DREAMS FROM 1989 2 of 2
6/10/89: 6:40AM: 1) Mailman MUST deliver TWO "express" packages, someone reserves (?) wrongly. 2) Michael Blackburn TAKES my cup of coffee as we sit at what looks like a college-cafeteria table, and as I stare at him in amazement, he then pours me a FRESH cup from his pot. I sip, crunch through the undissolved grains, and say "I must put sugar-lump into my GIFT coffee" and we laugh. 7:35: 3) I forget the LAST dream (only recollecting it was homey and prosaic) while I was writing the scanty notes for the above TWO dreams!
6/11/89: 1) Five of us are sitting in a large car (none of us are driving) and the woman in the CENTER always says about woman who's just in FRONT of her, "She's SO smart." Woman BEHIND me (I'm behind middle woman) directs "smart" one to spell "restitutious" (this is obviously from Robert Moy's talk at Homogeniuses last night about his winning the Smith-Corona spelling contest AND from conversations at the Games group yesterday), and "smart" one pretends to doze off with her head on the backs of her hands cupped on the seat's top, and everyone is laughing as everyone r-r-r-r's their r's as in the R-r-r-ruffles potato chip commercial on TV. 2) I'm looking at a TV-Guide-type listing of activities, which has a symbol in the heading that indicates whether it's "done," whether it "will change," or whether it "could improve in the future." One "company" cancels its activity-code because they're changing their program, but they assure me it's OK---they'll remember their previous status if needed.
6/12/89: I'm supposed to move an ENORMOUS box that's shaped exactly like a coffin, but it's lid is off and it's full of office supplies, and I get that shipped out, but some clerk with a smirk says there's a SECOND box that I have to move, and he points to an even heavier coffin that turns into a child's toy automobile, actually more like a Jeep, that I can lift with difficulty under my arm just to prove that I can move it myself. I have to take this to IBM, but by the time I get ready to leave, my watch says that it's 5:05PM and I hope there are still people working in the office to let me in. I go into a warehouse-looking entrance to try to get a woman at the dispatcher's desk to telephone to the New York IBM branch (I guess I'm in Chicago), and she asks what the address would be, and I seem to remember that it's 2301 East Park Avenue South, and someone asks what that MEANS, and I explain that Park Avenue South is a southern extension of the regular Park Avenue, and that streets east of Fifth Avenue are called East and streets west of Fifth Avenue are called West, and I ignore the "correctness" of the "East" in the address until I type this note, thinking to take it to Roger Woolger this afternoon for tomorrow.
6/13/89: 7:25AM: Joe Safko and I are sharing an apartment for four weeks in a sort of summer school. He's not IN dream, but I know he's my roommate. I'm dressed in black jeans and look out through venetian-blind slats to see that students are walking around in short-sleeved shirts---maybe it's warm enough to unpack my blue cotton pants so that I can be cooler. I know I don't need to eat lunch, maybe I can read in the cafeteria until my 1PM class (or my 2PM appointment with Woolger?). I look into the small "kitchen" and see yet-unused plates piled in a plastic washing-pan, and open what might be a BATHROOM-type cabinet over a sink to find that it's a small refrigerator, and I vaguely remembered Joe and I buying some groceries (this must be connected to Vicki and I planning to stop at the supermarket last night to pick up groceries for my stay from Monday-Thursday which was changed yesterday afternoon when she has to WORK Tuesday and I'd have to get up at 5AM to drive her to the station at 6AM and I decided to pick up her keys at the office and TRAIN up to her car in Poughkeepsie) and putting them into the fridge, and some of the things are gone so he must have been eating something, and I'll have to remember to use some more of this food. There's a "vacancy" about our "apartment" and a "fuzziness" around the edges of the surroundings IN the dream that makes THIS dream LOOK like a dream. Take notes and drowse until the following thoughts hit at 8:05AM: I'm feeling ANXIETY, which I sense is somewhat LIKE my anxiety before flying, and think it might be a fear of UNCERTAINTY? Or more like a fear of DISCOMFORT: I'm perfectly comfortable in bed, could I just "cancel the whole day" and do my own thing on my own terms? Maybe it's connected with a growing realization of a possible fear of the disabilities of growing older, or more acutely the fear of pain of disease or the anxiety of disability. This changes conceptually into a "fear of the 'price paid' for LIVING," which leads to the possibility that I THINK that the "better" my life (with the facets of comfort, money, control, ability, and pleasure) is, the "worse" the upcoming DIScomfort, LACK of money, deprivation, LACK of control, and PAIN. Am I "repeating" the evolution of philosophy from scientific "certainty" to the "existential angst" of Sartre? Let's hope I "break through" to the New Age of positivity and optimism FAST!!
6/22/89: 2:30AM: Dream of searching for TINY cloth-reel collectors for some sort of camera. But in trailer the two "old AMPEX" computers are ONE---"No big problem," my friend, like Barbara Lea, says, but I'm still puzzled. Wake to find my FINGERS and HANDS crushed under me---as if they were "forming a rune," my mind wonders, and the ground seems to RING and QUIVER---earthquake??---AND I wonder, "Can I OOB?" Piss and drink and write to 2:42, very scrawly writing.
6/24/89: Dream to fantasy recorded in NOTEBOOK 496-497 that morning.
6/25/89: I'm watching an opera from the left end of the front row of a sort of "box" about two rows deep and 8-10 seats wide, and I'm congratulating myself on a VERY good seat (about the same angle of view, now that I think of it, as my front-row seat at the Met, except that the dream-seat is raised to the level of the optimal City Center first-balcony seats), when there's a curtain-lowering and a scene-shift, and our "box" seems to have moved around to the RIGHT so that we can see what I first take to be a backstage scene, since we seem to be behind a curtain, but it's thoroughly staged in a kind of kitchen where people are moving around and singing as they appear to be preparing some kind of meal. None of the sung words are very important, and I can't decide if we're watching a rehearsal for the next opera, a throwaway entracte from this opera, or a main scene from a strange angle: the back wall of the appliances seem to be facing where I THOUGHT the main body of the audience was. At the end of that "scene," our box is ZOOMED to the left across the entire arc of the first-balcony seats, moving at SUCH a speed that heads below and the curtain in front seem BLURRED with the speed of movement, and I'm wondering how we can move this fast without being strapped in (obviously fragments from yesterday's tour of Coney Island, with its photographs of old roller coasters, loop-the-loops, and "tours through Switzerland" enter into this), and I'm amazed at the modularity not only of the STAGE picture but of the AUDIENCE configuration in this hypermodern opera house. Then without transition I'm standing at the top side of old opera-house steps, rather like my memory of the Family Circle entrance to the old 40th Street Met House, and there's a poster of the opening of a new production of "Siegfried" which seems to be tonight, except that the poster is in BLACK with WHITE lettering, giving it a rather funereal look. A car has pulled up at the curb below and to my right, and someone so important has gotten out that he's surrounded by a FLOTILLA of men in green Beefeater-type uniforms as a honor guard AND safety squad, and around this inner core are swarms of reporters and photographers trying to see the celebrity in the middle. I catch a glimpse of a young smiling mustached head, possibly Oriental, in the middle of the phalanx of protection, and when I see the face I (now) think of Robert Moy, who gave the talk on winning the spelling contest at the last meeting of Homogeniuses, but at the time in the dream I thought, "Oh, he must be the Japanese Ambassador who helped finance this" (could this be from all the Japanese bowing for sponsorship of the two top Tony-winning plays a few weeks ago?), and I woke up.
7/1/89: I'm some sort of supervisor for IBM, and there are two jobs that I'm trying to help solve problems on, though we don't seem to be getting anywhere. We've worked over the weekend, but the feeling on Sunday is that this same sort of thing happened on Saturday: we were supposed to contact each customer to get more information about the problem, but we're not even able to get through to them on the telephones. I talk to a number of people who seem to be operators, trying in every way I can think of to contact the right people, but no one seems to know who's responsible for what, what persons are working on what projects, and who would know the answer to any specific question. The "signal" in the company seems to be an arm on the shoulder (as it seemed to be in last night's showing of Woody Allen's "Another Woman" with which this dream seems to be connected, since I stopped watching it at 12:45 last night and was highly impressed with the intricacies of it---though the purport of the MOVIE was that good work COULD be done on oneself if one overhears enough pointed conversation and criticism in a short period of time, while the purport of the DREAM seemed to be that no matter how hard I try, I couldn't come up with ANYTHING productive), and toward the end of the afternoon each "trainee" (is this from "Pelle the Conquerer" that I saw just BEFORE "Another Woman"?) puts his arm on my shoulder to imply that I did my best and it's not MY fault if they didn't make progress---though one seems definitely to make a mistake when he asks me, "So what's new in your life?" and I can only respond "There's not much TIME for anything new if I work all week and then have to spend my weekends TOTALLY here because there are problems that can't be solved," and hope he doesn't take offense. And at a last moment in the dream, hoping to get SOME clarity into the situation, I ask both "managers," "Did you at least come here with some phone numbers of people who would KNOW what the parameters of the problems were?" and both of them assured me that they had, that it wasn't really THEIR fault, either, that nothing concrete was accomplished over the entire weekend, and I have a sort of movie-scene ending-shot of the three of us walking up a short flight of three or four stairs toward the exit with MY arms on THEIR shoulders, as if to say that I forgive them for taking up my time on this weekend, and that they seem to be doing a good job, and that "I forgive them" even though there's some sense in which I DON'T---and I wonder how both movies AND this dream have bearing on my current life, in which it's nearing 9:20AM and I have to get the movies to Dennis so that he can return them since I'm going to be out all day with Paul Bosten, having to leave here at 9:45AM (after having breakfast and washing my teeth) to get to Paul's so that we can case out Monte's Venetian Room for dinner tonight after touring Bayard Cutting Arboretum during the day, and I NOW resist the temptation to continue to the end of the page with only 18 lines to go and not really very much to say, except the notebook-type note that I'm very pleased with my visit to Dr. Meyer at HIP yesterday when it was definitely diagnosed as TENDINITIS in my elbow (I have tennis elbow!) and given an injection of lidocaine and cortisone, and told that I should do wrist bends for 2-3 days for 30-40 times, going to pushing up and down for 3 seconds from 15 to 45 times for 4-5 days, then increasing to a one to two pound weight in the hand for the same, up to 15-45 pounds, stopping if I get to pain, and then using ice 2-3 times a day for 5-10 minutes for each day of the regimen that I didn't feel like starting yesterday in order not to outdo the injection, and Vicki said at Caravan (a wonderful find last night---and this IS a part of the notebook) that SHE'D gotten a shot and the pain went away completely the first day even though the doctor insisted that the cortisone didn't have any curative effect, and I can feel it vaguely now that I'm typing, but hope it goes away---greatly relieved that it's NOT the start of EITHER arthritis OR bursitis, though I don't quite know how to hold the OTHER joint pains, but I can call him in 3-4 weeks if nothing works, and try to get a handle on the other pains, and I HAVE gotten to the bottom even if it's 9:25AM and I don't have anything else to say, but I HAVE gotten to the bottom of the page!
7/4/89: 1) Color printouts are rolling out of a computer for a customer proposal, and we're all working for IBM. The black-and-white pages seem OK as they are, but the yellow lines that show the process-control flow seem to be as much a work of art as anything else, and I ask Mom, who did them, to SIGN them AS a work of art. She does so, but some of the following sheets are only "indications" of works of art, sort of "more like an ordinary proposal," so Mom's decision is to sign her INITIALS on them, as I do for DS when HE isn't there to sign it. 2) A laughing young woman is demonstrating how to use a prototype of a gambling machine by looking at which light flashes (or where a man in a video demonstration-tape puts coins into a slot that flashes briefly) and putting a nickel, dime, or quarter into the right slot. It appears that if the combinations are correct (rather like that "Simon says" computer-light game that Pope demonstrated to me a couple of years ago), there's a large payoff, and it IS a form of gambling that might slide around some of the rules AGAINST gambling devices. It's also rather like the three-card monte game where you have to see what light ACTUALLY flashes rather than "looks like" it flashes, and it seems that an elaborate program can be built in to circumvent LARGE winners---so not only is it an illegal gambling game trying to look legal, it's an UNFAIR and CHEATING gambling game trying to succeed. It seems as PART of the "come-on" that's lit up in the slots that I jotted down note 4): "get this" is a photograph of an enormous expensive book, and what is GOTTEN is only a PHOTO of the book, and it's rather like a joke except in the context that the person getting a PHOTO of a prize would feel CHEATED rather than AMUSED, and again there's a circumscribed thought of "How can we do this and remain legal?" that's IN the dream and part of the CIRCUMSTANCE of the dream. 3) Seemingly unrelated, a thin-armed tired-looking woman is sort of cruising in a busy public area, and I'm somehow interested in her until she puts on a sort of jacket over her bra-or-bathing-suit top and pushes through the crowd past me to show me that she's not really an appealing person. "How can such people hope to attract anyone to their body," I think in the dream, "when they don't even like their OWN bodies well enough to show them off to best advantage," and I think (in the dream) of the advantages to liking bodybuilders, because when you GET them, even if they don't like YOU, they still like their OWN bodies and will continue to preen and pose and show them off, and even masturbate their cocks as they flex their muscles and pose for you, and THAT's what you want, not particularly that they like YOU, but that they show YOU how they like their OWN bodies, which leads me back to the desire for OOBs so that I can WATCH how these people admire and polish and show off their bodies in mirrors to themselves in the privacies of their own rooms that turns me on. 5) And my mind upon waking goes to the needs to do two indexes, watch three of Spartacus's tapes, watch fireworks tonight that I hope are better than the duds last night on the promenade with Pope (and of course I'm aware that I'm going into NOTEBOOK material again), and get finally to the BIG projects of practicing the OOB exercises, transcribing and rehearsing the past-lives tapes, and writing, though I remind myself that there's an art exhibit that ends on 7/7, and it's THAT far along ALREADY, and while my mind goes quickly through various things that I could be writing when I'm finished with all THIS (including finding out how much I can EARN this year by finding how much I LOST when I sold the stocks in April), the RICHNESS of what's floating to the top of my mind overwhelms me, so that I compare the PETTY dross of the dreams that went before as like the final bits of RUBBISH that float to the top of my mind when I get many of the MAJOR things out of the way, liking that TOTALLY free feeling when I feel that NOTHING is waiting for me to do (or when I have WHAT I have to do listed in a "got-them-off-my-mind" fashion as I just did, above, and this is like a final clearing of the slate for BIG things to formulate in my mind, or for BIG happenings to show what my NEXT big direction will be, and I record everything, noting also that I've managed to get to the bottom of THIS page.
7/7/89: 1) I'm talking on the telephone to Mary Vilaboa, and I'm complaining that I can't HEAR her, and she retorts with some asperity that the didn't SAY it, and I know that she's at work and can't talk about Actualism, but that she tried to TELECOMMUNICATE something to me, and I had not the slightest idea what it was about. 2) A fragment somehow connected with dream 3 but not really: it's raining VERY hard, just POURING out of the sky. 3) I'm eating in a VERY elegant restaurant (of the supposed quality of Le Cirque: just as stuffy, just as proud of its reputation, and for my taste just as NOT quality) and I'd ordered some fancy tasting menu and they serve a large platter of what looks like DESSERT: cherries and jams and whipped cream, but some of the chunks of what I thought was stewed FRUIT actually turns out to be some kind of African- style STEAK. I start with eating a creamy soup in something like a shell or an elaborate stemmed cup, and I spill some of it and try to cover it with a napkin, but then I look at the fellow next to me and he's spilled an entire PLATE with some sort of yellow-green vegetable-pepper GOO all over the tablecloth AND his trousers, and the waiters and Maitre d' are all fussing about him, so I don't feel very conspicuous about my soup-spill. He says that he'll join his friends at the table behind us (we seem to be eating singly along one side of an enormous table covered with dishes and presentation sets of silverware and candlesticks, so thick with tablecloths and quilts that it's almost the surface of a bed), and when I turn to look at him, the table is jammed with people very close together and he's more TALKING that eating by sitting between two people and leaning forward but not even able to GET to the surface of the table. I either spill something else or choose to get a new place, and move off to the side along a sort of bar when I glance out through the front door (which seems to be situated where the Paris Theatre is just west of Fifth Avenue on 58th Street looking out to the Plaza Hotel entrance) and see (and hear) the passing of a PARADE with lots of marching bands and strutting drum majors with uniforms and twirling batons and blaring whistles in their mouths. The waiter nods and seems to say "Yes, isn't that nice" to the noise and movement, which I just think is annoying. Then, as I continue to stand in the corner at the bar, someone who looks like an enormous John Simon with a tiny Liz Smith sits at the "head of the aisle" between two of these long tables and he starts SINGING very loudly and drunkenly, and I can't IMAGINE that the patrons of this elegant restaurant would tolerate such behavior, and when I look to my right, the staff is bearing down on me with platters of new food and the armaments to make me a new place setting: a chair, tablecloths, silverware, and even magazines to read while I'm waiting for my new service. I'm just flabbergasted that people LIKE this sort of thing. Then, to continue as usual with NOTEBOOK stuff, I'm waked early by more air-hammers on top of the garage next door at 8AM, when I'd gotten to bed at 1:45AM after watching a TV tape after finishing an index at 12:50AM, and then the dogs start barking from 176 Hicks so annoyingly that I get out the complaint number and phone them at 9AM and get them after about 18-20 rings, and they TAKE my name, apartment number, and THEIR address without MY address. I come across the note that "The Phantom" was shown in the Journal-American, and I think to include the newspaper library at West 43rd in my town-tour today which includes the Merrin Gallery on 57th and 5th for bronze sculptures (again, last day today) and the IBM gallery with an exhibit from the Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology, after which I join Vicki for hamburgs at the unknown- name place across from the north face of St. Patrick's Cathedral on E. 51st St. and then a tape at center at 6:30, for which I want to call Mary Vilaboa this morning at work to see if she's going, which brings me in a circle back to the dream this morning, which is probably connected to my thoughts of calling her before I went to bed last night, and I have groceries to get except that I'm expecting a rush-index delivery from Springer this morning and it's too early to phone Dennis to watch out for it as he phoned me last night at 5:30 to watch out for an index of HIS that never arrived. And so much for the page TODAY.
7/9/89: 1) Tiny-titted smooth-skinned shirtless teenager upstairs on 52nd (?) as I go down, and I dream of going back UP. 2) UPstairs with Chinese father to 52nd Street "K" train when I want another train, and stand under marquee because it's raining.3) ENDLESSLY masturbate ENORMOUS Rolf's cock.[Typed 7/12].
7/10/89: 7:25AM: Computer goes WILD, first overprinting and printing on SAME page, then spewing out paper as it prints only one line per page, with the input sheets as loose as butcher-paper on an input roll behind the computer, and I can't even shut the machine OFF---a total waste of paper and time. 9AM: Mom acts like Judy Watson: there's a tree in our kitchen because she told me to put it there, and there's water on the dining-room floor in spider webs which I try to mop up, but it's a REAL mess and the woman goes into HYSTERIA about it.
7/11/89: I try again and again to jerk off in front of a television screen (I'm lying down on the floor with the TV on the floor and I'm craning my head to look down my body at my cock and at the TV screen between my feet). There's someone else there that I'm trying to play with, too, and I wake feeling sexy and try to jerk off in the before-dawn darkness, but get weary and fall asleep.
7/12/89: I'm supposed to be doing some kind of research in a huge German library, starting with a 1-hour VCR tape of Aldous Huxley's "The Hyphaestian Islands" which I'd never heard of before. I'm naked and some woman I'm with gives me an enormous black quilted blanket to wrap myself in, but it's terribly heavy with an enormous train (thinking of the WHITE trains glorious in the "Marie Antoinette" a few nights ago?), and I switch to a large white bath towel which I knot securely on my chest, hoping not to scandalize anyone---but no one seems really to be there to look at me. I can just about transliterate much of the German script to see what I don't need to look at, and there's a cardboard display describing a 2x3-foot "stamp" of something like a Revolutionary War soldier with gun and uniform, and also a listing of special displays in various hallways and rooms of the library, most of which I'm not interested in, but I still have the feeling that some good research can be done even though I don't understand the language perfectly. Though in a foreign setting, I feel "at home" and comfortable, as if I "live there."[All 4 above typed from notes7/12].
7/14/89: 1) I'm holding up a MASK of "The Mother" made out of some slimy plastic with a green glow around the eyes, and as I look at the face from different angles, the features begin to MOVE, as if it's about to speak to me. 2) I seem to have slept overnight in my office, and I take my clothes out of desk drawers and go into the john to change into a business suit and pee. 3) I enter a huge Turkish mosque with two other tourists, but we're separated in a huge throng entering for some kind of service. I have the option to be seated at a "single table" on a sort of platform, but as I make my way down that aisle a horde of people comes from the other direction and I can't make it to the empty seat that seemed to be saved for me. The sermon is oddly in English. I'm out alone, feeling sorry for being separated from my companions, wishing I had my camera since I'll be walking through the mosque gardens that stretch between the mosque I'm leaving and the palace, which is near my hotel.
7/15/89: 8:30: VERY long and elaborate audience participation GAME, like alternative lives as we go through YEARS recording them on videocameras. Codes and trials, using ice to take heat from wine we must TASTE (?), and the ice stains our mouths (?)[VERY poorly-written notes]. Monastery and mountain. Roles like in Dungeons and Dragons, and Schwabisch Hall King's treasures. Made-up languages, tables, mystical visions (warriors, giants, ghosts): EXCITING!
Segments separated by roller coaster DIPS in trains that splash in waters or go through dark tunnels, and one is a CONTROLLED descent, surprisingly SLOW, always something different. Companions and traitors, allies and sex-mates, passwords and mock executions, letters and ciphers, riddles and surprises. Like LIVING through a FUNHOUSE quest. Real-life knowledge, travel, and experience counts, and I'm recognized as one of the best (because oldest and most experience) players. Dream-game-life is DEFINITELY more FUN than my life, but with the MESSAGE that my REAL life can be more spontaneous and fun!! 10:30: DETAILED section: I go to a NEW john with a TINY sink and see John A.'s washcloth---I move it and it's NOT his, but belongs to a TEMPORARY EMPLOYEE that I hired last night at a drunken party---she's typing, speaking FRENCH, and I say "Plutot, c'est pas BIEN tot; c'est TROP tot!" I put hands on her chest and FIT fingertips under her tits. Previous bit: you're so GOOD at what you do POOREST that no one ELSE could do BETTER!
NOTEBOOK-DREAM combination: TWISTOR-BED: elementary twistors CROSSING shadow-worlds to ANY universe/time/sex/possibility/alternative; shadows and shadow-worlds. I can read ALL books and see ALL sights and screw ALL screws!
7/16/89: 1) Filling SECOND drawers in bedroom chests as second-in-command guide on ship. Drawers under the large round table in the dining wine are filled with ornate champagne glasses. 2) I'm flying in the back of a plane that's even wider than a 747, with sofa-chair seats with large spaces on either side of each cluster of four-abreast. I feel a trusting calmness even as the plane banks sharply and I can see the ground moving from my position of standing in the middle aisle that the banking is VERY steep and VERY sharp. 3) I'm lying next to a fairly ugly nude guy in an East River apartment who gets a very long thick erection under my hand resting on his stomach. 4) I'm walking on a "new dock" (which was probably influenced by Clarke's "Cradle" fishing docks) of stonework with water lapping at both sides (from his blue-necked sea creatures from the same book). It comes over the edges and gurgles around a too-small sewer opening which almost empties before another wave fills the low-lying area to overcapacity again. I get my shoes wet and even the bottoms of my knee-length shorts in the swirling waters. 5) There's a choral concert scheduled at 8:15PM Sunday night, but I know everyone can attend because the boat is scheduled to dock at 5PM and it's usually always pretty much on schedule.
7/18/89: 1) 8:45: I'm unstacking and opening to air out blankets in an enormous dining room, for dozens of people who are moving in. I mention that I can have the floors scraped or sanded if anyone's from Manhattan and owns their own company, which I suspect many do. A woman asks questions, calls me Bryan, people laugh, and I interrupt her to say "Bob." 2) 9:45: David Frost passes a few empty twin beds in a huge room to spread sheets on a double bed for me and another guy who seem ready to have sex. Delightful dream.
7/19/89: 7:30: A LONG dream of hunting for a CALIFORNIA EPCOT map---I'm there for two weeks, have PACKS of stuff from my trips to the Florida EPCOT, and I go to a desk where I'd gotten a map the LAST time and the busy-on-the-phone guy there says that I have to go upstairs now. I struggle up a green metal ladder in a tight green tunnel (is this supposed to be part of some ride, like a plant stem or something?), reaching to my limit for rungs very close to the curved walls, wondering how children or older people can traverse such a passage, but there are lots of people pushing up behind me (NOW I remember the spiral staircase scene in "Les Miserables" last night where those on the upper floor kept trying to kill the soldiers coming up the broken stairway from the ground floor). I'm told I'll get a special package of information and go through an old packet of brochures and find an ink-faded old one in ONE color, and get a new colorful one (like the subway map I picked up yesterday) which describes a newly-added area of "Wild West" theme rides and concessions mainly directed to the kids, so I don't feel I need to see it. Recall that some OLD section centered around a 60+-year-old acrobatic couple and hope THIS park's better. Also think "I've been here ONE week, and low-cost flight OUT should be reserved one week in advance for lower fares." But maybe I can get a cheap fare the DAY before as I did in Frankfurt. I'm traveling alone but I seem to be LOVING it.
7/21/89 NOTE recorded 8/2: Kept recalling that I had this strange dream at Sherryl's, somewhat affected by the largeness of the room I was sleeping in, because the dream was that I was in a new-fangled bathroom on many levels, like this apartment in Long Beach, and along one wall was a new toilet design: a padded back wall that either doubled as a seat-cover or remained in place, and a large shelf leading up to a hole that's FILLED TO THE BRIM with water. I knee myself up onto the shelf and sit over the hole, and find that I have to slouch forward and brace my tailbone against a metal ridge at the back of the hole, where my buttock-tips JUST get wet in the water, but with my KNEES above my GROIN I wonder if I'll be able to summon the muscular coordination to even FLEX enough to let the shit drop into the water---where it might not splash, but might it overflow?? Odd uncomfortable dream, recalled EVEN NOW fully.
7/25/89: TERMINAL confusion in dream and in memory of dream, so there's nothing to do but get up at 8:10AM and record this DIRECTLY. Could events have seemed so "random" because I watched a "random" program on dreams night BEFORE last on TV? Anyway, there were usually CROWDS of people, MANY items on my calendar (as IS true now), and COMEDIC sequences in which I seem to have laughed aloud in my dream (and in my sleeping body?). LAST was a sequence where I was gathering items in "my secretary's area" when a heard a distant phone ringing. "Is that extension 1221?" I asked her. She looked at a blinking light and said it was. "Could you answer that for me here?" "No," she said, "because my extension isn't working." So I gathered up my papers and a large slice of pizza out of which I'd taken one or two big bites (and anyway it was so long since I'd gotten it that it was stiff and cold anyway), and followed her through deserted aisles (was everyone at lunch?) toward my phone which she reached JUST as it stopped ringing, so that she looked back toward me with resignation and a plea for forgiveness, but as I walked back through the area with my pizza slice flapping in the air, the place was JAMMED with people, mostly men, and I thought "Is that Gay Men's Seminar at 2PM TODAY, and I'd been involved in a GENERAL Introduction in another part of the building that had been scheduled for 1.5 hours at 1PM in conflict with it??" and that DID seem to be the answer as someone seemed to be finishing with a gathering in the middle of the clump of men as I reached the 4-person cubicle (though the cubicle-boundaries were only 4 feet high) NEXT to mine and prepared to ask someone sitting at my desk to hand me MORE papers from MY desk so I could take them somewhere else to work on them without disturbing THIS meeting, but some of the men (who seemed older, as if they were all from Homogeniuses or PrimeTimers) looked at ME as if they'd expected ME to handle the leadership of the Gay Men's Seminar, and I woke, but at THIS instant my memory clarifies a bit on a PREVIOUS dream-segment, where I was at the General Introduction in another (but somewhat less) crowded room where everyone was moving double-desks around for seating, and I tried (again as in a comedy) to sit at a number of (still moving?) desks only to find seats already taken, and as the LAST double-desk (more specifically, a flat table about the size of MY desk, i.e. quite small, maybe 18 inches by 40 inches, with two ATTACHED grade-school-like simple-seat-and-attached back chairs moving as a unit with the table) was moved into a 3-o'clock position as part of an inner ring inside maybe 8 double-desks already moved into an outer ring, and in the other seat was someone like Phyllis Hjorth transmuted into "the ugliest girl in class," like Rosemary Rapant or Rosemary Canova with pigtails and a pimpled face of consummate stupidity, so that I was decidedly of two minds: whether to take the LAST seat available, or to try to flee to an unknowable "somewhere else." There was another dream-segment BETWEEN these two, where I did something REALLY humorous, like comedy-hour-special slapstick-funny, and actually laughed in the dream and thought to myself "This is REAL slapstick comedy" with even a fragment of "How glad I am that this is a dream" possibly? I now sit, earplugs still in, at 8:30AM, trying to think of more dream-segments but aware of the itch from the white pimple-like object on the inner knuckle of my right middle finger (inner in the sense that it's not ON the knuckle but 1/3 inch toward my right index-finger knuckle); aware of a pressure to move my bowels; aware of the humid heat of a living room without the air conditioner having been on since 1:15 this morning when I shut it off and shut the connecting door, which is still shut, and I scratch my face, determined that today will be the day I change sheets (do accumulated bedbugs bite to give me these itches, which seem to go away when I change sheets), and note that I'm on line 54, now 55, wanting to get to the bottom of the page but tired of typing the words ABOUT getting to the bottom of the page, since I'm SURE I'll be tired of READING the words about getting to the bottom of the page at any later date when I READ or EDIT these pages for something more USEFUL than the purpose of clearing my mind of the dream so that I can continue with my dozing (or getting up), whichever I decide to do after I print this page(and hope the printer works)!
7/26/89 NOTE recorded 8/2: Three of us, Mrs. Johnson on my left and some guy on my right, are eating at what could be grade-school desks in front of a television set; we're not talking. We share dried clover flowers in a glass, and I'm EATING them. I feel I can use an upstairs apartment for indexing and writing. There's a DEEPLY cut alabaster fingerbowl for our use.
7/27/89 NOTE recorded 8/2: I'm filling out an INSURANCE or an AIRLINES ticket that has a large blue-black INKBLOT on the TO-date, and I have a LONG talk about whether I fill in the days 1-6 or 1-5/6, and my grinning roommate says goodbye to a fellow who slept overnight to help me fill out the form correctly, and then the female clerk says that I could MAIL it in, and I feel exasperated that she hadn't told me that BEFORE; it wouldn't have been so much trouble then!
7/30/89 NOTE recorded 8/2: 12:02AM: and I figure I'm 53 1/3 years old TODAY. The dream had fantastic INGREDIENTS: A huge old Victorian mansion---an INDIAN family blocking door with wife and fat children on my staircase to my ROOM, which I want to go up to to CHANGE. There's fireworks tonight, and it seems it might be Thanksgiving. and some preliminary fireworks streak in white smoke across a still-lit twilight sky. I'm in some sort of military force or militia but I have my regulation ten shells, but they drop out and sink below the wainscotting (what a WORD) because the floor is raised a bit and these drop between the platform and the wall. An aide says "We have boxes and BOXES of ammunition," and little "puffs" come up from the boxes like tiny floating fireworks made of interlocking triangles, which float out of the drawer and blaze like tiny sparkler-wires and then die to limp ashes that scatter into dust on the floor.
8/1/89: I'm running, actually more like jogging in a park, along a grass-lined path, and I glance to my left to see that a big Greyhound bus is passing me, almost sliding off the road to leave me room on the narrow path, and when it gets ahead of me, seemingly safely, it swerves on a soft shoulder and when the driver tries to put it back on the road it skids on the wet grass and slues to the side, where the angle becomes to great and it actually falls onto its side for a bit when it's BESIDE me, but then it's AHEAD of me and it looks like it's about to flip END-OVER-END back down the slope, possibly hitting ME, and I begin to run backwards with the tiniest touch of the "can't run as fast as I'd like in a dream because 1) my legs won't work right and 2) the ground keeps slipping under my feet," thinking at first that I've managed to escape, but a moment later the erratic tumbling of the bus has put me into new danger. I don't really feel THREATENED, but know I have to move fast, when I wake up.
8/2/89: 8:40AM: Wake feeling vaguely achey and sore-throated, wondering if I'm coming down with a cold or the flu or a stomach disorder, and think AGAIN that I should schedule an AIDS virus test so my mind won't rush to THAT when I get a recurrence of what the dermatologist called a "neurodermatitis." Want to jot the note about LAST morning's dream (above) and the two segments of today's dreams, and decide to piss and get to the computer to write these two notes to keep track of my memory before writing out 8/1 in detail: 1) new California school, cafeteria later, share rooms, new friends, "I'm smart and friendly." 2) on bus with sexy-black-shorts guy with tanned thighs and little girl "trained to make people sympathetic." Expanding 1): I'm moving through a campus that looks rather like the University of Akron (which WOULD be different since I've been in NYC for the past 31 years!), and I have the understanding that I'm a new student in CALIFORNIA, taking adult-education classes just for the fun of it (though I'm ACTUALLY in my 30s in the dream, it seems), and there's an enormous sense of the DIFFERENCE of my California classmates as compared to people in NYC: they're younger, friendlier, more open, more willing to make friends, eager to laugh and get to know me, and much more accepting of homosexuality (maybe I'm feeling like Quentin Crisp coming to young American from old England, older compared to most of his new friends, since I've just indexed his book yesterday). I know I'm to lunch in the cafeteria soon, and there's some kind of new sub-ground "mining-camp atmosphere" set up to make lunches more interesting, kind of like "lunching in Disneyland" with false rock-fronts and sluice-streams and mining-dining tables, maybe even a "rustic" sort of old-fashioned gold-rush menu. At the same time I sort of KNOW what it looks like and am eager to see it for the first time. Over a sort of PA system over the green grass swards comes the announcement that the upperclassmen will be volunteering for their roommates, and "there'll probably be a lot of interest in our new students named Liza Minelli and Dorothy Hunter." And I idly wonder if Liza Minelli is THE Liza Minelli, and conclude that it IS, and that's just an example of the new friendliness and wonder of my new campus. I have an enormous sense that my personality characteristics that were a liability in NYC (intelligence, sense of humor, interest in people) will become ASSETS in my new surroundings, and things are going to be just FABULOUS. Expanding 2): I'm sitting on the aisle in a front-facing seat with an older woman to my left at the window, and we're both looking at the little girl climbing on and off the side-facing seat before us. Her "father" is a tall, tanned, narrow-faced sexy guy who's a combination of the dancer Richard Steinberg on Monday night and the programmer from SBC that Daisy's name "Bill Graham" puts me in mind of: tall and good-looking with wonderful eyes. He's wearing silky black short-shorts that show a tempting bit of ass-cheek as he bends to put a small athletic bag from one side of his feet to the other. Not that the little girl is CRYING, but the "plot" of this dream, which hardly lasted three seconds, is that he's going to use her youth and vulnerability to beg money or help from the subway-or-bus crowd, but we can see the setup and can smile knowingly and imperious to the coming entreaties. Odd FEELINGS!
8/3/89: I'm on a tour of a country that looks like Canada (but may be India, later) in a bus that's so like a regular city bus that at one point we actually stop to pick up a couple of women (that the driver fancies?) at a regular bus stop and they thread their way down the aisle to the rear and separate to sit in empty seats near other single travelers like me, and I see that I have my blankets and bags on the seat next to me to protect me against such incursions. At another point I raise my head from a nap when the driver announces "The King William Promenadal Staircases" in front of a squatly Gothic building (which rather looks like St. Stephen's crown with its domelike shape spiced up with spiky towers) set back on a wide lawn lined with wide flat staircases, rather like the broad steps described in some book I read recently that were designed for horsemen to mount, so I guess King William would have been on horseback when he paraded here just after his coronation in England. I decide that the vista isn't exciting enough for me to get out my camera and take a picture of it, and some part of my mind wonders, since I'm ON a trip, why my camera isn't out on the seat beside me the whole way. One night we're driving through a deepening grayness and I idly look to see that the rain seems to be changing into snow, and that little white dustings of snow are beginning to appear on rock outcroppings on the roadside. As I continue looking out the window, which is now framing a constant downpour of snow, it occurs to me that my pillow on my seat is getting flaked with snow, and I discover that my window is actually OPEN, which surprises me. Look at some of the other windows ahead of and behind me (usually shared by a youngish hippyish couple) I see that they're only open a crack for ventilation at top or bottom. So I close my window because that's what everyone else has done. I idly wonder why we're sleeping in the bus rather than in a hotel when the driver announces that we have the option of spending a little extra money and will be dropped off at an optional hotel or restaurant or fair, if we'd like it. I remind myself to keep that in mind. Without transition there are Indian-woman beggars in the bus, going up and down the aisles and peering in from outside the windows. I'm eating a sort of trail-mix from a wooden bowl something like my salad bowls (wood, but not really as rough as wood: agatized wood), and I distinctly remember looking down to see some bits of dried apple and pineapple and nuts, but there's a patch of purple-black raisins that I head for to "even out" the remains of my portion in the bottom of the bowl. A middle-aged woman (which is to say about 27) looks longingly in my window, holding up a begging bowl that seems to be filled with the ashes of her last child, and I offer her my bowl so that she can take some of the raisins out of it, and before I can stop her she's grabbed the edge and tipped the entire contents into the gray dust of HER bowl. I try to protest, asking her to rescue some larger clumps of the fruit from the ashes (as when I've dropped too many raisins in a clump into my cream-of-wheat bowl and try to get out some that haven't been moistened by the cereal yet), but somehow she disappears with both bowls. I leave the bus effortlessly (not through the window, but certainly not up the aisle where I'm sitting two or three seats from the back) and she's with a group of friends mourning in a cemetery which is just dusty ground demarked by flimsy metal rectangles-on-supports that outline each child's grave, with an irregular marker or memorial stone toward the "head" of each area (but I think without names or dates, so rough and poor are they), and I find her with my bowl and her bowl nestled together (they've somehow grown little molded handles like my large salad-serving bowl), which I try to retrieve from her, but she makes a sheltering motion, saying that they're both hers, and the other women frown at me accusingly, and I wonder what kind of security measures the other people on the bus have taken to protect their belongings from such sticky-fingered women. I have no sense of how long the trip has taken or how long it will last, or even precisely where it is, since the landscape seems reminiscent of the Canada that I mentioned to Mary Vilaboa last night that Avi and I campered across before I wrecked it under an A&W drive-in roof, brought to mind by the truck-clobbered ceiling of a driveway entrance to Lincoln Center that we passed on her way to her apartment after the ballet last night, and yet these sari-ed women (I guess this stems from the two African women in shiny-patch-and-striped wrap-around dresses I saw in front of the St. George on the way to the subway yesterday) are clearly Indian or Pakistani, even to the red dot in the middle of the forehead and the prematurely wrinkled countenances. I don't NEED to get to the bottom of this!
8/4/89: 1) I'm standing in the lobby of what looks like 309 W. 57th St., and it's jammed with people waiting for the elevator. I ask a few people around me if anyone's phoned for information or assistance, but they don't answer me. Angered, I shout to the entire area: "Doesn't ANYONE here know what's going on or is doing anything about it?" Still no answer. I debate about walking up, figuring that it's only 17 flights, less than three tiring 6-flight walks. 2) I'm using a long, limp, rubbery utensil something like a strip of seaweed with a tiny bladder in the middle to substitute for my inter-tooth cleaner, and it sort of bobbles along my gums without cleaning out anything. 3) I'm enrolled in yet another university and I don't have class on Thursday until 5:30 in the afternoon, so I'm sort of watching TV(or really sitting in a grandstand) for a black singer in the end-zone while dancers are gyrating on the football field. I look down as the singer dashes from the microphone to intimidate another black male performer, and then he runs over to a black cheerleader-type right below me to grab her around the waist and throw her up onto his back, piggyback style, and curves one arm around her ass so that I think, "He's trying to make the TV audience think he's going to enter her, so he's covering up her crotch area with his arm." But (I know this isn't anatomically correct) he wrestles the clothes off her so that I'm staring down at the two eyes of her tits, flat enough to be a sexy man's tits, and curvy crotch rather like the Magritte-face on the Surrealist book cover. Then without transition the action's transferred to a cafeteria where I'm sitting alone at a big round table, and the action seems to be taking place nearby, drawing people from all around to look, and finally someone sits down next to me while I pretend to study and ignore the whole thing. All interactions seem well-rehearsed and smiling, so I don't feel that I'm looking at real-life, but some sort of campus theatrical show.
8/5/89: Eastenders? 8:45AM: Me and lots of others are drinking in a pub. A tough says "Here, drink THIS." I do, and THINK I'm OK, but an ODD woman says "Let him go." Me: I'm OK. "Hey, buddy, you mucked up so and so." "OK, then I have to CLEAN it." ONE guy on my left laughs and lets me clean his SURFACE. Mid-guy: "You don't touch SURFACE." I scour the wall ABOVE the table with a wet rag, and so NEATLY wipe it off with part of the rag that no BIT falls onto the table, and middle guy lets it go. Middle guy: Did you SEE--- everyone gathered about? Me and THAT man?" "Did she give you permission?" Me: "No, I would have known THAT discussion---she was TRAPPED there." Me: "Could have been someone else." They: "No, DUCK, for not RECOGNIZING me." This makes no sense to me now but I tried deciphering my sleepy handwriting as best I could.
8/11/89: I'm attending a party in the roof-top apartment of two women from IBM who share an enormous space: at least three balcony-angles, so that each woman has a sitting room and bedroom of enormous dimensions, while there's a ballroom -sized common area which has been built up into a sort of ship's prow at one side so that one stands just below the ceiling while looking down at the streets 40 or more floors below (even though the floor is carpeted in the cheapest possible area rug, like the brown salt-and-pepper $4/yard carpeting that I bought for 320 E. 70th Street). There's some sort of agenda for the party that I don't understand: everyone seems to be there, yet there are introductions to be made or music to be heard before the food is served (am I thinking of Dick Hsieh's SBC reunion coming up on 9/9/9?), and I'm either early or late because I'm wandering from area to area wondering exactly what's going to happen next. One bedroom stretching before me has a huge marble-based bed covered by a silky rainbow-hued throw, and there are catwalks of corridors and stairways linking roof-elements with what must have been accessways for the two or three individual apartments they must have linked in making such a rooftop aerie. Erik Lauer phones to interrupt this flow of description at 10AM today.
8/12/89: I'm watching the very first rehearsal of an elaborate historical pageant, and as the principal actors read through their lines on the stage, I wander in from the right-rear wing and push through some bushes that I think form the back of the set, but find behind them a rushing stream that they've diverted from a river outside to provide the sound of cascading water, and behind the "stream" is a line of meticulous models of houses on the other side of the river, each house about two feet high and three feet wide, the logs and porches and windows rendered in almost photographic detail, and I marvel at the expense the set decorators must have worked through. I move off to the left and climb up some gentle rocks represented by cardboard boxes, and when I get about twenty feet above the stage level I hear the leading man calling back, "You up there, move that thing (pointing) more toward center-stage." I gingerly scrabble over boxes, trying to get to a position to touch a box, or an amplifier, or another piece of the lighting equipment, to see if THAT's what he wants moved, but another stagehand comes up from the bottom and seems more expert in moving whatever has to be moved. Then I'm on the apron of the stage when the handsome leading man, who looks like Herman Whoever from Salinas Union High School, comes over to me and says "We're set for rehearsal on Saturday," and when I express puzzlement he states with some asperity, "We have to get our dialogue timing down, you know." I'm surprised that he's willing to make the presentation so professional. I begin to worry about my lines (which I haven't even gotten yet), concerned that I won't be able to remember them, thinking of an elaborate plan to make the keywords of each speech into a sentence that will serve as my memory jog. Then I'm standing outside the theatre with a group of people admiring the poster for the presentation, but it turns into a map of the entire Yellowstone Park area. I'm attracted to a site in the Northwest (that is, the upper left) of the map labeled "Bright Angel Discovery Site," and I seem to know that this is an American Indian (or even earlier) historical site of great mystical importance not only to the primitives who put it there but to a sect of some sort who worships to this day something uncovered there a number of years ago. The lower part of the map is so detailed it seems to contain actual miniatures of the buildings that had been and are being constructed near the site: the Festival Theatre where half-inch models of circus performers are made to move by means of metal rods oscillating out of the model-floor, complete with amphitheater seats filled with painted spectators; the old-fashioned Shakespearean Theatre, steep-sided with postage-stamp sized painted flats at the rear and sides of the stage; hotels built to resemble old- time lodges and rooming houses; and in the distance are drawn-in trails around the geysers and mud pools and boiling cauldrons through which the district has attracted its hordes of tourists that threaten to destroy the very sites that drew them. Off to the left side there seems to be a picketing group exhorting those who look at the poster to realize that any more construction would severely damage the ambiance of the rest of the National Park. There are other sections of the dream, quite fragmentary, that follow this, but as I made notes at 9:30AM, having been awake and back to sleep at 8AM, I feel that the dream has actually filled the entire hour-and-a-half interim, and marvel at the inventiveness of the brain in forming such shadowy pictures, recalling again that I didn't manage to look at my hands or look at my face in the mirror as lucid-dreaming advances would require. Type this from 10:05 to 10:20AM.
8/15/89: 6AM: Dream starts in Akron University's "Parke R. Kolbe Hall," in two rooms that seem to be my hotel room, and I'm outside on a windy morning to see cows and milk-wagons blowing through the sky, below the white clouds boiling higher up against the crisp blue sky. The sequence started with a hawk hunched forward under furled wings, taking off without flapping, lifting into the sky almost as if it were a kite. I wait for fireworks beside the ranger's building and I hear requests for "Two volunteers" and "Save my place" as I return to my rooms for my lunch-box and my camera, deciding to go the LONG way around to my rooms (rather than the direct way straight across campus), and I watch someone beside me jumping down about four feet from one parapet to another to save walking around to the stairs in the distance, and I follow him on that, feeling that it's high, but not too high, and then he jumps and floats down a LARGER precipice and I decide that that's definitely a "dream jump" and I'm not going to follow him, and as I type this at 6:15PM (over twelve hours later) I wonder if this might not be a SMALL advance into lucid dreaming, as there was SOME sense that I had that I was IN a dream and therefore couldn't act as I would in real life. But no sense of strangeness about being in Akron, or even in looking into the sky and seeing cows floating across it, could make me take a clearer hand in what I was looking at in my dreams, but I'll take it as a compliment: as a start toward lucid dreaming!
8/28/89: I'm either 1) living with the old woman or 2) working for her on a part-time basis, but I'm doing something elaborate at a desk near a sofa in a room rather like my living room, but she shouts to me that the ceiling is coming down, and as I move away from the sofa into the middle of the room, I can see that the LINE I thought was in the ceiling painting is a BREAK in the paint-layer of the ceiling and it's sagging along its whole length from the nine-foot height in the back to just over six feet in the front, so that the rough plaster can be seen in the gap. I figure I have to move my delicate designs out of the way before the paint-layer crumbles all over them. Then there's some sort of entertainment going on down in the next-level court or raised atrium, and there's an increasing leak in the roof (is this caused by the stained-glass-in-ceiling leak in yesterday's tape of "Tequila Sunrise"?) which the viewers seem to ignore politely by moving their chairs to the periphery of what's almost like a large SHOWER-head pattern of round-area of rain falling onto the concrete floor. There's a secondary shower that appears to be dusky-colored until I get around to the side and realize that it's just dark-colored from the air rising from a heater that's causing the air to waver like a desert mirage. I go up and down an elaborate stairway, circular in part, cluttered with blue piping and chunks of concrete in other parts as if things have been falling off the wall, and I look down at my sneakered feet pattering over the debris, wondering if I could negotiate this successfully if there were a catastrophe and I'd have to make my way out of the building in the dark. I'm down to the performance floor to see a little girl laying out what looks like plowed furrows onto the floor, seemingly demonstrating how to plant a small interior flower-garden, and she also isn't concerned about the rain, which might help the garden even if it DID fall where she's working, in a sort of behind-the-orchestra area, but it's not falling there. The rain seems to increase momentarily, people putting up umbrellas or getting gently wet, but they're too well-behaved to complain, only move to the sides or out of the main drift of the rain. The woman who seems to own the building and for whom I seem to be working is there only in the vaguest sense of a little old dyed-haired lady in silken garments and lots of costume jewelry on her neck and wrists, with a sort of old-movie comedienne-quality about her manner and behavior. I seem to be in my thirties, dressed in a rather foppish suit, as if I were a pet poodle or some other performer in a dated comedy movie. My free-lance activity might have something to do with arranging jewelry designs, but it might also have been something about embroidery, since I seem to remember a table with a kind of fixed design on it, or it might have had something to do with stamps. I remember reading that the final dreams of the morning last as long as 40 minutes, and this seemed to have filled most of the time between 8:30AM, when I knew I was too tired to get up yet (even though I got to bed at 12:30 after an exhausted hour skimming the paperback I'd bought yesterday on Quantum Mechanics) (and I'd jerked off without porno for the first time in ages, coming almost feelinglessly and then licked off my belly and fingers until they were essentially dry), and 9:30AM, when I woke from the dream and figured I'd better take notes on it or else the memory would vanish, but I kept going over parts of it in my mind, and details seemed still fresh when I dragged myself out of bed at 10AM and without even bothering to dress sat down and finished typing to this point by 10:15AM, listening with disgust to the people making noise upstairs, hoping things will quiet down when school starts for the autumn next week, feeling that I have to go to the john now, and observing that I'm now on line 53 (which is a lie since the "now" is on 53 but "this" is on line 54), so I have a chance to get to the bottom of the page, and then I'm BACK to the computer for the first time since my OOB page NOTEBOOK 512 exactly one week ago on 8/21, and hope I'll keep to the writing so that I can send some samples to the Racanelli address given to me last night when the guy called from the second of the writers' groups that I'd telephoned over a week ago. Maybe the gym exercise yesterday can galvanize my body out of its last week's lethargy!
8/29/89: (Note typed 9/8, TEN days after): 1) 4:15AM: I'm dusting and see WEBS on "pine tree" in north-facing window in my living room. Get large q-tips to get webs and ANTS, then go behind small "panes of glass" to squash 2-3 BEES and then use "Bottle Rags" to break neck of large MOUSE and move whole thing to kitchen to dump mouse-body in garbage. Mouse-body hairless and wrinkled like a PIG. GLAD there's no BLOOD. 2) 6AM: INCREDIBLE "seduction" by Turandot-singer above La Scala: I'm under her in bed as servants flit about. She goes to get ready and I'm onstage on an on-set screen---TINY stage and I'm "singing" to SMALL arc of the orchestra-area, which is up three steps. Before, I look at watch and see NEW face on old band ("someone did a LOT of quick work" "That is why one has Sundays." "Is it a GOOD watch?" "Why else would I switch it?" My old watch comes back---web-wrapped. I have SMOOTH young body, she has WASPS and Monkey-tree tongue. GROUP in seats, I have "special" seat, and there's a "large set in dressing room." [Frankly, I can't remember what ANY of that is!]
8/31/89: (Note typed 9/8, EIGHT days after): 1) Bombing: I'm traveling north, hoping to get to safety in Lebanon, and to East a line of bombing flares into a large fire and I HOPE it's not a NUCLEAR explosion---with an INTENSE fear that wakens me. 2) 8:50AM: I've got an Actualism group at a NEW apartment atop 309 W. 57th Street, and someone like Margaret Meschio brings one or two glasses of water, on which the group drinks. Pass around 3-page Joan Pankosky letter, and assume Margaret's running the water very fast, due to the fact that my COLD water takes a long TIME to come up through the pipes. We're TEN, so I despair sitting around BARN dining table. CHEERY group.
9/2/89: I'm living in a different apartment (could it be Shelley's in Greenport?) and Paul Bosten and I are trying to get information about an upstate restaurant that we want to go to. There's a phone machine under the kitchen sink that takes a tape the size of a videotape, and when we get a recorded message upon dialing the number of the restaurant, we can't all hear it on the telephone (is the telephone in this dream based on the sketch of the Keith Haring telephone in the AIDS-hotline ad I noticed on the subway last night?) so I rewind the tape so that I can play it back for all of us to hear, and I'm nonplussed to see bluish water being wrung out of the machine, dripping onto the floor. I take out the tape and look at it, try to dry it off, and try to listen to it again, when Paul passes wrapped in a bathrobe, saying that he wants to take a 10-minute nap before leaving. Others press around me trying to say something else, and I impatiently snap, "Quiet, let him speak!" and he says he wants to be wakened at 5PM since it's now 4:50PM, as we look up at the clock on the wall. I go across a small hallway and find "the other bedroom" empty and recommend that he go in there, "because the blower's on, keeping you cool," and he goes in and lies down. I go back to the sink under which the telephone machine is installed and check into a bottom compartment to find that filled with two inches of water, and I check the "second sink" to find that the stopper seems set and unleaking, but I have to make sure there's no more water falling into the telephone-answering machine. Obviously this stems from the continual crimps I'm finding in my VCR tapes. Many COLORS in this dream.
9/8/89: Fragment remembered at 3:20PM, now finishing off this page: I'm leafing through an overfull notebook (rather like a combination of my calendar with pages stuffed with variable-sized sheets and even boxes for future reference, and the odd-shaped stack of stuff "to do" atop my bookshelf next to the desk) trying to find a particular index-card on which I've recorded some important information or list. I think I have to give it to Mom, who's waiting patiently so far, but I figure she's going to get very annoyed and snippy if I don't find it soon, so I look under the chair on which I'm sitting, wondering if it couldn't have been put someplace else, and this COULD have stemmed from my fruitless search for the "Rent-a-Wreck" brochure YESTERDAY before getting a ride upstate with Lucy and Danny for the Hsieh's reunion on Saturday.
9/11/89: I'm riding on a roller coaster that starts off slowly, and goes upside-down immediately, then climbs through another twist to the first hill, and after it goes through the next few, there's another spiral before coasting almost to a stop, just before which it goes through ANOTHER slow-motion upside- down twist. The SECOND time I ride it in succession, it gets stuck at the innermost twist of the last loop, and we're scrambling (rather leisurely, there's not really any sense of danger) to get out of our seats and to get upright on the bottom of the car, when the ride starts up again and I'm riding on the bottom of the car as it goes through its final loop (and I guess this "ride at the bottom" is probably influenced by the second-time seen "The Mission" on "Amazing Stories: the Movie" where the belly gunner is wedged into place and cartoon-draws a set of landing wheels on the plane to save his life), and things are all scrunched up together and flying around as the car rotates through 360-degrees, but I wake just before it stops, so I don't have to decide whether to ride it a third time or not. I draw an elaborate diagram of the rails.
9/14/89: There's a tiny tape recorder on a doll's bed on the edge of a stepped shelf so that the recorder is slanted and the tape has fouled up, and in rewinding it's come off the reel and is now slanted diagonally a number of times across the top of the reel. The probably echoes my concern for my VCR tapes being crimped and too-fast or too-slow. I point out with asperity to the dunce who's trying to fix it that a proper-size book can easily be gotten from the shelves of books that front the piece of furniture on the corner of which the tape recorder sits, and fit onto the lower step EXACTLY to level the machine so that the important recording time, coming up soon, can be captured.
9/15/89: [Note typed 9/21]: 1) A totalitarian government has taken over the world and doesn't allow ANY sex for procreative purposes, and there's a vision of the world with standing people EVERYWHERE---the water surface seems to have become land, or the whole thing is a drawing or animation or schematic of an over- populated earth, and then the government WANTS an increase and puts PRESSURE on the world, which brings a vision of VISES being applied on at least six sides of the globe to COMPRESS it down, smaller and smaller (like squeezing that one drop of essence from Li'l Abner's Hammus Alabammus?), until it's squeezed down to QUARK-size, and this PROVIDES the density of mass necessary to (another) Big Bang---and clearly this stems from all the Quantum Theory and Cosmology books I've been reading, though this is BEFORE the Kaku lecture on the Theory of Everything at the Open Center (this) Friday evening. 2) At end, I'm on dark-night street and ONE black asks me for a handout; I turn to move away from him and a SECOND seems to make a demand that I take the time and listen to their problems, and I still just want to avoid and get away, and I turn away in dread to the rear and there's a third person behind me, so I seem to be running out of escape routes. Glance quickly around and the street which had been busy with pedestrians and traffic is now EMPTY, and I feel a stab of panic and I quickly plan to shout "Hey ROCCO" to an imaginary friend (or gang) just out of their sight, to shake them and cause them to loose their sense of coordination and unity, almost WILLING someone to be ready to come to my rescue because the situation has clearly gone over the line into the DANGEROUS.
9/16/89: [Note typed 9/23]: There's a sexy young man displayed on TV or a slide against the wall, and I think to myself, "I won't feel anything if I touch that most attractive muscled abdomen" but when I sheepishly reach out to touch "the wall" I actually touch FLESH, and as I get into it, HE gets into my touching his body and I put his cock into my mouth aware that AIDS is a danger, and then I think "I have to go to school, and to work, and support my sister," and I debate whether I should tell him we're "just friends, but decide NOT to and wake.
Fragment: unwatered plants below plants OK--below--PATTERNS of drooping leaves.
9/17/89: [Note typed 9/23]: Although my OPPONENT bids for the "pot" deck to improve his sort-of-poker hand, I shuffle through MY approximately twelve cards and see FOUR ACES! So I MAY win! Be calm. I raise TWO francs, but have no more change, so I present a hotel-check of 1500F and the hostess gladly cashes it with 3 500F notes. Sadly I didn't FINISH the dream to find if I WON or not!
9/19/89: [Note typed 9/21]: I'm wandering in the Bronx or Queens and come across a large building with the name OCCULT HOUSE on the facade over a marqueed entrance something like that large apartment building on East 67th Street whose driveway caved in year ago. It's clearly an apartment building that's been totally occupied by fringe-type occult practitioners, and they're having a festival: there are colorful booths and flags in the courtyard outside, warrens of concessions going under stairways and around corners as in closely-constructed buildings in mid-Manhattan, and there's some kind of band
playing on a makeshift stage which has a tethered balloon floating above it in the shape of monstrous blue LIPS which puff in and out to mimic the words of the songs that the band's playing. Then I'm walking down a stopped-escalator type of stairway with booths set up that you must pass, or literally step over, as you descend, and one lone woman sits at a clean desk with the sign above: "Everything," but as I get closer, she's filled the stairway up to and past the handrails with books and pamphlets and brochures, so that by the time I get to her I'm really PISSED, and I say "You shouldn't make the passageway so CLOGGED that it's difficult to get through," and she observes loftily, "Yes, I can see you're annoyed, you have to tune into the anger in your paraparusha" as if she were talking about some sort of esoterically named splenic complex. Dennis is somehow being a subject of some experiment on the ninth floor, and I have to GET to him to give him a hint as to what it's all about, but first I go DOWN a stairway into a dead-end lower-lobby symmetrically furnished with paisley- patterned sofas in each quadrant that look as if they've never been used, and as I turn around the 10'x10' area the ceiling seems to lower so that I have to get down on my hands and knees and CRAWL up the stairways that are now separated from the ceiling by only about two feet. Then I start UP the stairway, which has become a Magic Mountain analogue with little pilgrimage stations modeled in clay which has too much sand, so everything is starting to crumble. I go around earthworks seemingly built upon the original spiral staircase that led up to the third-floor elevator-lobby, and come to a balcony overlook where I have to wedge myself between that pillar---which turns into a PERSON, so I figure I have to lever myself up by the stairway only, pleased that my elbows and hands and arm-strength still serve me, sneering on those below who thought this would stop my ascent. Everything's crumbling more and more, but I hope to make it to the elevator lobby and up to 9th floor when I wake to jot down quick notes and even mention the oddness of the dream to Pope.
9/20/89: 9:20-9:35AM: Rita has circus TOYS lined up in an elaborate array on the floor of my bedroom at 1221 Dietz. There are wooden toy-train cages for menagerie animals, detailed string-rigged trapeze-dolls strung above modular rings floored with paper-representations of sawdust, and dolls for ringmasters and horses and riders all about 8 inches tall displayed in the space between my bed and the desk along the right wall. I'm supposed to be vacuuming the floors for the weekend, and I'm in Mom's room, which is oddly sparse and monastic in look with a small area rug on a polished floor, a cot for a bed, a spindly wooden table for a dresser, and almost no litter of bottles or clothes visible. Then I have to leave for a lunch appointment outside somewhere, and when I go to get my clothes from my bedroom, my bed has expanded into a small set of three or four or five rows of bleachers on which are sitting many men and women from the neighborhood, whom Rita has roped into PAYING to see the circus which has now expanded into half-life size, performing in the space between the foot of where my bed had been and the closet-door, though the room hasn't increased THAT much in dream-size. Where did she get the performers? It seems they and the "audience came through the YMCA." I have to get my clothes by noon and hope there's an intermission when I can sneak into my closet to change. I detour into the bathroom and it's somehow larger and darker, and the toilet has become a hole in the floor with a trickle of water from a "stream-head" in the outside wall as a flush, and I think it looks crappy, but when I get close it's really clean and fresh-smelling, but I've just GOT to get to coordinating SOON!
9/21/89: Though there were three major sections, it all seemed to be part of one dream: a) We're standing outside large office buildings and what looks like an airborne TRAIN coasts by overhead, guy wires visible even from the ground extending what could be a MILE from a central stay-structure to the distant ends of the "train" to stabilize the enormity in flight. It must be truly gigantic because the structure takes MINUTES to move its own length in the sky, and surely the civilization hadn't progressed to antigravitational lift YET! There was the hint of another, even grander, "aircraft" overhead, and somehow there was the thought that we were estimating programs in CONNECTION with such expanded flight capabilities. b) I'm in charge of a couple like Maria and Dick Hsieh, and we've already been at the client's offices for a week or more: we have reams of documentation, hours of conversation, piles of preliminary estimates, yet I seem to be in charge of the final figure. "If one person worked on it a year, that would be $30,000 multiplied by machine time..." and "The more people work on it, the more has to be added for intercommunication time..." and "It IS a huge company, but this bill would stagger even the Federal GOVERNMENT!" These are the types of thoughts that float through my dream-mind. c) Then we're finished, walking out through a parking lot to our car for the final return to NYC (we could be in New Jersey, like Bell Labs), and Dick and I are wrestling each other around in playfulness with relief for the end of the job, and I joke to him "We could just give it to Lou DeFonzo to do with his card-sorting devices, and it would only take him five years." By this time Maria has gotten to the door of our car at the curb, and in front of the car is a tree in blossom. I pull down a lower branch and cup a handful of pinkish-red waxy blossoms in my hand; it smells medicinal, and Maria agrees when she laughs and says, "That smell always reminds me of diabetes (or some other common illness)." There's another tree with opulent large blue flowers surrounded by a mist of tiny white blossoms that smells differently and I wake.
9/22/89: 1) 7AM: I'm looking at the setting SUN and there are some VERY bright stars nearby. As I watch, they turn into tiny, directed puffs of smoke, and I feel SIMULTANEOUSLY in the dream and on waking a sense of DREAD, that these points of lights are WARHEADS which are directed toward us. 2) 8AM: Again I'm looking at clouds, and there are connected streamers of WHITE FIREWORKS that come closer in the sky toward us, and I run inside the house to feel protected. 3) Like the transparent whirling planet that Universal Pictures used for their old globe-surrounding airplane, I see what I take to be the Planet Saturn in the sky, but it's transparent so I can see the path of the rings BEHIND the planet, and then there's a ring PERPENDICULAR to that horizontal ring, and the objects in the rings suddenly COLLIDE and dissolve each other and threaten to dissolve the planet itself, and AGAIN I get a feeling of terror and foreboding!
9/24/89: 1) 5:30: Dad has new house and store. I move things around in "my apartment" and still have time to spare. Go into the store and am attracted to two sexy teens who are looking for hardware supplies. The store is very busy and large, about two dozen people are moving expeditiously about the self-serve areas, and I'm not familiar with the prices, wondering why the little items they've selected to buy aren't already price-marked. I don't quite know what the little balls are for, but I try to remember that he got one blue one, two black ones, and a gray one, each looking like little round pencil sharpeners. They go outside without paying, and I'm pleased to follow them. They seem to be distant friends of mine, so it's not really a pickup situation. We're out into what first appear to be woods: I'm in the middle of the path, someone like Ed Godbold is to my left, rather out of it, and the other, sexier one, is ahead of us on the right, beckoning us in his direction. As I go to join him, I'm impressed to see three or four large black geese testing their wings in the stream-water, and ducks are swimming around elsewhere. "I have nothing to do," I say, so I work on my Soap Box Derby." "We never did that," they say, not without some interest. I know I'm too old to enter, but maybe I can spend some time with them on their entries. Then we're on a street like those around Akron University that the sororities and fraternities have taken over: large formerly private homes that are now redone into somewhat residential and somewhat commercial establishments. The first are widely spaced on tree-lined streets of comfortable luxury, but the buildings get closer and closer together when I remark that one brick-core with brick outriggers could make a very cozy little theatre. They don't seem to know what I'm talking about, and the next block has a number of videotape rental places with two-day specials and lists of movies on the doorways, and I debate renting something even though I seem to be visiting for only one or two days. The signs on the buildings get bigger and bigger until one building has the whole lower floor covered with garish white frosted plastic panels, rather like the bottoms of ice-cube trays ten feet in length, with neon blazening from all the upper floors. We say "Some shops will do anything to attract attention, even BAD attention," and I move along a block with four buildings on one side and three on the other, all covered with poster-size signs. Wake and pee and write to 5:35. I'd gone to bed and to sleep at 11:40, making up for the 3:40 from last night, and sleep an ODD time of 5 hours and 50 minutes. And I'd peed before at 2:10AM. BEFORE that, I'd been a PHYSICS teacher "grading on the curve." If 100-92% is A, or 8%, next 16% is B: 91-76%, then 32% is C: 75-44%, and D is 43-12%, and student "P" has 0, so he MUST get an F, though he merely MISSED taking the test, but I have no other choice in grading. 2) Back to sleep and I'm in the Museum of Modern Art with Joe, looking at a new exhibit about the movies, and there's an elaborate brochure that includes a map that shows five or six rows of kiosks of exhibits (could this have been influenced by the floor-map of the Whole Life Expo?): the first two rows are described completely, the rest of the rows are described as being like the first, but the descriptions end with ellipses to the 53rd kiosk. At some of the side walls there are beams of light drawn in, implying that a permanent movie is going on there at all times. I want to look at some other part of the museum, so I go to the model of the floors that's unfortunately situated right next to a moving walkway, so that you've got to sidle ON the walkway if you want to study the model when someone's on the walkway. I try to balance on the narrow edge between the walkway and the model, but people keep stepping on the walkway and confusing me into stepping onto it myself. Then an attendant steps merrily over it without stepping on the sensors, and I think I've got to learn those positions. Locate the curving "history of the Museum" exhibit right at the entranceway, the luxurious restaurant to the left of the entrance, the odd wooden coat rack to the right of the entrance---and then I'm whirled off my position, spin on my heel to avoid going outside, and pass the restaurant which is advertising some fixed-price special, and enjoy the red- marble look of the newly-refurbished lobby area. Extremely PLUSH feelings. 3) Then, without transition, three of us are packed into the front of a car driving through the streets of Paris. We don't really care where we're going, but I keep thinking that I should KNOW what the names of the shops that we're passing are, particularly the bronze-faced corner-shop that I espy down to the left, but the traffic is moving quickly and we're swirled past that corner and whirled around another corner and twirled around a few carousels of circles, and everything's sunny and colorful and busy, and we're enjoying each other thoroughly when my telephone rings at 10:30 and it's Vicki.
9/25/89: 8:20AM: A beginning fragment of buying and selling "loose" women on a Civil-War train shifts to an east-bound trip with Daisy Roach, involving getting chairs along the rail, drinking cherry soda that contains cherries with cherrystones, looking around for an extra chair that isn't reserved or isn't wet with the rain that seems to have come in either through the open windows of the train or over the railing of the boat (not entirely clear). We watch the sunset over New Jersey as we pull into New York (State, possibly upstate; or City, without having crossed the Hudson), and I'm concerned with the geological fault that runs across 96th Street, either that it will warp the subway tracks that have been laid above the ground (is this a fragment from the Hugo Hurricane coverage where an incoming tide warped railway tracks on a bridge over a channel?), or will disturb the tunnels through which the tracks sometime travel. There were richer details before; I've forgotten them now at 11:55AM.
9/26/89: ANOTHER opera-dream! I'm sitting at the extreme left of an upper balcony squeezed in below the balcony above. The "left" is SO extreme that there's only one row, so the people to my right are the only ones that I encounter, and they're an opera-goer's nightmare: a doting father on the right, a silent mother in the middle, and a constantly-whispering five-year-old boy right next to me. Whispering. Asking questions. Making remarks. I ask them to be quiet again and again, and only moments later the voice, not even a WHISPERED voice now, of the boy pipes up with "Why is she...?" or "What is that...?" or "I bet he...!" Finally I can't take it and move to another seat, but as I go down an aisle in search of an empty seat the dream becomes absurd: the steps get steeper and steeper until they're literally vertical, and I must use my hands and elbows to support myself as I lower from seat to seat as the lights get brighter and brighter in the auditorium. The seats are bright green or bright blue or bright yellow, like Lego constructions, and I'm stepping on seat-backs that now occasionally have saxophones or violins on them, so I appear to be getting into the section reserved for the expanded orchestra for this enormous production. I settle into a single seat that appears empty, but an usherette appears instantly to tell me that the seat's not available, and I rush for another, since the choral forces for the finale are already moving into place with a pretentious rustle and magnitude: the four top balconies form the sides of a square, each of which has two aisles, and down all eight aisles come double-rows of costumed singers---women in colorful ruffled Carmen Miranda dresses arrayed by color from top to bottom of the row, men in mariachi-band blacks and whites and ribbons, and each row holds about 40 people, so the massed forces promise an impressive finale that I want to SEE. There's a narrator onstage now as I move down an aisle in the middle of a huge PLAIN, with no seats to be seen, and others are moving about, and I'm wondering if we can "fake" moving to our seats DURING the finale, since there seems to be lots of room. But people keep moving, the orchestra has been replaced by a modernistic electronic array, and I'm still moving when I wake and debate making notes, but then there's a child-oriented coda: 2) I'm sitting at a dining table, maybe in a restaurant, with a three-person family, except now the child is a five-year-old GIRL who's supposed to answer a question but doesn't want to for some reason. The father's supposed clue for an answer IMMEDIATELY is to look closely at the little girl and say, "But SERIOUSLY," at which point the girl looks as if she's about to cry: clearly the knows she's being forced to answer the question while she's also quite clear that she's NOT going to answer at all. I rather admire her restraint as she does NOT burst into tears, reducing the battle to the ultimate power of a child's refusal, no matter how adult the father THINKS the child ought to be, but there's an interruption in the conversation and the father is distracted and has to RETURN to the "But SERIOUSLY" at the child who thought she had wriggled off the hook. The end of the dream has the child determinedly moving away from the table, and I woke be- fore I could see what the irate, yet still wanting to be fair, father would do.
9/27/89: 1) I'm attending a demonstration or lesson of some sort in a kind of classroom and have to construct or draw various stages or steps on a blackboard with mainly red chalk, but that piece is very tiny and sometimes my fingers prefer white chalk which is bigger (this sounds like Michio Kaku with his tiny chalk-pieces at the Open Center two weeks ago). Stage 1 is a series of blocks or buildings like a Manhattan skyline; Stage 2 could have been a series of circles of varying sizes; Stage 3 I reconstructed as a zigzag line; by Stage 4 I wasn't leaving enough room and thought I'd be cramped at the end, and I imagined it was a different kind of geometrical shape like a gridiron pattern; Stages 5 and 6 are not well-remembered, but Stage 7 started with a line and ended with something like a face pointed downward on a balloon held in place by its string, and Stage 8 was like a final sine-wave signal that was the result of this "circuit diagram" for some type of constructed signal or artistic output. The last two steps I have to squeeze into the bottom right corner of the board, just managing to get everything in, though not in the proper perspective. Somewhere in here was the impression that I wanted to be finished with the class by 9PM so that I could watch a TV program that I'd forgotten to set up on my VCR, and by the time I finish drawing my diagram it's 9:15 and I'm missing part of the program, to my mild disgust. 2) Some guy is either MAKING a schedule or ADVERTISING a schedule that he's already made, or trying to tell his cable-TV service by means of this schedule, which is an enormous process- flow type grid about five feet wide and two feet high, divided into time slots for the 24-hour daily schedule over a 3-4 month period, and there are some movie-intensive slots like at 11PM and 5PM, but he's really pushing a new series of sexy programs in the 6-8AM slot, knowing that most people TAPE them anyway, and it's before most children are awake, and the advertising rates are lowest (maybe he's trying to sell advertising, rather than the movies or the channel itself). 3) At 9:15 I take note: I'm driving a HUGE white Buick, with black trim and lots of chrome, that Uncle Henry rented for me in Los Angeles. I've entered some kind of underground garage and have found my sub-garage within it: this is lined with white tile on the walls, and I'm supposed to park in a particular corner for a special one-month storage-rental fee. I enter, mis-park, drive out again, rubbing some of the chrome against the white tile, but no damage seems to be done, then crash against what seems to be a john-door behind which appears the mildly irate garage-attendant who'd been taking a crap, and I back just PERFECTLY into place as he comes out to observe and praise my skills. I leave car and pass numbers of people outside THEIR doors, and it appears that there are APARTMENTS for a somewhat lower-class family down here, and I wonder if they think standing outside their windowless apartments will help them get any better circulation. There doesn't seem to be any automobile or combustion fumes or smoke underground here, so there must be powerful fans to circulate the air. Kids are playing, fathers are sitting in chairs rocking, mothers are tending children or sewing, and though they're not exactly all black, there's a primitive, underclass feeling about them all. I can't quite remember my way out, and I stop at an elegant green-metal information booth manned by an arresting black woman in a gold-sparkling dress who has hooded brown-gold eyes looking moistly out from a shimmering gold-lamé mask into which two eye-slits have been jaggedly cut (the effect is of beauty rather than bizarreness). There's a reference to a map that I can't take with me, and I ask if she can direct me to 13th and Broadway, which she recognizes and I agree is near the Hotel New Yorker, and Anthe's right there has good food (and I recognize in the dream that that's a place from Akron, AND I'm interested in getting where I'm going, not in a restaurant recommendation), and then her telephone rings and she's preoccupied with her caller and I never do find out which direction I should take before I wake up, record the LAST dream first (remembering that I had SOME dreams before that, but with NO CLUE as to what they were about), and in a few minutes the details of the previous two float back into my still-dozing mind, and I take those notes with a fading pen.
9/28/89: This dream seems influenced by my starting "Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time" last night. There are lines of people who have either been poisoned or sacrificed in some way, and they're all just at the point of death then they're somehow frozen in time or secreted in a fold of time so that they "vanish" from ordinary time. Time moves "past" them again and again, and relatives and friends SEE them and then they VANISH until people begin to get suspicious, ask questions, poke at the boundaries of the area and of time, and both the friends and the victims try to FIGHT the concealedness or the death, and in some cases time slows to a flicker-frame-by-frame mode so that "the vanishing point" can be seen to be EXACTLY at the second (obviously this frame- by-frame intensification applied to my watching porno as I jerked off last night, trying to freeze the INSTANT of orgasm) that life leaves the body and the corpse begins to collapse from lack of support. Then God, or someone else, starts to "cheat" and not everyone needs to die, or the dying is visible, or postponed. Clearly in TYPING this it seems to be an analog of AIDS in a way.
9/29/89: There's an L-shaped (hinged) "limitation gadget" attached to the lid of a box (or something like that), and I wonder, in the dream, "Do THEY use it?" and "Should I use it?"
9/30/89: 9:20AM: 1) I'm watching ice-hockey on TV and an ad comes on that "wipes" across the screen three times with former or future championship years. 2) I'm watching hockey again, this time wondering about the names of players.
10/1/89: 10:05AM: [Note typed 10/3]: Fourth row left in opera house---chart. "I saw people use thought to think thoughts of anxiety." No recollection now!
10/2/89: 1) Ingrid Bergman reading (from folded newspaper, to shouts from audience "Who's the source?") a list of HER personal Tonys, which seems to be a "joke" that no one likes. As part of her stage performance somewhere??? 2) I'm dashing around the office of a new gymnasium or exercise center while scratching the back of my cock that itches furiously, and wake to find it itchy.
10/3/89: 8AM: 1) I get to a "waiting hotel" for a 6:30PM flight, and at 6:10 Spartacus says I should have called the train for a cancellation-refund before 5:50PM, when it LEFT, otherwise I'm just late and missing the train without a chance that they would give me about a $25 refund. I'm sorry, but shrug my shoulders, not REALLY concerned. A moment of "where's my ticket?" but I KNOW it's in my shoulder bag. 2) I'm looking at a map of a "smaller inner-town tram" which goes clockwise and counterclockwise through its four nearby stops, and a larger suburban train where one end is always in the station "toward the edges of town" and the other end is always in the station "toward the center of town." 3) 9AM: I'm in crowded cafeteria and spot Marj Mahle---and ask her if she "has change for the $100 I usually get stick with [from Alice, I suppose]." She glances around, hoping no one's heard what I just said, and comes over to sit by me when a guy comes around to pass out newspapers and possibly spy on us.
10/5/89: 7:40AM: 1) Rita, Denny, Paul and I approach trails to rustic fairgrounds. 2) We enter, interact, and I step into stream as Paul laughs. We joke around, some proprietors scold us. 9:10 3) I've reduced in weight and am feeling good, walking from downtown Brooklyn to home, head down and strong. Walks get steep and snowy and I grab wooden handrail, and suddenly onto dead-end porch---I'm past my turnoff. Dog snuffles around corner, and I back down rickety wooden risers when Mary-Barry-toothy owner comes out to play tennis. "It's OK," she says. I walk up driveway, blocked by hedges and trash (like the camera-shots in the sewers in NYC on TV last night). 9:55AM 4) Into tent-show directed by woman who says her different way is RIGHT. 10:25AM 5) "Don Schneider" in office: "Do you remember the plant tour?" I say, "Two years ago, maybe 10% of it." Then door opens and doctor want to see me in side room: "Did you ever eat Norwegian meatballs?? You've eaten contaminated beef." Confused notes, I know!
10/7/89: 9:15AM: Yellow-orange-skinned slender boy writhes under my long scratches down the side of his body after he takes off his black riding-tights. His small cock finally comes up and he JABS it toward my mouth, down my throat, as I have thoughts about AIDS. VERY sexy dream, and I wake up totally aroused.
10/9/89: 8:30 1): Rita, Avi, and I walk north from Dietz Avenue to our 9PM playhouse reservation near the Akron Airport, and Rita's keeping up with us (she seems about 17), but Avi silently reproaches me for not thinking of taking public transportation at least partway. I sit down to eat dinner BEFORE they arrive with a "farm family" of kids and adults. We all shift seats back and forth (like the family on the subway coming back from the Whole Life Expo last night?) and laugh at silly jokes. Somehow the environment, even though there are a few young women present (Avi and Rita aren't in this part at all), shifts to a sex party, and a guy to my left lounging on a sofa actually seems to have gotten his soft penis partway up my ass, although I only realize it when I move away and feel him slipping out, as if from between my thighs. I watch an almost alien form sliding around on the floor trying to satisfy his arousal: it has a dog-face but the body is ovoid almost like a roach's and the penis is the tail-end of his body---there doesn't seem to be any hind legs at all. It twists into a neck-stand and licks itself more and more avidly, as everyone stops whatever they're doing to watch, and almost like in a fantastic pornographic cartoon the cock starts spurting a fountain of cum two feet into the air as the base of the cock starts smoking, sparks coming out of the tip of the fountain, and he growls and moans in his ecstasy. People are sleeping and leading and talking and exchanging addresses as I wake out of a doze. 10AM: 2) Susan and I are going out on a COLD day and I THROW her on the floor and TRY to pull a blue mackinaw hood back down to the floor over her HIGH forehead with just a glimpse of tight black curls so I know she's not bald. I'm somehow obliged to wash her FACE so it won't freeze in the cold, and she stares wordlessly at me in uttermost amazement at my actions. 3) Almost like in a cartoon there's a man with a red-sand-colored beard walking in the woods to a soundtrack something like "Skies of BLUE/ Are GREEN/ My heart is TRUE/ As SEEN" and I quibble about the "green" sky (although there DOES seem to be a greenish reflection down near the horizon, as from very-green fields reflecting off transparent clouds) being used only for the RHYME, but I do like the internal sound of it. Take the notes reluctantly with pens that are running out of ink.
10/19/89: LONG, DREARY, FRUSTRATING dream at 8:35PM: to bed at 1:30AM after writer's meeting and dragged-out TV-watching, with a cold under heavy blankets, and seem to fill the whole last hour with a marathon of frustration looking for my mother in some American town somehow connected with my being in the Army (is this from the "Brooklyn Army Terminal" search at the writer's meeting last night?). We're touring some town together---like some large suburb of Akron, only it seems to be in the south, and I keep thinking it might be Mexico, though I don't recall a language problem in ADDITION to the missed meetings. Anyway, it STARTS with her walking surprisingly fast IN FRONT OF ME down the final blocks to the place where she left her car, and I last see her turning a corner to the right. I turn the same corner and enter the building where I was supposed to meet her, and she's not in the front lobby. I go upstairs to the lunch counter, and it's crowded but she's not there. Try to find the car, but there doesn't even seem to be parking space in the rooms and auditoriums and stairways in the building that seems to expand before my search. Finally to the very top floor and look into a doorway to find an unused theatre stretching down for two or three floors below me with narrow rows of 5-7 seats descending for 20-30 rows, but slightly musty and unused, with an abandoned-looking screen at the bottom. Around the small narrow hallway to other doors, mostly locked, others to empty rooms. Down one flight to a dance floor that's crowded, but with young kids in dimness where I'm sure she's not waiting for me. Down another flight to the lunch counter again, this time only occupied with 4-5 tired scattered people, and my frustration begins to build: "Where IS she, why didn't she wait for me, will I have to get back home MYSELF with my enormous suitcase (which seems to be checked somewhere near the car) and overcoat and shopping bag of purchases?) and then only to the station and then have to take an expensive cab from the station home?" Can't even find any kind of central office in which I could possibly have her paged to see if she's anywhere in what's becoming a COMPLEX of buildings rather than just one building, and it doesn't even seem the type of place that would MAKE an announcement for a "lost mother." Seem to figure she's not IN the building, maybe she's near the curb AROUND it, but when I exit the building, I'm in some kind of back alley that's not really CONNECTED with the area where I was supposed to meet her, and try to find my way back to the "central" area of the building, but I'm somehow in the countryside now, with a concrete amphitheater below me that I have to get around by going down some ruined stairway that I just can't imagine her EVER going down, but I have to get down there to find some basement entrance back into the building which now seems like an enormous mall in the outskirts of some Mexican town, because after I wander up streets and down alleyways and into basements and corridors and stairways looking for "the right way" I come to the "official" steps leading up to "RATP PARK" entrance, which I dimly connect [the RATP part] with the mass-transit system of Paris and [the PARK or some other four-letter word like TULA] with a Mexican ruin in the outskirts of Mexico City, and maybe this would be something to see in itself, but it's just a station that I find at the top of a dusty slope with two end-of-terminal stations waiting. I see a sign reading "6:15" and I look at my watch to find that it's 5:15, and I figure I COULD read (though I realize with a sinking feeling that the only book I have with me is the rather boring "The Secret Doctrine" which is in my shoulder bag NOW, which would occupy my mind without nodding off for a concentrated hour's perusal) to occupy the time, but then I see a doodlebug train slowly coming up the hill, and a number of thoughts hit me at once: "Which direction is THIS train going?" "How long will it stay in the station?" and "Could this possibly be the train that's to leave BEFORE the one at 6:15, namely a slightly delayed 5:15 departure that the automatic timing device hadn't realized hadn't departed yet?" I start moving toward the station with that dreadful frustrating "can't move very fast yet I very much want to run" slowness as the almost-empty train (which seems almost to be a cable car with a cable running underneath, a "reminder" that I've been watching TV about the San Francisco earthquake for the last 24 hours) pulls toward the station and the last few passengers get off. I look to the end of the track, now that I know which way the train is pulling in, and see that the small blue shed-roof seems to END in front of an abutment in the cliff that doesn't have a tunnel in it, so this is the END of the line, and my mind can't even quite grasp that it would thus HAVE to be the train BACK to the city, though there's a chance that the train in the OTHER direction, that doesn't seem to END here, just MIGHT be the one I want, and I try to identify how far I'd have to travel before being able to transfer BACK to the RIGHT direction if I DID start off in the wrong way, all the time struggling forward to ASK someone to SAY something to FIND some answer. Before my agonized eyes, the train comes to a stop, a few hangers -on around the station leisurely take their seats, and the train IMMEDIATELY starts to pull out! NO! I try to shout but no words come. Visions of my heavy suitcase and the high-priced taxi rate (is this from the Pat Sajak show I saw last night with two actors stranded in Los Angeles and in the Phillipines?) drag me back as I AGAIN curse Mom for not being there to pick me up---how COULD she have left so soon?---AND not being able to move fast) run through my head as I CREEP toward the departing train. Try to call out but no words come; try to wave but no one's watching, and it's now DEFINITELY too late, the train's gone, and I wake with a terrible sinking sensation and decide I just MUST type this all out before I forget the grinding frustrating INCAPABILITY of it all! Type to 9:07, slumped in bathrobe over the keyboard, desiring to return to bed!
10/20/89: It's almost like a short-short: An inspector has come to visit our compound, and she's terribly traditional. I'm appointed to guide her around the holding pens, to try to modify her dated views on how the outlanders should be treated. We all try to ignore the earth tremors that quake the ground beneath our feet; she seems to understand that if WE don't seem concerned about them, she won't mention them because it would be too expensive to move the compounds to a different part of the globe. We've learned that they actually stimulate the vegetation and our own development---and it's amazing how the idea "a good shaking benefits everyone" applies across the base-ideas of the dream. At first I try to let her be on her own, but friends of mine can see that she's going slower and slower on her cane, her forehead wrinkled with concern as she watches the exuberance of the outlanders. My vanilla-colored friend comes up behind me quietly and warns, "She's going to protest the way the Reptilians handle their children." I put down my stylus and pad and gently insinuate myself at her side. "We've found that their backbones are actually strengthened, rather than weakened, by throwing them into the air like that." At another "episode" an orange-bodied set of twins looking like some kind of fish-creature were squeezed around the middle in a way that she THOUGHT was dangerous but turned into healthy affection. The climax came when she was pushed to the ground and literally swarmed over by masses of multicolored and differently textured creatures, laughing with glee, her cane forgotten by her side, and she remarked about her bringing "the 43rd Street Jew" and the Village Hippie with her, and when we asked where these WERE, she said "YOU, right THERE!" and we laughed again because we'd been actually BLIND to our differences. It ended rather soppy, like a soap, but still compellingly real.
10/21/89: 6:25AM [thanks to language of "Secret Rapture"?] I'm the "Sage of Stanford" (or some equally prestigious large university) in senior colloquium 1) approving as moderator ends all CLASSES but "two applied practicums in nursing and economics" for work-experience formats, 2) describe "teacher showing antagonism will show NONE if student reflects it" and student being SHOWN antagonism all but WINKS at me as he handles HIS teacher (who ALSO winks at me) adroitly. 3) I adjudicate some class-administration conflict with placating deftness while remaining comradely and sexy in appearance---a dream of WINS versus 10/20(?) frustrations. And I try OOB at 6:30AM, just before DAWN. Then I remembered MORE: 4) I lead large (Chinese?) family in accepting the fact that they "pay 30% MORE for bulk household supplies" and "suck sugar off the wheelbarrows of jelly gumdrops being wheeled in as I wake." And then remember 3A) Identifying PIECEMEAL artwork 10-20, then CHANGING NUMBERS (like page numbers in page-proofs of index-text yesterday?) and piece 21C FITS 20, so SHIFTING for new numbers 21-30 works STILL. [Yes, these notes are DREADFUL!]
10/22/89: Fragment of a PREVIOUS dream on my note for an OMNI letter, ending exactly as here: "orange sweater. 3) I keep trying to j/o watching tapes and MOM butts in! J/O at 8:20AM." Obviously her impending visit disturbs me!
10/23/89: 1) Working for IBM, but NEVER on my "building" program, which is MOST important (like writing, no?), and I fear they'll FIRE me. 2) Packing for trip into SOFT-sided STEAMER trunk---only twenty pounds and I feel porters will RACE to carry IT to the railroad cars because it's clearly the lightest one of all.
10/29/89: 7:45AM 1) Two lovers in room---CUTE bumpy-muscled kid behind me exchanging body-rubs joyfully; fellow ahead seemingly ALREADY "a friend," and there's Bob Rosinek, with his outrageous smiling pansexuality, making all the connections even BETTER. 2) 8:45AM: FLYING dream at LAST: a) in WOODS, low, tentative but positive, left and right and over narrow streams, b) to beach over est-like group playing, and some even SEE me flying above them and express joyful wonder at my accomplishment, and it's just a GREAT dream that I LOVE ALOT!
10/30/89: 8:15AM 1) ERECT-MALE photos on floors and walls of World's Fair exhibit in Germany! I skim-float over rock-filled floors!! 2) Bill Hyde and I SUCK and play with our HARD cocks!!
10/31/89: 6AM 1) Hectic car chase (I'm inside a car that's chasing) for a LONG time and we SCRAPE the road top so that sparks fly off to the sides. 2) I have a series of long "experimental" caresses with a young woman, not very sexually.
11/3/89: 6:50 1) I'm writing a theme on "Gone With The Wind," a) All women PLAN for the future except for Scarlett O'Hara, while all men go from day-to-day; could this be the crux of child-bearing? b) selecting CONTINUATION characters for the same or opposite traits. 2) In class I'm teaching I try to like a WOMAN (that I FEEL with my arm around her thin waist) and her husband (I move forward and rub his ALMOST garish or BRUSH-like eyebrows) of family with NO sexual overtones. 3) Peter-Graham-type (like Peter Beard in funny-skirted ad?) is eating LUSH asparagus spears and carrots and cauliflower, but he's brought his OWN vegetables for his vegetarianism and will share them ONLY with "his special friend" at adjacent desk, though he's STILL friendly and understanding toward me. 4) We get at 1:53PM to cafeteria that SHOULD close at 2PM, but they will ONLY "slice ham to roll around ONE frankfurter" for me, because they're closing for their own party tonight, and I roam aisles TWICE looking for ANOTHER course that's NOT sugary or cooked in salt, or pretzels or chips, but NO fruit or canned goods seem to fit the bill, and I settle on breadsticks.
11/5/89: 6:05 1) I'd removed a tooth to try to lose weight, but I'm sad to find that it didn't work. 2) Some white woman, who later says "My only conflict here is that Herman Washington is my husband," is asking "Twenty Questions" for prizes at a party, but she ALWAYS calls on someone ELSE when I KNOW the answer, and on ME when NO one raises their hand or tries to answer. I try to cheat by looking at her answer sheet, but it's coded and she moves block of wood over "1A" of question 9 and the answer of question 10. Some author named Nersessian or Cherkassian, is answer to 3-4 questions that no one gets, and final question involves some number "30" that she gets a FUSE to show us to hint that she's looking for a "30-watt fuse," but never gets to call on anyone when I wake, feeling dry-throated and frustrated, and write this to 6:15AM. 3) 7:40 [I wake to a noise that sounds like a piece of TIN falling in the next room]: two of us sign up to play bingo and the first game has already started, but number-caller writes down all the numbers already called so we can catch up with the first game. 4) 8:50: I'm going to Actualism for an 8PM class and trying to pack an awful "lunch" from the refrigerator: 1/4 sandwich badly wrapped, containing lettuce salad rotting at the edges, other junk, and I scoop out a handful of licorice disks and candy corn from a large paper bag for "dessert."
11/6/89: 1) I've xeroxed two pages of a brochure, and those pages are also order forms for tickets. Someone like Paul Bosten and I go to a NEW section of Lincoln Center that's now expanded its box offices, but use-patterns on the old rug and half-repainted walls that display WPA-type murals half covering Michelangelo-type Renaissance murals like at the New York Public Library show where old paintings and partitions had been on the walls. But the new ticket- system hasn't been finished and woman gives me vouchers and says I EXCHANGE them for tickets, and I blast her: "YOU'RE creating problems," and in disgust she GIVES me the tickets. 2) I'm talking on phone to woman talking to someone in the background, and I say that I can get my index to her NEXT week, then realize I don't even have all the PAGES yet, and add, "Assuming, as usual, the second half of the pages come FASTER than the first half," and hope I don't sound SILLY. She's flabbergasted at my speed, and sounds rather like Joy Bowell.
11/8/89: 9:15: I'm in Paris Metro with Mom, and she waits beneath a spiral staircase up. I talk with a conductor: there WERE three trains here, now there's only one line. I bypass to a restaurant, where I have to step onto counters to get over them, and ask three Americans "how to get out." Climb to a pinewood section which is closed, and over roof to road-split that I can't cross, so I have to backtrack as I see others piling onto incoming trains. I seem to be moving SO slowly and getting nowhere: frustration dream AGAIN!!
11/13/89: 1) "Alex Druck" made a seminal movie in "1914" that has just been reconstructed, but we're too late to attend the first showing, and there's a long line, so we wait in a TV room that shows a cartoon-outline of the movie, and the smoothly-drawn "Prince Valiant" type cartoon figures are nippleless in their swelling breasts both male and female, and crotchless in their teasy poses of standing and sitting, and I figure if the movie doesn't show cocks it's not going to be worth it. 2) There's a two-hour lineup of cars on the highway (obviously taken from the TV last night of cars lined up for TWELVE hours waiting to get out of East Germany into West Germany for a visit) waiting for a special brunch in what feels to be South America. I try to convince myself that I'm "flying" over the highways to see the cars looping over underpasses and under overpasses, but again it's probably recollections of the helicopter shots from the TV news last night at 1:30AM. I think we've rented a car (Mom seems to be involved), but perhaps we've just borrowed or even stolen one, and we're debating whether it's worth it, now at 11:15AM, wondering whether the food ORDERING will stop at noon or whether you have to be FINISHED EATING at noon, but there's the feeling that the service will CONTINUE simply because there's such a demand and they wouldn't have the heart to turn us away.
DREAMS FROM 11/14/89 THROUGH 12/23/89 ON OOB PAGES FOR OOB CLASS-WORK.
12/24/89 (typed 12/29): Computer-listing (or editing and marking) and it's not-enough---model railroad tracks! As I observed at Matt's last night??
12/25/89 (typed 12/29): 10AM: I'm editing an index on a Fortran-like book and add subentries for four kinds of statements, "illustrated," with two large page-ranges and two small ones.
12/26/89 (typed 12/29): Kid pushes me backward; out of store at 5PM, it's dark, and I look for 40th Street in a new town, but the highway stretching below me is strange and unknown in the dark, and I almost trip over rocks on the hillside. How can I FIND the car in the dark? And I'm just on a 3-day vacation!
12/28/89 (typed 12/29): 9:20AM: There's a big IBM do in a major city-center hotel, I leave---but I have no SHOES. I go to a concierge-type with a laugh and want to get into the "baseball-fan" lounge. "Guidry won't do that, but DeMaggio---" Did I leave them on the first, second, or seventh floor? (I tried to get back into one dining room through its hallway door but it was locked). Finally a guy comes with a shoe-box package, lightly wrapped, saying "Zolnerzak," and I give him $2 as a tip but he wants more money, about $35, and I say "I'd buy new shoes if I had to spend that kind of money." I then sit down on a tiny plasticized shoeshine "prop" of black and white zebra-stripes, I guess in order to put my shoes on, but that's all I remember.
12/29/89: I've been too preoccupied with indexing and other things over the past few days to even keep up the "This is reality/This is a dream" statement through the day. I haven't done the relaxing exercises (as Pope says he's just done with his TV tape from Sandy), and I haven't done either of the techniques. I guess I just want free progress, maybe "because I'm a good guy and deserve it," and expect results without really WORKING for them. Anyway here's page-end!
12/30/89: 10:20AM 1) We're in a movie pavilion or exhibit-hall watching shorts on travel with multi-movie tickets for riverboat, ocean freighter, train, etc, and Alice wants another river steamer and orders in that way, but when the ticket agent presses her, she says she actually wants to see them all again, and I decide to go along with her (I guess like persuading Joe to resee Velazquez at the Met with Sherryl and me on Thursday). 2) I'm ordering items from a list of objects, and realize from a salesperson that the items that are crossed-off by a series of hyphens means that I have to order the item BELOW the one that's crossed off---it's really more the flavor of a GAME than really buying or ordering items in a department store. 3) I'm riding in the death seat while Pope is DRIVING us to eastern Long Island for an overnight visit, and we've really left too late, Pope is very tired, and Paul Bosten is in the back seat, and off on the sunrise horizon ahead of us (Yes, I KNOW we're going EAST toward SUNSET) there's an expanding ring of light, like a firework-halo, but both Paul and I gasp and remark that it's REALLY a UFO that we've ALL seen, and I somehow at the same time tell Pope to LOOK at it AND to keep his eyes on the road, because it's suddenly gotten FOGGY (though we continue to see a series of "expanding halos" at various distant points in the sky that we "know" are UFOs), and he's driving too FAST, and we're coming perilously close to guardrails overlooking dramatic drops to prairies below (rather like in "Close Encounters", actually), I keep shouting "Pope, DRIVE SLOWER," and he keeps protesting through half-closed eyes and slurred speech that everything's OK if we could just GET there, and the rings KEEP appearing above the fog, and when we stop for just a moment behind a car in a gas station, the driver of the little red car ahead is a "cowboy" who, by hunching back and forth and sweeping the air with his arms can cause his narrow-gauge rear-auto-wheels to HOP off the ground like a bucking bronco. Further out, like Riverhead, we hit a crowded intersection where there are a group of cars, trucks, and trailers bunched together on a right-turning curve, and I complain about the stupidity of the cars gathering all across the right lane, blocking traffic so that we have to swerve into the left lane just to get PAST them. Pope keeps saying, "I'm all right, but we've GOT to leave EARLIER to get back home to NYC tomorrow." 4) [This was EARLIER than the last, which REALLY seemed to take place in a MOMENT between my looking at the clock that read 10:15AM and then 10:20AM, so that I almost thought I was IMAGINING it, though I've never lain in bed imagining SUCH A DREAM-LIKE episode] I'm talking on the telephone to someone who's telling me about the possibility of invoking "invisible hooks" to take one's shoes off without touching them, and I focus on my bedroom slipper not-quite-on my right foot crossed over my left knee in front of me, and almost without thinking of "allowing" it to happen, and SURELY without twitching my toes in ANY way, because I WAS interested in seeing if the "invisible hooks" could actually operate, the bedroom slipper FLIPS OFF MY FOOT without any intervention from me, and I shout amazedly into the phone "It works, it really WORKS!" Had no dream YESTERDAY because I got to sleep at 4AM and got up about 10:30, only 6.5 hours sleep, and I dropped off to sleep INSTANTLY last night while BEGINNING to think about the progressive relaxing that would put me to sleep quicker, but that was at 2:15AM, so that "waking" at 10:15AM gave me the confidence that I'd gotten my full eight hours' sleep, and I debated writing the notes from numbers 1, 2, and 4, but I figured I'd REMEMBER them quite clearly enough (that old justification for being lazy!), and it was WHILE I was debating taking notes that I seemed to have fallen back asleep for the Pope- driving dream, which I'll have to phone and tell him about, even though I've gotten started late in the day, now at 11:15AM, and I'd finished reading about the various Armageddons about the millenium last night in Omni, and I'm almost CONSTANTLY aware that these are the LAST TWO DAYS before the FINAL DECADE OF THE MILLENIUM, and maybe THAT'S be hyperactivating my dream-brain last night, the NEXT-TO-LAST night for dreaming---but I want to be careful not to OVER- ANTICIPATE my dreams TONIGHT, or I'll never get to sleep and dream ANYTHING!
12/31/89: 1) Joan Sumner is showing off her display items on a table in what could be her bedroom. There are bright white Christmas-tree-like back-lights that light up various objects displayed is silhouette behind translucent white screens, and there's a large object out of a jade-like stone displayed on a dinner plate that I have the idea is greasy---reminder of the applesauce-cup- bottom greasy on my pork plates when finishing up Alice's pig? 2) Two CUTIES seem to be after me, and I have the idea we'd been forced to be together for some intellectual purpose, and my want of them sexually has gotten through to them and they're willing and smiling to oblige me. One is naked and cuddly and there are wisps of white fluid oozing around the underside of his stiff cock, and I chew gently on his flattened balls and lick around his cock-head and he seems to come, but people are moving in the room for dinner and I cover him quickly with a blanket so that no one will see that he's shot his load. 3) Another dream that seems to take only a moment between 10:25AM and 10:26AM: there are fires burning in little silver-colored cylinders that have to be poked delicately either to keep burning or to give off an incense-smell with its smoke, and I poke them in cycles that seem to keep them going for a long time, even though the duration of the dream itself is exceedingly brief.