maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was looking through some kind of magazine like the New Yorker, although a lot of the formatting for the magazine seemed like it was for a popular men's magazine like Maxim.

There were three articles by Joyce Carol Oates in this magazine. I wanted to write Oates a letter to tell her how much I'd appreciated her articles. But I realized that I hadn't actually read the articles, and that I'd look like just some kind of "autograph hunter" if I wrote the letter, expecting a response, without having read the articles.

So I flipped through the magazine to find the articles. I found one of the articles, which seemed like a two-pager, on the front and back side of one sheet of paper. The article was all in some kind of grey text box. I figured this article would be the easiest to read, since it was so short. But even it seemed too long.

I got a little confused as to whether the article was one pages or two pages. I then came to the conclusion that the article was written on both sides of the page, but that the second page was partly taken up by an advertisement. So the whole article was less than two pages long.

The article, I could probably tell, was about Oates and her "new husband" taking their honeymoon in Italy. But the place they'd rented for their honeymoon seemed to me more like a place they'd just bought or rented for the long term.

The first paragraph mentioned something about how the apartment was just perfect "for allowing us to tatertater (an expression which means very much the same thing for us adults as it did when we were children)."

I couldn't figure out what tatertater meant. I just figured it had something to do with making tater tots "out of the can" (?).

So Oates was apparently pleased at first glance with the place. But she said that there ended up being a lot of faults. Mostly the place hadn't been very well cleaned after the previous occupants left. There were plenty of signs of their still having lived here.

One was that, "For close-drivers, a guard rail had been put right up against the edge." I couldn't quite figure out what close drivers would be doing in a house, or what kind of edge Oates was talking about.

But there was a picture, a kind of half-impressionist oil or pastel painting of the place. I looked at it and saw that there was some kind of babmboo fencing, still green, fastened all around the breakfast bar.

I realized that the "close-drivers" were people who pushed their babies in strollers everywhere and had the habit of bashing into everything with the strollers. The bamboo fencing was put up to protect the wood of the breakfast bar. The apartment seemed to be a living room with the kitchen inside of it. The breakfast bar and the kitchen counter seemed to be the biggest parts of this room of the apartment.

I was kind of worried. I didn't think I'd be able to get through this article. There was so much new language in it, so much current speech that I couldn't follow. I also felt bad because Oates, a few decades my senior, knew all this current vernacular, while I had no idea what it meant.

I continued reading the article and looking at the painting. Oates complaints were then that there were empty food cans strewn all over the place, as well as newspapers. I looked at the drawing again. There were newspapers and cans strewn on both the kitchen counters and the floor.

I thought, Did the landlords here bother to clean this place up at all when the last people left?

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a big room like a school gym. But there were bookshelves on some of the walls. The floors were covered with something like different-colored exercise mats. The exercise mats were maybe 1 meter long, 500cm wide, and 3cm thick. They seemed to fit with each other like floor tiles. I stood right inside this room, on the right wall, right near a door.

I walked out of the room. I was now in a smaller room. There were a good amount of people in the room, all engaged in a number of tasks with each other. The room was lit only by greyish natural light from windows somewhere.

I sat down in a school-type chair in front of two girls who also sat in school chairs. The girls looked very serious, as though they were giving me a job interview. But they were really cute and couldn't have been more than 13 years old.

As part of whatever interview-like process this was, I began showing the girls how I could sing a song. The song sounded like "Drops of Jupiter," by Train. But it was an older song than that one. I'm pretty sure it was a real song, but I don't remember the song. As I sang the song, I heard/felt it pretty vividly.

I sang lyrics that I'm pretty sure didn't match the actual lyrics of the song (if it was real and it wasn't just "Drops of Jupiter"). I pretty much had the lyrics memorized. But I wasn't sure I was getting them right.

So I pulled a newspaper page out. The page had the song lyrics printed on it. Some of the lyrics were printed in bold, possibly to highlight really important parts or really smart words in the song.

I think there was a point when I realized I didn't have the song fully memorized. But if I looked just a little bit at the paper, I could sing a long string of words. So I felt pretty sure I'd have the song memorized soon.

When I woke up, I actually remembered the tune and a couple small phrases. But they all melted away.

(Side notes: I actually spent part of yesterday evening walking through town and memorizing the song "Kurumi," by Mr. Children. I've listened to and sung along with the song enough times that I almost had it memorized, anyway. I actually thought I did have it memorized. So I was a little frustrated to see how many times I actually had to look at the lyrics.

Although, whenever I get frustrated, I also wonder why I'm my age and still getting frustrated over a rock song. Ugh... immature?)

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was on the Brooklyn Bridge with my mother. The walkway of the bridge felt a lot different. It was like all the suspension cables were packed tightly together, and as if there were layers and layers of them. The cables seemed to run incredibly high up into the air. And the bridge itself seemed much bigger and taller than it is IWL.

I was standing out on some metal beam over the walkway with my mom. I may have been holding on to some of the suspension cables for balance.

I was telling my mom some dream I had. In the dream I stood out on some beach, possibly bordering a jungle. One of my co-workers, DD, was there. He had been followinf me around, snooping into my business.

Then, in this dream, a flood had come. It managed to wash me up onto a railroad freight car that was itself filled with debris. I stood on the debris, but it also sometimes felt like the freight car had a solid, red roof on it, and that I stood on that.

I was carrying something like notebooks and textbooks. I was actually in this place to begin with, I now understood, so I could study this stuff. There may actually have been a school desk in the distance, now littered with debris, which I had possibly been using for studying.

DD was now running all over the place, trying to find out where I'd gone. He was really intent on snooping on me for some reason. But I kept quiet and just got to my studying again.

I might not have spoken this dream to my mom. I may have thought it while she read my thoughts. As the dream ended, I may have gotten distracted and tried to tell her the dream again. I may not have known whether I had actually finished telling the dream. But at some point I felt like I was done telling my mom the dream.

For some reason I now climbed through the multi-layered lattice of the steel suspension cables. As I did, my mom asked me, through voice or thought, whether the people publishing me dreams were paying me a lot of money. I said no, that the newspaper (or periodical) I wrote my dreams in took my dreams for free.

I climbed down along a section of suspension cables that was like a ladder. It wasn't until I had started climbing down this ladder that I had felt any fear of heights. The bridge was so tall!

I was now back down on the wooden walkway of the bridge. My mom was already down there, but she was now an old man. She walked behind me as we walked on the outside of the fence guarding the walkway. We were on the edges of the wooden slats now, possibly heading back out to climb on the suspension cables.

The old man started talking about his life as a reporter, back in the old days. He said that in those days reporters really dug into a story. Nowadays, the old man said, reporting was shallow and lazy. I felt bad about what the old man was saying, as if I could have done something to prevent this.

Dream #2

I was in a living room which was positioned in the house like a bedroom. A few people had been in the room. They were all nice-looking and young.

Among these people was a Latina woman who had been recognized as a spy. The woman had been fatally injured or had been made to take poison.

Everybody else was now gone except for the woman and I. I may not have been "there," but just seeing the room. The woman lay on the couch on her back, her head and shoulders kind of slumping off the front of the couch. She was still alive and she may have said something.

I now had a view of another or the same woman. She was standing over me, as if I were a child. My view came up to just under her breasts. She wore a tight t-shirt and a dark blue hoodie. She was in trouble. She had possibly just been shot, or else she was possibly about to be shot.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a small hallway that was dimly lit. I stood by a little group of shelves for newspapers. I saw and grabbed a copy of The Onion. But somebody acted in a mean way that made me nervous as I was grabbing the paper.

I got nervous, pulled the paper out quickly, and hurried away. But a few steps away, I realized I had gotten only a few of the first sheets of the paper, not the whole thing. So I went back to grab the rest of the paper.

I was now in a gas station. One of my friends was with me, I'm not sure who. Behind the counter of the gas station was a youngish woman, a little overweight, with copper-tan skin and long, black hair that was pulled back and a little frizzy. She was really cheerful and nice.

I was sitting in a big, pink recliner before the counter. I seemed to be sitting inside of it as though I were really small, maybe a child. But I also seem to have been myself, at my normal height, as well.

Apparently I was wearing diapers and I had wet my diapers. I hadn't told the woman, but she knew that I needed to change my diapers. She told me that there was a restroom in some place across the street (a cafe or a fast food restaurant?). She told me I could change my diapers there.

I didn't have diapers, and somehow the woman knew that, too. She pulled down, from a top shelf over the cash register area, a partly empty pack of diapers. There were two adult-sized, pink diapers inside. The woman told me I could change into one of these diapers and hold onto the other one.

Somehow I came to understand that the woman thought of me as either her kid or as a person who needed someone to take care of him like a mother would. She had known this for a little while, so she had prepared for it. I thought it was wonderfully nice of her to think of me.

I was now outside, on a wide street on a sunny day. The space on either side of the road seemed wide and empty, maybe with dirt lots or grassy lots, although there also were buildings somewhere in the distance. All around on the road there was a feeling of heavy machinery and dusty construction material.

A group of young people, some or all of whom may have been my friends, were laying out a line of what looked like gigantic surge-protector power strips. The power strips were maybe 1.5m long and .6m wide. At either end, they seemed to have poles sticking out of them, like the poles for rope-belt line makers.

The young people would lay the surge protectors down and then plug huge, black cords into them. A few people had to carry and set down each surge-protector. Both that work and the plugging work seemed difficult.

I was trying to find a place in the work where I could be helpful. But the people were all working so quickly and efficiently together already. I couldn't get in. Eventually I was worried that I would look lazy.

I may have made some kind of weak assertion to everybody else that I should have a place in the work. But one of the people (the only person I can remember now was a man with olive-colored skin, shaggy, black hair, and a shaggy goatee) said something about how I was too much of a sissy to help. One person may have told another person, "Tell that guy to go back to the diapers that girl gave him and have fun with those."

So I walked over to what seems, now, like a flatbed trailer for a semi truck. The bed seemed to have been made out of heavy planks of wood. Oddly enough, the pack of diapers the woman had given me was sitting on the bed. There was also some kind of pile of pages or some kind of book. The story in the pages/book may have been something similar to Alice in Wonderland.

I was now "almost-present" in some kind of place with an old friend of mine, M. M was trying to show me, in his usual intelligent-jester way, some article that he found really funny in The Onion.

I had a series of views based on that article. Sometimes it was like I was looking at the paper. Other times it was like the images on the paper, while still paper-images, were also my whole view, as big as the world. At other times, it was like I was in the images, like they were the three-dimensional, real world, while still looking like newspaper images.

The article was taking some fictional discovery made by fictional scientists, which was obviously a cave which had been used by prehistoric peoples for women to give birth in. But the article was trying to make it sound like a mystical place. The humor of the article, apparently, was how the scientists were trying to give this place a really mystical meaning, when it was "just" a birth cave.

At one point I saw a cross-section image of the birth cave. The cave had three rooms, one set behind the other.

The very back room was labelled with some "really mystical" title by the scientists. In actual fact, it was "just" some kind of room where a spirit was being prepared to enter into the body in the mother's womb. The middle room was the room where the actual birth took place. This room was again, given some "comically mystical" name. The front room had some weird label like "meat and other stuff." I took this to mean that all the supplies that one gets by living in the outside world started to be given to the newborn child here.

The article seems to have been full of references to an astral state. Apparently the scientists had discovered human ribs in the middle or front room. So the scientists made some weird comment about how the "astral ribs" of a cave dweller had been damaged and left behind.

The front room had been fashioned, apparently, into a spacious, domed room, with a wide doorway to the outside. The domed ceiling was the natural stone of the cave, though it also seemed to be fashioned into shapes that looked like tiles.

Near the front of the room, some of the "tiles" were missing from the ceiling. The scientists made some "comically mystical" statement about the shaped that the dark space now left by the missing tiles made in the ceiling. But the "comically mystical" statement "only" amounted to what the image actually looked like -- a woman lying on her back, giving birth, while another woman knelt before the first woman, receiving the child.

At this point I may have been trying to figure out what exactly was funny about this article. As far as I could tell, I thought, from my reading about prehistoric life, birth caves were very mystical places, and the birth process was very mystical. The fact that the image of birth in a birth cave had naturally occurred also seemed mystical to me. I couldn't see why a mystical treatment of the whole thing would be so funny.

Dream #2

I had apparently done some kind of complex work project for my boss. It was something I had done on my own initiative.

My boss now began criticizing my work. He told me that the work I had done was too complex. He said that this wasn't the kind of things clients liked to see from us. He said that our job was to do something more simplistic, very basic, and using very basic data.

My boss told me that we couldn't do anything that expressly directed our clients' ideas, because our clients' job was to have ideas. My boss said, "We need let the clients have a chance to do some value creation on their own. So if we just put a bunch of basic data together and something in it inspires our clients to have an idea, we've done a good job."

I took this to be my boss' nice way of breaking it to me that I was spending too much time doing the stuff I actually liked and not enough time doing the pain in the neck work of finding basic data, doing basic number work.

I knew my boss was too nice to tell me that I had been kind of on the wrong track for a while, and that I needed to get back on the right track of looking for hard number-data. So he'd made some cover-up story that really didn't even match what his real thoughts about our work was.

I now felt kind of stupid and lazy for not having done enough number work.