Wrap your Worries in Dreams

Bad-Neighborhood Dream, and Last Night's Dreams

2007-08-17T05:45:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

The first dream I'm going to record is one I had about 4 and a half months ago. I also had two short dreams last night, but they're somewhat mediocre, so they'll come after the older dream.

In the older dream, I was about 12 years old and had moved with my Mom to a bad neighborhood somewhere in California. The dream seemed very real because in real life I moved to North Carolina when I was almost 11 years old, and had some of the same feelings in this dream. So, in the dream my Mom and I had moved to a one story house, with holes in the walls and floors, and no curtains. Even the switches and plumbing were either out-of-date, or somehow faulty. I remember my Mom gave me a little bag of penny candy (she used to do this in real life when I was little), and asked me if I liked the new place we lived in. I was worried about the new school I'd have to go to. The doctor had prescribed me methamphetamine for ADD, and I was afraid I'd get in trouble for having drugs, even though I was supposed to have them.
I heard a police report about the people who lived in the house before my Mom and I. Two sisters lived in the house, and got killed in a botched drug deal. The police were saying that one of the sisters had just pulled in the driveway, and that she would have survived if she had just hid next to her car, rather than go in the house. In my 12 year old mind I had decided I would hide outside the house (like the sister should have) if I got in trouble for my methamphetamine prescription at school.
I was particularly unable to get comfortable in the new house because it was in such bad shape. I remember trying to take a shower, but I could only get cold water to come out because I didn't realize till after the fact that the hot water was turned on by a little switch to the side of the faucet. When I got out of my cold shower and was drying myself off, I remembered there were no curtains, so I had to dry off in the one corner of the room not visible from the windows. That is when I noticed that my Mom had tried to hide the holes in the walls by stacking books and CDs in them.

In the first dream I remember from last night, a woman was painting her face with a paint brush. She was literally painting a face on her face, so not simply putting on make-up. I felt as though I recognized her from another dream, and said to myself, "Oh, that's who she is."

In the second dream I remember, I went to a small party, had a lot of fun and met some new friends. I was walking home one day, and one of the girls from the party offered to give me a ride home. Evidently, her friend (who was the hostess of the party) made a bracelet for me for my birthday. The girl wanted me to stop buy and get it. I felt awkward just showing up at the hostesses house to ask for the gift, but I did and the hostess was happy I came to retrieve it.

My new friends and I got together at a convenience store (I think to practice running it). The front of the shop was an actual store, but the back of the shop was a "practice" store, but it still had real products on the shelves, and I remember we could take anything we wanted, so I got some over-the-counter medications, and was happy to save money. Every one left the store and walked away in different directions. I ended up walking downtown.

I could tell I was near the sea though I couldn't see or hear it. My throat was dry, so I stopped in a convenience store to get some hard candy. When I was about to interact with the clerk, another customer mistook me as an employee there and rudely asked me to help him. I ignored him and proceeded with my transaction. The clerk became impatient as I was putting my purchases on the counter for him to ring-up, so he went to the back of the store. I could see a television in the back of the store.

Though I couldn't see the clerk, I could see someone was fast-forwarding the TV, so I assumed it was him. The image from the store security cameras came on the TV, and showed the clerk sitting on the couch watching the footage. I felt irritated and just left. I then came to a dessert store, but when I went in, all the desserts had ice cream in them, and I'm lactose intolerant. I left the store and continued my walk through downtown...and that was it.

Thanks for reading,

Marc

Tommy-Helps-Me-Dream and Some Fragments

2007-08-16T15:09:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Here's a picture of me in front of the computer, and a picture of Angie on the computer. I'm going to record a dream I had almost exactly five months ago, and then record some brief fragments I remember from last night and the night before. The older dream I had about a co-worker named Tommy. Tommy and I both descended into one of life's darker oubliettes at the same time. Our problems had different causes and expressions, but I think the fact we were both in a downward spiral caused a certain understanding between us. I'm no longer in contact with Tommy, and last I heard he was in a rehab in Canada.

In the dream, my mother had a house in a swamp. The house was so overcome by the swamp around it, that the back-end of it was sinking into the water. If you went into the rooms in the back of the house, their very edges were underwater, and most of the floorboards had moss and mold on them. I went to my mother's house to retrieve something from it, something sentimental. I brought friends with me because the trip was too dangerous for me to take myself. We retrieved some of my precious childhood belongings, and trekked back through the swamp. We had to swim across a deep reservoir to get back to the road. The depth of the water felt more threatening because night had fallen, and now the water and land around me were equally black.

When I got back to the road I realized I had left something very dear to my heart in my mother's swamp house, I'm pretty sure it was the very thing I had set out to get in the first place. I felt so upset! Out of all the people with me, only Tommy felt bad enough for me that he agreed to go back with me, even though it was a frightening trip. I really think this dream was reminding me of some warm-heartedness or understanding that I got from Tommy during my "crazy." Perhaps it's just a dream, but there is a lot I don't remember from that time. So, I feel the need to say, "Thank you Tommy."

The past two nights have been a bit restless, so I've only remembered some dream fragments. The night before last I had a dream I was in class with Michael May. I kept a telephone in my desk. I went home that night and drove back to class the next day, but when I was driving to class my car's engine just stopped. I managed to coast the car into a parking spot near the building I had to go to. I was very upset and hoped Michael would help me, but I wanted to try and get someone else's help first, so he wouldn't feel I was imposing on him.

I went to my desk, but someone had taken my phone. I said, "where's my phone?" and Michael told me he just put it in a cubby by the door. I went to the area, but didn't see it, and needed him to take the phone out for me. I felt stupid for needing his help anyway, just to get the phone to call someone for help with my car.

Last night, I completely forgot my dream even though I was aware I was dreaming. I thought very hard and was able to dredge up the last scene. A man and I were courting each other, but hadn't started dating yet. As a gift, my dad gave the man a large quilt. However, the quilt had been used as a death shroud before, and my suitor was too uncomfortable to use it. My dad was very angry he didn't use the gift, and I tried to explain to my dad it was an inappropriate gift. I hoped he would understand why the man wouldn't use it.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Roaming-Dream

2007-08-13T05:06:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Today I'm going to record two dreams, but will post the newest dream first, so I don't forget any detail. I just woke up and had the dream about 15-20 minutes ago.

In the dream, I was moving out of a rental house where I shared a room upstairs with one of my house mates. I remember my bed had mustard yellow sheets. I moved out of this house into an apartment of my own. A friend asked me about my old house, but I had already almost forgot about it. I think it disturbed me that the place I just lived in should leave my memory so quickly. I guess it was a fear of separation from the past.

I left my apartment on foot, and went to find my sister. She lived in a town house, and the sun was setting. I knocked on her door, but no one answered. I had a small CD player with me, so I lay it on her doorstep and listened to "No Quarter" by Led Zeppelin. She was home after all and just wasn't answering the door. She only answered the door because the particular song irritated her. She ended up talking to me for a little bit anyway. It was still dusk when I left her apartment. I walked between the townhouses and through yards of apartments, and came out to a street that led to a sea-side carnival closed for the season. The wood of the stands was dried out and splintering from the salt in the air.

I came by one closed stand that had a wooden Christmas scene (the size of a moderate stage) laying on its back. I traced my fingers along a statue of a toy soldier. I continued walking and came to a mental hospital I had stayed at perhaps when I was a teenager in the dream. I decided to go in because they still had some of my personal effects I never collected, but when I went in they wouldn't let me go. I took it upon myself to just leave. I recognized the road which left the hospital and began to follow it to my apartment, but it started raining so hard that I couldn't move very fast, and before I knew it guards from the hospital tracked me down with scent dogs.

I was returned to the mental hospital, but a journalist came and walked me out, and we snuck to the side of the building. A guard confronted us, but the journalist began to argue with him. As they were arguing, a disgruntled employee from the hospital came around the side of the building and dropped a pile of files and letters on the ground and left. I went to the pile and found files providing proof of criminal malpractice in the mental hospital. I also found a manila envelope filled with my belongings from when I stayed there as a teenager, and the letters were ones I never received from various friends.

I found two Dexedrine pills among my personal effects, and thought "good, now I can get something done." A lot of the letters were from a girl named Audrey Pratt, who in real life was my best friend from the ages of 12-17 (this is why I presume I was in the mental hospital as a teenager). She sent me pictures of herself and little pieces of artwork. The journalist scared off the guard, picked up the files, and we left. She dropped me off at my parents' home, and my parents told me the mental hospital could call me back any time they wanted to, and I asked them if there was anything they could do, but they didn't answer. We got in the car (a white station wagon) and began to drive somewhere. I kept on asking if there was anything they could do, but they wouldn't answer.

We then turned into a different family, I was some teenage kid (and no, not even me when I was a teenager) with short light brown hair, and my parents were in their 30s and kind of looked like white-trash. As this kid, I was still asking them if there was anything they could do about the mental hospital having a permanent hold on me. The car broke down, and we all got out of the car. My parents started talking about if there was anything they could do, and I was glad they were finally thinking about it, but I soon realized they were talking about the car, not me.

I kept asking, but they weren't paying attention to me, and I began to feel faint and lay down on the ground next to the car. I then switched to the point of view of a woman walking down a snowy path (it was Trinity road as a gravel foot path). I remember her thinking, "I can see castles in the snow on the path, I can see castles in the falling snow, I can see castles in the snow that's blown by the wind, I can see castles in the clouds." Then I woke up.

I remember a short dream from the night before last. I was in Connecticut again, and playing in the undergrowth of a forest. I found various herbs and was excited about it. I was looking for a holly plant and finally found it, but it was missing leaves and sickly looking. I then heard a voice come out from the sky saying, "Marc, you're always disappointed by what you find." I left the forest and walked down the driveway of a small farm to the road, and the neighbor from across the street told me I could swim in his pool if I liked. I did and was happy because I love swimming.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Another Fragment

2007-08-11T09:57:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Yesterday evening I told my Mom my method for remembering my dreams, and just that night I became aware I was dreaming twice, but nearly forgot both. I have a slight memory of one of the dreams.

When I'm not so faded and tired, I can look much more androgynous than I do now. For so long I've been meticulous about my appearance, but now that things have changed in my life, I'm too tired. Perhaps that will change some day, and perhaps that's why I had this dream.

I had a dream of being in school again. I abruptly left class because my sister was moving and I had to get some boxes. While getting boxes from a store, one of the employees mistook me as a co-worker, and rudely asked me where the plastic spoons and forks were. Glad to be unhelpful, I just answered, "I've never known where those are."

When I returned from class the teacher was mad at me for leaving. I was suprised because I left class to do something important, but it soon dawned on me that when you're in class it doesn't matter if your sister is moving. I returned to my apartment in a bit of a down trodden mood.

As I was making my way past an ill-tempered neighbor's door, he came out dressed very beautifully. I could hear the silk rubbing together, and smell his perfume. I thought to myself, I wish he knew I could look just as beautiful. In my mind I imagined introducing myself to him, after taking some time with my appearance.

Theatrics are theatrics, but presenting an image can be something to be missed.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Worry-Dreams

2007-08-09T05:16:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

This time I managed to take a picture of myself much earlier in the morning, closer to when I actually had the dream. I'm going to narrate two dreams I've had since I've been a bit slack about writing my dreams down. The first one I had about two nights ago, and the second dream I had this morning. The first one will be harder to describe because much of it had to do with how the place felt and how I felt, not really how things looked.

A big family gathering of a friend of mine was about to take place. I was evidently a friend of the family as well, and was invited to stay over the night during the reunion. It was a very big house with a large yard, and wide deck, elevated about 8 feet above ground level by wooden poles. The house was three stories high, but the first and second stories were actually split level, which is the reason the porch was so high above the ground.

I felt uncomfortable about staying over, but it was one of those situations where it would insult the family if I didn't stay. Nightfall came. I was sleeping in a chair in the family room, along with other guests my age, who were distant enough to the family that they weren't able to get a room in the house. Everyone in the family room were either sleeping in a chair, on a couch, or on the floor. We joked (with a grain of sincerity) that we were the orphans of the house, and we should stay up all night, while they stayed up all day.

It's odd to be a guest, so you feel the need to "make yourself at home," but at the same time feel too uncomfortable in the host's house to really accommodate your needs. I find this often to be the case when visiting someone other than a peer. This is how I felt in this dream. I woke up in the middle of the night, and all the other "orphans" were fast asleep. I had to go to the bathroom, and decided to go to one on the bottom floor because no one was there and I'd be less likely to disturb someone. However, when I got down there, I felt if someone in the house heard me rummaging down there, they might think it was a burglar. Of course, the bathroom didn't have a lock, so I was afraid that if they did think it was a burglar, they might bust in the bathroom while I was using it.

Upon deciding this, I felt it was better to go to the bathroom in the main hall, on the second story (the same story as the family room). I went in the door, and realized it was a kind of mini-kitchen (perhaps for a mother-in-law suite etc). It was messier than the rest of the house and had someones personal effects all over the place. I even saw a pair of eyeglasses on the counter. I felt maybe I wasn't supposed to be there, but then rationalized the hosts knew they had a lot of guests, so should expect to have people using whatever bathroom, and then I woke up. The dream highlights my discomfort with being a guest (I've never been the kind of kid to go to slumber parties, and when I did I always regretted it).

Here is the dream I had this morning: The dream started with me searching a discussion board for answers about how to relieve my anxiety around other people. I typed in my particular inquiries thinking I was typing in a search engine box, but instead I was actually starting a thread, so everyone could see what I wrote and reply to it. I remember going back to the website and seeing that someone replied to my post, but since I didn't intend for it to be public, I didn't read the reply and continued my search.

I actually forgot what happened between that scene and the next one I'm going to describe, but I know not a lot of action intervened between the two. I was hiking in a forest with my friend Michael May, trying to divert myself from my worries. We had done the hike and I was still very anxious, so Michael pulled out two CDs and we both put them in our walkmans in our backpacks and continued to hike. The CD was of a man leading us through a path in the woods. The object was to follow the directions the man gave on the CD, and we were supposed to do everything at once and not pause, so we rushed through the forest paths following the recorded voice's instructions.

We came to a small canyon (so perhaps I should call it a ravine with a creek running through it). The creek at the bottom was only about 20 feet down the sheer walls of the ravine. It was very clear and shallow, but quick running over its bed of smooth rocks. There were three boulders that rose to just 4 feet or so below the cliff-top our path led us to. The CD told us to cross the ravine using the boulders as stepping stones, and said we could take no longer than 30 seconds to do this. In my head I pictured a man stepping off the cliff-side, falling forward with his foot landing on the first boulder, he then stepped-out with his next foot and fell forward. Perhaps because of the angle of the drop, he was able to bypass the middle boulder and fall with that foot planted down on the third boulder, he then leaped up to the cliff-side on the other side of the creek. Basically, the man I pictured in my mind (a mental manifestation of the directions I was being given by the CD) was crossing this ravine (about 20 feet wide) with only two steps and one leap.

It seemed very dangerous to me, if not impossible. Michael told me it was just an optical illusion, and that it was actually not that far from the first boulder to the third, and that the middle boulder was shorter than the other two, so you could just step past it. Our 30 seconds was nearly up, so I decided it was too dangerous, and quickly took an alternate path that led down to the ravine floor, across the creek, and up the other side. Michael decided to use the boulders as stepping stones like the CD instructed. He made it fine until he came to the leap off the third boulder to get on the other side of the ravine. He lost his footing and fell backwards, and landed on his backpack at the edge of the creek.

Since the boulder was already below the cliff-side, I figured there was a good chance he wasn't hurt too badly. I went down the path to the ravine floor and came to Michael. He seemed dazed and I went to help him up. That's when I noticed his CD player and his CD were shattered, which made me think he had a good chance of having a substantial injury. I helped him and we left to go to the parking lot of his work place (my former work place) to send him home or to a doctor. Michael was silent the whole time, and I began to feel something was wrong with him. As I walked him to his car, shards of the broken CD started to fall on the gravel parking lot . I tried to gather them up so no one would step on them.

As I was gathering the shards, I came upon very thin sharp pieces of glass, which I assumed came from Michael's backpack too, but as I collected them they started to break off and melt in my hands. I noticed there was ice, sleet, and snow all over the parking lot now. I got Michael to his car, and returned to the woods to go back out the path to where ever I came from, but I was stopped by employees of the store I knew from when I worked there. The snow was very deep now, and they were all drinking in the parking lot. I joined them, and started to feel very drunk, so I said to one of my friends there that I was going to stop drinking. He encouraged me to have some more, and I drank more. I then realized he was already smashed and was just trying to get me on the same level as him.

We went into the workplace because the people I was drinking with hadn't clocked-out yet, and wanted me to wait for them there. I stopped to say hello to my old boss, she looked very tired and work-weary. We went into the back of the store and I sat around while my ex-co-workers were tying the loose ends up to get out of work. Their supervisor was irritated with them because he said, "If you clock-out now your just going to have to wait till everyone else is ready anyway." I felt relieved to not be working there anymore.

Everyone was finished and we went back to the parking lot, that was now buried in high drifts of snow. I helped the friend with me get to his car because the snow was almost over our heads. He was parked at the edge of the lot, in front of a restaurant with people eating outside under an awning. The snow was so deep I had to turn around and do a sort of somersault to launch myself forward and get a little higher on the snow. The proprietress of the restaurant said, "He looks like he's trying to get away from something." I then reached my car, and the dream ended.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Pact-Dream

2007-08-06T08:10:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

My dream last night was slightly out of character for me like my last dream post. It reminded me so much of playing a video game that it took me a second to realize I was dreaming.

I had a dream where people lived in protected conclaves with force-fields around them, so only members of that conclave could exit or enter it. Marcus and I (Marcus was my best friend when I was a teenager and I haven't seen him in years) lived in one conclave, but we had another group of friends we secretly contacted (people from one conclave were not supposed to communicate with people from a different conclave) over some time. This group of friends consisted of two girls and one guy.

Marcus and I, and this other group decided upon a suicide pact, which we were going to carry out separately in our own areas. Marcus had got a very sharp sword that we agreed I would kill him with, and then I'd kill myself. When we got down to doing it, I realized I didn't want to kill myself, and that if I killed Marcus like he wanted me to, I'd just get charged with murder. I told Marcus what I felt, and he decided he didn't want to kill himself either. We hatched a plan to falsify our identity, so we could sneak into our friends' conclave. We wanted to try and stop them from committing suicide.

When we left our conclave, we were in some sort of flying vehicle. Outside, there were a lot of unmanned flying machines equipped with weapons. We had to keep a certain distance to keep them from detecting us. I remember feeling nervous as we flew over one in particular, I was just hoping our vehicle could fly high enough. We got to our friends' conclave where we contacted someone we knew there who was a maintenance worker on the force-field. He managed it so we would seem like members of that area. We snuck in and found our friends.

The man and one of the girls had already killed the other girl. When we told them we had decided not to kill ourselves, they also agreed. I remember feeling sad for the girl who already got killed. I went to the bed where she was killed, there was blood all over the place. I looked at a photograph of her with one of her friends. I was surprised to recognized them as acquaintances in my real life (of course in the dream I was just surprised to recognize the friend, but when I woke up I realized they were people I knew in real life). I looked on a shelf next to the bed, where the girl had been playing with a few small figurines while contemplating her death.

The remaining of us realized we now had a murder scene to clean up. We quickly cleaned up the bedroom and washed any clothes and bedding with blood on it. If I remember correctly, the dream ended with us leaving that conclave and sneaking back to the one Marcus and I came from, so the man and woman could start a new life with us, and not be penalized for the other girl's death.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Typical Nightmare

2007-08-02T06:02:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Last night I had a nightmare. It must of been produced by some increased anxiety I've been feeling because it otherwise seems to have little to do with my day to day life. Luckily, I had a sense of disassociation from the dream when I was having it, so it's not as if it was actually a scary dream. Unlike the dream I had in my last post, this dream just didn't feel like it was really happening.

The dream started with a lot of people gathered in a large outdoor parking lot, so something like where a state fair would be held. People sat on the hoods of their cars (etc) and talked with each other. On the road going by these fairgrounds, I saw rows of people walking by -- these were some type of alien. It didn't seem like any of the people knew for sure if the aliens were a threat, but my family, friends, and I already decided to leave the area. We rushed into our cars and drove to a large underground chamber, it looked like a sandstone rock quarry, but was completely underground. That's were we stayed, closing an enormous door behind us.

My perspective then shifted back to the fairgrounds/parking lot area. A couple of young men approached the aliens and began to talk to them. The aliens had a sense of decay about their otherwise human features, and when they spoke their intentions materialized upon the humans they were talking to, like illusions. As one alien spoke to one of the humans, it appeared the young man's throat was slit, and that the alien had flesh between its teeth. As soon as the young men stopped talking to the aliens and left, the illusion of a slit throat disappeared from the young man, and the aliens looked like normal people again.

My point of view then shifted to a number of other people around that particular town getting ready to hide underground from the aliens. I remember one was of a boy alone in his house, taking his pets down to the basement. I also remember a scene of people trying to get out of a mall through it's back entrances, but most of them were being caught and eaten. Oddly enough, one female alien was trying to catch up to a human child, to try and help him escape. However, in the child's fear he ran too far ahead of this female alien, and the scene ended with her looking through the back corridors of the mall, looking at the victims being eaten by the other aliens, in fear this boy was one of their victims.

I then appeared back in the dream with another man. We were trying to escape together. We entered something that seemed like a very large drainage system, or sewer, but it was large enough to have concrete and glass office stations lit by florescent lights through out its levels. Other people were trying to get into this underground area too, but they were being overcome by the aliens. For some reason the aliens didn't seem to notice we were human, and kept passing us by. I remember in one instance a nerdy looking alien was tricking humans into thinking he was a human, and an evacuation official. He would direct the humans into a corridor as if it was a path deeper into the underground area, but it was in fact a trap (where the humans would then get eaten).

A lot of people tried to get back out the doors of this corridor once they saw it led to a dead end, but more aliens would come to the entrance and keep them from escaping. Again, the man and I were overlooked and escaped after also falling for the nerdy alien's trap. We realized their was nothing safe about this underground area, so as soon as we came to an entrance that led back outside, we ran out. There was a creek leading into the woods from the tunnel we escaped through. We followed the creek into the woods, and this is how we escaped.

The dream then switched to a scene of two girls who had been killed by the aliens. After realizing they were dead, they jumped down a shaft in the underground area, down into "heaven." In heaven all the creatures were cartoons, but the girls soon realized these cartoons were also aliens that wanted to eat them (again). However, the two girls determined that since they were in heaven, they were the monarchs of all the cartoon aliens. The girls then shouted for the alien cartoons to leave them alone, and the cartoons fled in a big crowd. That's when I woke up.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Happy-Disrepair Dream

2007-07-31T05:55:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

I had a dream worth recording last night. As it began, a man and I were in bed together. We weren't having sex, we were just sleeping together. It was really humid in the room, and the window was open. The man I was with was older than me, he seemed very adult and manful. I felt somewhat dazzled to be in this situation with such an authoritative, masculine man. We both had insomnia together, and were knotting and twisting on the bed in a sweaty beige sheet. We would wake up every hour or so, drink wine and smoke a cigar, and talk until one or the other could sleep again. I remember the man would lay the cigar on the windowsill, and every time we woke up, he would tap the ashes off the cigar, and it'd still be burning.

I also had the impression the house we were in didn't have electricity. When we woke up, we went our different ways in the neighborhood. It was a strange neighborhood tucked away down a muddy dirt road in the woods. It seemed like some people's houses didn't have either running water or electricity, or only had one or the other. Everyone seemed to know each other (including myself), and gathered in the middle of the neighborhood each morning to figure out what to do that day. In this particular day, we decided to play in an abandoned school at the edge of the neighborhood. Both the neighborhood and the school sat by a large lake. The dirt road left the neighborhood between the school and the houses, and crossed the lake.

After visiting the abandoned school, we all went to the other side of the lake. All the houses on the other side of the lake were completely abandoned. We put candles all over the outsides of the houses and the trees around them, and got dressed into scary costumes. It was like a Halloween parade. We all went our separate ways after this festival. I heard a car come down the dirt road, and went to hide. I think this side of the lake was abandoned because it was too accessible to the general public, and the neighborhood I lived in on the other side of the lake was kind of a hidden community.

I tried to get down the dirt road to get across the lake back to the inhabited side of it, but the road was flooded. Some normal people (people not a part of the hidden community) had driven a jeep to the edge of where the road was washed out, and were swimming and playing in the water. I avoided their sight, jumped in the lake and swam back to the inhabited side of the lake. I remember walking through the abandoned school, and seeing a watermark on the wall where the flood waters had come up to. That's when I noticed the sound of construction workers in the school, and I quickly left it before I was noticed. I guess it was being reclaimed.

I went back to my neighborhood and told the people about the normal people swimming by the washed-out road. A bunch of them went out and swam to the edge of the washed-out road and started harassing and playing pranks on the normal people. Someone, I'm supposing it was the guy I was sleeping with, handed me the cigar again. It was still lit, so I smoked from it again. I then began to think about all the people who had been murdered in their lakeside houses, on the other side of the lake, and thought to myself, "It's dangerous to live by a lake."

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Nap-Dream

2007-07-27T14:01:00.001-07:00

Hello All,

Today I found out I've been declined for unemployment aid, nearly 6 weeks after I first applied. Naturally I was upset and laid down. The substance of my life is very thin now. I had a dream swhirling with everything I've read and done in the past 6 weeks.

I was wearing the embroidered robe of a priest, but it was tightly cinched at the waist like a dress. I remember thinking about my last name. It's "Guilarte" and is Euskara, that's the language of the Basque people, and I'm half Basque. My name means "From the Oak Tree." Dressed as I was, I walked into a forest with so much undergrowth I felt as if I was wading through water. I came to an oak tree.

I sat there staring at it quietly for a while. I saw a long unicorn horn come out of it. I thought it was going to stab me because it came right for me. Instead, the horn slid along my shoulder and between my hair, which hangs far past my shoulders. Then I saw the unicorn. It's body was furry and flexible like a cat's body, and it's face was long, but exceptionally narrow for a horse's. It began to speak to me. The unicorn's lips curled and puckered like a human's lips. It whispered into my ear, as if to remind me,

"Judge ye not, "I am a withered tree."

I woke up, and don't feel any better. I'm thin skinned, and exceptionally afraid. Is there any act of humankind that can calm me?

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Diary Entry: Trees and Fields

2007-07-25T14:19:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

I'm acutely aware of time passing, but when I look back at my life, I've made such an effort to keep my time consistent it seems as if my life will just keep going on. I know it won't, so I don't know what to think of my eternal childhood. When little, first I played in the forest behind my house in Connecticut, and then in the choked and shallow creeks of North Carolina --always returning to my stuffed animals, books, and daydreams in my room, no matter what age.

In my adulthood, I played in the online forests and fields of video games (MMORPGs), while often doing much the same in real life (swimming, drawing, reading, writing, dancing around in my room). I wonder how long it will be that I can count the months on one hand where my life hasn't changed too much. I even had the same cat from 7 to 27, and desperately clung onto my parents and their house till I was 28. Age hasn't taken much of a toll on me, I look much the same now as I have for many years.

I live in fear of the time when I lose that continuity. With every change in my life I always wonder, "Is it now?" For the present, I'm unemployed and mostly isolated in my apartment, so I have plenty of time to scour over the past, and try to keep things up. It's my reluctance to break this continuous chain of events from my past to present that leaves me by myself, and unsure of my future. I just hope I can add another link rather than break the chain when I'm finally forced to do something different.

In the meanwhile, I can look back at the recent past and see how I continued to be able to play with my sister or a friend in the woods or fields, even though it may have been in computer world. I really miss listening to "Trout Mask Replica" by Captain Beefheart, or "Freak Out" by Frank Zappa, while playing the futuristic MMORPG "Anarchy Online." To some people it will seem nerdy, or unseemly for someone past childhood to gild something like that, but I haven't been as happy as I was then... ever since. I still had my parents watching TV downstairs, some good friends, my older sister playing with me, my childhood bedroom, my childhood cats, my grandmother, and my daydreams of "what I would be when I grew up." That was only a matter of years ago.

Now, I feel I can only be happy it wasn't that long ago, and hope this isn't the time when things are going to change, and my charmed, immortal childhood will end. I'm not finished growing up, and I'm not ready to decide what I want to be yet.

See you later,

Marc

Another Homlessness Dream

2007-07-24T17:07:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

For the sake of documentation, I decided to go ahead and record yet another homelessness dream I had on Sunday night. It's the second dream I've had that involves Christians trying to kill me. At some point in time, I'll write down the other one I had a number of months ago... hopefully, within proximity to this post, but I've been busy in the past few days, so I have no ideal how well I'll be able to organize my next few posts.

I had a dream I lived in a rather organized slum. The buildings were made of scrap-wood and corrugated metal boards. The main path was dirt, but had ditches dug on the sides to channel waste water and what-not down the sides of the road. Each building had a little plank that went over the ditch and into their entrances. I was looking for something in one of the buildings. I remember this slum being a lot like what I imagine the middle ages being like. It was very dirty, and appeared to be run by common-law within the community. I remember seeing people bath next to the waste-water ditches, and their nudity wasn't appealing at all, it was very real, and filthy...just animals taking care of their bodily needs.

I bought a compact from one of the buildings that had a razor embedded in its powder. When I left the slum, people warned me a man claimed to have a spear blessed by God he planned to kill me with. I was supposed to use the razor in the compact to kill him before he was able to attack me. I left the slum and the woods it was hidden in, and came out to a clean, suburban street. I remember the dream ending as I watched the man talking to some other people on the street. He didn't notice me coming to his side as I opened the compact and took out the razor.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Dreams of Home-life, Dream of Strange Life

2007-07-21T03:54:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

I had a lot of dreams last night. I woke up with a dream where I was in some third-world country. I can't remember it's name, but its sky was milky white, almost as if it was smoky outside. I was in a rural area, and there were trees everywhere, but none of the trees had branches. The land looked like it was covered by telephone poles.

I went out into the back yard of the house I was staying in, and it was on a very steep hill that lead right down to a large river, but the incline of the hill was so steep I couldn't see the bottom of the valley. I remember there being an outhouse in the back yard. I went to a side of the house where the incline wasn't as steep, and walked down to the valley floor. There wasn't a big river as I thought, but several very broad, shallow, creeks. Some kid threw a rock in the water, and I heard an old man say, "Oh he wants to wake the country of so-and-so (whatever the name of the country was).

At this point in the dream, something in the wilderness made a noise kind of like an owl's hoot, but with the raspiness of a pig's squeal. Then it seemed like the whole opposite side of the woods from where I stood started repeating the sound, just like an echo. The noise got louder every time it was repeated. I looked into the woods, but couldn't see anything making the noise. As I was looking in the woods, I heard the same old man call the animal the Rising so-and-so (after the name of the country). He said that only its own kind could "limit its scourge or scope."

Earlier in the night, I had three dreams related to home-life. I'll start from the first to last. The first one was a revision of what actually happened in the past. In real life, I stopped working as an assistant accountant, took that summer to study for the GRE, started taking classes that Fall, and was then accepted into graduate school in the Spring semester, but in the dream. I went back to work part-time for awhile (maybe almost a year?) before going to graduate school full-time.

I wore slacks and a button down shirt, and felt so nervous about going to work I threw up in the parking lot (I really hated that job). I remember going into the office and having to start the boring cubicle routine. I thought to myself, "I'm not going to be able to work here anymore in a few months anyway, so I might as well not put myself through this anymore." I left work and went home. I still lived with my parents, and it was around Spring break for those who were in college.

I looked around my room at all the things I had ever since I was a small child. There was a three-tiered fountain outside, and it had ducks playing in the large pool of water in the bottom tier. I had different friends come and visit me as they came home to their families over Spring vacation. They were people I knew from all different phases of my life in my real life. I remember talking to one of them. We were both sitting on my bed and I was looking out the window watching the ducks in the fountain, thinking I could watch them all day.

The next dream was much shorter. I was in a parking lot of some offices in the process of being built. I remember watching the builders' progress in one office over two nights, and once it got dark wanted to look in the window to see what it looked like inside, but I was afraid some sort of alarm would go off. I was about to go to sleep in the parking lot, but then it dawned on me it'd be safer to sleep in my car.

In the last dream in this series, I was living in our house in Connecticut. I got up in the middle of the night to look for something downstairs. I accidentally came across one of my Mom's hiding spots for sweets. I decided to just take half a pastry, so my Mom wouldn't be too angry with me, but when I went to heat it up, it got all gooey, so I had to eat the whole thing. I felt really bad about it and decided to buy my Mom another one when I got home from school the next day (I was probably about high-school age in this dream). I went upstairs and started to get tired. I could hear my parents wake up early and start moving around downstairs.

My Mom was talking about going to see a concert in London and my Dad was talking about the cost. They were putting up a Christmas tree. I was finally about to fall asleep again when I heard my Dad calling me. I must of been coming out of my dream and falling into deeper sleep in real life because I remember thinking if I were my black cat (Winkerton) I wouldn't have to wake up and go downstairs because then I could turn invisible.

I supposed I had a more active than usual night last night because I'm feeling a little sick today.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

To Touch the Pacific Ocean

2007-07-20T10:44:00.001-07:00

Hello All,

I thought it important to include a picture that proves I do Indeed get dressed some days, but sought to comfort you with my usual morning picture (the one with my hair down). In this post I'm continuing my transfer of dreams from my old blog. This dream is part of my beach dream phase. I actually had one other beach dream that I never recorded, so I suppose I'll try to record it here for the first time, but first here is the one I wrote down.

I'll have to malign my rather stuffy old roommate a bit to record this dream. In the dream, Ashley (the ex-roommate) and I had to go to a conference out in Utah. The conference ended nearly as soon as we got there, but filled with an adventurous spirit gained from making such a trek from my home-state of North Carolina, I told Ashley I wanted to go ahead and see the Pacific Ocean, since we had gone so far already. As typical, my ex-roommate reacted with irritation as she was excited to get back to her normal television-programmed routine in NC and snapped at me saying, "I've already done that!" I withheld myself from arguing (which trust me, isn't normal for me) and drove her back to our apartment in North Carolina, and drove myself all the way back out West. I arrived in San Fransisco.

I reached the city exhausted, and needed to stay in a hotel before I could continue on my trek to touch the Pacific Ocean. I remember watching a documentary in the hotel room. It was about a local eccentric. A scruffy long-haired man, who pedaled around on his bike, with a baby-doll dress on (the similarity to me is noted). This man was strikingly ugly to the point where he was cute, much the way people think pug-dogs are cute. He was noted in the neighborhood for his child-like personality. He had rode his bike into a dangerous neighborhood because a woman there had offered to plait his hair into dutch braids (corn-rows).

The police stopped him, knocked him off his bike, and beat him to death because of his appearance. At that point, I had finally fallen asleep in my crusty hotel room bed. My parents are full-time "RVers," and had happened to be in a camp-ground near San Francisco. In the morning, I called them to tell them I was nearby. My Mom approved of my trek to touch the Pacific Ocean, so they agreed to meet me at said beach, but when I got there (in a rent-a-car) the road ended on a high cliff. I could see the beach below, but had no idea how to get there.

My parents had the same problem as I and met me at the edge of the cliff. As we were looking out into the vast darkness of the new moon sky and black ocean, I decided to go to the rent-a-car and use my cell phone and a map to try to find where the path down to the beach was. My parents were satisfied with just standing on the cliff, looking into the outer-space like darkness, so when I found the path to the beach, I just called them and told them what I was doing. I remember the car sharply pointing down a sandy path. It slipped down the path's loose sand, and I used it as a sled to get down to the beach.

That's how that dream ended. I had another West coast beach dream I never wrote down because it seemed fragmented and silly to me. Now, referring to real life, I've dated very seldomly, so the men I've had in my life maintain their significance through the years. My first boyfriend was a guy named Terry. He was a year older than me. It was at the height of "grunge" and we both loved Courtney Love's "Hole." I was 17 and he was 18, and we both had eating disorders and angst-provoked drug habits. Naturally, it was love at first site.

In this dream we had trekked across the USA in order to fulfill my dream to touch the Pacific Ocean. Terry had some drug-buddies he met back in Baltimore who we could stay with in San Francisco. I remember their house was a four-roomed disaster, but was achingly close to the beach. Always being the prude in the group, I was nervous about staying in a house full of junkies (Terry's drug habits where rather serious, while mine still remained in the realm of youthful experimentation), but Terry isolated me from the rest of the group, so I felt relatively safe.

The first available morning, Terry and I went out to explore the sea-side, and finally touch the Pacific Ocean. I wanted to go straight to the beach and get our quest done with, but Terry wanted to show me a tide-pool where ostriches had colonized. We were just a dune away from the ocean, and I remember walking along it, looking at the ocean, but knowing I'd have to wait till I could go to it. We reached a copse of palm trees where the wide, shallow tide-pools began. As soon as we saw the ostriches (they were much larger than I had imagined), Terry reminded me they were very territorial, and would attack us if they thought we were a threat. He also said they would follow a potential threat for miles once startled. I was rather put-off by this and asked him if we couldn't just go to the beach.

Sure enough, as soon as I said this, the ostriches spotted us and immediately started to charge. We ran all the way back to the dilapidated junky-house, and never got to go to the beach. He tried to act like it wasn't a big deal because there was a big party at the house, blah. So there you have two more Pacific Ocean dreams.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

The Blood-rush of Escape Dreams

2007-07-18T13:32:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

This is another post where I'm transferring dreams from my old blog to my new blog. The next few dreams from my old blog are all related to escape, and oddly enough, most of them have something to do with touching the Pacific Ocean, something I've never done. I had this dream about 3 and a half months ago.

I lived in a new prospering city. A place that could only exist on the West Coast, it's European history remarkably brief. I lived in a hotel stories upon stories high, with every thing inside. A tower of elevators and escalators, vast windows and unending views out into the sea. I was a completely different person. I was someone I'd be attracted to, rather than myself.

I'd go to my school, only to go out to the beach in front of it's large tempered-glass windows, framed with steel piping. I put on a wet suit, and swam as the sun set. The light blared through everything, it obscured the landscape as much as fog. I was late for class because I couldn't leave the rushing ocean and intense level of sunlight. I never feel so much energy in real life as I feel in dreams like these.

I soon went back to class as the evening took hold, and only looked forward to the next day to where I again could be so completely blasted by sunlight. I woke up with an incredible amphetamine rush, that only lasted a few minutes, and then I went back to bed. Real life, is so much like, trying to drag a soggy, dead body to shore.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Trapped

2007-07-18T04:31:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

I dreamt unpleasantly last night. However, I take any dream as information, and also as my own little movie, so I can't disapprove too much of any dream. I decided to take a picture of Angie and I this morning. Each day, she wakes up around 3am and proceeds to play with her loudest toys (I live in a studio apartment, so it's basically one room), and to tread in every place she knows she's not supposed to go (kitchen sink, my desk). The past few days she's been better behaved, so I thought she deserved a close-up.

My dream began with me driving to bring an item to a doctor at their home, so it was a personal visit, and not an appointment. When I got there, the doctor wanted to take some sort of test sample from me anyway. The doctor anesthetized me without my knowledge or permission, and locked me in the bathroom. When I came too again, I felt very sick and the doctor had done something to my legs that made it hard to walk, and had operated on one of my teeth, so the tooth was almost all gone, and replaced by a clamp with a dull lead-like finish.

The doctor came to the bathroom to see if I had woken up yet. I was very angry and admonished him for not even giving me anything to read. He gave me a newspaper, but I left anyway. I lived with a number of people of different ages, including a girl about 8 or 9 years old. The girl had trouble understanding the seriousness of the rule that my cat is never allowed outside. Some big mess occurred, and everyone gathered to clean it up, but my cat (in the dream it wasn't Angie, but a long-furred, orange, tabby kitten) kept on trying to get in the mess. The girl suggested putting the cat outside, and I became very angry with her.

The next day, I drove out into the country to visit a friend. I'm always nervous about driving into the country, it doesn't feel safe. In Raleigh, once you leave the city it becomes even more conservative. The rural culture in North Carolina is dramatically different from the urban culture (and the urban culture isn't particularly progressive either). In some directions, it only takes a few miles of driving to find your self surrounded by the religion-fueled fear and hatred of the untamed tobacco lands. I arrived at my friend's house, carefully noting landmarks and streets, so I could get back home.

I stayed later than I wanted. I don't like driving at night, but I hate staying over the night even more. I made it home easily, relieved to be back in familiar territory. Unfortunately (and I can't remember the reason), I had to go back out into the country the next day, but this time I just couldn't find the way back home. I eventually had to stop and ask one of the natives directions, but he gave me some smart-assed reply and walked off patting himself on the back for being rude to the weird city-fag.

However, some local homosexuals overheard the incident, and told me where I was and how to get back home. They (perhaps a group of 5 or so) said I could stay at their place and make the drive tomorrow. Unfortunately, I really was far away, and felt it wiser to accept their offer. When I go to their house, it was very dirty and in much disrepair. I'm not the cleanest person on Earth, but their house was way past my threshold of decency. I figured it was just one night, and any motel would be just as unhygienic.

An older man in the house, yelling at a young couple, woke me up in the middle of the night. The two young men were standing out in the hall, as the older man raged on about how irresponsible and indecent they were. The problem seemed to center around their room, so I walked by the hall and looked in, and saw one cat on the bed that seemed to be dead and another laid on the floor as if mortally wounded, while a third cat poked at it. I was very upset and just went back to my room and decided to stay awake until the sun rose, when I could leave.

The morning came, and all the cats seemed fine, but the one man was still very angry with the couple. I was thoroughly upset by the experience, and just wanted to get out of the hinterlands. As I got in my car to leave, I noticed an ugly sweaty guy on a lawn mower staring in the window of a neighbor's house. He lustily stared at a very worn looking housewife as she exercised in front of the TV on her exercise ball. She had raccoon-like eyeliner on, and a big frizzy hairdo. She looked as if she was being held up by her rolls of fat. She was staring through the window back at this guy on the lawn mower. Bits of dirt and grass were glued to the sweat on his bald head. She clearly enjoyed his voyeurism. It made my already disturbing experience seem much worse.

The dream was actually more upsetting than amusing, but it seemed to be covered with an inappropriately comedic lacquer. I think that's what made the dream so unpleasant.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Looking Back

2007-07-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Ever since I had the dream I posted in "Frenetic Acting" I always think, "If I had done things right in my life, that's where I would have been now." I really love dreams for giving me a taste of having a vibrant and curious life. This is perhaps the earliest dream I remember. I had this dream when I was three or four.

My parents, my best friend Craig Gillan, and I were on a cruise ship. Every thing looked adult and fancy, and I remember the pressure to be on my best behavior. I had to go to the bathroom. I turned the faucet on to wash my hands. I tried to turn the faucet off, but it just wouldn't turn off. The sink basin began to overflow, and I kept trying to turn it off.

Soon fish started to come through the faucet, and the sink looked like a little aquarium, but then the sea began to fill the cruise ship. I couldn't turn the faucet off, the knob just screwed off. We all went to the deck, and some kid had to go overboard with an inflatable raft, then they just brought her back up onto the ship, and said, "See what you did to her."

That's when I noticed we were still docked. There really wasn't any danger at all, but the ship's captain was still acting like we were all going to drown at sea. As punishment they threw me and my Dad into the sea. I remember him trying to grab hold of me under the water. It looked like we were underneath the deep end of a pool. I started to breath the water, and we both began to turn into fish.

My dream world has always had such a tangible feel to me, my whole life. It's as if it's a place I can go to, if only I knew how to drive to it.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Decisions and Changes

2007-07-17T05:18:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Here is a picture of Angie this morning, and a picture of me standing in front of my desk. The highest picture in the photograph is a picture I drew of the Julian and the Hurricane dream. Last night I had one of those dreams that presents itself in an annoying patchwork, but I'll try to make sense of it here.

The dream began with me in school. A war raged in the continental USA, so it was mandatory for everyone to be trained in the military. I was the teacher's pet in this program and expected to participate in a street battle in a part of the city not secured from the invaders.

I had ethical problems, both with killing people, and with risking my own life, which my parents, the school, and I had spent so many resources and time into teaching and training as an educated member of society. However, my commander (or whatever he'd be called in the military) was so proud of me I had planned to go ahead with the battle and not disappoint him.

Some of my class mates began to also question my decision to go on with participating in active battle. I had considered revealing my status as a sexual minority to have myself kicked-out of the military, but that seemed a very cheap and dishonorable way to go. A friend of mine laid-out an easy plan to go AWOL, and I decided that would be a better way to skip-out of military service because I wouldn't be using my minority status as a wild card to get out of a sticky situation.

It seemed in the dream I had already graduated, and this battle was just a graduating step as far as the military school went, so I just left the campus, and that was that. I thought of the surprise that'd swarm around my military associates and teacher. Now finished with school, and having made my decision to not participate in battle, I returned to my hometown.

My hometown had changed significantly. All the old buildings were there, but so many new buildings had been built, that in some places I had to concentrate to see the old neighborhood underneath. I decided to stay at a small motel operation on the second floor of some offices, and only had about two rooms. The offices seemed to be a place my parents would take me when I was little (such as a dentist office), so they remembered me after spending some time scrutinizing my face. I stayed in one of the rooms and visited my parents. I noticed how the suburbs began to have an urban feel, like row-houses in Baltimore.

I went back to where ever I lived by myself for a short awhile, and then came back to my hometown to visit my parents again. I went to the small motel above the offices again. The people recognized me, and let me walk around unsupervised, but I still felt put off by how quickly the people became unfamiliar with me again. I decided not to stay there. I felt it would be better to just make it a day trip.

I left the motel, and walked down the street, as the turn to my old neighborhood was only a few blocks away. The once quiet (and miserably dull) streets had become full of busy people. I noticed people I knew and talked to, only as long ago as a few years, but they already seemed to have completely forgotten about me. I just kept walking. The police and firefighters had cordoned off a house, and evidently someone was still on fire from the house fire, and they were trying to put this person out. Even though I saw all sorts of people I knew around me, only a stranger started to talk to me about the incident.

I continued to walk down the street, but it soon began to seem more like downtown than it should. I had missed my turn, evidently some building had been built where the turn once had been. I wanted to take the next turn possible, but the wall of buildings remained unbroken. I entered the inner city gates (kind of like a European city has a walled in "old town"). Finally, I saw a turn on the left, the way I needed to go. When I took that street, it came up to a gated tunnel. When I opened the gate, wind rushed out of the tunnel, blowing me backwards. The tunnel was actually an entrance to the old city, and the rush of air was meant to encourage people entering the area to keep on walking.

I kept on looking for a way to turn around and get to my parents house, and the dream ended somewhere around there. Well, I need to get myself ready to go to Cindy's house.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Secret Rooms, Alternate Lives

2007-07-16T15:26:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

I decided I have enough energy to transfer another dream post from my old blog. It's actually rather good timing because I just re-read one of the dreams from its original source in one of my diaries, so have it better memorized than when I recorded it in my old blog. Today has followed the pattern of the past number of days, feeling mysteriously uncomfortable, and aggravatingly unproductive. I simply can't settle down to the things I want to do, so at least I can do this.

I have re-occurring dreams of looking through my grandmother's house (she has been dead for almost five years now). Often, she has just died, and I'm at her house trying to save sentimental things from being thrown out, or taken by strangers. Other times, I'm just looking through the house to try and get to know more about her. My grandfather died when my Mom was 17, so I never met him. In my grandmother's-house dreams, my grandfather lives in a secret room.

In one dream, I was looking through each room to try and find a secret door. I finally found one, it was disguised by being in the corner of the room, rather than being a door flat against the wall. I opened the door and the room was shaped like an octagon, rather than having just four walls. The walls were green trimmed with gold baroque designs and little cupids. The furniture had green velvet upholstery, with gold-gilded wood. Every bit of counter space was covered with images of the saints, jewelry boxes, photos in fancy picture frames, and ornate bottles and vases, some with gaudy fake flowers in them.

In another grandmother's-house dream, I asked my grandmother if I could go to the bathroom. She excused me, I finished going to the bathroom, but accidentally loudly dropped the lid of the toilet. A secret door flung open behind the toilet, and my grandfather's angry silhouette appeared with red light glaring behind it. His anger was so powerful that it seemed like a bolt of lighting was pulsing through the whole image of him and the secret door. I quickly ran out and slammed the bathroom door shut.

One of the stranger grandmother's-house dreams I've had started as usual, with me looking through the trinkets and rooms in her house, trying to learn more about her. An older lady who was a tenant in the upstairs portion of the house invited me to look around her apartment. When I came downstairs my whole family was there as if it were Christmas or Thanksgiving. It seemed like no one noticed me, or I wasn't supposed to speak them.

I left the house to go to a bar, and that's when I realized I was some big fair-haired guy with a beard. I was dressed like a blue collar worker. I was drinking a beer with another guy at the bar, and we went out to the side walk in front because there was a big crowd on the street. We saw a large spaceship flying low over Middletown (NY). We acted as if it was a normal sight, but soon some smaller shuttles (or perhaps they were robots) began to approach the bar. Their lights came on and alarms went off. We, and the other people outside, ran into the bar to warn everyone that the aliens where about to enter the bar. And the strangest thing is, me and the other man ran into the bar and we had our own families. We took our wives and children, and snuck out of the bar to hide from the aliens. How strange to have a dream of being some blue collar straight guy.

Even though it was a bad dream, I remember it left me with a refreshed feeling, just the chance at being someone different for a little while. I have another dream I"m going to post soon, where I get to be a different person for a while (this time a single woman), and it too gave me a strange feeling for a few days. I think I had the aliens dream when my grandmother was still alive, but I'm not sure if she was alive during the other dreams or not. I've always felt estranged from both of my grandmother's because neither of them spoke English very well. I think with my Italian grandmother, it was actually more that she had a heavy accent, than she didn't speak English well. It still ended up being a language barrier when I was growing up. I guess the cultural barrier was a more significant obstacle in getting to know either of my grandmothers.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Transition

2007-07-16T10:41:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

This is the way I'm going to wear my hair for any interview. You can't tell in the picture, but I've parted my hair from the side, so it looks like a pomaded man's hairstyle from the front. Hopefully, for an interview my hair will be dry though. I'm not going to wear earrings, and am going to wear glasses instead of contact lenses. It's really about as business-casual as I can get. I'm hoping with practice I'll learn to put my hair up more tidily. My hair would never lay so flat if it was short, I'm having fun learning to put my hair up. I wish I could do more complicated braid-work.

With this post, I'm trying to move my dream-posts from a blog I no longer write in, to this one. Here are two love dreams I remember. This first one I'm going to tell you is one I had five months ago, the second one I had about 14 years ago. The more recent dream, is one I had when I was feeling very sick, and felt nauseous every time I tried to get out of bed. It's frightening to be so sick, when you live alone.

I dreamt I had a boyfriend, who sat at the desk behind my bed, trying to open a bottle of aspirin for me (that's it). The boyfriend was a person I had a crush on as a teenager in real life. He was one of those people who seemed to have every reason to date me, but wouldn't because I was too young and too "weird." I liked him because he was very left-brained and together. The very opposite of me. It's unfortunate during that brief period of time, say from the ages of 12-22, when I still had crushes full of blind love and pure emotional thinking, I was beset by man after man who simply would never think of it. It always seemed to be because I was strange, and unlikely to lead a conventional life.

It would have been nice to have some one to struggle through life with, especially rooted from that time of "young love" and "high-school sweethearts." Well, I've never had much success with romance and have remained single for most of my life. There will always be those times when I'm sick or frightened, and wish I had someone physically present as some beacon of humankind. Nearly all my relationships are transmitted by satellite it seems. Here is a dream with a more wistful note, it's from when I was 17 0r 18.

In the dream, my best-friend at the time (Marcus Gill) and I went on vacation to Scandinavia. Marcus had some business to attend to, so he dropped me off at the apartment of a friend he knew. The apartment complex was new and had an inviting pool, shining brightly in the mid-day. The man's name was Julian. We liked each other very much. I was thrilled and wanted to make the most of my time with him.

Julian wanted to show me his job, but at the same time wanted to keep it as a surprise for me. I grew more curious, and a little worried, as we arrived at the coast. We got into a little row boat and began to paddle out into the wide sea. The coast had islets of pillar-like rocks, very jagged and threatening. The sky and sea began to well up and join each other in the same colors. A great storm was coming.

I then learned Julian was a hurricane researcher. It was his job to row his boat out into these enormous storms. He took measurements beneath the sea when the storm was at its worse. He tied his ankle to a wooden board he used as a marker, so you would know where he was underwater. I felt I should trust him and not seem worried, but I really was. He took a confident dive into the water, his body outstretched with no evident fear of the waves that seemed to be curling into tighter and tighter loops each minute.

The wooden board swung like a pendulum between the troughs and crests of the waves. As I was contemplating this, it quickly occurred to me he had no breathing aide to rely upon under the water, and no matter how good he was at what he did, he still had the same human limitations as anyone. I realized he had drowned under sea. I jumped in the water and dragged the wooden board tied to his ankle onto the boat, but the rope waved loosely in the sea, and wasn't attached to anything. I felt myself waking up, and wanted to remember his name. The only thing I had was a cigarette he left burning in the boat, so I burned the name "Jules" on the wooden board, and then woke up.

I simply don't have love dreams with the frequency I once did, but when I do, it's always a nice break from the tenaciously monotonous path my life seems to walk. Much of my interest in dreams stems from the "break" they provide. If anyone out there has love dreams they would like to share, or perhaps dreams of uncanny similarity, please say so. It's also interesting to hear the life circumstances occurring when the dream was dreamt.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Frenetic Acting

2007-07-14T04:10:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

Here's a picture of me this morning, and a picture of Jackie Curtis dressed up all pretty. His picture kind of matches the mode of my dream this morning.

My dream started with a movie-feel, the motion was even sped-up like a movie might do as a special effect. I drove my car, following another car to an old shopping center. It was gray and overcast outside, and the shopping center sagged with some age and use, but tall trees surrounded everything. The trees looked more vibrantly green against the dull sky. The shopping center had an odd layout. When you drove up to it, it appeared to be a one story grocery store, but once you went around the side, you realized the shopping center was built into the side of a hill (so I guess you'd say it was"split-level"). The bottom floor had several smaller shops, and cars filled the parking lot.

That's where the car I followed stopped and parked. The people then walked out of the car and into a path in the woods behind the shopping center. I lost site of them, but evidently knew where to go because I walked up the path to a three story white house (maybe about 100 years old, very narrow and tall). The house was separated into apartments. I walked up a flight of stairs built on the side of the house, and went into an apartment on the second floor. The apartment was two stories, the bottom floor was about the size of an average apartment, but the second floor only had one bedroom, and a bathroom.

The house was full of interesting stuff. There were books, clothing, rolled-up posters, mugs, and all kinds of knick-nacks all over the counters, tables, shelves, and floor. Everything was much to my taste, lots of odd and eye-catching things. I didn't have much time to look around though because about 9 other people were already there. It looked like a completely out-of-hand party and I had to remind myself we were acting in a movie. The people I followed in were already in costume and acting with everyone else, so I felt the need to hurry.

All kinds of colored lights flashed through-out the house. The music reminded me of Henry Mancini, but fast paced with the occasional beeping car, or other urban sound blended into it. Everyone had to quickly change from costume to costume (we were in "fancy-dress," as if at a masquerade party). We also had to move from room to room, from chair to couch to floor very quickly. Even the guy filming the scene (he was a young gay man who owned the house) kept on changing into different costumes and masks.

At one point in the "party" two women and I ran around through the house, and had to end up in a couch in the main room. I plopped down on the couch first, but it was small for all of us. I ended up being crushed into the corner, and the two women started dancing while sitting down, flailing their arms and legs up and down. The woman next to me kept on accidentally hitting me in the head with her arm. As we were about to get out of the couch to film the next scene, she said to me, "Look he even has a doll that's a leper, see it's on the top shelf in the closet." I looked and three dolls sat on the top shelf, they all looked like normal 1940s era baby-dolls, but one was covered by leprous sores.

I remember having to change into suspenders, and an Amish person's outfit for the next scene. Everything happened so fast, and so chaotically that I still had to remind myself we were filming a movie. Soon we stopped filming, and people started to go home. I finally got an idea of what the owner of the house looked like ( for most of the day he wore different masks and accessories that obscured his face). He started to get out of his costume, but left a robber's mask and a cheap nylon cape on. He had been rather intimidating to this point because I was so impressed he was filming a movie, and had such a great collection of stuff. He had excellent taste in movies, music, books, and other odds and ends. I'm sure he would of had "Popiol i Diament" (in movie form, not the book), or "The Balcony" by Jean Genet.

To this point in the movie this guy had been telling everyone what to do, but as you got to get a better glimpse of him he seemed like a normal approachable person. He allowed me to look around the house and borrow some things. I picked up an article of clothing (something flowy, lavender, and sheer), an interesting looking mug, and a few books. I only remember two of the books. One of them was "The Book of Toth," and another one was a woman's fashion guide from the 1950's called "How to Dress from Head to Toe." The last other actor began to leave and I jumped on the floor covered with all the stuff I borrowed, and she sighed because earlier she told me she couldn't stand all the "weird stuff" laying around the place.

After she left it was just me and the guy left, and he wanted to take me to another location to film another part of his movie. I gathered my stuff together and waited in the foyer. That's when I realized the foyer floor was covered in marijuana. It was as if someone took a pound bag and just shook it out on the floor. The guy came to the foyer and we were about to leave, but two robbers burst in through the door. They weren't very threatening and it took me a second to realize they were serious about robbing the place (I felt they wanted to take the marijuana on the floor). One of them had a sturdy build and pretty blue eyes framed with thick eyelashes.

The guy who owned the house told me to go to the kitchen and get some bigger mugs. When I came back, one of the robbers was using another mug to gather the marijuana. The owner (and director) said to me very loud and in a way I could tell he was up to something, "Go outside and start the car because we're in a hurry to get to our next acting gig. You can leave the mugs with me. " I gave him the last mug I had, it was a big copper one, and the blue-eyed robber remarked to me, "Oh that's a good one, it's really strong." As I left to start the car, I realized the director/owner was going to fill the mugs with the marijuana and dash out of the house, and that's why he wanted me to go ahead and start the car. That's all I can remember from the dream, but it was nice to have a mostly fun dream for a change.

I've had other dreams this past week, but they were all kind of mediocre. One had something to do with a secret passage in a house, another one had someone pointing out the difference in the pelts of koalas raised in the north versus the south, and in another one I was still living with my parents. They just didn't shine very much to me, so I haven't recorded them.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Tornado Dream

2007-07-07T06:08:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Here's a picture of me in my new glasses (my old ones keep on breaking), and a picture of Angie in the sink. Last night I had a tornado dream, but I think the dream's focus was really on safe places to live.

As the dream begun, A friend showed me a new housing development supposed to be completely self-sufficient. It had its own power grid, it's own sewage system and water supply, etc. I remember the construction method. Every house begun as a wooden foundation, with what looked like a big port-a-potty towards the back, which connected to the neighborhood's sewage system. The builders made this construction for every lot, and began to build the houses on these foundations.

This new housing development was adjacent to a much older neighborhood, with a small private college in it. This neighborhood was very beautiful. The buildings were obviously very old, and the only new thing about them was their modern window panes. The buildings had decorative stonework (they seemed to be made of either gray slate, or some type of tan granite), and different plants growing up their sides. As dusk approached I could see people studying through the windows of the private college. This neighborhood really cast a contrast between it and the new self-sufficient neighborhood.

I returned home (in the dream I still lived with my parents) and went to my bedroom. It started to rain and I read for awhile, until I noticed the storm really picking up. I went to the window and the wind was blowing so hard everything outside looked like it was going to be shoved sideways off the earth. I looked up to the sky and I could see a hole opening up in the clouds with a dark wisp of clouds starting to spin out of it.

I tried to get under my bed, but I wouldn't fit, so I sat under the door-frame of my closet. I noticed the funnel-cloud was really getting pronounced, so I decided I needed to go somewhere safer. I got my parents, and we went to a walk-in closet under the stairs. We turned on the closet light and waited. The storm soon passed, but I was eager to see what had happened to the new housing development.

I went back to the housing development, and it was more or less fine. Some building materials were scattered about, and the wooden foundations were thoroughly soaked, but none of the finished houses were damaged. I wondered if the fact the neighborhood had it's own power system would make it a better place to live in case of a severe storm. The old stone neighborhood was also fine, and I wished the new neighborhood was made to look like the old neighborhood.

Well, that was my dream. Not as interesting or symbolic as my other recent dreams, but it still lets me know what's worrying me deep down inside.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

The Two Forms of God Dream

2007-07-05T12:51:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Here are pictures of Angie and I mid-day Thursday. My dream last night was an odd continuation of my last posted dream. It's funny how night-to-night my dreams seem to have their own secret plot-line. Unfortunately, I'm semi-conscious during my dreams, so don't have all the fine details of what this plot-line is.

My Dream last night, started in what was supposed to be my last apartment (when I had a roommate), but the apartment didn't look anything like my former apartment. I felt so tired in the dream, I kept on falling asleep in the first bedroom to the right, which was vacant. The second bedroom to the right was mine. I remember having monumental difficulty getting from the vacant room, waylaying on a couch in between, and finally to my room. I got to my room to sleep for a while, only to soon be awakened by my friend Marcus (a friend I haven't seen in about 12 years, who I used to go to dance clubs with when I was a teenager).

I got dressed in a red, strapless, latex dress, fashioned after Samurai armor. I even had those raised Japanese clogs on (red, of course). My hair was twisted up, much like the picture of me in this post. Again, as in the last dream, the building we arrived at was made of cinder blocks. As we entered the club, I was taken aback because it was like a sordid bath-house from San Fransisco in the 70's. I kept on trying to keep up with Marcus while trying not to interrupt people having "private moments" in dark corners of the club.

I finally almost reached Marcus, but that's when I noticed I was alone in an empty part of the club. It was a hallway all made of glazed cinder blocks (like in a public pool), and the hallway went around in a square (so you could run laps around if you wanted). In the hallway before me, a group of people helped one person off a horse. I heard the person getting off the horse say, there are two ways to see God.

In front of me I saw the recently dismounted person set down a flame on the ground, this was one form of God. I quickly ran around the hallway block to get to the other side of that same hall, and saw that in the other hand facing the other way from the flame, the horse rider was holding the hilt of a sword (with no blade) that emanated straight laser beams of different colors of light, this was the second form of God.

It's funny to have this dream, when last night I had the Satan dream. I guess people's subconsciousness has a plot-line of its own. The feeling in the dream was as if I had been led through a maze, simply to be shown the two forms of God. There was no malevolent aspect of the dream, unlike the dream I had last night.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

A Second Look

2007-07-03T16:46:00.001-07:00

Hello All,

While I was visiting Cindy and family (the picture of the woman), I tried to tell her about one of my dreams last night that I couldn't remember well. I decided I retold the dream well enough that I should probably write it down here because it was a very unusual dream.

In this dream I was a fat kid of WASPish descent around the age of twelve (so, not the 30ish, wiry-built man of Mediterranean descent that I am), and it was in the 1950s. I was swimming in a lake, and had to walk down a dirt road to a crossroads where a man and woman picked me up in their car. They drove me home, which appeared to be a half-way home for troubled kids. It was a rectangular, WWII era, cinder-block home with an aluminum car-port. The sun soon set and we began to watch TV.

There was some deep-set evil in the house we were all apart of, the Satan kind of evil, not the facade-of-normalcy kind of evil. It had something to do with one of the house cats giving birth to a litter of some numerological significance. I'm not sure why, but this signified some success in evil in the household. I remember watching the cat give birth in the TV light.

I remember sneaking out of the house at night and sneaking in another house in the neighborhood to get a chance to play with one of the normal kids. We were talking and playing behind some heavy art-deco screen, made to look Asian (though more New York than Beijing). The wind began to groan and fuss outside, and it began to rain. The parents of the house woke up and I quickly snuck out of the house.

I left that house with a strange sense I was not only unwanted in the house because it was late and I was there without permission, but because of some kind of evil I carried with me from the other house. I really wish I could remember why the cat giving birth in front of the TV was considered such an epicenter of evil, and what numbers had to do with it. I think that's why I didn't retell the dream this morning.

I've spent my day water-coloring and exercising at home, talking and drawing at Cindy's, and now writing this. I had a good time looking at Cindy's garden. It turns out black plum tomatoes aren't really black, they're just darker than regular tomatoes, but they taste really good. Evidently they're from Russia,, just like my watercolors.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Saint Anthony Dream

2007-07-03T04:09:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

My Italian Grandmother (the other one is Cuban) came from a small rural town in South Eastern Italy called Rio Nero in Vulture. Our family's patron saint is (was) St. Anthony. Even super-secular-me has two statues, and an old nightlight of Saint Anthony. The photographs in this post are of me this morning, and if you can peer back through all that stuff, it's a photo of a statue of St. Anthony that once belonged to my mother, and is the same statue that figures in my dream.

I had a dream about my grandmother back in the 70's when her hair still grew brown (if not a little reddish with age). She wore one of those big loose Mummus (sp?) so popular in the 70's. In the dream, a family member narrated as the scenes rolled through my mind like a movie. My grandmother took this little Saint Anthony statue to the church in Rio Nero in Vulture every year as a pilgrimage.

She placed the statue in one of those little fake potpourri terrariums (you know the kind with pussy-willows glued to a piece of mulch, and eyes dotted on them to look like little animals), and then walked through town to the beige stone-made church with the little glass-encased statue on a platform of hay tied around her neck, kind of like the platform a cigarette girl would wear around her neck to sell her wares.

Once she got to the church, I saw her join a large group of people in an outside courtyard within the church. People drummed frenetically, and a pipe was beeping in short bursts (more like a pipe from North Africa than Italy). The scene really looked more like Santeria, than rural Italian Catholicism. I remember feeling bad because the little potpourri terrarium she carried the statue in ended up being something I'd use as a house for my little miniature Hello Kitty dolls.

I have had about three other dreams in the past few days, but am trying to err on the side of tacitness to keep my blog readable. I might in the future decide to recant those dreams, but who knows. Well, I had better get on with my day. Thank you Michael (http://michael-in-norfolk.blogspot.com/) for mentioning my blog on your own.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

The Day's End is too Quiet

2007-07-01T18:52:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Here's a rare evening picture of me, and there's no dream in this post. You see I look much the same in the evening as in the morning. No matter what I do with my day I feel the same when I go to bed. The past number of months have felt like I'm talking through a pillow while being smothered with it.

I went to a party Saturday night -- a very rare thing for me to do, and I had a good time (rare as well), but today I woke up with the same "now what?" feeling that seems to follow everything I do. You're supposed to exercise to feel better, so I exercise, but when I finish, instead of feeling good about exercising, or from the endorphins, I just feel that same old, "now what?"

If it weren't for my own fear of aging, and fear of losing my physical prowess, I doubt I'd exercise at all. Though I have to admit I have a muted sense of accomplishment when I feel able-bodied. It's the same with writing, reading, and drawing. I do enjoy these activities while I'm doing them, but only retain a muted sense of accomplishment, and then feel restless about the quite space of time after the activity. Sometimes I wonder if I acquired an exaggerated sense of life's rewards when I was very young, and that's why I now have trouble exacting and retaining pleasure from life.

Thanks for reading,

Marc

Fragments

2007-06-30T05:54:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

I'm going to recount three dreams, but they're just fragments of larger dreams. I'm hoping to discover dreams from my past, while reading my diaries. So far, a lot of the dreams I've come across, I either don't remember well enough to retell, or simply aren't interesting enough to mention. Here is the first fragment, I had this dream the night before last.

The dream started in the shopping area of a large airport terminal. As I waited for my airplane, I went to an outside area to pass time. The terrain was hilly and forested by deciduous trees, like a forest in New England. However, a tropical sea rested at the foot of the forest. Something inside me warned me to go back inside the terminal. I realized many of the people I might meet would be unfriendly to me.

I went back inside the terminal, but before my plane left I wanted to go outside one more time. I walked quickly because I knew to avoid anyone I might encounter. I began to fall into an unusually quick stride, and the more I kept this pace the quicker my speed became. By the time I came outside, my stride looked natural, but all in a certain beat that gave me a speed faster than a galloping horse.

I passed a rocky peninsula covered in ferns and maple trees. I saw a family of primal looking country-folk huddled around a fire. Every flicker of my intuition told me to keep up the pace in order to not even be seen by these people. I came to a small bay where I seemed to be alone. The ocean water was so clear I could even see the features of its floor. A certain type of fish swam around, not in a school, but individually.

These fish were thick and round like goldfish, but had distinct octagonal scales, all iridescent. Most of the scales were a greenish-blue, but each fish had a different pattern of gold scales spraying across their bodies. The fish varied in size much to the scale of an oink of pigs. I soon noticed another family of rednecks killing these fish and dragging them up the grassy banks to their camp fires, and I quickly rushed back to the terminal.

The next dream fragment occurred last night. I can imagine it's a dream most people have had at some point in time. I accidentally came to work in my pajamas, and had clocked-out, but couldn't find the exit closest to where I parked my car. I had to walk all around the outside of the building, hoping no one would notice my bare feet and night-clothes. The next dream I remember from last night was also kind of typical, but with an unusual element to it.

I was about 5 or 6 years old in the dream, and had a crush on the boy who delivered newspapers. My family moved to the other side of town, but I discovered we still lived in his delivery route. Oddly enough, as I thought about how happy I was I'd still see the delivery boy, I watched all types of cloth coming out of mechanical looms. I carefully examined the different textures and colors of cloth, while walking down a long row of these mechanical looms.

Those are the dreams I have to tell. I already feel a bit of dread concerning my day because I can feel sloth creep about me. I hate how often I want to do something, but don't feel like doing anything, and can't seem to make myself settle to doing anything, so I spend my day pacing back and forth from station to station in my room (computer station, kitchen station, drawing station, reading station, pet-kitty station). Hopefully, things will iron-out and I'll add some productivity to my day.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Too-Drunk Dream, Watercolor Dream

2007-06-28T06:17:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Well, it's another day, hence the morning view out my window. I've started re-reading my diaries. I've kept diaries in a here-and-there way since I was 11, and thought it might help me analyze myself to re-read them all. When I finished reading one last night (a diary from about 8 years ago, consisting mostly of dreams), the last page had the date at the time and a little sketch of myself, and then it said, "How old are you now, old man?" I put yesterday's date in it, and did a current sketch of myself.

Last night I had a dream my whole extended family (Italian-side) had gathered at my grandmother's house in Middletown, NY. I remember going on about the day as usual, centered around the kitchen. Later in the day, my Aunt Janet told me everyone was going to see the play "Love! Valour! Compassion!" because it was being shown just down the street. I felt glad my family was open-minded enough to see a homo-centric play, but at the same time disappointed they didn't chose something more progressive. "Love, Valour! Compassion!" is not without its merits, but it reflects a different generation and experience of sexual minorities, from what I've experienced first hand in my own life. It seems a bit dated today, and almost like a period piece (like, The Boys in the Band).

Unfortunately, I hadn't foreseen going anywhere, and had decided to drink some, or perhaps a bit too much, anisette. I realized I needed to get dressed in something more appropriate, and take a nap. The next moment in the dream I was in a deep sleep in my grandmother's bed. I remember waking up in a start because I hadn't expected to sleep so hard. When I woke up, I realized I had plenty of time, but I also realized in my drunkenness I had thrown a bunch of clothes around the room while looking for something to wear, and thus needed to tidy my grandmother's room before we left. I also noticed I had packed odd things with me, like a laminated picture I drew in the 8th grade, along with some other finished pictures, and a music book stand. I could tell I was still a bit drunk and very tired, so I went back to sleep.

At this point in the dream, I was very frustrated at how hard I was sleeping. I really felt I needed to get ready for the play. I woke up and went out into the kitchen where my parents and uncles were telling me to go outside because the animal trainers for the play were outside exercising their animals. No, I have no idea why trained animals were needed for "Love! Valour! Compassion!" as there are no animals other than humans in the play. I saw a man in a top hat letting a chipmunk eat a nut by the roots of a tree. The chipmunk dutifully returned to its trainer, who gave a quick whistle. In the vacant lot next door, I saw dancing horses. The horses wore tiaras and played in a make-shift mist shower. An elephant trainer approached me and told me to let his elephant pick me up with its trunk. The elephant picked me up and started rushing all over the lawn. I suppose it was supposed to be fun, but it was a bit scary.

I returned to my grandmother's room to change clothes and try to tidy-up, but I grew very tired again. I went back to sleep, and remember being very frustrated at how deep my sleep was, and feared I wouldn't awake in time. I took the precaution to tell my Mother to make sure and wake me up. That's where that dream ended. The other dream I remember was quite simple, but wasn't particularly shorter than other dreams.

The dream began with me picking up one of my many diaries made of handmade paper, which is very good for water-coloring. The dream just consisted of me carefully moving the pigment across the page to make one consistent wall of color on the page. I remember carefully transferring areas of heavier pigment to areas of lighter pigment, while trying to hurry before everything dried too much. That's all I remember from last night.

My new medication makes me very tired and a little nauseous (side-effects I hope will go away soon). So it's either because of that, or because of my heightened emotional distress that I ended up sleeping ten hours last night. What a waste of time! I certainly hope I can make up for my shortened morning today. I have to exercise, work on my resume, do more diary reading, work on the picture I'm going to sell, and work on another dream sketch I'm doing. I need to cook and clean, I should go visit a friend. There's a lot I could do today, but somehow I feel I'm going to need to sleep again before it's evening.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Despair

2007-06-27T15:27:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

I've had a very bad day, and feel very alone. It's one of those rare days I wish I had someone to hug me (I'm not a touchy-feely person). I feel hopeless and pathetic. I decided it might help divert me for a little while, if I tried to recount a dream from about 7 and a half years ago, as I wish I could take myself out of my life and start a new one.

I once had dream I was playing in the forest (as I often did when I was younger), and came upon a ruined house. The house still had a roof, but this cabin was so old and overgrown by the forest that a tree next to it had grown to enormous stature, died and fell over. The cavern formed by the up-heaved roots made a hill the cabin now sat on. As I approached the cabin I saw a very old man, who looked a little like Louis Armstrong, in a rocking chair. He was very nice to me, so I made it a regular habit to visit him. He said his house was all he needed

I often wondered how old the house might be because there was no longer any obvious road or driveway near it. As I furthered my friendship with the old man, a deformed man began to befriend us and join our little group. I have to admit he scared me, but the old man seemed familiar with him, so I went along with his friendship. This deformed man really looked strange, hardly like a man at all.

He had a head discolored and misshapen like a russet potato. He had only a few hairs coming out of the top of his head, but they were thick and leathery like mice tales. He had a large hump on his back, and he was always dressed in burlap and carried a stick for a cane. His eyes were so small they were the size of pencil erasers, and seemed deflated and flat. He wore thick spectacles. All of a sudden, a long time passed since I was able to see these two.

I was visiting the mall one day, but it was closing and I almost got locked in, but as I came to the glass front doors, they opened for me as if they were automatic (which they weren't). For some reason I was in a very good mood, and skipped through the parking lot looking for my car. I soon noticed a path in the woods that I realized was a way to get to the old cabin. Despite the sinking sun, I decided to visit my old friends.

When I got to the cabin, it looked the same as before, with moss covering the roof as if it had been thatched with it. Only the deformed man was there, and there was sad harmonica music, but I couldn't see anyone playing a harmonica. I went on the porch and began to talk to the deformed man, waiting for the old man to come out. It's then I noticed a skeleton laying face down in the mud, just off the porch. The bones looked withered and weak like dead weeds. I knew it must be the remains of the old man.

The deformed man started acting oddly like the old man, sitting in his rocking chair, saying "This house is all I need." I then said to the deformed man (about the remains in the mud), "Oh, he must of died." The deformed man began to seem very agitated, and said "Yes, something like that." I followed the deformed man inside the cabin where his temper suddenly started to rise, and I began to get frightened. His whole body began to shake, and he dropped his stick that he used as a cane shouting, "ditch the stick!" He jumped into a hole in the floor that seemed to be the collapsed roof of an abandoned mine. I followed him.

Once he got into the mine tunnel, he startled something I can only describe as a mole-man. The little mole-man was rather cute, it looked like it was made of play-doh and wore a blue winter coat with a knitted hat with fuzzy balls on top of it. Once the mole-man saw the deformed man, it's eyes and mouth all made an "O" in terror. The deform man screamed at the mole-man and said, "I charge you with the crime of smuggling sticks!" The deformed man took out an axe and began flailing it at the mole-man. The mole-man was soon chopped to pieces and dead.

What an unusual dream, I even drew a picture of the frightened mole-man in one of my diaries. I wish I could transport back to seven and a half years ago. I wish anything to be happier than I am now, maybe tomorrow I will find some hope again.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Squash-Flower Tree Dream

2007-06-27T03:50:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Here's a picture of my cat playing with my feet under the sheets as I wake up, and a picture of me waking up. My cat Angie was very good this morning. When I woke up she had only knocked the camera and mouse (computer mouse) off the desk. I had a dream about an age old fear of mine, being left behind, or stranded.

I was grocery shopping with my parents. The grocery store was in a filthy looking strip mall in a side-street curtained from the main road by a thin strip of woods, with garbage dumped around the trees. As my family and I were shopping my parents began insisting I was bored even though I insisted I wasn't bored. Eventually, they told me that if I was so bored I should leave the store and wait by their car.

I left the grocery store, but couldn't find their car. I looked every where I could imagine they might park. I ended up standing in the parking lot in view of the store entrance, to be sure I'd see them when they came out. I waited a long time, until it was clear they must of left and I didn't see them, nor they me. I became very nervous, but luckily my Dad's office was nearby on the same side-street.

I went into my Dad's office, which was more like a small apartment. I tried to use the phone there, but it was somehow connected to just the computers in his office and couldn't make out-going calls. I went outside and took a walk back and forth the side-street. I hoped my parents might be looking for me, and would see me outside on the street. While I was taking this walk I noticed huge trees, trees that looked like squash plants in tree form.

The trees had yellow crook-neck squash hanging in their boughs, and each squash was in a cluster of huge yellow flowers. It was very pretty. The sun shone through the petals because the day was growing late, so the light struck parallel to the ground, and right through the trees. It made the flowers look like rippled tissue paper. I noticed a large black-furred animal jumping from branch to branch, it looked like a large raccoon, but I couldn't tell for sure. Since it was getting near dusk I walked back to my Dad's office, still looking at the trees.

I was still trying to tell what the animals were. As I was just about to get to the building, I realized they were black bears, climbing the trees to eat the squash. Really, dozens of black bears, just as if they were squirrels. I became a bit afraid and ran into my Dad's office. I turned on all the lights, hoping it would discourage the bears from trying to come in. I then saw a woman walking outside, going to the offices upstairs from my Dad's.

I ran out to her and asked her if she had a phone I could use to call my parents. She said yes, but it was in her office. As I was in her office, she introduced me to another woman she worked with and they explained to me they worked for a division of the highway patrol, and already knew my Dad's number because he had run a red light recently. I called my parents and told them where I was, and the woman walked me down the street to where they would meet me

The part of the street by my Dad's office was surprisingly pretty, not at all like the strip mall part by the grocery store. The sunlight was still shining horizontally through the trees and buildings, making everything glow yellow and green. I noticed concrete sculptures in the wooded areas between the office buildings. The sculptures reminded me of Hindu temples abandoned and overgrown by the forest. I could still see all the black bears jumping from huge yellow-flowered tree to tree.

The woman confirmed my suspicion that the black-furred animals were bears, but she said if I looked carefully some of them were a smaller type of animal that also fed on the squash (it was the animal I first thought was a raccoon). I mentioned to her how surprised I was at how pretty this part of the street was, when the rest of it was so ugly. That's when my parents big burgundy car pulled up and my dream ended.

Now I better get ready for some appointments. I didn't sleep well last night, so I'm going to have to take a nap at some point in time today. I hate the feeling of leaving the house when I know I'm sleep-deprived. Oh well, it could be worse (blah, or better).

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Dream in a Dream

2007-06-26T06:56:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Here are pictures of my cat Angie and I this morning. I'm surprised I even remember a dream this morning because Angie kept trying to play with everything on my desk, so I had to keep waking up to get her to stop. Angie wakes up at about 4am and starts playing, some mornings she can be really loud (like this morning) and keeps waking me up. Anyway, I had a dream.

My parents managed to get me into some sort of quick degree program that we all hoped would make it easier for me to find a job. It was a very busy and difficult program, but school type things don't really bother me, and by chance my best friend Craig Gillan, from when I was around 5-7years old was also enrolled there.

The end of the program approached and the instructors alerted us that we would be participating in a short group experiment before graduating. I thought nothing of it, and eagerly looked forward to returning home. Craig Gillan and I were assigned to stay in the same room. It looked like a hospital room, and that's when I became suspicious.

Craig and I sat down on one of the beds and began to read a letter together. The letter told us that our suitcases (which we had packed in anticipation of going home) would be kept from us, and we would be staying in the hospital room for some type of observation. We would have to spend 9 nights in the room. Though it was a small comfort that my childhood friend was with me, I quickly began to panic.

I somehow managed to get momentary access to one of my smaller bags from the nurse (I think I said my toothbrush was in it or something), and took my cell phone out of my bag and hid it in my bedding. The nurse came back to retrieve my bag. As soon as I could hear her footsteps fade out of earshot down the hall, I quickly called my parents. My Mom answered the phone and it seemed to take forever (though I'm sure it was only about 30 seconds) to explain to her what was happening and that I was trapped and needed help and couldn't stay on the phone much longer. My Mom said she didn't know what to do, but she and Dad would get in touch with the institution and see what they could do.

The next thing I remember, I was waking up in my own bedroom at home. I felt very disoriented and came downstairs to the kitchen. My Mom was acting angry with me, but I didn't know why. She then started asking me why I was acting so strange last night, and if I was drinking. I was completely mystified, and had no idea where she was coming from. It was then I realized the school and hospital room had all been part of a dream, and had I probably called my own house from my cell phone, and slept-talked to my Mom. I told her this, and she seemed relieved at the explanation, but didn't seem entirely convinced.

So, that was the dream I remembered. I have a vague phantom memory of another dream, seedy, and taking place at night behind some building, but I can't recall the plot at all to recount it. Today was my first day calling the unemployment people to update them on my job search. I was surprised that the entire phone call was automated, and I never had to speak to a real person. The only job opening they had for me was as a public school teacher. I don't necessarily want to be a public school teacher, but it would be a great way to get out of retail.

It's unfortunate, North Carolina is far too backward to allow a sexual minority like myself to teach in public school, not unless I completely hid any aspect of myself from everyone (including people outside of work). I've never been able to pass as "straight," which I guess is a mixed blessing. I've met a lot of school teachers who where homosexual, and all of them had to be very secretive about their lives.

I'm such a frevrent admirer of education that it would be impossible for me to allow my students to live in the dark about so many truths in life. Even if I could get hired (which, trust me, as an obvious sexual minority I couldn't in NC), I would probably get fired for telling my students both sides of every story, not just the government approved one. It's a shame that many people that would be wonderful educators will never have the chance because of the frightened and ignorant critical mass of the USA.

Thank you for Reading,

Marc

Dream of Little Worth

2007-06-24T07:12:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Here is a picture of the 3inch high-heel boots, that are my working shoes, and a picture of me waking up this morning. This morning I had a dream really lacking in any ephemeral qualities, but I decided to post it anyway since the way I felt in the dream, sort of matches the way I feel in real life.

In the earliest part of the dream I can remember, I was in a very expensive department store with my friend Jones. The floor was so highly polished it was hard to tell which was brighter, the lights on the ceiling themselves, or the floor tiles. I was wearing my high-heel boots, which usually makes me feel good because they make me look taller and thinner, but in the dream I had injured one of my knees, so it was hard to walk in that confident click-clack. I felt self-conscious that the women in the department store would think I wasn't walking well because I didn't know how to walk in high-heels. In real life I get irritated when I feel women are watching me walk to see if I have trouble walking in heels, there's nothing genetic in a man that makes them unable to walk in heels. My 3inch heeled boots are the shoes I stand up 8 hours a day in, so it's understandably irritating when I feel a gaggle of women are excitingly watching to see if I stumble when I step over a curb. It's a pet-peeve of mine, just like when people ask me who did my make-up (I DID, duh). Anyhow, back to the dream.

As Jones and I were in the department store, he introduced me to some wealthy friend of his, a man in his early 50's. I have no idea why we were talking to him, perhaps he was going to buy us something, since we were in a store where neither of us could possibly afford anything. The man clearly wanted to say more to me, but his younger brother walked up to us (he was a man in his late 30s), and thought we looked cool, so wanted to hang-out with us.

The younger brother took us to a music store after hours. Naturally it wasn't to look at music, but to meet his wealthy friend who owned the place, and to play around with his instruments. We had a lot of fun, and soon the night grew late. We all went our different ways, but the younger brother had left a prescription bottle in my car, and called me the next morning to ask me to bring it to his house. I knew the younger brother was just slumming it with Jones and I, and would never actually want to be friends with us. He was just toying with us because we were cool, artsy, poor people. I did however recognize his older brother's desire to speak with me, who I could also tell was a homosexual.

That morning, I headed-off in my car with the directions the younger brother gave me. I was excited at my opportunity to talk more with the older brother because, frankly, I'm very poor and really want to get out of Raleigh and move somewhere were it's easier for an effeminate homosexual like me to get a job, or at least move to a place where I don't feel so marginalized. I figured the older brother might have some pity on me and lead me to some job connections.

When I got to the house (a mansion, of course), it had a large lawn, softly patterned with little hills, and each little hill had a large oak tree on it. Every once in a while, I'd see a suited security guard move from behind a tree. I got to the door, and to my dismay the bottom floor was laid out just like a reception lobby to a business, receptionists and all. This meant no chance encounter with the older brother. I brought the prescription bottle to the receptionist, and she called the younger brother. When she got off the phone with him, she said he couldn't come down because he wasn't finished sleeping, but thanked me for bringing the bottle back. Disappointed, but not really surprised, I went home and assumed my dealings with this rich family was over with.

When I got home there was a message on my answering machine from Jones. He was telling me that the younger brother wanted to hang-out with us that afternoon. I went over to Jones's house and we did something quick with the younger brother, like have coffee. The younger brother soon said he had to go home because he had a lot of work to do that night. Before I left Jones's house, Jones told me I should go to the house and ask if they wanted to buy one of my drawings because they had all kinds of money to throw around. So, the next morning I went back to the mansion.

I walked down the perfectly groomed lawn, with one tree for every hill (I suspected the hills were man-made). The closer I got to the house, I began to encounter little plastic toys, streamers, and plastic wine glasses. By the time I got to the house I actually had to brush the party refuse aside with my boots in order to get through. I had that humiliating feeling of, "Oh, he didn't have any work to do last night, he just didn't want us to show up at his party." I went up to the desk in the lobby, and there were two receptionists there.

I asked for the older brother first, and they said he wasn't home, but they would call the younger brother to see if he would look at the drawings I brought. I could hear the irritated mumbling of the younger brother on the other line of the phone as one of the receptionists tried to get him to come down. She seemed genuinely to feel bad for me, and said she was sorry and he couldn't come down. I began to talk to both of the receptionists and told them I was trying to see if the brother's would buy any of my drawings. They replied, "Dear, there are all kinds of little things you could do around here for money, you should come around later and see what we need done."

To me, that was the obvious point of demarcation between my "class" and the people of the house's "class." It sucks living in a "classless" society because there ARE classes, they just get to be more stealthy about it. That was about the end of my dream, so I got to wake up this morning with a mild sense of inferiority. I know I shouldn't be so vulnerable to social judgement, but oh well, I'm human.

Thanks for reading,

Marc

Just Toys, not Friends, are Only for Fun

2007-06-22T13:58:00.000-07:00

I just got back from spending time with my friend Cindy, and had a really good time, here's Cindy wiped-out from the day, sitting with her daughter Iona. Cindy's a typical mother in the sense she sacrifices her right to emotion in order to be a leader to her family, and a guide to me.

Today she had had it. One company's accidental double charge caused her a 175$ overdraft fee she cannot afford, meanwhile the company at fault is wrangling with her to right their wrong. Meanwhile she has to struggle to feed her family, pay medical bills, and help me, an emotional supercell.

So, today her temper trembled under her voice as she tired to get her money, as she tired to explain to her father why she didn't have any money. All this while herding and attending to her four and five year old, with her adult daughter not far away on her mind. As we dragged ourselves around in the summer heat her mood sizzled, but as always she retained her personality and self, and that's who I'm friends with. As I left for home she apologized for her bad mood. There's simply no need to apologize. Life is hard, and it has been for both of us. Life's been a disappointment, and at times an insult in addition.

I rather have solid quality time with a friend in a bad mood, than be the type of person to just abandon someone because they're not happy, because they have problems, because they can't "rise to the occasion." This whole past year I've really had to struggle with some dark emotional problems, and I've seen friend after friend either just straight-out leave, or do their good deed only to abandon me forever-since. What kind of society are we where it's acceptable to only stick around for the good times? People should make friends for companionship, to share like-mindedness, to form a safety-net and a community. However, people I've respected, and known for years have simply crumbled and disappeared once things started to get rough with me this past year. For some of these people, it was just a few bad months out of years and years of friendship, that caused their allegiance to crumble away. I suppose I don't want friends like that, and I don't want my one remaining friend to think I would be like that. I will not abandon a friend because they're not all roses. Life is not happy, nor fair, so why expect people to be fun and happy all the time, or even most of the time?

There's no place for fair-weather friends and the picture of me in this post is of me having a great time during hard times with Cindy.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

The "What-if" Dreams

2007-06-21T06:47:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

Last night I had two dreams I can remember now. Both of them either had a beginning that didn't match the end, or an end that didn't match the beginning. Here is the first one:

I was in the car with someone else, and believe it or not we were both dressed like good old boys from Eastern NC (with the baseball caps ever so lightly rested upon our heads). We were unfamiliar with Raleigh and were looking for Hillsborough St. For those of you from other towns, that would be the main street by NCSU. We were driving some rusty looking Chevrolet, with fruit-shaped car-deodorant pendants hanging around the rear-view mirror, and papers and cups wedged on top the dashboard. We stopped at the Phillips 66 gas station for directions and began to take a left at the intersection.

The guy I was with quickly realized it was the wrong way. So, instead of turning around using a side street or a driveway, I just did a U-turn right there in the intersection and took the next possible direction, which of course, was wrong again. My ever-so impatient passenger implored me to make another U-turn in the intersection and go the only other way in the intersection we hadn't tried. After all this spinning around, I began to be worried a police officer would see us and pull us over for reckless driving. Sure enough, I did see a police officer in my rear-view mirror, but oddly enough he completely ignored us.

When we finally got to Hillsborough St. To our surprise everything was blocked by a mass of construction. There were lone concrete towers with metal pipes sticking out, high mounds of red clay, and half-demolished buildings everywhere, all covered in a constant beige wind of dust. It looked like what I would imagine the Valley of the Kings looks like. We had to leave the car and spent a good time climbing over the construction to reach the nearby neighborhoods we were looking for. Oddly enough, once we got to the house, the guy I was with disappeared, and all the construction was gone. It was just me standing at the Ridgewood Philips 66 watching two rednecks get pulled over by the cops for driving loop-de-loops all around the intersection.

My next dream was a little more detailed, so I hope it won't make this post overly long. The second dream began with me arriving in Raleigh, as if I had never moved here, and was coming straight from Connecticut. I walked into an apartment that evidently was my Dad's. I instantly noticed a small dog-eared and loose-leafed Bible in Spanish on a little night-table. I looked around the apartment, there were only his clothes shoved in the drawers and on the furniture. I thought it seemed as if he had never met my mother, and wonder if perhaps they weren't actually my parents, so I left the apartment to go further into Raleigh.

Now, in real life, Raleigh is not pedestrian-friendly at all. You pretty much have to have a car to live here. It's also one of the uglier cities around. Most buildings have a modular home/ strip-mall type look, and there's hardly a hint of any older architecture that might have once been here. Where Raleigh does seem quaint tends to be in areas that are now crack-ridden and dangerous, so imagine my surprise in the dream when I found myself walking into something not unlike grand-central station.

Huge steel beams held-up railway bridges at least 50 feet above my head, and crowds of people were busily making their way through the station. In every little half-hidden spot, I'd notice a homeless person, or runaway child contently sitting in their area as if they lived there forever. Once I got past the station, I came to a large indoor aquarium. It was a beautiful building with a mezzanine and a glass dome, so you could walk around and look at the sea-life as well as look out the windows to see the many large buildings of this imaginary Raleigh (really, it looked like a real city with people crowded on the streets under beautifully constructed buildings). It was then that I noticed a floor-level pool of water surrounded by tropical plants. I noticed dolphins jumping and squeaking all over it. There was a sign by the guard rail surrounding it, telling you to blow into some horn that would make a sound like a baby dolphin, and that they would approach you.

I looked all over the guardrail for the horn, but couldn't find it. The dolphins continued to jump and play right in front of me anyway, and just as I wished, one of them slowed down and made eye-contact with me. That's when my Dad approached me by the dolphin pool, as if we had planned to meet there.

Well, those are the dreams I can remember from last night. It's early in the day (I woke up about two hours ago), and I already feel tired. Today I'll just be working on my resume and on more pictures of the dream I described in my very first post on this blog. It's a shame how I always seem to draw really great detailed pictures on my crappiest sketching paper. I guess I just feel less inhibited when I'm not using my thick, more expensive "final draft" paper, so I attempt deeper detail and trickier perspective. Once I figure out how to use my hand me down camera (no, I'm not a good with technical electronic things), I'll take some pictures of my artwork, along with some pictures of my cat.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

First Day Out

2007-06-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

Hello All.

Today I was my first day out of the apartment since Friday. As you can see from the picture above, I went to my friend Cindy's house (As I do, on Tuesdays). Her garden has been doing very well. Here I'm posed in front of her black plum tomato plant that I've been very excited about, and luckily is doing the best of all her tomato plants. I've been rather shocked by all the financial calamity I've tumbled into (mostly by my own stupidity, and somewhat by mere misfortune), so have barricaded myself in my apartment for the past few days. Luckily, I made it to Cindy's and back without dieing.

I would love to tell you more about my dreams last night, but they were truly lame. One involved me being worried about clearing a space in my room for my yoga practice. My room was so messy that a large conical tan-furred mole had burrowed it's way into my clothing basket. Another involved Cindy's eldest daughter asking me if I wanted to make cookies with her and her mother. I woke up to find my yoga area clear as usual and preformed a sufficient amount of my practice (keep in mind I've been in trauma-mode for the past week). I surfed the web a bit to read more about the atrocities being carried out towards my fellow sexual minorities in the Middle East. I've been preoccupied with accounts of the treatment of gay Iraqi's and Iranians (though certainly know it doesn't stop in these geographical locations).

I have no money, I don't know how to help these people, but I think the LGBT "community" in privileged America should be doing more. I'm now considering trying to learn at least a usable amount of Farsi or Arabic over my time of unemployment (I do have a Master's in English, so I'm assuming I have some sort of language "knack"), to see if there isn't a way I can get involved with helping these people. I don't understand the Gay community in America, if there are other sexual minorities being lashed, stoned to death, and hung in other countries, why aren't we sneaking them into our own country, hiding them in our living places, so they can make a life for themselves.

As citizens of America, it's not our fault our government doesn't immediately give these oppressed sexual minorities a safe refuge. It's our duty to take the higher moral ground and provide these people with a network of refuge in our country. I don't care if it's underground and illegal, but these oppressed LGBT people deserve to live, and to be free. We have plenty of illegal migrant workers and that's unofficially "OK" with our government and society as a whole, so why shouldn't it be de facto "OK" to harbor and protect gay Iranians, or transgendered Iraqi's (etc) in our homes and places of business. I truly doubt these people are going to turn around and destroy America, I think they'd be elated to be able to live somewhere where they could not live in fear for being found out as a sexual minority.

I feel plenty marginalized as it is in America, so I can't imagine how it must be for people like me in countries with even less sensitivity to the LGBT minority.

Thank you for reading,

Marc

Wrap you Worries in Dreams

2007-06-18T17:56:00.000-07:00

Hello it's Marc:

I spend most of my time alone. I have a best friend, her name is Cindy, and I see her every Tuesday. My dreams are my television, I have wonderful dreams, and most of this site will be narrations of those dreams.

I have acute agoraphobia, and I regularly become trapped in my apartment. It takes enormous effort on my part to go to new places, or to speak to new people. I also have trouble recognizing people, which makes making new friends even harder. I have a Master's degree in English, practice Ashtanga yoga to the point where I could teach it, but I've been a bagger at a grocery store for the past several years. Change is very hard for me, and I've just lost my job.

I hated that job from the bottom of my heart. I only stayed there out of familiarity and for fear of discrimination as a homosexual. I also have a touch of gender-disphoria, I don't mind my male body, it's quite nice, but for as long as I can remember I've always wanted to look like Mia Farrow, Jane Birkin, or Audrey Hepburn. Since that's not a possibility, I just take the part of living as a gay man, save some body-glitter and crystal-glass earrings (I love all that shimmers).

Now I'm presented with the task of going forth in the world of strangers, to get unemployment, to get food stamps, and at last, to get a job out of the retail circus. To get a job that uses my skills. I have no idea of how to present myself to the world. But here is a dream I had in November which more or less explains my current mortal dilemmas:

I had a dream completely smothered by a sense of hurriedness. I was about 5 years old, and on a field-trip to a distant town. I accidentally brought my blankey, teddy bear, and stuffed unicorn with me, and I was terrified I was going to lose them, especially since the teachers were rushing us from place to place. First we went to an old opera house, it was nighttime.

As the class entered the large marble-staired foyer, I got distracted. I walked up some red carpeted stairs to some forgotten corner of the opera house. It was a prop room, that seemed untouched since the 40's. I remember seeing framed pictures of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. I was hugging my blankey, stuffed bear, and unicorn tightly under my overcoat, but just couldn't keep myself from putting them down to open a large chest beneath those starlets' pictures. The chest had beads, dazzling in the street lights that stretched through the windows, the beads hung to the floor.

I made sure my toys were close in my sight. I opened the chest and began to deck myself like a Christmas tree, with an old fur coat, clip on earrings, and strings of beads. All so large on me that I seemed to sink in them like a child submerged in a snow bank. I just remember everything, even the slick mink hairs, flashing in the street lights through the windows. I pouted dramatically with one hand to my heart and the other reaching for the ceiling, " Comme moi!" It was then I eyed my blankey, unicorn, and teddy. I quickly shrugged off my costume, and ran down the stairs, only to find my class had already left the opera house.

I tucked my toys tightly under my coat again, and ran down the dark cobbled street in the direction the doorman told me my class had gone. I finally saw them, with their wood-soled dress shoes clacking down a small stone outside amphitheater into a library. I caught up to the class once they were inside, and carefully checked to be sure I had my blankey, my teddy bear, and my stuffed unicorn. I had all, but the class was being rushed along to a story time area, with all colors, shapes and sizes of cakes and sweets gleaming in the library's fluorescent lights. The story time had ended and we were all allowed to eat whatever we liked, but I had to put one of my toys down in order to have a hand free to have the lime green frosted chocolate cake I wanted.

I put my teddy bear down and quickly ate my cake because a teacher was already dragging me up by my arm to rush off to our next location. I almost forgot my teddy bear, but jerked away and got him before we rushed back into the moon and lamp-post lit streets of the town. Again we clacked down the cobble road. The road led past the opera house again and straight down to a man-made harbour, all made of huge stone blocks. The oddest thing was, the harbour had a humpback whale treading water right in the middle of it. Not swimming around at all, just kind of hovering at the surface of the water and looking at us as we made our way down the street. It was then I became an adult man (who looked nothing like the adult man I actually am) perhaps a journalist because I was seized by the desire to take a picture of this strange whale.

That man was still little me though, with my blankey, teddy bear, and unicorn tucked into his leather jacket. Now an adult man, I made way stealthily along the street-side buildings to try and take a picture of the whale without startling it, but just as I got my camera out, some iron-grating covering a basement level stairwell gave way. I knew I had to drop one of my toys in order to keep myself from falling to severe injury. I dropped my blankey to the bottom of the stairwell, and grabbed on the street-level railing to keep myself from falling. The dream ended with me looking down at my blankey, wondering how I was going to safely pull myself up and get down to reclaim my blankey.

I think that dream is a good summary of who I am. I plan to draw a narrated story of the dream and have already completed some sketches, but now that I'm unemployed I'm working on pictures to sell, perhaps when I finish working on the pictures I'm drawing now, I'll finish my picture book of that dream.

Thank you for reading,

Marc