2000
1/3/00: 11:05AM: I'm supposed to have lunch with a group, but I don't want to, so I go upstairs in the lunch-place and wait for a waitress to take my order, but only one of the tour members comes up, saying SHE has to take my order. I'm furious with someone's arbitrariness and stomp downstairs to get something to eat quickly, except that the place is so crowded I'll never be able to get it on time, so I order a half-pound of goose liver (taken from a large, partly dried out hunk) and a half-pound of Swiss cheese to eat on the bus. Then I'm ON a bus and see a transfer across the street, but the driver doesn't let me off until he's gone two EXTRA blocks, where I get off at a curb I have to climb on tree roots to get over, and then find myself balancing precariously from dried branch to branch, looking down an impossible jump to get back to the ground, but it's also terribly difficult retracing my steps, so I simply think to myself, "Well, I'll just ignore everything by waking up" and I do---so there!
CAMBODIA DREAMS, January 7-31, 2000
1/13/00, WED: ODD dream: I go into a room where I'm a temporary volunteer and get told, "You can't work because we have Chess Club (chess exhibit at National Museum?) tonight, but maybe no one will show up." Then upstairs things must be moved behind a gate, which I unlatch and wedge open against the floor near the wall. We start pushing heavy objects, but I have to climb down steep stairs (like on Angkor temples) and a woman REFUSES to leave me alone (Maxine?) and grabs my leg, and I climb down with her ON my leg and she flips head downward, touching the floor with her head while others watch and she lets go and lies on the floor (Fred "lying on stomach" as soccer team enters his restaurant on his tour?) motionless.
1/14/00, FRI: Two dream fragments: 1) I’m having sex with someone VERY fat, like Jim, and we're just stroking each other's stubby cocks (monkeys in zoo yesterday?) and I wake hard after I give a wonderful, lascivious pelvic thrust. 2) I'm riding in a car with Vicki in the back seat, and Sherryl (the driver) has just told her, "You don't have to say 'thank you' every minute." "Thank you," says Vicki, quite unconsciously, and I glance sideways at Sherryl, who's looking gimlet-eyed over her right shoulder and sending a moue to the completely unaware Vicki.
1/18/00, TUE: Dream: I'm in a house in northern Manhattan, like Inwood Hill, and a transparent cylinder rolls out of the roof, goes west to find a family on deck chairs blocking our way to the water there, and so rolls into a clear driveway to the east that I'm certain will convey us safely to our swimming pool (from yesterday's swim---and homesickness?).
1/20/00, THU: Over halfway on trip! Odd dream: details forgotten.
1/22/00, SAT: 6:40: I try to recall the dream I had before 4:44: Jerry C. is driving me somewhere, but I have to follow in another car and I realize I have to go from the extreme west of some island like Manhattan, although the island is foreign to the extreme east. Frustration abounds in trying to accomplish multiple steps of some necessary task, and I wake with muscles and jaw tense from the concentration and annoyance.
1/27/00, THU: 6:57: I’m up to write this dream: a woman on a trip offers her introductory handshake with a sincere "Gazebo." I recall sexy Aussie descending stairs at Water Ballet with "G'dye" to me. ANOTHER dream involves INDIA travel.
1/29/00, SAT: [Pee 2:22 and 5:40AM.] Dreams: 1) Brad Pitt hoists Gwyneth Paltrow on his shoulders to whirl in a dance, but she objects because she's topless (tiny pointy tits) and they pause in front of me and she asks if I could pull on the two harness-straps at either side of her waist which would draw two bands together into a narrow halter across her chest. I fumble for them, pull them toward the middle, and her breasts are indeed being covered. He, alone, then comes up to me and asks, "Are you still on the second floor?" I think to tell him I've changed addresses, but feel he's only perfunctorily kind and wouldn't remember my new address, so I just say yes, figuring if he REALLY wanted to find me, he could check the telephone book. But his face is so close and smooth and handsome I can't resist touching his cheek and neck, fearing he won't like it since EVERYONE does that, but he tolerates it well enough. Wake with a great YEARNING for SOMEONE, and a lingering sadness. 2) I'm picking up a program at the start of some kind of sales-pitch banquet (guy on Vietnam TV last night, talking to an audience est-like?), but I take TWO, and a woman says, "Only one," and I get a card with a woman's name, wishing I'd gotten a man. I go to her table and sit next to an empty chair, across from three connected people, and one of them moves to my left to "form a party of four" and I face an empty place. Then the same woman comes up and says, "You should have taken SECOND one," and hands me a card with a MAN'S name on it and a floor plan that indicates I'm at table TWO, and I recall passing a table ONE, but I don't remember if I should retrace my steps to it or just continue to circle the large hall until I find it. Wake with a sense of frustration and a vague sense of sadness.
1/30/00, SUN: [Piss at 2:02 and 5:30]. Doze and dream: 1) I'm directed to walk across ridged rocks in a certain direction to get where I want to go, 2) I get valuables from a leather multi-compartment bag (like a large credit-card accordion-file wallet insert) and want to protect it, so I try to push it into the middle of a street, held above reaching hands, but it goes too far, to the opposite curb, and an old man reaches up and grabs it. I chase him around a corner and he's cowering on a grassy bank with his old wife and young child (like beggars on this trip) and he pleads with me not to hurt him or punish him. His face is caked with makeup to look even older and I'm reminded that I told Fred about Michael T.'s makeup and facial "do's" at the Metropole yesterday.
END OF CAMBODIA DREAMS
2/1/00: 1:58AM: HORRIBLE nightmare: had taken a Rohypnol at 12:15AM and woke at 1:56AM with this dream: I’m walking alone in a market, looking like India, and someone snatches my A&K shoulder bag with my camera, video camera, and wallet with lots of money, replacing it with a ratty bag which SEEMS to contain only my camera, and my video camera is GONE. I try to recognize it in the nearby shops, thinking I found it once or twice, but when I snatch it back, it is usually smaller or of a different make. I’m surrounded by people trying to "help" me, I at last think of offering $200 to anyone who will get it back for me, and suddenly the market is alive with people chasing around, seeming to KNOW where it is, and I try frantically to follow to verify they retrieve my actual one, hoping they don't have time to realize that my wallet is in the front pocket. Wake with a shocked start, realizing with instant relief that it is only a dream: that I am home in bed with everything from the trip safe (and I actually GO NOW to get my camera, verify that MY video camera is in my bag, and snap the LAST picture, #36, of my LAST roll of Fuji film remaining in my camera---of my dining room table laden with my three bags, the stack of mail and accumulated Sunday Times---with ENORMOUS relief), finishing typing this up at 2:10AM, hoping to get back to sleep without TOO much trouble. (Return to journal 2/1/00)
2/2/00: 4:10AM: GHASTLY frustration dream: smoked bidi and came and watched TV from 10:15 to midnight, bed, peed at 2:10AM, then dream: visiting Mom in some dreadful multiple-dwelling project, and while IN her tiny apartment she keeps insisting I'm going to be late for Die Frau Ohne Shatten at Carnegie Hall, with two very expensive tickets in my wallet for me and Charles, who's supposed to meet me there at 8PM. Mom keeps telling me I should be leaving, and finally when I look at my watch I see that it's 7:43PM, already impossible even if I catch a cab, so I start frantically looking for my new wristwatch, first finding a VERY old one whose body had slipped out from under its crystal, which I place on a tiny shelf beside an even older watch that I'd saved, and can't find my new blue-faced buckle-strap one, so I settle for my old Omega with the silver expansion band, and the watch has amazingly started working OK again. Without thinking of looking for the tickets, for some reason I'm out in a kind of garden with Mom, who insists on lying down in the grass for some late-afternoon sun, refusing to guide me to the apartment, which I'd been in only once that afternoon. I go into the right entrance, I think, but I round the only corner I remember and come to a pass-through kitchen where someone is preparing a dinner, and out the other side to a corridor I don't remember. I think maybe I have the wrong floor, though I THOUGHT she was on the ground level, and climb awkward brick stairs to a second floor into a completely squalid area which has no chance of being anywhere near hers. I try to get back to her in the garden to LEAD me to the apartment, but I round ANOTHER corner and there's a decorative stream/moat which leads around a third corner to a sapphire lake which I KNOW can't be anywhere near where I'd left her, and before I can avoid it, the water suddenly gets deeper and the current carries me to a drop-off where I get wet to the armpits, and now I'll have to change clothes before going to the opera (aware of how frustrated CHARLES is going to be when I haven't showed up YET, now well past 8PM, and I hope he at least has the sense to realize I'm not going to show up and buys another ticket for himself). Manage with great climbing exertions to get out of the water and go down yet OTHER corridors and garden paths, now so confused I've given up looking for her AND for the apartment, trying to find SOME landmark or location I remember, angry with her for not coming back to her apartment in the first place, angry with myself for not leaving more time to get to the opera, at last accepting of the fact that the two expensive tickets are going to go unused, but still needing to find SOMETHING before it gets TOTALLY dark and I'm lost with wet clothing and no place to BE. I gradually come awake to the greatful relief that it IS a dream and I only have my 2PM lunch scheduled today with Mildred, and pee and get to WordPerfect to finish typing this to the last line at 4:22AM. (Return to Journal 2/2/00).
Another 2/2/00 dream:11:30PM: After cumming the third consecutive evening with bidis, I wake with a dream involving aliens and "hidden" aliens, based on the Roswell episode I watched just before going to bed at 10:20PM, which had a handsome young man who seemed to possess preternatural powers. There are 20 or 30 of us human beings who are prisoners on some alien planet, but some of the aliens want to RELEASE us and treat us, giving food and gifts: I LATER see a "mixer" that I could have put one folding-accordion "box" into to make it into a milkshake of some kind. One brown teenage-appearing alien says, "I'm 400 years old" and tries to push me (no, actually a WOMAN alien tries to push me) off a parapet, but a lighter-skinned "ten-year-old" fights him to save me. A hysterical woman screams in panic and fear in the background. I ask for and GET a carrying-bag from the white-plastic/metal (rather like the armor of the robots from Star Wars) car-like conveyance which comes from behind a screen and stops near us: two nestled compartments (each like the bucket of an earth-mover) in front prove to have, in compartment one, a few supplies including a cloth bag which the "driver" indicates I can take; in compartment two, a compact but highly engineered driving motor for the vehicle. I put my "stuff" into the bag, cross a street (where some aliens in columns are chasing and fighting among themselves) to an "American cafe" where I want to order a hamburger, but there's no time for it to cook. I want to go BACK across the street to get more STUFF that I'd collected to eat and as souvenirs of my imprisonment, but I wake and write a detailed note rather than wake thoroughly at the computer. Pee. (Return to Journal 2/2/00 11:30)
2/3/00: 9:32AM: 2) 9:25AM: I'm the servant of a youngish sexy guy who's a combination of Carl S. (primarily) and Fred L. (only a bit). We stop the car at an underground counter of a potato market, where my boss wants to buy 3 pounds of thickly sliced white potatoes, which he pays for by going into my wallet, which is lying on the counter, from which he may or may not quickly slide a twenty from its right-hand position in the small stack of bills, and I wonder if he's trying to cheat the merchant. Then there's another purchase which requires a twenty, and I check my stack of bills to find that the two twenties that I know were there are both gone, so he DID pay for the potatoes. Also in my wallet is a small-card-deck-size cluster of tiny objects: a coat check, which he thumbs and asks, "What's this?" (which I don't answer), a lip-balm cylinder at one end, a thickly folded 8½ x 11 sheet of paper with important information on it, and a few Visa receipts and other small pieces of paper that comprise the 6-inch packet. Since both twenties are gone, I think I might not have enough money for other purchases we might make before going home (which seems to be in California in the dream), but when I leaf through the bills, there are, at the high-value right-hand side, four tens, some of them highly used and faded, then a few fives, and finally a couple bills that I take out and look at: they seem to be highly colored South or Central American bills in units of "wilners" and I can't for the moment decide to put the two "six-wilner" bills before or after the American fives in order of value, wondering exactly WHERE we'd be able to CASH these foreign notes, though I don't doubt our right to have them or debate the actual country of their origin (most likely they're Mexican). Wake at 9:25, amazed that I've slept SO late, and record this by 9:43. (Return to Journals 2/3/00), or (Return to Journal ON 2/3/00)
Another 2/3/00 dream: 9:58AM: [transcription of small note from 3:30AM 2/2/00]: ANOTHER dream: I'm stopping all over in a MARKET, getting lost, finding my travel-group again, and somehow Adele is part of it, but I don't remember much more, since this followed the elaborate dream on the previous page that I DID get up to transcribe, but I didn't want to go to the computer AGAIN with this and thought I'd take down the outline and would remember the rest of a number of pertinent details, but now I've forgotten them all. [Feel compelled to record these dreams from the first few days of February, and even to record my activities (or lack of them) during these days, as I'll now try to fill in on NOTEBOOK:2/3/00, which I'll go to now to finish before having breakfast at 10:02AM 2/3/00.
2/4/00: 1) 4:30AM: First of two rather more tranquil bidi-cum dreams: I'm videotaping a cooking demonstration or class in an Oriental method that sounds like "Quo Gong," which I realize is going to be difficult to research since her pronunciation isn't that good, and there's no use my asking how it's spelled in English because she wouldn't know, and it could be Kwo Gong, or Quo Kong, or Qua Kung, or something else. It involves wokking stacks of vegetables so tall that at one point a wall of tomatoes or small cabbages actually spills forward onto the counter while the cook makes disparaging, dismissive remarks. The ingredients that she describes seem more Indian in terminology, and I'm viewing the tape afterward, for editing, and am reminded of details (in the dream) that I hadn't remembered (while trying to remember more details to transcribe while actually still IN the dream) before. 2) 8:15AM: Carl S. is in my house at 1221 Dietz looking for a particular kind of musical selection from my stacks of records scattered about on the floor, and I choose one of the Odyssey multiple-selection records with some kind of overture like the Cockaigne (heard on WQXR yesterday) that I think he'll like, trusting that my dual-deck (like my GO VCR) record player isn't full enough on the right side (there's the barest nub of a spindle sticking up above the stack of 4-6 records on the turntable already), and I sigh with relief when the automatic needle-arm clears the edge of the stack to start playing. Then the phone rings and it's Charles, speaking with GREAT insistence while Carl is urging me to listen to HIM with even GREATER insistence, so I listen to something rather inconsequential from Carl (because I love him) before getting back to Charles, who's saying that this avant-garde play that I've selected for us to see Saturday night (which is either tomorrow or the next day) isn't going to be very good, even though I thought the rather long ad/review (which implied SOME financial backing, which to me implied SOME kind of quality) sounded sexy with its description of "milk, the mother substance, which rains down on the cast (and maybe even the audience)" which might provide semi-nudity for some attractive male cast members. But Charles insists that "sometime in 1952-1953 the avant-garde plays changed from being good to being not-so-good" and we should choose something else. I say fine and hang up to get back to Carl. (Return to Journals 2/4/00).
2/5/00: 1) 2:35AM: I'm in Laos, where everything is VERY poor and there are very few tourists, debating exactly at what camera angle to take a picture of the exit gates (or souvenir shops) as I'm departing the country. 2) 10:35AM: I've left the group leaving the amusement park because I want to take one last ride on a gigantic Wonder Wheel (except that the seats are in round cars only waist-high under umbrellas, like the ones at Great Adventure, rather than enclosed, as at Coney Island) which I can see at a distance, obscured by trees, but as I try what seem to be likely roads angling past its site, I almost end up farther away than when I started, until finally I seem to be seeing the construction at the entrance, but I suddenly realize I've left my shoes somewhere behind me, and I really should look for them before going on the ride, and then I simply lose my way completely and wake just in time to call Arnold for Wrong Mountain. (Return to Journals 2/5/00).
2/10/00: 1) 4:15AM: I'm visiting some foreign country and want to take a picture of a window display featuring mannequins showing lady's clothing, but on the floor of the vitrine are golf ball-size glittering crystal spheres, and I want to get as many of these into the picture as I can, so I back up and angle the camera and yet can't get the whole spectacle that I really do want. 2) 7:30AM: Sort of on the same tour there's a show of people shooting guns, and the real kick of it is a gun that projects a metal band that, if perfectly aimed, can curl around and insert the tip of the band back into the barrel of the gun. No one around me quite realizes this is the POINT of the show, but I seem to end up with a video still-image that SHOWS this self-fellating weapon with the whitish-metal projectile curling back on itself, and I wake and make notes so I won't forget the barest outline of the two dreams this morning. (Return to Journal 2/11/00).
2/19/00: 9:15AM: 1) I'm typing and look at my watch and it's 1:15 and I have to be at the ballet at 2PM! I dash out, but I have to do something first and find that I've gone a block west when the subway station is a block east (I seem to be living around 60th and Third Avenue). I debate circling back, but Arnold says that if we go up those stairs, we might be able to catch the N train, but people coming down the stairs are discussing their plans RIGHT at the foot of the stairs, blocking a long line of people waiting to come down. I try to push through, going up, but Arnold says that I'm being rude, to which I counter that THESE people are being rude by holding everyone up! We get to the top of the stairs and a train streams by, going south, and doesn't stop, and we realize that, somehow, though we're in the same STATION, the N train stops at a different PLATFORM. It's now 1:45PM and we figure to hail a cab, but traffic is jammed going north (we're at 60th and have to get to the cross-town street of 65th) so we try to get a cab going south, stepping in front of a family on the west side of the Avenue who have obviously been waiting for a while (and now, perversely, it's DARK out), but there are no taxis coming ANYWAY. Wake with a sense of dull frustration. 2) I've been tailoring some kind of fabric, or word-text, around a pattern-line drawn on a piece of plastic, and when I look at the plastic more closely, it's VERY like a piece of shower curtain on which the line is drawn exactly in the center of a SEAM or EDGE which can with great ease be torn away from the excess material to the right of it, and the EXACT texture and yellow butterscotch color of my former shower curtain is TACTILE between my fingers as I'm relieved to find that the glue has weakened and the seam tears away from the excess VERY cleanly---though now I have to explain where the whole SEAM should be placed to get the right result, now that the line ends up being PRECISELY in the MIDDLE of the seam. [Now 9:25AM, and when I opened this document it was AGAIN off by one line, which means that the "printer-error" from the index last night probably caused a glitch in THIS WP file! And it turned out to be in the TWELFTH line of a previous DREAMS page, 8 characters changed into a few MORE than 8, causing the one-line overflow. Why did it affect it THERE!?]
2/21/00: 5:50AM: Without having drunk or smoked, an intensely emotional dream: I'm riding in the back seat of a car driven by a middle-aged woman who shares characteristics of Carolyn, Shelley, and Shelley's long-lost friend Louise S.. I'm talking on a cell phone to a gay friend of mine about this woman, leaning forward to ask her if she minds my telling him, and describe her as a very beautiful middle-aged (but when she grimaces, I put my hand on her shoulder and insist that she's JUST OVER the border to middle age, and genuinely beautiful) woman who's just coming to terms with her being gay. She seems struck by my candor and turns to gaze at me admiringly, but I have to shout, "Watch the road," since the hilly Scotland-scrubby road we're driving along turns to the left with a ragged drop to the right which the car almost drives over, and I physically turn her toward the wheel, and have to do some of the steering myself, as we go through more turns to get down to the beach and drive across some grassland until we're in walking distance of her beachfront cottage. I support her bodily in getting out of the car, and we manage to reach an area of strawflower asters or mums outlining the grave of newly dead Eula, and behind two women tending the head of the plot I can see the handsome friend of mine (with whom I've not yet been intimate, but with whom I would LOVE to be so), head bowed, and I sink onto the sand cross-legged and begin to weep with combined 1) relief the last part of the drive didn't turn into a catastrophe, 2) grief over the dead Eula, and 3) pleasure (the release of tears is as liquidly satisfying as peeing in bed or cumming with little effort) in the vulnerability-showing of gentle but deep-felt tears, hoping that my friend will slide up behind me to comfort me affectionately, using the beard of the death to hold me gently in his arms and comfort me from my tears, and reward me for my aching vulnerability and sheer NEED, which I feel as I wake and look out at Saturday night's FULL MOON and put on the computer to type this. (Return to Journals 2/21/00).
2/27/00: 6:55AM: I'm someplace rather like 1221 Dietz, and Mom is insisting I take the opportunity when she's out of bed to WASH either HER bed or Rita's bed, Rita being something like three years old. Mom's pillow is quite black on one side, and I vaguely wonder if she's not using some sort of hair coloring to make such a stain. Then I wonder how I can use WATER on BEDCLOTHES without making them wet for a long time. Wake at 5:50AM wondering about how to accomplish the task set in the dream, and find that the margin of my REAL pillow is quite wet, maybe from drool, and I switch it around when I get back into bed after peeing. (Return to Journals 2/27/00).
3/4/00: 7:20AM: I'm at a big party in a large basement hall, and everyone agrees we should get into seminude costumes. I try to think of what to wear and find a large plastic sheet (like a plastic version of my black-flower-printed shower curtain) folded on the floor that I unwrap and drape about my body like a Grecian toga, taking my clothes off underneath. Some guy finds that my costume is "nice," but I'm puzzled as to why so many of the men have simulated bullet holes on their cheeks or foreheads with trickles of phony-looking blood running down from them. A later dream: details all forgotten now.
3/8/00: 8:40AM: I'm touring on my own in a huge city like Barcelona, and climb up a rickety Skytrain stairway to find myself looking down at an empty wicker chair at the very back of a roller coaster-like subway car high above the city, and I slide into it hoping I'm not asked for a punched ticket of entrance which I was supposed to have gotten when I would have boarded legally. I move forward to a seat from which I can see better, and rummage through my shoulder bag to find that I DO have an "Ordinateur" map of a scarce facility into which I can punch "Where I am" and "Where I want to go" and get a connecting line, but I have no idea where I can find that object. I look out to see bare grassy areas interspersed with built-up centers of activity, and see a sign indicating that we're coming toward "La Borsa," which would clearly be a transportation hub. It's only 2:15PM and I think a performance (or a museum, like this afternoon with Charles, who's supposed to phone this morning) starts at 3:30PM, so I have some vague hope of getting there on time. The train goes down a steep hill into a subterranean area from which I can see nothing, and in exiting I spy a dust-covered space between two concrete-block walls that would afford easy free entry to the system, and many people sneak through, right past two bored-looking children in khaki-camouflage uniforms who are supposed to be guarding this loophole but obviously couldn't care less, almost as if they hadn't been told their duties. I hope to find an information booth, or an "Ordinateur," but one exit leads to dark streets with unproductive warehouses along them, another to an even more countrified vista, and I take the only other choice, to find myself, nightmare-like, clutching my way up a felt-covered earthworks to what looks like the foundations of a building blocking my way to the street, and I clamber back and forth along this ceiling-barrier until I'm convinced there's really NO way out, and by this time I'm semi-awake and wearily come out of the dream to register my sense of total frustration and fatigue and get up to this.
3/25/00: 10:30AM: [Woke at 7, dozed, figured to phone everyone (if Lina was still home to give me Judy G.'s and Piri H.'s phone numbers) to come at 6PM rather than 7PM since we have to EAT, and started Actualism and went back to doze.] ANXIETY DREAM: I've invited seven or eight relatively unknown guys to a party at Don M.'s beach pavilion, with the understanding that we have to order out for food before some unknown activity starts (with THAT group, I'd hope it was sex, rather than just my slide show). But THEY don't know Don, who doesn't seem to be around anyway, and I start looking through a stack of papers under an end table where I knew Don kept (and just spent a half-hour trying to find an OLD Thai Grille take-out menu, putting away the "second restaurant file" papers and finding the take-out menu stack in the TasteOfBrooklyn file!, so I'll have to get a stack of NEW ones when I go to the gym this afternoon!) his stack of take-out menus. But they're not there! I look in the NEXT cabinet, for OTHER stacks, but I can't find them and think vaguely that I'll have to go OUT to the restaurant to GET another for our ordering-in. In the meantime, I haven't even DRESSED yet: I'm wrapped in a brown and a blue blanket that I keep readjusting because they bare my pallid, fleshy shoulders in a most unattractive way. I think to find someone I know as Don's houseboy, or serving woman, so I go off through the expansive house trying to find them, but end up in what I recognize to my horror as the next house toward the beach, ON the beach, and the owners look at me in amazement until I back away, aware of my awful mistake. I overshoot again, and find myself in an even larger house that must be next to Don's, and there are a number of tables set, almost as in a restaurant except that this is clearly a private house with a cadre of cooking and serving personnel who are taking care of the guests with exquisite taste and here I'm looking for my clothes, for a take-out menu, for Don or someone who is employed in his place----even for Don's HOUSE! Back out to what I take to be one of the entrances (after exiting the house-nearer-the-beach I seemed to recognize the wooden palisades [like the highway noise-silencers on my trip on the bus to Hartford yesterday] that protect his gardens and porches from the views of outsiders) and go into a nook to the right to find that it leads to a tiny john in a cul-de-sac which is clearly not where I want to be (except that I do have to pee when I wake from this awful nightmare). I go around again to another entrance to find yet ANOTHER residence which isn't Don's, and I'm VERY aware that it's been over an HOUR since I left my guests, had even debated returning in the state I was IN to apologize and let them go OUT to dinner as a last resort against my horrible failures to provide, and now I can't even find where THEY are, or the HOUSE that they and my clothes and Don are all supposedly in, and I mentally wring my hands and DESPAIR of EVER getting out of this HOPELESS QUANDARY, and wake lying on my back to reasonably calmly recognize that it was only a dream, and I DON'T have these eight or so men wondering what the HELL happened to me, and won't have to face Don (from whom I was somewhat estranged even in the dream) with any kind of explanation, and anyway probably the clothes I would have gotten into weren't anything LIKE what I should have been wearing with a group of handsome men in the beauty of Don's palatial residence at Fire Island, or some other exclusive resort in which he had his house that I was defiling by my mere PRESENCE. [Woke at 9AM and tried to do a quick Actualism until about 10AM, then up to get Lina on the phone with relief, phone Piri and leave word with Judy (whom I later re-phone because she's at some kind of Mensa meeting today and may not even get back home to get her MESSAGE that it's been changed to 6PM!) and get to Charles and Sherryl and Vicki (who doesn't have a Windows 95 CD-ROM because she gave it away with her computer) who agree to the time change, except that Vicki is showing someone her apartment at 6:15PM yet ASSURES me she'll be here by 7PM! Mary hasn't gotten her MRI results in the past two weeks and is concerned about it, and isn't in the mood for a slide show tonight, so I tell her that leaves Dorothy H., her, Maya B. and Lina M. to coordinate for another slide show, and finish typing this BEFORE breakfast at 11:15AM---LOTS to do before 6PM!!]
3/29/00: 9:30AM: Woke about 7:30 with the slightest anxiety dream: I'd been enrolled in some kind of class, possibly on computers, possibly on indexing, and had been paying $10 cash each time (except the first) for the 4-5 sessions I'd had so far, but when I'm paying THIS time, the teacher says with some surprise that the cost per lesson is only $3! (I guess this is from paying $2 for the room at Village Playwrights last night?) I don't seem to have any receipts, and his records are in his office, which is in another building, so we're supposed to meet there. I enter his building into a kind of cafeteria with crowds of people around a counter, and some woman in a group of women waves me over. I figure she's somehow connected to my problem and go over to her and have a meaningless conversation until the teacher comes from the side and asks me, with some asperity, "Why are you talking to THEM?" I try to explain that it was just circumstantial, but he's annoyed, and I'm reminded that I'm supposed to get to my NEXT class at noon, and he looks at his watch and says with humor, "It's already two stadia (which I take to mean two five-minute markers on his watch, or 12:10PM) after that, so you'll never make it." I know I can get SOMETHING from the class even if I'm that late, but I haven't any idea how to reconcile payment for the previous classes, except to say that I've already paid too much, he can keep it, and I don't have to pay for the rest of them at all. Wake and mull over the dream and start DOING stuff.
AMAZON DREAMS 4/12-5/3/00
5/5/00: 7AM: Vague memories of getting a job, full-time, somewhere, and then going on an interview for ANOTHER full-time position as a kind of companion to a sexy artist rather like the host of the MAN parties on 17th Street, and I'm not quite sure where to go, and end up in some inner sanctum where I'm not supposed to be, but that impresses my future boss and he hires me. I walk away from the place happy to have gotten the job, and then it hits me: I already MADE a commitment to another job. (This COULD be based on my having two trips in such rapid juxtaposition AND on a Sunday Times "Ethicist" article I read yesterday about someone who accepted a new job and then got a good raise at his OLD job that tempted him to stay.) Wake and think to get up to transcribe it, but just feel too lazy to do so, and it wasn't THAT unusual anyway.
PRAGUE DREAMS 5/9-16/00
5/12/00: [From Prague log]: Recall erotic dream-bits.
5/14/00: [From Prague log]: I'm dining in the IBM cafeteria and the cook combines the last two pork chops onto one plate for me, but then he HIDES it, like a kid's joke, and I look here and there and it's getting late and I'm hungry, and he WON'T hand it over. Furious, I go to "bosses," and two women deny any responsibility, and a young guy says, "He's harmless." I protest that no CLERK, clearing-plate BLACK is harmless, but this snot of a cook is MEAN, and, "I'm goddam MAD!" He shrugs, I'm frustrated, somehow it's starting to RAIN, and somehow, in the dream, it's 24 hours to a long plane-flight (it's ACTUALLY more like 55 hours to MY flight from Prague to NYC), and I'm mad.
END OF PRAGUE DREAMS
5/17/00: 6:14AM: [Bed at 8:30PM, very tired (2:30AM Prague time), and wake at 1:40AM to take a great NORMAL shit. Back to bed, starting a small Actualism session, and must doze, though I think I don't, because I look at the clock next at 3:25AM and decide to j/o to become more tired to sleep some more. Watch endless cums from the newest Bjorn section of one tape, cum with three or four watery spurts above my navel (first time in ages), and listlessly flick through TV channels until I dry off at 4:30AM. I smoked almost a whole bidi. Back to bed to a VERY complete Actualism session: up, down, summary, feeling rather good with it, and sometime around 5AM slip back into a sleep (with the faint need to shit, but I figure that since I just HAD shit at 1:40AM, it could wait until I next woke) that produces the MOST INCREDIBLE DREAM from which I wake at 6AM]: it starts with FABULOUS images of sexual passion: I'm at a party in a luxurious apartment that could almost be a palace in some country like Turkey or Morocco (or Prague, or in one of Bjorn's settings), and many of the MOST handsome men are VERY attracted to me, allowing me to feel their beautiful bodies through their silk shirts and sheer trousers, and then submitting to passionate kisses so stunning that only after the fifth or sixth session do I think, "I GUESS this is safe from AIDS, but what an INCREDIBLE way to GET it." We roll around on cushioned/fabricked beds and incite the jealousy of their women, who look at me with disgust for seducing their men but are tempted to taste this stranger who has produced such an attraction. This goes on for a LONG time, and I'm feeling satisfied with the REALITY of this, the PLEASURE of the body and the kissing, but then, toward the end (ha!) I realize that I've got something stuck in my ass-crack, and I think it might be a cum-filled condom that someone left who had tried to fuck me (though I felt clearly that I hadn't been entered), and when I reach to extract it, it turns into a tiny-grape-size cluster of turds which I can easily conceal in my left hand as I ask where the john might be so that I can clean myself. An intermediate dream-section of wandering down endless highly decorated and intricately colored corridors and through posh rooms and halls, not seeming to find just the place I need. Finally one of my hosts, a small Arabian type, says, "Ah, you'll find what you want in our COMMUNITY baths." I'm led into a seemingly underground chamber dense with steam from a number of baths in which varying numbers of people are reclining, though oddly each seems to have a PRICETAG, as if this were a SALESROOM of bath equipment rather than a working JOHN. I look into various crannies and find nothing that works, and glance down at my left hand to find that the turd-cluster has dried enough so that small bits are breaking off and I could actually dispose of it in an ashtray or some other receptacle, but I would STILL like to find a JOHN! Then the same sort of host, except degenerated into an almost imp-like djin-figure, escorts me down a series of increasingly slippery and wet stairs, clearly demarked into blue central-regular steps which seem the MOST wet and slippery, and reddish off-stair areas which don't have such distinct risers but seem to offer more purchase for my black shoes, which I realize with gratitude are affording me nonslip access to what could be the source of a disastrous fall, even though toward the bottom the stairs vanish into a two- to three-foot ledge down which I can fairly easily jump, hoping only to get to the bottom soon, into a sub-basement, in the center of which is what I take at first to be a large silken tent with anomalous humps in it, but then it seems to BREATHE and emit a high-pitched sing-song of welcome, and I'm reminded, in the dream, of the bulky hulk of Jabba the Hutt, as the inverted-vee of the entrance stretches up and widens at the bottom with what it hopes is to me an enticing whine of welcome, and I surely don't want to go into THERE, and I look around at a scene out of Dante's Inferno, with people writhing on ledges silhouetted against the backlit walls, and one particular yellow-skinned teenager pushes his chest forward and rolls his head back, running his hands through his long false-blond hair. I look around and beseech no one in particular, "Will I EVER find just what I WANT?" and the dream, which had started with sexual activity of such startling reality, segued into a bathroom search of increasing unreality and danger, and concluded with a scene of such outré outlandishness that I at last realized that it WAS only a dream (as opposed to the start, which actually convinced me IN the dream that it WAS real), rapidly turning into a nightmare, and the only way "out" was to wake up! Lay a moment, stunned with the detail, color, and sexual content of the start, and total nightmare of the finish, realizing that my porno tapes and the bidi certainly contributed, possibly encouraged by my recent cessation of eleven days of Amoxacillin and my Rohypnol in an attempt to sleep at 2:30 Prague time, which would convert into 8:30AM New York time, about 20 hours before the start of this dream which I've NOT succeeded in transferring to this dream-diary page. It's now 6:38AM and I feel well into the day, even putting on the radio to counteract the already-moving nemeses upstairs. Stomach queasy, but I feel OK.
5/23/00: 8:35PM: 1) 6:35AM: Murray E. sits in a chair across from me and says in a barely perceptible whisper, "I love you." At first I think he might be kidding, but he keeps repeating it, and he seems to be serious. This seamlessly evolves into a highly erotic sex-scene where I'm jerking off BOTH his cocks (don't ask!), which cum simultaneously to HIS great pleasure, and I look down at my body to find that my shirt-front is totally saturated with my sweat and his cum and maybe fluids from other sexually active bodies that have come to surround us. I'm wearing an old striped tie which is quite wet for the lower third of its length, and I can only sit back and relax and let him enjoy his orgasmic pleasure and hope to be given enough time so that my clothes can dry before I have to make any kind of public appearance. Why HE from IBM so long ago should be involved I have no idea, but his two cocks appeared quite normal. (Return to Journals 5/23/00).
Another 5/23/00 dream: 8:40AM: 2) 8AM: I'm in a large group, like a college course, certainly bigger than an Actualism class, and the teacher asks, "Explain karma." There's some kind of fence between me and her, but I put my hand through and wave it around and she recognizes it and calls on me. "Karma says that everything is set from the first moment to the last. It's as if there are photographs taken of the whole universe, from your point of view, every second (then I think, "No, light travels an ENORMOUS distance every second, so a LOT could change in a second"), no, every INCH that light travels: so you have a photograph from HERE (and I point to my eyeball) and from HERE (and I point to a space an inch in front of my eyeball), and from HERE (two inches in front), and so on. All those pictures exist ALWAYS, so that whatever happens to you ’in the future’ is already there, NOW, in those pictures." Some students seem to raise questions and not be convinced, so I add, "AND these pictures are taken for EVERY person in the world for THEIR futures, so the number of pictures is practically infinite," and the class bursts into applause and everyone loves my explanation. [When I jot down the note, I wonder to myself, "How long does it take for light to travel the distance of one Planck length?" Let's say that the Planck length is something like 10 to the -47 cm, and c is 10 to the 10th cm/sec, so that time would be L/c or 10 to the -57 sec, or put another way, in one second, there would have to be 10 to the 57 pictures to take one picture at each Planck-length of light-travel. So for 10 billion people, or 10 to the 10 again, it's 10 to the 67 pictures, SAY 10 to the 5 seconds in a year, and 10 to the 10th years, comes out to 10 to the 82 pictures, which could surely be fudged down to 10 to the 80, some "cosmic anthropologically significant" number. Now it's 8:55AM and I've got to get into the rest of the day!]
5/26/00: 9:13AM: I'm staying in a cluttered rooming house, possibly in London (where I'll be in a week), and I'm trying to take a shower in an impossibly complicated bathroom, where the water seems to be coming from the center of the ceiling, making the carpet a soppy morass, until I manage to find a tiny remote hanging spigot that turns it all off, but then I'll have to find where the spigot is for the water into the smallish tub against the wall. I try to turn on a light, flipping one dangling switch to turn on another dangling night-light, but there doesn't seem to be any central BRIGHT light in the room. I try to get more light from a window, but the sill is far above the tub, wet with moisture both from inside and outside, where the ground seems to come just to the bottom of the window, so there wouldn't be much light from outside anyway, and for reasons of keeping out cold the sill seems piled with folded towels and blankets and other barriers against the outside light and temperature. I start to go out into the hallway to find a switch, but there are two toggles right outside my door, one of which I suspect might be a bell, though I don't hear anything when I push it, and another seems to control a dim light somewhere in the central hall. A more distant, larger, switch I'm about to push, when a small group of Oriental cleaning girls suddenly surrounds me in the hall, twittering that I shouldn't do this or I shouldn't do that without checking with the mistress of the house, who doesn't seem about to make an appearance. I wonder what's going to happen to the flooded bathroom, but at least since I seem to be on the ground floor, there's no danger of all the water leaking into any lower apartment. The predominant color in the bathroom seems to be a bluish purple, and the hallway is white or pale yellow, and the major impression is of things HANGING in the bathroom (I'm reminded of the odd bathing-suit pieces on a line in the liquor shop-window on Clark Street when I passed it last night), most of which aren't mine, nor even from other tenants, but possibly just decorative exuberance like the tchotchkes festooning all the rooms and hallways of the bed-and-breakfasts in Scotland, particularly Mrs. T.'s place. Don't particularly feel like transcribing this when I get out of bed at 9AM, but there haven't been many dreams which have been this distinct recently, and now that it's done, it's done---and so THERE!
Another 5/26/00 dream: [Typed 5/30]: Merest fragment of held-down, flattened-out big bird having anus stretched to be fed a frog from behind, with lots of people looking on.
5/27/00: 7AM: I'm touring in a large city, maybe in Canada, and come to a plaque that describes "the DesHonneur Style," from the 1500s, in which the 500-foot building has a hulking back wall with two high windows, with a rim of age-blackened darkness under the tops of each, that make the building appear like "an enormous silhouette with the kohl-rimmed eyes of a silent mourner." I look up in the twilight to see this effect, standing in a square that has been cleared to display the building in a better perspective, and when I look at the lights coming through the windows I go up closer to see that I can actually look into the golden-coffered room that occupies most of the central cavity of this building, and it's like a cathedral-room in which some kind of ecclesiastical service is taking place, and I try to take a picture of it from outside, but somehow I'm now INSIDE, aware that the click of my camera will be distracting to the celebrants of this mass, and I'm reading a description of the service in which, during the Offertory or Consecration, there will be the pealing of "Chalice Bells," a number of times, and I hope to be able to time my picture-taking with the ringing of the bells so that my camera-click is imperceptible in the background noise. I want to take other pictures inside this enormous chamber, and for a moment I'm poised against a railing looking down into a dimly lit interior, and in another instant transition I'm trying to advise Mom over the telephone (as impossible as all this juxtapositioning sounds) how to take a picture indoors with rather slow film. "Do you look at the readings before you take the picture?" I ask her. "Yes," she says, with that intonation that indicates she's lying: telling you want you want to hear despite the fact that she's not doing what you want her to do. "Then you have to get the lighting factor by multiplication. You know how to multiply, don't you?" "Yes," she repeats, unwillingly. "I'll show you when I come over next time," I conclude. "OK," she agrees, this time seemingly with truthfulness, willing to give it a chance if I'm willing to show her what to do and it's not too difficult. "Otherwise you'll just be wasting your film," I press, and she grunts her usual kind of agreement. Wake with an erection which I debate playing with, but promise myself that I'll do it this evening, free from the pressures of indexing for the first time in a very long time between trips.
5/28/00: Jerked off with bidis 2:25-3AM, then woke at 4:30 with the vivid memory of going to bed with Sting, amazed that he finds my body interesting enough to suck off, and I fondle him and caress his warm, fuzzy chest while handling his short, stiff, hugely veined cock into what he clearly demonstrates is a heart-felt orgasm. I wander around the party afterward, proud that I'd actually SLEPT with Sting, let alone MET him. It seems to be a high school reunion with some familiar faces from my other backgrounds, like greeting a tightly-curled Michael B. and exclaiming that I hadn't seen him in a long time, and he responds with his characteristic tight, mocking smile. Other rich, detailed incidents have been forgotten but I marveled at the bidi-effect.
MAURITIUS-REUNION DREAMS
6/7/00: 7:46 dream in many parts: 1) Joan S. sneaks into a tiny porno bookshop and goes to cash drawer and counts out a large number of singles and stuffs them into her purse and walks out for me to ask her, "He owed you?" and she says yes. 2) A young guy is trying to be charismatic by saying, "You've got to clear out your negative thoughts," and we all leave him. I join a guy like Andy M. who's eating a self-made sandwich in a coffee shop, but I don't want to eat there, and leave. 3) A Chinese fellow LIKE Fred and I are walking around blocks in Bangkok LIKE where we stayed and walked, but I FIRST say, "All these roads under construction a few months ago are now FINISHED," but we go ANOTHER block and the cleaners have huge brown-concrete blocks around corners to block views of TOTAL excavations and reconstructions.
6/15/00: 6AM: 1) I'm facing someone who draws a gun, and though I say, "No, please," he shoots me in the THROAT, and I feel nothing for a bit, but then feel myself falling backward to my death. 2) Dennis has been forced out of his apartment and lives in a hut, gathering ferns "for a company in Philly who wants them a few times a year." His bookcases are all falling down, but no one will help him. I had gone to a ticket office in Columbia's woods to get tickets tonight for 1:15PM tomorrow, but the schedule CHANGED to 1PM, so I must wait for the 5:45PM show, which frustrates me. I say I GOT a three-seat-wide sofa for three of us to sleep on, but Dennis wants me to do something ELSE before I can get to sleep. Odd!
6/16/00: 2:40AM: I'm in some kind of group therapy involving children's mental health, and I find myself choking with a great emotional release when I say, "Why do we insist on treating babies as if they were NOT babies?! 'Oh, you're so strong, you're so smart, you know so much, you can do so much,' when they're just helpless BABIES." A man starts playing my father playing rough with me, poking me with a large metal pole as if I were some sort of fish or eel, insisting I can RESIST him, but I CAN'T. Then a woman on the periphery says she trained with the originator of this therapy, now in England, and our facilitator says, "We only deal with the American administrator, who has an office in this building, so you can talk to HIM." A few other interactions with members of the group complete the dream. This was my SECOND dream, but I don't remember first dream now.
6/18/00: 4:14AM: 1) I go to Lina's for TV, but she's got a group of women preparing food. We watch TV to the end of Act I of an opera, but I’m told they don't want to watch REST and I hope I'm taping it for myself---might even be Wagner's Ring, a review of which I read last night. 2) I'm in a room full of students taking an important test, and the fellow to my right is halfway through already! Most others haven't started, so I ask, loudly, THREE times, "Have we started yet or not?" and the proctor looks at me expressionlessly and doesn't answer! 3) I'm with a VERY sexy, tall German type, and we've had sex before (maybe in a prior dream) and he's now dressed in yellow tights through which (like the TV-episode in the PRIOR dream, a dancer in BLACK tights lies down with his crotch toward the camera and I can CLEARLY see the outline of two testicles, then the camera moves to show a length of cock, and someone REACHES for it and pushes it DOWN, visibly, so it's CLEARLY a dream!) I see his semi-rigid cock, and I clench my fist into a claw and hassle it, which causes him to gasp and it to grow, and quickly he's sucking on me and somehow squeezing off my sausage of a penis and stuffing it into my own mouth!
6/20/00: 2:45AM: I'm accused of doing something AWFUL (treason?) that I didn't DO and they prepare to TORTURE someone by hanging him upside down in WATER. I'm SORRY for him, and wake out of breath! Sleep apnea?
6/21/00: 6:15AM: I'm dressed in some sort of toga, as if I'm playing a minor Roman Emperor in some sweeping television spectacular of the History of the Ancient World. But I'm just coming back from lunch, and I seem to have lost my "minders," and I'm wandering around, looking for where I'm supposed to be, and feel as if I'm intruding my anachronistic appearance and costume into enormous shot-once scenes which will either have to be scrapped or from which I'll have to be digitally deleted. I enter a desert setting and two opposing armies of maybe Assyrians and Medes, caparisoned in purples and golds, advance to meet each other in a no man's land where I stand out glaringly. I hear drumbeats heralding some huge, costly, Egyptian barge, and I'm RUINING it!
END OF MAURITIUS-REUNION DREAMS
7/3/00: 8:17AM: I'm doing some kind of apartment reconstruction that involves moving everything against the walls, which I know is going to make the owners furious, because I was supposed to have been finished with that phase ALREADY. I have to connect something in the apartment downstairs, and I go to the window and look down to the window below, realizing that I'll have to catch my sill with an inverted grip, flip my body out the window, and HANG there until my feet find the sill of the apartment below and I can clamber in. I'm debating whether I have the strength to do that when the young guy in the apartment below somersaults out of HIS window, with his muscular hands and arms using a BAR which is stretched across his window frame, and it appears to take ALL his energy using this BAR, so I leave the window and walk down the stairs to the apartment below. I'm working there, trying to get some kind of telephone lines with three outlets topographically worked across the floor-area, and I'm thinking where all the lamps have to be placed so people can read with a comfortable light-level in almost every corner of every room. Then as the fellow in the lower apartment is pushing out what looks to be a bulky floor-waxer, I ask if the owner of the apartment below HIM is there to let me in, and he looks at me in a puzzled way until I realize that THAT is the apartment I'm ultimately trying to fix up, and I have the keys and access to that apartment MYSELF. Wake and lie drearily, trying to remember when I went to bed, having not transcribed the time for the FIRST time since my return from the Reunion, and pee and try to shit, but can't, and finish this by 8:25AM, starting my day.
7/5/00: 8:55AM: Another IBM-centered dream: I'm STILL working on my third-to-last job, having to do with listing job-cards, wondering how many error-checking routines I have to include, not sure how to invoke Sort, which of course I think of in terms of WP5.1's sort, rather than anything to do with my old-time IBM-machine. Can I just LIST cards out of the range of dates we're interested in---but then how much storage can I afford to save them in---or just list them to a second tape? Somehow in the same dream, I tell Charles that we have to have lunch together, since I owe him two lunches and want to get the debt paid off, but lunchtime comes and he's not around. Then, in a shift, I'm waiting in some room that seems to be filled with inventors trying to get recognition of their invention from IBM, people with backpacks and in-line skates and deformities waiting for an audience. Then some woman, modeled vaguely after the jowly agent in Strait-Jacket, comes from an inner office and asks me if I know anyone who can get her a ticket to a sporting event she wants desperately to attend. I think and think, and finally enter the office she came out of, to find that she's in attendance of a severely sick woman lying on a cot surrounded by six or seven employees trying to make her last hours happy---did she want the ticket for HER?---and write down the name "Bob M.,"---though when I wake I realize I meant JACK M.---and she smiles, saying she KNEW she could depend on me to come up with a name, but that he'd been fired---"something about womanizing"---a long time ago, but he WOULD have been able to help, and I feel she has someone ELSE in mind, since meek Jack M. could hardly have been a womanizer, remembering his comment about the "gigolos" who worked as waiters at the ancient Salum Sanctorum above the Sign of the Dove as we walked up Third Avenue so long ago, and that someone ELSE looked vaguely like Tom Selleck (whose name I had to find my looking up Kevin Kline in the movie-book and finding his last-listed movie was In and Out, leading me to Selleck's name). But still the IBM-frustration, knowing I hadn't yet finished the whole job-card program, nor yet the (perhaps) nuclear-energy package, still getting PAID, still RESPECTED, and yet I hadn't finished ANYTHING successfully and HAD to get this little program finished, and I hadn't submitted anything to the computer for so long I had no idea of needed start-program cards, submission procedures, even who to ASK about these things, just the knowledge that I was LACKING and had to work to MAKE UP FOR IT, and I woke and tossed for a bit and got to the computer and finished this at 9:10AM (NOW)!
7/8/00: 9:50AM: 1) I'm leading a class in some New Age consciousness-raising, and I'm responding to questions as Dr. Melfi (whom I watched in The Sopranos yesterday) does: "Why do you think I did that?" and "What came to your mind when that happened?" as I responded to Mildred last night: "What do you want me to say?" and "What should I do now?" Then there's a lunch break, and I'm supposed to be back by 2:15PM, but (as in dreams) I get lost trying to get back to class (not remembering where it is, turning down hallways I don't remember), but I figure I can make it into an exercise by saying, "That's the way the class was planned; what went through your mind when I didn't show up after the break: how did you handle the class and the consciousness-raising yourselves?" 2) I'm getting up in the morning in a house that Mom owns, and I know she's outside in the garden and I think I'm alone in the house, and a voice-over says, "The increasing heat turned every surface in the room into a blazing inferno." I look around and see that the oven, which I thought was on in the room I'm in, is in an adjoining very roomy kitchen, which seems to be in no danger of overheating to the point of ignition. Then I look at a clock that seems to be at 7:20, and I thought an alarm should have rung at 7AM; at the same time I'm aware of the noise of snoring (could it be ME? And could someone upstairs or downstairs have KNOCKED the multiple-knocks that woke me from one of these dreams, in order to wake me and stop my snoring?), and when I go into another bedroom I see a tumble of bedclothes and mature male feet and think, "No one told me Dad was going to be sleeping in the other room," and I take the alarm clock and turn it (ahead, I thought, but it was actually backward) until the alarm reads and the now-digital time reads "7:00." I'm not sure about anything in the dream and wake in confusion about 9:15AM. Reluctantly decide to get up and finish this at 10AM.
7/11/00: 10:30AM: Two bidi-enhanced dreams: 1) I'm sorting an enormous box of stamps and supplies on a sofa that's a combination of the position of 1221 Dietz and the colorful cover of 167 Hicks. I'd started yesterday, and when I'm going through and sorting out the stamps by country, I wish I'd finished yesterday, because the automaticity that develops with placing countries has almost vanished and I have to "reconstruct my map" to get the stamps in their right places. In addition, there are little booklets which, on awakening, I think I should have opened, because they may have been miniature country-albums containing MORE stamps; and there are two large objects, one which I know to be a ruined Romanian telephone-box (don't ask!), and another something like a shoebox with loose papers only, which I put aside to throw away; yet I still have enormous quantities of stamps to look forward to sorting. 2) I'm sleeping in some kind of camp-dormitory (maybe from reading about the Aranui?) and curled up in bed with skimpy bedclothes, knowing my butt is exposed, wondering if someone like Fred is going to find me appealing lying in bed that way. But I can't get to sleep, afraid of snoring, and when someone comes to visit me I confess that I'm still awake and get up to find the bedclothes bunched into a ball which has to be stretched out to become functional again. In spreading it out, I find it has the variegated patterns of my Peruvian llama coverlet, and it's in some kind of malleable plastic covering which I can first spread narrowly from head-to-foot of the bed, even clamping down on some kind of bed-press at the foot to hold it in place, and then smooshing it sideways to cover the entire area. Then, looking at it from the side, I see that it can be "inflated" by moving it laterally and incorporating air between the top and bottom layers, but it has some kind of knobs in the center that turn out to be a representation of a skier with poles that have prominent knobs at the top and bottom for orientation in the coverlet. When the whole thing is "inflated," there's a miniature Swiss ski-resort with lit houses, like under a Christmas tree, and slopes, with this skier at the top with the knobs embedded in the llama-fur, and I think it might even "rock" back and forth on its pneumatic insides to "rock me to sleep." Wake at times during the night and feel the dry-mouth flavor of the bidi remaining, causing weirdnesses. (Return to Journals 7/11/00).
7/12/00: 10AM: [Going to bed 1:40AM and tossing until I peek at the clock at 2:05AM, then to sleep.] 1) 6:20AM: Wake to early-morning light and NOISE through my earplugs, and take one out to hear hovering HELICOPTERS close by, so I get up to pee and put on TV and find that an explosion (last night at 7:30, when I'd just gotten on the subway to go to Lincoln Center) "rocked the neighborhood" and pancaked a four-story building into the basement, where they think three older people are buried in the rubble, with all three networks broadcasting images from hovering helicopters. DREAM it interrupted was with Mom and a lady-friend coming home (past two pizza boxes on each of the top two stair-steps) to find me just starting to watch a TV movie which I won't have time to finish this evening now that they're home, and I go to the refrigerator to find it totally empty, having defrosted and half-filled the crisper in the bottom of the cabinet. "You defrosted the package of peas," I moan. "And all my stocks are defrosted and have to be thrown out," Mom responds. 2) 8:10AM: After I put myself back to sleep with Actualism, the PHONE rings, confirming my dental appointment tomorrow. DREAM that stopped was a nightmare about working on editing an index, having done an unknown quantity of file changes, and the battery starts beeping and the screen starts dimming (showing the reflection of some bright light at waist-level somewhere in the room [that doesn't exist]), and I turn to the keyboard which has somehow been transferred to a higher coffee table BEHIND me as I sit at the monitor, and the double-wires connecting the keyboard to the computer have been turned backward, and the WordPerfect key-strip has fallen off, so I try stabbing blindly for a "save" of the file before the screen goes completely black, but it doesn't work, and I get increasingly frantic as the screen dims and dims, and I can't wrestle the keyboard around to the correct position, remember the right key-code, or find the lost key-strip, and it's all going and I feel just AWFUL. 3) Wake about 9:30, amazed that I'd fallen asleep again for the DREAM of playing Scrabble with someone (again) like Mom, who keeps turning the screen on which the board is displayed AWAY from me, so I can't see where the letters are to build on, and she seems to think this is part of the game, and I sputter in frustration, trying to convince her that I have to see the latest board before I can play ANYTHING, and I wake before it gets even MORE annoying than it is NOW! (Return to Journals 7/12/00).
7/16/00: 8:30AM: Strange MIX of dreams: 1) I'm staying at a very elegant home, and the master of the house says that I have to meet him the next morning to go on a trip somewhere, but the final details haven't been decided yet, so I have to wait for that evening to know exactly when I'm supposed to leave and where I'm supposed to meet him. An elaborate bathroom has something to do with this part of the dream. 2) I'm in a customer meeting at IBM, where I'd edited a book in Topology which is the source of a customer's delight, and he has to be constantly reminded that I didn't WRITE the book, but only edited it: he's pleased because it's longer than a competitor's book, but for some reason afraid to Xerox a color diagram because it's too much LIKE one in the competitor's book. I think: this is the THIRD book I’ve edited that this has happened to! (Return to Journals 7/16/00).
7/18/00: 10AM: 1) 7:45AM: DENNIS visits me in my apartment (which is in a basement and set up more like his old apartment than like my present one) with a large group of his relatives and friends (none of whom I've met before): they're on a trip, just passing through NYC, and then expect to be invited to stay overnight! I'd just put lots of things away and dressed, so at least I'm content that the apartment is PRESENTABLE, but there's NO WAY they're going to stay overnight: I'm taking classes in college, and I've missed a few History classes, and I really have to read the book in order to participate in the class that starts at 9AM tomorrow morning (it's about 11PM in the dream), so I just can't let them take over my life like this. Someone wants to use the john, and I think, "This'll get rid of them," because I have a mental image of needing to crawl through a hole (rather like the hole under the tree out of which the Headless Horseman jumps in Sleepy Hollow last night) to get to the john, and I open the door to the bathroom to show her the hole, but to my surprise there's a commode standing right there in the doorway, so THAT won't work to get rid of them. There are towels hanging on a line over the kitchen that's more like the one I had at 320 East 70th Street than Dennis's downstairs, and these are the ones that might figure in DREAM 2. They all try to convince me they should stay, but I say they must LEAVE by 1:30AM, so I can read and get to sleep. Find the History book and look for a place to sit down, but many of the chairs are occupied, or taken up with clothes, but there's a damask-covered side chair with only a package on it, so I remove that and prepare to sit down to read, but now at about 1:15AM they actually seem reconciled to the fact they have to leave and appear to be preparing to go out the door, and I wake before the dream is actually resolved, writing a lengthy note so that I'll remember details (many of which I've, nonetheless, forgotten) when I transcribe it in the morning. 2) 9:50AM: I'd taken two towels (left over from DREAM 1?) into a laundry to be washed, but there was no one at the counter and I just LEFT them, with a note saying something like, "Put these in with some other wash and I'll pick them up later." To retrieve them, I leave my apartment in my shorts, but am embarrassed to find that I've been walking a block or so with my shorts BELOW my ass, and my T-shirt doesn't cover it, so I've been walking with it EXPOSED, though I haven't seen or heard any reactions to it. Then I have to climb a large sand dune that's covered with a light green moss, and it's SO steep that I have to use my hands to help me up, and the moss sticks to the backs of my hands so I can barely brush it off---which leads me to the realization that I'm going to the laundry near Borough Hall for my towels, but I couldn't have left them there because this is the FIRST time I've encountered this sand dune, so I must have left them at the laundry right next to my apartment (thinking of a non-existent place NEXT DOOR to my apartment on Hicks, rather than the laundry on Montague Street). 3) 9:50AM (thought this was the ONLY other one when I re-woke at 9:50, but then remembered DREAM 2): In a VERY familiar scenario, I'm waiting for a down elevator from the 6th floor at Bloomingdale's, and two arrive at the same time, and I think, "What if I choose the one that's going to FALL, rather than the other one? Or if the OTHER one falls and the one I choose DOESN'T?" I take the one on the left, and it's not that crowded, but a woman in the back on the left has her three-year-old son on her shoulders to save room. But the son has vanished as we start down, and I listen to the clicks as we pass floors five, four---and then the descent speeds up SO much that I'm forcibly floated to the ceiling, feeling not only a neutral free-fall but an actual PRESSURE on the top of my head from the NEGATIVE gravity, and everyone else (remaining on the floor) in the elevator stares at me in astonishment, as if I'm CHOOSING to do this, and I REALLY fear that something will happen, but I hear the click of floor three, two, and then a LONG wait---we're still descending rapidly and I fear a final crash at the bottom---before we start slowing to the point I feel safe, but before the final click at floor one, I wake up, noting the time at 9:50AM---another bidi dream!
SANTA FE DREAMS
7/30/00: Wake at 2, 3, 5, 6, and LOTS of "altitude" dreams: a cock sticking up to be masturbated, frustrations and anxieties.
8/4/00: 6:35AM: I'm working for IBM, waiting for a bus on a second-floor balcony where I'm washing my face at a sink which permits water to splash on people standing in a corner on the floor below, particularly a sexy blond with no shirt on who seems not to notice, but as I rinse my face yet again, one or two guys peer upward. I fumble in my bag for my time sheet, knowing that I've already worked on a long project like the Holt Rinehart and Winston book indexes for 500 or more hours and I have to update the time sheet about 100 MORE hours, and my bus is just pulling in and I'm ready to board.
END OF SANTA FE DREAMS
8/6/00 [TYPED 8/8/00]: 1) 4AM: Bidi-dream complex: guy WAS mummy, SHE buys odd apartment on Upper West Side, and we fold out a "pillow-cased" folding bed, with mosaic areas in the walls, and the "other" room has paper walls that fold down from a clothesline, so we can arrange them anywhere. Outside is a view of the river and towers, 180° view of bay at Miami Beach, with Russian Orthodox church across street---and I just can't read the rest of my complicated note, but it was a GREAT dream that I WANTED to remember, but it's now 8/8 and I can't. 2) 5:37AM: I'm living in an incredible tower apartment on Riverside Drive and have just jerked off when ANDRE enters and wants to have sex, but I manage to have him cum on my chest with his long Bob R.-type cock, and just as he does, someone like EDGARDO comes over and we start a threesome, but it somehow segues into a party in which Charles, Ken (Who? the cute Actualism M.?) and his girlfriend, and a host of others come to visit! Bob K. is living there, too, and shows off his new apartment, bragging about how he's gotten organized MUCH better, with shelves containing brass boxes with OBJECTS sorted in them, in addition to lots of books, and he gives books to people who need them, including Ken's girlfriend Shelley (wasn't it?), and they all get ready to leave, but when the elevator arrives it's a fantastic outdoor scaffold -type framework that swings us around the base of the building a number of times before taking off for the seventeenth floor, where we live, but I make a mistake and stay on, going up to 18 with the next person to be left off, and the operator says, "You can use the stairs down," and I take his suggestion and get off in the middle of an incredible "Apartment St. Regis" it says on the plans that I pass on a table, and it has sweeping floor-through rooms with incredible window-spaces, and unfinished rooms on the sides, and I somehow have to go to ANOTHER floor to try to find the stairs, passing OTHER apartments of impossible dimensions, one with someone eating at an enormous dining-table- work-bench combination with food and architect's materials combined, and showcase bedrooms and sleeping quarters and other fantasies and wake to type this by 5:44AM.
8/9/00: 9:45AM: Had taken my first Ambien at 1:15AM after going to bed about 12:45AM and not yet having gone to sleep, and then recorded that I was still awake at 2:02AM but was WOOZY, then got up at 6:35 to pee, then woke and felt sleepy, then had this dream that was complicated enough to get up to transcribe rather than take notes on and then forget: I'm in a continuing series of one-day seminars, rather like est-follow-ups, but this one is so odd and boring that I'm pretty well convinced it'll be my last. The "core" of the experience seems to be three men sitting in the front of the room with their 3-4-year-olds in their arms, with someone looking like Jeremy Irons (who came up in conversation yesterday at lunch with Mildred when she brought up Stoppard's revival of The Real Thing, of which I recall ONLY that it starred Irons) sitting on the right holding a DOG in his arms: I guess he didn't HAVE a child. But whatever they were saying or representing was of so little interest to me that I found myself with my BACK to the presentation, looking out of a station wagon in which was positioned first a glittering blue crystal work of art which was slowly tilted back and forth so that I could see the purity of jointure between the encased scene (something vaguely reminiscent of Santa Fe) and the flawless white crystal above and blue crystal below. Then it changed to a lizard with a wire around its neck so firmly that I thought it really must HURT the poor creature, and then that was gone and I was aware of someone singing to my left, and I thought, "That doesn't SOUND like the guy leading the seminar," and on looking more closely, it was a salesman, like a butcher or a restaurateur from a shop to my left in the middle of the Italian street-block of stores and restaurants, singing some aria into a microphone (not very skillfully), and I sat there, pleased that I had a good seat to see what was going on, and puzzled about what this had to do with the seminar, and I woke debating taking notes to remember the disconnected details, but felt it wiser to get up and transcribe it here till 9:52AM, getting everything recorded and then printing out the page.
8/10/00: 8:20PM: Having had too much chocolate fudge after a late lunch at 6PM, I tried typing, but went to bed for a nap about 6:30, glanced at the clock a few times, the last one at 7:45, and then woke about 8:15 with this elaborate dream: I'm standing outside an opera house in the gloaming, and someone just out of my range of vision strews a handful of tickets, in various envelopes and packets, on the ground. Everyone standing around is stunned, and someone starts grabbing before I have the presence of mind to put my hand on a group of three within blue covers, two in an envelope like an airlines reservation envelope, and a few singles. Rita comes over to observe what I've gotten, and I start looking at the locations before thinking to check for the dates, and they ARE for this evening. I find some in upper rings, but I see one that's a "1st Ring Hanging Chair," and Rita thinks that'd be good for her; then in a red packet I see Orchestra, Row S, and I try to find a seating plan to locate how far back Row S really IS. Then I see a briefcase on the ground, and looking inside I think at first it's only full of empty envelopes, but then I see some packets of tour reservations and some REAL plane tickets. I run the bag over to an office where many people are milling around, and finally find someone to accept the lost-and-found object, though I'm not really sure they'll announce over the proper loudspeaker that they've found the tickets. I look at my watch to see that it's 7:53PM, and the opera starts at 8PM, and I can't find where I put either MY original ticket for that opera, or the one that I set aside for myself of the FOUND ones, and then find ANOTHER envelope with valid reservations for a future tour which MUST have fallen out of the original briefcase, and I return to the "office" to find it almost unoccupied, but see a counter behind which are thrown a few coats, some bottle cartons, and what I take to be the briefcase and its contents, and in desperation I throw the newly found envelope behind there, too, hoping it will find the original horde, and glance at my watch to see that it's just a minute before 8PM, and, like Santa Fe, the notes from which I started transcribing just at 6PM, I know they always start either on the DOT of the hour or a minute EARLY, and I hear the faraway strains of some kind of music (I recall the tickets were marked for Parsifal, which would put the first-act-end late-seating impossibly far into the opera itself) and fall into a total despair of EVER seeing the opera I'd actually had TICKETS for, and with a wrench wake up, look dizzily at the clock in the still dimly lit evening, and am SO glad that it was only a dream and I won't be missing ANYTHING, so I drag my sore back out of bed and finish this at 8:32PM.
8/12/00: 1) 4:55AM: I'm watching a play about mountain climbing, in Texas, and the main character belays all kinds of ropes right in front of me in the front-row seat, but then an onlooker standing in the aisle in the audience in a spangled costume starts talking to someone sitting next to her, and the climber turns around, looks, and says, "It's Seeley See! Give us a song!" And she starts singing and everyone joins in, and it turns into a hoedown with everyone DANCING, but I'm older and smile broadly as I watch, looking down at my green plaid shirt, seeing it catch the light differently as I move back and forth in the rhythm of the dance, hoping someone will ask ME to dance, but they don't. Then I write the note: no, Seeley See was a famous BALLPLAYER who came up to me with red-rimmed eyes (from a line in Avow last night about "bleeding eyes") and started telling me about the ballpark I'd just been in last night, seating 28,000 people, which HAD been built in Canada, but was now just SOUTH of the Canadian border in the United States, and I tried to ask him whether it had been MOVED to the United States or whether the BORDER had been moved, but the people crowd in around him as I talk to him and I never get my question answered. 2) 6:30AM: I'm traveling in Egypt, and a friend tells me I should go see Shatt El Arab (wherever that is), and I'm parking my car and going into my trunk for my bag when two women come up close to me, one telling me she's "Beth Henley," though I'm sure she's not the playwright, and I try to dismiss her as one of a number of older women trying to hit on me, but she persists in trying to tell me something. Then I meet an old guide, with yellow eyes, who tells me that the devil's REAL name is Shatan E Fiend, and I fumble and say "Shatan Fiend E?" And he insists the E comes between the other two elements.
8/13/00: 8AM: My airliner lands on a French village ROAD, where all seem to speak English. I search for my bedroom slippers and my jacket, but can't find them. Observe a car speeding along a parallel road and a police car following closely, cheered on by the villagers, and finally they meet and stop and the speeder is attended to. Kids flock around looking at everything (I guess prompted by the predominance of kids' awful sounds on the trip yesterday). Bruce J. says, "Wait a bit," so that he can meet his girlfriend. Scattered!
8/14/00: 3:30AM: UGLY dreams about 1) moving some large piece of furniture (TV? AC?) for Carolyn, SCREAMING at people and relatives, ANGRY with myself and her, and NOTHING'S working out! 2) I wait to GET or SEE something, INCREDIBLY irritable and quarrelsome! UGLY people, feelings, and attitudes! Actually question my mental status and wonder if I mightn't benefit from medication! Was it because I finished the tuna casserole at 12:30AM before going to bed about 1AM? Felt displeased with myself DURING the dreams and after waking from them!
8/28/00: 8:10AM: Common type: I've got to shit, but I go into a familiar-looking john and a woman is just leaving, so I'm sure to "get a seat," but I find another woman sitting in the biggest, most comfortable john, and I go around a corner to a secluded spot where I can't easily be seen to find that there's no TOILET in there, and to another spot at the other end which opens only into a PIT with nowhere to sit, and finally into the fourth, only other, place, which is very dark and contains blocks of straw, of questionable cleanness, around a hole from which arises a horrible stench, but when I sit down and try to strain out a stool, suddenly it's quite light, I'm in full view, and there's even a mirror in which I can see my face redden as I strain. To make things worse, a group of women come through, ignoring my raised-voice rhetorical question, "I thought this was supposed to be a MEN'S room?!" To wipe myself there are only already-dirty-with-shit thin rolls of GAUZE in place of toilet paper, and I get my fingers dirty removing the sticky turd which is the only one I was able to express, which didn't even get beyond my asshole. Without transition I'm in a doctor's office next to this hellhole, looking through his appointment book to find what the price of my elaborate (and unknown) procedure was, and his secretary comes in to say, "You can't do that when he's not here," and I try to explain the problems (like at LICH) when I don't get the amount of the bill early, and, unheeding, he launches into a tale of a friend who got a window seat in a plane next to a "BEHEMOTH" who wouldn't let him out, and the secretary has an ugly slimy bit of what could be Vaseline visibly clogging one side of his left nostril and the left side of his mouth, but when I try to subtly tell him where to wipe to remove them, he makes a vague brush with his hand and then totally ignores me to continue his "awful" story about ANOTHER woman-friend who gets equally squelched by chance seating-arrangements on a plane. Ugly dream.
9/1/00: 10:10AM: On my last day of a vacation in London, I go into a crowded-with-people living room where Michael S. looks up from an elaborately marked and formatted board game and asks if I want to learn how to play it. I smilingly refuse, but when I go back to my room and try to decide what to do, I feel the same dragging tiredness which has been dogging my current life and think that I really don't HAVE to find something new and interesting to do today, I CAN just relax and learn to play a new game, stay in the apartment, and pass the last few hours before the trip back to NYC taking it easy and not expending hectic energy. Wake at 8ish and doze back to sleep and wake again with a surprise at 9:50AM, sweating slightly in humidity, getting out of bed TIRED!
9/6/00: 10:20AM: What a melange of situations, places, and people! Charles, Shelley, breakfast, getting lost! 1) I'm in some Amish Disneyland type of place and want to get their special breakfast, but as I go from room to room: one place seems like it's NOT the main dining room, another is just closing, and finally I get to what looks like the main entrance and they're just taking down the sign for the "$5.99 all you can eat" breakfast and putting up a "$4.99 Tombola Special" about which I have no idea, but I figure I can get their regular menu anyway. As I go toward the entrance I'm met at a desk by a clerk with a tiny crystal cylinder, insisting that I "must leave a $50 deposit on my bill." I know I just have one twenty, two tens, and just a few singles in my wallet, so I try to argue with him, "How could I possibly eat $50 worth of food: I'm only a single---I can see you doing that for a table of 4 or 6, but not for a SINGLE!" But he insists. I debate asking someone around me to LOAN me $10 until after my meal, when I will CERTAINLY get it back, or even asking the MANAGER to lend the money, but it's unresolved when I'm thrown into the next quandarious dream. 2) I'm in a crowded apartment with people bustling about getting ready for a party, and Charles is standing on the back of a sofa, under some kind of metal valance, looking out a window, when the valance collapses on his head without warning, and then lifts to vanish as his body topples backward off the sofa onto the floor, to lie motionless. I'm frozen where I am, knowing I can't do anything anyway, but worried that people who know that I know him will seem indifferent to his plight. People work around him for quite some time, as if he isn't there, and then somehow he's transformed into Shelley, who's sitting in a kitchen alcove, where I go to ask how she's recovering, and she's sweaty and grimy, but she says that she feels fine and I shouldn't worry about her. I want to say something else of importance to her, but suddenly she's left with a small group of friends to go someplace where they have to take a bus in just a block or so, so I rush out the door to chase the group, knowing I can surely walk faster than they, and see them just turning a corner to my right ahead, slightly puzzled that there are streets that I don't recognize this close to my starting point, but I hurry in their direction to find they've totally vanished! I keep walking in the way I think they must have gone, but the streets meet at an angle and I have to decide which APPROXIMATE direction to walk in. I finally get to a major intersection (which I seem to recognize from a PREVIOUS series of dreams where I get lost on a street in old Akron, trying to get to Firestone Tire and Rubber where I know I can get a bus that takes me back to Firestone Park and home) which seems to bear no relation to the group I'm following or where I thought I'd end up, and I want to cross a particular street to find that I'm in a railroad-track trough with wooden sides that don't allow much room, and suddenly out of the dark height at one side rattles a railcar filled with pieces of wood and metal which swoops past me with only inches to spare. Workmen, looking on, glance at me as if I'm crazy, though they wouldn't dream of warning me of any danger, and I get out of the way just as ANOTHER car comes hurtling from the other direction. I try to walk out over boardwalks like last night's Leticia-video of my boardwalk-fall area, but know that I'm TOTALLY lost with NO hope of finding my way back, and wake up with some relief to type this!
9/8/00: 9:10AM: I'm riding a bicycle on my way to Bayreuth, and a young man stops to pick me up, but when he gets out of his car and comes around to my side, and then dashes back into his car and drives away, I find that he's taken my wallet and handkerchief from my back pocket! I ride along for a short while and this time a long (wooden-sided-less) car with an ambulance-style back door stops, and I think how perfect this is as I lift my thin bicycle with its MOMA-art-object-like wire-thin magazine-and-paper rack snug along the frame and its equally fragile and light narrow basket into the capacious space in the empty back of the dark-green vehicle and settle into the front seat with its pop-eyed driver with a ratty folding map of Bayreuth opened out on his lap. I describe the white-shirted fellow, whose face I really can't remember except that he was young and "not the type to be an opera-lover" (and my current driver doesn't really look that way either, even though he asks why I don't "go to the Berlin Opera when it visits New York," and I respond that it's just not the same thing outside the romantic interior of the Festspielhaus, and outside the charming village in which the operas are presented), which is what I say when I'm confronted with hotel-dwellers without transition, who say that I can find cheaper accommodations in many of the smaller hostels whose roomers have the habit of moving around a lot while they're staying here, leaving lots of vacancies, and I repeat, "But I have my opera tickets and my room reservations, it's only my wallet and handkerchief that were taken," and they look at me in some amusement because I keep insisting on mentioning my lost handkerchief, as if that were as important as my wallet with lots of cash and credit cards. (Return to Journals 10/14/00).
11/2/00: 7:45AM: I'd had a few dreams in the past few weeks that I haven't recorded, but this COMBINED two frustration-dreams, so I'm compelled to put it into print: I've been cast in a small part in the SAME play that seems to have been the basis of my latest four or five "can't-remember-my-lines" play dreams, in which I have to deliver a message at, like, the end of Act II, and have another brief walk-on at the end of Act III, but I don't have a copy of the script and only have the vaguest idea of my three or four lines upon delivering the message. In this dream I'm lying on a bed in the downstage-right corner, hoping the people in the audience don't see me, but I overhear someone asking about my part, and they DO verify that I'm in two brief scenes toward the end. But then there's some general actor-movement across the stage, and I walk toward stage left and follow everyone out through the wings and out an exit that seems WOEFULLY far removed from the theater, which now seems to be some part of Lincoln Center, and I find myself at the extreme northern tip of an old-rural Manhattan, where the roads are barely paved and the street signs show a "Maple Avenue" and a "Cedar Street" that I only vaguely seem to remember are street names for the northern ends of Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues. I get to the top of an overlook and vaguely verify I'm in the extreme northwest of the Island, and look at my watch with relief to see that it's 8:45PM, not something like the 6PM that I had thought it was, so we must be on a dinner break. I look to move downtown faster, and turn and think to hitchhike or hail a cab, but the cabs are taken and I don't have that much money for what would be a longish trip. Then a huge trailer-truck rounds the corner much too widely and too fast, and to compensate he steers too close to the road barricade and I watch in seeming slow motion as he gets too close and then starts scraping the side of the truck along the barrier, and the squeeze gets so tight that his forward motion is arrested and he starts tipping toward the right, and as I back away from the truck it begins falling over onto its right side as I just manage to clear the back of the truck, and then the right door begins to flop open as it hits the pavement, and I merely put out my hand and prevent the door opening completely before I'm able to move out of the way. NOW how am I going to get back to learn my lines, possibly from a tabletop of scripts and small calendar-books of the type I used to use to record my day's doings. Wake and feel SUCH frustration from the dream, and at least know it's not THAT which is my problem, and write. (Return to Journals 11/2/00).
11/13/00: 3AM: After cumming bidi, dream that Dennis and I are trying to ride a special cable-operated (realize only NOW, typing at 12:30PM, that this may have been subconsciously influenced by the news yesterday that 170 people were killed in a cable-operated-car fire in Austria!) roller coaster, but we can't leave the docking area since we're in TWO cars, and I've attached one cable from EACH car to BOTH cars, so they can't be operated at all. This seems to have been our only chance, and we're both very disappointed. An ensuing frustration dream involves getting all kinds of records checked and transcribed onto sets of papers, AGAIN probably influenced by the ballot problems in the Florida presidential election which STILL hasn't told us who our President will be!
11/26/00: 6AM: I seem to have FLOWN a helicopter from NYC to, like, a seaside town in the Carolinas, and then we're riding in a small bus past yellow brown tree trunks, some fallen, in swamp-like waters near the coast, as we enter the town, and MAYBE the two people I'm with will have to fly BACK, and even though I can't figure how I'd ACTUALLY controlled the helicopter---how I'd actually moved the control stick to increase or decrease speed or altitude---on the way down, I might REALLY have to fly it on the way BACK, though I feel confident I can.
11/28/00: To bed at 2AM, up at 2:32AM to jerk off to 3:15AM because I can't sleep, and TRY to summon mympths but can't. To sleep perhaps 4AM, then follows an EXTRAORDINARY odyssey as I finish attending an opera hall on the FAR Upper West Side and, in leaving, TREK along paths, slopes, slides, rock crevices, and finally inside a factory, possibly abandoned, on a TRESTLE where I have to plead with the guy on the exit route in front of me to move his footing to a firmer support on our swinging "bridge" so we can both get closer to a part of the structure where we can hang by our fingertips from a roof girder to support our return to a safer position on this factory balcony. People laboring below keep looking up at us, puzzled to find us in their workshop. I keep feeling in the pockets of my blue jacket, which seem to be wet and friable, to make sure I can distinctly feel the shapes of coins and the holes in the sides of subway tokens to make sure I haven't lost them, and also feel the bulges which I know to be my bedroom slippers and my wallet hanging below a bundle of clothing which includes my jacket and a sweater I've been carrying all along. I see people moving along alternate paths ahead of me, and I’m confident I can get over local rocks or impediments to get back to the REGULAR streets where my progress can be made more safely. I'm sort of below Riverside Church, along the river, but can't quite make my way up to a known street like Broadway. Memories of having been this way before reassure me, but the oddness of the territory makes me fear I'll NEVER find my way to the nearest subway or bus station without falling somewhere and severely hurting myself---all VERY frustrating feelings!
12/2/00: 10AM: I'm reading in my apartment, but it's not MY apartment plan: someone vaguely like Owen L. is working at my computer (which is more like a typewriter) at a workspace-desk in a corner with his back to the wall and a floor lamp at his side, and he moves his chair in a tangle of wires and the lamp falls over and goes out. He tries to turn it on, but it won't, and I look at the wall outlet into which it's plugged and see lengths of shiny copper metal where the plug's about two-thirds out of the wall. I plug it in and the light still doesn't go on, but he fusses with the bulb and solders something and it turns back on. Then without transition I'm standing in a tiny bathroom with a door closed at my right shoulder, with a panel in the upper part of the door with a vertical grill that's been flipped open, which I close, yet that doesn't entirely stop the sound of my urinating from flowing around the space between the door and the doorjamb, and I feel myself urinating in the dream, with a great sense of urgency, and then I release my sphincter "further" in the dream and ACTUALLY release it a bit, and wake with a jolt to find the lower and upper sheets WET a little as I get up, pee, and record it in MEDICAL.
12/4/00: Bed 1:40, think GOOD things to do; Actualism perhaps 2-2:30, sleep and dream (now 3:45) of (prison?) train (or series of long, narrow, connected compartments with rows of men on each side, tormenting, hitting, and hurting each other as badly as they can with limited physical resources. I get pieces of a smashed glass embedded in my forehead, which I try to extract singly without pushing other pieces in deeper or getting shards embedded in my hands. Some guy BEGS me to inject him, with an analgesic or some kind of drug? And then he JAMS a needle suddenly into my neck. "Why did you do THAT?" I scream at him in defensive self-pity. "O-Zone," he replies, hesitantly. All this was VERY ugly and I couldn't really figure out WHY, but went back to sleep without more.
12/23/00: 9:50AM: I'm applying for some kind of test, or consciousness-raising movement, vaguely est-ian, where the details aren't going to be made clear until the actual "experience" takes place. Maybe I'm concerned about the repeat of the sleep-apnea test coming up next week. I've removed my clothes and put on a blue satiny bathrobe with a complicated loose waist-sash that I don't quite know how to put on most effectively. I go down a hallway into what I take to be a preliminary-examination room, and am surprised to find that most of the applicants seem to be younger men in pairs that in some cases look like they may be fraternal or even identical twins. I count off the pairs (rather as in Taipei, when I'm looking for pairs to remove) and "to confuse the issue" there seems to be a single of one pair in the middle of two mated pairs on each of two facing sofas. Previously, when I'd been alone with evaluators for the program, we'd been walking along a streambed like a cenote emptying into the Atlantic, and I saw shallow water rushing along until it got to a chasm perpendicular to its course, and I saw greenish objects floating in the water, and though we were in a fairly subtropical outdoor setting, the water appeared to be somewhat COLD to the experience (maybe I'm thinking of the water-sections of the Turkey trip in early-cool March), and the implication is that the "training" consists in part of (could this be really part of it?) hanging upside down in a considerable depth (triggered in part by typing the Mauritius entry in my life-list about the submarine?), presumably wearing some kind of body-suit to protect against the waters and pressures, but still vulnerable to the currents and temperatures of the flowing waters. I'm not really sure I'm up to this type of physical endurance-test at my age in the dream, which seems to be more 40s than 60s. Later, in something like a subway taking the lot of us away from the laboratory and toward perhaps another preliminary-meeting place, I'm sitting next to one of the pairs being considered, all quite handsome young men, and I get up the courage to ask, "Is there any significance to each of you seeming to be one of a set of twins, while I'm not?" He looks at me compassionately and starts explaining something which begins quite abstrusely; then he says, "Let me look at your hands," and he studies my palms and begins to explain some momentous significance he seems to find in one of them, and the scene shifts again to a private apartment. There'd been some vague suggestion from surrounding women that these men "didn't seem to be available in the usual way," (maybe influenced by the homosexual data in the Kinsey section of The First Measured Century, which I watched the tape from yesterday), and here's the verification: two of the taller men, similar in appearance, size, and attractiveness, though not "a pair," are meeting in some secrecy, and they express intense satisfaction at being able to meet "like this" as they grab each other avidly and seem to be preparing to kiss, but I get the impression this is part of a televised or recorded section, and they really can't be as open as they want to be (or else they're just straight actors trying to play gay characters), so they move fervently toward a passionate kiss, but hold off just before contact, expressing the greatest affection for each other without quite being able to get perfectly expressive of that emotional attachment. But I'm sure "the intent" is that they're gay and not willing to tell the outside world. Wake 9:20AM and retain details till now.