maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was really late at night. I was walking out on a sidewalk in front of the building where my old job was. I noticed that there was a karaoke bar similar to the one I regularly go to. I was kind of surprised to see a second bar like this, so I went in to check it out.

There was a small, narrow staircase leading down into the bar. The bar was also small and narrow, very dark. There were a few young, white men sitting at the bar. They looked kind of miserable, a little scraggly and unkempt. The bartenders were all Indian, and they all wore headdresses.

I looked for the karaoke song books. I found a couple laying around. At some point, I looked at a menu and ordered food -- home fries and cucumbers. I didn't really feel like singing. The place was so dark and cheerless. I looked around, but I couldn't seem to find any screens for singing.

I finally saw a television screen. A news program was playing on it. A mass grave had been found somewhere. Some group like the al Qaeda had murdered a bunch of people, possibly Jewish people. They had buried each person in a specific square and then put some sort of statement in the square of soil over each person.

The news report may have said that the statements were Jewish or written in Hebrew or the language of the victim. In this way, it almost seemed like the statement was a statement of solidarity with the victim, as if the people had been part of some kind of voluntary death. This was confusing to me.

I then got a closer look at the grave -- still on the television screen. Some squares of soil were undug, revealing people's bodies, which weren't decayed at all, so that it looked like the people had only recently died. Other squares were still untouched. I saw the writing on the soil. A lot of the writing was actually ancient Egyptian. I couldn't figure out why al Qaeda would use ancient Egyptian.

A young man, apparently of the family of the people running this bar, was sitting behind the bar or at the end of the bar. He was dressed in a modern fashion. His skin was pale, and his tightly curly hair was cut short. He may have had green eyes.

The man turned around and looked past me, into the kitchen, which was bright with fluorescent light (and which may have been the only source of light in the bar). The man spoke to one of the older men, saying something to the effect of, "Well, that's what (whatever race it was) gets. They deserved it."

I felt like, when the man was saying that, he was also saying something about me. I felt like the men didn't like me because I appeared to be of whatever race it was that they didn't like. I figured I'd just get my food and go.

The young man took my money and handed me a small, white bag (paper or plastic or some kind of papery plastic?). There was, I could tell, a very small, clear, plastic box inside of it. I thought I'd ordered a decent amount of food. And I thought I'd paid a good amount for the amount of food I thought I'd ordered.

The young man was already talking more with the older men and making it clear that he was going to ignore me for the rest of the time I was there. I opened the bag to see if I'd actually gotten what I'd ordered. I saw a little bit of home fries and a little bit of cucumbers in the small, plastic box. I figured that was fine, and that I'd take it. I didn't feel like arguing with the men to get more food.

I walked toward the exit. As I passed something that looked like a tiered display for desserts, but which held karaoke books, I thought that I would say something out loud like, "Yeah, I really like this place, but I'll come back at another time. I just wanted to check it out and see if it was good." It was like I thought the men actually cared whether I liked this place and like they actually wanted my business.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was at "my office," sitting at a cubicle. The office was kind of empty of people. Down a short hallway was a reception area. One of my co-workers, D, was talking with a female co-worker, M, about some new procedure everybody had to go through at work to keep their jobs. You had to talk with some higher-up person about your qualifications, but you had to do so through stories that proved you'd done all kinds of special things and that you were really passionate about your work.

As D explained this to M, he walked into the area where I was. He was still talking with M, though she wasn't around. He wanted to use me as an example of how this new interview would take place. He asked me a question. I began to answer. D walked over to a desk where a woman was sitting. A black boy in a yellow sweater and white button-up shirt came in and sat by the woman.

I was droning on about my school and work history, wondering if this was any different from just giving my resume. But suddenly I was talking with M. We were talking about business in general, making jokes, and so forth. We were now in my room. She lay down on her back on my bed. I lay next to her on my stomach.

As we continued talking matter-of-factly, M grabbed my right hand and lay it between her legs. She then may have moved it to rest on her belly, just above her crotch. I nowbrealized she was naked. I moved my hands down to feel her more. But as soon as I did, I stopped. I couldn't do this. M really isn't my type, I thought. Plus, she's married.

I sat up. M stayed laying down. There were two white guys in my room. My room was dim, too, as if only a small light shone from a low corner of the room. One of the guys sat on the bed between me and M. He wore a blue top like the SNSD girls wear for the Oh! video and a long, white denim skirt. He flung his head back and reclined seductively, as if I were going to have sex with him.

I stood up and walked over to my table. I looked at my right arm and saw that I had some small, hard, white substance jutting out of it. It was like a piece of pummice was growing out of my arm. I flexed my muscle to push it out. Then I pulled it the rest of the way out. It wasn't very big, maybe 1cm long.

Dream #2

I had a really long hair on my face, below my lower lip. I tried to pull it out, but I think it kept slipping out of my hands.

Dream #3

A black and white photo. A woman supplicating before another woman dressed as a nun. The nun's headdress cast enough shadow around her so that it took me a while to realize that the nun had no head, only a stub of a neck.

I knew that people came and prayed to this headless woman as if she were a saint, capable of performing miracles. She seemed to be alive. But for some reason I wondered whether this woman were actually dead.

I thought it might be possible that this was all some game put on by drug dealers in Mexico. They could, I thought, have beheaded the woman and then sat her up to look alive in this square to trick gullible religious people.

Dream #4

I was on some balcony or mezzanine in a big building. It was daytime, and the building was filled with a bright, gentle, natural light. But the mezzanine may have been in disarray, with broken pieces of the building lying all about.

There may have been one dead one woman lying on the ground. Another woman was screaming in fear. A man dressed in a brown uniform like a UPS uniform attacked the woman. He picked her up and was carrying her toward a doorway. The woman fought as the man carried her through the doorway. She may even have clung to the doorjamb.

I knew that if the man got the woman into the room alone, he'd kill her. Even worse, he'd terrorize her while he killed her. I was afraid, and I felt pretty weak, but I knew I had to do whatever I could to stop the man.

I ran up to the man, still wrestling the woman past the doorjamb. I managed, after a kind of pathetic struggle, to separate the woman from the man. For some reason the man ran away through a sliding glass door at the other end of the room.

The room was completely empty. I lay the woman down on the floor. She had been stricken in some way by the man and was near death. I knew I was near death, too. I figured I'd just lay beside the woman to die, too.

But I knew that if the man came backb when the woman and I were too weak to fight, he'd terrorize us until we died, which would be a horrible way to die. So before I lay down I closed and locked the front door. I then pulled the curtains over the sliding glass door and locked the sliding glass door.

I was heading over to lay down beside the woman to die. I was having a conversation in my head with some woman about the meaning of life and death. I started floating up into the air. I then began descending into a weird structure like a futuristic, silvery car with dark black windows. The structure also looked like the huge server in the anime Summer Wars.

I was now in some room that looked like a bar or restaurant that had gone out of business mixed with a living room. A decent amount of natural light came in through the windows. The place was full of boxes. I was here with a female friend. A tallish, gentle-looking, bald white man in a black shirt and pants stood behind the bar.

I sat at the bar, between a couple messy stacks of boxes. The man handed me two plates or rice. The rice had green vegetables in it and was covered in some yellowy-brown sauce, possibly curry.

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.