1/1/02:

   I am on the corner of Lafayette and Prince in NYC. It is morning and I am on the northwest corner by that magazine stand/deli. A man walks by holding a little girl in his arms. The girls is about 4 or 5 years old and is wearing a party dress. The man is maybe 40 and has gray short hair, is very handsome like a model, thin, and wearing an Italian suit. As they walk by me they both look at me and I see that the man's left eye is very strange looking. The pupil and iris look very small and don't seem to have any eyeball surrounding them. It looks like a mechanical eye. I get the impression that it is shining a light on me as I look at it.
    Later I am somewhere else in the city. I kind of "see" the little girl again as a doll that is lying in the gutter of the street. She sometimes looks like the girl I saw earlier and sometimes she looks like a little plastic doll. I am not looking at it but am kind of "aware" of her/it's presence in the gutter somewhere. When the girl is a little doll, the doll's left eye is mangled. When the girl is a little girl her left eye is mangled and there is blood on it.

1/2/02:

No dreams.

1/3/02:

   I am once again in some strange city that I do not know. I get the feeling I may be somewhere in the Caribbean. I am with someone who is my friend, but only in the dream. I do not recognize them at all. We seem to be going to someplace, or trying to get somewhere. At one point we are in this house, like a kind of ramshackle place with pastel colored concrete walls, shuttered windows, some old tables and a bar. Now that I think about it, it was a bar. There was liquor stocked behind the bar, a jukebox... the place seemed "open aired" like there was no need for AC or heat. Like the weather was always mild there and there maybe was no rain. Anyway, we seem to be stopping off here on our way to our destination. There is a very big black man who sees us enter the bar and starts setting up a bunch of merchandise on one of the tables. He wants to sell us some stuff. He puts one of the objects around his neck and it has flashing toy lights on it. He is smiling and saying we need one of these. We are half paying attention to him and half looking out the window trying to figure out what direction we need to go in.

1/4/02:

No dreams.

1/5/02:

   I am with a bunch of people. They are my friends but I have no idea who they are. They are just my friends in the dream. I am at a church service at my old church in Dallas. It looks different but is the same church. The "stage" area of the church is huge, and has these giant leveled areas that kind of look like arena seating, like a choir would stand on them. The area of the levels that you stand on are very narrow. There are these little staircases on different sides of the levels so you can eventually climb up to the top one. The uppermost level on the stage is very, very high. Almost dizzying.
    There is a church service going on. Me and my friends are sitting in the back row. You can see the sun shining through the windows inside the church. The carpet is red, industrial, all the walls are ping pong white and the pews are dark wood with cushioned maroon seat, the vaulted ceiling is very high, there is a 2nd floor balcony that runs all the way around the seating area, just like my old church. Now that I think about it, I think the friends I was with may have been my old high school friends Katy, Carolyn, Kim, Sondra, Alyson, etc.
    The pastor is at the front making his sermon (his podium is in the center of the stage thing, half way up) and we are all in the back kind of bored. We are whispering to each other, passing packs of Bubble Yum gum back and forth to each other, reading the Sunday paper comics, stuff like that. Just like me and my brother and friends used to do in church as very young kids.
    Suddenly I am sitting in the uppermost level of the stage area, for some reason I was asked to come up there by the pastor and now I am just suddenly there. It's REALLY high up. So high that I kind of fear for my safety. There are other people sitting in this stage thing on the different levels as well. If I were to just scoot my chair six inches forward, I would plummet down about fifteen feet to the next level and land on the person sitting in a chair on that level, and then they would fall and so on and so forth. It's very dangerous. At on point we all stand and read from our hymnals and sing a roaring version of "Amazing Grace" all the movement and singing causes the stage thing to teeter and sway like it's gonna collapse. I'm kind of terrified.
    We finish the song and all sit down and the stage thing stops teetering. I look out and see my friends way in the back row. They are still talking and goofing off and waving at me. I think one of them has an umbrella.
    I look to my right and down at the level below me and see that the group of people next to me is the retarded group at the church. They all sit together on this stage thing and sing hymns when everyone else is singing. But because they are retarded, some of them severely so, they don't quite know exactly what is going on around them and can't pick up on social nuances. All of the sudden, about half of the retarded group stand up (which causes the stage thing to sway a little bit) and start singing "Amazing Grace". They are singing very badly, all out of time with each other and they don't really know the words so they are just kind of yelping really loudly over and over in an atonal way. The people below them and in front of them motion for them to stop and sit down but they don't. The pastor looks over at them and asks them to please stop and sit down "...the singing is over for now guys." But they seem oblivious and just keep right on.
    Eventually they sit down and the pastor continues. The retarded people are still fidgeting in their seats and making slurping noises. I find that I can't stop laughing. I am laughing really hard and I can't stop. I am covering my mouth with my hand. I am looking way down in the back row and see my friends all laughing that I can't stop laughing. The pastor seems annoyed.

1/6/02:

   I am a woman in this dream. I seem to be living in some kind of fantastic science fiction world scenario. It's kind of like I'm living in a live action Japanese anime film. Anyway, I work during the day at some super high security, high government, top secret building. The building is huge and is shaped kind of like a rounded cone, like a sideways zeppelin. It is made of blue metal and has no windows. There are all kinds of blue metal bridges and flying buttresses sticking out of it and stuff. Very old sci-fi movie looking.
    I am at the building way after quitting time. I am way outside the building and I am standing at the main entrance, which is very far from the building itself because once you go through the entrance you walk down this very long bridge with concrete side rails and industrial blue and gray carpet to actually get to the building. The entrance I am at is this kind of desk with these two glass doors on either side of it. The desk is a security checkpoint and you have to clear it before you can go through the glass doors and onto the bridge and then all the way to the building.
    Anyway, I am there and I have a bunch of friends with me. We are all dressed in these really cliché cyber punk outfits, all black leather with straps and big boots and trench coats and eyeliner and stuff. It seems we had just been hanging out in the city and decided to "drop by" where I work to check it out - just out of boredom. I am at the security desk and all my friends are leaning against the edge of the bridge, waiting for me to clear. I am on some kind of video phone with a security woman. She says that only me and one of my friends can come in, the rest will have to wait outside. I tell her OK. For some reason, at this point I get the impression that we are not just hanging out, and that we are doing something very secret that we don't want the security people to know about. Nothing sinister, just something playfully mischievous.
    I pick one guy from my group, like my best friend I guess (I have no idea who any of these characters in my dream are) and tell the rest to wait and we'll be right back. They all kind of protest and are like "No... wait, why don't we all just sneak in when the door opens!" For some reason I don't want to do this, probably because I know that the security in the building is so thorough and high tech that there is no way we can get away with it. So I just make up any excuse to them and say "No. That won't work, we're being watched by security cams!" All the other friends sulk back on the wall and me and my one friend enter the building. Right then the security woman comes on the loudspeaker and ways "You're being watched!"

1/7/02:

   There is something where I am living in this really tall tree house-looking structure (although it's on the ground) with my brother, mother, grandmother and father and grandfather. In real life my grandfather is no longer living. It seems to be dusk and we seem to be preparing some kind of lavish meal. All at once everyone in the house but me and my grandfather leave to go out and get things that we forgot for the meal. My grandfather and I are there and we are joking around about how lame the whole dinner charade is. My grandfather asks me if I want to ditch the rest of the family and go wander around. I say yes and we split into the night.

1/8/02:

   Very strange dream:
    I am living in my own apartment here in NYC. I have a daily routine. I seem to be doing this daily phone conference thing with some guy that I have never met. Every day we talk on the phone at the same time. The conversation always seems to consist of us talking back and forth and laughing and just having a normal discussion. However, the conversation ALWAYS ends with some trivial disagreement that the guy on the other end of the line has initiated. He always slips it in somehow and we sit there arguing back and forth. I'm always compromising and saying "OK it's fine, this really isn't important, you're right let's just try to get along." But he does whatever he can to keep the conflict going. The conversation/argument always ends with him saying something like "I won't ever speak with you again until you apologize to me and admit you were wrong!" and then he hangs up the phone and I'm perplexed.
    Then the next day he calls back, always at the same time and is like "Hi!" all cheery like as if nothing is wrong and I'm just chatting away and then comes the point same point in the conversation where he says "Remember what I talked about yesterday, about you apologizing? Well, are you?" and I always say "Oh yea yea I'm so sorry" even though he can never explain to me what exactly I did wrong when I ask him to. Then during some point in the conversation he will start another trivial disagreement and the whole stupid spiral will begin all over again. I have no idea why I talk to this annoying, awful man day after day after day and we keep having the same stupid pattern in our conversation. I don't even like him or enjoy his company. Then I get the impression that somehow this is my "job" and that I am getting paid somehow to do this. Very odd.
    Then a shift: suddenly I am in my apartment and it is a different time. It is late afternoon. It is Summer I think and all the windows are open. There is a lot of wind blowing around, I think a Summer rain is on the way. I am laying on my bed and am kind of having this really calm, centered feeling. I get up and walk through the apartment into the other bedroom. I see a "ghost" of my old Dallas friend Chuck sitting on the bed. He only appears as a shadow, all black, sitting there on the bed. I sit next to him and I get the impression he has "died" and this is his ghost coming to protect me. We sit there and his black form lays his head on my shoulder. He is comforting me and letting me know that the annoying man on the phone is of great harm and I should not talk to him anymore. We sit there kind of embracing and we are looking at my wall full of pictures. I feel really warm and centered.
    Then I am laying back on my bed in the other room and I am looking out the window, sideways. I "feel" the presence of my dead friend Luis (who is dead in real life and I have felt the 'presence' of once or twice before, in real life, watching over me). Luis is kind of stroking my back and letting me know everything is going to be OK and to not trust the guy on the phone.
    Then it is the next day. The rude guy calls. We start talking. Suddenly, as I am talking to him, all these rows of letters and numbers and code appear in the air in front of me. The more we talk, the more numbers and letters appear. I don't know why I am seeing them, but I know the guy on the other end of the line can't see them because he isn't saying anything unusual. I don't tell him about what I see, I just keep talking like everything is normal. The more we talk the more rows and rows of figures appear. I soon see that what I am looking at is this incredibly complex math problem. The daily conversations I have with this guy are different every day, but I see by this configuration that they can be translated into symbols and numbers that equal roughly the same pattern. The conversations we have are actually the same exact complex math problem every day! Although I somehow sense that the math problem has a "different answer" every day.
    The conversation flows like it usually does; the guy starts some disagreement and we start to argue over something ridiculous and I try and tell him it's no big deal and he just gets madder and then he says I need to apologize to him and he hangs up saying he will never talk to me again (just like he does at the end of every conversation - he will call back tomorrow). The same pattern of conversation = the almost same mathematical configuration every day. I hang up the phone and look at the numbers and symbols hanging in the air. I see at the bottom that there is a place for the "answer" to go, the solution to the problem. Luis' ghost kind of pops into view and points to where the answer goes. He lets me know that this man has been calling me every day and having basically the same stupid conversation with me because he is totally aware of this math problem that the conversation and argument produce. Luis says that the "answer" or solution to the problem that is missing at the bottom is the first thing that will be supplied tomorrow when he calls and picks up the phone and I am friendly and say "Hello!". Luis says that every conversation/math problem begins with the solution to yesterday's conversation/math problem, and then goes on to create a brand new problem, the answer to which will be provided at the beginning of the next day's conversation. Sure enough I look up at the top of all the rows of figures and see the answer to the previous day's conversation/math problem, sitting there all by itself.
    Luis lets me know that this man is totally aware of what he is doing and is manipulating me and is not to be trusted. He is slowly gathering each and every answer to every day's conversation/math problem and all of these slightly different answers, when lined up chronologically, will spell out (in code) instructions that will make him very rich and successful and happy. The man is stealing all this information from me. He has to take it in this round-about, manipulative way because if he just tries to get it from me by asking, I will be onto him. Also if I were to tell the man the information right out, the man would not be able to understand it. He has to use this slow process to ease it into his consciousness. Luis says the man has about a thousand more conversations to go until he has the solution from me, so I should gradually stop talking to him to prevent him from getting it.
    Luis says I have this information inside me and many people are after it and I need to be careful. I ask him what the information is. He doesn't tell me. I plan not to pick up the phone when the man calls tomorrow, I know he will become enraged and do everything he can to keep talking to me. Luis says the key to getting the man to stop calling or trying to contact me is to, somehow, through my words or actions, convince the man that I am "evil" and convince him that any energy the he puts towards me will only make my power grow and grow. The man won't want to have anything to do with me after I do this. This is the only way the man will truly leave me alone. Luis says "Sometimes you have to fight Evil by pretending to be more evil than the actual Evil itself. If you trick Evil into thinking you are more evil than it, it will fear you and you have beat it." I ask Luis how to do this. Luis says this will be easy for me to accomplish but doesn't tell me how. He says it's in my nature.
    Then, another shift: suddenly I am watching this scenario, like a little animated cartoon scenario that I am kind or "watching" on a screen in front of me. It is an animated cartoon of a crowd of rich English aristocrats having a picnic gathering on a rolling green hillside. Every character is dressed in the latest upper crust fashions and is acting in a very well-to-do and snobbish way. The woman all have jewels and the men all have top hats and monocles. Everyone is holding martinis and are talking to each other with lock jawed accents and with their noses up-turned. They all look like New Yorker magazine cartoons. Suddenly from the left, a giant animated black and yellow bumble bee pops into the screen. It is flying over the heads of everyone at the picnic. The head of the bumble bee has a picture of my face pasted over it, which moves along with the body. The bee is a personification of me. I am flying over the heads of all the aristocrats and raining down all these pellets of bee poop on them (honey?) and the little black pellets are shooting out of my bee ass and hitting them and knocking off their hats and wigs and tiaras and plopping in their martinis and they are all scurrying around and yelling and says "Well I never!" and stuff like that. My face on the bee is laughing hysterically and obnoxiously as I am doing this. I just keep raining down the pellets on them and they are running around, their picnic and dignity ruined. I hear Luis' voice telling me to pay very close attention to this cartoon because it holds a complex math problem that will tell me about my eternal happiness.

1/9/02:

   In this dream, sometimes it is very obvious that what I am existing in is a movie (with editing, credits, music, etc.) and sometimes it is normal dream reality. Also, just like my 1/6/02 dream, I seem to be a woman at times in this dream, always switching back and forth.
    I seem to be the son of the President of the United States. I am on an old fashioned train (I am riding in a box car full of hay like a hobo) and I am being taken to this old western-theme resort town so my parents, the president and first lady, can pick me up. It's like I am on spring break from college or something. Sometimes I am a woman on the train, and if it is the movie I am played by Winona Ryder or sometimes Patricia Arquette, and if it is not the movie, I am always back to just me (although sometimes I am me in the movie as well).
    I arrive at the station and the train squeals to a halt. I seem to be myself at this point. Although what keeps switching now are the fact that my parents are the president and first lady, and just my normal parents. Sometimes, as I am walking out of the train, I am walking towards all these stretch limos and secret service men, and sometimes I am just walking to my folks in their car. Either way, we are all going to eat at some wacky western theme restaurant in the resort theme town.

1/10/02:

    Another strange house that I live in, in another strange town I don't recognize, yet both are filled with people I know. I am at my parents home (unrecognizable) with my brother. We are waiting for my parents to come home from some trip. I go out jogging, it is nighttime. When I come home, my parents have arrived and are in the living room. I go in there and we embrace and say hello.
    Then it is the next day and I am at my old Dallas friend Eddie's "new apartment". It is a converted warehouse space, kind of, that he is renovating himself to live in. It looks really run down. There are times when I am in it that it looks like the inside of a dilapidated old plantation style mansion. Eddie is going from room to room talking about all the stuff he is going to do with it but I am looking around and wondering how it's possible. In each room, the giant windows have old shutters (which are closed) and I can see the sun shining through all the little slits in each shutter, as well as through the cracks in all the outside walls. It is at that moment that I look around and think that I am in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Eddie's new place, in the dream, has transported me there.
    I walk outside of Eddie's place and am on the streets of San Juan. I see all these transsexuals putting their make up on with little compact mirrors. Each one of them is sitting in the back of their own convertible car while they do this.
    Then I am back in the town I don't know but is full of people I know. I am at some new nightclub run by Chip Duckett. The club seems to be in a converted old building or house. There are a lot of cute guys there. I am walking up and down stairs and from room to room. Some of the room are really crowded and some of the rooms have no one in them. The rooms that are empty kind of scare me for some reason. I see one really cute guy there that is very, very tall.
    Then it is daytime and I am with some people that I don't recognize. I am on my way to do something important with them, what I don't know. I get a cell call from my friend Alan. He says he will not be able to meet me because he is tied up and will I please take care of things without him. I can tell from the call that he is actually not "tied up" but is at a GLAAD cocktail party and having a great time and doesn't want to leave. I talk with my friends about this and we talk about how only old people go to GLAAD cocktail parties and how people like Bruce Valanche and Whoopie Goldberg go to them and how lame we think it all is.
    Then I am with my friends and we are passing the building where the GLAAD cocktail party is. I decide to go in and play a joke on Alan and surprise him. I go inside and am on this second story landing that is in the lobby of the building. The party is in the next big room. As I am on the landing (hiding out?) the party suddenly spills out into the lobby. I can see the top of everyone's head. Everyone is very old and they are all wearing Bob Mackie style gowns and tuxedoes and carrying cocktails. It's like a masquerade party at an old folk's home. I see one of the people is Bruce Valanche but he looks different. He is in "drag" kind of, a Bob Mackie gown and bad make up and drop earrings. He looks like he is totally going bald but still has a "ring" of hair around his head. He kind of "poofed" the ring up into a woman's hair style and just left the top bald. It looks hideous. His arms are hairy and he has jewelry on his fingers. He is hurriedly talking to as many people as he can and is acting like he's on speed. Every old person at the GLAAD party is acting socially hyper. I never see Alan.
    Then it is another day and I am walking outside, carrying a box. I am going somewhere. I look around and suddenly realize that I am on the campus of my college. I am walking down near Fry Street. I think had heard from some friends that there was some amazing outdoor party or concert or rally or something going on there and I think I am casually going by to check it out.
    I walk into Fry Street and there is a crowd there. There is a podium set up in the middle of the street and a long line of people behind it. Each one is waiting their turn to make some kind of speech. Everyone gets up to the microphone, says something inspirational, then the whole crowd applauds and the next person gets up to make a speech. I notice that everyone there is a woman. I wonder if it's some kind of lesbian or feminist rally. I hold my box and sit on a car hood really near the podium and watch some of the speeches. I notice some of the women seem "nervous" or anxious as they are in line to make their speech. I am sitting on the car hood and trying to make eye contact with some of them and then mouthing the words "You can do it!" and "Give it your best shot" and "Don't be nervous!" to them if they see me and making this little victory motion with my fist, like moral support.
    Then I see some girls in the audience I know and I am waving to them. They are these two girls I used to know in Act Up but I forgot their names. They point up at the sky as if they want me to meet them there. It is then that I realize the crowded rally is not on Fry Street anymore but is inside the Chip Duckett night club I was in earlier. I wander past the lesbian rally and find the stairs and go up. I go up level after level. On one of the levels I look into the first room I see and see my parents in their living room. I keep going up. I don't see my friends at all.
    I reach the top level and find all these weird doors that kind of open onto each other like a maze. I keep opening them and going into these cramped passage ways. I realize I am in an old house. I find one room where I hear someone. I go in and see the cute tall guy I had seen at the club earlier in the dream. He is with another guy and they are having sex. They are both totally nude and sweaty and I think maybe covered in whipped cream or something like that. I feel really jealous for some reason.

1/11/02:

   I am in a room in a house I don't know. I am with my friend Mario Diaz. It's his room. He is showing me these video tapes on his TV, or is trying to. He keeps trying to show me the videos and there is a problem and he is preoccupied with trying to fix it.
    There is something floating in front of the TV in the air that I seem to be able to see but Mario can't. It's  this transparent kind of weird maze looking thing between me and the TV screen. I am about four feet from the screen. The maze thing is three dimensional and is made of this stuff that looks like dry pasta, semi transparent and off-white. It is a maze construction that has all these passages moving at all right angles. Some of the little passageways are thicker than others and look like miniature hallways you would see in a little dollhouse or something. I can see little figures inside some of the passageways. Sometimes the maze is there floating in front of me and sometimes it isn't. Mario can't seem to see it, but he can't figure out why he can't get the tapes to play on the VCR. But he doesn't know it is the maze that is preventing it. I don't tell him because I know he won't believe me, because I know he can't see the maze. So I keep quiet and just watch the maze while Mario fiddles with the tapes.
    I look closer and see that the little figures in the little intersections of the maze are actually different little tiny representations of me and Mario sitting in front of the TV as little representations of other alternate realities. There are about six different representations of us in different parts of the maze, and they all show what would happen if either of us had done anything slightly different than what we did in the reality we are in (i.e.; I arrived five minutes earlier, or later, and Mario had been in a different part of the house, Mario forgot to plug in the TV before he tried turning it on and therefor was sitting on the other side of me because he had to move to plug it in, I had said I didn't want to see the tapes, etc.) I am watching all the little representations of us and I see as Mario does different things as he is trying to get the VCR to work, every time he does something, all the little positions of all the alternate realities shift at the same time within the maze, at the same speed. It's real weird. I also notice that all the representations lead to one conclusion: the end of the maze leads directly into the TV screen.
    Then suddenly we are watching TV, the tape, and the maze is gone. Me and Mario and I are kind of cuddling on his bed watching the tape. Time seems to have passed. The video that we are watching is a stop-motion animation cartoon of these two kids who live on this big round rock that is floating in the sky, or space (kind of like that book The Little Prince). They cartoon characters live on the middle of the rock (like where the equator would be). The one kid is trying to get the other kid to come with him to the top of the rock and the other kid doesn't want to, he is happy where he is. The kid keeps trying to get the other kid to move to the top, telling him it's better up there and the other kid really isn't sure he wants to. The first kid is like "It's so much better up there! We'll be happier up there! It's the top!" and then it looks like the second kid might be convinced. Then they both start walking to the top of the rock and just then the camera pulls back to show the way the rock is floating in outer space. It's upside down in our perspective. The kids on the rock are unaware that they are actually upside down and they are not walking to the top of the rock, they are walking to the bottom. Both Mario and I laugh.

1/12/02:

    I seem to be in this weird hybrid of a neighborhood I lived in Pennsylvania briefly as a child, and a modern shopping center. The time in my life is now, like I am back at this neighborhood for some reason, and it is mixed with a shopping center. The entrances to people's homes kind of look like the glass-fronted store entrances and vice versa. It is dusk and I am approaching a home/store that is really beautiful. It has a lush green lawn and all this dramatic lighting in the front yard. The people I am with all have sleeping bags. I notice that on the way to the house there is some kind of scenario where I am interacting with these middle aged housewives who are fiddling with one of those life size cardboard promotional stand up things for movies, like you see in the lobbies of movie theaters. They are trying to put one together, or several of them, and are talking about the film it is advertising and I seem to be involved somehow. I am done with that and me and my friends go into the house with our sleeping bags.
    The home is this really nice, modern suburban home and looks nothing like a store. It has all kinds of levels and balconies and pristine dry wall and plush wall to wall carpet and central air and is decorated really minimally. I don't seem to know the people in the home, or only know the people I arrived with or something like that. I get the impression that I am only supposed to stay for a minute but somehow that turns into the whole night later on.
    Soon I am in the bedroom of one of the girls who lives there. It's just me, the girl, and another guy. We are watching this DVD on the girl's elaborate entertainment system. The entertainment system takes up an entire wall of the room and looks like it's a whole recording studio or film editing booth. It has all these slots for DVDs and all these hundreds of knobs and switches and is really huge and overwhelming. We are watching some movie, staring at one of the giant screens on the wall and kind of talking and zoning out. I am not interested in the film and I keep talking to the guy. The girl eventually falls asleep on the bed and the guy and I are talking, ignoring the movie. Soon the guy says he's going to go to sleep in his sleeping bag and can I turn off the movie. I turn around and look at the giant console. I have no idea how to work it. The labels for all the controls have these cryptic symbols on them and I can't tell what anything does. I get up and kind of look at the wall of machinery in front of me. There is a DVD playing really loudly and I have no idea how to switch it off or even where the disk is stored. The guy and the girl behind me are now asleep.
    I start to experiment with all these switches to try and get the DVD to stop or the volume to go lower. I am having no luck. I keep trying all these weird combinations of things and getting really involved. I think the DVD that was playing stops and then starts all over again, like it was on repeat or something. This really frustrates me. I notice also that another DVD movie starts playing over the one already playing, the audio track just blares over the original one so there is the sound of two movies going at once. I look on the screen and see a super-imposed image of both movies. How the hell do I work this thing? It's really loud. I am crawling on the top of the machine looking for something, anything to turn them off.
    While crawling around up there, I keep bumping into these little cardboard stand up advertisements of movies that are miniature versions of the giant ones I was helping the middle aged women with in the beginning of the dream. As I look at the little cardboard stand ups I can hear the women's voices from before going "Oh I just love that actress don't you?" and "Oh she is so good in that film!" and "Oh I don't know if I like all that violence in that one!" and stuff like that.
    Then yet another movie starts playing over the original two. Then another one! And another one! I am able to tell from the machine that there are eight storage players for DVD discs so there can be eight movies playing at once. I am getting so wrapped up in trying to turn the damn thing off I forgot what I was even doing and I start to actually pay attention to the five movies that are all playing over the top of each other on the screen and the blaring, non-sensical audio. I do this and then I am like "Oh yea I have to turn this thing off!" I know many hours have passed and we are deep into the night and everyone is asleep in the house. I am lost in a hopeless maze of confusion and have been so for hours. Did it ever occur to me to wake the girl up and ask her how to turn this off? How can she sleep through all this deafening cacophony? The movies' audio is blasting! You can see the walls kind of vibrating from the intense sound and I can't believe that the guy and girl are still asleep, let alone anyone else in the house. What the hell do I do? Help! I feel like some kind of slapstick baffoon in a wacky comedy movie, like maybe Woody Allen in "Sleeper" when he is getting all wrapped up in that giant recording tape in front of that machine while trying to impress that woman, or when he and Diane Keaton are trying to steal the leader's nose when they are posing as surgeons in front of the cloning medical council. But I am so wrapped up in what I am doing that I don't even think it's funny. I'm like "This sucks." I consider sneaking out the window and letting them deal with it. I don't even know these people! I look out the window and see it is now dawn. I could probably hear the birds if there wasn't the screetching sound of five action movies blaring at full maximum volume over the top of each other.
    Suddenly I look over and see one of the other women in the house walking into the bedroom. She is in a bathrobe and walking into the room and glaring at me with a really mad look on her face. She says "Mark stop doing that!" and then walks out all pissed. Just then the guy that was sleeping sits up from his sleeping bag and is like "Huh? Wha... what's going on?" he gets up and walks over to the left of the machine and reaches down and simply pulls the electric cord out of the wall socket and the entire machine goes "W-h-o-o-o-o-o-o-p..." and all the power just fades off. It's all quiet. Then he just gets back in his sleeping bag and goes back to sleep. Now why didn't I think of that? I just sit there on the floor looking at the girl asleep, who I see is not really asleep. She is laying there with her eyes open and is saying out load "Mark stayed up all night watching DVDs at full volume and I got NO SLEEP!" to no one in particular. I just sit there like "Huh?"
    Then we are all in the living room of the home, there are a lot of people there, I guess other people that were sleeping in other parts of the house. Everyone is talking about how I kept everyone awake all night with my super loud DVD movie watching. I am just sitting there alone in the group and everyone hates me. I look over on the kitchen counter and see one of those wooden note-takers that has the roll of adding machine paper on it and a pencil attached to it, you know where you write the note on the paper and then pull it down and tear it off. On the paper that is flattened out is all this cursive writing that says "Mark was up watching movies all night really loudly and kept everyone awake!" over and over in rows. I'm just like "Oh whatever" I don't even know any of these people! I don't even like them now! What in the hell am I doing here? I go back into the living room and everyone is still talking about me. I explain to them that I was simply trying to turn the machine off and they say nothing and just glare at me. This is bizarre and pointless. I'm so outta here.
    Just then my old NYC friend Scott Russell walks in. He seems to know them all and starts talking to them. In real life I don't really like this person, and haven't seen him in years, so I am surprised to see him. He is talking to all the people and looking at me. He says "Mark are you leaving? Wait... I'll go with you." I just walk out without him and start walking down the street towards the house we used to live in. I decide to walk by my old Pennsylvania friend Dave Roland's house to see if maybe his parents or whatever still live there. I can't seem to find Dave's old house anywhere, like it's just gone. I notice that many of the homes on the block have been completely renovated. I see one house is now in the shape of a 50's diner. The living room, which you can see through the glass wall in front, looks like that Edward Hopper painting "The Nightwawks", kind-of. There are booths and a soda fountain and stools and a bar. Real weird. I see people living in the house, they look like they are having beer for breakfast and look like typical straight, party-all-the-time types. They are overweight.
    I walk down to where we used to live. I am looking at all the surrounding homes. All the houses in this neighborhood had immense yards, but now almost every inch of space seems to be taken up by these little shanty towns that are covering the yards of all the original suburban homes. It's really weird. The dawn light is casting a weird glow over all the little plywood and plastic huts and you can hear people kind of waking up and see smoke coming out of some of the shacks like people are making breakfast. So strange. How did this nice neighborhood turn into this?
    I am standing in front of our old house. For some reason I get the impression that the rest of my family is actually living in the house again. They are all inside, just waking up for the day. I notice that there are no shanty town shacks on our lawn, it's pristine. I am looking across the street at the yard across from ours. I walk over there and I see there is a camper mobil home that is jutting out of the rest of the huts that cover our neighbor's lawn. I can hear a radio playing really loudly from inside the camper mobil home. The windows of the camper home are covered in old towels. I can hear someone coughing inside.
    Then all the sudden I seem to be in Plano, Texas, where I primarily grew up. I am kind of walking down the middle of Parker Road (there seems to be no traffic at all, like it's deserted), heading towards Custer Road. Suddenly I see, smack in the middle of the eight-lane road is this giant, man made mountain. It's kind of dark purple and made entirely out of plastic. It is a kind of fake looking amusement park ride-looking version of a mountain, or a rocky mountain landscape. Like a construction you would see at Las Vegas or Disneyworld. It's just plopped there in the middle of the street - and it's gigantic, like an office building. No cars can get around it and it looks like there is no traffic at all on Parker Road. I somehow know that this is the latest of many "entertainment family super complex mall/movie theater/theme restaurant/video arcade/ice skating rink/etc centers" to be built in Plano. Inside are all these levels of these things that kind of have a "Rocky Mountain" theme about them. The place is huge and very successful supposedly. I kind of "hover" over the top of it and am inside the complex. I am trying to find my way out the other side so I can continue walking down Parker Road and get to Custer (am I trying to get to my old house at Big Lake Park?). I am entering all these doors that say "EXIT" but they lead to nowhere. There are video games and kids running around all around me. I see tourist-y looking women in stretch pants walking around drinking sodas and movie popcorn. I can't find my way out. I see a custodian and ask him which way out, he doesn't seem to know. I really want to know.
    Then suddenly I am back in NYC, on my street. I am at this deli below my apartment building and it is really crowded. I am buying a soda or something. I see some of these old guys that I used to kind of know from the NYC club scene. They were these creepy old guys that used to hang around a lot of the dancers and were always leering at them and trying to become friends with them. Some of them were suspicious photographers. One of them recognizes me and says "Oh!!! Mark Allen!!! Oh my goodness how are you you handsome devil!?" he turns around and tells all his friends "Look who's here! It's Mark Allen!" they all put their fat little arms up in the air (full of snack cakes they are buying) and go "Ohhhhhh!" real faggy-like. They all waddle over to me and are like "Ohhh! Ahhh! Mark Allen!" and they gathered around me and looking me up and down like furry little Ewoks and are asking me questions all at once like "Where have you been all these years?" and "Are you still doing the modeling?" and "Do you dance still?" and "Whatever happened to Tracy James?" and "How's your music coming? Are you still in that band?" and "Do you still have cancer? Oops! Sorry did I offend you?" and the usual stuff like that. I am thinking "Oh god I can't remember any of these people's names! What are they all doing here in my building? I can't wait to tell Gregory I saw them all." Then one of the subtly reaches his hand over and pats me on the ass. I have this sudden feeling of dread like I'm gonna puke.
    The "leader" of the group tells me that they all live in my building now and they can't wait to be neighbors. I am in total shock.
    I look over at the guy to my left. He has very thick glasses. I can see that he is facing away from me, but through his thick glasses I can make out that his pupils are focused on me. He also has this little itty bitty mechanical robot arm attached to the right side of his glasses that is moving around and going "w-h-z-z-z-t... w-h-i-i-i-r-r-r-z-z-z-t" and I can see that it has this tiny spy camera on the end of it. The little camera is using this mechanical, extendable arm to move closer and closer to my face. It is about one inch from my face and moving all around my head, recording me. I look at the guy's face and see he is facing the direction of whoever is talking and saying stuff like "Oh yes moving in! And snack cakes!" but, he is looking at me out of his peripheral vision and using his pupils to move and control the little spy camera, which seems to be recording the skin on my face with microscopic vision. I somehow know he is doing this to see how much I have aged since I saw them all last and after this they are all going to watch the tape together.
    I imagine that the guy had the setting on the tiny camera lens too high, like super magnification x1,000,000 instead of x100. And because of that mistake, all it picks up from my face are garish close-ups of those microscopic, living dust mites that live on everyone's skin. I imagine all of these guys are watching it in one of their apartments later, in the dark (and eating popcorn) and all going "Ohhhhhh... monstrous!"

1/13/02:

    There is something where I am with someone I don't know, a guy, and we are going inside this outdoor public pool area. We are entering through the gate and then climbing up this big tower that looks like a fake plastic cave. It is actually the entrance side of the diving platform. There are all different levels that you can dive off of. Each level has a stream of water that runs off it into the pool, and you dive off the little cliff part where the water falls off. Inside the fake cave tower/diving platform are running pools of water that collect on each level and then run out the diving platform cliff things. We are changing our clothes inside the tower, into our bathing trunks. I am going to dive of the second highest platform but I decide to go off the highest one at the last minute.
    Just then, before I dive off, we are on the top of the tower. This puts us level with the grassy area outside the fence of the public pool, I guess it is built into the side of a cliff or hill or something, so people standing on the outside of the fence are at the same level as the top of the high diving platform. There are two fat men that seem to be in charge of the area around the pool, like maintenance and security and stuff. Me and my friend are standing on the top of this cave tower diving thing, which is really high up, and across from us, about ten level feet away from us are these two guys who are standing on the other side of a chain link fence, in a patch of grass with a parking lot behind them. In between us is like a sixty foot drop.
    The two fat me are pointing at this nearby tree that has some kind of banner wrapped around it with something written on it. They are asking me if the banner is mine. I say it isn't and I have no idea what it is. They say "Are you sure?" and I look at it and see big letters on the banner. The only letters I can see, since the banner is wrapped around a tree is "ME..." but there are obviously a lot of letters I can't see. Suddenly I say "Hey... wait a minute... it just so happens that I had a birthday party the other day and it was on the top of a hill on the other side of town. After the party I was supposed to meet a friend on the same hill and we were going to go see a movie that's title started with 'Me...'." The guys kind of look at me as I say this and I wonder myself if such a broad generalization could possibly mean that the old banner, which is litter at this point and very unsightly, could belong to me.

1/14/02:

   I am in a hotel room. I don't know what city I am in. I am alone and it is bedtime and I am going to bed and watching TV as I fall asleep. The giant window to my room is open and I can see the city outside - it looks like a fantastic city, really futuristic. Lots of gigantic gray concrete buildings with no windows and those flashing red lights for airplanes on them. I think my hotel building is like this and I am on one of the top floors. I guess my hotel has windows.
    I am kind of zoning out and I think I am talking to someone on the phone as I go to sleep. I get the impression that I am in this city for some kind of work. It was a busy day today and I am talking on the phone with one of the people I am working with. We both have to be back on the job early in the morning and are exhausted. The company that we work for or that hired us has flown us into this city for the job. I have no idea what the job is.
    I have a vague memory of me and some other people earlier in the day deep in some underground parking garage or something like that. We had flashlights and I think we were doing something illegal. I think someone may have even died. Real creepy. Like the job is top secret or dangerous or for organized crime. It's a real "heavy" vibe I get from whatever the job is.
    Anyway, the weird thing is that, while I'm laying in this hotel room watching TV and the futuristic city is outside and I'm talking on the phone and trying to fall asleep - suddenly I am aware of this naked, very sexy but not totally gorgeous guy standing right next to the bed. He has a huge hard on and his cock is right in my face. He's just standing there looking at me and kind of posing. I don't even seem to question his presence at all, like how he got there and who he is and what he is doing in my room. I just kind of casually glance up at him as I am talking. When I look up at him he kind of looks down at me sort of but doesn't make much effort. It is weird how I'm not freaking out at all. I don't even remember him "appearing" at all. I am treating him like he's some framed picture on the wall, like I just barely acknowledge him at all and don't even question his appearance in my room. It's so strange.
    So I am talking on the phone and I reach over and suddenly I put this guy's dick in my mouth. I start casually giving him a blow job and I am talking to the guy on the phone still. But I don't tell my friend on the phone, he doesn't know I'm blowing some ghostly stranger as I am talking to him. I'm kind of getting into it but it's so casual, I'm totally deep throating the guy, my attitude is that same like I would be setting the alarm clock or turning the light out. It seems automatic. As I'm kind of giving him a blow job I notice something very "hollow" about the guy. He almost seems like a hologram or like his presence is being "transported" from another location or something. Something about this guy's persona seems pre-recorded.
    Suddenly it's the next morning and I am not in my hotel room, I am in some office building with the people I am working with. The sun is shining brightly in all the windows. We are all there and I think we are waiting for "the boss" or whoever to show up so we are all just talking about whatever. The guy I was talking to on the phone with the night before is there. He says "Hey Mark can you believe those ads they have in the hotel rooms?" and I'm like "What ads?" and he says "They have those new ads in the hotel rooms that read your brain and can tell when you are falling asleep. When you are reaching a near-dream state, they make a hologram appear of a really sexy person that they know you will be attracted to, because they can read your mind... anyway, they make this naked person appear next to you all nude and wanting sex from you and if you touch the fake hologram person and start having sex with it, it connects to your subconscious mind and starts filling it with all these desires to buy products like laundry detergent and cars and clothes and stuff. I hate those things!" I'm sitting there listening like "Whoa..." and then my friend says "And what's so weird is that I had one appear in my room as I was talking to you on the phone... and guess who the naked guy was?" and I'm still in this weird state of shock and I'm wondering what subliminal advertisements were planted in my brain while I was giving the hologram guy a blow job and my friend says "...my naked guy was David Spade!"

1/15/02:

    I am in some living situation where I live in some kind of motel, or Melrose Place-ish apartment complex, where all the living spaces have big sliding glass doors that face an inner courtyard that has a pool. The building has only a ground floor level.
    It is night time in the courtyard. The pool lights are on. There is some really mean, dramatic scenario going on with me and this mother and daughter that live in one of the other apartments. They are in the swimming pool and I am throwing stuff at them, or the mother at least, and trying to prevent her from getting out of the pool. She is in there in her clothes, like a nice evening gown or something and her make up is all running down her face so maybe I pushed her in or she fell in somehow. There is all this stuff floating in the lit pool that I have thrown in there at her. It's a real wacky, slapstick fight full of childish yelling like "Fuck you!" and "No fuck you!!" and "No I said FUCK YOU you sopping wet bitch!!!" and "No! Fuck yoooouuuu!" *spa-looosh!!!* "Agggghhhhpffft!" and so on. It is hard to tell what side the daughter is on. She is out of the pool. She is all wet too but she just kind of hovers around me and says nothing and doesn't try to help her mother out of the pool. It's real funny actually. The mom keeps trying to get out and I keep pushing her in. It's right out of Melrose Place or The Three Stooges.
    At one point the mom is climbing out of the pool al wet and make-up-y and I notice she has this sopping wet black feather boa that's feathers are now kind of clinging to her glistening skin like seaweed. Anyway, I reach out from the edge of the pool to push her back in. She has this totally vicious "I'm going to fucking KILL you" look on her runny make up face as I reach out to push her forehead back and cause her to fall backward again into the pool. But... ahhhh! The tables turn! She quickly grabs my arm with one hand (I notice her nails are done really nice but one or two of them have been broken in the struggle) and she now has my arm in a death's grip and she is pulling on in with her full weight trying to pull me into the water. I'm really loosing my balance and trying to get loose of her grip but can't. I really think I'm gonna fall in but am unsure and am panicking. The look on the mom's face has changed from "I'm going to kill you" to "Ah ha! I've got you now asshole!" and I'm kind of struggling and the wet daughter is just standing there looking at us and I'm not sure what my fate is gonna be.
    Now some time seems to have passed, forward or backward. It is either before the pool incident or after. There is something where me and the mother and daughter are sneaking around the apartment complex and hiding from one another, breaking into each other's respective apartments over and over and stealing stuff from each other, or setting booby traps in the apartment to harm each other. It's all very sneaky and mean and malicious and childish. At one point I am in the mother's bedroom and I take this giant bottle of amber-colored, expensive perfume she has and, hiding behind her bedroom door, I see her creep into her own bedroom maybe thinking I'm there, all looking around all quiet and wide-eyed for me (she has a neck brace on for some reason) and I jump out from behind the door and pour the perfume all over her and am like "Ahhhh HAAAAA!" and she's on her knees covering her face all "It burns agggggghhhh! My eyes!" and then I run out of the bedroom into their living room to dash out the sliding glass door but the daughter surprises me from behind a corner with a big spatula and she tries to whack me in the face with it but I'm like "Whoa-ah!" and duck real fast and she misses and I leap out the glass door and dash into the bushes of the courtyard. It's still night time out there and I'm all hiding under the tangled branches spying on them and I see the two women creeping around all quiet looking for me and the daughter is still holding the spatula and the mother all stinks of perfume now and the mom is like "I know that bastard is around here somewhere! I'm gonna kill him!" and I just lay real still and then the mother says to the daughter "Let's go back into his apartment and smash up some more of his CDs!" and I'm thinking "Bastards!" and they run into my apartment and then I get out of the bushes and I run into their apartment and I take out a book of matches and look for somewhere to start a fire.

1/16/02:

   I am living in this giant warehouse apartment in NYC. My roommates are these girls I've never seen before. There is maroon industrial carpeting on the floors and TVs in every room. There are clothes and junk and clutter strewn all over the place. My roommates both have long, blond hair. At one point I am saying something to one of the roommates as she is laying on the floor. I am telling her I am going out for the day.
    I go outside and the streets of NYC are these very small hallways, like in an office building or hospital. There are big rooms that have cages with animals in them. Some rooms have these fake "parks" set up with fake plants and little fences, like you would see at a kiddie zoo. The whole place is flooded, there are giant puddles of water covering whole parts of rooms and stuff. I meet up with my old NYC friend Girlina and Gregory. Sometimes Gregory changes into this old roommate I moved to NYC from Texas with named Ray. They keep switching back and forth. After I meet them we are walking through the hallways kind of strolling around. We keep running into these situations where we see snakes. Big colorful ones, that must have escaped from their cages. At one point Girlina is down this long hallway trying to make her way to us by tip-toe-ing around these puddles of water. As she is doing this, a giant snake uncoils from one of the puddles behind her. Gregory/Ray and I are like "Watch out!" The snake looks like a cartoon version of a cobra.
    At another point all three of us are passing through these two sets of double swinging doors, like you would see at a hospital, and this very long blue snake gets trapped in between the sets of doors with us and we are laughing and freaking out and can't get out of the doors and the snake is darting around our feet. We are all laughing and I think "Wow! This will make a great picture!" I tell them that I want to get my camera and I'll be right back. I run through the hallways back to my place but just as I get there I remember I have my camera already on me. I had it the whole time. So I go into this public bathroom attached to one of the hallways. Inside there is a toilet, sink, counter, and one of those hand towel things that has the loop of cloth towel that goes through it and gets really filthy. There is also a frosted window - the only window I have seen in the whole endless hallway NYC that is in this dream. I am spending a lot of time in the bathroom, like a whole hour, but I have no idea what I am doing. I can now hear Gregory/Ray and Girlina right outside the door. There was a bench outside the door of the bathroom I remember seeing, they must be sitting on it waiting for me.
    I am taking so long, I don't know why. I imagine them both giving up and going home. I am sure once I go back out that the energy of the day together will be ruined and it won't be fun anymore. What the hell am I doing in here anyway? I have my camera on me! I go outside and they are sitting on the bench like I thought. The hallways of NYC have changed since I was in the bathroom. There are no animal cages and no other people around, and now there is no water. There is blue industrial carpet and track lighting, it looks like a nice office building hallway. In a giant office building. You can see bronze plates next to all the doors with each company's name on them. The elevators look nice to. It smells good. Girlina stands up and says "There you are! What took you so long? Are you ready? Did you get your camera?" We go off to hang out in the hallway city some more.

1/17/02:

   I am looking over the city of Las Vegas, Nevada from a very high, far away vantage point. It is daytime. Suddenly my vision "shakes" violently to the left (as if I was looking through the view finder of a movie camera) and everything I look at becomes blurry. Then I am looking at the valley where Las Vegas is from another angle - again from a high vantage point - and my vision starts to shake violently all over. Suddenly I become aware that what I was looking at was a severe earthquake in Las Vegas.

1/18/02:

    I am on a road trip and I am in a rental car and I am driving all over the United States. It is night time and I am pulling into this small town that I am visiting because I am going to give someone a massage in the town. This is a person who contacted me through email and I decided to give him a massage while on my trip, weird because I would never do that. I pull up to the house, which is in a suburban neighborhood. There is a large soccer field directly across the street from the house. I see a bunch of people playing frisbee in the dark in the soccer field. I am getting some stuff out of my trunk. I see the people that were playing frisbee are now walking over to me. As they do, I see that one of them is an old college friend from Texas. Her name is Tahnee. I haven't seen her in forever and I'm like "Wow! Tahnee! Oh my God how are you!" and she just walks over to my trunk and says "Whatever was in your trunk you can forget about it!" and she slams my trunk shut and laughs all mischievous like and walks away and disappears between two of the houses. This is the type of thing Tahnee would do in real life, her way of being goofy. Except I don't think she realized my wallet and car keys were in the trunk. I'm like "Hey wait come back here!" but she's gone. I'm fucked, how am I gonna get my keys out? Should I call a locksmith? The cops? The rental car place?
    I decide to worry about it later and I walk up to the dark house where the guy lives. I ring the doorbell and he answers the door. He is a middle aged man who is married and has two sons. They all live in the house. I walk in and the subject of the massage never comes up. I just kind of hang out in the house with the family, eating dinner, playing video games, eating ice cream. I get the impression that the family is very "Christian" and a "family values" kind of family. The house they live in is this one level kind of Spanish style, 70's-ish home with archways made of brick and black iron grating and suits of Conquistador armor and bad paintings of bull fighters and vases with giant peacock feathers sticking out of them and those brass wall hangings of things like a ship on the water with the sun shining on it. The color scheme of the whole house is brown, orange, yellow and beige. The wife never seems to be around for some reason, like I only ever see like half her body or foot as she is walking out a door into another room to go get something. I am always around the husband and his two sons. One son is about 15 years old and has red curly hair and freckles, the other one is much younger and has short straight blond hair. They both look like they are going to be really handsome as they get older. After we play video games in the living room, we all sit down in the kitchen and eat another meal for some reason. Then we all eat these giant ice cream sundaes. I am so stuffed and I can't believe we keep eating. The father seems to be in real control of the boys and they do whatever the father says. The boys are very polite, they seem pretty sheltered.
    All four of us then go into one of the bedrooms of the house and all lay on this giant white bed and the father tells us stories. The two sons lay on either side of the father and he puts his arms around them and they lay like that the whole time. It's very creepy. I'm sitting indian style on one of the corners of the bed. The father finishes telling the story and tells the boys to go to bed and the boys are like "Yes father! Goodnight! We love you!" ...it's very creepy for some reason. The father then tells me that my room is down the hall and I can go to bed if I like. Which I do immediately. What the Hell am I doing here? At one point I am in the hallway bathroom brushing my teeth and the youngest boy knocks on the door and tells me to go into the father's bedroom. I do, with my toothbrush still in my mouth. I stand there and the older son is standing next to the father who is lying on the bed eating this large slice of ham. The older son looks at me and then the father tells him to go get the younger son, who is still in the hall. The father says "I've decided we are all hungry again and as a special treat I think I'm gonna take us all to Pit Stop for a meal..." and the boys are like "Yay!!!" Pit Stop is apparently this 24 hour diner in town somewhere. We just ate like three meals! Are these people insane? The boys run off to get their coats and the father just lays there eating his slice of ham, bloated and looking very proud. I get the impression that he seems to think he is a great father to his sons.
    Then suddenly there is a slight shift in scenarios. It is still the same night in the same house, but instead of the weird family living there, it's MY family occupying the house. It is the same night, about the same time, and everyone is going to bed. My mother is in the shower at the end of the hall and my brother is lying in the bed in the room where the first father was laying. I don't see my dad anywhere but I know he's in the house. My room seems to be the same room I was told to sleep in by the first father. My mother yells to me from the shower "Why don't you call your brother on the telephone from the phone in your room!? Call to him on the phone he has in his room, they are separate numbers! Do it as a joke! I don't think he knows you are here! It will be funny!" For some reason I agree to do this - very odd - and I go into my room and pick up my phone and dial his number to his room. There are no lights on in my room and I am fumbling around in the dark, weird. I dial my phone which is this big black plastic phone which looks like it's the shape of an animal. I walk outside my door and peer into my brother's room, while on the line, and see him lying on the big white bed. His phone rings (which is a green plastic phone in the shape of a frog) and he picks it up and says "Hello?" I don't say anything and we just sit there like that. Then my brother hangs up the phone. I don't think he ever sees me.
    Then suddenly scenarios have totally shifted. I am still in the town I was in, away from the house, and I have stopped in some area that seems to be a kind of moutain-y, desert-y kind of area that has all these big hills made of dried white sand. It is the next day I think. Some of the hills have clusters of dead trees on them. It's sunny and daytime and there is a cloud-less sky. I was told about this area by someone I met on the road and they said it was a good hiking area. I am all alone and don't see anyone for miles. I think at one point I have a walkie talkie and I am communicating with the guy who told me about this place. He says "Look out for the Abominable snowman!" and then I am keeping my eye out for the Abominable Snowman as I am walking around. According to legend it lives in this desert/dead tree region. At one point I am coming around this big hill and I think I hear something. It's the monster! I see sand moving, like falling from above, like something big is walking on one of the hills. I actually hear dramatic music play, like suspenseful music, like something scary is about to happen, like in a movie. I am waiting for the monster to appear. But it doesn't.
    Then suddenly I am running to the top of the highest sand hill. I get to the top and look all around me. I see that this desert area is actually on the edge of the large downtown area of the town I am in. The downtown area is pretty big, like Chicago or something. I see a large fire off in the distance, on the edge of town, in one direction, and I look the other way and I see yet another large fire on the other side of town, way off in the distance. Both have large trails of black smoke coming out of them. I see around me, as I climb down the hill and onto the street, that the hills of sand are now transforming into buildings and I am suddenly in the downtown area. The desert is gone. All the sand hills have changed into buildings and I am in the middle of the street.
    Everyone around me is asking me about the fires. I tell them there is "...one over there... and one over there!" and everyone is looking. People are coming out of the streets and gawking like it's a big deal. Suddenly I notice the sky is overcast. I am pointing to one of the fires, which you can barely see around the tall buildings, and suddenly some woman explains to me that it is not a big fire in the distance with a giant plume of black smoke, but a tornado! Me and the woman climb to the second story balcony of this restaurant and look for ourselves. She's right! It's a HUGE swirling, black/brown tornado and you can see where it is shredding things in it's path. It keeps changing forms. It sounds is overpowering and scary, like a million train whistles or a million screetching subway cars. It's getting bigger and smaller and bigger, then smaller... then huge and menacing again. It seems to be doing a lot of damage. Everyone in the city is running around in the streets screaming and panicking. The tornado is getting closer to us really fast. What exact direction is it going in? It's hard to tell. I run out into the street and away from what I am predicting will be the tornado's path as it nears us. The tornado goes by about four blocks from where I am. I see it literally crumble these buildings and half-topple a bunch of other ones. Everyone is screaming. Giant pieces of concrete and cars and glass is flying violently everywhere. The gound is shaking. I imagine thousands of people in the buildings I see destroyed have died, but I don't really see any bodies. What was weird is that I don't see the tornado at all as it violently whizzes past, only it's path of destruction, like it is invisible. Now the tornado seems to have passed - it all happened really fast. It seems to be over and everyone is kind of regrouping in the streets and freaking out and saying "Oh my god I can't believe that happened!!!" and stuff. The tornado has moved on.
    Then I am back at the house of the man and his two sons, but I don't see them, just a lot of strangers in the house gathering after the tornado incident. They have converted their house to a make-shift hospital to care for all the people injured in the tornado. I am in one of the back rooms with some blond woman. She says they are going to bring an injured person into the room on a stretcher and we are going to care for her. They bring the woman in. She is a small Asian woman with a big white bandage around her head. She really doesn't seem that hurt. In fact it looks like she is wearing an "injured person" costume. She's just sitting up in her stretcher, on the floor, looking at us with one eye covered by the bandage. The blond woman tells me that it is my job to tell the woman jokes and entertain her while she figures out what is wrong with her and prepares medical attention. I sit next to the woman and start telling her this joke about a dog that visits an aquarium park, at least I think that's how it went. As I am telling this injured Asian woman my joke, I have all these other joke options running through my head. As I am telling this woman the beginning of the long joke about the dog going to the dolphin tank at the park and all, I am thinking stuff in my head like "Should I also tell her the joke about the drug addict bear at the bar who can't get a beer and who eats a barbiturate? Should I tell her about the agnostic, insomniac, dyslexic guy?"
    I start to weigh all these options in my head and as I am telling her the dog aquarium joke out loud. In my head I am thinking about how I only know a few jokes but I decide I can't tell the first one about the bear because it is too "dirty" for some reason, I decide this is a clean, Christian house hold and even though this woman would be entertained by the barbiturate-eating bear in the bar joke, I can't tell it because it would disrespect the father and his two sons. Then I realize that the bear joke really isn't "dirty" and why would I even think that? I realize it's because the bear joke isn't "dirty" it's just kind of "violent" and it might upset some of the people around me, for some reason. Plus I think the Asian woman may not speak English so why am I doing this anyway?
    Then, as I'm still telling her the dog at the aquarium joke, I am thinking "I can't tell her the joke about the what-do-you-get-if-you-cross an insomniac, an agnostic and a dyslexic?" joke because it's too "intellectual" and she wouldn't get it. Also it may upset some of the Christian sensibilities in the house. But then I realize that the insomniac, agnostic, dyslexic joke is hardly intellectual or even non-Christian and how could I possibly think that? I wish I knew some more jokes. Suddenly I realize, that while thinking about all these joke options and weighing them in my head while simultaneously telling her about the dog looking at the aquarium gift shop buying a shark t-shirt, that I have totally forgotten how the dog at the aquarium joke ends! I have completely blanked out on the entire second half of the dog aquarium park joke! How does it end? As I am telling the Asian woman about how the dog doesn't have any money to by the shark t-shirt, I am thinking "How does it end? What is the punch line? I can't finish the joke!" I don't let on that I have forgotten the end of the joke, I just try to wing it.
    So I just kind of make up stuff like "Well, you see, um... the dog then leaves the aquarium gift shop since he can't afford the shark t-shirt and he goes BACK over to the octopus tank and says um... he says to the octopus... uh... uh..." and I am trying to figure out if I should just try to make up some punch line or should I just jump into one of the other jokes or maybe... hey! I can combine one of the other jokes with this one to make it all make sense! I'll tell her something like this; "Well, you see, and then this drug addict bear walks into the aquarium park and goes to the bar to order a beer, yes the aquarium park has a bar... and he passes the dog..." or something like that and then I realize ...hey! The whole fact that there is a "dog" in the first joke really ties into the punch line of the insomniac, agnostic, dyslexic joke and hey maybe I can just combine all three! Maybe that would work! Suddenly I realize that I'm really confused and I'm getting all weary from thinking too much and talking simultaneously and I think by now I'm so distracted that I'm just spouting random words like "uh... dog..." and "....the bar..." and "gift shop guy... um... who... by the bear... uh..." and I'm looking at the injured Asian woman and she hasn't changed her expression the whole time and is just staring at me blankly and maybe she doesn't even speak English anyway so what does it matter and why is it taking the blond woman so long to diagnose the Asian woman and... oh FUCK IT!
    I walk out of the room without saying anything to the blond woman and I go upstairs. Upstairs I find this large bathroom with walls that are made of stone like an old castle. The bathroom is huge, with a lot of stalls like a public bathroom. There are tons of people in the bathroom, all younger people, people my age, of both sexes. There is a lot of activity and everyone is kind of socializing and it's like a little party. Everyone is drinking bottles of Guennis Stout Dark beer. I am standing talking to someone, looking at this little piece of paper I have that has words on it and little perforated holes punched in it. Suddenly, out of my peripheral vision I see a food delivery guy delivering a Benny's Burrito burrito to someone in the room, they must have ordered it on their cell phone and had it delivered to this party here in the bathroom. I am talking to my friend, but out of the corner of my eye I see that the delivery guy is my old NYC friend Glen. In real life Glen and I had a kind-of falling out and we don't really speak anymore and I haven't seen him in years. I think I should turn around and say "hi" but I don't, I just keep talking to my friend and pretending to look at my piece of paper, like I'm really wrapped up in what's written on it so I can't look up by any means because then I would have to talk to Glen and I've decided I don't want to have some big reunion because I'm really not in the mood. So my friend walks away and I'm stuck there kind of cornered, with Glen standing right next to me waiting for the guy he's delivering to who is taking a long time counting his change. And I keep looking at the piece of paper like I'm too wrapped up in the four single words written on it to even stop and look up and it's getting really frustrating and I feel stupid and I start kind of nodding my head like "ah-ha! Mmmmhmmm ...interesting! Yes!" like the four words I am reading on the paper are really engrossing and Glen is still standing there waiting for his change and I'm sure he sees me and why don't I just look up and say "hello" and I feel like I'm in Hell.

1/19/02:

    I'm sitting at some table breaking bread (literally) with some old man with a beard. He is saying profound stuff to me.
    Also at one point I am back at my old high school in Texas for some reason. It is a Saturday and I am there with some people I don't know. We are under one of the bridge overpasses that connect two of the buildings. It is a sunny day, in Spring, with a breeze. We all seem to be positioning ourselves in very specific places and just standing there, like we are rehearsing a play or something. Some of us are giggling. One of the girls has a long chiffon scarf that is blowing in the wind.
    Then also I am with some people I don't know. We are driving somewhere in a car. It is a beautiful sunny day. We stop at a public outdoor pool for some reason and decide to go swimming. We go inside and are hanging around the crowded pool. I see my friends Candis and Girlina sitting with a group of guys talking to them. Candis comes over to us and starts asking me and my friends questions. She seems to be acting out something she rehearsed. I am amazed at how fantastic she looks. I am imagining her at home rehearsing all these questions she is asking us, like a little speech.

1/20/02:

   I dreamed that I went into Domenic's room and told him that he doesn't have to stay in there all alone and he can come out into the living room and join me if he likes. He says "Thank you Daddy!" and rolls over and goes to sleep.
    Then I am on a candle lit dinner date, in a nice restaurant, with actor Zach Braff (the really cute guy on that TV show 'Scrubs'). We are looking at each other kind of googly-eyed and laughing and talking and at one point we are holding hands. I think he looks incredibly handsome. I can tell this is our first date and I can also tell we are going to have sex after the date. Suddenly I picture/see the two of us on this beach in the winter time. It's a sunny day and windy. I see Zach has this dog collar but no dog with him. I look at the dog collar and it makes me feel regretful.

1/21/02:

   I am walking around my neighborhood in the daytime. I go south of where I live and the environment totally changes. There are vast green lawns, backyard fences, sidewalks, curving streets, mailboxes and huge suburban homes. It's a total suburban neighborhood. It looks nothing at all like NYC. I get the sense that I may be near my old neighborhood in Big Lake Park in Plano, Texas - but also in my neighborhood in NYC. I also get the sense that people I know in NYC may live in some of these homes. I am looking at the little green signs on the poles on all the corners to see the street names. I am imagining people I know in NYC walking along these streets and living in these prefabricated houses.
    It is sunny outside but all the lawns have dead grass, so I think it's winter. I see some people walking around. I am walking down this one curved street and I stop by this wall of tall bushes and an alley entryway and some Rubbermaid trash cans. I am looking back over my shoulder at this really fantastic suburban house. I stop and look at it. Suddenly I realize the sky is cloudy now, maybe even dusk is approaching. I see two women walking down the street near me. For some reason I am apprehensive about what they think of me looking at the house, like they might think I'm a potential burglar or something.
    The house I am looking at is unbelievable. It has these huge glass windows that kind of jut out of the front and shoot way up like five stories high. It almost looks like a church. The entire front of the house is glass. It looks great. I think I am actually looking through the viewfinder of my camera at it at one point so I must be taking pictures.
    Suddenly it is night time and I am standing in the same spot. I am looking through the viewfinder of my camera at the same house. I can't believe how amazing and futuristic it is. I can see another house a few yards away that is even bigger and has a similar style. I see on the fourth floor of that one, through the glass front, there is a room with silver walls and silver furniture and a silver Christmas tree and green lights all in the silver room. I think all the homes in this neighborhood look amazing.

1/22/02:

No dreams.

1/23/02:

   I am in my apartment in New York. It is daytime and sunny outside. I am looking at this big hardback book I have called "Modern Architecture and Interior Design" or something like that. It appears to be a book that came out sometime in the 70's and is filled with color photographs and descriptions of fantastic homes from all over the world. Some are classic homes like the falling water house by Frank Lloyd Wright and some are by newer, lesser known designers. The newer homes are more outrageous. I am looking at each home and admiring them. All the houses look really amazing. Suddenly I notice that in one of the photographs, I can see hanging on the wall of one of the houses is this large version of this magnet that Rex from www.rexsworld.com gave me when I visited him. The magnet is a caricature  of Rex's face. It's a very recognizable design so there is no mistaking that it is the one. But this photo was taken some time in the 70's. How did a large replica of Rex's caricature face magnet get hanging on the wall of this house over two decades old? In a photograph that's just as old? I'm totally baffled and I keep looking at the photograph to make sure it's real. At first I think it must be some amazing time travel thing that Rex did somehow where he zipped back in time just as they were taking this photo in the 70's and hung it on the wall really quick when no one was looking. Then I think that maybe Rex, or whoever designed the magnet saw this photograph first and then copied the design exactly. But it's unmistakable as Rex's face in the here and now. Rex was a small child at the time this photo was taken... so how could that be?
    I turn the pages of the book and suddenly yet another Rex magnet design shows up on another wall of another house in another photograph - this one a black and white one taken in the 50's! I thumb through the book and suddenly notice that there is a Rex head magnet design hidden somewhere in almost every home, in every photo - either hanging on the wall or leaning against a bookshelf or wherever. I even see one Frank Lloyd Wright house has the Rex head design carved as a kind of pattern onto the wood panels separating some of the rooms in one of his most famous homes. He even has the Rex head design done in stained glass in one of the rooms. I am stupefied and amazed.
    I close the book and see that the cover of the book has now changed. There is a huge Rex head design on the cover, with a kind of air-brushed halo of light behind it. The title of the book now says "Tons Twitty Halos" or "Twinkle Twitties of Halos" or something like that. I look away from the book and then look at it again. The Rex head design has now changed and it depicts Rex squinting his eyes and blowing up his cheeks. There is a cartoon drawing of smoke coming out of his ears. The title of the book is now obstructed by the Rex head design. Suddenly the book is kind of laying on a table on the other side of the room. The Rex head, in 2D - like a cut out piece of paper, kind of floats up off the book at an angle and starts talking to me. It moves like an animated cartoon. I am having a conversation with the cartoon head now. At first I am thinking it is incredibly strange, then I am thinking that this is totally normal and this is how Rex and I communicate - like we have some special weird internet hook up or something where his cartoon head appears floating over an architecture book in my apartment and talks to me. Do I appear in one of his books as a cartoon head, on the cover, and talk to him in California?
    Suddenly I am in Bakersfield, CA. I am at Rex's house and I am in his bedroom. It is daylight outside and we are sitting on Rex's bed. He has his white bathrobe on. He is leaning back on the bed with his arms propping him up and he is just staring at me. He has a very stern look on his face like I'm not sure he wants me to be there in the room with me. I can't figure out what's wrong and Rex just keeps glaring at me and not moving. One of Rex's cats is sitting on the bed to his left, licking it's paws. Suddenly Rex's mom is in the room and she has some sort of dental tool and she is sticking it in Rex's mouth. The whole time she is digging around Rex's mouth, he has not moved an inch, he is still facing me and giving me that dead, unblinking stare like he doesn't want me there. Rex's mom just keeps digging around in his mouth with the dental instrument, like she's really concentrating on what she's doing.
    Suddenly out of nowhere Rex's mouth grows to the size of a barrel and this GIGANTIC orange cat comes squeezing out of his huge mouth like it was being born out of it. Except it's a full grown cat and it's also monstrously gigantic (but in correct proportion), like a giant's cat. It's incredibly freaky, like some bizarre birth. Rex's mouth is now normal size again. The whole time that Rex's mouth grew and the cat squeezed out of his temporarily giant mouth, he continued staring at me without blinking or moving. It was so weird. Rex's mom and the giant cat are now gone and we are alone again. I get the impression that Rex didn't want me there because he didn't want me to witness what just happened. Like that happens all the time or something.
    Suddenly Rex's mouth is really big again, like open really wide and I can see inside it. Rex seems to be motioning me to look inside his mouth. I peer into the large opening and it is totally pitch black dark inside. I see that the inside of his mouth is much larger that what it appears to be on the outside (even though on the outside it's grown huge like the size of a Volkswagen). I see way, way in the back of his mouth is a little window like you would see in a basement. There is light outside the window. It is the only thing I can make out in his mouth. So I guess the inside of his mouth is a dark basement. I see a woman standing by the window, a middle aged woman. She is looking out the window at the sun and grass and birds outside. I can hear the birds coming through the basement window. I can tell that the woman feels "trapped" in the basement, or inside Rex's mouth. I want to go to the basement window and hear the birds, they sound so pretty and inviting. I think I also want to go console the woman and tell her that it's OK, she isn't trapped in the basement/Rex's mouth thing and I can help her to get out. I want to go in and do all this but I know that means I will have to go inside Rex's mouth and I don't want to do that. I look up at Rex's eyes over his huge upper lip and they don't look stern anymore. They look a little curious but mostly resigned.

1/24/02:

   I am driving down this winding road. It is a sunny day and I think I may see mountains in the distance. The road is very narrow and sometimes the it becomes a dirt road, and there are wooden telephone poles lining the road. I am in some kind of little, one-person car. It almost is like a joke car a clown would use to perform at the circus. On the road with me are a little girl in her own little car, probably about eight seven or eight years old, and an older woman in her own little car. There is only enough room for one of us to get by on the road at a time, like the road is too narrow to pass each other.
    The little girl in her car has this fuzzy, furry little dog that she has on a leash and is letting walk beside her on the road as she drives the car. She keeps swerving the car from side to side of the road so the little dog can sniff the grass on either side of the road and pee. She keeps stopping her car over and over to either let the dog pee or maybe untangle the leash which keeps getting caught up around her car because she keeps swerving from side to side and the little dog (who is running faster than the car is moving) is running all around the little car and under it and stuff. I cannot pass the little girl and her dog, even though I am trying. It is very frustrating to keep having to stop and only be going about ten miles an hour anyway. I am being patient though as it's a little girl and a dog and everything. The girl is very distracted while she is stopping and then zooming forward all the time, like she keeps paying attention to the controls on the dash board rather than the road or the dog running all around her. She'll be looking back at the dog while she's driving forward and run up on the curb and be like "Oh!" and then turn forward and straighten the car out. A couple of times I almost slam into the little girl's car or maybe run over the dog because she keeps stopping so abruptly. She keeps saying "Good poochie!" or something like that every time she thinks the dog does something cute, which is about every thirty seconds. I sense the older woman in her own car (who is behind me) is becoming frustrated too because the little girl is holding up traffic. Every once in a while I hear the older woman toot her horn in that kind of polite way. The little girl is driving so recklessly and is so distracted and the dog is darting all over the place, under the car's wheels and stuff, I just know sooner or later she's going to run over the dog.
    Sure enough... at one point I watch and the little girl has hit the accelerator and is moving forward going "Come on doggie" in a sing-song voice but instead of the little dog yapping and bouncing and running ahead of her, it just kind of lifelessly drags on the leash way behind her, letting gravity dictate how it moves. I see that the dog suddenly seems to be this lifeless blob of hair and I think only half of it is there and one side of it looks like raw meat. It takes quite a while for the little girl to realize what has happened. I'm just like "Oh no..." Soon the little girl realizes she's run over the little dog and she stops the car diagonally in the road, blocking me and the older woman. She gets out of her car and starts crying uncontrollably and looking down at the little lifeless half dog. I think I should get out and help the little girl, or comfort her or whatever. I kind of sit there in my car and debate whether I should do anything or not or just zoom around the girl's car and get going. For some reason I get the impression I am in a hurry to get somewhere.
    Finally I decide "Fuck it!" and I zoom my little car up over the grassy embankment and around the sobbing girl and her little car and dead half dog and I get in front of her and hit the accelerator and really start moving fast. It feels great. I wonder as I'm driving if the older woman behind me stopped to console the little girl.

1/25/02:

   I am with a bunch of people I don't know. They are all gay men. We are all staying at this house that later turns out to belong to Bryan - www.chaosinaustin.com - but it is in no way his real house in Austin, Texas. There is a big party there but Bryan is away. Sometimes in the house, during the party, there is a room that is a kind of classroom where a bunch of people sit on these benches and take notes while a woman lectures in front of a blackboard. Sometimes someone else besides Bryan lives in the house. Nevertheless the big party full of guys is always going on, day and night.
    In order to get to the house, I have to walk a very long way across this big field, on the other side of which is a big shopping center and the beginning of endless rows of suburban homes. I get the impression that it may be Plano, Texas. For some reason I seem to be walking back and forth across the field many times to and from the house. I get the impression that I may be "hiding" while I am in the field. There is snow on the ground in the field. There is also a point when I am walking in the field where I see this really fake looking tornado in the cloudy sky - it looks like a cartoon. When I first see it I panic then I realize it is so phony looking.
    Suddenly it is night time outside and there is lots of snow on the ground outside. The party is still going on and Bryan is away at work or something and I am hosting the party. At one point during the party I am talking to this group of guys and I am lying to them and telling them I did a lot of the computer animation in this Disney computer animated film about a pig. When they say "Which one?" I start to say the title of the film and realize that I have completely blanked on the title. I am sitting there trying to think of the film's title, it's not "Babe" I know but I can't think of the title. I run to look at Bryan's collection of computer animated movie videos and DVDs. His collection is divided up between his bedroom and the study, which is huge. I am looking at all the titles and I can't seem to find it. I am running back and forth between the bedroom and study frantically looking at all the colorful spines of the boxes looking for the title, hoping seeing it will trigger my memory. Was it "Shrek"? No... was it maybe "Charlotte's Web"? ...wait no way. Arrrggghh! The guys are waiting behind me and are suspicious that I don't know the title of a film I worked on, which is a lie anyway. It's a very strange feeling and I don't like it. I never find the title. I can't believe that I lied about that. What was I thinking? Who was I trying so hard to impress?
    Then I am in the classroom in the house and am sitting down listening to the teacher and taking notes. A girl sits down next to me, Tammy, that is the sister of a childhood friend way back in Texas. But this is the grown up version of her. She is wearing pearls and a baby blue cashmere sweater. She is talking to me and we are like "Hi! I haven't seen you in like 15 years!" and blah blah and I think the teacher scolds us for talking during class and is like "Ssshhh!" At one point Tammy is copying some of my notes quickly because she was late and I am searching through my notebook for some other thing I want to give her, what I don't know.
    Then there is this other girl to my right who I don't know. She has long blond hair. I am copying notes from her now for some reason.
    Then it is another time and I am in a bedroom of Bryan's house. It is daytime, the next day, and I pick up the phone and call the number of the blond girl I met in class the day before, who's notes I was copying. For some reason I feel like I can call her but I don't know why. When she picks up the phone I am like "Hi! I sat next to you in class yesterday!" and she is like "Oh yea how are you?" and I'm like "Fine. Listen I was wondering if I brought my red baseball cap to class tomorrow sealed in a plastic baggy, if you wouldn't mind taking it home to your house and washing it in your washing machine? It's really dirty." I have no idea why I say this to her or why I called her in the first place and I don't even know what her reaction is.
    Suddenly it is the next morning and I am on a school bus with a bunch of other students being taken to school. I am thinking about how much I regret calling that girl and asking her to wash my hat. What was I thinking? I see we are approaching the snow, covered school - it is Bryan's house.

1/26/02:

    In the first part of the dream I was on a "Harold and Maude"-esque adventure with a woman who looked like Ruth Gordon but was not. I was the Bud Cort character. We were in this old car driving around all these fields.
    In the other part of the dream I was at some boarding school. I think I was younger. Sometimes some of the rooms in the boarding school were these little shops where you could buy things, or they were these little television studios where they filmed shows like The Conan O'Brian Show. At one point I was with my friends checking out this little store that sold little toys and sculptures. The store was decorated with fake castle walls and red lights like a haunted castle ride. I think my mother was with us at one point. In this plastic cube display box near the cash register was this pile of sculptural goo that was silver like wet silver paint. It was moving slightly. I pointed to it and was showing it to my mother saying "Look at this creature mom! They found it somewhere in the school!" I don't know why I said that because I actually had no idea what it was. The more I looked at the sculpture the more details I noticed and the more I was able to distinguish what it was. It was a little sculpture of a giant intestine. There were these little creatures that looked like Abominable Snowmen and they had huge sharp teeth. They were grabbing junk and unwanted stuff from the large intestine and eating it. Like they were eating up unwanted bacteria and undigested food from the intestine. The little figures were animatronic so they moved. One little creature was putting this thing in his mouth that looked like a little bucket. The entire thing looked like it had been covered in silver paint that was still very wet. As the figures moved, strings of the silver goo would form and then break between the moving parts.
    Then there was some kind of show in the school that had this giant bald guy talking to us about prison. It was one of those "scared straight" things where they show you how awful prison is. The bald guy was talking about how if you go to prison you're gonna have sex with other guys no matter what.
    Then I am outside the school and there is this area with all these fold out tables with giant piles of broadcasting equipment on them all set up to broadcast some kind of radio show. It is WFMU's - www.wfmu.org - broadcasting equipment and they are going to be broadcasting from outside our school. I seem to have a radio show on the station and I am looking at this little piece of paper that has the schedule of the DJ's and when they are to go on. Apparently my show is starting soon. Someone is asking me what songs I am going to play and I say I don't know I'm just gonna wing it. When I say this they say "That's cool.. whatever!" and as they are saying this they are crossing my name off the list with a black Sharpie marker. I sit at the table and go on the air and start talking and playing songs from CDs. As I am broadcasting I am making this big collage on the table out of poster board, Elmer's glue and pictures and words I am cutting out from a Vogue magazine. I use the pictures to make this face of a dog that has a picture of a black comb as a kind of mustache. Under the mustache I paste letters to form the name "Adam Strest".
    Then I am in this giant auditorium in the school. There is a presentation or speech going on. The auditorium is full of people watching the speaker. I enter from the back of the auditorium through these sliding old antique wooden doors that open automatically as I enter. I cannot hear the speaker up on the stage or anyone else, all I can hear is the continuation of WFMU's shows which my head seems to be picking up the broadcast of. I hear that Pseu Braun is coming on the air on her show. She is talking about things other DJs have done during the week on their own shows and making fun of them and being all funny. She is going on and on about everybody and then she gets to me. She says "And Mark Allen... geez! 'Adam Strest'? Why don't ya drop another name why don't'cha? Geeze Louise!" I think this is weird because I don't know if there is a real Adam Strest It was just a nonsensical name I formed with letters on the collage I made. I imagine Pseu looking at the collage as she is saying this.
    Then suddenly I am in one of the rooms in the school that is a TV studio where they tape TV shows for a later broadcast. They are going to be taping The Conan O'Brian Show. The audience is sitting in these classroom chairs that have been set on the tile floors in rows. There is a blackboard up in the front of the room and a desk, just like the one Conan sits behind on his show. There is a giant window to our left as we face the "stage". Outside it is Times Square in NYC. It is night time. I can tell it's the real Times Square and not a fake set. I am looking around the room and realize the set is just a converted classroom, like they hardly tried at all to make it look like a TV show recording studio. I am amazed because when I watch Conan's show on TV it looks so professional. I am imagining they do all that stuff post production.
    It is time for the show to start. The lights go out and everyone applauds as Conan comes out and sits behind his desk. It is not Conan but someone who looks like a shorter, skinnier version of Conan. Plus he has jet black hair that is sculpted into all these different-direction-pointing spikes with hair gel. I am amazed that it is not Conan because I get the sense that this is really The Conan O'Brian Show I am at a taping of. Does Conan have the day off and this is just a stand in that they will make look like Conan with computer animation in post production or is there indeed no Conan in real life? I stop caring and watch the show. Conan's jokes are really lame and the audience is barely responding to anything he does. Conan says to the audience "OK! Let's bring out our first guest tonight, a very talented young man... ladies and gentlemen... Sean Lennon!" Sean Lennon comes out from these sliding wooden doors to Conan's left. Sean looks like the version of Sean from years ago. He is the real Sean Lennon but he looks about 13 or 14 years old. He has a group of friends with him and they are just standing there in the doorway as Conan asks him questions. Conan asks Sean questions and Sean gives a glib answer and Conan makes a joke about his answer and everyone laughs - the typical formula. It is weird how Sean doesn't sit down next to Conan though (I actually don't see any chairs), he's just standing in the doorway with all his friends and every time Sean says something all his friends giggle behind his back like "Oh my God we're on The Conan O'Brian Show I can't fucking believe it - tee hee giggle!".
    At one point Sean is talking to Conan in this really obnoxious, overbearing, too loud, "I think I'm so funny to myself only, but deep down I think everyone thinks I'm being brilliant though even though deeper down I know they think I'm not but I'm so nervous I don't know what else to do so I'll just turn the obnoxious-ness up more and more to hide the fact that I'm shaking with nervous fear" voice and manner that is probably due to his being the son of two such famous people and his having to go through the normally nerve wracking ordeals of puberty and growing up and fitting in at school combined with being thrust at birth into the national spotlight and being on television all the time and this gives him this weird combination of being unsure of himself and also too sure of himself because people are probably kissing his ass a lot and he feels deep down inside that he has to live up to his parents legendary status even though he is just this little normal kid trying to grow up and it causes him to act in this obnoxious way sometimes when the spotlight is on him. At least that's the impression I get. Anyway, he is saying in this manner the following: "I love living in NYC Conan! Hee hee hee! I love all the opportunities here Conan! Hee hee hee! I love keeping myself bust Conan! Hee hee hee! I love to spend my time... uh... hee hee hee! Uh... making these sculptures out things I see in my dreams Conan! Hee hee hee! I make sculptures out of things in my dreams and put them on display around the city! Hee hee hee! I make the sculptures out of the materials which are Pantene shampoo, silver paint, balloons, Elmer's glue and pieces of toys I find in the trash Conan! They are these gooey silver sculptures that have little moving parts Conan! Hee hee hee!" As he is saying all this he has a big smile and is holding his arm and kind of spastically moving back and forth and back and forth like he doesn't know what else to do and out of nervousness he just keeps doing this even more obnoxiously. While he is telling his story all his friends are behind him giggling.
    I realize the sculptures Sean is talking about is like the one I saw in the haunted dungeon shop, next to the cash register, in the other part of the school with my mom. I say something loudly to Sean from the audience and everyone in the audience breaks out in laughter (I don't know what I said) and they all turn and look at me. Sean looks at me and he stops smiling and says "Well... yea!" to whatever I said. Conan makes a joke about what I said. Then Conan walks over to the big window that looks over Times Square and he reaches for the blind cord and yanks it and this slightly transparent bamboo-looking curtain drops down and obstructs our view of Times Square and the show continues.

1/27/02:

   I am visiting my parents at a strange house in a city I don't know. The house is incredibly minimal, all off white colored with no curtains on the windows and bare mattress beds with white sheets in the bedrooms. I am at the breakfast table with them in the morning and they are talking about how we are all going to church and how nice it will be. I tell them I will go by myself and take my own car. I decide I'm gonna skip church.
    I go back into my room and I look at the clock, it's 6:15 am! Oh my God when did we get up!? I go back to sleep on my bed. Suddenly my mom wakes me up and tells me there is someone at the door to see me. She says it's a young girl from HX Magazine and she is here to see me about something. This young girl comes in carrying an 8"x10" manila envelope with the HX logo on it. The girl says the people at HX want to "take me out on the town" because I am visiting this town. The girl is really staring at me and keeps saying stuff like "Everyone at the magazine is always talking about you and it's great to finally meet you." I have bed head and my face is all puffy from sleep. I am on the bed interacting with the girl, like we are holding each other and caressing each other as we talk. My mom is sitting in a rocking chair in the corner watching us. Very odd.
    Then I seem to be at some mall with a group of guys. The girl from HX is with us. We are on the roof of the mall looking in through the glass skylight. There is some kind of presentation or speaker or something in the mall with a big audience. The girl from HX tells me that the speaker is going to call my name at some point and then I am supposed to crash through the glass skylight and land on the stage. I'm like "Huh?" It seems the group of guys I'm with are somehow waiting for me to do this because it means they are all going to get something or get to see something exciting. Something like that. I notice one of the guys in the group is Seth Green. I can't figure out if the group of guys are my friends or just with the girl. We wait and wait for the speaker in the mall to call my name. It's hard to hear what he's saying through the muffled glass skylight and the noise from the traffic nearby. The speaker never calls my name. Finally the girl says me "He isn't gonna call your name I guess" All the guys look at me and each other disappointed like "Aww! Whatta... how lame!" Then I hand each of the guys one of these tickets with words printed on them. They seem to like this.
    Then suddenly it is night time and we are in the parking lot of this country and western club. I am with the group of guys and the girl. We are going into the club, which is having a lesbian night. We are at the outside corner entrance waiting to get in. The doors are open wide and we can see all the activity going on inside, it looks really festive. Soon we are all literally laying on the black asphalt of the parking lot, face down, taking naps because we can't seem to catch anyone's eye in the club to get in. It's not like a doorman or velvet rope situation, it's just this surreal thing where there are all these people at the entrance, hanging out, talking with the cashier girl, taking popcorn from the popcorn machine in the lobby, doing whatever... and we are all just laying there face-down in the asphalt like no one can see us or we're hiding or we can't enter or something. Very strange. Kind of like that Luis Buñuel film "Exterminating Angel" where the party guests can't leave the party for some odd reason that is never explained. Suddenly I see, out of the corner of my eye as I am laying face down, that Amy Sedaris is a cocktail waitress in the club. She, while carrying a tray of drinks to the cashier girl, sees me laying out there. She runs to the ticket lady and gets some tickets from her. Then Amy runs over to us and walks all around our laying-in-the-parking-lot bodies and shoves these blue tickets in our hands that say "Admit One". I say "Thanks Amy!" while face down in the asphalt. For some reason I get the impression that Amy has now taken the place of the girl from HX in the dream.
    Then suddenly it is the next day and I am in the backyard porch of some suburban house. I am having sex with this very young guy and sometimes the young guy turns into the girl from HX, back and forth. I am asking the guy/girl how old he/she is and he/she is being very vague about the answer. I know he/she must be under 18.
    Then I am suddenly in a Mexican town, a very poor town with gravel streets and shack-like houses. I am walking down the day time street with Girlina and some other girl. Then Girlina turns into someone that looks like Jennifer Beals but isn't. We are walking down the street and suddenly the Girlina/Jennifer person stops us and says "Wait... don't move... turn around!" and then she looks over her shoulder and is looking really scared. Then she says "OK... keep moving down the street and whatever you do ...don't look at those two guys to our right!" Me and the other girl walk slowly down the street and I peak to my right and see two very rough looking guys dressed in black leather vests and silver jewelry. One of them is looking right at me and he is casting this strange shadow that is being projected right into the air rather than on the ground. The shadow is in the shape of a scorpion. I get an overwhelming sense of doom and evil as I look at the man and his scorpion shadow. The scorpion man is now looking right at me as I walk along and is laughing derisively. Girlina says "Mark don't look at him! That is the Scorpion! He lives in this little Mexican town and causes great harm to those he doesn't like! He is evil - Satan himself - and if you look at him too long he will cause you great harm!" I look away from him as we keep walking. Out of the corner of my eye I see the man transforming into a monster. We all turn a corner and the man is gone. The evil feeling is gone.
    Then it is the next morning and I am at my parents minimal house and we are all sitting down eating breakfast. I am eating cereal like a little kid. My dad is reading the paper... it's very domestic and like I'm young again. I am holding my cereal spoon up and looking at my mom and smiling really proud and saying to her "Guess what I saw yesterday mom!? I saw The Scorpion!!!"

1/28/02:

   Gregory and I live in a world where we can travel back and forth to the moon freely on this subway-like car thing that flys through the air. To do so, all you have to do is buy a cheap ticket (the tickets are these little yellow plastic disks - like betting chips) and board this blocky little car that looks like a big elevator. The car flys you to the moon and as it does, the big door to the car that you entered from is open the whole time. So the wind is whipping through the car the whole time. The trip takes about twenty minutes. Whenever we are flying to or from the moon, we are traveling in the normal sky, not outer space - like we are on earth the whole time. I mean, you can't see the ground, but if it's daytime, you see the blue sky the whole time you go to the moon, or if it's night you see stars and feel the cool wind - it's like we never leave the earth's atmosphere the whole time.
    The moon itself looks like earth. The car takes us to a heavily tree-d area with normal, earth-like atmosphere and oxygen and an earth-like sky and everything. In fact there is nothing to indicate that we haven't left earth but we know we are on the moon for some reason. On the moon, there is this shopping mall with a big parking lot all the way around it smack in the middle of the area that they are always shipping people back and forth to. There is hardly anyone ever at the shopping mall on the moon. Gregory and I go there and hang around. When inside the moon mall, we see it's just this gigantic open room, like a large air hanger or convention center, with little booths set up that have store keepers setting up shop for the day and selling really shoddy merchandise. All the walls of the booths are make of this cheap, fake formica-covered particle board wood that has horizontal ridges in it so vendors can place those wire shelves on them easily. We are in one booth and there is this fat man with a beard and a Hawaiian shirt selling only yellow disc tickets to go to the moon and back. The rows of disks he is selling are dirty and worn, some even have this translucent goo all over them - and the fat man selling them looks kind of sad. We only see a few other vendors who have set up shop. Some are selling cheap food, I think I saw one selling used comic books. About 80% of the booths are empty or unused. The moon mall is pretty pathetic.
    Gregory and I seem to come to the moon often and just hang around. One time we are out in the parking lot and it is dusk and very warm and we are hanging out under one of the giant parking lot lights which is collecting june bugs at it's base. The light is on a giant pole and there are light poles like this scattered throughout the giant parking lot. In the trees on the edges of the parking lot we hear millions of crickets. It's really loud. It's like we are just on earth. We ago to different sections of the parking lot and there is hardly anyone ever around. It seems like the moon is a failure as an attraction to draw people in.
    It is so easy to get to the moon and back that we come and go often, like several times a day. One time I get all the way to the moon and realize I forgot my jacket or something and so I go all the way back to earth and get it and then go back to the moon and meet Gregory, who was waiting for me in the parking lot (while on earth getting my jacket I remember this scenario where I was driving a convertible car on these highway entrance ramps and almost getting hit by other cars). At the end of the dream Greg and I are taking the last car of the day from the moon back home to earth. We are exhausted from a whole day of loitering around the empty and pathetic moon mall and we have barely enough money to but yellow discs to get on the transportation car. There is a little box on the inside of the car where we put our yellow discs once we enter. The box is covered in sticky, stringy, translucent goo (just like in that man's booth inside the mall). Gregory and I plop down on the floor of the car as it starts moving and we kind of hold each other arm in arm and sleep as the night wind whips around the car and it speeds away to earth.

1/29/02:

   I am staying at a motel in Los Angeles, CA. It is like a Motel 6 or Quality Inn or something like that. There is this very strange woman that owns the motel and who runs it and takes my money every morning when I decide to stay for another night. She is tall and slim and about 50 years old. She has black hair with lots of gray in it and wears glasses. She not attractive at all and always has this strange look in her eyes that says "I'm insane." She is always walking around carrying stacks of towels and keys to open room doors. She seems to also have another woman there that helps her run the place, but I hardly ever see the second woman.
    The woman doesn't seem to speak much, she is always handing me things written with pencil on little pieces of paper. She always adds those "emoticons" to her notes, you know like those smiley faces made with punctuation marks you use in emails like this - :D - but she's always drawing them in pencil and in-line with the text and drawing them sideways like they would go in a typed email.
    She is always walking up to me and handing me notes that say things like  "I understand you were very loud in your room last night! :( Explain yourself or I won't let you stay here anymore! D:"  or  "Why don't you throw your styrofoam cups from the complimentary coffee in the lobby in the trash can? :O I found fifty cups littering the floor around the trash can this morning and I heard from someone you did it. :8( Please explain your actions in an adult and mature manner so I can get on with my day. :( Thank you. :)"  and stuff like that.
    The weird thing is that I haven't done any of these things at all. I have no idea why she is thinking these things. Every time she hands me a note I have to explain to her that I didn't do it and that I am staying here alone and I leave the place early in the morning and come back at night and go right to sleep and that I don't even drink the coffee from the lobby, etc., etc... She always looks really skeptical at first as I am explaining this to her and eventually she reluctantly comes around and believes me and smiles and nods and seems like she's OK. She seems to really get a kick out of this.
    Soon I realize that I am the only guest in the entire two-story motel. I hadn't noticed this before. I have been the only guest in the place the whole week I have been staying there. I also realize that the woman is just nuts and this is how she kind of entertains herself, giving people weird, made-up accusations on hand-written notes and then forcing them to explain themselves and this makes her feel validated and she is addicted to the feeling of being suspicious, then being relieved and happy after the person explains that they didn't do it. Very odd. It's like a non-sensical obsessive/compulsive disorder with her. Every day she hands me a new note, or maybe several, and they start to get more and more outrageous, like  "I heard you on the roof of the motel last night hammering loudly! :* Explain your actions and apologize now!:)"  or  "Where you creeping around behind the desk at the lobby while I was cleaning the pool? >;( I think you were! ;{"  and stuff like that. I see now why no one else ever stays here. I somehow know that around LA she is known as this nut case and no one ever stays at the motel because of it. I have no idea why I keep staying with her and putting up with the abuse. It is totally depressing.
    One other weird thing she does is that, near the pool and in front of my room one day, I see her parading this Mexican family back and forth in front of the window of my motel room. The woman keeps making the family walk back and forth by my room window and then she looks in to see if I saw them. The Mexican family is looking around confused like they don't know why the woman is making them do this. I am inside my room the whole time looking out the window. I find this really odd. When she stops, I go to my door and look outside. I see the woman in the parking lot paying the Mexican family for doing this. They were not guests in the motel. When she gives them their cash they run away saying "We have our money now let's get away from the crazy motel lady! Ahhhhh!" in Spanish and they run away screaming. I realize that the motel lady did that just so I would think that there are other people staying in the motel. Sure enough the woman walks over by my room after this and looks at me (with a stack of towels in her hand) and says "They are a nice family that stays here all the time because they love my motel. I heard some complaints from them about you earlier and I will address them to you in a note later so you can explain and apologize!" and then she just walks off. Why the Hell am I staying here? I don't even like it here.
    It goes like this day in and day out. The weird notes, the false accusations, the explaining myself to her just so she won't kick me out, over and over. I think I have been staying in the place about a week and it's the same thing every day. Finally one day she sees me in the parking lot of the motel and she is crying. She hands me a note that says "Because of your obnoxious and slovenly behavior, and your constant behavior that is disturbing the other guests, I have no choice to officially kick you out of my motel. :( I will refund your money for tonight's stay. :`( Please leave and I'm sorry things had to end up this way. :("
    I walk with the note to the lobby where she is with the other woman. They are both crying and look like they have been having a serious discussion. I tell the woman I shouldn't have to leave because I didn't do anything and that she is just imagining these things. She starts crying and screaming and pointing to her friend violently and saying "She saw it too! She saw it too!! It wasn't just MEEE!!! SHE SAW IT TOO OK!!!???" like a child having a temper tantrum. Her friend breaks out crying like a child when she does this.
    So I go into my tired but tried and true routine and start telling her calmly that I didn't do it and it's going to be OK. She looks at her crying friend, they are both sobbing, and then looks at me and asks me to please leave or she will call the police. The lobby is dark and fetid and it smells.
    My reaction is so strange: instead of just leaving, which I should have done days ago, I literally sit there and plead with her to let me stay. I actually lie and tell her that "Yes" I did do some of those things, and that she was right all along and can I please have another chance and stay. I lie just so I can stay there. I start to literally tear up in my eyes and I am TOTALLY feeding into her neurosis and she is of course loving it with pride tears streaming down her face. She says "No" I cannot stay and her decision is final and to please just get my stuff and go. I look completely discouraged and beaten down and walk out of the lobby sulking, defeated and looking guilty. I think to myself "There is nothing I can do now. These women can act as crazy as they want, they own the hotel, they hold all the power. I am powerless." I have no idea why I am thinking this or even caring.
    Then I walk out into the parking lot and look around me and for the first time see about a zillion other motels with cheaper prices and that look much better than this one and are full of laughing, interesting people and aren't run by crazy people. I could have been staying at any of these other places the whole time.

1/30/02:

I remember waking up in the middle of the night and remembering my dreams. But now I can't remember them.

1/31/02:

   I am living at the old house that we used to live in in Big Lake Park in Plano, Texas. note: I think this may be the first time in many years I have actually dreamed of being in that house, rather than dreaming of making an unsuccessful attempt to get there once I realize I am in Dallas - the reoccurring dream I used to have before going actually going there on my road trip.
    I am living there but sometimes the house isn't the house... sometimes the setting is completely different, the house, the yard, the neighborhood, etc... so it keeps changing back and forth. The setting is always switching around in the dream. When it is not the house in Plano, it is a places I don't recognize. The way the setting of the dream kept switching - but the subject remained the same - was weird and makes it kind of hard to document the dream here in words.
    Anyway, The deal is that in the beginning of the dream, I am "sneaking up" on the house, where my parents are living. I am in the neighborhood and am visiting them... but I don't want them to know I am there. So what I do is sneak into the next door neighbor's house. In Big Lake Park, we had these next door neighbors who were these real extreme Christian types, and it is their home that I am sneaking into. Sometimes in the dream I imagine these Christian neighbors to be Ned and Maude Flanders from The Simpsons TV show, like living versions of them. The reason I can sneak into their house is that I know they are away on vacation and won't be back for days. So I sneak into the house and kind of set up camp there. I try to leave as many things as undisturbed as I can and never turn any lights or anything on so it will look like no one is there. Also in case they come home unexpectedly I can slip out the back quickly and won't have to "cover my tracks." Of course this doesn't last long, and the boredom of secretly sitting in this empty house and spying on my parents next door takes it's toll and pretty soon I'm propped up on the neighbor's couch, eating their food, flipping around their cable TV channels, trying on the clothes in their closets and leaving them strewn all over the house. Making a mess of everything over the days and nights I am there and never cleaning up after myself.
    Whenever I see my parents, sometimes when I am outside the neighbor's house, I kind of hide so they don't see me. In one scenario that was different than Plano, I see them from far away walking out to check on their mail. I seem to be high on a mountain or hillside when I do this. In another scenario I see my mom walking down this dirt road amongst all these trees, on the way to her house, and I decide to just pass her like nothing's wrong. But we never pass for some reason. It goes on like this for days.
    Then for some reason, a scenario shift: I am in my parent's house and everything is fine. I keep thinking about the neighbor's house. I left rooms in total disarray and even left some of the windows open. I don't tell my parents I was camped out in the house next door because I'm embarrassed, but I know that I need to get over there and straighten everything up or else when "Ned and Maude Flanders" get home they will freak out because someone was living in their house while they were gone. "Or will they?" I think to myself. They are so "turn the other cheek" Christian, maybe when they see nothing is missing they will not call the cops and maybe see it as an act of charity they miraculously performed... like a homeless person wandered into their house and they will be happy and proud that they were able to help a "needy" person... like God lead the person in need to their house as an divine act... a needy person got a roof over their heads and something to eat and got to bath... t Ned and Maude it was like they got to wash and dress the sores on a leper's feet or something like that. So maybe I don't need to worry about it.
    But really I'm kidding myself. Every day I'm with my parents I am thinking... "I've got to get over there and straighten everything out. I don't want to get caught or arrested!" It's weighing on my mind night and day as I'm saying at my parent's house in Big Lake Park in Plano. But for some reason I never go over there and just do it. I seem to be procrastinating which is a real gamble since I know the neighbors could come home unexpected any day now.
    Soon something strange happens: my mother tells me I have to "go down to the water pond park" and "live inside this old movie" so I can see what it was like for her growing up. She tells me I have to take a trip down to this park in Plano and kind of "check out" this old film, like you would check out a book from a library, and "step inside" the film and "live in it for a while" and it will reveal how it was growing up for her. Weird. So I set off down the street to do this.
    As I am walking down the street, Iam passing my neighbor's house... oh my God! I see they are home! They have lights on and are shutting the open windows. They seem to have just arrived. I wonder what they are thinking(?) Are they freaked out? I just walk by the house all casually and act like nothing's wrong. I seem to know somehow, after seeing them through the lit windows, that they won't even care and will never even call the cops. I somehow know they will be all "Oh look someone was living in our house illegally while we were away! Oh well whatever... it's good to be home!" So I don't worry about it anymore.
    As I walk down to the park where I'm supposed to rent the film about my mom's early life... suddenly I AM inside that film. I just kind of "fold into" the film's reality as I am walking along the street in the direction of the park the film was supposed to be housed at. I didn't even need to rent the film. Everything around me in the film is black and white and everyone in the film is dressed like they are teenagers from the 1950's. I am inside the film. The setting of the film is a flooded town. There is water everywhere and you can see the roofs of houses and tops of buildings and hills poking out of the water. Everyone is getting around on boats or rafts or swimming. No one in the black and white film seems to be particularly bothered by this, like it's just the way they live. I am swimming in the water and I think I may have a film camera with me and am making a movie about everything I see around me as I move along in the water. I am using the viewfinder of the camera I have to see where I'm going as I swim through the water. I seem to be able to hold the camera with both hands and swim with just my legs, without getting the camera wet.
    Suddenly I spot my mom in the film. She is beautiful and blond and dressed like a country girl you would see in a comic strip. She has a checkerboard shirt tied at the waist and that features her cleavage. She's wearing skimpy (for the 50's) cut off shorts and high heel sling backs. Her hair is tied up in a scarf and her face is made up a little. She is hanging out on the bank of a hill above the water and is flirting with some guy swimming around. She is very glamorous and sexy and seems to keep saying witty things. Everyone in the fictional black and white town seems to know her as a friendly girl who is really witty and all the boys are in love with her and she's too big for this little town and will one day leave for the big city. This is the impression I get: that this is the message I was supposed to get from the film. How my mom used to be.
    Then I kind of "fold out" of the film as I chase this little creature out of the water and onto a little park island. The creature looks like a dark gray duck with a platypus' head. There is an old man with a cane telling me to film it. I follow the creature out of the water and onto the land with my camera, watching it through the viewfinder. Everything is back in color now and I know I am back in reality.