maboroshi

Good morning

(I think this is a single dream, because I can't remember waking up at any time. Usually I do remember waking up between dreams.)

I was with a woman about my age. She was my friend. I had helped her out with some kind of work, possibly homework. Now I was walking with her into her workplace.

She took me around the building. The buidling she worked in was some kind of official building, and access to it was somewhat restricted. I had always wanted to see inside. Since I had helped her with her work, my friend took me on a private tour.

We got to some wall-sized window that was as wide as a hallway. It looked out across a small courtyard and across to another wall of the building. It was late afternoon, and the windows on the opposite wall were orange with sunset.

I knelt down, possibly to write something in a notebook. But I soon realized that my friend had to get to work. She had been kind enough to show me around, I thought, and I shouldn't take up any more of her time.

We walked to a big, black-stone, triangular front desk in a huge, glass-walled lobby. My friend worked here as something like a security guard.

I now walked toward the doors, through a moderately busy crowd of business people.

I was outside the building. It may have been early afternoon. The light was a dimmish grey-blue in the shade of the building.

I was waiting for a friend. Now I saw her. She looked like my old friend P. She may have been walking with a tall, handsome, blonde businessman.

My friend and I started talking. We walked into a building adjacent to the one I had just left. The lobby of this building was huge as well, but without any windows. The fluorescent light made everything look a little greenish and dirty.

To my left I saw one of my old co-workers, MD, walking past. I went to catch up and say hi. But when I got up to the person, he turned out to be someone completely different. I greeted him anyway. He said I was confused and walked on.

I went back to my friend and told her that MD always did stuff like that, pretending to be somebody else. I laughed a little.

I was now in a cafeteria. I sat in a small, booth-style seat. A line of people behind my seat, running along the food-serving counter, just kept getting longer and longer. It didn't seem like anybody was getting served.

I heard some man and woman in line talking about a movie called Schizophrenia. I got excited, thinking I recognized the movie. I went to the man and woman and asked, "Were you just talking about Schizophrenia, the movie by Dario Argento?"

(I think I meant the movie Suspiria.)

The man and woman just stared at me blankly, as if they didn't know how to respond, and they didn't want to speak to me, while they also didn't want to be rude. I felt ashamed, so I walked away.

As I was thinking of leaving the cafeteria altogether, a man called out to me, "Hey! You like to movie Schizophrenia?"

I said, "Yeah."

I turned to the man, who was leaning on a trashcan. He was tall, pale, with jaw-length, greying brown hair and a broad face. He wore a tan jacket.

The man started telling me how insane it was to work on the set of the film. He said that people stayed in character all the time. So sometimes you had these disgusting zombies all over the place. It was almost like a horror film itself.

I laughed and said, "I guess it's like those Day of the Dead movies." I lifted up my right leg and scratched it. I pulled up my sock. I felt a little embarrassed having mentioned Day of the Dead. I didn't know if that was a movie that people who liked Schizophrenia thought was cool.

I now had a vision of blue human figures roiling about in tan gravel. It was very disturbing. I thought, This is what the man must have seen.

I was now with a group of friends. We were heading into a McDonalds that was on the second floor of a building. The McDonalds was dark and empty (it was late at night).

I stood at the register with one of my old co-workers, L, who is tall, pale, and overweight. We waited at the register, but no workers came to serve us.

Larry started saying something about this being just the kind of thing you can expect when you're dealing with labor unions. He then stopped himself and said, "I better not say that too loud. They're liable not to serve us. Or they're liable to harm us in some way for talking bad about them."

I thought, wouldn't it be funny if you had to serve yourself at this McDonalds? If that was how bad things had gotten?

I imagined myself in this empty McDonalds, going into the back area and fixinjg all my food. Then I would pay a computerized register for everything.

We seemed now to be driving away from the McDonalds. But I was still imagining things. I imagined that things had gotten so bad that you couldn't even cook your food at the McDonalds anymore. You just had to eat it ice cold.

I could see a frozen Egg McMuffin as part of an ad. Apparently, the ad was trying to make eating frozen-solid food sound desirable, trying to trick everybody into not realizing McDonalds just didn't want to cook their food anymore.

I was now in the bedroom of a big house. I was on a top floor. The walls were brick. I was getting ready for bed.

A woman had told me, before I'd gone into the room, that there was a group of something like fundamentalist Christians on the loose. If they caught you doing anything non-normal, they'd kill you. They could sneak into your bedroom, too.

I pulled all the blankets down on the bed, revealing light-green sheets. I figured I'd lay on the sheets, not under the blankets, and with my head at the foot of the bed. I wouldn't read anything, because reading was considered non-normal. And I would try to keep perfectly still. This way nobody would think I was doing something non-normal. But if they decided to attack me, I also wouldn't be encumbered by my blankets.

My light was still on when I lay down. I heard a sudden laugh from outside my door and down the hall. It sounded like my old friend D laughing and flirting with a girl.

I stood up to go see what was going on. In my mind's eye I could see a yellow latex glove.

I was now outside, in some backyard area at night. It was snowing, and the snow was about six inches deep on the ground. A woman had told me before I'd come out here not to venture outside, because the severe weather conditions would kill me. Now I hoped she wouldn't discover I'd been outside and punish me.

I walked into a small, wooden, shed-like house. The door was wide open. My friend D was inside, lying on his bed, which was near the door. The room was cluttered, but in a comfortable way.

D told me he was going to venture outside. I thought that was a dangerous idea, as the woman might punish us if we went back outside. But D went anyway.

I looked out into the severe conditions (which weren't very severe now -- it wasn't snowing, and the snow on the ground was mostly melted). A few moments later, I'd realized that D had gotten into a dangerous situation.

I rushed outside to help him. He had fallen into a narrow hole just as wide as, and a bit taller than, a human being. D had been in the hole so long in these severe conditions that he was now frozen solid!

I rushed to help him out of the hole. I might have had the help of a woman. D was now a woman. She was tall, with deep-copper skin and long, black hair. She had a slightly large, soft belly and big breasts.

I hugged the woman, crying because I'd thought she'd died.

I stood back from the woman. We were in the desert, with sagebrush all around us. The woman was wearing a horizontal striped shirt of purple, yellow, and black, and a pair of pale blue jeans. I wondered why I was so attracted to this woman. She didn't seem so attractive to me. But I was just so happy to see her alive that I again hugged her and cried deeply.

I was now on the second floor of some building, in an area that looked like a small school cafeteria. I either was Jaden Smith or I was watching a movie in which Jaden Smith played a boy who had been homeless but was now living in a shelter.

The boy ended up needing to save somebody. So I/he decided I/he would. It involved some act like going into a room and shoving either his/my head or whole body into water.

When I did this, I woke up laying face-down in the sand in a box canyon in the desert. I figured I must have done something wrong, because I had no idea where I was.

I looked to my left. I saw the woman I had saved. Behind and beyond her, on either side of the box canyon, were women standing against the walls (which were pretty sheer, and a sun-baked brown). The women were dressed in shimmery, Ancient Egyptian style dressed. They also had wings. They would lift their wings (and arms?) slowly up and then slide them slowly down.

I figured that since something like this was going on, I must have done the right thing. I at first lay back down on the (cool? moist?) sand. But then I got up and started walking through the desert.

Only a small distance away was a small park. It looked like a normal city park: trees, lawn, shade. It didn't look like a desert at all.

I walked up to a group of people who were having a picnic. There was a man in the family who was nitpicking everybody. Finally he may have walked away.

I was in the backseat of a minivan. My dad had driven me and my brother somewhere, possibly to the airport. He let us out. My brother, in the front seat, said goodbye to my dad and went into the building.

I opened the back door, told my dad goodbye, and got out. I could tell my dad was disappointed and a little angry that I hadn't said more to him. It had been so long since I'd seen him. Now I was leaving with few words.

So I got back in the van and said something nice to my dad. He reached back and hugged me.

We got out of the van, which may now have been a car. We went back to the trunk.

I now hugged my dad even more and started crying. I apologized for not being around when my aunt died. I felt horrible. My dad handed me a sheet of paper. Typed on both sides of it were small paragraphs talking about all the ways in which I'd failed my family. At the top of the second side was a paragraph mentioning my not being around when my aunt died. I couldn't read anything very well because I was crying so much.

The piece of paper eventually became a magazine and then something like an online news program. The show I was watching was about the top 10 crimes of the year.

One crime was a person who had killed a police woman when she went to address a 911 call at a house. I now saw a video. It turned out that four family members and the cop had been killed. The video showed the four family members' bodies lying in a field of gravel and patchy grass. The bodies were laid two-by-two. The heads of the one pair were placed against the heads of the other pair, so that the feet faced in opposite directions.

The woman officer had been found buried. The video showed the officer's body unburied, curled up, and covered in dirt.

The video now did all kinds of strange panning moves, as if the camera were all alone in the field, floating around and filming the bodies in an experimental-film kind of way.

I now heard the narrator (?) mention the next crime. My view changed into a tall, pale man wearing a grey sweater and grey cap. He had shaggy hair and a shaggy beard and glasses.

The narrator mentioned that the man was owner of a fetish bookstore. He had molested and killed a number of little girls. The narrator listed his crimes, which ranged from some terrible stuff down to "blocking people with his legs so they couldn't go anywhere."

I saw a view of the man in something that looked like a school hallway, heading into a restroom.