Mark Allen's Dream Journal - May, 2004
*note: Date of dream entry refers to day before,the date of the night I went to sleep and the dream I had into the next day's date.5/1/04
I am in several locations during different parts of this dream:
A) a vast city that kind of reminds me of Kobe, Japan - it is always dark and rainy here.
B) in the kitchen, den and adjoining hallway/laundry room of a house I lived at in Big Lake Park in Plano, TX - it is always dark and rainy outside the windows.
C) a decrepit tenement building somewhere in a city (NYC?) where I have an apartment on the first floor.
D) the interior of a vast, two-story, modern penthouse apartment high atop a roof somewhere in a big city (NYC?) - it has a grand, sweeping staircase in the main entryway and giant floor-to-ceiling windows on one wall.
First I am in location C, the tenement apartment building. I have just returned from a trip and am walking up the stairs with my luggage. I walk into my front door, and as I do so I say hello to an across-the-hall neighbor... a tall, young guy with bushy hair and jeans and a stained sweatshirt. I walk into my apartment, which is filthy and falling apart with peeling, maroon painted walls. I find a large note on the floor that had been slipped under the door while I was away. It is from some historical restoration society. The note tells me that, according to the society's research, hidden in the walls of my apartment is the single known copy of a very important film by a very important "philosophical film director" from a foreign country. The film is an important and priceless work of great cultural significance. It is on a large reel... and is apparently the actual working copy of the film... not a print. The director is long dead and his work is studied greatly. This particular film is elusive and highly sought after, people have been searching for it for decades. The note goes on to tell me that the society would like to arrange a time when I am not at home so they can come in and knock down the walls of my apartment and look for and retrieve the valuable film reel. They say they have pinpointed several locations in various walls where it may be... but they really need to just come with their scientific wall-reading equipment and sledgehammers and look for themselves. The note doesn't explain at all how the society came to gather this information. I put the note down and go out into the hall. Suddenly, I notice (I hadn't seen it before) a large aluminum reel of film standing upright on a wobbly, old antique table. It is placed right at the top of the stairwell. It's just sitting there unattended. The aluminum canister the film is in is shiny and looks brand new. There is a large note masking-taped to the reel which has written on it (in black felt marker) information for a shipping service for what to do when they pick up this film. I guess that the historical society got tired of waiting for me to show up and just went ahead and got into my apartment and found the film... now here it sits waiting to be shipped off to some cultural restoration research lab or something. As I am standing looking at the note and thinking about everything... I keep seeing out of the corner of my eye my across-the-hall neighbor who keep opening his door very slightly and peaking out, then slamming the door when he sees that I have seen him. For some reason I know that he is fascinated by the film and may have been trying to get at it and tamper with it, or watch it. I wonder why such an important historical work is just sitting here in my hall with a note taped on it for shippers.
Then I am in location B, my old Plano home. I am there with a very big-hipped, short-bleached-haired bull dyke whom I don't know. We are watching television in the den and keep walking back and forth to the kitchen. At one point we are looking for some microwave popcorn to make but we soon realize there isn't any in the pantry. We kind of get into a little argument about it. As we are talking, I look over on the counter and see a bag of freshly popped microwave popcorn laying there... with the top slit open and steam coming out of it. Oddly, the note for the shippers (that was on the canister of film from location C in the dream) is taped to the bag of popcorn with the same kind of masking tape. I reach over and grab the popcorn and rip the note off of it and start to eat the popcorn really loudly and obnoxiously in the dyke's face... and chant all childishly; "Ha, ha... na...na..nee... na-na! Eye-yie-yie have popcorn and you-woo-woo doe-won't!" She opens her mouth in a joking shocked way and then runs into the den. We both know I was kidding. I look over on the counter where the popcorn bag was and now see the aluminum canister of film with the note taped on it.
Then I am in location A, the vast, Kobe-like city in the rainy night. I am deep inside one of the massive buildings of the city and I seem to be giving these people dressed as doctors (in long, white lab coats) a tour of the building's basement. I sense hostility, like I am under suspicion from the doctors and am trying to prove my innocence. I just keep taking them from room to room going; "...and here... here we have an empty, brick-walled room. Look at that wall over there... it's crumbling! And now if you'll step this way, notice the hallway that has a musty feel... uh-oh! It smells like mold!" and I'm kind of trying to make really boring uninteresting things in the basement seem interesting and worthy of being pointed out. Suddenly one of the female doctors crosses her arms in defiance and says to me sternly "Where is the film Mark!?"
Then I am in location D, the giant penthouse apartment. I seem to be directing a film that is starring Deborah Harry. She is there, and there are some other tech and film people. There is a scene we are setting up to shoot on the massive, curving stairway in the giant foyer of the apartment. Debbie is wearing a cream-colored, classic cut, 1940's-style dress and black shoes. Her hair is her typical platinum blond with the deep black roots in the back... it is kind of longish and is styled with a slight wave and kind of curved ends... and parted to one side so if she bends over the long bangs hang over one eye very dramatically. In the scene we are setting up, she is supposed to stop on the stairway while going up it, put one hand on the handrail, and bend over and remove one of her high-heel shoes (so her bangs hang glamorously in her face over one eye). She is also supposed to also say the line; "Mirrors and fucking are the same since they both make more people."
5/2/04
No dreams.
5/3/04
All I remember is approaching a window (from indoors) and I can see what looks like a big chunk of grass that has peen pulled out of a planter pot, roots, dirt and all... and placed sideways on the outside window ledge. The sun is shining on the grass so it kind of glows bright green.
5/4/04
No dreams.
5/5/04
I am in some suburban city that I don't recognize (but it is very similar to Plano, Texas). I am with a group of people I don't know. We are in a car, it is nighttime, and we are driving across a totally empty landscape that has white concrete roads with grass medians and stoplights at each intersection and streetlights overhead and electric wires running the length of every road. It's like a suburban area that has everything in place except any houses or buildings of any kind. Just endless empty lots. Whenever I look up at the white glowing streetlights from the back seat of the car, they glare in my eye almost like a camera lens.
We seem to be hurrying because we have gotten word that some movie that Courtney Love is in is going to be premiering at a certain shopping center, and Courtney herself is going to be there, along with the press and it's all very exciting and we want to go. We are suddenly at the shopping center... it is a very new, outdoor mall shopping center... very modern and lavish and nice. There are people everywhere and spotlight shining up into the night sky, and I think a red carpet leading into the movie theater part of the mall. It seems like Los Angeles. We are out of our car and mulling around the crowd. We seem to be trying to figure out a way to shmooze our way into the premier. At one point we see the top of Courtney's bleached blond hair as her and her entourage go inside the theater. We are still trying to get in.
Soon, I find myself separated from my group and I am wandering around alone. At one point, somehow... one of the security guys lets me in and I go inside the lobby of the theater. The lobby has great big vaulted ceilings... but is prefab new... not an old structure. Despite the chaos outside, the lobby is rather serene... few people are around.
I go back outside and I keep walking back and forth from the crowd outside to the lobby inside. At one point I see a little "tent area" that is a kind of holding space for people that are going to be allowed into the premier, but are being made to wait in this tent area before they can all be let in as a group. I see Drew Barrymore standing under this tent, alone, facing the building impatiently like she really wishes she could just go in. People are taking pictures of her in the tent as she just stands there waiting. We lock eyes as I walk past her.
Back inside... I am wandering around the vast lobby, looking for the screening room where the movie is being shown and Courtney and everybody is. I keep looking in theaters that are empty and have all the lights on... or vast rooms that look like the insides of nightclubs when they are closed during the day. Every once in a while I'll run across a small group of people that say they think they know where the Courtney screening is... then they will give me directions to this location, but I won't be able to find it.
Finally, I find a theater on a basement level that is screening a film and I assume this must be it. The seats are only half full. I look around in the dark for my friends but don't see them. I just sit in the seat and watch the film. It is some really bad student film shot on digital video. My eyes keep scanning the half-full crowd to see if I can see Courtney or anyone. Soon the end credits roll for the film and they are extremely out-of-focus. I point to the screen and say to the guy next to me; "Those are good credits! Blurry credits!" He laughs.
As the house lights come on I see there is a whole front section of seats I couldn't see. There I see the back of Courtney's head and her entourage sitting with her. People start getting up quietly... it's late and everyone seems tired and just wants to go home. I walk out into the lobby again and walk towards an escalator that I know will take me to a parking garage where my car is. For some reason I don't seem to be with my friends anymore and am now driving home alone.
5/6/04
I was in my apartment here in NYC, but it looked very different. It was much, much longer... like a railroad style apartment. There was also a large pile of cardboard boxes on the floor in the kitchen. I am walking all the way from the bedroom to the kitchen, and it is late at night. I see the kitchen door opening, it's opening the other way than usual... plus the inside of it is painted glossy black so it's kind of reflective. It reflects a blurry image of the kitchen as it moves open. I am creeped out as I don't know who would be walking into my apartment this late at night.
Then a total scenario shift: I am on some really phony-looking beach (like maybe it's a movie set or something) and there is this tall, skinny, beautiful woman with short dark hair, lying on the sand in a two piece bikini. There is some man next to her who is either crouched down, or may be a midget. I kind of "hear" this voice say "Sitting down forever..." or "waiting an eternity sitting down..." or something like that... and then some time seems to have passed and the woman's stomach has banana pudding spread all over it and vanilla wafer cookies arranged carefully on top of that, like polka dots. She is lying back with that stuff on her stomach and exhaling and huffing her cheeks in exasperation... she seems really annoyed. I think the midget guy is the light meter guy, and it is indeed some kind of photo shoot.
5/7/04
I'm with Jim and we are at some mall that looks a lot like the Galleria in Dallas, TX. For some reason there are news kiosks in the walkways of the upper levels. At one point Jim and I are standing by one of these kiosks and we are kissing. Some black guy looks around a group of people that are between us and him, to look at us. For some reason his image "freezes" and I see a photo of him doing this, which has been printed out... cut into a circle, and then arranged on a piece of construction paper with glitter and other pieces of paper. It looks like a child's school art project.
5/8/04
I am in some suburban neighborhood setting, some town I do not know. It is daylight and it is springtime. In this dream I seem to take three four different forms: sometimes I am me, and other times I seem to be a little girl... and other times I seem to be a little toy doll (a doll of a little girl) that can move around like a person. Even other times I seem to be a tall, slim, older man with a gray beard who is some sort of con man or criminal. When I am the little girl/doll... I know somehow that the older man is my father.
At first... I am the older man. I am visiting some house in the neighborhood that I chose at random. The yard of the house is kind of on raised land... like a little hill... and is covered in lush, green grass. It's a ranch-style house... modern. I don't know the people that live in the house... but I seem to have conned my way in somehow, like telling them I'm a long lost relative or something. The inside of the house is all done in drywall, dark wood and light beige carpet. There are lots of windows that let in natural light, and also a lot of sliding doors/partitions that separate the rooms. We are soon sitting in the middle of their living room and talking, and they are serving me tea and cookies.
Then some time seems to have passed. I am still the older man. Apparently, everyone in the house is dead... I have murdered them. Their bodies are scattered around the house. I get a cell phone out of my pocket and call my daughter and give her the address of the house and ask her to come over and help me steal the valuables and the car. As I am speaking to her on the phone I am looking from room to room and sometimes I see the legs of one of the house inhabitant's bodies sticking out of a doorway or something.
Then, suddenly, I have switched... I am now the little girl, and I am in a different location. I am walking through the neighborhood towards the address my dad gave me, talking to him on my cell phone. It is the same phone conversation. I arrive at the house and go inside. My dad, the older man I used to be, is pointing out everything in the house that is of value. He tells me that he has to leave and go do something... but he gives me specific instructions to take the family's car (which is a huge, old, maroon and white-colored 1970's Cadillac) out of the garage at a certain time and drive it to our house so we can strip it down and sell the parts. He tells me to be sure and lock up the house before I leave, and turn all the lights out. He then leaves the house, and I am all alone in the home. It is so quiet inside that you can hear that weird little "sound" hiss that you can sometimes hear in extremely quiet, enclosed spaces. The sunlight is beaming through many of the rooms through the many windows... sometimes making steaks of light in all the little dust particles that are floating around. Because I am only about four feet tall, my perspective of everything is different.
The bodies of the slain family that my father killed are strewn around the house. I just wander from room to room... bored and waiting for the time my father told me to take the car and leave (a few hours). At one point, I take the body of the oldest woman in the house (who is slim, in her late 30's, with short black hair and wearing a maroon silk blouse and navy blue stretch pants), and I actually prop her sitting upright on the carpet and start to play with her dead body like it's a doll. I start talking to her and arranging her hair. I get the impression that I am so young and spend all my time helping my father on his murderous con schemes... that I never have any friends or even personal playtime... so this is my way of coping.
I keep talking to the dead woman's body as I pace around the room... kind of acting like a mother to it. I keep shaking my little finger at it and saying stuff like; "I told you it was time to stop playing and come inside for dinner didn't I? But you disobeyed me! Now I have to punish you! I want you to go straight to your room and have an imaginary tea party with your stuffed animals!" So then... I walk towards the stairs and I begin to walk up them. As I do... my body changes from that of the little girl, to an actual little plastic doll that can move like a human. I am a living little doll, in the shape of a little girl, that looks kind of Shirley Temple-ish. I have a cute little dress on, and plastic hair in little curls, and plastic little shoes on and a plastic-formed face that has eyes and lips and blushed cheeks painted on. All my joints are attached with little plastic rivets. I find it very difficult to walk all the way up the carpeted stairs since I am only a little plastic doll that can't move it limbs as perfectly as a human. I'm only about a foot high. But somehow I hold onto the wall and kind of work my way up the stairs... step by step.
When I finally get to the top of the stairs... I am still the little doll. I go into one of the bedrooms where two of the family members' bodies are laying on the floor. I decide that I am going to have an imaginary tea party with them. I arrange a little table in the middle of the room with little chairs, and a play tea set. I then try my best to push and pull the two dead bodies onto each of the little chairs. It's too hard for my little doll body to pick them up. I give up, and decide to go back downstairs. It's much easier to climb down the staircase than it was to go up it.
I start running around the house with my little doll legs... waiting for the time I have to take the car and leave. I start to get a little scared because I am in this house all alone with these dead bodies. I start to imagine that the body of the mother, which is still sitting up in the living room where I left her, has sort of "come to life" ...and now has a giant plastic doll arm in the place of one of her real arms. I imagine that this "alive" dead body woman with the giant doll arm is evil, and can sense where I am in the house at all times... and is just waiting for the right moment to strike. At one point I look over at her dead body propped up in the middle of the floor, totally motionless, sitting upright with it's back to me, a ray of sunlight in beaming across the carpet in front of her.
I get so creeped out, that I decide to go into the garage and take the car out ahead of time, just to get out of the house. I go into the garage and lock the door behind me. Somehow now, I have transformed back into the human body of the little girl. I get in the big Cadillac car and I look in the back seat. There are two more dead bodies propped up in the back seat that my father didn't tell me about. I put the keys in the ignition and realize that my little girl body is too short to reach the pedals or steer and be able to see over the dashboard... but somehow I think that I will be able to manage. I start the car, and push the button to open the automatic garage door, and back the car out of the driveway. As I do... the two bodies in the back seat seem to come back to life, to "wake up," and as I back away from the house down the driveway... I start to talk to them. They seem totally casual... like nothing is wrong.
As I pull away from the house (it is still daylight)... I can sense that the "alive" dead body woman with the giant doll arm is inside the house... walking around and plotting to come after me. I look up at the front door of the house as we pass in front of it. I see the front door of the house suddenly slam shut! Who did that? I look at the road... then I look back at the front door again and see that it is back open, and I see a giant doll's arm wrapped around it, and pulling it shut again! It's the evil dead body woman and her giant doll arm! I speed away from the house a little quicker. As I drive through the neighborhood, I tell the two resurrected dead bodies in the back seat about how the dead body woman has the ability to dematerialize and then materialize through thin air wherever and whenever she wants... and that she knows where I am at all times. I tell them about how she is just waiting for the right time to materialize right in front of our car and smash the windshield with her giant doll arm, killing us all.
5/9/04 - 5/12/04
No dreams.
5/13/04
I am walking through a downtown section of a very small, old town that I do not recognize (possibly in the southern US). It is nighttime and no one is around but me. The area I am in looks like a typical "town square" that has been slightly modernized... the buildings are antique but very clean and maintained. I seem to be walking to a nightclub to see some bands perform live. It is a club I have never been to before, and for some reason I am worried about not having enough money to pay the cover charge when I arrive. I don't know how much it will cost to get in and for some reason I'm stressed about this.
I finally reach the club and there are a lot of people hanging around outside. I walk into a side door of the club (which I think is the main entrance), and expect to eventually run into a ticket taker or person to pay, but then I find myself totally inside the venue. I don't know if I accidentally went in the wrong entrance when no one was looking, or if there's just no cover charge (or ID check) and anyone can just walk in. There is a loud rock band playing in the main room and the place is packed. It's kind of dark, but the room is lit up from the stage lights and from the lights at the bar. I go to the back of the club and up a stairwell which leads to another room where another band is playing. Up there, it's just as packed, but the mood of the room is very different. The whole room is kind of lit up, and the crowd is tightly packed together, all just facing the stage staring and motionless and quiet. The weird band on stage has an elaborate setup: there is a system of layered tiers of hot tubs (actually just about three layers) that look like they have been made from children's plastic swimming pools. The band is made up of about twenty members, and they are all in bathing suits (or nude?) sitting in the pools. The pools are filled with water. All the band members have bleached platinum hair that is styled in outrageous new wave hairstyles... and they all have elaborate "new romantics"-style make up on their faces. Some of the women have their entire faces painted cobalt blue. The lead singer is sitting in the uppermost pool, and is singing a slow song, acapella. He has his arm around one of the women. The other members in he pools look like they are waiting for their cue to all join in like a choir. The audience is very still and watching very intently.
Then a total scenario shift: I am "observing" a huge sphere-shaped, complex machine. The whole thing is make up of beans and poles and small riveted girders and pulleys and levers... and it's all arranged into a giant sphere that is kind of in front of me. The machine is actually a chicken cutlet meat tenderizing machine. There are little panels where slabs of raw chicken meat sit, and then there are meat tenderizing hammers attached to little arms that pound the meat. The whole thing is kind of repeated... hundreds of slabs on panels with hammer arms... all over inside the machine... repeated like a 3-D tessellation... like an M. C. Escher drawing. It seems to operated by perpetual motion. I just stare at it as all he hundreds of pieces of raw chicken get pounded and tenderized inside the massive sphere-shaped machine in front of me.5/14/04
I seem to be two people at once. I am a tall man with dark, slicked-down hair, in a 1960's-style dark suit and skinny tie, and wearing dark sunglasses (I actually seem to be the character Professor Leonard Nosferatu / Professor Von Braun from Godard's film 'Alphaville,' or just look exactly like him - but am still me inside), and in other parts of the dream I am simply myself. The two personas are different people, one looking exactly like a character in a film, but is really me... and one just me.
At first I am the 60's man, and I am standing in an outdoor plaza in front of a business building made mostly of glass. It is daytime and very sunny. I can see inside the lobby of the building, which is made mostly of marble, has a row of elevators and has an old man sitting behind a security desk wearing a white dress shirt and a security guard hat with a black shower cap over it. I can also see my reflection silhouetted in the glass... I seem to have an old fedora hat on.
Then I have switched and seem to be myself, and I seem to now be inside the lobby. I look around and see the old man looking down at something a his desk. I can see outside the large glass walls into the plaza, but I don't see the 60's man (me). I notice that over near one of the side marble walls, oddly, is a little kitchen table and breakfast nook area, with a mom and two little kids sitting at the table working on some sort of arts and crafts project. The decor around the table is done in oranges and burnt yellows and browns... and the style of the mother and children's clothes is very 1970's-looking. I kind of move closer in on them to see what they are doing. I see the mom showing the two kids how to make something out of what looks like crushed Cheetos that are being arranged and glued onto a black & white 8x10" photograph. I look down at the photograph and see that it is a photo of Professor Von Braun outside in the plaza. The child is looking down at the photo and arranging the crushed Cheetos so they perfectly cover Von Braun's silhouette. The pieces keep falling off of where they are supposed to stay in place... but eventually they all stay. Then the mother starts blowing on the Cheetos, which for some reason seems to "harden" them and make them stay in place. The mom keeps blowing on the Cheetos and as she does more and more, she then reaches down and gently lifts the hardened orange blob off the photo, which lifts off completely clean and has now formed a perfect sculpture of Von Braun (in scale size to the photo) with his little hat and everything (all made of Cheetos). The mother stops blowing on it and smiles really big as she lifts it up, and the kids go "ohhh!" and "aahhh!" I walk over to the table and see a strange big box of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, which seem to be involved in the project somehow. the box is very large, and has a weird, reseal-able top. It has a graphic of Tony the Tiger on it, surrounded by some illustrations of bicycles. I somehow know that the box is not filled with cereal but is instead filled with plastic toys or something.
I wander back over to the security guard's desk and look at it. He is still sitting behind it... with his head resting on one arm, which is looking down at something behind the little partition in the front of the desk. The desk is made of marble. As I walk around to the front of it, I see a large black glass camera lens imbedded into the front... which is pointed outwards in the direction of the outdoor plaza.
5/15/04
I am a trucker. I drive an 18-wheeler all over the country. The truck itself is red, and sometimes it is black. The inside is huge, with all kinds of panels with blinking lights and stuff. It seems that most of the time I am driving around at night, so all the lights on the inside of the truck are glowing in the night as I move along the road. I remember stopping at some point on some deserted, moon-lit mountain road... getting out and just looking around at everything as the truck engine idled.
5/16/04 - 5/19/04
Out of town.
5/20/04
I am sitting in a giant , fluorescent -lit room that looks like a school room for small children. I am alone in the room. The floors are tile and the ceiling is white cork board with fluorescent panels. There is a wall of windows on one side, it's daylight outside, sunny, with the afternoon sunlight is shining through the rustling green leaves and making light/shadow patterns on the glass and in the room. I am sitting at a giant formica table and there is a large sheet of tracing paper in front of me. I "know" that I am supposed to take some finger paints and paint on the surface of the paper. I sense that I am being kept in this classroom, after class has let out, to do this assignment on my own. For some reason I know that this class was in session earlier in the day, and some embarrassing thing happened where the teacher scolded me in front of everyone for not having some homework assignment or something. So I now have to sit here, in detention, and finger paint until my parents come to pick me up.
I somehow know that my parents were reached by phone and they said that they would come eventually to get me, later in the evening. But, now that all the teachers and faculty have left the school, and I am here alone. I now know too that my parents have since called the school office to say that they have discussed it at length, and they are not going to come get me after all - because they have decided they want me to face a hard life lesson on my own, and rough it getting home on my own. But since no one is in the school, they just left a message on the school answering machine. Plus, I don't know how to get home from this school. I also kind of know that my parents actually just don't want to have to come pick me up.
So I just sit at this table... waiting to finger paint, but no one showed me where the finger paints are... and all the cabinets have been locked. I contemplate going to the school cafeteria and getting packets of mustard and ketchup and painting with those, but I know I will just get in trouble for "mocking" the punishment assignment, and probably just have to stay after school to do it again. I decide to do it anyway... paint with packets of ketchup and mustard - besides, all the paints are locked up... how am I supposed to get them with no one here? I walk out of the art room to go to the cafeteria. I find it but the doors are locked shut with a chain lock around the door handles. So I walk to the bathrooms but find them locked too. I start walking around the empty halls looking for something to paint with. The halls are dark and echo-y and spooky.
Along the edge of the floor in one hallway, between the floor and the lockers, I see this weird little stream of water. It is running in a little troft. The troft is beige in color and appears to be made of that same kind of plastic that the inside of swimming pools is made of. I walk along the hallway... following the stream of water. The sound of the trickling water is very soothing. I keep walking along the dim hallway... following the water. Soon... the water stream gets bigger and I see that it leads to a large opening at the end of one of the hallways. It leads out of the school and into a brightly sun-lit back of a giant grocery store alley/truck-loading area. I recognize the area from the back of a grocery store area that me and friends used to play around as a kid, in Texas. It's really wide ...a large, open, warehouse-y space. I see the big, dark green dumpster, the large beige stucco wall with the trees hanging over it. I see all different kinds of gum spots on the white, hot, sparkly pavement, I see the metal stairs that lead up to a door that says "exit" over it. I look down at one end and see where the wooden fences of people's residential yards start. I see that the stream of water that came out of the school is now trickling into a little drain in one part of the alley. I realize the school isn't around me anymore. Its a beautiful day, and I start to walk away from the alley area and decide to walk around in the town I grew up in.
5/21/04
I am on a beach. It is sunny and hot and windy. I am there with a woman I do not know. She is tall and thin, and is wearing what looks like black ballet rehearsal leotards and tights, with a black wrap over that, and a large black scarf wrapped around her head and flowing down her back. We are sitting in the white sand. She starts talking about how she is a "smell sculptor" who creates invisible sculptures that kind of hover in the air invisibly, and you have to pass through them with your nose to experience them. They stay motionless in one spot in the air, un-movable and invisible... and consist of pockets of air that are scented. She is talking about how she is an "olfactory artist" and how she wants to create the "perfect sculptor of the beach" and make it a masterpiece and all. She wants her beach sculpture to be "real" and not "fluff." At one point as she is talking she suddenly has a black umbrella to shield herself from the sun with. The wind is blowing her clothes as she talks.
She is still theorizing, and as she does, I look down in my hands and see that I have a bunch of objects in them, that are kind of hovering in the air around my hands. They consist of a small kitchen towel that has been soaked in ocean water, coconut-smelling suntan lotion, a cheeseburger, packets of mustard, what look like amputated seagull feet, weird pockets of black tar/oil, sunglasses, carnival tickets, gross wet seaweed, packets of condoms, temporary tattoo stickers and a pair of small binoculars. The objects are kind of just floating there, and I am able to "mix them up" or kind of wring them out in the air right in front of me as I listen to her talk. I somehow know that this is one of her sculptures in it's raw form right in front of me. Soon these objects will become invisible and turned into pockets of smelly air that will become her "beach sculpture." As I wring the objects in my hands in front of me, they start to get sand on them because they are wet.
I soon look around and realize that I don't see the ocean anywhere. I conclude that we are not at the beach at all... but are at the White Sands National Park in New Mexico. I look over at the woman and see that she has a large black leather purse with the back end of a white poodle dog sticking out of the top. The dog is not moving, and is either a stuffed taxidermy sculpture, or a dead dog. I wonder if it is an ingredient in one of her upcoming sculptures.
5/22/04 - 5/24/04
No dreams.
5/25/04
I'm watching comedy actress Catherine O'Hara on some TV show, and for some reason I'm thinking about how she has been a heroin addict all her life and how it eventually killed her (not true in real life! not a drug addict and still alive). She is on the beach in the scene of the TV show I'm watching, sitting on a fold-out chair and having a conversation with someone. Her hair keeps changing drastically every time the camera cuts to her, like she's switching wigs. In some of the cuts she has wild sunglasses on. I start to think about how she probably got hooked on drugs in her SCTV days... and I think about how she must have snuck heroin in her trailer while on the set of "Home Alone" so she could be funny. I start to look way in the background of the TV show beach set, and I see Rush Limbaugh laying on a towel all covered in suntan lotion.
5/26/04
I am working in some publishing office in some building that has white plaster walls and dark blue industrial carpeting. The office is spacious and the building it is in is old, and kind of not kept-up very well. A lot of the office furniture looks used and mis-matched, and in some of the rooms you can see where the carpet was just laid over the concrete floor and is curled up against the walls because it didn't fit the floor plan exactly right. I think the publishing company produces children's textbooks.
There is one meeting room that has a formica fake wood fold-out meeting table in the middle, and windows with white horizontal blinds that look out onto the rest of the office. I am in there with this girl I used to know, Emily (I used to work with her in places like this years ago in temp jobs, in real life). Every time I am with her we are just hanging around in empty office rooms (the company seems pretty sparsely employed) and talking about how lame the company is and how they aren't paying us on time and how we want o quit so bad. It's really lazy and weird. I never see any windows in the whole place. Sometimes we walk through vast, wide industrial carpeted and drywall-ed hallways with overhead fluorescent lights... that lead to immense copy rooms where no one is around. Everywhere we go we can hear the distant roar of centralized air conditioning vents. We're always gossiping about our coworkers but I hardly ever see anyone else in any of the rooms. It's almost like we're the only people there (or on Earth). We just wander around and laugh at the store-bought framed art prints hanging on the dirty walls, and then open closets and look at dusty boxes of office supplies (pads of paper, paper clips, post-it notes) and go through them out of boredom. Sometimes I think we are looking for snacks or candy. At one point when we are going through one of the supply closets I come across this box of record albums... it is filled with about one hundred mint condition copies of The Durutti Column's old "Circuses and Bread" album.
At one point, we are back in the meeting room with the formica table, and Emily and I are eating what I think are cherry Twizzlers. Emily is laying on her back on the table and is telling me something very important. She is telling me about another company she discovered on another floor in the building we are in. She says that she "discovered" a secret hallway in a part of this office that no one ever goes into... and she found out that it connects right to that other company's office. She tells me that this passageway connecting both companies in also unknown to the second company, because that hallway on their end is part of their office that no one over there ever goes in either... not even the nighttime cleaning people. So it has existed for who knows how long... and no one knows about it. She's telling me all this in a very secretive tone, like the way a child would tell friend's about a haunted cave they had discovered in the woods.
So we leave the meeting room and go off in search of the hidden hallway. We are still on the clock. We try to act really sneaky and draw as little attention to ourselves as possible (even though hardly anyone is around). Finally, we find it. We round a dim hallway corner where a lot of the overhead fluorescent lights are burnt out. The passageway looks kept-up and clean... like someone has been maintaining it... but has not replaced the lights. We pass through the dim area and suddenly realize we are in another office. It looks just like ours, but a lot nicer. There are more employees there, and many of the desks have nice partitions and hanging plants around them. The furniture looks new. Plus... all along the parameter of the room is this strange kind of under lighting strip which shines up and casts interesting patterns on the white plaster walls. We just try to blend in and walk around like we work there. Everyone in the office is being really quiet... like it's a library. At one point we pass this pretty woman with long blond hair and a brown business suit on. She is sitting at her desk and she is placing these transparent, plastic toy slug cartoon character things onto the wall next to her desk. Each one is a different color, and they have sticky stuff on the bottom of them so they stick to the wall. She looks over at us for a second, then she goes back to what she is doing. She has heavy eye make up on.
Then suddenly me and Emily are back in the meeting room of our office. I know a lot of time has passed, weeks or months. Emily and I have, over this time, worked out a system where we still work in this company's office, and collect checks from here... but we go hang out in the more fun, nicer company's office all day... via that passageway that no one here knows about (or the other company itself). I also get the impression that we have "built" (or discovered?) yet another secret hallway that connects straight from this meeting room to the other company's office.
5/27/04
I actually seem to be in the same double secret office setting I was in, in yesterday's dream (unusual). I am with Emily, and some other people. Apparently... the word about the secret hallway and other company's office has spread and now everybody knows. At one point I am in the meeting room of the first office, and Emily is standing there with a bunch of other people. She has a bunch of those sticky colored toy slugs from yesterday's dream... she has them all over her face and is standing there making gurgling noises. Everyone is laughing and Emily is really hamming it up, just standing upright with her arms tensely at her sides kind of vibrating and going "gruuuggggle... sluuurrpprrlleee..." really loudly. As I stand and watch her though, I realize looking closer at her face, that the toy slugs are not the only thing there. They are stuck on her face, but underneath this... her face actually is a monster face. All her eyes and nose are gone... and her face looks like the giant sucker mouth of an eel or maybe a giant vagina with razor-sharp teeth that contract in and out (similar to the monster in the movie 'Predator'). The colored toy slugs are stuck around this monster face to try and kind of camouflage it. Everyone is laughing, but the thing is... I see now that Emily is actually standing upright but is rigidly paralyzed... and the gurgling noises are not a joke... those are monster screams and she is screaming for real, in monster pain, but everyone thinks it's a gag.
Then a scenario shift: I am in the exact same public library from my 3/21/04 dream, but I am with the people from the office of this dream. Emily is there and fine and her face is back to normal. I seem to be an older woman in this dream, like maybe in my 60's. For some reason... I am standing around the library (which seems to be closed and most of the lights out - kind of dim) with these people, and we are all talking about some much younger man that I seem to be dating (who is not there). We are all talking about how kind of taboo it is for me to be dating such a younger guy. As I am talking to them, I go over to a wall that has a large mirror... and I proceed to try and light a cigarette. I keep lighting the wrong end of it. The sulfur tip of the match I use breaks off and gets imbedded in the tobacco at the end of the cigarette. I keep switching the ends around and trying to inhale it. I keep trying to light it over and over. Everyone in the library, all my office friends, are silently watching me... giving me all their attention. No one is saying anything. I finally am able to light the cigarette and I look at my old woman face in the mirror as I exhale the smoke. I kind of smile really big a fake smile to look at my teeth in the mirror. They are stained very badly yellow.
5/28/04
I am in the back yard of a childhood friend. It is daylight and overcast, wintertime. All the grass is dead and all the leaves are off the trees. I am just walking around their backyard, alone, and I keep sneezing constantly... like I can't stop. That's all I remember.
5/29/04 - 6/1/03
No dreams.