DREAMS FROM 1972
DREAMS FROM 1972
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.
5/30/72
WILD DREAM
John and I have gotten to the top of a hill where a sign proclaiming "Cliff Walk" stands, and we've finished looking through the ruins on the hilltop to see a brochure that states that the world-famous statue of _____ is in the back of the ruins, and we haven't seen it yet, though the photographs of the famous hacked background, the broken torso of surpassing whiteness, the arm attached only to a metal armature, is instantly recognizable. But we figure "Well, we'll be back again," and don't bother to go back to see it. Then I'm standing in a dim curio shop of some sort, and there's a colorfully dressed black man standing next to me seeming to look at a large metal container on the floor next to the table I'm looking at, but I hear the sound of running fluids, and it occurs to me that the large metal container is a pissoir and he's not quite hitting it: he's urinating on the floor. Maybe because I looked at the requirements for being a Pinkerton guard on Thursday (and this is Saturday morning's dream), there's the feeling that I am supposed to keep some sort of order in this shop, so I am supposed to stop him urinating. Somehow I effortlessly get him outside, and it's really a tall slinky SHE who starts looking at a tree growing against the outer wall of the building, pulling it back and forth, uprooting it to see a long length of woody root, pushing it back and pulling it up as if it were a bone encased in some sort of velvet plush wrapping, like an FAO Schwartz toy-animal tree, and then it's completely uprooted and she proceeds to tear it up (and she's looking more and more like Elaine), though the "taproot" doesn't tear so easily, only bends. She towers over me and says, "Just WHAT will you do about it?" And then the phone is ringing and it's NORMA. And I wonder how much of the vividness of the dream might not result from the fact that the FIRST ring of the phone roused me from dream-sleep, and this was the fragment that raced through my mind before the second ring, which was the first one I heard, and then I answered during the ringing of the third ring. I wanted more, but hardly ever dream after I smoke, and I've been smoking more and more to get to sleep without thinking how much I miss John.
8/1/72
THREE BIZARRE DREAMS
The first's memory is dimmest: looking down on a sunlit sea from the top of a cliff, watching the curling tops of waves slowly rolling toward the beach far below, and then moving down stairways in open rooms that seem to be constructed of crumbling sand bricks, as if the stairway were built into the sand cliff itself. It's wet and there's the realization that the tide must have gone down enormously to bare these interiors of old castle bottoms. I remember reading on Sunday about the sand-beach erosion on Fire Island, so that's probably a clue as to source. The second is in a cottage somewhere near the ocean, and people are talking about a "blue hole" in the sea, which probably stemmed from the arresting description in "Magic Mountain" about Hans Castorp sticking a pole into the snow and watching the "blue light stream out." The men talking to us frown and grin with mysteriousness as they say that the hole is about 500 feet deep in the shallow offshore area, and thus looks blue from the air (again partly from the Fire Island article). The third section centers around a sand-colored, elaborately dressed doll, whose head can be studied microscopically to reveal a regular square-cut braid pattern rather like the carvings on the gateway at Tiahuanaco, and there's some sort of court case, with a "protagonist" and an "antagonist" who alternate in making the case that the doll was made "naturally," or that it was carved by either beings from another planet, or beings far back in time. There's a lot of talk about the "skull-feet," but when I study the round blobs at the end of the legs with black plastic disks or shells stuck through them, I can't see why they're called "skull-feet." The body of the doll is flexible, like a sand-filled bag, and I bend it over my head to investigate the three layers of dresses: one white and frilly on top, another of some other color in the middle, and a white satiny slip underneath, and there's the amazed realization "You call it underwear because you WEAR it UNDER whatever else you're wearing!" Her hair was black, her eyes were blue, and the crowded schoolhouse-courtroom was distinct, but again the common touch with the other dreams was that this was somewhere near the shore (was the doll found in the 500' hole?), and the doll was sand-colored.