5/1/02:

    All I remember is that I was in some house staying with a bunch of people and Jim was one of them. When everyone went to bed one night, I was still laying on the floor in the living room watching "Saturday Night Live" and Jim was still in the room and he came up behind me and was cuddling with me.
    Also there was some wacky stage show that I was sitting in the audience of and there were these kids on stage doing tricks with a parachute and some crazy old man, who was naked maybe, playing a grand piano in this really bombastic way and some Asian girl with black coal smears all over her face doing something with these wooden rods.

5/2/02:

No dreams.

5/3/02:

No dreams.

5/4/02:

    I'm going to college at some unknown college campus where all the buildings are made of wood and are shaped weird and are separated by rolling green hills. It is sunny and Spring time outside. I seem to work in a firehouse with a bunch of firemen when I'm not in class. I don't fight fires but I'm always at the house for some reason, like a janitor or something. At one point in the firehouse I see one of the firemen, with this crazed look in his eye, walk downstairs and start pouring gasoline all over everything and himself. He then gets out a lighter. I run out of the firehouse as quick as I can and start screaming "Everybody run! The place is gonna blow up!!!" at the top of my lungs while I run down beside this dirt alley beside the firehouse - which leads right to a gas station - which I think might blow up too, so I dart off to the left and into these dirt parking lots next to all these old buildings (it looks like I'm in an old run-down town now). Everyone had run out of the firehouse when I started yelling. The sun is out and hot and reflecting off the dusty reddish dirt.
    I am still running full speed and I am in this wide open area and for some reason I think I am in an area that is near a fault line in the Earth or a sight where there has been a lot of underground tunnel construction or maybe a site where a large explosion happened in the past. As I am running and waiting for the firehouse to blow and I am looking around and thinking "When it does blow this whole area is gonna collapse!" and so I just keep running and running hoping to get out of the area as quickly as I can.
    Then it is later. My college friend Mary LaPort is around (she is in the dream but I never see her). For some reason I am writing an article about her for Time Out magazine. I am going over to her house on campus to pick up a photograph or something I am using for the article. On the way to her house I keep going under all these stone, moss/ivy-covered underpass tunnels like they have in Central Park. There are lush green trees and kudzu is growing everywhere. I get to her house apartment and she is not home - for some reason I knew this would be. I go inside her empty apartment somehow and she has a cat - which is actually Gregory's cat Kino. For some reason I know I am supposed to feed the cat. I open these floor level cabinet doors and inside I see a cat bowl full of dry cat food. Kino jumps in and starts picking at the dry food. I am saying to Kino "No don't eat that food it's all old and moldy! Wait! Let me open a fresh package for you!" and Kino kind of half responds to me. Suddenly this icky green goo plops out of the end of this open pipe which is attached and pointing down inside the cabinet. The goo plops down onto the bottom of the cabinet. I look to see where the pipe leads - it leads somewhere upstairs. It seems the goo coming out of it was some mistake and the super needs to be called - what if there is more? I see Kino was startled by the goo and I open the other door to get a good look at the goo. I don't see any - it's gone - but I saw it come out and hit the bottom of the cabinet. I feel obligated to call the super even though I don't live there, I kind of half think about this.
    So I seem to find the photo of Mary I need for the article about her while kind of casually rummaging through her apartment. I also seem to be planning to take a loaf of wheat bread from her kitchen home to eat - for some reason. I think she won't mind. I take the bread and the photo and am walking out the door. As I am - uh oh! - I see a group of women walking in the hallway towards Mary's door. They're her friends! How will I explain that I was here? I take the photo and kind of hold it out in front of me and plan to tell them I am a writer for Time Out and I think that this will impress them so much that they won't notice the bread I am stealing. I hold the photo out and kind of walk out as they are walking into Mary's apartment. They don't even seem to notice me at all. I walk home amongst the moist, lush green trees and kudzu and dusk light and think about the article on Mary and why I am even writing it in the first place and I imagine my digital clock next to my bed with red light digital numbers casting a faint red glow in my bedroom which is illuminated by the dusk light now.

5/5/02:

No dreams.

5/6/02:

    I am living in some giant dorm house that is an old victorian home converted into dorm rooms. I don't know what campus I'm on. It's Spring time outside and sunny. I live on the top floor in my own room. I know that Breck, the crackhead I met in Dallas on my recent road trip, is living on the floor beneath me. I am leaving my room about to go to some local restaurant and study and drink coffee. I think to go knock on Breck's door and ask her if she wants to go but I'm hesitant. As I leave my room, I am on the landing where I can see down the stairs to the next floor, I see Breck down there, on her floor. She looks up at me and says "Hey!" She has long-ish, very straight red (artificial punk red) hair with bangs and is wearing a tight dark blue turtle neck sweater and a red tartan school girl skirt, knee-high white socks and penny loafers. I ask her if she wants to come with me to study. This is the first time we are seeing each other after having both moved into the dorm house - for some reason I know that.
    Then I am on a subway train in some city I don't know. The subway cars are elaborate like Amtrak trains. I arrive at my stop and get out. I don't recognize anything - it almost looks like I'm in an airport. I am with Matt. As we are walking out of the large subway stop - I get the feeling that Matt and I have done something wrong and we are kind of being careful so as not to get caught. As we are leaving, this pudgy woman with dark hair approaches us - she is wearing a flight attendant uniform. She says "You can't leave gentlemen. Please come with me." we follow her and are looking at each other like "Shit we're in for it!" and we go to this room where a black man in a business suit and glasses and carrying a beige leather briefcase is waiting for us outside the door. The man says "Step inside guys!" and we go in and it is a large conference room with a big long table and chairs and beige industrial carpet and fluorescent lighting and a big blackboard. We sit at the table with the black guy and the flight attendant woman and the black man starts telling us all of these technical details using lots of technical lingo that me and Matt don't understand. We just sit there looking at each other and are kind of goofing off and stuff and laughing quietly because we know we're supposed to be serious and we are trying to crack each other up - we are kind of ignoring him. I pull out this photograph I have in my pocket - which actually seems to be my webcam. I lay it flat on the table and I start broadcasting pictures through the webcam/photograph onto my website. Matt and I keep angling out faces and posing for the cam/photograph (which is laying on the table, flat, below our heads so they are all under-hand shots like inside our nostrils and stuff). The black man and flight attendant seem to not notice or care that Matt and I are not listening to them.
    Then a complete scenario shift: I'm kind of "watching" this horror movie - but I'm also in it sometimes as an observer and sometimes I am one or some of the characters. In the movie, there is a killer who is an older woman who wears a sloppy blond wig and black lace clothes. She wanders from building to building in a european town at night and kills people. At one point, the woman has entered this building that has lots of floors. There appears to be a community of artists or dancers that live there. It is late at night and some of the artists are asleep. Others are on the top level of the house, in this big kitchen with a black iron stove with a fire in it that casts flickering shadows all over the walls. They are all talking and laughing and hanging out. All over the house, the rooms are lit dimly and dramatically with colored lights. On the top floor there are other large rooms that all have angled ceilings. One room has lots of beds with some people asleep in them. There is also stuff all over the room like an attic. There are tons of female mannequins all over the place.
    The killer middle aged lady in the blond wig, who is in the building, has entered the room with all the mannequins and people asleep. She is creeping very slowly and quietly and dramatically across the floor all the way to the other side, which is where the door to the kitchen is, and she is gonna go into the kitchen and kill everyone. At this point I seem to alternately be the killer woman and one of the girls in the bed. As she is creeping across the floor, she keeps loudly knocking over these mannequins really loudly. It's kind of funny. There are "shots" of the people in the kitchen reacting like "What was that noise?" but then they forget about it. The killer woman stops every time she knocks over a mannequin - which is pretty funny as she is creeping very slowly and there is lots of room around the mannequins to walk and there is enough light to see. She just keeps bumping into them somehow. The killer kind of looks like Phyllis Diller at this point. One girl (who has punk hair) wakes up in her bed and looks around to see what's going on. Suddenly the "camera" moves to the right, off the killer, and onto the girl in bed who is sitting up and saying "Who's there? Is anyone there?" then the "camera" pans back over to where the killer woman was and she is no longer there - and you just know now that she is posing all frozen-style as one of the mannequins being all still. The girl in bed gets up and is looking around at all the mannequins carefully. She then starts screaming hysterically "There is someone in the room!!! There is someone in the room!!!" and one of the girls from the kitchen comes running in and starts shaking the girl like "What's wrong! Get a hold of yourself!" and I can kind of "see" what the hysterical girl sees - I am her now - and I see over the shoulder of the girl shaking me and behind her I see this weird, creepy little midget mannequin looking toy thing that is sitting in a big chair. It seems to have robotic parts that make it kind of wiggle and move - like a wind-up toy. It has a blond wig just like the killer. It keeps moving and mechanically writhing in the chair until it moves so much that it's head falls off and onto the floor.
    Suddenly I hear a female voice saying to me - in my dream "Mark! Wake up!!! Stop dreaming about this horror movie!! Someone bad is standing over your bed while you are sleeping and making you have this dream to control you!!!" I wake up and see that I have been sleeping in the top floor room of the european house in the dream - the mannequins and everything are there - but now it's daytime. I really think I have woken up, and that I live here (not at my apartment in NYC) and that this is reality. As I wake up I kind of see some girl moving away from my bed - I guess she was the one waking me up. I also see this kind of ghostly, black image of some figure kind of hovering over my bed, or next to it. I, in my just-woke-up stupor, look at the dark ghostly figure - the one feeding me the horror movie dream supposedly - and raise my arm up and go "Shoo! Shoo!" and kind of shoo it away like a fly. As I do this it slowly disappears. I am thinking, as I lay my head back on my pillow and go bad to sleep in the bed in the european house that I think is my reality, I think "Wow! I wonder if that apparition is just my paranoid imagination or if it really was a specter? Like the images of death I imagined before I knew I had cancer? And who was that girl who woke me up? Where is she? Was she an angel? I guess we as a society will never be %100 sure if things of a paranormal nature are real or not. Just do what you can." and I go back to sleep.
    Then I really woke up in my NYC apartment and was like "Wow! I thought I already woke up in my dream. I live in NYC, that's right."

5/7/02:

    I am living in some large house. Each individual room of the house is a small apartment. It seems like a kind of college dorm. On the outside of the house, there is a lush, upscale suburban neighborhood - very similar to parts of Plano, Texas, which is where I think I may be. I have a neighbor in the room/apartment across from mine who has a little dog. One night when we both come home late from being out he takes a shower and he asks me to feed his dog some dog treats from this jar on his counter. It is hard to tell what are dog treats and what aren't because there is candy and stuff in the jar. When he gets out of the shower he shows me which items from the jar are dog treats - they are these little things that look like tan colored, cylindrical styrofoam packing pellets mounted in little plastic bubbles with foil backing that you break open - like pills would be packaged on a foil sheet that you pop them out the back of. The dog is really excited when I start handling the weird dog treat. Some other stuff happens with me and the other residents in the house but I can't remember what.
    Then it's the next day and I seem to remember walking among all these lush parks and stuff with friends from the house but I can't really remember it. It is Spring time and beautiful outside. When I walk back to the house - it is now twilight dawn. I go into the house and now it appears that my parents live there and me and my brother live there too. When I walk in, there is a lot of commotion going on and there are police and FBI agents in the house. I see a bunch of them inside my brother's room and my parents are off to the side all freaked out. It seems that they are arresting my brother on all these wild charges like armed robbery and murder and terrorism plots and all kinds of stuff. When I run up to my brother one of the FBI guys pulls out a gun and goes "Whoa! Stop or I'll shoot stay back!" and one of the other FBI tells him to stop because I am a family member. My brother is handcuffed on his bed and if flailing and yelling and screaming like a madman. The cops tell me that they found notes in his room that included a plot by him to have me murdered, amongst other things. I'm in total shock and don't know what to believe. They also tell me that the way this happened - the way they caught him - was that my childhood friend Tim called the cops on him after my brother violently attacked Tim at some store he works at and when the cops showed up to question him about the assault charges, which he is also being arrested for, they found all this evidence of the other crimes - which they had been trying to solve for years and are happy that they finally apprehended the perpetrator.

5/8/02:

    I seem to live in this weird little town where different combinations of things I experience in New York and I experienced growing up in Texas are all combined together. There is a main street in the town where all the stores and businesses are and that all the action surrounding my dream seems to happen. I kind of work in this weird store that looks a lot like Bill's Records, this wild store I used to work in as a kid, it looks like the store but is nothing like it and the way things work is different - plus Bill isn't there. Even though it's different from Bill's I "know" it's the same place. In my dream, people go there with their collections of old records or Mad Magazines or toys or movie memorabilia and they find a suitable place in the crowded store and sit there with all there stuff and people can come look at and buy their stuff - like a flea market. I have a collection of old Mad and Cracked and Crazy magazines that I am selling. People are coming in and out of the store and it is night time outside as I can see it outside the giant windows in the front. I am situated near the door so people keep having to step over my piles of magazines to come in and out.
    It seems that there is one guy working there, selling merchandise, that has a really notorious reputation. He has cropped black hair, is a little pudgy, always has a toothpick in his mouth, kind of dresses like a skin head, and is gay. I hear other guys working there saying that the stuff he is selling isn't even his, he stole it - and he's wanted by the cops for some low brow crimes and has no real friends but is always in trouble because he likes the attention it affords him - kind of a loner troublemaker.
    All the guys are talking about him and there seems to be a kind of scuffle amongst them and him at one point and the guy is just laughing as they all gang up on him and accuse him of stuff. A little fight breaks out and some stuff gets knocked around in the store. I just seem to be observing the whole thing.
    Suddenly I am outside the store and I am meeting up with these people I live and work with in another location. One of the people is Justin Bond. We are all going to drive back to where we live. The car - or contraption - we are driving back in looks like something out of an early Disney live action movie. It is this three-leveled, giant car that looks like a slightly miniature version of a Victorian style home - like the house in the movie "Psycho" maybe - and runs on all these loud, old-fashioned motors that you have to crank and that blow clouds of black smoke. It looks like something out of a Charles Addams cartoon - like an "Addams Family" car. The car has many wheels - like the thin black kind with lots of spokes you see on the first Ford cars ever built and stuff. Inside the car is like a little house complete with a chandelier in the little foyer and a piano in the living room which has a persian run on the floor and a wet bar. You drive the car from the upper-most tower on the house/car and that is this little black cage that is enclosed and has a gas and brake pedal, and a big steering wheel.
    We all climb into the contraption and set off to go home. At the last minute, the trouble-making kid comes running out of the store and asks Justin if he can drive home. Apparently he lives with us. Justin asks him if he knows how to drive this thing and he doesn't say anything and just runs in the front door and climbs up to the driving tower and knocks whoever was in there out and cranks up the engine. Black smoke blows everywhere and people are coughing and trying to see and breath and the whole thing just takes off at full speed with the kid at the controls. It is still night time and the street we are driving down is this super-crowded street full of partying people and open bars and stuff - it looks like the main street in New Orleans during Mardi Grais. We are swerving all over the place at full speed and crowds of people are jumping out of the way and almost getting hit and the kid just keeps swerving around at full speed and almost hitting everyone and the street is almost turning into a panic riot because of us plowing through them. Everyone is screaming "Slow down!" and are being thrown around from inside the various rooms inside the car and the chandelier is swinging around from all the wild twists and turns the car is taking. The car is really out of control at one point and I think someone is ejected from one of the windows of the house/car when the kid swerves just in time to miss hitting this cop car and the house car almost tips over because he makes such a sharp turn. I am thinking "Justin should not have let this kid drive... he's gonna kill everyone." You can just hear the kid laughing up in the driving tower as all this happens.
    Suddenly we end up - somehow - underneath the stairs of the outside of this building - we somehow fit under the outside stairs that lead to the second story balcony of some restaurant or something. We still are on the main street. The whole car fits under the stairs somehow and we seem to be behind the bars of a security gate - like the business one the ground level is closed. As we crash into this area, the car/house completely tips over and we all crash around inside the house. Everyone is OK and are all like "Whew! It's over". The kid just jumps out of the driving tower cage and runs off into the street and screams "Later fuckers!" Everyone seems resigned to the situation.
    Then somehow I get to where I live. There is is this guy I know, Ed, that lives there with Justin and me and a bunch of other people. The house is beautiful with everything made of bare wood and caramel colored shiny tile floors and dramatic lighting and mirrored hallways and stuff - really cool. It's another weird kind of work/live situation that I always seem to dream about. Ed seems to be our "boss" - like we all kind of work at some job outside the house - and every night before we go to bed Ed tells us our assignment - where we will report to the next day for our specific job. Ed also is always giving everyone at the house presents. Whenever he tells you about your specific job - he gives you some gift that he bought and wrapped for you himself. Weird.
    It seems that my job the next day consists of me going to some remote, beach/cliff location near town and working inside these little caves that are in the sandstone cliffs next to the beach. We will have to climb these long, skinny ladders to get up to the caves, which are high up on the cliffs. There is a ladder in my bedroom - which I share with this black guy, and as Ed is telling us about the caves he is putting the presents he bought for us on two of the steps of the ladder in our room.
    Then it is the next morning. Me, the black guy and Ed are all hiking with backpacks and camping supplies on this fantastic beach with high sandstone cliffs on one side - a long beach with weird arch and bridge natural rock formations jutting across it growing out of the cliffs, a blue water beach and lots of birds flying around. It's spectacular, huge and amazing. Almost like we are on another planet. The little caves are these black little holes on the side of the enormous face of the biggest sandstone cliff. They look like little dots because they are so far away. The rickety little skinny ladders lead up to each one. You can see people already on some of the ladders climbing up. Me and the black guy climb up the long ladder to our cave.
    Once inside the cave, we start unpacking our supplies. I see these brightly colored figures and shapes painted on the cave's walls. They look recent. We are going to be doing some work that has something to do with the paintings. Ed is telling us, that because of him, we are working in the best cave on the cliff.
 

5/9/02:

    I am attending some school. I go to class every other day - it's like a community college ot technical school or something. Inside the building where my school is are also stores and food courts like a mall - a cheap mall, like an outlet center or something. There is one class in particular that is the focus of the dream. There is some guy there that I have a crush on but am too nervous to approach. He sits behind me on the same row about five seats back. It's very high school. One day in class I am staying at my desk and doing some kind of work long after everyone has left. The classroom is really big - and after everyone has left there is "mood" lighting in the room - like yellow and red and green accent lighting - plus the light from one of those overhead projectors projecting something up on the front wall. I keep going into the room next door - which seems to be a supply room or maybe even a walk-in refrigerator - and getting stuff to work at my desk with. Lo and behold the guy I have the crush on seems to be staying after class too. Suddenly I realize it's Jim. I get the impression that he is very smart and friendly. He starts talking to me as he keeps getting up and getting changes of clothes out of the supply closet. He keeps changing into these weird layers of clothes that are like mixes of parts of wacky vintage tuxedoes - like a maroon coat with tails and a tartan blue vest and a big yellow bow tie. He keeps changing into different outfits as we talk. He is getting ready to go somewhere. I am very aware that this is the first time I am speaking to him and I am very self conscious about what I say.

5/10/02:

No dreams.

5/11/02 - 5/22/02:

I'm out of town - no dream entries.

5/22/02:

    I have to fly to meet my family as my mother is sick in the hospital. When I get to the hospital, my mother is in a bed with all this machinery around her. Her hair is cut very short. When I speak with her she says very nice, docile things like "That's nice Mark" and "That's lovely" and smiling really big the whole time. She is being so friendly it almost seems fake... like a robot... it's very weird. I feel like my mom's brain has been taken over by something else. I am thinking how weird it is to be here since I haven't spoken to my parents in two years.
    Then a total scenario shift: I have an apartment in Paris. It is the top floor of this giant concrete building in a busy industrial section of Paris. The apartment has very little natural light and has only glass brick windows. I have painted many of the walls in the apartment blue and silver and have dramatic accent lighting everywhere. There is a Christmas tree with lights inside the apartment. I seem to be packing things up as I am am moving... to where I don't know. Bryan comes into my front door. He seems distracted and to have something important on his mind. As I am packing I am telling him "congratulations" on his new house purchase. He is looking at this row of Japanese action figures on a ledge by my front door that are all dusty and covered with spider webs. He is saying he just wanted to come by and say "congratulations" on me moving to Paris and everything... whatever that means.
    Then suddenly it is another time and I am still in Paris and it is cloudy outside. I am alone and walking around a very old section of Paris. There is this kind of dirt trail by this row of houses that are built onto the side of a steep rocky cliff that I am kind of walking along. The trail kind of leads me onto the maroon-colored tile roof of an old building. The roof has many parts and angles that all are slanted at 45 degrees. I keep walking up the sides of the roof until I reach the top of the building. When I get to the top... I turn around to look at all of Paris from the roof. Suddenly I look down and realize that, for some reason, the slanted roof I just walked up is very very high and steep... so steep and high that I know I will not be able to get down. I didn't see this when I walked up. I freak out and am very scared. I see that if I do fall... I will slide to the bottom of the roof and then drop off the edge which is a huge 10 story drop-off. I am thinking "If I fall off here I will die." I start to really panic, I feel that terrible feeling in my stomach you feel when you realize you are very high up and are going to fall. My adrenaline is pumping through everywhere. I see a side window on one of the parts of the roof below me and I see a light on in there and hear a French family having dinner and speaking French. I am totally panicked and am frozen with fear and feel like I could fall at any moment... there is nothing to grab onto. I see these branches that are attached to a tree near the roof and grab onto them as my feet slide (I am wearing slick dress shoes with no grip) on the tiles and I start to fall. I somehow "know" that Guillaume is "watching" me from somewhere in Paris and wants to help me.
    Then another total scenario shift: I am living in some weird town that looks like a forest with houses dotted around amongst the trees. It always seems to be dusk or twilight - or maybe that light that happens when it is very cloudy and the sky is kind of pink/red and it's windy like a tornado is coming and that weird "there might be a tornado" energy is everywhere. It is Spring time and that windy, tornado-y energy is always in the dream. There are always children running around playing in the village. There is a certain clearing in the trees where most of the buildings and houses seem to be. My house, as well as houses of friends and businesses and stores are in this clearing. The more I look at this clearing, the more I realize it looks exactly like a neighborhood I lived in as a small child in Texas, and my house is located where our house was, except it looks different.
    There seems to be this beautiful, tall blond woman with long, Farrah Fawcett 70's style hair that we all know who owns a strange store in the tornado-y forest village. Her store sells vintage punk rock records, magazines, memorabilia and clothing... it's kind of a museum/store. I get the impression that she used to have an exciting life but is now in her late 30's and just owns this store and kind of feels like she is over the hill. The inside of the store is huge and when inside it, the sun beams in through the windows even though it's always cloudy outside. She only opens the store when someone calls her and requests her too... or when me and my group of friends... whom she is part of... want to hang out in there. I have no idea who anyone in my group of friends is.
    We are all in the forest at one point walking around and there is something involving a tree house up high inside one of the very big trees in the forest... like we are up there and are waving to people down in the street. The street down below looks like one in Paris. Inside the tree house is like an apartment... we are all hanging out on couches in the tree house.
    There is also some point in the tree house where someone calls the punk store blond woman and says that they have a part for her in a film they are making... a part that is perfect for her as it is the part of a 30's-ish tall blond woman who is past her prime and owns a punk memorabilia store. I "see" the blond woman leave our group of friends up in the tree house and go back to her store and get ready to go to meet the director... she is very excited but also kind of resigned to the banal reality of the situation.

5/23/02:

    I am traveling with some people I do not know in this little rickety car. The car looks like a golf cart that has parts of cardboard boxes and stuff put around the sides and top and making little walls inside like little rooms or compartments. The car is full of junk like old magazines and weird old toys and junk stuff you would find in somebody's closet. There are things hanging on strings all inside the car that swing back and forth as the car bumps and chugs along. It is sunny and Spring time. It is me and some guy and some girl in the car. We are riding along through the back alleys of old houses. The alleys are dirt with lots of overgrown weeds... it's a bumpy, slow ride.
    Soon we get to the Good/Bad art collective house in Denton, Texas. We get out and go inside. There are a lot of people and all kinds of junk (like the kind inside our car) inside. For some reason I know that I used to live in this house over ten years ago. But it has been so long I don't recognize anyone.
    Soon my two friends tell me they are going somewhere else on foot and that I can have the car to myself. I am in the garage of the house and when I look out of the garage I see a big shopping center parking lot. I also see the tall blond woman that owns the punk memorabilia store from yesterday's dream(!) in the parking lot talking to someone. I also see an old Asian woman collecting aluminum cans and trash in two blue garbage bags hanging from a pole she has horizontally resting across the back of her shoulders. I, for some reason, have to get all of the junk out of the car before it will start. I am in the garage and I see this room next to the garage - a kind of split-level adjacent room - that has piles and piles of junk in it. I decide to take the junk out of the car and put it in there, for now. I start taking stacks of junk out of the car and putting it in there. One of the piles of junk I grab out of the car is this pile of miniature paper ping pong paddles that have a string on them and a little red rubber ball you can bounce off of it - except the paddle is made of flimsy paper so it wouldn't really work. The paper paddle is in the shape of a head and it is the smiling, black and white Bob graphic face from The Church of the Subgenius logo. As I put the stuff from our car in the room, I realize that there is a danger that I will accidentally mix our junk up with the Good/Bad house junk. This is terrible for some reason. I try to pick our junk back up from the floor but I already have it mixed up and I start to panic a little. I also see a leak from the ceiling that is making a puddle of water on the floor and it might get some of the junk wet and this frightens me. I go inside the house and start talking to the college art student types, who are laying around on old couches, about how I need somewhere to store the junk in my car and how it won't start without doing this. Everyone just shrugs me off or ignores me. I start to tell them that I lived in the house many years ago with Texas artist David Lamb and I'm kind of an alumni and can they please help me. No one responds.
    I go back in the garage and see this styrofoam package of raw hamburger meat with plastic wrap over it (like you would buy in a grocery store) in my car. It is opened and half gone and looking old and maybe rotten. I decide to take it out of the car - but wait - I can't mix it with the other junk! What will I do? I look out into the shopping center parking lot and see the Asian woman. I give her the old meat. This seams to solve the problem.
    Then a scenario shift: I am "watching" this documentary (that is also the dream) about a young high school girl that is a lesbian and who moves into this giant Victorian house with a family and is lovers with the mother, even though the mother has a husband and two kids and they all live there. They all share the house as a kind of weird family. Sometimes I am the lesbian girl in the dream and sometimes I am just "observing". This part of the dream has actual "edits" and camera work like a film. At one point I am watching the girl walking down this very long staircase in the house (which has red carpeting on it) at night time, and I hear a voice of the mother talking about how this arrangement is so great for her and how she is really happy. The "camera" follows the back of the girl as she walks down the stairs. I see a leak from the ceiling making a puddle of water on the carpeted stairs.

5/24/02:

No dreams.

5/25/02:

    I dreamed I bought a new roll of paper towels and put it up on the shelf with another roll I bought recently.
    I also dreamed that Gregory was showing me this long hair he found that was growing from inside his ear. Weird because I have a hair like that.

5/26/02:

    DOGS! Boy did I dream of dogs last night! Dogs dogs dogs! Every part of the dream had a dog in it - it was pretty weird. The images and scenarios are real sketchy but I remember something with a tall skinny woman waiting on a corner in (I think) Paris, holding a long, tall skinny pure bred dog that looked really expensive - the kind with tufts of hair around their heads like a horse's mane. I also remember some scenario where I was in a cafe with Guillaume and a bunch of tall skinny dogs walked into the cafe and started begging at everyone's tables. There were a lot of other scenarios in the dream where dogs would suddenly appear and take over the dream - weird. Also there was something where I was back in my apartment in NYC, and I was "waking up" (in the dream) and this long, tall dog appeared at my bed and was nudging me with it's nose. I remember thinking, in the dream, "Wow! I'm dreaming about a lot of dogs! I wonder what it means?"

5/27/02:

No dreams.

5/28/02:

    I think I may have dreamed something about dinosaurs with very long necks, but that's all I remember.

5/29/02:

    I am living with a bunch of people in a big house in some part of a city I don't know. I think it's a big suburb. One of the people there is my old friend Michael. Also my old college friend Cathy is there. The house has lots of rooms and levels - I think it's an old warehouse. Some of the rooms have been re-done so they are very nice, and some, like one of the bathrooms, are still old and worn down with rusty walls and filthy floors. A lot of people live there - everyone is my age.
    It is daytime and I am walking to a back part of the house, I see that the back part of the house suddenly turns into this massive mall, kind of like the giant ones they have in Dallas. I seem to be meeting my dad and some other people there. I am at the area that I am supposed to meet them all at the right time, but they haven't showed up. There are lots of shoppers in the mall all walking around. I am on this kind of balcony thing that overlooks another level of the mall - and looks at the grand entrance to one of the department stores connected to the end of one of the wings of the mall. The floors of the mall are ginger colored industrial carpet. The ceilings are glass and the sunlight is beaming in. All the poles on the hand rails in the mall are chrome. Since my dad and the people I was supposed to meet haven't showed... I go into the department store.
    I walk around and kind of look at merchandise, just killing time. I come upon this table with rows of paper with things written on them neatly laid out. I see this these pieces of paper have small, neat stacks of money (bills) laid on top of each piece of paper. The paper/money things are arranged into neat rows. Each piece of paper has a name and address on it. I look and see that one has my name on it. I instinctively pick it up and start carrying the stack of money (about 20 bills) around in my left hand. For some reason this seems totally normal - like some weird kind of ATM machine. I am walking around with the money in my hand and still looking at stuff. I look down at the money at one point and see it almost looks like fake Monopoly board game money. I see this woman dressed in stylish clothing with lots of (80's Dallas-style) make up on and large costume jewelry working behind a counter. She has a friend working with her. They are looking at me and talking to each other with kind of concerned looks on their faces. I get the impression they think I stole something. I just keep walking around normally. As I walk towards the exit, one of the women picks up a phone to call security I think. I feel wrongly accused, and hope no security guard stops me because it will be embarrassing - but am not worried since I didn't steal anything.
    I walk back into the mall area and see my dad and friends still aren't there. I keep going into the department store (where the two employee women always stare at me), then back out into the mall, then back in, out, in, out... the whole time killing time waiting for my dad and friends... who are late.
    Then a scenario change: it is dusk and I am inexplicably in the bedroom of one of the houses I lived in as a teenager in Plano, Texas. I am lying in bed, I think I am sick. Everything in the room is the same as it was when I was a kid. I see that on my chrome and glass bedside table, the stack of money from the mall is lying there - but it has now turned into black and white cards with words on them that only look vaguely like money. My mom is coming in and out of the room carrying food and stuff on a tray for me because I'm sick. My old high school friend Marty is sitting in a chair beside me. We are talking really excitedly and I am telling her about what it's like to live in NYC. I am holding a glass with iced tea in it and the ice is clinking inside the glass as I move and talk.
    Then a scenario change back: it is night time and I am back at the warehouse house with Michael and friends. It appears that there is a vicious serial killer on the loose in the city and he has targeted our house, and us, for tonight. We know this somehow. Some of the people that live there decide to leave for the night and some decide to stay and fight the killer if he shows up. Everybody is terrified. We all have dinner in the dining room at a big long table, always expecting the killer to jump out at any moment, but he never does.
    Soon we all split off into little groups in the house... it's about 1:00AM... we collectively seem to be thinking the killer won't show up... or maybe he isn't really real at all, and we all relax a bit (although in the back of everyone's minds we are still apprehensive and on guard). I am with Michael and we are in the rusty old big bathroom. It's about 3:00AM now. We are talking about the killer and stuff and I am looking in the bathroom mirror and and putting bleach on my hair to dye it white. The bleach has set in and now I rinse it out. It smells bad. I look in the mirror at my new bleached wet hair. It is that weird orange just-bleached color and smells weird. Michael and I keep stopping when we hear weird noises out in the hall - thinking it's the killer - but it never is, we don't think. We just keep talking and - for some reason - I am now applying brown hair dye to my just-bleached hair because I guess I changed my mind. I am painting it on my wet hair - which is all dried out and tangled and clumped. I am thinking "I am ruining my hair with all this processing" as I do it. I look in the mirror after rinsing out the brown dye and see that it's a really fake brown color.
    Michael says "Let's go out on the back porch and talk and stuff and watch the june bugs hang around the street lights!" I say "OK!" but first I want to bleach my hair, again, back to white. I apply beach and watch it slowly turn my hair white. It takes longer this time. I rinse it out and see that it's only been bleached in certain areas. I decide to dye it brown again and paint more brown dye over my hair - which now has the consistency of wet brillo pads. I just leave the dye in and kind of mold my hair into the shape of a head of hair and decide to jut leave it like that- with the clay-like, clumpy dye just in it. It looks like hard plastic mannequin hair.
    Michael and I go out to the back porch and street. It's an industrial area. We talk and laugh about stuff. It's a real nice environment - the air is warm and it's summer night time energy. Soon the sun starts to rise and we say to each other "The killer never showed up!" Yay! We're OK! It was all fake!" We go back into the house. The morning sun is beaming in through all the windows. I have that stayed-up-all-night feeling. Everyone in the house that has left is just getting back and we are all inside the house again. I lay down on one of the couches and start to fall asleep. I look at the clock and it says 7:00AM. Michael is on the other side of the room reading magazines. I fall asleep.
    I wake up and look at the clock. It says 7:10AM. I have only slept for ten minutes. I see policemen all around me and emergency workers and flashing ambulance lights outside and yellow police tape all over everything. I sit up and wonder what's going on. I walk outside and one of the cops tells me that, in that 10 minutes I fell asleep, the killer (who had been carefully hiding inside the house all night long waiting for the perfect time to strike) killed every single person in the house EXCEPT ME! While I slept! They don't know why he spared me but everyone else has been viciously murdered. There is blood and body pieces all over the house. I am in shock and freaking out. I sit on the bumper of a police car and someone brings me coffee.

5/30/02:

    There is an 8" x 10" black and white photograph of me, Gregory and Sammy. The three of us are at Gregory's apartment looking at ourselves in the photo and discussing it. The photo looks like it was taken in an old abandoned warehouse or something. There is a large, arched doorway and we are kind of positioned in different parts of the doorway. Gregory is posed closest to the camera, lying on the ground on his side facing the camera. I am kind of behind him, standing up. I am holding one of those "Rocket Pop" popsicles - with the rainbow colors, in my hand. Sammy is farther behind me just standing there making a goofy face. Sometimes when we look at the photo, our positions are slightly different, or one of us will be out of it, then back in - the photo keeps changing.
    As we are talking about the photo, some guy walks into the apartment and we all start talking to him about the photo. He is a young, very scruffy looking guy with a scraggly beard. He seems to know a lot abut the photograph. It turns out that this photograph is a kind of meter or gauge of some guy that the three of us have all dated at separate times. The photograph is directly connected to the guy we dated's brain, where ever he is. Our position in the photo represents where we stand with the guy at any given time - like if he is thinking of me, I will be the central focus of the photo. If he is thinking of Gregory - and maybe a little bit of Sammy - Gregory will be featured and Sammy will be somewhere in the background. And so on and so forth... the photo is always changing depending on who of the three of us he is thinking of.
    As we all discuss this... we also realize that, the three of us and this guy talking about the photograph can also influence where we are placed within the photo. We look at the photo and keep shouting our own names along with the guy's name we all dated. As we do - our being featured in the photo will change. We keep shouting our own names louder and louder, trying to drown out each other so we will be more prominent in the photo. We're all laughing and shouting and the photo keeps changing and changing. It's funny.

5/31/02:

    I am living in some GIGANTIC house with my family. The house is so huge, and has so many infinite levels and rooms and hallways that at time some sections of it look like the old streets of Paris. I am laying down in my parent's room. My mom and dad and brother are all there. My dad is changing into his pajamas in his closet, I am laying down asleep on my parent's bed. I have been awake all night for some reason and am really tired and fall asleep everywhere I lay. My dad says "Ask Mark to wake up, I need to do some stretching exercises on the bed" to my mother. I overhear him and wake up all mad for some reason and get out of bed. I seem to be angry because, in such a huge house, he could do stretching exercises anywhere, but he chose to do them in the one place I was laying. It makes no sense for me to be angry because I was laying in HIS bed - duh. I storm out of the room and decide to go to my own.
    My room is so far away that I have to get in a little car and drive to it. The inside of the house looks like the streets of Paris. It is night time. I see some man that I seem to know (in the dream only). He owns a little shop somewhere in Paris. He is closing it up for the night right as I drive up in my car. He sees me coming and kind of walks away like we don't want to talk to each other. I just keep driving along in my little car. The streets are just wide enough to fit my little itty bitty one-seater car. Whenever I come across a pedestrian it's really awkward and hard to get around them. My head lights are always shining on the old walls of the streets as there are a lot of turn. It seems that I myself own some little shop on one of these streets. I drive to my store and get out and open it up. I don't turn the lights on I just go in there and lay on one of the tables. I can tell it is late at night. It's dark so I can't see what I sell but I see the store is full of some kind of merchandise. I just lay in the dark, with the light from the streetlight outside making weird patterns inside the store. I am thinking about my life. I get back up, go outside, lock my store door, get in my little car, and continue driving to my room.
    I get to my room, which seems to be this kind of converted attic room. I drive my little car up the stairs. I go lay in my bed. I hear my mom coming up the stairs. The whole time I had been driving through the house, she had been walking behind me - to come and talk to me about why I was upset. My mom lays next to me in my bed. She asks me why I was so upset. I tell her in this really loud voice. She seems alarmed when I tell her and doesn't answer me... she just seems surprised that I even said anything.
    Then a scenario change:  I am looking at a photograph taken of the back yard of my parent's house. It is an aerial photograph - taken from a helicopter maybe. It is at an angle - you see part of the roof and the back yard and the boat dock. The more I look at it the more the house (in the photo) changes. I notice that the roof now is a big deck with deck furniture and stuff. I think I see my mom sitting in one of the little chairs. The house seems huge like a giant estate and the back yard seems to open out onto a fantastic beach rather than the river. I am explaining the house to Gregory through the photograph. He is impressed that the house is so large.

Oops... I seem to have two 5/31 entries - well they both happened on seperate nights. I just must have inadvertanly lost track of the dates as I was recording daily entries:

5/31/02:

    I get the feeling that I am in a movie in this dream. It seems to have the timing and "editing" of a movie. I have fallen/crashed through a large glass skylight into a giant dark room - an old abandoned room. It was like some kind of trap. I fell all the way down onto the floor of the room - quite a distance. I am not hurt but I know that I will be trapped there for a long time. I can see through the now-broken skylight that it is dark outside, night time with a full moon and clear sky. The moonlight is beaming down through the skylight onto where I have landed. I am laying on my back and just looking up, kind of resigned to the situation. I am calm. I turn my head slowly to my right and see this white styrofoam cup of chicken soup. The cup has a label imprinted on it that say's "Chicken Soup" with a little red and green design. It looks kind of like a Cup 'o Noodles cup but it isn't - and it's smaller. There is a tiny little spotlight coming from overhead shining down on the cup of soup. The "camera" of the dream has panned kind of down slowly over the cup, so it is in the foreground, and I am out of focus way in the background looking towards the soup, and the cups label is facing perfectly towards the camera. The focus changes and you see me look towards the soup. Some sinister sounding male voice (that I can hear in the dark room) says "Welcome to your new house Mark. Would you like some chicken soup!? Hahahahahaha!!!" The camera sees me looking around to see where the voice is coming from. It sounds disembodied - like it's being broadcast out of a hidden speaker. The camera pans forward and you can see in the cup. Inside is not chicken soup, but steaming hot black coffee. I think I am afraid to drink it because it might have something gross hidden in it, or poison.
    Then I don't seem to be in a "movie" anymore. Scenario shift: I am working ar some kind of weird, giant grocery store. Everyone that works there and shops there is Mexican. It seems like a cross between a grocery store - with isles and stuff - and an outdoor market. This is because there is no ceiling, it is made of green tarp that kind of blows in the breeze sometimes - and in some places the ceiling is made of wood lattice work with ivy on it. It is daytime and sunny and beautiful. I am in the store but I somehow think I work there. I keep taking peices of meat that are in styrofoam and clear plastic (like in a grocery store) to the meat department guys. The butcher area is this giant room with a clear plastic ceiling. Lots of guys in white aprons and hats work there and are all very friendly. I always take them this meat and they put it under these little shower thingies and "wash" it or rinse it off. Then I take it back to the store and place it in it's chilled isle thing.
    I am always talking to the Mexican guys that work there - we are all friends. At one point me and two of these employees go through the meat department, and through this back door which leads to this giant abandoned room. The room is really huge - like an old cathedral - with crumbling brick walls, and a giant hill of dirt in one corner. The ceiling - which is very high up, is crumbled away in some parts and the light is coming in, as are plants and ivy. This big abandoned room leads to another one, and another one - like a whole series of rooms - each one giant. Each room has mounds of dirt in it - so the huge "floor" is a series of mounds that are connected - so walking through the place means climbing up then dow then up then down dirt hills. Whatever this abandoned building is it must have been huge. There are also prostitutes scattered throughout the place. They are dressed really flashy - like Hollywood movie prostitutes. The are in the building kind of working or taking a break or lounging around with a cigarette. It's hard to tell - it looks very casual.
    We walk through all the rooms and past the prostitutes (who seem to know us) and out into the sunny daylight. Right outside the abandoned rooms is a giant car junkyard. There are mountains and mountains of abandoned cars, some still intact, some smashed and some crushed into those cubes. There are car parts and junk everywhere. We wander through the hills of car junk. We come upon this one black car that is sitting by itself on top of a little dirt mound. It has no wheels and all four doors are broken off. All the glass on the car has been broken out. We sit in the car. It has all these crazy, sci-fi looking contraptions connected to the car's controls - all black in color to match the car. Something that looks like a laser cannon where the stick shift should be - these weird scanner things on the blinder flaps with green and red lights (which seem to be on) and all kinds of on-board computes and stuff. Weird. The two guys I'm with seem fascinated with the car. They play-act driving it and stuff. I imagine myself on a long road trip in the car.
    Soon we get out and me and one of the other guys have to convince the third guy to get out and leave - he's too occupied with pretending to drive the amazing car. We walk back into the abandoned building/prostitute area. We stop and hang out with some of the prostitutes. We are all talking with them. As we talk with them I sit down in the dirt and start to weirdly "design" this t-shirt with this weird little plastic machine in front of me. The little machine is flimsy and cheap and made of brightly colored plastic parts - it's flat. It looks like a child's toy that I found in the dirt somewhere. Part of it looks like one of those creepy round plastic things with a round board with farm animals or maybe the alphabet or something on it where you pull the string and the arrow in the center spins around and, depending on whichever thing the arrow was pointing to when you pulled it, the toy says "C is for chicken - I am a chicken!" and then makes the sound of a chicken or whatever. I make this white shirt with an orange circle blob thing on it and write all these words on it that tell a story - somehow the machine allows me to do this quickly - that's what it does. The machine allows me to print out a bunch of the shirts all at once. A little folded stack of them. I show the shirts to the prostitutes. They are all like "Ohhh look what Mark made! I want one!" They are all gathering around asking about the shirts. I look over and see one of the rooms (a smaller one) in the abandoned area has white dry wall walls and a bed with posts and a bedside table and an old fashioned "ring" rug on it's hardwood floors. These is a large poster of my shirt design on the wall behind and above the bed. A little halogen light is shining on the poster. There are candles burning on the bed. As me and the two Mexican guys are leaving... some of the prostitutes are wearing my shirts over their flashy sequin tube tops and stuff... it looks funny. I hear one talking to another one and saying "Yea... tonight at 8. They want six girls... you wanna go?" she takes a drag off her cigarette and says "...yea... six webs... live." I know when she says "webs" she means there will be six webcams broadcasting whatever they want the six prostitutes to do tonight at 8 o'clock at wherever they are. I imagine some orgy or something that will be broadcasting on a pay porn website or something. We go back into the grocery store and some of the employees are wearing my t-shirts somehow.
    Then a subtle scenario shift: suddenly it is night time, later that same day, and we are hanging out with some of the prostitutes on this street sidewalk. There is traffic right beside us. Some of us are sitting down and talking and everyone is hanging out. I think someone has built a fire on the pavement. I hear the prostitutes talk about who is going to the broadcast orgy tonight. I see a catalogue on the dirty ground. I look through it and see my t-shirt design is for sale inside it. It says "T-shirts by Mark Allen" and there is a price and order information. Some of the prostitutes are talking about seeing some band perform locally that they all like. Everyone is smoking cigarettes.