maboroshi

Good morning, everybody

Dream#1

I stood on an area that looked like a mix between a craftsman's workshop and a subway platform. Where the subway would be, there was a single car that looked like a mix between a roller coaster car and a coin-operated ride for little kids. The car may have been pink. A person was either fastened safely or held captive in the car. The person may have been a kid. I may have identified with the person somehow.

Dream #2

I was kneeling on the floor in the threshhold of a doorway. Across the threshhold from me knelt a young man, probably with longish, scraggly, blonde hair.

We were placing squares of carpet on the floor. The squares were about 35cm long and 18cm wide. The carpet was a slightly shaggy, greenish tan material.

We started cutting the carpet on some of the squares. I wondered why we were doing this. It was destroying the carpet, making it look terrible. But for some reason I thought the carpet might grow back, like grass.

I got a closer look at one square of carpet. The cuts revealed a series of squares that were made by comb-like tracings of lines, or like the lines made by a rake.

Dream #3

I sat in an office with "the head of my department," who was actually one of my boss' peers, R. The office was huge, but kind of dim and dingy, old-looking. The small desk was in a corner of the room, near the door. I sat behind the desk instead of it. R sat in front of the desk, probably with another person to his left.

R offered me some new responsibility in addition to my current job. I took it. I then started complaining about my boss, how it seems like he completely ignores me, even that he doesn't want me around. I told him of one time (not true in waking life) when my boss even told me, "Get out of my office. Leave me alone," as soon as I had opened the door.

I thought I had now seen my boss walk past the door. I thought I should be more careful with what I said. R was now gone. The other guy was trying to start up a conversation with me. But I saw an old co-worker of mine, JM, and I stood up to say hi to him.

We shhok hands in the hallway. We both laughed. He looked skinnier, tired, and red. His hair seemed to be thinning. There were a few people around him. I looked to my right, down the hallway. My boss stood with some other people as he played with his BlackBerry. I hoped that my boss would actually think better of me, now that he'd seen me speaking with JM.

Dream #4

I was in "my apartment," which was on the fifth floor of a building. My friend H called. She apparently lived in the same apartment building, on a lower floor. She said she heard the noise one of our mutual neighbors was making, and that she was going outside to look through the windows to see if she could see anything going on.

I decided to watch out my window to make sure she got outside and back inside alright. But I tried to do so discreetly. I saw her walk outside then across the street. I saw her cross back, then run up the road to the corner. She ran left, across the street, and around the corner. She looked panicked. I wondered what was wrong.

Now she was running back. But she was now a blonde girl in a red t-shirt and white baseball cap. She was at the front door, talking into an intercom system that looked like an old payphone. She was talking about something bad she had seen or someone following her. She was talking to a female roommate of hers.

"Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a kitchen with my mom. The kitchen was full of boxes, though it didn't feel disorganized. The light was bright and the air was warm and humid, as if something were cooking.

My mom sat at a nice, wood desk with a stand of shelves on the desk top. She pulled a bunch of magazines out and showed them to me, as if she thought I'd like them. Something about the magazines made me mad. They were like porn magazines or women's fashion magazines.

I started yelling at my mom. Then at some point I realized that the man across the street from my mom's house was either a killer or some other kind of criminal, and that he was coming to attack us. We were, in fact, staying alert, waiting for his arrival.

I walked out of the room. I stood before a few stacks of boxes about my height. I turned to my right. I looked through a window on a door. I saw into another room, which I may have thought was outside, and which looked like a smallish warehouse full of boxes.

Dream #2

I was walking down a dark hallway, probably in an office building, on the ground floor. I ran into an old co-worker, CJ. He looked great. He was clean-shaven, and his clothes looked really well taken care of. I stopped him. We spoke for a bit before a closed door to my left.

We spoke about our old boss. Then he asked me if I liked this kind of work. I told him yes. He laughed but said he wasn't surprised, given how enthusiastically I went about it.

CJ was now gone. I was somewhere like a bedroom, rifling through the top drawers. At some point I had a brush and maybe some curlers or toilet paper rolls.

Somehow I came to realize that my boss owned a concession stand downstairs from our office. I now understood "why he left work so early" (?) every day. He had to come down here at a specific time (4 PM?) to take charge of the store.

Dream #3

Some people were testing out a mask that looked like a black wool cap t o be pulled over a person's face for doing things like spying or performing robberies. The fabric looked thick. But apparently you could see through it pretty well.

A man was testing out the mask on another man. But the man wasn't giving a clear answer on how well he could see. The first man got really frustrated and said, "Just tell me how well you see!"

I now saw from inside the mask. The view was like looking through a very thin spider web. I tried to express this.

Dream #4

I was on Dreamviews. I had posted some comment, then a picture which I'd intended people to think was me. It was a low-angle shot of a little, blonde girl in a bright green sundress, below a blue sky. Below the picture I typed in all this stuff which I thought would make people think I was a little girl.

After I'd done this, I felt some regret. I knew people on the site already knew I'm a guy. Now they'd know I was just trolling.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was with my family in a dark house. There seemed to be a lot of us, more than my extended family. We were all crowded around the television
The rest of the living room was crammed with boxes.

I was in town, visiting my family. Today was my last day in town.

My mom was behind us, in the kitchen. She told me that she had just called my aunt, and that my aunt would be coming over soon. I got mad at my mom. She and my aunt always has conflicts. I wondered why my mom would invite such conflict on my last day in town. I really didn't want to see my aunt.

My mom got upset and started crying asking didn't I know she was just trying to make it so I could see everybody I loved? I now felt really bad and figured I could deal with seeing my aunt.

Dream #2

I was with a man and a woman, walking through a place that looked like the lobby of a hotel. The man and I were carrying big plates of mirrors as big as windowpanes. The T three of us were here to visit a dying woman. We headed for an elevator. The woman by insisted on carrying the mirror I held. She felt like she hadn't been c doing enough. So I let her carry it.

We went into an elevator. The woman had laid down the mirror, which was now only about knee-high. We got up to the second floor, or the mezzanine. I walked around by myself now.

I was now in a place like a library. I found a book on a table that interested me. It seemed to be written in Hebrew and had colorful art on the jacket, like an Art Nouveau version of Hans Christian Andersen.

I was a little annoyed that I couldn't read the book. From a stack of books on a balcony above me, the voice of an unseen man began calling at me. The man sounded kind of nersy and annoying. But he was yelling at me that my time was coming soon, and that I was going to die.

I was really annoyed by the guy, but I decided to ignore him. Suddenly I found a section of the book I was looking at that was written in English. Finally I could understand the book.

Good morning, everybody. My dream recall has been slim over the past week. But I remember three dreams from last night.

Dream #1

I walked up through some tangle of vegetation, out onto a clearing that looked like an enormous, slightly sloped, corrugated tin roof. The roof was surrounded with vegetation like tree limbs and shaggy vines, which seemed to be hanging down from the brick walls of buildings. It was a sunny, cold day.

One of my old friends, M, stood on the roof. His face was grizzled. He was balding a little, and his hair was unkempt. He wore a brown and white flannel shirt.

I had been sent by a group of people (pretty girls?) below to offer something to M, something to keep him warm or entertained while he was hanging out on the roof. M had sent me away once, refusing whatever I had offered. But the pretty girls now sent me back, offering something else they thought M would want more.

M got annoyed and asked me, "Can't you see that all I really want is to be left alone for a little while?"

I realized now that M's being up here in this weird space was part of some kind of training or re-charging practice. He needed his solitude for the whole thing to work.

M began to tell me some kind of wierd story about popping chesnuts. I looked down at the roof and saw that chesnuts lay all about. Something about roasting and popping chesnuts fit perfectly with whatever M was trying to do up on the roof.

At another point, M was standing by a tree limb. Something like the seed case for a milkweed plant hung from the limb. The seed case quickly expanded like a balloon (or a condom!) until it was 1.5 meters long, transparent, and yellowy white. I knew the tree was about to release seed or even a whole organism, either a tree or possibly even some kind of animal.

Dream #2

I was with some people (my mother and some other family members?) in some plaza-like area that seemed to be at the top of a hill. The plaza area was before some kind of public area like an amusement park. There was a winding complex of roads, circles, and walkways, bordered by nice, red- and tan-stone buildings. It was a sunny day.

I looked into the distance, down a straight stretch of road, to another complex of nice looking buildings. We had come to pick up something from the buildings in the distance. But I'd made the mistake of getting us to this nearer set of buildings. I wasn't sure how to get to that complex of buildings. I figured the best way to get there was by walking (even though I'm pretty sure we'd driven to get here and could easily have taken a car).

One of the group, possibly my mother, started complaining about how far away the complex of buildings was (it was three or four hundred meters away). She complained that I'd come here not knowing how to get what I'd wanted and that now I didn't even know how to get to the place where I could get what I wanted.

I felt like arguing with her, telling her that I did know how to get what I wanted, and that I'd just aimed a little wrong. But I didn't feel like getting myself distracted or my mom upset by argument. I figured I would just stay confident in what I wanted and keep going forward.

I led us through some kind of long pool that went before the front of a long series of short, red-stone buildings that looked kind of like college dormitories. The buildings were to our left. To our right was a narrow, stone path, to the right of which was another long series of buildings. The pool was about waist-deep. The walls were white, and the water was clean, like chlorinated water in a swimming pool.

I called back to the people with me, "Don't you see we're going right where we need to go? We're taking a straight shot there, and we even get to cool off in this pool!"

Before us now was a staircase leading out of the water. Two little girls wearing purple swimsuits (one girl wearing a one-piece and the other wearing a bikini with a fluttery waistline) walked up out of the water. We followed the girls up the staircase.

We were now in an old-looking building that seemed like a museum or an old library. The lights were all off, but plenty of greenish-yellow light came in through windows. The floors were some kind of waxed concrete or dull-colored stone. There were stone columns everywhere, and some heavy, wood counters just out of the corner of my field of vision.

The group of people I was with was now two or three young adults, probably all women. The building was a hotel, and one of the women was talking to an older woman, asking about the pricing for the hotel. The older woman wore a long, blue skirt and a white blouse, and her black hair was done up in a 1950s style. She also may have been wearing some kind of gold necklace with a cameo pendant.

The hotel rate was something like $499 (or even $700) a night. The older woman explained that that was the way things were when you were in the city in Hawaii. I told the girls I didn't think there was any way we could afford a hotel at that rate. We couldn't stay here.

The older woman then pointed out a black and white poster on a column, advertising a special kind of "two- or three-room hotel" for only $299 a night. The older woman explained that once you got out of the city, things got a lot cheaper.

I couldn't help thinking that being that far out of the city would make the hotel cheap and risky. But the woman continued talking about the hotel. She said that each hotel was more like a house. It had two to three bedrooms, was completely separated from other dwelings, and even had a yard. The only reason it was so cheap was because nobody wanted to stay outside of the city, even though the trip back into the city wasn't bad at all. "20 to 30 miles at the most," the older woman said.

The situation kept sounding better and better to me. But I was still a little uncertain. I kept wondering if we'd have some kind of surprise roommate once we got there -- some guy who would be a complete creep. I also kept seeing all kinds of vegetation covering the house, and I was wondering whether the vegetation was corroding the house and making it unliveable.

Dream #3

I went to some kind of convention, probably with other people, possibly family members, including my mother. The convention was in a wide building. I walked into the lobby first. The lobby was vast. It had white tile floors and was bright with harsh, green-white fluorescent light.

There were tallish, round tables everywhere. People were gathered lazily around the talbes, talking to each other, doing stuff related to registering for the conference, and waiting for the conference to begin. A couple of tables may have been staffed by workers, some of whom may have had boxes full of t-shirts on their tables. In one wall of the lobby was set a little concession booth.

I may have had to go back out to the parking lot to get something I'd forgotten. I was kind of afraid to go back out and come back in. The registration people didn't seem to like me, and they made me feel really uneasy.

I was now in an auditorium. The presentation I had attended in the auditorium was now finished. Everybody was filing out of the room. I stood at the front of the auditorium, possibly near the woman who had been presenting. The woman was now putting some materials away and getting ready to leave the room.

Near me was a cardboard box, probably with clothes in it. I realized I was wearing a white, silk-and-lace teddy and white pantyhose. I wondered how I could have missed for so long the fact that I was wearing this outfit. Nobody said anything about me. Nobody even seemed to notice me. But I felt like I needed to change out of these clothes and into my regular male clothes as soon as possible.

I walked through a set of hallways, looking for a bathroom I could go into to change. As I walked past groups of people, I got more and more afraid of being noticed and ridiculed. But nobody seemed to notice me.

At some point I found a restroom. When I went in to change, I seemed to have difficulty figuring out how I could take off this lingerie while putting on my regular male clothes at the same time. It seemed inconvenient and embarrassing. At some point I may have thought I would just put my shirt and jeans on over the lingerie and leave it at that until I left the convention.

Good morning, everybody. Happy New Year.

My dream recall was pretty terrible over the past two weeks. I was just relaxing and doing holiday stuff.

I recall three dreams from last night.

Dream #1

I was in a movie theatre. The movie ended. I walked out into the hallway. I was waiting for another movie.

There was a woman in the hallway whom I recognized as having sat behind me in the theatre. She had seemed to take an interest in me in the theatre. So I thought I would return the interest.

But as soon as I acted interested in the woman, she ran down the hallway and started playing with a light-skinned black boy who looked about 10 years old. I understood that this woman and boy were lovers. The woman had just acted interested in me to trick me and make herself feel good.

There was now an Asian boy with me. He looked about 10 years old. The second movie was starting. I walked the boy into the theatre.

We at first sat in the back rows of the theatre, where I had been sitting before. But now the back rows were so crowded that I was getting annoyed. I left the Asian boy in the back rows (he seemed to want to be there) and went up toward the front of the theatre.

The theatre's seating swung around in weird ways, and the aisle between the groups of seats curved like a snake.

The movie was starting. I finally sat down in an aisle seat a little closer than halfway to the front of the theatre. I was surprised by how empty the theatre was up toward the front.

The movie image I saw may have had something to do with a road on a hilltop, a clear, blue, summer sky, and a white, 1970s-style car.

Dream #2

I was in some living room with an old female friend, G. She sat on a couch or chair to my right while I stood. She may have been sitting on the arm of the chair. She felt almost as tall sitting as I was standing.

G had been making fun of me, saying some really nasty things, which I found typical of her. I got mad and was just about to go away. But G began stroking my arm in a really seductive way. She said some really nice things to me. I became aroused and thought I might stick around and see whether I could have sex with her.

Dream #3

I was in a space for a flower garden in a park. The garden space was maybe 20m wide and 7m deep. It was a sunny day, but the light felt slightly grey.

The garden space was full of weeds. The weeds were single, slender flowers that looked like tulip stems topped with cream-colored hellebore (or lotus?) blossoms. The garden space was densely packed with the flowers.

I was "killing" the weeds by pulling off their blossoms. I had gotten about halfway through the garden when I stood up to look at all my work. I saw half the garden full of just stalks. Beneath, I saw dusty soil.

I wondered why I was just pulling the blossoms off. Why didn't I just pull the flowers out of the soil by the roots? That way, I thought, any remaining roots would die from the cold before they could sprout up again. Something about this thought made me think that the month was November.

Good morning, everybody. I'm pretty sure I was only semi-lucid in the first dream, even though I was aware that I was dreaming.

The second dream took place between 5 AM and 5:30 AM, I'm pretty sure.

Dream #1

I was in a house with some female "family members." They appeared to be about my age, white, very pretty. I saw them as if we were all close together. The women were having some kind of serious conversation.

I suddenly floated up and out of the house. I assumed I was in the neighborhood my family had lived in before I went to college. (Though it now seems to me that all the houses were much bigger that in that neighborhood, and that they all had flat roofs.)

At some point during all of this, I told myself I was dreaming. I think that I was thinking this was something more like an out-of-body experience than a dream. I told myself to focus on the rooftops and try to "bring something back" to waking life that would prove I'd had an OBE.

But I was only floating around between a small number of houses. I think I was having some kind of trouble with my vertical control, like I kept on going up way high and having to pull myself back down.

At some point in time I saw a house with its roof caved in. I recognized this house as being a couple houses down from my family's old house. I thought for sure that this would be something I could "bring back."

I thought I'd focus in on this house, land on the roof. But instead of landing on the roof, I ended up going way down to the ground or a much lower roof (as if all these houses were like multi-story buildings -- which is obviously not true in that neighborhood). I flew back up and landed on the top of the roof.

But the roof wasn't collapsed. Instead, I found, the whole thing had been an optical illusion. The object which had given an impression of a depression in the roof was actually the basin of a gigantic hot tub.

Somehow, again without any criticism, I found myself in the empty basin of this gigantic hot tub, indoors. The hot tub was actually on the roof of the back end of a big RV. The room I was in was like a gigantic garage for the RV (even though, again, it was on the top floor of this "house").

I called out to my brother. He'd been friends with the son of this family. I figured he'd know more about this than I did. My brother "appeared," though I don't think I ever saw him directly.

After I'd "asked" (mentally?) my brother about the gigantic RV and hot tub, he responded, "Yeah, I was surprised, too, the first time I came to their house. I thought it was a broken roof, too. Because they always looked and acted so poor.

"But then I realized that they really did have all this rich stuff, too. Then I started getting jealous, because we don't have anything like this! But then they started letting me use it, too."

Dream #2

I was watching some kind of live-action drama that had elements in common with an anime drama.

The view eventually changed to some kind of drama of which I was a part, even though I was still only an observer.

There were a bunch of beautiful, rich, college-aged people walking from the right to the left of my view, before some stone castle which was part of some college campus. The sky overhead was dark and roiling with clouds. The students (mostly or all women?) were wearing colorful, silk dresses and plastic masks to make them look like anime characters.

Eventually I was in a room, at a party. The room felt like a study in a big, nice house. The room was dim, full of people, probably rich adults.

I had been talking at first with a young woman. At some point I was listening to the speech of a man who had a face like Rodin's sculptures of Balzac. The man was speaking with great pride about how he had cheated some business associate, then killed and eaten him.

Now I saw a group of partiers, all turned toward me, motionless, silent. They were mostly women. The women wore masks like female anime characters. The men wore masks like the mustache mask from V for Vendetta (?).

My view now shifted to a number of fragmented scenes showing old, great manga and anime artists at their work. One scene had a man sitting back in his swivel chair before his desk. The man was tallish, wearing a sweater and a beret (but he wasn't Tezuka).

The wall of the man's room was turquoise blue, and was decorated with some of the classic anime and manga he'd created. One drawing was a figure of a plain, young man with black hair wearing a yellow sweater and khaki slacks. Another anime of his had to do with the adventures of some little girl in a forest. I heard the anime theme song.

(As I woke, I could hear the theme song of this anime. I even hummed it to keep it in my mind. But I forgot it now. Ugh.)

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was "at home" with my mom and possibly a couple other family members. The house had two floors and probably a basement. The stairway up to the second floor was near the back of the house.

There was a policeman in the house. He was tall, white, with reddish-tan skin, blue-green eyes, a balding head of red-blonde hair, and a mustache. I saw him in my mind's eye, but I'm not sure if I ever saw him physically.

The cop hurried out the backdoor of the house at some point. He may have had some kind of goodbye scene with some of my family members.

I then realized that the cop was on the run. He had murdered another cop (who may have looked exactly like him, except pale white). The other cop's body, I knew (seeing it in my mind's eye) lay sprawled on the final few steps and the floor of the basement.

I felt like my family should have done something not to let the cop get away. I also felt like I should go after the cop or help the other cops find him. But I was too afraid to do so. I thought the cop would probably kill me.

At some point I realized that I had also murdered somebody, so that if I informed on the cop, I would only be letting the cops know where I was, so they'd come after me, too.

Dream #2

Some woman dressed as a ballerina with a tan, fluffy skirt and a black leotard-top was trying to get away from a killer. But at some point she had fallen from some height and broken her legs.

She was panicked. She now pretty much knew she was going to die. The killer, who may have been some kind of ghost-hag woman, would catch up to her and toture her to death.

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. I slept 11 hours last night. I think I'm finally over my freaking cold. And ready for a new one to get me, I guess. Ugh...

Dream #1

I was in "my bedroom," which was a lot like my waking-life bedroom, except that it had, I think, green walls and really dusty floors. The light in the room was dim, as if some faint light were coming from some other room.

I saw a very skinny roach, about 5cm long, crawl across my floor. It looked all shrivelled up and dry, blackish-grey, not like a "healthy" (eww...) roach at all.

I began to aim for the roach, to kill it. But it darted away. I looked for it and found it again, in an extremely dusty spot between some boxes and a wall. But it got away again.

I had some toilet paper in my hand now. Apparently I was going to smash the roach with toilet paper. I found the roach again. This time it was climbing up a wall.

But I wasn't exactly sure that I was seeing it. I kept squinting and slowly walking closer and closer, to make sure that what I was seeing was actually the roach.

Dream #2

I was sitting in a desk near the front of a classroom. The classroom was lit with a dim, grey light. I sat near the right wall, facing the left wall. Most of the rest of the class was facing the front wall. The room was packed with students.

Everybody was quiet and listening to the teacher. The teacher was a tall, thin, white man, slightly balding, with grey-white hair, and squarish eyeglasses.

The teacher was giving some sort of lecture which may have been on film or some kind of performing art. But I wasn't paying attention. I had a big, fat book in front of me. I was huddled over it, elbows on my desktop, "taking notes" (I.e. scribbling) in the margins.

The teacher lifted the book off my desk and presented it to the rest of the class. I saw that the title of the book was "An Essay on Art and Love," and that it was by Karl Marx. The cover of the book was like a deep blue sky full of stars, with some kind of drawing in a circle in the center of the cover.

The teacher said, "Now, you see, (he said my name) is actually reading a book! Which shows he's paying attention in class! Everybody else needs to pay attention, too."

(I obviously, however, had not been paying attention in class. I don't even remember what the teacher was talking about.)

The teacher had now stopped his lecture and was apparently walking around, checking on how the students were doing. I went back to doing my own thing, a little embarrassed and upset that undue "good attention" to me had been paraded before the class.

The teacher now addressed a young, white man with fair skin and long, brown hair. The boy wore a black, wool cap and a baggy, black t-shirt with some kind of punky, black-and-white photo-print on it. The kid was slouched in his desk as the teacher addressed him.

The teacher said, "(The kid's name, which was the same as my name), I really hope you can learn, sooner or later, to stop making smart aleck comments in class whenever I say something you disagree with. It makes the whole class laugh at me and take your side."

I thought that was an odd argument for the teacher to make against the young man. I actually thought the kid was pretty funny, even though he was kind of distracting.

(Note: I seriously don't think Marx wrote anything about Art and Love. That would seriously cramp Marx' style.

I think this book is a mish-mash of my own thoughts. I've lately been reading the porn-philosophy book Juilette by the Marquis de Sade. A lot of people say the book is just porn and justification for doing all kinds of wacky things.

Reading the book, I kind of disagree, and I've lately thought to myself that the book could be read side-by-side with Karl Marx' Capital and Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is within You. They all three address something about the bipolarity of society.

So my dream life decided, apparently, to take that mish-mash and run with it. And now Marx is a romantic artist somehow... Okay...)

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.)

Good morning, everybody. The last two dreams definitely came from my last hour in bed.

I think the third dream is partly influenced by the picture Caden posted on Dreamviews yesterday of the zombies walking into the diner in a big city.

Dream #1

I was at a movie theatre. I had finished watching a movie. I was probably going to watch a second movie. I left all my stuff in the theatre and went outside.

I may have gone to a K-mart in a big shopping center. I may then have gone across the parking lot, to a McDonald's. At some point (after the McDonald's?) I was looking out the front windows of the K-mart. Big flakes of snow were falling and the sky was a heavy grey.

I went back to the movie theatre. I may have been talking with a female friend of mine right outside the theatre doors, in the dark hallway.

I then went into the theatre. The lights were on. The theatre was brighter than a theatre would usually be. The floors and seats were all a tan-brown. Everything looked dirty. I was upset that I'd left my stuff among all this filth.

I picked up my stuff (I had a lot of bags, for some reason) and headed toward the door again. I'd decided I didn't want to stay for the second movie, amid all this garbage.

(I have some memory somewhere (possibly here, even though it seems out of context) of being at the ticket counter, right at the corner to the long hallway down which were all the doorways to the movie theatres. I was probably standind there thinkng about whether to buy a ticket to the second movie.)

At the back of the theatre, I sat my stuff down, as if to arrange it properly, put my coat on, etc. As I did, the theatre dimmed to a usual level. The chairs and floor were now a vivid red, almost glowing. I thought, This place looks a lot cleaner when the lights are out.

At some point I may also have thought of a worker coming in and asking for my ticket to the second movie, which I didn't have. I also thought of how the workers would be disappointed that I wasn't staying for the second movie, after they'd watched my stuff while I'd left it at my seat during the break between movies. I think I had been the only person to leave my stuff.

Dream #2

I was on my cell phone, talking to my mom. It was daytime. The sky was clear and blue. I was walking through a small parking lot that was adjacent to another small parking lot for a fast food store that sold tacos.

My mom was telling me something important that I should do to ensure my health. I said I would do it, but in a half-hearted tone so that we both knew I actually probably wouldn't. My mom sounded patient, but disappointed.

I looked into the taco restaurant. The walls were all windows. The floors were white tile. Almost everything else was a bright yellow. The store wasn't opened yet. It was empty, and it looked so sparkling-clean and spacious.

I turned away from the restaurant and walked down a slight slope of parking lots, toward a busy street.

Dream #3

I was out with something like a tour group. We were looking at NYC from downtown (from an angle that seems now to have been from the deck of a ferry, out on the water).

Our tour guide was a tallish, skinny, white man with fuzzy hair down to about his jaw-line, an equally fuzzy mustache, and stubbly cheeks. He probably wore a dingy, white t-shirt.

The tour guide was pointing our view all the way up to Midtown, to the Empire State Building, which looked kind of small and old. The guide said that in the days when this building was created, people didn't care about the size of the buildings. They just wanted to make places for people to work.

The tour guide now pointed out some buildings near us, in the financial distritct. Compared to the far-away Empire State Building, they looked huge. The guide now said, "When people built these buildings, size was of the utmost importance. Each new building had to be the tallest."

The guide now pointed to a building at the top of which were clear windows, revealing an enormous board room. The guide said, "You even started getting features like that, where the people in the taller buildings could look down and gloat at the people in the shorter buildings next to it."

I seemed to float upward with my view. I was flying among these buildings. I was then suddenly inside a buiding. I was in a huge conference room with a gigantic table. The place was empty and quiet, and the light coming in was gentle.

There was a balcony somewhere that apparently looked all the way down to the ground floor of the building. It made me dizzy to think of. I was crawling around on my belly, partly because I was too dizzy to stand up, and partly because I had come into work late and didn't want to be noticed.

I saw, beyond the huge conference table, and probably beyond the balcony, a gigantic window to another huge conference room. The conference room was in another building, but it felt like both buildings were in the same, larger building.

The huge window was framed in heavy, beautiful wood, fringed with beautiful American Arts-and-Crafts style squares. I was really captivated by the pattern of this window frame. As I concentrated on it, it seemed to change into a different pattern, or to develop a second layer of patterning.

Dream #4

I came "back home." "My home" was like a small, suburban house. When I came in, I noticed that there was a set of papers on a chair right by the front door. The papers were my lease.

I understood that, somehow, my landlord had gotten into the house and put a new copy of the lease renewal in a spot where I'd be sure to see it. Apparently I'd taken too long sending back the first lease renewal he'd sent me.

As I opened up the lease, I walked around my place. The living room was very small. The whole place was dirty. There were toys and clothes all over the place, and the walls seemed smeared with stuff. I then realized that my family was in town, and that they'd been staying at my place while visiting.

I knew, before opening the lease, that my landlord had seen all this evidence of other people in my house. I knew he'd just assume the people were living here permanently, and that he'd charge me extra rent to account for the extra people. I hoped I'd be able to convince the landlord of the truth: that there was nobody else staying with me.

I opened the lease, and, sure enough, the lease was now made out for six people. The rent specified was some unbelieveable amount. I closed the lease and walked around the house, looking at all the stuff my family had left lying around.

(Note, evening of Dec. 16: Not like it's a big deal, but, regarding the third dream, I should say that in waking life the Empire State Building was not made only with the concern of having a place for people to work.

The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were both in a race to be the tallest building in the world. It was definitely a size and status thing. I'm pretty sure that's common knowledge.

I'm not exactly sure why the tour guide gave the story about how trying to build tall buildings simply to be taller than other buildings wasn't a motivation for developers until later on.)

Good morning, everybody. I think these dreams are both influenced by other dreams I've read on this site.

Dream #1

I was in a department store. The light was somewhat grey and dim. I walked to my right, into an area with a lot of dresses for little girls.

I walked past one long rack of dresses. The dresses were all shimmery. Most of them had one single color, like purple or pink. Some may even have had pointy, brimless "princess" hats (which now remind me more of the I Dream of Genie headdress).

All these dresses were supposed to be long on little girls. I assumed they'd hardly even fit onto my body. But for some reason I was still thinking of trying these things on.

I walked between two long racks of dresses. Some of these dresses seemed to have black velvet tops and gold skirts.

As I walked along, two or three tall, young, black men came walking from the other direction. The men were all dressed in shiny, satiny outfits that looked like jester outfits. The front guy may have been wearing sunglasses.

I scooted out of the way a little bit. When I did so, so did the guys. I excused myself and said sorry. The front guy said, "No problem, no problem."

I now found myself out in a wider area of the store. I was trying to figure out whether I wanted to go back to the dresses or go somewhere else.

Dream #2

I was possibly somewhere like a room in a library. I was probably with a group of peers, which was probably led by an older, tall, balding "teacher" figure with grey hair, glasses, jeans, and a denim shirt.

At some point I realized I wasn't wearing any pants or underwear. I was just wearing a big button-up shirt. I knew I needed to get fully dressed.

I walked out into a large stairwell like a big, open stairwell at a museum. I knew I was on the third floor and I needed to get down to the first floor. There were people on the stairs and on the floors between the stairs, walking in and out from exhibits. I had told myself I would run down the back stairwell. But I now realized I was going down the main stairway.

I thought for a moment I could keep going. I thought the shirt was long enough that nobody would see I was wearing no underwear. But then I saw that people had noticed I was wearing no pants and underwear. I was embarrassed. I hurried at the next landing to a doorway to the back stairwell.

I ran past a couple people and into the smaller stairwell, which was more like a fire escape stairwell. I was all alone. I started speeding down the stairs, almost flying down them, taking a lot of steps at once.

I went too fast and found that I had gone too far down. I was in an area full of white-painted pipes. The area was huge and well lit, and the pipes were all so neatly arranged, like bookshelves in a library.

I felt way out of place down here (although my state of undress didn't seem to bother me anymore). I knew I needed to get up to the correct floor. I imagined workers finding me and trying to do something bad to me.

I now imagined (???) a tall, black man in a beige denim jacket and black sunglasses standing before me at the bottom of the staircase. My view panned through the aisles of white pipes which also seemed to be decorated with white Christmas lights.

I imagined myself asking the imaginary man a weird question, like which way was the way out. I imagined the man first telling me something weird, like telling me how to get to the position in the basement where the exit would actually be on the first floor. I even imagined a huge painting, like a huge equestrian painting that might be seen in the lobby of an art museum.

I then imagined, as my view panned through an area of white pipes lit almost entirely by tons and tons of white Christmas lights, that the man asked me something, like he was asking me on a date (???). I imagined that just around the corner from this area there was something like a themed food court, all done up in a confectionery style, like old merry-go-rounds.

I thought that if this guy wanted to go have all this fun at "the festival," I'd have to get money from an ATM. I could hear Mexican music, like Mariachi music, playing somewhere.

I found myself in a place like the parking lot of a shopping plaza from when I was a kid. The shopping plaza had a number of large stores, like a big clothing store, a big grocery store, and a big bookstore. It was night, and the light was deep blue, with all the lights in the shopping plaza turned off. But I still saw the lights, felt the warmth, and heard the music of the festival somewhere.

I walked around trying to figure out where the festival was. I felt like I had woken from a dream. I may have been trying to convince myself that the music and light had only been in my dream, and that I was now just having trace memories of that stuff.

But, I told myself, I'm still dreaming! There's no way I could be just walking around here right now. This is a dream, too.

Realizing this was a dream, I felt a lot more clarity. The sky may have even gotten a bit lighter.

I decided to turn around and look for the festival. But as soon as I turned around, everything went black, like I had closed my eyes. I tried to "open my eyes" and see again. But I couldn't. I walked around. I felt and heard myself walking. I even continued hearing the music. I even had some idea of where I was in the parking lot. But I couldn't see anything.

Dream #3

I was in "my office," which was larger than my office, much more like an office floor for a larger company.

I got up from a cubicle when I heard that a couple of women were getting ready to interview a man for a position. I felt like they were interviewing a replacement for my position.

I walked a little ways, then looked through what seems to have been the underside of a large semi-truck's trailer, to the elevator bank at the front of the office floor.

I could see the interviewee in my mind's eye. He was a little kid, maybe 10 or 11 years old, dressed in a nice suit. One of the women interviewing him was a stout, Hispanic woman with short, black hair.

I heard from somebody nearby that my boss was getting fired, and that the person was interviewing to become my boss' replacement. That was a relief for me, considering I had been thinking all this time that I was going to get fired. I only hoped that management would decide to keep me after firing my boss.

I may have thought about the complications for this actually being possible. Maybe the man already had somebody like me on his team. So maybe he'd just bring that other person over from whatever company he was coming from. I also thought that it might not be worth it to work for this guy, anyway. Maybe he would just turn out to be a jerk.

Good morning, everybody. These dreams are all influenced by an anime/manga event I attended on Sunday.

Dream #1

I was at some kind of chicken fast-food restaurant, possibly in a mall. I'm not sure if I was an employee or a customer. I think the store colors may have been blue and white.

At some point I was in the back area of the restaurant. There were a lot of workers rushing around in a panic regarding the chickens.

Apparently live chickens were kept in another room. The chickens were then killed and cooked. But someone said that the arrangements for the chickens didn't make sense, that something was wrong about the whole thing. The thing wrong may have had to do with the chickens never seeming to go to the bathroom, or with their waste never having to be removed from the room where they were kept.

I went to the room where the chickens were kept by exiting a back door in the restaurant's food prep area and then crossing a small hallway that was like the back area for a mall and an alley. I'm not sure if I ever went into the room with the chickens.

I think I knew, however that the fact that the chickens were producing no waste meant one of two things. The first possibility was that the chickens were being manipulated in such a way that they didn't create waste, i.e. they were just being made into something like food machines, big globs of meat.

The second possibility was that chickens weren't being used at all. I imagined that babies were actually being kidnapped at random and being used in place of the chickens. The "chicken room" was just a front, a room with nothing in it at all.

Dream #2

A man got mad at me because I was doing something (I have no idea what) that hindered his ability to help preserve a whole bunch of new species of fish that he had found. I decided to stop doing whatever it was I had been doing. It may have had something to do with using up some kind of funds.

I was now out over a huge body of water. It was a bright, clear day. I was skimming over the water as if I were on water skis. Just to my right was some kind of track or some kind of dividing line. It was barely visible above the surface of the water.

The fish that the man had discovered and preserved now began jumping up out of the water as I passed them. They all had the same kind of look. They were almost cartoony. They had the look of a children's book drawing of a whale: the bulbous head, flat belly, and fan tail. Some of them looked plasticky; others looked scaly. Many of them had jewel-like dots on them. Some also had silvery bands floating around them or above them.

I seemed to be happy that I had done whatever I had done to allow these newly discovered fish to be preserved.

Dream #3

I climbed up through some dark area and found myself in the top area of some place like a temple or a church. The place reminds me of a belltower, exept much wider. It was daytime, with a clear, blue sky.

A young man (who I spoke with at an anime event in waking life) was playing with a computer. The man was a little overweight, with tan skin, short hair, and black-rimmed glasses. He wore a black t-shirt.

The young man was showing me some anime he was really excited about on his computer. He eventually told me that it was related to some other anime. He had to go somewhere, but he pointed out some magazines that were behind me. These magazines were also related to this other anime.

I turned around and was suddenly in "the young man's room," on a swivel chair. The room was dim. I was looking down at a small desk with a couple of magazines on it. The magazines seemed to be about making 3-D art on the computer.

The magazine covers showed a bunch of half-finished 3-D characters, mostly cute girls in frilly dresses. The faces, in particular, were often unfinished, so that the eyes just looked like peach, plastic globs.

One dress struck me as very realistic. It was light blue and satiny, with white frills as trim. It suddenly struck me that these anime art magazines were very similar to fetish porn magazines. But I decided I'd keep that opinion to myself, since I didn't want to offend the young man.

Dream #4

I was apparently Shinji Ikari from Neon Genesis Evangelion. I was living out "a scene from Neon Genesis" while also remembering/watching it.

The story was (in my "memory") that Shinji had been dissolved in some battle. He had been evaporated by a huge mass of white steam. But somehow scientists had managed to reconstruct his body. So he was now, in a sense, artificial.

Now I, as Shinji (not inside the giant robot Eva, just as Shinji, all on my own), was in the huge mass of white steam. I was waiting to be dissolved. But I wasn't dissolving. This was kind of disappointing to me, and I wondered if I had remembered the story correctly.

I was now climbing up a wall, out of the steam. I still kept thinking and hoping that I would be dissolved. I assumed that the steam would surprise me by jumping up, pulling me down, and dissolving me. But it never did. I just kept climbing up the wall.

The wall was like a wall leading up from some kind of industrial drainage area or some dam. The wall was green, as if it had a forest mural painted on it.

I'm not sure how I climbed up the wall. There seemed to be some metal, rebar-like, squarish portrusions to my left. I seemed to be using them somehow to climb. But they seemed to be too small to be totally practical.

It was getting harder and harder to scale the wall. I didn't know if I would make it. But I finally got to the top.

At the top was a grassy area, like a park. There was a huge "fire" (actually a huge pile of burning ash) on the grass. I knew that this fire was being used to melt down a large, golden statue of Buddha.

I watched the fire, however, and saw that the golden Buddha was not melting into the ashes. In fact, no Buddha was there. Instead, the Buddha's hand emerged from the ashes. I knew that the fire was actually creating the Buddha from gold that had already been melted. I may have wondered whether enough gold had been placed into the fire to create a Buddha sized in proportion with the hand, which itself was probably as tall as I.

I now found myself in a museum, watching the creation of the Buddha on a TV screen. The gold rising up from the fire took all kinds of shapes, but nothing resembling the Buddha. I somehow got the impression that very few people actually watched this video, because they were too afraid to actually watch something rise from the flames instead of being melted by them.

I backed away from the screen and looked around at the room I was in. My mom was somewhere nearby. The room was open, light, with white walls and adobe-red floors. It felt very free, though the room was small.

I was now in another room, looking at the video of the creation of the Buddha. But the screen was now behind a glass case set into the wall. The screen also seemed to be like a frozen image, a still photograph on pasteboard, even though it also still seemed to be a moving image on a TV screen.

The image of "the Buddha" was actually a huge, golden structure that looked something like a menorah made out of bricks. It looked almost Assyrian. At the top, where flames would normally be depicted, there were, in some spots, flames, but in other spots, just cubes of golden bricks.

An older Jewish couple walked into the room. The man was humming a Jewish folk tune. He bent down and pointed at some title card in a display near the melting Buddha display. (The display the man was in front of may now suddenly have been the melting Buddha display.)

The man may have said something to his wife about the similarities between Judaism and Buddhism.

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.)

Good morning, everybody. I recall two dreams from last night. They're both fragmented.

I've been sick over the past couple days, and my sleep cycle has been all weird. So I think my body has taken whatever sleep it could get, and my dreams have been of secondary concern.

Plus, my boss has been playing some wacky cat and mouse game with me for the past two weeks. I've been stressing out, waiting for some resolution. It gets more stressful each day. That obviously screws with my dream memory, too.

Dream #1

A black and white view, as if of a somewhat modern movie posing as an old, black and white movie. A young, red-haired woman in kind of greasy denim overalls and a button-up work shirt was in her apartment, backed up against a wall or the doorway to a wide closet. The woman looked panicked.

A number of men rushed into the room. They were all big and strong. But the woman had a wrench. She smacked one man on the back of the neck with a wrench. She may have also beat another man with the wrench. The remaining men may have run away or scattered back against the opposite wall of the room, possibly near a radiating heater.

I got the impession of the men's names (or heard the men's names through narration?). The men's names were very similar, mostly like variations of Neil, like Niall, Niell, Nall, and Neil. Another man was either named Duncan or MacDuff.

Dream #2

A girl lay on the top bunk of some tall bunk bed. She noticed that she had bed bugs. Some other person, possibly a child, was probably up on the bunk bed with her. The girl started explaining that she knew she had bed bugs. She may have started explaining how she'd gotten them.

Her explanation became a narration from an adult male voice. The dream's view flew, just beneath the roof, through the girl's house (it might actually have been the girl's house -- i.e. she lived there by herself), to the front door.

The narrator explained how three bugs came in through the crack at the bottom of the door. I now saw three bugs come in. One was a "bed bug" (it was kind of a brownish, beetle-like creature). Another was a strange bug that looked like a mix between a big roach and a shaggy-looking trilobite. The last was possibly some kind of black beetle.

The narrator explained how each of the three bugs was attracted by some different element in the house. The narrator seemed to disregard the black beetle altogether throughout his explanation.

The narrator began with the shaggy trilobite. The trilobite had been attracted by some kind of mucousy substance on the floor. As the trilobite scurried along the floor, following this mucousy trail, which would have been unnoticeable to the human eye, it also created a mucousy trail. The trilobite may have ended up somewhere like the kitchen.

I didn't care much about the trilobite, and I was wondering when the narrator would finally get to the bed bugs. Finally the narrator explained the way bed bugs got into the house. I missed or forgot the explanation. I just saw the girl's bed again, the high bunk bed, dizzyingly high off the ground, almost touching the ceiling.