Dreams 1992
1/1/92: 8:15: Cathy O'Sullivan's at IBM party and she's "lost" her eyeballs and will soon be fired because she can't read anymore!
1/3/92: 7:25: I'm talking to a lawyer about sending a "custody" name to a company I'm contracting with and he frowns and says I should be saying "pari passus, which I pronounce PAri paSOUS and he looks "Uh-God" and says PAri PASSus!
1/4/92: 9:35: 1) I make coffee for Dennis, who didn't drink the whole panful, and when I poured it into the sink there was SUCH a dark stain I figure I better ask if I'm making it too STRONG. 2) I'm decorating an Xmas tree, from a display that's a woman in a big white fur coat that covers a filing cabinet FULL of decorations that she wears like a huge false front. The BASE of the tree is an old stump with two huge sawed-off limbs, one of which is parallel to the table-top as a balancer, and I have SHEETS of artificial grass that I wrap around lower limbs to give an impression of lush density. Bit LATE for this??
1/9/92: 9:15: I'm in an AIDS hospice and watch a HUMPY big care-giver run his hands over the clothed crotch and chest of a young male patient, and look around to about 24 patients and over 50 care-givers, trainees, and observers, and there's a GREAT sense of suppressed sexuality and opportunism everywhere.
1/10/92: 8:35: I'm at an IBM conference upstate and a) have to confront Arnie Smith (still blond and handsome in a dark-blue suit) and refuse to sit at HIS table for breakfast, b) have to tell some female potentate WHY I'd left a previous meeting: I HAD to go by my FEELING, and there would have been NOTHING valuable coming from it, and I had MUCH more important things to handle back at my New York City office---I can make the things I'm telling you PHONY (she seems to feel this is a dangerous ploy on my part, but I make it CONVINCING), but I HAD to follow my UNPHONYABLE feelings. c) Someone said there was a tour of a famous local HOSPITAL that was now, however, closed, and I wondered what would be gained from a view of the BUILDING now that the famous PEOPLE and TRAINING had left it. d) MY breakfast table, when I returned from the central buffet-table with ONLY a pair of tuna-salad half-sandwiches because everything else had been scarfed away, was being taken over by a set of jokey AFRICANS in dapper suits. e) There seemed ALSO to be a problem of scheduling PLANE flights, undoubtedly stemming from Tony's late-night call last night about his quick departure for Albany on Friday morning, getting back only today with stories about the gay page he picked up in the Capital and the nelly room-service clerk in the hotel; and everyone agreed that Albany had LOTS of gay men.
1/11/92: 9:15: HORRIBLE party on a rooftop and this tall skinny huge-lipped girl French-kisses me until I pull away in disgust, spitting globs of saliva all over her, me, and the floor, since I'm totally worried about AIDS from her.
1/14/92: 9:30: I walk into the lobby of John Jay Hall at Columbia and ask for the key to room 823. The desk attendant looks at me suspiciously, but I try to reassure her by saying, "You must be new; I've sublet this room one day per year for the past twenty years." She hands me over two NEW keys that I'm not sure I know what to do with, so I'm glad there's no one in the halls when I go up the half-flight of stairs and confront "my" door in the dimness, not sure whether to put the regular key into the door first or the round-plate identifier into the alarm-slot at the top of the door first, not even sure that's where the two keys GO. There's loud music in the halls and "my" door opens when I push it, and I don't recognize the inside of the room because it's almost wall-to-wall beds, and there's a form dimly visible in the farthest corner, naked arm upraised over a dark-haired head which seems to turn toward me when I start to come into the room. What do I do and where do I go now? How silly of me to think I could get away with it anyway.
1/15/92: 7:50: Edward drives car down steep driveway to "his" slot against farmer's fence in back of Henry's house. I walk back to a BLIND Marion, Pauline, and lots of BLACKS I don't know who are walking to Helen's house (though she may live in Manchester, Massachusetts). Then I take my CAMERA out and the FRONT seems to open, exposing film, and when I rewind it, numbers like 3104, 3105 show that something's wrong and I fear I've wrecked the whole thing!
1/17/92: 7:55: I board a DINNER BOAT off a summer resort and finish in the JOHN that's like a truck at the rim of the boat, and I wipe myself wetly and not-too -cleanly and try to figure whether and how to leave as we DOCK and new people are boarding for the next tour right in front of me, but a female storyteller assures everyone so much I take a chance on leaving since I don't want to go on ANOTHER trip twice-around the canals of whatever town I'm currently visiting.
1/18/92: 7:20: I'm to hand-deliver a package to a "great old woman" in a Russian theatrical company, but I don't remember any Russian and no one speaks English except a drunk I don't QUITE trust in a bar I'm not even sure is outside the right THEATRE, since the names weren't very clear on the package, and things have changed, and I'm not even sure the woman's still alive. I keep saying "Of COURSE this is important; they sent me PERSONALLY to deliver it!"
1/21/92: 8:30: I'm at some kind of country school/retreat/camp, and old codger "teaches" by expecting us to "intuit" rules. About 2PM he warns "We're camping OUT tonight across the lake and don't expect to be back before 5PM TOMORROW (Sunday)." So I gotta EAT! To kitchen to see nothing but a pot of oatmeal, ONE dirty plate and spoon, and heaps of bacon and toast on HIS desk that he says shortly "That's MINE." I rinse oatmeal from plate, leaving water in bottom, and he makes a quick move and I find two slices of BACON going soggy in the bottom, but I say "Thanks," anyway. Later in a "talk break" a fellow student says "He didn't like my work---said 'That's fine' in a tone that saw 80% disapproval." So I must be doing OK?
2/3/92: 5:45: 1) Dennis and I are touring Paris and he buys me a BROKEN guitar for playing on "as we did before in the Army." I complain about it's being broken and he says I'd REHEARSED what to say and said it to hurt him. I shout back to him---now we seem to be in a bank---and an announcement asks for "the guy who kept saying 'Bob' loudly," so it must be HIS voice they heard. 2) Something about TRAVELING to GET there, but I FORGET details in less than a MINUTE as I think about writing down the details.
2/4/92: 4:52: HALLUCINOGENIC (from LSD in Psychiatry index?) dreams: 1) Riker crushed, 2) "Be serious" as a) wind blows on my back and I'm PROPELLED forward through two rooms as MONSTER to be called a coward because I ran from the rain. b) "Leader," transformed, reaches FORWARD to receive me but begins reproving "captain." c) Flowing figure in white gossamer attempts to REACH me but turns into Michael Blackburn in a blanket because he's cold. I'm getting REVELATIONS that turn into commonplaces. 5AM: Bizarre interlude as I pee, go for aspirin, and MIRROR-bottom sprays water and it's LEAKING, two red streaks down wall to shower curtain rod! 1) "Riker crushed" expanded: Cast of new "Star Trek" and I are on an unexplored planet, and we THINK we feel "presence" of master-force, but there are only filmic possibilities: faces at window that turn into other investigating crew-members (we're in ENORMOUS barn-like/industrial/temple building, HUGE faceted-dome ceiling, which at times seems to glow and expand away with puissance, but it turns into reflections from lightning storm outside. Then "we" (I'm a member of this cast, too, a sort of grown-up Wil Wheaton as a younger fresher recruit, more open to "alien" suggestivity and brainwashing, they say) seem to be on a "transporter platform" that's more like an enormous MICROSCOPE slide-table, and Commander-Riker character is CRUSHED to a yellow and red STAIN (and I wonder a) will THIS be an hallucination and he's still in CAST, or b) is he getting BETTER acting jobs and has to leave and so is KILLED to free him from cast DRAMATICALLY, or c) did he REALLY die and so they take the opportunity to kill him off in the series DRAMATICALLY?), and voice from above seems to announce (but only to ME, so is it AGAIN an hallucination?) "You were too arrogant, I had to show my power and YOU had to be humbled, but now that you ARE "enlightened," YOU can become deity of this planet, releasing ME to my NEXT level of development and power, and YOU must wait for your NEXT visitors to this planet which YOU will crush (one of) and let THEM replace YOU as you follow ME "upward" on our infinite progress through hierarchical planet/world/universes of increasing sensual attractiveness, physical complexity, and moral revelations. This note I complete at 5:13AM and then at 5:28 I'm UP to type notebook 600.6 and 600.7, getting rid of some of the pages now that I'm preparing to transfer all my files to the new computer, which isn't coming in till next week, but at least I know I have copies of these pages on various saves---and I CAN put those together, but I should REALLY use the freed-up time to GET THROUGH the Galapagos videos.
2/6/92: No REAL dreams, but SOMETHING was operating at night (see NOTEBOOK 600.7) and "out of the blue" I woke with the GREAT thought that I can attend the "Men over 40" group AND announce my slide-show! Something's thinking then!
DREAMS FROM SOUTH AFRICA TRIP, 6/26-8/12, INCLUDED IN TRIP.
9/4/92: 8:10AM: Sleeping at MMB's in Point Pleasant, I dream I'm lying as the outside spoon with a young man "inside" me who doesn't seem to mind [he doesn't mind; it doesn't matter: mind over matter] that I'm curled against his back, my arm along the length of his upper thighs. I take the chance and move my hand into his crotch, and HE shifts so that his cock rests in my hand, which begins to play with it, getting him slowly hard. I wake feeling good at 7:20AM. Nap again and Tony has been sleeping over at my house, and I'm amazed at how much he's moved around. He's taken the RADIO part of my stereo component set atop my BUFFET (which of course I don't have) down, gotten out a box of kitchen matches for his cigarettes (when I pick them up, one bursts into flame, and I blow it out, but it's "so hot" it bursts into flame again, until the phosphor tip is consumed). I give the footstool he used for his feet as he stretched out to jerk off. I hope he'll help me move the heavier pieces back into place. Up at 8AM and put on tee-shirt and pants and socks after shitting and combing hair. Now at 8:15AM I'm ready for the day, Diane moving around upstairs but not a sound from Michael on the screened porch.
9/8/92: 6AM: "Power of VISION is unlimited; power of SIGHT can be DEVELOPED TOWARD vision." This seemed semi-dream, semi-me after I and woman (Yveline, I now see) go to dining compartment of train and FIRST told "It's 10:30AM and we're closing" and I INSIST "THEY are eating and WE will eat only ONE course and finish BEFORE them" and we're seated in OLD black-painted banquettes, side-by-side, and I look up to turn on light and it has a bead-like gaslight and menu's first item is "Two Ghats" $12 for two, Indian food in a stack with spices. She seems delighted with choice, and dream turns into talking with eye doctor for the quote that I'd jotted down at the BEGINNING of this dream.
9/9/92: 5:20AM [Getting into European mode again!] Opera-watching dream again! THIS time I'm sitting in the FIFTH row, against the wall, and the "stage" is more like a PULPIT---4'x4'---edged with a slight "curbing" (index-term from last night), and my next-seat neighbor says "Last night's solo by some guy named something BONGO was pretty bad," and I say "Yes, the fellow who sits next to my REGULAR seat (one row BACK) said HE was going, so I'll hear about it from HIM." Stage is so RAISED that first row---of three seats---has two seats ADDED that face the RIGHT SIDE of the stage on a 90 angle.
9/11/92: 4:45AM: [I've wakened a bit later this morning than the 4AM I woke (too early) yesterday on my way to becoming Europe-acclimated, and came to THIS computer to type the dream just as I would have gone to the OTHER computer, except that THIS morning I had to OPEN the file named DREAMS because it wasn't THERE yet!] 1) Talking to someone about a radio program last night, playing some symphony from Italy, and the person is saying "It was wonderfully heavy on sostenuto: I wouldn't swear that he (the conductor) was precisely on PITCH, but it was so LOUD that I could just visualize the SWELLING of the coaxial cable carrying the signal as the MAGNITUDE of the sound passed along it," and I think the swelling is related to the batholith-uprising that I read about yesterday in MacPhee's New Yorker magazine article about California's formation in the distant (though geologically recent) past, and the distinction among various sound qualities is related to the "continuously rising or lowering tones" that I read about yesterday in the Scientific American article while I was eating lunch. 2) I go into work early, but there's still a short line waiting for the elevator in a small crowded lobby. Someone else was to have left a note for yet another employee, and I glance into the corner behind the door and see a legal-sized white tablet stuffed into a memo holder rather like my desk caddy in size, shape, and color, and at the bottom of the top sheet---used for various daily notes to various people passing through the lobby---there's a darkly inked top-section peeping out just above the retaining front-wall that I'm sure is the note in question, so I mention it and the person asking about whether the note's there or not seems to be satisfied. That same person says, matter-of-factly, "You don't happen to have any cutlets with you?" and just as typically I say, "I happened to bring an extra one for my lunch," and he asks for it, and I hand over a thick pork fillet (like the ones advertised so frequently in the Point Pleasant area last weekend with Michael) which I'd broiled to MY taste, and it flops open as I hand it over, and there's an inner section that shows it's quite rare, but the look is of perfect meat with only the tiniest bit of yellow fat around the edges, and somehow either I'm EATING that piece (though I DO give it to the person who asks for it) or REMEMBERING eating a duplicate piece, but in the dream I can TASTE the tenderness of the meat, the slight coolness of the greasy fat which adds taste without being TOO greasy or fatty, and I know that my supplying the meat will be a success and I idly think, "When I bought it at a quantity for myself, it was only about $2.00 per pound, but if the person whose lunch is being prepared with this LIKES it and continues to get the meat from me, I could EASILY sell it for about $6.00 a pound, and that would be a nice supplementary income for me here at this job"---which appears not to be exactly IBM, but some rather more menial job in a rather rundown neighborhood (to judge by the dignified tattiness of the lobby we're waiting in---I never DO get through to the elevator, but the line in front of me manages to make it all into the next car that comes down, so the NEXT car will be mine). [Now at 5:04AM I'm at the 67- or 68-character line that WP51 gave me by default, and the line 9.83" that I'm now finishing, going to page 2, so I'll reduce and print. It turns out to be 52 printed lines, so it's 9 inches of print (started at 1" rather than 0"), which fits on the "heavy-top-margined" index-page which the printer was set-in-default for, and I observe that the print IS getting light, and maybe I should try another ribbon for my next index, AND I want to try the rather attractive "page 47" rapid, serif-less font that came out "accidentally" yesterday as I was printing the PARTIES index. But now at 5:15AM I'd better stop for breakfast before continuing editing the Water Technology index.] [And I CAN duplicate from a "narrow format" from DREAMS to a "wide format" to DREAM, which I've just done, but I'll leave all the "extra" stuff anyway.]
10/8/92: 3:20AM: Bizarre, almost fever-dream of paranoia: I think Marj is on my sofa, and I ask her if she's still giving Dennis billing forms from her computer. Marj turns out to be Abra Poynting, now in this apartment building, who's trying to destroy Dennis's indexing career: "He sometimes just uses words, sometimes whole phrases, sometimes parts of sentences, as topics." Me: "That's what indexing IS." Another guy like Bob T. (I didn't remember his name when I wrote this note, so I added "What WAS his name from IBM-days who started Diplomacy games?"), telling me I'm above Dennis on TWO charts but BELOW him on ANOTHER astrology-like "aspect," so I WANT to help and protect, but also to MISGUIDE him. THEN someone like Avi comes out of HIS room with a paper "halo" about him---"Who do you think YOU are?" "Living God of Light and Love---formerly I was THIS (dark and drab), now I am THIS@ (and he goes behind curtain, I know, to put on neon and strobe-light "surround" that I think "Would make a carrot cake look divine"). I wake and think "This is revelation: I've GOT to tend more to my HEALTH and WELFARE."
10/10/92: 7:50AM: 1) Watching the filming of a movie and many guys, including a young Marlon Brando-type, getting HUGE free-swinging Tom-like erections and I hope they leave these shots IN the movie so that I can rent, copy, and use cocks as porno. 2) I'm in England and buy lunch from a small newspaper shop, and change from a pound should be "Three crowns." A 3-crown PIECE is a wooden cylinder with a brass bottom, and I say HOW many pence? "Three hundred pence in a pound, I think," my host says, but I can't work out math. 3) Some sexy guy is walking naked in the narrow aisle, like on a train, between windows on the left and my bed on the right. I'm naked and only lightly covered by a sheet and wonder if I can risk throwing off the sheet and showing off my erection; will he be offended, become abusive, or get a harder cock himself and be tempted to play! I think about a) going to Brad's party as old man, and b) going to Eagle or Spike to meet guys who LIKE older, pottier men. AND it feels like I STRAINED a muscle on the top of my right foot JUST ABOVE the base of the fifth metatarsal!
10/11/92: 7:30AM: 1) I'm watching a couple trying to make love while hanging from their knees from bamboo poles stretched above their bed, and her long hair brushes the sheets. She looks worried as he begins foreplay, saying, "The sheets are always so COLD when we finish up here." That somehow DISGUSTS him so that he pushes her away with an angry gesture, and I feel sorry for BOTH of them. 2) I'm watering my plants, some under a kind of bookcase or planter, and I see water has collected in one bowl under a pot so that the soil is moist and a film of greenish-gray mold has grown around a rotted stem and the other lies dead in the muck. I take one more sturdy stick and push it into a higher, dryer, more solid mound of dirt, but REALLY feel that all is lost.
10/13/92: 8:30AM: I've got some kind of "special storage symbol" in the shape of a small elm leaf, but when I try to "read it in," the computer screen BLANKS (for the first time since I get back from EUROPE)!
10/16/92: 9:40AM: 1) Dennis has moved into MY room at 1221 Dietz with small bed on quilts, mirror with laces (shoelaces hanging over it?), my mirror behind dresser. I figure I'm closer to someone knocking on front porch when I'm in MOM'S room. 2) Some guy is teasing me and I get semi-erect and he dives to lick my cockhead and I turn my head away, hoping no one notices so he can CONTINUE.
10/17/92: 7:15AM: I'm lying in bed with Joe S. (from IBM), naked, and he starts to get an erection and I start to get an erection and he feels mine and implies that "even though he's straight" we could have fun together anyway!
10/18/92: 7AM: Terry K. visits and brings a pizza that lasts two meals, and she MAKES me a huge hopple-popple omelet that has lots of potatoes and meat and anchovies and will clearly last 4-5 meals. I feel LUCKY to have such good friends.
11/4/92: 7:30AM: I'm in an IBM meeting room with a group of businessmen, finishing a meeting, and everyone starts grabbing crotches and playing with cocks. I unzip one guy and try to make him teased to point of orgasm, and he praises my touch so that a thin guy in purple-sequined trousers who looks like a girl is willing to bare himself to me and I bring him off as a neighbor plunks down a Kleenex to absorb the little cum. All cum, and I look through old cigarette matchboxes for a "souvenir," but they only give names or classrooms, not places or restaurants. Sad.
11/6/92: 8:30AM: Drive upstate to an IBM holiday dinner and meet woman and she takes my hand and pulls me behind her while she holds hand of man in FRONT of her. They vanish and I fill my plate and sit at wooden trestle table across from people I don't know. Fill plate 2-3 times from HUGE selection of meats and fruits and vegetables. LOTS of stuff frying for NEXT meal on HUGE hot-tables. Bar is open too, and dessert is ice cream and LOTS of fruits. HUGE details, and I worry about eating too much for getting into the car and driving back.
11/7/92: 1) 3:45-6AM! EXHAUSTING NIGHTMARE of first rehearsal of a PLAY in which I have a part with three SMALL sections: 1 line, 3-4 sentence speech, and a third part I NEVER get to because I CAN'T say SECOND part---look through SCRIPT, papers in car, and can't even FIND it to READ it---to END of finding PAPERS atop my CAR, put by GIRLS who borrowed my car, as AWFUL! 2) ELABORATE series: a) I'm up and down stairs in "my apartment" building---movers coming for reconstructing and switching our apartments tomorrow. b) To buzzer at rental office on 97th at 1:50PM (appointment with Shelley N. [brunch at noon today] at 2PM and I KNEW I didn't have her 110-115th Street address to WALK to) and agent talks mysteriously of "added payment." "Added to loan," she adds. "WHAT loan?" Mysterious! c) Bomber and monoplane do LOOPS past window, around horizon with OTHER planes. d) In CAR driving UPTOWN and HUGE jets are buzzing avenues VERY low (like in Wayne's World video last night). e) Silver "dagger craft" lands NEXT to us with METAL SAIL atop it and no wings, and pilot opens hatch in the nose and crawls out of golden-color interior and I ask, "How do you launch?" "From jet at 30,000 feet." "How long is a typical flight?" "15 hours. I must take care not to 'surf' UPWARD and have to spiral DOWN to get back to proper oxygen levels!"
11/11/92: Jean-Jacques and I are sitting in what seems to be the second row at the City Center Theatre, watching a ballet company like the Paul Taylor, and I know that the initial "ballerina" making the line of pirouettes from left to right over the breadth of the stage is actually a guy with a determined little ponytail looking very much like the architect who wore the weathervane at the MAN Hat party. But when the act starts, there's the sound of someone raggedly snoring from the audience--- which titters---and Jean-Jacques is reading an enormous menu-like placard---which obscures his view of the stage---because he's annoyed at something, but when the fellow passes across the stage and the lights come up on the rest of the action, Jean-Jacques has made the placard disappear and is clasping my left shoulder in a friendly way with his right arm and reaching over to stroke my face and neck with his left hand, so that when the lights reflected from the stage hit us, we're clearly recognized as gay lovers, but the reaction of the men onstage and around us is so smilingly positive about our relationship that I feel a glow of contentment and peace.
11/22/92: 9:15AM: Hawaiian class, pert-nosed green-eyed kid cute, lots of hangers-on; travel to many islands, by boat or plane with tour. Lots are shirtless, and there's an easy sensuality. I may become a guru. "Villain" guy with spiky dog, FEAR! Grassy water's edge with CITY across the channel, with cars, trucks, and trails and shapes in greeny motes.
11/24/92: 9:45AM: My "family" (I may be 8 or 9 years old) is driving down a rainy road in a big camper or truck, saying, "You'll get your pant-legs and loafers wet getting ashore---the dock's underwater!" But I say, "Then we CAN build it up with milk cartons so we WON'T get wet." And then they TURN around on the road and I can't figure out WHY.
12/7/92: 9:55AM: 1) I'm looking through a set of books (rather like the "law books" in last night's TV production of The Man Upstairs with Katharine Hepburn and Ryan O'Neal) and at the head of a double column find MY name as the compiler of a list of technical references, but then I put the book back in its place right at a division of the shelving, and can't find it again to show someone ELSE. 2) TERRIBLY depressing dream of making scrambled eggs for someone, maybe even a party, and myself, by putting ENORMOUS quantities of eggs into a huge square pan, like an oversized brownie pan, and mixing and mixing it, and then pouring it into a sink-like stove filled with water and vegetables, and only too late thinking that I should turn on the HEAT, but the egg-liquid gets lost in what looks more and more like dirty dishwater, and I try to skim out bits of finished egg and get only mushy globs of what look like saltine crackers coated with pale yellow glop, onions hanging like earrings from dish racks in the bottom of the sink, and pulpy lima beans from stalk-like arrangements that might be vegetable stems or plastic stalks. I barely get ONE plate together when I try to find more clean spoons (as I have been scavenging for for the past few days among MY dirty dishes) and find only relatively less dirty ones in the same nine-square-foot sink-bottom, and don't know HOW I'm going to explain the loss of the eggs---maybe I didn't even have the STOPPER in this incredibly messy sink, and they all went down the DRAIN, and I wake in depression and think that this somehow refers to my LIFE: no longer able to conjure up penile intensity during masturbation, increasingly bound up with digital arthritis, hooked on videos and games and not getting to learn the computer, frustrated with trying to hook up the fax modem, not getting a lover, teeth and exercise and weight control being neglected---really a DREADFULLY negative time AND dream-fugue!
12/9/92: 7:10AM: I'm HEATING my pills in a toaster oven, and some MELT and I pull them out into a tissue---have about 18 of them since I'm catching up with many from my OLD supply. [Took till 12/22 to even RECORD this note!]
12/22/92: First in about two weeks, and the first about the MAS bulletin board that I hooked into just UNDER two weeks ago (12/9). Two parts that flowed into each other: 1) I'm riding in Vicki's car, and she wants to dash up the block between Columbus and CPW on 81st to make a left up CPW, but rather than just turning right on 81st from Columbus, she makes an odd U-turn after I notice there's a knot of traffic at CPW and 81st, including two Army-type trucks blocking even the wrong lane. First I think she's going to go over the sidewalk past a pyramidal concrete stanchion that's obstructing the turn so that she can ignore the light on this corner, but she makes a U-turn as the lights turn RED for us, but I'm figuring if they turn green for us HERE, it's red at CPW and 81st while we're going along 81st, but will then turn green AS we hit the corner, so she's planned ahead and we'll make our schedule. Then the dream segues (though connected) to 2) the MAS bulletin board, and across from me and my computer (though in some sort of "public-access" office that's not my apartment) there are a pair of people: on my right a vaguely British fellow who's like the Brian or Keith or whoever Robin K.'s husband is, who's guiding a woman that---as I lean over my monitor I can see---is blind and in a wheelchair, so I say, "You must be---" but I can't think of Tzippy's name in the dream, and then she introduces herself as Reba or Reva, but says, "I'm Jewish, also," so I figure she KNOWS Tzippy. The guy is teaching her how to use the bulletin board, and she's quite slow but working optimally with a one-handed data-entry board that looks like a TV remote control, and I think she may have the use of only one hand, or that she needs the other hand to control her wheelchair. He gets something to print out for her and guides her fingers to a moving array of pins that transmits Braille to her standing fingertips, and I think "How ironic that she'll be holding up the timing on the bulletin board JUST when Vicki and I are in such a hurry to get up CPW to go wherever we're going." I admire Reba's tenacity, though I wonder if she hasn't chosen a VERY difficult occupation, being wheelchair-bound and blind, with SO much visual information that she has to get from adjunct sources, but then she---and Tzippy---obviously ARE successful, so I shouldn't worry about her.
12/25/92: I'm in England with someone who starts out as Joe E. but ends up as someone like the cute movie star Dennis Quaid. Joe and I are walking to some exhibition past where busses go, and I wonder if he brought the street map, and he pulls it out of his overcoat pocket in triumph. We're to walk down the only street that enters into a self-contained project, and that street appears to be blocked by a table of women volunteers for some kind of home-tour, but we just walk past them and they pay us no attention. We're supposed to go to someplace called Cadogan Place, but Joe grumbles and says, "No, it's Antran Avenue," and I realize he's right. We pass an enormous building labeled "The Planetarium," and he points out the beauty and strangeness of the highly polished doors with their shiny brass lock-plates at the very bottom. I suggest we go in and look around for a few minutes, and there are display cases and photos on the walls, and down a flight of stairs there's a lecture in progress: we can see folding chairs set up in a library-like room with lots of vacancies, but Joe says we don't have time to stay. Without transition, Dennis Quaid-like and I are in a large auditorium that reminds me of The Royal Albert Hall in one of the Hitchcock pictures, and he's parading at the top of one of the side aisles, already attracting a lot of himward-turning faces, debating how to get everyone's attention: we've been offered tickets to a soccer match---"With everyone in skin-tight jerseys" he leers at me, as Joe would---but there's no public transportation to the stadium and we'll need a ride. While he's getting up the courage to address the entire auditorium, a nearby woman says to me, "You can have this ticket," and hands me an entry for a seat in row B ("Won't that be too close to the ground?" I wonder to myself), and I turn it over and see the price marked as 5.392 pounds, and I wonder if I should offer her a couple of pounds in exchange, but she seems to have 8-9 tickets and appears not to be able to use ANY of them. [I'd gone to bed at 1AM but it was just after 10AM as I rose to type this out.]
12/28/92: 8:45AM: I'm working atop a twin tower, somewhat nervous about being up so high, visualizing exactly in my mind's eye what would happen if something sheared off a section of the top of the building: there I'd be, exposed and vulnerable, visible against the skyline. I'm programming for IBM, again, and array-displays are atop a cabinet with a narrow box for one-dimensional arrays, a wider box for two-dimensional arrays, and a solid cube for three-dimensional arrays. I pull open the drawers of the cabinet to find, to my disappointment, that they do NOT contain the distributed program-listings as I'd fantasized they would. I've finished programming and am ready to start testing, well aware of the problems I had before caused by testing from the beginning through all the error conditions: it took forever and found only one bug at a time. I'm debating doing a pre-run reading to get rid of clerical errors, and partitioning the program into numerous parts so that I can run a dozen or so tests at once. I'm aware of a CURRENT advantage that the program doesn't stop compiling once it finds one parameter-error, but continues to indicate ALL of the textual errors in the program. Maybe my IBM career can become, if only in my dreams, a programmer's success story.
12/31/92: 12:31AM! (and actually TYPED 2/23/93!) Two old men are on a marathon TEAM in the Olympics and BOTH can't run another step so they hand the baton to ME. I climb the final flight of stairs and, in danger of losing my footing, slap one foot into the winner's stance. Cheers and applause and bulbs flashing. They insist I claim the prize, but I say THEY did 99.9% of the work, so THEY must claim it unless they INSIST I'm doing them a favor to HELP them out. (I dreamed this after "Dreamtime" and being sick with penicillin).