DREAMS FROM 1988
1/1/88: I'm applying for a quiz program and learn I will be accepted if I haven't been on three network programs so far. I don't think the test of the "dice" program will count, nor will "To Tell the Truth," so I qualify. On the bulletin boards at a company, lots of cards from "Karen" are displayed. I end with the cryptic notes "Get book?" and "Back at 6:30 and HUG": I don't REMEMBER!
1/2/88: A real sword-and-sorcery epic! Only fragments remain: 1) I'm about to make a second trip out to a distant lake, but I know the way so well I don't have to pack food for the trip, since I can be back by darkness. I have some secret source of power that I have to tap which will let me rise to leadership over compatriots who haven't the same source of power. 2) A large group of previously-met women are in prison, asking for sexual relief in their misery, and one says, "Milady X has not the service of her lower parts, but her shoulders are still most serviceable, as I recall from twenty years past." I got the idea they somehow masturbated against or between her shoulders to get sexual orgasm and relief. Another elegantly tall woman, with swirling blonde hair like on a science-fiction pulp-cover, asks about her supply of Furio-C, or furio-SEE, which is some sort of strength or sexual empowerer. The AIR of the dreams, however, was of an expensive movie, maybe influenced by the ad I read in Omni last night about the "Gaming Universal," a booklet about Play-by-Mail Adventuring, showing a somewhat elderly teenager being propelled by a cloud into a futuristic world and welcomed by a Conan-barbarian on one side and a Flash Gordon-modernist on the other. Could certainly be interesting sex!
1/5/88: at 9:25AM: 1) I'm handed a red cube that "sags" ominously: a silk-wrapped wire-frame cube with something heavier and smaller and "granular" inside, and I feel a foreboding. 2) I'm playing with a dog that's too BIG, and it lays FLAT on its back more like a HUMAN than a dog (probably from recently- seen paintings in Omni).
1/12/88: I'm sitting in one of the first rows watching a very painful performance, obviously patterned on the intense physical suffering of "The Singing Detective" that I watched on TV last night, and the broken leg of "The Day of the Locust": a ballet dancer has had an abscess removed from the top of one of his thighs, and he tries to do his former choreography, but he has to be supported by dancers on both sides (is this also a reflection of Dennis's sex, reported last night, with his armpits supported by his Corsican Pirate's legs?) and his movements are constrained and painful-appearing. As a finale he comes out upside down, positioned like a dumbbell above the head of a not-too-strong dancer who seems to have his hands RIGHT ON the spot on the thigh that's causing the trouble, while the recuperator maintains an impossible upside-down split, and the walk offstage through a doorway so low that everyone worries whether the double-decked performer will clear the top of the sill. The audience prepares to burst into incredible applause (fragments of the ice- skating program here too?) to acclaim the determination of the injured dancer.
1/18/88: I'm going up in the elevator at 309 W. 57th, except that I'm pushing the button for 15 and there's a floor above that---AND the walls of the elevator are transparent, so I can see the orangeish bricks and black-painted steel girders and looping elevator cables rush down as we move upwards slowly. Some man gets off on the floor below and the elevator door doesn't close for a long time; as I realize he's stuffed something into the rubber door-close bumpers and get irate, he comes out of the john with hardly an apology. When I get to my apartment I apologize for the mess (empty potato chip bags, piles of rubbish, dirty dishes everywhere) to the Chinese woman (like the newscaster Kaity Tong) and her white husband who are my guests for the evening. Then others from the hall are in my apartment, and I ask "What are YOU doing here," and a pretty woman like Jerri Sokol, with wing-flaring hair, says, "I must talk to you about----" and the rest is lost. I go to close my door on OTHERS entering, blacks and children, but turn to find everyone's vanished! One couple is sitting on the floor under the window talking, and another small group is out on the grass-covered terrace that's like a field in the sky. I stare out trying to recognize them, thinking "First he chases everyone out, now he wonders where everyone's gone" of me, as some other onlooker would. Odd!
1/20/88: 1) I'm out in the country in the evening, watching a spectacular display of UFOs along with a large number of other people. There are two classes of them: a) Low-flying white sizzlers come from behind us and we stare forward to see where they land only yards from where we're standing on a riverbank. They make a sound like sparklers as they zizzle past, and look like very narrow neon tubes surrounded with electrical-fiery discharges. It's very much like looking at the highway sequence in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." b) high-flying pink "traditional" saucers soar through the sunset- looking sky above us, majestically sweeping out wakes in the sky in formations of three little ones in a wedge before a larger trailing one. We're not alarmed; more than anything else there's a sense of "at last they've appeared" running through most of the silent observers. 2) I'm in some sort of sales office for real estate, and the videos along the walls come alive with a set of specials: cliff-top sites of unparalleled views. They're available in almost every state overlooking 300- and 400-foot cliffs, though some of them rise to the peak of 1500 feet like the ones in Minnesota or some other north-central state---where I question there are ANY cliffs that high at all. Some of the slides or videos show grassy tops crumbling over the side of fertile-loamy red earth, and I can't imagine how they'd sink foundations that would be solid; it seems to me that buying such apartments would risk having them slide down the cliff-side at the first heavy rains and winds.
1/21/88: 8AM: 1) I'm eating LUSCIOUS toffee-caramels coated with chocolate so soft I know it's been out in the sun. 2) I'm getting an "enlightenment worker" (somewhat better than Jehovah's Witness) on the phone to let me sign up for some advanced work outside of class in my apartment, and when he arrives (in a room that reminds me of my Columbia University John Jay Hall room), Joe Safko starts talking to him and HE signs, and then the worker has to leave, so I sign the sheet on the clipboard MYSELF. Then I go to a combination kitchen-bathroom down a windowed hall and use my finger to meticulously wipe the over-slopping edges of a white jelly that's been applied (as a caulk, as my bathtub was caulked yesterday?) to the frames of the windows, which are like the windows facing 57th Street in THAT apartment, and I lick my fingers, so that I "excuse" my behavior as just being HUNGRY (is this saying something about my meatless apartment?). 3) Then as I'm walking back to my room, I pass people coming down the hall toward me who chatter as they move to my left to pick up their car, which they parked in the adjoining room (even though we're on the third or fourth floor of the Columbia-like building), and I know they're merely working in the building, not participating in the spiritual exercises, as I am. Then someone else is walking toward me, and I have a distinct impression of the neatness of my closed three-button jacket over my vest of my suit, knowing that the closure is nicely draped rather than being pulled to the sides by my overweight tummy. Then there's a) the path on the front-right that descends to the lake past the summer cottages, and I realize that I can go down there to eat lunch (rather like the realization of the canoe for lunch at the Rhinebeck Center on the Labor Day before last); and b) looking to the rear-right and slightly UP the hill, I can see the bungalows like on Dietz Avenue, but at the top of a slight hill (maybe more like the two-story houses around John Crano's house), which gush forth torrents of water that I know are the runoff either from a flood, a rainfall, or a water-main break, regardless of the fact that these houses, as I realize in the dream, are at the TOP of the hill, so they shouldn't be inundated before the entire VALLEY floods; and c) I've gotten up (this is still in the dream) and threaded through my memory to list all the facets of the dream I've had to far, and write them down on an index-card (exactly as I do by 8:10 AM, when I'm getting to the last part of the note), ending up writing very small into the lower right-hand corner, just as I'd done before bedtime for the note on what to do next with the Indexing Handbook, and just as I'm finishing typing from at this moment, which is 9:35AM,cooking soup.
1/24/88: Two dreams of fabulous parties: 1) Dennis and I are poking into little holes in the ground around Chambers Street until we move farther south, almost to South Ferry, and go down a rabbit-hole to find an enormous cavern as an entrance to what must be one of the most mysterious and romantic estates yet undiscovered in New York City. This "antechamber" is empty, but its lofty spherical ceiling glitters with operatic stalagtites, loses itself in smoky distances at the base of the walls---actually the shape of the room is more like being inside an enormous blister---and for a floor has a maze of gate-like fences or trenches like the labyrinth in "Labyrinth" or a profusion of the Chinese-style fences newly erected outside the about-to-be Chinese restaurant where the scruffy stationery shop once was. We sure do look forward to this party! 2) We board a boat so closely docked in a lune-shaped dock that we don't know we've descended to a boat until it rocks back and forth gently in the water as we step down into it. The owners of the boat know us AND the hosts of the party we're looking for, and I feel pleased with our connectedness. We're directed to a yet-larger boat at the very end of the wharf, and when we board, there are people that I know who are about to introduce us to notables like Elizabeth Taylor and Malcolm Forbes. This dream is not so detailed in splendor as the first, but there's an even greater feeling of "belonging" and "being in." Up at 10:30 and transcribe this at11AM.
1/26/88: 1) Fragment: water or wind is coming out of or going into a hole in a house or a dike, and it's somehow significant that I know that as part of the history of the site, so that I can prepare for a coming storm. 2) I'd passed by a theater in a park like Central Park near the end of the first act of a reading by Mary Martin. Since the audience was so enthusiastic with applause, I decided to move into the theater at intermission and see if I couldn't claim one of the folding chairs that appeared to be empty on the stage itself, or at least a place on the concrete seats that rose in a low (5-6 row) amphitheater around the plain concrete stage. The lights go up for the second act and she seems very young (or else skillfully made up), and performs well (I'm amazed in the dream by the fact that this is just a READING, yet she appears to have MEMORIZED the book she's reciting, leading me to wonder if she doesn't have an eidetic memory for scripts) until she pauses for the next words, then substitutes words that don't really follow. She had a sort of stage-manager companion onstage as a sort of supernumerary, but he steps into her pauses with the text she needs next. When she does that a second time, he remarks not unkindly "You left out a page," as if pages had stuck together when she was reading the book to memorize it. Since the omission is only 2-3 sentences, it's obviously a children's book that's being presented. When he joins in a second time, he's acting more than she had, and I wondered when I woke whether I wasn't being influenced by watching John Hurt on Henson's "Storyteller" on tape last night. 3) (which I'd recorded first, as 8:30AM, and then turned over and the other two pieces flashed almost entire into my head---rather like clearing out what I'd had to do with the Indexing Handbook which led to the NEW things to do for the handbook when I woke this morning) Someone NEW is observing me in my bathroom as I stand before my mirror. I "wipe away" with cupped fingers what may be the remains of Vaseline from my eyelids, saying as I do "I don't need this; my skin is naturally oily." He says, "You DO have shiny hair," and I say "THAT's natural; I just have to shampoo it every two days." In retrospect he somewhat reminds me of a pudgy guy like David Feld, but he's young and attentive, reminding me again that I'm supposed to be searching for a new "significant other" and I'm not doing very well at it. Getting to bed just after 3AM each of these mornings and waking at 8:30, too tired to get up, but then resting very quickly and being filled full of ideas (interesting how I put that into the PASSIVE, "being filled full," rather than the ACTIVE, "filling full") that pull me out of bed with only 6 or 6 1/2 hours sleep--which would be good if it got me tired earlier to so I could bed and get up reasonably earlier.
2/1/88: 1) There's a review of a new Spielberg film in some mansion, woman urges us in (someone vaguely like Julia Hoover, new bodyworker?) to screening room for "Phantom Ox," a film about a marauder; killed dog is suspended off the ground and blood from its muzzle drips into the camera lens, and there's a fragment of audience reaction, saying "That's a bit much, isn't it?" 2) Carson or Cavett (?) before war, host kills giraffes, attracted to naked ominous officer, and woman says "See his eyes? He must have been gay." [This is typed from a VERY scrawled note on 2/4, and most of it's totally gone from memory.]
2/6/88: Two fragments: 1) At an elegant Long Island dinner party for the VERY rich, people talk of others who are "less well off." 2) I'm driving a PACKED bus in India, just JAMMED with people, and I go through a very narrow passage (view is from ahead, as from a television camera) and then the engine fails, and I try to get it started again. Pity I've forgotten many of the details.
2/16/88: One thing about having a cold: I have INCREDIBLY trippy dreams: 1) First I'm "moving in and out" of some sort of consciousness-raising experiment in an old house in the country. I'd signed up for possibly an hour's introduction, or maybe even a morning's experience, knowing little about the actual CONTENT of the class or course I was looking at. There were two or three teachers or guides or practitioners in the room with me, and at the start they must have invited me to lie on a table in the middle of the room, because at the time of the dream I'd just gotten UP from the table, not knowing if I'd been there for five minutes or two hours, not knowing if they'd "done the experience" or if it hadn't started; I was woozy and dreamy (rather like the washed-out feeling associated with the cold I have) and tried to get data and information about where I was and where I had been. But they were being gently evasive, supportive of my state, but noncommunicative to my brain. It may have been in THIS phase of the dream that I thought of myself walking toward a bridge across a river with John A., thinking either we WERE upstate somewhere or I was REMEMBERING a time when we were upstate somewhere--it was a place closely similar to Cold Spring on the Hudson with Joyce Alaya last fall-- and as we walked toward the river I remarked that all the BLUES I was looking at now seemed SO blue and dominant, as if the river had always been low before and now it was overflowing with water, or that the sky filled more angular displacement in my vision, so that more of my vision was filled with the color blue, and John smiled and made some noncommital remark. 2) Then there seemed to be a break in the "schedule" in the old house, so I walked outside and looked up at the old red-brick facade and round turreted tower in which the "experience room" was located, which I could recognize by the semi-circular shape of the outside wall and the position and construction of the large curved window, and then turned away from the house to look over the countryside: the house seemed to be on a slight rise looking over a little old village. I walked down the front path to the street and was surprised to recognize, in front of me and covering the area to the front and left of my position at the top of the steps at the entrance to the grounds of the house, a place I'd been a few months or a few years earlier: a large estate which had been converted to a Consciousness Center something like the one at Rhinebeck, only not as rustic, or the one at Stony Point for Kubler-Ross, only much larger, though I thought that through the college-campus-like dormitory-type buildings surrounding the entrance quadrangle I could look across fields to see the bungalow-type buildings that housed four or six people in which my previous experience THERE had occurred in. I walked unchallenged through the entrance gate and saw a small group of people in an alcove, one of whom looked like the unpleasant Barry Lenner who immediately departed to an inner room, and one of the older women who looked like Midge Hillsinger came over to me and said, "Hi, Bob, I'm Hedda Nussbaum" (though she wasn't really Hedda Nussbaum as I remember her pugilist's nose and punched-in face from recent TV coverage of child-beating, but more like the Helga, or whatever her name was, the older woman in Claude Underwood's exercise class so many years ago with John), and tried to lead me through THIS place's offerings. I started in a smallish room with six or eight people sitting around on the floor, in a sort of intermission from THEIR class. A few of the women were EXTREMELY pretty: one was meticulously made up like a movie-star of the 40s, and I thought I recognized her pencil-line eyebrows and large twinkling orbs pushing through spiky jet-black eyelashes as being those of Hedy Lamarr or Joan Bennett. Another woman wore brilliant-red necklaces of cut gemstones, another wore a lavish satin-shiny dress, and when the pretty- eyed woman kept staring at me, as if to entice me to her or into the class, I reminded myself, in the dream, that this was like a more-elegant version of the "New Age Dinner" that Dennis and Mary and I attended where I was being obviously cruised by the bruised prettiness of Cintra from Portugal. For a short period of time I moved through the people on their break, trying to engage strangers in conversation to tell me what this experience was supposed to prove, or be about, but by quick yet undisturbing transitions we were sitting in a schoolroom environment, at desks in rows, at the head of each of which was a "secretary-coordinator" who seemed at a glance to have taken this course before and were retaking it free in exchange for their services as "squad leaders" of the 6-8 people mostly filling the row of 10 seats behind them, being directed by two or three facilitators standing about in the front of the room. I tried getting to talk with people in front or to the sides of me, and the "class" started informally enough, but I feared it would soon fall into a disciplined "heads forward, no talking" format which would trap me into the session before I really found out if I wanted to stay or not. The fact that I hadn't paid anything yet also entered my mind, though the thought that I was now AWOL for a long time from the "old house across the road" didn't enter my mind at ALL. But I didn't have time to worry in THIS dream because without transition I was in dream 3) walking through a crowded street in what I assumed to be Bangkok (is this because Mark and Arnie were asking me about it on distant February 9?), attracted to the outside of an enclosure that seemed to present rows of temple sculptures down the walls of large bare rooms inside a narrow entranceway. I moved closer to see more of the sculptures visible to the right and left of the doorways, and a small woman said "May I help you?" I took her at first to be a hostess from the museum, but as I moved into the entranceway, I could see tiny Thai natives moving toward restaurant-tables at the extreme left of the large space: it was a restaurant, with tables surrounding perhaps a large dusty wooden central dance floor, and the "sculptures on exhibit" were merely decor for this dine-and-dance establishment for natives and tourists. "Did you want to eat?" she (or another passing waitress) inquired in English, and I was happy to find someone who spoke my language. "No, I just wanted to look at the statues. How long has this place been open?" "Over twenty years." "Oh, I don't think I saw this fifteen years ago, when I was here last [though in fact it was 1971, or almost 17 years ago]" though I started "recognizing" smaller dining areas raised on rickety wooden boxes on which were attached table-leg holders that "clicked" the plastic-like table-legs into place so they wouldn't skitter from platform-cube to platform- cube. We could have eaten here before, I thought. Then she led me to a side room from which I could see an enormous amphitheater, with the crowded stands facing me filled with masses of figures clad in either white or yellow coats. I thought this was much bigger than anything I'd remembered from my previous trip, and I asked her how the patterns of colors in the stands were formed. "Oh, we give them their coats with their seats" (as I'd heard was done in the Calgary Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony this Saturday). Through intervening hordes of people, I could see two black elephants racing neck-and-neck down the sand filling the center of the amphitheater, and other enormous space-filling spectacles waited to be performed. "I never saw that before." Then we were walking over a narrow elevated wooden bridge: either this was an extended theme park or we were in some suburb of the city, and she took the chance in the closeness to remark, "Would you like to change money?" I brightened because I was aware, when debating eating inside, that I'd just arrived and hadn't exchanged any of my dollars yet, and that she might be a good entry into the black-market system, though the thought immediately followed that she'd start with a very low rate of exchange, so I'd have to take a chance and ask either an elevator operator (as in Santiago, Chile) or a shopkeeper (as in India) to find what a higher rate of exchange might be. Then we were squeezing into a taxi that already had a small woman sitting on the right of the back seat; I was next to her, then an acquaintance of the first woman rushed up and settled in to my left, with the first woman on my far left, and the taxi started slowly through the teeming streets. I looked out the back window to see a hoarding (having read the word last night in "Isis Unveiled") advertising an American silent film, though it was by a modern playwright like Rabe or Babe or van Italie, and it had a few stars that the women didn't know that I could describe to them. The woman on my right was becoming very chummy, the woman on my near left was talking incessantly, and the first woman took the liberty to tickle the bottom of my foot, which was somehow now unshod, and I said "Get out" as a way of demanding her to "Stop that." She drew back in hurt surprise, saying "That's very RUDE," and it occurred to me that her English was imperfect enough to lead her to think I meant "Get out of the taxi," which I didn't mean (yet), and I was thinking of the proper words to explain myself to her when I rose to a groggy consciousness out of the dreams completely. In the semi-sleep state it came to me that I was sprawled across the back seat of the taxi, that the three women probably knew each other and had been planning to ambush some rich American tourist and get him where they could rob them. There had been sexual innuendoes made throughout the encounter, but I hadn't yet told them I was gay. If I was barefoot, by this time my wallet may also have been extracted from whatever suit pocket it was in (I seemed to be wearing my Brooks Brothers gray) and I could be penniless already. Then I lay for a moment in bed thinking over the elaborate scenic and visual details in each of the three dreams, then got out of bed at 10 to start typing at 10:10AM and only finish now just after 11.
2/17/88: Another fever-dream, but this seemingly the basis for a plot for a new novel, or at least series of short stories: I'm tottering on foot while walking over a cross between the top of a braced-girder bridge (and just now, when I'm searching for the proper name of the type of bridge I'm thinking of, I think "Try the Eleventh Edition of EB" and go find the proper volume, and open the book AT ONCE to the section on bridges, and SEE the type of bridge whose name I'm looking for THRU [i.e. on the other side] the back of the exact page I opened to!) and a welded- metal breakwater. I want to get off, get to shore, and I look down to see various lines of railroad tracks that have been constructed along this breakwater, and am just debating jumping down to one of the tracks when I hear the voices of hard-hatted engineers working nearby, and one says to me "Better just hang on," and he flips a switch to open a kind of drawbridge structure on which I'm standing, so that the metal beneath my feet begins to rotate along the circumference of a circle that goes down and out over the water. I scramble for a handhold as my "floor" becomes a "wall," and I find a protruding rectangular-section tongue of metal about a foot wide and two or three inches thick that I can hang onto as this tongue swings down from about 45 degrees above horizontal to about 45 degrees below horizontal in about 4-5 seconds. As it swings down toward straight-down, I find there is a hollow cylinder at the end of the tongue, like the empty receptacle for a hinge-pin at the end of a hinge-flange (phone Joe Easter now at 8:30 AM to find the technical terms I'm looking for and there's no answer), into which I can place two or three fingers to hold myself up. But a locking-plate is slowly lowering into position down along my supporting tongue so that I have to remove first one pair of fingers, then a second pair of fingers, until I can't hold on with only one pair of fingers and I let go---to find myself on the floor (or below the floor) on the bottom of a boat. I stare up at someone on a bed above me (this probably stems from Johnny Carson's joke last night about lying in bed sick with a cold and seeing his reflection in the mirror on his ceiling--- except that he doesn't have a mirror on his ceiling, there's a guy sunbathing on his skylight!), and then I'm crawling on my hands and knees through a cabin on the lowest desk of an enormous yacht, looking at the top of a tiny shipboard desk-vanity to see cosmetics, perfume bottles, a tiny tray filled with local coins, a small "booklet" of once-folded banknotes, and a colored-bead necklace that I associate with the one around the neck of the beautiful Joan-Bennett woman in my dream LAST night. As I'm getting to my feet I see a woman in her bed that I take to be a secretary or a low-level research assistant writing notes under a small night-table lamp. She barely notices me as she asks "Where's your crash helmet?" to indicate she's aware of, and not panicked by, my involuntary arrival in, and passage through, her cabin. I have to declare my presence to someone official, and when I exit her cabin I find myself behind a uniformed (short-sleeved khakis) plumpish man like a younger Donald Pleasence swinging a tiller back and forth: I must be on the stern of the ship. I try to declare my presence to Pleasance, but he closes his eyes and shakes his head and goes into an endless blather: "Since I'm on-duty steering the ship it's not permitted to me to talk to anyone because I have to devote my full attention to the matter at hand, so you'll have to go over there to the Captain and declare your presence because I'm not permitted to talk to anyone because......" I begin to feel trapped in cuts from "Alice in Wonderland." I wait respectfully just outside the group of three or four women clustered about the Captain (and owner?) of the yacht as a shot-glass containing a few dozen round wooden toothpicks is being passed around. As each woman takes a toothpick and moves out of the circle around the Captain, I take a step forward to be stopped by the shot-glass being shoved at me by a woman who'd just taken a toothpick, who says "Don't worry about it, just take a toothpick." I'm torn between a feeble protest of my nonbelongingness and a simple gesture of acquiescence. "This whole thing," she continues, waving her hand vaguely to indicate the yacht and all who sail on her, "is about Luck, anyway; that's obviously why you're here." I wake at this moment, but continue the dream to include a hand being placed on my shoulder as I sit in a wicker deck-chair, trying to recover my composure, and I know, not by the voice but by the pressure of the hand, that my father (not my real-life father, but my fictional dream-character's father) is onboard also. I know without turning that he's a compact man the size of Julie Lieber, wearing a cookie-duster mustache and thick-lensed glasses. I continue my waking elaboration of the dream-situation by noting that the aim of the owner- Captain of the yacht is to solve the problems of the VERY rich. I sum up my present position as "being caught in a lunatic version of 'The Prisoner.'" Then the theme-music comes into my mind: heavy chords: "Dun DUN!" followed by ascending fifths in descending pairs followed by a briefer descending triplet: "du-DIT, du-DIT, du-DIT, du dit-dit-dit," followed by the same pattern one note lower, then again the same pattern one note lower, then a resolution-pattern of an ascending fifth-descending triplet, high note-descending triplet, high note- descending triplet, high note-lowest note-low note: "da dit-dit-dit, DA dit-dit -dit, DA dit-dit-dit, DA dit DA!" All this followed by another "Dun DUN!" cycle one or two notes lower. I note that this is "Theme music for Scene Changing." Then I note that the final literary theme of the novel (or series of short stories) is: Have ALL (keep it all, just spend) versus Have nothing (give it all up, just get). Then I note at the bottom of my note-card: DO lottery today: 6, 16, 23---and I get out of bed at 8:15AM to get to typing this at 8:30, pleased that it's warm outside so that I CAN get a haircut, put in a check-request for EAB, get cash, buy niacin and other things at the drug-store, phone Terri to see if the index is coming in today, do errands, and continue work on my Family Medicine index: I must be recovering from cold, I feel GREAT!
2/27/88: I'm reading some sort of program that's talking about the production I'm about to see, and it seems to be something like Wagner's "Ring" being given in Akron, or someplace like Blossom Center, not even in Washington state. The page of the flyer is yellow, and there are black words broken up by flaring red words of superlatives about the production---or the CONCEPT of the production. I hand in my ticket and get shown to the front of a low balcony, where I'm to lie on the floor and prop up my chin on a tiny square of pillow. I gaze out over the audience assembled below and figure it's about 3/4 full, and the look is more Japanese than American with the pinewood accents and colorful fabrics of the possibly-open-to-the-elements auditorium below. I come back from an intermission and find someone's "borrowed" my little pillow, but the fellow next to me says that the small squares of carpeting at the side of the balcony will do just as well. I feel somewhat ludicrous, but I stretch out on my stomach and prepare to watch part of a performance. But then, behind me, there's a message, possibly from Helen Arnett, saying that Jimmy has a telephone call for me in their white wood-frame house at the border of the grass around the auditorium: "It's from Dr. Someone about your father." I'm torn: I think it's a ploy on their part to get me out of the opera, that there's not really a phone call, but then I decide I MUST see to it, and start off by trying to think of the doctor's name. Then it comes to me: Dr. Gibson (despite the fact that it was my MOTHER'S doctor, not my father's), and then the NEXT revelation comes to me: my father's DEAD for two or three months now, and so it can't be for me to be at his deathbed. But I console myself with the idea that maybe it's something about his final condition, or maybe having something to do with money left to me, so I continue on my trip, somehow coming to the memory that he's located on Brittain Road and 7th Avenue (this probably stems from my looking at all the Bronx maps last night trying to find out how to get to Wave Hill this noon). I'd rather take a taxi, but as I see a top- lighted cab pass on the other side of traffic, there's so much traffic backed up turning onto the street up which I must go that the taxi has no chance of getting through to me, and as I back toward the curb, I see the waggling fingers of businessmen behind me: they'd been trying to get a cab for a long time and have had no luck, so my chances seem dim: I'd better walk. I get into a bit of that "foot dragging through the mud" frustration of trying to make speed against a deadline in a dream, and then the blocks seem to be longer than I remember here in the country, and it'll take me a long time to get to the corner, and even then I don't think I'll remember exactly what the house looked like. Wake feeling unusually sore, and I'm wondering if there isn't something significant about my dreaming about my dead Father: I've been looking forward (in a manner of speaking) to my second annual AIDS antibody test, knowing that I should make the appointment in February if I'll get the date in March and the results by the end of March, and I haven't done it yet. Then my right arm is overly sore, as if the bursitis was moving down my arm bone to my elbow, and again I'm drawn to the bruise on the inside of my right elbow---at least I HOPE it's a bruise, and not a Kaposi's sarcoma as appeared to be on the arms and chest of one of the jerk-offs in one of the porno movies last night, though there I can excuse some of my lethargy from having come last night before going to bed. And the reddened hair follicles on my legs, I hope only aggravated by wearing tight blue jeans in the cold weather, make me wonder again whether I have problems with diabetes, even though Dr. Chin said that my glucose measurements assured him that I didn't have diabetes. And then poor Dennis says that he has an infected tooth this morning and is thinking of trying the emergency Dr. Feldman, and I phone Joyce to find she's still enthusiastic about going to Wave Hill, and there's the open greenhouse and a photographic exhibit to take up our time, so we agree to meet on the uptown #1 platform at 96th Street at 12:45 PM, so I type this dream-page and prepare to finish the with Actualism lesson from last night (before I forget the little I remember from it!), bringing me to departure time at noon and finishing off this end-page!
3/10/88: 9AM, groggy from bed, chilly in bathrobe, face squinched to sneeze, I type these dreams: 1) an enormous slab of silver filling falls from the outer face of my upper right largest molar (next to wisdom tooth). I take it in one piece from my mouth (where it threatens to fragment rather like the sample of schist that I catalogued in my collection yesterday from "the water-tunnel tour 500 feet below Roosevelt Island"), show it to someone, then tongue the intricate remaining structure on the tooth, then replace the filling, finding that it fits well enough, hoping that I'm not entrapping sugars to erode both sides of the fault. 2) a series of British University "skits": a) many of the black-robed students have adjourned to a tiny sitting room to get terribly stoned on a number of home-made pharmaceuticals. I'm vaguely old, or penicillin-taking, and I determine not to smoke, so I sit on a low stool in front of a donnish type rather like Edward Moulton-Barrett as drawn by Ronald Scarfe (whose wonderful book I looked at for $34.95 in Barnes and Noble while waiting for Spartacus yesterday) and watch others light up picturesque shapes of joints, or sip garishly colored philters from liqueur glasses (from the Rosolio at Rosolio last night?), and then someone says something rather plain and the fumes and smokes color the statement so that everyone starts laughing, and I accept their coloration of the comment and smile permissively, when the old geezer behind me leans over my head and says "Let's have a kiss" and I figure it can't be that bad, and rather explicitly feel the child-like wet mouth of a saliva-cushioned buss. b) Walking through hallways to get somewhere else, which halls go THROUGH rooms that belong to others (like the "shotgun apartments" as opposed to the "railroad flats" described by Spartacus as being so narrow that the rooms are building-width while you must walk THROUGH each room to get to the next room), though I look down at the green plush carpet (which reminds me of the runner I had at 320 E 70th) to find that it's neither worn nor lint- and paper-strewn so that it doesn't LOOK oft-traveled. We get to publick hall corners lined with bookshelves and I turn to ask someone rather like Jack Seelye, who'd been walking behind me, whether it's the university that owns all these lovely books (through which I'd rather like to spend time seeing if I could find old editions of authors I'd been collecting), and he says the university does, but it's risky. Why risky? Because if you walk along and trip against a bookshelf, you'd be risking injury either by hitting your head on a sharp shelf or by dislodging a shelf and being buried and injured under a book slide of enormous magnitude. c) Sitting with another undergraduate time-wasting group in a chemist's room watching fascinated as a glass-blower adds another chamber to an already-elaborate five- or six-chambered structure adding up to a glorious bong, filled with filtering fluids and swirling smokes, though I can't quite see the source of the Bunsen flame (or would it be an Etna flame in Europe?) that heats the glass since he is already using three hands to hold the finished structure, apply the added segment, and smoke a cigarette. There are other fragments of British idiosyncrasy and addledness that I don't recall now at 9:20, so I'll leave this to piss and return to bed, possibly for another dream-segment. Return at 10:15 with ADD: d1) Fellow looking up the telephone number for W & B Something in the phone book for me, d2) I come back to his room to find the number myself, but in looking for the telephone book on his piled-up desk, I push one ledger to the rear and another book slides to the right, just as he returns and glares at me, d3) he opens the book, sweeps his finger down the left column for AL followed by a large number of All's, then phones to be told "push the GN button on the console and enter control DAB to get the information," and I glance down at his elaborate telephone (reminding me of the futuristic apparatus offered free with Time or U.S.News and World Report by a business-like Rex Smith), puzzled that I don't remember seeing the computer-console buttons and arrays like a combination adding-machine and comptometer on his telephone before, or that he even used that telephone before. Also finish at 10:20, going to write "To the world, I am dead" for New Yorker Magazine, as struck me wholly finished this AM.
3/13/88: The two scenes were reversed chronologically: 1) I'm in a New York office looking at brochures for the trip, trying to remember the names of the destinations for a sexy co-worker. I ask a woman, a combination of Spartacus's Irish Cathy and Springer's German Ute, whether we went to St. Thomas or St. Croix, and she states patiently that we "flew to Lilit (there was no final "h" as in the Lilith I'd just finished reading about in Anthony's "Wielding a Red Sword") and then took a boat to Annoyance." 1a) Just remembered a tantalizing intervening sequence: the sexy co-worker reminds me somewhat of Gene Crofts, and without transition we're on a floor lying next to each other, and I somehow "gain control" over him my stretching him out on the floor with a pamphlet curved around his neck, forcing his head up. This manages to please (or assuage) him, and then we're nestled together in an intense, deep, prolonged, soulful kiss that expresses all my repressed longing for his body. 2) Without transition our tour group has landed in our plane on an island that looks rather like Tinian for the trip that would have come BEFORE dream 1). We effortlessly transfer to a boat rather like a canoe (is this partly based on Spartacus's report yesterday of his nephew drowning in the sudden Santa Ana in California last week?) to the smallest possible island for some kind of beach party. The island is shaped like a giant wonton in the water, with surf rushing up on coarse dark sand on all sides, leaving only the very top rock-shaley as if it's never submerged, with a knob about one foot square at the very apex of the island near which I put my foot. There are crowds on the sands all around the island, but then it gets dark and the sea swells, and though the people surrounding me don't get wet---have they already transferred to boats or rafts to take them back to the larger island?---everyone looks with interest to the last wave, which easily covers the sands, sweeps up the formerly dry slope to the apex, and then with its last surge of effort sends a millimeter-thick sheet of water over the polished apex just to my left, water- darkening the stone-dry lightness of the last square foot unwetted, and the crowd bursts into a round of applause for the ocean for wetting the last bit of the island. As we're preparing to leave the island, now at instant-night, I glance up at the sun/moon (there's a slight HALO around the orb, standing at about two o'clock high, so that it seems to be radiating and self-luminescent, yet the sky is quite dark without clouds, and there are even stars) to see a faint shadow that at first looks like a passing jet aircraft just to the right of the orb of the sun/moon. I call everyone's attention to it, though I'm disappointed that (since it's a jet) it'll be gone from the orb's proximity by the time people look up. But as everyone looks up, the shadow remains near the orb, the haze clears somewhat so that the shadow is stark against the black star-dotted sky, and my first impression of swept-back wings changes to a recognition of a right-angles CROSS in the sky (though the four areas are so nearly equal that it's really a PLUS SIGN), with a faint gradation that shows the THICKNESS of the plus (about 1/8 its width), AND along the side AWAY from the orb, so that it's not possible that it's a mere metallic reflection of the light of the orb, as if from the far-bottom edge of the plus sign, there is a thin line of light, or line of cabin-lights too tiny to distinguish one from the other, and the crowd gasps "It's a UFO" as it pauses, posing, and then gathers speed and heads toward the horizon, though I wake before it actually disappears from the sky. Up at 10:35 and take acidophilus, so I've finished the last of the penicillin 22 hours ago, so it's not really a fever-dream; though I felt sweaty as I woke, I feel "more cured" now that I've stopped the penicillin. Have a moment's debate (is it clear that I'll filling out the page?) before typing: "Exactly WHY am I continuing to type these dream pages? I don't really STUDY them (except as I write them out), and the fantasy of having them printed after my death is quite ludicrous. I think they should be good for something, but mainly it's just the previous investment---the force of habit---that keeps me doing it. As I'd stopped the DIARY pages years ago (and survived), will it be possible for me to STOP recording dreams in the future?
3/1/88 (recorded from note 3/30): John A. planning el cheapo "Swan Lake" or "Sleeping Beauty": "Break them down [page by page] and fly---with mirrors(?)!"
3/2/88 (recorded from note 3/30): Drive away for vacation and get to 34th Street to find we FORGOT to put two suitcases and LARGE PACKAGE into car at ALL. Think of "exercise pill" that pushes out lactic acid---it hurts, but "No pain, no gain"?
3/6/88 (recorded from note 3/30): 1) Dennis Wayne WILL smoke cigars as meals here. 2) Three squab turn into CRICKETS in ground-oven. Water-spray from gas- tap. No "second door" closes in refrigerator(?). Array of goldfish and crab on display in the refrigerator. There WERE more details, but I've forgotten.
3/18/88 (recorded from note 3/30): 1) Stream drying and refilling. 2) Get down from orbit WITHOUT vehicle, 3) Tray of snacks to be de-roached---and little bug BIT me.
3/19/88 (recorded from note 3/30): 7AM: 1) At 1221 Dietz with Mom and Helen and Jimmy, all reading Sunday papers, I think all have finished and draw cock on a cartoon ad, and Jim picks up section and starts reading? Then he goes for shower and I FRANTICALLY try to find p.91 in magazine, but there are 5-6 magazines and pages like 87A-D and 91.4 and I CAN'T find it. Get two OTHERS that I clip a) four pages and put them in bathrobe pocket and b) Rita wants "Story Theatre" and I say we can't CUT this and a few quotes from a 27-year-old (whatever this means, but again it's long ago.
3/20/88: 1) Like the puzzle in the Times last night, this dream involved words that were "mirror images", but in this case words that were palindromes, with some of the letters already filled in. There was another facet of the dream, about words, that I don't remember now. 2) This dream seems to have been set in Washington, D.C. I was going for a job interview, and I knew that the store was just one block this way and two blocks that way, but I stopped off in a place for breakfast, on a railing-enclosed terrace, and I looked two people over and saw Roger Evans dressed in a natty suit, who said he was applying for a job at Polsky's---I said, "What a coincidence, I just applied for a job at O'Neills," naming the two main department stores on Akron's Main Street. "Let's sit and have a chat," I said, and he agreed, but the two people between us wanted the table they were at, and as I talked with them, they turned into four, but I said, "Look, you four can have that table in the corner, and Roger and I can have this smaller table here," but someone Roger had gone farther over, or had gone over the railing, and it didn't seem that it was working out. Without transition, on the same "path to work," I was walking through a small field, looking up to a foggy-topped hillock of great beauty (thinking about it after awakening, the following scenes were more like sets for a Metropolitan Opera!), and I thought to myself, "Oh, this is like being a child and finding an area of natural beauty and streams and hills and gardens just east of Wilbeth Road in Akron." The road in the declivity seemed to have water in the bottom, because the snow along the edges cracked suspiciously, but I just followed the well-trodden path just above the bottom and seemed to be tracing the edges of a narrow stream rather than a roadbed. Coming to the top of a rise, I saw a truly breathtaking sight of a small tree haloed in the sun, rimed with hoarfrost, with bits of color of berries and green and yellow leaves showing through the snow and fog like a Christmas tree or a marzipan-candied white cake of great delicacy. Then in a larger depression was a lake I remember from the summer choked with reeds and fish, and to the distance (but again only a stage-distance) was a small line of hills that I seemed to remember from the previous summer. Finally I reached the small gate that enclosed this wonderland and found myself at Avenue U, marked on green street-signs that I associate with Washington, noting that the diagonal streetcar line HAD been marked as Avenue O but that had a line through it and it was now Avenue N, and I thought I was close enough to my appointment "just down the street and then to the right a couple of blocks" to walk, even though I couldn't bring the exact address in mind. Anyway, the streets were crowded with people, so I could always ask my directions. A magical feelinged dream!
3/24/88: Two interconnected (somehow) dreams dealing with combination locks and gurus. 1) I'm a woman searching for the (seven?) most important gurus in the world; I'm being told all the reasons why I can't make (or complete) this search, but the magic word seems to be "Prasin" (clearly not "praising"), and in my waking state I keep thinking of narrow footpaths in grassy fields that lead me from one part of an amusement park to another: this resonates with past dreams of a park that's situated on a scrotum-shaped peninsula, where the elaborate entrance covers the width of the area where a scrotal ring would be, but the left side is more undeveloped, yet down the leftmost side is the longer trail that leads to the most spectacular roller coaster, but I always forget to go that way when I enter, and when (later in the evening) I remember that I haven't been on that ride yet, I'm usually on the smaller-rider right-testicle side, and have to find the narrow passageway that leads from the left testicle to the right testicle and then go around the U-shaped left-testicle path to get to the roller coaster, sometimes trying to bushwhack across the pathless tree- patch (too scanty to merit the name of "forest") that covers "the high-point of the left testicle" on the map of the scrotal area. I wake thinking of Summit Beach Park, remembering the Bug ride that solidly terminates the (let's call it) northward end of the cement walkways, though a funhouse to its right marked all I can recall of the northeastern branch of the park; recalling with pleasure the Sail-O-Planes at the southern end, which I early learned how to whip to wire-snapping extremes by gently guiding the sail resonantly out just before I reached the limit of in-going, and in just before the limit of out-going. There was a shadowy dance-pavilion, possibly in ruins, right AT the lake-front, which seemed to be the last area of interest for me. The entrance under the various hills of the roller coaster (visible like a lure along the length of the avenue (Dayton? Allen?) that led to it), debouched on small areas of food-stands and games of chance that had no interest for me, and the small Kiddyland toward the south, holding the Kiddycoaster along which I was running when I fell (about six feet) off the highest hill and cut the top of my head on a pointed supporting stake. What other rides WERE there? Look at the brochure in my souvenirs and get reminded of the Dodgem and the Ferris Wheel, and the name of what I called Sail-O-Planes above was, of course, Flying Scooters. 2) I had two combination locks to open in my gym, rather more like a high-school gym than my current one, and I somehow confused both of them so that I could open neither. I then understood that the attendant could unlock them with a key, and I went out feeling very guilty, but she was so understanding, saying something like "Of COURSE you forgot your combinations," that I waited with relief as she finished a conversation with a friend before coming back with me to open the doors I needed. Somehow this seemed more colorful in the dreaming!
3/30/88: 1) Grapes and 2) Cliff-climbing were the cores. 1) I was helping a group of men handle grapes: I wasn't sure if they were buying them for making wine from individuals (would that be better stated "buying them from individuals for making wine"?) or simply helping individuals make their grapes look more attractive to buyers. I plunged my hands into a large plastic Ziploc bag and took out a mostly-picked tangle of stems and branches on which were left a few dozen enormous yellow-green grapes and tried to fumble them off their attachments. I noticed stacks of bags that contained curiously flattened purple grapes. I took some other bags up to the main counter and was told by one of the workmen to label those I was working on in a particular way, and he handed me the notebook of the chief seller from which to take a partial sheet. As I thumbed through the pages, which were gray-yellow and crumbling with age, I found that most of them had been torn off already, and some of the remaining fragments, when I turned them over, were actually photographs that had been incorporated into this kind of log-book. The fragments of the pages became smaller and smaller, and I progressed from the idea that only a few pages were written on to the idea that most pages were already full. Without a transition the dream changed to 2) a shifting auditorium that swung a ramp of seats downward to an orchestra pit, and upward to chandeliers on a flat-stone ceiling of such expanse that when deep drumming and percussion came from the orchestra, I imagined that sandy pieces of mortar and abraded rock were falling from the ceiling as a warning that it might not withstand the stress of intense vibrations from the music, so I thought to climb up the steepening wall of the amphitheater. A raking spotlight was playing over the sides (like the ship's searchlight in the storm in "No Way Out" yesterday?), and as I climbed I tried to remain graceful in appearance because I thought they might be televising my ascent. The steepness was so great now that there were only rudiments of seats left to clamber up, and the walls were veined with bronze finials that reminded me of facades of organ lofts. I tried not to panic, or become tired, but continued upward, wedging myself between organ-pipes, grateful for whatever solid purchases my fingertips could find, trying to regulate my breathing. Then I reached what might have been the top, and climbed 20 feet higher to turn and find myself in an alcove above the aisle over the orchestra seats; I turned as if to enjoy the view, to fool anyone looking at me into thinking that I had really intended to climb ABOVE the aisle and safety to enjoy the view, and then made my way down to the aisle for safety just as I wakened at 9:45AM: my Birthday!
3/29/88 (note transcribed 4/8): Packing to leave hotel: making 3-4 lists to check: 1) Empty boxes and repack, 2) Leave wine with Dennis---but keep most, 3) give books to Spartacus. Prior-Mrs.X cleaned BUILDING through top floor, then only HALF of it (?), 4) Keys, 5) Drawers, 6) Bathroom stuff, etc. LOTS of memories of CARCASSONE then arose. I wrote this note 8-8:05AM.
4/1/88 (note transcribed 4/8): 1) Consciousness-raising meeting (donation at least $5 in yellow envelope)---changing aisle seats---I curl up and lay down. I put tiny flower in OTHER woman's bag by mistake, try to solve "problem," but she won't help. 2) Susan-like bookcase---points, "Is that Proust?" No, it's someone else, like Taylor Caldwell. Written to 8:20. At 9:20: 3) I'm having a BIG party at my place, people playing with KID, someone's singing "What's Love Got To Do With It" while people are telecording him. 4) 10:20: Walking Akron University campus; party at my place; sexual overtones.
4/8/88: Woke with vague memories of typical dream: semi-travel, semi-friends, semi-intellectual stimulation about some anal-retentive compulsive problem, but I don't take notes then and don't remember much as I sit thinking about it at 2:40PM, having wakened at 11AM to take a telephone call that went to 11:30AM and then not eating breakfast until 12:40AM and I must go to the gym early so that I can get back about 4:30 to pack to Joan's tomorrow, assuming since she hasn't called me that it's going to work out OK that I stay at her place tonight. I feel strangely "off," (even in dreams), not catching up on these notes until after a week later, not willing to work on the Bacteriology index but preferring to watch TV movies, eat dinners out, and read "Critique of Pure Reason." But I've at last caught up with most of the things to be done (except that taxes are now looming precisely one week away, and I surely won't be finished with the index by then), and I just want to get to the bottom of this page before going on to catch up with the Actualism pages, and I'm STILL not doing a daily session, so I'll have another self-castigating session tonight!
4/13/88: 1) I'm looking at a map of southern Greece, and a name like Arcanese or Andamanese or Circean (like Vulcano or Lipari where Anna Magnani lived) seems appropriate to the arc of islands off the southern coast rather like the keys off the coast of Florida. In one section of the dream I'm driving in a car over the long bridges that connect them, looking ahead at how the rising tide is washing from one side of the road, or bridge, to the other; and in a second section I'm just looking at a map of two parallel routes: a) the northern route, on land, through small villages by bus or train, and the little circles are identified not with the names of villages or attractions visited at each village, but with the mileage from the starting point and the time of day so that I can see that two middle villages are visited at 0200 and 0600 hours, where I'd normally be sleeping on the transportation, debating whether it would be worthwhile (or inevitable, with the stopping and the people getting in and out, and the noise) waking up just to see the passage through the villages, rather like the long bus-ride back from Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories; b) the southern route, over water, stopping at small islands by freighter or mail boat, and again the little circles seem to mark a landing at 0100 and 0700, leaving only six hours for sleep, which sounds brief but not impossible. 2) I'm helping hand out programs or literature for some enormous project at Dance Theater Workshop: there are stacks of 24" by 36" or 38" white sheets with various schedules and maps (listings of the time and content for soloists in performances, listings of coming attractions, maps of the performance locations and routes between them, and [the one I seem responsible for] general maps of southern Manhattan with eating places, hotels, parking lots, and the performance venues---does this really seem more like the Olympics than a set of centennial performances by Dance Theater Workshop?), and I look through them to make sure I have enough of the kind that I'm responsible for passing out. But then a small auxiliary performance seems to start in an adjoining theater and I quickly walk down toward the front where the seats are in long arced rows reminiscent of the New York Experience yesterday, except that these are concave around the stage, rather than convex as in the McGraw-Hill building, and there's a guy who comes out and at first seems to have his feet toward the audience, though later there's a reflection and it seems that his head is rather between MY feet, since I'm sitting in the center of the front row, and the "performing element" is really his reflection in a mirror at HIS feet, AND he was supposed to be some sort of comedian or instrumentalist, but his cock is hanging out of his shorts and he makes some remarks about how it's dripping, and he tenses the base of his cock so that it throbs and begins to erect, and I'm amazed that he has such control and aplomb during a performance. He juices, he fingers it and remarks about the copiousness of it, and then he actually starts to jerk off, getting quite hard, and I'm enthralled by my choice to sit in the middle of the first row when I didn't even KNOW that it was going to include such a heavily sexual component. Then without transition I've moved to a small narrow performance-space, and want to save a seat at the extreme right in the front row, and people are just coming in to set up seats like at the Psychotronics meeting last night with Maya. I put my blue duffel-coat and tan sweater on the seat to save it, and then want to go back to buy my ticket for $6, and the stage widens and Steve Reich and his group are practicing "Drumming" and I'm wondering if I shouldn't be more center to enjoy THAT performance, and I continue along the increasingly fantastic theatre where individual gamelonists are situated behind each four or six rows of the orchestra seats to "encircle" the audience with sound. I walk through very crowded walkways, where someone jams a care-package into my shoulder bag that I open to find crackers, cakes, cookies, and a box of "croustades" filled with limp ripe fruit and trifle, and I'm flabbergasted at the generosity of the performance. Killer whales now arc at the right, showing their distinctive white undersides while pedestrians gasp. Now we're on small fan-propelled(?) subway-boats along canals in which swim small sharks and more killer whales, and I'm amazed at the distances to be covered and begin to worry about getting back to get my ticket for the seat that I've reserved with my coat, and I'm starting to think, in the dream, thoughts like "this is getting to be a very complicated dream that I'll soon want to consciously simplify." I pass a small stage on which young inexperienced performers are lip-synching words to songs being broadcast from the main stage, swaying back and forth in unison like a rock-group (or a line of alien automatons described moving synchronously as described by some abductees as reported last night by Budd), and a small group watches them appreciatively as I pass, wondering why they just don't go into the main performance hall, but I look back as if from the subway bridge over the Gowanus and see a view like lower Manhattan, so I get the idea that we're now in the sticks and there's a very long way to go, and I'm wondering what time it is and whether I'll be able to get back to the start of the performance after I buy my ticket, and the entire dream slips away and I wake at 9AM, thinking I'll record the dream briefly before I get into taxes, but now am surprised to see that I've surpassed a whole page in writing it up.
4/18/88: Very strange fragments from going to bed at 3:45AM, getting to sleep about 4:30AM, and waking at 9:30AM and finding so many details (and the overall FEELING) so odd that, wearing a bathrobe and still retaining my earplugs, I turn on the computer and type the parts: 1) dressed military, 2) wanting the guy, 3) combing the Cyndy-Lauper-hair. 1) I'm looking down from my second- floor window to the street below, where two tall clean-cut young men dressed in brilliant red-and-blue dress uniforms emblazoned with gold braid and ribboned medals are pulling their flowing red-satin-lined capes close about their bodies so they can get into their (rather tiny) car parked just below my window (now I flash in memory back to the view out of Edgardo's window down onto the colorful market one Saturday morning in Milan): they're going to a military ball and have been escorted into their car by three pairs (one at car-front, one at car-back, one at street-side car-door) of less-glorious military aides who are so formal they might as well be on horseback, but I think they're not. Without really seeing their handsome faces I know that they're proud, yet feeling slightly embarrassed about their glamorous uniforms, and glad to get into the car so that they can drive away from their too-attentive aides. There was another section of this part dealing with oversplendid uniforms on 6'5" hunks, but I've forgotten details. 2) I've come to a small (maybe upstate New York) town to visit a collegiate-looking young man (or maybe there are two of them, and they might be lovers, or about-to-become lovers) for a weekend, and we're uncomfortable because he seems to know that I'd like to be sexual with him; though he's willing to be a good host, he's not really comfortable about getting sexual with me. In the air, unspoken, is the aftermath of a TV program or est-like consciousness-raising session that's left this feeling: If you could only be honest enough, or direct enough, or true enough to yourself, you could become terribly attractive to the other person regardless of what you look like on the outside. I'm trying to find this directness, this honesty, and he seems to feel more and more uncomfortable, until I loudly lie to say that I'm going to take a nap before the evening, when I'll go for a walk in the sunset in town, and he goes out walking with his friend, two lean, tall, well- groomed young men, down one street, and I'm following them, but when they turn left at the corner without crossing the street, I quickly cross the street, hoping (yet hoping NOT) that they turn and see me and request me to walk with them, since I'm JUST ABOUT to break through to a level of honesty that will "coax" one or even BOTH of them to see my qualities and suddenly feel a great stab of affection, even physical affection, toward me. 3) With that same aura of "be honest with yourself and I'll love you," I'm sitting in another apartment with a young girl with a striking Cyndy-Lauper-like hair-halo of gray or white streaked with flaming-red orange, and suddenly I have this hair-halo of wet long hair, and I try combing and brushing and styling it to make it look as good on me as it did on her, but then it occurs to me that I'm older, heavier, and maler than she is, so that maybe it's not APPROPRIATE that I have this kind of hair, and I try to tone it down by letting it dry and fall closer to my head and become less brilliant, and I feel that I'm JUST at the verge of "becoming myself" or saying something so empathetically human and honest that anyone I talk to will fall wildly in love with me---then I wake up and type this until 9:55AM, feeling quite cold in my too-little-slept morning apartment.
4/19/88: 1) I'm looking at a "sea-slug on the half-shell" that I've been keeping for a number of months in a bowl-aquarium---it looks rather like a 3" x 1.5" x 3/4" piece of green fine-sponge foam (like the texture of the insulation strip between my bedroom windows when I put the air conditioner in) with a plasticky shell attached to one ("the top") side only. It's been quite inert for awhile, but when I take it out this time to look at it, the shell seems to have become more polished: I can rub off some of the accumulated slimy algae and see shiny black spots, about as big as nickels, looking healthy against the pale gray-green background of the shell and the dirty-green grittiness of the "body" beneath. Then as I turn it over to put it back down, the "body" seems to slough apart in two places, so that I get a jolt of fear that it might have died and is now decaying, though it doesn't smell like it would if it had been dead for awhile, so I can begin to kid myself into thinking "maybe it's just dividing into smaller sections." 2) Three of us younger guys (the other two seem to be like Kevin Costner and Richard Gere, goosey and gawky and young like high-school jocks) have looked under the hood of my old car (rather like Susan's old Plymouth, except it's black or dark blue in color) to find that it needs some sort of fluid or lining material or piece of a new battery. We don't want to leave it in the open so we wordlessly decide to push it down the gentle hill into my garage at the bottom. We start it easily enough, then I have to dig in my heels to slow it as it goes down a steeper slope, and I can hear the two guys giggling and giving advice from behind as they alternately push and hold it back. I seem to have good control of the front end, acting to steer it by pressures to one side or another, semi-lifting it to ease it over ruts and rocks in the road, and then I have to turn to the left to enter the wrecked foundations of the older front-part of the garage, avoiding the deeper ruts in the center and guiding the tires over the unrutted section of roadway, and then steer it quickly to the right to avoid hitting the earthen embankment on the left, since the actual garage is partially underground. It's picked up a bit of speed since I'd been considering the direction more than the velocity, so I really have to strain to slow it so that it doesn't ram into the back wall of the garage, and somehow magically I'm stopping it from the front AND hovering above the hood to watch it slowing, yet not stopping, as it noses into the loose gypsum-like flakiness against a ledge that just meets the chromed nose of the car; it digs in about a half-inch, seeming to do no serious structural damage to the front nose---the fender seems to be receded in front, not expecting to hit a wall---and we relax and laugh in relief from having done the job. Then there's a momentary feeling of doubt: should we have left the car in the open so that there'd be more room to open the hood to put in the replacement parts? But I console myself with the thought that the space in any repair-garage would be as confined and as dark, and I visualized the hooded, steel-protected gooseneck work-lamp from a garage being hooked up in here for light, and figured that the replacement pieces would be so small that they could be placed by hand, so there really didn't need to be much room. Bed at 4 after jerking off, woke at 10:30, and finally writing this at 11:25AM, happy that today will probably be the last of the Bacteriology - I index so that I can get to the dozens of things to catch up which that have been cluttering my mind with pleasure as I think about at least a week's free time at the completion of this index, even more pleased with the conversation with Sandy Buck yesterday implying that a bill of as much as $1/line is acceptable to her!
4/21/88: I'm in the Army with a large group of men on a bus going south to spend a weekend in a gambling town that might be Atlantic City or might be a sleazier town farther south, like south of Aberdeen or south of Fort Meade. I've got the front right window-seat, next to an attractive guy who bunks at (say) twelve o'clock in a smallish barracks-like room where I bunk at seven o'clock and two or three others bunk at three o'clock, maybe five o'clock, and between nine and ten. We arrive early Saturday evening and there's a section of dream I don't remember too well in which we tour the facilities: I recall fleeting fragments of entertainment-shows, in one of which there's a tall fey cowboy on stilts smirking down at the people taking pictures of him while he cocks one knee seductively in his tight faded blue jeans on narrow hips. There are other fragments of shows that touch briefly on transvestitism, and there's some recollection of hands reaching out from behind to touch me and others beguilingly on the shoulders. I decide that I can have some fun here on my own for the rest of tonight and most of tomorrow, so I take a small plastic bag of things that I'd collected as souvenirs so far this evening and hand them over to an acquaintance on the same bus, telling him to give the bag to Patrick, who should now be seated alone in the front of the bus, saying that he should do me a favor please and just toss this on my bed when he gets back after the two or three hour bus-ride. The guy doesn't seem enthusiastic to do it, so after he wanders off and I see that the bus has pulled up ahead, right even with the casino-entrance, and the guy with my bag is dutifully following the sidewalk along the street, I decide that I can sprint across the grass on a diagonal and get to the bus in time to take back my plastic bag and hand it to Patrick myself. I start running, realizing IN the dream that I AM running in a dream, hoping not to get caught up in that "nightmare running that gets nowhere," and I'm pleased to "experience" that my sneakers are getting good purchase on the small bits of gravel on the possibly-slippery cement or grass on which I'm running, and my legs aren't tired, so I make pretty good speed and DO catch up with the guy just as he's about to board the bus. I snatch the bag away and call "Patrick," from the front steps of the bus. He's turned around in his aisle seat, talking to the two people behind him, but turns and reluctantly accepts the bag from me. As I walk away from the bus I discover a small plastic object in a plastic bag that I stuff back into my blue hooded-jacket pocket, and find the pockets are already stuffed with gloves, a paperback, my wallet and keys, and a few other objects that I could as well have left with Patrick. Oh, well. Back down a flight of side-stairs down into the rummage- sale room in the basement of the casino, surprised to see the Spanish wives of the servicemen pawing through glassware, crockery, pots and pans, and various linen items. I'm attracted to some of the linens, attractively displayed on racks to show the embroidered patterns, with colored threads of the embroidery material hanging off the designs so, I guess, you can see what colors and textures to match against. There are small Mexican designs with, in one case, three or four tiny spools of bright red, green, yellow, and black thread, and in another case, one spool containing bands of light violet, lime, and orange thick-yarn in sections around one dangling spool. I think I might be able to buy something of value (the prices on sign-cards certainly look like bargains), and then catch a free bus or a pay bus outside the casino tomorrow evening and get back to the camp in time for reveille Monday morning. I'm surprised others from the camp haven't thought of this, and I'm prepared for an exciting evening in the casino (though I don't intend to gamble at all) and in town. Clearly this is based on the gym's advertisement of a cheap bus-trip to Atlantic City.
4/22/88: 1) A group of us are studying some sort of martial art where the teacher (either Japanese or African) wears an elaborately folded linen underwear involving a highly suggestive crotch-pouch, and one of the teachers lets the pouch "unwrap" and displays a thick curved semi-hard cock that one of my co-students notices and turns to me with a lascivious look in his eyes and a tiny tip of a tongue protruding. I think to disrobe to show my body, but I have a strong image of my body as it IS, not as it WAS, and think that it really won't be too sexy---but it's all I've got, so I try to disrobe in as sexy a way as possible without revealing too much stomach. 2) Dennis is trying one of his, "Gee, Bob, wouldn't you like to telephone someone tomorrow to ask about arrangements for something that I'd really like to do but don't want to call about it?" I'm eating at his place, a dish of limp "green-bean pasta" (as it seems) in a mess of soft shit-on-a-shingle (only smaller curds and much more mooshy in texture, rather like overcooked kasha) ground hamburg, trying to tell myself that he really didn't have to make this for me, that he really DOESN'T have any money to prepare meals with, but STILL why can't he take responsibility for organizing his OWN life. 3) There were a few other sexy fragments, but I don't remember them, only the before-sleep fantasy of kissing all over, where I thought of phrases that would communicate the idea: starting at the small muscle-rise on the neck below the ear, following down to the hollow of the neck, around to the depression between the throat-tendons, then skipping to the upraised arm to venture toward the hand in inch-thick kisses that lovingly lick the languid flesh. The sadness that Dennis's acne-scars made me unwilling to explore his back or hold his face and head (though he loved that) reflects the sadness that the skills in loving that I had have been unused for so long, with no real sign of them being usable in the near future.
4/23/88 (note typed 5/2): 5AM: After saying I never dreamed I was INDEXING, I DID dream that! That was ONE thread of PARALLEL-RUNNING dreams: 1) Indexing "Antepar" and related words like "Zoonosis" and disease entities, 2) Cleaning a new house, moving windows and shutters to their respective walls from a central pile that becomes a stack of CHAIRS that more and more Architecture people help me unfold and set up for a LARGE party (I ask Joyce Alaya: "Is there enough room in front of the hall for another row of chairs?" and she says "No, because we need room for the FLOWER arrangement." WHILE DREAMING of writing page ranges for this DREAM! 5:15AM: "Remember" (or invent in the five minutes between) another strand: READING the BOOK on "Antepar" that I'd indexed before it was printed. 3) 5:25AM: HAD directed myself to look at HANDS, but didn't. Another strand od SHOWING SOMEONE the book. 4) Out walking, I pass large white empty house that becomes the locale for Dream #2! 5) In bed with someone with AIDS. He wants to kiss deeply and I do, worried. His roommates are solicitous, carrying him to bed when he faints after acting intensely. He wants to go down on me but I kiss him instead, and he starts biting. Fear-filled dream that I find disquieting.
4/25/88 (note typed 5/2): 1) I dream (without making the connection THEN) about my looking with unease at four SCARS on leg, like scabs over the little scoops of flesh UFO medicos take. 2) I'm looking over hills to a plane that's flying low, and it starts rocking up and down because one of the WINGS is gone; again, though I don't connect it at the time, NOW it's clearly related to a short story that I read in Omni a couple of weeks before this.
4/27/88 (note typed 5/2): 5:40AM: Again the frantic, frustrating "going to Paris Opera and not seeing stage" dream: START in 1) top balcony, center, and the orchestra is obviously way BELOW us and behind a screen. It's "Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Bartered Bride'" in rote English, which we can HEAR but not SEE. Down and around stairs to GLIMPSE stage, but no seats there, so we're out to a hallway to see an usher selling 2) "Grand Tier" seats for 89.5 F, and they're on the SIDE, viewing PART of the orchestra through dark glass, then girl wants 200 F to seat us 3) BELOW stage, at intermission. We LOSE the ticket office, look up side of BASEMENT stairs, and try to use FORCE on someone holding us out of the auditorium because we don't have the proper tickets. Enormously frustrating even trying to REMEMBER the details of this agonizing situation.
4/29/88: I'm on vacation in the winter in the mountains somewhere, maybe the Adirondacks or the Poconos, and I've just climbed a tall tower that seems to be some sort of training tower for skiers: you lie down on a tractor-like platform which is pulled down an elevator-shaft-like tunnel and you're propelled down a snowy slope on ski-like attachments to your feet that seem terribly dangerous, except that the instructor (a combination of Ute Bujard in name and accent, Spartacus's pretty woman friend Judy Arthur in looks, and that muscular blonde workout-artist-waitress at the gym in mannerism and brashness) says "It must be safe (patting my thigh) because we sure don't want to spend our insurance for your eight months in the hospital with a broken leg." I'm wondering whether there's any way down from the top of the tower EXCEPT by the ski-catapult when the ratchet-mechanism of the tractor-platforms starts working, which makes the top of the tower shiver so much that it's appearing to tip over, and I REALLY panic---this seems like a combination of the noise Sherryl described last night from her Doppler sonocardiogram, various worries about the air flight to Bayreuth, and some random thoughts about skiing on some television program last night. Other dreams I'd noted before this will just have to wait their typing.
4/30/88: I'm cuddling with Dennis on the red sofa in the living room of 1221 Dietz Avenue, and he's moaning loudly, "I've got AIDS!" I try to shush him, saying that Mom will hear, and while he's sitting on the glider on the porch with his arms wrapped around his knees, Mom shows that she DID hear by putting his packed suitcase out on the porch. I confront her on the front porch by stepping onto the tops of the elaborately ribboned platform-heeled black shoes that she has on (if they were in colors, the shoes would be more appropriate to Carmen Miranda than Mom), trying to FORCE her to accept the fact that Dennis with AIDS is no danger to her household, but she just GLARES at me from under her black-veiled hat and I'm forced to resort to shutting and locking the front door so that she has to confront the truth on her own doorstep. Ugly dream!
4/9/88 (note typed 5/2): 8AM Dream/Fantasy: "Not in 1980 or 1984, but in 1988, when you can elect ELIHU" someone says as to why I took trip. And I flash on Reagan STAYING in power AFTER 1988 and being killed THEN to keep the "elected in 20's" presidential disaster myth complete. And I travel to Europe to be OUT of catastrophes in NYC! And I flash on writing and winning lottery and changing the WORLD. 9AM: REAL dream of orgy and my partner turns OLD with STOMACH scars, and he says my brain is COLORED and TWISTED by my RELIGION, and he says "I SAID so" when I say I was brought up CATHOLIC. Then I'm taping the MIDDLE third of a WALT DISNEY feature film and look around to see KIDS sleeping around me and I hit "REJECT" on the VCR and take out GUTS of machine, and a host in ape-mask with blue-cloth mouth (like a shiny-clothed underarm as it opens and closes) says "I recorded it," and I pick up my dropped camera and it's an old Archiflex, on which the "exposure-number window" says not a number from 1 to 36 but "$10 + 1," and I'm more HURT and PUZZLED than annoyed or angry at the switch in controls.
4/19/88 (note typed 5/2): 4:48AM I wake with the feeling that there's been an earthquake, and even go to the television set to see if there's anything on, but I've obviously just dreamed it: had intended to put it onto the notebook pages, but it would have been lost, and since it was a dream, it might as well go here.
5/2/88: Not been sleeping overlong these days, though I've wakened the last few mornings to think that I'd BEEN dreaming, but just didn't remember any of the details. Maybe it's part of my "change of life" that I'm not having as many dreams over a constant period of time as I had in the past---though my efforts to get to the bottom of the page for printing are as strong as ever, witness this last line!
5/4/88: 9:10AM: 1) Gertrude Lawrence consents to read (or endorse) a 6-page position-statement or letter for some political stance I've written for, and I'm happy. She may even make a TV special ad on the subject. 2) I'm staying with a short stocky cute "straight" guy in a four-gay-guy apartment. We're touring (what I take to be) San Diego, and in bed with me he starts acting coy. I want him badly, so I touch him gingerly and he comes to me and kisses me gently, then lays on top of me and we roll around a bit, commenting that "the one on top has to do all the work." Without transition we're dressed and he's going around very tentatively kissing each of the gay apartment-mates, and each one of them looks at me with raised eyebrows at this performance, and all I can do is smile and shrug my shoulders with a "What do I know/Who can tell?" attitude. But I'm feeling triumphant that I've made a breakthrough with him.
5/5/88: 1) I'm walking north to Akron University, having to detour to the left around a chicken-wire fence around athletic fields, and find myself sitting in on a grade-school class as class-lists are collected. 2) I'm in the country when I come to a cliff with a projecting wooden cornice. I climb out on the cornice and realize I have to get down, and someone pushes over a five- or six-stepped wooded platform so that I can more easily descend from my perch. 3) I'm mustering out of the Army, and pass a hallway lined with booths, some of which have something to do with glasses, as if I'm entitled to a free pair when I get out, if only I know exactly where to go. 4) Someone will give me a check. 5) I'm standing on a beach (I have the feeling it's in Florida) looking at a luxury liner moving so fast below rolling clouds and through curling prow-waves that it looks like the engine of an express train rolling rapidly across countryside. I somehow know that it will get to NYC in three days. The last note is also numbered 5) but all I can read is "waiting groom does emakonic." And since it's now 5/7, I haven't the foggiest idea what it said.
5/8/88: 9AM: 1) SEXY guy (Stephen Collins-like) cums and I wake STIFF. 2a) Andy Gyenes comes from corner office bleached BLOND and looking like Rutger Hauer, unfolding office map to show me where the Jewish holiday celebration will be held. He gives me his glaring "How DARE you!" stare when I ask "Why Jewish?" b) Woman tells a joke I heard TWICE on TV before, and all laugh SO loud that their supervisor comes in---she's like Alice Stearns, and she's wearing a HUGE short-napped-furry light bluish-purple hat that frames her head like a halo, and like another enormous "boss woman" from ICWU.
5/11/88: 9AM: 1) Art Bauman and I are driving on lightly snow-dusted back roads in back-country like the Adirondacks and our car is stopped by a "washout two years ago," as we look over the edge and the people walking below say that our car "isn't strong enough to simply drop into the ravine" to pass. 2) I'm very irritated at young toughs who squeeze into a long waiting-line ahead of me, even though two gentlemen offer that I can go ahead of them when they step out of line for a moment to buy something from a cart nearby. 10:15AM: 3) I'm very irritated at a well-dressed black man who looks at a red-flowering ornamental tree in a Hyatt-like hotel lobby and PULLS off leaves for himself. I'm angry at his MOTHER, also, and shout, "I really hope you'll understand me," since they seem both to be pretending not to understand English. 4) Silly image like a TV sketch of woman exercising with front leg-curls a) putting up sign advertising editing services, and b) complaining she can't pull panties up while exercising---and hot lover tries to help her, while everyone laughs because he'll just have to pull them DOWN again because he clearly wants to fuck her immediately. 10:35: Remember and note down 5) Getting shiny-polished but extremely light, like Styrofoam, yellow planks delivered for self-built bookcase into my army barracks apartment, pushing through jostling crowds of working people who jam the hallways. Feel good that I have the tenacity to keep notes that describe the ridiculous dreams clearly enough for my journals.
5/16/88: 1) I'm watching my porno tapes on a VCR in SOME mid-western town when Rita comes down the hallway; I'm somewhat younger than I am now, and she's in her late 20s or 30s. I try to turn the TV off, but she asks what I'm looking at, and when I'm somehow distracted it's clear to me that she's seen what's on the screen and has accepted it. I turn back and give my stiff cock a few whacks and turn around to realize she's probably seen that, and AGAIN she seems to take it in stride, and I'm both annoyed and relieved. 2) The school of Actualism is in some sort of cathedral for an examination. We're arrayed up and down a crowded center aisle while announcements are coming over a loudspeaker about some sort of required information or procedure, and Elizabeth is in charge of us so she directs Roger Bester to check out the members of HIS class and Phyllis Hjorth to check out the members of HER class, while she attends to the most-advanced class, of which I'm included, and I become aware that she's been training those two particularly to become teachers. The second dream in particular is full of COLORS: people in bright-colored clothing, the cathedral brightly lit and glowing with yellows---a sensation of CLARITY.
5/26/88: I'm having furtive sex with a cute guy in the bedroom of someone else's house, and we've just decided to get dressed when the door swings open for another member of the household to enter as I'm washing some cum-stains out of my shirt. As I fold the wet shirt into a smaller and smaller volume and press it between two spoons (remember this is a dream) to get the last possible bit of water dripped out, I explain to the interloper that we were just getting ready to go to bed as a way of excusing our state of semi-undress. There was another episode before or after the interloper when Penny Arcade's comedy sketch about a transvestite's being "fondled where no one should fondle a tranvestite [namely between the legs where the cock's hidden]" enters in: one or both of us are being rubbed sensuously here, and I'm running my forefinger in the well-lubricated cavern of his foreskin and feeling the stiffness and wetness of his needle-dick within the loose foreskin. We're also kissing sensuously and wetly, and I'm acutely aware of AIDS in the dream, wondering if this moistness would pass into the area of danger, trying to hold back yet not wanting to alienate this cute kid who's so eager to kiss my lips. Very erotic dream, though not really very satisfying. Other elements I've forgotten now.
5/27/88: I'm in the Army, or some regimented organization very like it, but there seems to be a homosexual orgy going on in various beds, and I'm lying in my corner bed trying to think how to make myself more attractive to the sexy uncoupled guy in the bed next to me. I debate lying on my stomach with one leg provocatively outside the blankets, but I also don't want to emphasize my ass since I don't want to be fucked. Then he comes over to me and starts caressing me, asking if I like the feel of his stiff dick; I debate asking him if this is what's called a "needle-dick," but I reconsider: it's more a PLANARIA dick, that is, flattish with a broad middle tapering to points at head and base, with a more muscular center flattening to almost sharp edges at the curved sides. But it's still sexy to manipulate and I somehow grab him up against the back of me like Katharine Hepburn forced Cary Grant to cover her back in "Bringing Up Baby," and we pass through crowded halls as I wonder if anyone can see the tiny rim of cock-flesh that must be visible between our two sets of clothing where his cock enters my hand. Without transition, there's a scene of adjusting blue silk quilts (much silkier and shinier than Susan's blue quilt last night) on our bunks for uniformity. Then I want my underwear, and I'm going through the pile of stuff at the base of my mattress, and with puzzlement come across many pills of types I've stopped taking: purple game-piece pills with small knobs on top, yellow lozenges, amber pillowy pellets like Vitamin E, and many other types. Later, I look in a mirror and my beardless face has a fat pasty Robert Epstein-like roundness with henna-tinted curls (though I know I don't color them) that I tousle to arrange sexily under a cap and think "That'll work OK."
6/2/88: I'm involved in composing a Broadway musical that teaches the cast how to compose music. I start by putting symbols like # % & * on a blackboard and then ask for the difference between a "morphoPHEME and a morphoGRAPH" and get them to say that the morphoPHEME is PRONOUNCED while the morphoGRAPH only REPRESENTS the pronunciation. I get them to understand that if "IF" is represented by #, then "ST-IFF" would need TWO morphoGRAPHS, like % #, and someone behind me claps me on the shoulder with a "That's just wonderful, Bob!" I'm concerning myself with the advertising for the show when it occurs to me that it should include the fact that it's not only entertaining, it's also educational, and begin fantasizing about making it into a television series for ADULT education (after all, the kids have Sesame Street and the teenagers have Take Charge! or whatever their series is, why can't the adults have a remedial show that teaches them grammar, spelling, and dealing with ADULT situations?) The fantasies extend into my waking period after the dream, so that it almost seems like a viable idea in ADDITION to being a colorful and interesting dream.
6/13/88: Incredible melange of dreams after the over-stuffing dinner at Ponderosa Steakhouse after the disappointing "healing center" day in Lambertville New Jersey with the bickering Vicki and John. 1) Fethi is explaining why the tub-drain might be emptying slowly: he'd put a sock filled with flour down the sink-drain, which connects with the tub-drain, and some of the flour might have caked with the moisture and prevented any decent outflow. I tried figuring out why he'd put flour down the sink-drain to start with---to cut down the slime blocking the throat of the drain like I thought of my hands removing phlegm from my throat to stop me coughing in concerts and class yesterday? to kill fungus in the drain? to somehow smooth the flow of water? 2) Joan Sumner has had a hard day and Alice Sabah, who seems to have the same type of body, is giving her some sort of herbal massage which Joan appreciates very much, except that when I go to thank Alice, SHE ALSO has had a very rough day and is almost falling asleep, and I caress her naked breasts (which are very small for the thickness of her trunk) to make her feel appreciated and loved, and she smiles wanly up at me as if to say, "I'm very tired, but I agreed to do it and it'll all work out OK." 3) I'm going through my desk (which has a raise-up top like grade-school desks) at IBM, trying to come up with the next test of the Billing System, but I hadn't put away previous tests in order, and I really don't know how far I've tested what parts of the system, but I'm coming across old card-boxes marked with the original program I did for Dick Johnston for the Centroid Method of Factoring, and another program on Summation for Integration that I did for Irwin Stoner, and I'm wondering whether the new IBM machines can even USE these old programs, and why am I keeping them. I keep coming across small binary decks of red-topped IBM cards for programs I can barely remember, and I get a little frantic thinking how I have to keep up with all of these and really clean out my desk (rather like I have had for the past two weeks to clear up the stack of junk in my living room). 4) I've repeated a dream about going south in Manhattan along some connecting street lined with Manhattan-foot skyscrapers to get from one subway line to another, but this time I've discovered the end-of-the-line spiral tracks where trains switch from coming downtown and ending at an elevated station by going down this multi-turn spiral to start uptown at an underground station. Red-metal trains like the First Class cars on the Paris Metro screech down the white-tile lined spiral tracks (I guess influenced by the spiral staircase centering on the elevator-less shaft at the ATA theatre with Mary Vilaboa on Thursday). 5) For the second or third time I've seen a visual display rather like the Mympths, but these are in the MORNING and are comprised of SILVER SLIVERS rather like waste flecks from a drilling machine, and I'm concerned if these might not be precursors of some sort of visual damage to go along with a vague sense of eye-strain after I've watched TV for eight or nine hours a day, much at high-speed, while I am going through the J&R tape-listing.
6/17/88: 1) Seems I've had this kind of dream two or three times before: I enter a theater which I somehow "know" to be the Apollo on 125th Street in Harlem, but it's in the past, while it was still an elegant Black showplace. I'm in charge of a group of five, as if from Actualism, and no one knows anything about the theater but me. Each time "before", we'd entered on a Mezzanine-Balcony level which had seats only in the upper sides---all these seats gave angled views because their views funneled down through a very small opening between the front of the first balcony and the stage and screen below. "This time" I get smart and say, "We want to try to get seats in the ORCHESTRA." We go downstairs at a left-side stairway, and there we're slotted into a kiddie's area: low wooden benches loosely occupied by mothers and smaller children---but we're so far off to the side that there's NO view of the stage at all! I say I'm going to try to find a better place, and I walk down an ornate hallway (rather like the ones used in the Armory for "Tamara" with wide staircases, bronze statuary, and Art-Deco-glassed light fixtures) where semi-naked females are posing in "previews" of the Follies-type stage costumes. Up a left stairway leads me to the entry-ways for a series of boxes like the boxes at the Met or the under-balcony loges of the old Paramount Theatre, where uniformed ushers ask to see my tickets, but imply that most of the boxes are empty, and will fit five, if I pay a supplement (which may actually be a bribe or excessive tip) of one or two dollars for each seat, which I think is a bargain and begin to pay, wondering how I'm going to scout up the rest of the group to gather them into their new seats before the performance starts. 2) I'm cruising somewhere and am strongly attracted to a short-statured, large- headed body-builder with mahogany flesh and oiled texture who looks rather like Franco Colombu. I run my hands over his squarely-defined abdominals as he flashes a smile of triumph that I've chosen him. Then I'm in bed with a younger, less-defined body without the "produced" veneer of the first, and he's marvelously erect but somewhat shy about letting me touch his cock, but wants to go down on me. After a few sexy flurries, he's somehow sitting in a chair while I'm chewing on his hard nipple in the bed, and he gasps, "Not so hard," as I twist his erect tit, and when I glance over at his cock rubbing against the seat of the chair, he appears to be cuming, and I see the white dots of jism and go over to put the remains of his orgasm into my mouth without a single thought of AIDS, while he groans in post-orgasmic pleasure, and I think that with his youth he'll soon be erect again and ready for another orgasm. 3) As part of the same episode I go into a new kitchen which I've rented, but I'm disappointed to find a leak from the center of the ceiling onto the newly-tiled floor. I reach up into a cupboard for a large plastic container into which I've dumped all my pills, and as I'm selecting my dozen or so for the morning, I'm appalled to see that some of the plastic-like capsules have cracked at one end, permitting the yellow grains of the vitamin-supplements to sift to the bottom of the container. Even worse, some of the gelatin pellets have melted and their oily contents have dribbled to the bottom to make a half-inch layer of sludge at the bottom of the container, and I wonder whether the proportions would be retained so that I could just take a teaspoonful of the sludge as my daily supplement. Wonder if some sort of cabinet-defrost could have ruptured these pills, or if there was too much heat recently, both of these ideas somehow, though not explicitly, connected with the over-hot weather we've been having recently and the power outage of last night that stopped the clocks at 7:30PM after Dennis and I had left for dinner, so that we returned at 10:15 to black apartments with flashing time-signals from VCR and Microwave, and I left the refrigerator closed, hoping that the power would return in time to save the ice, and in fact woke at 2AM to find my phone-machine light on, put on the air conditioner to freshen the impossibly humid bedroom, and reset the VCR to record a 4:30AM show that I'd wanted, finding that all my "repeat" settings had been eliminated by the power outage. How lucky I felt that my computer had stopped about 7:15PM, only fifteen minutes before the outage! Had been DIM in day!
6/3/88 (note typed 6/18/88): There was a beautiful topaz-light-blue clip in a silver setting with interspersed diamonds, and somehow it fragmented into many pieces that I bent down to pick up off the floor as I woke. Only a FRAGMENT!
6/10/88 (note typed 6/20/88): 7AM: I'm trying to (and do) get hired by Miss-Marple-type PUBLISHER---selling one-volume encyclopedias----which sales guy says has never sold BETTER, even WITH a complete encyclopedia. 8:45AM: Computer keyboard PINGS, like line-ending on a TYPEWRITER.
6/24/88: VERY MUCH like an Actualism picnic, gathering, or camping-trip-in-the- Adirondacks, of course seeming like a preparation for the GG ride I'm taking tonight to be with the rest of the group at Adriel's in Queens. Only fragments remain in memory now, but rather than jotting down a note that would get MORE vague, I've put on the machine at 9:05AM to type it direct: I'm staying in my own cabin (having looked at single supplements and rates last night in the Antarctica brochure), but I'd not been there last night (there was either an all-night meeting, or we'd been camping under the stars nearby), but I was still a little surprised to find that a newly-married couple had put in their own bed: a strange, short, elliptical, obviously-for-two, looking-like a waterbed because of its "bouffant" puffiness", and I glanced over at my longer narrower single bed in the corner, VERY like a Hemlock Hall corner with its light polished woods, red turned-down coverlet, and spindle-spool-legged chair nearby, to make sure it hadn't been slept in. But then I felt that ANYONE would let the sexy husband sleep in his bed to share the virility: he was an Irishman that somehow I associate the name of Susan MacMahon's friend Bob Kelly with, though this fellow was non-acned and solidly built to contrast with the "real-life" Bob Kelly. He came over at one point and slapped me comradely on the back with a broad smile---HE had the broad smile, the BACK didn't! Before entering my cabin, we'd all left some dining hall or meeting hall to drive somewhere, and Mary Vilaboa (definitely) and Maya Bryant (less definitely) ran out across the parking lot toward the cars in a driving rain wearing only short-sleeved blouses and no raingear whatsoever. "I'M not going like that," I protested, and determined to return to my cabin to get a raincoat, and I decided that the weather was JUST cool enough to warrant my donning my quilted blue duffel-coat in addition. It was when I returned to my cabin that the encounter with the newlyweds took place---the female small and out of sight. As I was dressing, Meg Huskey (definitely) and Adriel Frumin (less definitely) giggled near me that I had time to do ALL that I needed to do, and somehow (remember, this is a dream) that involved folding up a contraption that was a combination camera-tripod and movie screen, with a tiny upper part for affixing something, but very complicated and sturdy tripod-legs that, when they were folded, I could STAND on like a portable river-wader or puddle-stander or non- jumping pogo stick, and I DID, only it toppled over and I strained while falling to make sure my raincoat over top of it didn't tear when we toppled to the floor. Some vague memory of a pre-episode in which we were all driving and riding in cars through mountain scenery, with either sunrise or sunset making the views more dramatic, but the details have completely escaped me. In addition, my first contact with "Bob Kelly" was through a pass-through as he bustled about cleaning up a kitchen after their breakfast, and somehow I retain the impression that THAT room was brightly lit for use, while the bedroom I was in was eiher only lit by early-morning sunlight, or by means of a tiny yellow- parchment-shaded floor lamp near my bed. I'd hoped that typing the retained memories directly would lead me to recall other fragments that I'd forgotten, but it didn't seem to have done that. Anyway, the quantity of detail (and the fact that I've gotten down to the bottom of the page) warrants my having turned on the machine to type this after pissing and turning off the telephone machine, but before removing my earplugs or putting up the bedroom shades, so I can now return to bed at 9:20AM, having slept just over a good-feeling 8 hours.
6/28/88: 7:50AM: INCREDIBLE STORY: I'm STRAIGHT, at first unwilling, then willing accomplice to a thief, but it's all over-melodramatized as on a TV program or on-stage: 1) I feign injury on a roadway so a car will stop, the driver will help me, and my accomplice will rob him. 2) I feign losing something, and someone's WIFE will help me while her drawn-away husband is robbed. In these episodes I feel blameless, rather that I'm acting like a Robin Hood in an excusable way. 3) There's an episode with stamps: a mummy or cadaver is suspended (rather like a magician's trick, between two chairs at head and foot) and RIPPED open at the chest so that stamps (packets and envelopes and blocks, too) fall out and someone orates about the relative values of these tiny pieces of paper. 4) Last and most EXTRAVAGANTLY, I'm duping a family but fall in love with the WIFE, who sends me off as I humbly accept my fate (probably in a jail), then, out of her sight down the stairs before rolling cameras, I heavily, heartily, magnificently WEEP and SOB and GROAN and GASP and CRY to show my extraordinary LOVE of her, which I know she will RESPOND to so that she'll throw over her husband and marry me in front of an ENORMOUS supportive and loving audience that CHEERS our conjunction. There is MUCH emphasis on my SHOCKINGLY good ACTING: in 3) I remain ERECT while sobbing---where others would collapse, and in 4) I collapse into a BONELESS SOBBING PUDDLE where most would have merely gone LIMP. I'm even aware of niceties like in 3) I HIDE my face, while in 4) I'm OPEN. Plans form in my GENTLY WAKING mind for new episodes, dwelling on all the honors I'll be getting for acting such SUBLIME terror and emotions. The memory of the INTENSITY of my sobbing at the end of 4) lingers as I wake, leading me to wonder idly what ELSE I may have been working on---and then the buzzer buzzes with my returned manuscript from the University of Chicago Press! Could I have FORESEEN that??
6/29/88: As opposed to the "typical opera-house dream," this seems to be one of the "typical movie-house dreams." I buy my ticket at an old-fashioned self- contained ticket booth standing alone in an ornate arcaded entrance, and get inside thinking I'm early enough, but find that the theater is about 3/4 full and the curtain is slowly parting on the theater's logo prior to the short subjects and previews. I have my little blue ticket out for the taking, but no one's at the head of any of the aisles to check, and I make a mental note that they really should have someone checking tickets or just anyone could sneak in off the street to see the show free. I first take a seat about 2/3 back on the extreme right, but find that my view is blocked by a pillar at the "waist" of the theater, so I excuse myself and have to push past two VERY heavy men (the nearer one rather like Ed Druck from upstairs) to regain the aisle. The front half of the seats are almost filled in the center, but there are scatters of empty seats at the extreme sides, and I figure to sit about 1/3 from the front on the extreme LEFT side. Moving down the right aisle just before the middle, I pass on my right a man coming up the center of the aisle, rather hogging the space, and I put my left hand across me to his right upper arm to gently shove him to the side by lightly drumming my fingers up and down on his sleeve, and he grossly over-reacts to my movement, beginning to shout at my pushiness, and I want to respond about his hogginess, but suddenly find myself about to take a seat on the extreme left aisle near the front, when the door at the head of the aisle swings open and two men come out, saying something like, "How can you expect to watch the show when you've been engaged to entertain a certain man," and without transition I'm a woman dressed in a long, bustled, pre-WWI chintz dress, surveying the rough-faced attendant who confronts me, thinking that HE is the man I must entertain, and with his youth and size I think to myself "Well, it could be worse," and start to step into his arms for a caress, but he pushes me off with a rude snort and implies that HE'S not the one I'm paid to entertain, and as I back off I wake up before discovering the next object of my intentions. The sex-change was so without shock that I just may have been female through the whole dream but hadn't noticed it prior to that encounter.
7/1/88: EXTRAORDINARY PARADE of SUBMARINES vrooming past me (and fellow AWOL?) in stream as we started by cooling our feet, then saw what we took to be fish swimming below us, which grew larger and larger until our log-like seat expanded into a bridge from which we viewed the parade of submarines, clearly visible in the green water, bubbles of turbulence fanning spectacularly from their V-shaped rear fins. [I don't understand this next, but this is what the note SAYS:] AM & PM hotel---wash (before going back to camp) with the other's soap and dry with a washcloth for a towel, since I hadn't brought anything of mine along. Before that, there was a fragment of the "2nd Ave/1st Ave" subway to get to 15th Street and I know I have to subway up to 42nd Street before I can go west. This note typed on 7/17/88, getting ready for my EUROPEAN TRIP!!
7/21/88:8:15AM Dream of Joe Easter constantly interrupting me and female director who's telling me how to retype my play for a student production. Also, 2 photos of two ships in a San Francisco display demonstrating various perspectives, versus a display of cat/kitten, dog/puppy, and Joe says, "Well, I have a cat." And a woman who owns a small hotel like Meineke who casts her eyes down when someone says, "With only 1 bathroom, you can easily clean 10 rooms in each day."
7/23/88: It's restaurant fuss like last night, but too lazy to recall details.
7/28/88: Almost forgot "Kevin Costner" dream from this morning: I'm looking at a PRESS kit from him, how he invested heavily in SILVER to become RICH, has a number of cars, exhibits facsimiles of stock certificates, even gives postage stamps to be invested in!
8/12/88:6:50: Two dream fragments: 1) I'm an amazed guest at a wedding in a family with many beautiful blond daughters in white who kiss each other affectionately at the least provocation. How happy the family must be! 2) I'm trying to catch a boat about to leave a dock, and step off dock into water and effortlessly turn the boat about in my hands, looking for the easiest and widest point of entry between the smooth wooden lower rails and polished rosewood upper edges of the dock. A pair of "real problem" dreams.
8/14/88: Wake at 6:45 with memories of three dreams: 1) Typical "must catch subway but I don't know where or when" fragment, 2) Playing an odd "marble chase" game that on third play I realize I don't even have to WATCH previous marble "work," just keep pressing button for "release" and they keep coming in long lines on final "roller-coaster tunnel" that observing kids watch and can somehow fling streamers of marbles colorfully around them in the "game box," 3) Talking to Mom about some relatives going to see someone "who was married on Saturday ANYWAY" and she gets amazed or hurt and leans her head against a wall and starts to cry (or rather KEEN) bitterly and I don't know what to do---but when I WAKE I remember how grateful she was when I put my arm around her in her sadness, frustration, and agony after her EKG in Akron last year (2 years ago?).
8/16/88: 6:30 wakeup call disturbs CHARMING dream: I'm cuddling with a lovely guy who wants a "cover-up" so a sort of teacher gives him a chiffon tube skirt that JUST COVERS his brief sports shorts, tying at top and bottom to emphasize his slim tanned muscles.
8/17/88: Record two dreams again at 6:05AM: 1) Wonderful episode of playing with a sexy hard cock that comes almost at once, but I can match his speed and we think we're wonderful together. 2) Large group of "past-Army" men are enrolled in a university-like class, and I'm talking on the phone with A about B's needing things, but I don't want to mention B's name, but when A suggests "Moses," (a large black boxer) needing help, I say I agree HE might need help but I was thinking of sleepy-eyed possible-psychotic D!
8/21/88: 6:25AM: Another two dreams: 1) I'm shamelessly hugging a new-found friend in the first row of a balcony, then pay some attention to a silly performance, and I know we have to get somewhere where we can be alone and more comfortable. 2) Again IBM: I'm in charge of a huge file conversion and I had somehow thought I must convert files manually on a keypunch, which should take two years. I quickly move through two steps: a) wanting a PROGRAM to convert personnel codes, and b) only SPECIFYING the program for someone ELSE to write.
8/22/88: At 6 remember two dreams: There's a blank program name-slot where I stepped in to partner a ballerina, but I find and take STACK with my name PASTED on for my own archives. Then I'm pouring water over platform and thinking I may have washed off my INSTRUCTIONS. Then my table built in wall by a cute German in shorts who works before I get in, but that's OK.
8/23/88: Wake at 12:30 and shit diarrhea, and get cold chills in which I have odd "dream" of toilet at 12:20, 1:45, 3, and I don't NEED them, but COVER for chills and UNCOVER for sweats and seem to be up ALL NIGHT.
8/31/88: Wake at 1AM, with odd dream fragment of [diagram] eyes or beetle wings (or now that I draw it, GARFIELD) that "should be kept secret." Something of Egyptian scarab about it.
9/2/88: 6:10: Pretty former Actualism student, activist, Elaine Hyams? and I am among 3-4 guests in ARCTIC, donning heavy costumes to sample military life, running across tundra and I only have 3 photos left but it's getting dark anyway.
9/4/88: Wake at 7:40 with memory of dream of having a bit of input data on plastic lens-like disks that slip apart and MAY have gotten out of order. I can input them and get format errors or try to LIST them with a special program, or just feed in each in turn and see which one works. I worry about the time and effort involved in this until I "recall" that it's only a dream.
9/11/88: Dreams at 7:35AM: 1) I'm an "expert" on the trip to South Africa with only four tourists, and it looks to be a luxurious great trip. 2) I'm a house- guest of a wealthy playboy who MAY be gay. I play on a 20-octave piano for four and entertain "Peaches" Mangin, the fabulously wealthy widow "who WAS Auntie Mame." In a fragment I step in icy water and wake unblanketed with cold feet.
9/13/88: Remember a few fragments of dream, now forgotten.
9/15/88: Wake at 2:20, then before 7, laying and recalling two bizarre dreams: man on TV staring at his blood-red arm as his SHIRT is pulled off, thinking he's just been FLAYED. Then a very thin "Jewish type" young man is flailing his shoulders, saying he doesn't WANT his arms. Then a soldier, teeth clenched against the sight, chops up underarms with a flash and a fountain of red blood and the arms are off as the victim gives two tremendous screams. Ugly dreams!
DREAMS AFTER RETURN FROM EUROPEAN TRIP
9/25/88: Ken Miller killed by "shop" associate, lots of people for funeral rehearsal; priest grumbling about other assistant's cursing.
9/26/88: 1) Again RUNNING around IBM balcony for train that leaves at 10:03 and it's just 10:04. 2) Again, JJ has paid for my ticket that I must get from conductor, who gives me stub from his wallet with a disgusted look as the closed-door train starts moving slowly and I KNOW I'll have a terrible "dream- run" to endure to TRY to make the train.
10/4/88: 8AM: I've gotten a part in a play on 10/3 that I must "read from the podium" as tour guide on 10/4. I think of tensions---private jokes and rehearsal readings through 7-9AM.
10/6/88: I'm backstage at a church-play: wood-cased bodies are put onto the floor to grow and shift and split down the middle to show drawings or impressions of golden cocks, and I can see something like shadows or super- imposed images as the models for these drawings lying beside each other playing with their cocks and making them semi-hard. Someone flicks the end of tickets to form a spray of mold onto some other tickets, ending up with dots of mold on the top which are then passed around rather like canapes with caviar toppings. Once the tickets are numbered, once the tickets are for the "actors." There are little models of wooden boats floating in bowls of "water that should be saved," and there were expansions that were in my mind but which are gone at 5.
10/9/88: 9AM: I'm watching an SST land and JUST as the plane-wing sweeps over the sight there's a puff of dirt and someone BEHIND me says, "Oh, they crashed," and "I chose THIS flight because the pillows on the other flight were too FLUFFY." And today (10/22) I agree to FLY with Spartacus to Epcot in Jan!!
10/22/88: 6AM: LONG dream of FIST-FUCKING 5-6 guys, ALL of whom LOVE it and cum COPIOUSLY and QUICKLY, and the LAST fellow ends by kissing and hugging and becoming someone SPECIAL in my life, liking me for being ME as I like him for being young and tanned and stiff-cocked and cute-as-a-bug. Warm positive dream!
10/23/88: 3:40AM: Awful dream of group of men staying in old house getting killed off, and I fear getting bitten in ankles by SNAKE, thinking I'm next, but I make it MOST of the way through (rather like a funhouse) and then I WAKE!
10/26/88: 9:15AM: I'm standing on a street in Paris with my luggage, and a couple rather like Kevin and Susan from the Dinner Club approach me to ask in broken Franglais---they'd heard me speaking English and know I speak English--- information about getting around in Paris. I describe the choices of Metro: fast and sightless, or bus: slow and sightseeing. I'm trying to describe the folded route- and street-map that I own, and bend over to rummage in my shoulder bag at my feet to see if I have it with me; and "Susan" reaches into my back pocket and pulls out my wallet with a curved-arm gesture that hides my wallet from my sight for only a moment. I grab her arm and hand and demand my wallet back, and she gives me a rueful stare and returns it. I fumble through and find my cash (about $75) gone, and demand THAT. She returns it with a glare. Then I check and find my two major plastic cards are gone, and get THOSE back---realizing the finesse of their theft: I might get SOME back but they might be able to retain some. I feel slightly sorry for their naivete and amateurishness, but then we're somehow removed from my luggage, and when I get back to look at the boxes being handled by two trucks at the curb, I find my large suitcase is gone: they must have had an accomplice in a car ready to take whatever I left as I pursued the smaller objects in my wallet! I'm feeling frustrated and angry and resentful: where will I stay tonight and how can I be comfortable if all the shops are closed and I can't begin replacing anything until tomorrow, and why hadn't I learned that I had to watch out for my possessions while I was on a trip, and why had I trusted the young innocence of the stealing couple, who make me hate everyone for a few moments. Wake with fragments of that resentment hanging about me, and I determinedly remember that it was only a dream and I really don't HAVE to start shopping for lost objects!
10/27/88: I'm watching two plays at someplace like DTW. The first is somewhat better than I'd expected, though I don't recall details now, but the second starts with two people starting to make love in what looks like a planter right at the end of the stage in front of the two rows of audience, and the girl talks about her spinal operation, and the guy says he's had the same thing, and she says, "But I don't recognize your notochordotomy scar" and I'm amazed at the "intelligence" of the playwright. Then an ugly woman comes out and someone behind me whispers "Throw Mamma from the Train," and she LOOKS like the ugly mother, but she has (I hope) makeup of what look to be ACORNS of white pustules in rings of skin "set onto" her face, and she's making fun of the "more traditional" skin eruptions of the GIRL'S mother by saying "She doesn't even have QUALITY FAT." Then there's a trio of violinists in the corner (from the concert last night?) and then a marching band comes through another door, and the audience and I go mildly APE over the imaginativeness of the production!
10/28/88: 7:45AM: Traveling with Mom in car through the South. Stop 1 is in a small motel along the road, from which we get a gift as we leave. We drive off freeways onto back roads through towns that pass baronial mansions fronted with old trees that have died off in some places, so that sweeping vistas of tree- lined streets are interrupted with stands of younger trees framed in the new- shoot haze of fresh growth. We stop at another motel, and at a certain angle from the bedroom I can see the manager sitting in his suit at a desk in his office, so I close the door (sounds like a fragment from "Frantic" last night) so he can't see me. Mom is in the bathroom first, and I look at my bed, which has three wooden disks that act as hanger-supports for clothing, and Mom's put her coat on one, her dress on another, and her slip on the third. I look around for a closet, but there isn't any. So I combine her slip with her dress so that I'll have at least one place to hang MY clothes. Then when she opens the package (rather like the one from "DOA" last night), it turns out to be an unlabeled large glass container with beige fluid in it that she pronounces to be "foot lotion," and we puzzle about why the previous motel could have given her such a strange gift, and I suggest that they had QUANTITIES of the lotion, so they economized by getting their own surplus jars into which they poured some of the lotion, making it very inexpensive for them to do it. There was also a pair of "large-computer" dreams in which a human-formed computer of about ten feet in height assisted first a scientific experiment, and then "appeared" in an upstairs hallway to assist in a bedroom in some way, and though I expected the walking hulk to break down walls, it tipped to one side like an enormous top-heavy dresser-bureau to maneuver under a low hall archway and proceed on its way with the hallway undamaged. More details I've forgotten.
10/30/88: 9:35AM: Only impressions remain of two thoroughly delightful dreams: 1) I'm walking down streets (do we ever walk UP streets?) in Manhattan with a new-found group of friends (this seems to be influenced by everyone seeming to like and/or pursue me at Homogeniuses) with whom everything seems charming to "to work." (Though how everything could be said "to work" when I can't even remember the details of this particular dream.....) One sequence involves my transferring some folded-paper (I guess I mean "origami") object (like a small sailboat) from one hand to the other, both of which are covered with a kind of lotion or grease. The "object" of my digital dexterity is to a) rid my fingers of this sticky white glop (no, it's not like cum in the dream, it's more like Crisco; and none of the implication in the dream is sexy, it's only become that in this transposition into words) bit by bit without completely destroying the fragile origami and to b) [or not to b)] be as original as possible in the switching of the object back and forth (and now an influence certainly has to be the article about Michael Moschen in the Sunday Times). There's a lot of laughter in the dream, and a lot of serendipitous finding of places on the street that look interesting either for eating in or looking at exhibitions in, and the whole thing is rather like a stroll in Disneyland where everything is charming and pleasing, I think now, which reminds me of the comment by the speaker at Homogeniuses last night (the M-Phasis contact who introduced himself to me as Brian Marsden (?) the Mensa contact who spoke with me on the phone) that walking in the streets of New Orleans during one of the National Conventions (which he attended as a representative of ABC Radio) was like walking in a kind of Disneyland. The people include one little enthusiastic woman like Sandra from Milan, and the rest of the people could have been patterned on Edgardo and Marina, though none of the small group of four or five was a serious and silent as Marina. 2) I'm partly watching rehearsals for and partly watching myself direct a small play which looks to be so totally disarming and charming it's alarming: a "Sound of Music" group of unrelated adults and two small children (well, the boy may be about 11 and the girl maybe 5 or 60 (I loke---yes, like/love: loke---that typo, a young girl of 5 or 60)--- maybe 5 or 6 break into a simple little clog-step dance at intermittent points in the action: they line up quickly, looking intently down at their feet as they start with their feet parallel, then spread their toes apart (from foot to foot, rather than intra-foot) to do that simple duck-step from one side to another, waving their hands distractedly in the air, laughing with themselves, and somehow each time that happens on the stage it's a magical moment: the audience laughs and applauds, the music returns to the tonic, the skit-like plot resolves another set of complications and returns to some known and well- loved starting-over point. There are small gifts connected with this, too: tiny tin boxes (like Brasil Dannemann Pierrot boxes) that are opened to reveal little sparkly gifts, which include delicately made tiny joints and little compartments of white powder that give the "innocence" of the gifts a slightly knowing air; and some of the sparkly gifts are brilliant enough to suggest precious stones, giving an air of carefree luxury and richness that adds to the charm and pleasantness of the dreams. I wake vaguely aroused and highly pleased, thinking that I should also start going to the j/o clubs to see how my luck holds, and maybe influencing the sex-group subsection of Prime Time to rent a stud from a magazine for about $200 and watching (and videotaping) him as he jerks off and preens for our own jerk-off entertainment. Everything seems bright and positive, though I'm still tired from having gotten only 7 hours sleep during the time-change, but I DO manage to get out of bed and type this by 11:05, pleased with Homogeniuses and what it seems to be leading to; delighted that the restaurants are being taken off my list with charming swiftness' even happy that Vicki accepted my goof of mistaking 85th and Broadway for 83rd and Broadway and not meeting her for dinner last night at Patzo; and my second subscription opera, "Gotterdammerung," was pleasant, and I'm passing my cards out at Homogeniuses and getting useful telephone numbers.
11/2/88: 9:15AM: 1) There's a stamp-collectors seminar being held somewhere in a huge university, and I'm wandering on-campus when someone asks me for directions, which I think is strange: asking directions of a gray-haired man on campus. Then I enter a wing of one of the halls that has a room in which are tables full of stamps in glassine envelopes (obviously from Bill's stamps in envelopes that I opened last night), but everyone behind the tables is a kid. But I figure there will be a few other speakers (this stems from the possible stamp-club in Brooklyn, too) who are adults, so I'll be comfortable eventually. 2) Continuing in a child-like vein, I'm trying to illustrate the use of color in advertising by coloring the collar of a fat woman whose chin is sticking out from under the brim of her large hat, and I try drawing in amusing lips and tongue, but that doesn't work, so I go back to pencilling darker areas to bring out the humorousness of the fact. This segues into coloring the upper arm of a baseball pitcher with orange, until someone defines for me the difference in color depending either on the team or on the season of the year, and I take up a green crayon to more easily color the full uniform of the player. 3) A brief final episode (I may be more awake than sleeping at this point) involves a cuff around the skull of a person into which a doctor is methodically operating a large hand-drill. I MAY be that person, but the operation is "benign" and painless and the person is commenting on the benefits to be gained thereby.
11/5/88: 10:15AM: Put bathrobe on JUST as I get out of bed to type these dreams: 1) A group of us are breaking for lunch in a kind of school, and everyone's asking where to go, and I suggest a nearby MacDonald's type place; there seems to be general agreement. Someone (a combination of Dennis and Carr) has shared an overnight bag (it's my cylindrical travel-bag) with me, and I'm separating out our things so that we don't have to carry so much just to go to lunch, but as I take items (like a small folding umbrella and an overnight kit) of my own out, it seems easier just to put them into my own bag (it's my BOAC gym-bag). Then it looks like it might start raining, so I put my gym-bag INSIDE my travel-bag so it will get less wet. As I'm struggling to open my umbrella, random sprinkles of rain come in through the roof, darkening the concrete floor on which we're sitting, and I open the umbrella to stay dry inside. When I get outside, everyone's dispersed, and I make my way through the puddles on the street wondering where everyone went. 2) Rather a continuation, I'm now standing in the aisle of a MacDonald's type place, rummaging through a littered counter to find a small folded menu that say that breakfast is available from 7:45AM to 11:45AM. Since it's just five after noon, I'm hoping to still get a breakfast steak sandwich. I ask if they have a particular special, and a counterman holds up a handful of onions and says "Yes." But then I look over this entrance-counter into the dining area proper and it's DARK. I ask about the lights and someone says, "I'm sorry, there's absolutely nothing we can do about it. The electricians know about it and they're trying to fix it, but we don't know when the lights will come back on." Others in my group who had mysteriously gathered now leave, but I order something that I like and move plates aside at the small counter to clear a place for myself, just to the right of a tiny placemat right AT a mirror at the extreme left of the counter, where there's just not enough room. I get a glass of something red, labeled "English salop," and it's a new beverage they're introducing, and I drink it expecting an acidic tomato-like fizz, and it's smoother and sweeter and gentler than I'd expected, rather like a milk-based fruit punch. I pour the remains out into a corrugated-bottomed plastic dish, and spoon up bits of what should have been tomato but look and taste more like squishy watermelon bits. Dictionary says that "Saloop" is a variation of "Salep, a hot infusion of salep or sassafras," and "Salep" (which literally means "testicles of the fox" are "the starchy or mucilaginous dried tubers of various Old World orchids (esp. genus Orchis) used for food or in medicine." Then wake and doze with materials and memories now transcribed onto NOTEBOOK 458.
11/9/88: I'm enrolled in some sort of training class (not at all like Actualism's teaching classes) that involves looking at old IRS forms (maybe this is connected with my talking yesterday with Tony Davis from Macmillan, the source of the IRS books I index). They're all in manila folders with names on the edges, like my files that I've been concerned with the past few days, and I've picked up a stack of older, dusty ones held together with paper clips, and one of the larger packets slumps open to show a typed list of addressed of apartment houses owned by someone. I look at the tag with curiosity to find the name of the owner of all these buildings, but am sorry to see that it's only something like "241 W. 12th Street Corporation." I figure these were pulled out for auditing some time in the past and had never been returned to heir proper places, and would probably be listed as "lost" if anyone asked to see them now. I take them into some sort of back corridor (like a lobby-way for an elevator bank or a fire-escape entrance; maybe this came from the entranceway to apartment 5A at One Bond Street last night) to study them further, and debate leaving them THERE, to be found and filed, or taking them back to where I found them, in case someone had left them there for some purpose. The building was an old high-ceilinged, dimly lit warehouse type building, and the whole effect of the dream was of age and mustiness.
11/15/88: 1) Fragment involving a sand-colored coral necklace, as if it were coming out of a beach, or tabletop, or display counter. Woke with a fantasy of a world in which precious gems were so common that EVERY surface would be studded with cabouchon drops of intense gem-like color, preferably in a beaten- gold setting with equal glitter. 2) I'm sitting in a hotel room on the ocean, rather like the photo I showed Carr Saturday night of me on Helen and Jimmy's Virginia Beach condo, though I somehow know that this is in Florida. I'm talking on the phone to Dennis, who seems to be in the next room (rather like my talking to him on Hicks Street when he's really downstairs), and I'm pointing out sights from the window: the clouds racing by in low-scudding wisps, islands of sea-wrack being propelled past on gusts of current and wind, and there's a fragment where we're in a BOAT skimming north on the coast past surprising islands of coral heads and agglomerations of seaweed that have made a kind of channel through which our boat passes. Then the scene from the hotel window gets more dramatic, and I feel trembles as if there's a high wind buffeting the building, or the pre-tremors of an earthquake, and I try not to be nervous about the building falling over (using the argument: after all the building's 25 years old, and it's stood for these years, why should it pick the time that I'M in the building to experience a storm that'll collapse it). There's something about this that reminds me that I've been thinking of adding my name to the waiting list for an apartment in Cadman Plaza, as I'd mentioned to Carr on Saturday and to Spartacus this morning on the phone, and the "hotel" in Florida could have stood for a future apartment on a high floor subjected to buffeting by winds and swaying by earthquakes. Before I went to sleep and after I woke there were tremors that I had difficulty deciding whether they were only inside my body from tension and nervousness, or outside my body from subways passing underneath, lightly shaking the apartment, to which I seem to have become more sensitive over the passing years. There were fragments I wanted to recall from yesterday, but mostly I remember lying in bed increasingly depressed as the dog next door continued to bark and bark from 10:15 to 10:30AM and I wondered if I'd kept the phone number from before, wondered where the dog had been for so long that he hadn't bothered me, and annoyed with myself for being so easily annoyed and distracted by what objectively is a very low-level (but damnably persistent!) sound. Thank goodness the barking didn't continue this morning, as I got out of bed around 11AM after having stayed up to 3AM reading all of Bear's "Psyclone", luxuriating in the having the time to spend as I like, but feeling guilty about not putting in enough hours indexing to get the money I need for restaurants!
11/16/88: 1) I'm at a Japan Airport Customs Desk with Dick Hsieh, and a woman refuses to pass us through customs to allow us out of the airport, simply saying "No." When I insist on some sort of reason, she points to a map behind her counter to roads that lead north from Niigata Airport, where we are now, to the green-colored border of Korea, just about 30 kilometers away, and she says we could have gone from our hotel to the border to pick up "contraband goods" to smuggle overseas. I pursue her from behind the counter into a corner with her back up against the wall and finally ask, "Can we give you ANYTHING that would change your mind?" and she hisses, "Money." "How much?" I ask in desperation. "Two hundred dollars," she says firmly. "That's too much," I shout in outrage. "Then $70," she says, with some cowed fear in her demeanor. Then we're through, and I ask Dick how much he's given her, and he says $500! I know that I have about $20 until I get back to the states, so I get angry with him, too, and he walks angrily away down a diagonal path leading away from the station into the countryside. I take my attaché-case from the lobby and down under some trees to get it out of the rain, and I can see the rain being stopped by the pine trees growing in the orange earth. Dennis is talking to me, saying that he's going to go find Dick and apologize to him for me, and I'm just wanting to get back home. 2) The former at 9:15AM before Alice calls, this more like 10:30 when I wake again: I work in a large room that's an IBM office, and I'm showing someone a very low-level pullout on the front of my desk, saying that it can be built up with a pad for a computer or typewriter, and the other person says that it's sturdy and useful. I push the pullout back in and my desk looks more like a tan credenza with drawers than an office desk. Then a woman from a company like Time-Life enters with a presentation: we've won their account and she's going to present the job to our office. I look over to find that my desk's been shoved into the far corner, other desks have been pushed back against the walls, and two sofas (like the ones from Actualism) have been pulled up to form the front row and many folding chairs have been arranged behind to make the room into a small auditorium seating maybe 50 people. I see only one cushion-padded wicker chair empty at the front right of the room, but as I head for it someone else takes it. But when I turn back to the room, there are a few seats left in the front of the room, so I slide into the front-right corner seat on one of the sofas as she enters in a small spotlight to begin her presentation. As I slouch down on the sofa so that those behind me can see her, I realize that with the spotlight on her, reflecting off her glasses, I'll be about the only person she can really SEE, so I struggle a bit more upright and look directly into her eyes. She gives a small talk and then says something about "light." "Oh, if you're interested in the light..." and Leslie Moed, in the row behind me, almost starts to give her an introduction to Actualism, which embarrasses everyone in the room, and she's silenced rather awkwardly. To celebrate, the woman presenter is passing around pieces of a very oozy cherry cheesecake she'd brought with her, and she starts by shoveling a very messy piece onto a floppy paper plate on my lap. I'm momentarily distracted and look back to find the cherries have flopped off one side onto my Brooks Brothers suit, so I scoop them back onto the plate and try to wet the pants so they won't show a stain, happy that they're black and will look OK darkened by wet. But the cherries slip off the OTHER side, and I try to balance the whole plate to put them onto a stony ledge just over the grass (how we got outside I didn't notice), and when I scoop up the slidey cherries again I notice that I've included bits of bark and dead grass which I try to separate from the sticky cherry-red sauce. It really is a terminal mess and I haven't managed to even TASTE the pie with my droopy white plastic fork. But I'm very glad that our office has won the contract, because it'll keep everyone busy for a number of months, and we really needed the money (obviously influenced by my need for more indexes to pay off my debts). It's now 11:15 and time to stop this and have breakfast and get back to try to finish my Genetics index before leaving to Caribbean with Sherryl before Michael Moschen.
11/17/88: 1) I'm attending a new opera by the City Center Opera at New York State Theatre, sitting in one of the Rings. The stage is plain at the start, but as more and more chorus members come onstage, the scenery gets more elaborate in such a compelling way that the audience flocks to stand at the edges of the rings, blocking my view for a moment, and when I get a clear view to the side, ENORMOUS buildings boasting lavish detailings have sprung up in a spectacular flash. There's a full-size five- or six-story Italian seaside shop-building at the left side of the auditorium, and when I go around to that side, where the fourth floor is about even with the ring I'm on, I can see a derrick-like structure towering over the building so I figure "They must have pulled it up like an accordion from the floor," but as I pass a "shop-front" I'm amazed at the detailing of the facade and seller's trays, and someone next to me gingerly reaches out to test that the "pyramid of eggs" is really only a Plaster-of-Paris reproduction glued together rather than the real thing. Between other scenes there are blackouts after which there's a series, almost like in animation, of an enormous cathedral being built, next to impressive administration and governmental buildings, all with huge cupolas and Romanesque columns. I figure it must be done (is this all influenced by Michael Moschen's Magic Show last night?) with successive back-lit scrims or quick painted drops. The audience is overwhelmed and keeps cheering the scene-changes, and I don't remember hearing anything of the actual OPERA, which I think to be "Traviata," but know that the outdoor scenery doesn't quite fit that scenario. Just remember a preliminary fragment when I'm looking for a seat: it seems the program is in two parts, the second part of which will be a student pageant, and I can see sections of the student orchestra, band, and chorus sitting with their instruments and identical costumes in clearly demarcated sections of the orchestra below me in the half-light before the curtain rises---the section of snare drums glowing with their serving-platter-sized white drumheads. 2) I'm in the second row of an auditorium (rather like a school auditorium) for an Actualism whole-group meeting, and I'm surprised at how many people are filling the seats in the room (rather like my surprise at the size of the audience for Michael Molthen last night, and except for two large square columns that seem to separate the first third of the hall for the "upper classes" from the back two-thirds for the "newer students," it's rather similar in size and shape to the auditorium last night). Elizabeth comes in wearing an uncharacteristically loud green-and-yellow plaid woolen suit, and it seems that one phase of the meeting is already over because she points to a large number of people and says "You've heard all this before, so you can go (on vacation, is my feeling) now." Then she sits in a folding chair in the front row, just in front of me, and turns to me with her chin on her hands on the seatback and tells only me about the television series she's been contracted to do. I listen in interest to some of the details, and when I ask about the radio program she'd been set to do, she dismisses it by saying that it wasn't working out like everyone expected so she'd decided not to do it. I somehow get the feeling it was cancelled without her wanting it (like her New York "engagement"?) and her next project may be similarly cancelled without her governing influence, so I take it all very casually. I look into the back of the auditorium and see that she's dismissed almost half the audience, but there are hordes of people coming in from the back doors to fill in the remaining seats---and here there's an overlap with the previous dream, since the BAND members from the previous audience have been saved the front-row seats in various sections of THIS arrangement, so they just have to file down the aisles and sit in their reserved emptied seats---and I observe to myself or to a class-member next to me: I didn't think there were THIS many students in the school, and I wonder if this might not mean that the New York Center is coming back to life. I never hear what the actual meeting is about, but think now that this might be SOME kind of reflection of what's going on in the inner with the reorganization of Actualism students, control committees, and classes.
11/18/88: I'm vacationing in CUBA, in Havana with a friend (rather like Andre, but also somewhat like Avi) who wants to BOAT to FLORIDA for lunch to cruise with another friend, dismissing the distance by saying that it's just a couple of hours away, and I'm not sure if he wants to attempt the trip in the little boat he's in, or if that's just local transportation to a bigger boat or a small plane. Without transition I've taken a tour to some sort of crafts factory where we're served a snack or lunch, and the woman I'm with (rather like Claire, the know-it-all from last night at Garvin's) seems to know how to handle things, and when the old woman beseeches us with a moan for some money, I ask the woman for small change for a tip, since my blue purselet has only larger coins, and she grumbles and hands me three tiny odd-shaped coins: a squarish brassy-porcelain 3.14 millisemes, an octagonal duller-colored 1.8 P, and a tiny round .022 msm. After another shift a small group of four or five of us tourists, like Eddie Jimenez and two or three of his friends, find ourselves in the hilly countryside, having gotten here by subway or tram, and we're looking at a subway-like map to try to locate where we are, seeing a tree-covered ruined brick aqueduct-like semi-buried tunnel off in the distance, and someone else mentions "The Castillo," and we figure we can walk to see that from here. This segment is either before or after we're looking at a sketchy map on which Havana seems to cover more than half the island (though I know that's not so in actuality), saying that it might be interesting to see something MORE of the island OUTSIDE of Havana to complete our tour. In a final scene we're driving a car (someone nervous like Edgardo is driving and another guy is next to him, and I'm in the center of the back looking between their shoulders at the road in front of us), possibly following another car ahead of us that's leading the way, and the road narrows to a trestle-bridge between two railway-type railings on either side that get narrower and narrower as we go over a second and third bridge, so that finally the driver hunches his shoulders and "pulls in the sides of the car" to negotiate a bridge precisely as wide as our car, careful not to scratch the new blue paintjob on the doors.
11/20/88: I'm waiting for Thanksgiving Dinner at GRANDMA'S: she's youngish (60s) in bright green dress, sitting on a sofa next to Henry and Marion. LOTS of people in the crowd, and I talk lots with BLACK woman (rather like Delores Lawton) and we even joke on "black." SO many people I ask "How many at DINNER?" and they say 12. I try to count (Grandma, me, Henry and Marion, Mom [though she's not ANYWHERE visible] and Rita, Helen and Jimmy, Edward and Anne, so that's 10, so 12 may include Grandpa and Dad??? or Greg and Gary), but don't get much beyond 3-4 in the dream. [Or is 12 our Actualism class? Or is the whole thing caused by my apartment-size worry about hosting Homogeniuses 2/24?] [or Dennis's for Thanksgiving, though I think NOT.] Then I wander OUT to "stream" behind Hartford Avenue and wander banks and part the riverbank on the WRONG side and try to find my way back through a tunnel that someone warns "Don't go through," and it's a tunnel where I crossed BRIDGE before, and tunnel comes up LOCKED [TRUCK before went UP stairs with a HUGE effort] and top is chicken-wired off and sides are locked gates. I go back and forth, meeting more people, and finally enter gatehouse to say "Lots of people TRAPPED in here," and she goes and OPENS gates and there are MANY gates to let people out, but I have to get my pink OVERCOAT that I'd draped over a rock and I begin to WALK SLOWLY in that AGONY dream-walk, but NEVER with the relieving thought: "This is only a DREAM," and fear I'll NEVER get to dinner at ALL. Wake with a jolt and ask Carr "Did I scream?" since it's VERY like the dream with Jean- Jacques in Pistoia where he said I SCREAMED---but Carr said I didn't.
11/27/88: 1) Bob Rosinek and I are having stiff cocks together with sex, 2) Tom flops atop Carr and Dennis in a bed as I sit at the foot of it, and they complain, 3) Amusement part with variable walkways and halls that lead to changing areas of cliffs and caves, with wire-flying across canyons, and I fear my knees might be skinned if I'm shot out of a cannon. Long detailed dreams.
11/30/88: Wake at 8:10AM and recall two dreams that I record on computer now: 1) I'm on a Pacific Island like Yap (read about Yap in EB yesterday looking up Yale University) and "know" that some sort of viral disease (I'm thinking that my sore neck might have been virally caught from Carr with HIS sore neck and shoulder) is responsible for the illness of exactly 32 people, and I'm looking forward to the tests that will prove something scientifically (is that from watching Weinberg being interviewed by Lehrer on TV last night about "The First Three Minutes"?). 2) I'm leaving a building (could be IBM, but I have the feeling of more like 57th and LEXINGTON than 57th and MADISON) and thinking first that I have to subway to Brooklyn Heights, but then remember with pleasure and relief that I've moved back to 57th and 8th, so I just have a few blocks to walk home. It's raining a bit, but I'm wearing another of my elegant raincoats (not Aquascutum, but WHAT Irish name---not MacIntosh) so there's no problem. Into a narrow hallway like a ship's corridor of cabins, and walk THROUGH Valda Wells' bedroom (she's there and greets me with surprise that turns into a greeting as she knows I've done this before), where she's in an elegant pink slip primping before a gold-plated mirror in a well-appointed suite of rooms, and open my door just NEXT to Maureen Duffy's elegant suite of rooms across the tiny narrow hallway. Then I'm inside with a few friends, and Rolf is taking my turned signet-ring (like the ring that identified Valentino as "The Eagle" to Vilma Banky on Monday night?) apart to examine the watch-face which is suspended on three tiny silver-silk like cords, and I say "It's interesting that the case is solid gold and very sturdy, but the connections seem DESIGNED to break as you try to repair the watch itself," and Rolf (who I talked to yesterday about the Yale Museums) opines that if anyone is the least bit careful about slipping the attaching pieces apart (they're very delicate, like the attachments of the needle to my stereo set), they won't be broken. Feel satisfied that I've finished this at 8:27AM, ready to call Carr at CBS.
12/3/88: I'm attending some sort of esoteric-enlightenment school that carries a large number of classes for a large number of people. I'm sitting in one class early in the morning (thinking of Carr's appointment for the 9AM Radio City Music Hall Christmas show with friends tomorrow, Sunday?) knowing that I have a 12:30 appointment (like one of my two appointments in the early afternoon today and tomorrow?) somewhere, but I'm not quite sure where. I'm then talking to the head of the whole organization at a counter-top, and he's taken his wristwatch off and I've taken mine off (I can visualize my turned- inside-out watch on the sofa at class last night), but when I pick "mine" back up it turns out to be someone else's: a gold-colored watch of 40s styling. I figure the organization-head picked up mine by mistake and this is his, so I go through a number of classes looking for him, but he's hardly ever there, and I excuse him by thinking that he's simply an entrepreneur who's gotten together a catalog of teachers for classes that he's not necessarily interested in himself, so he spends his time with administration while others attend the classes that he organizes. One of the classes I try to find him in turns out to be in a well-attended barn, and it's for deaf people, because the speaker is signing and not talking, and everyone's eyes are following her hands closely. I walk farther and farther back in the barn and all the seats are filled and people are lined up alongside a corridor stretching way to the back of the area. Then I go to a lost-and-found office where some officials are looking at about four watches, none of them mine, and I tell them the story but they list my watch as "stolen," saying that "exchanging watches" is an old scam and the watch I got "in return" is broken and worthless. I still hope they may be wrong, but it's now getting close to 12:30 and I realize I have a DENTIST'S appointment (though it's not far away and I won't be late) and I'll return here to try to find my watch about 4:30, the time of my next class. Wake feeling relieved that it was only a dream and I don't have to replace my watch, but WHY are people so ugly nowadays and movement ANYWHERE in the city becomes so risky??
12/9/88: 8:45AM (having gone to bed at 3:45AM!), bits from a three-month summer vacation (including computer-filling itinerary which must be diskette-stored for journal-pages) WITH someone, but I'm not sure who, though I might be a chaperone for a student-type. A number of times I jump fully clothed (like on the "Lifestyles" last night when they jumped into a hot-tub clothed) up to my knees, to my crotch, and at the end I find the deepest part and am up to my chin while others are only up to their chests, into pools of warmer or cooler water. I'm wearing jeans and my blue quilted coat, but it seems I dry very quickly and don't get cold. I have the idea I can see sandy and seaweed covered bottoms through the ripples as lit by a full moon. Usually there are others in the pool with me, too. Other fragments forgotten from previous days.
12/12/88: (Note typed 12/20): Poster tied in contest "Live in the Poster," and later I'm IN the poster, looking for how to get back IN.
12/20/88: 1) Another test-anxiety-awful dream: I'm sitting in a classroom where the instructor has just passed out an advanced-mathematics test and I don't even remember my calculus for three-dimensional integration. Others start drawing elaborate diagrams of the mountain-range the equations represent, and I can't even thumb through the plastic-wrapped pages of the voluminous test. Sit in misery thinking of what I'll do if I totally fail the course, how I can possibly put ANYTHING down on the paper that will look competent, and wishing I could wake up FAST! 2) A Max-Headroom-type "constructed" image appears on a TV screen against a fishbowl-like background (memory from the mottled-faded colors in the backgrounds of "Les Girls" last night?): a bald, fat-faced, wattle-necked man's image goes transparent so that traces of a lobotomy can be seen, and then the camera focuses on his neck where a tumor glows red and an animated face appears on the surface to describe the particular manifestation of this melanoma caused by the faulty lobotomy. I can't decide if it's an advertisement on television or some hospital-instruction film that I ALSO have to pass some kind of test on. After reporting Sunday to Carr that I have mostly innocuous dreams, these are two reasonably discomfiting ones!
12/21 & 12/22/88: POWERFUL memories on awakening, that leave upon arising!!
12/23/88: 1) Strange fragment, as before, of EATING eyeglass lenses---just munching them out of their frames and crunching them into small bits like sugar-pane crystals (and it's interesting that this is the day BEFORE I have the "Lower East Side Broken Glass Pudding" at Everybody's!). Only after eating badly (or crunching popcorn?)? 2) TV show of with a gray-looking audience that's full, and a boy is on a wheel to his pubic hairline, and ONE irrepressible boy has a pink ERECTION that he bobbles up and down with pleasure as if glances at the cameras. Yummy dream recorded as late as 10:15AM.
12/25/88: LARGE multi-character dreams: 1) "Hunter/Victim" type PLOT that all try to uncover/stop. 2) IBM "board" tries to tell department (including me) how who does what, finally setting up motion for a MEMO for questions and answers and organization. 3) Last-night's-party-like gathering with gossip and revelations---will I foresee dinner tonight? 4) Cute "straight" guy is SO pleased with me and Alice and third guy (combination of John and Carr and Dennis) that he wants to KISS us---and he only kisses ALICE, mightily disappointing me and others left out.
12/27/88: 1) I try to choke (and break glasses [again]) a clerk at Thalia-like theatre and stand around outside wondering when cops will come to pick me up---but Spartacus and I go inside to try to pick good seats: not against curving walls, not behind lighting stanchions, not close to railings. 2) Gym-stretcher is told not to SIT on the mat, then to pose, with hairy cock (from TV porno), and HOW to exercise as I look on from the back, pleased with the hairy legs TOO.