DREAMS FROM 2003 2 of 2
10/1/03: 7:17AM: I'm on a tour with Ken on a luxury boat in the Mediterranean, and the boat is to depart in 15 minutes for its next stop, which we're not going to. He's got his stuff together and I say I'll meet him on the dock. Can't quite find my way back to the cabin, and finally find the hatch (like the food delivery hatch at Savoie yesterday) under the green flooring-cover, and pull it up and l choose between the stairs and finally get to our cabin, from which his stuff has been taken, and I can't find my LARGER suitcase, and can't hope to pack anything into my briefcase-size smaller matching piece. Try to find an officer to say he has to delay departure, but the deck is full of elegant German passengers dressed in almost-uniform gaudiness, and break up a group to ask if anyone speaks English, and they say something nasty, and I shout for attention, and out of the corner of my eye see crew members trying to look inconspicuous. Finally i get the message they can't possibly delay, and I seem to be left with getting off the boat into a tiny dinghy and making my way back myself, impossible, or hiring a transfer-boat at some exorbitant rate, or going to "Cragun, Romania," their next stop, and making my way back to the itinerary on my own. Astounding! And then say "I've lost my big suitcase," and they say "Did you CHECK it?" and I feel in my right pants' pocket and there's a tiny bit of cardboard, and I draw it out to see a tag with enigmatic printing on it, and the crew-member rolls his eyes and takes it, so maybe I can get THAT back. Grab my things out of drawers to try to get them all together, and am drawn to a bunch of ceramics and glass on a coffee table, and some are the ship's, some seem to be Ken's that he left behind, and some MIGHT be mine, but they're fragile and I decide to leave the ceramic rose and the little figurine behind, because even if they're mine, they couldn't possibly be packed without breaking. Pack a wine glass and then see that the base IS broken, and take that out. Then, out the window, or from a viewpoint above, like the view of the ferries churning at the docks yesterday morning as I was watching sunrise, the ship churns away from the dock and we're definitely on our way and I'm still on the boat, and no one who can do anything about it has even been NEAR me. Turn and turn in despair, and then wake up. Pee and finish this at 7:35AM, cold.
10/3/03: 4:45AM: I'm touring a broken-down middle-Eastern capital like Bratislava, mostly in ruins, under reconstruction, buildings covered in scaffolding and wooden frames, and there's a film of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, with a lot of soldiers on the castle ramparts marching through geometrically precise display-marchings, and then I'm in the cast, following a group of tourists sharing loosely rolled joints, sparks and flecks of grass showering from saggy ends, enjoying smoking and the group with great delight, even though the surroundings aren't the most splendiferous in the world.
10/4/03: 1) 5AM: I'm on a tour, and the tour leader starts saying something, and my companion, someone physically rather like Bruce Lieber, talkatively like Fred Lasker, keeps sharing HIS views with his neighbor, and the leader faces and dresses down my friend in no uncertain terms, calling him rude and disrespectful, thinking he knows everything when the tour leader might actually know, and want to impart, information that my friend in fact doesn't have. I'm not sure the talking-to is going to help at all, but my friend seems to understand and at least APPEAR contrite. 2) 8:43AM: I'm attending some kind of summer outdoor opera or theater, having moved down to the front row next to someone like "Fat Jack" from the Beard, and during intermission I've got to pee, so I go to the back area where there's a row of black-curtained entrances to what seem to be the toilets. I'm standing in one line and someone crowds in behind me because someone's coming out of the doorway to my rear, and the person in line behind me has nowhere to go except to push me toward the entrance, where I put up my arm to prevent being pushed through the doorway. Finally a large personage appears above the floppy curtain so that I can go in, but am amazed to find a darkened area in which a toilet is full of papers and food containers, a branch of the kitchen is working in full view right nearby, what appears to be a urinal is surrounded by paraphernalia of stagecraft and kitchencraft, and PEOPLE are working and standing and talking all around. I go in one direction, foiled; another, stymied; another, blocked, so in an antagonistic mood I unzip and piss right into the darkened bushes in the middle of the area, well aware that there are people ALL AROUND who can see me, even though I turn my back to the bulk of them, and finally urinate with relief, only to feel a small turd three-quarters escape from my anus, and wonder how I'm going to feel sitting on it for the rest of the performance. Feel that the next act is about to start, but when I get down the side aisle I find many seats still empty and the curtain seemingly not about to rise, so I even debate going to one of the johns BEHIND the stage to find a toilet and toilet paper to wipe myself before the performance re-starts. Wake with a pressure to pee.
10/10/03: 9:40AM: I'm back on Dietz Avenue with Rita and Rolf, and she brings out a box which had contained a corn popper, but it's full of papers, and when I look at them, they're all stamped envelopes, the top ones being mainly the large yellow "balloon" air-bubble-wraps which had contained presents from a friend of mine in India, and the envelopes had these extraordinary swathes of expensive stamps in large numbers, and I said "That's why I'm keeping them like that." Vivid images, but no connection with anything I can think of now.
10/26/03, 3:30AM: I'm in some kind of meeting-hall party, maybe in a distant part of NYC, maybe in the mid-west, but it's an out-of-the-way, unsophisticated sort of place, maybe even as if it were back in the 20s, and I'm in a large living room, having things to eat, maybe more like a church social than anything else, and a young man and I meet, somehow, and he's attractive and probably gay, and we seem to be attracted to each other, though I'm not quite sure if he's being sexual or trying to proselytize me in some way, and in our awkward conversation he seems to imply that he can sing, or even is an entertainer, and I suggest I might like to hear him some time, maybe only leading him on, but all of a sudden he's standing up and singing (rather in the position of the black woman in "Omnium Gatherum" yesterday matinee, and he's transformed into an almost Japanese-animé type of rock-star, with an electric light-brown and gold suit topped by a super-coif of light-brown hair emblazoned with gold highlights that's more like a Christmas tree ornament, or neon-sign of an entertainer's head, than any possible real stage-makeup, though it's VERY theatrical, almost Kabuki-stylized, but almost metallic in its plasticity, electricity, and artificiality, all the while looking like "him," but a super-him, almost like a comic-book super-hero. And not only HE is singing, but a group of men in the corner, near the projection TV, are singing as a chorus, and this is obviously a show, but it's a semi-religious thing, like an American version of Oberammergau, or some U.S. southern-valley legend of their settlement. It goes on for a while, but not to the point of over-surfeit, and then he's back "in his human garb" and at my side, and I don't know what to say. "You're very talented," I start. He smiles and takes my hand, and his hand is cold, curled into mine, and I make that a statement, and he moves his hand and smiles shyly, and I say something to the effect of "You're certainly very professional," and he allows as he's been developing this for 18 years. "And do you take it, I don't know how to ask this, on the road?" "Yes, I travel with it," he says, again as a shy teenager would say it, and only now that I'm typing am I reminded how much like the persona of Jean-Pierre-in-first-meeting he's capturing, or inhabiting, or living, and then it's clear he has to go, though I don't want him to, and I stammer for something else to say, something to keep him with me, and I can only come out with "I like you," and he smiles, again with that agonized shyness of "the love that cannot speak its name," and he pulls his hand slowly away so that his clenched hand uncurls in mine so that our fingers curl together, then uncurl, so we're left with only finger-tips touching, and then he pulls away and is gone, and there's no seeming notice of the people around us that we've had an electrifying encounter, and I wake and look at the clock at 3:31 and pee and get out of the AlphaSmart and type this in my bathrobe and sore nasal passages until 3:47, aware that though I'd been sleeping since 9PM to 3:31, six and a half hours, it's only 2:47 in the first "fall-back in time" day, and a LONG time to dawn, and it was only YESTERDAY'S dawn, but coincidence, that I got up to WATCH the sun rise, and today it would have to have been an hour earlier! 5:55AM: I hadn't gotten up to record the SECOND part of the dream: I'm in a bus, realizing I'd just gone north of the Canadian border in a tour bus (like the one Spartacus and I saw driving past on Houston while we had an early dinner at Jane after "Omnium Gatherum?"), and it gets to the top of a hill in late afternoon and he shuts off the engine so we coast down the gentle slope of the hill, coming around a corner to expect a dazzling view over the ocean, but we merely get a sweep of farmland, and we go slower and slower as the slope eases off, and finally he puts on the engine again and we're off to stop at a small town where I get off and wander along a beach, getting lost, not knowing quite how to get back to the bus station, and walking over a detailed shoreline of grassy edges with tiny clear streams making walking slippery and muddy. I had the DISTINCT thought "And this is NOT a dream, so I'll HAVE to remember a way to get back, because I can't just wake up and GET back since this is DECIDEDLY not a dream." Other things happen, but I can't remember if the next section was in the SECOND or THIRD installment: I'm on a boat tour, sharing a large room with an older man who seems sweet, but when I want to ask him something about the trip he's already asleep in his bed on the far other side of the room. We dock in an unknown town toward evening, and I go out to wander the streets looking for entertainment, and see a bar-restaurant type of place where there are distinctively young pretty women that I interact with (this is important later) but I see a sign that indicates "entertainment downstairs," and I go down some stairs which are painted black and divide into many stairways going deeper and deeper into basements, until I come to a small theater-auditorium space where the stage is comprised of black-painted wooden levels, almost like wooden boxes piled up at different levels and painted uniformly to look like a modular stage area, and when I walk along one level, it seems there are positions indicated by black plastic, thick, tiles, I can't think of a better word, which indicate where various instrumentalists sit, or they're maybe like music stands, slightly open-book-shaped, that show where the instrumentalists sit, and I'm walking between these when a few musicians DO gather and sit in the some of them and begin to play music as a small combo. As the crowd increases, this is definitely a gay bar, but I'm very much aware that I'm quite a bit older than anyone else here, and then I begin to wonder if the boat doesn't sail before midnight, but somehow know that we're not leaving until the morning. Start to ask around about how to get back to the town, but there's confusion, though they think I might have to take a taxi, and I don't even start to feel if I still have my wallet, since suddenly, to me, this seems like a perfect place for pickpockets (like the article in the New York Times Magazine about the clean new something-or-others, busses or hotels or trains, that have clean new pickpockets to be avoided), but I'm not clear even where I have to GO, and at last I see a familiar WOMAN'S face I'd seen before, and she vanishes down a hallway as I shout "Miss, MISS!" and go through a doorway and around a corner and, thankfully, there she is, staring back at me in wonder, and I ask "Where do I say to the taxi to go, to the boat dock?" "Which boat?" she asks with puzzlement. "I don't know---from America?" I stammer, and she says "Most from there take a boat to the Olympia Hotel rather than stay on THAT boat," but I figure I might as well go back to the boat since I'm going to be ON it for about a week, and in MOST places there's not going to be ANY alternative to the boat, so I might as well get used to it at the start, but when I exit the building, I find myself on strange hilly terrain in the dark, with rock-paved paths going up to various houses on hillsides, none of which seem related to the place I originally entered to go down the long stairways, and now this is DEFINITELY in the third part of the dream, and I'm walking up and down trying to find someone who'll help me, and a medium-sized dog (not as large as the white St. Bernard, or whatever the sheep-sized dog was that someone remarked about across from the Victory Theater before the show yesterday, comes up in possible friendliness and starts clasping my leg, his muzzle coming up not quite to my waist, and I push him away in a friendly way, saying "No, get down, you're not mine," and then there's another dog running for me, again clasping my leg, but in a somewhat more threatening manner, and suddenly there are five or six dogs, still only medium-sized, circling around me with obviously bad intentions, and one comes snarling toward me and I grab his head and start trying to separate his lower jaw from his head, but it won't break, and the teeth are sharp in my hands, but I keep trying, fearing for the awful bone-breaking sound and feel of the dislocating jaw, and I'm not so much trying to displace-DOWN the lower jaw as push UP on the upper jaw, with a ghastly picture in my mind of the upper jaw cracking off and splintering into the dog's cranium and brain, and I keep TRYING for this, and it never quite works, and I wake, rather heated, to see that the clock reads 5:55, and I've GOT to get up to record those last TWO episodes before I forget them, and finish now at 6:19, feeling vaguely feverish in this long time-change evening.
10/31/03: 7:10AM: I'm back at IBM, working (first in a LONG time!, well, since 6/22 and 9/3), sitting at my desk, and someone obnoxious, rather like Tim Curry (can't think of HIS name, and for awhile I can't think of "Rocky Horror Show" which would GIVE me his name from Maltin), comes up behind me to sit in a chair and says "MY mother would like special treatment, too, but I don't know who to ask to GET such treatment," alluding to some exceptions my Mother took advantage of many years ago at the company, and my cubicle mate whispers as an aside to me, "I guess he knows what we are [gay], but I hope he can be placated so he won't make trouble for us." I ignore him, and realize that I've finally finished with a long-term project, and so I can clear up my desk drawer from THAT job, and need to make a final test of another job, the job-card job, and all I have to do is put in test cards and multiply simple numbers together to get a final price and I'm finished. Find PLANT tendrils drooping down behind my desk, next to the wall at my left, and bring them back into the light, and come across a plastic-like packet of luxuriant moist MOSS, and when asked about it, I say "It's very special, needs exact conditions to grow well," while kneading the specific texture and heft of the moss, "and is comprised of LIGNINS," I saw, expressing a brownish ichor from a broken middle cross-section, "and it's really UNIQUE," I conclude, not knowing what I'm going to DO with this prodigy.
WEDNESDAY, 11/5/03: 6:33AM: Wake with memories of dreams that seem distinct, but with time they fade into obscurity. Something about arrays of numbers, listed according to state, or cities within state, that are either dates or amounts of money connected with some parameter like time of settlement, or worth of property, or priority of importance---or maybe even amount of damages inflicted by Hurricane Isabel, which figured so prominently in conversations about the Nice and Fleasy Antique Shop or Thursday's Restaurant. Another topic was, even more vaguely, me in a play, or working, or writing something, or maybe a computer---it seemed very current and important and I've forgotten any details that might have made sense or memory of the dream.
SUNDAY, 11/9/03: 6:42AM: Woke about 4:30 with dreams: 1) I'd been in an acting group but had no news of what parts I might be considered for, so I told some supervisor about this and he sat me down and said that a) I was being considered for a voice-over part on one program, and everyone knew that voice-overs very often led to other parts, and b) I was in lead contention for the part of Nico in the play "The Master and Nico," and I looked at a script and saw that it was an impressive part, so I felt satisfied with my progress. 2) Some pattern in a plan was to be filled in with me getting a pair of air-lift, height-increasing shoes, and other parts of the pattern were being filled in promisingly. 3) I'd finally gotten mail from a tubular box (rather like the pipe into which I dropped our $2 car-fee for the Tosohatchee Refuge), and it contained a) a plate block of a pictorial stamp for Walt Disney's "The Sleeping Beauty," and I debated keeping the copy of the ad, which was larger and more detailed than even the plate-block itself, and b) a certified copy of a prescription that I needed for Dr. Jaffe, from some organization to which, for whatever reason, I had to send my post-office-box-number address, which I didn't check very often (a version of e-mail?), but here was the official form, with xeroxed signatures, which was all I needed to complete an application I'd been working on a long time, so I could finally report that things were coming together.
TUESDAY, 11/11/03: 4:55AM: Wake at 4:43 and try to fit together the dream: I'm in a north African city, traveling with Jean-Jacques, and I want to buy something, and he takes out a pile of coins and measures me out about an inch and a half of three sizes of coins: the largest seem like silver, and might be the equivalent of silver dollars; the middle sizes, like nickels, are of two or three metals, maybe gold, silver, and nickel; and the tiniest, smaller than any usual coins, may be of gold, silver, and copper, which might be the local equivalent of a penny. I seem to want to reduce the number of coins by giving a lot of copper ones and fewest of the gold ones, but I can't be sure, and think to try to buy something for the equivalent of $1 and try to get one of the salespeople to show me how many coins of what size and color would be the equivalent of that $1 purchase, but then I get involved in objects of various values, and the details get vague. 6:50AM: Dream of bicycling in hills, somewhere in the US, I'd guess, with Spartacus, and I "come to" when I gather my stuff into my basket to continue, and wonder how we got into all these PEOPLE around, in back of us up a slope on which an old snowman is melting with soot-blackened fringes into the warm Alpine sun, and have to retrieve my wired mouse from a ditch to get around another cyclist blocking my way onto the main path leading to the waterfall at the head of the trail we'd been cycling up.
WEDNESDAY, 11/12/03: 4:31AM: Had one of the most INCREDIBLE dreams of all times: not ONCE in the phantasmagorical odyssey did I question the reality of the "cadenzas" (chains, as I read in New Yorker yesterday) of happenings: I was in NYC, somehow present in a building given over to a small number of apartments occupied by a number of obviously wealthy (from the extent of the apartments and the enormity of the artificiality with which they surrounded themselves), probably "very important," (since I was impressed by the whispers that Andy Warhol [who, of course, is dead, but that didn't occur to me in the dream, so the most logical conclusion would be that THIS dream took place in a time before Warhol died] and Robert Rauschenberg had been in attendance at my-----coronation?), and surrounded by a hierarchical coterie. I was looking from a distance at a sort of show, rather like the Scales and Fins show at the Naples Caribbean Zoo yesterday afternoon, which began with the unrolling of a long elaborate scroll, which at first I thought was individually painted along its 7-8 foot length, but at closer look may have been only a strip of wallpaper selected for its psychedelic pattern, into the center of which was inscribed "Robert Zolnerzak," and with the revelation of my name, I was swept into an elaborate ceremony which encapsulated my "fifteen minutes of fame" in this artist's circle. He was young and dark-skinned, reminding me of SOMEONE from my past: rather diffident, reasonably attractive, somewhat aloof, placid in a distant way [was THIS the Bob someone from Advanced Actualism?], looking like an actor, or a clerk at IBM, or a passerby on the street or in a museum I may have seen a few times, but FAMILIAR in a way I won't pursue here. People around him, when he revealed my name, were in turn attracted to ME, and they marveled at the sound and spelling of it, but then his attentions to me got more personal, and he began coming closer to me, touching me, as part of the ritual, it seemed, but then I thought he might be getting interested in me PERSOANLLY, and he began to caress me more closely, and people around began to exult: "He's expanded the age-limit, THANK you Robert," from an older man whose sexual advances were now more acceptable because he was yet younger than I, and now that I was "in" he could be "in." Another thanked me because now his BEARD was acceptable because it was like mine, another was grateful because his POT was no longer abhorrent to this artist's disciples. We began to kiss, ritualistically at first, but then I felt he grew genuinely affectionate, but then realized we were going beyond the bounds of acceptable public behavior, so he stopped kissing passionately and others flocked around as if to share the extent to which he liberated the pattern of sexuality with someone of my age, weight, style, and personality. I was lionized from room to room, people crowding around, though as time passed the people around me seemed less and less close to HIM, and after a number of diversions I found myself on the street, my moment of fame passed. But I wanted to know one thing, so I knocked at a door at which I FIRST entered this ritual, and a number of people flocked around trying to get in, until finally I recognized someone from the "inner circle" and begged her, "Let me get just ONE minute with [and there never WAS a name associated with the artist] him, to see if he was SERIOUS in any way in our brief relationship, and I was wordlessly admitted to the next circle, which enabled me to walk down a street to a large building (maybe this was all influenced by my impression of beauty of architecture and shops and restaurants, and wealth of inhabitants of Naples---and maybe even the handsomeness of Shawn our beautiful, sexy waiter at Pazzo!), on the second floor of which I could see into openings that were almost too large to be called windows, into the no-walled area in which throngs of people, as at a Costume Ball, were racing back and forth merrily from one activity to another, and I entered THERE and tried to find someone closer to the artist, but found people who were tired from all the activity, or jaded by it, or newbies who didn't know anything of "the inner circle" in which I'd been so briefly exalted, and I kept looking for someone, or him, or a place that looked familiar, clutching the now ribbon-shaped band on which my name was inscribed, hoping it would gain me entry to that charmed circle yet for a moment again, but as the time went on my hopes faded, and the entertainments seemed stale, and I figured there OF COURSE had been no lasting emotion felt----and then I WOKE with a feeling of incredulity: it had been a DREAM! I lay in stunned amazement: not for an INSTANT had I thought it might be a dream, it was SO real even though it WAS completely fantastic.
FRIDAY, 11/14/03, 5:45AM: Woke with another dream: I'm in a pharmacy and they say they can put in my prescription, that I'll pick up next time I come in, and they ask with gentle curiosity "Aren't you covered by some plan?" and I almost shout at them, "Yes, I am, and they always ask me that, and then I never get any discount anyway!" They turn away in repulsion, saying, "And if you act this way all the time, it's no wonder." and I end up feeling properly cowed and resolute to never be so antagonistic and angry again, but to use the "I'm just a silly old man and don't know what to do and can you possibly help me" ploy which HAS worked in the past.
SATURDAY, 11/15/03: Wake at 5:52AM with the memory of ANOTHER incredible dream: I'm hosting a games group at my apartment, and there are only four of us: me, a young guy, and two very young and quiet women, possibly oriental, and I'm suddenly aware I'm supposed to be at some kind of MEETING at a school which is offering a free series of sessions in a topic I'm interested in, so I turn over the games group to the guy, sorry that it'll be so quiet with him and only two timid girls, and get into a crowded classroom to find I have nothing to take notes with, so I rifle through the desk I'm sitting in to find a blunt pencil that's been sharpened with a dull knife, with not a very good point, and then I'm at a set of lockers which I look through in turn, to find a spiral notebook whose owner won't miss one or two pages that I can rip out, but interestingly the two pencils STILL have only those blunt-knife-sharpened ends. Finish the class and know that I'll miss some of the next ones (like Paul with his hospice classes in North Beach), but I can get the information from notes from classmates and make it up before the final exam. Back to my apartment to be amazed by the NUMBER of people who showed up for the group after I left! Two, three, FOUR more people greet me as I come in the door as they're getting ready to leave, and I look for the guy I'd left in charge, and he's wielding a broom, sweeping up what looks to be leaves from the Mahogany Hammock boardwalk from my floors, and I'm amazed he had the wit to know where to look for my broom and took the responsibility for cleaning up my place. Go into my "second-floor living room," as it was in the dream, and try to put on a new tee-shirt, but the old one somehow gets tangled in a VERY stringy old-rose plant, like the one I got from Arthur Ellenbogen grown to about 7 feet tall and 18 inches in diameter, around the top of which my shirt is impaled by the thorns, and in the process of SHAKING the shirt to get rid of the plant, a LOT of dusty old leaves filter down to the floor and form a PILE of debris that I decide no one's going to see, since they're all leaving from the lower floor, so I go downstairs in only my tee-shirt and trousers, and there are even MORE people there, but when I try to count, I realize that some of the people who are gathering in what are now a set of pews in church are college students early for a concert in this auditorium, part of which a black friend of mine had described before, "I was just singing softly, but they REALLY boomed out 'Ite, Missa est,'" (or some other mass of 40-hours liturgical song), and without transition I was in a vehicle going south on Broadway with a load of people, I think still from my party, who were being left off at various places, and as we pass down near Columbus Circle, which looks more like the theater section of Broadway, I realize that if I can get out across the street, it'll only be a short walk east across the bottom of Central Park, and a few blocks north to 70th Street, and I'll be home, so I ask the driver if he please won't stop there for me, since I'm the last person off from the rear of the enormous bus-station wagon, and he agrees and I wake at 5:52AM, laying dazedly thinking about the complexity of the dream.
SUNDAY, 11/16/03: 4:28AM: Waked earlier from a dream of being with Paul in a strange hotel where the shower was a cube of bamboo lattice (with other cubes like it on two sides of a central hallway) lined with plastic: on the floor you could see through it to see that the plastic didn't fit to the sides so that the water could flow freely to the floor below, and on each side were loose sheets so that when you soaped up, you could rub against any wall and have the sliminess of the soap reflected back on you. The idea seemed to be for TWO people to shower together and mutually rub and stimulate each other until an orgasm would be almost inevitable, and I started soaping myself up in the dream and began to get excited, and woke to find myself almost excited just by the erotic sensual possibilities of such a shower arrangement.
MONDAY, 11/17/03: 5:47AM: Wake from dream and pee and start typing at 5:53: I've eaten a snack-dinner (like last night, after TV, or this noon, the tacos at Jalisco before the buffet at Roger's in Fort Lauderdale) before going to a party at an upper West side address I've never been to before, and when I get outside the building I meet people going to the party, so I never get the name or apartment number of the hosts, and go in to find everyone's sitting around having dinner off plates on their laps, so I have a bit to eat and then find myself in a mass of people (I guess from the crowded masses of elephant seals on the PBS special about sharks in the Farallon Islands last night), and I'm next to a cute guy and I try linking fingers with him, and he RESPONDS, so I roll toward him and we start kissing and I push him into a corner and want to have sex with him, and someone behind me starts pulling down my pants, but I panic, thinking this is a "normal" party, but just then there's a kind of announcement, "OK, time to take the clothes off," and I realize it's a sex party, grateful not to be embarrassed. Take clothes off with everyone else and someone near me says "Here's your outfit," and hands me a pile of green material which seems comprised of three pieces: a filmy green veil which seems to form an undergarment, a plasticky green cape, almost like a carapace, which closes with large awkward snaps along the neck-and shoulder-line, and some sort of bulbous headdress, like an inflated ellipsoid of green, resembling a tapered balloon-disk flying-saucer or a monstrous caricature of a nun's wimple perched atop the head. As I'm adjusting these, I ask a nearby woman "How many years has this group been meeting?" "Oh, about two years." Ah, so fairly new. "Has it always been---" and I motion vaguely to the two women nearby. "Mixed? Just the last few times." "Oh." I finish dressing and go out a rear door into a huge back yard, maybe over an acre, that seems to extend "to the river," though in the darkness I really can't tell, and when I hear that EVERYONE is supposed to host these in turn, I remark to no one in particular "I hope they don't expect EVERYONE to have a 25-bedroom apartment on an acre of garden in the back." There's some sort of formalized ritual, or game, going on in the back, and I get back into the house for more sex, but I have to LEAVE for some reason, and walk south, but when I try to find my way back, I locate the house OK, but when I look at the INNER apartment-directory, it's a modernistic sculpture with no names, but only representations of who lives inside, with sticks and levers and buttons and decorations sticking out in all directions like hatpins in an enormous pincushion, everything made out of various colors and shapes of wood. So I go to the OUTSIDE array of bells and nameplates, and this is simpler, maybe six or seven names, and I think it MIGHT be the top, but I'm not sure, and I ask someone leaving if they know the name of the people in the apartment throwing the party, but they don't know, and then I wander down the front walk to see someone else FROM the party and they say "Schnauer," but I can't find THAT name on the nameplates. See two guys in costume, one with white paste almost flattening his eyelashes to his cheek, and ask if THEY'RE going to the party, but it turns out theirs is up the block, and I'm not invited, and I wonder if this is somehow an indication that I'm not going to be invited back, and walk north again, trying to find this larger building between sets of smaller ones on the block, and think I'm about to get there but only see something else that tells me "Oh, I forgot that, but the place I want is just down the block," possibly based on my surprise last night when Paul wants to WALK to the Community Center for swimming, and it's farther than I thought and he surprised me by taking along a plastic bag for his customary trash-walk, and I almost despaired of getting THERE without tiring out my feet in the flip-flops. Think I'm JUST coming into view of the place I'm looking for when I wake up and AGAIN lie in dazed stupefaction (tautology?) at the realization that, as much as I looked forward to getting BACK to the party, or enjoying another like it in the future, it was only a dream, and even getting back to SLEEP would not retrieve the wonders that I'd left behind, now knowing that they're left behind FOREVER.
TUESDAY, 11/18/03: 12:48AM: Wake and realize I had ANOTHER dream: We may be in a musical, or a TV about a musical, and we're looking to be produced, with the lead lady a friend of ours, but the producer is having trouble auditioning the right people and we're having trouble getting auditioned. We've come up with an idea for a revolving stage, with rolling wheels (from TV commercial just before I went to sleep?) as a sort of footlights-carrier, in the middle of which can be popped up trees, flowers, or other musical-number "foredrops" (do I have to say, no backdrops?), and at first I thought the whole carousel-top rotated, but it need be only stage-front. It's past midnight, but we have to get there, and without transition we're traveling in Akron daytime along roads which have been shifted and upraised by an earthquake, so that I can observe "They really made the roads thin around here," since the 5-6-inch ends of jagged road can barely support us, or our car, it's not clear which, without crumbling, and at a particularly big orchestral climax, a whole segment of road-edge collapses down into chunks of concrete that must be good for SOMETHING theatrically, and I wake and transcribe dream, missing many of the details and all the convinceingness, by 12:55AM. 6:08AM, remember to record a dream that has me in some kind of esoteric organization where data is available through numbered slide-sets, and I've seen some, contributed one, and look at arrays of numbers to see who should get which ones and which should be mailed to whom, and remember no other details except for an impression of young, eager, maybe somewhat naive participants in this arcana. NOW finish at 6:10.
WEDNESDAY, 11/19/03: 7:06AM: Influenced by "Master and Commander" documentary over at midnight last night, I'm sailing or walking around a semi-oval, filling in requirements as numbers on a required itinerary, and I need a few codes to finish an outer loop and only one of an inner loop, and it wasn't this EXACTLY: I'm inventing a simile to the dream I had because I can't remember the details of it, only the IMPRESSION of it, and the rest is gone now at 7:11AM, and back to bed.
THURSDAY, 11/20/03: Pee at 2:24AM. Wake while it's still dark with a dream, but don't record it until I wake again at 6:36AM: We're traveling in southeast Asia, in a tiny country whose language no one knows, but someone makes a hit by describing something good by saying, in the language "It is not bitter," and a small group of natives smiles and applauds. There are other small interactions that I forget, but then we're in our bus, going to our next destination, and we've volunteered to transport a young couple with a baby in two of our unoccupied seats, and the baby starts crying (maybe patterned on the baby in Wambaugh's "Onion Field" on the History channel last night which almost led him to kill himself from guilt about giving over his weapon to criminals who shot his co-worker) and I seethe with displeasure and hatred of the parents who'd let their kids get to the point of uncontrollable crying without keeping them out of the public, or of placating the restless kid BEFORE he or she starts crying and destroying everyone else's peace. Again, much of the richness of the dream lost in the retelling.
FRIDAY, 11/21/03: 7:53AM: Pee at 1:23, and again at 6:27, forgetting the first dream which I'd said to myself I'd remember as Xing the Y, but had no idea what that was now, and then the second dream was the typical "Got to get to class, but can't quite find the way which is very complicated" dream. I'm walking down a street, somewhat like some around Akron University, and think "I always go the LONG way around two and a half sides, while I can go around ONE and a half sides from here and get in." But then I'm confronted by a valley filled with water that I hope might be shallow, but I see someone coming from the other direction, and he quickly wades in up to his CHEST, and I figure I can't POSSIBLY get so wet, and see what look like piles of wet clothes on the edges of this pool and wonder if they're actually people, or only piles of wet clothes people left behind. Know that it's now getting to 1PM, the class started at 12:30 and I had nothing ready for it, though I think this will only include handing back the tests I think we did LAST time in class, so I'm not missing THAT much.
SATURDAY, 11/22/03: 6:33AM: Pee at 2:55. Then wake a few times, each with a different dream: 1) Something about a quiz show, or answering a list of questions. 2) Something intensely sexual, but I wake thinking "Not act on the sexuality now, wait till I get back to NYC." 3) Most recent: I'd watched a play and wanted people to go back to see it, but a couple said they hadn't liked it and didn't want to spend the money, but then someone came out with free tickets. Then up the stairs rushed a group of people shouting "Sting! Sting!" and it appeared he'd be coming up soon, so I turned to the auditorium and climbed over a small railing to get a second-row center seat, by which time people who had been sitting in the two side sections had begun to flow into the center for better seats. Back in 2) A group of us had been selected for a photographic study of faces, and (sort of based on the selection of Dreyfus to go onto the spaceship in "Close Encounters" last night) I'm chosen first, my head framed as I step toward a closet-like wooden framework, having to stoop a bit as it was made for people shorter than I by about four inches, I had my picture taken and then could get some good food, and noticed that they were clandestinely taking my picture while I was doing THAT, and then we all had things to drink and I was feeling VERY good and lay back in a supporting nest of attractive men, allowing my arms to fall in a calculated halo about my head, seeming to think that I was looking VERY fetching for photographers, and AGAIN naked limbs nearby seemed to accept me, and I started caressing people near me, who responded positively, and I felt that I was REALLY blessed with personal fulfillment and rare beauty and was REALLY enjoying myself, when I would wake again, think to take notes, and then doze back to sleep.
SUNDAY, 11/23/03: Pee at 2:07AM, almost exactly halfway between 9PM bed and 7:15AM departure for bus. Then wake and turn light on at 4:12 to record dream about following John Vinton thru Central Park, as he's heard about this lecture by Pat Oliphant at the Museum of Natural History, and "He's hardly EVER given a presentation, and he's the world's expert in whatever-it-is (I don't have the slightest idea at any time in the dream) and NEVER gives an interview, let alone a peronal lecture, so we want to get there early before the 8:30PM start." I walk around an upper terrace as I usually do (usually getting lost) and see John going down a very long staircase which starts just BEYOND the entrance to the terrace I'm on, and I think "I NEVER saw that staircase, so I MUST remember that THAT'S the way to get across the Park in the shortest way." He's always several yards ahead of me, so that when we get to the Museum grounds, I lose sight of him, but the small grouping of chairs around a projectionist on an upper level indicates where the show will be. He might be saving me a seat, but as I look over the very small number of people clustered around the screen, he's not there. I decide to find my own seat, but the rows in the back won't have a very good view over the heads in front, the sides would be at too great an angle, and the front seats---but as I look and look, more are more are filled up, and each of the empty front-row seats has been reserved for someone, even someone important as is breathlessly announced by the person sitting next to "Pat Wiess", and then the right side of the second row can't support ANY seats because the ground is VERY muddy and even has water-puddles and marks of foot-slides where someone's slipped disastrously. Then even the back seats are filled, and more and more people are coming in, so I try upstairs, but it's difficult to get up to (and here I remember going through a narrow passage, and a very handsome man kisses the young man in front of me as he squeezes past him, and then a woman passes ME and is kissed by him, bending her over backward over the hunched body of another teenager, and he looks at me as if he knows I'd seen him kiss the other guy and want him to kiss me, so he does, but I wish he'd done it longer and with more feeling), and I climb an odd foot-at-a-time stairway that gets narrower and narrower at the top, and someone is following me up so closely that as soon as my foot leaves the lower perch HIS foot is placed on it, and we're holding onto side supports to maintain our almost horizontal body position as we climb to the second-level balcony. But only the projectionist has a view of the screen, the rest being obscured by tree-branches and draped curtains that seem impossible to move, so I'm magically down to ground-level again, seeing if there aren't views through the hedges surrounding the seats (like peering through the hedge on the bird-watch yesterday to catch sight of a caged red-headed parakeet making a noise we could all hear) but there are no openings, and it's getting close to 8:30 and it suddenly occurs to me that CHARLES had told me about this lecture, not John, and I should have called HIM to arrange to see this, but now NEITHER of us will see this once-in-a-lifetime lecture.
TUESDAY, 11/25/03: Pee at 2AM. Dream of passing a table on which is displayed a model of some kind of rustic house, and when I want to look at it, I somehow hook a corner of the base of it and it twists off the table and falls onto the floor, and when I retrieve it, a stern-looking fellow with blood-shot eyes rimmed with what seems to be raw bloody flesh, as if his face were CUT to let the eyes see through the obscuring face, and though he's being FIERCELY condemnatory of my activity, I can feel his calf and foot PRESSING against mine with such INSISTENCE that when I move he moves right along with me, and I think he MIGHT be interesting if I could get him in the dark so I didn't have to look at his bloodshot eyes and could only feel his clearly strongly-built body.
WEDNESDAY, 11/26/03: Wake at 5:16 and think for a bit, then pee, then try to recall the dream: In the future there's a way of coming back to life to do something in particular, and there's a definite start, almost visible, and a variable end when the task is accomplished. Along with this, there's a definite erotic component that wakes me with the first erection in ages. 7:04AM: ANOTHER extraordinary dream: I've gotten an invitation to a party in some NYC suburb I've never been to, like Queens in the 30s---wait, just recalled a prior fragment: I'm in my apartment and become aware of a small hole with a view of another apartment, and I think there's a guy down there who's about to undress for a shower or to go to bed, and I think he'll NEVER look up to see my little peephole, and think to get my binoculars, when I also become aware it might be a MIRROR on a wall below me, and I'm actually on a balcony overlooking a whole apartment below, and why hadn't I realized this before. Another erotic jolt. Back to next: I'm riding in the back seat of a taxi to get there, and we're unwrapping little candies to eat, leaving the back of the cab in a real mess, but my companion doesn't seem to care, and when we stop, there's another passenger in a jump seat in front, and the car starts forward, almost driving this guy's head into a pole, and he does a comic double-take when he sees how close he's come to being bashed. When the taxi leaves, an INCREDIBLE scene is revealed: we're in a town square, maybe the size of the finale of "Hello, Dolly," with buildings all around, and an enormous "vehicle"---it could be a tram, a bus, or even a land-moving ferry boat starts from its terminal toward "the station of normal access," so this is a free shuttle into this land of Oz, with people dressed in 30s style, definitely women with parasols and large hats, floating down the center of the street loaded with passengers who've already seen the circus available here. I seem to know that the second 7-story building across the street is the party-building, and most of the straight people are leaving in preparation for the gay party to end all gay parties, but my companion is attracted to a hovel to our right: green-painted wooden facade looking like shutters nailed over windows (the white metal awnings lowered over windows down here in Florida as a hurricane protection?), producing a rather featureless facade, but above the third floor there's a smooth space and an ENORMOUS overhanging---auditorium?---on top (reminding of that neon strip I saw atop a building coming back from Flambee last night, looking like a flying flagpole until it appeared to outline the top of a projecting top floor---apartment? gym? ballroom?---but I KNEW if I went down there I'd lose the location of the party-house, and so I started across the street, marveling at the bright colors everywhere, the clarity of the air that semed fresh and countrified, hoping that I could find my way back here again, and then woke DIRECTLY to an awake sense of wonder at the WEIRDNESS of the scene coupled with its "undoubted reality."
THURSDAY, 11/27/03: 5:51AM: Two dreams: 1) sitting at a counter with Joe Safko and I feel something at the lower cavity of my right ear and with a fingernail extract a small bean-sized fatty capsule from inside my right earlobe, and when I touch it closely, it seems to be built around a sprig of something like lettuce, or a celery-stalk leaf, that ended in a thorny spine that I'd extracted part of but this part had caught and festered, and to protect itself, my body had secreted this fatty capsule to isolate the irritating thorn from my flesh, and I kneaded it in my fingers and finally nudged Joe and said "Do you want to see something really gross?" and he said neither yes nor no, so I showed it to him and he evinced no interest whatsoever, though I thought it one of the marvels of the natural world. 2) I'm watching a film about some Civil War in Spain, and the camera moves to the side along a sheer-walled canyon to focus down about 150 feet on a road coming through a pass in that canyon, and then zooms in on that road as a woman tentatively enters the frame, looking furtively behind her, and two metal chutes loom ominously over the bottom of the canyon, as if a trap had been set and molten lava, or boling water, or other killing substances would be poured down in ambush on a column of enemy soldiers who were due to cross below, and then the screen is filled with flames and the woman's voice-over mutters portentously about "Hitler," and I wonder how easy it will be to disguise an actor as Hitler convincingly if they only show him from a great distance. Wake and feel relief that it's the next to the last day and that tomorrow night I'll be home with my bad back and finish typing this at 6AM to go pee.
SATURDAY, 11/29/03: 5:19AM: As predicted, with bidis to jerk off, I had an incredible dream: I'm younger, living in the Village, and I've made a lunch appointment with Bruce Jaffe at 12:30AM, but then get a telephone call from Bob (Hayes?) (whoever the sexy senior student in Actualism was that I wanted to go to bed with whose last name I can't remember) for lunch and I impulsively say yes, then hang up and remember I MUST have lunch with Bruce Jaffe, since he's more important and I CAN'T renege on HIS lunch. Bob said he'd be outside in his purple sedan, and I run down the hill to my building to see a purple sedan drive up, and I just go to the door and say in all simplicity "I can't." He doesn't like it, but in his direct, enlightened way, he simply accepts it and I hope he leaves before Bruce comes up and he can see that I'm having lunch with HIM. Get up to my apartment and it's jammed with people having a meeting, and I can't find my SHOES! Get a pair of dress shoes with impossibly long, untied shoelaces, and try frantically to tie them by skipping every other lace hole, but they get tangled and I'm left with impossibly long laces to tie, and suddenly there are colored ribbons attached to the shoes, and when I finish they're ludicrous cake-like objects with colored streamers like I'd stepped ankle-deep into Technicolor mud, so I can't POSSIBLY wear them. Search under a chair and find ONE red sneaker, but I can't find the other, and then I go down a stairway to my lower floor, and up the stairs comes Bruce, looking distractedly at his watch and not even looking up at me, saying, "I've waited an unusually long time for you---" but I greet him at the lower doorway and say "Let's go," and I fly out into the rain with only my sock feet, knowing I'll get wet, but maybe no one will notice I have no shoes on. Then the rain has stopped at we're stopping at the end of a line of people waiting for a VERY slow elevator to get into a special building where he wants me to look at an apartment he wants to rent, called Good Proportions, because, as he says with a serious face, "It has good proportions." He said the doctor was just up there, which is why there's a long line fo the entrance, but we can go to Tuller's for lunch, after, because they're open til 4:45PM, but I say "Can't we go there FIRST (since I'm hungry and want lunch and fear Bob might pass here and see us together) and wait for this crowd to clear away?" And he looks at me as if I'm stupid and says something that makes me feel stupid, but by this time I'm waking up, having forgotten LOTS about the BEGINNING of this dream.
SUNDAY, 11/30/03: 4:55AM: Dream of riding somewhere with an older man like Cathy O'Sullivan's father, who's dating a woman I know rather well, and he told her he went to bed with another woman. I tell him in all seriousness that if he ever does anything like that again, he'd better not tell her, because she'll leave him at that moment. I want to add that I don't intend to blackmail him or anything, but I can feel his suspicion toward me as I keep piling vegetables into the bottom of his little refrigerator. Oddly, he's chewed at the ends of each item (celery, red pepper, Romaine, zucchini), whether to make them soft or to prevent anyone else (me, for instance) from eating them. They kept coming until the bottom shelf was full of them. Earlier, I'd stood outside the house looking at the VERY distinct details of the original screened-in porch, with its two kinds of NYS license plates in the window, one blue, one white, as he explained the oddity of putting an air conditioner in the window of the living room, then adding a porch with an air conditioner in THAT window, then a garage with an air conditioner in THAT window, then a porch outside the garage with an a/c, so that there was a nested box three-deep of additions, where the outside air conditioner was in the exact form of a modern, cowled, powerful motorboat motor, complete with propeller, outside what looked like the back door of a trailer: very neat in its small fitting, looking never used since the entry was from the side into the original house, not through the additions. He was very proud of these additions and I kept looking at a photograph of them on an inside wall that was somehow in front of the whole house. An episode BEFORE that I'd forgotten now.
MONDAY, 12/8/03: 8:10AM: I'm trying to have breakfast with a lot of other people around, in the kitchen of a sort of Adirondack Inn, and when I get the bacon out of the refrigerator, I see that Mom has put BACK four or five pieces that she'd partly cooked and then decided was too much for her, so I didn't have to cook these too long to have them finished. When I took them out of the pan, the meaty part was hardly cooked at all, and someone eating with me looked at the underdone sides and started putting them back, but when I got some of them back out, they were totally black. Without transition, the kitchen became the lunchroom at IBM and management was evaluating tables of time spent on various projects, and the argument was made that much of these times weren't spent solving problems, merely doing routine administrative tasks, and then we were on a movie set with gunmen outside firing in, which made some of the administrative times even longer, and I marveled that the BEST people had a fatalism about being shot: they went about their work in an ordinary way, thinking somehow that if they WERE shot, it wouldn't make any difference to them afterward, anyway. Confused, scattered dream all taking place around wooden trestle tables like at Hemlock Hall and ??? the place at Thirteenth Lake. Record on AlphaSmart to 8:18 before peeing.
THURSDAY, 12/25/03: 7:35PM: Intended to write about this in the morning, but waited until now: I'm in some kind of shop, but notice that the men are VERY humpy, and one strips down "to change into work clothes," (sure!) and his muscles are so distinct that they come to SHARP EDGES, fringed with hair, that I find uncommonly sexy. Another guy comes around from behind the counter with an enormous hairy chest, and is SO naked that his cache-sexe looks like an EYEPATCH, and sticks out about as much, but I STILL find him VERY sexy.
SATURDAY, 12/27/03: 8:30AM: Almost like lucid dreaming, I went through episode after episode of a combination shock-horror-TV movie and actual experience of monsters invading a theater and throwing clothed dummies around to "prove their power." At one point a black woman with three squalling kids, sitting in front of me and annoying me, were inquisitioned by one of the monsters: "Are you responsible for these annoying children?" and she gives some kind of mollifying answer that both I and the inquiring monster can't think of any good reason for killing her, or at least throwing her out, so we reluctantly pass on to the next victim. Toward the end I run down one aisle of what seems now to be the Metropolitan Opera House (but more like the old one than the new one) and see the poor-sightline seats at the extreme front of the theater (in my dream there doesn't seem to be an orchestra at all, so the front seats are right up snug with the apron of the stage), and a small section at the stage-left front which seems to be the exclusive property of poor Puerto Ricans, and lots of people are waiting around for vacant seats, reminding me of ONE sexy guy that I'd looked at in the top balcony occupying various better seats as I wandered lower and lower in the tiers, finally ending up in a third-row aisle seat of great desirability. More ugly episodes run together in my sieve-like mind now.