maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a living room with a couple people I knew. One of them may have been my mother. I sat on the couch, which was positioned, it seems, in the middle of the living room, so that I was looking, to my left, into a hallway.

Somebody just next to me, on my left. This person may have been my mother. Another woman walked up to us and sat on a wooden chair that was just beside the couch. The woman was really tall and skinny, with pale skin and dark red hair. I was really attracted to her.

The woman started talking to the other person on the couch about how she'd met some guy she really liked. The guy was really sensitive and caring, and he always knew the right thing to do for the woman, or the right thing to give the woman.

This whole time, the woman may have been looking at me. The woman may have thought, in the past, that I liked her. She may have liked me as well. But I had been so ambiguous with her that she had finally given up on me. But it seeemed like even now, talking about this guy, she thought there was hope for her and me.

But the woman was still talking about the guy. She said the guy had brought her a cake the other day. The woman said the cake was a special kind of cake, something like a wedding cake. But it had blue frosting instead of white. The only white was the trim. I saw the cake in my mind's eye. It was actually pretty beautiful.

As the woman spoke about this cake, her eyes lit up, and I could tell that she really did think the man was romantic.

Dream #2

I walked into a movie theatre. The theatre was kind of small and a little bit worn-out looking. But it had stadium seating and big, cushiony chairs.

The movie was just about to start. But everybody was just filing in. Everybody here was really old and a little bit eccentric or crazy. Everybody also seemed to know each other. They were all talking with each other easily, asking about their lives.

I went to a seat a couple rows back from the front, toward the right wall of the theatre. As I was getting ready to sit down, a very pretty, professional-looking woman sat in the row behind me. Some of the people seemed to know her, though not so well, and they greeted her.

The woman seemed to be attracted to me. I was attracted to her. But I was too shy to try to flirt with her. But we may have spoken a bit, maybe about the film's director, about whom the woman didn't know very much.

The movie, or the previews, may now have been beginning. I was getting ready to sit down in the chair. But I suddenly realized that the seats in front of me had such tall backs that once I sat in my own chair, the back of the seat in front of me would be blocking half my view of the screen!

I realized this was because the ramping upward of the stadium seating didn't begin until one or two rows behind where I was right now. So I figured I'd move back a couple of rows. But I didn't want to move back behind the woman. This might make her feel like I was trying to avoid her. I definitely wasn't.

The woman, who may now have been sitting with her husband: a man about fifty or sixty years old -- and who herself may now have been about fifty or sixty years old -- asked me if my seat was alright.

I didn't want to look like I was picky about my seats. So I said my seat was alright. To get a full view of the screen I just sat on the arm of the seat, instead of sitting in the actual seat. The arm of the seat had had its cushioning torn off, and it was just a ridged, black rectangle of metal, about the size of a brick.

The movie began. It may have been from the 1970s. The opening scene may have been very colorful, with titles in lavender lettering flashing on the screen. There was also a narrator who spoke either in French (while English subtitles ran across the bottom of the screen) or in English with a French accent.

Dream #3

It was the time of the U.S. Civil War. A man from the Southern states had decided that the cause of the South was unjust. He decided he was going to stand against the South's decision to enter into war.

The man was white, tall, pale-skinned, bald on most of his head, but with unruly, long, red-brown hair along the sides and back of his head, and a long, kind of thin, red-brown beard. He wore a military uniform, it seemed to me, of a very dark blue color (which would be funny, if he was in the South *and* against the war).

The man's community decided to turn against him. I could hear a group of older men, probably about the man's age and older, conspiring against the man.

As I heard the men speak, my view became a bird's eye view of a modern-day warehouse, or a really big garage for semi-trucks. It was a sunny day. The big garage was beige-walled and brown-roofed, and seemed to be made all out of sheet metal.

The conspiring men were saying something like, "There's two kinds of people in the South: the yas'sahs, and the no'sahs." (Which meant "yes sirs," and "no sirs.") "The yas'sahs are on our side. The no'sahs are against us. And this man is a no'sah. If he isn't a no'sah, he's a friend of the no'sahs. And it's time we taught him a lesson."

The doors of the big garage opened, and three vehicles drove out of it. These vehicles seemed to have the rectangular shape of semi-trucks, but the size of garbage trucks. But they were all a dull, silvery grey, featureless, and smooth-looking, as if they were all built in one piece, except along the edges, which seemed to be barred with chrome tubing.

These trucks were made for causing trouble for people who were on the side of the no'sahs. They would go to the locations where the individual no'sah either lived or worked, and do something malicious to him, his living space, his work space, or his vehicle.

Each person had something different done to him. I can't remember what the first bad thing done was. But it involved the vehicle removing a part of its body, like it was just an outer shell, and causing that thing to transform into some means of destruction.

After that, either one or all three of the trucks went to a parking lot that held a few trailer-less semi-trucks. One of the vehicles now took off its "shell" and transformed it. It transformed into something that looked like a second front for one of the semi-trucks.

The shell was a pale silver-grey, and it didn't fit onto the semi-truck very well. It kind of sat diagonally. But this was intentional. The shell was supposed to block the truck driver's view so he would get into a wreck.

The truck driver now appeared. I don't know whether he was aware of the shell. But he drove the truck anyway. He backed his truck out of the parking space. Immediately he noticed troubles with his field of view, and also possibly with the actual ability of the truck to drive.

But the truck driver, clunking and chugging forward, barely seeing anything, decided he'd do the best he could. He drove out onto a street that was so packed with cars it was almost at a standstill. Tall buildings crowded over both sides of the street.

The truck driver was in a tight space, and he could barely see. But he knew these streets well, and he decided he'd just drive by instinct. If he trusted his instincts, based on his memory of the streets, he could get through anything.

And he was doing well. He turned right around of corner and disappeared out of my field of view.

I caught a glimpse of a sign over a shop on the corner of the street. The sign was made out of some kind of turquoise-painted, ridged steel. There were big, white letters on the sign. It gave the name of some bank, I think, Mc-----. I recognized the bank and the sign as being key landmarks for anybody familiar with this town.

I now knew that I was watching a movie. I thought to myself that the film makers had done a good job of giving an idea of what city this truck driver was in. They didn't put too much detail into it: just enough to give people a sense of the place, by using broad, general landmarks.

The movie scene changed, showing the effect of the attacking trucks on another person. The scene showed a female news reporter, speaking to the camera, giving a special report from one of the city's streets.

The view was from the news camera's point of view. But the camera view was really low, like the cameraman was in the street and crouched down really far. The news woman kept walking, sidestepping, along the sidewalk, while addressing the camera.

I knew that the trucks had attacked another man by making him crazy. He was a kind of tall, skinny white guy with frizzy brown hair and a kind of balding forehead. But he had now gone crazy, and he was running through a park (Central Park?) naked, possibly giving his money away.

The news woman was reporting on the man. But, like everybody else, she didn't know anything about why this man had gone crazy. She was just reporting that this man was dangerous. Apparently there was a risk that this man would attack people and take their money.

And now the news woman was interviewing a woman who had been attacked by the man. The woman had apparently agreed to the interview. But now she was just walking as she was talking. She was walking faster than the news woman, like she just wanted to get away from her.

The woman was white, with blonde-brown hair, fair skin, and blue-green eyes. She wore a grey sweater, and she had a green sweater wrapped around her shoulders. She also wore tight blue jeans.

The news woman asked the woman how the crazy man's attack had affected her. The woman replied that the man had taken everything she'd had on her. The news woman asked what this meant for the woman. The woman could only reply, "I'm done. I'm done."

The woman had now gotten far enough away from the news woman that the news woman stopped following her. The news woman had, apparently, stopped walking.

But the camera was no longer focused on her. Instead, it was focused on the window of a Sony store. The window was black, except for a big flat-screen TV that was showing colorful imagery.

The news woman explained that what the woman meant by, "I'm done, I'm done," was that she was completely broke. She had no money left, and she had been unemployed for a long time. She couldn't survive in the city anymore. She'd probably have to go back home.

Dream #4

An older man and his middle-aged son were sitting, apparently, in an airplane. But this airplane was more like a private airplane than a commercial one. The two men sat on a bench-like seat against the wall of the plane. Their backs were to a long but short window.

The son, who was a tiny bit overweight and had a white beard and white hair, was playing with an iPad. The father, who was very skinny, clean shaven, and had his white hair in a short, square haircut, had a bunch of newspapers on his lap.

The father addressed a camera (my view). The father said, "You know, I like the iPad. And it gives me... about... ten percent of my news for the day. But for the rest of my news, I still trust the newspaper more. Why, look at this!"

The father opened up the newspaper and began flipping through it, illustrating how easy it was for him to find the news he was looking for in all the right places. But as he was doing this, the newspaper got more and more jumbled up.

In the meantime, the son, who kept trying to get the father's attention, was scrolling really quickly through all the news, apparently on the New York Times app for the iPad.

The father was now trying to illustrate how easy it was to find something like stuff to buy from a store, or movie times, or stuff to buy out of classified ads. But he was getting really frustrated, because he couldn't actually find anything.

In the meantime, the son had found exactly what the father had been looking for on a website like a mix between the New York Times and Amazon.com. He was scrolling down to the exact thing the father wanted, and clicking on it to buy it.

As the father was getting really frustrated with the newspaper, the son called out something like, "About to buy it, right now!"

The father stopped talking and looked at the iPad. The camera view closed in on the iPad. The son seemed to be looking at a list of books. He tapped on what he wanted.

But the son wanted three of this item. So he had to click on a special word, in a three- or four-line-long list of words. As he did this, he said, "Now, let's see here. What's that process called again? Ah... filchering."

The son clicked on "filchering" and bought three items of the product his father wanted. The father was amazed! That was so fast! The father said, "Why, with that machine, you can buy things so much faster than you can buy things with a newspaper!"

The son, as the father spoke, was just smiling at the father with a weird, open-mouthed, fat-tongued expression, like a panting dog would give its master, not for being good, but for doing something really annoying.