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DREAMS FROM 1984

 

2\2\84: Wake at 6:20 and write this note: I'm a civilian researcher for the government in a university, and am sent to Seattle to work for a week on a project. When I return "home" (rather like California) I see three suitcases and contents spread on a set of blankets on the grass of the campus and "recognize" Jean-Jacques' type of SHIRT (collarless, old-fashioned they are). I look, not wanting to pry, and see the top of a letter to "Mr. and Mrs. Villey" and know it's to his parents. I go to the cafeteria to meet the head of the project (whom I rather like) and ask him about JJ, and he says JJ's HERE for a time. I'm happy, putting a VERY warm hand on his shoulder, and he gives me a top secret letter to explain the situation to me, saying I'll be seeing JJ soon. Then I go across campus to eat, passing young women students that I mentally criticize for dressing like whores, with straw-colored silk dresses and pointy-toenail feet slipping out of tiny high-heeled backless silk pumps.

2\3\84: (Typed at 7:10AM) (and typing the PREVIOUS dream after finishing THIS transcription recalls to mind an EARLIER, UGLIER fragment: I'm sitting along the wall in a crowded movie house, quite tatty, when people (mostly men) along the wall where I'm sitting begin shuffling their feet back and forth. I ask the fellow next to me (there's a vacant seat between, so the place isn't PACKED----rather like a porno house) why they're shuffling, and he says casually "To chase away the rats." I move my feet slightly and become aware of a warm furry weight on my right foot-top, and lift it to realize in horror that there's a HUGE rat wrapped around my ankle. I don't really try to shake my foot so much as to try to PULL the creature off, but it doesn't want to COME off, and I tug at the fleshy fur, fearing the nip of awful disease- ridden teeth biting into me, and I tug so DESPERATELY that I think I feel the bite of teeth, then think "No, I'm doing this the wrong way: the rat is obviously frightened, so what I should do is calmly walk out into the aisle and THEN let him run for cover on his OWN, without biting me. And time rather "runs backward" so that I can try that, and I start shaking my foot, but the dream stops when the unreality asserts itself.) I'm in the lobby of an office building and ring for an elevator, and when the doors open, suddenly there's a BLIND woman and her companion inside, waiting to go up. The inside of the car has just been painted, and various supplies and cartons and cans and ladders are placed against the walls of the car, and I say "Oh, it's a maintenance car," but the blind woman says, "Well, anyway, it works," and seems intent on getting where she's going with THIS car. I get out my elevator keys and turn the controls for her to stop at 15 and me to stop at 18, a bit concerned because the control panel had just been freshly painted and there were still patches of wet light gray paint pooled about some of the locks, and the door closes and we start up: others who had wanted to ascend looked dubiously at the car and waited for another. We rise jerkily and slowly, and I try not to be afraid, but it seems like we're going to stop one floor OFF, and somehow I connect the car stopping at one floor lower (I figure we can always use the stairs for the one floor, if indeed there ARE stairs that are usable) with the precession of the number of the day of the week through a month: if the elevator hadn't intended being used this month, and floor 18 was set for a TUESDAY on LAST month, it might be WEDNESDAY this month, and so it would stop at 17. Then, without a transition, I'm working at a desk in a large office when I become aware that it's 12:45 and the lights have been turned out: everyone in the office is either at LUNCH or chatting with a friend or napping at HER desk---so why am I working? Someone raises her head sleepily and looks around, and I wonder idly how they can expect EVERYONE to eat lunch at the SAME time. I move away from my desk for a moment and come back to find a VERY unpleasant woman having taken over my spot. I wait around, angry, until she gets up from her chair, and then I sit in it, saying that's what she did to ME. She smiles grimly with yellow-caked teeth and says "You'd better get up fast, you wouldn't want to incorporate any of my SENSE (and she means SMELL, I know, because there's a menstrual reek about the seat of the chair; I only hope that sitting there a TINY amount of time won't communicate the odor)." I say "How do you keep a seat around here?" and they (there's a little antagonistic audience by now, of mean little male and female office help) respond "By spreading your stuff around." I respond triumphantly that I HAD put down my dictionary, and where IS it? A nasty young man picks up a ratty black-bound 200-page book and says "Here it is." I twist it around to the cover and say "This is the Webster Jolly Country Dictionary; mine was Webster's COLLEGIATE," thinking of my beige- bound volume from home. There's a pause, and I wake up.

3/3/84: I'm with a group of somewhat older people (Actualism staff on human?) in a vacation-type villa, all very civilized and yet Fellini-like: eating meals, chatting, being very TOLERANT of each other yet very TRADITION-bound in dress and manners. I retrieve my shorts from a plastic bag under the sofa to "dress" for dinner. Then I'm given a packet of souvenirs from World War II, and a corner of the plastic is open and there are a few scraps for me, including a corner of a US dollar bill crowned by a tissue-paper shawl looking like the image of the slightly turned head of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and another green blob and the lower left blob looking like like the head of the Infant Christ. When I checked it, however, there was no similarity at all. It was hard for me to sleep (till 2), because of field? And Michael was NOT in the TV living room (unless he was at the desk) at 12:50 when I went for a glass of water, and I fantasize that he could have been in the bedroom with Rosanne.

3/6/84: I'm somehow associated with a movie, if only watching previews of it, about a painter who's a combination of Matisse (for colors) and Gauguin (for South Seas settings), and the actresses on the screen have been montaged with paintings of the real-life women they've been made-up and dressed to resemble. Then I'm observing the filming of a very important series of commercials (for AT&T?) with a Mr. Ordinary who's rather homely (like Randy Quaid "playing" Karl Malden in Sunday's "Streetcar Named Desire"), but he's very defensive about his homeliness, saying that it's going to earn him hundreds of thousands of dollars during the five years of the run of the commercial (providing some technological breakthrough doesn't render them obsolete before the end of that period), and for this ONE day's work, he won't have to work again for the rest of his life, and he can still support his wife and two children. Transcribed notes directly into computer at 9:45AM.

3/7/84: I was sitting in (an Italian?) theatre, in the front center of the orchestra, and the stage was enormously DEEP on which they were portraying an EARTHQUAKE which shook the stage and made enormous slabs of stone peel from the roof and fall convincingly onto the stage floor. This effect was repeated a few times, and I almost got the idea that I was looking at an ingeniously projected scene from a MODEL of a stage. After a few more "looks" at the masterful presentation of earthquake destruction on a stage, I found myself in the front row of a BALCONY, looking into a VERY narrow frame around the stage, which was elaborately set with rows of people in armor, rather like for a Renaissance festival presentation, and I asked a few other of my friends in the balcony to come forward next to me so they could also look through the VERY narrow frame, maybe a square foot, so that we had to essentially lie next to each other to permit our heads to be so close together and so far forward as to be able to see through the narrow frame, and as we lay contentedly there, suddenly the balcony became a SLAB which ZOOMED up and around and away from the frame and the stage, so quickly that our stomachs were left behind, and we gasped at the "stage effect" as the theatre itself receded into the distance below us. Woke at almost exactly 8AM, but too busy to note this til 2:l0 AM!!

3/30/84: A whole SERIES of dreams about JAPAN: 1) First I was between one place and another and was staying (possibly with a friend of Paul McLean's?) in a house where I wasn't quite sure of the customs, but some woman that I couldn't remember was either the hostess, a member of the family, or a maid, helped me tear up the bedding and rearrange a rather tatty under-sheet beneath a scratchy blanket that was too narrow beneath a puffy futon on the bed I was sleeping on. Then when I looked out the window of the apartment onto an enormous public park, I was amazed to see rows of Japanese militia, in green uniforms and red shoulder rank-insignia, alongside each ceremonial walk and waterway and lily pond, interspersed with clusters of similarly-dressed younger boy-scout types, all of whom, she told me, were maintaining the beauty of the parks for the tourists AND the city-dwellers. 2) Then I was in a theater, again having put together a too-busy day, and I was supposed to meet someone there on the left side-section of the front row who didn't show up, but I was taking a shower anyway, marveling at the cleverness and portability of the shower-head, and how, though a LITTLE bit of water splashed onto the person across the aisle, everything was so neat and self-contained. When I was finishing up and drying myself, I heard a voice behind me, and there was the fellow I was supposed to meet, and behind HIM was ANOTHER person who was to have joined us. Then an usher came past to charge me for the use of the shower: I asked how much, fearing it was going to be exorbitant, but he said "75 cents" and I knew that was quite reasonably, lamely explaining that I didn't like to take one TOO often, but was going to have a busy evening so I wanted to be CLEAN for it, at the side of my mind worrying slightly about the purity of the water, yet I knew that the Japanese were so meticulous when it came to their cleanliness and the services for tourists that I had nothing to worry about. Then they made it clear I could order FOOD, too, and I studied a menu with life-like representations of the food and serving dishes, and felt comfortable with using all their services. 3) Then I was walking in some sort of amusement park, but I'd left my key-chain behind, and someone found it and THREW it over to my left. I didn't feel convinced they were MY keys, so I didn't look for them immediately, but then I saw some other tourist pick them up, so I went over to him and tried to grab them out of his hand, which was loaded with a set of HIS keys. He was suspicious of me, but I glimpsed that my name was taped onto one of the keys, so I said I could show him my identification with my name on it, and then the day darkened into brightly-lighted night and he turned intimately to me with a large smile and said "How about working in Cosmic Mother?" and I felt completely joyful that he KNEW me from ACTUALISM, so I'd get the keys back AND have a companion in my travels, and I HUGGED him, pleased to feel a BROAD back with a DEEP cleft between his back-slab muscles, and I was OVERWHELMED with joy. 4) Finally, I was in a large complicated room, possibly in Paul's apartment, and someone ELSE I was visiting in the city was in another room, saying that someone NEW was coming over to join us, and at that moment Alice Duskey came through the door, greeting me with her usual "Oh, I know where everything and everyone is" attitude, saying she could sleep in the same room by curling up on a sofa-chair, saying "I'll just grab some shuteye here without disturbing anyone else," and I retorted that the apartment was large enough that she could find a BED for herself in one of the other rooms, and just now realize that the dreams had now come full circle on the theme of BEDS in Japan!

4/8/84: Walking through big department store and winter guy in brown fur coat and HUGE dreadknots walks in front of furred Barbara Lea, and someone says "Well, he just got back from a party, you don't have to WALK with him." I go under bleachers set up for advertising cheerleaders and it tips forward and FALLS, and I just get out from under in time to prevent being hurt.

4/15/84: I'd been taken prisoner by real SADISTS: all I could do was SUFFER all that they did to me. When I FINALLY escaped, I was left with an underarm-area that had been RIPPED OUT (just out of idle evil curiosity and desire to torture) and lighter flesh had been TRANSPLANTED, even though it had the overall texture of a ripply-hairy young Italian's abdominal area, and it was VERY lumpy, lighter in color, and just DIDN'T FIT. I'm taking a shower and looking at it in the mirror, and suddenly my sorrow for myself and my horrible experience bursts forth in heart-rending body-shaking sobs, and I wake with SUCH a residue of sadness that I feel I MUST be connecting with some PAST sorrow that's been deeply suppressed, but it feels GOOD to get down toward it.

4/17/84: I'm walking toward Akron U from a "different angle" and figure how to get to the gym past "the playing field which is a lot like the corner of Garfield High School." I have my shoulder bag, carrying a few items in it, and get to a room where I shove it under the bed, but the contents spill, so that when I go to pick it up, I have to crawl under the bed and sort through a new pair of roof-prism binoculars that I know aren't mine (but wouldn't mind taking) and plastic parts of what seem to be a gun, which I ALSO know I didn't have; it seems that I just had three items in my shoulder bag---at least from what's left under the bed. I get to the "baths" part and find lots of people "changing for the swimming pool" in a moldering area, and when I push through them to "go to the john" I find the stalls jammed with kids waiting for sex. Some are crawling under the side partitions to get to their friends, and I push one out, saying I want to piss (as an excuse for coming there at all). He's only about 9, and he complains, but I shut the door and then debate how to leave. Someone who looks like one of my fellow-lieutenants from Summer Camp (was it Siegel?) sneers when I ask if they RENT room-locks "You have to bring your own, and I know you don't belong here, so just GET OUT." ALL the room-doors are locked with safety-hasps at the bottoms, and I figure it must be worries about AIDS that fouled everything up. I don't really want to stay, since because everything takes place behind locked doors I have no chance to WATCH, as I so liked to do before. Now no one's VISIBLE. I'd gotten there at 10:30, and now it's 11:30, so I feel I can go home and Mom won't think I wasn't able to get in, but when I get outdoors it's raining VERY hard, and there are loads of (straight) people sitting around at a glass-roofed patio-dining room, but someone leaves in front of me and I figure I can sit there and watch people pass by until it stops raining. I recalled back that I probably HADN'T brought my tan folding umbrella with me, so even though it's not in my shoulder bag, I probably DIDN'T leave it in the mess under the bed. And NOW make the connection (like Ayla's dream of screaming in terror of a cat raking her leg after the earthquake she's suppressed) that "under MY bed" was an area of terror for me: Mom might look and find porno-drawings, and that AWFUL time she found all the "stains from spitting out when I had a cold" in the cold-air register at the side of the bed that I used to masturbate into. Could this be one of the "breakthroughs" I'm about to make in Actualism through Perceptual?

4/20/84: Pictures at Thalia: new schedule is from the bottom up, like the numbers on the diskette slots I read about last night: 12 3 6 9; I've seen the one at 3, and there's horror and bombing in 4 movies at 9. One movie is "Airplane", and there are models of ships and logs on a river that COINCIDE with movie preview-clips. Talk about "dim images" and I say, or mumble, "Tell me where to sit." On the subway home, I transfer at City Hall, and the but doors open on the STREET side as cars roar past and guy gets off. Buzzer wakes.

4/22/84: Cartoonist asks "experts" for critique. I THINK she draws May Jenning Junius too HEAVILY and SOLIDLY: a candle SHE draws T*H*I*C*K should be THIN. And there should be more DIFFERENTIATION between May and JUNE, which I presume is part of her JOKE. I SAY "Let me hear what others say to teach me technical terms, and then I'll go LAST. I IMPLY "Others will MISS what's "wrong" and my LAST critique will be more POINTED and the BEST one. Lots of Japanese kids come in to get advice TOO, and elders LAUGH at their NUMEROUSNESS. 1) "Laugh at numerousness" and not "laugh at numbers" in that NOT "Ha ha, those 50 Japanese kids are funny" but THAT "Ha ha, there are FIFTY of them." 2) she writes my name Zol ner zak, and her pen goes so FAST that it appears to be INSTANTLY over each triad: her pen-tip is a STAR that EXPLODES with "zak" in an INSTANT.

5/1/84: I'm visiting at Peter Ream's, and there are a lot of us who are trying to bathe and shower in the morning. The bathroom STARTS OUT quite elegant: we gather around the marble-lined hot tub, wondering how long it'll take to fill the large pink cavity, but then I see some showers around the side, and I think that'll be quicker. Sort through my things to make sure I have soap, shampoo, and fresh underwear, but as I'm about to use the nicest shower, Peter comes along with a young friend and says that HE should use this shower. It's getting later and finally Peter takes me into a dark wooden closet where there's another shower head, and he says "Just trace the pipes to find the faucets," and I demand that HE show me, since I've never showered there, and he gets into his pissy mood and fumbles along the pipes, which meld with the numerous slats and dusty beams along ceiling and walls, annoyed because I won't leave him alone and because HE can't find the faucets. Then he leads me out to a yard where there are cooks and dozens of people eating breakfast, and demands of the staff (rather like the women at St. Mary's cafeteria) "Can Bob shower?" Before they can answer, I protest, "What does that MEAN?? Are you asking if there's enough HOT WATER for my shower? Is there enough TIME for my shower? Do they need the WATER for cooking? Do I have their PERMISSION to do something?" I sense the people are angry with ME, rather than with PETER, who's making my morning so miserable, and I feel lousy. Without transition, I "sense" that everyone's about to leave, so I forget the shower and scout around for some food, seeing a hand of bananas over a small fire in a brazier, thinking, "I guess they'll be baked bananas, but the skins are so BLACK from the direct flames," and pull them out. But somehow they turn into a stack of pancakes on burnt-out ashes, and on top is a branch of thorns. When I lift the thorn-stem, on which the few pancakes are impaled, I find the top of the pancake is covered with large black ants, attracted by whatever honey or syrup had been poured on in the cooking, and the bottom is covered with sand or ash from the brazier. I take off the (now)-single pancake, the ants fall off, and it feels more like a tiny CUSHION than a pancake as I try to brush the sand off the velvet-like nap of the bottom of the pancake, wondering if the ash is DIRTY or if the texture is coarse enough to CRUNCH in my teeth as I eat it, and I wake with a sense of being frustrated, angry, and hated without cause. Dreary dream, possibly connected with the "rage" that everyone seems to be seeing in my Actualism processing lately. Susan's book "The Watcher" seems "of the same mood" of the dream: mystifying, ugly, less-than-human, and unsatisfactory.

5/10/84: I'm working for IBM (because I was trying to PROGRAM last night, and felt the same frustration I'd felt at IBM when things didn't work out immediately?) and have to leave my desk, but I have no call-forwarding on my phone, and there's no secretary that has my number on her call-director, so I have to tell someone rather like Ellen Leichtman that I'll be on extension so-and-so. There're random phones ringing, only once, around the office, and I can tell how frustrating it is to try to answer them. When I get to the office of the fellows who are working for me, I find what their problem is: they've been taking input from three books for something like an index, and they'd not been told to prefix the page-numbers with some sort of book indicator: how could the reader tell if page 45 was in book 1, 2, or 3? At first I tried to bluff the customer into thinking he didn't NEED the code (maybe the books didn't start or end with the SAME page numbers, or maybe they were ALREADY in different formats: 15-16, A5-A6, 1.5-1.6), but of course they DID, and were blaming us that WE hadn't thought to put the codes in from the START. But when I requested the input done so far, I was relieved to find that multi-colored packets of 80-column cards done up with rubber bands were tossed onto the desk, and each packet had the source written on the top, so we all knew that what had to be done was merely reproduce each set of cards with a prefix for the source-book. What a relief! Then I had to go to another office to report something, and I was talking to some sort of maintenance person on the phone, and he roughly said that I had to come to "department D57." "Is that on the 57th floor?" I asked helplessly, trying to remember whether this or ANY building went as high as 57 floors. Somehow I KNEW it wasn't in MY building, on 59th Street, but in the "main office" on 57th Street (like being told to go across the street to the other building at PATH yesterday for the dancers), and the voice on the phone, as if I were utterly stupid, said, "No, it's on the eighth floor." I felt totally frustrated that someone would EXPECT me to know something I had no EARTHLY way of knowing. All part of the frustration of programming the line-length adjust program? Anyway, when I woke, I had "found" the solution to ONE problem: read in a COMPLETE line at once, so I wouldn't have to "remember" WHICH kind of turnover I was working on for a main-entry, a subentry, or a sub-sub. At least SOME things work out!

5/11/84: I'm somewhere like home in Akron, helping Mom clean, and there's a mop -like apparatus in a glass jar (though it had come in a large tin can like a paint can, which had been wrapped in a plastic bag, all of) which had instructions on it. The instructions said to pour in a bit of Glee, a washing fluid, and then use the mop-like "applicator" to spray the fluid onto the shelves that wanted to be "deodorized" and probably bug-proofed. I rooted around until I found an almost-empty bottle of Glee in a old dish-draining rack but felt there was enough for the two shelves we wanted to do: like my under-sink cabinet, with flaking paint, and I started using the mop like a dust rag, which seemed to work well enough. Jars were arranged in some acronym like Soap, Alkali, Rinse, Acid, Natron (SARAN), and were neat enough, anyway. Oddly homey.

5/12/84: Mom is driving us through US countryside to go visit someone, and the wide paved road through farmland changes to a narrow paved road through rolling countryside, and it finally becomes a dirt road that quickly becomes covered with large head-sized road-rocks that means we have to drive slowly and carefully. But as a wooded hillside rises to our right, we're surprised to see a large sedan-car pull out of an opening on the right, and it quickly pulls around to our left and vanishes in the direction we came. As we look to the left there's an ornate red-brick pergola with a vaguely Central-Park-Chinese look standing at the bottom of a symmetric dip in the hillside that frames a spectacular view over a Hudson Valley scene at sunset, and I quickly glance to the right as I glimpse a crumbling archway and gate made of the same ruddy brick, beyond which, in the gathering gloom, can be seen battered cottages, rim-broken pools, and rubble-filled foundations that lead me to say to Mom: "It looks like an old resort---why don't we stop and explore a bit before it gets dark," with the unspoken thought that this'll probably be the only time we pass this way, since we'll probably never have any reason to drive out here again. She seems to be slowing to a stop at the margin of the road when I wake up.

5/20/84: Obviously a reflection of my anxiety about waking up after only 6.5 hours to shower for Dim Sum, I dream I'm back at Dietz Avenue wanting to take a shower, but the bathroom is full of other people's things: Uncle Henry's shirts on hangers on the shower head; Rita's clothes on the towel racks; Mom's stockings on the rim of the tub; other things piled onto the sink-edge and toilet-back and seat. Barely containing my rage, I walk into the dining room where everyone seems to be setting up for some holiday feast and announce that I'd like to take a shower, so would everyone please claim his or her belongings now? Mom rather coldly says that I can put everything into the hall on my OWN, since everyone's too busy to handle such a minor thing, but when I pile every- thing into the hall, I find that I'm left with only the main shower-head in the center of the room (where it actually was) and a subsidiary one over above where the toilet had been (now gone), and when I turn on ONE tap, water comes from BOTH, though much more lightly and at a much greater angle from the one on the side, and I think "Oh, of course, I forgot the tub is being repaired, so there's nothing else to do but take a shower without it." Wake way before time.

6/6/84: FIVE dreams: 1) A fragment about my living in a house built right on the bank of a small stream, and looking down from a room rather like the dining room at 1221 Dietz, I could see that the waters had eroded away part of the lower walls, so that small plants, grasses, and ferns could grow up through narrow chinks between the plaster walls and the foundation stones, and in one place the grasses even waved in the breezes that could come through a basketball-sized hole. I idly wondered how much it would cost to divert the stream and reset the foundation with bricks, and then replaster the bottoms of all the walls of the stream-side house. 2) I'm watching a TV program about a family living in a large apartment in an old New York tenement-building, and with one of the older brothers I'm climbing out through window frames that are rotting: green-with-rust bronze window frames have come loose as the rotting wood underneath crumbles away; we climb through windows falling apart to walk on roofs cluttered with debris from windows from above and pieces of masonry from the cracking walls. Inside, the mother shows us her daughter's room where books are piled in stacks around bunk beds in the center of the floor: though the apartment was nicely decorated, it's possible to see structural damage in the rooms. Then there's a cut in the TV program and the camera looks lovingly up at a very nice mansion on the right, so long that my eye wanders to the manor house on the left, and I think "They must have had money all along." Then there's a sort of interview with the family on the street, and they said they should have moved to France long ago. 3) I'm seeing Larry Ball in some office, like Actualism or Mattachine, where both of us are helping out, and I'm telling him about the TV program, and he says incredulously, "FRANCE?!" Then in here somewhere, maybe in 4) I HEAR of a movie with a guy with an incredible cock who's fucking a baby so realistically no one can realize how it was filmed and then suddenly I'm watching a film of two men and a woman, but the woman leaves and the men start getting undressed (the smaller man reminding me of the "slave" I saw on one of the music videos yesterday) and the larger one has an enormous cock, and he DOES fuck a baby convincingly, the camera below, the man standing with one leg up on a hassock, the baby curled up and then going limp after the foot-lock cock is withdrawn from him. There are other sexual scenes and I wake horny. 5) I'm sitting by a pool serving drinks to a still-mumbling Patricia Neal, and she's pointing to tiny green apples, and I cut them up for her and decide I might have apples in my wine too, and there's someone in the pool who wants to be served, too, and I cut up lots of little green apples.

6/7/84: Into Thalia-like theater where the seats are filling quickly. Whenever I seem to see a seat it's either filled or someone is rapidly shuffling toward it. Finally I get a seat way over to the side, glad that I'm not among all the people making noise down in the front. Then somehow I AM in the front, and just behind me is a handsome blond fellow who starts talking louder and louder, and as I'm assuming he's some sort of crazy, he pulls out a knife and kills the person next to him, while everyone else tries to move away and dissociate them- selves from the awful bloodless, rather tranquil, action taking place.

6/8/84: I'm arranging to sleep with two tiny girls, young teenagers by the looks of them, on a large queen-size bed in the middle of a room, but then when it starts to rain, there are leaks in the roof that cause puddles on the floor that endanger some quite expensive coffee-table books spread around the floor, and when I move one of them, I find my suitcase underneath, relieved to find that none of my clothes has gotten wet. Then I have to (as in "Gambit" yesterday?) crawl along a low passage ABOVE the bedroom, and in crawling under a guillotine-like transom I find that crawling on my stomach is just impossibly difficult, so I roll over and hold the doorway up with my hands, which makes it much easier. Then somehow I'm on the ground floor or basement of a series of apartments, moving through their connected basements in a way that reminds me of my old apartment on E. 70th Street. I pass old pianos, wardrobes, sinks, and furniture, and use a key that gets me through all the doors, wondering how I could be in the WRONG place if I have a key that FITS. Finally get to the end and Mom's waiting for me in a car, asking angrily why I went that way and took so long to get there. I'm confused and don't know what to answer, and I don't wake immediately, since it takes a few minutes of concentration to remember this dream: FIRST I remember that I didn't record the dream of YESTERDAY!

6/17/84: I'm playing the part of JESUS CHRIST in some sort of church pageant, and first I'm looking from the back of the church in my white robes, feeling conspicuous, but when I run up the aisle to the children gathered in the altar area, they begin to dance around me, and it only makes sense to dance WITH them (I suspect this dream was influenced by my reading yesterday about the Monroe Institute and its "interview" with an "out-of-body traveler" who said that EVERYONE was Christ.) Then I find that I've lost the red felt bow from the middle and cap from the top of my flimsy aluminum spear (undoubtedly produced by all the photographs of the same-shape SPIRE on the top of the Chrysler Building yesterday), and I retrieve them and tie them back on.

6/19/84: Again I'm in an amusement park, trying to get people to meet at the same place, and I figure that if I just go around THIS way, I'll get back to the multi-level wooden roller coaster in the middle of the park, but there are difficulties and obstacles in my way, yet the "thereness" is impressively real.

6/24/84: I'm having lunch in some sort of stone school courtyard, sitting at a trestle table with someone like Steve Kahn and a somewhat more obscure woman rather (looking at her now) like a quiet Ellen Godowitz. But it's not lunch, though that's what the food's like, and the sense is rather of a picnic outing, but dinner, since it started being served from the cafeteria at 5PM and it's now 6PM when I look at my watch and I can see Steve cutting into the last of his meat to find that it's rather burnt at the bottom and raw at the top, and I figure I better get my portions before it's all gone. "Ellen" makes a remark about the "guests" at the dinner, saying in disgust, "Like Henry Kissinger, he makes, what is it?, $16,000 per night..." and "Steve" picks it up, "...and all he does when he talks to me is TICKLES me and asks if I got his dreadful JOKE." I think to make a shortcut through a building, and find myself in the john, having to go down a stone stairway to get to the pissoir-section, and as I enter I find "someone from the lower grades" finishing at the far end and leaving by a lower door that takes him over the parapets of the castle (influenced undoubtedly by the castle in yesterday's "The Eye of the Devil") and down to a lower level, and I get the "distant" view that this is rather like Neuschwanstein in that ONE side (I know this isn't accurate, but this is what I though in the dream itself) is built into the side of a cliff, but the other side overlooks a precipice, so entrances and exits on another SIDE may be 4 or 5 floors below. I'm debating how to leave when I wake up. Silly dream.

7/2/84: Lots of fragments: 1) There's a demonstration of a "fast-altitude-gaining" plane, with someone hanging onto the back of the pilot's seat trailing a huge fin like the control fin on an amusement park Sail-o-plane; I have just a few seconds to OBSERVE this taking off at a 45 degree angle when I am gripping a sail and the back of a female pilot's seat and we follow the other plane UP at a steep angle (the pull on my hands is large, but not threatening) and then dip to the right to follow a large tilted circle in the sky close above the little village we took off from the main street of; then we're on the ground and I'm saying "Isn't this a bit dangerous?" and the woman pilot is saying that nothing happened, did it? and what's to worry about? 2) I'm lying down jerking off (with someone watching, I think) and it occurs to me that it would be better to use ONE hand on EACH of my cocks instead of just relying on the friction of the BACK of my right hand on my FRONT cock to stimulate my REAR cock, and though I have to "reach around" a bit, it feels better to jerk off my TWO cocks with my TWO hands, wondering why I never thought of this BEFORE? 3) Riding in a low-roofed sports car with some unknown guy driving, we look back to see that a large tiger that had been chasing us down the road has leapt onto the back deck of the car, making it bounce up and down a bit, and I wonder when it's going to scrabble down onto the hood and attack our windshield. Then, without transition, I'm looking into the back seat and by observing thin outlines of light and shadow of a silhouette against the car's back window, I can see that the medium-sized leopard is INSIDE the car, rather than OUTSIDE, and as I ask "How did it get IN?" there's a THIRD phase and I'm reaching into the back seat to control a twisting, snarling tiger CUB, glad that I'm wearing thick black leather padded gloves so the claws and teeth can't get through to my hands and wrists, and look back to see a metal trapdoor that can't be pushed DOWN from INSIDE but which could be popped open from BELOW, allowing a fast runner to get inside the car. 4) I'm riding in a car beside a driver driving a couple in the back who are looking for the house of a friend along a farmhouse road, and "That's his trailer," identifies the rambling house we want. Then we're in the back fields watching groups of families arrive to stake out their picnicking areas and golfing areas and horseshoe pitches, and I'm into the snack-food shop to listen to the attendants raving about McWinchester hoagies and large rolls made from McWinchester flour, and I watch her pulling out huge aluminum-wrapped sloppy-Joe-filled submarines, but see a TINY one that I ask the price of and the owner looks at a long price list and points to the tiny print at the bottom saying that it's three cents. "I can wrap it up for you now and you can pick it up later; you can really blow your horn," and I'm confused: do I blow my horn to pick it UP or does HAVING one allow me to blow my horn?

7/5/84: I'm standing on what I know to be a London street corner with lots of people rushing by, and there's a survey-taker (of a sort) who's either going to ask me some questions or going to train me to be a survey-taker myself. I don't know what's going on, and she indicates wordlessly that she'll show me how it's done. But her first "respondent" is a weirdo: a little woman who bangs with concentration on her bosom between her breasts, as if trying to "loosen" the taut cloth between her large brassiere-cups, and then she moves her hands down to the survey-taker's sides as if adjusting an under-girdle. Watching these two, OTHERS join in "manipulating" parts of the survey-taker's apparel. I'm astounded at the seriousness of the "manipulators" on the one hand, their distant impersonality; and the INTIMACY of their touch, like workers manipulating the body and physical functions of an enormous termite- queen. There was a section of dream BEFORE this, but I've forgotten it by now.

7/8/84: Maybe I'm trying for a quiz show, but there are rebuses on a blackboard that I'm supposed to solve: 1) a multiplication problem of a triangle over a square obviously produces a product of triangle-square, just as a x b = ab, 2) a CITY followed by a BUILDING followed by a HOUSE is obviously the number 1,001,002.5: a million people in a city plus a thousand people in a building plus the average 2.5 people in a household. 3)Another that I don't recall now. Then, completely different, I've showed slides to a family in an upstairs bedroom, and now I have to leave with my suits and clothing in plastic bags over my shoulder, shoulder bags bulging, and I have to go down a flight of stairs filled with people putting on shoes and socks and packing to leave also. I have no idea the FRAME of this odd image, but there it was and I was working through it as best I could, brushing people's heads with the bottoms of my plastic bags as daddies helped little blonde daughters put on their shoes.

7/9/84: 1) After a few forgotten preliminary scenes, I have to plan and test and program some large IBM spreadsheet program, but I'm working at home full time and wonder HOW I'm going to find the time to finish the IBM project, or how many weeks they'll pay me before I have to produce results, and the idea of putting in a weekly progress report (of progress I haven't done yet) occurs to me as an idea of how to fool them into the idea that I'm making progress (there now seems to be obvious parallels her to my "progress" in Actualism). 2) I'm up at a place like Hemlock Hall, with a woman very like Betsy Griswold, but the man isn't very like Mack, and John doesn't seem to be around (as I know he won't be from here on out), but we've moved into a new LARGER house, and the ceilings are very high and the furniture is very new, and we're by ourselves in the middle of the woods. There's something after this about plotting how to travel somewhere, but I've forgotten that, too.

7/17/84: Not a PRETTY dream, but seemingly connected with the "healing" session last night at Actualism: I'm watching (and somehow participating) in a TV film about New York down-and-outers, and the CLEAREST (and COLORFUL) image was of a derelict man rescued in a cruddy room off whom COCKROACHES are being sponged! As some come off, others appear in their place (rather like the maggots in the eyes of "The Cadavers" or whatever the ad was on Broadway and 43rd that I passed yesterday too), but they gradually become less in number, though the disgust of those doing the wiping is evident. Then there's a flash of an even worse case, a rather Burroughs-like image of a man almost liquefied by decay, though still feebly alive, pasty face covered with a white glair like saliva or egg white, who feebly brushes a light brown spider TOWARD his slackly open lips, and one of the "cleaners" says "Ugh, he ATE it," though there's the thought that he had NOTHING to eat (like the woman holding the sign on 7th and 34th yesterday) and if he didn't eat spiders he wouldn't be alive at ALL. Awful images, but the men were ALIVE AND RECOVERING; having been found, they could now be cared for---the parallels with Actualism are obvious.

7/21/84: Wake at 7 with memory of driving with someone like Shiela Andron in a car driven by, say, Neil Sendar and Kristen. I have some hidden agenda to meet someone at 11:30 somewhere else and THEY think WE have plans. I antagonize Neil, but then SHIELA turns against me as manipulative and awful to deal with. I have a great conviction of the truth of her accusations. Then at 8:30 I wake from a LONG dream that started with my meeting Beverly Sills, when she says that "As I start off, I can only have a small role in a vanity production" but better things will come after I take a voice-range test, and everyone laughs at how actors screech and screw up their faces to get the highest and lowest possible ranges of their throats. THEN I'm in an ugly "Liquid Sky" type movie with beautiful Grace Jones-type people doing ugly things like committing suicide, but at the END the pretty-boy hero "points" to a football hunk who starts a funky jerky dance with shoulders contorting in break-dancing, and there are perfectly-edited fast sequences of, say, a board becoming bifurcated, drawn legs becoming in stages WOODEN legs and REAL legs topped by a "cabinet" that becomes a body that turns into a dancer that points to a cat that turns into a horse that---etc, and I remember the REVIEWERS said the MOVIE was awful but the concluding DANCE sequence was beautiful and marvelously inventive.

7/22/84: Wake 5AM, then to sleep to LOTS of sex-dreams of type: beautiful guy says "I remember you from (so and so and so) a place, and I want you to suck me off!" One is Lloyd Moore-like with a hard rod down one pant leg, another is just a kid with a great enthusiasm for kissing, another bares a huge gnarled cock that OTHERS have obviously chewed on. I feel excited but wake limp. Then there's a strange interlude of a city-scene with blacks dressed in long which gowns IN FRONT only, bare black asses folding and getting up, and I see they're being chased from lighted city by police cops AT NIGHT, so TOWARD city they fade in WHITE and looked at against black night they fade in BLACK. they're smuggling dope and running from the cops. THEN the odd sequence: I'm at the top of a VERY high (about 400 feet) steep hill that I have to get down. I'm afraid, but I can see lots of logs, trees, papers, etc., that can SLOW me DOWN, and the bottom DOES slope more so I can COAST to a stop even if I'm going fast, and there's no overhang where I'd actually FALL, so I start sliding down, hitting first bundled cardboard that slows me, but tumbles out of the way faster than I descend, then some gravel I can dig my heels into, then a tree trunk end that I push down, almost STEERING by shifting my weight, and I'm 1/3 down and going not very fast and it's ALREADY less steep and I'm gaining CONFIDENCE, when I'm transported to a strange garden-party: a fanatic group of three or four are "conjuring" a Dea to descend from the sky, and there are cloud WISPS that intersect to fool some into thinking it's a shape, but then I see five STARS that I think are part of a dipper, but they dimly generate a LINE between them and the formation begins to BEND and MOVE, developing into a GULL-SHAPE that FLAPS across the sky, except when it gets CLOSER, in glowing white outlines, it looks rather like an EAGLE, except someone turns in terror and says "It's a BAT." It flies lower and closer and a feeling of AWE overcomes me when suddenly (I have an IMPRESSION of David Hoch) I'm LIFTED UP from behind, like someone folding his arms around my waist and hugging me to his huge body so that I'm in a SITTING position, and PROPELS me forward with SUCH SPEED that I feel the fronts of my calves and knees and chest and arms TINGLING with speed and terror, and it's all I can do to FORCE from my petrified throat the words "WHO...IS...CARRYING...ME...SO........ FAST?" The scene becomes punctuated by two or three egg-sized blind-white spots that flash out dotted rays of light, BEHIND which are orange-red dots that I can ALMOST judge for the words "see" many times overlapping, and my BRAIN tingles with anticipation---"Can I...will I be able to see at LAST???" and I FORCE my concentration....if this is the START of the "final white light," do I have to CHOOSE now (I feel it IS choice) to FOLLOW the light (rather, go TOWARD, ACCEPT, and BECOME ABSORBED by the light), or turn AWAY from the light and not YET die (or possibly, RETURN to the world to live AGAIN---or just simply CONTINUE to live THIS life). I awake with a DISTINCT tingle remaining on my calf-fronts and feet, still INTENSELY in the FEELING of the dream, which slowly fades to the light of a 7:35 cool dawn in France.

7/24/84: 1) I'm lying at the head of Bruce Lieber's sickbed, and he's dying of AIDS, and he says sobbing that he's lonely and scared, and I caress him and he turns into Dennis who insists I kiss him, and his blubbery fat lips enclose mine and I fear contagion from him and back away as soon as I can, worried I'll get it from him. 2) I'm sitting in a cramped theatre-type seat in a class, and argue with the black woman next to me to remove her coats from under MY seat, and she insists that's not my business and they're not bothering me, but I shout that they ARE and haul them out and throw them at her and put my OWN under. Then I'm on the aisle sorting MY things out and put my violin (!) under my seat, grubbing around in waste papers wondering what this METAL object like a microphone or plumber's snake is doing under it. Then the "class" includes a showing of "Bloopers of a famous quiz program" and in one scene at windows the camera zooms ABOVE the set to show a huge cockroach and the audience laughs "This IS New York!" In ANOTHER scene a stout woman who's supposed to be slapped around suddenly refuses to react and quits on the spot. Ha ha.

7/29/84: John A. and others and I have tried to eat at "the best restaurant" without reservations but the tables are full and we're turned out. It seems we try a second, having left word at the first for someone to meet us at the second, and then go to a THIRD. There, I ask if anyone thought to say that we'd GONE to the third after the second. After we've eaten, someone who's rather like an 8-year-old Gary Vallish has fallen asleep to my left and I just save him from slipping off his chair under the table. Then he turns into Malcolm Simmons, who says "I'd go to bed with POPE just to hear the things he TELLS me." I say, "Then why don't you go to bed with ME for the things I could tell you?" He looks at me with dark, steely, hateful eyes and says "What a STUPID way to approach me!" And I protest, "What do YOU do if you see someone who attracts you?" With the start of a smile that leads me to think I MIGHT get somewhere, he says "Well, I guess I'd talk to him, no matter WHAT I'd have to say!"

7/30/84: Medieval courtesan displays her cotton-draped and ribboned cunt, then removes the "cap" to display a slit over which shiny trimmed blond hairs have been artistically combed and held with a gold clip.

8/6/84: 1) Two cards or one card remaining(?) on pulley, 2) Michael Blackburn feeling my crotch, 3) car-full of people to "island" for "breakfast."

8/7/84: Strange dreams of vague sex.

8/9/84: 1) Dahlia-like flowers wilt and mat into felt-like silken slabs of close-knit brilliant color. 2) Some girl like Robin Magid is getting married and someone like George Pierson offers her a wedding gift for her husband of a $1.50 belt and I bristle at the suggestion that I could get her father a shirt or jacket--that would cost MORE. 3) A Western thriller ends with the sheriff facing down three gunmen aiming at him with their pistols. The scene fades to a final scene in which the sheriff, obviously alive, asks with amusement "You think it wouldn't turn out OK?"

8/13/84: (probably): Someone puts his SHOULDER under the wedge-shaped foundation of one of the World Trade Center buildings, and lifting UP, so that the building swayed once, twice, then TOPPLED with a great crash that SOUNDED PHONY, and then an obviously PLASTIC boat crashed into it and people dove down to look at the floor-blocks that the WTC was MADE of, crumpled up in the Hudson River.

8/17/84: Wake with a SHOCK at 4:30 to write these. An earlier one gone, I remember a fragment of a second where I'm hiking and come to a cliff-face I have to sidestep along, clinging to friable rock at waist-level that I have to COMPRESS INWARD to prevent its scaling away from the cliff face and tumbling me backward, not TOO far, to the ground. But the third? I've rented a car for $40/day and driven into Ireland to a cabin to be ALONE. But I'm writing "another" musical and singing the lyrics to my wife and friends, and when I get to the line "Yours is the first grade and second grade of love," my wife smiles in great gratitude, and I break into TEARS of gratitude and DASH to the house to write down the line. But it's begun SNOWING and I'm just in shirtsleeves and fumble with the screen door, and the latchless WOODEN door, having to avoid a FLAP that opens from the BOTTOM as a sort of TRANSOM, and the sleet is beginning to freeze on the screen as I finally wrench it open to be shocked by the dim (and YOUNG) figure of my MOTHER in the hall, saying "Surprised?" And I'm in such an open, anguished "OH!" of shock (as if SEEING her means SHE (and I?) is dead), but I find myself thinking that I have to RECOVER from my shock (which is partly NOT wanting her to be there) or she's going to suspect I DON'T want here there and am not DELIGHTED but DISMAYED to see her. As I write I remember fragments of the first: a large group of Actualists are sharing a vacation home and Crystal is camping it up in a bikini under a bright green silk shawl worn like a chlamys (dict: a short oblong mantle worn by young men of ancient Greece) over one shoulder, and she's RACING around the room having fun like a kid. I'm going through racks of old clothes and find that over the years I've left TWO pairs of cut-offs (jeans into shorts) with distinctive belts and back-pocket leather patches, and I'm glad to find them and take them home with me. But the SHOCK of finding my mother stays WITH a shivering me as I wake with a jolt at 4:30 to cover myself from a cold air-conditioner breeze and write this to 4:45.

8/21/84: Never have I remembered such a SPECIFICALLY Actualism dream, and never do I recall having wakened AFTER a dream TO remember it with such a SPECIFIC PHYSICAL ACTION! Things had gone on in the dream BEFORE: a group of VERY advanced males were traveling in some India-like country, and we were being invited to stay in a chain of castles on some peninsula. I pointed to a huge pile rather like the hotel particulaire (huge old black palace) yesterday in Bordeaux and said jokingly "Only a little better than this, eh?" and the response was SERIOUS, a bit REPROVING, and at the same time assuring that the WORST was BETTER than that. Then "the group" moved around a pool and someone like a mature, muscular Mike Mao combined with Bob Galvin (remembered for his muscles so vividly from a naked dive in a swimming pool) suggested we all dive into the pool and "talk things out," and the next scene was sitting in a particular FORM at the base of tiled walls that IMPLIED we were sitting around the BOTTOM of a FILLED POOL, and someone who was a combination of Gil Messenger and Henry Garehime (this IS bringing up muscles from the past!) said (whoops, he said in RESPONSE to a Bruce Jaffe-type asking "Why is it that we can't use the terms "human, perceptual body, emotional body, mental body, soul, angelic, and archetypal" with people who aren't in the work?" and I said, "Wait, remember Paul and Dick (the names of the two people I was traveling with during this week) haven't even been INITIATED yet," rather cutting off Paul who was about to suggest the SAME idea in a very long-winded way), "What makes you think those terms ARE forbidden" to "Bruce" and "What makes you think they're NOT initiated" to ME. I paused, staring at his handsome face (maybe the face had a touch of the handsome "American-type" that Paul pointed out behind the bar of the Les Noailles Restaurant yesterday), and felt he was asking a QUESTION rather than jeering at me. At that moment, it seems, my left leg was taken by a calf-cramp SO sharply that I AWOKE UTTERING SOUNDS (glad I'm sleeping in a room ALONE---AGAIN the higher?) and feeling almost as if my leg WERE PULLED DOWN TO WAKE ME, to remember dream, to write it at 5:30, which is not a VERY usual "wake from dream to remember it" time. AGAIN (as I have so often recently: my moving to Hotel du Lac, late planes, seeing Avenue de Trunzia, other trip places) I feel that "all's OK" because the HIGHER is orchestrating events. WAIT, NOW I remember what "handsome" DID respond concerning Paul and Dick: "Do you want them back the way there were?" which strongly implied to me "Do you want them to MOVE BACK IN TIME; to before they heard the Jaffe-statement?" WITH the joke that of course that's impossible, but my imaginative mind (in AND out of the dream) leaped to the idea that "they" MIGHT be able to control time.

8/23/84: I'm in charge of a large group of recruits (talk yesterday of authoritarian solution to problem of undeveloped blacks) (though my recruits are white), one of which I want to just bat against the wall to drive some sense into his head. I want to circle them around me and have them VOTE on how they thick I'm doing, but I realize THAT'S silly and try to come up with some way to convince them that this is for THEIR good and we're in it all TOGETHER for the benefit of us all: it needn't be difficult, it can be FUN.

8/26/84: I'm pricing hotel rooms: at the "top of the hill" they were $75 (or 75 dinars or 75 francs), but lower down they settled into $31, until I came to one, comfortable but empty, where the owner was willing to fill a room at something like cost to get SOME income and said $21, so I took it. As I was "signing in" some women came in who I assumed were ALSO checking in, so I handed them a copy of the form I was filling in, and I said "Sign this." They took out other forms and said, "No, we have to LEAVE these," and I was embarrassed to find they were either WORKING there or were signing OUT. Later I was riding in some sort of land or sea conveyance and the two women in the back made it clear they were the authors of a book of fiction that described how "two molecules of sugar could reflect themselves (obviously from the theory of "reflected bodies" I read in the Out-of-body book yesterday) and I saw two rings slightly DISPLACED , yet transparent and connected (like vague impressions of two DISCS formed together in Peche-Merle), and I said "You know that the current issue of Scientific American has an ARTICLE that describes research into this "slippage" that allows growth were not expected---as I know THEIR book spoke of these crystals as LENSES that produced GREEN growth (Peche-Merle again).

9/2/84: 1) I'm going to a restaurant with Mom, who is younger and more reason- able, as if combined with Lorene Cahill, and she says that she's rented a car, so I try to tell her to turn left but she goes straight, and I figure that's for the best as the street the restaurant's on is a one-way street, so we turn left a few blocks beyond the restaurant and drive down a hill to make the second left when a flock of Chinese teenagers on bicycles pedals past on the left and we have to wait for all of them to go through before we can make our turn. 2) I'm visiting the Gay Community Center on some mid-western college campus, and am leaving past an influx of paraders carrying various signs, and I'm impressed by the number and the QUALITY of the marchers: it's as if it were an ordinary political rally rather than a gay-rights event. A reasonably pretty twenty-year-old woman passes me and touches my arm, saying "Remember, I want to dance with you," (she looks slightly like Judy Watson, upstairs), and then I move toward the door past more and more marchers, wondering if I could possibly find some attractive young man to dance with ALSO, but I'm mainly concerned about getting through the crowd so that I can find the cafeteria to have lunch before it closes for the afternoon.

9/12/84: 1) We're in an apartment or hotel room somewhere around 72nd Street and Mom wants me to make a delivery to 48th Street before dinner and to 58th Street after dinner, and I get very angry that she ASSUMES I'll do this without her really ASKING if I wouldn't MIND doing it. 2) Paul Bosten snuggles up to me (rather like the blond in "Another Country" on Monday) and then goes down on me, and I feel his hard little cock pressing appealingly against my body. 3) Uncle Henry helps someone by freezing strawberries (?).

9/17/84: (3:55AM!) Wake at 3:45 with two vivid dreams: 1) Bruce Lieber and 2) Science Fiction "movie" of "after-earthquake" adventures. 1) Bruce Lieber walks into "my" room (no room of mine that really "fits") and sits down on a sofa in his usual wide-kneed slump, but I notice that he no longer pulls at his hair and he seems much calmer in general. "How are things going?" is what I remember him asking, but there's also a fragment in the dream somewhere where I'd already written a transcription of our dialogue and he's pointing out more correct wording here and there. I actually NOW don't remember anything of his actual WORDS, just his PRESENCE: there FOR me, there to TALK with me, there to ASSURE me that---not TO ASSURE ME that he's OK, but BY HIS PRESENCE TO LET ME KNOW---no, NOT (at least in words or implication) that ACTUALISM is OK, but that HIS PRESENCE IN MY DREAM (AT LEAST) IS POSSIBLE. 2) Lying in bed before going to sleep last night, early at 9:45PM, I recall the bed shifting slightly, as if "the subways are going by beneath again", though it's ALMOST a dream sensation in which I think "These tremors are too REGULAR (about 1 second long, repeated every 4-5 seconds for about a half-minute) to be the subway---maybe I'm coming down with a shivery chill from sitting outside for dinner last night." Then IN the dream I'm briefly "in pre-earthquake New York" and feel tremors coming, but then I'm in a science-fiction movie about life in New York AFTER the earthquake, and for many years there had been battles between factions to gain power among the survivors, so that "now in the movie" (with a feeling of maybe 15-20 years AFTER the earthquake) there are stubbly fields on Manhattan interspersed with rush and rough-wooden huts, maybe a slight memory- touch of the farmhouses interspersed with the menhirs of Kermario, with men and women and children mostly out walking in fields, not seeming to need to work too hard, and there's an "invasion from outer space" in which what looks almost like a building (say the Chrysler Building on its side) rather that a spaceship is sighted above the ruins of lower Manhattan (I notice the "artistry in the movie" in that the LEFT tower of the World Trade Center (which is still standing) is slightly out of plumb (viewed from the north, from the West Chambers Street area) in relation to the right tower and other towers still standing, and only a building on the East River, of more modern and "glassy" (yet still with the "phony" science-fiction-movie-construction look I've noted before in my dreams) construction than at present---only that one building is actually DOWN because of the earthquake) and with a phony swoop it "lands" in the Hudson River with a splash that sounds like a beach-ball being thrown into a bathtub, and I mentally note that this "movie" is pretty cheap. An earth- spokeswoman for the aliens comes out of the ship to announce that "the leader" is very old and feeble, so we'll be permitted entry only briefly (after being led to think we won't see him at ALL), and the room is dark with a dim light on a massive head with large FOLDS of skin, rather than wrinkles, and he lights a match (not to smoke, only for us to see) and says a few words, and I ACCEPT "him" until "a backstage scene" shows the spokeswoman talking about the MAKEUP she's putting on to impersonate the leader, and I remark to someone who's "watching the movie with me" like Bob Grossman, that it would have been better for this to have been made clearer IN the movie for those, like me, who didn't realize "he" was "she." As Bob and I speak, "out the window to our left" there's a "trampoline-turret on the spaceship" that bounces some character from the deck of the ship to a spaceship IN space, but the "raised turret" obscures the trajectory of the transported person from the "camera" and I remark about THAT to Bob, too. They try it again, and something else gets in the way. Then I look down as a tiny plastic green boat goes swishing through the narrow water passageway between "Manhattan" and "the space ship in the river" and again I think it's a VERY cheap movie. Wake at 3:45AM to find my bedroom rather strangely lit by the bright-green "call" light on my answering machine, and I lay for a moment trying to remember details of BOTH the Bruce Lieber dream and the science-fiction dream, and decide to transcribe it directly into the computer, just much easier, and I finish now at 4:20AM.

8/22/84: Strange dreams again: I was washing lots of glasses and cups like Dennis's narrow high goblet-waisted white ceramic cups, there were almost a hundred of them. Then a female servant on a somewhat higher level than I came in to tell me "Mix some bitters or lemon in soda water, or something that His Majesty likes, and take it to him." I was stunned: here I was given a GREAT responsibility of appealing to the taste of the King, and I thought with excitement that I was becoming closer to him, one day maybe I would even become a FRIEND! There was an ancillary dream concerning listing or covering place names on a map of 15-20 sections, planning a royal trip or dictionary or something like that. I felt that I was in SERVITUDE but LIKED the increasing importance I was attaining.

9/19/84: I'm reclining on a mattress watching "the filming" (though there are no cameras) of a movie or TV show. One of the "extras" raises his head in a familiar way, and I identify him as Ray Bolger, wearing makeup reminding me of his Scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz." I nod at him to show that I recognize him, and he smiles back at me in acknowledgement, but I figure he's MORE interested in the breasts of the pretty woman propping herself up on her elbows in front of me on the mattress. Without transition I'm now waiting for a hair- cut, and looking out the window of the shop see that Arno Safier is strolling past. I tap on the glass to get his attention, even though I know that when we talk I'll lose my place in the haircut-line. I say "This is your neighborhood" and he replies "Yes, I only live on Second Avenue in the 80's" which puzzles me since I know he lives on the West Side on 72nd, near where we are. "I'm thinking of investing in a Cabareteria," he says with an amazed grin, and I start to talk him out of it (we're now walking toward a bus or train-stop at street level), though I admit "if you invest equity you HAVE in your apartment, you can earn 35-40% yearly in a new investment." He starts to justify his investment by describing this place where you can see elegant nightclub acts while eating from a well-prepared cafeteria-style restaurant, and I begin to think he MIGHT have a good idea, until he implies that the place will be centered around an ice-skating rink, and I begin to protest that people rich enough to afford this place won't feel like ice-skating, nor will the elegant clothing of a FINE place lend to the relaxation of skating and falling down, but I wake up and marvel at the rather complete TRIVIALITY of dream-content.

10/3/84: Dennis and I and a "friend" (a skinny fidgety person rather like a young Japanese-y Michael Jackson-y Larry Ball) and driving down country roads that had been rained on, and the water gets deeper and deeper until finally we plow into one heavily mired place and actually FLOAT on the waters when the ruts give way to ponds of water. Two old men seem to have rescued us and we're without transition in their Victorian living room, and the "friend" wants to reveal that he's a transvestite. He acts it out rather in pantomime until one of the old men leans toward me to say "You tryin' to say you three had some GAY old times together?" I'm vaguely irritated: Dennis and I haven't had sex in a long time, the "friend" hasn't had sex with either of us, though I don't want to discourage his being on the right track, so I just say "That's not PRECISELY the case." The "friend" "comes out of the closet" in an outlandish costume: silver bugle-beads on strings falling from his halter over silver panties, and a headdress of ANTLERS on top of which have been arrayed dark- brown feathers, between the plumes of which are draped fur pelts and various jewels. We notice with GREAT surprise that there's a clothes-tree in the living room with, at first glance, a DUPLICATE of this outrageous costume hanging on it, but when we get to examine them together, closer, we see that the shapes and colors and materials and quite different, but we feel that there's "something in common" between the three of us and the two of them.

10/4/84: I'm working at IBM again, and I'm working with narrow slips of paper that I'd put at random into a lower-left desk-drawer. There seem to be white slips that record what I've done during a day, separated in little packets by green slips that summarize a week or a month. Then I recall I should collate them with OTHER forms that I'd done before, so I go to forms piled on the top of a filing cabinet and find there are STACKS of them there, and I decide to make a summary-sheet for the year (this probably stems from my "inaugurating" the Sierra Club 1985 calendar yesterday), pleased to have the time to put it all together. There's not a sense of DUTY but of PLEASURE about this dream.

10/23/84: (First entry since 10/11!) I'm looking at an apartment I want to rent rather far from the center of the city, and get elaborate directions to a particular elevator, but I get lost and ask someone directions who sends me by another way, so I have no way to connect both sets of directions. When I get on the elevator, we're sitting in little parallel rows, like in a short subway car, but as the elevator mounts, it begins to curve over into an arc so that I follow another fellow around the SIDE of the car and begin to ride on the BOTTOM, while people still inside have to hang from their toes or heels from guard rails in the floor, and I wonder what shopping-bag ladies do with their shopping bags full of groceries when THEY go home. Get into my apartment and figure there could be a lot fixed up, and there IS the cheaper rent, but how DOES one handle that odd elevator ride. I'm in a side room unwrapping old parchments that turn out to be old rolls of toilet paper, divided into cardboard boxes according to whether they're single-ply or double-ply. Meet Dick Hsieh somewhere outside, and he tells me he lives just a few buildings away (it begins to resemble Stuyvesant town---areas of 20-story brick buildings with gardens and walkways between them), another good reason to stay. Wake later that I would have thought (sleeping in the living room with Mom in the bedroom) at 9:30.

10/25/84: (Forgotten previous section, seemingly connected with a job I had at someplace like IBM) which changes into a description of buildings sold from the University of Akron site, and I infer that all the OLD CORE buildings to the north and west were sold off, while the newer buildings and apartments to the south and east were kept. Then I'm at a party where I'm told that I have to let the bride have some time in a distant corner room with her gifts so that she can acknowledge receipt of them from the respective givers. I pass a section of cars after the wedding---where the guests are peering under hoods, taking apart various components, and I have to restrain myself from asking why guys are raising, lowering, tilting, and examining the mechanisms of the head- rests in MY car by saying they're only LOOKING at it in an appreciatively analytical way---to get to the back room, and some tiny woman is surrounded by gift wrappings and piles of goods, but I'm attracted to a horse made out of plastic which trots along a sofa, then falls on its side breathing heavily. When I look closer it turns into a tiny tiger cat, with cub, puzzled because it's being kept up so long after its usual bedtime. Wake and type this 8:40AM.

10/26/84: I'm in some sort of college chemistry class with Elaine Hyams, and she's teaching me how to make a chemical compound that involves a blue-fluid- filled pyramid being turned from bottom to TIP that regulates a reaction that's going on below it, sort of inside the table-top itself, but there's a feeling of "don't touch" about it as if the table-top were actually the teacher's desk. She inverts the pyramid a few times and the blue fluid bubbles back and forth from top to bottom, but then it boils over and things seem to go wrong, until finally she opens some sort of ultimate release-catch and a porridge-like bubbly substance pours out from the desk and down along ledges toward drains in the floor, and I fear the corrosivity of the reaction-product will destroy the drain itself, but when it seems to be holding up, I figure with relief that, after all, it WAS designed to be the sewage system of a chemical lab. There was another set of dreams before this, but it's all I can remember at 9:50AM.

11/2/84: There's some sort of international meeting (or we've all just met in a waiting room at an airport), and some man with a foreign accent is asking about the plans for a new city that my current lover has been trying to implement in the face of administrative and political opposition. The two of them chat for a bit, but there's little understanding, and the foreign-accented man turns to me for some sort of final conclusion as we're walking toward our separating flights. I find myself saying with increased emotion "He's going to try his plan in our neighborhood at least," and when the foreign-accented man has a very positive encouraging reaction, I find myself getting choked up in the throat: very emotional. He asks me to repeat it and it's almost like a welling catharsis to gasp out "He's going to try it in our neighborhood" and I wake to find the emotion still stuck like a lump (or a coming cold) in my throat, and it's almost as if (in the dream and in waking) I felt that the foreign-accented man was about to become my lover-of-a-lifetime, and all my yearnings for someone to live with and cry with were to be fulfilled. There's some strong connection with the new Actualism energy The Desire of God, and I again have the feeling I'd had before, that The Desire of God is for love and beauty and unity and the CREATION OF LIFE-FLESH, making the Rosy Pink unbearably SEXUAL, and it occurs to me that if THIS is going to emotionalize my week, I should phone Jon and talk to him about it, avoiding my two-week "down" of the LAST new energy, which now (Joyous Warrior) feels "earthed" and "grounded."

11/4/84: I'm going back to my hotel in some American city, passing through a public square like a smaller version of the Mall in Washington, D.C., and a group of people around me form into a choir-and-band something like Salvation Army and begin to ask people passing by for money. One woman solemnly approaches me with an outstretched tambourine and I try to ignore her, but she puts her arms around me from the rear and refuses to let go until I give her something. This infuriates me (though I don't show it), and I try to brush her off me by walked just behind a row of the band, "rubbing her off" against all the people we pass, but though the people are all jostled out of position and she's pushed about, she still clings. I'm not in a killing rage and try to squeeze her off by sliding through the heavy door that I unlock to the hotel lobby, but STILL she clings, though by the pressures I exert on the door her arms must be severely bruised. At length I bend my head and BITE very hard into the doughy-white flesh of her upper arm, so hard that I almost feel my front teeth MEET through about two inches of flesh, and her mild face shows no reaction at all except patience with asking for a donation, and I'm greatly appalled at the VISCIOUSNESS of my response to her. Then, briefly, I'm visiting an IBM office with Madge talking to Dick Hsieh, and it's just after 9AM and I'm still in my bathrobe, and I want to talk to someone in the office but decide I should go back to my room and at least dress. Pass a man in the hallway who's looking out a side window, and I see that his feet are encased in snakeskin-like transparent dollar bills. Such strange juxtapositions!!

11/17/84: Fantastically detailed and richly moving dream, though a bit on the sad, nostalgic side, about graduation from a college that seems a combination of University of Akron and Columbia: it's clearly Graduation Day, but I haven't found the schedule for anything: it's about 2:30PM and I think there's something scheduled for 3 or 3:30, but first I'm wandering through an enormous building that used to be my dormitory, but it's mostly empty now, and though I had friends there, I can't remember where everyone would be gathering, and I vaguely think to search out something like the Chemistry lounge in the Knight Hall basement where Larry Ball and Dick Seaver and Bill Broske and the perfect-eyebrowed Dick Mellypell (some name like that--the name is a moment later recalled as Dean Dickerhoof) would hang around. I DID know people there, but I DON'T know people there now, and there's a sad quality to that. Then I pass a theater-entrance on the main floor of that building, and I think that there was both an appreciation of the architectural qualities and beauties of the building that I didn't FULLY appreciate while I was there (and now I'm really thinking of John Jay Hall at Columbia) AND a feeling that I "missed most of it" while I was there (clearly a duplicate of the feeling I'm now having about LIFE, that I've missed much of the opportunity afforded by it): I should have socialized more, made more friends, had more fun, been more relaxed and less shy, taken more advantage of opportunities missed. As if to mirror the opportunities, there were the "personal" interactions: I passed a small snack-shop that I "sort of knew was there but never used" and it was fully of a bustling smiling crowd getting snacks before the banquet that was to be held AFTER the Graduation Ceremony, and I was sorry I didn't go there more. Then there was a little larger coffee-shop restaurant that I could have used more, rather like Riker's. Then someone on the ground floor was lugging suitcases down the ornate wooden stairway and I followed him up for another case, and he shouted over his shoulder, "Imagine this as a garden apartment!" and I turned a corner expecting to have been invited (with my pleasure) into his APARTMENT in the dormitory, but merely went outside into a large campus where the sun was shining on a huge expanse of greensward sloping up a hill to distant shading trees (larger than any greenery on either campus), and I could only ruefully (having been attracted to the "inviter" for something more) move into the center of a milling crowd. Oh, while I was IN the building I was in the basement looking for somewhere to take a crap, and I walked into a tiny lightless cubicle off the john and felt wet squelchy things on the floor, and I turned on a tiny light afraid that I might be stepping onto turds---and that was AFTER having moved into a crowded john where someone tall and attractive like Arthur Cohan at Center had been washing out his clothing, draping it over the sinks and stall-doors, and I tried going into one of the four stalls, but either HE was in-and-out of one, or one was locked, or others had rustling people inside who were also washing, or having sex, and ANYWAY I felt just OUT of it. THEN I went to the tiny room, and then through another door into an antechamber off which led a VERY narrow slit with cobwebs at the top (anal analogue?) through which I decided I would NEVER force my whole body, and THEN into another section where there were wooden ledges decorated with tent-silks and furnitured decor that led me to believe that I was no longer in the john but in some loft-style do-it-yourself section of the live-in dormitory, AGAIN with people moving about that I had nothing to do with---but wanted. Clearly through here I'm bemourning my "friendlessness" in NYC, wanting to do more but having no one to DO "more" with, outside acquaintances, but I want LOVERS, or at least someone of the intensity of Jean-Jacques and former-Joe-Easter. Then, still in the coffee-shop-boutique, a very tall (interesting how many of the attractive figures in this dream are TALLER than I---maybe I'm YOUNGER in the dream?) fellow fingering trouser material says "Is there something wrong with this for being so cheap?" and I glance at size 32 woolen trousers for $20 and try to figure the cloth-to-price ratio for a size 42 being sold for $24 or $26 to see if the pricing is "fair," and I feel the material (it feels fine) and try to continue the conversation with the handsome fellow, wondering AGAIN why I didn't do more of this in the past (and clearly wondering why I don't put the stamps away and SOCIALIZE more at SAGE or baths, or even try the Bijou which both Dennis and Arnold said are VERY nice now). Now outside, I pass some French-club type group with a Bernice-Cousins-like "leader" who says "We really WANTED more participation, but we can't really tell people what to DO, but we did offer LOTS of activities" and she displayed tours of museums and interesting areas of town with maps of the subway system already marked for travel from 116th Street to Wall Street, so this is now a combination of Columbia and Actualism! Follow sexy male figures around trying to introduce myself to them (or wonder why I missed them while I went through four years of school with them), one of them shirtless with wonderful legs. Another shorted fellow with a ruddy mustache and slogan-fronted tee-shirt is LEAPING silently in the air with a GREAT TRIUMPHANT smile on his face, punching the air in completion, and I figure he's CELEBRATING his graduation ALONE AND IN SILENCE, and I feel sorry for HIM. (Through here there's the idea these individuals, alone and in groups, might represent various ORGAN EGOS in my body: loners, sufferers-and-even-CELELEBRATORS in silence, and grudging groups.) Then follow someone with GREAT legs and a broad back and neck wrapped in a sweat-suit poncho with the hood up (with a neck rather reminiscent of the automata-head in one of the videos last night), with a companion walking silently in front of them, and as I follow them, they walk toward what turns out to be a sunset-ocean view, and they're silently transported (ala "Isle of the Dead") into a boat on which they CONTINUE standing, companion in front, sexy-guy with his head still bowed as if reading a paperback, as it moves out toward the sunset, but when it gets HALFWAY to the horizon, it CLEARLY slowly vanishes, so that the horizon-line is for a moment CLEARLY VISIBLE THROUGH the standing sombre figures, and a woman next to me verifies: "Yes, they DID vanish" when someone asks "How did they get away so FAST?" and we're left on the shore to ponder THAT part of the experience, and even in my DREAM I wonder if this isn't some analogy to death. Then back on the green campus, getting toward 3:15 by my watch, I muse over the fact that the four years HAVE passed, and rather review the decision I made to GO for the commitment of four years, knowing that it WOULD pass, and all thought is concentrated on the PAST, rather than on the future, as if there's NOTHING OUT THERE after school, that school is ALL of it (as I remember my pride of school activities, thinking that THOSE would remain important throughout life: ODK honors group, Phi Eta Sigma trying to become Phi Beta Kappa and STILL seemingly not there, Theater Group, Newman Club, A-Key, Newspaper and Yearbook work), and that somehow all the people AROUND me are sharing these same thoughts and nostalgias and there's no one there to TALK with---where DID all my friends go? Wake at 10AM with dry nose and throat, but which a stuffed-feeling in my lungs, as my cold seems to have passed to another stage---don't feel FEVERISH, but it's rather a fever dream! Also feelings of NOT HAVING DONE enough Actualism session-work through some of the lessons, ANOTHER opportunity missed. And after I wake, the "mistakes" of my life sort of file past: not staying at IBM long enough to qualify for a vested interest in the 10-year pension-plan, not studying enough at Columbia while I WAS enjoying the fruits of being gay and cultured in NYC, friendships missed and opportunities lost in the sexual world, not USING Actualism enough. Try to tie things together: are these my organ egos? Is this my life and I'm about to leave it, as the organ egos would be "graduated" from the body when the body dies? There's so much RICHNESS in the dream it can be applied to almost anything, and with the idea of COMPLETION coinciding with my fears that most of my life (the interesting part, anyway) is OVER and it'll all be down- hill from here, "graduating" rather "rightly(?)" takes on a sadness for the past---but there was ONLY backward-reflecting, NONE of the "Now I'm more qualified and I can...." or "And AFTER this I'll....." or "NEXT I'll....." And again I've been wordy enough to get to the absolute bottom of the page!!

11/18/84: More crowds, only this time they're in INDIA! I'm on some sort of guided tour (or maybe I'm off with one of the guides on a study-trip BEFORE a guided tour) of India, and I ask the tour-leader whether there are more complaints on the more-expensive tours (as I assume this one is), and the leader makes some sort of canned amusing response like "Yes, but the replies to the complaints are always the same: you've got the best, there's nothing better." At one point we're leaving some little shanty-hotel room and he says he's going back to his village. I have nothing better to do so I offer to walk with him. He says OK but when we step outside it's raining. I go back to get my raincoat, but this is an excursion within the trip, so I don't have my suitcase in which I've packed my raincoat, only a little knapsack, and I'm vaguely curious why I didn't bring my raincoat, since I KNEW it would be raining, and then decide it's warm enough that I can walk in the rain without catching a cold, but then return to change from a red-velour pullover into a shirt that I'd put aside as being too dirty to wear yesterday. At another point there's spare time in the heated middle of the day and I go into the "Jamaa al Fna" (the local town square) to see what's going on, and AGAIN the dream impresses me as being fantastically detailed: there are groups of women sitting and smoking or talking or weaving, there are incredibly detailed impressions of large flies, small flies, exquisitely detailed (as in a Dali painting) shiny-bodied ants walking in intricate patterns over garish-colored intricately-patterned floor mats, and impressions of even smaller fleas and gnats, all infesting these dark-skinned women without making them move a muscle that they don't choose to move. In the distance there are herds of animals they're vaguely tending, and in a greater distance are deserts on one side and forests on another, all steaming under a blazing-white noonday sun. I know it's been something like this on all afternoons, but the patterns of insects are different, and somewhere in the back on my mind I'm on the lookout for snakes: none are visible, but there MIGHT be some there (as in the article I read about them in Omni yesterday). I'm vaguely sexually interested in the guide, so it might be someone like Ron Miller who's only as courteous with me as he needs to be to perform his job efficiently. I wake then at 7:15, nose drying with the oncoming radiator heat, and lay until 7:45 debating whether to get up (having gone to bed at 1:45, only 6 hours ago) or not, then decide that tonight's entertainment at Jan Wallman's will end fairly early, and this gives me a change to shower and wash my hair and having it dry before leaving for my session with Jon at 11, so I'm up and finish typing this by 8AM, not printing.

11/21/84: 1) Paul McLean is driving and I'm riding in a large beige-leather padded car that he rented for only $578/month from a nationwide company who may be subsidizing his long-term rental for some public-relations reason. We've been driving and touring through the US Southwest for two or two-and-a-half weeks, but when I find he has it for a whole month, I ask him where he plans to go after he drops me off in NYC, and he says "Western Kentucky," and I think of the hills and elegant resorts there and suggest I could stay with him for the rest of his trip, and he says that'll be fine. 2) A kind of "wholistic health fair" in an enormous auditorium is est-like with everyone seated in chairs listening to one lecturer, but there's something like "video-therapy" being offered via an enormous cannon-like machine that confronts the individual with questions and images from his past, and they'll be demonstrating it on a select few, and the cute fellow calls out three or four names from a clipboard and then almost winks at me and calls out my name last, and I reach out with a smile and press his arm and rub his back and say "Thanks." I watch a bit, but it's so crowded with people pressing around to watch the video-therapy that I go into a room alone and get involved with a game. When I look at my watch, it's 12:05 and go out to find things are closing up: supervisors sitting around tables doing final evaluations, I ask who's in charge, and someone says I should ask for Cyril, and I look around for him, and finally some watchman says he saw Cyril leaving, maybe we can catch him, and we start running down the heavily-trafficked street after him, and it becomes that TYPICAL agonizing dream-run in which the shoes feel so heavy the feet can hardly be lifted, the ground is so rough or sandy that progress is enormously difficult, and finally the THIGHS feel so COMPLETELY tired they just CAN'T push the legs forward any farther or faster, and an awful "I'll never catch up" despair takes over which is psychologically even more slowing than the physiological weakness, and one wakes from that agonizing effort feeling SOME of the physical weakness remains!

11/22/84: I'm staying in a new Hilton-type hotel with Mom in North Akron, and we want to go to a movie in the afternoon, but when I ask someone in the hotel lobby about what's appearing at Cinema I or Cinema II or some other first-class (New York) movie-house, no one knows. We're about to leave the hotel when I remember I left my paperback in the john, so I reenter this marbled room and return to my low-partitioned stall to find lots of junk on the 1x3' shelf at chest-level behind the toilet. Rummaging around, I find ANOTHER paperback that I debate taking out for Mom to read, lots of other papers and boxes, and then my paperback. When I return to the lobby I have to search around and espy Mom sitting on a sofa far from where I left her. Then it dawns on me that I'll have my New York Magazine waiting for me in my mailbox on the porch at 1221 Dietz, which doesn't have a very large capacity, and since I've been staying with Mom in the hotel since last Wednesday, and this is Monday (and wonder if the postman was even able to fit all TODAY's mail into the box), so I suggest that we just taxi to MY place and pick up the magazine which gives all the movies and even the time-schedules. She says OK and we're out in the darkness to get a cab, but there are porters and doormen all trying to get cabs. Then I think there's that North Avenue bus that goes down into Firestone Park, so I ask a postman coming onto the sidewalk "Where's North Avenue?" "Just two blocks north of Greenwood." "Where's Greenwood?" He looks at me as if I don't know ANYTHING, then points north and says "One block." Three blocks, I think that's a bit far for Mom to walk, and then suddenly we're ON a bus which stopped in front of us, and I figure we'll go a couple of blocks (maybe to Copley) and get away from the hotel-crush for cabs, but then figure we might as well ride THIS bus as close as we can get to Dietz, and am just about to query the driver, above whom I'm standing in the crowded bus, when I wake at 8:45, having been awake previously with ANOTHER dream memory at 8AM, but it's now forgotten.

11/25/84: 1) I'm taking tests in school and not getting the right answers, failing the tests while others get 56 out of 60 correct, and I feel AWFUL. 2) I'm on some sort of "slingshot" amusement park ride in a little capsule (actually it's more like a YO-YO effect!) that spins outward, then falls back toward the ground, then loops out again on a fragile-looking white cord, but every time it loops out it goes out HIGHER and FARTHER, and I shout to draw their attention to this, but they don't even BELIEVE me, and somehow they stop the other cars and I keep on going, getting farther and farther out.

11/29/84: I'm sitting in a lawn chair watching some Colette-like Frenchwoman (long skirt, gray hair pinned into a brioche-shape, a parasol, sitting in a Monet-painting garden) doing an index. She rather desultorily checks off proper names of who appear to be authoresses always with only an initial for a first name, as they appear every three or four pages. Then she recognizes some fact in French I don't follow, and I inquire, "Do you mean to indicate whether the entry is three or four pages?" and that she needs to indicate page RANGES. She irritatedly shrugs me off and I'm glancing through the book to find that the first three or four CHAPTERS will be a problem, the seem to be about a book written by Lillian Gish about her early film career, and it's hard to tell what to take to index from these pages, but I enjoy looking at the photographic stills from early films with Gish as a slave girl, princess, etc. VERY French!

12/01/84: 1) Just a fragment wakes me at 7AM: I'm watching a movie of a naked guy floating up and down on the screen, and I'm able to doodle on the screen and get various sounds from a stereo system, and I get fantastically sexually excited and figure this could go on forever as I tease myself, and then I wake with a hard-on and jerk off til 7:20 and fall back to sleep again, contented. 2) I'm on a cruise-ship that's docking, and I reach above to the Greyhound-type overhead rack to pull down my camera, and the case-strap is tangled with some wires. I get out of my seat and try to untangle the wires, and before I'm finished I'm involved with someone's guitar, a headset for a Walkman, and various gift-wrappings, AND have somehow managed to misplace the CAMERA! Look around, think I may have put it somewhere else, and managed to get LOST in the bowels of this huge ship. Realize that there's a FARTHER part of the bunk-area so that I'm not against the back wall, as I'd thought, but in the middle somewhere, which makes my area more difficult to locate. In trying to get back, I open the door to a storage area, musty-smelling, with leather-padded dining-room chairs stacked in bulky volumes of two or three that reach six feet in height; I see an ornate sign that two explorers AHEAD of me pronounce when they open the door ahead of THEM and say "Oh, this is the CREW area," and I think vaguely they may be looking for sex, and I'll have to remember where this area is. Off to one side is a door that had been decorated in something like hard cake-icing for a party, and I scrabble through plastery hands and feet and faces and tendrils of ivy before I get to the basic bamboo screen that's the door, and I vaguely think this would be a fire hazard if anything got started down here. Past more public and storage areas, most of the latter SMELLING unused and dusty, and start using "positive thinking" that I'll find my camera, but I find my area again, which is subtly changed, and feel that everything's all WRONG, that there should be more of a feeling of faith aboard a luxury ship (though that might be the problem, this is a CHEAP cut-rate ship), and am totally confused when I wake again about 8:30. 3) But then I doze off immediately and I'm a television interviewer talking to a man who says how much he likes women's breasts, and he begins coming closer and closer with a concentrated leer on his face, and it turns into a "Laugh-In" sketch of a freak pursuing a pretty female interviewer. The next sketch involves three boxes of soap powder, one labeled "Olympic flakes" which the woman shakes and shakes to get only scattered dust, and I feel that the punch line will have her ripping open the top of the box to find one GIGANTIC flake inside. I wake at 9 with the memory of a THIRD whacko sketch fresh in mind, but it's gone now at 9:40AM.

12/6/84: 1) I'm working at my computer, just starting a session, and I'm filling in a date on one of those DATE.......... lines, and the lit cursor stops on the fourth or fifth dot, stops blinking, and refuses to move. I wake hoping that this isn't a bad omen. 2) I'm standing at the base of a shale cliff whose face is furrowed like heavy fabric and I have a stick with which I'm prying looks sections of shale which tumble toward my feet, leaving the raw shale-face a darker, wetter color than the tannish outermost surfaces of cliff. 3) I'm talking with someone, very hesitantly, maybe Bruce or even Jon, and when they insist I say what I'm struggling with, I come out with "I get the idea that Actualism doesn't want anyone to have CHILDREN," and I'm thinking more of the female bodyworkers like Linda and Laura and Rosanne than I am of teachers like Crystal or Anne, though the idea seems to be to keep THEM busy, too.

12/9/84: 1) The computer stops indexing operations with "118" on the screen. 2) I'm in a PLAY again, with one word to say at the end of Act I, one line on page 128 at the end of Act II (so I don't have to worry about those), and three lines on page 194 in Act III, which I AM worried about, since I haven't GOTTEN there yet and this is a PERFORMANCE going on now! 3) I'm watching a movie about alligators and the camera zooms to close-up as a man is dropped into the river and a TV ad of "2000...LIVE....ALLIGATORS! (close-ups) rush toward him." And I wake with something of a jerk at 8:30AM to record these notes.

12/11/84: I'm rehearsing for a play in southern France: I'm to be a combination Frankenstein-Messiah and have to run down a hill. I'm running down, with people around me, and I'm also pushing ahead of me a boy, the son of the conductor of the orchestra, and he has to find where to stand in the boy's choir. To help us down there's a sort of roller coaster that I choose to run on the INSIDE of and get balled up in rose-bushes along that side that enclose the FRONT of the car, so I have to excuse myself to the two people in the front seat, who have to get out to let me across their seat to continue down the hill. When they speak in French in response to my English excuses, I'm again reminded that I'm in France. When I get to a profile-view of the Virgin's memorial at the top of the hill, I'm terrified to see that HALF of the base has been bombed away, and I remind myself NOT to go under that side when there's an earthquake, and just LOOKING at that damaged arrowhead-shape makes the top look as if it's tilting, about to fall. Don't even have the chance to get to the point where I can worry about not knowing my lines when a bell rings IN the dream and I wake to find it's the telephone ringing at 8:40AM with Spartacus telling me to bring the batteries with me when I meet him at 9:05AM, and I finish typing this at 9:03AM, just at the boundary, which is OK since the VHS J&R store doesn't open until 9:30 and we'll get there in order to WAIT at bit anyway, and I've again managed to fill up the last line on the page with words!

12/12/84: I'm on the TOP floor of an elegant CPW apartment building, walking through what starts to be a normal-sized hall, but I'm looking through entrance portals and seeing 20 x 40 foot swimming pools (though they look quite shallow) with elegant people sitting around them, and I draw back even farther to see little self-contained castles at the edges of parapets (rather like the tall water-towers I remember seeing on the East End Avenue skyline around 96th Street), and now I turn to the left and look over a FIELD, to the left of which extends a DIRT ROAD, and I start down that when a doodle-bug two-car subway comes out of the distance and stops to let off a lot of people, and I know that this train's come from a VERY elegant enclave back on this road, all on ROOFTOP!

12/14/84: I've been staying in a boarding house with Paula Gannon and Linda Klau and I leave the room at 2AM and forget to take my CLOTHES. I think they're down at the doorway, but THOSE clothes are covered with DUST. Back to the room and chat and out to AGAIN find I forget clothes. Back and find the door LOCKED and debate picking them up next week, but I NEED my gray pants and know I'm wearing only silky underwear/pajamas that won't stand up against the cold. Into a house AGAIN and it's the PHIBES house, and mine is two doors down. Down and I'm CONFUSED: where did I ALREADY sleep, since it's dawn already and I've been out all night. Jot these notes at 7:15AM.

12/16/84: I'm watching a movie that was filmed at the University of Akron's "cemetery vaults" and suddenly me and some woman are THERE, walking toward the "cemetery," and the path goes between two overgrown HEDGES covered with long green fronds containing THORNS (rather like the tiny thorns on my asparagus plant), and as I pass between my voluminous blue sleeves (like on my red jacket, but it's blue) get caught on the thorns and I have trouble pulling them off without scratching my arms beneath or my fingers as I pull them off. Then my female companion remarks about the "single trees" and I look to see why she's pointing them out: they're merely new trees planted in sodded plots (like the plots described in the Hesse essays I was reading), but then I notice some are quite small, and strangely the bottoms of them all are wrapped in SILVER PAPER, some bending over away from us. I pass between ANOTHER thorny plant and start complaining that no one's helping me get them off my sleeves, and she complains we "didn't bring wrapped sandwiches to eat," but I say "the cafeteria is JUST over THERE," and we begin to climb the rusty black-painted iron steps that lead up to the cemetery plot, but I KNOW it's not REALLY at Akron U. Odd.

12/17/84: I'm clerking in a store under Dick Hartill. Tourists are waiting on line to see a popular theater production entitled "Boys," and some ask me what to see between now and when they have to be at the theater this evening. I take out an ELABORATE map and direct them down to South Ferry, saying they might take a ferry to Staten Island, or Liberty Island, or Ellis Island depending on what they want to see and the time they have left. Later, at 8:30, I realize that I should have been at Dad's store to help out at 6PM! I get the keys that I need and get out to a quiet intersection to travel in a diagonal direction (10:30, as I think of it) on Miami Street, knowing I haven't been this way before, so I'll see new sights on the way to the familiar store.

12/18/84: 1) Someone who I characterize in the dream as a "straight fuck buddy" brings a SPANISH girl to our apartment, but since she looks like RITA (with pudgy nose and protruding lips and narrow chin) I tell him I probably won't get excited about her (using this as an excuse, I know, for hiding the fact that I'm gay). But we DO start kissing, and I think that she just MIGHT be exciting! 2) I'm driving a car (rather like the car-into-plane of WonderWorks last night) following another car around a sharp turn to a steep uphill side-road, and the car in front slips around neatly but I take it wider, lose momentum, and go so slowly that I start sliding backward, telling whoever's in the next seat NOT to expect me to be dextrous with the pedal and shift to get up the hill, and then without transition I'm watching a TV show or movie about some woman welcoming a SEAL into a chair in her living room, and the camera pans back to show that the living room is knee-deep in WATER, and this is obviously a whacked-out comedy!

12/28/84: 1) I'm riding in a car and someone's twisted the neck of a bird until it's just a single red tendon or blood vessel, and a rat in the back of the car is gnawing on the crunchy beak of what looks to be a spoonbill. 2) There are coffee tables piled with work (my TVs on my coffee table?) in what could be an IBM office, and I move from one to the other to try to move OUT the tables and move IN desks that would be more useful. 3) NOTE VERBATIM: Common (1221 Dietz) kitchen lights need changing, but Erik-Lauer type says Chrystal said type plastic recipes off old bathroom walls. I follow dwarfs with loaded grocery carts through crowded aisles.

12/29/84: I'm at some sort of reunion-party in a country resort that's rather like a school, or it's a SCHOOL, whether high school or college, reunion, but my group or year either isn't represented or I don't know where they're gathering, so I spend time wandering around with a large aluminum-plastic bag of chocolate chip cookies under my right arm, thinking two thoughts: they will think I'm generous and my whole class will enjoy them, or I'm happy that I'll have a lot of them to eat myself. I pass by a busy cafeteria about 11:45AM, seeing that the lines from breakfast have dwindled, but it's too early to have lunch yet, except that I haven't eaten today yet. Hear someone ordering and then demand a repeat, and the counterman patiently but with a touch of exasperation rattles off "one tom, one reg, one rad." Then I'm wandering down a road where a class has agreed to come in hillbilly calico skirts and strap- over-shoulder blue jeans, and they're having some kind of contest or race in which people are scooting back and forth in twos and threes, and I find to my fascination that two of the men are bare-assed, except one turns around to show he's covered his genitals with bent tin, rather like half a potato grater, and another has hooked the tip of his cock (I've been looking through too many old copies of The Advocate!) to either his tits or a waist-belt, and at first I think it's some sort of pouch, and then I see he has a huge red erection, and I debate whether to pass by or stand and stare, but I wake at 9AM and lie a bit.