The Perils of Appreciation

Date: 3/30/2017

I am having a nightmare. In this dream I am dreaming and having a nightmare. I keep waking up to this room, it's not my room but feels like mine, and looks familiar. I am comfortable enough with it that when I wake up in the dark at night I see the walls and the things in the room and I recognize where I am. But I sense a presence in the room. Every time I go back to sleep I see strange faces, or eyeballs as faces, and this overwhelming sense of someone in the room. This scares me so I wake up a lot, inside this dream inside this room which is mine and isn't. On top of that nightmare I wake I real life, and notice my own room, which looks so normal, but I am too tired to wake properly to shake the nightmare. I keep falling back asleep into the room not mine and the presence. I see the same things when I close my real eyes, and finally I try and wake up for real but I can't move my body, sleep paralysis. I feel like I am falling out of my body sideways, being pulled out of it actually, and my body can't shake it, I will my body to move and it won't. Finally I focus on my foot on my toe, circling my toe then foot, then shaking it and breaking out of sleep paralysis. I can't keep awake so I tell myself happy thoughts as I fall back asleep. This works and my dreams become softer. ---- I keep running into my ex girlfriend. She is doing a job and looking sexy, maybe looking sexy on purpose. I hang around because I miss her and want her back, but she doesn't ever ask me for even a conversation. She leave the sexy job and goes onto another one. I follow her there too. I hang around and basically do the same routine. I am desperate to have her back. But after a while I get bored of stalking her and her not responding, she only smiles and loves me but never initiates any contact. I decide to get a job on this strip of stores in order to be able to buy her things and to have a nice place for her to visit when we get back together. I run into another ex, this time one not from real life, an Indian chick. She is working and living in this strip of stores as well. I kinda switch focus and feel all my feelings for her and follow her instead. But more distantly. Her mother is there too, her mother is white. I find her mother crying inside her car, in tears from pain, sleeping while waiting for the day to start so she can go to work. Her mother asks me why it never worked out. I tell her my version, which is softened by sadness and tinged with this understanding love. Her mother goes home and I follow her, and her daughter hears about her seeing me and starts venting. She vents about how much she loves me but can't be with me. Something about how a guy hit her and I attacked him? And how I am always going to be the same. She is super stressed, clearly loves me but is angry, and I leave not wanting to eavesdrop. But even as I get down the street, farther and farther away I hear her still and see her in the window talking to her mother, waving her arms. --- I visit various stores on this strip. One is an antique shop, very nice, with comic books I focus my vision on in this weird pulsing way in order to see them. And there is a whole wall devoted to little wooden shelves, like for curios. The smell of coffee wakes me up a bit and I leave the store to go find breakfast. I wander into various stores, there is a nook I had been in previously that dealt the shady dealings in this town. And lots of breakfasts shops. Someone tries to make me drink a shot glass with cheese in milk for breakfast. I am really grossed out and decline. An Asian woman takes me into a public restroom to fix my hair. Apparently it's cut real short but doesn't look good, she has me kneel on a clean part of the floor, and uses water to make it look nice. She is pregnant and working, just started the day and is exhausted already. She fixes my hair to look like the Buddha. After this we sit down to eat breakfast in this little waiting area, there is a cowboy who introduces himself with a handshake, he has a very cowboy name. He asked me about the two things I bought. The are like soft lunchboxes, one square and one round, and they have pictures of Buddha on them but are made by a Catholic artist, both painted by the same artist and each are signed. I go on to explain I love religion, all religion. He asks why, and I say this passionate little spiel about how religion is about life and and birth and death and is the eye of a person and while inside one religion you can't see out, outside you can see the over arching effect of all religions speaks to the human condition and soul. I say I have been to every religious store on this strip because I adore each one and believe in each one. Even tho I don't subscribe to any one in particular. I feel a little weird saying this to the Asian lady who was drawn to me because she thought I was Buddhist. He says wow. And I'm a little embarrassed by my passionate speech. I didn't mean to go on like that. ----- There is a large group of circus freaks who are professional whores at a funeral. The normal people, kinda like old times black and white photos, the women buttoned up like governesses, don't approve of them. Since they are professional whores. But the connotation of where is mixed in with "circus freak performers" and I get that they are respectable, but not in our society. Or especially the old timey black and white society. ----- I go to the theater with two friends. It's like airport security to get through to the movie. I think the movie is Memoirs of a Geisha. Once inside the movie starts and I light up a cigarette. I still there smoking three in quick succession, for some reason this is my habit when I begin smoking. My friends are quickly disgusted by this. They get upset at me, and I get upset at them, and they get upset at each other. We decide to quit the movie. I leave for a bit, I leave my things because I intend to be back, and I go out. I think I cool down, get something from the concession stand and go back ready to finish the movie but they are checking tickets. I get really freaked out, but my receipt for the drink has my ticket Barcode on it. I go back in but the movie isn't playing, they've stopped it and my friends are preparing to leave. I don't understand why, they want to borrow my trash too, the candy trash. I try to get them to tell me why and they reveal two aliens they are trying to smuggle out. Apparently the "airport security" is actually military and the aliens are on the run, trying to escape. We manage to smuggle them out of the theater in candy boxes, I don't know how. These aliens are green jelly blobs with twin tentacles on their heads, and stand about 3 feet high. Once in the desert these aliens perk up a bit and I figure out how to communicate. It appears their intelligence and consciousness is deep inside them, I talk to it as if it's another alien but really it's just a part of them. It was in hibernation which is why they appeared so dumb before. It's actually impressive this setup in my opinion. ___ There are this horde of zombies. At first I think they are people, but they aren't, they are zombies. They lurk in the deepest recesses of an underground system and they worship The Woman Who Doesn't Like To Be Touched. She is an ancient old woman who is trying to take over the above world with her zombie army.