maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was walking up the stairs in a fire escape stairwell in an office building. The walls were white and the light was either incandescent or a warm-feeling fluorescent. There may have been one or two people ahead of me, guiding me. One may have been a pretty, young woman.

I was told something about the office where I was being taken. It had something to do with the difference between this place and my old office. I felt like probably nobody would even know me here.

The door opened to the office floor. Colorful Christmas lights were glaring somewhere at the periphery of my vision. The two people guiding me either disappeared or walked really far away into the office.

I was by myself in a corner of the office. It felt kind of like an elevator bank. But it was open to the rest of the office. I wasn't even sure why I was supposed to be in this office in the first place.

A young man came up to greet me. I knew him! (I don't think I really know him IWL.) I was so relieved to know somebody.

But the man didn't quite want to acknowledge that he recognized me, as well. Some people didn't like me, and the man didn't want to be seen by them as liking me. So he just treated me politely, but indifferently, like he'd treat anybody who came into the office.

The man may have told me that my old boss would be here to meet with me momentarily. In the meantime, the man said, I could visit the museum on this floor. The man walked me to the wall behind me -- the wall with the doorway to the stairwell.

Off to the left of the doorway was something that looked like a display. It was about the size of an animal display diorama in a museum.

The "display" was of something like a space station. It looked fake, like one solid, plastic piece -- almost like a Star Wars toy! But some part of it, I knew, opened like a door. From there, you would walk into the museum. The museum would, I think, be about the size of a hallway, or the size of one exhibit room in a large museum.

Off to the left of this "museum" was a long hallway. On the right wall of the hallway, from the waist up, were windows letting in a lot of yellow-white sunlight. The floor of the hallway was blue.

I was now in "my apartment," which was rather large. The living area, which may have included the dining area, was three or four rooms long, with all the rooms opening into each other, only distinguished from another by the varying widths of their rectangles.

The place was empty of furntiture. But there was stuff everywhere on the floor. Nothing was cluttered, and maybe everything had some kind of order. But it mostly felt like I just had all the stuff I liked just laying around everywhere.

I'm not sure, but at this point, I think I looked like Lance Loud, from An American Family.



(In this photo, Lance is standing, to the far right. The mother, Pat, is seated, in the center.)

I had my phone to my ear, and maybe I was waiting for someone to pick up on the other end. I was looking down to the floor as I stepped over all the stuff I had laying around on the floor.

I think I walked over some vinyl records, in their sleeves, and over a really old cassette tape player, the cassettes for which were bigger than eight-track tape cassettes.

I probably started thinking about music. I thought of something that I really wanted to hear. I was going to play it. The music may now already have been playing. I still had the phone to my ear.

But suddenly I realized -- I'm almost all out of money! It's totally wrong for me to stay in this place with no money. I can't sit here listening to music. I need to get all my stuff reduced and organized, so I can get the hell out of here!

I may now have started putting together a plan for how to throw out a bunch of useless papers I didn't need, so I'd have less stuff to take with me once I left this place.

I was now in a house which was supposed to be the Loud family house. At this point I definitely looked like Lance Loud. The house had two stories. I was up on the second floor, in a bedroom which had been converted into an office.

I wasn't a member of the family. I was like a friend of some member of the family. But I had also been doing some kind of work for them. I had had tough times, and I needed to stay at their house. I think I had been staying at the house a couple of days, but now I was getting ready to leave.

Pat, the mom from An American Family, came into the room. I was reclined -- somehow -- either against an office chair and some small filing cabinets, or on a bed.

Pat sat down on something and told me that she knew I was planning on leaving the house. But she said she didn't think I actually had enough money yet to go out on my own. She said she was going to talk with the rest of the family about seeing whether I couldn't stay here a little while longer.

Pat stood up and left. I looked through the doorway. There was a short, balcony-like hallway, with the stairs on the end closer to me. Again, I'm pretty sure I saw the colorful glare of Christmas lights somewhere.

I was kind of relieved that Pat had asked me to stay. But I knew that I couldn't accept the offer, anyway. I didn't want any of the manlier men in the family to think I was just being a waste by sticking around here. I knew that if Pat made a good case for me, none of the men would say anything to my face. But I'd always have to deal with them showing me how they felt in other ways.

I figured that what I would do, then, if Pat got the okay for me to stay, was just act like I was going to stay here, after all. Then, when nobody was looking, probably when everybody was gone from the house or asleep at night, I'd just pack up all my stuff and sneak out, leaving a letter saying why I'd gone.

Dream #2

I was walking down the hallway of some movie theatre. I was in a huge line either for tickets or to get into the theatre itself. The wall to my left was just a plain, beige-colored wall, possibly with some kind of wallpaper that looked like thickly-threaded linen.

To my right was a wall that occasionally had narrow, tall windows, letting in the grey light of late afternoon. There were also occasional arcade games positioned along this wall. And somewhere there was a feeling of faint, flashing, multi-colored lights.

There were a couple of people, probably a man and a woman, directly ahead of me, talking about a movie. The woman was doing most of the talking, and she sounded kind of arrogant and pretentious.

Apparently the film the woman was talking about was a short film. The woman was speaking about the director of the film. The director may also have been a character in the film -- a comic kind of character who, even though he wasn't the main character, was supposed to "steal the show."

I may have had an image of this guy in my head. He may have been a white guy, kind of rich-looking, wearing a really garish, multi-colored tuxedo, and a hat that looked either like a wizard's hat or a dunce cap, which was also multi-colored.

I then looked off to my right, to a part of the right wall of the hallway that bent diagonally toward us, making the hallway narrower. On the sloping part of the wall was a poster for the movie the woman had just been talking about. The man was on the front, in his costume. He may have been waist-deep in popcorn.

I realized that the film wasn't a short film. It was feature-length. And it was the film we were all heading in to see (or buying tickets for?) right now.

I had been telling myself that I really didn't want to see the movie. I really didn't like the director. But now that I'd seen the poster, and now that I realized the movie was feature-length, I decided that I actually would like to see it.

Good morning, everybody.

My nighttime discipline has been terrible lately! Last night, I spent too long watching the Girls' Generation "Visual Dreams" video and some anime stuff on YouTube. It wrecked my dream recall.

One thing before I do the dreams. At the Japan Society in NYC a series is currently running showcasing the work of the director Sabu.

On Wednesday I watched Sabu's film Monday. The plot of the story revolves around a businessman who wakes up after having been drunk for two days. He slowly recalls all the things he did while he was drunk.

The story reminds me of waking up and looking back on a dream. But at a certain moment the main character takes charge over his actions. At this moment, the "dream" stories become more like lucid dreams.

There aren't any extreme special effects. But I think the film, in itself, is very good. And I think it's also good as a metaphor for the dreaming and lucid dreaming processes.

Anyhow, I want to suggest that anybody in or near NYC go to the Japan Society to check out some of Sabu's films. Sabu is there to introduce each film and do a Q&A. So that's also incredible.

Dream #1

I was in my great-grandmother's backyard on a sunny day. My great-grandmother was still alive. My family may have been near me somewhere. My great-grandma was talking to me, possibly standing very close to me, or possibly through some kind of telepathy.

I was now in my "great-grandma's basement." I stood before a bed that was covered in deep blue sheets. My great-grandma told me something about my great-grandfather. I got the feeling that this may have been the bed my great-grandfather had died in.

My great-grandma now told me that I had to lay in the bed. It was as if I was going to be in town for a while, and that I would have to stay at this house while I was here. So I'd be using this bed.

The bed was now different. The previous bed didn't have any headboard. But this bed had a very fancy headboard of nice wood. The bed also had blankets. In fact, the bedding appeared to be a very nice, homemade quilt with mint-green squares alternating with white squares with pink flower (?) designs on them.

I was a little afraid to lay in the bed. I felt like it had been empty for so long that maybe bedbugs had started to live inside of it. I thought I would check the bed for bugs. But I knew my great-grandmother was somewhere around me. I didn't want to check the bed in front of her and offend her by implying that she had neglected the bed.

Dream #2

I was in some museum or art gallery. I was in a room, possibly laying face down on a cushioned bench that was backed up against a wall. My head kind of hung down over one end of the bench. This specific room was spacious but small, kind of dimly lit, with white walls and possibly some thin carpet.

There had been some big art exhibit opening. The opening included some kind of presentation by the artist, a woman who kind of looked like Laurel Nakadate. Now everybody was milling around or leaving. Most of the people looked like somewhat wealthy business people.

The artist woman leaned against the wall near the bench on which I lay. I was playing with some device like an iPhone. All the icons on the phone were squares with a swirly pattern of pinks, browns, and oranges. I was scanning through a number of different icons.

The artist said something to me like, "I could never figure out how those things worked. You seem to know it pretty well. You must be smart."

I figured from this that the artist couldn't afford to own an iPhone. I let her look at mine, so she could figure out how to use it. But as soon as I handed it over, I felt a little bit of anxiety. I knew I had a lot of really wacky porn sites still up on my internet. I hoped that she wouldn't look through my internet history.

The artist, did, however, end up scrolling through my internet history. As the artist continued using the phone, the phone became something like a sit-down driving game like you would see in an arcade. The artist was sitting inside the game, scrolling through my internet history, which was a black screen, with old, pixellated, dim-white lettering. The room also became dim, like an arcade.

The artist, thankfully, kept scrolling down to sections full of internet searches I'd apparently done for really fancy recipes. Also, there seemed to be some sections where I'd taken pictures of these fancy dishes I made.

The artist may have made some comment about how nice it was that a guy actually put effort into making all these delicious meals. That comment made me even more afraid of the artist finding the porn sites.

I thought that maybe I'd get lucky and that the artist might not happen upon any of the porn sites that I'd looked at on my phone. But she eventually did. The porn sites in question were apparently of me, all by myself, on my bed, masturbating or dressed in women's underwear.

At some point the arcade game version of my phone became my phone again, although at certain times the views were coming straight into my head, as if I were just imagining them all. The artist was gone, although I may have heard her talking to me, as if I were hearing the conversation telepathically or through "memory-phone."

I now stood before a bed in an almost completely dark room. I may have thrown the phone on my bed. I still had the weird photos of me running through my head. Eventually I got on the bed, standing on my knees.

(Side notes: Dream #2 implies that I look for porn and fancy recipes on the web. This is wrong. I don't look for fancy recipes. But I probably should, because I think cooking is really cool.)