Rangeman Meets Some Very Tough Guys

Rangeman went around, doing what he did, mostly telling people to be nice and rescuing cats from trees.

Turned out that a lot of cats got stuck up high in trees in NYC. Soon Rangeman was getting very busy with the cats. He was becoming more well-known. He was getting some respect from the NYFD, the normal go-to guys for cats stuck in trees. 

At first the firemen regarded him as a nuisance, a crazy person would just get in the way, possibly injure himself or the cat or one of them. But soon he won them over, above all with his absolute dedication to get the job done, his nothing-is-impossible attitude, and his rapidly-increasing climbing skills. Do anything strenuous all day long every day, and work out when you're not doing it, and chances are you might get very good at it. 

Now the firemen would see him from down the block as they rolled in, and they'd yell, "Rangeman, my man!" Sometimes now they'd just watch, confident he'd get the job done. If he was up very high they would stretch out those stretchy round bouncy things that fireman stretch out, just in case he or the cat fell. But he didn't fall, the cats didn't fall. He was getting very good at this. He hadn't been in bad physical shape before he became Rangeman, but he was definitely more cut now. 

One beautiful crisp afternoon he was just walking around, guarding his city, when someone called, "Hey, Rangeman!" He turned around to see half a dozen very bad-looking guys walking up on him, with lots of denim and shiny black leather and sneering faces, and three of them had handguns leveled at him.

The first group of thugs Rangeman had dealt with, the ones who were there during his transformation, playing keep-away with a lady purse -- those guys might have been intimidated by a hypothetical second group of bad guys who were clearly tougher and meaner. And the second group might have been afraid of a third group of bad man. But that hypothetical third group would still have nightmares about these guys who were pulling guns on Rangeman. Murder and intimidation just oozed from the pores of this fourth, non-hypothetical group.

Even before he spoke, it was clear that one of the three with the guns was the leader of the whole bunch. Rangeman wagged a finger at this one and said, "Hey now ! Be nice!"

The leader and a couple of the others laughed. Rangeman saw that one of them who wasn't pointing a gun at him had a gun in a holster at his waist, clearly visible over his knit shirt and under his black leather jacket.

"I'm not a nice guy," the leader told Rangeman, and some of his gang laughed some more. 

"And how's that working out for you?" Rangeman asked.

"We're doing okay."

"It looks like you all spend a lot on clothes."

"Oh, we got plenty to spend on clothes. We see something we want to wear, we buy it, we don't need to ask the price first."

"Uh-huh. But you don't look happy. You're laughing at me, but it sounds like hollow laughter." 

The head gangster stopped smiling and said, "You're giving me mental-health advice?! The guy who choked Tony Stark?!"

"I only choked Tony for a moment. Just to establish some boundaries. He was being a real dick, and I knew he knew better. I didn't choke him out, nothing like that. Any bad feelings about it were over with the same day."

"Uh-huh. TONY STARK DOESN'T EXIST," the lead bad guy yelled in Rangeman's face. "He's a fictional character, played by Robert Downey, Jr in movies, and drawn in comic-books."

"Yes, yes," Rangeman spluttered, "there are movies and comics about Tony and the other Avengers, but they're real. Stark Tower is right over there."

"Where?"

"Umm... You can't see it from here, the buildings on this block are blocking the view, and --"

"Wanna walk to where there's a view of it? It's imaginary! It's CGI in those movies! And your 'superpowers' amount to telling people to be nice, and saving cats, and getting your picture in the news every now and then, because --"

"The Rangeman has an altimeter in it! And a barometer! And an ambient-air thermometer! And solar panels that re-charge the batteries, and every 24 hours it synchs its time with an atomic clock in Colorado, and it's especially durable, even compared to other G-Shocks, and --"

"Wait a minute, an atomic clock in Colorado? What's up with that?"

"Yes, even if you turn off the synch, it's still spec'ed at plus-minus 15 seconds a month, so if the synch is on it's always within a split-second, AND it springs forward and falls back by itself!"

"Hey, now, that last thing," the main bad guy, "that I like. That's a real pain in the ass with watches." By now all of their guns were holstered. "Give me your Rangeman, Rangeman."

"No."

"No. huh? Just like that."

"You want it, you're going to have to take it."

All of the bad guys laughed at that, and now the laughter sounded more relaxed, less hollow.

"How much does one of those cost?" the boss of the bad guys asked.

A second bad guy spoke up: "That's a GW9400-1, right?" he asked, and Rangeman nodded. The second thug told the first, "Retail's $330. You can find them for less. Down to about $100 off of retail." The boss looked nauseous on hearing such a low price, but the second one went on, insisting, "it's not always all about the price. Maybe 99.9% of the time in life, but with G-Shocks..."

"So they're a couple hundred bucks, these things?"

"That particular model. There's thousands of models."

"THOUsands?"

"Thousands, boss. From $30 up to several thousand."

"Huh," the boss said, and turned back to Rangeman: "So you're risking your life over a couple hundred dollars."

"Like your guy just said -- not everything is even about money."

"Well, you're a brave guy."

"I don't know if am brave. But I have to act that way, because I'm a superhero. I have an important job to do."

"Superhero! There's no such thing as superheros! You're a great, big, huge, nice, somewhat charismatic crazy person!"

"Agree to disagree?"

The boss crook raised both his hands and was about to start shouting again. But then he lowered his hands again and said, "Sure." He turned to the second guy and asked, "You know where we can shop for G-Shocks?"

"Sure, Boss."

"For the fancy expensive ones?"

"Yeah, I know that too."

The boss turned back to Rangeman: "You want to come with us? We'll buy you a watch."

"Oh! Oh. Thank you very much," Rangeman said, "but --"

"But what?" 

"It's this time of day. I don't know why, maybe it's because the firehouse nearby is changing shifts, but this time of day I'm usually pretty busy."

"Okay. Some other time."

"Thanks, that would be nice."

"And, you know -- I like cats."

Hey, you know what?" Rangeman said.

"What?"

"YOU'RE BEING NICE!"

The other 5 crooks laughed at the boss. The boss looked confused for a moment. Then he smiled, shook Rangeman's hand and said, "You're okay." 

Dream Log: Keanu Reeves/Siddhartha/High-Powered Lawyer

I dreamed I was Siddhartha, the prince in India who was going to renounce his wealth and become the Buddha; and also Keanu Revves;

 

and also a high-priced lawyer in Manhattan. I moved back and forth from the prince's ancestral palace in ancient India to present-day Manhattan, but after a while I stayed in Manhattan. The ancient prince was about to leave his family's palace to wander and seek enlightenment, and the attorney was about to leave his wealth and position behind to do the same. Ray Liotta was also in both realities: in ancient India he was one of the prince's most loyal servants, and in present-day Manhattan he was the attorney's loyal assistant.

The differences between the two times and places seemed unimportant. In both, Ray was very upset that Keanu was about to leave. "Let me come with you," he asked, not for the first time.

"We've been through this," I/Keanu/Siddhartha answered. "I need to go alone."

"I'm going to miss you."

"I'm going to miss you, too," I said. "But, to some extent, we can choose whether missing someone is painful. We can choose to be happy thinking about what was good in that other person." (I have no idea whether any part of this post resembles Buddhism in the slightest. I have no wish to offend Buddhists with this post.)

I also reminded him that Maura Tierney, another attorney in the firm, was staying. Ray liked her a lot.

Philip Seymour Hoffman was/was playing a defendant represented by the firm, a whistleblower who had exposed very bad things done routinely by a very big company, charged with criminal theft of documents belonging to that company. It was late afternoon, the jury was about to return. The other attorneys were already in the courtroom. Almost the entire firm was in the courthouse except for me. I was going to set out on my quest for enlightenment after the verdict. I rushed over to the courthouse, and then realized that I had neglected to put on a shirt.

Maura Tierney had a car and drove me back to the firm. By the time I was properly dressed, multiple texts had infomed us that Philip Seymour Hoffman had been declared innocent, so instead of rushing back to the courthouse, Maura and I waited for everyone else to join us at the firm for a party. Caterers began to arrive and set up shop. It was getting dark. It was one of those old Manhattan offices with a lot of exposed hardwood.

I said to Maura, "You know, Ray's crazy about you." By the way that she blushed and looked away, smiling, it seemed that the feelings were mutual. Which in turn made it seem that right now, with a party in celebration of having won a good fight about to get underway, would be an excellent time for me to go. I slipped out via the stairs and the alley. It was cold, my breath billowed out in big clouds. On the sidewalk and out in the street people were in a big hurry, typical for Manhattan. I, on the other hand, didn't know where I was going, so it made sense for me to just stand there, except to jump up and down when I needed some warmth. After a while I decided to turn left. Left was east. I started walking east on 42nd Street.

Dream Log: Economic Mediocrity in Manhattan

I dreamed I was in a department store in Manhattan when my G-Shock alerted me that a package had been fired at the store like a bullet from far away, and was about to fly through an open window. Quickly I grabbed a drone from a shelf, took it out of its package, assembled it, and got it into the air where if deflected the package, knocking it to the ground and avoiding injury or collision with other goods.

A store manager saw this, assumed that I was already an employee, and set me to work deflecting more packages which flew in through the store's one open window.

I quit this job and got a delivery job, delivering bags of candy from a storefront. However, I felt sure that the commissions for these deliveries must be very low, so when I saw a bunch of people going onto an office to start a day's work on another delivery job, and they said they were always hiring, I tagged along. 

In this job, every single package delivered by anybody contained one Three Musketeers candy bar. We were each given a bag of packages and a list of addresses and sent out. 

I found myself walking in Upper Manhattan looking for 176th St. Other delivery people from the same company, each with a bag of Three Musketeers, were walking along beside me. The streets were filled with a mixture of sea salt left by evaporation from the nearby Atlantic, and toxic waste. There were no sidewalks in this region of warehouses. We dodged speeding semi trucks. The salty poison piled high in the streets was beginning to melt the rubber in the soles of our sneakers. We were afraid it would burn right through our shoes and burn our feet. 

We managed to get out of that area uninjured. But I still hadn't found a single address. I was beginning to wonder what kind of commission I could possibly expect from such a job. I had neglected to ask how much I was going to be paid. 

The boss of my previous job, where I had been delivering bags of candy, and where I had also not asked about the pay, spotted me walking along and yelled at me angrily for disappearing. However, he also made it clear that I was not fired. He was a big burly guy with black handlebar moustaches.

Then things became much more abstract. For example, I was holding a tennis ball inside a steel protective case. Then, I was inside a beauty shop, and a women held my head between her hands as she murmured incantations which I didn't understand. Then, I was in Wisconsin for just a moment. I don't know how I knew it was Wisconsin. It was a rural area, autumn, and the trees were full of firy-bright red and orange and yellow leaves. Very few leaves had fallen yet from the trees. Then I was back in the department store were the dream began, and the store manager was yelling at me for pretending to be an employee. Then I was sitting on the ground in African grasslands among some lions, and I wasn't afraid of them and they weren't afraid of me. Then I was back in NYC, on the sidewalk, with some people I've only met on Facebook. Then I was playing basketball in what appeared to a comfortably-old NYC YMCA or school gym. Then I was testifying before a legislative body in favor of massive expansion of public funding for rooftop-solar, and also in favor of 100% net metering. Then I woke up.

Dream Log: NYC: First, Scary Violence; Then, Dave Foley

I dreamed I was in NYC, in Grand Central Station. It was crowded, and I and all the other people were dressed as if it was the early 20th century, when the station was new. I was running up and down staircases and all over the station, for no apparent reason other than to have fun. 

But the fun mood suddenly disappeared when I heard people screaming. I ran in the direction of the screaming, and found an enormous man assaulting people. Before I could do anything, he turned on me and laid me flat on my back with one punch to the jaw. I got up and kept fighting, although I was frightened, and with good reason. This guy was big enough to make me feel small, which very rarely happens, and when it does, it makes me think about my possible effect on other people, and so I try to be extra-polite and gentle around others. He was over 7 feet tall and 500 pounds. At first glance it seemed he was a bit fat, but wherever I punched him, he was rock-solid. I was getting beaten pretty badly, but at least I and a couple of other people were distracting him from hurting other people, so we kept at it, until a bunch of NYPD officers arrived and ended it by shooting him 30 or 40 times, which didn't kill him, but slowed him down enough that he could be tied up with ropes (handcuffs didn't fit around his wrists), and dragged off to a hospital.

Then it was evening, and I and everyone else was wearing ordinary contemporary clothes, and I was hanging out with Dave Foley 

 

and a couple of other celebrities. I've forgotten who the others were. One was a woman, and they were all about Dave's age, which means they were all about my age too, and they were about as commercially successful as he is. 

In real life I met Dave Foley once, very briefly, in 1995, as I and a young lady were bar-hopping late at night in downtown Manhattan. I have no reason to believe that Dave Foley recalls meeting me, but in the dream, he knew my name and remembered talking to me and asked whether I and the woman were still together. I told him that the woman and I were never more than friends, and that I had managed to screw up the friendship pretty quickly, too. How had I done that? Dave asked. I told him that I didn't know, but that I had been drunk round-the-clock in those days, and that I suspected that might have had something to do with it.

They were all talking about the big-time show-biz projects they were working on. I felt self-conscious about my lack of success, and so I told a phony story about how I was playing bass in the studio for Dave Wakeling, former leader of the English Beat and General Public.

I made a remark to the woman which was intended to be funny, but she didn't laugh. She seemed very offended. 

The others all got up and walked away. I didn't know whether I was welcome to join them or not, so I stayed sitting where I was. The woman had left a big plate of some sort of appetizers, and I was very hungry, so I started eating them. Then I thought: what if they came back right away and saw that I had eaten her food. That would have made it all even more awkward. But they didn't come back.

Later that evening I met Dave Foley again, but not the others. Dave said that he was recording some music and invited me to join in on bass. I admitted to him that I had been lying to try to fit in, and that I had actually never played bass, and had no great ability on any instrument. 

The next morning I was wondering around midtown Manhattan, not knowing what I should do to survive and feeling helpless. I was wearing a suit which was new but not very expensive. I walked downtown, and came across a loud and festive Greek wedding reception which had spilled out of a building and onto a street. I stopped and watched, smiling and nodding at the many people in the wedding party who paused to smile and nod at me. 

Then suddenly Dave Foley was at my elbow.  He waded into the wedding crowd and waved for me to follow him. He came to a table holding mugs of coffee with some sort of topping which looked like whipped cream. Dave took a mug. I took one too, wondering whether Dave was trying to help me by sending me a sort of reach-out-and-take-the-good-things-of-life message.

Dave walked around with me as I continued to prowl the sidewalks aimlessly. He kept trying to offer me employment of some sort or other. Although I needed employment, and would've liked none better than the types Dave was proposing, I felt unworthy, and told Dave so. 

"You could be an agent," Dave said. "That requires no talent, and also no hard work."

Then I was wandering around by myself again in midtown, worrying that others could see how cheap my suit was. Then someone put a package into my arms. I opened it up and saw the nicest briefcase I've ever seen, filled with notepads and pens and calendars and such. Paper-based and some electronic gadgets too. All first-rate equipment.

The next day I was living in a very nice West Side apartment somehow, and actors and other performers were visiting me, wanting me to be their agent. Dave had sent me a list of the people who were coming to see me, with gigs each one would be likely to get.

Dream Log: Grunt Work in NYC Theatre

Last night I dreamed I was working in a New York City Off-Broadway theatre, something I've done a lot of in waking life. Many New York actors make ends meet, when they're not acting, by taking tickets and ushering, and so forth, in theatres. Besides the pay it's also a chance to see a show for free, and tickets can be sort of expensive.

 

In my dream it was my first time working in this particular theatre, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I was one of a dozen or so people who were given receipt pads. We were supposed to help out when the line at the box office got too long. We were all wearing the standard usher outfit: black shoes, black pants and a white shirt provided by us, with a black vest and clip-on bow tie provided by the theatre,

I started flirting with an actress who was standing around holding a pad like the one I had. Pretty soon we were snuggling and kissing. She was wonderful. Beautiful and intelligent and witty. Just made me sigh to be around her, let alone having her permission to touch her. She reminded me of a wonderful actress I knew once in real life in NYC, who, amazingly, seemed to like me a lot, and it seemed as if she and I were beginning a romance, but I managed to screw it up.

One man came in, got a ticket and went into the theatre, and then another one did, and then the show started. None of us seemed interested in watching the show, so there were only two spectators this evening, each prominent New York theatre people themselves. 

None of us standing around with our receipt pads had had to do a thing. But each of us still got paid a $20 bill. Judging from this evening, it did not seem that the show was a huge commercial hit. But I didn't know anything about it. For all I knew it might have been playing for years in that theatre already, might have made a fortune before winding down.

We were discussing what we were going to do with our newfound 20 bucks when the house manager, a beautiful young woman, looked like an actress, approached with a clipboard holding a form she was filling out, and asked each of us in turn what our major non-theatre job was, and what our biggest weakness was at that job. 

I replied that I test drove EV's for the manufacturer (in real life I haven't yet had been employed by an EV maker), and that my biggest weakness was not concentrating on what I was supposed to do. "Asleep at the wheel?" the manager asked me, and some people laughed. "No," I replied, "I haven't actually caused any accidents yet. Not that absent-minded. What I mean is that I'm supposed to be talking into a tape recorder the whole time about the vehicle's performance, comfort, user interface and so on, and a lot of the time I just forget to do that, and drive, and think about show business instead."

Some of the others decided to blow their earnings on dinner. I and the actress whom I had been hugging and kissing went for a walk, holding hands. It was a pleasant evening, brisk but not unpleasantly cold. We told each other our life stories, window-shopped, people-watched. A nice stereotypical beginning to an NYC showbiz romance. Then I woke up.

Dream Log: NYC: Bridges and Staircases; plus, Jessica Lange

I dreamed yet again last night that I was in New York City. This was one of the dreams featuring an unrealistic New York City. The city I dreamed about last night was even bigger, in its buildings and bridges, and even more bustling in its streets and sidewalks, than the real city.

I was in very good physical shape: I was living in the Bronx, and very often walked to Lower Manhattan. It was winter, and I just zoomed along over the snowy sidewalks.

Some of the unrealistic nature of the dream was that certain landmarks were in different places. For example, the Brooklyn Bridge was in the Bronx, and it was very different from the real Brooklyn Bridge. Much bigger, much broader. To start my walk from home in the Bronx to downtown Manhattan, I had to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on a pedestrian walkway made of see-through iron mesh which crossed the bridge over the motor traffic. This walkway was four long city blocks long, because the bridge was four long city blocks wide.

Harvard University was in downtown Manhattan in the dream, instead of across the Charles River from downtown Boston, as it is in real life. After walking downtown from the Bronx, I liked to enter a certain Harvard building and walk all the way down a long ground-floor hall to the back of the building, where there was a huge marble staircase which went all the way to the top floor. There were six stories in this building, and each one was enormously high. The ceilings were thirty feet high on each floor. On each floor, bookcases lined the walls, going up to the ceilings, with huge rolling ladders affixed to the cases for access to the higher shelves.

This version of New York City was so huge and so complex that many versions of it were superimposed upon each other; as the dream went on, it became more and more clear that the many-universes theory of physics was partially manifesting itself in human perception there.

It was different times at the same time that it was 2019. I seemed to be younger, and much more physically vigorous, than I really am, although, at the same time, I was my real age, 58. I seemed much more like 19 or 20, in my physical appearance and condition. I was dating Jessica Lange. Although it was 2019, and New York City, and Jessica Lange was there, she was also back in the 1970's, and was also out of the city, filming the Pacific-island scenes of the version of King Kong which was released in 1976. And although it was 2019, Jessica Lange looked like she did in the 1970's.

Also, as a part of the many-universes manifestation, at the same time that King Kong was being filmed elsewhere, and Jessica Lange was both elsewhere and in NYC at the same time, the movie was also being filmed with several other actresses in Lang's role.

Also as a part of the many-universes thing, Jessica Lange and I both were and were not in a relationship. We were in a relationship in one dimension, but in other dimensions she was seeing other people. I was bothered by her other relationships, and I said so. Jessica said that I was being ridiculous, because those other relationships of hers were occurring in entirely different universes, so she wasn't even being promiscuous. She was monogamous with me, because I was the only one she was seeing in this dimension. Jessica pointed out that I could see as many other people in other dimensions as I wanted to, and that wouldn't mean that I was being promiscuous. She said the words "promiscuous" and "monogamous" with a certain mocking pronunciation. It was clear that, even if she had been seeing someone else in the same dimension or universe where she was seeing me, she wouldn't like it at all that I was so jealous and possessive.

Intellectually, I not only understood her position but agreed with it, and also agreed that jealousy is an ugly, un-constructive thing. Emotionally, however, I was still very upset. Moreover, even though it was separate dimensions, separate universes, I could still see everything she was doing with the other guys, just as clearly as if it were happening right in front of me in the same dimension.

Although Jessica and I were disagreeing about certain implications of philosophy and physics, at the same time, it was just another relationship which was difficult because the two people wanted different things from it. We went for long, long walks through the wintry, snowy city, holding hands and not saying much, both of us upset because we wanted to keep seeing each other, but we didn't know how to fix the problems we were having.

For some unexplained reason, Jessica and I both had full access to all of the employees' areas of the New York City Transit Authority. (This seems somewhat ironic to me now that I'm awake, because she and I walked a lot where other people would take a bus or train.) In the middle of a long walk, we went into a subway employees' office to warm up. We helped ourselves to coffee and put our feet up on desks. The employees greeted us in a very friendly fashion and made small talk with us. I whispered to Jessica that maybe my main problem was that she was so beautiful that it was literally driving me insane. Then we both started laughing and crying at the same time. Transit employees saw this and closed in on us with Kleenexes and hugs and kind words, and soon we got a grip on ourselves.

There was a brass box slightly larger than a matchbox, which was traveling back and forth between dimensions. Despite the many dimensions, there was only one of these boxes, and it always stayed the same. At the moment, I was holding it in my hands. It contained a very long, thin brass chain with a clip on the end, from which you might hang keys. All of a sudden, it occurred to me that, because there was only one of these boxes in all dimensions, it might be able to teach me something about multiple dimensions which Jessica and most other people already understood. I suddenly felt very happy. I gave Jessica a big hug. It was one of those winter hugs which are well-padded by many layers of winter clothes. Then I woke up.

Dream Log: Love and Theatre in New York City

I dreamed that I was a young man in New York City some time during world War II, and that I had been drafted. I was one of a long line of men, most of us wearing knee-length coats and hats, moving from room to room in some enormous building full of varnished wood, as we were processed.

As a group of us were sitting in what appeared to be a lecture hall, with chairs bolted to the floor and desktops which folded away beside the chairs, I saw a women whom, in waking life, I knew thirty years ago.

Then suddenly it was the present day in New York City, I wasn't being drafted, the woman and I were still young, and we had just fallen in love with each other. She was a member of a theatre company, and got me an audition for a play she was starring in, a big-time play, a play on Broadway. I got the part.

After my successful audition I talked to an old man who had a cart on the sidewalk from which he sold fine reeds for reed instruments, mostly for saxophones. It was about the size of a hot-dog cart, and the reeds were piled up inside a glass case. Many of the best sax players in the city got their reeds from this guy, and he was wealthy, just from his income from the cart. He had long, wild white hair and a long white beard. I asked him why he never got a store and moved his business inside. He didn't even try to answer. Instead, he just shook his head and gave me a look that seemed to say: If you don't already understand why I don't want to move off of the sidewalk, I don't know how to explain it to you. It was a friendly look, not a disdainful one. Then he said, "Excuse me for a minute," and turned away and did some business with Branford Marsalis.

I've dreamed many times that I was in New York City. Many times before I lived there for a few years in the mid-1990's, and many times since. In some of those dreams the city has looked much as it does on waking life; in some other it has looked nothing at all like the real city. Last night it looked pretty similar to the real city, but much more beautiful. The architecture and the streets and sidewalks and staircases of stone or concrete were grander, and there was some sort of a sweet, mellow glow to everything. In real life the light in New York City can be very beautiful at moments, but in this dream it was even better. Better than this picture. This picture was the closest I could find to how things looked in the dream. It wasn't that everything looked expensive in the dream. It was something else:

The day after I got the part in the play, I was scheduled to attend a rehearsal which started at 1 o'clock in the afternoon, and I was running late, and I was downtown, and the theatre was in midtown, about 40 blocks away, and I was moving slowly, because I was carrying two 50-pound barbells which I had just obtained somehow. The terrain between downtown and midtown was a bit hillier than it is in real life, and there were some huge outdoor staircases to be climbed, and going up all of those steps with an extra 100 pounds was really difficult. It became more and more clear that I was going to be late.

After I woke up, I realized that in that sort of situation in real life, I would just have put the dumbbells down, written them off, and got on the subway, or, if time was really pressing, hailed a cab. But in the dream, none of those things seemed to be feasible. In the dream, the dumbbells were much, much too valuable to even consider putting them down. In real life, dumbells cost about a dollar a pound, sometimes less, and scale pay in a Broadway play, if I'm correctly informed, is currently $2,034 per week.

I was an hour and a half late to the rehearsal. (And my arms and shoulders were killing me by the time I got there.) I assumed I was going to be fired. However, the next day, the woman with whom I was in love went roller-skating around Manhattan with several other actors and two skating bears. This attention-grabbing behavior signaled that I was with her, and that if they fired me, they were going to have to fire her, too. So they didn't fire me.

Before that day's rehearsal began, this wonderful woman gave me a big hug and tried to explain to me that, although my new 50-pound dumbbells were really cool and all, if I were in a situation like that again, I could afford to just let them go. She wasn't really getting through to me on that point before I woke up. Then, of course, I knew she was right.

Dream Log: Dilapidated Manhattan

Last night I dreamed I was in Manhattan. I lived in Manhattan for a few years in the 1990's, and both before and since, I've often dreamed I was there -- sometimes in a place which actually looked and felt like Manhattan (assuming that Manhattan still looks and feels like it did in 1997, the last time I was there. I know that many huge buildings have gone up since then and that there are other changes like the elevated walkway they call the High Line, but it's hard for me to believe that the place would be unrecognizable to me), sometimes not. For example, in some of these dreams there have been phantasmagorical skyscraper-scapes which exist nowhere in the real world. More than once, I dreamed that Central Park was much bigger than it really is, and had the look of a rural area, with dirt roads and telephone poles and an isolated one-story house here and there.

In my dream I covered, on foot, a large part of Lower Manhattan. In real life, Lower Manhattan:

or midtown Manhattan:

may still have the greatest concentration of very tall buildings any where on Earth, although several Chinese cities have been catching up quickly. The buildings are taller in midtown and Lower Manhattan than elsewhere in NYC because the bedrock is deeper there, and the foundations of these skyscrapers have to go very deep underground to ensure that the building will remain stable.

In my dream last night, it was the present day and I was in Lower Manhattan, but all the buildings in sight were one or two stories, and most of them looked like they were falling apart. A few of the roads were gravel, the rest were dirt. The area seemed to be mostly residential and was crowded with people.

My brother and I and several other men were moving into a small one-story house. We were excited to have found such a place at a rent we could afford between us all, on my brother's salary and the other men's as successful stockbrokers and my earnings as a successful sculptor. (In real life I am not a sculptor and my brother is not a stockbroker.) Each of us had a small room to himself, and we shared a small living room, a small bathroom and a small kitchen. The stockbrokers had to get wheeling racks such as are found in New York's Garment District:

to hold their many business suits, because there were no closets in the house.

There was a little strip of woods across the dirt road from the row of small crumbling houses which included the one we had rented. I moved in more quickly than the others, having fewer possessions, and then I went for a walk in the woods. I saw sparrows and robins and squirrels there.

Speaking of stockbrokers, there was no sign of the New York Stock Exchange building in my dream, just as there was no sign of the many skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan irl.

On the morning after we moved into the house, my brother and I went to have our passports updated. We stood in a long line beside a chain-link fence, waiting to get into the passport office, which was a tiny shack, barely a booth. It was cold enough outside that we could see our breath.

Their was only room enough inside the shack for one person at a time to see the one city employee who worked there. When it was my turn, the man working in the passport office enlarged my passport photo so that it now took up an entire page in my passport. He also added a white laminated page which fit over the front cover of my passport and informed people in red-white and-blue letters that I was disabled.

Dream Log: Business and Anger in NYC

I dreamed I was living in NYC and working in midtown Manhattan at an import-export business.

I have often dreamed about being in NYC, both before and after living in Manhattan for a few years in the 1990's. Often, in these dreams, the city has not looked or sounded or smelled like any actual place on Earth, but last night's dream was much more realistic in that regard.

Some of the people I worked with in this import-export business were Orthodox Jewish men, with the side curls and the fringes for their prayers shawls and their heads always covered.

The part of the business I worked in was concerned mostly with keeping records. We did this partly with computers, but to a great degree we still used paper. And it seemed that some of the ways in which we treated these pieces of paper was somewhat ritualistic. It was hard to say how much of this was purely for the sake of ritual, or was actually efficient, or both, or neither.

The record-keeping part of the business where I worked was divided into two parts. One part faced the street, and then the part where I worked was farther into the building. We in our part had to walk through the other part any time we arrived to work or left. It was unclear whether the two record-keeping divisions actually belonged to two separate companies, or if one company divided the record-keeping section into two parts for some reason.

A young man named Michael who worked in the front section, whose appearance was not distinguished in any religious way, had rolled up a long receipt in a manner which was not the way we usually did it. We usually rolled such items starting at the top, so that the bottom, with the signatures, showed when we were done.

Michael reacted angrily to the criticism. Soon Michael and I were yelling at each other. We all closed up for the night and went outside, and Michael and I continued to escalate our verbal fight out on the sidewalk. Michael and I and a few other people from the business or businesses were going to fly to Tel Aviv on business, and as we walked toward our transportation to the airport, Michael and I went from yelling at each other to yelling and shoving. Michael screamed, "I'm going to kill you!"

I said to him: "Look at you!" He was an average-sized thin young man. I said, "Look at me!" I was about twice his size. I asked, "What are you going to kill me with?!"

Michael spluttered for a while, and then said, "Guns! Guns!" And he threw a couple of punches at me which missed, and I tried to get him into some sort of wrestling hold, and then our co-workers dragged us apart and took us separate ways.

I had one stop to make before the airport, to pick up my dog, Lucretia, at my apartment. Lucretia may have been a mutt. I'm not very knowledgeable about dog breeds. Lucretia looked like a smaller version of a German Shepherd, except that her fur was grey all over.

Next, we were at the airport, I, my dog and the people from my section who were going to Tel Aviv. Lucretia was a very good-natured dog, and being with her was calming me down.

It wasn't clear which airport we were at, JFK, LaGuardia or another one. We were in a section of the airport which mostly handled freight. Just as at the office, so here we had our own little terminal, and the guys who had their record-keeping section out by the street had a little terminal right next to ours. It wasn't clear whether we were taking the same flight as these other guys, or two separate flights. It was also unclear whether or not we owned our own plane or planes. Michael was already in their terminal when we showed up.

Michael saw me and looked away. I walked up to their terminal, told Lucretia to sit, and said, "Michael. Could I talk to you for just a minute? I just want to say one thing." I looked down at Lucretia, whom Michael had never met before this. "This is my dog, Lucretia. She's a good dog. Very gentle. She's never bitten anyone."

Michael approached.

I said, "They won't let me take her in the cabin with the people. She has to ride in a cage with the cargo. They say it doesn't tend to bother dogs very much. And she's a very even-tempered dog. So I'm probably a lot more upset about her being in a cage than she's going to be. If you hold out your hand and let her sniff it, she'll probably like you right away and be very happy to have you pet her. If you want to. You know. She won't lick your hand. That's one of the things I like about her. I don't like dogs slobbering all over me." Michael was petting Lucretia and starting to smile, and Lucretia's tail was thumping against the floor. "Anyway, all I wanted to say is that I can't remember what we were fighting about."