July 31
*I’m standing on the corner in a city… waiting for the school bus. O is with me? There is some function she can take the bus to get to, but as I look at my watch I realize school will be ending just about 10 minutes after she gets there, and then she’ll take the bus right back here. I’m not sure if it’s worth the time to have her ride to school, but she is already on her way so I might as well let her go. Two other moms are here, discussing things. I point out to them the bus ride is so long that it’s hardly worth the effort. They don’t say very much back to me. We only have about a half hour to kill before we need to be back here at the stop, I’m thinking it might be nice to just hang out and talk, but the two moms have walked off in another direction already. I pull my coat closed, I’m cold, and I start to walk. I can’t take full strides so I look down at myself, and I see that I’m wearing a long dress which reaches down to my ankles, and a fur coat over it. The coat is white with some black vertical stripes… not in any distinct pattern… more like long black smudges. I love this coat, it keeps me warm and I hug it around myself tighter, but at the same time I’m looking at it and wondering where the hell it came from and why I’m wearing it, it’s not my style in the least. Neither is the dress… it is narrow at the bottom and I can’t take full strides when I’m walking. It will take me forever to get anywhere like this. I pull the dress up slightly (to my knees) so I can walk better and I feel like I really need to change clothes when I get to my apartment, which is about a block away.
*I’m in a classroom, I am a student. There is a robbery attempt. Two men with guns come in telling us to all stay still, don’t move. I’m keeping my face down, staring at the desk top, until I realize I recognize the voice of one of the men. I look up and see both are guys I went to jr high/high school with, the one yelling I recognize as DS. I turn my head to the side… what the FUCK is he doing robbing people? I stand up, hands on my hips, and start to walk towards him. He is scanning the room and then he sees me walking. At first he looks like he is going to yell at me, then he recognizes me and freezes. He can see I’m ready to scold him for robbing people… he brings the hand with the gun down to his side and says (in a sheepish voice) “Umm… good work folks. Thanks for cooperating with this drill, you all did great!” and leaves the room. The teacher asks me why I was walking towards him, and I said “That’s just DS… I know him… I didn’t realize he was part of the drill program”
*…I”m being dropped off at a little log cabin off the side of the road. The road is under heavy construction. I’ve been out, busy all day (can’t remember what I was doing just before this) but I’ve been wanting to be dropped back off at home so I could get back to the project – which is the cabin. The road is dusty, gravely… I see orange construction cones along one side. It’s hot out… I go into my little cabin for shade and look around to see what I need to work on next.
July 30
*Talk at work – Kevin wanted to hire me. I was talking about what time I have to walk to the bus stop. I’m talking to a school official, not sure when classes are supposed to start and what the schedule will be once it does. The man is telling me that the schedule will be similar to last year… where the kids will have to get up early for a few days in a row and come to school for full days… then the second week of school will kick off with a “Vegas Night” for the parents and the kids will have 3 half days, their schedules being mixed up, and the other half of the days will be teacher work time.
*I’m in a house… there has been some kind of conflict going on here for the family – something in the house is affecting the people living here. The house has been emptied of furniture… there is a large smudge on one wall… it looks only slightly darker than the paint on the wall… like oil smeared in circles about halfway up the wall. It was done to see if there was some kind of spirit in the house. The next room has the entire wall covered in this oil, what is revealed is a face… it looks like a watermark in the paint and you have to stand in the other room to see the entire face because it takes up the entire wall… the image looks like what a wood carving of the face of an old man might look like (large, angular strokes) but flush with the wall. This is the image of the spirit which resides in the house.
*I’m standing outside of a living room in a house… wooden floor… people are walking by with their dogs. Seems like this was some kind of gathering and people are leaving. There is a woman leaving, walking a small black dog that looks like my dog from when I was a kid. I kneel down and see that it is my dog… I tear up slightly… I haven’t seen her in 20 years and I wish I could keep her with me, but I know she has to leave with the lady. My dog’s eyes are really bright, though her hair is more gray than I remember.
*I’m in a store doing some grocery shopping, O is with me. I’ve placed a couple of small items in my cart. I walk down the aisle and grab a few more things I need, walking back to the cart I see there are two kids inside the cart, as well as a boom box blasting music at the kids very loudly. The radio has a couple of receiving blankets folded and laid across the top of it. O asks why the kids are in my basket, I say “I don’t know… they should be in the basket next to us” The mother turns and looks at us… apologizing… she got the baskets mixed up when she put her kids down. She has two older children (one girl and one boy) and a set of twins. I ask if she needs help, her arms are full… and she asks me to move the babies to her basket. I think it’s odd someone would ask a stranger to pick up babies who are so young and tiny, but I help. I move the radio over first… as she explains it, the kids really have to have the music blasting at them, otherwise they will cry. The baby I move over is tiny… the size of one of O’s dolls, and dressed like O’s doll as well. The lady asks me if I need any work, she cleans houses and could use someone to wash windows of the houses while she does the other stuff… if I need the work. I explain that I already have a job and I really don’t have the time to take on another one… and I tell her the hours that I work while O is in class. Then I realize she was supposed to go to a camp this week and I slap my forehead… saying “Oh SHIT! I can’t believe I forgot about that! I should have dropped you off two hours ago! I wonder if it’s too late to go?” then I remember that the camp isn’t this week, I don’t have to worry.
July 28
Light sleeping last night, so not a lot to write today.
*I’m watching a house from a distance… running surveillance. I’m slouched down, peeking out a window through the blinds. I’m eating potato chips. I’m watching people come and go… the house is down a grassy hill from where I am, on a riverbank. I’m thinking about weak points… thinking the chimney is a weak point (smoke from the chimney shows when they are home) and the fact that the people in the house need to trade.
*I’m cleaning out my car… I’m just home from a long road trip and there is a lot of stuff to pull out. I’ve pulled into my mom’s side of her garage and I’m leaning across the front seat to pull stuff from the passenger side. S is standing at the garage door talking, telling me about what I’ve missed while I was gone. I wasn’t expecting him to be home… it’s nice to be able to hand him the laundry to take so I’m not hauling everything in myself. I find my iPod on the floor of the car and put it in my pocket. I sit in the front seat to reach some other items while he comes back to bring more in for me. I walk in the house, feeling in my pocket that the iPod doesn’t seem right… it feels as though there is a bend… at an angle across where the screen is. I pull it out of my pocket as I’m walking and I see there is a bit of a bend across the screen… looks like a small crease will be permanently etched if I can get it flat again. I press on the bent part to try and straighten it out, but it breaks apart in my hand. I walk back to where S is and show him… thinking about how much music I had loaded on the iPod and how long it will take me to reload a new one.
I walk down the hall of my parent’s house and see a large, brown rat in the bathroom. It looks clean… like someone’s pet… but as I think about it I realize nobody in my mom’s house would be allowed to own a rat. I close the bathroom door (which is glass paneled for some reason) to trap it in that room and yell that I’ve found a rat in the house. I see the rat leap from the top of where the bath tub is (to the right of the door) across the door area and up to the corner of the ceiling (on the left of the door) and through a hole. I’ve noticed what looked like a thin spot in the ceiling before, but as the rat scrambles through the hole, the edges crumble and break away… and I can see into the attic space. I see a lot of movement. It’s not just one rat, the house is infested. I hear my dad running up the hall behind me and I show him, through the glass, how the attic is filled with rats. I can see the mice running behind the walls… the walls have become so soft that they ripple as the mice run down the support beams on the inside of the walls. There are streams of them running, I can hear them… there are birds nesting under the house and a couple of them fly out from a hole in the floorboards.
July 27
*This one is a bit jumbled.
I’m sitting in the living room of someone’s house (might be Mom’s place) discussing dinner. It is late at night. O wants to try using some make-up that she has found… there are two low quality make-up kits here, looks like they were bought from one of those shopping channels online. As I look around I see there are a few things here that were purchased off a shopping channel. I tell O no, and explain that the lipstick will make her lips dry out and crack, she is better off with the chapstick stuff we bought for her before.
I’m laying on my stomach on the floor, talking about something we were supposed to figure out. There is a large, gray cat walking on my back… I can feel it’s paws dig into my back… no claws… just the pressure of the little feet. The cat can talk, it is saying that it has figured it out (whatever it is we were discussing) but it doesn’t want to tell the other two cats in the house. I feel it’s paws on the top of my head as it’s trying to balance… it’s back paws are at my shoulder blades. The paws slip to my left side and the cat rolls off my back, then springs back up and is rubbing under my chin and purring. The cat stops suddenly, and steps back… staring at a spot about 4 feet in front of us. The cat is backing up, explaining to me it can see a ghost. I look and see nothing, but the cat explains it can feel the presence of the ghost, and wants to leave. I shrug, and get up… carrying two laptops into a bedroom I place them on one of the twin sized beds in the room. The bed is unmade. I’m back in the living room explaining to S that I moved his laptops onto his bed.
*I’m in a hotel lobby with S, S’s brother (SB) and I believe SB’s wife (BW). We were going to go to the restaurant here for dinner, but it is very expensive and since this was a last minute decision we are trying to decide where else we should go. I look and see a lot of teenagers sitting at little round tables… their food is in those little boat shaped red and white checked paper trays… burgers, hotdogs, fries… that sort of thing. The food is from a little cafe that is on the other side of this hotel. I point it out to S.
Now we are in a car… I seem to be in the front and back seat at the same time. We are driving east along a road I recognize, going through a beach town. S is in the front passenger seat, SB is behind the wheel. The driving appears to be coming from the back seat, behind the passenger seat from BW. I mention that we can just go back to the main beach and get a burger… that would be fine with me and it would be fast. But we are headed the wrong direction. S tells BW to pull over at the bus stop over on the right. The curb curves in for the buses to pull out of traffic and stop. The car rolls to a stop next to the curb, and S and SB jump out of the car, running around to trade places. S will be driving because he knows the way and he can get us there faster. I move from the front seat to the back now, and I explain to BW where we are going to go. The car is traveling quickly now… I look around and see I’m in a compact car, in my mind I flash a picture of a green Geo Metro. We are driving quickly down a neighborhood street which ends in a dock to a lake or lagoon. You have to turn a sharp left at the end of the road to drive parallel to the water’s edge. S takes the corner too sharply. I was not paying attention to his driving, but I look out the window now (I’m sitting in the back, on the right) and see the edge of the dock is just below my window… way too close. I’m saying “Oh shit shit shit shit shit shit” and I grip the handle of the door. We are way too close to the edge, and turning from here will put the back end of the car off the dock. I hold on, hoping he can turn the car sharp enough to get us out of here. I’m willing that the car will return to the road. It feels like slow motion now… my heart is racing as the car lurches backwards. I hear a splash, it feels distant. The back left corner is the first part of the car to hit the water. I see it filling up that side of the car. My breath is knocked out of me as I panic. Logically I know I need to take a deep breath and get the door open before the car is submerged, but my instinct is to reach for the other passenger in the car. I think it is O, though I know she is not here right now. I can’t take a deep breath, the water is too cold. It is murky… green… I hear a lot of chaos around me. I’m afraid if I close my eyes I won’t open them again… I can’t breathe and I know I’m going to drown. I’m trying to look for O, but I’m starting to realize there is no reason for her to be here, or me. Everything is dark… and I can hear my own voice in my head screaming at me to open my eyes… I just need to get my eyes open and I will see that I’m fine. The noise of the water is fading and I can hear myself clearer as I wake up.
