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DREAMS FROM 1970

DREAMS FROM 1970

Most of my dreams prior to the 1980s are included in my daily journals and my trip journals. Dreams are placed unpredictably in the 1970s.

 

1/15/70

On the morning of January 10, it seemed that the dreams would go on forever, brightly colored, laughingly pleasant, interestingly plotted. In the first cycle I was back at home in Akron, but the house was full of relatives, even to great uncles and aunts who I don't think were even in that house at all. Everyone was preparing for some sort of festive meal, and mingled with the preparations was the feeling of luck and happiness, as if the world had been destroyed, or was stricken with poverty, and we among very few others were still a family, and together.

I was in the kitchen, laughing and talking amid the bustle at the sink, and sun was shining in the window. The back door was open and there was a fresh breeze coming through the morning glory vines which enclosed the back porch. The attitudes changed very slightly, and I seem to remember Great Aunt Elsie being slightly disturbed about the people outside, fearing they might make trouble. I looked out from the back door and saw that the back yard was filled with hippy-type teenagers in bizarre clothing, long woolly hair, and beads and earrings. Then I was among them, listening to them talk and scheme, and they did seem to offer some traditional sort of danger, but I saw they were only children who wanted love, so I moved among them and sat down on a log with some of them. They looked at me with expressions which were not wholly of acceptance, but I thought to myself "Well, maybe there's a risk, but you just have to do what you feel like doing." I was seated next to a blond beaded boy who was quite attractive, and I put my right arm out about his shoulders. He didn't mind, in fact he seemed to cuddle closer and dip his head downward onto my chest. The crowd fell silent, watching, and I'd forgotten about all those in the house. Then I looked deeply into his eyes, of a lovely blue, and our faces got closer until our lips touched lightly, and I felt a moment's fear "Now they know," but there was a felling of acceptance and even approval, and I drew his lips into my mouth, and they stretched into narrow protuberances until I almost fancied they were two tiny fingers or cocks. Then I moved, without real transition, into a completely different dream.

I was in the cabin of a boat, and there were two or three others with me whom I don't recall, but I looked out through the tiny curtained porthole and saw a bulbed Broadway sign, very much like the marquees used in the credits for "The Great Ziegfeld," rising slowly from the water, so that water leaked out of the aluminum frames in which the bulbs were set into letters. It dipped into the water again a bit, then rose again, and I had the distinct feeling "Oh, they must have just missed the bridge," As if I knew simultaneously that we had just passed under the Golden Gate Bridge and that the sign was being towed through the air by a blimp dragging a long cable. I didn't see the bridge, but the blimp was there in the air, being bobbled by winds, and the cable tautened and slackened, and the sign raised and lowered accordingly.

By chance the sign came very close to our boat, which started as a tiny cabin cruiser, and I could see there were two or three people climbing about on the sign, showing no indications of fear: they were riding on the sign. The cable to the blimp broke just as the sign hovered about the deck of the cruiser just outside my porthole, and the people were suddenly in the room and I was impressed by how nice they seemed: young and rich and smiling. "There isn't much to see," I said smiling too, "but let me show you around."

As we walked out of the tiny cabin, we were on something rather like a steamer going for a long distance, and there were people gathered about the bar, others were dancing, others passed, drinking, as in an elegant TV advertisement for liquor. I was inwardly elated, thinking, "Oh, they must have come on board at the islands; this might turn into an interesting trip AFTER all." We opened another door, this one smaller and in a more crowded room, and the décor was the gold and acidic green of Byzantine icons, and the air got stuffy and the rooms were smaller, and the doors were little windows with buttons to open them, like medicine chests. In the next room was Frances Ryan, and I let out a whoop of joy to see her, and leaped into her arms. She swung me around in a circle, and I wriggled around until I had my back to her, and I found if I bent my head back and drew my feet up into a bow-shape, we would go around in circles faster and faster and faster.

Then on the morning of January 15, there was another vivid dream cycle. First I was in a dark room somewhere in the baths or the sauna or the YMCA, and Joe was in the room with me, but as a vague light revealed other people, and I started feeling the other fellow, Joe said he would leave. Then the floor seemed scattered with reasonably unattractive people, semi-dressed, writhing and moving their hands provocatively up and down their bodies. Looking closer, I could see that some of them were fucking and eating each other, and there was one fellow at the edge of the crowd who had a beautifully sculptured chest etched with crisp black hairs, and he was undulating forward and backward on the floor, drawing down the draperies which hid his genitals so that I could see that he had a very small cock. But the chest was so nice I wanted to feel it, and as I did so, everyone vanished and we were now on a bed, and I went down on him, my hands caressing his chest, feeling the muscles, particularly the prominent chest muscles, and his small cock had gotten hard, the balls had tightened up to the base so that they formed a neat package, but they seemed extended out from his body on a sort of thick cock base, forming something like a capital letter T.

It seems I could put the cock and balls into my mouth, and he started to groan, and his apparatus became a long thin cock which I could take entirely down my throat without difficulty, since it was so thin I could breathe air past the edges of it. He began pushing my head down and straining his groin up until I felt I must have at least a foot in my mouth, but the cock got thinner and thinner, until at the point when he felt like he was coming, it reduced to a vein-like tube at my lips and I feared I'd bitten it off. Then the tube dissolved, I could feel no cock in my mouth, my hands began caressing what seemed like breasts, and I found my mouth buried in a woman's cunt: she came, and the secretion-semen flowed into my mouth, and I knew, suddenly, that THIS was the way they could say that the sexes were the same: they actually WERE the same! Then I dozed into another set of dreams, and this time, for the first time that I can remember, I was actually lying in my own bed, looking out my own bedroom window. It was light outside, as if a winter's morning had come, but there were clouds in the sky, and I could see a horizon band of grayish yellow between the buildings where the bottom of the cloud was. Smoke from the city rose up at various points, black and shivering, and I was reminded of old German silent films that showed a city smoking against a sky, and I felt I knew exactly how they would get the idea to film it as they had.

Then the band suddenly vanished, and I alertly realized that there was a cloud whose bottom was precisely at my height moving toward me, and I felt pleased to see something of this sort which happens so rarely. The sky grew darker and darker, and I felt it must be raining, but it seemed not to be. A few lights came on in building windows, and it grew even more night-like, and I saw it was, in fact, raining. Then I pulled aside the curtains of the window at the HEAD of my bed, and saw it was also raining against the building next door, but that there was more light there.

I dozed off again, whether in the dream or in actuality I can't tell, and woke groggily to realize I was cold, and wanted to find out why. I raised the shade from the side window, and it was still raining and dark and cold out there, and then I moved the draperies from the same side, and it was the view I had had from the head of the bed, but now it was somehow still a high view and somehow slightly below ground level, and I saw black painted window frames three or four thick, and there was no window glass in the frames, though now there was a yellow-green light filtering down through leafy trees, and it was a cool spring morning, and I found myself thinking "Now I know why I'm so cold all the time, there isn't any glass in the windows." There was also a damp, rich, moist earth smell that elated me and told me it was nice outside, and I dozed back again with a contented smile on my face, cuddling into the blankets for warmth. Then the telephone rang at 11 am, and it was Azak about his apartment.

3/10/70

I'm on a huge passenger ship, shaped somewhat like the new 747's that so haunt my flying fears, and I've gotten lost. I'm searching for my cabin, but feel so silly to have lost my way that I don't want to ask anyone else, so I wander up and down stairways, always seeming to find my way back to an enormous motion picture theater set on many levels, with many balconies. Leave down one center aisle below balcony seats above me, and get to a tiny lobby from which I can see a dark narrow flight of stairs turning above me, but know that that's to the top balcony, but I'm looking for my room.

Wander more ship-like corridors with various signs on the walls, but none of the signs are floor plans, and I'm annoyed with that. Then look to the side through a huge open door and see blue and yellow bunks of the ship's crew, hazy and smelling of smoke, and I'm vaguely curious why there's no one in the cabin, but figure they have to air it out. Back in the hall, it's clear I'm not in a passenger area, and I'm vaguely excited about seeing some part of the ship I'm not supposed to see, and there's a purser putting on a blue rustling jacket.

I'm just about to ask him something when the ship rolls, slowly, very far over, and some folding deck chairs slide out of corners across the floor. I listen carefully for sounds of machinery breaking loose, but there are none. Then the ship rights itself and I take a deep breath, but again it keels over, going further and further: we're not thrown against the wall, however, and the thought goes through my mind: this movie sequence isn't being handled very well by the special effects department, and the ship continues to rotate until it must have gone through 100, and the extreme panic of "This is IT" hits me, and I wake up, frightened about the dream, but knowing that it all seemed very staged, like the cyclone dream I had when the glass didn't blow in, but should have, and the cyclone didn't cause really much damage to the building, but it should have if it would have been a well "produced" dream. Maybe my imagination is slipping.

March 27, 1970

I'm walking somewhere, get hungry and stop in a restaurant. Want a buttered hot roll more than anything else, get a bit of butter, use it, ask for more, but there are ashes in the pat of butter. Ask for more, and there's a large dish with about four pats put down, but when I reach for it, it's melted and full of ashes: someone used it as an ashtray.

I'm feeling dreadful: all I want is a buttered hot roll, so I pick up the roll and walk toward the kitchen, but the lines are closed, and I have to walk somewhere else, but somehow I know it's only a short distance. I have books to lug along, and along the way I take my shoes off to put on heavy boots, because it's raining out, and somehow I have an Army mess kit, which I hold by that funny hooked handle. I'm climbing up hills and down very steep stairs, but I know I have just a short distance to go, so it won't be so bad.

Down the stairs, hanging on for dear life as the cliff face crumbles into the sea below, and suddenly I'm in a house, and since the door is open, all I really want is something very small, a fork or something, but when I take stock of myself, I have a huge quilted blanket with some sort of Gothic "S" marked on it, and that's caught in the top drawer of a very fine Louis XVI cabinet, so I pretend I don't notice it and carry it along.

Now it's raining, and gotten muddy, and I can hardly drag my boots through the heavy brown-black mud, and I look down to see the gunk mushing over the tops of the boots, but thank goodness the quilt and the cabinet are still dry, and I'm carrying all these things, carrying them farther and farther, through the shit---and it dawns on me: THIS IS ALL SHIT THAT I'M CARRYING. I don't really NEED all this stuff (and I dropped a shoe, anyway), I'm just carrying along my OWN SHIT, and I'm TIRED OF CARRYING IT, and I wake with a tremendous burst of knowledge: I've GOT to get rid of some of my guilt, role-playing, record-keeping shit, GOT to get to work on the book, GOT to be more honest with myself, work, do what I WANT!

8/30/70

having to find it and get some kind of form from it. The parallels between this and my unexpressed anger of last night was laughable. I was riding on some sort of subway, and I had to get specific forms for someone about that subway ride, but I was appalled to find that every floor in the building had been cut into on one side and a bank of elevators installed. I recognized these elevators by the swoop of their descent, the distance over the horrible gap from the newly cemented floor onto the dirty elevator platform, and the thinness of the cords and pulleys that controlled these lifts---and why did they have the nerve to install glass transoms that allowed everyone to SEE the shoddy construction of these death traps? But since I was on the fifth floor, it would be easy to avoid these frightening relics from previous dreams and walk down the stairs to get the forms I needed. I didn't know exactly what I wanted, but I had someone else's assurance---as well as my own confidence---that everything would be straightened out when I simply showed up. I didn't show up, much as I didn't broach my anger to John the next morning. When I suggested that "we" were hungry last night, he responded "Remember, YOU hadn't eaten for 7 hours," so in the same way I was afraid to accuse HIM of being angry because I wasn't sure how angry I was, he was accusing ME of being hungry, which made him rush with the meal. So I said I was VERY upset about the problems with the house, and he admitted that he was concerned enough about his own problems that he didn't detect my being upset (with the obvious implication that I should have TOLD him I was upset), or else he would have been more sympathetic with my problems. So I forced myself to take action through the following day, loaded down for the most part with the too-large buffet dinner at the Parkview Caterers in the early afternoon, and the laziness of the day following was symptomatic of a general run-down state in which NOTHING that offered itself could really seem to be of much interest.

9/25/70

First is a brightly colored, slow-moving one about a number of people in a black storage room, whose neatness I'm responsible for. They seem to pay no attention to me, but I'm busily and neatly gathering up empty bottles and putting them into their proper racks on the walls, and at one point I feel very good to have put wheels on the bottom of one of these racks, so I can wheel it about and collect the bottles that way. At the end, I have a vivid recollection of three or four bottles, some upside down, rattling colorfully in a partially full crate on the dolly.

Then I was sitting in something like a large classroom in Maine, and I was definitely the sophisticated one while the others in the audience were country boors. There was some sort of Prologue to a play going on on the stage, and there was a lot of disturbance, but "as I got into it" I just knew there WAS disturbance, without knowing precisely what it WAS. So I said something like "Please keep QUIET" rather loudly and offensively, and those around me turned to stare at me (like those in the Thalia during "Journey to Jerusalem" last night).

The crowd at the right front parted, and I was rather surprised to see a spectacled school teacher (rather like the woman on the steps from "Potemkin") surrounded by little children, and she shouted back something incoherent about her RIGHT to speak in this place. Suddenly I was in the front row, and others in the front row, local toughs, craned around to see me and laugh harsh laughs at me, saying they were going to get even with me. I resolved to face them with courage, and somehow they became part of the play, flapping canvas sheets just above my head to antagonize me, brushing close to me, being brutish in all the terrifying ways that they could think of.

Someone seemed to be with me, shrinking down in their seat, but whether it was John or Avi or Bill, I couldn't tell, but I seemed to feel a growing sense of danger as the grinning toughs got closer to closer, and I tried to muster the extreme courage to fight for my very life against them.

10/20/70

GUERLAIN DREAM

Rita, who's visiting me, and the place is QUITE deluxe with nice furniture and neatly arranged rooms.

The MAIL situation is strange, since all mail is still coming to 25 East 61st for me, so now it can STAY. Ground floor is a reception area, very rocky on the floor because it's being redone, and Ceil is an ineffectual phone-woman/ concierge.

Crowd gets on elevator, and I wonder "Who's having a party?" and someone says, "We're going to 8," and I wonder HOW, since the elevator only goes to "1, 2, 3, Locked, 5," so I join them and find that the two buildings NEXT DOOR have been renovated into one, and the top floor is a LARGE, VERY aluminum and tinselly Guerlain shop, with a huge moat and fountain in the middle of, and below, the sales areas.

I'm thinking it's VERY plush and flashy, and a series of male models float over the water, having completed their fashion show, and I join the crowd looking at the elaborately dressed women (but the main point is their exotic FACE makeup), and get to the steps where a VERY bitchy woman is in charge of the commentary. She has an exchange with a woman in the audience, who is dressed in yellow, and she says "You're really HATEFUL," and I feel sorry for the mistress of ceremonies who isn't even HURT by this.

As she makes her FINAL comments, she's mounted on a white horse which suddenly goes charging off to the right, but the woman, voice completely under control, CONTINUES with the commentary through her body microphone while the horse rears and prances and I marveled that she can be heard at ALL. But everyone takes it for granted. Then I wake at 5:15, having to piss.

I took all these notes on a sheet of paper that I kept at bedside, and John was amused and a little curious to see me writing away, even when he was in bed wanting to sleep, but I said that since I'd gone to sleep while HE was still reading twice, he could fall asleep while I was still writing for just this once. It was the only writing I did, except for the poem, during the entire trip.

12/21/70

This was obviously generated by our guidebook shopping tonight. John and I are driving, or maybe on a bus, down a range of hills toward what I know to be the West Coast, and then we're on some sort of moving vehicle that moves the same whether it's on land or water, and we can see colorful picnic areas and green forests set up on little islands off the mainland, and it turns into a tourist boat which is broadcasting news about the sites to us, though I can't hear anything that's being said. We approach a Statue-of-Liberty type construction in the water, and as we get closer, we can see that it's a huge square rusticated-stone structure sitting quite massively in the water, and only the edges are carved into the profile of the statue, so that there's actually a windowless building inside, and we marvel about the construction, because it looks so much like a statue from a distance, and so much like a building close-up. I can see the people peering out of the side windows looking up at the huge erection in the water, and then the boat is passing through apartment-type buildings very much like Watergate in Washington, or the curved building at 59th and 7th, and the boat makes a large skidding stop, while the waves beat against (but don't wet) the neatly constructed apartments, and there's the knowledge that the boat made a wrong turn somewhere, and we were momentarily lost, but now we're on the way back.

Then the scene changed to a hotel hallway, and John and I wanted to hold hands, so we opened and closed a closet door behind us, and stood there, listening to the people in the hall, until a woman social-cheerleader type opened the door and discovered us. We were quite embarrassed as she led us down to the desk, but she looked at us with hugely mascaraed eyes and winked, saying, "Well, I might be able to tell you where the gay beaches are," and we looked at each other, highly pleased because we'd fallen in with someone who now knew about us, and didn't care.

Everything was colorful and tropical, and there was a delightfully "vacationy" feeling about both segments of this particular upbeat dream.

12/21/70

Again we were driving along some hills along the ocean, only this time there seemed to be three of us, and it was just at dawn, so that I could peer past John and see the rising sun, still dim in the morning mists, and at one spot where the hills dipped, the sun stood out clearly on the horizon, and the sun spots were brilliant flashing beetles on the surface of a darker sun. Another conversation was going on, and it was a few moments before I said, "John, back up, there was a fantastic view back there." So John turned around and we went back along the way, but there didn't seem to be the same great view, and the sun had gotten slightly higher and brighter, so that I began to fear that even if we FOUND the place, the sun would have become too bright to see the highly contrasted spots on it.

I seem to have found the place and the car was stopped, and John and someone else was standing in the sand behind me, and I was scrambling up some sort of dune, through rushes and low trees, to see the view over the ocean, and I found I had to climb one of the low trees to get the best possible view, and I felt strange stretching my legs to get into the lowest branches, because it had been so long since I had climbed a tree.

The tree was dry and rotting, and I began breaking off branches so that I could see the view more clearly, but it seemed that it took me so long to break off the dead boughs, or else the sun rose so rapidly, or brightened so quickly, that as I tore off the last crumbling branch it was daylight, and John and someone else was standing behind and below me, talking away without paying any attention to me, and I found myself at the top of a denuded tree, and the bark seemed to be soft, like drying skin, and I felt it lower me gently to the ground, with strange flexes, as if it were an enormous wrinkly-knuckled finger with me perched on the back of it, and it was obvious to me that I'd missed the view I wanted to see, just as it was obvious that John had taken me where I had wanted to go, but he wasn't interesting in seeing what it was I had wanted to show him. Woke still in the traces of my cold and, after he did me, told him of his patience in the dream.