maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was near "my car" in the woods. It was almost night. The sky was a dull, dark blue. I was all alone.

I may have been planning to sleep in my car for tonight and, perhaps, for a number of nights. I may not, though, have thought this was the right place to sleep. I may have been planning to drive my car somewhere else.

At some other point I remembered one of my male friends talking about living in some other town. He was complaining about what a boring town it was to live in.

He said, "The thing is, it doesn't have a road that leads directly out of town, up to the mountains. You have to take all these roads that wind around town. It's really hard not to stay stuck in town. And that gets really boring.

"Not like Boston. Boston has a road that leads right out of town! It's easy to get out of town and have fun."

At some point I saw a view of "Boston:" a town at the base of some deep-green mountain range, with its "main road" running along the side of the town and a little bit up the slope of mountains. There may have been houses lining one side of the road.

I thought how I didn't quite agree with my friend. I thought the town I was thinking of sleeping or spending some time in was fine. But I didn't want to disagree with my friend and look uncool (even though my friend wasn't really around, and I was just "remembering" a conversation with him).

I may now have been standing on the outskirts of a pretty big mountain town. I stood in the parking lot of some hotel. The hotel building looked kind of like a restaurant building.

(I've seen a building very much like this, in a space very much like this, in at least one other dream.)

Dream #2

I was in some bookstore. The bookstore was huge and mazelike. After winding my way through a few areas, I found myself at a manga section.

There were two thin, Japanese men shelving some books near the manga section. They both had a mild intellectual look, with casual, short haircuts, big eyeglasses, and nice, button-up shirts. They spoke back and forth with each other in Japanese.

I didn't want the guys to think I was just another American who only knew about Japanese culture through manga and j-pop. But I was also really curious about what manga the store had. In particular, I was looking for a copy of Tezuka's Phoenix series.

When I got over to the manga shelves, I heard the men laugh back and forth with each other. I "understood" their Japanese. They were basically saying exactly what I didn't want them to think about me. I got ashamed and thought I would leave the section. But I figured if I was already here, I might as well stay.

But I got bored pretty quick. It was all a lot of new manga. I had been looking for some really old, classic manga. Some of this stuff didn't even look like manga. It looked like airbrushed versions of American comic books with medieval European themes. Some of the books were tall, thin paperbacks with really glossy covers.