DREAMS FROM 1987 2 of 2
6/3/87: 9:30 I wake with fading dream; by 9:50 it's almost gone: I'd been at some sort of two-week summer camp-with-therapy, but we're told we have to LEAVE for the middle weekend: there's to be some OTHER activity at the camp Saturday and Sunday (from Patrick Cullen chasing us out at 10PM last night; from my thinking of taking the Kubler-Ross weekend intensive?). But we have to have a talk with the teacher/counselor (NYU linguistics teacher's 3-year tenure interview last night?), and I'm almost last on the list, finally waiting for someone like a brash showy Marty Stock to finish HIS interview before I get mine and leave. Though I'm sorry to leave: VIVID sequence of my FLOATING over flower-filled grass in the central recreation-park surrounded by cabins, and noting with interest that the stairs to our cabin, which had been almost entirely flower-moss-covered, now had a path worn in the center because we'd been using it through our first week. No idea how I'm going to fill in the suddenly-free weekend; no concept of what's going to happen next week; indeed, no concept of what HAD happened the PAST week---the main points: there HAD been action and activity toward progress, and I had been and will be participating!!
6/4/87: PLAY dreams: 1) I'm a YOUNG ITALIAN LOVER, in Act I saying "Yes (beat) Antonio" and "Antonio for Congress" chants for my brother, and having a short LOVE scene with a girl in Act II, the lines for which I'm not sure I'll remember. Then something else about the set, the rubber-like drops coming down around wooden frames to act as walls.
6/7/87: A group of us are in an enormous museum, peeping through a door behind which the installation of some important historical-artistic importation from some ancient civilization is going on behind curtains on the right and left walls. I remark, "Remember when they installed the Pergamon Altar on the back wall last year?" Then a handsome young man who appears to be a guard comes up behind us and asks if we'd like to look at it closer, and we say yes, following him as he runs through an ornate door on the left (like a corner of the Cloisters) and then around to the right. We find that it's a hoax, and trustees of the museum begin chasing us out of the storerooms in which we find ourselves, and I dash between two people's grasping arms out a back door and turn to the right to find a sort of interior tube made of a greenish ceramic (influenced by Giger's artwork in "Alien"?) that curves UPWARD. I grasp horizontal straight bars, rather like ladder rungs, that extend across a two-foot chord of the circular cross section of the tube-wall, and as I climb I wonder how strong this ceramic material really is, except that I can sense or see that there are wire-supporting forms running through the ceramic rather as iron rods reinforce large areas of poured concrete. The "walls" of the tube are ribbed intestinally rather like the repoussé form of a worm, and they shine, but are not wet to the touch. The last image from the dream is clinging to the wall, wondering how high to go.
6/8/87: Two dissimilar portions: 1) In some sort of school, seemingly in California, twice there's a shuddering WHUMP and we rush outside to see if we can see any effects of an earthquake. In the second sequence, there are roiling waves under slanting sunlight with hills in the background (which would make the water more a lake than an ocean), and I'm in some way reminded of the noises from "Son of Kraken" in Clarke's "Songs of Distant Earth" that I finished last night at 2AM. There's also a foggy sequence where school is either beginning or ending and I'm sitting at a desk listening to the teacher say something just before the WHUMP goes. 2) In a hilltop village, maybe in India (via Ambi Mani, from Madras, calling last night?) or Mexico---anyway a country with many people in much poverty: there's a theatrical presentation, and I from the audience catch a glimpse of shirtless pale-chested dancers WAY back in a point-perspective through two sets of open doors on a narrow stage, so I get out my binoculars to watch the bodies, but first there's a movie on a near screen which I know is meant to come to a point where it freezes and the screen will slide up to replace the screen-characters with the stage-characters as at a World's Fair presentation. Outside, there are masses and masses of people, mainly wrapped in white sheets, waiting for some spectacle. Then I'm outside AFTER the spectacle, thinking idly that some of the after-loiterers are looking along the paper- and rag-strewn ground to see if anyone's lost anything, but with such a poor crowd, what of value could ANYONE have lost? There's a fragment with Susan MacMahon saying "What a remarkable evening that was," and my rejoining: "The last time this happened was "merely" two thousand years ago!" implies some sort of religious Christ-connected miracle (like the loaves and fishes with so many people on a mountaintop?). The theatrical presentation inside never really SHOWED the shirtless men it had promised, but I recall tottering slightly atop a combination cliff-bluff and bookcase (sheer sides, covered with papers and slide-y materials) that wobbled only very slightly when I jumped from the top of it to the hilltop, relieved that it was sturdy though I could see the cleft-to-the-ground that actually proved it was a separate structure BESIDE the hill itself. Very odd, disconnected fragments!
6/15/87: Wake at 9:50 with memories of two enormous dream-cycles, but when I get to the typewriter at 10:15, I remember only fragments of the latter: there's the aftermath of a huge social party in an apartment at the top of what could be the Waldorf Towers, and a famous young woman---who's not related to me but is nonetheless very like Rita---and I agree that we have to leave soon if we're going to catch the 8:30 train to our destination, and right then a buzzer sounds indicating that it IS time to leave. I'd been watching a servant clean up the living room, moving objects around (like the lawnmower maneuvered around the nesting Gooneys on Midway on last night's TV?), leaving two or three tiny items to be picked up by hand (like, unmenacingly, a bullet cartridge), and then wearily flopping on the sofa to rest, and I was concerned about his increasing age. Then everyone's running toward the elevator, and she and I are separated, but I figure she'll probably fit into the second elevator-load with me. The first loads up and starts down, and I get the strange feeling that the LOADING LOBBY is going down, but as I look at the unmoving shadows of the X-barred windows on the white-tile flooring, I know the floor isn't moving down, it's just the noise and vibration of the elevator motors trembling the floor that makes it SEEM like we're moving. I wonder why such an elegant building has such an old, cracked-ceilinged, dirty-windowed elevator-waiting room, but conversation around me indicates people had talked about it before and decided to keep this for its Art Deco touches. I count about 20 people waiting for the second elevator-load (since this lobby seems to have only one elevator shaft in it), and decide we'll have to wait for a third, but since she's not come into the lobby yet, I fear she may have gone down ANOTHER elevator out another exit and is waiting for me downstairs, where I hope the two elevators debouche into the same lobby. It's a long time for even the FIRST elevator to return, but I'm not terribly worried about time. Another fragment has me triumphant that "I'm actually finished with school; I'll never have to go back again," yet somehow this elevator is taking us to a train that will take us to SOMETHING like a school, so things don't make precise sense. The first dream of some amusement park, or elaborate party, or job-related dream, or construction project, just won't come back by 10:27, and I finish this.
6/27/87: I've been invited to a party at someone's seaside Mexican house, but when I find the people clotted around the door paying their $2.50 entrance fee, I realize that I've left my wallet in my shoulder bag back at the hotel the whole group of us (Actualism?) are staying at. I hear that this is Patrizia's house, so I figure Michael Blackburn must be here, and I look for him to borrow $2.50 from him. There's someone else I know, but they don't have any money either, and I bump into someone tall that I ask for money before I realize it's a tall black that only vaguely looks like Michael but isn't. Then I'm through many blocky-airy rooms without too many guests, and I figure we're early, and more people will be here later. Then I'm out to the beach, where, as was promised, flowing water keeps the lawns cool: a gentle inch-deep flow runs over a concrete slab which has become mossy with time, and people are gathered around tables on this base, or are sitting in lounges looking down over a spectacular ocean from a height from which I look down on many people on floats and surfboards drifting over multicolored sea-floor formations of sand and rock. There's a pinnacle of lava-rock uplifted to an angle of about 80 degrees on which are tire-tracks for a short distance, and the rock is only supported with a sliver of tough tufa, so someone obviously dared the rock to snap off into the ocean with their light car or jeep. I'm wondering if I can recognize Patrizia if I see it, and the main refreshment is many different kinds of cheeses, and I sort of fantasize in the dream that the entrance fees will at last amount to the sum spent for cheese and then the $2.50 fee will be withdrawn, and I can legitimately be there without paying. There are other people that I think I know, or wonder if I know, but I find myself, as usual, not talking to many people and feeling slightly out of place, but I'm OK.
7/1/87: I'm in some hotel on a vacation and we're all packing to leave, but when I ring for the elevator a couple of guys appear behind me with a CAR (a small convertible sports car) that has to be transported downstairs. I dash into the elevator and move something away from the right wall so that the LENGTH of the car can fit, and then worry about the HEIGHT of the car fitting against the upstanding mattress and large piece of fiberboard at the back of the elevator. But the two maneuver the car into the elevator successfully (is this stemming from the two-handled computer-box that I helped Sherryl with yesterday?) and we press the button for the ground floor. The elevator lurches wildly as we descend, because the car unnaturally concentrates weight in the back of the car, and it even stops between floors to swing into a "safe" position before it starts up again and with a feeling of great relief I see it open safely on the ground floor. Other details of this "vacation" I've forgotten.
7/2/87: Lots of REMEMBERED fragments: 1) I'm looking into an enormous MIRROR, which looks in color and composition more like an elaborate Matisse or Picasso room-interior with vivid colors and arresting objects. I'm very conscious of the distortion caused by the beveling where the 4' x 6' mirror dips into the light-wood frame. 2) When I pass the garbage cans outside my building, there are piles of Christmas wreaths on the sidewalk between here and the next building. I can't decide if they're being delivered next door or have been thrown out because of their unnatural lightness in the color yellow-green. But then right AT the garbage cans are two puffs of darker green that resolve themselves into sprigs of balsam, with their flat needles sparsely distributed among scarce branches, and one is limp with lack of moisture and I debate whether to take them upstairs and pot them in the pots that haven't been coming up with any hyacinths from the bulbs I planted about a month ago. 3) I'm waiting in the Clark Street Station for the elevator when a blond in a brown white-pinstriped suit turns around and it's a dapper Jean-Jacques! He presses me up against the elevator-door corner so firmly that I can feel the well- upholstered (by the thickness of the fabric of his suit and by his fleshiness within) length of his body against mine, his face so close that I can only think that he wants to kiss me here in public, but then he whispers "I'm with Susan," and I quickly think three thoughts: a) why wouldn't he say Suzanne, being French, b) it's Susan McMahon he's with (influenced by my dinner and ballet attendance with her last night?), c) he's MARRIED to this Susan and has to appear straight when he's in front of her. 4) Last and most lengthy: I'm in a college-dorm room (or maybe a workplace, since many people pack up and leave at 5PM; or most like a hotel for semi-transient volunteer workers like Jehovah's Witnesses---and it strikes me HARD now that MANY dreams have this "Witness-like" background---am I being INFLUENCED by them somehow in my DREAMS??) that contains maybe 8 people during work-hours, but I "know" that it "becomes" a bedroom for 4 people. Somewhere I have the bedding I've been issued, but no one IN the room seems clearly to SLEEP in the room, and I don't know anyone to ask WHICH cubicles and beds are ALREADY taken, and it seems nosy to pull apart hidden beds to see which have bedding already (and are taken) and which have no bedding (and can be taken by me). Someone two desks away turns on a loud RADIO, and as I make my way past the smirking fellow at the next desk, the radio-owner turns the radio off and leaves for the day. All the others leave and I debate whether to look into two cubicles for my bed-space, or to unfold large hassocks to check for bedding on the fold-out beds. But I decide to look farther afield, and through a door see a Community Dining Room with MANY tables and chairs and people walking with trays: it's a larger establishment than I knew. Farther along is a shallow tile-floored pool with a fountain directly upward as an inverted shower for kids to play in, and then a large swimming pool with a mural of a Coney-Island like sandy beach with nice bodies on it, and I think this will be VERY pleasant: a NICE feel to the place!
Now remember the sign: "Join the Aquatic Circus if anyone asks if you belong!"
7/4/87: 1) There were some sort of shape-ratios which seemed to be TRUE of a situation in which I found myself, and there were WORDS which were true of it also. Michael Blackburn seemed to be involved somehow in it, which was so much more emphasized in the second segment (first almost COMPLETELY forgotten but for the strange off-center "spool" shape [or more precisely, ill-fitting segments of the curved columns of the baldachino of St. Peter's in Rome nailed together on flat disks to form golden spools] that "symbolized" the proper words) that I felt like phoning him when I awoke at 8:10AM to piss and drink.
2) Someone (like Dennis Hopper in "Blue Velvet"?) is showing me an experiment with rats (brought on by the "William Wilson" segment of "Spirits of the Dead" viewed yesterday?) that involves singing whiskers off with flame, but he so burns the head-hairs that there are drops of blood being scattered around. Then the experiment involves cylinders of clear glass (like a cross between a large hypodermic-needle barrel with calibrations in red on the sides and a 2" by 5" pill-prescription bottle with prescription-label writing in red on the side) filled with blood, and he splashes a little on my hands, and I rasp out: "If you splash any more blood on me, I'm leaving" (and of course even in the dream vague thoughts of AIDS virus are present in my mind), and he DOES splash more blood on me, and I put down whatever I'm doing, take off some sort of apron-of-duty, and totally prepare to leave. I have some objects to finish getting from something like the kitchen at 1221 Dietz, and look among various- sized drinking glasses in both cupboards (both of which are accessible: there is no kitchen table blocking access to the one on the right) for something to drink out of (and I'm thirsty when I wake at 8:10), and debate the curved-lip stemless "wine glasses" on the left, but when Michael takes one from the right, I opt for one of a set of glasses with a shape almost like a beer-mug on the right. Then he goes to a cupboard-high shelf (or a refrigerator) high on the wall where the cellar door was, opens the door to that shelf, and reaches up high to a bottom-spigoted large thermos-mixer type container which is used to reconstitute milk on a middle shelf, and I ask him if he would pour me a glass of milk too (thinking it might be slightly too much, but since I don't drink it too often, it'll be OK in my stomach), and he takes my glass and says something to the effect of "I'll be glad to" with obvious pleasure, and fills it for me as conversation centers around the number of people in the house, contributions for the house's upkeep from Dorothy Hunter or her family in Florida, and something about his two sons, culminating in the figure of "the house needing $2,000 a day to maintain," and I knew it sounded high, mentioned it to him, and he gave some sort of brief explanation that made it clear why that number might SOUND high, but was actually quite reasonable when all the facets of the facts where known and considered. There were other segments of THIS dream too, with "facts and figures" about the house in general, that I've now forgotten.
7/10/87: A number of people and I are gathering in a large wooden structure (a sort of combination meeting-hall, prison auditorium, and church) to witness the execution of a criminal, but according to the law the criminal has the right to CHOOSE his means of execution at the last moment, so workmen are setting up different areas 1) with a pipe to be put in the mouth for gassing, 2) a gibbet for hanging, 3) an electric chair, and 4) another area that I don't quite identify---and people are choosing their seats according to their prediction as to what method the criminal will choose in a few minutes. And this is BEFORE I watched the beheading sequence Sunday in "Private Life of Henry VIII." The last "scene" of the dream is in a church full of wooden pews with a SUNKEN main floor that makes the choice of seating difficult: if you're CLOSE you're LOWER; if you're FAR you're HIGHER with a better overall view.
7/11/87: I'm lying at the bottom of a boat with other boaters nearby, most of them jerking off like I am, and as I near one boat I'm so hard that I can stiffen myself upright between my clenched thighs and SLAP the backside of my meaty cock so that drops of precum spurt into the air and dribble down the side of my cock. It's so exciting I wonder why I didn't think of it before, and I keep slapping at it, getting closer and closer to cuming, when I wake VERY excited and debate trying it RIGHT THEN because it would feel so VERY good.
7/13/87: I'm living at Mom at 1221 Dietz (aged about 45), and she's sitting on the sofa talking while I'm sitting in the chair reading, and she says "Then you'll get some green paint..." and I look up to say "I'm not going to be doing ANY painting anymore." She's more disappointed than mad, and I move into the kitchen to the sink as she says "I really need $2-3 a week from you; I really can't support both of us," and I figure that $20/week will satisfy her. Notice that there's some kind of leak down the kitchen window that's frozen into a thick branchlike rivulet of ice, and I use the hot washcloth from the dishwater to melt off the ice, using a bit of the soapy water to wash off the grease- stained top pane, realizing I'm contradicting what I'd said earlier: "And I'm not going to be washing windows, either," knowing that I'd rather PAY for someone in to do these things than to exert the energy to do them myself.
7/16/87: I'm gathered in a small room with many people waiting for the start of a conference on drugs, and then we're ushered into the conference room and there are only two or three small tables set up for the listeners, and I wonder where all the people are going to fit, unless some of them gathered are the speakers, who are arranged on a very high dais with various slide projectors and rostra and microphones (not really like the Iran/Contra hearings, but I guess it must be influenced by that committee-hearing setting). I try out a couple of seats near the front (after the jam-up at the door of people trying to get in, I'm surprised so few of the seats are taken, and those mainly in the middle so as not to have to crane heads looking way UP at the lecturers), but find that the box lunch placed for our use there has been taken. I move around a bit, asking questions, and someone says that the grant that pays for this series of talks is very large and productive of money. Then, somehow, one of the Arabic-type participants across the school-desk row from mine is attracting my attention to a gold- and silver-chased leather notebook cover. I pick it up and flip it over in the light to see the inlays and enamelings of the cover, and he bends close and whispers that it's only $500, and he has other treasures for me to examine, and do I think that this is his best selling-piece? I'm too puzzled by the transitions to say anything, but figure that $500 is more than I want to spend. Then there's some sort of play, and a little boy (like the little girl in "Coastal Disturbances" last night?) is flailing at a larger boy, one of them shirtless with thin blue veins showing through white skin on arms and chest, and then he shouts, "I have to pee!" and a stream of color flows down one khaki pant leg and across the "sand" on the floor of the stage (again "CD" from last night), and I see with surprise that it's a ribbon-string of three brightly-colored silks (red, green, and blue) that together, from a distance, give the effect of a yellow-green flow of urine. These flop across the sand with little bobbles as he walks backward to display his "liquids." Then I'm on a subway, sitting next to a dark (again Arabic-type) woman, and I just get the impression that she says "Pest!" toward me. I look at her and in a series of very slow and tentative questions ask "Did you talk to me? Did you say something to me? Did you say 'Pest!'? Why did you say that? Do I smell?" as she draws away with an offended face and an ever-so-slightly wrinkling nose. I think of the brown shirt that I'm wearing (as I wore last night) that hasn't been laundered for a couple of wearings--is it that? I think of my teeth, not brushed since the night before last (as is true as I dream)---is it that? And I go even farther and think that she's psychic in some way and is smelling a disease, or literally a pestilence, coming from me, and I wonder whether I shouldn't see a doctor to diagnose my disease, since I haven't been feeling in top shape recently. Wake at 10:20AM and record this till 10:40AM, getting DONE!
7/17/87 (note transcribed 7/24): 5:50AM: survivors of sea-wreck "start" island, but tidal waves "fill vacuum" and submerge people EXCEPT Maya Plisetskaya, who dies as swan on chasm, revives, then dies again as swan on chasm.
7/22/87 (note transcribed 7/24): 1) I scratch at what I take to be two pimples or ingrown hairs on upper left thigh and scratch out two long fleshy cylinders that I'm shocked to find start WRIGGLING and they're two WORMS that grow to about an inch long like worms one might pull struggling from a rotten apple. 2) I'm staying with a woman (who may move out) and using a WOMAN'S room (which has brown soap and a row of johns down one side). I'm working for IBM (filling out a form that needs a specific data number in a box in the lower right corner of the form, something about "run beyond you," and I'm in department 583, with the feeling that I want to be transferred to the main office, of which I have the dim memory that there are CLERKS who fill out forms for us a take jobs to the computer for us, rather than leaving that tedium to US when we're HERE in the branch office). Then at 9:10AM a "HELLO?" jolts me awake, as if a man had come into the apartment to spray for bugs or check the BUG meter or deliver a package. Also jot a note that while at the IBM office I was pairing and filing and collecting stamps that had pictures of Greek mosaics and statues of goddesses that we either carved of a composite stone that was black at the draperies, or the statues were recovered "complete" with the original black tinting for the draperies.
7/24/87: 1) I'm driving a car pulling a large metal trailer behind it, and I careen down a VERY narrow mountain road, amazed that I don't scrape the sides of the trailer on the rock walls, and then round a sharp curve so that I can feel the pull of centrifugal force almost tipped us over the cliff, but we bounce back to level just as I have to slam on the brakes because we've gotten to a tunnel into which the trailer doesn't fit. We (I seem to be with two other men, no one I can identify) then unload the trailer and surprisingly easily carry it over the "pass" the tunnel goes under, and then we continue the drive. However, in a short time I'm AGAIN on this over-narrow road (like a footpath that wears through high-altitude moss to form a narrow passage on slippery under-slate), this time going through TWO spirals of tight curves before I AGAIN confront the too-narrow tunnel opening. 2) I'm in a corridor between two sections of a circus, but the ATTENDEES seem to be the freaks, because someone next to me whispers "They're the seven-foot people," and I look up to feel like a child staring at the waists and bosoms and chests of men and women two or three or even FOUR heads taller than I am. There are other small details (like dwarfs, too) of being at the circus or carnival, and then I'm onto some kind of railing near the entrance where I'm supposed to wait and meet Mom, and then the railing turns into the side-rail of a railroad car that starts moving down the tracks toward the ticket-booth entrance, and I figure it'll save me the walk, so I look out over the side of the car as it careens close to trees and concrete abutments dangerously near the swaying car-side.
8/3/87: There are two tubes [diagram] in IBM machine (copier?) reversed; water/fluid on floor. "Get flat squeegee" wipe---to "Victor's"---ladies--- "Triumph". Attendant gives toilet paper "cute boy in your class---Erik Lauer: heard from Netherlands. Queen Elizabeth "in these times of trouble" coronation on TV tonight---"weekend of novel." I didn't hear. CRY crossing busy street. I had intended to EXPAND this note immediately, but on 8/9 I don't remember it.
8/6/87: It seems I'm in the Army, just about at the end of my tour of duty, and a Korean (?: someone like Fred Sun) is going through a catalog of objects that I bought from him with the idea of updating or improving them, but when he comes to a light-green pendant on a chain, his NEW version is of some soft plastic with blue letters on the back spelling out "LOVE" which I don't like at all, far preferring the hard-green purity and delicacy of execution of the pendant which reminds me of the one Mom wanted from Grandma: the webbed-crystal frame to a tiny diamond on an extremely fine chain. I want a piece of small notebook paper to write "better green pendant on chain" in the catalog to remind him I want him to "find a replacement" for his inferior item, and to look for my small datebook-notebooks I go to a wooden chest of drawers and draw out the lowest three of them (by their wooden fingers-insert-from-below pulls) and again puzzled by the fact that pulling on ONE pair of pulls happens to pull out the drawer BELOW the obvious one. Don't find it immediately in the rolls of underwear and other items, but in the bottom drawer, which has a clear plastic front through which I can see athletic shoes, including the red ones I've worn to the gym for years, I find a small stack of notebooks and pull one out to find a blank page between notes of instructions on how to find places in Japan and Hong Kong. There's a "good" feeling of "finding" throughout this particular dream that's noteworthy for its casual placidness.
8/12/87: Expressman knocks me awake at 8:30 and I jot down three dreams: 1) I feel a slight toothache in my upper left quadrant and I take out my DENTURES to find a small CRACK I'd not known about, and hope dentist can put piece in to fix it and cement it (obviously from Dennis's talk about his impending palate- transplant to an abscess pocket on HIS upper left quadrant. 2) I phone a black operator at a place like Mern's or Bloomingdale's who says I have to come to Park Street, which I know is just one block south of Main Street in Akron, so I can pick up the parcel containing the purchase I made, and I figure I can get a cab from the Akron University neighborhood (where I seem to be calling from) and take it the 10-11 blocks to the store and tell the taxi driver to wait until I get it and then finish my trip for the noon plane at the airport, knowing I can get a metered receipt from the driver for which the company (like IBM) will pay the ENTIRE expense of about $26 and never know how I helped myself in the process. 3) Someone who's a combination of Uncle Edward and Dick Hartill is walking with me on Copley Road, near the Copley theatre on the way to Grandma's, and he shows the grocery store that now has "the local breakfast place" since the Mary Coyle's that had been on the corner (all-glass frontage is now plywooded up with signs For Rent on it) has gone out of business. I'm happy that he's showing me around, and flattered to be introduced to this grocery store, which I clearly think must be the "in" place in Akron now.
8/15/87: Out of bed at 8:45AM with memories of dreams so varied, vivid, and bizarre that I wonder if they're not fever-dreams related to a combination of Benedryl-taking for my poison ivy and last night's alcohol. [And even the composition of that SENTENCE was "aleatory" in that I typed first "dreams related to Benedryl and alcohol", then went back and inserted "last night's" and then further back and inserted "fever-" and had a few MORE insertions going so that the design on the MONITOR was "-- - -word - -- words---word----words".] Drew the following sheet (which I now recognize will be ENCLOSED by pages 211 and 212, so I LABEL it TEMP pg. 211.5) in order to capture the CREATIVITY and PROGRESSION of the VISUAL component of the images of the segments of the dream, and then wrote an outline of the EVENT-patterns so that I wouldn't forget them. So now at 9:17AM I'm "up to date" and can DESCRIBE the dream:1)I--EITHER knew I HAD attended many nights OR dreamed-in-sequence ATTENDING many nights of a kind of pageant-ballet in a place like the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park---even though it was enclosed by walls, it still had doors, AND you could see lighting effects from the stage from a distance outdoors (well, I say to myself now, all those words STILL apply to the Delacorte).The performance was an OPERA-ballet about Mexico; the male dancers were tanned and feathered (as opposed to TARRED and feathered) and nearly naked and danced with aprimitive (oh, I LIKE that word, let it STAND, rather than separating "a" from "primitive") force and energy that VERY much appealed to me; maybe there were chants or songs that hypnotized the ears, too. I liked it so much I attended often, though my most vivid memory of one (the last) performance is that I was late in getting there, and from a distance, in the last light of dusk, I could see, partly through the trees and partly rising above the trees, the theatre and the main Maya-temple stage-decoration, which was lit, as up a narrow stairway, from the bottom with a raking spray of golden light. When I got into the theatre, the performance had already started (it seemed lighter inside the theatre than in the surrounding park, due I suppose to the effect of the golden light), and there were people in the front seats (which had usually been empty), and I found an empty seat farther back, but then it was clear that this was in the ORCHESTRA, which was strangely situated along the right SIDE of the audience (see Diagram A on p.211.5), and an usherette took me gently but pointedly by the arm and directed me to a section of empty seats under a canopy labeled "Friends", though when I sat in the seat I saw that BOTH the orchestra AND the audience obstructed great chunks of the stage-and-setting, so that I mused that you'd have to be a "friend" INDEED to sit in THIS section. 2) Without transition I was walking in downtown Manhattan (above Chambers St., south of Canal) and noticed the building that Andy Warhol had worked in (someone in the New York Magazine I read last night while soaking in Aveeno had designed his factories), which I'd always been curious to see, and AGAIN without transition I came OUT of the studios inside to give a final look at the LOBBY which was filled with people that I pitied because THEY couldn't get into the building proper and I had just come OUT of the "inner sanctums." I looked at some of the art-work on the walls of the lobby, noticed the receptionist's area which sold books and cards and mementos of the building, and was amused to see a plastic display- case full of stamp-sized photo-reproductions of what looked like physique magazine-covers---naked bodies in provocative poses, and I fleetingly thought that most people wouldn't even LOOK closely enough at this tiny tray (see Diagram B on p.211.5) to see the sexuality on sale. Exiting from the building I glanced up atop the building across the street (the intersection was most like that at the point of intersection of Broadway and 5th (?)---the Design buildings and Decorating sections where the Lionel trains and toy-shops used to be, just north of the Flatiron building) and was amazed to see what appeared to be a colored-plaster statue, almost like a Warhol caricature of the Atlas holding the world in front of Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick's, of a scantily-clad athlete in a fairly sexy position, and I wondered why I hadn't really NOTICED the tan-grape-colored skin exposure BEFORE (which again led me to think that it was a TEMPORARY exhibit on a building-top across from Warhol's). Again without transition I was in a spacious apartment (retaining elements of Art Deco columns and light-tan swatches of silken cloth from the "Andy Warhol Building lobby"), delighted with its richness, and someone who was a combination of Dennis and Paul McLean came out of the bedroom to welcome me with an air of "it's about time you got here". He handed me (or I picked up from one of the numerous work-table scattered about a sort of central atrium) a multicolored spindle (see Diagram C on p.211.5) which I applied to EITHER thick sheets of paper OR thin canvases on thin panelboard and found that it SPUN SEWN PATTERNS onto (and through, or into) (1) the three-foot square "canvases" that I could "paint" by moving the spindle carefully (and I wondered about the mechanism at the tip of the spindle which would GRIP the "canvas" and push-in- and-out to actually SEW the silken thread (that changed colors at random on the one I had, though I was aware there were others that had only a single color) to form, first, jagged circles like contour maps that changed colors as the thread pre-wrapping the spindle changed colors, and the "thickness" (or number of times the stitches were applied, since the spindle seemed to "pump" stitches at a variable rate depending on the ANGLE at which the spindle was held) of the "lines" (of thread) in the composition seemed determined by the PRESSURES applied to the threads on the spindle itself. I quickly mastered "the technique" of handling this "magic silk spindle" to be able to draw CIRCLES of ONE color, then to progress to colored 3-D "grapes" of varying THICKNESS. As I continued my delighted experiments on the SAME sheet, covering the previous designs with the NEXT experiments, there was a moment when I became aware of an overall array of multicolored RECTANGLES on a GRID system that I had either CONSTRUCTED unawares or had suddenly APPEARED as a "hint" of what kind of design could ALSO be done with this spindle-and-canvas magic. But the rectangles I quickly covered with 3-D free-form bas-reliefs in fabric rather like the carpets on the walls at the Dallas BBQ in the Olcott, which then led to colorful designs and patterns like Jackson Pollock-inspired abstract art. I looked at this wondrous spindle with true amazement, and then Dennis/Paul paraded out with a tapestry-on-a-clothesline with a marvelous openwork weave that seemed at once a pliable comb made of long colored rubber bands woven together (as Kei Takei wove bamboo with hemp-rope for my wall-hanging) with the silk thread from the spindle. It shimmered with taffeta-colors and sounds as he swung the supporting rope or baton back and forth for me to appreciate (1a). Then I was standing in front of a work-table on which was displayed an array of (2) plastic plaques as if they were artworks (ashtrays?), about four inches by five and a half or six inches in size, each comprised of unified (in each piece and among the pieces) blocks of "frosted glass" of solid but crazed (like ice cubes with many champagne bubbles in them, or better like chunks of champagne frozen to RETAIN the bubbles) colors of light green, pale red, silver-blue, and white. Most of the patterns centered around a larger, thicker (but the plaques were slightly concave so that even the thickest centerpiece didn't rise above the beveled-square [both the RIM was beveled to be smooth all the way AROUND the perimeter, AND the four corners of the plaque itself were beveled to form pleasingly rounded-off, though yet 120-degree pointed, corners] plaque-surface) oval or squeezed-square or squeezed-triangle or near-round piece of matte-jewel plastic/ceramic, around which were placed (sometimes with a small corner "hidden under" or "riding atop" the centerpiece) two or three or four elements of one or two differing colors, all on a background of a third or fourth color. The effect was rather like the "mystery patterns" of circles and triangles and rectangles of blue and red and yellow that were LAID and then COVERED OVER in the lower corridor of Clark Street Station. These "artworks" presented themselves to me at an increasing frequency of form and freneticity---or what- ever the word for franticness is. (3) For only a few moments I was at another workbench on which spindles twirled, and I could select from an array of colors and thicknesses of yarn to "cast" onto the rotating spindles, so that they quickly accumulated yarn to form a spool which could be angled into a "plastic skew" or built into a cylinder of regularity or constructed AGAIN to form "abstract art." In the dream I remember distinctly feeling that these were all novel interesting "art-forms" that I should remember when I woke; and how Dennis/Paul must have become rich enough doing this that they could afford such an enormous elegant apartment-workspace. (4) In only a few moments I went through "rock paintings", literally FLINGING rocks onto a canvas, which "stuck" when they were hung to form--again--abstract art, either with a SINGLE HUGE rock, rather like a rock-bonsai mountain, or with a 3-D PILE of rocks that might jut two feet from the wall. (5) Somehow interspersed with (4), or following so quickly there was no distinction between the two, were "dyed macaroni and pasta" collages, starting with multi-colored "wheels" of intense monochromatic coloration, and I [ah, forgot above to mention, as I was typing, that "technique (3)" could very well be used in FORMING the "magic spindle"'s supply of silk threads used in "technique (1)"] invented, while drawing the sketches on TEMP p.211.5, the further ideas which were only IMPLIED in the dream: spaghetti "plaids" and mararoni "lunes" and multicolored combinations AGAIN leading to 3-D abstract art. My mind (in the dream AND at present) reeled with the complexity, ingenuity, and SPEED of inventiveness is the dream. Then 3) a sexy "former roommate" (dream-knowledge only) reappeared, sort of a combination of Paul McLean and the short muscle-builder prancing down Christopher Street as Vicki drove past last night returning from La Petite Auberge, half-flexing and half-stretching, seeming to say as Paul would say, "Why don't you get sexy with me, baby." In half an instant I either DID or RECALLED I HAD wanted to jerk off, but felt with relief that I hadn't come, so I was ready for sex with him, and we started sucking on each other's cock, mine satisfactorily hard, his stubby and equally hard. Though thoughts of AIDS cautions went through my mind, there was a fragment of "dream-memory": we'd both had tests over periods of time that showed we were negative, and we were faithful to each other, so I COULD suck his cock without fearing infection. Our brief sexual encounter was VERY intense, and I woke with a hard-on, amazed at all the sequences of dream that were still fresh in my memory.
But the whole THING has an "other reality" feeling to it: the SPEED of images, the INVENTIVENESS of the art-forms, the IDEA IN THE DREAM that these WOULD be wonderful things to DO, and the parallel idea of "I always get involved in some strange SIDELINE when I'm about to do good work on something that might be published, and will these art-forms become a DISTRACTION for me?" I objectively saw that some of my ARCHITECTURAL fantasies of modern cities could be fetchingly done with dyed spaghetti-lines for straightness and color (see Diagram D on p.211.5) [and I actually went off and CONSTRUCTED something with spaghetti, spaghetti-dipped-in-soy-sauce-for-color, and rubber cement (see p.211.6)!] AND the whole dream-set had an air of "not-quite-real" about it, as if the "I" in the dream were not REALLY the I of other dreams, let alone the I of the awake state. Even while TYPING these four pages (and this MUST be a record for dream-transcription length, both of page-space AND time, since it's now 11:02AM, though I kept going into the kitchen to listen for the buzzer for the IRS Workbook delivery. AND put in a baked potato at 10:35, beginning to feel hungry, AND this is degenerating into "Where Am I" and this is only DREAM!
8/20/87: There were so many phases, it's hard to remember, particularly since I woke about 9:10AM and it's now 1:30PM. First there was an attic in which I was found doing VERY anal-compulsive constructions: 1) Some kind of Erector-set dual catapult that hurled pinball balls back and forth at each other, 2) A series of triangle-topped constructions that looked like some sort of periodic table for quarks when the little wheeled vehicles were finished and lined up in their distinctive colors, 3) An array of other constructions for various purposes (this was certainly affected by my reading the interview with Claude Shannon, who loved constructing things, last night). In addition, the walls had a kind of shoulder-epaulet-insignia design, and I'd painted over the insignias, but they'd gotten stained or darkened in the dusty grease of the attic, and I suggested that they COULD be washed. Then at the END (and I woke up STILL concerned with it) I was due to perform as someone like Ivan the Terrible (Part 1) in a play which was really an opera, in a couple of days, and I hadn't rehearsed my lines to READ, let alone SING, yet. As I came in and out of the dream-state through the morning, the performance-time got closer and closer until it was just a half-hour away. Could I arrange to play a recording of someone SINGING my operatic part? But could I have my back to the audience the WHOLE time because I couldn't BEGIN to lip-synch the singing? Could I write notes of the script on my sleeves or on tabletops; could I have a teleprompter; could someone COACH me by feeding me the lines? Could someone READ FOR me offstage, but AGAIN the problem of lip-synch came in. I'd just have to CANCEL, but they couldn't get anyone ELSE to perform in my place (is this connected with all the indexes people want me to do, too?). I woke and thought about it, and at LAST had the consoling thought: well, anyway, it was just a DREAM, so I don't REALLY have to worry about it; though there was a FRAGMENT of concern that I keep my "dream-space" or "dreamscape" "clear", and I DID keep thinking about how I could "clear it up" even AFTER I was awake, contemplating the dreaming state. Got out of bed about 10AM feeling somewhat draggy because I'd put the air conditioning off; picked up the Computron package at 9:30, too!
8/24/87: Almost on a par with the 3-page epic of 8/15 (but that was NINE days ago!), this two-parter looked at the SKY: 1) I was walking north on something like FDR Drive, with enormous vistas over Manhattan (except that it wasn't Manhattan, because most of the scattered buildings were quite low, so that I could SEE the phenomenon in the sky; the feeling was more like I was on the Great Plains, with enormous FIELDS to my left as I walked north on my road) and suddenly, without transition, there WAS a double-ribbon of birds flying north faster than I was walking. Each bird was a DISTINCT IDENTICAL checkmark in the air, beating its tiny wings in exact synchronicity with the others, like a duplicated animated automaton. But somehow the BIRDS didn't progress; no, there was a feeling of movement of the RIBBONS slightly undulating up and down: a feeling that the RIBBONS were being drawn north, like pennants advertising birds drawn by planes flying offshore at Fire Island. I remarked to --- whoever was with me, I don't remember WHO, I just remember REMARKING --- that it was an extraordinary spectacle, and the sky was filled in TIME-SLOTS, as if discrete slides of birds were superimposed upon the sky about one second apart: a) there were seven ribbons, b) there were two sets of three ribbons, c) there was a high cloud, d) there was an intermediate band, e) two very CLOSE ribbons, f) suddenly the entire SKY, filling vision and periphery, was checked with birds, numberless birds like the flight of the Quelea on the Nature program, though through all this there were no SOUNDS of birds, as if I were watching these manifestations on a silent-movie screen when the pianist was at lunch.
2) I was in an enormous auditorium (like an armory--or more precisely a recreation hall---with a huge flat floor onto which folding chairs had been put in seating sections, except that the center-front section had armchairs, with arms, obvious later) in which most everyone was getting up for an intermission, and I looked to an older woman (like one of the older women I see in the Heights often, neatly dressed, with piercing dark eyes out of a white-powdered face) sitting next to the side in front of a left-side-of-auditorium section, who smiled down away from me, saying "So you'd like to meet Bob West....." and I figured THAT'S the woman who "was a friend of mine" that someone had told me KNEW this blond body-builder I had the hots for; I noted in my mind that I'd have to talk with HER. Then I was in the lobby, in a souvenir shop, and she was there, toward the back, and I was just about to talk with her when suddenly John Cleese, very tanned, naked down past his oil-slick ass in the back, wearing a strange pair of blue overalls with a bib in the front, but shaped in the back like chaps which left the ass totally bare (which, I thought, was strange, because Cleese was supposed to be straight, and he WAS coming on to this older woman, though he was mugging as if he were on the show, or just kidding around---"Got a bit of wetness down there?" he suggested obscenely, groping her, and then fucking her right there in the aisle (the ass-nudity and leg-over fuck position seemed drawn from the "Dracula" in the Guggenheim I watched yesterday), so that I paused, looked, looked away, and figured I'd have to talk to her some other time. Then there was a fragment of a memory of a dance performance BEFORE intermission, with four women holding two chains which governed their spacing, so that they could delineate geometric patterns on the floor as they---it seemed SKATED---moved smoothly over the floor. And now I see I have to have an adjunct diagram-page AGAIN, with (A) for the bird-patterns in the sky, and (B) for the dance-patterns on the floor. The chains started at the same level for all of them, then two held the chains in each hand on either side of one in the middle, who held them, with upraised arms, slightly separated on her torso while the two at the sides TWISTED the chains about each other so that they formed two "knots" at either side of the one in the center. Then the intermission was over, and there was a BRIGHT DISTINCT image on a movie-screen that people whispered were "TV tapes", and I moved down the aisles trying to get a seat. It looked like there were lots of empty seats toward the front, but when I got to the right-front section of the auditorium, many of the easy chairs had overcoats on them, obviously pre-taken. But there were empty seats in the second row, which had a VERY wide aisle in front of it, and I knew I could get a seat even though a few other women were trying to find empty seats. Then, without sitting down and without transition, I was OUTSIDE the auditorium, coming around a small rise in the lawn surrounding the auditorium, as if it were a festival-center in a Western skiing town like Aspen (though I VAGUELY remember a FOREIGNNESS to it, too, as if it might have been in Nepal or Tibet)(hm, all FIVE letters?), and I looked over the horizon to my left, away from the auditorium, and was impressed by the LOOK OF THE LIGHT IN THE AIR (rather like Joyce remarking on "the quality of the air" on Friday in Central Park that she tried to attribute to the previous Sunday's Harmonic Convergence): like the light in the park, the sun was halfway up the sky, and bright behind thin clouds or a ground mist so that it was almost possible to discern the edge of the disk itself, and of a metallic pink-gold color that MIGHT have been somewhat different. As I looked in "Nepal" I thought at first there was a slight fog in the air, but as I looked at the small spruce and pine trees nearby, most about 6' high, I could see tiny flakes of snow feathering their tops, and I again looked to my left and front over a VISTA of rolling hills (C) with a slight decline, possibly to a lake, in front of me, with higher hills or mountains off to the front-right, and I thought "It IS snowing," as the obscurity of the sun got less, as if it had gone behind a thicker cloud, but the air was still BRIGHT with snow in the noon-time air, and as I walked around a small ellipse, maybe a path now hidden under the snow, it occurred to me that this was SATURDAY, and the new recruits (that's how I thought of it, though there was a bit of "campers" about it, as if this were some kind of summer camp for mixed-gender adults) would have been here since FRIDAY noon---and of course (this was all "known" in my mind) that's why we'd been forced to pack our belongings before our first sessions on Friday morning, so the cabins (or more precisely barracks-rooms) could be cleaned for the next week's lot. There were fragments of memories that recalled packed suitcases in a pile which was then put in the back of the large car or small bus that many of us had taken---WHEREVER it was we went last night, the feeling of an excursion to a mountaintop for an evening's party after our week at "camp" was over---and it (my suitcase) was still there, so I didn't have to worry about the room (fleeting vision of a Spartan quarters with army-type blankets and solid sombre furniture rather like my BOQ at Aberdeen Proving Grounds) being in order, or my having left something BEHIND in the room--- everything was safely packed into my suitcase. So I had the security to walk back to the auditorium through the deepening snow with PLEASURE, thinking that it WAS getting deeper, and would it maybe keep OUR group bound to the camp for a few more days, though there was a feeling of confidence that this Saturday afternoon's program would be over in just a few hours and then the bus (or maybe even train) would take us down off the hillsides back to "town" and "home" (though these concepts were VERY vague in the dream). Back a moment, I remembered looking with displeasure at a house being built (there were two small brick stories completed already, and the frame of a peaked roof being constructed now, which was rapid progress from the "halfway up the first story" stage the house was in when I FIRST saw it about a week ago) to mar the view from the fields, but then I recalled with "OKness" that the road was the boundary of the "nature reserve" that the auditorium and our camp was in, so this was a legitimate house being built by someone rich who wanted to take advantage of our views. I felt the snow crunch under my heavy boots (but realized with wonder that it didn't feel COLD nor did the boots FEEL heavy, but that only indicated to me that I was VERY comfortably and appropriately dressed), thinking that it had already accumulated about 6 inches, and how beautiful it was, and what a WONDERFUL feeling and look there was to the air, which filled the bowl of the hills with almost a FRAGRANCE of freshness and pureness, and I was glad to be there, glad to return to the auditorium, glad to have witnessed what I'd witnessed in this week's "stay" at the hillside camp.
8/2/87 [in Patchogue] (Note typed 8/27/87): On bus with no change, get handful of pennies, dimes, nickels, and 30-cent Canada pieces that I try to add while talking to Ken Miller/Larry Ball about BILL for a lunch bill for $9.50, and I paid $10 so I owe Mary Vilaboa $1 and think to give her all change--- and in my dream during this my JAW has an AWFUL cramp!!
8/26/87: Note after waking thinking I heard the buzzer at 8AM, at 9:20AM:
1) "Rites of Marriage": a) Twins marry only other twins, b) A groom's younger sister must marry the bride's brother, c) Widows can marry only widowers---I get the STRONG idea that someone somewhere is setting up a NEW RELIGION!
2) "North Manhattan Walking": a) I'm skirting the western edge of the brambles that come right up to the concrete wall on the east side of Third Avenue at 98th Street, looking north to a fork in the road which goes easterly to the Bronx or westerly to northern Manhattan, b) look down into a shallow pool in which is swimming a toy fish made of wood in the shape of a food-snapping nipping pair of scissors, c) draw back in surprise as, from the rear left, comes (in the FRONT of the creature) a moray-mouthed creature from unknowably either underwater or above water, followed by the BACK of the creature in the shape of a clumsy broad-assed SEAL, d) I look back up at the water-sheet falling in front of me as a waterfall, and someone with broad shoulders is trying to wedge themselves thru a narrow opening behind the falls, and then e) I look up through a small greenish hole, wondering how I could boost my body through it, though I can always go through the larger door just to the right.
8/27/87:7:55AM: A knock-down COMEDY dream of my day's work in an Italian dessert restaurant (pastisseria?) 1) Prior, though, I was standing across from a corner like Cherry Lane's on Commerce in the Village, and I'm watching a MOVIE being made in which an old building with DESIGNS on the front (like it's made from ginger-bread) is being SHAKEN by an EARTHQUAKE, cracking them down, and ELEGANT building next door has no response---movie-company couldn't get owners' permission to use it. But ANOTHER landmark on the OTHER side is FILLED with frilly-dressed extras in windows. Another two-family house has a family of actors upstairs and only elegant chandelier-light from downstairs. We watch and remark "Only in New York can you stand on a corner and watch on TV a show or movie that USES THAT CORNER as a SET!" I might have been coming to work at the Italian place. 2) Time for BREAKFAST, and I have no trouble watching to learn and serving only ONE table with soft-drinks that are all the same price. a) Then get "advice" if you spread ginger preserves on CLAMS, the clam-meat COMPRESSES the ginger (still in shell?) and juices run down over ANY flavor ice cream below. b) I pass close wall-base and guy behind PUSHES the wall and it MOVES cardboard-ly aside, and I say I GOT to write this DOWN! Only time I moved the WALL to get past! c) Watch sauce/fruit /nuts/fudge "combo-stand" where customers flock(like for noodles at marriage in "Small Happiness" last night)and try THEIR combination-requests, which are charged by WEIGHT ONLY. d) Woman-owner (Erminia in New York Mag article?) takes me aside and recommends I keep a plastic bag so I can take "one-L, more or less, of customer -left croissant(C)" wrap it in a dispensered zip-lock bag and put it into MY plastic bag. I laugh and had to say I'd JUST put a plastic bag in my pocket for that reason; I'm GLAD to hear it's "policy." e) It's empty, now, but it's 12-1 and everyone's out at LUNCH, and we've got dessert-crowd AFTER lunch. f) It DOES fill up but I can just SERVE (like Liv Ullman in "Autumn Sonata"?) and be OK. g) John A. gathers small group of waiters: "You know I tell stories to individuals---I don't care WHO refers me, even if he's a FAGGOT---I so got a reference to Joe Anderson, and his mother said "He'll be right out" and he's a FABULOUS ("I don't EVER use that word, but HE WAS.") guy, and I don't hear if he's NAKED or if they have SEX, but he keeps talking about him. h) I ask to watch woman-clerk making ice cream, and she busily clears a cooking area of plates and cutlery and pots to prepare "stage" to do her stuff, ready to please and instruct me, but I don't recall her DOING it.[Notes to 8:10AM; rain on AC shell.] i) Even BEFORE dream 1): I recall either crop-fields or an array of city-street corners and whether it's a "desert street-scene" with powdered sugar sprinkled on it, or FIELDS under an early-autumn sprinkling of fine SNOW, I'm not really clear.
8/28/87: Another of the bizarre dreams, but it was really the first (whose details have mostly faded now) that was the most outré: 1) There was a book of plans or instructions that I could open to the "center" and see that the label of the book had been taped over many time, but I could still read that it was the "INSIDE YELLOW PAGES." This, I knew, gave me lots of valuable information if only I could read it. But the only fragments that remain involve a quartet of heavily-muscled men, like pirates, who would sing and perform some ritual (is this vaguely affected by all the mystical rituals that Hadrian indulges in in his "Memoirs" that I'm reading?) which ended (or came to a climax, in an emotional, ritual, intens(ity)ual, even sexual way) with them circling each other with fierce shouts and each raising his right tanned muscled arm to clasp the others' hands in a manly, bulky, sensual paroxysm of feeling. 2) Mom and I were sightseeing in New York in some even more enormous version of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and it's true that I read about its expanding even more, including a new Japanese exhibit, yesterday in New York Magazine). We'd enter (from the west in the dream; impossible in reality) a large orientation presentation involving hundreds of people, who would then filter though a huge exhibit (which figured in a previous dream with dozens of perfectly-crafted artifacts in a series of exhibition cases which I didn't see THIS time but which I "knew," in that dream-like certainty that is so bafflingly noetic, were there) which branched off to the right (south) and culminated in another "nodal" presentation where we all sat in something like a circus bleachers (indeed there was sand on the floor of this enormous amphitheater-room) for a set-length presentment of archival splendors, and then we had another fork, and I was sure that Mom had taken the left fork, which went around most of the exhibits to the right, which culminated in a waiting-room in which I sat for a long time, waiting for her (the last time I saw her she was limping rapidly ahead wearing a green sweater and red pants, when the intervening crowds cut her from my view), and after a long time I decided to go to the actual EXIT, and there she was, exhaustedly leaning against the counter, turning to berate me for having taken such a long time. Then, with embarrassment, I found that I had forgotten my SHOES in the "nodal" presentation room. I WAS wearing my OVERSHOES of floppy black plastic, but inside those were my RED SOCKS, rather than my BLACK SHOES. So I excused myself "for a moment" (not daring to tell her that I was going back to retrieve something that I'd stupidly forgotten), and left (to an outside enormous inner courtyard) by the west door and BYPASSED the normal routing of tourists by walking north over the apex of a triangle of grass that separated the end of MY path on the southern leg of the triangle from the equally long path on the NORTHERN leg of the triangle (thereby saving me going back over BOTH legs again) (I'm aware this isn't making connected topographical sense) and entered the "nodal" amphitheater "in the middle" both of the seating AND of the periodic presentation. I found where I had been sitting, looked around for my shoes, but when I took off my overshoes I found that I HAD my black shoes on. I looked down at them with considerable puzzlement and frustration because I KNEW I was wearing ONLY my soft dark-red socks with Mom at the exit, and NOW I was SURE I was wearing my hard black shoes in addition. So I left toward the west (against the flow of traffic), trying to get the sand out of my shoes from the amphitheater-floor, and pried open a door that said "Do not enter in this direction" and continued against the flow of tourists until I came to ANOTHER, smaller, door, which had the label "Don't even DARE", but I could prise my fingernails around the bottom corner and rose up "on the deck of the pirate ship in the middle of the presentation" (which I know doesn't make sense, but that's the way it was), pleased to see that no one seemed to NOTICE me being against the flow, either to follow me or to send me back. I got to another door, tried to ask directions of a number of puzzlingly badged (Gary Cooper as Deputy last night in "The Westerner"?) attendants, and at length (after a time of that AWFUL energy-draining dream-leg-drag-run) got back to Mom---TO FIND I HAD AGAIN LEFT MY SHOES! Total frustration, and I woke!!
8/31/87: Another LARGE set of dreams (and I MUST record a fragment from YESTERDAY, influenced by a photo of two shirtless sailors in the "Year to Come" section of the Times, in which Dennis and I were waiting with a crowd of people to get into an elevator like at the bottom of Clark Street Station, and he kept smiling at two sexy "regular" guys AND at two VERY sexy sailors without their shirts on. The sailors smiled back at him, but with a predatory rapacious look that made ME not want to stare or smile at them, but Dennis continued to smile as we crowded into the elevator. He rubbed up against the front of one with his back, and as people were getting out of the elevator at the top, I looked back to see a look of intense sexuality on Dennis's face as he was being clasped from the front by one of the sailors [I couldn't tell if it was with pleasure or with pain, as the predominant emotion from EITHER Dennis or the sailor {whose face I really couldn't see behind Dennis}] and was saying, "Oh, yes, I don't care, DO it, DO it." I thought fleetingly that he sometimes got into being fucked, and maybe the sailor was making overtures that he wanted to fuck Dennis, and Dennis was willing. That was the end of the fragment, and there were others sections to the dream yesterday, but that's the end of THIS day's dream) which had some sort of sexual component in that I was waiting to get home to jerk off, feeling intensely sexual, but I was delayed in walking toward my apartment, which seemed to be in the vicinity of my old one on E. 61st Street, because I was walking east from 1st Avenue up E. 61st, thinking I was near home, yet knowing I was walking outside where Paul Bosten's apartment used to be at the northern side of the Queensboro Bridge, with its tramway to Roosevelt Island. I was delayed by an area of construction immediately to the south, as if the bridge-entrance had been torn down, as had long been planned, and a major amusement-art area (rather like I'd visualize Art on the Beach to be) was being constructed with large areas of purple-and-red painted cement floorings already in place. I felt pleased at seeing that this was at last being constructed, but there was some sort of ancillary construction on the north side of 61st Street: a scaffolding of large wooden beams, again painted with the "characteristic" dark reddish-purple color painted over large areas, with highlights of red and blue on adjacent narrower areas of single planks. When I got to the eastern end of this scaffolding, I matter-of-factly pulled myself up about four feet by grasping a loose 2x4 that marked the lower eastern boundary of the construction, and pulling myself up onto the scaffolding to walk along a bit before so many loose boards and gaping holes in the flooring of the scaffolding made me think better of it: after all, there WERE people walking alongside this construction on the south side of the sidewalk, and in the adjacent gutter, so it WAS possible to walk west WITHOUT climbing up here, so I backtracked from plank to plank, fearing that I might fall through a gap or slip sideways when stepping on a loosely-attached floorboard, but I managed to negotiate my way backwards until I climbed down from the ending colored planks and once again encountered the same loose 2x4 on which I'd climbed up, and dangled from that with my hands, fearing for a moment that this would still be too high above the sidewalk to jump from, but was relieved to find that the sidewalk was immediately beneath my feet (and that the relationships hadn't changed into more dangerous ones, as is so typical in my dreams of this type, where the entry is VERY easy and safe, and the progression gets more dangerous until I look to turn back only to find to my horror that the way OUT is even more dangerous than what I'd already covered on the way IN, but THAT way is no longer THERE!), and I jumped down to the sidewalk to get one last view of the dappled sunlight (from the park-trail on Saturday or from the Conservatory Gardens on Sunday?) coming through the sparse scaffolding onto the sidewalk. Again there was that sexual eagerness to get home (I think this is connected to the sexuality I felt toward our evening-shadowed conversation with Ben Blackburn last night at the picnic in Central Park). There were other more specifically sexual parts of the dream that I can't remember at this time, now being 11:00AM and I'd wakened at 8 with the dream and then lay till 9:40,dozing.
9/3/87: 1) I'm in a large dank bathroom where someone like Rita has just taken a bath comfortably in a bi-lobed bathtub, leaving the room saying that I can have a bath next. When I fill up the tub, the top-right section seems very shallow, and when I step into the tub it tips back and forth, sloshing water over the edges which slope very gradually and which are shaped more like a saucer than like a bowl. I sit in the tub and find that the bottom is covered with a moss-like slime, somewhat less in the well-used center, but I slide back and forth and splash the soapy water over my body vaguely effectively.
2) I'm in a large shadowy bedroom where I'm going through old chests of drawers in order to pack some suitcases (whether to move or just on vacation I don't know), and I come across old pairs of socks that I take apart to find that the white has yellowed really VERY badly. I debate wearing them only UNDER other socks when I need to, so that no one will see them, but decide I hardly WEAR socks under other socks, so I take them apart and those that I find are over half a yellow, almost orangish, color (most of them) I just throw onto a pile to throw away later. I don't recall any other kind of clothing being packed. 3) A couple of us have bought an "address computer" which I've unfolded to see that, due to the strange shape of the labeling, it can only hold one address, which it's used as a sample, on the top, another one (I count the characters and find that if each of the names and addresses is fewer than 30 characters, you could squeeze two onto one line, but it's not clear to me if the three lines would then be 1 2/3 1/2 3 or 1 1/2 2/3 3 in order, and this now reminds me of the text I wrote in the Indexing Handbook last night saying that those quarterly journals with fewer than 200 pages could be numbered starting with even hundreds, but maybe they don't do it because they fear they might go over 200 pages in an issue) in the next section, and only five or six more in the body below. There is a note saying that you could get other computers to work in series with this, but that sounds to me like a very expensive way to do it. Think for a moment that these could be used as an adjunct to my regular computer, to print out addresses for envelopes without having to change papers in my regular printer, but then I find that these little calculators don't have any capability for printing at all, which is reasonable since they cost only about $35. Distinct impression of a brown leatherette casing, like a billfold, of the computer and of plastic or thin-metal "plates" (which form the memories for the changeable addresses) which may even be capable of slipping in and out if you had a file of addresses which you used all-at-once only occasionally, and of clear-plastic-covered instruction areas at top-right and bottom-left which cut into the room for storage. Many details in a tiny amount of dreamtime!
4) Talking to someone like Sherryl and maybe Vicki or Fran Shorr (both of whom I mentioned to Sherryl on the phone yesterday)---we're on something like a bus either in the city or going on a short tour somewhere---and saying that my new lover (who seems to be rather like Joe Easter) probably isn't going to work out: he was over my place for the weekend and we bickered a lot about just about everything, knew that the shower (which in my mind was a circular curtain in the middle of the tub like I had at Dietz Avenue) was "too thin" for the two of us at the same time, and "probably he wouldn't be coming back and it wouldn't be lasting." Sherryl responded with a knowing semi-smile that "I'm not surprised." These dreams were well-spaced through the night: I'd gone to bed about 7:05PM because I felt too nauseous (for the second night, though the night before it was at 11:55PM after hours and hours of watching TV, so I thought it might be my eyes bothering me) to continue working on the computer without the REAL risk of getting sick to my stomach and throwing up. Up about 9:50 and had a half-can of soup and a sandwich and my pills, then read the rest of "Memoirs of Hadrian" and took a spoonful of almost-dried Milk of Magnesia (end-date sometime in 1984) with some water, left out a BIT of shit, then slept from midnight to 4:10AM, when I lay about thinking this might be a reaction to the cortisone I'm putting on my legs for the poison ivy, which I've now used up, and then woke about 8AM but didn't get out of bed until 9:50AM,feeling Ugh!
9/6/87: 7:50: 1) Rich Indian silk-weaver hides operations underground in modern glass-walled "factory;" finds illegal CHILDREN in side alleys. 2) I'm working and living in odd, draped, basement room observing old(?) weak(?) pigeon/dove sitting on concrete floor and snapping (he GOT it, at last) at buzzing BEETLE flapping around curtains draping round-topped table in center of room. 3) Me and Mom and four-year-old Rita are "waiting" for a doctor or a therapist in a "basement" room tended by Elizabeth Barber, who's baking a multi-layered ice-cream/pastry for us, seating Rita in a MUCH-too-small chair at my right, with regular chairs for me and for Mom and ECB across from us, as we're "next in line" for service. 4) 8:55: I "dream" I dance for a LONGER TIME that anyone else at a sleazy bar---winning $27 CASH (pointedly stated not a check or a traveler's check), and I go out to join John A. in backyard of 1221 Dietz as MOM grabs paper bracelet and necklace (?), saying "Of COURSE she put on a paper necklace---I wasn't THERE, WAS I?" and I say "I'm going OUT" and she says "Go" and John A. and I cross the next lawn and go up stairs to house (where the Links used to live), where I said "I DREAMED I won---" and John sneers wanly and says "$27?" I say "And HOW did you KNOW" (lowering a ladder somewhere in here---my note's not clear now at 11:05PM). The back porch there is burnt (Spartacus had phoned us to tell us about the fire before this), but we knock and BANG pieces of the door against the frame and we can see him through a chink in the doorway as he pulls back from doing the dishes in the sink against the wall of the porch, and we can see he's wearing earphones, and he says "Come on in here, this still opens." 5) 10:10: A lovely segment about a cute, affectionate, sexy LOVER: we kiss and hold each other and play with our cocks, his hard and bright pink, and we watch TV tapes together, living together and enjoying each other wonderfully. That IS a dream!!
9/7/87: 1) I'm showering in sunlight from a window in the distance (like my impression from showering in BC's bathroom with the window right THERE?), and I'm looking into a mirror from a crouch, my body golden-tanned and wet-shiny, with a slender definition-less body that's not GLORIOUS, but still isn't QUITE mine at this point (though maybe what I'd like to think at its BEST it is), and I'm shampooing (writing "shampoo" on my want-list late last night?) in the mirror, amazed at how THIN the black cylinders of soapy hair are, each shiny cylinder outlined with fuzzy-white soapy shampoo, and as I scrub, looking directly into the mirror, I'm dismayed to see BALDING STRIPS up each side of the head, with a narrower strip right up the middle, both taking off from a concave area of "guard-hairs" showing that I'll be "monk-bald" sooner than I thought. There are also angry-looking red papules, far-gone versions of what I feel now when I shampoo. 2) There's ANOTHER hazy interlude with a sexy FRIEND in loose, soft-textured, faded, well-worn jeans over possibly humpy thighs, and he's ushering me into "another room" in his apartment, about to introduce me to one of his younger friends, because he thinks I like them younger, when I'd really like to cuddle with HIM. Bob Dane is the name I think he has, or some short surname like that, and "in and out of the drem" I sort of think he's someone I've lost track of from (and I write on the note "Compuserve" and then in parentheses) Comquest, but try to sift down through the names and faces and can't quite LOCATE him either in memory, on the list, or in my telephone book. But again a nice feeling of ACCEPTANCE (though last time it was a MUTUAL acceptance and this time I'm definitely accepting him more than he seems to be accepting me SEXUALLY, anyway) pervades the dream, and I hope I can put power into the idea that "someone's coming close" and that I'll be having SOMEONE to be cuddly with in the near future, if not from the long-neglected Comquest list, then from people calling ME or my increasing desire to get OUT (maybe to some of the movie back-rooms) to meet SOMEONE, though it IS connected with my getting back to the gym now that my poison ivy is almost completely gone and my legs are beginning to look presentable) and FIND someone to have some nice hours with---after all, that's why I'm SAYING I'm avoiding long VACATIONS now!!
9/9/87: 9AM: 1) "No CLASSICAL music in AUDITORIUM." "But that's what we WANT; and it's better than SILENCE." 2) Cleaning TUB with soap, then TRAY-TOP has LAYERS that PILE UP as I scrub them off, going down through layers of colors like accumulated paint on walls, and I scoop up and put most of the scraps into a box onto dog-lying-flat-shaped broken ARMCHAIR. (This note typed "only" 12 days later; no additional details here.)
9/11/87: 4:15AM: I'm up in SOMEPLACE like Poughkeepsie with 2-3 friends, and drive near where a "university field-corps" helicopter beats out of the sky, and Harrison Ford waves casually as I pass "from our previous visit to the zoo." My friends (like IN Armonk) are reading papers during lunch. I KNOW they're filing this afternoon, and we'll see some spectacles, but they don't film. One offers me paper, but I say I don't want it. "Remember, when it happens," I say with a smile, "that I was here," My timing is confusing, and my friend grimaces at me uncomprehendingly. (This note typed "only" 10 days later; no additional details available.)
9/14/87: 7:40AM: I've bought three theater tickets, but I only HAD $6 and with $3 LEFT I don't have enough to EAT with. I WILL, however, if I sell the tickets to Mom and Rita for $8 apiece. I say "Here's two tickets, I can't go with you." Mom gets furious and says "We're going to eat GREEK," and goes out onto 20th and 3rd (Michael Blackburn's place from the train last night?) and there's a brick subway wall and we walk toward an opening as I grab five-year- old Rita's clenched fist to pull her along more quickly. (Same as above.)
9/15/87: I'm arranging to meet Elizabeth Barber (as I did last night for lunch today), and she's going someplace else first, then meeting me for dinner and we'll be going somewhere else. I have a list of four places I have to go, written on the back of an indexing card (as I've been indexing all day yesterday and have to, aside from lunch, today), but I'm not precisely sure where every place IS. I try to console myself with the idea that I can always ask a cabdriver where the next destination is, but what happens when he doesn't have a hackman's guide? I guess (all this is thinking from the dream) I could always get out of the cab and phone the place and ask for directions. My first destination is somehow "across the bridge" (it's like I'm IN the Bronx but I want to get across to Manhattan, but in my dream where I'm currently walking in "the Bronx" is separated from the WEST side of Manhattan at about 86th Street by a river about the width of the Harlem River which seems to be to my EAST and still WEST of Manhattan--which would put "the Bronx" about where New Jersey is), and I look up to an intersection to see that there are no cabs among the private cars passing, but I know I can easily walk across the bridge and be in a section where there are more cabs. The first destination is some kind of Turkish restaurant (thinking of Dennis's restaurant file that I threw out yesterday?), and then there's someplace to have a drink, and someplace to visit afterwards, though UNLIKE today, this schedule starts about 8PM and goes to 12.
9/20/87: There was a dream BEFORE this, but in the only one I recall now at 1PM (having wakened at 9:30) I went into my kitchen where Joe Easter and Dennis (sitting in an impossible site: where my sink now is) were chatting around my round table, and there behind Joe was a splotch of red, like bloody-meat-grease or diluted tomato juice, and I said "What's THAT?" and he said, "Oh, don't worry about it, I'll clean it up." Then I looked at two delicious-looking cakes on the table and said "And what's THAT?" He smiled, said "I thought you might ask," and continued eating fragments of what looked to be a chocolate log covered with roasted pecans on the outside, so that it looked like a real fireplace log, and they were almost finished with a yellow cake with a white whipped-cream icing that I reached forward with a knife to clean up around one edge, but I didn't get to TASTE it in a dream; have I EVER done a TASTING??
9/25/87: I'm staying in Joe Safko's large house for a weekend party, wandering from room to room with many people, noticing that they're thinning out, and not really knowing how I'm going to get back home (since I have the idea this house is on the top of a sand dune out in the Hamptons somewhere). One woman comes up to me and asks me if I want her address, and when she writes it down on a written-over piece of paper I find somewhere, I find the first name is something like Siiandira, with a lot of "i"'s in it, and I have no idea why she wants me to have her name or how I would have known her. In finding a paper, I seem to have torn it from a car-door, or even car-SIDE, that was in this large room, and now I rip off a large white fabric sheet that's part of the wrapping of ANOTHER car-side or door (is this from the animated "Wind in the Willows" last night where Mr. Toad drives and wrecks many types of motorcar?). Then almost all have left and Joe is driving me somewhere, saying that we could spend two weeks in Acapulco (this IS from that animated film!), and I inquire (from his tiny sister, Helen?) whether he's not got a job, and then I realize that he's FINISHED his schooling, and maybe he'll be taking a long vacation before he starts his work as a physician (from Marcia Lipski here yesterday for a body session?)---maybe he's even wealthy enough that he doesn't need to work at all (as was Toad of Toad Hall). Confusing and confused, but the memory is sharp enough after I get an index at 9AM to type it out by 9:30AM; Mom's here.
10/2/87: 5:30AM: "U virus" starts with incurable mouth-lesions (as I have inside cheek and on crowned-tooth gum-line?), implying HIGH contagion through KISSING. Bill Hyde has a large SCROLL of studies, that's on a chalk-tray with a "building-block" array (reminding me of the plastered subway-wall that Dennis and I joked about admiring in the subway after the Art Exhibit at Belanthi last night) that seems to involve how the virus EVOLVED.
10/5/87: Obviously based on my fuss with the broken VCR-connection wire, I'm climbing out onto a VERY thin-branched tree to scrape off dried leaves and bark, rather like pulling off dead leaves from some of the plants on my windowsill, except that this tree is growing in some sort of atrium or central court of a four- or five-story apartment house with brick corridor-like balconies surrounding the approximately ten feet by ten feet inner courtyard. As I work, I'm amazed that the thinness of the branches hold me upright, though there MIGHT be some thought of supporting inner wires, particularly since I can see attachments, as to telephone poles, of the outermost twigs to the walls of the opposite balcony. I debate whether I'd fall THROUGH the branches below me or get CAUGHT by them if I fell off my particular, highest, perch. But then I'm finished and all I have to do is slide backwards to get off on my own balcony, relieved that I didn't fall and that no one saw me---and at THIS moment it reminds me of my various vine-cleaning operations on the fire escape!
10/7/87: I'm touring in a foreign town, looking at a map that has circled tourist areas, and I keep seeing Kamezama Palace, so I figure I must be in Tokyo or Kyoto, not to mention that most of the characters outside the circled areas are in Japanese or Chinese. I seem to be touring seedy gay-bars, and in one I'm accosted by another tourist who insists I have drugs, threatening me with a very dull folding straight razor which he presses down on my thumb. At first I fear it will cut, but it's so blunt it only SCRAPES along my thumb-tip as it closes, and I shout that he's crazy and order him to STOP THIS. Then I'm out again to a street, glancing behind to see if he's following, and find myself in another bar where Japanese fags in short skirts are dancing, one revealing a grotesquely bent-left semi-erection. In another bar a tanned nude body appears to be female, but then I seem to hit a better place where the quality of the bodies is more masculine and to my liking. There seems to be an air of AIDS-awareness over the grim "festivities," but I'm still excited by the naked legs and glimpses of hardening cocks, curly black pubic hair, and muscles.
10/9/87: I'm sitting in the middle of a crowded movie-theater, just to the right of the right aisle of a two-aisled theater, sitting in the midst of a pod of attractive young men who are chatting back and forth with each other, and then as the lights go down, Spartacus comes up the aisle and is greeted with a real CHORUS of whispered "Hi, Spartacus"'s from each side of the aisle, including guys near me, so I figure I can later ask him to introduce some of us. Then the movie starts, something like "Sleeping Beauty," which me and a fellow behind me are recording on a Walkman-like VCR, but then after a few minutes it's interrupted by a black-and-white film from the 30's with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope and some blond woman. When THAT goes off after a few minutes, and the "guest-lecturer" starts waving at some posters and photographs on the left-most wall of the theater, I raise my hand to talk, the only one in the theater who seems to be concerned about this, and he glances over and says "Roumelli?" I glance behind me to see that the fellow next to me, who just may be Roumelli, hasn't raised his hand, but my hand is the only hand up so I shout out "When the movie comes back on, WHICH one is it going to BE?" He makes some exasperated sound and says, "What difference does it make which it is; I don't know; why don't you just watch whatever movie comes ON?" Others around me murmur that they might have BETTER things to do depending on which movie it is, and I see groups of people making their way through a door at the lower left corner of the theater, through which I can make out a sign "Cine 2", and I don't even know what's playing next door so I can see THAT instead of this.
10/10/87: I'm having breakfast in a room rather separated from the rest of the restaurant, rather like an entry-way or annex to the cloakroom, so that my solitary table can be relatively undisturbed through the day. I've brought in a set of VCR tapes (which looks exactly like the stack of 7 tapes I have on top of the VCR right now, with the colored boxes surmounted by the black plastic case of the "odd one" on top), and my favorite waitress (rather like Elizabeth in a black dress and white apron) has lent me her apparatus for listening and looking at the tapes, and it sits looking like an old Wollensack microphone (black plastic with brightly polished chrome fittings and pushbuttons) with a shiny antenna sticking part-way out of the fitted presentation-box container in which it fits almost like an expensive brooch, placed on the edge of the table next to the stack of tapes. I've finished with breakfast and am just about to "handle" the tapes (maybe I'm over-concerned with the 50-plus hours of TV watching I have to do after I finish with the National Academy Press index and before I start back on the Indexing Handbook) when I have to leave for something, and the waitress assures me I can just leave the stuff on the table, it won't be in anyone's way. I go off for a few hours to do something (it was only shadowy in the dream, and I remember nothing of it now), and when I return for lunch I'm very surprised to find the table EXACTLY as I left it, with the tapes and the listening-device unmoved since breakfast, only the dirty dishes taken away and a new place-setting waiting for my lunch (obviously this also reflects my preoccupation with my restaurant-list now that we're getting to the end of the year and the completion of my second list---and there won't BE a third list because I'll never have a list with as many as 60 restaurants in which I want to eat), and the waitress is still bustling around in the next room, just around the corner from my right elbow, and I want to thank her for being so considerate, but then I "remember" the idea that this is almost HER table (or the manager's table?) so that it COULD EASILY have been left alone, aside from the regular run of tables. I'd had JUST a fragment of this all left in my mind when I got out of bed at 10:30AM, but having read about half of Monroe's "Far Journeys" last night, I'm HOPING my night-dreams have some reflection of the OOBE's I'm presumably having each night, trying to "tune in" to the technique of REMEMBERING them, hoping that this RECORDING will be a step in the right direction, and anyway I wanted to expand it to the bottom of the page, which I've now managed to do!
10/18/87: I'm sitting in some sort of restaurant, and Mom is sitting at a neighboring table looking through a new stamp catalog, making a notation in tiny ink-letters aside the stamps of some country which have appreciated by about 30% in the last two years, and I go over to turn to the pages of the country of "Haldol" (knowing at some level that it's equivalent to "Haloperidol"), to illustrate some point I'm making, and when she looks at the descriptions of the various denominations: 10d: G. Haldol; 20d: P. Haldol; 30d: F. Haldol; 40d: H. Haldol; 50d: K. Haldol; etc, she's puzzled but I get the joke that it's a take-off on a new country, made up as comic relief in this figure-oriented catalog. A waitress comes over to pour Mom some more tea into a cup which the waitress puts on the PAGES of the catalog, "So that it won't get the table wet," and I pointedly move the cup TO the table "So that it won't get the pages wet." There might have been other details, but I forget them now at 11:48, having gotten up as long ago as 11:35AM. Also something remains from yesterday's dream about another restaurant, but I can't recall ANY details now.
10/23/87: I'm trying to move through some sort of basement shop with narrow aisles flanked by shelves overflowing with merchandise, but there's a kind of tour group ahead of me, each of the twenty people carrying large suitcases, the guy in front of me lugging an ENORMOUS blue soft-sided fourteen-suiter, and he turns back to give me a sardonic smile of "You're not getting ANYPLACE" as I try to push past him and his suitcase in the narrow aisle, as we watch people slowly moving up the staircase to the front-right to get to the street level. I move off to the right as we get to the head of the aisles, and in the right wall I can see through an open door a glimpse of a white-tiled bathroom, and I push past a few gesticulating tourists who are slowly moving past the bathroom door without noticing what it is, and with relief I push the door open and move inside. Then recoil with horror as I see that there'd been a painter literally straddling the edge of the door (was this influenced by Philip Morrison's segment from the San Francisco Sciencearium with the skilled teenager appearing to float in the air by straddling the edge of the mirror?), and when I opened the door he was flung from a height to land backwards on an array of paint-cans to severely crack his spine and neck (is this from Peter Schaufuss's spine injury on "Dancer" last night?) on the edges of the cans. I stand helplessly as he struggles to regain his feet, both of us hoping desperately that he's not seriously injured. I move toward urinals filled with yellow-orange liquid, but I can't concentrate enough to piss with him groaning off to my right. But at the end of the dream he DOES seem to be moving (and vociferating) enough to give us both confidence that I haven't caused him permanent damage---and why WASN'T there any kind of warning sign NOT to open the door, or why wasn't the door LOCKED by him in the first place? Type this early-ish at 10:50AM.
10/24/87: 1) I'm in a group in, yes, an "upper room" (the second or third floor that's the top floor of a large factory-like building in a place like a New Jersey suburb---maybe it's a school building), and we're waiting for the end of the world, and as we "celebrate" and "prepare," we're looking at a radiant sunset (though the sun is behind clouds) and then, yes, the light in the sky blinks out, as though the sun had vanished, and we panic for a moment, but then nothing really happens but wind, and we feel confident again. 2) Our group is going through some sort of metamorphosis, and we're at "354" knowing that our next step is "359," but someone is talking about "749" as our ultimate stage, though we know that's very distant in time and maybe even in space. There were other components to this dream, but it passed quickly into 3) me in bed with some VERY sexy guy who reminded me of Mario Papiri: short and stock but a square face in a cubic head, but VERY sexy with a THICK hard cock that I squeezed and lay atop, but then he turns to me and says he's VERY tired (and I think Mario used to say that, too!), and we debate coming before we go to sleep, and I wake VERY aroused, but I've got to get into the day at 10:15AM.
10/29/87: Only fragments left at 8PM, but it had something to do with a VERY ornate signature by Elizabeth Taylor, with whom I'd been speaking, and then there was a section about Greta Garbo with even less detail. My "famous ladies" dream?
10/30/87: I'm not in the Army, but I'm sort of working with Army personnel who are moving materiel into huge warehouses like train-barns. I'm rooting around in containerized railroad cars (?) and putting "valid" cartons on one side and throwing out "too-small boxes" (which are very like McGraw-Hill cartons that pages arrive in), feeling contempt for whoever packed these in, thinking they would "be of some use." I'm walking BACK "to town" along a road beside a lake (somehow the feeling is of Florida), and I've gotten tiny shreds of very thin WIRE (a silver-colored similarity to the extremely thin wires braided into the still-thin wire that broke on my VCR connector comes to mind now) stuck onto the tips of my fingers (this comes either from burning my thumb and forefinger last night [no aftereffects now, thank goodness] on the hot spoon at Tamu or from the oft-repeated maneuver of picking out tiny bones from the cooked frozen sole as I did at breakfast this morning), and when I try to use my teeth to remove the shreds from my fingertips, the shreds stick to my LIPS, and then when I pull them off my lips with my fingertips, they're stuck again onto my fingertips, with tiny hooks like miniature barbed wire on each end. The lesions are so tiny there's no blood, but a discomfort and a worry if I'll EVER get rid of them. The route between the factory (at the "fishhook tip" of a J) and the town (like upper Manhattan at the "line-tie eye" end of the J) is also the route of a bus, and I'd seen someone get on a bus at the corner where the long side of the J turns into the base of the J, so I walked forward toward that corner along the long side of the J, looking over my shoulder to ensure there is a steady stream of busses which I'll be able to catch filled with workers coming from the factory.
11/8/87: I'm on some sort of observation platform: a public room high in a building where my access to the window (and the view therefrom) is inhibited by a myriad of connecting-wires to female plugs in pillars and under window-ledges from headsets worn by hoody-type teenagers. I ask in my "rhetorical" way: "I guess I just get to the window for my deserved view in any way I can?" and there's a bristle of hostility from the hoods silently saying "Just TRY it!" and I reach down, convinced that I'm protected from the violence of a few by the presence of the many, and start disconnecting large connecting-wires with centimeter-thick jacks, but as I progress along a line away from me, disconnecting as I go, the jacks get smaller and increasingly intricate: jacks- within jacks of tinier and tinier wires, with connectors that have complex angled inserts and screw-wired grounding wires like on three-pronged plugs, and with the bristle of hostility audibly rustling behind me, I decide I've cleared enough space and more forward to take in my dangerously-earned view. I don't know what happened in THAT dream after that, and the certain-dream state was replaced by a semi-dream state in which "what I have to do today" was mixed in with fantasies and extrapolations too complicated to recollect, except that when I jumped up in bed to a sound from outside, turning my head back and forth quickly between my earplugs to try to identify "what it was," I idly contemplated the idea that I ALSO had AIDS in the brain, as John Robertson and Jose Gonzalez have so recently been diagnosed with the AIDS virus and Avi Golub has so recently been diagnosed and operated on for colon cancer---what with my shit-dripping asshole and intemperate eating and drinking habits---and what life would be like in a state of permanent hallucination-dream, sort of like an ultimate science-fiction plot in which ANY CONCEIVABLE ACTION could follow any precedent and be followed by any succedent at all, like a hyper "Mary Hartman, Mary Harmtan (sure, Harmtan---any letters could be followed by any letters, too!) Hartman" of the brain----would I be willing to release in my death THEN??
11/14/87: I'm in a seedy section of town, knowing that (as is the case this morning) I must get OUT of here by NN:30, because it takes me half an hour by bus to get where I have to be half an hour later. But there are just ENDLESS delays in getting out of the store. First I go up one aisle and find that you must climb some rocks and then slide down a tree-trunk to get to the ground! I watch a few men younger than me look very surprised at the difficulty of holding onto the tree-trunk with their hands as they slide down the trunk to a place where they can let go and fall to the ground below, and decide that I'm just not young enough to do this, so I back off and look for another way out. Mom is with the sexy guy I used to go to Signal Corps Reserves with (is this from my yesterday's recording of trips I've taken, one of which was that Summer Camp?), and at one point I find him and ask him to take me back to her car, but he misunderstands and takes me to some sort of john, which I don't need at that point, thank goodness. Rita's there, too, complicating things with Denny and Paul. At another episode, a young vagrant meets me and insists on handing me a package he's just bought---then I have to get BACK to Mom to leave it with her because I don't want to carry it with me. I try AGAIN to find her, and can't, and finally look at the package to find that it's only a corduroy shirt, sized 50, which is so large that I can just put it out for someone else to take: it's of absolutely NO use to me. At the end, I'm going, again and again, over a stretch of rocky ground so arduous that I think of myself immediately after waking as an ANT laboriously climbing over hilly ground, not knowing where to go, just knowing that I have to get OUT in this direction, but repeating the same ground that's clearly getting WORSE, not better, and just when the frustration is building up to a TERRIBLE place (is this part of George Pierson's frustration last night in class, reported about his xeroxing that morning?) I look over my shoulder and see an orderly array of buildings that I know is the northern section of the town I've been visiting, so I can get back down there and go to the bus-stop I need MAYBE in time. Wake at 8PM, having set the alarm for 8:30 for the Roger Woolger seminar on Past Lives at the Open Center, and maybe THAT'S affected the dream, too: my meandering through past lives trying to make some final destination, but there are always detours and obstructions, some of which seem very familiar (like getting caught up in reading and TV and movies and restaurants when I should really be working on something "permanent" like my writing, as is the case I reported in class last night) and repetitive, and I'm getting increasingly tired WITH the idea that "I'm getting older and should not have to put UP with such industrious messing around"---rather like Maya last night when I said something about "doing something in ten years," and she says "I won't even BE here in ten years" and then reports that she felt in SUCH pain and frustration about it this afternoon that she debated not coming to class and even wanted her life to end, and she's not even much above 70, which means she'll not live to be 80, and I keep talking about my mid-life birthday because I'll be living to 105, and I'm not even halfway THERE yet and am feeling the frustration of not being able to do what I want, or getting the results that I want, or am increasingly, as in the dream, finding myself in the same place of berating myself for getting lost, or wasting time, and not doing what I WANT to do (establish a WRITING reputation for myself and make MONEY). And again I find that I've gotten near the end of the page, tuna warming in the oven, now at 8:35AM and close enough to the bottom to want to be able to print this out without having to print it out again, and thinking what I have to take to class to be most effective, dressing in clean jeans and a clean flannel shirt so that I won't smell, but my pot is getting more obvious, and I'm thinking about the partner-work, hoping I'll get some guy young and sexy that will end up being a lover, since that's one of the reasons I do ANYTHING these days: the SECOND of my prime objectives: get published and find a lover. Not bad, and my detours aren't PERMANENT yet, and I still have hope, which is the important thing, and the COMPUTER is certainly an aid to getting done what I WANT to get done WHEN I want it to get done!
11/18/87: The details were SO clear when I woke at 9:15, but they've shaded into vagueness by 9:55: There's a package or a schedule with four quadrants marked off on it, and either the package has four sets of stamps on it showing its travels through four countries (though there is an anomaly in that one set of stamps and cancellations in one quadrant shows that it originated in India while a second set of stamps and cancellations in an adjacent quadrant shows that it originated in Nepal) or the schedule has four time-slots on it showing that I should be doing two things at once for a short period of the afternoon. There were other details that indicated a trip, or happiness, or finding a lover, or getting a book published, but I've forgotten them now.
11/19/87: Two dreams seem to run CONCURRENTLY: 1) I'm standing (either a teacher or a student) in a large classroom that's playing "Twenty Questions" and I get a flash that my subject is "Ethan Frome." I announce that it's animal, and then as I prepare to receive the questions, I realize I don't know who WROTE the book or anything (like the age, nationality, or occupation) of the fictional person I've chosen (certainly I wouldn't have remembered the author as Edith Wharton, and Ethan a young American unhappily-married farmer). My embarrassment about my lack of knowledge of my subject popped up incongruously three or four times through the "running" of 2) I'm in a combination funhouse and art gallery: each artist has a tiny room in which s/he works, and the rooms are connected by ramps, twisting corridors, and changes of level that eventually become dangerous for the participants (is this based on my looking at the set for "Tamara" placed in some Armory, which article I read a few days ago?). First I'm attracted to a man who's cutting little plastic shapes, either furniture silhouettes or man-exercising patterns or picture- puzzle pieces, from colored plastic gels and gluing them onto canvas as a "painting," though I remark when I look close that the pieces he's chosen don't quite "fit" together, and the excess of glue he's used makes the construction very messy. Then there are a number of Orientals who add to the bizarreness of their art by sitting in patterned leotards and facial makeup that extends the color-patters of their tights up through their faces and hands. I want to find an exhibit that I'd liked before, but in doing so repeat my turns through some of the levels, frustrating me because I can't seem to find the right turn to lead to my desired goal. I climb up a ramp into the center of a room, stooping more and more as the ramp nears the ceiling, only to step off to one side, thinking how silly this entrance is. I'm walking up another bouncy walk, like a suspension bridge, and an old woman coming toward me loses her footing on the flexible-lathe flooring and pitches forward ludicrously onto her face, her shirt flipping up over the back of her head to reveal bulbous pink limbs encased like sausages in pick body-tights--everyone ignores her pratfall and passes her by to fend for herself, even though she might have been knocked unconscious. Then I descend a stairway with some people into an "environment" that looks like a rock-lined bunker, and as we reach the bottom of the stairs to "feel the atmosphere" in this prison-like tomb, yellow briquettes simulating a cave-in tumble down on us, tumbling us onto the floor, me against a wall up which I scramble to keep my head above the rocks falling from a reservoir above the entrance---as it goes through my head that it's a good thing there's no dust in the briquettes, or we'd be suffocated; that I'm glad I'm tall and strong because I can battle my way to the top of the heap and get out; that the cylindrical walls haven't been made strong enough, because I can feel them give in a cardboard flexibility when we fall against them, and I figure if I can't get out the regular way, I can just tear through the walls to give the briquettes more place to spread out so that I can crawl out on top of them; and that it must be a terrible job to clean up this mess for each new group of "visitors" to the underground "simulation." And every so often I'm drawn back to dream 1) to regret choosing a subject about which I know so little. Get this all down nicely before 10:30, still stuffed from my Brive meal last night.
11/16/87 (recorded 11/20/87): 1a) Filing cards, first is A - AAA, and there's more to go. 1b) Looking to expand "Einstein" in index, knowing that the see entries are relatively incomplete. 2) From 38-year-old "Apocalypse Now" Ranger, I'M leading young men across mock-battlefield, and SOME leap lightly from log to log, and I lead the way uphill through a parking lot---afterwards I go near dogs that bite my knuckles----and I KNOW it's my old "dream path to the old mines in the woods by way of the cliffs" again. 3) Women composing a song, wistfully, "Women in love (DO FA FA FAAAA); Women in love again (DO FA FA FA FA RE); Women in love (DO FA FA FAAAA)---in waterbed style (FA RE RE RE DO).
11/23/87: 6:15AM: Someone's driving a car back to NYC and it's LIKE I'm 9-10 years old and it's me and Mom and Dad and a 6-7 year old Rita in car! Leaves under trees are being "flicked" into paths as we wait outside car, as if by large running rats. Then TRAINS roar past on tracks (this is rather like outside Washington Irving's Sunnyside), and there's a news item that "fire in New Jersey nears New York," and that the spectators from the ballgame should be cleared out of the Holland Tunnel; tell all the trains to be observant.
11/25/87: Fragment: Black shoes curve and clasp my foot like mussel shells, and I try walking with them, wondering how durable over time they'd be.
11/27/87: 7AM: I'm riding with Vinnie Tomaselli (Mary's husband) in his car and I'm being VERY rude and pushy, and he says I'm HARMING myself and should CHANGE and get OUT of the car. I apologize and ask if he can bring two sport coats to work on Monday so I don't have to carry them (work = IBM, even though he works for DEC). He says OK and I get out TOO SOON at Avenue N going to 95th Avenue, and I search SUBWAY map, both sides, to put Avenue M and Avenue N and 95th Avenue (which is perpendicular) together to see where I am and where I have to go to get subway to get home. Later, Richard Otto offers me a body-slot, and then he offers me a BEER, and I wonder "Beer before or AFTER the body-session?"
12/3/87: I'm standing in a dance class, observing from a very distant corner as children rehearse in the center of the gymnasium-like room. Someone standing behind me says "That's not a boy, it's really a girl," and my point of view changes to that of a television camera on the floor, focussed up on this eight-year-old with a helmet of light-brown hair and a vaguely pear-shaped body in light beige tights. The shape of the body changes slightly as the body moves, so that I can't really tell whether it's male or female, but at such a young age it hardly seems to matter. There were other details that I wanted to remember, but I got out of bed at 9:30 and it's now 11:30 and memory's gone.
12/4/87: 1) Somehow I get the idea (from reading about ONE, Inc. in Omni yesterday?) of the word ONESWAY as One's Way AND as One Sway, for a consciousness-raising movement. 2) I'm looking at a muscle-slide and think I'd love to TOUCH the body, and raise my hand up to find that I can FEEL the flesh of his chest, and I caress his body and his cock and wake briefly VERY excited! 3) There's a dog that's been following me around in an apartment or a house on a farm: like a brown German shepherd with large moist eyes, and the dog's owner remarks that he's really TAKEN to me. I look at the dog as he comes out from under the kitchen table (which is covered with a cheesecloth tablecloth) and laugh to see my wristwatch's stretch-band entangled in the hairs under its neck, and when I take it from its neck, the dog GIGGLES, causing laughter in me and the owner. I know that I'm leaving and the dog will miss me very much. 4) In the first part of the sequence I don't remember very well, I've gone to a counter in a department store to ask, "I'd like to ask some questions about telescopes," and he brings out large scopes for me to look at. In the second part I RETURN to the same counter and AGAIN say "I'd like to talk about telescopes" but this time it's somehow DIRTY and REVOLTING, but I'll be BUYING one.
12/7/87: 1) There's an investment group at a broker's: guy is selling EVERYTHING, while the broker is pointing to an $8600 balance in ONE stock, saying this is still to be saved, but everything else the guy invests in goes bust, and he's frantically trying to recoup his losses with smaller and smaller amounts to work with. 2) "Blacks wash cleaner" is the gist of this advertising campaign, and a black woman (like the dancers yesterday at the Alvin Ailey?) is lying under a brown-canvas blanket while I'm putting one large hand on her stomach and soaping up a sponge which I wipe down the front of her body, trying not to make it look sensual but merely CLEANSING, and she rolls over so that I can soap her back, to further the impression that "just one wipe keeps black clean." I wake and take VERY scratchy notes, and don't record them till 1PM 12/8.
12/10/87: Other fragments forgotten, but the main dream seems to stem from seeing Don Mongiovi on Tuesday night (strange, since this is THURSDAY!): I'm sitting in the rear right corner of a movie house, maybe a porno house, and the guy next to me is openly jerking off. I start on myself, and he moves right in, leaning over so we can nuzzle as we stroke each others' wet cocks. He flips right over to start doing me, and I glance over to the aisle from my brightly-lit seat, and see people passing by totally unconcerned with our activities, so I'm relieved that this place is so open. Then we're standing in the lobby, but the lobby is near the stage, where drummers are sterilizing their drum-heads and sticks by pouring boiling water over them, and they're packing up since it's about midnight and their show is over, but they're coming back tomorrow. I'm concerned that the young guy next to me will see that I'm too old in the light, but he doesn't seem to be concerned, and I think, "That's what musicians are like." They're talking about their schedules for the next performance, and I'm being looked over by others in the group, and I feel happy that I've found this place as a sex-haven.
12/15/87: 8:40AM: Joe Easter and I are at a gym or baths and we're sitting next to men like an adult Joe and Chuck Levigni from Akron. Joe and Joe are stroking their cocks and others are saying "Ag, they're gay," but no one seems REALLY to mind, and it's all stiffness and eroticism and pure pleasure.
12/17/87: Only a fragment remembered of babies screaming in a peculiar rhythm, so that when I wake and see the phone-light on, I figure I might have incorporated the ringing of the living-room phone into the dream.
12/18/87: Only a fragment about getting VERY irritated with Spartacus about something but the details quite lost when I got up at 10:05 and it's now 12:20.
12/21/87: I'm sensing some sort of lump between my left upper jaw and my cheek, and when I get a double mirror in the bathroom I can see that there's some sort of angling slope off one of my teeth (looking rather like the photographs of the Bleeding-Tooth Shell that I looked at Friday night [but this is Monday morning!] for the Omni puzzle) toward one of my gold caps. There's nothing wrong with the slope itself, except that it slopes toward a growth like an enormous gumboil along the upper cleft between my gum and my cheek on the left. I work at it and work at it and can feel the thread holding it in place (sesso-blast from the puzzle-work last night??) wearing thinner and thinner, and finally it comes out in a lump (more like something I'd gotten stuck between my teeth, like the popcorn-shells last night, than something that's GROWING there) about the size, shape, and color of a very large wad of chewed bubble gum. When I examine it, it's PACKAGED in a way, with Cyrillic letters that I transliterate into something like Globofibroma (from my work on the Indexing Handbook yesterday?), though there's a sense of relief in that I know that it's not malignant, that it came out OK, and that it probably won't come back again. New moon and shortest night of year for deepest darkness of year??
12/23/87: I'm visiting some kind of reconstruction like Williamsburg, at one point watching a play or opera from a very high balcony, standing right in the front against a somewhat rickety railing, so that every so often I get worried about the stability of the railing and move back to view the stage through the lower parts of the supports. Someone like Joan Pankosky is standing next to me (though I don't talk to her), dressed in the period with a long skirt and a bonnet with ribbons tied around her head. The play seems to be in dress rehearsal, because it's spectacular, though portions are repeated again and again, with lines of people in a final chorus coming forward in lines toward the front of the stage again and again. There's another segment in the room where I'm staying, something about claiming it, or packing up to leave from it, which is very foggy now.
12/25/87: I'm walking outside in hard-driving snow, and in crossing a street I find that I'm wading deeper and deeper into icy sludge (though my boots seem to be working: I can't feel the cold through them), and find myself on a precipice over which I have to scramble on enormous blocks of concrete, only to find my way blocked at each side by perpendicular barriers of cement blocks falling into pools of ice. I should have listened to the weather reports which were saying that "you couldn't get downtown from here." Wake hoping it's not a prediction dream of some future storm this "supposedly worst-ever" winter.
12/26/87: Having been so filled with Sherryl's dinner on Christmas Day that I went to bed at 10PM, I woke just after midnight to write this dream: I'm going to a class in an adult education program, and after the last of MY class's sessions I go to the next classroom's class out of curiosity: I'd read handouts that he talked of large numbers, and it listed sentence by sentence: he talks of "10's, 100's, 1000's, 100,000's, and of numbers so large that groups begin to titter with amusement." It goes up to millions and billions and googols. I sit in right-hand side-desk and look toward the teacher making idle jokes under his blue beret, and I envy his savoir-faire. Then at 2:35 I wake to record the second dream: I'm in a crowded movie theatre (the forward section, I can see, is deluxe, in light, in chevron-shaped sofa-rows, costing much more money), and an Iranian couple behind me are harassing my right-hand neighbor by a) putting talcum in his hair which he accuses of being heroin so that he'll be arrested while traveling for smuggling drugs, b) trying to take his umbrella, at which I really use lots of pressure to PRY the old woman's fingers away from his umbrella handle, and which she whispers dire threats to me under her breath, saying I won't get away with it, and finally we make so much noise that the management stops the film and attendants come around (asking "Are they reelists?" of the tormentors, as if that were some religious sect or film club) to try to settle the brouhaha, and the manager's voice comes over the PA saying that the film will be rewound, and everyone clusters in the open aisle in front of us to testify that HE wasn't causing the problem, so I can sit back, knowing that my support isn't even needed. The film HAD been showing a sequence where pairs of planes lift off the ground in graceful flight, the lead one containing the camera which films the following one rising slowly off the ground, and then when the contretemps is solved, the film re-starts at that point, with the planes rising off the ground, and then the third dream starts, without transition, that we're all somehow IN the planes in a "flight of imagination", but just soaring in the sky in some sort of simulation (maybe this was from the write-up about the new ride at Disneyland where space-travelers sit in a small auditorium that moves to give the semblance of traveling through space) in which we're sailing like followers of Peter Pan OUTSIDE of any plane, to some cross-country destination, looping through trees, whizzing down into valleys, all "flying" in a "group" yet having PRIVATE adventures, and I slide to the bottom of a V-shaped valley and other slide down to rest around me. Girl on my left is putting chicken dinner into a microwave that appeared on a slope in front of us, and I pull out a "slab" which turns out to be a frozen lobster dinner, and I open it and it's a reconstituted frozen lobster steak that has a strip of fish-scale purple running across the middle of it. I ask her if I can share her cooking cycle and she says yes and I SQUEEZE my tray onto the tiny top shelf, which looks like a too-small freezer compartment, taking off some of the pats of butter which had been part of her chicken dinner, and when the door closes the butter squishes around and is crushed and melts over my lobster rather than over her chicken, but either she doesn't notice or doesn't mind. As we're waiting 10 minutes (that's how low she says the cycle is) I ask "You mean EVERYONE's now eating somewhere?" and people more experienced at this simulation look at me boredly and say "That, or something ELSE," and, I continue, "We still all all arrive at the same time? (to keep the impression of traveling in one wave, or on one plane)" and they wearily nod "Yes." There are other sections of soaring over canyons and forests in this "free-form flight" that I don't remember the details of, but it's funny that not until I'm TYPING this on 12/27 do I wonder if it might not reflect a MEMORY of an "astral flight" at night??? The next sequence is in real LIFE: I pee at 4AM and go to the window to see if it's snowing and the air looks greenish, and I wonder if the elements I'm looking at didn't rush to assemble themselves, as if they whispered as I came close to the window, "Behave, he's about to look OUT"? [Had a flash of the same sort of thought as I exited the steamroom at the gym: did all these people I'm looking at suddenly appear out of nowhere to fill my vision as I needed them to fill my vision?] And may have had yet another dream, but didn't record it then.
12/27/87: Many fragments: from thinking that Enoma... (which turned out to be Onomatopoiea) in the puzzle last night: a class situation or training session in which students had to find backward spellings for technical terms as a learning device; from the photo-caption in the Times about a woman whose pelvis had been pitted, proving she carried her baby to term: a donkey is so VERY pregnant that she's humping forward and hitting the front of the fetal sac against a stable railing, thinking that the baby should be forced through the front of the stomach, rather than out through the rear of the birth channel, and I have the idea to get some sort of sling to hold the baby UP far enough so that it can be expelled from the right HEIGHT, rather than slumping so low. Finally, I'm in charge of some kind of tourist group going through an enormous factory for tchatchkas, and the owner is annoyed my group isn't buying more, when the problem is that he refuses to hire anyone good to help him produce the goods. There's a pathetic attempt at displaying his manufacturing process, but as we step onto something with plates like a horizontal, or gently dipping, escalator, it moves much too fast past a plastics-extrusion machine that forms the front of a toy bomber, the nose of which has to be cut off, the wings added, and paint applied all in a few seconds to get us past looking at the process, and I suggest that a small CAR should be produced, with people painting the body one color and the top another, which would take a SMALL item THROUGH a definite process, rather than taking a LARGE item through PART of a process with a lot of explaining to do. Then some of his workmen are trying to re-round tubes of acrylic paint by hammering on the narrow edges of the collapsed tubes, clearly a difficult and painful process, and I suggest they put the tubes in a VISE to squeeze them with a much greater and steadier pressure. At first the stupid Spanish foreman is as obtuse as Spartacus can be sometimes, but then he understands and appreciates my suggestion. By this time my group is doing late-night calisthenics on the barn-floor, waiting for the bus to take them back to the hotel at 10PM, and again I want to suggest to the owner of the plant that rather than kicking around small metal buttons for souvenirs, he should plan some more interesting exhibits so that my tourists would WANT to buy more. Yet he just doesn't want to delegate authority. At the end I feel I have almost as much responsibility to HIM as to my tourists.
12/28/87: 10AM: 1) Odd TV ads of GREAT casualness, like showing a simple room with the star on the EXTREME RIGHT in a chair, saying two words about the product as the camera lazily pans left and everyone looks at the Chinese sitting in a chair, expecting something from him, but he doesn't move. 2) I have an IDEA for an ad, so I have an appointment to see an advertising manager for a company, who's rather cute and desperate for ideas. I recall that I left my "square" in my overcoat pocket, so I go toward the bedroom where I've left my coat (he hangs back shyly), and at the door see people fussing about inside, so I ask a woman if she'll throw it out to me, which she does, but in the flurry of arms and pockets I can see it's not there---and I'm just about to ask for my shoes and socks under the bed, but she's so frantic I don't trust her to do it without getting annoyed, so I figure I can just sneak in when the woman who she's making the room up for goes to sleep. 3) I figure the ad can be based on the square in this way: the left vertical stands for the cigarette: Lucky Strike, so up the left vertical is LS, then tracing the square around to the right is very simply M, F, and T, for Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco, which is as elementary (and complete, and simple) as the four sides of a square. 4) After a bit of fog, the square somehow symbolized some kind of ENERGY INTAKE that Marty Sokol needs, and I'm in his apartment, which is a large new apartment along Riverside Drive with a long hallway of glass overlooking the river (or is this Don Maloof's apartment, which I've been calling to arrange for Cellar in the Sky tonight?), and I'm washing his windows, which project is going nicely for some of them, getting them transparently clean, except for one toward the right which is getting iced up as I wash it, and there are smudges UNDER the ice, which vigorous work with the rag manages to clean off at the same time, but then the ice gets thicker, and I can feel my fingertips strain as I pull DOWN with the cleaning cloth and pull a whole SLAB of ice off the glass, which seems oddly dry and somehow discolored, as if it's very old, but as I rub the rag over the glass I feel that it's still solid, and the trapezoidal discoloration isn't a separate small inclusion which is about to fall out. But as I clean the next one to the right, some of the bottom of the glass flops in the wind from outside, and it turns into somewhat flexible leaded glass which flaps lazily back and forth like a curtain, pliable about the gum-like lead links, but there's a rectangular piece missing from the bottom, and something will have to be done about that before the glass will be tight against the wind. Then I realize that he's gotten DIVORCED, and this will be energy FREED for him, so it's not energy that he's being GIVEN that's symbolized by the square, but energy that's been directed from a now-dead area of WASTE. The colors of the windows somehow remind me now of the aqua-colors of the incredible costume of Turandot at the Met on Saturday night.
12/31/87: 1) Sherryl and I are in back of a car, and I stretched out NAKED on top of her reclining body, humping my ass so that my cock was the uppermost part of my total nudity, and Joyce Alaya puts her long-haired HEAD as if to rest right down in that area, though she's started by aiming more toward my chest. 2) Summer-camp evaluation shows that I'm NOT QUITE ready recommends that I should transfer into another unit (?). 3) In ROTC class, the cadets pass a bucket back and forth and later find that it's filled with BARF. A cute instructor tells me to write an essay on "just when in inventing a pornographic story I start to get HARD." There was some sort of chorus line of soldiers in the front of the classroom, demonstrating something, and the instructor's cock started to rise, and my note says something like "I felt black's bite and felt GOOD," though I don't remember enough to transcribe it more clearly.