DREAMS FROM 1978
DREAMS FROM 1978
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.
1/2/78
CAFETERIA
I was wending my way into a cafeteria line right at the end of the serving period (the IBM clock overhead said that it was 1:50, and I knew they stopped at 2, though I wasn't sure if I couldn't afterward just order hamburgers or something simple), but then I found that I had no money, so I made my way back through the rather crowded tables (fairly surprised to see Mary Lou Patsy, rather heavily made up, talking into a two-way radio at her table, and I debated asking her for a loan, but I somehow thought that since I hadn't seen her in such a long time, maybe I wouldn't see her AGAIN for a long time and it'd be difficult to pay her back), looking for Mom, who I knew as about to arrive, and she'd have extra money that she could lend me. I looked around to see if there was anyone else that I could borrow money from, but though it seemed that I knew some of the people just vaguely, there were none that I could talk to that would make it NO IMPOSITION to borrow from them, and I knew that I'd find her in time. The colors of the dream were somewhat muted: the cafeteria was all white, the tables were somewhat gray, and the food was rather colorless, as was the clothing, but maybe the brightness of the lights washed out some of the color. Never have I really noted what I was wearing, but I was quite sure that I was dressed in a suit, or else I wouldn't be in this IBM cafeteria. I had SOME knowledge that this was a strange place to be, but the feeling uppermost was not to act in any way that would draw attention to myself; maybe I was just touring in town with Mom and we stopped in for a cheap meal, for all I knew the history of the dining there outside my WORKING there. What Mary Lou Patsy had to do with anything I haven't been able to conjure yet: she didn't even fit into my thinking about "Earliest Memories" yesterday, since she dates from St. Mary's. But the scope was still open: the cafeteria seemed SPACIOUS and there seemed lots of people around and lots of detail that I'd invented to fill the dream, even to the distant sight of the serving line with the women in white standing behind it, just ready to close up as soon as the IBM clock on the wall hit 2 pm.
1/4/78
PHANTASMAGORIA
So episodic and detailed that I had to take notes when I woke, this is only a SKETCH:
1) I'm taking a taxi to Philly (though I wonder how much it's going to cost, and wondered why I didn't take the busses that seem to be running), and we stop in a rest stop garage. I wander dark streets, back to look into neatly painted pastel cubicles to find no taxi, then out to find it at a gas pump, so I go down a garaged alley, and wandering back find someone's launched a "message rocket" that's about 6 inches in diameter and 8 feet long, that buzzes in a green light, turns slowly on its exhaust jet, and then takes off to its destination. I check my wallet and find TWO wallets, one loaded with cash, with a company name of "Wyandotte" on it, so I can at least find the address if I forget my way in the back streets, or if the cabbie deserts me.
2) Brightly colored paintings of buildings, hard-edged and shadowless, come at me from a distance, and I succeed in thinking one rule of dreams: "I can look as close as I please and it doesn't change," and so I zero in on one section of a building, one façade, and it remains clear as I go from section to section, and at last go around to the shaded back and zero in on a tiny projecting balcony door which I want to enter, and PRESTO I'm in a computer room, then around a corner to a teaching-game room, where I press levels like the light switch in Joan's bathroom and both sound and visual teaching reels come on, and a salesman starts giving me the pitch from behind for the equipment.
3) There's a long coil spring (which resembles both a long telephone extension line or a clothesline) which is unwinding through a pulley, but it's maddening because it rotates in the OPPOSITE direction to the way it should go, and it divides itself into HALF the thickness and about 1/4 the diameter, so I can't figure HOW it could get back into one piece through the pulley again.
4) Large group is settling into front row seats (with their backs to a wall) in a theater with little aisle-sections of seats on either side of the wall, and there aren't enough seats (Charlie Chaplin film as waiter pulling out chairs yesterday?), and Joan S squeezes herself into the GAP between my seat and the seat to my left, and she turns to me with a puzzled look, and I quote, "Joan, you're not going to believe this when I tell you, but ..."
1/6/78
LOADED DESK
In the first segment I'm standing in a field bounded by trees, rather like one of Akron's Metropolitan Parks, and a coworker and I have a pile of papers that have been set on the ground, and a wind blows the top of the stack away into the trees, so that we have to run to retrieve them, though I don't place all the blame on the person who didn't put the papers in a box, as he should have. We gather some of them up, some of them dirty and crumpled, and then it's into the second segment, where we're at a long table trying to sort them all out. It's comprised of computer listings, drafts for typed copies, and I'm collating all the material to see what we have, worried that some original work may have been lost because it was only in draft form, but as the piles shape up, it appears that nothing much is missing due to the mishap. Then in the third, most detailed, segment, I'm sitting at an IBM desk along a left wall, and I'm finding what's in the drawers, and when I pull out the deep drawer right along the wall, I'm surprised to find that it's Paul Loewner's old desk, with quantities of special-sized construction paper both larger and smaller than usual size, with meticulous pale blue blocks ruled off for his particular applications, and I can't figure what I'm going to use the special paper for, but I'm sure it'll come in handy and shouldn't be thrown away. Then toward the front of the drawer, down to my left in the shadows thrown by myself and my chair, are compartments that contain tall bottles whose tops are still wrapped in foil, and I bring up one familiar looking tall bottle and, sure enough, it's Galliano not nearly started, and another tall bottle of red wine, and a large glass-topped decanter-type bottle which is filled with what seem to be candies or babas wrapped in gold foil, and I wonder how strange I'll look walking out of the office with a grocery bag tall enough to conceal the top of the Galliano bottle when I take it home, pleased that I've been assigned Paul Loewner's old desk, and there are also some of the papers that had been missing from before, so everything has worked out fine. Almost forget the dream this morning from 7:30, when Dennis got out of bed, but remembered the desk and it all came flowing back for typing at 9:30 or a little beyond.
1/8/78
TOUR-LEAVING IN PARIS
I'm following behind a group of little girls while walking down a street in Paris, and some woman in the front of the group is pointing out some place of interest, but I've seen it, so I slip away and go for lunch in what looks to be an English pub-type place with wooden beams on the walls, and there, though I have no firm recollection, I just know by my erection that I'd met someone very sexy and there was a chance of our getting together later this evening. Then I'm somewhere else, wondering if they'll miss me in the group and wondering what kind of excuse I'll make so that I won't be fired from my job as a tour guide. I'm conscious that I'm away from my group a number of times, but mainly it comes up in a sort of a church in which they're doing an avant-garde play, and I'm sitting in the back in one of the last pews, but some Chinese woman who seems to be the director of the plays sits down next to me, and I ask her, seeing that it's 12:45, what time these plays will be over, and she nods and smiles and says "Oh, about 5:55 am," and I repeat the information in a shocked tone and her nodding and smiling continue. There was the faint touch of looking in a newspaper to see the schedule that the tour was supposed to take, and I was wondering if I could just catch up to it somewhere so that they might not even know that I had wandered away. The other thing was to bribe some of the tourists to say that I'd taken them to some place special that I wanted to go, but since I didn't know any of them very well, it would be difficult. I didn't know who I was at the play with, but it seemed to be with the sexy guy who was supposed to have sex with me when the evening was over. I felt the same feeling I felt when I stayed up to watch "Forbidden Planet": will I get enough sleep WHILE seeing everything I want to see and doing everything I want to do? And usually, in those cases, I say yes, so in this case I was saying yes, but I knew that it was going to be difficult to explain myself out of my quandary, and I had the same feeling of vague anticipation as I've had the past few days, maybe wondering if the trip to the Caribbean was going to come off, if I'd finish the three indexes I have hanging, if other things will come out OK.
1/11/78
HARLEM PARK
Again, an incredibly detailed dream: I'm in an outdoor stadium (rather like Lewisohn from the point of view of the pillars holding up a Grecian roof), and there's a movie going on some screens to the front. I can't find a good seat, so I move around to a children's section and find that they're looking the other way, and there's a lower screen set up, though there are interfering stands of spotlights before it. Find myself in a tiny corner with other people around, and I'm very conscious that my height will obstruct the view for kids behind me, so I'm happy when a guy leaves who's right on the corner, so I dangle my feet over the side of the parapet and find that I'll be able to see the screen without blocking anyone's view. But it's just the end of one feature, so I wait for the beginning of the next, reading, but look up to find that it's twilight, the place has emptied out, so they're not going to have another show. Try to find my way out, and I go through a very distinctive set of corridors and come to an inner room that, as nearly as I can recall, has the control panels, or the plans, or architectural models of the whole place, and it's a lovely place, and I'd like to get back to it, but when I leave, wandering around a back promenade, I can't find my way back to it, even though some of the corridors look distinctive in the same way. Pass a couple of workmen and ask directions, but they can't help, saying they don't know about the room I'm referring to. Then suddenly I'm in a helicopter and taking a look down over the whole complex, which I know to be in Harlem, in fact my peripheral vision from the helicopter seems to have seen the towers of lower Manhattan to my right as we flew into the east. It's daylight again, and I'm telling someone that I came down through the inner stairway, which he doesn't know exists (rather like Arnold). So I direct the pilot to land at the base of the stairs and point out the people exiting from the stairway, and then back in the air we can see how the area is down a beautifully wooded section (rather like an old Grecian temple area), and the under-slope stairway would be the only way to get down without going great distances around to traverse the slope. Then we're back into the air again, and there's a commentary as from a television documentary, and it's again bright daylight outside, and the speaker says, "You can see how the people use the park and the waters to swim in, and this is only one of the three major centers of this beautiful park which people outside Harlem don't really know about, though it's not closed to them," or something like that. Looking down, indeed I can see lightly tanned beautiful people standing on a grassy shore and diving into the cool gray-blue depths of the enormous lagoon in the park, looking like brightly colored fish as they dart away from the shore and join with other flecks of light that seem to be swimming across the lagoon to the opposite shore. I'm amazed that there'd be a place in NYC in which to use my snorkeling equipment, because the water's obviously so clear that the equipment would be useful for seeing the bottom AND for looking at the beautiful bodies as they swim around (obviously influenced by the tiny trailer from "The Deep" on the hype program last night). Then the helicopter soars into the air again, and I can see the temple complex where I'd seen the movie from before, and from a distance it's obvious that each four columns set into a square form one ENORMOUS column that holds up one corner of the elaborately architraved building [DETAILED DRAWING]. In another area is the little hillside section of smaller buildings, and all three are set into a thick jungle with a canopy so dense that it's not even possible to see the paths which are surely hidden beneath the trees, and now in retrospect it looks more like the first vision of the towers of Uxmal or Chichen Itza rising out of the Mexican and Honduran jungles before they'd been cleared away. The view was from such a height that no people could be seen, only the three complexes set into the middle of a vast greenness which could even have been the upper reaches of Central Park, and again I think of the surprise I had when I found that there WAS a huge new outdoor swimming pool for Harlemites in the northern part of Central Park. I haven't devoted nearly enough time to my puzzlement about getting back to the inner room from the first part, but the wonders of the brilliant green-set park were much more striking from the end of the dream.
1/18/78
SCREAMING AT MOM
A previous dream may have touched on the "wearing a dress" that was referred to later, since it seemed that it did happen, and closely in memory. But the dream proper had only one setting: a rather low-ceilinged, dim side room from a kitchen, like a small eating porch on the side of a trailer, and I was sitting at "my" chair (if we go by the kitchen on Crosby as a model, which it most closely resembled) and being served what I was quite sure was breakfast by Mom. Vague memories of movies to be seen at the proper schedule, and something about working, swirl through my mind now as they may even have swirled through my mind at the table: it seems I was preoccupied then as now. She was bringing something out and, seemingly out of the blue, though she may have been reading something in a newspaper about new male styles, she asked "And what was that about being reported wearing a DRESS?" I knew she was referring to a time when I was at the "summer cottage" alone, and most of the time I'd been going nude, but when it got cool I put on a dress, so I shouted that I HAD been alone, so nothing that I did would have made any difference to anyone, and who was SHE to question me about what I did when there wasn't anyone around? Then she folded the paper to another column and said something about "The news is full of the places you've been," and I knew she was referring to some black front porches and gatherings, and I got totally furious at her and began pounding my fists on the edges of the wooden table to emphasize my point: "Sometimes I feel that I could actually KILL you because there's so much that you don't know about me; do you hear me, I COULD ACTUALLY KILL YOU FOR MISUNDERSTANDING ME!" Each syllable was a smash on the table, and I was amazed that her reaction wasn't stronger than it was, because there was no way I could make my point more emphatic, shouting at the top of my lungs, shrieking my wish to kill her at her only fairly startled face, totally taken over by a fury, by a rage, by a hatred not of HER but of her THOUGHTS, that there was no way that I could see to increasingly emphasize my point. I woke with the screams fresh in my ears, amazed with their intensity and the strength of my dream-feelings, and it was 11 am.
2/4/78
SHIP DINNER AND DENNY
Dennis and I are vacationing on a cruise ship, though it might just be parked in the Hudson, from what comes later. We enter the dining room late (probably after sex, which explains why we feel faintly flushed and excited), and the casual headwaiter tells us with surprise that we didn't know "Breakfast is served from 1 pm, so it's just 1:30 and you're right on time." There seem to be different areas in which to eat, all on different levels (rather like Windows on the World), and I specify that we want to eat "along the edge." So a waitress shows us to a table that's up on a platform but against a decorated wall: it's the edge of the room, but not at the windows so that we can see the water. But I pretend it's OK and Dennis doesn't say anything, and we're still in the place anyway, so we sit down to order when suddenly at the "edge" there's a bar, and two bartenders look at us and start singing "Two gay guys," and THEY are gay and WE are gay and we look around the dining area and there are two OTHER gay guys at the next table across, so we don't know whether to be offended or pleased at the attention (surely this comes from my wonderment about how our trip to the Caribbean is going to come off going with someone who's so obviously gay as Azak, and so fragile and "delicate"). During the middle of the meal, in the middle of the dream, which I don't remember clearly, there was a phone call from Denny inviting us to a cocktail party thrown by the Air Force that he'd invited us to, and then at the END of the meal he'd called back, I was embarrassed to know that I'd forgotten his first call, and he strongly implied that Rita had left already and he wanted ME in particular to be there "so we could talk," and I could only imagine that he was confused about homosexuality and wanted to talk to me about it. He said that I could take some sort of public transportation across the island (of Manhattan from the Hudson, where I suddenly was) to HIS island, which for a NAME I thought "City Island," from POSITION I thought "Roosevelt Island," and from FUNCTION it might be "Governor's Island," and he assured me there was still enough time to get there for the cocktail party to be still going on, though I thought it's ended. Was debating when I woke up.
3/30/78
BIZARRERIE
Tuesday, March 28: Woke with the VERY strange memory of being in an automobile with a very intelligent dog, who was smoking a pipe and DRIVING!
Wednesday, March 29: Arresting image, quite non-connected with anything before: Mom is kneeling comfortably, as if nothing is wrong, before a toilet bowl, which is like mine since the floor is carpeted, with an enormous wooden spoon in her hand which is covered with flecks of chocolate, and she's put in enormous quantities of powdered chocolate, like for making chocolate drinks, into the toilet water and is spooning out quantities and tasting them and wondering why I'm standing over her disapprovingly.
Thursday, March 30: After a number of preparatory scenes with smaller sprays and buffers, there's the buildup to the gigantic climax of a sketch which might be a comic thing on "Your Show of Shows" with Sid Caesar: the camera dollies up close to a door, and since I've "seen it before," I can see the huge rollers lurking behind the cracks of the door hinges. The comic comes to the doorway with an artificial smile on his face and the suspense builds through a number of lighting and music devices until the doors pull back to reveal the large rollers, but then there's another take which has the cameras moving in AGAIN to butt up against a plate glass on which the spurts of water can be seen splashing from the sides, and suddenly the comic has turned into Zero Mostel, who's being sprayed and buffed from the sides as in a huge carwash, and there's a voiceover which states how courageous he is to do this stunt, seeing as he had brain surgery only a few months before and thought he'd never work again. Two oddities: Zero Mostel is dead, and I was very impressed by the U.S. Terpsichore program last night that (no, the review in the Post) Bronwyn Thomas had almost died of lung disease (and here she was dancing "Giselle"!) and was now back on the stage doing marvelously. There were other details which I've forgotten, but I wanted to get down all that I remembered from the first dreams that I've recorded since February 3, just barely getting an entry in the dream book for these two months with VERY few dreams recorded during their days.
4/13/78
MOM AS ENTERTAINER
The setting rather reminds me of the old-fashioned European opera house in which Bergman's "The Magic Flute" was set, and the Scandinavian influence is echoed in the idea I get that Mom is rather like the heroine of "A Little Night Music," and I'm the son who's come to visit her in a performing city, and we've made arrangements to be together for a short time for dinner after the performance, but I'm there with Dennis and keep asking him if he knows where we're supposed to go, and he doesn't. At one point in the small audience, I know that Mom's maid is there in the row in front of us, and I figure that she must know where I'll meet Mom, but there isn't a chance to ask her. Then we're up in the front row and somehow I manage to get her ear for a few seconds, and she whispers something about "the corner of 8th and Marguerite," and I quickly get out a map because I'm not quite sure of the second name other than it starts with "Mar" but could be Margate or Marquette or anything like that, but I'm hoping that once I find 8th on the map, there'll only be one "Mar" street possible. I find "8" on the map just as I'm getting up, and I feel like remarking to Dennis that I'm glad the alarm waited at least until I could find out the address, but it also obscured the idea I had that the performance that my mother gave on the stage wasn't of the best: the provincial crowd might have been liking it, but with my greater refinement I could see that it was rather coarse and that I should be embarrassed if she ever took it anywhere as sophisticated as New York or any other world capital. The feeling that it was in the far north was heightened by my realization that it was light out even into the evening, and that we wouldn't have to worry about getting lost at night, since the darkness never reached a more intense peak than a rather dim twilight. Meant to take notes on the dream when I woke up, but even got to the day page before remembering that I had the dream at all, and then went through the usual wonderment if I could find enough details to fill the entire page, not having learned the lesson that I CAN stop before I get to the bottom, if I choose to, though it's convenient to rattle on.
4/28/78
$100 BILLS
Most of the details have vanished in the five hours since I had it, but the memories of the echoes from the previous day IN the dream are still elusively tantalizing: I had a number of $100 bills, as I got yesterday from the bank to give 6 to Dennis and turn 10 into traveler's checks, and I was in a closed-up room, but as I remember I had 16 and there were 7 gone, leaving 9, but since it was a closed room, and only me and "my guest" were there, it MUST have been he (reminding me yesterday of looking for the list of money owed me: I just COULDN'T find it, but I assumed it HAD to be there, so I just continued to look and look until I actually DID find it. Here I looked and looked and they were GONE, so he HAD to take them). But since I had no proof, he just stood around looking faintly amused and challenged me to PROVE that he'd taken them. Oddly, at no time did I have the thought in the dream to search him. His identity is elusive: I know, even knew in the dream, that he reminded me strongly of someone---someone straight, who knew he was attractive to gays, who catered to their desires for him, but who remained aloof---but maybe I only know the TYPE of person, rather than an actual person. Then, somehow, we were out of the room and getting into an automobile (since I'm thinking of renting a car in Italy and just got an international driver's license yesterday), and I'm aware of the road, but I don't know whether he's going to get into the car or not, and still the unresolved $100 bills are on everyone's mind, and I can see his light-colored hat on his handsome profile with the black mustache, see some sort of scarf around his neck, see him smoking a cigarette, as he still defied me to find some way of proving that he took the money. As I left for the dance last night, I thought that it would be terrible if my place were ROBBED this night, but I figured I'd just have to go back to the bank and get $1600 MORE dollars, since I was taking the trip. So that was all there was to the dream, very little in the line of detail and very much in the way of innuendo---reminding me NOW of an interview with the original producer of "The Prisoner" who said that even the last elusive episodes eluded HIM!
5/17/78
DIAMONDS
Azak has come to my apartment, and it seems that he wants something that I'd borrowed from him before, and I open a black leatherette, white satin-lined case and find only the OUTLINE of two pieces of jewelry, one a smaller ring, and another, larger, cigarette lighter-shaped structure which I somehow know was a very elegant setting for a very large diamond, and I immediately think that I HAVE to find it, since it must be here somewhere, since I could NEVER work long or hard enough to get enough money to pay back the millions the jewel must have been worth (is the jewel in the heart of the lotus of great price creeping in?). I look in various drawers, and then he comes up with a clear plastic model of the "casing" the diamond has been in, and it turns out to look like a CAMERA in which the diamond formed part of the lens, and it was held in a peculiar way, and I was asking him for some sort of explanation of its function, but I couldn't understand what he was saying. I knew I didn't have to worry about the smaller one, maybe because I may have had it on my finger, or he knew that I'd returned it, OR the larger one was so much more expensive than the smaller one that I concentrated on the larger one. Why HE had it I don't know, but there was the feeling that it might have been some sort of investment on his part, and while I'm typing I recall his delight over the outrageousness of buying a kilogram of gold in Switzerland. He's not concerned about it, either, and I've moved to a newer, somewhat more elegant apartment, so there's no thought that I'm trying to cheat him or play games on him, but I just can't find it. All sorts of parallels with Actualism streamed into my mind as I typed the somewhat garbled recounting of the dream, and I almost just now remembered my "Story of the Old Man" who found a diamond in the middle of his sack of rags, and there's something working here, but I can't tell what it is, and there's so much to do, and so little time to look back on anything, that this page will probably be the last I devote to the topic until something ELSE (just "reread" "pearly-white" on line three of DIARY 12991!) comes up which will repeat the pattern of diamond concerns, and I come up with another page devoted to it, that I might add to my index.
5/30/78
FLOODING AND MOM
A large group of us are standing on an embankment, and from a gully beside it streams a gush of water so strong that it's carried a few feet from the embankment onto the plain below in a horizontal column of greenish-gray water. We get down and see that it's playing onto a melting mass of old ice, and there are comments that it had been one of the hardest winters in history, and I look with surprise to see that the edges of the ice are tinged with pink, and some of the broken pieces are turned over so that I can see there's a dusting of pinkness and dirt on the bottom, and I conclude that the red earth is being churned up and blown around on the strong winds. We're then across the landscape, somewhat sodden fields and houses in the distance, to go through a ruined house, and there's a group of us filing up the walk and around to double back on ourselves as we cross the porch, and Mom's right above me. Our guide is telling us that the pinkness has even attached itself to the corrugated walls, but when I look at the tin walls, it seems to me that the blue paint has been knocked off to a layer of white below, and below that it looks like hammerhead marks have flaked off the white to show the red below, and I say something about "That's not from the wind, that's from the wall," and Mom shoots me a MURDEROUS look and with her brusque low voice tells me to not bother him with my worthless comments. I feel myself literally expanding, blowing up with rage, and I squeeze a comment through writhing lips, as sarcastically as I can, "I can say anything I WANT to say, whether you like it or NOT," and it's astounding to me even in the dream now much ENERGY is behind my anger toward her, how CONCENTRATED my hatred toward her is for shushing me when I'm only trying to say something which would help, and all the other people almost vanish in the intensity of my hatred toward her. She stares back at me, but before she can react in any way, the dream is over, and I'm left to wonder why such INTENSE feelings toward my mother have been coming up more and more frequently in my dreams, and she's always left with literally NOTHING to say, and I KNOW that I'm right and she's wrong in each case.
6/1/78
JET PLANE
There's a whole group of people getting ready to board a jet to go somewhere, but somehow it's also something like a mob waiting to get inside an exhibition at a World's Fair, and I know that it's a produced show rather than a real thing. We're lifted on a huge platform, somewhat like an aircraft carrier elevator, up to two other moving platforms filled with people, and I can see the higher level of the two we're coming up to as well as the not-quite-fitting joint between those two themselves, but it's all made out of clean wood underneath with a coating of plastic or metal on top which makes everything look like something out of "Star Wars." There's music playing, too, it seems, but the people are shouting and pointing up into the air, where on either the sky or a huge projected cyclorama are dozens of enormous jet aircraft lifting off into the air to the amazed "Oooohhhs" of the audience standing below and pointing. Some of the SST takeoffs seem to be across some of cyclorama wrinkle, since they seem to warp slightly as they leave the ground, and I'm fearful that it'll turn into a dream where the closely watched jetliners crash with horrible detail of flames and sounds, or that something will happen in the air that will NOT fulfill the purpose of this display, which is to make people who are about to take their first, or a fearful, jet ride into an adventure. I say that I've been on these before, but the people I was there with seem to have become separated in the crowd, but I feel no concern about that: we're not going anywhere, or rather, we're all going to the same place, whether the same jet destination or the same exhibition exit I'm not quite sure, but there's a marvelous sense of the spaciousness of the vistas on all sides with these giant machines leaping into the air (soundlessly, it seems) and the tiny people below milling around in the crowd and having a good time on their orientation. It was only a brief dream, and I had no luggage to worry about or time schedules to make me hurry, so there was a nice sense of mere observation, and I congratulated myself somewhat that the time during which I WOULD have been very afraid of flying in jet aircraft seems to have passed more and more away.
6/7/78
PEOPLE FROM PAST
First I'm in my bedroom at 1221 Dietz, but Rita has a bed behind the door, Mom is sleeping along the wall that used to hold the door to the closet which now holds a bathroom, and my bed is below the windows. There's a wooden table with all kinds of possessions on it, and at a time there's Helen's voice from the door, coming up the stairs to the apartment with a load of groceries, assuring someone from the building that she's kept track of the people's coming and going, and "There are now 13 in the building," and the fellow praises her keeping track. Rita's lent me her pillow, and I'm amazed to find how rock-like it is, and when I take back my blankets I find that I have no mattress cover, only a folded sheet like I'd put on the sofabed in the living room. Mom had been sleeping in my bed, and when she crawls sickly back to hers, I look and see a wet spot at the top corner, and when I pull the sheet down it moves wetly over the seemingly plastic covered mattress, and I ask "What's that?" and she retorts defensively, "What do you think it would be?" and so I know she's wet the bed, but know that it won't smell anyway. Then I have to start fixing things up, and start folding clothing and putting things onto the table, and suddenly I'm sitting behind a desk at Times Square Information-Police Center, and Mom's mother has just gone out of the room and Dad's mother has just entered, and I say to someone who's sort of a combination of Dennis and Larry Ball that "All my relations are right here in the room," with amazement, not realizing then in the dream that Grandma has died already. There's a TV program showing the displays and lists in the center, and it lingers over a movie like "Nashville" which advertises "7 stars, 200 people, 0 nominations, 0 awards," and the cameraman is obviously for it, since it lingers over THAT, rather than the Academy Award winners and their playing times listed below on the white-lettered black-felted board. Then there's the display of a globe of some sort (should be Earth, looks more like Mars or Jupiter) with a mirrored effect that makes it look like it's behind a glass, but if it were BEHIND, it would be on 42nd Street, and a lady comes in and asks the obvious question, but the bored policeman, still courteous, behind the desk says it's only an illusion, she thought the police station was at that side, but she looks through the window behind me and then agrees that indeed that IS the side facing 42nd Street.
6/10/78
RADIO CITY; LETTER-SPIN SENTENCES; CURTAINS
1) Radio City-like place, sitting in back, but it's a boring movie, but on the electric digital clock above the exit I see that it's only 2 hours and 5 minutes, so I decide to stay since I'm here, and audience APPLAUDS the good sections, which surprises me. Woman behind me talks with friends, and it turns into Mom, whom I leave and walk through the empty central walk space and she comes up behind me and threatens to throw some liquid from her cup at me, but doesn't. I move down to the front to find that many of the seats have been taken out (and there are still ladders up where people are fixing the lights for this premiere, and the lighting director's face is bathed in an unpleasant green light) and there's a large stage: they've taken out the platform and put in grass, and it looks almost like they're going to have a football game, and there are a few seats left in front, one of which I take with a pleasant expectation of seeing something spectacular, if not good.
2) Groups of people are standing on a huge slanting array, spinning wheels of letters about horizontal axes, and when the letters stop they make "sentences" that form a prediction or random paragraph, and some guy turns to his neighboring woman and says "Mine say this, but someone said it ACTUALLY says this," which NOW brings up the intriguing idea that the sentence is not on the TOP, where the spinners can see it, but BELOW, where the WATCHER can!
3) Huge heavy macramé-like knotted curtains, rather like a heavy decorative table covering that would NOT be used as a tablecloth, is hanging at my French windows, and I push them aside and some support gets caught in the plants at the side like the curtain rod came crashing down on the kitchen window yesterday (Thursday), and the curtains are heavy and quite yellow with dirt and grime, and I decide I have to WASH them, hoping to get rid of the yellow discolorations, and thinking about hanging them on the line outside to dry, figuring they'll brighten up just like the kitchen curtains did when I did the same thing when they'd been darkened by cooking grease. Woke and reached under the bed to jot these down, but when there was no paper, came out to the desk and wrote down the necessary notes by 10:45 am, late.
6/13/78
ICEBERGS AND DANCING
One section had me looking, disembodied, down on icebergs from something like an observation platform or ship's deck, and I could see them breaking off and turning over (rather like in Dersu Uzala from Saturday) in the opaque water, and then all of a sudden I decide I'm on a helicopter, because we're rising STRAIGHT UP from the views, and more and more churning ice comes into view, but the ice is quite white and not nearly as small as seen from the jet returning from Venice. I continue to stare down at the ice, which then seems to stop moving at a certain height, and I look closer, thinking something like "Gee, that looks just like dust on the edge of a lake now," and I sort of pick myself up and it IS just dust and dirt particles on the smooth sand just at the very edge of a very quiet pond, and at the periphery of my vision is a fender from some sort of vehicle, and suddenly I'm on a car or jeep-like conveyance traveling over some semi-desert landscape, and I'm wondering where I am and what I'm going to be doing here, and it ends. Second section had me sitting in a big, quite empty auditorium which was like a high-school auditorium with non-raked seats, and I was sitting in the right-side section, wondering what I was doing over here since the auditorium was quite wide, and only a few people were sitting in the front rows immediately in front of me. Onstage was a famous ballet star of the caliber of Nureyev and Baryshnikov combined, and it was an unabridged performance of something they were quite famous for, like "Moor's Pavane" or "Spectre de la Rose," but this version had a spoken voice in it, sort of reciting poetry, and then at the extreme left of the stage some black curtains were pushed aside and a beam of light as from the moon came through and lit the profile of some fellow who was doing the speaking, and I wondered if we were really supposed to see him then, or if the curtains moving had just been an accident. Thee was no orchestra, but gently recorded music was in the air, and I had the feeling of being at a historical occasion, but wasn't really sure why it was being done here and why there were so few people, and only while TYPING think of the gay overtones of a man dancing while a man recites poetry that goes along with it, as if they were lovers.
6/13/78
BLANKETS AND LETTERS
I'm searching for particular color combinations of blankets, almost as some sort of ritual or appeasement of the gods---that's how important the colors being proper is. I have to get a red and orange blanket, and then I have to get a brown and green blanket. But the only place I seem to "be" is in bed, as if all the blankets were already on the bed, and all I have to do is unwrap them to see what colors they are (and this seems ridiculously close to what I'm struggling with in Actualism now: experiencing what's already inside), and first I find one, thinking myself very lucky, which is red-and-white checked on one side and totally orange on the other side, saying that I've been lucky to find ONE blanket with both colors ON it, and then I almost immediately, as if there weren't really any problem, find and cover myself with a blanket that's brown and white checks on one side and green all over the other, feeling that I've succeeded in a difficult task. But it was really more a matter of luck than effort, I felt in the dream.
Then (or before, I don't remember, but since this is the vaguer dream, I suppose it was prior to the first described) I was sitting in some sort of summer cottage putting pre-addressed letters into envelopes (rather like JOYI forms), but as I'm putting some into the envelopes to be sealed, I see that they're already addressed to people that I'd decided not to send them to, or that didn't have addresses I could find, and I tell myself I have to erase these obsolete names. Then I begin getting letters back which I tabulate, and I have the IMPRESSION that (though the names aren't familiar) I've written to the people in my high-school class to come on a vacation with me, and when I got the results I penciled the names on a sheet of yellow tablet paper, saying Audrey Heinemann isn't available, Martha Somebodyelse can't come, and others have moved and can't be found. I guess this comes from the thoughts about Larry Ball and a vacation to the Caribbean, but it also seems that I'm confused, and searching, and rather scattered in lots of things that I'm doing, but at least the dreams are COLORFUL and not uninteresting and surely not DANGEROUS---in fact, rather a bit TOO innocuous?
6/17/78
BATHS IN CHURCH WITH MARTY
Marty Sokol and I are traveling in a strange American town and have found what we were told were baths, and I'm vaguely wondering what he'll do when he finds out that baths means gay, and we're into a roughhewn timbered church with a ceremony going on, and we go up a number of stairs in a white entranceway (rather like the theater on 49th, or wherever), and then our path leads us right down the middle of the congregation, where we feel rather foolish with small suitcases, more like attaché cases, in our hands and our overcoats over those, but the people engaged in the services are wholly concentrating on exchanging their food or unwrapping their picnic baskets, we can't be quite sure which, and people are offering food to the children and adults are refusing offers, saying they have plenty themselves, and they seem to sense that Marty and I aren't there for that, so they don't offer us any, and we feel quite free to look around at the gentle-faced married men and women and their children, some with the little white fringed caps of the Amish. Up through the areas in front of the stained glass, and we can hear the voices of the congregation behind us, and we know that we have to go to the "offices" that are at the top of the stairs, and we come out onto a small balcony and into a tiny foyer which could be anywhere, not necessarily on top of a church, though the ceilings slope in rather, and there are a few people waiting to check in, I suppose, but the center of attraction is a young farmhand, not more than 13 or 14, who's standing shirtless in front of the check-in desk, and he's quite unconsciously stretching back and forth, as if he has a crick in his back, and his abdominals ripple under his young summer tan, and his blond head turns back and forth over his flushed face, and he sort of flexes his arms and I think "He probably IS gay, but there's going to be a lot of competition to get HIM," and that's about the end of the dream, though there IS a fragment of Marty and I going DOWNSTAIRS and seeing a dark hallway with doors opening off it and men sitting in the dimness waiting for passersby, but I can't connect that at the end. I guess I was reminded by the "39 Steps" incident about "only one room left in the hotel?"
6/17/78
CONSTANTLY FUSSING
1) A crowd of people is waiting to tour a huge factory with yellow-tiled roofs that have intermittent dormer windows of many panes which are covered with enormous billowing white nylon curtains, which have been blowing around and getting caught on the roof tiles and sloppily hanging over the windows. The tickets for the start of the tour have been delayed: "No Rome, no clearance."
2) To an assembled gathering are announced "The Vice Mayor of Baltimore," "The Lieutenant Governor of North Georgia," and various other dignitaries that some of the audience, including me, think might JUST be put-ons.
3) Helen and Jimmy and I are living in California and get into car to drive 300 miles for a vacation weekend on Elm Island. I don't have the right clothes, and we're sitting at a table waiting for a restaurant meal, but I lose my shoulder bag and I have to walk on the tabletops to get out of the crowded place, hearing in the lobby that they're "totally engaged" for the evening, though I think it might be some sort of selective snobbism, and I'm back home to have to leave the keys to the door under the kitchen (or is it the bathroom?) sink, but the doors are locked, I somehow have no pants on, only shorts under my white shirt, and then they come back to make sure it's all OK with me, and I don't have to worry anymore. Someone in the restaurant later says "We ate at James's in Bermuda" as if it were the place to be seen, but with the air of "We don't have to be here doing this, we choose to."
4) Still another KNOWING that I've had a Physics class nightly at 7 pm, but I've not been to it because I don't even know where the classroom is, and here it is June, so how can I take the test? I thumb through the tabs on my notebook to see the lineup of classes, and I get the dreadful sinking feeling that I'm not ready for anything, and where has all the time gone, and what can I do to make it all well, and then the idea that it's THAT dream again, and HERE'S where, still in the dream, I should make the effort to look at my hands, to see if I have SOME say in what happens in them, and I've forgotten what---oh, yes, someone ELSE said I should try BEAMING in my dreams, at the characters, to see whether they're real or just images of the brain.
6/16/78
DISHES / INTERVIEW / VEGETABLES / GRASS
1) I'm washing dishes in Herman Washington's apartment (reminded by taking water from Mara Alper's sink?), with a LONG-handled pan I'd stored something in, too long to fit into KITCHEN, as the instigation, and there are lots of pewter ladles with some sort of gravy or pasta stuck to the bowls which I have to scour, and he compliments me for doing a nice, but slow, job, and I'm pleased.
2) I'm interviewing Al Goldstein, and when I say I'm from "New Yorker," he takes off through the factories in which he produces the Village Voice, of which he's the editor, and it's rather like the glass factories in Murano. To a back office, waving to someone at the gate not to disturb him, and I take notes as he talks, while he wonders why I don't have a tape recorder, and then I turn to a teletype-sort of typewriter, fussing with paper in back, trying to record my next questions (what would you publish if you didn't publish this, how would you change policies in other papers, etc) while getting the gist of his current answers, vaguely feeling that I'm not qualified to organize all this information, hoping I won't misquote him, and that he won't think that I'm incompetent, but he seems to be respecting my work.
3) Three or four of us (Pope? Larry? Arnie? Dennis?) are walking down the lawns to the last session of an agricultural congress in a huge amphitheater, but the lawns are planted with fruit trees growing enormous oranges, segments of which, large as pumpkins, liter the ground where people started them, and I pick up a piece and eat it, delicious, and nearby are wax beans growing of such tenderness they have little cellules of juice like oranges do, and we eat those, then look at the juiciest tomatoes, and I envision a cabbage about as big as an automobile tire, and we're all very happy there.
4) I'm talking to someone in my apartment, looking with wonder at the tiny small growths of my grass plants, and it dawns on me that the upper stems have been broken down by too much water, and I can separate them from the soil as limp spinach-like tendrils, and I'm wondering if it would be worthwhile to sort them from the dirt and dry them for grass for smoking, and then I wake and marvel at my PROLIFERATION of thoughts about EVERYTHING (see DIARY 13086).
6/17/78
STORY WRITING
I'm writing a story which has to be REWRITTEN today, at some sort of office. I'm revising it from a story to a play, and to help with the stage directions, have taken a movie camera and show the actress-heroine rising from the road, with a haunting look on her face, and comes toward the camera, and I want to say something about how she's about to do something so extraordinary that no one will understand her for doing it. I set down the first five or six lines of dialogue, and they're all one- or two-word phrases. To do the work on the retyping, we go around the back door of the house on Dietz and down into the basement, while Mom hollers out "Where did you take her?" and I said "Just around the side," and the heroine who's helping me with the rewrite turns out to be Rita. I climb onto a ladder to type, but find that the high stool (rather like the stage setup for "I'm Getting ...") on which the typewriter is placed comes only to my calves, and we laugh about that level with someone a desk away who's also on a ladder typing, and I try to adjust the height, swinging back and forth on the ladder to wiggle it down to the right height, and then get to writing. That's the end of the dream, but I wake and KNOW there's a story there---and I start with the vague memory that the story was something about the misfit, with a relative working on a genetic clue for a cure, and it quickly resolves to the old "to cure is to make normal, is that good?" of "Equus." I struggle with my thoughts---should I get up, bother Dennis, and write notes? And the story? WHAT story? Look at the clock and it's 7:10, he's sleeping, and finally I come up with the idea of "The Singers" and it's too good to pass up, so I get up and write one note for the dream (above), one note for the debate (to here), and one note for the story (see DIARY 13093) at 7:30-7:40, and I begin to see an echo of ME in the STORY. Later, when I get back to bed, I think more about it and write still another note after I get up, so I won't forget some of the details that I've added. It started fairly short, but it seemed to get long, save that I added the note: quick moving, fast as NOTES, yet FEEL for her AND her son, since thoughts had swirled through changes.
6/19/78
TEXT AND EDITING
1) I'm looking through a copy of what seems like New York Magazine, and the announcements of coming events are printed smaller than usual, and I see a note somewhere that the "J.V.J" section has been reduced to 8-point or 7-point type (or something technical) and is therefore occupying 40% less room that it had before, and I note that it looks OK in the smaller type since it's only a reference section and doesn't have to be read like an article. Obviously part of my idea to cut down on entertainment absorption.
2) Someone who's a combination of Larry Ball and Dennis Southers is recommending me their MOTHER for an editing job in a publishing company, and the mother turns out to be a diffident Judy Watson's who's saying in her typically querulous voice that she doesn't know if she's qualified for such a technical job, but her "son" remarks that she has a marvelous command of her use of "whether" in sentences, and with that she could do anything that the job might demand of her. There's something about typing hovering in the background, probably due to the fact that she's recently begun the sounds of typing upstairs, and due to my worry that typing noises might bother her. The setting for the latter dream is a very small office with nothing of note except its smallness and whiteness, and we're all clustered around a small desk with maybe a small lamp on it, but there's very little of the background visible, and the lighting is bright but not glaring.
Went through the details of the dreams as I lay in bed in the morning, not wanting to forget any of them, but they seemed somewhat disappointing in the amount of rich detail that some of the previous dreams have had, and except for the two Sundays, the latter of which I woke up JUST at 10 am when I wanted to watch TV, I've had dreams every day for the past 10 days---or dreams that I remember, since we seem always to have dreams. But there aren't those times that I can remember having DREAMED but can't remember what it was, possibly helped with the putting of the pen and cards under the bed so that even if Dennis is here, or I don't feel like getting out of bed, I can record the ideas which will keep the details in mind until typing.
6/24/78
SPIDER/MITE
Haven't dreamed about bugs in a long time, but a group of friends and I were in an oldish-type dining room and there, on the small antlers on the wall, was a brown puff of what looked like a crab-shaped spider, and then it swung down on some sort of thread and attached to my ass, panicking everyone in the room, and I rather tried not to be terrified, but when I sat down I really expected it to bite me. They went through the folding---sliding, rather, polished panel wooden doors to the next room, hoping to contain the menace, and I said to them that it really need not be a spider, in any event it wasn't a biting spider, and it rightly might be a mite, though I told myself that a mite wasn't USUALLY 3-4 inches across as this was, but it just didn't have legs long enough to be a spider, and then it did NOT bite. The haunted-house effect of the dining room was notable, as were the vagueness of the 2-3 "friends" who were with me.
Another part, possibly earlier, concerned having sex with a number of people in, not a baths exactly, but it seemed to be a place where it was OK for men to be nude and have sex. I particularly was attracted to a young man with thighs that were so muscled that they shone in the dark, possibly like the thighs of the black in "Canto Vital" who also stood out in the chorus of "Giselle" last night, and I went up to these marvelous thighs and tried to excite the cock between them, and it started to respond, but I rather quickly woke up and felt that I was excited by the dream, but that it was too early to do anything about it and Dennis wasn't really awake yet, and probably by the time he woke up the feeling would be gone, and why WAS it that I really didn't feel so sexy anymore? Was too sleepy even to take notes on the dreams, though I should have, notepaper right below the bed, but I'd forgotten them almost entirely on waking, and it was only when reading something after breakfast that the ideas of the dreams came back to me, so the remembering process isn't as complete as it need be, provided I try quickly enough to sort out the details and organize them for typing on pages that go on interminably to the bottom as this one has just done.
6/26/78
ALONSO AND LAUREN BAHR
1) Alicia Alonso's taking her curtain call, and with a flourish she steps to the side and clacks away at a typewriter, typing out the name of some of her admirers for badges, it seems, and the spotlight flashes on the whole apparatus somewhat late, which in retrospect might make me think that she couldn't see, but when she types, I figure that she MUST be able to see, and her long black lashes are almost furry in the bluish spotlights.
2) I'm standing in Lauren Bahr's apartment looking out the kitchen window onto what seems to be her terrace, and her husband takes me out for a look at it, and it turns out to overlook the East River and it's not really private, but for a whole complex of buildings and their apartment is sort of a townhouse overlooking it as if it were private, and there are kids playing and bicyclists moving along dirt paths, and it seems to be built out over the East Side Highway, running below, but I'm amazed that it can support such large trees. The sides are fenced and I think they might be good for cruising in the path-infested bushes growing alongside the fences, and there are even small hills in the landscaping. We pass someone who's listening when I say "It seems like spring," though I know it's autumn, and the listener says sarcastically "Spring's the wrong season," but we're past blooming daisies and I look down to the river and there's a WWII camouflaged airplane being towed down the river, but it's nose is facing upriver, so it's disquieting to look out and see this plane going backward over the edge of the playground. I'm getting indications that Lauren's husband might be interested in me, and I don't remember her saying anything about his orientation, so he just might be bisexual so I keep an ear turned to his conversation, since I find him rather attractive in an older way, looking vaguely like Wayne Dyer whose "Erroneous Zones" are so widely advertised, and I figure he must be quite successful in publishing and it might be someone to get to know well and keep contact with. Up and write notes about these two, which is good, since I don't get to typing them until the next day; I probably would have forgotten the whole thing, let alone details.
6/27/78
JIM MAHER AND BEDS AND BALLET BOOKS
1) Jim Maher and John and I are arranging the sheets and blankets for one large bed, and I'm wondering who's going to sleep in the middle (this probably came from listening to Bill's tape (see DIARY 13115) about sleeping with a friend in Portland with two single beds in the room), but it turns out they have three single beds, which first are only sheet-springs with a sheet over-top, then there are blankets and I nestle in mine wondering what I said wrong to sleep apart. I move bed to alcove with windows, and then wander out in the night into a Gothic courtyard which turns into almost a university-size complex of buildings and dwellings, and I wander aimlessly and come back to my section, seeing how it IS a townhouse on the edge of a university quadrangle, but now it looks like a classroom, or at least NOT like a house, and see where my bed would be and think about going back inside, but then the dream sort of ends without any resolution.
2) Jim and I are paging through ballet books, at the end of which I sort of regret that I hadn't bought one every year, since his books are different from mine: bright white covers with color photos of the dancers and the new repertory, and I recognize Eglevsky and Jillana and Conrad Ludlow and lots of people from the New York City Ballet stretched out in extensions depicting their new ballets, and some of the dances I've never seen before, and again this seems to be connected to some sort of COLLECTING mania that I have, like when I compared going to Saba on the tape to Bill like getting one stamp from some out-of-the-way country just to have one on that page, just to have a visit to that island. Wake early and mull these over, and then, though I feel listless, reach over the side and take down the notes necessary to bring them back to mind, since I'm tried enough to go back to sleep and thus might have another layer of dreams that would completely put these out of mind and replace them with a new layer. Wondering recently what help these would be: there doesn't seem to be any pattern, and there are so MANY of them that they're becoming too bulky to think about establishing something SIMPLE from them---just another collection to maintain!
6/30/78
NETHERLANDS CUSTOMS
I have my shoes on and off to pass the time, and my friend, who I think to be Dennis, is sitting in the back of the schoolroom-like setting talking to another customs inspector at a desk and is having more of an easy time than I am. I talk in French on the phone to a woman who's been called in to assist with the customs duties, and she asks now long I stayed, where I go next, and when I seem to indicate that I'm just wanting to return to the states, she asks "How long have I lived in Brooklyn," and I can't imagine what that has to do with anything. Then I brush the dust off my feet and put my shoes back on and the lights dim in the room as others are questioned, but the people seem to want to be friendly and helpful, even though the chairs turn out to be VERY low and seem to have been cut down from some elegant dining chairs from palaces, with patterned brocade on the seats and fringes of gold-threaded lacework nailed down to the sides, and they're getting all dusty from the lack of care in the room, and I brush the sides of my shoes against them, though maybe I might have smelled something and thought I might have stepped into some dog droppings. There's a question about insurance against what seems to be accidents on the trip, and since the trip is over and I haven't had any accidents, even though I didn't take out insurance, I say I'd taken out insurance, and think how I can fumble in my bag for the proper papers, and then remember that since it was the end of the trip I just threw them out---or maybe I sent them to someone to safeguard, but anyway I didn't have them, and I hoped that this tiny lie wouldn't trap me in some way, give them something to pin on me so they could keep me there longer. It seems almost that they ENJOYED having us there to talk to, or maybe they just were bored at their job and tried to stretch US out until someone else arrived to cheer up their cavernous gray offices with little light outside barely visible fixtures that served to set up each desk as a small part of a stage set on its own. But I had no taxis or busses or schedules to make, I just wanted to be OUT of there and continue with the return part of the trip to, I don't know how I knew, the Netherlands.
7/1/78
LABRADOR ADVENTURE
When someone asks if I liked St. John, I figure I'm not in northern Canada or Alaska on the West Coast, or Norway, but that I'm in northern Labrador, where there's ice most of the places except hidden valleys of greenery. A group of us are climbing a mountain, and it's gotten very icy in the windy darkness, and they've gone ahead of me and I'm clinging with every toe and knee that I can muster, but in the darkness I reach up the vertical wall and find something leveling off that's a kind of grass so thick and even it feels like a carpet, and when I pull myself exhaustedly up, I'm so relieved and thankful and hungry and thirsty that I just BITE into a good hank of grass, and the acidy liquid stings and tastes good and reassuring at the same time. Then rise and walk and there the muddy path leads to wooden walkways and the beginnings of a street, and it's a mining or hunting community built in the middle of nowhere that I'm delighted to find, and I walk into increasing crowds until there's an amusement park lights-array in the distance, and instantly I'm in the calliope-entertained crowd, lining up for something like a Wonder Wheel, and I'm glad to have found the place. Then I'm eating food like chicken in an enormous buffet, fishing out tomatoes swimming in mayonnaise, and this is probably influenced by the reading of eating with the fingers in Theroux's "Great Railway Bazaar." When I get to the cashier there's lots of problems, and I reach into my bag and get out my blue thing to find that I have a passel of tokens, as I usually have, and so I don't figure they will take them, and that's when I start talking with the people with the idea in the back of my mind "If you think St. John is a big place, you should see New York," but I figure that would be a bit much, after all I'm their guest, so I don't say it, but this bit of judgment seems to wake me up, and it's 6:50, but I figure I'll be sleeping more so I take notes which I can't read later and then get back into bed, noting how I've managed to come up with at least SOMETHING in the dream book for the month of July, which only just started, and things just go on and on to the end of the page, as this has now, just taking up time, hey?
7/5/78
RESTAURANT-WAITING AND BLACK DANCER
1) First we seem to be seated at tables on a sort of tiered balcony waiting for someone, but then we're standing looking AT the tiers of tables from the side, and somehow I know that this is only the waiting area for a very elegant restaurant, and Azak is dressed very casually, as I am, but everyone in the tiers is dressed in tuxedos, making a striking arrangement in black against the whites of the shirts, cuffs, faces, tablecloths, and décor of the silk-paneled room. Azak's talking to a waiter, trying to pay him off or charm him with his innate elegance (and this seems to be ANOTHER TIME when I feel totally lost---see DIARY 13158), and no one's particularly looking at us, but I feel very conspicuous anyway and hope he handles it OK.
2) I'm sitting in what seems to be an enormous amphitheater, like some old Roman ruins overgrown with grass in Olympia or Epidaurus or Corinth or somewhere, and the white stone seats are filled with colorful people who have come to watch a dance performance as part of a whole afternoon's entertainment here, and as I look out from my sort of box, there's a huge black male dancer who's reaching out to partner a large black female in some very thin white garments with her arms raised above her head, and he picks her up around the knees by stooping as she leaps at him, and he carries her over right below where I'm sitting, and I get the image that I might be some sort of person to whom the dance is being offered, since he lifts her over to the box without a rail in which I'm seated, and I turn away from my conversation with someone, though I'm in the very front of the box, and he lays the woman out so that she's lying on top of the white stone floor of my box, and her black hands are reaching out for me as she looks up and says "I hope you like it," and I'm so flabbergasted to be singled out by this famous dancer, whoever it is, and she hopes that I like it, that I don't think I can think of anything to say, so I just smile and sort of wave my hand, and she remains lying there, looking at me with expectance, until the quick end of the dream rescues me from having to figure out exactly HOW to handle this particular situation, and AGAIN I seem to be totally lost in it!
7/14/78
CHURCH SLIDE-BOX LIGHTS
I'm in what I think to be Notre Dame de Paris (probably from reading Ouspensky's chapter about it recently), but the seats are built up like into an amphitheater or a theater, wooden benches around perhaps a 45 arc, and at the top, as I come down the stage-right aisle, is a Chinese girl playing a radio loudly, and I make a face at her and maybe even tell her loudly to stop playing the radio. Then the scene seems to shift, the other people and benches disappear, and we're in a dark robing-room part of the church, and there's a small box with tiny peepholes into which you look and see slides of the face and parts of the church then it has the lights on inside, and I reach above and feel the toggle switch and push it down, and it's rather like a fluorescent-tube-type of light where the button has to be pressed DOWN for a moment, and there's a faint vibration like the starter on an automobile, and the light starts to flicker on, but the girl distracts me and says the one on the other side is better, so we switch over there, and it's unusual how DARK it seems to be in the dream inside that windowless room (or room in which the windows have been draped in dark brown---and NOT dark violet!) We wait for the slides to be put in, or for a fresh light to be put into the box, and I'm amazed that the church "trusts people" by leaving this room open, but then, as I think in the dream, the only thing to take are these ratty chairs which no one would want and these two casques that contain the light source for the slides, which might be good for something, but you'd have to have these tiny carrot slice-size slides specially made for display, and it seems silly that anyone would take them. I wait for something, the light maybe, to "come around again," and as I jot that last bit of note down, I think that THIS dream has something to do with reincarnation, too, "waiting for the light to come around again," as if waiting for the soul to enter and illuminate more bodies while everyone waits in the darkness for a new source of light. Wake and jot down the notes at 9:30, and it's good that I do, since things this morning get rather activated (see DIARY 13174) and I would have forgotten it by the time I type this at 2:50 pm.
8/3/78
MR. BALL
At first I'm stranded in some sort of information office with lots of reference material, but the people behind the desk won't give me ANY help at all, and don't even have change for the telephones. I look through a street guide to find one thing and a phonebook with white pages to find another thing and the yellow pages for something else, and every time I get to the next step there's one more step that they won't help me with, and I'm getting increasingly frustrated, feeling like I'm in a foreign country even though these people speak English. Everything depends on the time of day and the season of the year and the section of the city and the divisions of the book, and since I don't know the first thing about any of these, I have to ask for everything, and they treat me as if I should know it all. Then I'm finally walking toward the district where the Balls live, and I find a huge modernistic house with a driveway beneath where long strings of black limousines come and go, and I somehow get the feeling that I'm in Mexico where there's a large economic difference between rich and poor, and Mr. Ball is obviously one of the rich, and from the black cars I think there's a funeral, and even in the dream it strikes me a bit strange that it's MR. Ball who inhabits the house alone, and not Larry. There are silent women about, maids or nurses I can't tell from their silent white uniforms, and they seem reproachful of me, but when I buzz the side door, Mr. Ball hollers down something like "They'll kill me if they find out about it," and I enter to find him hugely distracted, with that strange whine he'd get into his voice sometimes, and he says something like "I'll go out of my mind," and I consider that he may already have done so. He seems to recognize me in the same way Larry would, and I feel uncomfortable to be there just as I may feel with Larry. Wake with the MOST vivid remembrance of the dream, and even when I forget to do the page on the day it was dreamed, there's enough of the detail left to enable me to recapture the frustration and the anxiety and Mr. Ball's whining puzzlement and despair even now, and I wonder if that has anything to do with our planned MEXICAN trip (JUST made the connection!).
8/7/78
HANDLESS WOMAN TEACHER
1) Odd handless woman teacher standing in front of the room, almost as short as Joan Ann, starting rather sarcastically talking about social science, and everyone hastily moves to the front of the room and takes all the empty seats, and as I turn around to get one in the back, it seems to fill up and we're one moment standing along the back wall and at the next moment standing in an open portico of a larger building, spilling our overflow onto the lawn beside the building, bright sun making things cheerful. She ends up teaching the class in a rather warm way, and suddenly she's hostess in her own apartment, sitting on a high chair addressing her students sitting around on chairs and on pillows on the rug, and then she directs me to go into the kitchen and get something, or I'm helping her with something, and then she shows me how to use a hand gadget rather like a Dymo machine that spews out thin white strips of wired material to make a sort of nametag strip and loop along the edge of a wooden shelf and catch a screw-end-of-hook to the SIDE of the shelf, rather than going INTO the shelf, rather like my tooth was caught in the pull-then-clamp device that Dr. Winston called "a new torture device" when I had my mouth so open I couldn't disagree with him, and I tried to do the same thing myself, remembering the Zoom program where a kid fixed up the top of the hook pushed into a cork to look like a person from which the toothbrush depended. I feel complimented that she lets me feel so at home in the kitchen of her apartment, and obviously likes me in a brusque way.
2) Huge trees have been knocked over in the flood, and the "porous soil" can't hold the roots, and there's a whole tabloid newspaper (with odd unreadable print) devoted to photographs of roots, dried, still holding rocks in their grasp, either silhouetted against the sky or still down in rocky porous holey earth, and I open to find another double-spread [DETAILED DRAWING] inside of the same sorts of photos and the same sort of type, and I wonder idly if there isn't any other news that needed SOME space devoted to it, but I don't turn another page and wake up just about then to jot down the notes, which is good, since this is now two days later and I've remembered enough thanks only to the notes I took then.
8/8/78
CONVENTION
I'm attending some kind of convention that evokes many dream sequences:
1) People in dining hall lining up for food; I get in car with woman driver like a younger Marilyn and almost-full seats, then I'm standing outside and women have been leaning against white-wood fence to get rides, and I wonder if I can claim priority having ridden with her in the cafeteria line, and there are more crowds up the lane at the building, spilling off the porch, all looking for rides, and someone asks incredulously, "Does this car really intend to drive to MOROCCO?" and I get the idea we must now be in southern Europe. A line of gay guys, singing "Gay is gay is good," dance out of the cafeteria before, and I sort of continue eating, observing but not commenting.
2) Seated at tables figuring finances, I'm assisting some female total the expenses, when the secretary of the organization, reminding me of Peggy Schillinger, changes the reporting date from Friday to Thursday. My colleague is frantic at the change, and I speak up blandly and defend her, saying "Why are you changing the day?" and Peggy says, "Day isn't changed," and I say with dripping sarcasm, "Of course, what a fool I was, of COURSE Friday is the same day as Thursday and you haven't changed the day," and everyone seems to side with ME, but intermingled somehow with this is the basement scene:
3) Scientist in charge of frozen desserts is looking in dismay across a lit basement to a huge box of a refrigerator, and down at some plans showing what the workings of the freezer are, and he's putting down coils in the bottom and placing above that an enormous tray which will contain the sheet cake which is then iced and cut into squares for dessert. People in the background marvel at his skill in constructing a workable freezer out of it.
4) Throughout it all, it's a different CHARACTER of dream, as if it were an animation with a difference like going from the flatness of Disney to the shading and depth of comic books or Bakshi, or with a completely different DIRECTOR who knows better how to manipulate a short scene to get the best effect out of it, or the FILM quality is better so that I can see the details and the colors with finer precision, and the colors ARE quite nice, like studio-lit Technicolor with the addition of soothing pastels, so colors aren't garish.
8/9/78
ANIMALS
The bus driver-guide on a tour through some place in South America is being filmed, and he looks out the window and distractedly moves his head back and forth, and the camera pans outside the bus to show a large-holed wire fence about 6 feet high enclosing a furry brown animal with yellow fur highlights and the most ludicrous set of Non-Tropo-cat close-set black eyes [DETAILED DRAWINGS], with an enormous chain and padlock around his neck, pacing elegantly back and forth along the back edge of the enclosure, then DIAGONALLY across to the near right corner, having repeated the pattern so much the long green grass is damaged and yellowing along his path, and he stops facing the LEFT front corner and plants his two delicate hooves far in front and leans back like a cat to YAWN, closing his enormous shiny eyes in the meantime and shake, and then I'm in some woman's apartment and she says "Well, if guanacos mean Americans, I'll always like them," and I figured she meant SOUTH Americans, or Peruvians, and that we were in Peru looking at a poor captive guanaco for the tourists. THEN another naturalist is testing the "liveness" of a beaver-like creature, turning it over on its back on the concrete floor of its pen and pushing a knife (obviously acupuncture) through the thick short brown fur and saying "He's dead here, live here," depending on whether he struggled a little or a lot when he was pierced to a depth of about 1/4 inch, but there was no blood, and then he's flipped over and I'm given the knife to see if he'll hold onto it, which is also a sign of life, and he reaches out a prehensile claw and grabs at the side of the knife, pulling it away from me so that the sharp edge runs against the underside of his cuticle, and I fear THAT might draw blood, and am impressed by the paradox that if he KEEPS the knife he'll get cut, but he's alive; but if he doesn't get cut by the knife he's dead, and will then be stabbed and gotten RID of. Both creatures had the realism of life, but somehow with the charm of cartoon animals, particularly their bright black eyes, seemingly seeing everything and reacting with soft pleasure to being considered by their keepers. Details fresh when I jotted down the note, so it helped to recapture the vividness of the animalistic dreams.
8/14/78
COUNTERFEIT MONEY AND TREE HOUSES
1) On Sunday morning I dreamed I was given either $100 bills or $20s by some official teller like a bank or funding office, but I thought they might be phony, and as the dream went on and on they became more and more phony, until they were literally xeroxes of the bills stapled together at the corners, and from my first merest suspicions it became "Of COURSE they're phony."
2) On Monday morning there were numbers of dreams possibly inspired by the broken-down remains of a boardwalk in the pine treetops at Monomonock Inn: Dennis and I were checking out numbers of tiny 3-4 room houses surrounded by greenery: living rooms with a corner sliced from them to accommodate a diagonal pane of glass from floor to ceiling that admitted emerald-green sunlight filtering through tree-leaves surrounding the house, and then at the railing to the other rooms one could look down to jewel-like rooms with minimal bright-colored furniture, again with large windows looking out to the bright green surroundings. At the end of the dream, it seemed that he had to admit that he'd just gotten a new apartment at 146 E. 43rd Street. Mrs. Johnson was somehow connected with one of the apartments, and maybe it was my looking through Interior Design magazine yesterday illustrating how to index to Ernie that I got some of these architectural visions. In one of the houses the dining room was separated from the living room by a low wooden railing that had a cushion, rather like an upholstered saddle, tied to it so that it could be used as a seat for the tiny dining-room table on a slight dais behind it, though the low-hanging chandelier would have made it difficult to eat at without banging one's head. There were other parts of the dream, too, but though I'd idly thought of taking notes this morning, I thought I'd get to them sooner in typing and remember them, but not having taken the notes on them, I didn't remember. But each little house was looked at as if I were hovering near the ceiling, possibly inspired by Ernie's tale of his out-of-body experience (see DIARY 13295), when HE looked down on his room and his body from the ceiling, and since the green continued going down below the window ledges, at floor level, I got the idea of tree-houses.
8/15/78
ROGER EVANS AND NYC
I've met this baggily-dressed bum who turns out to be either Roger Evans or so like him that I like him for that reason. He asks how to get to the bridge (Dr. Hsu?), and for awhile I think he means the George Washington Bridge, which I can't direct him to from Broadway, which he wants to keep to, but then it occurs to me he wants the Brooklyn Bridge, and I think of how to direct him from my somewhat sketchy knowledge of how that street relates to Chambers Street which relates to the bridge entrance. At one point I hold up the palm of my hand and flatten it out, showing him the basic north-south and east-west grid formed by the streets, and then draw a line (since one doesn't seem to be there) which indicates how Broadway cuts its way diagonally up the whole thing. But then we're about at 57th Street and he seems to want to turn back south, so I indicate how he can make his walk only a LITTLE longer, but to go east on 57th until 1st or 2nd Avenues, then walk south to see such things as the United Nations, and then walk west past the public library and Times Square to get a bit MORE of an idea of the city then he would get by slavishly following the diagonal of Broadway. He doesn't seem to understand my meaning, and I try to draw it on the palm of my hand, but then start searching for something to draw him a diagram on, and I get involved in thinking of his actual route of walk as I wake. He seemed stonily attentive as he often was as he sat on my sofa, pursing his lips slightly in concentration, narrowing his eyes in understanding, and nodding his head up and down with a soft "M-hm." Though he was somewhat the worse for the wear of travel, he didn't seem to smell dirty (as Dorothy Kent did, somehow extending her image as a somewhat ill-kempt person, quite the opposite of someone like Joan Ann de Mattia, who gives the impression always of having just stepped out of a shower followed by a shower of talcum), and he had the traces of the sexuality and sensuality of the innocent that he always seemed to be, even when he was trying to appear wise by puffing on a pipe or spouting computer talk.
8/16/78
FRENCH RIVER / WOMAN / BOYS / MOVIE
1) An old French-speaking woman and I are standing at the railing of a cruise ship, fairly small, just starting on a river cruise that might be the Seine, but it goes to the sea and we're following it. We hug each other, she lapses into French and apologizes and returns to English, waving her arms around describing what we're seeing, and I look down to see that we can see through the foam-flecked water down to the intertwined strands of sand and seaweed about 15 feet down at the bottom of the river, and I marvel that it's so clean. The ship noses into a tiny algae-flecked side channel under languorous willows and there are four singers in striped shirts, straw hats, and white pants with instruments under a tree, a real scene from Manet or Renoir of summer French delight, and they blush as we pass, listening to them. Suddenly we're sitting in the same sort of field, maybe having a picnic, lolling on the grass, when something that looks like a giant basketball back-support pivots down with a crash (someone said "A plane crashed into it," but I couldn't see the evidence of that), and it transforms into a movie projector that cuts out a small square of white on a black screen in the movie theater we're suddenly sitting in, and it's a movie, in color, about naked boys lying in the streets of Ferrand, but they're not acting well because they're peeping up at the camera and it's obvious they're not dead, and then a smaller square is cut as another projector comes in with black-and-white documentary film of the actual incident in 1945 when the French had just been liberated from the Germans, so the kids WEREN'T killed, saved at the last minute, and the grainy print was the inspiration for this "400 Blows"-like movie (obviously inspired by the clip before "Cinema 13" and the smaller TV screen from a power dim-out---I hope). I wake, muse, and then get
2) An actor resembling a young Christopher Lee is taciturnly talking about karate-type films, when with a flash of lightning he changes into a yellow made-up, claw-handed, feet-spraddled, uniformed Karate-chopper, ready for anything, in a cheapie film-within-a-film, having changed into BRUCE Lee. So I take notes, recovering the whole Seine trip momentarily forgotten, nice.
8/17/78
DENNIS; FABRIC OF WRITING
He's in an apartment that's somewhat like his own, but slightly different, and I wonder if I couldn't have been imagining him in the basement apartment here. Someone has given him a present of a new pair of trousers, and he's showing them off, but they're blue, of a material something like heavy velour, don't keep a press very well, and sort of swirl around his legs. But since his legs are about the best part of him, and since he's not tall enough to make something impressing out of these over-full trousers, he just looks a bit silly, and I can't figure how to tell him this without hurting his feelings or impugning the taste of the people who gave them to him. Told him about this in the morning, and he was rather intrigued about his new apartment that I saw him in, and he's seen a few around town that he might be interested in. There were other parts to it, too, but I can't remember, but I DO recall that I got this marvelous image of a FABRIC coming out of my typewriter which I then separate into different colored THREADS of diary, dreams, reviews, writing, subjective, objective, people, places, things, and these could then be REWOVEN to make any kind of tapestry desired, and now I'm confusing things by putting two ideas on paper, as I did with Actualism insights and beauty on DIARY 13310, and here I have a dream and FABRIC of writing. And not even down to the bottom of the page!
8/20/78
LONE RANGER
That was only the last part of it, and I guess it was inspired by the wry-lipped lopsided grin by some instrumentalist on the Crumb record at Bruce's yesterdays, because there was the Lone Ranger (and it was also inspired by the LR-type mask across Faye Dunaway's drawn face (drawn in bone structure and drawn in art style) in the review of "The Eyes of Laura Mars," looking rather old, unshaved, and wrinkled, coming into a little tobacconists' shop that seemed to be run by Art Ostrin as a comedown from his rag shop, and ordering something, possibly razor blades, and Art said "Thank you, Mr. Clark," and I marveled that now I know who that masked man is, and he seems to be getting old, and I wondered if Clark had anything to do with Clark Kent, who was Superman, and it was only THIS morning (Sunday, later) that Dennis mentioned again the Comic Book article in the volume of the Encyclopedia of Collectibles that his folks were getting. There WERE other parts to it, ONE of which was the image of myself lying on an operating table with many people gathered around in consultation, and they were talking about the possibility of opening up my head for some reason, and when I woke I thought this might have something to do with people from Actualism working on me from a distance, maybe even from California, so I lay there, just waking from the dream, and said "Yes, it's OK, you can do what you want," into the air, hoping that in case it were some sort of TEST or QUESTION that I could transmit the answer that I was willing to go along with whatever they thought would help me, never for a moment thinking that it could have any PHYSICAL effect on my ACTUAL body, or any fear that I was getting into anything that I didn't KNOW about. Which reminds me of the strong feeling of "niceness" about the Bahamian chanting that Bruce played for me that I melodrama-ed up (laughed when he told me he'd just had the "Melodrama energy") into saying "It's so pleasant it's almost like I'd known it in a previous life," and at that point he gave his characteristic sidelong glance around the room, as if hoping to surprise the spirits before they scuttled behind the bed. But I couldn't get BACK into that dream, even though I very much wanted to do that.
8/21/78
SCHOOL / SOMERSAULTING BIRD / OFFICE-WORKING
1) I'm in a school dorm, unpacking my belongings, and I'm happy there's room for some of my stuff on top of a huge speaker (?) sitting on a radiator alongside which bookcases are jammed. Then I'm waiting downstairs for a friend, and some Eliot Feld-like person shows up with another friend and waves to me, and along the way the father and brother show up, the father giving me a cafeteria ticket saying "Good anytime," after some slight confusion.
2) Rolf and I are sitting at a wading pond, looking up at the people in swimsuits walking past leaving wet marks on the pavement and grass, and a yellow-breasted, flecked with gray, fuzzy bird struts up to the edge of the water and I say "It looks like a fat chickadee," after Rolf asks "What kind of a bird is that?" Then it stands for a moment, almost tail-less, and flips over backward, using the tops of its wings to support itself in a sort of back somersault, ending up stretching one leg behind it, resting on it as if in a Tai Chi position, and then goes into a somewhat wobbly arabesque (It's not a wonder that the dog talks ...), and we gasp, nudge each other, and gape at the antics of the bird, whom no one else seems to notice.
3) I'm in the hallway at a receptionist's desk, which has some few letters scattered on it, but I ask if the mailman's come yet and the new receptionist doesn't know. Someone complains about the service, saying "Treat him kindly and he'll NEVER give you service," advocating a hard line. I find myself down in a large lobby of the building, with people streaming in through a revolving door after lunch (probably inspired watching the people leave Wolf Trap Park after Sarah Vaughan on TV last night), and there's a roar of a plane overhead, a small motored job, and between the adjacent building and this one comes a descending column of gray smoke and soot and dust, which crosses the street, catching the sunlight, and passes between the two buildings across the street, and purple dust and the wind comes down with a fury, and I think that the plane must be flying awfully low, since it doesn't sound like a helicopter, and for a small plane to sound so loud, it must be flying at about the top levels of the surrounding skyscrapers. Take notes.
8/29/78
ANTHONY DOWELL AND BALLET
Someone's remarking that when Anthony Dowell appears with the Royal Ballet, they can charge $12 more for the most expensive seats than they can for their second-best dancer, whom they name but I can't remember. They're constructing a set for a new ballet for him which is going to be televised, and it's a sort of set of narrow, regular ledges built up like a rock face, but the impression is that it's made of overlapping stacks of dishes with gold edges [DETAILED DRAWINGS], so that the white "rock" looks like it has veins of gold running through it. I don't see how they're going to clamber about on these narrow ledges, but then the cameras focus on them and I look into a monitor to see that they're being photographed from the bottom looking up, at an angle, so that it appears to be a flat ballpark-sort of setting, on which the people, actually on an angle, will look very strangely when it's appearing that the set is HORIZONTAL rather than VERTICAL. Then the ballet's being televised and I'm watching it in bright colors, and four men in red, blue, green, and yellow are sawing one of them across another of them, and when he bends to stand, he holds onto the pelvis as if he were fucking him, getting a rather explicit expression of orgasm on his face, and I'm marveling about the choreography when the camera zooms in for a close-up of a crotch, and the sailor suit-type fly flips down and lets a naked, long, uncut cock rather like Dennis's flop out, filling half the height of the camera picture, and I'm REALLY amazed at the choreography and the camera angles and the director, whom I'm beginning to suspect might be gay, and then there's another flurry of action where someone's intended to look like they're coming, and the white milky stream looks like it might be coming from a container down at the bottom of the crotch, but the camera moves in, again very closely, to show the close-up of the cock spewing the come, and I'm widening my eyes and leaning forward to sharpen the image on the screen when I hear the alarm going at 8 am, and I wake on my stomach with a roaring hard-on which lasts until Dennis is up and in the shower, and I would have loved to have finished the dream, and look forward strongly to actually seeing something like it on TV.
9/16/78
STAMPS / COINS / CHOCOLATE CAKE
STAMPS are found on a display rack at the back of my father's store in Rome, and he's seemingly surprised to find he has them, says I can take what I'd like, and there are small sheets, souvenir sheets, cards, and in a cigar box are remains of the centers of souvenir cards that have been burned, but I think maybe I can trim away the char from the sides and keep some of them, and I'm pleased, as he is, that he has something that I'd like to have.
COINS are found on the sidewalk, and my companion (Art Bauman?) and I sort of trip over each other trying to pick up the quarters, and then in the grassy embankment that we fall over accidentally in our pursuit of the quarters, there in the clumps are half-dollars and dollars, some clad some silver, and we gather them up until our hands are overflowing and stuffing them into pockets, and I think wonderingly that it'll amount to some DOLLARS of find even though there's no SINGLE piece worth more than $1, and others begin to see what we're doing, but they're so clumsy we still manage to get most of them.
CHOCOLATE CAKE is made, like in the recipe for Troy Chocolate Cake I'm wanting to make when I get the powdered sugar for the icing, in two sections, but I have a hand-operated beater that operates as my new sifter does: hold it in one hand and press a full-fingers trigger in and out and the thing spins around, and I'm using that to beat the egg whites that it starts with, and I'm amazed to find that when it's not quite SET it turns green on the top, and then I whip if up and it turns into a green SANDAL that I have to insert the tip of the beater into so that it turns floppily around it until it loosens up and gets back to the frothy form, and I mix in the other half of the stuff, and then open a huge, deep, tin-lined drawer looking for a baking tin, and I get the feeling I'm in a bakery kitchen rather than my own, since the drawers have this professional size, are crowded with full-size baking tins and sheets, and the stove looks different, and I wonder if I'm not in the basement, in Dennis's new apartment's kitchen, before I wake up and think in wonder that this is the first time the rudiments of a RECIPE that I've been thinking about have ever entered a dream, and I don't have to take notes to remember all three parts of the bizarre trilogy.
9/25/78
PISSING AND LARRY BALL
FIRST is only a fragment, and I know that I've been visiting Yasny Polyana, and I forget the name until I start writing, then remember it's Tolstoy's place.
SECOND is me and people crowded around me, and I can't wait to get to the urinals so I piss under a door, which is OK, right against a mirror, which is sort of a turn-on, but I'm careful not to look around since I'm worried about being found out, but as I'm leaving, a dark-skinned guy with a darker-skinned cock is shoving his semi-hard member against the underwear of a much taller blond who's urinating in a regular urinal, and I'm surprised to see that the guy, who didn't want it, though straight, just turned and said "No," to the guy, without getting violent, and I'm glad to see the change but wish that there'd been more of it during my time, and was intrigued by the dark-skinned cock with the oily-black wrinkles of foreskin around the head.
THIRD was Larry Ball and me at some convention, and we were going to a bus in order to get to lunch, and there were more details but I've forgotten them, except a vague sense of not caring for being with him, and I guess it's preying on my mind more and more that I said we might go either to the Caribbean or to Mexico for his vacation sometime this fall, which the scheduling of the course at the end of October and through November would change a bit, particularly since the Eastern plan goes up to $369 in the middle of December, and I'm deciding not to write to him until he gets in touch with ME again, just as I'll let AZAK contact me again if he really WANTS to think about the $999 Pan-Am trip around the world, since it's usually ME who gets to THEM about trips and then am disappointed when they don't pan out, as numbers of things that I've discussed with Don Maloof have not panned out, despite his seeming willingness to take them, but to let me do all the planning and then if it isn't exactly what he wants, to beg off because of some work or family commitment. Should have taken down more notes on the dreams if I'm going to wait three days before transcribing them, because some of the flair is left off them, and probably what's FORGOTTEN in the first 2-3 minutes are among the most IMPORTANT details of feeling.
9/25/78
EST AND RESTAURANT AND BUS TRIP
1)) Dream of est training: "Margaret Meadows, what's your name?" Laughter. To a man in the last row: "What's your name?" Embarrassed and accently: "Robert LaVerrine" Address? It's hard to spell: Quellaulet Avenue, Toulouse-sur-Riviere, Touloulou, New Orleans, Louisiana." "Where's that?" "Look, I'm very tired, rode on horseback and bus to get here, and haven't gone to sleep." "Look mister, I'm tired too, but this is the end of the 'stay' part." "Can we ask questions?" "Yes, but by your eyes and mouth I'll know if you're telling the truth." And suddenly there are TWO intense screams from people and heads turn quickly, gaping, to stare at the screamers.
2) The comedy team of Bergen Evans and Jack Benny compare styles, one of which is set from years of use, the other (Evans) of which is still searching.
3) Mom and I see berries, an enormous bee on a pillow-shaped berry, and then at the base of a tree a huge snail grows even more enormous as the weight of the shell drags it away from the roots of the tree, body stretching out like melting rubber, and the whole messy clot slithers down the hillside.
4) I try to eat in a restaurant and apricot sauce from the wet table wets my shirt, no one gives me a menu, a husband and wife battle nearby, and then the bar in which I'm sitting fills up and gets noisy, and finally I leave without paying for the soup I've had. Out to walk streets where women are prowling for men, and I pass some building in Philadelphia that I've passed before, and now I know I have a LONG way to walk back to the hotel, but I seem to be going the wrong WAY, so I return to the building to start off in a different direction, thinking "There are only two OTHER wrong ways to go, and ONE way of the three left is right," so I feel that I'll get there eventually.
5) We're on a team training for something (or in the Army), and we file off and on busses, sweat, and I walk down a LONG hallway feeling EXACTLY how it feels to walk JUST PRECISELY with LONG steps very FAST. Then outside to an incredible view over mountains with snowy peaks, one top with four rivers falling from the summit, and I know we're going to the coast of Hong Kong, and remembered a fragment from BEFORE when Sharon Askew had to STOP at a coastline and do SOMETHING with her contacts which were disturbing her. ALL FROM NOTES.
10/1/78
CONTINUATION AFTER CRASH-DEATH
I'm moving very fast in a public conveyance which is like a train because I seem to see things AROUND me passing at a great clip so I KNOW I'm going fast, but it's like a plane in that it's flying through the dark and I'm sitting in a cigar-like tube, reading quietly. Then there's an electrical flash from upper rear-left (I'd just heard about the jet collision over San Diego, which I think was part of it), and the tube starts to slide SIDEWAYS with panic among other passengers and a thud of terror that something's gone terribly wrong. There's the instant flash of annihilation at some ultimate crash, and at SOME level I'm thinking "This is awful: a catastrophe dream where I'll wake up terrified just as I die"---but the DREAM CONTINUES and ALONG THE PATH OF THE PLANE, which has now been disintegrated (or I've passed to another dimension might be more accurate to the dream-picture), I can feel A CONTINUATION (not my body, though I'm definitely SEEING what I'm passing through, as if I'm watching a movie) STILL MOVING VERY FAST with the speed and general direction of the plane, but when at first I think I'm moving in stars, I "look" closer and see lights as smudges on the wall of another, larger tube, rather reminding me of the circling lights and flashing shadows in the "stop tubes" of some roller coasters just before they take to the first hill, and THESE lights go streaking past me, without any sensation of wind or effort on my body's part. When I wake, it's PAST the panic of death, and I DECIDEDLY think "that dream's trying to say that there's SOME KIND OF CONTINUATION after death," and for that reason "I'll take it as a compliment" and think good things about it, and I had none of that "cold sweat" feeling of a dream that ends in death, and just a bit of that "poetic certainty" that what I'd seen was the truth, and I felt much more inclined to look with at least an HONEST abeyance at things about reincarnation, based on the STRONG sense from the dream that SOMETHING continues after the body's been obliterated, and there was no pain at the instant of death, so quick was it, and no pain or even fear of something new afterwards, and I felt ALMOST as if I'd been blessed with a glimpse at something that maybe at SOME level I want VERY MUCH TO BELIEVE, and at another level FEEL THAT THERE'S NO WAY OF PROVING ANYTHING one way or the other. But I'm glad I dreamed it.
10/2/78
SHIT-STIRRING / DENNIS TALKING JAPANESE
I make my way onto the john that's sitting atop a masonry mound, like the one in the middle of the enormous bathroom, and before I sit down, the little native-brown boy on the adjoining hopper states that I have to know what I'm doing, and he sticks his sneaker-clad foot into the bowl of my john and stirs the shit around so that the natural whirlpool in the center can become unclogged and take down most of the crap that's there, and then the normal motion is resumed. I'm relieved to find that his sneakers wipe clean from the yellow-brown shit coloration and I can sit down and relieve myself without worrying about the smell (though in answer to White's question in "Merlyn" I did NOT sense smell in the dream) or the dirt of the john.
Then there's one of those instant transitions and Dennis and I are sitting in a shaded nook, possibly on the floor, in a foreign place and he's leaning eagerly over his bowls of food to converse with the oriental-looking people to his right and across the table from him, and I find myself marveling that he's speaking their language so well, but I sort of wonder what it is: I can tell from the fact that the words aren't familiar that it's not French, which I know he knows, but it doesn't sound Japanese, either, so my respect for him grows even greater because he's conversing easily with them in a language that's even more obscure than Japanese. We don't say anything to each other in the dream, and I'm just sort of observing him and not interacting with any of the other people at the table, indeed if there ARE any other people at the table. There was the idea that we might be in the alcove of a restaurant in the country, with other diners in outside rooms around us, but I had no idea how we'd gotten there or where we were going next, but there was a pleasant sense of being in a good place and having a good time with the people of that country, and maybe it was pleasure that Dennis was prepared BEFORE we went to the country, rather than trying to learn French AFTER we went to Paris, or thinking of getting an Italian dictionary AFTER we went to Venice. Told him about the dream, and he smiled his wide smile and was pleased to be included in my thoughts even while sleeping.
10/3/78
JERKING OFF A GUY AND OTHER NOTES
At 8:10 I note the first (and last) dream of the morning: I'm jerking off this beautiful guy's cock, and he's nude with one knee up on a chair, so that "she can't see," though she surely can, and he keeps pulsing his cock into my hand, rubbing my hand with his, so I know he wants me to keep on, and all the while he's talking brightly with the girl with long hair, and I sort of get some idea that it might be Amy and her as-yet-unmet Adam. Hm.
I wake to feel my stomach feeling very FULL even though I HAVEN'T eaten a full meal, and it's been almost a month since I've done exercise, so I MUST get started on that, so my do-list can go down to 11 if only for a DAY. Then I think of the strange change in quality of my perception of the voices on TV as I come close to dozing off: the words, semi-understood, seem to change in timbre and ECHO quality, to become more penetrating and MEANINGFUL at the precise moment when I can't understand what they're saying, and I can see how (1) this would be powerful for people who leave radio on as they drop off to sleep, as Don does---or when they're SLEEPING, as he does, and (2) ANY near-unconscious perception is different in some strange way. Then I make a note to myself to ask Dennis if he wants more body sessions, if he wants to go to the unknown destination with Don and Ernie which may be on Friday, and again to talk about the chances of an Actualism party here. Then think of a note for "Throwback" which I'll expand in DIARY 92074. THEN get to thinking that I DO want to get into Frommer's indexing business, so think that I'll tell him he WILL have some few pages left over, and I can fit the index to THAT in a few days, so for only the PRINTING costs he'll have an index that he needn't PUBLICIZE, so public won't expect OTHERS to have them, and SEE what positive response he gets from readers, and I'd be willing to take payment in half-price copies of their books instead of cash.
FINAL NOTE A: Tell Dennis that "our problem" has to do with HIS ASSERTIVENESS.
FINAL NOTE B: Tell Paul I'll take index payment in FROMMER books at 1/2 price.
FINAL NOTE C: Call Dorothy Hunter for body and Ken Miller to say "Hi!"
FINAL NOTE D: Call Susan Lieber about bringing plastic drinking cups for champagne.
10/13/78
ROLF AND TRAVEL
Rolf and I are in Canada, over in the west, since there's some comment that we're from New York and that's far away. The village we're driving around in closes down early so there's "no place to get a drink of water." Had been on a PLANE before with Mozelle (reminders of our trip to Seattle for the fair?) and she had lots of little bags around her knees in the seat, had hoped to use the seat next to her for them, but the stewardess seats someone next to her and Mozelle is disgusted, asking "whether I take the luggage to the forward door or the backward door to store it" and the stewardess informs her tersely that there's no room for her luggage there, but that she'll have to put it all under her seat, and Mozelle stares across the aisle in barely controlled anger. Then Rolf and I (back in that western Canadian village) are in a car with a drunken gay guy on my right, so the evening might not be THAT boring, but then we're driving someone ELSE: a woman who's been called a "professional of the street," and we find that she's more pleasant than anyone would give her credit for, and she's thrown herself on our mercy to find her a place to stay for the evening. Then Rolf stopped at a drive-in or a garage across a highway and had to cross over to me on the highway, and he looked one way and managed to run in front of a car coming from the right, but in looking at that he almost didn't see a car coming from the left, and he ran quickly, looked to the left, put out a hand to ward it off as he would fend off a football tackler, and dodged his way through the traffic to cross the highway. There was more to it, but I didn't take notes and have forgotten.
Then woke Friday with the vague memory of a dream about a guy who was very SIMILAR to Rolf, and wanted to take a note on that, but I couldn't seem to get started this morning, so I didn't take the note and consequently forgot all about it except the detail that it was about a guy who reminded me of Rolf, or possibly of Willy Hayes of the Rolfing (is there something THERE, too?) center who had reminded me of Elliott Gould on Wednesday, and anyway as much as I can remember now is down, I can throw away the note from Thursday morning, and another page comes down to the bottom---almost.
10/19/78
EST-TYPE SEMINAR
Note reminds me of a long dream of an est-type gathering lead by someone rather like Barbara Bergman, who shouts out to the crowded room "Yes, you'll each come up and get your (plastic) cock" as she brandishes this orange plastic thing aloft and I think to myself in the dream that it's a very effective therapy, since with this freedom to talk about it I'll regain the USE of my OWN cock. Then she (or the assistant, things were heard more than seen here) announced that the tickets to the "choral performance" (which seemed either a reference to a benefit for est, a reward for coming to the training, or some oblique reference to the graduates singing "You Are So Beautiful" at the end of Actualizations that I said I was so happy to have missed) will be passed out afterward by someone who's comfortable with everyone (and I naturally think that since I made such a good, friendly impression on everyone with my brilliance and my openness and my progress that I might be a logical choice to pass out the tickets---and remember now that I'd just read the article about stealing subway and bus passes when someone was chosen to pass them out who STOLE them for the absentees).
There's something that was vague as I wrote it and even vaguer now as I type it, about a "center of the book" dictation (where I seemed to have been taking notes---in the center of a book) to "her and everyone below," which I guessed meant only the people on the staff of this organization, and we're in a long narrow CLASSROOM like in a university or in St. Mary's library and lots of people are shouting and leaping into the air and saying "I got it, I got it," and I don't know what it is that they've got it, why they would want it in the first place, and I was even more of an observer in the group than I was by means of being in a dream state, and I woke up fearing that it would all leave and wrote it down, which is good because I would have remembered nothing of it two days later as I type this page.
10/30/78
DREAM RESEARCH AND SPIDER WEB
Dennis and I have volunteered for dream research in a hospital, finding the effects on dreams of a drug which is administered in little dull green or bright red pellets on dreams which are influenced by glow-in-the-dark pictures whose content is to be kept secret. Dennis stands on his head before sleeping, so I know for a fact he's not asleep yet, and I'm somewhat confused about the sequence of the experiment: when he falls ASLEEP do I give him the pills? How soon after I give him the pills or he falls asleep do I show him the pictures, and now do I DO that? Then there's a fuss about letting the photos stand in the light so they'll absorb the light and transmit it more brightly when the lights are shut off. The scene shifts to the next morning with many pairs of researchers in a large schoolroom noting down their responses, with overseers commanding repeatedly "Don't SAY what's in the photographs, just say what they SEEMED like in the dream." I don't quite understand that, either, and don't see the difference between "It seems like a cradle of civilization" and "It shows people in a boat-like wooden construction." But the research is going forward despite my non-understanding.
THEN I'm on the concrete-parapeted roof of a tallish building that looks out over a vista of hills in the distance and stubby pine or fir trees right around the house. I can reach out and touch the pine-cone-like top of a tree whose top comes to the edge of the roof, and as I move it to one side I see that there's a droopy spider's web swagged (Dennis observes that it might have been based on our discussion yesterday of his swagged lamp) to a nearby tree, but when I brush the tree AWAY from the other, to break the web, a large black spider in the middle of the web oscillates in a marvelous way, expelling white clouds of web that manage to fill in the spaces and keep the web even stronger than before. I brush the tree a few times, causing ever-greater constellations of cloudy web, and finally I almost push it parallel to the ground, which breaks the web and flings the spider somewhere into the tall grass, where I can't see it anymore, and I'm not sure I should be glad that I don't know where it is now, and leave the roof.
11/5/78
ROLLER COASTERS AND ROMANS
FIRST Dennis and I are on a large, winding line waiting to board an incredibly high roller coaster that we can see silhouetted in two huge loops against the far-distant skies, and the line goes under the supports of another huge coaster (rather like the one in the KISS movie last week), and people from that coaster are spreading the news that THAT one will be closed tomorrow, so I'm debating leaving THIS line for THIS coaster, which WILL be open tomorrow, the last day of the park, and joining the OTHER line, which will NOT be operating tomorrow. Later, the line seems to pass through a building that turns into a nightclub-cafeteria, sitting on benches which move along, eating from trays, and I don't want to eat or drink anything and feel vaguely imposed upon because the line goes through these food places and all I want to do is ride on the roller coaster I'm waiting for.
THEN I'm finishing up some sort of wrestling or boxing match in ancient Greece or probably Rome, and my companion was a sort of combination between Kirk Douglas and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he's won, but there's a sequence in which HE has to shake my hand because I've won and show he's holding no hard feelings, but in this case I'VE come in second and am reporting to my owner or my manager, who's small and richly garbed in a purple toga, and he's supposed to pay me off for coming in second, but his mind is obviously elsewhere, on more important things, as I look into his cubicle and find on the green baize-topped table a number of items spread, from a tiny pair of violet women's sandals that I obviously have no use for, to a number of small trinkets that he pushed forward not even trying to make appear valuable, and he's fingering a small semi-precious stone, which I see as maybe something of more value THAN HE realizes, and he maybe considers that, too, and tries to DEVALUE it in my eyes so I won't take it, and the whole thing stinks of deception and ill-will, and I'm debating overthrowing the entire counter full of stuff and saying proudly that I don't want anything of his at all, but I know that I can't afford to lose his patronage OR his good will, so I'm rotating the things back and forth in my mind when I wake.
11/18/78
TEMPERATURE-FEELING AND TRAVEL
A group of us are traveling somewhere, and we're making the transfer to an island in a small boat which may be a hydrofoil, cutting up columns of chop on each side, and it's quite windy so there's some spray coming over the side of the boat, and I can SENSE THE TEMPERATURE, in the dream, surprised to find that it's not as warm as I would think it would be, and it reminds me of Freeport or Nassau when it was chillier than I thought, and I seem to think I'd been to the island we're approaching before, and as we land I ask "Where are we?" and they say "South End" (probably related to my thoughts of wanting to get to West End on Grand Bahama) and I envision a map with a little hook down to the south and I say "This is a coincidence, it's the only part of the island I've never been to before," and I look forward to moving up along the peninsula and moving into familiar territory. Then the scene shifts and I'm rushing to what might be an Actualism meeting, and I find myself in lower Manhattan (probably just out of a movie) and I'm standing before an enormous park surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, and I'm standing before the large old gates, thinking "This must be the old City Hall" and I try to visualize a subway map to see if it would be closer for me to walk to the A train to go up CPW to 72nd Street, to get the 7th Avenue express, or to go to Fulton Street and transfer there, and I seem to visualize a subway map in my head and know I'm so far south in Manhattan that it doesn't make much difference. Somehow, the scene shifts again and I'm in a large old hotel or casino-type building, rather elegant, and Bruce Jaffe meets me in the hallway and says that I'm late, but as we're going down the stairs to the meeting room, there are Tony Morse and Rich Semel and one other coming up the stairs, so I turn in triumph to Bruce and say "See, I'm not the last one after all!" The order's not exactly certain, and it was only when reviewing the events that I remembered that the most unusual things about it was the TEMPERATURE SENSATION on the little boat, and being connected with Actualism. I of course wondered about Bruce's talk of "going somewhere" at night for lesson-learning, and I'm wondering if my dreams will get more bizarre and specific in Second Advanced.
12/2/78
MICROENVIRONMENT
I'm typing somewhere and there's all my change in my blue purse which has enlarged to become a wicker basket full of tokens and pennies. Before I'd been taking a tour through a house somewhere and was mortified to find my coat and indexes spread around as if I lived there, so I gathered then up and (presumably) started typing in a corner. For some reason I have to pay a penny a letter for each word that I type, and I think this is a good chance to get rid of the excess of pennies in my purse, so I count them out but come across some plastic-enclosed NEW pennies in cardboard squares, and the copper pennies themselves, dated in the 1980s, are square, and people remark about them and I recall buying them as an investment. As I get more and more modern pennies out, they become thicker, more plastic, more brightly colored, until I look closely at one and there are tiny motes swimming around inside, and when I put it onto the table it starts growing and growing, the sand sifts down through the water, and the fish get larger and larger until the sunlight glinting in from the side reflects off golden scales between what look like black onyx insets in jeweled necklaces of fish. I'm amazed that they can live in this sealed environment, but then I draw back and see there are green grasses waving in the currents in the yellow sand at the bottom, so I can see the oxygen-carbon dioxide cycle, and then there is a pile of eaten-out clam or oyster or scallop shells, brightly lined in oranges and blues, around which a flock of butterfly-like fish are flickering, in a dance which I take to be an egg-laying ceremony in the homes vacated by the shellfish, and then I draw back again and see a huge dead body (looking rather like one of the rabbit drawings from "Watership Down") being shifted in the sand by some Disney-like rodent creatures, and I know they're moving it to form pouches in which to lay eggs which will feed and grow healthy off the carrion, and I think "This is a complete microenvironment," and the thought "rather like the world" trails after me as I wake and marvel at the brilliant colors of the entire dream, and later Bruce voices what I'd felt but not said: it was also like the self-contained cells of the body with THEIR microenvironments.
12/5/78
OFFICE WORK
1) There's a memo about the inadvisability of drilling 50 test oil-wells in South America somewhere, saying that there's very little chance of getting anything from it (influenced by Adam's talk of 50 indexers being replaced every 3-4 months, and by the cult suicides in Guyana, and by the oil and gold prospecting in MacPhee's Alaska articles?), but some executive from the company is reviewing the case and he seems to think that it's surely worth the small investment when faced with possible enormous returns.
2) I'm sharing an office with Rolf, dressed in a suit and connected with some other project, and he grins to himself as the executive comes in and mumbles about his plans for the project and his opinions on the letter writer.
3) At the same time, there's an evaluation form turned in for Terry Kornak, who's being interviewed to have some contact with this project, and I can see some things checked off at the bottom of the form (which looks rather like the Actualism surgery form), but I can't quite read upside down what the comments are (and this is obviously influenced by Joan Ann's reports that Terry might be slow on deadlines and tends to overwrite too much).
4) At the same time, I seem to be validating some estimate or actual work that I did (influenced obviously by my trying to justify charging $400 for Rolf's 1300-line index for a 277-page book and Dennis's charging $200 for his author and subject index for the journal, while continuing to get more jobs from them), and I'm on the telephone with a woman who may be someone like Audrey Hanneman saying that while her USUAL rate of $895 for a job of this size was understood, MY charge of $950 (and I wanted to tell her that this is only something like 6% of the price, so what's she arguing about anyway, but I don't feel that I should) is based on the fact that there is NOT a standard form for these pages in layout or quantity of words (she's surprised to hear that, but I'm gratified that she glances through and seems then to agree with me), so that the $895 could only be an ESTIMATE, while my part of the work was much more complicated and deserves more money, and she seems to be agreeing when I wake and marvel at so MANY business-type dreams in what seems to be a VERY short amount of time, both elapsed AND in dream.
12/16/78
"REALIZED"
Writing at 6:30 am: Look at clock at 6:15 and feel for pen and cards under bed---none there since the painting. Thoughts continue to perk and at 6:30 I get them. Same feelings of "It's so immediate" and "It's so layered" and slight nausea (and slight intestinal discomfort) from booze, yet would I be HERE without it? But, as Actualism says that grass is bad because it gives a CONFUSING spurious high, I feel alcohol may give a confusing, spurious high, too. But what about DENNIS?? I went off grass because of Actualism and he never really liked it; if I went off booze it would probably be the end of the relationship for him, since he'd be convinced I'd been taken in by some neo-moralist religion that denied me any pleasure, and would be proscribing masturbation next! Then to FIRST DREAM of boys swimming IN (not ON, since the TV-movie camera-screened view was half in and half out of the water, and the boys were COMPLETELY submerged, feet toward camera, looking THROUGH water as fish would to the far hillside) a large lake looking to a huge hexacombed set of sections in a hill, lightly covered with dirt, almost like a construction built by denizens escaped from a UFO. Or was it an eco-minded futuristic atomic generator? Or a covering framework/disguise/COVER for something vaguely CIA-ish? Then the cover collapses and boys swim away in terror from newscast voice (like "Hindenburg") talking of the "cataclysmic disaster," and I think it's MINOR, but then see fragments hurled through the air and realize that this was FAR away, and what looked large from HERE was HUGE there, and turned to the left to move away with the boys, into the SECOND DREAM of the escape from the lake on a modern subway/train coming into NYC from New Jersey via long stretches of semi-lit tunnels that gradually line up to show the whole length to be traveled, and I think "This is underground and dangerous" and the thought came as I was writing the note that the "cataclysmic disaster" was in the Hudson River ABOVE the subway tunnels.
THIRD DREAM, I'm (Malcolm?) going to bed with Rebekah, and she glances over to see if my cock is rather harder than soft, and we're both pleased, at this point, that it is. Then "interruption." Some friend of hers is living in a TINY apartment with a kitchen that's 1/3 the little cement cubicle (Dennis's basement?) and I open the fridge to see ice cubes mostly defrosted, and they're melting all over and she says (or I say in jest), "He could have remained sane had he invested in a better kitchen." Then we're standing in "another room" (HER kitchen?) and there are a few people about and she's saying to me "You didn't realize that when Dick Leitsch had that meeting of 20 guys it would end up being the start of Actualism in NYC." I said "I just went for the cruising, because I was curious, but the guys were pretty bad, then." She makes some joke and I lean on a shelf and say "The only thing that's left for me---what do you want me to be, REALIZED," and my voice deepens and I feel my sensations deepening and feel tears coming and wake and try to think of a word that would adequately describe my voice quality and AT THAT INSTANT, from the physical universe in a river sound (the River publication?), is the sound of a tug---but not a high panicky "In Old Chicago" screech, not a low "waterfront" fog-horn moan, but a middling wide-band "reality" sound, an ORGAN CHORD that's pleasantly euphonious---QUITE A COINCIDENCE---and I think MANY TIMES (and my nose is DRAINING!) of how I react to Castaneda: "Come ON, idiot, it's all there, it's obviously HAPPENING, BELIEVE it." that that's ME NOW with ACTUALISM, as I said to SUSAN yesterday. And I think AGAIN how to describe my voice quality for "realized" and AT THAT INSTANT, there's a 2.5 earthquake-feel that's probably a subway passing underneath, sort of a building-vibrating low organ note that AGAIN echoes my searching. KEEP THINKING of how much I love muscles (J/O stuff, Soho Weekly News underwear model, Advocate French semi-porno portfolio, desires for bath, movies, wanting to touch, thinking of Malcolm's cuteness, Bruce's body, Ken Miller's cuteness, and even, in some strange way, all the UNDERSTANDING women at Actualism, and the muscular Advocate cartoon of God saying "Oops," and there's a fig-leafed male EVE smiling down on a fig-leafed pleased Adam. And then I WANT TO BE A PHOTOGRAPHER, too! Want to feel and suck and glorify those bodies and HOW will this FIT? Beautiful naked male bodies to feel MUST be a part of heaven! Look at Christ! Adam! Vishnu/Jain gods!---and I keep thinking I should get out of cold bed and get aspirin to cure headache, or rig cassette to record my voice or TYPE at 7 am or go into cold living room and record, or take notes, or hope to remember?
Then wonder WHY I WRITE SO MUCH and think that my actual LOOKING at MY experience may be valuable to someone "following" me! My bodywork has SURELY changed me, my belief in Amy's readings change, my belief in Actualism is changing.
NOW SCANNING EDGES OF MIND to recollect more---disgusted with pigeons outside, thinking of telling Richard Hilty (here's a VOICE that would be so GREAT and WEALTHY but he makes such a GREAT teacher, who am I to say he's "not used in the best way?") about Amy's tales of "Indians being happy with my voice to be Indian Medicine healing chants." and my feeling so PLEASED as (1) Richard praises me in class, (2) Rebekah praises me in dream: "LOOK at you, you ARE aligned, but you don't REALIZE it! You've GOT the process, but you don't EXPERIENCE it? You COULD be realized and you're NOT?!," (3) Susan praises my bodywork and teachership, saying Elaine Claudio and I appeared to be "the two natural teachers" from the intro class, (4) Actualism praises me, saying I'm doing well and knowing in advance what's happening, so I should keep quiet about it, (5) index editors praise me, (6) Even I praise me, but in such a limited STEREOTYPED way. I wanted to remember my ANSWER to Susan: "If understatement weighed POUNDS, you'd break the table," but I needed the REMARKS---was it like "And you're having trouble earthing the sensory in Actualism?" But what IS real?? Dreams as these? My "imagination" that moves beyond the dreams? Amy's visions? Actualism's teachings? My feeling of pleasure? My desires for male bodies? The hope to bring all these together into happiness for me and others? AHA, now not MERELY me, but ALSO others---selfishly: If I get happy male bodies to hold and touch and lick and kiss, I have to make SOMEONE else happy! And then on to fantasies with Kathy and Susan and GIVE THEM MY SEED FOR CHILDREN! Do I AGAIN want to HAVE and BEGET children WITHOUT the trouble of bringing them UP?! My feelings of "Being younger" with Richard and his delight with my openness. Could I be open with women and get KIDS? And I debate talking about ALL THIS with ALICE at 1, rather than having my surgery---or how about doing BOTH, as I regaled Susan's mind with travel as I did her BODY in the session. And I debate talking an aspirin but then I should get rid of headache WITHOUT it. Again, what's REALITY! But such a strong feeling that I DO create reality; as long as I REFUSE to believe, CONTINUE to resist, none of this CAN be true. Yet if I BELIEVE, cease RESISTING, does it become real ONLY because I CREATE it?? Yet that's what the mystics' view of reality IS, that which the mystic DOES create with his mind. So to "realize" I create reality is to KNOW I create reality without suspecting that it's "only" my imagination! It's now 7:05 am, I'm furious with the pigeons outside, THOUGH I've said in the past: "If they were RARE, we'd TREASURE them," and then what's the DIFFERENCE??
Susan's life now WORKING and teachers are always so APPROPRIATE (are they EVER sick?), and everyone is being SO sucked in. I'm saying it's only a con ALONE?? OR am I the only one who sees TRULY?? Different strokes for different folks?? All roads lead to Rome?? And though that's the end of the notes I wrote then, getting up and getting aspirin and returning to bed, the inner conversation goes on, though it really does nothing but circle around the void. I think to process the whole thing, presuming that I'll retain the essence of it, but there's a bit of DELIGHT with the circling, the GLEE of the chase and circling, closing in, suspense of "Will he find it or not?" MORE of a sense of "God playing hide-and-seek with himself" and the session this afternoon with Alice even reinforced it (see DIARY 13719). And it has to be a BIT more than coincidence that THIS is the day on which I first SAW an energy (see DIARY 13718), and that threw me for the next week, not quite knowing WHAT to think, and, worse, not thinking that KNOWING would make much difference ANYWAY! Should I look forward to an apotheosis at the Christmas party for Actualism that's going to take place THIS VERY NIGHT??
12/16/78
CLEANING AND DIRTY FEET
I'm walking through a field filled with junk (like from the "WIZ"?) and there are kids playing with a black mop that's rather like a graduate's tassel, arranging it over a hoop so that it looks like an enormous head, and they're playing something like "Soap Opera" so that one of the girls is inventing this marvelous story about a career girl who conquers one world after another, wrapping men around her fingers, and inventing songs to go with the story, including lines with the rhythm-and-rhyme perfection of the following: "She didn't NEED no endorsement; she got her BILL of divorcement." I pass them, marveling at the advances made in children these days, but as I'm looking at the mop, I'm worried how people will react: "He's so INTELLIGENT, what's he doing as a cleaning person? Can I trust him because he's so smart? Maybe he's just setting us up so that he can rob us. If he's so smart, why doesn't he have a better job?" Then I'm on the slum streets, accosted by a teenage hood who's trying to make life rough for me, and for HIM I use the excuse "Look, I'm only a cleaning man, what good would it do you to make life miserable for me," trying to find ways of saying this which wouldn't put the idea into his head that he COULD terrorize me, yet wanting to let him know that I'm on his side and he doesn't have to damage me, he can let me go on my harmless way. Then I'm inside a building, dusting shelves and trinkets on the shelves, and I'm wondering why I didn't ask my boss just how much I was supposed to do: wasn't I just hired to sweep the sidewalks? If so, what am I doing here INSIDE? But if I mess up the job, he'll fire me, and I need a job---but WHY didn't I ask him? I had no reason to think I knew everything about it to start with, and the start of the job would have been the time to find out, but why am I so afraid of asking questions? I rattle some lid on a candle holder and there's noise from inside the house, wondering who I am, and someone comes down the narrow stairs just as I leave, hoping that I didn't cause trouble, or worry, to whoever it was. Then I'm outside and walking into my own place, which looks awful, far back across a junky field, and there's some leakage from the adjoining building's brick wall which has formed small pools all over, a larger pool across the entrance to my building, and made the earth into very soft black mud into which my feet sink. There are a number of repetitions of sequences in which I'm walking toward my house, each time my bare feet getting muddier and muddier, more and more sticky, and I seem to be sinking into softer and softer mud, until I'm dirty about halfway to my knees, and then I get to the larger pool, hoping that it's clean enough for me to wash in and get cleaner rather than dirtier, and find there's a bit of clear water coming from the seepage, before it tumbles into the rocky depths and gets murky, and I'm washing the gunk off my legs, but it won't quite come, so I have to hang somehow by my hands and rub one foot against the other to get both of them clean, and the muck is faintly adherent and doesn't come off quickly (and I guess I'm thinking about trying to mop the grape juice off the carpet before it stained last night). Then there's a complete shift, and I'm clean and investigating some sort of signs which are appearing to me: two types of figures, two stick-figures [DETAILED DRAWINGS] dancing with linked hands so that their arms form a circle surrounding the design, and then one figure behind another, so that the designs are more variable about the edges: and at first I think there are just EXACTLY two designs, but then I see that the figures move from "cube to cube" (it seems that I'm being presented these codons on rather the same sort of plastic cubes that turned into a fish bowl in a previous dream, having evolved from money, and that now they're becoming an implement of communication!), so that it's possible to note a catalog of positions, but the rate of input is so slow and the quantity of inputs seems to be so small that I suspect I'll only end up with one or two examples of each pattern, and there won't be enough "text" to "decipher" each codon into a letter which would form some sort of communication. And I don't remember whether this was BEFORE or AFTER I heard SOMETHING in my bedroom shaking against something stable, going "tick, ta-tickticktickticktick" rather like dots and dashes, and I thought of jotting them down to see if the subway-laundry-parcel-desk combination represented a knowing entity that was trying to communicate to me in Morse code. This with all my THOUGHTS (see DIARY 13732) this am.
12/29/78
FRAGMENTS
MONDAY: A tanned older blond gay guy is oiling himself and his cock and he strokes and displays himself unselfconsciously before me and straight friends.
TUESDAY: There's a computerized list of things being printed out, like index entries, of things to be taken care of---but no one seems to understand the program.
FRIDAY: Something that I'd intended to jot down, but I didn't and it's forgotten.
SATURDAY: I'm walking at night in front of a modernistic high school or college in some Midwestern community, and I want to cross from the sidewalk to the lawn, or sidewalk alongside the lawn, but looking down I see the glimmer of a wire about shin-height, so carefully step over it. There's no feeling of danger, just "Hm, glad I saw that." Into the lit hallways, though maybe it's daylight now, and get asked "What to register?" I say I have an appointment to cover the fact that I'm just wandering around out of curiosity, but he has a list that he checks to find my name, and I say it and he says "Zolzernak?" and I spell it, and then he suggests I sign up for a class in petrology or archaeology by an old geologist who's offering strange degrees, and he gives me a "lesson sheet" that's sort of like a PR brochure about his researches, photographs with famous people, and lists of books published, but when I want to return it the "registrar" is gone. I fold up the sheet and put it into my pocket before I decide that it might be the only one they have, therefore valuable to them, and some fellow who's been behind a crack in the door has opened the door and expanded his space out into the hallway to make some sort of snack counter, complete with little stools, and I try to give it to HIM to return it to the registrar, and then I wake and take notes at 10:20. I kept trying to ASK for interesting dreams through the week, but when I got them I forgot to take notes on them, so had to rely on at least these notes to record the busy week, and then when I had more time the following week, I hardly remembered anything at all when I woke, so I'll have to ask again to see what I get in the line of "lesson dreams" before the old year ends and the new year starts with vastly changed astrological portents for happenings and dreams.
12/30/78
SCHOOL WITH A DIFFERENCE
It looks like the basic school dream, but THIS time I pass a table that's been just set up for paying fees BEFORE the last days for doing it, and I think, "Oh, I can do it NOW and save time later, because I have the money and the time to do it right now, so I won't have to worry about it later," and think of then going down past my locker and taking care of emptying it out NOW and checking in the lock, AND I know that I HAVE been going to all my classes. Quite a difference from the horrifying knowledge that I'd signed up for some classes and hadn't been there and now I'm obliged to take the final tests in something I know nothing about and have never done any of the homework to prepare for. And the next class surprises me because we have to read 97 pages in class for World Government, so I ask the teacher if I can go back to my locker, where I know the book is, and bring it up, knowing that I read fast and so will be able to catch up with the rest of the slower readers in the class, and it seems to be fine. So everything seems to be coming under control! Tell Amy and Adam about this dream on the way to deliver the indexes this morning, and both of them laugh aloud and say they'd just been discussing how both of THEM have dreams of that type: missing classes and knowing the test is going to be impossible, not knowing where the classrooms or schedules are, forgetting books and knowing that we're going to have to be flunked. By coincidence, at Barnes and Noble this morning, I find "The Dream Theatre" by Faye Hammel, originally $6.95, on the 95 table, and find that school means "fear of failing, or testing in life," which isn't very imaginative, but Bruce talks to me about dreams THIS (Saturday) morning, so the topic is still very much in the air. Maybe I can get to the point of LUCID dreaming, which I'd never heard of before, where I know what I'm dreaming and command which way it goes, as I'd done a few times before when I had an appealing sexual dream that I woke in the middle of, then went back into and continued the dream to see how it would come out: what kind of cock or come he'd have, how the teasing would continue, seeing whether I'd get excited, but that hasn't happened recently.
12/27/78
GRAND CENTRAL AND ARTWORK
FIRST I've just gotten in to Grand Central from some trip with a group of people (train ride sequence from "I Know Where I'm Going" last night?) and we're moving through enormous hallways which I don't recognize, with all the directional and subway signs WAY up on grandiose architecture, and I ask a concierge-type at a desk, then go into a john that turns into an elegant little bathroom with an alarm bell that I mistake for a light switch, little white towels, silver implements on the clean sink, and I figure I'll have to tip, more than 50 too, but the lights overhead won't go on so that I can use the pearl electric razor and silver comb, and suddenly the dream shifts.
SECOND I'm looking through a sort of observation window, and "the great artist" who looks like Walt Disney is showing us Picasso-like drawings on various mechanical implementers, and there's one labeled "Stork on otoscope with laughing setting sun" [DETAILED DRAWING] that's somehow generated by a dot-matrix printer from a pencil drawing by Picasso-Disney. (Find it interesting that "oto" has to do with the EAR, since this is a shade-density rendering for the EYE.) Then there's another technique that involves the glass between us rather as tracing paper itself, or some sort of cathode-ray tube, so that he runs his finger over his face to darken and transcribe certain contours and lines and features, and the more the finger traces the darker the line gets. The Disney-face isn't well done, however, and it turns into Alan Alda's face, which takes on a life of its own and mugs, as in a mirror, and someone who resembles Ryan O'Neal comes up next, and I decide that they animate the figures by cutting out the figure and moving it in a block, but cutting (and enlarging) the eyes and moving THEM around for expression. Then there's a procession of people "behind the mirror" looking into the mirror, and I recognize people like that woman choreographer who was married to one of the men in her company who used sexy guys then deteriorated, and someone is pointed out to look like Cathy Benson, but someone who might be Amy says "No, that's her sister's mother," and I wonder why it isn't HER mother, and look around to see Cathy's side-glance, and she looks quite different with her hair swept straight back from her forehead, and it's SORT of the Actualism group who's BEHIND the mirror looking at the parade of people coming to preen at the mirror, enabling all of us to comment on them without being seen. All in OTOSCOPY.