maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was walking out on a sidewalk, near the top of a hill. It was daytime, and the sun was bright. I was walking past the stone gates of some kind of professional center. The gates had an arched entranceway.

One of my old friends, PD, walked out from the gates. PD was apparently dressed as a business professional. But she looked kind of horrible. She wore a grey skirt and a green blazer, with a white blouse that had some kind of old-style bow-tie on the front of it. Everything looked like it was from the 1970s.

PD's hair was also weird. It didn't look quite real. It was curly or crimpy. It looked wet, like after a shower, when a person's hair looks damp and a bit disarranged. But it also looked dry and dead, like the stringy hair of an animal that had been laying on the road for a while.

PD's face looked about the same, except that she may have had a tan, and that her face may have been a bit worn with age.

I called out to PD, kind of gently, since we were so close, and I was so awe-stricken at seeing her. PD said, "What makes you think you can just come up and talk to me after all this time? I don't want to see you anymore."

PD either got onto a bus or got into a white SUV, driven by some rich guy who had been waiting for her. I respected PD's desire not to speak to me.

I walked down the hill and found myself under a bridge, like a bridge for a highway overpass. The sunlight curved down under the shade of the bridge, making a warm little quarter-circle of light in a small space.

Some kids may have been skateboarding in that space of light. One of the kids may have had a red and white skateboard, with a design almost like the Coca-Cola logo.

Dream #2

I was watching an old film. The main thing about this film was actually the music. Some great composer from the early twentieth century had made this music. The film may have been a documented performance to accompany the music.

But what the film was was living footage of an actual event. The footage was from one of the World Wars, possibly WWII. The scene was some torn out space of land. The upper right area looked like a trench or a foxhole. But the whole area before the foxhole was a blasted out cavity in the ground.

Two or three men sat slumped on the ledge of the trench and the blown out space. Behind the men was a bright light. Some thick cloud of gas spewed out from behind the men and into the blown out space.

The way the men were slumped against the trench and each other, it was obvious they were dead. I assumed that the gas clouds I was seeing were poison gas, and that the men had been killed by it. I assumed their deaths had been very painful.

At some point the music built up to an ominous crescendo. I was trying to figure out why the composer of this music wanted us to watch the actual deaths of soldiers on the battlefield while we listened to his music.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was with a couple of "friends." One of the friends looked like a person who has attended a lot of the anime events I've gone to IWL. He's white, kind of pale, tall, with jaw-length, brown hair and eyeglasses. This friend was organizing some kind of theatre event. He had gotten me and my other friend to volunteer.

We had first been discussing the details of this event in some bar. The bar hadn't seemed very well-lit, and it also seemed a bit empty. Then we were discussing the details out on some hilltop, out on the driveway of a house in a residential part of town, probably in the kind of early morning.

The theatre friend said, "We'll have a lot to do. We'll barely have time to go home and go to bed at 11 AM, before we have to wake up at 1 PM and do the second show."

As I realized how much work my other friend and I had volunteered for, I saw, probably in my mind's eye, dark grey clouds rolling overhead. I told the theatre friend, "I don't think we can do both shifts. At least my friend can't. We didn't realized we'd be going all the way through 11 AM. And we already signed up to volunteer at another event. Your second show will overlap with that event. At least my friend has to go to this event."

At this point the friend I was defending may have been my brother.

I was now in a small theatre. It was either before or after a show. The theatre was only half lit. The stage didn't have any light on it at all. The area felt like a cafeteria in an elementary school's basement. The walls may have been sea green. The seating area was made up of folding chairs. There were a good amount of people sitting in the chairs. Some people were also milling around in the empty space behind the seating area.

I sat near the back row of seats and near the aisle. So I turned myself around to look at the people milling around in the back area. Most of the people looked pretty normal. But there were a couple of older black women wearing very flashy, dressy outfits. They stood out from everybody else and seemed to demand being treated in a very special way. They each sat in chairs against the very back wall, at some distance from each other.

One of the women wore a turquoise dress and hat. The dress seemed almost to have been made out of a crepe material. The hat had a big, round, kind of floppy brim. My theatre friend immediately came up to the woman and started saying all kinds of nice things to her. But I could tell he was trying to get something out of her. So I telepathically told her to watch out for the man.

We were now watching a movie which was supposed to be Back to the Future. There were a few scenes, kind of randomly put together, which gave the feel that the movie was more about a group of kids working together to create a time machine than anything having to do with Doc Brown or Marty McFly.

One of the scenes showed Amy Irving, like she looked in the Brian DePalma version of Carrie. The view was of the girl's face, framed in a misty circle, looking up toward some kind of blue, moonlight, garden light and singing some kind of rock song. The girl's eyes glowed bright blue or green. I liked the girl's glowing eyes and the rock song a lot.

There were also a couple of scenes, apparently from the future, showing some kind of time travel bridge being built. The scenes were all in some kind of way overexposed, really pixellated video. The coloring was almost black and white. But it was more like the sky was all colored brownish-grey, while all the solid bodies were pure black silhouettes.

The bridge was somehow being built backwards. I watched (maybe through time lapse?), the "tracks" (?) of the bridge being built backwards through a frame of standing columns. It seemed to be in a mountain setting. I then watched a similar process near an ocean shore. This bridge had a sign over it, kind of in an old, Coca-Cola-esque style. It said something like "B-Way Bridge" or "B'Way Bridge."

I then woke up in my room. I stood up and looked down at the floor. Something seemed not quite right about my room. I walked really slow. I could hear my breathing rushing though my head, like I was wearing a space helmet.

Something seemed really weird about my floor, like it was made out of grey-painted concrete, especially where the floor met the wall. I then saw that my table was pushed away, at least 33cm away, from my wall. I thought it was possible that I could have pushed my table away from the wall. But not that far away.

I looked up and noticed that the walls in my room were now painted green. Some of the walls were a dark, pine green, while at least one of the walls was a slightly lighter shade.

I told myself, "Well, obviously I'm dreaming. My walls aren't green in waking life."

I figured since I was dreaming I would try to fly out of my house and out and around my neighborhood, to see what kind of views I could gather. But I must not have been totally lucid. I went flying toward my bedroom "window," which was actually a thick, ornate, wooden wall. This didn't seem to register with my "lucid" mind at all.

I was about to penetrate through the wall when something stopped me. A very polite woman's voice spoke to me through telepathy. It said, "We're sorry, but at this moment we cannot access the outdoor scene you would like to experience. Would you like to have a Gothic lucid dream instead?"

I said, "Oh, well, yeah, okay. That sounds nice." But I didn't want to have a Gothic lucid dream. I just wanted to go outside, into my neighborhood and gather data on the environment. I think I was thinking that I was having an out of body experience as well as a lucid dream, and I really wanted to gather some hard evidence of it. So I was disappointed that I couldn't get out there.

Dream #2

I stood inside a room, looking out to some area like a dock on a river. It was a nice, sunny day. The dock area was all a kind of beige-white concrete. A man was out working in front of two cars. The two cars themselves seemed to be junked. They also seemed to be wrapped up in coppery brown garbage bags, or in adhesive tape with the coppery brown color of VCR cassette tape.

The cars were parked one in front of the other. Either the hood of the front car was open, or else the windshield of the front car was completely missing. A huge object like a leather suitcase, possibly also all wrapped up in tape, was jutting out.

The suitcase-like object was open, revealing the snout and tip of the jaw of what appeared to be a gigantic lizard. Just given the size of the snout and jaw, the head of this creature must have been taking up the entire interior of this car! The jaw had leathery-looking, brown scales all over it.

I was now outside, near the cars, even though I could no longer see the dragon's head. I was with another man, but not the man who had been working outside while I had been inside. That man had been like a dock worker. This man was a wealthy business man. He was really tall and strong. He carried himself well. He wore a nice suit and a clean, beige overcoat.

I came to understand that the dragon had been killed. The cars were used as containers for transporting the dragon's body. Nobody had thought dragons existed. But this dragon had been discovered by accident. Possibly it had emerged from the sea.

Luckily the dragon had been killed before it could kill anybody. But people were (or I was?) worried that there were a lot more of these dragons, and that it wouldn't be so easy to kill them every time they posed a threat.

I told the man that this whole thing seemed to have been foreseen in a science fiction book written by a Russian man. I tried to tell the man the author's name. It was something like Gogol or Sergei. Finally I settled on one of the author's names, possibly his first name, being Selkei.

I saw a view of the book I'd bought (which seemed to have the name Selkei as the second name). The book was paperback. The cover was kind of glossy. There were a lot of swirly, black and white stripes all over the front cover and on the first few pages of the book.

The author was apparently either from the early twentieth century, like from the 1920s, or else his life was so impoverished in the late twentieth century that it was like he lived during the 1920s. But his sci-fi writings had a lot of subversive political content, and a lot of it seeemed to have been really prescient.

The man with me may now have been closer to me. We were still out on the dock -- or out on some shore cliff -- but we stood behind some kind of screen-like display, like a big text display at a museum. The man told me, "You just go into places, like bookstores and libraries, and you seek out these guys, don't you? You don't know who they are. But you know what you're looking for. And you find them.

"But people think, when they see you with all this stuff, that you've stolen it somehow. They don't understand the work you've made to discover it. They just think you've stolen it all.

"This book, for instance --" The man and I turned toward some kind of black, basalt cliffside as the man opened up a wide, short book full of pages that looked like coloring book bages. The pages were all colored in. They had drawings on them reminiscent of Henry Darger. But they were apparently supposed to have been by William Blake.

One drawing showed a little girl, colored pale peach and in a pale yellow dress, against a maroon-colored hillside. The drawing looked kind of crude, and the girl seemed very lonely, especially in the context of a Darger-like drawing such as this.

Good morning, everybody.

Dragon #1

It was black night. I was walking to a cafe, probably because I thought I was going to meet some friends there, in particular my old friend ML. I may actually have known ML was going to be at the cafe, though he hadn't invited me. I may have decided to show up at the cafe, in spite of his not inviting me, just so he'd know I knew.

I was in some small shopping plaza, possibly at the edge of a smallish residential area in a suburban town. The shopping plaza was three stories tall. It was a series of buildings, kind of like office buildings. The shops were all connected to each other by outdoor balconies. I stood between the buildings in a big, concrte courtyard. I felt like the cafe was in the basement level of one of these buildings.

I may then have been out by a bridge, somewhere near the banks of a river. I was working on some kind of box, like an electrical box attached to some kind of short, stout, concrete pole. The "box" may have been something more like a simple switch. The switch may have been in decent condition, but the metal base around the switch may have been really rusty. I may have heard some weird, whistling sound, which may have frightened me.

I was in some room, probably with three other people. The room we were in felt a little like a living room. But the room was so big and empty and cold-feeling that it seemed more like some kind of business room. There was a huge window-wall looking out on the black night.

One of the three other people was an older man, probably dressed nicely. He was like a boss to the rest of us. Another was a woman, about my age (early 30s), dressed like a business woman. The third person was probably a man.

The boss told us something we should get started working on. But he told us, as he seemed to be leaving the room, that we should avoid going down to the bridge. The man now seemed to be touching a glass case, trying to get an electric reaction out of something else in the case.

The man told us that certain monitoring equipment was picking up a strange noise down there. The noise, the man told us (although I heard it at the same time) was like a phone picking up, with a conversation way in the distance. But the noise would soon turn to a shrill buzzing. This kind of noise indicated ghost activity, though I don't think the man said this directly.

I suddenly remembered my own experience near the bridge. I didn't tell the man about it. Instead, I tried to question the man more on the characteristics of the sound. I got a little more info from the man.

The person who had had the ghost experience was now a woman. After hearing the info regarding the ghost bridge, the woman seemed to have become distracted and dazed. The man had told the other people to keep the woman from going to the bridge. But the woman was definitely going to try to go back.

At first it seemed like the people were all staying in different cabins in some kind of wildnerness area. The woman snuck away from her cabin without anybody noticing. She was running down through a well-manicured but large garden area and down to the bridge. She wore a Victorian-style dress, probably white on top and pale, sea-blue on the skirt. She also had red hair, done up and back in a round, Victorian style.

Now it was like all the people were staying in one big mansion. But the woman had escaped the mansion. She was riding a bike on a garden path between two rows of very tall, euonymus-type shrubs. At one point, she turned a corner. As soon as she turned the corner, a man, also dressed in Victorian clothing, stood up and began pursuing the woman.

The man knew what path the woman was taking. He also knew paths he could take as shortcuts, so that he could cut the woman off, even though she was on a bike and he was on foot. There was water somewhere, coming from something like a fountain or a lawn sprinkler.

The woman was riding through a section of path with the hedges so thick on either side that she couldn't see anything else. Suddenly the man grabbed the woman from behind. He pulled her off her bike, spun her around, and embraced her. The man acted like he was in love with the woman -- maybe he was. The woman and the man embraced and kissed.

The man and woman were now in a bedroom. But now the man was a woman. The two women were kissing, and it looked like they were going to end up in bed together. But the first woman broke free of the second woman. She took on a dazed kind of attitude again and said that she had to go away. It was pretty obvious that she was going to try togo to the ghost bridge, though she may not have said it.

The second woman lay down in bed. She was partly frustrated that she hadn't gotten to have sex with the first woman. But she was also frustrated that she hadn't been able to keep the woman from trying to go back to the ghost bridge.

The second woman now pulled a hood over her head. (The second woman also had red hair, though her hair was darker than the first woman's hair.) The woman wore a pale sea-blue nightgown. The hood was a part of the gown. But it was a wizard's hood. The woman said something like, "We'll see about that girl! She thinks she can just go like that when she's been kept from the place. I'll pay her back for acting that way."

The second woman lay her head on her pillow. It looked like she was going to fall asleep. But I felt like she was going to try and perform some kind of magic action against the first woman.

I now sat in a cafe, which was more like a waiting area in some place like a college or a hospital. It was like the ghost bridge incidents had been from a movie I'd been watching, and that I had just now been deep in a reverie regarding the memories of that movie. I had also remembered some background tune from the movie, and I was humming it to myself.

I sat on the arm of an orange, thickly cushioned chair. I was looking out a big window, to some lawny area like in a city park. It was daytime, and the light was bright grey outside. A skinny, young, black man sat at a picnic bench near the window. I knew the man was following me. He couldn't come into the cafe for some reason or another. So he had to wait outside for me.

I was kind of sick of being followed around by this guy, and I was wishing there was some way I could stop him. But I also seemed to be really preoccupied with the imagery of the ghost bridge "movie."

Somebody else in the "cafe" started brashly humming a terribly out of key tune. It suddenly drew attention to the fact that I was still humming the background music from the ghost bridge "movie." I stopped huming as soon as I realized that I'd been humming loud enough for other people to hear.

I sat there silently, still staring out the window, though I couldn't see out the window very well anymore. My focus was more on the man, who kept humming horribly out of key.

I looked to my left, to the man, who sat in a chair, reading a newspaper. The man was old, from some Latin-European country, I guessed. He wore an orange polo shirt. He was short, and he was good looking, but he also looked kind of mean and rude. Another old man was sitting at the end of a couch, directly to the first old man's right. This man was a little taller, pale skinned, a little overweight, and bald.

I looked away from the old men. I figured that now that I'd stopped humming, the man would also stop humming. But he only began to hum even louder! I was like he was trying to annoy me, rather than trying to say anything about how I'd been humming too loud. I was getting kind of mad, because the guy just kept humming louder and louder and more and more off key.

But, finally, the second old man said, "Look! You don't like it when people do things like that? Then don't do those kinds of things yourself!"

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was walking along either a sidewalk or a concrete walkway on a bridge at night. The night was really clear, and the sky was blue with moonlight.

A group of girls walked behind me. I don't think I ever saw them clearly. But I had the impression they were all blonde and pretty. I feel like they might have been dressed up in business clothes. But they also might have been in casual jeans, shirts, and jackets.

The girls were all talking about a specific person's love life. They seemed to be trying to get a guy and a girl to hook up with each other. But they were talking about one of the person having too many issues and messing things up. I don't really know if they were talking about the guy or the girl.

The sidewalk curved around somehow and went along the side of some concrete wall. It ramped up, as if leading up to a bridge. There was now a lot of snow on the ground, though the sky was still clear.

Some of the women passed me. They still seemed to be talking about the match they were trying to make. As the girls passed me, I wondered if they hadn't stayed behind me all that time because they'd wanted me to talk to them.

There was still one girl behind me. She said, "You know why I love these new shoes for the snow? Because then I can walk around in the snow, and it's not difficult at all!" I may have thought it was a little nerdy for the girl to brag about her new snow shoes while everybody else was talking about this matchmaking attempt.

The girl went off the left side of the concrete path, onto a bank of snow. She passed me while walking through the bank of snow. She then walked back toward the path, maybe two or three meters in front of me now. But as she approached the path, she tripped. She fell down right in front of me.

Dream #2

I was walking down a kind of lonely sidewalk on a sunny day. I was in a kind of old-looking part of a big town, with cobblestone streets and wide, brick buildings.

There was a really old, Asian man behind me, about twenty meters away. For some reason I had turned around to look at him. A young, black man, not really tall, but kind of broad and muscly, came up to the Asian man. The black man had a big, thick beard that only went around his jaw line. The man wore a big set of headphones and wore a red t-shirt.

The black man said, "Assalamu alaikum" to the Asian man and then quietly started asking the man questions and pointing toward me, as if the questions were about me. But as soon as the black man saw that I had seen him asking questions about me, he stopped talking. He then quickly thanked the Asian man and walked away.

I felt like if the black man had been asking questions about me, he had been following me. So I was going to find out what was going on. I saw the man go into some corner-set brick building that looked like a restaurant. So I headed toward that restaurant.

It was only a few seconds from the time the man went into the restaurant to the time I actually approached the door. But the man was already walking out of the restaurant -- except this time, he didn't have the huge beard around his jawline. He looked at me and pretended not to know me. He rushed past me and crossed a street, toward a block with a huge, grass fille vacant lot.

I followed the man across the street, calling out to him, "Yep! Yep!" As he hurried away, as if to let him know I knew he had been following me all along.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in something like an atrium, at the foot of an escalator, with a big crowd of people. The atrium was gigantic. The walls were made of glass, and they let in the deep blue sky and sunlight, though somehow shaded, maybe because the glass was tinted slightly. The escalator was also enormous.

Bill Clinton stood near me in the crowd. We may actually have been walking near each other as we had gone down some corridor to get to the atrium. Clinton was wearing a pink polo shirt and kind of pale blue jeans. As we stood before the escalator he said something historical about the atrium, and possibly about the bridge outside the atrium. The bridge was likely the Brooklyn Bridge.

I thought the stuff Clinton was saying was pretty interesting. I tried to stand closer to him as we all went up the escalator. But I felt like I was being annoying, so I kind of backed away from him. We got up to the top of the escalator. There was a small landing and then another, smaller escalator. I think I took the opportunity of this landing to back even farther away from Clinton, to be less annoying.

Somehow I ended up out on the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge was colossal. I could only see portions of it as I traveled under it, either via car or subway. The road was covered in dark shadow.

I was then on a subway train that was running above ground. This eventually turned into a bus. There were only two other passengers on the bus: both were male friends of mine. We, or they, also knew the bus driver. He was driving us through a kind of quiet part of town, like some area far out in Queens or farther out on Long Island. The sun was shining orange-yellow like it was early morning.

The guys and the bus driver were talking back and forth with each other. The bus driver finally asked me, "Hey, should I be dropping you off at the college with these guys?" I couldn't think of any reason why I'd be going to the college, but I didn't want to disappoint the guy by saying no. I may have been really curled up in a seat, so that my knees were against the back of the seat in front of me.

Dream #2

I was in a department store with Oprah Winfrey. We stood at the end of a bunch of clothing displays, at a wall which was a window looking down at some other section of the building of which the department store was a part. There were maybe one or two other people around us.

We finished watching some event down below. I turned to Oprah and thanked her forf inviting me to this event. She was very friendly, but I don't think she said anything. She was gone.

I walked away from the window. I was probably heading out of the store. I saw a black woman looking through some clothing.The woman's back was turned to me. But, for some reason, I thought she was Oprah. So I walked up to her and said, "Oprah, I just want to thank you again for reminding me about this event. If it hadn't been for you--"

But now the woman turned around. She was really short and round. She had very dark skin, and she wore dark sunglasses. She looked pretty mean! She wore a pale denim jacket, jeans, and hat. She yelled at me, "Why are you calling me Oprah? Just because I'm black, I have to be Oprah?"

I was scared, and I backed off pretty quick. I didn't know how to respond. I kind of forgot whether I'd thought the person I'd thought the woman was was Oprah or my old friend and co-worker, CL. I figured it must have been CL, even though I couldn't remember her name. But she didn't look like the mean woman either.

I had walked back to the window I had stood at with Oprah. I think I had figured out that CL had reminded me about this event, and that I had met Oprah there. I figured that if I really wanted to thank CL, I could write her a letter. I either held a letter really close to my face or saw a letter in my mind's eye. The letter was on notebook paper, in pencil, and in really big, loose, scrawly handwriting. I may finally have seen CL's name.

Dream #3

I was in a bedroom in the dark. There was, for some reason, a towel rack right near the light switch. It was my blue towel. In the dim light I saw a bug crawling across the towel. The bug was either a smallish roach or a gigantic bed bug. I was really grossed out, and I wanted to see what kind of bug it was before I killed it.

So I stepped back and flicked a switch on a small wall a couple feet away and in front of the bedroom door. The bedroom light bulb flickered, popped, and went out. To solve this problem, I walked a little bit into the room and pulled a string from the ceiling to turn the light on. The only thing that happened was a little bit of plaster falling on my head.

So I went to the closet to see if I could find a light bulb or some other source of light. I flicked a light switch in the closet, but it didn't turn on, either. But then, somehow, I found some source of light. This light source became like a light bulb inside the closet.

I was looking directly into the top shelf of the closet. There were a lot of lamps, all arranged as if in a shop. The lamps were all small, wooden, on a square base, with a candle-like, wooden cylinder running up about 8cm and ending in the metallic fixture for the bulb.

I grabbed a couple of these, figuring that if I placed these lamps strategically, I could get decent light in the room, though not so much light as I'd get if I had the ceiling ligjht working.

I then saw behind the lamps. There were all kinds of canned foods -- things like SPAM, cocktail weiners, and corned beef hash. I might have seen other provisions. I suddenly realized that whoever had put this room together had put it together as a kind of shelter in case of some kind of disaster, possibly including nuclear war.

Dream #4

I was sitting at a table and eating with my friend H. The table and the lighting of the room remind me of a fast food restaurant or a cafeteria in a place like a school. We may have been eating something like fries and mayonnaise.

H said, "You talk about -----'s (can't remember) movies so much, as if you were such a big fan of Japanese film. But when was the last time you actually went to the theatre to watch a Kurosawa film?"

For some reason I kept getting ----- confused with Ozu. But this director was much more recent. But I also wanted to tell H that I actually had seen Kurosawa films lately. I may have had images from Ran and The Hidden Fortress in my head, though I couldn't actually get their titles correct.

I may have felt, in some way or another, like I was shrinking, or maybe hunching over more and more.