maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a museum with enormous rooms. The paintings were also enormous. The walls of the rooms may have been twenty or so meters tall. The paintings were just as tall.

I may have been with a group of people, possibly a school group. But I had broken off from them for some reason or another, and I was now walking around by myself.

But I was afraid to go into any of the rooms very far. The paintings on the walls were so gigantic. I was afraid they'd fall on me and smash me. So I could barely go beyond the threshold into rooms.

One room was kind of dimly lit, like from a dirty set of windows in the ceiling. I saw a pair of paintings in the room. The paintings were, I told myself, either by Goya or El Greco.

The paintings had the same subject: a young man in rich attire, something like pink, satin pants and a white shirt. The paintings stood opposite each other in a kind of side niche in the room. I wanted to examine the paintings closer, but I was too afraid of them falling on me.

I left this room -- I think -- and went into another room. The paintings were also huge in this room. But I may have been getting braver about being around the paintings, and I may have stepped quite a few meters into the room.

But now I looked up and saw that there were also paintings in the ceiling, the rest of the ceiling being made out of thick, ornate wood, like in the Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library. I was now afraid of the ceiling paintings falling on me. They seemed like they'd be heavier than the wall paintings.

Dream #2

It was a greyish day. I was either treading water in a river, moving backwards slowly in a small boat, like a rowboat, in a river, or standing on a walkway through or at the edge of a river.

I may at first have been with a group of older, well-off people, like a tour group. But I'd broken away from the group a bit. The group were all walking along the walkway.

The river was wide, and at the other end of it was a big, kind of square, building. The building faced the river directly, starkly: it may even have been a bit cantilevered over the river.

The building was made of some kind of white stone, but the front of it, or the side facing the river, was of slightly tinted glass. This windowed section curved around the sides of the building as well, giving the white stone of the building a kind of backwards "C" shape.

I knew that the building was an art museum. It was the Art Museum of Mexico or the Mexico Museum of Art. It was a very good and nice museum. But it was also used -- especially the enormous room overlooking the river -- by drug cartels for arranging certain deals.

People liked to visit the museum. But people who went there were always afraid. You always had to be careful not to hear things, or at least not to act like you heard things. And you couldn't offend any person in any way. If you offended someone or acted like you'd overheard some drug deal being arranged, you could be killed.

But for some reason I was feeling defiant. I was going to go into the museum and I wasn't going to act afraid at all. Besides, it was the Mexico Museum of Art. It was full of great works of art. I'd be really disappointed in myself if I didn't see the art works there.

Dream #3

I was in some building. I was near a staircase. Apparently I'd always come here to this place to read. Other people did, too. But I'd come to have a favorite spot for reading on the staircase. And I'd read there all the time.

There were some guys who'd decided to follow me around. They thought I was really smart. They were jealous of me. They wanted to figure out everything I was doing and studying. They thought if they read everything I read, they could get smarter than they thought I was.

One of these guys was an old, kind of tall, white man with a big belly. He wore nice slacks and a nice button-up shirt. He saw I was heading toward the staircase to read. So he either took the place I always took or took a place a few steps higher than my place. Wherever he sat, his plan was to look down at what I was doing, so he could do it, too, and hopefully beat me at it.

I tried to figure out what to do. I didn't really care if people knew what I was doing. I tried to be open about that. But I felt annoyed. I may have thought I'd hide whatever I was doing, just to annoy the man back a little. Or I may have thought I'd just act unperturbed, like the man didn't bother me, or didn't exist at all.

Good morning, everybody. I slept about 12 hours last night, in hopes of getting over my cold. I recall three dreams from last night. They're all pretty fragmented, and I'm not even exactly sure what order they came in.

Dream #1

I stood out on some concrete balcony or ledge (like at the head of a concrete wheelchair ramp) a couple meters higher than the road. It was daytime, and I was in a big town, in some area that looked like SoHo in NYC. The streets were cobblestone. The place was empty.

I was looking across the street to a place that looked like a bank next door to a fast food restaurant. I was playing around on my phone. I was trying to look into my bank account to see how much money I had. I may have been out on some trip to a different city or country, and I may have been trying to figure out exactly how much more money I could spend on this trip.

But I couldn't remember the name of my bank. I went over the names of banks (probably not real names) in my head without locating the name of my bank.

At some point I may have figured out the name of the bank, only to discover, contrary to my previous insistence, that it was precisely the bank across the street from me.

I now noticed that there were a lot of cosplayers going into the fast food restaurant next door to the bank. I was curious about these cosplayers.

I was now in the fast food restaurant. The place was packed with cosplayers. Some of them may actually have been dressed up as clowns, like Ronald McDonald, rather than being in cosplay.

Dream #2

I had come down to Mexico with my mom. I was now walking around town by myself. It was daytime, a warm day. I walked down a quiet, narrow street.

I probably went into one store, the floor for which was at the bottom of a few short steps. I may have walked around in the store for a few minutes.

I was now back in the house where my mom was. It was like a house that belonged to "one of our family members" in Mexico. I was in a completely empty bedroom. It may have been later in the night or early the next morning.

My mom came into the bedroom and sat down across from me on the floor. She insinuated that some people had mistaken me for a narc while I'd been walking around the city. Now I was kind of in trouble with these people.

My mom told me, "They say here that a narc is like a dog on a leash, except they say he has a coat-hanger attached, too."

This saying gave me a picture in my head like a chalkboard drawing of a sillhouette-man walking a sillhouette-dog on a leash. The dog also had a coat-hanger sticking up from its back.

I understood the "coat-hanger" to be a symbol for the nice clothes that narcs wore (???).

My mom and I were now downstairs in the living room, which was also empty. My mom told me we had to be very careful now, walking around town, as all these drug dealers would now be looking out for us.

I wondered why on earth people would think I was a narc. I knew that if I even slightly resembed a narc, I wouldn't be coming down to Mexico at this point in time.

But now I remembered that "the cousin of mine," whom my mom and I were down here to visit, actually was a narc. So even if the drug dealers figured out I wasn't a narc, I'd still be hunted down and under suspicion for visiting a known narc.

I now wondered why in the hell my mom had chosen to come down here at this point, when all this dangerous stuff was going on.

Dream #3

I stood behind a tall, thin, young man. The man had a pale complexion and red-brown hair in a squarish, tall haircut. He wore a grey jacket. We may have been in some kind of small, crowded room, having just finished some kind of meeting for young adults.

The young man spoke, and for some reason I said aloud that it was obvious the man was Scottish, given his accent and his manner of expression.

The man turned around. Rather than being annoyed with me, he seemed to assume my observation meant that I had something in common with him.. He asked me what I was.

I said, "All three," which the man took to mean Irish, English, and Scottish (???).

The man said, "Oh, right, right. I wonder why they don't say all four and include the Welsh?"

I responded (or tried to respond?) with the thought that perhaps they were separated by language (???), so that everybody thought of the Welsh as different from "the other three."

(Note, December 13th: I forgot to mention that in waking life I've been reading The Judge, by Rebecca West. Rebecca West is a writer who was active from the 1920s through the 1980s. She's really cool. One thing that really struck me about her is that she is Irish and English on her father's side and Scottish on her mother's side. I took this "Irish-English-Scottish" aspect of West and identified myself with it -- for some reason -- in the third dream.)