I'm in Random Row having dinner with several older people who are friends of my mom's. However, Random Row is in the Vinegar Hill McDonald's. I'm talking to one really old lady in particular who taught me Japanese religion in grade school. We're looking through a small gift bag of stuff from my trip to Japan in middle school. We just got it out of my mom's attic.
In the bag are two not very expensive gemstone hook-style earrings on cards, one green and one brown. I remember that there is one of each left because I gave the other ones to my girlfriend at the time, who had only one ear pierced. We also find two cards the old lady sent to me while I was in Japan. One is sort of off-green, with a tan page attached to the front that has a black bamboo design painted on it. Neither of us can make sense of what it says. I shyly admit to the lady that I couldn't make sense of it at the time either, and that I had thought it was evidence that she was going senile, seeing as she was really old even back then.
I get up and move to the side of the restaurant that is facing Preston Avenue, or would be if there were any windows to face out of. To get there I have to go up three steps, made out of darkly stained wood like everything else in the restaurant. I sit down with a white guy in his 40s. He's got a round, shaved head and is wearing a dark bomber jacket.
Agent Gibbs from NCIS walks in the back door with another naval officer. All of the naval personnel in the restaurant stand up, salute, and start screeching really loudly. Agent Gibbs walks up to our table. I tell him that I'm new to NCIS and I don't what the correct protocol is. He just looks at me with a little expectant smile on his face. So I stand up, salute, and start screeching at the top of my lungs. I'm doing this face to face with a younger, square faced black guy. We're standing there screeching at each other, staring into each others' faces.
When the screeching is done I sit down to have lunch with Gibbs, the guy he walked in with, and the guy in the bomber jacket. I'm the lowest ranking person at the table, and they don't really pay a lot of attention to me. The booth is weird, with the bench on my side extending into the wall and forming a cubby about three feet deep. I shove all of our jackets in there.
After lunch I walk through the door facing Preston Ave., and walk around the corner of the building to the door facing 5th St. By the time I get back in Gibbs and the others have already left, but there is a young, white trash navy cadet greedily going through a gift bag that I realize Gibbs meant for the both of us. It has gray Civil War style caps with black rubber attached and cut away in cool, tattoo-style designs. I get real angry, bunch up my fists, walk toward the cadet, and wake up.
This dream was posted one day late. It happened Thursday, January 20th
Showing posts with label thursday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thursday. Show all posts
Friday, January 21, 2011
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Watching Myself on TV
I was called down south to one of the Carolinas to help work on a murder mystery. I got to the FBI command center for the investigation, which was in an old hotel, the kind with one level of rooms all with doors leading outside, arranged in a row with a covered walkway in front of the doors.
The room that the FBI had taken over for their command center was huge. I wander back through it, chit chatting with various people, many of whom I knew from high school. Most of it was personal stuff, catching up with each other, but a fair bit of it was about the investigation. Eventually I passed a table with two women I didn't know at it. However, they knew me. When I looked at their name plates on the table, I realized that one of them was the woman I was supposed to report to, but I had forgotten her name up to that point. I sat down and handed her the manila folder I had been carrying around with my orders in it.
The other one, who looked like Mary from work, asked me if I had any concealed weapons on me that I needed to register with her. I hesitated, because I had my butterfly knife in my back pocket, and while I was with the investigation I wasn't a law enforcement officer. The Mary look alike went on for some time about concealed weapons, and what a pain it was for her, especially when people held out on her about them, and how we could deal with it now or later, how she (as part of the FBI) could confiscate it now, or she could just turn me over to the Mountain County Police. I asked her if we could deal with it after dinner, figuring I could just stash it in my hotel. She agreed.
At this point, the other woman had come back. She handed me a white t-shirt with several strips of masking tape on it. There was cursive writing on the masking tape done with ball point pen. It had a list of parking spaces that I could use. I assumed it had my hotel room number on it as well, but I didn't read all of the numbers to be sure.
I got up and went back to the interrogation room, where there was a group of people standing together talking over what the interrogation strategy would be for the suspect they were bringing in. They were somehow all managing to stand facing away from me. They had long dark hair, so I couldn't see anything of their heads, and I had the impression they had no faces. I realized that I wasn't quite ready for an interrogation, so I left to go to the bathroom to freshen up. When I got back from the bathroom, I got lost and couldn't find the interrogation room again. I kept walking down the hallway opening doors, but they were all the wrong door. Eventually I realized that I had gotten into the wrong hallway. As I got to the door of the interrogation room, I realized that maybe I shouldn't walk in during the interrogation. I started to open the door, which had two huge stickers on it with lots of warnings using incomprehensible ideograms and lots of fine print. Kathleen, my supervisor, came up behind me in a white lab coat, and reminded me that Lt. Bone was running the investigation, and he was a real hard ass.
We backed out and went next door to the observation room. Inside was Russ, Kathleen's supervisor. It was a very cramped room. It was narrow in the first place, and one whole wall was packed with filing cabinets. The window between us and the interrogation room wasn't a one way mirror. It was dirty, yellowed sheet of thin, clear plastic. Down at the bottom was a small slot for passing notes back and forth. Clearly, the whole thing was improvised.
There was a huge crowd of people sitting and standing at a table. Again they had their backs to me, with long dark hair, and the impression of facelessness. There was one man in a light blue button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, who's face I could see. I figured he was Lt. Bone. The suspect was an overweight black guy with close cropped hair, dressed in an electric blue track suit. He was totally at ease and answering a lot of questions. I could barely hear anything, but I looked down and saw a small black cube, with a screen on one side. I could hear someone typing, and notes about what was being said were showing up on the screen. They were talking about being constructive at the moment. I looked over to see who was typing, and I saw Marishka Hagaritay with a small keyboard. I hadn't noticed her because she had been hidden behind one of the filing cabinets. I remember think that she didn't look nearly as hot in reality as she does on TV.
At this point the show ended. The whole dream up to this point had been a TV show that I had been watching in my hotel room. I was impressed with it too. I was thinking that this was maybe a second TV show that was worth watching on Hulu, along with the Daily Show with John Stewart.
I got up and left my hotel room. The hotel I was staying in had the exact same exterior as the hotel in the TV show, but with new paint on the trim. I walked down the block to a small diner. While I was eating (at the counter) I noticed that the time zone here was an hour and fifteen minutes off Eastern Standard Time. They had these weird clocks with all the numbers rotated counter-clockwise 90 degrees, so that fifteen after was at the top. The clock wasn't round, either. At each fifteen minute interval there was a rounded lump sticking out, and each one had another circle of obscure numbers in it.
When I was done with dinner I went back to the hotel. Kirk had been working outside of town, and had just gotten back in. He was wondering if it was time for dinner yet, and I noticed another of those weird clocks in the hotel room. After making some comment about the clocks to Kirk, I suggested we go to the diner for dinner. He wasn't interested, so I suggested the Italian place I had eaten at the night before. But Kirk wanted to go to some weird ethnic restaurant. So we went outside and walked over to the street, which was 355 near the White Flint Metro Station. We jumped on a bus. It was more like a trolley, with an open back with two benches facing sideways away from each other. The whole thing was painted in Rastafarian colors, and the driver was playing Bob Marley's Exodus really loud.
The bus pulled a U-turn and started heading north on 355. It was wobbling back and forth a lot, and there was no way to secure yourself in the seat. Kirk and I were both sitting up on the top of the seat backs, grabbing onto the poles supporting the roof. I was really nervous about it, but Kirk was totally casual, having ridden the bus a lot in Richmond.
When we got to our stop the bus just slowed down a bit. We had to jump off and hit the ground running. Kirk and I got off, and so did a family of black people. The family was really confused, because they hadn't been here before and they didn't know which way to go. Kirk walked over to the shoulder, hopped the guardrail there, and ran down the hill. I looked, but that section of hill seemed too steep, so I went around the guard rail. Here there were strips of mulch with small shrubs in them. I managed to run down the hill without stepping on any of the shrubs, although I did step in the mulch twice.
There was a parking lot at the bottom of the hill. Kirk had already run across the lot and ran into a cave that went under the next parking lot and led to the restaurant. I ran across the lot after him, but when I got there all the cave mouths were really small, and I would have to crawl through them between the narrow gaps in the stone columns. I wanted to go further to my right, to try and find a larger cave mouth, but I figure that by the time I did that Kirk would be so far ahead of me that I would get lost in the caves. I was thinking what an asshole Kirk was being by running ahead like that when I woke up.
I haven't had a good dream memory like this for a while. I think the key is to remember as much of the dream as possible while still in bed. When you wake up from the dream, try to remember as much as you can right then and there. Then as soon as you can after you get up, write it all down.
Connections with reality: Kirk is thinking of coming up here this weekend. Brad Warner is planning on moving to North Carolina.
The room that the FBI had taken over for their command center was huge. I wander back through it, chit chatting with various people, many of whom I knew from high school. Most of it was personal stuff, catching up with each other, but a fair bit of it was about the investigation. Eventually I passed a table with two women I didn't know at it. However, they knew me. When I looked at their name plates on the table, I realized that one of them was the woman I was supposed to report to, but I had forgotten her name up to that point. I sat down and handed her the manila folder I had been carrying around with my orders in it.
The other one, who looked like Mary from work, asked me if I had any concealed weapons on me that I needed to register with her. I hesitated, because I had my butterfly knife in my back pocket, and while I was with the investigation I wasn't a law enforcement officer. The Mary look alike went on for some time about concealed weapons, and what a pain it was for her, especially when people held out on her about them, and how we could deal with it now or later, how she (as part of the FBI) could confiscate it now, or she could just turn me over to the Mountain County Police. I asked her if we could deal with it after dinner, figuring I could just stash it in my hotel. She agreed.
At this point, the other woman had come back. She handed me a white t-shirt with several strips of masking tape on it. There was cursive writing on the masking tape done with ball point pen. It had a list of parking spaces that I could use. I assumed it had my hotel room number on it as well, but I didn't read all of the numbers to be sure.
I got up and went back to the interrogation room, where there was a group of people standing together talking over what the interrogation strategy would be for the suspect they were bringing in. They were somehow all managing to stand facing away from me. They had long dark hair, so I couldn't see anything of their heads, and I had the impression they had no faces. I realized that I wasn't quite ready for an interrogation, so I left to go to the bathroom to freshen up. When I got back from the bathroom, I got lost and couldn't find the interrogation room again. I kept walking down the hallway opening doors, but they were all the wrong door. Eventually I realized that I had gotten into the wrong hallway. As I got to the door of the interrogation room, I realized that maybe I shouldn't walk in during the interrogation. I started to open the door, which had two huge stickers on it with lots of warnings using incomprehensible ideograms and lots of fine print. Kathleen, my supervisor, came up behind me in a white lab coat, and reminded me that Lt. Bone was running the investigation, and he was a real hard ass.
We backed out and went next door to the observation room. Inside was Russ, Kathleen's supervisor. It was a very cramped room. It was narrow in the first place, and one whole wall was packed with filing cabinets. The window between us and the interrogation room wasn't a one way mirror. It was dirty, yellowed sheet of thin, clear plastic. Down at the bottom was a small slot for passing notes back and forth. Clearly, the whole thing was improvised.
There was a huge crowd of people sitting and standing at a table. Again they had their backs to me, with long dark hair, and the impression of facelessness. There was one man in a light blue button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, who's face I could see. I figured he was Lt. Bone. The suspect was an overweight black guy with close cropped hair, dressed in an electric blue track suit. He was totally at ease and answering a lot of questions. I could barely hear anything, but I looked down and saw a small black cube, with a screen on one side. I could hear someone typing, and notes about what was being said were showing up on the screen. They were talking about being constructive at the moment. I looked over to see who was typing, and I saw Marishka Hagaritay with a small keyboard. I hadn't noticed her because she had been hidden behind one of the filing cabinets. I remember think that she didn't look nearly as hot in reality as she does on TV.
At this point the show ended. The whole dream up to this point had been a TV show that I had been watching in my hotel room. I was impressed with it too. I was thinking that this was maybe a second TV show that was worth watching on Hulu, along with the Daily Show with John Stewart.
I got up and left my hotel room. The hotel I was staying in had the exact same exterior as the hotel in the TV show, but with new paint on the trim. I walked down the block to a small diner. While I was eating (at the counter) I noticed that the time zone here was an hour and fifteen minutes off Eastern Standard Time. They had these weird clocks with all the numbers rotated counter-clockwise 90 degrees, so that fifteen after was at the top. The clock wasn't round, either. At each fifteen minute interval there was a rounded lump sticking out, and each one had another circle of obscure numbers in it.
When I was done with dinner I went back to the hotel. Kirk had been working outside of town, and had just gotten back in. He was wondering if it was time for dinner yet, and I noticed another of those weird clocks in the hotel room. After making some comment about the clocks to Kirk, I suggested we go to the diner for dinner. He wasn't interested, so I suggested the Italian place I had eaten at the night before. But Kirk wanted to go to some weird ethnic restaurant. So we went outside and walked over to the street, which was 355 near the White Flint Metro Station. We jumped on a bus. It was more like a trolley, with an open back with two benches facing sideways away from each other. The whole thing was painted in Rastafarian colors, and the driver was playing Bob Marley's Exodus really loud.
The bus pulled a U-turn and started heading north on 355. It was wobbling back and forth a lot, and there was no way to secure yourself in the seat. Kirk and I were both sitting up on the top of the seat backs, grabbing onto the poles supporting the roof. I was really nervous about it, but Kirk was totally casual, having ridden the bus a lot in Richmond.
When we got to our stop the bus just slowed down a bit. We had to jump off and hit the ground running. Kirk and I got off, and so did a family of black people. The family was really confused, because they hadn't been here before and they didn't know which way to go. Kirk walked over to the shoulder, hopped the guardrail there, and ran down the hill. I looked, but that section of hill seemed too steep, so I went around the guard rail. Here there were strips of mulch with small shrubs in them. I managed to run down the hill without stepping on any of the shrubs, although I did step in the mulch twice.
There was a parking lot at the bottom of the hill. Kirk had already run across the lot and ran into a cave that went under the next parking lot and led to the restaurant. I ran across the lot after him, but when I got there all the cave mouths were really small, and I would have to crawl through them between the narrow gaps in the stone columns. I wanted to go further to my right, to try and find a larger cave mouth, but I figure that by the time I did that Kirk would be so far ahead of me that I would get lost in the caves. I was thinking what an asshole Kirk was being by running ahead like that when I woke up.
I haven't had a good dream memory like this for a while. I think the key is to remember as much of the dream as possible while still in bed. When you wake up from the dream, try to remember as much as you can right then and there. Then as soon as you can after you get up, write it all down.
Connections with reality: Kirk is thinking of coming up here this weekend. Brad Warner is planning on moving to North Carolina.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Country, Color, Object
This dream was posted a day late.
I'm staying with Coleen and her family in a large house full of college students. There was a big party the night before, and the place is a total mess. Every surface is covered with garbage or a spill of some sort. Coleen and I are surveying the damage when she tells me that my job is to help Benjamin with his Blues Clues book. I'm confused. I thought she would need help cleaning up the mess.
So I go and find Ben in a back room. He starts giving me instructions on how I have to write my sentences. David is there, and he's chiding Ben for insisting that things have to be so exact. I open the book, and each page has blanks for a country, a color, and an object for me to fill in. Then Benjamin has to guess what I wrote.
Somehow, the three of us end up in the bathroom arguing about it. Something jumps up from behind the toilet and start to climb the walls.
At this point I woke up and rolled over. I kept doing that all night, with little snatches of the dream in between. The only one I can remember is that everyone was standing around talking. Everyone had fractals growing out of their faces, except for one person who had smooth skin that everyone was treating like a weirdo.
I'm staying with Coleen and her family in a large house full of college students. There was a big party the night before, and the place is a total mess. Every surface is covered with garbage or a spill of some sort. Coleen and I are surveying the damage when she tells me that my job is to help Benjamin with his Blues Clues book. I'm confused. I thought she would need help cleaning up the mess.
So I go and find Ben in a back room. He starts giving me instructions on how I have to write my sentences. David is there, and he's chiding Ben for insisting that things have to be so exact. I open the book, and each page has blanks for a country, a color, and an object for me to fill in. Then Benjamin has to guess what I wrote.
Somehow, the three of us end up in the bathroom arguing about it. Something jumps up from behind the toilet and start to climb the walls.
At this point I woke up and rolled over. I kept doing that all night, with little snatches of the dream in between. The only one I can remember is that everyone was standing around talking. Everyone had fractals growing out of their faces, except for one person who had smooth skin that everyone was treating like a weirdo.
Sporty New Car
This dream was posted a day late.
I have a sporty new car, and I'm showing it off to people at Walker Middle School. Somehow Kara gets a hold of it, and I have to drive out of the parking lot in her car. I drive up to Dairy Rd., and she squeezes in beside me on the right, even though I'm making a right turn too. She zips around and down to 250, but loses control and slides out into traffic. Cars keep coming and smashing into her, spinning the car around like it's on ice. I end up being the one who has to explain everything to the cops.
I have a sporty new car, and I'm showing it off to people at Walker Middle School. Somehow Kara gets a hold of it, and I have to drive out of the parking lot in her car. I drive up to Dairy Rd., and she squeezes in beside me on the right, even though I'm making a right turn too. She zips around and down to 250, but loses control and slides out into traffic. Cars keep coming and smashing into her, spinning the car around like it's on ice. I end up being the one who has to explain everything to the cops.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Dice Club
I was hanging out with a teenaged Edward Norton in a high school. It wasn't any particular high school, more like a generic high school from some movie. We were trying to get into the locked corridors that that janitors used to move secretly around the school. We had managed to hack the computer security system, and enter in a fake PIN for a short period of time. As we were trying it out we heard some people coming, but we punched in the code and got into the room before they saw us.
I could hear the people talking, and realized it was the principal (an overweight fellow with dark hair) and the new janitor (who I'd never met, but somehow knew was a pretty-but-plain blonde lady). The principal was giving her a job orientation, and mentioned what her pass code for the locked corridors would be 2-0-3-6. This was great, because Ed and I now had a permanent code for the corridors, but it also meant they were coming in to the corridors so we had to high tail it out of there. We snuck through the secret corridors and out into the woods behind Charlottesville High School.
The next day in Algebra class at Walker Middle School we started organizing an underground student rebellion. Some other kid (an overweight pompous type) challenged us for leadership of the revolution, so we went down to the cafeteria to fight it out. The challenge was resolved with some dice game, which involved throwing the dice at your opponent. I beat the guy in the challenge. Norton and I were leading an angry mob of students into the locker area when I woke up.
But I was still dreaming.
I was in Jason McLeod's old room on Locust Ave. (East side), but it was my brother Kirk's apartment. I was waiting for Kirk, Mom, and Ryan to get back, and to kill time I was reading Cerebus #9, although the comic otherwise looked like Cerebus #51. After a while I stopped reading it and put it down on top of the plastic bag it had been stored in.
When Kirk and the others got home he noticed that the tape from the plastic bag had stuck to the cover of the Cerebus comic, and peeling it off stripping the ink from that part of the cover. He was really mad about it, and wanted to know who had been reading his comics. I owned up that I had done it, and promised to buy him a new copy of that issue. He pointed out that the issue is rather hard to find, especially since most of the comic shops have closed because of the recent economic downturn. He thought the comic shop near me might be a good place to try, though.
[Now this is interesting. The comic shop he is talking about is not a real comic shop: it's one that has shown up in several other dreams of mine. You get their by catching a bus at the corner of Monticello and Altavista in Belmont, which goes a few blocks out of Charlottesville and ends up in Rochester, NY. It's a big and wonderful comic shop that takes up several buildings, completely in contrast to the actual (sucky) comic shop in Rochester (at least when I was there)]
Ryan was confused and didn't understand what the problem was. We explained how the tape that hold comic storage bags closed often adheres to the comic itself, damaging the cover. By that time we needed to get ready to go to the rock concert at the bat perserve in Gainesville, FL. I put on my punk skull T-shirt that Kirk had made for me, which was drawn in a Southwestern Voodoo style. Mom was running around with a mesh bag full of orange onions, trying to make sure we had enough food.
That's when I really woke up.
I could hear the people talking, and realized it was the principal (an overweight fellow with dark hair) and the new janitor (who I'd never met, but somehow knew was a pretty-but-plain blonde lady). The principal was giving her a job orientation, and mentioned what her pass code for the locked corridors would be 2-0-3-6. This was great, because Ed and I now had a permanent code for the corridors, but it also meant they were coming in to the corridors so we had to high tail it out of there. We snuck through the secret corridors and out into the woods behind Charlottesville High School.
The next day in Algebra class at Walker Middle School we started organizing an underground student rebellion. Some other kid (an overweight pompous type) challenged us for leadership of the revolution, so we went down to the cafeteria to fight it out. The challenge was resolved with some dice game, which involved throwing the dice at your opponent. I beat the guy in the challenge. Norton and I were leading an angry mob of students into the locker area when I woke up.
But I was still dreaming.
I was in Jason McLeod's old room on Locust Ave. (East side), but it was my brother Kirk's apartment. I was waiting for Kirk, Mom, and Ryan to get back, and to kill time I was reading Cerebus #9, although the comic otherwise looked like Cerebus #51. After a while I stopped reading it and put it down on top of the plastic bag it had been stored in.
When Kirk and the others got home he noticed that the tape from the plastic bag had stuck to the cover of the Cerebus comic, and peeling it off stripping the ink from that part of the cover. He was really mad about it, and wanted to know who had been reading his comics. I owned up that I had done it, and promised to buy him a new copy of that issue. He pointed out that the issue is rather hard to find, especially since most of the comic shops have closed because of the recent economic downturn. He thought the comic shop near me might be a good place to try, though.
[Now this is interesting. The comic shop he is talking about is not a real comic shop: it's one that has shown up in several other dreams of mine. You get their by catching a bus at the corner of Monticello and Altavista in Belmont, which goes a few blocks out of Charlottesville and ends up in Rochester, NY. It's a big and wonderful comic shop that takes up several buildings, completely in contrast to the actual (sucky) comic shop in Rochester (at least when I was there)]
Ryan was confused and didn't understand what the problem was. We explained how the tape that hold comic storage bags closed often adheres to the comic itself, damaging the cover. By that time we needed to get ready to go to the rock concert at the bat perserve in Gainesville, FL. I put on my punk skull T-shirt that Kirk had made for me, which was drawn in a Southwestern Voodoo style. Mom was running around with a mesh bag full of orange onions, trying to make sure we had enough food.
That's when I really woke up.
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