maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a dark restaurant. The restaurant had a lot of small, black, two-person tables in the main area. I sat at a table there. Off to my left there were some bigger booth tables. Multicolored neon lights seemed to reflect off many of the dark surfaces in the bar.

The two-person seating area was pretty full. A business man sat next to me, at the table to my right. He may have been Asian American, maybe in his late thirties or early forties. He wore square glasses and a kind of plain suit. He had a gentle, easygoing, but mature-sounding voice.

The man asked me why I had left my previous job. I began to list off a whole bunch of complaints about my former boss. The complaints just got worse and worse, and I just got more and more agitated as I listed them. I think the main complaint was that my boss wanted me out of the office, and that he just neglected me and tortured me until I left.

I now noticed that my boss was sitting up in one of the booths off to my left. Red, white, and green light was playing off his face, like a rotating neon sign (or a barber shop pole) was shining on him.

My boss was sliding a grey iPad back into a case. It was almost like the iPad was the thickness of a VCR cassette and that the iPad case was like a VCR cassette sleeve.

I could tell that my boss had heard everything I'd said about him. I was a little ashamed of myself for having spoken bad about him. But I was also glad that he'd heard it. I hoped that it would sink in somehow, and that he'd feel bad.

But I also felt bad for complaining. The business man may have been thinking about hiring me. Now that I'd complained so much, maybe he just thought I wouldn't be a good employee.

My boss was now standing just beside me, on my left. He said, "Hey, I need to talk to you for a second."

I stood up with him and walked toward the center of the restaurant. There was a wide pillar there, around which was a chest-high counter that had a bunch of computer screens (maybe cash registers?) on it. My boss stopped there and spoke to me.

He said "You know, I've been getting the feeling lately that you think I didn't treat you right while you were working for me. And that's just not true. I have a feeling you've been telling people stuff like that. And I really don't want you to."

The way he was saying all this made it sound like he had just come to these conclusions all by himself -- like he hadn't heard me speaking at all just now, and the idea had just popped into his head. I knew he was just trying to impress me by making himself sound insightful enough to guess my moves. But I'd seen him listening to my conversation.

I told my boss, "I saw you sitting there, listening to everything I said! I knew you were there, and that's why I said it! I'm not sorry I said it! You treated me like garbage while I was there!"

(EDIT: I forgot to say that there was also some point where I was even making fun of my boss' voice, doing some kind of high-pitched, flat squealing, with a sheep-like, bleating rhythm. I may have been standing or crouching over my boss while he was laying on the ground. I may even have had his left (?) arm pinned to the ground.)

I was now standing out near the dugout of a baseball field in a park. I was with my boss momentarily, still yelling at him. But my boss eventually changed into my old friend R.

We were actually standing with a group of people, maybe twelve or fifteen of us, all straggled out along a fence that went along from third base to home plate. R and I were standing just beyond third base. At this point, the fence was separated from the diamond by about twenty meters of lawn, and it went up a small slope.

I knew that I had been yelling at R just like I had been yelling at my old boss. But suddenly I felt like R was in control of something in my life. I didn't like R very much, but I felt like I should apologize to him and be nice to him, so that he would stop controlling whatever it was he was controlling in my life, and make things okay for me again.

There had been a little bit of a game going on on the ball field, a game between two semi-competitive teams, maybe teams of little kids. But now the kids were all just milling around the field, clearing off the field.

There was some sort of ceremony that was now being held on home plate. A kind of tall, kind of fat, bald man in a grey suit, white shirt, and reddish tie was presenting somebody to give a speech. The person was another old friend of mine, E.

I only heard one particular phrase from E's speech. I can't remember what it was. But it struck me as attempting to be "folksy," something that would be understood by and sympathized with by all the "common people" around him.

I was kind of sickened by this. When I'd first met E, he was a kind of intellectual guy. He struck me as being a genuinely good person. But the older he got, the more he enjoyed cheating and taunting people. But he still tried to carry off the act of being a good guy. By now, it was all just a horrible charade to anybody who knew him. And his speech was an awful example of it.

Nevertheless, when E finished his speech, I went after him, to go talk to him. I figured that since he'd done something important like give a speech, and be introduced by a man in a suit, that he might be an important guy now. He might be able to help me out in my own difficulties.

E walked over toward the fence, toward a section closer to home plate. I hurried down toward him. I may have reached him and started talking to him, in a really shameful kiss-up kind of way.

Dream #2

I was in some place like a house or a mansion. I was in what looked like a big living room. But I may have been sitting on the left edge of a bed. The room was all made of dark wood. There were no lights on. But a lot of natural light was coming through a doorway, probably a wide doorway into a bathroom.

The bed didn't have any blankets on it, just a white sheet around the mattress and a white sheet over that. The bed may actually have been a hide-a-bed, the kind that pulls out from under the cushions of a couch.

Just off to my right, a guy stood talking. It was as if he were in a commercial, or in some kind of "special features" style mini-documentary for a movie. He, and everything around him, had a gauzy haze, like I was already watching the documentary, and the view from the camera lens, which was in some kind of soft focus.

The guy was some famous director. He looked like he was from the late 1970s or early 1980s. He was kind of skinny, with hair down just below his shoulders. He wore roundish, black-rimmed glasses and some kind of nerdy-looking suit.

The director had a kind of high, but full voice, so everything he said sounded a little pompous, and a little more like singing than talking.

The director was talking about his future plans. But he didn't really seem to have any. He may have mentioned that he'd done a lot of work already, and that he now planned to just spend time with his family, to re-charge a little.

The director said that the thing that ruined a lot of creative people nowadays was letting themselves get too overrun by taking on too many tasks. Their work was cheapened, and the artists would get burnt out. The director said that he was going to try not to let this happen to him.

I stood up and walked toward the bathroom, still hearing the director, as if he were speaking directly into my head. The director may have started talking about the French filmmaker Francois Truffaut's career as an example of burning out. I may have seen some black and white photos of Truffaut, intercut with solid views of lavender color.

I now stood in the bathroom, looking down into the bathtub. I was thinking of taking a shower. But there was a little reddish dirt or grime ringing the side of the tub and dusting up the floor of it.

I was kind of grossed out by this. I wondered how a bathtub could be so poorly taken care of in such a rich house as this. I may have thought I'd clean the tub. But I also may have thought that I just wouldn't take a shower.

Dream #3

I was in a house with my sister. I was in the living room, and my sister was in the kitchen. Both rooms were small, so even though we were in two rooms, it felt like we were hanging out together. The living room had no lights on, but light came into it through the kitchen.

I had been sitting on the couch, probably watching a movie on a TV that stood on an entertainment center just off to my left. But now I stood up and walked into the kitchen. My sister was sitting at the kitchen table, doing something -- maybe writing, or coloring in a coloring book, or doing something on her phone.

At some point my sister may have turned into a blonde girl I knew in high school, though she may have been college-aged.

I told my sister that I was going to take a shower. She said okay. But she then mumbled something about the university I'd attended. I didn't understand what my sister had said. So I asked her to say it again. Again my sister just quickly mumbled something about the university I'd attended.

It was like my sister was giving me news about the university. But it was more like she was sharing her reactions to the news with me. She already expected me to know what the news was. And if I didn't know the news, she would just figure I was pretty stupid.

This was even more the case -- at least in my mind -- because my sister had been told the news by a man that she was attracted to.

This man was maybe ten years older than I. He was big and strong and probably involved in business in some way or another. If this man could outdo me with his knowledge, through my sister, my sister -- I thought -- would feel like she didn't need to respect me, or even treat me nicely, anymore.

So after I'd determined that my sister had really mentioned something about news regarding the university I'd attended, I just said something really non-committal, like, "Yeah, it's pretty crazy, right? I can't believe it," and then walked to the shower.

I walked down the dim hallway and into the dark bathroom. I didn't turn any lights on. I closed the door. I must have stripped out of my clothes, too. I now figured I would look at my phone, try to get whatever news I could about my old university, and, while I was showering, think up some responses to give my sister.

When I turned on the news, though, I found a web page that said that the house of famous actress Barbara Steele had caught fire. Apparently Barbara Steele (an actress famous for her roles in Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 and David Cronenberg's Shivers) nowadays lived in my old university town.

The news article showed a picture of Steele's house. But the photo was from the roof of the house. The roof, actually, took up almost all the photo. And the main focus of the photo seemed to be a small array of solar panels that now seemed to be sinking down through the roof.

There may also have been snow on the roof, and there were a few men on the roof, apparently in the middle of putting out the fire. The house seemed like it was just a regular, suburban house in a regular, suburban neighborhood, not a big mansion one would expect a movie star to live in.

The news article said that Barbara Steele had been in the fire, and that she'd been rushed to the hospital. It seemed to imply that she'd died. But I couldn't really determine whether that was true.

I figured this must have been the article my sister had been talking about. My sister would know how much I loved Barbara Steele. So she probably would have wanted to discuss with me any news she'd heard about her. I started thinking of responses to give my sister about the article.

But now I could hear (and maybe even see, in my mind's eye) my sister and the older man talking with each other. My sister was telling the older man that I seeemed to be going through some sort of difficulty. My sister even seemed to imply that I'd lost or was lacking something, as if the older man might help me get a replacement.

I was a little upset that my sister had told the man all of this, especially since my sister and the older man already seemed to be planning with each other how they could make me feel less intelligent than they were.

But I was also relieved. I knew I was missing something. And maybe the man could help me find it. I figured that once I got out of the shower I'd approach the man very humbly and ask him to help me.

But now I saw a strange image. It was a cartoon, or a comic book. A little girl had knocked on a door (her own front door?). A man, maybe the girl's dad, had answered the door. The man let his wife know that the girl was at the door.

But something about what the man said made me realize that the man and girl were going to have sex. They had probably already had sex in the past. It was like the man and the little girl were in love with each other.