James Green-Armytage

68 Dreams

            This is the longer version of the dreams. Click here for the shorter version.

 

 

OLDER DREAMS

# from an unknown time in early childhood

            My parents and I are waiting on line in Dr. Claw’s office. It’s a perfectly normal office, but the wait is very long. When I finally get to see Dr. Claw (the villain from Inspector Gadget), he pushes a button and a trap door opens under me. I don’t fit through the trap door, though.

            Somehow I’m separated from my parents. I remember a rain-soaked city street at night, lit by red and white lights of cars and their reflection in the black pavement.

 

# from an unknown time in childhood

            Our mothers had sent Nicholas and I away in a flying basket, like the basket for a hot air balloon but without the balloon. We were being sent off on our own, and we were kind of scared. We reached some sort of distant alien place and were taken in by these two somewhat hostile alien women. They were going to eat Nicholas, but I convinced them not to. I remember looking out their window into the night; there was a windmill outside.

            Another night, I had a dream where the two aliens had become friendly and come to my parents’ house. They got bad sunburns from sitting by the pool. The second dream was much more lighthearted than the first.

 

FROM NOTEBOOK H2, SUMMER 1994 - LATE SPRING 1995

#
            Daniel and Zack keep disappearing to go to a pool with some people who I don’t know. I go in the pool once without being invited. I sit in the pool and realize that I’m naked, so I stay there and do nothing while everybody else has this weird kind of fun. Later I imitate it accurately and in disgust to Zack: “Let’s all go under water! HAHAHAHAHA!!!” (They go under water.) “Let’s play with this beach ball! HAHAHAHAHA!!! (They throw around the ball.)

#

            In my dream I remembered another dream where my friends and I are at camp and we jump off a dock going forward fast into the water. In this dream I was telling my friends that I remembered it, and I’m not sure if they remembered it.

#

            I shoot a police officer dead for telling me to show him my bus pass. I don’t get in trouble for it, but I bad feel later and think that maybe I shouldn’t have done it.

 

FROM NOTEBOOK H3, SUMMER 1995

            A man says: “If the devil said anything, he would say ‘The devil is the devil.’”

            I say under my breath: “That’s a lie. He would say do or die.”

            Later in the dream the man is tied up and trying to get me and my little sister to pull out his teeth, which would return him to power or corrupt us. But we don’t give in. He transforms into a small green gargoyle-like devil, and shouts: “Do or die!!!” Referring I think to the teeth. But I punch his face in, and his whole body becomes spaghetti in a green liquid.

            Our parents, Mama Bear and Papa Bear, walk in the door at that moment. I say “Dinner’s ready.”

 

FROM NOTEBOOK H4, DECEMBER 1995 - EARLY FALL 1996

            Floating around in a cathedral while music played. The music had a lot of counterpoint, very cool stuff. I was kind of frustrated, though, by the fact that I wouldn’t ever be able to remember the music. (I knew, I think, that it was a dream as I thought this.)

/

            I’m in Central Park, trying to enjoy an unseasonably hot day, somewhere above 80 degrees in the middle of winter. I walk over and watch people playing baseball from behind the batting cage. Some people are watching a movie on a giant screen. I think about taking a bike ride, and wonder what time it is. But then I remember that it was night in the last sequence and because I realize this, the sky goes black, and the movie screen goes off. But everything is still lit like day. Some of the people are annoyed, but one guy seems to know what’s going on. Presently I start to drift off, so the sky and the movie light back up. Just as I leave completely, the guy says “that’s because James is falling asleep,” as if he was sharing a secret with me that I am familiar with but don’t know. “Right, James?” he asks, and the whole thing is gone.

#

            I sell my soul to Satan, but it’s really weird and not at all like it is usually imagined. First of all, it’s not just me. It’s, like, everybody, I think. Second, I’m not altogether clear on what I sold it for. I think that everybody got everlasting life, and maybe nobody is ugly in appearance. I don’t know what else. I don’t think that Hell was involved either; I think that this was already the afterlife. There were no moral restrictions, and no death. People have sex and fight without restraint.

            At one point I was trying to figure out how many bricks there were on some wall, and Satan, who in the dream was just some guy, passed by. I yelled to him from where I was, asking him if after a long while of immortality one became super-intelligent. He couldn’t hear me though, and just kept yelling “What?” in response.

            At another point I stop to think and realize what I’ve done, its irrevocability, and I break down crying at some sort of table, in a warehouse.

#

            Someone throws a wheelchair at me. Great, I think, and wheel around in it. I wheel over and talk to a few of my friends. Someone is trying to take a picture of me in the wheelchair. I realize it’s a setup, my friend’s dad is shooting at me through the window from another window. I’m real scared, so I wake up on purpose.

 

FROM ???

            I am in New York City, in the streets. Everyone has just found out that a nuclear attack will hit in a minute or two. For those in the city, including myself, there is no way to get out in time.

            I give up trying to find a way to escape, and focus on trying to understand the fact that I am going to die. I’m very frightened, with a sort of sinking feeling in my stomach. I wonder what it will be like when I die. I believe to some extent that there is no essential difference between my own experience and someone else’s, that both are real and experienced in terms of the same ‘I’ or the same kind of ‘I,’ and therefore my individual death isn’t the end of what my being actually is.

            But still, I wonder what it will be like once I die. Will I just suddenly wake up as another person, or a newborn baby, without any memory of my life now? I can’t wrap my mind around it really. I see the bomb beginning to descend.

 

FROM BOOK OF DREAMS FEBRUARY 1998 - JUNE 1999

            A kind of free and open existence where I am driving through the country, probably homeless, and sleeping on people’s nice suburban lawns. I am driving at sunrise, as I am driving the car the scenery is very nice but I think that the Central Park West towers were in there somewhere, which of course doesn’t fit. I’m looking for a parking lot turnoff to the right, but don’t find it. When I’m sure that I’ve missed it, in one motion I stop the car, get out, and lie down on a nice bit of suburban grass at the edge of the curb.

#

            I get conscripted. I try to fight it, but I can’t, I have to go to this war. I am very afraid of being in a war, knowing that I could die so easily. I think that they might have threatened to put me in a mental hospital if I didn’t enlist.

#

            There is a war. I don’t want to be in it so I come in late. The drill sergeant yells at me for being late, and I still have to go, although without my gun. I realize that this is even more dangerous, especially when I am caught between some thing with poisonous claws and someone with a gun.

#

            I come in to check out the end of a Hollywood party. When I get in, it's the big penthouse ballroom upstairs, and empty. I take huge slow floating jumps, often kicking off a wall at the top, that cause a thrilling rush of weightlessness in my stomach on the way down. I am very glad that I can really do this in my waking life, as I think that I am not dreaming.

#

            An omniscient tells me to go to a certain subway platform at night in order to help a lot of people. I am scared, I think. I meet a girl there. Up until then, she had always taken the train going one way while I had at the same time taken the train going another way.

#

            Basically what I remember is like really yelling and flipping out because of massive like insecurity, even possibly self hate. Something about my face, I am screaming like about how could anyone love me, because I’m so ugly, etc. Perhaps I had just caught sight of my face in something reflective. I think I had just been rejected by a girl. Then I see my reflection and I flip out, start yelling.

# May 10, 1998

            In a stairwell in school fighting some kind of monster man who is hunting me. We have an argument about who will win. He says it has to be him as he lives forever and there’s nothing I can do to kill him so it’s only a matter of time. I say that I might be able to find a way to kill him. I seem to have a gun which only sort of slows him down. I run, turning corners, losing him. I go to these locker rooms on the second floor to hide.

# May 24, 1998

            I meet an autistic girl around my own age who is punk with green buzz-cut hair and very white makeup. I try to shake her hand but it is a very clumsy, touchy-feely kind of handshake. She is with her guardian, and we are on either side of a doorway, she on the outside.

#

            Luke Skywalker prophesizes the death of millions. He notices something fucking up his future-vision (is it a tractor beam?). In a strange and dangerous new city. Two incomplete globes in Columbus Circle, back in time, a benefit concert that isn’t on the radio.

#

            I am in the water at night, water to the pale mist horizon, when I see the head of the statue of liberty floating around. Then, further away, I see that the statue of liberty is missing its head! This is possibly the work of three serial killers who are now trying to kill me and someone else there.

            At a restaurant, I buy an ounce of marijuana, I’m looking for a secluded table, watching out for undercover cops, the laser system is shutting down, are the frying electric monkeys alive? Skyscrapers, laughing gas area.

#

            I was looking through a magazine from the 80’s and right at the front is an ad for my parents like they were a rock group. I’m in the picture as a little kid with a leather jacket, all of us looking down.

#

            Taking trips to the moon. Big chunks of ice gather on the ship and we have to knock them off.

#

            With Zack and everyone all of a sudden in a circle: Alex Mike and Evan. I weep with joy that we are all together again. Zack asks me why I am crying and I say ‘nothing,’ but I think it is clear to him. Then the others have already run to some sunny dock that is supposedly from my memory and I am real happy about getting there though of course I delay a bit, changing or something like that.^[1] 

#

            I yell at Mike: “You haven’t said one word to me all week!”

            Mike: “That’s because you’re crazy!”

            Aaron says I’m not, Mike argues with him.

            Aaron's father comes in drunk and interrupts by taking about the nature of accidents.

 

FROM SUMMER 2001 FOLDER

#

            A relatively long period of dreaming while I actually knew that I was dreaming. One interesting part is that I was able to sustain my effort to stay asleep in such a way while still examining the process and content of the dream. Paying attention to the way in which the dream is continually created.

            Asking myself: who is creating it? Am I? Who am I? I would meet people, know they were dream figures, and listen to them talk. They kept coming up with words even though I knew I was dreaming. Same with moving through places / environments: New visual-spatial information kept arising even though I was paying attention to it. Was it by my own will that I was able to stay asleep, by my own skill or practice, or was it the unconscious causality of my body which allowed it?

            For example, I was floating down this hallway and I was thinking about the hypothesis that dreams are created by randomly firing neurons which create meaningless sense data which is only later interpreted to create specific objects and a narrative. This theory didn’t seem to hold up, since the walls of this hallway were so complete and well-defined.

            At the end of the dream, I remember that I was trying to really fully meet and open myself up to my girlfriend or the image of my girlfriend, the face of my girlfriend. Before this I had been practicing opening fully to different sensations, realities, imagines, feelings. But really confronting this face of my girlfriend was pretty hard for me, pretty frightening. The face was there right in front of me, gradually changing form. I think I was afraid that it would turn into something frightening. I think that I woke up because of this.

# 7/18/2001

            I again have periods of awareness that I am dreaming. But different. This time after a while it actually condenses itself onto a TV screen. I am watching this show, and I realize the TV is turned off, that my mind is generating the images. I wished that others could see it; it was crazy animation and weird nonsensical words. Now Lindsey comes. She thinks it’s a movie. I tell it’s not actually a movie but my mind is generating it. Later I partially break a glass bottle on the floor and try to keep watching and enjoying without cutting myself.

 

FROM INDIA NOTEBOOK, FALL 2001 (C6)

            I am in a locker hallway at Hunter, back in time, and everyone is just going to class. I recognize a lot of people whose existence I am kind of amazed by, and I feel lucky to have grown up with such bright people. I also feel that sort of sweet-painful desirous love for people, the desire to fully embrace and realize them, loving people as I would love phenomena or a memory, the desire for them to fully come forward, to be absolutely realized, in actual not just potential - all the appreciation of them.

            Alex walks up to me (still in the locker hallway) and says that he’s not sure that he has the same kind of love for things that I do. I try to explain that the love I have for things doesn’t mean that I don’t feel shitty and angry and despairing, that I don’t feel bad also, but that the love in somewhere in there. That it’s kind of like a kernel of its potential, that it’s not necessarily realized or consummated. I might have said that it’s not necessarily even something I feel. We start talking about different phenomenological and Buddhist text which list this sort of basic love among the many elements of consciousness.

#

            Reluctantly climbing Mount Everest, really kind of miserable, forget why. We reach this sheer sheer nearly vertical drop, and I jump off it in a sort of mad giving-up. I guess I live.

#

            I was spending time with a girl I had met. We were riding down Central Park West on a bus. She was guiding me through a sort of step-by-step meditation experience, focusing on specific sensations, thoughts, situations. My jaw was shaking a lot.

            When that was over it occurred to me that I rarely spent time so in social togetherness with another person. Walking through the park quickly. Then back in my apartment, I realize that although I have been interested in this girl I haven’t kissed her or anything. So I hold her and then give her a kiss. I thought that she had wanted to also, but she says that she’s got to go, and turns away.

            Later it somehow occurs to me that she doesn’t exist. I have been spending the last three days or so with her, but I realize that she was a fantasy. (I am, you see, not considering that my whole reality of the last few days has been a dream anyway.) It makes me feel like I’m pretty crazy, the idea that I’ve been spending time with an unreal girl.

            Then I’m with a group of girls somewhere in downtown Manhattan, and these are the girls who actually introduced me to her. So I’m not the only one who imagined this girl! These girls are sort of British-type mid-twenties with a tired-casual attitude. One of them says “Oh yeah, as it turns out she isn’t really real.” She says it like sarcastically, like they knew it all along and let me get attached to her sort of as a joke.

            Here I get mad at this British girl. We argue for a time. Then I argue that maybe she isn’t real either (even though I’m not totally sure about this). She protests angrily. I pick her up and throw her in the Hudson River, hoping that she isn’t real after all, because if she was of course I would be in trouble. It turned out I was right, though, and here the dream starts to fade.

#

            I’m in a room and with Hunter folk. Mike is talking about how he must do something or other, he’s excited about some idea of making a video or something. I’ve got my back to the room, drawing on some chalkboard or something. Alex comes in with some others, postpones Mike’s idea by say he really really wants to play some video game to calm down or something. Some rap music is playing, and I say (still drawing) that “phatty” is a ridiculous word. Zack laughs. I try to turn around. I’m feeling like I like this group, like it’s normal and calm and sweet like when we were kids.

            It’s like a weekend night now, a party. Girls come in. I notice that though the guys are dressed normally, the girls are dressed really sexily, like in party dresses, evening wear, nice silky stuff showing skin. But they also seem kind of sleepy. We’re on couches. Someone sits down on a couch next to a girl. She stirs as if waking up and sleepily says her name and shakes hands.

            The thing turns into some kind of crazy Muppet thing. There are a bunch of crazy Muppets - like of two different kinds - at the head of the room, and some kind of exchange breaks out with everyone getting chatty and animated over some issue, like a debate or future plan. But I see this as kind of ritualized, preset, everyone chattering, noise moving to back and front like waves.

            But then somehow things start to fall apart. The room clears out. Something’s about to explode. I say that this must be the work of Oompa Loompa. A wise elder says “Yes of course, he’s a very powerful elf who’s at the back of most mischief.” I try to stop the explosion. The elder says that I’m out of my depth, I should get out of there. I’ve got something attached to the machine, trying to save it. I can’t get it detached. The elder says I should leave the pen (which is what’s attached) and get away. Yes of course, I think, just leave it. But I am struggling to pick up all my other stuff, like my luggage, books, folders, etc., and meanwhile the rumbling noise of the machine about to explode is getting louder and louder.

 

FROM SPRING 2002 NOTEBOOK (C7)

            I have disappointed a bunch of mafia guys who are in my house. I see one of them has a gun. Even as I’m trying to placate them he shoots about three times, and I get one shot in the left ribs. Now I stop trying to placate them. I notice that in each moment I am making a choice just for that moment about what seems like the best thing to do to survive, rather than hanging on to previous plans when they are no longer useful. I think I get the gun, but it’s out of bullets. I use it to sort of bop people on the head. I run upstairs, partly with the idea of calling the police. I’m being chased and there is someone up there, so I don’t have time. So I decide to double back and run outside, to escape by running down the mountain. I see that there is a black attack dog whose job it is to run me down. However, there are a bunch of different low fences around sectioning off the land. The dog can climb them but I can do it faster. Once I get across the stream I will be safe.

#

            There is an ancient subway station which is all the way up in the Catskills, all abandoned, spooky. I’m amazed, I tell someone there that I’m amazed, but he doesn’t answer, withdraws emotionally.

            I think about the deeply sad fact of the limits of happiness. In the dream I can sort of fly around and I have a girlfriend who is neat, but we still feel lost, we don’t know what to do with the time...

            After the subway station, I try to find my way back to my girlfriend. It’s totally dark, like underground. I don’t know how long my light will last. I’m looking, my light shines into caverns of endless endless statues, tiny statues some of them, visually very striking. I call them Shiva statues, and I think they belong to my girlfriend.

            I hug my girlfriend and play with her, but we feel lost.

#

            I’m trying to take care of this ball of flesh. It is spherical, about 1-1/2 feet in diameter.

            There is a man who is like guiding me, telling me where to go with it. The ball of flesh has a limited life span, but my guide is telling me how to convert the temporary value of the ball of flesh into a kind of permanent value.

            The beginning of the trip is lost in my memory, I have an impression of remote bus stations at night.

            Eventually we are on a city bus, traveling through Manhattan. The other passengers tell me that I should store my ball of flesh in one of these incubators on the side wall of the bus. I hesitate, unsure that it will be good for it, buy they insist and convince me. As soon as I put it in the incubator, the ball reacts badly: it turns from a pale color to having dark veiny lines, and parts of its flesh spike up jagged like mountains. I wonder if I’m going to feel any pain as the ball gets injured, because the ball is me. I turn off the incubator and touch the ball gently; it’s hot. The people on the bus say “well, that’s what those things do, they die.” They seemed to feel that since the ball of flesh is a mortal thing anyway, then there is no particular reason to take especially good care of it. I am mad at them for their irresponsible attitude.

            My guide gets out, and is standing at an intersection. I can’t get off the buss just yet because I don’t want to hurt the ball of flesh by picking it up while it’s still hot. So the bus pulls away with me on it. I look up at the street signs and try to make a note of the intersection, and I hope that I can get back there before he leaves. I don’t even know whether or not he’s waiting for me, but I hope so.

            I gently try to pat the ball down in the jagged areas, to soothe it. Eventually I think it’s cooled down enough to take it out without hurting it further. The ball is less of a ball now, more a droopy shape that hangs down on either side of my arm as I hold it.

            I get out of the bus and search for the intersection, but I can’t remember the name of the streets, so I am almost walking around aimlessly, just following hunches. Two people are talking on the street. One of them says that all we can really do is chose how we die. I am searching through the streets and I agree with this, and start thinking about it.

#

            I’m watching a movie that shows all these weird shots of living skeletons of giant, carnivorous whales. A couple of penguins slide down the throat of one. They slide out of view and some blood slides up the other way after a couple of seconds.

FROM MID 2002 NOTEBOOK (C8)

            In New York for a few days only... Driving with my parents, can’t park for some complex reason. My mom yells at my dad and leaves. Time with my dad. He says that when he was a boy sometimes the wind on the water would look like rain.

            We keep losing keys in this pool, I dive in trying to fish for them.

            I fish out sheet music. Time with my mother. She talks to me about piano music, says she taught me how to play so that we could play duets. She’s overwhelmed by the beauty of one duet she can remember.

#

            Some creatures have invaded, who may be extraterrestrial, but have the power to look like humans. They eat humans. They seem to have largely domesticated humans, and they slaughter them at will. There are scenes of them gleefully slaughtering passive humans, one at a time, and unexpectedly-spontaneously, with a gross sort of drill device. Humans are feeling standing up off lunchmeats which apparently are made from human flesh.

#

            Life without life?

            I somehow thought I walked into the darkness without life to see if there is still being. I thought there was? A light beyond the darkness, I stepped into it. Yet I thought it seemed lonely, as if it was solitary somehow.

            Later I had my doubts, a feeling that maybe life beyond life was implausible.

 

FROM LATE 2002 / SPRING 2003 NOTEBOOK (C9)

            A group of us are in the forest. There is some kind of ominous danger I think. But many of us are just sort of trying to have fun.

#

            I go to catch up with Micky et al but instead of a hotel it’s a bowling place... But I come in and just see this weird short-range bowling where the lane is just like 10 feet or so. I go downstairs and see a much bigger area. There a huge area full of full-sized bowling lanes but also I see endless chickens placed everywhere, pretty densely covering the area. Many of the chickens are alive, and people pick them up at whim and kill them by tearing them up and then cook them over fires. Some of the chickens are just dead laying around without heads or just with big bloody patches where a wing was ripped off. I walk upstairs and try to leave but I run into problems. Maybe I need a ride or something. And the people are scary, not just carnivorous, but vaguely cannibalistic, at least in some sort of emotional way. They seem like they’re trying to harm me somehow and I think I have to fight with some of them.

#

            At hunter on a sort of homecoming day. Lots of people from my class and others are around. I feel kind of absent, like I have to go soon or I’m tired.

            Later on it morphs into a bar scene and then into a single concentrated party. It occurs to me that seeing old acquaintances disinhibits memory, and I feel bad that I am out of touch with so many of the people I have known.

            Later I’m happily jumping / floating backwards down a staircase, then sort of breast stoke floating - walking around below. I think I’m back in time. I am wading in water and intercept someone’s ball in a game of catch. A group of people is performing to a recorded song.

#

            On Central Park West at night, we find a porthole which leads into a different and perhaps much better world. But we can’t fit through the porthole. A friendly dog comes up to us while we are there.

            Later I come to think that maybe the dog is my salvation - I am terrified of it but I think that maybe if I let it bite me through the neck I will not feel pain but rather be transported somehow. I have formed this plan and I am making all this crazy artwork on the computer.

            But when I let it, it doesn’t bite but is rather gentle and friendly; we adopt it...

#

            I am gazing up at the moon. The sun is apparently just behind it, so perhaps it is a solar eclipse (although actually my sense at the time was that it was night). A gentle halo appeared around the outside of the moon and I think it is very pretty. Then, all of a sudden, there is a series of very violent explosions which seemed to be originating behind the moon. I and the people behind me all gasp in terror. We don’t know what it was, but we speculate that something terrible is happening to the sun.

            The next scene seems to take place somewhat later. If it was in fact night before, then this would be the next morning. We are talking about finding out if anything catastrophic had happened. We are inside now, and one of us points out the fact that there is in fact some light coming through the window, and that hopefully the sun hasn’t exploded after all. For a moment, this seems hopeful. However, Micky, actually seeing a part of the sky through the window, says wait, doesn’t the sky look red? We look out the window and in fact the entire sky is a deep, uniform red. We are looking out onto a city street, and all the light cast from the sky has a reddish hue as well. It is snowing furiously. You’re right, I say. It’s over.

            Apparently the sun has undergone some kind of sudden change whereby it has stopped giving off anywhere near the amount of heat necessary to sustain life on earth. It is going to get colder and colder, and there will be no hope of its ever getting warmer. Everything will die soon enough. Perhaps my instant reaction is not too different than it would be if this really happened. I have a sense of intense fear, and also intense sadness at the loss of any future whatsoever. I also briefly wish that we were in a warmer climate to begin with, so that there might be a day or so of bearable outside warmth before the final cold set in. In the dream I don’t think that any of us have much more than a few days in which to live.

#

            I was some kind of orphaned ape, maybe a gorilla, maybe the product of some kind of experiment which had since been destroyed.

            At one point some guy was trying to call around to see if were are any places that will take me in, like zoos or something. Apparently there weren't, because he killed me then.

            I feel the point of a knife at my back, and I am terrified, I ask what are you doing, and say please don’t but he runs it right through my stomach / chest. I died and woke up. I think he wasn’t killing me out of malice but just because of the fact that there wasn’t anything else that could be done with me.

#

            A brief period of lucid dreaming. I am in a strange sort of apartment building. There are some other characters on the floor: male, not especially friendly or intelligent (henchmen of some sort of enemy?).

            I ask one of them, “Are you God?” because I know it is a dream and I am fascinated by this otherness, this force all around me which creates my reality. Since I knew I was dreaming, for some reason I felt like I could examine this force close up.

            The guy I asked, however, answers “No,” and they walk away.

#

            Weird work anxiety dreams. Like I am working at a mortuary, and I am supposed to come in and out by squeezing through a tiny door in the freezer.

#

            I am supposed to be executed because I didn’t score perfectly on some multiple choice test. The functionaries who tell me this are real assholes, and stupid.

#

            During my dream it suddenly occurred to me that I had lived beyond death, and I felt reassured. That is, I felt that I had died as one person, and now I was another person, remembering a moment as the first person where I wished for life, was self-aware. I guess this gave me a sort of assurance that what is most important / valuable about my own life is present in many other lives as well, and possibly infinite in extent.

            Later on in the dream it occurred to me that I had been mistaken: I was still living the same life as before, still the same person. That made the reassurance go away.

 

FROM C10 (SUMMER 2002-SPRING 2004)

            At the office, John takes a call for the director, I pick up the phone, then we both put the phone down, assuming the other person is holding the line. The director totally flips out on me, insulting me, getting really sarcastic, making fun of my ‘boots’ which are lying out on the floor.

#

There are some mafioso guys in our driveway, and as my girlfriend and I pulling out in the car, my girlfriend suddenly decides to shoot one of them because she thinks he is a notorious wanted criminal. She shoots wildly, killing one of the men as well as several nearby animals. Then we flee. There are other people in the driveway who gasp as we go by. I just wish my girlfriend hadn’t done that, now we’re fugitives. But eventually I go back and no one really seems to care about what happened.

#

            It’s an exciting chase through city streets at night. I’m in a horse-drawn carriage trying to elude pursuers. I’m with a friend. We’re even riding this crazy carriage up and down stairs, very fun. I believe that I am one of the twelve apostles, going out on a journey in lieu of St. Peter, who has been killed.

#

            When I need to do something, I spiral inward, and when I don’t, I spiral outward. There’s nothing else that I can do.

#

            I am dead and in the land of the dead. Was I alive at the beginning of the dream, and did I trust a dead person only to have her kill me?

            The other dead are trying to convince me to let them mutilate me, stab me with a big knife, so that I can get over my fear of being injured, which they say is useless once you’re already dead. After preventing them from cutting off other parts, I ask one of them to cut off my ear, which she does. But now I’m not even sure if it’ll grow back. Then I get in a vicious knife fight with another one, both getting really bad cuts. I’m trying to cut off her hands so that she won’t be able to fight anymore.

            It’s kind of a sad land of the dead. There are some girls standing at a desk and praising the effects of a particular brand of painkiller pills which help to dull the pain. I’m not sure if I had any hope left of coming back to life; maybe I did.

#

            At work I find a card that says “Hunter Graduation ‘94”, but instead of a picture of the graduation on it, there are pictures of suburban streets with palm trees, and a picture of a girl. I’m so interested in the card that I bring it with me to lunch, where, at the takeout restaurant, I actually by coincidence see the girl whose card it is, waiting on line. She’s gorgeous. I give her the card, tell her where I found it, ask her about it, try to make conversation. She takes the card but seems totally uninterested in talking to me. Still, I find the event so astounding that I go on telling it to other people later on in the dream.

#

            Endless variations on a theme.

1.         There is a fight between two pairs of people, each pair consisting of a man and a woman. The women are fighting with a knife against two sai blades, while the men are fighting with hand guns. Later, we are sitting in some kind of a temporary truce, and Nicole seems to be causing some danger, she has drawn her sai blades. I move in and restrain her partner Brian with a gentle block, almost like a hug, while my partner kills Nicole with knives.

            The Brian doesn’t seem to blame me for this murder, but I’m worried that he soon will. I’m extremely nervous about a reprisal either from Brian or the police. I’m wandering around by myself, trying to get a handle on things. I think about doing a news search with Nicole and my names to see if the murder is being reported.

2.         I keep going back in time to earlier situations in order to understand the cause of later conflicts. This sequence is an earlier situation which caused the sequence I had just experienced. Children are disappearing into the house of an enemy. It is a small house like a shack. Lots of kids are going in, and I think that one or more will not come out, leading to the later battle. One member of the enemy family holds up a very rusty saw and leers at me: “Do you want to have brain surgery?” It’s supposed to appear as a joke, but I don’t trust them and don’t want to go inside. I’m strong but outnumbered, and it’s partly a bluff when I say “I’ll kill you if you try anything like that.”

3.         I’ve gone further back in time to understand the cause of the conflict between the two families. There is a security checkpoint where a few members of one family have temporarily stored some valuable possessions. Another man comes, a very clever man. He makes a play that keeps them occupied happily at a booth nearby, while he is casually dressing himself up in their stuff at the checkpoint under the smiles of the guard there, who is also fooled.

            A brawl follows later. I’m in a tenement building, and I catch this clever thief who started it all, shrink him down by rolling him up in a paper, and squash him with my shoe. I’m trying to end everything from the beginning, but I don’t know if it works. There is an earthy dirt on the bottom of my shoe from stepping on him, which I wrap into a tissue. I need a place to hide the tissue now, to erase the evidence (the other witnesses being on my side and therefore not a liability). Instead of putting the tissue in the garbage in the apartment, where it could be found, I walk down the stairs within the tenement building. But when I walk outside, the area is totally filled with police cars. I worry that I will be question if I try to walk beyond the area, but that I will look suspicious if I double back. The murder seemed natural and fair at the time, but again I’m seized by a great anxiety about the reprisal.

#

            A magical stone has been stolen, which has the property of turning water into blood, among other things. I find out who took it by solving a crossword puzzle with the answers hidden in it. The puzzle also implicates this nice little French-African kid as an accomplice. Alex and I are both trying to explain this to his friend in French, but he says that we’re not making any sense.

            I try to ask the publisher of the newspaper who wrote the crossword puzzle, but I’m cut off by Arthur Lewis. Actually it was Arthur and his associates who write it, but he doesn’t want too much attention called to it. The puzzle is published anonymously.

            I decide to set out to try to retrieve the stone, but I know that it will be difficult.

#

            I’m some sort of prisoner, being tortured by a very painful and elaborate electric shock routine.

            A group of children who are there come over. They seem to be very powerful, and one of them tells me that they are going to save me.

            In the next scene, a lot of people are standing around. The overall superintendent of the prison is talking to the more local manager. Both look like deranged hillbillies, and the higher-up one is the more deranged of the two. It is against the will of this man that I would be able to go free.

            Here is how the children save me: They have transformed into people of various ages, and we are all lined up toward the exit door. Before each person leaves, a guard asks them what is the worst thing they have ever done, or what crime they have committed. When it is my turn I say “stealing a car”, which is apparantly what I was in for, and the guard lets me go out like everyone else. Apparently my crime was no worse than theirs and so I was saved.

#

            I look at a map of midtown manhattan, and see that I’m close to a large circular area called “the Desert Hole”, around east 42nd street. I try to get there and I find it. I’m in a building, at an observation window that the public cannot pass beyond. The desert stretches out for miles and behind that, mountains. The hole itself is actually more of a bowl-shaped depression, not heavily concave but enormous in size. I have quite a feeling of vertigo and I am in awe of the whole scene. I understand and am thankful that this observation window is the only way to see it, because if there was an open-air platform, people would be likely to fall off. Somehow the hole can only be seen from this one place.

#

            Watching a very intense anime movie, in which subject and object are somehow so compressed that time doesn’t move, in a frightening way. Someone says hello to a man on the street, and the man says slowly and with intense rage “me too...” His point of view is represented as sort of infinite layers of really fine cloth between himself and the world, the sun shining through dimly.

            Later a tuft of hair floats down from the sky - it fell from a powerful demon.

#

            I’m watching an episode of Saved by the Bell which I can’t identify. Kids are discussing something in this narrow school hallway covered with graffiti - it seems much more realistic than other episodes of Saved by the Bell.

#

            I’m some sort of mental patient, in heavy confinement, believed to be highly incapable, etc. There are some sort of intensely sinister dealings going on. There are various people covertly fighting over the outcome. Perhaps one of them even allows himself to die in the interest of his plan. Some kind of evidence is buried.

            I become a subject for some kind of intense dream and sleep research. It is frightening because they seem ready to keep me pumped full of drugs and confined so that I stay dreaming all the time. I plead with them to at least let me outside for some time, and they do. I’m up on the roof of the building, desolate beige concrete with broken glass here and there.

            It isn’t clear whether I am actually this mental patient or whether I’m only temporarily inhabiting his body.

#

            A lucid dream. I’m speeding down a highway which I realize is the West Side Highway, going north. I’m looking east into the city. I’m really overwhelmed by the beauty and impermanence of it, the fact that this alternate version of the view my mind is creating will never be seen again. I think back to other lucid dreams I’ve had, and feel that my verbal descriptions of this beauty are inadequate. I walk to a place near Broadway in the west 60’s, a place where there is a ramp that goes down from street level into a tunnel. I have a sense that this is a significant place where I will find something important in real life. Around the corner it suddenly looks like daytime.

            Semi lucid. I have a girlfriend in this dream, but I know that she is a product of the dream itself, and I need to maintain the dream in order to keep her in existence. I’m having a hard time doing it. We’re on a couch together and all these dangers come from outside. Dogs are wandering around and I have to fight them off. I go back to the bed and she crawls out from under it with her hair fallen out, looking miserable and sick. I try to restore her but the dream fades.

#

            I’m at a football game, and I see George W. Bush in the stands, drinking wine. TV cameras are pointed at him, but he’s drunk off his ass and out of it. He says that he’ll give anyone $20 if they’ll go out with him. Which is doubly pathetic, first that he’d take anyone, and second that he’d pay them for a date. Everyone watching is scandalized

#

Zack, Mark, Alex and I are discussing some sort of heavy psychological issues, near the inside of the doorway of a brownstone building. Suddenly, some sort of popular psychology / guru guy comes in the door. He’s a TV personality and he’s doing a show outside. There is a big crowd of people on either side of the steps, and this guy comes inside and points the microphone at me. He wants me to tell him about the psychological issue we were discussing, so that he can ‘solve’ it.

I don’t exactly cooperate with this, though. Instead I take the microphone, look around at the crowd and yell “How’s everybody doing?” and they cheer. Then I pause, look up at the sky (it’s night), the trees, get into the ‘suchness’, the momentariness... then I yell into the microphone “Why not?! Why not?! Why not?! Why not?!” looking around at the crowd. (Meaning, for example, why not live life to the fullest, etc.)

Triumphant, I step back inside to talk to Mark and Zack and Alex about it, but it turns out they weren’t paying attention. Disappointed, I walk up the stairs to my room. It’s a shame, I think, we were having a good conversation before it got interrupted. I’m having a hard time climbing up the spiral stairs in the wrong direction.

#

            I’m old and immobile. I wonder whether this is the final descent into tiredness, or will I get healthy and active again.

            A man stabs a woman who he was pretending to love, stabs her with some kind of poison on the blade. I wince - it’s scary. Then  girl comes in, dazed, who doesn’t seem to realize that some of her body parts have been replaced from organic matter to some grotesque wood and string simulacrum. The man did this to her whole family. The man, actually a woman now, seems to be extremely powerful, with some vast plan of world control. I’m going along with whatever she orders me to do, waiting for an opportunity to kill her. I’m crawling in a circle around a vast thing that is either a miniature model of a town or a vast circuit board. There is a gaping hole / tear in the middle. Also there is a cut on the edge where I smashed at the circuit board with an axe before I was co-opted. This woman wants to expand the simulacra to choke out and replace other life.

#

            A wizard and I are in possession of the “holy water”, a quicksilver-like substance that enables you to manipulate politics on a macro level. We had just excised a great evil from the city, and I feel relieved knowing that although the wound is there, it will heal. The holy water also makes a perfume that people become addicted to; a friend of ours is in the hospital and is addicted to it. The wizard and I are discussing whether to destroy the holy water. We decide to do so, because it can enslave people’s souls.

The holy water is in a pot on the stove. A weird little creature like a vitamin bottle is trying to feed on it there, but we throw him out of the kitchen. But, just when we make the decision, the wizard vanishes, teleported away be some evil forces who must have been listening in. I’m scared. I decide I have no time to lose in trying to destroy the holy water. I pour it down the sink with the hot water on. Just as I’m finishing, the little creature comes in again, but now he’s big and strong, with metal claws. I dodge his attacks, try to run out of the apartment, but know that he’ll catch up to me while I’m waiting for the elevator. But just as I get to the elevator, the door opens and the wizard comes out. The creature is no match for him, especially because the holy water was destroyed.

#

            It seems to be my job to take group after group of people to see Zeus, and in seeing him, to die. Some die seeing only his back, and thus die in a kind of ignominy. Some see his radiant glorious (even loving?) face, and have a brief experience of happiness as they die.

#

            I’m walking with Alex down the hallway of the elementary school. Kids are lined up with traveling bags. I ask them whether they’re going to Club Getaway (the place where we went for our sixth grade trip). One of the kids says yeah, that’s where they’re going.

            I start crying, I mean really crying hard, bawling, about how it’s all gone, the past, about how its ontological status is unknown to us. (It's funny to me that in my dream I actually use the phrase "ontological status of the past".) Does the past still exist? Has it been destroyed, never to return? How does the existence of the past differ from the existence of the present?