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Lisa, William, maybe Sarah, and myself, were rummaging through a house in the middle of the woods. I can’t specifically remember coming across the house and entering it, but I do remember being inside of it with Lisa, William, and maybe Sarah was there, although, if she were there, she was not as clearly memorable as Lisa and William. Got it? Good, now let’s move on dammit. I recall walking through this home and it resembled no home I can recall in real life. There were several rooms and some were well lit and then there were those, which I did not venture into, that seemed dark. I recall a bedroom and I stood in front of a closet that was in this bedroom. The door leading into this bedroom was to the left of me and I vaguely remember seeing Lisa standing there at the door, perhaps looking in on what I was doing and then going on about her business of exploring other parts of this house we did not live in. It was clearly a breaking-and-entering type of scenario and I kind of wondered why we, as a family, would agree to break the law and do such a thing. But whatever. The closet I stood in front of had a door that opened to the right, and inside it was well lit as if there may have been a light up inside at the top of this closet although I can’t specifically seeing one. There was a shelf inside this closet that was up high, you know, just like all normal closets you see. The shelf was head level and was a half-inch thick and was about three feet wide and two feet long. It was a milky peach color, the same type of shelf I have in my own closet by the front door in my house. There was a book on this shelf or maybe among the drawers in this bedroom. The room was the typical bedroom with a chest of drawers against the far wall and maybe a bed behind me. It was a room that was dimly lit and I’m sure I may have seen this room in a TV show or something but I don’t know specifically where I have seen it before. There is a dresser like the kind Lisa and I have in our room and I remember standing next to it and looking toward the wall. There may have been a large mirror on the wall there by the dresser but I can’t remember for sure. The doorway leading into this room is to the left of me as I stand at the dresser this way. I recall seeing Lisa at the doorway as she casually looks in on me as if to analyze what I am doing, then she is off to further explore parts of the house where I am not. The closet with the shelf is to the right of this dresser. Either on the shelf of the closet or on the dresser is a book where the person that lives in the house writes down all their thoughts. The book kind of reminded me of the book my mom bought me when I lived in Arkansas and sent to me, that one with the leather leaves embroidered into the cover and where I wrote the book Case and wrote my 1988 diary that starts with the words This is 1988 folks. I remember reading through the pages and seeing words there that were written by the person who lived in the house. I can’t recall what the words were or what the person had to say as they wrote down their thoughts but I can remember seeing the black words written on the white pages. The pages were mostly only half full, like whoever wrote in this volume decided to write their thoughts until they were done, and instead of continuing on the same page when it was the next day, they began writing on a different page instead. Occasionally throughout this volume I would see something that I myself had written, as if to show the person who wrote in this book that someone else had access to this private journal and was writing stuff in it as well. Apparently I had written these things in this book when I had been in this house before. I may have been in this house at another time in this dream and actually encountered this book to write things in it, but that memory, if it does exist, is gone forever. However, what I see as my entries into this book, I believe, happened at an earlier time in this dream. I put the book back and on the top shelf of the closet I see some other things. Among these things I come across is a baggie of marijuana. It is tightly rolled into a half-inch barrel-shaped piece and holds about two grams of what looks like pretty good weed. I look to my left as I examine this baggie, see that Lisa is looking into the room beyond this bedroom and not really paying me any attention, so I grab the pot and take it, stashing it secretly away. This is strange because I don’t smoke pot but this was like a reason to secretly smoke it sometime in the future. I stuffed the pot into my pants or something and decided to keep it. Around this time something happens that indicates we should leave the house. I don’t know if the people who live in the house are coming home and we hear them pull up in the driveway, or if we just decide that we have been hanging around here long enough and it is now time to go. Whatever the case, Lisa, William and myself (and maybe Sarah) exit the house and begin to walk away from it. I am viewing this scene from behind us as we exit what must be the front door. Outside the front door is a cement walkway and the brown side of the house is on the left of this walkway. Outside is a dense forest with many trees. We walk away from the house and as we do, William is playing a recorder instrument, the kind that Sarah has. He is in front of Lisa and I and is playing a haunting melody on it as he leads the way into the woods away from the house. It is hard to explain the notes he is playing, but I’ll try. I distinctly recall a series of short notes that progressively go high, then I exactly remember the last four notes he plays, which are the finale to what his previous notes set up. They are four eerie notes that climb down a minor scale and end the tune he had been performing on the recorder. The notes gave this scene the perfect gothic feeling that accents the brooding forest beyond. Lisa and I walk after William as he strolls into the forest and away from the house.
I took William to the movies. When we arrived at the building where the movies were playing we walked in and it was kind of like a mall atmosphere, although I don’t recall seeing a whole lot of people—there was just that feeling. William and I initially walked up to the ticket booth, which was a hexagonal-shaped thing with each side about three feet in width. The booth was eight feet high and on the top part of the booth sides, above the glass where the booth ticket takers stood or sat inside, were posters announcing what movies were playing or what the coming attractions were. The building this booth was in was a large open-spaced place, very brightly lit and clean and mostly white. I didn’t pay much attention to what was occurring beyond the scope of this ticket booth, but, again, I got the feeling we were in a mall-like atmosphere and I got the feeling the ceiling was way up there, many stories high and open to the other floors of the mall that climbed up and up. I can’t recall what movie it was William and I wanted to see but I think there was a poster displaying it on the ticket booth. When I approached the ticket booth I realized that the movie we wanted to see had been sold out, even though we had arrived a half-hour before the show had even started. I wasn’t sure how we knew that the movie had been sold out, whether the person inside the ticket booth told us or it was written on one of the posters there, but whatever the case, I was disappointed and felt bad for dragging William there to see a movie that we now couldn’t. However, as if to get in line for the next showing of this movie or something like that, William and I were allowed into the theater anyway to sit in front of the screen. This was kind of confusing because we could still have been able to see this showing of the movie and, therefore, would have no reason to get in line for the next showing. Or, perhaps, because the show was sold out, we were placed in these seats that were seats for people who were too late to get tickets. Something like that. The lights were on, which indicated the show had not yet started, and the theater was a medium-sized capacity jobbie, able to seat about 200 people. The seats were tiered as they went further back, I think it’s called stadium seating, so people in back always had a view of the screen no matter who sat in front of them. I was crammed into some seats, as I mentioned earlier, by the front of the theater right next to the screen, and there were others sitting there with me, probably also people who had come to the show too late to get tickets in the premium seats. The screen, to the left of me as I sat there, was a large, 15-feet-tall thing and was white like a painter’s virgin canvas. I looked up into the crowd and it was pretty busy with people moving around and talking and situating themselves in their seats and others roaming around to do whatever it is people at the movies do. There were people up there in the theater’s good seats that I recognized and I recall someone to the left of me saying that they had seen “…Lecia, Theena, and others…” They referred to Lecia Evans, Theena Brainer, and other youths I used to hang out with at Lake Hamilton Baptist Church in Pearcy, Arkansas. I actually saw their faces and this was a surprise, as I had not seen these people since 1979. As the crowd situated themselves to get ready for the show, there was an announcement made by management somehow, either over a loudspeaker or everyone just somehow knew it, that they needed to check everyone out for some reason so everyone had to leave the theater. I got the feeling that the management of the theater complex felt that there may have been some people who snuck into this theater who had not paid for their tickets, so they wanted to screen everyone to verify just who had paid and who had not, although I had no idea how they were going to do this. Soon, people began emptying out of the theater, filing into the center aisle that snaked up to the back of the auditorium, and started walking out to the exit of this place, which was to the left of me as I faced the crowd. The last part of this dream I remember is standing there and watching as the crowd accumulated and bunched up at around the halfway to two-thirds mark of the theater seats and started walking slowly out of the room. I stood there and stared at this progression, presumably with William at my side, and waited for a time when I would be able to filter into the crowd and also exit the room.
There was a gathering at my house that consisted mostly of kids that were William’s age so I think this was some kind of birthday party for him or something like that. I’m not sure who everyone was and William is the only real clear person I can remember, although there were many others at my house, at least a dozen. At one point I discovered that someone had threatened William in some way. I’m not sure how William was threatened but I knew that it was the neighbor who had done it—the neighbor who lives where Peewee does (to the north of me). I walked to the chain link fence that was there and confronted a kid who was about 13 or 14 years old, and this was who had threatened William. I don’t know who this kid was, I’ve never seen him before, but I think he had red hair and looked and acted like a real smart-ass punk. There may have been one or two other kids with him. I walked to the fence to confront him about him threatening my kid and he quickly reached over the top of the fence and grabbed the hair on the top of my head and pulled tight. This catches me completely off guard and, to say the least, pisses me off pretty bad. I manage to free myself of this punk’s grasp and when I pull away, some of my hair may have come out in his hands because he held on pretty good. Enraged, I tried to scale the fence to get at him and I realize at this point that the fence is now a barbed-wire fence instead of the chain link fence it used to be, or it has barbed wire at the top that makes it hard for me to get over. I can’t remember ever getting over the fence to beat the crap outta that delinquent piece of shit, or perhaps I just give up, but the next thing I remember is looking at the deck that encircles my house and see big globs of the dark brownish paint, the same color of paint I actually used to paint my deck this summer, streaking across the deck. Apparently someone had taken some paint out of my shed and dripped big globs of it onto the deck. This, as well, infuriates me and I somehow come to find out that it is William and one of his friends who did this. There is a carport type of garage next to my driveway, at a spot that is actually where my neighbor Nackston’s front yard is, and I find William walking around here. Being upset about the paint he splashed onto my deck, I yell at William, having no patience for his being a little vandal. I push him around and rough him up (which is something I would never do in real life) as other people who are there watch me. I am unfazed by this, however, and continue to push William around and yell at him, not caring in the least what the people think of me as I do this. The next thing I recall is being in the carport/garage thing and seeing some workers there that had arrived. Apparently they had shown up to help me re-sand and re-paint the deck. Not recognizing who they are, I ask them, well, who they are. One of the guys there, who was demonstrating a sanding tool to someone else that was there, looked up from his down-on-one-knee stance to eye me over. He had dark eyes, dark collar-length hair, and had a stubble of beard. He explained to me in a blunt, straightforward tone that he was here to sand and paint my deck. Seeing this as sufficient identification on his part, he ends his explanation to me by saying: “That’s who!” I accept this and, even though I don’t really know this guy and the people he had brought with him (which were city employees or professional construction workers), I feel fortunate that they have come to take care of my deck. Immediately one of the men, someone other than who had explained who they were, takes a hand-held sanding tool and goes to work. The tool is the kind that has the round disk-shaped sandpaper on the end of a rotary setting and he applies it to a section of a windowsill in the garage. The sander does its work well, stripping the old, brown-colored paint off the windowsill. This sill surrounds a four-paned, streaky glass, like those you would imagine to see in many garages. I don’t think the windowsill here really needed to be redone, but this guy was just testing the sander out to show that it could indeed strip old paint off in a hurry. As we concentrate on the deck, I mention to the guys that when I painted the deck I did not use “Stick ‘em,” which meant, I assume, that the paint may come up easier and may not have to be sanded. Apparently this meant that there is a primer type of coating, called Stick ‘em, that you can spray or paint onto a surface before applying paint so that the paint adheres better to the surface after being applied. To prove this point, I go to one of the globby sections of paint that William had created earlier, which was a mess about 10 feet long, 4 feet wide, and mounded up to a foot or two high like a brown, solidified, lava flow. It looks like a big brown glob of dried paint, sure enough, and when I reach down and grab onto one end of it, it comes right up off the deck in one piece, apparently a sign that Stick ‘em was not used. I guess this meant that perhaps the guys would not have to sand some areas of the deck because the paint could lift up easily.
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