1994
1/4/94: 9:20AM: 1) I'm presenting a play in which the hero is VERY good-looking, but turns into a VILLAIN, and the REAL hero is rather plain. Somehow, in the dream, this seems like a unique, revolutionary idea. 2) A wiry young man is READING a play to a small group like Village Playwrights, and he's arranging himself on MY naked body, and I wonder if he'd mind if I get erect. There's also a bit about my SOAPING up my groin so I won't SMELL for him, exciting myself at the same time.
1/5/94: 5:30AM: Two ARRESTING dreams: 1) I'm climbing in sun-drenched mountains, along with adults with TINY CHILDREN just at walking age, and only ONE woman is as horrified as I am to see two independent occurrences of toddlers FLYING off mesas into golden POOLS of light in off-trail chasms, as if joyfully swimming, but undoubtedly wind-swept to their deaths, and onlookers BELOW must be HORRIFIED to see them dashed against the rocks, even though their splashes would be barely visible from above, since the chasms are so terrifyingly deep and steep. 2) I'm exploring an alien spaceship, and I have authorization from my on-board seniors to venture into dark unknown areas, and I get the shivery feeling that I'M BEING WATCHED. I stare desperately into a particularly dark storage area to see TWO---or worse---only ONE eye of brown, or GREEN, staring lidlessly out at me! 6:15AM: Uncanny feelings observed (in my half-sleep state, I'll include them here in DREAMS): 1) Henry's End: UFO. Dining at Henry's End, I AGAIN get the feeling this was "someplace special." But the food wasn't THAT extraordinary, though my imagination supplies the following: a) Is it the SHAPE of the room that engenders ALIEN feelings like Lovecraft's "eldritch civilizations"? b) Is this a CANNIBAL experience: DANISH venison a DANE, RED deer an INDIAN? c) An alien OBSERVATION post in which aliens can observe human eating habits? 2) AGAIN imagined the thought: "I forgot 10/20/93 movie ALREADY, but if I'm an alien-information transmitter for an alien race observing our humanity, my time is NOT wasted time which is of no use to ANYONE, but it's precious to an alien observer and therefore WORTHWHILE. 3) Odd "story" of space explorer being PICKED UP (as a human would PICK UP a frightened KITTEN or BIRD) and as frighteningly FIGHTING being HELD, desperate for freedom from pain and being crushed, and being firmly but gently molded to the SAME shape as an infant being cuddled in the arms of a vastly larger MOTHER, into a feeling of familial comfort and even LOVE.
1/7/94: 8:45AM: I'm at some party, and a fellow who looks like the smooth-haired guy who sat next to me at Hit the Lights last night at the Vineyard Theater comes in with something for the hostess/door-guard of the club that looks at first like a small bouquet but drops out into a flower NECKLACE that he rather clumsily puts over her frizzy hair around her neck while she looks somewhat tolerantly impatient. I'm lying on a bed, then, and he bends over me while still talking to her, and I can feel his right hand brush my left love handle, and I try to settle into it to say, "That's what I am; if you like it, fine," and he CLASPS my waist, and I start to breathe warmly into his left ear as he bends closer, and we seem to accept each other more tenderly and more closely, and I sense my erection and am prepared to tell him, "Well, it comes and goes," if he reacts either favorably or unfavorably about it, but I'm happy I haven't chased him away---he seems handsome and gentle in close-up.
1/15/94: 7:30AM: I'm having breakfast at a LARGE house in which I HAD been the only person UP when I turned on a LIGHT that had a base of bubbling fluid that COOLED the air and turned on a hot-air heater that heated the air. Someone else woke and said he enjoyed reading my NOTES, finding it a bit hard to read my handwriting. Breakfast I THOUGHT was bacon, but ONE piece turns into an OK pancake and two OTHERS into awful pyramid-shaped, goggle-eyed MONKEYS that I leave in the pan on the stove.
1/31/94: 8:30AM: Well, I wanted a dream to end 1/94 and I GOT it: Amy F. and John A. are in MY PLAY, rehearsing in my apartment. It's a farce whose center involves washing bedding linen in a machine that's somehow a STOVE, and at one rehearsal my biggest concept is that the PILLOW is so thick it'll scrape soot off the burners as it's slid into the broiler. And then how are they DRIED between presentations? Our LAST rehearsal takes place as we travel between Russia and Lithuania, and I PANIC that I didn't bring my PASSPORT until Amy reminds me we didn't GET them back after we went to Estonia yesterday. As we WALK up the stairs to cross the border, I seem to think it best to climb the BUSIEST stair, but the entry-visa stampers are fast and we're soon walking toward a block of boxy public buildings garishly painted yellow, green, and purple, fresh for our visit, and Amy is frightened of the people so she walks RIGHT behind me, attracting even MORE attention. We march to a woods and decide we have to turn BACK for the theater. Later the play is billed as Zolnerzak's Added Gruesome, to capitalize on my POLISH name to attendant people, and the acronym ZAG means something funny in Lithuanian, too. The first performance is DELAYED an hour, and I suggest we CUT, or just not DO it, but they flatter me by CONTINUING to insist on performing the play even though it's very late.
2/2/94: 9AM: I'm having sex with Dennis in my bedroom, with pornos playing on the video for our pleasure, and some of the shots are very clear and in PERFECT color, making me think that I'd transferred my 8mm films successfully to videotape, but the only problem is that MOM AND THE KIDS are home, and I can't figure out WHY they'd be here on a Friday, until at the end of the dream Dennis tells me that it's SATURDAY, and then I wonder why I set UP the whole thing in the first place. Mom is audibly about, maybe even coming partially into the room to make snide remarks about the bodies on the video screen, and the two kids (they seem to be girls, about 3 and 5, and I'm so annoyed that they're THERE that I don't even leave space to wonder whose they are or where they actually CAME from) and screaming with play around the bed and even grabbing some of the bedcovers under which my aching erection is hiding. Wake with a good hard-on and feelings of GREAT frustration, which I now, at 9:05AM, proceed to record in NOTEBOOK - 30, having to retrieve it and return HERE and now finish. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 2/2/94).
2/5/94: 9:15AM: 1) We're at a beach resort, in an incense shop, oiling ourselves for the sun. I FEEL each bit of oil from the transparent, unscented vial that I pour into my palm and apply to the back of my neck, face, and forearms. A woman jokes: "Get this AROUND to get rid of this AWFUL INCENSE smell," and I laugh, "They'll come back and say, 'It smells like an oil refinery in here.'" 2) Then we're in a group for a SONG-session. "You might not like the song, but, repeating it, you'll get carried away and cry and laugh and NOT want to STOP.” I'm with three CUTE guys who seem to accept my closeness and I wonder what to do when the CUTEST leaves for a second and a newcomer BLACK worker throws his COAT over our chair-back and I decide the coat can STAY, the guy can RETURN, and just take WHAT HE THOUGHT he was reserving as his SPACE, but WE don't have to ACCEDE to his idea: LET him take his coat back if he wants to move elsewhere. I tuck my shirt back in to prepare for the start of the show.
2/7/94: 6:30AM: Real melange: traveling in Florida, but then in cafeteria where Ken gets GREAT burnt cake with THICK rich chocolate icing, saying, "I'll take that on the tour with me tomorrow." Then they put out green spirals of pasta around bacon topped with cheese, and I get LOTS of bags of something, and waitress commends me on my TASTE. Travel and food all mixed together, and a cute guy in black jeans is sexy in there too. Another part has me worried if my white sweater under my jacket is ENOUGH with my black shirt, or do I need a tie too?
2/8/94: 6:40AM: I'm at a big (somehow Italian) family dinner and 1) I want wine, they have none, but a little supplier on a bicycle arrives with a bottle of Strega, and someone says, "Look in the drinking catalog to see what mixes with it for a cocktail." 2) Someone like an aunt is smoking two seats away (there are maybe seats at a large table) and my mother, between us, pleads with her not to blow smoke at the table, and "aunt" apologizes with a smile and moves back to a side chair, but I whisper loudly, "I'm SURE she's blowing smoke deliberately" to a BLACK woman to my left rear, who asks what I said and I'm glad, since I'm sure SHE finds it disturbing too! Wake feeling out of sorts---sore and smelly of crotch.
2/9/94: 10:30AM: 1) Naked woman swimming and splashing in full glass shower cubicle. She exits over top, then the open door permits WALL of water to FLUCTUATE back and forth like a rubber membrane is holding it back, and we can go in and out and NOT break the "surface tension" at the "door." I try to swim inside it, find that holding my breath is uncomfortable, and wonder if a hose for breathing air would BREAK the "water tension." 2) Horrible thought of people dying from gas embolism while INJECTING amyl nitrite!
2/18/94: 11AM!: We're in a tour bus which has its front bumper pressed against a gate, which breaks, and the bus stops rolling toward the cliff anyway. We're out to a crowded restaurant where we're served platters of appetizers---cheese and peppers, and I think, "That music sounds Spanish," and it IS: we're in SPAIN! And officers in their club smile and treat us all as their guests, and a waitress serves me a special cracker with GREAT chopped spiced meat on it.
2/20/94: 9:45AM: I'm in what seems to be GRANDMA'S enormous house, and all the family is coming for a Sunday dinner (I guess the MAS [Internet user’s group] dinner is on my mind), but I'm surprised when I go upstairs to "our" place and find that MOM has set out a table ready for about 14---more places than I thought we could accommodate. We're about to sit down and eat when she starts spraying the tabletop VERY wetly with ROACH SPRAY, and I tell her with great distaste that I'm not going to EAT in the room for the next two hours (maybe my meatless upcoming blood tests enter here), and go into ANOTHER part of the house, which is more like a Disney pavilion now, and there's a row of kiosks (maybe the main street in Leh from Harvey's Travels in Ladakh?) selling food, mostly great-looking hamburgers, and I order one, laughing as they want to totally BURY it in catsup, and come to a big table presided over by Jerry, from MAN, that has an ENORMOUS tray of HUGE bunches of exotic mushrooms (portobello mushrooms being sold at Key?) displayed in its middle, banded and identified, though seemingly not priced, and he says they're only for display, but I say since they're THERE they must be all edible, and maybe just for the taking, but then in the dream I start to worry about the AMOUNT of food that I'm going to eat, and how much wine I'll be drinking, and the spectacle and color of the start of the dream peters off to mundane concerns about my health before I wake and take notes.
2/23/94: 6:50AM: Vicki's driving a MOTORBIKE on a wet highway, and I'm saying to go faster and faster, though we're unsteady on the bike. Rounding a bend, we can see fog racing from right to left just ahead, and the cycle SPINS out of control. I fall on the left margin-strip and she HYDROPLANES down the road, tumbling into the grass (this strikes me as I TYPE it that it could stem from lots of shots of skiers tumbling down snowslopes in the Winter Olympics), and emerges unhurt and laughing amazedly, "Maybe we shouldn't have been going so FAST?" I telephone her the next day at work to find she's just fine.
2/25/94: 10:15AM: I'm in a Mexican marching band which is staying in my house, and a guy like a SEXY Don M. is staying to have sex with me, as I try jerking him off, but at last I decide that playing with his cock with my hand and tweaking the moistened tip with the other hand WILL get him off, but there's a MEETING at some ungodly time like 2AM and he has to HIDE in a garage till the meeting's over. THEN it happens we're MARCHING to the next village THAT night, and I'm escorting a line of flute players that wake up the peasants for their applause. We enter a PARK set up with what seem to be permanent fireworks, like fountains, that shoot as we pass, and elegant night diners are surprised to see us beneath the vine-covered pergolas under which they're eating. I figure I can SWITCH to the LEFT side of the scrimmage-line-like phalanx of flute-players and TELL my trick to follow the parade to our next stop---I have no idea where it is. The flutists stop to do a series of delightful arpeggios in unison to EVERYONE'S charmed smiles. LOVELY night-scenes and fireworks and impish dark-skinned native flutists, and SEXY cock on my partner, whom I can't wait to see again later.
2/26/94: 10:30AM: I'm dining with a Mensa-like group in a restaurant named something like "Ambassador" in the Waldorf-Astoria. I don't know ANY of the people, and suddenly there are 3 or 4 people BEHIND me, and I laugh, "OK, they can eat ME." Then there's a HUGE uproar of changing chairs, stools, and tables, and during this couples of not-well-dressed country hicks come in to sit at other tables. There's an immense quantity of DETAIL of people, chairs, tables, waiters, decor, etc.
2/27/94: 9:25AM: 1) I'm on a long, long bus ride in Italy with a frightened maid, consulting a red-line route map that leads from a river through a city and out into the country, and we get off at Long Street. 2) I'm watching a walk-tour video of the backyards of private homes in Provincetown, and the narrator speaks of the "oval bowl of the Presbyterian baptistry" as little Chinese girls fall off balancing poles into the water, which is somehow in Venice, and I guess this comes from watching the Olympics for almost two weeks. 3) I'm frantically searching in a warm, crowded dorm for my shoulder bag for a hike---through jammed closets and full boxes of clothes---and I'm VERY late for my 9AM departure, fearing the bus might leave without me, and I think that I MUST buy LUNCH, too, particularly a chocolate bar to tide me over the hike. All is late, wait, frustration---like this BALLPOINT that doesn't work!
2/28/94: 10AM: 1) Helen and I are shopping in some pre-dawn department store, and I admire the palm-lined (probably from the Star Trek palms in the "temple" in the program I re-watched on Saturday), glass-walled room that looks out over a dark view, and as I draw closer to the windows, I hear birds and frogs and animal-veldt sounds, and see silhouettes of lions and tigers and panthers against bars of cages, and realize that's the Washington, D.C. ZOO out there, and take bearings on the sun rising behind me to say that the zoo is WEST of where we are. Helen says, "We could EAT there," and I laugh and suggest, "We could have lion in the lion house, tiger in the tiger house---" Drive around outside as the sun comes up and we get LOST on streets and exitless highways. 2) I see a guide with IVY leaves speared on a sword, talking about them outside an old manse, and the preacher's wife has as a "friend" a CHIMP about four feet tall---wearing a hat and carrying a handbag, with long black fur like an elegant monkey-fur coat---which shakes hands with us, nonplussing a ten-year-old four-foot-tall RITA---is this some sort of ecological or "save the animals" ploy? At 10:30 I remembered 3) An announcer announcing to a monkey, saying that it can ice-skate, but Rita doesn't believe it, and I guess, now that it's Monday, I've been watching the taped Winter Olympics from Lillehammer, Norway, for the past two weeks, and my mind is filled with the incidents and fast-forward images of snow and ice and various nationalities. Each morning is a real STRAIN to get the details clear enough in my head to laboriously write the notes that I've just transcribed above.
3/1/94: 9:25AM: VERY DISTINCT: I shit in a corner of a steam room in a gym that turns into a park, and I casually go for newspaper on ground, think to cover shit with it, but find I'm scraping up DIRT and burying shit under paper under dirt, to displeasure of gathering DOGS, who I figure will dig it up after I've left, but I'll be GONE and OUT of there. Distinctive RED turds---just had occult blood test, too, which seems obviously a source of this.
3/2/94: 9:40AM: DON'T remember the START, but I'm doing a quick tour of an upstairs museum, and person CLEANS as I step into an old train car, and off to the LEFT is a sleeping compartment that expands into a display of old BLANKETS, all folded and showing their colors in 8-9 rows of 15-20 thicknesses, and to LEFT some French tourists go upstairs for a quick exit and I find the theater-auditorium, with tiny tables circling on a loge-balcony, and a big sign for an off-Broadway play, and seats SLOPING UP to a tiny outlined-by-a-rise stage set in the same shiny red ceramic tile as the whole floor. The "back" of the stage is a triangular bleacher-seating area, people lounging there now, and in the FRONT of the stage are two young guys sitting at the point of a triangular array of seats, and one starts SINGING: "If you think we can hear the play from where we are, you're very much mistaken, the acoustics in this place are AWFUL." And the audience breaks into applause as they rise, carrying a white flag, and march off out of the auditorium.
3/3/94: 8:40AM: I'm working in an office where a burly repairman is trying to open a cabinet or drawer on a safe, but he seems not to have the right tools. So I look at his screwdriver and take a bit off the handle and say, "Wouldn't this fit onto that piece and then go under the lock and unscrew it?" He thinks I'm just BRILLIANT! I'm pleased. THEN he can't get purchase and is REAMING the threads and I suggest his ASSISTANT lean in from the outside so that the wall of the cabinet can't move outward and allow the screwdriver to slip. I'm now his mechanical GOD! Yeah!
3/7/94: 7:30AM: 1) I'm looking at a PAINTING and a representation of a painting, and the RED turns to ASHES that I MOISTEN and drag, rubbing, out across the card, then I look up to the painting, of a lush green forest glade, and it's been BURNT and bruised and blasted, and I SHOUT and cringe, while others seem not to see what I KNOW I see. 2) Driving to a mystical meeting, in Paris, and a lovely girl commands that I come with her in her white-sheeted front seat that has no legroom in it---it's supposed to be a car but it's only a BOX, and, driving along, a yellow Buick next to us slowly TURNS SIDEWAYS, moving along the highway SIDEWAYS until it hits a turnoff to the right, and gracefully CONTINUES its spin till it STOPS right at the entrance to a Buick REPAIR shop. 3) AT the mystical meeting, there's a display of coins, with a sign saying "Andromache wants to test you," and I pick up a coin that's just VIBRATING with ENERGY in my FINGERS, and I exclaim to someone nearby, "I've never FELT such ENERGY in a COIN," feeling that the BOX holding the coins must be EXCESSIVELY ELECTRICALLY charged to give ALL of the coins a jolt in ANYONE'S hands, but other guys are looking at a large display of blue and yellow comic strips that they say are "remarkably perceptive" with their Disney cartoon-figures and blue cavorting clowns. VERY strongly emotionally fraught series of dreams!
3/8/94: 11:58AM!! 1) I'm in some building and a CUTE kid seems attracted to me; we chat and seem to become friends, and then his family comes over: a small group of mother, father, and two or three siblings, but the bald-headed father is Patrick Stewart! (And I note that the previously typed---though not at the MOMENT---dream from 2/28 ALSO refers back to Star Trek!) I try to contain my excitement and put out my hand to say, "I'm Bob Zolnerzak," and he responds, "I'm Patrick Stewart," and I think this might be a WONDERFUL encounter. 2) Various caged animals are attacking each other across barriers, and there's some strange computer involvement in that a DISPLAY of the barriers---as they're broken down---goes from six to five to four to three, and then it has to take two adjacent screens, so that when the barriers go down to two, it's clear that the LAST one is on the "boundary" between one screen and the other, and when the penultimate screen is cleared on ONE screen, BOTH screens will appear to be clear, the remaining boundary being AT the boundary between the screens, like the moment in editing where additions to ONE line will extend that line "past the edge" of the screen, and will form a SECOND line instantly when <ENTER> is hit. The animals seem to be more and more vicious, leaping toward the barrier with open-mouthed roars of rage, hardly frustrated when encountering the mesh of the final barrier---and then it seems that animals are attacking each other from BOTH sides of the barrier, leading to the thought that the BARRIER is actually a MIRROR, and the animals are only attacking their own IMAGES in the mirror---though their ferocity would seem to imply being "incited" by smells or sounds or appearances BEYOND a mere reflection. The psychological aspects of "mirroring" come to mind only after I wake, and I think the dream might "reflect" certain aspects of my own personality that are coming to the surface and battling with other aspects of my personality (games versus productivity, earning versus spending, aging versus maintaining youth, travel versus staying home, entertainment versus writing, etc). Then, afterwards, in an effort to soften the images of the fury of the animals, I concede that these MIGHT be actual caged animals in mating pairs, so that their urge to merge has sexual avidity behind it, and the meeting of the animals won't result in annihilating destruction but ecstatic sexual and reproductive frenzies of sensation and production. [Had been doing a GREAT Actualism session, JUST getting to the final level, when Pope phoned about 11AM, and we talked till about 11:45, and now it's 12:10PM and I have to get out to meet Carolyn at Acadia Parish for lunch by 12:30, and the day is HALF GONE ALREADY, and I have the index to do, the letters to the Sundance Brooklyn Heights group to print and mail before going to Village Playwrights! And I won't even PRINT this yet due to the backlog of dreams to transcribe.]
3/11/94: 10:20AM: 1) Handsome fellow named Don, sitting in dim light near window (Monticello in La Cage last night?) talks softly to me and I hope for a friendly relationship and sex. 2) I'm looking at two fish in a small bottle, and the CAP is sealed. How can they BREATHE? I uncap it and the liquid starts BUBBLING and BOILING! Horrified, I watch as fish writhe, the smaller dies, and the larger POKES DESPAIRINGLY with gill-fins at the body, OBVIOUSLY BERSERK with sadness and despair!! 3) I look to see a FIRE on the carpet under the TV, put it out, and see MOSS and GRASS and DIRT on my GOOD BROWN carpet and wonder how I can EVER clean the burnt and dirty areas. A lamp is toppling and I string its light cord to a corner of the desk to "balance" it, but tell myself that I have to remember not to TRIP over the cord and try to lower it somehow.
3/14/94: 10AM: I'm at a job in a new building in a California town (Susan M. moving?) and have only to make a page-revision to show SOMEONE plans for new offices in a building. Driving down for coffee, and I go out to see almost MOTLEY groups in halls as I go to lunch. Picture of three guys opening windows by standing on sills after air-conditioner on high (I THOUGHT to make a cover-noise for a secret convention) blows stuff off desks and raises dust from carpet-crevices. Down to next-door green-park for SOLDIERS playing games with secretaries, turn to a shopping mall with COMPLEX surfaces and kiosks, and a ZOO with an orange "robin" in the middle of all-blue birds and workers are throwing rocks, and ONE expert is HITTING FLYING rocks EXACTLY where he aims them, and I go up a grassy slope to the road back to work, where I see an edging model of COAST from the harbor jetties, past central hotels, crumbled areas, to OUR office building next to beach from harbor---VERY detailed plan!
3/17/94: 9:30AM: I'm in an Army barracks before a summer training program, and go out to watch a land-effect aircraft land, and it whizzes close overhead and tips over with a roar, rusty ruffled undersides upward, and top turret is pulled off and junky auto-body interior is burnt and dented, but it seems the two pilots are OK. Back at base, before lunch, young Chinese girl, Rita-at-8-like, insists on SEEING it, and I try driving along coast, but we don't quite get there.
3/21/94: 4AM: Bed at 9:30PM after Joan Ann and Sundance gatherings, NICE. I'm feeling a married couple, they ask about my salad, insisting I must blanch vegetables, and I say "simple" like Dennis said of zucchini quiche. She's cold, wearing "no underwear" under MAN'S suit---kinky! I light lights in huge castle but get little LIT, but she finds space heater. I close monster-stove with multiple flames that folds up neatly. Then out to climb hill for picnic, near PLEASANT loud-radio group, and I wake thinking of Edgardo and Marina and Sandra, feeling nicely nostalgic, happy that I could be cared for by them lovingly in my dotty old age.
3/24/94: 7:25AM: UGLY dream of "older brother" as a MONSTER who wants to bully and curse and INJURE me, who WILL NOT STOP torturing me, though I CHEW on his fist until his knuckles are a bloody bony mush like a bleeding plate of spaghetti. He laughs evilly and RETURNS to a musical accompaniment whose notes VANISH, to be replaced by ugly metallic scrapes and shrieks, screams and throaty roaring moans, and ear-wrenching cacaphony and Gehenna-sounds of devils and the lamentations of the damned, cursing themselves, everyone else, and God! Ugliest possible scenario.
3/25/94: 8:30AM: LOTS of OPERA-attending details: late for new Ring and sit in AISLE complaining to usherette I SHOULD be allowed to get to my seat A1, which at intermission turns out to be UNDER a bleacher of only four seats, narrow and wet. Try to read program and a KID keeps TALKING to impress me with how much he knows; as I read last bit of program his FATHER finally tells him to shut up. In this REVISED Ring, Wagner tries HARDER to make his hero "unconnected" to humans by introducing "Vater," who's both the hero's father AND mother, and the program, in runic script, refers to "Nimrod," an angry God, as Vater's father, or even his ONLY parent.
3/26/94: 9:30AM: 1) I go to the toilet in Ruth F.'s house in Constanz and see a huge PINK coil of excrement-like material floating. I flush and it breaks up RELUCTANTLY into flaky pieces, except for one long loop that turns languidly in the swirling water. I go out to the hall and she says, "I'd gotten some salmon for paté, but one layer went bad and I had to throw it out or it would have made us all sick." 2) Also, held up old SUIT pants that I'd been wearing and the ASS was so thin you could actually see spots of PINK FLESH through it, and I decided I MUST change and finally throw these out!
3/28/94: 9:10AM: 1) Guy shows me his skin tab and I tell him it's not to worry, I can pick it off, though it DOES bleed for a while. 2) Playing with some guy's HUGE cock, squeezing and having HIM suck on it and getting excited MYSELF and wake hard.
3/29/94: 9:15AM: LONG saga in India, looking at some multi-chapter Indian STORY (like Ramayana), only it's an endless set of lists like I looked at yesterday: Usenet mailing lists. Also out on a VERY long pier into a river that's so REGULAR it's more like a CANAL, and I think I should have brought my CAMERA, but it's so BORING a view (flat ground, straight banks, tourists) I don't NEED to, I'll REMEMBER it, but my current depression shows up here too: I'll probably be SORRY I didn't exert the ENERGY to return to the hotel on this last day to take a last memory-picture. I wake and EDGARDO phones, which makes me VERY happy.
4/2/94: 8AM: 1) I'd DESCRIBED it as "a World Series game," but it was the "first half," so it must have been a "Super Bowl game," where I was INTERVIEWED on national TV, and selected to run (EVERYONE waving) the length of the field (or HALF field) to ANOTHER oval with RACERS down the hill toward the rear. And find what's the LOWEST point of the UNIVERSITY building. Inside, down various stairways, and at FINAL basement, some AUTHORITY raises the final EXIT door and shows me the green POOL of "Kon-Trol" which is some sort of ANTIFREEZE or DEFROSTING DIP that uses K (potassium). "What's NEXT door, at the Hyatt Hotel's lowest?" THAT'S DISCARDED, WASTE water or antifreeze from hired cars, from the garage SO low it has no DRAINAGE, the lowest point in the STATE, I know, is IN that hotel, for waste water. It's 3:20PM, which I think is the LATEST to return to the GAME and report, thinking, "First half ended at 2, from noon, so it took me an hour and twenty minutes to GET here," but then I think, "No, game started at 1, there's an HOUR intermission, so it took me TWENTY minutes and I can get BACK in twenty minutes, so I'll be on TV AGAIN." An older couple asks, "When did you graduate?" I say, "Akron University, 1957." "Do you have a SISTER from Lima (I think that's "Nerk, Ahia"), 12 years later?" and I'm overwhelmed by the synchronicity that they KNOW my sister in Florida! Incredibly EXCITING dream. [Again, I THINK phone rings ONCE at 8AM, but I'm not REALLY sure.] 2) I'm hosting a party in a FABULOUS suite (like a Don M. super-apartment) and it starts with 6-7 people I know, but after an hour about 70 revelers, some in costume, some almost naked, arrive SCREAMING with anticipation. I go from room to room trying to shit (which I'm doing now) and "The Confessional" is full and "The Marble Crypt" has a line. Coming from another elevator bank, a gaggle of men produces a young blond who cruises me momentarily, then sneers, "You were probably at David's End in 1951, I'm looking for someone YOUNGER." Steam comes from showers and steam rooms, and I'd found a blue-lit sort of stairway up to a magical pergola earlier, and went BACK outside to see enemy airplanes diving low to check us out, and a balloon with a flaming engine careens lower and explodes in an open garden, highlighting the naked backs of a few survivors who scramble to safety as I see that the gate to the field in which they've crashed is open and I really SHOULD try to see if there's anyone else trapped in the burning wreckage, and wake with a feeling of chilled horror, a group of women that I half recognized had arrived at the party before, and I figured this suite was so BIG that people could simply take care of themselves without my attention---indeed, most of them didn't even KNOW me---and I wondered WHO had announced to the convention that it was open to everyone, and HOW had I lucked out with the Busby Berkeley roof? I patted my wallet in my pants to ensure they couldn't rip off anything of MINE---the hotel's property was the HOTEL's worry. DOZENS of men rushing about, cleaning spaces.
4/3/94: 7:45AM: I'm somewhere in the FAR north of Scandinavia, ready for the last north-going trek, and others are packing and joking and saying words that make us laugh and say, "Now we're ALL speaking Danish." Look at some woman's pack and see she's taking carved wooden souvenirs NORTH with her, and say she should leave everything she can HERE and pick them up on the way BACK. I think it's one day's trek north, then the plane-assist to return to warmer climes in the south.
4/4/94: 9:30AM: Seems I had this dream RECENTLY: a man has a BEAR or APE for a pet that he MASSAGES the limbs and participating hands of, the creature grimacing as knuckles are cracked and muscles are stretched. THIS time, he did a drawing of a dog (or bird) smelling a bear (or ape) from Germany, though he DENIED that's what the drawing SHOWED.
4/5/94: 9:45AM: Huge initiatory ritual---STARTING with a point and EXPANDING to all life, what had been important becomes trivial and vice versa. Scan "forward" changed from "unabridged" to "visi-scan" at start of day 2. I THOUGHT I was seated in seat 38, lowest "core" set with the most brutish hunks, who would have been the "best" of the "old," THEN to seat 65, in the "middle," then to seat 98, the "last seat on ground floor." Then through a door to the SECOND floor, where at first there's ONLY one tier, though it's ONE of the "top pantheon." Then I move to almost "top place," among certain men who were "men of the camp." Then it turns out that his WIFE is close to the leader of the troupe, so sex is important here. On the SECOND day I shout out LOUD and can't even FIND them. Start my trainee's camp and TELL them I'm in, say, "Life Force," and I'm LOOKED UP to, with admiration, and they tell me about "user's" steps and try to play UP to me and give me their phone numbers and philosophies, and seductive messages that I take with me. "So how can I find the movement?" Staff at FIRST tells me where I can leave MESSAGE at each HOUSE but I say, "No, there's no adventure THERE," and they give a gasp at my effrontery, and I determine that it was a day to "get lost," and I did it in SUCH a complex way that I ADDED a new LEVEL to the day's purpose ITSELF. [I can BARELY read my scribbles here!] 2) Forgot long middle section on MORNING of second day when I had to WALK out of camp, not knowing which way my camp's BUS went, but I figure ALL exits EVENTUALLY end up at the same highway and I get a ride and CHANCE takes me to where I NEED to be, VERY much like Simple Men last night, which may have been one of the triggers for these INSANE dreams!
4/9/94: 3:30AM: 1) I'm in some big old house (like Quintandinha in Petropolis outside Rio) and notice an odd "dim-bright" area on marble wall, where an old PAINTING had protected the wall from being POLISHED through the years, making THAT area DIMMER. I went closer and a young woman did what I wanted to do: moistened a finger and rubbed across the juncture---CLEANING the dim area to SHINE like the REST of the wall and offer a more DISTINCT reflection. 8AM: 2) A parachuting woman spy keeps looking at a map of Ireland where she has to walk south along the coast from the Essela River to her camp 334, this probably being from Medea: her being exiled from Corinth to Athens last night, or MY walk over the George Washington Bridge this morning?
4/11/94: 7AM: Rita's going to lunch somewhere near where we're staying in the Adirondacks, and I follow about an hour later, figuring to surprise her, but go into a rustic-looking place OUTSIDE to go to the door I think leads to the johns, but another guy says goes to "the main room," and go through the FAR door into a HUGE lobby with TRAINS set up on the ceiling, lounges full of old people smoking, and LOTS of elegant bars and restaurants. Get caught up in sales-areas of model war-games and battle-zones, and look down to see Robin Williams as a sales ploy, seriously talking with a reporter, but he looks ABOUT to SLEEP.
4/12/94: 9:30AM: Group-Game: SIMPLE world: red/green. Red indicated by A. Two individuals pass blue back and forth. Malversion predicts red vanishes and world dies. Green produced by B, warlike Malversion predicts green vanishes and world won't die. How? #1: Blue is SEX, B kills AT change. #2: A desires B and kills. #3: kills ME: kill Malversion and change to COCKROACH world. (Interim: I feel I FAIL, like non-cutting daggers.) [AGAIN, lots of words I couldn't READ!]
4/13/94: 8AM: Wake with a sensitive hard-on after dreaming of a threesome of exquisite cock-teasing, where two (me and Tony?) have come so close to orgasm we divert ourselves by bringing a third (Bob R?) to the joint point of orgasm. After I wake, I tease only the HEAD, then the back, of my cock, then bind with two bands and get out the furpiece, and finally smoke to a point at which I finally cum, thinking of Leni Riefenstahl's sublimated sex at 90 with a manta ray and The Best Little Boy in the World unknowing of his FIRST orgasm.
4/16/94: 8:15AM: I'm with a young group, traveling in remote Turkey, and we don't know how we're getting to the next city: a) Bus? It comes---When? Don't know. b) Rent a car? Wide-eyed non-response from local guide. Itinerary is wrong. Please don't care. Where's my book to read for 3-4 hours? What's on road? "Miles and miles of view." No fear of DANGER, just boredom. Thinking of Kathy O.'s not-planned when-phoning? 10AM: I'm in an NYU students' lounge and three people seen to know me and want to talk to me. Leave, and one guy pulls out a VERY cute cock and I draw up a chair to linger. He starts an impromptu lecture and I have problems and a couple of observers from school look straight away from me.
4/28/94: 6:45AM: What starts as a "spy novel," moves from the Paris of an assassin I'm trying to escape, becomes a story of trying to get to a Metropolitan Opera performance on the grounds of the Cleveland Clinic from a TRAIN I've arrived on. We stop, I get off, and am told to "Go to the main entrance," but I find that the train is pulling out of the station BEFORE I can get off. Another stop is "fifteen minutes before curtain time," and I try to crawl through a small window that other people are using to crawl INTO the train, and I look at the people, fearing they won't understand English, and finally tell a swarthy Sicilian, "Tell the people behind you that I'm coming OUT." But I don't quite make it before the train starts again and I go forward to an agent-supervisor who takes out a key and opens a GATE for me, causing me to shout, "You could have done this for me BEFORE!" I climb onto one door of the heavy gate and force both doors together so that the latch will catch and make it easier for HER to clamber up over the fence with me. I find myself in an ENDLESS inner court as the opera is STARTING, and fragments of furniture and fabric reach out to me as I FRANTICALLY try to get to the auditorium for the opera. Wake in a SWEAT! [Later in day: What a pity I waited for over a month to transcribe some of these dreams, for many of them had lots of additional details that I could have added had I transcribed them on the day that I actually had the dream. Better luck later!]
4/30/94: 6:30AM: [Mom is here!] I'm walking to 1221 Dietz, and a New York beggar, young and bright-eyed, comes up behind me and asks for money, pointing to my visible wallet-bulge in my back pocket. I refuse, but he's obviously dangerous and going to try to rob me. I walk faster, past second house from corner, past third house from corner---he's just about to reach to take my wallet when I shout, "Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, MOM" and dash up my front steps, and he leaves in frustration.
5/5/94: 8AM: I'm in Germany having sex with a succession of sadists, one of whom pulls a RAT out of a crack in the wall, holds it by its tail TOO long, and drops it into a paper bag he REFUSES to close and throw away, trying to make ME fear the rat, and I REFUSE. A man with a lovely oiled chest (like Hercules in film yesterday) lets me play with his tits. Women and other men look on in bored amusement. Sexy/ugly dream that STARTED much more tamely, with details I've forgotten. At 8:40AM I recall: men were paired, through cards, like Mahjongg, in forfeits or instructions to be done in sequence or all together.
5/9/94: 7:30AM: CENTIPEDE from side of my COCK: Ken L. arrives and it crawls back in, he leaves and it finally SHOOTS out! Then a raucous party where we're waiting for some famous person to arrive.
5/11/94: 10:30AM: Sewer tunnel: microphone/power cord. Shot with kids hanging on my cord. Cord under broken surface-ice. Foot-deep water---HOW to FIND cord? Pull and BREAK it? "Bracket" the area and find it? Unworldly or computer aura!
5/17/94: 4AM: I'm walking toward my job as a festival guide on the side-paths outside the hall, and a volunteer meets me and asks if she can follow me to our posts. ONE of us (I'm not clear about dream) is carrying a hot-air register grille: one side painted black, other WHITE, on a long STICK. We get to a park leading down into a main gathering and see a succession of watering cans filled with milk or rather empty BLUE or RED sherbet boxes, and I try to direct her to stuff empties into each other to have MORE room for people to EAT more neatly and have more space in cans to put empty boxes. Odd! Dentist today? Slideshow?
5/18/94: 7AM: VERY erotic dream: a sexy bachelor attempts to rape a beautiful wife, his cock hard and thrusting against her. Her husband comes up and demands she jerk him off to disgrace him, but she's so tentative she brings the stiff cock to the edge of ejaculation but is too maidenly to bring him off, begging her husband to release her from her onerous duty. The husband's beautiful bony fingers reach toward the long-struggling cock and testily enfold it, as it spurts, and the husband's hand moves as if hypnotized, and the cock spurts a long stream again, and AGAIN, and I wake aroused and cum.
5/20/94: 9:30AM: FedEx wakes me from dreaming about talking with Mom about my insistence on seeing a Disney cartoon-show at the Booth (3) Theater, which starts at 8PM, even though I glance at my watch and see that it's just before 7:55PM and will clearly be impossible to get there on time, even if the subway is waiting for me at Clark Street. But I want to get out, and can't find the listings in New York Magazine for the address for Booth (3), even though I figure it's in the Times Square area and I'll get out at 42nd Street and search. Find a cartoon-like listing (rather like the new cartoons on the penultimate page of New York magazine) that shows black-and-white-reproduced cells on a black (background-less) square, and for the first time think it might be a MOVIE, though I'm convinced that it's showing only at theater-work times, since I sneer at Mom when she says, "Why can't you go before 3:30PM on Monday, when you have more time?" and I respond, "Because Broadway plays aren't put ON before 3:30PM on Mondays." [Type this on computer because of all the details I didn't want to bother putting in illegible scrawl on notes to be transcribed badly later.]
5/28/94: 7:10AM: I'm in a plane that's taking off just to the right of a long freight train and WE go and the TRAIN goes and it seems to take a LONG time to leave the ground, but as I'm sitting in the front right seat (like a BUS rather than a plane) I can see the ground underneath, and it's grassland, so we're obviously PAST the road or the runway. It looks marshy below, with a small lake ahead, and we start turning right for our one- or two-hour flight to some northern Midwestern state like Michigan or Illinois. SOME anxiety on flying, but not TERRIBLE.
6/2/94: 9AM: NIGHTMARE! Woke about 4AM, too lazy to write the awful details of the decaying house in which Dennis and I took refuge after having been terrorized by implacably evil hoodlums in a strange town, and the enduring image is my SLIDING down wrecked staircases from our fifth-floor room to meet him coming UP at the second flight, where there's an obstruction that forms a tiny TUNNEL on the stairs that we have to clamber OVER to negotiate, and HE has been so affected by the terrible things that happened to us previously that HE'S now fighting against me with malign and completely un-understandable viciousness.
6/3/94: 7AM: 1) I look into a VERY stark IBM outer office: immaculate desks in blonde wood, yellow leather guest chairs, two impeccable female secretaries chat because there's no work for them to do. I enter and they offer me a violet drink from a HUGE glass decanter. They pour mine into a clear glass and it's COLORLESS, so I think there's been WATER in it and ignore it, picking up the huge tumbler to find an office boy to siphon off the bottom and can SEE that the purple liquid pours CLEAR in a tinier volume. 2) I have a TICKET voucher for a movie preview of the Spielberg/Lucas-epic type, and a line of kids is RUNNING through a HUGE Cineplex-basement set of corridors, and someone's dumb MOTHER, behind me, keeps PUSHING me along. We go through 4-5 corridors and end in front of refreshment booths where manicured mannequins are doling out free snacks. "Yogurt and milk?" one asks me and I say yes, picking up a fruit salad, looking at what may be a bowl of whipped cream, but looks more like blue-cheese salad dressing. The "yogurt" comes in a cereal bowl and the fruit-salad server has a LONG decorative handle covered with candied fruit which is both awkward to eat and awkward to carry. I nibble fruit off the end and curl the handle back. Then to the lobby to proffer my voucher, and sassy manager says, "Yes, you must present YOUR voucher (like Audience Extras?)---if you don’t show me a BUILDING-entrance permit, I'll throw you out on your CAN." Present my ticket with Joe (and I'm amazed he's SPEAKING to me!) and the movie's STARTED with what looks like a line of chorus boys in a Chinese restaurant and I think, "It's like Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom!" Our seats are down a dark aisle and in a mostly empty row of easy-chair-type seats, and we sit with my yogurt next to Joe's seat, and he KEEPS ON scrabbling on the floor as if I'd spilled it on his shoes, and he grumbles and says, "I'll get rid of that for you," while I remonstrate, "I WANT it," and he FLIPS it onto the shoulder of the aghast guy next to him as the theater lights come up brightly and he PLOPS the rest of it down the guy's suit-front and rubs and rubs it in with glee. I'm HORRIFIED!
6/4/94: 7:50AM: I'm attending a VERY strange auction, the female auctioneer saying the prices will be VERY high, so we must be prepared to be generous. She's a VERY superior type, and starts with a jar used in pool-games with a "2-ball" that's FLAT and a "powder-duster bag" that was somehow used 2000 years ago in Greece (pool from Roommates on TV last night?). Bidding didn't start when the alarm woke me for my Kykuit tour.
6/5/94: 7:30AM (after going to bed at 9PM!): I'm on a TRIP (WOW!). Woman draws circle on map of Sicily to show where we are, and I think "Cattalnisetta." Then I'm in a real DIVE and try to go downstairs and everyone's coming UP, so I must wait, then I "float/fly" down the first two flight sand skim down 4-5 MORE flights, then I'm in a tight top bunk---a cute waiter tries to get into locker, pushing on the bed away from the wall in a practiced way, and I wake thinking I should have groped him. It seems there was MUCH more, but I've forgotten.
6/8/94: 9:15AM: I'm trying to get into an orgy bar, but there's some sort of "entry exam," with a bogus-looking doctor, for "health reasons." I'm told to lie down, and I lie on my back, and he laughs and says, "Turn over now." I say, "I NEVER turn over." Others laugh but seem to have to accept my word. Then he lies down with me and wants to fondle me, but I refuse, and I'm refused entry in return. Fuming with frustration in the dream AND as I wake: should I try to DISGUISE myself again just to get in, or would they REMEMBER me and turn me down again out of SPITE? Should I try to call the police down on them? REPORT or punish them in some way? But they imply they're impervious to punishment. I feel that the whole system is just CRAPPY!
6/10/94: 5:45AM: 1) AWFUL dream of a grotesque UNDERWATER (though we obviously breathe and SEEM to be on land, FISHES in BREATHTAKING colors float above us in the "air" and scrabbling deer swim past on a flat surface about 30 feet above us) scene, where heroes are ENORMOUS and extraordinarily sexy, and a menace GRABS me by the hair and PULLS me painfully through WALLS for sheer malicious FUN, roaring with laughter, while, on semi-waking, sights of what look like corpuscles moving through FLESH and LEAVES flood my sight---changing colors ALMOST at my WILL in my painful, drowsy, morbid state. 2) 8:45AM: I'm walking home in Akron and see the "Brown Street Shuttle" and get on and it ZOOMS past blocks of bookshops (that I didn't know Akron had) to a closer corner. Driver gets off and I ask her "What's next stop?" and she says "This is the last, all get off." I start across a field where every ROCK's abuzz with little flies, then I walk onto ridges of dirt like three-foot-wide plowed furrows, and white spiders have made HOLES in the loose earth and are feasting on flies, which in turn eat the dead spiders' carcasses. I walk yards on this insect abattoir and come to shallow water in which I see duck-like baby platypuses swimming in the murky water like distant dugongs or manatees, then see the approaching shadows of what may be giant turtles, but the LAST one is certainly a faster-swimming CROCODILE. I move out of the water as the figure glides nearer, and I near the shore with that awful foot-dragging nightmare-slowness that strains the legs and panics the mind, and to my horror the shore is SLICK, as if covered in rolling PLASTIC, and I fear that if I SLIP I'll be in REAL danger from the croc, which swims closer to increase in size from about three feet in the water to about seven feet on land. I walk VERY carefully (though NOT as slowly as on slippery shower floor at gym, of which this reminds me) and seem to get away as I walk, feeling TIRED and achy and OLD, and nasally and orally dried out from two cigarettes with sex last night!
6/12/94: 7AM: First I seem to be an accountant for an African safari-operator: on the back of a matchbook (like the one I sent off for stamps a few days ago?) I list how many days people have worked, doing what task, though I have to add that our boss was in the hospital on the 28th-29th of the month because I have no other information to fill in. A woman guide announces proudly that she's cornered the clearance for the sale of beads in the markets, and everyone should work as hard as she does, but I think, "I'd rather spend my time sightseeing, rather than earning a pittance through hours in markets." But I'm not quite sure where to get the guides' balances for my accounts, and WHY am I doing it on matchbook-insides? Second, it seems to be a sort of detective story: a man has files, two sheets of which give personnel lists of some spy-or-drug-or-other-illegal operation, and then men seem to vanish to another corner to escape, or have been killed, and two women are in a throng of other women being filmed in a Frontline-type report where women are demanding to have either justice or their husbands, and one woman is trying hard not to cry, and a film-clip shows her riffling through her husband's or lover's file sheets, which are MISSING the two pages that have been taken by "enemy" infiltrators.
6/13/94: 7:30AM: We're in some sort of speech class, and Mom does VERY well with her demo with a minimum of coaching---everyone seems to realize that trying to interfere would lessen her performance. As you perform, you leave, and the class is down to three or four, and I haven't prepared anything---but since there will be no one to HEAR it, it hardly seems to matter. Maybe I'll lie and say, "I memorized it," and make it up as I go along. But I wake before it comes to any deadline and I can learn whether I pass or fail the course.
6/14/94: 9:35AM: In a WordPerfect-type listing, men change their characters in novels or a play: a transvestite might appear as his original gender, or staid office workers might become leathermen, or dowdy secretaries become divas. Numbers on the lists are like the page numbers on which these characters appear, with annotations for particularly sexy, attractive, odd, or repulsive transformations. There are dozens of listings over hundreds of pages, though scenes or acts appear to be divided into even-hundred groupings, like indexing pages. Though I'd had up to a week without dreams as recently as 5/20-28, and I didn't have one for 6/11, I'm beginning to get bored with this almost-daily transcription of dreams. Again the question: WHY AM I DOING THIS? comes up, though the sheer WEIGHT of what I've transcribed in the PAST seems to imply that I SHOULD continue through the future. Now that I've got it all on ONE file, too, it should be easy to see how they PROGRESS through the years: fewer nightmares, almost NO repetitions currently, though relatively fewer APOTHEOSES which wake me with the entire plot for a new play or story or way of life. Maybe I'll just upload them all onto the Internet and let the WORLD take from them what they may? That's the problem about being "caught up": I have time to worry about what to do NEXT, or worry if what I'm doing NOW is satisfactory, or to be too concerned about moment-to-moment decisions which, in stress, become automatic.
6/17/94: 8:40AM: I'm going to my desk and happen to move my hand close to a pipe-riser, and it's HOT. Feel the plastic around some notebooks, and it's warm but not too bad. Look up to see the pipe ENDS at a flambeau-like top, with dark heat-stains fanning up from it. I put one hand over the top and it's VERY hot, and suddenly a wind starts up BEHIND me, rising to a COLD FURY streaming TOWARD the pipe, as if it's ASPIRATING all the room-air TOWARD it. Papers fly, I gasp, it slows and stops, and I watch, warm/cool, next to the pipe.
6/18/94: 8:30AM: 1) Sex with Edgardo, 2) Indexing a book and trying to find the proper indexing words with which to say "This book" and "This indexer." 3) Lost.
6/24/94: 8:43AM: So many details had been clear when I woke at 8AM; fewer memories now. I'm touring in Germany (from Paul M.'s agreement yesterday to take a Baltic tour with me?), where no one speaks English (from Robert Heinlein's Tramp Royale that I'm reading now?), and I come up with three wonderful phrases based on "That's Wonderful," "That's Glorious," and "That's Right" that I've forgotten. Get served from a huge platter: the asparagus seems to expand from a bunch to a huge flower-arrangement of meat and vegetables (from a combination of the lovely chicken-meat last night at Chez Madeleine and the barbecue at the Beard on Sunday?), the green of the green beans somehow changing into the red-black edges of roasted beef. There are children in colorful costumes (somehow reminiscent of the children in The Man with No Face that I watched on videotape yesterday) whose functions and features I've forgotten. I remember using "Danke shoene," knowing it was "Thank you," but there were other phrases which were only half-right but understood by my eager-to-please hosts in this hotel-restaurant in which we stopped. At least I managed to get the computer up and running and get THIS much recorded by 8:50.
6/25/94: 9AM: I'm in a house with a very specific floor plan [drawing of a large L-shaped room with a "tail-hall" leading from the lower right to a small square room quite a distance from the main party-room] with a bored host, and people can get ANYTHING they want. I MUST socialize, but what do I REALLY want?
6/27/94: 8AM: I'm visiting and interviewing great chefs (looking through July Beard News last night?) in upstate NY, and someone like Sirio Maccioni is being very boisterous, cracking jokes and flinging bon mots, and I fear much impersonal verbalism (from reading Heinlein's Tramp Royale?). Other chefs enter and start slapping and punching each other and I can't figure out how to act. Three archers come out to cleared patio, shoot ropes across a ravine that complexify into a rope BRIDGE/hammock. Astounding reactions to my possible-Baltic trip?
6/28/94: 9:30AM: I watch a sanitation man use two hoses to wash sand from piles across a street to form a smooth beach, and try it myself to help him out, but find his practice makes it look easy when it's hard to do efficiently.
7/1/94: 2:15AM: To the song "I've just got to get a message to her (roll on, un huh; roll on)" the final sequence of the dream took place as I entered a burnt wooden framework in the woods filled with "experience-participants" that had run and entered before I could get there, and with glad shouts they swung sideways against the weakened structure until it pulled away from its supports and began to roll down the hill toward another participant-filled structure, which rocked slightly out of the way, so that the collision was imperfect, permitting the original cage-like latticework of carbonized wood to cartwheel sideways as the participants exulted in their crashing through the wooded growth, and the second structure began skidding downhill, dragging some trailing participants in a netlike bundle: the last, a man clad in white-tight shorts, was dragged on his back, headfirst, so that he scraped along the ground, the dream-quality being heightened by the circumstance that there was absolutely no blood or visible bruising caused by these convulsions that a group of movie stuntmen would be hard-pressed to endure safely, while others alongside him were being equally dragged on their sides, fronts, or even heads, rolling and scraping along the forested ground laughing uproariously. I'd GOTTEN to the structure after having run to catch up with a strong female experience-guide (rather like a younger-than-I'd-ever-known-her Margaret M., having the characteristics of a bulldyke-strong Louise-WhateverHerLastName [who sent me to Grossalbert in Johannesburg]) whose name I knew started with an "A," and as we walked along, I clasping her waist for support as she strode toward the next station in the experience, she said, "Arabella," as I felt under her thin blouse a structure that might have been a tiny nipple had I not been feeling a section of her side. Previously, struggling up a hill with difficulty, she had said, "You also have cancer," at which I smiled and ruefully observed: "That's the THIRD thing you said I have that I----didn't know (not wanting to offend her or the seeming rules of the experience), the second being AIDS, and the first being [I forget now]”). We were leaving what I dimly recall as the CENTRAL dream-experience, loaded with threat and danger and only-dream-preserved physical safety, which I was about to protest to her by asking, "But if the experience is only in my MIND, how can it change my feelings about such an experience if it were to happen in REAL LIFE?" The first, core, experience had me somehow exalted in a group of fellow-participants, as if challenged to "be highest," and I had calmly claimed Godhood, and they had acknowledged my claim, which I knew only to be a mental ploy rather than actuality. [Clearly this was all based on my fantasies, just before falling asleep not sooner than 1:30AM, having gotten into bed after smoking and cumming to porno by 12:20AM and lying a LONG time thinking of finding a rich "soul-mate" at the Rosicrucian Retreat due to depart in only 6.5 hours now, at 9AM, lying calmly and thinking of his having a triplex atop Cityspire into which I would move, with my books on the lowest floor, my computer on the middle floor, and my bedroom in an aerie on the top floor; and he would have the sexiest-possible orgasm and immense wealth, and he would have been waiting for a superior peer just as I think of my self as having been doing for the past years since Dennis---or since John or even Bill H. I wished I could remember more details of that core experience: for that reason I dragged myself out of bed, my sheet wrapped around me, to the computer to get the ideas all TYPED, rather than bothering to make notes that I'd struggle over, some distant time, without effectively recalling what words I'd used exactly.] It was est-like, or rather Outward-Bound-like in its physicality in the outdoors, yet we were all protected from physical injury by its dream-quality. It was esoteric in mood, in that we'd "reached a level" that permitted such extravagant proofs of our capability to experience to such depth of fervor. Arabella somehow attached herself to my experience, verifying the vigor of my desire to excel, so that I knew I could ask her for support at the climax of the core experience and the run through the woods which formed the transition to the remembered burnt-wood cages, or tree-supported corrals, in which the second experience occurred. Other, physically stronger, participants I vanquished with the zest of my mentality for the contest. It was as if I had demanded conquest by my Self, and had succeeded, and she exalted in my victory with me---she would have tried to do as much had SHE been only a participant and not a game-guide. There was a feel of specialness about the experience like my pleasure from being on the incredibly individual (and expensive) South African safaris with Delores and Michael. I had striven mightily and had won, had been rewarded, though that would not affect the results of subsequent experiences. [I seem to have described myself out, now at 2:46AM, so I'll finish and get back to bed, possibly hoping to reenter dreams.]
7/6/94: 9:50AM: After falling asleep again at 9:20, this must have happened in just about real time: I'm in the upper story of a five-story building that I know has a turreted top like the Osaka Castle, and then broadens successively
as it goes lower, as if smaller and smaller additions were put onto a building that originally had two or three stories. I'm standing in the middle of what might be an elevated dance floor, with people sitting at tables a half-story below me in nightclub clothes, and when I want to get down to the ground floor, I figure at first to take an elevator, but there appear to be only stairs, and I conclude that adding the stories to the building prohibited constructing a "through" elevator, so there COULD be only stairs. But these stairs are put together from beams and braces and ladders and odd constructions, as if a child experimented with as many ways of descending as he could with a wooden Erector set. I hold onto multi-segmented banisters and go partway down, but then there are four- or five-foot jump-offs that I don't feel like accomplishing. Moving from side to side, I see others descending by sitting in chairs which are cantilevered so that they arc down to deposit the sitter gently on the floor below. I try one, but somehow I'm sitting on the support, and it doesn't move, and then I sit too far to one side, and it starts lowering crookedly, but then I seem to get the hang of it and descend to the next floor. Now it seems like an attic in some sort of gymnasium out of the old University of Akron campus, and I'm wandering through hallways trying to find my way down. Then I'm at the edge of a construction that seems to be a miniature of that central bandstand from which I started: a rounded-off square with many small sub-levels, maybe only two feet high in all where the original construction was eight feet tall, but this is painted in varying shades of purple and blue and primarily red, with parts that come off when I step on them, as if the model hadn't been designed to bear the real weight of people. I try to be careful, but as I finally descend, I break off a sizeable portion, like a fractal-small version of the entire construction, which comes off like a small wooden model or an immense multi-faceted jewel. It breaks off but doesn't fall, as if waiting for me to reattach it somehow. I wake and try to recall the details, not succeeding at all at first, but then the colors of the final model, and the smoky nightclub-like dance floor at the beginning, come back. [Finish by 10:20AM.]
7/12/94: 9:30AM: Just check that it STILL takes a minute for the computer to "come up," with all the additions, though that IS to the document ITSELF, which took even more time with the Radio Shack. To the dream: I've finally gotten to a large party in a huge high-ceilinged mansion. One of the plump female guests, wearing a lavish gown, with a one-inch-square passport photo at her neck like a brooch, says jokingly, "It would be a pleasure to have this place too, but it WOULD be a chore to maintain along with my OWN palatial suite," and I retort, equally jokingly, "How happy you should be that you don't already have FOUR palatial suites, or you'd have been even MORE burdened to add another one," but she doesn't seem to get the joke. Maids are serving appetizers on enormous trays, and one fat maid has trouble getting through a space between a highly decorated table and a doorway because someone has moved the flowers and glasses toward the front of the table, so she precariously balances the tray to one side as she moves the flowers and glasses back, but another waitress comes from behind the table and starts to push HER tray through the door first, causing a slight clash of trays. I've seated myself at a nearby table and reach over to take two silvery disks of some kind of dessert pastry just as the now-freed maid tries to serve me two squares of raw tuna covered with a mustard sauce, and these four items collide at the side of my plate, sending one tuna-square into my bag, where it enters an unzipped part and puts mustard sauce on some of the papers therein, and I joke, adding a phrase to a line I'd said before, "I now have white and yellow and MUSTARD-colored papers." There was some prior section of the dream about the confusions of GETTING to this party, and at the END of dream there was a quasi-waking section dealing with someone's complaint about going to a particular country restaurant which didn't take reservations, and getting slightly lost and arriving later than they had planned, so the waiting line for tables had gotten fairly long. They were pleased the restaurant had started taking reservations, because now when they got lost, they found themselves driving around the entire time of their reservation period, so that when they finally arrived under the NEW reservation regime, they didn't even have a CHANCE to eat, so the "improvement" in the reservation system actually resulted in LESS eating at this exclusive country restaurant. Other details are forgotten by 9:15 wakeup.
7/15/94: 10AM: 1) Meeting Frank Sinatra, in a hammock across from Carter Burden. 2) I'm in a plane taking off, looking out as we gather speed with a hill still above us to the left, and I seem to be looking for a special building on the crest of the hill, rather in the same site as the Cloisters, and the plane was taking off north along the East and Harlem Rivers, but this is a 20-25-story apartment building of shocking white, and we curve around it and gain altitude as we fly south, with nothing but clouds outside the window to see as we rise.
7/19/94: 10:30AM: I'm late for an elegant dinner, but the chef is willing to serve some of the leftovers to me, fluffing up some sort of red pudding which had been served on a kind of folded pancake. I thought he was going to cook me up a pancake from scratch, so I could taste it warm, but it turned out that I'd misunderstood him. As waiters cleared off other tables, I managed to get some of the desserts from their trays---a chocolate-covered stick-of-cake with some sort of poppy-seed filling like Charles had at Florent Sunday, for one. Next to my plate were some chocolate curlicues like cake icing, some soft in dark chocolate, some more brittle in a kind of maple-syrup-flavored chocolate. Then I was in another room and got a last serving that somehow got plastered onto the back of my multicolored sweater. I reached around for a handful of goo and that tasted pretty good, so I looked in a mirror, saw my black-lined eyes and decided that I didn't look THAT bad, and at the limit of my reach came upon a sort of brittle cake decoration that I took a bite of, but it tasted really like plastic, and, on looking more closely, saw it was an Art Deco dress made to look like a cruise ship, with a deck layout formed of plastic or icing like Necco wafers showing passengers and stewards and waiters around dining tables and even crew down in the boiler rooms, all in pastel colors with little brass brads for decoration that held on the discrete bits of plastic forming the various colors. I took the bitten plastic out of my mouth and decided that this would make a wonderful souvenir of the party and a funny story to tell! (RETURN TO JOURNALS 7/19/94).
7/26/94: 9:15AM: After YESTERDAY with book-list at Brooklyn Public Library, and last NIGHT with \COMMO and \ZIP lists, I DREAM of working for IBM on a project I'm NEW on, and I'm asking MOM (I phoned her Sunday AND yesterday evening) if she has time before lunch, or---if she has to go to a meeting---if SHE can help me with a) a PERSONNEL list, b) a set of instructions in ITALIAN (like LVIEW last night?) and not in English, and c) a few other queries I'm trying to see the sense of! AND keep putting on holey SHORTS to cover my NAKEDNESS, as I do in current HEAT!
7/27/94: 8:50AM: 1) I'm finding things to eat among stacks and closets of CLOTHES, when an Army team is packing stuff into a "mobile desk-area with pull-out apron" that turns into a field office. 2) People are being trained to go into fiery rooms and pull out burn victims who are still alive, though injured.
7/28/94: 8:30AM: INCREDIBLE dream, after smoking TWO bidis and cuming softly from porno at 3:05AM, and finding it difficult to get to sleep afterward (and maybe my 300 cholesterol reading and 2000 triglyceride reading from Dr. Chin this afternoon have something to do with my current malaise and "hardness of the gym"?). Woke at 6AM from the dream, too stoned-out-of-my gourd to write notes from it, only noting when I had to arise to shit. It started with details of catching subways that were rather prosaic, but got unusual when Midge and I (thinking about her, with LOTS of other people, who I put onto a person-map this morning, yielding 72 friends/relatives in NYC, 66 in other US, and 22 overseas for a "round" number of friends/relatives of 160 [of whom 13 are relatives]) were looking for a ride, possibly at the END of the subway-ride, and wandered along a fence up to which cars were backed with their trunks open, revealing by the pairs of hands on the bottom of the trunk-opening whether there was room or not in that particular trunk. The first four or five car-trunks were full, but the next-to-last had three vacancies which I left for the larger groups behind us, and the last had two vacancies, and then the two occupants saw that one prospective gal-traveler (is that the feminine of fellow-traveler?) was an older woman, so they vacated a cushioned corner and said that Midge would be most comfortable curled up there. Without transition, we were deposited, seemingly from the air, into a country inhabited by dirty, ugly people, where the ground was covered with mud and the sky was overcast with dirty-brown clouds of humid pollution. We stumbled over supine bodies layered with filth until we heard a small rumor that a breeze might waft our airship into the "clean" land of the next territory, but we had to be careful, because the dirt-land inhabitants would try to stop our escape or recapture us if we did manage to elude the border guards. We breezed over the border, sunlight dappling the green fields below, and Rita and I landed in an amusement park. She raced to a car that was about to take off into a tunnel, but I didn't quite make it to the empty space beside her, so she slid underground without me. Somehow I knew that we were in danger from the spies from dirt-land, and I scrambled to the top of a hillock which was part roller-coaster highest-hill and mountain-top fire-station observatory, looking below me and frantically calling "Rita" to find to where she might have descended. She didn't respond, it became clear that my pursuers were closing in, so I slid down chutes and crawled through barricades to a cliff-side from which was pointed out the "brown safe-haven" hundreds, if not thousands, of feet below, model-like on a promontory surrounded by blue sea. I passed through incredibly detailed countrysides and cityscapes, psychedelically rich in color and texture and sound, at one point with giant jaws chewing through a slab of jungle-greenery, tasted the juicy chlorophyll between my teeth and running down my cheeks, and felt danger behind me, grown hopeless of discovering where I was and how to reach safety, I sort of half-woke and drew myself out of the dream by looking down and seeing the pattern in sandy ground of an unmade mosaic spelling "Get out of here; there's no place like home," and I tried to fill the colored tiles into the mosaic-form, but realized there's a shortcut: I produced a pair of ruby slippers and in my actual awake-body clicked my stacked heels together three times. I lie there, overheated, slightly sweaty, burping when I raise my head to lie on my pillow, debating which of the excretions, urine or feces, seems the most demanding, and try to restart lightwork, wondering if the unusualness of TWO bidis were what precipitated such a strange dream, of which I've managed to capture only 2-3% of its Peter Max coloration and anal-compulsive over-detail.
7/30/94: 9AM: 1) I'm in Akron and think that Akron University is starting. I have to find what class to go to tomorrow morning, so I take a four-page pamphlet and run across a dimly lit street (like Russell Avenue that Charles lived on) in my pajamas to look at the small print of 8AM (aghast that some classes start as early as 4:30AM), and I can't find any in the lights from a car coming along, and I run across the street to home. 2) I'm in an Akron University hallway and see kids heading up to room 310, and I check for mail and finally see notice: "Head behind the diner is CLOSED at dinner." The doors are two thicknesses of opaque plastic separated by noise-deadening airspace. 3) I'm in front of a theater like the Colonial, and ignorant Italian peasants are being razzed by saying, "There's a man in Udine" (Dr. F., last night at the Beard Foundation), and they, from the terrace, don't even know that's their HOME in Alte Adige! 4) I'm bedding with some balding blond, and I start rubbing his back and he cuddles close, then I rub his cock and he hugely juices, and play and play and make him hugely hard, even after cumming two or three times in a row.
8/5/94: 9:20AM: Maybe thinking of my gay-group river-tubing tomorrow, I dream I'm trying out a new baths, only three small rooms, and I begin by lying on my stomach on my bed, but then I decide I'd better turn over, since this is the standard signal that I want to be fucked and I don't. Get up and cruise the rooms, but only a few guys are in the stalled john, hardly anyone in the shower room, and the vacant cruise-room looks like it's never occupied. I seem to start there about 2PM, and it gets a brief flurry of busyness about 5PM, and I think they must all be Wall Street types who come in to get off after work before going home to their wives. Then it's down to 6-8 people, some of whom seem to be more attractive than before, but no one's really looking at me. Then the scene switches and it's as if the baths had been on a train going south to someplace like Philadelphia or D.C. or someplace even farther south, for some kind of gay rally, because when the enormous vehicle stops, some of us still in towels or semi-dressed from the baths exit onto a kind of roof-terrace on the train, overlooking a crowd of a reception committee, mostly women who could even be straight, who are cheering and applauding us and throwing up what turn out to be packets of gum, like "Pink Doublemint" or "DoubleBubble", which I'm not very interested in, though some of the women on the train (where did THEY come from?) seem to be scooping them up. Then one of the receivers is on the roof with me, handing out discount-ticket packets that I literally demand one of by asking, "Are they only for WOMEN?" so she hands me one. I look into a ratty envelope and there are two or three thin-cardboard ticket-chains, each of which has four or five perforated stubs about 1/4 by 1 inch, colored in pallid Necco-wafer pastels, offering 15% off at various clothing shops, 25% off for various rentals that I would never consider even at HALF the price, and maybe ONE food-type or restaurant-type discount ticket that I might consider using. But maybe things will brighten up: it seems that the whole train of us has come down for a political or social gathering for a day or a weekend, and this is just the beginning of the fun. No hint of yesterday's trauma: I should stop alcohol!
8/6/94: 1) 5:20AM: INCREDIBLE saga (had BEFORE?): I'm some EXTRAORDINARY psychotic, possibly living with a crazy twin, who's killed someone, living in a boarded-up basement, having to move a table away from a shit-filled toilet to piss, always listening to whoever may be prowling around outside for fear of being discovered, yet I'm also afraid of someone else IN there with me, of him discovering ME. There MUST be the smell of a rotting body that may reach the outside world too. I'm moving around, trying not to be heard or seen, yet some part of me is also hoping desperately to be rescued from the pursuer. With intermittent flashes that this has happened before! It seems there were MANY MANY more episodes and details, but toward the END someone broke into the house, and I remember (from before) that there were climaxes within climaxes, like the best Stephen King thriller, where it looked like I might escape, but was discovered; that I might kill someone else, but was prevented; might be killed, but was rescued. Then, when the lights went on, I found I was in a decrepit mansion in the middle of something like a bright laboratory-basement where I looked over to see the most INCREDIBLY beautiful and colorful array of ORCHIDS growing over the lab benches covered with beakers and retorts and burners, and as I was being led away to final sanctum, I felt a new level of world-control and FLEW across to the blooms, shouting, "Orchids! Orchids!” as I tore away handfuls of fragrant blooms, wrecking this lovely movie set and thousands of dollars of peak horticultural specimens, but the police seemed not to see me---so I continued, flying from wall to ceiling to adjoining room, grabbing blooms and stems and pots, flinging them about in hurtless abandon---and they STILL didn't see me, so I floated unseen up to a policeman, handsome as he was writing a report on the bloom of a rarity, and ripped open his fly and dug inside for his soft fleshy cock, and, squeezing lasciviously at the base of it, making it hard by running my mouth around its bulbous head, savoring its hardness and sheen and fullness, then going to another, handsomer and more muscular, masculine specimen and grasping another, larger cock, with still the idea that I'd HAD this dream before, and woke---dry-mouthed from the bidi, groggy---and peed, then came to the computer and transcribed this directly, in the dark, hoping NOT to take the time with a note that would be incoherent in the morning, and doing this much by 5:35AM, steadily growing lighter outside (or are my eyes just becoming more adjusted to the dark as I'm awake?), knowing that I've MISSED so many of the colorful details of the first of the dream: the crowded, abandoned-apartment look that echoed my bedroom and hallway at 1221 Dietz, yet I was an adult; the supposed presence of the REAL killer, or at least a menace to my OWN safety that I had to move slowly to avoid; a real presence of my "personal Igor" who would croon sympathetically about the mess in the toilet as I urinated into it; the possibly mummified or rotting carcasses of bodies in plastic or body bags around in musty closets; the general air of disuse and putrefaction and crowded decay. Now I sleep for my trip! 2) 7:05AM: 2) A woman is searching for a TENSELESS English, saying, "Not I, me, my, but for I, at I, is I; and not was, will be, but is then and is future." A male erotic dancer draws a colored picture and asks her how to say "is to cum" and she thinks and says, "Ah, it must be on the RIGHT side of the picture," but I remark, "So there must be 'is POSITIONAL,' rather than 'is following in time?'" She's angry and doesn't want to consider my point valid.
8/8/94: 9:50AM: Though I'd wakened at 9:30AM to pee, I had this VERY factual dream by 9:50! [Also woke with dry nose, cold/sore throat, and numb left forearm and fingers---probably ALL from bidi 7 hours ago--SHOULD watch and maybe stop?] First, some younger woman (sort of like the strange one who lived in "the monastery" on Pierrepont whose name I can't recall at the moment, but it isn't Judy) and I have gone into the enormous old-fashioned beamed kitchen of what had been my apartment, and as we're leaving we're talking about throwing out some chili found in my refrigerator. I seem to recall having warmed it up once or twice, so it's clearly old, and I say, "We might want to take it with us," but she says "Well, we COULD just throw it out," so to be agreeable I say, "OK, then, just dump it." But when she takes the cover off---it seems it had been heating as we were ready to leave (no logic: this is a dream)---it LOOKS fresh and smells good, and she hesitates and says, "Or maybe we could just EAT it?" I laugh and say, "Great, we're not in a hurry, we haven't eaten for a while, so let's just sit down and EAT it." An older man, somewhat like the fellow who's the owner of the New Deal and Henry's End, also says HE would like to have something to eat, and I'd forgotten he was there with us, so I go over and hug him from the side, which he CLEARLY doesn't like, struggling to escape the unwelcome touch as a cat would, and I "take this in" as if I were really storing information about this particular character. We're then, without transition, sitting at a small table which has service for only one, and I look across what's become the second-floor dining room of a small Tea Shoppe, and have a clear recollection that my female friend had gone across the way and set up the table for the TWO of us at the middle table against the far wall, and some older woman, sort of a CROSS between Midge and Polly, has seated herself at one of the two place-settings. My friend says maybe we should leave her alone, but I say, "No, you SET up the TWO places for US, and she has NO right to seat herself at ONE of them," so I go over to her and sit in the empty chair across from her and explain myself VERY softly and sweetly: "I'm sorry, but my girlfriend told me that she set up these two places for US to eat, but that you sat here by mistake. Could we possibly ask you to vacate the places that WE set for OURSELVES?" She'd put some packages on the seat across from her, and there were people now sitting at tables on either side, but she did reluctantly, without malice, agree to move. When she left, an older woman from the Tea Shoppe sat next to me and said, "That was a very rude thing to do!" I explained, again very softly and sweetly, to her, "But she KNEW that it wasn't a place that was vacant, and she HAD to admit that the table WAS set for TWO," and the older woman seemed somewhat mollified and moved away. "Was that the owner?" I asked a waitress, and she said, "That was the owner." Then some OTHER woman sat next to me (my friend remained settled at the FIRST table we'd occupied, at least for this short time), and she started lamenting the situation of the poor woman that I'd just chased away: "She lives all by herself way to the south (and I get an impression of a location south of Manhattan, where we seem to be located now at West 72nd Street, and even south of Staten Island, so it must be New Jersey), off a small street called Clifton Avenue (I seem to remember a community called Clifton, New Jersey), and she hardly EVER gets into town (and the unspoken chide seems to be "So she should be allowed to sit at whatever table she chooses"), and what do you think of that?" I pause, having started eating, and AGAIN very softly and sweetly explain, "I'm SURE if she thought we were displacing her from some place that she DESERVED sitting at, she'd make it VERY clear we had no right to make her move; but she didn't make any fuss at all, did she?" I concluded brightly, knowing there was absolutely no argument that could be made. THIS woman then departed, and someone from an adjoining table said, "That WAS the owner, you know," and I thought in the back of my head, "But I thought that OTHER woman was the owner, so SOMEONE has to be wrong, or JUST possibly there are TWO owners." My friend never DID join me, but I remember finally looking past the next table---two women eating in front of a window---regretting that THAT table with a street view hadn't been empty.
8/10/94: 10:15AM: [This shit NEVER ends: go to the end of MY\DREAMS and find that MY page 47 is now WP page 57! Check to PRINT and the printer is STILL the Panasonic, but somehow these pages have gotten NARROWER, obviously due to the Panasonic/DWP shifts I've been doing, yet I don't know WHY or HOW! DAMN it! Anyway: to the DREAM:] I'm in the Actualism Center for the first time in a LONG time, and there's a small group of people gathered for some kind of session, and we go into the "small" teaching room that has suddenly become MUCH larger: the side benches have been removed and most of the furniture taken out except for one plush sofa with soft arms, on which I sit next to an older, very round woman, and four chairs of various kinds (folding, desk, metal, wood) facing us. The emptied black-and-white, salt-and-pepper carpet seems to stretch for YARDS to the distant walls. I don't really recognize any of these people, except the teacher is vaguely like the brittle, thin figure of Rebecca. We settle into a session that I've never had before, and it starts with some kind of figured scroll being unrolled on the carpet in front of the sofa, before which the fat woman kneels and keens ritualistically, waving her hands over it, and I see that she wears gloves so that the orangey blood-like liquid that's part of the ritual doesn't soil her hands, but it dots the scroll with tiny flecks of orange, like accents on a printed page. I'm mystified by the reasons or effects of the ritual, but as she sits down and looks expectantly at me, I find myself drawn to her, caressed by her, and gradually I start to tear, choke, and finally sob with relief on her ample bosom as she consoles me very quietly, letting me do what I wish to get whatever relief I might seek. Oddly affecting dream, and I think that I'll call Bernice and see if anything specific is happening with the Center. [She only reports (in the five minutes she could spare me) that they were looking at names to be sent something in the mail, and when they came to my name Bernice said, "Well, he doesn't come in, but I know he's still plugged in."]
9/3/94: 10AM: I'm visiting a somewhat "gay" bar in London, though there are lots of women there (probably influenced by my watching Threesome last night), including a dark-haired woman I recognize from New York Actualism, wearing a black leather microminiskirt. Then a sexy guy with his shirt open to his waist comes up and asks, "But what are you looking for?" and I pinch his tiny soft nipples and try to kiss him, but his whiskered chin puts me off and he doesn't really respond. I look into a "backstairs" area painted in a muted red, with ladders and cubbyholes for late-night sexual encounters, but there's no one there in the late afternoon. Remember that I should be back at something like a boarding house for dinner about 6:15PM. Then someone volunteers to walk me back, passing the entrance to an exhibit of a miniature city, like Monopoly houses glued to street plans over which the visitors walk, and I stroll beside a "tank" (ala Ceylon) filled with red-streamer-tailed shrimp and lots of translucent krill churning about. Another visitor walks on the water (thanks to Jeanette Winterson's Passion that I finished reading?) beside me as I wade in a knee-deep canal that represents a river with riverfront shipping and factories. Look to my left to see an expansion area for the park, but it's already a zoo: I can see vividly colored parrots clustering in a near tree and distant giraffes and zebras and antelopes in hedged-in pens. I know that this place closes about 5PM, but I've lost sight of the fellow who was taking me through, though I figure I'll probably be able to spot him in the crowd outside the gate as the place closes, though I might have to find my own way through the London streets, and I debate which direction I'd have to go, or wonder if I can remember the address to give to a taxi to take me there. But I don't feel any pressure to be anywhere or do anything by any specific time: just a nice feeling of being on vacation and being able to wander where I want to: might be connected with the chats I've been having with Vicki recently, trying to get back in Joe's good graces so that he'll share my Garnet Hill stay with me without costing me TOO much $$$.
9/6/94: 9:15AM: Wake when Susan phones, and talking of computers REMINDS me of a dream that I had: I'm sitting in front of the computer as it constantly BOMBS, seemingly from the heat, since it resets, cycles quickly through start-up, shows a screen of text briefly before bombing, resetting, cycling again, until the screen is only a flurry of "static" like a television tuned to no working channel. And THAT reminded me of the dream of 9/4, Sunday, when I was sitting at the computer and suddenly there was a DOS screen that said something like "Disk failure." That was what prompted me to do the complete disk-backup on Sunday. 12:30PM: [Worked on the crazy PAGE-ADJUSTING needed because of the maddening shifts-of-page length described on the previous page, and found out WHY: when I blocked and duplicated the TITLE-lines, I was getting a wrong FORMAT also, but now it's all the SAME format, and it should work "forever."]
9/9/94: 10:15AM: 1) Something about traveling in China (probably based on my looking at map late last night for the tempting "Lost Islands of the Atlantic Ocean" A&K M.S.Explorer trip), and coming to some borders with some two-day limitation either about-to-be or already-past. 2) Eating at a multi-table restaurant, and they're passing out Lotto tickets in the form of little address-stickers (based on my NY State Lotto Survey mailing looked at late last night), and I look to see that the first two stickers have different names, neither of which I know, nor do they seem to be sitting at my table, and then other stickers don't have names at all, and I'm not quite sure what to do with them. Memories of the dreams were quickly replaced by further thoughts on the "BE/DO/HAVE" reorganization of my files, which seems to be growing in intensity, detail, and coverage, so that I even now write "'BE/DO/HAVE' File/Home Reorganization" on the calendar for Wednesday, and expand the lists at my desk of things to do to include the "Do-Home COVER list" which will be the ordinary day-list, starting with "Record Dreams," and I've again managed to get to the bottom of the page without undue pressures.
9/16/94: 1) 1:40AM (to sleep at 12:10AM, so this is a 90-minute cycle?) I'm alone on the eve of the "first big night in the Village," and I don't even know WHAT the occasion is! I delay dressing while passing all the fags in drag on my "guesthouse" terrace, but NONE looks at me as a TRICK. I don't know WHERE I'll have dinner, and I seem to want to be reading some gay story on a poster on Seventh Avenue and like Perry Street, but I don't want to be caught STARING. Wake JUST as I've tucked my fresh shirt inside my beltless trousers, making sure it's wrinkle-free. VERY gentle dream---based on John's stating he's NOT going to Garnet Hill with me? 2) 9:20AM: After going to bed at 5:10AM Susan wakes me and I have memory of a CYCLIC dream of my FORGETTING my LINES---DREAMS in a play with LOTS of characters---and finally I'm practically READING the script as others try to telegraph my lines to me in THEIR speeches. VERY frustrating dream---caused by a) money worries, and b) my Facades play?
9/18/94: 11AM: Probably influenced by my reading about Alice Tully's floor-through apartment at the Hampshire House, I'm at a party in an enormous space that seems to be owned by Don M., though he's not in sight. An episode about sorting through tiny bits of metal to get razor blades (which was the interview that said that someone was the razor blade but that the other person was merely the razor, so it was the BLADE that did all the work; though I thought that the blade would be useless WITHOUT the razor to hold it in place for work?) and little metal buttons separated from the other bits of metallic trash, putting them into a tray which I could move with my other bits of clothing with my shoulder bag: everything in one place---that episode came near the beginning. In the middle was a "show" put on by John A., who some of the attendees were surprised to see there. He was dressed in a black leather pouch, and he'd shaved his chest-hair artfully so that it was a haze of black and silver across his pectorals and belly. He joked about his upcoming performance, which consisted of an assistant FLINGING him through the air onto a bed about ten feet away. He landed with a thump, paused for a bit, then raised his upper body painfully and said, "Why didn't someone tell me there was a TABLE at the end of this bed?" and we could see a slightly higher end table covered with bedding---the wooden tabletop must have caught him in the chest with punishing force, as opposed to the soft mattress that he had expected. But then he was showing off his crotch to a sexy guy hooked into an enema machine, who immediately started fucking John, right above my head, so that I had a wonderful view of the straining thighs and thumping groins, but then when he came, someone announced that it was "with a rush of enema," and some of the connections must have been loose, because in the darkness I felt a down-flux of wetness on my face, neck, and right shoulder, which I rolled into the sheets to wipe off, hoping to get it all off with the voluminous sheets that I seemed to have access to, hoping not to be left with any stains or smells, leaving them behind in the sheets that weren't mine. Other episodes of color and drama are forgotten before the ending one: I'm going to get my clothing and coat at the end of the party, descending a long staircase into a cave-like region, at the end of which I remember a small room where I'd left everything, but when I get to the bottom, there's only a plaque on the wall, behind which is a window looking into the next-door restaurant, the plaque informing me that "Access to the restaurant is back around to your right," and THAT wasn't where I'd left my clothes, and I'm concerned because everyone is leaving and I haven't found my belongings yet. In another episode in the middle, seemingly unconnected, I'm riding in a tour bus with others from the party, amazed to see that it's dark out already at about 4:30PM, thinking that maybe I'm in the far north of Europe in the wintertime with its Black Days, knowing that this was the price I paid for staying out VERY late the previous day, into the following morning, and then sleeping to recover my energy only to wake toward the end of the following day's daylight. The dream was remarkable for the intricacy of detail, the subtly beautiful gradations of colors in clothing, buildings, furnishings, and people, and the complicated plot-lines of which I can only remember the barest minimum as I finish typing this at 11:30, waiting for a call from Carolyn for today's boat-ride.
9/22/94: 9:50AM: 1) Fragment of standing at VERY BRINK of top of Angel Falls, viewed from HELICOPTER straight out from tepe-top! 2) I'm home at Dietz and BILL H. meanders past, in the driveway, hardly looking at me. I ask him how he's been, and he replies, "Where can we go to be in the COUNTRY?" I think of Firestone Metropolitan Park, but it's too far to walk, and the vacant lot behind our house is too SMALL. Then we're in the kitchen and David C. comes through and I introduce him as "Sherryl's friend," but he doesn't know Sherryl---and I think David might DRIVE us to a park. Then I'm sitting on a sofa and feel my nose dripping and put up my hand to feel wet, and someone next to me says, "Your nose is bleeding." I go to the bathroom, then wake up and think it MIGHT be bleeding.
10/19/94: 8:45AM: I've LANDED with a GROUP from a trip to Europe and DON'T remember GETTING on the plane or the FLIGHT---and I feel it's WONDERFUL!!!
10/23/94: 9:45AM: I'm trying to get into a MAN meeting at some huge complex (NOT like the Bulge, today, I hope) and a) go through India-fabric-draped entrance to find narrow entry to a john, b) go down sets of stairs to a group-leader explaining that "Eitholon is an EOE-funded children's group" and not Esalen, as I'd thought, and dumb-looking guy MIGHT be interesting naked, but I go around a corner and find concrete-framed entrance SECURELY barricaded, and c) try an elevator-exit and see "No-Entry" pole-supported police-denying figures that I try to ADJUST and then can't get them to STAND, pushing one's pole DEEP into the sand and propping another against a tree. Then d) look down a LONG university-town-like view toward a woods or an amusement park that I think to explore INSTEAD of going to the nudist group, but I STILL figure I can go to the MAIN entrance, where I tell them they should include BETTER directions in their invitations!
10/26/94: 9:40AM: A whole futuristic world: 1) A boxcar-like plane that flies STRAIGHT, then STRAIGHT DOWN (seats swivel to allow passengers to remain upright), which is DISCONCERTING! 2) Applying for job within IBM---first interviewer says I'm overqualified, second response didn't come through, and I'm thinking of waiting for MOM and turn to find myself in a vast recreation hall with THOUSANDS of new-job applicants! OTHER, and MASSIVE, amounts of detail forgotten before I jotted down this note.
10/27/94: 9:20AM: 1) I'm printing a document that's normal, then it has a line of VERY LARGE type followed by many lines of VERY SMALL type. 2) I'm reading for a soap-opera "for timing," alternating with a cute guy who hogs the script, and it seems like it'll be VERY successful and I've even passed the auditioning phase and seem to be IN the program.
10/29/94: 8:30AM: Six of us are eating Chinese food in a combination restaurant-courtroom, and the judge says we can STAY here, unless there's room on the group floor, one flight down. She admonishes a little girl in our group (in which I notice I'm the only male) to keep her feet to herself, while the girl thought she was only making a gesture of closeness and friendship. Odd fragment. I'd had other fragments that I felt too lazy to write down in the past two months, feeling that the dreams just weren't INSANE enough to bother to capture in any kind of detail. Maybe this goes along with a GENERAL feeling of apathy toward practically ANYTHING the past few months: people, dinners, travel, television programs, movies, indexes, job-hunting, computer activity, and almost anything except routine reading, working, and television watching.
11/4/94: 9:30AM: Something about waiting for a performance in China, rather interesting, but I neglected to take notes and have forgotten the details.
11/18/94: 9:30AM: I'm shitting a SOLID CURVED cylinder of shit, can't get to a john, throw it into a trash bag, and try to wash hands without being noticed.
11/19/94: 9AM: I've been handed a $150 check on a windy platform and it BLOWS AWAY, and I must phone the publisher and have it cancelled (I SIGNED it before) and have them send me a NEW one to take its place.
11/22/94: 10:10AM: I've been attending some kind of foreign performance (in a previous dream this morning, I can recall looking down a row of seats to see many are empty, including one against the wall next to someone I'd either come with, or was cruising, so I aimed for that), and I'm walking country roads outside the playhouse during intermission. Some of the trees have tiny clumps of pink flowers at the ends of each branch, and I move through clusters of them near a rough-hewn fence bordering the road. An enormous country house sits on a hill on the left, extending back along a street with a mile-long loggia or arcade stretching along a block-front facing an array of tiny Victorian shops, and I tell myself that I should wander down this street after the play is over. Then I'm at an entrance (whether to the play or to something AFTER the play isn't clear), and we're told to go underground. I start to complain, but then the charm of the passage is seen: constructed channels of waters like paper-mache funhouse vistas are lined with public and private entrances---I pass a private one at my left and can feel a breath of cool air coming past an ill-fitting cloth door barricading a roughly circular side-cave opening. Quaint islets in the center of the stream form stepping stones for our passage, and I find places to overtake some of the slower travelers, looking to left and right at shops, galleries, clothing emporia, and souvenir shops of almost Elizabethan antiquity. At this point I'm not even sure where I'm going: the trip there is the tour itself. Wake at 10:10 and manage to remember enough of this past Bob R.'s phone call by 11:30AM.
11/24/94: 10:15AM: SIGHT gag at end of a movie: the villain has been unmasked, now pursuing hero and girl (about 10 years old) who are riding on bikes, and their families (who are in a car). Around 42nd Street, hero tries to deter villain by pulling a bedroll off a truck. Villain picks up bedroll (no longer "hungry") and car PASSES the WALKING villain at Wall Street (because the traffic is SO bad that a pedestrian arrives downtown BEFORE the car!).
11/28/94: 8:15AM: I'm PITCHING in a baseball stadium, even though the batter is standing in an aisle above me in the bleachers, I'm throwing from an ordinary seat below, throwing an orange with the peel beginning to come off, so that I ask the woman eating an apple next to me if she happens to have an extra orange I could throw, and the best she can do is come up with a grapefruit. Only after I wake does it occur to me that I don't even have a glove to catch anything BACK with, which means that the batter usually HITS what I throw (or that it gets lost on the way to the batter, I realize now). Then it starts to rain and a sort of metal roof covers over the part of the stands in which I'm sitting, and I take the chance to go home and try to get back in time to resume pitching. The road back is a typical nightmare: I pant to the top of a hill, hoping to see my destination close ahead, but the road stretches on, winding through forests and alongside a river that seems to go endlessly out of sight. I run along what looks to be the roof of a collapsed cave, with an almost crystalline thin roof supporting coniferous trees, below which are scrabbles of rock and smaller bushes grown since the collapse. In another sequence, I look back on the road to see a bus coming up behind me, and I arrange to run onto an exit ramp just before the bus gets to me. I actually WAKE before trying to convince myself that if I don't show up they'll have to put in a REPLACEMENT pitcher, and I couldn't have been THAT bad because I'd already PITCHED a couple of innings, and they could have replaced me BEFORE if I'd been that bad. The TOTAL NIGHTMARE LUNACY leads me to consider my rather unbelievable indexing career: that old "With THIS index they'll find out I don't know how to do it, and spread the news, and I'll never get another job again." Then the WHOLE unreality of life strikes me: my working at IBM (and determine to order more fitted shirts at the Custom Shop, which quotes me $198 for the basic four, with delivery by January 15), my taking LSD, my trips to Antarctica and South Africa and other places, and just dealing with everything in New York City! Out of bed at 8:50AM to talk to Pope for over an hour, then to Carolyn after the mail comes with a $75 discount to the gym she's already signed up for, and I finally get to this page at 12:20PM, pills still just after noon, and raining pre-videotape.
12/6/94: 9:10AM: Dennis and his family (looking like the Seavers) are driving us to their place in Pennsylvania. By 3PM we're eager for lunch. Small cluttered place, and Dennis and I start necking and his brother, a sexy kid, has a LONG rubbery cock that he squeezes precum from like a leaky faucet. We kiss sensuously, looking at parents (and other customers) over our shoulders. Then OTHER kids come in to "play" in junky computer/video/toy corner. There's also a segment of getting a table off crowded shelves on which to carry purchases, and a section on finding an available bathroom shower for Mrs. S., looking at slurping guys in bedrooms to check who's where and what's empty, so that she won't be offended by what doesn't offend US at ALL.
12/11/94: 8AM: 1) I'm in a movie house, next to a thin young man, and our legs parallel and our bodies entwine and he gets hard and pink in screen-light, which also reveals red-painted fingernails, but that's OK. Another guy tries to join us and that's OK too. 2) On a lakeside and see a huge "fairy sitting" butterfly (a huge butterfly that looks like it has a Peter Max cartoon figure astride and riding it), and shout for others to come see it. It's 7:45 and I SHOULD be in school at 8AM, but it's near the end of the term and I seem to be exempt from most rules---influenced by Simon's "Magic Touch" that I'm enjoying? 3) Think how I'd PAINT the scene: dark green background, lighter green bushes and shrubs, red and blue flowers, then, last, thin yellow stray-grass shining in the sun. See photo-painting above fireplace at 1221 Dietz or children playing in field with a PARTICULARLY well-painted red-blue rock in lower left foreground---scumbled colors matching nature.
12/12/94: 9:30AM: I'm in a boat coming into a dock on a clear lake, and my eyeglasses fall off a railing into fourteen feet of very clear water. I try to think where I could get a fourteen-foot pole, or how I could dive into the cold water and get far enough down to retrieve my glasses without bursting my eardrums. There are four places for breakfast, but my tooth fillings are falling out in chalky clumps---and something about playgrounds.
12/13/94: 10:15AM: I've been whacking at a woman's eye, then finding she's NOT dead. I'm taking a tour of the HUGE Cinecitta film studios, past an ENORMOUS tree on its side that they've made into a hallway wall, crowds of people, and on a plane flying through HALLWAYS while the pilot gives a "tour-bus" type of speech, and I wonder how he can concentrate on BOTH at once. Debate building a room that could FLIP OVER to increase and decrease gravity as an amusement park ride, windows opening to show the world outside turning over to add to the effect. LIFE as an amusement-park ride, and something I've forgotten makes me JOLT away at about 10AM, and then Susan phones at 10:25AM to get me out of bed at last. [I'd meant to get to the computer EARLY to type that out in more detail, but I got involved in the Christmas-card letters and didn't get to this until 3:45PM on 12/14, only one week to darkest-day Winter Solstice.]
12/17/94: 9AM: An adult Rita has gone away for a long weekend, leaving me space to spread my stuff out in the living room at 1221 Dietz: my dop kit and tooth-cleaning array and earplugs and books and clothing and suitcases and magazines arranged below the fireplace, my vacuum cleaner in a cluttered bathroom, and knowing Mom will clean up house good before Rita returns, except we might go OUT someplace in Akron to show me what's new. Also I'll have a chance to get to stored old suitcases and drawers and consolidate all my stuff neatly for my eventual departure.
12/29/94: 8AM: Maybe from "Spies" sung by Mark Russell before bed at midnight---or from budding cold---I "enunciate/announce" in market (in Florence?): "Anyone who wants to collaborate on biography of --- current Cuban rebel," please see me." Then I'm in a Panamanian hideout with sexy guys who debate trusting me or not, and emotions and characters are as confused and confusing as a new 6-part Mystery, and I end up sleeping with a woman (to prove my virility) and cruise a john where gay AND straight partners wait, and women HOPE it will turn out sensibly, and I should wait and see about it too.
12/30/94: 1) 5:05AM: Bed at 11:20PM on 12/29, lighting both creative energies and asking for "A creative fever-dream." This is it: two Village Playwrights readers---A and B, sitting on chairs with a placard in front labeled "A" and "B." There's a "reader of stage directions" at C, who at times can demand that A and B exchange places (and argue OPPOSITE sides of controversy) [and on 1/2/95 I add a note: in play, A = READER'S name, B = READER'S name, which STAYS, even AFTER A and B switch places, for IDENTITY echoes.], and sometimes with C, at which point HE reads stage directions. There's an "explainer" at D, who comments as an "overseer," but who can exchange with A, B, or C. I, as Playwright, can read "E" FROM the AUDIENCE, and can "sift down" through D, and C, and A and B. A and B always DO: stand behind chair, read IMPASSIONED words DISPASSIONATELY; read DISPASSIONATE words PASSIONATELY; sing; take off an article of clothing [at which, react and glance about apprehensively], etc.. THIS is the "new form" that I chided Al L. to INVENT to include ALL his short readings into "one piece" and ALSO AT LAST get away from actors having to MEMORIZE lines---audience will ACCEPT a script, and at some point all that I have written HERE will be read by "E," though "E" may have STARTED as "A" and obviously NOT be the Playwright, though he will read, at "THEN," the "NOW" that he IS---and it can be even more complex! B: What we have read to date has been a Fool's Mate in chess: "A" is a pawn, moving two squares, with two speeches; "B" is the other pawn, moving one; "C" is the bishop, moving 6, check; A is the---etc. This ALSO replaces and is much more inventive than "Playwrights Circle," since people CHANGE WHILE READING, and don't have to "pretend to offer comments (which would have to be completely written) and "new form" allows BROADENED wordplay and action without MEMORIZATION and huge REHEARSALS. This much to 5:20AM. Players can ALSO talk in French, German, or Spanish, DEPENDING on whether they KNOW it (clearly, from reading, some DO and some DON'T). Maybe imitate or USE Kevin, with his speech impediment NOT UNDERSTANDABLE. And SING, and DANCE, and KISS (they DON'T kiss, as directions read---but TENSION!). Title: 5 Readings by/4 Actors in/3 Scenes and/2 Realities by/1 Playwright. But THAT'S a lie: read Shakespeare's "Shall I compare thee" as a LOVE duet, and then Ogden Nash's "A: The trouble with a kitten is/B: That/A: Eventually it becomes a/B: Cat." MORE than two REALITIES, too. "Private" stage directions unread; actor just DOES them as he reads. "Public" stage directions READ by C, sometimes OBEYED, sometimes NOT, according to PRIVATE directions! To 5:45AM. Make sure at start: A has a watch; B has a jacket. C reads "Four days from now." A changes time on his DIGITAL watch---Spartacus: How? Changes BACK? Circles? Laughs/frowns/turns red/raises eyebrow/yet DOESN'T, or OTHER does action, or walks OUT, to "stands on head" or "strips naked." To 6:15AM. Time is NOW; then, four days LATER. 2) 9AM: A woman like Dennis's Katherine is hosting a grand brunch and I spill, TWICE, her tippy egg-frying pan, sloshing fried eggs onto the floor, and I volunteer to get 30 more from the Chinese place downstairs to replace them. VERY large elegant house as setting.