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DREAMS FROM 1983

 

ITALY-LIKE TRAVEL / WORD AND FINGER COMPARISONS

1/11/83: After a number of mornings waking with VAGUE dreams, finally this morning there was enough definiteness to record: 1) I'm wandering around a new European town (somehow it seems like a coastal village in Spain) that has a central section modeled on some of the famous constructions of Italy: something like the campanile of Venice that's locally called something like the Torcello Tower, a large auditorium with a huge surrounding round enclosure that's called the Coliseum, and various churches modeled after various cathedrals. I have a two-sided map of the town, one a small-scale map that lists only dots for places, the other side a large-scale map with the street names "dreamily" faded into what looks merely like "a" and "b" and "c" and "d." I try to get a camera angle up at the Torcello Tower to capture the bright yellow coming through the church-like windows at its base, and then walk through a Romanesque arch to find that the town "ends" in green-scrubbed fields right at the margins of the streets, almost like a set for a movie. Then I'm back on the main street, looking for a place to eat, and I have the idea the neighborhood I'm in isn't very good for luxurious restaurants, and I'm making my way toward the beach for someplace marked so vaguely on the small-scale map that I don't really know how the well-marked streets on the large-scale map meld into the areas on the small-scale map, and I might get lost and have to go hungry. 2) Then I'm doing something like writing the computer text for grade school students, because I'm dealing with simple words and how they're spelled and pronounced and set into type to be the most clear, and to use an example, I put up (or find photos of) fingers which are uniformly plump and long, except for the fourth finger (ring finger), which is uncharacteristically short and thin, obviously taken from some OTHER and merged photographically in a trick shot. Other details were clear before, but I woke at 9:20 when the phone rang, started typing this, but then the typewriter repairman came and now it's 10:40 and a lot of the sharpness has vanished.

 

MISSING CLASSES

1/29/83: The same dream, but somehow more under control. I KNOW that it's Tuesday (as opposed to other dreams when I don't even know what DAY it is), and I KNOW that I'm supposed to go to a 10 am class, but when I check in the "schedule" section of my notebook (which I have with me; I don't have to go to my locker to get it, as usual, and THEN don't remember what building, or what floor, or what hallway, or what number, or what the lock combination is needed) and find that it's "laboratory," I know that I'm NOT caught up with the preparation for that, and then, in a more typical way, begin to wonder how far advanced the school year is and HOW far behind I am and how much time I have left to catch up in. But at least I'm calm about it, and have some information about it. Meaningful?

3\29\83: 7AM wake from a dream of a group of travelers wandering laterally across South Africa, but through a countryside that is changed from what the maps had been. They'd suffered a hard winter in their home territory and were going toward the sea, hoping the fish would supply them protein, but found that the sea-floor had risen, and now they walked through frozen forests of coral and past low cliffs that, on looking back, turned out to be built of the skeletons of enormous fish that no one had ever known about. Traveling from Anone, they found nowhere that anyone had known. They meet strangers coming the other way, whose language no one can interpret, going the OTHER way convinced that THEY were coming from land and were going toward the sea, which should have been where Anone was. One day their clocks stop, over-wound, and they can't get them started again. One night, as a coon casts sharp shadows, an unseen luminary passes quickly in the night, from horizon to horizon, sending shadows of red before and after it, showing an invisible orb of green!

3\3l\83: I'm interviewing Aaron Copeland, and he mumbles childish things and his manager says "You know he's VERY old, but don't make a fool out of him to the public---protect him." Then I try to set MY alarm clock, whose wire is tangled in many others, on the edge of my gardenia pot. There are cut ALOE leaves on the hands of the clock and one on the base of a hanging planter, which, when I remove it, turns out to be full of WATER that cascades down into an enormous dry planter that I'd FORGOTTEN to water. So the water-rush is OK, because BELOW it all is a gurgling STREAM.

4\7\83: 6:30AM: a) In foundry watching Greek sculptor firing his bronze torso with a phallus that protrudes through the grate and needs special coals and a white salt piled on top of it. He actually handles glowing briquettes.
b) I'm in NYC and there's a line of smoke from horizon to cloud and someone says with fear, "That's one of our defense rockets; THEY must be sending devices toward US. As I run, there are whirling buzzbombs, seven feet long, coasting leisurely through the air about five feet above the ground. I dash as they come, and others avoid them easily. c) Then I'm in my suite on an ocean liner as it cruises up Broadway toward port, and I debate jumping off at 96th Street before it gets to its dock at Columbia. People trying to live normally in abandoned NYC (from earthquake documentary program on TV last night?) and I feel sorry for us if NYC is bombed. Buzzbombs continue to pass, but NO one's KILLED. Colorful streets and fields and women gardening.

4\23\83: Joan Sumner wants me to go to a restaurant she knows in high East 80s or low 90s,owned by a VERY handsome man. We enter past a large papier maché but very lifelike MODEL of the owner, eating, and he looks like David Copperfield, the magician. Past the model to the REAL owner, eating, and he walcomes Joan and shakes hands with me; and he has the tip of one finger missing (like the manager of the Key Foods yesterday) and shows us to a table. As he welcomes her he says "Take a few things off" and as she passes me I say, "Take off THREE things--two shoes and coveralls--and you'll be NAKED. As I get shown to a CHAIR (they're BRINGING a table for us), she appears NAKED, to the gasps and conversation-starting of people around. One of the waitresses looks at Joan's only slightly hippy figure---and seemingly trimmed pubic hair---and says, "Not a bad figure," and Joan sarcastically says to the plumpish girl, "Seeing who's giving the compliment." A table is being lugged into position and a BUS draws up outside and the owner says "Oh, here's THAT woman with a bus full of clients. They'll have to eat OUTSIDE," and people begin setting up tables under a marquee outside. But they need room INSIDE, too, so Joan appears in a red and black bordered dress and goes to serve THEM, while MY table is carted out of the room, down a small hall, to ANOTHER empty room, up a small ramp into an ENORMOUS empty room, and as I follow waiter to the LAST table I reflect on how fast things can CHANGE in this world. This note taken at 6:35AM, and I went to bed at lAM.

5\9\83: (copied from page 70l): I go into a Carvel-type shoppe and some announcer is screaming "Sexist" because the black female clerk hands out "Master" buttons to her MALE clients and "Friend" buttons to her FEMALE clients. She laughs and says it's not important. Then I'm EAGER to jerk off in a bed in a LARGE room but people keep opening the door and looking in. Then I'M working in a shop and people keep asking the STUPIDEST questions, like the obvious-thief female who slyly asks "Could I have a job selling airlines tickets," and I reply sarcastically that she'd better try a ticket AGENCY, wondering who'd give a job to someone obviously ready to steal a ticket for HERSELF and fly away! Great dream before a flight!

5\l7\83: (copied from page 706): Wake a number of times, once after dreaming of having to do something very special at my job at IBM that demanded my Radio Shack computer. Wake about 5 and think about computer and doing good things on it and work and NY and decide I might be "ready to go back." JJ says "There's something wrong with that place" because HE dreamed about work too.

6\l\83: The dream was pretty bad, and it followed a night of coming awake and going back to sleep, as if "something were going on." After a class in which I experienced such intense personal joy that I again was "hounded" by a vision of an immense cloud-white and sky-pure horse with a mane of red-gold flames, the powerful epitome of physicality (based in no small part on a feeling-filled dinner at Noodles with David Hoch that started with a small glass of white wine and ended with anisette-filled coffee), I went to sleep at l:l5. Then, past times of waking at 6 and 7, I had a vivid dream in which a Sylvester Stallone-type and I were wandering on some kind of trip (prompted no doubt by my debate about joining David and his gay Rolfer friend on a one-week trip to Rio to visit Dorothy Hunter for the first week in July) which involved some sort of gold-link ruby-and-sapphire-inset necklace that had become a chain used in torture. It proved that he had something to do with the discomfiture of our present captors, and though I tried to influence him not to brag about the fact that we HAD the chain, he flaunted it until our captors realized that he WAS the cause of some of their discomfort, and they resolved to punish him, but the pain he was suffering and their delight in his torture grew so much that they stripped off his pants and began lashing his genitals with the cutting edges of the golden chain. He began to scream and plead for mercy, but that seemed to goad his torturers to flay him even harder. The scene began to be played out in silhouette and, far from being sexual in that I might enjoy the sight of his body, I so cringed at the thought of his pain---and the certainty that his torture was to the death and I didn't want to be there to witness it---that I BEGAN TO CONTROL THE DREAM and knew that it would be better if I simply fainted, and somehow knew that I HAD CONTROL OF FAINTING, both in my dream and out of it. I woke without that sweaty feeling I get when I've had the very worst of dreams, and the IMPORT of what I had done began to seep through to me: I had WILLED ABSENCE from a scene, WILLED NONEXPERIENCE of a painful sequence of events, which circumstance with only a tiny bit of expansion became the possibility of WILLING DEATH when life got too unpleasant! I lay thinking about it, feeling the pleasure of it; remembering class last night when I thought of myself as holding ill-will FOR EVERY LIFE (in my own personal train of lives) BUT MY HERE-NOW ONE---and here-now I was actually facing the possibility of TERMINATING a here-now experience (by fainting, by withdrawing voluntarily my perception of it). I lay in wonder, and through my mind began to fall crystal-drops of music, seemingly random, then slowly taking the pattern of the limpid notes of Pachabel's "Canon." La....La....La....La... ..and again, as in class last night, a feeling of intense personal joy began to fill and amaze me: a sense of work accomplished and financial benefits reaped; a sense of pleasures to come: movies, museums, plays, friends, travel, writing, reading.

6\23\83: Large group of people are trying to enter the Guinness Book of Records for creating the largest "Hat Sheet," and when I see hundreds of black bowlers rolling around I wonder if they have to start from scratch, but then I figure that the sheet must have HOLES in it and the difficult part is to get the sheet LARGER than any other and train enough people to move in UNISON.

7\9\83: 8AM: I'm in Miamey, on map, in Africa(?) in tent, and someone suggests ARMY will CROSS where my tent is. As I see it, I'm NOT in the way, per map, expecting lone horsewoman from ll o'clock. But I turn and the GATE has been pulled back, and a TROOP of distant horsemen seem advancing from 6 o'clock! I pull up tent pegs and gather belongings and try to stuff them into a little black balloon zippered case, too small. As they pound closer, I wake as I KNOW I can drag remains to 3 o'clock and get out of the way.

7\29\83: SPRB dream: on Wednesday, I was Iago in a Shakespeare "Othello" in a scene with his wife (Amelia?). I didn't know my lines and, rather in the manner of "An Actor's Nightmare," she was trying to coach or coax my lines out of me by reading HER lines again and again. On Thursday I was with a tour that went into a pizza shop and I had to buy the pizzas, debating whether to get three super specials with everything or two specials and a regular to finish easily if we were too full. As a second dream on Thursday I'd rented a room but was surprised to find a woman, then her husband, then their twelve CHILDREN already in the place. I tried talking to the rental agent, but the best he seemed to offer was that I SHARE it with them, but I wanted to get them OUT. The B was this morning, but I forget---B for Book, I think?

8\25\83: Looking out the window of a high-rise on Fifth or Park Avenue and see the enormous tree outside being blown in a wind so strongly that it uproots and flies upward through the air. Three of us inside look outside with fearful foreboding. Then we're driving in a car along an undeveloped road near the ocean, where I seem to know we have some property, and we see that many trees are blown over, exposing white-ended root systems that could be either some sort of killing mold or a thin coating of frost. There's some sort of idea of "snow in August!", possibly instigated by Mom's saying it was l07S in Augusta, Georgia, and only 34S in Yellowstone National Park yesterday. Again there's a heavy feeling of foreboding: could this be the beginning of the end?

9\8\83: l) Kiss a LOVELY thin-lipped bearded fellow who's off to work, but he hints he MAY be back in about an hour. Dally with a cute but VERY sexy kid who's throwing himself at me in the meantime. 2) Visit an English specialty shop and I'm too SHY to ask the price of deviled eggs, or a slice of capicoto(?) meat, or the LOVELY desserts. Can we get a TASTE? Discounts on OLD goods? Then LOTS of remorse in that they're not STUPID questions and I STILL have troubles mustering up the courage to ask them.

9\ll\83: Dennis and I are painting the inside of a very wide warehouse. We see a guy with a roller, but we're using only tiny brushes! He's working on the ceiling, but we're filling wall-frames, and frame-nails keep pricking at me. I get told I should take vitamins F, E, L, and N.

9\l2\83: I'm finishing a restaurant meal, but payment chits for various bottles of wine are still on my ticket-roll, so I have to pay for them. But I have no credit card, and I'm searching through the trunk of my car for it, but finally decide I have enough cash that I can pay for it THAT way.

9\23\83: I'm attending a movie with Barbara Ellmaker, but each time we walk toward an empty seat there's someone saving it, caps or coats left on it to reserve it, or we move out of it to get a better one. At one point she has three or four children on her lap. The movie begins early and we're missing part of it, too. Then without transition I'm in the back of a car with Barry Gordon driving and his wife fretting that we're going to be late (this is probably based on my worries about driving to Hemlock Hall next week), and he drives forcefully into multiple lanes of traffic. I unify with him, glad that he's using the energies, and the people we're going to see in New Jersey (who seem to be connected with Lloyd Moore) are using the energies, so it'll be a good weekend. There's also something about a map that's a mystery-clue because a "20" that's intended to be a street-number on lower 6th Avenue is connected to another street-name to form a clue (this probably comes from reading how dots and pearls change positions in stamps from the Scott catalog yesterday).

9\27\83: I'm watching the making of a movie or TV special in which Jack Lemmon is demonstrating the use of artificial oil (the plot involves some woman trapped in a submarine while it fills with oil and she has to descend a spiral staircase into it), and there's a top-view of pigments being poured into a basic grayish substance, and I "can see" that there's blue and red and yellow and silver mixed into the coloring of the on-screen oil, and he puts in a stick to stir it, and to prove its harmlessness, he then takes the dripping stick straight out of the mixture and licks it messily, then starts to explain the whole process to the camera as I wake up.

10\22\83: INCREDIBLE series of "three" dreams in extraordinary details.
l) I'm working and a boy comes up to me with a wet-bottomed bundle, saying "Hold this for a second," and it's a pissed-up KID (read about diaper advertising in New York Magazine yesterday?)! I absolutely REFUSE, pushing the kid back at him, which is difficult since he's DETERMINED that I'm going to HOLD him. He somehow manages to get rid of the kid on someone else, and some woman comes up to me and asks how I could refuse to hold the kid for a MINUTE, and I say "It's not MY kid, I have NO responsibility for it, and I can REFUSE to hold it for even a SECOND if I want to." She accuses me of having no heart, and I say it's up to the MOTHER. She asks if I can't help for a SECOND, and I say "Not if I don't WANT to," and proceed to say that the mother can get someone ELSE to help, or can GET RID of the kid, or shouldn't have had the kid in the FIRST place. The woman departs in a huff into a tiny hallway apartment, and I see that there are FOUR of these tiny apartments (rather like the men going into telephone-booth-like cubicles in the awful Italian sci-fi movie I watched a few minutes of last night) in the entranceway of this rather grand apartment building I seem to be living in: each behind elaborately paneled dark oak doors with dark-brass fittings, but the four doors are SO close together that the apartments must be VERY small (like Joe's $600 house on Milos?), just one room in front and maybe a tiny windowless bedroom in back, and I can hear the sound of her clicking on the floor lamp through the stucco walls, and I figure they must just be CARDBOARD, but the entranceway would be quiet since there's a courtyard (like James Manning's?) around the doorway and there are no loud street noises to put up with. INCREDIBLY detailed entranceway doors!
2) A female teacher is collecting "projects" in a class I've been attending, and I'm describing some elaborate process on the blackboard but can't find my notes for the exact numbers: there's a formula that involves some process that can be approximated as 2 to the x = 2 to the square root of two. I KNOW that that's what the formula is, which is the solution to the problem, so I CAN write that on the board, but I can't remember what the square root of two IS, so I'm arguing that I've SOLVED the problem, I just can't find the slip of paper (it's written on the back of an index-card torn into pieces, and I just can't find the right piece) that has the numerical value of the square root of 2 written on it. And is it 2.4l6? Or l.l4l6? Or l.4l6? Somehow the class disappears and I'm sitting in my seat and manage to find a set of four small connected tags that model some sort of nuclear building-model, and hand THAT to her, and she laughs ironically and implies this is from MONTHS ago, where are all the OTHERS? I describe a few that I've turned in, make excuses for a few more, say I've just put one on the board and have just GIVEN her one, and somehow I get the idea she isn't quite rational and has to be humored (like Mom?), and I'm trying to talk to her logically when without transition
3) she turns into a MAN who's sitting on my bed as I explain things to her, and I notice that he's sweating, maybe sick, but he leans toward me, nuzzling me gently under the chin with his damp, thin, blond hair, and I figure he's just lovesick for me, and I caress him gently, erect so that he knows I like him, and he tries to push himself into being fucked by me and I decline, and at the same movement show I don't want to be fucked, pulling him around to a head-to-head embrace, and he pulls back with a teacher-like exasperation and says "Don't tell me now you don't want to fuck or be fucked!?" I try to gently put him off; I DO like him in bed, but not that way. Suddenly there's a woman somewhat like Joan Sumner's friend (Alison?) who's brought her cafeteria tray into bed with her and us, matter-of-factly eating, and he becomes some kind of teacher-inquisitor again, suggesting ways she should do things, and I'm vaguely aware of the incongruity of his trying to counsel her while we're wrapped in sweaty blankets. Wake amazed at the details at 8:45AM, having gotten to bed at 2:45AM, and debate writing this out on cards, but figure it's easier to compute it all down. And I'm worried about being SICK: strange taste (lead acetate from the Grecian Formula) in my mouth, funny body-tingles, and vague nausea which I associate as being one of the indications for AIDS, and I MUST call the doctor for an appointment and do things OTHER than STAMPS for awhile! Finish typing this at 9:l5, glad to have gotten SOMETHING accomplished, anyway.

10\3l\83: I'm checking out of some German hotel and for some reason deserve a refund of 53 marks. The blond boy behind the service desk shuffles through papers, signs me out of my room, cautions that I have to be on the tour bus at 8:30, asks if I've packed my clothes from the room, and tries to dismiss me before I observe rather testily that he still hasn't given me my 53 marks. His father joins him behind the desk, seemingly in collusion with him, and then I get a bunch of papers and certificates, but when I ruffle through them they're tickets for future tours, brochures of information about the next phase of the trip, advertisements, and even a credit card of some kind. I rather shout for the 53 marks, and the boy looks flustered, as if he's been discovered cheating, and rustles around more frantically behind the desk, and I'm convinced that he's pulling a fast one. I become aware that I have a handful of coins, and when I FIRST look at them I fear I'd been GIVEN the 53 marks and didn't even realize it, but then I look at the coins more closely: there MIGHT be a clump of 5 gold-colored 10-mark coins, but as I separate them the ones in the middle look to be a LARGER clump of silver 5-mark coins, but there just couldn't be TEN of them, and one of the larger coins is only marked 5.4 marks, and there's a square silver piece that I turn over and THINK says l2 marks, but I look at another piece that's smaller and turn back to the square silver piece and it turns into silver-colored and backed PLASTIC and it's a credit at some shop for 12 marks. The boy's suddenly gone and I'm desperate to pack, thinking the "small" amount of money's not worth the concern, so I'm back to my room after looking at my watch, first fearing it's 20 to ll, and then realizing it's just about 5 minutes to 8, so I should have time to pack and get to the bus. Into the room and put my hands to my head and go "EEEEEE" in hugest frustration, not knowing where to start packing, and tear open a closet door (or what I though was a closet, that turns into a vaguely unfamiliar highboy, but then we'd only been there one night and had been to MANY similar hotels already, so I could easily have been mistaken, and vaguely see my jacket and clothes and pants hanging on jumbled hangers, and I can just rip them all down and pack them into the cardboard box I have for my things. Then into another cabinet and gradually realize that these are not MY things: they belong to someone who's checked into the room for the NEXT stay! I go back to the highboy and find they're NOT my clothes, and I look at some other places and see strange new sanitary utensils in the bathroom cabinet, and "EEEE" in frustration again, hoping against hope that Dennis has packed my stuff and taken it out to the bus for me. Out of the room, fearing suddenly I have the WRONG one, and open the next likely door to see two women settling in. Apologize and look down the hall: none of these could have been mine, and down to the next hall and see that it's close to the street and couldn't have been mine either. Stand while bellboys go past with other bags and begin to try to rationalize that I've even lost my CLOTHES, that's not too bad, and it begins to dawn on me that I'm DREAMING, and wake with a rather sweaty start, and wonder if the feelings can't be transferred to LIFE: that I DO have some terrible disease and will die soon, and should I look at this LIFE as merely a stop on a longer trip, give up this one as completed for better or worse, and just LEAVE (die) and get on with the next part of the larger experience, which tends to be forgotten as on a trip where ONE city seems "all there is" and is fully enjoyed and appreciated, but then is quickly exhausted (though I recall NOW my tendency to like the towns that I want to return to, "that I could do more in," and this is a LIFE "that I could do more in," but it'll be better for learning and for experience if I just moved peacefully on to the next one, even if I have to cut my losses in this one and relatively dismiss it as "only a dream." I guess I'll report this in class tonight to see what response I get.

11\3\83: A remembered fragment at the beginning has me going up to Dennis's new apartment in an elevator shaped like the lower half of an hourglass, barred like a portable prison, that's quickly SLUNG up the side of the building so that the whole car swoops up like an amusement park ride. In the dream proper, I get into the lobby as the elevator to my left is just closing its door, and the fellow in the car to the right holds the door for me. But when the car starts going, it doesn't go UP but to my right as I stand in the car facing the front, and I see we're passing along a mezzanine looking down over a suburban-type sell-everything department store, and I wonder if there aren't two separate sections to Dennis's building and I'm going to the wrong one. We circle the building counterclockwise to a very modernistic section in the back, and THEN transfer to the elevator that swings up like a cage on the outside of the building. I ask a girl if she knows where the Southers apartment is, and she asks if I've shown my card, and I say no. I think she may be gently trying to put the make on me, and when we get into the lobby the place is so RICH I'm sure Dennis isn't living here. She says I should look at the names down this corridor, and I get to a shop described by her as being somehow on consignment to Dennis, and it displays elaborate tapestries and frescos in the hall (a woman's voice from the tiny office behind me asks "May I help you?" but she doesn't come out), and there's a handwritten note from Dennis inviting buyer's to a buffet at his apartment, and I'm amazed at the directions his various careers take.

12\l2\83: 3 dreams: Baryshnikov, snow-fall, washing hair in hotel.
l) I'm sitting DIRECTLY ABOVE Baryshnikov, who's in something like the Big Apple Circus in an act that has people on his shoulders as he bounces across a tightrope on a pogo stick! He bounces from one end to the other, and I'm so pleased I'm right above him because I can see how CENTERED he has to be to make the act work. The audience is overjoyed, awed, and applauding. He goes back and forth about for times, then the lights are dimmed and he jumps OFF the rope and as the bottom of the pogo stick hits the hard floor there's a small flash of white light, almost like a large cap exploding in a bizarre cap-pistol, and THIS repeats itself as he bounces OVER the tightrope as over a rigid JUMPROPE. But on one pass he catches an elbow or shoulder on the knot of a LOWER tightrope, which causes him to lose his balance and he falls OFF his stick onto the floor, where he tries to roll over but starts SPEAKING in a low voice, as if he'd been BRAIN-DAMAGED: trivial pitiful things like "Now I have to take my shirt off; what will I have for breakfast? Is it raining out?" A spotlight comes on him but no one comes to HELP him. This goes on a long time, a constant stream of words from his lips, and he rolls about gently, sexy naked torso above black tights, eyes closed, and finally a nun comes into the spotlight to help him, and when the house-lights come on, many nuns, in habits, have prostrated themselves on the ground around him: an arresting sight as people start quietly to file out of the tent, and I pan around at an altitude as if I'm directing a motion-picture camera, rather than just being a PERSON.
2) Fragment of riding in a car full of tourists, and a light rain turns into a heavy SNOW, so heavy at times that the near horizon is just a MASS of white, and all of us in the car exclaim about the HEAVINESS of the snow.
3) I'm staying in some quaint hotel, probably in Germany because of the "painted" quality of the public washroom I'm in. I'm alone at first, pushing through ropes (again) of hanging towels to get to a tiny sink against the wall, and I'm washing my face and then for some reason I start washing my hair, soaping it up easily and rinsing the first time as if I'd had LITTLE soap and LITTLE, SHORT hair, but then people start coming in, using other towels, and I notice there's a bathtub to the lower left which is being filled with water in a tiny-town setting, made for tots to take baths in, and there's an even smaller sink to the right where a kid is washing his hands, and a family comes in and takes over the sink I was using, and now in my second washing my hair is suddenly VERY soapy and VERY long, and I'm wondering how I'll get rid of all this SOAP without getting all the dregs into everyone else's wash-water. Odd.

12\l3\83: I'm looking at my arm, and a small white growth produces HYPHAE, like a mushroom-root, and sprouts like a fungus to other places on my arm, which in turn sprout. I look closely at one point near my elbow which, like a Dali painting, has a HOLE in it, and it grows ACROSS the hole as a method of working its way up my arm (toward my brain? I now wonder). In the semi-sleep before I wake, I think of warning people about it by incorporating the fungus with ink printing on paper, so that they can watch the hyphae sprout from the very ink on the paper on which the warning is printed. AIDS worries?

12\20\83: (Note found only AFTER typing LATER ones, giving rise to COMPUTER CHRONICLE thoughts and NOTEBOOK musings on l2/30) A) Dream of johns: l) rotting underwater, so that when I step on the edge, it squishes down allowing brownish foul-smelling water to seep UP, 2) clogged, so that when I try to flush nothing happens, and I obviously can't ADD to the troubles, and 3) into a cleaner area where signs make clear they're for wheelchair cases ONLY, and I have to debate USING them: is there a penalty if you're CAUGHT?
B) Dream of class in a school where I'm suddenly YEARBOOK EDITOR and think of catching dream-notes up to date and worry about SCHEDULING everything.

12\27\83: There's been a girl fixing or cleaning things in my apartment, but when I look around, she's gone. Then I hear someone on the stairs above, who might be Mrs. Watson, but when I look out, it's the girl saying she's been cleaning the MAN'S apartment up there, whom I have the idea is some sort of Arab, and she smirks as she says she was refilling a carafe in the refrigerator that she THOUGHT had been filled with water and it was really filled with alcohol! Just a fragment, but I thought it worthy of transcribing.

12\30\83: First the circumstances: I hadn't liked the Club (see Club page), thinking "the Higher" might be trying to tell me something, and when I go to bed I quite firmly think "I'd like to have a DREAM that indicates what's what. Wake about 8:40, rather sad to remember no trace of any dream. But then doze back off and have a VIVID dream that's quite disturbing, in or out of circumstance: I'm talking long-distance on the telephone, somehow about an index even though I'm at l22l Dietz, when there's a bunch of kids on the porch. I go to see what's what (hm, look at 4 lines back!) and these kids, all talking confusedly together, IMPLY rather than SAY that they have a school project that calls for them to check data they have against (now even THIS seems connected) interviews of the actual households. They show me some blue hectographed forms saying 5 people live here, and I say "Actually, even I don't live here, I'm just visiting; really only my mother and sister live here." So they scratch out the number on their sheet, but meanwhile kids have INVADED the living room, rooting into cabinets, looking on shelves, moving furniture around. I HAD noted that they'd moved in a dolly holding little appliances below and carrying a small TV set and something like a stereo tuner piled on top of it, stuff for their interview, the implication was; but now when they're moving it OUT I notice that a LARGE TV that had been sitting in the corner of the living room was GONE, and I was QUITE sure one of the kids had sneaked it out when I was looking at their "data sheet." I started getting angry, the kids started shouting and running out the door, and I finally I was left with only the older, female "interviewer" whom I held firmly by a wrist while with the other hand I fumbled with the phone (which is now inexplicably in the living room rather than in the adjoining dining room, and it was NOT as if I'd been talking on the phone) to dial 911. She got uglier and uglier, saying I wouldn't be able to pin anything on her, trying to twist away from my grasp, and I shouted some obscenity at her in rage and KICKED HER IN THE CROTCH, and I was amazed to find such hate-kill storming through my mind that I wondered how I could kill her and plead justifiable homicide or self-defense, and then settled on throwing her against the wall to fracture her skull or break her back over the arm of the sofa and declare that "it was all an accident." The VIVIDNESS of the dream and the INTENSITY of my final thoughts were enormous!!