DREAMS FROM 1981

SEX, STAMPS AND TRAVEL

1/18/81: Sex: there's a sort of panel, or competition, and the decision seems to be that the YOUNGER of two competitors for sexual activity will be more successful. Stamps: I'm going through some boxes that it seems Bill sent me (though I'd mentioned Mrs. Johnson's brother-in-law's collection to Dennis last night), and when someone asks how much there is, I open some loose leaf albums and am flabbergasted as the quantity of stamps just seems to multiply: pages of souvenir sheets, semi-connected stamps that flutter away from the pages like fringed pennants, strange stamps that seem to be printed on both sides in different colors, and lots of sets that are hinged one atop the other, to save space, and each up-leafing of a stamp reveals another spectacular stamp of a different color underneath. Travel: a tour bus leaves too early in the morning, and I try to figure out some way to get to a catch-up point by public transportation. It seems important to know how many days I have left on the trip, but the more I try to figure it out, the less information I seem to have: no itinerary, no tickets, no calendar to check against, and I look around in amazement for something to base my counting of "how many days left" on. I seem to be somewhere in France.

MASTURBATING CAT-HUMANS IN HEAT

1/20/81: As if watching a movie, I'm watching two butterscotch-furred cats circling each other in high heat, fierce yellow eyes riveted on the other, white-yellow hair so fluffy it almost looks like a lion's ruff. They circle closer and closer until they're parallel and lying down with each other, at which point the male, particularly, turns into a rounded, pink, humanoid body not so much like a muscle builder's but like a rather obscene rubber doll's. I marvel that, once getting the hair off, the anatomy of a cat is SO like the anatomy of a human: rounded pink calves, dimpled knees, thick thighs, well padded rumps and rounded backs, with the same doll-baby definition in the arms. When the male rolls over, he possesses a VERY stiff plump pink-red cock, which he'd been rubbing against the female (with such a male body, I've not been LOOKING at the female, a mere shape off to the right of the "picture"), and it's almost to the point of orgasm from rubbing, and then he takes it in his hand and comes with thick white gouts of come, toward which I bend forward, hoping to catch the last of them, and he CONTINUES to ejaculate an acidy come, warm in my mouth, and I marvel at the amount that a cat can come, yet there's so much yowling build-up I'm not really THAT surprised (though I AM surprised while typing this the next day that THIS was the day that Mrs. Johnson chose to show me Mrs. Watson's and "ED's" apartment, REALLY a mess, with the bedroom unmade and packed with cartons, the closets all open and spilling out jammed contents, the living room turned into a crowded study, the entranceway their living room with a gadgety hi-fi set right above my radiator where I hear it, and no carpets on the floors and lots of wine bottles in the kitchen, where they can't possibly eat. AND she says that he didn't like cats, so the cats are gone, which is a blessing, but INTERESTING that I had this cat dream the SAME morning I learned that the only cats in the building (except maybe Mrs. Corden's) are gone).

PEG CASEY AND SPENCER TRACY LEADING ME ON / SWIMMING POOL

1/21/81: I'm somewhere and Peg Casey's saying that I should follow her to HER place. I think I've done this before and she's played a trick on me before, so I follow very carefully, noting how her black fur coat turns rough and travel-surfaced when she enters a black cement-wall basement that acts as camouflage for her black hooded coat. Through one exit into a gymnasium she goes, me getting farther and farther behind, and I see her sprinting down one leg of a wooden running track crowded with people and lined with exits, and she keeps looking back at me to see how far I can see her, and she MAY fake going around the running track bend to the RIGHT and run backwards out an exit to the LEFT, but I get very tired of running with all my heavy clothes on in about the middle of the gym and sit down on a bench, breathing heavily, cursing out Peg Casey, I KNEW she'd pull another trick on me. Then I'm sitting outside someplace like the baths and someone who's a cross between Spencer Tracy and my dad comes out of the office and seems to know what's going on, and HE says HE'LL lead me where I want to go, and I'm gathering energy to get up and follow when some other guy comes out and tries to sell me a membership in THIS gym, with its swimming pool, when I know very well I have my membership at the St. George, and this would be silly to get since I don't even know how much I'll use the St. George, let alone THIS new one. Sit rather dazedly with people almost plucking at my arm to get me up and going, and I wake.

TRAVEL WITH FAMILY / MOVIE THROUGH GAUZE / virtuoso plays

2/4/81: 1) We're riding in some enormous trailer through America, and the daughter, middle in age, curls into my lap, under my cape, and gently cries as I hold her and rock her. The older son is lying on a sofa nearby, making clear to me that he name is Nalien, so I write it down to make sure I remember how to spell it. The younger son is around somewhere, and I feel good with the whole family, particularly when we stop for the night and the mother and father dress up: the mother in a white satin wedding gown with a crepe paper bridal train, the father in a makeshift tuxedo of wit and style, and they parade from their bedroom to the dining table, candlelit, with mock pomposity and prepare to eat dinner with all of us. I'm sort of a servant-friend. 2) My seat is section K, row J, seat 6, which should be in the middle, but some usher like Niel Sendar looks in the wrong section first and finds it full, then looks along a narrow section right to the extreme side, where my seat IS, but then he points to a seat right in front and indicates I can sit there. But when I DO sit, it's too far to the side so that it's completely behind a gauze arch that's been erected to "frame" the movie screen, so finally I just pull UP the gauze and sit INSIDE it, careful to slouch in the seat and not move since my silhouette is now cast ON the gauze for anyone behind me in the theater to watch. Neil and someone like Tony Taddio or Lou DeFonso comes in and sits on either side of me, sort of making the gauze drape like a smoker's seraglio (Dennis's burlap serai-drapes yesterday?), and I know that since THEY'RE there, I'll be safe to stay there. 3) Liv Ullmann is acting a gentle nurse to Laurence Olivier's stroke patient who's reverted to childhood. She holds up a watch, he inquires "What makes it run?" and she responds, "You have to wind it," with such gentility that I'm sure the audience will be reduced to tears, and I think it would be a FABULOUS idea to have this trio of plays (I'm not quite sure which, but maybe the man and wife in the first dream; the hero and heroine in the movie, the plot of which was highly dramatic but which I don't remember; and this) made into a movie with such an acting team would be an ENORMOUS financial success.

IBM JOB AND FINDING JOY LANE / LYNN CUNNINGHAM

2/13/81: I'm newly re-employed at IBM, having to estimate a job, and Dick Goppelt currently goes for $35/hour (forgetting that he's dead), but 4-5 TOP people like Frank Gracer, Lloyd Moore, and Jack Seelye are not working (like my indexers?) and I try to convince my boss (combination Jerry Berg and Murray Eisenman) that TRANSFER rates would be good enough, just to get the people WORKING on something, rather than standing idle. I think of the oil customer and his deeds and his unknown files and VERY unknown quantities of work (maybe something like Continental Oil), but I know that indexed values can be summed within loops to make the needed totals, and maybe the job doesn't have to take SO long, yet things usually take longer than they HAVE to or are ESTIMATED to, but I think about $30,000 for 1-3 months should be OK, since it'll be highly repetitive and profitable afterwards. I think of asking for a study contract, but don't think that'll be accepted, so I have to come up with an estimate even though I'm worried that I DON'T know how long it'll take and have NO confidence in my ability to make an accurate estimate. 2) There's a red-coated messenger with a telegram for Joy Lane. The girls sitting up on crowded bleachers say that she's really Lynn Cunningham, who's contracted cancer and is now in a hospital getting radiation treatments. I ask where her desk was, and they point to a four-chair table off the dance floor, between the square wooden columns, where the strip-line dances, and in desperation I ask if anyone in the company would have known her better, and they point to a cheery guy sitting at a desk about three bleacher-sections down, who waves to us in a spotlight, from Dayton. I'm down to the aisle and wave to a red-haired messenger who I decide is NOT the shorter, darker fellow I'm handling, and tell him we have to look for the dark-haired guy, but then decide I have to go along WITH him, so I wait until he's about to enter my turnstile and grab him and shuttle him through the crush of people to the guy who's sitting with a group HIGH in a balcony. I climb up easily but the messenger REFUSED to climb, waving them to come DOWN. I sit across from them and figure I'll just sit this one out, wondering WHY I'm so concerned about the delivery of this telegram and what I'm DOING this all for!

MOVIE HOUSE / TOURISM IN INDIAN CITY

2/27/81: 1) (Though the dreams seem to be NOT unconnected) I'm sitting in the second row way to the left in a huge movie house, but everyone's clustered around the first few rows because (I don't think it wrong at first, only after it's corrected) the movie's being projected on the FLOOR in front of the first row of seats, so that you MUST be in either the first row or in the second row able to look between two people in the first row to see the picture at all. I don't know WHAT the people are doing in the rows behind, but there ARE people scattered there. There's an empty seat to my left that has on it my coat and papers that I'd brought along with me from before AND fliers from today's program of films, which I notice the guy next to me has more of than I do. Then the film stops and, as if I'm WATCHING a film, I can see inside the projection booth the projectionist, a woman who owns the theater, pulling back on a rope that goes through the wall and is connected to the projector, pulling it UP so that it now focuses on the SCREEN on the wall, not on the floor, but she has to pull the rope through the BACK wall of the projection room, fixing it in place with a patch of paper that matches the contact-paper of the projection room walls themselves. The rope runs through the center seats in the auditorium, too, rather like the connecting link between the baby carriages in "Les Mamelles de Tiresias" at the Met Wednesday. I think it's an ingenious device. When I look to my left again I find someone's sitting in the seat, having moved my stuff to HIS left, and he begins talking about mutual friends with the people in the row behind, and I try to break into the conversation to ask for my stuff in the seat to the left of HIM. But I can't, and feel rather a stranger and left out of everything. 2) Almost without transition I'm traveling in a remote region of India, as if it would be a large city in the north, just south of the Siwalik Hills, that I'd never been in before, and I've found an inexpensive hotel and am taking a tour of the city with a woman who knows it somewhat better than I do. We're riding in the back of an open 8-passenger car more like a bus but for its size, and the streets are crowded with pedestrians and animals and animal-drawn conveyances. We stop at the edge of the jungle and I'm awed by the enormous flowering trees against the blue sky, but I can't quite get the proper camera angle to get everything I want to get into one picture. Then I see a brochure about the locale and am amazed that the mountains on the left are part of the Tien Shan range in China, and the ones on the right are Russian peaks, with one in the center that I mistake for Mitla, while I try desperately to put parts of the world together to find out where I AM! There's something marked as being in the foreground, and I straddle a moss-covered structure which turns out to be a polished, new-looking green-stone temple that someone says is "from the Hoysala period" (though I can't figure out how it would look so NEW), and it's been covered with a sort of dry-moss Astroturf to protect it from the weather and clambering tourists, but it's coming apart in places and the serpentine-stone-green balustrades are shiny in the sun between patches of artificial moss and fern. Then we're somehow down IN, looking even farther IN to the temple to the "trek rooms," one of which is an ENORMOUS chamber (and I'm sad it's just TOO dark to take a shot, and too huge to be lit by flash, so I reluctantly put the camera away) with TINY furniture in it, with a family of tourists sitting comfortably in chairs and on sofas, and the next room is the SAME size---ENORMOUS---but it's filled with furniture ten times larger than the furniture in the next room, so that the people sitting in front of the enormous chairs and sofas look like dolls or Lilliputians compared to the furniture, which now FITS the scale of the ROOM. I ask someone about the white folder that describes the two "trek rooms" and then I have to go upstairs because the tour's leaving, and I think I've gotten separated from my tour, because I'm on ANOTHER 8-passenger bus with OTHER people, touring a market center on a holiday that causes thousands of young girls flocking before stalls in the market to be brightly dressed with nets of silver beads in their hair that glitter brilliantly under the bright stall lights. The woman from the hotel asks an elaborately chapeaued little girl (rather like the costumed boys for the Guadeloupe festival---they're made up to commemorate some festival) to pose for a picture. Back in the car I tell myself to remember the Chattanya section to return to visit, and we drive through enormous HALLWAYS in some public building, rudely bumping the front of the car against elaborately carved (some very thickly, as if in the form of bumpers) doors (rather like cars in a fun house), moving very quickly to get back to the hotel, and I think I'll have to spend MORE time in this incredible city.

FABULOUS BEACH HOUSE AND LIGHTED MOUNTAINSIDE

3/16/81: I wake at 6:30 am and jot down the following: It was a dream that made me wish I'd never used the word "incredible" before. And on the rest of that first note card I draw the following diagram, since it was SO visual! Guess I'd better transcribe the legends around the picture: THE FINAL VIEW (and counterclockwise): Estates nestled along crests of peaks. "And plan to climb to the higher pass on the left---the houses look out to sea and up to the sky, and not down on each other." Waterfall from top. Trail. We had come through the pass and were standing HERE. Formal gardens. Fountains, Spot-lit perimeter. Pavilion and house edged in blue lights at twilight. I knew I was staying down THIS way! Bluffs to right of pass. DOWN to ocean. Dawn---or DUSK at the Pacific? Lit hallway into which hundreds flocked. Now notes: YESTERDAY I had a "desk cleaning dream" in which I was seated at a strange desk and spent a long time going through the contents of one section of one drawer, opening packages and small boxes and throwing away what I wouldn't need and saving what I wanted. TODAY I STARTED with the act of trying to drive a little experimental car that seemed ideal: tiny, single passenger, simply controlled, with a tiny motor that would tool along at about 20 mph at 110 mpg UNTIL it came to a hill, where it would exert a gently increasing energy until it was ALL climbed at the SAME 20 mph! VERY easy to operate and efficient to maintain. THEN I was in a huge hall, like at a convention, with crowds of people who'd gathered from all over. They seemed dressed for a pageant, or an opera (like "Attila" last night). Lots of milling around from level to level and area to area until someone shouted something about a drama (or a trial) that was taking placed elsewhere---our hall may have been connected by telephone (or maybe messengers ran in to tell fragments of a story). Gradually I became aware that there was a DRAMATIC REENACTMENT of some sort of amalgam of a REDEEMING CRUCIFIXION or a yearly recreation of the EMOTIVE and REDEMPTIVE quality of an event taking place FAR away (like the yearly enlightened event in the soaring valleys of the Himalayas around the Wesak full moon). As I began to REALIZE where I was, the shouted (or orated or SUNG) words became more poetic, evocative, and charged with emotions. People wept with joy or overwhelming emotion. I longed to record the words, hoping I could recapture the traditional solemnity mingled with intense personal joy. As the group broke up afterward, I tried to ask questions, but some went silently, clutching the majesty of the reenactment tightly and not letting me see any of it, while others shared their awe and privilege of attendance with me. I asked how long it had been going on and they smiled gently and said "Years." I joined some men walking away from the convention and was thrilled to find myself at "The Final View," from where I KNEW I was staying at a hotel down the beach to the right, KNOWING that the lit hall below me must be the Fellowship building (at Encinitas?), and hearing him talk of the beauties of the path up the canyons to the left, where the estates had quite a view. GREAT FEELING as I dreamed and jotted these notes to 7:10 am. Talked to Richard about them at 2:40 that afternoon, and he seemed very positive that they reminded him of dreams that HE had about the Halls of Learning, saying that I'd dreamed about being in them---though I only described the "Final View" and NOT the "convention hall" from the beginning of the dream. Just check the March full moon, and it's on March 20, which is TODAY, at 10:22 am, which MIGHT be about the time that I was TYPING some of this, since I finished typing this (the notes from the dream) at 10:45, just when Andre called and then I phoned Springer.

PEOPLE IN BED AND WATCHING MOVIE WITH ME

3/20/81: I wake in a large bed and find a small child next to me, also just waking up. Next to the child (of indeterminate sex) is the mother, who's twisting around in the bedclothes with the two of us, and on her finger is an enormous diamond ring, about 40 carats of glittering blue-red diamond in a pointy ellipse that covers the first joint of her ring finger. There's some small conversation that the ring enters into, and I turn to find there are other people gathered at the foot of the bed. I sort of silently ask the question of where they're from and why they're here, but they're sitting in folding chairs as if waiting for a movie to start, and I roll out of bed and try to get into some clothes, without too much embarrassment, but they're not really paying that much ATTENTION to me, though I get a sense of their loving ACCEPTANCE of my presence, as if they wouldn't be here without MY being here, and I feel moved BY their presence. Some of them seem like long-lost relatives who have come from a long distance just to see this movie in this bedroom, which I see isn't MINE, but probably belongs to the woman with the diamond ring OR to a hotel in which we're all staying.

BEACH HOUSE AND FIRE

4/11/81: I'm in some beach resort, but we're clearing out one pavilion and there's a scrawny child that I find in the back and present to the "leader" of this pavilion. I see HE doesn't want to take the child to the pavilion nearer the beach, so I volunteer to do so and he thanks me. I take the kid by the hand and we walk together down a wooden bridge-type boardwalk, looking down at our bare feet carefully stepping from green board to green board down the catenary slope to the sand dunes. Get to the dunes along the beach and the kid slips out of my grasp and slides in the sand down and to the left and behind some wooden construction, which I find to be an elaborate Victorian house, now abandoned, constructed of weathered wood and once painted yellow, now peeling and fading. I search through the house but the kid seems to have vanished in the empty trash-loaded rooms. I look at some of the electrical fixtures and from the switches come electric-blue flashes, and quickly there's smoke and the house has caught fire. I can't find the kid below, but take care to save myself, climbing upward to near the room and get out onto a balcony and find no easy way down, but I can dangle from my hands from one level and drop easily to the next level, which I do for two or three levels, finding that I float more and more effortlessly down, until I get to the bottom level of the house to find that it's perched on eroded sandy cliffs that offer no foothold down to the surface of what I think is a green lawn, but as I leap from the basement level, hoping to land easily on soft grass, the lawn turns into an algae-covered lake or swamp into which I sink ever so gently, and people are watching from the shore as I know I have to swim to safety, but when I start paddling I'm so high out of the water, almost not getting my head wet, that I think that either I must have on some kind of water wings, or the muck in the swamp is very thick and buoys me up, so that I skim along the surface, or that Actualism has paid off and I can actually partially levitate. It's a very SAFE feeling later in the dream after the controlled fears and panics from the fire and the need to jump from the high house.

DIANETICS-TYPE INSTITUTION

4/15/81: I've been invited to what started as a party and movie, but turns into some sort of Dianetics or Jehovah's Witnesses or Mind Control-type of training. I'm sitting way on the side of a large auditorium, but the seats rotate about a pivot right where I'm sitting, and it turns out that I'm pivoted into the center of a smaller area around a large movie screen that starts to show some sort of indoctrination film. I leave and wander around the institute, getting reproving stares from people around, and end up in a small lecture hall with a frosty-eyed elegant woman beckoning to two people at my side of the room. I step forward from the small entryway into view of the 20-25 people in the tiny amphitheater, asking if she's been gesturing at me. "Since you didn't start with the class, why would you continue now?" she inquires frigidly. I leave and go outside to a large lawn where, in a depressed area, the grass starts undulating, and I can see that water's being pumped from below into a grassy bowl which will become a swimming pool. This looks like fun, so I watch the waves grow larger and larger (and what was a sidewalk now becomes the ocean, and I wonder if anything will go wrong if the salt waves from the ocean mix with the freshwater waves from the pool), and people start playing in the water. There's a current of water up the side of the slope, and I look in amazement as someone zooms UP the current. Looking more closely at the current, which IS moving up, yet I can't see how this could propel a PERSON, let alone ITSELF up the hill, and I see small seats on an endless chain moving up the hillside, and in fact a lolling bather gets knocked on the foot by one. I look up to see the people at the TOP of the slide being tossed in an arc into the water, and as many seats together come out of the bank, I wonder how they distribute people in the water to prevent them striking each other. As I think this, I'm in CHARGE of it, telling a supervisor that it's broken: the device, which is supposed to throw three consecutive people to the left, center, and right, is broken, moving at random. "If you set it to the left?" is asked. "Still random," I say. "If you set it to center?" "Everyone goes to right." "Then set it at center and at least it'll be PREDICTABLE." Vivid green of grasses and purples of frosty-woman dress, and a feeling of AIRINESS about the "campus."

WALKING WITH GROUP

5/4/81: A large group of friends are leaving a house they've been visiting and taking a walk through the slightly European (narrow stone-paved streets with VERY narrow sidewalks and open storefronts right onto the streets) town. I'm alternately ahead of and behind the group, but I'm in my "I don't want to be part of this" mood, and groups of my friends talk and recognize me as they pass me or as I pass them, but essentially I'm walking alone. Toward the end, I'm way ahead, so I slip into a hotel lobby and pull a chair over to one side so I can view the groups passing as they file past on the narrow sidewalk outside. Then it's changed into a movie theater with movable chairs. and I'm off to one side, reserving my seat by my papers and a coat, looking at a soft briefcase that someone else has put onto my chair, sort of rehearsing what I'll say to him when he expects that this has reserved the chair for HIM that I'M sitting in. The theater fills up and I move my chair to the other side, but the show never begins. Then the group has reached the town square from which everyone will depart, and there's some discussion about whether the train comes out here from the center of the city that we're all returning to. Small groups of girls go up to cars to ask directions and, during the asking of involved questions, they're somehow sitting in the car and they've arranged to be taken where they're going. I regard this with a mix of contempt and envy. I debate walking the rest of the way, but it seems to be a long, rather boring, trip, and I'm sort of looking around for companions with whom to hire some sort of transportation for the return, but by now I'm rather aware that it's a dream, so it piddles out into waking. Before sleep, I'd had the casual idea that I hadn't had a really GOOD dream for awhile, wondered idly whether I'd not been having enough of the vitamin that Adele Davis said is necessary for dream recall, and drifted off to sleep thinking it'd be nice to have some sort of "revelatory" dream tonight. This can't quite be considered a "revelation," but it was pleasantly "present" during the walk through the streets, nice feeling a PART of the group yet not INVOLVED with its members.

EARTHQUAKE

5/6/81: Sleeping at Dennis's after the blood-and-thunder explosions of "The Stunt Man" last night, I dream that I and another person are on the ground floor of a glass-walled tower and are suddenly thrown to the floor as the room almost ROTATES, throwing us around like ping-ponging numbers in a bingo machine. The glass doesn't break, nor does the ceiling rain down debris on us, but we're certain that much of the country is destroyed, and I go from building to building to find that civilization has been reduced to 25-person fiefdoms in each surviving building, each saying that they're self-sufficient but that they can't keep any extra people, and they won't join with anyone else. As I'm telling the dream to Dennis this morning, I'm reminded about Amy's remark about the book of catastrophes she's reading, and her previous "vision" of flying over the country in a modernistic flying automobile and seeing that everyone was living in tiny villages about a hundred years from now. I said that I'D always thought a super cataclysm would send the country back to technology-free primitivism, but she said that "since the West Coast started in Nebraska" and lots of the East Coast was devastated, there were large reaches of middle America that were untouched, that survived WITH all the technology, and that the subsequent distribution of people permitted a village-civilization WITH high technology assists. She said HER vision was in the 2080's, but that the book talks about the last 20 years of the century---or millennium, so there's still the chance that things will happen with great suddenness. But the Actualism headquarters is still on the West Coast, and we're still in New York, so we're leaving as yet UNTOUCHED that great core of the country that would remain unscathed in "the harrowing," so hopefully it's still a number of years into the future. Enough for me to finish lots of my travels, further diminish the sexual drive that helps keep me in NYC, and further dissociate myself from NYC and its pressures and pleasures and more directs me to a pleasant low-energy countryside where I can tend to growing plants and watching sunsets and chatting with people, rather than tending canned entertainments and mechanized culture media.

MULTIPLE HIGHLY COLORED DREAMS OF SPECTACLES

5/20/81: I'm coughing and faintly feverish, which may explain the HECTIC dream quality: 1) There are multiple rehearsals for a "Radio City Music Hall"-type show, and I've left my coat on an aisle seat six rows from the front and am now enjoying the close-up view from a left corner in the FRONT row: there are rows of dancers, a great overhead view of a marquetry floor imported from some defunct dancehall now butterscotch-and-chocolate and shining underfoot, and I look off into the wings, where most of the audience can't possibly see, and there's a cool vista under green trees that seems to be painted, but a glass panel pulls in front and it might be deeper than I'd thought. Like for the Cavett show, there's an elaborate electrical board showing what's being rehearsed for taping for the next few segments, and I'm delighted. 2) This seques into what may be the OUTSIDE of Radio City Music Hall, and that's DWARFED by an ENORMOUS panorama of spectical (optical spectacle?) being set up for a Ringling Brothers-type poster camera shot: I'm pulling away from some elaborate underwater-fantasy scene with "mermaids" with aqualungs concealed in their costumes to dancers around the pool, cages of animals, and up on the rim were enormous yellow earthmovers which had hollowed out the bowl, interspersed with camels caparisoned for the photograph, and I walk up in the sliding sand, knowing that the photograph can't include the earthmovers. THIS slides into what might be an advertisement or trailer for the MAKING of the circus, since we're looking down on panning shots over garishly painted (glamour?) facades that front crumbling interiors in suburbs of Ohio that used to be flourishing but are now decaying. Purple and yellow globes and pillars stand out on one theater, another amusement park-like set of booths are incongruous in a dock-like setting, and I'm into what had been a bar-restaurant with bums lying about, but glimpses of candlelit dining tables with crystal and silver and elegantly dressed diners make me realize that it's all been taken over by someone like the owner of Tavern on the Green and made into a VERY pricey restaurant. I'm being shown out and I stop at the hostess to get a souvenir menu and a press of people leaving push us so close together that she looks at me as if I were suggesting sex with her. 3) Then I'm Helen's and Jimmy's guest in some HUGE Cleveland Hotel where they're sponsoring some sort of congress or symposium (and there had been talk in a previous fragment about a "dentist's bus to Cleveland" that was cheaper and more direct than usual public transportation), and I'm in a hallway, decide to tour my private suite, and see a HUGE reception hall, dining room set up for an elaborate buffet all in pink, with a restaurant-sized kitchen with enormous iron stoves and gleaming copper cauldrons, with huge bedrooms and sitting rooms to the rear of that. I want to take a picture of this luxury, but I know I have to get batteries for my flash, so go down to the shop to find a black hostess from the adjoining nightclub telling me it won't be open until 1. I'm incredulous, and she says "in the AFTERNOON," and I'm more incredulous, and she says "Monday!" and I look wistfully in and SEE arrays of batteries for sale inside. Then I'm outside a banqueting hall which is quite dark, though it's only for lunch, and it's 1:15 and I have until 1:45 to eat, so I play with cute boys outside who get erections but DON'T want to jerk off because "I can't come here and I'll just be frustrated." I'm about to follow them to where they CAN come when they leave and I shift to 4) Play-type environment (I'm ON the stage with all the other characters) with lots of psychiatrists, and one is collapsed over the footlights saying "I'm fooshed," and some actor in the far upstage area is doing a better job of acting out self-revelations than the real psychiatrists who wrote the play or who are sitting in the audience---anyway, they're there, though I'm not quite sure where. Wake with rather vivid memories of all the COLORS in the dreams, and take down the first notes in ages to make sure I keep track of them all long enough to get them down in typing, which finally happens at 1:30, and the days just GO, without much working on the index, and Lauren Bahr has to call me back to see what happens with her business index which WAS due on June 19, but she says the schedule's delayed and she doesn't know WHEN the pages are due.

JOAN ANN; JOHN CAGE & CHARLES MAGISTRO

5/21/81: I'm at Joan Ann's and she's telling me to take care of her coffeemaker, which is a strange ceramic two-piece house. When I take off the "roof" the hot water spills into the lower section, making soggy her toast and eggs which are down there. She complains, I try to remedy the situation, but it just gets worse, and I end up feeling pretty lousy about it.

5/23/81: There's a fleeting glimpse of a handsome young man, shy, who's being introduced to me, and I fantasize that it might be "my next true love." Young, dark-haired, smooth complexion, medium build, large dark eyes. Then I'm in a concert hall at a John Cage piano concert, first in the balcony, then in front of a section of folding chairs, estimating whether if I sit in the second-right seat in the second row I can see past the heads in the first row to see his face, and I think I can, but as I approach the four or five rows of seats from the rear, Charles Magistro is in the last row of two seats which are facing the REAR, and he's VERY clear in the dream, in a tan suit, eyes small and sparkling as they were in high school, and we chat for a bit, but then I'm looking at the concert, and there's another performer who moves off the stage to the left, and as people get up to leave, John Cage, screened by standing people, mounts his faithful gray donkey and rides off the right side of the stage, people exclaiming over the strangeness of his transportation, and I look out the right-hand door to see him riding skillfully away down a dusty trail toward a village and mountain scene that seems very Mexican, and I admire the tricks of perspective that puts this perfect scene framed in the doorway. There seemed to be other parts to both days' dreams, but I can't remember any more of them at this time, even though it's as early as 10 am when I'm typing. 4:50 am: WAKE (after I insist I want verification of being "on duty" for Actualism) and "get" a dark violet, so I send OUT Subtle Warrior to "the organizing center of the problem" and unify with whoever's in trouble with various energies, and I look at the clock, wonder, and fall immediately back to sleep without any trouble. Very DREAMLIKE sequence, but it HAPPENED.

IMPEDIMENTED TRAVEL IN INDIA

5/26/81: I'm traveling around the world with someone else who doesn't know me very well, sort of a combination travel agent and snob, and I'm not making him very happy. We have some elaborate connections to make between various parts of India, and we're traveling by taxi to the airport when I look out the back window and see a beautiful vista of building façade, ceremonial arch over the road, and distant temple spire glittering in the sun, and I get out my camera (slide camera I now have) from its case and fumble with the settings and find that the last few pictures are rolling loosely in the case, so I open the back and hope the light doesn't destroy the last few, and unwrap a roll of film that I've just bought to find that it flops loosely in my hands and there are little perforated pictures where the gels would be and I believe it's a PRE-DEVELOPED roll of PRE-TAKEN slides, with the labels where the gels should be. I ask my "friend" for local currency and he glares at me disdainfully, and I gather my shoulder bags about me and search for a sign that says "Cambio" and see one that says "Money" and follow it to a crowded shop where people are waiting in line. Somehow I get another roll of film, weighed down more and more with baggage that's not very useful, and I frantically look ahead to a stop at which I can reorganize my belongings more usefully (would this apply somehow to Actualism last night?), and hope my "friend" doesn't think I'm totally at a loss: usually I take ONLY what's necessary and have everything WELL organized, but on this trip it seems that I need about as much organizing time as TRAVEL time. I try to line up the shot, but he's gone ahead to the hotel, but when I get to the hotel, he's already checked out, taking MY stuff with him (I hope), and the new tenants of the hotel room look at me with puzzlement (they're VERY elegant) as I sweep by with bags and books and papers and films fluttering all about me, and I only hope that he HAS taken my stuff and it's not been a ROBBERY that's caused all my belongings to vanish. I know I have to get to the airport to get to the next destination, and I LOOK FORWARD to a place of rest so that I can just get ORGANIZED for the next section of the trip.

SELLING STAMPS UNDER GUIDANCE OF "COUNSELOR"

5/29/81: Interesting that the last two dreams have been with a man (somewhat disdainful on the 26th, rather more warm and friendly today, yet still slightly authoritarian and removed) who could be called a "counselor." This time I'm selling stamps: I'd come to an exhibition, or an auction, and just "happened" to have some stamps with me, but a few that are in strips of 4 are bent in on each other, and there's some question about how I'm to display them in the glassine slots that are provided with each sales (display, more like it) point. I try to straighten them out, and suggest maybe I'd get more by simply taking OFF the two damaged ones, but that doesn't seem to make sense. Then I really LOOK at my display point, and I leaf through metal-framed sheets with transparent slots, then down another compartment (like looking down into a big desk shaped like a pair of binoculars standing on end, but with mirrors I can see that the left "eye piece" is filled with the same set of supplies as the right "eye piece" I'm investigating). There are gold pen and pencil sets, scissors, tweezers, and even elegant overnight kits if the auction goes into another day: comb, toothbrush, hairbrush, safety razor, drinking cup, all in polished metal that looks like gold or golden chrome. VERY beautiful, with yellow-tinted mirrors reflecting other compartments with supplies and sundries and luxuries. The man comes back again to sit quietly showing me what to do, and I think I could go home and get out more of my stamps, some of the sheets, for instance, and make a bigger thing of it. But everything I do seems acceptable to my "counselor," who seems to be coming down in the world to talk with me, but he seems content with who I am, and that the stamps that I have to sell are somewhat worth his time. He doesn't seem to be commissioned, but working for the auction house. I don't have any money with me, but I seem to expect to SELL the stamps I've brought for enough money to supply me with the money that I'd need to finish out my time here. It's a warm and pleasant feeling to be accepted into such luxurious surroundings: the rooms themselves are more like quiet, dimly lit libraries filled with older serious people, and it's a treat to be acceptable while still being so young.

TRAVEL / RICE / VW/ MANY-MANY

5/30/81: 1) Traveling somewhere by car (that's all the notes I took).
2) I'm cleaning the corner of my foam bed and there's a bit of RICE in the corner, which I clean and clean and it puffs up and increases like puffed rice---probably connected with the mealy bugs I seem to have flying about now.

5/31/81: 1) I and one or two others are creeping gingerly along a cornice on a VERY high castle or cliff wall, on the outside. I know that we're taking a shortcut and there are two OTHER dangerous places to traverse, and I suggest going a longer way around which would be SAFER in the long run.
2) Cop finds me and demands to know if I was driving "the limo." I point out a bright sporty VW and say "No, here's MY heap, and I CAN'T get it up to 70 mph." I surmise that he was following a car that escaped him and turned off and he turned off and found me and wanted to pin the speeding ticket on ANYONE he could find.

6/2/81: MANY short ones: 1) (CAN'T read my note): Took (tank) my stars, maybe OUT to let it finish. 2) TINY envelopes and I can buy 6 15 stamps for 90 and they're USED 15 large old Special Delivery, like a cigarette-pack stamp, and other old stamps. 3) Trying needle and thread for the (some kind of) design. Find it, and 5 end on "Red River Valley" in PREVIEWS. (If DREAMS are cryptic, notes are MORE so, at distance.) 4) Standing on bus line, wanting to come on bus to Riis Park with me. 5) SEX with Bruce LIEBER! We're lying down next to each other, head to toe, and we sort of roll toward each other, sheets between, and I figure if HE doesn't mind the closeness, I don't, so I put my arms around his thighs and my cheek just HAPPENS to be against his genitals, which are semi-erect, and I just let them be there, and HE starts mouthing MY cock, so I respond in equal fervor with his cock, and when I look up to see how he's doing in my crotch, there are two strong spurts of semen from his cock, and he looks at me with his wry grimace and seems to shrug the information that he hadn't come in so long that he just shot. I didn't figure he'd be interested in hearing about this dream.

NIGHTLAND "TOUR"

6/4/81: It's either the "Land of the Midnight Sun" or an eclipse, or possibly somewhere in southern Australia, or the arctic, or "shadowland," but the place is always dim and dark. I'm off a tour bus, not wanting to go with the crowd, and I try to find my OWN place to say, and to the right of the glitzy pavilion we're supposed to be entering (like a Big Mac, or someplace), there's a marvelous enormous gingerbready house in brown trimmed in white, like the three-story palaces of wood along parts of Brown Street that looked like they could accommodate three families of 15 each. There are signs outside for something like $4 a night, but when I ask the unconcerned woman the rates, she quotes me $15. I don't want to pay so much, but decide that at least I'll LOOK at the room, and she shows me into part of a restaurant (couples sitting at dim tables nearby looking at us with mild curiosity) where she unwraps a sort of sleeping blanket and spreads it over the middle of the floor (it might have been a dance floor if the place had been busier), and the flutter of edges and texture of the paper reminded me of the bison painting above my bed. "You'd sleep here," she announces, and I refuse to stay and go down a neighboring alley that turns into a covered bridge sort of affair that recedes darkly in the distance, and as I go deeper and deeper into the tunnel there are puddles which just might be piss, and I'm thinking that this is NOT a pleasant place, and I wake up and decide that I DON'T want to return to THAT dream.

GRANDMA'S DOG'S SICK

6/5/81: 1) FRANTIC to get Grandma's DOG to a veterinarian for "ulcerated herpes"!! Visiting nearby (at Helen's?) and have to try to get a CAB to Copley Road, where Grandma lives. But I have no money. Ask Mom and she's VERY cold. Finally ask someone for bus fare, then have to phone for cab, first getting a VERY complicated directory and looking for "Vet," then asking someone and they have it marked on MAPS. Someone thinks it's a PERSON that's sick and tries to tell me to be brave, but I finally confess it's a DOG. Get it there at last and doctor TIES it to a grate in a cage, and it turns into a little frightened lemur-like creature who just licks my fingertips, and it occurs to me it might still be NURSING, and it's STARVING! In middle it was HELEN'S dog TRIXIE, and I had to avoid ulcerative mucus from its NOSE. Confused---first frantic then very SAD---dream. Notes at 6:20 am.

STAMPS & FIGURINES

6/6/81: 1) Looking at woman's stamp collection on pages in an enormous book with LOTS of loose HINGES flapping about on them, and I don't know what to tell her it's all worth. I don't think to ask where all the OTHER stamps are.
2) In "foreign fair" I study a LARGE number of very tiny, exquisitely made figurines and ornaments in store made of semi-precious stones and gold. Could have been leftover from seeing "Raiders of the Lost Ark" last night.

WRECKS & GAMES

6/7/81: 1) Wandering city and Sixth Avenue is WRECKED, only shards of buildings on many different levels making it impossible to cross the city. 2) INCREDIBLE physics professor: uses games, diagrams, bean bags, candy, names and games, and a sweet girl wandering around saying "All students who get an A can see "The Thief" free." Before, I'd been given some research assignment and had to recall how to integrate numerically, how to get [ELABORATE FORMULAS]---but have to wait for Amy's help since SHE completed the computer time.

INCREDIBLE SHOOTING JERK-OFFS

6/13/81: First I'm in some huge painted hallway that just might be underground, as a sort of child's-films-updated-to-"Raiders of the Lost Ark" equivalent of update of The Hellfire Club. Men wander about jerking off and coming, and the garish walls are regularly sprayed with small dots of semen from wildly shooting cocks. I engage one humpy guy, and as we watch three or four send jets squirting 12-13 feet up onto the walls, MY partner floods the floor below (and I think I've picked a loser) and THEN directs his cock upward to spatter the far upper corner of the room with cream! I hold his cock in my hand in abject wonder. Then there's a second, set-less, scene, where again people shoot monstrously, and in the middle there's an interlude in a theater that's full (referring to the packed Brooklyn Heights Cinema last night for "The Four Seasons," I guess), AND at the beginning of the evening there's a strange dream where I have to take a bus one stop into a Parisian army base for some reason, but I can't think of how to ask the bus driver in French if he turns into the base gateway, so I board the bus and get driven PAST it and am too listless to even get OFF the bus, not close when I have a chance to walk to the base, not far when I'd have to take a taxi: I seem to remain on the bus in faith that it'll circle back and at least take me to where I started. In THIS pre-segment, I DO get some sort of conveyance where the driver speaks Franglais and I speak Anglench and WE have sex, his huge cock shooting. Thirdly, I'm in some sort of school where three kids are playing, and this time one kid has a TINY cock that stands straight out of a hairless crotch, and a few of the other kids have tiny erections, too, and I play with THEM as they come, somewhat more reluctantly now. The fourth and final scene involves what appears to be a dance in a military academy, uniformed cadets dancing sexily together, and I'm a guest (or parent) and cut in on a few sexy guys and get one off into a corner (there's ANOTHER cameo with a guy in some sort of silk jumpsuit who gets all excited when I grease him up and play with his entire body) where I neck and stroke and play with their chests and tits, and it seems to my excited self in the dream that I can have anyone I want, and people gather around to prepare to take out their cocks for ANOTHER exciting jerk-off session. Totally come-drenched movie: is THIS what happens when I don't have sex for a week?!

BRUCE JAFFE'S ACTUALISM TEST / FAMILY TREK IN NEPAL

6/11/81: 1) Bruce Jaffe is administering the "Actualism Editing Test" to me. "Put this letter together," he says. Page one is dated and says "Dear Sir," and pages 2 and 4 are stapled together "to confuse," and page 3 "reads" from page 2, and 2 and 3 together are a carbon of some technical-medical letter on new chemical-pharmaceutical compounds, like a Raven book. Pages 1-4 are interesting gobbledygook he's typed on "orange popcorn" and typed representations of the towers of Manhattan skyline. I "solve" test and he leaves room and I entertain myself trying to psychoanalyze his gobbledygook. 2) Then there's a newspaper/newsletter on Tibet: he's drawn "Important Person" exactly like "Important Donkey," and "Enlightened Person" like "Stupid Donkey," and "Man Deeply in Love" like "Angry Donkey." Amateurish and Dr. Seuss-like. Then there's an article on "How not to be startled on Tibetan trails by people coming up behind you and passing you with a laugh or joke." Then inside there's a photo article of a family of 4 from Arizona taking over temple ruins for a campsite: the Whites---all in the family have ash blond or eye-white hair---are on vacation in their green sleeping bags beneath the walls that have been newly painted red with the blackened images of Shiva in her niches. Vishnu Devi is their guru-guide. One daughter is in tatters and the other has put on her best pink summer dress for the photography session, but she looks pale and chilly in the early morning mountain-air cool briskness, getting out of bed and trying to help with the chores. "What a job to trek in Nepal with two children," I think. Photos in color and text has that amateur "spaced-out look" of Indian newspapers. In the first, Bruce was comically serious about the test, sorry that I found it so simple. Colorful, pleasantly daffy dreams. 7:55 am. Somehow, on waking connected with my "organization of the data" for the Prokaryote index.

TRYOUTS

6/17/81: 1) Wandering West 40's and see projects of brick castle-style INSIDE façade of old brownstone, sign about CO-OPS STARTING AT $30/ROOM. 2) We split up our group for lunch, and I go in SOUTH doors of "school" used for tryouts, ask at large information desk, and get sent to gym for having lunch at 12:50 before PROMPT tryouts at 1, unmoved that you have to be PROMPT for summer shows in city. I move from table to table to watch, guy and gal I'm with saying I can't stay to watch ALL the acts. 3) Long "parade" of men and curly haired women as Greeks, then they turn and spotlight is on a red-violet-lighted ballerina 4th or 5th in line. Applause. 3/4 girls LEFT (they tremble) in alcoves. VERY strange. I hope to be picked for my humor, physical beauty, intelligence. Then, in the dream, pick out details and words with which to WRITE down the dream! 4) BEFORE, I was meeting Arnie and we were walking down from the 30's. 5) THEN a "tryout" of an opera, orange-robed king stabbing himself to shouts of "OK" from black audience. I'm finishing my drink and think I have to eat the glass. Bite off the bottom and have it in my mouth, but decide it's not PLASTIC (and edible), but GLASS, and I shouldn't eat it or I'll bleed. Take it from mouth and drop it onto plastic tray, but I get tiny glass slivers stuck in my fingers, which I remove with great care with other fingers and with my teeth. ODD!

SEX WITH KEN / POLITICAL PARTY / IBM JOB

6/23/81: 1) I'm in bed with Ken Miller; I'm on top, he's on bottom and I "recognize" the problem of hugging him around his waist because he has a HUGE Linda-like WART on his waist that MOVES like a marshmallow when I push on it. I try fondling his genitals and they move lamely and softly. Try kissing and he moves his face away. He's HUGGING, but as a GREETING or AVOIDANCE, not as affection. VERY frustrating. 2) At an elegant political dinner, maybe in Gracie Mansion, and there's a pushy short-haired woman trying to become IMPORTANT, talking to everyone and rushing about officiously. I sit glumly at a table and eat my salad, thinking I'm the only one EATING rather than greeting and talking and joking and laughing and making influential friends. 3) BEFORE, there was a typical "I'm getting a new job at IBM and I don't know what to DO" dream. He says the position is "designed for 17 lines/cycle but does only 6", and I don't know if I'm to try to PROGRAM more efficiently, change the WIRING on the printer, study the interlocks and TIMING, or just go by trial and error. 4) ALSO before, in some elegant resort building with clocks that have eyes and mysterious parties of people I don't understand.

HERMAN WASHINGTON AND NEW 35 E. 61 / ROLF AND VITAMINS

6/24/81: 1) Herman Washington and I are visiting a "different" 35 East 61st St. I reach out from "old wing" over "ledge" and removed plastic "paint panels" from right and lift up the layers that "show how the apartment used to be." HUGE rooms and luxurious ivory-white walls and embellishments and carving around windows and doors. Then he sits on ledge and I have him hold plastics BACK, and the doorbell rings. I find Mrs. Johnson and a crew of maids cleaning up OLD wing. Coming back, the "peasants" have sprinkled DUST in colors and shapes in the "attic" to form model VILLAGES: trees in green, houses in brown and purple, lakes in blue. Beautiful. I remark about his skill and he points to "the village church" in the distance, saying they're having a PARTY there tonight. 2) Rolf and I are on a bus, and I'm reading a pamphlet about vitamin evaluation. "If ascorbans are richest source of thiamine, and the cheap government supplements use ascorbans, the cheap government supplements are PERFECT." I ask Rolf "How can this be?" and he says the vitamin article is VERY strange and we can expect SOME good luck, so just take ADVANTAGE of it.

ROCK CLIMBING / BOATS / REEFS / STAMPS

6/30/81: I'm climbing UP (very difficult) and DOWN (easier, but crumbly rocks) Chimney Rocks, proud that I can do it as well as I can, and not falling. Then I'm not able to stop the CAR, and I'm parking in funny places waiting for Rolf and someone else at 6 pm.

7/1/81: I'm wandering through a pavilion to the "Mamiya Hotel," which I at first think to be in Brighton or Atlantic City, but then I think "It looks just like Morocco" because of harem pants on elegant AMERICAN women who are selling fabrics and beads for some sort of charitable organization. I watch a couple of men bargaining for lace, elegantly displayed in cases and on walls in a tiny shop, by writing figures with their thumbnails on yellow felt which can be brushed lightly to erase numbers. Owner wants to sell 4 for 3.0, the men say 6 for 2.5, and they settle for 5 (with a flourish, written onto the yellow felt) for 3.5, and everyone thinks they got a deal. BEFORE, I was being taken off a ship onto a rowboat (or wide canoe), and I lay across one of the seats and tip boat to stand up on one edge, almost tipping it over and throwing people into the sea, but I realize what I'm doing and sit back down. We're passing over reefs that looked good to snorkel on, yellow sand through green water, rippled with waves, and we're somehow watching a trailer that accuses Americans of "always looking for the carrot-yellow-orange sands and the pink sands of the very best beaches," but they COULD find interesting areas with unique fish populations off their own coast of the United States. ALSO I studied a "15 Newfoundland" stamp of blue and white and black that was unused, had no gum, and 7-8 perfs cut off one corner. The OWNER thought it was perfect and I tried to soften blow for her by saying she might get 1/2 catalog value, but I feared she wouldn't be able to get more than 1/3, with the damaged (cut) perforations.

REORGANIZING CHURCH SALES AREA

9/17/81: I somehow know that I'm in the basement of either St. John the Baptist in Akron or under some modern church complex which has its sales and administration area here. I walk past a copying machine that must be 3 feet high, 4 feet wide, and about 30 feet long, with a dozen people "in attendance" working with it, which is separated from a book-selling area three times as large as the area for the copying machine. There are areas of desks and computers in which administrative assistants are caring for mailing lists, letters from parishioners, and purchasing and accounting. At one point some men line up behind me and I figure they're waiting for the john, but I find that I have my erection pushed into the soft liner of a trash can against a wall, and I pull out in embarrassment, glad they won't find the liner wet from my urine. I'm debating whether to take over the reorganization of the floor space and the entire area, and at first I panic that I wouldn't be able to handle it, and then I'm mollified by the idea that I'd have people helping me do the actual MOVING of equipment, and that it needn't have to work PERFECTLY, only better than it does now. I walk past a display and cylindrical pieces of wood used as "roofing" on a kiosk almost poke my eyes out. That should be removed. I go downstairs to a "western museum" with dusty exhibits, including a rack of antique bottles that have rusted and dusted: it'd be easy to clean these and display them better. Then I'm outside, passing a canoeing area that's too close to a motorboat area (both dug out of the ground, poorly lined, and too small and tacky), both of which overflow and make the surrounding area VERY muddy, so that my shoes are FILTHY by the time I pass through the area. So at least I see lots of things wrong that I could change. There's pieces of the dream in which I'm looking for a job here, and people aren't sure if they want me or not, and it seems rather connected to the mud in last night's TV movie of "All Quiet on the Western Front" and Bruce's constant problems of employment and usefulness. Futz a bit about typing this before typing dreams from the trip, but they wouldn't be included in this section, but Travel, anyway.

DESK-FLOATS

9/29/81: I'm sitting in a classroom at a desk that's joined to those behind me on wooden runners like they used to use at St. John's Grade School when I was a kid, and I'm attending some sort of ROTC class---we're all wearing uniforms and service hats of some sort---in which the rows are suddenly yanked backwards, rather to everyone's surprise, to be carted en masse aboard huge trucks or rolling float-like platforms, in a double layer so squashed together that we have to remain in our seats. I'm sitting one or two behind the front on the top layer, however, and since there's glass all about, like in a Vista-Dome railroad car, there's a good view of the city streets that we're passing. We get wherever we're going and finish there in a time that's not covered by the dream, but suddenly I realize that everyone's left and I haven't returned to my room, or seat, or the float for the return ride. I dash around looking for it, and as it's pulling out of some hanger or garage I leap aboard some part of it at random, hoping there's ways of going THROUGH the corridors to get to my proper place, but thinking with one part of my brain that I might even have to climb around the outside to get where I'm going. I'm interrupting some sort of administrative session, or party, of a group of people I don't know, but they realize my predicament and sort of wave their arms about to indicate where I'm to go next. I don't know if I ever get back to my proper seat, but in telling the dream to Dennis, it makes a great impression on me so that I can remember as much as I have and write it down even though it took place three (or more) days ago.

RUNNING DOWNHILL AND CLIMBING PARAPET

10/7/81: As in a number of dreams before, I'm running down a gentle slope on a sandy path between trees toward the sea, taking long easy steps that enable me to float over the ground and land without pressures to the feet or legs or body, but THIS time I'm being followed by a farty old man (like one of the guys from the gym) who gently puts his hand on my shoulder as we lope along. I speed up to evade the hand, but he speeds up, so I slow down abruptly, and since he hasn't gotten the point yet, he slows down, at which point I speed up again. He's beginning to suspect, but he hopes to outlast me, so we joggle back and forth a few more times, I completely ignoring looking at him or admitting what's going on, merely speeding up and slowing down "at random," and finally he takes the hint and lets me continue on down alone. When I GET to the bottom, I find that it's pretty crowded, and behind a thick stone wall parapet topped by a solid wrought iron railing is a THRONG of younger people dancing to music. I want to get around them to the beach, so I try climbing into the parapet, thinking to walk along its foot-wide top AROUND the dancing ground to circumnavigate the crowd and get to the beach. The top of the stones are at about chest level, so I have no difficulty grasping the railing about a foot above that and pulling myself up by the arms to get the stone tops at about crotch level, but I have a hard time pulling my feet up to get totally atop the parapet. I'm at a blunt angle in the wall, which means my feet have room to move to the side, but that seems to throw me off balance and make getting onto the wall more difficult. No one's paying any attention to me, the bodies are bobbing up and down inside the parapet like tanned puppets jerking to the strings of the music, which I can only sense, not really hear. I try a few more times getting on top, but though I'm making progress, I don't actually REACH my feet onto the top of the wall by the time I wake up from the dream.

PLAY GOING / CLANAGHAN-COURTNEY DRAWING / EATING

10/14/81: 1) I'm sitting in a theater watching a play, but it's also a classroom in which we're supposed to tell the teacher what happens on the stage, and it's ALSO some sort of sweatshop in which we're supposed to practice pedaling around a merry-go-round for 20 minutes but the "director" has let us go on for 30 minutes and tries to excuse himself while I get angry about how tired my legs have gotten. I've written a few words about what I thought has gone on, and the teacher gets angry with everyone for not having defined opinions, and comes to my paper and draws women, four in a row, which is what I'm SUPPOSED to have seen, though I don't know how I could have seen it. Then in a break I return to find a lovely dry-tempera drawing of myself and some black person on the stage as Arabian slaves, with Fred Courtney and Amy Fleetman looking on, and Amy wants to see the drawing and I show it to her proudly, noting that the signature is "Clanaghan," though Fred Clanaghan is neither the black in the drawing nor the person who did the drawing. 2) I'm sitting waiting to give my order in an elegant little restaurant with the menu written on the wall with cute little drawings like "Poison pop" and other things. Meg Huskey is somehow both a waitress AND eating there, and I look down to find that each table has a candle over which is put a link of sausage to broil, and some are taking it up fairly rare and eating it, but I look down to find that I have a huge joint of ribs on mine, and as I turn it over, it sort of spills fat over the container and there's a large glob of red fat and gristle at the other end, and I hope the small candle is enough to cook this thing all through. People are eating and paying the bill and leaving, and someone else comes in to remark that the prices certainly aren't low, and I haven't gotten the menu yet, but I'm confident that when it comes to me I can glance through the 6-7 items and very quickly choose what I want to order without taking up too much of the waitress's time. I've got to be somewhere and I haven't been waited on yet, but I'm confident of my ability to get out of there on time, too, though it's fun to pass the time reading the elegant choices written on the walls.

DETACHABLE COCK AND NORTHERN MANHATTAN PARK-DRIVING

10/15/81: 1) Someone with a fairly nice body (like David Naughton's body in "American Werewolf in London" yesterday) is being dressed by his "trainer," and the dresser has the guy's cock LOOSE (or attached to a slender cord) in his hand, placing it FAR down his thigh, almost on his knee, saying that it's very provocative, but the cloth tends to irritate the glans. I can see why! Then the cock stands alone on a display stand, straining to itself to come, and the dresser states that he'll try coming this way (touch-less) for a bit and then try stage 2, coming while being fondled. By this time the cock has lost its firm erection and is drooping on its pedestal, and there's more talk that rubbing it with irritate it more than might be effective. ODD! 2) I wake and decide to remember that, then fall back asleep and I'm driving guests through parks in Upper Manhattan, like Van Cortlandt, but the roads are confused and we're going across railroad tracks (like Mooney Lynn in yesterday's "Coal Miner's Daughter") and the fat woman in front (the image of Lila Kaye who was in "Nickleby" AND in "Werewolf" with David Woodbine in both, too) turns to me (somehow in back for a moment) to see how I'm doing with the map. I know that if we go farther north we'll hit some nice scenery, but somehow I have to turn south before going north, and get lost in some paths, though my guests assure me that ANYPLACE we go is rather interesting to them. Wake and remember dream well enough to interrupt typing China pages to type this page at 1:40 pm, long after the dreams.

RESTAURANT / FARMHOUSE /MURDER MYSTERY

10/16/81: 1) I've taken the Cuyahoga Falls Road bus to the end of its line and am walking even farther to get to a restaurant (somehow connected with a movie house, or maybe the Cuyahoga Falls Theater) that I've heard about. I can see the theater marquee on the hill, so I know there's not far to go. 2) But in the restaurant I'm SITTING in I look around and see the name "L'Hermitage" on the wall, and I recognize it as one in Akron across from the Colonial Theater (which I can see the side of through an open door onto the street) that I'd been to before, but I wanted to take Dennis there. Dennis, sadly, is sitting a few tables away having an argument with the owner, who doesn't want him to be there, and Dennis wants to stay, so he's arguing in a loud voice about reservations or dress code, but it's clear to me the owner isn't going to let HIM stay, so I debate going over and sitting with him so that MY presence might influence her to let us BOTH eat there, though I'm getting a bad feeling that we DON'T belong in this elegant, richly patronized place. 3) Then the meal I'm FINISHING is in the first "row" of a "school form" restaurant in an old farmhouse noted for its laconic style. I can see that the people behind me have finished eating and are leaving, but I know that's OK because they seat from the back to the front, so I've obviously been served last (like in an airplane). When I DO finish, the place is closed down and dark, but I've paid my bill, so I announce that I'm leaving so that the people can lock up and go back to bed (maybe influenced by the usherette at "The Dance and the Railroad" who encouraged us to leave so that she could finish cleaning up the place and go home). Then, without transition, 4) I'm leaving a restaurant or theater, having come with a man in a car, and that man has just been accused of being a murderer (as influenced no doubt by "Green for Danger" last night on TV, with the inspector rather like Alistair Sim), but he hasn't actually been ARRESTED, so he might STILL be able to drive me home, so I sit on a porch waiting for him to come out, but as no one arrives I check over the porch railing to see a sporty blue car and a large black car, neither of them the middle-size red car HE drove me in, but I recollect (in a circle of dreams) that I just have to walk back along Cuyahoga Falls Avenue to catch the bus, and I wonder what the schedule for it may be, or if it would be possible for me to hitchhike in order to get back home.

PHYSICS LAB / ORNAMENT CONSTRUCTION

10/17/81: I'm working in some sort of underground physics lab, as a student, but not really young, though I'm NEW here, as is a USUAL feeling in dreams for me. I have a piece of metallic foil in multicolored filigree, and I want to know how to soften it so that I can bend it around the neck of a pottery jar and add a bit of color to it. At another moment, I've broken off a piece of kaolin (read about kaolin in Omni yesterday) that's light and smooth and mostly white, except that it has stripes of red and green across it, patterned rather like an athletic sock, and I'm thinking of taking THAT onto a smooth drumhead and BEATING it into shape so that it covers the entire top of the drumhead smoothly, but I want help so that I don't shatter either the kaolin or the drumhead while I'm applying the décor. I take it around to a couple of people working, but they don't seem exactly to belong there either, so they're tentative about helping me. At one point I get SOMETHING to work, and it sort of falls into an elaborate necklace of aluminum-bright highly colored and reflective leaves from an elaborate source that could be the original foil that's been flattened from some of its three dimensional intricacy (like a DNA molecule) into a piece that would stay flat on the chest. There are other parts to the dreams, but I don't remember them now.

SCRABBLE / WALLET COMMAND / NEW YORK RICE

10/23/81: Forgetting some prior fragments, I'm sitting at a large table facing a clear window with a good view of the New York skyline, playing Scrabble with Avi and Robin, but Avi has some strange idea that each word should be placed in a small box and put onto a rack which eliminates any reference to any other words. I try to play like this for a bit, and he even relents by allowing play in a very narrow central square---liking playing in the lid of the box, but I finally I insist that I can't keep things connected in my head and we HAVE to put them out onto the table. I grumble and frown and begin to do this, but then the table has to be readied for dinner, so I pick up the box lid and put it onto the black-and-white overnight bag sitting on the floor to the left of my chair, marveling at how much detail there is in the dream, and how HAPPY I feel. Amy's sitting at my left, and she asks if I've read the articles about the women dancing in a kind of madness. I say I've seen a TV news blurb about it---"What do they call it?" "Wallet command," she says with a laugh, miming a woman taking a wallet out of her hip pocket and being led around by it into a frantic dance. "They've come out with a movie about it, but it's sold out for the next few weeks, so there won't be a chance to see it." "I know," I say, "and I'm going out of town next week, too, so I won't have a chance to see it," and I marvel about the richness of life: Here I am in a New York apartment playing Scrabble with Avi and Robin, talking about "wallet command" with Amy, and here comes Robin (or someone balletic; taller and more handsome than Robin) with a huge platter of New York's latest rage dish: "New York Rice," which he puts down in a center of the table, though I get the impression that the rice around the edges has grown cold and hard, and he has to bring out the rest of the sauces before we can begin to eat. But again I'm impressed with the quantity of detail: looking under the table and seeing that one leg has broken off, and there's a yellowish glob of rubber or glue stretched to a point dribbling off the end of it---details that I wouldn't have any hope of attaching any formal significance or meaning to.

UTE / ICE FALLING / CRABS AND OVA ON SIDEWALK

10/21/81: Write note and leave it in drawer for 4 days; I hope I can expand fully: 1) I'm working for or with Ute Bujard, and I'm making a TV ad for some soap powder, except that I've forgotten all about it and open up a Santa Clause-like figure with socks on one side that were supposed to illustrate the superior washing power of the soap, and I try to tell her that I hadn't heard what I was supposed to do, but in the dream I DREAMED that she had told me about the painting in New Yorker Magazine of the ad, so that I couldn't HONESTLY tell her I didn't know what the purpose of washing the sock was. 2) I'm dusting some shelves and brush ICE into trays of food and sandwiches. I manage to pick off the flecks of ice before the bread gets wet or puddles of melted ice form on the plate. A woman owner comes out on the porch and asks what I'm doing here, and I tell her I'm dusting the porch, though it seems to dawn on both of us that this was something I'd been paid for in the PAST, but WASN'T being paid for now, SO WHY WAS I DOING IT? She accused me of stealing from the house, but the male owner comes out and dangles the keys that I'd FORMERLY been in trust of, saying that I didn't have access to the house anymore as a TAUNT to me, but I fired it back to HER saying that I COULDN'T be stealing from the house. She was nonplussed, but I still kept wondering why I was DOING this when I wasn't even getting PAID for it anymore. 3) There are dozens of tiny crabs scuttling sideways across a sidewalk, and passersby look at them in amazement in the middle of a city. Then my attention moves to the side where there's a wet particulate MUSH squashed across the sidewalk, with the idea that "a mad dog had been squashed" combined with "a spider's egg sac had been stepped on," and the grisly remains were sprayed across the sidewalk, some particles of the egg sac having grown into LIFE forms of spiders, dogs, or even tiny HUMANS, though they seemed to be in the FORM, rather than in the ACTUALITY of these creatures: cookies in the shape of, rather than miniatures with the LIFE of. I remember looking with puzzlement down at the red-violet ooze and brown background and thinking that all this was INDEED VERY STRANGE.

CRYSTAL'S HOUSE / DRIVING / APARTMENT AS ACTUALISM OFFICE

10/26/81: 1) I'm a guest in Crystal's home, in the kitchen, asking if I can help out in the evening's party by washing the dishes that are sitting in a TINY metal sink surrounded by misty (not really soapy) water over them, and she says I can dry the silver, which is arranged under clear water in neat rows of knives and forks and spoons. I find a dry towel and reach for some of the utensils and come out with large ladles and bulky tools that I hang on their proper nails among other items of kitchenware, and somehow I end up with a SAW that should either a) be hung on two nails that would fit inside the hole in the handle, but I can't find two nails in that pattern, or b) hang on ONE nail and a CLIP above, but I can't find THAT pattern, either, or c) be put on a SHELF, but someone says it'll ROTATE and knock things off. I don't think they're right, but I'm not quite resolved to put the saw on the shelf. 2) I'm being driven by a host to his house; we're four (three guests and the host) in his larger car and we get up this tree-lined road to find the host's WIFE waiting at the side of the road in a little green sports car, her blond hair waving in the wind, and he says that only two of us will fit into the car next to her, so one of us will have to walk the 18 feet or yards from there to the house. It doesn't seem like an enormous problem. 3) My apartment's in the bedroom of a house very much like the house at 1221 Dietz, and I nuzzle some pajama-ed body, knowing that it's female, but I nuzzle anyway and it turns out to be Rita. I get a call and put on a bathrobe and go into the living room which is the office for ACTUALISM. Mara's crouching on the floor before the sofa on which I'm sitting, and I realize my bathrobe's gaping open and my body's ill concealed by my shorts; as I wrap up snugger, I heard Maureen's voice from the next room, the office proper, and everything's very BUSY, so I go BACK through the hallway from my mother's bedroom to my bedroom, pleased how well the house functions as an office AND as my apartment, and there's a mirror over part of the door. I enter and close the door to see that Rita's living in that apartment, too, and she's soaking rather interesting old stamps off paper in a pink basin for me, though I get rather annoyed that she's been soaking them for a few days (Dennis marinating dinner for 22 hours?) and they're really WET. To 8 am.

BRUCE LIEBER COMES ON TO ME

10/27/81: I'm sitting at some kind of desk, or chair at a yellow-topped table, and Bruce is standing in front of it, craning around to see what I'm writing or working on, and he leans closer and closer, tears coming to his eyes, small whimpers coming from his throat, and he starts to enclose me in his arms, somehow getting over the desk and insinuating himself next to me. Then we're somehow lying down, I on the bottom, he on top, and I'm totally passive, arms at my side or possibly just resting lightly on his shoulders, as he reaches down to the area of our groins and tries to fondle our penises together. I can't feel if he's hard, and for a few moments it might be that I'm hard, but I dismiss that as an artifact of the circumstances, and a bit later I can tell that I'm not hard, but tiny and soft, and the more he makes movements to excite me, the farther I get from being excited. I recall that he read something from my notebook last night that he read aloud as "Last night I jerked off slowly, but tonight I did it fast," or vice versa. I didn't comment at the time. I wonder vaguely in the dream if I should be interested in getting physically involved with Bruce, but decide it wouldn't be very much fun, and when he doesn't move away of his own volition, and may even be trying to get around to my ass in some awkward, inexperienced way in which he seems to expect me to be the teacher, and I'm getting more and more uncomfortable, and I summon up the courage to say, quite loudly and vehemently, "Get AWAY, Bruce, go AWAY." And I wake, somewhat, during this time and wonder if he might not ACTUALLY be visiting me, on some level, as Arthur said he'd felt Bruce do on a couple occasions. I lie vaguely thinking about it, knowing that I in fact DON'T want a physical relation with him, wondering how much he may have been drawn to me because he told me HE jerks off and now he read that I jerk off, and he might have been trying to get sexual release in a way with me that wouldn't be threatening to his fears of homosexuality or my desires to keep a sexual distance from him---manipulating right at the border of Actualism acceptability or prohibition. I wonder vaguely if HE had a similar dream last night, or even if there might have been some more CONSCIOUS intention on HIS part to produce MY dream.

PLANE FALLING INTO THE WATER

10/29/81: I'm standing on a roadway or in a park alongside a lake (or maybe I'm on a bridge looking over a river---it's not clear in the dream)---anyway, at a point NEAR an elongated body of water with its long axis perpendicular to the edge on which I observed. An enormous white jetliner with red-stripe trim is taking off from just behind me, and I'm one of the first to notice that it's VERY low, and as it passes overhead with VERY little sound (so I think that it's not even running at full power), it's making a turn to the left so that the top of the plane has rotated to about 11 o'clock, but as it moves away from me it seems to go more slowly and turn even more, to about 10 o'clock, and I think that it's really TRYING to make a steep turn, but it doesn't have the speed or altitude to do it, and as it swings over to 9 o'clock, I force myself to consider the panicked people inside who are now sitting in seats in a plane that's lying completely on its side! But as it turns, the bottom wing seems not to be in the way, as if it's retractable and forms just a fin-like structure on what's now the side of the plane closest to the water---at least, I think in the dream, it's not going to catch its wingtip in the water and cartwheel. But as the turn continues, it seems to go even slower, almost stopping, and lower to the water, and the front of the nose is beginning to be visible from the front, so it's almost heading toward the left. I strain, thinking it MUST speed up and gain altitude, and people with me have now noticed and are now pointing to it and looking at it. But slowly (as in a dream?), to my horror thinking that this is REAL rather than in a dream and that my dream's at last coming true, it touches the water with its fin and (at this point I realize it IS a dream) sinks so gently into the water that there's not even a bow-wave, and for only a moment do I wonder if the plane's waterproof (thinking back to one of the "Airport" movies in which it IS), since I know it's not real, and it gently subsides below the smooth surface of the water, almost disappearing, then like a balloon bobbling ever so gently back to the surface with one smooth section of windowed body showing, and I wake in relief.

AMY AND A BILL / RICH GADABOUT / BOAT TRIP

10/30/81: 1) I'm at Amy's trying to find out how much I owe her or she owes me, and I don't have two pieces of information, so I make a note on a scrap of paper and get home to check my records, phoning her back as I scrabble through scraps of paper trying to compare notes with her, and I know I can find the restaurant bill, but can't remember how much I paid for the movie at the library, and she says she sometimes loses important information because it'll blow away from her on the street and she'll glance after it, saying "It's nothing, not important," and it'll turn out to have had valuable figures on its other side. I think she may owe me a few dollars, but we're not sure. 2) I'm in someone's house wanting to work or read, but my host is very rich and wants to be GOING, telling his friend-chauffeur "We can go to X to eat and then Y to the party and then Z to dance," and I'm following dutifully behind them, distracted by a dwarfish servant who says "Oh, you collect stamps, let me show you photographs of mine," and I hope maybe he'll have duplicates of the large colorful ones he gets on letters from Arabic countries and will give me some of them. 3) I'm with someone (not John or Dennis---a NEW lover?) on a sightseeing boat, and we're making our way toward the bow, seeing that we're about to move out of the sun and into the shade---as if we were moving from the East River, broad and flat and sunny, to the Harlem River, narrow and tree lined, towards sunset, so that we'll be in the shade in the Harlem River and be shadowed by the cliffs of Jersey when we move around the tip of Manhattan and into the Hudson River. I know all this in the dream, but it gets hazy when we have to pass between clumps of passengers in chairs---does my friend WAIT for people pushing baby carriages to go before us, or do he and I also have little wheeled carriages that have to take their turn in the line? But we're heading for the front of the boat to sit outside and enjoy the rest of the trip in comparative cool, since the first part of the day has been very warm. The other passengers don't seem to know where we're going well enough to take advantage of the special knowledge of the route that I have.

BOAT WRECK AND LARRY AND SHAWNEE BALL

11/19/81: I wake at 5:50 am and jot down fragments of two dreams: 1) I'm on a boat (read about the wreck of the Karen E in New York magazine yesterday) with a group from the China train tour and SOME husbands have been lost or killed. I'm somehow involved as a witness or as a clerk of the court. Women turn away from me and won't talk with me. 2) Out and meet a guy who's dating Larry Ball's sister Shawnee, and walk toward a subway entrance at the corner of a park, and they say it's CLOSED at 2:30 am. I say "I'm supposed to meet somehow here" and Larry Ball has been waiting there, I can just see the top of his head at the sunken entranceway, and he comes up from the entranceway, saying "You could have phoned me," and I respond "You should have seen the films---wait till I tell you." Then he spots his sister, and they circle about each other like dogs, not realizing that they're brother and sister, and they both snatch off white peaked caps that they're wearing to reveal the SAME short-cropped hair with a peak in the back like it's been molded from a funnel, with a tail like a dog's (rather than like a ponytail) peaking from the back, and they wrestle about either in joy or in defense-attack of their odd hairstyles.

ART OSTRIN'S AND LOADED TOILET-CABINET IN KITCHEN

11/24/81: I'm staying at Art's large house somewhere in the suburbs; the house has porches and large windows and stands alone on a large lot overlooking the sea at the back, though from the front it looks a lot like Akron. He gives me a dime to phone a friend (Edgardo?) from overseas who's staying nearby, and also gives me a card with four company names in different cities on it, so that I can phone where he's staying. I know we want to meet in a few hours to have dinner somewhere, but everything's quite unclear. At a later point I make my way around to the kitchen, in back, and find that the walls have been broken down from storms from the nearby ocean. I have to climb over rocks to get to the kitchen area, and when I walk around a slanting rock stairway that curves around the kitchen area, the first place I come to (I'm supposed to clean up, it seems) is a commode of a toilet that's stacked with some sort of boxes that exude a kind of powder or dust, and I try to throw most of this into the toilet, but the boxes (like Kleenex boxes, only the openings are on the side) keep spilling out their white powder and I begin to suspect it might be some sort of construction material, like large Kraft-paper bags I'd found a bit earlier at the entrance, their contents confused by the fact that there was WATER in some of them, and I couldn't tell if the bags all contained the same substance so that they could all be mixed together---interesting that THERE it was WATER in the DUST, and here it was DUST in the WATER of the toilet bowl. As I flushed once to get rid of some of the dust, the suction drew in the edges of a few large green towels that were hanging out of a drawer below the boxes, above the toilet, which was in sort of the lower drawer of a chest. I swung the towels out of the way, wondered how they would dry out, and still had the problem of the talcum powder-like substance over everything. I wasn't exactly panicked, but I was clear that I didn't know what I was getting into, had no idea of the function of anything here, and was worried about doing the wrong thing and incurring the wrath of my kind host---I really should have supplied the dime for the phone call, I recall thinking then.

COOKING PANCAKES / INTERVIEWING MURDER SUSPECT / HIDING FROM GUESTS

11/28/81: After a few mornings of VAGUELY remembering dreams and writing nothing I DO remember: 1) Lots of distant relatives: older cousins, long-lost great aunts and uncles, and a number of children (probably thinking of Susan's Thanksgiving she told me about yesterday, with 22 people, since I remember wondering if I had enough for 23-24-25 people during the dream) are sitting in a park way away from a large house which still resembled the layout of 1221 Dietz, and it was now getting on to 2:35 and they'd gathered for brunch which I was cooking. In the living room I was pouring out fresh batter into two or three frying pans which contained pancakes done on both sides, pancakes mushy on top that had to be turned over because they were done on the bottom, and mushy lumps that I TRIED to turn over only to find that they weren't even cooked on the BOTTOM. I tried to organize the pans so that at least all the cakes in one pan were cooked to the same degree, but kept getting confused and running out of plates. In the dining room were lots of dirty dishes but also lots of serving trays with prepared foods already ON them that someone else must have done: trays of thin sliced beef that was already so cold and flaky-dry that they moved when I moved the platters, but these were arranged on bacon slices and piles of yellow scrambled eggs the same color as the pancakes, but at least there was MORE food than JUST the pancakes I was cooking. In the kitchen were two deep pots in which pancake batter was BOILING to make a thick sort of dumpling. I didn't trust these to be tasting good; did I make a mistake in cooking them (or did someone else?) this way? But I tasted one (making sure the edge didn't seem like teeth but more TORN in the turning) as I was turning it over and it didn't taste bad, though rather doughy, and I wondered what the lump in the middle was, sort of like an enormous Chinese dumpling. I left many of the pots and pans cooking and took up the two trays that were FINISHED and started carrying them out to the group, grumbling that they expected me not only to cook but also to carry it OUT to them, and I figured I'd ask for 8 hands to join me on the way back so that THEY could carry things back, and as I walked, I tried to figure out just WHAT the four new people COULD carry back. 2) A television truck is sitting on the green (rather like the setting for the Wharton story dramatization on TV a week ago: "Summertime"?) and there's a program going on talking about a murder in the village, and a commentator, who's sitting in the death seat of the truck, looks in the rearview mirror and sees a face coming toward the back of the truck (looking very much like the face of the ballerina in Fame who's becoming a real dancer according to the Ballet News Magazine I glanced through last night) and he whispers "Here comes the prime suspect now," and she SEES him and crawls into the BACK of the truck and starts to try to charm him, but the TV camera keeps rolling as her BOYfriend crawls into the trunk facing the commentator who's blond and cute, and he's obviously GAY, because when the guy and girl start getting hot for sex and taking clothes off, he concentrates on licking the tits of the GUY, ignoring the girl's breasts, though he's conscious of the TV camera and darts forward to lick when he thinks the camera can't see. From the look on his face he wants to kiss the boyfriend, too, but doesn't. The girl is trying to arouse the commentator by fondling HIS tits, but his nipples are only red areas flush with his pectoral muscles, so the best she can do is sort of abrade and redden a few papillae that appear to be slightly erectile in the reddish area. Highly colored picture: yellows and tans and green. 3) I'm in someone's apartment (probably Susan's, which we talked a lot about yesterday) and for some reason have my clothes off. She gets visitors as a surprise, and I think to hide in the kitchen until they leave, but John Vinton comes out of the bathroom and HE'S naked. There's talk about Susan's Irish boyfriend, and I peek out to get a look at him as he climbs a chair to get to the top of a kitchen cabinet, and someone makes a remark that they can have sex, since they're three couples, and another person remarks it's more like three trios, implying nine people, but a Chinese girl with a greenish face says "No, there's ten," having found ME, gathering people around to stare at me, giving forth the psychological opinion that I'm OBVIOUSLY terribly unhappy, only covering up my unhappiness, and I protest against it while the others smile, and I'm still in the middle of sorting out my protestations of ACTUAL happiness when I wake up and review all three dreams enough to write them at 10 am.

SIX SHORT ONES FROM NOTES

12/2/81: 1) I'm staying with a MARRIED man, but the family is out and we're passing each other in the bathroom and the hall outside, he with a large white towel wrapped around his waist, and when I pass and WANT to reach for him, I touch the towel, which he allows to fall, and he turns to me with a smile and we hug---he has a fabulous lean, tanned body---and begin to have sex. 2) I'm staying with HELEN, and she's angry with me, saying I'm a hippie because I have long hair and bare feet, but I point out that she's barefoot, and she wouldn't think of HERSELF as a hippie, and neither would I! 3) I'm standing in a large mixed public urinal in a rocking train, and the basin is almost full and I'm turning my back to the women, amazed that whatever culture I'm in has such FREEDOM of sexually indiscriminate pissing. 4) Two old women are traveling together from the East Coast through Chicago, where they stay in a hotel room just at water level on the lake, and when they get to the West Coast it's beginning to storm, and as they go down the concrete stairway in their hotel they can see the water coming JUST to the lower level of the concrete-lined window, so that when the waves come in they can see the sand and seaweed BELOW the water out of the lower part of the window, and I think it'll be VERY dank and damp, but it's all encased in concrete and waterproof, so they must have a dehumidifier going to take the moisture out of the air, and they begin to notice that they're always put into rooms this LOW when they're near the water. 5) I seem to be living in an Agatha Christie mystery and I ask an old man sitting across from me, "You know who did it?" (obviously influenced from "The Vicar Did It" in "Grownups" last night). He says "We always trust people named AL," and I can't remember an Al, only an Aldo and an Adam. 6) I'm looking at Sierra Club-like photographs of LOVELY natural scenery with NO touch of trash or people ANYWHERE, thinking how EACH is a PERFECT ecological microenvironment COMPLETE with land, water, tiny animals, and tiny plants all taking up ALL the space and furnishing EVERYTHING the other components need to exist in PERFECT harmony: lovely greens and yellows and colors.

TRAVEL IN LONDON AND MEETING BOYS

12/3/81: I seem to be BICYCLING (or motor biking) along strange streets, looking for the way to go north (except I sort of want to go west, too, toward France) and get lost somehow on a street that becomes a balcony of a ramshackle apartment complex-tenement, and as I'm maneuvering my bicycle (definite now) around a precarious corner about four flights up, there are attractive young men (one about 18, another about 14) outside one place who invite me in. I ask directions, but they say I can stay there rather than looking for another bed-and-breakfast place farther outside town, but this would be more convenient since it's right ON Piccadilly Circus. They're lying in bed, making vague sexual overtones to each other, and I join them, and the older jumps atop me and makes some remark about a contest for the first one (or the last one) to suck on his cock, which is still soft. I'm conscious that I'm much older than they are, but they seem to take NO notice of that at all. The younger one is just coming into manhood, childlike body beginning to have muscular definition in the abdomen, gentle blond hair around the pubes. I wrestle gently with him and chew on the soft area inside the hip joint, and he seems to love it. Coming out from under the covers I'm puzzled to see that the room is so small that the double bed, on the floor, has to cover the entrance for the doorway. No other furniture, but there are a few windows covered in yellow-orange curtains that still let in lots of rays from the bright sun through them. I figure the bed's big enough, even with a fourth person who seems to be joining us, and I figure maybe I can stay here a few days more before continuing on with my trip, but as I move toward waking up it comes to me that I should have started in ZURICH and be getting down to ITALY, but the place seems so welcoming and easygoing that I'm really not very concerned. A nice facet was the TOTAL absence of worry or paranoia about being blamed for being gay, shacking up with younger people, or even indulging in sexuality with someone I didn't know very well. Idyllic feeling, in all.

MEN IN A CONTEST / ARNIE SERVING A MEAL

12/4/81: 1) I'm having a party, or am master of ceremonies of a spontaneously impromptu quiz program, and six men are sitting in front of me---I have to find the winner. First I test them in pairs, naming one of the pair the winner, then testing the loser against an untested individual. When I finally eliminate the bald-headed contestant, it occurs to me that I am choosing who's to lose, and this isn't quite fair. I search for a way to make the contest random, worried that they're SITTING in seats 1-6, so even if I choose to eliminate a NUMBER, I'll still know WHO I'm eliminating. Then I think of throwing a die outside their vision, and the number on the die says which one is eliminated, then consider having THEM choose numbers instead of their SEAT numbers, but then I'm worried what to do if one person chooses two numbers. Then I dimly recognize that they'll simply be moving around in their SEATS in ways THEY choose, which the randomly thrown die will match up with and eliminate, so no one can accuse me of cheating. But I have no idea of the purpose, the audience, or the provenance of the contestants for the program, or what the elimination is "all about." 2) Almost without transition, we all in a group (maybe the contestants, maybe the audience, maybe someone completely different) are waiting for our meals, though there's a slight connection in that only one meal at a time will be served, so I pick up my plate to see what the situation is, and when I go to the kitchen, there are people working in the background, but in the foreground is Arnold, cutting into a roast chicken in aspic for slices for various plates in front of him, and I know where the food comes from and I'm left with the decision to return to my seat and wait my turn now that I know what's going on, or merely to persuade him to give me my food and let everyone ELSE wait their usual turn. Both dreams are quite short, but they stayed with me in such detail that it seems to be saying something about feeling exclusive and "better" than others, "knowing" people, and trying to find ways of getting around (or making) the rules.

TRAIN / AMUSEMENT PARK / PLANE FLIGHT

12/6/81: Ill-feeling after Amy's wedding, I get to bed at 6:45 and can't sleep. 8:45 dream 1: Four of us (I and Dennis and Michael Sullivan and Adam(?)) are driving SOMEWHERE upstate. THEN we're instantly on a train which goes over a bridge of "mock Greek tombs" and a flap comes down and hides the terracotta warriors, vases, and garishly painted statues, busses, and buildings of "Ancient New York State" that's supposed to have been just excavated, but either they're phony or so poorly restored that they LOOK phony, even worse than Minoan in color. I insist we get off at an amusement park, and we're in a little tramcar that coasts down a little incline to a VERY complicated sign for admission, awkward because I don't know what's INSIDE and what's for adults and what's for kids.

XNUBNI PARK
2 Adults, one child $5
10 Adults or children $9
Morning/Evening $8
Teenagers over 12 $2
Giant Train Package $6
Kiddie Koaster Pack $4
Combo-ticket/Kiddies $2
Combo-ticket/Adults $3

Joke that REAL railroad cars in the distance, that we just got off, are "Giant Train" and the other three go to a bar to drink as I plead with them to come back. And a guy paints hieroglyphs OVER the admission sign, and I recruit him to be a waiter at the (marriage?) party. Then Dennis phones at 11, and we talk until 1:45. Recall a dream there: 2) Flying in a 6-8 passenger plane, coming in over a tiny village low for landing, and a one-passenger plane has been flying RIGHT at treetop level and bouncing in the air up and down over fences and telephone wires and hedges and houses, and he flies over in our direction as he tries to gain altitude, and I'm looking back out of the window, impatient with him, as he needs more altitude as OUR pilot is slowing for his landing, and the pilot PUSHES our tail out of the way of his engine TWICE, and I know he can't hear me over the roar of the engines, and it doesn't seem to be adversely affecting our planes, but I get anxious at our closeness.

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DREAMS FROM 1981