July thru December 2001
7/4/01: 6:45AM: 1) I'm "showing off" by inflating a bubble in my arm-vein, repeating the specific flex which pops up a skin-balloon about the size of a double-size cotton-swab tip. Onlookers are amazed! 2) I know I have to pack a hard-sided suitcase (like the small blue one I used for years) with a large pillow and my dirty long-sleeved red shirt, and lots of little stuff which will easily fit around the edges after I take the "plumpness" out of the pillow, and then I'll be ready to "move back." Whatever that meant. Noted then, typed 4:20PM.
7/5/01: 8:30AM: I'd attended some kind of meeting, or private session, at a doctor's apartment, and I'd left, walking home for about two blocks, when it dawned on me that I left my shirt and jacket in his bathroom while I was dressing. I go back to his house and enter a strange doorway which has a kind of blue portcullis as a partial closing device, but I manage to get in again and find my shirt and jacket and shoulder bag neatly folded over an urn on a table in the entranceway, so I don't have to go back to the bathroom, except that I’m glad the door is open, because I have to pee. When I come back out, the doctor greets me at his desk and says that I should read an author named "Heesburg" because I was sure to find him interesting. When I woke to pee, I looked in EB to see if there was an entry for Heesburg, but there wasn't.
7/8/01: 7:20AM: 1) I'm helping a doctor file papers for an upcoming convention, and I seem to be working for Dr. Astor (and Dr. Pizziaola), and Dr. Astor keeps handing me manila envelopes filled with his papers, and I'm about to make the joke that he's filled the "A" slot all by himself, but the dream changes to 2) I'm sitting in the audience in the dark before the start of a play, and there's the screech from the microphone as the narrator picks up the voiceover---in gibberish! I start laughing and the audience joins me as he ("ah looma ba loafa ma oona") continues with intelligent-sounding nonsense syllables, and I think, "What a relief that the audience realizes this is a joke, rather than not having the fun intended." I wake, having INTENDED to be up at 6:30, at 7:15AM.
VIENNA-KRAKOW DREAMS 7/9-23/01
WED, 7/11/01: Up at 12:12AM to type Dream A in file 8. DREAM A: I'm celebrating a victory with a small group: we have the "R" on our ticket, which seems to mean we cooperated or came into action three times, more than anyone else, so we get the prize. A small ceremony makes us feel accomplished. Up at 5:19 to type Dream B. DREAM B: 5:19AM: Don M. is visiting me, and I'm trying to make breakfast, asking him what he'd like: "A BLT." "Sorry, I don't have any B." But I have to explain that that means bacon. I look in my fridge and I have a variety of salads (as at dinner last night), and some tarts and a few sweet rolls, one of which he asks me to toast, and I can't imagine putting it into the microwave, so I put the bottom toward the coils of a regular toaster, hoping that the melting syrup won't mess up the bottom of the rack. Then the phone rings about 8:30, and it can't be a friend so early, and it's a professional who's heard about my selling some kind of insurance, and he's willing to look at the application, which would give me a nice commission, so I ask if I couldn't call him back in a few hours, since I'm in the middle of another engagement. Don sort of disappears, and the phone rings AGAIN with a speculative client, but when I explain some of the possibilities, he doesn't seem interested, and as in a TV program, I can see him wander off from the phone, leaving it unhooked in the middle of his front yard, and I finally hang up and the TV program continues a few days later to see a kid on a tractor coming toward his front yard, evidently with the idea of finding his telephone and prompting him to phone me back, since I had pissed him off by not copying down his name exactly---asking him to repeat it---and his address, something involving "pineapple," and he was clearly not pleased with my speed of transcription and uninterested, therefore, in any offer from me, but I still hoped he might see the advantages of my financial offers and call me back, since I'd never gotten him to give me his phone number to call him back.
7/13/01: 7:42AM: DREAM C: I'm lying on the floor, naked, next to some woman I'm staying with, but we're comfortable with each other's nudity (like Ken and me). But then some guy comes in while I'm reading the Sunday Times (which surprises me by having comics and a Parade magazine rather than the Book Review section) and starts making love to her, so I discreetly get up and go to my room, where I'm surprised to hear a baby crying in the next one, and in my own find a small boy, sulking, whom I seem to remember as some former visitor in a family I don't particularly like, so I mumble hello to him and he leaves, but there's an older brother who's even more hostile, and suddenly the room is filled with other people trying to make breakfast, and Aunt Helen is pulling apart a piece of fruit to show that it's rotten inside, and someone else talks of a family who'd been living with terrible health conditions and even worse food, and I hope we're not going to have some sort of nutritional disaster, and wake up to find that in the half-hour between 7:03-7:33AM I'd had this elaborate dream.
7/14/01: DREAM D: 5:59AM: First, left heel hurts AWFULLY when I walk to john! 1) I'm back at IBM working on a job-card program from a desk facing a second desk in the room that appears to be unused, which in turn is next to a desk that appears to be an unused EXECUTIVE'S desk, and late in the dream I debate turning my desk around so it at least faces the door. I'm working, I think in the dream, under Herman W. or Frank M., and I debate having a meeting with him to clarify my position in my job: I'm to complete the job-card program, but with the cooperation of the future users, who will understand each step of the transition, tests, usages, and purposes of the job cards. I think of clearing my desk of all unnecessary jobs, past trials, obsolete paperwork, and false starts. I think of calling a meeting with everyone to explain the new system to them. But first I DO have to clean my desk, knowing drawers are to be dusted, recent tests to be checked, and management to be checked to ensure that current needs are met and near-future requirements can be pre-included. I feel on the verge of starting on this huge project when, without transition, I'm thrown into the middle of 2) sitting in a meeting room in a square of four of us, but there may be more behind us, listening, willing to be influenced by the results of the talk among us. Facing me, as my partner in the left pair of the four, is George P., who's been connected with some new spiritual movement LIKE Actualism, obviously dream-based on Actualism, but not ACTUALLY Actualism, though he confesses with mock-modesty that he's been connected with it for 25 years, only two years more than my 23, yet he seems internally torn about whether it's REAL or not. On the one hand he professes absolute belief, yet there seem to be fears, uncertainties, doubts that he's afraid to admit, and part of my thinking is to "help" him, though possibly I want to usurp his "most-taught" position for myself. We talk, some of the others are impressed with us (they admit to lesser levels of learning than those we've attained), and all listen to us, maybe sensing some conflict growing between us. To amplify a point, I pick up an antique circuit board: a framed glass in which I know the elements of a core-memory are embedded, and that electric current is flowing through the frame and that the current in the "glass" is the energy that maintains the memory in the storage-elements in it (so tiny as to be invisible), and that when I SQUEEZE the frame so that the glass shifts slightly in it, I'm infused with part of the energy, which may make me more powerful or possibly marginally insane. HOWEVER, as I squeeze the glass-frame, the dark street ahead, canopied in overarching leaves rather like the "solid-arch-as-leaves" arcades in the gardens of Schönbrunn two (or three?) days ago, suddenly LIGHTS UP LIKE A STAR-FIELD, with uncountable points of ilumination that make the arch-of-street breathtakingly beautiful. I ask the others around me, knowing they don't see it, to verify how glorious it is, to acknowledge that I see this glory and they don't, and that clearly I'm superior in knowledge, perception, and advancement to them. I squeeze the frame in an ecstasy of vision, and then release it for the tree-arches to fall into their normal darkness. I KNOW that my powers are real, KNOW that I should "help" George P. resolve his conflicts, GLORY in my advancement and power, and wake still bathed in the brilliance of the street-arch and firm in my knowledge of my own superiority. The room is QUITE light, Ken lies curled with his ears protected from my snoring with his pillow, and I AGONIZE as I step on my left heel, limping, wondering if I can even WALK today, and go into the bathroom to pee, can't shit, and type all this until 6:15, happy to have had a real DOOZY of a dream after a relatively long period of "nothing-much" dreams.
7/16/01: DREAM E: 7:39AM: 1) I'm taking my laptop in its yellow envelope out of my shoulder bag and inadvertently hit a "new" button on the lower left which scrolls through a sort of ALT-B set of capabilities: accounting programs and scientific calculations and tax helpers which name themselves on a steel plate that appears across the bottom of the keyboard, and it starts printing out on a thin steel plate that rises out of the top of the letter-display, all of which I knew nothing about before, and I try to push it back into the top and it blurs into a bluish smear which I presume I can wipe off, and start fresh with new calculations, amazed that I hadn't discovered these capabilities before this. 2) I'm on vacation on some tiny, seldom-visited island in the South Pacific, and go to an ocean-side cliff to see a group of women preparing some kind of ceremony below: building fires in small pits near the beach, and carrying around their odd homemade products (what look like leather-bound briefcases with what could only be clocks encased on top in lunes of leather, and I wonder how they could get the raw materials for any of the components of these odd, identical, souvenir thingies). Back in my bedroom, I'm annoyed to see dozens of tiny black antlike bugs crawling along the side of my bed, hoping that my travel-mate, unseen but a sort of combination of John A. and Ken L., hasn't noticed them yet because he would be very upset by their presence. Then I try to go to the john, and there are two large turds that haven't been flushed down yet, and I try pushing on a brown pad which would be between the legs of anyone sitting on the pot, which I think is the flush, and nothing happens. A bit later I find that the flush is a metal switch at the other end of the toilet unit, and it DOES manage to flush everything down. Not very happy about this odd tourist location in the dream. Finish this at 7:48 and return to file 1.
7/18/01, WED: Wake at 5:14 VERY erect with memory of some kind of dream with Madge M. wanting me to make her pregnant, and I think that I'm so hard and close to coming that I might actually do it. Wake at 6:18 with a vivid dream and get up at 6:21 to go to the john with my notes and laptop to record it: I'm enrolled in some fancy IBM-type seminar in what seems to be a cafeteria-cum-conference room: I hang my coat on a hanger on a nail in the corner of the wall and ignore the food service because I've had breakfast, and sit at one of two or three rather crowded tables for maybe 20 each on both sides of the table, listening to a tiny woman like Joan Anne D. talk about new computer or programming developments. We don't seem to be taking notes or asking questions, but after the session we sit around chatting and I survey the group with satisfaction: I'm about the oldest one there, some of the men are attractive and none of the women are real dogs, and the conversations seem friendly and open. Someone makes a remark about "at least [not being] 75 years old," and there's a rather embarrassed silence until someone next to me asks, with real curiosity, "You're not 75, are you?" and I reply, simply, "No," and the group seems relieved. "Closer than you, though," and everyone laughs. I think that the following days will be pleasant enough, and I retrieve my coat from the nail on the wall and walk outside, where it's raining. I think I might as well get groceries on the way home because it's the last thing I have to do, besides returning the library book that I'd been planning to bring back anyway, and then I'll be totally caught up. In the rain I'm very conscious of my shoes' solid purchase on the sometimes-paved and sometimes-dirt paths on which the water is flowing on my way home, looking down at my very narrow new-suit dark-blue trousers and black-leather shoes, thinking that everyone's dressed so casually that I'll be more informal tomorrow and won't have to worry about wrinkling my new suit. Someone had asked me what I was doing with IBM now, and I had replied that I was a freelance indexer, and she had exclaimed, "Extracting indexes!" with such amazement that I wondered whether I hadn't inadvertently used some kind of buzzword that implied I did more "scientific" work that I actually did. Pleased to be attending the conference.
7/19/01: DREAM F: 5AM: 1) I'm dealing with or describing some kind of "connecting jewelry" in which two earring-like sets of jewels have a hook on the "outer" edge onto which ANOTHER set of jewels can be attached, and on this set of jewels is a hook onto which a kind of "exponent" can be hooked, smaller than the original set, and these "exponents" can be concatenated into four or five tinier jewels, all connected with these hooks. 2) I'm at a wedding reception which is apparently hosted by someone like Madonna, and she moves through the rooms with vague displeasure because she seems not to like the husband-to-be, a rather tall, stout, clumsy, clown-like sort of guy, whom she seems to deem unworthy of the wife, who isn't in the dream. I think to ask her if my impression is right, but she's busy and moves into another room and I have to leave, so I never talk to her. 3) Maybe in the same party, or somewhere else, I feel a cramp coming to my left calf, and they look at me in concern, and I wake with a burgeoning cramp in my left calf. When I wake I see Ken going into the john, look at my watch to see that it's 4:58AM, and decide I have to pee and also take two aspirin to fend off what might be a slight headache due to the combination of boozes last night: the wine, the vodka followers, the apricot liquor, and the Malibu in the Square. End of DREAM F.
7/20/01: DREAM G: 8:57AM: I'm sitting in a bus across from what seem to be two brothers, one older and reasonably cute, the other fitted with a prosthetic support which pads arms and hands and feet, with a monkeylike mask over his face that shows only his true eyes, attractive with long black lashes. I suppose that he has some horrible disfigurement (e.g. the real Elephant Man we saw pass the Stephan’s Dom with a hideously overhanging right-half of his upper lip, and some horrid bump on his forehead; and yesterday's enlarged red upper lip over an enormous birthmark that extended over his chin and neck, awful even though he has attended by his attractive wife and small son). The younger one talks animatedly, ignoring my looking at him, and the older seems to instruct him, or direct him, constantly, and I’m really curious as to what he might look like underneath. End of DREAM G.
7/21/01: DREAM H: 6:32AM: I'm taking charge of restoring parts of a large old house I don't really own, but maybe am one of the children of one of the owners. I first start looking at some old trees growing around the house and climb up and put my foot against old dead limbs, which then come crashing down to the ground. One branch seems to contain some flexible life as I lift it away from its contact with another branch, and I look closely at the moist groove from which I removed it and there doesn't seem to be any small creeping bugs which I would associate with decay, so maybe the greenness and flexibility will return fully. Another branch, however, has amalgamated with the rotten wood of a window frame, so that the frame tears away from the wall with its window still intact, and something will have to be done with a new frame. Another rotten frame just collapses on itself: the top ornament sitting on the bottom sill. Surely (don't call me Shirley) all the restoration around Cracow contributes here. I move into a sort of family room with an angry woman who shouts that I'm ruining the place, but I adamantly maintain it's for the best: better now than later for these importuning tree-limbs. I actively ask for support, saying there may be three needing replacement, and I can phone a hardware store now, on Friday (though it's really, now, Saturday), so we only have to plastic-wrap over the opening for one night, a night that's not terribly cold. Do I have any support from the other responsible males in the family? An older one turns away in disgust, but a younger one reluctantly offers his hand to shake, and I'm disappointed to feel a very weak (tactile sensation in a dream!?) and uncommitted contact with an unconvinced, soft, unclasping hand, and mutter something like, "Yeah, thanks," and he turns away, though not totally against me. Wake at 6:26 and lie for a bit, then up at 6:31AM and bring this in while I pee for a second time after my first this morning at 2:28, almost 3.5 hours, just as this ends at almost 8 hours for me and just over 8 hours for Ken. End of DREAM H.
7/22/01, DREAM I, 5AM: I'm talking with Dad, who's about 40, young, with that smiling, red-faced look he had when he'd freshly shaved but was still slightly drunk. We’re watching a new movie based on old movies, and I say he'd like watching All About Us, on which THIS movie was based, which in turn was based on a movie that came out that he was sure to know called All About You. He expresses doubt that he'd like it, but I insist a number of times that "if you liked All About You, you should really rent All About Us, because it's based on the same movie, and this movie, which you like, is ALSO based on it.” He smiles at me and shakes his head slightly---and I note that I'd had a dream about MOM just before my LAST going-to-NYC flight and wondered if it might be an omen (except there, I think, I dreamed about Mom one night and Dennis on a previous or following night?), which I mainly disregarded during the actual flight, which of course came out OK. End of DREAM I.
END OF VIENNA-KRAKOW DREAMS
7/27/01, 6:50AM: I'm working on the first day in a new office, and everything is in a complete mess: papers everywhere, nothing where it should be, no one seems to know anything about anything important. I've somehow gotten a magazine photo of a very sexy guy, almost naked, and I quickly realize that I've left it on the top of my desk, propped up like a family photo, and anyone who wants to see it can make whatever conclusions he or she wants. I have to make a very important phone call, and one of the first things asked me is my zip code. I don't know the zip code of this office. I ask people around me, and they don't know. I ask the person on the phone to hold, and I go looking for some correspondence which would contain the number, but can only get something in Chinese which seems to have it in characters other than English, though I think they are OK until I come to a triangle, which doesn't compute. I'm very concerned because the person has been waiting on the phone for about fifteen minutes when someone comes up with a card that supposedly has the number, but it starts with an 8, which I can't figure could be in New York, which should start with a 1, though this might be in some special area, like Mildred's NYC zip code, which is somehow out of sequence. Suddenly I'm "up the street" in an ancillary office where someone finally writes the number down on a tiny white dog-eared card, and I'm walking back down the street to the office when I start searching through my pockets, bits of paper flying off in the breeze, and my blue jacket flapping in the wind, and I begin to think that I've LOST that little piece of paper. I search more and more frantically through my pockets as it begins to rain, which blurs the numbers on other pieces of paper I bring up to see if it isn't the one I'd agonized so long to get, and I'm even finding magnetic-strip cards like subway Metro cards and credit cards which are getting wet in the rain and probably ruined, and my clothes are getting wetter and wetter as it's raining harder and harder, and there's no chance I can even get the last block and a half back to the office without being soaked, and I STILL don't have the code that I went to get, and I'm crying aloud with total frustration and bitter agony of how could this have HAPPENED to me, wet and miserable and missing what I'd gone out of my way to get, trying SO hard to be a success at my new job but making a TOTAL mess of it, and I'm at the ultimate in misery when I wake up and lie there, feeling the breeze from the floor fan, looking at the clock to see that it's 6:49AM and I've slept through the night for the first time since my return from Vienna, and I get up to type this out even before peeing, seeing that it's the first dream I've HAD since Sunday in Vienna, and finish this at 7:03AM, ready to start my fourth day home.
7/31/01: 6:15AM: I'm trying to have sex with Joe E., but we start outside and when I want to go to my bedroom, which is in a separate house, like in the back lot of a brownstone, in the dimness I espy four kids who have sneaked inside to watch sitting on a small stairway going up to some other part of the house. I chase them away and try to get some privacy by unhooking heavy curtains that vertically line the doors and windows and pull them all together to make it dark and secure inside. But then I look at the small alcove of the dining room and "Madame" (who owns the front house) is sitting with a group of tenants, seemingly wanting to hold a meeting right then! I boldly address her, saying, "As PROPRIETOR of this space, I demand the right to throw you out when I want to." She knows I'm in my rights and can't complain, but she does anyway. I wake quite hard, but don't do anything about it for about an hour, then jerk off, finishing this at 9AM.
8/14/01: 9AM: I'm lying down, as if I've been customarily sleeping there, in a corner of a group of people who might be congregating atop the front pews of a large open-air church, or in a square at a major intersection of a large city, and a number of things are happening at the same time: 1) A section of seats to my right has to organize itself around some kind of leader, but he seems to be taking advantage of his group's helplessness and not really assisting them but exploiting them, and we all wait for them to organize themselves "more orthogonally" in their section to become more orderly and "responsible." 2) A remarkable flying machine is circling quite low in the air around this major intersection, where the two "pilots" are posturing on white-clothed tables to get the attention of onlookers below. The aerostat gives the impression of a large plate with a helicopter-propeller the same size of the plate whirling almost noiselessly above it, so innocuously spinning that it seems to represent no danger to anyone below it, whirling so quickly that it doesn't obscure the view of onlookers when it comes between them and the brown-suited "pilots" walking, posing, and standing in various perfectly secure positions atop the tables as the flying machine tips and loops like a Frisbee circling the intersection, and even though I try to draw the attention of people around me to the phenomenon, no one seems very interested aside from myself. 3) A group of brightly costumed ethnic dancers "from Santiago, Chile," (as they announce as they finish their dancing and prepare to head for another street show elsewhere), have been performing all along the length of the double row of pews at the front of this church, to some kind of canned music, and we're expected to applaud their dancing, but it's not clear whether they expect donations: I'm lying down so I can't see if anyone is collecting money, and the woman on the extreme left of the dancers, right in front of me, is red-faced and slightly sweaty from the exertions of the jota, or whatever it is, but she's smiling and seemingly not interested in whether anyone gives them money or not, though clearly they don't seem wealthy on their own despite the richness of the embroidery on their red-and-black costumes. They're about to move off and don't seem disturbed that no one thinks of paying them, though the woman’s smile becomes SLIGHTLY strained toward the end of the dream. I'd smoked a bidi while cumming before going to bed about 1AM this morning, and had sort of looked forward to an unusual dream, but this was not exactly the kind I'd been anticipating.
8/20/01: 8:15AM: Melange of dreams: 1) I'm sharing a bedroom with Ken L., and his clothes are strewn over more desks and tables than mine are. 2) I'm in a public bathroom overseen by a military woman, yet kids are jerking off in pairs, others are making lewd jokes and gestures, and I hope I don't get a hard-on. 3) Due to my O. appointment, I've put gauze pieces into the sides of my big-toenails, and when I take them out they've become deeply rooted and one side looks pretty good, but the other permits a clear serum to ooze out in a surprisingly great quantity, and I can't manage to bring it to my nose to see if it smells of corruption or not, and I'm concerned about what he'll say.
8/21/01: 8:15AM: I'm attending some IBM-type special-training session, but I'm not making any connection at all with the other guys there, so much so that at some kind of graduation ceremony I'm barely dressed for it, and when it's over I'm surprised to see an audience, mostly women, waiting for their husbands to finish so that they can be congratulated and hug their kids and go off to their cars to return home. One fellow whom I thought was sort of friendly to me greets his rather pretty wife, but they completely ignore me: I thought at least he would introduce me. I go into some kind of closet and have to paw through the coats and briefcases of the others to find my jacket and leave. Quite dissociated poor-in-feeling dream, intensified by logy feeling on waking.
8/26/01: 9:48AM: Wake from an extraordinarily detailed "domestic" bidi-dream: I'm visiting (maybe even PART of) an expansive apartment inhabited by a very large (9-10?) number of quite young people, all cooperating and moving together and making sense out of a chaotic layout: the kitchen has counters and sinks, many of which are filled with water, and in one of which I shut off the constantly running hot-water tap with a sense of accomplishment, though I don't go under the pile of suds to find what's below. A counter supports what might be some kind of nutritious lasagna, but on looking closer it's an enormous multilayered cake with icing oozing out of some of the middle sections, and I sort of remember we had that for dessert last night, and I vaguely wonder why it's keeping so well without any protective wrappings, but I figure the kitchen is very humid so it won't dry out, and there are a lot of people nibbling about, so it'll be gone quite soon. I'm being followed around (AH, just remembered a PRIOR section: I'm in a living room rather like 1221 Dietz's and I enter it to find Rita [or a young man somewhat like her] sleeping on the sofa, and through the front door comes a moviemaker with an attached camera that he maneuvers around the room like he's shooting some kind of nouveau-documentary, swooping the camera down to the floor and around the walls and up to the ceiling, and I interpose my face in his sweeping shot and ask what he's doing, wondering if he'll edit me out of his final version or if he'll just leave it in. He never really responds, but he's enough like Brad Pitt that I find him quite attractive and like to follow him around. Another Brad Pitt-like young man seems to be interested in me, but I appear to find it useful to ignore him as much as I can, so I keep moving out of his path and his attempts to strike up a conversation with me. I'm getting more and more desirous of breakfast, for which I only need a pan in which to warm up the water for my oatmeal, but the flowerpot which had been used for heating some other water has been used, or broken, or has lost whatever it was that kept the water from dripping out of the hole in the bottom, and I dream-logically go hunting for another clean flowerpot that I can use in its stead. I come to a partition between two rooms that's about seven feet high, made out of some plasterboard like a stage flat, but the space between it and the wall is rigid and not to be expanded, and is clearly too small for my plump body and unshrinkable head to pass through, so I climb on a chair to look over the partition and see what might be flowerpots dangling from some kind of tarpaulin suspended from the ceiling, but when I reach toward one that might be promising, its broken side dislodges and crashes to the floor. Try to get some kind of rationale about the movements around the apartment: people going here and there, many starting to pile up dinnerware and crockery from the washing-up the night before (could this be connected to the 8-9 of us at Stephanie's for slides last night?), putting plates in stacks on racks around the kitchen, and I wonder how everyone knows how to put what where, so that eventually the kitchen is possible to move around in without interfering with anyone else's activities and STILL make my breakfast before it gets to be noon, but then I start to wake up and lie there thinking that this has been one of the mildest and least traumatic of many bidi-dreams, but I still feel hung over from last night's boozings.
8/27/01: 7:47AM: I'm AGAIN in a large household which is partly a shop, and I'm going to clean my little section, but I need a dust cloth, so I go to a box with lots of them in it, and get out a piece of blue-and-white toweling material and have to shake out many tooth-key chains and other things sticking to it before I can use it. Getting back to my area I go down narrow steps and dislodge a name-plate-size tile depicting an airplane, which slides to the bottom of the stairs. I retrieve it and return it to the saleslady, imperious, sitting at the head of the stairs, and she makes the dismissive remark that I don't even know where I moved it from, and I say that SHE can now put it back, but she's smiling nicely. Back in my area, I see that I can clean off the bottoms of some things, but worry about raising dust that'll have to settle before I can do it thoroughly, and I'm reminded that I've almost caught up on my stack of things to do. Wake and want to pee, but get the laptop and record this to 7:55 before doing so.
9/9/01: 9:09AM: [Well, it's actually 9:14AM, but I couldn't resist the quadruple nines, and I'm only off by five minutes.] I've just moved in with a lover who's a combination of Fred, Rolf, Joe E., and a younger, hunkier man I haven't met yet but hope to. It's the first time I've seen the place, and I wander from huge room to huge room, marveling at all the furniture HE has, and vaguely recall the Queer as Folk episodes where the older doctor puts the young move-in's furniture and souvenirs in storage: I don't seem to see any of MY stuff anywhere. HIS bedroom is full of period furniture and the walls are lined with case after case of dolls, soldiers, and other miniature people that seem to be his collecting mania, and I wonder how livable that room will actually be. I intend to see MY bedroom, but some workmen come in to quibble about some architectural detail, and I recall a VIVID episode in which I get up to put on my clothes, and a sheet that I'd been sitting on becomes stuck to my backside, and from a combination of what I can sense of the clothing hiding my back, and a glimpse of a mirror that implies that I've got the sheet wrapped around me, rather than just hanging on by happenstance, I finish dressing and turn to observe this interaction: it seems that a small tubular fitting was supposed to be gray and is actually black, though it has more to do with a capability symbolized by an internal gritty material in the tube, which my nameless lover is scraping out to prove HIS point that it doesn't work, while it actually seems to be proving THEIR point that it's the only choice possible and regardless of what he THINKS they agreed upon, this is actually the best resolution, and (maybe to save face) he ends up admitting that his feelings about the selection of the pieces have actually been mollified by how it operates when it's in place. The workmen vanish (they don't depart, they're just not there anymore) and I might have him to myself for some nookie (when was the last time I used THAT word?), but suddenly two of his nieces and nephews are sitting around a table engrossed in conversation with him, and in comes their mother, (his sister, whom I don't think I've ever MET before), and she seems to ignore me (rather as Marina ignored me when she visited Sherryl yesterday when I was there) in attending to the conversation of her children and talking to him and fussing with a camera that she doesn't actually seem to be using. I wonder when she's going to start noticing me, and what she'll think of me: before in the dream I was younger and thinner, but now in the dream I've aged and am bearded and possibly older-looking than she is, which isn't good, because her brother is younger and rather good-looking and she may feel I'm not worth his affections. Forgot a moment when I looked out the window at an incipient sunset (reminding me of my thoughts about castle-dwellers in the Middle Ages who ALWAYS could see their sunrises and sunsets from their hilltops with no obstructing buildings, as most ALL buildings in NYC obstruct sunrises and sunsets from almost all OTHER buildings in NYC, making me appreciate my move MORE), thinking that THAT is a good facet of this new apartment, loaded with his as-yet-unpacked stuff, and I've STILL not seen anything of MY furniture or books anywhere!
9/16/01: 8:55AM: First set of dreams after World Trade Center catastrophe seems to have nothing to do with it: 1) I'm in some sort of parochial school; my teacher is a nun-like person who seems to be a combination of my St. Mary's French teacher Miss Someone-whose-name-I-can't-remember-now, like Ruth, or French, and Michelle Morgan with her sultry half-closed eyes; and we've been given an art lesson in which we have to either paint a picture or go over an existing one to make some kind of religious statement. I choose an image of a man sitting at a desk with people behind him proclaiming some kind of political position, and what I hope to do is fill in certain areas with pencil on a Saran-wrap-like overlay that would make it appear that the activities of the people behind him would seem to be those of the students in our classroom demonstrating Christian ideals in some ways. My idea seemed good at the beginning, but now things are falling apart: I wrinkled the Saran wrap and mixed it up with lots of other things in my shoulder bag in preparation for taking it home to finish there. I wanted to fold the whole thing into an envelope with an explanation of what the picture was supposed to convey, and when I go to a kitchen-cabinet in the service area of the classroom, my teacher opens a middle door to reveal a packet of business-size envelopes and gives me one (rather like Sherryl directing me to HER envelopes in her apartment), but I somehow loose it and go back to get another one. I open cabinet after cabinet, seemingly prying into her personal effects, but can't find the envelopes, until she moves some things from the counter and opens the doors in the middle and gives me another envelope with a tolerant smile. At one point it was 9:15PM, and I really SHOULD go home, but I find a frame for my presentation, which the original cardboard-art-base fits in width, and I think: "Oh, I can get a piece of obscuring cardboard, mask out the man at the desk with the cardboard on which I'll print some kind of explanatory legend, and then stretch the Saran wrap over the frame and fasten it in the back with adhesive tape, which will keep the pencil-work right over the affected areas---it might all be possible." But when I go back to my work-area, or desk, they're reconstructing the area RIGHT AT THAT TIME, and they've moved my stuff somewhere else: a workman points to a high shelf over dry, yellow earth and says he put my stuff up there, and I do one of my dream-frustration agony-dances and almost cry-scream: "You've taken my tape measure, my adhesive tape, my pencils, my shoulder bag---how can I continue with ANYTHING?!" He mollifies me in some way and without transition I'm sitting in a crowded classroom-turned-into-TV-viewing-room where they're showing some kind of mystery involving a woman getting ready for bed and the camera pans over the room to focus on hands pushing a man from behind another bed, guiding him effortlessly over the intervening space and beds to be on top of the till-now-unaware woman, and I figure I MUST stay to see how this turns out, and the smile of the bulky young man in front of me causes me to become aware that he's actually unzipped my pants and laid my cock and balls out onto my trouser-front without my being aware of it! Other young men are playing around in the row ahead of me, so it seems to be OK (like the two guys necking in front of the corner newspaper shop last night), so I reach into the crotch of a guy in front of me that I'm not very interested in and feel a semi-hard needle-dick with floppy skin that's not been wet with precum, so he's not very interesting, and suddenly the wrong people seem to be interested in our activities, so I quickly zip up, hoping nothing will be blamed on me. Somehow I know it's 1:15AM (the time I got home this morning), I'm not going to get much sleep tonight if I still have to go home and get back to school early this morning, not to mention trying to finish my art project, which is somehow connected through the schoolroom quality of the viewing room I'm sitting in with what appears to be a group of male students from the same school. I wake with great uncertainty, not really erect, at 8:45AM and lie there, now with thoughts of the catastrophe in my mind, marveling at the lack of connection with the dream, and get up to pee and put on my bathrobe and finish this page at 9:15AM, eyes allergy-itchy and tired.
9/17/01: 9:30AM: Most fragments forgotten, but I recall knowing that John and I have to spend one or two days "later this week" in Hemlock Hall or Garnet Hill, and I phone them, recognizing from the tab of one of my desk-drawer file-folder dividers that the area code is 605, making a reservation for a double room for that time, but then later realize that John is already UP there for some reason, during the beginning of the week, and that HE probably already has the room reserved, and now should I phone them back and cancel my reservation, possibly to incur a cancellation charge, or should I just wait till I get up there and hope that THEY realize later that this is a duplicate reservation and cancel it themselves. [Hoped that some other fragment would float back as I typed that: something about books or shopping or some other triviality of which the other fragments had been comprised, but nothing comes. Guess I'll go to record current thoughts on NOTEBOOK:9/17/01, where the last entry was 9/7, just ten days ago and outside the range of the hideous World Trade Center disaster.
9/18/01: 1) 3:15AM: I'm riding in some kind of military boat in the entrance to a floating harbor: what appears to be an immense dry dock is floating in the middle of the ocean, rising and falling ponderously in heavy seas while the passing waves show enormous holes in the mile-long pontoons. As our little craft turns slowly, the view is alternately of the thousands of chip-like ships similar to ours cornered in the protective sides of this leviathan and of the raging waves tearing at the enormous rises and falls of the edges of the shelter, and I wonder WHY I haven't brought along my camera to try to capture these grandiose scenes. My two companions are lying on their backs, wearing only the smallest loose white shorts, and somehow the reflection of the farther body is very elongated, but I know it’s the better of the two, and would love to caress it, and then I glance to the side to see that the fellow in the middle HAS turned "casually" and put his arm over the other's chest, so I feel that I would be able to do the same without arousing suspicion. 2) 8:50AM: I've been waiting in a doctor's office (like T.'s, yesterday), but it closes at 3PM and (as at T.’s) I don't have an appointment but am waiting to be seen anyway. AT 3PM the office has emptied except for a very few, and I've been reading to pass the time, but then the lights dim and finally go out completely, leaving us to sit in the dark while I fume and debate shouting out, "Thanks for the consideration!" Then the door to the office opens and a doctor who looks like T. calls out "L.?" I pause in amazement, and he tries another name "Pope?" and I respond: "HIP has REALLY messed up: not only did they not give me an appointment, but they gave the wrong NAMES." As I follow him down a dim hallway to a back room, his long white hair looks almost gathered into a bun at the back, but it's clear to me that it's the right doctor. Amazingly, the back room has a number of chairs and tables scattered about, filled with older people all busily opening small bottles, like perfume vials, and pouring the liquids into their open, staring eyes, and I figure I'll soon be one of them doing this as he pads his income by taking on enormous numbers of patients, and overseeing their treatments, after normal closing hours at 3PM (which of course are banking hours, while the clerks work afterward to 5PM, as I'd noted a few days ago when thinking about banks). I find a chair among the few empty ones and sit at a table in the dimness, wondering what the order of his dealing with these people will be, and if I'll have to wait until he's checked out ALL of these before he'll see me, since clearly these are here for checkups. But instead of T.'s giving only a glance into my mouth to evaluate a possible procedure on my floppy, fatty uvula, he'll be looking into my eyes with an ophthalmoscope he's carrying from one table to another, checking for whatever it would be that would require me to start washing out my eyes with whatever substances these others are using. Wake and think idly about my upcoming trip on October 10 and the dangers of flying, and about the things I have to do today, and come out with my heel-support slippers and nothing else to finish typing and printing this out at 9:06AM, but still tired (bed 1:15AM).
9/29/01: 10:25AM: Little remembered except that I'm wandering around Joe E.'s large apartment, as if we'd had some appointment that he's forgotten about, or as if (as is the fact) I'd been out of his acquaintance for many years and didn't know any of his current friends: I can't quite find my place, and everyone's clustered in groups talking, or around two cloth-covered tables with a brunch buffet set out on them that I'm clearly not to partake in, and I wander around, getting ignored by everyone besides Joe and completely snubbed by him, as if he were thinking, "He KNOWS he shouldn't be here at this time, so why doesn't he just LEAVE; I'm certainly not going to take the trouble to even TELL him he should go." I finally find my belongings, which seems also to involve putting on some kind of bathrobe or raincoat which covers more of my body (which should have been not quite so casually dressed---or undressed--- to be encountering these rather formal and stiff people crowding his apartment), and get ready to leave, though I don't have a specific idea of exactly where I'm going or how I'll get there. Possibly reflecting a sense of unreality I have with the continuing onslaught of images of the destruction and the dead (like outside the firehouse last night) from the World Trade Center catastrophe.
SOUTH PACIFIC DREAMS 10/10-11/18/01
10/14/01: DREAM from this morning: with someone like a young John C. who LOVES to be sucked off by me, and two other hunks, and the four of us have a GREAT time, almost pre-AIDS, and I wake erect for the first time in ages.
10/15/01: 12:34AM: Woke at 12:29 with dream: I'm in New York, wanting to go out on a Saturday night, but I can't find the movie listings I want, and can't remember if the Thalia is still open, or what the name of the theater nearby is that shows old double features like the Thalia used to. Think vaguely of going with Charles, but without transition I'm in an apartment which is somewhat like mine on Hicks, but it's Dennis's apartment, and I know he has an index to finish which is only thirty pages to type, which he can (in dreams, anyway) do in half an hour, and I say to him, "It's only thirty pages," but he reprimands me: "There are different ways to have to type thirty pages," and I prepare to leave by climbing up on a bookcase something like an enlarged version of my black index/paper holder-shelves, getting ready to (crazy as it sounds) lie down and go to sleep, but when I reach the top, hanging precariously, taking care that my weight doesn't pull the unsupported, un-held-to-wall bookcase from toppling AWAY from the wall, I find "my" shelf too narrow, so I climb down, saying sheepishly to Dennis, "I forgot I don't do that anymore." "What?" he asks, puzzled, and I can only repeat: "I forgot I don't do that anymore; you see, I CAN change." And leave.
10/16/01: 5:25: I'm watching a play involving a couple on a bed, right in front of me, and she says something about a "stubby dick" to which the cute male lead takes humorous offense, but he removes his shorts anyway under the sheets, though from my angle I can see that he keeps his hand over his genitals, but later I can see the edge of his seemingly shaved pubic hair, dark against his pale skin, and a few tempting morsels of genital, and wake faintly aroused, but for some reason (news of more anthrax yesterday morning?) I'm obsessing about the WTC catastrophe and bioterrorism and anxiety about my five upcoming trip-segments into unknown territory.
10/19/01: Pee at 5:05 after a sexy dream leaves me rigid and wishing for privacy.
10/20/01: 7:26AM: Dream 1: I'm holding a beautiful blond body from behind, running my hands completely up and down his front, and he gets VERY stiff, his huge cock flopping grandly up and down as he writhes in my grasp, and I'm sure, though the coloration isn't right, it's somehow associated with Jean-Pierre. Dream 2: I'm teaching a beginning class in Actualism, and when I look behind a curtain separating me from the person on my left, I find it's Joan Ann D., and I say that SHE can answer questions if they have any, and then a brainstorm hits: "Joan Ann, would you mind giving the intro yourself, since you're the real expert here," and I have the idea she's glad to be asked.
10/22/01: 4:17AM: Wake with MELANGE of dreams: 1) I'm in a play, reading my script from long, narrow sheets of paper, leaning my face against what might be the bars of a baby's crib which form part of the fourth wall, trying to give the impression of great sadness, but then the possible producers of THIS show are elated by the news that the network has renewed their contract to do a revival of a very successful work, like Oklahoma!, and so obviously they won't do OUR show, though we still have a chance to produce it independently. 2) A small restaurant shows very-short movies, but some of them are classics, like 1930s French films or early American silent comedies, and their schedule is printed in very small type on sheets high up on the ticket-seller's window, so it's hard to read. One film ends, cut to the very last moment of the final scene, and another film begins instantly, making me wish they'd left a BIT of breathing space between. 3) I've been having lunch with Marj M., who's moving into another apartment, and as we go by taxi from our last night's stay in one of a series of TINY rooms constructed by a proud hotelier who buys out window frontages and builds little lanai-like rows of temporary shelters, and we're passing his 35th and 36th numbered apartment, marveling at the adjoining furniture stores whose displays are under wide eaves, protecting them from the rain (though many are displaying leather furniture that's actually being rained on), Marj looks out to see her brass-knobbed expensive bedroom suite being moved in in the rain, and she rushes over to supervise it to make sure it's not wet or damaged in moving it through narrow doors. I vaguely think, "Now she'll have room to let friends sleep over, though she's not the type to share her living space easily."
10/24/01: 5:38: A complex, confused dream: I'm touring London with Sherryl, and we pass a corner where a crying woman is consoling a tiny woman with some dreadful disease under a scrawled sign detailing their disasters, and Sherryl is greatly affected and starts crying, and they're obviously moving lots of others who are passing money to them. We climb onto the scaffolding under which they stand, but then have to come down at the same corner, and I apologize to Sherryl for making her confront these two women again. Then we're riding on a series of very crowded trams, and each time I hear the clicks of the conductor's ticket-punch I'm reminded that I didn't get a new ticket, as needed, but we're coming to the stop and I always flee the coach almost before we stop to get away from the conductor's fine. Great confusion about time: it's DARK here at 1PM in the afternoon, light some other inappropriate time, but as the next tram's headlights illuminate the desert sands over which we're traveling (in London??) I think there's something charming about "traveling in the dark in afternoon London." We pass a corner on which a series of modernistic buildings have been constructed by some famous architect (like Frank Gehry) under the influence of some famous artist (like the guy who did Where the Wild Things Are), with buildings in the shapes of Alice in Wonderland Cheshire Cats or Mad Hatters, or built around roller coasters, all brightly lit and colored. "Oh, I've always wanted to see these, and here we are," I shout with glee. As we get off the trams, we're confronted with odd beggars and contortionists: the last is a French woman in elaborate boots slowly settling into a front-facing split on a rain-wet sidewalk, and I think it must be awfully uncomfortable for her both for the strain of the split and wetness of her underpinnings. Other details, all in London, escape me now at 5:55AM.
10/25/01: 5:13AM: Dream 1: I'm correcting a program deck of IBM cards, and some woman operator asks if I'm using line-orientation or code-orientation, and I don't know the difference, so I just say "My code 1 in column 80 means the line continues on the next card." When someone I'm training asks if I've made the corrections, I say I did, until I check and find that I'd not said that the rest of the first line was blank for the header card, so I have to make that correction, feeling stupid. Dream 2: I'm buying tickets for an amusement ride in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but realize that lots of rides are closed (indicated by black hoods over the kiosks that in some way represent the rides or concessions), and when I notice that some that had been open before are now closed, I go back to the originally open ticket booth to find that IT is now hooded, and I wonder if I'm going to be stuck with tickets I've already bought for rides that aren't even going to be open today. Wake with light coming in the porthole and see that it's 5:05AM, debate recording the dreams, but then do so, ending now at 5:20AM after an itty-bitty shitty.
10/26/01: 4:50: "Operatic" dream: I'm vacationing in some historic Polish city (too preserved to be Warsaw, too big to be Krakow) which I've never been in, but thankfully most people seem to speak English. I've had to dress quickly and for much of the time I'm barefoot, but toward the end I look down to make sure I'm wearing my sockless black-leather loafers. Somehow I fall in with a priestly looking older man with huge white beard and flaring black locks who's the prophet or spokesperson for some enormously popular, but underground, group, and I'm responsible for helping find a meeting room for tonight. We had had the top floor of some small hotel, but that just wouldn't have been large enough, and some facilitator says we should try "The City Hall Commons Room," of which I have no idea of the location. They somehow get "ahead" of me and I rush to catch up by trying the tram, but go TWO stops when I should have gone only ONE, but when I try the RETURN tram, the ONE stop puts me back where I started. I try to walk, but find myself at a famous "Brukke," a memorial to an old bridge AND an old river, an elaborate construction of ancient stones with modern windows into "history”: a rotating wooden waterwheel showing the "river bottom," and a wire-enclosed hunk of rock showing the "river side." I go "across" town to find a block-long ten-story octagonal monstrosity of an under-construction City Hall, but go into the "Opera" entrance, and think, "Well, I can see what's playing the seven days I'm here." I enter THROUGH the ground floor of the space, elaborate, though small, and I think prices might be cheap and this a good chance to catch up with opera. Three women throw a die to see which serves me, but none can speak English, pointing me to a pile of pink programs. One woman, dressed for evening, reads a pink program that seems to have a synopsis of last night's performance. I find a schedule and they're playing Cinderella for two nights, one night with a tab announcing "Richard Tucker," though I thought he was dead. The next three nights is Wohollozzek.... which is the abbreviated name of something about Halloween by an American composer, and I think it would be a pity NOT to hear it in English. I ask an elaborately dressed sentinel about a meeting "room for 100,000" and he seems to leave to find out for me, but never comes back. I feel my usual dream-frustration and finally wake after more complications I can't recall now.
10/29/01: 2:55AM: Dream 1: I'm on some Survivor-like quest for four specific items, and the first three are very easy, yet I find the fourth after other teams seem to have done so, though I try to make a better list than anyone before me has. Dream 2: I'm at a huge company, a combination of IBM and Holt, first having trouble with the elevators: I get on at 24 and hit 26 and it takes a LONG time to get there, then I can't find the right extension and it seems EVERYONE is having that problem but no one's doing anything about it, and I start making a list of names (like Fred does for Moorea) like "Bob Letterman" for coordination of projects, and "Richard Zooman" for primary specifications for this huge project, but at one point I'm talking to two handsome programmers and one starts manipulating my tits, and I try to think of something clever, like "If you don't stop that in two weeks, I'm going to report you," and am led to think that I might have an important part in the project if only I can figure out what it is, and then get recognized for HAVING that part.
10/30/01: Dream last night about fitting little wooden carriages to the backs of dogs so they could walk with more "delicacy" in some bizarre Japanese-like fashion sense.
10/31/01: 3:19AM: Wake with dream: I'm touring a kind of amusement park of exhibits, and a door CHANGES in front of me to become a kind of testimonial-hall for something like a war-crimes trial or atrocity hearing, with an audience of mostly defectives (cripples, deformed, mentally deficient, misshapen), but all of whom are life-or-death interested in these testimonies. A woman behind me asks, "Is this Thursday or Friday?" and I say, "Saturday," and she says, "One must hear a through line." People come and go in groups, or families---ALIENS might be a better way to characterize some in the audience, as if this were a horrifically detailed science-fiction movie about some cosmic genocide and its retributions. A noise VERY (in my head, of course) like my doorbell at Hicks Street wakes me.
11/12/01 [TUE, 11/13 here]: 4:32AM dreams 1) I'm attending some crowded seminar on Jewish extermination camps and am looking through files on IBM cards in somewhat alphabetical order, and see "Zolnerzak" at the top of a little sub-stack in a box when someone else wants to look at the very section I'm looking at, about which I make one of my typically acidulous remarks, and there are talks and meetings that seem important. 2) I have to get back into a college where I'm studying, and go around a long detour through bumpy roads that are very difficult to traverse (not REALLY like yesterday's trip into the interior), but like lots of dreams like this from the past I keep getting lost on roads that seem to take much longer than they should to traverse, and I know I have to take a particular inside stairway, but first I have to pass a number of office-doors where I hope to avoid a particular teacher, to whom I owe a term project that involves printing a computer file with a cover-sheet that I'm not sure how to access in my computer, and when I talk with her on the phone there is a long pause (like in the movie I saw last night on TV), and I feel that she wants some kind of personal relationship with me, but fears that she might think I'm acquiescing only to get a good grade on my paper. The complex topology of terrain and land and roads on which I'm walking, getting exhausted, is as tiring as trying to recall these details now at 4:38.
END OF SOUTH PACIFIC DREAMS
11/18/01: Dream: 4:29AM (really 3:29AM, as I later find daylight-savings time went out when I was away, making my clocks an hour ahead now): Wake from j/o buzz to INCREDIBLY luxurious dream: I'm beloved by someone very rich, rather like a good-looking Don M., and he INSISTS that I command whatever food and variety and entertainments I wish, so I concentrate on food: rooms are filled with permanent feasts, enwreathed with chocolate desserts both cold and hot, and he insists I order more as we eat more---have a wall of tasting dishes, and I command a second wall in a distant place because "the first is too far away," and he's charmed with my reasoning. Someone with house-responsibility tries to say I go too far, and he denies their authority. We go into a car filled with food, and I’m kissing him in front of servants to everyone's delight: we love each other and show it so freely. After this tasty dessert comes another adventure, and I order more food. He kisses me for my inventiveness and I program a day's activities centered around love-displays and food-pleasuring. It goes on with infinite variety, and I wake to find my mouth salivating into my pillow and I'm up to record the time and what little justice I can do to the Indian sybariticness of the luxuries he permits me in my dream, and I'm only slightly sorry (such a relationship would be SO demanding!) when I wake that it's only a DREAM luxury, rather than a real one, with dishes to clean, clothes to maintain, food temperatures and freshness to be controlled. 10:49 (9:49): Dream of interview with architect who designed opera sets---and watch a baritone who runs past sheer stone wall of set fleeing from the bass.
11/19/01: 1:48AM: Wake at 1:40 with sweat and nausea and a ghastly dream: I'm traveling in the south and pick up an old woman who thinks I love her (hmm, how is THIS connected with Jean-Pierre?), and two horrible people who might be her sons, but I hope they are just hangers-on looking for a kick: I have to shit, but they won't let me leave the room, so I have a large champagne-glass- like stool on which I sit and strain a turd into, throwing it behind the building, but then they get ugly again and I'm feeling a little residual turd, so I take down my pants and try to wipe myself with a candy wrapper, which is so smooth it takes nothing away from my ass but a slime. They try to attack me and I threaten them with the glass, breaking it until a tiny broken rim remains, and they laugh and run off. There were more ugly details which I've forgotten, but I've at least succeeded in recording this by 1:53, feeling somewhat cooler, but almost sick from the two tumblers of wine and the "Kahlua Especial" with which I finished Spartacus's dinner at 10PM before coming home to smoke almost two bidis and jerk off again. 3:50: Another horrid "lost" dream: I'm in London, visiting cousins of Laird's, and I'm to meet them tonight for a performance to which they have the tickets, but I don't know where they are, nor their names (though hers is Marge, I know), nor any other address. I try to find a taxi, but the only one I see turns out to be a toy-riding carriage in some kind of park where no one knows even how to get out of the restricted area I’m in. I find two ladies of the night, disappointed that I don't want THEM, whom I follow down a short ladder, but they can't point me in the direction of Marble Arch or anywhere else, so in final desperation, I’m again banging on a railing with my clenched fists, looking at my watch to see that it's getting close to 8PM and I have no hope of getting ANYWHERE, knowing I don't even have a letter with their return address on it, can't find a taxi, have no idea where to go, and there's even ANOTHER appointment for 8PM that I'm supposed to be at and I have no hope of getting there---and at one point I "know" that this is NOT a dream and my desperation grows: how COULD I have come out without ANY address or name to get back?? At one point they might have been in the fancy restaurant in the middle of the Beresford Hotel, but someone on the escalator says it occupies two floors, enormous ballroom-size areas, in the hotel, and I can't imagine standing on the terrace between the two shouting out "Marge" and hoping that the right one would recognize me and come to my assistance. Utterly, totally, agonizedly frustrated. Wake and lie in a stupor before figuring I've GOT to take an aspirin or two for my headache and get MORE sleep now that I finish at 4AM exactly. 6:19: The worst one yet!: I'm in London, and Helen and Jimmy have bought three tickets for tonight's performance of Love's Labour's Lost, at 8PM, and I don't have the ticket, don't know the name of the theater or where it is, and am riding with a new-met friend on a bus going in some unknown direction while I try to find out where to go and how to get there. I’m finally off the bus, with friend gone, and I try to ask people on the street, to no avail. At least people speak English. I go to a booking office and ask for a list of plays, and they come up with some kind of flyer that lists only 15 or so, and NONE of them are by Shakespeare, and I say, "This can't possibly be all the plays in London at this time," and they can't adequately answer me. I try a number of resources, finally ending up in a posh hotel, no idea where I am, but someone IS trying to help me, and finally I think of the name Love's Labour's Lost and the clerk says, at last, "Oh, they're calling it Folinari." "AH," I shout, "And where is it?" "I don't know; let's look at the office." I go to a bureau in the hotel and find a shelf of packets of brochures for each play, but there are only about six of them, and none of them are Folinari. I keep looking at my watch and it's getting closer and closer to 8PM. "Isn't there any other information?" "Yes," he says, but I need the key for that." "KEY?!" "Yes, it's at that desk," and then maddeningly he has to answer someone else's question, so that I rush to the desk and ask for the play-key, and they GIVE it to me, a key with a heavy metal tag attached, and I can FEEL myself gliding across the room toward the clerk, who's racing toward the desk for the key, and he opens a drawer below, and a strange plump man appears with strips of actual tickets, mostly red, in his hand, and I almost shout, "I don't WANT a ticket, I HAVE a ticket, I just want to know where it is and how to get there---what time does it START?" "8PM." "Oh, God! Where IS it?" And he frustratingly stands pointing out in a direction, saying, "Well, you know, the tickets are 50 pounds each. I'm not paid to give directions; if you're not going to buy a ticket, I won't be able to get my commission, and why should I help----" "Please, please, please," I beseech him, "I'll pay you---how much do you want (I realize sickeningly that I have only American dollars in my wallet)---$5? $10? Just lead me to a cab and tell him the address; or take me there yourself if it's close---I just want to GET there before it's over!" And suddenly he's riding an elaborate bicycle or even tricycle with bags and a huge stuffed animal hanging off the handlebar (like the elephant provided with my Amarula-liquor bottle?), and he rides outside the lobby and around the corner and up a small wire-enclosed circular staircase, I hope to discommode him of his burdens to escort me to the theater, but he doesn't come down immediately, and I crumple into a heap on the street, very conscious that I'm wearing a very good pair of tweed suit trousers over my dusty and worn and tattered-looking Velcro-snap shoes that I've worn through the last five or six trips, knowing that this must look incongruous to anyone noticing my crying there on the sidewalk, and I bury my head in my arms and sob and sob and sob, knowing it's now 8PM and I might not even yet have started on my way there, and sob and sob brokenheartedly---and wake up: drawing up and back from my body as if in a dolly-shot, maybe six feet away from my body in the light into my dark body lying in my bed, weak and limp with relief that, once again, it was only a dream, not even sure if this is the fourth or fifth dream I've recorded this evening, finishing now sitting on the edge of my bed at 6:37AM, faint morning light in slits around the edges of my blackout drape over the window opening in my bedroom. Need to pee for the third or fourth time tonight, too. And did I record that, at the end of the dream before that, that I was coughing and coughing and coughing at the end of the dream and WOKE UP having to cough?
11/21/01: 6:50: I'm waiting for an elevator, and a naked 55-year-old Dennis prances past, trying to fix the cables: the elevator is stuck about six feet above the brick floor of the shaft, and two other men are also trying to fix it, and they make gentle fun of him, and they isolate wires which they roll over pulleys to try to remedy the situation, and finally the elevator lowers to the proper level. Dennis has gone off to the side, where some women are making fun of him for being naked, but he enjoys the attention in his puppy-dog way and there's no air of real animosity which would make me worry about his safety.
11/22/01: 9:44: Dream: I'm living with my family in a home that's like Dietz but unlike Dietz: lots of people are coming over and we have to set the kitchen table which is exactly like Dietz in that its extensions have to be pulled out from the front and the back, and I ask Mom to help hold it down in back while I pull out the front extension, and vice versa, and she wanders around with a blank look on her face, preoccupied with something else or just trying to annoy me, and I shout at her to HELP me as I try to open the extension in front by myself and the table simply slides toward me. I try again and decide it's more of a priority to shake out the tablecloth which will cover it when it's open, so I unfold a bit of the cloth and find that a particle of food left from before has attracted an enormous number of red ants (not the TINY ones from the South Pacific, but regular-size ones from Ohio), so I shout in disgust and take the whole bundle out to the back porch, which is much larger than at Dietz, and I'm in the process of shaking out this enormous billowing tablecloth when the visitors, including first Aunt Marion, are heard coming in the front door. I'm just wearing my jockey shorts, so I can't possibly be seen outside in the next seconds, so I let the cloth out of my hands and it floats across the backyard to light I don't care where, and dash into my bedroom to dress. Without transition I'm in the backyard of a Hollywood-style mansion and I have to go pee before OTHER, younger, guests of Rita's arrive for ANOTHER gathering unrelated to the first, and since hers is nearer I go into her bathroom just in time to hear a large, mixed-sex group coming down the garden path toward this wing, all intent on the bathroom. Without consideration to them (BIG consideration to me, but what can I do?) I come out of HER bathroom and say, "I'm her brother; women on this side for her bathroom, men on the other side for the men's bathroom." With everyone coming down the narrow corridor to her bathroom between me and MY bathroom, and all the women are going toward hers and all the men now toward mine, I say, "But I have to get there first," since I need to go from before, and I want to make sure it looks OK for them before they enter, and I just want to be first.
11/25/01: 8:45AM: Pee and record dream: I'm traveling in a rental car with Mom, who's more like a girl friend than my real Mom, and we have to stop for gas, which I pay for with a credit card that I get out of my wallet which I keep in my dop kit, which Mom wonders about the contents of, and I say, "Well, we're away for a full-day trip, and there are lots of things that I might have to use, so there are lots of things that I brought along. I leave her with the credit card while a guy comes into the car to put the gas-hose into a tank-like receptacle in the back seat, and I go off to buy something, which takes so long that at one point I wonder if Mom is reading to pass the time and how she's holding off the gas station attendant who'd want her to move the car. But I go into an apartment complex to try to find a shop, and wander backyards and even model village areas where I take care not to step on the sand-constructed gardens and pavilions laid out by kids in some of these sites. I also encounter a miniature village for kids and I think, "So this is the place that I've heard about (rather like the Village in that British series that was filmed in Portmerion in Wales) with half-size houses surrounded by neat gardens, painted in elaborate flower patterns, with outdoor tables and chairs and village squares that are neat, charming, and useable at the same time.” Then I ask for a men's room, and get told there isn't any. Then I ask for the employees’ men's room, and they laugh and say I won't believe it, but there isn't any, and someone even starts directing me, "Go out, make a right to 51st Street---" and I refuse to hear any more about that. I go out to some back alleys, running with water, and step onto a shelf and take out my enormous cock and it half-hardens as I urinate (isn't that unusual, still in the dream?) for a long time, my dick getting harder and curved like Bob R.'s, and I think that people seeing me will want some of THIS. I finish peeing and find that I'm dressed only in my shorts, and wonder where I've put my clothes! I look at the exit I came out of in order to find this place, and they're not there. Where could I have left them? I search with increasing dreamlike distraction back through model towns, taking care not to step on the intricately patterned gardens with my feet in shoes, and still wander as I wake.
11/26/01: 7:23AM: Bed at 12:17AM, wake 3ish and 5ish, then up to pee and write dream: I'm sitting in my apartment on the sofa and notice a man looking out his window opposite: he's dark-skinned and very tall, so I think there might be some good cock there, but he can look into my apartment too easily, which makes me uncomfortable. I see him opening his French doors and stepping into a courtyard that we have in common, and when he leaves I go to my French doors and look at the terrace between us, then close them, worried about the gaps in them, and the curtains are strung on a very limp string, with the sections separated, and I think I could tighten the string and tie the edges of the curtains together, and maybe they'd shut out the view. Then I close another set of doors and there are INCH-WIDE gaps between the hard edges of the sections, and I meditatively move them back and forth to see the gaps remain, and I'm curious why I'd never noticed that cold air must come between these during the winters. So many gaps! Wake and debate writing this, but then pee and put it down: just do it and do it and do it! End at 7:50AM.
12/3/01: 8:50AM: Might be connected to the fact that I tried to jerk off from 1AM to 2:20AM, but couldn't: I had TWO dreams about failing to catch a train? 1) I'm racing with a lot of others to catch a train, but go up the wrong stairway to a dead end, thinking I'll have to go all the way down to go up the right stairway, but have to go only to the landing, so think there's a chance, but I get to the platform and my feet are SO slow, I TRY and TRY and TRY (like last night) to get there, and just CAN'T make it before the doors close and the train pulls out. 2) I'm dragging some kind of luggage cart, more like a grocery-shopping cart, but it goes easily up the stairs and there are lots of others rushing into the car from elsewhere on the platform, so I figure with so many people I have a chance, like with the elevator at Clark Street when there's a solid line of people not giving the doors a chance to close before I get there, but the train starts off ANYWAY, with a large group of people stoically trudging to the front of the platform so they won't miss the NEXT train. Type this while sitting on the pot, reminding myself that there's another dream BEFORE this to transfer to the PC today. As I couldn't cum and couldn't catch the train, I couldn't SHIT, either! Finally DO cum before 10AM and dress and transcribe this to PC by 10:15AM, ready to try Juno again and get into day!
12/10/01: 8:30AM: I'm back at IBM, but my current concern is my stamp collection, specifically Chinese issues, a small pile of loose stamps which I want to put into my album, but then I have a supplementary album that I've sort of filled at random, and it has mostly newish stamps of various dogs, mostly heads either full-face or profile, with varying sizes and colors which makes it hard to catalog, and as I page through the catalog it's in a new format that's mostly descriptive rather than pictorial, and I don't quite see the correspondence between stamps that I have and entries in the catalog. Then I draw back to the larger picture and decide that WHILE I'm doing this, I could be putting in final tests of the two large PROGRAMS I have yet to finish, the first being a billing program that I'm near the end of finishing, except that the program deck is too big to be tested as a whole, and I'm not sure how to partition it for testing, not certain about finding all the transfers OUT of the central program in a section that I might isolate for part-testing without having to feed in the enormous entirety. Then there's my SECOND program, of an unknown application like nuclear codes, where I think of getting specifications of how to use it from customers who are ALREADY using it and seem to know more about it than I do. I wonder why my bosses are being so lenient with my completion of these two jobs (rather like my current worries about Holt being content with my progress on indexing their Chapters 9 and 10 without having been asked BASIC questions about what to index yet). Wake in relief to find that I'm not working for IBM anymore (could this have come in part from my meeting with Madge Saturday night, as she doesn't work for IBM anymore and Werner retired from IBM even before her LAST two-year job out of the company). Lie worrying about the irritation of my right eye, thinking about Tony's possible coming over sometime today, and get up to pee, then put on the bathrobe and go to the computer to find the Num Lock light on, wondering vaguely if the machine hadn't rebooted, thinking of Vicki's FreeCell problem with "painterly" remnants of the unusable program her son thinks might be the subject of a virus attack, but get to Windows when I turn on the monitor and go through this typing satisfactorily till 8:37AM, printing it out before quitting.
12/13/01: 9:50AM: AGAIN maybe in reference to Jean-Pierre, this time in response to MY response to his letter received yesterday: in two parts: 1) I'm cleaning a room in a house and a small chipmunk-type head pops out of what could have been a square Kleenex box. "For fun" I pick it up and turn it upside down to see if he'll stay inside, maybe throw it up, but he doesn't come out. I put the box down and then suddenly he's outside and running around the floor, and I don't want him to escape, and see two gaping exits in the walls, knowing that if he gets out of the room it'll be difficult to find him in the entire house. I pull aside some curtains and he's not there, but as I turn around again and again, searching for him, there he is at the side of the box and I fan a paper over him, as if he'd understand, and command, "Get back into your box," and he does. I feel great relief. 2) I'm observing some kind of veterinarian, or doctor working on animal research, and he has a kind of glove on, at the end of which is the front part of a large white rat. I think the experimenter must be doing something to the rat's tail, or rectum, and wonder if the rat could turn around and bite him in retaliation, but I look closer and see that the rat doesn't seem to be hurting, or even uncomfortable, it merely swivels around its imprisonment point trying to see more closely who’s holding onto him. Wake and finish my Actualism session and type this out and print it just at 10AM.
12/18/01: 7:37AM: I'm traveling in China with Madge and her father, and they ask me to help them get papers from various official agencies so that they can manufacture some small electronic gadget there and sell it in the United States. I have no idea what the gadget is or what permits they need, but they insist that I leave a restaurant where we're about to have lunch and come across town with them to help them with a particular application that they give me a copy of. We go into a large office filled with people in a section of town that I don't know at all, and I just catch a glimpse of them going up a crowded stairway to the floor above. When I manage to get to the second floor, there are crowds of people in a sort of bleachers, or grandstand, on two sides of a central aisle, but when I try to locate the two of them, I just can't find them. There is a row of functionaries at the foot of the grandstand, and one of them motions that I can come before him. I give him the two stapled sheets of paper they gave me, and he produces a form that has to be filled out that has no obvious correspondence to the information that they gave me, though a bit later I see that there's a carbon copy of some kind of information including addresses of a manufactory on Boerum Place in Brooklyn, and a few technical details that I don't understand, and the clerk can't help me and I can't help him, and at the end he respectfully requests, "When you return, please don't come back to me to help you, because you've exhausted what little patience I had with your lack of understanding of the requirements of this office." I still can't find Madge and her father, and the only possibility left to me is to return to the restaurant from which we left, since that's the only other place in the city that I know, even though I fear I can't remember the address and have no written information to give to a taxi driver who might not speak English, and I have no idea which hotel we're staying at, or even if we've checked into a hotel in this city yet, and have NO memory of how we got here in the first place. No real feeling of PANIC in the dream, or even great anxiety, as if "Well, there's only one possibility and they must be at the restaurant," with no idea that they wouldn't be there, since I'm not really in any position of authority with their company to start with and couldn't REALLY have been expected to have been of much help to them in THEIR country with THEIR product. Wake at 7:34AM and debate getting up, but finish at 7:45AM.
12/25/01: 10AM: I'm about to have lunch in some hilltop English university like Cambridge, and I keep thinking I'm next, but someone else always seems to be ahead of me to get the plate loaded with meat and vegetables and an enormous green salad that looks more like a bundle of hedge-greens than anything edible. Then I have to go somewhere else, and when I try to get back to the cafeteria I seem to have made the wrong turn and I find myself in a part of the campus that I don't recognize at all: first I'm in the same building, but the configuration of stairways and hallways doesn't seem to make any sense, then I'm in the same quadrangle but the shapes of the buildings seem counterintuitive and when I find myself outside the quadrangle I look up to see the towers of the university proper higher up on the hillside, and I've somehow gotten myself far down the slope into the college town proper. Rather than walking back I think I really have to find a taxi. Then I'm in an enormous warehouse-type building that I think might be along a riverside, but when I finally find a window to look out, I see that the "outside" is beginning to move, and rather than looking out onto a riverboat that's pulling away from the dockside on which I've happened to wander, it appears that I'm on the boat which is pulling away from the dock! I think to jump to the dock, but it's now so far away that that's impossible, and I begin to have the typical end-of-dream feeling that this is all so INCREDIBLY frustrating that it can IN NO WAY be real life, and it MUST be a dream, so I wake up and lie, numb, trying to think why it is that starting an Actualism session would lead to a nap that would produce such a totally frustrating dream. But lie for a bit, get up, and type.