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DREAMS FROM 1977

DREAMS FROM 1977

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.

1/1/77

FEMALE PERFORMER

Smoke only a half a lungful before sleeping, and have no trouble dozing off, so that gives me a chance to dream: I'm sitting in a large auditorium, full, though it might be more a school gymnasium or someplace like the YMHA on 92nd than a Broadway theater, and there are two women onstage singing, by request. But the woman on the right quickly takes over with some song that she ruins, everyone applauds politely and I'm hoping it'll soon be over, and then she does "her" rendition of a song whose title I don't hear, but it turns out to be "Ave Marie---YA" where the "Marie" is on the right note and the "YA" is thrown in an octave higher, incorrectly both stylistically AND in accuracy, and she sort of smiles as if knowing she didn't do it well and says "I know there's supposed to be two people singing, but I thought I'd try it that way." There's some sort of acceptance of her anyway, and someone near me says "And she's not even wearing any slip, panties, or bra," and onstage she suddenly stands with a swoop and her white night-robe falls open to show that, indeed, she has nothing on underneath AND she's showing two large, well-formed tits complete to nipples that look rouged and a tiny modest area of pubic hair that's almost demure under the nicely proportioned curves of stomach. She tries to make it seem an accident, but I know that it was all carefully planned, and actually it's not bad: she's rather old in the face, but she's probably had silicone treatments for her breasts, since they stand out, apart, and up so nicely, with so many various curves and pleasantly rounded masses to break up the ovoid conoids. They push apart the edges of her robe, she walks around the stage as if in a flurry of confusion, then strides down the aisle and starts pushing her way through the row behind me, and I'm happy that she didn't take MY row so I wouldn't be directly confronted with those tits looming above me as I sat, or her cunt hairs uncomfortably close to my face as she'd push past. There's a slight amount of astonishment in the audience, but it's almost like a Florence Foster Jenkins performance; everyone knew it would be some sort of parody and came expecting it, and were just as happy that they actually got it. The End.

1/7/77

LUXURIOUS HOUSE

I'm the guest in a new, spacious, VERY modern house made up mostly of levels (and I remember thinking in Star Trek last night that they had some difficulty designing a MODERN house, still having to keep things like tables and chairs and windows and draperies). I'm standing on some sort of semi-balcony (in that it's only about 4 feet above the floor) over a seating pit, and the décor is stark, mostly with seats in black and the walls in white, with tables and frames and touches of chromium framing. Then I'm in the bathroom, and my host (who's a good friend, but I don't know who he is, and I'm reminded when I talked to Arnie we talked about San Diego being such a friendly gay town, and there's the "feel" that this is a good friend of mine in San Diego, but not Dennis) shows me that he has two, and I volunteer to use the very tiny guest one, but I have to piss and find that the urinal is in a leather pouch hanging on the wall, which I shake to find it's a chemically operated one, so I figure NOT to use it when I don't HAVE to, and go next door to use the john, which now I think looks rather like the john at Art's newly designed place. Then I'm into a bedroom and my kindly host suggests that the guy on the bed is very friendly, and I sort of move around the room at a height, looking down at him, and he's tanned and muscled and lying there seductively with his eyes closed, though I don't remember any cock. Then I'm on the bed making the most gentle overtures to him, and he's responding in a pleasant way, and that's all there was to the dream. I'm NOW reminded of the spacious openness of Carl Spring's house in Stanford, too, and there's no doubt, from the openness and the SELF-CONTAINEDNESS of the house that it's in California, though I'm NOW reminded that I got the letter from Carl and Henry from THEIR new spacious house in Michigan, too, so there were a lot of influences on the dream, even though I didn't consciously use the est thing of WANTING to remember the influences on the dreams, there are certainly a lot of them, including the ad for the floor-through apartment I read about in the Phoenix for $250 that I sort of thought would get a lot of responses. But it was a comfortable dream, in pleasant contrast to my WORK now!

2/24/77

SCRAMBLE DOWN CLIFF TO BOARD SHIP

The CLARITY of the dream was totally staggering: all the edges were sharply in focus, all the colors were true-to-life, all the situations were totally believable. I was in an office about 3 pm and knew that I had to get to "the coast" to take a ship. I was some sort of executive, and my tickets were handed to me in a wallet with my other arrangements. Without transition, I was standing on a cliff watching the ship churning into a dock straight below me, white foam curling to follow the curve of the ship as it nosed into shore. It looked like a full-scale model of the tiny metal ship I had as a small child. Then a stream of people were lowering themselves on ropes and pulleys right beside me, and I thought, "If they can do it, so can I," so I grabbed a rope and swung myself out among them, only to have the blue cardboard canister under my right arm fall down among the scrambling people. I stared down, one hand on a rope, one foot on a small ledge, and watched as the blue cylinder fell in slow motion while I hoped it would miss everyone. It didn't. It struck (but it couldn't have been very heavy) a climber about 20 feet below me and he fell in terrible slow motion, but with a finality that I knew was fatal. I felt that I had to own up to it, but I heard someone behind me saying "How awful it is, and I was carrying that." Well, since someone ELSE was willing to take responsibility for dropping it, I certainly wasn't going to contradict him! Then, instantly, I had boarded the ship, and the tableau again was one of striking verisimilitude: aged grand dames in cocktail dresses faintly faded stood behind wooden desks to welcome me abroad, and one stood by ready to show me about the ship. I turned to move off with her, and it seemed she did a crazy dance step rather like something Marie Dressler would do, and then I woke up with a CLEAR, VIVID picture of all parts of the dream, running through all the images and clarifying the scenes so that I'd be able to write it down, even though it wouldn't be until after 11:15 PM and I woke at about 7:25 AM to move the clock into the light of the electric-blanket control and moved into the bathroom to take a leak and have a drink of water (that I spilled under the bed as I got up with Dennis to work at 7:15 am; STRANGE days!

3/4/77

INDEXING AND SEMINARY

I jot down a note about a fragment of SOMETHING about indexing---looking at three entries or subentries on a page and being pleased with the way they worked out, knowing that whoever had to check it would be pleased too. Then I'm in a very informal seminary (how I know it's a seminary I don't know, but there's never the feeling that I might be wrong in dreams: since I'm creating my own universe, if I SAY it's a seminary, it IS a seminary!), where the people don't dress like priests, and I get the feeling that the person I meet either IS Teilhard de Chardin or I'm in a place that is LIKE the place he was in, or I'm still influenced by reading his "Letters to Two Friends" that I finished way back on February 15, just two weeks ago. I'm standing in a crowded "hobby" or "recreation" room with tables littered with stuff all around, walls heavily used for hanging tools, and the oddly angled walls contain a number of doors past which busy men pass, and I know they're the other people of this building, and that I'm not one of them, only sort of an observer, or maybe a reporter or interviewer. There's a free-standing set of shelves with carpenter's tools on them, a TV set that I search for the schedule for, and a feeling of genial clutter. One graying fellow, old but active, comes in and out (as if he'd like to stay longer, but more urgent duties take him elsewhere) and urges me to be comfortable. I'm in a special place, I know, but I AM comfortable and unquestioning; I know that when the time comes for him to talk with me, he will, and my job will be done and I can leave the place and get on with my business. There's no sense that I would like to STAY there (a nice place to visit, but not to live), and though it's not CULTURALLY active, the people who are there are content with what they have. The FEELING I had there is still attainable through memory, though I had to be reminded of the TV set through my notes. That wasn't a very important part of the whole feeling: the main thing was that here was a place that people ordinarily engaged with the MIND could come to relax by engaging with their HANDS, and it felt good to me to know the benefits that this room were giving to the dwellers in the seminary. (Gee, does this mean I can read books without feeling guilty about it?)

3/5/77

SURF IN FOREIGN LAND

Not having smoked, I dreamed. Lots of images of simple native women, tiny and brown, standing around waiting to be trained in the movie or stage show that's being produced, and everyone marveling at their unstudied grace and glamour. Then, in this same foreign land, I'm on a precipice in the moonlight looking down over the ocean, and it's rolling with a tremendous swell into a cove just in front of me, and when I edge forward to look over, it seems that the whiteness isn't of sand, but of water-washed edges of snow and ice falling precipitously to the rocks below, invisible under the constant wash of the enormous waves. The sound tells when they're coming, and the interference at the mid-shore sometimes cancels the next wave so that there's a moment of calm for the moon to reflect on, then the surface is violently broken as the next wave crashes in with its veils of foam and spray caught in its hair. I edge back along the narrow path leading to my vantage point, and then I'm in an old hotel that's been taken over by the Production crew, and I'm in an elevator that's going up to my room so that I can dress for the final dinner. People in the elevator with me worry about the rickety mechanism and the door. but I fold the door back and there's a candlelit dining room with most of the men and women sitting in elegance around the table. I'm wearing a white Indian-style shirt, and I see that the four or five of us at MY end of the table are going to be all in white shirts, opposed to the colored shirts at the other end of the table, and I smile at some secret joke. There are a few other confused segments with the immobile faces of the Hawaiian or Thai or Burmese women, but there was never any definite sensation of WHAT it was that was being produced, or exactly what I had to do with it. But the sense of FOREIGNNESS was overpowering, as was the sense of tranquility from the maidens, whom we know would go back to their usual life when we left, totally untouched by this invasion of technology that we at least didn't bring to the candlelit dinner to celebrate the completion of the project. Lovely blue-whites in the moon and yellow-green-browns in the dining room, and the sounds of the surf were shockingly real.

4/5/77

WORKING AT IBM

Rhoda whines in the night, Dennis pulls the covers off me a number of times, and each time I wake with the memory of what seems to be part of the same hours-long dream: it's my first day of work back at IBM, and I don't quite know what's been changed and what I'm supposed to do. First there's the gentle flack from a secretary who has to deal with time cards, telling us at about 9:45 that we should have been there at 9. Then I'm sitting in an array of desks with Frank Gracer in front of me and others that I remembered in the dream but forget now beside me, but I can't find anything I need to work with. Next I'm going down a VERY long narrow staircase between two parts of the building (obviously influenced by my irritation both recent nights of being held up by slow people ahead of me going down the stairs from the subway platform to Dyckman Street), and I'm amazed that it's so narrow that both my hips touch both sides of the stairway, and I wonder how others can make this journey. In the next segment we're moved to another office, and the array of desks are neater (and surely my concern about the letters shows here: there was a letter about time cards and a letter about moving offices), but still I don't seem to know what I'm supposed to do. Ask Dennis this morning what he thinks about me going back to work for IBM, and he doesn't say anything, saying that it's my life and not his, but he's noted in his diary that our sex isn't as great anymore, without laying it to the fact that with him getting up at the 7:30 alarm, there's not much TIME for leisurely getting into sex (regardless of whether it's without grass), as we had Sunday, for instance, when we HAD sex. I can't really say I look forward to working there, but the thought of transferring to World Trade looms up again: I would like to travel, and traveling as an IBM employee would certainly be a DYNAMITE way of getting lots of money THERE and having saved lots of money HERE, and it would be worth waiting for for a year or more if it could happen and take me to Tokyo at company expense, for instance. But getting back into the routine of getting up EVERY morning M-F and going to work on those awful SUBWAYS would be poor---would I move back to be near WORK? Now THAT'S a possibility, maybe EVEN, somewhat later than Pope's prediction, buying a co-op so that any move would have to be at IBM's expense, not MINE. All SORTS of changes would come about if I DID go back to IBM: HEY, one step at a time!!

4/11/77

RICHNESS AND LOSS

I was in a bus going to some rich woman's place (like Rebekah Harkness or Doris Duke) who had a penchant for beautiful people and decadent dance, and as I arrived I found that the dance on the open-air stage had started: three women in emerald-green satin dresses were twisting their hips into an imitation of Christ's photogenic slump on "Jesus of Nazareth" last night. The audience seemed humpy through the doorway that looked like the door to the tomb on the same program, but I looked around to the men's room (like in the elevator lobby yesterday) and wondered if I should stand in line, and found that I was third in a line of about 10, so I stayed. When I entered, the toilet seat could be lifted like the plunger that fits into the drain in the toilet stand, and painted on it in perfect Red Grooms style was a woman's face with bright staring eyes and a protruding red tongue, catching whatever would drop past it. [DETAILED DRAWING] Then inside to sit on picnic-like benches (after urinating carefully between the insert and the bowl) with cute guys, and then we were on the backs of flatbed trucks going somewhere, and some of the bodies from Man's Country on Friday were there, which I caressed and sucked on with glee. Without transition I seemed to be in a large lecture hall where some kind of one-page psychological test had just been given. People had left during the first intermission, so there were more tests to evaluate than people there, but I said I did NOT have test C11 (from the 11th seat in the third row) because I had A-something (this from searching for the proper mailbox yesterday for Peffer, who wanted her mail brought up, but Dennis did it), but then I turned over a spiral notebook with a rubber band around it that held C11 to the back of it, but I wanted to keep THAT and find the one I should have, but I kept turning over all the papers and books and bags that I had, but couldn't find it. Before being TERRIBLY frustrated, I said to myself, "No use getting concerned, it's only a dream," and I woke up. Dennis Zenned me one better by saying that "All LIFE is just a dream," and I lay for a bit thinking of letters, taxes, indexes, IBM, and letters to people before I decided I was doing NOTHING about them THEN, so why worry about them? But PART of the dream said to me, "THAT is what would happen if you worked for IBM!" But I consoled myself that I really HAD to work there for only THREE MONTHS!

4/18/77

AMA DABLAM

Many references to the experiences of the day: the scene in "Where's Poppa" where they're driving speedily up to the rest home and the nurses have to push the elderly out of the way; the announcement of Guy's exhibit at the Union League Club, with an illustration of Bierstadt's picture of a humped mountain; and general ideas of traveling. I'm riding in a luxurious bus (also ideas from "Concrete Island," that I'm reading) down a narrow highway through ancient countrysides, and the natives are being whirled about by the winds of our passage, some even appear to be tipped into the countryside by being clipped by the bus. But the driver barrels on, and I can see through the window that we're coming to what I know to be Ama Dablam, across a huge lake surrounded by trees. Before, in the dream, I'd had the somewhat typical sight of what looked to be a three-dimensional map that gradually increased to become what I knew to be "Eastern and Western Europe," and then the ground revolved eastward below me (so that I was going COUNTER to the direction the sun would appear to take "in going around the earth") and I knew I was either in lower Russia, upper China, or possibly somewhere near Tibet. I'm pleased to be getting there, and we're roaring through the main streets of town, with houses on either side that remind me of the Potola, and the bus draws to a quivering stop at the lakeside. Then I'm in the hotel, being escorted by a smiling boy who knows no English (no one does, everything is by understandable sign language), and I'm sorry to look out the huge picture window to see that clouds on the lake have blocked the sight of the mountain (or the mountain's gone), like the clouds shown in "Brewster McCloud." He shows me to a balcony on which is a cot covered with rich woolen-work, indicating that that's my bed. By coincidence, Dennis ALSO had a dream of staying in a commune house in which he had to hide his nakedness because there were no partitions between the bedrooms. I return to the window, where a storm is coming up across the lake (like in the book "In a Shallow Grave"), and I'm hoping to see the mountain, but the hotel is nicely old-fashioned, the people are quite elegant, and I have the feeling I'm in a very special place, and feel special being there.

4/18/77

WORKING AT IBM

This was far more pleasant than my PREVIOUS dream about it: I had lots of time to get there, I knew where I was going, and the elevators MAY have given me a problem, but they went smoothly: even the two people in front of me on folding chairs (which I thought was curious even in the dream) got off on the floor I wanted to get off on, and I found myself in a divided space where 1/3 the area was occupied by soloists and a chorus doing something like a Handel oratorio, and I thought "What a pleasant way to work!" Susan McMahon was there, and some other people I knew, and I joined them and we talked about my new job, saying that IBM was surely in the forefront of employee contentment. There was a shadowy section before this, too, about a performance of some kind, that involved an enormous naked black man with a shaved head, looking somewhat like James Earl Jones, dancing about a smaller figure behind, and the figure was supposed to RIDE on him (I guess this came from "Concrete Island," too), so the black did a spread on the floor, arms and legs as wide apart as possible, and I could see when he raised himself slightly off the floor that his small genitals were dangling free, and I hoped that the stage floor was clean. Then he raised himself in the rear, and I was glad that that gaping ass was facing toward the back of the stage rather than the front, because it would be very difficult to make that in any way esthetically pleasing. The smaller person in back began to mount, but I don't remember any more of that shadowy segment of the dream. I wanted to jot down some notes about both dreams before breakfast this morning, but I figured I'd be getting to typing so soon, and the images were so vivid, that I wouldn't forget them, but I think there were a few more sections of this dream that have been lost because of the intervening 3 hours between the dream and the writing, and if I want to record these thoroughly, I'll have to write them down to insure I won't forget them. I now remember that page in the past about Werner that I didn't finish, and I'm typing like crazy, know that I only have a few more lines to do, just to get finished completely to the bottom of the page and fill it up with all these extremely neat words.

4/20/77

MORE TRAVELING

A. Traveling on a plane that turns into a bus with maps of where we are NOW pasted on the windows, opaque on the left, translucent and SLIGHTLY transparent on the right (and I JUST NOW connect the TRAVEL with the LIGHTWORK lesson of last night!) where I'm sitting. Woman ahead on the left has a route map of the US, with each flight marked with the MOVIE that's being shown that day, and I marvel at the new system of communication that allows such a map. She remarks (she's like a stewardess traveling to the airport in an airport limousine) that she'll be seeing a certain title (that I've forgotten) on her flight this evening. I think of my trip on the Greyhounds.

B. Traveling with my FATHER in a car from east to west across the United States, and going south in California into Mexico, but not as far (as I write in my diary looking at a map in the dream) as "Barmapada or Darmapada." (Reflections from reading about Otto and his "mistaken father" in "The Recognitions"?). We sleep in back of gas stations and eat very skimpy meals, but I've slept and eaten and am content to be with him---concerned that he feels OK with me, and looking forward to what adventures we'll have together.

C. I'm on a vacation somewhere with strangers, and a friendly fag sort of looks at me (we seem to be seated four across in a front seat of a car: driver, him, me, and someone who AGREES with him) and he smiles and says, "You're CUTE." I grin and know it (obvious connection with Bruce's talk last night of thinking we're better or worse than we actually are, or not even worth evaluating to see WHERE we'd rate). Then we're standing in line to buy tickets and we get them next to each other, and a butch Arab-type in front of us gets an odd side seat in the balcony, while we climb the stairs beside him [DRAWING] and go into the rear door and there are Indian-fabric-padded little tables and backrests, and I have a last-row seat, he has the seat next to me, saying happily "We have a YOUNG table," and someone cute sits across from me in the third seat, and I recall NOW thinking with appreciation that we have a young good-looking group that I'd like to stay with, as opposed to the woman-dominated, MUCH older-in-general group that comes out on Monday before we go in.

4/20/77

STAGE AND TV PRODUCTIONS

A. Stage production: Women who all looked like Giselle MacKenzie stripped off their suits and dove into the glass-fronted pool to produce a shocked gasp from the audience as they curve up underwater to the surface, baring their breasts. (Breasts courtesy of "Middle of the Night," I would guess)

B. TV production (courtesy "Ladies of the Alamo"). Everyone would KNOW that Ginny Croft would have had trouble with the final dramatic scene in which she reveals she's a lesbian. But she was acting with someone VERY like Judy Sagert, and they kept breaking each other up. They'd try wiping the smiles off their races, smearing their mascara and lipstick, then nudge each other so that helpless grins would spread across their faces. Then they'd attempted to sob again, but again it would turn into a strangled snigger. I was sitting beside them, knowing the camera was on because I could see the pale-blue window reflecting the scene's being shot. At last the unsatisfactory climax came and the planned pan to the extreme tight close-up on the eye of a woman who looked very much like Peggy Meade (from the movie last night, of course), a close-up so tight that the woman sitting next to her could reach up with her finger and thumb and spread her eyelids apart so that the goggling eye remained alone on the screen. I was amused and amazed to find that productions were being done so amateurishly, and awoke. There were lots of other people around, rather like the Ingres painting of the inside of the Turkish harem's bath, but they didn't have much to do with the actions. I wasn't the only male in the scene, but I could sense that they were having troubles with the camera angles (as they did often in last night's "Uncle Vanya" filming). But there wasn't any time at which I felt that I was NOT in a dream, though the colors weren't nearly as vivid as the green of the maps in yesterday's dream, and they were left only with the faded bluish color of "Peggy's" face and the red-veined whites of her eyes that were duplicates of the tired eyes I saw in her face as she went to have something to eat before Dennis and I left her on her own, exhausted, to catch a cab home before getting up early to work the next day in editing.

4/22/77

PROFILES AND CHICKEN EATING

A. Some sort of forgotten fragment about interviewing for some kind of job.

B. Cutting profiles from printed papers or magazines or newspapers and gluing and later Scotch-taping them to larger white backing papers so that I can first DRAW and then actually THROW whipped-cream-topped pies into their faces, studying the flow over the hair and under the chin, but the faces are drawn in almost a caricature manner of elegant women with receding chin lines.

C. In a HUGE auditorium, brightly lit, with an array of maybe 20 by 30 little tables manned by bright young women in waitress uniforms who are giving away free chicken in some sort of promotional deal. I know that it's supposed to be going from 8:30 to midnight, but they run out of the first batch at 10, and I can't quite figure if they'd planned to go through so much so fast (there doesn't seem to be THAT big of a crush in the place), or if they have another batch coming out, but I can't quite figure what portion of the time between 8:30 and midnight the hour of 10 represents. I'm in the middle of a small group, which devolves into two people, and there's a lot of shuffling around by two girls of three aluminum cake-tins filled with roast chicken that are put on and off three wooden breadboards like I have, and it ends that they're serving the guys at either side of me while I take my small carving knife and start hacking away at the Kentucky Fried batter outside the chicken itself to convince myself that I'll free enough so that they'll be able to make me a sandwich of this meat between the soft floppy slices of Wonder Bread that they're using. I vaguely remember it started with baby beef or even pork, carving first from the ribs, tiny, for the best sections, and then getting to the moist and red meat of the rib eye which I thought looked pretty good, too. Suddenly there isn't any more, and the guy on the left goes off with the girl to neck in silhouette against the windows along the side, and I'm at least content that the vapid girl behind the counter knows that I'm next, but then SHE sort of disappears. I'm beginning to think nothing will happen when I'm standing outside as a Japanese businessman walks by the open door, looks in, but can't understand what's going on and walks off looking puzzled while someone next to me observes to me, "It sure helps to know the language," and I feel sorry for the Japanese, and that's the end.

4/23/77

CROWDED ROOMS

Wanted to take notes on it originally, but the day passed and now at 3:30 I feel most of the details have vanished. I was standing in the middle of a room in the middle of the night, but the dim light allowed me to see that every possible space was filled with beds and couches and cots and recliners on which people were sleeping. Amazed, I left to the porch of a frame house and pulled open the screen door to find that the living room of this Middle Western house was similarly crowded: two people blinked up and frowned as they tried to sleep on armless chairs that were little bigger than hassocks, and all around were people propped up in corners to make more room for others on beds and cots. Suddenly I was upstairs with a 10-year-old Gary Vallish rising from his crumpled bed, and I had to do all I could to make him comfortable, so I smoothed out the sheets, aligned the blankets, straightened the mattress, cleared a small space around him in the swamp of papers, clothes, and suitcases of the sleepers around him, and he smiled his gratitude to me and sleepily slumped back down to rest. There was some thought in my mind that it was good that this was only for a few days, but the town should really put together more accommodations for whatever special event (it's linked in my mind, somehow, with the bus-rental letter for the company baseball games that I just finished on Thursday) would bring so many people into a town with so few hotels. But they weren't really miserable because they knew it was temporary, that the townspeople were giving them as much room as they could (I didn't see anyone that I judged to be someone who LIVED in the house), and that they all definitely wanted to BE there. Most of the people were young or teenagers, so it seemed to be some sort of school event, and I remember now having the idea that I could characterize the houses by saying they were FRATERNITY or SORORITY houses like they had at the University of Akron, houses given over almost exclusively to sleeping as it WAS, and now crammed to the physical limits because of some sort of sporting event which would take place the next day and release this mass of humanity to return to their proper homes and comfortable beds the next night.

4/25/77

MORE TRAVEL AND CLEVELAND

A. First fragment of having to get out of Russia, but no details with it.

B. I'm riding on a subway/train with Dennis, looking with pleasure at the last stop in Europe, knowing that the next tunnel will take us under the divide and into Russia, and we stop at a Cyrillic-labeled station that could be "Leningrad," and the people look gratifyingly different, and the buildings visible from behind the station-posts look foreign enough in their gold facades and green roofs and snow-covered Russianness that I say to Dennis "Welcome to Russia," and feel pleased with the whole thing, albeit brief.

C. I seem to leave a station in Cleveland and board a taxi for some sort of sightseeing trip on my way to meet someone. We're riding on a street that I make sure I see to remember, but it's something like Grand Street, Superior, and sure enough we're climbing to ridges of hills, looking down over the city in the lower distance, which has the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in its center, but the houses we're passing are quite beautiful: "Old Lark" is a raw-wood façade in an old style that goes up about 7 floors, but it's been remodeled so that the windows are large, square and modern, and as we pass I look behind to see buttresses holding up the false façade around a tiny room on the top floor that's all there is inside the building. On the other side of the street it looks like Merriman Road, and then we get to connected rowhouses in glowing red brick that's emphasized in the sunset-light by what looks to be Japanese maple tree IVY clinging to the red bricks, and I think how handsome it looks in an angular Frank Lloyd Wright style of architecture with horizontal planes, balconies, and a few lighter or black details of ornamentation. Then we're in a crowded city street, with different-height buildings across the street and a bank of apartments so high that their facades appear to be slipping into the street on the right. I'm shouting "Where are we going?" as we pass a monument to a snake with one head that joins two necks, from the space between which flows a drinking fountain, and the meter reads $6.75 and I shout I'll pay only a dollar when we pick up a woman who stands at my left and a man at my right, child-sized but obviously mature, and we draw up in front of the EMI restaurant, elegant in a Venetian-English way, where I insist on making a phone call. VERY strange and VERY detailed, to a kimono-clad tall American walking on gitas running to get out of our way.

4/25/77

DANCING GIRLS AND SOMETHING ELSE

A. Probably stemming from all the reviews of "Annie" recently, I saw a bunch of little girls in flowery costumes lined up and gyrating to spell out the names of things like "Wonder Woman" or "Springtime" in various appropriate colors. I don't remember any of the words, but they went through about 5 or 6 sets of symbols, some in two lines, all very Busby Berkeley-like, in color.

B. There was something else that took place in a short period of time, of which I remember only the incredible amount of detail, again, and when I woke I figured this would be the LAST dream, and so I would surely remember it, but then I forgot it. Felt good about having dreams from 6 of the 7 nights after Actualism told us to remember the dreams, and will make a list of the salient features to compare them with others. Possibly there's a connection with the fact that I haven't smoked grass now for over a month, but the intensity of the dreams was somewhat slow to build up, and I would think it was ONLY because I was observing them for Actualism now except for the fact that I had strong dreams two days BEFORE the class. The detail involved seems to have increased, the amount of rememberable color has heightened, and the word content is being more clearly remembered. Many of them seem to deal with travel, which is nice, but there was nothing DISTINCTLY connected with any of the phases of lightwork, though traveling in THIS time-space dimension would be pleasant, though there's no idea of VERISIMILITUDE to the dreams: Russia did NOT look like Russia probably looks; with my father I never saw what Mexico was LIKE. Make the list of 8 nights' dreams now, and 4 of them have me traveling somewhere (Tibet, Mexico, Russia/Cleveland, something); 4 are theater/productions (IBM-with-music, theater-India-hangings, TV production, dancing girls), and they're ALWAYS outside my house or apartment, which leads me to think that I'm spending more of my energies OUTSIDE my central self, or central issues, and not going INSIDE enough (though if dreams BALANCE, maybe it means I go inside TOO MUCH, and I dream of outside AS the balancing factor?). But I'm curious if the GROUP dreams anything AS a group (I didn't), or if they have anything like similar themes on the same nights.

5/12/77

ENGLISH WOMAN

I'm in some sort of tour group that's traveling in something like a station wagon in a country that's probably England to a tiny set of houses built around an inner court that's world-famous for some reason. I feel very privileged to be part of the small tour that's going there, and we go through the Tudor front door into a pleasant-enough house, and looking out the back windows I can see a terrace that looks out over a huge depression with some kind of mining operation going on. There's an enormous concrete-block wall down the center of the garden, very high, since the view from one house has to be blocked by a wall that is based at the bottom of the deep chasm between the houses. It seems disappointing and silly to have the wall, but I'm making noises of appreciation anyway. Then the woman of the house has been introduced, and she starts as a harried housewife that I have the impression has children, and ends as a naked seductive woman that I'm cuddling in my arms, reaching around to fondle substantial, well-formed breasts, marveling at the contrast in the smallness of the waist, not going below the waist to the naked voluptuousness below. People look at us curiously, but I've made a coup analogous to being on the tour in the first place, and I feel good about our attraction to each other. Then I'm down in the pit, which has turned into a sort of river embankment lined with stalls of shops, mainly banked with tables of books that, on closer inspection, are all about touring in England (rather like the Australian book that I got from Arnie on Monday, even to the light blue color of the covers and the white of the print on the front). She escorts me through the tables, explaining that it's mainly a mail-order business for the Chamber of Commerce, but I request a number of books, and she gives them to me gladly, asking me to open one to see the organization: a strip of black tabs down the side clued to a map of London, each marked by some sightseeing destination like a church or a castle or a public building, with streets radiating from it, and I'm surprised to see that the court in which I'm now standing is one of the important sites, and I feel good to have gotten oriented so quickly. She's dressed now, for outdoors, and the sun's bright and cheerful, and I'm glad to be in England.

5/18/77

DEATH SENTENCE

Couple days ago there was a vivid fragment that I wanted to write down, but it was probably over the weekend, like Sunday, so I didn't get to type it before I forgot it. But even WITH that, it's strange that ONE week can be FULL of dreams when Actualism WANTS me to have them, and so LACKING in dreams remembered recently even though I have NOT been smoking for two months come Saturday, which should be enough to get it mostly out of my system. Anyway, wake this morning with the EXPERIENCE, rather than the details, of my dream about being sentenced to die in the electric chair for what I seem to remember as a murder in self-defense, but it was as if I were seeing it as I would have wanted the jury to see it, rather than as it actually happened, which seemed to be gone from memory. I kept trying to say that the death sentence was ILLEGAL in New York State, wasn't it? Remember all the fuss the ACLU put up to stop the death of the guy who WANTED it, why weren't they knocking themselves out to save ME? I wasn't in jail, and I kept thinking that I'd escape---even if they shot me on escaping, at least I wouldn't have the suspense of waiting for the electric chair! And then I MIGHT get away, since they didn't seem to be guarding me so thoroughly. There seemed to be something WRONG with the dream, and part of it was my THINKING about the situation IN the dream and not being able to come up with any IDEAS about how it happened in the first place: How did I GET here? Woke and told Dennis about it, and he smiled and said that I considered myself such an exception to everything ANYWAY, why not an exception HERE, too? I thought it was connected with some sort of lesson I had to learn in this life, but it seemed like a very harsh way to prove a point. I woke feeling confused, but without the usual sense that I have in trouble in a dream that it WAS a dream. My concern was to get OUT of the situation, rather than out of the dream. Not even all this typing brought back to mind what my previous dream was, but it was something better, not worse, and I remembered my playing with Dennis's cock Sunday morning, and then him not remembering THAT but recalling nicely erotic dreams with humpy people in them.

6/6/77

May 22: I dream of interviewing for a job, and being in an office, but I'd taken down that note and can't remember a thing more about it.

May 25: I dreamed about Jean-Claude Perrin's room card, again nothing more.

June 4: I have some sort of odd dream in which my fleshy shoulders and chest are being pushed through a narrow window for some reason, over and over again, but I don't know why, but only feel happy that I'm just the right size to fit through without tearing my flesh.

More than a few mornings I woke with a DISTINCT idea of what I'd dreamed, and meant to jot them down or write about them directly, but from the precision memory in the morning to the fog of the afternoon, only the memory that I've BEEN HAVING dreams is there, and I hope to catch up on the diary and get back into SOME swing of things, so that dream recording can become more exact.

6/12/77

FROG EATER

Again there were two VERY vivid dreams, but in the few minutes in which I wanted to remember the FIRST dream, the second one went beyond all efforts to recall. It must have something to do with practice, and now that I'm back in SOME kind of schedule of doing things, maybe it'll pick up better. The actual sequence of the dream occupied about 3 minutes: it started with two doll-like toys come upon on the floor: a frog with a gaping, but closed, mouth sitting on the floor near which a little wide-eyed fuzzy doll rolled, and when the two pipe-cleaner antennae of the fuzzy doll touched the head of the frog, the eyes widened even more in terror and the little wheels tried to hurry it away from the rubber-looking frog, which remained motionless. This bumping encounter repeated two or three times, with the fuzzy doll getting more and more uncomfortable: in the manner of a cartoon one could almost see the drops of fear fanning out from its head. But then both of them started to grow larger, the fuzzy doll about doubling in size, but the frog-monster grew and grew into a human-sized monster that held the frog, now changed into a real one, tightly in its claws, and the wide mouth smiled wider and wider and yawned open into an incredible maw into which it stuck the frog. There seemed at this point to be onlookers (maybe they were watching a newer, bloodier version of "Star Wars"), who gasped as the razor-sharp jaws, which seemed to include the teeth in a sweeping scimitar of ivory, met through the neck of the frog, tearing off the head in the mouth and squeezing the body so that spurts of blood and small dangles of severed tendons and tubules dangled from the squirming body of the quickly dying frog. I wondered what it could be about, but then tried to think of the second dream, but couldn't do it. The colors were vivid: yellow and then green-spotted-with-black for the frog, WAIT: just remembered that the monster STARTED as a frog and it ended by EATING a frog, so maybe it has something to do with HUMAN LIFE, which has to end by being consumed by itself in the insatiable round of life and death which I have been so afraid of confronting because I want what I HAVE to go on and on!

6/20/77

PLAY

Again I wake at 8 with a vivid memory, but by now, 11:55, it's faded badly.

I was at a play rehearsal, or what seemed to be a series of them, since when I finished one rehearsal people from another cast returned, though I knew it was after midnight, and I realized that this was the final rehearsal so it could be so late. At a later time there were the sounds of vocalized sex carried over a speaker system which I debated they didn't know was on or that the fellow---a showoff---knew was on but wasn't telling the gasping woman about it. We stood facing the speakers smiling vaguely. Then something happened to the script I was holding, and I was busy putting it back together with clips like I use in my diary, but I had to do it backward from the bottom, somehow, and it got very confused bending the little metal tabs in unaccustomed directions. At one point, mysteriously, the bent metal tabs were surrounded by the point shoes of some famous ballerina like Alicia Alonso, and she stared down at them with a puzzled, somewhat pained, expression, and they were straightened out as if they had been supports for a very difficult number in which her leg had to bend forward from an extra joint between ankle and knee, but now that that bravura performance was over, the supports could be removed. There were other people like me sitting in the orchestra of a bare theater for the rehearsal, but their functions or identities I didn't even know during the dream. There were other facets that had nothing to do with the rehearsal, things that went on before and after that, and though I went through them while lying in bed, I then got up and read some more of the philosophy book, washed dishes, got the index from Harper and Row, and fixed up the apartment somewhat until I felt free enough to try and recapture this fragment before starting to work on the index, and might also want to get some food: interesting how EACH time I wash and put away the cereal bowl, I manage to USE it again the very next day for breakfast. And now it's exactly noon, and I've managed to pass a morning when I don't do ANYTHING of note, except be content with what I'm doing, and I have to decide if THAT'S worth anything, yet I'm not even as CONCERNED about it as before.

6/28/77

DRIVING

I'm alone, driving a powerful car down tree-lined streets after dark, and the road is so dark I realize only in retrospect that I didn't have my lights on, which explains why I felt vaguely apprehensive that something was WRONG about the way I couldn't see where I was going. Yet I was good in SENSING the road, and stopping by applying GREAT pressure on the brakes when I came to an intersection. The speedometer was lit, and it tended to slide up over 80, and I knew if I kept it below that, I'd be OK. Then, suddenly, it's daylight, and I'm stopped for a light while the cross-street cars are passing in front of me, but then the light changes and the cars CONTINUE to cross, and I'm hoping no one comes from behind me and causes an accident, and I wonder how these cars can continue to cross when I see that paralleling the street is a railroad track, on which now passes a HUGE train behind them, so I realized THEY knew I couldn't cross, so they could continue to cross, protected by the enormous hulk of the passing train.

DREAM OF 6/23 OF WORKING

I'm introduced to someone with a name something like "Ellen Robinson" (or maybe even it was Eileen Robertson, the owner of the building I live in!), but she was black, and I remembered her from the West Coast, just as I would remember the Someone Robinson that Arnie talks about a lot, a black who worked for the census for him.

DREAM-NOTE FROM BEFORE OF SUMMER AND SNOW

Just a jotted note from one day at Dennis's: first day of summer, but I'm in school and look out window and it's SNOWING out.

DREAM OF 6/24 OF TV SHOW

About ten panelists line up for the show and I'm about 30th, but the whole set of first panelists is refused, so the second set steps up, and some of the others leave, and I have hopes of being accepted, except that there are HARD questions of three or four parts, but I'm confident I can do as well as any others.

DREAM OF 6/27 OF THREE LOVERS

Remembered it VERY clearly, but that was awhile ago: Jean-Jacques was being very characteristically masochistic and mooning; John Vinton was expostulating on something he knew nothing about; Dennis was dithering about a decision, and there was a FOURTH person, a youngish, brown-haired person who was sort of cute, who I take as my NEXT long-range lover.

6/29/77

STRANGER FROM OUTSIDE

I copied down a cryptic note that I had to transliterate before I could read it: 1) "stranger from outside; let stay; sleeping in chair; leave because people coming, wants to leave silver diptyched crucifixion, done.

2) gather for orgy, one brings 4-5, Wanna come? on phone. I remember answering a door that looked onto a porch to a man standing there, dressed casually and cleanly, and I let him come in though he doesn't seem to be ASKING for anything. Then I move into the kitchen and he's sleeping in an overstuffed chair that I don't question being in front of the stove in the old kitchen at Dietz, and I gently wake him up because I'm having people over and don't want him to be here when they come. He's going out the back door but pauses to hand me an unwrapped present that sort of falls open as he lowers it toward the kitchen table. It's a flattened cylinder, rather the size and shape of the wrist-shaped steak from South America, and inside there's the gleam of silver (it's something duller, like brass, on the outside, and there's a small tab that was a fastener that seems to be broken), and when it's set on the table and I look closer at it, it's a highly intricate carved and soldered silver depiction of a crucifixion with an elaborate city in the background (possibly rather like the elaborately drawn structures in "Wizards" yesterday), and some of the figures are even free-standing, so the thing is incredibly delicate. I turn to tell him it's too beautiful for him to leave, but he seems to have left already. Then in a room rather like a dormitory bedroom there are lots of people moving around, and I'm asking people who are there AND people on the phone to come to an orgy, and there's a slight sense of relief that the man in the kitchen has gone, and the people are attractive, and I think it's going to be a fine time if all these beautiful young men come, and there doesn't seem to be any resistance to their accepting my invitation. I'm feeling more attractive in the dream than I do now, and there's a strange memory of the fourth lover in the dream of 6/27 on DIARY 12063. Woke with the memory VERY clear and jotted down the note before it could go, and I've saved most of it.

7/1/77

SUBWAY RIDING

I'm waiting on the subway platform and there's an announcement that the express isn't running (this seems to be at 14th Street), so that we should all go upstairs to the local tracks. There are lots of people moving slowly in front of me, but I manage to make the top of the stairs just as a train pulls into the platform and people swirl around the front door to get in. I catch a glimpse of the platform signs and they say 23rd Street, and I'm puzzled by the fact that the stairs seem to have connected two stations. Onto the train and get a seat by the opposite window (this is all RATHER similar to my subway experiences of last night, coming home from the Bleecker Street Cinema), to find that the lights from the car windows illuminate construction and plants up against concrete walls outside. We go along slowly, stop for a bit, and from the debris along the sides of the tracks I'm beginning to be doubtful if we can ever get through. Though I'm worried, I chat in a casual tone with people sitting next to me that I don't know. There's a second dream image which is more fragmentary, in which I'm trying to compute something on paper, and put down a long string of additive factors on the left and put down something like the sine of X on the right side of the equals sign. Then I look at it and see that each item on the left contains an X, and decide to divide both sides by X, and I seem to remember that (sin X)/X is some specific function, and that I AM simplifying something, but I can't remember what that is, and since I can't explain it more fully to the person I'm trying to help, the fragment ends by my sitting there trying to think of words to explain how that's being simplified and the wordless puzzlement of the other person, whom I don't remember anything about.

7/4/77

APE; PIMPLE

DREAM OF 7/2: Great Ape captures me with a strange cross-chest hold that makes me look like a rag doll in his arms, but though the observers are very worried, I assure them that everything will be OK, that it's going as I would wish, and it turns out to be OK for everyone concerned, despite their worries.

DREAM OF 7/3: I'm pushing at spots on my face, and there's some talk of skin cancer, but I'm saying that it's only a certain kind of pimple that has to be worked around. (This surely comes in part from Dennis's news Sunday morning---whoops, that was AFTER!!!---that he'd charge his brother 25 for the pain he'd cause him by squeezing pimples and blackheads from his chest.) I squeeze carefully and there's a large cigar- or penis-shaped lobe of sebaceous matter following a blackened tip, and I squeeze until it's held on by just the thinnest thread, and I say that it's most important to squeeze until all that thin thread is out, and I do it until it falls off of its own accord, and everyone's pleased with it.

7/6/77

JANE ROBERTS AND MOM IN ATLANTA

1) Again forgot most of it by 3:15 typing time, but I was talking to Jane Roberts with some other people around, and she seemed impressed with something about me, and sincerely recommended that I read some new book by her or by Seth, which was NOT "Education of Oversoul 7," but something that had that rhythm and about that number of words and syllables in the title.

2) I'm staying in a bedroom in a strange town, and I'm packing everything, hoping that it'll fit into my suitcase, and find that I have lots of room left, and lots of time left to get where I'm going. Then I'm at some sort of dance performance, and I seem to think it was influenced by the snatches of the program on Channel 13 that I watched last night about the Santa Fe Opera: the auditorium was new, the work being offered was experimental, and people weren't sure whether it was good, or finished, or ready for showing for this premiere or not. Then we milled around leaving, and I came up through some sort of exit below the building into a parking lot, and there was Mom and Helen and others in the family that I couldn't identify going to their cars. I knew by the plans of my vacation that I was to go on to the next city this evening, but there wouldn't be time to do anything (or else the NEW city was Atlanta that I was going to) that evening but find a hotel room, so I asked if I could stay at their place tonight and get an early start in the morning, and they said that would be OK. Helen was brusque in her usual way, and there seemed to be no animosity (though there was no interchange either) between her and Mom, and no negative feelings about my staying that night, or even any certainty that I'd stayed with THEM the night before. But I felt comfortable in the situation, feeling in the dream that I was making the best of whatever circumstances were coming up, and that nothing was being lost by staying more time, and it would save a certain amount of planning and money-spending in another city where I wasn't quite sure of where things were or how much things cost. Had more of it in mind before, but as usual the details have left during the hiatus between dreaming at about 8:30 and writing almost 7 hours later. Should get here SOONER!

7/26/77

So many strange FRAGMENTS that I have to take notes to remember EPISODES:

1) down a paved path, lost, and over a village-like hill to take a bus somewhere.

2) Avi drives through a little gate to get into a fenced parking lot, under streetlights at night, and I'm surprised that he can afford such luxury.

3) I'm in a divey restaurant, dark and spotlighted, and think to leave a 25 tip, but I've only had a 20 cup of tea, and the people are young and groovy around me, but I'm sitting alone and get the feeling "This is what an old man must feel like." Leave without getting a check, but I know I've forgotten a sweater, and I try to turn back, but get lost in a warehouse section that looks like the area around Fulton Street, but I don't see where I'd been, though I'm confident I can find a way to get home at length.

4) Then I'm in another, sunlit place, and I'm "cruising" an older, fatter man next to me who's reading a magazine by putting my finger on his lips (probably inspired by my gush of love toward Dennis when he dove onto and sucked my finger, saying it was the only part of me he could touch with safety!) and he nibbles it and pays attention to me without looking at me, and I feel accepted.

5) In some stony dark basement there's a shower with a clogged drain, and I put my fist down into it to pull out lots of SAND, with bits of white cloth around it, and I find it's no wonder that it doesn't drain. I take out handfuls and dump it into the adjoining toilet, hoping I won't stuff THAT up.

6) In the same basement I find something that I thought might have come from the drain until I see that it's an old toy typewriter in two pieces that fit back together perfectly, like new, except that for each key you have to turn a dial like a telephone's dial, and a window-blind comes down and imprints the letter you want---so it's good as a toy, but it'll never do for volume.

7) Someone's willing to drive me where I want to go, which is a short distance, but he looks at me significantly and says "I'll need about 10 gallons of gas," and I'm disgusted with him because that's over $6.00 and even a CAB wouldn't cost half that much, and I'm offended that he's trying to squeeze me for more than he's worth, and wake with the puzzlement of WHY did all these DISTINCT images take place in dreams at THIS time? Sunburn fever?

9/2/77

THEATER

[DETAILED DRAWING] Had previously dreamed of "The Majestic" with its stage-floor WAY above the orchestra seats, mezzanine and balcony strangely oriented but with better seats. I first recognize the place from the back of the orchestra, getting View A of the stage about 5 feet above heads of people in first row, so that they can't possibly see the floor in the back (I'm reminded of a similar concern when I got 3rd row seats for "Kabuki" for tonight), so I think to move around and into the mezzanine. The orchestra is fairly crowded, but the mezzanine and balcony are quite empty, so no one will worry if I take a seat that's not mine. Gravitate toward area B by going up side steps, seeing that the center of the balcony is pretty full, but look down and then go down to find only one woman sitting in the front row of the mezzanine, and I crawl over her to sit at the side, but find that the proscenium opening is VERY narrow, with a set of doors that can be opened (rather reminiscent of some of the feeling of "Die Fledermaus" on TV Tuesday), but I and she agree that "the stage is narrow," so I crawled back over her to sit in the MIDDLE of the front row of the mezzanine. The performance begins and a woman in a long black dress throws open the doors and some things go on in the well-lit room behind, but then the sides of the stage go up and we can look DOWN (seemingly to the floor of the orchestra, since the scene now seems to be FAR below the level where the stage was) and find, through some magic of projection (though I turn around and find the projection booth, immediately behind me, quite dark, though I think it might be REAR projection) or mirrors which give the illusion of great distance, we're looking down on a great city SQUARE, with buildings standing to the sides (like the strange short subject on 13 last night "Invasion of the Clowns"), and people and carriages moving slowly (and with only a HINT of being automatons) down the wide paths. The whole audience leans forward to look and gasp (though the thought passes through my mind that you really have to be in the FIRST rows to look forward and down and see everything), and this happens a few times and I'm thinking it will be a spectacular production of whatever it is, but that's as far as it goes.

9/9/77

STAGE PERFORMANCE

Actually, the dream was repeated TWICE, so the details are very sharp in my mind even two hours later, dreamed before waking at 8 am and after dozing until 9:10 am. I'm climbing red-carpeted stairs as at Lincoln Center theaters, but the penultimate flight narrows up to a step so tall that I have to put my hands up to shoulder level and hoist myself up by throwing up a leg and pulling myself onto the penultimate landing, and then reaching up directly AGAIN and hooking my right foot against the side of the wall, being careful not to look down because it's so steep, and pulling myself onto the top step, brushing myself off, and looking down into the vast auditorium below me. Regardless of the climb, I'm suddenly seated in the first row (wondering not how I got there, but how ordinary people climb that last flight of stairs), and someone like Shirley Maclaine is doing a dance number on a pyramidal flight of stairs which involves her separating two lower sections and dancing up the steps, getting to a top triangular arrangement of three stairs, and then flipping these on top of her head like a pharaoh's headdress, then bowing quickly toward the audience so that the stairs flip up in back, the lower three detach on springs and fly out toward the audience to frighten them, and then the whole set is pulled suddenly backwards and disappears behind a drop lowered for that purpose, while she smiles triumphantly and says "Had you worried there for a second, didn't I?" Then the stage lights are dimmer and it's Lauren Bacall who's dancing in a colorful horizontally striped jersey tube-dress, showing off her slim body and bony hip bones, and she makes a costume change that involves bringing the tube top over her body but covering it with the new costume before exposing her bare breasts, and lowering the tube bottom until you can see the top of a pretty yellow pair of G-string panties, but at that moment she's behind the side curtain, and that's the end of the dream. There was a section where she was flashily dancing, so that I could see the tube was actually a pair of culottes, since there was an elaborate pattern of goring and seams and pleats at her crotch that moved in a complicated way as she danced. At no time did I have an awareness of anyone else in the audience of this theater.

10/9/77

ISTANBUL; TWO WOMEN; BRUCE JAFFE

1. Dennis and I are walking around inside/outside a Japanese-style building with clean pine walls, rock/pebble/wooden walkways, and an intricate pattern of watercourses between the walkways. There's even a miniature bridge off in that corner, and in a brief period of darkness, there's a nestling of lights at one foot of the bridge. As we walk around the paths, the purpose for the whole thing becomes clear and I say to Dennis: "Now I know why we always see the city of Istanbul first and then go way around in a circle: see, it's built out on this peninsula, but the bridge only comes into the OTHER side, so we have to go way out on this spit of land, then over here, then cross the bridge, and only THEN get to Istanbul. How clever of them to have made a model of it," and it slowly turns into a kind of map.

2. I'm one of many men clustered around a woman slumped in a chair. She's just acted as an oracle, or has just been reborn, but there's no way of knowing HOW I know those may be true. She wakes, smiles, and gets to her feet in a spotlight-blaze that reveals her dressed in a loose gown that falls free from her shoulders, rippling slightly as she moves, and she looks down in amazement and ruffles the white overgown and the colored patterned gown beneath it, falling to the floor, and smiles and seems VERY pleased. The audience bursts into amazed applause at the costume change, and even I wonder how it was done---sort of like in the Japanese kabuki, I guessed, and someone ripped off her outer dress or that Russian peasant added it to her when he fell across her with that package (don't know how I knew all those details, either). I'm sitting on a rail fence and she comes very close to me, and I smile and whisper "You're beautiful, you're SO beautiful" (she looks rather like a plump-faced Jean Seberg), and she gently pushes her face into mine and kisses me. I'm delighted, and the audience appreciation begins to swell into an ovation that brings tears of joy to my eyes, and I bend backward off the fence so that everyone can see her modestly swinging her dress back and forth in the blazing spotlight.

3. I'm standing outdoors on a terrace overlooking what is probably the sea in what I take to be Greece. There's a portentous entrance, almost appearing from nowhere, of a heavyset man clad all in black, and there's a buzz in the air that announces someone of great import. He stands around, no one pays any great attention to him, since he's turned his back to them, and I lay down on a soft sofa that happens to be nearby, reclining to look at the people on the terrace. The man in black changes to a woman in blue, dressed in a cross between a nun's habit and a Greek peasant's dress, with a blue or black veil over her hair, and two tones of blue in her apron and her undergarment, which is of the softest blue flannel imaginable. She comes over to my sofa and sits gently on the side, pulling down something that looks like a detached zipper: joined at the base for 2/3's of its length, it then parts into a delicate Y shape. It, too, is blue, and I think it might be some sort of beautiful bookmark when I pick it up and it turns into a richly embroidered scrap of cloth. I look at her in puzzlement, and she smiles and says that obviously I'm a person who's destined for great things, because otherwise she wouldn't be paying this attention to me, she wouldn't have been drawn to me, and she wouldn't have wanted to give me this. But there's a definite request on her part that I should "donate" something to her, and I get the feeling I get when someone comes up ostensibly as a friend, and then turns to be a proselytizer for some sort of whacked-out religion. But I feel kindly to her attentions, and may listen.

4. FIRST dream was the most sensuous: Dennis and Bruce Jaffe and I were in bed together, and Bruce was giving his lecture while Dennis and I were necking. I'd thought Bruce was with Jan, but when I look surreptitiously over the covers, I see that the blankets have been pulled down his rather formless body below the crotch, and he's playing with a nicely formed, veined, and very erect cock, and doesn't seem to mind that I'm watching him. So I nudge Dennis around to where he can see, also, and am anticipating quite a pleasant session with both of them when unfortunately the dream stops and I wake in the darkness of the very early morning with a pleasing erection.

10/15/77

ARMY LIFE

The quartet in Army uniforms (inspired, I guess, by the fascist uniforms in "Salo" yesterday) is the old college group of Larry Ball, Bob Seaver, Bernie Broske, and myself. We're out for a morning's drive on the base, or to its surroundings, and I make the suggestion that we haven't gone to the post headquarters to pick up the movie schedule at the three movie houses that I know are somewhere on the post, and the dream seems to involve a MEMORY of similar dreams about army posts, where a line of official buildings are lined up along a railroad track that separates the "officers" from the "training area," and there's an old-west quality to the surroundings. At this point, we're neither picking up the schedules nor driving anywhere, but roaming along a riverbank (again from the lakefront shots of villas in "Salo") looking at cottages, but I look at my watch and it's 10:45, and I know breakfast stops at 11 (but is it really 11 on Sunday, which I know it to be today?), and I whine that we should get moving, but Bernie looks at his watch and says tartly that it's only 10:25, and we have plenty of time, so I glance at the other two watches and see with relief that they agree with my time of 10:45. So it seems we might be able to get moving.

THEN, another fragment comes back to memory: I'm in a house, sort of a compromise between mine in Brooklyn and in Akron, and I'm in the middle of some sort of redecoration, because the carpet's up in the bathroom and I feel the unaccustomed tiles under my feet with coolness, and there are drops of water or blood on the floor, so I have to be careful not to slip. Beyond the bathroom is another room painted white, and I'm pleased that at least THAT room is ready to be moved into, while the rest of the house is in a mess. But there's a feeling of lightness from sunlight pouring in from windows along the side, and the new arrangement will be better than the old.

THERE WAS ANOTHER, probably sexy, fragment that I've forgotten, again inspired by the horniness communicated to me by "Salo" (see DIARY 12364), in which AGAIN I was pleased that someone handsome was willing to have something to do with me, but nothing was ever really accomplished during the dream.

10/21/77

CLASS GOING

Finally, after a long absence, recurs the dream of having a full schedule of classes in Akron University, but losing some key document and forgetting in what buildings and at what TIMES the classes are being held. This time there's a BIT more specificness: I seem to have a notebook in which I've put out the SUBJECTS I'm taking, so at least I know WHICH classes I've forgotten, and I have the idea that I go from 9-12 every morning and some more-scattered times through the afternoon, so I take myself to some sort of administrative office and get assistance from a woman who doesn't seem overly surprised about my predicament: maybe others have come to her just that day. She looks in some sort of course book and tries to compare my course titles with those, and then she has a kind of map of buildings on the campus, and some of the names "Health Center," and a strange H-shaped building that's entered to one side of the Student Union, for example, remind me of things that I HAD known, so it's easier for me to say, "Yes, I remember now that ONE class was in there," and then I had to make tracks across the campus (and part of the campus had some of the features of Columbia, too), to get to my next class. And there wasn't the VAGUE feeling of FRANTIC-NESS as in previous dreams: I knew there were ways of finding out what my schedule was and checking into it BEFORE I'd missed a lot of classes, rather than coming in on the middle of classes and realizing that I'd missed a great number of them, and how could I possibly take a test if I'd never done any of the homework in them. Have the MEMORY of a Quonset hut-type building from this TYPE of dream, but I don't think I had that in THIS dream, since ROTC didn't seem to be one of the courses that I was missing. There were bright colors on the map, rather like the folding map of Paris, and the woman's office seemed capable of yielding HELP to my plight but not a real ENROLLMENT log that could tell me UNEQUIVOCALLY which classes I had enrolled in. Maybe the dream reflects my PERSONAL feeling of narrowing questions down in my own mind, cutting out stray worries, getting more confidence that there ARE answers which are accessible to my private searchings.

10/25/77

BLACKS; LIGHT BULBS

1) I'm sitting in a booth in a restaurant talking to three blacks, and they seem to center on my telling them something, though we're making plans for something we four are going to do together. Thought I remembered some names, maybe one was Herman Washington, but I've forgotten a lot since morning.

2) Vaguely connected with the first, I'm in some sort of sign shop, and I can see against a black background various neon-colorful signs displayed for my choice, and I sort of float among them seeing which would be best.

3) In the clearest of the three, I'm fixing light bulbs in an overhanging---HA, just found the word tester today, and that's what it could be---elaborate cornice in a vast mirrored hallway, and for awhile I think I'm very far above the floor, and start to get jittery from the altitude, but then seem to realize that I'm just about 5 feet off the floor, so even if I slid off the vaguely convex surface, nothing would be harmed. The bulb is encrusted with designs in gold, and it fits into an elaborate socket, so that I have to be very careful that I don't break the bulb while trying to unscrew it. But the bulb comes out, and I can look around at the glory around me, but people are starting to come into the hall, so I'd better hurry. Then I've left that auditorium, walking through narrow streets uphill that change into dusty paths, one going off to the left to an elegant mansion, I know, so I turn to the right and find myself on the spine of a ridge connecting two hills, along which is built benches so that people can sit and look out over the view, past the grasses alongside the dusty paths that are all there are room for at the top. There are lots of people up there, natives of the area, blacks or Puerto Ricans of various clans, and I have to ask directions for the subway from there, but I'm confident that nothing will happen bad, so I'm not worried about being up there. That's the end of the dream, though I think I had a fourth fragment afterwards that I tried to remember, but when I jotted them down right after getting up, I couldn't remember the fourth one, and though I thought it might come to me while I was typing, it didn't, though it's now about 8 hours since I HAD the dreams.

10/31/77

ROLF'S

I'm sleeping in Rolf's apartment, though it has more rooms than he has, being a combination of Dennis's apartment in a funny way, and I wake to find that my arm is along the side of a cute blond boy who's Rolf's roommate, and I start to move my finger along his side when he gets up and gets out of bed. Rolf is there laughing silently at me, and suddenly the room is FULL of people as I sit on the edge of the bed nude, covering my crotch with my arms, trying to look nonchalant. A woman comes up with a charity can for some Russian organization and I shake my head no. Another woman comes up with a clipboard to ask some kind of questions, but the crowd pushes her away. Dick Goeppelt, looking rather young in blue jeans and a tan and some sort of hat, pushes through with 3-4 other programmers to talk with Rolf about some project. Just as I wonder where all the people CAME from and why they're there, they vanish, and I'm rubbing the red flock off the bottom logo of some elegant poster that had somehow been on the top of the bed, mixed in with the blankets and coverlet, and the silver foil underneath shines up at me, and I'm embarrassed to show it to Rolf. I'm on the point of asking him (though I don't remember HIM even being there) where the people went so QUICKLY, and I wake up. The apartment was strange: [DETAILED DRAWING] the bed was in a hallway connecting two rooms in a sort of phone-receiver arrangement, with the bed at the top of the handle and the door at the grip, and the front room lowered to a gable just as in Dennis's apartment, except there was enough light there to cast a nice glow on the blond's body. In the back was some sort of kitchen, with sink, where Rolf was fussing around, and it was sort of Dennis's kitchen, too, but he had no place in the dream, since I KNEW that it was a place of Rolf's that I was in, and I was hoping to get into some sort of threesome, but that wouldn't happen. Wonder if this might portend some sort of working arrangement with Rolf, who DID phone me at 11:30 Sunday morning to say that he was going to be in Providence for a number of weeks, but he'd be leaving 10 am Monday morning, so I got back too late to talk to him before being away, but he said he might call me for bouncing off ideas if he got bogged down in his control of his project there.

11/1/77

POPE AND ICE CREAM

I'm sitting in some sort of ice cream shop, with a feeling of being in Brooklyn Heights rather than anywhere special, and I'm having vanilla with the streaks of chocolate through it, and he has some kind of maple nut that rather surprisingly I haven't tasted yet, and he's so close to being finished I'm not sure I'll even HAVE any. He's wearing a short-sleeved blue pullover with a button or two at the neck, one open, one buttoned, and he's got a cold, so that his nose is running and there's a small dark area of moisture below his neck opening where his nose has dripped. He's vaguely aware of it and keeps wiping the tip of his nose with his spoon-holding hand, but I'm sure he's not aware of the dribble on his chest. We've been talking about something, but I have no idea what it was, only that he was being very intent and very sincere about what he was saying. I offer him some of mine, and he leans forward to take a huge glob off the end of my spoon, and I think, partly then and partly afterward, that he'd then put his nose to the bowl of the spoon, and there was a very good chance that a drop of his exudate would have caught on the bowl of my spoon, to be taken into my system at my next bite of ice cream. The dream was so short (but nevertheless VERY distinct, even to the Formica top of the tables, the exact sort of corner we were sitting in, Pope facing the wall, I facing a part of the corner with a tiny view of the stooled counter to the extreme left, knowing that there were very few if any other people in the shop, with no concept even of the person who may have served us the ice cream in the little glass tulip servers) that I don't have the problem of deciding whether to take the next bit of mine or not, the last part is just him drawing back, making small frantic movements with his mouth to show that it was a large, cold dollop of ice cream, and he's making approving motions with his eyes to show me he likes the flavor, maybe even indicating that he's about to offer me some of his, when I wake up. I was sure I wanted to record it, but also sure that I might have trouble filling the entire page, but I was content to leave it half-full, so here I now find that it's FULL.

11/2/77

FIVE THINGS (10/29)

Just came across the note sheet last night, while clearing off desk:

1) In Oceanside cottage, into bathroom and look west over Pacific and see waves start, grow higher, sky blackening, waves breaking to windowsill, close it, and then out to talk about it in wondering appreciation.

2) Someone young cute and humpy is in bed with me, and I do something there under him that I look only at his body and say and feel great liking, tempted to say love for him (these notes aren't the clearest). Then, at the little picture window outside, I see someone looking VERY like Dennis with his cap. Out the door and it's a woman, but I've mistaken the number of blocks I've walked and wander over one too far and get lost trying to see which basement window of which house my bedroom's in.

3) I'm at Dad's old store on Thornton, and buy a cantaloupe and a cake and put these aside below counter. When I go to leave I take only candy bar in bag and when I get to CORNER door which is now closed and doorknob-less, and then to side door that's now open, I remember I've forgotten cake and cantaloupe and go back to find cake changed into rolls, but I take them anyway.

4) I add 8 to 7 to get T, T + E to get B, and say "B, B as in dependable," in some crazy Sesame Street-type program about the 36-base number system.

5) EARLIEST dream (which came back to me as I was scribbling these notes at the breakfast table---no, in the bathroom while Dennis was still asleep, leaving them on the toilet stall for Dennis to see and wonder what I was taking notes about) was driving in a CAR down steep, ANGLED wooden STAIRS in the mountains, with a grand feeling of daring and rightness and wrongness all at one, [DETAILED DRAWING] but it was WORKING, we weren't breaking down the stairs, and it seems I was in the car with someone like Joyce Ostrin, and we all were having a grand time, even though we knew that we weren't supposed to be doing this, even though it was working and we did want to get the car down to the bottom of the hill and there didn't seem to be any other way of doing it. Couldn't even think of the right way, FIRST, above, to label this page so that an October dream wouldn't look funny typed in NOVEMBER.

11/10/77

CHANGES

Woke early and had been involved in a very elaborate dream connected with the Griswolds and possibly John under very crowded circumstances which had to do with a bathroom. There were things all over the place which were finally cleared away (obviously connected to my progress in Actualism and my ticking the items off my do-list) so that the toilet itself is actually usable, and when I use it with a degree of wonderment, wondering why it's suddenly so convenient, it occurs to me that it had been covered up by so much STUFF that we had to use something else, and now that the REAL function of the bathroom is usable, the whole PLACE is more convenient. And I feel good that it's been cleared away (like I felt yesterday when I FINALLY vacuumed the junk piles off the floor) and more pleased with life. Then the phone rang at 7:50, waking me out of ANOTHER elaborate, colorful, detailed dream that I told myself I should remember, but I just recall that it had to do with very pleasant people that I was beginning to get to know better---and the IMPRESSION left on me NOW is that I was called away by something from my PAST which made me tend to something that wasn't nearly as interesting as the NEW things I was getting into. The parallelism and "lesson" is obvious: my old images and engrams prevent me from getting into new things because rather than permitting me to LEARN, the engrams force me to replay some skepticism from the past (and I HADN'T noted here that I felt I had been conned by the Catholic Church into thinking IT was right, and now that I know it isn't---or at least know that it isn't the ONLY right thing, as they insisted they were---that I was reluctant to be conned AGAIN). I felt no PLEASURE in moving away from that con, and suspect I'll feel no pleasure in uncovering the con that Actualism may be, since, it seems, in fact, reluctantly though I may admit it, here it comes, are we ready?---it seems that I HAVE ACTUALLY ALREADY BEEN CONNED BY ACTUALISM. My first CLASS was on November 15, 1976, and I'd had the intro before, so I've now been "conned" by Actualism for MORE THAN A YEAR---SO WHY AM I SO CONCERNED ABOUT COMING TO BE CONNED? Well, as Werner observed, it's not the BEING conned, but being found by OTHERS to have been conned, which can only happen after I STOP being conned by having left---how's THAT as a lever to KEEP me in Actualism? Now if only I can keep in Actualism AND enjoy the benefits that everyone else seems to get.

11/14/77

ICE COWL; THEORIZING

People had come in from skiing with black tights on, trimmed in dark red and dark blue, but around their collars like brilliant-studded cowls were parures of ice crystals which formed around their breaths, glittering with blue and red in the sun behind them. There was a second part, very active, bright, and colorful, but I've forgotten, except for the vague idea that it had something to do with travel with a large number of people, again, to a very pleasant destination---but it was NOT anything like Actualism, since I find that description could be taken a couple of ways. But I wonder how much dreams have to do with the overriding emotions of the TIME, not particularly the day, but the OVERALL time of life of the person: I seem to be changing, moving on, and dreams about travel, speedy and snappy, have been more common. I haven't had the recurrent dreams about the color-fish in the funhouse or the car-bridge leading to nowhere up the side of a hill in a VERY long time. Haven't even seen mympths for awhile, though I want to try them on the alphaphones. But the CLARITY of dreams might have something to do with the clarity with which life is seen: not that life seems CLEAR at this point, but that it seems to be BECOMING CLEARER. If dreams are related to engram-releasing, I wonder if some of them might not be released from the pain-turned-into-pleasure relief of getting rid of engrams from the storage units and transferred into regular memory. If Actualism is also a process of releasing engrams which is called "withdrawing identity from images," it could be the same thing there. My mind seems to run so wild during lightwork that possibly many of the images that would come out as dreams ordinarily come out there---though science seems to insist that much of sleep is spent in dreaming no matter WHAT the person is going through, though I suspect that research on Actualism or Scientology or even est (in which Werner says that dreams should vanish with completeness in life) students has been slight to nonexistent. But again I have to make a greater effort to recall them and note them down right after I get up, so that I'll have data of my OWN to compare among themselves in various stages of my life.

11/15/77

HURRIED BUFFET

A huge windowless (and doorless, I guess) room has the enormous back of a chair impossibly close to a wall, and when I chin myself up on an arm to see, the "chair" is only a sort of prop that provides a composition-board platform with a couple pillows as sort of a loft bed in an office. Then, almost without logic or transition, the office is filled with a lot of Oriental businessmen hurriedly grabbing food off a long white-tableclothed buffet, so rushed that they're standing among the candlesticks and kneeling into cakes to fill their plates with food. I know they have a plane to catch at 6, but the Orientals are so strange that their habits just have to be put up with. Then they're all gone, and I know that I have some sort of special bus arrangement just after 6, but I'm not worried about making it. Then chinning myself back into the chair seat, there are two people (probably influenced by the bi-bi-sexual film last night) dressed in men's clothing, but one then the other turns out to be female. One is obviously a dyke, and I assume the other is starting a relationship with her, so I draw her aside, not particularly liking the pasty, plumpish face, over-made-up eyes with ludicrous eyelashes, and moist purple-red lipstick applied in a distinct THICKNESS. "When I start an affair," I begin, and see her brighten up so much that it's clear that she'd NOT been gay and was now anticipating an affair with ME, so I had to stutter and begin again: "When I start an affair with a guy---," but her eyes widened in surprise and disappointment as she cut me off instantly with "Don't EVER use that word ... " and I had a moment's doubt if she thought I said GAY or GUY, but she turned away in a fury and, just when things were getting most interesting, the alarm rang in a way totally unconnected with anything in the dream, which seemed to say that whatever ELSE was going on, I hadn't been predicting the alarm would go off at 5 minutes BEFORE 9, and I woke feeling rather out of sorts, but at least I dashed to the paper that I'd left below with a note of what happened, since I knew that I wouldn't be able to transcribe it until later in the day, and I didn't want to forget this as I'd done so many others.

11/16/77

TOUR GUIDING

I'm leading about 35-40 people on a bus which is built like a city bus, as I see myself sitting on the first forward-facing seat talking to the old married couples sitting in front of me in the right-center-facing seats. I get the feeling it's about 7 days to 8 places, and I'm being trained by a pretty woman who's checking up on what I'm doing. At one point I wander off, possibly to check the safety of a new attraction, and find myself climbing up a Disneyesque confection of a castle in white-and-blue-painted papier-mâché, and I'm clinging to crumpling ledges while a troupe of little people push a structure on a swing up so that I step onto it to avoid another section that's crumbling into ruin. Obviously, I think in the dream, this won't do for the tour, and I feel the worry that my supervisor will think that I did it for my own curiosity. Then I tell everyone to look forward to the curio shop just ahead, but enter what seems (and smells) to be the interior of an abandoned Indian or Javanese temple to find that the seller's stalls have been cleared out, and there are some temporary platforms to be seen where the stalls were, but otherwise the temple is empty. Just beyond that is another temple that has possibilities, and then there are three young people who may be monks or sharpies, who "hint" that there's a show in some place close by, and that I should pay them something, but the supervisor comes in again and says that the hotel with symbols or rolls on the side is better than THEIR attraction, and the rest of my notes on the sheet dribble into incomprehensibility rather like that last sentence, but at least I got the correct IDEA captured properly. Have been getting LOTS of sleep lately, and maybe this again is the "recovery" from the psychic surgery, or the fatigue from the cold, or the price of the conflicting emotions about Actualism and getting everything off the do-list, OR merely the result of doing a lot and not getting much sleep beforehand, while not having THAT much sex, but maybe as I get older a little tires a long, long way, and I just CAN'T think of a way to finish out this page, to produce a self-defeating, time-consuming, page-ending paradox of the first degree.

11/19/77

BOAT TO AFRICA

I'm sort of the Captain's Ensign on a sort of military/passenger ship that's my first tour of duty, and I seem to know that we're bound for Africa. I'm worried about my uniform and keeping things neat, but later in the dream he tells me that since there are so few passengers he won't bother to insist on as much discipline as he usually would, implying that I was doing OK. At one point he sent me below to bring him something from a shop, perhaps a shoemaker shop, and I went below decks into a huge area, so high that I could look up and see an expanse that I took to be the sky, even though I knew I was in the bowels of the ship, and the streets were dark and damp, and I knew that I wanted one of the seven shops lined on one side of the street, but I could barely make out the old carvings on the lintel pieces that said "Contractor" or "Cabinetworker," but finally I found what I needed and took it back upstairs, marveling that such a dank dark place existed below such a modern ship. I AGAIN had the sense of the glistening-dark dampness of stones inside Indian temples (see DIARY 12494), even IN the dream. Earlier, we'd edged into an island which was some sort of check for customs, and then we docked against Africa, and I wanted to go through the jungles but someone told me that the old stone steps lead to where I wanted to go. Went up there, but it was time to leave already, and though I wondered why things were so fast, I had confidence that I was keeping up with them. Probably from being told Arusha was boring last night, I looked down on the beach and said the place was boring, but to fill the few minutes I had left I went to the vegetation along the seashore and was fascinated by the tall waving plants of bright blue and red and green and yellow FEATHERS that waved like exotic pampas grass at the edge of the forest. Looking more closely, I saw clusters of berries of bright colors, and chartreuse peanuts that I thought weren't ripe yet, growing like bunches of tomatoes on vines, but I looked even closer and saw teeming bunches of little yellow ants around the decaying end of one of the peanuts, and though I wanted to taste them, I knew I had to pick another plant. Two girls came up (shades of Balinese dancers) and said I should taste a fruit, but I said "That's aloe, aren't they supposed to be bitter?" and they giggled behind their hands.

12/2/77

FIRING SQUAD

(Took OTHER notes that I'd forgotten, so they're all here, inversely chronological):

I'm in France (possibly because of "The Soft Skin" on TV last night), lined up against a wall to be SHOT for sedition, and I stand there facing the wall with others wondering why I keep COMING here, and thinking that next time I'll FIGHT against the government, so that I won't be dying in vain without having accomplished anything against the government. And then I wonder if I should try NOT to die: I know that I've died this way before, and just died quickly and was reborn to die again; now I wonder if I should CREATE my NOT dying, but I think of the pain I'd have to suffer from the bullets then, and I don't feel that it would be anything other than AWFUL.

Also this morning, I've been passing a shop just around the corner that has changed hands any number of times (again, I see images from "The Soft Skin.")

On Thursday morning, possibly in PREPARATION for watching the Liz Taylor special Thursday EVENING, I woke with the dream of being with a very small group around Liz Taylor in some living room, and there's an interview of her on TV in HER living room, and I can see that it's the SAME room that we're in now, and I think it's a kick to point it out to the others.

THEN, either Wednesday or Thursday, I had the SAME OLD dream about going up or down in an elevator with windows so that we can see outside, and it's in a VERY modern building where there's HORIZONTAL traverse to the track of the car, and when it's changing direction something happens to the cables, which come down and beat about the car, which lurches from side to side and speeds and stops in an alarming way, but there's not the TERROR in this dream that something's going to happen: I'm rather calm, seeming to tell the few other people in the car that this has happened before and there's nothing to worry about, and at the very end of the dream we're standing outside looking at the car, seeing where things were slightly wrong, but knowing that it'll be OK to ride in it again, that this is the way it was designed, and it's been working for a long time, so it'll not be dangerous to ride in again. First time for THIS repeated dream---the only one I have---in a while.

12/6/77

CHECKING/COCK/GUY

First, probably from waiting on line at a new bank yesterday, I dreamed of being in a bank tended by Japanese, asking about a checking account, and the manager had a form with which he answered questions: you fill out your address here, you put the date here, we put your account number here on your printed checks, and your name here on your printed checks, but we don't give interest on your balance, though the checks that you write are free. There's my typical feeling of annoyance whenever I'm dealing with the needless paperwork of banking, but he's being very patient with me, even though I know I won't bank with them because they don't give interest.

Second, I'm reading the Sunday Times and the second page of the sports section has three pictures in the lower left corner, but the one that draws my attention to the exclusion of the others is the middle one, on the left edge, that shows a basketball player's cock, erect, in silhouette against the floor, and I remark to someone, possibly Guy, that they couldn't have taken the picture for any OTHER reason, and he comes over to look at it.

Third, there's a doorman outside a western-type two story wooden hotel, and I'm cruising someone who slips past him and goes upstairs, so I slip past him and go upstairs, to face a dim hallway with about 8 doors, all purest white, all closed, leading off the hallway, and I think I'll have to use my intuition to find which one my trick went into, and I go to the end of the hall and stoop to look through the downward pointing louvers aside the door on the last door on the right, and can just make out Guy's face bending over his cock, which is very long and very hard, and he's coming and getting come over his face, and I go in when I wake up, thinking it must be about 9:10, but it's only 8:50, and then I think I'll go back into it, and then I DO enter the room and play with his hard cock, and before this I'd wakened with a hard-on and jerked off nicely, then waited for it to dry and turned over to doze again, and then had the dream in which I DID play with him, pleasing myself by being able to direct my dreams to that extent, and I thought "It must be now 10:30" when I woke, and it was EXACTLY 10:30!

12/13/77

TELEPHONE PROBLEMS

As in real life, this morning I'm trying to get Azak on the telephone, but I'm in an apartment that looks like the living room and dining room and kitchen of 1221 Dietz, and whenever I pick up the phone I can't get a dial tone, only a weather report (as on Pope's tape last night?) or someone else talking, or a news broadcast. Even when I push down the receiver button, there's a sticky resistance, and lots of times when I push it down it won't come up, and even when I get a dial tone, it's mixed with the voices of people talking. When I get that semi-dial tone, I dial Azak's number and someone who sounds rather like him, slight accent, answers and I say "Azak?" and he says "Who?" and I say "Is Azak---or Andre---there?" thinking that it might be a guest that Azak has only mentioned that his name is Andre, but they think I'm asking for two people and say "No, no one's here with any of those names," and they can't quite hear me clearly, so we both hang up in frustration. Someone rather like Roger Evans is sitting in the old easy chair in the corner of Dietz's living room, and he has another phone beside him, but it's a white phone, like the one I used to have in my closet, which doesn't have any insides, and I remember vividly the bright orange wires that had been connected to the guts that now dangle loosely inside. There's a third phone, maybe on a wall, but I know that one doesn't work either, and I'm feeling frustrated without ANY idea that I could go outside and use a payphone, or could try getting in touch with the telephone company and have them come and fix it (I think of that vaguely, and know that I would have to hide the extra phones if they DID come out, just as when John and I had our self-rigged extension), which seems to say that I'm reluctant to accept ANY kind of outside assistance when I have a problem. The dream itself was quite brief, but it seemed so full of significant detail and revealing attitudes that it wasn't hard to fill up the whole page with it, even though my fingers are quite cold from the lack of heat in the building since the temperature has hovered in the 20 range since the beginning of the week, but anyway I've started the diary today.

12/14/77

CLEANING UP

It's the aftermath of a large banquet (maybe my planning for the Christmas and New Year's Eves, maybe partly "Abide with Me" from Monday) and I've gotten instructions from someone in authority (though I don't know who or how), that I'm to organize things on a serving table for cleaning up, but that I'm not to disturb the people who are still dining. Luckily for me, most of the people on the serving side of the table have left (or it's organized as sort of a "Last Supper," with everyone eating along the wall side of the table), and I recognize Mom as one of the elegant women talking to one of the formal men. I know I'm to divide the dirty dishes from the clean, but I also figure that I have to divide those things that haven't yet been used from the implements, so I divide my table into three sections. There have been appetizers of small canapés which seem to be little toasted packets into which things like lemon slices have been slipped---sort of a Chinese dish, I think---and I break into them and taste to see if they've been eaten or not, and put them into their place. Some napkins are still clean and some are dirty, so I divide those. Under the table is a tray of silverware (made of colored plastics somewhat like shrimp chips expanded) still unused, and I take off salt and pepper shakers, but debate whether to serve the parsley, but since some are still digging into huge platters of raw fresh vegetables and salad makings, I figure they won't want it. Then I'm directed to a corner, where there's a pile of my stuff, and I can't figure whether everything goes into the box, or into the bag that contains the red beads and faceted pieces of glass and pearls, rather like my puzzle with packing the Alphaphone yesterday for transporting to Pope's place. I wake with the refrain ringing in my ears: "The carNAtions followed CAMpion," which I later change to a more appropriate "And the ROses followed CAMpion." BEFORE, I dreamed of walking with two females (Cathy Harlin and Susan McMahon?) up Lexington Avenue, and 88th is a well preserved stairwell that they're delighted to see, and I think it's NORTH, but it's south on 87th that a single person is going to take over the whole corner building (*northwest corner) and redo it in its original splendor as a townhouse, and everyone's impressed with my knowledge of the "Hidden corners" (per New York Magazine) of New York.

12/16/77

BUS WINCHING

I'm riding on a bus (like the one at the very start of "The Sands of Kalahari" last night?) and we stop before a stream of water across the road. I can't imagine that the seemingly shallow stream would stop the heavy bus, but the driver seems very concerned, and when a small string of cars goes across, a lighter one appears to be in some trouble (like in Rabacca Dry Flow on St. Vincent). Next thing I know, we're all winching the bus up a hill, cutting down trees, moving boulders, and getting across in what seems to be the hard way. I go ahead to scout, and get caught in snow up to my waist, and lots of other guys seem to be larking on the hill rather than helping with the bus. I want to change clothes, and the woman at the head of the hall says that someone's back there already, but I shout and push past her and demand she get out of the way, since it's a whole area and who is SHE to say that one man can't change clothes next to another man. There are two clerks, husband and wife, working at a table obstructing the hall, and I push past them to make room for the parade of people behind me to get through, and they carry their table to a wider section of the hall, farther along. I get into a huge chamber that's a combination storage room and locker room, but can't find the fellow who's changing. All the guys move toward the lockers, but then there's attraction to all the cartons and boxes along the walls, and people start looting, and there's not much that can be done about it, since the printed boxes are showing goods that they've always wanted. I'm looking on as the looting continues, and people come around asking what's going on, and I'm as noncommittal as can be without participating in the pillage. The SCALE of the room and the number of people and the feel of the woods around the bus were quite unusual in my dreams, and the strange floating feeling that I had: not quite connected with anything, yet feeling that I should be more, somehow, were quite unusual in my dreams, but it's good that I can get out of bed at 9 and actually get to the bottom of this page, recording it, by 9:30, with my breakfast hamburger broiling in the oven and the woman upstairs tromping around.

12/19/77

CATS / SEX / MORE

EXTREMELY long, detailed dream, started typing at 9:15 pm, to get it all down. I'm walking south on a city street, but it's a smaller city like Akron, in the northeast section, I think, though when I think it might be NYC it doesn't look like the Upper East Side. There are bungalows along the street with those curved cross-section curbs that I associated with Firestone Park, and there's a central grassy strip with trees growing, too, and I think of Akron streets named Spicer, or Reed Avenue. Anyway, I'm walking south, but maybe I'm walking on the east side of the southbound street, so that I'm walking along the west side of the grass divider, and I see a reddish tomcat race after a passing car that's passing other cars, as if it recognized the owner and is trying desperately to say "Here I am, stop and pick me up." But the car vanishes in the dust and the cat runs off, maybe trying to catch it at the next stoplight. Then I notice that there are many cats: gray cats with long matted hair, hair so long that it's tangled like mop strings on some of the older cats, and the gray hair has white stripes in it like mops would have. They're in rut, and as they couple on the grassy margin they begin to TALK "Stick it in there, stick it, stick, STICK IT." Or "Hey, let's make it here," and "Yes, do it, do it." I'm flabbergasted and vaguely aroused by the sight, and as I'm passing a little section of white wooden storefronts along this 40s or 50s Street, a policeman stops to smilingly look with me. "Isn't it wild that they speak English?" I remark to him. "Yeah, they stay a long time among themselves, that's why they can do it," he says, and I understand and agree with him. Suddenly there's a crowd of people on that sidewalk outside those shops, which have become boutiques and boites, and there are guys behind and ahead of me, and when I put my hand down I feel the soft warm cylinder of a cock resting atop rolls of clothes, and I gently reach down and squeeze the cock when I've identified that the cock behind me belongs to a sexy cop/military person who's not going to attack me for touching him. Others are groping in the crowd, too, but he puts my arms around him and puts his arms around him, and we move off together. Then there's a fast, very unsteady series of images that someone who the cop/military person turned into, who looks like a combination of Peter Ream, from the smooth self-assurance and flip way of speaking; Warren Strauss, from the wealth and knowledge of hidden places in NYC; and Bruce Jaffe, from his gentility and soft acceptance and facial tranquility, and I am having a great, though somewhat drunk or stoned, time on an evening in town. But the next full section has me in a comfortable bed being awakened by a radio alarm at 11:30, but the music gradually fades off, and when I get out of the large bed in the luxurious bedroom and go into the even larger living room to check out the radio console, the radio's tuning dial acts as the minute hand of the clock, sweeping out arcs on a polygraph-like display with station frequencies marked on it, and then the increasing frequencies hit, like WNCN at 1150 on the dial, where the red stationary bar of the wakeup time is positioned, the radio station fades into tuning to wake me up. But then as the tuning dial/ minute hand moves on with time, it makes the station progressively fuzzy, and as I fiddle with the dial I think it's a rather strange way of making a radio alarm. But then there are two other people in the room: some woman who's ordering my host around, and the same Ream/Strauss/Jaffe person trying to please both her and me. The idea is to make breakfast, and we move through two or three more rooms, on which I complement her for having a good apartment, and we're in a small kitchen, opening a padded refrigerator that has sliding drawers like refrigerator crispers in a panel that looks VERY much like a white oven. They're saying there's not enough food, or just enough food, or that the dirty dishes that are stored in that drawer will have to be washed before we can eat. Instantly we're sitting at a dining-room table, finishing a meal, and my host is talking about Marianne. I remember Mary, who may be the girl secretary sitting to my right writing on a steno pad, but who was Marianne? "I don't like to drop names, but last night---the Andrews sisters?" And I reflect back on that unsteady series of images and say "Oh, I thought that was a DREAM, but you're saying that was REAL?" And he smiled, the secretary started bustling around as if I were an intruder, and my host said that he had to hurry out, but I could make myself comfortable here or leave, and he gave me a folder with names and addresses and even a little map of the bistro at 2nd Avenue and 11th Street that he'd introduced me to last night where we had such fun. Without transition I'm out of the apartment and walking on, say, 15th Street, but I think it's 13th and turn north, but I get to 16th, but I want the 14th Street subway for the 7th Avenue line, so I turn around and come to a section of town that I don't know well, apartment buildings on the near side, but a grassy area filled with Roman-Gothic buildings that look like some college campuses, and I cross the street and climb the grassy slope that gets so high I have to stoop on hands and knees to climb the last bit, knees tired (like the dream of Mara Alpert last night's dancing included), and find myself in the backs of either college dormitories or the spacious apartments of the professors and administrators, whose shiny plate-glass windows I can see through the bushes in the old stone walls. I walk along ledges, past buildings, and come out the other side in a park-like community of small homes that seems to have something to do with a postwar housing project to make the city look like the country, and there's a group of women (holding up a hot-dog-colored balloon representing a grotesque baby---like in "Obscene Bird of Night"?) on the corner talking, and I ask, politely, "Where am I?" and one says "Automotive corps?" and I figure it might be a military installation, but someone else, more authoritatively, says "The Automobile Club." I figure it's a project comparable to the ILGWU buildings and walk through, having increasing troubles with my shorts, which keep falling down around my crotch to tangle my legs, and come to a busy intersection that has parking places built into the curbs, and garages under the curbs, and I think "Wow, the Automobile Club really builds its section of town around CARS." I'm lost then, but know that I have my host's map in my pocket, and maybe I'll walk past the little bistro on my way to the subway, just to see it outside the dream of last night---at which point ends my DREAM, though I'm rather drawn to see WHAT the corner of 2nd and 11th might ACTUALLY be like, thinking of the projects just north (to 9:45) of 14th way east as that UNKNOWN area of my dream, too!

12/21/77

DESKS AND SUBWAYS

Sidney Sudberg and Dick Hartill are clustered around my desk in the corner of a square array of desks in a square room, and they're both sitting in the swivel chair at various times writing industriously and trying to make believe it's THEIR desk. Without saying anything to make problems, I go back to the "basic" side of the square to get space to write my OWN work, not being too troubled by their usurping the corner place that I'd earned. Then I'm looking for the humanities book that I had in college, remembering very clearly my pencil-written name and address inside the front cover, but either someone else "borrowed" it or the library "took" it, and I debate going to look for it, but am very depressed with the human nature that would take it from me. Possibly in my search for the book, I exit a subway through a kiosk that opens into a grassy field and walk down the winding path to a freestanding little wooden library that MAY look quite a bit like the new one in Houlton, as I remember it, with the blond-wood exterior, the pebbled glass windows beside the door, the little entrance foyer, and the clean functional room beyond with couches and librarian's desks and displays of books and papers. As I'm going to my section, I'm---(AND THIS FLOORS ME NOW! since I DID use the upper balcony IN the library today!) walking along an elevated walkway and I see signs pointing out the subway lines, so I know how to return, and I come back by walking along the wooden tops of their new bookcases, thirsty, and exit to the odd fountain of a bronze woman with her feet in the air with the water coming from a fount behind her head, [DETAILED DRAWINGS] but the spray is so fine at the edges that it wets my pants, and the jet in the middle is so solid that I can NIBBLE on it, but it's too hard to supply much moisture. Then look for the GG, but it only runs from 8-18, and illogically I think "Hm, it runs for 10 hours starting at 8 tonight." Pass AA and CC signs in the same green plastic and walk back along the path to get to the IRT #7 that connects through the kiosk by which I entered the scene of the dream, which is again characterized by a richness of color, expanse of detail, and BROADNESS OF SCOPE that makes them seem much more enjoyable.

12/23/77

WORLD TRADE CENTER

I'm sitting in a restaurant somewhere (not the view from The River, but like sort of ground level in New Jersey) and they're filming SOME movie that has to do with the falling of one of the towers of the World Trade Center (and all through the dream I "thought" they'd actually made such a movie, and I was sorry that I missed it, even though it DID get awful reviews), and there's a plane flying BACKWARD to position a model (or actual, I can't tell) [DETAILED DRAWINGS] of the tower in a fallen position, but then it's as if our rotating restaurant turns so that a corner's between me and the view, and people gasp and start running because the plane's backed up too FAR and the people who were observing it are running and being trampled and killed. Then I'm in a long series of corridors under the tower, and the map is on the roof, and I see that I'm going on a blue encircling route like the Paris Peripherique, but I'm climbing stairs so I'll soon be out, but I wonder if I'm under the same corner of the building as a "scene" from the "movie" which shows a crowd of people, centering on one woman who tries to get away, but the people crush in on her and she's right at the corner of the building as it falls, and it all gets VERY dark, and I wonder how they can give the impression of WEIGHT in the movie house? Then I'm semi-awake, wondering if the movie about the falling of the World Trade Center will ever come to TV, remembering some stoned images I had of my apartment building on 57th being shaken by an earthquake, hit by a plane or bomb, or otherwise ravaged with me in my bed in the VERY TOP CORNER of the building. Then I get farther awake and wonder how far the World Trade Center tower WOULD fall if it fell, and that it must be more than a mile from here in Brooklyn Heights, so it couldn't reach here, but maybe something's telling me to get out to the Promenade because there's going to be an earthquake, and I can see the tower falling, and then wonder what the effect of an earthquake would be on 167 Hicks, since there have been articles about a small fault, relatively inactive, that runs nearby through Jersey, and NYC was shaken a few times by a very minor quake, but it runs near the proposed atomic power plant, and the modern world has more terrors than even the imagination can supply.

12/26/77

ELEVATORS AND MOVIES

I'm riding in an elevator that's rather like a funhouse car along convoluted tracks ON TOP of a complex block-brick building, and I figure it's a good way to get people to the top of MONUMENTS that have no insides: track an elevator up and along the top of the building from the OUTSIDE. Then we're going down a hill, and someone expresses fear that we'll go over the side, but I give them the line about "the elevator's so old obviously it's not happened to anyone BEFORE," and we DO come to the bottom against a mesh fence at the edge of a cliff, and the elevator bumps down into it and it sags over the edge, and we get out and marvel that they made this way of stopping it. Then I'm inside a small theater, like one of the Quad cinemas, and I have the feeling that it's a new "mystery" movie and everyone is going to be talking about it, it's just opened, and I'm glad I'm in one of the first audiences, because there's going to be a lot written and talked about it. Lots of people in the aisles make it hard to get to seats, and most of the seats are taken: I ask someone if the seat next to them is occupied, which it seems to be because of the coat over its back and the handbag on the seat, and he says it is, but there's a seat two in from the aisle in about the third row, and I get into it just as the movie starts, and I'm taking my coat off when the screen SHIFTS from one side to the other, and there's a projector in the middle, and I'm remembering my "either on the mirror on the wall behind or BESIDE the mirror, but smaller" effect of last night when someone said "You really know all the angles." I'm sure that affected it. But the movie didn't have time to start before I woke up, not really remembering anything at the beginning, but then I got back first the one part and then the other part of it, but they weren't nearly as elaborate or as detailed as some of the more recent ones I've been having, and then, true to form, the next morning I didn't remember anything at all since I smoked grass for the first time in ages (see DIARY 12627), and as I NEVER do when I'm smoking, I didn't dream THAT night, either. But glad I took notes for it, since I forgot to type this page until the NEXT day.

12/28/77

"LORD AND MANNY'S" AND OLD CENTRAL PARK

I'm having a drink with Lou Epstein, but what I think to be "Manny Wolf's" is smoky and crowded with men drinking at tables, so he sits at a single and I go around a corner to find it's larger than I think. Men come and go, and I finish and take my coat and exit through a men's clothing shop, which I think to be "Lord and Taylor," as if it's the prohibition era and we have to enter the bar through this elegant clothing store with its red carpet on the floor and suede sofas along the walls. Out through a set of brass swinging doors to the outer door, heavy chocolate-covered (fudge?) marble that's dusty near the shiny brass hinges, and I'm on somewhere like East 85th and Lexington, and decide to walk across the park to either 96th or 72nd and Broadway to get the IRT express downtown to get home. But it's near twilight when I get to the large old school building on "Central Park East," and lots of blacks are gathered outside where two or three studs are sitting on a curb massaging their shins, as if they'd tripped against something, and others are milling around, like before or after a basketball game, but I refuse to be intimidated. There's some kind of explosion somewhere (methane bubbles in the sky?), and I walk down an alley next to the school (Garfield?) to get into the center of an older Central Park, and there's a charming dirt-streeted wooden storefront village with vintage cars making clouds of dust in the street, but two parallel streets are separated by a grassy mound and barbed wire, and I climb the mound to get from the street I came in on to the "one I have to get to," with a sign above the intersection that says "To West 70s." There's a black smoking a pipe in a tree, but when I ask him direction he says "Get outta here, man," and I creep through the barbed wire and walk down the street, amazed that this relatively unknown corner still exists in Central Park, though I think it may be before they've made it into a park. Get sort of lost in the end of the dream, walking down the street, passing people who seem to belong in the past, not sure which direction I'm going, and the sky's cloudy so I can't even get an idea of the direction from the sun. Wake amazed with the rapidity with which such elaborately detailed dreams were restored after grass-smoking Sunday.

12/29/77

FRENCH HOTEL

I'm in a four-room suite with a number of people, some quite elegant, and they're all seemingly on the same tour, having to find a place to sleep. I don't know where I'm to go, feel lost and confused, and then wander out to see the sights, depressed because I forgot to bring my Paris material even though I knew I was coming to Paris. Wander colorful streets and think to buy a newspaper to see what's doing in town tonight, but remember they also have these magazines for tourists in hotels that list things free, though I debate whether the newspapers might offer new, more up-to-date listings. Walk back to the hotel and see it with a road curving up to it, with two wings with Corinthian columns RATHER like the setup at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and I see that they're rebuilding some of the exterior and interior, and maybe that's why we're so many in one room. Meet John (though this is the end of the dream) and he's with someone flamboyant who's named "Plato," who insists that John's coming to HIS house tonight, and I ask John, in CASE he's not coming back to the hotel, which room he's staying in. As I've seen him do so well in the past, he wrinkled up his face, snarled his lips, and squeezed out an intense "Casa Colon," and I didn't bother to explain that I was only asking IN CASE, but the damage had been done already, so I just let him go on. I didn't remember that the rooms had names, but I seemed to recall some strange baloney writing on the rounded corners of the walls, white letters on blue backings like the Paris street signs, giving what could have been intersection names OR the names of the rooms, and maybe I DID remember seeing a "Paseo Colon," named after Columbus (as was St. Christopher, which I'd been reading about just last night). Went back into the hotel, but I don't remember what happened after that, except that most of the people were gone, there seemed to be more room, and there seemed to be an unused bed, and I woke with the relief that I wasn't in Paris without my guide to the Louvre, but the whole dream intrigued me so much I lay in bed between 9:30 and 10:30 and just thought about how strange it felt, how distinct the details were, and how idiosyncratic John's response to my question was.

12/31/77

FRENCH PRESIDENT

Don't know why this emphasis on FRANCE the past few days (see DIARY 12633) in my dreams. But this time loads of us were in a hotel room getting ready for some event, and people come up to flatter me by asking "Est-ce que l'avion vert?" which connects our group into a unit, and I can say it is. Out into the corridor, but they're lining up the cars for the parade there, and I KNOW I've been invited to ride with the young and sexy President of France in his tiny car, but as I walk toward him the line moves forward, and I trail behind, wondering whether I should sit down in the vacant front seat, since three people are already squeezed into the back. I walk around to the front of the car and say something like "Puis-je s'assoir?" thinking from the sound that it makes good sense in French, and he smiles and says that I certainly should, and again I'm flattered by being in such a prime location. Then he's rearranging the car, and the other three are gone and he's slipping out of the car as out of a pair of white duck trousers, and I wonder how on EARTH I'm going to fit in, but he flattens them out on the floor and crawls down one pant leg, and there seems to be SOME room next to him, so I crowd in my bathing suit and T-shirt, down one leg, hoping there's enough room for both my legs next to him, happy we're both quite thin, and as I see how much room there is in the front seat, I'm feeling his crotch under his thin black underpants, and his cock gives two or three very sharp twitches, and he's signaling that he wants me indeed, and I report to those around me that I've found my place: the President is VERY young and dark and wiry, like a sexy young Azak, and I'm terrifically pleased to be riding with him, and I start getting into the seat, wondering if we're going to have sexy encounters during the parade, but then I'm awake, remembering more of the hotel room that came before the car section, but I don't remember them now as I type this at 10:15, involved in the last day of 1977, ready to go on to the OTHER revelation that hit me in bed this morning, that things for me DO move in a 9-year cycle DEFINITELY according to my "1" year in numerology, so there MIGHT be something there (see DIARY 12645).