1998
1/1/98: 10:15AM: I'm riding in a tour bus, but I seem to have the only map, because I keep looking onto one corner of it (which I unfold like a subway map) and look out the window to tell the driver (who's standing in the middle of the street to stop passing cars to ask where he's supposed to find our hotel) that we "haven't come to Main Street yet," so that we're not even halfway to the hotel, which is about as far in the other direction from Main Street as we have to go to get to it. A few other people on the bus don't seem to trust my directions either, but I have the sense that I've been getting along well with the group, and the situation is improving, rather than getting worse. We seem to be somewhere in Virginia, along the coast, or maybe as far south as North Carolina. It's only a weekend trip, something that Spart might do, but he doesn't seem to be connected with it. Mediocre year-start dream.
1/2/98: 10:25AM: After smoking and cuming, I lay from 12:40-4:15AM engrossed in "waking fantasies" (though probably I DID nap during some of those hours) of 1) being a busboy-in-training at a large resort patterned somewhat on Hemlock Hall and Garnet Hill, though with many more rooms, and I followed my trainers around trying to do something useful rather than just observing what I was supposed to be able to do, and then 2) trying to dine with an aged Mack and Betsy G., and maybe a more-dim Susie M., walking down corridors trying to find a dining room that was serving what we wanted at the time, and finding most of the ordinary dining rooms full or booked, and being told we could go to "The Parlor," which we went outside to find along a small street with Depression-era buildings and shops built along it, and it was named Getrick's, which name I somehow recognized, and we moved past crowded front rooms and were left in a sparsely populated inner lounge which the waitstaff rushed through, moving bare tables together and covering them with white tablecloths so that what had been a hallway or lounge area could accommodate our party, which was clearly an important one as far as this establishment was concerned. When I woke and thought about this dream, making a note of it about 8:15AM, I recollected 3) coming back from a walking tour of an island---reached by a narrow bridge which then had a large concrete construction which blocked most of the way---followed by a wooded area which may have been patterned on Sherryl's tale about---4:30PM on the 31st---being locked into the southern part of Roosevelt Island and released by a policeman who finally believed that the gate HAD been open and they hadn't climbed over the fence to trespass. I'd wandered around for a few hours and walked past the concrete construction and found myself back on "the mainland" at the bottom of an elegantly residential hill, with an enormous gothic cathedral at the lower right, above which was a residence so huge that I had difficulty separating it from the cathedral: it was at least seven stories above ground, and windows below the main entrance suggested four or five basements of considerable size and capacity. I somehow had the knowledge that the University of Akron was vaguely located at the Summit [sic] of this hill, and woke to think "Where had I actually SEEN a block of houses of this vast scope?" and was forced to conclude that it was in a series of DREAMS I'd had a number of years back, of apartment-building-sized private residences fronted with various genres of Tudor, rococo, Biedermeier, and Queen Anne (the one style that epitomizes NO style) gingerbread, in varying degrees of decay or restored glory. "Had I been on a tour bus in Canada or Australia?" I wondered, but it just didn't seem REAL and I concluded it was all part of a dream, and I wondered if I could search back through my files for "architecture" or "buildings" and trust with any certainty of finding them. Look back to be astounded that these 50 pages only cover 9/96 to now, 50 pages in 15 months---well, a page every nine days is OK. DREAMSA is 100 pages from 11/92 to 9/96, 100 pages in 45 months, a page every 13.5 days or somewhat less, with interesting memories jogged, but clearly the dream I'm searching for is WAY before 1992. More reason to get my endless hand-typed notebooks onto computer. FIND it p. 282, 4/12/89, in WP51\SC\DREAMS! Hooray!!
1/5/98 (on p. 51!): 1) 5AM (ANOTHER 1/5!):(FIVE 5/1 combos in TWO lines!!): "Oh, is this FOAM?" I jot as the clue to the first VERY elaborate dream: Beings of Elements, in a totally different world, fly and learn and read minds and get "intro/elected" to new states of awareness and power. The central image is of a "novice" twittery entity, through whose eyes I view this scene, flying above a central square---more like a pavilion in a fair---that has a vast array of fountains, gardens, walkways, and monuments, mostly in white, with a preponderance of flowing substances (the image of an ice-skating ad from a few days ago might have influenced this, with its airy/watery/fiery apparitions of the five colored Olympic rings in corresponding colors: blue as ice, green as trees, red as fire, yellow as clouds, black as earth) boiling in turbulence in their subsidiary basins around a central spewing fountain above which my view hovers, looking down the column of rising water to where the water splashes back into the basin in a roiling vortex of foam, down into which my view plunges vertiginously, so that in a welter of spume my view plummets and then looks back up to see masses of larger and smaller bubbles refracting the sun's rays through the tumultuous waters and foam. I have a distinct sense of this Being's delight at its encounter with this form of fluid energy, and either it's been THROUGH all the other surrounding forms and this is the APEX of discovery---the central well of highest potency---or it's the FIRST step of a series of discoveries which will lead the way through all the other elements of air, earth, fire, liquid, having STARTED with the admixture of most of them in the "element" of foam. Or possibly EACH Entity has ONE element, and this excited, young, vibrant Entity has discovered that Foam is ITS particular natal element. "Taken-for-granted" is the sense of classes of entities (and maybe even ELEMENTS) in a world and universe TOTALLY different from mine. 2) MIXED with the first are brief flashes of a kind of CAMP, inhabited by meaner representatives of current-world male, in which I must CLEAN UP my excrement, which I seem to produce copiously by squatting under my bed (though the stains are similar to dog shit I saw in a couple of places on the sidewalks of Brooklyn Heights last night), but I don't have adequate supplies of paper (and maybe my over-copious inking of my computer ribbons, on which I printed brimming letters of my LIFELIST last night, enters here), and I keep getting my fingers soiled and the papers overloaded and I’m not quite cleaning up the floor, and I wake with a vague sense of having to shit that's not immediate enough to get me out of bed when I jot the note from THIS dream. 3) Later, I'm given a phone number jotted at the very bottom of a series of notes, and I somehow know that this is a call returned from a job-placement service to which I'd gone for help to get Carolyn a job, and I know this is her opportunity to start as a Travel Agent, though I have to get through to her because the classes start at 8PM TONIGHT and she has to be at the first one or she'll lose her chance at this particular employment. Must call her and tell her about this. 4) 9:50AM, wake for the last time and jot the memory of the last dream (pity there weren't FIVE, for this 1/5 page!), involving replanting my plants here at 167 Hicks: a large pot of an enormous aloe is sitting on my TV set, and when I poke around the soil-line, I find that the main stem of the largest clump of aloe is beginning to rot through, so that it seems it will soon die and the pot will contain only a smaller specimen. There are hordes of mites crawling and flying around (as there are in mine) the surface of the soil, and I get a canister of bug-spray which was sitting on the plant-stand by the window (as it is NOT, now), and spray it into a large Kraft-paper bag in which someone had been enclosing the pots and soil on which I'd been working, and it comes out very dribbly and wet, but I figure it will REALLY get rid of the bugs and dry quickly (over-wet ribbons again?). Wake at last with the idea that today I really SHOULD vacuum, but that first I have to go through and eliminate all the dried-up vines and leaves, repot the aloes which are coming out of two pots, and spray for bugs, making a mess on the carpet that I will THEN vacuum--after phoning Lina M.!
1/7/98: 8AM: Rita winces when I admit being gay, and I take her into the privacy of BATHTUB to TRY to explain I don't FUCK, but women come in and start to OVERHEAR and we look (as in 1221 Dietz) into two BEDROOMS, EACH with three people, and then to KITCHEN where Mom has laid out fruit and SALADS for breakfast, waiting, PATIENTLY, and I take chair in MIDDLE of end---"That's for Jimmy and another for Marion." Helen gives Rita a sample of LEMON juice that hurts her TOOTH, but I take some in my orange juice which tastes GOOD, and ask Jimmy for a carton of juice from a CASE, and aluminum foil top is DRY and FLAKES away easily.
1/9/97: 7AM: Wait for bus transfer, for which I don't pay, which stops by Borough Hall. Other details I don't remember as I type this on 1/10.
1/17/98: 11:12AM: 1) 3AM: I'm wandering down dark hallways in a four- or five-story building patterned like St. Mary's High School with stairways at either end of long hallways with rooms off to the sides, and everyone I encounter is somehow auditioning for modeling jobs, but when one of the hopeful models slings a butcher knife across the room which sticks into my chest, I leave the room and avoid others because, as I caption the note to remember this when Rita calls, this is "Audition by Knife." Many other sequences of my running down dark hallways, hoping no one is lurking in the shadows waiting for me, or that there aren't any trees (this IS a dream) that I can run into in the middle of the halls. Some flowing curtains along one hall remind me of horror movies, but this is done very matter-of-factly, including the body on a table which is decapitated before me, with no blood, the head being held up like a trophy on the one hand or still auditioning for meal-shots on the other. Many more gory details were forgotten of mayhem among these slender elegant people, dressed for posing, who tripped, stabbed, and mutilated their way to the top. 2) 8AM: John A. is driving a large car down a country road, but he pulls over to the side because he says we're going in the wrong direction. I say, "You said the same thing the LAST time we drove down this way, but this IS the right direction: see that farmhouse in the middle of the yard over there? That's the same one we passed before. If you make a U-turn here, we'll be back at the crossroads we turned around at BEFORE, which reminded you that we ARE going in the right direction." So he turns around AGAIN and we DO see that it's the "same" Y-shaped intersection, and down from the far leg comes a car that turns down the third road, which appears to have a small water-filled rut before the dip to the road below, but it's a CANAL or enormous ditch filled with water so that the car drives in and is SUBMERGED before it gets to the road below. The cars don't float when they're submerged, but they go through a sort of museum-like cross section of water and come through a curtain-wall on the other side and continue safely down the road, the "display" affording the view that the water is rushing around the sides and top of the car, cascading over the windshield, but the interior remains dry and the driver can see just well enough to continue on a straight line through and come out the other side safely. In the dream itself I puzzle about the mechanism that encloses the water so that it doesn't flow down the hill but permits the cars easy exit from the ditch on the downhill side. A second car goes in, and a black woman opens the right-hand door to get out before the car is totally submerged, and I expect to see a black man as the driver in the "cross section," but am surprised to see that it's a small pony-tailed white woman who's manfully driving the car through the water and out the other side. I DO recall a van ad I saw on TV yesterday about some off-road vehicle driving through waist-high water without stopping, and this might have been a hangover from that. Was too lazy to take notes when I woke at 8AM, wanted to get to transcribing this after I took my morning shit, and sitting on the pot could NOT remember the topic of the second dream, but I told myself "Relax, it'll come," and I thought about a trip, maybe a plane or a train or a CAR, and then it returned.
1/18/98: 12:20PM: 3:40AM 1) I'm walking through an enormous men's room with five rows of five johns each, and thinking to make sure I have one when I need one, I go down one corridor and lock three successive ones from inside, and then do the same down a second and third corridor. Then it at last dawns on me that I'll be locking many needy men out of johns, and I wonder how I can do the unlocking without drawing attention to myself from the lines of men waiting for facilities they have no way of knowing are empty. I wake with painful stuffed feelings of reflux, and even though I walk around a bit, no gas comes up and I resign myself to returning to bed with the pain. I fall asleep almost immediately and wake at 7:30 to record 2) I'm on a line immigrating to London, advising a girl who has NO visa how to get in, and get told to stay in a MILITARY base outside London and commute there on public transportation, which sounds like a great saving because I try (in the dream) to think back to whom I stayed with, or what hotel I stayed in, and can't remember the G.'s from last time and vaguely recall the Brompton Road gay hotel I stayed in the first time around. One officer says to the other, "We have his INTERVIEW," and I get some small gay-oriented wink behind what he says, and wonder if this isn't an invitation to base-wide sex. Back to sleep and wake and laze till 10:20, when I record 3) Joan S. promises "to have the Aurora” for me by tomorrow, which is part of some project I'm working on for IBM, and I look at my datasheet to see that I've drawn in four ellipses of elements to prove that I've done more than my share of the work, and I go into the library to search for Volume One of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and find that it's missing, and also that others are slightly misfiled in the crowded room on the jammed shelves, and figure anyone who needs a particular volume will know enough to look into the adjacent areas to find what they want. I return to my desk and open a drawer and see two ledgers which I'd found, labelled "The Book," recalling that I thought I'd have good uses for them, and beneath a pile of papers find another two volumes of the EB which I have to return to the library, because I didn't officially sign them out and no one would have any way of knowing I have them, and that's just not fair to the others in the office. Wake and laze further, then finish the puzzles and finally prepare breakfast as I finish this at 12:35PM, one of the later breakfasts on record.
1/20/98: 12:25PM: 1) 5:30AM: NIGHTMARE: I want to QUIT a powerful organization and they won't LET me. I try to plead my case and they won't LISTEN to me. "Why won't you just drop me from your list of supporters and LET ME GO??" I plead. "We will CRUSH you," they gloat. I threaten to interrupt a broadcast and they threaten violence or jail or both. I feel TOTALLY helpless and frustrated and in a PANIC to GET OUT! Wake with a THUD of dread. 2) 9:30AM: Rather like DNA building-blocks on a double helix, I'm following the construction of modules numbered 2,3,4,5, down to 20 on one side of a column of modules, and then numbered 21,22,23, etc, up the other side, and everything fits wonderfully. NO idea what it's for, however.
1/25/98: 10:30AM: 8:50AM note: 1) Someone is questioning me in detail about my former and present STOCK advisors: Warren S., Rolf H. from my actual life, my uncle Henry, who, I clarify, died a few years ago, and my other uncle, Edward, both of whom actually never advised me on stocks or bonds to buy. 2) Someone like Bill H. (reminded by narrow-faced similar-bodied curved-cock guy from last night's MAN party?) is lecturing me and someone else about what to wear (heavy boots, also from leather party last night?) and what to carry on a probably icy trail the next day: tree-limbs cut to 18-inch lengths with wooden braces nailed to them, for carrying and thrusting out when slipping and falling so that no bones will be broken when we fall. 3) "Japanese ways of saying embarrassing things," which isn't exactly it, but probably stems from having to say things just the right way to Marilyn and Sherryl or they'll get annoyed and lecture me on "how I should say that type of thing" to them at ALL!
2/2/98: 9:45AM: Incredibly complex and "old-fashioned" frustration dream: I'm working for IBM and have a presentation on a program I'm working on. I know the whole thing is in a tiny laptop, set up on screens that I can display for viewing, though in the back of my mind are many thoughts: there aren't many diagnostics with error messages, I didn't debug it completely but am relying on my meticulous orderliness in coding to be correct, I don't know who is coming to this presentation or where it's being held, or even exactly WHEN it's being held, except that I find myself finishing my lunch in the cafeteria (wondering why I'm having beer for breakfast---remember, this is a DREAM) when Mozelle D. comes past and exasperatedly says that she's scheduled some woman's office for our meeting (I remember the large, blond, messy woman, a combination of the waitress at Henry's End and Judy G./J., but I can't for the life of me remember the name Mozelle used, which I recognized), and I try to gather everything up in my arms, but find that someone who looks like Arthur D., with his type of long-suffering patience, has picked up the large book (like a Castles of Europe hardcover with stiff-paper jacket) of specifications AND the computer and hugs them to his chest to imply that they aren't heavy or difficult to carry. We walk across a rough campus-like terrain to get to the base of the office tower, when someone like Dick H. drives up in a car which I didn't think was legal on these grounds, but we go upstairs to find that the area in which the old offices were is littered with junk and there's a large metal block, like an upside-down wastebasket, in front of the door NEXT to the office I think we're in, and the office we're THOUGHT to be in is filled with trash, broken cubicle partitions, and no chairs, so we can't possibly be set up in there. I have a vague memory, in the dream, of the corner office of the scarred-face Harry Someone at IBM whose office on "another floor" I'd dreamed about in the past, and wonder if that wouldn't be available. But I ALSO "know" that Mozelle and Cathy have SET UP an office for us, and it's on the 36th floor, and when we exit under a gothic-type door arch I look up to see we're on the 34th floor, with no way to go upward (and I seem to have remembered that the offices were built along the outside walls, so that the hallways had no view-windows, whereas the floor we are ON has large glassed-in areas which are clearly of a different, incompatible floor plan), and without transition we find outselves outside, on the ground, looking up at a distant tower, knowing we have to get there, but not knowing how to find our way past the intervening "old-college-type" buildings. Find ourselves at the base of a large cathedral which we for no particular reason think to look into and see a narrow dark stairway (almost like the throat of a Giger monster) looming upward in the red-tinted darkness, and without rational thought we figure we have to mount these stairs, coming across a "floating fire escape" in the middle of a flight that we have to separate to go around, and someone like John A. is surprised by this obstacle in the middle of his path and gives out a SCREAM probably inspired by the screams of young Marcus in No Laughing Matter that I started reading yesterday. Wake in dread and frustration: there was NO WAY I was 1) going to GET to the meeting in ANYTHING like the proper time, 2) having anything cogent to present about my program, 3) bolstering my faith that the program would even WORK when it was tried, showing everyone what a fraud of a programmer I was. Frustration continues when I realize I 1) haven't yet thoroughly brushed my teeth in about a WEEK, 2) am feeling frustrated by the enormity of the FIRST of the culls: Omni---let alone the huger task of Scientific American, National Geographic, or my BOOKS, 3) still haven't gotten two checks after two months and one month, 4) have too many "errors" to take care of today based on Saturday's mail, 5) MUST go to the gym on the FIFTH day away today, when the dance programs yesterday took me away from the fourth day yesterday, 6) have to get up to transcribe this before I forget all the details, and 7) generally getting old and infirm and late in appointments and tasks. Vicki interrupts to confirm Friday the 13th for slides, which is good, and I can print this and file Xmas-card list!
2/4/98: 6:30AM: HORRIBLE nightmares: 1) I'm facing someone like Paul M., who has to undergo some hideous initiation that I must watch and in some way PARTICIPATE in: he takes a small cylindrical button (with a slit in the side like the puzzle I checked in next month’s Scientific American to see how a small rectangle could be invisible in a front view but visible in a side view) and has to sew it onto a jacket (like the spare snaps that came in a plastic bag with my new overcoat) without needle and thread, but slides a small metal catch into the slit that ejects a spring-loaded Chinese-box-nested pyramid of tiny rectangles that become a kind of puncture-knife when it's properly placed, and he has to insert this into a small ring, like a cratered nipple, on his chest right above his heart. I don't want to watch, but he insists that part of the ritual is my watching it WITHOUT BLINKING while he does it only inches---or AN inch---from my eyeballs. I try to stare but find my gaze glazing over, and he pushes it in at an instant in which my eyes are open and staring but so dry and forced and agonized as to be totally unseeing, and that causes me to fail in my mission and he falls atop my body while grunt-shouting, "You didn't do it RIGHT", and I wake WITHIN the dream with the weight of his body atop me, the trickle-feel of hot, sticky fluid running down my back with a simultaneous pressure and feeling of HEAT, and think---I believe still sleeping---"That was an AWFUL dream!" Immediately I am in the midst of another dream in which I can't see my bedroom clock, but Mom says I have to get ready to go with her before 9AM or something awful will happen to me (like she'd have to leave me forever---a portent of her death?). I'm in my bedroom, somehow beforehand (probably a reflection of spilling ashes from my bidi-ashtray at the top of my sheet on which I lay my head on my pillow, just before 1AM this morning, after taking three Magic-Mushroom pills, which might have something to do with the ALIENNESS of the dreams, or just the mixed wines and Grand Marnier in the Pousse Rapier at the Beard last evening), and in doing some unidentified (but forbidden) actions I'm left with bits of PINE BOUGH NEEDLES on my bed, which I cover loosely with a sheet over the ENTIRE bed so that the needles can't be seen under the pillow and sheet, on which I'm now sleeping in the dream; I wake still in the dark, but she has the light on in the bathroom and I can tell it's still early, but the next time I look at the clock (actually, the THIRD time I look at the clock; the second time was 8AM) it's 8:40AM and I put on the light and get out of bed to find no one in the apartment, and I run to the back door (I'm in 1221 Dietz now), pleased to see what I take to be HER car in the driveway, through the curtained dining-room windows, but when I get to the back porch I see it's a metallically shiny Art Deco Chrysler in which James A. sits (or HIS death?), and he gets out and tears up when he says, "I've never cried when I've started my speech, and it doesn't matter where you go, but you can come live with me if you want, or I'll take you anywhere you want to go, but you can't---" and the final awful purport of his speech is unclear. Then I'm in a dark alleyway being attacked by young, menacing men, who first seem to be after someone else, and then turn to attack ME, saying they're going to shoot me in the head, and I plead with them, and again they release me and Jimmy and I run away, around a corner, but they follow and grab us and force us against a wall and say they ARE going to shoot me, or now maybe STAB me, and I feel an AWFUL dread, and even a premonitory PAIN, and wake AGAIN in the dream and think "Now I have to go back to sleep and ESCALATE the threat in the dream," which is immediately succeeded by the thought "That's CRAZY, I must just WAKE UP and STOP this awful sequence," and I wake feeling AWFUL (and I've FORGOTTEN some crux, final threat or image in the last part of the last sequence, as if maybe they actually PRICKED me with their knife to show they were in dead earnest), and lie for a few moments thinking "Do I take notes of this, or just remember it to transcribe it later?" but then get up, note the time, and come to type this out by 6:55AM, stomach queasy, throat cramped, sweaty, back arched and aching, and faintly nauseous, but now finished and I can go back to my sweat-cool bed.
2/12/98: 11:30AM: Woke at 9:10AM and then again at 9:40AM, between which times I had a rather extraordinary dream: I've received a small spherical object (or maybe pyramidal in shape) which seems to be a combination of the "Diamant" that "Scintilled" in last night's Tales of Hoffman and the travel clock that American Express offered as a gift for $3.98 mailing, which projects an image which can be controlled by the mind: I look in through an aperture (maybe the vignetting circle stemmed from the excessive use of vignettes in the tape of Civilization, which I watched yesterday morning) and see a pyramid that appears to be comprised of glittering, glowing, flashing chips of color like confetti or jewels, and if I WILL to come closer, the image comes closer; if I WILL to back off, the image recedes, and I can even soar into the air to hover above the image (and only slightly later comes the thought "Could I even imagine myself under the ground?”), and I think this is an INCREDIBLE advance for technology and mind-entrainment. Think only to have had a demonstration of this new gadget, but I go off to the side to find a novice attendant at what has become a New Age-type conference, and ask if it's possible to BUY one of these, but the novice sidles up to her supervisor who might know the answer, and without transition I find myself at a counter where everyone is very helpful ("Are you being helped?" "Who's next?" being asked in such a way that I wonder NOW if that's from the dream or somewhere I WAS yesterday being asked to be helped at a counter---maybe at the video shop!), and I'm presented with a package marked "Original price: $149" and "Reduced to $64" and I think I'm getting it for $64, which is quite a bargain, but when I get my Visa receipt I find that the receipt attached to it has been FURTHER discounted to $38, which I think might be a mistake, and then a clerk says, "And for an added bonus, you get 23 of these SMALLER versions," and she proceeds to dump 23 gooseberry-shaped and -colored spherules into my plastic shopping bag, and my mind reels at the thought of having 23 of these tinier versions to give to friends: an actual mental receiver for almost NOTHING: I'm flabbergasted. Wake and immediately think of the "Touch Me's” that John and I handed out on our trip around the world in 1970 (and wondered if any of them remained blackened among our souvenirs), and THEN think of the incredible CONCEPT of such a dream which I'd just had (and had to make sure to document), all contained in the "three-pound bloody sponge or dog's breakfast" as Vonnegut so many times described the brain in Timequake. AGAIN I thought of the image of my experiencing all the books and meals and relationships as a TRANSMITTER of these experiences to aliens, eager for sensation on a remote world, who can understand and REMEMBER the books that I index and can't even BEGIN to comprehend, or books like Relativity that I'd DETERMINED to read even though I really understood only a small fraction of what my eyes ran over on the pages. And then those 23 "gooseberries" reminded me of the "universe-marbles" plopped into a bag at the end of the psychedelic outward-bound trip at the conclusion of Men in Black, and thought of the BRAINS and encapsulated EXPERIENCES of everyone as being similar to these gooseberries: tiny but incredibly RICH and VARIED and heart-breakingly EMOTIONAL, which must benefit MORE THAN ONE individual, since the idea of ALL these trips and meals and people benefiting ONLY ME seems like such a WASTE! Which might be encoded worthlessness on my part, or fear of my memory deserting me and the hope that it would desert me for SOMEPLACE MORE RETENTIVE, and again I think of WRITING something like this: as yesterday I was bound for the Metropolitan Opera House for Tales of Hoffman with an international cast, concerned with Pope's possible stay in a hospital, looking to find a replacement for Mildred's dinner at the Beard tonight, reconfirming with people I talked with my Tibet slide-show tomorrow night, and I suddenly think that I'm OUT of my dream-page and INTO my notebook-page, so I'll finish off this page and then COPY the END of this page as the START of the notebook page and get BOTH of them printed before breakfast, which, now at 11:52AM, will certainly come AFTER noon, but I'll have time for lunch before the Beard with Sherryl this evening, and will have completed TWO printed pages by then! (RETURN TO JOURNALS 2/12/98).
2/19/98: 9AM: Up for breakfast at 6AM, but then take a NAP at 7:15AM and wake with memories of TWO VERY highly charged sex-dreams: first of a guy who's in my bedroom with other people around, and I'm worried we might be seen, but then the apartment is quite DIFFERENT from mine, so I figure we're in HIS place and it's all OK. I'm sucking furiously on his cock, conscious of the dangers of AIDS, but still absolutely enjoying and FEELING the stiffness and pulses of his cock in my mouth, and SQUEEZING the shaft with my hand to engorge it as much as possible, and he WRITHES with pleasure. In the second, I'm stimulating some sort of monkey-robot combination with a squat thick cock with astounding PROJECTIONS on the underside of the glans, and as I squeeze and suck, the pyramidal projections get as hard as cardboard and the creature evinces obvious signs of extreme sexual pleasure. I'm excited, too, and want very much to suck him off, but it never really happens and I wake excited but still tired from the fatigue that made me want to nap in the first place. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 2/19/98).
FLORENCE DREAMS 2/19-25/98
2/26/98: [note found 3/7]: 4:10AM: Elaborate two-parter: going into old office and "cleaning" antique brick-wood frames and large pliable moldings to be taken to appraisers, who may work 55 days a year for $50, and SECOND part in DINNER with friends---and Bart H. puts on a jacket and I have only a sweater---and I hand telephone to my boss so woman on phone can tell HER the dreams, costs, and timings, so I won't be in the middle. [Bed 9PM, so up at 4:10 is 7:10 hours. 5:50 start j/o, to 6:30.
2/27/98: 7:55AM: 1) 3:30AM: I've MOVED house, and then go to baths, standing with towel and shoulder bag and dop kit looking at everyone and then find that my dop kit has been TAKEN! WHAT to do? Stand by the exit and check everyone who leaves who might have it? Buy new stuff? Glad there's not much expensive stuff in it, but have to buy new tooth-brushing equipment. 2) 6:25AM: It may be that Mensa (because Abbe B. seems to be my main opponent, jabbering away as she effortlessly solves the problems) is giving a verifying IQ test, but I also have the idea it's a test for entrance into a very important school, because when I'm faltering I start to wonder what I'm going to do as an ALTERNATIVE to this school if I fail their entrance exam. The test is to take four sets with large numbers of somewhat similar objects (there are playing-card lozenges, swizzle-stick poles with chess-like finials, puzzle-pieces with odd-shaped projections, and a box I never even GET to) that have to be PAIRED, and every time I think I find a pair I find a SLIGHTER kind of difference that obviously has to be taken into account (rather like pairing my socks!). One set seems to be in a story-sequence and rather late in the game I get the idea to arrange the tiles sequentially and pair them off as duplicates appear. Abbe seems to be doing MUCH better than I am, and I have no idea if there can only be ONE winner, but as I think my time-limit is drawing nearer, I have more and more insights in how to do it more productively, but I have the idea that Abbe is finished with at least two or maybe even three of her boxes, so I'm hopelessly outpaced. Probably wake for a few moments to be relieved that my future school career isn't in jeopardy, and fall BACK to sleep for 3): I'm part of a crew that seems to be a sort of clean-up after a larger number of contestants have taken the same matching test, but the job NOW is to take sequential stacks of number-cards and put them BACK onto the little stands from which some of the matching objects had been TAKEN (I know this makes no sense, but in the dream I was in a sort of post-Rohypnol state of bland acceptance, willing to do whatever was necessary just to get through the next few hours without catastrophe), and I have to be careful about dropping the stacks, since they're so narrow they could easily get out of order, which would make replacing them that much more difficult. People are working around me with other tasks, somewhat similar to setting up for a large banquet at the Beard House, and I nip in between workers to see that the numbers are gradually decreasing, but that I have a few more rooms to traverse before I get to my codes, which are in the 3000-series. I finally find numbers rather close to where I should be, and spy what seems to be close to my first number just at the entrance to an exhibit room (is this based on my hyper-museuming in Florence?), and I take the first slip and delicately adjust it back into its easel-like plastic support, clipping two delicate brackets around the top of the slip to keep it in place, and figure it's going to take a VERY long time to get ALL of these back, but before a REAL feeling of desperate frustration can set in I wake up, jot down the notes, and fall back into doze. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 2/27/98).
3/1/98: [note typed 3/3]: 5:35AM: I'm giving a HUGE party and trying to apportion tasks: 1) baking brownies, but when I get out cake tins, they contain OLD brownies, which are sampled by dipping a measuring cup into the soft middles of them and passing the contents of the cup around, and the conclusion seems to be that they're quite good yet; 2) making pasta, which someone volunteers to do (it wasn't actually THAT task, but it was something LIKE that task when I wrote the note); 3) washing dishes, which a young HUNK volunteers to do even before I ask him, which makes me doubly pleased, because when I'd nipple-pinched him during our first encounter last night, he hadn't really responded---but when I slide alongside him at the sink and kiss him on the neck (as the daughter did in Independent People), his nipples are quite erect, AND he says he's now HAPPY because I let him be HIM and he may even like me enough to have sex with me; 4) a woman who tends her shop across the street is being WHIPPED by two women who say I should LEAVE, but when I ask the first woman, she says I should STAY because I ASKED HER what to do which THEY never did and it's now a BREAKTHROUGH for HER, and OTHERS are helping me make the party WORK---with SOME characters from Six Characters in Search of an Author from last night. [6:10AM: Through my earplugs I think I hear KNOCKING on my door, but I don't think it really happened.] AND I decide to open CENTER door of a room and change the seating arrangement from two arcs of about six seats each along the "top" and "bottom" of the floor plan---which open to two SIDE doors to the room, to an almost-circle of all twelve seats which opens to the newly opened CENTER door at the "top" of the floor plan. And also tear pages off a program to make a new cover from one of the inner advertisements and reorganize the pagination.
3/3/98: 8:40AM: I'm on a small-truck safari with a female guide who seems to be patterned on Laurence B., and the first part I've largely forgotten, but it probably had to do with an itinerary by bus, or looking at a map and deciding where to go next, or relating what happened to me on previous trips to Africa. But the second section had to do with stopping somewhere alongside a road and looking down through intervening trees to see the unmistakable shape of a rhino passing slowly through the forest. It reminds me of the rhino I spotted for Dolores and Michael from the truck in Etosha. We stealthily tried to get closer for a better view and videos, but then he caught sight of us and started to circle US: one vivid image had me hiding myself behind the densely entwined wire and woody-vine-y material of a gate, so that I could follow his movements through the interstices, but he couldn't really see me. Then, with surprising speed, he trotted halfway around a concrete fountain-area and actually clattered down one set of steps which I wouldn't have thought he was capable of negotiating, down to the center of the fountain-area so that all he had to do was trot up the nearest steps and be in our midst! The third section was clearly on the same trip, but in a totally different water environment: I was looking down from a height, as if a pair of aluminum canoes were deployed from a helicopter, and I could see them sliding over each other as they hit the water not quite bottom-down, and they rolled about on the clear, unruffled surface until they slowly filled with water and, being metal, began to sink toward the invisible bottom far below. There WAS the thought that it would be possible to DIVE and retrieve the lower one, but I thought to use the topmost one as a hook, pushing one end down into the water and hooking the gunwale of the deeper one with its up-curving tip, bringing the first one back to the surface where it could be emptied and used. Enough of the dream remained that it seemed to be working, but a distance intervened as if I were watching this on a TV program, or were only observing it from a hovering helicopter (which didn't ruffle the aquamarine water that retained clarity through the first twenty feet or so, but would obscure the boats below that with milky opacity). Woke about 7AM, "knowing" that I would remember all three parts clearly, but the first faded almost completely now.
3/4/98: 3/5/98 record fragment of six guys teasing their cocks in a circle to their stiffest, waking me with my own stiffie that I cum into a condom in bed.
3/5/98: 7:15AM: [I wake to a fantasized door-knock again!]: a) I'm at a sale or auction of jewelry and come across a tiny notebook that records drawings and photographs of jewelry made by a now-dead dealer. One photo is inscribed: "Ring on hand held in the helpless harp position of a person who dies peacefully in her sleep." Some diamonds are only drawn, other pieces described in words, and another photograph shows an odd pink crystalline rock placed into a ring-setting just visible on a still-live hand. b) I'm in a museum exhibit of gems, and a very famous stone has been poorly placed and identified on a floor of secondary treasures, and I return to take a picture of it, since photography is allowed on this floor, but not on the floor of masterpieces, as it had been up to last year. Feel lucky to have spotted it "out of place" here. Can't recall anything that would have produced TWO dreams of jewelry.
3/6/98: 7:50AM: Driving---driver preoccupied with young lady---into "fort" entrance, and back, and told NOT to mention grasshoppers used as rail-tie support stays. NOTE: TINA BROWN---INTERNET AS GLASS BEAD GAME!
3/7/98: 5:10AM: Must jump a six-foot chasm to "get in," and laugh with woman at work who'll join us for dinner at Beard House. After dinner, I tell her co-worker she dined with us, and he makes loud comments in a meeting that makes the moderator shush him, to his discomfort and my amusement. Have to get up courage to make jump over chasm BACK.
3/9/98: 7:45AM: I'm Actualism coordinator and someone comes in looking for two patrol-people---I figure he can ask in lounge for volunteers. Fragment of "photo-taking" for people who pass particular steps. Lots of people in little rooms.
3/10/98: 7AM: Riding in some American southern city, looking for a hotel somewhere along a central-city river. I see a reference to Nob Hill and get out of the car for some reason, then climb a grassy, steep hill to see a derelict building to my right: one brick section with boarded-up windows, and some kind of wooden lean-to against one side with a precarious penthouse on top which WOULD have been good to live in when it was in mint condition. But when I get to the top of the hill, the courtyard of the hotel is filled with rubbish and hoboes, so clearly my friends wouldn't have wanted to stay here, but where DID they go? Hope there's a message waiting for me inside, telling me where I want to go. I look at the only map we have of the place, and it's more like an aerial photograph of the area around the river, obscured by trees, with no street names marked on it. Get a scrap of paper on which someone is attempting to draw a map, but I insist I have to know the name of the intersection we're ON, and the ORIENTATION of the map, before I can follow their arrows to go two blocks this way and then turn right for two more blocks. I have to know which way to START OUT. Recording these unimpressive dreams is getting increasingly tedious: I lie there, half-awake, debating whether it's even WORTH it to transcribe notes which will be relayed imperfectly to these pages. Thinking of throwing EVERYTHING away soon??
3/18/98: 8:50AM: Not sure whether I'm IN the submarine or only watching a filmed version of it: it's descending, with ominous overtones of "something's wrong" or "something bad's going to happen" and there's a close-up of the Captain's face with his eyes lowering in fatigue, then a CLOSE close-up of one eye blinking shut, looking more like a Santa Claus eye than that of a hardened submarine commander. Focus flicks to a woman engineer looking at her instruments but catching---from a porthole, out of the corner of her eye---a glimpse of what looks like a TRAIN cruising underwater, passing the sub in its descent. How much more ominous can you GET? Then without transition there's a focus on the outside of the submarine (this all probably stems from a photo of a huge dry-docked nuclear sub in a book at Strand yesterday) rolling in swells and pivoting about its center in what looks to be the flooded inside of an underground crater or volcano, with no way to get out, but an aerial view shows a menacing white shape rising from below that might be a whale, an enemy sub-vessel, or some alien spaceship. Wake with NO sense of imminent danger.
3/22/98: 6:55AM: I'm with Elizabeth B. in a car, driving somewhere in the West of the US on a vacation trip. I try to think of a way to ask the question "Did YOU, or any one of the senior teachers on the West Coast (and on the basis of this dream I ADD the two Sunday dates---remarkably, free!---on my calendar) without asking DIRECTLY in case they hadn't TOLD California about them (though I see by the announcement that one of them is FROM California, and only the second is from Bruce in NYC), verify the new energies? Elizabeth responds: "If you want to combine sensory and mental, you don't need a NEW energy, just COMBINE----" and I don't remember what energies she said to combine, but recall from the dream that it seemed perfectly reasonable, probably something like pink and electric blue. I suppose I'd been slightly conflicted about attending the sessions (and getting two new energies, but "reconnecting" with the "doomed organization") or ignoring the mailing (insisting on my own separation from the decaying membership---but admit to being VAGUELY curious as to who might attend: some sexy new fourth? Michael B. or Dorothy H.? Mary V.? Phone Mary just now but there's no answer. But with my usual "Oh, why not INCLUDE it?" omnivorousness, I'll probably attend the show.
3/23/98: 8:55AM: I'm poised at the brink of an artificial body of water, watching a lobster dive in from beside me and someone in a snorkel mask who's supposed to seek out the depths of the water, and I'm beside him to join him in his plunge. Our point of view shifts to the "deep end" of this body of water, and from there I can see that it's being supported in a huge taut net of mesh steel from outside with, I presume, plastic on the inside which is in turn lined with mud to simulate a sea-bottom. I can't see the end-supports of this net, but it's about the size of a construction that would fit into the end-zone of a football stadium, thus 50 or 60 feet deep. Nonetheless, we dive off the edge and I feel myself plummeting through the water until my nose actually touches the bottom and I can see tiny balls of mud (like the balls of makeup on the face of some woman in Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes that I was reading yesterday?) in the depression my nose formed, while not being able to see much beyond the muddy periphery of the hole. We bob back to the surface and report on what we've seen, though I can't add anything to the "mystery" of what's contained in the murky volume of water. A later fragment had me stroking my hard dick in a bed with RITA, aged about 10, on the bed, and I imagined her possibly telling Mom that I was "playing with my thing" when she was with me, and feeling guilty about it. Woke about 8:15 with an erection and debated jerking off, but I didn't want to feel tired while escorting Sherryl through her MRI anxiety this morning at the HIP area on the Upper West Side, and thought I could leave it to after the Academy Awards ceremony to see if I couldn't have more fun with it THEN than I would have this morning, trying to break the pattern of semi-felt orgasms for GOOD!
3/30/98: 9:30AM: Incredible QUANTITY of dream-material after going to bed at 10PM, to sleep at 11PM, and getting OUT of bed at 9:15AM!! 1) 5:45AM: I'm working for a NEW company, which lets me take time off BEFORE STARTING with them to work for IBM for a few months: I was being interviewed by them and was at that time "interrupted" by an IBM representative who said I could come BACK to IBM for a few months if I wanted to (ENTIRELY SUBCOUSCIOUS reference to the fact that TODAY, at age 62, I would have become eligible for early-retirement benefits from IBM if I HAD worked the minimum ten years needed to get vested interest, rather than quitting after nine years and nine months), and then be employed by this new company. Now, with the new company, I go to secretary/scheduler's desk to pick up two test cases that I'd left last night (and they return such a small quantity of paper it's clear that the tests didn't do very much), and there's my name on one of two large manila envelopes on the other side of her desk: it contains two PLAYS from Bill M., who wants me to review them as I'd done for him BEFORE. Yet I don't know how or when to RETURN them to him: he may have a note about that inside, or I might have to put it into the same envelope and return it to the same secretary later after review. I add a note below this: IS arthritis pain on writing this LESSENED with the Arthril and cream from John G.'s "ripoff" company? 9:10AM: 2) Spend a HUGE amount of time in the Bronx waiting for a bus to take me to Brooklyn, there being no convenient way to get to ANY subway that takes me ANYWHERE NEAR where I want to go. Ask through the window of the first bus if this takes me anywhere near Court Street (aware I should be asking for the NORTH end of Court Street rather than a much longer walk from the SOUTHern part of it), and the woman behind the driver says I should take the O-2. Rush around the FRONT of the bus and see that it IS an O-2, but it rushes away not full, leaving still a line of people who hadn't gotten ON. I curse that white bus out, and go around a corner to see a GREEN bus waiting with FEW people getting on, so I figure this must be a DIFFERENT line, maybe even to a different city or STATE. There are also YELLOW buses that I thought would be only SCHOOL buses, but people are waiting on line to get onto them, too. It's getting dark and I worry about missing the LAST one. 3) A woman who's trying to marry me (a very much younger Carolyn-type) lets me squeeze a rubber-covered dildo she's holding in her crotch, probably hoping I'll surrogate my penis-wishes onto something SHE can offer me. Then she's demonstrating elaborate embroidery (from Princess Di's show's emphasis on beadwork and embroidery?) by turning a round display-piece upside down and carefully snipping cover-threads so that at first only a tiny bit of underwork is visible, then turning back and snipping MORE so that about 1/3 the circumference flops off the frame to allow us to see the underside. Then I'm bending over a large display of tiny objects which she's showing off to other visitors to this odd country store or exhibit-stall. 4) I'm somewhere out on LONG ISLAND, maybe vaguely associated with Charles telling the group last night about how much Bill loves his house there, and I have to catch ANOTHER bus which I'd gotten before, so I KNOW the long route I have to take to the corner on which the bus stops, and I can see the last part of the route around an acute corner, so I can tell the bus isn't on its way yet. Rush through side streets, constantly looking back to see if the bus is coming, then the last obstacle is a block-long general store with counters VERY close together, and I seem to recall troubles pushing through here before, and though I avoid counters obstructed with people, I push past dishtowels thrust into the aisles so that my foot catches six or seven of them and STEPS on them and drags them to the end of the aisle, where a clerk complains about MY not putting them back, and I grumble, "They shouldn't BE hanging out anyway!" I push past stairs at the end of the building and out onto the narrow sidewalk to an acute corner where a gang of teenage boys are instructed by a cutie: "Touch the tip of your nipple---it'd be BETTER if it were ERECT, not mushy like it is now," and he's clearly trying to turn them on to their own bodies, which I think is commendable. [Last note: bed OVER 11 HOURS!! Now 9:50AM!]
4/1/98: 6:15AM: I'm visiting a very rich man, maybe a prince, in India, and one afternoon he presents a dance performance with his OWN troupe for the delectation of me and John. The five handsome men (well, two are VERY built and sexy: my choices; while the other three are darker and more doe-eyed and effeminate, so they think THEY will be importuned by me after the dance, but they're wrong) and seven women whirl through their steps in geometric order and flashing glittery costumes. This is so exotic and exhausting that I'm resting after the performance, and wake at 5:35PM to be told that dinner will be at 6:30, before which I'll be expected to make my bed for the first time that day, and after which John will be driven into Privali because he wants to shop for a shirt and some trousers. I don't want to go to THAT area of the market, but might want to go along, even though it'll be after dark, because I've never been to that town, and anyway I might get a view of the twilight Himalayas on the road to the village. There are kohl-darkened women's eyes watching from somewhere, envious of our maleness, and I have a sense of wonder that our host is SO wealthy and yet makes no pretensions about it. I wake and lounge in bed and then get up at 6:20AM, in the full morning light, to fail to capture the splendor and sleep wonderment of the dream in my halting words. 9:15AM: Additions: Twice, once with Uncle Jimmy, I'm riding in a car that pulls up nose-to-nose with a stopped car in the oncoming lane! Both times the driver stops in time and shakes his head and pulls into a safe lane. In another segment I get off the subway with an ERECTION and go to buy the Sunday Times, hoping no one will notice, and they're OUT of it, except that the owner asks me what SECTIONS I want, and I figure there are too many for me to be satisfied. Finally, I'm out in public somewhere, leaning against a chair as I talk to friends, and I'm dressed only in a T-shirt and my undershorts, and we're going out somewhere even more public and I hope I can pass, and that the front of my undershorts aren't stained with urine which will draw even MORE attention to my underdressed state. Haven't had one of THOSE in a LONG time!
4/4/98: Was UP at 5:10AM, to cover myself with a blanket other than the one Paul kept pulling off me, and then woke at 9:15 with an EXTRAORDINARILY emotional dream-sequence: I'm following the instructions of a new cultural and esoteric guru, and he seems to be pleased with me as I am with him (is this in anticipation of tomorrow's first Actualism session in years?), and even his closest followers seem to accede to my rising competence---I've passed tests that I didn't even know were tests with flying colors, answered questions wisely that I didn't even think were questions that demanded answers, and held myself in such an open way that even the guru seemed to acknowledge my skills. This makes me feel WONDERFULLY elevated and happy, with a burst of endorphins that I haven't felt in ages. Then I encounter a sexy kid with knotted abdominals, posed up against a wall, and his tiny erect penis is unutterably appealing as I reach out for it. Though this segment isn't ENTIRELY connected with the guru's following, it almost seems to be part of a test that again I unknowingly ace. Then, without transition, I have to be back to my testing-ground, but I get to the middle of a road and discover I've left my wristwatch behind, so I have to turn around to return to the building from which I'd come, but mysteriously it is now night and I run through a frigid dark landscape of bare-branched trees covered with a lightly falling rain-snow that leaves me physically cold (no blanket on my body again in the morning?) and tingling from each snowflake's kiss. I stretch out my arms in wonder as I run through the woods, wondering how I could have gotten lost in such a short space of time, where the buildings went, and how I could both get my watch back and reach my meeting on time. [I woke with AMAZEMENT at the INTENSITY of my feelings of A) COLD from the race through the woods, B) THRILL at being accepted by the guru of this mystery religion, and C) SEXINESS of the encounter with the bumpy-ripply kid. Tried to recapture, or HOLD, the feeling in my body as long as I could, on waking, but it quickly faded and I got up.]
4/6/98: [Notes typed 4/10]: 1) Paul B. cums after I encounter him (quite alive) in a bed and resort to my usual mouth-hand job to get him off, to his great pleasure. 2) I'm working in an office on a report incorporating large sums of numbers, and my boss is insisting I can change the addends without taking any concern that the sums should change to reflect a correct addition. I tell him that they MUST add up, frantically grabbing text and saying that though the sums may LOOK right, they must BE right, just as the word "pearl" in a sentence can't be changed to the word "purl" without massacring the actual meaning and sense of the entire sentence. I wake without resolution.
4/7/98: 8:50AM: I have to change a $500 bill (new and crisp like the new Franklin $100 bills) and do so by buying two $60 New York Central train tickets from upstate New York (thinking about Letchworth trip, and that I got a receipt from them saying that Suzie has already paid our $50 deposit?) to NYC, without causing any undue concern about the size of the bill being given.
4/8/98: 8:35AM: Having cum unsatifactorily last night after wasting the day after Paul left at 2:30PM Tuesday, I wake to record dream of pasting round-cornered stamp hinges to "enhance" eroticism of images in a cock-book that I just bought---noting that the width of the hinge JUST agrees with the thickness of a particularly scrumptious cock draped across the black-and-white leg of one of the humpier models---and then for some reason have to pull them off from all the pages while COUNTING the numbers of them for some significance.
4/10/98: 5:15AM: Having gone to bed at 11PM after tiring out after reading. 1) CONTINUITY of walking "south" (when I should have walked "north") and seeing a smiling Paul N. from a distance, and I'm through an overpass and out to a sunny green-grassy riverbank, but I can't cross a stream that flows to my right because the large floating logs (like enormous pale asparagus stalks) roll and sink into the water when I try walking on them, and some that looked stuck---at the top of an enormous rock forming a quasi-dam at the riverbank for the source of the stream---are washed over the lip by the surging water from the river, and they sink so deeply into the clear water at the base of the dam that it's obvious it's no WADING matter but a SWIMMING that would be needed. Without transition I'm being driven in a car by a local, down through the wooded hills (rather like the Teletubbies landscape), and he points out to me---and Rita in the back seat---Mt. Tabor, whose top is lost in clouds, but when it comes clearer it's obvious that the factory abutting it is ingesting it for its rock, brick, or limestone, and the mountain will soon be gone. He stops to chat with his friends outside the car, and at 11:30AM he says, "We may get a frozen fishwich for lunch at a local bar," which sounds good to me. At the end, a woman is glad to be accepted by the local group "even though I have an artificial leg," which explains why she had a funny limping walk. 2) 5:45AM: I'm visiting a pink-faced tiny-wrinkled old man in a bed, and kiss him with some reluctance because he's not sexy, but then a masked figure removes his leather cap to reveal a "wrestler's armor" (rather like the Roman armor in From Jesus to Christ that I watched on tape from TV) which he takes off to reveal a pale MUSCLED body on which he caricatures a wrestler's menacing pose with a delightful self-effacing grin. He puts a rubber on me (his cock has on a thick one that looks more like lunchmeat waxed paper than a condom) and pushes my cock into his ass, and I seem to accommodate this as my "moving to a new level of acceptance," and methodically jerk off his now-naked cock, hoping to make him cum without protesting that it should be protected by a condom. Wake feeling very sexy, pleased that the dream was BOTH AIDS-conscious AND very sexy and that I felt "advanced" to allow my condom-clad cock to remain hard enough to give him anal pleasure as I concentrated on his cock, which seemed JUST on the verge of cuming for a LONG time (rather like the cocks on the new videotapes that are still scattered behind me in the living room right now!).
4/13/98: 10:05AM: 8AM: Wake with dream (after having gone to sleep at 11:30PM) of forensics class plotting elaborate murder of a local but important political figure. I think of SUPER-plot OVER this till 8:20AM: 1) SNITCH in class REVEALS plot to victim? 2) WRITER in class PUBLISHES plot? 3) Victim's LOVER in class plots to kill the TEACHER? 4) Plot goes through and class is indicted for CONSPIRACY because they DIDN'T do anything about foreknown plot? 5) I write it up for Village Playwrights and some political killing is BLAMED on my reading of it tomorrow? (RETURN TO JOURNALS 4/13/98).
4/15/98: 9:35AM: I'm on a street in Manhattan with a sexy young guy, looking for a specific address, and we both realize not only is THIS streetlight out, but ALL lights are out (there's like an UMBRELLA of dark, low-hanging clouds which reflect NO lights from below at all): blackout! Also, the sidewalks are VERY slick, as if someone had SPRAYED them with grease. I walk gingerly to a curbside made narrow by a sloping talus of old snow to my left, with puddles of muddy water to my right off the curb, but I negotiate this at speed in my sneakers, following the guy in front of me, and I'm bending over, when my shoulder hits a strand of barbed wire, and I look up to find that the guy in front of me has vanished and there are three or four strands of barbed wire about nine inches apart: too narrow to slip through. A muscular punk-like guy appears to my right and reaches through the strands to grasp a concrete barrier on the other side of the barbed wire, which I think he's going to slide up like a window to make room for himself, but he sort of starts to do a chin-up which I can't see the purpose of, and he doesn't seem to be making any progress when I wake.
4/17/98: 12PM: Had a fragment of a dream of a number of guys along the back seat of a bus with dirty windows that gave a twilight glow to the interior, and some sort of pre-sexual activity was going on that was delightfully pleasant, but I woke at 8:20AM and forgot details by now.
4/20/98: 8:35AM: 1) I'm waiting to buy a ticket at a bus depot, standing in a long line behind slow people, and all I have is a check, which they won't cash, and I watch my bus depart, wondering when the next one leaves. 2) I'm in an office and meet Meg H. among new co-workers. I'm getting paid with a check wrapped in other papers, which is for 751 hours for $751, and they won't cash it without proper identification, so I shout toward Meg, "Tell them who I am, and that while I'm waiting for something to buy, I just worked SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-ONE HOURS FOR ONLY SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-ONE DOLLARS, and now they won't CASH it, which I HATE: DAMMIT!" And then I stamp my foot in such a childish way that I fear I've mitigated the strength of my displeasure. 3) 9:15AM: I'm sitting in a dental chair, which is more like the end of a paper-covered HIP examination table, surrounded by three or four dentists, one of whom puts a metal object suspiciously like a shoehorn into my mouth, clearly trying to get a look at the cavity at the back of my right upper jaw, and I try to tell them, with my mouth full, that they'll have to use a narrower implement if they want to look WAY back there, and I wake uncomfortable in the warmish morning, surprised that I got to sleep AND dream in such a short time, clearly concerned about the upcoming dental appointment on 4/30 when that back cavity will be attacked, hopefully with a bite-block AND with nitrous oxide. JUST after not having to worry about taxes on 4/15, NOW I worry about the dentist in her coming four appointments, which illustrates the old est saying "There's always something to worry about," even when I have NOTHING to worry about and go GLOBAL thinking of earthquakes and atomic-bomb attacks on New York City and meteors falling unannounced out of the sky, or other disasters from which I flee back to the relative comfort of my small personal worries and concerns. Just NEVER pays to get TOO caught up, even by typing "personal" notes at the end of a "dream" page to fill it out!!
4/22/98: 7:45AM: I'm to give a talk at St. John's GRADE school and get there at 7:45AM (HA!) and the church is OPEN but the JEWELS are not yet on display in their accustomed cases---I never knew they TOOK them OUT every night. Some nuns bustle about fixing the altar for the coming mass. I go out the side door into the midst of kids waiting for the school to open, and then inside with a group of surprisingly ADULT kids, one sexy guy wearing a flip-flop and a shoe (probably because of some kind of sporting injury), others punching their comrades and joking, and I figure I will find a teacher in a classroom on the first or second floor to direct me to MY classroom. Wake at sound of DOORBELL with guy telling me, "The water will be turned off all day at 8:30AM," so I fill pots and bowls, having to wait for Owen early today anyway.
4/23/98: 9:30AM: I'm visiting some park (a preview, or concern with, Letchworth?) and just after sunset I'm focusing my camera through some trees to a distant prospect and see that a glowing cloud isn't reflecting the setting sun, but some fire below, or possibly an explosion. I try to zoom in to get a better picture, at the same time opening the shutter to accommodate the dying light, when suddenly there's indeed an upwelling smoky explosion on the horizon, as if of a volcano erupting, and I wait for what I think will be the maximum expansion JUST as I think I get the camera adjustments to the proper positions, and snap off a shot without, I hope, too much hand-motion, wondering what the explosion is and how long the tremors of the earth or a blast of wind will take to reach me. Wake with similar thoughts, remembering "when I don't have stuff CURRENT to worry about” [above].
4/24/98: 9:50AM: I'm riding a bus somewhere, and something's not quite right: either the bus has to take a detour, or gets lost, or develops a problem, but we have to ride "to the end of the line" and get out and wait overnight to get another bus back to where we should have been taken. THOSE circumstances are vague, but CLEAR were the surroundings of trees and Yosemite-like cliff-facades as we drive deeper into the wooded valley, and I somehow think to get off BEFORE the last stop, which would be too far from any accommodations for the night, so I peer out at the narrowing road, the lack of any other traffic, the paucity of houses, and what seems to be an upcoming loop at the end of the road where the bus would simply turn around, disgorge its passengers, and wait for morning to go back on the road it came. Without transition, it’s getting close to the following noon, when we are all supposed to be back on the bus for the return trip. I ask if there is enough time for me to revisit someone I'd known from a previous trip, and find it’s OK, but when I enter the shop and an unknown clerk asks if she can help me, I suddenly blank on the name of the owner that I knew, and have to resort to waving my hand and asking if "he" were in the back office. I don't remember her response, or even if I ever caught a glimpse of the guy I was looking for, because without transition I’m back at the bus, even ON the bus, and talking to a woman who lives in this terminal village and suddenly know that she doesn't even HAVE to ride on the bus back to the starting point: she LIVES here and would have to take ANOTHER bus BACK to where she lives, and I get up the courage (but not quite the words) to ask her, "I guess you only took this bus-ride because it was AVAILABLE to you, rather than you needed to take it anywhere to get where you wanted to go?" Don't remember any response from her, though it’s clear to me that I'd understood the basis of it: she DIDN'T need to take this ride and was only doing so because "it was there" and she felt under some obligation to make the bus driver, or me, or the other passengers feel comfortable with the idea of riding on the bus by making it more crowded with passengers than it otherwise would have been. Woke earlier and lay there, then got up to try to shit, but couldn't, and felt so stuffed from the large meal the night before at Junior's (ending at almost midnight), that I didn't even feel like getting out of bed (see NOTEBOOK:4/24/98 for remains). (RETURN TO JOURNALS 4/24/98).
4/25/98: 7:55AM: A real phantasmagoria: 1) 5:55AM: I've returned to 1221 Dietz with Rita and a strange young man, and I'm in the garage (which has been made into a storage room), laboriously closing an umbrella VERY like mine which seems to have its shaft bent (making closing it a difficulty), and I glance outside to see Rita and the man uncertainly waiting in a (nonexistent in actuality) side garage off the driveway at ground level---which would have had to have incorporated pieces of the kitchen, dining room, and basement had it been constructed into the house at 1221---and I mentally slap myself upside my head for having left them there, putting their bags into storage, when I should have led them around to the front door and into the house proper, rather than coming into the garage for my own storing of luggage. 2) 6:30AM: between waking and sleeping I DREAM fragments which I wake and thread together with recollections of details that I want to transcribe here, but then IMAGINE time-shifts and character developments which then fade into more DREAMS that are again interrupted by periods of waking where I'm thinking of Pope, and indexes, and letters to be written, and dream-sequences, and typing the memories as I'm doing now, even when the DETAILS of the dreams themselves have been TOTALLY forgotten---as if I've chosen to describe the BOXES in which Christmas presents had been packaged, since I've forgotten what was CONTAINED in the boxes. HEALTH is clearly implicated in the WAKING sections as I recall fragments about a) Pope's being blind in one eye, b) possible use of hyaluronic acid injections for help in my osteoarthritis, c) Dennis dying of AIDS over a prolonged period because I did NOT let him die when he first was taken to LICH emergency (though this was BEFORE I went to sleep at 1AM, as I DO clearly recall), d) Mom with Alzheimer's (which was NOT part of the dream OR imagining, but is certainly on my mind), and e) financial considerations connected with everyone's future comfort. At 8:07AM I've exhausted what I REMEMBER about dream-details, and this has clearly become a STATUS paper!
5/4/98: 10:30AM: VERY vivid details when I woke at 8AM, somewhat blurred by transcription-time: I'm riding west on a bus in a town that's a COMBINATION of NYC and Akron: it's like 57th Street and I know the restaurant I'm going to have dinner at is about where the old Angelo's was (on the west side of 9th Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets), but it's also like Main Street and Market Street (where the old Diamond Grille was in Akron), primarily influenced by the "unknown wooded area" just to the south of the main drag (which doesn't exist in NYC, but was the Howard Street "black" area in Akron with some railroad tracks messing up the street-grid). Anyway, the bus turns down a small Wall Street-type thoroughfare just BEFORE where the restaurant would be, and I think this is as close as the route gets to where I want to go, so I get off the bus and think to head in the right direction, but there are no STREETS that go the way I want, and I find myself heading increasingly SOUTH into a semirural area with wooded fields, and at length at the bottom of a slope like in a riverside suburb of Pittsburgh, and see a long passage going uphill that appears from the outside like a long covered bridge, but when I look AT it from the end, it seems more like a walkway that allows no vehicles, going up the hill where I want to be. I enter the hotel lobby from which the walkway appears to extend from the back, and have a tiny bit of trouble finding the entrance to it, but I ask someone and they imply it's possible to get a TAXI or a CART that will convey me up the hill, but I don't think it'll take THAT long to walk (maybe like along the East River with Sherryl after the Met Museum yesterday?), and I get ready to walk up to where I want to be, when I wake, thinking that the details are QUITE sharp in my memory and I'll have to transcribe them right away to keep the 50s-type rural woodsy flavor of the area "below" the hill, with the Wall Street-built-up and large-buildings-crowded-in-on-twisting-street flavor "above" the hill before I get off the bus. And the definite "above" NYC flavor and "below" old-time Akron tinge. It seems I'm dining alone and don't know anyone around me at all.
5/6/98: 9AM: I'm working at a computer in a room that's more like 1221 Dietz than 167 Hicks, with a much more crowded Windows format (as if I have a large number of pending programs on my toolbar), and I go to a particular Geography program which has a number of imminent tasks on THAT program, and I scan through various maps (like surfing the Internet or reviewing nearly done projects), and a number of maps have insets, like port cities on islands on the tips of peninsulas, and one in particular I'm interested in refining to twice the level of definition, and I'm thinking there's another program I can import the map into which will double the number of pixels per area---sort of like making more defined the patterns on Fractint---but I can't immediately think which it is, and when I'm trying to decide what to do next, the screen gets an overlay of two front-end shots of jets which blink at me and I think "Oh, that means I now have a particular supervisory system operating, and I should click the button that says I don't want to be reminded with these overlays which system is still in operation." No particular frustration or pressure associated here.
5/7/98: 8:50AM: I've just had INCREDIBLE sex with a group of people, but the party is ending and I'm lying on the side of a bed when a VERY sexy dark-skinned man comes up to me and starts to caress me very sensually, and I give myself over to feeling his body and letting him feel mine, and I'm getting into his hard cock pressing against the side of the bed and urge him to lie full-length against me, when a young girl with long black hair appears in bed next to us, caressing him at the same time he's caressing me, so that I also include her in a wondrous hug, thinking that all this is VERY good to feel and be a part of. Without transition that segment is over and I'm lost in a series of very large rooms with only one or two pieces of furniture in each, and I go into what seems to be a circle of chambers, though off to one side is a partly open door to what appears to be a john, though I don't need one, and then I come to an entire wall of barred metal doors that clearly lead outside, and I figure I must be down in some loft area in the Village where such doors would logically be more appropriately present. On the floor of one room are a number of papers and envelopes, and when I bend down in the dimness to examine them, two are envelopes with my name and address on them, and I try to sort them out from things that aren't mine, thinking "Maybe one of these is the invitation I brought along which will tell me where I AM." But then I'm in another room, confronting a very tall man with an East Indian-type face, wearing some sort of military uniform with brass buttons and chest insignias and badges of occupation; he seems to know me, because he smiles dazzlingly and dips his head to kiss me and says he wants to see me again, but I can only ask where he's going and could he show me how to get back to my hotel. We exit the building (only after I'd circled the rooms a few more times and returned to the papers on the floor, trying to pick up what was mine, leave what wasn't mine, and find out where I AM) toward a poorly lit entrance to an underground transportation system (more like a train than a subway), but then lights flash and people start running and clearly his train's come because he rushes off down the distant stairs, leaving me stranded. Without transition I'm moving with a group of people down a hillside to the left of where I had been, and I try a blocked left-fork and clamber over a concrete barrier to a right-fork down which people are riding in paired car-seats, as in a roller coaster, and I can only stand on the back of one and follow the cars down the hill to another split in the road; some continue straight down the hill and I randomly follow the curve to the right which dwindles until I'm standing in the middle of a dusty road (NOTICING that it now seems to be in the LIGHT OF DAY, rather than the early morning dark hours when I left the building), STILL with no idea where I am. I'm clutching my jacket around my chest, feeling in my pockets that I still have my change-purse and my Subway Card, and feeling my back pants pocket for my thick wallet---I should look in there to see what kind of MONEY I have, to identify which COUNTRY I'm in and maybe what hotel I'm lost from---but then I'm caught up in a crowd of people in which kids are trying to pick my pocket, and I grab for my wallet and protest "Leave me alone, don't take that---STOP it," and am gradually left alone again. I go up to a group of women wrapped in black shawls and to one with graying hair say, "Pardon me, are you a tourist here?" "Don't talk with me," she says fearfully, moving away, "I can't talk to strangers." "Please help me," I beg, "where are we?" She looks at me conspiratorially and says, "We've been innocent, too, going undercover to the native cities of Darkla and Lukla, but we're not supposed to talk about it. Pleased to meet you," and she extends a bony hand that I try to grab hold of, but she's gone into the crowd with her group of black-shawled younger women. I look around and see Hindu-type temples with silhouettes of statues in inner chambers, with the glow of fireworks from some distant festival. "Maybe I should just enjoy the day here," I think to myself, "and then find out where I have to go later." Without transition I'm in the passenger seat of a car, looking over at a Nehru-jacketed older man with an impassive Indian face, like Dr. D., and he says "We could go look at the festival," motioning toward the reddish glow of spitting fireworks against the again-dark sky, but I panic completely and snivel, "I just want to go back to my hotel, I don't know where I am and what my itinerary is and I'm VERY confused." He nods and seems prepared to do what I want, and again I wrestle with my clothes in the front seat, wrapping my jacket around me, feeling in my pockets that my possessions are still there, and am aghast to find my trousers down below my knees, but when I pull them up loosely my wallet is still in my back pocket and I STILL haven't looked to see what currency I'm carrying to identify the country I'm in and how I got here and where I'm GOING from here. And I JOLT awake, VERY relieved that it WAS a dream, even though that thought NEVER entered my mind during the dream itself. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 5/7/98).
LETCHWORTH DREAMS 5/19-22/98
5/20/98: I'm in India, playing (or training as a player) in a detective game. I get papers to find an object, as in a scavenger hunt, but they're VERY disjointed. I run down alleyways until they look dangerous; kids follow me and help or obstruct the game. I climb to a fairground-top and see an elegant office, and look down to see a bearded face that looks like that of Jack A. from IBM, and think it significant. After many adventures a messenger arrives with a KEY, saying I must use clue "Animal from a confetti place" to open a door for a prize. I enter an old monastery and fly down halls too quickly to be stopped, to see clerics in dry-blood-colored robes plotting in secret, looking into inner chambers illegally as in the Kathmandu Hindu goddess's home. I'm fast and having fun as rich and poor swirl past me as I run. I got all but one clue paper and must reconstruct it. FABULOUS dream, written to 2:33, and I pee.
5/22/98: 3:05AM: I apply for and GET a job as maitre d' at the Plaza Hotel dining room, put on fitting blue jacket and check to see that room is FULL. First two guys and a gal are VERY snooty, DEMANDING a table, and I take them to the BACK room where I seem to remember EATING at a table for 3, and it's only a SHOP and a yawning back stairway down and they REFUSE to eat back here, to my RELIEF. Back to find it's 12:30AM already and people are clearing OUT. To basement bôite to find the hall JAMMED with jazz listeners. Back up to try to "meet the staff" but someone guesses I'm 51 (I say "Thank you!") and they laugh at my pleasure, and I wake glad I DON'T have a new job.
END OF LETCHWORTH DREAMS
5/23/98: 3:50AM: ANOTHER sex-bidi-sherry-fever dream: I'm (no other way to say it) like a character in a Dungeons and Dragons game, observing feuding among the MALE powers therein, wondering why our explosions were getting weaker and weaker; a whole series of "back-screen center-to-edge rocket-explosions" had been set off, which were so bright that I had to cover my head with a wet handkerchief from a wet-sack nearby, and the last even engendered sparks that left (I could feel with my hand), a singed shortened patch in my crew cut, yet there was no effect among the paltry women in our midst. I didn't know the rules of this game (hell, I didn't know it was a GAME---meaning that I didn't know it was MORE than a game, but a Struggle for Power in an Elemental Sense), and I scarcely knew the characters, but one of the inept older men, like a grizzled Joe S., muttered, "We're losing our Power." When I asked why, he said, "Leah (conjuring up someone like Lea T., but raggedy and Valkyrie-garbed, old, and ruminative) has been involved with the Power Struggle among the Women." "Then why don't we go ask her to mediate here, or things will be bad for all of us?" Then, into our midst, came an older hag clutching a white flower to her scrawny chest, and he said, "Here comes Jezechial to try for the Grace of Azael (I'm making up the names, but they're like unto the impression I got of the flavor of the names), but it's not going to work." Indeed, some young whippersnapperette tried to grab the flower away with a witchy scream, and Jezechial shrieked and fell into the arms of the lounging Leah-Sister, or Matriarch of Our Side Whose Name Is Not Known, and she whimpered, "All my roles in films won't help me tonight," to which the Leah-Sister chided, "No films have you made, only one small commercial in crass Hollywood," at which Jezechial lamented (tearing the flower from her breast and brandishing it Shakespeareanly), "Yes, I had failed in my trial, yet I now implore my waning Power to beseech your help in the growing Circle of Defeat, that we may yet salvage some remnant of Puissance for our waning Forces," and I woke to savor the high-flown words, the dream-visions of HolAnimation, a start to a new play in which the thundering speeches would beguile the ear like, at least, Marlowe.
5/25/98: (note typed 5/27): 7AM: Someone's complaining his TRANSLATION of a play in TURKISH has to CONVEY the ideas in English AS WELL AS encode a SECRET message about the international situation. Then I'm sitting alone next to a huge round table at a diplomatic banquet, and waiters insist I move IN to allow a LARGER "waiter's circle" around that table, and NOW I have a gruff political table-mate who sympathizes with my discomfort.
5/26/98: 3:55AM: MY GOD, MY GOD: IT WAS A DREAM!! AGAIN, having smoked a bidi and masturbating, THINKING I might have a dream that was a nightmare, I had a REAL nightmare of rushing frustration and endless running, hopeless striving, senseless anxiety, agonizing uncertainty: I'd gotten off a round-the-world charter flight, having stopped in Japan, Korea, and other places in Asia and Europe, and had finally arrived somewhere like New Orleans, gotten off the plane to go into the temporary terminal, and then lost my way back (after a now-forgotten series of missteps and agonies involving someone who was now helping me get back), but with my discovering the plane was missing, was trying to check which flight I had been ON so that I could send a telegram ahead to the next stop saying that I was getting another flight that would meet them at the airport, even feeling only QUITE certain, but not POSITIVE, that the next stop WAS Chicago, because we were going to a particular exposition or special event (remembering only on waking that I HAVE a trip scheduled for Chicago, but only from New York, hopefully nonstop!), and somewhere in my endless circling running it dawned on me that we would AT LEAST stay overnight, so that I had an even BETTER chance of catching up with the flight before it left CHICAGO, knowing that I'd left my passport with my luggage ON the plane, but knowing at least I had my wallet with my credit card so that I could get a quick ticket from New Orleans (if we WERE in New Orleans, is this only my "Mildred" connection?) to Chicago, maybe getting there WHEN my charter landed so that I could join the group from the AIRPORT rather than finding my way to the hotel or exposition IN the city, getting back only to find that the second flight had LEFT, but that one of the two or three NEXT flights WAS to Chicago, but I ran around an enormous area, trying to go down a rocky wall, stepping into a circle of four men juggling balls and forcing one to drop one when I barged across their midst, wondering briefly how I had gotten so far AWAY from the ticket offices, at one point crossing a BRIDGE (ala Brooklyn just Sunday?) with cables dipping to a low level, knowing that I could just "walk across the track" to get to the other side, finally seeing a set of signs saying "tickets" and asking (of the THREE planes now in) if ONE were to Chicago, and hearing "I don't think so," but asking AGAIN when I found myself in bed in a sleeping position and thought: "AH, it's a DREAM!!! (RETURN TO JOURNALS 5/26/98).
6/6/98: 9:05AM: 1) Only fragments remain of encountering Dorothy H. somewhere on a trip and confiding or speaking to her in a special way because she was such a close friend. 2) Again I meet Dorothy, like at the entrance to my bedroom, and we actually lie together and I say, "You're the only one to which I could confide this realization of mine: that I have so many arguments with people because when others SAY something, most people would just ACCEPT what they say or the position they take, or if they DIDN'T agree they simply wouldn't SAY anything---but I rather INSIST on my point of view when I disagree with someone, ARGUING that my point of view is the proper one rather than theirs, so that I have many more ARGUMENTS than many I know." I’m reminded of ARNOLD's penchant for argument for JUST that reason. Great sense of REALITY about this dream, the first in almost the two weeks since Tak's been here.
6/7/98: 7AM: I'm joining a well-established gaming group of men in, like, an old Wild West town, around a floppy plywood-round table, finally spotting a wooden swivel chair in which I can sit while I'm taught a "bookshelf" game in which we compete in allocating shelves for books (according to a printed sheet with rules "to make things more interesting" as my guide and I [a la Michael and I] say simultaneously), moving an initial distribution onto red-marker-enclosed "B" book sections, and the game promises to be more complex, interesting, fun, pleasant, and somehow SEXY as it goes along. Wake from that feeling good. 8:15AM: Vicki and I are playing Scrabble and I put down the word "contempo" which I saw in ad adjoining Times crossword puzzle as the answer to a clue which contained a sheaf of "contemporary" magazines, but when she saw that I got that answer from another source, she demanded not only that I take the word off the board but that she have the choice of my letters from my board to make up her next word. I looked on in amazed amusement.
6/8/98: BIDI DREAMS AGAIN: Bed and sleep about 1AM; 1) about 2AM: Grocery-bag stuff-transfer between Delores and Michael and me in a car in a school-yard VERY like St. John the Baptist's doorway, my having filled my hands with spools and clothing and tools and small-groceries that belong to THEM while they have stuff in their bags that belong to me, VERY detailed but I don't feel like getting up to record it AT that moment, and roll over to sleep to 2) 4:15AM: I'm trying to elude some dwarf who's following me that we picked up running past myriad alleys in a turn-of-the-century town John and I are touring (as in olde India), ending up mounting stairs that turn into paper-clip ladders, protecting my back pocket from the followers (part of an early-morning horde "commuting" to work by running), when we pass through a "gate" to a hilltop "pathway museum" before descending to the town, getting a ticket that entitles us ONLY to a "print-exhibit" without paying more for other venues. I search in my pocket for change, but only come up with (in my blue coin-purse which I find in a plastic baggie at the top of one of my shoulder bags) sets of rare British 3-guinea pieces and 55-cent large-flat-silver coins from our PRIOR stop, and John says he has no quarter, so I get out my wallet and give one of my last two wrinkled paper bills, which are received as "tote money," and when I ask what that means, it's "total" in the sense of old-fashioned 100 cents to the dollar, as used in "tote-board" horse races, as opposed to "word-money" which is contracted at a discount rate with whomever you're trading goods or services. Bits of sky-observed villages from some movie I've just watched, and other inordinately detailed surrealistic bits I've unfortunately forgotten now.
6/11/98: 3:40AM: Bidi-dream of walking on CRUMBLING mossy rocky loam surrounding a lake, leaving only ONE high point where there had been encircling cliffs, shaped like a HEAD, at which I laugh and point out, "That's really what a HEADLAND looks like", namely, a HEAD. Note typed 6/12.
6/12/98: 8:35AM: Possibly influenced by the vaguely Far Eastern flavor of The Seagull, which I saw yesterday, the multi-episode dreams last night took place in INDIA: 1) First, vague memories of an elaborate itinerary on the east coast which involves a six-day fast, for some reason. 2) I'm in a large kitchen where I have some responsibility for helping clean up, so I choose a large sink in which to wash dishes: the first batch is of plastic, air-filled figures that must have been used as decorations for some child's party, and most of them are almost clean, but a few dark-colored plastic wallets or purses are encrusted with greasy ridges as if some kind of fried meats were put next to them and got them stickily blanketed with "skritchies," which when I try to scrub them threaten to pull off the plastic-covers from the fabric beneath. When I go back to the table which had been covered with dirty serving dishes, I find that the dishes had been filled with breakfast foods: what looks like a wine cooler filled with hot water in which float rafts of contiguous, tiny, poached eggs, one raft atop another; a salver of freshly fried eggs; cruets of cream and milk and syrup; plates of butter and rolls and muffins, and assorted other breakfast-buffet types of foods. When I look around the room, I see small tourist groups eating breakfast at tables with some empty chairs, and when I get my plate to fill it with food, none is left, so I go to the kitchen to see maids unaccustomed to such cuisine black-frying eggs on huge square stoves, and I tell myself that even though I liked the taste of burnt food, it would NOT be necessary for me to take the DARKEST eggs from the pile, because they would be TOO totally black. 3) Another middle-fragment of searching for a particular tourist site floats into my mind, but I don't recall any more details. The India-trip seemed pleasant.
CHICAGO DREAMS 6/17-23/98
7/2/98: 9:15AM: A number of inchoate dreams, ending with a stay in Israel, where a wall-map turns into a model of the city with a luxurious fashion show in the lobby of a hotel across the street, with Qatar as an enclave on the map, and a group of Jewish charity-workers troupe past, shaking our hands and asking where we're from, and some of them are from New York City, too, but they don't seem terribly outgoing. We talk of planes arriving home late because they picked us UP late: the flights usually take as long as planned, but delays are at the START, rather than in flying-time. Detailed colorful map!
7/3/98: 6:50AM: I'm walking along the pathways in a jungle village, probably in Borneo, because a baby orang which had been scratching its belly against the concrete side of a mud-hut foundation sees me and gleefully leaps atop my head, where he clings like a turban impossible to dislodge, and I hope he wouldn't defecate or urinate in his glee. Then, impossibly, there’s a BABY lying under a bush: a blond-haired, naked, pudgy, dirty BABY (undoubtedly influenced by the blond-haired doll baby that figured so prominently in the "deja vu" story by Stephen King in the New Yorker issue I was reading just before I went to bed at 1:10AM)! I pick it up and take it back to our host cottage, where it is lost amid a gaggle of tourists, cottage-help, and other unidentifiable people. I know it has to be around somewhere, because it’s too young to crawl more than a few feet, so someone has probably picked it up and taken it somewhere to wash it, or change it. A small maid says that she had changed its diaper (which I don't remember seeing when we found it), and it had had "such a teeny tiny turd in it"---and she scrunched her face and her fist as small as she could make them to communicate her amazement and pleasure at the tininess of it all. I didn't make a note about this until about an hour later, certain that such an arresting image would remain fresh as it has done.
7/9/98: 8:30AM: I'm surprised to find that I'm sharing a bedroom with David C. (could this be from Dave that I watched last night?), rather than his sleeping with his wife in the next room, and I've just moved in, so my stuff is all over the tops of things while his stuff is neatly put away in chests that have odd soft-front drawers. I know that this trip is only for a few days, so I can put on some clothes that are slightly dirty and don't have to worry about long-term wear and tear on my few things that I've brought along on this trip, surprised that this seems to be a PRIVATE plane that we're about to take off in, and does it REALLY have this bedroom at the back of it or is only the FRONT room going to take off? We're in the AIR without ANY sensation of taking off, and down on the road below are Michael B. and Dorothy H. going on HORSES toward Nairobi, and the pilot LANDS in a grove of trees so that I question "how he did it" but he points over the hill to a cleared field in which he landed and just taxied to this tree-covered position to wait for them to catch up with us so that they can fly to the coast without taking all the time to go overland. I recollect that I've BEEN to Nairobi before, but only as an entry to the country and hadn't really STAYED there, and that there'd be tours that I'd like to take, like to Isak Dinesen's house in the hills and to the island of Mozambique. But somehow the scene shifts so that this bedroom is in a NEWLY BUILT reconstruction of a brick-walled ruin which had been in BACK of an old house in which I had lived (in previous dreams, only roughly pattered on the actual apartment house at 309 West 57th: same location, but it was only a four- or five-story brick building, in which I had an apartment on the top floor) before, but the C.s have bought the building and left the top two or three floors as apartments and remade the two bottom floors into a duplex for themselves, rebuilding this back room into the comfortable chamber which I was now enjoying. There'd been another dream BEFORE this that I'd wakened to in the dark but didn't take any notes on and have now totally forgotten.
7/15/09: 8:45AM: As maybe a preview of our stay at Knoebel's Amusement Park tomorrow night, I'm lying next to a dwarf in a rest-area (though when I suggest that all the kids might be having a nap, now, just before 5:30PM, he says probably not), first with my head on his round tummy, then next to him in a more affectionate posture---but then I'm lying on my stomach, naked, figuring that I'm not THAT much of a scandal to the mothers because I AM on my stomach, and bare butts aren't THAT much of a show. But it starts to rain, large drops wetting the material of my clothing, so I gather up my shirt and pants and jacket and underwear and dash for a porch, where I select a round-seated restaurant chair so I can still gaze out over the crowd, and quickly put on my jock-strap and pants, but find that the straps have broken and three long white cords are dangling outside various pant-edges, and I lengthen them but can't quite decide which two should be tied together for the waist and which two for around the legs. Then a large touring car pulls up outside the fence, and one of the special areas is having a tour of the tunnels which became mines for the establishment of this part of the park, and when I suggest it's all hype, the old-woman leader seriously says that 120 years ago these were actually MINES, and therefore this part of the tour IS genuine (and in fact I recall a Mining Museum on the MAP of Knoebel's that I looked at a few days ago), but everyone around still regards her with some skepticism. A fragment of a car going over WINDING roads (with most of the storefronts closed before opening later in the evening, though they're colorful and obviously in current use) reminds me of some Disney statement where they said they demanded that the roads wind so that the VIEW would always be changing, and people would have to drive slowly and carefully, and then there's my map of LONDON with small villages with major churches grouped among the connecting roads, and it seems more an AMUSEMENT PARK London than any ACTUAL London, but I'm happy to BE there and looking forward to finishing indexes today and travelling tomorrow!
7/16/98: 3:10AM: WOKE at 3AM with dream, decide I MUST transcribe it at 3:05AM, and find page 69 messed up as I left in note for CompChro! BIDI-WINE dream of complexity, color, and ultimate frustration: 1) I'm stuck in a building, coming around a kind of basement to a parapet (after climbing stairs?) along which I have to CRAWL to get to the next stairway going DOWN, but I decide that the tin-gutter-like roof-piece that I try to HANG on, to get around a corner, is too fragile to support me, so I'll just go BACK down to the cellar and come out the way I came IN. But THAT leads me to a small group of people leaving some building at around 125th Street at 12th Avenue, with a woman saying, "I have to get to the Iprnt Theater on 57th Street," and I know I have to get to an ACTUALISM meeting at 57th, between 11th and 12th Avenues, which is a BREAKOFF Actualism center that Bernice set up when she left the main group. But somehow I'm in the ORIGINAL Actualism Center (a bit like the top floors of the old Hotel Olcott), trying to show CHARLES the top-floor "upper room" in which there's a MEETING going on, but I know I can come up the stairs on one side, go through a darkened foyer OUTSIDE the meeting room, and come down the stairs on the OTHER side, without being seen. We go INTO the darkened foyer, but someone ELSE is there and Charles REFUSES to go in with me, and we bump around in the dark before I say, "Well, let's go downstairs to the Coordinator's Room." But even THAT'S full of a Coordinator's Meeting, so I go to a side desk where a woman asks me what group I'm in. I don't know. "Who are some of your classmates?" "Oh, Mary V. and Maya B.---and Bernice C.!" "Oh," she gasps, "You're in 8A” (which is clearly the most advanced group and she's apologetic she didn't RECOGNIZE me, which isn't difficult because she's never seen me before because I haven't been back to THIS center for about five years)---"Ah," I interrupt, "the meeting must be in the special SUBcenter (unknowingly punning on AN Actualism term)." Leave with some OTHER guy like a combination of Charles and MICHAEL, and a woman with whom I've been taking a TAXI offers us her "motorized skateboard" for transportation. (Somehow, I think she's going to come ALONG with us, but it only holds TWO, and only partway "south" does it occur to me that I, in fact, STOLE this from her because I have no idea who she is or how to get it BACK to her, and can only hope that SHE in some way knows how to get back to ME to get her "vehicle" back.) So we look around and find a heavily traveled road just over a berm, over which we carry our portable "vehicle" and put it in a lane and start off---to find we're on a country road going (presumably) in the right direction---until we seem to be STOPPED, with no progress, and we AGAIN stand up and look around and see a road "right over there" which still happens to be around 124th and 12th Avenue, but I still hope to get to the meeting (which starts at 10PM?---Mary and Maya would NEVER have accepted that: it's probably 9PM and we're almost LATE, but I MIGHT be able to get there by 9:10PM, still acceptable). (Another fillip: leaving some "bar" I see people who LOOK like a younger Mary and Maya LEAVING, having just finished their dinner, but it CAN'T be them, because it's NOT!) I drive a bit more and find we're STUCK in a FUNHOUSE dead end! I have LESS patience, get out and PUSH on the next wall, which turns into a soccer ball (Buckyball?) sort of construction that FLIPS open to reveal a ROAD outside, past high windows like on the hospital overlooking FDR Drive, with CARS whizzing in one direction. I KNOW that pushing on the OPPOSITE wall will get cars whizzing in ANOTHER direction, and I wake, panting, knowing it's a dream, and try to think how to construct a SOLID of these CUBES: EACH with a side-wall that "folds out" to allow egress to the cube NEXT DOOR, all of which is topologically engineered to be connected and enterable, yet fold FLAT for shipping as a home-game of incredible complexity. I begin to sort out how to BUILD such a modular mental=physical (LOVE that "-" into "=" typo!!) when I decide I just HAVE to get up and transcribe an incredible bidi-dream before I FORGET the details, thinking it MUST be only 2AM (having gotten to bed at 1AM), and find that it's quite clearly 3AM when I wake. Finish this (and print) at 3:26AM!!
AKRON DREAMS 7/16-22/98
8/18/98: THIRTY-THREE days since last dream transcribed! Not that I haven't HAD dreams, but they've been so inconsequential that I haven't bothered to note them. But, coupled with my feelings on NOTEBOOK:8/18/98 (which I hadn't written since 8/4, FOURTEEN days ago), I'm inclined to note THESE dream-emotions: FRUSTRATION and placid ACCEPTANCE of UNACCOMPLISHMENT. I'm getting ready to leave a room on a trip with a group, and about a quarter to ten in the morning it occurs to me that I haven't PACKED yet, while the others in the group seem to be ALMOST ready to leave. Open my suitcase and begin piling things in, but SOME of the things are ODD (without seeming odd in the dream---these were simply the things that I had brought with me that I have to repack): not so much the drawer of soft sweaters that I ball up and throw into the bottom of the suitcase (which is strange in itself, as opposed to the soft shoulder bags or duffel bags of my most recent trips), but surely the drawer with bright-colored pastel-silks on thick hangers which I glance through to make sure "they're all there" that I fold in half, which fills much of the suitcase. Look in the corner of the room and there's one of my kitchen-set folding chairs, which I'd CLEARLY brought along but can't POSSIBLY pack, and somehow the "hotel room" changes into a room in Bill H.'s house in Maine, where I CAN keep some of my stuff, or leave stuff that's HIS which will be mine when he dies, like the sets of plastic drawers with stamps that at first seemed to be MINE but then turn out to be HIS, and boxes of matchboxes neatly stacked and categorized which I figure will be a good addition to my collection when I incorporate them, and other indications of "collections" which in the dream symbolize my stuff to be sorted and possibly thrown out, reflecting changes in my life-style over the years, accelerating with age and arthritis. The tour guide is now chatting with my roommate, and I see that it's 10:50AM, 50 minutes after we were due to leave, and he's saying something about how the deadline wasn't REALLY important, but we'll have to learn to get along with shorter times later in the day. Then I realize that I haven't STARTED to gather my stuff from the bathroom into my dop kit, for which there might not be room in the suitcase with all the clothes and stuff in it, and I'm so hopelessly behind that I wake with the sense of frustration that I take for the abiding sense of dread of the Holt indexes, the pending modifications to the Springer-Verlag laparoscopy index, the annoyance with the upstairs always-at-homes banging around, the breaking-in of the new television and turntable-amplifier, and the increasing sense that SOMETHING must be done about MICHAEL! (RETURN TO JOURNALS 8/18/98).
8/19/98: 9AM: 1) I've just SHIT into a SWIMMING pool which is filled surprisingly uniformly with foot-long sausages of startlingly varicolored turds---yellow at one end, brown at the other---which float around as the pool "flushes" and drains away, and as it sinks to the distinctly-square tiles at the bottom of the pool, I start urinating, filling one side with an acidy-yellow, even though I realize I may be dripping on the elegantly dressed people on the balcony of the pool below me. True absurdity. 2) I leave one floor of an apartment, or party, and find that the floor below is filled with a casino, whose roulette tables, slot machines, and card tables I pass without being tempted, but the FOOD stalls look appealing---though I ignore the more traditional fudge brownies and chocolate cake for an appetizing "chocolate chip" cake which is mainly white with thick burnt-chocolate crusts top and bottom, but though it's only two dollars (and I pull four out of my wallet), it's also not REALLY that tasty, rather bland, and how many dreams have I had in which there are ANY tastes at ALL? The fellow who sold me the cake was very cute, and might have given me an extra-large piece, and there was a definite sexual component in my interaction with him, but it's been over an hour since I wakened and I haven't bothered to rehearse the details, not even thinking I'd record the dream, but the 60° vigor to the morning air led me to write this---and the bit of NOTEBOOK:8/19/98 which I'll write after this---and print out now at 9:05AM. Except that I miscounted my lines and have this line to type before printing. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 8/19/98).
8/24/98: 9:20AM: Bed about 12:50AM, but can't sleep and wake at 2:15AM with grand erection after dream of enjoying erection, and jerk off with bidis till 2:45AM, then wake at 5AM, making notes on typical frustration-dream: I knock my black shoulder bag off a parapet in a park, and it tumbles in slow motion and lands with a dull clunk on a riverbank below. A female friend rather like Abby B. and I try to catch an elevator going down, but all the doors close JUST as we get to them. I try walking on the bluffs upstream, hoping to be able to find a way to get down to the riverbank, but can't. Try following a guy who says he knows how to get there, but he insists on RUNNING with his kids over the huge-gravel-size rocks in the path before us, and I can't follow him, especially when he zips through a set of interlocking cloth-tube tunnels, and I enter to find that I can't unzip the entrance to the central chamber in order to move from the southeast "tentacle of the cloth octopus" to the northwest one, where he seems to have gone unimpeded. Without transition I'm in a gathering in a building, and someone who looks VERY like the dead Marty S. enters and starts speaking in a VOICE very like his, and even talks about the problems of Diane Frederick's Medea recording and performances, but in a much more critical way than Marty would have done it. Again without transition I'm on the border of a model city like the MiniFrance I went to with Jean-Jacques outside Paris, and try to follow someone over a chest-high model of a suspension bridge, but after I duck under the first crossbars, I find that succeeding ones are successively lower, so that I can't really go down the middle and have to use the paths alongside, but when I turn I can't easily get out. I figure, in the dream, that NEXT time I'll start off going DOWNSTREAM, which is a longer way but which has more promise of getting me to the riverside, along which I can then trace my path upstream to the place where my shoulder bag fell. Wake with a rueful "there it is again" sense.
8/27/98: 8:40AM: 1) 7AM: My house is filled with sleeping celebrities when I wake one snowy morning. In the corner of the living room of my chalet in the mountains is an enormous snow-covered car, and I can only hope the tires didn't terribly damage my carpets and that the driver was careful to avoid any furniture as he parked in the corner. I talk to my friends among the notables, but the choicest bunch are sleeping nine-to-the-car, and when the vehicle's carapace magically melts, alone in the next-to-last seat is Prince Charles, frowning and glum-looking, and someone like Mildred eagerly says to me, "You should have heard what Michelle Pfeiffer sounded like when she was having sex last night," and begins moaning heavily in an embarrassing way. 2) 8AM: I'm leaving one part of Switzerland on a trip to go to a nearby town, but everyone seems to think we're flying there, so I try to get my bags together even though I'm still in my undershorts and shoes, but when I look around for the torn shopping bag in which I've meticulously arranged my cylindrical shoulder bag I find that it's gone, and I head off toward the airport ASSUMING someone must have taken it with the group's luggage. I get to a "terminal" at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and a trio of stewardesses are bickering about who's going to go up the stairs first. When I ask one of them where the terminal is, she rolls her eyes as if EVERYONE knows THAT and says, "Upstairs, of course," looking at my lack of dress as seeming proof that I couldn't afford ANY ticket to go ANYwhere. I'm up the stairs past a small room where three very blue-eyed pilots look dazedly into the distance (I’m hoping they're not too stoned to fly), and into a triangular arrangement of seats mostly taken---particularly the tiny windows at the left, the ONE tiny window for the six or seven rows of seats on the right, and a set along the BACK, the corner one of which is miraculously vacant---and I sit, only to find that it's facing FORWARD and we're a BUS, not a plane, trundling bulkily along ordinary highways toward our destination, and I wonder if my seat isn't empty because this corner-front seat is most liable to damage in case of a collision, but I figure my odds are good for ONE short trip and lean forward to enjoy the view.
9/6/98: 10:45AM: [First recorded dream in ten days]: I'm vacationing in Japan on a bus tour with about eight other people, and I'm having breakfast alone in a dim restaurant, where I get in a long line to pay my bill, and there's been some mistake somewhere, because I thought I had to pay 25 Rin, which would be the same as 25?, but the bill only comes to 15 Rin (rather like last night at Home, where they charged me $4 for my $6 rum-lemonade cocktail [which I let go] and then added the $64 bill and the $5 tax and got $65 [which I brought to the attention of the dippy waiter, who thanked me]), and there ensues a long confabulation with the cashier, the waiter, and the owner, which convinces me that the lower amount is correct, except that I'd not yet left the tip, and when I return to the table to leave the nickel for the tip, it's been dismantled for the morning and there's no WAY I could leave it without just dropping it onto the floor. Think to give it to the waiter himself, but somehow that seems culturally impossible to do. When I leave the tiny restaurant, I find myself walking along a roadside toward a bus-marshalling point because MY tour bus seems to have gone from the hotel, which isn't connected with my restaurant anyway, and I have no idea if they've picked up my suitcase from INSIDE my room and just lack ME, or whether I've so missed the connections that I'll have to return to the hotel, pack, and take a taxi with my suitcase to the bus's next destination. Peer through bamboo windbreaks to the road, and finally, after having troubles with rushing waters and paths that don't go where I think they should, I break through to a clearing at the bus marshalling point to see an ASSOCIATED bus turning to leave (like the large ship in the pier-spaces coming up to see Wigstock as we were leaving last night?), and I wave and call and some of the passengers at an open window hear and see me and the female bus driver (rather like Mrs. Charlie B. from Garnet Hill) leaves her group and goes into a nearby office where, I presume, she's calling my hotel to see if the bus isn't still parked THERE, since I'm on such a luxury tour that I don't even know that my bus wouldn't even be parked as far away as the marshalling area. I look at a local map available and try to have pointed out where I'd have to take a taxi if I couldn't get on my bus, and I see some long televised explanation that shows ships having to go around a circuitous southern route if they don't pay the toll at the "Swiss gate" to take the shorter northern route, and then the program focuses down to the town of Ise, on the northern coast of a Japanese island, where an enormous ship is docked which is said to be the temporary residence of the Dalai Lama (from Capitol Steps "Hello, Dalai" vignette?). After a fuzzy interlude, I find that I'm WAITING at the Ise Tourist Office for this woman to make her telephone call, and I look out the window to the prow of an elaborately painted ship (from the Burne-Jones exhibit?) and ask if the Dalai Lama's on board NOW, but am told that he isn't taking visitors. AT LAST the woman comes out of the place where she'd been making her call, and she sits in a corner and looks around in a paranoid way and beckons to me, "Can I tell you something in EXTREME confidence?" and I draw near her and she starts talking about someone named Etheridge, who is either ON the tour or CONTROLLING the tour from a distance, and there's something, probably homosexual, about him that she has to tell me about, but she starts in on an ELABORATE detailed recitation of books and places and people and historical events, and I draw back with extreme confusion and ask, "WHY do you have to tell me all these things; I don't know WHO you're talking about or WHY these things have anything to do with ME, and I just want to get on my BUS" and I wake with a rather sharp pain in the right-rear-top of my skull, which is alleviated when I put that part of my head against the wedge-pillow that I've had to sleep on since I've had my cough for the last 5-6 days, and I feel the itching on my legs and the humidity of the weather and look at the clock to see that it's AFTER 10AM and I HAVE slept eight hours, having played hours of FreeCell last night and gotten to bed just before 2:30AM, and I'm glad Pope didn't call yet (he interrupted my transcription here from 11:15-11:45AM) and I finish this 11:50.
10/6/98: 9:25AM: Weird, convoluted, detailed dream, first in ONE MONTH: I'm sitting in Vicki's apartment with her and a male friend, and I'm suddenly aware that they're dressed nicely and I'm in an open shirt and stringy cutoffs, so I ask, "Aren't we eating HERE?" and Vicki says, "No, we're going to ..." and names a place which is fairly fancy, so I say, "Oh, then I'd better go home and change," which is OK, since I only live a few doors away. Then I'm back in MY apartment where Vicki and her boyfriend had been SLEEPING the previous night, and I see a strangely misplaced object on a cluttered stand, and find that some of my PLANTS have fallen to the floor, broken their cups, and left water on various papers and objects. I'm amazed at the amount of change and damage in the mess, and then go into a small hallway to hear WATER RUNNING, and there's a SINK which is hardly used with a tap FULL-ON, and it's running over slabs of siding to engulf COMPUTERS and PRINTERS and all sorts of electronic equipment, at which I silently scream "OH NO," and hope that the electronics won't be ruined when they dry out (like my video camera!), but they're all probably RUINED. There's another strange cylinder filled with a brownish fluid that seems to be leaking, with a different kind of turn-on and turn-off valve, and it's a rug cleaner that seems to have leaked all over things below. Go into ANOTHER room and find that things moved OUT have uncovered an elaborate red-and-black Turkish carpet I hadn't realized was there, and I'm suddenly aware of lots of full-length mirrors on the wall that I'd not seen before, which seem perfect for masturbating in front of, and somehow the apartment is now connected with Art O.---filled with furniture and costumes and STUFF. But then I'm in ANOTHER room (there are at least six rooms in this apartment which I'd somehow thought had only three or four at the most), and Rita's a child fondling a cat which is purring VERY loudly, and I think it must be UNUSUALLY happy, but its eyes are yellowing and rolling back in its head, and then it's humping painfully across the floor, hunched up so that its legs are oddly clumped together under its arched back, and it's moaning and thumping against the wall, and I say, "Maybe it drank some of that rug cleaner," and Mom (younger, too) says, "It was always very clean, maybe it thought it was cleaning up." "Maybe we should take it to the vet," Rita suggests through tears, and I say, "I think it's too late for that, it looks like it's almost dead," and as I speak, it keels over with a wooden thump, almost totally stiffened, and rolls onto its side, showing that greenish turds have seeped out of its ass, and Rita now cries about the death of the cat, while the two birds (that I'd forgotten we had) in the cage start chattering and flying back and forth in panic, and I think to myself "Are they worried about the cat, who's now dead, or did they somehow panic at the cat's SOUL leaving its body?" And I go up to the cage, which has multiple layers and more birds than I remember, with the two big ones in front flying back and forth so frantically that they're bruising their wing-feathers, while against a screen of a dividing wall behind, about four or five LITTLE, very colorful, birds are batting back and forth in panic, and I put my head against the front screen and coo to them, "What's the matter, don't worry, nothing's going to hurt you, what's WRONG?" and they seem to notice my placating tones and quiet down and even sit on the screens quietly and appear to be listening to me. That's about the end of the dream (except that I wake at 9:20---feeling more tired than when I did when I woke at 5:45AM and peed and glanced at the full moon out the kitchen window---and almost immediately I hear the cries of a cat which MUST be from a nearby apartment, except that I couldn't possibly have been influenced by that in the dream since I was wearing my earplugs). And of course this comes at the WORST time, since I wanted to print out the pages of the index before having breakfast and brushing my teeth before getting to my LICH cleaning at 11AM, and now it's 9:40 and I WON'T have time to print the index, but I just HAD to get this first dream out. There'd been other fragments in the past few days that seemed too inconsequential to record, but this was such a strange agglomeration that I just felt I had to sit down and type it all out.
11/4/98: 9:30AM (typed 3:25PM): Variation of the frustration-dream: I'm working at my desk (or maybe eating something at a kitchen table rather like the one at 1221 Dietz) and look up at a clock to find that it's 5:32PM, and I suddenly remember I'm supposed to be meeting someone for dinner at 6PM!!! I race to my calendar but my desk is cluttered with so many things that I can only find my address book, which of course doesn't help with my not-quite-sure date. I pick up a large book (even bigger than Maltin) and riffle through the pages hoping to find either a yellow Post-it or a card on which I've written the missing information. I go into the "dining room" (again, patterned on the 1221 Dietz floor plan) and find a younger Rita and Mom arranging a LAVISH deli/dinner/picnic platter of brightly colored fried/curried chicken parts, bright-yellow sweet potato lumps, red and yellow peppers, and other appetizing items for a party of 15 or 16, which I ALSO have absolutely no knowledge of. Make a distinctive mewling sound in my throat as I can't find what I need to find to get me to the appointment, and it's clearly based on my full calendar this week: last night to VP and Beard, tonight to the Paul Hall concert with Michael, tomorrow to St. Ann's wine-tasting with Charles and Michael, Friday to dinner with Carolyn, Saturday hopefully to the City Opera for two rush seats, and Sunday the games group, which Vicki won't be attending. Good rush!
11/26/98: 8AM (typed 10:50AM): In a Philadelphia museum, Sherryl wants us to look at an old Greek bronze, something like a dying slave (though the gold loincloth makes him look more like a Roman Emperor), and then Dennis, in a corner of the museum, starts crying with pleasure because they've put up a "Dennis S. Memorial Living Room," and I can see his two knitted cushion covers on his fold-out sofa in the corner (where it wasn't), but the walls are quite bare, and after I wake I think "I could donate one of his African masks to put on the wall to make it more authentic." But there are odd drawings of what looks to be some kind of idyllic Caribbean island resort-plantation set of buildings which clearly aren't his, and I think "What they really need is his penis-enlarger on the floor amid stacks of index cards." Tell Pope about it when I phone to say he should be GLAD to be staying in rather than being at the VERY rainy live Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (though it IS 50°, which isn't that bad), and when he asks why I had that dream, I think it's probably because Dennis so often cooked Thanksgiving Dinner, and Pope recalls at least two meals that he had had with Dennis and me on that day. Raining HARDER now!
11/27/98: 9:45AM: Bed at 11:10PM, wake at 7:30, then back to sleep for a LONG dream I wake from at 9:10AM, after TEN hours sleep. I'm taking notes in some kind of large auditorium, and become gradually aware that the speaker is NEAR us in the middle of the space, rather than at the stage, so that when he gets up and moves, part of his surrounding audience follows him to the front of the room, while I remain where I am, thinking I'll be able to see and hear clearly from where I sit. Then that part of the lecture is over and I'm about to leave, when, at a small side-stage, someone who may be a charlatan is setting up a magic show. A few other people gather as he manipulates his props, drawing intricately colored patterns on a blackboard, which then MOVE about the board at his command. My neighbor is convinced it's a projection, so he stretches his fist into the air and, sure enough, we can see a small darkness at the bottom of the "screen." Then it's over and I get up to leave, only to go a small distance outside the room and realize I FORGOT my shoulder bag under my seat! Dash back to the room to glimpse a figure that I take to be the charlatan exiting through a back door, look under all the empty seats to see a sweater here and a scarf there, but no black bag! Rush out the exit he took into an echoing chamber which leads to a library-like room filled with workers who question my presence, saying this is restricted territory, and none have seen anyone passing through. I exit through a set of doors that I didn't know existed (somehow the setting confirms itself as the University of Akron campus [maybe from my talking about it yesterday at Michael's Thanksgiving Day dinner]) and think "I'll have to remember where this all is." Down what starts out as a VERY narrow cramped stairway, but it leads onto a purple-velvet-draped old-castle-type curving low-riser, semicircular-drip-patterned last few steps, into what appears to be the antechamber of a theater I didn't know existed in these basements. There are dim lights, as if they're rehearsing some kind of witch-play, because black-gowned crones are scattered in the corners of the stage and on the forestage, but as I move across under the proscenium the cast gets larger and larger until the entire auditorium is filled with Grimm's Fairy Tale characters and viewers dressed in dirndls and knickers and leather caps and embroidered aprons, and I think that this is going to be a WONDERFUL new kind of theatrical production where the cast mingles with the audience to create a VISION of the setting of the Goethe-like play in a European Fantasyland. And was it in THIS dream or in the PREVIOUS night's dream that there was a segment of a bus or train passing an amusement park in the outskirts of a city with a set of roller coaster hills taking advantage of the undulating terrain over a large area of land, with many trains of cars careering up and down the slopes in a delightful manner. Then without transition I'm walking down ANOTHER inner hall in the convoluted campus (like a computerland virtual reality built on my memories of the many buildings and halls of the University of Akron, yet bearing no REAL relation, this time, to any SPECIFIC building), and I let my right arm and hand brush down past---my shoulder bag! It had been there ALL THE TIME! I hadn't lost it at ALL! I didn't have to follow up on my bright idea to check with the Lost and Found Department (not knowing where it was or even how to telephone to inquire what might have been turned in to them, but hoping against hope that it was someone honest, or even the charlatan himself, who had found it and turned it in, so that I wouldn't have to cancel all my credit cards and replace all my membership cards), and felt ENORMOUS relief with still having it, though I did for a few moments before waking wonder how I was SILLY enough to THINK that I had lost it when I HADN'T! Now 10:03AM and Pope hasn't made his 10AM call yet.
12/1/98: 8:35AM: 1) 3AM: EROTIC dream with Bill H. kissing and fondling, with emphasis on the prostate, and I wake with a pleasant erection, better feeling than the sudden right-bicep flutter about 30 minutes after taking my first LDL-lowering pill at 12:15AM. 2) 6:30AM: We're dashing for a plane to leave Florence (which I finally identified after we got to a bridge over the river that I recognized from my trip earlier this year), and when we wave for two taxis following a bus down a rather dusty road (looking more like India than Italy), they both pull over to the side to disgorge their passengers (which fill both cars, making the insides look quite dark), and on the careening turn on the soft dusty-muddy traffic island they overbalance and ROLL OVER onto their sides, lingering on the final top-side crush to give verisimilitude to the "special-effect-type" incident, and we're glad we weren't inside THOSE! We somehow know that "the plane tickets are good until midnight," so even if we miss this flight, somehow scheduled at 8AM, we can get others, though I wonder how they can schedule seating, particularly toward the end of the day, if everyone has as much trouble keeping to their schedules as our group does, with the leader, or a friend of mine, a combination of Mimsy F. and Madge M., looking after her old FATHER who's joined the group, so that we all have to fend for ourselves. Not nearly the pressure to record dreams, particularly when they're so trivial, but at least there's now an entry in December, which I count as the THIRTEENTH month before the Millennium, fewer than FOUR HUNDRED of the days to go, and I start making sure that the right margin is even, confident anyway of getting to the bottom of the page, the right of the page, the end of these words, only two more lines to go, not yet 8:45AM when I've figured I've got a two-week stint of 45 hours per week to keep up with both textbook-indexing jobs and will still have time for dinners and various tasks I have to perform TODAY!!!
12/2/98: 9:55AM: Middle of the night: I'm visiting a Pacific atoll which is surrounded by a ring of fire from underground volcanoes erupting, and out in various tour-boats the water and air are full of dark clouds of falling ash. We want to get out to see the lava shooting out of the water, but a map of the circular (more like parabolic) atoll shows that it's primarily comprised of little islands with local roads but no bridges across from one to the next, and no large-scale tour-boats that could take us near the danger. We feel no sense of peril, but, like those old sci-fi movies, the whole thing could blow and take us with it without much advance warning than we've already gotten. No REAL sense of presence, though there was no dream-awareness, either.
12/8/98: 10:15AM: I'm working in an office (probably IBM) at a desk that's turned BACKWARD to the wall for some reason, and I look at it, evaluating what I'll get if I turn it around properly: at least I could open my DRAWERS! Then I want to go out to get something to eat, rather like a breakfast or brunch, and the streets in Brazil, where I seem to be, are very quiet except for the occasional tourist, speaking English, also trying to find a place to eat among all the closed and steel-shuttered buildings in this commercial but desolate area of an enormous city. I find a cafeteria-like place that turns out to be some kind of free center catering to the homeless or those caring for them, and I look over the selections in the glass counter-spaces and they seem to be mainly fried chicken parts, which is OK with me. I start with a plastic dish into which a slice of pie is slipped by a helpful clerk who also speaks English without a pause, and I go down the aisle to pick up the rest of my foods, but after I put them down on my table I come back for something to drink, and the clerk tells me, "You can get water from that fountain over there, and if you want some milk, you'll see a fountain just behind that which is intended only for the staff, but they won't mind if you take a little bit of it." So I go in the direction he pointed and fill a tiny plastic cup (more like a cupcake paper) with water, much of which spills, and I can't quite see where the milk fountain is, and I'm in the process of finding it and getting some milk when I wake, thinking I'm about to be discovered and tossed out OR will get into an interesting conversation with some Peace-Corps types sitting at the surrounding tables looking at me with curiosity but no animosity.
12/20/98: 9:55AM: "Prozale, Prozac, prosale, prosimian...," says Jimmy, stabbing at a note paper with his pencil. "He'll say anything until he gets it right," laughs Aunt Helen, and the shadow of the bird on the water becomes two transparent gels that slide atop and under each other, detach one from the other, until one slips beneath the waves and the other soars aloft and the soul is bereft of the body. "Proconsul," says Jimmy with a cunning grin.
12/25/98: 11:11AM: Melange of dreams after bidi-cum last night: 1) A young blonde is walking backward and bumps into me, but only gets angry when I suggest she should have looked where she was going, as if it were MY fault she had bumped into me. Then I'm sitting on a lawn in front of a massive ornately topped Victorian building, watching the unfurling of a tentacular kite in the air above me, pieces weaving back and forth like limbs of an enormous aerial tree with leaves and birds and airships looping in the breezes at the end of gossamer webbings connecting the whole like a spider's web, but of surpassing lightness of weight and texture and hue. But then there's a cracking sound and I look up to see the entire upper story of the Victorian building bow toward the crowd below, and fall very quickly and silently to the ground, where it hits with an earthy CLUMP that I think I would have found hard to describe if the interviewers asked for the impressions of onlookers. Clearly a number of people are crushed beneath the debris, but I'm relieved that it missed me, and others on the lawn are running around in relief, not really caring to investigate what obliterated bodies might be suffering beneath the fallen bulk.
12/26/98: 9:40AM: Another post-bidi-cum travel nightmare: I'm late getting down to two busses waiting for two groups of 14-15 each who are going off on two different itineraries, and I'm happy I'm getting the one that's going to the mountains, because the others are going down to the coast, which will be much like what we've seen so far in this unknown country, the map of which seems to indicate is somewhere in the north Balkans near the Yugoslavian Adriatic, or in western Russia near some lake like the Aral Sea or the Sea of Marmara, both near a new Russian country I don't quite know. The busses were supposed to have left at 12:30PM, but I know it's almost 1PM as I struggle nightmarishly down the wooded path to the busses I can see below with people still outside them, so they're not INSTANTLY ready to depart, but I feel myself being held back as I try to lean forward to increase my speed of walking, or to consciously increase the rate of my pace so that I can MOVE faster, but then I pass through what appears to be a thigh-high swath of fluffy snow on the left side of the track, and without that impediment I seem to be able to move with a lighter, faster step, but before I'm more than halfway down the slope, people are moving UP it toward me, saying, "Now that it's 1:05PM, everyone's SO late, we have to all go back up to the camp to have lunch," which last part they don't EXPLICITLY say, but I INTUIT it, since the bus ride is supposed to be two or three hours, and getting in at 3 or 4PM would have caused too much hunger for lunch in places where it couldn't be satisfied. So I race back UP the hill to get to my cabin to go through my knapsack (memories of John's sister's Christmas gift to him?) and sort through to find what I'll need to take with me for the two-night excursion. Somewhere in here I'm concerned with what feels like a wedge of shit which might dirty my shorts, but I reach into my coat pocket and find a mass of crumpled tissues, one of which I shreddingly isolate and remove, and then reach in to find that there's not much color to be wiped from my crack. Without transition it's suddenly 5PM, now dark outside (as it is, currently) and the bus STILL hasn't left, and I'm sorry that we won't be able to see the mountain scenery from it as we make our way to the excursion site. The map is quite detailed with towns and roads, but it's not clear what the forest-area or wildlife might be like, so I have no real idea what to expect when I get there.
12/27/98: 10:50AM: 12/25 disaster, 12/26 travel, now 12/27 IBM: The traditional trio of dreams. I enter the smallish lobby of an upstate hotel on the main street of a little town and ask, "Is there a room?" The clerk looks up at me with widened eyes, and I wonder if he doesn't recognize me from having stayed in the same hotel a week or so ago for a night. He excuses himself to "go check," and I'm sidled up to by a dirty middle-aged man and told, "Be sure you don't stay on the paths in the [adjoining, obviously cruisy] park if you're going to be---doing anything." I sit on a sofa to wait, and a wiry Hispanic sits VERY close-up to me and semi-whispers, "If you sit back, your face will be in the sunlight---that's very healthy." I'm beginning to get the idea this could be a very gay-friendly place, while still homophobic, and I go back to the desk to inform the clerk: "You know, I work for IBM," which immediately changes the expression on his face, and I suddenly realize that he thought I was ONLY there for sex, maybe even for a daylight hourly rental, and wasn't sure he could TRUST me, not really knowing me, maybe I'm even an undercover cop trying to bust someone for illicit pandering for sexual encounters. Other people in the lobby either seem either to be gay like me, or employed by IBM like me, or IN FACT pandering to the gay IBMer, knowing that said IBMers have to be discreet, will be wealthy, and won't be staying around permanently so that the transients will be replaced by other transients with as few emotional and residential demands. Think this might be a good idea for a Village Playwrights piece, which indicates I'm finally getting out from under the burden of indexing enough to be able to THINK about devoting time to other projects.
12/29/98: 10:17AM: 1) Someone's coming to visit my apartment (clearly not Tony, who might visit today) for whom I have to clear the decks of visible porno, and I collect three video boxes with near-naked men on them, and find a fourth on my desk in the bedroom (clearly not my current apartment), and pile them under a corner of my bed, which already has other papers and books of an innocuous type slipping out from under. 2) Tony has BEEN to my apartment and left, and I come out of the bathroom to find that he'd unfolded an orange and white sleeping bag from the bottom shelf of an almost-empty (AGAIN clearly not MY apartment!) white bookcase, clearly to see if it might be some sort of fabric sex-aid in the nature of the purple satin sheets I'd bought for him before, and there was an almost TACTILE quality to the dream-segment, in which I shook it out to see that it WAS a sleeping bag, and then folded it back into its sphero-cubical shape to return it to its place on the bookcase shelf. There was one OTHER large cloth object that he disturbed which I returned to its place, but I forget the details at this point: bed at 12:40AM, up at 10!
12/30/98: 10:30AM: I'm showing some woman the IBM cafeteria, and she waves at me across a jam-packed room and I think, "Oh, she looks just like Helen O.," and I wave her over and we go down a stairway and she goes through an arch that for some bizarre reason I decide to CLAMBER OVER rather than simply pass under, and I find myself climbing onto flimsy-looking wooden laths tacked together that might pull off the superstructure and send me sprawling into the muddy water below, but the whole structure seems STIFF, as if some sort of plastic had been sprayed over the entire exterior to GIVE it strength for my kind of prank. I pull myself up without muscular exertion or arthritic twinges, and even in my dream I think, "Wouldn't it be great if I could still DO this sort of thing in REAL life?" I lower myself into the middle of the central lobby of the cafeteria, knowing she has no idea which way to go for which kind of lines for what kinds of foods, and I go toward her, confident that I know the layout COLD and will be able to tell her where to go, impressing her with my long-term knowledge of this company and its cafeteria.
12/31/98: 10:55PM: Woke at 10AM with a FEW fragments, but now I remember just ONE after a long talk with Pope: I'm leaving some apartment and there's a FOAL whose mane I scratch and he becomes very affectionate and sort of rolls over to show a white-furred belly which I scratch and caress almost as if it were a human torso, and I vaguely wonder whether the host has had sex with this appealing creature of indeterminate gender, though it SEEMS to be a male, however without any prominent characteristics in that regard. More I forget!