maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in group meeting room with about twenty other people. The room was only partly lit, with a drab, greenish white, fluorescent light.

The room was divided into two parts. The back part was kind of empty, with maybe a long, folding table. The front part had a few couches and chairs. Most people were in or near the front part. The area was so full that people were standing up behind the back couch.

I had been standing way back in the back area, by myself. But now I walked forward to listen to what was going on. A young woman was leading the discussion. She sat on a couch on my right side.

To the woman's right, on the same couch, and on another couch, probably the back couch, sat two young men who looked a lot alike. They were both tall, thin, pale, and shaved-headed. They wore nice, casual khakis and dress shirts. I felt like I'd known both of the guys from high school.

I came to understand that this was a group discussing alien abductions. Aliens existed and were among us, in a very obvious way. And, somehow, the young woman was serving as something like a go-between, between the aliens and the people in this room.

Some of us in the room had been abducted. Others of us were, apparently, trying to be convinced to volunteer for abduction.

I was now sitting on a couch opposite the young woman. The man to the young woman's right was now speaking about his own abduction experience. I now realized that the young man's head had been shaved by the aliens, while they'd experimented on him.

The woman asked the man if the experience was really bad. The man said that most of the experience didn't really bother him at all.

The only part the man hated, he said, was when the aliens did a mental probe on him. He said that it felt really terrible to have all his memories drawn up. He could see them. But he wasn't controlling them. And he knew he was only watching them because someone else -- the aliens -- wanted to see them.

The man mentioned another part of the experiment he hated. As the man described it, it first sounded to me like the aliens had put the man through some kind of system where they'd caused his body to work as if it were under a lot of stress. But then the man said that the aliens had actually shut down the man's body entirely. He was dead, but still conscious.

This man's discussion was supposed to convince people that alien abductions weren't so bad. It didn't convince me. I got up and walked toward the back area. But I knew the second man was going to talk. I wanted to listen to him as well. I think I may still have been considering volunteering for an abduction.

Dream #2

I was in a group meeting room, like in the first dream. It was divided into two areas. The front area was full of people, and the back area only had a few people. I think most of the people were Indian. The room was warm with incandescent light.

On the right wall a movie was playing. All the couches in the front area were arranged to face the movie, like a makeshift movie theatre. I think everybody had plates of food.

There were plent of seats open on the couch. So I sat down on one. The couch felt really nice. It was a dull blue or pink, and it had a kind of soft, crushed velvet feel to it.

I looked up at the movie. Some really pretty Indian girl was either being taught or teaching someone how to make a kind of honeyed bread. It basically looked like a cornbread square, glazed in honey, with a walnut in the center, on top.

The girl was dressed in a traditional Indian outfit. There was a sense of sexuality, romance, and tradition all wrapped up in the food making.

I got the idea that this screening was a kind of preview for the film. The film wasn't finished yet, and we were all supposed to give our feedback on it, so that it could be tweaked for more audience enjoyment.

But I started to wonder if maybe this film wasn't a bit too stereotypical toward Indians, what with the food-making and tradition and so forth. I wondered if Indians would be offended by a film like this.

It didn't occur to me that the film was actually Hindi (it was -- it had English subtitles), and that pretty much everybody else in the room was Indian.

There was a father-like man standing near the couches. He had dark skin and a bit of a pot belly. He wore a button-up shirt of really nice, pale-blue material and nice, dark slacks. I thought I might go hang out with him, since I figured he'd have a better idea about all this stuff than I did.

Dream #3

It was daytime. I was walking through a forest, probably a pine forest. I was walking along a slope, not on any trail. The pine trees were all spaced well apart. The ground itself was black. It may have been black cinder soil, or (I think now) the forest could have been burnt down.

There must have been a road at the top of the slope, up to my right. Suddenly people came blasting down the slope! They were all laying, extended straight out, with their legs crossed and their arms crossed over their chests. And they were propelled so that they were rolling, tumbling, down the slope.

I followed these people down the slope. I reached a point where there was a cliff. I couldn't go any farther. The cliff must have been about fifty meters high. It ended with a flat valley of forest, of the same black-soiled, or charred look as the area up around me.

But one of the rolling, tumbling people, in his movement, had rolled right off the cliff.

I suddenly knew that this was all some game. People were thrown, almost at random, down the slope. There were all kinds of random land formations down the slope. Depending on fate, and the skill of the person, the person either would or wouldn't survive going down the slope. Survival, as well as something else, would determine who won this game.

But this person's path had been directly toward this cliff. There were a few places, going down the cliff, where the person managed to grab hold for a moment. But everything in the cliff was really soft. The cliff was like some shelf of really soft, brown coal.

Finally the person managed to grab onto a thick tree root that was growing out of the cliff wall. It might have been able to get him over to a thin ledge.

But it was obvious that the root was dead and rotten. The more the man pulled up on it, the more it was shifting its way out of the cliff. And, besides, even if the man got to the ledge, he'd be trapped there. There was no way down.

So the man just gave in to the fact that he'd lost. He either let go of the tree root or held onto the tree root until it finally snapped out of the cliff. The man fell maybe about twenty meters and died on impact.

There were already a bunch of people down on the ground by now -- some alive, some dead. The living had set themselves out in the valley, as if they were going to camp there for the night. Some of the living headed over to the man's body after they saw that he'd fallen to his death.

I walked back up the slope. I reached the top of the slope, where the road was. I saw cars passing along the road. I then understood that the people were tossed out, in their rolling positions, from the cars. This was what gave them such great speed (??? -- in a perpendicular direction?). I may even have seen another batch of people thrown out from the cars.

I think my mom, or at least somebody I knew, was up around here. I'm pretty sure, anyway, that somebody was calling my name or talking to me, probably from a slight distance, maybe even across the road from me.

I may have spoken a little bit with the person who had been speaking to me. But, even though I think the person was looking forward to me helping them with something, I told the person that I would be back in a moment.

I knew there was a really safe way to get down into the valley. I walked down the slope and kept going forward, in the direction of the road. The cliff merged into the slope farther along, and the slope became very mild.

I walked down along the mild slope to the valley. I figured that once I got down to where everybody was, I'd help bury the man I'd seen die, out of respect for him. But I also probably figured that I'd help bury all the dead. This game didn't make any sense.

Dream #4

I was sitting in some restaurant, probably a fast-food restaurant. It was daytime, and there was plenty of light coming in from the windows. There were a lot of people in the restaurant. The place felt packed, busy, and humid, like a coffee-warmed store on a winter's day.

I sat on the right side of a table for four. A police woman sat across the table from me. I don't think either of us had any food. The woman was white, kind of short, a bit overweight, with a round, pale face. She had frizzy, red-brown hair, drawn back in a braided pony tail. She had kind of thin eyes, pale blue-green. She looked like she may have been in her early twenties.

The woman was telling me something about how disappointed she was in me. I'd either done or said something that had really gone against her expectations of me.

Now she was pretty much through with me. I knew this was bad for me because, since she was a cop, now that she was through with me, she'd probably have the other cops start giving me a bad time.

The woman stood up to leave. I may have stood up to try to get her back. But I don't think I really knew what to say. So I probably gave up and sat back down just as soon as I'd stood.

Dream #5

In my head, I was talking with either my old friend R or his first or second wife. I'm pretty sure that the conversation eventually became between the first wife, N, and myself. As I had this conversation in my head, I was cleaning out a bathtub in a bathroom with kind of dim, warm, incandescent light.

I was telling N that I hated even talking to her and R. They seemed to love making me feel inferior to them. It was even like they operated as a team, taking turns saying nitpicky things or one-upping me, when the other person couldn't find the right thing to say.

I probably said that this was why I didn't want to go to some thing that N had invited me to. This probably ended the conversation.

As I was finishing the conversation, I noticed that my efforts to clean the bathtub were really failing. I'd sprayed cleaner all over the tub, and I was wiping the tub off with a sponge.

But I just seemed to be taking whatever grime there was in the tub and spreading it all over the entire tub. The spray bubbles themselves only seemed to be gathering up the grime and expanding it, so that now my tub's surfaces seemed to be coated in soapy grime.

I might possibly have realized that I'd need to wipe and re-wipe the surfaces before I got all this stuff off. The first spraying was to get everything wet. I'd have to spray again. Then the wet stuff would start coming off, leaving the surface clean.

Dream #6

A commercial from the late 1970s. A thin, prettyish, blonde woman was pushing a cart through a grocery store. A male narrator was talking about wise choices a mother should make while shopping.

The "wise choices," obviously, meant buying whatever product the narrator was advertising.

The view then switched to a view from the cart. The woman's face was framed in a circle in the center of the screen. The rest of the screen was black. This was supposed to be the view of the woman's baby, who was sitting in the cart.

The woman was making all kinds of kissy faces to the baby. The male narrator was now saying, in connection with making wise choices while shopping, that a baby will always imitate whatever a mother does. This implied that the baby was probably making kissy faces back to the mother.

Suddenly the mother let out a flat, kind of raspy burp. The mother was surprised, and a little apprehensive. She knew the baby would probably imitate her burp.

The view now shifted to a view more like the mother's view. The "baby" in the cart was actually a pretty, skinny girl, maybe seven years old. She was sitting in the basket of the cart, rather than the seat of it. But I felt like she was probably too old to sit in the cart, like a baby would.

Sure enough, the little girl, kind of looking up to her mother like a baby would, burped, in almost the same way as her mother did.

It was then nighttime. The mother was in her bedroom, which was pretty big. It was dark. But somehow the mother could be seen, maybe in a nightgown, masturbating.

The little girl, standing in the hallway in only underwear and a tank-top, was watching the mother through a crack in the door. With a baby-like mentality, the little girl thought she'd copy the mother, in front of the mother.