maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I stood with another person, looking out over a large body of water, like a really large river. The day was bright, the sky almost white, and the sun glittered on the surface of the water.

There was some kind of vessel out on the water. It looked like a mix between a ship and a dock. It looked like it was made out of wood as well as metal.

Another vessel or huge machine was either near or on land to my right. It was firing some kind of explosive devices at the vessel. This big vessel was an enemy vessel, and it was openly firing at the vessel in the water, which belonged to America. But nobody was really doing anything about it.

The explosives were being launched really clumsily, often missing by a long ways. And the explosives that actually hit the vessel didn't really seem to be doing much damage at all.

I started to think that if I stood here watching this whole thing for too long, somebody would start to blame me personally for the explosive devices attacking the vessel. I figured I should just get away from this whole scene.

I started talking with the person standing near me about the explosives. Not long after this, we saw a huge missile launch up into the air. It looked like one of the rockets that launched the Apollo missions into space, except that it was flattish, almost having the shape of a plastic cigarette-lighter. It launched really slowly into the air and up through clouds.

Dream #2

I was probably finishing crossing a street, walking up to a corner, on a city street that looked like an area of Manhattan with a lot of housing projects.

There was a little, blonde girl lying flat on her back on the sidewalk, her feet pointed toward the curb. The girl looked maybe eight or nine years old. She wore a pink or orange summer dress, the skirt of which was pulled up all the way above her stomach.

It seemed like the girl was either dead or dying. She was so still and expressionless. I could feel (somehow) a lack of consciousness in the girl. I could also see or feel a sinking away of the life in her.

A Latino man with long hair in a pony-tail and wearing a baseball cap was near the girl, trying to help her. The girl may have fallen while the man was around, and the man may have softened her fall, laying her down gently. But now, as I lingered to figure out exactly what was going on, the man seemed to be trying to stand the girl back up.

I figured the Latino man was the little girl's father, or some kind of relative. I told the man it looked like the girl needed medical help, not help standing up. The man insisted the girl was fine. But I asked him, "Did you even call an ambulance?" The man may now have been Chinese. He told me he hadn't called an ambulance.

I told the man that I would call an ambulance. I said it wouldn't mean there was necessarily anything wrong with the girl. But it was always just better to check in with medics to make sure nothing was wrong.

I put a flip-open cell phone to my ear and called the ambulance. I thought to myself how dumb this guy was for not calling an ambulance. The girl was obviously really sick. I started to wonder whether the guy was going to get in trouble for not having called an ambulance. I wondered whether he was trying to hide something that was his fault.

As I waited for 911 to take my call, I walked down the sidewalk a bit. There was a platform of scaffolding built over a section of the sidewalk. On the blue, wooden wall of the scaffolding, maybe 3 meters in the air, there were two signs.

Both signs were made out of tarp-like material. They were set side-by-side. They were probably pink. The messages on them were written in Chinese characters, which were a dull shade of blue. The sign on the left had a photo as well as a message on it. The photo may have been of a little girl.

I was able to read the messages (???). They basically spoke about how, due to rampant racism within an apartment complex almost all the residents of which were Chinese, certain residents of the complex were being forced out.

I got the idea that these people had basically just been intimidated by their neighbors until they left. They hadn't been forced out in any legal sense. The people who lived in the complex would have struck anybody else as being also Chinese. But they may have been Muslim as well, or something like that. So the other Chinese people didn't like them.

It turned out that the building had some kind of disease running through it. The situation was either that the disease was more prevalent among the people getting purged, or else that the people being purged were developing the disease more violently, now that they were basically living on the street.

I went back to the little girl, who was now "Chinese" (even though she actually looked like a Latina girl). The little girl was sitting up, completely conscious, even kind of cheerful. I knew that she had whatever the sickness was, and that she could get really sick. The ambulance was coming to pick her up for a check up and medication.

I put my left arm around the girl's shoulders. The ambulance backed up to us, and the back doors were open to receive the girl. A medic lifted the girl out of my arms and into the ambulance. A medic (possibly the same one?) told me, "That girl has tuberculosis. It's really contagious. You were too close to her. You should probably get checked, too."

I kind of resigned myself to having the disease, even though I was a little afraid. My mom was now standing over me. She told me, "I went to the store the other day and got a disease testing hit. It can diagnose if you have the disease. So that way you know way ahead of time and you can treat yourself before you feel all the pain."

I stood up and followed my mom. We were now in something like an unfinished bedroom. The bedroom had a concrete floor and barren, white walls. It was lit with a stark, incandescent light.

My mom pulled out this stretch of cotton padding, like a piece of padding that might be stretched out atop a bed mattress. She laid it out on the floor -- it was actually rolled up, like some kind of stiff, plasticky material, and she had to kind of unroll it and "snap" it into a flat position.

My mom told me that you tested yourself by laying down on the mattress. I felt like the testing really wouldn't work, and that the whole thing was just a big ripoff. I wasn't going to lay down on the thing, because I felt like it would do more harm than good. But I didn't want to disappoint my mom, and I was thinking of a way to stall her.

My mom rolled up the mattress, which she'd laid out in the middle of the room. She walked over to the right and back side of the room, near a doorway to a dark room or hallway, and laid the mattress out again.

As my mom did this, she told me, "These testing kits were on sale at Wal-Mart. So I bought ten or twelve of them. I'm planning on giving them to people as Christmas presents."

I thought, Oh my god, Mom! You bought twelve of these damn things? You really got ripped off! For some reason I went over and lay down on the mattress my mom had laid out.

I either sat up, or was helped up. My mom was gone, and my friend H was now in the room. There was somehting in the center of the room that looked like a hearth, for a fire, except that there were a lot of stones in it. H and I walked over to the left, front side of the room and sat down near an old-style, rotary-dial telephone that sat on the floor.

H picked up the phone and started talking with one of her friends. I watched her on the phone. My view was really low, almost level with the floor, so that the phone's base seemed really big in my view.

H spoke to one of her female friends about a gift she had given to Y, another female friend of hers. It may have been something like a coffee mug with a photo on it. But when she mentioned the gift, H asked her friend, "What did S (a male friend of hers) think about it? Did S like it and pay attention to it?"

I heard a little bit of H's friend's response. H and her friend spoke a bit more. Finally I got the idea that H and her friend were speaking in code.

H hadn't been in contact with Y for a while. They'd had some kind of argument. But before the argument, H and Y had actually been secret lesbian lovers. So now H heard Y was having something like a birthday party. But H wasn't invited. So H sent a present to Y.

Ostensibly the gift was supposed to have something to do with H's male friend S, as if to signify that H liked boys, especially S. But the gift was really, secretly, supposed to show Y that H was still in love with Y. H was now on the phone with her other female friend to see if Y had gotten the right message, and if Y was also still in love with H.

H was kind of treating me like I was her boyfriend, even though she never real showed it. So she didn't want me to know that she was actually in love with Y. So she was speaking in code with her friend.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a camper trailer, one of the kinds that hitch to the back of a pickup truck. It was parked somewhere in the woods. The door was open. I stood in the doorway. My sister stood just outside it.

My sister told me that "J Bieb" or "J Bumblebee" had died. He was some kind of famous figure, but I didn't know very much about him. My sister kind of took a mildly sarcastic tone with me, as if to say, "I know you couldn't care less." It was like she was accusing me of not caring about our family because I wasn't so emotionally stricken by this celebrity's death.

I was then in some other place. A young, kind of attractive girl told me that a celebrity named J Bieb had died. She might even have said something like, "Everybody remembers where they were on the day J Bieb died."

I didn't know anything about this celebrity. But suddenly I remembered that my sister had told me about either this celebrity or a celebrity with a very similar name.

So, to imptess the girl, I blurted out, "Oh, yeah! My sister had said something about that! I think it was back... My sister and my family had come to visit me. They'd rented a camper."

Realizing I would have made my family sound like they had a lot of money for renting a camper, I said, "Well, not one of the big campers. Just one of the small ones, you know, that..."

I may have been making hand motions to illustrate how the small camper worked.

Dream #2

I was with my friend H on an airplane. We lifted off. It was a cloudy day. Everything seemed fine. But just as we ascended into the lower layer of clouds, the plane sped up really quickly. That seemed really abnormal. We suddenly slumped downward. The plane was headed back toward the ground. It was obvious that something was wrong.

I could see as if I were looking through the pilot's window, even though I was still with H in the normal passenger area. The pilot got us turned around. The engines were dead. But the pilot was trying to get us back to the runway. We were kind of gliding, but we were also descending really quickly. I knew it would be a bad landing.

The plane approached the runway. It hit the tarmac pretty violently, possibly smashing theunderside of the plane. But nothing exploded.

I could hear or imagine some kind of news announcement talking about the plane crash. My vision was now outside and behind the plane. I was still alive. But I didn't know about H. I could still see from inside the plane, but not very well. Everything was shaking around.

Then the plane twisted over onto its left side. I could see it as if I were outside and behind the plane and see and feel it as if I were inside the plane. At this point, the plane came to a stop.

Dream #3

I was on a plane with a woman like my mother, although the woman was not more than a few years older than I. The plane had landed, and people were all getting off. I might, however, actually have been staying on the plane, as if I had just stayed on in order to help my mother get situated.

At some point, my mother became a kind of tall, thin woman, like my old friend AL.

Now a young woman with a kind of hip look, possibly with maroon-dyed hair, came into the plane and sat down. She may even have buckled the seat belt. But she was really here to meet with my mother/friend and visit places in this area with my friend.

The young woman was a lesbian, and I got the feeling that she was going to try to seduce my friend. I really didn't mind. She was only my friend. I wasn't in love with her.

So I tried to give some advice to the young woman about how to have a good time in this area. It was partly because I felt bad that I wasn't staying here. It was some kind of tough place to be, and my not staying kind of implied that I wasn't tough. But I'd been here before, and I wanted to prove it. So I started to give the girl advice.

I said, "You look like you're dressed for the summer right now. But when you go down into the caves, make sure you bring a sweater. Because it gets cold when the wind whips through the tunnels. It's like --" and I made some kind of blowing, whistling sound.

The young woman had gotten bored about halfway through what I was saying. Finally she unbuckled herself and stood up. She sulkily walked past me and said, "I already know that stuff."

Dream #4

I and a group of people, probably my family, stood up from dinner at a restaurant. A family at another table stood up at the same time as we did. My mother may have started up a little exchange between our group and the other group, based on some interesting similarity between us. Both groups were laughing and cheerful, but I felt like things could turn stressful pretty quickly.

The tables we were sitting at were in a basement area, and we had to head up some stairs to get to the first floor dining area and exit. I may either have been heading for the stairs or some place like a coat closet or coat check. My family was headed in the other direction.

I was kind of happy to be splitting from the two groups and the almost tense situation. But my mom then called out to a young boy in the group, "You know that ----- (she said my name) lived in Colorado, too." This was supposed to give me something in common with the boy, who was getting ready to go do something in Colorado.

I knew that now I'd be obliged to talk to the boy. He was tall, white, pale, with kind of shaggy hair, not quite down to his shoulders. He wore a t-shirt and a hooded sweatshirt. He seemed cool. But he seemed about as inconvenienced by having to talk to me as I felt for having to talk to him.

We walked in the direction of my family. We headed up the steps. I asked the boy where he'd grown up. He said, "In the West V-----"

We were walking through some kind of crowded space with wood walls. There were a lot of people, and the place was full of noise, so I hadn't quite heard what the boy had said. So I mistook it for "West Village."

I said, "Oh, you grew up in New York?"

The boy said, "No. I said the West Valley." He seemed annoyed at my mistake. So I made some kind of dumb joke. I became really sheepish. As the boy, kind of ignoring me, walked away and back toward his group (we were all in the ground floor dining area), I kept calling out to him with this weird joke.

I suddenly stopped myself, thinking, Geez. The way I'm going at this guy, you'd think I had a crush on him.

So I went and sat at a table where my mom was sitting. The boy's mom was also sitting there. She was white, kind of thin, with short, blonde hair. She'd overheard my weird joke to the boy. She said, "Yeah, a lot of people don't know where the West Valley is. But it's basically all the most populous regions in Kentucky." She said this with a kind of mock-flair that made me realize she thought the area was pretty dumpy.

I wanted to respond with a joke like, "Right, all the great suburbs of -----." I wanted to say a really big town in Kentucky. But all I could think of was Louisville. And I didn't think that was good enough.

A waitress came up to the table from my left. A man had been calling after her. He'd been trying to joke with her, trying to flirt with her. He'd struck me as a bit of an old creep. I was afraid he'd pursue the waitress to our table and start making trouble for us.

The waitress was wearing some kind of one-piece shorts outfit with a gently colorful floral print and made out of a satiny material. She had tan skin and pale brown hair. She was incredibly sexy, but she didn't strike me as a waitress.

The waitress gave me some eye and body signals to let me know she was attracted to me. She then said, "Maybe you should give me your card or your contact information, so we can keep in touch."

I said, "I don't have a card, but I can give you my email address." I shifted in my seat and leaned back a bit, as if I were going to pull a card out of my wallet. I felt embarrassed that I didn't have any business cards. I asked the woman, "Can you give me a napkin?"

The woman sat down in the chair across from me. She picked up a napkin. There were drawings along the top of the napkin. I had apparently been looking at them before. They were done in black, felt-tip pen. They had struck me, as I'd seen them, as some kind of mystical hieroglyphics.

But the woman, looking at them, laughed. I asked her why. She directed me through each drawing, from left to right. It showed stick figures, in frame-like settings, like in a comic strip. One frame showed a boy chasing a girl. Another frame showed the boy and girl together in bed. Another frame showed the boy and girl doing some kind of really nasty sex position.

I said, "Well, I hadn't seen that at all! Must've been cause I was reading it the Japanese way." This meant from right to left, instead of from left to right. Okay...

I suddenly realized that this drawing was made as a kind of love letter to the girl. I was scared. I thought she'd think I'd written this to her. But then I realized that the creepy guy had actually made this drawing for the waitress.

There was another drawing below the first drawing. The first frame showed a cabin in a snowstorm. The second image showed a close-up of some structure in the snowstorm. Then there were a couple of images of an American flag waving in the wind.

Below each frame there were captions. The first captions were something like, "A snowstorm, loneliness, the comfort of a warm home." The next to last caption was, "Destroy the commandos." The final caption was, "America the brave."

I realized that this was some kind of mass-marketed (how?) advertisement for how America should continue the war on terror. For some reason I felt like this was directed against me. I also thought that, since I thought the drawing was kind of silly, that I'd somehow be targeted by the government as unpatriotic.