DREAMS FROM 2004 2 of 3
SATURDAY, 3/27/04: I find TWO identical settings for two portraits of different individuals, one famous, one not, and one of the people is misidentified, confusing things still further. Also, I'm taking back a lot of LOCKS for a rented box at the airport. Other details forgotten.
SUNDAY, 3/28/04: 8:09AM: I'm a guest at a training conference for a bunch of Japanese salespeople, and I've brought along a box of index cards and lots of supplies in a cardboard box lined with foreign stamps, and I'm working on a test-question for the fun of it, but at the end, when they're about to start a tour of the Waldorf Astoria, where the conference is being held, preceded by a prosciutto-mozzarella-drink reception beforehand, I know I don't look like a Japanese, so would stand out as an interloper, so I prepare to pack up and leave, but find that when I'd left my briefcase under two boxes of cards, with my binoculars on top, right at a doorway, I go back to find my index-card box torn into three sections, my test-case-material reclaimed and gone with the rest of the supplies, and my binoculars gone. I check in my pocket, but I have only my two PREVIOUS, broken, binoculars, so I start looking around for my new pair, clear in my mind that they fold together nicely as I'd had them in a play a night or so ago, but I can't find them as I wander the trash-strewn conference room, and then suddenly I'm outside, having to jump across a narrow stream, and I know I won't be able to find my stuff, and quickly realize that ultimate feeling of dream-frustration and console myself by thinking this IS a dream and I don't really have to worry about finding anything, and I wake and get the AlphaSmart and type until 8:15AM, cold in the room with the radiator turned off for the first time since I've been back from the trip but coughed NOT AT ALL last night, and only once so far this morning. Cipro at 8:15AM. Also some PHYSICAL contact with a SEXY Japanese guy.
SATURDAY, 4/3/04: 7:38AM: I'm on a bus, going out to Long Island to get off at a hotel under a set of highway bridges along a street where Fred Lasker lives, and I'm supposed to go to his place to pick up something tonight, but it occurs to me that I don't have his address or even his telephone number to check if he's home (vaguely I think he lives with hs mother, who should be home even if he isn't). It's dark when I reach a stretch of street that clearly leads up to the intersection I want off at, and ring the bell as a few others get up to stand at the door awaiting exit. Off at a strange traffic island, but then I'm inside the hotel, and a clerk asks me if I'll be wanting a room, and I ask how much his cheapest room is, and he rather indicates that I should tell him what I'm willing to pay, and I shake my head (thinking that I'm so OFTEN in this bargaining position to make things cheaper for myself---like my e-mail to Fred about the benefit at his place for $75, somehow, now, expecting that he'll invite me to the $250 event by only donating $75!) and I say "I guess I'd not even debate staying if the room were $30." I expect a derisory laugh, but he seems to consider it acceptable without any fuss at all, and I later think to myself that he probably figures I'll have dinner in his restaurant there, and it probably costs somewhat less than $30 to actully maintain a room if I've slept in it, and I look at my watch in some surprise to see that it's 8:40PM already. I'd checked to see how late the busses run and was surprised to hear that the last one left at 3:30AM for the city (I guess this comes from my looking at the 2 and 3 trains' schedules a couple of days ago, when I found that late-night service on some was by BUS). Now I just have to get a telephone directory, or a telephone operator, to tell me what Fred's number is, and I'm glad that I'm sure it's actually listed. Prepare to stay the night, knowing that I don't have anything on my calendar for the next day except for the Beard that night, as I do in fact have for tonight. Up and pee and debate sitting at the cold window, but get out the AlphaSmart and finish this at 7:49AM.
THURSDAY, 4/8/04: 7;52AM: Wake at 7:19AM with a dream of sitting on a john, having shit a great shit, but someone who's a combination of Rita and Mom are in the bathroom with me, so I have to get her out before I can take an enormous wad of toilet paper and wipe myself, thinking how many swipes will be needed for such a great shit, and when she leaves and I flush, I get up to see yards of toilet paper being sucked down into the almost-waterless commode-hole, thankfully not blocking it up as I'd feared. Other parts forgotten: something about tasks to perform, or office work to finish---ah, now the remembrance of another detail comes back: I'm working an entire weekend at home on an office job, and I'd forgotten to record when I'd started and finished work, and how many hours to put down that I'd worked, but I do a quick survey in my mind and know I didn't start each day much before 1PM, and I finished each evening for a reasonable dinner, so rather than being two eighteen-hour days, it was more like two SIX-hour days, adding only 12 hours to maybe 300 already worked, so the budget-price of $45,000 still seems to yield me a good rate of pay, even though I had to spend the "whole weekend" working to finish the job on time. And this time I DO pee all over the floor, as I'd feared I may have done many times before, and DO load the toilet-bowl with gobs of floor-wet toilet paper that I hope doesn't clog the flush!
FRIDAY, 4/9/04: 8:30AM: This extended over two sleep sessions: one before jerking off about 2:48AM, the other after. I'm a patient in some kind of rehabilitation hospital, and remember primarily "the guy in the black and yellow striped socks" who was given more freedom than some who had to remain in the hospital at all times. We were going on a two-day field trip, somewhere in Russia, because there were maps of various provinces, one compared to the size of the state of Massachusetts, another along the river Dneister which had only recently been open for tourism. I looked into my little overnight box and was surprised to see that someone had added two red hair-care clips, and I smiled to think that someone knew I used these every night and had thought to go into my medicine cabinet and add them to my overnight supplies. Momentarily thought "But why didn't they add my electric razor?" but the answer was clear: my beard wouldn't grow enough in two days to warrant its being taken along. Some elements of IBM-type work were present in the dream, but when I woke with memories of the first segment, I felt too tired to even go to the AlphaSmart to type them out, figuring I would at least remember the patient with the black and yellow striped socks. Other details, which I was sure I would remember about one or two other patients, one possibly like my Mother, I've forgotten now that I'm typing, trying desperately to get to the bottom of the page, sitting in my socks so my feet won't get cold at the window, since spring hasn't started enough in earnest to provide consistently warm weather, though it looks sunny enough that the forecast for rain this morning isn't taking place, though I hope it stays clear for our trip to the Brooklyn Botanic today.
SUNDAY, 4/11/04: 4:45AM: Wake at 4:39 with a depressing dream: I'm in Akron, maybe in my 40s, and Mom is at work and I'm staying awake all night writing in my bedroom. Planes start flying low overhead, seemingly chasing enemy planes in the sky, and through skylights in my roof I can see them flashing by, and think I hear the sounds of distant explosions, but I somehow know that even if I turn on the radio or TV, I won't get accurate news of how bad things are outside now. Mom comes home as I'm about to leave, and she asks what's wrong and I say that I'd planned a vacation in a week or so, but now I've decided to go to Florida for the week before that, and will be leaving in the morning. She expresses regret, but we can't talk about what my real reason is. I get to Aunt Helen's, and she's maybe in her 50s, still very plump, but seemingly single, or maybe living with a similar-sized woman. I tell her that I want to leave for Florida, and she senses my fears and leads me to a sofa where we sit down and she tries awkwardly, because of her bulk, to hug me and console me, but starts making excuses about not being able to leave for her summer home there for a few days, and her friend says something about "leaving on Saturday and getting there Thursday." I know Helen usually stops at her place in Virginia Beach for a night or two on her way down, but I didn't think it would be that long before she gets to her house in Florida, but I figure I can get a hotel room for the few nights before she arrives and I can stay at her place. Wake feeling sad and depressed and worried about New York's safety, and lay for a bit and then up and type this until 4:53, needing to pee. 6:11AM: I'm in the back seat of a car that's driving through the US South, and we have to stop for some reason, and I have an erection as two teenagers feel me up and say "We can have a lot of fun now," and one climbs out of the car and indicates I'm to go with the other guy, both dressed in baggy blue jeans. I get out of the car and am told I can get back in by a young girl who seems to know what's going on. I feel suddenly self-conscious and say I'll wait. Look over to the gas station and see poorly lettered signs for Rest Area and other area, but I can't tell if it's a john, because I've got to take a shit. Then the girl says something about joining one of the guy's daddies in anther car, and I hang back, and she looks at me like I'm demented. Wake with a strong (but not severe) anal pain and type this on the john, nothing moving in the area of my bowels.
TUESDAY, 4/13/04: 5:35AM: I'm staying in a northern Canadian (or far-north central US) town, leaving that night, but I guess NOT on the 11:15 train "across the "Selous" (which turns out ONLY to be the name of an explorer in South Africa---maybe they named a TRAIN after him?) to Alaska, which I'm tempted to get onto just for the hell of it because I've never been across that particular band of the northwest. Standing in line for a john when people seem to be cutting in front of me, and it turns out the real line is around the corner, which I really hadn't seen. Wait and wait, and finally get up a narrow stairs to an Art Deco entrance that confusingly refers to BOTH men's and women's johns. Just AT the door I meet a cute guy who needs to piss, but I said I've been waiting in line, and I intend to go in next. Get into the rustic, outdoorsy-looking entrance to find the actual door to the toilet is modern, and the toilet itself looks like a space-age expanded airliner toilet with smooth corners and modernistic design. Pee for a bit into a bathtub that has layers of plastic in it that prevents the pee from going down the drain, but then halfway through, I notice that the actual toilet is BEHIND me, and I start using that, glancing at the Playboy or muscle magazines on the counter that may explain why the guy before me took so much time in here. Before the john, I had a strange conversation with a woman from the town, something that seemed to skirt sex, but I can't pin down the memory of that part of the dream. Had wakened about 3AM very COLD, almost with a chill, and carefully, under the covers, crept down the bed to get out the woolen Guatemala blanket to make me warmer, hoping I'm not getting a cold, like Ken has which is incapacitating him for work, as well as his radicular pain which will get him a spinal injection later this morning.
SATURDAY, 4/17/04: 4:10AM: I'm riding in a car with two sexy guys, who sadly don't seem to have any interest in me, and I give them my card, but it's an old one with my old address on it (maybe the "I'm still on Clark Street" e-mail to the lawyer last night caused this detail), so I try to write down my address but the pen doesn't work, so I say "You can phone me if you need my address for any reason," and I shake hands with them, and one has a beefy hand which lingers somewhat in mine, so maybe there is something there. Another segment has to do with file drawers, stemming from my search for a particular article on a Brooklyn penthouse to show Charles last night, but not being able to find it: frustration again! But that's NOTHING compared to the frustration in the NEXT dream, from which I wake at 8:53AM and begin typing now at 9AM: I'm driving through a remote area like southern France, with Mom, in a tiny car that seems almost a motor-scooter when I look down to see a foot-wide pathway across a bridge over which we're driving, and I'd seen that we were just passing a young woman about to go over the bridge, and rather than stop to wait for her to go, I decided we had the right of way and just cut her off before going onto the bridge, and looked down to see that there might be 3-4 inches of smooth cobblestones on the bridge-surface on either side of our 4-5 inch thick wheel where, in my dream-state, she would still have room to walk without being pushed off the guard-rail-less side of the bridge, which wasn't more than two or three feet off the tiny stream it crossed in any event. We'd made previous reservations for a very cheap hostel in this tiny town (slightly reminding me of the St. Vincent, or whatever, that Dennis's cousin and I stayed in after going into the hills for the two ruined French monasteries in the Pyrenees that contributed cloisters to the Cloisters), and had signed up for dinner at 6PM, and it was getting close to 5:30PM already and so we had to rush. Into the tiny town which looked more like a farming community in a cul-de-sac at the foot of surrounding hills, and up a steep road to the tiny town square where there was only one way to exit: up a narrow road which drove directly into the place where we were supposed to stay. The actual topography is very confusing in the dream: we really had no choice of where to drive: there was only the narrowest of roads and no alternative road to take, but when I parked, temporarily I thought, so that we could go into the hostel and find where our room was, and I moved uphill from the car, I pictured our suitcases in the back of the unlocked car, and when I looked to see what time it was on my wristwatch, I had the picture of my watch on the top of my suitcase, in plain view for anyone who might want to take it, and figured I'd better get back to the car quick. Into the hostel directly into the "end room" which was more like a dormitory---really more of a flop-house with one open area which had beds along looming walls, some occupied, some not, and right at the right-side of the doorway crouched a 15-16-year old, half undressed, who looked up at us (Mom was somehow WITH me in the search for the room, but only moments later I knew she was searching for this room, or the dining room, or maybe waiting for me at the car) with an expression of "Who are YOU to be staying here; I HAVE to stay here, you can afford much better." Now that I knew where we were staying (and I could rationalize IN the dream that there would ALWAYS be people moving around this enormous, maybe 15-20-bed-capacity room, so that anything like luggage left on the beds would be safe from theft, but happy we'd brought earplugs and eyeshades so the noise and light needn't prevent us from sleeping), I left and tried to get back to the car, but turned one corner to see a red-brick ruin, almost like a stupa, blocking the right-hand of the T-intersection, and a Gothic pile, like an abandoned chapel, blocking the left-hand of the T-intersection, and I told myself I'd have to try to get a photograph of BOTH constructions. Then to ANOTHER intersection (these were scenes like the mobile cameras moving down along the walls in the Mayan and Tiwanakan ruins in Mexico and Guatemala on TV yesterday) to see MORE camera-worthy shots, and without transition I'm looking at an old blasted tree stump with a graceful new yellow shoot, with symmetric leaves on each side, curving about 15 feet into the air from the wrecked stump-top: another great shot. Then I'm outside in a park-like area, glad that it's still light enough: the sun is still so high that I have at least a few hours left to take shots in this place in which we're staying only one night, but then from the slopes below comes the curling white fog, the garua I think, that I somehow know obscures these mountaintops every night, like at Montserrat or the top of Alcedo Volcano in the Galapagos, so I HAVE almost no time to get back for my camera and take pictures of this remarkable countryside, and I should have made plans to stay here two or three days, except that I had no way of knowing how incredible this would all be! Look down and see what appear to be two escalators going down from a point below me to what seems to be the parking lot where I left the car, so I try to find the tops of those, but find myself in the elegant lobby of what seems to be the high-class section of this unexpectedly large hostelry, and I think maybe I can stop at one of these marble-topped desks or counters to see if they happen to have a more expensive vacancy for tonight, since there seem to be VERY few people in this elegant section. Go down what looks to be a long flight of stairs, but on looking down there are only 6-8 tightly spaced marble risers without a banister, but I can grasp a pole on the left and swing myself down with confidence in case I lose my footing. Pass elegant hallways and ask a porter, "Ou sont les escalateurs?" and he makes fun of my pronunciation, clearly able to speak English, but then he tries to enlist me in a conversation: "Have you even been to Caledonia?" "Nouvelle Caledonia?" thinking of my Pacific cruise just completed. "No, Caledonia, near Portugal," and I'm very confused, but have NO time to talk to him, but he won't be distracted from his train of thought to tell me where the escalators are, so I go off myself, to find strange rooms with no exit, and ask someone in the kitchen, who says "Tout droit," which as usual I take to mean "Always turn to the right," when she actually means "Straight ahead," so I take some false-rights into dead ends and try going straight after that, but find myself at the top of two OTHER escalators, both coming UP, with no stairs down which I can go, and look at a clock, with a strange semi-lit face that turns from yellow to orange as it gets later and later, to see that it's 5:50, but I figure with a place so big, and nothing more scheduled for this evening, we CAN eat dinner later than 6PM, so I STILL have to find the car. Down through some woods and see a clearing on busy main-city streets where the huge streams of traffic are just then stopped by traffic lights in my favor, so I try to get down to the intersection to cross, but inexplicably find myself at the foot of an enormous brown-orange statue of the Virgin, like at Puy-le-Dome, or wherever, in France, and climb to a sort of windowsill that leads into what looks like a darkened Way of the Cross as a way of getting to the cathedral, and when I see the FACADE, I think this must be the same church I saw from above, from the rear, and the escalators should be THAT way, but when I go that way it's only getting pitch-black, I have NO idea where I am, NO idea how to get back to the car, and am seized with an AGONY of frustration when I wake up, lying dazed thinking of all the details which I want to remember to transcribe, and get up to pee, dress, take out my earplugs, and get to the computer to enter in the first AlphaSmart dream, then start this Odyssey which takes until 9:22AM to complete! Relieve to find that the right-arrow speed has returned to normal after its painfully-slow rate at the end of my five-hour proofreading stint yesterday. Now 9:32AM and I want to get to the bottom of the page, wondering whether the bird-chirp outside is RECORDED in some way, since it sounds so song-bird-ish, or if it's akin to the wonderful sounds I heard some springs from the back yards of 167 Hicks. Just AMAZED that this dream has taken TWO COMPLETE pages, like some of the dreams I transcribe on trips, and wonder if it's not related to the more-than-half-bottle of very good Australian Shiraz I shared with Charles last night when Queen insisted that the $18.98 special was only good till 6PM, when clearly that wasn't the case, and I left without complaint (Charles took the card with the phone number to complain, on which I saw Southwicks & Quercy as the ONLY two in Cobble Hill.
SUNDAY, 5/2/04: 8:15AM: I'm spending a weekend with a number of young people in the country, and we're having breakfast, first centered around a table for four, but then there are more people, someone's cooking eggs on a portable stove, and I've brought some packed food, there are rolls in a basket on the table, and I have a little corner in which to eat, but no one seems to be talking to me, and I feel somewhat out of place, but figure that by the time we all get to know each other things will be better. Anything more I've forgotten.
TUESDAY, 5/4/04: 6:40AM: I'm attending the second in a series of Paul Taylor dances at an unusual indoor-outdoor space where there are side wings that are sort of outside, while the rest of the theater is something like the Joyce. At a sort of climax there are phalanxes of males, dancing in military unison, their steps thudding on the ground like the tap dancers' in "The Lady in Red" number of Busby Berkeley's, and I wonder how these guy are paid. Then I move along an aisle, knowing I'm not blocking anyone's view, and get to an extreme-side seat to watch the climax, where four women on point in angel-costumes dance at the corners of columns at the sides of the theater, and at the end the main one, who turns out to look like Madonna, comes running up the aisle and slips a newspaper between her face and the man's sitting on the aisle, and she makes to kiss him through that, but I'm amused to see that, from the angle of almost everyone else, she'd contact his face, but from my angle on the side, it's clear there are at least four inches between his face and her grazing lips. Walk out thinking how lucky I was to have seen this performance from such lucky viewpoints.
WEDNESDAY, 5/12/04: 12:45PM: At 7AM took notes on four dreams: 1) TV program of thick-thighed hunk in white tights who was usually shot from the back, with his legs in the air, showing off wonderful muscles and curves. 2) I'm on some kind of quiz show with the person next to me being given five chips, and he plays the game and I play next. 3) I've finally gotten an updated AARP Prescription Guide, and I try squeezing it into the space next to the old one, finding in the process and thin volume which I'd been looking for for a long time. 4) Get in line for a free porno showing in a school (or a jail) and I'm hoping it will lead to good hot sex with the humpy group of men I'm there with.
SUNDAY, 5/16/04: 9:11AM: Maybe because I did a good Actualism session from 7:30-8:15 before falling back to sleep, I was in a car with who seemed to be Valda Wells, Bernice Cousins, and two other people (to bring us up to the five who played Trivial Pursuit yesterday afternoon?), having a picnic or gathering in Staten Island. A costumed fantasy group was nearby, and I was particularly attracted to a blond muscled giant in a colorfully patterned loincloth who paraded back and forth, showing off his beautiful biceps, and then in a flash did a standing somersault that left his loincloth behind, but he was moving so fast I could catch no genital details before he'd shot back into them and his female assistant was doing him back up. Somehow I wandered away from the car into the "center" of the island, and wondered how to get back, figuring to find a bus to "Times Square" or "Wall Street" or someplace where I could subway home. At one point I was on a platform, or a small island, with junky dirty shallow water around, which was bobbing up and down, but I timed my jumping off, disentangling my cuff from a projection on a railing in time to jump off safely. Brightly lit "pleasure palaces," like whales showing movies inside them, tried to lure me inside, but that wasn't what I was looking for. Kept trying to locate myself, but no methods of conveyance, mostly looking from a Gay Nineties amusement park, seemed to go anywhere known, and I kept wandering around, not sleepy or hungry, until I woke and got up naked to type this to 9:22AM, thinking that the three glasses of white wine and two pieces of chicken at M.A.N. last night may have been enough of a psychedelic-inducer to permit this phantasmagoria after my Actualism session cleared away some inhibitions.
MONDAY, 5/17/04: 6:31AM: I'm touring with a group with people I know, like from high school or Actualism, and we're at Niagara Falls in a group waiting for a group-ride, like the Maid of the Mist, but I'm down the corridor a bit to look at a small open-work cage that allows a single person to be lowered on a cable to the surface of the whirlpool, and I'd REALLY like to do this, even though the cage looks very fragile, and I use the same argument I use when I get onto a rickety elevator: it's not broken for an obviously VERY long time, so why should it break when I get on it? But the attendant doesn't seem to be there, even though I'm right behind a woman who seems to be first on line, and even she wanders away as if willing to let me be the first down if the attendant actually arrives. Think there might be a schedule posted somewhere, and wander to the back of the hall, and then an agent comes past handing out brochures, but just as I'm about to get one, the man next to me asks for NINE, and that's about three more than she has to give out, so I don't get one. Keep looking at my watch to see what time it's getting to be, since the Maid of the Mist goes very often and my group might be almost FINISHED with it by now, and that was scheduled for something like 11AM and it's past noon, so I'm hoping to see them when they get off their boat to go to the next stop on the tour, which I think may be lunch, but it dawns on me that I don't know WHERE lunch is scheduled to be, or where the next stop is, but I sort of rely on the leader of the group, a woman who knows I tend to wander off, to leave someone, or at least a note, saying where I can catch up with the group. Then, somehow, I've wandered far away from this tourist pavilion and now have to RETURN, but I don't know exactly where it is, except that I know it's across this river, which gets smaller and smaller until I see some boys wading across a muddy section, and figure I can get across by going a little farther where the sand looks dryer, affording a passage across the water, but I sink down more than I expected and get pretty muddy crossing, the kids in bare feet making fun of me in my sneakers. Then seem to be in an area which leads me to think is an old University in the town, and try to go down one road which leads to a dead-end surrounded by very old, colorful buildings like a movie set or a scene from a fairy-tale movie like "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" with low. narrow doorways, colorful dormer windows leaning into the middle of the road, ending in a damp-looking brick wall. Down the next road to see a group of young men, to whom the guide refers to as "You Brits," and I seem to hear accents, and I ask the guide where the pavilion is, and she points in the OPPOSITE direction in which I thought to go, and she motions on a diagonal to where we are, toward the river, and as she turns to see where she's pointing, she sees a concrete road going in the precise direction she's pointing, saying "There's your way to go!" I start off on this, looking at my watch, upside down for some reason, to see that it's about 5 minutes to 1, and surely they've left the pavilion and are having lunch in some place it'll be easy for me to get to, or maybe they've even FINISHED lunch and are ready to travel to the next town, and I seem to have eaten small snacks during my wanderings so I'm not worried about missing lunch and will survive to dinner, if only I can get back. See the white expanse of the side-wall of the pavilion, knowing I'm close, now if I can only find someone who's been left behind to tell me where the group has gone. Type, feeling tired and warm, almost feverish, until 6:49AM.
TUESDAY, 5/18/04: 8:40AM: I'm visiting Grandma's house, but not the old-fashioned, palatial home on Oakdale and Crosby, nor the smaller, more modern house on Hartford: it's large and comfortable, and I'm sleeping in HER bed, which I'd never done before, and know that SHE will fix it up after I leave, so I don't have to worry about making the bed. But I know I'd stayed there as a child, so when I walk through the upstairs landing, I tell myself that it's amazing that I did not remember the three sets of two steps up, thickly carpeted, that climbs over the lofty entrance-way below, and then the three sets of two steps down, curing around to the left, that leads to her bedroom entrance. Also note that there are open ellipses in the floor, looking down over the areas below, which seem perfectly natural, except that I'm wondering why I didn't at all remember that I had to be careful walking up here so that I wouldn't fall through to the floor below. I'm visiting for what appears to be Christmas, because toward the end Aunt Helen is rewrapping a Christmas present to take back home (as if she still lived in California) with her, and I feel awkward because I didn't bring her a present, but I could excuse myself because she was really dead, I thought. Mom wasn't there, nor was anyone present other than Grandma and myself. Grandma was competent and healthy, aged probably in her mid-50s, which would have made me a small child, though I was already an adult living in New York, here only for a Christmas visit. Went outside at the end, passing a sort of devil strip of scruffy lawn between the house-front sidewalk and the street, though this seemed to be way out in the country, with no houses in the immediate vicinity, and passed a Teenage-Ninja-Turtle-costumed boy lying on his turtle-back, speaking into what appeared to be a cell phone, but from the nature of his talk was more of a recording device for his memoirs, since I remember him saying, "It's really perfect that I'm teaching kindergarten, because it give me a great opportunity to learn the psychologies of these young Americans---and then the food here is just excellent." I think that I might cause a burst of self-consciousness when I pass within a few feet of him on the sidewalk, but he hardly looks in my direction nor lowers his voice as he continues to record his young Japanese experiences in perfect English, and I guess he's more like a boyish Sadahiro Yamaguchi, but I didn't think that in the dream, only now.
FRIDAY, 5/21/04: 12:45AM: I'm standing in an open area like the back yard at 1221 Dietz and look up to see a light-rimmed flying saucer blasting straight toward me. I watch, frozen, as it lowers to perhaps 200 feet off the ground and STOPS, still lighted around the rim, metallic-looking above and below the sharp cutting edge of the perimeter and I wonder what it may be going to do. Note it.
SATURDAY, 5/22/04: 8:45AM: At 7:10AM jot a note that I'd been walking along a foggy coastline in an early morning, and see trails of footprints leading down a gully toward the unseen coastline below, so I start walking-sliding downward, hearing the surf come nearer without seeing any evidence of it, and to the left a sand-slip conveys what looks to be snow down past me toward the bottom, where it slides between two sets of rocks that I'd thought to be at the shore, but the rush of material causes the mist to part slightly and all I can see are jumbled rocks even further down. Someone like Susan Lieber had shouted to me earlier that the water was "too cold to swim in this morning." Without transition I'm on a little ferry docking "across the river-mouth" from where I started, and at first I think it's free, but then the 5-6 passengers are grouped around the ferry-captain, who's showing them a book that looks very much like "The Trees of Central Park," which he obviously wrote as a guidebook to this area and wants to sell, offering a discount-deal for the price of the book and the ferry-ride combined, but my friend, patterned after the long-ago Joe Safko, says that he doesn't want it, and I tell him that we HAVE a number of current guidebooks for the area, so we don't need his, and he rather huffily says that the ferry fare is $1.10, and Joe makes some remark that he only has $6, which won't be enough for lunch, but I have some spare cash and figure between the two of us we'll be able to pay for whatever we need until we take the ferry back to our destination and we can get back to the car and the rest of our belongings. Just remembered a fragment from the beginning: I realized I'd left my walled behind in my jacket at the top of the beach, but thought that with the fog there would be very little traffic on the beach until we got back, and my money would probably be safe. First time I've used the note cards on the night-table in a LONG time to jot down dream-ideas so that I wouldn't forget them by the time it's ready to transcribe them later in the morning.
MONDAY, 5/24/04: 8AM (note transcribed 3:15PM 5/35): I'm writing for a newspaper, quizzes, and the papers so fill the kiosk that I have to sit outside it, selling them. Don't remember any other details.
TUESDAY, 5/25/04: 8:10AM: Wake with vivid dream of traveling in, perhaps, Germany, and as a group gathering before lunch in what seems a university meeting room to have a talk about matters political and philosophical before being their guests for lunch. Various speakers give their little spiels, but they seem enthralled by someone I'd not seen before, not conventionally handsome, but he grows in appeal as he talks with reasoned, logical English that seems to convince these German-speakers even more completely and compellingly than someone speaking in their own language. An attraction, seemingly mutual, had grown between us during other presentations, and as he talked, drawing the audience in with answers to their questions and arguments to their statements, we drew physically closer, and at one point I wondered if I couldn't feel his erection through thick trousers when we pressed against each other in the "heat" of his argument. When someone asked him a particular question I could draw back and look at him more objectively: sturdy body, shirt open at the neck to show a nice chest-top with neat black hair growing thicker into the cleft of the pectorals at the bottom of the shirt-opening, compelling eyes, a rather large nose, but with a smooth, appealing prow-shape that was both manly and Jewish, and I considered that friends of mine would agree with me that he was masculine and sexy (maybe from the jokes about Christopher's "prow" on "The Sopranos" VCR tape last night). I was struck by the strength of our growing attraction, and felt that at least the rest of the trip, if not the rest of our lives, could be illuminated with the brilliance of our budding relationship, and I'd searched in my mind in the dream for a possible response to a comment from him about what seemed to be our mutual attraction: "Your fire enflames me," I thought perfectly poetically limned my quickening response to his vivifying presence and attractiveness. Wake a feel the least touch of sadness that it was only a dream, and up quickly to record it until 8:25AM.
5/28/04: 7AM: Edgardo, naked, is standing over me, moving seductively back and forth, smiling, and saying "This is NICE!" I wake, not hard, and record note.
SATURDAY, 5/29/04: Cum with bidi and get to bed at 1:12AM, then at 2:39 note this dream: I'm showing my brother Frank around my IBM office in California, downstairs at first to lots of people jamming my office, shouting various things, and to get away from the noise go upstairs to find ourselves outside on a cliff-face, when someone down below in an inner court shouts up to me "You have a phone call!" I say to tell them I'll call back in 30 minutes, but she seems to think it would be more proper if I said I'd call back in a HOUR and 30 minutes, or TWO hours and 30 minutes, but I shout back "THIRTY!" peremptorily and I prepare to tell my brother the geological history of this particular cliff, overlooking the surf coming in on the Pacific Ocean below (probably influenced by watching "National Geographic's Best Moments" on TV last night after cuming and before going to bed), before going into my upper-floor office in a building which isn't visible to us at this moment, but where I know my luxurious office offers a spectacular view over the ocean, though I know I have to worry about the storms which could make this cliff-face vulnerable to collapse into the ocean below. No question in my mind that this is my brother, Frank, who in fact looks a little bit like the hunky Frank Mungo whom I'd WISHED were my brother back in St. Mary's High School, but then he got married and got fat and I barely recognized him when Charles and I went back for our 45th High School reunion, but the brother resembled the younger Frank Mungo, not the older. Had lightly thought, before going to sleep, that I hadn't had a good bidi-dream in a long time, and maybe I'd have one tonight, and other details have been forgotten by the time I finish typing this bottom at 12:40PM.
FRIDAY, 6/4/04: 5:02AM: Slight headache/hangover, bed at 11PM after too much Beard wine: dream of Dad's sitting in my living room at 1221 Dietz and there's a ROACH on the floor, and I step on it, but it rolls over and waves its legs in the air, and gets bigger as I look at it, and then he's in a bed and there are LOBSTER-size bugs (copepods from last night?) on the bed and I ask if he SEES them, and he says "Yeah," as if "But what's your problem?" I'm in to bathroom and there are stick insects on the toilet paper roll, and I have a sheet or blanket covered with bugs that I think to flush down the toilet, having to be careful not to clog it, and it too gets larger and larger and I figure I can't FLUSH it down, it's become a blanket wrapped in a plastic wrap, and I try to spread it out so that it can dry out from where I flushed away the bugs---I hope successfully. Then, without transition---or maybe a completely different dream---I'm in some kind of military compound looking for a way to memorialize Henry Vallish from the Army (from Bill Hyde's being mysteriously in a VA home in Presque Isle?), and it's rather like being in Arlington Cemetery for Paul's mother's burial: I don't know what to do or where to go, but leave it up to the people there to help me: a guy comes up and asks what I want, and he, or I, rummage around in a black-plastic-bag-lined trash can, and then I'm at a table that has a single push-button on it, like a simplified computer, and I push the button and get, at first, slides of VERY elaborate headstones, and then, gradually, cheaper and cheaper grave markers, deciding that what looks like a cardboard box at an angle off the ground is TOO cheap, and then start to wonder why I'm doing this, doesn't he have children: Greg and Gary, who might be doing the SAME THING, and why didn't I talk to THEM before coming here to do this on my own, and wake confused and headachy. Take two aspirin and pee and start typing this in the dim light, but somehow get back to the top and put on the bright light to see where I went wrong and indicate how to fix what I messed up, finishing now at 5:19, feeling pretty awful, glad that I have nothing that I MUST do today! Wake again at 7:05AM with a second pair of sort-of-connected dreams: I'm with a young woman who reminds me of Shiela Andron from SBC, and she giggles and confides that she has a PENIS, a supposed rubberized mold of which she shows me in embarrassed triumph, and I wonder how it would be to marry her and still have her penis to play with, but then I'd have to put up with her female personality, and her female rest-of-body, and though she wants very much for me to be tempted, I move away from her, taking the mold of her penis with me, saying I'll think about it. Supposedly in moving away from her house on a hill (reminded now that I was impressed by the fact that some relative, an aunt?, had an apartment in one of the West-side twin-towers buildings like the El Dorado or Majestic) I pass elaborate grounds through which streams flow down over rocks and through gardens, and in some of the deeper pools are small boys sunk up to their chins in the water, enjoying watching the birds and insects hopping at the margins of their pools, and I think it might be nice to try that some time, and walk out onto the street as I wake up and debate taking notes, but figure it's so bizarre that I'll remember both parts of that dream. Transcribe it now at 11:15AM, having taken time to clear off the Spider game tied at 10 consecutive wins, with a 43.907% average.
FRIDAY, 6/11/04: 8:45AM: I've signed up for a course in joke-telling, much to my disgust, and the teacher is addressing his new group at the base of a hill which I start to climb, but hear him say behind me, "After all, it's not like I'm teaching indexing," to indicate that this will be SIMPLE, and Ken, who is back down with him, laughs and says, "Well, Bob, there, IS an indexer," and I don't wait to hear the reaction from the teacher or group, as I'm fascinated by the rushing water and waves at the top of the hill, enormous combers with faces of sheer rushing gray before they hit the parapet and spray up over the rough mounds of earth along the roadways that meet at the top, and I just want to stand and look at the waves crashing in and out for the rest of the time we're there, all thoughts of the joke-telling class completely, gloriously, forgotten.
SUNDAY, 6/13/04: 9:40AM: Woke at 7:07AM with dream of having gotten control of a nuclear missile, somehow, which I, in anger about something or someone to whom the missile was directed, set off, but then thought of the consequences, the possible start of a world-wide conflagration, the guilt I'd feel if anyone OTHER than my enemy were harmed, and I wondered in the dream if this was what anyone ELSE who had started something had wished: that they could RETRACT their irretractable action. I went outside when the explosion didn't take place as I'd expected, and saw what looked like a firework, high in the stratosphere, which was the missile exploding, I hoped harmlessly, far above anything on the earth, where even the radiation wouldn't travel far enough to damage anyone; and I felt a great sense of relief: that the action had essentially BEEN negated. But, without transition, I'm watching a presentation (maybe live, maybe on a commercial television station) by a jet pilot who described hitting something---he thought it might have been a high-flying bird---that had caused him to lose control of his aircraft momentarily, and I thought it might have been some effect from my high-altitude missile explosion and waited to see what the consequences might hve been, but then I woke.
MONDAY, 6/14/04: 9:30AM: I'm on a tour, and people are leaving their luggage to be taken to a bus, but for some reason I've taken my shoes and socks off and for a mad moment think that they'll include those as luggage and take them to the bus, but when I get away from where I left them, and think about it, and even remark to a fellow tourist about it, I realize I have to go back and pick them up myself. Interlude while waiting to get into a bus while others are piling out through something like a revolving door, and it goes slower and slower and has to be pushed harder and harder, and it's obvious that the people inside have crowded too many into one section for the door to revolve easily, and when three adult men spill out, laughing, I make some caustic remark about how they should just grow up and find out that life can work better for them if they used some sense, but people are more annoyed by my remark than influenced, and I make a lame attempt at humor by saying, "Well, at least it's gotten very QUIET since I made my remark," but no one will even give me the courtesy of a polite laugh. Then I can't find my way back to the luggage room, and I'm wandering around outside, with no known landmarks to guide me, and I find myself inside a building, going into a room that's only a cul-de-sac, and thinking to myself "This is just like a dream, where I can't get where I need to get and don't know how to get there." Wake after a few more frustrations.
SATURDAY, 6/19/04: 5:45AM: Dennis and I are in a shop, talking to the owner, who we know, and, as we're about to leave, Dennis reaches for a pair of woolen gloves behind him and two pair of synthetic-fiber gloves from right near me and says "I might as well get these while I'm here," and the owner laughs and says "Since those (near me) are only 79, you might as well NOT take these (taking the woolen pair back and hanging them on the rack) and take a couple more of these (taking two more of the pair near me). Dennis agrees. An earlier section had us walking outside after talking with a conservative couple, the husband of which is very sexy in an outdoors way, and I remark, looking at the weathered base of an old tree just off their doorstep, that "I'd suck him off, as they now say, in a minute," and Dennis savors the phrase in that way of his: "Yep, IN, A, MINute." Before that had been a discussion in which the guy had somewhat concealed his neo-con positions in order to appear more flexible and attractive. Other details have been forgotten, as have been the few details from earlier in the week, remembered and rehearsed on waking, but just deemed too trivial to get to the laptop or the screen to record on waking, and then forgotten in the course of the day. Proofing my "oeuvre" has made me more sensitive to the "just WHY am I doing this" component of recording ANYTHING. But the records are getting clearer, sometimes the grammar corrected, as with the spellings corrected, and the Internet repositories built in their accuracy.
WEDNESDAY, 6/23/04: 5:03AM: Wake (to see an early sunrise) with wildly fragmented dream of being at Grandma's for a big party centered around an almost-baby Rita and some other precocious little girl who insists she phone Marion at 2AM to say goodbye, and I think it's a pity to wake Marion, but the girl insists and I figure it's between Marion and her, so I'll just let her do what she wants. Rita has to pack to leave, and I think she'll do it on her own so I'm free to wander around naked, but then there's a knock at the door and I run into the bedroom where my clothes are and debate picking up a washrag to keep in front of me, or to quickly put on my jockey shorts and blue jeans and become quickly decent. Other details of a busy, raucous party, involving at least 20 other people, now lost in the fog of memory. Now 5:12 and I'll go back out to see if the clouds will AGAIN block sunrise north of the big Witnesses building, as it did yesterday morning when I watched, and Sunday morning when it HAD risen, but at 5:45 WAS hidden by the building itself.
SATURDAY, 7/3/04: 8:55AM: 1) I'm being introduced to an elevated level of awareness by a handsome, sexy guru who starts by injecting a "prunt" into each of my ears (seemingly stemming from Charles Busch's "Mommie" pushing the cigar-sized arsenicked suppository into her abusive husband's rectum), and I can see, as in an x-ray, the cylinder filling my inner ear, and then he inserts a SECOND one which strains me to capacity, but I think, in the dream, that my constant usage of earplugs has already enlarged my ear-channel, making these "prunts" easier for me to accept. We're lying together and he's urging me, sweetly, to be completely honest, which MAY be a suggestion that he'd accept my sexual advances, but I'm still not completely sure and don't want to mess up the core situation, which is showing me a fantastic new realm of knowledge and understanding. 2) On a "Survivor"-type program, whether actually on TV or only in a sort of advanced course of learning at some teaching institution, I and four other "contestants" are introduced to the clue-possibilities of five "seers" who parade past periodically, and I really only remember the description of the first "seer," who will give an ESP-type impression of what the next cycle holds, and I ask her "What do you see?" when she passes me by. To my surprise, she spouts a cornucopia of impression, data, and information which I don't remember a fraction of, and I'm more confused than enlightened, though I seem then to get the impression that I might have WAITED to ask her, since it seems the rules say that each of us can only ask ONE question of EACH of the "seers" at each of their five cycles through the game-periods, and I've done (I understand while I'm typing this) what I so often do in these new-age intensives: volunteer before I actually UNDERSTAND what people usually do, and how to act, and am thus embarrassed by my lack of prior knowledge and frightened to do anything with later experience might show to be either completely acceptable or totally inappropriate. Woke various times on my new mattress with the fan blowing warm-night air over me, and think of how rich and encompassing each dream is, but I don't take notes so much detail is forgotten.
MONDAY, 7/12/04: 7:58AM: I'm in a museum's bookshop, and I'd put in a reserve on a book which the woman found for me, and it was $21.91, and I put down my bag and rooted in the change-purse section to finally come up with two dimes that I could combine with three quarters to make the change, but I had a little copper-colored foreign coin mixed in with the change that I had to take back and replace with a penny to pay the final bill. Then I'd asked for another book, something about priests and maybe nudity, and she found it for me, but when she gave it to me she said "You live in the city but don't come here very often," implying that if she found OTHER books she knew I'd like, she'd save them for me. I simply said I didn't come into the bookshop that often. When they were turning the lights off, saying they were closing, I got all three books and my bag, thankful that I'd kept everything together, but realized I was NAKED and maybe had lost my SHORTS somewhere, but I thought "OK, it's OLD."
THURSDAY, 7/15/04: 9:30AM: 1) Talking on the phone with an accented voice who didn't say his name, who I assume is Ray Reyes, and he says he has some stamps to send me, but wants me to send him money for postage first, so I ask for his address, fumbling for a card and a pen with which to write the information, and he doesn't seem quite to understand what I want---maybe he assumes I already know his address, and I think how to ask him again, but the dream is over. On awakening I fantasize that Bill Hyde has died, leaving me his (considerable, I think) stamp collection, and Ray wants to send it to me. Would be wonderful! 2) I'm lying somewhere, jerking off wonderfully, heading toward cuming, and wake with a strong erection that I jerk off in 20 minutes WITHOUT ANY EJACULATE WHATSOEVER. How's that for mental absorption of the news that I'm aspermic, so now I invent the term acumia for my orgasms without cum. This is progress?
SATURDAY, 7/17/04: 5:09AM: Having taken an Ambien at 9PM and wakened a few times and despaired at 3:47AM of EVER getting back to sleep, I did a full Actualism session and DID get this rather unusual frustration-dream: I'm vacationing in some American town like Boston, and have contracted for a bed in a kind of upscale flophouse. I'd put my stuff on ONE bed, but then went out of the room to have something to eat, or watch TV, and came back to find someone else had laid claim to my bed, so I put my earplugs carefully on the corner of a clean bed in a corner slightly out of the morning light from a nearby window, but when I got back to THAT bed, someone else had stretched himself out on the bed and I clearly wasn't going to remove him, so I felt around on the floor to see where he may have brushed off my earplugs and found two similar-sized globes of slightly gummy-tacky translucent yellow substance which just might work as earplugs, since I'd obviously need them in these rooms with so many occupants. Went looking for a vacant bed in various large downstairs rooms which were obviously living rooms or dining rooms, and another room in which I thought I could dimly make out a master bed with two sleeping---or watching---figures in it, and then in the hallways I could hear a woman saying to some newcomers "More beds down here," and I tried following, shouting out "Where are these available beds?" and found myself in a windowless room that seemed to slope down toward the far wall just as she announced, "And if you need more air, you can open this," opening an enlarging square which let in some light from outside in which I could see that the flooring was brickwork and this was some kind of garage, rather than any sort of sleeping room, and as she left I tried to follow her, shouting, "You have to have more beds than these," and she turned and gave me an irritated glance and turned a corner and was gone. I started running after her, but found myself outside on a sort of path on a hillside that made a quick U-turn that led me to the bottom of the hill which left me on a street that I'd never seen before, in a VERY old section of town which was done up almost like facades of funhouses or amusement pavilions in a very old (or simulated old) amusement park, and I knew instantly I'd become completely lost, having NO idea how to return to the house I'd just left, or even what it looked like from the outside, and I rubbed the side of my face in exasperation and thought something like "And this is REALLY HAPPENING, and I DO have to find a place to sleep tonight, and maybe I can get to the center of town and find some kind of hotel to stay in with my credit card," and my mind in the dream didn't even have time to think of whether I had my wallet with me, or where my belongings might be if they were still in the house that I'd never be able to find, when I woke up at 5:09, amazed that I had managed to get back to sleep to HAVE that dream, and then decided that I'd "had" my eight hours sleep and got out of bed to check the VERY bright planet I'd seen when I went to the window at 3:47AM to check the light outside, and it had moved along the ecliptic, rising to a point almost south of where I could see outside my window, and there was already a reddening light of sunrise in the far north, and I finish typing this at 5:30AM, peeing for the THIRD time this morning, and check that I'll be transcribing my notes from earlier this day on NOTEREPL-53.
MONDAY, 7/19/04, 2:21AM: I'm working with three other people to put on a great play with a great cast, but it takes on Machavellian overtones, with so many twists that my delay in writing makes me fear I've forgotten some of them. We want to put on ONE play to compete with someone we don't like, casting it so perfectly that it'll put the rival production out of business. We four work so well together we think we can put everyone ELSE out of business and dominate the Broadway stage, taking the first step by putting our female lead into a revival of some old chestnut, but she's so good that business is just great. Then I and the older of the two women want to convince the other guy that he should star in a revival of "Annie Get Your Gun" which emphasizes the MALE lead rather than the female, but we know he wouldn't do it unless it seemed to be HIS idea, so we plot how to do this, inviting him to a meeting at which he can "discover" that this would be a good thing for him to do. We feel very sly doing this, even agreeing with the younger woman that the casting of ANOTHER older actor in some key role actually caused the COMPETING production to close, showing the efficacy of THAT tactic, but then when he FAILED in a second production, we agreed that it was because he was TOO old for the part and couldn't dance, so we had to be careful about making the same mistake with OUR older male star. Other twists were revealed through conversation in stunning ways, but unfortunately [I don't have room on the margin of this page to complete the proof] I've forgotten them now as I finish typing this at 2:27AM. 6:23AM: Dream 2: I'm in an apartment that appears to be mine, but in the apartment above John's on 167 Hicks, and hear noises from the street, and look out to see police tearing down some construction next door (to the north), and neighbors on the roof on the south side say "They knew it was unsafe, so they had to do something about it." People on the street look on and seem to agree that it's for the better, but I never find what's going on, but in the apartment without transition seems to be the guy CAUSING the trouble, and he's a cute large young man I seem to remember seeing in the neighborhood, but "something happened to him," and now he's mute and seemingly very addled, maybe reverting to a very young age, and I ask someone in the room "Was he mute before?" twice, but he only gives me a withering look and doesn't condescend to answer me. I sit in my chair as he agonizes to himself, then comes and talks to someone on my LEFT chair-arm while he stands and crouches near my RIGHT chair-arm, and I find him VERY attractive, thinking I can "help" him, so I try to act helpful, and I'm naked, so I think I'm vulnerable (and appealing) to him, and he first takes a chance to slap my belly good-naturedly and I say "That's OK," and he tentatively reaches for my cock, then tries to jerk it off, looking at me pleadingly, and I say that's just fine, and I try to squeeze his tits to help him, but he screams in mock pain and say "Mommy hurts!" and I apologize and ask HIM what he wants me to do, and he cries "Sex fun!" with joy and he sits on me and squirms atop me and I can feel myself getting hard and he's getting pleasure when I wake with a jolt and am semi-hard. Finish this at 6:30AM. 10:18AM: I'm performing a series of experiments which involves me getting patients from dentists to some kind of strange test for IBM, for which I haven't finished the person-list, and talk with someone like Ken about possibly describing some infant disease by surveying my information, but then it occurs to me that I haven't entered the data for the past year, so these newborns we want to study haven't entered the system yet. Shades of old "I haven't finished my IBM project yet" type of frustration-dream. Go to a new doctor's office and he's lying awake on his daybed, and I ask where his tongue depressors are (which I need for my part of the data-gathering) and he looks up backward at me from his head lolling off the back of the couch and directs me to a series of black-faced place-holders on his shelves, and I pick out one that he says the tongue depressors are right next to, and then I have a book which he says contains a study of HIS on something or other that I should look at, and I open the thick book to try to find what he's referring to. Confused dream remembered on my waking for the third or fourth time at 9:48AM!
TUESDAY, 7/20/04: 9:02AM: Woke about 2:30AM with fragment of a group of men needing to validate their actions for certain times, but they could only do it for an hour, where some of them had to account for the time between 8:30 and 10, for example, so they could validate 9-10, but had to rerun something, or go to another resource, to account for 8:30-9. This went on for a series of men for a series of times, somehow everything coming together in the end to comprise a complete television program.
WEDNESDAY, 7/21/04: 12:48AM: Thought I'd remember the simple dream, something like having to get somewhere, or do something, or watch a TV program, in 15 minutes, but forget it now. Then wake at 4:15AM with a dream of being in a bookshop, or at a literary banquet, awaiting for the fourth or fifth year the coming out of Volume 3 or 4 of a series on science-fiction writings, and we compared waiting for these volumes with waiting for the "four volumes of "Lord of the Rings," with the second volume coming out after 2 years, the third after 5 years, and the fourth not even after 8 years, despairing that it would EVER come out, and someone like Dick Sime described his edition, which "Had an imprint" (which I took, possibly, to have been even a personally-impressed thumbprint) which he had been entreated to put on as proof that there would in fact be another volume for which everyone was waiting, and it seemed analogous to the three-part movie of "Lord of the Rings" or the now three, soon to be four, and eventually all seven, movies of "The [no, this isn't the SERIES title, only the most recent movie] Prisoner of Azkaban" series---Harry Potter series. And there was some reference to the seven volumes of "Remembrance of Things Past," too. 7:26AM: I'm in some University, having lunch, and there's no cafeteria line, only people ordering across a counter from women who cook what you want, so I ask for two cheeseburgers and a fish and chips, and wait a long while, thinking they may have forgotten me, and the movie's started next door which I don't want to miss, but finally out come the two burgers in one enormous bun, and she says it's 55. I figure it must be subsidized food. So I give her a dollar and say I'll give her a nickel, so she goes away to get 50 in change and AGAIN it's a long time as students come in and eat and talk and leave, and finally she returns with two quarters and I've dug a nickel out of my crowded pants' pocket, and she thanks me and I thank her. Then I'm outside, chewing with my fingers on my fish fillet, getting greasy, but the flesh is good and the breading is crumbling off, and in the distance there's the sound of cheering crowds and marching bands, and old shepherds have herded flocks of ducks and geese and even a few swans onto the road and into the distant lake (like the ducks on the Esclapian Lake yesterday?), and there's a parade of men in green uniforms (St. Patrick's Day?) and then a phalanx of naked men, and I look to the side and rows of onlookers are displaying handfuls of matches, or boxes of matches with only three or four lovingly displayed, and some guy passes calling himself the "Safety Officer," and I corner him and ask, "What IS this?" and he seems to say it's a very secret tradition, but seems also to want to confide in me, and he says "You know when people go off to an area of war---" "Like a theater of operations?" "Well, yes, but this is an ATO." "ATO?" "Don't tell anyone, but it's "apartment, transfer to."" I then puzzledly ask "How long has it been going on?" and he infers that this might be one of the last years. But then from a distance there's another whoop from the phalanx of naked men, and I hope to catch sight of a few nice bodies and cocks, but wake up, feeling rather frantic, and look at my watch to see what time it is, and finish this at 7:34AM.
THURSDAY, 7/22/04: 4:35AM: I'm either making a movie or actually living while being in some kind of band where people look soulfully at each other to play at their best, and then try to extend that into a sexual relationship. A sexy guy stares at a beautiful woman, but somehow we're lying together, side by side, and our bodies are breathing together, in and out, and my hands want to touch his body and then, breathlessly, his hands touch mine, and I feel myself growing hard, and when he grabs my cock I can grab his and am physically and sexually exalted when he's roaring hard and we can start playing in earnest. Then without transition I'm having to "cut my chest hair" as a symbol of the relationship being over, somehow, and I find strangely BIOLOGICAL (all this "biological" wine in restaurants here?) growths of, like a water-plant that grows tendrils from a common root that I snip close to my skin, which is just after trying to trim "regular" chest hair which is stiff and matted, rather like crunchy coral-growths, and wonder how much taken off would be too much, and try to "even out" what I cut off so that what's left looks more like chest hair rather than the efflorescence of a coral reef. Then get to a central area and find most of the staghorn-like "hair-substitute" comes from the spouts of two garden-sprinkler-connected holes, from which I remove all the growths, but then the sprinkler-top comes loose from the common bottom, and that was set into a limp bag, like a bag of fertilizer, and I ask someone "Is the sprinkler supposed to LEAK and come off?" and the answer is no and somehow the whole apparatus is supposed to be fixed. Somehow the dream circles back to the instrumentalists playing their rehearsals and seducing each other, and I again get a sexy charge and wake and debate recording this, then take it into the bathroom to finish at 4:43AM.
FRIDAY, 7/23/04: 1:29AM: Wake at 1:25AM with THE MOST Extraordinary Dream: I've read a book by a man who happens to live downstairs in my four-floor, rather poor, building somewhere in Manhattan. I'm convinced that it's the most important book ever written, and it simply MUST be publicized, or adapted into a movie or television series, and I get the idea that two men can do exactly that: in real life they would be someone like Spielberg and Lucas, and in the dream they somewhat resembled them, with traits of Bill Gates (someone with unlimited wealth and power) and Bill Moyers (someone with an inquiring mind for someone like Joseph Campbell). Then there were two other invitees to "the perfect introduction party," in my mind: one was definitely, distinctly (though why, I have no idea) Lauren Bacall, though somewhat younger than she would be now; and another noted woman, who as I walked toward the bathroom with my laptop I thought the perfect EVOCATION of her would be Maya Angelou: enormous reputation, a representative of huge underclasses of Blacks and Women, and someone whose voice would tend to be heard as "a voice proclaiming the truth." Well, somehow, whether by letter or telephone or Internet, I DID get these five people together---call the author of the book (though of course now I suspect it might have been someone suspiciously like me) Jack. Jack had been perfectly self-satisfied: his book had been published, rather well received, sold; he'd been interviewed and feted and awarded on the basis of the goodness of the book (I didn't invent its goodness, in the dream it was REAL). And Spielberg and Lucas had had SOME knowledge of Jack's name and book, but as they were encouraged by me to introduce themselves to each other in their most idiosyncratic way (thereby 1) allowing EACH of them to characterize themselves in the way that EACH felt put themselves into the best possible light in these auspicious circumstances, and 2) I didn't remember their names in my insane, frantic, all-encompassing pleasure in the thought that I had actually brought ALL these people together into my lowly apartment, and they were actually SPEAKING to each other in terms of my proposed collaboration among them). Lauren Bacall and Maya Angelou had somehow arrived later, and I disastrously made some horrible gaffe in admitting them, or entreating them to introduce themselves, and BOTH of them turned on me in icy fury and said something like: "I'll never forgive you for doing what you did; will NEVER give you the chance to do anything like this to me again; and I was INSANE to respond to you in the first place, and I'm LEAVING." I'm horribly sorry they leave, but there's absolutely nothing I can think of to do to mend the situation---and anyway, it left me with by far the most important threesome of my scheme, and THEY seemed to be getting along---except that I couldn't find MY copy of Jack's book, and I even went down to his apartment and couldn't find a copy of it THERE, and even though both Spielberg and Lucas professed SOME knowledge of the book, or at least parts of the book, they seemed to fade in their enthusiasm because they couldn't look at particular charts or chapters which had either impressed them in the past or had convinced ME that, if shown, they would be key to the launching of the entire publicization process. They began looking at me with incredulity, each of the three of them in their own hurt, self-important, angry way, expressing horror and amazement that I couldn't produce a copy of the book, which I ransacked the shelf on which I was SURE I had placed my copy at LEAST three times, as well as looked in the next most likely, the next less likely, and the impossibly unlikely places to no avail, with the "same" familiar dream-frustration agonies. Then as the whole MEETING threatened to disintegrate, and my frenzied mind could think of NO way to prolong their contact so that their mutual magics would strike fire and continue what I had started, I woke up, in an AGONY of apprehension, despair, frustration, and possible-beginnings-of-my-flight-home anxieties, looked dazedly at my watch when I realized IT WAS JUST an Extraordinary Dream, and typed this after peeing and finished at 1:47AM, ready to get back to bed ONCE MORE. 6:57AM: Fragments centered around people having to do things in six-hour stretches, but it was also possible to CHOOSE the six hours, like filling in hours 1-36 but being able to "fit" in hours 7-12 just before 30-36, and in my waking memory was also something about a bomb going off, though I'm probably anticipating my flight home.
SUNDAY, 7/25/04: 6:35AM: Having taken an Ambien and gotten to bed at 10:35PM, aware of Ken remaining up with the light on for at least 10 minutes, I then went to sleep easily, woke very briefly without even checking my watch for the time, then woke at 6:24AM with a dream: I'm in a group of top management in a company which has been physically or religiously or mystically ruled by a very beautiful young man, but now he has to be presented to the public, and as successive doors open on him, his face finally appears on a strangely short and stocky body, bearded and lined, but someone remarks that it looks like a make-up job, which it rather does, and someone makes the paradoxical remark that "his age will make him look even younger (because it looks phony)." I draw no conclusions, because the company and the company's finances are solid. No real connection with the dream except the beautiful blond boy having a cocktail on the outside terrace of the Eden Hotel last night before dinner with an older English-speaking man who is clearly not his father or any other blood relation, who I mistakenly think is dining later with a beautiful young WOMAN with long blonde hair, but Ken says no WAY is it the same man. Lie for a bit, grateful for the Ambien for having given me an unprecedented almost-eight hours sleep, and up to pee and type this to 6:42, ready to go back and doze for another hour or more, only something like 20 hours before HOME! As I touch my head behind my left earlobe, there are crusts of dried blood with are easily moistened and wiped away, leaving the skin feeling smooth, but I guess I now have a pillow bloodied on BOTH sides. Leave bathroom 6:50AM.
WEDNESDAY, 7/28/04: 4:15AM: Dream just WON'T let me go: wake at 3:40AM, remember nothing, then it comes bak to me: I'm backstage on opening night for a play in which I have the third role, and my brain tells me that I've never even READ the play, let alone memorized the lines. The leading actress comes backstage and I air-kiss her as I did Rose just as we left the Beard last night, and she moves away to do her warm-up exercises. I fan the pages of my script in my hand: can THEY tell me what to say? Is there a prompter? I think it's a comedy, therefore relying on timing, and I'll simply mess it up. Worse than that, I don't even know when my ENTRANCE is. First time in a long time for THIS kind of frustration dream, and I'm STILL not sure whether I have a temperature or am just hung over from too much wine last night. 4:58AM: Remembered another dream-sequence: a guy passes on a self-propelled vehicle very much like a speedy library-shelf ladder, and he goes from naked statue to naked statue in a sort of Roman Forum setting. I envy him his machine, wondering if I could rent one.
FRIDAY, 7/30/04: 8:50AM: 1) Wake at 5:20AM with dream of having gotten a book (influenced by my trip to Strand Bookshop yesterday, probably) from a cute guy who's sitting in the top seat in a corner of a small restaurant, but I later realize I don't know his name, the name of the restaurant, or even where I AM. I lay down in a bed in a house that's occupied by Joan Sumner, but someone comes into the room and demands to know who I am, because this is HIS bed. I try asking Joan where the restaurant is, and she assumes it's "the usual one," but when I get there it's much bigger, and doesn't have the distinctive top seat in a corner. I feel slightly desperate that nothing will ever set sorted out. 2) Wake at 7:50AM with dream of being in a restaurant with four other people, sitting at a table in the corner, and at one point the manager opens a window to the street, and a HUGE breeze blows through, making the temperature more pleasant, but the napkins and small items are almost blown off the table. At another point Vicki (who called me yesterday) and I are standing, looking at something outside the window, and look down to see a VERY small table between us, and I laugh "Who shrunk our table?" and she laughs and we move back to our usual table for five. Earlier, two women from our table, Barbara Lea and someone like Barbara Whoever [Kahn] from Village Playwrights, and chosen to be "queens" for the evening, and one of the sights out the window starts with two long-gowned women in black being joined by a third, with raised arms in a celebratory circle in a park downstairs, and I beckon the others to look with "Oh, look, there are the three queens." As we look, they're joined by three OTHER long-gowned women in black, and I change it to "No, there are six queens now," and then about a dozen in chiffon gowns join them in a circle that changes to a conga-line, and at a signal they all fall back on each other's dresses like a comic domino-push of soldiers in a Gilbert and Sullivan farce, except the progression isn't perfect: some women on the left, right, and center, hit the ground out of sequence, so the effect is rather ruined, but it's still a very funny event. Something about ordering reminds me now that this part much have been influenced by my lunch yesterday (the first from my restaurant list this year!) at Pie, with pizza by the pound and me sitting in the corner at a communal table for six. Finish typing at 9:05AM, finally feeling rested from the Rome trip, having gotten to bed about 10:30PM loaded with two Nyquil, 3 night pills, and two Sleep Aids, then getting up again about 11, still coughing, for a melitonin and an Ambien: DETERMINED to sleep off the cold and lethargy since the trauma of the leak on Tuesday and the energy taken by emptying and upending the bookcase on Wednesday.