DREAMS FROM 1976
DREAMS FROM 1976
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.
1/6/76
Wake in MY bed and see two girls playing in a back lot with a kitten, and when I call the kitten they tell it to stay away from me. Puzzled, I get out of bed and find that what I had THOUGHT was a partition between our apartments was now quite OPEN, and their toys and railroad tracks for toy trains went everywhere, and I regretted that I hadn't known there were kids next door when I moved in. Then looking around the apartment, I found two boys in a bathtub right between us, so close that I couldn't decide whose bathroom they were in, again cursing myself for having moved into such an awkward position. Then outside, and it's cold, and I'm stepping into marshy pools of grass at the end of my property, and I figure the trees are dead---I snap one off and walk it across the dirty crossroads and throw it onto the vacant property across the street, and hordes of young and not-so-young boys come tearing down the road playing commandos, and one races across my yard and plows into two enormous tree-fence posts at the end of my yard, knocking them over, and I try to tell myself that I would have had to take them out if HE didn't, and I puzzle over the barbed wire that I hadn't noticed before as a boundary, but I'm still wishing the kids had never been there. Up onto the porch, and from the sounds of the mother's voice inside, it sounds like the kids live upstairs, and this is something ELSE I hadn't planned on. But I'm not quite sure which apartment is mine, and I walk around the enormous outside porch looking through the windows to see where my place is, and I can't decide if this is another person's living room inside or if this is the reception hall with its heavy sofas and chairs, and then walk past more windows looking into rooms that I don't recognize, so I decide it's not my apartment, but when I round the corner that I thought was mine, I find that this STILL isn't my apartment, and I'm vaguely relieved that I've even got the wrong HOUSE, though the thought is not too far behind, "If this isn't my house, where IS it?" Wake with the memory of a News headline about "Subway toughs," and think that as I get older, I'll be more and more brutalized by such kids, and don't exactly feel the best feelings in the world about my rebirthing.
1/7/76
Arnold and I are going somewhere to wait on a cafeteria line, and he's way ahead of me down the hallways and staircases, and I think to catch up with him by taking a roundabout shortcut, but arrive there just as he does. The fellow who's monitoring the line starts praising Arnie to the sky, then because he ISN'T there, and I'm amused by his praise. Then we're inside eating at a large table, like the last one against the cafeteria wall where we ate so often at IBM, and someone across from me like Nick Sanabria or Joan Sumner is passing me sheets to proofread, and typing the corrections with correction fluid right there, and the fluid is so thick that he's putting them down still wet, and I tell him about it when one of the red circles that marks a correction has had its ink blurred by the moisture which also made it stick to the sheet below. Then, somehow, it's Arnie, and the waiter (or is it the same monitor?) comes over and praises "A true Salvador," just as someone would say "A true Da Vinci" or "A true Michaelangelo," and I hold up a large sheet of paper and a catsup bottle and say "If you're such a Salvador, paint us a picture, Dali," and everyone at the table laughs. But as the standing person (the typewriter has vanished, to be replaced by regular dining dishes) continues to praise Arnold/Salvador, the fellow NEXT to me, rather like Bob Boxer and Joe Farinas, crumples a large Kraft paper bag over and over so loudly that the praise is drowned out, and the whole table erupts into laughter, all very good naturedly, and the Bob/Joe guy is grinning from ear to ear, Arnie has his typical "How can they do all this to me but I LOVE it" grin on his face, I'm rocking in my chair with laughter, and the praiser continues obliviously. I'm instantly reminded, when the alarm rings right then at 8 and I'm jolted awake, of the conversation around the table last night with the rebirthing group, even to the configuration of people: Arnie next to an empty space, just as the older Bruce Moody was next to an empty space to me at the table, and Stephen, not too different in character, was next to me on my left, and the other people were laughing with the general cooperation that Diane and Tom showed.
1/8/76
I'm in some very large amphitheater, so large that there's no feeling of "insideness or outsideness" about it, and I'm with a group of children. Whether we're on a tour, they're visiting me, or we're all going to the same school I'm not sure. I feel somewhat detached from them because they're children---I'm not in a position of responsibility for them, yet I want somehow to be LESS detached from them. So I move toward them, and they're crowding into a small room filled with games, and someone's announcing that everyone should register for the playoffs in the games, and I see there are so many people there before me that I wander off, knowing that I can come back and register without waiting so long. In another room that looks like a huge Busby Berkeley stage set---silver foil covering the floor, wide stairs on which groups of children are sitting---Rita and some other children are playing with many packs of cards on various levels of the stairs. I go up and hear them discuss various games, but none of them seems to be playing with any of the others: they're just shuffling, handling, listlessly looking at the cards, and someone says "You have to go fishing," and I suggest "Let's play Go Fish," but Rita says with a VERY bored voice, "No, we're not going to do that," and I feel disappointed that they don't want to play with me, and I move off to another area. Possibly even go back to the smaller room and still find a crowd of people there, but I'm not sure, since this was dreamed either at 8 or at 9, and it's now 10:15 and I've forgotten many of the details. Can't recall what the children were wearing, who any of them might have been besides my sister, why they were there, how long they would be staying, or what my connection was with them, except that there was a definite feeling that I was not "of them," and that if I wasn't to remain alone, though among them, I would have to make some kind of advances toward them, since, left alone, they would leave ME totally alone. Neither were THEY firmly grouped---they seemed more unaware of the possibilities of playing and of learning and of getting more fun out of smaller groups. I suppose, on looking back, this may be a very significant, evocative, connected dream with my personal life at this time.
1/30/76
After richly experiential day of Rita's wedding, no grass, and SLEEPING intermittently from 8-10 am, I had BRILLIANT detailed dreams: from stopping in snow along the sidewalk (Akron) to find PAGES of a Scott's album in the snow just FILLED with green mint (ice cream last night?) stamps (as I'd pawed with little hope of finding anything through the envelopes in The Stagecoach Antique Shop) from odd countries, complete, like Aitutaki and Batum, through being SOMEWHERE in a lounge and seeing people, and someone comes up and asks if I remember him (I SAY I do and I don't), and he says he edited a book of studies that I worked on, and one of the editors wanted to see me, and I remember HIM, and he said that he was doing a study on the characteristics of normalcy and that I was one of the most EXTRAordinary people that he'd met, and he wanted to thank me for my help. It turned into a kind of TRIBUTE---he was now doing low-temperature research and some of his tools were knives that cut with a strange kind of whirring sound, and four or five women stood on boxes and began humming (Denny's sister's singing "Our Father" at the wedding interlude---if not for that, the ceremony would have taken only 15 minutes!---and Mom complained that Denny had to pay the minister $30 and the organist $20, though SHE gave them a present of towels, too) the HIGH tones of the "Song of the Singing Knives" (probably from Sturgeon's "Some of Your Blood") and then they set off four ROCKETS. The first flew VERY low over Akron U's roofs and the SECOND went UNDER the arch of Kolbe Hall and hit the wall of MEMORIAL Hall in a cloud of black smoke, and I listened to the fire trucks coming and debated if I wanted to go see the wreckage (as Edward's son David thought that his working in a butcher shop with flayed meat would steel him for the sight of a girl whose parachute didn't open during a voluntary jump which turned out to be MUCH WORSE than he'd expected), but know that there will be people all over that I don't want to see. And I'm so impressed with the incredible RANGE of the dream that I jot down the note immediately that I get up, since I know it'll be gone completely if I don't---and I didn't remember it AGAIN until NOW.
2/4/76
For some reason we're all looking up into the sky, maybe there's been some kind of warning, and the moon comes up VERY swiftly, then, awesomely, it reverses in its course for a few angles, changes colors, and gets black as if covered with ashes through which glowing orange coals show, and that would be (I think now), more appropriate of the SUN than the moon, but it was the moon because I remember seeing the craters with binocular clarity. It switches direction a couple of times, and we sort of brace ourselves for the earth shocks that must follow, and there are a few tremors, but the best effect, psychologically, is that the small wind that's blowing seems to have much less oxygen in it, and we breathe more deeply to get as much air, except the fact we're in dread panic wouldn't help much. The coals start sputtering on the moon, and it begins to sink from the direction in which it rose, and the ground starts to shake again when I switch to another dream that I've since forgotten, but it wasn't that interesting because I didn't bother to take down notes about it.
2/13/76
Possibly it's an aftermath of being VERY near coming last night and then not quite getting it off, coupled with the severe tugs on the rubber bands that leave sensations even in the morning, but the dream is QUITE erotic and VERY beautiful: I'm somewhere visiting, possibly even having sex, with someone like Stephen Waite, who's very hard, very sweet, but very undemanding and very considerate. He has a roommate, or a visitor, or a former roommate (and he COULD have been an image for the dream), and he's younger and quite cute, rather, actually, like Brian Webb last night, who I'm sure has a piece of the action, too. And he's lying there in the bed, and I roll over to him (probably after finishing off the host without having been satisfied myself, as is so usual) and start necking, and there's that marvelous instant rapport with necking that makes it almost more important than genital contact, bringing about that awful conflict when they're about to come rather to look into their beautiful faces as they struggle toward the visual joy of the orgasm, to WATCH the come spurt out on their stomachs, or to FEEL the throes and throw of the cock in the mouth as it comes. We keep on necking, I throw a light bone of attention to the other person, but they sort of wave us on because they're content (or not rocking the boat), and we continue necking, and for some reason get up and walk around, and I walk up behind him, bending my head forward, and he bends his head up and back and our lips meet at a most delightful angle, and there's nothing anally erotic about it, but with a person like this in a position like this with lips like this, I might be excited enough to make a back entrance. He's cooking, and I'm kissing him; he's washing the dishes, and I'm kissing him, and the total delight of being with him (as opposed to the tooth-pulling quality of Don's constantly wanting me to be WITH him without DOING anything) would make us forever together, and that reminds me strongly of ANOTHER page that I'd wanted to type, about finding someone to love at 40 (see DIARY 10672), and the dream ends with me waking up in bliss, not even hard, but loving the sensation of having been so nicely CLOSE to someone so KISSY!
2/24/76
I have some sort of responsibility for being with a large group of people in a strange house (like being a tour escort in a foreign land that neither I nor the tourists have been to before), but I'm so busy trying to get MY things located that I find myself avoiding OTHER people [and this is SO in keeping with my personal state at this point it's AMAZING], who pass around me, wanting to talk to me but they instinctively realize my position as being "different" and they're reticent to start conversation or even ask a question, though there's the slightest touch of resentment, as if they KNEW that I was there to help them around the house but I WASN'T. The house is shaped like a doughnut, and I go around porches, around hallways, around stairways, but sense that I never quite get to the HEART of the house, and that might be where the plans, directions, rules, connecting passageway might be that would make everything fit together. Seldom have I had a dream that was so EXPLICITLY applicable to my current situation!!
Then I dozed, and a SECOND dream had someone showing me a specific sequence of pages in an enormous book: a book like an atlas in size, with enormous folio pages with colored photographs illustrating various mechanical processes, with a sort of paragraph form that indicated where something might go wrong with the machinery, with diagnostic procedures and debugging techniques and repair charts like a systems manual at IBM. Then I had to take the book somewhere and show someone else what to do, but I stopped in the middle of my passage [Dante, yet?] and tried to find the specific set of pages AGAIN, to make sure I knew where they were, and though I kept KNOWING I was searching in the right place [rather like my hunting for the map of NYC bookshops], it just wasn't what I'd REMEMBERED as being the right page: the illustrations were the wrong color, the repair technique was different, the problem was said to be insoluble rather than amenable to maintenance work. I was too embarrassed to return to my original source [ohm'god!], but couldn't find it on my OWN, and didn't know WHAT to do when I finally had to report to the people who SENT me on my task. TOTALLY BLOWN AWAY!!!
3/22/76
First I went into a garage and saw a VERY dirty Land Rover, and used a hose to blast it clean, and then I was driving in it to a resort where I was meeting a very rich woman, but when I brought out the car for HER, it had become a VERY stubby, short sports car with HUGE wheels, and they were so filled with helium that the car FLOATED, and I made some remark about how extraordinary the car, and its floating, was. Then that got together with a collapsible boat that she had, which I could push through the air by steering from the back, as if shouldering along a surfboard, and then there was some fear about my losing both.
Second I was in a crowded nightclub talking to someone like BobG and Dennis, while a man over my shoulder was talking about his female date, saying how much she looked like a CAT, and she DID, with her stringy hair around her neck and her slitted eyes that glanced felinely back and forth as if she were looking for the next person to make her purr. I was drunk, and started making a joke by saying that I liked ROOSTERS, because they'd rise up in the morning and crow so exuberantly, and then thought to write a whole THING about "the man who liked cats and the man who liked roosters" (taken in part from the Animation Festival thing last night at Pope's about "The Man Who Had to Sing," which became a metaphor for someone who liked to do almost ANYTHING that made him different from anyone else, but Arnold said that the thing was a bit transparent, and he didn't think anyone would buy it.
DREAM OF 3/17: Since I jotted it on the same note and really don't remember THAT much more of it: DO remember the gobs and GOBS of paint that I got off the floor, which came VERY clean after I dissolved and scraped the parquet which seemed also to be hard linoleum, but then I can't even READ the end of my note, "News that Grandma's ????? BURNED," and I remember the idea of the BURNED, but though the ????? looks more like "remains" than anything else, it WASN'T her remains that burned, since she was still alive, but I don't know what else it could be. Pity that I'm writing this about a week after it happened, when there wasn't ANY GOOD reason why I couldn't have kept more up to date with the diary except that I didn't FEEL like typing.
4/26/76
First a whole sequence about something like a small department store that has been turned over to a benefit orgy: the clerks are still behind their counters offering their sales services, but guys are running around naked in the aisles, feeling up anyone they want to, having sex in the brightly neon-lit store. I've been undressing in pieces and have clothing scattered all over the place, and when, after a police-raid fright, I put on my clothes, I find that I don't have my pants, so I put on someone else's (shakes of "Arabella" last night on TV), and then gather more of the pieces from other places in the store.
Second I'm clambering along some sort of cliff on which are growing pine trees that are completely covered with snow (shades of "Challenge to be Free" yesterday on TV), and I'm backing along a narrow ledge, but some of the snow falls on my back and I'm pushed forward slightly, sliding down the hill for a small distance, and I get a genuine feeling of panic: I might ACTUALLY fall down this cliff face and fatally hurt myself. Then I turn and clamber upward, and I can see the tree-lined hill that I'm trying to get to, but then I see that the climb is actually going up a cliff side that begins to OVERHANG, so I won't be able to make it to the top, but when I look down and to the left, I find that I'm actually climbing up the snow-covered side of a BOAT (I guess this is from the snowy scene in Space 1999 yesterday), and it would be far easier to simply slide down to the frozen surface on which the boat RESTS, and I do that, moving gingerly in the green-oozing swamps on which I'm walking, which don't seem to have been frozen at this "lower" altitude, and then I'm around the nose of the ship and in a quaint Tudor-style village nestled under the other side of the ship, and I begin to make my way up the narrow picturesque streets when I wake up, surprised to find that I'd slept so late (11:25) and that I'd been willing to stay in bed so long, seeing as I've done nothing in the past 8 days but eat and have sex and wander in the park of the Cloisters with Dennis, and then I get up and at least START this page at 11:30 (finishing now at 5:05 pm!).
4/29/76
I'm working in some unspecified position halfway between a janitor and a surgeon in a hospital---and it may be a military hospital. There's a patient who's a very important person, and he's there to get something like his appendix removed, and I have a more-than-ordinary responsibility for his well-being. Part of this comes, undoubtedly, from the special on orangutans last night, particularly the injection part. Someone (or I) comes around and injects something into the patient, but it doesn't put him totally to sleep, only makes him drowsy, and I can't see how you can cut someone open without their being fully asleep, but the patient dreamily assures me that he won't feel anything. I don't know what happens then, but I'm looking at a jar filled with a clear liquid that contains black objects that look rather like truffles, or the ruffled edges of pieces of tire that one finds along highways where trucks have had blowouts. I'm surprised it had to come out in some many pieces, that there's so much of it, but I'm glad that the operation is over. Now he has to stay in bed, but I'm perturbed to see him wandering off, sitting up reading a book, and falling off the side of the bed---but since I can't see the sutures (reminiscent of not being able to see Olga San Juan's navel where it should have been in "Blue Skies" last night?), I'm lulled into thinking he's OK. Then, at last, the patient seems to have disappeared (this is related to "All Over" of last night, too), and I'm concerned because I have responsibility for him. Then, in the same setting but with different people, someone's standing in pieces of a military uniform, and he's trying to seduce me. He looks rather like James Fox, so the seduction would be an easy matter if I didn't have some business in the place, but when I pass by him standing at the foot of his bed, there's the blunt pink end of his erect penis (again Albee) sticking out of his trousers while he looks fixedly at me, and I brush up against it and feel the familiar excitement of sexual arousal, and know that something wonderful can happen when I wake up. Since I woke at 9:50 and am typing this at 11:30, the details managed to stay with me long enough to get written down.
6/4/76
I'm packing with three friends for a trip, and I seem to be very far behind, but when I finally bring out my things for the suitcase (three suitcases in "Seven Beauties" yesterday?) they're not packed yet. Then to the ship, and we're sailing to the north (to the area where Ramsey is writing about Eisengrim's childhood in "Fifth Business"?), where I find that I'm missing a number of things, but some of them I can buy along the way, like rubbers, a spiral notebook in which to take notes (and I see that they have memo slips on the table, I can even use THOSE if I have to), and a few other things that I copy onto a list. Then we're in some kind of hotel, and I'm into an elevator with some woman who's very much afraid of them (like the woman who was afraid of the high Ferris wheel at Great Adventure?), and we start down very quickly, and somehow I retain my perpendicularity so that I can see that we ARE tipping from side to side as we go down, and I recall that I was usually very afraid of elevators (in dreams?) but I'm watching HER reaction and am not so afraid myself (getting the guy NEXT to me to walk out in disgust in est, taking MY anger with HIS fingernail tweaking away?), even when we plunge to a stop, bounce up a bit, and see the elevator door open in not quite the right position. Into another elevator with another woman, and this time it's richly paneled and ormolued, still tipping from side to side as it descends, but again my terror is defused by keeping up a bold front to stop HER from going into panic. But the dream is quite positive; though I'm conscious that things are late, going wrong, or dangerous, I've got the confidence that I'll be able to buy things there, get there on time, and survive, and it's a nice feeling that I want to get down as soon as I get up at 10:15, but now it's 12:20 and it's been over two hours since I got up (and since I dreamed it just after 8, add another two hours), but I managed to get quite a bit of the detail down in writing, and again I'm vamping until the bottom of the page, going on automatic, pleased to see the hole coming up in the left margin, knowing that I have just ONE more line to fill and I can take this sheet, fully completed, out of my fucking typewriter.
6/18/76
FIRST, there's the achingly familiar dream of being in school and having to go to class and not being sure which one comes next, nor what was done before in those classes. But I say to myself not "This is a dream," but "This is just like the dream I often have," so there's no profit from having had the dream before. I look through my shoulder bag, SURE that my class schedule must be there, and see that at 11 am Friday I have an elaborate title that turns out to be gym, but I can't THINK what I'd done in gym before: Did I swim? Basketball? Enjoy the showers and nudity? Then I see that algebra is on Monday. I've NEVER done homework in that. Can I pass the test by the logic of algebra alone? Where have I been? I find the schedule and then lose it again, walking across campus to my next class.
SECOND, seemingly connected with the first, I'm confronted by six burly nude males in the tight quarters of what I know to be shop from which the clerks have left for lunch. Dennis, somehow, is in command of them, and their purpose is to "teach me a lesson," though whether it's to go to class regularly, not to look at the cocks in the shower, or something beyond the first dream I'm not sure of. They move out of the back room in which they'd had me cornered and I can get past them, to see Dennis lounging by the doorway across the street, and they try to terrify me by taking someone else they want to "teach" and encircle his head with their beefy arms, and then one fellow comes up and claps his hands together about the head so quickly and strongly that the black-haired skull pops and vanishes off the body like a balloon. "VERY effective treatment," I think nervously, and then I'm across the street, with Dennis still lounging, now beside me, and see that it's after 2 pm and the clerks have returned to the store and the naked roughnecks have gone, and that I don't have anything to worry about anymore, except that now the vagrant thought passes through my mind that I'll STILL have to attend whatever classes I had missed, that I STILL had to continue with my life though I wasn't being taught the lesson they and Dennis thought I so much needed. Wake at 8:15, pleased to remember so clearly the two dreams.
6/23/76
The first part was some craziness about someone cupping someone in their body and ACTING as a horse, and BECOMING a horse, and someone crawling with someone else above them or clinging beneath them, sex with Guy and Dennis, I guess. The second part was marvelously clear: I was sitting in a restaurant, facing the back wall and stairway, when Jim Crane comes down (since I met him on June 12th, not TOO long ago?), recognizes me, and drops a whole bunch of tickets, richly decorated. It turns out that he gets all sorts of free offers from various theaters and entertainments, and he tells me how to get them, and I feel grateful for having met him (and when I wake up I AGAIN wonder if he might not have been gay). I wanted to write this down, but didn't, and then when Dennis and I were having SEX, I got the VISION of the first part of the dream, which I'd forgotten, but I seemed to remember that this sort of dream recollection had happened before, and the feeling of feeling that this has happened before has happened before, and before I knew it I was toiling through the coils of ribbons of events wrapped tightly around pencils to form a spring, which when unwound would cross each of many other segments at strange places, looping back to them when they crossed, like detours out of the regular linear path of time, and I tried to explain the whole picture and concept to Dennis, but was too stoned (and he might have been too uninterested) to listen and I to talk, so I just figured that I could let him read some of the pages that I'd typed in the past about that very feeling of "having done it before" leading into an incredible rush of memories and feelings of déjà vu so strong that it spoke for some sort of cosmic unification rather than of quirks of memory. But since I am, in a sense, only my memory, if THAT has a quirk, then the fabric of TIME---the only dimension along which memory can work---must perforce have the same quirk and folds and doublings-back. It seems clear as I write it, but I fear that once the idea has eluded my memory, reading these pages may not bring it back, only the feeling of clarity contrasted with the obscurity I would then feel would make the "having written" of these pages at all worthwhile.
7/7/76
This wasn't the time; actually it was probably June 28, but I thought it was AFTER July 1, since I'd kept the diary well up to date UNTIL then, so it was probably SOMETIME in July, early, so the second is the FIRST possible time. I'm on the roof of an old wooden building which had once been an elegant hotel by the sea, which was now fallen into disrepair. I can see parts of a white-painted wooden medallion at the center of the roof, but the most impressive view is downward. There, straight down, is a sandy beach that looks black in the darkness, broken only by torches pushed into the sand around coffins somberly arrayed on the beach. The sands are perfectly smooth, and as a wave washes over some of the coffins, I can see that the tide is coming in and that the hotel was really built right on the edge of the sea. Another tide comes in, washing away torches, coffins, and some of the black-robed mourners who were majestically parading down to the waves with candles in their hands. Another foamy wave comes in, and the beach has been swept clean. I'm impressed with the vividness of the night vision in this, and by the fact that I've remembered it so clearly even so many days away. There was something else connected with it that I forgot, something about the resort that I'd seen before, walking over sidewalks up to hotels and casinos and shops and restaurants in an all-white town that just MUST be Yalta, or some such, in the Crimea: memories of movies and pictures of that area have just the right air of decay, whiteness, and seedy gentility about them. Maybe I'll come across the real resort one day and say "THIS is where all those dreams of mine have been taking place." With the idea of death and being washed away there was nothing NEGATIVE in the dream; the cleanness of the sand, the strength of the hotel, the magnificence of the view from the top were all more impressive than the images of death and transience. Possibly it was prefiguring the Boehme book, since it makes much of moving with the motion of time, the fire of life, and voluntarily dying in order to keep up with the flow, free yourself from the evil of the world, and reunite with the goodness and eternality and bliss of the Godhead.
7/12/76
I'm sitting in a breakfast nook that I don't recognize, but there's Mom and Grandma and a man who's a combination of two Edwards, my father and my uncle. The man's wearing, over some sort of shirt---I can't see below the waist---a black, thin-strapped sequined dress, and I say it looks good on him, did he get it from Mom or Grandma, and they get mad because they say it's obviously too big to have been gotten from THEM. I shout back that I can't see all of it, and that I just was trying to be kindly. Mom shouts back that I have to be responsible for HALF of the family, and I get a TERRIBLE feeling of being hemmed in (and I do NOW, when I think about it), and I say I'll be BACK when dinner's ready. She says something about it NEVER being ready if she has anything to do with it. I come back with the notion that I'll raid the refrigerator, and the door seems smaller than before, and newer and whiter, and I open it to find a SMALL storage area surrounded with thick white walls, and a round-edge molded freezer compartment. "What's THIS?" I demand, and Mom pulls on the freezer door and a HUGE mass comes out, shaped rather like the central motor on Indian busses, which has the machinery inside, as on the busses, but there are little doors and compartments for stuff to be frozen, and around the side are racks that are filled with jars and packages and canned goods, some of which bump over the retaining rails and spread frost over the floor, so violently did Mom pull it out. "This WORKS," she shouts, since our old one didn't, so well, I guess, and I'm still mad. But the impression of "having to support half the family" really got to me. Grandma's now back in a nursing home at $30 a day---so for three years that'll be over $30,000---and Mom's living off what she saved and taking MANY trips, so that'll be going fast, and she's about to sell the house, so she'll have to start paying for rent, and it looks as if no one's going to have ANYTHING after awhile, Not that I ever PLANNED on legacies from anyone, but it would have been a nice surprise to have come into, say, $10,000 that I could invest in the stock market and get SOMETHING that I could leave the country with if we ever caved in for good.
7/22/76
SWIMMING IN NYC
I walk out the side door of a pavilion and find people swimming in the Hudson River. Small section here, but larger section out the next door, with families encamped in the sand, kids screaming, and muscle boys posing in the water. Pleased that there's such a nice place right in the city, and surprised that I hadn't heard about it before. Wonder where it IS, and after following people to a breakpoint, decide to follow kids down the LOWER hallway, and find that there's a flight of stairs at the end that joins it with the UPPER hallway, so it makes no difference (rather reminds me, now, of the various exits from the Coney Island subway station). Out in the dark street to see the Empire State Building glowing from below, and I think it's 72nd Street, but it's 102nd, or something, so I walk down to the express station at 96th, passing kids riding horses; Gypsy kids, I know; in a large vacant lot, lit only by the red-flare torches that they hold in their hands. I'm happy that they and the horses can have this exercise, but I'm slightly puzzled why I didn't know this large field existed before. Then I'm inside a gym somewhere, I assume near the "Manhattan Beach," and I'm sitting on the stairs (it looks rather like the inside of a Japanese temple: dim, silent, furniture-less) looking into the room, and some fabulous shirtless muscle builder turns around before me and I can see the muscles of his legs and ass tanly glowing through the sheer black crepe of his poured-on trousers, more beautiful and perfectly proportioned than any drawing could be. Someone else joins him with a see-through black mesh T-shirt on, and they caress gently just inside the doorway, and I'm both pleased and frustrated that two such beautiful men should love each other, as evidenced by their smoozling gentility. Others come out and join them from a more brightly lit inner room, and they're all hands and acceptance, and I wake from the dream not KNOWING it was a dream, but appreciating the beauty of the dream anyway. If such nice things happen when I get to bed reasonably early (1 am) and don't smoke, I'll do that more often. And now a final sentence to get this page through the last line at the very bottom.
8/11/76
The VERY morning I complain to Dennis that I seldom have sensuous dreams when I have sex so often---not having had sex for awhile---I have a dream of a male body. First, a group of guys come over to my place about 1 pm, and I say they're very lucky, because we'd just gotten back from "All the President's Men," which we'd gone to the first showing of this Sunday morning, and if we hadn't been there, it would have served them right for not phoning before they came over. Then Stephen Waite was driving a car to my place on Dietz, and he drove into a gas station to get some gas. Somehow, from the death seat to the back seat, I was naked with another guy in the back seat: I was sitting leaning over to the front seat, idly watching out the front window, seeing nothing, and playing with my cock. The other guy was seemingly sitting on the exhaust tunnel, leaning against the side of the car, so that he could look across my legs and possibly see my semi-erection, so I stopped and put my arms up so that he wouldn't see it. But somehow I thought maybe he had, and maybe he would be annoyed with it if he were straight. Then, inadvertently, I found that I was playing with his genitals; when I discovered that, I stopped with embarrassment. But then I felt, in the tangle of bodies not quite touching in the back seat, that he was playing with ME, and it seemed OK to reach back to him and press on his bulb, and I received an answering pulsation from inside him, so I knew it was agreeable and began playing with him in earnest. His legs went from BELOW my knees to ABOVE my knees, with his legs in the air, and I began to run my hands up his legs, which were somewhat edematous, feeling the extraordinarily cushiony flesh as it came together almost at right angles where his thighs met, but above them was a nice cock and balls, and I ran my hands up his MARVELOUSLY smooth, blackly haired, and gently muscled midsection, thinking this was going to turn out rather well, and looked at his face for the first time to see a one-day growth of beard on a thin, attractive Italian face with some tiny red pimples on it. But then Stephen leaned over from the front seat and said to him, "You're a colorist, I hear?" After his acquiescence, he said, "I'd like to present my signature to them for framing and hanging on their wall, would you color it for me?" And he reached an idle hand into the nest of genitals as I woke up, having dreamed this between 10:20 and 10:35 am this morning.
8/24/76
CRUMBLING TEETH
Just after a "typical" elevator dream of, as I remember, Friday, where a custodial fellow who was waving to his friends through the grillwork that permitted us to see outside the elevator as it rose in the slant-sided building (as if 5 W. 57th had altar screens for sloping sides), and when the elevator got higher and higher it swayed back and forth until even the custodian said that it should probably be fixed, though the dream ended before we got REALLY panicked, I have the SECOND typical dream: that of my teeth crumbling. I'm sitting studying or working somewhere and keep sucking at the middle of my lower left jaw, where a substance that feels rather like the crumbly stuff they use for temporary fillings keeps rising from a tooth as I keep sucking it away. When I remove the slimy mucoid substance from my mouth, I can see small solid inclusions that look like tooth braces, or even more like the very thin edges of teeth that have been almost totally drilled away to add fillings. I touch my upper right jaw with my tongue and feel a whole insubstantial mass up there, and then I tongue it out of my mouth, it contains something like a wire temporary bridge. I put it down on a tabletop to examine it, and more substance falls free, until I'm extracting large handfuls of rotten teeth, fragments of good teeth, and masses of metal work that even in the DREAM I begin to doubt came from my mouth: large metal plates like from some machinery, with bolt holes and flanges cut to fit their housing. I can feel only the stubble of teeth left in my mouth, and I panic because "it's really happened at last," and I have a sinking feeling that I'll have to put in a whole half-plate to fix the damage. I think I wake then, knowing it's a dream, but then doze back off to have another fragment of a dream where I'm reading a magazine in a crowded dentist's outer office and the nurse comes out to offer free "Aim treatments" that no one responds to, and she shakes her head and smiles and says "You won't even do what's good for you when it's free" and then calls someone like Mr. Goldberg, who's sitting next to me, to say that it's his appointment, and he seems reluctant to lay down his newspaper and go into the inner office. I look at him mildly, glad that it's not my turn yet.
9/15/76
SCHOOL
Vaguely remember something short from yesterday in which a bunch of kids are on an amusement park ride that looks like an airplane with variable length struts beneath each wing, and the ride consists of the struts being pushed in and out to make the plane flop from side to side, causing the kids and people inside to scream with delight and terror at the jolts and twists. Today, I'm enrolled in some sort of summer school in a large old Victorian building, and it sounds like the school would have a name like Sarah Lawrence, or some such snobby northeastern prestigious name. I'm thinking that the classes are going to be a bore, and they go on for some time, while I and others discuss the rationale of what's being taught. There's none of my frustration or forgetfulness, and I remembered quite a bit of it when I got out of bed that I've forgotten by now, 10 minutes later. There was some sort of survey to be filled out, concerning personal history, reason for taking the course, decisions made after taking the course, and I remember that lots of the questions simply didn't apply, so I left a fair number of blanks. Then the male teacher in the class, someone rather like Don Altschuler from est, was trying to convince us that we should take more classes for our own benefit, and we just laughed. "How many are planning on taking more classes?" he asked cheerfully, and no one raised his hand. He asked a couple more questions that we all laughed at, and then he said "Well, how many left 10 or more blanks on the questionnaire?" and about half the class raised their hands. "Well, anyone like THAT would benefit from more classes," he said brightly, and we chorused our laughter the louder. Then he turned to the board and said, "Now the difference between unhappiness and normality deals with"---and he started writing on the board---"the homosexual problem of"---and I IMMEDIATELY turned off, because he linked the words "homosexual" and "problem" in a way that implied his bias against that state, his lack of understanding of that state, and my refusal to think of homosexuality as a problem. Woke JUST at that point at 9:15, and here I am finishing this page at 9:28, and all my journal work should be completed so nice and promptly.
9/29/76
HIPPIE TRAVEL
[Just when I thought I might NEED a dream for September, here it came!]
I'm in a crowded car, willing to drive, and I don't recall looking OUTSIDE the car until we stop to visit a commune for lunch. There are people all over the place, sitting on stairs, getting a stew dipped out of a tureen to eat, napping anywhere they can find room. There are two people who want to join us, and I can't really see who they are, but I feel that I can't decide if we have room in the car or not. Someone tells me that we have 8 in the car already, and I think it must be very wide, since I'm not crowded in the front seat, but then I AM driving, so I'm not sure I can tell. I play with the thought that someone else can drive and that I can sit in the back, and there's the definite idea that the MALE of the pair could sit in my lap and save a lot of room in the back. The colors are nicely pastel, but I don't remember eating, nor can I ever remember eating in a dream at all. There's a nice sense of togetherness and understanding among all the people, and it's tranquil and silent because there are no children crying or getting dirty anywhere around. I don't remember ANYTHING from outside and at this point I don't remember anything more about the dream except that when I woke at the alarm (which I don't think ENDED the dream) at 7:30, I felt that it was QUITE long and episodic, and that I'd have no trouble writing a page, thankful that I hadn't had grass last night. The room felt rather stuffy from being closed, fairly humid, but still chilly with low temperatures, and it's possible that various feelings of heat, cold, and being crowded in the bed generated the bases for the feelings in the dream. I asked Dennis if HE dreamed much when he smoked, but he said he didn't know, but reported that HE'D had a dream of travel, too, but travel to another planet, where the people were quite like us. I asked him whether they were sexy, but he either didn't hear my question or chose not to answer. But he said that his dream was interrupted by the alarm, and I said that I must have been sleepy, because ordinarily I wake up before the alarm rings and shut it off, but this time it DEFINITELY had to ring to wake me.
10/14/76
SEX
I'm in a huge room with lots of people, rather like the beginning of a new torture-race from Marathon 33, who are lining up for some sort of movement around the place. When it's time to go (rather like the feeling at the end of the Halloween party at the church in Brooklyn Heights), I find that I have misplaced my shorts, the little plastic container of grass, my pants, and my shoes. I feel good that I have my socks, since they're black and no one will know I'm not wearing shoes. The grass loss is OK, since someone may have gotten pleasure out of it by smoking it, but I'm concerned about my pants---my shorts would be covered by them anyway. I'm thinking that my shirt might pull down low enough, but when I evaluate the crotch, I find that I have Dennis's cock, which dangles far below the shirt, so I HAVE to cover myself up before going out. Dennis is there, looking lost and puzzled about the whole thing. Then, somehow, transition-less, I'm in the front of a crowded car, I suppose leaving the party, and my hand is resting gently on the thigh of the person next to me, in the middle of the front seat, and he's quite cute, allowing my hand to rest there, and then I "casually" move it to his crotch and feel him getting hard, and I turn to look at his smiling lips and know that everything's going to be fine, and reach my arms around him and start gently kissing him. His cock grows down his leg, and I know there's no backing out, the contact has been made, and everything will be going smoothly when I wake up. Try to get back to sleep, but I can't, and I'm not even away from my lovely orgasm on Friday night to be horny enough to have an erection, so there's no real conflict when I wake. Figure that not smoking grass for the past two nights put me into this dream position, and like remembering so much of it. Put down just the scantiest notes in the notebook, but I can remember most of the feelings and details from them. Didn't see who was driving or who was in the back seat of the car, but there was a feeling of cheerful permissiveness that seems to be lacking in New York but existing in most of the other places that I visit, making myself feel somewhat paranoid and restrictive in comparison.
12/17/76
RIVER CROSSING; MORE ACTUALISM
I'm walking in a sort of desert-land with Arnold Bernstein and, surprise, Arnie FISHMAN, looking just about the same, though we're all dressed just one step toward civilization from safari outfits. Fishman slops into a river running past, desert boots and all, and I hang around the shore protesting that I don't want to get my feet wet: there'd been a small plane in trouble streaking low across the sky, and a puff of smoke from some long distance away, and I can remember saying "You don't even know if the plane crashed in this STATE." But they're across and I'm walking back and forth like a caged tiger on the near shore, wondering what I'm going to do.
The SECOND part of the dream was totally convincing: Dennis was taking a puff of grass on the edge of HIS bed and looked up at me with his hurt eyes, his mouth working and then pursing in sickness, and then he can't sit any more and he gets up and goes into MY bathroom and leans over the sink to throw up, and I walk slowly after him, not wanting to make him feel uncomfortable, but wanting to sympathize with him and let him know that I don't mind that he's sick. Wake with the VIVID memory of it, amused that I'd not dreamed through the week that I DIDN'T smoke, but the first time BACK smoking I had these DREAMS!
FORGOTTEN FROM ACTUALISM #5 (DIARY 11501): the handwork was to concentrate on the spleen and get rid of the DROSS from the bombarding incoming experiences, saving only what would benefit the Being, and then to the liver to help things flow THROUGH the body and OUT through the liver, with the hands on the solar plexus, the nerve center, to balance the flow of input and outflow. I laughed and said that THIS lesson started being appropriate on Saturday, when I drew the picture of every arrow coming IN on me in the androgyny class, and for Dennis undergoing the data bombardment which is the second weekend of est. Bruce laughed and said it DID seem appropriate. Then did the handwork on Dennis and too late knew that he'd WANT to do it on me even if I didn't CARE if he did, and his disappointment was so palpable that I wanted to gather his sad body in my arms and say that everything was perfectly OK, I love him just the way he was, and he could do it for me if he wanted to---and since he had the intro I suppose I COULD tell him to use the white star, since he's already USED it when he brushed me down AT the intro.
12/31/76
METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE
I know that it's about 8:07 and I'm dashing toward what I remember as the steps of the OLD Metropolitan Opera House, dimly lit under the marquee between 40th and 41st Streets. Since it's a one-time-only super-special performance of something non-operatic (rather like "Einstein on the Beach" I imagine) I'm surprised to hear applause and laughter coming from the house: I'd thought it'd start VERY late. Into a MODERN lobby and a formally dressed usher looks at my ticket (C440 was about the seat number) and points to a tiny elevator which he said should be coming soon, and I get inside and there are three levels in letters like A, G, K, which I don't know, and he reaches inside and pushes the top one, and I figure it MUST be the top or he wouldn't have told me to take the elevator. Out into what reminded me of the back of the OLD Metropolitan Family Circle (though in at the LEFT facing the stage, rather than at the RIGHT, as in the old one), and look up at the seat signs on the wall, and see A and B but no C, and decide it must be on the side, so I go along the side and can't find ANYTHING, and decide I'll have to go INSIDE (oh, forgot that from the LOBBY I saw in through the door what looked like a whole STAGE FLOOR being flown: maybe 50 dancing girls in brightest gold dresses standing on a stage dancing in formation while the STAGE swept gently up and down and back and forth, like the STAGE was a flying Peter Pan being swooped around by wires), and find that it's DAYLIGHT, and we're only on BLEACHERS erected on the SITE of the Metropolitan Opera House (the NEW one, this time), and there are people sitting in folding chairs looking at the stage, but I can't see anything going on anymore, so it must be over. Look at the people and some of them look at me, and then I'm caught up with the wonder of where I am: ruined buildings around, like before some huge public-works construction job in a whole neighborhood, and I recognize a few of the walls from old school buildings in the neighborhood, and grassy plots and trees where houses used to be (rather like that abandoned town above the Massena locks in Canada with Larry, where we bathed in the street), and I'm surprised that someone like Robert Wilson had the wit to build the bleachers and put on a show at the site of the old building, and I wasn't sorry to have missed it at all.