DREAMS FROM 1987 1 of 2
1/4/87: 6:55AM: 1) Cradling a narrow-chinned faun-faced boy in upraised arms, around my head, and kissing lightly but deeply in joy that WE want EACH OTHER. 2) Christmas party at Lea Terhune's, setting up tables and party areas (arrays of gifts to her friends in bedroom, and I can't remember what I brought, thinking of two bottles of champagne in my fridge and then of two bottles of red wine and "realizing" with a jolt that "I'd missed MICHAEL's party, on Saturday, how COULD I? And waking with relief that Michael's party is TONIGHT. Earlier, I'd found a set of KEYS to a rental car with the name Peter Cain, and went into the kitchen to ask for Peter Cain, and a guy talking to Anne Messenger gasped and said, "So soon?" and I laughed and handed them to him and then told someone ELSE, laughing, in the living room.
1/6/87: 1) Laboriously MAKING SHORTER shoelaces from black shoes that have TOO short laces, with Susan Lieber's hot-wire cutter. 2) Waiting, at 6PM, on a long line going downstairs to a bath or J/O club, like on Pierrepont Street.
1/15/87: 5:35AM: Odd dream of SHOWERING at ACTUALISM as Bruce Jaffe (or a more LORDLY version of him) has been asked by me and told me that there was NO coordinator yesterday, so HE will be sure the tub I'm showering in will be scoured when I'm finished. I'm rinsing off soap with my face in the stream, opening my mouth, and suddenly I can't BREATHE! I wake to find my breath STOPPED, because I try to COUGH and my throat's STUCK, and I'm panting for BREATH. Roll off my stomach and feel that it's HOT. Catch my breath, curse the radiator clashing (I thought they'd FIXED it as it was OFF from 12-2AM when I was awake), and finish this at 5:42AM, having SIPPED water and leaning on my elbow.
1/15/87: 10:35PM: typing this now, I'm impelled to finish the page by saying that I'd described the Quilted Giraffe as a HALLUCINATION, so I'd better record it here in case the restaurant WAS only a dream!
1/12/87: SPACECRAFT streaks through atmosphere to water and EXPLODES blackly!
1/18/87: A real MUSIC-HALL extravaganza: MIDGETS dressed in circus-tinsel costumes and glitter to the ears dancing across a stage singing: Everyone's lovely in SOME way! Then they cluster and throw one of their number into the air, and he's wearing a golden SARI wrapped around his chunky body. Then the audience is ushered, like an amusement park, into a building called the Norman Abbey, and my first reaction is of a green iron lattice holding up a crystalline glass-paned roof and walls, and then there are small exquisitely faceted turrets at every corner down which a tightly-wound spiral staircase descends to the gardens below, but when I start down the staircase the tube of the turret changes into a chute down which I descend like an escalator, but the edges of the tube curl around me so that even when it TWISTS and I'm UPSIDE DOWN, the tube holds me firmly in place: it's like being inside a taffy-candy Ferris wheel. Suddenly, there's a bus wreck, and there's something about a bombing at a runway that makes of afraid of planes, so it's QUICK, to the boat, and what I call a horizontal squeeze tube, another amusement-park type ride that makes me think the whole DREAM could make a WONDERFUL animated music-video!!
1/19/87: 7AM: Wake after having gone to bed at about 11:45, and my MOTHER-IN- LAW is plotting against the family in ELABORATE detail: There was a CONCERT, in an amphitheater in a Park, of an AWFUL all-woman orchestra---I could HEAR how everyone was slightly off in timing and pitch and bow-angle and fingering. Someone in my company thought it was GOOD and so he ordered discount tickets for $805 to a voyage the orchestra was sponsoring and leaving on the next day, thinking people would be FLOCKING to the trip. (Later, after the concert, the amphitheater WITH orchestra and full chorus SAND into the BANK of ground, leaving only greenery in the park.) I realize that these tickets will have to be RESOLD, but we've got to get to LUNCH. "Mother-in-law" dramatically creates a "trembling" and then an "I can't breathe," clutching her wrinkled throat ("YES, you can," my angry wife snaps at her). We call an ambulance to pick HER up, and I ALSO call one to pick US up for the TRIP after our lunch at a Village restaurant. We're walking to the restaurant in the RAIN (VERY glad we have our exit-ambulance ordered, since EVERYONE wants one when it rains), and I'm walking with a 4-year-old Rita into oncoming traffic at Sheridan Square and she PANICS, so I lift her to carry her and calm her crying, and she explains earnestly through her tears that she's not so much frightened as HUNGRY, and I assure her we'll soon be at the restaurant and eating, so everything's OK. There's a quick flash of my returning to the apartment for some quick reason and seeing the mother-in-law plotting with the MAID, looking sheepishly at me because she's obviously healthy (though I didn't understand this ASPECT until I was copying down the dream). Dozed off again and woke at 8:25 to note THIS dream: I'm visiting the apartment of friends of a 12-year-old Rita, and there are LARGE numbers of lamps to be turned off in the center of an enormous white-furnished room, but then I see a note in the center that some of the GROW-lamps should be left on for the plants, and I realize there aren't any NATURAL windows in the room. Also a fragment of my being in MY bathroom, on the john, and look up to see that Fethi has come up unexpectedly and put yellow-FELT wallpaper on one wall and is soft-plastering the base of another wall, by the door, in preparation for putting up more of the same paper. I figure I MUST leave him a $20 tip for doing such a good job, even though it was about time that my bathroom was taken care of. Then I'm outside, looking past a number of mirrors that reflect in each other to make my apartment look QUITE a bit larger, and I'm now reminded of the nicely-placed mirrors at the Quilted Giraffe to make the bottles at the bar that I was FACING appear to be NEXT to me when observed in the mirror opposite me. I jotted down these notes, again amazed at the amount of DETAIL (almost impossible to capture all of it) of colors and personalities and OBSCURE relationships in them.
1/22/87: 1) Wake early and decide not to write notes on "heart-attack" community, where everyone living there had had a heart attack at some time, and strict rationing was the order of the day, with "hash browns" as the major food. Some leader was giving some kind of warning lecture and had a heart attack that looked suspiciously like an orgasm in the Locker Room. I've forgotten other details by 10:20AM. 2) I'm guiding some sort of group of boys around, and at one VERY exciting point, one of my blond favorites is wrestling with me in a back hallway, and as we're rolling over each other we're even very roughly KISSING, and I switch to a GENTLE LOVING kiss and I can see his eyes widen in pleasure, amazement, and acceptance, and I can feel an erection growing under his jeans, and then we break, but he looks at me in a new way, and as we find a table for two set up on a stairway between two larger tables, he holds my hand and smiles that this is a GOOD place to sit, though I reach out for the tablecloth over the oil-drum-head tabletop and feel the metal flanges cutting through the thin cotton of the tablecloth and hope it doesn't affect our meal, while the waiter tests the table-for-four next door and finds that it tips back and forth and needs to be fixed. Then the boy who's my intimate friend, another boy who shows great interest, and I are touring a village with a street that's overgrown with grass, and one makes the comment that everything's so quiet it's not very interesting, and I say that it's interesting BECAUSE it's so old, and they understand. Another asks if we can see Hong Kong from here, but I say it's 200 miles away, and that Tokyo is a thousand miles in another direction, and Singapore is a thousand miles in the other direction, so we won't be able to see any of the buildings from the city from here. [This, while typing, puts me in mind of another fragment from the earlier dream: a plane descends VERY steeply to land in an airport, and when I'm on the ground in the country for a time I come to a wall, and when I look over it, I can JUST see the top of the Empire State Building, and I'm starting to explain to myself that the curvature of the earth is SO sharp at that point that I can SEE the Empire State Building even though I'm across the ocean hundreds of miles from it, but then even in the dream I begin to wonder about that, and suddenly I'm in the air and find that I'm actually somewhere in Westchester County, so it's not very unusual that I can see the Empire State Building from THERE.....and I can see as I describe that NOW that that's VERY like an out-of-body-experience description, though I had no REAL sense of being there, but I DO want to "think of this as progress," and hold onto getting a MORE REAL experience of the DREAM-STATE of an out-of-body experience to lead to a WAKING experience of an OOBE.] We're walking under a shaded area of the street, maybe under a grape arbor, where I have to watch my head (I think this is from the multi-level ceiling at Brewburger last night), and my "special" friend say, "Tell us about importance again." And I smile ruefully and say, "Well, you know I told you to get as much sleep as you can," and when I wake I wonder if that's not good advice for myself. I wake and feel tired still, having gotten to bed at 2AM, at 10AM, and I'm lying, debating getting the cards and making notes on both sets of dreams, when the buzzer goes and I have to sign for the Vitamin Trader delivery, precisely one day after it should have been, and I open it to take a MAXepa right at the time, and I finish typing this at 10:30, feeling SO strange recently (and obsessed with death), and DO acknowledge (to heighten the experience in the future) the REALIZATION of what I'd asked for before I went to bed last night: a clearer experience of the mystical, and the dream-state, and the out-of-body experience, to accelerate my progress toward knowledge and experience, so that if I AM diseased in some way to cause these headaches, and this slight cough, and this fatigue (which I do NOT want to think of as precursors to AIDS, since I haven't had the CONTACT which SHOULD lead to AIDS), I won't feel that I have LOTS to catch up with before I "pass", and that the few travels, restaurants, and experiences left that I WANT I can STILL squeeze into the three or four or five (or more) years left me during the COURSE of the disease [though LIFE is ALWAYS terminal!!!].
1/24/87: 1) Only a fragment remembered of traveling abroad with two friends, and I'm telling them how to flip down bookcase shelves (like mine from Barnes and Noble) to fill them with either books or travel souvenirs. 2) I'm sitting in a movie house with Mom, and people in the left front have cleared out to the right and back because of noises from the ceiling (probably influenced in the dream by the louder-than-usual radiator-pipe bangs from the bedroom heat-riser) that portend something disastrous, maybe even like "Earthquake." We move to the right aisle and the lobby as everyone leaves and the house lights come up, but I stop just inside the lobby doors and say "But I want to stay for the rest of the movie," and Mom leaves and I go back inside to see workmen climbing up a ladder to hammer and saw on something above the false roof, and it LOOKS like they might fix it, because others in the audience are milling around and would have been told to leave if there was no possible benefit to be gained by staying. Then somehow the (maybe underground, like the Thalia, which in the past few days I've had news from Spartacus of closing, and yesterday I saw a clipping about it in my New York City file) scene is an underground railway system, and workmen are half-driving, half-pushing a three-car train of MOVABLE BOOKCASES along a sinuous track, testing that loading the bookcases on one side or the other won't cause the entire train to tip over as it rounds a particularly sharp curve in one direction or the other. The train moves back and forth a few times, with minor adjustments so that the stability of the system seems to be improving each time. Up at 10 and finish this by 10.30AM.
1/27/87: Amy Fleetman and Stu BERNSTEIN (and HIS son's name is ADAM) are data-checking with me at MY computer and I get mad and Amy gets even MORE annoyed with ME for getting mad, and we debate room-to-room VOICES, and Mom's somehow connected with it too, but I take this little note and transcribe it later without remembering anything more to add to the report.
1/29/87: I'm sitting in some sort of class that seems vaguely connected with the military, writing notes on a pad of complex forms that might be connected with some sort of taxes, and the class clown from the right rear makes some crack in my direction about my working even though this is the LAST day of school. My mind does a double-take as I realize that I HAVE been here for a month already, and since it IS the last day there's hardly any reason to continue taking notes. I start to erase some pre-printed matter to replace it with notes from what the unseen teacher in front of the class is saying, but the eraser is poor and the printed words remain visible beneath, and suddenly it just doesn't seem worth the trouble, and without transition we're in our barracks afterwards. Some of the guys are leaving this evening, some can stay on until tomorrow morning, and I realize I haven't made any plans to leave at ALL, but figure I can catch the subway downtown to some kind of restaurant or theater or bus-departure point, and I get to the station to hear the train pulling out below, so I run to the next station and run down the ramp to find some little red one-car bus that announces it's come to the end of its line, and I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do next, and the IMPRESSION of the dream is somehow connected to the paperwork and telephoning in connection with my lost wallet on WEDNESDAY night, reported THURSDAY night, which makes work connected with it FRIDAY unnecessary until I actually pick it up and CHECK it.
2/3/87: Only a dimly-remembered fragment of "A.A.," a combination of David Carridine and Art Bauman, in or rehearsing for a movie where he plays the lover of a younger woman, but he's also romantically involved with the woman's mother. He lowers his head to communicate some important point very rationally.
2/4/87: For some reason (on welfare?) I'm moving into an AIDS hospital, and I follow patients around and notice gay male nurses looking with sadness at some of the handsome men with the disease. The doctors says "You'll be taking the AIDS test on Monday," and I feel relieved that I'll be getting the test without really CHOOSING to get the test. Is this a message for me, somehow?
2/6/87: When the buzzer woke me at 9AM (though no one answered), I knew I'd had many strangely detailed dreams prior to waking, but consoled myself with the thought that any dreams I'd have AFTER this wakening would stick more in my memory. Well, maybe there were more DETAILS, but the plot-line lacks a certain continuity. Susan McMahon and I are shopping in something like a suburban Sears department store. We have tickets later that afternoon for some kind of dance or opera performance in another part of town, so we decide about 1:15 that we have to leave. We start downstairs, and I go around to the right and find that there are a series of strange constructions: the stairs start out looking OK, but then they spiral clockwise and become very tiny and close together for five or six steps, then come to a boxy edge where there should have been two or three steps so you wouldn't have to JUMP down the rest of the way. I glance around and Susan has gone some other way, so I don't have to worry about whether she can make it or not. But then, after an uncarpeted landing, there's another clockwise turn and a large wooden expanse like a stage, but without any entrance save the way I've come, and no exit at all: it's more like a SHELF built out over the size of a cavernous room below where there are counters and salespeople selling things, like an old Polsky's in Akron. I try another exit off a landing and come to exactly the same kind of configuration. Then where did SUSAN go? I look around at the TOP constricted landing and find a narrow Art Deco-glass door on the LEFT (more like a panel at the side of the doorway I used) that swings open and leads to a very NARROW flight of stairs that spirals tightly down. I go down THAT and find myself in a lobby leading to a drape-lined room, but some woman impatiently realizes that the "room" is an elevator, and she pushes some button and the door closes and I realize for a second that we're going DOWN, below the level of the ground, but then realize that's OK since the main entrance is below the shopping level. Get out hoping to see Susan waiting for me, but there are small knots of people getting busses and flagging cabs, and I look at my watch to see that it's 1:35, so I'd better see about getting a cab, hoping to meet Susan outside the auditorium before the curtain goes up. As I'm typing this at 11AM, a fragment from a prior dream floats through my mind: I'm working (my first day) in some sort of office, and I try to find where I put my coat, but I reach behind some poster or molding to find it's been attached by its upper right corner with blue paint that's still wet. My fingers are all sticky, so I open that supply closet (which isn't the coatroom I was looking for) and find scraps of material on a shelf, on which I wipe my fingers, thinking guiltily that I hope the scraps aren't some sort of samples that I'm now sullying with my painted fingers. Close that door and get to the low swinging door that divides the client area from the workers' area, and I see that the top of the door has been beveled (or worn from use), so that it's possible to STEP OVER the door, swinging it open slightly between the legs, and glide off the top of the door when it's pointed in the direction I want to go. I feel SO good to have found this secret that I lean to one side, weight on my left foot, and angle the foot back and forth so quickly that I scoot across the room like a music-hall entertainer (except I don't have the top hat to diddle off the top of my head with a Maurice Chevalier grin) making a classy exit, and I vaguely wonder why I haven't been able to move like this in "real life," and I even more vaguely realize, in the dream, that it IS a dream, and I couldn't possibly do this in real life. There's another fragment hanging around that I can't remember, but I woke with the "Midsummer Night's Dream" song "Theseus, Be Praised" revolving through my memory, and it seems that the words or the melody had had a part in a previous dream, also. Also something else to do with time, since I was very conscious of setting my alarm at 10:30AM when I got back to bed at 9AM, still feeling VERY tired after having gone to bed at 1:35AM, thinking that I must be making up for some sort of fatigue from my 6.5 hours sleep two days before, that makes nine hours seem like the right amount of sleep for me tonight. Glad Actualism coordinating had been changed to 12:30 starting, now at 11:10AM!
2/11/87: 9:15AM: This is the dream (the numbered sections took place in some unremembered order, with absolutely no transition between them: the effect can be duplicated by cutting this page into sections at the numbers, tossing them into the air, and taking any one before or after any other: 1) I'm in bed and the woman who shares my room has gotten out a large cardboard box on the bottom of which is a scattering of blue, white, and pink combs, which she sorts through to find a particular combination she's looking for. She'd stopped making a salad, which involved a number of individual plastic containers holding varying isolated amounts of pickles, chickpeas, lettuce, half-inch cuttings of celery, shreds of romaine lettuce, nubbins of iceberg lettuce, olives, and at least three possible dressings. There were various articles of clothing scattered across her bed, since she was not yet completely dressed, and there were various notebooks open to a number of projects she was working on. Somehow I was watching all this from a vantage point over her head, as if I were a television camera recording her activities for a dispassionate cinema verité featurette. I wanted to take notes on the quantities of objects with which she was attempting to deal simultaneously, but I pulled myself out of bed (much like I myself pulled myself out of bed just before 9:15 to turn on my hard-disk drive before urinating) to turn on my hard-disk drive, counting slowly to myself so I wouldn't turn on the monitor before the hard disk had its minute to warm up, and begin to record her activities (as I'm now recording my dream). 2) I've gotten a manuscript to evaluate (possibly for the New Yorker Magazine, though possibly I'm READING something in New Yorker Magazine), and the cut-up style is unmistakably that of William Burroughs, so I page through the the final page, which ends in a number of ways, including Steinbergian signatures and scrawlings and cat-headed women with enormous boxy high heels, but at the bottom, under a tiny block of print which resembles a reduced "Letters We Never Finished Reading" feature from the New Yorker Magazine, is a typed block (I can see and feel the Braille-like effect of the letters typed on soft paper with typewriter keys that have been hard pressed because the ribbon is running out of ink) containing the words "William Burroughs/Copyright 1987." 3) I'm typing at my desk (in a newspaper office?) at an orientation of "facing 9 on the clock" if my previous computer-typing orientation had been "facing 3 on the clock" (though I now realize [as I was typing the phrase between the previous two words "orientation," above] it would be easier to describe by saying that I was facing in the opposite direction, except I NOW realize [as I typed the two words "opposite direction," above] that the "3" and the "9" on the clock is relative to the "12" on the clock that I am NOW [as I type this entire page] facing). I'm busily typing a manuscript for a class when a fellow student comes to stand behind my typewriter with a long face and say "I know you worked on the political-satire mask [though I knew I hadn't] that won the first prize in last-year's parade [though at THAT point in the dream- conversation I knew that the mask I had worked on in a previous parade had NOT won the first prize, so he was "doubly" lying]. The guy who was designing the political-satire mask for the upcoming parade has been killed by the school authorities [I doubted that]. Could you possibly design this year's political- satire mask?" While I took pages out of the typewriter and arranged them with a volume of other pages I'd done previously, I responded, "I'm very sorry, but I can't. I have a number of projects to finish quickly [and I felt angry that HE seemed to have time to work on political activities while I had to work on school projects] and don't even have enough time to finish THOSE, so I can't possibly spare the time to help you. Besides, I haven't even been active previously in the area you now want me to help in." I felt that I described my position frankly and accurately. He, realizing this, dropped his head in dejection, folded himself into a lumpy rag doll on a shelf, crawled under a highly colored scarf that had been lying on the shelf, and flopped down onto the floor as in a cartoon to waver dejectedly to the right and to the left as he slowly departed from the room, while a coworker remarked, "Now THAT is over-dramatization!" 4) I was riding in something that at first seemed like the [and at THAT point in my typing my buzzer is pushed by the Federal Express deliveryman, and when I had typed the FIRST word on this page I thought "I'd better not start the printer going, because Federal Express might buzz the buzzer while the page is printing out and I won't hear the buzzer," and that's clearly what WOULD have happened!] bus that took me through the mountain-passes to Cortina d'Ampezzo, but then lowered and got closer to a flooding river, and I could see the splashes of a number of swimmers leaving the opposite shore for this side of the river or lake, and then I turned my head from my right to my front to see that EVERYONE in my "cohort" was actually in some sort of sluiceway filled with water that was paralleling the river. I was alternately IN the sluiceway and ABOVE the sluiceway, alternately EXPERIENCING and SEEING OTHERS EXPERIENCE the up-and-down flowing over roughly-angled planking that took on more and more the appearance of an amusement park ride (like an enormous water-flume in an Action Park) through an increasingly artificial- looking countryside (the horizon constricted from Dolomite-distances to Disneyland-painted backdrops). But the exhilaration of MY riding and OTHERS' riding up and down through several feet of elevation at each hill (leading me to marvel at the construction of the levels which would permit the water and the passengers to continue their flow "westward") was deeply felt. 5) Sometime in the fog between or after segments of the dream I wanted to get to my computer to capture the details: these dreams had so much the cluttered matter- of-fact complexity of real-life situations that authors like Pynchon in "Gravity's Rainbow" or Gaddis in "JR" or Barth in "Letters" capture precisely. There was also some touching on the cold that I have: giving the details a hallucinatory complexity and color. There was a connection to the water-leak in the bathroom which I can't tie in at this moment. At some level there was the realization that it was getting close to 9AM, at which point the Federal Express delivery promised by Stan George would be imminent. And the feeling of satisfaction that my 1AM bedtime would have allowed 8 hours sleep already. So after getting all this down and getting a call from Dennis about the Academy Award nominations and chatting with John about ECD, it's 10:30AM already!
2/12/87: I'm sitting at some sort of layout table, slanted with a clip at the top for pages, working on a large index whose manuscript consists of 8 1/2 x 11 sheets with drawings on them and large blue Magic-Markered numbers at the top. I'm working somewhere around 385 when my editor (I'm working on their premises) comes in to see how I'm doing, and I tell her how I work slower at the start and faster at the end, since I had to finish up two jobs before I could start on hers (the actual situation with Patricia Hurdle's Little Brown pages), so she doesn't have to worry about the deadline. I ask her how many jobs I've successfully completed with her company, and she says only one or two, so I have to come up with the statement, "Then when I've finished four or five on schedule you'll be able to trust me completely." Some school kid comes running in to deposit a coin in a machine in back of me and get out a "Slush" soft drink, and it seems I working in a recreation room, and to my lower left is a television monitor that a kid turns on to watch a cartoon show that's SO clearly in three dimensions (each character is on a clearly defined plane: one about three inches from the surface of the set, the next three inches beyond that, and so on for about five planes, the last of which shows a lifeboat with people debarking on a surfy shoreline) I mention it to the woman with appreciation, and we're joking with the kids, and I say "We're old enough so that WE grew up with ster-e-op-ti-cons," and the woman casts me a glance as if to say "I'm not as old as THAT" (she's a combination of Kit Lee and Susan McMahon and someone else), and we laugh together and continue to watch the TV, though I'm aware she might have additional concern that I'll be watching television when I'm supposed to be working on her book. Finish typing this at 11:10AM, bit of a cold still hanging around in a sense of fatigue and achyness.
2/13/87: I'm in a new apartment. 1) Lying in bed, I look behind a doweled-wood headboard and notice that the person who'd moved out had left magazines in white-painted racks: something that looked like Newsweek and National Geographic, but also, I noticed with increasing pleasure, comic books with superheroes like Captain America (movie coming to TV on Saturday) and others, and some might even be porno, and I'm looking forward to glancing through them. I look around the room and it ALL seems very neat: racks built into most of the walls, neatly arranged bookcases, and foursquare furniture that makes this cubic apartment seem capacious and "all I need." 2) Movers are trying to put my refrigerator on a strange earthen shelf past a corner of the bathroom, almost in the living room, while the low stove is about 20 feet away, and I clearly want them together, so I motion to the movers to bring the refrigerator over here. In this apartment I'm amazed at the number of rooms and the THINGS in the rooms: I push past great leafy potted plants that interfere with mobiles hanging from the ceiling and stabiles sprouting from the walls and floors; there are tabletops crammed with ornaments and bibelots and tchotchkas; it's hard to walk because I must wend between chairs and cabinets and tables and bookcases and lamp stands. 3) I remember other sections in which I was AGAIN, as yesterday, impressed with the DETAIL in the dream, thinking IN THE DREAM that it was extraordinary: the amount of detail in the dream, and I don't recall.
2/14/87: I'm either on furlough from or LEAVING the Army, and have one or two or three months, or some lengthy period of time, to spend before needing to be back in New York. There was some episode about packing and repacking, involving putting a bulky typewriter into a folding two-suiter suitcase, but eventually I got everything into my old pink-identitaped blue suitcase that kept snapping open on so many trips it needed a strap, not yet part of this trip. But by the time I packed, and finished in the bathroom, it was something like 7:55 and I knew the last bus to New York for the day left at 8PM, so I started in thinking "Well, I could just go as far NORTH into Canada from here as I can (having then the "realization" that I was somewhere in the neighborhood of Missouri or Tennessee), because that was so delightful from Alberta before," but when I went down the tight spiral staircase to the station entrance (thinking then, "Well, it WAS dark here when I ARRIVED in Washington, D.C., so I wouldn't have remembered the ENTRANCE to the terminal") I found there was a bus that everyone was boarding, so I just climbed aboard, passing the driver taking the money and tickets, so that I had to turn around and ask "Where are YOU going?" "N'Yawk, whar else?" he smiled back at me, and I struggled to get off the bus to his laughing, "Isn't that where you want to GO?" "Yes," I said, "but I left my SUITCASE in the Army barracks." With a smile he said, "But what if I said I'd pass there and stop for a minute for you to get your suitcase?" I agreed with pleasure, and sank into a front window- seat, amazed that he got out of the lot by steering his enormous bus-wheels OVER a barricade of railroad ties about a foot off the ground on rail-track stanchions, but the guy sitting next to me assured me both the barricades AND the tires were designed for exactly this restricted usage! We drove for a bit, and the guy sitting next to me wanted to demonstrate a camera he once had, so he jumped out the window into a wire-enclosed vacant lot and framed his hands about his face as if he had a camera focussed on the bus at different angles. I was amazed that he would get OUT, but then realized that the driver had stopped outside my army barracks for me. Without transition, I found myself with my suitcase on a section of roof that was under construction, and I had to cling to tiny metal flanges at the base of girders, WITH my heavy suitcase AND with BARE feet, to get back down to the ground. The total ridiculousness of the situation impressed me even in my dream, and IN the dream I thought to myself "I'll just close my eyes and be OUT of this ridiculous situation," and woke with the relief that I didn't have to figure how to get OUT of a dangerous place I didn't remember how I'd gotten INTO.
2/15/87: I'm in some sort of small museum, and an artist-craftsman is demonstrating a mobile he's exhibiting, showing how the balance changes when a tiny piece of colored clay is extracted with a long thin stick from one hole in Calder-like plate on the stabile-like portion of the mobile and placed into an adjacent hole in the plate, causing the axis of rotation and direction of motion of the supported mobile to shift and change. He does this a couple of times and most of the observers move away to other vitrines in the dim interior, but I remain, asking about the construction and dynamics, and he shows me how the two spinning oranges support the entire system. One of the oranges drops off and he twirls it to give it the needed momentum before returning it to its spindle-tip, and he's adjusting something else when another tiny piece of clay drops from a slab and rolls across the floor of the vitrine. "Watch the..." I call, and he catches and returns it deftly, thanking me for being so helpful, and as we move down an escalator he asks me for my address and phone number, and I'm flattered that he wants to establish a relationship because I've been so interested in his display. Then it seems I've been telling this story to Joe Easter in some apartment in the upper West 90's, and he laughs appreciatively at my being liked for my inquisitiveness. Then he's due to go out with a friend to interview for job somewhere on the West Side, and he asks me how to get there, and I say, "Well, you could take a bus down Riverside Drive, but what's the address?---403 W. 86th?---you could just walk from here." Then I remark that the artificial flowering tree occupying the top of a large polished buffet (like from 1221 Dietz) seems to have grown larger, though it then seems that it's just been pulled up out of its vase and fluffed up to occupy more space, and he gives his characteristic moué at me for that remark. Then I confusedly, in the dream, think that his FRIEND asked me for my address, and I have to remember that it was the guy in the MUSEUM that did so.
2/16/87: (Wanted to transcribe this at 10AM, but called Rolf and talked till 2!) I'm preparing for a party for someone else who lives in an "apartment" laid out very much like the house at 1221 Dietz. She's in Mom's bedroom dressing, while I look over the buffet-table loaded with food and can only see fragments of crepe paper on the floor to pick up to finish arranging for guests. But then in the kitchen I see a vacuum cleaner with hose and attachments on the floor and prepare to take them downstairs. At one point I knew it was about 5:30PM and the party would start around 7PM, but I had a theater ticket that evening for 8:30PM to about 10:30PM, so I would miss the CENTER of the party, but would enjoy the beginning and ending of it. Then I was downstairs (in the basement) looking at a VERY strange washing machine: it had legs that were more than jointed, they were flexible and bend and turned and weaved as if doing a four-footed dance while the clothes chugged around inside. There was another larger machine, possibly a dryer, which hadn't started yet, and when I lifted the cover, I saw that someone had not bothered to take the red sheet off the green sheet off the mattress cover before putting all three into the unit, and they flopped wetly on the cover-rim, preventing the mechanism from starting. As I pushed the multi-sheets into the machine and closed the lid, an old woman who combined Blossom Dearie and the plastic-surgery old-woman actress in "Brazil" came early to the party. I had a "picture" of myself in a dark brown (rather Paul-Bosten-like) wig, so I hastened to assure her "I wasn't Tom." "I KNOW you're not Tom," she said sarcastically, and I turned to see that others had come down the basement stairs (which I had to pull out, like connected drawers in a chest, when I teetered at the top and noticed that they had been "shoved in"), so I knew the party had begun already. I was back upstairs (without GOING up the stairs) in the middle of the party, knowing I had to leave soon, and other things happened that I've forgotten in real-life, since I had lunch, typed the above, and gave Dennis the last three boxes of cards from the PENULTIMATE carton of cards by now, 2:30PM, at which time the rest of the details from the dream have faded beyond recall.
2/17/87: 1) It's not that I'm WATCHING a television coverage, it's not that I'm MANNING a television camera to cover, it's that I AM in the position of a television camera observing the opening night of a female movie star at something like the Roxy Theatre. Her voice-over says that "They either came to the 7PM show to say they saw my opening show, or they came for the 9PM show so that, in case I died after the 7PM show, they could say they were the first ones to be disappointed because of my death." I zoom down to watch the couples who are dancing flamboyant waltzes and tangos on the enormous stage during the orchestral interlude between the shows, and catch out of the corner of my eye a couple sprawling ludicrously on the stairs, having slipped on some slightly beveled edges of the left stairway from the audience to the stage, which is like an enlarged tabletop: the stage-floor an enormous slab of polished onyx, the rim of the floor shiny wood moldings, and the stairway is more like an ornamental ledge, not really made for walking on, than distinct stairs, and as the Master of Ceremonies moves to pick up a second couple that falls with a Chevy Chase-like flailing of arms and legs, a third couple goes flying, and I wonder why on earth they couldn't put up a sign, "Watch out for slippery footing." 2) I'm standing on line with a friend (possibly outside the same theater for the same show), chatting, and come to a corner where a couple that I take to be people who snuck into line (though I later wonder how they could have sneaked into the CORNER, with a white column, while the line circled AROUND them; but I push me and my friend in front of them with a haughty "WE were behind the lady with the fur coat," but when I really look at the back of the fur coat, I have a moment's suspicion that she wasn't really the one we HAD been behind. 3) There was a fragment BEFORE those two, now forgotten.
2/24/87: 1) I'm on the top floor of a large department store, like Bloomingdale's, that's closing, so I funnel with others into a large elevator, but when it starts there are only 3-4 of us in it, including a fairly sexy guy (like Andy who lives down on Hicks) who seems to want to get to know me. He asks if I'm planning to see the Max Bodmer exhibit (I look in New York Magazine when I wake and find only an exhibit my Mel Bochner, and EB says there's a KARL Bodmer, but he's represented by a watercolor of an American Indian, and I had in mind one of the Expressionistic Germans from the 30's), and he makes a point of telling me that he'll be going on Saturday. At one point we're sitting on the floor, leaning against the walls of the elevator, and then the walls are glass and we're racing along a packed-earth channel at the side of the department store, and though I have no feeling of apprehension, I wonder where we're going, until we get to an elaborate subway station, and the guy mentions that this is a well-accepted part of the service of this suburban branch of the department stores: free transportation to the subway station AND entry TO the station. We go through various barbed-wire barricades, and though momentarily I think we're going to be left outside the actual platform, we're finally conducted into a tan fence-lined inner room with tracks running through it, and lining the non-track wall are doors up against which are pressed would-be passengers who have yet to deposit their tokens to get through the gates onto the platform on which we're already standing, and I can see that the planning for our free entrance had to take care that no one else could sneak in free along the tracks. 2) Without transition, and maybe this fragment was BEFORE the other, I'm sitting in a room facing Mom slouched down in a chair in a dark- print dress, and she's smoothing her hands over her large (though somehow not pregnant-looking) stomach, saying "The size of my stomach has always been a big benefit to my health," and I sit in a straight-backed chair at an angle to her, saying with some chagrin that I've gotten a large stomach too, but only in the last few years, and I don't think it's such an advantage for MY health, but she has no curiosity to question me any further. Only remember this part when I've been up for awhile: woke at 9:15 and lay till 10 and crapped and finish this rather late at 10:25AM---the mornings always go by so QUICKLY!!
3/2/87: Some dreams DO have the feel of "miscellaneous thoughts from the previous day, ruminated over to be discarded," but some have such a feel of A SPECIFIC PLACE that it's hard to think of the dream as NOT being some sort of "excursion" to an ACTUAL place, inhabited REGARDLESS of the dream, having great circumstantial (and therefore discussably comparable with dreams of others, or of books that others have written under the influence of dreams to that place) PRESENCE. Such was my dream this morning. And because of the PLACENESS of the dream, it seems easier to tell it OUT of chronological order that seems so important in OTHER types of dreams. At the END of the dream, I was sitting in some large area (either an outside screened-in porch in one segment, or in a cavernous room in another segment) where there was an informal community meeting going on, and someone asked where Max Anderson was. "Didn't you know? He's on his honeymoon; he married Jane Somerset three days ago." "Are you sure he's not racing his horses at Pimlico?" someone from the side asked with a bit of sarcasm. "No, they were married three days ago in the Cathedral," and I looked across the group to my only friend (I'd been about to type "guide," but that would put an unfair mystic slant to the narration), to ask if Max was the man who had been married at the wedding I'd witnessed in my dream earlier, which seemed to have taken place "three days ago" in my dream. To cover more details of this last time-episode in the dream first, we were all sitting on the porch informally when two people wanted to see "Madame President," and some official of the group knocked on the door just to my left rear, and a secretary (Mary Vilaboa's talk last night and Connie's referring to her as her secretary may have been at work here) came to the door, unseen, to say that she was speaking today at Yale (Cathy O'Shea's talked-about-Saturday-night place of visit on Friday). I "knew" that Madame President was Crystal Snyder, so this "group" seemed related to an Actualism-like group. An unmarried couple were embracing to my right, in a dim set of bunk-beds or a cloister-like enclosure that may have reminded me of (or been based on) the Cheese Cellar with Paul and his friends yesterday brunch, and I said something like "People seem to have good relationships here," and my "contact" said something about liaisons both private and official. "Three days before," there had been a series of pageants around an altar something like St. John the Divine's, and in one arresting sequence I was sitting on the ENORMOUS base of a Gothic stone column, about 15 feet above the floor of what turned out to be a STAGE onto which an actor strode, voicing a line from what seemed to be a Shakespearian play and flinging with a theatrical gesture his red bishop's cap away to land at my feet, and I gathered my jester's motley about me and slid off my perch, aware of pink flashes of my naked legs and buttocks, but I knew them to be slender and "in keeping with the mood of the day," and figured that the audience would think I was somehow part of the play. Later that day I found myself on the roof of an ENORMOUS cathedral, knowing that the huge interior I'd just left was under only the farther third of the football-field sized roof I was walking on, wondering in the dream what a look through the Guinness Book of Records would tell me about the world's largest cathedrals. I rather pictured that the highest would be Beauvais or Ulm, the largest interior volume would be Bourges, and the biggest in some other dimension would be Notre Dame, though I knew I wasn't in any of those PRECISELY. But to my surprise I NOW find that the "largest...is..St. John the Divine...floor area of 121,000 sq.ft. and volume of 16,822,000 cu.ft. Highest spire in Chicago is 568', while Ulm is 528'." There were other less-important fragments that I don't recall now, at 8:35AM, having wakened at 7:55AM, good for having gotten exhausted to bed at 11:45PM. But there was such a sense of CONGREGATION of good-natured people, and of a place I KNEW I DIDN'T KNOW, but would "be allowed (there, not really in a dream, since IN the dream I thought about a previous episode as "having been in a dream,") to get to know." There was some sense, when first I woke, of some relatedness to the richness and population of "Mists of Avalon," though it was contemporary, or maybe 60s-ish, in the dream itself. I look forward to returning to THAT land of dreams.
3/10/87: 1) Mom and I are waiting on an outdoor line, up concrete stairs. Line starts moving, Mom's ahead, slowing; I TRY to catch up with that familiar "dream-run" of sore thighs and aching calves by "going uphill on level ground." 2) BEFORE 1), I was pulling down five shelves (2 on one wall, 3 on other) in two bedrooms, thinking "I should have let Rita do hers" (she's about 12), and I roll up in blankets on old silver-threaded blue sofa, broad below, narrow above, and I know the blankets won't quite cover, and I should move down or up, but I'm too lazy to do so. Jot down notes and remember little 4 days later.
3/13/87: One of the IBM dreams again: I'm working on two projects at the same time (rather like indexing), and realize that I haven't STARTED on a new job- card program which is due NEXT WEEK. I can't possibly finish it in that time: I'm not even sure I remember how to program, and then it occurs to me to make up a detailed flowchart as Barbara Cope did for Cathy and Mozelle and me on the Defense System back in 1959. I can visualize the yellow sheets with very simple directions, but I worry about how I can excuse my not having done anything on the project to THIS point. Then, without transition, in the same office, someone is giving me (or getting from me) specs for another, but related program, on assigning serial numbers to new employees. It's planned that the program do it automatically, but there are two serial numbers, one about five digits: an employee number; another of about 12 digits, separated with hyphens like a Social Security number. Each of the 17 digits is assigned from a rotating supply of non-ordered digits: examples might be 0000000-111 for the first digit, 22-33-44-55-66 for the first digit, and 0123666999 for the third, each taking a specific function for identifying the employee. It's clear to me how to do it, but I'm having trouble telling a programmer how to implement it. Wake and essentially decide NOT to go to Washington DC today!!
3/14/87: Partly fever-dreams, I hardly remember any details of 1) the first segment in which I KNEW I was finished with school, which made me feel very happy, but when I thought that meant I was stuck with the JOB that I had (something about handling something like bowling-score cards, adding up sub- totals and substituting codes for numbers time after time after time) for the rest of my life, I wasn't sure I was so happy. But then, either in talking with someone or in taking thought in myself, I realized that I was now free to CHANGE my job if I wanted to, so things weren't as bad as they might seems. Then 2) I was attending some sort of concert-production of a Haydn opera: the orchestra was at the OPPOSITE end of this enormous Tudor-style hall, while I was sitting at the entreme right side of the stage on which the singers were holding forth: this was some sort of bedroom scene in which each man sat cross-legged on the bed (and I decided that the costumers knew the males would be in this position for a lot of the time, so there was no chance for a glimpse of cock through accidentally-agap pajama bottoms) across from a woman (except for a pair to the extreme right who DIDN'T sing all the time, so I charitably decided that was because he was a bass and didn't participate in this particular part of the chorus, rather than that he was sleeping, as he appeared to be, heavy lids closed in a smooth-skinned face under beautifully- proportioned wide brows. More people entered during the performance, and someone sat to my immediate side blocking the extreme-side angle I had of the stage. Then it was an intermission, as as I waited for access to the aisle, someone rather like Bruce Lieber addressed me as "Bob," and gave me advice, and I decided he must have been one of the many guys to whom I was introduced, over time, at Laird's parties in Philadelphia, where we seemed to be. I went to another performance, something like an instrumental sonata, in another building, marveling that this small---university campus? summer resort? autumn music-festival town? had so many performances on the same evening. I slid down the narrow black rails of a tightly-spiral staircase to get to some exit doors, and down a polished-wood hallway to a revolving door I encountered a matron entering who wanted to ask directions somewhere, but an attendant in the hall answered in a solution I hadn't known. I found myself outside the building, on the "west bank" of the river, and oriented myself by knowing that the group of dimly-lit-in-the-sunset white farmhouse-like buildings to the right was the concert house, and I figured intermission would be over by now, and I might even do something ELSE. There were 3-4 encounters, in both dreams, with someone who called me "Bob" that I didn't really know, but since they were all young attractive men, I decided I was more happy with my unknowing reputation than less. No sense of being sick IN the dream, as I was in real-time sleep.
3/31/87: Last one recorded 3/14; many fragments since, some just fever-dreams. But the last few nights have had BAD overtones: 3/30 with blistery boils on my neck (possibly a bad dream from "Toxic Avenger" horror the night before), 3/31 at 5AM with the vaguest possible sense of "brain damage" displayed by a construct that resembled the edge of an aluminum sled-runner (three-pronged with one tine for the curved front of the start of the runner, one above it for the straight start of the sled-body side-support, one slightly curved perpendicular to the other two for the sled-body front-support), but of glass or plastic or sausage-casing so I could see it had some kind of sludge in it, though the memory of the CONSTRUCT was clear, it was the area through which it was displayed that was sludgy. Then the fragments from 9-9:30AM: a sensuous segment in which I was in a kind of vacation-camp, in bed with a very attractive guy laying on his stomach who didn't mind my running my hand lightly over his smooth right side and voluptuous right buttock under the light blanket. There was some talk with a third fellow on the other side of the bed about the louvers on the windows letting in light, and by pressing on the five- part brass light-plate on the wall I found that the angle of the switch and its placement corresponded to the actual angle of the center-hinged single-louvered window-covering and its placement along the wall. Four below for louvers, one above for the artificial-light level. Then very briefly I was outside running down narrow-risered concrete steps with others who were visiting the camp. Without transition I was going on a sort of tour through a modern child-rearing facility, watching fat little human babies (though the size of tiny monkey babies, only uncharacteristically fatter) smilingly climbing rungless colored- plastic ladders at the side of their playpens, using only the support-wide space between their big toes and the next toes for foot support, wondering how they could maintain the strength to take the 25-30 tiny steps they needed to climb to the top of the playpen-side, which was about 5-6 times their height. I idly wondered who engendered these oddly-endearing little beasts. Then I was in the middle of a real-life or TV-version car-chase, and a large rather attractive woman was forced at gunpoint out of her car and made to sit on the running-board with feet straddled in front, leaning against the seat-edge, CROUCHING on which were the two policemen, ABOVE which was the camera or me, and one gave a harsh laugh and slapped aside the wig to show the straggly-haired head of a bullet-headed muscle-builder, the skirt was stripped aside to reveal hairy muscular legs, and then with an impossible twist, the body was in an ass-up autofellatio position at such an angle that the cop could move the toe of his shoe forward to insert it into the large loose asshole to "prove" that the transvestite was also an accomplished anal receiver. I felt badly about the "negative affect" of most of the fragments, though I didn't feel well enough to stay awake after I woke at 5AM in another night-sweat and more fear of AIDS, which I'll go into more fully on NOTEBOOK 407, for the ONLY entry for March, which has been a VERY bad month: previous dreams were too ugly to be noted in any detail, and I simply didn't bother to be faithful to the dream- record since other ideas, and the listlessness of the flu and bronchitis, made it much easier to get up and read or watch television in a hope that enough days passed would permit me to feel better and more energetic, but sadly it's not even happened YET!
4/3/87: I'm living with Mom in a different but "familiar" apartment---I know that even though she's not there----she's already left the apartment. I go into the bathroom (which is somehow like a kitchen, too), and see that things have been moved around: there are my blue duffel-coat and shirt-and-jeans on a table which is rather like (this is how it is seen by the "me" in the dream) a flat bathtub; there is a pile of brooms and papers in the far corner, which is where a little movement catches my eye, and I see a small gray mouse peeping out from a corner of the papers. So THAT's why the door was closed: she was trying to keep the mouse in one place! I try to move around it, and it runs over the "flat bathtub" to the door hinge, where it tries to slip out through a crack which I fear it CAN slip out, except that it stays in the room, frustratedly leaping at various cracks trying to get out. I step onto the flat bathtub and, like a shadow or a ball of fluff, it seems to "float" up toward my feet, and all the while I'm shouting-grunting "hunhs!" in my throat almost like karate-shouts to give myself the courage to face this mouse, which is now large enough to be feared to be a rat, and its belligerence makes me think its trying to bite me, and I'm trying to keep away from it. Reach up to pull the string on the old-fashioned corroded-brass-flower ceiling light-fixture (like the old one in the hallway at 1221 Dietz?), but the light doesn't go on (in approved awful dream manner), and I wonder what to do next. WONDERED if "Poltergeist II" would affect (or give) me dreams, and I somehow connect it with that rather mediocre but still chill-giving picture.
4/19/87: I'm in some sort of Russian-style nightclub, but I think it's in New York rather than in Russia. I have a seat, alone, at a crude front table that's more like a picnic bench---rough plank-wood and no tablecloth---than a formal nightclub table, and I'm having problems with my clothing: earlier I had on a long-sleeved striped shirt, but now that's hanging on the back of my chair as if it were a jacket, and I'm wearing one of my short-sleeved tricolor over- pocket striped shirts that keeps coming out at the waist. I keep tucking it in, but I have a pair of dark-denim jeans on over a pair of light-denim faded jeans, and at one point I see a gap in the front of the light jeans where I haven't done up the top button to give my femininely-wide hips a chance to breathe. Before this section, I was looking at a stage performance of ballet, with someone famous like Vasiliev and Evdokimova (maybe prompted by the crossword puzzle entry I filled in last night: Eva), and I'm peering through my binoculars at their faces in closeup to see how they've aged. Vasiliev looks pretty good, but Evdokimova is large-boned and dark-haired and stern-faced to such an extreme that I think maybe it's a man dressed up to imitate her for some comic reason. They do some spins and leaps, but they seem more cabaret performers than ballet dancers. Helen and Jimmy are sitting in the LAST row, and Jimmy is gesticulating to Helen, and they both seem to be trying to avoid looking at me, since with my standing in the front of the room I'm getting some attention, not all of it favorable, and they don't want to "own" me. I kept tucking my shirttails back in (like I've been doing now that I'm wearing the light pullover to "dirty" it enough to wash it), feeling self-conscious that I shouldn't look like a drunken slob before these people I didn't know. There was a section that came BEFORE this, that I woke about 8AM to try to remember, succeeding pretty well, but when I got up at 10 with the final episode, the memory of the first had gone except from something vague and characteristic like traveling abroad in someplace that I didn't know, trying to get from one place to another with an inadequate map, and not being able to speak the language to get clear directions, but this is all aleatory typing at the keyboard rather than accurate recollection of what the dream actually was. But I want to get to the bottom of the page, and I haven't HAD that many dreams during my flu-bronchitis-AIDS scare, now that I think of it, and it IS interesting that I haven't had ANYTHING even VAGUELY like a nightmare for a VERY long time, which is rather heartening---wait till I schedule a FLIGHT!!
4/28/87: Wake at 8:05AM (again in a night-sweat) to jot these notes:
I'm in some unidentifiable place that gradually turns into something like a summer camp. 1) Dimly I recall comparing colors of the greenery outside: like last year was BRIGHT green, but this year is mostly silver-green or off-color. 2) There are two exhibits behind timber-framed windows, the one on the right is "normal" but the one on the left (first as you enter the doorway on the left) is more problematic: at first there seems only to be a shelf with a hologram- type rainbow above it, but when I hunch down to look ALONG the level of the shelf, I can see a tiny doll-dance circle of a pinwheel of maybe 25 women dancers, 5 each along five spokes of a slowly-rotating pinwheel, and it's really an exhibit of a masterpiece of miniature carving or model-making.
3) I'm walking down a ramp-stairway up which some young women are walking, and the steps become large pieces of wood, almost planked timbers (which, now that I think of them, resemble the "bark-bread" served at Union Square Cafe last night, like we first had with pleasure at the Heights SeaGrill), that become detached from the girder-frame of the ramp and slide down to the bottom, leaving a gap which can't be crossed. The women have scrambled up to my level, and now we see a truck with a cherry-picker-type back backing up to our position to take us down and transport us to safety. We walk onto the back, which is transformed into a four-person-wide truck seat onto which I slide, then reach forward to clasp the waist of a tiny old woman, almost a dwarf (does this stem from the dwarf moving briskly on crutches through the halls of Washington Irving High School while I was waiting for the AIDS in Theatre benefit last night?), and seat her beside me. Then, in taxi-like jump-seats in front of us, there are two "adults" with dummy-like "parents" on their laps, with grotesquely over-made-up faces which are nevertheless real and human and communicative. Later remember a fragment (before #3) where I was going into a cafeteria for lunch, looking around for somewhere to sit where I knew someone, but I couldn't find anyone I knew. 4) The last note I can't read: something like "people vote on west's good to see." I don't recall anything now.
4/29/87: When I woke about 7:30, BOTH dreams were very clear, and I had no trouble characterizing them in my memory: simulation and amusement park. But then I dozed a bit more, so that by the time I got out of bed at 8:40, they had each faded and both merged into each other. 1) The simulation seemed to be on a train, having something to do with a wristwatch, as if reality changed as time changed (which is somehow not a very original idea---though maybe, actually, it is a TOTALLY original and very BASIC idea that hasn't been sufficiently investigated!), and there were very elaborate scenarios that were executed artificially (on the train-windows as view-screens?---clear images of one's EYES!) when certain options or choices were executed, and I marveled (either in the dream or afterwards) about the STORAGE CAPACITY of the computer that contained the data for the simulations. 2) The amusement park was also a ride which entertained with simulations, but there's the vague memory of MORE people present (with the obvious NOW connection between the amusement park and the WORLD we all inhabit---or think we inhabit). Somewhere in here was something about "simulated" accidents, where specifically-shaped shards of bone hung from garments (prompted by Dennis's showing Mack Griswold his pregnant ghoul-with-one-hand last night?) without any sense of the OMINOUS or DANGEROUS or PAINFUL at all: this is simply an amusement park where all danger is illusory. And the possible parallel with Life on Earth (either reality or the television program, also conceived as interchangeable) is irresistible: almost as if the dream encouraged a Kubler-Ross optimism that current experience is only a chrysalis-stage (enormous, but benign, changes) preparing one for a glorious existence as a butterfly after the transition to the next level is made. Well. I HAD woken with the idea of pursuing the DECAY of the DREAM- MEMORY as a parallel with the decay of REAL memory, but obviously I've indicated that direction in a number of ways already. Dreams DO mirror life!!
5/1/87: 1) 6:15AM: I'm trying with a very HARD (#3?) pencil to write the word "SERMONIZED" on shredding newspaper which has a copy of the crossword puzzle that a class (and its teacher) is trying to work out. I know the word, but suspect that no one's gotten that far yet, and I'm trying to transmit the word to a friend so that HE can tell the teacher what it is, but I can't get it to WRITE clearly, though I try about 5-6 times with increasing frustration. The teacher reminds me of the pop-eyed woman who I'd forgotten was an Elizabeth Kubler-Ross facilitator (was her name Carolyn? Even LOOKING at the list of names (assuming she put hers on the list) I can't recognize the missing facilitator's name). The teacher has only the letters "---MON--E-" to go by. One guy who "gets" the word from passing my note tries to read it aloud, and I go through elaborate mimed mouth-motions to tell him to shut up. Two girls bicker at the top left corner of the large-class amphitheater (as at Columbia University), and a classroom monitor points up to them to tell them to be quiet, and we all start standing and agitating in what seems to be a well-rehearsed practice: shouting "SHIT" in unison and in rhythm which makes the word itself somehow innocuous. Somewhere in here were films on ground effects and dust-ripples from underground nuclear explosions, and at waking after writing this note get into "why don't we just STOP MAKING and MANNING nuclear weapons and arsenals---just get the people who make and man these things to QUIT WORK." Yet, what do they DO for a living then? Answer: they could ALL go on PERMANENT retirement with just a SMALL part of the MONEY SAVED from stopping the silly nuclear arms-race!! (List the 8 facilitators: Larry Lincoln, David Mullins (fat in Joyce's car), Noel from Maine, Joan, Subhana, Joyce, Cat, and Carolyn.) 2) 8:05AM: even more elaborate: I wake on a bed from which I look out to a temperate field of early-morning grass, and realize with enormous pleasure that some kind of summer camp is over and I've stayed over one extra day, getting assigned to this cave which I roll over and study the roof of, and I'm feeling EXTREMELY pleased to be here: the temperature is mild, the view is quiet and pleasant, I've nowhere I have to be quickly, and I can even trace down a puzzling spot of reflected sunlight on the back wall of the dry cave by looking out to a spot on water outside the entrance to the cave. Then I'm wandering into a log cabin for something like breakfast: first I'm only in the back, where ranks of tables with dirty plates and napkins and used utensils surrounded by scattered chairs from dinner the night before FIRST make me think there's no one here, but I see people lining up to go in another entrance, and I go around a corner of the building and see people waiting for a fixed-price breakfast and think I might have stumbled into a TOUR, but as I step over and around people waiting to be served, I see black marks on fronts of sweaters and shirts, then black marks on legs and thighs of the people, and look at the faces to see they're all OLD and RETIRED, so this must be some sort of social-security camp, and as I step out a corner of the building I think a sombre-faced woman puts her hand to the back of my crotch, but when I feel around with my own hand, it's only the strange pull of the pants I'm wearing. Then I'm on a bus into the center of town (Boston?), thinking I'll have to stop into an information booth to find how to get closest to the farm I'm going back to and wandered away from, and an announcement comes over that the next run of this bus "will be in two minutes, if you care." As I prepare my clothes under the seat for debarking, I encounter a strange round white ball of grease about as big as a marble, and I try dislodging it from my fingers under the wooden seat of the bus, and most of it comes off, but some get messed into my coat and woolen scarf that I'm trying to pull out from under the seat, and I keep smearing it around in the soft fringe of the scarf, not being able to get it off my fingers. It's more sticky like sugar-syrup than gluey like come, but there's a large amount of fat in it that I fear will have to be cleaned with soap off the coat, if there are splotches of it. Get up at 8:10 to put on fish to cook before Actualism today, and start typing at 8:15 and finish at 8:45, perfect for finishing off both the fish and the bottom of this page!
5/5/87: I want to attend an opera in an enormous Opera House (in San Francisco?), and I'm trying to buy last-minute tickets from an usher who's at first standing under the side-balconies inside the auditorium at the side aisle at about the eighth row of the orchestra. He shows me a ticket, for about $40, numbered something like K37, and indicates the seat right next to us, close enough to the front but rather on the side. Somehow, perversely, I think I can do better than (or certainly cheaper, for possibly a better "bargain") that, and without transition I'm in the LOBBY, talking to what seems to be ANOTHER usher (except that he has the same packet of tickets for unsold seats that the first usher had), and he's dealing with others who want tickets, so he doesn't have much time for me and hands me the packet of tickets to look through. When I handle them, they multiply into a sheaf of variously-sized and -colored bills, envelopes with clearances written on them in Magic Marker, and actual tickets which are much smaller than the envelopes and tend to slip out of the sides of my hands as I thumb through them. I'm amazed as how many ROWS the theater seems to have, going from AA through about FF and then A through R and T and W and Z, some with very large numbers like 475. There are also a few at the bottom of the stack that seem to be for the first and second rows, but I somehow assume these must be for seats on the EXTREME side and not desirable. (I now connect this elaborate opera-house with my watching of "Colette" last night, when she's applauded for her acting in "Cheri" by an audience in a rococo opera house that seems to be more multi-leveled golden balcony facades than actual seats or applauders.) I try to find the original (blue) ticket for K37, fearing he may have already sold it, and through this section I can hear the orchestra and chorus blaring away, so the opera's already started.
Again more or less without transition I'm IN the auditorium, fighting my way down one of two orchestra-level aisles around a center section, and the aisle is filled with groups of similarly-dressed people as at a pageant (some are dressed in gray, and have false duck-heads, as if it were a child's fantasy of wonderland; others turn the grayness of their dress and their white headdresses into something like nun's habits; others seem to be acolytes at a religious ceremony, possibly swinging censors), and in THIS case the unsold seats are spread on a wooden frame to my left, where some seats are covered with a platform on which technicians are standing to control the lights and the filming of this pageant. It begins to dawn on me that "the opera house" also has an adjoining auditorium (like the Brooklyn Academy with its Theater and Opera House adjoining?), and I've gotten into the wrong place. I glance up the sides of the auditorium, and pairs of seats in two rows (for small squares of four) are situated on one of six arms of three V's on the two side walls and back wall, the groups of seats looking more like different sections of an orchestra (since they don't have railings and are more like progressively- raised platforms or daises like for some modernistic rock band) than like seats in an opera house. And the seats don't, to me, seem to agree with the ticket- numbers that I'd studied previously.
So now I try to fight my way OUT of this into the NEXT auditorium through passages through a basement or backstage area, and without transition find myself in what seems to be a shop, talking to a keeper who gestures and makes exasperated sounds, and seems to turn into a Japanese who can't speak English, and he seems to understand that I want the Opera House, but he seems anxious to indicate that it's some distance away, and I'm still wondering if he understands what I want. "Can I take a taxi?" He shakes his head in exasperation: it must be too close for that. "Just motion which way I should go?" I attempt; he whirls his hands in circles as if to imply that it's too complicated to pantomime in that way. We're standing on the dark steps of his stop (through ALL this section I can hear the orchestra building to some glorious chorus, like the Pilgrim's Chorus from "Tannhauser," which I really don't want to miss, but the missing of which seems more and more inevitable with time. I wake at 9:30 wanting to make notes, but computer-enter it 10:20AM.
5/8/87: Two dreams obviously influenced by Bear's "Blood Music" readings yesterday: 1) A group of people including Robin McNeil are sitting in my living room talking over a microphone through some sort of black box to a public-radio station (this is probably from listening to Mary Vilaboa's "radio psychiatrist" in her car just before midnight last night), and I'm amazed that when he dials the number of the station, he seems to get on immediately, and whatever he says on the telephone is broadcast, though in a muffled way. He puts his hand over the microphone and begins to ask if I have a.....and I quickly tell him I have no other kind of microphone. But then he goes to my computer or typewriter and removes its three-pronged electrical cord, takes the other end out of the wall behind my black storage shelf, and substitutes some connection on his apparatus with that, and it appears to improve the transmission of his voice. 2) Somehow connected with the first, now I can see a tape of the program, or a program like it, on my VCR, and I can see that my apartment looks like a research center, and there I am in the middle of the screen, looking at some woman who resembles one of Sherryl's friends, Fran or Stephanie, both of whom live in the Heights, who's working at my computer, or at least at a terminal with a screen like my computer has, and I'm embarrassed to see that I move in to "guide" her at the computer, looking intently at the screen, but as I do so I block off her face from the television camera, and I know she wouldn't have wanted that, but I know I didn't do it purposely. This broadcast has something to do with a yellow butterfly (and now I remember a fragment of dream from before when I opened a letter or newspaper to read and saw what I took to be an ink-blotch obscuring some of the text, but as it flutters up into the air I can see it is a tiny, dime-sized, butterfly of a dark butterscotch color) which has metamorphosed into a dark yellow-orange color, and the legend on its original plate in a book said something about Lymphogranuloma venereum, and this mutant is either responsible for some other disease or has been CURED of that disease, and I'm pleased to be a part of the group that brings that news to the US (could this also be related to the 12:45AM chat with Dennis, met in the elevator, about the possible success of the AIDS vaccine in Zaire, which has a 25% incidence and may wipe out African culture, and about the SECOND AIDS virus which hasn't been tested for in blood supplies yet?). Record this at 10:30AM.
5/9/87: Enormously long and detailed dream with me as a tour-guide on a trip probably to France, since many of the people are French, except that it's unusual that we SPEAK French, so maybe it's NOT France. There are three lists of charges that I know I have to make out; I know the format of the lists, and what totals go on the list, but only after I make out the first two (for breakfast and lunch?) do I realize that maybe I should find out who SIGNS the lists to VERIFY that the charges are correct. I have lots of trouble with one woman, who seems retarded (like Suzy in "Blood Music" I finished last night?) because she hardly ever speaks, seems confused, and at one point is taken away and when she's brought back (though nicely dressed), she drops a bowl of soup on the floor and looks over her shoulder at it like it was something someone else did. Then, in a conversation, I find she comes from around Annecy and speaks French fluently. Some man joins the conversation with enthusiasm and asks me a question so rapidly that I can't catch but 10% of the words. I describe my trip up the west side of the Lake to Annecy, my trip to the "Chateau d'If" (the wrong name), and then the trip down the east side of the lake to Tailloires, which I stay at the Auberge de Pere Bise, and when I finish telling her this, she's gone from across the table and I'm gesticulating and grimacing at a fellow at the NEXT table, who obviously thinks I have a screw loose. I make some sort of rationalization to feel better about this, but clearly I'm not comfortable or knowing in what I'm doing, and I'll be glad when the whole trip is over. Other details prior to the end I don't remember, except for the overwhelming amount of trivial detail that makes my dreams so all-encompassing---but exactly the details I CAN'T add to fiction to convince!
Then 5/12 typing of 5/2 dream-note: 1) "Mom, just let me READ," I say, as she a) hums, b) turns lights off, and I just pull shades up and find it's STILL too dim to sit in Actualism-like pink chair with pillow to read. 2) "Mom, DON'T boil my milk" as I FEEL skim on top and boiled substance sticking to pan at bottom. FORGOT to record the VERY erotic dream of Tue/Wed (?) of hanging by ankles from shower curtain-rod and SCRUBBING and TEASING my ENORMOUS meaty floppy dick with two circular-sectioned soft-white bristled brushes on either sensitive side. Woke HARD and came bleary-brained with the alpaca fur.
Then 5/12 typing of 5/3 dream-note: 4AM: I'm sitting at my computer and hit [down arrow] and it "breaks" past end of storage and gives that familiar:
++++ --- wor frag
++++++++++++
post-impressionistic-picture effect of a permanently ruined file, as I shout "NOOOOO" and wake with a small jerk, who shall remain nameless.
Then 5/12 typing of a 5/6 dream-note: Rita at 3-4 years old is taking a PM nap on my mussed-up 1221 Dietz bed as I come in to sort through small cardboard boxes of pornographic pictures in glassine notebook-size protectors. FIRST book has STRAIGHT color photos, and I stuff SMALL box of, like, slide frames, in side before going to NEXT box as Rita begins to watch and peek over covers at me. There's also some SMALL books (like size of box of Pendaflex tabs) that I have to keep straight because (like in "Blood Music") some are infected, some are radioactive, and others safe, except MAYBE the loose LABEL's slipped out into mass of stuff on bed.
5/12/87: I'm sitting in a single front-row side-aisle seat, holding the empty seat across from me for someone else, though I don't have to tell any of the people milling about looking for a seat. We seem to be on top of a building (though it feels more like Brooklyn than Manhattan) waiting for a play to begin, and when I peer toward the back of the roof, I can see through girders that the people who have apartments in the front of a building that looks either like mine on 57th Street or like some of them around the Columbia campus would be able to see the performance free, albeit from a great distance. Then without transition I'm thumbing through a selection of color postcards in a wooden tray that for some reason should be filled with water (or developing liquid in a photo-development lab-tray), and I keep ladling water with something like a small alms-tray back and forth to keep the postcards wet, as they should be. Depicted on the cards are details of the facade and interior of a very old French cathedral, and I wake with the idea that it was a Carolingian or Merovingian (though I check and that starts at 476 AD, much too early for the large cathedral) church. Forgot to note the detail that a cute waiter serves me a sandwich in my theater seat, and I hand him a $10 bill, expecting change, and he waves the bill at me with a gesture that clearly means "Thanks for the tip," and I figure when my friend comes he'll serve us better, and maybe even for free, and anyway he doesn't earn much money and I can afford a large tip, if only to make a very favorable impression on him.
5/22/87: I'm debating between two museums (probably influenced by my determination to see the Carracci exhibit at the Met today), and look at the floor plans of something LIKE the Met and figure that some of the newer rooms that have been redesigned around the central pyramid (which I think has something to do with the Temple of Dendur, in the dream), and there's a Rosenman or Rosenberg collection in one room that I've never even seen. So I start to stand in line at one round kiosk, complaining about the slowness of people in front of me since I have limited time, and then look on a pillar inside the kiosk to find out that they're selling tickets for performances in two little theaters (one by a pianist in something like Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium), and I curse myself for choosing the wrong kiosk and realize that with the "pay as you like" admission, I just have to go around to the guards at the front entrance and pay---I look through my change purse and find a bunch of dimes---50 cents in five dimes to get in. By the time I get to the front door I'm confused about the quantity of dimes, and decide that even if I give them 10 dimes that's only $1, and that's OK. Then without transition I'm going into an exhibition area that has much gold ormolu displayed behind a plastic wall- cover, as if it were flayed furniture-coverings displayed flatly under similarly-flayed plastic seat-covers. These are furnishings of some kind from some elegant New York house that had been imported from an old castle in France or Germany, and I overhear a guide, speaking in fractured French to his group of stupid students, saying "I said there were two rooms in one suite, and two SUITES on a floor, not two ROOMS on a floor," and waving his hands to the display of a fifty-foot hallway in explanation of some sort. I looked along this hallway to the left and faced an array of tiny shelves on which were displayed knick-knacks through the centuries: yellow-glass candle-holders, a black-footed ceramic vase from Mexico that I was amazed to discover was just like one that I have, small etageres filled with cloisonne work like the piece I have in MY private "curio cabinet" in the living room, and other objects that right now (8:55AM, having wakened directly from the dream at 8:20AM) were clearly (in their yellow and orange and acid-green coloration) patterned on the array of prizes available for from 1-22000 tickets at the Skeeball game in Coney Island last night with Vicki and Joe. Then, again instantly, I was looking at a particular object: rather like a silver heart that I had gotten from I-don't-know where (though I'm somehow reminded of "The Infinity Concerto" by Greg Bear that I'm now reading), and before I'm actually AWARE of it, it's fallen to the floor and been crushed; so that, when I pick it up, the silver casing flakes away in chain-mail-like connected platelets almost like a vegetable or fruit-husk, and I'm left with the insides, which are like two omelets of the same shape and placed together at a perfectly flat middle plane of some thin, transparent dividing material. The two halves fall into halves in each hand, and I can see there are tiny membranes or wired electrical contacts that have become not so much broken as DETACHED, and I immediately know I have to take this somewhere and get it fixed. I look at a set of Victorian-type dials (like something out of Well's "The Time Machine") and see that the major one is calibrated from a high of 9 to a low of 3, and the dial pointing to 6 means "simply running continuously" and I figure that's an appropriate setting for a mechanical heart (?) or strange timepiece that continues to operate in a museum environment, but I can't figure the purposes or the inscriptions on the four or five ancillary dials around the central one. There's some vague question in my mind about which stairway to go down: the central marble stairs with everyone around, or a small side-stairs with dark- wood banisters and newels that seems to descend secretly from my left-hand side as I stand holding the omelets in my hands. This seems to be the major part of the dream, also maybe somehow connected with the "examination" of my Female Genital Index today at Springer (though Thomas Narr calls at 8:55AM FROM Springer, obviousli/y oblivious (to make explicit the seen anagram) to the situation AT Springer), for which I went to bed early and rose early and put on the tuna casserole to have something to eat, put on the computer to have this typed by 9:10AM, about now, and phoned the car service to get a car for $12 to take me to the Metropolitan, since I have to carry the 15 pounds of marked pages from the book to excuse myself (worried about their paying of the $2310 bill at $70/hour, like the ACC non-payment I just came across yesterday in getting medical landmarks out of old calendars) for whatever indexing "errors" the various authors think I caused, which bulk-of-pages managed to break some of the metal teeth from the zipper of the old Travel Dynamics bag, making it unusable after this, and these words are really more properly NOTEBOOK pages, but I wanted to get to the bottom of the page, as I have, with this anyway!
5/23/87: I'm in an apartment that, on waking, I somehow associate with Joan Sumner, though she's neither IN the dream or MENTIONED in the dream (I guess I AM still tied up with the "defined and mentioned" from the Springer index!). It's full of people, some visiting for a long time, some just dropped in for a brunch-party, though there's one person (I don't quite place him, but when I look at him I'm content to know that he has a regular good-paying job, and that he can afford going to Arcadia with me for brunch) who's waiting for me to get ready so we can go to the elegant restaurant that's just down the block (here I have the idea that my apartment's in the area around the Cherry Lane Theatre on Carmine Street). When I look at the clock, it's just before, or exactly, or just after noon, so I know it's just opened, but I also see that a few people are waiting in line to enter, so I keep thinking "At least we can go over and put our names on the waiting list and get told about how long we have to wait for seating, and then we can come back HERE and party and have a drink and then go over when we're ready to be seated," but I never get around to doing it. At one point I'm OUTSIDE the apartment for some reason, and by the conversation I can tell from their conversations that the small knots of people who are waiting AWAY from the restaurant, down the small cul-de-sac over which the back of my apartment looks, are ALSO waiting to get into it. I re-enter my apartment by climbing up a small set of bricks (convinced they know I belong there by how well my bare toes can find each cranny in the brick wall to support my weight) to my bathroom or bedroom window, but when I get the window open, suddenly there's the air conditioner in the way and I have to step through a VERY narrow gap to get into a room that's much cooler than the humidity outside, and someone like the bug-eyed facilitator at the EKR week is my house-guest watching my unorthodox entrance. In some small part of the time I'm concerned about people having drinks and places to sit, but for the most part I'm trying to take a shower, and that process is almost a comedy of mounting ridiculousness. At first, it seemed to me, I had a SMALL WOODEN ladder that I used to stand on to take my showers, but when I look down, I'm swaying about five steps off the floor on a fat-limbed pink PLASTIC ladder that I wonder who, with their terrible taste, got new for my use. I seem to think that it's quite rickety, so to test it I start bouncing up and down on it, and sure to my prediction the lower supports that hold the legs together snap and I'm gently (as on springs) lowered to the wet floor, raised by only inches of the actual rungs of the two halves of the now-broken ladder, and I figure at least this is good enough to keep my feet off the floor, though when I step through the rungs onto the floor, I sort of wonder why I'm concerned about keeping my feet off the floor at all (slipperiness doesn't occur to me until the moment I'm typing this). Then I pull the shower curtain over me, and I wonder how my old long-wide white one has been replaced by this short-narrow blue one, and when it keeps sticking to me I draw it aside, figuring the men know what I look like and the women can learn, if they care to. I sit on the floor to soap my legs, endlessly (after thinking that my groin isn't TOO flabby for everyone to stare at as I soap it), and find my toes are webbed by some sort of fungus, and I turn my feet over to see white strands of dead skin webbing over vaguely blue-cheesish areas of long-term fungus, and I scratch them with soapy fingernails, wondering how serious it might be, thinking I should use athlete's foot remedy. From across the room a stocky tanned blond looks over at me (he's engaged in sex with someone else) to announce "I guess I should lose some weight," and I reply, "It always feels better to take a couple of pounds off than to add weight," and he misunderstands me with a quizzical look, since he's training to be a weightlifter and needs to add MORE weight. I'd said "You don't mind waiting?" to my brunch-to-be partner and he leans over a police traffic-control horse with an exasperated look and says "My stomach's just empty, that's all!" and I say I'm sorry and will try to get ready sooner. There were many other people on the sidelines that were THERE but not describable by any stand-out characteristics. A busy, lifelike, detailed mess.
5/30/87: Two main opuses: 1) Bus-travel in England: a wonderfully accented and sophisticated male tour guide is pointing out the salient points of a rolling countryside in a bus so luxurious it's almost like a private touring car than an autobus. There's something about relative sizes of islands (like England and Ireland) and distances between them, and then we stop for a break on a roadside and I look between trees and past an enormous boulder to see a tripod- shaped structure with little colored areas, like flags, decorating the top half of each leg of the tripod, with a little excrescence on the top also brightly colored. At first I think it's an amusement-park ride, but I see people about 1/3 the height of the top of the tripod walking around beneath, dressed in farm-workers' clothing, carrying pails, and looking furtive when I spot them. Then they come running toward us as if to order us back into the bus, and the guide explains that this is "sugaring," which I take to mean some sort of illegal distillation process, though I say, "Oh, yes, now that you mention it, I can smell the grapefruit," which is to mean that they're concentrating sugar from the grapefruit growing on the surrounding trees. Then 2) summer-school with tree-lined paths, packages, elevator-swoops, notepads, and endless details. I'm studying or working, apparently only for a week or so during the summer, at a college campus that's spread out, and I'm grumbling to myself that most of my time is spent "changing classes" (or going from one scheduled phase of a seminar to another), because I'm constantly walking the three blocks separating the tall tower of the administration-type building from various out- buildings on the campus, which seems to be dispersed throughout a city like Akron or Houlton, which private homes donated to the University forming the disconnected campus. The tree-lined sidewalks are very difficult to walk on (like the sidewalk in Central Park on Thursday) because the overhanging trees and outblooming shrubs and broken sidewalks and driveway-parked cars form a difficult obstacle-run between two points. I always seem to be carrying things that make my passage more difficult, too: bags with groceries and books, sacks of books and bottles of soda, long wooden mops or yardsticks. I have to duck and swerve and sidestep and plan my progress every step of the way. In a number of episodes I get into an elevator to leave my work-floor, and it closes and lowers five or six floors "in local mode" which means it goes slowly because it could stop at any floor, but then it swoops with a belly-raising acceleration into "express mode" which is much faster, and I sink to the floor and try to watch a malfunctioning floor-indicator which as often seems to be increasing as decreasing, and watching it is made difficult because there are mirror-reflections everywhere and flashes of light that make it uncertain where the actual floor-indicator IS, but at last there's that stomach-lowering deceleration toward the sixth floor, and 5-4-3-2-1 comes with greater uniformity. I grumble that "not only do I have to walk three blocks, but I have to go up and down even farther." In another episode I pass the athletic balding cutie (Don someone?) from IBM who went from programming to management, and he has some connection with the quart plastic-bottle of soda I carry under one arm. Then there's a tiny notebook like a pink-slip pad that some woman gives me, showing me entries on a second or third page under a stiffer cover, telling me to write my name and address on a page with another name and address on it, and when I look down I find that I've written "Robert" over a line she'd previously written with numbers like 984002, which can now just BARELY be read under my name, and I try to explain to her that I'd intended to write on the proper sheet, but this sheet accidentally flipped back and I hadn't noticed when I started my address, but when I tried to explain it to her, there were more pages in the book, some were loose and coming out, and others didn't flip back in any way to excuse my stupidity for covering up some of her important data, but I couldn't in the end even FIND her to explain it to her, and I got the DEFINITE idea that most of my time (as in IBM administration) was taken up in getting READY to do things, and WAITING, and TALKING ABOUT doing things, and not in the actual PERFORMANCE OF TASKS. Extraordinarily detailed exasperation.
Then 5/30 [Note from 5/27]: 4:35: "Raging Bears" ride in one piece of dream. In another, bear chews my right NECK and I wake, breathing fast, with crick in neck at that point. Partner (?: can't read note) offers half mint; I ignore; she ASKS "Would you like it?" I say "No, thanks."
Then 5/30 [Note from 5/28]: 5:30: I'm driving me and a little girl (like 6-year- old Kathy O'Shea) from Ohio to some school-camp in NY state, going "my way" till Helen and Jimmy's in Pennsylvania, then Kathy directs, and she gets in early and walks the halls, while I greet people I know, among them Dal Devine (from IBM, but I think St. Mary's earlier), and feel impressive. Strange, old-timey dream.
6/1/87: Very sexy fragment in which a woman and I enter a man's bedroom to find him sleeping on his stomach with a pornographic magazine having slipped from his bed onto the floor. The woman flips through the magazine, says, "I didn't know he had it in him! Look what we have HERE!" She bends to look at the curve of his erection under his belly. I move to prevent her, but she somehow fondles his cock so that he bends only slightly, still supposedly asleep, and slips the head of his cock in and out of his mouth, its long thick shaft moving easily against the bottom sheet, and I move back a bit to try to get it into some perspective: his cock doesn't seem much longer than 10-11 inches, yet without bending his back hardly at all, without much strain on his neck, without undue pulling on his groin, he's managing to get two or three inches of the end of his cock in and out of his mouth. I wake with an erection but decide to do nothing about it: to save it for Tom Manuel after dinner tonight.
6/2/87: 9AM: Quite clear dream: I'm walking from my apartment to a shop on Atlantic Avenue when I feel in the pockets of my red jacket that I've forgotten to bring any money along! I go into a small cluttered shop and announce that I want to pick up the CHANDELIER I'd had repaired. The woman motions to a Kraft-paper wrapped object about four feet around and three feet high, like a gift- wrapped merry-go-round, and asks me for $12.50, please. "Wait," I protest, "the estimate was only $9!" "But it had to be WRAPPED." "Had no repair job ever been WRAPPED before, so that that's never been considered as part of the estimated cost?" "Sorry, it's $12.50." "Please let me talk to the woman who gave me the estimate (I'm hoping I can remember what she looked like)." "You want to talk with Mrs. Bolton?" she asks with such emphasis you'd thought I'd asked to interview Nancy Reagan. "I want to talk to her even if I have to come BACK to do it," I shout, knowing full well that I have to come back ANYWAY because I'm sure they don't take VISA and reasonably sure they won't take a personal check, which I DO seem to have with me. Wake amused.