DREAMS FROM 1974
DREAMS FROM 1974
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.
2/10/74
Typed the "DREAM" Table of Contents yesterday, noting that I've had a representation of dreams for each year from 1963 through 1973, and sort of tell myself that I should have at LEAST one a year, and sure enough, this morning, lying dozing at 9:30 am, the latest in YEARS, since I got back from the bars (frustrating experiences all three of them) at 3 and got to bed at 3:45 am, I had the following VERY vivid dream. Sitting at a table at something like an elaborate IBM dinner---well, I remember coming into the room and finding it was already filling up, people filing into seats, none of them reserved, with few contiguous places left (I see NOW flavors of the SHOW last night, since I remember feeling that one wouldn't want to sit with one's back to the speaker, then thinking that one could EAT dinner and then turn around AFTERWARD easily enough to hear the speeches). I found two seats together near a pole, and it SEEMS, now, like it was Larry Ball who was to sit next to me, next to the pole, looking toward the stage. But then I noted two place settings ACROSS from that, back to the stage, still empty, and noted Bob Seaver (I'm SURE it was HIM) sitting facing the stage at the next-closer-to-the-stage table, looking wistfully back at us. Then there was a fourth who really didn't enter into it, but I shadily figure now it must have been Bernie Broske or, the face and person enters my mind as I type, for I have no idea what reason (I remember the perfect lunes of his eyebrows as something I was fascinated by, though his teeth were bad), of Dean Dickerhoof. ANYWAY, I suggest that the four of us CAN sit together, by the pole, and I am magically sitting with my back to the stage (which I undoubtedly volunteered to do to make it easier for the four of us to sit together), and the other three leave for something, and I'm supposed to save the seats. Then two OTHER guys, older and sales-types, come and sit in the seats across from me, ignoring the dirty salad or appetizer plates that indicate that someone was sitting there, and I say politely that someone was sitting there (this also reminds me of leaving my coat on the seat at the New School, where someone wanted to sit in the seat ANYWAY, and I got there just in the nick of time and the girl had to sit somewhere further down the row), and they simply ignore me. I suggest more loudly that they can't sit there, and they make some mumbled disparagement with food-filled mouths. I stand and get angry, and they remain in their seats and are surly back at me, and I go to find someone in authority to tell them to GET. Find people setting up TV cameras and sound equipment, but they're not the ones to ask. Somewhere on a lower level I wander along richly carpeted halls as in a grand hotel. Then I find a serving area with waitresses around and see who I take to be a hostess, who's talking to someone in Spanish, but then asks me what I'd like in perfect English. I explain the situation to her and she's not about to do anything, saying this and that, and how busy she is, and how she has no authority, and how I should do what I can do by myself. As I wheel away from her in anger---she may have gone through a leather-padded swinging door---I see a dirty partially filled creamer, glass, standing on a serving dolly and, enraged, I pick it up and fling it to the floor, hearing thankfully that it doesn't break, only dirties things up, and I stalk away with anger and with disgust at MYSELF, that I "ruined my chances for sympathy" by doing such a rash act. Walk away strangely hunched over and tense (almost like walking away from the apartment last night in the extreme cold, hunched over in John's overcoat, feeling that it can't POSSIBLY be this cold, but I'm still almost RIGID with discomfort, knowing that I'm walking very strangely), and I can feel THEN that I'm not a youth anymore, but have definitely crossed the border into middle age, and even in the DREAM feel somewhat sorry about that fact. Then I might be debating leaving or I might be trying to find someone from "IBM" to ask for help, but I find myself on the stone steps of a grand verandah overlooking a garden (the steps go down to grass), and there's a social type handing out tickets, and she seems to know what's wrong, because she sort of sideways confides "Do you want a set of free tickets for the---?" and she uses some locution that makes me think that there's an amusement park on the other side of the trees edging the garden, and I'm somewhat mollified, but then determine AGAIN to get those interlopers out of MY party's chairs. And she turns socially to someone else. Then there's a vague transition, and I'm reading a newspaper, very Wall Street Journally with elegant type and few pictures or ads, about "Nico and Nicaragua" or "Riva and Rivadavia" and it's something to do with a speech introduced by---I could SEE the type at that point---"She spoke Jamming," and further down, "Her speech could be translated as follows": and it was an encomium for some political movement, and through another transition I was somehow giving ANOTHER speech, in which the words of the language of Nicaragua was perfectly clear in my mind, and I had the marvelous feeling of COMMAND, knowing that I could proceed from Mexico (this touched off by Gilles's postcard yesterday, saying that he was spending three months there with his "amie" Vitry and maybe passing through New York?) southward through Guatemala, and then Nicaragua, and know the language of each (but aren't they all Spanish?) and be able to give some valuable information on each of the countries, though then, as now, I was somewhat vague as to what came after Nicaragua. And then I woke up, with I guess those two beefy sales-types still stuffing their mouths with food at the places of my friends at the banquet. Woke about 9:35, amazed at the completeness of the memory of the dream, and then quickly associated the typing of the DREAM table of contents last night, and smiling to myself knew that I DID have a dream to transcribe this morning, so I'd better get out of bed and get it down before the Camera Three at 11. Just as I turned off the electric blanket and was swinging around to get out of bed, John came in and said it was about time to get up, and then I came over here and typed this, and now that I've finished the DREAM, I'm tempted to leave the rest of the page blank. Why the hell NOT?
2/22/74
Wake on the morning of the 20th still IN the tail-fragments of a dream in which I'm working in some sort of enormous factory, monochromatic in color, and as I concentrate on some fine work under a bright light, people around me are talking with me, and I'm saying things that DON'T fit with what they think, and they're telling me why I'm wrong. And then there's the feeling that I'm outside, and there's a crowd of people behind me, shouting something about how different I am, and I walk a little faster, though I'm not really afraid since I have confidence that the state is SO well controlled that I don't have to fear violence. Maybe it's the drabness of color, or MAYBE the features of the people are actually Chinese, but I have the overwhelming impression that the factory is in Red China. I have no idea how I got there or what I was doing there, and to make matters worse, I woke and went THROUGH the dream in GREAT detail, thinking it amazing that I could remember so much of it so clearly, even though it was just after waking. I reviewed it all again about a half-hour later, confident that I could transcribe all of it, but then I didn't write ANYTHING on the 20th, and by noon I was searching for increasingly elusive memories of what it was that I had dreamed. I wanted to write down notes, but didn't really have the occasion to do so. Then I almost forgot it while writing in the diary YESTERDAY, and it's only the note (and my annoyance with myself for having forgotten all the details) that goads me into typing this page TODAY. But it DOES lead me to another idea, which is the question of how MANY levels of "state-oriented" knowledge do we have. Since that's really different, and apart from the dream, I'll put that on DIARY 8223.
3/10/74
There was an iron bar attached to yellow police stanchions blocking the path down through the woods, and I couldn't figure out why it should be blocked off, so I went down anyway, to find two other people standing right on the edge of the plateau, their feet sinking into the rain-soaked red ground which crumbled off the precipice, and the trees that overhung the abyss tipped toward the edge and chunks of red loam fell from their bare roots into the void. Now I understood the reason for the barrier, and I looked from one tree to the other to see which was the sturdier to lean against. Just above me, a pine peeled away from a tree it was growing right next to and crashed downward, making other parts of the cliff more vulnerable, and I was afraid that the sound would warn the other two that I was there, making the passage more dangerous. And then possibly the whole thing gave way, because suddenly I was at the bottom, unharmed, trying to get back to the TOP, and the only way I could mount was on teetery piles of stacked blocks of dirty foam rubber, rather like mounds of mattresses from someplace like the Club Baths piled precariously atop each other. By dint of great balancing, I could climb on top of one stack which seemed the lowest, but then I had to run along a wall comprised of a single row of CUBES of the same material, somewhat cleaner, that rocked back and forth if one would walk on them like the independent springs of the mattress that used to be advertised in the magazines so long ago. I could balance on the larger base of the mattress-stack, but when I started moving along the wall of cubes (about 3 feet cubed), about 17 feet high, they swayed back and forth, threatening to bring down the rest of the wall, and I waved my arms frantically to keep my balance as I dashed toward a somewhat more solid ledge that I was trying to reach, even though I realized that my weight would carry the cube-wall too far below the level of the ledge to ever allow me to get on top---I realized that just about as I was waking. And as I type this, I see a parallel to my life, crumbling about me, steady things now gone (sex with John, perfect memory for proofreading, finger flexibility for typing, physical attractiveness, time for writing, skill at writing), and activities becoming more frantic, positions growing more precarious, and I'm depressed!
3/14/74
I'm in a large audience which is trying out for a quiz program, but it's run by people different from the Ron Greenburg people, the questions are much more difficult and I don't know the answers to any of them, and the small panel is chosen by means I'm not familiar with from the large group that I feel lost in. Don't even feel like laughing and applauding when everyone else does. It goes on and on, and I don't even know the rules of the game, but finally it's over, but there's no indication that we're going to get any money out of it. But they say they have a treat for us: they will let us go to the amusement park/fair which is set up in the back of the church! There's a small interlude in which I seem to be in the basement climbing over boxes to get through doors, and I'm sure this is connected to the fact that yesterday at New Century the repairmen were doing something to the door and we had to request to get to the hall. Then I'm separated from the group, wandering in the back of the church, and what seems like carved walls (I guess from the carved walls at the "Anna Bolena" last night) are really sort of stage flats, and I figure the amusement park is behind this construction, which when I enter I find to be a funhouse. Walk through a maze very quickly, smiling to myself at the amateurish construction of the simple maze, and it's not even frightening, and three snakes close together come out from the wall, and I tend to dismiss them but they TOUCH me, and I'm surprised at that, since I think vandals will grab them and rip them from the walls soon. Then there are the yellow and violet velvet spiders which dangle from the ceiling that I have to brush through, and there in the distance is a sunlit green field with a carousel on it, but it actually seems like a small roller coaster with huge caterpillar-like cars rolling over the tiny hills, but the cars are filled with laughing shouting people, and I'm not a part of them. I have a few moment's wonder that all this fits into the back of the church, and then I'm awake. But it seems to have a connection with my relation-change with John at this point (see DIARY 8366), which I get into NOW.
5/28/74
SETH-INSPIRED DREAM
I'm sitting on a chair in a large set of rooms in a house, and there are two warring factions, sort of a cross between the Montagues and the Capulets and "The Godfather." Someone's killed or injured, and I sit upright in my chair when someone introduces me to speak to them, and I can hear in my voice (though I can't remember the words), the high, asexual, lilting tones described by Jane Roberts for the startling personality of who they call Seth Two, who seems to be "over" and "after" Seth I. I speak and the audience completely agrees with me, and even the atmosphere in the room turns from an amorphous dimness to a feeling of somewhat more light as I speak. Wake to feel pleased that my VERY vague thoughts while reading the book last night made me regret that I didn't have many dreams, and I'll have to keep away from the grass for awhile (in fact, dreaming after three solid nights of grass smoking is unusual in itself) and make a sincere attempt to REMEMBER the dreams that I DO have, and then maybe I can get into the area of trying to HAVE dreams in certain areas as suggested in "Seth Material." Then I focus half-awake on the sheet, and see one eye's perspective of a fold floating about above the OTHER eye's perspective of the sheet, and immediately think that this would be a GREAT illustration of the fact that we create our own reality: neither of these "floating" images really exists, but each eye DOES see its own "production" of the perspective, and only if the eyes are FORCED to focus do they meld into "reality," but from Seth's point of view, EACH view from EACH eye is no more real or unreal than the MERGED image from TWO eyes, or than images which our eyes don't see at all. I'm rather AGAINST the ENORMOUS complexification of the universe as Seth describes it, but that may only be because Seth Two (or even Seth Three) hasn't formed the groundwork for the unities UNDERLYING the complexity. I must admit that I wouldn't have been ABLE to swallow Seth Two until so MUCH of Seth One had been described and explained. And the STATEMENT that they created their Seths DOES seem convincing, but it's THERE, and it should be dealt with from THAT point: IF they created, they created BETTER than they ARE!
6/25/74
DREAMS OF LOSS AND ABANDONMENT
The first is connected with no strong physical images: I simply know that (suddenly realize that) I HAVE taken my final exams, and the grades are waiting for me in my locker, but I don't quite remember where the locker is, and I fear when I get to it I won't remember the combination. I fear that I may have flunked some of the tests, but I think "I can always take another semester of only a few courses and make up the credits I need to graduate."
The second is definitely connected with Ruth Rozman. I'm to meet her, but beforehand I'm on a subway platform on which I carefully pile the things I was carrying and my clothes, hoping that a passing subway won't knock them off the platform or that someone won't take them, and then I'm in the lobby of a large building, rather like Radio City Music Hall, but there's a line at the information desk, and I wander into the ground-floor offices and the desks are very brightly lit, close together, and empty except for a few people I don't recognize. Also, I'm looking for a men's room in which to dress, and I can't find any. I ask a few people, but they don't know where Ruth's new desk is. Finally I'm sitting in a chair, in despair, and some girl comes out with a heavy foreign accent and either calls my name or says she's there in place of Ruth. I go up to her, wondering how she found out I was waiting for Ruth, and she says that she's in a special class now, which won't be over until about 7:30. I remark how long it is, and she says something about 14 hours, but I'm not sure whether she means the class is fourteen hours in one day, fourteen hours in total, or that it starts at 1400 in the afternoon. But she says she's having lunch now, and I can meet her there. Recall now that I'd been looking through the office, and marveled that it included a theater-like structure with great windows looking out over the bright city, and that on a part of the floor was the remains of a banquet---very much with the "morning after" look about it. All the while I was talking with the girl I kept fussing with the brown army blanket which kept slipping off my shoulders, but there was never any danger of my exposing myself, and she seemed to take the entire situation in stride, as I seemed to be doing, too, for that matter.
7/5/74
DREAM OF HORSE RIDING
I guess it's based on the mud and agony I saw last night in "All Quiet on the Western Front" because I recall looking at a newspaper schedule (and THAT came from the chapter one of the physical sciences book that I worked on yesterday) that talked about the "Slide" and the "Jumps" and it noted that a certain high percentage of the riders fell from the horses since they were as amateur as I was. I vaguely knew, even in the dream, that I didn't ride a horse, but I remembered only the times at summer camp, forgetting completely about the time I'd ridden upstate with Sharon Askew and that other marvelously intelligent woman who worked on Fortran optimizer. But I wasn't really nervous about riding the horse in the race, though I hadn't even SEEN the horse (though I knew it was waiting for me), and I was wearing jodhpurs like I wore for the "To Tell the Truth," and talking to people I met on stairways, brushing away the strangeness of my riding in the races. It seems that I woke (all this was after 7:15 and before 8:45) a couple of times and glanced at the clock and settled back into sleep to continue the dream. There were lots of people in the grandstands to watch the races, and I felt that it couldn't be THAT bad to fall off a horse, probably taken from the remarkable stunt men who came VERY close to the explosives in "All Quiet." I remember feeling sorry that there was no one even in the DREAM to really talk to, and I was doing something I had somehow fallen into, might not really want to do, but it was the only thing TO do. And I told myself when I woke that I should write it up quickly, while I remembered a lot of the details, but I hardly remember anything now, struggling to finish the page, since I should have done this at 8:45, when I got up, rather than at 11:05, now, after I've eaten and exercised and showered and watered the plants and gotten myself back to the typewriter, where I've just done three diary pages for the day, and the momentum of the writing takes me down to this, which is the third to the last line to type, and then carriage return to the next to the last line to type, and then see that I'm actually finished with the whole page and I can stop right now right here!
7/6/74
TOOTH DREAM AGAIN
Highly unusual to dream after a night of smoking, but that's what happened. First I'm fussing with an electric typewriter that's rather like mine, only it's quite a bit bigger and somehow older, and when I hit a carriage return it comes flying off the carriage, and I try to restrain it, rather like holding onto a greased pig, but I can see that the springs and tubes and wires and collars that are holding it onto the carriage are gradually peeling away, and I'm left with this corncob of a carriage cradled in my arms, sorry that now I have to expend the energy to get the damn thing fixed before I can use it again. Then I'm nowhere in particular, chewing on something like my breakfast cereal (which contains a ludicrously SMALL portion of the daily nutrients, 10% of the maximum of ANYTHING), and there's that horrible crunch of a foreign object, and I root around and take out the amber-translucent cap which I know has come from my lower left molar which has fallen out so many times, and I root around my mouth, feeling that my whole consciousness is concentrated in the tip of my tongue, and I get back to the lower RIGHT, where the teeth seem to be ground down except for the wisdom tooth, which stands very bulky on a small base, like one of the "flowerpot" constructions on the tidal beaches of Fundy. I gingerly feel around it, and there's all sorts of silt around the bottom of it, as if it's been eroded, and just as I'm fearing it won't hold much longer, it sort of keels over rather like a rooted building falling in an earthquake, and it tips into my mouth's center with a sort of crunching tearing sound, and I expect a gush of blood, but there isn't any, so I steel myself, saying since it's down it might as well come out, so I tongue it aside and there's an organic ripping as of blood vessels, and again I expect blood and a great deal of pain, but there's just a momentary discomfort, and I feel that I can reach back and pull out the whole thing, but that's all the farther I get into the dream, and I'm awake, relieved at the thought that it IS just a dream, though I can't resist feeling around in my mouth to make sure some actual happening in my head hasn't caused the dream occurrence in ANOTHER part of my head.
7/15/74
The monster is the most phallic creature possible: a tube of grayish brown, with a pink head enclosed by a caul or cowl, rather, of thin pinkish fabric that resembles nothing so much as a the very loose foreskin around the small head of a large cock. I'm riding in an underground subway, and it rears up beside me (I also, now, have a faint memory of being in a resort area and standing looking at the beach with the waves rushing in, thinking that the beach is covered with a fine moss like my plants are covered with, and that the beach is so shallow that the tide comes in very quickly, and then there's some sort of canal that I'm looking into, and I believe there is some sort of fat tube of a fish swimming THERE, too!) and attacks a small girl who gets off the front of the subway. Then, somehow, I'm standing below the track (and the tube could be a vagina, of course), and the train is just coming in again, and the front of it is QUITE distinct for a dream, with the front that is an intricate construction of silvery metal with hands and bars across its front, with some sort of line-marker on the top, but no windows, so the driver can't see that the monster is waiting for it as it stops, and I stand with a bunch of people, thinking if the monster attacks US, there wouldn't be anything I could do, since I'm furthest in the corner, and if he crushed us all, everyone would be crushed back against me and I would be wedged forever into the tiled corner of the subway's end. And he rears up from the other angle, attacking the same little girl in a fresh pink dress, and that's all I remember. I woke at 7:30, happy to be up before Arnie calls, but then I doze off again, and wake to the frantic sound of the doorbell. I'm not even wakened enough to realize directly it's the phone, so I go to the door, open it, peer stupidly into the hall to find no one there, THEN see that it's 8:30, pick up the phone, and it's Arnie's voice asking if he's wakened me, and we arrange to meet in 20 minutes, in which time I can water the plants, wash my face, have a bit of breakfast, dress, and type THIS page between 8:30 and 8:40, feeling somehow still asleep, as if each letter takes my individual attention---fingers stiff.
7/18/74
Reading Part II of Orbitsville in the August "Galaxy" is as good a reason for the second part of the dream (with "The Odo" from Ursula LeGuin and Elizabeth Lindstrom from Orbitsville as the two old ladies), and I guess the first part comes from my concern about an overabundance of pimples on my arms and back recently. First, I'm talking to someone about the body, and I point out that I have "Crease-followers" and looking down, I see that I have PHILODENDRON SHOOTS growing from a point on my waist under my belt, and they dangle down along the front of my thighs, ending just above and just below the knee on the left and right, respectively. I looked down with amazement that I didn't break them off when I was lying in bed, but as I moved I could see that they were slightly flexible, and the attachment to my body was by means of a very flexible fleshy tab that seemed not painful even when flexed to an extreme. Another appendage was somewhat more worrisome: a cross between a plant shoot and the double-wired flat cable leading from the set to the television antenna, it was so soft and mushy that when I fingered it to see its strength, I tore some of the surface covering off and it began to ooze a watery blood, and I figured I'd just have to get a scissors and cut it off from my side, sort of an adjunct umbilical cord---connecting me to the world of plants? Then I was traveling far north in Norway with a group, and we were walking because we'd gone farther north than any transportation, looking out over snowy plains, and then we found a village (much like Orbitsville) and we were peacefully chatting when I could see from the windows people racing out along wooden fences to stare and point into the sky, and the old woman I was talking with (reminding me of the old woman I'd talked with (Mrs. Meredith?) about the rent hassle on 57th Street, whom I'd seen while I was eating a pizza in my old shop on 58th yesterday) smiled and said it was quite normal, and I looked out to see fleets of flying saucers moving as one unit overhead, with others moving further out in the distance, all exactly alike, all seamed along the side, sort of purplish above and yellowish below, but I couldn't tell if the colors were due to lights in the saucers, reflections from the bluer sky and the whiter snow below, or actual colors of the hull, appearing to be metallic without really glinting with a high polish. Then they seemed to be landing on a field outside of town (and in "Orbitsville" the heroes landed and the villagers came out to see them), so some small group of us started walking across the dusty landscape (much like the fields around the Raj's Kirtipur Estate in "The Music Room" yesterday), and I found myself helping two very old ladies along (and now I remember the one old lady helping the other SOMETIME yesterday when I was in a rush somewhere, and I helped hold the door for one of them and she smiled very widely and said "Thank you."), and we went very slowly, but I had a lot of respect for them, and had the feeling that they knew more about the saucers which I didn't actually see landing in the fields, but I knew they were there and would stay there, and the rest of the group I'd been traveling with weren't to be seen, and I'm reminded that DIARY 8759-8762 states how MANY things seem to be happening to me, sending my mind into a whirl, and it seems this whirl of experience is carrying over to my dream state, since there are so MANY connections to be made with things that happened during the day. I'd had a dream YESTERDAY that I wanted to remember, too, but it seems that it faded VERY quickly, though this one sort of went just after I got out of bed at 8:20, but while I was showering it came back strongly, and now that it's only 9:30 am, I can finish typing it out and LET this page end now!
7/18/74
On Wednesday, 7/17/74, things were going so fast that I just jotted down a number of things that I might otherwise have forgotten, like buy the July Galaxy, but it was already too late: the AUGUST Galaxy had just come out, and I read the end of Orbitsville, so I guess that's the end of THAT. Then I had a dream this morning, and I only vaguely recall it NOW, but the notes I jotted down help me to remember it: I was sitting at my desk in the front of a classroom, but somehow everyone was gathering for an ORGY. Things started getting very cuddly somehow, and I didn't want to get involved with anyone, so I went outside, onto a sloping lawn with concrete steps going down to the building the school was in, and John Connolly and another friend was lounging on the steps, and I knew HE was the host, and that I could "be the star" by getting close to him, and I engaged him in conversation, and before I knew it he was tinily hard, and I was proud that I could get the host up.
Then I thought I'd have to add a character to ULTIMATE MANDATE, who WANTED TO USE All/One's knowledge, and HE would add the "must/cannot" to make a story that Meredith WOULD like and Sheckley WILL buy for Galaxy. But I want to put it down HERE and not on my list of things to do, since I despair of EVER finishing that damn list, which gets bigger and bigger, yet I won't REMEMBER otherwise.
And I have the distinct thought that if EVERYONE gets depressed with the energy shortage and the governmental scandals and the awful state of world affairs and living conditions, and if everyone just DIDN'T care, it would PRODUCE, according to me AND Seth, an anomie that would CAUSE a catastrophe to jolt the human race out of its apathy, or CAUSE a war to create an enlivening interest, or even CAUSE the end of the world simply by taking away all the people who would look forward to living. But this is just ME, depressed, thinking the WORLD is like this---but when I'M depressed I CREATE A WORLD FOR MYSELF that is also depressed!
8/11/74
Sleeping with Ron on Tuesday I remembered dreams of myself rubbing up against him, or someone like him, and that kind of dream was repeated voluptuously on Thursday morning, so that I came just to have myself off. Then this morning there were two large chunks of dreams, and as I went over the details in my mind between 9 and 9:30, it seemed quite clear, but now that I've read through the rest of the paper, fertilized the plants, and eaten breakfast, and it's now 11:35, about the only thing I remember is that I DID have a dream that I wanted to recall, and now I'll have to put myself to thinking what it was actually about. This stems in part from the reading of the parapsychological article last night, which said that people who were better versed in parapsychology remembered their dreams better, and since I WANT to be good in ESP, I DESIRE to be good in remembering dreams. But it hasn't come back yet, so I'll have to stop typing and THINK. It seems it MIGHT have been something about going to school again, but it seems that I was somewhat more of a SUCCESS than that. I definitely remember connecting it with something that I'd just seen, but I don't remember what THAT was. I also notice that that last six lines have started with either "i" or "I." It's too bad that I don't remember, resolve NOW (and just DID) to put paper beside the bed so that I can jot the gist of it down so that I can recall it when I finally type. Well, though I could remember something while brushing my teeth, but I just came to the conclusion that at least I'm ahead of those who say they DON'T dream, and now that I've made provisions for jotting down my dreams BEFORE I get out of bed, I'm content, and I'd figured that this stuff to type would take me down to the bottom of the page, and here it is, just around the corner, and I'd decided that I SHOULD get to the top shelf of stuff and at least set ASIDE what's only for reference and what things should be written, and I DO want to get the DO list down to almost nothing before I take off on the two weeks to Greece, and I'll have to get some grass so that I'll have something to SMOKE to keep from worrying about the FLIGHT as it grows nearer, and it's only seven weeks (less than 50 days) away NOW!
8/15/74
Jotted 8/13 am: I talk with kid who's a performer at a Middle East circus about my plane in an oil-smuggling scheme. Money involved for me. Then a speaker takes the wooden bottom off a very small orange crate (nails sharp) to form a frame for his head as he speaks.
Jotted 8/15 am: A servant sets up a footrace for the Master. TOMORROW only blacks race, so the race has to be set up TODAY and the Master wins. Traveling with a woman who has a job interview in a big office building. A dark, carpeted bank of elevators to the regular floors, but through a utility door there's ANOTHER bank of BACK elevators, and one of them comes down, and I can see the candlelit interior where people are having an elegant dinner at a black-velvet-clothed table glittering with crystal and silver. She goes up by pressing the button marked "Economics" and I have lunch with the rest of the group that's traveling, and she comes into the lunch counter JUST as we finish, and we're going back out to the cars, and she says the man told her he was VERY rough to work for and she KNEW she wouldn't take the job. We leave together and the others are all talking about us.
8/19/74
I'm visiting a large family in a large, two-story house, trying to keep out of the way of the members of the family who are either studying or getting ready to go somewhere. The phone rings and I'm surprised that they're asking for Mom, who's come along with me, and I go into the kitchen where she's helping with a meal to tell her to pick up the phone there. Then I'm watching someone like Joe Safko working out some figures at a desk, and someone shuts the lights off from a remote switch, and someone else has to go answer the telephone on another floor, so there's no one to put the light switch back, so I have to go around corners and through hallways to feel along the wall and put the lights back on, though I put too many on (with only one switch) because as I pass through an adjoining bedroom, I see that I've wakened someone who's sleeping there, a hairy-headed man who's all wrapped up in blankets who's stretching and yawning and annoyed that he's being waked up at 3 in the morning. Then I'm either watching a play or a TV show or a movie, but the scene shows a large bed in a jail, and Sandy Dennis is sitting up regally over another blonde in a black slip who's leaning WAY back on her elbows in a difficult curve on her knees, and though she obviously looks like she's being commanded by Sandy Dennis, Sandy is saying with her typical flutters and lisps that they're all equals, and she shouldn't feel that Sandy's superior to her, but the other two, lower on the bed than the first two, laugh at the statement with each other and with the audience: "How silly it is for her to say that they're equal, just look at the position the other one is in," but then it's rather clear that they all SHOULD be equal, and then I wake up. Look at the clock and it's 7:35, which isn't bad since I've been sleeping since midnight, and then recall the Sandy Dennis section of the dream, rather amazed that I've dreamed even though I had grass yesterday evening, and then it occurs to me that I had some sort of elaborate, time consuming dreams BEFORE that, and gradually it comes back in some of its details, so I decide to pull myself out of bed at 7:55 and get to the typewriter, where I am now, finishing this at 8:02 am, doing SOMETHING.
8/20/74
Based I guess on Bob's stay in the Poconos, I'm in the woods somewhere, and I have the impression that I'm in the Land of the Midnight Sun, because I feel that it's very light out, and the light will stay through the night, giving a strange effect, as someone who MIGHT have been Bob Grossman remarks to me in my dream. Everyone's gone to some sort of performance, but I'm tired and want to go home (as I was last night when Arnie wanted to go to the baths at 1:15 am), but when I thought it was very light out, I looked at my watch and it was only 7:35, so I thought it was just a long twilight. Went down some path toward a river, a sandy path surrounded by low shrubs, yellow-green with dryness, and then found myself in lush green thickets coming back up a slope with only the trace of a path, to the wooden house that we were all staying in. I knew I was sleeping on the second floor, but the doorway arrangement in the hall was unfamiliar, and I went into the wrong room first, seeing only one large bed and a few small ones, none of which were mine (this is obviously based on the rooms in "Devil by the Tail" that I saw yesterday), and I went back into the hall to see that one of the doors had been sealed up and moved, so that I had to reopen the door of the room I just left to see if the next door opened into the SAME room or the NEXT room. Then down the hall to another room, and someone was sleeping in one of the beds (same as LAST dream Diary 8843!) and I sense that one of the cots on the floor is mine, but I think that there must be a BETTER way of remembering which bed was mine, even though I didn't have any belongings by which I could recognize where I was. Then I was alone with an attractive blond, and I was hoping we would have sex, and was gratified when he lay on top of me, and I started kissing his fair lips, but he kept them closed so that I was actually sucking on his lips, which he permitted to be drawn way into my mouth, and I could feel down his attractively muscled body, pleased with his build, and he started getting excited and turned over to neck with me, and as I just began to get excited I turned my head from lying on my left ear to lying on my right ear, and the feeling of excitement immediately left. I debated turning BACK to recapture the excitement, but then didn't.
8/23/74
Standing with a group of people pointing out my new desk in a modern office, someone who's deciding what I'm to do decides to make me the administrative assistant to the Director of Personnel, who is not in charge of training for [I'm sure he said this] "the Old Line" of computers which is just about to come out. "You'll be perfect for this" he assures me. The beige and brown tones of the office are quite distinct, and I remember the brief dream clearly. Then I see a large room with small groups of people lying naked having sex, and I zero in on one group where it looks at first like the husband is holding their baby so that it can fuck the wife, lying on her back on the floor, but then I get in closer and see that the person lying on the floor is a man, and the baby is above his cock, which is quite hard, and as the other man bends over to be done by him, the man on the floor starts straining in orgasm, and the come spurts from the cock in a thick white stream, running down the cock, and he groans and strains upward, and the other person goes down to watch, and more come slides oozing from the cock, which pulsates, and I wake with a feeling of hardness. The person on the floor with the large cock COULD have been Michael, because I'd been thinking of him the night before as I was going to sleep, and I'd thought not much of him on first meeting, then the second meeting he seemed interested in me, making some kind of remark about how "You'll see," when I say something about him being limp, and Bob stares at me with jealousy. Then at Coney Island his body turned out to be very appealing, so that the only step is to meet him at Arnie's on Wednesday (or at the Club tonight) and find that he has a marvelously large sexual apparatus (though looking at him he's more inclined to be small, like Paul, rather than large, like Bob Rosinek), and that would just about solidify our relationship, particularly if he said some of the fantasy words that I've so many time already thought as coming from his lips "Would you kiss me, please?" or "I'd give anything to be in bed with you, just to hold you," and I find myself idly wondering if I might not be in the throes of infatuation.
8/30/74
Two sections to the dream: one in which I'm trying to look my best for a party, or something, and I've put gray makeup on my lips by means of a strange super-felt-tip applicator that I've moved out too far, so that it becomes a greasy limp gray snake that I try to caress to my lips. But it doesn't quite work, for when I look in the mirror, I see that my constant lip-licking has completely removed the makeup from my lower lip. But my face itself is gray (I guess, suddenly, now, that this stems from the white makeup as a robot that Woody Allen wears in "Sleeper" that I saw last night), so that the lower lip is a shocking stripe of pink in a dun face. Then I'm making up for some sort of performance, which necessitates that I cover my entire forehead with the gray stick (something about Queen Elizabeth, or is it Bette Davis PLAYING Queen Elizabeth that I'm trying to interpret), and I push my hair aside when I realize that there must be no bit of flesh showing, and I can actually FEEL, in the dream, the sweat on my brow and the texture of the small pimples up near my hairline as I apply it. But I put it on too thick, so that when I'm sitting down in the banquette at the restaurant that a friend has invited me to (who can follow the logic of a dream?), he stares up with obvious displeasure at my muddy gray forehead, and I feel like I want to say something about it, but figure that I also want to get to a mirror to see how bad it looks, and I can picture the cement-like shiny gray surface with small ridges and furrows of concentration in it, quite apart from any lines that my smiling or frowning or eyebrow lifting may have put into it. This, for once, has been a dream that I've managed to remember well past my waking time of 9:45, probably since it's such a simple gimmick to remember.
9/5/74
The barbershop was a huge place, possibly dark because it was partially underground, as was the little place by the bridge over Brown Street where I got a haircut as a kid. The barber was a combination of that fellow in the shop: dark-haired, tall, lanky, and the fellow who was my tailor for a number of years---Dorfman---who was shorter, more loquacious, glasses, with pocks in his face. I was reading something as he cut my hair, but the first main impression was that he'd wet my hair to cut it, and there was a mirror hanging above my head, so that I could see the top of it, and there, to my horror, was the view of my coming baldness: scrawls of black hair separated by rivulets of pink flesh, and I combed the hair back from my forehead and put my fingertip at the furthest recession of my hairline and found that it was almost precisely in the middle of my head. My head looked more like my father's, or someone's who'd had a disease, than like mine, and I was happy when the hair dried and got fluffier, so that I couldn't see so clearly how many bald places I had on top. But the back was even stranger, cut straight and evenly into a Ben Franklin sort of haircut that Franklin Kameny had that was so unpleasant when combined with an almost totally bald front. At least my hair was black, though it might have had the matte-blackness of a dye job. The barber went off to do something else, and I looked at the clock to see that I was late for work, and he came back and put in the last finishing touches, saying something about work, and then I put on my jacket and looked at the other mirrors on the wall, having a feeling that the place was somewhat darker than it should have been, and the clock showed that I was very late, and that was the end of the dream. This wasn't in the morning, but in the middle, somehow, of the night, so that it wasn't right on my mind when I woke, but suddenly came clear, in a totality, after I'd lain a bit in bed, debating exactly when to get up. And when the dream came so clearly, I got immediately out of bed at 9:15 and went to the typewriter to capture it, determined not to start another day of reading by reading the first thing in the morning.
9/10/74
Someone is teaching me how to broil fish in my broiler, and when I look at it, it's broiling under a piece of METAL to reflect heat from the flames and still not get burned. But the fish has slid into a corner of the pan, in its own grease, and though it's golden, it still looks improperly done. I have to finish cooking, or helping to cook, before 7, since I have to leave at 7:30 (odd, this was BEFORE I checked the Elgin schedule, finding that the movie started at 7:35, so I have to leave at 7, and had to make golden CORN before having dinner).
Then I'm also moving. The kitchen is a mess of furniture and dishware and things in boxes, and I'm moving boxes of glasses, and things are falling off edges of tables and breaking piles of stacked glass bowls beneath, and I'm disturbed, but have the detachment that maybe they're not my stuff, and I don't really have to be worried about them. I had a great detailed awareness of the clutter in the room, the shadowy colors of the things that had to be moved, the glitter of the shards of glass that had been broken, and I could almost SMELL the fish sizzling in the broiler. I guess here I'm thinking of the chicken that's been in the refrigerator since Friday, when I wanted to cook it, and it won't be cooked before Wednesday, since I'm going out to dinner tonight with Bob.
9/13/74
Rita and I are in a small house somewhere, maybe a summer-type cottage by the sea, and somehow she's gotten a snake, but it's not one snake, it's a slim slimy blue-green viper that somehow emerges from a mottled green skin, leaving that skin behind in a rigid, bulky mass almost like a wickerwork replica of a snakeskin. Rita picks up this replica with fire tongs and carries it outside onto the lawn, where I look at it suspiciously, for it seems to have grown in length and girth, looking as if it has just swallowed something as bulky as a large rat. The rigidity loosens somewhat, and I seem to see the head pushing against the tongs, but the head isn't the flat triangularity of a snake's, anymore, it's grown a more protuberant snout and the eye ridges have grown out of the plane of the skull, and it's got the appearance of some sort of small dinosaur or sea serpent or dragon. Rita carries it across the lawn, but then it falls out of her tongs into a large body of water, and we step back in anticipation, and the head, now far larger, emerges straight up from the water, followed quickly by a shooting green figure that is quickly revealed by the white spraying spume not to be the body of a snake, but the gigantically muscled forequarters of a horse, yellow-green (yellower than the Uruguay airmail stamp from 1932, Scott's C30), in a vertical prancing stance that doesn't change (rather Disney) as it shoots out of the water followed by some sort of thick green body (as if only the first part of the snake had grown horse's legs), but then like a keel-less sailboat, it emerged beyond its draft and falls in a welter of spray, rigidly, backward into the green waters. Then there's a transition, a small scene inside the house where Rita says it's now smaller again, and then outside, around the side of the house, on the horizon, there are groups of people gathered, staring and pointing almost straight up into the sky behind the house, and I gingerly step along the dusty road toward the people on the small rise of road, looking reluctantly up the slope of sky, and see pillars of clouds rising into swaths of clouds, and I first expect to see the rearing horse in green towering into the sky, but the pillars of clouds form into titanic legs, moving like reflections in water, that support what begins to appear to be a mythical Greek person, not a statue, but the clouds intervene, there's some sort of a roof appearing, the sense of magic leaves, and the roof becomes a proscenium arch framing a stage in a movie studio, and I'm standing in the back doorway watching the cloud-pillars dissolve into tiers of dancing girls in white plumes, kicking and smiling and giggling as they're filmed for some Busby Berkeley extravaganza. There are about four rows of decreasing size, as in a pyramid, and then some kind of disturbance like clouds, and above the disturbance is some sort of trick-photography array of dancers that might be men, but they're very obscure. Then the show is over, and the dancers move backward into the stage and ponderous doors begin swinging shut in lieu of a curtain. A trapezium of heavy green folds down from the roof to form a box top, the stage becomes darker to form the bottom, and two huge doors swing shut from the sides, mismatching in the center, and then they adjust so that one shuts in front of the other, and they close together, shutting out the golden light from the stage, with a muffled clang of the gates of hell. Stagehands chatter in the small corner near which I stand, and then everyone leaves.
Instantly I'm sitting at a table, or in a lounge, and either John Vinton or Larry Ball is sitting next to me reading the same menu or program, and I note that during this course, or act, there's a side note saying that the "Tremendous cacophony" of some symphonic piece by some composer would be played while we ate or watched this act. I thought it was too bad that these art nouveau avant-garde pieces were all lost, and that the total feeling would have been tremendously impressive if the music could be reconstructed, and I somehow realized that this was one of the reasons for collecting antiques: one of the records found could be one of the few private pressings of these eldritch musical compositions, and then one could actually recreate the mysterious mystical dinners or performances by people like Gurdjieff, or Holzman Hunt, or Rubenstein, and I wanted very badly to see one. [This is one of the most vivid, and most true, recapturing of a dream in ages.]
9/18/74
Monday morning (before I went and bought wine glasses) I recalled dreaming about going into some sort of pharmacy or small glass-case-lined shop and looking at very tall elegant glasses. The elongated pilsner glasses were set into some sort of wooden frame, and there was the impression of an engraved plaque, almost like a trophy's, on the side or bottom, and I tipped them over to look at, since their shape changed when they were moved around.
This morning a group of us found an "abandoned" house in the woods that we camped in for a bit, but when we were about to leave we found that the owner had returned, and we had to be careful to take only what was ours. There was much fuss about packing things, and I felt that I had to go over each floor carefully to see that everything that was there originally was still there, and that everything we brought with us was taken out with us. There were two stories in this house (which had originally been only one room, when we moved in), and even the basement below had to be checked. After my friends left, I went again through all four rooms on the ground floor and all the rooms upstairs, and then coming down the stairs I had to step between all the items, toys, tools, packing cases, junk on the steps themselves. There was a book I wanted to take, so I carefully sized up the books and lined them up and packed them around the book I wanted to take so that when they were all in their plastic envelope the owner, who was watching, wouldn't know that I'd taken one of his books. I felt vaguely guilty that he who was responsible for the safety of everything (me) was taking something. At one point Larry Ball said that we could go in to the town of Watertown tonight, but I said didn't he remember how boring it was when we were in the Army to go there? But then I thought there might be a movie playing there that we could see. Outside, finally, everyone had gone for the car except me, and I had a silk laundry bag full of stuff, and on top of that I had to pile my shoulder bag and my portable typewriter, which fit, but bulkily, and I knew I had to go back into the house for my suitcase. The two girls in the owner's family helped me pack the laundry bag, and I was happy we were able to get away so easily. Vivid memory of stepping over stuff on the stairs.
9/24/74
This I jotted down when I woke at 4 am on Monday morning after "having slept a full 8 hours" on Sunday night already. I pass a line of people, and one of them is Gerry Berg in a suit with a white shirt so bright that it dazzled out in a snowy mist from the dark hallway in which everyone stood. I work with someone on writing a long table of reference, and find that I am wearing a black turtleneck sweater under a white shirt without a tie, and I feel very conspicuous. Then I feel that I'm in my apartment, and have three different jobs to finish before I go on my trip, and I can remember the index, but think there are two other things I have to do, and feel rather frantic that I can't remember what they are: akin to the tension I feel in the typical dreams that I'm back in college and have forgotten where my classes are, when they are, and that the final exams are due and I haven't been to any of the classes yet.
Then I'm wandering (this obviously came from reading the article on Iona) up and down ladders in a very dark set of buildings, coming to a semicircular window that's pulled down, and I have to crawl over the transom to get down the next set of ladders, and there are stairs and streets, and then there's a sort of sunrise, or sunset, and I look down to find that I'm wearing the same black turtleneck under an open white shirt, but I don't have any pants on, and I'm rather eager to get inside before the people in the village wake up and find that I'm wandering around without my pants on---anyway, it's chilly. Though I see a bit of the beach, I can't get my bearings, and I stand there, puzzled, looking back and forth up and down the curving bricked streets past bricked houses, still dark in the dim light, and have absolutely no impulse to go one way or the other, so as I wake I'm still standing there, not moving an inch in one direction or another, and (worse) having no great compulsion to really START moving in any of the possible directions, and the parallel to my own life at this point, where I've read six and started seven books in the past two days, is very striking, and today, I decide, I really MUST do the index for Appleton!
11/20/74
Dream of 11/19 am: I'm moving about a large apartment which is put together rather like an office in an old tenement building, and somehow I know that I'm about to marry Madge Mao! About 3/4 through the dream she comes breathlessly in through the front door, locks and chains flying from the jamb, and her face is dark with exertion and flushed with anticipation and frowning with concentration, and she doesn't look at me, and as I turn my head to the left I see all her relatives, sitting along the bench with me, turning their heads so THEY won't see her before her wedding. I vaguely suspect that Werner must have died, but don't question the marriage; indeed I feel rather a relief that it's taking place at last. I go over in my mind all the things that I have to do before the 3:30 pm wedding and go to my room, which has a number of closets and doors that hide a bathroom and somehow a kitchen, and know that I have to take a shower soon, since it's about 12:30 and there are other things that I have to do, but everything's under control: I'll be finished with everything I have to do by the time of the wedding.
Dream of 11/20 am: I'm wandering through a huge wooden school building, and I think it's a girl's school, but they don't really remark about my being there, since I'm only a tourist. Then there's a shop where all the girls sell their stamps, and they're hung by means of safety pins through them attached to thin wires above the sales counter, and I can read some of the inscriptions on the stamps, like "not to be licked" and "not for postage," and other clear but unstampish inscriptions. There's an umbrella that I have to keep track of, that seems to be made out of fur, and I go up and down stairs that spiral and turn quickly, finding myself out on a lawn, and finally going down into a sort of cafeteria where everyone is sitting in pews to see what's going on behind me, and I twist around to listen to the speaker, but it really doesn't apply to me, since I don't go to that school anyway. Both were long, detailed, very colorful dreams that seemed full of content while I was dreaming them, but it's hard to recollect those details so long after they've actually passed, seeing as it's 2:45 pm right now.
11/21/74
He's to be king. I'm not sure if I'm a friend, a relative, or just a servant or messenger to the man who doesn't yet know he's to be king. The present king has either died or been deposed by war or incompetence, and I have to get the message to him. I ride through small villages that look like they're out of "Orlando," and it's either snowing lightly or very cold, and I'm intrigued by two people riding past on the strangest animals (maybe based on the Martians talked about in Clarke's "The Sands of Mars" that I read last night): I think at first they're horses, but they're covered in what MIGHT be blankets but are more likely their own pelts: curly and wooly and very long, giving them a strange profile (could some of this be based on Henry Moore's sketches of sheep on Sunday's Camera Three?) quite a bit like a llama. Though there are people riding on them, I don't see their legs anywhere (maybe INSIDE the fleece?), and the curly fleece is dusted with powder or with the snow, and they trot along very prettily, giving the lower edges a pleasant ripply sway that might be fat from the creature or the fringes of the overgarment. The pleasant curve in the front of the chest is rather reminiscent of a camel's neck curve. Then I'm in the castle, and people are racing about, and then I'm in the room with the man who is to be king, and he's working at a wooden table as a desk in the candlelight, shirtless, and I don't have to tell him, somehow, and he gets up and leaves the room, and the next time I see him he's riding in a large cart on big wheels, but the big wheels have broken and there are outriggers of heavy steel drums acting as wheels (and I'm quite sure I got this from the festival carriage in the ballet last night: stable wheels and tiny stage-truck wheels rolling furiously underneath to give the motion to the carriage). I'm pleased that he's to be king, but he seems very serious about the whole thing (does he look a bit like Richard Harris in "A Tramp Shining"?). The marvelous FEELING of the medieval English town was very convincing, and those strange horse-lamas are usable in a story, somewhere.
12/28/74
There's a dance performance in something like a ballet rehearsal studio with lots of people sort of moving about the floor as if to indicate what the scope of the performance is to be---and the simile strikes me as I type that it's like a painter roughing in the areas of color on the canvas before adding any of the details or any draftsmanship at all. Then the female choreographer brings out someone in a very elaborate Indian-Indonesian type costume and I get the feeling this female dancer will indicate the finished choreography, and the tremendous complexity is shown by fast-moving finger contortions that almost fade into a blur in their swiftness, intricate hip motions that set silver and blue ornaments swinging and tinkling, and facial and head expressions and attitudes that rapidly express fear, happiness, love, joy of dance, and many other things in the literal seconds during which the excerpt seems to last. Everyone around me bursts into applause when the excerpt is over, and everyone, including me, looks forward to seeing the canvas completed with all the glittering highlights. Then an elaborate pageant begins behind enormous closed gym doors: the sounds of preparations can be heard, and glimpses of elaborate costumes and floats can be seen through the doors. Just as the doors swing open to something almost like a circus parade combined with a Mardi Gras celebration, and some jangly spectacular music just starts when my alarm goes off and I wake at 9:25 to shut off the alarm, and there in my mind, almost full blown, is the idea for the play "New York City." See DIARY 9182. Just stop smoking the grass for ONE night and the dreams and the ideas just flow into my mind.