maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was somewhere outside, standing before a small building like a cottage. I stood before the door, which split in half so it could open on the top and stay closed on the bottom. I probably leaned on a counter-like ledge topping the bottom half of the door.

Inside were my family members and a guy I know from a cafe I go to. The interior of the cottage felt very plain and empty, almost as if it were a children's play-cottage with no decorations in it.

I was talking to the guy about stocks. Apparently the guy had been talking about some Chinese stock that was really great. He was even thinking of buying it.

There may have been a business man somewhere in the cottage. I may have been trying to impress the business man by showing how much I understood the guy. I asked the guy, "What's keeping you from buying the stock? Or..."

Here I seemed to start having trouble getting words into my head as I spoke. "Rather... what is it that is keeping your... joy... about this... company... from becoming 100%... unmitigated?"

The guy then began talking to me about stuff like Chinese economic policy, which I didn't understand. The guy made reference to a few key people in China. I now saw them on a TV screen.

The guy continued to talk to me, but we were now both on a bed outside the cottage. The guy sat on the left edge of the bed, watching a TV in an entertainment center that stood against the cottage wall. I was crouched up in a weird position, like a little kid, behind the guy.

The Chinese political figures were still on the TV. The guy had explained a lot to me. Now he said some quote that apparently some famous investor had made, like, "Why invest in the country's companies, when you can just invest in their currency?"

I thought the guy meant he was going to invest in Chinese currency instead of the company he'd mentioned. But now he mentioned a completely different company he was going to invest in.

The business man now sat on the bed. The guy was now my little brother. But it was like my brother wasn't there. My mom was somewhere around. The business man had been impressed by everything my brother had said.

The business man told my mom, "We need to hire someone new for our firm. We need somebody intelligent, somebody who can give our firm some direction.

"And we're open for all different kinds of people. Duncan Jansen (???) was our CEO." (I knew that Duncan Jansen was a black man.) "We need people who are willing to work, and can have good, new ideas."

I assumed that the man meant, by what he had just said, that my little brother was a good worker, while I was not. I sat up from the bed. I was a little groggy-eyed, as if I'd just woken up from sleep.

I knew I had some sort of data project I had to take care of. I hoped that if I just went and took care of my project, the business man would see that I, too, could work hard.

My office was apparently down a flagstone path, past a few other cottages with fenced yards. After a few cottages, I "knew," I'd turn right.

But as I started going down the flagstone path, the business man mentioned some propecy he'd read, which he now thought was related to my brother. The business man mentioned something about a heavenly choir singing at the announcement of this prophecy.

At the same time, a singing group, which I may have organized, was getting ready for their daily practice. I thought to myself that I might mention to the man that I considered holding singing practice every day to be of great importance.

The group sang a song that had the words "Angels and spirits sing on high." This line kept repeating. It was more like a chant than a song. But it sounded beautiful.

On either side of the flagstone path was lawn, in which were random, wild beds of irises. But the blossoms of most of the irises were way past their prime. Purple and white petals, in different stages of browning, barely clung to the stems.

Dream #2

I saw from the viewpoint of a spaceship in outer space. The spaceship was, apparently, approaching the planet Venus. The planet, though, looked silvery, almost cloud-grey, from our approach.

We seemed to be very close to Venus at first. The upper left quadrant (?) of the sphere had taken up almost all my view. But then we were a ways back, far enough back to see the whole planet and a good deal of the surrounding space quite easily.

At some point the beautiful voice of a woman asked us, in a very professional, almost computerized voice who we were and what our business was.

A man on board the ship may have mentioned that the planet Venus required permission before allowing people to land on her. Suddenly I realized that the voice I'd heard hadn't been from a person on Venus -- it had been the voice of the planet herself!

A spherical shield like glittering gold dust went up around the planet. I knew that this shield could keep anybody off the planet.

The man must have begun interacting with Venus again. This time, though, as Venus spoke, she turned different colors. It was like her surface was banded, like Saturn's surface, but with neon orange, green, and pink. And these bands would shift up and down, like computer lights, as Venus spoke.

Good morning, ,everybody.

Dream #1

A gigantic cruise ship like the Titanic was out on the sea during a huge storm. There were a lot of people in the main dining room. The dining room was big and bright, with low ceilings and small, round tables draped in white tablecloths. The dining room may have had doors, and possibly even windows, right out to the deck.

People had been warned to stay inside the inner parts of the ship during the storm. But one of the men actually opened one of the doors or windows out to the deck. He may actually have gone outside, on the left side of the ship.

The storm blew the man back through the door and out another door on the opposite side of the ship. The man could be seen clinging onto an old-style, wooden mast, his body being blown pretty much horiztonally by the storm, like a flag in the wind.

I was now back in the dining area. But now the place was almost totally empty. It was also very dim and full of heavy, wooden tables. I sat at a rectangular table for six or eight people. A beautiful woman sat across from me. I myself was a beautiful woman.

One man had just walked away from us. He may have been my boyfriend, or he may have been the woman's boyfriend. But there was also a man slumped down in his chair to the woman's left. He seemed to be the woman's boyfriend. He was so drunk that he'd passed out.

The woman was upset about the man having gotten this drunk again. I, possibly as the woman's friend, was trying to comfort the woman.

I encouraged the woman to have a drink. I said it might make her feel better and make her feel like she'd equalled things up between herself and her man. I told her the drink would be on me.

But the woman, hearing that I was buying her drinks, suddenly became greedy with drinks! I don't know where she was getting the drinks from, but she kept pounding them back, sometimes even two-fisting it.

The woman was drinking gin in something like a baseless wine glass. And each time she'd finish a drink, a little green scoreboard over her left shoulder would count the drink off.

Finally the woman stopped drinking. But it wasn't like she was drunk at all. Both our men were back. But my man was already in bed. The woman's man was still passed out drunk.

I figured both men wouldn't be much good for sex tonight, but I told the woman that she could probably find some way to make her man please her. I had an image in my head of either the woman or me sitting up, still in a dress, while one of the men, so drunk he couldn't even sit up, lay on his stomach and performed cunnilingus on either me or the woman.

But what I was really interested in was trying to prove to the women that her man was so drunk that he'd be no good at all for the night. Then we could find some way to get rid of the man for the evening. After that, I'd convince the woman to have lesbian sex with me.

But now we were carrying the man back to the bedroom, which was apparently down a short hallway just past the dining area. The woman had the man's head, and I had his feet. The man seemed really sick. I was afraid he was going to puke all over me sooner or later.

Dream #2

A man was telling me and a group of friends about how he and a woman (who sat beside him) had lived in a mansion for a while. Someone else may have lived there with them. The other person may have been really rich. The man and woman were well-off, in fact they looked like a glamorous couple from the 1920s, except alive today, but they weren't rich.

So while the rich person had one portion of the house, the couple had the maids' quarters, which themselves were huge. The man said the couple didn't have to do any maid work. They just liked the quarters because they were so big and they felt kind of old, like an old castle or monestary.

As the man spoke about the maids' quarters, they materialized around us. Everything seemed to be made of concrete, painted over, like a public restroom. In fact, there was some huge restroom just behind the man, not divided from our room by a wall, but by a concrete seat, in which the couple sat.

The man told us, "We even used the hands-all bathroom while we were there, which was huge."

Somebody, possibly I, asked what a hands-all bathroom was. The man said he didn't know, that he'd never asked to find out.

I said, "I think 'hands-all' is like when you say 'all hands,' like when people say, 'all hands on deck.' I think it was a huge bathroom that all the servants used at once when they were suddenly called to duty, so they could all get washed up and ready at a moment's notice."

A woman said, "Or, what I was thinking is that it was for the smaller bathroom. Because that one had a mini beauty salon in it." A small bathroom, with something like a barber's chair and a mirror with lightbulbs around it, appeared in a room two or three rooms down, behind the woman.

The woman said, "I think 'hands-all' meant something like 'the works,' like if you went into that bathroom, you'd get 'hands-on' treatment -- a full makeover. And all the maids would take turns giving each other makeovers."

I was pretty sure my idea was right and the woman's idea was wrong. (??!!) But I didn't say anything. Instead, my vision seemed to focus on the huge tub in the huge bathroom. It was like I was right there. The bathtub was full, almost to overflowing, with very warm, but not hot, water.

Dream #3

I was in outer space, speeding upward and away from the earth. I must have been in a small spaceship, but sometimes it felt like I was just out in space, in some space suit.

Another man was out there, even though I don't think I ever saw him. The man spoke about another man who had taken a dimensional transport to another universe. He had done this as part of a battle with a group of aliens trying to destroy the world.

The man told me that the aliens could actually use the shockwaves of dimensional transport to destroy the earth. But the use of shockwaves and dimensional transport in flight was also the method of fighting that the aliens normally used in their battles.

So, the man told me, the other man had gone into another dimension and was conducting these kind of shockwave battles with the aliens. I imagined orange, kind of traffic-cone-shaped spaceships fighting with each other.

The man said that the other man would be back soon, as soon as he'd accomplished his mission. But now this man seemed to be going somewhere as well. Perhaps I was going somewhere, too.

We, or I, sped upward through space. I encountered a dimensional shockwave, from where alien spaceships had been. As I blasted through it, the sky of stars became filled with many more stars, some of which were different colors -- gold, purple, red, pink. There was also beautiful, brilliant nebular dust everywhere.

I was amazed by the beauty of the sight. But, suddenly, the sun (?) was eclipsed. The darkness of the sun (if it was the sun) revealed an even deeper layer of beauty in this universe. I was astonished!

I was now in a hospital. But the part of the hospital I was in was more like the control room in some kind of military base. All the people in this control room seemed focused on taking care of some procedure for one little girl. The room was small and crowded, with four or five rows of computer-embedded tables, each row split into two slanting aisles.

One man was in charge of administering painkillers to the baby girl. But he said, "That girl's had enough stuff to mess with her system. I'm not putting anything else in her." A black man, somebody like a nurse or a janitor, sat to the man's right and heard him say this.

There were two or three men standing before a screen at the back of the room. The main man was something like a head surgeon. He may somehow have been controlling the procedure being done on the baby girl, who was in another room, through something like remote-controlled robots.

But suddenly the screen shot of the baby girl cut to a sign (in kind of cheesy, 1970s style, "high-tech" lettering) saying "INCONCLUSIVE." This sign stayed on for a few seconds.

The head doctor was panicked. Something had gone wrong in the operation. But he couldn't figure out what had happened!

The screen now switched to a sign saying "INCONSCIOUS," which I guess was supposed to mean "unconscious." It meant the girl had slipped into a coma and was probably dying. This sign was flashing on a lot of different screens, now, and it may have been accompanied by buzzing alarms.

The head doctor shouted, "Dammit! We're losing her! What went wrong? Does anybody know what's going on?"

One of the other people shouted, "Her pain levels are really high. Her body couldn't take it anymore. It slipped into a coma to shield itself from the pain."

The head doctor yelled, "Did somebody forego painkillers before the operation?"

The black man, who had been sitting next to the doctor who'd decided not to administer painkillers said, "Yes! The doctor said he wasn't going to give the girl anything! I saw him! I was right here when he said it.!"

The head doctor seemed relieved. Everybody did. I saw from somebody's point of view, as if I were now actually in this scene. I was looking at the screen of the doctor who hadn't administered painkillers.

The head doctor said, "Start giving the baby girl some painkillers. As soon as they start to take effect, the girl should slip out of her coma. We'll start the operation over after that."

I was already putting in the commands to administer painkillers.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in some run-down part of some big town. I was on a block with thin apartment buildings. The outsides of the buildings were grey, like they were either of unpainted cinder block or had their paint chipped off or worn off. It was daytime, and the light seemed kind of yellowy-pale and humid.

I was with a group of people. We all seemed to be in a line, and we were all being directed into one of the apartment complexes. I understood that we had all been sought out by some group and brought here.

I was now with the group that was seeking us out. They were seeking out Russians. But I wasn't a Russian. I had a bad feeling that I was simply part of their operation, kind of disguised as one of the people being sought, but that I was actually helping catch the people and get them confined in this one apartment building.

I was now with a line of Russian men, heading into this apartment building. One of the men in front of me was blonde, with a short haircut and pale skin. We got inside. The door opened directly to a dark, narrow, winding stairwell.

There was some kind of military guy just inside. He looked to be maybe in his 40s, a bit overweight, with a pudgy face, sweaty, and stubble-covered. He wore some kind of camouflage trenchcoat and one of those thick, round hats with the fur lining and earflaps.

I asked the man what I was doing here, what the Russians were here for, and if I really needed to be a part of this. The man raised a finger to his lips and said, "Sh... Just wait here until they're all upstairs. Act like you're going upstairs, too. Then, once they're all upstairs, just leave through the front door. We want to make sure we have them all here for the trial. As long as they think you're going, they'll go, too."

I now felt really terrible -- even though I definitely planned to leave this place as soon as I could. But it was like all the Russians had to think I was going with them, or else they wouldn't go. So I had to trick them into thinking I was going, too. But I wasn't. Why was I helping these military people capture these people?

I didn't quite feel like I could leave. Now that I knew there was going to be a trial, I wanted to see what it was going to be about. So I'd stay for that.

The trial took place in a room on the first floor, just off from the stairwell. The room was short, but kind of wide. It was barren, with dirty, concrete floors and plain, white walls. The light was incandescent, but it also felt cold and barren. There was a group of officials seated at a long folding table to my left. On the other side of the room was a vague group of people. Some were people being judged. Some were attorneys.

Someone had told me, again, that I could come in and see what the trial was all about. They told me that I could actually even help them out with the trial. I didn't want to help out with the trial, but I suddenly found myself doing so.

I stood out on the floor, giving some kind of random speech. I was trying to make myself look like I was defending the Russians. But what I was really doing was making them feel more comfortable, so they'd give up as much information as possible.

Dream #2

There was a man in some part of the world like Vietnam. I'm not sure what the time period was. It seemed like nowadays, or maybe even a little bit into the future. The man had done some spy-like thing, probably against America. He had been discovered. But he was already beginning to make a quick getaway.

The man looked like a stereotypical "Sgt. Rock" type of soldier. He wore a camouflage uniform, a rounded helmet with something like netting over it, and he had a muscular face and stubble. He may even have been smoking a cigarette.

The man was now getting into something like a spaceship. It was right next to some kind of hut on stilts. The spaceship looked like an old, 1950s style rocket, with the elliptical body and tailfins and everything. But it was made of some really silvery material.

The man had climbed into some kind of side door or hatch high up on the ship, possibly via some high window, or even the roof, of the hut. There were now a lot of rushing and booming sounds.

The space shuttle seemed to be lifting off. But now an Asian-looking woman, who was actually a spy for the American side, was calling out the window of the hut for the man. She had been assigned to get him back so that the Americans could put him on trial for whatever his spy activity had been. So she was pretending that she loved him and she didn't want him to go.

At this point I may have seen from the man's point of view. The woman seemed huge, like she was stretching all the way up into the air to pull me down. Her cries also seemed really terrifying somehow, like supernatural moans. For some reason, either I or the soldier decided to stay, since the woman loved either me or the soldier.

Dream #3

There were a group of people trying to fight some kind of alien menace. I'm not really sure what it was. The group was maybe a couple of guys and a girl.

One of the guys was separated from the rest of the group. He ended up finding the body of a woman who was thought to be in on the aliens' plans. But he didn't know that his discovery of the woman's body was planned.

The woman was actually an alien. The aliens were actually like robots. But the robots were made out of this purple mold, which was something like a living machine that could shape itself in various ways.

The man had done something to the woman, possibly cutting her open with a scalpel for some reason. A piece of the purple mold squirted out of the woman's body and onto the man's left eye.

The man didn't pay it any attention: it wasn't much. But the mold worked its way behind the man's eye and into his brain. I knew this meant that the mold would proliferate in the man's brain and body, eventually turning him into a robot.

Later the rest of the man's group would (or did?) find the man. They would (or did) think, wrongly, that the man was fine, when he actually was an alien robot, ready to spread the mold into other human bodies.

Good morning, everybody. Sunday mornin' and doin' my dumb laundry as I write this.

Dream #1

I was in a "spaceship" with my family. The spaceship was lit with a dim, amber light. The walls and floor were smooth and white. The interior was like some plastic-molded futuristic living room rather than a spaceship.

My mother said we were going to test out the spaceship, possibly just so my mom could show me how the thing worked. The ship now began blasting up into the air.

I was impressed by how little we felt any of the acceleration. Right next to me there was some kind of black vertical strip with a series of light-up green and red signals in it. I watched as the sign showed how high our spaceship was going. I was really impressed when we hit the "250K feet" signal, which to my mind meant we were in outer space.

I thought we were going to stop there. But we kept going. I wondered what the heck kind of "test" this was, if we were actually going all the way to the moon. But the signal showed us getting closer and closer to the moon at an unbelievable pace.

Before I knew it, the signal said we were really close to the moon. I put my eyes to some kind of periscope which served as our "window." The moon looked very clear, but still pretty far away. I looked back to the signal. I guess I had misread it. It had said we were approaching the moon. But now it said we were actually close to the moon.

I put my eyes to the periscope again. The moon was really close, apparently: so close, I could only see a small piece of it. But that part didn't look like the real moon. It looked like some kind of old-fashoned, black-and-white clip-art version of the moon.

I looked away, kind of disappointed, like I was never actually going to see the moon.

At this point, I kind of woke up. I had a half-awake, half-asleep fantasy in which my mom shut off all the lights in the spaceship and then activated some kind of screen all around us that showed us a view of the moon. It still didn't look like we were close to the moon. It just looked like an extreme close-up of the moon from a video shot on earth, on a really big TV screen.

Dream #2

Someone was holding a creature that was either a young child or a cat or both mixed together. The cat-baby had to leave the possession of the first person. I think it was going into the possession of my sister or a woman like my sister. (I saw all this from a low-angle view.)

The person handed the cat-baby off with some effort. The cat-baby held on with its claws and cried out, "No! No! I couldn't bear to be away from you."

The person laughed and said, "We'll see."

My sister felt guilt for making the cat-baby sad. But the cat-baby was already attaching to my sister, even while it was still crying that it couldn't bear to be away from the first person.

The cat-baby was now calming down. It told my sister, "You know, this isn't bad! I can deal with this after all!"

My sister laughed.

Dream #3

I walked up to a group like a family playing in some kind of park area that seemed to be near a beach. I must have known these people, as if they were my family in some way.

I knelt before some little boy who lay half-naked, wearing only a blue shirt (like the one I wear to bed). To my left was a big cliff of grey rock. We were on sand, and the sand extended about ten meters or so to my right. A lawn went to my left and forward about 100 meters, rolling down a slight slope, then ending in a long beach.

A woman (dressed in Victorian clothing? a white, frilly dress with a long, lacy skirt and a big hat?) and a couple other people (dressed in modern clothes) sat on the sand. Other people played on the grass and beach.

I was playing some game with the boy where I put my hand on his stomach. There was some kind of joke involved with this. It made me look like a dope and like I was the boy's slave. So the boy would always laugh at it.

But I suddenly realized I had to get going. I don't know where I had to go: maybe just back to my own house and life. The boy got upset when I stopped playing the game with him. He sat up on my knee. Somehow he looked half-human and half-animal. Maybe his eyes were all black.

I told him that I had to go, but that he'd always have the memory of the fun times we'd had together.

The little boy impetuously cried, "Well, what the hell good are you to me that way?"

Dream #4

I don't remember why, but a group of friends and I had to get to a certain part of some beach. I don't know exactly how we were traveling there.

It was more like my view was just skimming to the right over long stretches of beaches, water, and roads near beaches. And I never saw my friends. It was more like they were just voices in my head or some kind of narration.

My friends, who all sounded like young men and women having a good time together, were picking on one woman in particular who kept asking why we couldn't just go to any old part of this beach.

One of the friends said that we had made a plan to meet some specific person at this specific point at the beach. The person had even given the name of the point.

We were heading to some spot where it was like the beach turned off from the actual ocean and turned into something like a shore surrounding some offshoot of water from the ocean. The water barely moved. It looked clear, but it looked like there was a lot of green moss at the bottom.

I made some comment about "Bleach Beach."

One of the friends translated my statement for the girl that everybody had been joking with. He said, "He just made a joke that the reason why they call this place Bleach Beach is that the water here moves so slow and gathers so many germs that the only way it can be safe for people to swim here is by having a bunch of chlorine poured in. Just like a swimming pool."

For some reason, this was yet another proof that the girl was a dimwit for not having realized why we couldn't have just stopped at any other point on the beach.

Good morning, everybody.

The endings of the first and third dreams were lucid. The first three dreams happened between 1:30 AM and 3:30 AM. The fourth dream happened between 5 AM and 5:45 AM.

Dream #1

I was with a couple of my nephews in a car that was driven by my grandmother. I may have been getting a ride back to the airport after my visit back home. It was a nice, sunny day.

My grandma asked me where I'd like to eat. I may have felt like a little kid at this point. I didn't want my grandma to have to pay for a big meal, so I said, "Oh, just Burger King will be fine."

We began driving up a winding hill, the face of which was brownish rock. My grandma said, "No. We're going to go to a sit down place to have some food. Let's go to Denny's."

We were at the top of the hill, in some kind of parking lot. Behind my grandma, from a view out her window, down the slope of parking lot and across some street, I could see a Denny's. Out my window and slightly up the parking lot's slope, I could see the car my mom was driving.

My grandma said, "You go tell your mom we are going to Denny's, and that she is coming, too. Don't let her make any excuses. Tell her I'm paying for all of you."

I was at my mom's vehicle, looking in from the passenger-side window. The vehicle was tall, like a tall van or SUV or pick-up truck. My mom sat at the wheel, giving me an almost dead look. I understood she was almost scorning me for thinking she'd go to Denny's with my grandma.

Somehow I was in my mom's car, riding down the hill, possibly to Denny's. I was trying to keep my mom's emotions under control.

We were now at my family's house. My mom and sister and I were playing with a little boy and a little girl, "my niece and nephew." We were all sitting on the floor, which was kind of cluttered with toys and clothes.

The little boy was doing something cute, but the little girl got really jealous. She did something mean to the little boy, hurting the little boy, and then started crying herself. Either my mom or my sister started comforting the little girl. They fed her a bottle which had a fleshy look to it, like a bottle-shaped breast.

The girl seemed to have a weird-shaped head and weird shaped eyes. The head and eyes got weirder and weirder as I looked at the girl eating. I stood up and walked toward the kitchen.

There were a mattress, some blankets, and some other stuff strewn on the floor right before the doorway to the kitchen. I stepped over all that stuff to get into the kitchen. But among that stuff, I saw that there was a little baby boy who had been forgotten under a bunch of blankets.

I knelt down and uncovered the little baby boy. It looked like a white-furred monkey with black eyes. It was swaddled in a blanket. I picked it up. I felt there was something meaningful, almost psychological, about my having found this baby boy and having started to care for it.

My sister and mom knelt near me. My sister took the baby. As I handed it to her, I felt like I needed to see it again, as if I couldn't believe I'd seen it at all. But now it was a "cell phone," which looked more like a blue, plastic alarm clock with green-lit punch keys on the underside.

My sister handed me the phone. I started talking with my sister on the phone. It was like she was no longer in front of me..

My sister said, "Yeah, it's probably not a good idea to tell F (my oldest nephew) about some of the things you did. It makes him think it's okay for him to do them. I mean, you think it's funny, and I think it's funny. But mom thinks it's just destructive in her house."

I replied, "Yeah, that's cool. We just come from different generations, I guess."

As I was saying this stuff, I found myself in another room, "my bedroom," which was more like a big room in a museum. The room was gently lit with warm, white-gold light. I wasn't on the phone. I was laying on something like a bed, on my left side.

I was looking at a huge painting, maybe 5 meters long and 3 meters tall. It was of Jesus, just his head, before a blue sky. His hair flowed as if blown by the wind, like you sometimes see happening for female anime characters.

Jesus had blood on his head and face, from the crown of thorns. The blood was also blowing in the wind. The blood then turned into red and orange leafs blowing in the wind. There might have been canopies of red and orange leafed trees in the background.

For some reason, this fall-themed crown of thorns painting made a lot of sense to me. I began to wonder why there wasn't a fall-related holiday relating to the life of Christ.

I rolled onto my back and then onto my right side. The room was dark. I was looking at another huge painting, this time winter-related. It had something to do with Jesus' footprints in the snow.

But there was something weird about the snow. It actually looked like boot-tracks on the moon. I realized Jesus wasn't in this painting at all. It was just a painting of boot-tracks on the moon. Yet it seemed so mystical to me that I reached up my arm (a child's arm?) parallel to the tracks.

Suddenly I realized I was dreaming.

I sat up. I was on the floor. I stood slowly. The room was dim, almost completely dark. The painting which stood before me was now even larger. The only detail I could see on this painting was near the lower left (my left) corner of the painting. It was the back of an almost naked person. The back was huge, muscular. But I couldn't tell iif it was male or female.

Next to the painting was an enormous (maybe 1.5-2 meters tall), metallic vessel, probably silver, on a stout, white pedestal and under a plexiglass display cube. The "bowl" of the vessel had a weird, nest-like tangling of metal, as tangled and fine as moss, which was incredible, considering how big this vessel was. The "neck" was smooth and polished.

Walking around, I kept feeling myself fade out of the dream. I tried to keep calm and hold onto the dream as long as I could. But eventually everything went black and I woke up.

Dream #2

I was in some big room like a school cafeteria on the second floor of a building. There were a lot of long tables with bench seats. The light was nice, incandescent. I sat at a smaller table with my friend T and a friend of hers, who I at first thought was Japanese.

T's friend and T were here to study. I had helped T with some kind of study project. I was apparently here to hand off a paper with my revisions. But now T took out a copy of a screenplay I'd written, with a lot of revisions on it.

The screenplay seemed to have been printed on 11x17 paper, so that two pages showed on each side. The first page was covered with pencil-revisions, in a really nice, narrow cursive hand. I understood that the rest of the screenplay was just as full of revisions.

At some point, T's friend reached over and scribbled something in the margins between the two pages. It said something about how T was my girlfriend. The T's friend said something out loud, and I realized T's friend was actually Chinese.

I felt odd about the implication that T was my girlfriend. But right after that T may have called me her boyfriend. I may have been happy about that.

Dream #3

It was night. I was walking down a sidewalk in front of some apartment buildings. A young, black man in a bright red hooded sweatshirt, black bubble-jacket vest, and jeans ran into an apartment building. Seeing me, the guy slowed down and gave me a kind of suspicious glance. He then ran the rest of the way into the building.

I knew somehow that the guy had been planning to kill me for a while. Now that I had just gone past his building, he figured he might as well shoot me now.

I saw him, through some windows, run up a stairwell, then run back down it. I knew he had just gone into his apartment to pick up his gone, and that he was now coming back for me.

I didn't walk any faster or try to get away. I figured if it was going to happen, I couldn't avoid it, even though I'd probably be really afraid once things really started happening.

I was now walking through a long hallway in a dorm building or apartment complex. The hallway was kind of dumpy, with white walls and stark, fluorescent lighting. There was somebody following me. But it now felt like an older, white man rather than a young, black man.

I came to a door, which I knew was for the apartment of the man who lived in the apartment directly above my apartment. I knocked on the door, thinking I'd finally take him up on his invitation to come up and hang out some time. I figured this way, I could throw the stalker off my trail.

The door was a really weak wood. I knocked. The door was now a heavy door with a thin window on the left side. Through the window, I saw a small hallway and the another door. A college-aged girl opened the far door. She waved me in.

I thought the door was locked. But as soon as I pushed on the door, there was a buzzing, and the door opened. I walked into the smaller hallway. The woman was gone, which struck me as strange. I realized I was all alone. This struck me as odd.

Suddenly I realized I was dreaming. I almost lost the dream right there. But I calmed down.

I told myself to keep walking, and just to explore the space. I walked past the small hallway. There was another small hallway. The walls here had wooden drawers set into them, like old library card catalog drawers, except that they looked really light and cheap. I thought this was an interesting place, full of files or something. But I kept going.

I walked through another door. I was now in a very small room with a small, grey-painted metal stairway and second level and a bunch of grey-painted, metal lockers. Below the balcony of the second level, the room seemed to twist off into a much smaller corridor. The staircase also had a metal-railed gate in front of it. The place kind of reminded me of small rooms in the Intrepid aircraft carrier.

I was surprised that I was all alone, and I kept on gurad for a person, who I assumed would probably not be very kind. I remembered that in my last long lucid I had met a really crazy person.

I had two options for exploring. I chose to go up the staircase instead of around the curve on the first level.

I floated over the gate. I almost floated up the staircase. But I felt like the floating was actually causing me to lose my dream-control. So I grabbed the railings of the staircase and forced myself to walk up.

I had a weird feeling through the rest of this dream. I felt very closed in. I could hear my breath, like I was wearing a space suit.

I felt very warm. Walking up the steps, to my left, I saw a clothing rack full of old, pale blue and white button-up shirts. It looked like they were for a somewhat old man. Above that, there was a shelf piled with upside-down, round-brimmed, straw hats. I picked one up and fiddled with it a little. It looked like it was in bad shape.

I got up to the balcony. There were more lockers. It looked at first like I couldn't go anywhere else from here. But then I realized that there was a hallway or something off to the right.

In waking life, my computer made a loud noise. I woke up.

Dream #4

I had been in space, flying some kind of space vehice. I barely remember anything. I remember being high up in the sky, coming back down, around sunset, when the sky was a vivid purple.

I was now taxiing an airplane (?) into an airport with my mother. We were "parked." My mom went into the airport to take care of something before we went home.

I sat in the backseat of a car, outside a metal-walled building like some staff building at an airport. I was still waiting for my mom. The sky still had a deep-blue-purple post-sunset look. It was kind of cold.

I could imagine what was going on between my mom and the people she was talking to. The people were something like military people. I could see, in particular, one tall, older, white man who kind of looked like a very thin Stan Lee, wearing a green military uniform for formal occasions.

My mom was asking the military man what he would do now that she'd told him about the weird adventures I'd been through, which were undeniable fact.

The military man said, "I'll do the same thing I do to every mother and son who comes in here telling me stuff like this. I'll tell them to get out. I had money to pay attention to this kind of stuff the first few times it happened. But now it's happening all over the place and -- you mothers and kids are bleeding me dry!"

I was sitting in the trunk of the car, with the trunk opened just a crack. I thought of getting out of the trunk and telling the military man something about my experience that was so unique that he wouldn't want me to go away. Plus. I would tell him, I didn't want his money. I just wanted to tell my story.

I thought to myself (why?) that this was a lot like a Joyce Carol Oates story (which it wasn't).

I opened the trunk all the way and sat out of it to see one of my female cousins, A, walking down the tall stairway of another metal-walled building. She came my way. I could tell she would be mad at me for not having spoken with her for a long time.

By the time she got to me, my mom was there, too. I was standing by the car. There seemed to be a miniature living room surrounding the car as well.

I was trying to explain something to my cousin about how I couldn't include her on something my mom and I were doing. As I did so, I was kneeling by a small bookshelf and going through some items.

I stood up to see my cousin kneeling on the opposite side of the bookshelf. My cousin now had weird, plasticky, shiny, black hair, like an anime character. She was also wearing some kind of red and yellow uniform that reminded me of an anime character.

My cousin gave me a half-mad, half-disappointed look. I tried to make her less mad by saying something half-heartedly interesting about anime.

(Note, evening, Dec. 17: I think the "crown of thorns" image in my third dream is influenced by a set of images from a photo slideshow I saw yesterday on the US version of Reuters.com. The slideshow was just the normal "editor's choice" picks of global photos, I think.

But it showed a lot of images of people in England, Greece, Turkey, and other countries, involved in some form of protest. A lot of the photos showed people who had sustained head injuries during the protests. What really struck me was that these people were still protesting, even after having been hurt.

So I don't think the "crown of thorns" image is entirely about Christ.

Also I thought at first that the metal vessel in the first dream was just a really big symbol for the male, uh... parts. I still think that's the case. The painting of the man's or woman's backside and the giant... parts right next to each other seems like an image readily supplied by the unconscious.

However, I also think the image stands for a couple other things. First, I think it's an upside-down version of a brain and neck. In my fourth dream I also have an upside-down head (the hats) near a torso (the shirts). I don't know why the head and neck have been important in my dreams lately. But they have.

Second, I think the vessel is like a jet or rocket engine: a bunch of fine, intricate pipes and valves, ending in a big propulsion valve. Anyway, I guess jet engines can be phallic or intestinal, depending on how you look at them.

None of this is a big deal. I just write it down to help me focus.)