11/1/01:

    I'm once again in some weird part of some weird city I don't know which - although it looked like it could have been Amsterdam. It is always dusk. I am alternating between these two structures with lots of different people in them.
    One is this strange meeting hall or convention center - it is a giant structure that is made of these round, bubble-ish shapes that are made of paper mache and are then sloppily painted blue.
    The other is this video rental store that has no windows and is always almost always dark. I am friends with the owner of the video store. The store is closed and locked up but for some reason the two of us keep going inside it to use the bathroom or something. I'm always trying to make out the movie posters on the wall in the darkness. At one point we are in there and we see this super giant guy in a hooded sweatshirt roaming around the store - it appears he is looking at videos. What is he doing there? How did he get in? He looks menacing. We freak out. There is some strange scenario where we both separately bolt for the door and outside before the guy can catch us - it's very suspenseful.
    We go outside and instead of it looking like Amsterdam it now looks like the inside of a gigantic airport lobby. The convention center made of paper mache is still inside the lobby. Me and a friend are diverted slightly by this old plantation style house inside the lobby that is supposed to house two "authentic North Carolina old school 19th century re-creationists". A man and a woman who live the old fashioned lifestyle down to every detail. We are able to suddenly "see" inside the living room of the house where the man and woman are. I now see they are characters played by Katherine Hepburn and Modernism's Dirty Little Secret (don't ask). They are sitting in the living room and are both under these spotlights and are saying things to one another in this very bizarre accent. Their outfits are ridiculous and exaggerated. Katherine is wearing this elaborate sun hat kind of thing made from what looks like pastel gift wrapping paper. As the two say things you can hear a laugh track - it's like the whole performance is a sitcom. As they are talking in their weird accents I am thinking "Did people really talk like that back then?" It's weird.
    Then we are hanging around the convention center. We keep going in and out and we have these sleeping bags with us. We are still surrounded by the airport lobby - but sometimes it's like Amsterdam again. We seem to be going in and out of the structure and every time we go outside we look at the outside of the building to see where we are going to go next. We seem to be looking for a place to live inside the paper mache structure - and we want to make sure it's a nice place. At one point I get this weird key from a woman security guard in the airport lobby that will open a door in the paper mache structure that will be our home. It is a weird key and there is something particular about the way you are supposed to use it but I can't remember what now. I soon see that one of the people with me is my old friend Curtis Brown from Texas. He is wearing a sheet over his head like a ghost costume and lugging his sleeping bag around.
    At one point I get into our paper mache living space with the weird key. For some reason I only entered the cramped bathroom of our living space. It seems that there is a separate door that opens to the living space, and a seperate door to the bathroom. I am holding my sleeping bag in the cramped bathroom and looking at the toilet and urinal. They are all made of paper mache and look very flimsy. I am looking at the toilet and it's very weird shape and wondering how the hell anyone could go to the bathroom in it without ruining it.
    Then it seems to be another time and I am going into another room in the structure. I am meeting some woman there who is going to give me a job. I have my graphic design portfolio with me. I am on my cell phone while I am ruffling through my portfolio - I am really kind of freaking because I see that it is full of all this old stupid illustration work and I hate everything in it. I decide during the interview I will show the woman my web page on her computer. I get off the phone. For some reason I think this will help me get the job. Then the foyer I am in floods with people, two of which are my friend Matt Bell and also Johnny Depp. I talk to Matt for a while. The woman shows up who is interviewing me. She leads me into her office. She's really goofy and fun.

11/2/01:

No dreams.

11/3/01:

    I in some vehicle that looks like an ice cream van, that is being driven by my father. My mother, brother and grandmother are all in the van. We are driving out of Manhattan, through Brooklyn and deep into somewhere far away from NYC but where I don't know. We seem to be going on a picnic somewhere and we seem to be taking my grandfather, who is no longer alive (in real life). Is my grandfather even in the van? It is like the whole reason we are going out is to take him out of the city and on a picnic. Weird.
    I am sitting in the very back of the van, which has it's own little closed off area. I can see clearly out the back windows and I am watching everything go by. I see a billboard by the Brooklyn art group We at one point. It is nighttime. As we get farther and farther away from NYC, the roads get more and more tricky and winding and dark and you have to be a good driver to not get into an accident. I am watching my father drive at certain points and kind of freaking out. It's scary. The driving on the winding road is almost like a video game. I seem to think he knows what he is doing. We all see other cars wipe out on the road as we are all watching my father drive.
    Then I am sitting in the back of the van - it seems to slowly be changing into the interior of a convenience store. Fluorescent lights, glass refrigerator doors with drinks in them, shelves with snacks and food and motor oil and stuff. Yet the van is still moving. These three girls are in the store, standing up, and they are talking and kind of looking at me sitting in my van seat. Suddenly the van kind of stops for a second and this other girl climbs into the van/convenience store from the back doors directly behind me. She climbs in and she has some bags with her like she's traveling. She seems to know the other girls, who are all happy to see her. They are all talking as the van keeps moving, and they are kind of looking at me since I am kind of cornered by them in my seat. They are taking different snacks from the shelves as they are chatting. They are asking me if I "van travel" as they call it "...very often?" I say no I am just in this van with my family and we are taking my grandfather on a picnic far out of the city. They don't know what to say about this and seem a little confused. The girl that climbed into the van earlier, who is sitting to my left (the other girls are still standing on the white linoleum floor of the convenience store/van), is taking a piece of chewing gum out of it's wrapper and putting it in her mouth as she is telling us "Well I van travel all the time! This my van travel time number five!" All the girls seem really impressed by this and kind of applaud her. I get the impression that this girl is kind of a Dead Head or maybe a rock groupie or a hitch hiker who kind of travels around the country and the other girls want to be too but they haven't reached the level of the girl sitting next to me. As I am listening to her talk I am arranging these containers of pink toothbrushes and cotton swabs that are on these shelves that are suddenly in front of me. I "sense" that the girls seem to think I am doing this so I don't have to talk to them but I'm not sure. I realize now that because the girls are there that I can no longer turn around and look through the back window as my father drives the convenience store/van.
    Suddenly it is daylight and the girls are gone and the van is just a van again and we are driving around somewhere I do not know. We are looking for a great picnic spot for my grandfather. The area we are in is really industrial and ugly. It's very barren and run down and I have no idea how we are going to find a spot for a picnic. As I am looking out of the van everything seems to be "washed out" in too much sunlight. Like when you set the exposure too long on a camera in outdoor lighting and it's all whited-out.
    Suddenly we are stopped and out of the van. We are on the edge of this giant field that is covered in giant mounds of construction site sand. The kind of mounds that a tractor that dumps sand makes. The field is surrounded by a chain link fence. We are all walking around the circumference of the field, carrying all the picnic supplies (I think we are even carrying grandfather) until we find and opening or gate in which we can enter the sand mound field.
    We finally find an opening. The field is kind of "sunken" - like the tops of the sand mounds reach high above the ground, but the bottoms go well below ground level. So if you step through the gate into the field there is a "drop" of about ten feet. We are all standing there and we have grandfather in our arms and all the picnic baskets which are getting very heavy and my grandmother is with a cane and I suddenly realize that I have no idea what in the Hell we are doing in an area like this having a picnic when some of us can barely walk. My mother asks me to "leap" from the entrance to the field to the top of the nearest sand mound to "test it out". As I approach the gate, I see my brother is already on one of the mounds. He gets off the mound and leaps back to the gate entrance. I hold his hand as he makes it onto the ledge. I leap off the ledge with my brother's help and get onto the nearest mound. Suddenly it turns night time again and the field is lit up with stadium lighting. The mound is very "long" - it goes in one direction like a row or line or something. I start to walk along the top of the long mound, along it's length back and forth and back and forth, re-tracing my steps. I am "patting down" the sand making sure it is safe. My mother and brother are yelling at me from the ledge to do certain things. I am ignoring them and doing my own thing.

11/4/01:

    In the first part of this dream I am an asian woman for some reason. I am like a James Bond-esque kind of spy or something. I have an underwater high tech hide-out that is full of scientists and assistants. I am always going out of the decompression chamber in the underwater hide out to the water and up to the surface to do "something" that is very important and top secret and has to do with saving the world or something. At one point I am in the parking lot of a Chili's or TGIF's or something and everyone is in tuxedos and sequin evening gowns and I am there to infiltrate something. I then put on a wet suit and go back underwater into the hide out. I think when I was in the parking lot of the restaurant I was in Dallas (didn't I think to go to Big Lake Park?)
    One time when I go down into my hide out I am confronted by another asian woman - she is evil. She is there with her henchmen and has discovered my hide out and is going to kidnap me, sabotage my operations and take over my hide out. Just as I am coming out of the decompression chamber I see her standing there with a dart gun. She shoots a tranquilizer dart into my leg, and also another dart into one of my scientists. I run away from her and through the hallways. I am wondering if there is any place in the hide out I can pass out in that no one will find me? I am thinking about how I should have built some kind of fake wall with a hidden room for situations just like this one.
    Then I am in the audience of some weird movie theater. I am myself again. There is some weird movie playing on the screen and there is a man up at the front who is asking people questions about the movie. Every time he asks a question the house lights come on even though the movie is still running. It's very chaotic. I see my friend Mistress Formika in the audience. The inside of the theater looks kind of like the inside of a fake cave. At one point this guy in a ski mask is assaulting a woman in the front row. I go over to him and attack him with the blunt end of a dart gun I have. Then I shoot him with the gun and he falls asleep. The woman thanks me. I then go back to my seat and the man asks me some questions about why I attacked the man and what it was like. Everyone is listening intently.
    Then there is some thing where I am in some outdoor shopping center and I am looking to buy some porno magazines. I am standing at this little newsstand in this shop that is owned by some mexican woman. She is outside the store sweeping some dirt. I see there is this new kind of porno magazine, I am looking at the cover. The magazine is very thick and has a binding and the company that publishes it has it's "logo" kind of printed over what looks like the title of the magazine. It turns out this company just finds some old porno magazine from a second hand store, takes photos of all the pages, reprints it exactly (even though all the pages come out fuzzy because of a second generation copy) and just slaps it logo over anywhere where the original publisher's title appears. There is a whole series of them on the stands. The only thing about them that matches is the pasted-on logo. I open one up and look through it. Every single page is an identical two page spread of some guy's leg poking through a window. I look at every page of every magazine and they all have the exact same spread on every page of every magazine.
    Then I am "at" Bryan's house in Austin and he is there. He seems to have a new house. This one has all of these round shaped rooms and lots of curved glass walls. Parts of his house are exactly like a mall food court. There are little neon signs over the little stores that say "Taco Bell" and "Subway" and stuff. The sun is shining in brightly in all the glass walls. I am "watching" Bryan online - but I am actually appearing in his new bedroom. Even though I am seeing him on his webcam while I am in NYC, I am actually sitting on his bed talking to him. We are talking about whether I should come visit him on my road trip or not. He is wearing a blue green Izod shirt.

11/5/01:

No dreams.

11/6/01:

No dreams recorded from 11/6 - 11/30 because Mark was on a road trip.