DREAMS FROM 1985
1/15/85: Short but VERY sweet: I'm at some sort of baths or dormitory-type rooming house and there's going to be a body-building exhibit. Rolf and I go to see, and we're the only ones for a humpy muscular number, and I start hugging, and it turns out that's the reason he's there, to be worshiped, so I'm having a GREAT time, and then suddenly there's Herman Washington, into body- building, and WE start hugging, and he feels VERY good to hold, and I wake about 9:30 with a great yearning sweetness, thinking NOW to call Gay Switchboard and ask about the current bars and J/O clubs, and if there are any gay EATING, RESTAURANT, or FOOD-enjoyment entries---and maybe put ME into it!
1/10/85: (note lost until 1/28) International espionage connected with Biorhythms, something BIG happens on three-cross day, I have to find out WHAT and PREVENT it, in seven days. My teeth are "red and bleeding;" enemy's teeth green and food-caked. Have to drive California to Mexico in one day. Lots of sadness and frustration. (Don't know what this last means:) Crisis (on TV) 12/11 or 1/1.
1/17/85: I've been recently inducted into the Army, and there's a meeting called for 9AM but no one's told us whether we're supposed to be wearing our uniforms or not. Half the guys in the barracks are in street clothes, but somehow that doesn't make me feel any more comfortable. My uniform is down a pathway outside the barracks, inside some little shacks at the bottom of a hill, but when I go down there I wander around inside and can't find anything that I recognize, so I seem to have lost my uniform anyway. I rehearse my yelled "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" and "No excuse, sir" and debate whether I'll insist on using only a normal conversational tone OR really blast them with a developed roar in my voice. Basically, though, I wonder how I got here at ALL!
1/26/85: 7:35AM note: I'm watching TV, to bed early and Michael Blackburn's being interviewed on how he likes program from 2 to 7:30, and says he wishes BOB would join him, nice people there, he's going to Man's Country at 10PM. People there will be nice, but Michael's sorry I'm not there. Program HAS been a string quintet playing and SINGING opera (there are calls on the phone, too), and Bill Bartenbach-like jazz pianist is nervous sweating and may go too.
1/27/85: I'm watching the filming of a TV program (obviously based on "Other- world" last night) in an enormous studio which has white plastic CUBES instead of cork SQUARES on the walls and ceilings, giving an impression of brightness and enormous size and richness. The first scene is indoors, a very elaborate laboratory, and when I pass BY it, there are bleachers filled with people that I somehow know have WORKED on the series by writing, costuming, lighting, constructing the set, and they've all been given tickets to the filming of the first episode and they're enjoying it enormously. I pass around the side to a set that's supposed to represent outdoors, set into the left half of an enormous sound-stage with those white plastic cubes visible all over the right, but now I guess they must be able to "take" special-effects like desert and clouds and sky on their surfaces. I feel somehow responsible for the writing of the series, and I think it's good that all this is so RICH: not only can the plot concern the FICTIONAL setting, but it can include the people who WORKED on the show, and I look forward with eager anticipation to writing MORE of the show---obviously connected to the tail-end of a science-fiction program I saw last night about a telephone-answering machine dictating series-plots to a harried writer who seems to have no good ideas of his own.
1/28/85: Wake early with a memory of a dream, but as I try to retrieve it, I think that I didn't write down YESTERDAY's dream, and when I retrieve THAT one, I find to my chagrin that TODAY's dream has vanished. It was ALSO grand and architectural and something about accomplishment and writing, and I wanted to record it, but the best I can do now is record the IMPRESSION I had of it and put in the "request" to repeat a dream like it TONIGHT that I can record BELOW.
12/20/84: (Note lost till now): I have booth at ASI or ACM or some computer show in some hotel. Have to go to john, and today it's downstairs. Risk going without pants and female cop puts hands on my bare hips as I move toward the locker that has my pants. Put them on, but can't get to john because my BADGE is upstairs, and slide out revolving door blocked by armchairs and ask David Hoch where Seventh Avenue entrance is. "Up stairs marked exit," he says, and I'm back, safe, to my area.
1/30/85: We need to construct a ladder (like a DNA lattice-ladder) to have sex on, and find under floorboards pairs of HORNS whose tips link and ends pile up to form ladders six-high (six-squeeze?). Sort of in corners, instead. Odd.
2/1/85: Susan McMahon is at head of table of about 10-12 classmates and I talk to teacher and she's huffy, someone says, because I seem to be "wanting to take leadership away from her." I said I knew no such competition. Then a CUTE little train comes through behind us and THAT takes all my attention while Susan leaves.
2/5/85: Traveling in Tanjore, India. Have map of rail system and tootle about by day, returning to central location (as at Lourdes). Jon arrives and shares a few days with me, and I travel with him to his place, where he'd drawn a crude map of the direction to his hotel. Conductor says I must get off, and I'm pushing folders and maps and writing tablets into bag and ask for way from Jon. He pretends and draws a new one and we both pull out pictures and pills and food. But bus this time goes FAST and he leans back and laughs, obviously not WANTING me, and I'm aghast and angry. Is he joking or REALLY wants to be mean? (This note is VERY garbled.) Later, at 10:35AM: Kevin Blackburn calls me for something important, and says something about Michael. "What?" I ask. "He's taking a PLANE." "Yes, he's taking WHAT plane?" "LADY!" "Kevin, I just don't get it---WHAT plane?" Plain or plane, something to do with LADY!
2/7/85: Real hodge-podge: at party a black female dwarf hands me "my old drink" of half-and-half root beer and Pepsi, and I hug her trying not to spill any on her shoulder. In cafeteria line at 11:15AM for breakfast and there's no COOK for the eggs (though they can be bought raw!) and I debate entering kitchen and asking for a cook. Fuss with acronyms and TV programs. AM I "working" at night?
2/19/85: Seemingly a busy night after Actualism class: I'm walking down byways in a foreign city, knowing that I'm staying in a small hotel somewhere near either the mouth of a large river or the ocean, but when I get to the top of a small rise with an enormous view of a stupendous tropical-white city, I'm surprised that the water seems distant and small. Down into a mass of small buildings and see a vista down a palm-tree lined street with a ruddy sunset above it, but when I get my camera out it has grown too dark to take a good picture. Then (in the same or another city) I've climbed a flight of stairs that's more like a wooden ladder close against a wall, and step out onto the roof of a small penthouse to grab a cloth-battened wooden form that's smaller than a yardarm with the sails wrapped around it but larger than a cloth-wrapped trapeze-bar. There's a small-link chain holding the spar to the balcony, and when I unhook it, it detaches, allowing me to swing out 6-7 floors above the street, but then I have to throw the chain back onto the penthouse balcony. The woman who lives there has returned, and I wait for her to go into another room so I won't bother her, but her dog keeps prowling about. The amplitude of my swings on the batten is lessening, so finally I just throw it and it just manages to catch. When I'm starting to worry how to shinny along the batten to MY room, the scene shifts back down to a marketplace where I'm pushing my way through round-faced urchins who are trying to act as guides or selling souvenirs. This happens a few times as I wander the streets, sometimes after dark when I have to wade through a small stream up shale-y streambeds to get where I'm wandering in this primitive village. Then I realize I'm walking without my shoulder bag! Again that AWFUL feeling of loss: I KNOW my camera was there, and a fairly full wallet with credit cards and papers---and my PASSPORT as well. IN THE DREAM I think of alternatives: could I have left these valuables somewhere ELSE? Is this only my IMAGINATION? Do I have a spare passport somewhere? Just as I figure I'll have to be philosophical and take things as I come do I WAKE and feel with relief that I solved my problem by KNOWING THAT IT WAS ONLY A DREAM!
2/16/85 (Note just found): My Wallensack-type tape recorder has lost the right- hand tape guide and I debate replacing it with a toothpick, but then tape CRIMPS on underside of take-up reel and in trying to restore it, it all falls off (as on my backless reel) and becomes damp and limp like noodles, and I wonder if I LEAVE it, it'll CLOT like drying noodles, and if I PLAY it onto reel, if I'll be quick enough to disengage the TANGLES.
2/20/85: Multiple "rockets" taking off from a roller-coaster-like "track" (or it's actually more like a Bobsled rubber-bottomed curve-sided chute), but the one I'M on doesn't quite work, so it falls to a lower track to try AGAIN, and then as a last resort goes onto a THIRD track where all seems to be going well.
2/21/85: I enter a large restaurant for a group lunch and sit next to Jim Arnett at a table for 12 that gradually fills up with his business acquaintances, and as I look at the NEXT table, for 28, I see people like Ron Tiekert and some people from IBM, and I've been seated at the wrong TABLE. The other table is full but a table is added to one corner in an ell-shape, and I sit alone. A waitress comes with a menu and I look and look and can't find anything. When I call for "faux filet," she points to the fine print and it's CREAM CHEESE. I look and look and she hands me a green-sheeted list of entrees that describes a hamburg of half chopped round and half filet, and I'll take it, and find handsome stranger has been seated to my left, so I might meet someone anyway!
3/1/85: A) I'm in a class, all of us adults, and we're reading. Dark-haired handsome Britisher behind me is mumbling aloud and I turn and ask him to stop. He doesn't. I turn and say earnestly: "It's VERY inconsiderate"---he continues ----"and annoying"----he continues----"and RUDE"---he continues. We're almost nose to nose at this point and he's VERY attractive to me----"and it MUST stop," I conclude grittily. He puts a VERY nice hand on my shoulder and stops. I turn back to MY book, and it's "playing" like a radio at low volume about a bounty of buns that a bunch of bears are eating in the morning, in a delightful light British accent, reminding me of my old-time Saturday-morning children's programs. But no one seems to hear it but me.
B) Then I'm in MY kitchen, but it's RUSTIC (got from New Yorker cartoon where the housewife shows her mother her "new" kitchen and IT'S like one her MOTHER would have gotten rid of years before?) with a small wooden chest of drawers where my table now is, and there's a TREE TRUNK on my cabinets, which have moved right next to the window (and I wonder how there's room for the trunk, but "know" that it's only slightly raised on the OUTSIDE of the doors and on the inside there's all the room there was before, because the tree trunk has been sawed off to fit only on the OUTSIDE of the cabinet, though I have a sense that it's harder to open the doors wide, and it's darker inside the cabinets than it was before), and I open one of the drawers below the cabinets, which are full of the utensils my drawer is filled with now, and transfer something into the chest, which now contains drawers like my bedroom chests, which are only lightly filled with the TOOLS that are now in the cabinet below my sink, and when I hear the empty rattle I think "Oh, I have room for more tools."
3/4/85: 2AM: Strange "waking" dream of sore throat caused by pulling long HAIR out of throat, and the LAST pull, lasting a long time, grating past my uvula, ends in EXHALING in a ROAR to pass the BEADED STRING of Eyeclasses, with a larger white pearl at the END! And that very day I throw all that stuff away!
3/5/85: 7:05AM: Wake with a THUMP after one of the most frightening and "dangerous" dreams I can remember: There were many sequences to it, and I've forgotten the details of most of them, but they all involved "bullies" that were "after" me (I recall reading Nabokov's "Lik" yesterday [even REreading it in his "Quartet"] and the phrase in one of his other stories from a few days ago where the bully "knew how to pummel without leaving visible incriminating marks). I was either a student in a school (as in the Nabokov stories) or in some sort of business or play that involved garishly-colored "phony" looking furniture and backdrops (or as if the dream were SO INTENSELY a dream that there was little energy for the backdrop and MUCH energy for the feelings of pursuit and punishment). I had various things to do, but just as I was about to accomplish them, or directing efforts toward accomplishing them, a menacing figure (almost caricatured, like the "Blue Meanies" in the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine") would come out from hiding and threaten to torture or ACTUALLY torture me. I recall one sequence where he easily held my stiff body in the air (as if he were the enormous spider brandishing a chitinous grasshopper on one of the "Life on Earth" programs), proclaiming to others that he was "helping" me, but actually he was digging his angular shoulder into my inflexible side, causing me physical damage. In the final sequence this same fat round-faced bully had appeared in the midst of a group of "admirers," and I knew that he was going to smile and pretend to embrace me, but he was ready to stab me or pummel me or physically abuse me in a very damaging way, and I wanted very much to get away from him, so I ducked down into a crouch and received a BLOW ON THE HEAD. This blow on the head was accompanied by, or indeed manifested in, a tin-drum clangour of sound like the expanding thump of a hot-water heater remembered from youth in Akron, as if the blow were so solid that the head itself reverberated with a thin metallic rattle, like a brief clap of stage thunder caused by shaking a metal plate. I woke at that moment, in a similar crouch while lying with my feet drawn up, shoulders hunched, head on two pillows, with such a feeling of PRESSURE (and the echo of the sound still in my waking ears) on the top of my head that I wondered in a moment of panic whether I might not have had a stroke and now lay paralyzed or even dead. Visually startling was the inner sight of FRAGMENTS STREAMING DOWNWARD, as if my inner eyes had been taken over by a camera on the body of an ascending rocket, showing falling ice from the fuel cylinders and showering sparks from metallic connection-fragments streaming down past the ascending rocket. This lasted for only a second or two, but it was long enough to have the impact of something visually completely different, rather frightening, and certainly memorable. In sensing my body in the moment of awakening, I felt oddly hollow, as if some essential necessary parts of my inner being were "off" somewhere; I felt like a fragile crystal frozen into a fixed position that any movement would shatter into hopeless shards. In trying to convey that crystalline feeling now, I think of an ice cube removed from a tray before it has had the time to freeze through: most of the unfrozen water drains away leaving only a glittering shell of sharp ice crystals that shatter and collapse at the least heat. I opened my eyes after the DOWNWARD STREAMING stopped, and the dim light of 7:05AM had an underwater feeling of grayness about it. I lay perfectly still, afraid that in attempting to move I would find I was INDEED paralyzed, but then after a bit felt that I was merely overdramatizing, and stretched out and looked around and sensed that I was indeed undamaged, except psychically, by the extraordinary dream. I'd gone to bed at 3, gotten up at 4:10 to 5:20 to write, so I was really lacking SLEEP, and I dozed fitfully until getting up at 10:30, still somewhat "underslept" at 6:20 hours.
3/6/85: As if to CONTRAST with the horror of last night, THIS starts with my being told to finish a dessert platter, which involves reaching into a box of chocolate-covered crackers, separating the top and bottom halves and filling each half with chocolate mousse and piling the filled halves carefully into an aluminum bowl. Then I'm told to wash bright-red strawberries and arrange them on a larger platter, but some of them slip off the table into a clear, swift- flowing stream nearby, and I have to wade into the stream and get the strawberries, still clean and edible, and I taste some just to make sure.
3/7/85: Since I'm sleeping from 12:20 to 9:30, there are LOTS of them:
1) John Crano is driving somewhere with me next to him and someone shadowy, who may be Jean-Jacques or Dennis, in the back seat talking to John, and I look over to see that a large bulge is forming in John's crotch, so I laughingly say to the person in the back, "You're turning John ON!" and John makes some embarrassed comment about it. Then we're on his front porch, talking, and his mother is cleaning the slats on the venetian blinds inside the porch windows, but when the slats separate, it's really MRS. JOHNSON who's inside there.
2) I'm working in an office, with many things to do, meeting with bosses and co-workers, but when I look at the right arm of my white shirt, I see that I've broken a large pimple on my right upper arm, and the blood has stained the inside of the sleeve and dried into hardness, and even the inside of my suit- jacket is bloodied, and I put my jacket back on, feeling very self-conscious.
3) I'm in a large apartment, like Don Maloof's, for sex, and I've gone into the bathroom to take a shower. I'd remembered the shower head as being a simple PIPE with the water streaming out, but now it's some flexible pipe ending in a tiny surgical-like appliance like the end of a transfusion bottle, with a tiny flange that has to be pushed back to allow the water to flow, and I excuse myself to someone who's been waiting for me. In here, too, I think, I found that the wall between the bedroom and bathroom has been taken down (the scars are plainly visible on the ceiling, wall, and floor, and what had been the bathroom window is now OPEN, and as I close it I find old dust-patterns to indicate that the glass in the window has been changed; all very strange.
4) The door to the office opens and there are pairs and small groups of six and distant larger groups of an ENGLISH MILITARY parade, all very clean and colorful, rather like a Broadway extravaganza, with rosy-cheeked performers and lots of colorful pennants and flags, marching about and singing some British- accented song, and I move to a window looking down over a large grassy field to see larger formations marching below, and boys on bicycles zoom past, held back by the drag of the tall grasses on their bicycle wheels, and others on scooters and wagons have the same problems keeping in formation with the grass hindering them, but they manfully pushed their vehicles to keep up with the groups.
5) I'd left work on my lunch hour, around 12, for an appointment with a therapist, but side doors (like different offices in a dentist's office) open and lots of handsome men pour out, and there's some sort of convention going on, and I ask when my time in the queue is, and am told 10PM. I'm startled, but I sort of forget about it, getting bound up in a computer-display that looks like an advertising placard on a stand in a department store, but it's a video display that outlines one FORTRAN statement and has lots of explanatory information around it (like the program I ordered from VISA yesterday?), and I ask if it can also LIST the whole program, and the demonstrator assures me it can. Then I'm looking down over a group of men like stockbrokers writing on little BLACKBOARDS in a video-display panel, but when they fill the board, it just slides UP and they have fresh board to look at. I see that it's about 2PM, and I really SHOULD get back to work, and I ask some secretary far away when my appointment is, and she tells me it's 10PM, and with chagrin I remember that I'd been told this BEFORE, and get ready to go back to work and return here, wondering how the therapist can remain FRESH enough at 10PM to handle my appointment, but the office is STILL so busy there's no good waiting around.
3/10/85: A) I go about 8 houses to Carol Ann's BROTHER for a quick neck job after Joan Ann DeMattia gets one, and he charges me $100. I'm about to sleep there, but it's 3AM so I go home. But IBMers are pissing in the bus for a pissoir, and I return to office to find all of SBC is still there. Ask and find an invitation to a Car Sale party. Query? B) Someone got $23,000 in order to spend 2000 writing a screenplay that's being sent to England to be looked at by five ugly women: Elaine the owner, her secretary, an agent, and the "Rich Ladies" who are the backers, all with HUGE noses. The US office has a lady president, a lady manager, and a guy business manager who backs the writer. Odd combinations for a VERY romantic plot! C) I'm watching a distant movie of water flooding the crops, then buildings collapsing on workmen, then people driving through ruins and getting swept away---and I'm reminded of the disaster from "Star Wars" (all this in the note, which I don't understand as I transcribe). D) Driving in car and two rockets split apart, maneuver, then join nose to tail (almost hitting car), and then take off again with GREAT smoke effects and slow motion. E) "Raiders of the Lost Ark" type scenario: I'm led by captors who let me go up spiral stairs to see church area, and my "guard" starts getting an erection. Then I'm "given headdress" of power and BROWN eyes, and notified of FORMER power-wielders/fathers. F) "Display" of "America in 1989" TV special, views and players from soaps and segments and series, and there are piles of BEDS on top and I climb up and tip the pile FORWARD and think "Well, that'll teach them to build a more STABLE pile!"
3/11/85: A) Watching TV and KNOW they're making a FRAMING shot into which they'll later dub some eye-catching bodies for an ad---that I can slow up.
B) Lots of guys climbing a large-branched tree, walking up and down limbs, and one LARGE one breaks and everyone jumps into car to get away before cops come. I return and find I'm on a seaside where---- C) There's a sign for "Merchandise Dump 3" where shoppers can take things from SHIPPING conveyor belts, putting back things they don't like on a PARALLEL belt that'll AUTOMATICALLY match up returns and rejects with the original stock.
3/20/85: 4:25AM. SUCH odd long dreams: 1) Helen sobs to me that we have to tell Mom that her baby (2-year-old Rita) is DEAD, and then MOM says she was THERE when the baby died, so she knows it, and Helen is so silly. 2) I'm "on a break" from a trial and go out for a walk and a strange "confidence game" takes place when a MAN comes into a ladies' john where I somehow BELONG and puts down a SUITCASE near me and calls a COP who is young, blond, and very attractive, rather like Tim Kramer in the porno films, and then the man accuses ME of owning the suitcase (which obviously carried drugs or porno or some other kind of contraband he's trying to smuggle THROUGH my unwitting offices), and then ANOTHER accomplice enters to say I SOLD him some contraband goods, but I simply state with GREAT force (knowing somehow I'll be believed) that "It's all a frame-up," and when the cop takes me out of the john, he TOUCHES my hand at my side so tenderly that I know he "understands" and might even be available for sex. 3) A pushy pesky IMP causes troubles in a police station and I offer to "get rid of it," and take it through corridors to an outer door and want to CHASE it away, but as I KICK it, it falls to transparent bits that fall into a nearby gaping hole that smokes under the doorsill. I pick up some of the pieces, but they smell so badly that I push them down the hole, too, feeling guilty about it. 4) I return through garden walls and step over low sills and say "Do you ALWAYS leave these unlocked?" Secretary wearily says Yes and I say, "Well, robbers can enter as I did and TAKE EVIDENCE." 5) Into room of tables at 4:55PM and go to Ed (the old IBM clerk who retired, forget his name) for pencils and select a few SHARP but still WOOD-coated points, and then he stands are starts to order various kinds of cooked hot dogs for us on a very elaborate listing of alternate ingredients, donenesses, and condiments. Write all this to 4:31AM, again weary of ALL these DETAILED dreams to copy down!
3/21/85: This was SO weird that I transcribed it directly into PLAYWRITER form:
TRICK (frantic to interrupt): Dreams! You ain't heard a dream till you heard mine! I call it my "Atlantic City" dream!
PW: Atlantic City?
TRICK: Yeah. You know, at the end of the Boarkwalk, how, way at the---what end is it?---you know, the lookin-at-the-ocean-you-turn-left-and-walk-to-the-end, end---
PW (following directions with body English): Uh, I guess that's the north end.
TRICK: Yeah, the north end. You know how (waving at PW)---at the NORTH end of the Boardwalk---Atlantic City gets kind of seedy, and old, and little run-down houses with funny little bars---anyway, that's the kind of place my dream is in. I'm eatin at one of these funny little hamburg places, and this guy is eatin next to me, and he's kinda cute, but like he's high on somethin? So he's eatin this hamburg and gettin closer and closer to me---I don't even know if we was TOGETHER or not---and I get the message, and I want to let him know that I GOT the message, so I say "OK, let's just wait till we get to YOUR place." Hey, it's like I hit 'im with a brick, but a GOOD brick, cause his face lights up and he says "HE-EY, that's OKEY-EY" and gets up from the table. We musta been somewhat more than close, because he kind of gets up from BEHIND me and is pullin his shirt together and zippin up his pants, and I gotta zip up MY pants and pull MY shirt together, and he got the waitress to give him a check, and he takes out his wallet and counts out one, two, three, four, five, six dollars and hands it to the waitress like it's twice the bill, or somethin, but it ain't, cause she looks at the money and looks at him like there was cockroaches wrapped up in it and walks off lookin back over her shoulder tellin him off. But he's not hearin; he runs out of the place tellin me to "FOLLOW HIM!" I get my shit together, but I ain't got my SHOES. Now I know I had SHOES on when I went IN there, so I go back to the table, and then I look DOWN, and I got on these like brown ARMY BOOTS on, except the shoelaces are brand new ---which I think is funny, cause I don't remember puttin in new shoelaces--- and they're like YELLOW and REAL LONG and hang off the sides of the shoes like some kinda STIFF RIBBONS. So, OK, I got my shoes on. I follow him out and he's just across the street---a dirty little street just like in Atlantic City ---goin inta this REALLY RATTY building, and when I say REALLY RATTY, I mean REALLY RATTY---
PW (bemusedly): Really ratty---
TRICK (almost unhearing): REALLY ratty, because the front steps is like dry- rotted away and he's got to reach down and say "Here, I'll give you a hand" so I can get up the first step, which is very high because the first two steps have kind of rotted away, but they're tryin to make it look good because that first step is painted bright RED. And I look around the hallway that's all crowded with people comin and goin, and down at the floor there's RATS---no, there's just ONE rat, but it's a BIG one, and he's goin into this big rat hole in the wall that has a kind of a GRATE in front of it, but it don't bother the rat because he just goes in and out, in and our right THROUGH (he has put up his left hand, the back of it facing PW, with separated fingers pointing upward, and with great facial concentration aims the separated fingers of his right hand, parallel to the floor, THROUGH the separated fingers of his left hand) the grate. Now, I don't think it's a very nice place---
PW: No, it doesn't sound like it---
TRICK: ---but I'm willing to go along with the guy for awhile because he really IMPRESSED me when he paid for my bill at the hamburger joint. He kinda waves at the owner of this place, and the owner says "Room Five," which seems to be right there at the entrance, with lots of people goin in and out. The guy I'm with seems to know one of the gals, and I watch close when they kiss, and SHE wants to kiss him on the lips and HE sort of goes off to one side, which is good, because of AIDS, but I can see that his lips are sorta flipperin around (he sticks out his lips and opens and closes them rapidly) and I think "Oh, oh, he looks like he likes kissin, and you can't do much kissin because of AIDS." So I'm kinda worried. At first the room is small, but more people come in and it gets bigger and bigger and more crowded and more crowded. There's this cute gal smokin a cigarette, and she's tryin to put the make on me, so she pokes the mouth-end of the cigarette into my belly-hair, just below my belly-button, where I sorta TRIMMED the hair into this nice narrow SHAPE, and she sorta says (sexily) "That's CUTE." I look down and by damn is my belly doesn't sorta clasp the end of the cigarette and puff on it, and she says (with amazement) "That IS cute!" I look for the guy who brought me here, to ask him about all these gals around---I mean at first I thought it was sorta like the baths, or a our-hotel---
PW: An OUR-hotel?
TRICK: No, a HOW-ER hotel, you know, like you rent rooms by the HOUR?
PW: Oh.
TRICK: So there's this gal with her TIT hangin out, and she goes up these little stairs into this part of the room, and I wanna follow her, but there's all these OTHER people, and I wanna find someone and ask what kind of a place IS this, but I don't see no one to ask so I just wander around, and people are drinkin and smokin---but I ain't smokin, I'm pretty straight, so maybe that's why I feel kind of out of it. Then I hear all these people SINGIN, and I go into this next room and everyone's sorta in pairs, like on a dance-floor?, and they got their arms around each other and they're all singin this song, you know "I Believe"---
(PW starts, "I believe for every drop of rain that falls---" and TRICK joins in for a few bars.)
TRICK: Yeah, that's it. And they're all sorta---sorta FLUTTERY (he flutters his hands at the sides of his head and rapidly shakes his head back and forth in a quick jitter) in the singin, like they're gonna burst into tears, or somethin, and then they're all standin, facin in one direction, singin, and I look in that direction, and there's big windows, with rain comin down on them, but it's like a MOVIE because what's outside the windows is MOVIN, but when I get up to the windows I see that the ROOM is movin.
PW (puzzled): The ROOM is moving?
TRICK: Yeah, the ROOM is movin. So I go to the far corner, near the windows, and one of them must be open, cause I feel a cold breeze comin in, so I squeeze through some of the woodwork and go into a (he has trouble with the word) triANGular room (describing with his hands) with the people singin behind me and the other two sides of the room all glass---and what's outside the room is still MOVIN, and I can FEEL the room movin, like in a earthquake, and I look down at the floor and there's little cracks between the floorboards, and I don't feel SAFE there, so I go through the woodwork at the back (hunches up shoulders and pantomimes sliding sideways through a narrow opening) and I'm OUTSIDE, and there's this fresh-painted white wooden wall with a blue sign painted on it (frames sign with his arms and hands, then cups each word as he reads the four lines of the sign): "The White Hotel; the most famous--- something, something---hotel in the world; rooms only---I try but I can't read the numbers---something, something per night;" and then I can't quite read the last line.
PW (shaking head): Weird!
TRICK: Yeah. And then I move along the roof-side and get to the BACK, and it's the back of like a (spaces between words) long---white---trailer that's goin down the road past these, like, Atlantic City houses and summer cottages, and people are wavin from front porches and sidewalks, 'cept one woman points to me and shouts, like "Oh, you shouldn't be out THERE!" like I was somethin shameful, and I look down and my shirt's open and my pants are kinda down, so I pull my pants up and close my shirt, all the while hangin on to like the pointy last EDGE of this big white traveling trailer-hotel, and it, like, gets to the end of its LEASH, so it's gotta make this U-turn and go back the way it came, and it makes this (mimes the words) BIG, TIGHT turn, and I sorta SWING OFF to one side, and it SWAYS to one side, and it MAKES the turn, but it's still SWAYIN, and then it TIPS OVER onta white gravel that sort of sprays up on both sides---(pauses for effect)
PW (obliging): Wow!
TRICK (accepting): But I'm OK because I was outside, but I'm wonderin what might have happened INSIDE---all those people standin next to each other, tippin over and bouncin off rough edges inside---there might be broken bones and all, but I'm OK---and that's the end of the dream.
PW (dazed): Wow!
3/22/85: I'm traveling with a group that includes Dana Barraclough, someone rather like Joe Tomanosy, and a short-haired balding sexy blond who reminds me of someone I can't quite remember. We're leaving somewhere like upstate New York, and Joe in the death seat tells Dana the driver that we're not going the usual way to the Interstate, and Dana retorts that if we cut across this road we can get to some feeder route in quicker time than the other way, so we three passengers sit back with an "OK, let's see what happens" air. We're riding in an open-topped narrow vehicle rather like a four-passenger Minneapolis Speedway racer, with a body we rather recline in and wheels sticking way out to the sides. As we approach the river, we go down a steep hill that ends in an rise followed by a fall that we're going so fast for that we really feel the lift of weightlessness on the way down and then the HEAVY drag of gravity as we quickly rise again, compounding our added weight. We all go "Ohhhh," as if we were riding a roller coaster, which the sensation resembles, and suddenly we're driving along a narrow slate-slabbed causeway over shallow water. We're not going very fast, but we quickly overtake two pedestrians on the road, and the roadway's so narrow that they have to jump off into the water, but it's very shallow and sandy, and they're wearing waders because they're intermittently stepping off the causeway to probe for lobsters or horseshoe crabs among the miniature dunes and valleys of the off-causeway riverbottom-scape. As we pass, we watch them wading first to their calves and then to their thighs as they scrabble the water muddy in searching for their prey, bending over to get almost completely wet as they retrieve a horseshoe crab. Dana turns to look at something, the causeway veers, and suddenly the racer is in the water, so I get out and push, but find that the now-underwater causeway is covered with small piles of sand that almost reach to the top of the water, so rather than pushing the racer back onto the causeway, I push it alongside the causeway until we reach the gentle slope (beached-whale program?) that leads to the resumption of the road. The racer won't start as it struggles up the slope, but as it reaches level ground, water cascades forward onto the sandy road out of the motor cowling, and with the water-rushing sounds comes the rev of the starting motor, and I try to crawl back into the empty seat in the right rear by getting into a very low crouch holding onto the back seat with my left hand, blond's shoulder in the front seat, as I try to lever my right foot and leg into a skimpy pair of shorts held by the blond in a low awkward position. I almost lever the car onto its side as I struggle into them, wondering in a vague way why I have to keep my feet off the sand (as I'm already pretty wet) as I put on my shorts to get back into the racer. Wake at 10:30AM and type this at 11:40.
4/1/85: Fragments: 1) I'm in a college class on writing, and while one small group from the class reads their story or play, I'm aware I haven't finished my homework for the NEXT class, nor have I finished the story for THIS class, and I debate reading "Dissolution" in lieu of the story I had planned. 2) I'm on the Starship Enterprise and as the power goes off in some battle, I go to the john with emergency lights on, and the whole ROOM starts "sliding down to the right" with causes a TERRIBLE feeling of fear and foreboding to rise up in me. 3) DAD has moved into my 320 E. 70th Street apartment, and I'd thought he was just visiting for a week (as Yama is now), but then I look to where the sink HAD been and see that it's now moved back and to the right, and there on a black bench is a portable sink and oven that he'd brought with him, and I'm amazed that there was room to move MY sink unit back far enough. 4) I'm sitting with Neil Sendar in a booth and about TWENTY people are gathering in our area, a sort of combination train-compartment and restaurant where each booth along the wall seats four, and I'm thinking that this is a new record for a restaurant event (possibly still working on the 12 who came to my birthday restaurant on 3/30). 5) I phone the Coq au Vin for reservations for some future date, and the pleasant voice on the telephone (and I can see the handsome head-waiter who's speaking) asks if I'd been there before and know the type of food available and dress code, and I say yes, but when he asks for the date I don't remember it: thinking "Let's see, one week from April 4th is April 11th, and then eight days from that----" 6) Wake and, rather affected by that flurry of fragments, have a feeling of FOREBODING, as if "something's going to happen." Maybe just pre-activation for class tonight?
4/10/85: I'm sitting on what first is like a lawn outside an enormous hanger like Akron's dirigible building, and what looks to be a huge air-effect machine comes out of the hanger toward us sitting in what is now an AUDITORIUM like a circus tent with ropes hanging from the ceiling for acrobats or gymnasts, and it goes along the far wall, curves around the end of the auditorium, and moves OVER us with silent stateliness that is made more awesome by the fact that the fabric becomes TRANSPARENT and we can STILL see the ropes hanging ABOVE it, and the ropes and the very air begin to SHIMMER like a badly color-tuned TV set (with slightly-displaced ghosts of light green and light violet on either side of actual objects), and I feel that something ENORMOUS has just been revealed to me, and I try to communicate it to people around me, but I choke up with tears and just try to convey my sense of elation through my tears of joy.
4/27/85: I'm walking along a Manhattan street toward lunch just before noon, and Dorothy Kent comes up behind me to remind me of a special lunch for Alice Stearns's birthday, which I'd completely forgotten about (or had decided not to attend) and we laugh about how "appropriate" it is that she came along just then to guide me to the restaurant. I'm not quite dressed, but I have a red silk pullover (in a Chinese style) in a suitcase that I put on as I go into the cloakroom and put my suitcase up on the top shelf (from a scene in "The Spiral Staircase" last night?) and feel self-conscious about all the clothing that I'd taken out of the suitcase and put on hangers to unwrinkle, and I push aside four or five jackets of mine of the same design so that someone else can hang up his coat. When I go into the dining room (which might even be outside in a grove of trees), I can't decide which of the four long tables to sit at (rather like my feeling at the FIRST Actualism Christmas party in 1976!), and I sight along the shoulder of someone like Dan Pfeffer who's sitting alone at one end of a table, and he thinks I'm looking at him, but I explain that just past his neck sits Michael Blackburn with a new girl-friend, and it seems like such a DATE situation that I don't want to sit next to him. There are no seats next to Dorothy Hunter, and Joan Ann De Mattia is at the far table with a few other people, and I think of joining them, but then the scene shifts and they're ready to take the group picture, and somehow I'm outside a wire fence and have to quickly decide whether I'm going to pose OUTSIDE the fence as if I'm INSIDE, or go around to the gate on the other side of the enclosure and dash to the group in time to get into position by the time the picture is taken. Wake before that decision is taken. Surprised to find, on getting to this page, that this is the FIRST dream to be recorded since April 1! (Though I later find a note for a dream from April 10.)
4/14/85: I'm in some sort of resort or hotel (and as I type it passes through my mind that lots of the people around seem to be in Actualism, and maybe this is a fore-view of some City of Light project---an Actualism hotel or resort!), and I want to go to the john, but after I enter a doorway that I THOUGHT was the john, I'm puzzled by a bed on one side and clothes on chairs, and no urinal, so that when I leave the room and there's someone like Shelley Hooe at the door chatting with a friend, I apologize for entering her room, saying I thought it was the public john, and she's barely distracted from her conversation to dismiss my apology as being no problem. I go to the NEXT door and reassure myself that it's the place I want AND similar in look to HER door, but when I enter I find that MUCH of it is under construction, with barricades before newly-built facilities for pissing and shitting, and so confusing that I ask someone (like one of the denizens of the St. George Gym) where the USABLE urinal is, and he points to the end of the line. "What's going on here?" I ask, and he waves me to the OTHER end, saying "We're expanding, didn't we need it?" And I look out over a low curving white marble wall (rather like one of the staircases at the Metropolitan Opera House) to see (as in a Busby Berkeley movie) steps starting small at the top and broadening and widening as they go down, so that by the 10th or 15th step, there are pieces of body-building equipment on each side of the passageway, and more pieces on the lower step, until at the bottom there's an ENORMOUS area of equipment, pools, benches, lockers, and people so distant that the fact that I can see THEM from the john poses any threat to anyone seeing what they might not want to see. I'm really pleasantly amazed at the scope of the reconstruction, and instantly I find myself outside, wanting to join someone like Bob Karwowski who's about twenty feet below me, and the patio below looks soft enough to jump down onto, but he sort of looks dubiously at my indecision about jumping down, and I see others walking off to the side, so I begin walking down around to the left to a ramp that curves slowly down to him, but then I see that the walkway at the right side has been torn up a bit, and it's only made out of thin plasterboard painted some carnival color like cotton-candy pink or green, and suddenly as I continue around a large loop the right 80% of the walkway has been eroded away by a river running alongside, leaving only a thin shelf alternating and interspersed with patches of thin ice, but I can still manage by hanging onto the left-side parapet and treading as lightly as possible on the walk-remains. Others are running on top of or swimming through the water, and finally I find myself IN the water, glad that I have my heavy blue coat on so that the coldness of the water (but maybe it really isn't that cold, since my bare hands and face aren't chilled by it) doesn't bother me, and I glide smoothly through it pulling myself hand-over-hand along the route, seeing that lower down I can cross the channel from left to right to shorten my way around a bend, and I'll soon be out of it, but I wake and don't see any landscapes after that.
5/9/85: (Note from a week ago): Taxi to distant tourist spot. Stop for gas and get angry over "Beethoven for drivers only" sign. (I now have NO idea what that was or what it meant or what it was condensed from!)
5/12/85: I guess I'm affected by Arthur Ellenbogen in the hospital, because I'm dressed in something like my old blue side-zippered pants which are low on the hips, and there's a pattern either on the pants or on paper on top of the pants that indicate parallel slits ABOUT where the pockets would be, very low down in the inguinal zone just above the crotch. I trace those lines with a pencil or sharper object, and get a wrapped SCALPEL from some hidden container or pocket, which I unroll from its plastic baggy, and then using the pattern I cut firmly with the scalpel into my flesh, and it's too high for a castration, but it strongly reminds me when I wake of where the eggs would be stored in the ovaries above the fallopian tubes on a FEMALE, and it's as if I'm doing a FEMALE castration of myself. Rather disturbing (though not painful) dream.
5/15/85: Wake at 3:15 AM with a real THUMP of the heart and great fear, but got a call later that day from Arthur, so it wasn't anything from HIM.
5/18/85: I'm sitting close to the stage at some cheap porno production and when the two protagonists start having sex, taking off their clothes, I take my clothes off too, and when one of the guys on the stage indicates I should get hard, I cup my soft genitals and bring them from between my legs and start to play with myself, and suddenly the stage to left and right around me is filled with VERY hard cocks and action. I'm attracted to a young fellow on my left, seeming to be "the other half of my pair," and he's working his ENORMOUS almost-black cock above my head, and pushes it toward my face, but even in my DREAMS I'm aware of AIDS, so I reach up with my hands to find a double-handful of a cock that's so hard it feels like it's encased in a cardboard cylinder as I pump the shaft up and down. He tries to press it into my mouth, but I grasp the softer head with one hand and begin to wring it out as he starts to come, bending his head toward me, saying "You can kiss me, you can kiss me," as he squirts hot heavy semen into my hand. I keep my lips closed but am STILL aware that he's left some saliva on my lips, and I worry about "mucus-to-mucus" contact even in the dream. Wake with a rousing hard-on that I almost reflexively jam into the mattress, but I'm disturbed about AIDS-consciousness.
5/24/85: Dream-fragments of getting plant-clues for poison, word-clues to indicate a dwarf-killer, and mark-clues to indicate a spider in the killing of what was thought to be a baby but might be a dwarf too. But just "innocuous" fragments left in memory.
5/28/85: Small, niggly fragments: I'm working on some sort of geographical index, and someone's questioning why I have no references to a map of a country, and I exasperatedly insist that if the whole thing is on one page, why should I have all sorts of extra entries all referring to the same page. Then I'm making a deposit in a bank, and I'd had four items to deposit but end up depositing only one: a can of tomato paste! I look back over the other items and decide that the large can of V-8 juice I'd slammed down onto the floor in exasperation and it had rolled toward the foot of another angry customer, and it had broken. The teller I was waiting for had a line, and then I got OUT of line to go to the fourth window, which was empty, but just as I got there they drew down a green curtain saying they were closed (like the men's john at Battery Park yesterday?), and I stormed back to the first window to find other people in line ahead of me (like ahead of Dennis to get subway tokens as we took the subway from the Heights?). I'd put one can of grapefruit juice that I'd drunk into a large cylindrical container of some sort of Kool-Aid like shiny powder which had two smaller inserts, both of which I'd taken care of in other ways (ate one and put the other in my pocket for later?), and then addressed the irate teller who said he wouldn't take an OPEN can for deposit, so somehow the whole trip wasn't worth ANYTHING. There was something BEFORE those two about traveling, but I don't remember---just the overall atmosphere of nothing QUITE working out, the details being more time-consuming and energy- consuming than they were really WORTH, and my being irritable and frustrated. Not a very HAPPY dream, but at least airliners aren't crashing before my trip!
6/5/85: First was a fragment with someone like Maya Bryant connected with something that was to be done, or was to happen, before noon. Then a group of us took a day-trip to a strange place and remarked about a half-repaired, half- ramshackle wooden house on a hill, and someone we were WITH lived there: he jumped onto a porch-roof on the fifth floor and then jumped to the ground, surprising everybody. There was a three-floor complex at the bottom sort of built into the hill and a five-floor house built above it, and we marveled at how many steps would have to be climbed just to live in the place awhile.
6/6/85: 1) John A. is looking to rent or buy a country "studio" and we're talking to a prospective landlord who's showing us the closest of a set of three gray-painted wooden houses that slope off a gentle hill (much more gentle slope and traditional architecture than yesterday's STEEP-hill GOTHIC-architecture). Each is a story or a story-and-a-half, and there's a nice feeling of symmetry among the sizes of the three. Which John would seriously violate if he raised the superstructure of the first, as he wants to do in order to have a higher ceiling. I point this out, and we begin thinking of lowering the cement or stone floor even further into the ground to make the area he wants, but I'm not really that personally interested in the negotiations. 2) I'm staying with Helen and Jimmy in a place that's closest to Mom's apartment on Market Street than anywhere else in Akron or Virginia Beach, and they're about to go off to their teaching jobs, asking if I'm ready to go, too. I think about packing my Psychology book into my briefcase, which is dusty and loaded with trivial scraps of junk as I open it, but at least I have the little notebook with the front-page diagram of what my classes are and when and where. Get out to the corner and there's Helen in the back of the bus, and I can see her waving me in as she sits sideways facing the door. As I near the bus the light changes, but they sit and wait for me, and Jimmy gets out of his seat right AT the door so that I can fumble for the slots in the side of the carriage of the bus where I can put my feet so clamber aboard the door, which seems about four feet off the curb-level. I draw myself up by main force as the bus starts slowly off, and when I get settled I ask Helen if they leave each day at this time, just before 9AM, and she says, "Of course, Bobby," in her trying-to-be-kindly-but-is-really -annoyed way. Then I'm in "school," but it's really working at IBM, and I'm moving into a new desk that's sort of a combination of office desk and school desk. "As I come into the next scene," I'm rather more looking to see what I'm taking HOME with me for homework than settling IN: I look at material on the back part of the top of the desk, which opens on hinges like a school-desk modeled on a car-trunk, and find that it's handles and screws and bits of desk that I'm not using but might want to use later, so that has to stay. Other small piles of stuff include a lot of black-padded red-inner slabs of fabric over a curved support wrapped in storage-plastic that I finally decide are possible alternative backs for my swivel-chair at the desk, and I take my jacket or a dust-cover off the back of the chair and see that the original back-piece has been removed, leaving only an inverted-U back support, and I think to myself "It's rather like my sleeping on a bed without a pillow, but I'd better keep these chair-backs, because this chair-back doesn't look to be terribly comfortable without them." There are only a few books that I might take along, otherwise things are dusty and unused, and I'm thinking of getting back on the bus, but I look out SOMEWHERE where I expect the bus to be, and even though it's rather exactly 3PM, or whatever "going-home time" is, the bus isn't there, and I have the feeling that it's gone rather than not arrived yet (this is a PRIVATE vehicle that Jimmy doesn't drive himself, but only the three of us and MAYBE a stranger I don't know but who would be one of their personal passengers, as I am, were on the bus COMING here, so it's not part of a public bus-transportation fleet), and I figure they'll probably be annoyed that I wasn't there at the right time, though I think self-righteously to myself that I really didn't KNOW what time it was leaving. The whole dream was filled with such circumstantial detail that I felt I had to get it down---with no trouble recalling all the details of the gray, curved, dusty drawer-handles at the back of the desk and the actual yellowish-dun cover of the Psychology text and the Orly-airport-like "double" terminal-type drawing of the classrooms where it was indicated I had class. It seems slightly DIFFERENT from the ordinary "I've got school or work and I don't know what my schedule is, but still in that AREA. It also seems connected with my pages for the Kirchoff Math project, getting ready for the trip to France, and the general feeling of "nothing exciting going on in my life" that I had last night as I wrote the notebook page 349!
6/7/85: A large group of about 15 of us are having dinner, eating some sort of cold smoked fish in a cream sauce, and the host-driver is saying that we'd better hurry since we're about the last ones to finish, even though it's only about 9:15 P.M. Someone makes a joke about "but we have a reservation next week," and the waiter says with condescension that he knows we do not, but I try to prolong the joke by saying "Yes, we do, it's in my name, which is Bob, but I won't tell him the last name," and then I get the idea that the joke is NOT taken well. There were more details but I forget them by 9AM as I do this.
6/9/85: A real symphony of low-level frustration. So many fragments I can't count them now: first, I'm supposed to meet Mom and someone else (Rita, Grandma?) at a New York City subway station for a train to a plane, and as I rush into the station a half-hour before plane-time, I see a train pulling out with no indication if they're on it or still coming. I dash about trying to get information and can't find anyone who knows anything, and the implication is that THAT was the last train of the day. Second, I'm somewhere in Connecticut trying to get to Rhode Island, but when I'm trying to figure out my schedule, I hear someone talking on the other side of the partition who seems to be in the same situation I'm in, and I can hear the ticket-seller saying "Well, you'll have to sleep on the farm overnight, and then catch the next train the next morning, because there's no direct service." I dash around the corner of the partition and say "Where's SHE going, because I think that's where I want to go." But it turns out to be two different destinations. Third, I'm talking on the phone to someone IN Rhode Island, and she asks what station I'm IN, and I look at something on the desk and "Twaite." "There is no Thwaite," she says listlessly. "No, there's no H, it's just TWaite." "Well, there's no TWaite, either." I demand that she hold on and I dash back to a very busy lunch-counter where two waitresses are very harriedly trying to catch up with waiting customers, and I holler over to one, asking "What's the name of this station?" "TWAITE," she hollers back at me, and I know I'll get no satisfaction on the phone. Fourth, I've somehow gotten off the phone and have my back to the now-quiet lunch-counter, and I'll looking over the whole lobby, saying to myself that I was sitting at THAT corner table by the windows with--- whoever the woman was, someone like Laura, the bodyworker a few years back at Actualism---so I WAS here before, but I don't remember how I got here or where I WENT from here. Fifth, it passes through my mind that from SOME station it was a relatively short walk to where I was staying, or where I was living, but I don't remember what station THAT was. Sixth, I'm told that there are three busses leaving for where I'm going, and I follow out a crowd that fills the first bus, and when we get to the SECOND bus, people have already gotten ON (and there seems to be NO third bus), and I get on to find most of the green EASY chairs taken, and I don't want the uncomfortable-looking WICKER chairs, so the only thing left seems to be a green side-chair at a table partly occupied by a little boy, and I figure at least I'll have someplace to sit and read. Seventh, I'm (before this fragment) looking at a schedule-board with all sorts of special trains for a once-a-year activity, but this isn't that time of YEAR, and otherwise the board doesn't seem to help. Eighth, I'm looking at a rack of brochures and pull out one that shows an old terminal made into a shopping mall, with glass over the former high entrances (rather like the post-office building in Washington, D.C., and I remember that I'd been there RECENTLY, but I can't remember when it was, how I got there, what I was doing there, how I got back from there, and where I got back TO when I got back FROM there. Ninth were other fragments---oh yes, I was talking to Sherryl, who had collected JOBS for me, and she was implying that nothing was really TOTALLY ready, but I had to many of them that I'd better get started on SOMETHING, or I'd be swamped when everything DID finish coming in, and I wasn't really sure how I got into THAT situation. Obviously lots of mental activity before the trip, and my scheduling with Actualism, and low-level anxiety about money and work and time.
6/12/85: NEGATIVE (see Notebook 350, also) dream about me and Arnold being in some sort of seminar in a classroom. There's a break and people are changing their seats; I'm in the middle of the last row, and someone wants to move to the seat to my right that someone was saving with a jacket over it, and I complain about something or other. Then a guy in the row in front of me, with his desk switched around so that he's facing me in the back of the room, lights up a cigarette and I ask the world loudly, "Are you allowed to smoke in this room?" The smoker just gives me a poisonous stare and continues to smoke, and I repeat the question again and again, more and more annoyed, poking at the end of his burning cigarette with a pencil-point so that the ashes and glowing tobacco is scattered all over his desk-top, and finally I dip the end of it into his cup of coffee, where it hisses partly out, and I expect some sort of retribution from him, but just get this dull sullen glower. Then a teacher- coordinator like a combination of Mrs. Johnson the landlady and Mrs. Ward the English teacher from California gets up in front of the room and starts being obnoxious, giving orders and class rules, and people are moving around, hardly listening to her. Just a terribly negative dream.
6/15/85: Four of us are in a car starting a camping trip (combination of Actualism, Neil and I, and math problems?), and the dream opens with me in the back seat of the car with Bruce Jaffe driving, and we're climbing VERY steep hills on a grassy track, and I really have to praise the car for having very good traction. We get to the campsite on a grassy mesa and look out over the view as night falls. The scene is then inside the back of a small camper-like vehicle and Dennis has just spilled lots of water on the floor around his bunk area, annoying all of us until he says he thought he was allergic to the dust on the floor. I start feeling my sweaty-greasy face and feel tiny particles, and when I go to the mirror, there ARE black and dark-brown flecks of dirt and dust in the grease, and none of us had been aware of the problem until Dennis brought our attention to it. Bruce suggests that we try to handle the problem in another way. I don't have a clear picture of the fourth in the dream, but it could have been someone taking the place of Neil Souther, whom I don't know.
6/21/85: I'm traveling with someone like John A. somewhere in England or Scotland. We've walked north from our hotel to a large darkly-towered building like one of the ornate towers of Glasgow University, and then wandered through large formal gardens to the east, then back to the hotel. John then shows me a map of the city and I recognize the central tower-building and the gardens on the map, and point to a silver-roofed building just in the upper right corner, and say "And that's where we go tomorrow for the ferry to France," and he agrees with me with some asperity. There were other parts of the dream about making other plans for travel (somehow based on my re-reading yesterday of my plane-bus-train-boat travel through northern Europe and Norway in 1973 that had me eating lunch in BITBURG!), but I don't remember them clearly enough. They were all fraught with low-level anxiety, undoubtedly brought on by my concerns about the flight, which have gotten so strong that I'm thinking of calling Wyndee and having a special session to look at what factors can be DEALT with, since they're now so UP. I wake after 8 hours sleep feeling tired and depressed, which seems to imply that I'm in a state of high tension and anxiety that even prevents me from getting good sleep and having GOOD dreams. And if they get worse I begin to get in a real PANIC about the flight, though I haven't yet gotten into the terrible feeling that I recall from the past: waking and feeling GOOD for a few moments until the "body" memory of tension comes back to me and I can feel a physical "whomp" of increase of weight and stomach-jitter and muscle-tension and jaw-gritting, and the day becomes a BURDEN and I feel I don't WANT to take the trip, and then I get MORE tired, which makes me MORE depressed, which makes me MORE tense, until I'm a nervous wreck for SURE by the time the flight actually comes. NOT a good situation!
Old note from 6/11/85: I'm checking a McGraw-Hill index, and 1) I cross off "silvered" behind the main entry "Ceramic." 2) Headings are in RED with a), b), c) IN them (translated from the Spanish) AND used in the index, with queries. 3) She changed BILL from $453 to $442 because the EDITOR cut PAGES from the text AFTER I indexed it, and I fume and rehearse statement of "You're very fussy and have STANDARDS and RULES that MUST be followed; well, I have standards TOO and if you can't PAY what I BILL, I'll have to stop doing work for you!" 4) Author has LONG note about lists and exercises in the last appendix, saying his MANUSCRIPT had to be 645 pages, but he CUT a certain number of BACK pages, so this transcription exercise just needs to be reworded and he CUT it, but I can't use that cut material in my entries, so I have to PROCESS it, and Helen Ferguson CAN'T cut my bill because the author cut it AFTER. I must be concerned about my INDEXING! Then changes made in exercises (in two copies) of 5-6 pages of my index with EDITING marks---which pages are included, which are not, and I'm checking to see what MADNESS was the REASON for the changes. Shit at 8:15 to release MINOR prostate pain. Then a fragment about me and DAD and some kind of light, and then something about Rolf and me in LOUVRE zoo-museum and boat through models of cities---people taking rolls of films---and the Riviera, and returning a tube from the steering cylinder of a car that we'd rented. Obviously thinking about my TRIP!
6/26/85: I'm back at Dietz Avenue, in my rather crowded bedroom, and I know there's someone in Mom's bedroom, and when I go a bit into the doorway, I can see "usual" bed in the corner of the room nearest the porch and the living room (where it never was), and (where it would be blocking the closet door) there was a SMALLER bed that I could see someone's feet rumpling the bedclothes at the bottom of. From the voice, it was Bill Hyde, and he didn't sound receptive, so I didn't go into the room. Back in my room, I was taking off overcoats and sweaters to get down to a white shirt that was unbuttoned at the bottom, and as I looked at the shirt in a full-length mirror, I decided that I looked good enough to "get sexy" and ask Bill if he didn't want to jerk off with me, and I got rather excited thinking of him playing with his big cock. But the dream went no farther and I woke with a good-feeling erection, which I debated playing with, but it soon went away.
7/4/85: Up at 7:10, having dreamed of my really BEGGING Rolf to love me; I'm hard on my stomach.
7/5/85: Wake at 7:50 after LONG dream of George Hudacko being fucked by woman being fucked by man, and I'm playing with some KID, trying to excite him, and wake VERY hard.
7/16/85: Up at 6:45, disturbed till I realize it IS eight hours' sleep, and to john at 7 (after DREAM [And I remember dream of 7/14AM when I was ending a vacation in ROME {hearing song "Arrividerci Roma" and thinking on awakening "But I'm in FRANCE,"} and then sitting on a STABLE plane looking out left window and seeing ANOTHER plane heading toward us (without ANY apparent forward-motion on OUR part), then banking sharply counterclockwise and diving BELOW us, and I watch in fascinated horror, thinking "Is this IT; is this IT?" and then the wingtip dips BELOW my view and a moment later comes the sickening LURCH and mushy CRUNCH as the wingtip rips a gash in our under-fuselage, cascading fragments (luggage? people?) in a fan-wise spray through the air as my mind clutches in agony, "It IS it; it IS it!" Nothing beyond that but the puzzled awakening with "But I'm in FRANCE," letting me off the plane-crash hook.] about that dark-faced, short-haired long-cocked guy from the gym trying to entice me into sex by caressing me from the rear with soft warmth, while having procured a cute young sexy blond with a smiling faun-face who comes out of the shadows to my left as I reach for his crotch and he flirtatiously bends with my fondling fingers. Sexy dream, and before or after that was a DETAILED segment with Joe Easter visiting some hotel under construction or reconstruction, and there are elaborate places to go and things to do and patterns to remember, but I wake early with memory of a LOUD clap of thunder during the night followed later by some lesser rumbles.
7/24/85: Wake at 6AM (in Neil's Chamonix light and cold) with vivid dream memory. "As before" (so it seemed to me in the DREAM) I had to clean the decorations on an elaborate gate, so I had to climb one leg and make my way across to rickety foot-passage, relying mainly on handholds in the scrolls and filigrees of the decoration-top (probably based on the fragile-looking floor in the Brevent teleferique and my thought to hold onto the WINDOWS in case the FLOOR fell out), and wondering if these faded yellow stones (and my arms) could actually HOLD me if the foot-stones gave way. The plaster COVERING was flaking, but the underneath seemed solid. At the center I had to dislodge filmy undershirts and slips from the decorations. As I came DOWN, I noticed about 30-40 OTHER female garments that had been draped or blown across the ledges BELOW the gate. I went inside the "office" of the castle I worked for to report to the Overseer, who distractedly asked his secretary "If there was REALLY going to be a war?" She smiled sarcastically on her bright green telephone and said she didn't even think the politicians and diplomats knew for sure. "Oh, well," he said indecisively, "put a couple of boxes of disinfectant with the dresses. We might as WELL store them since we have the room."
7/25/85: Wake at 5:55 with awful dream of looking at my shoulders at scab-like round spots slightly smaller than a dime and take off shirt to realize these may be signs of AIDS with a rush of fear and anguish. Then BACK to sleep and wake at 7:35 with two MORE dreams: first I'm hugging a somewhat unpleasant- looking friend in a Village grocery store while he tries to convince a handsome clerk he'd MET him before. The clerk has BEAUTIFUL clear green eyes and FLAWLESSLY smooth skin, but the skin is painted with same LIGHT GREEN his HAIR is dyed, and his two FRONT teeth are painted RED, like an ungulate's incisors, while the rest are painted SILVER for effect with the green, but in BACK, when he smiles, they're dark and the roots are purple and rotting. THEN I'm in bed with this unpleasant person who has green fuzz-flecks around his uncut cockhead, and I brush them away in annoyance as he begins to suck my cock AND balls, and I clasp his twisting head to my crotch and begin to moan "Oh, my GOD" in excitement and give one HUGE thrust and wake with an ENORMOUS erection.
7/28/85: Up at 2:30(!) with dream fragment (HA) about a FRAGMENT missing---the tongue of some medieval creature, and I suggest it MIGHT have been used in a LOWER FRAME. Then up at 5:10 after dream of being "softened up" for some "consciousness raising" workshop with three others, and when we get to "main room," Matt Carnicelli stretches and lays on his back in SUCH luxury that I MUST grasp his waist and put my head on his crotch (inspired by two horses standing head to flank yesterday?). Then up at 6:40 with a dream of me staying in a new top-floor apartment, trying to jerk off, and woman across way comes in with a tiny photograph of family I "replaced," maybe her son and his wife and child, and I say "That's what life IS." Then I try to find PRIVACY to jerk off. Then someone's designing a HUGE miniature village as my apartment decor. I say "Yosemite Park came out FINE with red-rock hills and green trees on "horizon," but the VILLAGE BELOW is poor because I stepped on a STREET with wet feet and the colors ran, and here are the houses , duplexes with garaged with two cars each, but they ACCORDION floor-by- floor, and the SETTEES are bigger than the HOUSES.
8/9/85: 1) To business meeting at place like IBM and receptionist is automatically making me coffee. I say, "I need the john," and she directs me down corridor and I enter a kitchen-like room and guy THERE says "Every other floor," and I take stairs up. 2) I'm in a botanical garden in a section of paired trees: right is Rollain glabrata, large and effloresant, and left is Rollain rollata, smaller; and many other pairs on either side. SOMEWHERE are samples of MATERIALS, and a black-veined fluorescent green plant that's NOT on display.
8/14/85: A dream recalled in such CIRCUMSTANTIAL detail: I'm working in some office like IBM, but when I arrive this morning, the desks have been switched around somewhat. Where before there had been two "main" desks in the office side-by-side, now one is switched to the left, as from noon to nine, and the guy who had been seated BESIDE me is now somewhat BEHIND me. My desk has been removed, and in its place are two smaller credenzas (again somewhat positioned at noon and nine), but where the desk ITSELF used to be there is only a small table with a temporary top that looks something like a plant stand. As I contemplate where I'm going to work, I look directly behind me to see something like a morning-coffee caddy, but it's not quite high enough to be a desk, and it has a bottom shelf that would prevent me from putting my legs under it. There's another small rolling table that could be used as a desk, but I observe with dismay that NONE of these would allow me to spread my work out over a large area. Then there's the problems of the telephone: previously we had shared the same phone, being right next to each other. Now I'm carting in lots of supplies, and one of them is a new phone. I take the new phone and take the old phone over to my office-mate, saying, "I'll take the new phone, which means that, if you have the old phone, I'll have to tell people that---" then I think about it again. "No, it means that YOU will have to tell people to call ME on my new phone extension." "OK," he says, "what's the new extension." "Well, I say, "the phone's marked (206), but you'll have to call to make sure it IS 206." He phones someone, talks for a moment, then covers the receiver and says, "He wants to talk to you." I take the phone and hear, "This is Marvin, downstairs." "Yes," I say, not remembering EXACTLY who Marvin is, but hoping that if I have to go downstairs to talk to him, I'll be able to ask for Marvin and there'll only be one on the floor. "I've got some jobs for you if you want." "Well," I say, cupping my hand around the phone so that everyone won't be able to overhear, "I have a couple of jobs to do, but someone ELSE said that I MIGHT be considered for some OTHER jobs, so if I could be put on THOSE jobs, I'm sure I could be put on YOUR jobs." Then he starts to describe some technical problem, but stops to say, "Or, do you remember the covers you worked on before, the puzzles?" By this time there are other people in the office, and they're obviously bothered by my using the phone on someone else's desk, so I move out to the hallway just as someone comes out of the door at the side of the hallway, walks right into my phone wire, turns around so that the wire twists around his neck, and gives me a disgusted angry look as he bends and twists and lurches around trying to get the phone-wire from around his neck. I meanwhile try to continue the conversation, "Yes, that was last year, wasn't it?" "Yes," he says, "and we need another set again this year." Then without a break, there's some sort of concert, and someone is playing a piano solo of great complexity, to a Disney-like cartoon of abstract designs based mostly on swirling reds, and at the end of the first play-through there's wonderful applause, and then the piece is repeated, down to the exact final use of the pedal to let chords blend over each other, and releasing the pedal to make a series of staccato notes at the end of the piece, before the rather humorous effect of a burp or a throat-clear just before the dizzy climax and the same uproarious applause. Then I wake at 8:10, stew with the details a bit, and before sitting, have to get to the computer at 8:25 and finally get it all down by 8:40, shifting from side to side in the chair to be able to type down to the last line before shutting off the machine and going to the toilet. Anything for accuracy!
8/22/85: I'm at some sort of costume-party where people are getting dressed, and I'm given a piece of red velvet with a tiny slit in it as MY costume, but it turns out to fit over my COCK, letting the head (which isn't quite hard, and I'm a bit concerned that the whole presentation won't "droop" when it's displayed) peek out of the slit, and somehow this is meant to represent "Joan of Arc." I stand in front of the audience and present my "character" and some people are scandalized, some amused, but some begin to interrogate the person who TOLD me to do this, and I feel relieved that HE'S getting the brunt of the criticism for the presentation, not ME, so I sort of lean back and let the audience and the instigator discuss it out.
8/29/85: I'm attending some sort of political rally in Ste. Marie Madeleine in Paris, and a George-Rose-like orator is standing at the apex of a triangle of people jammed into a steep balcony at the top of the church. He keeps talking about how steep the balconies are, and how slippery they are, and I mention to my neighbor that it wouldn't SEEM so steep and slippery here if he just wouldn't TALK about it so much. A handsome male neighbor says, "OK, we talk in English," and he knows English better than I know French, and we talk with a woman on the other side of me about how difficult it is to hang onto the metal railing in order to keep from sliding down the slope of the balcony. All the seats are full, and one line of people sitting on either side of the stairways makes it seem really jammed, and I have I copy of a newspaper with a photograph of a previous rally here, and I can see that this crowd is exactly like the previous crowd. Then I'm in some sort of ice-cave on the same balcony, but with lots of space around me, and I have thoughts like "This is what happens when he keeps talking about how slippery the balcony is; this ice really IS slippery!"
9/3/85: I'm watching a CHINESE movie comedy about "out-of-body" characters falling in LOVE at a battlefield, and I recall good "special-spirit effects" of bodies making shadow-silhouettes with laser-light in swirling fog.
9/5/85: I'm watching a movie or TV program about a man who has to carry around a "Red A." Though my memory is VERY sketchy, it seems I've WATCHED the program and am now looking (or participating in) a CRITIQUE of the movie: how the Red A isn't any SPECIFIC malady or personality trait or dysfunction (this seems related to the part of "Monty Python" I watched last night that spoke of "Men dressing up and acting as mice" in the same "delicate" way as homosexuality was spoken of 15 years ago). We focus in on the "generation" of the Red A: over the man's left shoulder as he sits in an easy chair there's a raised area forming on a shelf-like area against the wall, standing-shoulder height, that (through animation or stop-motion photography) changes into what looks like an open book which then mutates into a capital-letter A in a lipstick-red color, which then "peels off" the book and becomes part of him somehow (and I just NOW think of the "Scarlet Letter," which I'd not thought of in the dream). Then I'm on a kind of field trip that has to return to our starting point, and I look over a fence into a stream and figure I have to dive into the ---(AH, just remember a PREVIOUS snippet: VERY distinct now: I have to retrieve something through a set of BARS or a VERY heavy wire fence enclosing an underwater pen of fish and crabs and other large, mean-looking crustaceans, and I reach through the bars and get BITTEN: one tooth snags the edge of my little finger, and I try to pull the fish to the grid and twist him off my finger without tearing through the skin, and am amazed at the yellow-brown-green colors of the carapace and the thickness of the chitinous plates forming its armor. Other crab-like legs scratch with their thorn-like projections, but then that phase of the dream is just OVER) weedy fish-filled water to get back, but then see ahead of me someone in SHALLOW water (AGAIN like "Monty Python" last night where the water is only knee-deep YARDS into the bay they'd used for the opening and closing credits for the "It's---" guy). All merely short pieces.
9/12/85: I'm living in some kind of fraternity house and everyone's going through their closets and packing their clothes for a vacation. I pull out a dark-gray suit and find a brown accretion on wrinkles on the upper lapels, as if the suit had been scrunched into a corner of a closet and gotten corner-lint or paint or insect excrement on it. Pull out another lighter-color suit and find that IT has stains, and I figure I've GOT to get things to the CLEANERS. Then it turns out that the whole fraternity is flying to California for a DAY (rather like the male couple flying from Maine to New York for lunch in the New Yorker article I'd been reading yesterday), and I figure I'd rather spend the time READING, and have to rationalize away the fact that I COULD just read on the plane, but I don't like to FLY. Then someone rather like Jim Murray from St. Mary's High School (very tall and VERY broad-shouldered and thick-chested) is trying to coax me into going, and he picks me WAY off my feet to hug me to his chest, and I figure if I could get a lover out of HIM or from the west coast, it might be worth it. Wake with an erection (which is pretty good, seeing as I came TWICE yesterday!) and remember the humpy Rob Pendleton in UCLA that Carl Spring introduced me to, that I was too shy to have sex with, and lay luxuriantly in bed thinking about THAT missed opportunity, wondering if I'll ever get anything like it AGAIN, and wanting someone VERY much. Will finish the rest of these thoughts on the NOTEBOOK page for this day.
9/15/85: There's some sort of dance performance scheduled for 2PM and it's only 12:20 but what looks to be a cafeteria on the floor below is quite crowded, and I'm starting to think there might not be enough room for the performance for everyone who wants to go, and I'd better get to the performance space. Enter an elevator which everyone agrees is "a strange one" and it goes up and CURVES along the underside of an outward-jutting upper floor. I think, "I remember this from BEFORE, but the elevator doesn't go REALLY upside down." Then I'm coming DOWN, but have to be OUTSIDE, which is permitted, and the foothold gets smaller and smaller until I'm literally PLASTERING myself against a vertical wall to keep from slipping off, wondering frantically "How do CHILDREN hang on here?" and hoping we get to the floor before I fall off. Then I'd met Arthur Dworin, who tells me that there's a wedding reception I should go to a few doors down, and I get there to miss the ceremony but make the banquet. I'm sitting alone at a long table with scattered people, and behind me there's a large noisy group that I know from Actualism and Leslie Moed. A waiter comes up to offer something like Goretex, and I ask what that is, and he indicates bunches of preserved fruit, and when I say "Yes" he puts a large prune on my plate, knocking off a thick limp noodle in the process, which I catch before it hits the floor and stuff into my mouth, to everyone's approval. I figure the place would have been much EMPTIER had not Arthur gone around inviting about a dozen more people. But then it dawns on me that I'm eating all this food and should give a wedding present that should at least cover my expenses at the banquet. I have only cash in my pocket and debate whether $20 or $30 would do it. Encounter Arthur in a circle of dancers, who part to invite me to join when I move toward them, but I ask Arthur, "Where's the wedding party?" and he says, "Of course," thinking I want to meet them to congratulate them. We look around the dance-floor, but there are only relatives. He drags me down a flight of stairs to kitchens and maintenance and garbage areas, and we only see the feet of workers under swinging doors, and at last I'm about to suggest that he tell me where I can MAIL something, since I don't even have an envelope to put my "gift" into, but then I wake up. There had been a substantial dream BEFORE that, when I woke at 8:15 after getting to bed at 12, but this is all I remember at 10:40 as I type this, thinking it might have had something to do with the Review Board meeting last night at Actualism which was so festive, and I'm at LAST doing one of the things-to-do-for-a-summer: going to Coney Island, and I'll do anything to fill out this page so that I can type it out on the printer before closing down the computer for today and going out in the coolth.
10/6/85: Wake about 4:30 and don't immediately get back to sleep, and start thinking about many things (see PLAYRITE for today), and up at 5AM to type this dream: in a festive tuxedo-dressed (almost the same group as danced in the Juilliard 80-birthday TV production of Paul Taylor's "Cloven Kingdom" last night) group of men and silken-gowned women I enter a rickety elevator and press the 4th floor button and we groan up the side of a building (much more freight-elevator poor-neighborhood depressed than the elegant glass tubes in some Atlanta Hyatt that Cissy Spacek swooped up in the Sneak Previews excerpts from "Marie" last night) to jolt and creak to a stop at a wedding reception that I "recognize" as being in the apartment below me (and vaguely even in the dream connected it with the rather loud party there last night), and they pull the gate open and step into a long room with dancing couples and scantily- filled white-clothed tables of celebrants. I continue up one more flight, with the elevator pausing and shaking even more with me the sole occupant (is this some symbol of my shaky BODY transporting my brain and being with a feeling of lesser reliability?), and debate reaching through the gate on the elevator AND the grate on my apartment's exit/approach (obviously the elevator was put up in the position of the fire escape, and the entrances are enlarged windows) to hold onto my INSIDE gate, but realize the falling elevator-cage would rip through my wrists before my wrists would rip through and free me from the falling elevator-cage (am I still concerned about my cell-egos staying with the earth-elements of the body?). The door at last opens and I step onto a sloping loading-ramp (like the oily slot into which a teleferique glides) that leads up to a wide wooden gate that latches loosely in the center, hardly covering half the entrance-height, and I vaguely wonder how much winter cold will slip past the slatted gate and enter my apartment, where the bed is just around the corner from this elevator-entrance. Short but oddly-detailed dream.
10/11/85: Dennis and I are attending the third evening of an opera-series, sitting in the front row of a VERY precarious balcony: it's clear that our seats are held up by the back legs of our seats which are wedged between two railings, so it's only the strength of the gluing of the chair-base and the toughness of the fine white wood itself that prevents the chair-legs from breaking and precipitating us into the orchestra far below. (This somehow from last night's look at the rebuilding of the San Diego Shakespeare Theatre.) I vaguely go over in my mind the OTHER opera-series (the four nights of The Ring of the Niebelungen, the three nights of someone's Missa Solemnis, the three nights of whatever-this-is) that I've seen and never need to see AGAIN. Then we're down for an intermission and somehow get all across the park (like the opera-house is where the Gulf and Western building is and we've managed to get across to the eastern entrance to the Central Park Zoo) when we "hear" the bells for the end of intermission. We go underground to the (something like) Malasherbes passage, but find that it's crowded and we enter on one side of a square that turns out to be an INNER square of a spiral of THREE squares, and as one batch of "park-crossers" comes from west to east, one side of one square (about 16 people) are permitted to walk from east to west, and I figure since the walk takes ten minutes and we're on the twelfth side, it'll take us two hours to get there, so I announce that I am taking a taxi, and the other three (Dana and Jody have somehow joined us) can come with me free. We're out trying to look for a cab, and though we have trouble finding one, we're back in time, but they don't climb up to the balcony quickly, and I have to chase someone out of my seat. Then I'm in an amusement park with Rita at about age 7, and I keep asking her what she wants to GO on, and she cries and looks at the rough rides that throw people upside down and back at me in bewilderment and I insist that she tell me what she WANTS to ride, since I know that she DOESN'T want to ride THESE, and know vaguely that the park is big enough for us to take a day to walk across, and I wonder if there are better rides on the other side of the park that are really too far for us to get to quickly.
10/26/85: I'm attending some sort of training school, and it's a lunchtime buffet but I can't tell where the MEAT is coming from, since there are lots of bowls of salads and trays of rolls, but the only meat visible are ENORMOUS hunks of chuck steak about a foot square and two inches thick with bones running through them. Then I see a few smaller steaks sizzling dully on some hibachis, but they don't look quite done yet. I gnaw on the piece of meat on my plate and spit out a hunk of greasy gristle I get in the center of my piece, and when I chew on the muscle-fibers, they're very SPARSE and grayish in tone, and I can't chew them away from the skin-like membrane to which they're attached. Then everyone starts saying they have to get to the next (it seems to be something like exercise or gym) class, and the room starts clearing out. I spill (or someone bumps my arm to spill) some beans from my plate, and I start to clean them up but realize that the whole floor is dirty and I'm hardly responsible for THAT. Out to the hall to find groups of people running past, and I assume they're the tail-end of my exercise class, so I follow them down a few halls and turnings and see my "teacher" leading my class in some sort of aerobics exercises. Without transition I'm sitting in the third row of a theater-like room, and a person in the FRONT row is "in the steam seat," because steam is rising up from either the base of his seat or from under the stage-apron which is just in front of him. We're waiting for our turn, and it's strange to see the steam rising to envelop a man sitting in the front row of a theater, but it's clear that that's the way it was designed.
10/27/85: MY FIRST SAFE-SEX DREAM!! I'm in bed with someone short and a little cuter than Barry Levin, who's married to a woman and living with another guy, and he turns out to give every evidence of being interested in having sex with me, so I roll toward him and he descends on my face with lips that are truly drooling saliva, and I turn my mouth away and let him slobber over the skin of my cheeks and neck and shoulders, and kiss him dryly and murmur something about being interested in safe-sex practices which do NOT involve the exchange of saliva. He seems to understand and we proceed to a series of extremely erotic positions: he sits on my chest and I run my fingers and hands over his torso and cock, we lay spoon-fashion and caress each others' bodies, I run my mouth dryly up and down the side of his stiff cock, avoiding the lavish pre-cum, and we toss and roll in pleasure until someone says he has to come and attend to some family matter, and though we both go down, when he returns to bed we go at it again with unabated lust.
10/28/85: It's as if I'm on vacation in Akron, looking at new views from a large architectural complex that combines schoolhouse and museum, and I look to the "north" and there's a steep hill up and down which pilgrims climb to participate in some religious ceremony taking place in an old castle-like structure (rather like some of the steeply-rising towers of the castle of Foix) towering above me with crumbling yellowish stone-bricks. The name St. Mary's is somehow associated with the ruins, but I have the feeling that if I could only look at a street map I could find a dimly-sensed connection between the northern area of Akron where John Crano lives, the Goodyear factory, and other ends of "tentacles from the center" that I know FROM the center TO the end of the tentacle, but have no idea how the ENDS lie in relationship to each other, and what buses I could take out one way, walk across from "tip to tip" and catch a bus associated with a completely different place back to the center of town. I seem BOTH a young age and the age I am now, and the dream seems to combine images of the New York Marathon yesterday (all the people streaming across the bridge and through the streets have been transformed into the pilgrims streaming up and down the hill---and I go to the base of the hill and it's so steep that it's clearly easier to take transportation to the TOP and walk DOWN), travel, school days in Akron, and the myriad thoughts brought up by throwing (or TRYING to throw) out stuff from the large file cabinet yesterday.
10/29/85: (written 10/31): I'd wanted to record it before, but kept forgetting. All that's left is a pleasant memory of climbing over barricades and bunks made out of a clean white (birch?) wood as if for an L.L.Bean photography session. Good feeling of well-being and world-under-order and glad-to-be-alive, but no more details than that.
11/1/85: Again I'm visiting somewhere, and I've unpacked all my SHOES, which are spread around a room rather like the living room at 1221 Dietz, and I think I've made a big mess, but I find that OTHERS have left THEIR shoes (and lots of BABY shoes) lined up throughout the room, and I now recall reading Hesse's Christmas short story yesterday about the gift-giving that left the house filled with wrappings and gifts, and it seems like it might have been something like Christmas in the dream, too.
11/3/85: I'm in some sort of schoolroom, with desk-tops that flip up to get material from beneath, and we're all taking notes on yellow legal pads, and the teacher is really emphasizing that we understand that our program (I write down and then cross off SCRIPSIT, and try to look at a scrawl of names of programs and see that I'm working with something called something like Perkin-Elmer) can only run because we're using---and then I forget the name he said. I ask the guy in front, and he copied down SCRIPSIT, which is wrong, but I refrain from telling him this, since the tests are graded on the curve, and if he gets more wrong, I come out better. I turn to my left, where the large guy is like someone who used to work at IBM, but now he's riding a motorcycle, and he didn't think it was important to write down the name of the program. I hear it again and I start writing it, then take another note and forget the name AGAIN. When I wake, I go through three or four trials before I remember that it was the "Balance-Break" (or "Break-Balance") program, with contentment. Then the teacher asks us to take out our UNIQUE break-balance program, and I put stuff from the top of my desk inside, and have to un-Scotch-tape a larger and a smaller piece of paper from my desk-top, and get all balled up with the tape, trying to throw it away (like the tape from the plastic envelopes with the VCR instructions and information). Then I'm touring another schoolroom (this must be influenced by the talk about New York University Acting Department Dennis and Sherryl talked about last night in connection with Frederick's play) and see kids in a final dress rehearsal of what looks like "Gianni Schicki," since everyone's grouped around a large bed over which stands a commanding male figure in gold and in which lies an insignificant figure in white (unless this is a scene from the "Tibetan Book of the Dead,") and I pass down the aisles looking for a place to sit, and see kids being passed a tiger-patterned fur boa so that they can TOUCH something to get a feeling of being in the group, but some of them are listless, tired, and inattentive, so they're not into the feeling of touch at ALL. I wake a lay awhile as if stoned, then get up to write these notes by 11:30, aching to piss, and Arnold calls to say we meet at 1.
11/7/85: FACT: After the publicized earthquake, another tiny one (subway beneath?) woke me one night. Then another woke me and I looked at my clock and it was on an hour (7?) PRECISELY. Then about 2:54 this morning I jerked awake again to a growing crescendo like a train passing nearby, and probably by coincidence my fire alarm began giving off its "energy depleted" 15-second beeps, which may have been what woke me in the first place, though that's unlikely for the tiny sound not really heard through my earplugs. Then later I wake with what feels like an "ass pat" that REALLY jolts me awake and nervous! DREAM: I'm in an est-like group in a large room like the AIDS high-school gym, and am pleased to link up with 7 or 9 other men in this mixed assemblage to do our warm-up exercises with. Then I sneak out a door to ask someone where the john is, and they gesticulate that this is a no-piss day, but I demand to know where the john is, and he points me to a door and I find myself squirming through a tunnel so narrow I wonder how anyone with ANY weight would be able to get through! I finally get to a tiny toilet at the end of this ant-hill-like tunnel, and am just about to sit (no room to stand) when the room opens up and I forsake the toilet which some woman rushes to use. The floor is covered with a fine white powder unlike flour that would clump in moisture, maybe like chalk (from the wine last night?) or cornstarch, and I figure it's OK to piss on it, though I'm concerned for the smell and wetness, but I'm pissing down over this enormous chalk-covered board or cardboard in an enormous spray that women stand around marveling at, and I keep going and keep going until I'm embarrassed and stop though I'm not really finished. Out into a regular corridor to return to the group-session, and they're breaking for lunch and a woman like a younger Lisa Malsin links her arm in mine and offers to guide me around Washington DC, where we seem to be. Quickly she finds a "foreign square" with colorful markets, hanging brocades, plaster models of Indian and Chinese and Japanese temples and pagodas and pavilions, and a busy polyglot clientele that makes me want to see a map of DC (to a square area delineated in all the diagonals of the capital) so that I can return and spend more time in this fair-like atmosphere. We walk into the Chinese area and are pushed onto a platform that's like a treadmill of rough boards slowly but inexorably pushing the crowds toward a deep chasm in the heart of the area, and I grab for a railing and scoot away from the edge, feeling the feet of those behind us threatening to push us over the edge anyway, remarking to my companion that the whole thing struck me with its COLDNESS and RELENTLESSNESS as being very Chinese and not a fun thing to be on. She leads me by a short way back to the group-program, and people are enjoying their lunch-break by gliding through the waters of a long narrow swimming pool, and the dream ends with the primary memory of the colorfulness and vivacity of the crowds at this little-knows DC fairground.
12/8/85: I'm visiting some newspaper executive in his large office in what might be Washington, D.C. (and I keep thinking of the name James Reston), and for some LEGITIMATE reason I'm naked and close to him behind his desk, and an associate rather like Everett Sloane is "Citizen Kane" comes in and comes around the side of the desk far enough so that he can see I'm not merely shirtless but actually NAKED. He seems to accept the fact somewhat, and I'm glad that "the boss" takes the situation with calmness. Then I have to start dressing because the place is closing at 5PM, and a woman comes in with a thick manuscript in her arms, announcing that she has to read this 500-page manuscript "Under the Roof", and "the boss" introduces me to "the Book Review editor," and I'm confused into thinking that she's reading a SUBMITTED manuscript, and I think to tell her about one of my books, or to mail something to her, amazed that such a large newspaper would have a major editor reading manuscripts that came in through the slush pile, but when I wake I "realize" that for the purpose of the office she would only have been REVIEWING a book that was about to be PUBLISHED, and she may have just been carrying dummy pages before the book had been actually BOUND. I'm putting the rest of my clothes, scattered over the top of his desk (he's gone by now), into my suitcase, and I find that my overcoat still has a hanger in it from his closet, so I extract the hanger and take it to puzzle over two closets at the left of the desk, the closer labeled "MAPS", and decide to open the door and see all sorts of reinforced door-guards, like a safe-door, and figure that maps must have been important to whatever kind of company built this building that was later converted into a newspaper office. The hanger has a tortoise-shell clip that matches the others in the closet and I'm glad I thought to put it back. Then I'm about to go out the door and some associate on a cane is hobbling down the hallway looking at me curiously, and I'm glad I have most of my clothes on by this time. Wake feeling somehow comforted and accepted by this dream, and notice that it's been a month since I transcribed my LAST dream, and anyway I've gotten down to fill again the last line on this page.
12/12/85: On something like this date I woke with the VERY vivid memory of a dream involving my walking through a "funhouse of science of the future," which had a central "arena" of exhibits which were surrounded by bright brass railings and inset into a green curved-plastic unit of sweeping lines and various levels as if a mesa had been carved into a museum showcase. One decidedly dream-like facet of the museum was the fact that strange Alice-in- Wonderland creatures walked past with human or animal heads or limbs encased in beautifully textured plastic prostheses which gave a dog eight legs or a horse six legs or a human a centaur-like body with four hooves. They would come silently up behind me, or walk down the hallway toward me, as if there were seeing the exhibits much as I was, and part of the charm of the museum was that some of the exhibits walked the halls with the observers. As I woke slowly I "expanded" on the museum to make a kind of participatory amusement park of the enlightened future. Some of the rides were begun in the dream and formulated with rich detail in the semi-sleep state after waking. One was a chocolate "shit-room" into which naked participants entered to enjoy flexible walls that moved to form various-sized anal orifices that excreted, at the participants' whims, hard chocolate bonbon deer-droppings, fudge-like banana-shapes of phallically sensuous excrement, or variously-liquid effusions of more or less explosive chocolate diarrhea. Many participants could participate at once, some watching with amusement the drenching of others while they sat back and ate daintily in their corners, others enjoying the tactile pleasures of brown- oiled bodies slipping about on the plastic flooring of the shit-room. Another "ride" was a semen-coaster, where a water-trough was replaced by a semen-trough down which a rider plunged, to be squirted from appropriately-shaped nozzles with various viscosities of ammoniac-scented pre-cum, semen, and post-drip. Other rides are hazier now, but there were rooms that provided various forms of body odors from room-parts that mimicked the underarms, crotches, or mouths of the odorator; piss-rooms where liquors were dispensed in varying colors and flavors and textures; and more ordinary rain-rooms where jungle downpours could be alternated with London fogs, Los Angeles smogs, San Francisco smazes, and mid-Western thunderstorms. Then or now there are ideas of entomologically correct (but vastly enlarged) vermin, arachnids, and even bacteria and viruses would enter the room to romp with children to be educated in the shapes and forms of various biological genera. There were others that relied more on the tactile, like hot rooms, or cold rooms, or fire-and-ice rooms, but I don't recall the details now, and I SHOULD have kept notes by the bedside!
12/18/85: As the last of MANY dreams through the early morning, someone like a TV ad-man was pouring hydrochloric acid from a ladle into a wine to "make it smooth," and he was sipping from the ladle to see what the ACID tasted like.
12/20/85: I and other spectators at a bicycle race are walking down the outside of the polished-wood chute for a good position to watch the race, and then the cyclists are allowed down to position themselves where they choose in slots marked in black on the blond wood: the positions are an exaggeration of the staggered-starts of a long foot-race. I judge that the fellow at the inside, steepest part of the conical slope will have the best start, but am surprised to see others moving PAST him as the cyclists start. I begin to follow them, and see Mary Vilaboa in the pack at the back, moving very much in a squared-off military formation like the Trobriand Cricketeers in the film on TV last night. We chat about the race, and then there's a transition to walking with someone who'd been slightly hard of hearing who now is wearing a large, obvious, transparent hearing aid in his left ear. Another switch and I'm looking at a map of London with someone like Jean-Jacques, saying that the AFTON (or other) river must run through London here at LONGSTREET, and the unlabeled river to the east must be the AVON (or other) along the STRAIGHTSTREET. He doesn't comment, but says that the extension to some hall (not Albert Hall) is over the hill so it doesn't obstruct the view but I can't identify the place on the map.
12/22/85: VIOLENT dreams after pleasant party here last night: 1) I'm exercising in the gym and let go of a t-bar (like on the leg-and-tricep machine) on a long wire running over a distant pulley (like on the side-bend machine) and it skitters over the floor and SMACKS the side of a woman's head who'd been exercising on one of the floor-mats. I look in horror as she flops in place and lies as if dead after the t-bar hits her, thinking "I didn't mean to do THAT." 2) I'm crossing a busy intersection like Madison and 42nd and I hear someone coughing persistently behind me, and as I step up on the curb I look back to see a black woman dragging a boy who seems to be crawling on his hands and knees, but when she drops his body near the gutter, the head flops down limply and red rice-like particles scatter from the top of the head in a pool of watery blood, and I think with horror that he's been hit by a car. She keeps asking him to get up while passersby shout to "Get an ambulance" and "He's dead!" as her husband comes up behind to try to tell her there's no use fussing over the body. A few of the elegantly-dressed salesmen in the corner shoe or dress shop come to the inside of their glass street-door and cluster together in shock over what's happening outside their shop. Don't wake with exactly a feeling of DREAD, but it's sure not the best possible pair of dreams!
12/24/85: Idyllic dream of my burgeoning relationship with the King of England! We're already "together," so the piquant question of how we met isn't answered. Some of the elements appear to have been taken by my channel-switch through moments of "The Bounder" on Channel 13 last night: the serving-girl being dated by the member of Parliament, and the surprising HEIGHT of Peter Bowles when he towers into a room. The king is at least seven feet tall---or possibly I'm someone else quite a bit shorter than I am, since I recall a dream-sequence of going through elaborate doors where most EVERYONE was taller than I was, and only a few of the servants were anywhere near my height. In one wonderful sequence we were alone together, and he said "Feel how the cords in my back separate when I breathe," and I felt the muscled ridges at either side of his spine expand from four inches apart to about a foot apart as he inhaled and tensed his torso. I ran my fingers up his sides and felt the curves of his latissimus dorsi and teres major with sexually-charged delight, and looked forward to urging him to display ALL the musculature of his enormous body for my avidly sensing eyes and fingers. In another sequence we were driving a bus in the country, riding down the left side of the street while other traffic was moving normally (for the US) on the right side, but somehow the opposing traffic on the left moved INSIDE our line of travel on the highway, and I wondered how he could do this without his bodyguards around, though I suspected everyone on the highway knew he was driving the bus. Somewhere else in the dream I wondered how MY life would be affected if I got close to him in an emotional sense: would I move into the Palace? Would I get my own corps of bodyguards? How would the rest of the family treat our relationship? Another sequence involved our trip to a small river or canal in the countryside, and I had to report what the king had been doing to some ministers who tried not to pry but who had to know what was going on. I remember vividly skipping down some rutted stone steps (like in Riverside Park) surrounded by trees, thinking "And this is ACTUALLY happening; this isn't just a dream or a fantasy." There was no real STRENGTH behind this thought (no melodrama of pinching myself or asserting again that this was REALITY), but just the sheer happiness of the confidence that this was an ACTUAL relationship, and not just a fantasy on my part, and how VERY lucky I was to have it. I wasn't quite as old as I am now, and I certainly felt a lot better about my physical attractiveness than I do now, but I can't underestimate the amount of cheering that bolsters the psyche when someone expresses interest and appreciation in what I have to offer both physically AND mentally. Lovely dream, though I wake with a vague alcohol-blur from the wine and creme-de-cacao-coffee I had at Sherryl's last night; now all I want to do is make it come true with SOMEONE, not even the King of England.
12/29/85: I'm sharing an elegant (Paris?) apartment with someone named Bill, and I'm debating how to make him into a lover. Wake in the morning and decide to crawl out of my bed wearing only an undershirt and find that Bill's still in the bathroom, because his suit is still over a chair, but when he comes out of the bathroom it's Bill HYDE. I say, "I thought Bill---uh," and Bill leans close and whispers, "Will-o," which at first I thought he might have used just to DISTINGUISH himself from whoever Bill was (someone shortish and stocky but quite handsome, like Doctor Auerbach), but as I looked at the "new" Bill Hyde with bleached-blonde longish hair (of the same thin quality when I ran my hands over it, however), with face-powder and eye-liner and some lipstick to make him look somewhat like John Lithgow in one of his more extreme roles, and we kissed through strange strings hanging from the ceiling, he stepped back to show me he was dressed in a kilt-like SKIRT of many colors, and was otherwise likewise outlandishly dressed, and I made some remark like "Good Luck," when he suggested he might find it easier meeting people in his new transformation. We went out of my large apartment into a central hallway with others coming out of their apartments into the hallway, and there was a flurry of greeting and farewell, and someone else whom I wanted to take as a lover, and I woke with feelings of pleasure from this friend-filled, luxuriant dream.