DREAMS FROM 2004 1 of 3
DREAMS FROM 2004
FRIDAY, 1/2/04: 7:17AM: As vivid as the dream was, I've still forgotten many of the details: I'm working in an office somewhat like IBM, trying to get final specifications from a customer who keeps calling on a line that keeps going dead. I get so annoyed at one point that I say: "I can't continue talking to you unless I get answers to these questions I've been trying to ask you." I debate asking the operator to intervene, but he's not calling me through the IBM operator, he's dialing my personal phone direct. And the connection seems to be to HIS personal phone as well. Is he making fun of me? Is he sincere and I should continue trying to communicate with him? Wake about 5AM with the dream, then about 7AM to shit and pee, theoretically awake since I went to bed about 10:40PM last night, drunk from Piper-Heidseck champagne and lots of food (but not TOO much?) at Fred's New Year's party, the BEST YET, with MOST TALK YET.
SUNDAY, 1/4/04: 9AM: I've driven to Rita's place, in Akron, for a funeral, and the house is full of people. I'm in a bedroom when I see Elsie Lupo drive up outside with two others in the car with her, and a young boy comes out to cling to her, and she says "I don't see why I can't share this wonderful child cuddling me so nicely," and he peels away from her leg to attach to someone else. I have to pee, going into a bathroom with three doors, and Rita rushes into the john ahead of me, which pisses me off. I hear a flush from across the hall, so maybe there IS another john. Then she comes out, a slip of paper in her slit, and I pee into a stream of water from the shower as a kid and his mother comes rushing in to watch. At one point, I realize I haven't brought tooth-care stuff, but I'm only here overnight, so it doesn't much matter now.
FRIDAY, 1/9/04: 8:55PM: Notes at 7AM, VERY hung over from too much to eat and drink at the Beard last night: 1) I'm asked where "Dolly Witch-girl" has gone, and from a photo she looks hag-haired and ugly, and there's a class with a lecturer known to be very boring, and also something about playing cards. 2) A traffic jam of trucks at an intersection is depicted by a very low shot of numbers of moving wheels under trucks whose fenders are only scant inches apart. 3) In a movie about London there are jokes about an earthquake which is scheduled to occur, and then the car shakes, and when we (in the movie) look over to the right side, a number of huge orange explosions rip through large buildings on the horizon, and we figure the earthquake must have been huge.
SUNDAY, 1/11/04: 4:10AM: Having gone to bed at 11:30, not to sleep until midnight, not too full from Azafran's mediocre food and drink, I dreamt of lying in a men's dorm, and as I look across to the sexy guy talking to the guy in the bed next to him, I can see, behind the front of the loose towel draped around his loins, that he has a very pleasant erection, and I wonder if he's talking about "his difficulty" with the guy, trying to get him excited too, but then the lights go out and I can't see any more. But then he comes over to ME, we kiss, and in my excitement with him hunched over me with his gorgeous body I rake his arms with my fingernails, and he pulls away quickly and protests, "Not with my sciatica," but he might have meant psoriasis. We get more intimate and I wonder what's going to happen next, and if my old body will be acceptable to him, but then he says "We gotta get up early," and it's the perfect excuse for him to move away, to my disappointment. I say "You never know what'll happen" to the quiet dark room. Wake and jot the note and pee; typing this at 11:40AM.
WEDNESDAY, 1/14/04: Wake at 1:44AM. (Start typing this at 12:16PM.) Wake at 1:44, dream of young guys in an Italian Mafia-family scene, one getting sucked off, saying it felt so good that he just came, and something about the skill of the tongue that went alongside the penis-shaft and drew the sensations out. 10:59PM, slept only 2:27 to wake with a confused dream: Rolf is in my apartment which ends in the living room of 1221 Dietz, and he'd burned a videotape of mine that I wanted to keep (somehow connected with my erasing the files from the floppy disk that turned out to be my saves of the last few indexes) AND patted my lips until he allowed me, with a slight smile, one small peck on the neck, saying he had to go, but still with the odd feeling that he might want more----maybe if he were drunk enough---or honest enough?
THURSDAY, 1/15/04: Wake at 6:54AM, and then l record an extraordinary DREAM: I'm in a place that FEELS like it's a version of the Gay Center, or even of Mattachine: I'm younger than I am now, have had some connection with the place, and I have a package to carry under my arm about the size of a long-playing record, and they're reorganizing the space, so I'd better take home a small rug (maybe 4x5 feet, rolled up) that I'd bought at auction somewhere (File 2 at 7:08AM 1/15), and I picture it as I had left it: rolled up on top of a pile of stuff in the middle of the storage room in back, but when I look into what had been that room, it's been transformed into a library, with shelves up to the ceiling and constructed around corners, so that the walls of the room appear to be made from books, and ELEGANT books too: I remember looking at a set of travel books at eye level and am struck by a pair of agate-bound books inscribed "Barcelona" and the Garrett Edition below, and this is an elegant gift-set that might be worth a price into the low hundreds. Other sets and treasures line these shelves, and I wonder what happened to my area rug. See a man go down a narrow flight of stairs to my right, and think he might be going to the storage room I remember, but when I look down the bare descent, I know my memory holds nothing like this from before. Then there's a movie, or cartoon, about a woman who wasn't happy with her life, so she somehow turned into a spirit and, becoming wraith-like, she slipped upward into the door of a red elevator that had some mystical significance, and when she returned, she was dressed in a white gown that enabled her to fly, and suddenly there was the announcement of "a new mode of being," and she appeared as a bride, in a beautiful flowing-trained dress, SKIMMING across the stone floor with her groom at her side, attended by equally fleet, flowing maidens behind her, sweeping swiftly and majestically for all their speed, across to a minister waiting for their rituals to proceed. As she disappeared, swooping from left to right, from the far right, in "real life" in the dream, marched a "truly real" cortege of similarly dressed actors and actresses, running lightly, as in a ballet, across the front of the cathedral in which we found ourselves as the congregation, and brilliant lights came up all around, and my peripheral vision caught the gleam of jewel-bedecked white powdered wigs over liveries from some opulent French court, and I even glanced into the nave to see, massed for effect, it's true, on either side of the aisle, two columns of elegantly dressed and coiffed extras, up and down either side of the main aisle for about 20 of the 30 rows, and I turned to try to project my startled question over the resounding organ music accompanying all this "Where did we get such money all of a sudden?" Before this, a vaguely-remembered segment concerned handsome young men, possibly in uniform in some kind of military unit, displaying sexy muscles and crotches, and then returns a memory of looking at a small ad, at the bottom of a page in the New York Times Classified section, Section 4, Sex, and there's a small but surprisingly detailed photo of two men sitting in the front of an open-topped convertible, quite clearly jerking off for each other, and I'm amazed that the usually-fuzzy reproduction quality of the Times is atomically clear here, unquestionably revealing the circumcised back of a shapely cock-head poking above the fist of the masturbator on the right, with a shadowier show of cock from the clothing-muffled young man on the left. OTHER sections of this dream (like thinking "If I can only find a large sheet of paper in which to wrap the rug, I'll find it easy to carry with my record-sized other packet.") are forgotten.
FRIDAY, 1/16/04: At 6:55 wake with a dream: 7:45AM: I'm wandering in a huge zoo, out on a peninsula for special new exhibits, and at one point all of us are chest-deep in water, and it passes through my mind that they'd better have facilities for drying out, or we're going to be very uncomfortable. At one point I ask someone how to get back to "where we checked our coats" as a way of indicating the entrance, or where we can get out. Before, I had seen a strange concrete spiral constructed into the side of a hill, and wondered what it was, and later we got into a small area and I looked to the side and saw a narrow, iron-railed path zigzagging back and forth down a trail, and figured we'd go that way, but it looked old and rusted and muddy, and then as we clustered in the little area in front of it, a gate closed and we began to swing back and forth like a pendulum, and it turned into a kind of elevator on a track that swung into huge arcs down and around what turned out to be that concrete spiral in the side of a hill, and this seemed to be a new, adventure-ride kind of way of getting us from one part of the zoo to another. There were other parts, now that I'm sitting on the pot trying to shit but not able to, that I forgot.
SATURDAY, 1/17/04: 5:42AM: Record a HUGE dream: 5:15AM: I'm at some kind of New Age festival in a place like Philharmonic Hall in New York, but I'm not sure there's even an entrance fee---maybe it's more like in Lincoln Center Plaza where people can come and go as they wish---or Damrosch Bandshell, where there IS a sage (ha, funny typo for STAGE at this point), but people can easily enter and leave. I make the observation that since this is NEW age stuff, everything that's done has to be something that's NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE, so BY DEFINITION events have to get more and more "far out," so that the emphasis seems not to be on TRUTH, but on NEWNESS, or at the very least NEWNESS ABOUT WAYS OF PRESENTING TRUTH. Toward one "end" the dream, a woman asks me to order something, maybe food or maybe a transcript of what's going on, and I say I don't want anything, but she seems to say "I'm bringing you something, so you might as well say what it is you want, since you're going to get something anyway, so YOU might as well make the decision rather than ME" and I think this IS truly a new level of salesmanship, where even if you don't want to buy you're FORCED to buy---rather like the Publisher's Printing House "Select an item even if you're not ordering an item so 'we'll be better able to serve you in the future.'" Anyway, I'm watching something, and listening to this saleslady, and somehow I know Barbara Lea is sitting near me, and I glance at an old New Yorker someone's been reading, somehow knowing (or not knowing) that the person READING the article is the person about whom Barbara WROTE the article many years ago, and I get his attention with some difficulty and misunderstanding, but finally communicate that Barbara Lea is sitting right over there, and he goes over and she almost passes him by---or he decides to pass HER by without "recognizing" her, and she shouts "NAME", whatever his name is, and he acknowledges and she POURS FORTH this WAIL of "Why didn't you want me, why did you leave me, we could have been perfect together, why am I seeing you now," and somehow I get the feeling that I should have read the REST of the article before doing what I did, and the basic lesson for me seems to be FINISH WHAT I'M DOING BEFORE I ACT ON IT, or SOMETHING about finishing, or completion, or looking WAY forward for consequences of what I do even lightly, and he starts arguing back: "But you said---" and she talks of "Slamming a door," but he says "But the wind pulled it out of my hands," and it maybe turns into a series of ghastly misunderstandings and misinterpreted circumstances and mixed messages, and both are in total misery and I'm miserable for having started the whole thing, and at one point she runs off in sheer despair, almost WAILING in her unhappiness, and he runs after her, but then he pauses, but then SHE turns back, and he rushes forward again, and it turns out that I'm watching a TAPE of this whole event, and the image becomes blurred and it SEEMS that as SHE rushes off, someone ELSE comes from the far left side and follows her out, while HE stays where he is, maybe with her NOT having rushed out, or with someone ELSE, but the image ends changing focus to focus on a close-up of a racing river with various sediments washing different colors into the river (of life, of course) and the ending being obscured, and I shout "Wait, let me backspace that tape, because I'm not sure what I saw with this other person, or was it her, or him, rushing out of the corner of the picture," and as I backspace the mechanism gets more and more uncertain, with slippage and blurring of the images, and I end up more confused than when I started, and think it's some sort of simile for the actual universe: that if I look at something too much it changes, or even looking at it ONCE changes it so that it's not POSSIBLE to rewind it and show the same event in anything LIKE the same way, and in the dream my philosophical musings merge with the confusion of waking up FROM the dream and continuing with the philosophical musings about the meaning of the dream and the events of the dream, and what I saw or what I wanted to see, and then the added level of whether a dream is what I WANT to see or what I DON'T want to see, or what DID happen or what DIDN'T happen, or only RANDOM with NO significance, or with significance to be pried out with difficulty by me, or---and there was a previous segment about Actualism, and some attempt at "proof:" whether it was "real" or just a hoax by Paul Schofield, or we could make the best out of it, but I'm now at 5:33 seeming to complicate it even more than it warranted.
SUNDAY, 1/18/04: 4:04AM: Woke about half an hour ago with a dream centered on a woman who might be a combination of Anna Mae Wong, from last night's crossword puzzle, Olan from "The Good Earth" as portrayed by Luise Rainer, and Madge Mao: an Oriental woman, maybe widowed, determined to prove herself in a certain (unspecified) way that involved her making a profile drawing of some other woman, possibly to show a guilty person out of many, and she describes to another woman (somehow the mistress of the house) how it was difficult to capture the reflection from a boiling kettle of potatoes, since the water bubbled and steamed and made the likeness-taking difficult, and then the mistress of the house declares "But I drew a picture of you, too," and shows her a dramatic vision of two huge eyes framed by a cap of hair with two Olive Oyl-like braids sticking up from the two sides, two huge eyes staring upward, and she is surprised to see herself portrayed so positively, and she stares at it as if to incorporate the strength and determination in the drawing into her own character. 6:44AM: don't know WHAT to make of all these dreams or their imports, if any, but THIS one is a Hollywood extravaganza: I've gotten an invitation to a big studio, MGM as a guess, and I see by a map that I'm in building 2 on an arc that has maybe a dozen buildings, and I'm to meet a particular friend, but somehow I have free access, and someone half-famous is escorting me around, and I see Pat Chalfont going down a stairway and I'm sure she's famous, but I can't quite place her [may be thinking of Kathleen Chalfont?]. A later scene has a director wanting to kiss a gas station attendant, but he says "He's only like a monkey," but the guy gets up and says some line like "But I think," which I think is from "The Planet of the Apes," which he's making fun of, but he IS cute and I wonder why the guy can't have him anyway. I step behind someone in a TV booth, being filmed, and it's a guy who's made up to look like Walt Disney, talking as if he were still alive, and I duck out of the frame because I think I might be destroying the illusion, but then I'm in his car, and it's during a commercial that he announces with asperity "Is eight minutes long!" I hear over the car's intercom that someone is paging Data, and they try the Cordial Shop, where you might not necessarily be served what you order, and he comes on in his voice, drunken-funny, saying "Who would assume I was HERE?" At one point I'm taken for someone famous, and I think I COULD have a chance here, but the feeling evaporates, as does most of the rest of the dream, though I'm talking to plenty of known people, having lots of fun---remember a friend going behind a door to a candy dispenser and asking rhetorically, "You think they'd have SOMETHING beside pretzels in this place?" Other vignettes were wonderful as I dreamed them, but they're forgotten now at 6:52.
MONDAY, 1/19/04: Type this dream at 6:07AM: I've been driven to a sandy beach and see a sexy dark-skinned man working nearby, so I go into a reading area and get a chair with a view to where he's moving around. Sit with my newspapers in a chair behind a bookstand, out of the sun, and a guy behind me, slightly unshaven and unkempt, taps me on the shoulder and when he senses that I would turn away IMMEDIATELY, strengthens his request and holds my attention by asking "Wait, look, is it closer to take the test for driving nearby, or for some kind of job in a different direction." Wake and type this bit, hoping I'm not getting a cold! Another snooze and jolt awake at 7:26AM with dream of sitting on a train and being PUSHED by a woman in a blue jacket through crowded corridors, and I say "PLEASE don't push," but she INSISTS and so I start pushing, and after two or three crowded doorways get to MY seat, and as she continue on in triumph she waves gleefully back to me, thanking me for getting her so far so fast. Then I'm in a classroom reading a newspaper, and someone ELSE asks my help: a young man wants to enter a contest, and there's something about writing a saying in 1-33 words, but no longer than 132 characters, and he seems to think there's an inconsistency in the rules, but has forgotten exactly what it is, so searches for it while I glance at it, finding only grammatical errors of punctuation. Record dream at 11:27PM: Dream of a young snot trying to make out I stole "freelance money" from him, as I first meet him in some kind of ticket agency, where I buy a ticket to a performance on Broadway, but not certain of the time I wander down 42nd Street to find it mostly dark, with steel-shuttered storefronts, VERY few people on the street, and I think "If any tourist came here, they'd think the entire country was in sad shape." Get to my hotel room to be mystified by finding him there, trying to put it into words by saying "So everyone who buys tickets at that agency is assigned this room?" to someone else who is either sharing it with us, or is a policeman safeguarding the room. Seem to go to the john and on my way back to the room figure I should have taken my cash with me, because the kid seemed perfectly capable of taking all of MY money with the excuse in his head that I'd taken HIS money, and debated separating my wallet and my money in my pocket, so as to surprise anyone who would demand to check my wallet to find that I had NO cash in my wallet, because, as I would say, "I'd always pay with cash and never show my wallet, because I'd never want to lose my credit cards."
THURSDAY, 1/22/04: Recalled little dream-fragments: I've been instructed to pick up a "lemon pie" that has to be baked before eating it, so I think that buying it by 1PM should be good enough for cooking it for a couple of hours and making sure it's cool after a few more hours and ready to eat for dinner about 6PM. When I go to the shop, I remove what now looks more like a half-pizza from a pie-pan and find that about a third of the far side's bottom crust sticks to the pan, leaving only the thinnest semi-crust holding the ingredients together, but manage to dislodge the stuck piece in a unit and mash it somewhat off-kilter into the bottom of the piece and think it will bake out OK.
FRIDAY, 1/23/04: Wake at 2:57AM: Dream of two different kinds of cataclysms: 1) a data "collapse" where four or five data-lines of the papacy coalesce in some hard-disk crash so that Quirinale, Giuseppe, is at once obliterated, in another way truncated, and so an early biographical line becomes "official" in which he hadn't yet been elected Cardinal, and was yet now Pope, data surviving only in a small-caps form of his name. 2) What may be a storm, or an earthquake, but which is so compressing and confounding of atoms that it must be more like an atomic explosion, where in a microsecond two people have the neuronal capability to realize "something happened," and to look at a clock to see the split-second time, or look at another face to see a blank aghastness before the moment of annihilation, and four other men are thrown into the middle of a wooden tunnel in which, somehow in the novelistic reporting or televisionistic romanticization of their fates, the "atoms of their bodies and the molecules of wood from the stair-canopy become inextricably mingled in a primordial soup in which only a cloud chamber could record the production of a hyperon or the annihilation of two quarks into a spurt of sheer kinetic energy, carrying away life force in a sun's center paroxysm of transformation and reconstitution." Wake coughing from some lung-depth that seems mixed with gastric reflux from the pizza eaten without enough digestion time before retiring, and phlegm and stomach acid and possibly one last squirt of liquid vitamin C from those effervescent tablets merge in the same mad amalgam as the atoms in the dream.
WEDNESDAY, 1/28/04: 1:28AM: Dream of looking at a rug on a wall and thinking it would be good for a living room like Susan and Rick's, and buy it but then wonder how I'm going to roll it up and transport it, or even if it's any good, since when I look at it closely I see holes and poor repair jobs on it. Then Susie Mead phones the guy who owned the rug, who got me invited to the party where I saw the rug, and I shout into the phone "Curse you, Susie Mead," as a joke, but she hangs up. Then I'm riding in a telephone-service car, thinking to go home, but realize that I have to go to the Express office to pick up the package (not really the rug anymore) and that I can't send the driver to do it because I have to show two kinds of ID and really SIGN for it, so I say he has to turn back, and he does so as I bend forward and say "Lights, please," and he's turned on his headlights, but the light outside is so anomalous and indistinct that I really have to peer ahead to see the two cones of light on the road from his headlights. Confused plotting, but the LOOK of the rug (orangey-brown, Oriental-y, about 15 by 20 feet, which I had to convince myself wasn't TOO big for their living room, and maybe they could hide some of the worse spots under pieces of furniture or corners of rooms, and the clarity of the decision I had to make about MY going to the office to sign for the piece I was getting, were very distinct.
THURSDAY, 1/29/04: Dream: 2:24AM: Woke at 2AM with some memory of dream, but now only recall it had something to do with a handsome prince, or a handsome castle, or a handsome inheritance: very appealing, very pleasant, a situation I'd rather be in---my transplanted head as discussed at Chanterelle lunch yesterday?
FRIDAY, 1/30/04: 3:30 dream: However unlikely, we're SPIES, and go to a gambling casino's restaurant in a car that he's sure isn't bugged (which seems unlikely), and notice that his dusty cargo pants aren't really the kind of dress this elegant, expensive restaurant would warrant, but then we're obviously special people who don't have to obey the ordinary rules.
SATURDAY, 1/31/04: 6:30AM: I'm vacationing with Faith Prince, who definitely has a mind of her own. We're on a beach, and there's a program about the area that's starting at 2:15, and she thinks it won't take any time at all to go down, and at one point says "We can go to that farm and---" And I don't get the rest of it, but ask "Did you say we could go down by tractor?" She looks as me puzzledly and says "No, why did you say that?" And I say "Because we wouldn't have the time to get to the performance on time." But she doesn't seem concerned about that and goes to a sand dune and stretches out in the sun. I figure, with all the other people around, that maybe this IS the better way of seeing the place, just BEING there, rather than running off to some canned entertainment. Later, we're at the boundary of an amusement park, and she's suddenly INSIDE the fence, and I look to see what fences I can climb over, but a gateway appears when what I thought was locked was open, and I pass a farmer, through whose property we'd passed, picking fruit from a tree, and he ignores me, which I'm grateful for. Then hop over a railing and see her disappear up a flight of steps. Hear her at the top, and follow her, and we're in a room of people listening to a travel talk, and she settles down, and I find two pillows that no one seems to be using and settle down in a corner on the floor, and then SHE is talking about a trip she made to the south of Ireland, "To Sligo," and I think "Well, that's a place I've never been," and she talks about some nice woman there who helped her out, and everyone's fascinated by what she's saying, and I have a distinct picture of my comfort in an easy chair, in my red-squared flannel shirt, with a pillow on my belly to disguise my paunch, and she's leaning on the pillow, obviously "mine" to everyone, and I feel proud to be associated with her and lazily appreciate how she's handling our vacation together. Like my contentment with Ken's planning for trips we go on together? Finish typing this at 6:40AM, latest awake-time yet.
FRIDAY, 2/6/04: Typing from WEDNESDAY, 2/4/04 note: 5:12AM: I'm xeroxing lots of stuff on USED pages, some on 11x15" paper, and there's a strip that's been folded in half that thusly copied only half of it. Probably thinking about xeroxing new copies of "The Gift of the Alien" for Village Playwrights. There's a burnt smell and frantic looking for the right supplies and a great deal of FRUSTRATION! Were other details, but I can't remember them now.
SUNDAY, 2/8/04: 6:22AM: I'm vacationing in some Southern city, sitting in an outside area where I see groups of ladies, totally covered in voluminous gowns and capes and hoods of a solid color (maybe a takeoff from the Bill Cunningham photo spread in the Sunday Times about people wearing quilted orange coats), and a few stop to chat with people near me who have false mustaches, saying "I told him to do something"---that only a man would have the nerve to tell him to do. Then I was inside, eating at a table set for one, someone like Mildred, with someone rather like Charles across from her who'd already finished eating and had most of his stuff cleared away except for a loaded plate that remained stubbornly on the table until the "Mildred" demanded that the waiter take it away, and when I wanted to order, I said I could just as well sit right next to her, if that was OK with everyone. Then, without transition, I was sitting at a more crowded, communal table when the waiter hands me a complex menu, and I order a three egg omelet for $7.44, three slices of bacon at 55 each, and when the Chinese waitress brings me the omelet, it's HUGE, in a bowl, with lots of liquid, and a layer of feta cheese that's almost solid, and a green layer of spinach that I decide is OK, but now I have to order more butter, which is quickly brought, but then discover I have no toast or rolls, and though it might be a surcharge, I ask the person across from me to flag down the waiter so that I can order more, pausing to catch a glimpse of what looks like a roll on a plate under the table on a support about a foot off the floor, but a closer stoop reveals a chocolate cake which obviously couldn't be cut up and buttered. I ask "What was the parade of women in cloaks---and it had something to do with, uh, masculinity." "Oh, that's the oldest traditional parade anywhere in the country, starting with a black woman who said so-and-so, and now we celebrate it every year." I continue to ask questions like "How long does the festival last?" "When did it start?" and try to think how to ask if it's only white women now, even though a black woman started it.
THURSDAY, 2/12/04: 4:52AM: Another school-test frustration-dream: I'm at Akron University, having just finished a test, and go to the doorway for the next test (and some even had to leave before the first test was over, because the tests had somehow been scheduled at overlapping times), and it's raining furiously outside, and I'm without an umbrella and had just put on a pair of new khaki trousers (even though the front button was missing), but then there was a lull in the rain and I dashed out to the street only to slip and have a VERY difficult time getting up: my legs just wouldn't move to support me for a LONG time, and I felt that dream-frustration of being in a rush and not having the resources to move at ALL. Then I got to my feet and started running through a gully filled in places with old snow, and wondered how I could get back to the campus proper if I stayed in this ravine, and then saw an exit to a road on my right, with a truck winding up a series of switchbacks up which I could cut directly, and found myself at the edge of the campus that I recognized as the southeast corner, having thought to maybe go back to my dorm room to pick up my math book in case the test depended on my having it with me, and there across the street I saw a campus map, and took care not to trip over the guy-wires for the people crossing the street perpendicular to me, and got to the map to find someone there who told me that my teacher, Mr. Vartan, who was a temporary teacher from India, was in a building near some known building, there on the map, and I took off on the next leg of my endless journey for a test that had started already in a subject I hadn't studied the last 20 pages of the book for, hoping to average it out over the material that I already knew---and I wasn't that bad in math anyway, being able to make my way through rather complicated algebra problems with ease. Woke and peed and typed this on AlphaSmart till 5:04, chilly and vaguely tooth-sore.
WEDNESDAY, 2/25/04: 12:29AM: At 12:21AM wake with a dream: I've been dining with Mom, who's mad at something, and she'd broken a knife earlier in this meal and is now waving the stump of a fork, and I see the end with a jagged piece of wood sticking out of the round metal housing, and say "You broke this, too," and she throws a piece across the table and makes some remark like "They don't make them like the used to." Maybe there were other details that I don't remember now, but at least I've remembered something to transcribe here. Type this to 12:32AM.
FOLLOWING FROM KENPAC TRIP:
SUNDAY, 2/29/04: Dream recorded at 2:15AM: I'm sitting in a room in the White House with shitty little Bush, with two gunmen on either side of him ready to kill me but I'm hoping to talk them out of it, secretly hoping to turn the gunmen against HIM and spare ME, by saying that SURELY someone will know that this is the last place I was, and SOMEONE will tell the truth, but he's sure that he has ABSOLUTE power and NO one will accuse him of being a liar, and I plead more and more convincingly until I'm QUITE sure that I've turned HIS accomplices into MINE, but I wake, as I said, with SEVERE heartburn that seems to be TIMED in a dream-like way: but it must have been in ANOTHER dream that I'm setting up the taping of a TV series and it'll say at the start of the program: tonight the program will be aired on Channel X, where X is NOT the channel that I'm on, and it's different EVERY night, and I surmise it's to PREVENT anyone from setting up a KNOWN schedule, "for a week," say, that will make recording it easy: you have to WATCH IT EVERY NIGHT to make sure you see all of it. Just as my heartburn seemed to be "in place A, but when that's cleared up, I have to turn on the other side and ease it in place B, and, even after that, turn and ease it in place C. But maybe I'm just "hallucinating" everything because of fatigue. 3:43AM dream: I flush a toilet just as my A&K bag falls into it, and I gasp and stick my hand down the narrow pipe to retrieve first my old camera's Macro Zoom lens, then my new camera, wet but seemingly still operable in its wet case like the OLD camera, and this cycle happens two or three times. Then, or maybe later, is a fragment where someone operating a VCR tells me that there's a way of arranging it so that Channels 1 to 9 will operate actual channels 0 to 8 for some hard-to-understand technical good reason. Then at 5:08 on a Carlton sheet I note my dream of a lunch with Art Bauman and his BOSS, somewhat like Bob What-Was-His-Last-Name--Conkey or Husky or Malkin? And debate how the boss would accept my joke about "Not teaching old dogs new tricks" without being incensed with being called old. At a later time I dream about jerking off blissfully by myself, thinking how nice it will be to play with the final voluptuousness, and wake to find myself HARD, which is a nice change from the ordinary, thinking maybe GETTING HERE released my mind to more pleasant channels.
MONDAY, 3/1/04: Dream of lying on a bed with RITA (aged about 14) lying next to me, and I'd gotten excited, somehow moving my cock around at the end of a rope, from which I could feel the balls nicely nestled up against the base of my cock, and when I ask her if she could please go into the next room, she sweetly asks, "Can't I stay here and watch you jerk off?" I want to say no, but say "I admire so much your asking directly that I'll say OK," but it never GETS to it, and I doze on and off, probably getting at least 2 hours more sleep, with another dream fragment about watching TV channels in a strange way (I'm probably obsessing about watching the Academy Awards).
FRIDAY, 3/5/04: Dream of sorting out boxes and stuff in a crowded bedroom like at 1221 Dietz, but take boxes of things from someplace like the Mattachine office to type (with a strange episode of stepping over tiny plastic buildings of a city-plan that were set out after a dance performance where the four leads got much less applause than I thought fit), and content that a box of envelopes with stamps can be condensed into my collection and my drawers can be organized NOT to be overflowing at LAST.
SUNDAY, 3/7/04: 6:55AM: Dream-fragment something about organizing furniture or books or papers in a room like one at 1221 Dietz, but the second was a GREAT sexy dream of a VERY humpy body who refused to be touched at first but who loved to pose, coated in a shiny slick oil, but I admired him so successfully that he let me touch him on the arm, then on the leg, and then I could EXPAND my touch beyond his designated area, and he loved it, until finally I could touch and caress him anywhere I wanted, but at the end he refused to let me kiss him, suggesting that when we were in private (people around us were watching us as if at a sex-show, or maybe we were being filmed) I could do that if I wanted. Then I couldn't take it anymore and grabbed my almost-soft cock and shot and shot and shot GOBS and STREAMS of almost-clear, hardly viscid, scattered volleys of cum, everyone amazed, my volume making up for any whiteness or stringiness, and it's one of the few dreams when I actually CAME in it, but not even hard when I woke after it.
MONDAY, 3/8/04: 12:26AM: Dream of being asked to pay $2 for a cane that Anna will need because she'll be limping from her injury for the rest of her life (probably from the two broken legs in "Seabiscuit" last night). I look in my wallet and find lots of receipts, not many $20s, and some smaller bills, though no ones. Other details I forgot now.
TUESDAY, 3/9/04: 3:35AM dream: I'm shopping at a huge store like Macy's, which keeps its doors LOCKED, and I'm somehow outside when I still have a loaf of bread to buy and my coat to retrieve from the coat-check room. I have a loaf of Entenmann's Whole Wheat which turns out to have a slit in its plastic wrapping, so I want to return that and get a Wonder Wheat bread, which turns out to be in the middle of the bread display and out of reach. Try to climb over the display-strut-structure to get it, but can't, so ask a clerk, first asking why it's out of reach: "It just came in, and that was the only place that had room for it." Then we get to chatting about some esoteric ingredient, and the manager comes by and praises the clerk's work, but says he should do more of it. There's a segment where only the middle of two [huh?] elevators will move from the second floor down to the first floor. Then, with my bread, I'm STILL outside and try to push my way past someone who won't let me in, and race to a door that closes in my face, and feel generally frustrated and mad at the stupid store! Another dream from earlier in the night concerns my moving into a large (7 bedroom, as John Lennon had with 50 acres in the Trivia question yesterday about who said "No possessions" while he had these?) apartment and get shown around, particularly noticing the worn-thin but still highly colored carpets on the floors, carpet-on-carpet when two rooms abut, the one larger one below serving as the runner through the doorway connecting the two, and I say "What I pity I threw away my carpeting when I moved from my old apartment." Recall to myself that I have to check this apartment's convenience to subway stations before taking it. 6:55 I record another dream: I'm in Susie Mead's house and I've mixed her files up with my files, and when I think I've gotten all my stuff together, I find a complete FOLDER that's hers, with lot of other sheets of paper with HER handwriting on them, and sort them out and give them to her, and she, too, is amazed at the amount of stuff we confused with each other's materials. Then I'm standing in her hallway and a bunch of large red ants (moving rather like the small schools of light blue fish I swam with yesterday) dash across her rug. I try to step on them but they're very good at evading my foot. I say "I've never seen such BIG ants before," and she protests that they're actually rather small, and she'd like to see them on tennis balls. Then another, later, dream has me lying on a large flat area with lots of people around, but I have my hand contentedly at the top of Ken's legs, just under his ass, and don't seem to mind if anyone sees me doing this, and then I feel someone's heel in my crotch, and I'm getting hard, and I'm surprised, and know that Ken (whose heel I'm assuming this is) will be surprised because he's never experienced me hard before, but then he's lying apart some distance away and somehow I'm pressing down on my own cock, and I recover with some embarrassment. NUMBER 2: 6:21AM: Recollections of three (liar, forgot the last ALREADY!) dreams: 1) I've slipped my book into what I think is MY bag, but it turns out to be someone ELSE's shoulder bag, and when I ask for my book back he gets VERY angry and insists he doesn't have it, and when I look through, to his disgust, I can't find it, and want to put my name on a "If found please return to" list at the bookshop in which this happened, but when the head woman goes off duty (she seemed competent) a leering young man comes on and when I say I want to have my book back, he makes some snide remark and clearly doesn't want to do it, so I figure I'll have to buy another copy of Alan Watts' "A Perfect Philosophy," which I'd read and marked ONCE, and was in the process of reading for the SECOND time and marking AGAIN, which concept the sneerer could barely understand anyone taking the time to do at the FIRST round of reading, let alone the second. Total frustration. 2) Another dream in which I'm playing with my cock and get VERY hard, balls tight against my cock-base, and feel like it will be GREAT to cum, and wake with a semi-hard that quickly goes away. Then wake at 6:21AM with memory of those two and a LAST dream, go to pee, but by this time, 6:34AM, I can't recall the third.
WEDNESDAY, 3/10/04: 5:39AM: One of the most AGONIZEDLY frustrating dreams in a LONG time. I'm traveling alone in northern Nepal or Tibet, waiting on a street, and go to where I'd left my bag, and there's my blue cloth bag sitting alone on a muddy bank just off the street with my WALLET sitting, isolated, in the mud in front of it. I take the wallet and try to scrape some of the thick black-gray mud off the side of it, and peek inside to see the much-used, dirty, wrinkled singles still taking the majority of the space, with clean new 10s and 20s peeking out for when I'd need them. Unzip my bag to quickly see that everything's still there, and resume my frustrated search for a taxicab along these dark, almost deserted streets. Every so often, up the hill or down another hill, people would get out of a translucent taxi which would light up its availability in bright white over its entire exterior, but always someone else was waiting there to get the taxi. Peered into tiny two-person cars hoping to find an unlit taxi, and even stop a small car with a shirtless muscle-builder in the driver's seat and ask if he'd take me to the airport for money, but he reacted with horror, as if I'd asked him to perform the most outrageously illegal act in his country, and it well may have been precisely that. My watch is always perversely upside down on my wrist, but it's getting close to my 6:25AM departure, surely within the hour, though I can't quite clearly read my watch in the darkness, and finally I see two semi-American semi-Oriental young women seemingly trying to flag down a taxi across the street, and go over to ask if they're going to the airport too. They react with suspicion, but finally they admit they're not only going to the airport, but have the same departure time and are going on the same flight to Pathankot that I'm trying to get to. Then, somehow, we're AT the airport, which is just a congested office building with no airstrip in sight, so maybe it's just the city office of the airline, who can somehow authorize us a taxicab to take us to the airport, and there are suspicious officious clerks who ask why we're traveling together, at which the women frantically disavow any knowledge of me, and I keep getting asked for my ticket, which is a thick booklet, like a ten-ticket raffle booklet with a blue cover with indecipherable writing and printings, in Nepalese-like circular scrawls (or is that Thai or Lao?), with a clear-enough PAH or PAT so that I know it's the right ticket, at LEAST. At one point I'm sent down a vertical stairway with RIDICULOUSLY small steps, like one-inch-apart gashes cut a half-inch into the vertical wall, up and down which frantic businessmen are climbing or descending one step at a time, moving incredibly fast to make VERY slow progress because of the minuscule steps. I pull myself up with my arms, covering a foot or so at a time, finally seeing the top after agonized minutes of alternating step-by-step inching and foot-by-foot musclings-up, and get to the top and muscle my way to the SAME room to find that my BAG is nowhere to be seen. Frantically race around the room, seeing the same bags and suitcases in the same place, but not my big blue hard-sided suitcase which now seems to have transformed into my searched-for luggage. Try to find SOMEONE who works there to ask or demand both my bag and my taxi, but NO one seems to work there: EVERYONE is just a confused traveler waiting for the right person to see. Accost a worker-seeming man who hurriedly-worriedly denies having anything to do with this office. Search again through the two or three rooms of the office: no bag, no hope of getting anyone to say anything, fearful that the two women have safely gone WITH my bag to the airport for the flight, but finding no way of confirming or denying that fear. Wake finally, blessedly, in the rocking ship to know it was only a dream and that everything is safely in its place.
THURSDAY, 3/11/04: 7:57: Dream of being at HOME, with my stamps and other things spread over the dining room table, and know that if I put all those "other things" into their proper places, the dining room table can be kept PERMANENTLY for stamps, and that delights me. Everything else seems somehow "in order," too, and it seems like the state that I'm looking forward to at the end of this trip, with no specific trip scheduled, and no real tasks to occupy my time (except, in real time, for IRS).
FRIDAY, 3/12/04: 6:36AM: A real MELANGE of dreams: 1) something involving Wallace Beery, quite definitely HIM, but not in a Hollywood context, sort of as if Fred Lasker had BECOME him. 2) An idyllic home in the south of France, with charming people, and I'm sitting on the bank of a small stream watching a little dog walk across this stream and the next little one, searching through his environment, and (added at 6:50AM as I remember it again) I'm sitting on a rock that's dry at the top so I'm not worried about staining the back of my pants by sitting on it, but as I sit the moss on the top starts to slide off the rock, and I move higher and higher while the turf (one of my words in Scrabble last night) slides lower and lower, until finally I can verify that the top of the bare rock is dry and I can sit on it easily, just soaking up the view of the streams and surrounding trees and suburban beauty of France (finish addition at 6:52AM), and there are well-behaved children in adjoining homes, sunlight filtering through high-leafed trees, the prospects of wonderful food for dinner with delightful sophisticated conversation with upper-class families. 3) A strange fragment in the loft of an actor in an off-Broadway play, his head shaved to the same stubble as his beard, and it turns into the fact that he's dying of AIDS and telling, partly the audience, partly his heirs, and partly me, that the two units on the side of his apartment can be fit into any small closet at ALL, and he demonstrates with one that each SIDE pulls down into a nested series of storage shelves, and then the CENTER pulls down in a magical way to make SQUARE YARDS of space for storage of anything at all, and I look on one shelf and see his private collection of lamp-pulls or electrical connections, all meticulously clean and jewel-like in clear plastic colors and geometrically connected shapes. 4) Somehow in an Italian family, all chatting with each other, and I ask if any can speak English, but they smile and none can, and then I ask if they can speak French, and one cute young man can, and then somehow without transition, but in the same environment, I'm in a bedroom, maybe being shown where I'll sleep, and a handsome boy gives me a knowing smile and indicates I should follow him, and after a moment's delay I think I've lost him, follow one set of doors around to a maze of interconnecting bedrooms to still not find him, but somehow go back to the starting point and go the OTHER way, following a retreating shadow, and he enters a lit closet and turns to greet me in a VERY slobbery but still gentle series of kisses, hands going all over the body, and I wonder if he knows I'm so much older than he is, but he doesn't seem to mind, and I'm concerned about getting an erection, but it does seem to be growing, and I start adoring the front of his body in his white shirt and loose pants, and he seems to like this also, when without transition I'm in something like a department store, going up an escalator, surrounded by VERY sexy men, almost like a pornographic music video, and I'm caressing the man in front of me while the man behind me is tearing at my clothes, denuding me, and I bend backward and can see my cock hard in front of me, so I know I can at least be presentable to this sexy bunch of guys, and wake hard, trying to remember the NUMBER of dreams, meanwhile forgetting the CONTENT of the Wallace Beery dream which took place before the rest of them.
SATURDAY, 3/13/04: 3:14 record the two dreams following. 4:44AM: Dream of having ridden on a bus for 8 (or 10) hours to get from NYC to New Orleans, where I get off in a very non-touristy-looking area and see a phone booth in the distance because I'm supposed to phone Mildred when I get in. I seem somehow to have done so, because without transition I've checked into a VERY strange hotel room which seems occupied by a half-dozen people who seem to be involved in some kind of accounting business which has them at desks and tables with all kinds of books piled in front of them, and on filing cabinets and bookcases around them, and I see a few beds around, but I wonder how we're all going to sleep or even agree on WHEN we're all going to sleep. I have to call Mildred back, and I've written her number down at the top of a small piece of paper with other things written on it, and I look and the number appears to be 07458, or something like that, definitely five numbers starting with 0. The phone is an old plastic one with the top DIAL somehow missing, so that I have to press hard on the NUMBER, which rotates, to dial it, and the TOP HALF of the dial contains the letters of the alphabet and the BOTTOM HALF the numbers, so I have to go WAY AROUND on the slippery plastic to dial a number. But someone jostles me, and I don't dial the number, then wander around the room for some reason, and Ken has joined me, and I know we're supposed to meet for dinner, but it's getting to be 9 and 10PM and later and later and I'm getting more and more frustrated until, in another mysterious transition, we've gone somewhere OUTSIDE the hotel and in getting back someone INSIDE raises a portion of the wall of the restaurant on the ground floor (which looks pretty decent, I think, and maybe Mildred will come HERE for dinner) to make it easier for all of us to get inside without going around to the narrower front door, and we're jostling each other to step over the low thick painted-concrete wall to step among the crowded tables in the restaurant, and some step WAY up and some LOWER up, but we're all finally inside and I'm without transition back in the SAME room trying desperately to find the slip of paper with her number on it, but find OTHER slips of paper (which are really water-dampened and wrinkled index cards), with OTHER numbers written on them, and I try and don't get her, and finally find Ken again and say "I guess I have to start just TRYING numbers until I get the RIGHT one," and he rolls his eyes in his typical way and I again try to locate the phone, let alone any of the slips which have some numbers which may be HERS written on it. Wake with GREAT relief that it was only a dream. 6:55AM: Incredibly, AGAIN I'm with a large group that's met in a manufacturing plant to see where films are---developed? produced? made? not FILMED but MANUFACTURED (the frustration CONTINUES to the DESCRIPTION of the dream!) so that we can get an idea of that process before flying to Chicago for a few days of SEEING films that will have been manufactured here. I'm with a large group, and we're going from area to area in the building, but I get separated from them and don't know how to FIND them, because I don't even remember the name of the person who's taking us on this tour! Get to a phone-operator's room when I see someone who's not talking to someone, and ask where someone's office is, and no one KNOWS. Women begin to confer with one another to see who can help me, and I, again without transition, find myself wandering down a green corridor to a door that opens onto a stairway that I KNOW I didn't enter by, return to find the only exit a 3x3 foot square that isn't even a DOOR, and get increasingly panicked (though before this I'd determined to go to the AIRPORT and see which FLIGHT I'd been reserved on to go to Chicago with the group, since there can't be THAT many flights this afternoon) and with increasing frustration, thinking "This CAN'T be!" I open a LAST door onto a huge vacant green-painted area with NO way to get to the floor of it and NO way out of it, and I think---but still thinking this IS real life---"This MUST be a dream," and for a few seconds endure the "real life" feeling of BEING in a frustrating situation that SHOULD be a dream before waking to find that it IS a dream.
SUNDAY, 3/14/04: Small dream fragment forgotten, another of being in a car rounding a curve to the left and a green racing car swerves WAY out toward us rounding the curve toward us, and I comment to the Indian driver "He couldn't have missed us by more than an inch!" Felt that everyone carries around his OWN PRIVATE CHICXULUB of immanent disaster! 5:46AM: Fabulous sex-dream of being with a hot young guy, smooth-bodied and bright-eyed, who likes me a lot, but he won't go down on me, and I keep playing with myself, squirting KY over my cock so much that the white spurts look like glistening cum on my body, and I keep playing while he ignores me until I'm totally hard and hugely enormous, and he looks over at me when my cock is about 18 inches long, when we (somehow) are sitting in the front of a car, and I've played until my cock is blade-thin and steel-hard, stretching up from my body like a brass page-clip with my cock-head flat and hard and round like the button-connector on the top of that page-clip, and he licks the first two inches and says he won't be able to go farther down than that, and how would I like that? I'm about to assure him that it would be OK whatever he did, and I'd do anything he wanted with HIS cock, when we're suddenly confronted by a young couple in the back of our car, the guy of the pair suddenly jumps out in traffic and disappears, and the girl in the back demands to be taken to Sky Harbor, which is WAY away from the dock on which we're driving, in the daylight, now, and she's suddenly demanding $100 in addition, which I have in my wallet but then I won't be able to buy any souvenirs from Christmas Island, which is somehow at the other side of this New England-type dock on which we're driving with sailboats on either side of the road, and I know the quandary he's in, because she knows the license number of his car AND that we're having sex in the front seat, and could blackmail him for anything she wanted to keep her quiet about his august position in society. Then he, bizarrely, changes to Ken, dressed in Louis XIV style with embroidered stockings and silk waistcoat, who puts little ornaments like tiny vases and plastic gewgaws on the end of the input line to the JOBCARD I'm entering into the system, marveling how the input gals can keep track of the intricate coding like 2(a),8(3),16(2b), but I tell him to please take these things off because it's just as confusing to have this interrupting him as, and I start tickling his calves through the stockings as he's putting these objects back in full view of the court all around us, and he's trying not to laugh, saying OF COURSE he realizes my point and would I PLEASE STOP, and somehow we're now outside a country-gate in New England, going in to a party in the back yard of this old mansion, with a seated party off about 24 in the garden next door in front of which we have to look perfectly proper, and I wake and type this to 5:58AM, not attempting to make ANY logical sense out of the confused melange of images at the end of the dream.
MONDAY, 3/15/04: 7:45: Dream of being in bed with John Corbett, who seems interested in me, but when I try to kiss and neck with him, he sort of turns his head away and pushes me down toward his crotch, and I can feel that he's very hard and large enough to be really interesting, so I'm just about to uncover his riches when I wake up.
TUESDAY, 3/16/04: 3:16AM! Two dreams, of testing and bedroom/Charles. 1) I'm a teacher of my contemporaries, as it seems, of my grade-school class which has advanced to college level. I'm not REALLY a teacher, but when the male teacher of our Physics class seems to be intimidated about teaching a chapter in Thermodynamics, which is one circle among other circles of topics on the cover of the textbook, I say something like "Oh, you'd have to make it easy by drawing it out" and the teacher says, "OK, YOU teach it." So I look at the enormous chart of men's faces associated with this chapter, and I take one as an example (Thales?) and draw him on the board and label him as in the book: "Everything boils down to the concept of INPUT (which I inscribe on a band along his forehead), which can be electrical energy, or physical quantities like apples or oranges or tons of coal; and OUTPUT (which I print on a band along his neckline), which can be anything from packages of food to hours of heating for your city to rows of books in a library----" I think this is a wonderfully clear way to start this concept, but I'm aware of a row of people, standing about 10 feet from where I'm somehow standing in a playground teaching this class in the open air, who start TALKING to each other, obviously paying me NO attention, and I get angry and say "Anyone who doesn't want to listen should just leave so they won't disturb the others," and a group leaves, followed by ANOTHER group that chats among themselves and leaves, until I'm left with only three or four guys, one of whom, Joe Safko to be precise, says "Pretty soon you won't have anyone left, then who will you teach?" And I realize the truth of what he says, feel very disappointed (like with the cancellation of our visit to Kauai last night), and sit back down at my desk to wonder how I could have done it better, and what am I going to do now? 2) I'm fixing up the bedroom of my apartment, which is laid out like my house at 1221 Dietz: my bedroom is situated in the northeast, say, with the living room in the southwest; rooms connected with a common hallway. Mom comes to my bedroom door to say that Charles Magistro has arrived (as she may have in real life), but I want to finish fixing up my bedroom before inviting him in for his reaction to my fixing-it-up scheme: I've put all the books (like in my 101 Clark apartment) in cases BEHIND a screen, which in this case are racks and racks of CLOTHING, many more suits and shirts and coats and other articles of apparel, until the whole window-wall of my room looks like racks in a men's clothing shop, and a desk is in the corner by the closet, my bed is behind it, and other pieces of furniture are placed around. I go into the living room to find Mom hunched over at the end of a sofa against the fireplace wall, reading a magazine, or book, or TV guide, and paying no attention to Charles, who's stretched out sleeping on a VERY large sofa taking up most of the room where the sofa was at 1221 Dietz, but he wakes up and starts to apologize for falling asleep, but I say "Come and look at my bedroom. I've still got to put dimmers in the two light switches to control the level of the lighting, but the basic idea of my renovation is there, and I'd like your reaction to it." Finish typing this opus at 3:35AM. 5:33AM: MOST extraordinary sex-dream: I've been invited, or stumble into, an enormous "factory" which has huge rooms devoted to sexual fantasies: 1) a "battle" room in which mostly white-clothed armies, some as small as one man, some a phalanx of similarly-uniformed men, come from the sides and advance to the center in a choreographed "battle" in which decoration and stance and pose seem paramount to "winning." 2) a "waterfall" comprised of levels and ledges like a rapids, oozing soapsuds, foam, SHIRTS, milk, oatmeal from vents that overflow like the crystal terraces of Rotorua, but with edibles, or clothes, endlessly erupting and flowing down to a central reservoir. 3) a sex-orgy-fantasy room in which a) a Christ-like figure (I guess from drawing of Mel Gibson as Christ in his movie, saying "More blood, more blood"), saying "Don't touch my cock, I've very close to cuming," sheathed in condom-plastic into which he injects gouts of blood, so that he's bloody in spots all over his body, even his head which has his hair slicked back, but I can kiss his mouth and he responds slackly and I fleetingly wonder about AIDS, but I'm drawn away from his beautifully-formed, but too-gorily bloodied, body---to a seemingly legless man (from the Flesh Fair in "AI" yesterday, no doubt) whose cock and tits are being wrenched from side to side by machines gripping them, and he shouts "Don't move!" to me, because I might change the pressures on the platform on which his machines are ministering to his pleasures and change the rhythms by which he's engineering his most prolonged, erotic orgasm. 4) Into another room that seems merely loaded with pieces of paper and foam rubber and plastic that I walk unsteadily over, afraid to fall through, or push some off an invisible edge and fall off with it, and wonder how to get to the door to get to another set, amazed at this "party," wondering how (or even IF) I got invited, and how I could make sure I could return to this (I felt) annual affair of stupendous expense and eroticism. 5) a meticulously recreated 40s pharmacy with racks and shelves and displays of notions, shaving equipment, tooth-care implements, razors and blades and creams, all kinds of facial and foot and dental and digital creams and aids and culturing implements, that I thought would be invaluable to finding "just that thing" that no other store would stock, no other modern pharmacy still sell, but extremely useful nonetheless, and this was only the entrance-facade to another exquisitely sexual fantasy with an engorged cock and contorted-with-ecstasy face lurking underneath the painstakingly detailed obsessional surface. 7:19AM: It's endless: 1) I'm at Arno's, trying to hook up hi-fi speakers with wires exactly like my video wires from the last few days, and I say "They're old, but they still work: listen!" And I hook them up and they play, somewhat staticky, for a few moments, and then a wire breaks off at the base and he'd already looked at me balefully and announced: "Bob, they're from 1952!" Well, I KNEW they weren't NEW! 2) I'm eating something mushy with big pieces of fruit in it, and feel something large and HARD in the mess, and fish around in my mouth and pull out my RIGHT CANINE TOOTH! Get home, where there are a couple of guys and two young punkish girls, and I rinse off the tooth and it's perfect in form, like a shell with an arrowhead-shaped root, too large and too flat for real life, and one girl says "No one will ever notice," as I smile at her, and the other says, somewhat contradictorily, "You're right in style," she says, smiling a gap-toothed smile of her own.
WEDNESDAY, 3/17/04: 5:51AM: Transcribe dream of being in a pharmacy or gym of some kind where I want to leave my name and address for their mailing list of products or programs, and at the desk are many white tablets, but they're all filled with name, addresses, lists, and other schedules. Look for a blank corner, but none seems available. Try writing my name in a few spaces, but I always mess up one or more letters in my name (never even GET to my address!) and have to write over them so darkly that I know they're completely unreadable and try to start over. Finally tell a clerk that he needs to put out a new mailing-list tablet, and he tries to look through all the present material and finds nothing to write on, but can't manage to come up with anything new on his own. Still trying to write my name when I wake, lay thinking numbly of my frustrations (and do I REALLY have early-stage malaria?).
FRIDAY, 3/19/04: 3:23: Dream of working at a Turkish dig and coming across an easily-scraped-off bit of "Turkish glass-beadwork" that's so exciting to uncover color by color, bead by bead, that all of us can feel the excitement at the ease of the cleaning, and then others decide they have to get their cameras to record this work, and I'm pleased to think that it'll be MY fingers doing all the work in all their history-making photographs. 6:22AM: Dream of being in a play without having read the script, though I feel it's "perfect" because I don't know where it's going and my reactions are genuine. We're looking to elect someone to office, but it seems they want me to participate in a plan to kill the opponent because, as they try to prove to me, he's totally evil. I feel I'm doing a good job, though for much of the time I'm off to the side so that much of the audience can't see me, but I somehow think that's good for the "avant garde-ness" of the play and its ideas. THEN a short cute actor has his ELBOW practically in my CROTCH, and I fantasize it's being a porno production and he'll get me excited and we'll have sex (all as a legitimate part of the play, you understand), and I'm excited at this thought.
SATURDAY, 3/20/04: 1:26AM: Dream of living in a multi-room apartment in a small building owned by Mrs. Johnson, and I'm trying to watch an important TV program that begins at 9:30PM but the TV in my room isn't working, and I know there are FOUR TVs in the storeroom that don't work either (one has been there so long it's actually rusted and covered with moss, but still she won't throw it out, and I'm considering asking her what day trash is picked up from the street so that I could cart out all SIX TVs that don't work in the building out to the curb to be picked up, but I try to puzzle out in my mind how I did it before when I helped her take junk out to the curb: I know she didn't pay me, but I didn't do it for free---did she give me a month's rent, or a good meal, or some other kind of trade? So what should she give me this time. By now it's 9:35PM and she's tried to tell me to "go to THAT TV" but it doesn't work, and I get an old "lap model" and put it on my lap with its reflective screen in a picture frame, but the channels don't work right, and it's not "replacing" the photo in the frame with the picture I want---in dreamland a typical way a TV goes on the blink. Get more frustrated as time goes on and I miss more and more of the program, until I wake and have almost no memory of the dream.
TUESDAY, 3/23/04: 4:37AM: I'm on a ship, in my similar health condition, participating in some kind of consciousness-expansion program, and we go in for the first evening's---reporting is too formal, but it gives the right impression---someone like John Casarino (IS he still alive? Can I search the internet for him as Anthony Gray did for me?) comes in with me, and I look around and see one empty comfortable rocking-armchair, and sit in it, and see John go to a vacant spot and sprawl becomingly on the rug. I say I want to say something of an apology to the group: I'm not feeling very well (I don't say I think I may have malaria---or the flu--- because I don't want them to think of me as dangerously contagious to them, but I say "So I'm not really fully participating, as I feel this group deserves, and I want to apologize for that." I can feel the group's warmth for me, and like the feeling of specialness this "confession" gives me. Another fragment has me standing at the head of a small bathtub which has partially filled with water, though I only took a shower, and I'm running more water into the tub as it drains (rather like draining a small sink in an airliner toilet) and think "I'm using a lot of water," but figure that since this is a luxury ship, they must be used to this luxurious use of fresh water, and continue guiltless. Feel good to be in this position, thinking maybe I need something LIKE this to share----ah, yes, added to the group that "I'm also feeling like this in life generally: that as I get older, I DO less and less, even though my level of "doing" has always been so high that it may SEEM to you like I'm very active and participatory, but this is NOTHING like I would have been a number of years ago, in my prime." Also say that I'm concerned about dying, but then isn't everyone?
THURSDAY, 3/25/04: Dream to 3:05AM: Recall Ken's problems with ship-vertigo, taking Meclazine, not going to work! Dream of being on an island with elaborate shells, and there's an "elaborate shell game" in which the islander will put a valuable shell next to a particular KIND of shell that you can put down, but if you don't know to put down that special shell, you'll get nothing special from them. I think there are only two of these shells for each tourist, which he has to use like an end-tile in Dominos: at the end, so that the special gift-shells can be appended. But then I go to another part of the island, and they don't seem to follow the same custom, and one woman puts out STRINGS of special shells, all of which I scoop up without telling anyone else, hoping not to break any tabus set up about this ritual. Then I'm telephoning for someone to come pick me up, but I don't know which telephone number to use or which spot on the island to tell the taxi to come to, and the map is very detailed but somehow confusing. I go into a raucous bar and meet a couple of waitresses who jokingly help me out, but the brown-haired one in particular is very helpful: "Look," she says with mock severity, "If you ask for ME, I'll not only TELL you which number to use, I'll call the taxi-company myself so you won't have to spend the extra money after you've gotten through to me." But then I talk to ANOTHER, blond, waitress, who seems more seductive, and ask for HER name but then realize that's NOT the name I wanted to get, so I find the brown-haired one, and she makes a game out of telling me her name: "Is it Farnis? Sniranf?" Until she confesses to Francis, and I feel so great with this that I leap across a desk-top to get to the path where my car is, thinking I might betray that I'm an old person, but knowing to take another step at the EDGE of the desk, I figure, will clue her into my real age. There'd been a movie I wanted to see that only stated once a day, at 8PM, and a clock says 8:30, but maybe they'll have previews and I'll be able to see it from the beginning if I rush there now.