back through violence.

I also wondered if there were some kind of buzzer device on it, like for car keys, where you can press a button and make your laptop buzz until you locate it. Or a device where you could track where your laptop was through GPS to catch the people who stole it. But I knew I hadn't gotten any features like that.

I ran through a bunch of junk and overturned furniture. I was now back at the front of the house. I was in a little, dark area near the front door.

Near me, my mom's ex-boyfriend J was working at a desk underneath a half-toppled mattress. He told me he understood my frustration.

I may have been standing on another mattress or between a could of half-standing mattresses. I said, "It's not the expense of the computer so much as--" I started shouting, "I had all my writing on that thing! How am I supposed to get all my writing back?!"

Dream #2

I was walking along a sidewalk at night. The sky was dark blue. I felt like I was in some country area, but I must have been in a big city, because there were lights around me like on a big, Fifth Avenue building.

I walked up to a huge SUV limo from behind. I then walked alongside its driver's side. The SUV limo had a light brown or dark beige color, with glitter-like flecks in it. Its windows looked weird: slim, long, and completely black and seamless. The SUV also seemed to have no doors.

I felt nervous all of the sudden. I had a feeling that some law or authority figure was going to try to get me in trouble for being near the SUV.

But I also had a feeling that I was here for a meeting, and that some high-up work associates of mine were in or near this SUV.

I was now with one of these associates, whom I could not see (I also have no idea who it would be). We walked back toward the back of the SUV.

As we did, one of the windows opened, revealing my old boss and friend E inside. I said, in a happy, "cool dude" kind of voice, "Hey! E!" I immediately felt I shouldn't have been so easygoing, that I should have shown him some respect, because he was so rich now.

My work-associate and I were now both standing before something I can't quite get, logistically. It was like the side of the SUV, but it was also like the inside of a building.

E was inside. He pointed out a couple of small, cubby-hole-looking things. He said these were rooms. One was for him, and one was for his wife (who sat in an SUV seat, only a couple feet away from E).

E then displayed a chest full of amenities he had been given by this "hotel." The chest looked like an entire drug store. There was so much stuff. But E seemed to be singling out only two trial-size tubes of toothpaste. I also seemed to be impressed that this "hotel" would give you trial-size tubes of toothpaste.

(Something happened in the dream before this "beginning," but I can't remember it.)

I was sitting in the living room of "my mom's house." My mom may just have moved into this house. There were packed boxes all over. I'm pretty sure that I had come from out of town to visit my mom.

The house had a yellowy light in it, like afternoon or morning light. The house was pretty big. It had at least two stories, the ground floor connected to the second floor by a long, narrow stairwell.

My mom may have sat on a couch while I sat on the floor, surrounded by boxes. My mom and I were talking about something, some kind of abstract discussion that eventually wound around to a book of mine.

The book, I saw in my mind's eye, was a tall, wide, thin, hardcover picture book. The cover was all black except for the title and a photo of some brightly colored life-form, either an exotic plant or a deep-sea creature.

My mom may have implied somehow that she would like to see the book. But I felt like the book was in one of the boxes, and that it would be pretty hard for me to find.

My mom was gone. I "went out to the truck" (I'm pretty sure I didn't actually do this, but kind of "told myself" I had done it), where the book had been somewhere like the floor of the front seat. I was now in the living room with the book in my arms.

I put the book into a slot in a series of vertical steel-rod separators in a drawer of a short filing cabinet, which may have been part of something like an entertainment center.

I thought, My mom wanted the book. I didn't think I could give it to her. But now she'll have it. But I won't make a big deal about it, because I don't want her to feel like she needs to thank me for having gone out of my way to find it.

I walked out of the living room. I went into a couple different rooms on the ground floor and on the second floor. All the rooms were full of stuff, but they didn't feel moved-into. It was like everything still needed to be unpacked.

The rooms were all bathed in warm light and had a summery, breezy feel. But there was also a really eerie feeling. I noticed after a while that some of the windows seemed to have been opened, and that bedsheet-like curtains were billowing in the breeze.

I was certain someone had illicitly entered the house. I got panicked. I ran down the stairs and found my mom. My mindset was now like I was living in the house with my mom, possibly like I had been living there with her for a while.

I may have scolded my mom for something or other, like not being vigilant enough about keeping the house safe.

I was pretty sure the person was still inside the house. So I decided to explore the rooms and try to find the person. But as I started searching, I got really afraid.

(I can't say whether I got so afraid that I woke up or whether I woke up because my alarm went off. I had unintentionally set my alarm last night, and I woke as soon as it went off. But I am also very certain that I was so afraid, in my dream, as I went searching through the house, that I might have woken up out of fear pretty soon anyway.)

I had a number of dreams, but they're mostly so fragmented I can't remember them. This is the only dream I remember.

I was in my great-grandmother's house, probably with my mom and my sister. My great-grandmother had passed away a while back (like in waking life), and the house was empty. But I think my mom, my sister, and I were going to throw a party for our whole family in the house, like my great-grandmother used to do.

I walked into the kitchen. I may have had the feeling that I didn't belong in the house for some reason.

Now my great-grandma appeared. She may have risen up through the floor, or she may just have suddenly appeared before me. She stood really close, between me and the kitchen counter. She was even shorter than she had been while she was alive.

She may have told me something. But I can't remember what it was. She may have seemed a little agitated or annoyed.