1996
1/4/96: 9:15AM: Having neglected to transcribe yesterday's dream about working at IBM and trying to juggle my time on two projects, one finishing some enormous programming effort like TOBIAS which was scarcely started and should be soon completed, the other a sort of paper-juggling program that echoed Internet, or at least the Internet index, having to do with some type of huge accommodation, office or apartment, with innumerable rooms and luxury furnishings; I record this morning's cold-caused Russian idyll: I'm sitting in the front of a huge audience about to witness a dance-program, and some cheery woman like a young Lina M. compels me to get up onstage and dance with her, which I do, without dreaming how I've done during that phase. Then I'm back in a more crowded audience and other performers are onstage entreating other audience-members to join them onstage, and I refuse, so she chooses Charles to one side of me, and others from my party eagerly leap onto the stage. Then phalanxes (one of Susan's words in Scrabble last night) of dancers emerge from the wings to form a pyramid of performers similar to the one on the tape I watched yesterday of the Kennedy Center Honors for Sidney Poitier, incongruously ending with some children's chorus with thousands of neat kids lolloping down the aisles from the rear of the audience onto the stage, where they formed the prototypical people pyramid. Then I was mixing with males in a dressing-room type of place, where, intriguingly, piles of towels would fall off a chest-height array of shelves to reveal Russian soldiers in ANOTHER type of uniform who are showering or dressing in cubicles that had been hidden, which leads me to fear there might be duplicity in their personnel duplications. This "towel-bank unveiling" takes place two of three times without consequence, and I feel more relaxed when one grim-faced soldier approaches me with "blah-blah ne datch?" I seem to know this means "not give" and I parrot back "not give." He final-tests me with "datch," which of course is "give," and then he proceeds with a halting English whose purport I've forgotten, but I seem not to be welcome there, some plotting IS going on, and yet they seem in some strange way to welcome me as an interloper who can't do them any harm. I wake and lie, chest-stuffed, for another hour before rising.
1/8/96: 9:50AM: "Dreaming with someone else's mind" is how I'd put these two: 1) I'm testing some sort of ride like the water-lubricated tubes at Great Adventure last year, but in these I'm totally immersed in a kind of oil through which I slimily glide feet-first, and am surprised when thin plastic letters or numbers slip between my hands and my body, so that I can "collect" them on my progress "downstream," and I think it's a GREAT idea: either they're LETTERS which can be formed into words for a MESSAGE, or they're NUMBERS which can be exchanged, like a lottery, for various small sums of money when presented at the exit of the slide, with maybe a chance in a million for a really large prize. Woke after collecting a few of these colored plastic tokens with a feeling of disappointment: I wanted to get right back to sleep and continue this unusually kinetic-feeling dream. That was followed by: 2) I'm in a large office with two workers surrounded by banks of filing cabinets, and they're forming an image-bank for some reason, transcribing the descriptions of finely detailed colored drawings, but they quiz each other: "Are 'Big Crusty Letters' filed under 'Big' or 'Crusty' or 'Letters'?" and I think: "They should translate all this into HTML, so they could find anything from anywhere, and even though the CD would be enormously full with these hundreds of drawers in dozens of file cabinets, it would be available for anyone who wanted to use their valuable research." I thumbed through some of the 5x7 file-cards, trying to find images that pleased or excited me, and woke thinking again that I should HTML my Indexing Handbook and put it on my home-page, a task I'd been engaged in considering when the September-end indexing crush removed everything else from my mind. Woke to even MORE snow!
1/18/96: 7AM: Star Trek set is pushed into place, and a man ON TOP of the set can be seen pumping arms up and down. Someone on a "personal transporter" is being jostled around to simulate motion. Laughter from the live audience. Then I'm in a seminar in a classroom, returning from lunch, and the square-faced handsome R. David J. from Akron University's ROTC underclass has taken MY front-row seat. I point to my belongings on the shelf behind him and on two side chairs, saying quietly, "You really must have known someone was sitting here," and he tries to ignore me. So I lean over his desk and say with intensity, "You really must leave my seat now," and he moves, in part because he's had Actualism lessons with me and knows eventually he will have to move. Then some new WOMAN is being introduced by Bernice to the Privilege energy out of the 12-15 listed on a colorful introductory sheet, and I'm amazed the progress people have made. Then, without transition, the Star Trek set is being wheeled in AGAIN, only this time they're pushing too fast and it goes BEYOND its stage-markings, so that the left edges, papers flapping off tables, unpainted backings, and supporting wooden braces can be glimpsed from the laughing audience. There's the quick shout of an order and the set is retro-pushed into place. Next, during an intermission, a man and woman soft-shoe across the stage to gain everyone's attention, and then the man returns to TAP DANCE his way across. Half the seats are gone after intermission, and a family from the back is recruited to play a little SCENE in the next act, and people around me are drawn into the action with lights and references. All this last drama seems to be in a secularized church. So many tiny, detail-filled scenes!
1/22/96: 8:20AM: TYPICAL ANXIETY DREAM! With the play starting at 3PM, with a 20-minute makeup session necessary, it's 2:35PM and I'm sitting backstage due to go on in 25 minutes as "Father" in some reasonably classical play (by Ibsen or Miller or Williams, NOT Strindberg), and I KNOW I have three lines RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING, and some lines AFTER that, BUT I'VE NEVER EVEN READ THEM, and I don't even HAVE a script! Since I'm alone onstage at curtain-up, I might be reading from a book in which I'd written the lines for my start, but I don't have a script. Look around the dressing room, in which I seem to be alone, and go out into the corridor and find myself at the entrance to the theater, and pick up a couple of PROGRAMS from shows EARLIER in the season, but then it occurs to me that a PROGRAM would not have my LINES in it! Ask passing strangers if they have a script, and time is clearly slipping away, and I'm thinking that I’m probably old enough not to NEED makeup to act the part of the father onstage, and even vaguely debate NOT SHOWING UP AT ALL, when a woman stops in front of me and asks, "You look awful, how can I help you?" "Do you happen to have a copy of the script for this play?" "Yes, right here; my name is Geag." "Oh, I grew up near a Geauga Lake near Akron, Ohio," "Well, that's the THIRD state that has a Geauga Lake in it," and the entire audience standing around us laughs. My mind races over possibilities of copying lines that I can read from shirt-cuffs or menus through the rest of the play, but when I get hold of her script and open it to the first page, the type is SO small I can barely read it, and it looks like an Elizabethan printing job with f's like s's and blurred type, and WAY up at the top of the page I can see the character-name FATHER typed but I can't even READ what my first lines ARE! Geag is flirting around me, and I "know" that she's been trying to put the make on me for a long time, and when I look at her long legs in black trousers and her mannish haircut, I think that a relationship with her wouldn't be the MOST awful thing in the world, and I seem to "know" that she's quite rich, and would be accepting of my gayness like Emma Thompson in Carrington, but I glance at my watch and it reads 3:07, and so the curtain must be JUST on the point of going up and I'm not even DRESSED or MADE UP or ON the stage at all, and then I wake with the complete remains of the anxiety and panic of the situations, lying there in bed with relief that it WAS only a dream, and then the thought floats through that maybe they would have had an understudy who was already in place onstage when I didn't show up, so the PLAY would be saved, anyway. Then I started sifting through my mind for reasons for my having a panic-anxiety-attack dream: the upcoming trip, now officially in LESS than two months; my depression about talking with Bernice on the phone yesterday after the rather sad visit to Pope yesterday afternoon and a quick chat with Spartacus on the phone before that; my depression about the reception of my play last Tuesday? And then my mind starts into thinking about a NEW play for THIS Tuesday, which I'll put into a NEW document, which I'll call MY\ABSOLUTE for Absolute Truth, which means that I won't put more NOTEBOOK:1/22/96 stuff on THIS page!
1/23/96: 8:55AM: At the END of the dream, I'm sitting with group on LAST day (of school?) and Bill M.-like guy asks me to "Report on who attended your seminar and what expenses and meal costs and retrievals were," and it's like I'm trying to remember a PREVIOUS dream of small attendance, some guys not paying, my not keeping good records, some people not told they had to pay, and someone to my left had just REMOVED a sheaf of pages from my notebook (of which I'd been idly cleaning the edges of dust and grime with sore fingers) that would help me report, so I have to ask for them BACK, and "Bill" is jiggling his foot nearby and I can't "squeeze down" the pages in my binder (as in my address book) and I say, "Please stop that so I can LOOK at these sections." The PREVIOUS part concerned a field trip, problems we had with scheduling and funding, and maybe missed connections and frustrations like last night's dream? Felt vaguely weary and depressed on wakening, though I'd had ENOUGH sleep from yesterday (and HAD caught up): just general depression?
1/24/96: 7:45AM: The merest impression left: Numbers, or tasks, in columns were totaled, or summarized, at the bottom, but there was some significance in the fact that these elements somehow CANCELLED, making elements BENEATH them important---and the only real-life tie I can see is the article on Tomb KV5 in the Valley of the Kings in New Yorker that I finished just before going to bed last night: which detailed the possibility that the REAL tombs might be BELOW the chambers they've so far discovered, and that the tombs BELOW might still contain some of their original burial treasures.
1/27/96: 7:30AM: 1) I have to get from one ice-ledge to another, and I climb up and up, nose right against the crumbling ice-mud face, knowing that I'll be slipping back, but I MUST get to the top, and there's no sense of weariness or impatience: just a process that I know will be inch-wise and laborious, and at last I SEE the top and elbow my way onto the corner, which is surprisingly stable and rectilinear, but then I have to jump across to a thinner sliver, almost like a Popsicle-stick of ice jutting perpendicularly from the cliff-face, and it looks so unstable that I put my foot out to test it and it crumbles immediately. The next outcropping is too far to jump to, and my final image is clinging to a ledge that my arms are wrapped around, knowing I can't go back and can't go forward, and calmly realize that I can solve my problem by waking up, so I do. 2) I'm in a room that's full of junk, connected to the room next to it by a hallway that's so dirty the crud forms a sloping HEAP in the middle of it, but when I walk over it I know that it's HOLLOW below (and maybe the memory of the hollowness below the chambers in KV5, above, is still in my mind), and I can look DOWN to see weeds and grass, tires and bedsteads, columns and boxes and pillars and shapes almost filling the area below, with looks rather like a sandy beach under a cottage near a lakeshore. I move to an adjacent room and "use my x-ray vision" to scan the area underneath, which is also loaded with debris. This seems "obviously" connected to the LSD-talk at the Open Center last night (notes on NOTEBOOK:1/27/96), with the idea of "going deeper," and that "a bad trip is GOOD because it means you're REALLY getting into repressed material that's eventually GOOD to be brought up into the light of consideration.
1/28/96: 9:45AM: I'm visiting a lavish British castle, getting up early on a Sunday morning (as now) to leave my roommate and venture into a suite of rooms occupied by a group of women who welcome me with smiles and curiosity. One young pretty woman (seeming to see I'm gay) says that she has a number of young men-friends who would be delighted to show me about the countryside. Another sits next to me and tells me of some of the local Welsh names, like the Countess Whthwhulgothlgu...., which sounds more like owls gargling than an actual word. She follows that with "Llanfair......" which I confess to having heard before, but never pronounced as effortlessly as she does. Then I'm sitting in a side chair on which someone places a tea tray with a filled cup and a solitary slice of dark toast---though my neighbor has a sweet roll and what might be a delicate omelet on her tray---and another Restoration-gowned older woman seems to make me welcome. Then I decide I must return to my room, and as I round a corner, there's my roommate struggling into some kind of leather pullover---or is he just wearing leather pants? He directs me: "To the left, past three inset suites of rooms in wings" to our room, saying that it's 15 minutes till the next train, but "don't worry, the last train leaves just a few minutes after that." We seem to be joining some kind of tour which will take us to an official breakfast, so I don't have to worry about finding more food here, even though the train leaves at 11:45AM, which means I'll be eating rather on my New York time-frame. The castle has enormous rooms filled with damasked furniture, enclosed by drape-shrouded windows that prevent any view of sunlight outside, carpeted with fraying rugs, completed with vases, knickknacks, crystal, footstools, and dark brooding oil portraits.
2/1/96: 7:35AM: 1) I've entered a large dining room after having met many aunts and uncles and cousins of my extended family at some kind of resort hotel, and one enormous central table is as yet unoccupied, but set for about 14 people, and smaller tables around the sides have 3-4 people at them, including some kids I'd met before. Yet I can't decide where to sit: taking the first chair at the empty central table seems presumptuous, but sitting at one of the smaller tables with families I don't know seems even worse, so I just stand at the edge of the hall with my arms folded and wait for more arrivals before deciding where to sit. 2) I'm on a series of boardwalks outside on a beach, and there are rumors of strong tidal rips as at the Bay of Fundy. "Here it comes," part of the crowd to my left shouts, and I look over to see a hill of smooth water rolling along one part of the beach, lifting masses of kelp into inverted cylinders of tidal water, and it sweeps with a roar exactly to the narrowest part of the inlet, where it makes a standing semi-circle of roaring water (is this partly from Endless Summer II's surfing sequences?) with enormous restrained power. Then a kid leads me out on a floating path, where the wood sinks slightly when we stand on it, and I can see dim forms in the yellowish water that might be fish. Then there's a sluice on the left where another wave comes in, headed by a SHARK which catches one of the observers on its nose and sweeps both of them in a curve at the head of the wave, moving in an enormous U-shape, leaving the man gasping at the end of his run. Another couple is caught by the crest of another wave and is pushed up against the wire fence separating two parts of the beach, and they shout to someone to get the keys to the fence to let them come onto our beach, which isn't underwater yet, and a wiry fellow slips between the hotel wall and the fence to go to their assistance. Could part of this be from reading Marine Expedition's mail-report of the "Islands of the South Atlantic" trip taken LAST year with the landings and sightings?
2/4/96: 2:35AM: CHILLING wake-fast after QUICK dream of being in my kitchen with lots of people talking, and suddenly we hear a horrible clatter and squeezed rush of SOMEONE falling down the dumbwaiter, and getting STUCK, maybe right outside MY door. We STARE at the door---maybe if we open it we'll send the victim plunging to the BOTTOM? Wake with an AWFUL JERK (me)!
2/17/96: 4:30AM: 1) A doll (like the huge-eyed guy in subway?) sits smoking in a corner while I tease my hard-on in bed, and he smokes fish-fin/magic-Myrtha-branched joints and finally comes to bed and flops a sausage-like semi-erect cock on my belly and offers me (at last) a toke, and I fire a seam of wrapping, revealing green-coated brown seeds in a row like BBs in an air-rifle barrel, waking at the instant I gratefully inhale. 2) 8:35AM: Young gays at an elegant palazzo (from Pope's description of the Longorias' Mexico City Loma-top house in National Geographic?) finally dress for the masquerade. Three wear HUGE leather bell-bottoms, asking me, "Which South American country were these from?" and I say, "Ar-hentina, of course!" and lead them hand-in-hand mincing down the curved stairway, where we meet the unveiling of the costumes of the rich lover as Don Quixote and his little peasant lover as his ass, Sancho, connected umbilically to him, yet loosely enough so that Sancho sashays to the side to dance a Latin figure while Don Q's chaps spread into art-deco skirts of pannier width, and I feel CRUSHED that I didn't think to bring ANYTHING in the line of a costume, and go through my meager wardrobe in my mind to try to figure out WHAT I can whip into some kind of imaginative costume (probably thinking of packing for my trip, which is now only two short weeks away, and I wake and add two more items to my lists of things to do), and feel grateful that I've had such sexy, luxurious dreams---into neither of which entered the increasing soreness at the base of my thumbs, especially the right, from arthritis, particularly hurtful after handling National Geographic issues for twelve hours yesterday, filing all of them).
2/22/96: 8:10AM: Such odd dreams I get up to transcribe them: 1) Edgardo is about to leave NYC for Italy and wants to take back some stamps, but the ones I have for him feature a languorous reclining male nude which he seems embarrassed to take, so I cut it in half horizontally so he gets some semi-schematic representation of the bottom half of it, and then leave a large margin on the top as distraction, except that I think "But it really looks more like a photo cut from a magazine” (this is obviously based on the recent few hours spent at Pope's over three different days cutting out photos that I like from about two feet of porno books and ads from Spartacus's apartment) and then the dream shifts to 2) I'm collecting some kind of beetle (from the Channel 13 three-episode series on insects from the beginning of this week?) in a packet of frozen water, and get instructed that re-freezing it will enable it to last longer: I can also make through-cuts that will come out as microscopable sections. 3) Then I wake at 1221 Dietz and go to have breakfast in the kitchen to find a note from Mom on the stove: she left at 9AM to go somewhere, but a) I should meet her outside school at 10:40AM with a companion so that we can go to some kind of amusement park or museum exhibit I'd told her about yesterday that I wanted to see (and I'm surprised she remembered, is willing to take us, and wonder how I'm going to get out of the school I seem to be going to as a young child), and b) a long semi-religious (is this from news of Pat Robertson's wins in New Hampshire and good showing in other primaries, so that the US will be religion-dominated if he wins?) rant about how I spend too much time alone in my room, talking about my "hand" in what seems an obvious reference to my masturbation, but that "being of legal age" (which implies I'm now an ADULT, rather than a child) she's "not permitted to enter my room without my permission," which means she feels helpless and wants more control in some way. And now I'm supposed to make myself breakfast and determine if I want to leave school this morning, and, if so, whom I want to invite to this amusement-park or picnic outing later this morning. VERY odd set of dreams, somehow influenced by my trip-start to Atlantic Islands in only ten days, and note with displeasure the 65° temperature without heat here now!
2/25/96: 9:30AM: Woke at 7:45, started Actualism, fell back asleep, and had the most ARCHITECTURAL dream of traveling in a tour-bus through an immense nave-like structure that I somehow intuited was the SHELL of an interior into which would fit---like a giant ship mooring in an all-encompassing granite husk of a building whose inner doorways could then be reached by elevators and passageways within the ship---an absent edifice whose shape could be seen in the inverted prow ahead, the ribbed ceiling which would fit the keel-shaped roof of the insert, and the blank doors on many levels which would open to the nestling outer doors of the inserted core of the building. I was in the front-right seat, talking excitedly to my partner (both of us were in the very front, ahead of the driver) as we passed openings to my right through which I could see candle-lit corridors and hallways of tombs and chapels commemorating heroes and events from the history of the country or religion that this cathedral embodied. Byzantine icons glowed from walls briefly glimpsed before being replaced by another set as the bus passed, and these went up for many floors, reminding me of the interior of the mother-ship at the end of Close Encounters. Then we swept out of the building into a narrow corridor lined with rickshaws and hand trucks so close to our sides I was amazed we didn't crush them. "Look out!" I shouted to an elegantly dressed black couple we were about to plow under. Then we swept onto a granite balcony, whirled about in a change of direction, and I fell off but was instantly grabbed and reseated as the protective bus roared down a Cloisters-like hillside toward the next site. If this is a preview of any part of my trip, I'm impressed. The feeling of wonder, safety, and glory of view was compelling; I'd love to return in a continuing dream-exploration of this medieval-seeming yet modernly furnished country of limpid light, graystone tranquility, and architectural astonishments.
5/15/96: 8:45AM: There's a huge party going on, in the apartment of someone who seems to be a combination of my sister Rita and my old friend Joan S.. The place is full of people, and I wake to sense that the substructure of the apartment is really falling apart: the floors are water-warped and creaking, the walls are hand-marked and dirty (a segment has me reporting what's on the wall for the people in bed below me, and I come to a corona of dirt around what looks like it might have been a picture hook, and I say, "Nothing new?"), and the place is LOADED with furniture and appliances that seem to be partially disassembled, brought in from the walls as if the room were about to be painted, except that there's still JUNK against the walls. I try to think of a reason for this, asking Rita who's been staying here, but she seems to HAVE an explanation that I don't seem to NEED because she HAS it. Chests lean with drawers hanging open with clothes scattered over their lips; desktops are a clutter of papers, books, circuit boards, and sheaves of wiring of various colors; beds are unmade and heaped with people and clothing; there's barely space to walk between the items of furniture and piles of debris. Now in the dining room about 20 people are trying to eat, including children (maybe this reflects the chaos in Rushing to Paradise that I'm reading?), and someone passes me a paper bag and asks for milk. I decant milk into the bag, which falls apart in my hands, and I laugh: "At first I thought 'Why is she passing me milk in a paper bag?' and then I realized that it was ME that was passing HER milk in a paper bag!" Lots of the sexy fellows are foreign-accented (like the Brit at the Beard table with Ken and me last night?), but I feel they're getting practice by continuing to struggle with English rather than resorting to their native German or French or whatever. Get the feeling this is some sort of youth hostel set up by a close relative, so I have to tolerate whatever I see here: it's really for the best and I can't honestly complain. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 5/15/96).
5/16/96: 8:20AM: Party, CANDLES fall, BILLBOARD starts to "fly," and three men hold on, slide down a hill, one STAYS; helicopter view, one on ledge, wake up.
5/20/96: 5AM 1) I'm having sex with two guys and a "drunk" and there's a HUGE stack of stuff in refrigerator/freezer. 2) Don't recall. 8:15AM 3) In restaurant with two women and NEXT table has Neil Sedaka and four OTHER rock stars.
5/22/96: 8:05AM: A John Sayles-like instructor gives his large "Lord of the Rings" class about 100 questions on a test, which seems to be written in blurry pencil with almost unreadable handwriting on yellow legal-pad sheets. I don't have too much trouble with about the first 15 questions, but when they get VERY technical and deconstructionistic, I can't answer ANY of them, and feel that other students are having the same problem, but he doesn't seem to mind. On the sides are baskets of squalling objects that turn out to be very small BABIES, and no one seems to be paying any attention to them. Then we've all handed in our papers and he's grading them, and I'm trying to think of some way of excusing my bad performance, and wake feeling AWFUL.
5/24/96: 8:40AM: The same old "I'm-in-a-play-but-don't-know-my-lines" dream, but with developmental differences: it's actually being PRODUCED---it's not just a rehearsal; there are other people around in elaborate makeup doing peasant dances; there's pre-recorded music; the script has been published and the uses of Roman versus italic type have been changed so that my lines are now in italic and the stage directions are in Roman and being DONE, rather than being read, as they had been before, which makes the text much larger, so that I can't find as easily the places where my speeches are. The theater is tiny, and there are only about eight people in the audience, with a funny little side balcony (the theater's even smaller and rattier than Wings) with three wide-armed, steel-frame, black-leather-seated and -backed chairs as if for VIPs. But I know that this is only the first of five or six performances, and there'll be word of mouth and following evenings will be more crowded. There are singing and complex facial gestures going on onstage and I'm not sure when my first speech is as I go through lines that I do seem to remember from before. Little chorus girls (6-7 years old) scamper by and I'm amazed they're here. Many other details I've forgotten---now 8:50AM.
5/28/96: 7:30AM: 1) I'm trying to get somewhere at a railway office, and am told that my "red Visa card" can't be used here, and that the next train isn't until 9PM! I protest that that's absurd and outrageous, and finally they admit that there IS a way I can transfer and get where I'm going by a train that leaves at 9:30AM. It's now 9:05, and I rush out to get the shoulder bag that I'll need on my trip. 2) Then I have to find a seat in a theater, but the aisles are quite wide and the hall is brightly lit, so I can see where a number of vacant seats are. Other details I've forgotten by 10:40AM as I type.
6/1/96: 9:15AM: Hordes of people on hillside seeking non-wormy tasty fungus. I had some with TENT caterpillars on that I could brush off, but then I could find no VISIBLE worms.
6/5/96: 9:55AM: I'm invited for a game of Monopoly at the large apartment of two friends (rather like Joe E. and Bob W., and I wonder how they're doing in Florida), but somehow the Monopoly seems to be over and everyone is eating. I'm not talking to many people, but I seem to be taking large amounts of food off my plate to eat, going away from the table, and coming back to find that my food isn't diminishing in quite the way it should be, so that I'm very much behind everyone else, and at one point I return to the table to find everyone's place has been cleared off but mine, and I haven't really begun yet to eat. I'm in the middle of cleaning out my pockets, to see what food I'd put in there to make my eating away from the table easier, and I find a chunk of red tomato that had been juicy, and I'm devouring that to be rid of it when someone across from me, her plate filled with tomatoes, asks me if I want any MORE of them, since I seem to be enjoying mine so much, and I respond, "Thank you, but it's all I can do is finish what I've already taken." Again everyone seems to have gone on to some other phase of the party, leaving me behind, and I feel that more people have joined the party that I don't know, and don't really know who to talk to, or even very clearly WHERE the party is being held. Seems like I may still be thinking about Simon, his sudden departure for Australia that left me with a Beard Foundation meal to dole out at noon on the very day of the event, and the confusing dinner I had at his place with everyone that I didn't know. And whether I should call Catherine (who assured me I'd be invited back for MORE dinners) and set up an appointment to talk about Interrography. Debate NOT entering this dream, but decide to do it anyway. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 6/5/96).
6/6/96: 8:05AM: I'm studying in some kind of institution with Mom (it seems like a library, but since it's Mom, it's probably some kind of nursing home), and you seem to have your choice of person or period or science to study, and the facility will bring great bound tomes of periodicals or old magazines that have original articles or stories by the scientist or author you're studying---and there's a bit of surprise that I hadn't found out about this before, though it IS rather like the Main Reading Room at the main New York Public Library. I'm reading something about Bobbitting (obviously a dream-gloss on Babbittry), and have to leave. So I turn to Mom, ask if she'll be OK until dinner or her next medicine-call, and she vaguely replies in the affirmative, and I exit the room past racks and racks of books which have been requested and not yet picked up, or books that are just there for whomever wants to glance through them, and I think that I'd better go to the john, but I never can remember where it is: the one in the basement is for the poorer classes and usually smells, but I can't quite remember the way through the main-floor teachers' offices to the faculty john, which is much grander, quieter, and cleaner, though I know that if I just go through one of the great baize-lined doors off the marble hallway I'll find a warren of offices which will eventually lead to a dark door labeled "Men" and I can enter without a key and use the polished facilities there. As I leave the main room, I'm struck again by a respect for the facilities for reading: the catalogs, the books themselves, the shelving systems, the reference libraries, the journals in leather, the magazines with pages flaking as they're turned---and I contrast that to the glitz and brevity and quickness of Internet, which seems of little depth and little history compared with one of these libraries. And semi-in-the-dream, semi-out-of-the-dream, I wonder if such facilities will become obsolete now that everything is being computerized and digitized and microfilmed for remote reference, and I feel a bit of regret that the textures and silences of such great caverns of research are now obsolete and dying, when they were so much more comforting, serendipitous, and scholarly seeming than the colored labels and access-points of Internet. [Finish, wistful and full of mistypes, at 8:17AM, blanket draped over shoulders in warm-anyway room, feeling that I'd better shit before returning to bed for more rest.]
6/12/96: 7:20AM: Epitome of FRUSTRATION DREAM goes on FOREVER: I'm trying to mail a request for something like a Shure record-playing cartridge: I HAVE an old one that I want a new one exactly like (this is rather like my search for a Dual turntable spindle), but I've never been able to find the address from which to request one. Finally, in something like a post office or a desk at an express-mail delivery company, I FIND the address and want to MAIL my request, but when I search through my briefcase I can't find the SAMPLE to mail with the request. I find pages for an index due on July 2 (that's when the letter is dated, and since I KNOW it's not July 2 YET, I HAVE to assume that's when it's DUE) (and WHAT are the pages of an index that I have to work on doing in my BRIEFCASE?); lots of slips of paper with OTHER things to do and find written on them, sometimes indecipherably; objects whose purpose I don't at the moment know. I try to describe to the lady taking the mailing what the cartridge looks like: how it has three terminals but only two wires hook to it, so that one wire has to make a loop past the third terminal before attaching to the end. She says I just have to mail it. I'm waiting in line at a desk on the left, but the man on the right desk finishes and I figure I can move to that clerk, but the person to the right of HIM seems to think that SHE has priority, so I ask her if I can go ahead, since I'll be quick, and she says OK, but then I can't find the ENVELOPE that I've addressed to the proper destination! I know I've left it at some office which STARTED as just a door or two away, but when I go out to GET it, it turns out to be a LARGE distance across a grassy university-campus-like setting, and as I walk FAR longer than I'd expected, I look at my watch to see if I'm actually going to miss my LUNCH appointment---and have the thought that if I miss THAT, I can still get to the IBM cafeteria, which serves until 2PM, and it shouldn't be much past 1PM, which was the time of the lunch appointment that I'm pretty sure I've missed---and the watch AT FIRST appears to have been put ON upside down: it's not POSSIBLE that it be 8:15 in the AM OR in the PM, but when I look at the face closely, I see the minute hand TURN BACKWARD about fifteen minutes, and as I stare in disbelief, it moves FORWARD again for a few moments, pauses, and then moves backward AGAIN, as if to PROVE to me that it's really gone wacko (as my watch SEEMS to have begun STOPPING while on the ship, even though the repairman can find nothing WRONG with the movement when he looks at it, asking me when I'd been in last, and I say, "A number of months," and he looks at his notation inside and says, "November, 1993."), and why hadn't I had it LOOKED at BEFORE this time? (Like my constantly popping glass lens that I MUST see to today before I LOSE it or the screw holding it in place.) And I KEEP on walking to get the envelope, ignoring the fact, for now, that I can't find the ORIGINAL piece (maybe it's IN the envelope already?), and wake with the TYPICAL feeling of frustration, encompassing my current frustration with Mom's Alzheimer’s, Dennis's AIDS, Don's "let's DO something" impatience, Pope's travails, editing the trip-video, and my camcorder repairs.
6/13/96: 9:35AM: I'm working in Barbara L.'s bookstore, and I'm supposed to be setting up shelves for her, and I go through an elaborate scotch-taping of a book jacket to a bookend, which gets attached to one side of the shelving, so I have to use a razor to cut that loose, hoping she'll like the neatness of the edges when I'm finished. Then there's a crowd, and someone whispers to the manager of the bookstore that Barbara L. DIED last night, and she sits in stunned silence and begins to cry, and I come up to the scene and whisper in amazement, "Barbara L.?" Then without transition I'm sitting at my desk and there's a beep from my computer and the screen suddenly goes blank. Not the most cheerful of omens in a dream? Record it by 9:55AM, into the day.
6/14/96: 8:20AM: PLACE OF HONOR: I'm in the back seat of a car, but maybe that's only the camera-position in this television movie/play. The couple in front are sightseeing in what may be Staten Island, and he's telling her about the building of this great new hill from the top of the mountain to the shore, and they start down a winding residential road going too quickly, and I protest from the back seat, but maybe the protest is only in my head, and I'm not there, and they don't hear anything. (The houses are somewhat like the houses shown, while driving up to them, in The Revenge of the Nerds, which I watched part of this morning before bed at 1:20AM.) They pass a very large, almost hotel-like, house on a curve on the left, and as they go by, they find they're looking at a surrounding portico that displays how they produce stained-glass window-figures, so attractively colored that they stop and without transition are out of their car and looking at the placards describing the displays. They read that the clay is impregnated with color so that it becomes bright, and then it's fired in all its thickness to become part of the window, yet its characteristics of clay remain. Indeed, as they reach out to feel the red-plush-coated knight-in-armor sample-figure in the last display, they can feel, and remark to each other, how the "armored" feet of the knight still feel like clay. Suddenly a guide, dressed as a monk, rushes toward a bell that is hanging above the display and it starts to ring, which signals the couple being surrounded by the workers in the house---who praise the benefits of being there under the guidance of their leader, a handsome young man who smilingly confesses that he'd been put on a diet of vegetables and fruit (like Steve Wosniak on the program this morning) so that he wouldn't balloon into more than 200 pounds of benign fat. We look at the monkish people in this commune-workshop, and suddenly there's some kind of loudspeaker, directed mainly outside, shouting in the voice of the leader, "Don't let the peas leave! Don't let the peas leave!" We try to ignore it since we obviously don't know what it means. The displays begin to get creepy, and what should be a PICTURE suddenly seems to come to life, and a woman will go from an expression of adoration of the leader into a smirk of triumph straight out at the onlookers, after which she sinks to the ground below the frame of the picture, and I'm wondering if we're not having some kind of hallucination, and I tell myself that we shouldn't eat anything or they'll trap us here (like the food eaten in Fairyland that makes you a prisoner there). They invite us to stay for lunch, and I want to refuse, but they're not listening to us, and we're sitting with the rest of them around a wooden refectory table as servers come out with platters of vegetables on silver salvers, and we sit looking in a rather mesmerized way as they dish peas and carrots onto our plates, urging us to eat before we go on our way. The others look at us contentedly, and the leader is sitting at the head of the table being served by his minions, of which I, on waking, figure we are about to be kept as more of. [I wake at 8:10AM and think this would make a GREAT playlet, and get up to transcribe it, but have to try RESET twice before it even LOADS, but once it gets going, it's OK. Then Don phones at 8:30AM and begs pardon for not showing up last night, since he overslept and now has a cold and wants to go into the steam room, and I say he'd have BOUGHT the tickets, whereas I got one for FREE!]
6/15/96: 2:50AM: Elaborate dream involving cinnamon tins atop Mom's kitchen shelves, where Rita puts them, ending in midnight earthquakes felt in MANY places around the world as each part of the globe rotated toward the midnight hour.
6/16/96: 8AM: I enter a room with two john-cubicles having GLASS walls, so I feel self-conscious when someone enters the NEXT one as I enter the one on the right, but I go in and suddenly I've shit on my blue pants (shades of PARIS!) (I think, in the dream, that I'd eaten too much spinach; this may reflect my thought that I was eating too much FRUIT at MAN last night?)! Make them VERY wet and the shit seems NOT to have stained the pants or retained a smell, so I think, in despair, that I can RETURN to "class" with my WET pants that I hope will DRY as I sit in them for the next 1-2 hours. Wake feeling that I need to shit, but as I sit on the pot, the feeling goes and I don't shit at all then.
6/17/96: 9:45AM: I'm watching a TV tape of Marcello Mastroianni, and morphing changes his current face to his past face, backs up to a full-figure publicity shot of him at the age of about 22, and then the shot COMES TO LIFE through computer-generated images, and a sexy middle-aged Mastroianni is featured JERKING OFF, and his cock is huge, and he's with someone he enjoys, and I think, even in the dream, that this would be a DYNAMITE money-making scheme: porno of past stars in their early lives! Wake hard and jerk off fast.
7/4/96 [transcribed 8/16/96]: 8:30AM: I'm sitting in front of a class in upper high school or college, and the teacher drops a packet of crack or heroin or coke on the floor and kicks it to me, and I kick it back and to my right, and the teacher forms the words with her lips "Jack or Frank got it," and I turn to see a flurry in that corner and they seem to be saying, "It's a good-sized DOSE" and wonder if the teacher's plan will work, congratulating myself on aiming the packet EXACTLY right! This stems from the idea of my trying to "trick" Mom into going into a home?
7/13/96 [transcribed 8/16/96]: 3:10AM: I'm taking a charming BABY to a gate, where I'm leaving and have to leave HER, and I can see how affection for a child can lead to ADOPTION, but when I bend to say goodbye it's an OLD MAN on a gurney---Dennis? Me? Mom? Dad? And I say goodbye softly: "If you WEREN'T here, I wouldn't be seeing you SO MUCH," and suddenly I feel very sad, and WAKE feeling sad and pensive, and STAY sad for a few hours afterward.
7/18/96: (In Akron) 12:55AM: 1) Some AWFUL woman is torturing me: making me bite down hard on tough foods, cutting a huge cricket in half and feeding me its insides so that I FEEL my gorge rise, my mouth fills with something like the AWFUL spinach I had last night. 2) 5:44AM: Actualism got an ODD request: someone wanted to bare-sail (go on a boat without sails or oars) on Long Island Sound. I find a CLUB for bare-sailing and find a member who's THRILLED to do this, thanking me with tears in his eyes, as a storm sends HUGE waves crashing against rocks RIGHT outside his house-terrace, so that I say to him, "You KNOW this house will be swept away," and he says, "Of COURSE." 3) 6:05AM: Details forgotten now at 6:20AM after jotting first two and taking a pee.
7/20/96: (In Akron) 7:24AM: I'm attending a concert by someone like the Moody Blues, who've been retired but did one enormously gala performance (thoughts of Olympics speeches at opening last night?) for their old fans. I try to describe someone's indescribable feelings as "Bliss, as simple as that! You're totally happy, minute by minute," and think that's very wise. It's in three parts, at 5PM, 9PM, and 1:15AM, and I have ANOTHER ticket for 2:15AM and think I can hear MOST of one before leaving for the OTHER. Finish this on pot, tired for day.
7/30/96: 8:30AM: Have been having MANY dreams, but none have stayed as worth transcribing until this one: I'm in some kind of class where a professor is teaching various mathematical techniques, and I ask about how to use the school's catalog of courses, and he thinks I'm asking, "What is THIS course about," and starts drawing scenarios on the board. Meanwhile, ANOTHER class is going on in the BACK of this room, and the teacher is drawing on an ADJACENT blackboard for HIS students, which makes the room somewhat chaotic. Then one of the cuter students, with a ripped shirt over an undershirt, asks me with a smile if I happen to have an extra clean shirt that he could wear, and I look into my suitcase and find that what I THOUGHT was a clean undershirt is spotted with food on the front and sweat under the arms, so I push that under the rest of the clothes and pull out a wrinkled dress shirt like my brown-white-tiny-blue-striped shirt and give it to him, and he smiles and puts it on and it fits rather baggily. I wake, type this, and phone Pope about the synchronicity of his watching Marcello Mastroianni over the weekend and MY having a DREAM about him that I'd transcribed just prior to THIS dream.
8/1/96 [recorded 8/26]: 7:20AM: I'm with a KID in Prague, and we SEE an amusement park but can't GET there. LAST night we got there so late we couldn't get to the roller coaster. TONIGHT we'll try a taxi, about $30; I have no foreign CURRENCY, but the kid has about $40 and I have guest comps for the park itself. Kid is a GIRL and uses the john on ONE side of huge triangular building and I get lost finding the door on the OTHER side, but FINALLY locate an area with guys peeing against stone WALLS onto gardens. Out and we're ALL lost, wandering streets, and FINALLY finding the kid, and we start looking for a cab or a bus. Climb down HUGE electrical tower, feet on breaking components, and wake to pee at 6:45AM. [Trouble hearing shower come on.] Later, HUGE blond, kohl-eyed, blue-assholed gigolo with tiny nipples loves bloody cock, but no kissing.
8/15/96: 7:45AM: I'm working for IBM, getting in at 10AM to get a haircut at the IBM barbershop without an appointment. I'm not sure whether there are two or three (primarily female) barbers at work, but though the waiting room has four of five men waiting, I think I'm on some sort of "preferred treatment" list because the secretary keeps saying to me, "Just a few more minutes," when men who have APPOINTMENTS are being told that they might as well leave and come back because some of the barbers are slightly behind schedule. I wonder if I've been told to get a haircut (my hair's not REALLY that long) because they're going to make some kind of announcement today about my promotion, or being in line for some fabulous management job, and they want me to look good for the photographers. I'm so placid I'm not even worried that I don't have a book to read, since I know I'll be out at noon and it's only 10:50AM when I'm told for the third time "They're almost ready for you." [Transcribe this directly to the computer rather than taking notes, finishing at 7:48AM, tired!]
8/25/96: 7:30PM: [No, that's not when I dreamed it or woke: I'd thought of phoning Jean-Jacques when I woke about 6:30AM---less than four hours after I'd gone to sleep after getting home just before 1AM and finishing both puzzles by 2:45AM before going to bed---and I got up about 10:15 JUST in time to answer the phone, then read MUCH of the rest of the Sunday Times before having BREAKFAST at 2PM!! Now I just finished LUNCH by 7:30!] I'm riding in Jean-Jacques' new car, and I look worriedly out the window to see a large yellow car trying to cut in on his turn to the right, fearing JJ's fender will be ruined, but the turn is completed without incident and I settle back to look over the surprisingly high dashboard, which seems to be carpeted below a slit-like window. Then when I turn to look into the back of the car, I'm the ONLY one sitting in the front and the driver's seat is in the REAR, making it even HARDER to peer over the high dashboard and fuzzy carpeting to see out the front. But there seems to be some sort of built-in radar, or scanning device, and JJ smiles and says that there's no trouble at all, and proves it by continuing to talk animatedly with someone else in the back seat with him, and me in the front seat, and I can't even SEE out the front at this time. [Debate phoning him to see if he wants to come to NYC for the spring presentations of Wagner's Ring at the Met, and find they're charging about $30 more for EACH seat on Friday and Saturday evenings and on Saturday matinees (when it used to be a surcharge ONLY for Saturday matinees---now it's almost half: three out of seven time-slots). After doing the only index left for me to do, and eating lunch so late, I figure to catch up with this by 7:40PM and THEN what to do?]
8/27/96: 8:15AM: Taking notes for MY\MUSICAL from 8AM, when at 8:15AM I remember that I had a DREAM: I'm sorting manila envelopes in which I've put SONGS and on the outside numbered SCENES, starting with three songs in three scenes, but expanding into a set of FORTY-NINE songs and reprises, about which I think "Wouldn't that be too LONG?" THEN, as I write the FIRST line HERE, I recall a SECOND dream---VERY detailed---of sleeping in a room with 4-5 other college students (we're all in the same room, but it's large and we're all quite comfortable, with three enormous windows facing outside through open Venetian blinds), and I'm staring out the windows at a beautiful wooded countryside (moss-covered tree trunks like Laurisilva views from my video last night, but interspersed with brilliant-yellow rocky crags that the rising sun illuminates greenly, all on abruptly changing hillsides covered with bushes and rocks and ledges) in which clouds of mist are rising at dawn, becoming light, and a flurry of whitish movement becomes a herd of GOATS, very shaggy, and the HEAD goat is challenged by a BOY waving a LANCE and riding a DOG! My closest roommate sees this too, and then the clouds RETURN and it's DARK again, but we're not puzzled because I say, "You can SEE that the sun's up BEHIND the clouds," and we're driving on a hilly back road with no traffic and it DOES begin to get light as we drive along. Song title: “False Dawn”? (RETURN TO JOURNALS 8/27/96).
8/28/96: 11:35AM: I'm faced with two gorgeous young men, sucking them wildly, and the one on the left is very sweet and says that I've done a good job on him, so why don't I treat the other one, but when I suck him, it seems I see dots of blood on the tip of his cock, the foreskin of which is so tight it seems to hood the entire cock-head, forming a hood of flesh that seems abraded, possibly by my teeth, and I'm concerned that I'm not hurting him, but he keeps jamming his cock into my mouth and I keep on trying to bring him to the frenzy of orgasm. This reminds me that I found most of the last of John's tapes from Dick C. rather unexciting, and when I looked at the first of Dennis's tapes (admittedly I was nonplussed when it was copy-protected, so that I couldn't run it on the NEC through the RCA, and then the fast-forward button of the RCA doesn't seem to be working even IN the stripped status, so I had to watch the WHOLE THING, silly dialogue and ass-reaming and all) I thought that this might become a SYNDROME: like my increasing arthritis, I'll simply not be interested in porno tapes in any solid (or solid-making) way. I did wake excited from my dream (remember, this is supposed to be a dream page, not a notebook page, but I'm heading for the bottom of the page anyway), and thought about watching more tapes this morning, but an index MIGHT be delivered this morning (at least I'm supposed to call Terry if it ISN'T), and I don't want to be excited when I have to throw on my shorts and go down to pick it up. Lie lazily in bed until 11:10, thinking how the time passed so quickly between 10AM and 11AM that I must have dozed without realizing it, and then decide I MUST get up and into the day, maybe even vacuum to pass the time; wanting first to update my restaurant list, stuck in printer till now.
8/30/96: 9:25AM: Dick H. is coming over for dinner about 7PM tonight, and it's almost that time and I'm in my (very different, though it seems to be back on some intermediate floor at 309 West 57th) kitchen wondering what to serve. Primarily I'm torn in different directions about the precooked food I've stored atop a cabinet in the kitchen: a plate of veal chops that I'd roasted last night then put atop the cabinet (the chops have a dried look, but I figure if I'd put them back in the oven they'd regain their new-cooked look?), and when I get on a chair (like I did yesterday to put the newspaper clippings that I’d read in the books on a top bookshelf), I find there are two enormous roast turkeys on platters up there too! Though they're not refrigerated, they still seem to smell fresh, and I console myself that they're not covered with flies, which would be attracted to rotted meat, so they're probably still edible, though my system might be more accustomed to eating two- or three-day old meat than Dick’s is, so I hope he won't get sick if I DO reheat them, but that DOES give me pause. "How did all these meats get left OVER up here?" I wonder, but at least a greasy gravy (from Mutant Message Down Under, read last night?) carton seems quite empty except for a few tablespoons at the bottom, and can be thrown out. Then I'm back on the floor, looking into vegetables, and I'd figured to serve crinkle-cut carrots (like I ate last night with sausage---is THAT what's giving me food dreams?) but now I examine a plate of bite-sized cut carrots loosely covered with foil, debating to add them to the crinkle-cuts, sauteing both types in butter enough so that they either appear to look alike, or are a "fiesta-cut" of various types that won't arouse suspicion of coming from two quite different sources. As I'm staring at these carrots, I hear a distant bell, and figure that MIGHT be Dick at the door, which is two closed doors away, and open the kitchen door to a hallway off which other rooms of my apartment are arranged, open another intermediate door---which is awkward because the open door blocks another part of the hallway completely---and get to my front door, which is arranged with locks rather similar to the set here at 167 Hicks, and open it to find the hallway empty: Dick hasn't arrived yet. For some reason I walk out into the corridor and find my young and somewhat sexy neighbor at HIS door, and he's a nosy, chipper, outgoing guy who's probably gay and whom I can't quite place from Sage or Prime Timers, though younger, reminding me now of a younger cuter Joe E. with his chatty enthusiasm, and he's obviously curious why I'm in the hallway as I walk toward the elevator to see if it's on the way up, and I pass someone who LOOKS like Dick H. in the hallway too, and it occurs to me that he'd ALSO worked with me at IBM with my coming guest, who seems to have changed into a Richard L., whom I'm not quite sure Dick knows, or even likes, but he politely declines my invitation to join us---maybe I'm confusing someone ELSE in this confusing dream-situation---and suddenly the hallway fills with a group of young men of various heights, going somewhere or other, who have to pass our threesome in the hallway, so we press our backs to the wall to permit them to pass, and there's a trio of men---the shortest is about 4'5" and the tallest about 7'6", and the shortest is staring UP at Dick and the tallest comes closer and peers DOWN at Dick, and I'm wondering if they're debating they know each other and should greet each other, or if they're somehow antagonized or annoyed with our blocking the hallway and there's going to be some kind of scene in a moment, but I wake without having resolved that question, though there hadn't seemed to have been any particular MENACE in their manner, just the forced closeness of having to pass in a rather narrow hallway in a large apartment building in which I'd lived for such a short time that I didn't even have any idea who lived in other apartments on the floor, rather like the floor in Vicki's apartment on 76th Street. My apartment was sparsely furnished, as if I'd just moved in, and the paint seemed fresh too, as with a new occupancy---even the top of the cabinet lacked dust, as if I hadn't lived there very long. When I FIRST wake about 9AM I don't remember this at ALL, but then segments come back and I record this till 9:45.
8/31/96: 10AM: 1) I'm sitting in the back of someone's new car, and it doesn't really have a ROOF on it, more like a bathtub with seats, and the driver tells me in the back and another guy in the front seat that "this tape" (holding out a yellow flexible cord that looks rather like a cloth tape measure) "is actually the seatbelt, and you have to draw it out from the back of the car, pull it over your shoulder, and then, later, there's going to be a MORE SOLID key"---and he brandishes the CURRENT key, which is just a regular-sized ignition key for the car, implying that the REAL key is something like an enormously strong skeleton key that would FIT into the ignition and HOLD the belt-top in place with its own flanges, but that for THIS key to maintain us in the car in case of an accident, the tape itself has to be wrapped around the right wrist before the key is placed into the ignition, and I think this is a VERY strange modernistic idea that's not really going to work: for instance, if the car ROLLS OVER, the loose tape isn't REALLY going to protect anyone from damage from the ground, so they still have to make a better plan if they want this experimental car-model to seem SAFE. 2) I'm supposed to be testing some kind of stereo-eyepieced "reality binoculars" by hanging up an earring with REAL pearls and "looking through the parallel eyepiece at an earring with FALSE pearls hanging next to it and seeing CLEARLY the difference between the real and false earrings." I think obliquely that this is a rather strange test, and I'm not REALLY clear on the ACTUAL purpose of these parallel viewing-pieces, not clear on how to SUSPEND them while I hang the earrings, which seem to ME to be the SAME, though there are two clearly marked places to hang each of them, but I'm also not clear what I'm supposed to SEE: there's the idea that somehow the parallax-view will "work" when the two objects "fuse into one through the binoculars" to determine if the eyepieces FUNCTION correctly. But I'm not clear about the DISTANCE between the objects and the eyepieces, or the distance between the two eyepieces if they're NOT attached as binoculars, but it seems "not in the rules" to ask questions before making the actual evaluation, and I have no good idea how to do that. A DIFFERENT kind of "frustration" dream!
9/1/96: 8:35AM: I'm giving a party at Art O.'s place, and we're in a HUGE basement, waiting on line to get into a john. Sherryl is IN the john (she's coordinating the picnic today in Battery Park for Labor Day tomorrow) talking with a women friend, and the woman calls out through the curtain forming the door to the john that "Benedict" should come in. I'm next in line, thinking that they should go by the LINE, rather than by the boy friend-of-the-woman-who's-inside next, so when the woman calls out for ANOTHER male name, I announce to the line of about 12 behind me that "We're going by LINE, not by name," and I push my way past the two women and go WAY around to a urinal that's really into a POND. As I pee, I think the guys are going to think this is a VERY strange place: many of the wall-supports are canted at perilous angles, and I find one crossbeam settled down so low that you now have to DUCK under it, and I raise it up and support it even more perilously than the way it had balanced in place before---is the entire FOUNDATION sinking?---and many of the side walls look like they're buckling, and I'm wondering if THIS might be the day when the whole THING collapses? But I finish peeing into the leaf-covered pond that's the urinal, and recall that around ANOTHER three corners is a john with a TOILET, not just a urinal, so that the "bathroom in the basement" can hold TWO (or is it even THREE, because I seem to remember a SECOND toilet around ANOTHER corner in this cavernous basement that now seems to be under a CASTLE rather than an apartment or even a simple HOUSE), so when I exit I have to tell TWO guys they can come in to pee---which is good, because it's 12:50PM and we're due someplace at 2PM for lunch, and it takes a time to get there, and if every urination takes five minutes, as mine did, they'll NEVER be finished in time---but when I pass the ball game on the STAGE in the atrium in the basement, I think I have to tell them to turn right BEFORE they pass the ball field, and go up the flight of marble stairs leading to the ground floor where the entrance to this john is. The size of the place makes it look like a set for Don Juan for Douglas Fairbanks in the silent-film era, and the green-painted, plaster-chipped falling lintels, supports, and even walls are shadowy and dim, and I even wonder vaguely when Art is going to be fixing up all these things. MANY-detailed ODD dream!
9/2/96: 4AM: GHASTLY dream of walking lost in old-town section of Moscow, four various-sized cartons of new-bought clothes (ranging from entire suits or overcoats at the bottom to shoes or handkerchiefs at the top) broken and spilling their contents onto the muddy ground; no knowledge of Russian to ask how or where to go, but I manage to ask, "Which way to the Tupelov Tower?" which I think I can see looming on the far horizon from our hilltop view, which I know to be SOMEWHAT close to our hotel, or at least in an area where we could hope to find a TAXI, but that brings NO answer though children repeat my words wonderingly, and finally we (someone copeless like Dennis seems to be following me, refusing to contribute to finding our way OUT of this mess) struggle down a muddy path that I hope leads down the hill, but only ends in someone's garbage-laden back entrance to their hovel in this Russian favela. Earlier, we'd tried to find a road by turning into what might have been a driveway in which a wrecked Jeep was standing, but on the left side I only encounter a cobweb-strewn bush, and the right side seems blocked by a rundown house or shop, and to add to our concern it seems to be getting DARK and I'm beginning to WEEP and SHOUT with my frustration at not being able to find our way out (and having gotten lost in here in the FIRST place, with ABSOLUTELY NO recollection of which way we'd come or HOW we'd managed to get here), with unthinkable difficulties from finding no place to sleep or even REST in this muddy squalor of shacks and winding confusing paths, and there's also a lingering sense of SADNESS when I finally DO manage to wake out of this nightmare of search and fruitlessness and futility of almost ANY effort at ALL! Don't even have the energy to RECORD this dream until AFTER this NEXT!
9/3/96: 7:45AM: MOST bizarre: two connected "Japanese" dreams: 1) I'm studying for a long time in a tatami-floored bedroom which HAD had hangings to separate me from the other rooms adjoining mine and to keep out the morning light, but when I come back to find the laundry on the floor, I pick up what I think to be one of my cleaned hangings, but find it's my neighbor's pullover, exactly like the four or five of HIS coats that he's folding in a very special, trained way. I try to fold it like his, as if I'd picked it up to do it FOR him, rather than mistaking it for one of my hangings, but realize that I could never exactly duplicate his disciplined foldings, so I throw it distractedly onto his bed, hoping he'll see my error, accept my apology, and forgive me. So NONE of my things have been returned, and my next step in the training seems to be simplifying, renouncing, and living visibly correctly: I don't have my own clothes back, I don't have the quilted hangings that I'd attach to the ceiling tracks like hospital curtains to keep out the morning light, which I'll have to grow accustomed to; to keep out the sounds from the adjoining cubicles, which I'll have to endure; to keep out the sights from the adjoining cubicles, which I'll have to ignore; and to keep my actions hidden from everyone else, which I'll have to curtail and control to reflect my new level of student initiation. It'll be difficult, but I'm proud to have been promoted, and I'll continue to try to do my best to progress in this unknown discipline. 2) Seemingly as part of THAT dream, but describable as a separate part, is my "relationship" with "the killer" in the cubicle across from mine: my first impression of him is that he's a very skilled practitioner who comes out of his most ascetic room only to "kill" students who deserve it (I'm not sure whether it's an ACTUAL killing, a SYMBOLIC killing that may actually be a GOOD deed which kills off the student's "past" inexpertise and permits the flourishing of the student's "current incarnation," or some kind of ACTUAL evil deed that STILL helps us [or even HINDERS us] in our training), but then I take the INCREDIBLE chance of taking a good LOOK at him (which just may be totally forbidden), and find that he's a VERY old man, thus even MORE skilled in his energetic task than I had thought, and somehow my DISCOVERY of this fact concerning him releases the tension between us, and he comes into my cubicle to sit and chat and laugh with me, and I find that he's apparently much YOUNGER than I thought (or else his good humor makes him APPEAR younger for the moment), and we've actually become "friends" of some sort, which would seem to indicate my advancement in this arcane discipline. 3) We're all engaged in some esoteric "cross-country race" in which students of widely varying accomplishment have to make their way across a Ran-type battlefield covered with colored smokes, dangerous rocks and precipices, and other "combatants" who, because of the "hiddenness" of people’s beings and purposes and facilities, may be either allies or enemies. I encounter a few "equals" and seem always to acquit myself in a manner of distancing or friendliness that advances my status, but there's one fierce warrior whom I always regard with a mixture of attraction and awe, KNOWING that he's much more advanced than I am, yet finding his almost Stallone-type body---enormous muscles definitively cut, swagged with bandoliers and ribbons and weapons that enhance his "dangerous" look---enormously attractive. After a few minor encounters whose details I've forgotten, I see him running diagonally out of the smoke at my right rear, seeming to go in the same direction I am, and when I "brush past him," I take the enormous chance of grasping him around the middle and seem to try to communicate telepathically my admiration for his body without getting physically pornographic with it: hugging him sideways to my chest, grasping his pectorals with my clutching hands, and almost sneakily crushing his hard nipples between my "randomly placed" knuckles. This seems to please him and turn him on and "pass my test," because he ROARS his approval, swings around with drawn swords and SLASHES my body a number of times: partly as cuts of honor as in pre-War Germanic student culture, partly as marks of achievement in this mysterious study, and partly {I'm convinced} as outlets facilitating my body's discharge of fluids and fats to "whittle me down" to a more ideal body-sculpture: through some of the cuts flow streams of urine in penis-sized jets with much more "throw power," below some of the cuts that shape sexy lines down to my groin ooze greasy streaks of FAT to assist my "rendering" of unsightly blubber which, when drained away, will leave my body more like HIS. In triumph, I raise my arms in a victory-sign and go to the lakeside with many of the combatants and engage in a pissing contest, and I win over them by far and away the MOST streams of MOST DISTANTLY FLUNG urine, one stream from my navel jetting almost to the edge of the lake on the horizon to my left, and this continues for a good long time while others are quickly exhausted and look at my display with recognition and admiration. Seemingly some sound in my room wakes me, as it did after section 2, my nipple-presses.
9/4/96: 5:45AM: The dream-combination is SO odd that I get up NOW and transcribe it rather than trying for notes: I'm riding on a train with a red-headed friend that I've just told I'm gay [here are two branches:] a) and he smiles a BROAD smile at me as the DETECTIVE portion "heats up" when we're told that "Mr. Punch and Miss Szimring did NOT get on at the previous station where they'd supposed to have gotten on," and we smiled because Mr. Punch was an ENORMOUSLY attractive young man, escorting a rather bizarre veiled woman that we thought just MIGHT be his catamite cross-dressed as a woman, and the red-headed fellow could SHARE his feelings of attraction for Mr. Punch with me with his smile. And b) I retire to my car with bottles and jars lined up along the window to finish the COOKING portion by mixing the last few jars of water and contents, along with a number of vitamin pills that---I smiled---"the female chef" had added to the ingredients, and then "had to make the roux" by mixing the flour and the water with a wisk, and "had to take a bit of gravy" to make it dark and flavorful; and THEN I had to CHOOSE whether to use ALL the last ingredients because Bleak House (or some such long novel) was going to be READ in class, or use just PART of the ingredients because it was going to be assigned for HOMEWORK and only a small SECTION was going to be read in class (of COURSE this doesn't make any sense: it's a DREAM)---and I pour in a bit too much of the Karo-syrup-like liquid because there's not really THAT much left in the bottle, but what the hell, it's DONE and I'll finish mixing up the recipes in preparation for the cooking course, and someone else will have to worry about the literature---and just NOW I remember a PRIOR section to this hodge-podge of a dream: I'd been supposed to give a TEST in the DESERT, but two of my prize pupils had been to the john, or something, and MISSED the test, but I was DETERMINED that they take it, so I took two pages that I'd found and told them to take THIS test, and then they only had time before we had to leave for the wedding (DREAM again, remember) to do the FIRST page of the two-page test, and then not even answer all THOSE questions, and I'd taken a quick peek at their answers, seeming to think they MIGHT be OK and they'd pass as I knew they'd have been able to had I not messed up their testing somehow in connection with my brand-newness, but then we ALL had to go, and I had to scurry back to the desert where they were evacuating the school groups and putting up PEWS because this area was going to become the nave of the church in which the wedding was going to take place, and I tried to find the section of teachers who'd have the test-answers, but couldn't find them and was told to get out so the flooring could proceed, and I squeezed out with the last of them past a portable holy-water fount, just beside which I chose to spit out my gum, very soft into the deep powdery brownish-yellow sand, thinking that if anyone say me they might berate me: "Don't you KNOW someone will STEP into that when going to bless themselves and get it stuck on their SHOE?" and I can only retort that the scurry of everyone else will serve to BURY it rather than keep it at the surface to be stuck to. Just recall now that the red-headed guy is RATHER looking like Raphael S., and could HIS appearance be connected with all the plans yesterday about going upstate for Vicki's party, as I met him at the Actualism picnic upstate, just as the train might reflect the train that Shelley's taking me is avoiding for me, but the REST of the etiology of the dream-nonsense QUITE escapes me, except that it's so rich and varied I'm GLAD I got it all down now by 6:05AM in the dark! 11AM: woke again at 10AM with another dream, now forgotten, and now remember ANOTHER doozy: I'm in some tiny Italian town, hungry, but when I get to a restaurant in the center of town they've stopped serving. Ask for some ice cream that they serve from tiny tins on a table in the center of the restaurant, and the owner says queenlily: "You take that yourself, as much as you want, and come back here and pay for it." So I go to the table just as others have helped themselves to tiny bits of ice cream, and there's an array of four tiny stacks of paper cups, each of which has a scoop or two of delicately tinted ice cream in the top cup, so I tip one pile over and FOUR tiny scoops of peach-tinted ice cream fall out, each accompanying a rose, which I painstakingly ladle back into the cup, playing ball-in-cup with roses and ice cream and cups until I have the SMALLEST ball of ice cream in the bottom of a cup. Back to the bar in the restaurant and the owner is now showing me down a flight of stairs, being VERY friendly, and I think she's trying to put the make on me, so I sort of go along with her, feeling the thick felt of the back of her skirt over her ample ass as we descend the stairs. For some reason, I want to be taken somewhere else, maybe my hotel, and we're in a HUGE car that seats nine people (the truck in White Man's Burden last night?) that have to get out the same door, and I offer to pay for all three in my row: me, a crazy stubble-faced old man, and a dizzy woman, but the owner-woman says, "$54," definitely $18 apiece, which I KNEW, but somehow it's just LUDICROUSLY high. Try to argue with her, saying I'll only pay my OWN, but when I go into my wallet I find I DO have a $50 bill, and another tiny one that I figure is a $3, but when I hand it to her she sniffs and gives it back and says, "That's $30." I hunt through my wallet for something smaller, having seen it earlier, but I can't find it, and then think maybe it's a coin, so I start looking through my hooded coat which I have on, but the pockets are filled with purchases and maps and books, so it's VERY awkward looking through, and I laboriously take it off and put it onto a barrel on a recessed windowsill, but an end of it slips off the barrel head and down into the recess, and of COURSE there's water in the bottom of it and the corner of my coat drops into it. I draw it out, VERY tactually feeling the WEIGHT of it, and the WET of the corner of it, and complain that this ALWAYS seems to happen. She looks on coldly, merely waiting to be paid, and I wake with a jolt at 11AM, wondering WHERE all the details from these VERY complicated dreams COME from?!
9/11/96: [recorded 9/12]: Fragment of dream of scratching my right ear-plate (large flat area inside ear behind "hole") to feel a hairy scab-like crust of FUNGUS that I'm worried others might SEE, particularly if I cause it to BLEED.
9/12/96: 8AM: I'm either LEAVING IBM or just re-STARTING, and a clerk casually tosses two boxes of 2.5” x 4.5" SLIPS, dog-eared and wrinkled and faded TIMESLIPS on which I recorded things like "Day 1: I'm working for IBM men who are WOMEN"---and my boss has written something below them in SHORTHAND, and I'll have to find out what was said about my comment. I debate skimming through them and keeping any interesting ones, keeping them ALL, or throwing them OUT.
9/13/96: 7:25AM: I'm looking at a DIFFERENT apartment building at 57th and 8th, or maybe it's 57th and 9th, and three of us get onto the roof and look down to see what appears to be a terrace going around the apartments on the floor below, but when we (without transition) find ourselves ON the terrace, we go in one direction to a dead end and in the other direction to a dead end, and someone suggests it's because of the remodeling of the building that's actually ON the corner which the building we're on encompasses in an L-shape. I remember seeing, from the roof, books open on one of the terraces, and somehow I'm alone, gingerly picking up one of them and finding that it's an art-book of essays by Herman Hesse (whose name I struggled for last night at the Beard House when I described my trip into Montagnola up from Lugano), so I start paging through it but look up in horror to find that the owner of the apartment has come out, and he's angry and shocked while I attempt to explain what had gone before, but four or five friends with him kind of draw him away from me and his anger, and one of them says to me that he ALSO collects Hesse's books, and we start comparing notes, and it almost ends with my being invited to stay for dinner, even though I'm not even sure they know yet that I'm gay, while their campy remarks have already made it clear to me that THEY all are. I might actually have made some new friends!
9/15/96: 10:50AM: Had a dream somewhat like this YESTERDAY too: I'm waiting in some kind of line, like to a sex-club or bar, and the person NEXT to the person next to me in line is VERY attractive in a classical way, and I contrive to let the "interloper" pass or be passed so that I'm right next to the person I want to be next to. Then, this morning, the attractive person is spun around by the person behind him, so that this fabulously muscled, evenly finely haired, beautiful torso that really doesn't exist below the knees and above the neck is presented to my appreciative gaze, and I glide my open palm over his muscle-cuts and flop upward his flaccid penis which immediately grows hard and erect, and he seems highly aroused and on the point of orgasm because of ME, rather than because of the fellow caressing him from behind, and I wake with a pleasing erection and debate either jerking off or going back to sleep to retrieve the end of the dream and lengthen it to a satisfying sexy conclusion.
9/19/96: 9:30AM: I'm sightseeing in a Chinese cultural/amusement park (talking to Jerry and his lover about traveling in South America last night?), and my first view is toward the horizon, where the intervening and final hills are bristling with people about ten feet apart, and some official of the park is telling me and everyone that this is a particular tradition of this province, and we'd better take a picture of it before they relinquish their positions (got my new camcorder yesterday and looked for the first time through my own color eyepiece at my own furniture and paintings). I can't quite decide how to encompass both the sweep of the horizon and the detail of the people standing a precise distance apart. Then I'm on a path by myself, wondering if I've gone over a boundary into a private residential area, but the structures on both sides of the piney path are so enormous, looking on the left like Neuschwanstein and on the right like the Summer Palace in Peking, that even though the path is relatively devoid of people, I look inside and see small crowds moving from room to room, so they must be accessible to tourists even if they ARE privately owned. One in particular looks like the embodiment of a colorful mahjongg tile with bright airy spaces enlivened by primary-colored Chinese characters and tile work on the walls and ceilings, though I can't find any way of getting into the building. When I finally locate the entrance, it's a set of highly polished jade-marble stairs with rushing water flowing down that MUST be traversed before entering. So that only the "worthy" or those "willing to take the risk" can enter? To clean the shoes before entering? But this could be so DANGEROUS: if one fell, swept off one's feet by the rushing current over the slippery stone surfaces, that simple fall could break a bone, crack a skull, chip teeth and shatter digits, flowing red blood over the green stone stairs. Nowhere are their railings on which to cling, and it would seem to be MORE, rather than less, dangerous to cling to someone going up next to you. I try sneaking around to the side, where people are clustered, huddling in groups resigned never to enter, and I try to creep down one side to avoid the cascade, but a tiny dark woman monitor shakes her head at my thoughts of attempting to pass her and points an imperious finger around to the main entryway. I put one foot onto the first step and the water surges up around my shoe, wetting the bottom of my trousers and slicking the underside of my rubber sole so that purchase on the stones would be impossible. I never DO get into this building in the course of this dream.
9/21/96: 9AM: I had this dream at least once before: of a woman condemned to death by HEAT---in a tiled room, in bright light, with OTHERS already dead or dying around her, without steam or flames, just bright heat, not even local burns, but everyone is in GREAT agony, screaming and pleading to be let out! Wake disturbed and jot down the note. 10AM: I'm having sex with Guy S. (saw his face while going through Dennis's porno last night?), and he's mostly clothed so I can't tell what shape his body's in, but I'm kissing his face and neck and playing with his stiffly erect penis, while he seems more businesslike around my body, which seems to be wearing Betsy's knitted old cardigan (I must be thinking firmly about taking it to Garnet Hill next week) mostly open, with my pants dropped, and when I glance down I'm pleased to see that I don't have that much of a pot and I seem to be pretty erect, and I wake with a pleasant erection in relieved contrast to the starkness of the prior dream. Death and sex, first topics of a new 100 pages of DREAMS.
9/23/96: 9AM: A group of us are cleaning up after an enormous banquet, and three or four women and I are piling dirty dishes, glasses, and garbage together on the tables. I get three milk-product containers JUST managed by my two hands, and I have to reach for an already-milky light switch sandwiched between the refrigerator and a wall on the right, which means I have to juggle the three containers, taking care not to spill them, AND turn on the light switch and go out through the door on the left of the refrigerator. Then I gather plastic glasses filled with remains of strawberry shortcake (we shared strawberry cheesecake in Gee Whiz yesterday?), and I think that this process is going to be messily complex: plastic, fruit, cream, and cake all mixed with half-eaten strawberries and used silverware (maybe pieces of myself behind the flowers at the edge of the screen in the filming of the New Orleans restaurant Gabrielle on Sunday Morning yesterday that Pope told me to watch).
9/24/96: 7:50AM: I'm with Don M. and VERY elegant group of people 1) looking for lunch in a tiny upstate New York town, riding and walking to find a place they like but they have no idea where it is, and I say we MUST go to Shorty's, which is three blocks away, the only good lunch place in town, and three of us arrive early (the others are driving and looking for a place to park) and look at the menu to find that the only thing they have is a variously concocted list of hamburgers, and I look longingly at the plastic display of a breakfast roll, with a little note saying there's no filling, but it comes with a large pat of butter on which sits a plastic cuplet of syrup. Don O. (inexplicably there) orders toast, and when it's brought to him in a blond shade, he insists he wants it darker, but when it comes mulatto, he insists it's too dark and has to be done over. The counter-clerk looks at him as if he'd like to smash it in his face, but I say, "I'll take it," and everything rights itself. Others 2) are having a party in Don's CASTLE, and EVERYTHING I touch goes wrong, as on a television sitcom: I open a closet door to put my jacket in, and everything tumbles out because it was sitting atop a stack of BOWLING balls surmounted with POOL balls that come rolling out all over the Persian carpet; I keep knocking over knickknacks and bumping into outrageously Chinese furniture. I return to my room to change out of his-furnished light-blue silk pajamas, to find my clothes either stained or full of holes, and I'm aghast at my broken-bodied dop kit with my tattered toiletries splayed out on a Louis-Whatever marble-topped end table. I look for my deodorant, and see two cloth-of-gold covered beds aside open drawers where I'm supposed to put all my stuff, and even the DOGS are too well bred to sniff at my dirty socks, of course with holes in the toes. I feel hopelessly outclassed, and Don doesn't help when he loftily suggests, "If you don't know where to put something, just ask one of the uniformed servants." I'm sure he's sorry he even invited me, and I just want it to be OVER (thinking about the upcoming trip to Garnet Hill?). Maybe I should call him today and tell him dream?
9/29/96: 9:30AM: I'm attending some kind of class, and have to get to another class by 2PM, but the instructor asks me to write down my name and address so that she can have it for her records, so I try to write it for her but the pen smears and the letters end up quite unreadable. So I go back to my desk and search through for a better pen, and finally borrow one from the person sitting at the desk in front of me, but now I'm trying to write on something like a plastic dry-cleaning bag, and can't find an area CLEAR of printing to write my own name clearly, and when I do find a small area, the plastic slides over the lower layer, catching the pen point, and again my name is unreadable. Increasingly frustrated, knowing that time is passing and I MUST be going, I ask someone leaving for a piece of spiral notebook paper, and a woman gives it to me, but AGAIN in my hurry the letters in my name aren't clear enough to read, though I go over them and over them, trying to be careful to write them legibly. At last I'm resorting to pulling out random desk drawers, hoping to find a blank slip of paper, an unused index card, or a notepad or memo pad that I can take only one sheet of, and then I'm also scrambling for a new pen, or even a PENCIL, and one clock says 1:55, even though another reads 1:50, and I know it'll take at LEAST fifteen minutes even by CAB to get from 42nd Street, where I am, down to 14th Street, where I need to be, and I dash back and forth with such FRUSTRATION in the classroom that I actually wake up, feeling weak and helpless, having I suppose literally tossed on my bed before waking up, and finish this page 100 at 10:00AM exactly!
10/15/96: 9:20AM: I'm trying to climb a stone stairway by clinging to the rather thin trunk of a tree growing out of a rock-encircled balcony of soil jutting out from the top of the crumbling stairway. A group of tough guys around the tree warn me that I might pull the entire thing out by the roots, but I think they're just trying to get me away from their sitting perches, so I continue to haul myself up and the tree remains stable. Then I'm in a huge Actualism meeting where I think/fantasize everyone wants me to take some sort of controlling position, but I'm not willing to do so. I have to leave the room but then have trouble getting back: I wander through a huge central hotel lobby rather like the red-mosaic room at the Bank of New York on Sunday's tour, then force myself between the gates of a shuttered drugstore on the corner of the lot that turns out not to be connected to the central floor plan, then go along corridors that lead to another corner of the building rather than our meeting room. I'm going increasingly faster trying to return, though I'm not late, and see someone running down a hallway and RUN after her, but she's dressed rather formally in a gown and small veil, and she breaks into the doors of a WEDDING party that I hastily back away from. Keep trying to find this enormous meeting room and just can't seem to locate it, and wake almost WEARY of having no results from my frustrating, endless searchings.
10/19/96: 9:45AM: I'm in a commuter train, looking up at a Roster of Rides at the prow-shaped entrance to an amusement park that seems to be a combination of Great Adventure in New Jersey and Summit Beach in Akron. Ten rides are listed as their most famous, and some of the names are new to me, so I'm looking forward to the summer, when the park will be open, but then it seems to me that it IS the summer, and I could come any day to try out the new rides. A family with three small kids is in the front seat immediately ahead of me in what turns out to be a roller-coaster-type train (which reminds me of the fragment of Mom and me riding in a helicopter looking over a countryside below when they execute a loop and Mom, who hasn't had her seat belt fastened, flips OUT of her seat and is hanging onto the back, legs dangling in space, not terribly concerned by the danger but shushing me so that I won't tell the pilot that she's now outside, and another swoop makes her essentially weightless, giving her the opportunity to pull herself back into her seat safely), and I'm concerned that THEY don't buckle themselves in, because this "train" turns out to be a metal-underwheel-type roller coaster ITSELF, speeding into toboggan-type turns so that we're lying on our sides but held in place by our velocity. Not only that, but the ROUTE of the train is along the construction site of a FABULOUS new loop-the-loop coaster in the process of being built (the steel FRAMEWORK seems to be completed, but the actual TRACKS don't seem to have been placed yet), extending for miles into the forest, sometimes dipping below us to canyons dug into the earth, most of the time soaring above us in dips and curls among the leafy trees, sometimes involved in six or seven curls of such intricacy I can't trace (as we speed past) their sequential entrances and exits. I can't WAIT for the ride to be finished, as it will UNDOUBTEDLY be the longest, most loopy roller-coaster ride in the world, and I'm pleased that it's located where I can easily GET to it, rather than across the country or across the world. The DESTINATION of the train, however, turns out to be some kind of BEACH resort, and we pass through villages that I don't recognize, but I think I WILL recognize where I have to get OFF, and when the train stops at a little town whose name I MIGHT remember, and I ask the driver where we are and he VERIFIES the name, and I see in the near distance a pergola advertised as a Viewing Point, I'm pretty sure I can walk past the pergola, and about a mile down the beach, just a ten-minute walk or so, get to my destination, which in the dream seems to be some kind of shared summer accommodation, the whole thing maybe caused by the intricacies of my phone conversation yesterday with Carolyn about Kimberley and Marilyn and Marvin vis-a-vis leaf-viewing, Manitoga, and Sunday's trip.
10/21/96: 9:30AM: Odd vignette of my putting TOOTHPASTE on the corn-side of my big toe and scrubbing it into a cleansing-looking lather with my toothbrush, thinking that this might have prevented some infection from the dirt wedged into the cleft between the skin and the toenail. As I said: odd vignette.
10/22/96: 9:10AM: I'm sleeping with a number of sort-of-sexy men in what might be either a barracks or a car of a military train, and, when some sort of supervisor or sergeant gets up and goes into the bathroom right next to the bed across the way from mine, everyone starts moving "sleepily" and "not quite in control" toward the crotches of their neighbors. I'm gazing at a somewhat overweight young man across from me (like the guy on the subway last night?), and he's pleasuring himself, but he's obviously turned on by two other guys sixty-nining nearby, so he doesn't mind when I reach over and start stroking his body. He quickly climbs into bed with me, his cock-head already wet with precum, and whispers, "Take it in your mouth" into my ear. I shake my head reluctantly, regretfully, but also definitely, and I begin using my hands on him in what I hope is a satisfying manner. We're part of about four couples engaged symmetrically around me when someone across the way says urgently, "He's going to be out of the bathroom in just two minutes." I think that gives me enough time and just as I'm going into my sexiest palmistry, the observer quickly adds, "Move him over so he won't cum on the sheets," and I look to see gouts of semen on his own leg, and I've moved over enough so that he's not overleaning the gap of sheet between us but is spurting onto his own body, white and smooth and not as unappealing as I'd once judged it to be.
11/2/96: 10:10AM: First detailed dream in what seems to be a long time, though eleven days isn't so bad: I'm posted to an Army camp, though I don't seem to be actually IN the Army, more like an observer or a reporter, and I'm very HAPPY for the first time in a long time because I seem to have found a LOVER! We're sitting next to each other, semi-publicly, and I put my arm alongside his black-trousered leg and gently caress his knee, and he and the onlookers placidly accept my show of affection. He's some kind of guard or overseer in the cafeteria, and he remarks, "I saw an ad a number of months ago, requisitioning someone for this position, and when I responded, they were surprised because no one had actually looked for or understood the purpose of the ad, but I took advantage of it and now have this privilege. I just get up at 5AM and get here before anyone else, and then I can eat anything I want to afterwards," and the implication was that his importance let his FRIENDS also share in the perks of his position. Then without transition we're walking south on Second Avenue in the 70s, and I look southeast to see the rooflines of some of the buildings that I recognize from my old apartment at 320 E. 70th Street, and tell him (falsely, questioning my fib even in the dream, but dismissing it as giving him information about me and entertainment rather than actual fact) that I'd often ridden the East Side subway to someplace like Lexington and 77th (which of course I NEVER did except in later years to visit Vicki) from my job at IBM and walk down this very way. But I'm slightly puzzled because we're not down to 73rd Street yet, and I can't point out my apartment building down the block for another three crossings. Another switch has me observing from low down in the street as another companion walks past a sidewalk jewelry-sales-table and his eyes widen in a ludicrous parody of pleased surprise as he asks the young salesman the price of a certain bangle (rather like the Indian bangles from the tour on Wednesday in Jackson Heights), but I know he's just using that as a conversation opener to try to seduce the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old who's selling the stuff. Details from a slight conversation here have vanished from my memory now. [Sat on the toilet before transcribing this with ANOTHER vague seizure of unhappiness---or maybe melancholy would be a better word---looking down at my developed calves which no one is enjoying touching, no one appreciating looking at, NO lovers!]
11/6/96: 9:20AM: 1) I've just finished my first class in a new semester, concerned that it seems to be so difficult with so much reading and understanding to undertake in a field I'm not really interested in, and I have the prospect of a SECOND class that day, which should start at 1PM and it's now 1:08PM and I haven't even begun to find out where the class is being given, and as I fleetly descend a flight of stairs I wonder whether running to get to the class will partake of the nightmare slowness of struggling to get somewhere as if slogging through knee-deep mud or waist-high snow. I never get there, for without transition 2) I'm climbing a flight of stairs above my apartment, which I'm trying to fix up (thinking that I should put up the three-lamp pole that I haven't put into the corner yet, though the light is now streaming in through the window), and I open a door to find that the landlady, who might be Aunt Helen, has moved in two sets of pairs of wooden chairs around a small tea-table, and as I pass a locked door in the far wall I peep through the keyhole (as Lee Ryder did in one of Dennis's porno videos that I watched last night) to see my neighbor's Spartan upstairs room, bare-floored and sparsely furnished as the room I'm in. My eye is caught by what looks at first to be a $5 bill, then a $100 bill, then turns into some kind of foreign currency worth not very much---and there's a layered shelf containing small packets of foreign bills enfolding foreign coins, some of which spill onto the floor and I have to pick up and put back so she won't know I've been prying into the contents of this room when she cleans. I'm happy to see that I HAVE this extra room, but somehow feel that I'm not permitted to actually USE it, since Helen is fussy about things like that.
11/7/96: 9:20AM: I'm AGAIN looking at a room in my new apartment which I haven't seen yet, puzzled by a blanketed piano-shape under one window, and when I investigate I find it's a number of chairs nested atop one another, back to back, covered with an old bedspread to make them "disappear" and leave more space in the room (maybe this is from the Edward G. Robinson Biography I watched on Arnold's tape last night, telling of the crowded Broome Street apartment in which there was "always room for one more" visiting relative or friend to sleep on the floor). Then the phone rang and it was the friend I was expecting (who sounded a bit like Blair W. from Spectrum), and he was at Grand Central Station, asking how to get to my "legendary" place. I found that I hadn't the slightest idea, saying, "This is MY first day in this particular apartment," and---stretching the phone cord to the doorway, hoping I wouldn't pull the phone off the table and crash it against the stack of chairs, bringing the whole mess down onto the floor---I looked out to see an INCREDIBLY detailed intersection: subway lines above, busses below, curved street corner buildings looking like photographs from the 20s and 30s, and up on the ornate lamppost at the corner was an old-style white-letters-on-dark-blue-ground, framed-by-ornate-heavy-iron street-sign saying "Stassen Sq.," and while I thought I saw a fragment of "Third Ave." I also seemed to be seeing a lot of 99s. "How much luggage do you have?" I inquired. "Five," he said, which I took to be five pounds, but when I suggested he might walk and there was a breathless silence on the phone, I figured after I woke that he must have meant to say five PIECES of luggage, even though I thought he was just staying for a short weekend, but maybe he was coming for a month or so? I asked him to walk through the station, asking anyone which exit he could take for Third Avenue, thinking it was really in the high 40s or low 50s, but if I really WAS at 99th, I'd have to think how to direct him to a subway or bus, and since I had NO idea what the possibilities were, I kept staring out at the traffic at the intersection, and the people in old-fashioned clothing passing by, hearing the roar of cars and elevated trains, wondering what I was going to say to him on the telephone next, and I woke feeling relieved that I didn't have to solve THAT problem, and thought about visiting Dennis before picking up my VCR on Canal Street today and having to phone him first for his schedule.
11/15/96: 9:20AM: 1) First a fragment from yesterday or the day before: I'm in need of getting up to or down from an important meeting in a house or office, and suddenly I'm confronted with a familiar dream image---a cliff-face of crumbling sand, so steep that the sand must have agglomerated into rock, but so friable that a misstep or an overtrust of the support afforded by any particular projection or ledge would send me and a whole section of cliff plunging down to the rocky bottom with undoubted unfortunate consequences. In THIS particular episode of the dream-type, I hold back and think to myself "Oh, this is THAT dream: I just won't GO there, TRY that, TRUST even beginning the perils inherent of trying to negotiate such terrain." Maybe this just echoes my increasing sense of: "I'm 60, and I just don't have to WORRY about that." 2) Many fragments from today escape my memory, but the most vivid section is sitting in the back seat of a car or truck that has vague military connections: either the vehicle itself, or the short, feisty female driver, has outer-covering of khaki camouflage coloring. We're faced AWAY from the beach, but for no apparent reason the driver of the vehicle is determined to BACK INTO the surf, probably just to prove that it can be done and then recovered with no ill effect. Faceless, probably military, personnel around us start shouting warnings when the vehicle begins, faster and faster, to back up toward the incoming waves, and I protest and futilely paw the back of the driver's seat, but without even turning around or looking in a rearview mirror, the driver unsmilingly propels us backward until I can see our rear wheels, and then our front wheels, crossing the surf-line, and then we're floating in the shallow water, beginning to slew around to one side, and at last the driver seems to sense that she's gone too far and begins to try to take steps to return us to the safety of the shore. I never feel in great danger, but she's just so SILLY to want to prove the capabilities of this vehicle when I'm sitting in the back seat without any protective clothing or life-saving equipment---more than that, I don't even seem to be IN the military, but am just an innocent civilian or at most a kind of reporter or investigator of the circumstances of military life. Other bits still lost.
11/17/96: 8:50AM: 1) I'm going toward my car while looking out through slats in the side of the building I'm in and I can see the lowering yellow clouds that will at any moment produce a TORNADO which will ravage the area. People are warning everyone about it, and I'm looking on as if watching a TV documentary. 2) I'm walking toward the shower in the gym and another naked fellow walks up close behind me and snugly aligns his body against my back as I'm walking. "Hello!" I say, not knowing what else to say, and we comment about the relaxedness of both of us: he reaches around to find that I'm quite soft, and he's soft behind me, but as we walk a few more steps he starts hardening, and then has to pull himself away from me as it wouldn't DO to appear erect in this gym at this time. I wake erect and feeling pleased---unusual these days!
12/1/96: 10:25AM: Dreamed between 8:25AM and 9:45AM: I'm walking with a friend in a large business section; we're trying to get someplace and can't decide whether to take public transportation or a taxi, but then it starts raining, and though the subway stop is just a half-block away, his uncertainty leads me to get him into a convenient taxi and give the address "2305 East 37th Street" to the female driver. "That's in Cuyahoga Falls?" she asks, and I feel relieved that she knows where we're going, since it's a LONG way away in a VERY complicated routing. I feel I want to ask her how much the fare will be, but realize that she'd not be able to tell me since it would depend on traffic conditions. Without transition, we've stopped someplace so the driver can get something from her commune, and I've left my friend in the waiting taxi to enter the commune to look for her. As I'm courteously directed to the main lobby with many halls branching off from it, I realize it might not be that easy to find her since I don't recall where exactly she was going or what she wanted, so I call---at first quietly, then more loudly: "Matty, MATTY!"---to locate her. No one seems to object to this imposition, so I go down the leftmost branch of the maze of hallways, but this seems to lead to a furnace-room/basement-storage area, and calling loudly produces no one at all. Another hall leads past large windowed areas that look into classrooms or libraries, into which I don't think she'd have gone. I look down another hall that leads to a dormitory-like area, and I call more and more loudly, thinking she may very well be HERE, and though a few people turn their heads or pop out of doors to look at me reproachfully, I can't think of what else to do: my friend has been waiting in the car for almost an hour, the waiting-time on the taxi-meter is increasing, and we're not even halfway to our destination. A final "MATTY!" brings a familiar short-haired woman out of a shadowy room, and she says that we've come so far it'll even take us a while to walk back to the waiting taxi. Now we're in a central mustering area and I see a gigantic slow-moving bus pull into its stop and begin to drag her toward it, seeming to know that it's a free service of this entire area, but she hangs back, saying it'll take a while, which is clear to me because the enormous vehicle had had a few standing passengers when it pulled in, few people got off, and a small line waiting for the bus has grown larger (could all this be based on my telephone calls to Laurence B. and Ken about the Lascaux tour and waiting list?), and the raised rear of the bus now seems full of standees, though the elongated "fuselage" still has lots of room for standing between passengers who seem very SHORT at their windows, so at least the standees have room to look out the window over the heads of seatees---and why would we here say "seateds" but wouldn't say "standeds"?---and she's still debating, saying that the waiting charges will be expensive for HER taxi already, and we haven't BEGUN the charges for traveling to our destination, but unless she's suggesting I stiff her I can't figure any alternative and continue trying to get her to at least stand on the line for the bus before it gets so filled it would have to leave without us anyway. Wake and think that this is the first dream in a long time memorable enough to recall after dressing and bathrooming, and interesting enough in itself to be transcribed.
12/2/96: 1) 4:15AM: Dennis and I are dining with Sylvester Stallone and his son, and Dennis isn't feeling very well: he stands near me and I put my hand on his back and can feel a patch from some kind of intravenous shunt-covering through his thin tee-shirt, and he's thinner than ever. Then he leaves and Sly's son with him, and we're compelled to chat, since with others at the table before I had an excuse to be quiet. I talk vaguely about my age being a liability in a post-holocaust world because I couldn't fight physically for food and clothing and shelter, but it might be an asset in that my body has had time and vaccinations to build up my immune system against diseases and infections that younger people might still be prone to. We look out a window toward the horizon (not at the World Trade Center but on something like the Terrace) overlooking a swath of Hudson with cliffs to our left covered with Army barracks and hordes of people in serried ranks. Sly insists that that kind of terrain would be hard to camouflage, and as a phalanx of fighters and bombers sweep upward from the north, covering huge areas of territory, I mention that my problem with perspective is that the FAR planes look much BIGGER than they should (it might be an effect of the seemingly extreme CLARITY of the air outside at this time), since I think they should look SMALLER with DISTANCE. He doesn't address that, and I wake with a vague sense that I keep seeing ads for Daylight, his current film, without seeing images of HIM at all, so I'm not sure what's making me dream about HIM. He tries to be "ordinary" with me, but from the way he talks, he's either rehearsed these lines for a film of his, or he's stupid and only quoting some article he's recently read about a topic that really interests him enough to remember most of the details conveyed to him. No explanation as to why we're having dinner with Dennis. 2) 8:45AM: I'm dressing at the gym and red-pen marking "123" for my (high) weight on my red gym shoes, knowing I haven't much room to put many numbers, but I don't care how it might look.
12/9/96: 5:36AM: Odd (and deeply TERRIFYING) dream-CYCLE (food and Gaiety bodies and muscle-building magazine carried by seatmate "following" Paul and me to the subway platform obviously influencing these) of seeing, buying, EMULATING steroid-variants and getting into OFFICES of food-supplement companies and trying to sell OTHERS, but waking in cycle (or having psychotic episodes, one or the other) in which I feel people are TURNING on me with WHITE EYES and attacking/beating/humiliating me---and I FEEL myself COLD in bed with dream/memory/reality of SHITTING in bed: oleaginous turds SLIPPING between my muscled nates onto clean sheets---and AGAIN waking/psychotizing sets of repetitions (like weight-sets?), and up to SIT on toilet and HOPE to shit (as NOW at 5:45AM) and CAN'T---too full STILL to sleep, food in refrigerator, stomach rounded, Beard meal on the calendar, NO HOPE of a way out---HEART attack coming or AGAIN nightmare/dream/psychosis from overmuch food/drink/sweet dessert, writing notes, hiatal hernia, smells, burps, coughs, rotting teeth, organs breaking down, dreams/nightmares/REALITY!
12/11/96: 8:45AM: VERY long and elaborate set of dreams: 1) I'm traveling in the far East, with multiple arrangements of enormous complexity, all of which have been forgotten. 2) I'm in a hospital room trying to respond to questions about how well I can hear, speak, and function in other ways, and for some reason it's going VERY slowly: the nurse speaks softly, one nurse is just learning English and uses strange words, and I think now this may be a dream-metaphor of MY having had a stroke or Alzheimer's---I think I'm OK, and THEY have the communication problems, but it's the other way around. At one point I say, "I'd like my blanket," and wake dimly to cover myself with my OWN blanket in bed. AND it's the first day of five in which Paul isn't in bed with me, and I have it to myself, and get to sleep about 11:45PM and really wake only when Leroy calls at 8:40AM, so I've slept almost NINE hours, much better than the five or six I've been getting with Paul waking me. Another fragment had me dealing with a woman who seems to be a combination of Rita and Linda, and we'd been playing a game in which Linda was "channeling" a Barbie doll to get the rules, and I ask LINDA what the rules were, and she says that BARBIE said---and I hasten to appease her sense of rule-making, "Oh, yes, of course, I should have said, pardon me, BARBIE'S rules." Something about being able to pay a game-debt with either game-money or REAL money. OH, 3) (actually BEFORE the 2) listed above) comes back to me in a BURST of detail that I recalled in the DREAM being extraordinary: I'm riding in a boat-like conveyance with 10-12 others over a translucent white surface that would most EASILY be ice on a pond, but this is clearly some kind of FABRIC, like a stiff CANVAS, which is stretched on a frame with widely spaced struts so that for most of the time the conveyance is NOT directly supported by a strut but only by the strength of the canvas which creaks below us, though when I peer over the side it does NOT appear to be sagged under our weight, as it "should” be, so maybe the system is stronger than it appears, maybe there are TRANSPARENT struts, or even an entire surface of plastic under ALL of the canvas, or the "canvas" is really a super-strong metal-based white translucent SHEET, rather than an actual FABRIC sheet, and we ARE safe. I can't even IMAGINE what would be below if we broke through the fabric. THEN I'm SLIDING MYSELF on that same surface, skating around the periphery of a huge area of this fabric (now LESS translucent and more like room-temperature ice) which is now covered from only a skim to two inches in depth with various liquids in which small fish or sperm or magnified protozoa are swimming in various combinations (or maybe they're just inanimate particles animated by my skating past them, disturbing the water in which they're suspended), and I marvel IN THE DREAM at the differences in the consistency of the water through which I skate-slide, the varieties of animalcules through which I slip, the details that I observe in this obvious dream which seems quite real---and FOR WHATEVER reason it flashes through my head as I TYPE this that Paul and I were talking about out-of-body experiences: how wonderful they COULD be and how unreasonable it seems that they could ACTUALLY exist (for usual political-spying, sex-seeing, secret-opening reasons)---and in some way this segment of the dream SEEMS like it would be best-suited to an out-of-body experience! Mentally thank Leroy for waking me while some dream-details are still fresh and finish this at 9:04AM.
12/12/96: 9:20AM: After some preliminary, forgotten segments, I 1) enter an amusement park ride, thinking to get ONTO something, but simply walk past sales areas and cartoon displays all jammed with goods in a somewhat old-fashioned manner, as if remnants of memories from Summit Beach Park in Akron, to the base of a small seating area, and the smaller of two young men walking behind me (dark-haired, like a younger, undeveloped Daniel Day-Lewis) casually puts his hand on my left shoulder. We three stand together under some kind of overhang, and I glance back at him, wondering about the reasons for his attention, but he smiles evenly past me, seeming to be merely companionable rather than cruising or accosting me. His taller, blonder friend doesn't even look at me. There's a tiny performance on a small stage before which we seat ourselves at the lowest level, and then everyone gets ready to leave, except that I now see two small green boats drawn up at an entrance for a "water ride." Two women are in Disneyish uniforms and I ask one of them, who has a ticket upright in her mouth between her front teeth, "Where do I get the tickets?" "I on't unnasand you," she mumbles past her ticket, on which I can see printed rather clearly $1.50. "I don't understand you EITHER," I grumble back at her, deciding to leave without checking anything further. Without transition I 2) find myself exiting some kind of underground station to face a large, open space in the middle of a city, which may be a sizable city to the north, maybe in Canada, surrounding a building entablatured "Memorial Hall," and I think to myself "I've been here in a DREAM before, and now I'm actually HERE." I turn to the left and, as I remember from the dream, there's a raised highway looping around a business district to my right, and I climb a steep roadway to the crest of a hill, thinking that I don't know the plan of the city and have no fixed place to stay tonight, but I seem to recall having some kind of reservation at a school or a seminar which will undoubtedly have reservations made for us at a nearby hotel or dormitory, so I'm not really feeling worried, so I climb farther along the street, a tiny bit disquieted to see a far-off group of teenagers running along a parapet to my left---looking like a scene from a movie or bits of impressionistic paintings or movie posters I may have seen---as I continue straight ahead, and pass through an archway of an apartment complex something like the Bofill building in Marne la Vallée: there are green-painted, walled terraces and storage areas from individual apartments dropping in varied shelves down to my right-hand side---on some of them are individual adults and kids with pet dogs, and the shops and offices array themselves to my left. Again without transition, the road changes so that I'm climbing the inside of a cupola in which the steps get steeper and steeper, until I'm curious how the ordinary passerby can negotiate the clefts of the painted-stone cliff-face I am climbing, assisted by patently false "vines" hanging from the center of the cupola's ceiling: wires encased by cracking plastic painted to look like lianas in a jungle. A group of five or six teenaged boys are waiting for me to ascend so they can descend, regarding me without curiosity or any movement to assist me, and as I swing myself up onto the last ledge, I can see the frayed edges of the plastic casing pulling away from the core-wires of the "lianas" and unemotionally observe that these haven't been constructed very strongly. Wake still sleepy about 9:10AM, shit, and finish this by 9:32AM.
12/13/96: Obviously thinking of Kevin's rehearsing my play here Sunday, I woke at 8AM with the memory of a dream in which I was IN a play, but now at 9PM I can't remember any of the details, except that there was someone vaguely sexy in it and my feeling of frustration with not remembering my lines was not EXTREMELY great. Maybe I could read, rather than recite, the part.
12/18/96: 9:50AM: Madge (?) calls me at my desk at IBM (?) saying that her brother (?) is in a play in a theater ON Broadway, produced by X and Y (the phone connection is VERY bad and I can BARELY hear her, so IN THE DREAM ITSELF I question who's calling, whom she's talking about, and what names she uses), and then the operator interrupts (as if she were calling from a pay phone) and asks, "Where are you calling from?" and the response is "Morris"---which I know to be in New Jersey and somehow "identifies" to me that it IS Madge who's talking to me. My desk-mate shakes his head (having somehow overheard the telephone conversation) and says, "You know it takes so LONG to produce things on Broadway, and they might not even SEE opening night." Frustrating dream. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 12/18/96).
12/26/96: 10AM: Woke at 7:15 with many fragments, but jerked off and few ideas of what I'd dreamed remain: the last bit about hordes of people gathering for a swimming meet, some standing atop the sliding panels which are slowly being retracted to uncover the underlying pool, and I'm moving toward a crowded corner, access to which is limited by a metal railing over which many kids are clambering and over which I can barely manage to lift my elderly carcass, but I find that only if I stand can I get a clear view of a SMALL area of the pool, so I decide to move somewhere else, but wake before I actually move. A previous fragment involved a hot sex-scene in which erect penises were being teased and exclaimed over, but I forget the details. Another shadowy memory connects to some bus travel getting TO the swimming meet, with uncertainties about schedules and events to be seen, though memory-uncertainties outweigh the dream-events themselves. Somewhere, there, however, I felt VERY happy.
12/27/96: 7:35AM: Enormously long, detailed, disturbing dream that I must note the elements of before expanding them: the packing to leave, the duffel/laundry bag, the bus/restaurant tour, the blue-orange appetizer and comments, the political/personal shufflings, and at the last the explosions that woke me with dread. At first I'm in a rather hotel-like barracks or dormitory: I'm going through files of about 12-15 folders (thoughts of going through souvenirs today?) containing papers, cancelled checks, lists of jobs done, maybe actually old programs---I know that many of these will stay here after I leave, that I'll save some of the contents as personal memorials of my job/Army stay here, and that some will become worthless and be thrown away after I leave, and then I think "But I'm going home this afternoon, since I know I'm not sleeping here these final few days of my duties, so why don't I just take ALL these folders, which won't be much more than a bagful, and sort them out in the comfort of my HOME this evening rather than taking some of my last valuable hours HERE to do that work HERE." I think of various bags of paper and cloth that I could retrieve from my desk or storage areas here to contain the folders when I leave with them this afternoon, but then a friend (or replacement) approaches me saying he needs a laundry bag for the duration of HIS stay here, and I take out the bag I'd been contemplating filling myself with the folders, and present it by tearing apart some of the old stitches that hold its sides together, showing it in triumph as a perfect sort of container/wrapper of his desires, and he thanks me profusely and this segment ends without my being quite clear whether I'm going to give it to him now directly, or take my folders home in them tonight with me and bring it back emptied of MY possessions and souvenirs but still full of the company's/Army's possessions and folders and THEN give it to him. The next segment begins with a woman's announcing "the bus for the lunch at Combrai will be leaving soon," and the room suddenly transforms into the waiting room for the bus/bus itself, and people are filing on, taking seats by the windows (like the passengers in the train through Kenya I watched yesterday on the VCR?), and I think "Well, I WAS going home to have lunch at 3:30PM, but Combrai is supposed to be SUCH a famous French restaurant, and it's only a 30-minute bus-trip to get there, and I'll never have such a convenient chance again (am I thinking of Girardet, which article I saw again last night as I was searching for my misplaced-behind-TV-cabinet films-wanted list?), so I settle into my seat on the bus and without transition we're IN the restaurant, and I'm seated with the woman tour-guide/bus-driver who's also somewhat of an expert on French food, and we investigate beneath a somewhat-stiff coating (like the candied orange-slice at 5757 two nights ago?) of an orange-half to spoon out the light-orange mousse below that seemed to be tinged in some places with a blue that combines with the yellow-tones of the orange to make a lightly hued green mottling the contents of the spoon from some regions near the side of the strange appetizer, and the woman makes fun of it: "It's only an orange," but later the woman-owner tries to explain in broken English/French, "We don't want to be simple and say it's only an orange, because in fact we added a flavor which you don't really want to know, but neither do we want it to be so pretentious to say that it was Calvados from 1866 from which the alcohol had been removed because after all this is only an appetizer," and I keep rehearsing what I would ask in French: "Qu'est que c'il-y-a le bleu dans l'orange?" without appearing to be TOO stupid in French (Qu'est que ce IS the way of starting a question, and il-y-a IS "there is" so that IS "what's blue in the orange?") or about food/chemistry (not implying the green might be rot, knowing it would have to be a BLUE color added to the orange to APPEAR green), but without importuning the owner, who seems to be having trouble with the woman-guide, who thinks the next course is quite unacceptable and suddenly she's LEFT the restaurant, leaving me at ANOTHER table with a strange man across the way who appears to be either brain-damaged or speaking another language entirely, and there are references to "the princess" who may be sitting at the next table, and I look around to see the Euro-twenty-somethings with teased blonde hair and jewelry and too much makeup on their young vapid-rather-than-pretty faces, wondering "who might be who" at this most sought-after lunch in the whole of central Europe into which I seem to have fallen without QUITE knowing where or what it is, wondering whom I could ask "Who was who?" and whether I would continue to be served food now that my visiting hostess had disappeared. I'm eating my next course, unidentified by sight or taste in the dream, because all attention in the room is drawn out the south-looking window, through which I see that evening has now fallen, and the clouds are being distantly lit at the edges by what might be lightning, the illuminations of a distant city (Bordeaux, from the end of my trip this summer for which I'd gotten a brochure in yesterday afternoon's mail pickup) lighting up at twilight, or (as is made graphically clear by an actual ball of explosion rising on OUR side of the clouds and brightening our room so that a bombardment [though I still hold out the hope of rather-too-realistic "firework displays" of bombardment] catches the attention of even the most blasé Royal) the first awesome steps of a new war, a nuclear holocaust, or an approaching earthquake of quite literally earth-SHATTERING potentialities. I think to say something such as, "Oh, that's like the set of play-explosions I saw from my apartment window a few days ago," but I have the dream-fear that THAT might have been some cosmically dreadful manifestation that I "whipped-creamed" (to use the Actualism-learned phrase I introduced to Pope yesterday to pooh-pooh Leroy's over-praise of Dennis's too-sick symptoms) to cover my sense of panic and anxiety THEN, and BOTH that squelched dream-memory and the continued detonations lighting up the distant clouds cause an ENORMOUS sinking dread that CONTINUES in my stomach and nerves after I wake ALMOST as from a nightmare at 7:32AM, lie almost paralyzed for a few minutes, then look at clock at 7:35 and rise to type this.
12/28/96: 10:40AM: Snapped at Susan for phoning at what I thought was 9AM and turned into 9:55AM, removing me from memories of the dream, which are coming back: Dennis (healthy) is asking me to massage him, but not heavily on the back---lightly on the front. I oil my fingers and gently finger-feather his chest, catching his (smaller than his really are) nipples with the softest touch which makes him gasp and say, "That's really the way to do it." I smile and continue to brush the front of his healthy body. Phoned Susan to ask about HER dream about Dennis night-before-last, and she said she was planning to hand me a suitcase that Dennis could take with him "when he went to the other world." I told her about my explosion-dread dream that same night as hers. Finish this at 11:13AM, morning almost over, time to get to year's last index.
12/29/96: 8:30AM: Two disconnected segments: "The River" and "Edward's talk." 1) I'm walking along the Hudson River between 125th and the Cloisters, and when I get right down to the river's edge, I see slow visible inroads of the yellow-foam-flecked wavelets filling their way between rocks and debris toward a higher tide. Looking upstream, I see a group of 3-5 men talking and pointing up at a grassy bank about 40 feet high, and I wonder if the tide can rise that much (since this IS a tidal estuary) to wash against the base of that bank and bring down more of the cliff-face with buildings perched above. I seem to recall that once a community of houses were down here, but after a particular storm many were washed away and the city government made everyone move OUT of this section along the river (obviously from memories of write-ups about storms along communities on the OCEAN at Fire Island or the Jersey shore), though at the END of this segment I'm looking up at NEW projects built OUT into the river much like how parts of Red Hook extend beyond the Belt Parkway: new buildings on lower ground nearby, rising to older buildings on safer, higher ground, surmounted by an ornate old private palace converted into plebian-dwelling-type gingerbread residences, surmounted by small penthouse-type accommodations with glass-covered "shoulders" affording wonderful picture-window views north and south along the riverbank (probably a memory about the apartment building in the Times Real Estate section last night around 105th Street with its Tuscan portico remnants). 2) Uncle Edward (from his Christmas card) is trying to explain an invention of his, but something like Alzheimer's is affecting either or both his memory and his speech: he tries to cover it up, but finally admits "I know the word, I just can't say it," and "It's too late for me to try to explain this." His device has something to do with something ANALOGOUS to, but LARGER than, cooking a Christmas turkey, but he's trying to explain it in the latter terms, and I try to help him as he talks fruitlessly and waves his hands to the consternation of his coworkers: "It measures the temperature or the DENSITY of the turkey?" I ask. "Not really," he starts with assurance, "it gets into the---the---I can't pronounce the word." "Does it do its work in twenty different areas?" I ask, thinking it might be a VARIABLE device that makes it new and useful. "No, not really THAT," he says, not exactly wanting to say I'm WRONG, but not having the words to tell me how I've misinterpreted HIS description. The other men look on helplessly, wanting to protect him from my knowing his incapacity, probably not understanding enough of the scientific principles to take over the explanation from him, yet still dependent on his intelligence for their employment with him and thus not happy at all that he's revealing himself as verbally incompetent before me. They're not hostile as much as sadly regretful, and I doze into half-wakefulness thinking a) something might have REALLY happened to him, b) I'm anticipating some awkwardnesses tonight at Dennis's party, c) I'm worried about Mom, d) I'm worried about myself. Wake warm in the unseasonable morning's heat and finish to this point at 8:45AM, having gotten to bed about 1:30AM after having at last completed both rather difficult puzzles, happy not to have a recurrence of previous night's slight fever, so that I CAN go to pick up Dennis at 4:30 today to get him down to the 6PM taxi at Rivington House to bring us here.
12/31/96: 7:15AM: Another two-parter: Broadway and exercising. I'm drawing someone an elaborate set of travel directions, starting with a diagram of the intricate intersection of Broadway and 5th Street, where he's to get onto the subway, or maybe more accurately get his car to drive, and then I transfer his attention to a regular street map, which goes from Wall Street only up to 120th Street, so that I indicate he's to follow Broadway BEYOND that up to 125th Street, which is another intricate intersection that he must turn right on in order to proceed up Convent Avenue to get to his final destination which is something like the Cloisters, only farther south, maybe the uptown NYU campus. Then there's a mostly forgotten interlude in which I'm surveying a large room full of supplies and office materials for packing and moving in a van of a specific size such that the materials will take either two or three vansful, and moving them to another large room in which I'm quite sure the cubic space will be sufficient to move adequately. The final segment involves studying the clearances, while seated in a chair like Dennis's high bar-chairs, for a particular set of exercises with furniture suspended from barbells, though I'm thrown into a state of consternation when I read from a wall-poster that the WRISTS are the main moving-muscles, rather than the BICEPS, so I may have grossly overestimated the WEIGHT of the materials I can swing from my shoulders around my body in this synchronized exercise for a whole roomful of people. Someone like Suzie M. and I were among a group of people jockeying for positions of our chairs for this, and I had my eye on the last pair in the far right corner of the room, but she, with a sly smile, grabbed the CORNER one so that no one could get behind to WATCH her, while she was positioned behind me so that she could watch ME and comment (or admire) my positions and efforts in learning to do this swinging exercise. But then I moved my chair from a corner corresponding to the front door of the house at 1221 Dietz to the corner near the door to the hallway in the DINING room in that same house, lifting my arms to the ceiling to find that the barbells would clear it there, knowing that the height of the bar chair would allow the articles dangling from the barbells to clear the floor as I swung them through their circular traverse-arcs. Somehow I think there was yet another segment of the dream that I've forgotten entirely, since there were more details that I wanted to jot down on a note before resigning myself to getting out of bed to type this on the computer, and now at 7:28 to prepare to print it, since maybe the disaster that made my D-drive unavailable two days ago will spread to my C-drive, meaning that I MUST have each of these pages printed before I save them to make SURE I have them. What ELSE have I lost??