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May, 2014

1 12 13 22 31


5/1/14 - Title: "May Day Dream"

I am telling a sympathetic woman (Janet) about the traumas I experienced, from sex in my teenage years (as an impressionable young college guy) with an older, more experienced woman, Tonya, at the time both my friend and my grad assistant instructor in philosophy. She and I also shared sexual interest in another friend, a woman who was at once a classmate of mine (in the Plan II Honors Program, a liberal arts advanced studies curriculum at the University of Texas at Austin) and a roommate of Tonya's.

[It is true that I was in my late teens a confused (perhaps even traumatized) and impressionable young man, but a sexual relationship with Tonya was not part of my various "issues" at the time. Though she and I were somewhat emotionally "intimate" and did flirt with our having an affair, we never actually slept with each other. I did later have a brief sexual relationship with her then roommate (and my classmate and friend) who, in time, would turn out to be gay or bisexual and would have a longer, and quite possibly sexual, involvement with Tonya.

Of Janet, I'd say she is brilliant, extroverted, and a great facilitator.

Of Tonya, I'd say she is also brilliant, a good teacher, and has a history of activist engagement in various liberal causes.]

5/12/14 - Title: "Accepted - Growing Up"

Scene One - Both a male mentor (who is also a tough and expert drill sergeant) and a female college professor/administrator encourage me to go ahead with a Ph.D. program that we all know will be extremely challenging for me, hard to get into and harder to complete, demanding the most of me that anything ever has. I really want to do it, though, and so make the applications. The mentor and professor meet with me, look over the application, and decide to help assure I am accepted. I am.

Scene Two - I am now in the Ph.D. program. It involves both inside and outside work. They must be done concurrently. The outside part is quite rigorous physically, mentally, and emotionally. I begin to do it. I must not only prove I can handle the hard work and conditioning, sometimes at night, sometimes in the blazing sun of a TX summer, but also that I can anticipate, look forward to, and embrace the challenges while keeping my responses mature and being friendly and encouraging to others whom I meet in the program. I do. I am. My mentor/"drill sergeant" is pleased. Though all this is tough, it is working for me. It's making a man of me.

5/13/14 - Title: "Heads, You Win; Tails, I Lose"

Scene One - There is some kind of almost life and death competition between rocket scientists. Each side goes to greater and greater lengths to outdo the other via faster, bigger, or lighter rockets. At one point, it seems it is between China and the U.S. At another, it seems it is between a few brothers or handfuls of elite scientists seeking to be the best or first to get a really new advancement in rocketry into space before any other such team can manage it.

Scene Two - I appear to be looking over a lake or big pool in a city. It is adjacent to a low building of some sort, like a Greek ruin or modern architecture or sculpture. The latest rocketry advancement of some others has been in development and is near completion off to my left as I face the dark waters at night.

While people's attention is there, off to the left, I suddenly run off to the right, so that the lake or great pool is now on my left.

Others may see me and even try to shoot to prevent what I am about to do. But I am exposed to their view and weapons for only an instant, and then parts of the building are between us.

With practiced skill, I leap via some pulley or other lift system up to the nose cone of a new waiting rocket. To assure sufficiently low weight, it is terribly light and simplified. There is no extra protection at all. It is just a four-sided, flimsy transparent container that tapers to a point on top. I clamber into it's single seat, then pull on a light cord to lower it into place around me, hoping the fit will then be tight, for it must withstand the blast-off as well as the vacuum of space, or I shall be killed and the craft destroyed.

Now that it's apparent I intend to launch soon, some reporters and other interested parties rush over to interview me.

I realize the cone is far too flimsy. This may be the latest model, but it definitely is made more for a designer's impression of what might work better than the competition, not at all for my safety or comfort or even survival. I wonder if it is worth the risk. This seems likely to be a one-way trip. (I wake up).

5/22/14 - Title: "Anger Management"

A smiling imp (male) looking toward me and wielding an extremely sharp, large knife, is ritually, repeatedly chopping or stabbing with it, over and over killing creatures or people with each new series of slashes or jabs. (I wake up, but as soon as I close my eyes the ritualized, repeated imp creature slash and jab killing continues, till I've gotten up and written this down, but I'll not be surprised if, again, as soon as I lie down and close my eyes, once more the murdering mayhem resumes.

[Clearly, a lot of anger, as represented here by a nightmarish shadow aspect of myself.]

5/31/14 - Title: "At My Parents' Place"

Scene one - I'm staying (evidently as part of a mini-family reunion, such as used to occur fairly often when my dad was alive and my siblings and my nieces and/or nephews were much younger) with my mom and dad. Late at night, there has been a disagreement between me and them, and I've had to make some unpleasant adjustment to how they are doing things. At this time, staying with them this night or weekend, I'm the only one of their children at home. I'm resentful that they are both trying to tell me how to live, and yet they are just ignoring my preferences and doing whatever they please, for instance, staying up late and making so much noise, talking loudly or with radio or TV turned up, it's almost impossible for me to get to sleep in one of their bedrooms. So I'm just reading in bed or using the restroom late, and to even these inoffensive acts they are objecting, trying by their criticisms to correct or change me, each of them taking the additude (attitude): "I'm OK; you're not OK."

Scene two - It's late at night. I'm reading in bed alone in a large upstairs room at my folks' house. My brother, Pete, barges in. I yell for him to close the door on his way out. He takes offense and tries to turn the incident back on me, so I'm the one at fault. I get angry and remind him it was he who first came in without knocking.

Scene three - I'm apologizing to some nieces and nephews, sleeping in the same area as me in my folks' house tonight, for an angry reaction I had and which they'd just witnessed. My nephew, Chris, immediately responded that the neat thing about my emotions was they come with a map that made it easy to see where I was coming from, since my feelings, positive or negative, are readily written all over my face.

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