maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

My female friend H and I were in a mall at night. We were in one of the department stores. I think we wanted to head out of the mall.

We knew the exit we were at didn't lead to the section of the parking lot where our car was. But we didn't know what exit of the mall would lead us to our car.

But for some reason we were heading for the exit at the end of this department store, anyway. We walked out a double set of sliding glass doors.

As we passed between the two doors, a policeman, not a security guard, passed in front of us. He was a couple inches taller than I, kind of muscly, black, with lightish skin, and very short hair. He seemed to be trying to bully us or hustle us a little as he passed us.

The cop passed through the second set of doors, and we followed. After the cop got a couple meters away from the exit he turned around and did something like a sly, little look at us -- at me in particular, like he thought I was some sort of troublemaker.

I thought, Oh, god, I'm getting singled out all over again. The cop walked away. But I felt like I was going to get targeted for more harrassment.

I knew H and I had walked out the wrong exit of the mall. I knew the easiest thing to do would be to go back into the mall, straight through the mall, and to the correct exit.

But I felt like if the cop already had me singled out as a troublemaker, he'd probably either head back into the mall and harrass me or contact his cop friends and have them harrass me, if he saw me head back into the mall. So I figured the smartest thing to do would just be to walk all the way around the outside of the mall until H and I found our car.

Dream #2

I was sitting at a table in a food court area that kind of looked like the dining section at the student union of my old university. But this food court was either part of a mall or an airport -- or both.

There was one big area of seats, then a wide walkway, then another big area of seats. Both seating areas and the walkway were busy with people, all rushing all over the place.

I sat at a table full of people, mostly adults in their forties or fifties. But, off to my left, I saw somebody, maybe one of my old psychiatrists, sitting at another table.

I didn't want her to get up and hurry away before I got to talk to her. So I ran to her table. But when I got to the table, she was gone. But I felt like she was probably going to return. It was now like we were scheduled to meet. So I figured I'd sit here and wait for her -- so this time I wouldn't miss her.

But I realized I'd left my backpack (a huge, tall backpack!) at the previous table. So I got up and ran over to pick that up.

For some reason, I was now kind of wandering around in the seating area. I seemed to be upset with my most recent psychiatrist. I had feelings about her that were the same as IWL -- I felt like she neglected my deeper psychological issues all the time, always looking for a quick fix and easy way out -- to save herself the trouble of work.

For some reason, I felt like I finally needed to just complain to somebody about her. For a moment I may have complained to the psychiatrist I'd seen sitting at the table -- somehow. But that psychiatrist was now gone.

But now I saw my most recent psychiatrist's "boss," sitting in an armchair in a section of hallway after the seating area across the walkway from me. I went up to this woman and either sat in an armchair right next to hers, or knelt beside the woman's armchair.

The woman looked like Susan Seaforth, who played Julie Horton on Days of Our Lives, from around the time period of the late 1970s.



I either told the woman that I wanted to complain about my psychiatrist, or I just began complaining to her about my psychiatrist.

The woman listened to me for a moment. She then said that she understood what I was talking about. But she had to go take care of some business. When she got finished, she'd come back to me. I could tell her the rest of my story. And she could figure out what to do in response.

But I think this woman's "business" was to catch a flight. I'm pretty sure she even had luggage with her. It didn't register with me then -- but -- how long was I supposed to wait?

Dream #3

It was daytime. I was out on a wide, shallow, stone staircase with a lot of people. We all stood up near the top, near a whole wall of glass doors that looked in on a comparatively dark lobby. It was like we were all assembled out here for a photo.

I was playing some kind of important part in whatever proceedings we were all a part of. But there were these two really hot, young women right next to me. One of them, even though she was a really hot, young woman, may have been one of my friends' mothers.

The two hot girls began kissing each other. First they were just giving each other mild, quick, closed-mouth kisses. But then, either because I wasn't reacting much or because I actually was paying attention to them, they began to give each other slower kisses.

I was pretty aroused by this. The two girls kind of fed on my arousal and began giving each other open-mouthed kisses. They even kind of sunk down a bit, almost kneeling on the ground with each other. They may have been wearing wedding dresses, as if they were going to marry each other.

Now the young women opened their mouths slightly and began slowly sliding their tongues back and forth into each others' mouths. This was too much for me to handle.

The girls stood back up and were almost right in my face. So, even though I didn't want to start kissing my friend's mom, I just crept my face a bit closer. I began working my tongue in there a bit.

I was trying to get my tongue in there in the least intrusive way that I could. I was really turned on by the girls' lesbian kissing. I didn't want it to turn into straight kissing. I just wanted to get a little bit of the lesbian erotic energy on my own tongue.

Good morning, everybody.

I don't think I've ever made an out and out joke (albeit corny) in a dream before this dream.

This dream is another instance of so-so dream control. I was watching the video below yesterday afternoon. I thought it might be fun to dream myself onto the International Space Station.

But I got afraid of messing up the machinery if I actually projected myself up there. So I told myself not to try, after all. Anyway, the dream I had is a result of that thought process.



Dream #1

It was a sunny day. I was flying over the roofs of some really nice, 19th century-style mansions. I was apparently searching for a book I'd lost. It may have been some sort of classic book. But I think it was actually a porn novel or porn magazine.

I think a bird had stolen this book. I may have seen evidence that the bird was on the roof of a house just in front of me. I may have seen something like a little nest on one of the peaks of the roof. I may have felt like the book was now a part of that nest.

But I was now floating in between two mansions. The mansions both had complex roofs, with a lot of different angles of sloping. My oldest nephew straddled the roof of one of the mansions. My mom sat on the roof of the other mansion.

I may have been here now in order to get some books for my nephew. My mom had a couple of books on her roof. I think I was going to bring those over for my nephew. But there was still one book missing.

But now a cartoon bird landed at the edge of the roof of my mom's mansion. The cartoon bird was black, so I thought it was a raven. But it actually looked like the Warner Bros chicken hawk character, Henery Hawk.



The "raven" had the missing book on top of its head, for some reason. The book was real, even though the raven was a cartoon.

I thought, Whoa! Now's my chance!

Still floating in between the two mansions, I turned to my nephew. I said, "Hey! Why is a raven like a writing desk?"

My nephew said, "What?"

I bobbed back around to the raven and said, "Why is a raven like a writing desk? Because it has a book on its top!"

My nephew said, "Oh. I guess."

The raven now, for some reason, did something like faint. It slid down the right slope of the roof, taking the book down with it. I floated over to the peak of the roof and sat there, looking down at the bird.

I was a little sore that my nephew either didn't get my joke or thought it was corny. I was trying to blame him for the fact that he thought my joke was corny.

I could see the book laying at the bottom of the roof's slope, as if it were about to slip off the roof's edge. I guess the raven had already slipped off the roof's edge.

I thought about getting the book, before it slipped, too. But I really didn't want to do my nephew any favors, after he hadn't liked my joke. But I could see the other books, near my mom. And I figured I'd get those ones for him.

My nephew asked me to get the other book. He couldn't see it, and he didn't know whether it had fallen or not.

But I told my nephew I couldn't get the book. I said, "It's in too hard a place to reach. I'm an old man, now. I can't reach into all kinds of places like I used to."

I now really was an old man. I was a tall, white man, with a big belly. I was bald, with dirtyish grey hair on the sides of my head. I probably wore a nice button-up shirt and blue jeans.

I was walking with two extremely hot women, probably in their mid- to late-twenties. They were like models. But they were astronauts. They were dressed in these extremely sexy, silvery jumpsuits which, I guess, were their space suits.

We walked through an automatic, sliding-steel door on a vanilla-yellow wall. We walked into some area that looked like a cafeteria. But not far above my head were all kinds of staircases, as if there were a maze of balconies above this eating area. At the other end of this room was a huge window wall, revealing a gigantic swimming pool area.

I knew that one of these women was my daughter-in-law. The other woman was a partner on the flight that my daughter-in-law was about to take.

I was here to see my daughter-in-law off on her space flight. My daughter-in-law and her friend were dropping me off here to relax and wait in the preparation time before launch. I knew that this cafeteria was part of some fitness area, and that the girls were probably going to do a little exercise before their flight.

We walked toward some sort of booth table, talking and joking. My daughter-in-law, even though she was incredibly sexy, had a kind of low self-esteem. I tried to make her feel better about herself. So as we sat into the booth, I made some kind of sly comment implying how cute she was.

This made both of the girls giggle giddily. I had a bad feeling that both of the girls were now sexually attracted to me. I thought I should back off a bit. I didn't want my daughter-in-law to be attracted to me. But, I thought, it wouldn't be so bad if her friend decided she liked me.

The girls had to leave me now. They may already have been gone. But I at least heard my daughter-in-law telling me, in my head, "You know, they have the ----- (press conference?) going on right before the flight. Everybody's welcome to come to that thing. And we'll be there, too. You should come, so we can see you one last time."

For some reason I didn't think that was a good idea. I told the girls I'd probably just take a walk around before the launch, instead.

I was now myself again. I was sitting on the ground or on a concrete floor -- somewhere. A tall, heavy, white man with feathery, black and grey hair, stood by a blackboard at a wall. The wall looked like it was part of some warehouse or unfinished building. There were thin, metal beams running from the floor to some kind of half-ceiling.

The man was explaining something to me about Judaism. He was making calculations regarding verses in the Torah. He was trying to show that the appropriate method of studying was one passage of the Torah per week. He said that this was all a person could really handle, while keeping a balance on his spirituality.

I saw a number of -- what I would describe as traffic poles -- like the yellow-painted concrete poles with convex tops. But these poles were comprised of crystal cogs, all stacked up on top of each other.

The cogs were all different colors. But they were piled up so that cogs of the same color were near each other. One pole, for instance, started with orange at the bottom, worked its way up to a pinkish-red, then into a green, then blue.

I told the man, "It doesn't make sense to me that people should only study one passage a week. It seems to me like a person could actually study a passage a day and be fine."

The man was a little shocked that I'd said something like that. I felt like I had kind of insulted either his ideas of religion or his ideas of spiritual balance. I think I felt like I needed him for a teacher. So I had to find a way to apologize to him for having made a comment apparently against one of his major theories.

We were both standing outside now. The man was up on a sidewalk. I stood on something like asphalt -- maybe in a parking lot? The man was taller than me by his own height and the height of the curb. And we were separated by some kind of railing.

I decided that the best way to apologize to the man was by showing my knowledge of other religions and concluding with the idea that, compared to his religion, all the other religions I knew about were lacking.

I had a whole bunch of papers in my hands. It was like I was going to flip through some kind of PowerPoint presentation on the faults of all the other religions I knew about.

There were some slides regarding some religions on the top of my stack of papers. But I wanted to save those religions for later. I shuffled those to the back of the deck. Now the top slide was about some religion that was somehow based in the teachings of Edgar Cayce. I figured that would be a good place to start.

I gave the man some explanation about the tenets of this religion (I wish I could remember them now!). I was going to move on to how I thought they were silly, compared to the tenets of his religion.

But the man interrupted me -- as if he thought I were trying to convince him that this religion was really good. He took the same tack with me, now, that I was trying to take with him. He became really interested in what I had to say about this religion. He wanted to know more.

I felt a little defeated. I was trying to learn more about the man's religion. But now he wanted me to teach him about mine!

I stood up onto the curb. The man and I turned to my left and walked down the sidewalk, down a slight slope, to a complex of buildings like a university campus. There seemed to be a decent amount of people walking around down there.

I was explaining something to the man. But now I was in some kind of limbo space, floating around and discussing things in my head. I was now apparently talking to someone, kind of like the Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot Michael Collins.



Collins didn't believe in something about psychic phenomena. But I was trying to convince him that psychic phenomena did exist.

Collins and I were now driving in a car at night. I had gotten onto the topic of psychokinesis. I was trying to make some point about how it was already being used in outer space, and that it wasn't causing any harm.

To illustrate this, I had a chart in my mind. It was a white background, with an x-arrow and a y-arrow. Both arrows were really bold. The plane made by the coordinates was of either twelve or sixteen rectangles. The rectangles were stood vertically. The grid was four rectangles wide, and either three or four rectangles long.

In this grid, I drew something like a jagged line bouncing down through the rectangles. This was made to show the minimal damaging effect that psychokinetic powers had in space.

Somehow, Collins and I faded into some place like a residence area for astronauts who were about to head up into space. We were both inside a room with thin-panelled walls, like the fake wood-panel walls inside a double-wide trailer. The entire floor of the room was covered with mattresses, except the left side of the room, which had a set of bunk beds.

In the center of the room was some very space-stationy-looking computer area. A pole hung from the ceiling. Suspended from the pole were a big computer system and a seat at which someone sat while using the computers.

Collins was sitting at the computer station. I was laying on my back, on a mattress, looking up at the back of one of the screens of the system.

I was shocked to see that the logo of the computer's manufacturer was a circle with a stylized, interlocking P and K. I thought, PK! That's psychokinesis! Is this whole computer part of some psychokinesis project?

Apparently, though, I had been continuing my argument, because Collins, at some point, told me that I'd won him over. I don't know whether he actually believed in psychokinesis. But he at least seemed to believe that, if it existed, it wouldn't do any harm.

Somehow, I was now asleep, my back propped up against the back wall of the room. But now another astronaut opened the door of the room.

Even though my eyes were closed, and I was sleeping, I could see the woman. She was blonde, a little frumpy-looking, with frizzy-curly, long, blonde hair. She was maybe in her late forties. She wore a red sweater and red-plastic-rimmed eyeglasses.

The woman poked her head in through the doorway and asked Collins, "Do you know anything about debt for the companies ----- (can't remember, ----- (Provate?), and Fluxcil, that you might be able to help me with them?"

These were biotech companies. Collins said, "No. I don't know."

But the woman wasn't really asking Collins so Collins could help her. She was hinting to him that they should test me out, on my knowledge. But Collins didn't get the hint. So the woman had to make it a little stronger.

But the mention of the biotech names got me kind of interested (why? I don't know anything about biotech), and I was already waking up, lifting my dark, heavy eyelids, as the woman said, "Well... do you know anybody who might know about that debt? Like... another astronaut you work with?"

Collins might have said something like, "Oh. Yeah."

But I was already too interested in what the woman was talking about to wait. I stood up -- still incredibly groggy! -- and said, "Oh? Debt? I think I can get you some information." I knew I didn't know anything about biotech. But I was already making a plan in my head for how I'd do the research.

I walked over all the mattresses, toward the doorway. The woman may have said something to me, then asked me, "Do you think fifteen minutes will be enough time for you?"

I said, "Yeah. I can get you something in fifteen minutes."

I thought I'd have to use my own computer. But I wondered if my wireless would work all the way from up here on the space station. I thought that the satellite system would be all messed up.

Then I realized we weren't on the space station yet. It was still the night before we even launched up into space. I thought, of course my computer will work.

Collins had gotten up from the computer station. He was walking out of the room, to go down the hallway for some kind of meeting with the woman. I walked back toward the back of the room, to pull my computer out of my suitcase (???).

But I'd forgotten the names of the three companies. I turned around and caught the woman before she walked away. I said, "So the companies are... Probate... ?"

The woman said, "-----, ----- (Provate?), and Fluxcil. You know Fluxcil. They make -----."

I felt a little insulted by that. I didn't want the woman to think I was stupid. Of course I knew that Fluxcil made -----. But I was just having trouble keeping the companies' names in my head. My brain was still so groggy!

The woman left and I walked back toward the back of the room. My suitcase was huge -- maybe waist-high, and as wide as two of me. I knew my computer was in a pocket at the back end of the suitcase.

As I walked toward the suitcase I was already trying to figure out how to get my information. I knew that I'd start by pulling the most recent financial filings for each company.

I started wondering if fifteen minutes was enough time. These filings were for biotech companies. They might be huge.

But I thought that there were two other things I should do if I had enough time left in my fifteen minutes. One thing was to do a debt schedule. But I thought I would probably have to ask the woman if she wanted that before I actually did it.

I also thought that, to get the most recent debt issuances of the companies, I'd probably also have to go through the most recent press releases for each company.

Good morning, everybody.

I thought I'd share the passage below, since it relates to both dreaming and New Year's Eve. The passage is from Charles Dickens' story "The Chimes."

The plot device of "The Chimes" is similar to that of "A Christmas Carol": a ghost leads a man, Toby Veck, into the future, so that he can see the effects of the choices he makes in the present. The effects are terrible. So Toby mends his ways and lives happily ever after.

This quote comes from the end of the book.

"Had Trotty dreamed? Or, are his joys and sorrows, and the actors in them, but a dream; himself a dream; the teller of this tale a dreamer, waking but now? If it be so, O listener, dear to him in all his visions, try to bear in mind the stern realities from which these shadows come; and in your sphere, none is too wide, and none too limited for such an end -- endeavour to correct, improve, and soften them. So may the New Year be a happy one to you, happy to many more whose happiness depends on you! So may each year be happier than the last, and not the meanest of our brethren or sisterhood debarred their rightful share, in what our Great Creator formed them to enjoy."

Dream #1

I was in a laundromat which may have been a part of a department store or a K-Mart. I was at the far end of one of the aisles of machines. I think the machines were dryers, though they looked like washers. There were laundry carts cluttering all the way up the aisle.

Two guys were also in the aisle. I felt like they were my friends. They may also have been working at the laundromat. They were talking to each other without really regarding me. They were talking about some guy, who I eventually realized was me.

The guys were talking about how the guy was really conceited. They said that you could never tell this guy anything. And he'd never admit he was wrong. It made the atmosphere tense around him all the time. But he wasn't really so impressive that he should make people feel that way.

I thought, Wow. Is that really the way people feel about me? I realized I should really start watching how I act toward people. I thought I'd start right away, by treating my two friends nicely. I may have tried to say something nice to my friends.

But now I was suddenly sitting at a desk outside the aisles of laundry machines. I was looking at my phone. I was texting back and forth between my sister and my friend H.

I think I was just having a normal conversation with H. But my sister had gone into the hospital for something. So I was texting with her to find out how everything had gone.

But somebody, either H or my sister, was sitting at the near end of another aisle of laundry machines off to my right. The person was sitting with another couple of people, probably kids. They were all on the floor, maybe buried in coats.

I hadn't heard from my sister in a while. I wasn't getting worried about her health, necessarily. But I was worried that I'd said something to offend her, so that she'd stopped texting me and now wouldn't let me know if things were okay.

But I now got a text from my sister. It said something like, "Well, the doctor sent me and J (my brother-in-law) over to the pharmacy. So when I get my stuff from the pharmacy I'll be able to tell you what my problem was."

It was like the doctor knew the problem, but didn't tell my sister what it was. So my sister had to infer the problem from whatever kind of medicine she got.

The text did, however, seem to have a bit of a feeling of annoyance with me. So I tried to think of how I could be less annoying.

At the same time that I read the text, the person sitting on the floor off to my right was also speaking to me. It was like my sister was right there, telling me everything she had texted me.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was walking up the stairs in a fire escape stairwell in an office building. The walls were white and the light was either incandescent or a warm-feeling fluorescent. There may have been one or two people ahead of me, guiding me. One may have been a pretty, young woman.

I was told something about the office where I was being taken. It had something to do with the difference between this place and my old office. I felt like probably nobody would even know me here.

The door opened to the office floor. Colorful Christmas lights were glaring somewhere at the periphery of my vision. The two people guiding me either disappeared or walked really far away into the office.

I was by myself in a corner of the office. It felt kind of like an elevator bank. But it was open to the rest of the office. I wasn't even sure why I was supposed to be in this office in the first place.

A young man came up to greet me. I knew him! (I don't think I really know him IWL.) I was so relieved to know somebody.

But the man didn't quite want to acknowledge that he recognized me, as well. Some people didn't like me, and the man didn't want to be seen by them as liking me. So he just treated me politely, but indifferently, like he'd treat anybody who came into the office.

The man may have told me that my old boss would be here to meet with me momentarily. In the meantime, the man said, I could visit the museum on this floor. The man walked me to the wall behind me -- the wall with the doorway to the stairwell.

Off to the left of the doorway was something that looked like a display. It was about the size of an animal display diorama in a museum.

The "display" was of something like a space station. It looked fake, like one solid, plastic piece -- almost like a Star Wars toy! But some part of it, I knew, opened like a door. From there, you would walk into the museum. The museum would, I think, be about the size of a hallway, or the size of one exhibit room in a large museum.

Off to the left of this "museum" was a long hallway. On the right wall of the hallway, from the waist up, were windows letting in a lot of yellow-white sunlight. The floor of the hallway was blue.

I was now in "my apartment," which was rather large. The living area, which may have included the dining area, was three or four rooms long, with all the rooms opening into each other, only distinguished from another by the varying widths of their rectangles.

The place was empty of furntiture. But there was stuff everywhere on the floor. Nothing was cluttered, and maybe everything had some kind of order. But it mostly felt like I just had all the stuff I liked just laying around everywhere.

I'm not sure, but at this point, I think I looked like Lance Loud, from An American Family.



(In this photo, Lance is standing, to the far right. The mother, Pat, is seated, in the center.)

I had my phone to my ear, and maybe I was waiting for someone to pick up on the other end. I was looking down to the floor as I stepped over all the stuff I had laying around on the floor.

I think I walked over some vinyl records, in their sleeves, and over a really old cassette tape player, the cassettes for which were bigger than eight-track tape cassettes.

I probably started thinking about music. I thought of something that I really wanted to hear. I was going to play it. The music may now already have been playing. I still had the phone to my ear.

But suddenly I realized -- I'm almost all out of money! It's totally wrong for me to stay in this place with no money. I can't sit here listening to music. I need to get all my stuff reduced and organized, so I can get the hell out of here!

I may now have started putting together a plan for how to throw out a bunch of useless papers I didn't need, so I'd have less stuff to take with me once I left this place.

I was now in a house which was supposed to be the Loud family house. At this point I definitely looked like Lance Loud. The house had two stories. I was up on the second floor, in a bedroom which had been converted into an office.

I wasn't a member of the family. I was like a friend of some member of the family. But I had also been doing some kind of work for them. I had had tough times, and I needed to stay at their house. I think I had been staying at the house a couple of days, but now I was getting ready to leave.

Pat, the mom from An American Family, came into the room. I was reclined -- somehow -- either against an office chair and some small filing cabinets, or on a bed.

Pat sat down on something and told me that she knew I was planning on leaving the house. But she said she didn't think I actually had enough money yet to go out on my own. She said she was going to talk with the rest of the family about seeing whether I couldn't stay here a little while longer.

Pat stood up and left. I looked through the doorway. There was a short, balcony-like hallway, with the stairs on the end closer to me. Again, I'm pretty sure I saw the colorful glare of Christmas lights somewhere.

I was kind of relieved that Pat had asked me to stay. But I knew that I couldn't accept the offer, anyway. I didn't want any of the manlier men in the family to think I was just being a waste by sticking around here. I knew that if Pat made a good case for me, none of the men would say anything to my face. But I'd always have to deal with them showing me how they felt in other ways.

I figured that what I would do, then, if Pat got the okay for me to stay, was just act like I was going to stay here, after all. Then, when nobody was looking, probably when everybody was gone from the house or asleep at night, I'd just pack up all my stuff and sneak out, leaving a letter saying why I'd gone.

Dream #2

I was walking down the hallway of some movie theatre. I was in a huge line either for tickets or to get into the theatre itself. The wall to my left was just a plain, beige-colored wall, possibly with some kind of wallpaper that looked like thickly-threaded linen.

To my right was a wall that occasionally had narrow, tall windows, letting in the grey light of late afternoon. There were also occasional arcade games positioned along this wall. And somewhere there was a feeling of faint, flashing, multi-colored lights.

There were a couple of people, probably a man and a woman, directly ahead of me, talking about a movie. The woman was doing most of the talking, and she sounded kind of arrogant and pretentious.

Apparently the film the woman was talking about was a short film. The woman was speaking about the director of the film. The director may also have been a character in the film -- a comic kind of character who, even though he wasn't the main character, was supposed to "steal the show."

I may have had an image of this guy in my head. He may have been a white guy, kind of rich-looking, wearing a really garish, multi-colored tuxedo, and a hat that looked either like a wizard's hat or a dunce cap, which was also multi-colored.

I then looked off to my right, to a part of the right wall of the hallway that bent diagonally toward us, making the hallway narrower. On the sloping part of the wall was a poster for the movie the woman had just been talking about. The man was on the front, in his costume. He may have been waist-deep in popcorn.

I realized that the film wasn't a short film. It was feature-length. And it was the film we were all heading in to see (or buying tickets for?) right now.

I had been telling myself that I really didn't want to see the movie. I really didn't like the director. But now that I'd seen the poster, and now that I realized the movie was feature-length, I decided that I actually would like to see it.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in group meeting room with about twenty other people. The room was only partly lit, with a drab, greenish white, fluorescent light.

The room was divided into two parts. The back part was kind of empty, with maybe a long, folding table. The front part had a few couches and chairs. Most people were in or near the front part. The area was so full that people were standing up behind the back couch.

I had been standing way back in the back area, by myself. But now I walked forward to listen to what was going on. A young woman was leading the discussion. She sat on a couch on my right side.

To the woman's right, on the same couch, and on another couch, probably the back couch, sat two young men who looked a lot alike. They were both tall, thin, pale, and shaved-headed. They wore nice, casual khakis and dress shirts. I felt like I'd known both of the guys from high school.

I came to understand that this was a group discussing alien abductions. Aliens existed and were among us, in a very obvious way. And, somehow, the young woman was serving as something like a go-between, between the aliens and the people in this room.

Some of us in the room had been abducted. Others of us were, apparently, trying to be convinced to volunteer for abduction.

I was now sitting on a couch opposite the young woman. The man to the young woman's right was now speaking about his own abduction experience. I now realized that the young man's head had been shaved by the aliens, while they'd experimented on him.

The woman asked the man if the experience was really bad. The man said that most of the experience didn't really bother him at all.

The only part the man hated, he said, was when the aliens did a mental probe on him. He said that it felt really terrible to have all his memories drawn up. He could see them. But he wasn't controlling them. And he knew he was only watching them because someone else -- the aliens -- wanted to see them.

The man mentioned another part of the experiment he hated. As the man described it, it first sounded to me like the aliens had put the man through some kind of system where they'd caused his body to work as if it were under a lot of stress. But then the man said that the aliens had actually shut down the man's body entirely. He was dead, but still conscious.

This man's discussion was supposed to convince people that alien abductions weren't so bad. It didn't convince me. I got up and walked toward the back area. But I knew the second man was going to talk. I wanted to listen to him as well. I think I may still have been considering volunteering for an abduction.

Dream #2

I was in a group meeting room, like in the first dream. It was divided into two areas. The front area was full of people, and the back area only had a few people. I think most of the people were Indian. The room was warm with incandescent light.

On the right wall a movie was playing. All the couches in the front area were arranged to face the movie, like a makeshift movie theatre. I think everybody had plates of food.

There were plent of seats open on the couch. So I sat down on one. The couch felt really nice. It was a dull blue or pink, and it had a kind of soft, crushed velvet feel to it.

I looked up at the movie. Some really pretty Indian girl was either being taught or teaching someone how to make a kind of honeyed bread. It basically looked like a cornbread square, glazed in honey, with a walnut in the center, on top.

The girl was dressed in a traditional Indian outfit. There was a sense of sexuality, romance, and tradition all wrapped up in the food making.

I got the idea that this screening was a kind of preview for the film. The film wasn't finished yet, and we were all supposed to give our feedback on it, so that it could be tweaked for more audience enjoyment.

But I started to wonder if maybe this film wasn't a bit too stereotypical toward Indians, what with the food-making and tradition and so forth. I wondered if Indians would be offended by a film like this.

It didn't occur to me that the film was actually Hindi (it was -- it had English subtitles), and that pretty much everybody else in the room was Indian.

There was a father-like man standing near the couches. He had dark skin and a bit of a pot belly. He wore a button-up shirt of really nice, pale-blue material and nice, dark slacks. I thought I might go hang out with him, since I figured he'd have a better idea about all this stuff than I did.

Dream #3

It was daytime. I was walking through a forest, probably a pine forest. I was walking along a slope, not on any trail. The pine trees were all spaced well apart. The ground itself was black. It may have been black cinder soil, or (I think now) the forest could have been burnt down.

There must have been a road at the top of the slope, up to my right. Suddenly people came blasting down the slope! They were all laying, extended straight out, with their legs crossed and their arms crossed over their chests. And they were propelled so that they were rolling, tumbling, down the slope.

I followed these people down the slope. I reached a point where there was a cliff. I couldn't go any farther. The cliff must have been about fifty meters high. It ended with a flat valley of forest, of the same black-soiled, or charred look as the area up around me.

But one of the rolling, tumbling people, in his movement, had rolled right off the cliff.

I suddenly knew that this was all some game. People were thrown, almost at random, down the slope. There were all kinds of random land formations down the slope. Depending on fate, and the skill of the person, the person either would or wouldn't survive going down the slope. Survival, as well as something else, would determine who won this game.

But this person's path had been directly toward this cliff. There were a few places, going down the cliff, where the person managed to grab hold for a moment. But everything in the cliff was really soft. The cliff was like some shelf of really soft, brown coal.

Finally the person managed to grab onto a thick tree root that was growing out of the cliff wall. It might have been able to get him over to a thin ledge.

But it was obvious that the root was dead and rotten. The more the man pulled up on it, the more it was shifting its way out of the cliff. And, besides, even if the man got to the ledge, he'd be trapped there. There was no way down.

So the man just gave in to the fact that he'd lost. He either let go of the tree root or held onto the tree root until it finally snapped out of the cliff. The man fell maybe about twenty meters and died on impact.

There were already a bunch of people down on the ground by now -- some alive, some dead. The living had set themselves out in the valley, as if they were going to camp there for the night. Some of the living headed over to the man's body after they saw that he'd fallen to his death.

I walked back up the slope. I reached the top of the slope, where the road was. I saw cars passing along the road. I then understood that the people were tossed out, in their rolling positions, from the cars. This was what gave them such great speed (??? -- in a perpendicular direction?). I may even have seen another batch of people thrown out from the cars.

I think my mom, or at least somebody I knew, was up around here. I'm pretty sure, anyway, that somebody was calling my name or talking to me, probably from a slight distance, maybe even across the road from me.

I may have spoken a little bit with the person who had been speaking to me. But, even though I think the person was looking forward to me helping them with something, I told the person that I would be back in a moment.

I knew there was a really safe way to get down into the valley. I walked down the slope and kept going forward, in the direction of the road. The cliff merged into the slope farther along, and the slope became very mild.

I walked down along the mild slope to the valley. I figured that once I got down to where everybody was, I'd help bury the man I'd seen die, out of respect for him. But I also probably figured that I'd help bury all the dead. This game didn't make any sense.

Dream #4

I was sitting in some restaurant, probably a fast-food restaurant. It was daytime, and there was plenty of light coming in from the windows. There were a lot of people in the restaurant. The place felt packed, busy, and humid, like a coffee-warmed store on a winter's day.

I sat on the right side of a table for four. A police woman sat across the table from me. I don't think either of us had any food. The woman was white, kind of short, a bit overweight, with a round, pale face. She had frizzy, red-brown hair, drawn back in a braided pony tail. She had kind of thin eyes, pale blue-green. She looked like she may have been in her early twenties.

The woman was telling me something about how disappointed she was in me. I'd either done or said something that had really gone against her expectations of me.

Now she was pretty much through with me. I knew this was bad for me because, since she was a cop, now that she was through with me, she'd probably have the other cops start giving me a bad time.

The woman stood up to leave. I may have stood up to try to get her back. But I don't think I really knew what to say. So I probably gave up and sat back down just as soon as I'd stood.

Dream #5

In my head, I was talking with either my old friend R or his first or second wife. I'm pretty sure that the conversation eventually became between the first wife, N, and myself. As I had this conversation in my head, I was cleaning out a bathtub in a bathroom with kind of dim, warm, incandescent light.

I was telling N that I hated even talking to her and R. They seemed to love making me feel inferior to them. It was even like they operated as a team, taking turns saying nitpicky things or one-upping me, when the other person couldn't find the right thing to say.

I probably said that this was why I didn't want to go to some thing that N had invited me to. This probably ended the conversation.

As I was finishing the conversation, I noticed that my efforts to clean the bathtub were really failing. I'd sprayed cleaner all over the tub, and I was wiping the tub off with a sponge.

But I just seemed to be taking whatever grime there was in the tub and spreading it all over the entire tub. The spray bubbles themselves only seemed to be gathering up the grime and expanding it, so that now my tub's surfaces seemed to be coated in soapy grime.

I might possibly have realized that I'd need to wipe and re-wipe the surfaces before I got all this stuff off. The first spraying was to get everything wet. I'd have to spray again. Then the wet stuff would start coming off, leaving the surface clean.

Dream #6

A commercial from the late 1970s. A thin, prettyish, blonde woman was pushing a cart through a grocery store. A male narrator was talking about wise choices a mother should make while shopping.

The "wise choices," obviously, meant buying whatever product the narrator was advertising.

The view then switched to a view from the cart. The woman's face was framed in a circle in the center of the screen. The rest of the screen was black. This was supposed to be the view of the woman's baby, who was sitting in the cart.

The woman was making all kinds of kissy faces to the baby. The male narrator was now saying, in connection with making wise choices while shopping, that a baby will always imitate whatever a mother does. This implied that the baby was probably making kissy faces back to the mother.

Suddenly the mother let out a flat, kind of raspy burp. The mother was surprised, and a little apprehensive. She knew the baby would probably imitate her burp.

The view now shifted to a view more like the mother's view. The "baby" in the cart was actually a pretty, skinny girl, maybe seven years old. She was sitting in the basket of the cart, rather than the seat of it. But I felt like she was probably too old to sit in the cart, like a baby would.

Sure enough, the little girl, kind of looking up to her mother like a baby would, burped, in almost the same way as her mother did.

It was then nighttime. The mother was in her bedroom, which was pretty big. It was dark. But somehow the mother could be seen, maybe in a nightgown, masturbating.

The little girl, standing in the hallway in only underwear and a tank-top, was watching the mother through a crack in the door. With a baby-like mentality, the little girl thought she'd copy the mother, in front of the mother.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was out walking along some damp, sandy shoreline with my sister and my oldest nephew. It was a nice, sunny day. The water was to our right. We were probably pretty close to the water, too. The shore itself was probably pretty narrow.

We passed some really beautiful scene on our left. There was a big, beautiful lawn (though the grass may have seemed to be a little dried and yellowy). At the end of the lawn was some kind of beautiful, classical mansion or palace or plaza.

I can't really remember it that well at all. It was gleaming white, and it had a lot of columns. There were people in some non-modern dress walking around on the grounds and in or near the structure. Parts of the grounds may have been open from the shore. Other parts may have been separated from the shore by a fence.

My sister pointed to the beautiful scene and said, "This reminds me a lot of my trip to Italy."

For some odd reason I took a really sarcastic tone with my sister. I said, "Pfft! There's nothing like that in real life!" (??? ) I then either said, "That's only a painting," or, "That should really remind you of a painting."

My sister and nephew and I were now walking in the downtown area of some smaller town. We three seemed to be among the few people out on the street.

It was still a nice, sunny day. We walked down a street with dark tan or brownish buildings that were probably around eight to twelve stories tall.

Suddenly I saw, across the street from us, a huge helicopter descending from above the building tops. The helicopter had a dull, blue underside. It was shaped a bit awkwardly, like if you were to put an old, corded phone's receiver into a blanket and then try to make a rectangle out of that mass.

The helicopter was moving pretty slowly. It was still descending, and it looked like it was directed toward us. I'm -- pretty sure -- that at this time I recalled a time IWL in 2002 when I was in downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a huge, black, military copter floated down toward me and seemed to follow and watch me for half a block or so.

I'm pretty sure that I was really worried that this helicopter was going to do the same thing to me. I had been really afraid in Santa Fe -- so afraid, I'd had to hold onto a wall near me to stay standing.

But I didn't want my sister and nephew to see me that way. So I tried to show that I was actually interested in this aircraft, rather than that I was afraid of it.

But as the helicopter descended, it turned out that I really was more interested in it than afraid of it. The helicopter actually looked like some form of public transportation -- like a bus, but with propellers instead of wheels!

I could see now that the helicopter-bus was going to land and unload passengers at a building on the corner of a block just up ahead and across the street from us. I ran toward that building, leaving my sister and nephew behind.

I got into the building. It was like a hollowed-out lobby of an office building, but with something to its atmosphere that made it seem like a bus station. There were concrete pillars through the room. The window-walls of the lobby must have been tinted, because the light coming in was kid of smoky-amber colored. The floors may have been covered in a short, tight, brown carpet.

I'd come in through some doors to the left of the corner of the building. But the helicopter, I saw, had landed at the corner of the building. There were some hospital-like, sliding-glass doors that opened along with the opening of the helicopter's doors. A little wheelchair-ramp-type structure went down from the doors to the floor.

I ran up to the sliding glass doors as they opened. There were no passengers in the helicopter-bus, even though the helicopter-bus had apparently landed to let passengers off.

The pilot stood just outside of the bus for a moment or two. He was tall, white, with a kind of big belly. He had short, shaggy, red hair and a short, shaggy beard. He wore squarish eyeglasses.

I didn't say anything to the man. I just stood there, kind of awed that I was seeing such a new, incredible element of public transportation.

The man understood my feelings, though. He said, "Well, it's fun for now. But the city'll get rid of it soon. This is the new thing. And when the next new thing comes around, they'll forget all about this thing."

I now spoke to the man, but it was like I was speaking to him in my head, or through narration, as I was heading back out onto the street, out to my sister and nephew.

I told the man, "Oh, no -- they'll never get rid of this. It's too great! And it makes so much sense. It's so efficient!"

I may now have been telling my sister and nephew something as we watched the helicopter lift up and away. The helicopter seemed to be going right back in the direction it had come from. So did we. We seemed to be walking right back down the block we'd walked up.

Good morning, everybody. Happy holidays!

Dream #1

I was reading a book (???). The book at least claimed to be historical. It was about a group of kids who had paranormal powers.

But the government was somehow involved with the kids. And right after the kids had any paranormal experiences, the government would come brainwash the kids. The kids would be programmed to believe that their experiences had only been dreams. Sometimes the memory of the experiences also had to be distorted, to seem more dream-like.

I now had an image in my head. Six or so glowing, yellow spheres were all gathered in a line in a small space, like peas in a pod. All the area surrounding the peapod was black.

(I think this last image probably comes from the Christmas Google doodle.)

Dream #2

I was at my family's house, unwrapping Christmas presents. I sat on the floor. My mom sat before me and to my right. My oldest nephew sat before me, about a meter and a half away from me. Everybody else was wandering all around the house.

All the wrapping on the presents was white. There was also white tissue-paper padding a lot of the Christmas present packages. Pretty soon, in the space between my nephew, my mom, and me, there was a whole bunch of white paper piled up.

I figured I should probably work on getting some of this stuff cleaned up before everything got so messy that we couldn't get a handle on it. So I stood up and looked for a trash bag to put all the paper in.

I asked my nephew if he had any more garbage bags left. He said something like, yes, he had a whole bunch left. He handed me one. For some reason, I may have walked away from my nephew and my mom, as if I were going to start cleaning up at some other end of the room.

But as I was walking away, I realized that my asking for garbage bags was the first thing I'd said to my nephew in the entire time I'd been home for the holidays! I felt terrible. I wondered how I could have been so thoughtless. I was trying to think of a way that I could show my nephew how much I loved him.

Good morning, everybody.

The second dream is another silly instance of dream control. I told myself to dream of myself out in a wide, open space, all by myself. I told myself that if I found myself there, I'd become lucid.

Well, I found myself in a wide, open space alright. But I was in a painting. And I was looking at the painting of myself. So... my dream subject was kind of controlled again. But not exactly in the way I'd expected. Lucid fail!

Dream #1

I was in some place like a hospital or a retirement home. But it may also have been a school. I feel like I may have been on the first floor at some point, heading in to some class I was taking. The class may have been for high schoolers, even though I was my current age. But I think I was still doing horribly in the class.

I went down into the basement. I was in a hallway area. The hallway was low, wide, and kind of featureless. There were doorways that went to rooms, each room like a whole department of this hospital. But when the doors were closed, the hallway felt empty and small.

Off to my right was a little alcove with a few doorways. One may have been open, revealing a larger room. But the alcove was filled with shelf-carts for books and stationary bookshelves. The shelves were all filled with books. I knew this was a used book sale.

There were a few people rushing around, getting the shelves all prepared for the sale. The people were mostly men and women in their fifties or sixties. But there were also some younger people, mostly women, probably in their late teens or early twenties. They were all volunteers.

I was interested in seeing what books were on sale. I was mostly interested in science fiction books. So I looked for that area. I think an older woman pushed out a cart full of sci-fi books right as I thought that.

But right as I went to look at the books, a tall, kind of fat, older, white man saw that I was heading there, and he jumped in front of me. He bent over so that he was blocking all the shelves.

Instead of getting mad, I just figured I'd go look at some other books. I walked over to a tall bookshelf, which may have been for paranormal studies.

Dream #2

I was looking at a painting. The painting wasn't realistic: it was a bit blocky and thick, with the sense of three-dimensional perspective a bit flattened, and the color scheme kind of simplified for intensity.

The painting had a red cliff, like one wall of a canyon, taking up the left side. Then there was a bit of grass, then a path. There may have been a boy, his back to the viewer, walking down the path. To the right of the boy, the landscape extended flatly, maybe with a river.

I told myself that I'd definitely become lucid if I was in a landscape like that in a dream. I probably told myself to remember this painting, and to try and make myself go there when I went to sleep tonight.

Dream #3

I was walking around outside somewhere during the day. But I was also talking on the phone with my dad. My dad was telling me about floods occurring in St. Louis, Missouri, which was apparently where my dad lived.

As my dad spoke, I had very strong visions, which were like still photographs, except that I was in them. I stood out in what I guess were aqueducts: they looked like the concrete-walled channels used to catch and drain waters from heavy rains and flash floods.

But the aqueducts I stood in were like highways. I often even stood in the shade of highway overpasses. All around the aqueducts were hills of lawns and trees, so that the aqueducts all felt so quiet and secluded. But I knew they'd be raging with waters pretty soon. It was a bright, sunny, warm day -- hard to believe that it could flood anytime soon.

I may have seen a couple copper-skinned children: a boy and a girl. I thought that they weren't safe out here in the aqueduct. I needed to grab them and get them out of here. But it may also have occurred to me that these children were actually phantoms.

I came back to my senses and found myself walking along some stone-floored promenade in a big park. I was walking up a slope and looking out over an iron railing to my left. Down from the railing was a slope of brambly, leafless trees.

There were some women walking behind me at one point. They said that the flood in St. Louis was going to be 72 inches, once the rain really got going. I couldn't believe it! I didn't want to believe it. I told myself that the weather was too nice here for a flood to happen, even somewhere as far from here as St. Louis.

My dad said, "They're still saying that we're going to have 72 inches of precipitation. It's going to start out looking mild, with only ----- inches. But then it's going to go up really fast and hit 72 inches."

I said, "72 inches! Sheez! That's crazy!"

May dad said, "Well, that's not so bad. We've seen floods like this in St. Louis before. But what's really strange about this one is that it's happening at Christmas -- in December. We aren't even supposed to have rain in December!"

Now I realized that the women I'd heard speaking before were right. As unbelievable (and for some reason inconvenient) as it had sounded to me, it really was going to flood in St. Louis.

As I approached the top of the slope, I could see that, as the promenade plateaued, it also widened out a lot. Over to the right was an overlook, giving a good view over the town we were in (probably somewhere in New England).

But as I got to the wider area, there were a whole lot more people walking around. There were tons of people heading down the slope I'd just come up from. I could tell -- somehow -- that these people were preparing for the flood, even though we were nowhere near it.

One woman, short, skinnyish, and white, maybe in her sixties, with blonde-grey hair and eyeglasses, was walking among the crowd, heading down the slope. The woman was trying to spread some kind of wisdom. She wore a Hindu-esque robe, though I think she thought of herself as a Buddhist.

The woman was saying, "Global warming. Global warming. The flood in December is from global warming." I knew the woman was trying to get somebody interested in her idea so that she could preach to them about being an environmentalist. She may even have had pamphlets about it.

Some younger women nearby may have been agreeing with the older woman. I kind of agreed as well. But I didn't feel like I needed to listen to environmentalist preaching. Hell, I thought. I hardly use any electricity, anyway. All I do is read books.

There was a book sale going on just off to my right as I hit the flat area of the promenade. I got really interested. The books were used, and they all looked really old. I thought I might make some good finds.

But some tall, white man with a bit of a pot belly saw I was interested in the book sale. He tried to get in my way, so that he could get to whatever books I was interested in first. The man looked pretty well-off. He wore a plaid, button-up shirt, tucked into some nice jeans.

I may have tried to avoid the man altogether. But he may have seen that. So he just walked right in front of me, standing broad-chested, his hands on his hips, as if he were trying to block me from getting near any of the books at all.

I must have done something, because I got past the man, anyway. But I was pissed that the man would try to stop me like that! I started cussing the man out, not loud, but in a regular voice, so he could hear me, but I wouldn't be making a scene.

The man reacted by coming to the bookshelf I was at and bending right over in front of all the books, basically edging me out of the way. He started saying stuff about how he didn't know why I was so upset about what he'd done. But if I was so upset, he'd do it some more. And then, he said, we'd see how upset I got.

I told the man to fuck off, and I walked away from him. He seemed to want to start a fight, because now he was calling kind of loudly after me, "Why'd you have to say that? What'd I do to you?"

But I just decided to walk away from the man and ignore him. I walked around to the other side of the bookshelves and found myself in an area full of shelves and bins packed with vinyl records and comic books. This area almost felt like it was indoors.

I looked around here for a while. I may have found some kind of comic book that I was interested in. It may have seemed a little bit like porn. But I may have decided I really didn't have enough money to waste on something like this, after all.

I was walking out of this section and back out to the promenade. But the exit was a bit narrower now. And another older man was walking up toward the aisle I was trying to get out of.

This guy was kind of fat. He saw me and seemed to want to block my way. He stood and looked at the left shelf of items, blocking up almost the whole aisle. There was also a life-size carboard cut-out of either Superman or Iron Man, which blocked most of the right side of the aisle.

I had to squeeze through the fat man and the cut-out. I'm pretty sure I didn't even touch the man. But he may have turned back to look at me, as if I'd threatened him somehow.

I gave the man a complaisant, friendly smile. But the man just looked at me like he hated my guts. I walked away. I wanted to confront the guy. But I knew that that would only make things worse.

Good morning, everybody.

Last night I surprised myself by having a minor bit of dream control. I didn't control my dream. But I kind of determined the subject.

Kaomea had posted a few cool songs in her dream journal a few days ago. So I wanted to share one song in particular, too. But I would only do it, I told myself last night, if I had a dream about the song or artist.

The first dream is the result. But I guess -- you can see that it's not very good control at all, though.

Here is the video. It's by the Malaysian rock singer Monoloque.



Dream #1

It was a grey-white, partly cloudy day. I was in a car with some other guy. The guy was driving us through some kind of downtown area of a city. We must have been on the outskirts of the downtown area. It felt pretty quiet and desolate.

There were a lot of warehouses and small factory buildings on either side of the streets. The warehouses either looked closed down or vacated. Their gates were all pulled down. On a lot of the buildings' walls and gates, there were also a lot of posters advertising, I suppose, either rock concerts or movies.

We had driven up a slope, then around a block, then back down another small slope. We were -- or at least I was -- looking down the streets for something. I don't know if we were lost.

The man was talking this whole time about how arrogant the singer Monoloque was. It occurred to me from this that we were looking for the location where we were supposed to pick up Monoloque. We were either going to take him somewhere else, or spend the day with him, like we were collaborating with him on some project.

But the man was really not looking forward to picking up Monoloque. He thought Monoloque was really arrogant.

As an example of this, the man said, "One time Monoloque told me, 'A man hasn't really done anything with his life until he's directed a film.' As if anybody who hasn't directed a film really isn't a man! Well -- this was only right after he'd directed his first film!"

I think I may have seen a tall-spired, stone church in the distance, down the block on the left side of the car. I looked at some of the posters on the wall again. I realized that they were all for Monoloque's film. They were done in a kind of psychedelic, 1960s style, with block printing, big, chunky letters, and a swirly circle of color in the center.

Dream #2

I was in a bedroom. I stood before a dresser. I think I had just pulled something out of it or put something into the top drawer. I was now closing the drawer.

I must have been getting ready to go somewhere, although it turned out that I wasn't going to the place I'd really wanted to go to. My mom was taking me wherever I was now going. And she'd told me she wasn't taking me to the other place.

I looked to my right, to the doorway. The living room, apparently, was right outside this bedroom. There was a couch against the wall opposite from the bedroom door. A young Muslim woman wearing a head covering sat quietly and patiently on the couch. On the wall behind the woman was some beautiful, possibly iridescent, piece of artwork.

I walked out of the bedroom. I was frustrated that my mom wasn't taking me where I wanted to go. But the Muslim girl was so gentle-acting that I tried to mask all my frustration, and just smile gently, as I walked past her.

I was now in some kind of warehouse. The warehouse was huge -- maybe as huge as an airplane hangar. Where I was standing, it seemed like there was a living room set all laid out, with a bunch of stage lights cluttered around it.

My mom stood off to my right, about thirty meters or so away. She seemed really impatient for me to get started with something. She was being really insistent and mean -- almost like my mom had her spirit combined with one of my old shithead co-workers. My mom also seemed a lot skinnier than she is IWL.

I was frightened into doing whatever it was I was supposed to be doing. I turned around. There was something like an entertainment center -- it looked more like a TV and a bunch of other junk all piled up randomly on a cheap desk.

But over that stuff there was a huge tangle of old TV-top antennas. I knew I was supposed to be doing something with these TV-top antennas. But I couldn't reach them from the front of the "entertainment center." I had to go around.

I walked around to the back of the "entertainment center." I walked into the thick of all these old antennas, as if I might have walked into the center of a tall, brambly shrub.

I must have tried to arrange some of the antennas or something. But suddenly some of the antennas started throwing off fountains of sparks! I thought the antennas must all be catching on fire. I was really afraid. But, like an idiot, I think I grabbed a paper cup full of water and actually threw it on the sparking antennas!

Things were really a mess. My mom, madder than ever, called me out to the front area again. The living room, I now saw, also had one setup on either side of it. These setups were like cheap offices: there were a desk, a computer, and a kind of flimsy desktop bookshelf. There may have been a man working at each station.

Things were a big mess. In some weird clutter of technology surrounding the office on my right side, another fire, or some other kind of malfunction, was raging. Whatever I'd done in the antenna-nest had probably started this mess, too.

The person working at that station looked like one of my old co-workers. He seemed to be just about as mad at me as my mom was. My mom may have been standing behind him and on his right side.

I turned around, backwards and clockwise, to face the office station that had been on my left side. The office worker here was just as panicked. He looked like the 1980s actor Andrew McCarthy. He had shoulder-length hair and wore a pale-blue, button-up shirt.

This guy was on the phone with someone. But he was also dealing with some major computer issue he was having. I knew that all this was probably my fault, too.

Finally the guy started slamming his mouse against the desk, as if he were trying to aim it against something. It was like whatever the problem was with his computer, it had turned real and left the computer. The guy was trying to smash it and kill it, or poke it back into the computer, or something. He really seemed to be raging.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was going somewhere, possibly on a long trip somewhere where I wouldn't be able to get anything new to read. So I either had to take one book with me or read one book really quickly before I left.

I was in a living room which was filled with natural light. I was looking at a shelf-like niche that ran across a white wall. The wall served as a bookshelf, and the bookshelf was mostly full.

I felt an urge to look to the left end of the bookshelf, almost as if a voice were calling me to do so. The voice may have been speaking about psychic phenomena. I think the voice was low and a bit gravelly, but gentle and intelligent sounding.

I saw a book that was much bigger than all the other books. All the other books were small and black, almost like binder-shaped date books. This book was tall, hardcover, with a red, cloth cover. There was gold lettering along the spine, giving the book's title, which probably had the work "Psychic" in it.

I opened the book. The man's voice was, I think, now talking about either the Book of Revelations or the end times. I thought that the book I opened must have been the Bible, and that I must have been reading a passage from the Book of Revelations.

But when I looked closer at the words, I realized I was actually reading the text from a Christian book called Renewing Your Mind, by a pastor named Marilyn Hickey. (IWL this was an important book for my family when I was a young boy.)

Dream #2

Possibly down in the canyon of a United States National Park. Probably in the parking lot for the visitor's center at the park.

I stood outside my mom's car. My mom was dropping me off here. I was going to be here for a long time. I was possibly going to work and live here.

I saw all this as if from outside my body and up in the air, at least three meters up in the air, and at varying lengths from my body -- between three meters away and fifty meters away, at the other end of the parking lot.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was out on a road at the bottom of a steep slope in a neighborhood probably near the neighborhood I lived in during high school.

I stood just outside my mom's car. My mom was about to drive away. But before she did, she was telling me where I could find the nearest Dunkin' Donuts. My mom said the Dunkin' Donuts was up the slope, then one and a half blocks past a park I knew was up the way. The park was mostly taken up by a big lake, around which I used to run in high school.

I was a little disappointed to hear that the Dunkin' Donuts was so far away. I thought I could never make it on time (not sure what I needed to be on time for -- maybe the breakfast menu -- which wouldn't really make sense, either). But, now that I'd decided to go to Dunkin' Donuts, I couldn't stop here.

My mom drove away. I apparently started walking. But now I was already up the slope, and through and past the lake park. I was still worried that I wouldn't make it on time.

I got to some restaurant, which was either Dunkin' Donuts or some restaurant a few stores down the block from Dunkin' Donuts. I sat at an outdoor table with a Latino family: a father, a mother, a couple little kids, and maybe a couple more adult guys.

My mom showed up among this group of people. She told me that I didn't have to worry about Dunkin' Donuts. She gave me a reason for this. But I don't remember it.

My mom pointed the store out to me. I looked up the road and saw the store. The Dunkin' Donuts road sign had a lot of brown on it. The sign was more like a big brown sign, checkered, almost, with little, white squares that had the orange and pink "DD" logo in them.

Dream #2

I stood out on a beach, looking out over the water. The beach itself was very beautiful, but not natural looking at all, as far as I know.

The water was nephrite green, but it seemed to gleam like glass. The horizon was like white gold, and the cloudy sky overhead was like smoky amber. And, it seemed, there was an extremely long bridge, made of black iron, stretching thinly across the water, all the way across my view of the horizon!

At first I was near some Latino family: probably a mother, a father, a daugher, and possibly a son. I was either watching government testing of some kind of nuclear devices, or else I was remembering the testing of these devices, which had taken place on this beach within the past few decades.

I saw one explosion, the light of which I don't remember at all, but which must have been like an exploding ball of light a hundred meters or so above the ocean.

I then walked down the beach to my left maybe twenty meters or so. I saw something fall from the sky into the water -- although, again -- I didn't really see the object. It was like the object was invisible. But I saw its effects on the water as it splashed in: like a row of pebbles and rocks, splashing into the water one by one, in quick succession.

Now the points of water which had been dotted by the splashes surged upward in small fountains. There may have been the small sound of an explosion. The fountains then subsided.

I knew that another nuclear device had been detonated deep under the water. I knew that this device would kill all the fish in the water. I was preparing for the next big wave from the ocean to wash a bunch of dead to the shore.

I may possibly have thought that the device may actually have been made in order to kill the fish. Killing the fish was a form of sabotage against the economy of the nation that fished here.

I now stood back a ways from the water. I stood near a Latino family again. The mother and father were both young and attractive. They were both kind of pale skinned.

The father was muscular, very manly. I was afraid that I'd do something with my own usual personality and offend the father's masculine sensibilities. So I just tried to remain calm and do nothing.

At some point I looked behind me. There was a basalt-like rock behind us. The rock was maybe two meters tall at most. It made a good back-rest. (It was soft and smooth, too, though craggy -- so maybe it had been polished by years of backs sitting against it!)

But I thought that it would really hurt, if a wave washed all the way up here, and someone swimming in that wave were thrown against the rock. I wondered if this was really a good beach for swimming in after all. I'd heard of beaches that were too rocky for swimming. Maybe this was one.

A big wave may actually have made its way all the way up to us, washing against us and throwing me a bit against the wall. From this point forward, the father may have had long, frizzy hair and a scraggly beard.

I walked up to the top of the basalt outcropping. I lay on my stomach and looked out on the ocean. Even though the rock wasn't much higher than the beach, I noticed that when I looked behind me, over my right shoulder, I could see a city. Apparently I was on some island. But the island had a big city on it. I had a surprisingly good view!

I was possibly telling the father about this, when suddenly I noticed that I was lifting up into the air! I felt like I was lifting up on top of nothing. But the "nothing" felt solid, as if I were still laying on the rock. I was afraid to look down, though, to see exactly what was lifting me into the air.

I was afraid, too, of lifting up this high into the air. But I didn't show my fear about this, because I didn't want the father to think I was a chicken.

I eventually came to the conclusion that I had actually sat on some kind of ride this beach had. It was an elevator, I told myself, that lifted you all the way to the top of a skyscraper that was either on or near the beach.

I looked foward, over the ocean, for a while. But I then looked behind me, to the city. I was surprised by how much this island city resembled the city of New York. The buildings all had that old, stone look to them. I even saw one building with the trademark "NEW YORKER" light sign above it.

I was now getting so high in the air that I was starting to get uncomfortable. But I told myself that this elevator stopped at the top of the building. And I knew the building was 34 storied tall. If I could just hang on until then, I told myself, I'd be fine. So I calmed down. I think that I did then feel the elevator start to descend.

But I was now in the basement of some building. It was like the basement of a small, but really nice museum or art gallery. The hallway was narrow and "L" shaped. The Latino mother and father sat in a little window niche in the side of the hallway.

There was a narrow, kind of winding, stairwell up to the first floor. I may have been playing around on that stairwell for a little while, like a little kid would, even though I still had my own consciousness, like I was still myself, as a (so-called) adult.

I then came back down to the mother and father. I asked them if I could ride the elevator ride again. The father said no, I couldn't. If I got to ride the ride twice, then all the other kids would want to do it, too.

I said I agreed. We were almost ready to leave. But if I got to ride the ride twice, and then everybody else wanted to, we'd be waiting here forever for everybody to finally finish taking their rides.

I sat on some little bench somewhere. Across the hallway and off to my left was a kind of wide niche in the wall, with a counter before it. This must have been some kind of ticket or coat-check area.

On my side of the hallway, just next to me and on my left, was a doorway to a small office. This office may also have had something to do with ticketing.

One young man sat behind the desk, while another young man stood in front of it. Both men were kind of slim and pretty. The young man standing struck me as being gay. He had short, platinum blonde hair which shone like a silver plate under the incandescent office light.

Both the boys were friends. They may even have lived in the same apartment building, or only a couple buildings away from each other. So they saw each other all the time. They talked as friends for a moment. But the standing boy was here to take care of some kind of business.

Professionally, the standing boy was higher than the sitting boy. And, now that the standing boy was taking care of business, he was really driving the point home that he was higher. As the sitting boy was taking care of something for the standing boy, the standing boy began tapping the top of the recpetion desk and humming in a very annoying way.

Dream #3

It was daytime, or maybe morning, just after sunrise. I was driving through a grassy desert. I pulled my car off to the side of the road. I was at this specific place for a specific reason.

I was some kind of paranormal investigator. I may actually have thought of myself as a Fortean investigator. And this, I thought, was my first real Fortean investigation.

I stood out of the car, trying to "write up a report" in my head regarding whatever I was about to see. I was trying to think of some catchy headline.

I had an image in my head, which I thought was really clever, of a dark-raspberry colored ring. I knew this would lead to some kind of clever phrase.

But I now saw that, just off the road, there was a square-shaped billboard, starting maybe only three meters or so above the ground, with a picture of just what I had been imagining. The picture looked like a thick ring being pushed up through some kind of raspberry-colored syrup.

This billboard seemed only to be the left side of the advertisement. The right section -- the text part -- had been cut off. There may have been just a tiny sliver of it remaining.

Suddenly I felt stupid for having tried to put together a headline for my report before I'd even started my investigation of the subject. I also felt that the headline itself was really silly and cliched.

I turned to go do my investigation, when I was overwhelmed by a strong, almost magnetic, sensation coming from the sky. It was hard for me even to look up from the ground. But I did it.

At first, my view was all red -- a burning, but dimly glowing, orange red. But as my view cleared I saw, on the horizon, at the end of a flat expanse of land, what looked like a phantom sun.

The sun was a huge, glowing, orange-red ball. Its body was maybe four-fifths of the way above the horizon. But it was also translucent. I could see through the sun, to the sky.

This struck me as odd. But the sky itself was also odd. It was apple green -- a beautiful shade of apple green, blending its way down to pale yellow at the horizon!

I tried to figure out what this phantom sun was. I figured it was a reflection of the real sun against this side of the sun's dome. To test if this was correct, I looked behind me. Sure enough, the "real" sun was rising over the horizon behind me -- though it seemed to be rising over some small mountain peaks.

For some reason this satisfied me, and I was ready to begin my investigation. I walked across the street and onto some kind of cinder road. The cinder road went a short way off from the main road, then divided into two roads. I took the right road.

I was now down in a cave. The cave also forked into two caves at some point, and I was down in the right leg of the cave. The cave wasn't dark -- it was like it was lighted by little lights that ran along the floor. But it was kind of narrow and short. And it may have felt like it was getting tighter and tighter.

Apparently I'd had a colleague I'd come out here with: a young, black woman, dark-skinned, pretty skinny, with long, braided hair. But she'd gotten lost somewhere in the cave. I thought she'd either vanished into another dimension or gotten abducted by aliens.

At some point I may have been crawling on my belly through an extremely tight point in the cave. I was crawling with some white men, who were like police officer who had come to rescue me. I may have seen my colleague, lying on her back, dead. We were trying to get my colleague out of the place she was stuck in.

I was now above ground again. This whole area was the subject of a police investigation. Two fat, black police women were sitting on folding chairs near the cave entrance (which was basically just a hole in the ground, maybe with a tiny lip of a mound over it).

I walked away from the cave and off to the right. I could see some white police men wandering around through some tall grass and tree-like shrubs, apparently investigating whatever had happened here. They may have been searching for a body.

I was trying to piece together what had happened. I knew, now, that my colleague and I had come here to investigate. But while we'd been down in the cave, my colleague had suddenly disappeared.

I couldn't remember anything else. But I knew my colleague, unless she'd been abducted, must still be down in the cave. I needed to go back down and find her. But, honestly, now that I was above ground again, I was kind of afraid of going back down into the cave.

Nevertheless, I knew that I should at least face my fear and go back down into the cave. But I was also kind of afraid of the fat, black police women. I knew that if I went down into the cave without their permission, they might start all kinds of trouble for me, maybe even get me arrested.

So I asked the women if I could go back down into the cave. I was, now, actually kind of hoping that they'd tell me no.

But one of the women stood up. She was now kind of short, and very skinny. She had long hair, in a natural style, but pulled back into a kind of ponytail. She looked older, maybe sixty years old. She had to walk with a big, wooden walking stick.

The other woman, who was still fat and young, said, "I wish you wouldn't go down there. The police'll probably finish their investigation soon. And if we have to wait for you to wrap up, we'll be here even longer.

"But if you really want to go, we can't stop you. But she's going to come with you."

I was, honestly, relieved that the old woman was coming with me. I was really afraid to go into the caves by myself. But I was still afraid to go. I was partly afraid for myself -- regardless of who I was with, I thought, I could still get abducted, like my partner had.

But I was also worried about the old woman, who kind of looked to me like an older version of my missing colleague. If the old woman went down into the caves, and it was seen that she looked like my colleague, would she get abducted, too?

Good morning, everybody.

Happy holidays! The icy Dream Views logo is really fun. And the Santa Claus flying through the moon is cool, too.

Dream #1

It was night. I was either getting into or out of a car with my sister and my brother-in-law. The car was probably my sister's. It was a kind of short car, and it was packed all around by some bigger SUVs.

My sister was drunk, but she was trying to act like she wasn't. She was trying to act nice for my sake.

We now all got out of the car. The parking lot the car was in was in some downtown-like area. There was a really big, ominous-looking, tan-brick building right at the edge of the lot.

We walked out to the road, which felt very old and run-down. This place was like one of those downtowns that shut down completely at night. We were all alone here. The streetlights seemed like in a horror movie -- the light was all grainy, almost sepia-colored.

My sister was now not able to control her drunken appearance at all. She even asked, "Hey, isn't there some place we could pick up some booze?"

I knew there was a store somewhere -- maybe even just across the street and around the corner. I could even see the store, still open, like a chain drug store, its greenish fluorescent lights shining out through a window-wall in a stately, stone building.

But I figured I'd do what I could to keep us from going to that store. I think my brother-in-law felt the same way.

Somehow we decided we needed to go to the bathroom. I knew where there was a free public bathroom. We walked off to our right, toward some park-like area, then along a nice, stone walkway.

The light was just becoming blue with early morning, and there were already tourists out here -- it mostly looked like mothers and daughters.

We went to some area that looked like a fast food restaurant. It had the same color scheme as Dunkin Donuts, but with a lot more brown. And it was shaped like a wide, low public restroom in a park.

I knew that this bathroom had either been sponsored by the restaurant or was the restaurant itself. I probably thought the restaurant was McDonald's or Burger King. I think the restaurant itself was closed, but that the bathroom was always open.

I think we first walked through the restaurant's seating area, which was huge, but completely empty of people. I think we then walked through a concrete-floored, cinder-block-walled hallway that felt like it was a bridge over a road, between two buildings.

The three of us were now in the bathroom, which was a wide, concrete-floored, cinder-block-walled bathroom, like a really nice public bathroom in a park. But it may have had a Dunkin Donuts color scheme.

My sister was still drunk -- kind of wandering around randomly. But I myself was now really distracted. Eventually I decided I needed to use the bathroom. I went to a stall, so I could take a crap.

But I was having trouble closing the stall's door. It wouldn't stay closed. I was also trying to close it by twisting the little doorknob using a huge, wadded up piece of toilet paper. It was like I was afraid to touch anything in the restroom. So I was protecting my hands with toilet paper. But it was really hard to do anything with the amount of toilet paper I had in my hands.

Then, at some point, I felt some kind of erotic feeling. It related to the feeling of taking a crap. I thought I was going to do something really bad and gross in the stall. And it turned me on sexually. But I didn't want to get caught doing it.

Then a mother and daughter came into the restroom. I was kind of annoyed. I knew that if a couple of tourists were coming in, then that meant that a whole bunch of people would soon be coming into the bathroom. Everybody would know I was here, and they'd all start harrassing me. So I might as well leave now.

I might have walked back out of the stall, passed the mother and daughter, found my brother-in-law and sister, and walked back out into the long corridor.

Dream #2

It was a nice, sunny day. I was probably in the backyard of the house where my family lived while I was in high school. But the backyard was now three or four times as big as it was IWL, and it was filled with flowers. It was an incredibly huge, English-style garden! Where our garage had been, there was some big, shady kind of pagoda-like structure made of greyish, dark wood.

There were some little kids running around and playing in the garden. I thought of these kids as something like my friends or siblings. They were all angelically beautiful, like the golden-haired children of storybooks. I feel like they were all involved in some task. But I can't remember what it was.

My attention was caught by the huge, stalk-like plants near me. I couldn't put a name to them. They seem, now, to have looked like hollyhocks or foxgloves. But they weren't those flowers, either -- I'm pretty sure. They had a kind of fuzzy look. And some of them had bud-like centers: tight, green bulbs, inside a collar of thin, peach petals.

I was suddenly laying on my back. Our old dog, a cocker spaniel, was standing over me, vigorously licking, or "kissing," my lips. She was actually licking off a bunch of honey that I had on my lips.

Some voice in the distance (or in my head?), probably a child's voice, asked me either if my dog liked honey, or if my dog liked to kiss me.

Whatever the question was, I answered, "No, she's just getting the honey off my lips. She's really excited to go traveling. She loves to go places in the car. In fact, when she ----- (can't remember) -----, we'll probably get a nice car for her. Then she'll be happy to go!"

I now had an image in my head of a white, horse-drawn carriage, like a nineteenth century carriage. But the carriage was very short, proportioned, it seemed, to fit small children or dogs. And there was no top to the cabin of the carriage. It was flat and open, kind of looking like an ornate, white Radio Flyer wagon.

A man in a suit and top-hat sat in a small front area and drove the carriage. He may also have been holding a white, lace parasol.

I could see that there was a main seating area: a small square. But there was also a smaller, back rectangle, which, I now guess, could normally be used for luggage.

But I guess my dog was now dead, because she was stiff and motionless, and we had laid her in the back area, as if it were some kind of coffin for her, or a space that would have fit a coffin for her.

But I'm pretty sure the carriage wasn't taking my dog to a funeral, but to a wedding. And I may have been a part of the wedding. This was probably whatever I'd been referring to when I'd spoken to the voice. But I'm pretty sure this image didn't have anything to do with what I'd actually said.

Dream #3

I was in some kind of huge place, something like an old, French palace, mixed with a museum, mixed with an old, run-down, slummy apartment. The place was filled with all kinds of clutter -- boxes, junk, all over the place.

There were no lights on, and it was night. The only light coming into the place was extremely dim, orange light from the streetlamps outside.

There were a few other men in the structure with me. They were all in one room. The place was huge, but we were all sitting in just one room, which had a bunk bed and a computer desk in it, but which was so filled with junk that we could hardly fit ourselves into the room.

The men may have been Latino, and they may have spoken very little English. They seemed to be in their late thirties or early forties. They were short, a little overweight, and a little tough-seeming.

The men were being nice or indifferent to me. But I had a feeling that, as time wore on, they'd probably start annoying or harrassing me.

My mom now came into the room. I was happy just to have someone familiar to me in this environment. It kind of diluted the bad emotional sense I was beginning to get from these guys.

My mom looked a bit different. She was skinnier, and she had shorter hair. She sent me off to some other room. She told me that we were both getting up early tomorrow morning to take care of some task. She stressed the importance of getting up on time.

I was excited about the event. And even though it was already late, and that I wouldn't get very much sleep at all if I wanted to get up on time, I was really happy and determined to get up on time.

I lay down in bed and closed my eyes. Almost immediately, I re-opened them. I realized that I had woken up an hour late!

I ran out into the hallway to find my mom. It couldn't be true, could it? Had I overslept for the thing I was so excited for?

My mom was at the other end of the hallway. She said, "Yep, you overslept. But I wasn't going to wake you up."

I could tell my mom was disappointed in me. I felt horrible. But my mom now said something like, "Hurry up. If you just get your shit together and get out the door right now, we can still probably make it on time."

I was back in the room with the Latino men. Some of them were sleeping on the bunk bed. One was still up, sitting at the computer desk. The light was still dark. It was still very early morning, before sunrise.

I crouched before the bunkbed and began arranging something on the cuff of my right shirt sleeve for some reason. It was like I was peeling back my cuff and then twisting it back and forth. It felt like I was trying to put some kind of steel band around my wrist.

But I realized that I was just wasting my time doing this. My mom was probably out in the car, waiting for me. If I didn't hurry up, my mom would either leave me, or else she'd wait for me and we'd both be too late to make it to our task.

I stood up to get my shit together and go downstairs. But I was so unfocused. I really couldn't remember what the hell I needed to do. I didn't really know what I needed in order to get the hell out of here. And the Latino men didn't help. It was just like they were waiting for an excuse to distract me.

I now found myself in a car, an old, clunky station wagon, like the one I drove IWL when I lived out in the desert for a couple of years, working for the Park Service. The car was inside -- in one of the rooms of the house. I sat in the driver's seat. One of the Latino men stood just outside the door, looking in.

The car only had AM radio (IDL and IWL ). I had a plastic tub -- like the plastic tubs you get for various purposes during hospital stays -- filled with little, plastic knobs, each about 2cm in diameter. I had to put all of these plastic knobs onto various parts of the radio's face. Only after that would my shit be together enough so that I could leave.

But I couldn't fit all of these knobs onto the radio face! I think I managed to find ways to fit some of them onto the volume and tuning knobs. I also popped some of them onto the set-station buttons. And I may have tried to stick some onto the actual station indicator plate. But I was running out of space. And I had a ton of knobs left!

I was now by myself in a large hallway, probably inside an apartment. It was night, and the hallway was pretty dark.

I stood near the front door. The door was made of old, worn-out wood. I could feel something like a gentle wind whispering past the door. I knew it was some kind of presence. I partly thought it was a ghost. But I also thought it was some person -- or, a person coming, not a person who was actually there yet.

I knew that I was still a bit early. But as long as I kept aware of the situation, I'd see the person. Then I could meet the person just outside the apartment. I may actually have just thought of this person as only a breeze of wind.

I was now looking out through my door through a small, square window that was maybe 30cm directly above the doorknob. Looking out, I saw the dark sapphire sky of morning. I could see that out there was something like a brambly yard, which may have been something like a big, nice garden.

I was telling myself something very soothing, like the person who was coming to me was a very nice person, and that I had nothing to worry about or be afraid of.

I watched one or two people crossing my field of view. They were walking along some path, I think, that crossed between the garden and some much wider field. They were a man and a woman. A man may also later have crossed by himself.

I told myself, "See? See how nice they are? When they come for you, they'll treat you nicely. You have nothing to fear."

I was now outside. It was a bright, sunny morning. I was drifting up a very, very slight slope, on a long, wide lawn that led up to a sidewalk and an asphalt road.

I saw a man and a woman walking along the road, heading from the right to the left side of my field of view. The man and woman both looked like they were in their late thirties. But they wore clothes and had hairstyles like from the late 1970s. The man's hairstyle was particularly chunky and bowl-shaped.

The man and the woman seemed to be in a kind of peevish argument with each other. It scared me a little bit. I felt like if I got into their field of influence, they'd probably start getting all peevish and annoying with me.

But they were walking pretty quickly. And they were already away from me by the time I got up to the sidewalk.

Now that I was on the sidewalk, I noticed a few handfuls of people, all adults, walking toward a building. I realized that I was near a university campus.

The campus neighborhood reminds me now of my occasional visits to the Princeton campus. But the university building, which I saw off to my left, looked more like an elementary school mixed with a modern, suburban church building.

All the people walking toward the building seemed to be in their thirties and forties. There were men and women. Sometimes people were in groups, talking with each other. Other times they were walking alone.

Some of the people wore suits or formal attire. Others were wearing caps and gowns, like they were attending a graduation ceremony.

I also noticed that a lot of the women had very masculine faces. Some of the women were definitely women, just with very hard, squarish faces. But some of the people dressed as women may have been men.

As I got to the actual building, I realized that it was more like an elementary school. The adults I'd seen funnelling toward this area were actually teachers. They were all now dispersing toward different parts of the building: to their classrooms, I assumed.

I was in a square, concrete-floored courtyard of the building. There were a lot of kids running all about, rushing, I supposed, to get to their classes.

There were some adult women posted here and there, apparently to make sure that nobody was getting out of hand. I figured I'd ask one of these women either where I was, or where I was supposed to be. I didn't really know the answer to either of those questions.

I saw a woman posted just under the covering of the building, at the back, right corner of the courtyard. I figured I'd approach her and ask her what I was here for.

As I walked toward that woman, a girl wearing a pale pink sweater ran through the courtyard with a clear, plastic bottle of water.

One of the other women admonished the girl for some reason or another. The girl thought she was being really grown-up and helpful for doing something. But she was also using her task to avoid having to do some thing that all the girls her age needed to do. She knew this. So when the teacher admonished her, she listened.

But as I was about to reach the woman, some kind of alarm went off. The alarm was the prayer bell. Wherever you were, whatever you were doing, when the prayer bell went off, you had to stop, crouch down on your knees, bow your head to the ground, and start praying to god.

The ritual seems to me now to be Islam-influenced. But the prayer was more like a Christian prayer mixed with something like the United States Pledge of Allegiance.

I bowed, too, because I at least knew what all this meant. I was near a stairwell. A girl wearing a Muslim-style head-covering bowed near me.

As I looked at the floor, I noticed it was tiled in meter-square tiles looking like flecked granite. But this tile was all chipped away in a corner, so that almost a quarter of the tile was chipped into an oily blackness.

During the prayer-pledge, the girl in the pale pink shirt ran out of the doorway of a classroom near me. She had the water bottle again, and she was about to rush off somewhere. But the woman I was trying to approach told the girl to kneel down and pray, like everybody else.

The girl said something like, "Oh, yeah. Right." She didn't kneel down, though. She just sat, in some kind of athletic pose, with her back to the wall, and waited for the prayer to finish.

Something about the girl's face made me think she might have Down's Syndrome. But the girl was really smart and active. I liked her a lot.

When I got up from the prayer-pledge, I approached the adult woman. I had a feeling now that I was here for some kind of volunteer project with New York Cares. So I asked the woman if she knew where we volunteers were meeting. The woman pointed to the stairwell behind me and said that New York Cares was meeting up on the second floor.

But before I could go upstairs, a little girl grabbed my hand and told me to help her with her spelling. She dragged me over to something that looked like folding gym mats stood up on one side and w-folded, to look like a gym-mat version of Chinese screens.

Before the Chinese screen was a long, school-like table that was only 25cm or so above the ground. Both the little girl and I had to kneel to sit at the table. The table had a long sheet of paper across it. The paper was filled with items like multiple choice questions.

For each number, there may possibly have been questions, probably ridiculously inane questions, like, "How do you spell -----?" as if a kid wouldn't know how to spell a word he was looking right at. But there were no answers in the multiple choice spaces. It was just A, B, C, D, with no answers beside the letters!

I think what the little girl actually had to do was choose the correct letter, A, B, C, or D, and then correctly spell the word in the space beside that letter. I think the little girl may actually have explained this to me herself.

The little girl was probably learning impaired. But she seemed really smart, as well. She seemed to be doing well enough spelling for herself. And maybe she just wanted me around for the heck of it while she was doing her work.

But every once in a while I'd have to help her with spelling. At some point, I even chose, and circled?, the letter "C" on one of her questions. I also remember something about one of us writing in cursive.

Then the little girl's brother came up. He was also, apparently, learning impaired, though not as much as his sister. He may have been a bit younger than the girl. He was climbing all over both me and the little girl, though he mostly seemed to be climbing all over me. He really wanted my attention, and he wanted to prove, I think, that he was smarter than his sister.

At some point I stood up, as if my lessons for the little girl and boy were over. I told them they'd both done a good job.

But the boy wanted to see my cell phone for some reason. I was pretty sure that that was not a good idea, because I think I'd been looking on some sort of fetish website before I'd come here. The boy didn't need to be seeing any of that kind of stuff.

I then saw my phones screen, as if it were flickering on, like a TV would, with a bit of vertical hold striping a black screen, as the TV is getting started up and getting a hold of itself. The striping was yellow -- so it seemed to me that this was "effect" for a production, not real vertical hold striping.

There was then, probably, some kind of video, maybe starring Hyde from the j-pop band L'Arc en Ciel. But I can't remember anything about it.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was with two friends, a man and a woman. We were walking into something like a high school gymnasium which had been done up for a flea-market-type sale.

Just inside the heavy metal doors was an aisle of tables, running from the left to the right, and extending across the width of the gymnasium. The tables were all divided into booths, and were filled with people selling things.

It seemed like my friends and I had gotten to the flea-market sale pretty early. There weren't many other customers around. Some of the vendors may still have been arranging their booths.

My male friend split off from my female friend and I. My female friend was a black woman, short, a bit overweight. She had short hair arranged in little spikes or braid-like twists.

We walked toward the back, right corner of the aisle. My friend stopped and looked at some shirts. They were long-sleeved shirts, warm for the winter, in kind of flat green and cream-white. I may have fondled a square, paper tag that may have said something about how the shirts were made of hemp-cloth.

My friend now stopped at a booth with hats on it. She picked up a blue denim hat with a short, round brim. She put it on and asked me how she looked. I thought she looked pretty cool.

I thought I'd fool around and try on a hat as well. But my friend chose a hat for me. She said I'd look good in a cowboy hat. The hat she gave me was huge, almost like a caricature of a cowboy hat. But both sides of the brim were also pinned to the crown of the hat -- so the hat kind of looked like a hat-taco.

I put it on anyway and looked at myself in a mirror on the back wall of the booth. I thought I looked like a complete goofball.

I think at this part I started to hear voices in my head. They sounded like the voice of Sherlock Holmes. I may have been reasoning something out, as if I were Sherlock Holmes.

Suddenly I was in a room. I was one of three children. But I wasn't in the body of whichever child I was.

The children were actually more like young adults. They were probably in their late teens and early twenties. There were two boys and one girl.

One of the boys was Sherlock Holmes. The girl was a really pretty, fair-skinned girl with kind of slim eyes and long, pale-brown hair. The kids all had the style and attitude of kids from the late 1970s.

The kids were all up in one of their bedrooms, which was a kind of small room up on a second or third floor of a mansion. They'd each alternately pace lazily around the room or lay down on the bed, roll around on it, etc.

The kids were all speaking with each other. Sherlock Holmes still seemed to be reasoning something out with himself. The girl was at least teasing Sherlock Holmes, if not the other boy. All three kids were lazy -- and they knew it. But the girl took a little bit more pleasure in teasing the boys for being lazy.

The girl had to leave. Then the two boys were together. But then one of the boys had to leave. The other boy was by himself.

During this time the boy had transformed from Sherlock Holmes into Lewis Carroll. As Sherlock Holmes, the boy had been just a regular boy, or young man, from the 1970s. As Lewis Carroll, something about him changed. He actually took on more of a late nineteenth century appearance.

But the boy was still lazy. He may have known that the girl had gone off and found a job. And the other boy may have at least gone looking for a job as well. But Sherlock/Lewis was still just sitting up in his room.

Sherlock/Lewis was thinking of what kind of excuse he'd give his parents (with whom he was still living) for not yet having found a job.

He thought he'd make up something about being a writer and needing his time to write. In my mind's eye I saw a huge, yellow pencil laying across the bed with the boy. I thought the writer excuse kind of made sense. After all, if this was Lewis Carroll, he was really a great writer.

But then Sherlock/Lewis, looking out the window, started thinking about what his dad would say about him. I could hear his dad's voice in his head. Eventually the dad's speech took over the narrative.

The dad, who was like Bill Loud in the show An American Family, was narrating a letter that he'd written to his wife. His wife was out in some foreign country, maybe France, taking care of some business.

The dad wrote his wife that he'd gone to visit the daughter at either the location of her new job or at her college campus. Either way, the daughter was in a new town. But this was a town where the dad and mom had met and fallen in love. So the dad was happy to go back there.

There was a view of some part of a campus, I think, in this town. There were a lot of trees. But it was winter, and the trees were all leafless. The branches struck me as being very black.

The father wrote/narrated a very sentimental statement that began with him sighing, "Ah!, the memories..."

Now there was a strange view of painty-looking or animated-looking flowers, huge, five-petalled, yellow flowers, blossoming on the barren branches. The father made some kind of statement about the first experience of love between him and his wife, and how it was as delicate as trembling petals.

Dream #2

I was watching a documentary. There was a black and white photograph of two girls from a wealthy Italian family. The girls were sitting on the left rim of the pool for a big fountain, which was out on a gravel driveway leading up to the family's huge mansion.

The photo was really blotchy. It was apparently taken in the 1940s, though the girls seemed to me to look more like they were from the 1970s, or even the present.

The girls both had really long hair, which was very straight and plain. And the girls wore very short denim shorts, or denim coveralls with very short leggings. Both girls had a skinny look about them, though neither really was skinny. They both looked a little dull and overly spoiled.

The view now closed in on the girl sitting higher up on the rim. This girl was the older sister. A narrator now explained that the older sister had a disease, which had made her life very tragic.

As the narrator continued, the view now became active and in color. The view had shifted away from the fountain and onto the gravel driveway. It was the present. But things at this estate were pretty much the same as they had been in the 1940s.

There were a few old men standing out by some junk in the driveway. It looked like it may have been a ticket booth and some other equipment related to an old-time carnival.

The narrator's speech had continued. The narrator had explained that the girl had never been particularly pretty. But as she reached her seventeenth year, she'd begun to blossom into a more beautiful girl.

But at this time, the girl was suddenly struck by a disease which was like a cancer, eating away at her face. The disease was combatted once, and the girl was okay. But then the disease came back again and again, until a few years later, the girl's face was completely ravaged.

One of the men in the gravel driveway now walked over to the right side of the road. There was a big structure there. It was made of concrete, and it was as tall as the man. It was shaped like the plastic head of a baby doll. And I supposed that the face of this giant, concrete baby doll was turned away from me, so that I only saw the back of the head.

The back of the head, though, had a huge chunk smashed right out of its center. The chunk revealed , through a thick, ragged window of concrete-white, pebbly casing, the hollowness of the doll's head.

I assmumed that there was probably a similar smashing in on the front side of this gigantic baby doll's head. And I assumed that this head was a metaphor for the 1940s girl's head. I realized that this was what the disease had done to the woman.

Dream #3

Some anime. The main bad guy was a beautiful-man kind of figure: skinny, elegant, with long, purple hair. He was a very sinister kind of character.

But it turned out that the reason the bad guy had been causing all the trouble was because somebody had taken his favorite teddy bear away from him. He assumed the good guys had done it. So he was causing all kinds of trouble for them.

I thought this was a really disappointing reason for a bad guy to be bad. It cheapened the whole story. I couldn't even figure out why good guys would fight this bad guy at all.

Good morning, everybody.

Dream #1

I was in a living room with my little brother. There was probably a sharp, but pale incandescent lamp on somewhere. A TV was blaring on a small TV stand. And the living room was littered here and there with things like blankets and clothes.

My brother was being really annoying in some way or another. At one point he was really annoying me by doing some weird kind of walk away from me and then back to me really fast, as if he were going to crash into me.

Eventually I just tried to ignore my brother altogether, and I started trying to pay more attention to the TV. But then I felt bad for treating my brother so coldly. So I figured that if he started acting nice to me, I'd be nice to him, too.

My brother now came up to me and asked me if he could take a look at my phone. He was just curious to see what it had on it. Having told myself I'd be nice to my brother, I handed my phone to my brother.

My brother walked over to the couch and sat down with my phone. A little while later my brother was standing up and walking around the room, doing some other stuff.

I was wondering where my phone was. My brother may have told me he'd left it by the couch. I saw it on a desk that stood before the couch. I grabbed it.

I saw that I had either an email message or a text message from somebody (or a few people?). I was about to look at the messages. But my brother, looking at his own phone, at the other end of the living room, said, "Oh, did I just get a message from ----? Saying -----?"

This was the person I'd just gotten a message from, and the subject of the message the person had sent me. My brother said something else to make me understand that while he had been "looking" at my phone, he set it so that any texts or emails I received would be automatically forwarded to his phone.

I was really mad. I didn't want my brother in all of my business. I felt like it was stupid to give my brother my phone in the first place -- even if I had thought I should have been nicer to him. But I was mostly concerned with how to stop my phone from forwarded all my info to my brother.

Dream #2

I was on an indoor basketball court with a group of boys. But I'm not sure whether we were playing a game, or just waiting around for some other people to lead us in some kind of event. I'm pretty sure we were all milling around. I was just milling around by myself.

I saw the basketball hoop and wondered if I could jump and touch the rim. I'd never been able to do it before. But I felt like maybe I could now.

The rim seemed a bit higher than normal, and it was a really bright orange. The net was also torn to shreds, so that now only a couple ratty inches hung below the rim.

As I was getting ready to jump, a bunch of the boys all gathered around me. It was like they had all suddenly decided to start playing a game.

I felt a bit self-conscious now that all these other boys were around me. I had thought that maybe I could jump and touch the rim. But now I knew I probably couldn't.

But I also having a hard time even jumping, because I was getting all tangled up in all the other boys who were trying to play a game. But, at the same time, I was already in the air, and so absurdly high in the air -- yet nowhere near the rim -- that all the boys were already beneath my feet.

One of the boys said something like, "Oh, he's trying to touch the rim! Let's see if we can do it! Or let's see if we can do a slam dunk!"

Apparently now the other boys were now already doing slam dunks and touching the basketball hoop's rim, while I was apparently still floating my way on up toward it! (But strangely enough, I don't think, all throughout this dream, that I actually ever saw one of these boys.)

Finally I reached the tattered net of the hoop. I grabbed onto it and pulled myself up to the rim.

The other boys were now saying things like, "Oh, look! He's holding onto the rim! Is he going to try to do a slam dunk?"

I didn't really know what I was going to do. I didn't know where to go from here. I didn't know how to get down. I felt like I was up way too high.

But now I thought I should climb down. First I did this by inching my hands down the couple inches of tattered net.

Then I saw a pole in front of me. It was like a brass coat rack, or some kind of lightpost. It had one central pole. And off from the pole, on either side, set one below the other, like rungs on a ladder, were little loops of brass. But every once in a while the brass of this structure was black, like it was coated in a think layer of tar or plastic.

I started climbing down this pole. As I did, I noticed that on the other side of the pole was something like a shopping mall. Apparently this indoor basketball court was right in the middle of a shopping mall.

About twenty meters away, there was also a long folding table, at which sat three or four older adults, nicely dressed and very serious looking. I could tell these were the judges. Whatever event the boys and I were at, we were going to be judged on our performance.

All this time, the boys were saying, "Oh, look! Now he's going to climb down!" I climbed down to about two or three meters above the ground. There were no more rungs on the pole. So I either had to jump down or slide down. I think I chose to slide down, even though I may have thought that I was still climbing down.

When I got down, one of the boys (whom I'm pretty sure I didn't see) warned me, "We aren't supposed to be climbing on the pole. You're gonna get in trouble when the judges come!"

I was kind of shocked. I looked up at the pole, which now seemed extremely thin and weak, as if my weight should probably have snapped it off at its base.

I wondered when the judges would come, and what kind of trouble I'd get into. But I also wondered what the heck I was supposed to do, anyway. How was I supposed to have gotten down from the rim, if I wasn't allowed to climb down the pole?

Dream #3

I was in a movie theatre, I think, watching a movie. I already had some idea of the plot of the movie. I knew it was about two girls, probably sixteen or seventeen years old, who, after some kind of accident, were now able to see into a different world.

This world was either a different dimension or the dream world. But the girls would see the dream world or different dimension in waking life, while they were going about their normal lives.

It was like the different dimension or the dream world was overlaid on our world, but invisible to most people. According to what I knew of the plot, the two girls now had to fight some battle in the middle of the two worlds to save our world.

I was now watching the beginning of the movie, which was kind of showing the origin of the two girls' powers.

The girls were out driving on a highway at night. The streetlamps over the highway were different-colored, like lights on a stage at a rock concert.

One of the girls was a troublemaker. I think this was the girl driving. She looked kind of like the avatar Mayatara has on the Dream Views site, of the girl with the white flash coming from her third eye -- except, of course, without the white flash.

I think the other girl was a troublemaker, too, but not as much as the first girl.

But now another car drove up, first really closely tailgating the girls' car, then finally driving up right beside the driver's side of the girls' car. This car was like a 1970s style car, green, but with a big, white racing side across each side.

The drivers of this car also appeared to be girls, about the age of the main character girls. But the audience was supposed to get the feeling that the girls in the green car were demons from the other world, sent to make the two girls angry, so they'd do something stupid that would lead to their own destruction. Apparently the demons of the other world already knew that the two girls were going to work to save the two worlds.

So the girls in the green car began really agitating the two girls. Eventually the girl driving just told the girls in the green car to screw off. The girl stepped really hard on the gas, speeding way up ahead of the green car.

But now one of the girls in the green car pulled out a gun and began shooting at the main girls' car! But when she shot her gun, a whole bunch of stuff came out with the bullet. The bullet, actually, didn't get very far. But the other stuff did, breaking through the back window of the main girls' car.

There was something like a centerless coin, or a washer, among all this stuff. The camera closed in really tightly on the washer and followed it in slow motion. The washer hit the left temple of the girl in the passenger seat. It hit with the same speed of a bullet, but the impact didn't do more than just knocking the girl out.

The girl in the driver's seat saw that her friend (maybe they were more than friends?) had just been injured. Now she was really ticked off!

The green car pulled up beside the girls' car. The girls in the green car were now wild -- bashing and pounding against their own car windows, almost like caged wolves trying to attack a person outside.

But the girl was so angry she just wanted to kill the girls in the green car. The highway was now driving on an overpass that went high over a wide, black river. The girl figured she'd just smash the green car right off the highway and into the river.

The girl began slamming and slamming against the green car. Eventually she drove the car right off the highway. But somehow the demons had a hand in this, too. And the girl's car went off the highway, too.

I watched as both cars plunged into the river. I thought to myself, It doesn't make sense that this is happening. How can these two girls go on fighting with their powers if they're dead? But they must be going to die. There's no way they could survive something like this.

The camera view was now of the girls in their car. The second girl was probably still knocked out. The first girl was possibly trying to find a way to save her friend and herself.

But the girls' car was probably right up on the side of the demons' car, so that the driver's side window of the girls' car was right next to the passenger side window of the demons' car.

The demon-girl on the passenger side of the car now bashed on her window to get the girl's attention. The girl looked over. The demon-girl now let something go from herself, an aura-esque, holographic kind of expansion of herself, which may also have morphed into a demonic shape.

I think I now got the idea that this was what had given the two girls their power. The demons may actually not have been against the girls. But the only way the demon girls could have given the girls their powers was by putting them into a situation like this.

I was now sitting outside, in a hallway between movie theatres. I sat on a couch-like bench. Just to my left was a doorway to another movie theatre. And just to the left of that, I think, was a small concession stand.

The hallway was well-lit, with peach-orange walls. And, far down to my left, at the end of the hallway, was a smallish window letting in a lot of light from the grey day outside.

A guy, maybe in his late twenties or early thirties, stood to my left. He was white, with his head shaved, but some black stubble now growing back onto it. He also had a shadow of stubble on his cheecks, even though he may have had a pretty full mustache and some pretty full hair below his bottom lip.

The guy wore a green t-shirt with white lettering on it. He wore a long-sleeved shirt under that. He wore slightly baggy, black jeans. The guy, I somehow knew, was a popular movie critic. He may have had some blog that everybody paid attention to, when it came to movies, even though I hadn't ever read it before.

The guy seemed lost in some way or another. Since he seemed lost, and since he was famous, I figured that maybe I would see if I couldn't help him. If I helped him, maybe he'd be able to help me get a job.

But the guy was only concerned because his friends still hadn't arrived for the movie yet. There seemed now to be a whole bunch of people standing around the guy, as if they were all standing in line to get into a movie.

I told the guy not to worry. The movie didn't start until 2:53. So he still had plenty of time to wait here for his friends. But somebody near us was saying, in a kind of tone of urgency, that he and whoever he was with had to get to the theatre. The movie had started at 2:35. So they were already late. And the guy didn't want to miss any more than he'd already missed.

I got kind of panicked, too. I'd been excited to see this movie, too! But I thought it started at 2:53, not 2:35! I looked at my watch (? - don't wear one). It was 2:53 right now! That meant I'd already missed a lot of the movie!

I ran down almost to the end of the hallway, to get to my movie theatre. As I ran in, I saw that the movie had already started. I was coming in after the whole origins scene had come and gone.

Now I'd never know how the girls had gotten their powers! This had been my biggest question!

The theatre itself was kind of disordered, as if there were a lot of parents their with their little kids. So each family, or maybe small group of families, was in their own little space, making clumps of noisy areas, and whole sections of empty seats.

But a lot of the audience didn't even seem to be focused on the movie. The atmosphere was like a big picnic inside of a movie theatre.

I went up toward the front of the movie theatre and sat near a blonde business woman wearing a white blouse and khaki-colored skirt or trousers. The woman's hair was really thick and flowing. The woman may have been in her early forties. She may somehow have acknowledged me and then gone back to watching the movie.

The scene was now a daytime scene. A man and a woman, maybe in their late thirties or early forties, were out on some promenade on the side of the same river that the girls had crashed into.

The man and the woman were both teachers at the high school the two girls went to. The man had a kind of Joe Piscopo look about him: curly, brown-red hair, kind of tan face, but a little reddish, too. But he looked a little more worn out by life, and he had slimmer, paler eyes.

The man was telling the woman that she needed to stop messing around with the two girls. Apparently the woman had been in the car with the two girls during the crash into the river.

The man was telling the woman that things the woman had lately been involved with with the two girls -- some kind of weird adventures that the man vaguely knew about, but which generally appeared to the world like nothing but close scrapes with trouble -- were hurting the woman.

The adventures the woman was involved in, the man said, were distracting the woman from teaching her students. And if she got too distracted from her role as a teacher, there were people in the administration department of the school who would be more than happy to fire her.

The woman listened to the man and sympathized with him. But she couldn't really do anything about it. It was fate. She was meant to have the adventures she was having.

I knew that the woman had been sitting in the backseat when the car had gone into the river. She had received only a part of the power that the two girls had received. But she'd received enough to see what kind of trouble the two worlds were in.

And she had a part in saving the two worlds. So she didn't have a choice. Regardless of what happened to her, she had to have her adventures. She wished that she could tell the man about all of this. But the man could only know so much. And so he'd just have to be worried for the woman.

I could see that, off to the right, the main girl was walking toward the promenade from a stone bridge that crossed the river. I could tell that the girl was already seeing a new batch of holographic demons. I could tell that a new fight was already about to begin, and that the woman would be involved.