maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

A woman was possibly moving down a series of dark hallways or a cave. Somebody was following the woman, possibly the devil, some demon, or a big criminal like a mass murderer. The woman was glamorous, like Kim Novak in the Alfred Hitchcock movies.

The being had made a deal with the woman He wanted her help, and he would share his wealth and power with her. But the woman had declined. Now the being was following the woman to kill her. If she was going to know about his work but not work with him, she couldn't live.

The woman was now in some big, wood-floored room filled with yellowy-white light. It was like some room up on the deck of a nice ship. But it was completely empty. The woman stood facing the door on the stern side of the ship.

The being stood on the other side of the threshold, facing the woman. I couldn't see the being -- in fact, I may have been seeing from his viewpoint --, but the being now seemed to be as tall and wide as the doorway, and to have a very Devil-like appearance.

The woman faced the being and told him again that she couldn't work with him. But now there was a man in the room with the woman.

The being had posted up a $1,000 bill on one of the rafters of the ship's room. The being was using it as a test, to show the woman how unworthy the man was to work with him. The being, after posting the bill, mentioned a hidden $100 bill to the man. The man said that there was no incentive in working for the being for only $100. He walked away.

The being had disappeared. After the man had walked far enough along the deck, toward the bow, so that he could no longer see the woman, the woman went to the rafter on which the $1,000 bill had been posted.

I was now seeing from the woman's point of view. The woman took the bill. The being had made a deal with the woman that if the man was too stupid or lazy to look for the $1,000 bill, the woman could take it. The woman had also been tied to the man previously. But now that the man had walked away, the woman was free of him.

The woman still wasn't going to work with the being. But she did feel a bit of fondness for him. And she did feel flattered that someone as skilled as he was would treat her as nicely as he did.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was out on a road at the bottom of a steep slope in a neighborhood probably near the neighborhood I lived in during high school.

I stood just outside my mom's car. My mom was about to drive away. But before she did, she was telling me where I could find the nearest Dunkin' Donuts. My mom said the Dunkin' Donuts was up the slope, then one and a half blocks past a park I knew was up the way. The park was mostly taken up by a big lake, around which I used to run in high school.

I was a little disappointed to hear that the Dunkin' Donuts was so far away. I thought I could never make it on time (not sure what I needed to be on time for -- maybe the breakfast menu -- which wouldn't really make sense, either). But, now that I'd decided to go to Dunkin' Donuts, I couldn't stop here.

My mom drove away. I apparently started walking. But now I was already up the slope, and through and past the lake park. I was still worried that I wouldn't make it on time.

I got to some restaurant, which was either Dunkin' Donuts or some restaurant a few stores down the block from Dunkin' Donuts. I sat at an outdoor table with a Latino family: a father, a mother, a couple little kids, and maybe a couple more adult guys.

My mom showed up among this group of people. She told me that I didn't have to worry about Dunkin' Donuts. She gave me a reason for this. But I don't remember it.

My mom pointed the store out to me. I looked up the road and saw the store. The Dunkin' Donuts road sign had a lot of brown on it. The sign was more like a big brown sign, checkered, almost, with little, white squares that had the orange and pink "DD" logo in them.

Dream #2

I stood out on a beach, looking out over the water. The beach itself was very beautiful, but not natural looking at all, as far as I know.

The water was nephrite green, but it seemed to gleam like glass. The horizon was like white gold, and the cloudy sky overhead was like smoky amber. And, it seemed, there was an extremely long bridge, made of black iron, stretching thinly across the water, all the way across my view of the horizon!

At first I was near some Latino family: probably a mother, a father, a daugher, and possibly a son. I was either watching government testing of some kind of nuclear devices, or else I was remembering the testing of these devices, which had taken place on this beach within the past few decades.

I saw one explosion, the light of which I don't remember at all, but which must have been like an exploding ball of light a hundred meters or so above the ocean.

I then walked down the beach to my left maybe twenty meters or so. I saw something fall from the sky into the water -- although, again -- I didn't really see the object. It was like the object was invisible. But I saw its effects on the water as it splashed in: like a row of pebbles and rocks, splashing into the water one by one, in quick succession.

Now the points of water which had been dotted by the splashes surged upward in small fountains. There may have been the small sound of an explosion. The fountains then subsided.

I knew that another nuclear device had been detonated deep under the water. I knew that this device would kill all the fish in the water. I was preparing for the next big wave from the ocean to wash a bunch of dead to the shore.

I may possibly have thought that the device may actually have been made in order to kill the fish. Killing the fish was a form of sabotage against the economy of the nation that fished here.

I now stood back a ways from the water. I stood near a Latino family again. The mother and father were both young and attractive. They were both kind of pale skinned.

The father was muscular, very manly. I was afraid that I'd do something with my own usual personality and offend the father's masculine sensibilities. So I just tried to remain calm and do nothing.

At some point I looked behind me. There was a basalt-like rock behind us. The rock was maybe two meters tall at most. It made a good back-rest. (It was soft and smooth, too, though craggy -- so maybe it had been polished by years of backs sitting against it!)

But I thought that it would really hurt, if a wave washed all the way up here, and someone swimming in that wave were thrown against the rock. I wondered if this was really a good beach for swimming in after all. I'd heard of beaches that were too rocky for swimming. Maybe this was one.

A big wave may actually have made its way all the way up to us, washing against us and throwing me a bit against the wall. From this point forward, the father may have had long, frizzy hair and a scraggly beard.

I walked up to the top of the basalt outcropping. I lay on my stomach and looked out on the ocean. Even though the rock wasn't much higher than the beach, I noticed that when I looked behind me, over my right shoulder, I could see a city. Apparently I was on some island. But the island had a big city on it. I had a surprisingly good view!

I was possibly telling the father about this, when suddenly I noticed that I was lifting up into the air! I felt like I was lifting up on top of nothing. But the "nothing" felt solid, as if I were still laying on the rock. I was afraid to look down, though, to see exactly what was lifting me into the air.

I was afraid, too, of lifting up this high into the air. But I didn't show my fear about this, because I didn't want the father to think I was a chicken.

I eventually came to the conclusion that I had actually sat on some kind of ride this beach had. It was an elevator, I told myself, that lifted you all the way to the top of a skyscraper that was either on or near the beach.

I looked foward, over the ocean, for a while. But I then looked behind me, to the city. I was surprised by how much this island city resembled the city of New York. The buildings all had that old, stone look to them. I even saw one building with the trademark "NEW YORKER" light sign above it.

I was now getting so high in the air that I was starting to get uncomfortable. But I told myself that this elevator stopped at the top of the building. And I knew the building was 34 storied tall. If I could just hang on until then, I told myself, I'd be fine. So I calmed down. I think that I did then feel the elevator start to descend.

But I was now in the basement of some building. It was like the basement of a small, but really nice museum or art gallery. The hallway was narrow and "L" shaped. The Latino mother and father sat in a little window niche in the side of the hallway.

There was a narrow, kind of winding, stairwell up to the first floor. I may have been playing around on that stairwell for a little while, like a little kid would, even though I still had my own consciousness, like I was still myself, as a (so-called) adult.

I then came back down to the mother and father. I asked them if I could ride the elevator ride again. The father said no, I couldn't. If I got to ride the ride twice, then all the other kids would want to do it, too.

I said I agreed. We were almost ready to leave. But if I got to ride the ride twice, and then everybody else wanted to, we'd be waiting here forever for everybody to finally finish taking their rides.

I sat on some little bench somewhere. Across the hallway and off to my left was a kind of wide niche in the wall, with a counter before it. This must have been some kind of ticket or coat-check area.

On my side of the hallway, just next to me and on my left, was a doorway to a small office. This office may also have had something to do with ticketing.

One young man sat behind the desk, while another young man stood in front of it. Both men were kind of slim and pretty. The young man standing struck me as being gay. He had short, platinum blonde hair which shone like a silver plate under the incandescent office light.

Both the boys were friends. They may even have lived in the same apartment building, or only a couple buildings away from each other. So they saw each other all the time. They talked as friends for a moment. But the standing boy was here to take care of some kind of business.

Professionally, the standing boy was higher than the sitting boy. And, now that the standing boy was taking care of business, he was really driving the point home that he was higher. As the sitting boy was taking care of something for the standing boy, the standing boy began tapping the top of the recpetion desk and humming in a very annoying way.

Dream #3

It was daytime, or maybe morning, just after sunrise. I was driving through a grassy desert. I pulled my car off to the side of the road. I was at this specific place for a specific reason.

I was some kind of paranormal investigator. I may actually have thought of myself as a Fortean investigator. And this, I thought, was my first real Fortean investigation.

I stood out of the car, trying to "write up a report" in my head regarding whatever I was about to see. I was trying to think of some catchy headline.

I had an image in my head, which I thought was really clever, of a dark-raspberry colored ring. I knew this would lead to some kind of clever phrase.

But I now saw that, just off the road, there was a square-shaped billboard, starting maybe only three meters or so above the ground, with a picture of just what I had been imagining. The picture looked like a thick ring being pushed up through some kind of raspberry-colored syrup.

This billboard seemed only to be the left side of the advertisement. The right section -- the text part -- had been cut off. There may have been just a tiny sliver of it remaining.

Suddenly I felt stupid for having tried to put together a headline for my report before I'd even started my investigation of the subject. I also felt that the headline itself was really silly and cliched.

I turned to go do my investigation, when I was overwhelmed by a strong, almost magnetic, sensation coming from the sky. It was hard for me even to look up from the ground. But I did it.

At first, my view was all red -- a burning, but dimly glowing, orange red. But as my view cleared I saw, on the horizon, at the end of a flat expanse of land, what looked like a phantom sun.

The sun was a huge, glowing, orange-red ball. Its body was maybe four-fifths of the way above the horizon. But it was also translucent. I could see through the sun, to the sky.

This struck me as odd. But the sky itself was also odd. It was apple green -- a beautiful shade of apple green, blending its way down to pale yellow at the horizon!

I tried to figure out what this phantom sun was. I figured it was a reflection of the real sun against this side of the sun's dome. To test if this was correct, I looked behind me. Sure enough, the "real" sun was rising over the horizon behind me -- though it seemed to be rising over some small mountain peaks.

For some reason this satisfied me, and I was ready to begin my investigation. I walked across the street and onto some kind of cinder road. The cinder road went a short way off from the main road, then divided into two roads. I took the right road.

I was now down in a cave. The cave also forked into two caves at some point, and I was down in the right leg of the cave. The cave wasn't dark -- it was like it was lighted by little lights that ran along the floor. But it was kind of narrow and short. And it may have felt like it was getting tighter and tighter.

Apparently I'd had a colleague I'd come out here with: a young, black woman, dark-skinned, pretty skinny, with long, braided hair. But she'd gotten lost somewhere in the cave. I thought she'd either vanished into another dimension or gotten abducted by aliens.

At some point I may have been crawling on my belly through an extremely tight point in the cave. I was crawling with some white men, who were like police officer who had come to rescue me. I may have seen my colleague, lying on her back, dead. We were trying to get my colleague out of the place she was stuck in.

I was now above ground again. This whole area was the subject of a police investigation. Two fat, black police women were sitting on folding chairs near the cave entrance (which was basically just a hole in the ground, maybe with a tiny lip of a mound over it).

I walked away from the cave and off to the right. I could see some white police men wandering around through some tall grass and tree-like shrubs, apparently investigating whatever had happened here. They may have been searching for a body.

I was trying to piece together what had happened. I knew, now, that my colleague and I had come here to investigate. But while we'd been down in the cave, my colleague had suddenly disappeared.

I couldn't remember anything else. But I knew my colleague, unless she'd been abducted, must still be down in the cave. I needed to go back down and find her. But, honestly, now that I was above ground again, I was kind of afraid of going back down into the cave.

Nevertheless, I knew that I should at least face my fear and go back down into the cave. But I was also kind of afraid of the fat, black police women. I knew that if I went down into the cave without their permission, they might start all kinds of trouble for me, maybe even get me arrested.

So I asked the women if I could go back down into the cave. I was, now, actually kind of hoping that they'd tell me no.

But one of the women stood up. She was now kind of short, and very skinny. She had long hair, in a natural style, but pulled back into a kind of ponytail. She looked older, maybe sixty years old. She had to walk with a big, wooden walking stick.

The other woman, who was still fat and young, said, "I wish you wouldn't go down there. The police'll probably finish their investigation soon. And if we have to wait for you to wrap up, we'll be here even longer.

"But if you really want to go, we can't stop you. But she's going to come with you."

I was, honestly, relieved that the old woman was coming with me. I was really afraid to go into the caves by myself. But I was still afraid to go. I was partly afraid for myself -- regardless of who I was with, I thought, I could still get abducted, like my partner had.

But I was also worried about the old woman, who kind of looked to me like an older version of my missing colleague. If the old woman went down into the caves, and it was seen that she looked like my colleague, would she get abducted, too?

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a camper trailer, one of the kinds that hitch to the back of a pickup truck. It was parked somewhere in the woods. The door was open. I stood in the doorway. My sister stood just outside it.

My sister told me that "J Bieb" or "J Bumblebee" had died. He was some kind of famous figure, but I didn't know very much about him. My sister kind of took a mildly sarcastic tone with me, as if to say, "I know you couldn't care less." It was like she was accusing me of not caring about our family because I wasn't so emotionally stricken by this celebrity's death.

I was then in some other place. A young, kind of attractive girl told me that a celebrity named J Bieb had died. She might even have said something like, "Everybody remembers where they were on the day J Bieb died."

I didn't know anything about this celebrity. But suddenly I remembered that my sister had told me about either this celebrity or a celebrity with a very similar name.

So, to imptess the girl, I blurted out, "Oh, yeah! My sister had said something about that! I think it was back... My sister and my family had come to visit me. They'd rented a camper."

Realizing I would have made my family sound like they had a lot of money for renting a camper, I said, "Well, not one of the big campers. Just one of the small ones, you know, that..."

I may have been making hand motions to illustrate how the small camper worked.

Dream #2

I was with my friend H on an airplane. We lifted off. It was a cloudy day. Everything seemed fine. But just as we ascended into the lower layer of clouds, the plane sped up really quickly. That seemed really abnormal. We suddenly slumped downward. The plane was headed back toward the ground. It was obvious that something was wrong.

I could see as if I were looking through the pilot's window, even though I was still with H in the normal passenger area. The pilot got us turned around. The engines were dead. But the pilot was trying to get us back to the runway. We were kind of gliding, but we were also descending really quickly. I knew it would be a bad landing.

The plane approached the runway. It hit the tarmac pretty violently, possibly smashing theunderside of the plane. But nothing exploded.

I could hear or imagine some kind of news announcement talking about the plane crash. My vision was now outside and behind the plane. I was still alive. But I didn't know about H. I could still see from inside the plane, but not very well. Everything was shaking around.

Then the plane twisted over onto its left side. I could see it as if I were outside and behind the plane and see and feel it as if I were inside the plane. At this point, the plane came to a stop.

Dream #3

I was on a plane with a woman like my mother, although the woman was not more than a few years older than I. The plane had landed, and people were all getting off. I might, however, actually have been staying on the plane, as if I had just stayed on in order to help my mother get situated.

At some point, my mother became a kind of tall, thin woman, like my old friend AL.

Now a young woman with a kind of hip look, possibly with maroon-dyed hair, came into the plane and sat down. She may even have buckled the seat belt. But she was really here to meet with my mother/friend and visit places in this area with my friend.

The young woman was a lesbian, and I got the feeling that she was going to try to seduce my friend. I really didn't mind. She was only my friend. I wasn't in love with her.

So I tried to give some advice to the young woman about how to have a good time in this area. It was partly because I felt bad that I wasn't staying here. It was some kind of tough place to be, and my not staying kind of implied that I wasn't tough. But I'd been here before, and I wanted to prove it. So I started to give the girl advice.

I said, "You look like you're dressed for the summer right now. But when you go down into the caves, make sure you bring a sweater. Because it gets cold when the wind whips through the tunnels. It's like --" and I made some kind of blowing, whistling sound.

The young woman had gotten bored about halfway through what I was saying. Finally she unbuckled herself and stood up. She sulkily walked past me and said, "I already know that stuff."

Dream #4

I and a group of people, probably my family, stood up from dinner at a restaurant. A family at another table stood up at the same time as we did. My mother may have started up a little exchange between our group and the other group, based on some interesting similarity between us. Both groups were laughing and cheerful, but I felt like things could turn stressful pretty quickly.

The tables we were sitting at were in a basement area, and we had to head up some stairs to get to the first floor dining area and exit. I may either have been heading for the stairs or some place like a coat closet or coat check. My family was headed in the other direction.

I was kind of happy to be splitting from the two groups and the almost tense situation. But my mom then called out to a young boy in the group, "You know that ----- (she said my name) lived in Colorado, too." This was supposed to give me something in common with the boy, who was getting ready to go do something in Colorado.

I knew that now I'd be obliged to talk to the boy. He was tall, white, pale, with kind of shaggy hair, not quite down to his shoulders. He wore a t-shirt and a hooded sweatshirt. He seemed cool. But he seemed about as inconvenienced by having to talk to me as I felt for having to talk to him.

We walked in the direction of my family. We headed up the steps. I asked the boy where he'd grown up. He said, "In the West V-----"

We were walking through some kind of crowded space with wood walls. There were a lot of people, and the place was full of noise, so I hadn't quite heard what the boy had said. So I mistook it for "West Village."

I said, "Oh, you grew up in New York?"

The boy said, "No. I said the West Valley." He seemed annoyed at my mistake. So I made some kind of dumb joke. I became really sheepish. As the boy, kind of ignoring me, walked away and back toward his group (we were all in the ground floor dining area), I kept calling out to him with this weird joke.

I suddenly stopped myself, thinking, Geez. The way I'm going at this guy, you'd think I had a crush on him.

So I went and sat at a table where my mom was sitting. The boy's mom was also sitting there. She was white, kind of thin, with short, blonde hair. She'd overheard my weird joke to the boy. She said, "Yeah, a lot of people don't know where the West Valley is. But it's basically all the most populous regions in Kentucky." She said this with a kind of mock-flair that made me realize she thought the area was pretty dumpy.

I wanted to respond with a joke like, "Right, all the great suburbs of -----." I wanted to say a really big town in Kentucky. But all I could think of was Louisville. And I didn't think that was good enough.

A waitress came up to the table from my left. A man had been calling after her. He'd been trying to joke with her, trying to flirt with her. He'd struck me as a bit of an old creep. I was afraid he'd pursue the waitress to our table and start making trouble for us.

The waitress was wearing some kind of one-piece shorts outfit with a gently colorful floral print and made out of a satiny material. She had tan skin and pale brown hair. She was incredibly sexy, but she didn't strike me as a waitress.

The waitress gave me some eye and body signals to let me know she was attracted to me. She then said, "Maybe you should give me your card or your contact information, so we can keep in touch."

I said, "I don't have a card, but I can give you my email address." I shifted in my seat and leaned back a bit, as if I were going to pull a card out of my wallet. I felt embarrassed that I didn't have any business cards. I asked the woman, "Can you give me a napkin?"

The woman sat down in the chair across from me. She picked up a napkin. There were drawings along the top of the napkin. I had apparently been looking at them before. They were done in black, felt-tip pen. They had struck me, as I'd seen them, as some kind of mystical hieroglyphics.

But the woman, looking at them, laughed. I asked her why. She directed me through each drawing, from left to right. It showed stick figures, in frame-like settings, like in a comic strip. One frame showed a boy chasing a girl. Another frame showed the boy and girl together in bed. Another frame showed the boy and girl doing some kind of really nasty sex position.

I said, "Well, I hadn't seen that at all! Must've been cause I was reading it the Japanese way." This meant from right to left, instead of from left to right. Okay...

I suddenly realized that this drawing was made as a kind of love letter to the girl. I was scared. I thought she'd think I'd written this to her. But then I realized that the creepy guy had actually made this drawing for the waitress.

There was another drawing below the first drawing. The first frame showed a cabin in a snowstorm. The second image showed a close-up of some structure in the snowstorm. Then there were a couple of images of an American flag waving in the wind.

Below each frame there were captions. The first captions were something like, "A snowstorm, loneliness, the comfort of a warm home." The next to last caption was, "Destroy the commandos." The final caption was, "America the brave."

I realized that this was some kind of mass-marketed (how?) advertisement for how America should continue the war on terror. For some reason I felt like this was directed against me. I also thought that, since I thought the drawing was kind of silly, that I'd somehow be targeted by the government as unpatriotic.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a small hallway that was dimly lit. I stood by a little group of shelves for newspapers. I saw and grabbed a copy of The Onion. But somebody acted in a mean way that made me nervous as I was grabbing the paper.

I got nervous, pulled the paper out quickly, and hurried away. But a few steps away, I realized I had gotten only a few of the first sheets of the paper, not the whole thing. So I went back to grab the rest of the paper.

I was now in a gas station. One of my friends was with me, I'm not sure who. Behind the counter of the gas station was a youngish woman, a little overweight, with copper-tan skin and long, black hair that was pulled back and a little frizzy. She was really cheerful and nice.

I was sitting in a big, pink recliner before the counter. I seemed to be sitting inside of it as though I were really small, maybe a child. But I also seem to have been myself, at my normal height, as well.

Apparently I was wearing diapers and I had wet my diapers. I hadn't told the woman, but she knew that I needed to change my diapers. She told me that there was a restroom in some place across the street (a cafe or a fast food restaurant?). She told me I could change my diapers there.

I didn't have diapers, and somehow the woman knew that, too. She pulled down, from a top shelf over the cash register area, a partly empty pack of diapers. There were two adult-sized, pink diapers inside. The woman told me I could change into one of these diapers and hold onto the other one.

Somehow I came to understand that the woman thought of me as either her kid or as a person who needed someone to take care of him like a mother would. She had known this for a little while, so she had prepared for it. I thought it was wonderfully nice of her to think of me.

I was now outside, on a wide street on a sunny day. The space on either side of the road seemed wide and empty, maybe with dirt lots or grassy lots, although there also were buildings somewhere in the distance. All around on the road there was a feeling of heavy machinery and dusty construction material.

A group of young people, some or all of whom may have been my friends, were laying out a line of what looked like gigantic surge-protector power strips. The power strips were maybe 1.5m long and .6m wide. At either end, they seemed to have poles sticking out of them, like the poles for rope-belt line makers.

The young people would lay the surge protectors down and then plug huge, black cords into them. A few people had to carry and set down each surge-protector. Both that work and the plugging work seemed difficult.

I was trying to find a place in the work where I could be helpful. But the people were all working so quickly and efficiently together already. I couldn't get in. Eventually I was worried that I would look lazy.

I may have made some kind of weak assertion to everybody else that I should have a place in the work. But one of the people (the only person I can remember now was a man with olive-colored skin, shaggy, black hair, and a shaggy goatee) said something about how I was too much of a sissy to help. One person may have told another person, "Tell that guy to go back to the diapers that girl gave him and have fun with those."

So I walked over to what seems, now, like a flatbed trailer for a semi truck. The bed seemed to have been made out of heavy planks of wood. Oddly enough, the pack of diapers the woman had given me was sitting on the bed. There was also some kind of pile of pages or some kind of book. The story in the pages/book may have been something similar to Alice in Wonderland.

I was now "almost-present" in some kind of place with an old friend of mine, M. M was trying to show me, in his usual intelligent-jester way, some article that he found really funny in The Onion.

I had a series of views based on that article. Sometimes it was like I was looking at the paper. Other times it was like the images on the paper, while still paper-images, were also my whole view, as big as the world. At other times, it was like I was in the images, like they were the three-dimensional, real world, while still looking like newspaper images.

The article was taking some fictional discovery made by fictional scientists, which was obviously a cave which had been used by prehistoric peoples for women to give birth in. But the article was trying to make it sound like a mystical place. The humor of the article, apparently, was how the scientists were trying to give this place a really mystical meaning, when it was "just" a birth cave.

At one point I saw a cross-section image of the birth cave. The cave had three rooms, one set behind the other.

The very back room was labelled with some "really mystical" title by the scientists. In actual fact, it was "just" some kind of room where a spirit was being prepared to enter into the body in the mother's womb. The middle room was the room where the actual birth took place. This room was again, given some "comically mystical" name. The front room had some weird label like "meat and other stuff." I took this to mean that all the supplies that one gets by living in the outside world started to be given to the newborn child here.

The article seems to have been full of references to an astral state. Apparently the scientists had discovered human ribs in the middle or front room. So the scientists made some weird comment about how the "astral ribs" of a cave dweller had been damaged and left behind.

The front room had been fashioned, apparently, into a spacious, domed room, with a wide doorway to the outside. The domed ceiling was the natural stone of the cave, though it also seemed to be fashioned into shapes that looked like tiles.

Near the front of the room, some of the "tiles" were missing from the ceiling. The scientists made some "comically mystical" statement about the shaped that the dark space now left by the missing tiles made in the ceiling. But the "comically mystical" statement "only" amounted to what the image actually looked like -- a woman lying on her back, giving birth, while another woman knelt before the first woman, receiving the child.

At this point I may have been trying to figure out what exactly was funny about this article. As far as I could tell, I thought, from my reading about prehistoric life, birth caves were very mystical places, and the birth process was very mystical. The fact that the image of birth in a birth cave had naturally occurred also seemed mystical to me. I couldn't see why a mystical treatment of the whole thing would be so funny.

Dream #2

I had apparently done some kind of complex work project for my boss. It was something I had done on my own initiative.

My boss now began criticizing my work. He told me that the work I had done was too complex. He said that this wasn't the kind of things clients liked to see from us. He said that our job was to do something more simplistic, very basic, and using very basic data.

My boss told me that we couldn't do anything that expressly directed our clients' ideas, because our clients' job was to have ideas. My boss said, "We need let the clients have a chance to do some value creation on their own. So if we just put a bunch of basic data together and something in it inspires our clients to have an idea, we've done a good job."

I took this to be my boss' nice way of breaking it to me that I was spending too much time doing the stuff I actually liked and not enough time doing the pain in the neck work of finding basic data, doing basic number work.

I knew my boss was too nice to tell me that I had been kind of on the wrong track for a while, and that I needed to get back on the right track of looking for hard number-data. So he'd made some cover-up story that really didn't even match what his real thoughts about our work was.

I now felt kind of stupid and lazy for not having done enough number work.