DREAMS FROM 1989 1 of 2
1/6/89: Dream of many things: 1) In top bunk of window-filled bedroom and RAIN is pouring in onto suits on hangers that someone laid on the next top bunk. 2) I'm on bus/train, third seat back on left, and woman in front moves BACK practically into my lap, so I BACK up my OWN seat and the woman behind grunts in displeasure. Then the woman in from turns way around to her left to talk with her husband, far "ahead" of her, and I gently suggest she turn around and she HOLLERS back at me, and I KNOW I wasn't being nasty to her! 3) I'm waiting for a time-schedule in a restaurant to eat some kind of artificial foodstuffs: as I tried shopping for Scramblers and Morning Star "Sausage" yesterday? Then POPE had the best dream of all: that I was in a train that started going so fast I asked what was going on, and stewardess says, "Didn't you know? This is an experimental train that's taking off to FLY?" And Pope says everyone on the ground is looking up and pointing in excitement at the plane-train in the sky and he sees me looking out a window in sheer TERROR. YUP!
DREAMS FROM TWO-WEEK FLORIDA TRIP, 1/7 - 1/19/89
1/7/89: Wake with a jolt (after fragments of benign dreams) at 6:30.
1/9/89: Wake at 7:15 and up at 7:30 to shit and write two dreams: 1) directing a PLAY that's going WELL with 6-7 people who KNOW directions, now getting final instructions, and 2) humpy guy who smilingly leaves his flaccid huge cock in my HANDS as he say we better move to another room for sex!
1/10/89: Wake at 5:30 with dreams 1) I'm teaching kids English by dipping into dictionary and taking word 1, followed by next two words. Usually GET a noun, verb, and adjective. Single sentences, then add two more words and get better choices. 2) ONE word is PRISON and NEXT dream's a fantasy of springing kids from prison: teaching them and getting their gratitude and perhaps love. Not sexy, but very pleasant. At 7:20 ANOTHER soap-opera dream: 3) I'm at a party and someone comes up behind me and feels my back, then ALL over my head and face, and THEN he tries to FUCK me with a hard pointy erection and I shout "NO." Then he drives me "to end of island, where kids run wild" and tells me of his house "in middle, where I can get to either end in just two hours," and tries to impress me. 4) Short calculating woman tries to get money out of me so she can "support my apartment" with the new owner, a fat lazy woman who looks like a sickly Carolyn Quinn. I refuse to pay money and she gets ugly, then a woman friend, someone like Susan, pokes her in the belly and says "What about the baby?" "WHAT baby?" defensively. "YOU know." "Well, if anyone LIKES me, they like me for what I AM, and that's what I AM," she says bravely.
1/17/89: 5AM: Dream of Limbo---sort of cut-rate heaven: people standing around, vaguely clean, vaguely dead, staring at bugs on stick, selling pieces of paper, trying to be happy, and I go to visit someone like Gladys who says anyone who's interested in HER would say they're coming to see her at 2PM, not "sometime in afternoon," as I did, but of course I'm DIFFERENT because I had things to DO in town and didn't know EXACTLY when subway would get over to her place. Everyone seems ALIVE, but only barely---sort of a MENTAL graveyard before or after a PHYSICAL one. Like Florida?? At 7:30 write THESE dreams: 1) Interviewing a guy, not looking at him, and I become aware he wants to say something VERY personal, and I fantasize he's in love with me. 2) Doing bodywork on Bernice Cousins, and she slowly walks upstairs to the third floor, then takes off to Ladies Room without TELLING me. I go to look and find new agencies taking over third-floor Men's Room, so there's only the Men's Rooms on 1 and 5, when it had started with Men's Rooms on EACH of the five floors! Also, office doors have plaques reading 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, with "percentage complete" that department is each year, either really or in projection, and I wonder about accuracy of projections.
1/18/89: 6:35AM VISA card dream: Mr. Lemmee is explaining that only seven card-digits need to be checked: three for originating office (about digit numbers 6-8), three for personal ID (about numbers 10-12), and the billing office code (about #14). I write this data at the top of my "record," which looks like an Actualism receipt, for future reference. I think I'd better get a new card since all "correct" impressions are VERY light, even unreadable, on two digits, about #9 and #13, really UNNEEDED, but where "binding on billing machines must have exerted extra pressure to wear them down."
1/19/89: 4:35AM jolt awake from dream with acid-covered burp into left nasal passage. Dream 1) climax of some production is a waterfall (last night's Boca Pointe waterfalls at Palomar entrance?) flowing over a stage-set of a placid slope down to an efficient gutter at the footlights. 2) I'm watching an acrobat below me balance a LOG on his forehead, and I look DIRECTLY down at him. Then he climbs to my balcony and swings across to a cohort on a trapeze, hooks on his own two foot-connectors, and swings by his heels from there, just grazing the floor. 3) Fragment from BEFORE of TINY MEN (34 cleaners of Nara Buddha from the Norton---they WERE about that size!) in BIZARRE dream: they dipped their cocks into grease that solidified around them like candles, then tried to run a race. These one millimeter-tall men in the race were then STEPPED on by me like honey-filled ANTS under my ridged SNEAKERS, which were then held up to an unsuspecting onlooker who was asked, "What's THAT?" only I get a shock when someone like Gladys Blackmarr RECOGNIZES all those fatty white spots AS the cock-casings of tiny racing men! WEIRDEST dream in AGES.
1/25/89: Wake at 8:25 with fragments of two dreams: 1) I'm looking at a map somewhere in Florida, and I want to go to a community just THIS side of a county line and someone else wants to get to a place just the OTHER side of that line. The near place is something like "Schenectady" and the far place is on a system of roads vaguely in the form of a Menorah (or whatever the Jewish seven-branched candelabra is). 2) I'm putting away what I think is someone else's Christmas card, and see that it's signed "Dick Holt" with a square behind the name, and with fuzzier ink, like from a pen that's not working, "Betsy Griswold" (except that the last name isn't written as long as Griswold, except that I "recognize" that it's Mack's Betsy). It's inscribed "$7.50" from each (though there's not actually MONEY in the card) "We figured that's what the cards cost," and I struggle to remember that I'd produced some kind of decoration or gift from one deck of VERY cheap playing cards that THEY estimate cost $15, and I think, "like indexing, I've managed to make the cheap look expensive and worth many times more money." That's all, folks!
1/26/89: Half-remembered fragment of an array of four rooms, like waiting rooms, two on one side, two on the other, each beside the other, but there was a long twisting entryway and a "shortcut" that seemed in a later fragment to involve stepping over a low fence (that seemed somewhat dangerous, since the grasses on either side prevented a clear view of the actual GROUND level) to get from one to the other. This seems now that it might be related to the two features about Gauguin that I saw last on TV last light: how he stepped with desperation from the world of "civilization" to the "natural" world of the islands, and then stepped from Tahiti to the Marquesas in his searching.
1/27/89: Light on at DOT of 7AM, woke about 6:45 with BACK of hand on "lost" earplug, JUST getting light, and thirsty, with 1) dream of sneaking into Epcot with FORGED ticket, waiting for throngs for elevator entry, and security guard nods suspiciously and asks for my ticket RECEIPT. "Oh, my father bought this for me and gave it to me," as I innocently hand him my ticket. "Aha," he gloats, showing me a printed schedule, "you have a NEW ticket, which is NOT valid tonight, Thursday, night." But he lets me in anyway, and I think afterward in a semi-dream state that I could have been a repeater, who WAS OK with a ticket on Thursday night, anyway. Phone rings at 9:50AM, disturbing 2) I'm eating in a cafeteria with a few female co-workers at the table behind me, discussing business. I'm talking with strange women at my table, about the food and general matters, and then a very bright and smiley woman sits two chairs over with a colorful red and green salad (like the Mexican sauces last night), but the bowl looks more like a small black tire than anything else. She takes 4-5 bright lime-green gourd- like objects off her plate, of such volume that I wonder if she's going to eat them with the meal or take them home for decoration. Without transition I'm telephoning someone, but after a few buzzes of the busy-signal there's a pre- recorded message announcing what to do in a medical emergency. I'd never heard this before (usually hanging up after the first few busy-signal buzzes) and turn to the person next to me to ask if this is something that's been going on for awhile or is something completely new. Then the phone rings and I'm awake.
1/28/89 (transcribed from notes on 2/14): With whole family at summer colony--- preparing for lunch---I've got to pee, think to go way OUT, remember we have a JOHN here ("Not like in Dakshinkali") and back UP narrow ramp to sitting room where a guest wants to pee and I give him large JUG and pull Marion (Vallish?) inside with me, and salmon slices almost ready with lemon wedges and it's 12:25, almost TIME!
1/29/89 (transcribed from notes on 2/14): Epcot-like park, maze entrance (that I remember from before, and cheat this time) to tunnel and "roller coaster car" past new gambling area, explained by "stewardess" before, but I forgot.
2/2/89: Wakened by Federal Express at 9AM with two extremely clear sections:
1) I open a closet door in my apartment (not any I've had so far) to find a kind of wicker potty-chair filling most of the space. The two-piece seat has become detached from the back, and the floor is slanting so that I can see there is no water-closet, only a container between the legs (is this part of my thought last night about the cleanness of the toilet in one of the porno films, set in a john that I figure is probably a set rather than an actual multi-stall john), and for a moment I wonder why it's so DRY and clean until I recall that I DO have a regular modern toilet next to my bedroom (this turns out to be in a corner of the living room), so I wonder if I can't just throw the chair out and take the door off and have a nice window-surrounded alcove in the corner of my room. I glance at the supporting pillar for the closet-wall and decide that it probably bears weight from the floor above and can't be removed. 2) I'm having dinner with an Indian family of four in a fairly expensive restaurant in India, and am surprised when the bill comes to $48 without tip, about $55 with tip, and say that I'm not used to such expenses, and the mother gives me an understanding look, saying that "A family of four is expensive to support," and I think "Well, we ARE a group of five, so that $55 isn't really THAT much." Then we're in a car, driving to "the northern, industrial part of the island," and I'm behind the driver-husband, a child beside him and me, the wife to my right in the back, and I crane my neck out the window to interrupt the conversation to say "I never thought I'd see THAT in India," pointing to the prow of an ENORMOUS liner towering DIRECTLY over where we are on the rather inconspicuous road. It's either painted red or covered with rusted steel, which is unlikely since it looks like a newly built ship with extremely tall and narrow lines. We pass other lines of docks with dozens of ships standing in rows like soldiers, and then we're being followed on the highway by huge trucks whose drivers are moderately courteous, only jerking to too-fast halts behind us as our Indian husband-driver turns from conversations too late to stop slowly at stop-lights. At the end of the dream, a car beside us lets us accelerate first up a steep hill after the light changes, and our little car is stymied by the steepness, slowing almost to a stop before the driver can shift into second for more power, and I fear to hear the beeping of an impatient driver's horn behind us, but rather only hear the bleat of the buzzer for my index-delivery, feeling thinly hung-over now at 9:15 from only two GLASSES of wine.
2/8/89: 1) Fragment of people filing into a room with "waiting corridors" marked off (like waiting on an inside-building line for a Disneyland ride), and I'm in a loop that it's possible to "escape" from to inch ahead a bit, and people are annoyed that I do that, but I point out that I broke across no barriers, so what I did was OK. 2) I'm back at IBM testing a program that I'd written, and I get an error in the first try and then it seems to WORK, and I figure "that new programming language is MUCH EASIER TO USE than the former MAP and FAP languages I had to overspecify." 3) A balding blond father, rather like Michael Sachs the actor from "Slaughterhouse Five," is listening intently to the grades of his four sons. They're reluctant to tell him what their grades are, and he very seriously tells them, "You must uphold the tradition of the Jones family." "Well," nervously starts the oldest son, "what grades DID the Jones family get?" "We always got above a C-," the father responds with humorous solemnity. With a gust of relief the children go through their grades: 2 C's, 2 C's, 3 C's, 2 C's, and the father smiles at last to say that they're upholding the tradition of the Jones family. I was relieved to wake at 10:50 AM with these dreams, wet under the extra blankets I'd put on the night before, warm in the bedroom in which I'd turned on the radiator for the first time this year, since I'd wakened with SHUDDERING chills at 3:30AM YESTERDAY with 97.9 temperature, then woke achy and stomach-upset with 100 degrees, so I cancelled dinner with Carr last night and with Alice tonight, but I take my temperature at 11AM and it's 97.6 and I don't feel sick, so I've CURED myself??
2/10/89: 1) I'm getting turned on lying in bed, and by propping my head on my pillow I find that I can get the whole tip of my cock in my mouth. As I get more and more excited, I find that I can stretch my cock, the area around my balls, and particularly the flesh of my perineum to such an extent that I can flail about a two-foot strip of admittedly rather non-erotic flesh, marveling at the fact that I can do it, startling unidentified people I call in as witnesses. Wake with a hard-on, masturbate listlessly, and fall back to sleep. 2) I'm observing the building of a cathedral by the name of Colombard (which, it seems to me now, is rather the name of a wine?), and in the central, finished, section there's an altar with a point of light above a centrally placed monstrance, and this changes into a psychic-battle scene that appears to be an exorcism, and "to add to the scenic effect" the producers (this seems to have been turned into a television documentary now) have attached wires to two connected columns (shaped like an over-high capital letter O) and begin pulling them back and forth so that they appear to be "stamping the ground" in sympathy with the exorcism, to illustrate its power. But the amplitude of the swaying columns hit a resonance, the "curtain walls" (so described) start to vibrate back and forth like thin plywood, giving up their elements of side-support to the columns, and the structures the columns support begin to buckle and crumble, and enormous sections of groining begin to exfoliate down in agonizing slow motion, and it quickly appears that the entire nave is falling. I draw back in fear, wondering whether I'm IN the cathedral and about to be crushed, or looking at a film in which I'm in no danger. 3) At a later point, after more sleep, I'm shopping for clothes in an unknown section of a large French town like Paris (though it appears to be a few decades back in time), and I think "I don't even know where I AM; I might be in a section comparable to the garment district where there ARE no sights to see or elegant shops to be found." I walk into dusty buildings crammed with merchandise from floor to (and including the) ceiling, don't find what I want, and turn and walk into narrow alleyways to try the next doorway. It begins to rain both in the alleyways and in the awning-roofed shops (these may be related to the rain- leaks in the roof in the first part of the TV show "Melba" yesterday), and the plastic-wrapped dark blue shirt I've already bought is slippery with wet. At last I enter a crowded shop where a VERY cute sales boy sort of nestles back into my crotch and makes it clear that he finds me very attractive, and he's not concerned in the least about appearing to be gay (am I fantasizing in advance about Paul C. staying alone in Rolf's apartment for a week at the end of February?), and I reach around to fondle his exciting body and it appears that we'll be having LOTS of sexual fun when I doze into dreamless sleep again. 4) Dennis appears in the previous scene, talking sexily to the cute sales boy and even taking out a cigarette to stand in a theatrical pose, asking if the boy has a light, and he comes out with a lighter and I cringe at the soppiness of the interchange. Wake at 8AM and take the most minor notes, fearing to forget all the details: the jumble of merchandise in dusty wrappings stashed into corners, window areas, hanging in bunches from hooks and wires put into the ceilings, standing leaning against each other in musty floor displays, all colors faded under yellowing cellophane and grayish dust, and the pervasiveness of the rain-streams coming in doors and windows and being blown around corners of the maze-like alleyways; and the over-decoratedness of the "exorcism" altar with candlesticks, flowers, chalices, ciboria, icons, relics of previous cures, rococo angels and saints, and flickering dramatic lighting. AND the sexual charge of the boy, simply dressed, direct in face and manner, totally open about his attraction to me, completely sincere in wanting to be with me, making me feel comfortable with his genuine attraction so that I didn't fear my belly, my graybeard, or my superior (for which of course read "inferior") age. And my distress bordering on humorous disgust at Dennis's offering his cigarette to be lit as a way of making contact with the boy who obviously wants to be with ME and not him: I'm sure he'll come to me in the end.
2/11/89 (transcribed from notes on 2/14): Sat: 1) Trainee in mental institution a) getting tranquilizer needles, b) roaming halls, c) observing, d) "most emergencies," e) 6-7 [guys having sex?] with ONE guy. 2) Cleaning Mom's room: a) tray of figurines containing i) nude reclining child with a "fit-on" nude standing baby that covers child's crotch, ii) small dust-balls that I suction up with a vacuum nozzle, but they get bigger and bigger until I can pick them up like desserts and place them in the wastebasket, b) Chinese-lacquered floors under the dust; floors look quite new---and some OTHER guy spreads dust around.
I take notes below this: 1) Fox Movietone music is da da da DAH (of LSD trip). 2) Shraidi, shraidi-eye, shraidi-eye-eedie is still unknown. 3) "enim nimis in tentationem" is from my altar boy's Confiteor!
2/12/89: Sun: 2:40AM: 1) "Repeat" dream of vacationing on some "coastal" island of west mainland of Italy (idea of flying fast as SIGHT over lots of islands) and with a younger Stephanie (she replaced Dennis from my "first" dream [of which this is a "repeat," though it really isn't]) we're up a hill JUST at closing of the gate to get a summit view. To "same" glass door up the CENTER of mountain tunnel (with upside-down "push" glass handle as is now on the St. George subway-entrance door), and we get to ticket kiosk that "still" closes at 6:44, and entry is 3.45 monetary units, for which I supply "souvenir-sheet stamp-like" paper which is EXACTLY valued at 3.45 units. There's some confusion as I pay for Stephanie and SHE pays also, and the kiosk returns one payment, and we know we must AGAIN go through the MAZE (and I'm reminded of Spartacus's phone call yesterday telling of "football-field" sized maze in Southern California, in Vacaville. THIS one has seven exits, but we don't know their CONNECTEDNESS, but MUST get through to get to TOP of MOUNTAIN (and now I think of my Chinese children's tale!). 2) Sitting in room VERY like 309 West 57th Street #1703 BEDROOM, three of us Actualism "pupils" around a table, to be "initiated," and someone like Wyndee on my right and her husband on my left, and there's a SUDDEN SHARP gust of wind from LEFT (where I "know" there's NO door or window as 1703 bedroom) and MAN---"RUSSELL" is my IMMEDIATE thought- leap---SWINGS into room and goes into "next room" to "wait" and we're wearing FUZZY GLOVES and reach out in FEAR to hold hands in SUPPORT, like three free- falling parachutists from "Free Fall to the Rain Forest" on TV yesterday. Wyndee says "That's my first student from Greenwich," but it's so MYSTICAL I WAKE with "star-like brightness" in upper left field of vision that REMAINS, and I think "Is it my upper-room STAR---a point of WHITE LIGHT in dark room? And I WAKE to feel CHILL in left chest---did I have a small HEART ATTACK and provide a dream to ECHO it? Can't feel my heartbeat with my hand, but can SENSE pulses of circulation in my ear-plugged EARS for cardiac confidence. Write this in wondering awe till 2:52AM. A "once a year" VERY SENSORY dream. The SHOCK of wind and FEAR from upper left, and I think: psychic INVASION of an ACTUAL "open door" in ME??? 3:10AM: Till now, lay THINKING of 3-4 MAIN writings-possible in letter to Mitch, and THEN include 1978(?) proposal to agents to "Ocean of Jottings" from 1) TOPIC-slice, 2) TIME-slice, 3) "finished-book" slice. And I DREAD getting up to look at VOLUMES of pages and WAYS of presenting them! WAIT to get it DONE! Then at 3:27 I take notes [on ACTUALISM 296] and up at 5:09AM!
2/15/89: (Note transcribed 2/17): 1) Marty and I are listening to a radio program of a Finnish opera, and the announcer comes up with a quiz that Marty knows cold. He writes down lists of answers like A) Martti Talvela, B) Leninkainen, C) Havtela and Kanioonen (including numbers of diaereses, slashed O's, and other accents), etc, that I'm amazed at. 2) Cartoonist's panels are found as clues to adventures IN that cartoon: the first panel contained a tiny view of an entire set of 12 panels, with tiny figures prefiguring action to come later in the FOLLOWING panels. 3) "Do you know Mykonos?" And I say I've BEEN there, but my fellow-traveler has lived there for three years, and as we're talking on a dock, an automobile can be seen in the sea, coming toward us, and it raises itself from the water like a porpoise and settles, shedding sheets of water, onto the dock right in front of us. 4) An aging homosexual talks of a number of sex groups and advertising agencies, saying a) that he can find any sex-oriented word you want to know about in a dictionary for just twenty-five cents, and b) describing "Pyxis" as a group that advertises its services by saying "Jerk off as long as your dick wants it." I'd taken the notes hoping to get to the computer to retype them that morning, while lots of ancillary details were fresh in my memory, but now they've all vanished.
2/17/89: A group of us are eating in a hotel dining-room, possibly out of town, possibly something like the Plaza, where there are surrounding windows letting us look out onto a park. I'd recommended the restaurant (possibly we're staying there on business), but the food's not that good. We finish and the head-waiter asks how the food was. I pause, he insists, I finally confess it's "Not as good as Lutece, La Cote Basque, or Grenouille," congratulating myself silently about the goodness of my pronunciation of that last name. The head- waiter gives a bit of a smirk, and suggests that we should have ordered better, for instance the "Shrimp and Plaquettes," for which he goes over to the next table and takes up a frying pan which contains shrimp reddened with some sort of tomato-based sauce, which are surrounded by what I at first take to be blobs of cooking fat but turn out to be tiny dumplings with superinscribed Chinese characters, quite like Mah-Jongg tiles. He displays the intricacy of the "cooking" by inserting the corner of his spatula under one of the "tiles" and lifting it slightly to show us that the cracker-base has solidified enough to be lifted as a slightly squared-circle unit, but the top is still fluid enough to let us see that the elements of the "character" are bits of scallion-stem and pimiento set into a glairy substance like egg-white, which had yet to solidify in the cooking. I'm amazed at the intricacy of the cooking and look forward to tasting the food. Then, in an after-dream semi-awake state, I fantasize that he would continue the conversation to say that I obviously knew about food, and should write a review of this restaurant as a stepping-stone toward becoming a restaurant reviewer. I figured it wouldn't be enough to eat in a place just ONCE, but I'd have to sample many of their better dishes so that I could give an adequate review of the menu, and not forget one of their specialties, as I had at this lunch. There'd been another fragment, probably sexual, before, but I've forgotten it now at 9:45 as I transcribe this part.
2/20/89: 1) I've turned off my VCR and am looking at what is on Channel 4, and there is a black couple being interviewed, showing people around their apartment, but he's bending her over a table backward as if to fuck her, and when they separate, he's naked and showing a veiny semi-hard-on, and I wish I had the VCR on recording this, excited by nudity on commercial television. 2) I have to locate Norwalk airport to give someone directions, and I scan across connected sheets of NYC maps, hoping they will go far enough north to show me the airport in Connecticut, as I think it, and come ALMOST to it before I wake.
2/21/89: Three of us are sleeping in one room and Joe Safko crawls in with me for cuddling, and I scratch his back longly, hoping the noise will sound to the third person like moving sheets rather than caressed body. Exciting fragments!
2/22/89: 8:05AM: Long ELABORATE dream of Fatima-like statue MOVING: Our Lady greets Lucy, who smiles and curtsies, then turns expressive face to audience to "prove" that she came to life. Two out of five times, they STEP OFF their pedestal and move into the crowd leaving the church by the center aisle, moving preternaturally quickly through the crowd and out the door, where no one seems to notice or follow them. Everyone is agog, there are larger and larger crowds. "Father Angelo started out by disbelieving, but now he believes," someone near me says. When it happens near me, I'm sitting in a large flowered sofa that has a higher-than-seat footrest, rather capital-S-shaped like Stephanie's black-leather recliner, and in the ecstasy of seeing this apparition I burst into tears of happiness, which the little gray-haired woman next to me must think needs consoling, since she pulls my head down onto her shoulder compassionately. The two women to her right move more to the right to "give us room," (they must think we're crazy, I figure), sitting only on one cushion, which reminds me of looking at the Actualism room on Monday night with nine of us in class, seeing that 14 would fit if two people shared each side cushion, which would be quite crowded, so that 12 would be a more reasonable capacity for the room. Quite a feeling of strangeness and oddity about dream.
2/24/89: 8:50AM: 1) I'm washing a car in a driveway by running a hose over the side of the car, but I have to add caulking INSIDE the door to prevent the interior from getting wet. 2) Then I'm putting some double-sided caulking material on the inside of an aluminum shower stall to stop THAT leaking.
2/25/89: 7:45AM: 1) I'm at 1221 Dietz, watching a new color TV with a high, small screen and a VCR control that works only intermittently (like mine which seems to be losing battery power every so often), trying to jerk off to a porno tape I don't know very well. It's frustrating, and AS I put my cock away and zip up and make myself presentable to the world, Mom returns and looks at me. UGH! 2) I've been helping in Dad's grocery store at 393 Thornton and no one's been in for an hour while Dad's out for lunch, but then TWO business-suited men enter. "May I help you?" I ask the first, and he wants a carton of cigarettes, which I think costs either $2.50 or $2.44. The second points to a wooded crate of fresh asparagus (like last night at Chalet Suisse that Susan had) and asks "How much per pound (laughing), 50 cents?" Dad arrives just then, pointing me behind a counter which hides rolls of wrapping paper and cartons of goods to a shelf that has a clipboard of prices on it.
2/27/89: 9:40AM: 1) A warehouse holds stupidly-withheld goods (like AIDS drugs in Times article I read yesterday), and I write requisitions to release them, unknown to warehouse-management. 2) I'm opening a can of cream-soup-like white stuff to place, like pineapple rings, on sandwich meat on a sandwich for lunch.
3/2/89: I'm riding up in "the usual" special-group-display elevator at the Met, and we pass the window mullions that I remember surmounting "from before," but this time there's a jerky grind, the guy to my right clutches with panic and I look at him with amusement, and the elevator stops "between mullions" so that we can't really see. We hear spurts of energy and motions of cables from the elevator gears, but we can't move. An announcement comes, "Please move to the sidelines for the best available view." We clamber off to marble side-aisle walls, but can't really see the action. An usher dresses a Hamlet (or Macbeth) and tries to mime the main action, but that really doesn't work. There are other facets, like a radio-broadcast, that management attempts to duplicate the effect of our "special-seeing" of the show, but THEY don't work. I try a couple of different vantage points, but seem to be OUTSIDE the theater and can't even HEAR the singing in the opera, so it begins to seem familiar and frustrating in that "endlessly-repeated dream" kind of way, and I wake and take mental notes before Vicki calls and I get out of bed and write this by 9:55AM.
3/4/89: Note recorded 3/5: 1) Annibon African boy being tutored by me in Eleboy, and he's embarrassed because he's been praised by my teaching (or IBM) supervisor from Corsica. And I think in the dream: "Isn't there an old stamp- issuing entity that's "Annibon, Eleboy, and Corsica." It sounds rather like a nonsense phrase from an LSD trip-recording, but when I look it up in my stamp catalog there's nothing under "Annibon" but looking to the E's I find "Elobey, Annobon and Corisco" on p.740, "a group of islands near the Guinea Coast of western Africa" which issued 60 stamps between 1903 and 1910 of the two typical King Alfonso XIII type ranging in value from 35 cents to $100 used, so it's (vaguely) possible that I have one of them, or at least have a section for them in my more-frequented stamp album. 2) I'm estimating a big IBM billing job, evaluating possible ways of programming the task, depending on the "savings" (is that the word I wrote?) billing rates. Or would it have been "changing" billing rates, as caused me a problem with TOBIAS, the successor to my JCAS.
3/5/89: 10:45AM: 1) Typical complicated "loss" dream: I'm on leave from the Army, staying in a couple of motels just before returning to base, and I can't remember what I TOOK or what I have WITH me and where I would have LEFT what I'd forgotten. There are a number of fragments: a) I seem to recall having taken little WITH me in the first place, maybe only a tiny bag (what would have been my old typewriter case at that TIME has become my gym-bag in this dream's "more modern" setting) along with my shoulder bag, maybe in fact ONLY my shoulder bag, which I probably still have somewhere about me, but I'm too newly-awake to decide where that is; b) I'm fussing with my shoes and look down to see one of my ACTUAL new black shoes (the one with the patent-leather-like look about the top of it) in front of me as I sit on the flower-wall outside my last motel-room. Why ONE shoe? It seems I'm looking at the LEFT shoe unoccupied before me, and the OTHER one of them is on my RIGHT foot, and it seems that I'm in the process of taking OFF my left BOOT to put on my right SHOE (don't ask me where my RIGHT boot is here!). As I unlace my left boot and start to take it off, I see to my great surprise bunches of papers, my wallet, things I'd usually carry in my pockets, and even a pair of binoculars oddly out of their case, and somehow I twist the circumstances even in the dream so that I had actually slept with the boot ON and had placed these items into it to safeguard them during the night in this seedy motel-room! c) The time is only 10:40AM (as it is when the phone-click from Mom wakes me) and I realize I have enough time to rent a cab or hitchhike or telephone to the place I'd stayed LAST night to see if there's anything STILL remaining in the room, and I can even go back into the place I'm just coming from (could I have come to another place to have breakfast?) to see if I've left a bag THERE. And maybe I'm wearing all the clothes I'd taken with me, so that with these pocket-things I have EVERYTHING. Very detailed, very confused, lightly frustrating. Then 2) I'm talking to a bearded Marty Sokol with some surprise, since I know in the dream that he's dead, and I don't know if the dream is in the "pre-death past" or a "dream present." He's showing me a program of his intermission features during the Metropolitan Opera season, and there's a gala loaded with "intermission stars" (old opera singers, various experts and authors of books and articles, foreign visitors) whose photos grace little bios of them, and in the middle of this program is a single-sheet laterally-folded paper for a program dated "1/1/1." I look and think "If this is January 1, 1981, he'd still be alive and this dream is taking place in the PAST; but if it's January 1, 1991, it's not only in the future but it's not even THIS year, so FIRST I try to find out if the date's not a misprint for 1990 which would at least make it for THIS COMING opera season, OR if it's not 1981 and it's "logical" that he be alive. He's starting his eyebrow-raised splutter of protest when the click wakes me. I'd only gotten 7 hours sleep, but want to record details, even though I'm vaguely hung-over from Spartacus's Jubilee last night and my jerking off until 3:45AM, and my AM smell from not having showered for 3-4days.
3/6/89: 1) I'm fumbling with someone (we're both dancers, but we happen to be naked) who seems to be a woman, yet I keep sensing that I'm grabbing a COCK between "her" legs (is this a delayed remnant from "M. Butterfly" on Thursday?) and when I lay "her" out and look at her crotch, it's an oiled slit until I start exciting "her" and then a stubby foreskin-stretching COCK slides in and out quickly, and I ask something like, "What IS this?" 2) Bob Dukes telephones me about something, assuming I'm going upstate with Joyce Alaya at 11AM, and it's 10:55AM already, so there's not enough time for me to get ANYWHERE, and he asks me if I know whether she has a car or a station wagon, and I say I know absolutely nothing about it.
3/7/89: The crux of the dream is the finding of the stash: I've just spent overnight at a cabin in the woods that's somehow "managed" by my mother. I've stayed awake all night to settle the accounts (rather like Actualism) and put all the financial figures away---AH, just remembered how the dream STARTED: there are four or five of us leaving at the end of a working day, somewhat like the new Management Staff at Actualism, and I realize that I have a large number of singles in my personal wallet that might amount to ten, so that I can take a ten and leave all my change. I count through the bills in my wallet and come in the natural (large bills at the back, singles in the front) order to three or four twenties and a wad of nine singles, along with two checks that are somehow scattered with my wallet and other things in the bottom of the front section of my shoulder bag. I count again and again, but there are only nine singles, so I look at the two checks to see which I can leave. One check looks like one of MY personal checks, and I've somehow signed it already (or it just seems in a dream-like way to be more MINE), so I look at the other one. It looks more like a Chinese bill of currency than anything else, but it clearly states that it's a check for $1 and it's not even signed, so "I guess that's the way the Chinese do it." I find there are some blue pen-marks for the date, but otherwise it's not identified with me, so I reason that Actualism (or my mother's cabin-account) can just as easily cash it as I can, so I leave those ten pieces of paper and take a ten which I add to the ten that I find at the front of my stack, hoping that the others packing up around me won't think that I've just TAKEN the ten from the till. Then I'm alone in the cabin, and through the stands of woods glowing yellow in the rising sun, I can see that the sun is actually UP already (this sounds like part of the short story I read in Omni yesterday about "The Snow Angels") and I look at my watch to find that it's just a couple of minutes before 5AM, when my local bus will leave outside to take me to the major transportation (this now seems to be in the Adirondacks) that will take me home. But as I'm cleaning up the last items, I find a paper bag that someone's left, and in emptying out its cushion-like contents, I find a handful of dried grass! I'm about to throw it away when I think, "I'm far enough away from the core of Actualism that I can actually TRY a bit of grass now," and search around the rooms for another, smaller, bag into which I can transfer the grass. I find a few moldering bags under pine boughs and try one that seems drier than the others, waving it around in the air to fill out and dry up, and put the grass into that and squeeze it into the corner of my cylindrical travel-bag, and "then" find a plastic baggie with pink-liquid -filled tiny bottles like Rolf used for Amyl and a few ampules that look like they might be needles. This is serious stuff and I put THAT into the glowing coals (actually, almost-burnt charcoal briquettes) of the fire in the fireplace which comes to life quite quickly, and I hope the burning smell doesn't wake anyone. By the time I've finished packing and clearing up the place, two women are standing by the dining room table, one, rather like Stephanie, is ready to leave for the day, and I hope she doesn't come in MY bus, which I now think I may have missed and will have to walk or call a cab. THEN I think, "Did I put the receipts in a bag in the corner of the fireplace to keep warm, and has the now warming fire disintegrated the dessicated paperwork in the bag???" But I wake with a jolt at 9:15AM and start typing this at 9:25AM, retaining it all.
3/9/89: 10AM: Rolf gives directions to "secret" office---many turns to go the "long" way for safeguarding secrecy. But the keypunch-data processing area is crowded with people, and when he looks for me he calls me by NAME, so I get angry that he's not cooperating with the idea of secrecy.
3/13/89: 7:40AM: 1) Howard Reynolds arrives (late) in a suit and tie for a restaurant dinner, and Joe Easter is IN a suit and tie, so I figure I must change clothes. 2) A "cave" in the side of a hill that we're driving up reveals itself, as I see the whole form of what I'd taken to be a cliff-face, to be the side of a cathedral that's being built, though I can't decide if it's a true sign of Christianity or just a Disney-like theatrical device. The rose window seems to be made of shining wires, suspended in the scaffolding so that it swings slightly back and forth, reflecting light and colors off itself.
3/16/89: Wake with my name "Robert" lightly chiming in my ears. I'd been living in a space something like 1221 Dietz as in an Actualism Center; it seems I'd been there a long time and had reached a peaceful old age. I was reading a book in "the red chair in the corner of the living room farthest from the door" when a couple of men came in for a meeting, and they went through the rooms and into what had been my bedroom but was now an office, or even a small apartment, and when I asked where they were going, they responded that "the space had been set up" for a number of years and worked well and they smiled down upon me with a sort of bemused benevolence (as opposed to an amused anevolence). I sat contemplating this pleasing state of affairs while a sort of "over-voice" echoed through my head: "You were so surprised to find that there was a grand peaceful way of holding and dealing with the Actualism Center when the format changed in the late 80's; isn't it nice that you went along with it and were such a factor in its change and survival?" I'm inventing lots of these words, now, in typing this, taking care to make the right margins end at 80, but obviously the images were affected by my reading the Board Meeting's flyer last night, and the chime of the "Robert" that called me from my seat---to death, rather obviously---came with such tenderness and joy that my waking to day here was, hopefully, only an intriguing foretaste of my waking to day there will be when I DO pass on!
3/22/89: Note from 9AM transcribed at 12:20, no more known: "Nitsa" double-cock on four-titted boy in box office at President's house at University of Akron where I enrolled for one year to TRY for Master's, wandering hall-to-hall and room-to-room with that familiar frustration of not quite knowing what to DO!!!
3/27/89: 1) I'm working at IBM again, trying to run a deck of about 30 cards, but I can't get the recently-changed formats for two control cards, PROG and COMP, that I need. I keep bugging "the expert," a cute young kid, but he never gives me a straight answer, and I finally figure I'll have to go to the operations room of the computer itself and ask someone there. 2) WHAT WAS the other: I TOLD myself when I woke at 8 that I should note it down, and now at 9:20, after reading through Purdy's "In a Shallow Grave" to see what the video might be like, I can only recall it was SOMEHOW connected with the situation of the friends of Edgardo's that I have to see this evening in their hotel: like there was some OTHER errand that I had to run in town, something to order or something to buy---or maybe it was more like the toilet-bowl fastener that just broke and I figure it's easier for ME to get a replacement-part at the hardware store then go through the frustration and uncertainty of phoning Fethi and waiting for him to come and diagnose the problem, get the parts, and return at some very-much-later time to actually fix it. Or something about ordering tickets for a show tonight or the next night, or looking through a department store for a particular item, like the rental videos that I scanned, also, this morning before settling down to write this. How's THAT: lines and lines ABOUT the REMEMBRANCE of a dream, but not really the recording of the dream ITSELF!!
4/2/89 (note typed 4/20):1) Rolf in business, me consulted to set up "emergency food" plant. Take over EXISTING plant. Directors don't mesh with production; FABULOUS SUCCESS. 2) Group sex---dimple-chin in pink-blue wig---but he is cock -sucker. I play tune. [And that's the end of that note.]
4/3/89 fragments (note typed 4/20): 1) Hal Wallach and I sit opposite each other (in bus? in apartment?) and flare at erections pulsing lights under leather-silk pants. 2) Double elevators going to top of 150-story building--- 32 people on floor and 16 in each elevator. 3) Ads for gay groups in Yellow Pages segues to TV ad of guy "trimming" cock head with scissors and teasing with tip of nail file the delicate cock-head rim.
4/11/89: It was a charming place that I'd been to, in dreams, before. Deep in an old wood, high on a windblown hill, the village dated from Tudor times and the gentility and concern of its kindly inhabitants were so dated they made me smile breathlessly even as I tried to persuade them I appreciated them. First I was moved into a cozy bedroom high under a moss-laden roof that hunkered low under sweeping pine-boughs. The new pine-wood chests for my clothes hadn't yet been lined with waxed paper, and when later I made a small joke about drawers that I was the first to use, I tried to soften my phrase so as not to appear to be laughing at them, merely chiding their over-concern for my well-being. Belowstairs was undoubtedly a dim-lit kitchen smelling of breads and plummy jams, and the two pale whisker-fringed faces seemed more like illustrations for Mole and ????? in Wind in the Willows. Maybe they doubled as tutors as well as house-masters, for they seemed as eager for my mental as for my residential comfort and expansion. Without transition I was escorting a tiny grandmotherly form over village streets so tailored they could have been indoors in a venerable Crystal Palace. The pinched pink face was familiar, like Virginia Ward's from Salinas High School days, or like some dimly remembered librarian who'd so shrunk with age that her pointy nose and moist pink features greeted the five-year-olds' on their own level. I was holding her hand to steady her as we walked over the streets, but suddenly a flight overhead turned from what must have seemed birds into a stiffly moving tableau from "The Wizard of Oz" when the monkey-minions of the Wicked Witch of the West fly off to terrorize Dorothy and her friends: but the dark shapes above each horizontal flyer seemed more like modern parasails, though mutedly black, than like awkwardly flapping wings. They laughed as they flew, and their dangling tennis shoes seemed to come in two pairs each, so they looked at first shock like quadrupeds with shoestring-thin legs from which blue/black/red and white feet dangled grotesquely. A quaint old bobby stopped pop-eyed while his traffic snarled around him as the flight dipped low over the steep roofs and ran down the riverbank so low that it appeared some must be landing in the river itself--- which SUDDENLY led me to remember another entire section in which I'd been wading in the lake outside the cottage, described above, getting used to the deep pool where the murky bottom held a few foot-snags of rocks in its muddy depths, to the shallow reach that went to a tiny islet yards from shore, to particular bends of the hidden channels deeper between hummocks; and instantly the bottom dropped away isotropically (hm, reading "Gravitation" again?) and the men from the house came out in amusement to watch as I sank into the murky depths of the pool that now bottomed out at about thirty feet, and skimmed underwater along the bottom that I knew so well, coming to the top when I had to assure them that I was safe, then diving like a dolphin again to the channels I knew by heart. The peculiar specific yellow-green of the waters above my head register in my memory still. Anyway, I'd dragged my poor woman down the hill-stairs to a clear view over the suburb across the river where the bird-people were landing with shrill cries, and she drew herself up to her four feet of cologned height to insist that I remain aware that she was in her eighties and could hardly be expected to keep up with me, a young one, as I dashed down the stairs to a great thin store-front barrier that had lowered over the street that would ordinarily, before 6PM, lead down to the lower village by the river. She patiently extended an enormous flat hand that I took more as a lever of her support than a member to pull upon, while she laboriously put foot above foot on the manicured Disneyland streets as we went back up the hill, her telling me "We didn't go to the High Opening this afternoon" because of her frailty, and we passed the garishly marble-painted wooden fireplace that I remarked "How remarkable I found that the first time I say it," awkwardly trying to assure her that I'd been in her before, if only this morning, so that she wasn't responsible for my entree into this elegant manor-house at the top of the hill where the Bishop was to entertain us this evening. I woke with a curious pleased lightness, as if magic were still possible, and debated writing notes, but felt that I could finish a page if I got to the computer, which I've now done at 6:20AM, another odd waking morning.
4/12/89: WHAT ARCHITECTURAL DETAIL!! A strange hyper-reactive woman (like Sylvia Leiser from MMA days?) and I are on a bus tour of what might be an old provincial capital of Canada, and the tour leader announces that we're turning onto "Commonwealth Avenue" or a name of that governmental style, and everyone rushes to the windows (or even to the roof, since the bus seems to be topless) on the left to see the 2-7 story houses, since the right side of the road seems to be park-like with a view down a slope to the center of town. The first building has either a sign on the lawn on a banner-sign across the top of the first floor to say that this is or was the Town Hall of 50 or 75 years ago, and it's being redone, because the curved moldings around the two large second- floor windows are new-copper-penny color, either 1) because the wood that they've stripped the paint from is that color or 2) because the "siding" is actually a "roofing" of new copper of a color or 3) because the surface has been newly applied and that's the color it IS. The building is situated in a specific way upon its lot, rather like the two-story apartment buildings on Brown Street that had once been rather elegant but could now either be seedy or reconstructed as this one is being: occupying about 2/3 its lot-width with a small border of grass up one side and a narrow driveway up the other, and sited on about 1/2 its lot-depth (I'm NOW reminded of Joe's and my conversation yesterday about Avi's tax problems in Delhi noted in the New York Times, and I "pictured" his house [getting the highest assessment in the town] in rather the same way [but different, as I'll get into later] I "pictured" these houses in the dream), with a narrow cement sidewalk starting at the narrow porchless entryway and coming down to the pavement at the street with a small "elegant" broadening at the sidewalk. The view as we turned down the street reminded me very much of EITHER 1) another dream like this OR 2) an actual STREET that I think I took a bus-tour of: Old small lots on which 3-4 story buildings had been built and then ENLARGED into wedding-cake "belle-laids" (beautiful uglies) of seven, eight, or (I seem to remember counting) nine stories, where the tops would be only single-room aeries with one large picture-window looking out over (again) the valley below. Then we passed ONE building that epitomized the type: turreted corners edged ranks of dormered windows laced with gingerbread, with a convoluted front in painted gray that curved and angled and bay-windowed in and out along its facade. On a wrought-iron railinged balcony three or four women waved at us, and we couldn't decide if they were "loose women" waving us up or tenants who happened to be out at the time or actors from a company inside the building who happened to see us coming and wanted to give us a kick in their Victorian long skirts and starched shirtfronts. Five stories high, it was the Victorian counterpart of the Del Coronado Hotel in steel-gray paint. There were others on the street of similar design, but this with its detail epitomized the lavishness of detail and sumptuousness of space and windows. And I could SEE these in the dream with a CLARITY--which I forget by 4/20/89!
4/13/89: Care for Mrs. Johnson. Move my mattress that JUST clears the doorway. a) FAMILY, b) Ballet class!! It was obviously something, but it's nothing now!
Really should transcribe these notes while I REMEMBER what I wanted to EXPAND!!
4/14/89 (notes typed 4/20/89): Tour in Thailand, lost, last in car, WAKE all to apologize and they DON'T accept. Walking crowded street past what looks to be an excavation to my right, and a guard walks to gate when I want to ask him what this place is, and says "We don't WANT you here." Girls behind me produce a map with legends in English and start laughing and chattering, and I ask for the Lahl Hotel, is it on the map? They ask me to follow them, we turn right into a "five-corners" intersection that I think I'll have no trouble returning to, and then I'm lost, a TIGER brushes my leg when I see him and worry if he'll attack me. I FEEL the brush against my leg! I feel perspiration through my dreams. At 8PM through 5PM (?) I feel that I WAKE to altered reality, anything is possible. I start writing: I woke, recalling a dream: lost on a trip in Siam, wandering paths through a jungle. Incense trailed silk through my ears, bells played dessert-tastes in my nose, coffee sounded wonderful. Tiger, like a silk-shod snake, flowed through my calves, [two words unclear]. ---were-wolves where-/reality? MUST be line-break. Skew Universe? poem broken by hunger-deceiving? Smell---had my body rotted? More lines---still in a dream?---more lines---thinking a fever?---more lines---areas of transition?--- more lines---entry to skew? Last transition---fungi among me? Make a list of "Brazil, Legend (?), Dolph film," RECORDED with protect; get AGAIN for BOX-do! DREAM 2---Sore throat, sick-altered temperature, sensing in bed. To New Yorker IWOKE, noting the dream: lost in Siam, never a subject, not a period, undulating down page, poetry as prose, ending with Iwoke, wondering maleness. And sign it Trebor Kazrenloz. Then made the poem "Skew Universe" and DS liked it!!
4/21/89: 1) Eight or ten of us are sitting around a conference table or a dining table and we're talking about some poor woman who was taken prisoner by some dreadful enemy, bemoaning her fate, telling about her terrible tortures, and when someone like Tom Pearsall concludes with "Her sexual organ was in the most lamentable state," Barbara Lea pipes up and says "You mean they lit it but they didn't eat it?" and most of the table roars with laughter, except for Maya, to my right, who stands, mouth open in amazement, too affronted to laugh. 2) Again I'm in a bedroom with Mom hovering forbiddingly outside the door; I want to jerk off but she'll hear me or suspect I'm playing with myself and I feel terribly vulnerable and guilty. When I wake I have such a lovely erection that I play with it for awhile, but then doze back off to sleep.
4/22/89: NOW I can remember the details: buzzer-delivery went at 8:12AM this Saturday morning, and I'd JUST finished "re-turning the pages of a glossy magazine" that I'd looked through before, as if I were REVIEWING the pages so that I could note the details here: the New York Magazine-type double-page fashion ads that use types or people we know, the last two being lesbians and gay men, BUT this was proceeded by my presence at the summing-up of a season of off-Broadway plays, and I was then thumbing through a PROGRAM of the season, while discussing the reviews with principals from the production company. There were the new plays and the revivals of Shakespeare, but I recall the details of the last play, something thirties-ish like "The Boy Friend," that the program's reviewer didn't like, calling it in summation, "All in all, an iron glob of a play," and when the principals cooed among themselves for its being a success, I waited for them to agree with the reviewer, and when they didn't PRECISELY echo my condemnation of it, I quoted from the program and they conceded, "Yes, it WAS that." I turned the last few pages and the last thick block of paragraph gave all the financial credits, "Play A (XXX Drug Store); Play B (NNN Supermarket; Play C (Mr. and Mrs. YYY); Play D (students of the senior class at JJJ High School); Play E (MacDonald's); Play F (B. F. Polsky and Co.); and on and on for twenty or thirty last-page credits and attributions. Then, possibly in the same program, though the one for the play was digest-size and matte-papered and photoless, while the one with the ads was New York-size and slick-papered and photo-filled, there were the "regular" ads with two or three people interacting with solid-color, color-filter-lit-back- grounds, but they also seemed to be TV ads in that the models moved a bit before "the final photo" froze on the page or screen, and the penultimate one with the lesbians was entitled "Women like these who worry about themselves more than about men" and featured an aloof woman framed from her knees up on the left page with the title and tiny paragraph of costume-and-modeling credits, while on the right-hand page a hat-model on the near right was visible only from the back from mid-neck up, while the other woman faced her with an animated expression which settled for seductive eye-expressions to communicate her gayness, and the "freeze" concentrated on her wide white-edged blue-green irises in her Agnes-Moorehead face. Turning to the last double-spread for "Men who are that way, wouldn't you know?" the similarly-arranged three men from the left were a rugged-chinned thirty-something male model who somewhat echoed the aloofness of his female shadow on the preceding verso-page by seeming to stare craggily off into the sunrise on the slopes of some Alp that he was about to attack in his fashionable parka-with-gloves-on-display, though his hood was thrown back to display his carefully-combed blond-brown hair, and again the middle out-facing model used his eyes with almost a wink to show that he "really liked" the model he was facing, again showing only the back of a hat, this time a knitted cap for winter, but this out-facing model's face was tanned and lined for a forty-ish look, but there was a little of Mark Eliot's slyness and something of Don Taylor's handsomeness and that emphasis on "that certain intent flash" in the eye to indicate his sexual attraction to the man on the right whose face we couldn't see but had to assume was "that way" too. Again, as I'd wanted to indicate at the end of the 4/12/89 dream but which I'd forgotten by the time I returned after "CLARITY" had been typed and the phone rang to interrupt my train of thought, there was clearly some type of PHOTOGRAPHIC memory and retention of the dream, to indicate to Pope and Chrystal that I DID have pictorial fragments in my head, so that I could SKETCH the arrangement of the models on the two pages (though in truth their arrangements were duplicates of each other) and even some of the colors (certainly of the stunning eyes of the middle woman) in the fashions and backgrounds, and the type-arrangement on the final page of the program, with small paragraphs at the top and the block of "Play M (benefactor K)" type that ended the page about 4/5 the way to the bottom; but even the EMOTIONAL tone of the people involved was eidetic: the inquiring interest of the shadowy man to the right; the knowing, practical, diplomatic, yet frank attitude of the woman talking directly in front of me as she cradled notebooks in her arms as she stood in front of me seated in a theatre-type seat with the program resting on my crossed knees, interested in what she was saying, yet knowing in a rather superior way that I agreed with the final couplet-like dismissal of the final play and I would repeat the quotation unless she made it clear that she agreed with it, which was just what happened (to my satisfaction, even smugness) as that section of the dream ended and the "fashion magazine" section started, AGAIN, with the definite impression that I'd GLANCED through these pages just before the two of them came to stand before me after the final play of the short season, and I only turned the pages to glance for a SECOND at each of the last two-page spreads (and the first segments lasted only TWO seconds, so the entire dream I've taken 71 lines now to describe lasted a total of FOUR seconds with such definite PICTURES and LOOKS (and I could invent a musty remembered- smell from the York-Theatre-type playhouse, but I won't) and EMOTIONS and CONNECTIONS (such as the that the woman on the left was reminiscent of the mother's lover in "Spike of Bensonhurst" that I saw at Spartacus's ending at 1:18AM this morning, precisely six hours and 54 minutes before I was wakened), and now it's 8:48AM, 7 1/2 hours after finishing the movie and 32 minutes after turning on this machine at 8:16AM after picking up the package from Springer that I can finish before Mom arrives on Thursday; and THIS page is now finished!
4/25/89: I'm comparing notes on an invention a colleague and I have just finished: a localized heat sink that relies on some obscure chemical reaction (could this have been influenced by the reports last week of a similar reaction with platinum and heavy water that makes nuclear fusion possible at room temperature?). Triumphantly we hold up a diagram that shows molecules selectively going from one side of a chamber to another, which would make it colder in a localized volume on one side, which could be used as a tiny refrigerator, a "fan" when one is outside on a hot day, or for cooling a small area of a room in lieu of an air conditioner. We're ecstatic that the prototype works, and there's a sense that reporters and photographers are about to cluster around us, affording us major media exposure. There are chemical equations on a blackboard in the background, and I wish I could remember now what some of them were: there was a definite impression of a break-through which would earn the inventors a great deal of easily-acquired money.
4/29/89: 7:15 GRAND new amusement park---KNOWN to be a new and experimental idea with a TRACTOR beam to "fly" you. Mass-movers that rotate and "drop" onto roller-coaster-type ride backwards. Many choices available---interestingly like many games and consciousness-raising movements---moving people around. Branches from reality. CUTE bruiser's chest and coy "Cocks comin' up," and an "Island" film-shoot, with "all adults here," as if they could even host a willing straight or even gay orgy. Wake at 8AM and type AIDS HOUSE 90-92 GREAT
5/1/89: A lover and I are moving into a large new apartment, and tradesmen and low-life seem to be infesting the "back" door so that when there's a breeze in the apartment and someone suspects that I might have propped open this door, there's concern about who might be coming in without our knowing it. I then go through a passageway between "the bedroom" and "the living room" to find that what I had thought was only a back storage area is actually an enormous, pillared, windowed living area facing on some elegant street like Riverside Drive, and I exclaim to a friend, "THIS should be the living room," and a lawyer-type sidles up to say something like, "And for only a small price it could all be yours," with the implication that some sort of hospital-benefit has the rights to this room as a meeting-place, but since a new wing with an auditorium has been built, this room is no longer needed by the hospital, and since my lover, either administratively, doctorially, or family-wealth- financially, seems to have some sort of pull with the hospital, the implication is that the concessions to our use of the enormous room could be easily granted. As I wake and doze and think about the dream, I think how NICE it would be to have an enormous living room: my lover could be doing whatever he wanted on ONE side of the room and I could have the OTHER side of the room, and we wouldn't be annoyed with each other's working or breathing or even chewing, but if we wanted to communicate, the channels would be all there to just shout across the room, or move across to be with the other. A very elegant, rich, and loving impression left on me when I woke from this mellow dream. Record 8:45.
5/4/89: 4:45AM: 1) We're tiny people standing on shower curtain-rod holding up papers to reflect flashbulb-light as we "take his picture" to subdue a giant, who lives with us as we multiply and 2) WE fret for TINY people living in two little "empty" rooms, particularly at the sound of Indians on warpath, but the consensus is that "They care for themselves." 3) I get BITTEN on neck in bed, but I can't find any insect-carcass afterwards. Then, afterwards, I recall a fragment between 1) and 2) in which I'm tiny, taking to a giant me, who's eating an apple in the winter (because the apple is frozen in the snow, floating in ice water that freezes about it, and it's accessible as food-supply for the tiny me only if the giant me picks it up to break the ice and takes a bite through the tough outside so that tiny-me can get to the mushy-white insides which will sustain me if I can get at it through the peel and ice. ODD!
5/9/89: 1) I'm traveling somewhere like London or Paris, looking at a wall of Metro maps trying to find a specific destination, but all I can find are maps of Budapest and Belgrade, rather than THIS city, which seems to be built between ridges of hills so that the lines are all horizontal, connected only by nodes at the widely-spaced "valleys" between the ridges. 2) Mom is visiting ME in New York, and she's sleeping in a chair in a sitting room, so I get down a stack of papers to read, waiting for her to get up so we can go to dinner. But as I thumb through the papers, I find that they're comprised of clippings from magazines that I've already read, paper-clipped pages that I'd written or typed before, and single ads that don't have much content. But Mom sleeps on. Then I go into my bathroom, and find that the flaking walls have been overlaid with puffy fabric which is peeling off above the shower-faucets, and I stand on the edge of the tub to push the top of the fabric back against the wall, but there's been shrinkage or warpage and the underlying fabric has to tear at the corner before the edges near the corner can be pressed into place. As I move along above the medicine-cabinet mirror to the area above the toilet, I encounter extraneous puffiness that, as I draw my head back to look, I find are laundry-bags or hair-net bags filled with frilly undergarments that Mom or Rita had hung up for convenience to get them out of her baggage for use, and I get entangled in one bag around some sort of lighting fixture where the Dali print is, and when I pull something breaks, and I carry an armful of stuff into the bedroom and dump it onto the bed to see if I've broken a shoulder-strap of some of the slips that she'd had either hanging or in the bag, and a green velvet evening dress studded with brilliants, a cluster in each square inch of the sumptuous fabric, with a ruffle of tulle and brilliants along the short narrow lower hem, and I'm pleased to see THOSE thin straps intact, wondering if she'd brought that fancy dress along for some extraordinary dining place tonight, the last night of her stay, except that she's sleeping so late that it won't be possible to go to some restaurant near Grandma's that she's been thinking about (which may have been, paradoxically, why I was looking at the subway map in the first part of this morning's dream), but maybe she'll settle for a smaller, less elegant, place nearby, but then suddenly it's morning (maybe I'd wakened between dream-segments to see that it was close to 8AM) and I'm amazed that she slept all night without getting up for dinner, and Rita's in the bedroom now, packing for their noon departure, and we exchange a glance that says, "Yes, I'm surprised that she slept through the evening, but we still don't want to wake her or she'll find some reason to be angry, yet we'll have to wake her soon so that she can gather her stuff back into her bag in time for the car to the plane." Then the thought intrudes that if she didn't wake yet, maybe she's dead, which reminds me of her saying that she might die soon, but I said "Not when you're HERE," and we both laughed at that, but neither of us is now inclined to go up to her in the chair to see if she's still breathing (and now I think of movie-fragments I saw last night in some sort of New-York crime show where someone was shot by a gang of toughs and someone coming to his rescue was also shot in the stomach, but as he fell in slow-motion it wasn't clear, because of the intensity of his facial grimace, whether he was supposed to be dead or not, and as the camera stayed on him lying in the street it was clear he was still breathing, which brought up the question "Is he just a bad actor or is he intended to be seen as still alive?" I didn't want to write down notes about the dream, so got up at 8:30AM and got to the computer in fairly good time to recapture many of the details, though there were things about other maps or other conversations or thoughts about traveling in this foreign city that were in the 1)st part of the dream that I've now forgotten. It's unusual for me to get to bed as early as 12:15AM last night, so that I'm up unusually early this morning (which might be good if the messenger from McGraw- Hill arrives soon), even though I've had the thought that I should enjoy more of the early sunshine since the sun rises just before 6AM now, and I should NOTE that I think my sentences in dream-transcriptions are unusually lengthy?!
5/5/89 (note typed 5/9/89): 6:15AM: 1) Wandering "old Split"-type enclave in 1920's NYC on Upper East Side---blind alleys, narrow streets, noises behind windows, and 2) enter old MUSIC hall and flowered floors and hookers and "decadence" and out to snowy back alleys and starry sky and cold and 3) I'm IN a movie I'm directing: "Sultan" says I'm fainting and claps hands and an old woman brings in rugs and slave makes "smoke-sign" to cure me and producer sits next to me and says "It looks GREAT." Then 4) I remember posters for "Spanish- Africa-China" and parade starts to pass us (and wide-eyed guy in a milk truck) and WE race them down poster-stairs, and horses race to Hippodrome area---and there are GLORIOUS sights and colors in this dream, whose details I forget now.
5/11/89: I loan 7 or 8 of my videotapes to a strange woman I don't know very well, and she SELLS them to a COLLECTOR as if that was no problem for me, and now I have to see what I have that HE wants to trade with him to get what I want back. As part of this, somehow, I go to an attractive little shop of toys and video memorabilia and ask to see a catalog of what they have, and the young lady who owns the show (who seems quite new to business) says she'll GIVE me an old catalog that's obviously a collector's item in itself. I sit in a chair and look through the pages, which seem to be filled mainly with toys, and think that I've been lucky to find such an accommodating place.
5/12/89: I'm in a taxi giving detailed instructions to the driver how to get to my place on 70th between First and Second Avenues because I want to stop at another stop and pick up something or someone, but at a certain point (either because of traffic or because the time isn't right---either too early or too late now) I figure I don't have to make the extra stop, and feel strange telling the driver to just take me to 70th between 1st and 2nd. Then somewhere between sleeping and waking I think to myself (unless I've already moved to 57th between 8th and 9th---or what if I'm actually now in Brooklyn Heights; won't I feel stupid telling him to go BACK to Brooklyn from which he's just COME---which gives me the impression that I've just come in from the airport. Without transition I'm OUT of the cab and going into the entranceway of the enormous hotel which is my destination, but see that there are hordes of people waiting patiently in line to start up an escalator that doesn't seem to be moving at all, and I figure "I'm not going to get caught up in THAT," and (Dennis now seems to be with me) we start up another stairway that I see isn't being used at ALL, and I think to get to the elevator lobby by way of the empty stairway until it goes around a little corner and STOPS before a balcony. Well, OK, I step over the balcony and find myself in a string of apartments: there's no one in the first apartment, so we pass through it to what I hope is a common balcony, but find I have to enter the NEXT apartment, in which a family is seated at a table, eating, and the father gets up and demands to know who we are and where we're going. "We're just trying to get around a line, and I didn't realize I'd have to cut through your apartment---can we just go out your back door here?" He's surprised and sarcastic, but he does show us to the door, and I say "You know more about it that the other people did, because you ASKED us where we were going, and now you know." But this "escape route" leads to ANOTHER mass of unmoving people at the foot of TWO escalators, so we go down ANOTHER pathway between fences and find ourselves (a woman's joined us, someone like Shelley Neiderbach, and I remark that there seem to be a LOT of us trying to get around the crowds) at a four-way intersection. But the now-MOVING lines to our right and left onto the escalators are separated from us by some kind of barrier, and I step "around" to look at the full picture: there are two monorails waiting at the "stations" above us, metallic-green under their enormous supporting towers, going (say) north and south, and I think "Does that mean we have to get onto a monorail and go one stop in order to cross over to the monorail going in the other direction so that we can get out on the side we want?" and I want to look BACK to the barrier to see if we can't cross OVER it to get to the escalator. We sort of step off a curb into long lines of traffic that isn't going anywhere ANYWAY, but sure enough, a car pulls off the front of the line simply to honk at us because we're crossing, even though everyone else isn't getting anywhere at all. I stop in front of the car and stare exasperatedly at the driver, and then sink into a semi-dream state in which I'm wondering if this has anything to do with the skewed logic and humor of Adams's "Dirk Gently" that I finished reading last night at 3:45AM (and my clock says it's now about 10AM, so 6:15 of sleep isn't that much), and whether the police could arrest us if we climb over the wire fences that I figure are separating "where we are" from "where we want to go." Muzzily my mind wonders whether this dream has something to do with my felt sense of being different, or "special" in this world and the next, and touches on my pantheistic thoughts last night when I marked one page (fractal dimensions in a folded universe) of "Dirk Gently" as being the "pre-geometry" that Wheeler asked for in "Gravitation," and on the facing page (everything reduced to numbers) as being an even MORE basic level to the seven sets of seven levels in my "pseudo- Actualism" book. Then my mind was pulled off by the thought that I should have COPYed the file named SCRIPSIT before SAVE-ing it onto diskette yesterday: I'll have duplicate names if I RESTORE and ATTACH the file, and am not sure if I can RENAME the file before I ATTACH it for a duplicate SCRIPSIT/SCR. So I finish typing this page at 11:07AM, wondering about my postnasal drip and stomach.
5/13/89: At 8:40AM I wake with dream 1) I've just landed (though it seems I'd been there before) in a large Indian city that I think to be New Delhi, but it's laid out on a quadripartite plan that seems more appropriate for an older city like Hyderabad. What might have been bus transportation from the airport leaves me off at the center of the "plan," and I enter a gate to see myriads of shops, people, entertainments, and details: a group of circus-acts performing before an ivory-carved palace-facade that might just be a stage-set; avenues of restaurants (from a previous dream) in which there are platforms of dancers to entice strollers in for mat-seating for small snacks or large meals; arcades of shops overhung with merchandise as in Meknes, swathed in smells as in Fez, bustling with people as in Tangiers, chock-a-block with offices as in Casablanca; and the map that I hold up for reference shows more attractions in other quadrants. Elephant sales yards, amusement parks, royal palaces, museums, boating reservoirs---the attractions stand out on the map almost as if they were stand-up cutouts on three-dimensional greeting cards. I look over one wall of my quadrant and see a pair of passenger trains that are amusement-park rides, loaded with laughing children, with amorous couples reclining in Moghul costumes on rear steps of each car, controlled on their downhill swoops by drivers operating wooden levers as wheel-brakes, everyone so carefree that this must be completely safe although it looks perilous. I'm carrying a small suitcase, a silk shirt in a plastic bag that I've just picked up at the laundry, and two other packages that I figure I might more conveniently take to the hotel and leave off---and where and when am I going to have lunch? I seem to know where the hotel is (at least I HOPE I know where the hotel is), and debate taking a taxi from the main streets at the central axis of the city, and then return after I've left my packages off. In a rare trip-dream I'm not accompanied by anyone, nor do guides importune me, but there's the feeling that I've left my group from a guided tour and I'd have companions if I chose. The late morning is warm; I don't know where I've just come from but that was an exciting place too; I'm looking forward to a couple of days here so there's no sense of rush; the map is loaded with exciting enticements and there's both a grandness and compactness of scale that assures me I'll be satisfied when I have to leave it. NOW as I type this at 10:15AM there's an obvious parallel with my life in the world: it's rich and full and enticing, though I hope to have the assurance I'll see it to my fill before I have to leave---for the next city? So it's not only colorful and detailed, but optimistic and uplifting! Drop back to sleep and wake at 9:50AM with dream 2) in a most puzzling bathroom: I've entered the dim room and want to turn on the light: pull on the chain-cord hanging from a plate on the wall and nothing happens. There's another string-cord hanging, but it also does no good. Go to two fixtures on either side of a non-mirrored cabinet and pull on THEIR cords and though I wait what seems to be the required short amount of time for the round bulbs with a fluorescent-delay, no light appears. I try various combinations with increasing frustration, and then decide to urinate ANYWAY, but when I turn into the room itself, I see a trundle bed perpendicular to a high double-bed, both of them with storage coverlets on, and it's a bathroom that's been converted into a small bedroom and no longer has a commode! I leave that room through another door and enter a junk-room jammed with books, furniture, and electronic equipment. Somehow I think it must have belonged to my Uncle Edward: there are models of planes, game sets, boy's-adventure books in series on shelves, globes of the world and the solar system and the galaxy, and arrays of speakers, amplifiers, VCRs, TVs, turntables, screens, spread throughout the room like strawberry runners connecting components under tables, on chests of drawers, and even suspended from light-fixtures on the ceiling by loops and swirls and dollops of thick and thin colored wires and cables, looking like a Searle cartoon fleshed-out by Flash Gordon and Tom Swift. There isn't a free surface in the entire room and obviously it's not MY room, so I continue down a dim European-hotel-type hallway to a bathroom whose door is open, and there's my mother with her blue nightgown gathered up around her waist while she's spraying her bare ass with some sort of douche-hose. When she turns around to see me standing in the doorway there's no embarrassment, she simply says that she's using the bathroom now and I'll have to wait until she's finished. I respond obliquely, looking AT her but carefully only above the neck so that I won't see her frontal nakedness hairy below. A small child toddles in front of me as its mother's voice shouts at another child in an adjoining room. I enter my own room with some sort of relief (in my conversation with my mother, she repeated that I had to put up with some inconvenience since I'd only rented ONE room in this apartment---am I thinking of Joe's search for an apartment?---and it's only for a short time, so I'll just have to be patient and put up with it ---all in a tone that I'd never associate with my mother at all) and survey the large chamber with furniture spaciously placed below the four walls, but there are not even any windows visible (though there might be some lowered shades among the indistinct rectangular shapes on the walls above the chairs, tables, sofas, and bed), and certainly not any kitchen or bathroom appliances like stoves or sinks or commodes or even washbasins. So I can't even urinate into a sink, have no source for a drink of water, and can hear voices of other families nearby through each of the four walls---though the room's not even square: each corner is angled off by a 2-3-foot diagonal and I wonder NOW if I didn't have the impression that each of THESE added four walls didn't have a boisterous family living behind it. In the half-sleep half-waking stage I think with some relief that at least I only have to contend with people above, people below, and sometimes people on the roof next door in my waking hours, and not these hordes of vocalizing people on every side as in the dream. Again there was a myriad details: towels and curtains and fixtures in the bathroom, moldering wall-hangings, draped pictures, decaying furniture in my "own" room, which seems to be rented in an apartment-complex in which my mother is staying on a permanent basis. As opposed to the bright sunlit-colors of the Indian first dream, all the colors here are muted by curtains and draperies---or the possibility that the apartment is so enormous and our rooms are so disfavored that none of them even have access to a WINDOW and outside illumination. There's not so much a feeling of Akron (certainly not New York) as of Eastern Europe with its depressed people, poor accommodations, dying economies, and dust grime and grit (to adapt Bellow's comma-less style) that everyone is simply too exhausted to care about let alone take energy to clean up polish and shine.
5/23/89: Wonderfully sensuous dream in which I successfully stimulate a humpy guy with a bright-red cock-head surrounded by thin white foreskin with my spit- slick hand into an upturned erection which spurts slowly at first and then faster and more copiously into an excruciating orgasm which I enjoy closely and attentively for every throbbing spurt and splash. Wake erect and pleasured.
5/24/89: To bed at 9:45PM and wake a few times with remembered fragments, but can only recall the last before waking at 7:20AM: I'm about two hours upstate [which seems to foretell 7:50AM when I'm looking into a New York State map to find relative locations of New Paltz (Vicki), Hillsdale (MMB), Grafton (Woolger week-retreat), and Albany in New York, and Joan's place (actually closest to Grafton) in Massachusetts] at about 5:30PM, though it seems to get dark about 6PM, looking to return to New York City. There's a sort of taxi kiosk with lots of people milling about in front of the desk, but when I get onto line, most people move away and I see a bus schedule taped onto the right wall which seems to say that there's a bus departing at 6:35PM which would certainly be cheaper than taking an individual taxi on my own. I ask how much the bus is, and the guy behind the desk says that the 6:35 departure is actually receiving passengers now over at the departure gate where I see four or five busses lined up more or less filled with people. I thank him and walk over (in snow or rain or SOME sort of muzziness) as two or three busses actually pull out---I think to dash ahead and try to stop them at the light (is this an echo of my sitting on Broadway looking at people boarding busses and muscle-builders cruising the show at the Beacon on Saturday?), but there seem to be two almost-full ones at the front of the concrete island, so I don't seem to have "missed the bus."
5/25/89: 1) Isn't remembered. 2) I'm looking through old slides, so old that when I take out one that shows an old IBM friend the brittle gel cracks in my fingers so that a paper-clip-sized fragment of background beside his shoulder and right side breaks out of the frame. I at once set aside the slide because it's damaged and regret that I hadn't taken slides of my more ATTRACTIVE friends at the time. There's another slide that's like a blurred enlargement of a TV image (all colored dots and bold-block highlights and shadows) that I put into a "holding tray" outside this "show" tray. Then slides and reality blur (and I think of OOBs as on NOTEBOOK-490) and I'm looking at a scene that I "recognize" as a scene from a temple in Burma that I'd seen long ago: palm trees in the background proving a southeast Asian setting, a shrine (vihara?) in the right foreground filled with elaborate carvings as in Belur or Halebid, except that the images are of Hollywood "Jungle Book" (was that the lush-color film with Sabu and burning temple-forests?) eroticism with thick-thighed male deities coyly hiding semi-erections under wisps of loincloths while muscled torsos twist greenly in Bharat-Natyam poses of seduction, high-lighted by red- orange candle-shadows for maximum color-contrast, and I find myself thinking of many things: 1) that I'm glad that I HAVE a slide of a scene I'd been to but had not taken a picture of at the time, 2) that the eroticism is so strong it would be hard for anyone to ignore it, 3) that I seem to BE there, as in an OOB, simultaneously in the PAST when I HAD visited it and in the PRESENT as I'm looking at IT, rather than a SLIDE of it, 4) that I'm thinking of many things, and will have to remember the complex of images and image-produced thoughts so that I can transcribe them on the current dream-page without forgetting it like I'd already forgotten the even-more-travel-oriented dream of before, something about hotels and fellow-travelers and dining on foreign cuisines and worrying about rates of exchange and trying to recall exotic backgrounds or people that furnished the context of the now-forgotten dream. Not to mention thinking, in an admittedly more awake state, that if I DO start OOBing I'll have to start ANOTHER section of my SCRIPSIT file ASIDE from DREAMS and NOTEBOOKS in order to record my OOBs, and think to start it NOW so that "I'll create my own reality" of HAVING OOBs by recording them even before I actually start experiencing them!
5/27/89: 8:15: BIG Actualism group meets in the Adirondacks---some of us go on BOAT tour on CLEAR stream where I look at sand- ripples and fish swimming underneath boat, then back and it's 20 minutes before a fancy dinner, with covered "special commemorative dishes" on rear table---so obviously seating plans. Roseanne tried to "read swimmers on troubled emotions" (WHAT??). I wait and CHRYSTAL says we're to go on PORCH with books to be recommended (I can't read my writing) and she asks the name of the ???? (??hotel in the Black Forest??) and as I WRITE the last words, the words "Hotel Bauer Grunewald" flat into my mind. This is PROBABLY from "index-count" today.
6/3/89: 1) Woke at 4:30AM with a now-forgotten memory in what I've come to term the "Motor-Mouth Radio-Voice (MMRV)" mode: it's like I've tuned into a radio with a constantly-talking commentator that gives me news that I'm not particularly interested in (yes, I know it sounds like a symptom of schizophrenia), in this case something about some kind of company's jockeying for position, possibly. 2) A vaguely-remembered MMRV-dream about China and its political problems, and maybe even something about a possible election. I'm reminded about my conversation with Maya last night about Joyce Alaya's hearing voices AUDIBLY (which I niggle at, saying if it's AUDIBLE it's by means of vibrations of the air that ANOTHER ear in the same area would be able to hear) saying they were "Jesus Christ, and she should do such and so", and I say that I sometimes "hear" voices, but they're certainly not AUDIBLE to anyone else: they're in my MIND, so it's probably some part of ME making them UP, like reading stories to a child that hadn't come quite awake yet. 3) Another circumstantially-detailed dream about returning to work at IBM: this time I enter a crowded office with maybe 6 desks, 10 chairs, and 8 workers, so that nothing quite fits: some "workers" are lounging in chairs because they have no desks to work at, though I seem to see an unused desk against the wall behind the desk of my "orienter," who's younger than me and somewhat nervous dealing with me, though of course he has years of experience in the company that I've just joined after a LONG absence. I'm to work on the MR/85, which is (again) their newest, top-of-the-line-in-price-and-capacity-and-speed computer. He opens the lower right desk-drawer to find only a compact array of mailing envelopes (as if this is properly a secretary's desk that he's using just to train me) instead of the manuals he's looking for, and he then opens a sort of "personal" locker in the white wall to the right of the desk to push through a few scattered garments to a pile of manuals and notebooks and tablets, of which he pulls out the top 5-6 containing manuals that I don't need, a few personal magazines, and an enormous MR/85 manual the size of an Express Envelope as thick as the Manhattan phone directory. Some woman passes by saying that I could work on the cheaper, more available MR/35, but I take quick thought and realize she doesn't know how much my project is to EXPAND and since EVENTUALLY I'll require the 85, I'd do better to learn it from the START. I'm particularly interested that even the TSX of symbolic language has been replaced in the new FORTRAN-type language with a statement like "SUBROUTINE MX" which has the same effect with powerful assumed facilities, and I can't wait to turn to the index and start learning about this statement. I'm more or less on my own, and I debate moving from my chair (which is OK now that I just want to look through the manual) in a dusty corner to the vacant desk (with just a few items piled on top of it that I could easily balance on the wastebasket nearby until someone figures what to do with whatever's on the desk) against the wall, and I wake to debate taking notes so I won't forget the details (as I'd already forgotten the first MMRV segment), but my mind starts to FUGUE widely: from the indexes I have to do to the upcoming Woolger appointments to wanting to read the OOB book before Thursday to what books will I take along today with Sherryl to Wave Hill to the "Cinderella" with the stiffish Ann Murray seen last night on TV to the RPS tape with Maya to the various things I want to write: 1) the Casteneda index, 2) the small-booklet form of the Indexing Handbook, 3) the Actualism "takeoff", 4) AIDS House, 5) more of the plays, and idly mentally thumb through the two missing checks for the rent and HIP, the checks coming in for indexes already done, whether I'd want to spend an entire week in New Paltz with Vicki for the second through ???th session with Roger (though I'm certainly best to just LEAVE it go until I see how the FIRST session works out) and how I'm going to finish the Marketing and Houstons indexes while going back and forth, while I still have the Springer Lower Limb one to do in a day, and then will it rain tomorrow and cancel the Sunday picnic because I haven't yet got the juices and drinks that I'm due to bring from 12-4 when I could be watching all the TV tapes I'm recording today, or going to the new videoshop or
(and that's meant to be the end, so I don't confuse myself later with WORRY!)
6/4/89: 1) I'm perusing some sort of TV listing or past photomontages of year-just-passed and it seems I work and think "Tom Harmon's playing the son on the old TV program "The Goldbergs" when he was 7-8 years old, and that's what I was trying to DISCOVER by reading summaries or watching the trailers for each episode---is this connected to the Museum of Broadcasting? 2) SAME idea of "the last one on the list will provide the needed information", but THIS time I talk a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art into letting some MAN (a friend of mine like Tom Pearsall) into the exhibits on Monday, when it's usually CLOSED, but I say, knowing I would CLINCH it, "He's a MEMBER" (of the museum). And so he's LEGAL there on Monday---as IS the case, it seems, via his friend at the Met. Two "listing information" segments to get DETAILS from PAST, and FIRST I seem to have "gotten the clue" when I was AWAKE---if ONLY "awake in dream," so am I aiming to lucid dreaming?
6/6/89: 1) Four of us seem to by lying naked in bed, and I feel that my lying on my belly and lifting one leg will hide my genitals except possibly from someone lying around my feet, but no one seems specifically SEXUALLY oriented, it's more toward AFFECTION and HOLDING. Linda Phelps is sucking gently on my toes, and I sort of gasp and hold my breath so that I won't embarrass everyone else on the bed by showing how arousing that sensation is. She also seems to "pry apart" sore sections of my big toe, which seems to be having "ingrown-nail problems" at this point, and I suck in my breath so that I won't show that I'm suffering PAIN. I guess I just want her to STOP, and I fear that making ANY kinds of audible sounds would cause her to CONTINUE. Phyllis Hjorth is sort of somewhere around my midsection, but she's not saying or doing anything, and then I seem to understand that I've spent a large part of the night sleeping in a cuddle with Ron Kron, also naked, and totally asleep, and I feel that I've been supportive of him and that everyone around understands. 2) I'm a part of a large Actualism or maybe even former-SBC group, and I'd left for the afternoon to do something on my own, and now I meet them at some sort of dock or information-area for a group excursion to an island off the coast of Mexico. I can see the map clearly, with a thick arrow going from someplace like Cozumel to the north, maybe Isla Mujeres?, and then returning after the excursion. I'm then in a cabin by myself, amazed at how large the ship is, and then it dawns on me that I'm not looking at what we're passing, so I glance toward the window and find that we're already at the destination island, the tree-lined highways of which are SPEEDING past my windows almost as if we were on a TRAIN rather than on a boat. I prepare to get up on dock and realize that it's close to 7PM so that it'll be DARK when the boat returns after the dinner, and I SHOULD have been on deck more for the view. Then I'm to an upper deck and most of the group is lounging, some asleep, in 4-5 rows of church-pew or jury-box square- cut wooden seats with low backs and thin cushions and relatively little comfort though lots of space. I remark to the tour guide that "It's good we're in a group, so those of us who want to doze or sleep can do so without worrying about the next stop or planning for meals or hotels." I don't remember the response to this, nor do I really "remember" (though I noted it down and sort of "know" it happened) the dinner in the dark on the island, and at least I expand on THESE notes rather than blowing it as I did on the two PREVIOUS ones!
6/7/89: 1) I'm standing in some close quarters with three lovely young swimmers with dolphin-sleek bodies wearing the briefest of swimming-slips, and there's the sexual tension of bodies about to be bared for action and appreciation. 2) An unknown friend and I are in a (South American?) stream where I'd seen a rare shark-like fish with a distinctive tail the previous evening, but now it's morning and the rarity seems to be gone and we're trying to frighten bright- orange goldfish into the sunlight to photograph them by scuffling through the slightly muddy water of the knee-deep stream, but they seem to go JUST to the edge of the shadows of the trees on the eastern side of the stream and then dive back into the non-photogenic darkness to the east of the stream rather than swimming into the photographable brightness of the west side of the stream.
6/9/89: 4:45AM 1) There's a FIRST dream, all I remember is my half-asleep thought, what a WONDERFUL dream (I wrote)---no, it was AWFUL, being attacked by DOGS and I thought, "THESE are the horrible influences of PAST LIVES gnawing and snarling over My CURRENT life," and I now add, "and that's why I'm going to past-life therapy." 2) "McJackson Masters" seems to be the name I see in print for someone I'm employed by or doing an index for, who seems to be Tom Deloy from ACC, and I wonder HOW I'm going to alphabetize his NAME, since it's really JACK Masters, and NOW I note that it's the (disguised) name of a jerk-off device! Hidden levels about! 3) When I look at the clock and see that I've been asleep 4.5 hours, I figure I've preprogrammed waking now, having finished reading Stark's "Out-of-Body Adventures" last night, and look over to see a WONDERFUL greenish-white glow of pre-dawn light around my windowshade, and close my eyes thinking myself out of the body and hovering over the new-silver roof of the garage next door, expanding my view to the entire block, but though the idea takes root in my IMAGINATION, it doesn't continue OOB and I fall asleep. 4) Dialogue (that I wrote?) is being read by Gary Oldman and another actor (that I fantasize when I wake again, hoping to CONTINUE the dream with my "dream-casting," though it doesn't work, that the other actor is sexy Alec Baldwin and that something would develop between them that I could watch) who are snickering over the likes of lines like "Possible avenues of liking each other," which would obviously consider open love which they obviously consider beneath their dignity. 5) A fat little pink baby is handed to me, and following the example of a vaguely Spanish-looking father with his baby, I try to lift it at arm's length toward the sky, strikingly blue and cloudless above as we stand in what looks like a backyard in Akron. At first heft the baby is surprisingly heavy (obviously I think, through here, of the legend of St. Christopher when carrying an increasingly heavy Christ-Child) and I barely raise him above my head. I bend and cradle the bent body between my hands, careful to let the angle of the butt fall BETWEEN my hands so that any urine or feces will not dirty me (and the crotch seems to be one continuous crease without external genitalia, so I have to assume it's a girl-baby). I try a second time, determined to heft the body to arm's length, and have to stop about halfway, surprised this time by the gritty feeling of the fat at the sides of the baby grinding into the flesh between my fingers and thumbs, but pleased that this doesn't seem to cause discomfort to the baby, which chortles louder as I raise her higher. I gather my energies, the background having vanished and all the dream-image centered on the dough-baby fatness of the child as I raise her up again, ALMOST to complete elbow-extension, but the pressures of my thumbs into her sides seems excessive, and she seems totally captivated by the experience as it is, that there seems no reason to complete the arm- length extension and I bring her back down, panting (as yesterday?) to a cradling posture in front of me, delighted with her laughter, thinking ruefully that I don't like children as a GROUP, but individually, if they're well behaved, I can take pleasure with them by giving them pleasure, and I wake about 7:45 and jot down the last notes and feel EXHAUSTED still from the emotional outpouring of yesterday's 1st past-life therapy session in New Paltz.