maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

It was daytime. I was out on a street somewhere, probably in Brooklyn. There were a lot of people out on the street. I was apparently really focused in on something I was doing. But some person, maybe an older, kind of fat, white man, was talking to me.

The man told me that there had been some huge thing having to do with guns just down the road. There may have been a small gunfight. But the really big deal about it was that there were a whole lot of people all gathered together, and they all either had or were making a lot of guns.

The street the man was talking about was just down the block and around the left corner. It suddenly occurred to me that I needed to go down that block. The person who had been talking to me told me not to go down that block. But I didn't have a choice. I needed to go.

I was now walking down the block. It was as bright and sunny there as on a summer day. To my left was some kind of tall, chain-link fence, like might be around a school. Beyond that, farther down the sidewalk, were some brownstone row-houses and some narrow, shortish apartment buildings.

But to my right, the street, just down the way from me, was filled with cars. The cars looked like 1970s cars, more like Cadillac style than hot-rod style. They were all parked at odd angles, right in the middle of the street.

There were people sitting and standing among the cars, as well as on the stoops of brownstones on the right side of the street. I think the people were mostly white, kind of overweight, with hair in a kind of buzz cut. They may have worn black t-shirts.

I could see that all these people were either making guns or cleaning up their guns. I knew that whatever they were doing, it was horribly illegal, and that I was probably walking through the middle of a really bad situation.

I just tried to act like I didn't see anything. A few guys on my side of the street were helping out the gun guys somehow. They seemed to be suspicious of me, wondering why I was walking around here. But my nonchalant attitude made them less worried about me.

I had realized -- at some point -- that I was here because I used to live here. I'd moved to a different place a long time ago. But for some reason, some of my mail was still being delivered here. I had to come back here and pick up some of my mis-delivered mail.

I walked up to one of the narrow, short apartment buildings. The door of the building was glass with bars behind it that looked like chrome bars, which just glared in the summer-bright light. This was where I used to live.

There was a circus-peanut orange colored card in the door, somehow, as if the card were sticking out of the bars -- even though the bars were *behind* the glass of the door!

I pulled the card out and looked at it. It was some kind of postal service request card, stating that all mail should be delivered to my new address. The address was the exact address of where I live nowadays IWL, except, perhaps, without the apartment number.

I still needed to get my old mail. So I walked into the apartment. Inside, the place looked like the interior of a nice brownstone row-house. There was a nice first floor hallway area, which, it seemed to me, led to a spacious living area, probably where my old landlady would have lived.

There was a staircase along the right wall. I walked up the staircase. The staircase ended with a doorway that opened into a hallway. Along the right wall of the hallway were rooms. People would rent the rooms and then share the bathroom and kitchen on this floor.

My old room had been the room closest to the doorway at the top of the staircase. The door to the room was wide open. The room was empty. It was like nobody had moved in there since I'd left. I think I was now questioning whether I hadn't left this place only very recently, and not a long time ago, like I'd thought before.

I went into the room. There was a bed that took up most of the room. On the left side there was a weird niche in the wall, like a closet. But the shelf in the closet was low: waist-high, so that it almost looked like it could be used as a writing desk.

The place was all dusty. Some of the dust in the corners and on the surfaces of things was so old and caked up that it was starting to get gummy.

Something about the fact that this place felt so abandoned, so quiet and empty, made me feel like I should move back here. I was starting to feel like I couldn't live in my new place anymore, anyway. So maybe I would see about moving back here.

I walked back down to the front door of the apartment. But as I was leaving, my old landlady was walking up to the front door. I had been hoping that I could get into and out of the house without her ever knowing I was here. I'd felt like if she saw me, she'd harrass me about something.

I opened the door for my landlady. I greeted her. I walked outside. But instead of going out into the neighborhood I'd just been in, I walked into a big front patio of a house, which had been converted into a sun-room. It had grass-green, plasticky-feeling carpeting. Beyond the sun-room, the neighborhood also looked much nicer.

My old landlady looked about the same, except that she was a bit heavier nowadays. She wore a white, long-sleeved shirt. She told me that I still owed her my last week's rent. She'd thought that maybe that was why I was here.

I told my old landlady that I didn't owe her the money. I'd paid her everything when I'd left. I saw an image of my hands with a handful of bills. I was visually counting out everything I'd paid my old landlady before I'd left. I was even starting to think that I'd paid my landlady too much, and that she owed me some money.

But I knew it would be tough enough just to convince my landlady that I didn't owe her any money. I was trying to get my thoughts clear enough so that I could make the right argument. I didn't know if I could do it. It kept feeling like I was losing my train of thought.

As I was trying to pull my arguments together, my old landlady walked back toward the front door of this sun-room patio. My old landlady was talking to me about something, like she was still annoyed with me, but was trying to be friendly.

My old landlady spread out her arms, like she was taking in the sun. I noticed that the sides of my landlady's white, long sleeves had black designs on them.

The designs were very much like the flame-like emblems of the "tribal" genre of tattoos. But they also had a kind of "vintage," Ed Hardy kind of look. For some reason, seeing these tattoo-like designs on my old landlady's shirt made me wonder if my old landlady actually had tattoos.