DREAMS FROM 1980 2 of 2
SWIFT-FLOWING YSER AND BRIEFCASE AND PACKING
8/12/80: I was wandering through an old European town: narrow streets, steep-roofed houses with dormers and stucco and worm-eaten wood, tiny old people in turn-of-the-century clothes, and I came out to a clearing through which flowed a swift-flowing river, and I knew that it was the Yser (I thought it might be in Germany, but I find it's in Belgium), but was surprised to find that it was at flood-stage, and the swirling currents were eating away at the old stone walls alongside the river, so much so that wooden footbridges were awash and people had to clutch to each other and to the railings to cross without being swept away. I walked briskly alongside the river but small launches and store-laden pirogues bounced past in the same direction much faster than I could walk. The whole atmosphere was steeped in the style of Tengren's illustrations, and I almost expected to see a slanted wooden sign with incised gold letters dim with age proclaiming that this was the Yser. Then I was in a hotel room and packing my belongings, and I had a briefcase somewhere about me, but since the title was the only thing I wrote down about them, I don't recall them in the intervening two weeks since I jotted down the "titles" of the dreams below notes for Kathryn Flak's class.
PARIS and WINDOW SEAT
8/29/80: Wake at 7:10 and jot the following note: Met Mr. Maloney last night on the subway (and saw "Picasso" at the Modern) and so I dream I'm in Paris on a short vacation, and sitting around with jabbering ladies on tour. I phone a friend of a friend and we chat and I go over, and he gives me another name of a friend, and I phone HIM and he wants to know how I got his name, and I say that I forget the name of the fellow who told me, but a black guy with me raises his head and says "What COLOR is he?" and he talks with this person on the phone and says "He's an ANALYST like ME." Then they call the flight that I have a ticket for and I'd taken the WINDOW seat with my carryon bag, and an old lady says I'll have to hurry to get seated, but I know the plane isn't taking off quite yet, so I don't have to rush.
BASSOFF / ST. JOHN DIVINE / VW/ MOVIE BOBO
8/30/80: Fred Bassoff has won some sort of architect's award from the Phoenix newspaper and he's being surrounded by photographers and interviewers. He stands on an elaborate front stoop and his apartment is being cited as a model of his designs, while I try to recollect what was so special about his apartment. Outside, he shows off a gated driveway leading into an inner court that seems to contain a garage. We turn back and a stone building like a narrow St. John the Divine is across the end of the street, but there's a ROAD built across the front of it, about halfway up, and it HAD been a-building for a long time, as I recall cars passing on wooden trestles with wooden guardrails, and now it's almost finished. We crowd into a truck to move up the hill, loose dirt, almost tipping, and turn onto the highway, driving along it away from the cathedral towers and then we turn left onto the main highway, looking back at the towers in the sunset. We drive to a lake, and now it seems like an early-morning light over the gray-blue surface, and we get out of the station wagon and into a VW which opens on the side, and we sit on the wet, muddy, seatless floor. Drive off and someone asks where we are and I search my map for "source of the Monongahela in Ohio," which is where I think we were traveling from. Dream switches and then I'm looking back over my shoulder at an all-male audience watching a film, but they're actually looking at a phony TV ad and I enjoy seeing how they look at different places on the screen. One in the audience is bald and crazy, named "The Bobo" and he acts up and is pushed to the back of the theater, and it's as if he's been hired to give excitement, but he's acted up too much and they start filling his cubicle with water. I get a glimpse of a long white cock as he floats up to the top, shouting "What's going on here?" and I hope cameras are allowed in for a real sexy shot of his drowning, but it doesn't, and so I fear the OTHER film has been cut and I'm really disappointed. Men gather to check that he IS dead and I wonder what the IDEA of the whole thing is, anyway!
MOVING ORCHESTRA SEATS AND IBM SNACK BAR
9/1/80: 1) Dennis and I are sitting in a front row of motorized orchestra seats, which roll UP and DOWN the front of the tipped stage, and then the whole affair begins to ROTATE and I fear we'll be thrown completely out of it and either against the walls of the theater or fall down into the workings, but then we're shown a model of the orchestra seating and find we're only ROCKING back and forth on a fixed pivot with fairly rapid movements. 2) I'm waiting under a viaduct in a short-sleeved shirt and shorts, waiting for the traffic light to change to cross the street, and a light rain that was falling comfortably changed to a slush and then to SNOW, and I edge across the street, looking to the left at cars coming down the hill, taking care they won't skid into me in the slush. I enter a crowded IBM-building elevator that has an elevator operator and I'm convinced that I'm late at 11 am, but go up to the top floor (where I'd worked a number of years earlier) cafeteria, and find a snack bar and suddenly I'm HUNGRY for something like a roll or a sweet and will have a second breakfast meal, having had only a juice glass of breakfast at home. Just getting onto line and there's an AGED Cathy Harlin, eyebrows tweezed, green eye shadow, white pasty face makeup, wrinkled, mouth pouched forward into a snoot around a cigarette! "Did you usually SMOKE, Cathy?" I asked, and she brazenly shows her chest under a green satin décolleté (like the costumes from the Austro-Hungarian costume show) and says something about "putting up a good front," and I turn away because I find her completely disgusting. Write note at 7:15 am.
ENGLISH CLOCK TIME AND SIGHTSEEING AND TALKER
9/5/80: Jot notes for this at 6:35 am Friday morning: 1) I seem to be in England, where a clock shows, in each of its quadrants, 14-hour days, so that it takes 4 days for the "hour" hand to go around the clock, and I get the idea that the "picture" of a fairly long amount of time would be "included" in just a very narrow pie wedge of clock face---an hour would be only 6, and I think of a two-hour wedge of 12 as being quite small. 2) I'm with Rolf sightseeing, and I'm running down streets that turn out to be on the seashore, so that as I race along the edges of the street, the surf comes washing in from the left and I look down to see clear, slightly foamy water washing over my feet, and I'm glad I'm wearing my boots, but as the wet soaks through and makes my socks soggy I wonder how people manage to keep their footwear waterproof and I never seem to be able to. Then walk down pretty streets and into a bar, and I hastily ask some kind of tourist question as I can feel a cough clutching at my throat and I hurry to get it out before I cough, and the guy I asked gets very angry and in some sort of European accent (he obviously has trouble first with my accent and THEN with my speed) asks, "How would you like it if I talked as fast as this?" in a rattling-fast voice, and I can't explain since I'm still caught in the prelude to a cough and actually WAKE to a cough for the first time I can remember.
ELEVATOR IN WTC AND UNDERWATER SIGHTSEEING
9/7/80: 1) I'm riding up in a huge elevator (it's a whole FLOOR that seems to be sliding up, glass windows, small restaurant, people standing leisurely around, and all) in the World Trade Center and I know that I've asked the operator (who's standing way far away at some elaborate controls) to go up only to the 35th floor, so I calm myself by knowing that I'm not really going up THAT high, and the entire floor bumps back against the guide rails gently, but someone standing next to me ducks his head forward exaggeratedly each time the floor lurches, and since he's leaning back against the railing, I get the idea if it really bumped hard he'd fall over the railing backward and fall headfirst down the side of the building. I'm wondering what's causing the increasingly amplitudinous lurches, wondering whether it's just the normal motion or whether there might be an earthquake building up force. 2) I'm on an Explorer-type sightseeing ship, just back from the bow on the starboard side, standing with other sightseers with my binoculars around my neck and my legs spread apart to steady myself against the slight pitching, and turn to the right as the announcer says "There goes a school of ..., " and off to starboard spurt 6 or 7 tightly bunched fish with large blunt heads like nose-less dolphins whose names I can't think of, and they're near the bottom so I tell myself they're larger than they look. Then off the bow I can see the kicking feet of 3 or 4 snorkelers swimming rapidly ahead of the ship---and the first one streaked past the view to starboard, drawing my attention forward, and I raise my binoculars to enjoy the muscularity of the males, spotlights picking them out in the clear green water as they had the first to the right. Almost without transition we're UNDERWATER, or watching a scene as if from Captain Nemo's submarine at Disneyland, and the water is perfectly transparent green, with a carpet of clean yellow sand beneath, and there's a series of bunchy animals that look maned like lions and vaguely striped like tigers, and I think of a child's first shocked concept of "sea lions." There are huge furry Muppet-like beasts and LOTS of people passing back and forth in complete safety and COLORFUL sea life, rather like a Disney view of onlookers and looked at, yet very 3-D and colorful and realistic.
BITING DOG (WITH DENNIS'S MANIC CAT!)
9/10/80: Wake remembering that I HAD a dream, but none of the details remain in my memory until Dennis says he has to stop eating shrimp and sweetbreads, since he had such UGLY dreams and mentions the "manic cat" that swells up like a blowfish and screams around and digs his claws into his face and won't let go. Then I remember a detail of MY dream, about a tiny white dog, something like a Pekinese, which refuses to be tamed! A woman owns him and has given up on trying to make him stop biting, but I try to calm him down, but he bites with tiny white teeth that remind me of a piranha's---at which point Dennis shouts that HIS cat was like a fish as is my DOG. I get it down on the floor on its back and try to tickle it into a good mood, but still the angry black eyes flash and the little snout parts and he snaps and tries to bite my hand and wrist. Dennis also had a detailed dream about sitting in an Actualism class with his mother and father, who said "This was going too far" and it was something about "red" and "lesson 9" (which turned out to be Energy of Perfection, while Dennis said "pink" was something like "red"), and the teacher was a heavyset older man. When I searched my mental files and could come up with no such teacher, Dennis said he seemed to recall the name Ralph, and I immediately thought of Ralph Metzner, who isn't teaching anymore, but who COULD be older and heavyset. Dennis also had some experience with someone's report who had to go out and get some bags of water, which then broke or expanded and filled the whole room, and he said he got the idea of amniotic fluid, and I brought up the terminology of "amniotic sac" and then the water seemed to relate to both our dreaming about animals with characteristics of FISH. We asked Lorene and Mike if they'd had any dreams as a result of dinner at Windows on the World last night, and they said "No, we slept very well." I told Dennis to please type up the 4-page note he'd jotted down last night to show me, adding the small details that he subsequently remembered, and Susan thought there was definitely some inner work and sleep encounters going on between the two of us. Certainly interesting coincidences recently!
ROLF IN NEPAL/MEXICAN TRAIN
9/11/80: Rolf and I (he called to say he might be going to Nepal to climb mountains with a friend, and this place is just as scruffy and untouristed as Nepal) trying to figure out a foreign golf course: where are the tees, the dog legs, and the holes, and getting a map (like Lorene and Mike unfolded out of my Michelin) from a solicitous (English?) woman. Then I'm in a train terminal with subway-like seats and crowds and fights to sit down. It's all rather puzzling and "Where am I and what am I doing here?" in the dream. Then I (and Dennis?) are in a Mexican-type Spanish-peon country, in some kind of station, and a VERY long line forms down a dusty path outside the door, solely of men, and I rather think they've gotten into line for a john, and then Dennis joins the line and by the time I decide that, though the line's too long to wait in, it's only going to get longer and that's the only way I'm going to get to the john, I'm going to join the line, many others have gotten on too. We jam up tighter and tighter, clasping from behind and clutching bodies and arms and thighs, and we begin to move as a UNIT, a long articulated snake, and it's so crowded I look down and find that young boys are crushed under the weight of the crowd, and I'm actually sitting on the back of a black-haired dark-skinned boy with a yellow-and-white striped T-shirt on, and as we move faster and faster I think "It's like being on a train" and as we rise up one hill and coast down the next, I see that we ARE on a train with tiny toy cars that the people completely hide with the bulk of their bodies, and it's going faster with my long legs hanging off the side brushing up against switches and bags of garbage and sides of roads and other trains, and I have to keep pulling them in, although when I brush my foot (like the guy on "That's Incredible" who broke his foot leaping over two cars?) there's no great pain, but we just keep on traveling.
PHOENIX-BIRD-KITE AND DIFFICULTY OF REMEMBERING
9/12/80: I'm walking down a sunset street and look up to see Phoenix bird-kites soaring through the air, flapping their edges in the wind, turning in and around on themselves, and flying toward each other to form patterns in the sky. Their pelts have beautiful peacock colors and iridescence, rather like the feather coat at the Museum of Natural History, though the bodies are so SQUARE I can't quite figure how the features come from a narrow bird-body in the middle of the configuration, and I think it might be a woven fabric of some kind. There were other sections of the dream on the 12th, which I tallied to myself in my mind so I wouldn't forget, but I forgot them anyway, which is depressing. I'd wakened about 6 am thinking I should write down notes, so that I wouldn't forget the ideas, but listed them mentally, sure that I'd remember them, they were so vivid. Completely gone. Then this morning I woke with a memory of a vivid sex dream, but again I lay for a few moments, possibly dropped off to sleep again, and woke again with only the memory of having HAD the dream, with nothing about it left except the pleasingly sexual quality.
DRIVING ALONG CLIFF SIDES
9/16/80: Spartacus's driving a car and I'm with him, and he's sort of showing off his driving prowess, wheeling back and forth with his left hand while his right arm is companionably stretched toward me along the seat back, looking more at me as he talks than at the road. The road skirts the edge of a cliff and he follows its increasingly impossible course, so that finally his right hand is almost holding him from falling against the door on his side and I'm bracing myself against the floorboards to keep from toppling to my left, and he goes between two furrows lined with hedges up a little rise to the right, and I'm astounded that the car didn't roll over to the left. "That's quite a road," I manage to gasp out, and Spartacus grins and says, "That's nothing, watch this!" and he turns out to the left as the side of the cliff drops away to the right, and I frantically cling to the sides of the car while trying to describe to myself by what physical means the rapidly spinning tires are exerting the "suction" that enables us to "float" about ten feet from the cliff face, motor racing and wheels spinning to obvious effort in keeping us there, and I think of potential and kinetic and gravitational energy, but none of them seem to offer sufficient explanation, but nevertheless the car continues on its way without falling to the unseen depths below, Spartacus continuing to drive with one hand and I'm convinced that the rapidly spinning wheels are the clue to our levitation, if I could only remember the formulas for moments of inertia and torque generated by the somewhat gyroscopically-spinning wheels. There are other parts to the dream, but I forget them in the intervening days, and I'm not even sure this is the day I had the dream on, but it's close enough.
GENE EVANS AND ACTUALISM TEACHER AND MY PLACE
9/20/80: Someone who's a combination of Linda and Lea is sitting on my bed (more like the one in Akron than the one in New York), and Gene Evans comes in, but he's not quite "together" somehow, and the female teacher makes some sort of comment about that, and he brushes it off, saying he's getting better. They're looking at brochures on my bed (like Ken and me last night looking at the brochures from Mexico?), and almost without transition they want to eat something, so since the bed is crowded I pull up a table very like my reading table, which is OK for the three of us, but suddenly there are two adolescents sitting with us, big and blond (rather like the two Hoebermanns who were in for class last night), and I know they're nephews of John Vinton's, it's now too crowded, so I say "Let's go into my kitchen," and it's reminiscent of the kitchen in my apartment on West 112th Street, because it has a large under-cupboard area to the right of the sink, and it's just COVERED with dirty dishes from many meals. Even on the table, rather like my card table here, there are dishes filled with uneaten food; hamburgers without buns with three bites out of one edge, sliced tomatoes going bad, other elements of food, wrapped and unwrapped, on the table and sink, and I'm embarrassed and say "Usually it's pretty bad, but this is RIDICULOUS!" and wonder if I'd pulled some small gang away from the table for a BANG the previous night. Then I'm standing in my current doorway and John's door opens and there are 4 children there, the same four as I remember from before, and a bright-eyed golden-haired 6 or 7-year-old says "Hi!" brightly and rushes into my apartment and around the corner into the kitchen and starts rummaging in clattery thing that he'd played with before and liked, and I stand there feeling vaguely flattered by his ease with my apartment and vaguely uncomfortable because my guests are wondering WHAT'S going on, and John is his usual smiling and pleased self, and I wake with the vague recollection that I should write it down on cards to remember, and then later "dream" that I WAS writing it down, but think NOW that it's easier just to type.
DETAILED ISLAND MAP AND TKTS TICKET SELLING
9/21/80: Someone comes to me excitedly to say they've found a special island, and he's circled it: off a Fire Island-type island off the south coast of "Massachusetts," though I thought it looked more like Connecticut. In an instant we're on a point of land looking out over a very deep blue-green area of water, identifying it as the Clear Flow, and beyond it is a small island we take to be under discussion, but there's a pattern like a capital A in the bushes and we decide it's Astory (Astor-y) island, just to the west of the little island, whose shape we can identify with the detailed map. At the end, it's hard to know if I'm looking at a map or at "real" terrain. 2) I've gotten some sort of TKTS/Twofer concession in a Lincoln Center, Beaumont Theater-type lobby, and I shyly approach the Ken Miller-like candy salesman who expansively says I can use up to half of his table, since he's only a hired salesman anyway. I debate how to arrange the 6 or 7 stacks of tickets for which people are to pay $2, and my first customer, a sharp little Richard Thomas-type, picks one up to "look at it" and disbelieves they're not free and walks to the center of the lobby with it. It's begun filling up before the matinee, and I'm acutely conscious of others watching me as I try to run after the customer and experience the nightmare "walking in mud and not moving" sensation as I DETERMINE to move forward and DON'T move, finally pulling myself free with a PHYSICAL effort and take his hand with the light blue ticket. He gives it up without a struggle, but as I'm taking it back to the table I see it's a torn stub (I'd wanted to show him how much the discount price was compared to the printed price, but there WAS no printed price) from August 29 and this is SEPTEMBER, and it never occurred to me that he'd PALM the current ticket and give me back some PAST ticket stub, and I wonder how I'm going to search through his pockets, since he's probably folded it into his handkerchief. He tries to put me off with a seductive "What, and you say you're not married?" implying sex with him, and I get back to table to look at stacks to see that Liv Ullman doesn't open her 343-minute repertory of smaller pieces by various authors until October 6, and Radio City Music Hall's pass should be free, though I debate charging for that, too. Then I think about getting a tray that I can just OPEN, with ticket pockets, to save time, and I see that it's 1:40 and not too much TIME to show, and I feel shoddy and frightened.
EARTHQUAKE
9/22/80: Before going to sleep it occurred to me that I DO remember and record my dreams, so THIS would be the perfect way for the Immortal to get information through to me in a form that I'd BELIEVE. So I made a distinct thought to record whatever dream would come as some sort of FORECAST of future possibilities or activities, and tossed quite a bit before sleeping. Woke with the following note, written with the difficult-to-handle pen: I ASKED for a future-predicting dream and got EARTHQUAKE. I'm with a friend (not Dennis or Ken, who impressed me a lot yesterday by calling to say he DID want to go to Mexico with me) in what seemed by the greenness and hilliness and village- and people-character to be Nepal, looking at the scenery over a vast plain ringed with mountains, and distant volcanoes start erupting (though I remember being impressed, on Friday, by the volcanoes in Africa in one of the gorilla dioramas), which in itself doesn't bode too much evil, though I can vaguely feel the ground shake, but in the distance is a reflection off water that wasn't there before, like a very fast moving GLACIER rolling down the distant mountainsides (and I recall as I write the Volcan Agua in Guatemala that erupted water) and spreading out water-like in the intervening valley, coming nearer, though still not endangering us. We dash, with a following crowd, back into Kathmandu to gain HEIGHT from the advancing waters, and as we make our way up narrow streets with overhanging roofs as in Patan or Bhatgoan, our activities take on the look of a MOVIE, and maybe we're WATCHING this rather than LIVING in it. People look back at a reddish sky, and we turn back to watch the increasingly movie-like screen, and a banner floats over the sky that reads "The End" in yellow letters on a banner, and we don't really know what's going to HAPPEN. Odd.
OSWICZ RIVER AND ELBOW PINCHING
9/26/80: I'm inside a school or restaurant in some country that really FEELS like Poland (though I've never been there), and I'm leaving with a crush of people who are taking a long time to get through the (possibly revolving) doors to get outside, and a kid or a student behind me, to hurry me forward, grabs me from behind with each hand squeezing hard on the nerves just above my elbows, and it HURTS (it seems to, even in the dream), and I turn with pain and frustration and anger and try to confront him, but he's smiling with malice and just SQUEEZING away to try to get me to hurry, and no amount to talk (there might be a language barrier) will convince him that I shouldn't be hurt so badly. Without transition I'm then on a fashionable street in the same town, old fashioned houses lining a narrow road with very crowded and limited sidewalks, and an older man behind me squeezes my elbows in the same way to make me get out of the way of his wife and couple of children. He doesn't HURT me as much, I just feel the same amount of frustration and anger at the NERVE of him DOING this to me. Then I'm off to one side, where there are no tourists at all, to an enormous bridge spanning what I think to be the "Oswicz River," going through the town in a stream of bright blue, and the bridge that crosses here is actually more of a TUNNEL, lit up by the brightness of the water, but the entrance is rather dark with rusticated blocks of stone of dark browns and almost-blacks, but the ceiling reflects the ripples from the smooth-surfaced water, and I can almost picture myself hanging from some enormous soaring blue girders that make the inside framework of the bridge, looking down at the river with wonder, no one around to bother my seeing. I seem to "approach" the river two or three times, each time amazed at its clear blueness that seems to make the air around it come alive---and each time there are fewer people: first only a few pedestrians, second it's perfectly empty, and third it has the dream quality that NO ONE ever crosses it there, and I can be alone there as long as I like.
COLUMBIA, BARRY FRIEDENREICH, AND "OLD "MILK"
9/30/80: I'm taking classes in an old school that's a combination of Columbia University and the old Jewish schul I did the census at. I'm early or late for class, and an old professor, for whom I'm sort of a teacher's pet, says that I would do him a big favor if I could go to the "basement way uptown" and get him some of his favorite drink, the "old milk" that they have there: I'm just there to ask for it in that way and they'll give it to him. I get onto a subway (after passing some classrooms where students are putting on a mock television program about politics, and someone very like Barry Friedenreich is making some sort of skilled, pompous, yet educational speech much to the hilarity and learning of the hundreds of other students, and I sort of shake my head in amazement as I pass) and get ready to go up into the neighborhood of 180th Street, but then I look at a subway map that's more like a detailed map of upper Manhattan and find that I've gone too far, that there's NOTHING underground up here anymore: I remember taking a walking tour up here and writing on my map that "It's all above ground up here," above some park north of Harlem, and I vaguely think that it flattens out to the north, like Norway, so that there are no longer any hills to tunnel the subways under, yet some part of me remembers that Inwood Hill and Fort Tryon are up there, so THAT'S not quite true, either, and I recall that I can only go to about 165th, which is where City College campus is, but by this time all thought of exactly where I'm going to get the "old milk" has floated away from my mind and I'm just studying maps and looking at what parts of Manhattan I've seen and what parts I haven't. Wake with a DETERMINATION to write down this dream, since the last few days' dreams have been sliding away though I've been making mental notes to myself what the basis of them was.
SHORT MEMORIES OF EARLY OCTOBER
10/4/80: Ken and I are traveling and we get VERY long raincoats that come down to the tops of our boots. I remember being fascinated by the dream, but that was the only note that I took, aside from putting down a 2) for the SECOND dream that I had, which I didn't remember then or now.
October Other: Wake with vivid snatches of dreams, debate getting up to write them out, run them over in my mind until I fall asleep again and wake with the feeling of frustration that what I'd remembered is now GONE.
10/9/80: It was something about traveling again, something about riding on subways or underground trains and getting off onto some other form of transportation which wasn't quite working well. I remember ending up with a feeling "That dream means 'Try, try again'," though I don't remember the details now, much as I'd like to.
SICILY, STAINED GLASS SLIDES, CHAIRS & STAMPS, PISSING
10/10/80: At least THIS time I took notes (see DREAMS 72) and remembered ALL the plots: 1) Late Thursday, like just before I went to bed, I was interviewing someone who was a combination of Joseph Ardel (from Ardel travel to South America) and someone from Travel Dynamics, and he said no one wanted to escort a tour to Sicily. Since I'd never been there, I said OK, and he said I had to leave Friday (today) and return next Friday. Since my class wasn't today (as it is) and was NEXT Friday, I figured it would be OK and liked idea. 2) Crowded reception room circling about a display of stained glass slides of history or religion of someplace like the Vatican, slides stationary but lights illuminating them as commentary reaches them. Little girl from across the room kneels before a pink armchair (mine?) and Dennis gets panicked: "Did I miss a sacred shrine that I should have knelt before?" and I laugh. 3) I'd been given an enormous folio of stamps, and I asked to borrow a number of chairs to sort them out on, deciding there were so many countries that I'd divide them into groups of three to see how many countries there were, then later split each triad into its country, combining where necessary. Sheets from Epirus and Guatemala and Spain sort of stuck together, and the postcards from Japan and China and Manchuria got all confused together, but I'd gotten most of it done when I had to leave for a moment, to return to find stupid tourists had taken the chairs WITHOUT ASKING ME, and I got angry, saying I KNOW I shouldn't hog the chairs, but AT LEAST I ASKED before taking them, which they didn't. I noticed, however, that they'd at least kept the filler-paper separators I'd put on the bottoms of the piles in place, so I should be able to re-sort them quickly into stacks of three. 4) I have to piss in a crowded maze of urinals, seeing the crowds moving slowly to the right, I enter to the left to see three empty ones, but as I take the one nearest the door, a tall leering man stands next to me and tries to discomfit me, but I've started pissing already, so it doesn't matter, except that Dennis comes to the door with his typical quizzical lost look and asks me where he should piss, and I wave him on in my impatient irritated way.
BARBARA LEA IN ELEGANT DRESS AND APARTMENT
10/11/80: [Saturday AM: IS it when the Tunisian earthquake in Sunday's Times took place?] I'm in a huge apartment slab of glass building, on the 22nd or so of about 24th floors, and there are light-diffusing violet sheer curtains on the walls that permit a mystical view of the buildings and lights of the city below and about the apartment tower. I get the idea that it's owned by the Leveys (due to Huna lecture being handled through their apartment address, probably), and Barbara Lea's there, rushing about getting ready for some sort of job we both have to do there. She's VERY sleekly dressed in tight violet silk over which shimmers golden-yellow chiffon that swirls about her shapely legs as she walks quickly out of the bedroom I'm in, and I watch the tightness of the violet silk and the contrasting movement of the yellow chiffon and think it's a dynamite combination, complementing the violet undertones of the colors of the light filtered by the curtains. I lay back on a large bed that happens to be there (which reminds me slightly of the bed Ken got from his brother after returning a sofa, defective, to Macy's for his original price after a year and a half of usage), naked, luxuriating in working in such a PLACE, but at the same time, at this height, getting the same vague paranoid feelings about the vulnerability to disaster of living up so high, as I did in my corner apartment on the 17th floor on 57th Street, and as if to confirm my qualms there's a slight tremor in the building that I try to attribute to the wind, or settling of the foundations, or the rumble of a subway beneath the building, but which I think of as a warning earthquake, at which time the whole building would rock, the plates of glass would fly out from the windows, sucking out furniture and people that would happen to be near them at the time, and I feel rigid with anticipation and fear, touched by the beauty of the surroundings yet panicked by a sense of impending danger.
MASTURBATION AND CHURCH GOING
10/12/80: I'm sitting somewhere engrossed in jerking off, and see people sitting in front of me who can't see me, but then I look to my left and see a man and a woman immersed in their reading of a prayer book or hymnal, and I discover I'm in church! Try to cover up what I'm doing and see if the people next to me could have seen me, but I'm embarrassed to discover it would have been difficult for them NOT to have seen me. But I'm attracted to the man on my left (who reminds me of Ken), and when we kneel and I keep playing with myself, I realize that the guy to my left has moved in to touch me, and I thrill to feel HIS hand reaching over to take my cock in his hand. Then the scene shifts and we've moved to the back to try to get some privacy, and there are wooden benches set against the wall, and though the light is quite bright even in the back, we move back there thinking we can be alone to maybe even try some 69. Then I look down to the right and there's the upward-craning head of a daffy blonde girl, impossibly low so that her hairbob-edges actually brush the floor between the back of the kneeler and the front of the pew side, and I crane for a view of her body to see how she's managed to get her head so close to the floor, and I get a glimpse of toothpick-like yellow-pink limbs that remind me of the woman affected by Parkinsonism that I saw on the subway last night. Then she gets up and continues to stare across the aisle, and I wake with a strong erection and feel good rubbing it against the bed before it goes away.
COOKING AND OCEAN-SPRAY TITLES
10/13/80: Rita and Denny are cooking dinner, maybe here or maybe at their place, which I've never seen, and Rita is being very Dennis-like in her inability to do anything without my being there to tell her exactly what to do. So when she doesn't know how to cut up the chicken and carrots, I slice the breasts into the shapes of ship sails and make slabs out of the carrots so that they tie in with green (scallion?) bands to form something that looks vaguely like a cock's comb, and she says immediately that she knows what to do with it, and Dennis says that Denny can do the round parts, Rita can do the slabs, and he, Dennis, can take an implement that I've seen but never used, a spiral cutter, and core down the inside of an icicle radish or a chicken breast and form a SPIRAL shape which can then be interlinked and baked together to form sort of a double-spiral DNA formation with chicken and whatever colorful vegetable is being cooked with it. Then there's some sort of title displayed, with "Ocean-Spray" as the first two words, but "Ocean-" somehow is going to change, or is only an adjective and shouldn't come first, so I'm telling or suggesting that they can always say "Spray Whatever, Ocean-" as in indexing, so that it will alphabetize under spray and yet retain the part that says Ocean-. There's another fragment that I don't quite remember, something about my working for an IBM-like company at a cluttered desk (it's coming back now), having to generate some kind of report, and all the while checks for the person who USUALLY occupies the desk, someone like John Benirschke, are being littered on the desk, and I'm sitting at some kind of terminal or printer and trying to organize the data, and maybe THAT involves typing some sort of combination letters, because I woke with a DRIVING curiosity to use special characters: @ # $ % ^ & ( ) _ - + = ! : ' ; ' " , . ? / along with capital letters: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z and a few selected lower case letters: o and x, to see what "fitting" combinations occur. (see LISTS 11 & 12)
AMY/JOHN/NEIGHBORS AND POLICE FOR GRASS/LSD/POPPERS
10/16/80: There's lots of comings and goings in the hallways of the Arabian-type building I live in: lots of courtyards, sunroofs, nearby fields, maze-like passageways connecting apartments on different levels, filled with the noise of searching, police communicating through walkie-talkies, and telephone calls (determined in part by some high pitched beeps that might have been Dennis listening to tapes in the next room). Amy telephoned, or appeared at the door, as if to warn me, and then had to leave. John's being self-important and giving them trouble much as he does with Mrs. Johnson and Cray. They're searching everywhere, and I return to my apartment, which is in the basement with a stove rather like Dennis's, to check into the stove to see whether my apparatus is hidden well enough. I've used lots of eggs but there are still about 12 egg cartons there, which I'll explain (thinking there are 4 cartons to a dozen) by saying that I'd bought TWICE, thinking I needed eggs, but forgetting once that I'd bought them, and then there was a special that I couldn't pass up. But the CANDLES are very visible, and I try to press their wicked ends back into the pot-and-pan compartment so that the egg-crate ends will cover them, knowing that candles mean candlelit evenings, and what else would we be doing then but smoking grass? I also know that I have bottles of a clear liquid, like LSD, hidden among great arrays of bottles about the apartment, rather like Arnold's array of bottles of various unlabeled things in his kitchen that I ransacked for some stray bits of food on Tuesday, when I was watching TV there, and I at first think it will be safe, but then "see" the police systematically checking through EVERYTHING, so of course they'll find it, so I should just throw out the liquid, down the drain, and wash out the bottles and hope they won't check for residues. Poppers aren't illegal, I don't imagine, so they're safe. Then I'm walking along a Nile-like bank and I hear a voice inside my head describing the situation which says: "And from being dragged down, they were, every one of them, brought to a new understanding, and they understood the answer to the question of God." I marveled at the "God" but then sort of wondered whether that meant that God had asked a QUESTION that had been answered, or whether it meant there WAS a God, and God's EXISTENCE had been the question. Woke to hear the beepings, but Dennis said he wasn't doing ANYTHING that beeped!
UNPAID DINNER AT LUTECE WITH MOM NEXT TO CHINESE BABY GIRL
10/17/80: Mom is sitting on the outside, me inside a table for two at Lutece, which looks more like Le Steak than it does like Lutece, and next to me is a Chinese mother with a little black-bobbed daughter who just seems not to like me at all; she keeps hitting and slapping and frowning at me, so much messing with my food that finally I grab her hand at the thumb and BITE it so hard that I'm sure it'll leave almost permanent marks. The mother is furious when the child screams and she accuses me of trying to harm her daughter, and I'm very aloof and self-righteous, but somehow I know that things will turn out right, and it does: when they leave the girl turns back to me and waves with a smile and we part with lingering handclasps that shows that all is forgiven. Mom shakes her head in unknowing, and then hurries out so fast that I leave my shoes under the table in order to follow her so that she doesn't get lost. I just catch a glimpse of her going into a stationery shop, where she's buying something from the cashier at the back of the store, going around the side aisle almost as if to avoid me, but we meet at the entrance and she says "Where to now?" and I say "I guess I'd better go back to Lutece to pay the check, at least," and she looks at me with a surprised smile that implies she's thinking about not paying the check at all. Then we're outside at an intersection and she's suddenly with a male friend, saying she will or won't drive off with him in his car, and I'm still shoeless on the intersection knowing I have to go back to Lutece to pay the bill, wondering how Mom's going to end up, and wondering whether I have enough cash or whether the restaurant will accept my credit card, which I'd never used there before. Pleased to have remembered so many dreams so exactly after a spate of not jotting down notes quick enough to capture furtive memories of elaborate, desirable dreams.
RATS IN HOUSE / GETTING THEM OUT
10/18/80: Though it was THURSDAY that I heard a rat in the oven, phoned Dennis at 1:45, chased him into the bottom cabinet, started moving out the stuff until Arthur came at 2:40, closed it up and phoned Dennis back at 5, plugged up the hole in the cabinet, and continued scrubbing the kitchen floor until 10, getting totally exhausted physically and emotionally and mentally at the time, it was only this morning, SATURDAY, that I had a dream about rats in house: I seemed to be a guest in a house in France, visiting with two other men, and though I didn't see any, I knew that there were rats in the house, and I knew we wanted to get them out, preferably without the hostess knowing about it. We gathered in the dining room, a sort of nook in the wall with very old wood covering everything, making our plans, knowing we couldn't go into the bedroom where the hostess was sleeping upstairs, the third floor; we were on the second and the first was a semi-basement/kitchen-type of floor, where probably the rats would have no place to hide in the earthen floor---and in came some MAN from the household, wondering what we were doing up this late at night, and I was too embarrassed to say that we would have been HUNTING the rats, so I just stammered and was about to explain to him that we were going to do "some kind of session" (I knew it was going to be a Lightwork session, but I didn't think he'd understand) around the table to try to rid the house of rats by mental persuasion, at which he would look at me skeptically but rather believe the tale, when I was wakened by the phone machine squeaking away (would THIS be what engendered the rat dream, since it had been squeaking about 30 seconds before I picked it up, to hear Ken saying "I'm looking for you, I'll try at Dennis's," and when I called him back he wanted to visit the St. George at 10, maybe with his friend from next door, Carl, to see what the progress was, since he wouldn't be able to tour the facilities on its last day, Monday, so I told him to ring me when he comes downstairs a bit after 10; I'm tired from being up till 3 am watching the end of an hour-late Midnight Special which cancelled the broadcast of "Rock World" in favor of a Mary Tyler Moore rerun) at 9:30, and I hope he didn't wake DENNIS up for me. I'm still feeling snotty-nosed.
YOU DON'T LIVE UP TO MY VISION
10/19/80: 1) I'm trying to learn some computer's keyboard, rather like a keypunch verifier, but no one's explained the functional codes to me. I can see the example of the person next to me pushing one button, getting one array of lights, and performing one transaction on one card, then pushing a different button, getting a different array of lights, and accomplishing some other task, but I haven't been given training or a guidebook, so I try punching EACH button, thinking that the correct one would light up like his did, but nothing lights up. I'm getting flack from people I should be producing for, but I can't get around the fact I don't know what the codes are. 2) Dennis is somewhere in the dream or just on the periphery: HE doesn't live up to my vision of him when we first met: of someone capable of change to the extent that he wouldn't be a dependent child anymore, not so reliant on the giveaway smile and the "you decide for me" attitude and the "I'll have to think about it" response. Thought about this BEFORE going to sleep. 3) Also in the periphery think of my difficulties with Actualism, where I don't live up to my vision of where I should have been by this point. I'm still too judgmental, brain oriented, depressive, repetitive in thoughts of repetition, entertainment-absorptive (though I looked through the Times Entertainment section last night and ignored practically everything as not being very interesting). 4) Based on my memory of trying to make Bananas Foster with too much butter, WHITE sugar, and brandy and Cherry Marnier, and cooking the bananas in the bubbly mixture so long that they fell apart (though imparting a banana-liquor taste to the too sweet sauce), in my DEFINITE second dream I'm making some kind of bubbly cheese soufflé, cooking it, paradoxically, on the breadboard, and when the cup of soufflé begins to overflow I watch it starting to overflow the breadboard and think (in the dream) that I'll have to get a large plate and put the breadboard into it, so that the PLATE will then catch all the overflow, and the cheese can be cleanly picked off the plate and eaten so that nothing of magnificent taste would be wasted and thrown away.
BASS PLAYING / CLASS / JEAN-JACQUES / MOLDERING BUILDING
10/20/80: 1) There's a class/show in a classroom/coffee shop, and I'm a student/bass player with about 70 students/3 other instrumentalists. The teacher/master of ceremonies is a rather frantic older blonde who demands more attention than she gets. Female cellist drops her cello case "by accident" and people comment/laugh about it, and then I play some very rapid solos ala Rufus Jones (or whoever Helen Merrill's accompanist is who played on the Nancy Harrow (?) record), and then there's a lunch break/intermission and the blonde addresses the class/ patrons with clawing hands DEMANDING that we all eat lunch in the hour allotted and be back at 3 pm. I think that we'll probably all be able to fit into the IBM cafeteria nearby, so there's nothing to worry about. A couple comes up to me afterwards and talks very seriously about lunch planning, and I say it's all a very casual thing. Dennis remarked that the teacher seemed to be jealous of the attention the group was getting. I started making very delicate comments back to the audience, who laughed very much at them, and the repartee in the group became almost a show in itself, and I began to think that maybe we could branch out from being an instrumental quartet to being an improvisational entertainment group without instruments. The two other group members were shadowy, but I was sort of turning out to be the star of the group, and was pleased yet at the same point uncomfortable and worried about the direction events may be taking. In a fragment, we were on a hillside overlooking an enormous stadium in which some game had been scheduled, and with lights around the upper colonnade, the stadium looked like a cross between a luxury liner and the plastic-ribboned tooth-picked watermelon shell Spartacus and I saw on our walk back from the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. 2) I woke at 9:30 and recalled the details of the above dreams, then had a fleeting "waking dream" of Jean-Jacques looking at me very seriously and saying "I have lots of things to talk with you about." No idea of subject. 3) Another fleeting image or "waking dream" was looking at the green-moldering white-painted stairways of a building being razed, OLD enough for 325 W. 112th Street, or whatever my address was, but with a feeling of 35 E. 61st without the SPIRAL quality to the stairway: this was square, white-painted, and I was witnessing the condition so that I could report in court about the condition it was kept in when I lived in it before it was torn down.
LITERAL CLIFFHANGERS / DRIVING OVER MY FOOT
10/29/80: 1) On a gravelly scrabbly slope too steep for me to get a grip with fingernails---
2) On dry-rotted boards of a loose boardwalk where boards snap and the whole thing topples---
3) On a set of loose, breakable tree roots that threaten to come out entirely---
I climb toward the top of a HIGH cliff and each time FAIL to get up to the brink, keeping all my control of energy until a final handhold pulls off in my fingers and I sail, breathlessly, out over the cliff face toward the bottom and then, without transition, find myself at the next clamber at the top. I don't know how I got into these positions, and the REASONS for getting to the top change as quickly as the settings---again in no particular order:
1) To get to a WEDDING where I'm taking the place of a husband, and a black guy, oblivious to my plight, is calmly explaining the stand-in process to the shy white bride in her gown, with no one else in view---
2) Quite unconnected to a black officer seducing a white woman---
3) To get to a PLAY of three acts whose lines I haven't memorized yet, though I seem to know that I only have two or three lines in each act, so I'm hoping there's enough time between times I'm onstage to brush up my memory. This note taken when I woke to piss at 4:15 am, drank too much water. Then at 9 am: My last comment is "You drove over my FOOT"---to a man in a too-small Datsun blue pickup truck, head huge in the side window as John described Werner's head when he got his VW fixed, looking for a parking place on a quiet road which is nonetheless full of parked cars except where I sit on the running board of a car that had been waiting BESIDE a parked car, which then had enough room to pull out, and the truck is trying to park in that adequate space, but in backing up he runs over my foot, and I'm surprised (and relieved) that nothing broke, there wasn't even great pain. I'm shown a map of some old Massachusetts University (Cambridge?) that shows a spread-out site with numbers of gates around the periphery, and neighborhoods marked, one of which is "Robot Town," where I imagine Bradbury got his "Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round In Robot Towns" title from. I glance through the accompanying paper for gay activities, but it says the neighborhoods are quiet and you really have to know where to look to find what you want.
INCREDIBLE MÉLANGE: CHINESE WIFE / CAB / STRANGERS IN STRANGE APT
11/3/80: 1) I'm going on vacation from my house on Dietz, and my Chinese wife is depressed, saying she doesn't know how she'll eat or what she can do that would be DIFFERENT when I'm away, and I say she can go for walks, ride busses to different sections of town, buy new cookbooks and cook new recipes, go to restaurants and different grocery stores and buy seafood and meats and vegetables that are new to her and experiment and use her imagination for new things. 2) I'm in a New York-like city, around the Pan Am Building, but there are differences and I don't know the streets or where to get a cab, and I have to find a taxi but I don't know exactly where to go, so I wander aimlessly. 3) I'm getting out of bed and my apartment is being shared by the guy who shared my first apartment on West 114th Street when I was going to Columbia. I'm supposed to have left, maybe, and he's SUPPOSED to be there (like Bill sharing my place when I'm in Mexico? Like I told Bruce about at 11 pm last night?), but not quite YET. I get clothes out of my bureau and my closet, but I ask, when the wires break on a mirror over the head of the bed and the whole thing falls to the floor and I find the black and white plastic wires HAVE broken through, where the paper portrait of the buffalo has gotten to, and he says he rolled it and put it in the middle of the closet. I think of going to check but figure it will be OK. I'm undressing to take a shower and strange touristy women from another country enter by mistake, and I angrily usher them to the door, and then the guy's girl friend is there wanting to be introduced, and I shout "Wait until I'm ready to LEAVE," and then get into the bathroom to be amazed that it's DIFFERENT: the shower stall is in the middle of the wall with a shower curtain that I don't recognize at all, and a man there, when I ask, says this is apartment 913, and I don't even remember what apartment number I'm SUPPOSED to be in (the building is now more like 309 W. 57th, and was I in 1713, I think in the dream, and I WAS in 1703), and I'm VERY confused, then wake at 9 with this mélange rolling through my head, and decide I've got to take notes on it before showering and beginning a busy day with many arrangements, like in dream.
MISSING BUSSES AND TRAVEL WORRIES
11/5/80: Occurs to me that I HAVE lots of European-travel dreams recently, so I count, and from the period 8/19 through 11/5, 48 days, of the 29 dreams recorded, 10 of them, over 1/3 the dreams, over 1/5 the days, are of travel: 1 specifically in Paris, two in France, one each in Italy, England, and Poland, one general Europe, one Nepal/Mexico, one Asia, and one general travel. In this one, I'm riding on a bus with Dennis somewhere on the outskirts of Paris, and I must doze off at a rest stop, because I get back to where the bus should be and it's gone, and I have no idea where I am or how to get back. I try to find a cab, but in these sparse outskirts there are none. I finally get on a bus and debate how to ask the driver in French to let me off at the aeropuerto, or how to get a bus that would take me there. Distinct memory of sitting in the back of a 6-8 passenger VW bus looking at the back of the male driver's head, then OFF the bus and walking through a zoo trying to get directions from English-speaking travelers there, but no one really knows which direction to go. Finally I'm on a bus that seems to be taking me back to the center of Paris, since I have to get my bag from my hotel---since when I thought to phone and get my bag SHIPPED to the airport from the hotel, I kept thinking I was in the George V, but I keep thinking that's in ATHENS and not in PARIS, and I don't KNOW the name of my hotel in Paris. Driving through outskirts of town and see an arrow to Queneau (author whose books Updike is reviewing in "Picked-Up Pieces" that I'm currently reading), and finally ask to get left off by the roadside, where I flag down an orange airport bus, which stops for me when I discover I'm hauling a luggage carrier with two suitcases on it, and I try to force my way onto the bus while the woman bus driver gets very annoyed and shouts "Off, OFF!" and I find that PEOPLE are getting off and I should let them off before I get on, and I'm very annoyed but bustle down the stairs and figure I'll have enough time, it's only 7 pm and I vaguely remember Michael saying that only my first transfer was very late, leaving Paris about 11 pm and getting into London about 2 am, so I still have time, but I've not seen the countryside only fussed about TRANSPORTATION TO THE AIRPORT.
SHIP-TRAVEL AND HILL ROLLING
11/6/80: 1) There's a large bedroom in which Dennis is sleeping way in the back and someone who could be Mike Mao is sleeping right in the front, near the door, and I'm debating crawling over them to get to my bed, but I look down the windows in the back and see the wake foaming away in a blue moonlight, and we're in the bowels of some enormous ship. Looking off to the side, there's the shadowy silhouette of hills and mountains against a starry sky, and we've reached whatever coast we were bound for. Then the speed picks up tremendously, and the trees are in daylight RIGHT OUTSIDE, and it turns out that this VERY large ship has been containerized onto two enormous trucks that are carting the top half and the bottom half across highways to the next water-leg, and I go on deck and there's a pewter-colored decorative stanchion, rather phallic, sticking up from some stairs, and I wedge my sneakers into some of the corners to get a better view from the added 3-4 feet of height, and skillfully slide slowly down by applying sneaker-pressure against the smooth side of the stanchion, taking care that I don't rub black rubber marks onto its silver matte finish. Then down a winding staircase to a very low entranceway back to the hallway off which is our room. 2) There's a fragment that followed about going quickly in some smaller vehicle up and down hills on a road through some other foreign country.
LUCIS TRUST / JERKING OFF
11/8/80: Bed prepared for note taking because of my "night expedition" with Crystal (see ACTUALISM 101), and get to sleep at 1:20 and wake to write the following at 4:40: I'm riding a subway-like train into the basement platform in the Lucis Trust Building, but the doors won't open to let passengers onto the platform, and I know that you have to say the right words, so I shout "Loose-iss Trust" and nothing happens, and then I think of "Loosh-us Trust" and the doors open, letting me enter. Why would I want to go to Lucis Trust? Then write the following at 8 am: INCREDIBLY real dream of jerking off in the morning, followed by someone telling me about GREAT people taking care of some sort of HOTEL. "Guests would arrive at 1 am and she'd be FLYING and give them the whole PLACE." ME: "I hope nothing happened badly to those lovely people, that they weren't taken advantage of, or robbed?" And the answer was "No." I DID wake with feelings of strain in my legs, possibly from the strain of coming last night, and I SUPPOSE it might be possible to make a case for not participating in orgies anymore: when it DOES happen like it did with Gary, very nicely, it is nice while it's happening, but there's a vague feeling of loss and desire after it's over. When it DOESN'T happen, there's the feeling of having wasted time. But if I DON'T spend the time at J's, it's always the question of what I do THEN: whether something useless like watching TV or reading books, or something useful like finishing the indexing book or the play. There's the thought of trying something new, not necessarily permanently, but at least to give it a TRY, and SEE if anything new and spectacular happens because of it. Certainly I don't regret giving up grass, except at places LIKE J's, and I probably won't regret giving up poppers, except with people like Dennis, but I think I'd give up promiscuity if it means that all my sexual experience would have to be MEANINGFUL rather than just having fun. It's like being told one can never eat HAMBURGERS again, that every subsequent meal must be BALANCED and NUTRITIONAL. In general that's fine, but as a RULE it becomes take-away and hopelessly pedantic and hidebound.
FRAGMENTS / ARMY INDUCTION / MANHATTAN MODEL
11/9/80: Lots and lots of notes, later fragments written above earlier fragments: 1) 9:45: Later date-figure frieze-display noted around the walls (bed 2:10 am). 9 am: Into BATHROOM of cabinets of paper towels and trash, guy leaves dirty plates on counter, I tell him to put them into trash, he scorns me, I put them away. 6:46 am a) Some kind of male SEX panel, with lots of sexy guys in white, and I say something about the 8-9 guys on the panel and Dennis says only 6 guys were on the panel, but one of the others was his FATHER, and others were visitors. b) Some kind of play or show celebrating "140 billion people" like Sondheim's "And another hundred people just got off the plane" in "Company," except this is "another 140 million just joined the 140 billion on earth today." 2) Army induction: I'm on a LONG line for a combination Army induction/Customs clearance (from Third World travel article in NY Times?), and LOTS of people confront VERY lazy clerks---at one point EVERYONE goes to lunch and I watch clerks drop off to sleep and whole office clears out. I circle around outside, frantic, and then am waiting on gold-painted metal stairway leading down, FULL of people waiting in line, mainly ignorant laborers, and I'm indignant that I have to put up with this, and try to push ahead, but there's a frowsy housewife and child ahead who won't let me BETWEEN them to pass. Get to bottom and find a "shortcut" where there are fewer people---and I'm nude, somehow, now, and dazed clerk says "Where's your docket, your folder, and your forms?" He's more puzzled. "Do you have your fee receipt, your driver's license, and your clothes with you?" OK, now remember I have to bring all these. "Did you check the form for the movie?" "What movie?" "Didn't you see the MOVIE?"---aghast, obviously this had never happened before. "No." "The big hallway with the screens on each side?" "No," and I'm trying to be patient, but he doesn't accept the FACTS. Slightly BEFORE, I had a jacket over my arm and a vaguely INTELLIGENT agent I'm following says "I'm now an expert, I can tell what kind of grass it is by the density of the material," and I say "I've only got my tweed jacket, do you think I smoke THAT?" He says he'll have to check and SEE! I'm shouting, making a fuss, waking up one or another of sleeping groups of clerks, and it's vaguely a Chinese or Indian locale in flavor---definitely from the Third World travel article. Finish writing this set of notes at 7:01 am. I'd waked VERY warm, having forgotten to turn off the radiator in the room and the heat's coming on, and nose VERY dry, throat sore. Feeling weary and "used," but I had to take the NOTES. BEFORE I went to bed, cock looked VERY dark skinned, mottled-headed, very USED and loose-fleshed, and I wondered whether leaving it alone for awhile might not make it look less USED. 3) 9 am: Hugely detailed dream of Manhattan model. I'm in some exhibit (Bruce's mention of Alternatives exhibit somewhere?) and pass a room with a person sitting in a corner with a flashlight-like baton in his hand. Find that he's looking at a black-light exhibit of the New York skyline along three walls of a large room. Then I'M sitting in the corner, lights off, illuminating buildings along the walls, and people passing outside look in on ME. There's a companion exhibit, on a smaller scale, on an enormous central table, and I get above it and see that the ice in Central Park's boat pond (which is the only sizable lake in Central Park, in the dream), is unevenly frozen: bright blue at the south edge, misty and slushy toward the north, so I even out the slush to let it freeze evenly and can FEEL the cold and the give of the weaker ice in the center of the model under the slush, and know the refreezing will improve the model, and from somewhere comes the audio or mental note that "it's even more spectacular from far ABOVE the model," but I don't go up onto the catwalk to observe. I'm back in my corner and new-coming girls turn on the wall lights, making my flash-locator ineffective, and it's model-like and unsatisfying, so the lights go out and I return to my original way of pointing out skyscrapers like the Chrysler Building (another touch from NY Times Magazine just before bed last night) and other lit towers, vaguely like the backdrop for the modern sequence in "Brigadoon" a few weeks ago. Actualism observation: If I say I DON'T feel sexy, Actualism staff might think that's POSITIVE, while I think it's NEGATIVE.
FEMALE PANEL AND FREEDOM
11/10/80: Bed at 12:50 and to sleep AFTER putting the body into REGENERATIVE and ON THE WAY up to Mental but before getting into Wisdom and Soul for the night. Could it be that because I wasn't prepared when she got here we didn't go? VERY little dream---or dream recall. Woke with VAGUE memory of "female panel" of women saying things, and then a "waking-dozing dream" of a particular woman from the panel being given a second chance to express her opinion. Try as I might, I can remember no more, but as I debate what to write at 8:30, a fragment of "Evita" floats into my mind, Evita singing "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" where she croons softly "But I chose---FREEDOM." Write these notes to have SOMETHING for today, anyway. Harmonize up the levels to soul until 9 (while thinking wildly about all that I should be doing today and all that I haven't been doing) brings nothing more for today.
BUS PASSENGERS / RAIN / EARTHQUAKE
11/11/80: I get to sleep at 1 am and wake at 7:55 am to record the following notes: 1) Separating oxides of mercury from globules of metal with a pointed probe very much like a dentist's probe for depth of pocket. 2) Huge number of tourists waiting for a bus to take them to the airport, in a terminal where they're waiting for the snack bar to open, and the ONLY people I can find who I would WANT to eat with are Chuck and Joe Livigni from Akron, still in their grade school teenage youth. Finally into restaurant and busy hostess says we can only have sandwiches. Then, outside, everyone's gotten onto the bus but me; I know I still have to pick up my coat somewhere inside, and I debate getting on bus that's not as full as I thought, with only a few people standing, but it moves around the parking lot and I debate and delay and it finally moves out and I don't know how I'm going to get to the airport, nor EXACTLY where I left my coat. 3) Something vague about female opera singers and voices and dryness and diseases of the throat. 4) Just a glimpse out a window and it starts to rain STRAIGHT down with HUGE silvery drops of STRINGS of rain. VERY beautiful to watch from inside, but it would be VERY wet IN it. 5) Talking with Arnie and HE reminds me of the day we went walking in the northern woods and we felt an EARTHQUAKE, and I remind HIM of the time one of us got so angry with the other we began to SHOUT angrily, hurling curses at the other (which we've never done). 6) At 9 am I add a note about a sex scene in which I'm sucking off a handsome small-cocked blond.
BUS TOUR / TOURISTS / TICKETS FOR THEME PARK
11/13/80: I'm sort of a combination tour guide and tourist on a minibus driven by a rather brusque woman who's a combination guide and tour organizer. We seem to be driving through the U.S. South, maybe not quite down to Florida, and the other tourists have no idea what they want to see: there's a married couple in the back with a 3- or 4-year-old still in arms, there are two sexy young teenagers who I'm rather disappointed to notice have discovered each other as a possible source of sexual outlet, and there are 4-5 other people who remain vague and undefined. I recall being to some Great Adventure-type theme park in this area and she seems to say we're not going there, but then she stops and pulls off to the side of the road outside the park periphery and talks about distributing tickets for our afternoon there. She has a multitude of tiny clips, like restaurant receipts, which have fallen out of their bundles, and she gives them to me to sort them out into sets. I'm near the side door of what has almost become a LIVING quarters van for the group of us, and the side door opens to a curious jean-clad man with a demented 14 or 15-year old on his shoulders, who also stares in with a vacant interest. They quickly move to the side of the "porch" outside the door when I close it, and when she worriedly asks "Who was that?" I try to make light of it by saying "Only some locals," and I hope they aren't all degenerate like that out there. The two teenagers in the bus go off into a corner, arms around each other, intent on talk, and the others in the bus wait for me to sort out the tickets, and it begins to seem that I know more about the rides and times and amusements and animals in the park than she does, and it seems to relate vaguely to the zoo I'd mentioned on DREAMS 84, back on November 5, which was BEFORE the directive to "go places with Crystal to find out about my sexuality," so I'm less and less certain that anything's being done on THAT level.
PLANES MYSTICAL AND PLANES CRASHING
11/15/80: 1) Someone is teaching: ABOVE the Soul is the Cometary (Angelic in Actualism) plane, then the Soul, then the High Astral (Mental in Actualism), then something that I don't remember (Emotional in Actualism), and then the "regular" astral (Perceptual in Actualism). Someone is also saying that Mark (Eliot) fully KNOWS that he must teach (some mystical teachings). 2) I'm walking along a river basin with someone, idly watching a plane taking off (as if taking off from the Allen Street Park on the eastern edge of Manhattan and we're walking in the Brooklyn vicinity of the Naval Yard), and it begins to rise and then loses speed, arcing in that oh-so-familiar dream image of a plane about to crash, though we hope it can regain altitude and continue. It levels off a bit but still smashes into the river, not breaking apart but BENDING, like a train of subway cars, and wallowing in the river at some speed. The person I'm with (Dennis or someone else) worries if we're safe where we are, and I say I THINK we are, since the plane doesn't have too much kinetic energy left, but in the twisting of its length it suddenly noses toward a crowded naval ship at a pier near where we are, and when the nose of the plane hits the side of the ship the people who are bending over the rail are jostled so severely that some tumble off the side of the ship into the water, and others are thrown to the deck. The impact sends the plane in our direction, and I see that it will strike the shore abutment near where we're standing, and depending on how much energy it has left, it could possibly throw us to the ground, so I grab whoever's arm and say "Run" and, looking back over our shoulders, we move out of the immediate danger area, the plane noses into the shore, causing some small tremors, but we're safely away and stop running and turn back to see the wreckage and I wake up. There's no thought that we'll be able to engage in any rescue work: after all, the plane is still floating, there was no sign of fire, and the damage to the hull is so slight that it seems people might be slightly injured at the worst. But I'm disturbed to find that same dream pattern of a plane crashing still THERE.
VENICE TRAVEL WITH SAME FURNITURE
11/17/80: 1) There are a few people clustered about the steps of the hotel as I take my camera out of my suitcase, which is the old cardboard-leather brown one with a drawer-shaped hole in one side so that I can reach in without opening it, and then decide that I really don't want to leave the few articles of clothing open to theft, so I lift it up by the opening and carry it to my room, where I put it on a footstool before an armchair that I recognize, to my great surprise in the dream, as the yellow armchair in my New York apartment, with a hole in the same part of the seat cushion, and then the sofa is the same beige felt-like material as my new swivel chair, and I'm just flabbergasted at the coincidence, though there's some sort of printed notice that they've surveyed the furniture of all the tourists AND there are 37 hotels on the itinerary, so it shouldn't be too much of a coincidence if SOME of the furniture matches the ones at home. I've gotten my camera to take a picture of the hotel room, and debate mildly how to get in the huge bathroom that's so different from the tiny American bathrooms. And then I guess I want to take a close-up of the waters of the canals of Venice, too, since they're surprisingly clear and there are even colors underneath the surface that just might be colorful coral, though it might be assorted garbage, too. Another travel dream. 2) Then I'm standing at the toilet in the room trying to urinate, and I can't figure why it's taking me so long to piss, and wake to find my bladder on the point of opening as I lay on my stomach in bed, so I get up and go to the john quickly. 3) There's another fragment of talking to someone in New York, toward 10 am, that happens half in waking, half in dream, but I don't remember it.
OPERA SEATING
11/18/80: Everyone's filing to their seats at the opera (in a place that's more like Brooklyn Academy of Music than any other), and when I take what appears to be my seat way on the LEFT side, I can see that the place isn't nearly full, though the FIRST impression was of a large crowd with everyone standing down the sides of the aisles as they sometimes do at Carnegie Hall. The orchestra seems to be playing along the RIGHT side, so that when it begins, everyone moves over to the RIGHT, and I move down front, on the right. Then without a transition I'm sitting way on the SIDE on the right, in a sort of box on the orchestra-floor level, sitting with a young fat kid (JR?, which I just finished Sunday) who INSISTS on talking loudly. I tell him to please stop and he just keeps on going, and finally I put my hand over his mouth (where his teeth are sort of caving in, my dental work yesterday?) and he keeps mumbling but doesn't bite me. When I take my hand away he says "You do me VIOLENCE," and I say "Don't YOU think YOU do violence by talking so loudly when everyone wants to hear the orchestra?" He thinks about it, then admits I'm right and apologizes to everyone around him. Then it's intermission and I look at my ticket again, and it looks like H148, but then I see that the "1" is only a decoration between the H and 48, so I'm on the OTHER side---the ticket gives a diagram of which seats are available for subscription, and they're on a center arc across the middle of the auditorium, with most seats on the extreme side, and I think it's not a very good idea to get there, and WHO gets the BEST seats?? So I move down and each little wire-backed chair is marked with a description like "Back," "Right side," etc, and all are full but the one WAY in the back, where I can't see anything, but then move to a front one to find that from there I can see the male chorus, who appear to be firemen in this scene, dressing in what looks to be a kitchen, and the stage is almost over my head, and I figure I'll be perfectly placed for all the entrances and exits, but I'm not going to see much of the opera. Forgot that just after intermission the orchestra struck up popular WBAI-type music as a prologue to the second act while people were getting seated again. Another fragment after that I forgot.
KIDS WRECKING HOUSE / MEN BOILING THEMSELVES
11/20/80: 1) I've gotten lost in some enormous baronial mansion, and a butler points to a wall map showing how we can cut a diagonal across an inner court to get from where we are to the main dining room with the fireplace, since all the areas ahead of us are marked "Closed to tourists" on the map, and it's just too complicated and long-walking to go back the way we came. 2) I'm in a more modern house, as a guest, and see some stupid kid scraping across the clear plastic floor with a file that's been dipped in oil, and I grab it out of his hands and put it back on the shelf and try to rub the oil into the floor so that the scuffs won't show, amazed at the destructiveness of the kid. Then other kids take screwdrivers and pry up wooden lids on glass-topped display cases and take out lima bean sculptures and other bead constructions and dump parts of them over the floor and parts of them over other people sitting around, and I grab one kid in GREAT anger and shove his head inside a plastic beanbag with a mesh netting outside it, like a flexible cafe candleholder, and try to slap his face through the beans and CRUSH good sense into his head, conscious that I really shouldn't HURT him very much, just teach him a good lesson, but he smiles and laughs and remains unaffected. 3) Then I glance across---it's now gotten darker and later, and there are adult men daring each other to immerse their arms and faces into hotter and hotter water that they're getting from radiators and sinks along one wall of this house, and I'm aghast that these people actually appear to be GETTING OFF on this activity, though someone like Ted James has a boiled-looking face, more like a bad sunlamp sunburn, actually, and he's sticking his forearms into a pan of water that's sitting on a stove, lit, that's making it hotter and hotter, and as I can hear the bubbles beginning to leap from the bottom of the pan (heat coming on in Dennis's apartment as I sleep?), I turn my face away because I don't want to see any more of this madness, and I can see scalded, wet marks on arms and chests and faces as this group of men from some sort of obscene orgy room determinedly vie with each other to see who can withstand the most pain, the highest temperature, and therefore win the greatest applause for being the most masculine in the withstanding of physical pain.
DENNIS AND I CROSSING LAKES / DOG ON ICE POND
11/21/80: 1) Dennis and I are making our way toward some sort of resort, rather like Hemlock Hall in that it seems to be in the United States, possibly New York or possibly Florida or some other southern state, but we have to cross a body of water on wooden bridges with hand railings like one would expect to find across a swamp. Dennis runs ahead with high glee, jumping up and down, and he begins to break up the structures of the bridges, so I grumble irritably at him as he goes into greater gymnastics and the bridges begin to break, sinking down into the water like an undulating roller coaster, and he rides the bridge down and then sails back toward the surface in a swan dive-like grace of arced body and outstretched arms that I can follow clearly in the transparent green water. There aren't many lake fronds to be seen in the water, but the bottom is so far away that it's not really visible except as a yellow undertone at some places in the depths. I go around to the side of the property to find some passage that he hasn't broken down, and find a watery channel under a trellis rather like an enormous grapevine, and I know I want to get to the end of this channel, which skirts the left hand boundary of the grounds of this resort, but the only way to traverse the water is to stand on the soft cushion of the seat of a white-flowered pink chintz-covered barrel-type armchair which has been grounded at the end of the channel I find myself on, and I push off easily and rotate and dip a bit, as if I was riding in some sort of tilt-a-whirl car, and pull myself along with my hands along the arbor until I reach the other end of the channel. 2) There I take a few steps on dry land, now in a rather formal garden section of the approach to the resort, and in the last plot, right below the castle-like staircase leading to the resort proper, I can see a little feisty Booth-type dog jumping up and down, and I can't decide if the plot is earth with a light coating of water which has frozen on it, or if it's a decorative water pond or even lily or fish pond which has frozen with a light skim of ice, but this dog is agitatedly jumping up and down in a slightly bow legged but rigid movement, barking excitedly at something below him, and he's breaking up the ice and sending up little squirts of water, and some of the tourists are standing around laughing politely and distantly about this over-reacting, angry little dog. I don't get any closer to the resort than that.
BOTTLE-RAIN AND NEPAL SAND AND MINERALS
11/24/80: 1) I'm standing in a doorway somewhere with Dennis and someone else, and hear a soft rustling sound in the rain outside, and look out to find tiny bottles falling through the air, wafting gently back and forth in the rain, making a light sound as they fall that reminds me of the water sponge squeeze-effect of eating ricotta cheese in a cold cheese cake, tiny cold water-dots. 2) Another person and I are in command of a group of Nepalese young men in uniforms who are rushing from the direction of Pokhara toward Kathmandu to defend or protect it from some kind of attack. The head of the column has started down a steep hill but there's a bottleneck at the brink, and I push my way through the backed-up men and find that there's only a single-file sitting, sliding line of men down what I first take to be a snow slope in a cleft in the boulders on the hillside, but when some below me clear away and I slide down without wetness or coldness, the snow turns into some sort of soft, sandy, marly, white, compressible, marshmallow-like substance that I pick up to find that it clings to itself rather like snow, but without its very high compressibility. There are also mineral inclusions in the snow, some of which are quite spectacular. Someone pulls out an iron crystal attached to some mineral shard, and I see a two-lobed (rather like a gizzard in shape) cluster of green crystals that I pick up and wash in some water to clear away the soil, but the crystals don't have distinct facets on the outside, so it seems almost like a piece of plastic, though there are other pieces sticking up from the soil that implies it might be interesting to sift through and find the better pieces. No memory of going any farther than looking with interest at the mineral inclusions in this strange nougat-like sand-soil.
OFFICE AND BLACK TOUR; CONFUSED 29!
11/28/80: I'm working as a temp in a big office, go into NEXT office and meet an attractive woman, who displays signs: "I'll be going to college in 881 days," "268 days to Christmas," and "I now earn $20/hour; by age 40, I will earn $30/hour; by age 50, $45/hour." I'm very impressed, smile and chat with her, and she seems to like me. I meet a second woman and then a crop-haired blond I can't tell whether female or MALE, and chat with the person who turns into HIM and I FEEL my silk tie and look at my blue suit and think that I could be in his class. We're walking down hall to lunch, get separated, and I think of this humorous remark, but he doesn't show up---rather BLACKS in red caps who are touring the cafeteria, sitting on the ground, playing band instruments. I get on bus to go home and they're there, directed by black man who's to shoot when (and if) they cross the street to Museum of Natural History to look at the animals. Guide says, "Six nights here in a hotel north of Simpson Street," and I know the last stop on the trip will be for only one night. Bus then drives through Columbia University, where to the left there's a rock and roll band concert, scattered people on the lawn, and I know if I walk to the left I'll meet DENNIS watching the band.
11/29/80: Tooth and a half falls out. Driving looking for map-address---the houses get smaller, then bigger. Map codes confusing. Square metal plane goes "chok." Reading magazine on floor and kid pouts with red silent lips. No rectangular shaped movie ads---the kid takes. Girl squirts foam; I get to sleep and miss the rest of the dream.