January thru June 2001
1/2/01: 10AM: I'm working for someone like Gladys G. in an office which is like a two-story duplex apartment, and she says I've got to get to work on the bulk tests for some kind of medical program, and I think of making a deck of test-cases with "Dr. Michael Smith 1, 2, 3..." with sequential generations duped with a sequentially numbered master deck, and put in different prescriptions from each so they can be checked and billed properly. I want to tell her that will take away progress in the two programs I've been working on for ages: the nuclear sciences package, which "should still be useful because most nuclear reactors are built on elementary science principles, so the programs should still be helpful;" and the billing program, which needs to replace the jury-rigged one Roger E. put together from my earlier tries, is still not finished. I go "upstairs" to take off layers of clothing that seems to have been reversed: undershirt on over my regular shirt and other clothes all twisted. As I do that, I notice the plants growing in various pots, all near windows in this tower-room like a mostly windowed upper room: one set of branches looks like it thinks it's spring outside, because new leaves and buds are forming with their lighter colored delicacy at the ends and tops of darker, coarser leaves, and I even think there are some cherry blossoms, white in newness, but they're only fuzzy new leaf-growths. One vase is slightly tilted, standing on its stone-filled urn table, but it still looks stable enough not to fall over. Others are newly sprouting leaves even though their windows are relatively shaded with a yellow-fresh softer light that's luxurious rather than dim. Wake, and I've been in bed over 11 hours recuperating from Fred's party yesterday.
1/7/01: 11AM: Bed at 2 and NOT up during night after bidi-smoking to orgasm over images of my own jerking off on videotape. I'm sitting in my bathrobe in a chair in the middle of a bedroom (no bedroom I've known), trying unsuccessfully to bring myself to a satisfying erection, when I get up and go to the door JUST when my mother enters, and I say loudly and angrily, "Don't you even bother to KNOCK?" Then she vanishes and I'm standing in the room wondering whether I can go out into the public areas in my bathrobe in order to bring in my typewriter, because I have to finish some kind of specification-letter for an IBM project that's due tomorrow---it won't take long, just one page, and I know what I have to say in a kind of tabular description of various choices to be taken (maybe in some way influenced by the normal-curve distribution of pool-ball journeys through the two Ball-Room exhibits I watched in the Port Authority building with Charles before dinner last night), so it's not difficult, just inconvenient. There was another factor in the dream which I've since forgotten.
1/14/01: 7:20AM: As more and more details flood back, the dream seems more and more deeply disturbed: I’m living in an enormous, almost castle-like apartment with John A., who acts in a manner both his and Jim Carrey's with a lunatic intensity. We are entertaining a large number of guests, mostly relatives---in another part of our gargantuan apartment---who were unapparent in the first part of the dream, in which I look out of a high rocky window when I hear what sounds like a combination brass band and angelic choir, totally unexpected at 1AM as it is in the dream, and I unhasp the window and look out on a cathedral-like chasm facing the back of our apartment, rather like the view over the ravine from the shops at the back of Prague Castle: wooded at the top fringes, but partly a shaped amphitheater carved out of the chasm and partly a ruined gothic super-cathedral down whose right-hand entrance flow hundreds of children in white robes with candles (partly the atmosphere of the Sarah Bernhardt Trilogy that Sherryl and I saw last night), singing some partly known Renaissance antiphon to the accompaniment of a seated orchestra in the very bottom of the bowl below me, with added trumpets, glinting silvery in the massed candles’ lights, being blown with strident glory from balconies and parapets carved into the walls on my left, ascending in ranks from the bottom almost up to my regal level perhaps seventy feet above the bottom of the bowl. Chorus and response echo back and forth among the choir, the trumpets, and the orchestra, and the glory of the music fills me with tears. After absorbing this magnificence, I turn back into the room to find John behind me, self-absorbedly asking, "Did you HEAR that?" "Yes---," I start, feeling happy that he'd heard some of that superb symphony, “---I've never heard Leonard Lopate so eloquent on jazz," continues John, who had been listening to the radio in another part of our domain totally removed from what I'd just heard, and I feel totally inadequate to respond to him in any informative way, at the same time feeling deeply sorry for his having missed the transcendent chorus right outside our windows. Then my focus moves to the enormous bedroom we’re talking in, and I am appalled to find that part of my collection of pornographic paintings and reproductions has been sorted into piles beside the bed in which my mother had slept more than a few nights now in her extended visit to us, and I hadn't thought beforehead (what a wonderful typo!)--- beforehand to put them back under the bed in their proper hiding places. How strange that she seems not to have noticed them, since she surely would have said something caustic about them if she had. Then my attention is drawn to a huge black casket-like object which is also very much out of place in this bedroom, and I ask John to help me move it to somewhere more appropriate while this was my mother's bedroom. "But we can't move this," he protests, waving his arms, with his well-remembered screwed-up face and whiny voice. "Yes," I said, pushing it easily, "It's not hard." Without transition we are on an outside terrace on which an old-fashioned, twenty-passenger charabanc is parked, and I’m trying to push this casket-like object past this mortuary-car-like vehicle---but the rear door, of three or four on the cliff-edge side, is slightly open, and if we just push past, one or both objects might be scratched, so I say, "John, please close the back door." "No, no, no," he almost shrieks, "That can't be done!" "Just close the back door, it'll be easy," I protest, trying to stay rational. Yes, there is a cliff on my left-hand side, but a two-foot-wide parapet raised about a foot off the roadway is easy enough to walk on without any danger of falling off, and there are three or four inches clearance between the wooden wheels below the casket and the Baroquely decorated framework on the side of the charabanc. "No, no, NO," he groans in the throes of some monomania. "Just shut the back door, PLEASE shut the back door, ONLY shut the back door," I repeat and repeat with desperate intensity until finally someone else shuts the door and I myself push the increasingly lighter casket safely past the charabanc, even though the wheels of the casket are now encrusted with wood chips from the roadway and are like boulder-size rounded parcels beneath the now-balsa density of the casket, which I can easily lift off the ground and maneuver around the back of the charabanc and up a sloping driveway, where there is a perfect parking place for the casket in an out-of-the-way place that even I hadn't realized was so conveniently available to the final disposition of my burden. Again without transition I am in a living room where John and I had been sorting through a voluminous collection of art books, comic books, and more graphic material in which we'd, earlier that evening, been searching for the street-name of one of the Marvel Comics superheroes, and I clearly remember looking through box after box of books before finding the boxes of the comic-book collections, and then spilling the contents of more boxes before finding one or two of the appropriate Marvel Comics, and then searching further to find only books featuring Captain Marvel himself rather than the other members of his family. Now that whole array of books fans over this library-size floor, open to the gaze of our guests to make whatever derogatory conclusions they choose. Again I pass over this, willing to overlook it and tolerate whatever is said about it, and find myself in my own quarters. But the rooms between me and my naked body, and my bedroom where my bathrobe was hung, are filled with my aunts and uncles and their children, with John's relatives who I hardly know (having never met any of them in real life), and I try vainly to find some towel to wrap around my nakedness before moving through them to get to my bathrobe, but nothing seemed to suffice, and since I HAVE to get there, I just wave my arms and hands randomly (hoping to distract their line of sight) in front of my body as I try to move quickly through them, and in fact they seem so engrossed in their own conversations they hardly notice me. There might have been other detailed episodes which I've now forgotten, but it's now 8AM and I've been writing in the increasing light for 40 minutes, so I stop here, and then edit the whole piece visually until 8:06AM and print it all out.
1/16/01: 9AM: PARALYZING frustration dream: after an early-sleep fragment of walking along a sidewalk with an older man and watching as he doubles over and falls down, probably dead, I glance at the clock and see that it's 2:40AM, when I'd gotten to bed at 1:30AM, thinking I'd never get to sleep, so clearly I did. In the last dream, I've just gotten back to the airport from a trip overseas and got some kind of special ride back home, so that when I have to go to a restaurant the next day, I protest to Mom that I have nothing to wear, because we have to go back to the airport today to pick up my luggage! But I can point over a counter to a shirt hanging in my closet that'll be OK to wear with the utilitarian black pants I have on, and when Aunt Helen ignores my request for the shirt, and I'm going around the long counter to get it myself, Mom finally gets it for me and I find to my surprise that it's the fine-black-line new shirt that I'd had made in Bangkok with my suit. Then there's the sound of a small brass band (again!) outside, and Rita and I go through a vacant field to see the band standing at a corner, with clumps of people waiting in the field, and there's going to be some kind of high-school event held there at noon for which this is a brief rehearsal. Then a fuzzy transition where I know I have to meet back at Dietz Avenue so we can drive to a midtown Akron restaurant for a 1PM dinner, but it's getting close to 1PM and I'm not even HOME, let alone nearing the restaurant, and Grandma's going to be angry, because now somehow we're supposed to get to HER place, and I think I'm near where I can meet someone to take me there, but then see an intersection of Archwood, or Brown Street, and know I have three or four more blocks to go, more than I'd originally thought, and then without transition I'm in a rural setting where I at first think I must walk to Grandma's "new" place on something like Hardesty Road, but in another moment realize she's moved to this new project WAY on the outskirts of the town, an IMPOSSIBLE walk, so I MUST find a taxi, and I look around and can see only a plateau on which a wedding party has gathered for some atmospheric wedding pictures: their cars are parked in the background as they look over this enormous grassy bowl (rather like the rice paddies in The Year of Living Dangerously last night, with the Cadillac winding through the dusty roads) through which snakes an ENDLESS row of cars and busses and, yes, I can see now, a FEW taxis which I might be able to stop and say, "Look, please, I'm desperate, I'll pay you anything you want: you can take your current passenger anywhere they want to go, I'll pay for it, and then you must take me way out to this new project, something like 672 Grandview, I have no idea how to get there, but I'm sure you'll be able to ask along the way." Get to the road where the cars are passing in dusty processions, and a bus stops right in front of me with a load of passengers to disgorge for some mysterious reason, and I debate asking the driver to take me back to somewhere I can get a regular taxi to take me where I want to go, but dismiss that as useless, and am newly discouraged to find that the former very SLOW snake-like movement of this endless line of cars has speeded up and now it's going to be difficult to flag down any one car and beg to be taken aboard, and it's already PAST 1PM and everyone's going to be held up and late because of me, and I can almost begin to hear all the recriminations when I wake up, not in a sweat but in a welter of relief that it was only a dream and amazement that I can have such a frustration-dream when all I have weighing on me (no jobs, no immediate trips) is my South African tape and retirement!
1/17/01: 8:52AM: I'm living with Dennis in ANOTHER enormous apartment, but I'm having conflicts with him about the general look of the place: it starts with my picking up lots of little pencils that have been dropped around the telephone table, still leaving about a dozen little blue or yellow pencils on the table in varying degrees of sharpness, but "making a mess." I think to put the spares in my drawers, but remember that Dennis has a BOX in which he keeps the pencils (they're really HIS pencils), so I go to his drawer and his box has pens in the bottom (and erasers, paperclips, large-volume paperclasps, and other junk), so I put the pencils in there and go into the huge living room to tell him what I've decided. He's getting instructions on some new math that we're all learning together (somehow I've become Dennis's age without really having his YOUTH), with someone who looks a lot like Matt Dillon, who hangs around the apartment with his body mostly undraped, and obviously I'd love to have a relationship with him, but my "lack of youth" makes it very difficult for me, though he tries hard enough by joking with me, sitting beside me and poking me to try to bring me out of my doldrums, and staying around when I wish he'd just leave. The math involves determinant-type arrays of numbers which can be manipulated to provide specific answers, and I'm not quite sure how to handle them and am unwilling to take Dillon's or his partner's tutoring to TEACH me, though they're trying in vain with Dennis. I look around the fairly empty living room and see fragments of my Incan llama-fur, leaves, and other large bits of dirt on MY yellowish carpet, and would love to vacuum to have at least THIS room clean, but obviously can't while Dennis's two friends are here. I go to the door of what I think to be MY room and inadvertently find myself in a back hallway, where I observe two other rooms with doors that can't really close (in a previous episode I wanted to LOCK my front door, but found that my door and the door to the apartment next door both "swung past" some kind of central post which HAD been used as a common locking-post, but now it was "further out in the hall" and the doors could only SHUT-TO, so that anyone could burst in unannounced anytime, and I despaired of ever having privacy to jerk off again, though I could picture myself calling out from my closed-door bedroom that I was sleeping or working and didn't want to be disturbed, but since I couldn't LOCK that door, I would never be certain to keep out marauding visitors, leaving me with a great sense of frustration). I go into an adjoining suite of rooms which are Dennis's, and there is his blue suit laid out over his suitcase, and I remind myself that he is about to go back to L.A. to visit his parents over the coming weekend. Then I go into MY suite of rooms, and things look pretty neat, and I berate myself for complaining previously that things were so bad when it was only the floor of the common living room that really needed vacuuming. A side element enters when some kind of family-relationship counselor is talking with me and Rita, saying that now with Rita living in Cleveland, she can visit Mom in Akron each weekend, which would be nice, and maybe I can arrange to visit Mom every four, or even six weeks at the very outside, to make things more equal, but only at the tag-end of the sequence can I even THINK to protest by saying, "But Mom's DEAD, so we don’t have to figure out who's going to visit her when!" THAT adds to my sense of frustration, and I wake to lie in the darkness, thinking that I should have put Vicks in my nose last night but was too lazy to do it and DID manage to fall asleep pretty early, probably by midnight since I'd gone to bed at 11:30PM after brushing my teeth again, and before I can really recover from the frustrated feelings from the dream the PHONE rings, and I think it MUST be a misdial, but it’s the LICH dental clinic reconfirming my appointment tomorrow at 11AM and I grumblingly turn on the light to see that it is 8:45AM, much too early to be phoned, but I'd actually SLEPT almost 9 hours and hadn't wakened to go to the john, though I STILL feel tired and STILL frustrated because I can't possibly jerk off this MORNING since I’m waiting for the delivery of an index at 9 or 10AM---a surprise this early in the year---and go to the john bemoaning my tiredness, though my cold is gone.
1/18/01: 9:40AM: WHERE DO THESE FRUSTRATION-DREAMS COME FROM??? I've submitted a summary and sample page for some kind of eight-page story or book review for publication to a few magazines, and get a call that if I can fax them the rest of the article by 2:30, they can publish the whole thing! I'm thinking about that, but at the same time I'm in some kind of psychological office, working at a very low level, and Queen Elizabeth II (is this somehow connected with the gowns at The White Devil last night?) has paid a visit! Everyone is very obsequious, but suddenly some head doctor comes in who'd met her before, and he doesn't kiss her hand, as we'd done, but embraces her strongly and, to our immense surprise, turns her back to a small table, hops the both of them into the air with impossible strength, and flattens her back onto the table with him on top of her! We look on, totally stunned, and she tolerates it and somehow gets free and vanishes into the adjoining room. I'm thinking that I've got to get home, and look at my watch and it's become 7:20PM already, and I'd been due there for some kind of family gathering at 5:30, and everyone was going to go out to a restaurant at 7:45 in some sort of limo which I was supposed to be in on also. I panic, thinking of how quickly I can get home, but figure I've just GOT to telephone to tell them I'll be late and meet them at the restaurant. I can't find any pay phones on the street, and when I reach into my coin purse for a quarter, there are only very thin dimes and finally, molded around a stack of tiny papers of some sort, is a dome-shaped extremely foil-like quarter which I try to straighten out enough to fit into the slot, thinking that it's so thin the machine won't even accept it---but I can't even find a phone machine. So I go into the first business entrance I can locate and ask if I can use a phone there. "See the switchboard, there in the back." I find the switchboard and ask to use a phone there, but as she reaches for one, the light blinks and someone else has just started using it. "Go around to some of the other offices, and you can use any available phone there," the operator says with a helpful smile. I go into a few of them to find all the phones in use, and in one of them the only available phone is on a strange ledge far above the floor level, and I think to stand on a chair to get to it, but there are none available and it seems impossibly difficult, so I try another office. Again in this one, each time I try for what seems to be an available phone, either a light will blink to say there's an incoming call, or it will ring and someone will pick it up. It's now 7:45 and I'm losing hope of making the call, and even if I do make it, I'm very uncertain about how it would be received, because the only phone number I can think of in my apartment with two or three phones is my OWN number, and I know my answering machine is on, and I can't find a phone book to look up any of the other numbers, so I'd have to rely on my volume being turned up so that Safko (where did HE come into it?) would hear my voice leaving a message on my own machine and either listen to it or pick up my phone and let me talk to him. But there are no phones, no phones, and in the final sequence of the dream I'm walking down a very steep hill, hoping my rubber-soled shoes won't slip on the pebbles on the slope, heading for an intersection where I hope to find another obliging office, and I'm constricted in my whole body with the agony of the frustration, and tears are burning into my eyes and I'm crying aloud with pain: "Why is this happening, how can this be happening, how can I get around this??" and can FEEL the constriction in my stomach as the full force of the ultimate frustration hits me just before I wake up, almost paralyzed with astonishment at the strength of the feelings from the dream, and look at the clock to find that it's already 9:25AM! I'd gotten to bed at 1:40AM after brushing my teeth with great weariness after getting back from finishing dinner at Cafe Lafayette at midnight, then avoiding the convenient A-train station because Charles, for some unknown reason, doesn't want to go underground there, walking all the way to the #2 train at Atlantic Avenue, waiting for TWO #4 trains to pass because I want to get to Clark Street, and THEN finding that the #2 isn't STOPPING at Clark Street, so I have to walk from Borough Hall ANYWAY. [Gotten up to pee at 6:40AM, too. Drag myself out of bed to dress and finish this by 10AM.]
1/23/01: 10:25AM: 1) 2:15AM: Came with bidis and got to bed about 11:30 and had trouble getting to sleep. Don't recall SLEEPING at all but woke with a detailed dream about being in some kind of prison-concentration-detention camp which has just been relieved by friendly forces, and food is available for the first time in ages: one sequence has a large apple pie placed on a table and everyone is trying to cut it rationally, but hands are reaching in from a nearby window to grab at uncut chunks and I lunge for a piece and exchange knowing glances with a young woman who's just done the same thing. Another tray of dessert-like pieces is brought in from "on high," like the "high-pass" hors d'oeuvres at the Beard, and I reach for a cellophane-wrapped fig-filled slice of pie as my choice, and the thought floats through my head that fruity desserts may be easier to digest by stomachs which have been denied adequate food for long periods of time. When people move out of the barracks in which they'd previously slept, it is obvious that many rats had been running across the floor. John A., slightly bearded, is in a very sad state, rolling on the ground and screaming and refusing to eat, and I don't quite know what to do with him in his terrible condition. Two or three very blond-headed Russian troops come close, and I compliment them on their mastery of accented English, and they, trying to make a joke, compliment me on my English, my only tongue. At one point I try to run toward some kind of fence, and when I stop, my body lurches awkwardly and I remind myself that I've lost lots of weight, and my legs can barely support me, almost bending backward at the knee in the unaccustomed effort to stop my running. People are standing in water, bathing possibly for the first time in years. At one point I look at my wrist and find my Omega watch missing, and wonder idly if I'm going to get it back somehow, since I have some kind of crazy awareness that I possessed that watch "later in life," which of course I could have no knowledge of in my "present" time. Wake marveling at what the brain contains that the mild narcotic of the bidi can uncover. 2) 7:20AM: I'm visiting England with Rita, and we're in some kind of old chapel converted into a museum, and I try to tell her that the indistinct letters on the lower-left arch may mark the tomb of a previous "Diana," but then I look at an interpretive sheet given out and there's another, far more reasonable, name marked for that position. I sign my name on a souvenir book and an attendant actually RECOGNIZES my surname and tells me, "We've got some of your writings in our UTTER," which seems to be an Alibris-type repository of writings sent to them, and I admire his memory. A senior-in-charge woman tries to minimize his memory's powers by suggesting that they go through it every day, editing out what isn't "proper," and adding new things. I look at my file-card (probably from Spartacus's file-card reference yesterday---on the phone---to his works by Grieg) and see the titles of three entries by me, none of which are books or plays, so I assume they must be some kind of NOTEBOOK sketches that qualified to be preserved in this archive. I’m pleased that I've reached England with my writing. Wake and doze until 9AM, when I dress in order to receive ASME index.
1/24/01: 9:20AM: 1) I've got a model of the World Trade Center in a darkened room in my apartment, and I'm aghast to see that there's some kind of simulation of an electrical fire in the lower half of the right-hand building, but it seems to be brought under control or burn out of its own accord, and then there's a second blaze that sweeps up the center of the TOP half of the building, soaring up to the ceiling, where I later see a dark smudge-mark, and I'm afraid the adjoining building will catch fire, but it doesn't. 2) I'm talking on the telephone in my apartment to someone who's just had the introduction to Actualism and has confused my phone number with his teacher's number. I try to make it clearer: "When I said you had the wrong number the first time I called, I meant that you'd confused the two numbers; you HAD the right number for your teacher, but you were calling ME." I inadvertently cut him off, however, and in trying to manipulate the phone and my stereo set in attempting to get him back, I have to pull my phone wire over the top of my bedroom door where it always gets caught (like my mouse-wire at the corner of my scanner and desk), and then adjust the volume on my tuner, which has moved to the top of the bookcase in back of my television set. Then, without transition, I'm at a party, again on the phone with the same student, when another, cute, guy tries to get me to hang up to talk to HIM, and I'm trying to shield the conversation of the one from the other. At this same party I glance out the window and see some river on the left, and just to the right of that is a Chinese temple at the top of a hill that I'd never noticed before, and I think that with my new close-up-included camera I could just isolate the temple and photograph it as if it were actually IN China, and start a series of photos of New York in which it looks like the view is really in a foreign town. 3) As some kind of discontinuous connection with the former dream, I'm now in a cafeteria which is strangely crowded for dinner at 5:15PM, and I notice that a few of the tables are occupied by women employing sign language (as the guys did at the last few MAN parties), but in a way that amazes me they can read: all the fingers are fluttering as fast as they can in a seemingly random way, but I'm sure they're communicating. Others are eating normally, and it's still light outside and I wonder why they're eating so early. Bed at 11PM and up 7AM to pee, but can't drag myself out of sleepy-bed until 9:15AM, over 10 hours!!
1/25/01: 3:15AM: I'm living at 1221 Dietz in Akron, aged maybe 35, and Mom is maybe 50, and I find huge old poinsettia plant in living room window has fallen off its perch in an enormous clay pot, breaking the bottom of the pot, allowing dirt onto the floor, and I try to think where I can find a plastic container big enough to put under it so that watering it won't ruin the floor. I ask Mom where I can find something big enough, and somehow this escalates into a physical FIGHT in which she throws some of my precious (modern) Greek vase-souvenirs smashing onto the floor, and I'm DETERMINED to hurt her back, so I find myself holding her chin as I slap her now-feline-like face from side to side, but can't seen to get enough pressure against her little catlike cheeks to HURT her enough, so I push her to the floor on her back and sit on her to try to bruise the skin over her ribs with my knuckles, but again I can't seem to get enough WEIGHT to even raise the color of her pasty skin as it slides over her ribs. Frustrated, I get to my feet and utter the most horrible thing I can think of: "You'll have to water all the plants from now on, because as I far as I'm concerned they can just DIE!" I race to my bedroom, a combination in appearance of my 1221 Dietz and my 167 Hicks bedrooms and beds, and debate just going to SLEEP to get away from the awfulness of what I had done, but then think that I MUST leave the house and get a small apartment near downtown Akron just to be away, despite the risk of running into her somewhere or other, and "maybe I might move to New York," seems to be the last cogent memory from the dream, from which I wake in vague horror, wondering how I could have been so physically violent with her (despite having done no apparent damage), until with psychic relief I recall that she's DEAD and that must have been a DREAM---in THAT order, which is somehow even more guilt-making. So this is a result of a VEGETARIAN dinner at Tiffin this evening? Got to bed at 12:10AM and did what seemed to be a GREAT Actualism session, drifting off to sleep perhaps 12:40AM just at the end of it, not having had anything to drink or smoke this evening. Lay in bed, thinking that it might have something to do with "getting through everything I have to do," which is somehow clearing my brain of mundane matters and letting it get to deeper psychological levels while dreaming this two weeks, starting largely on 1/14, continuing frustratingly through 1/16 and 1/17 and 1/18, and then 1/23 and 1/24 and now 1/25. It DOES pass through my mind that I may need psychiatric help, thumbing through Shelley or Pope as a possible source of trauma relief, or even asking Dr. C. for some kind of professional reference. OR just think of it as RELIEF of long-suppressed thoughts of animosity toward Mom (reminded of her by Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box last night?)? Anyway, I HAD to get it onto paper by 3:32AM.
1/27/01: 10:15AM: Minor bidi oddity: I'm watching some kind of street theater where phalanxes of extras are rehearsing movements while two "heroes" attack a large vertical bare-wood pole with axes, and I see Don M. right under the pole, as if he might be supervising, or at least know what's going on. I try to get to him, but he's moved off with a small group of friends, and though I realize that there's some animosity between us, I go up to him, and he greets my presence cordially, but when I try to ask him anything about the performance he's very dismissive, somewhat hostile, and I don't know what to make of it--nor of the dream itself when it comes to that. Not much more in it.
1/30/01: 10:05AM: CIRCUMSTANCES so weird I write about them on NOTEBOOK:1/30/01! Many disparate PARTS: 1) I'm taking some kind of classes in a new-type school with new-type curriculum in which I'm almost a teacher, so I seem to have a lot of responsibility as well as ingenuousness. 2) I'm sitting next to Vicki and, after some indeterminate time, say hi to her, and she responds, "High is RIGHT!" and we'd been studying together and somehow seemed to be STONED together, without knowing how or when. 3) I'm controlling a strange VCR in a large auditorium in the school from 1), and I can't seem to determine precisely how to operate the remote, though it has a central rocker-control just like mine at home, and often when I'm sure I'm GOING BACKWARD the movie seems to be GOING FORWARD, so I'm very confused and I'm sure the hundreds of people in the theater with me are confused also, and I'm thinking of making an announcement that the controls seem to be malfunctioning, but I don't want to draw attention to myself. It's getting well beyond our break, or lunch period, or whatever time interval we'd had to ourselves outside classes, and we should be getting back to whichever class starts about 4PM, except (typical!) I have no idea where the next class is, or really even what time the class is or what time it is NOW! So I keep trying to rewind images of what seem to be a Gay Day Parade, not even clear what point in the film I'm trying to get back to, hoping the people in the audience aren't taking this in any way PERSONALLY, and keep trying to figure out why the people are moving backward when they should be going forward, or moving forward when they should be going backward. Wake in a HIGH state of frustration, RELIEVED that it's a dream, and puzzled that it seems darker outside NOW than it was when I jerked off earlier (not even certain I'd gone to sleep after I jerked off, but how else could I have had the dream?), and since I felt rather awake, suddenly had the dreadful fantasy that I'd slept into the afternoon and would soon get a telephone call from Mildred at lunch, asking me why I was AGAIN late (as I had been yesterday by over 15 minutes at Brasserie 8 1/2) for lunch; get out of bed surprised that it's 10:02AM, and finish this at 10:17AM, wondering why CTL-2 doesn't work for 1/2 as it's supposed to! WEIRD! (RETURN TO JOURNAL 1/30/01).
2/1/01: 7AM: Again frustrating dream [do I HAVE sleep apnea which CAUSES these frustration dreams?]: Some school I'm in demands that I reserve a facility, or pay an admission fee, of $159, but I have NO cash or checks, and the banks are closed, so I wonder if I can get a loan? (From Mildred's request for a loan at lunch today?) A girl befriends me and tries to work things out, but I think she may be trying to get something from me. Someone describes props for the class as "racks for slaves," and I wonder what that means. Also something about animal behavior, and I have no idea where I'm supposed to go. Of course, it doesn't help that I only took the sketchiest notes when I woke from the dream, and then got out of bed at 10:15AM! [And it's now 8PM and I'm finished with everything on my schedule and am waiting for Sarah Jessica Parker live on television because I'm taping two OTHER shows and don't want to tape this on my Touching Evil III tape, interrupting the smooth flow with one episode left to tape after this one. Phoned Pope, too (pity this has become NOTEBOOK!), but put the phone on the machine because I didn't want him interrupting my live watching, since he didn't answer his phone when I called at 7:45, wondering why he hadn't called me for a number of days---as Paul C. is still missing!]
2/4/01: 6:15AM: Dennis drops out of school to live in a rest home. I visit him, we chat, he goes to the john while I start programming, writing elaborate lines of data with code-names and underlined references. He comes out of the john after a long time and says he got enthralled by his foreskin, so I know he'll be jerking off for hours after I leave---he thinks I'm judging him, and I am. 9:50AM: 1) LONG Diplomacy game: I go the long way around to the South Pacific while others concentrate on the Atlantic and Europe. I get near some southern islands occupied by someone else and am told that I owe them $200 for "accommodations," and I hadn't realized we have a money-stock, too. I think I can move into Fiji, the "capital" for this area, but there's still one more territory to move into before that, and I'm not clear whether Fiji has to repel me with a force of TWO, or because he's "not there" my force of one would usurp him. The board is a strange polar projection around both poles at once, skewed. 2) I'm in a large room taking a 30-question test, looking over the shoulder of the woman at the desk in front of me and seeing that she's written the answer in the circle, put a "1" above in response to some confusing direction that says to indicate something about the priority of your choices, and there are two OTHER 1s below, and I’m trying to cope with other confusing directions about kinds of answers and order of filling out the form and other parameters that no one seems to have had the courage to question or clarify, and we're all trying to do the best we can. I'm over the time with the last two, which have an even more elaborate answer format, but my proctor seems willing to allow me the time to finish because of my obvious difficulties with the impossible instructions. 3) Somehow connected (in the same room, or at least the same school?) with the above, I move to a snack area where others have been eating already, and a kindly woman points me to the brownies, where I first mistakenly focus on one with other food near it, partially eaten, and then decide that's someone ELSE'S brownie, and she refers me to a new TRAY of them, with most of them cut and waiting to be taken, and I select one and start eating it upside down because the bottom is almost liquid chocolate-fudge, and I remember the actual TASTE in the dream itself (a rich, gooey, chocolaty taste that I immediately want more of), and she laughs and says I'd better take a napkin from a pile nearby to wipe my face, and I put my fingers into the whiskers at the right side of my mouth and can feel crumbs (from the more connected upper crust) that I can brush away easily, but there's still more of the moist filling clinging to my mustache and I laugh and say that I'd BETTER take a napkin to wipe myself with! Wake at 9:50AM and feel MUCH more "arthritis-sore" and "winded-exhausted" than I felt when I woke at 6:45 and went to the john and peered out the living room window to see if it was raining or snowing outside in the early-morning light.
2/10/01: 10:15AM: I'm attending an enormous multi-scene play, sitting in various locations: a) I pass a woman rehearsing her speeches as I climb up an outside walk to get some of my series of seats, and I wish her luck; b) I'm lying down in front of a large television set, and wonder if the people behind me are having their view of some of the screen blocked by my prone body; c) I'm sitting in front on the extreme left, looking at a woman naked from the waist up because she's nursing a very young, red baby, fussing with her clothes and her erect nipples when her time to speak comes; d) from the same position, a family group has an elaborate scene around a full tub of water, and the young lad performs so flawlessly during difficult extra-play circumstances that the audience gives them particularly long and enthusiastic applause, as they do e) for an elaborately festooned player hung by wires from the ceiling, clapping loudly as he's hoisted into position even before he can perform what he's been rehearsing to do; f) other fragments look more like the recreation of history than of any fictional play, and the audience observes from what might be a multilevel auditorium or from a Greek-temple-like set of ruins with groups of seats set up at various locations, assisted by television screens and even interpreters to translate from one language to another, lasting day into night.
2/11/01: 1) 2:35AM: I've written lots of notes in a notepad, and have to find some certain numerical bit of information, and though I go through page after page after page, I just can't find what I'm looking for, though I KNOW I had written it down! 2) 9:17AM: I'm vacationing in Canada, going to some sort of seminar, and I've MISSED my last class because I can't get back to the campus from where I am. I've tried to go over a number of embankments to what looked like a bus line or a taxi stand, but there was never anything there that could help me. A number of strange three-wheeled taxis with enormous windows passed, but I couldn't get any of them to call me a taxi to get back to my hotel, of which I had no idea of the location, except that I rifled my bag to get a map which I'd used, but couldn't find THAT, either, though I knew if I got near the area of Monckton I could find where the hotel was, though by the end of the dream I was even doubting THAT. Looked in a couple of gay-oriented magazines and newspapers I'd picked up, thinking I saw even a real-estate map in one, but they became so many crumpled, useless papers that I had to search for a place to throw them away, debating a pit in the ground next to a john, but then it looked like the "pit" may have been the john next door itself, so I couldn't pitch it over the side. Couldn't find anything, gave my name as "Bob" to some dispatcher, who made it into "Bobby," but I told him respectfully that I had really said "Bob." REALLY a frustrating pair of dreams after bidis and Beard.
2/24/01: 2:57AM: Dad and I (!) are calmly talking, at 11PM at 1221 Dietz, about where Mom will sleep when she gets home: "Probably here (in living room),” where drapes on the single window high on the fireplace-wall will keep out the light! She never appeared, and it's the first dream about DAD I can REMEMBER!
2/25/01: 1) 1:50AM: Mom orders me to SAVE wood and vegetables from RUINED living-room carpet at 1221 Dietz. I go out back saying bitterly, "We're not throwing out ANYTHING, even though I’m to blame for ‘streamlining’ the vacuum cleaner by removing the wheels from the bottom, the skirt from around the side, and part of the top.” 2) 3:45AM: I'm touring India, climbing to see a rock-top palace on the near horizon, walking on wood to break through and fall into gray-water river, where I swim strongly till I feel sand beneath me, fantasizing that I've encountered an exclusive all-gay Paradise Island.
TURKEY DREAMS 2/27-3/17/01
3/1/01: Wake for third time at 3:22AM and decide that THIS is part of what I brought this laptop for: I'm waiting with group (rather in the format of being seated around a table with the interviewer calling off the names as Mustafa did last night) and the guy comes out and calls, "Zolnerzak and S.," and I say, "S. isn't here, so you might want to call another person," and he does. He talks to me about my training, and I observe that the people he'll be speaking to have the same kind of vocal training, and he takes notes and seems impressed with me, and I have to figure out how to tell him (if I tell him at all) that I'm not going to be here next week when they phone with the results, because I'll be going on a vacation like the one I'm on now. Later, I'm talking with someone rather like the gal from Mattachine I spoke with, saying she'd like a performance space like the Thalia, and she says she was in the audience when someone she likes very much did something noteworthy that got into the papers, and I was impressed that she had actually been there.
3/2/01: 11:22PM: 1) Maybe a PAIR of dreams about a poor captive squirrel, in a waxed-paper prison, held by an odd friend who refuses to tell me WHY the squirrel seems either sick or drugged. 2) An extended dream where I'm having a snack in a tall gay-oriented building where everyone is arguing about who's paid the bill and who still has to pay the bill, and I exit by going down a LONG stairway which could have little stairs off to the side which only lead back to the main, direct, descent to a street littered with ruined cars, and I cut my finger on the edge of one of the cars while clambering over it to get to the actual street, where I'm picked up by an attractive guy in a VERY nicely tailored pair of pants who seems to be very much on the make but of questionable safety.
3/3/01: 5:06AM, type dream at 5:11: I'm looking for a cab very early in the morning, after I'd waited for Ken in a roadside bookstand where I got my feet VERY muddy looking at old books with extremely low price-tags, like a colored-cover Scott's Stamp Catalog from 1935 for $3, and photography books for equally low prices. Ken doesn't show up for breakfast, doing someone a favor for some charity, but when they ask me if I want to go to Hartford, I say, "No, I don't." Taxi to 58th and 5th, and some Indian keeps running behind my cab, whom I try to ignore, but when we stop a few blocks short of where I want to go, it turns out to be my taxi driver (but the taxi's really more like a rickshaw now) who'd PUSHED the rickshaw rather than peddled with his feet like a bike, and he stops and rather threatens me by saying, "I can do what I want, but you have to pay anyway." "How much?" I ask warily. He thinks, then holds up two fingers: "Two dollars." I figure that's OK and pay him and walk into the dirty-spoon restaurant he'd left me off at the back door of, thinking it might be an omen of a good place to have breakfast, or a good hamburger if it's too late to order from their breakfast menu. Down a flight of stairs, past people eating at tables, and to the lower level, where there are a few people at a counter, but when I round the corner to the front windows, there are only two tables, and they've been wetted down and the floor beneath is wet from washing, and I mock moan, "But I can't sit where I want to!" "There were only two chairs, anyway," the waitress says. So I figure I'll sit at the counter and see what's being offered, but that's the end of the dream.
3/4/01: 12:06AM: Wake with a nice erection from a dream: I'm in the shower in the gym and a rather abstracted, or drunk, fellow tries to come barging into my shower, but I push him back with one determined finger. "I think he was Scandinavian," muses one gym-mate. "I think he was drunk," I reply. Without transition I'm in a shower and a cute kid is standing in the doorway, looking out idly, and I figure "Why not?" and reach avid fingers forward to fondle him, and can almost FEEL the touch of his flesh on my fingertips when I wake, aroused by the dream and the feeling of the soft-wool blanket around my body. 3:22AM: Wake with dream of either having created or having bought a shopping bag with the figure of a girl somewhat like a Kewpie doll on either side, with tinsel going from bra to ankle so that, when shook, the girls look like they're doing the shimmy or hula with the tinsel glittering back and forth. I seem to think that it's a great idea; others say it's trivial or ugly and it'll never sell, while I think it would be a great investment. Don't bother to get up to write it down. 5AM: Dream of being in John A.'s apartment on Central Park West, and I've tried to describe a situation to him without using a diagram, but he seems unable to understand what I'm saying, so finally I grab a piece of newspaper or telephone book with a street map on it, and I slash a vertical, saying THIS is Central Park West, and then I draw emphatic squares: "And THIS is the Plaza Hotel (obviously impossible on Central Park West; I've drawn what would be Central Park SOUTH), and this is the abutting building with the balconies where Bill A. (the person I'm trying to make a point about) lives (and would be about 4 CPS), and this is your building (maybe 8 CPW), and suddenly John sees what I'm saying but refuses to admit he'd been blind not to have understood it without a diagram, dismissing the whole thing as trivial, adding, "Anyway, he doesn't think you're interesting enough to even know, and certainly not sexy." That hadn't been my point either, but I don't bother to press it. Meanwhile, the people for whom I'd been trying to make some kind of point are now absorbed looking at a thick stack of glossy photographs which at first I believe to be a stack of duplicates, wondering what John is undertaking now that would require a two-inch stack of 4 x 6 glossies with what I think is one identical photo on one side and a series of smaller photos on the other side. Others are going through photo by photo, so I pick up a small stack and see that John's been engaged in another of his long-term projects (this probably stems from Mildred's asking what John DOES with his time): "I'll do anything for 20 cents," proclaims the main banner, and it shows John in the top photo asking someone (probably someone different on each photo) for 20 cents "so that I can support myself without working." The first one I look at specifies some unidentified act with a theatrical agent who, it would seem, would have no way of profiting from her expenditure of 20 cents by asking John to do anything, but the result was he couldn't do whatever it was, and the last photo has the caption "Sometimes it turns out worse for me than I would have expected," (except that the photo looks very posed, rather than dangerous or spontaneous) and four or five roughnecks are threatening or performing slightly degrading forms of physical punishment on him: punching his shoulder, grinding a fist into his hair, menacing him in some minor way, with the agent, resembling Sandra Bernhard, at the side, looking on with a sneer.
3/5/01: 7:08AM: Dream of riding in a car with three or four others, Mary V. driving, and she faints or goes to sleep and the car threatens to go off the road unless I get around her to apply the brake and steering wheel to save us. She tries again, but this time the car is more like a motorcycle (I guess influenced by all the motorcycles who passed me on the road last night) which has a tiny flexible lever for an accelerator which is difficult to maintain a pressure on, though I realize this makes it safer---since your foot can so easily slip off it when you lose attention---because the cycle will automatically stop before any accident could happen. The group decides to wait on the corner of 118th and Madison until I can get back, and I go somewhere and then try to return, but the road at 119th Street suddenly goes into an enormous hump (which---as I explain to the group later---is necessary because the Park Avenue tunnel is coming out of the ground there and the street thus has to accommodate the ceiling of the tunnel) and I simply can't motor the cycle up the slope. I try the next street, and it looks OK until the SIDEWALK starts up in a metal arch, which narrows with enormous metal bosses on the top, so that it becomes almost like riding a tightrope, again becoming impossible. I finally manage to get back to the group and explain lengthily why I was so late, though it was great they waited for me, because it would have been impossible to predict which street they would go down and which avenues I would go up in search of them. Without transition I'm walking with someone like Joe S., who's making very cruel jokes that are physically hurting me, and I retaliate by taking a small metal box and striking him lightly across the fingers, which somehow hurts him more than anything he'd done to me, and he moans to his friends, "Look how he's hurting me!" Again without transition I've managed to get him back to me and we're dancing closely, I with my arms firmly around his back and waist, holding him to me, while he's distant, saying, "Maybe this is the end of the relationship, because I just can't take---" But I cling even harder to him and bury my head in his chest and begin to sob, either out of relief in holding him or in remorse for what I'd done to him, and he stops talking and I feel a great sense of relief that he's forgiven me.
3/6/01: 11:25PM (actually 3/5) wake with dream: I come home to 167 Hicks, and on the table is a package of laundry marked "V.," which is for Judy, upstairs, and a package of MY laundry from the Chinese place next to Teresa's, and I figure it's OK, because I DID pay! 4:30AM: Frustration dream of trying to show slides on a new projector (from "new" video camera which wouldn't work yesterday afternoon?), and though I can hear the changer putting slides through, nothing appears on the screen. I can't even figure out which SIDE of the projector has the switch for the light! Then, when I pick it up to look at the underside, slides began leaking out of the container, dribbling like sand into various grouplets along the arms and legs of someone like Mr. H., who I tell to please remain still, but he suddenly raises his arms to his head, totally throwing the slides into disarray, and I cry out in frustration, "I TOLD you to sit STILL." He replies with equal intensity, "I just moved my ARMS!"
3/07/01: 2:38AM: VERY erotic dreams in which Michael T. and I were VERY close to cumming, and I wake with a THRUST into the sheet that feels VERY good.
3/08/01: 5:40AM: two dreams: 1) The old “gotta-get-a-subway-but-can't-run- fast-enough" dream: coming upstairs, trying to make every step as fast as I can, getting to the top to see the last people entering the doors, grabbing onto every available stanchion to pull me along faster, but still the doors close just before I reach them. 2) This was VERY elaborate, but I don't remember the preliminaries: some woman and I have worked VERY hard to make a successful stage production, and we booked it into an enormous theater like Radio City Music Hall (with a sidebar of a man sitting on the extreme side, saying it was easy enough to pick up a good ticket at the box office without worrying about planning ahead and buying one through telephone or mail services), and we're gratified to see streams of people seated on both sides of the bus which is driving up the center of the street to take us there on the evening of the performance, and there seems to be an air of acceptance of us as producers that makes us feel very good. 7:16AM: I'm in a kind of gym, doing various exercises, but I'm supposed to be listening to an audio tape at some point, and my trainer comes up behind me when I'm sitting in a chair, and I perform an effortless flip so that I'm lying on my back on the floor with my calves resting in the chair where I'd just been sitting, and she smiles down at me and says, "I guess you know you have to take your shoes off before you hear the tapes," and clearly I'm letting her prove my shoes are off by letting her take them off herself, though I'm vaguely embarrassed because I'm aware that my socks smell, as they actually do now.
3/9/01: 5:18: 1) I'm getting rid of stuff from a library, or someone's personal collection, and come across many old letters, some of which have perfectly ordinary stamps, some of which have many 12- and 13-cent stamps that I seem to have somehow missed, and then there are larger foreign-origin envelopes, but most of the British and Greek stamps on those seem to be torn or ruined around the edges, hardly worth the trouble of taking them off the envelopes. 2) In a stage play a very pregnant woman is supposed to be giving birth, and she goes behind a curtain and a midwife goes to attend to her, and very quickly there are cries that sound halfway between a cough and a crow, and I suppose that's supposed to be the baby being born, but I think it's somehow "too much" for the stage at this time.
3/10/01: 5:50AM: Dream of trying to prove the effectiveness of some chemical on paper. 7:24: Semi-dream of showering, standing in front of a crowded bus next to Fred and a couple, of which the guy is smooth-skinned and sexy and I try to get him excited by the closeness of my soapy, sexy skin.
3/11/01: 4:30: Dream of mild earthquake while sitting next to Ray H. in Avery Fisher Hall audience. 5:25AM: Dream of me taking Mom back to nursing home she hates and me being as awful as I can when I have to write CHECK for MY entry fee!
3/12/01: 4:08: Dream of World Trade Center elevators, 747, and murders. 5:25: Not for a while: the "impossible-to-cross-to-bus-catch” frustration drag? [Draw diagram on back of page 11].
3/13/01: 5:23: Two dreams: 1) writing poems about Arabian stallions racing along hillsides together, manes streaming in the wind, hooves striking fire from stones, tails magnificent. 2) Mom and Rita and I are at church; I leave at communion, but miss them as they leave after, and I hunt for them, leaving our VW in parking gear, but it creeps forward and bounces off a chain-link fence. Then I find Mom and have to walk to 320 East 70th, but she's tired, we stop on Park, she pleads, "Don't drink the water, I have to take a pill." "ONE more block," I plead.
3/14/01: 4:28: A woman-friend recommended that I try to solo lead in a reading of a new play by a new, difficult, author. Author seems to see me as a competitor, and doesn't like me, refuses me. The friend takes me through "Old Radio City," including a barnlike room with THREE "41st Street" theaters of contiguous rows of seats. (Bar upstairs last night?) By chance we meet a group around the author and want to try again, except that my left-front incisor is loose, and as I argue, comes OUT in an unending drip of warm, sweet blood that seems to turn everyone ON and I may get the part yet!
3/15/01: 4:33AM: Flying home, we're flying VERY low, and LAND in Nepal, where the pilot lets out a hippy village he'd taken aboard as cargo, and I pass a daddy encouraging his baby to squat and pee before leaving the plane.
3/16/01: 5:32AM: Wake with dream from about 3:30: I'm walking in a park and a bird like a peahen tries to bite my hands, its head swiveling back and forth, with a vicious, hard, hooked beak. I finally fight it off, but as I'm leaving, I feel a hump on my back, centered on my waist, and a basilisk-like lizard has hooked its claws into four corners of my back and can't be dislodged. Then at 5:05 wake with VERY erotic dream that starts quietly in a Mexican village when a very young boy, maybe 8, wants to walk close to me, maybe holding onto one finger of my hand, but as we walk we move closer, and I'm conscious of my hand following the flexing of the front of his upper thigh and there's more little-muscle play than I'd expected, and I fear people will think I'm nearing his crotch. Then he grows to maybe 11 years and our adjoining legs are stepping together in perfect synchronization, then he wants to stand and hug, and his head is just under my chin, maybe 13 years old now, and then there's an older brother, maybe 16, with a thin handsome adult face, saying he has to do his show, and he lies down on a bed in front of a table of 7-8 tourists, some women, and starts an elaborate sex-show, and his younger brother now has a coarse adult-peasant face and says, "Maybe we could, soon, go to Lima, Peru, and---" and I wonder how I could possibly leave my job and apartment and friends and become lover-agents to the two of them as they perform for their Spanish audiences. An enormous dildo, huge hairy balls, orange foreskin over an orange-size cockhead, stand-ins for their planning sessions, and I suggest, "You could film them," and the older says, professionally, "It would be very difficult," but I think about filming many sessions and editing. Then there's a session where "people would rather use their mouths," and now his cock is thinner and more normal-size, though looking as if stained with purple ink on the head-details. His cock comes and goes in stiffness, and I wake hard and fantasize how I could surprise him using his secret personal tricks to achieve maximum hardness for his own pleasure and he would delight and benefit from some of my teasy tricks, and we could be very happy all together.
3/17/01: 10:50PM (3/16): Up with dream (after finally getting to sleep through car horns, an emergency horn that tried to sound like a fire alarm, and something that sounded like a doorbell) that I'm walking across a campus with a girl friend, saying that I had found two---no, three, as I see a third quarter on the sidewalk. And it could have been four since I see one ahead in the snow, except that the woman in front of me puts her high heel right on it and slips and looks down and sees it. Then I walk past a classroom window as a passerby uncovers a silver "Stockard Channing" plaque from the snow, and there through the window is Stockard Channing, who SEES the man pick up the plaque, but she looks away as he pockets it. "He could have at least said hello to her," I say, and am immediately challenged to prove how I would know how she would behave. "Well," I admit, trying to be as honest as I can, "I've only had six or seven teachers here so far, and all of them have acted as I predicted she would act," and the fellow can't really call me mistaken. 3:18AM: I'm stacking up my manuscript pages, very much like the Holt Literature pages, and there are so many additions and pages clipped on that I take off the top third of the stack and put it upside down to balance the height of paperclips and paper. Someone rather like Gladys G. looks on. 4:57AM: Dream of being in the ground-floor room of what one of the owners calls a "three-unit house, with two smaller units sharing the top of this enormous room," which appears to be at least 15 feet high and maybe 20 x 30 feet, seemingly padded in a light brown felt. One of the two or three owners is lending me a stack of records I wanted to borrow, and when I pick them up they're thicker and heavier than I expected and records and jackets spill out of my weak grasp, fanlike across the suitcase in which I intended to carry them, but the owners react like it’s no problem, so I gather them up and put them into the capacious old-style hard-sided suitcase, noting that I'd filled the bottom with small articles of clothing and containers of food.
END OF TURKEY DREAMS
3/18/01: 10:55PM (3/17): I’m traveling through Italy and passing a series of monuments to various heroes: 5 fasces for X; 7 busts of Y; 9 columns for Z, who became a villain by doing something bad; 6 portraits of Q, who assassinated Z, etc. 3:11PM: Wake from nap with immediate dream of a search in a Xena, Warrior
Princess world, where the idea is to collect fragments of a puzzle and put them together into a coherent whole before others complete theirs. I manage to get a bunch of green and blue pieces intermixed, in an area where the light is good enough to distinguish between the two similar hues, so I put the pieces in different parts of my A&K bag, along with the CURVING key pieces of an off-white (or ivory) color that might be DEFENSES against the ivory puzzle's being completed. Talk with a friend (it’s dark, I only know there is someone "on my side" there) who gives me a clue that the puzzle might be a circle-braid, like a rug, which starts with a center piece and then is WOVEN IN A CIRCLE around, outward, and has the benefit of needing to find only the "next" piece, rather than pieces "above" or "to the right" or "to the left" of what I have. It’s such a compelling idea that I feel that it MUST be that way. I see a brightly lit area ahead, not level, but I know we’re close to a place where we can start "melting" the edges together. I find an official who appears as if on a balcony in the middle of a flag, and I ask rashly if the completed puzzle is smaller than the flag. She laughs at my audacity, but my friend puts it in a slightly different way and the official smiles and says, "It is smaller in area than this flag." And then I woke, and now in typing at 3:23PM I think of another "clue": maybe the puzzle, like a DNA molecule, is three-dimensional, and we don't yet know the VOLUME of the finished piece.
3/19/01: 11:15PM (3/18): Dream of large ship in waves up and down, increasing in amplitude, until the last downward plunge sends people tumbling weightless into the air while the ship plunges into churning water that's all roiling foam.
3/25/01: 7:33AM: One of the longest, most frustrating, and NEWEST form of torture-dream EVER! Drank three tumblers of wine at MAN between 8-10PM last night; had a good dinner of chicken kebabs, almond orzo, salad, and cake and berry and peach pie; waited for the subway (finding Spartacus and Bob on it) and bought the Times and got home at 11:20 and got STRAIGHT to bed at 11:32PM, not worrying about jet lag; woke up twice, last at 5:40 to pee, and then WRENCHED my body in total frustration at the end of the dream to wake with ENORMOUS relief at 7:29AM, realizing that I'm only MINUTES short of a perfect eight-hours sleep, and dress in chill and get to this to start actual DREAM at 7:37AM: I'm traveling through the southeast (rather than the southWEST, to which I'm leaving in precisely [to the hour] four days) on a bus, and keep trying to look at a map to see EXACTLY where I am: somewhere near the northwest corner of Georgia, where it appears to be close to South Carolina and some other state; on one map (which now reminds me of the Greenwich Village map I saw on videotape yesterday) I see the CITY we're in, and a woman points vaguely to an area to the south, saying, "You can see how they make tobacco into cigarettes there," and a line indicating a shopping mall, and we're quite close to downtown because I remember before the taxi in which I’m now riding turned down a hill there was a main street with a closed-movie-house-into -department-store facade next to a small bookshop and other possible places to investigate on my "vacation" in this town. Don't recall how I got into the taxi, but the young, kindly driver leaves off two other people before he gets to me, making sure I don't mind being "driven all over Creation" for these other people before he leaves me off at an old mansion-turned-into-a-hotel where he’s sure I can get an inexpensive room for tonight. I'd looked into my wallet and found only three $20 bills (rather like my current status before the Times purchase gave me two fives and seven singles as my change of $20), and I’d bought SOMETHING for exactly $40, so I know I have $20 left, with which I hope to pay for the taxi AND the hotel room (reminded by last night's scramble to put a check in the mail for my Visa bill of $6342.06, which was "$33.06 over, and due by March 26" and found that neither my Schwab One nor my checking had a balance to pay the whole bill). Go into the lobby and speak ahead of two or three people waiting at the desk (as I may have pushed in front of people in the food and dessert lines by coming "from the back" last night), saying, "How much for a room that's---not too expensive?" and the painted lady rocks back in her chair and surveys me and says, carefully, "Six---TEEEE dollars." I’m a bit taken aback, but I guess rooms have gotten more expensive since my 1960 bus ride across America's YMCA bargains. "OK," I say, and then turn to a sofa to put down my conventional hard-sided suitcase, and the taxi driver comes over and I ask him how much I owe HIM, and he grins and hems and haws and finally allows as since I'd been so patient driving around with him letting off the other people, maybe I don't owe him anything. I thank him profusely and then think of another ploy: "Since you've been so helpful, maybe I can ask you for one last favor: could you cash a CHECK for me for, say, $60?" I know that next to the sole twenty-dollar bill in my wallet is my spare blank check, so I draw out a folded paper which is suspiciously GREEN rather than the remembered BLUE, and he unfolds it to read "Warrant in the name of Sherryl F.," with check-like items filled in already, and then it unfolds further into some sort of legal document of which I have no idea how it came into my possession. "Sorry, that's not it," I mumble, thinking I've ruined the trust the driver had in me. "Let me look through my bag for it." I rummage in my clothes in the suitcase, but some sort of mildew has set in and things are slightly damp, very wrinkled, and quite musty, and as I search deeper and deeper, papers and clothes seem to merge with damp loam from underneath, until I’m sifting dirt through my hands, wondering HOW I could have gotten to this TERRIBLE state, trying to pacify the driver by saying, "In a few days my next Social Security check will be deposited to my account, and then I can use my ATM card to get more cash," and he still seems willing to wait for me to find something useful, even though his cab has filled with three more women waiting to be driven to their destinations. I sort through my wallet-cards AGAIN (like the black on the subway that I thought must have STOLEN the wallet he was treating so casually?), find no folded check, and again turn to the loamy, increasingly sparse contents of my suitcase, noting a blurry rush of white mites on one side, and a daddy-longlegs creeping into an opposite corner. My stomach knots with frustration, I dig deeper into the dirt, almost crying aloud, "Where IS it, where IS it?" and wake with a wrench that quickly turns into the blessed relief that it WAS, in fact, only a dream!
3/26/01: 8:17AM: I'm waiting for a plane with a group of people due to leave someplace in the far North, and finally, among others flying high overhead, one DC-3-like plane lowers to land, but in making a final turn over a lake, one wing dips into the water, and we look on breathlessly to see if it will somersault, but it manages to keep on the same course, parallel to the surface, until it finally rights itself and lands safely. Some people leaving the plane say they won't get back on and transfer to a bus, but others look on it as a normal incident and are willing to get back onto the plane. No particular feeling of dread or frustration attached itself to this dream.
COPPER CANYON DREAMS
FRI, 3/30/01: 6:45AM: Dream of traveling somewhere like Spain, and there's a crowded market area surmounted with a view of a Cathedral with horizontal bands of silver across the facade which are reflecting the bright rays of a rising sun, and I want very much to get a good photograph of this effect, but I can't get the right angle, and somehow I want to get a breakfast platter in the foreground (to combine the sacred and the mundane?), but when I go back to the food area, I somehow collect four aluminum trays, like Army-issue food trays, but the only item I can find is squid surrounded by scrambled eggs for $1.50, which doesn't strike me as very appetizing, so I ignore the salesman's importuning and readjust the trays into a rough alignment (feeling the edges with great distinctness in my hands in the dream) and put them onto the edge of a serving table which appears to have had the trays before, but which is empty now. Another, female, tourist is trying to get the same shot of the Cathedral, but I know it's not going to work out for her, as it did not for me. Wake at 6:33AM and figure it's time to get up.
TUE, 4/3/01: 5:30AM: Fragment of a sexy dream I couldn't recall.
WED, 4/4/01: 6:05AM: Pathetic dream of someone like Jean-Jacques, only much younger than me, VERY much in love with me, hanging onto me, wanting to kiss and hug and be with me even with others around (is this from the redhead who seemed to have picked me up at lunch and made a point of talking to me twice on the boat?), and I feel I MUST break off the relationship even though it will hurt him terribly, before it gets even WORSE.
THU, 4/5/01: 4:20AM: PREVIOUS dream: A blond man, like a younger Joe, says, "I love you," as I run my hands up and down his columnar torso and wonder why he doesn't respond, though he surely doesn't push me away, and I say, "No, you don't." He says with a smile, "I mean, for now." LAST dream: A man is trying to redecorate a set, or a plan for a new apartment, with a sofa moving in and out of a watery hole in the ground (probably from the tree-transplantings in the Alamos lunch-stop yesterday), and somehow a secretary, either his or one who's attached to the production of the set/apartment, tries to kill him, but he forgives her when she fails and tells her to select a pencil to fill out a resume at the end of the dream, and he pushes the sofa out of the hole as if it was a bad idea all along: it should just stand in the middle of the "room" on the grass. A PRIOR dream: I'm running down an aluminum spiral staircase in the frame of a building like a conservatory, maybe like the native market at the lunch-stop the day before yesterday, only murkier inside and of a darker-painted aluminum, and, though dizzy from my rapid descent, I somehow know the building is rocking back and forth in a strong wind, or earthquake, and that I have to be on the ground and out of the building in order not to be harmed. But as I get to the base of the staircase the edges of the somewhat circular building begin to uproot, and I debate whether to run to the edge and try to creep under the low slot between the bottom of the wall and the concrete platform on which everything rests, or to stay somehow in the middle and let everything blow over me. The wall starts to flatten and all I can do is fall to the ground and hope that some part of the curvature will protect my body from the weight of the wall (is this from the 5000-pound concrete block pinning the guy to the auto-repair pit from the Discovery Channel a few days ago?). ANOTHER previous dream of an ALMOST-finished and VERY complex programming or writing job, but I have only TWO summary pages to write for EACH job and it'll be completed to everyone's satisfaction. Back to bed, and have absolutely no trouble getting to sleep each time in the room with the red-blinking light switch, though I'm concerned about what kind of morning light will come through the single-curtained window overlooking the shaded patio in the center of this section of the hotel. Then wake at 5:50AM with a two-part dream: 1) I get back from vacation to find people standing in my lobby, saying that there's something VERY wrong, and someone says, "What's that smell?" and there are traces of smoke or steam in the air and it's very hot. I go into the basement and tear apart a foam-plastic covering from the thermostat and find that the indicator has been pushed to the extreme right, to a temperature that looks rather like 200 degrees. I put it into a normal range and go back to the apartment to find other small things wrong which I put right. Without transition Dennis is there trying to help out, but mainly he's much younger in the front seat of a car with me between him and a mechanic at which Dennis is making real cow's eyes, and I want to tell him he's being MUCH too obvious. The technician has also checked my printer, which someone else had repaired, and I mentioned that Marj had helped the first repair person discover that the output line had to have a "1" in front of it, and since it was missing at one point the lines were off by a control character ever after that. 2) I'm watching a Virtual Reality program and a) ask why no one's programmed a "Computer Introduction" that goes inside a computer and demonstrates that the storage is here, and the instructions are here and the data is here and the data goes where the instructions say and the storage is filled or not filled in THIS way, and he explains that a former attempt at this kind of program got into legal difficulties when someone did something wrong based on the information supposedly "learned" from the program and sued for damages when their instructions caused their programs to go wrong. I thought that sounded like lousy law and judicial processes. b) I keep asking about the interactions between reality and Virtual Reality: "If a person is standing two feet in front of a locomotive, won't they be hurt?" and it's explained, or I quickly realize, that the train would just PASS THROUGH the person. LOTS of missing parts demonstrating how the program handles underground and airborne facilities, and I ask MANY questions and get MANY answers.
FRI, 4/6/01: 3:36 with two dreams: 1) I'm trying to mix a tiny vial (like a large half-pill capsule) of a watercolor (or some solid substance that needs water to liquefy it and render it viable), not sure what the color "Urban" is that my associate has suggested as an alternative. We have to apply another layer of makeup to a bald man who has to appear "natural" and right now he just looks too pink. I STILL think green or blue would do the trick, but both my associate and our "victim" think that's ridiculous. 2) Maybe we're trying to get a Chinese boat to the set for whatever production we're working on, but I'm helping push a heavy sampan onto a transporter-boat which is poled by an old woman who seems quite strong and knowledgeable of the river we're moving over. This dream seems to have an accompaniment of Chinese music in the background.
MON, 4/9/01: 3:55AM: Remembering dreams: 1) "Oh, sorry," some woman in my office says, "the cat ruined the end of your program." "But I have a backup," I say confidently, however the end of the backup runs out before the real end, so lots has been lost. 2) I remember no circumstances other than an actor like Robin Williams is in some sort of friar's burnoose with brown burlap over the arms and body, and his arms have to be cut off at the shoulder (maybe this was from my amusement at the Franciscans and Jesuits having missions in the same town we happened to pass through yesterday), and he allows one arm to be cut off without any outward show of blood or any facial expression rather than a trying-to-be-funny resignation.
THU, 4/12/01: 6:15 with memory of two dreams: 1) Someone has discovered a Chardin painting that should be worth at least half a million, and there's some interaction with other dealers or auctioneers that I've forgotten at this point. 2) I'm watching a series of reconstructions at 167 Hicks, which has turned into a southwestern-style series of balconied apartments somewhat like Doubletree, and they're finally clearing out a central pit which had become filled with garbage and putrid water, and as they dig deeper it turns out this is a wonderful cenote-type swimming pool which, when filled with clear water, allows anyone to look down from the edge and see two levels of apartment windows below, causing me to wonder, since they don't look reinforced, how the bottom ones in particular are constructed to withstand the pressure of the water down 15-20 feet. There's another decorative pool on another side, and I think, in the dream, that 167 Hicks has so much improved that I might actually stay here rather than move into Cadman Plaza when it becomes available.
END OF COPPER CANYON DREAMS
4/15/01: 9:45: 1) 6AM: Deadly Flies: I'm in some tropical location with a basement table on which are growing clusters of deadly flies which carry some kind of contaminating viruses. I look at it after a few days of germination and see a kind of very thin web formed over the colonies, and I inadvertently pull at a corner and a whole side lifts up and a blizzard of tiny flies rise into the air. In a panic, I try to seal off the room, but I fear that a new plague has been loosed upon the world, which will be entirely my fault. I travel to some other location, in temperate America, and dread doing any investigation into what larvae or pupae may have returned with me, but I keep fearing the worst. 2) 8AM: Entangled Clothes: I'm attending some educational conference seated next to some large woman who's not really like the fatty on the Dallas-NYC plane OR Shelley, and she says it's OK to sit next to her, but at the end I look to see my coat on HER side of the chair arm between us and say "My coat's on your side," which she takes to mean "You TOOK my coat to your side," so I try to explain, "I mean, I hope my coat on your side isn't bothering you too much," and it turns out that HER coat is also partly on MY side, and we untangle great lengths of coat-arm and coattail from each other's sides, and then hear the results of a lengthy discussion on a test-answer that had been given as the choice of "Morally aware" and "Morally unaware" as the status of a child who responds or doesn't respond to a certain situation, but it turns out that that's not the right TERM (probably from Sherryl's disappointment with a good student's using "poor quality of life" when Sherryl had made clear that the correct term was "unacceptable quality of life"), it should be changed to "Truth quake," and I feel like asking, "You mean the only people who would be marked right are those who would have written the two words "Truth quake" as the answer?" Again, strange dreams from bidis smoked during masturbation!
4/21/01: 9:15AM: I'm watching some kind of play in a square room without a stage, filled only by folding chairs seating about 50 people, and two of the actresses "come out of a daze" to the applause of the audience, and as they make their way from upstage right to downstage left they stumble into people sitting in the front row, and without transition the audience has LEFT and the cast has abandoned the stage, and I wonder how it's (or IF it's) going to end, and then again without transition I'm eating a lunch from a metal tray from which a woman across the table from me tries to steal my last curled, roasted shrimp, but I retrieve it roughly saying, "Sorry, but I want that," and she sulks at me. I look around at a crowd of younger people who have entered the room and try to ask, "Are these graduates of a prior session, or are they just visiting?" and I wonder how I'm going to get home, and have a vague memory of John A.’s and my agreeing to come and leave together, but now I wonder if he'd planned for this "premature termination" of the evening, and somehow I know there's a four-hour trip left from this end of Long Island (in my mind, this is located somewhere out near Stony Brook) that ricochets off the south shore of Connecticut to get back to the city with a combination of bus and train and boat (thinking of Sunday's trip to Garden City with Sherryl?), and I have no idea if John is leaving with me, has left already, or wants to stay longer for some reason. Wake feeling slightly breathless, but this was in no way another kind of frustration-dream, which in itself is a bit of a relief.
4/22/01: 5:30AM: I've taken the subway in a strange, northern area of the city, but it's come above ground toward what I hope is the end of the line, and I look out to see that I'm going at an angle of about forty degrees to my shadow, and I try to picture a subway map oriented north-south so I can see where I'm heading, and I think I have to turn the map upside down to be properly oriented, but then we pull into what I think is a transfer point, so I get off and go into the stationmaster's office to inquire about my next bus or subway back to the center of town. I look for a local map on the walls or on a counter, and I get strange looks from the people in the place, but finally ask someone if they have a "system map." He pulls a wrinkled copy out of a slot and it's clearly the only one he has left, so I can't ask to have it. He points out where I am on the map, and I see the last end of this line stopping in the north, so I say, "I'll probably catch the one I got OFF as it's coming back?" and he laughs (it seems he privately knows that THAT won't be for a couple of DAYS). When I tell him where I want to be, he points to a line going west, saying, "Well, THAT one left YESTERDAY." I playfully slap him on the shoulder, saying, "I want one that's GOING to leave soon, not one that's already LEFT!" And to my revelation of the SCALE of the map, which turns out to be the entire area of North America, he points to the line going west across the Northwest Territories, out past the Yukon Territory, saying, "It hardly matters, when the whole trip takes 40 days!" "But then I can go SOUTH," I say in some desperation, pointing to a dim line on the map. "But you've missed that already," he says with confidence. "But it's not IN yet," I protest. "But you've missed it already," he repeats. I dash out of the station and hear a train coming in on an upper level and look over to see some guy running up the stairs to catch it. "He'll hold it for me," I think, and run to follow him, but to my horror the train pulls out before even HE can get to it, and I'm now thoroughly stranded here! I walk along a side road, thinking I should go to a busier one so that I can hitchhike to a local hotel, or maybe even ask for a room overnight in some farmhouse along the road. Then without transition I'm walking down a very narrow dirt road in the twilight: I can see the setting sun reflecting off spots of rainwater in ruts in the road between overarching trees, and I can hear a woman walking with a bag of groceries behind me, and I start walking faster, and she's following me, but I can't ask HER for a place to stay and I start running faster, and she runs after me, and the road stretches ahead without any sign of even a driveway going off to either side, and it's getting dark and I can't begin to think how far I'll have to run, and I wonder will it get colder as the night falls later, and WHERE can I actually find shelter for the night? I start to skim over the road with a sense of unreality and have the thought, "And this isn't even a DREAM from which I can wake and save myself, because it's not even a NIGHTMARE---" and I'm beginning to wake to the reality that it IS a nightmare and I'm lying in my bed with a momentary sense of Unreality, so that for an instant I think I'm only KIDDING myself with the feeling that "it's only a dream," but then, as Bette Davis would say in Fred's voice, "But it IS, Blanche. It IS." And I turn to see that it's 5:30 on the clock, get up to pee, and type this out on my AlphaSmart until 5:49AM, checking to see that it's in File 8. Transfer file into computer at 8:35AM, after cumming, and then clear all files from the AlphaSmart and finish this page so that I can print it out and start on a new dream-page with a new number, catching up with this bit of my writing life.
4/29/01: 2:47AM: MOST incredible VIOLENT bidi-dream, ending with my riding up in an elevator with a handsome protagonist, and it bumps as it rises as if it were going up and going down in the same split second, but when it stops on my floor, I get out and the guy asks if I have my room-key and I feel in my pants pocket that I DO, and we go into the room to find someone ELSE there, with his arm sticking out through the door opening, and I BITE DOWN HARD on his arm, feeling my teeth meet through the flesh, and he vacates the room so we can move in. But it STARTED with some incredibly complex sexual session in which we bit and scratched, and in which others participated, but AGAIN it ended in a sexual congress of alien athleticism and cannibalistic intensity of retributive couplings and uncouplings, unrecallable now in their detail, but just HORRIBLY ugly and INCREDIBLY violent and vindictive and soul-destroying in hatreds and getting-back at each other and enemies and friends. TOTALLY diabolical and hateful. 4:38AM: Installment 2!!! I'm watching some Ur-play, possibly first produced by E.S.T., in which characters play hillbillies to start, then they're transformed into some sort of gods to perform an elaborate allegory with sumptuous sets and intricate plotting. People leave, but at the end I'm stranded in a lobby with some of the actors, who talk about their incredibly jeweled boots and shoes, apparently made out of pieced-together leathers and satins, and I go out to follow Joe E. (I was looking at his angry temper earlier and thinking about him), and he starts running ahead down a narrow canyon, and I try to run after him and the trickle in the bottom of the canyon becomes deeper and I sink in above my knees, shouting "Please, WAIT!" But he runs ahead to a street that I seem to recognize as near my father's store on Thornton Street, so all I have to do is follow this to Brown Street and I can walk home. But as I turn left, not following him to the right down the well-lit street, I look for a sign and all I can find is "Division Rte 13,338" and I'm suddenly in the middle of "Poorville," which I'd seen before and tried to locate on the map so I could really EXPLORE it, but now it's getting darker, there are no street lights, and I'm sure if I took out my earplugs I'd hear nothing because no one is awake, all having to go to bed before dark because they have no electricity and have to get up early tomorrow to work as slaves in the neighboring rich area. Tiny ramshackle free-standing houses look over areas even poorer, where people live in shanties hardly standing under their weight of decay. I turn and it's even worse in that direction, almost phosphorescent in deliquescent decomposition. I feel desperate, wanting to get to the top of a hill so I can see where to go, but I just think, "Sit up," and I wake, I THINK without sitting up in bed, and find that I've had Installment 2 of my horrendous bidi-dream! My mind is TRULY decaying!!! In the "violent" sequence there was a bit about unfolding large segments of colored velvets, brilliantly red or royal blue, in which were enwrapped parts of arms and legs which I would then twist or bite in order to influence their owners to do what I or the group wanted. In another section, a group of panelists as on a quiz program were instructed to read audience-written sentences from a card to some particular effect, and a second-row panelist chose to start on the third line down, but a third-row panelist caused a great laugh when she read from the top, revealing that the quotation really started THERE, and not on the third line down, which had then become a non sequitur. There seems to have been another vaguely job-oriented segment, where I had a lot of work to do (as I now HAVE) and had worries (as I have) about sequencing them and finishing them all by the assigned deadlines. Neither time did I wake to feel particularly breathless, but they had the trappings of true nightmares, with the attendant relief when I woke out of them. Felt cold and draped my shirt around my shoulders as I got the AlphaSmart to record the first quick impressions, knowing that I was leaving a lot out, and even the pissing when I first woke up ameliorated the extreme feelings that I had had, with detailed memories remaining. Now I have a full day with Carolyn ahead of me at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and it's now 10:35AM, leaving only two scant hours for index-work now.
5/6/01: 10:10AM: I'm dining with Mildred and look across at her place setting and say, "You shouldn't leave your fork on your plate," for some reason obscure even to me. She looks back at me in sheer fury and SHOVES the fork across the table, shouting, "TAKE it if you want it," and then she realizes that she somehow misunderstood me: her face clouds up almost to the point of tears and I realize she wants very badly to apologize to me, but can't figure what to say, and also fears that if she opens her mouth to speak the tears will burst forth and obliterate her words and her composure and her reputation as a hard person. The conflicting looks build up on her face as I wake and realize it's only a dream, though typical of many recent contretemps in restaurants and on walking tours like the Fashion on Madison with Charles. [And at this moment realize that she didn't 1) tell me what she chewed Charles out about concerning ME, nor 2) tell me what she thought of Gift of the Alien!] (RETURN TO JOURNALS 5/9/01).
5/8/01: 10AM: At 5:20AM I wake with a two-part dream: a) I'm in a large area, like a set for a huge game show, and am faced with a three-dimensional puzzle, divided into quadrants, that involves diaphanous sheets punctured by large or small holes through which thin rods (rather like the spun-sugar rods on which the blueberry eyes bobbled slightly on my dessert last night) did or did not penetrate and line up required parts of the sheets. I’m not quite sure of the point of the alignments, but compulsively shift the sheets and the rods, lifting them and allowing them to fall onto the floor, trying to attain some goal that seems difficult but possible. b) I know that I managed my large suitcase and another bag and two shopping bags (from Michael's packing and moving into his lover's apartment in Queer as Folk that I watched yesterday?) in one trip, leaving them in a storage room that appeared to be Penn Station, located on 42nd Street, and I was up at someplace like 49th Street, knowing that the busses weren't going directly anywhere because of a series of one-way streets, but I had to get my luggage before I could get onto my final bus, and a driver or dispatcher winked at me that "it might work out," even though I had no chance of getting a taxi. I woke relieved that it was a dream and not something that I had to puzzle out in the real world. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 5/9/01).
5/17/01: 9:20AM: During the last period of NON-non-sleep last night, the following paired dream: a) My job is to make a catalog of a specialized library, and to do so I have to categorize the books into ten subject-areas, mutually exclusive yet self-descriptive, and then write abstracts of each book onto a sheaf of papers which represent both the hard-copy book-catalog AND the arrangement of the books on the shelves. Taking the clue from book-maps that I'd gotten in indexing mathematics books, I divide the sheets in two and paste abstracts onto each page as if each were a shelf on which the books were stacked, but loosely, because the list has to be "edited" for content and appropriateness. b) Without transition I’m hosting a party in which I’m responsible for stir-frying onions, vegetables, and chopsticks (a dream, remember?) for a group that seems to include Aunt Helen and Uncle Jimmy, and the T.s from the dining group, and we play rounds of card games until the food is ready. I taste one of the connected chopsticks but find it still a bit undercooked, and Helen seems willing to put one heating coil on top to hurry it along, since we awakened about 4AM and are hungry. Meanwhile, one of the guests, perhaps an oriental editor, is looking over my book-maps and expressing amazement about how good a job I’m doing, of which I tried to disabuse her: I'd only ARRANGED, not selected, the books to be included, and the categories were pretty much self-defining, and anyway the main editors hadn't given THEIR opinions yet, but I’m glad to hear her positive reactions. I woke for the final time just before 9AM, muzzy from lack of sleep yet seemingly rested enough to feel like getting up and typing this until 9:25AM, ready to go on to a NOTEREPL page (how I WISH I could change it back to NOTEBOOK!) before getting to the first of two indexes waiting for me. (RETURN TO JOURNAL 5/19/01).
5/26/01: 5:55PM: Went to bed 9:20PM, tossed and looked at clock and peed at 12:30AM, then dozed a bit, looked at clock at 3 and 3:30 and 4AM, peed again, and then about 4:20 dozed off until 5:40, having VIVID dream of walking down an old London mews looking for my "old apartment on 70th Street", not recognizing doorways above #1 almost at the end of the cul-de-sac, but MY door seems to have been recently replaced, so it's new-looking and unfamiliar, but when I put my key out to follow two women in, the outer door pushes open freely and the inner door has a padding like a Renaissance carpet in a Vermeer, and I'm immediately surrounded by a group of people, obviously residents in "my" building, and I see someone familiar, like Joe E., and ask, "Has there just been a tenant's meeting?" and he says, "No, but we seem to be all here." I see two women I know and try to push toward them, but am detoured by a festive serving wench holding up a platter of meats, many bloody, and I look down onto a table to see pieces of bread with MICE on them, and one vivid morsel has two possibly dead mice lying on it, while the third rises up almost like a cartoon mouse and takes a few unsteady steps on its hind legs, its black fur trimmed for eating or roasted from precooking, and some of the younger guys around reach down and pick them up by the tails and put them into their mouths to crunch while others look on with curious disgust. Before this, in an office-apartment environment, I pass Miriam (Shap.? Shae.?) from IBM, who pulls out a deck of what look like greeting cards but turn out to be math problems, showing me the top one, labeled #1, asking me to give her my answers. "I just got back from a six-week trip, so I haven't even started." She smiles as if she expects me to comply eventually, and there's a brief dream-glimpse of my wandering over an Akron University-like campus, wondering where my math class is (which I haven't attended yet, and for which I haven't even bought the book), and WHERE oh where is my LOCKER now! JUST as I'd said (I thought it was recently, but looking back through May and April I can't find it) I hadn't HAD one of the "missed-all-the-classes" dreams for a LONG time. [Now 6:05AM, slightly muzzy!] (RETURN TO JOURNALS 5/26/01).
YANGTZE RIVER DREAMS 5/27-6/21/01
5/29/01: 1:30AM dream involved my starring in an off-Broadway play which would get better notices if I had a sex-change operation that they knew about and publicized. Then woke again at 3:45AM with a dream about working for IBM (again that dream!) and being forced to take a lesser position, one that denied me use of an upstairs office I used to use temporarily: when I try to take my phone up the steps as I usually do, it seems to have a thicker, whiter, less transparent wire (it used to be like the one I have on my phone at home now) that only reaches to the DOOR of my office at the foot of the stairs, and I think, "How could they have DONE that: clipped off a bit of my wire?" And then I think that I can simply find a whole roll of wire and cut myself a NEW full-length piece without bothering to ask anyone.
6/3/01: Wake at 5 and doze with a few dream-memories of a rather pleasant, accomplishmental sort, of which I remember no details.
6/7/01: 3:25: Dream of biting HARD on a woman's finger after she'd just KILLED someone in order to have her own way. 7:03: I’m at a grade-school class reunion in a huge restaurant, where I try to get a seat on the side but someone seems to have taken it after I reserved it. Someone looks at me and I think, "Leo W.?" and it turns out to be someone I didn't care for at all. Can't recognize ANY of the faces, and when Bruce C. introduces himself (regardless of the fact that he was in high school rather than grade school), I can't believe the lowering black hair and bushy eyebrows to be HIS in fact. In another embarrassing moment, I leak a bit of pee and realize the front of my tan pants are wet and stained (like the back of them at present) and try to cover it up and have no idea where the john is.
6/12/01: 5:50: Multiple components vaguely related: I'm out for lunch, but look at an exit stairway labeled "Antiques" and carefully place my feet on the tiny open area at the side of each step (the center of which is crowded with souvenir items), but when I get to the bottom I've somehow disturbed the whole stack, which I try to hold up while trying to balance myself, and the owner comes over with an impassive face and I give him much of the merchandise, which seems to be mostly pillows in the shapes of buildings or pyramids now, and he seems to be used to repairing such damages. As I walk to the front of the place, it turns into an expensive men's apparel shop with one or two items on each table. I go out onto the street in what seems to be Washington, D.C., and they're taking down the "Happy New Year" signs in some unfinished federal buildings, and I'm surprised that it's so warm here now, that I'm comfortable walking down the street in my short shirtsleeves, but then I realize I've left my jacket behind, probably in a restaurant, and I'm momentarily tempted by a very lightweight blue-hooded jacket like mine that I see on a fence by the sidewalk, but it seems newer and indeed lighter, so I put it back, wondering if I can find the restaurant again and claim my own jacket, and I wake with the sense of relief that it was only a dream. In one segment, I was following Fred out a door, but was stalled by something and he got lost on the way to wherever we were going. Something about an office in here, too, and that I had to telephone someone---ah, another batch of dream-memories returns: I'm working in an IBM-like office and don't know which buttons to press on the telephone (like with the remote last night when I seem to have lost the sound, after having lost channel 7 that afternoon, fiddling with the Chinese-labeled buttons) and one started some sort of timer ticking over, like the stopwatch on my wristwatch, and another seems to be a kind of reminder alarm, and I press it until it seemed to be nullified: I can't have an alarm going off in 10 or 20 minutes. Then a little adding-machine result-paper seems to spew out the back, which I manage to stop, but in tearing off the paper I'd wasted I somehow get involved with a larger printer, and I fear ripping off someone's results, but when I get my paper out of the way, a woman on the other side seems to have no trouble inserting her coded-pink paper into the feeder and getting her results printed almost instantly. I’m happy I didn't mess anyone up.
6/13/01: 4:37AM: John is taking Spartacus and someone else, maybe Fred, to a new orgy-club in the space that used to be the Eastern Athletic Club, but he insists that they be blindfolded so they won't know where the place is. I sit musing how to turn them around in various ways to make the nearness seem far, and how to avoid a place with a particular noise from giving away the location, when I wake. 9:10AM: Someone very like the angular ugly old fart at MAN has the hots for me and is willing to lie behind me naked in bed to get hard. He starts trying to fuck me, and I say, "I don't do that," and he pokes me in the small of the back with his long hard cock and starts cumming with incredible fountains and spurts and gouts of orgasmic jism, lump after lump after lump, until I begin to think it MUST be artificial somehow, and as I ponder this condumdrum (ha!) he continues to spew dots of sharp-peaked cum, like little white whipped-cream dots on a wedding cake.
6/14/01: 4:33: 1) Racing around with a folder and my Indexers and Indexing book, having left it in a restaurant while Fred is waiting for a bus that's coming in just a few minutes, and I'm hoping he'll be able to hold the bus for me until I get there with my stuff, and I keep running and running, but more and more delays make it seem that I'll never make it. 2) I have some kind of second make-up test that, if I fail it, I won't have any kind of a career (is this in the AIR because so many guides have explained that this time of year is the worst for students because they have three days of tests which WILL determine if they can ever be financial successes in their lives), and I know it's a physics test for which I haven't studied, but the tester draws aside a dark-golden curtain on a stage and presents me with the first question: if I mix sulfur into a beaker of calcium, and the liquid turns a vinegar-red, what is the substance formed. I hazard "calcium sulfate, CaSO4?" and though I'd HEARD him say "calcium hydrogen sulfate," I'm still annoyed when he says, "No, it's CaHSO15." And I know I've failed and look forward with dread to the next question.
6/15/01: 5:20: Fred told someone that I find very hot that I “don't do that (fuck or be fucked)," and I say, "That was very sweet," to him, and as a reward start caressing his back and ass very sensuously, and he begins to respond erotically when I wake.
6/16/01: 4:13AM: Dream of helping someone far above me look analytically at some phenomenon by attaching two wires connected to a ring to a stabilizing platform, first by pressing down on a flexible rubber torus, which I manage with success most of the time, then by screwing a nut onto a central dome, which is more difficult and in which I succeed only after great maneuvering.
6/18/01: 12:28: Intense dream of jerking off and coming closer and closer, feeling better and better, and wake with an erection which quickly goes away. Wake at 3:40 after dream: two actors are rehearsing what might be Dickens' Christmas Carol, talking together, but their heads are getting closer and closer, so there's obviously some other kind of relationship between then, and I'm amazed because this is taking place in what seems to be a Catholic high school or college, and their heads come together and their speech is more intimate until they actually KISS, and I'm surprised that no one in the audience reacts negatively, and I succumb to the possibility that people's reactions might actually be improving over time!
6/20/01: 1:17AM: I'm working somewhere, and someone says I'd better protect Dennis from those who don't like him, or he'll be fired, but Mom has been made Queen of the Night, so Dennis comes up and says that he's having his lunch now, at dinnertime, so that anyone who wants to join him can do so, and I figure now I can talk to him about how to keep his job. 5:05AM: Dream in which a baby near a doorjamb is turned slowly upside down, laughing, as his parents try to keep him quiet. There were other circumstances that I thought I would remember, but I don't.
6/21/01: 11:55PM: Wake with dream which I record on laptop: I'm touring (or a guide for) a collection of art that has extraordinary pieces I want to show off to a special group, so I point out two Poe drawings (gouache, I insist, which someone in turn claims should be called paintings) and say there are two others elsewhere in the collection. There's a special OTHER one here, and it's matched HERE. They're all VERY impressed, and I feel pleasantly important.
END OF YANGTZE RIVER DREAMS
6/22/01: 7:09AM: Dream about Mark H. and twins, one Sister and one Yvonne. "Eat dinner in White House. I missed the bus for "front-yard sale," which is closed. Bruce's prospect-house play. Whatever those mean.