2002
1/1/02: 7:55AM: Sketchy, but as the first dream of 2002, I want to record something: I'm listening to someone giving a lecture about someone else, somehow connected to the Tuesday slide-group, except that this female lecturer is idiosyncratic to such a degree that I mention to someone, "She's so different from the others that I've heard." At the end, she's wandered off on a dark road where I thought I knew the entrance she had taken, but there's a blockage of each entryway, though a large broom seems the item most easily moved from blocking ingress. We think we can hear her voice in the darkness, down by the lake in this sort of Adirondack-camp setting, but it's not clear why she would have gone there, though with her oddness anything is possible. Other details unfortunately elude me now, but that's enough to finish and print out now at 8.
1/15/02: 9:15AM: Having done Actualism and tried to "go out" to the Marquesas on the Soul level, I fell asleep and had a totally unrelated dream: I'm out somewhere but have to get home to meet someone who's going to arrive sometime near 2PM, and I look at my watch to find it's 1:50PM already. I walk down Hicks to my present apartment, but then I'm in a hallway with many doors on the ground floor and I can't remember which apartment is mine: I think it might be 15, but the doorway doesn't seem like mine, and I think it might be 14, but when I try to look for the number engraved on the head of the key, I can't find either number. I go down the hallway and hear loud music coming from a ratty door at the very end, and conclude I couldn't be in the apartment next to all that noise. I return to try to enter again "without thinking" so that I'll go to my door "automatically," and pass a middle-aged woman who seems to know me, saying hello, and I nod back to her, not really recognizing her, and she stops me and tries to say something out of a mouth ringed with what looks like either cookie fragments or lots of morning oatmeal, and I ask her to repeat it, but she looks at me like I'm crazy for not knowing what she's talking about, and I debate asking her if she hasn't confused me with someone else, or pleading that I just got back from a trip and haven't the slightest memory that we'd made any kind of tentative appointment, or discussed anything in common, but I wake before any real feeling of frustration comes over me: I really think she's mistaken me for someone else rather than I'd forgotten something we'd talked about before. Wake at 9:05 and feel that I must get up to dress to receive express packages soon, but feel woozier than I'd felt finishing Actualism about 8:30 before dozing off at the end of the session. Got to get some of the indexing business off my desk today as well as pay the bills and print out this page, of which I’m now at the very bottom.
1/27/02: 4:22AM: First bidi-nightmare in a long while; I've been invited to show slides at some enormous country house (from the side it looks like an huge wedge of cake about 14 stories high above a 4-floor stone base, diminishing floors capped by a two- or three-story penthouse in the front), and others are there when I walk away from a porch-wall and somehow bump against a rickety table (like the chair I stood on to get the maps earlier this morning) which falls to the stone floor in a clatter of layers that contain dishes which I try to gather up in the wood-pieces to bring it all upright, but what started to be maybe one or two broken plates turns into a dozen or so which have fragmented into skin-piercing pieces that stick to my flesh when I try to brush them up, and when the daughter (like the daughter in the climax of The Red House which I watched on TV from 2:22-2:30AM) sits on the sofa unawares, I say, "Don't sit down, because you'll have pieces of glass stuck to your bottom when you get up," and the father looks at me with greater disapproval than ever. I try to pile up the pieces, but the tiny bits get caught in my fingers and I'm forced to go outside and wipe my hands on a pile of leaves and moist earth which I try to find a place to discard, and can only locate a gaping hole in a large-mesh wire fence separating this estate from the one next door, unfortunately seemingly all gardens, which I pollute with this glass-shard- filled loam. Wandering back I get the side view of the house, and somehow wander up the back roadway and enter again from an unexpected angle. I ask if they have a screen on which I can project my slides, and he says I'll be shown downstairs to set up. As I'm almost waking, I think of their huge kitchen and refrigerators obviously containing what I'll be suggesting for a sweet treat to put this unpleasantness out of everyone's mind: butterscotch ice cream to go around bits of frozen Mars bars as a dessert-treat to sweeten the memory of the evening and prepare the group for my slides. Other things happened before I knocked over the table, and I don't recall them, but had to get out the AlphaSmart and transcribe this in my room’s red light by 4:34AM. Shut off, then back on to print the realization that this neighborhood is like the eldritch upper-Manhattan neighborhood with enormous houses and luxurious manors overlooking an old-time Hudson River, like Snedden's Landing would look if it were financed by a community of Gatsbys like the south shore of a fictional Long Island was.
1/28/02: 9:20AM: I'm on a tour in what may be London, with a friend of indeterminate sex who's never been there before. We're in some enormous building which is rather like a five-block-long Victorian mall, and we need to get to a misty unknown somewhere which I first get a faint hope of finding when someone points out that a folder given away free opens into a map of the center of the town, including a floor plan of this gigantic maze in which we're entrapped. I give my friend a map, and she (as the friend seems to be at that moment) loses it, but I find another, in a different format, in a separate pile of freebies that no one seems to be taking advantage of. I can see by the diagrammed steps that there are two east-west axes, the one to the north along the middle of town, the one to the south along the main thoroughfare, and I know from previous trips (dreams, actually) that taking the east exit leads to the westward (this IS a dream, right?) hill climbing to a pavilion that I belatedly recognize will give us the lunch we've been looking for as a respite from this jammed conference we're trying to find our way out of. Toward the end, a messenger runs up and hands me a loose bag of papers that I recognize I lost maybe two years before (like the restaurant list I lost last night, presumably in the World of Video bag I returned the tapes in that the desk couldn't locate last night but which may be waiting for me tomorrow when I return the next set of tapes before the Beard dinner), and I show them to my male (now) companion with amazement, wondering how they knew it was I who lost these particular papers. Wake remembering nothing, but details come back that seem secure enough to risk not using the AlphaSmart but waiting until I get up and dressed and type them directly into the PC, finishing at 9:32AM pleased.
2/6/02: 8:42AM: Wake at 8:35AM after a MAD dream which ended with my waiting endlessly on a telephone for numbers in Akron, Ohio. I forget some of the elaborate details that started the dream, but I first recollect wandering through hallways which look like they may be underground, looking for a telephone, and finally a workman dodging in and out between columns is attracted by my "excuse me" to motion forward along the hall as I ask, "Can you direct me to a telephone?" I come to an open space with a man sitting at a brightly lit desk, and he motions me toward a telephone on a little table beside him. Though it isn't a pay phone, I know I need change, and squeeze my little blue purse to see that I have two quarters and a number of dimes, so I feel better. I dial the operator and ask for the number in Akron for the management for 309 West 57th (yes, I know that's a NYC address), and I’m told it’s in area code 214. I get out my little spiral notebook to write that number down, happy to find a pen in my pocket, and for some reason hand the phone to someone else who gets into a ludicrous exchange with me: "It's un-E." "N?-E??" "M-E." "ME??" "No, I'm just saying that I have the same trouble hearing the letters as you do." Then I drop my notebook into water, pulling it up quickly, but a third of the length at the spiral has been soaked, so I try to dry it (hoping the ink won't run so I can still read what I've written on many of the pages) by swinging it back and forth, and the pages puff out like a sail so I hope it'll dry quickly. Then there's a LONG silence from the phone and I wonder if I'll have enough money to pay for the call, and I drop my PEN into water, and it develops a fish-like body and a fringe for a tail which waves gracefully as the object dives all the way to the bottom of this clear pond, hitting its nib-nose on a rock, but then the fringe seems to lend it buoyancy and it slowly floats back to the surface, where some guy next to me can retrieve it, wave it around to dry it off, and hand it back so I can use it when the operator asks whether I want the Rudin Corporation or Rappoport or someone who only lives in the building. I ask the operator to connect me with Rudin, but she says there's only a message now, and I look at my watch (analog) to see that it's a quarter to 7 in the evening, and certainly the office isn't open this late. So I can't see if the bag that I think I left in the closet of my old apartment is still there, or has been turned in to the office, and I hope I can remember clearly enough what's in it: I've been traveling in Italy, but only put about a two-day supply of souvenir booklets into it---I don't think I'd yet bought the teddy bear which might or might not be an identifying object, but it would be nicer if I couldn't really think of anything important in it, because then I wouldn't mind so much if they couldn't locate it. Then I say, "Wait," to the operator, because I know I'd put down on an index card TWO things that I had to ask of her, and I say, "I want the number for---" and I can't remember. I put the fist of my palm to my forehead in an effort to recall what number I want before she cuts me off, and she begins to quote the price for the call I made to her, but I struggle to remember the other number: Home? Office? Friend? and in my frustration I woke at 8:35AM, relieved to be awake late enough, having gotten to bed at roughly 11:30PM, to get up immediately and type this out before forgetting more of it. Finish now at 9AM, too far from the bottom of the page.
2/11/02: 7:4AM: SAME awful lost-in-London dream as before: I'm in a countryside looking for a bus to take me to the center of town, pointing to "that bus" which leaves as I get near or isn't the right destination. I look for maps and can't find the right one. Then I try to take a taxi to Pembroke Hall, where my bags are in a locker, where a taxi will wait while I get them and maybe get to the 2:15 train from the Central Station, which isn't that far but I don't know which entrance to use which will get me to the track in time. Someone's with me, but they're no help. Everyone speaks the same language, but they don't understand what I want. Feel frustration and wake and feel OUT OF BREATH again, through frustration or apnea?? Up and pee and type this on AlphaSmart, feeling AWFUL!!
3/3/02: 8:15AM: At 7AM I wake, having gotten into bed at 2:32AM, with dream: I'm visiting a couple who live "across the street" where the H.s lived in relationship to my house at 1221 Dietz in Akron, and she's very sharp and manipulative, reminding me somewhat of Laura M. from Holt, and he's quiet and somewhat sexy, like the husband who knew about branes at the Beard, and I'm finishing some kind of meal, or more of a snack, with them at their kitchen table while they busy themselves with other tasks in their hectic life. It seems to be Friday evening of LAST week, when I knew that after my Friday event (dinner with them, in my dream) I had nothing scheduled until Tuesday of next week, so when she inadvertently lets slip something about "dinner Sunday," and then winces because she clearly hadn't intended to invite me, and I make a little jabby joke about it, and she says, "But naturally you're invited, too," and she frowns, at which I respond, "You're probably thinking 'How can we possibly squeeze him in.'" She looks up distractedly and says, "But you're coming!" and I say I am, and pull out a little index card from my pocket and write it down. "10:30," she adds, and I respond, "THAT's different, too." When I go back to get my card to record that---thinking that when I arrive at 10:30 she and her guests will have finished with dinner and she'll accuse me of having gotten the time wrong, but I'll respond with the note card with the time WRITTEN on it that she's seen me WRITE---I get up from the table with my jacket on and she steps behind me and gently removes it, saying softly, "Mine," and when I look at it closely it's a blue-gray fabric with a tiny red-gray stripe through it, of a soft cloth that I have no clothing of, and I look up in puzzlement and she reminds me, "You SAID you were chilly," and I vaguely remember that, but then find my note card in my shirt pocket, but it's an index-record card with writing all over it and I'm just assuming somewhere in the corner I have the dinner engagement written to which I can add the 10:30PM time. Lie in bed, remembering this first dream since 2/11 clearly, and then get up at 8AM to pee and change the index-to-do on my desk to The Einstein File, which is smaller than the Informatics for Springer, both of which are due by Friday, AND write my first GRADE9 change on a sheet of paper (for switching Visualizing to Questioning, which I told Abby about on Friday), then drink some water, then get to this and finish at 8:26AM. Print it out and file index-done sheet away.
3/4/02: 9:50AM: A couple of odd fragments: 1) I get up from a copious shit to find a bouquet-shaped membrane-enclosed clump of almost totally undigested French-fried potatoes, too enormous to possibly fit through the small toilet hole. I think to myself, "I wonder what nutrition I'm getting from ANY of my food," and the fragment ends before I even consider how to flush the packet down. 2) I'm walking on 59th Street in Manhattan, where construction has made the north-bound entrance to Central Park West crowded and out of the way, so that when I think, "I haven't walked up CPW recently," it's just easier to continue my walk up Fifth Avenue by walking with the traffic circling the side of a large fountain which seems to have taken over all of the southern edge of Central Park. Parked cars block traffic entering from the west, so I cross a wet, sandy street to the edge of the fountain to shorten my trip across the southern curve, but without transition find myself in a theater lobby which is being reconstructed just about where A La Vieille Russie is. I think I can get out easier by heading south, but find myself in a closed room with all exit doors locked or blocked, so I go back north and find the pedestrian exit, and as soon as I push on it a watchman-doorman pulls it the rest of the way open so that I can get out of the lobby into an enclosed construction-shed space along the sidewalk which will enable me to continue my walk north up Fifth Avenue. The dampness of the street, the looks of the passing cars, the dimly lit construction material and old room-remnants give a decided air of reality, smell, and color to these fragments, but there's no tension or obvious "message" about them, so I have to persuade myself to sit down and record them just for the sake of completeness, finishing now at 9:58AM.
3/5/02: 8:47AM: As I think about it, more and more outrageous details come back, so I have to get out of bed and type this before they vanish from my mind. I'm in a casino (obviously from Carolyn's comment that on March 24 she's being taken by her son in Peekskill to the Connecticut Indian Casino and being given money to gamble away!) with Ken and someone who may be a combination of Fred and Dennis (as unlikely as that may seem). We start at separate tables playing cards, or some table-game, but then I see that the people are dwindling and Ken and Fred-Den have started the new-fangled craps which is supposed to be the centerpiece of the place; Ken's chosen red dice and Fred-Den blue, so my choice is green, a bright-acid green that I'm astounded I have to pay M320 to "use," and that's the FIRST highly elaborated detail: cash money(M) comes in a huge paper wallet for which I had to pay something like $20 for M500, and I think at first the largest bill, of which I of course have only one, is M300, but it turns out to be M350, so I get change. Then next lower bills (smaller in size) are M50s, then there are assortments of M5s and M1s, and the rest is in change which starts with a large gold-colored medallion (at which point I steal one worth maybe M.5 when someone spills out change---I know I'm cheating but I feel justified because the sum is so petty and the place is so rich) and goes down in size to almost the head of a pin, the whole containing about 30 denominations which I ask about, and I go through the brochure and then take out the "map" which I turn over and over and finally find the "money-conversion table" up in one corner, which lists the denominations. When I get back to the table Ken has started playing with THREE dice, for which he had to pay an extra sum, and since it's not like Monopoly (though it IS, because when we land on a space we somehow "buy" it and others who land have to pay "rent" to us for it) it doesn't matter how FAR you go, just which square you LAND on. But before I can really get interested in the game (seemingly better because most of the people have left, and we can play it essentially by ourselves, which is much more fun, though I can't see losing to the bank rather than to Ken and Fred-Den), they've bought things in the shop, which I tend to pooh-pooh, but Ken is very insistent that his gold wall hanging (it's much too big for an earring, I joke about it) is worth the $110 he paid for it, and though I weigh it in my hand and admit it's heavy, and the outside may be COATED in gold, it's surely not SOLID gold as he hopes it may be. It starts in shape as a hanging triangle with a gold boss on the top connecting to two decorative "braids" extending from a woman's head, but when I look closer the whole apparatus changes into a globe that the woman's head is enclosed in, which when shaken produces not snow but a swirling liquid that's just plain strange, but when I look CLOSER the ball's contents turn over and there's a small hill which, when looked at VERY closely, turns out to be a representation of Mont Saint Michelle, in which the church at the top turns into what could be a flying saucer that detaches from the hill and takes off into space. But when it's turned to another angle (a SECOND highly detailed fantasia), like a trick Christmas card that changes its picture when turned from right to left, a little man leaves the church and goes down the hill to a small hotel, which he enters, and climbs first an internal stair and then a fire escape on the outside, to his apartment on the fourth floor, and the story might well continue but I'm so amazed at the narrative capability of this "gift" that the dream ends before I can reply to Ken that he's made a very unusual purchase indeed. I remember now that there was an equally elaborate PRE-DREAM in another setting, involving food and eating, maybe stemming from Sherryl and my elaborate mezze-plate at Sultan on Saturday, which I've now totally forgotten. The details of the room with maybe eight tables with places for eight at each, reduced to maybe 20 people by the time the craps game starts, the fanciful setup of the craps table like a playing-piece-size steeplechase layout, the colors of the dice and board, the sizes and denominations and values of the money, the intricacy of the rules for moving and paying, like a Glass Bead Game of infinite allure, recorded now as I finish at 9:10AM, cold.
3/20/02: 8:05AM: I'm traveling somewhere with a large group (probably associated with Stephanie's slides last night of Costa Rica and our talks of various group-sizes on trips), at one point walking along a shore quite like the ones in the slides of the National Park last night, and I see a well-used trail up from the beach to a higher path as I’m going toward the hotel for lunch. But when I get back to the dining room, the group that I'm with already seems settled at their tables with no discernible [just looked at WordPerfect’s Dictionary and find I can eliminate hundreds of entries from the Supplemental Dictionary so that it can be USED locally to accept acronyms and common words so I don't have to REPEAT them in checking the spelling of a specialized index!---but I can't find a way to ELIMINATE a word, as I don't like having "discernable" acceptable when it's not in my dictionary] seat available. I go into the kitchen area to find a few guests sitting at tables at corners of the preparation tables, and I ask someone if I can have lunch, and he scurries into the back somewhere saying there are only three left, and I remark that I'm happy to take one of them. He returns with a plate in his hands, saying, "It's not even very hot," but I feel the warmth of the plate and the heat rising from the dry piece of fish and the baked potato burst to reveal its white contents, so I'm content with that but ask if I can have a few pats of butter (like I asked for the salt for my double Whopper with cheese last night at Burger King), and he goes back to tend to what looks like an egg frying at the top of a coffee-drip machine, and I figure he has to consider his priorities, but when he keeps on tending the egg I take my plate and hope for another source of butter somewhere. Rather lonely feeling to the dream, maybe connected to Jean-Pierre's longing to be with someone to whom he can talk "honestly," which I'll describe more on NOTEBOOK:3/20/02 at 8:35AM. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 3/20/02).
COSTA RICA DREAMS 3/29-4/9/02
3/31/02: Wake at 2:30 with erotic dream of many sexy guys teasing each other into jerking off openly before their friends, and then parading before a group of women who take turns sucking on them, but I want only to watch the men working over the men.
4/4/02: I'm at a party at Sherryl's and she tells me to "go to the other apartment and pick up some (whatever it was)." I ask her just WHERE this is, and she says, "Oh, you'll know." I end up in an alley in front of her apartment and she comes out and smiles at me and says, "Oh, Bob, I should have known, with your mind----" and then two teenage punks pass on the sidewalk and sort of shove her aside, and I stand my ground but they shove me aside, too, and I reply bitterly, "I'm sorry, but you don't own this sidewalk," and they make some ageist remark back about watching what I say to them or I'll regret it. Wake to think about this, the first dream in a long time.
4/7/02: 3:38: Dream of something about travel which I've forgotten, but then I'm lying in bed with a woman, or watching a video of someone like George Saunders lying in bed with a woman, having grease on his fingers (or her fingers) and rubbing them on my forearm, saying, "Margo wouldn't like this at all, she just wouldn't stand for it," and suddenly there's the sound of someone ringing the doorbell and it appears it might be the ghost of Margo, and this is somehow a remake of Rebecca with the dead wife's name changed to Margo, and I'm wondering how it'll all turn out when I wake.
4/9/02: I'm taking a graduate course in physics and think of how I can best help myself: either take a tutorial in basic calculus or hire someone to teach me the basic physical formulas I'll need to know to learn the material better. Then I seem to be listening to a radio station like WQXR or NPR that announces it's going to be giving the series of standard tests for grade-school students, starting with an "exemplum test that would encompass the basic types of questions on the more advanced tests. We came up with the following questions which we thought should be added to the tests: 1) What was the purpose of this particular question, 2) What particular skill was being tested with this question, 3) Which questions were considered more important, 4) What terms were the students supposed to remember, and 5) How did these questions relate to other questions in the tests." I remembered a dream from about 4AM: I'm eating from the bottom of a bag of potato chips and with the last small handful I feel a little pinch, or movement, between my first two fingers and look down to see the rear end of an ant struggling there. I give a little squeak of surprise and shake it off and wonder what ELSE I may have ingested while I was eating the first of the potato chips!
END OF COSTA RICA DREAMS
4/15/02: 9:34AM: I'm traveling to something like an Army camp or vacation spot in the southeast where I'd spent a week or more many years ago, recognizing the ratty towns surrounding the area, and I check into a motel or BOQ which has a multi-entried outhouse serving many cabins, though I seem to find more washrooms than toilets when I open a few doors. I finally find a pissoir in the form of a tree stump, hollowed out, in the middle of which rises an "eye of water" which is like a constant flush over the smooth top of the cut wood, and I'm about to use it when an older officer enters and looks at me in a strange, piercing way, and I'm about to make some comment when I realize it wouldn't be a good idea: his response would be too curt and sharp to make the sally worthwhile. Another segment, closer to home, I've forgotten by now.
4/18/02: 8:15AM: A curious melange of dreams: 1) I'm traveling with three small bags, and suddenly realize I haven't seen my black bag (which is a combination of the shape and size of my brown A&K bag and the color of my smaller black shoulder bag), and I must have left it somewhere, but think that nothing really irreplaceable or necessary has been lost because of it. 2) I'm watching a TV production of some operatic gala, and two semiretired sopranos are already onstage when they announce "Miss Beverly Sills," and she appears stage left, walking briskly in a brilliantly red, voluminous gown. The camera pulls back to show her moving toward center stage with a curiously jerky, rapid walk that causes her head to move forward and back, puppet-like, as if something were wrong with her legs, and then she moves faster and faster so that her red gown billows out behind her to an extraordinary extent, and when she suddenly stops center stage, her dress continues to ripple and billow all around her, forming small arched areas which enlarge with white frames around them in which suddenly appear full-grown individuals in black costumes, which she's been hiding all along, like Mother Whoever in The Nutcracker ballets. 3) I'm in a department store basement with a man who's a combination of Ken and Fred, and we're waiting for a demonstration ride on a deep-sea investigation capsule, reminiscent of objects mentioned on the Shape of Life tape that I was watching, falling asleep, last night; and there was a printed sign, saying "The first riders may have to wait for the test ride by Elizabeth Taylor" (rather like Mildred and I had to wait for the line before us yesterday for the face-altering computer at the Grey Gallery photographic exhibit of Nancy Burson), but we look around other sections of the floor, waiting to be called back, and a tiny woman in something like a wheelchair is being pushed around, and we figure someone else, perhaps the hundred-year-old Brooke Astor, was the celebrity who'd ridden before us. All we can see of the "ride" is the top-plate, resembling a manhole cover, like the ones used in the videotaping of Dark Angel that I also watched last night. In the dream, I wonder how they'll simulate the descent, the landing on the bottom, the cold of the depths, the sights to be seen, all in this little area. Maybe the "cold" of the depths is related to the current heat wave which went up to 96° yesterday and made the bedroom over-hot and sheets wrinkled and wet as I woke and looked at the clock, happy that I'd drunk LOTS of water before bed, which meant, perversely, that I did NOT get up at ALL during the night to pee, only waking, briefly, twice, to glance at the clock and sleep again.
5/2/02: 9:40AM: The dream was very vivid at 4AM, when I woke with it in mind, but it's faded considerably since: I'm working at some place like IBM, under new bosses, a woman and a man, who clearly don't think I'm qualified for much of anything. I sit silently during a meeting in which they practically ignore me, and only later do I try to defend myself by citing people for whom I’d worked in the past, people whose opinion they might respect, and I dig back to the Sage project in the late 50's and find the name Barbara C., though even in the dream I fleetingly wonder if they'd ever heard the name, and if Barbara still had the same high reputation now that she did in the past.
5/6/02: 9:05AM: I'm in a bed with two sexy young men, and one seems content to cuddle with me, though when I feel below his waist he's still wearing his trousers, so I can't touch his cock. But the other guy joins us in a threesome and the pants come off and I'm holding onto his cock as he moves his pelvis back and forth, and he starts gasping toward orgasm so I try to hold off and tease him at the edge, but he seems to give a terminal groan, yet I feel no cum on my fingers, so I keep playing, and he gives a second groan without any liquid, so I guess that he's just enjoying the sensations, but when I keep applying the "cum-now" pressures, he looks at me and says, "I just CAME two times, what do you WANT?" Then we're aware of the windows behind the bed, and through them we can see a car with three rough-looking guys in the front seat motioning toward us and mouthing the word "faggot" and other negative epithets and I'm reminded of a previous place where drivers could look in on a bedroom that I occupied with other men, and we all get out of bed, the other two saying that they DO have to go to school or work today, so I have to get dressed and have breakfast and go home. Before I can leave the room, doors open and we seem surrounded by other people living in the same apartment that the two guys want to introduce me to, like "Mrs. Pearl," who's one of the three women in wrappers who stand in one doorway, and kids come running through, and other couples seem to be sharing makeshift cooking stations in corners of other rooms. I wander around trying to find relish for the hamburger I seem to be having for breakfast, and think there must be MORE than the "fifteen or so" they'd estimated lived here: one room has only a spider web of interlocking extension cords, some going under closed doors to people as yet unseen. Back in the central living room, I see that the "bed" has clarified into a large pond (from the unseen pool in the Pool Room in which we ate at the Four Seasons last night?) (or the aquarium in Chinita Linda yesterday afternoon?) with numerous schools of fish swimming contentedly over masses of plants and weeds growing in the tiled bottom. I try AGAIN circling the apartment to get supplies available there, and see people cooking with hotpots on electric stoves, hanging their washing out, and searching areas of storage for clothing, tools, food, condiments, spices, hardware, etc. For some reason I start thinking about "Earliest Memories," and in a semi-dream I recall my being told by Mom to move something from the hall closet, my finding my "hidden" birthday presents including a wooden boat that I dearly loved, and not revealing that I "discovered" them, and then being berated by Mom for lying and having them taken away from me for months. And I recalled the papier-mâché drummer which, after a number of years of possession, disclosed a hidden treasure of small tissue-wrapped trinkets under the paper covering of the drumhead. And my pleasure of lining things up and putting them into a box, moving them along like pairs of animals homing in on Noah's Ark. Wake cold with my feet uncovered and a VERY sore throat that I hope doesn't mean a cold's coming, since I haven't had one in a long time and usually get one when I'm totally caught up. Put on the radio when someone puts on a loud radio or TV either above or below me, and try to think of something else dream-oriented with which to finish this page before printing it out and getting to the rest of this idle Monday, only having to catch up with Spartacus's tape of Queer as Folk and return it to him before he leaves for England on Wednesday, getting maybe some Kurasawa tapes, too.
5/8/02: 10:48AM: After Beard dinner, cumming, and bed at 2AM, I have prosaic dream on waking at 10:30AM of being first in my apartment and trying to turn the lights on, but a secondary rheostat on the wall in my library affords only the slightest light, and I switch on the bathroom light just to make sure the circuits aren't broken again, as they were when I tried to reassemble the floor lamp and short-circuited the room. Then I'm in a large apartment that I know to be Mom's, and she's not there for some reason, and amid a bank of artificial flowers on a buffet I find a wrapped bouquet of REAL flowers, and another small parcel of real flowers next to it, so I go into the kitchen to try to find vases in which to put them in water, knowing they'd been without it for a day or two already. In the kitchen I'm surprised to find two large bodies of water: one in the sink, partly filled with dirty dishes, with dirty utensils scattered around, and to the left a regular-size bathtub filled with clear liquid, with garbage debris in the bottom, and I pull the plugs in both, which empty quickly with loud gurgles, and I then think to clean them, and wash the dishes, among which are a number of small vases either in original packing, or soaking in smaller vessels. I figure she'll be very surprised to return to find that I've done the dishes and tidied up the place, which is much in need of it. Wake to rise lethargically, because of my cold, at 10:43 and finish this by 10:55AM, ready to get into the day. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 5/8/20).
5/13/02: 9:30AM: I've got to get to a class where my painting's due, but the time gets so short that I don't have time to wrap it, and can't carry it without wrapping it, and decide that I really don't have to get it in today, but can do it next week. Want to shower, but the room's being used, and it's getting close to the time when I'll have to leave for class without showering. There were other poignant details, but this was about 4AM and I've forgotten!
5/16/02: 9:45AM: I'm washing dishes in my present apartment's kitchen, but I'm scraping hardened residue out of what at first looks like a butter caddy but turns out to be a makeshift storage container which once contained a Sara Lee cake, and when part of a layer of sticky yellowish stuff won't wash off, I remove it with a thin bit of white plastic, so for a few moments I think I can pull off one uniform layer and end up with a clean storage dish, but the whole bottom sort of disintegrates, leaving extra-thin spots and even cracks in the bottom which makes me throw the whole thing away and go to the grocery list to add "Sara Lee cake" so that I can eat the cake and save another storage container, but even in the dream I stand with my pen in front of the list and think, "But I NEVER eat Sara Lee anymore, and I really DON'T need to store things in a cake-bottom plastic (and it's not plastic, it's just cardboard) because I have saran wrap with which to cover plates of leftovers, or aluminum foil to wrap leftovers in, or in a pinch REAL plastic storage containers of which I've kept a shelf-full and hardly ever USED. Back at the sink I've pulled the container out of a whole mountain of suds (like the suds in the Sex and Chocolate video that I watched yesterday), knowing that there's nothing left at the bottom of the water-filled sink, and see dark stain-scrapes down the front of the sink that I'd never seen before, but am confident that Zud will remove quickly after I empty the water and clean up and that the sink will match the overall cleanliness of the apartment in general after it's been painted and things from John’s apartment have been restored to their places and the rugs have been cleaned and vacuumed and I've taken the trouble to keep picking up bits of chipped paint and plant-top water-damage remnants to keep the entire apartment in totally mint condition, even to knowing I want to soon wash the champagne glasses and newly dirtied plates from as recently as Sunday when the place was PERFECT for the advent of the group meeting Lina here after our lunch at Park Plaza, and feel relieved that I finished the index yesterday and will go an HRW test-index today and watch more of the backed-up videotapes and finally get rid of the cold which has been around almost two weeks now!
5/20/02: 8:10AM: Some of these fragments are common to MANY previous dreams: I'm entertaining two visiting guests (one of whom is rather like Laird W.) who are enjoying some Manhattan entertainment while I return to my apartment to enjoy some time alone. I enter an entrance hallway and glance through a door to the kitchen and am surprised to see the back of a woman with an apron around her waist, standing idly before a stove, and just then Spartacus bustles past with two guests of his own and I ask where the attendant in the kitchen came from, and he looks at me and recites the Household Helpers Creed to me in serious French: "’Femmes de chambre available pour les temps longues ou les temps courtes, pour cent cinquante dollars par heure’---so I got two to help with my guests," he concludes in English. I smile and prepare to go through his living room to get to my quarters, and with a gentle reprimand he observes, "Why don't you use that way (he motions to a door adjoining the door to the kitchen) to your place---you get to see the stained glass windows, and the view from the top of the stairs”---and I envision a path I'd taken in previous dreams, past little-known corners of our enormous apartment, and into a public stairway---“But there's the small chance of running into others in the building when I'm not really dressed"---and he looks at me with amusement, as if for him that would be a wonderful chance for a brief encounter, rather than any possible cause for embarrassment---"As you like," and he goes into the kitchen. I go to the half-open door and, instead of finding myself in a little-remembered room, discover myself walking down a small slope on a path that leads slightly to the right where an old black stump (rather like the black uncertain bundle that Marguerite held in her arms during the "L'Altre Notte d'al Fondo del Mar" aria of the tape of Mefistofele I watched on Saturday, two days ago) rearranges itself as I look closer into the figure of a very black-faced man with a fragment of a cigar in his mouth and an old crushed hat on his head, sitting on a stump passing the time to himself, looking to his left as I pass him (which slightly surprises me), but I look over a sparsely wooded countryside which is at once familiar and enormously surprising because it's just HERE, outside my apartment, and I look more closely at the opposite bank of the river in front of me and puzzle over the fact that the fishermen with their gear on a point of rocks on the other side seem to be moving rather swiftly from left to right, as if I were on a boat passing them, rather than just standing on the stationary shore; and other rustic scenes, almost like paintings, pass by with silent rapidity as I watch, and then feel dampness in my feet, and I look down to see that the grassy-sandy riverbank is wetter than I'd thought at first, and I'm sinking an inch or so into the grassy sand. Ahead of me the stream is cascading almost directly (or maybe more precisely from eleven o'clock) toward me, and on the left are a row of small houses that I'm sure I'd seen before, their small backyards reminiscent of the cluttered ones of semirural houses from the turn of the nineteenth century, thinking, "Oh, of course, HERE are houses that sit right on the river, like the coveted properties along the Hudson at Snedden's Landing about which Charles has talked so much." But on closer look the houses are quite abandoned, boarded up for what appears to have been a long time (could this be from the decommissioning of the battleship Wisconsin that I watched until 11PM last night on Channel 13?), and looking to the left of the houses, more up the small bank, I can see what looks to be the outskirts of a very familiar set of almost Civil War-era brick buildings which had once been part of some small factory-and-associated-workers'-homes complex that I'd "rediscovered" in many previous dreams "on the upper-Upper West Side of Manhattan where I keep forgetting they are," and was always pleased to find again, reminding myself that I should come here more often to enjoy the countrified old-time quality of the riverscape. I think that Charles (or Laird) will certainly enjoy this section so close to my apartment when he next comes to visit, but wake before even beginning to think how I'll get back to the sections of the apartment shared with Spartacus that are MINE that I'd started the dream in trying to get into.
5/23/02: 6:20AM: Wake from two unpleasant dreams: 1) I'm touring in China with an unknown group (malicious like the Patriot Camp I read about in New Yorker yesterday) and going from place to place on a well-marked trail, but when I'm clambering over a wooden framework crossing an abyss, a "constructed break" occurs where it shouldn't have, and a piece I'm depending on breaks off in my hands, but I can somehow swing across and secure my safety by grabbing a more solid piece on the other side of the crossing while my "guides" tsk-tsk behind me. 2) I'm traveling with Spartacus somewhere upstate, and he's not very concerned with the fact that I have to leave our shared quarters and get home via laborious bus-train routes overnight, and he bids me farewell, hoping I'll be OK, and I reply, "Oh, I'll manage to get some sleep on the bus or the train," knowing it's almost impossible that I'll actually do so. I have to empty two wooden bowls of my urine (visited Pope yesterday, with the three empty plastic urinals that he'd demanded strung across his bed-railing) and go outside just as a Chinese family is passing by outside my door, and I'm horrified to see that I sprinkle my urine over two or three cooking fires of families selling cooked food for tourists, but I can't possibly acknowledge what I've just done, so I quickly duck back inside my cabin-tent. Then I need food for the trip, or more precisely (this IS a dream) empty plates, so I go to a food stall and try to wipe off dirty plates from the previous customer with my fingers, scooping sauces and food remnants with my fingers and trying to clean my hands by shaking them vigorously in the air, but the hostess thinks I'm there for food, so she keeps putting more on my newly cleaned plates, which I brazenly put off to the side so I can keep them cleared, though she clucks and doesn't understand at all, and I feel awful about doing all this, but I MUST for the exigencies (THERE'S a word for Pope's difficult-word list on yesterday evening's "keep me from being bored while waiting to be lain down in bed after dinner" phone call) of the trip I'm going to have to make, about ten hours back home without any sleep over the miserable night.
5/25/02: 11:30AM: Woke with a grand erection after dreaming about sitting in a darkened theater to realize that Jerry Seinfeld is sitting next to me, and he seems to be sexily dressed and alone, so I think something might be possible, but feel very self-conscious about even looking at him. But I move my left foot slightly to the left to encounter his, and though he moves it back a bit, it still remains in contact with mine, so I let it rest there for a few moments until I feel some movement along my foot from his, and then our upper thighs are touching and he actually reaches over and starts fondling my genitals, which embarrassed me enormously, so I bring my coat over my lap and try to hide his hand-motions from anyone who may be looking in our direction, and he keeps on and I’m astounded that he can show such interest in me and woke erect. There was another dream of similar sexual import that I've forgotten now, because I woke and jerked off, recorded on NOTEBOOK:5/25/02. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 5/25/02).
6/01/02: 9:15AM: I'm working at a seedy sort of IBM office, and come in after a weekend to find they've rearranged their bookcases, and I can't find most of my old job-files, nor can I find reference works that used to be on the bottom shelf near my desk. I look down the row of stacks to see that many things have changed, as well as sets of volumes being separated on widely spaced shelves, and other shelves being filled with supplies and non-book items. I ask a secretary who did this, and the main culprit is out of work today, so I can't even find out if the books I need were thrown out or just filed where I haven't found them yet. I can't believe the company would be so insensitive to my needs, or even to the needs of documenting the programs which were so recently finished for various customers. I have no idea of complaining to any bosses, however, since it seems already clear it was done without their knowledge or consent, but only because they would consider it beneath them to be involved in such a low-level task. I feel sad and frustrated that work has sunk to this level.
6/8/02: 9:30AM: I'm traveling in Germany with John and a small group of people for whom he has formulated the itinerary. We get up early one morning and go for a walk in an unidentified smallish city, coming to a combination theater-television studio where a large group of kids is sitting on a stage while a cast in the audience and balconies is asking questions, presenting ideas, and filming various groups of these actors. I separate from our group and go downstairs to clamber over ledges and test loose brick walls to get to the floor of the theater to watch more closely. Then I figure it's time for breakfast, about 9:30AM coincidentally with now, and squeeze through a narrow ascending passageway that gets me back up to the level on which I left them that's much easier than my gymnastic struggle down the theatrical-setting structures. But they're gone! I go into an adjoining crowded cafeteria where I think they must be at a table, looking for me and about to wave at me when they spot me at last, but though the cafeteria stretches through three crowded rooms---this is clearly the place to have breakfast---I don't see them. I get annoyed with John for not telling me, "We'll only be here a few minutes and then we'll be going for breakfast somewhere else," and wonder how I'm going to spend the rest of my day without his guidance, since I'd been relying on it. I pass a doorway to outside, where a German seems to be talking to me, but I can't understand more than a random word of what he's saying, and I envy John his prior-to-the-trip immersion in learning the language (as I hear him every day across the air shaft practicing his languages). I don't even have a map of the city or know what else there is to see, but I figure I can find a shop that sells maps and guidebooks and fill in my day, or just wander around and see what the city offers: it can't be that big or that full of activity for tourists. I don't think about money, or euros, so I don't even know if I can pay for breakfast on my own. I just feel vaguely depressed that John hasn't bothered to make sure I've kept up with the small group (rather like Fred and his "group" at the Beard, many of whom I saw yesterday at the Sanzin lunch at the Beard which Fred had to cancel because of his jury duty, though I nodded to many of his friends and was happy to be seated at a table that included none of them, a very good table that I was extremely pleased with in retrospect. 9:40AM.
6/10/02: 9:20AM: Odd bidi-travel dream, fresh from waking to AARP phone call: I'm driving a car which I know to be very similar to my uncles' old Studebakers with a limited front-window view, and I feel very awkward turning around a left corner because I'm pressed into my seat by the driving forces and can see only the smallest part of the right curb and a tiny bit of the road, but anything to the left of the road, like a car in my lane, would be impossible to see. We reach the crest of a hill and look down a small slope to a narrow river and a spit of yellow desert which I know to be mainland China, which is still forbidden to tourism, and I think that if I had my video camera it would be so easy to get a close-up of this taboo territory. I brake quickly to get to the bottom of the hill, and there's the side of a building inhabited mainly by women of indeterminate ethnicity, and I guess partly this is from watching Kazakhstan and Kirghizstan on Globe Trekker last night, because they're partly Chinese and partly Slavic-Russian featured, and I remark that it looks like a Salvation Army or other charity hostel, because the workers seem to be trying to sneak a drink from tiny bottles hidden about their persons while the overseers snatch them away and berate them when they find them, but the workers are too stupid to keep their bottles hidden, and another and another are taken away and emptied and broken while the frustrated drinkers can only look on in anger and desire. They're so preoccupied that they'd never look through the slats to find us photographing them. Other details about being late for some appointment, or getting to a performance over a half hour after it’s about to start, occupied the first part of the long and very detailed, colorful dream, but those are all gone now, except the feeling this wasn't fearful or threatening like some prior, more chilling, bidi-dreams.
6/19/02: 5:25AM: I'm working back at IBM after a long time away, but I recognize people (dream of this probably because I was proofreading Carolyn's transcription to computer of my IBM Round the World trip notes all afternoon and evening yesterday), though oddly distorted, like Delores K. (from St. Mary's, rather than IBM), with a long head and very long hair almost overpowering her body as seen from behind as we walk through a subterranean corridor. We go into a crowded area for lunch, and I'm making odd jokes, like I'm an obscene comic a la Groucho Marx, but they don't go over, as no one laughs when I stop for Mozelle to get some ground red pepper to season my frankfurter from a cart on which a black janitor is smoking, pushing around a comic black figure whose face lights up when the janitor exhales his smoke, and my line "His face lights up so much when you exhale, you must be blowing into a tube up his ASS," goes over so badly I think there must be a censorship I don't understand. Buying the franks is difficult because I'm convinced the salesman is trying to short-change, or short-frank me, since the fleshy-looking frank is much shorter than the shorter-than-average bun, with ragged edges that make it look like a dissevered cock rather than a legitimate hotdog. I seem to be on some sort of parole, and none of my behavior is guaranteed to prolong my employment: it's almost like I'm daring them to fire me. Fits in oddly with my "therapy" session yesterday, which was mainly to prescribe Wellbutrin to me.
6/29/02: 9:20AM: Forgot the start, but record the ending: the leader of the investigative team, rather like Terry K., has given me the red sauce that was the crucial element in the investigation; I'd thought it was to be thrown away, so I put the napkins with which I wiped up the bit of it that had spilled into the top of the container, almost causing the sauce to overflow, but she put the tightly fitted lid onto the container and said I should take it back to the boat. I carry it most of the way, when I realize that I have only a single shoe (a one-strap black leather shoe, like the pair I'd worn about thirty years before) on, so I get back to the crowd at the ramp to the dock and look around, asking, "Who's in charge here?" (I remembered an earlier detail: two good-looking guys, like two of the good-looking, slender, tall, long-cocked guy from MAN at Leslie-Lohman last night, had alternated in taking their shirts off, and I circled around them for a better view of their sexy chests.) A younger, attractive guy says he is, and I put the canister down near his feet, saying, "This is the all-important sauce, but I have to go back to the arena to get some stuff, so I don't want you to leave without me." He agrees with a laugh, and as I leave my jacket which I’d tied around my waist, knowing I wouldn't need it, I realize to my horror that my blue-jeans shorts have become so tattered that as I move down the rocks to the valley, onlookers laugh and point at my oddly purple genitals which are clearly visible through the gaping opening in front. But the laugh isn't TERRIBLY derisive, so I accept that that’s the way I look and stumble over the rocks to the bottom of the hill, doubling back to take a shortcut that another woman, also returning to the arena, had taken, which cut off a gradual sloping descent into a dusty scramble down a steeper slope to the bottom. I gain speed as I rush down, and almost catch up with her on the clearly visible path through the scree to the arena, and debate passing her, but it was then I woke up. The CORE of the dream was earlier in the arena, where she proved that the sauce did NOT have a crucial role in some scientific or biologic process (maybe in evolution, as the final article in the Scientific American that I've been reading the past week), but it should still be preserved as an example of how something that was once thought to be so important to a critical process is now proven to be a mere accompaniment of that process. I was only one of the observers, or students, who was now elevated to prominence by "Terry" entrusting the sauce to me to take back to the boat, which in retrospect seems to be connected to the Tortuguero trip earlier this year. Had to get this recorded before starting my Saturday, finishing now at 9:30AM, earplugs still in, air conditioner still off.
CANADA CRUISE DREAMS 7/1-9/02
7/2/02: 10:30AM: Woke at 4:10AM with dream of working in a library, checking items on the shelves, then helping someone to do it, telling her that those two blue backpack-like canvas containers have three and two items respectively, so with the four single items to their right, this shelf has the proper number, nine, of objects. Then I want to borrow the container with three items, thinking they’re ordinary videos (possibly pornographic), but when I open the zipper I find cassettes midway in size between a videocassette and a camcorder cassette, so I know I don't have the proper equipment to show the images on them. Then I’m told that I can check out a projector which could show these films, but that they don't have a copy of the instructions, which are very complicated, but I get an image in my head of putting the cassette above the projector, which would then take hold of the end of the film, like a motion-picture Super-8 projector, and thread it through automatically until it comes to the take-up reel at the bottom, and then I can experiment with the knobs and buttons to see how I can speed it up or slow it down, or freeze-frame the image just like on a regular VCR. But as they're looking for the projector, and can't find it, I wake up and make note of dream. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 7/2/02).
7/6/02: 10:05AM: THREE dreams while I lay awake many hours of the night, recurrence of insomnia because of Buproprion? 1) About 4AM, I'm moving somewhere, or leaving somewhere with souvenirs, but there are a dozen ceramic figurines that I have to take, along with a dozen smaller objects which may be able to fit into various pockets and shoulder bags, and when I start putting them in, there's the danger that they might break that I'm aware of. There's a cardboard box, broken at the sides, that seems ideal if I just line up the larger items on them and carry it like a tray of drinks, though I'd have to be careful that they didn't slip off the top or the bottom of the tray, though it's not clear in the dream where they're going or how far they have to be taken in the move. 2) About 6AM, I'm riding on a bus going toward my apartment, which is on something like East 70th Street, and I'd mentioned many of the neighborhood restaurants to Fred L., who said he'd eaten in a number of them and wanted me to join him for dinner at 7PM at one, but as I was riding on the bus, going east on what seemed to be 72nd Street, I couldn't for the life of me recall WHICH of the many restaurants which had been mentioned we were supposed to meet in. In pondering it, and talking to a woman in the front of the bus, I passed my stop, and was thinking maybe I was going to get closer to the restaurant than to my apartment, but I realized I had to go home and phone him before he left, to find out where we were supposed to meet, and I pressed the button to get off the bus and the driver kindly consented to deposit me at a place where he wasn't technically supposed to let anyone off, and the woman wished me luck. 3) About 9AM, I'm leafing through a BOUND copy of the final pages I'm supposed to index something like the HRW project on, knowing that this is only one volume of many, and that I'd looked at many previous passes of these same pages, and that I'd been given lots of instructions about what I'm supposed to index and what not (as has been done, and I'm concerned about remembering all of them, for the HRW job), and it seems that most of the corrections are acceptable on the pages that are bound together, but then I get to a chapter entitled something like "Gregor," and I knew that all the words for names starting with "G" were being changed to starting with "T", so some strange thing like that made sense to me in the dream, but then realized that this was about Franz Kafka's "Gregor" in Metamorphosis, (took me a few seconds to remember THAT name!), so that keeping the "G" would be correct here. Further mystified when the last chapter, or set of chapters, isn't bound into the book but are loose pages jammed into the back of the book, and I seem to remember her telling me something significant about a certain chapter, so this was probably the chapter, but I couldn't remember exactly what she'd said about it, and I felt embarrassed that I'd have to phone her and find what the details were unless I could look back at my scribbled notes and refresh my memory there.
END OF CANADA CRUISE DREAMS
8/2/02: 9:45AM: After transcribing lots of notes on NOTEBOOK:8/2/02, I finally get to THIS note: Wake about 5AM with first remnants of a SEXY dream (though I'm not erect) in a LONG time: I'm going to bed with John C., and he has his usual intense sexuality, and there's a younger, cute guy with us who John tries loving up, and he gets nicely erect right at my shoulder, while John goes down on me, though I'm not really hard. At this point a STRAIGHT guy (we seem to be in an apartment with a large party going on) wanders in with a drink in his hand, looks at our trio in distaste, and leaves the room without saying anything. In another phase, I'm in the living room with two very attractive (Talisa S.-type) young tall Spanish-looking women who kiss face-to-face very avidly, and they pull me in for a trio and then another cute guy who's in the room opposite me to make a four-kiss from which I wake, remembering vividly from my dancing Sunday with Leslie R. and two of his friends in another friend's apartment. But, sadly, I'm not sexually aroused from this dream.
8/10/02: 8:20AM: A long, detailed ORGANIZATIONAL dream: I'm back at IBM, moving into a smaller desk, trying to sort previous-job folders into stacks that will fit conveniently into the three drawers to the right of my somewhat shoddy desk, each of which is narrower and shallower than the drawers I had before, so I have no room for a wide pendaflex system, but all my folders are luckily narrow, so they'll stack slightly-lying-down in the bottom drawer, with the outdated ones in back with fading legends on the flaps of the manila folders that say what the projects were. Most seem to fit into the bottom drawer, which leaves the middle one free for a "miscellaneous" drawer into which I can pile anything on my desk that I'm working on, or haven't sorted out yet, and leave me with a clean desk-top when I leave for the day. The top of my desk is still littered with miscellaneous papers and folders, but I take time out to go to the even-older desk across the room from me, and the room turns into a field outside, which is grassy and somewhat hilly and VERY littered with junk and scraps and papers which the wind blows around with great freedom, and it's a REAL mess, but I somehow feel disconnected from it, as I feel about any mess around the garbage-rack in the front of my building, like "Yes, I live/work here, but that's not REALLY my personal space, and I don't actually CARE how messy it might be, because it's not my direct responsibility." There isn't much on the older desk (which my office-mate had just recently vacated) that I want, but two slick plastic office floor mats seem worth keeping: I don't have one under my desk now, and I don't really NEED one, but I might need one for the future, and I have room to store them, so I bring them back to my desk. I have another storage cabinet, rather like the file cabinets piled atop my file cabinets in the bedroom, into which I find I can BEND my wide-size pendaflex so that the narrower folders within are still accommodated while the surplus wire rigging just forms a square into which I can place the two large reference books I keep at work: The Idle Hour: Literature for the Casual Reader, which is a large old book of the format of the rebound Ibsen that I took on my Atlantic Islands trip, containing small excerpts rather like the Italian Folk Tales that I'm reading now at the kitchen table, and another reference book, about the same size, that fits conveniently into the space formed by the surplus wire on the pendaflex. My "current" job seems to be a smaller version of the job-card system that occupies many of my "done" folders, and I know that I haven't yet looked at the last test-output which is in the folder, and I'll have time today to do that and put in another test, which may be the last, to finish THAT job, like the organizing I have to do at my table today because I'm in a hiatus with the HRW huge project, and I have things to put away before Paul comes over this afternoon to pass his last time in NYC before catching his 9PM plane back to Paris. I feel no real job-pressure in the dream, as if I'm in the "flat-affect" stage in which I currently find myself, and I finish this neatly at 8:33AM, having gotten up at 8:18, after going to bed at 12:11, and come directly to type.
8/19/02: 8:40AM: Even with new-found pressures of moving, and my first Noctamide taken to fall asleep at 9:20PM after the Games Group, all I could come up with was this piddling fragment: some male trio had recorded many very popular songs, but they'd been going out of fashion, had been getting bored with what they were doing, and in the public performance featured in my dream, they sing in a lackluster way, looking wearily back and forth at each other, knowing they aren’t being inspiring in any way whatsoever, but they don't have the oomph or interest to lift themselves out of their lethargy. Like me? (RETURN TO JOURNALS 8/19/02).
8/30/02: 7:30AM: Thinking about my boat trip with Fred that starts the day after tomorrow, I have two segments (first forgotten) of dreams about a trip to Paris, the first going by subway through lines like "Jean-Jaures" and "Boulevard de Brain," the second being driven by a young woman through dark streets (once passing a car driving without lights), starting alone but with the car gradually filling with people, and then the car transforms into a boat-car which takes us along a section of Paris I'd never seen before, where the houses seem built around water: the first with a smaller then a larger pool in front of it along the road, then a fantastic trio of houses set back from the road in small depressions; each had once been an old "Maison Propre" or "Maison de Ville" or "Maison Particulaire" of three or four Haussmann-type stories with mansard roofs, but had recently been embellished with architectural swags that enlarged them under canopies held out by diagonal poles like awnings, covering elaborate gardens, dining areas, party-rooms, and pavilions. I ask, "What section IS this" of a young Frenchman sitting across from me, and I have two old maps, of one of which he says, "We just came to the edge of this, but this area isn't there," and then we pass a canal which is labeled M-4, and I think I'd seen that one on an orange-printed map, but when I draw out my brochures again there are a stack of VERY old souvenir booklets of "Riviera" and "Paris Banlieu" that I'd collected YEARS before that mysteriously show up now, and the driver presents me with an advertisement-filled current map which has no correspondence with the streets on which we're riding. I'd gotten into the car about 9AM and see that it's now 1:15PM, and I have no idea what my next stop or meeting or appointment is, or where I have to be when, and no idea where to tell the obliging driver to go next. Slightly untypical pre-trip anxiety-dream.
8/31/02: 5:30AM: Vivid dream of being in an Actualism-type class in an ordinary schoolroom with desks in which we sit in orderly rows. The guy behind me is reporting on a "new technique that the second-degree wizard sitting in front of me told me about," and praising the results he got from it. I can FEEL my happiness (my embarrassment, my suppressed joy) tingling in my body, so intense that I can HEAR lilting bell-sounds (rather like the erection-tinkle I'd thought of last night with Sean Connery's stimulation in Zardoz) and FEEL what I've been missing in my current "depression," and hoping our teacher doesn't think I've gotten too much influence (yet hoping he KNOWS that!). Afterward I have occasion to talk to the guy behind me, and shake his cold hand, saying, "Thank you for mentioning me so favorably," and wonder if he appreciates the contrasting warmth of MY hand. There's a break, as if for lunch, and when I come back I notice everyone filling out little forms, and I wonder how I'd missed picking some up to fill out when I re-entered the class. (Just remembered a PRIOR dream: I'm moving books from a basement bookshelf [at 1221 Dietz] to a new set of bookcases, pleased that things will now "fit" as they hadn't before, and come across a broken figurine that had replacement parts in a catalog: "torso $63, arm or leg $15" and was sorry I'd dropped and broken the expensive torso. I wonder what to do with LARGE rose bushes in huge vats. I meticulously dust off the tops of old books, pleased that the particles come away completely, revealing the bright colors of the cloth bindings at the tops of these elegant volumes. Shadows of my thinking last night that "things SHOULD be happier for me at this time, but I wonder why they're NOT"?) (RETURN TO JOURNALS 8/31/02).
Another 8/31/02 dream: 11:58AM: Another fragment remembered from 8AM: I'm walking on a ledge along a south Manhattan street, but my way is blocked by blue-gray pillows stacked on it. Looking down, I can see that some have been pushed off, probably by people passing this way before me, so I push more off and try to make my way along, but the stack is so shaky I grasp a metal stairway going down, and then a scaffolding blocks my way with supports widely spaced that I try to stretch my legs to climb down to get to the stairway and I wake up.
9/1/02: 6:25AM: Get up to type circus dream: we're walking down a side street from one amusement area to another when we see an opening in a building out of which come floats for the circus parade, and we see people running down the aisle to get a look at what's inside. The first corridor seems to be mostly ring-support: wooden boxes of blue or red or green which can be put together to form the base for different shows. But we can see down a further corridor the large trucks hauling out more floats, and try to get down there, when there's a kind of alarm and we start looking for a way out. One smart aleck goes up a few stairs to what might be an exit or the doorway to an office, and he glances in and says, "We can get out here," but then a security guard can be seen inside rushing toward the door we're facing, and we shout, "It's an office," and start running another way. Previously, there had been a large hill in the center, served by a funicular tram-car, and I glance to the side to see it descending VERY fast, and it hits the housing with a Melies-like stagy-looking jolt, while smoke comes from the housing after a flash of light, and I shout, "The funicular's crashed!" and we rush to see people strewn over a hillside, most looking only shaken up, but a few seem to be holding people who might be dead, so it was an accident after all. Some colorful section before, I've forgotten.
9/2/02: 6AM: Nice erotic kissing-guy-with-beard dream.
9/4/02: 9:32AM: I'm in some kind of camp like the Army, and have to shit, so go into a two-doored john and shut the door I enter, but leave the other door open, which has a view of one bed on the other side. Notice that the third toilet (there are no stalls) is collapsed and the wooden seat has been burnt, charred remnants in a semicircle only. I sit and strain to shit and a young female attendant comes in and says I should move to another stall because there's no water in the tank behind these two toilets. I look and there's NOT. I rush out into the open, crossing a field, and FEEL that there's something between my legs, and I've walked over some kind of weed that I've pulled out of the ground, so I disentangle it and throw it aside. I see a small bit of woods and know I have to cross this before getting to the other john, and then I wake, vaguely having to shit.
9/5/02: 8:02AM: I'm home in a combination of my living room at 1221 Dietz and my living room at 167 Hicks, entertaining a small group of guests, many of whom are children, and I have a tiny Heathkit-like television set about 2 inches high and 12 inches wide that I want to show a special TV opera or play on, but for some reason I've taken it out from behind the regular-size TV magnifying tube, taking care not to disturb any of the delicate wires connecting it to the power source that I've now exposed by having it out of its case. I look at a TV listing---something like the booklet on the ship---and prove that it's on now, just after 4:30PM on a sunny afternoon in the summer, and push a single button like the cabin's TV remote to find the right channel, but then wonder why I don't put it back to be magnified by the tube, and can't remember how it went: was it on a small pedestal which I've moved and forgotten? Was it a fixed distance from the lens, like some kind of telescopic objective? But the kids don't seem to mind the tiny horizontal image, so there's a small sequence in the dream about moving from one seat to another, around a two-seat aisle arrangement, that I've forgotten the details of.
9/6/02: 5:40AM: I'm in the ruins of some ancient Middle Eastern town, looking at "bow ties" of ceramics from shattered walls, not yet on sale, but clearly worth something, since lavish art-coffee-table books have been illustrated with just such remaining fragments. There are no mosaics, since these are probably already in museums worldwide. Some interactions with locals have since been forgotten in the few minutes between waking from the dream and going with my laptop into the john to pee.
9/7/02: 4:15AM: Dream has people lying on small beds according to the days of the week: Wednesday and Thursday reported on Thursday, so Friday and Saturday on Friday (but Sunday has to sleep, too, and does so temporarily in a slot), then Sunday and Monday on Monday (so they can take their proper slots).
9/8/02: 2:30AM: Dream about guys getting to the point of cumming and wake hard.
Another 9/8/02 dream: 4:20AM: Dream about a prescription whose second part cancels the third part, but it must be there to potentiate the first part, and the formulas are displayed so that the left half of one line should be normal while the right half should be blank, and then the next line somehow reverses that effect so that the prescription works either way it's used. I didn't understand it in the dream and I don't understand it now. Back to sleep after a bit and wake at 4:20 with a second dream: I'm sitting watching TV with Don M. and he reaches over and takes my hand and puts it in his crotch so that I can feel his erection. As I move it back and forth, it becomes smaller and more wooden, like I'm handling a large wooden paperclip that's solid on the edges and hollow in the middle. He reaches for me, and then climbs over me and stares me in the eyes as he starts to kiss me. I look back and his hair is messed up on his head (though it's clearly HIS hair rather than a wig), and his eyes become quizzical when he thinks I'm not as turned on as he thought I was, and as he gets more analytical I close my eyes so that he won't see the calculations going on behind them.
9/16/02: 8:10AM: 1) Earlier, I was at a camp, like an Army Summer Camp, and had to follow a group into town. I thought I knew where the intersection was where I was supposed to meet the rest of the group, but I obviously went down the wrong street and got lost and had to get back to the starting point and ask for directions. I asked a few guys but they gave confusing answers, and I finally chased one guy out onto the steps and begged him to tell me the directions, and he brandished a sheet of plastic onto which he'd traced the streets, and I persuaded him to come back inside while I found a pencil and rummaged on the top of a piano for a sheet of paper (on the back of which was written something like a poem in Cyrillic Russian) and tried to get the directions from him. I had turned right, and it turns out I had to turn left, and then get to Gatesby Street, and then I woke. 2) Just now, I’m back at 1221 Dietz and interacting with Dad for only a few days before he died, and Mom puts water in the bathtub and wraps him in sheets and puts him into the water as into a coffin. I then have to shave, and stand before the bathroom mirror, having lathered up my hair to wash it, and use that lather to ease the use of an electric razor with which I even my sideburns in a way I hadn't before, and then, by turning my head in an impossible way, shave off straggly sections down the sides of my neck, and finally even up one place in the back, and bring down longer hairs from one temple and cut a LOT of hair right in the middle and am rinsing to make sure it looks even when I hear a motion behind me and Dad sits up and starts talking. "Mom, Mom," I call out, and she rushes in from the kitchen and starts toward her bedroom when she sees the movement through the partly ajar bathroom door and sits down with an expression of stunned displeasure on her face, and I realize she would prefer it if he stayed dead, but I feel confusedly happy and wake to type.
9/24/02: 11:15AM: Woke at 6:30 with two semi-connected dreams: 1) I’m looking at some sort of map, or a television program about a city layout, and regularly gridded blocks have pairs of taller buildings facing each other across streets, and I’m trying to figure which have views and which windows are blocked by the building across the street, and this is clearly connected with my current worries about moving to Cadman Towers with their pairs of facing buildings. 2) On some trip Ken and I are ushered into a luxurious bedroom suite and I go into the john for a wooden toilet seat, and when I sit down there's a pleasant breeze on my back, as there was when I was standing SOMEWHERE, and it may have been at the Beard last night, when I had felt a breeze ruffling the back of my sports jacket. Then my wallet seems to be missing, and I’m searching for it, looking through my suitcase and dop kit and at one point seem to find a black rectangle like the one outside the YMCA in Montreal when I got out the taxi and dropped my wallet from my lap into the street, where I luckily spotted it, but in the dream it isn't my wallet but only some lookalike object. I say to no one in particular, "I'm going out to get the Sunday Times," without thinking how I can get one with no money, but maybe I hope I have enough change, or can find someone to borrow the money from. I get back to the room to find that Ken's bag is still on his bed, which is a relief because at least I can borrow money from him to take the subway to get home. And somehow my house keys are lost along with the wallet, but I console myself with the fact that John hadn't gone on vacation yet (which he did today) and would answer his bell and let me in so that I could get my spare door key from him until either I ordered another one or I could find the one that I lost. Woke and debated entering the dream on the computer, but finally took sketchy notes with a semi-working pen and went back to sleep.
9/26/02: 6AM: VIVID dreams: I'm on a tour in Eastern Europe and riding on the back of a flatbed truck, and at the climax the truck drives down a "typical" road, and around the houses on the right side of the street are women posed as if to show normal activities, but as the truck goes faster and the women attain archetypal status, it's like a wonderful Leni Riefenstal construction with one on a porch, another in a window, two standing on the lawn, one sitting in a chair, three decked out on a roof: all solemnly looking at my truck as it passes, as if in the most colorful of documentaries, their dresses bright and typical of the countryside, the faces composed and naturally beautiful. As we go faster and faster, the people increasing, I wonder how this will stop, and then the truck DOES stop, and I sit smiling at the completed spectacle, and suddenly from all around come a group of maybe ten young girls, perhaps 12 or 13 years old, all laden with pink and white blossoms like roses or carnations or chrysanthemums or wonderful light combinations of those, and all at once, as they gather at my knees, they FLING them onto my lap and chest, so that I lie back on the truck and FEEL the soft weight of the blooms on my chest, SMELL the slight, clean scent, and I feel MARVELOUSLY happy and hope that I have a chance to write this down before the day goes on much farther. I get to my room, and John is bustling about, saying, "We can drive to see the girls in Siena on Saturday and Monday," and I demur, saying, "But that's a long way to drive four times; I'd rather just take short tours into the countryside around here." Then I'm sitting on the floor, sorting through sections of a newspaper like the Sunday Times, and a young, attractive, rather elegant Frenchman is sitting on the floor nearby clearly trying to think of a conversation starter, and begins in French, something unclear about my liking this music, and I say no, thinking to explain later that I like classical music more than pop or movie music, and he continues in half-understood French to explain the kind of music he likes, moving closer to me on the floor (I'm still concerned about noting down the flower-climax sequence), and then he's talking in English which is even MORE difficult to understand than his French, and I try to think how to make the conversation easier for him when I wake and get up to type this to 6:18AM.
10/1/02: 9:50AM: For the first time in a long time, a bidi dream (and I search BACKWARD for the first time, and find one recorded 6/10!): 1) I'm preparing to take a trip with Dad, who's maybe in his 40s, while I'm an adult, maybe in my 30s, but still clearly we're father and son. He'd asked me to do something before that I couldn't immediately do, and now he says I can't take our passports to the office for a security visa because my briefcase, which has one padlock, requires TWO padlocks! I release the briefcase from my hand with disdain, and somewhat later I feel obliged to address my Dad: "I know I'm not acting correctly, but it seems that I have to do EVERYTHING about the trip, and that just annoys me." Then I think of how we might falsify a visa-stamp, since no one really LOOKS at it anyway. 2) I'm touring in a new eastern-European country with Dad, maybe Bulgaria, and I don't have any camera along and we're seeing more and more lovely scenery by climbing short rises of grassy sandstone to look over vistas which are quite lovely and worth photographing. Then I'm in a castle, going through strange rooms, and eventually it gets dark and the rooms seem off the usual tour, and I go around a corner in the wing surrounding a courtyard and look down through an opening in a stone wall and see a VERY unusual pool in which are swimming little creatures, some of which bear remarkable resemblances to fat plesiosaurs, and others of almost Boschian oddity, and I REALLY am sorry I don't have my video camera. An older native, watching with me, asks if I'd ever seen anything like that before, and I have to agree with him that I hadn't. When I'm going away (I was somehow supposed to meet Dad somewhere, at a certain time, but he wasn't there, and I'm still wondering how I'm going to meet up with him) I find it's raining, and I wonder where I could have left my umbrella, and I'm worried my dark suit jacket will get wet in the rain, but then when I'm outside under some trees, I feel in my left jacket-pocket and there's my folding umbrella, like my Channel 13 umbrella, and I feel a great sense of relief that at least I didn't lose THAT, and have to remember to come back to the Castle Schwarzenberg with my video camera in the future to take the pictures I'm missing now.
10/6/02: 8:10AM: I'm working at a company like IBM, where I'm having problems with various jobs I'm supposed to be doing: people are starting to say I'm not competent enough to complete them, and also, in an impossible-to-connect anomaly, I've been accused of "stealing the basic idea from the third play of some successful Broadway trilogy of plays and saying it was MY idea," when I KNOW I'd written a certain manuscript MANY years ago, and started wondering if it would be possible to carbon-date either the printer ink or the paper on which I'd printed out the manuscript, to prove that I'd set the crucial idea down YEARS before this play was produced. I go to a particularly sexy co-worker to tell him my ideas, but the scene changes quickly in two ways: 1) we’re driving in a car (thoughts of MY getting a car produced by the $93-per-month garage rentals which would come along with living at 101 Clark Street) along a treeless high ridge overlooking green valleys around a river below, thinking this is a wonderfully undiscovered scenic wonder close to the city, and the driver had either in the past, or just now, seemed willing to be closer sexually to me, and 2) we’re sitting in a movie theater, but the film isn't interesting us as much as the tentative pressure I exert against his right knee, which he responds to with a firmer pressure all along the leg, and that seems to bring back a memory in which we'd entangled our legs in a very sensuous way before, that had led to breathless clutchings of erections and mutual pleasuring that we both seem to want to repeat now. There were two OTHER specific criticisms against me in the IBM-job, which I enumerated in the dream to "prove" that I was being unfairly judged, but since I woke about 7:15 with the dream and then went through lots of thoughts about my new apartment (again, what a CRUSHING blow it would be NOT to get it now!) which put more specific memories from the dream out of my head by the time I got up at 8:02AM to start the day by typing this, and then going on to record NOTEBOOK:10/16/02 now. (RETURN TO JOURNALS 10/6/02).
10/17/02: 11AM: Had fairly trivial dreams the last three mornings, but I didn't bother to record them until now. 1) 10/15, some kind of local waiting-for-some-transportation typical-anxiety dream, though not very compelling. 2) 10/16, the same kind of anxiety, this time for a play that’s supposed to start at "8:80" in the evening, which I interpret as 8:45 or a little after, and when 8:20 comes and I have no idea where I am or how long it takes to get to the theater, I guess I wouldn't be seeing it, but again woke without any residual anxiety. 3) 10/17, I'm working a puzzle that involves an 18-letter anagram, one letter of which is changed each step to make a new anagram going down an involved ladder, and I have the solution to hand and sneak a peek at the next one, but involuntarily glimpse the following one, and wake going over various combinations of words that have the required 18 letters in two or three rather stereotyped phrases that might be related to more easy phrases anagrammatically or logically. Since the dreams weren't that involving, I'm not very interested in setting them down, nor very relieved having finished that particular action.
10/18/02: 8:50AM: Only fragments about 1) sitting on a porch like the one at the back of 1221 Dietz, reading, and feeling an itch on the back of my leg and scratching it and picking off a small speck which crawls over my finger when I look closely at it: a tiny baby louse, and 2) looking at a map, or the actual terrain, of the southern tip of Manhattan, seeing how the lowest subway stops correspond to the southernmost streets, some of which are very short and have no shops on them at all, and trying to come up with some formula that shows how the stops correspond to the streets, but waking to realize it's all trivial.
10/19/02: 9:55AM: I'm traveling with a bunch of English-speaking Europeans as a sort of auxiliary tour guide, and we travel in a bus across a bridge from New Jersey into northern Manhattan, stopping in a theater-like space where people can ask questions. Somehow I start pointing to the next questioner, but realize I'm taking away the real guide's position and catch his eye to indicate that HE should take up the choosing. Then we're in a bus which is following the route of the train from upstate, but starting along the northern Manhattan coast and going over to Brooklyn before returning through a tunnel to Manhattan. I ask him if he's planning to say anything about Brooklyn while we're in it, but he dismisses the question with impatience. Then we stop at the base of a hill up which a funicular is going, and the guide indicates a doorway and says, "When you're ready, you can go in there." When I enter, the woman ahead of me opens a door at the end of the small room, but rather than leading to an entrance-platform, there's a small john with a light over the sink. I think the guide may have made a mistake, but when more people enter the little room, it jolts and starts moving upward, the windows gliding onto a diagonal slant through which tourists can watch the view as the whole house goes up the hill, and I realize that the tenders of this funicular actually comprise a family who sleeps, eats, and lives in these quarters while overseeing the transportation of tourists up the hill. I answer more questions and feel competent in my job.
10/20/02: 10:50AM: After jerking off with bidis and falling back to sleep, a detailed dream of moving into a one-room apartment, putting everything in order, and then finding that other people are using my room, that I have a door to the outside, and that windows can open to street vistas. Then I look at a clock that I thought had said 8:15 and it's 9:15 and I was supposed to meet Laird for dinner at Kunstler's at 9, and I forgot where he said it was! I think it was on the corner of two "S" streets, like Stanton and Spring, but I can't find my Holt's Guide to see where that is, and I first think, "I'm on the east side, and so is that, so maybe I can make it," but then seem to remember him saying it was just near the ferry station on the WEST side. I go out and see a lion-faced house built onto two trees and think, "I've got to take pictures in New York, too." I walk to a corner of Market and see Akron University up the hill, and sort of remember him saying something about THAT. But now it's 9:45, and I can't even telephone the restaurant because I'm not sure of the name of it, and I continue down Market to see more incredible buildings I've never seen before, though I know the neighborhood is familiar, but despair of EVER finding Laird, wondering what excuses I'll make that he'll accept, and marvel at the intricacy of such a late-morning dream, waking at 9:30AM.
10/22/02: 9:50AM: I'm outside with a crowd of people in a Central Park-like open area, and people are looking up and pointing and exclaiming when a shooting star sweeps across, and all is pleasant and elating until the frequency and intensity of the shoots increase, and the white streaks become fiery trails that sometimes twist upon themselves and spin out of orbit, as if they were projectiles from a distant volcano, or debris from some massive explosion. Also, rather than being distributed through an angle of about thirty or forty degrees, they come from a point on the horizon which I'd noticed before: it was like looking at a blocky ship hull on the horizon of a calm sea at the very limits of visibility: an object more easily seen through peripheral vision than by direct sight, its location replaced by a blurry light when the object itself disappeared. Now that segment of the horizon begins to glow red, as if from a distant forest fire, and we all stare in that direction in foreboding, as if we expect to see a mushroom cloud, or a flaming disintegrating object like a plane or a spaceship. The fear and anxiety increases sharply just before I wake up, without knowing what the source of these lava-like traceries in the sky could be. Vaguely disquieting dream!
10/29/02: 11:10AM: 1) Two girls and I are lugging a canoe up a graveled path so that we can get to rises on which we hop into the canoe and slalom down a water slide on a hillside to a next stage where we get out and lug the canoe to the stage after that. They complain a bit, but I seem to have been there and done this before, so they're listening to me in the hopes that the benefit will be worth the struggle. 2) I'd been forced to leave a butcher shop in which I'd been drinking a large flagon of beer, and when I return I remind him that I'd left a lot in my glass, and he obliges me by filling it to the point at which I'd abandoned it, but when I innocently try to get more freebie beer, he makes it quite clear that he was willing to give me what I'd left but no more.
VENEZUELA DREAMS 11/2-16/02
11/5/02: First dream I forget, then later I'm looking at a TV listing that has some interesting programs but I'm not sure what channel they're on or how the listings are organized. I want to see a program called Universe, which starts at 4:40PM, but it's 5:35 so I guess I've missed it.
11/6/02: I meet someone in an orgy bar, even after it was supposed to be closed, and we play and get hard and suck, but then I have to leave and meet some "straight" guy in some position of authority, but he looks at me with a strange smile, sort of seductive, so I reach over and start playing with his nipples through his soft cotton shirt, and he loves it, so the shirt comes off, and his pants, and I start sucking on his erection, which gets larger and larger, as does mine, and we both get close to cumming but say we want to play more, and he gets absolutely enormous and I decide to take it ALL, feeling the cock fill my mouth down to the uvula, and then I just open up and take it all to the pubic bone, and he feels wonderful and I feel wonderful.
11/7/02: 4:25AM: Incredibly long, detailed dream of my attending some kind of consciousness-raising session with someone like a combination of Leonard Orr and Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Das, who's somewhat of a charlatan but also has some good stuff to pass along, and it's coming to the conclusion of the evening---but before that, someone at the end of my row of seats has a large glassine envelope of grass, and he's passing it around so we can all have some, and I take out a handful, which turns out to be grass "disguised" or "cut" with ordinary leaves, I suppose to make it less suspicious to an outsider, and I put lots into my breast pocket, glad to have it for later---and I'm sitting rather by myself, but people are leaving and I think I'm going to be among the last to leave, which would somehow prove that I was among the most developed of the audience, and people are moving from chair to chair, and I see a broken-down dining-room chair to one side and sit in it, rather wishing that someone would have some contact with me, and someone comes and stands behind me, and I mentally wish him to touch me, and he gently begins to rub the back of my neck, and I fantasize this will develop into something wonderful, but after a few gentle kneadings he stops, and I paranoiacally think he's found my neck too fat, or my chin too fleshy, and is turned off by it. Before that, I'd tried other seats, but they turned out to be damaged in some way and I didn't want to continue to sit there. Some rather revelatory things were said during the session that I might have wanted to remember, but I can't remember any of them now. More details remained in my head directly after I woke and lay comfortably in bed, but I forget them now.
11/8/02: 2:35AM: Dream of attending something like a press conference where some VIP, possibly a big movie actor, has been accused of some terrible deed and keeps insisting he's not guilty, and when the judge decides he ISN'T guilty, he says, "Now you'll have to apologize for accusing me." I'm no one of importance there, but I shout out, "WE know you did it, you FUCK, and will ALWAYS hate you for doing it." He snarls something back, but then a stop-motion film is presented in which, at .089 seconds, it's proven that he DID do it (maybe kill someone) and as a result I'M praised as being the only honestly expressive person there. 2:51: Another fragment hits me: I'd forgotten to deposit some checks, but I clear things from my desk and find them, four or five of them, with the deposit slip I'd already made out, and know that my balance is big enough that it won't matter if I deposit them tomorrow, even through there's been great activity, somehow, with other people for whom I'm responsible. ANOTHER fragment involves a very popular Brad Pitt-type actor (from the Toyota commercial, obviously) who's attracted to me, and he's got a date at a party we're attending, but he makes it clear he can take her home and THEN we can meet and be together. Very gratified feeling in this particular fragment, so I HAD to get it down, even in the dark.
Another 11/8/02 dream: 11:35PM: Dream of Rita having occult powers and threatening people around her if she can't have her way and go to a party a judge has said she's not old enough to go to, and is hoping to be proved old enough if she can be powerful enough. At first she trusts ME, but later she stares at me and in a TV suspense moment, she seems to focus to kill me, but I awake.
11/9/02: 6:15AM: I've got a pocketful of theater tickets, and of the five I'd ordered before, I have the three "regular-shaped" ones, but not the two "shaped-like-a-ship" ones, and can't remember when they are for, though I'm sure I've written them in my calendar, which I don't have with me now. Before this, I'd had an invitation to an Actualism event in honor of someone gay, and two of us could go for $85 each, so I asked Spartacus if he wanted to go, and he said sure, which made me happy, since it would be all-gay, but we all knew who we were because we'd belonged to an Actualism special-interest group. Also before, there was a benefit and someone asked me to be on the four-member Charades team, and I was amused to see that one of the other members was a woman, and another was a black, so we were "integrated." I was asked if I wanted to start, so I said OK and was handed a card with about 8 VERY difficult made-up words and phrases to give. At first I thought of some of the impossible ones to do, but then realized I was supposed to have the SHORTEST time, so I picked the word "SHIVE," thinking I could do "Shy" with my finger in my mouth and a simper, and "Five" with five fingers, and then show they should shove them together. Back to the most-recent dream: I knew that the play started at 2PM and I hadn't had lunch yet, but it was getting late and I figured I could treat myself to a $7 panini, like at the Met, during the intermission of the play, but then it became unsure if I could even get to the theater by 2PM, because one subway pulled in and I was going to catch it, but it just sped through the station without stopping. Then another pulled in, slowed enough so that I thought I had time to nip into one of the shops along 42nd Street and buy two belts, because my pants didn't have any, and I knew I needed at least two size 38 ones, but then the train speeded up and I thought I didn't have enough time, and then it slowed again and maybe I did. Then, without transition, I was at Broadway and 42nd Street, but on a mesa above the sidewalks, so I looked to the side and saw about a thirty-foot jump from a rock ledge to the street below, and decided that was too much to risk without maybe getting hurt, so I looked to the side to see curved brick staircases winding down from the mesa, and decided which would be closest to the theater I needed to get to, and I woke up. Dream of sorting through someone's stamps for 40 envelopes for Rita's wedding invitations, but I don't know where or when it is, and I figure to buy forms to be filled in and mailed.
11/13/02: A dream (rather than mere musing) that has me in my underwear in Bill P.'s apartment, though "Bill P." is more Ken L. than Bill P., and he definitely wants to have sex with me, or at least see me naked, and I'm not interested in starting anything sexual with him, and even think of leaving back to my apartment, but there's another guy there, a redhead who might be patterned after the sexy blond in the restaurant last night, that I COULD be interested in, and since he seems to "belong" to Bill, I decide it might be worth it to cater to Bill if it could lead me to the redhead.
11/14/02: 7:37AM: Dream of looking at a young Mark Wahlberg-type sexy guy, figuring I have NO chance with him, and as he looks at me with SOME vague acceptance, I reach out to touch his naked torso with what I hope is a seductive murmur of "Pretty pretty," and as ridiculous as that sounds to my ears when I say it, he seems to respond positively, or at least lets ME respond positively to HIM when I reach out to grasp him by his narrow, muscled waist and draw his abdominals to my bearded face, loving the subtle shadings and risings and fallings in each square, and I nuzzle and kiss his middle, which he seems to enjoy, but I don't get to even feel if his genitals are responding to my erotic touch, or even to note if I am responding to my touch, when I wake with just the vaguest tingles in my groin.
END OF VENEZUELA DREAMS
12/23/02: 7:35AM: Observe that it's been THIRTY-NINE days since my last recorded dream, and these are just fragments: 1) my office-boss assigns me and a list of personnel to be responsible for a publication-brochure that is the "ninth of a series" and it means that my team and I will have a chance to be proven the best in the company. 2) I'd squeezed a growing pimple on the left side of my nose the day before, and now there's just a tiny whitehead that I squeeze and the thin membrane splits with a tiny POP and I'm content that I'm well rid of the last of that. Feel amazed that my concentration on moving (possibly coupled with great sleeplessness associated with anxiety about the timing and details of moving) has ELIMINATED dreams from my nights, and as I look back I don't even recall having HAD a dream which I did NOT record because of the pressure of lists of things I had to do on various days to facilitate the moving. Like so many other "lists of things kept," maybe this is slowly being reduced because I'm truly growing into "another phase of life" with the coming move to my "final apartment" where I'm discarding MUCH from my past and even suspecting I might end up with ROOM to start OTHER collections in my life.
12/30/02: 9:15AM: 1) I leave 320 E. 70th (!) and see sidewalk stacked with furniture ready to be moved, and I wonder who's moving and why I hadn't heard about it (obviously influenced by Judy's "Hope you enjoy your new apartment," comment yesterday). 2) I'm delighted to find a discount-table of plastic containers (like the containers I still have to take to 101 for snacks tomorrow (!) night) of varying sizes, mostly translucent white plastic, but some are gray. Small ones I don't need, and I pick up a medium-sized square tray and see that it's rather overpriced at $6, but others LIKE it are marked $3 through $8 for a larger gray-plastic one, and I might get some, though I DO have a supply of my own at 167. 3) I suddenly realize I have ticket to the "Martin Beck" for a play, and a) think to get a bus, as I would have in Akron, b) think I can find a taxi to take me there quick, since it's now 2PM and the ticket is for 2:30, and c) think I can WALK there, since it's on 47th between 6th and 7th, and I'm on 47th---no, 57th, but I don't have much more than 10 minutes now for the 10-block walk. Finally find some kind of group-taxi that will take me, but when we get to the first group's destination, the driver makes some snide remark about how some of the out-of-town guests (influenced by Paul and his mother now here?) should be treated to the cost of THEIR ride by the New Yorkers, and I get mad and holler, glancing at my watch to see it's 2:29PM and I have no hope of making it to curtain, when I wake with unreasonable calmness.