DREAMS FROM 1982
ON ITALIAN TRIP
12/26/81: Bob Rosinek keeping me in a luxury apartment; meeting with Jane Alexander, Jane Fonda, and Marilyn Horne; sex with Malcolm.
12/27/81: George Parris and bear in country.
1/1/82: Female Japanese tourists.
1/4/82: Greek woman in ritual lights up with electric-blue.
1/6/82: Ultimate weapon "The Searching Wind"; going to Capri.
1/12/82: Pieces of paper missing.
1/15/82: Rubber boat on rapids leading to roller coaster on trip.
1/16/82: Brooke Shields and costar wanting to do a movie on an island.
1/17/82: Boy who becomes an Emperor of China; former caught fire.
TOURING COLLEGE CAMPUS
2/4/82: I'm riding in a car with some woman who's taking me on a tour of a town in the mountains, like I might imagine Boulder, Colorado, to be. She says that some little town (Excelsior, like the hotel in Venice whose slides I looked at night before last?) is in a valley, so that if we take THIS road, we won't be able to see it until we actually enter it. She describes how some of it's laid out from one view and some from another (like the sides of the Nile that the temples are built on in Luxor from the TV program last night?), and when we enter the college town itself, there are many new buildings (why do I keep thinking of Hunter College---from the New York article I read last week?): some of them are architectural disasters, but some are fairly pleasant. We pass blocks of classrooms and dormitories, and get to a hillside with a 5-story brownstone-type building, the only one standing on its own, with a marvelous circle of glass around the bottom floor, with elegant curved windows on each of the four corners of the building, and she says "Oh, that's the house of President (so the tenant changes with the position) Brown (from Cookie Brown, transvestite singer at Sal's last night?)," and I say "How nice, with glass all around," and then right next door we pass a sort of marble toolshed with four panes of glass in ITS four walls, and I think, "Even THAT tiny house has glass all around." Then we look across the street and there are other rich houses to enjoy and describe, and I get the idea that there's a whole hillside slope, that the road would curve around, of houses that would have a view out over the central valley, and we'd curve around that road on our continuation of the tour, but at 8:45 am the phone rang from Mr. Hoffner at the post office asking me to describe my lost Taormina slides, saying he got another kind of box, and those weren't mine.
WATCHING AN OPERA PERFORMANCE
2/5/82: My seat is rather akin to my seat at the Konzerthalle in Zurich: right in the left front corner, so that I'm very CLOSE, but at such an extreme angle that I seem to be part of the production. I can look BACK to watch scenes taking place in a box BEHIND me, but a woman comes and stands next to me so closely that I have to complain that her hip is pressing my head into the side of the arch through which I'm looking, and she doesn't seem to understand my anguish. Then there's a ballet number where a woman who is to be sacrificed (influenced by my watching silent movies on "Hollywood" at Arnie's yesterday?) is lifted into the air in a ballet, and then the villain's mother (the opera seems to be about someone like "Attila," though his mother looks rather like the short-haired large-hipped woman who played the mother of the rednecks in "The Midnight Man" at Arnie's yesterday) is brought in and everyone's appalled that he'll kill her, too. There's a scene change and I seem to have lost my seat in the corner, so I join a family who's sitting on a bench just out of view of the audience, though some of the extras are adjusting paintings on the wall above our heads, as if the audience CAN see them. The little girl of the family is just awful, making noise and crying when berated, and the mother and the father are miserable and I sit, equally miserable, wondering if it's really a good idea to train children so early in the "benefits" of sitting through a boring opera and not complaining. Then the ballet takes place AGAIN, and the woman who's about to be sacrificed reminds me of Louise Brooks in "Lulu" with her black dress and cap-like cloche of black hair. Then I wake at 9 am.
INEXHAUSTIBLE HOT CHOCOLATE
2/20/82: It seems I've wakened with fragments of dreams that I've just been too lazy to write down, so the only note is the following: I'm handed a cup of hot chocolate at some sort of private gathering in someone's house---maybe even rather formal attire, and as the cup comes toward me on a tray it starts foaming over, as if from a chocolate Alka-Seltzer tablet, with chocolate AND sugar AND cream, and the unaffected Englishman who's serving it to me sort of mutters under his breath while raising a very cultivated eyebrow "Oh, I SAY!"
BOTH BRUCE LIEBER AND POPE HILL WANT TO BED ME
2/27/82: At 9:20 am, having wakened at 8:50 am, both seem to merge into one memory. After thinking last night, at midnight, during session, that I might have a relationship with Luca, wondering if I'd go to HIM in the night, now this. Bruce is into his "poor me" number and mooning around in an unspecific apartment, and he's trying to get physically close to me, but I decide I don't want any of it so I ask him directions to get "back to town," and I decide to walk because I don't know any other way of getting there. When I get out onto the street, I'm at intersections of C45 and S82, so I don't really know where I'm going, and I don't see any taxis or buses on the streets, and no pedestrians to ask. It seems that I walk a long time, having to get from somewhere in the Bronx to somewhere around Wall Street, and when I've walked just about to my limits I look up and see that I'm at West 45th Street, only about halfway there, and I again wonder if I can't just take a subway the rest of the way, now that I seem to be in a more familiar part of town. Then I'm in a bedroom with Pope; he's trying to pretend he wants to sleep, but he seems to be intent on keeping me awake in order to have sex with me. He offers me food and drink, which I refuse, but I notice a jar of honey candy (squares of golden-colored hard fudge-like many- layered candies with nuts in each square) and I taste one and then have about half of them, feeling somewhat guilty about taking them, as if they were more for display than for consumption. Then there's someone at the door, which gives him an excuse to get out of bed, and when he passes by me on his way back to his bed, he insists he wants to give me a goodnight kiss, and these huge blubbery lips descend out of the semidarkness to find my own and I really don't want to kiss him, but find myself thinking that a kiss is only a social, rather than a sexual, exchange, and even though I may not LIKE his lips, I like him as a PERSON, so it should be OK to kiss him, and I drift out of the dream as easily as I drifted into it, without really knowing what happened then. Wake surprised that I'd slept so long, though I recall it took me about an hour to fall asleep in the cold, liking electric blankets and feeling sorry for the cold wet characters in "Quest for Fire" and inhabitants in concentration camps, wondering if the entire world could exist through the cold if some worldwide cataclysm struck unexpectedly.
AS TOURIST WITH MOM AND GUIDE ON ISLAND
3/1/82: Mom and I have just landed on some island which may be in the Caribbean, or may be Hawaii, and we're wandering around looking at sights and some woman joins us and starts telling us about the history and sights of the island, guiding us down over a jagged path to the beach that joins a calm lakeside shore to a rocky ocean shore. I debate how to ask her, and then say, "To be as direct as possible, are you charging us for this tour?" She takes the implication graciously and smiles and says she isn't, so we continue with her, except that toward the end of the path I lag behind in a restaurant where groups of people are sitting around tables talking and eating and drinking, and I go up to the deli-like counter and look at the signs of the foods and drinks available, surprised to find they also serve alcoholic drinks in this lanai-type coffee shop, and I look into a cold-foods display case and see the top part of a bottle of alcoholic Hot Cinnamon protruding, and think that would taste very good with butter pecan ice cream. But Mom and the guide have gone so far ahead of me that I leave the restaurant and catch up with them as they get to a beach where the guide explains that landing a boat here is very difficult because of all the rocks on the beach, and I see the rocks and the surf, and we're looking and collecting shells and various sea life that's been washed ashore. In a vague postscript to this main body of the dream, we talk with someone else about their plans, and these people tell us that they will be flying down to Georgia to go to a certain northern Florida beach, and I pause for a moment to recollect that there IS no flight to this particular small beach, so that flying to Georgia and then renting a car to get to the beach would be reasonable, but I seem to remember some small airlines that DOES connect the Georgia airport with the beach, and think with humor that we could actually get there before them without spending too much additional money. Recall particularly distinctly the sharp rocks sticking up from the path down to the beach, so that you had to look carefully where to put your sneakered foot on the worn-yellow tops of the sharp pyramidal rocks so that you wouldn't twist an ankle by stepping on the SIDE of one of the pyramids and sliding the few inches to the water-filled depressions between the rocks.
SHARING THE USE OF A CAR
3/5/82: I'm in a car parked outside what looks to be a California (or campus) house with a driveway and lawn and devil-strip, and I'm searching through it to find what I have to pack in a suitcase (like the broken-open briefcase in "The Romantic Englishwoman" yesterday), since I seem to be leaving soon. I tear off a Guatemala-like shawl from the backseat and debate how to fold it to get it to fit into the suitcase and suddenly there's someone next to me in the driver's seat, and she matter-of-factly puts in her set of keys and starts driving off. "What are you doing?" I ask, knowing that I can't get annoyed with her since she DOES have half-rental of this car. "I have to go to---" she says, and I suppress the rage I feel in that she could WALK that little distance. "But I have to pack to leave," I try calmly to explain, and she waves that away as she steers onto an entry to a parkway. I think ahead and figure I CAN finish packing the bag since she's only to be away about half an hour, and then I can drive back with her and get another suitcase and take out things from the glove compartment, under the seat, and on the back window ledge. There's even the image of a storefront, closed near our destination, where I can get out and find out if THAT'S for rent, what the terms are, and maybe get started fixing it up for opening. So it's not the disaster it might be, I haven't lost my temper, she's getting the car usage she requires, and I'll have something to fill my time.
TESTS, TEACHERS, AND EXHIBITS
3/6/82: First, I've graduated from a college and return to ignore a teacher who's a combination of Captain Linehan from Akron Reserves, Dr. Van Atta of Salinas Chemistry, and Dr. Fouts of Akron Physics. I'd kowtowed to him when I was his student, but now I have nothing to do with him and he's "suspicious." Second, I'm sitting in a large-windowed testing room in a Community College-type setting, filling out an easy multiple choice (and I wonder how each student's reading the question and answer for correcting the papers will work: just reading the question and then saying "a" or "b" for the answer and the teacher saying "No, it's 'c'"?) test, and paging through the test booklet that has panes of stamps under plastic covers and pictures of Egyptian statues and pyramids and sphinxes (which reminds me of a fragment of a PREVIOUS dream where I'm somewhere like in Grandma's old house on Hartford or in Helen's (unseen) apartment in Virginia Beach and I open a closet to find a collection of brochures for local exhibits of Egyptian sketches and drawings and of old Life Magazines that featured Egyptian history or archeology on its covers). During "recesses" from taking the test, I'm looking through display books of drawings, pen-and-inks, watercolors, and pastels of Greek statuary (with crotches usually a scumble of color with no erotic detail) and temples intermingled with Egyptian scarabs and temples and wall frescos. My desk mate calls me over to look at what I took to be a painting on the wall that turns out to be a three dimensional model of an Egyptian cliff-temple with tiny columns and inner rooms painstakingly represented in a tannish clay with mica-like glitters highlighting some floor or wall areas. In a cut, we'd left and people were coming leisurely back and those in front of me begin running and I wonder if they're started correcting the test already, so I speed up to go through large glass doors and down the stairs into the resting room. All this was very genteel and though I was younger, it seemed a strange combination of school and old-folks home, or a pleasure of the idle rich: no real demands for testing results, no "must pass" pressures, just sheer pleasure of knowledge.
CAR TRIP
4/16/82: Susan Lieber and Andre and I had planned a car trip, but Susan dropped out early, was replaced by another woman, and then Rolf joined, Andre dropped out, ANOTHER woman joined and dropped out on the MORNING of our departure when she got word she should go to nursing school in California (Kathy Benson?). IN the car a NEW woman brought a BOYfriend, so we're four: those two and Rolf and me. We FINALLY leave and drive past a LOVELY hill that looks lava-covered until we're UNDER groves of trees with rust-gold leaves that have little tumbleweed-shaped tops that I gather two of. Stop for gas and food and chat, and I'm feeling very GOOD about this trip.
SWIMMING / PLANE AND GOLDFISH / ARNO / MY FACE
4/22/82: 1) I'm at a beach resort with a group, getting ready to swim. I put on a bikini-bottom-like UNDERSLIP of black silk, then a top suit of shredding maroon nylon, checking that you can see only black, rather than skin, through the rents, and I have a white undershirt above that which is also torn, which people point out to me, but I say, "Well, today IS the last day," and they remind me we CAN swim tomorrow morning before we leave at noon. 2) I'm watching from a window as a HUGE goldfish swims past in the AIR, so big that an orange-striped white 747 can dive BEHIND it and flip it to its side and only cover 1/3 its length! The plane is EITHER allowing its passengers views of the monster alien from all sides OR is chartered to chase it away, because it becomes more and more bulbous in shape until it attains the shape of a leaping SEA HORSE which is trying to BUMP it out of the sky, flying very low over houses and threatening to lose control of its OWN flying. But the goldfish placidly undulates through the blue cloudless sky. AMAZING sight! 3) Fragment of Arno waving to ME as I sit at the window seat at a restaurant, and then he waves to ANOTHER friend who's waiting for him at the restaurant entrance, which is to my left. I ask them if they've seen the goldfish, but Arno gives me his "C'mon, Bob!" grimace of skepticism. 4) Fragment of myself looking at MY face in my bathroom mirror and seeing a bright green cone of velvet, like a furred insect's carapace, neatly fitting over all my features, but I can see THROUGH it to see that my hair is damply plastered down around my forehead and ears, and I figure I'll just HAVE to comb it, or I'll look like a disheveled Rolf.
WAR SIMULATED BY GRAINS OF RICE
5/8/82: I'm living in the South, and we're preparing for WAR. I go to a planning area that turns out to be a HALLWAY where an army will be simulated by rice grains, that line up and march, getting ALL confused, intermingling in the wrong lines, countermarching when not wanted, falling over into the supply wagons, and a motorcycle sidecar destroys many, and I can see problems of REAL logistics and why orders have to be kept SIMPLE.
GRANDMA'S DINNER AND PENULTIMATE SUBWAY STOP WITH LAKE BEYOND
4/26/82: 1) Dinner hosted by GRANDMA on OUR Dietz porch for GRISWOLDS and another couple and I bring out MY folding table with four rose stalks in little plastic pots and proclaim the tablecloth and table setting "the oldest in town" and set it up in dimness and try various lights and debate OLD ceiling lights. 2) "Familiar" dream of riding subway to PENULTIMATE stop and WALKING to the end, OR riding to the end and walking AROUND the barrier that would require "extra fare for exit" and being caught and innocently excusing myself OR agitating against SILLINESS of it, thinking of the walk through the countryside to the cliffs PAST the stop---to a lake??
SEX WITH TWO NEW MEN!
4/27/82: Coincidentally with sleeping during "class night" from Actualism, when the session had been about "meeting on the horizontal and vertical" with even a recap of "meeting on soul, then mental, then emotional"---and we MET on the soul in the session, I TRIED the mental last night, and then the following dream SEEMED emotional.... Anyway, I was on vacation, and the city SEEMED to be Paris, though the map didn't look like it: outskirts were marshy and bordered on a large lake or inland sea with something like the "Trocadero Beach" to the north in a fashionable district (though that could have been a holdover from Tom's description of living in Pebble Beach and talking of Big Sur and 17 Mile Drive in California). I had met the two (who may have been together, maybe even lovers) and was MORE attracted to the darker, more sexy one, and he seemed pleased with me, but anytime we tried sex he was rather unresponsive, though lots of FUN to be with: humorous, playful, like an agreeable child-man. Then HE left (now it rather reminds me, though the "colors" of the men are reversed, of the affair with Jean-Jacques that turned into a brief intense encounter with Mario Papiri in Florida and New York, though it didn't work because Mario kept wanting to fuck me) and I was wandering around, sightseeing, and I encountered the SECOND guy, and when we could be alone (sort of like Martin Milner (blond in "Route 66") was the second, blonder, less attractive one, and George ??? (dark haired who got hepatitis in "Route 66"?) the first, darker, more attractive one) HE really got excited and I woke as it appeared we were going to have GREAT sex---could that have been getting down to the PERCEPTUAL level? There was an episode where I was supposed to follow someone like Joan Sumner as she went toward someone who had left us for their car, and I followed too slowly and got lost in a kind of churchyard, missing THEIR car but meeting the GUY. At the end, there was also something about "distributing little party favors of bears at a restaurant," but I wasn't disappointed when there were none for us the following day because I figured everyone at the party took two or three when the management had thought each of the guests would just take one. Reminded of my little panda bears from China, and there had been a LOT of them because there were boxes that HAD contained them, even bigger than index-card cartons. Well, BOTH guys were worth tussling with, so I hope this dream augers well!
ABSURDIST
4/28/82: 1) There's some sort of crazy contest, like for a TV program, and people are imitating dogs and parasites and inanimate objects. I'm just looking at them in amazement, and at the end one pudgy ludicrous man is walking on the sides---the outsides---of his ankles, so that his soles are facing inward like palms in prayer, and he's imitating some sort of dog following the commands of its master by smiling eagerly and shuffling between guides set into the floor to prove his understanding of his master's orders. 2) Then there's an absurdist cartoon or hyped-up evolutionary film that shows how men's faces evolved from some swallowing mechanism deep within a fish's mouth, so that a bubble-like excrescence on the top rear of a tongue was to have become an eye, the natural curve protruded into a nose, and the lower meeting with a muscle-like object below the tongue would part and develop into a mouth. Some great scientific point was made to compare how a face looked when it grimaced and the fish contorted when it swallowed. It was humorous, but somehow the context was to show that it was serious and not to be laughed at. 3) As part of the climax of #1, there was also something about how foodstuffs were imitated by people, so that people parodied hard-boiled eggs that had been sliced, tomatoes that had been sliced, and lettuce that had been shredded, and bread that had been sliced, so that these people could imitate their components and then mingle together in an intelligent way to produce an egg-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich! I went to sleep just after 2 am, content from steak and wine, having just done an Action Intelligence session, and when I woke at 8:30 and got out of bed at 10:45, I felt weary of body (not to mention having had a 2-minute prostate pain), as if I'd been used by Actualism in some battle because I'd been coordinating yesterday and Crystal and Richard had colds. But what these absurdist dreams would have had to do with it, I can't tell, except that HERE is the connection, for whatever it's worth.
MON ON PICNIC / MEETING AT AKRON U
4/30/82: 1) (6:45 am) Mom and I are going on a PICNIC. In the Dietz Avenue kitchen, we move around each other packing items for lunch; she's making and packing pancakes, I'm sealing containers of syrup so that there's no spillage. She wants MILK, so I study the glass of it she wants and retrieve used coffee-creamer containers from the trash and get out the aluminum foil to wrap them in when they're filled with milk. Somewhat connected, John Vinton, outside in the muddy driveway between our house and the Lear's, says his feet are hardened by his thin sandals so he can go barefoot, while I in my thick sandals will have to wear them. Then John and I are on a TRAIN riding north, and I say that this part of the East Coast is so beautiful: a tree-furrowed rolling mountain outside our window---I've ridden it five times already and still love it, but can point out the best sights to him. Also, just WAIT till we get into New Jersey and look down from a bluff onto the lovely Hudson River where the George Washington Bridge crosses it. So there's a JUMBLE of partners and locations, and I also remember emptying out waxed paper bags of potato chips to be used for carrying the food. 2) (10:10 am) There's some sort of Akron University student meeting, and some issue or advance has been called off or cancelled or defeated. There's the "day after" listless and disappointment. Everyone's philosophically resigned, but still glum. I have a report or paper due for some economics or connected class, or perhaps an article for the school paper, and so I re-read the last, rather depressing paragraph, and to reflect the current defeat I add, "This is the way the world ends," and I think of adding something to it, but decide that's the prefect way to conclude the article.
LONG DETAILED DREAM OF BEING CRUISED IN GERMAN TOWN
5/2/82: I'm walking down some hallway in a building lobby in a smaller town in Germany and I feel a passerby, from behind, move past so that we're actually HOLDING hands. I glance to the side and a dirty blond with a determined look in his face is staring sullenly at me, and it's SO clear that he would like to have something happen that I follow him when we get to the street. There's a very complicated 5- or 6-way intersection and he crosses one way, then I start to follow him there and he crosses again to his right, so I cross diagonally over to him. He starts talking to me in German and I ask if he speaks English, and he responds with a slight smile and a mild accent in decent English. We're walking toward a tunnel entrance for large trains to Munich, and I think we're going toward the shady entrance, but we veer to the right and up a slight rise to a quarry area where people are caressing and even having sex in the bright sunlight and bushes on the quarried ledges. I feel safe since I know the police aren't interested in prosecuting homosexuality here, but he doesn't want to be looked at. We wander along the top of the area and I suggest someplace CLOSE to the side, so that someone would have to be DIRECTLY above to look down at us, but he leads me somewhere else to a museum-like building in a park at the top of the town. It's a lovely park, with a restaurant nestled in trees, and a cake-shop brightly lit, and we're into a Victorian-decorated concert hall where the woman who set up the park, who absurdly performs on a unicycle on a high wire, is in the middle of a performance. We enter the darkened hall and begin to touch in the back when the lights come up at the conclusion of the performance, and I suggest we can wait until the next one and make out on the side of the auditorium, but he seems reluctant to do that, perhaps because he would like light as much as I would. He's about to suggest some other place, and I start wondering what he WANTS: he's come up BEHIND me, so he's probably interested in my ass, and I don't care to give him that. He seems rather surly, but he's handsome enough and available enough, so I'd just as soon try, and think we'll rent a cheap hotel room in a hotel that wouldn't mind renting to two men, and then I wonder if he's (or the hotel's) after my money, since my WALLET is also in my rear pocket, and then the 11:15 alarm rings for TV!
EATING, TRYING TO PISS, AND TOMATO CREATURES IN PARIS
5/9/82: 1) I'm taking four guests to the fanciest restaurant in Paris, which has a name something like "Le Perigord." I'd eaten there before, know it to be very good but very expensive, so I order their four most special entrees for the five of us to share, but I don't remember EATING them, but coming to the dessert course I order a bit of the chocolate paté, some fruit pie, and some whipped cream confection and about three OTHER dishes and debate after passing little bits of all of them onto the plates: we should have passed around each one SEPARATELY so that we could compare impressions (is this based on the wine tasting yesterday?) on each at the same time. At the end there's the bill to pay, and it's 500 francs, or 600 with the tip, and I look in my wallet for money but find only two 100-franc notes, a few scattered 50s, three or four, MAYBE more, 20s, and lots of 10s, so I pay with a credit card, confident that, at a franc to a dollar, I have a balance of $1000 and 600 francs is less than that, but for a moment explaining it to Jean-Jacques, one of the guests, I mistake and say it was $5000 dollars, rather than five HUNDRED dollars, but then correct myself. 1a) Then we all try to squeeze into a tiny car, appearing to have only one seat in front for the driver, and people move front to back, try to fit under the knees of the person in the death seat, and finally I say "3 in back." 2) I'm sleeping in the living room on a made-up sofa and have to piss, but I know the apartment has no john, so I'm out to the neighboring grocery store but find that it's closed on Saturday, and wander past a few more window-lit, door-locked shops where I could possibly piss, and return to bed without it. Lying there, I feel "threads" under my big toe and scratch tiny white curly threads out, which I drop onto the floor, and they fatten and start to MOVE, and they're WORMS that I picked up somewhere. I search and scratch to seem to find no more, and I watch them moving, growing longer and fatter until they've grown from 1/2-inch hair-thin threads into juicy inch-long, drink-stirrer-thick pointy white worms. I spit on them to watch the reaction, and that makes them move faster and then die, at which point carrion flies race out from under the bed (now I have mice in the apartment again?) and carry the bodies into the fireplace. As I creep toward the barrier at the fireplace and look inside, I can see other fly-wrapped packages being piled up and adjusted by flies, but these grow into little creatures and finally into peppers and carrots and other moving VEGETABLES moving them around, and finally the "leader," a giant tomato with ARMS and rudimentary eyes, comes out and begins shoveling them in and out of dirt, and piles of dirt fall on it, and it digs itself out and takes charge again, until a BOY stands in the entrance and starts commanding. My host returns and the boy disappears, but when the host leaves and the boy re-enters I ask "How did you construct the tomato with arms?" and he with surprise and reluctance starts to talk with me, and then a miniature actor comes out of the fireplace and runs back in, and then a miniature Ginger Rogers comes out of the side closet and I URGE her to stay and MAYBE she's there as the host comes back into the room, and I think this is just the STRANGEST place to be, and then I wake up, wondering at the DETAIL remembered from both dreams, and determine to write them down at 10:30, just out of bed for the day after getting into bed at 2 am, "early."
MEXICAN "EXCAVATION" AND NEWSPAPER MOVIE ADS
5/10/82: 1) I'm listening to a couple of archeologists telling about their discovery of a lost Aztec culture, where they were climbing mountains and suddenly there was a vortex of colored lines like in Walt Disney's "Saludas Amigos" and the mountain was sucked down into the volcano-crater entrance to an old temple, with steep shelves leading down to more gradual staircases at the bottom. The women of the team leaped down these steep shelves, making them appear to be more like stairs, and then somehow I was part of the team and we knew that pieces of paper were going to be shot up from the bottom describing people down there, so I hung out over the upper lip with a bat with which I HIT each message as it came up, so that it slowed and revealed the writing on it, like "Jorge, mechanic" and "Maria, schoolteacher," and then they gradually got more involved and so MUNDANE that I began to think the whole thing was a hoax and these "messages from the past" were written by contemporary Mexicans trying to get publicity for themselves and their region of the country. 2) Then I'm scanning a display of movie ads, as in the Sunday New York Times, and seeing dance performances with names like Audrey Salzedo and thinking that she must be the new dancer that Jeff Duncan has at ATL, because I don't recognize the name of the woman who had been the PRIOR dancer of bit parts. At the top is a display ad for Robert Adan and Marie Hypermarie in some foreign epic, and she's depicted naked from the waist up, fully rounded breasts apparent in the gauzed-out ad so that you can just barely make out her full nipples, leaning back against a man, of whom only the somewhat aged and ordinary face is visible, and I wonder if her name "Hypermarie" has to do with the fact that her breasts are so large and completely hemispherical. Wake with a still vivid memory of the ARCHITECTURE of that Mexican scene. [DETAILED DRAWINGS]
EARTHQUAKE-AS-SHOW / SUPERMARKET-BUYING
5/13/82: 1) I'm sitting "across the street" in bleachers from a block front that's set up as the stage set for an earthquake "spectacular," in a geographical setting that's reminiscent of Agrigento: the buildings on the crest of a hill, the onlookers somewhat below and distanced from it by unobtrusive railings, and the surrounding countryside quite a bit below both components. As it gets dark, the block-set "comes to life" with lights and recorded sounds of people and bustling activity, even to strains of movie soundtrack from the yellow brick movie house on the right "corner" of the "block." Without a good synchronization to the earthquake sounds and motions, the movie house shakes and great cracks appear in the brickwork, but wedge-shaped pieces jut UPWARD unrealistically to show this might be a CHEAP production, though some pieces of brick have tumbled realistically into the street. The sounds increase and other buildings shake, and pieces of rubble are thrown out into the direction of the audience, and when some large shards bounce erratically I glance warily up to the shaking facades, hoping the stagehands who are throwing these pieces out into the audience are careful to throw them where people AREN'T. It's a good idea for a show, but the execution of it isn't very special. 2) Maybe in the same tourist area, I'm buying items in a supermarket and they have a strange way of wrapping everything in Saran wrap and weighing it and marking the price on it that confuses me, and they even have to take off the cap on a preserves jar and put some kind of price tag around the inside of the lid, where it meets the outside of the jar top. Then wake at 7:40, seeing that I've slept 8 hours with no trouble at all.
EATING, SLEEPING, TRAVELING, AND CAMERA LOSS
5/14/82: 1) A large group of us are standing on line for lunch in a Columbia University-like cafeteria, where we have meal tickets rather like that school, and a friend doesn't have them, but somewhere ahead is a petty crook who's stolen tokens that are good for ONE meal and will sell them for a discount. 2) Must have been early in the evening, since it seems a condensed fragment: Jean-Jacques and I are looking for hotel rooms, and he draws back in amazement saying "You mean we'll have to sleep and live in ONE ROOM (this might be connected to the "Scarlet Street" film yesterday where their Village apartment was so luxurious AND had a bedroom)," and toward the end of the trip I make the amazed observation that we've had at least two rooms or suites for the entire trip and didn't have to pay that much for them. 3) I'd thought of traveling with my IE last night before going to sleep, and dreams were sure all about travel: in the last one I was traveling with a large student-seeming group, since we seemed to be very close, loud, and young, and traveling cheaply. We'd pile out of a bus or car and pile into dormitory rooms where there seemed to be problems in keeping things private. Then we'd pile out and clamber over streets or the hillsides taking in sights, and one strange "sight" was an enormous grandfather clock that we had to climb up and over and down, and it was while I was swinging up or down the brass railings that helped us do that when my dangling camera seemed empty. When I opened the case, some indexing cards spilled out, so I knew it was mine, but the elaborate Mamiya-type camera that I'd had with me had been replaced with a falling-apart Rollei-type camera that rattled around in the case and looked VERY old and used. I could see the back plate partially open, and wondered if I had left film in it, and opened it slightly to see two orangish rolls of film stock rolled onto two rolls, but I feared I'd exposed it to the light that way, and then the stock was marked "Orange juice introduction" and it seemed more like a kiddie prize of an advertising agency than legitimate film, and I felt VERY disappointed that my good camera, almost $200, was gone, and I had no more camera to take pictures with, and had indeed lost the roll of pictures I'd already taken, debating taking NO pictures again. I even WOKE with a sense of loss and then relief when I realized that it WAS only a dream.
CHECKING OUT AT A FARMER'S MARKET
5/16/82: A friend who's very much like Werner Erhard would have been as Jack Rosenberg has brought me to his temporary job: bagging fruit and vegetables at a farmer's market that's not really like the one Hetch O'Shea took me to in Atlanta in that this one's in a large hanger-like space with no interior supports, with regular rows packed solid with produce that can be seen from every point of the room. At my first day there, I sort of watch more than do, and there seems to be one bagger for each customer, so there's no real way I can get produce packed except by pushing. It seems we get an hourly wage like $7 or $10 an hour, and I've only worked an hour since I came in a car with Jack in the late afternoon. There's some sort of closing announcement (like in Sloan's last night before 8) and someone pushes a huge jar of cider or applesauce into my arms and I make out a return slip. Jack gets checked out and has a pile of receipts to which cash is stapled, and I put in my small stack and have only a few singles; but though I have the impression I get a commission on THIS cash, too (though I can't see how I would rate THAT much just for PACKING, but maybe it's not the 10% I fantasize it is, but only 1%. But I get NO money, and I try to ask the cashier, and ask Jack to ask the boss, but he seems reluctant to do it. Then there's an office with a sort of "hearing" and I'm asked about the "glass discount," and I explain VERY detailedly that this must be because there were scratches, as if someone would SCRATCH into the glass (my new candle chimney of glass?) with their fingernails, which I accepted and probably shouldn't have, as a return of a deposit. Then I'm in a room reading large magazines waiting for Jack, and he seems not to be coming as the lights get shut off, and when I LEAVE the room I think I've left my shoes in there, so I return in a confused way and pass a small room in which someone's taking a bath in a soapy tub, and I wonder if it could be Jack, and I try to get in and someone holds me back, saying it's PRIVATE, and I debate taking a bus back into town, hiring a cab which will take me HOME, and debate the logistics of getting here the next day if Jack's not coming, and I start to worry about getting my shoes back when I semi-wake and figure it's just a dream anyway and I DO have no shoes, so don't worry.
EATING IN RESTAURANT WITH JEAN-JACQUES
5/18/82: The restaurant is so fancy that it could be Paris or New York, but everyone seems to be speaking English (so it's probably Paris!). There's another person (Georges?) with us, and we're sat at a table for 4 at the side of the room against a wall, but somehow a transition is made and two OTHERS have joined us by sitting AMONG the three of us, and there's moments of difficulty when we don't know who should talk about what to whom. Then there's another flash of Jean-Jacques standing by the side of the table, having gone out to meet the owner, or chef, a female he knows very well, since they're talking loudly and laughing and waving their arms and talking about "TouLOOZ" versus "TOOloose," which makes me think we MIGHT be in France. Then there's another seamless transition and I'm eating some sort of salad with bits of ham mixed in with a white dressing as an appetizer and lots of little girls are sitting around talking to themselves in excited whispers either because I am someone important or because the DISH is important or the RESTAURANT is important, and I fish for the last of the meat and make a few comments to them, but mainly try to ignore them, and they whisper about the bustle and nudge each other and I'll be glad when the whole thing's over, and I wake.
VISITING A STRANGE AMERICAN ROOM AND RESTAURANT
5/26/82: I'm staying in someone's room during a part of a vacation, looking through books in an orange-crate bookcase and taking one out and reading it while sitting on a corner of the bed, and someone outside is trying to attract my attention or trying to get in by pressing his hands against the window and trying to open one of the many vertically opening sections of the frosted glass. I'm surprised that I'm so close to the ground and worry about the guy actually breaking in (influenced by Arthur's description yesterday of how he feels surrounded by hostile blacks, with Diane Moser, in his section of Brooklyn if there were riots?), but he doesn't and when I put the book back into the bookcase and put that back against the window, it blocks out distractions coming from the lower part of the window. I have to pack because we're leaving this place today, and I meet my host and plan roads out of town when he says we have to eat in a coffee shop around the corner, and when we enter there are two other women in our group and he doesn't introduce me, so I introduce myself as I sit down, and suddenly there are two more female members of the group at the next booth, so I turn and try to talk to them, too, and I get the same feeling of interloping as I did at last year's Summer Gathering, which Arthur and I talked about ALSO yesterday, and I feel like there's nothing for me to say to these women and I wish I weren't there and going onward with the trip.
MOVIE AND EXHIBITIONS, GARDENS, AND MAPS
5/30/82: I'm sitting in a crowded movie theater having just seen a preview (talking to Arnold about these yesterday on the phone) and the place clears out but for people in the back who intend to stay for the NEXT preview showing. Then I'm looking at a map which tells how to go from a welcome area, through a concrete-blocked place with display kiosks set up with literature from these gardens, then a flight of crowded broad stairs to formal gardens laid out overlooking the countryside, and then smaller stairs going to an upper area which I haven't seemed to find yet, so I unfold the map again, and someone passing by asks where I got it. I'd been there with Mom the day before and I'm supposed to meet her here again today at either 2 or 3, but I don't remember which and certainly don't remember that we talked about WHERE. The place is VERY crowded in some spots (like the crowds at Zabar's in the TV magazine that included it), and I don't know how we'll meet unless we have a SPECIFIC place for it at a SPECIFIC time. She has to travel some distance, though it's only about an hour, and then we'll continue upstate along some river to other places like this. The MAP remains in my memory in some distinctness. [DETAILED DRAWING]
AFTER WARRIOR CLASS!
6/1/82: THAT was Warrior class? Wake intermittently with ANKLE cramp and "nailed to cross by feet" pain, then wake at 5:25 with LONG memories of LONG dreams: Three of us (and Bob Grossman!) at an amusement park and I berate them for buying objects to CARRY, but I find I bought a glass (square-bottom stem glass) with some sort of PLANT in it, saying "Well, it was HERE and I WANTED it" but KNOW we'll have to CHECK them before we can ride on RIDES. I'm waiting for Dennis to finish (or come out of john) and old man motions me to the bar, saying "Take a free glass of beer, but only a small one, please." I wander into middle-room restaurant-bar area with tables set for meals with glasses of light and dark beer full, ranging from totally full to only 1/4 full. I pass through to a high-ceilinged bar and the "regulars" are drinking blowsily at the bar and tables, and I think "Dennis will LOVE this place as "a regular hangout." Through to NEXT room and people are beginning to EAT and mess up place settings, and I realize I have ONE object with me but misplaced TWO others, probably behind something while looking at some exhibit or other. File back through rooms and find I've lost my GLASSES, too. (Eyeglasses, that is.) Want to pick up my drink but find all the free ones are GONE, MORE people having eaten and drunk and left already. Find eyeglasses on floor, find ONE package in a paper bag that I'd misplaced, but lose ANOTHER and try to return to SALESMAN to say "Just give me a beer YOURSELF," but get LOST in crowded rooms and (got cruised once or twice inside, but they were awful people) find myself in an inner court CROWDED with people and someone (or a radio) loudly plays 30's-type "Vo do de oh doh" music. Walk to what looks to be an exit, but men are clasping metal POLE coming down inside corner of building, and each floor (only about 4' high!) has a SPACE between its ceiling and the floor of the next floor, and it's been designed in a "modern" way WITHOUT ELEVATORS and this is the only way of getting from floor to floor. I only want to get to the ENTRANCE, so I only want to climb ONE floor from this sort of sunken garden patio-atrium in the center, and as a "thirties drifter"-type in front climbs up (and I look up to see men climbing about 4-5 floors all around) I reach for pipe and the old codger reaches out as if to help me but actually gropes me and tweaks my ribs and stomach to CRUISE me as I hoist myself up onto a dusty ledge 1/4 - 1/3 the way up each "floor." I brush him aside, reach first level, and look around hopelessly for the entrance, then wake and remember VIVIDNESS of details of table settings, high-ceilinged room in the bar, purchases, and inner court (to the brown color of the walls) and cruisings and feeling of NOISE and "vo do" music and WARRIOR CLASS? Piss and write to 5:40 am. 1) At 11:45 last night I broke a PLATE from the sideboard, into SMALL pieces. 2) Still awake after 5:40 writing before, and at 6:15 with a CRASH a leather thong on my bedroom-window hanging pot lets loose and DUMPS pot and plant and moist EARTH and leaves over INDEX CARDS ON CHAIR! Thank goodness they're PACKED enough so they're easy enough to brush onto TV section I HAPPEN to have in bedroom wastebasket, cleaning up THAT till I jot this at 6:35. Is freeing intelligence BREAKING old FIXED OBJECTS??
SCHOOL BANQUET
6/2/82: 1) School banquet: a) Senior Prize (I would think "junior") to Vic D'Andrea and Jerry Robinson. b) Woman's Club Prize to a group of 20; I pay for their banquets and will get reimbursed from the women's club. I TELL them this during the chairman's address. He talks of my talking and I DEFEND myself, amazing him. 2) On way to amusement park, I HUG him and he STILL doesn't like it or me. St. John's students parading in whiteface Mickey Mouse masks and crisp colorful clean dresses, and I run down to rides with others, somebody, who REFUSE to look at me as I run beside them, but as I pass them they have to grudgingly give me part of their attention. 3) Making some sort of index, words like Dysplasias and Diseases.
LARGE BUILDING-SCHOOL
6/11/82: I'm working at someplace rather like an IBM office, but I'm only going to school, it seems. Get directed to another office and wander down darkish hallways to come to another ENORMOUS area FILLED with men, and I wonder WHO all is working here! Then there's an exercise break and I'm down the wrong stairway and the ceiling lowers, made of some orange-pink construction padding, until I've gotten to a perfect dead-end, as if they had to construct the stairway from the TOP because of design requirements, but it didn't GO anywhere. Back out of that, feeling rueful, wondering HOW anyone got around during their first days here, and follow someone who seems to be going to a men's room (and I think of cruising there), and remember I'd seen a sign to the steam and exercise room down ANOTHER stairway. As I come to a corner of the passageway, I find I'm in one of the MAIN entranceways, huge like a passage at Grand Central Station, and as I go off to the left I see what looks like the entrance to an enormous museum or church nave, with a splendid gold-and-red tapestry, in excellent condition, hanging under spotlights on one wall: at the sides of it are just masses of heads and worshippers, but as I move along and see more of it, the central figures are full-body, life-size, and a combination of Virgin-and-saints and Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, with gold-spike auras and flaming halos. I figure I should go in to see ALL of it, but there appears to be some sort of ceremony or church service going on, and I go toward the men's room and find it's only a corner of a lobby, and vaguely remember seeing a small "Mens" sign in green-lit letters pointing somewhere, and go in search of that, marveling at the size and splendor of the building which is also a school for whatever I'm doing at this time in life. Also note that BEFORE I went to bed I rather thought "Wouldn't it be nice to go somewhere tonight, somewhere that would be an ADVENTURE?" I don't know if this qualifies as an adventure, exactly, but this is the dream I had.
LOOKING FOR A CUP / HARDCORE ARMY PLATOON
7/7/82: 1. I know that someone needs a cup, so I go into a john that I "recognize" from another dream, and a blonde woman dressed all in white is trying to find the female john, but she goes into the male one instead, and I follow her to find she's only washing her hands, so I look for a cup but there is none. Into an adjoining room and it's a surgeon's supply room, and I debate taking a plastic glove and stiffening it with something to make it into a cup. 2. Instantly, I'm standing with a tour group at a railroad crossing---everyone's walking, and an Army platoon stands nearby and is given the order to fall to the ground. Some are lying on their backs, some on their stomachs, and others are stretched into a forward-backward split, lowering their bodies as much as they can by reaching their arms around their forward foot. As I look closer in the dust and mud (it seems to be raining or have rained), I can see that SOME of the men are actually naked, their muscular tanned bodies so covered with mud they appear at a first glance to have clothes on, but I can see erections on some of them, somewhat lighter in color for not being as tanned as their bodies, that are being fondled by the hands or mouths or even the combat boots of others on the ground. I'm fascinated with this activity and sight, and watch a number of erect cocks being played with and knocked about, but all in a rather "straight" way of "This is a fun thing to do, but it's only for sensation, not for emotional contact." I enjoy the sense of what these thick semi-erect cocks would feel like: firm yet flexible with caverns and veins sliding around under the supple smooth outer skin. Finally the man at the end gets up and almost "shakes himself out of" the grasps and mouths of several men, and I say "I'm glad to see you're so tolerant," and reach out to grab him, but he deftly moves out of my grasp with a smile, making some evasive comment, and I reach again and he lets me hold it, and I fantasize he MIGHT even permit a body stroke or a kiss of affection. Suddenly we're in their barracks and I look down and see, in a tiny baby bed, Marty Sokol's large face smiling up at me in recognition, and I say with surprise, "Marty, what are YOU doing here?" and he says "Well, I'm on summer training recess now," and I "remember" that he's been separated from his wife and sleeping in his car, so he used this bed during the time he could look for a place to stay before he finds his own apartment.
GROUP TOUR THROUGH AMUSEMENT PARK
7/16/82: I'm waiting for my group to finish eating at two tables in an amusement park cafeteria, and I direct them to meet at the entrance, showing them some sort of slide to indicate the green-painted wooden bridges that people line up on while waiting to get their entrance tickets. Then I'm at the gate and most people have gathered and I see the last two (there's some feeling that these people are from IBM, when I worked there, like Cathy) joining us, so I lead them into the park, which is now dark, and the great lighted Circle of Light show is going on with five or six bicyclists in tights on silver bicycles [DETAILED DRAWING] going through their elaborate crown-of-light tracery, and I'm amazed at the risk they take: if their wheels jam and they're thrown off their bicycles, they probably wouldn't survive the fall. Then I shepherd my group up some stairs and over a swinging rope bridge, and I make sure the LAST of the group is on their way and I dash across a tightrope that's marked "Danger," making it all the way across to Mom, who's about the third person across the swinging rope bridge, and she wants to make sure that I don't get ahead of her by coming across the shortcut, so she moves out on the bridge too fast, and it sort of tips around, like the climbing-ladder game at one of the parks, but she holds on tightly and seems to be able to continue across when I wake up, surprised to find that it's 6:30 when I worried about getting up by 9:30, having gotten to bed at 2:30.
CASTLE-TOURING AND TRAIN-MISSING
7/23/82: A disconnected group of us are touring a large castle complex at the top of a hill in the middle of a village. The main memory from the dream is climbing a set of patterned aluminum stairs which don't seem strong enough to support the mass of people climbing it, and we have to make our way to the sides as it bends under our feet. Then I'm leaving the castle on a train, and I wander down the aisles selecting my seat. For some reason (possibly because it's the back of the train) I pass by perfectly empty compartments with window seats and red-plush seats, and then begin seeing two or three women occupying elegant suites of compartments, and then I pass a few down-steps and see a door that I open to see a SINGLE seat against a window, and I figure THAT will be just great, except that when I swing my suitcase in ahead of me, a sleeping form moves slightly and I'm embarrassed to find that the sleeping compartment is occupied already (it's like a smallest room at the baths, where the "room" is precisely the size of a bed, with the head farthest from the door). I move my suitcase out and gently reclose the door, getting to the point where even if the other DOES waken, I can just say my suitcase caught the edge of the sliding door and opened it slightly, causing the disturbance. But the cars in front of THAT are open, more in the shape of CANOES than anything else, with open seats and cheery people filling them, and I think "If I sit up here I'll get WET," and that doesn't seem good, so I begin walking toward the back of the train again when I see other people running frantically down from the castle because the train starts to pull out! I try to get into one of the passing doors and don't make it, and a terrible feeling of depression comes over me: I don't know when the next train is leaving, I don't really care to wander around this town some more, and I'm not even interested in reading. Try to shake the depression by saying "This is just something that happens," but the feeling doesn't lift, and I WAKE into that depressed feeling, counting the five days before my France flight with an increased heart rate, and up at 9:15 to do a session till 10:15 and then read through the "Star Trek Concordance" until 11:55 when I FINALLY get into the activities of the day!
VILLAGE-TOURING AND TRAIN SCHEDULING
7/25/82: Again the travel motif, probably based on looking at France information on the subway last night. I've gotten off a train on an impulse, and I wander into a very primitive, rather Germanic village looking for a place to stay. I follow some women with washing bundles on their heads down a sandy lane, but it quickly turns into a tree-lined country footpath with hardly anyplace that could furnish a hotel or even a B&B place. I return to the main square, noticing for the first time there are no automobiles, remembering I just walked the short distance from the train station at the edge of town. There's some sort of local entertainment going on: a plump woman in a white dress has come out of one of the tiny shops as a comedienne, and as she bends over to the tiny knot of people who are her audience, a mule comes up behind her and is about to comment (I suspect there are people inside the mule) about the wide expanse of ass-flesh showing under her dress as she bends over. I think that there must be a place to stay in THAT area, but turn to my train schedule to see when the next train is due out. The schedule is divided into five or six "routes" and I have trouble even finding the name of the town on the other routes when I see by the route on which I arrived that this will be the LAST train today, and I vaguely wonder why I didn't check the schedule FULLY before I got OFF. Without transition I'm standing on a sort of shelf overlooking a wooded valley, rather like at the northern edge of Merano, except there's no snow, and HERE I wonder why I'm now going to stay here for two or three days and haven't even brought along a change of UNDERWEAR---how COULD I have been so stupid as to leave my shoulder bag behind, and there's a combination of the idea that I'd left it in Rita's bedroom in Florida AND that Paul McLean will be annoyed with me if I don't change my socks often enough. These thoughts of the haphazard planning on my part filter into my waking mind, and I wake AGAIN with vaguely unpleasant thoughts, though nothing that could really be thought of as OMINOUS. Just usual pre-trip jitters?
WINDOW VIEWING AND JEAN-JACQUES' APARTMENT CLEANING
8/24/82: 1) I'm sitting in the window of an apartment rather like mine on East 70th Street, but across the street are five or six 5-11 story buildings, each with large picture windows in which singles or couples or families are eating before their open windows. AFTER the dream, now, I can appreciate the fact that the windows (and people) are larger in proportion to the actual building than they should be, so that it's rather like a movie set or a stage set for "Street Scene." Everyone seems to have a view, everyone seems to eat looking down into the street, and one window is so large and extends so far below the level of the table that I wonder how the parents keep the children away from the dangerously low ledge that would allow them to tumble out of the apartment. Not to mention that everyone's EATING now. 2) I've gotten the keys to let some furniture movers or construction estimators into Jean-Jacques' apartment (not any I know he's had), and in the twilight I manage to find a light for the kitchen that reveals an adjacent dining room that had been set for a rather formal dinner for 8 or 10 people, with colorful place-settings still dirty on the table. When I look at the tiny kitchen sink and see rows of wine glasses drying on the board, I know why he's left the rest of the dishes for later. After the men leave, I find large dried brown chunks of tuna fish (had it for dinner last night) in the drain, and take them out and rinse them and look under the sink to find a scrap bag to leave them in (and am later amazed about the DETAILS of dreams: how his sink had been constructed to be NARROW and he wanted it angled into a corner, so a false front of cupboards at an angle had been built out to diagonalize the cupboard front in the corner). Just as I'm ready to tackle the dishes, Dennis, who was leaving, turns off the light! I shout out "Dennis, Dennis" in great anger and he tries to find the light switch but can't in the now-dark. I stumble after him and find him cringing in a corner saying something about "After I stop crying," and I finally find ANOTHER switch that enables me to SEE the rest of the apartment, but after trying all the lights I rather decide that the kitchen light has just burnt out. After a seamless transition, we're sitting AT his front window looking across Central Park to the Chinese-topped, huge-windowed "Rebekah Harkness Pavilion" across from him, admiring his view, and dancers have pulled down the curtains in THEIR windows and have flopped onto the foresill rather like the quick-moving puppets in the Caliph's toy theater in "The Thief of Baghdad."
LIBRARY BOOKS / PLAY WATCHING / RIVER AND ROCKS
8/20/82
(Taken strictly from notes I found; don't remember ANY of the details.) 5 am: Dream of library books. 1) RETURNING books, I lay three on the floor in a long line and get ELABORATE list of how to get the books I want NEXT: Back to find books on floor GONE and sneak to FRONT of line to find they haven't been SHELVED yet, and I try to request looking at CARTS of books to be SHELVED to prove I've returned them. 2) "Remember" that I reserved three books from USC, but can't remember what they WERE to check why I didn't GET them, and can't remember how I RESERVED them. 7:30: Sitting in first row of balcony (as in the Rivoli Theater) watching a play, and the villain exits up a ladder PAST me, and I GASP. I take a tour of the house at intermission and the FLOORS shake so hard I look for my SEAT. To a river and ROCKS crumble underfoot. "Caught" with a wrecked helicopter, which finally floats off downstream, and the rocks remain on the bank but COALESCE into a FIRM bank to walk on, and everyone's amazed.
RAFT ON RAPIDS / SWORDS/ DNA MYMPTHS
9/6/82: Wake at 9:55 am, having gotten to bed after Flash Gordon at 2:30 am. 1) I read about EPCOT yesterday, which probably influenced my REPEATED (at best guess, three) trips down a Roaring Rapids amusement park ride in a rubber-seated raft that seems not quite as large as the 12-seater at the usual parks, maybe 4 or 6. I'm chatting with someone seated and some cute guy is standing, sort of guiding, and we swing around a corner where lots of other rafts are bumping slowly down the left side of the curve, but we swoop down a slope of water and seem headed for the swifter moving current on the right, more tightly curved, side, which is smooth and quick running, so he quickly sits down. The LAST time we go through, we end on a rather deserted city street like one in Firestone Park, with bungalows along each side, as if we'd come off the wrong exit from the ride and are now sitting in a street that's only got about 2-3 inches of water in it, not enough to float the raft, and most of the people seem to have gotten off, and I vaguely wonder what happens next. 2) I seem to be playing with SWORDS (influenced by the "Flash Gordon" movie, probably) with JOHN CRANO, who's his usual bewildered smiling self. 3) I'm looking at what at first seem to be my mympths, but NOW I see that they're more patterned: on an acid-green background, there are golden sparkles making up interlaced spirals of DNA-like substance, with the TINIEST POSSIBLE black dots as the nuclei, and they shimmer slightly as did the face-edges when I was on LSD. BRIGHT green background, BRIGHT gold strands, DEEPEST black dots flecked through. Quite beautiful. [DETAILED DRAWING]
TRAVEL / SUN-DIMMING / LIZARD ALONGSIDE DESK
9/8/82: 1) Traveling through Canada, off train to small town, and a woman drives me around, then back to the small town and get train. This seems to be influenced by my recent watching of Great Railroads of the World. 2) Avi and Larry Ball visit Paul McLean's brother Dick's house and complain they don't tour the INSIDE of it. 1A) IN the town, I remembered later and jotted on the note that I'm looking at the local elections, based on favoring the building of a bridge across a lake to continue a road, versus plans to build it along the edge of the lake and alongside (not through) planted fields, and I plan to run and WIN.
9/9/82: Taken at 8:30 am: 1)I'm in Akron for some reason and football games are going on in a huge stadium on a hill, and I can HEAR cheers of "Go team go" and "block that kick" clearly. Scores go up on a lighted board. Then Helen and Jimmy and I are driving home late and I look out the rear window and behind the car the clouds part and the SUN, small and yellow-gray and hazy-bright, is still about forty minutes before setting and I cry that something's WRONG, having trouble convincing THEM that they should stop and look at it and take me seriously, and I'm wondering what's happening and what WILL happen as the earth stops revolving. Taken at 9:25: 2) In a flash of a "waking-dozing" dream I'm sitting at my desk at an index and a green LIZARD climbs up my nearby bookcase with all the supplies in it, and it's about five inches long, and he cocks his head toward me, looking at me inquiringly.
HITCHHIKING TO CITY CENTER / ROGER EVANS
9/12/82: It's early on a winter morning and hardly light out, and I've caught a ride with a woman driver and her husband who park on the corner of 55th and 6th, and it turns out they're going to be in the cast of the first dance, which starts at 11 am, known as "Lines," where dozens of people clamber up and down ropes and scaffolding within the shell of the theater itself. I draw the conclusion in the dream that I'll be seeing it this once and that's all. My memory of little money this weekend continues in the dream, as it's Sunday morning THERE and I only have $5 cash with me, debating going to 42nd Street to some restaurant and using a credit card, since I'll be downtown all day and have to EAT. Get into the City Center lobby and it appears pretty empty at 10:30, even though it starts at 11, and there's a coffee shop with people on thick black cushions before a tan Formica table on which they're having coffee and breakfast rolls, and I take a seat along one wall, rather out of the way. Then I notice, behind the crowded counter, that Roger Evans has a full tray which he's carrying toward the kitchen. He smiles at me, and after a few moments he's sitting on a stool behind the far left end of the L-shaped counter motioning me to come talk with him. He leans back with the same sort of lazy, drawling self-confidence that he would exhibit in my apartment and says that he tried working for some South Carolina computer company, but they couldn't afford his services so they had to let him go, and I made some sort of comment that he implied that if the company couldn't afford HIM, they couldn't afford anyone, since he would work cheaper than anyone else with his comparable abilities. Don't recall that he answered that, but I DO remember going across and KNEELING on the cushion so as to put my face rather close to his, and getting the impression that he didn't particularly LIKE me, even though I vaguely contemplated (in or past the dream) that he wouldn't be a bad person to have a long-term relationship with on a sexual basis, and I had the strange misplaced memory IN the dream of a frustration that "the only two cute people in Actualism, Roger and Mark Smith," didn't like me very much, and wondered just exactly why that was.
FRUSTRATION AND SUBWAY AGONY
9/14/82: Took the briefest notes on 9/14, assuming I'd type that day, but didn't. I'm barring my door on the way out, and I meet John in the hallway, where I feel very conscious of the fact that my suit is torn, but I feel that if I hold myself in a certain way, it won't be visible. When I get to the subway there's no map visible, and I'm going to a school somewhere and I'm in a hurry and don't really know where I'm going. What "rocky john" means I don't know. I rush for the turnstiles and see coins lying atop the token slot, so I grab those up quickly as the elevator comes to the Clark Street stop. Then in the middle of the system I can find only IRT maps but I want to know where the BMT goes. Don't know what class I have at 9 am, and even in the dream I feel that typical "where am I and what am I doing here at school?" frustration and agony that I haven't had for a number of money (HA---intended to type MONTHS and out came MONEY, which is something I AM frustrated about, since submitting $7000 in bills since AUGUST 20 and having gotten only ONE check (submitted 9/3 on 9/17) TO DATE, and feeling VERY frustrated about the situation because I need the CASH!)
SLIDING HOUSE / CROWDED TRAVEL / STAR TREK III / dessert-carrying
9/21/82: 1) A large group of men have entered a sort of classroom in a house, sitting in crowded rows facing in ONE direction, and someone mentions that this is on a cliffside that might collapse in an earthquake, and I retort with superior knowledge that the fault would reach ALL the way up here only if the ground were muddy and the whole area would slide and it's now DRY outside, but to my horror there's a shake and the house starts moving. We all turn in our seats to try to "ride it out," and I shout that we should all curl up as small as possible, take off our glasses, and brace ourselves against the seat in front of us, but as we go faster and faster, I start to despair. 2) I'm part of a huge group in its next-to-last night in a resort, and the maids have taken the sheets off the beds, which makes me wonder if we're going to be moving TOMORROW rather than the next day. They've put $3 for each of us, but mine is in the form of two singles and a roll of quarters that's about 2/3 full (full, but sort of floppy with looseness) (and somehow I know it's EXACTLY $1 worth of quarters, so they're more like nickel-value in the dream) and someone makes the remark that we'll need the change for tipping, so I start measuring out four quarters for $1 (not thinking of the difference that I GOT), and hand it to someone to trust him to take 8 quarters for $2. When I go to my room I have to pass someone like Norman Mailer playing games with his two sons, making them move, and find out later to my chagrin that there was ANOTHER door to my room just down the hall that I could have used without making anyone move out of the way. 3) I leave my room at 7, expecting dinner, and people are watching TV of a new version of Star Trek where they're manning a space station, and in the introductory credits there are obvious heavies in the cast, and I decide that's necessary since the entire series is now on the space station, and since they won't be meeting anyone from "outside," all the plot movement will have to be from INSIDE their own group, requiring heavies. 4) In this same traveling group there's a picnic to which everyone SHOULD have brought something, but I'm moving around acutely aware that I haven't brought anything, telling myself I HAVE to bring or buy wine next time. People from IBM like Mozelle and Peg Casey and Cathy O'Sullivan are moving around a beverage-dessert table with the final pitchers and vases full of a very liquid dessert that looks like liquid butterscotch pudding, and when I ask Mozelle what it is, she says with some sarcasm that it's "Hurdle Elleck," as if I know perfectly well what it is, so she'll make up a nonsense name to answer my nonsense question. I don't want to carry it for fear the group will think I brought it and take the credit away from those who DID make it, but I ask them if they want any help and they say I can carry two of the middle-sized ones, since the largest needs to be carried by itself, and some of the smaller ones are to be carried on trays. I slip my hands under each large-stemmed glass pitcher, and find they're fuller and more fluid than I thought. Worse, the tops of each are SLANTED and FLUTED so that when I carry them with the BASES parallel, chocolate syrup and whipped cream begins to ooze over the lowest lips of the flutes, so I have to SLANT them while carrying them. Worst, the sun begins to melt the tops and they start to run ALL OVER, as I frantically try to hygienically lick the drips so they won't run on my clothing, try to maintain my dignity, and try not to embarrass Mozelle and Cathy with my antics. But they see me, have no sympathy with me, and berate me angrily, though I don't know what else to do. Near the area we're going to, beside a lake, there are downed pine trees with branches sticking straight up into the air, and a forester is busily engaged with a power saw cutting off these branches level with the horizon, and I can even smell the pine scent of the flowing sap. Never get to the picnic area (as the sliding house never got to the bottom of the hill), so the "catastrophes" never reached their climax. But the clarity of the DETAIL reminds me NOW of Jon's saying last night (see Actualism 260-261) that it IS usually the Human that provides the dream-body, and if I want to learn more about the human, I should observe in my "clear dreams" the antics of that body. Well, usually it has more FUN than I do!
FIGHT BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL
9/22/82: Record sketchy notes at 7:30 am. Forget lots of it in the intervening day. FEEL GOOD IN DREAM! "Evil" is personified by the tall normal-looking guy from the gym who was talking to the talkative Jewish guy in the steam room. Ron Miller (looking great) is asking questions. He questions me as "good," and gets questions handed him behind his back from "Evil." "Fight between good and evil." I assume (Honi?) (someone!) said to give evil my "peace." Class laughs. I translate Evil, he says (something) and I rotate by shifting the weight on my toe---I RECALL this now: I'm sort of squatting on the floor and lifting up and down like one might push-pull a spinning top, and I find that I can use the centrifugal force of my spin to keep me upright balanced only on one toe, and can also MOVE ACROSS THE FLOOR by gently leaning in one direction or the other, or by straightening from or bending my knee. DELIGHTFUL feeling of my own physical control. (My HUMAN??) Add note at the bottom that there's an oven thermometer somewhere, and I have dishes washing underwater. There's a clock somewhere reading 7:40! Jean-Jacques returns from somewhere---still candles on the floor (whatever that means). He says he interviewed for job for three months, will probably GET it. I hug him awkwardly under the armpits, and I tell him about "the trial" (as my note, I think, puts it) from the first part of the dream. ANOTHER lesson in the necessity of transcribing the notes WHEN I DREAM THEM.
SEX WITH TWO GUYS / WET ROLLER COASTER
9/23/82: 1) For the first time in ages, an exciting sex dream, which gets me so erect that I jerk off. I'm in an apartment with two guys, and the thinner one and I are in bed together (which is more like the backseat of a car), and he goes down on me and I'm trying to be excited by it, but he doesn't have a very skillful mouth. Then we lie side-by-side and I have something like Baby Magic that I've rubbed all over his crotch, making it almost soapy with white froth, and he's very excited with that hard little edge to his stubby cock-head, and his abdominals are very distinct as I rub up over them, and his nipples are little BBs of excitement. He's rubbing me, too, and I'm quite excited, and look up to see the second guy undressing, and his chest and head is rather like the fellow in the blue trunks in the slides that I found exciting, and that resemblance, in the dream, is appealing to me. He's about to join us in bed when I wake and jerk off. 2) Susan Lieber and others behind us are riding in a carriage-type roller coaster on a wooded road between green trees in a forest, going toward an old-fashioned picnic pavilion in the woods, but it starts to rain, and we pull our picnic bags over our laps so we won't get so wet, and when we get into the station we're really dripping and know we'll have to wait inside the rustic station until it stops, but though it's rather gray and quite moist, we're not really chilly, so it must have been a hot day that this rain has relieved. We're not terribly disappointed, just resigned to wait for the end of the rain, and even I am not agitated about the time being wasted, because the surroundings look so pleasantly romantic and serene in the gentle downpour.
TRAVEL IN "FUNERAL UNIFORM"
10/8/82: Alarm woke me at 8:32 when I had to be at the EEG testing at 8:45, so I jotted notes in the back of Huxley's "Moksha" while waiting to be taken. I'm in a restaurant in an Indian village (in India) and I come out to get told that I've been wearing a "funeral uniform" (which of course is my own body), which is a white flowing garment with abstract patterns screened onto the bottom sections of it, and I inquire that since I'm going to a temple next, might this not be a proper garment to wear THERE, in order to fit into the surroundings better and learn more about it (like I have to put on a body to learn more about life on earth?). Then a curtain raises behind me and I see that the woman I'm talking to (somewhat like Paula Gannon) LIVES in the back, where I can see a number of beds covered in bright felt-like coverings of blue and dark gold, which would sleep about 15, and I compliment them on their neatness and nice arrangements. There were other parts of the dream, but I don't remember them even at NOON.
TRIP / SEBASTIAN THE DUCK / GEOGRAPHICAL OSTRICH EGG
10/12/82: 1) I'm walking with a group of tourists toward a castle (from TV last night of Mark Twain's "Mister 44"?) and there's a running brook, but when we step into it, we quickly sink past our knees and some even start swimming, so I hold back, figuring there HAS to be an easier way to get there DRYER. 2) I'm looking out a paned window in an old castle (rather like the Landesmuseum in Zurich, though the WINDOW was rather like the one everyone was looking out of in "Doctor in the House" last night on TV) at turrets which have clocks and displays with elaborate colorfully painted drummers and tumblers which are automated to turn and gyrate when someone looks at them. 3) I'm in a grandstand with a large number of people, ready to cheer for the announcement of the advent of "Sebastian the one-footed performing duck," and sure enough he flies across the blue sky, one foot only silhouetted against the horizon, and climbs up a diving board to the cheers of the onlookers and dives off until it's about 2/3 of the way down, and then flaps its wings and flies off past a tree while everyone cheers again, and sails to a quick landing on a lake, obviously very pleased with himself. 4) I'm watching TV and there's a show segment which features a close-up of a cooled cooked semi-hollowed out ostrich egg which has been lightly painted and sculpted to resemble woods and trees and lakes and mountains, which is being described in the background by a whimsical voice "selling this lovely tract of land." [DETAILED DRAWING]
COUNTRY SINGER DIES / SEX WITH ROBIN MAZEY
10/14/82: 1) I'm sitting in the audience at something rather like the "Grand Ol' Opry" (rather like a scene from "The Coal Miner's Daughter") and someone who looks like Johnny Carson, with a name like Waylon Jennings, is introduced at the time of the announcement of the death of a famous female country-western singer. His costume is white and mostly covered with glittering tinsel, and somehow a newscaster reports that "His costume tissying into the microphone was the most appropriately mourning sound for the death of this great singer." 2) I'm in bed with Robin Mazey, not wanting to DIRECTLY initiate sex, so I roll toward him and run my right hand and forearm up the inside of his left thigh, so that I can see and feel the soft flesh of his scrotum just at the edge of my perceptions. He snuggles down into me and I can feel that he's hard, so I enjoy his erection and the rest of his body while he seems to be talking on the telephone with Avi, trying to invent a plausible reason for his laughing when I tickle him and his sighs of excitement as I stroke his oozing cock-head. When he's finally off the phone I caress him with great strength and roll him over on his back, with his legs thrown over his head, and he appears to be straining for an orgasm without touching, and I press on his curved-over back and ass and prostate area, beaming encouragement to him and egging him on, and when I rub his stomach it's wet with semen, and I exclaim "You did it!" and he smiles and nods his vigorous agreement, and then I dive onto his still-throbbing cock, feeling flayed with its intensity of bone-hard erection and web work of straining outstanding veins and nerves in his cock shaft, and I can taste the albuminous quality of his jism and feel the slipperiness of his cock-body as he shivers through the last spasms of his orgasm and I begin to torture him in the final nerve shrieks of the diminishing orgasm. Wake quite excited, but have to get up to work on an index. Nice that the sex dreams come when it's only been two days since I've come myself.
TRAVEL-DORMS AND MISSING LUGGAGE ON TRAIN
10/25/82: I'm traveling in Europe alone, staying in a tiny cheap room for which the door is a separate panel which has to be pulled shut from the inside without a handle, so there are still slits of vision on each side that can be peeped into, and I debate wandering the halls to see if I can see anyone else jerking off, or if anyone's going to come and watch ME jerking off. It might even be a sort of YMCA, but to show how indefinite the place was, it might ALSO have been a dormitory on a TRAIN. (Also JUST remembered a fragment where I was on a jet, coming in for a landing, and someone was saying that it was perfectly safe, but I KNEW that we were descending too sharply too close to city buildings, and I braced my legs and scrunched up my whole being in my best possible preparation for the horrible crash). Got off the train at a stop (to get something to eat?) and returned to the station to see the train pulling out, and ran alongside debating catching onto one of the doorways, but decided that it was moving too fast (like the jet?) and I'd be severely damaged if I tried grabbing onto a stanchion and pulling myself onto the speeding train. So I looked at my timetable (based on the AMTRAK timetable on the downstairs giveaway table?) and saw that the train ran every 24 hours, and I could catch the same one tomorrow at 5:25 am and get into Weser, which was probably my next destination, at 7:45 pm, and I thought it strange that this NON-TRAIN vacation would have so much time on the train, but I vaguely thought back that I MIGHT have been in a group, and had been with the group before, which was something like Travel Jules Verne, and they KNEW the group was accustomed to train travel, so that one day sitting on a train would be a welcome relief from the walking and sightseeing that BEING in a village involved, so it all seemed to be working out all right, except that I couldn't decide WHEN to phone the train authorities to tell them to check about my left luggage: did they KNOW I was supposed to get off in Weser yesterday and take off my luggage which will be WAITING for me there, or will they still assume it's my compartment and the luggage will BE there when I get back on the train, or is it on a DIFFERENT train that will have to be tracked down? Long involved dream, which seemed to stop BEFORE Dennis phoned me at 10:10 am.
SEXY GUY / REPACKING / CHANGE SPILT
11/23/82: Four of us are riding in the backseat of a car that stops to pick up a sexy hitchhiker, and when he crawls into the back he doesn't want to sit next to me, on the right, or between me and the girl, on my left, or between the girl or the other guy, in the middle, but between the other guy and Dennis, on the extreme left, and that means we all have to squinch around and he ends up draped across the BACK of the car with his arms around Dennis, saying that he's gay and he doesn't want to cuddle with a woman. I look on him with desire and envy. Then we get to the field where we're going, it seems like for some sort of ballgame, but the field isn't open yet and we have to wait on the side or the road. I take the opportunity to repack my clothes: take out an old army jacket and a heavy coat and fold them into the side of a box where my main luggage is already neatly contained, wondering why I hadn't unpacked them and left them in the closet of my hotel rather than carrying them around with me. Then I'm left with another small shoulder bag which I fold and put into ANOTHER shoulder bag that I have, and so I'm left with only one LARGE carton and a smaller shoulder bag, and one of the waiting girls is sitting on the carton, so I have to ask her to move before I can refill it. When I look into one of the bags I see that my change purse has been over-full and the space is filled with pennies and nickels and some smaller numbers of larger coins (rather like my stamp-collecting distribution). Then I have to piss and wander down a dingy alley to find that the first screened-porch building IS a men's room, though I have to study hard to see whether the smudges on the nameplate aren't an erased "wo" in front of the "men." Enter and vaguely see someone pissing in an inner room meant for shitting, and I move to the right to a very low urinal, breathing through my mouth but STILL getting a noseful of the terrible smell (which I actually smell in the dream) of the piss and shit that infests this building, which now seems to be in India, though the countryside outside, nor the people on the tour, seemed to have been Indian. I'm also aware I have chewing gum in my mouth in the dream, but wake to find one earplug has fallen out and is making a chewing gum wad-like ball in one hand. First dream in about a month.
ZOO / BROKEN TYPEWRITER / TESTING
12/1/82: 1) I'm wandering through some sunny, primarily outdoor zoo in some place like Berlin, and I see some lizards spiraling upward on ziggurat-like cones inside waist-level glass cases along a tree-filled inner court. In a larger open grassy area in back, there are animals lurking on trees, and I'd just passed a basilisk looking like an ornate Chinese chimney on a tiled roof. Huge black creatures with yellow tiger eyes are crouched on bent-by-weight palm trees as if waiting to launch themselves into an attack on an unwary passerby, and there's an alligator that swoops past me from one side, and as I look around with growing apprehension, there's another that launches itself at me and I try to dodge, but I'm slower than it is and I can feel it nipping into my neck, and I wake in a start of panic. 2) I'm working on the ball-support of my typewriter, and there are two capstans (rather like the side-dams on the Mississippi dams on TV last night) that support the ball and one breaks off at a knurled top, and I'm surprised to see that part of it is just plaster, but the joining parts are smooth metal, and I wonder if I can't glue the pieces together until the repairman comes. But I'm sorry my typewriter is broken again. 3) There was a fragment between the two mentioned above that involved going to different positions or tables around a room and taking a test or a manual dexterity workout at each, and I had no idea how I was doing or what the purpose of the tests were, and it was all so vague that I didn't even remember them on taking notes about 8:30 this morning, and this last may be more INVENTED from the FLAVOR of the dream than actual memories of details FROM the dream itself.