Any comments or questions about this site, please contact Bob Zolnerzak at

bobzolnerzak @verizon.net

 

 

 

DREAMS FROM 2004 3 of 3

 

SATURDAY, 7/31/04: 6:35AM: 1) Details forgotten, though when I woke at 1:22AM I thought to write down a three- or four-word summary that would remind me of it, but I didn't. 2) I'm attending a music concert in a theater that reminds me of the old Thalia Theater, but the first six or seven rows are roped off and the last six or seven rows are roped off, so we can only sit in the 15 or so seats on each side of the aisle in about five or six rows, and we wonder why until the lights go down and the semi-transparent curtains in a semicircle that conceal the stage reveal what must be a hundred-person orchestra distributed in a huge arc, almost the entire semicircle, which starts to play, encompassing the entire audience in delicate sounds, which, unfortunately, soon turn to jazzy sounds which aren't the most pleasant, but the effect is mesmerizing. Then, row by row, we're told to get up and march in a pattern around the aisles and rows of the theater; some rows have hats, straw in some rows, felt in other rows, that every other person wears; other rows have capes that they wear, and one row has a complicated arrangement of newspapers on their seats which are supposed to be drawn up around the crotch with Saran-Wrap-like plastic bands that tie on the sides to form a kind of diaper. The director of all this is a noted off-Broadway play-producer, who has assistants to help him direct each row in their apparel and movement, famed for his eccentricity and originality. At one point I get separated from my row and have to go through narrow hallways to try to return to them, but it seems that some single seats, as rows to themselves in front or back, are unchoreographed and can be filled or not with those who have lost their proper places. Two special rows have letters (the number 40 or 42 sticks in my mind, but that would be too many people) that spell out a three-word phrase, like "Abram loves us," (which clearly, too, couldn't have been 40 or 42 letters long) which is choreographed to circle around the theater in various permutations but end up the "climax" in the center row as a centerpiece to the completed picture. At one point I find myself in the second row, in the middle (the middle aisle has now vanished), with two sexy guys in slipping diapers on either side, and the guy on my right is writhing sinuously in his seat, obviously wanting to be genitally fondled, and I figure "This whole thing is so strange (clearly influenced by my watching Spartacus's video of "The Cockettes" last night) that I can do whatever anyone wants and no one will particularly notice" so I start feeling his muscular body and reach down to find his thick tube quite soft, but we both seem to enjoy my fondling it, and he's not concerned when he reaches over and I'm both very much smaller and very much softer than he is. The guy on the left starts getting in on the action, and I figure all's well, but the director is suddenly in the center of the stage (the orchestra has disappeared, and the stage is now a normal proscenium stage, rather than a semicircular surround), looking patiently down at us, wanting us to finish up so that the rest of his concept can be attained. We try to get up, but our diapers have become seriously disheveled, and in the folds of mine there's a square of paper that's burning in the center, giving off a dense white smoke, and I look at the inscription on it to find it's Hasperol, or some brand name, of a volatile narcotic that's to be inhaled for sexual stimulation, and I inhale a whiff and think it might be working, but smother the flame in the center so that I can take the remaining surface home to experiment further with it, while others around look at me, some with disgust, some with envy in their eyes, others with simple unknowing curiosity. Other combinations of movement and action and theater-garb entered the almost-militarily (shades of "Soldier's Girl," seen earlier?) structured dream, but I've forgotten them now as I finish typing at 6:57AM, tired.

THURSDAY, 8/12/04: 7:25AM: I'm seemingly in the Army, but as some technical assistant, rather than as an infantryman or an ordinance expert or someone more definitely military. I've just had a training session about how to identify some arcane medical condition, depending on the relative position of what appear to be spots on the chest or torso, relating to each other in a way that reminds of a number of right-handed or left-handed rules in electromagnetism in Physics, but the explanation is VERY confusing and it seems that the book doesn't explain it very clearly, and there's no clarifying handout to explain it precisely. So I have to go to some central office for a better explanation, but to do so I have to join hordes of plebes climbing up an arduous hill to get into the central information area of the camp: some of the more athletic can run up a very steep hill and make a shortcut, while others have to go WAY around an abutment that reminds me of one of the angled walks in the Ramble that takes you maybe 500 feet to go an actual distance of 20 feet if only someone had the sense to dig a tunnel through the abutment, rather than making everyone always walk all the way around it. Crowds of people mill about in the information center, making me almost hysterical, so that when someone asks what I want, I blurt out "FIRST tell me why they don't cut a pedestrian tunnel in that awful entranceway: why should everyone have to struggle up that awful hill and arrive in a state of exhausted breathlessness? THEN why wasn't there a sensible write-up about this procedure copied for the class, rather than making ME come HERE to find the answers? And WHY isn't there a more organized method of handling all these people milling around here? Everyone around me is laughing at me, thinking I must be crazy to demand such nonsensical things, and I'm told to wait for a specialist to take care of me. I sit for a long time, fuming, realizing that it's getting close to 6PM when I'm supposed to meet a group of people to drive somewhere for dinner, and about 5:40PM Charles actually shows up to ask when I'll be finished, but he calmly says that if I get the answers soon, I'll be able to go with him to meet the group just in time. Finally someone comes out with a sheaf of xeroxed sheets of paper, which I assume are 6 or 7 copies of one sheet for me to hand out in class, but when I look at it---saying I want to check it to make sure I can, first, read the handwriting, and second, understand the procedure as explained. Then I find out that there are actually four sheets of paper, somewhat frayed at the bottoms, which are only ONE copy of a far lengthier explanation that I would have thought necessary. I demand to have someone explain the explanation to me, now completely mystified about the process of diagnosis and even what conditions are supposed to be diagnosed, but the confusion around me increases, my frustration increases, and I wake to feel puzzled about the actual content of the dream, but thinking about it clarifies the sequence of events, and I finish typing this at 7:40AM, ready to crawl back into the over-humid bed of mid-August, mouth with an aura of effect from the tooth which will now be extracted in two weeks because Dr. DeMattio suggested I not get it extracted three hours before a Beard dinner last Tuesday.

MONDAY, 8/16/04: 4:17AM: LONG-lasting dream about my battle with the Devil for the control of my life: It centers around 1221 Dietz, making it "safer" in my mind at this moment, and I can conjure him when I want, and I can disconnect his energy-tendrils into "spaghetti" that snaps back from every component into a bloody ball that I can EAT and destroy before his power has a chance to overcome ME. At the end the house is on fire outside, and I stand on the front porch and wrench the rotten railing back and forth until it comes away and I leap into the snow in the front yard and defy him for the final battle, but he has no roots left and I know I've won. It starts on a minor scale, and someone else seems to be involved: THAT person will yield to his power, but I keep playing a wider and more dangerous game until it's MY soul that's at stake, and I keep the confidence that I know how to beat him at the last moment, except that it's always more as in a GAME, as if at some deeper level I KNEW it was a dream and that I'd wake finally and transcribe it, as I'm doing now, at 4:24AM with the sheet wrapped around me so I don't take a fatal chill and have the devil win as I'm writing about our battle. It didn't seem to involve any "won" powers for ME, just the ability to continue to live and to continue the battle. The dream itself was more of a GAME or a TV program rather than a life-and-death struggle, but my description has to go to that extreme because the outcome WAS so important and "real" in the dream itself. Rita was involved in a small way at one point, and I seemed to be much younger than I am now, since some of my winning tactics took a young flexibility and strength I no longer actually possess. Round after round of the increasingly dangerous struggle took place in the dream, buoyed by my exuberance at winning each segment, and I always knew the conditions so that I always had the energy to pull his tendrils out and "consume" them before his power corrupted whatever he'd tapped into. And somehow I knew he'd always play "fair" and not enlarge physically or in terms of his power so that I'd ever be in danger of being totally overwhelmed. More in the nature of an opera whose denoument was always clearly written in the libretto, played on a stage controlled by ME rather than him, so that I would have the Last-Judgment word on the outcome, rather than he, who in the dream really wasn't the DEVIL but only an evil demon trying to gain influence.

THURSDAY, 8/19/04: 4:23AM: I'm walking through Central Park, going for a gay-assistance unit based on 120th and Broadway to give them something, but I'm not sure exactly where it is. Then it's changed into visiting Pope, who's been making strange complaints to me to the center, and I go to check him out, fearing maybe he's locked his apartment against me, and he's moved into a new apartment, thinking it inferior to the old, because "the floors actually don't sag, the bricks have mortar between them, rather than having half the mortar all fall away, and the windows close without letting in air from outside. I think he might be demented, but he makes sure I know he doesn't seem to be. Another piece has me rolling up some kind of carpet and taking it down a series of escalators by feel of the tip of the front of he roll against the landings of the escalator, and I know it's cold outside, but hope that the exertion of man-handling the roll will keep me warm for the three-block walk to the apartment. I'd gotten the laptop out to remember the details, but I've forgotten many of them NOW, but at least have the bare bones down, in case I remember more details when I transcribe this later this morning (which I do SUNDAY AFTERNOON).

SATURDAY, 8/28/04: 7:40AM: I'm fussing with Mom at 1221 Dietz because some producer is coming to see the house (which has become two stories) for use as an interior for one of his movies, and she's sleeping in my bedroom and getting dressed, but I haven't put on my trousers yet, and think to put on blue jeans, but she says "But you're going to a wedding," and I think "Oh, she's right," so I decide to put on suit trousers and wear my black overcoat for the outside scene at the wedding. Earlier there was a notice that this same producer (someone like Richard Attenborough) was looking for "distinguished-looking older men" for the "cortege scene for the greeting of Queen Elizabeth" when she comes to the US for a visit. At one point there's a car with a young couple in the driveway next door, and she thinks it might be him, but I say "No, it's next door, but think that she COULD be right since it's not THAT clear which driveway belongs to which house when you don't know the neighborhood. Then I hear her in the back yard, striking up a conversation with the older man who has a house (which didn't exist when I was a kid) back there, who's being visited by his tall, handsome son, looking rather like a British royal himself, and I think Mom's being silly because she'd like to be dating the guy, and I go to the front of the house to find the sidewalk between the driveway and the walk leading to the porch, as well as that stretch of sidewalk, treacherous from a snowfall which hadn't been properly shoveled and it was rutted with frozen ice that was slippery and even dangerous to walk on, and I think vaguely of someone slipping and suing us. Scattered events, but it was definitely 1221 Dietz, there was no Rita, and Mom was in her possible early 40s, so I might have been late teens, though I had my adult (though not aged) body. Finish this note at 7:47AM, woozy from getting to bed about 1:50AM and getting up to pee.

SUNDAY, 8/29/04: 1:47AM: Woke at 1:43AM with the strong feeling "WHERE do these dreams COME FROM??" I'm back in Akron, with John Vinton, and we're walking down streets like Dietz Avenue, but he's up walking behind the houses fronting on Dietz, and I'm waiting for him at the corner, but he's being his difficult self and won't go just where I say for him to go. We come to a corner and I lose him, but go up a stairway while he stays down, and meet, at first, someone who is called something like Wladzu, and I think he must be my grandfather, and I'm meeting him before, or AS, he's meeting my grandmother, whose first name I can't remember. Then I meet a very young Henry Vallish, and, puzzled, I ask "What YEAR is this?" and they look at me so strangely that I'm not sure they tell me the truth when they say "1935." I figure that sounds about right, since Henry looks to be about 25 or a little more, and an even-younger Marion says that he's worried because he's sick, and I try not to astound them, but I say "I predict that you'll live AT LEAST to twice the age you are now, so don't WORRY about your health." But then I think of a better way of putting it, and say, "Take care of yourself, don't ignore what you think might be wrong, but don't DWELL on it, look on the positive side, and things will work out OK." He smiles tentatively at me and I go back downstairs to meet John, going down a stairway---no, I'm out of order. When I LEAVE, I meet a young man who's working in a store, sweeping out the second floor, and he tells me he thinks he knows me, and asks my name, but he doesn't recognize Bob Zolnerzak. He prepares to go to sleep on the floor, pulling up a blanket over him under a table, and I think to ask, "What's YOUR name," and he sticks his hand out from under the blanket and says "Tom Paul," and I say "Pleased to meet you," and just as I leave he calls out sleepily, "And will I still live with you in Brooklyn Heights?" I surely don't remember mentioning Brooklyn Heights before to him, but I can only say, "Well, I'm not sure---but we'll see," and he drops back to sleep contentedly. I go downstairs to meet three or four shopkeepers in a little plaza, and ask a bristly looking optometrist what year it is, and he huffily replies "1923." I lose all track of when that might be and go down a curving walkway which is paved in wet clothes (rather wrinkled like in the Old Navy insert in the Times I read last night) made to form faces by linking sleeves into the "eyes" of adjoining faces, looping down the path in linked faces, and I think "John HAS to see this," and get down to the inside of an old bar, where he's drinking in the next room, and I call "John?" and he comes down two or three steps, and I say "You've GOT to see this," and he murmurs to me, "I've got to tell you about the naked meetings they have here, too," and I go out first, to see elaborate box-work pipes (conduits made from cigar-box sized pieces of wood cut and painted like Amish-work, pieced together to form a snake-like conduit that goes down over the railing of the stairway down to the floor I'd just come up), and I anxiously call for John to SEE this, but he doesn't appear and then I wake, amazed, and look at the clock to see that it's 1:43AM, and I'd finally gotten to sleep after getting to bed at 11:23, but then getting up to put my stamps back into their plastic box so the humidity wouldn't get to them overnight, got back to bed to watch the clock change to 11:30, and started an Actualism session that went on for AT LEAST a half-hour, which leaves a gap of an hour and 45 minutes, which, I think, in the past has been an "optimal" sleep-length for a succession of dreams, and I finish this at 2:07AM, fan gentle on my back, still 76 outside, and need to pee. 9:38AM: Let's describe the second part of the humongous next dream first: I'm returning to the large house, but find the entrance "guarded" by an enormous outdoor shower, putting out an umbrella of water about eight feet across. I look at how to circle around this obstacle when a young woman with a child comes and turns off a faucet, which stops the shower but not the aftermath: a halo of dripping water that I walk RIGHT through thinking it's stopped, getting thoroughly wet anyway. When inside, some guy is telling me about how they negotiated for the contract to perform an est-like seminar for a huge amount of money up-front, and for a short time they'd get their profits from conducting the experience, but quickly a VERY favorable-to-the-originators percentage would kick in, and my informant told me they simply couldn't operate with such a small piece of the pie, and were currently in negotiations to increase their share, but with little hope of it succeeding. This next part I don't remember if it came NOW or at the end of the first part: I'm leaving, looking for my shoes, which I remember taking off INSIDE the house, but when I go back inside to the area where I think I left them, I'm embarrassed to find that I'm WEARING them: I hadn't left them behind at all. As I leave, I pat my pockets to find I still have the two small introductory booklets they gave me, so I didn't leave THOSE behind, either. Now to try to tackle the main event: I'm taken to some kind of meeting in "the Savoy section" of New York, which seems to be located on a bulbous non-existent peninsula somewhere westward of Battery Park City, where the main street is a diagonal called something like "Essex" and the little streets run off it on an angle reminiscent (on the maps) of the corridors of the Domus Aurea. We (I don't know who I'm with) drive down the main street and all the other, branching, streets seem to end quickly in bucolic rusticity. [Now typing at 2:10PM on MONDAY, after delay described below.] When I leave, I see that the main connecting street is now under water, and don't know how to get around it, and there are other details I've forgotten now. Now this from the AlphaSmart: SUNDAY, 10:35PM: If I'd known it would be so LATE, I would have done this earlier! Typed to the bottom of page 69 and went back to page 68 to print the SINGLE page and made the mistake of pushing ONE rather than TWO, and it started printing pages one and two, so I shut off the printer and kept checking back to see when the printing of the 69 pages would be exhausted, but it just kept going and kept going, and by about 10PM I actually managed to type a PAGE number and it was only page 36! So it won't be finished by the time I go to SLEEP! To try to recapture the incredible dream: I'm a newbie at some kind of self-help group, and all the women who are in charge of the training are completely taken and enamored of me, and I like THEM very much, and more than everything feel ACCEPTED for who I am and what I can offer to the program, and I feel just GREAT about it. There were LOTS of telling details which I've forgotten at this point, but I'll have to be content with this, transcribe it tomorrow morning when the printing is FINALLY finished overnight, and do the index TOMORROW that I was sure I'd finish TODAY. At LEAST I caught up with the Olympics, WATCHING the final ceremonies rather than taping it and watching it later, so I'll have only the MTV Awards to watch tomorrow AFTER I finish the index. Now finish with this at 10:40PM, having cleaned my teeth, been disgusted with the programming which 1) usurped the end of Ebert and Roeper with a "special" (sure!) about the convention, 2) concentrated on a) individuals in the crowd and b) repeats of event finales rather than showing the CEREMONIES and the FIREWORKS which they thus IGNORED at the Olympics. What a PAIN!

MONDAY, 8/30/04: 2:49AM: I'm visiting DAD in his apartment, with Mom, and she invites us to stay for dinner at his place, so he calls for Hester, his maid, who comes through the door in a white bathrobe at first and announces that she'll call the butcher's for a large steak for dinner. When she comes back, she mentions something about the two liters of Chardonnay she poured into a carafe yesterday, and I suggest we could have that, but he says dismissively "That's dishwater." Somehow the bottle is right there and he says "Take a taste," so I have a sip from the bottle, and it's astringent and oily-tasting, and I agree "That is pretty bad." So Hester says she'll call the wine shop for another delivery. Mom is aloof through all this, but not unwilling to be there if only to cause trouble. I find nothing, in the dream, to be particularly surprised at. I'm about 20, there's no Rita, and they're in their early 40s and healthy. The house looks large, obviously two floors, and the maid appears on a five- or six-step rise at one end of the living room. Check the computer and it's still frozen now at 3AM! 8:20AM: I'm in Grand Central catching a train, which is more like a bus, to go upstate to the first stop, something like Poughkeepsie, getting to the station just as I hear the train coming in, and two people in front of me squeeze through the closing doors, but then the conductor says "If you hold it, you can all get in," and he lets a commuter hold the doors apart as I squeeze in and climb two steps to the "back" of the car, where businessmen have all tried to keep two seats by spreading out in their singles by the window, and I select a fairly small man and sit next to him, thinking how much better this is than the subway: only one stop, private seats, lowered lights, and still only one subway-token fare. Then I'm at the guest house where I'll be spending a few days, and pass through one bedroom as I go upstairs to the second floor, where two beds, each containing a muscled set of sleeping arms, naked, under thin blankets, flank the stairway, and I think THAT would be a noisy bed to occupy, but I'm in the same relative position as on the train: up a few steps again, in the second bed on the left, and I lie down while my neighbor is eating his breakfast of one fried egg, and I just happen to have one of my Pyrex lunch-plates which I take a BITE out of every so often, being in the habit of eating my plate, not knowing how much I'm going to be charged for it, and look over the head of my bed to a more private room with a larger double bed farther back, and the side I see is unoccupied, but I think I see the edge of a person sleeping in the second half. Then I'm up to see what the downstairs is like, peeking into a formal dining room off to one side, seeing dimly-lit (from the early-morning light) reading and sitting rooms for guests, but then I hear a few kids roistering around in a closed-off kitchen for the help, and didn't think I'd have to put up with THOSE, too, and a snobby waiter passes with another plate of a single fried egg, answering an unheard question "$5 (clearly for a single egg), or $11, (for two eggs), and no one thinks of the five dishes I have to wash each time," with asperity. I continue to eat past the halfway point on my plate, but then REALLY think of the shards of glass going down my intestines, and it MUST cut into the flesh, because I couldn't have developed THAT kind of toughness through my entire digestive system to resist ANY damage by the tiny sharp shards of glass or crockery, and figure I won't finish, just parade around with my 2/3-eaten fragment in my hand, waiting for everyone to wake up so I see what the days will be like, thinking that maybe I shouldn't have contracted to stay here for four or five days without seeing what the privacy and quiet would be like, though I can always wear earplugs. Wake at 9:20 and get to the computer to find it STILL frozen! Finish this at 8:35AM and crawl back into bed. Sunday at 10PM I managed to see that I was at page 36, and 11:30AM Monday I saw lines from page 59, and at 1:10PM page 64, so I had lunch and then came back to find the computer FINALLY free, having NO idea why it took over 24 hours to not-print 69 pages and finish this at 2:20PM ready for some placating Spider to feel better.

SATURDAY, 9/11/04: 9:11AM(!): Many fragments: 1) Guys are talking about the guy who went into the "sniff tent" in the party apartment and was then found naked, dead, "Was he 42 or 43?" "No, he was 47, but did he have a BODY: NICE ass, great legs---but I guess that's not appropriate?" 2) Almost a lucid dream of watching a group of young men coming into a room, and one young cute one is fascinated by looking at me, and I'd thought, earlier waking, that now that I was catching up on everything, I was starting to feel LONELY, and that I'd really like a loving RELATIONSHIP---but maybe that was only Bill's eagerness to please me last night by taking me to "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway" and giving me apple pie and ice cream and wanting to see my Maltin. 3) Another, first, section in which AGAIN a group of people were appreciating me for something I said, or something I could teach, and I felt accepted and welcomed.

WEDNESDAY, 9/15/04: 9AM: I'm in my bedroom at 1221 Dietz with Rita, who's trying to push more of her stuff into the top drawer of my own chest of drawers, rather like my current bedroom's wooden pair, and I tell her that I'd really like that storage space for myself, and couldn't she find somewhere else to put them? She acquiesces, and I look at some of the stuff in the drawer, then look under the bed and see a lump under a cloth covering the carpet, and wonder aloud why someone would store something so that you couldn't see what it was, and take back the cloth to find another material, like a bedspread or a patterned sheet, and put the cloth back, satisfied. Then I look at the two shelves at eye-level atop the clothes rack in my closet, and see a collection of diskettes, seemingly old audio disks in series of ten or twelve, some of which are out of the package and one side is just wood-appearing, with no printing, but the other side has two series of numbers that I can't order the out-of-order disks with. Look at an array of books, seeing that I didn't buy another of a very thin series of science books, and some very THICK books that I don't think I'll be reading soon (maybe connected to the pile of discarded books that Sherryl looked through on East 81st Street on our way to Pearson's last night), but I don't think of throwing them away since they're in such good condition. I'm probably in my 30s, as Rita is in her middle teens, and the bedroom is much as it was when I lived there, no New York influence whatsoever.

THURSDAY, 9/16/04: 7:58AM: 1) I'm returning from a trip around the world, and think to make a listing of my means of transportation, thinking primarily of the bus that's just driven me essentially from east to west across Turkey, and of other strange, slow, local means of transportation to which we (maybe Ken, maybe Fred, maybe someone else) had to resort to getting around the way we wanted to. 2) Bill Hyde and I are starting a journey in what might be Houlton, and we stop off to see a mass of people waiting in one of the biggest houses in town to see what may be the sale of the house, or the exhibition (or feast day) of an icon of some sort, and when we move through the house we find ourselves on a balcony, and Bill says "What does it look like to you?" and I look at what at first glance could be a tea cozy: about 18 inches tall, somewhat pointed at the top and with a red skirt that could be made out of wax or wood or plastic, with a face that, when Bill repeats his question, and I respond "It could be a monkey," he nods and smiles and says "Exactly!" Without transition we're outside waiting for a car to take us either to the start of the ceremony or on our first step of a large trip, and I'm hoping I slept well enough to be able to endure the next two or three hard days on a little-traveled road with few chances for accommodation or eating, and then I'm shown into the back seat of the old, somewhat musty black limousine, and Bill gets up front with the driver, and I'm talking to a middle aged, somewhat attractive, obviously rich and intelligent man who turn out to be the owner of the house in which the icon is stored, and of the car, and I say that at least HE can sit in the back with me, but he's content to somehow sit behind me, leaning his chin on his hands on my seatback to talk with me as I question him about how long he's been here, what made him move here, in order to get to salient questions about the icon, but he gets involved in talking as if I'm the only person who knew what questions to ask to give the answers he himself had been searching for: "How long did it take you to get fed up with what you were doing?" "I was the ornery-est Bull in the market, so it took only a week---" "Just one WEEK?---" "Maybe two weeks---" "But you can hold your BREATH for two weeks---" and he gives me an exasperated but affectionate look and says that it was enough for him, so he just had to get out of town (this possibly based on my business-type readings in "Gain" last night before bed) to get away from it, and he found this quiet place (which I thought was a strange way to describe a two-story-and-attic thirties-type wooden building built right up against the main highway in Houlton, where the traffic had to affect living inside) to which to retire, and he began to be seduced by my questions and his answers and I began to fantasize that he was, in fact, gay, since he hadn't mentioned a wife or anyone special to come up here with him in his escape from his awful (though fruitful) business, and I woke to think of the many people, instantly met, with whom I've had such instantly intimate conversations so that we ended up feeling we knew each other much better than anyone else has even known us before, feeling in the same position, the same closeness, the fellow-feeling growing to brother-feeling to lover-feeling of unity, and he knew he was special and I knew I was special and we fulfilled each other and could (what's the opposite of baselessly? Basefully?) think of spending the rest of our enchanted, financially secure, emotionally complete, blissfully similar existences to the end of time and beyond. Woke feeling still tired, after just less than 7 hours sleep, but since I hadn't gotten to the computer for the first dream at 3:35AM, I felt rested enough to put on my japanese coat, looking like a Buddha with my belly rounding out the hand-closed edges of the coat in my reflection in the mirror as I checked the fog outside to see that it was still 66 and still wonderfully comfortable under only a sheet on the bed, and finished this by 8:18AM and got to the bottom of the page with only two lines to go and my eyes still crusted from the reading last night that left my vision tired and blurred, new glasses?

MONDAY, 9/20/04: 5:41AM: Seldom have I had a dream so RELENTLESSLY evil and depressing: I'm touring, alone, in Central America, somewhere I've never been before, and I take a bus way out somewhere, for an undisclosed reason, and try to ask the driver how I can get back, but it's getting so late that I fear any return buses may have already stopped running, and I try to get an idea of the map of the territory, but it's not quite clear, and then, without transition, I'm alone in a desert-like area being terrorized by a group of young people who have stolen my passport, ripped up souvenirs and books that I'd collected, and ransacked my baggage and I'm starting to feel in danger of being hurt or even murdered. I try to reason, to ask why they're doing this, but with a black vindictiveness they deny me any reason, any hope, and it spirals down into more ugliness, more threats, more depression as they continue to taunt me, hold out my passports and threaten to burn them, put me through indignities and degradation (though never actually HARMING my body), until I can hardly stand it and wonder if they're not driving me to such a pitiful state that I'd begin thinking of committing suicide to be rid of their taunts and threats. Finally, at the VERY end, when I can sink no lower (and have NO idea this is a dream from which I could EVER wake), I ask one last time WHY they're doing this, and they proclaim themselves the Juventes della Pais do Americana Centrale, or something equally arcane, saying "Do you think we LIKE to be invaded by old, ugly, rich tourists who add nothing to our land or our culture? We want to convince you and everyone like you that this is not the country for you to tour, that we want to keep our countryside pure from impurities like you and your kind." This goes on, but it's still so ugly that I can barely feel relief as they throw my passport back at me, giving me no idea how I can return to civilization to LEAVE their country, and I start wondering if I could even find some office or agency to which I could complain of my treatment, seeing as 1) the whole country might be equally against me, so it would do no good, 2) they might find out I'd tried to report them and behave even more despicably toward me, 3) no one would ever believe me. Wake and lie flattened by the dream, feeling that it's SO distinct that I MUST transcribe as much as I can remember, and review that I'd watched the Emmy's, which had NOTHING like this on it, and gotten to bed VERY late, about 2:45AM, and pee and start this and finish at 6AM, not quite relieved of the depression caused by the evilness of the dream. 10:12AM: As if in contrast, the NEXT two-part dream was a marvel of cartoon-like innocence: 1) I'm listening to a friend's stereo set, and somehow he's got a set of original records and a set of duplicate records which, he insists, are so identical that not only does the playing of a single record exactly match the duration of the playing of each duplicate, but the playing of the ENTIRE SERIES of over a hundred records takes exactly the same amount of time (for some unspecified benefit---TRUE stereo?), which of course I can't credit because of the variable amount of time it would take to CHANGE the records on the duplicate machines. 2) I'm in a household that has two tiny kittens as pets, but they're so agile and digitally dextrous that they're more like little monkeys with white gloves on their tiny hands than they are like anything feline, and I'm delighted at their antics except that I look down and one is SO determined with my slipper-like shoe, which nevertheless fits quite tightly, that he REMOVES it as he hefts my entire leg into the air, and when my young hostess mentions her surprise that they're THAT strong and agile, I may turn her off by saying "Yes, they're so quick that they rise above even the foot with which I'm trying to KICK them as they make off with the shoe from it." She does seem to frown with disapproval at that. There are children in the household that aren't nearly as attention-grabbing as the kittens, and there's a father shadowy in the background who makes no impression on me whatsoever, as doesn't the actual household, but the closest I can compare is the child-ridden O'Shea household when I visited them on Lullwater when they were feeding me and making me listen to my introductory Don Adams "Hitchhiker to Universe."

TUESDAY, 9/21/04: 9:45AM: I'm attending a business meeting in a small town in what seems to be eastern Pennsylvania, and everyone agrees that there's probably nothing to do, nowhere good to eat, in this hick town, and I wander into an elegant hotel to see if there's a restaurant, look through the glass door into a lounge where someone's either having a late lunch or a business meeting, and in a reception room is a table strewn with maps of the town, and I pick one up even though I suspect they should only be taken by people actually staying in that hotel, but there are so many of them that I'm not worried about being accused of taking something that I shouldn't. I'm amused to see that the name of the town is Peoria, which I take as a symbolic name of the generic hick town, but then I also remember that someone like Susie Mead and I came here some years ago, and I look at the map and see that the street I'm on quickly comes to a waterfront area that I seem to remember from before, and in the middle of the town is a lake that someone ELSE had referred to, and I don't remember anything else. A prior dream has now been completely forgotten.

TUESDAY, 9/28/04: 8:28AM: I'm sorting slides (as I did yesterday), with two stacks that have to be integrated, and some are of flowers embedded in plastic sheets, like place mats, and I have some elaborate numbering system that I'm trying to apply to them. Then I'm standing in the entrance to a bathroom where three guys are talking, and I have the impression that the tall one right next to me might have his cock out, wanting to be touched, so I try jerking off to get them aroused, but they ignore me and I wonder if I might not be making a terrible mistake, though they don't seem to be antagonistic to my playing with myself, except that I'm not getting hard at all---rather like most of my jerking off to my porn DVD last night after the drunk-making Beard dinner. And then I wake and wonder if I can jerk off in reality, but I just don't come up, so I pee and take two aspirin and drink two full glasses of water, trying to get rid of what might be a blossoming hangover. Type this to 8:30 and return to bed to try to get rid of a still-slight nausea from so much wine last night.

FRIDAY, 10/1/04: 7:47AM: AH, if they could only be true! It seems I spend much of the night dreaming of being in a training temple for some highly esoteric Tibetan sect. I seem to start as I am, knowing nothing, sitting on a mat while things happen around me that I observe as meaningful lessons (meaningless fulons): an Oriental woman becomes eligible for a higher title; I see a manuscript in which my enlightened name, Yorie-eb-orien, is described as doing remarkable deeds for the benefit of the universe; I look through a doorway and see an elaborate library of scrolls and books, with one book selected and opened to show an elaborate diagram (rather like "The Book of Life" in the 4-hour "Origins" that I watch from my tape from Channel 13 the last two nights, marveling at the "coincidence" that I'd visited the American Museum of Natural History to look at the meteorite displays AS this program described their creation of this earth); other segments, like peeing and wiping off a layer of the toilet-seat, knowing that previously, or futurely, that gesture would be significant, showed how actions could be effective in non-time-consecutive segments where, unknowingly, a future action could affect a past occurrence, while a past action prepared the way for future further enlightenment; but later looking into the room where the library had been unveiled, but it looked to be an inner-carapaced leather-lined wall that I marveled could conceal such troves of tomes. I listened to my name being called; I sat in meditation, knowing that another of my bodies might be in use for remedies beyond my current knowledge---and at 7:58AM I think, yes again, how Messianic, and Lyra-of-Hidden Materials (or whatever the Pullman trilogy's called), how self-aggrandizing these thoughts are, but I would WISH them to be true, so that I COULD be using my reading (even forgotten) and experiences (even now-fruitless) for greater advantage in some higher reality to which I have the most fleeting access through dreams and (hopefully) Actualism-inspired meditations and hopes.

SATURDAY, 10/2/04: 9:30AM: 1) I'm working in a laboratory, finishing up a large series of purifications of some liquid, or maybe extracting some rare element from a large solution, which involves liquid squirting up from a sort of enormous hypodermic needle into a holding chamber which overflows into another large tube where it's boiled and reduced to an essence, which goes to some other final container, maybe even out of the room. This process has been going on for months, and now it's so perfected and timed with the volumes and temperatures that there's no danger of anything overflowing, underflowing, boiling over, or escaping the process, so I cursorily oversee it and go into the main administrative office where everyone is celebrating the completion of the last batch of the chemical process, and I'm thanked, and also pleased and relieved that it's finally over and my contribution has been successful and appreciated. 2) I return one evening to 1221 Dietz, where I'm still living, and the dining room table is full of an assortment of stuff, and I kind of assume that Mom had all this packed away in her room, but when she was packing to leave on a trip, or maybe even to move to another apartment, she thought I might be interested in keeping some of this; but if I didn't want it I knew I was free to throw it all away. Spartacus comes in from some performance, loaded down as usual with shopping bags with groceries and two bottles that he puts into the refrigerator to keep cold, and sits down at the kitchen table to eat something while I sort through the stuff on the dining room table. Most of the articles of clothing, small knickknacks, souvenirs on the far edge of the table I know I'll throw out and that he couldn't possibly want any of it, but the near edge contains mostly books and travel brochures and souvenirs from recent days, very much like the stack of stuff I unloaded from my pants' pockets yesterday when I returned from my day with Sherryl in Federal Hall and St. Paul's, where I picked up about a dozen brochures about touring in lower Manhattan, maps of the Visiting Medicis of Florence exhibits in five or six venues, and particularly a 2004 Zagats of Lower Manhattan, all of which are present in a stack of other material which I'm preparing to put on the kitchen table so that Spartacus can sort through them before he leaves to see if he wants to keep any of it. I debate keeping the Zagats, but put that with the rest of the stuff before him to take into the kitchen, when behind me someone like the quiet Stephen Waite shows up, and I guess he might be there for sex, so without saying anything I communicate that I'm busy but he's to wait, so he goes into the living room without saying a word and sits down and starts to read a book he brought with him to pass the time. I look through other stuff at the edge of the table: matchbooks, an ashtray from some restaurant that has some kind of sticky goo on the bottom of it, a few old folders from ages-old exhibits, and an odd book, self-printed by a woman that Spartacus seems to have know, "She was talented, fun to be with, but never really made a name in acting, even though you'd probably recognize her name," but I never found out what her name was, and glanced through the book to see a fairly amateurish self-publishing effort involving text and photos and personal comments, with a strange frontispiece that seemed to tabulate expenses for the publication of the book, and a dedication to a boyfriend from the past who lived at a certain address, and she'd taken numbers from his address and her address in two photos on the page and brought them down to form another significant number, but since I didn't know who the person was, I had no impulse to keep the book, nor did (or, to paraphrase Paul Goldman's character, "and nor did") Spartacus want it, so he said I could throw everything out, which relieved me since I could reconsider whether I wanted to keep the 2004 Zagats or not, and just as he was leaving he stiffened and with great relief remembered to go to the refrigerator and remove the stuff that he'd put in temporarily, along with a large can of fruit juice that he overturned for some reason into a large glass bowl, and gathered everything of his up in preparation for leaving, and I was relieved that he was leaving so quickly, because then I could find out why Stephen was waiting for me, withing having kept him too long. Finish transcribing at 9:46AM.

TUESDAY, 10/5/04: 4:11AM: I'm trying out for a part in a TV show, and the main star is sort of the producer and talent scout, and he's either Tony Soprano or the fat slightly stupid actor who plays him, or VERY like him. We're sitting in a room waiting for something, which I don't quite know what, and at one point we're all sitting in this big room and one of the junior characters goes to get many cans of beer from the fridge and starts passing them around to fill up the glasses out of which we've all already drunk some of our beer, and I vaguely wonder if this is going to be a beer-drunk party that "flies" even without the benefit of real drinks. "Tony" keeps talking about what a great part I'm going to have in a TV series, even though he's never actually auditioned me to see if I could do it, but I say something like, "I've been sitting around so long, waiting, that if you don't know what I'm like, you'll never know what I'm like," and he takes that slightly negatively, saying something like "Whadda ya mean, 'I know what you're like,' you've never been in front of a TV camera before---but I think you're gonna be great, there's a kind of twist that's never been tried before, and I think you'll be perfect for it." Somehow there's the possibility that he's talking about my REAL-LIFE acceptance into something like a mob, and I'm concerned that he thinks I'm like these other characters, REAL mobsters, and I'm not---nor does he seem to know I'm gay, and does he think I'm supposed to fuck women too? Then a young woman, an actress, I think, is brought into the room, and she's stripped down in the back, and the mob in the room is aghast at what they see on her back, but I'm so far away I don't know if it's real, or just makeup, or what she did, but it seems they had to brand her in some awful way because of what she did, and "It's the same as her husband," who's also a very slender, white-backed figure too far away for me to see what might have been done to HIS back, if anything. Then I'm climbing the five flights to my apartment, because I'd tried writing some kind of formula about my character on the black wall behind me at the party, which no one could read but me, and then the lights went out for some reason, and it was already after 11PM and nothing seemed to be happening, and I thought I might "inflate" my character's persona by leaving as if I didn't CARE what happened for the rest of the evening---"They'll talk more about my importance if I just leave without telling anyone I'm leaving," I vaguely think, and on the third landing I pause to think that they might be planning some great TWIST to my character, or that the fan-mail will be so great for my small appearances that they'll DEMAND to see more of me, and they'll try to show my body, or even make me into a sort of nerdy super-character, and I figure with makeup, body-doubles, and camera angles they can do anything they want with my presentation to the public, and I'm certainly willing to go along with it, though I rather fear the over-recognition on the street so that my privacy will be impinged and I'll be mobbed whenever or wherever I appear in public. Just about to go up the final flight to my apartment, and the doorway is strangely dark, and I wake up. Type this to 4:28AM after peeing and trying to remember more details of this dream which seemed to occupy real time for AT LEAST half an hour.

WEDNESDAY, 10/6/04: 8:33AM: 1) I'm in a Broadway Theater with a very important audience from Washington, D.C., including the President (who appears to be Clinton) and his wife, maybe in the row in front of me, and the man to my left is a Cabinet member or a Senator, who stands up to take a video of what's happening onstage, which strikes me as strange. I'm taking notes during the play, and I can't figure out who the murderer is, though I've read reviews of it, and leave my notes, folded, on my seat during intermission, thinking that anyone who reads them will think I'm stupid. 2) I'm decorating a wall with white rosettes of plastic, surrounded with about nine across the top and three curving down one side, and symmetric on the bottom and other side, and they turn into pieces of popcorn around flowers in an apartment, and bugs come out to start eating them, and some catch fire and I watch the flames burning slowly out, wondering if it's safe to DO this, considering the bugs and the burning.

WEDNESDAY, 10/13/04: 1) 3:56AM: Don't even want to TYPE this: I'm sitting in the back of a van in Britain, watching TV, and it's a science-fiction series with modern architecture and automobiles, but the people and character are medieval, or future-but-changed semi-monsters like the villains in a Batman and Robin movie, and I ask one of the policemen whose van in which I'm sitting whether he knows how "the world" GOT to this situation (like after an Atomic war, or some natural catastrophe that changed the way civilization progressed), and he either doesn't know, doesn't understand my question, or doesn't want to answer, since he just doesn't respond. Then it's raining, and we've driven around a block for some reason, and we're supposed to have stayed with Carolyn, but the driver says "Oh, she's probably waiting for us at the other corner of the block," but the one who was speaking to me says to him, "We'll just wait for her here." I look out the back window and see Carolyn and another woman, who looks somewhat like Vicki or Mom, walking up to the back of the van, but the van is moving backward slowly as they walk right toward the rear of it, and I look out the back to see that we're about to hit them, and I shout "Stop, STOP!" but there's a thump and the van judders to a stop and without transition I'm standing behind the van, thinking "Oh, NO," and look down to see the right rear tire DIRECTLY ON Carolyn's head, crushing her skull abnormally flat, some few facial features horribly visible and compressed, as she lies face-up under the body of the van, and I moan "Oh, NOOOO," and bury my face in my hands just CRUSHED (bad word!) by the tragedy and loss, but I have a vivid image of looking down through my fingers to see my black pants, somewhat wrinkled, on legs somewhat thinner than mine, and I'm conscious that I'm thinking about what I'm SEEING and how others might see me, and feel terrible about my dissociation from the tragedy, but am FULLY aware of a terrible sense of loss and disaster, and wake and think "I don't even want to TYPE this." Get out the AlphaSmart and finish at 4:07, throat almost clear from a gastric reflux that stuffed my sinuses with sourness at about 2:15AM, after which I lay, thinking rather GOOD thoughts, but then dozed off to that terrible dream-image. 2) 7:08AM: I'm still in Britain, seeing a play, and during intermission I go off on some errand, and have to hire a taxi to get back on time for the second part, but I've really got to PEE, so I stop at what I recognize as an old hotel where I know there's a john around the corner, but when I get there, it has a LINE waiting for the johns, and I go up to a counter where they're CHARGING, depending on the number of flushes you'll need, and I push ahead and put down a quarter before I pee in my pants and get to a side-pissoir manned by little girls, and I'm directed to put my cock in a specific place nuzzling a metal lip above a wooden trough leading down into the sand, and I start peeing, actually peeing in the dream, for a good long time, so long that I expect the girls to start saying "This is the longest pee I've ever seen in my LIFE!," but they don't, and I end peeing abruptly, and am walking back to the cab when I see some kind of little VW backing out of its parking space beside a wooden track that's some kind of robbery-guard, and he backs out with a HUGE wooden disk in a slot on one side, but when he leaves, the disk is attached to his CAR, and he careens down a hillside to the highway, paralleling an even bigger 16-wheeler, but they don't collide and he goes on his way and I wake to marvel that I've actually PEED in a dream when my bladder was full and didn't drip a drop in bed. Up to pee and then out to look at the sunrise, bright-reflected in the city towers, and it's JUST at the edge of the window-edge of visibility, about a diameter above the horizon, so I don't have much more than a week, if that, of sunrise-visibility left. Finish typing at 7:15, and go back to the living room to see that there's only about two feet of far-balcony wall still in the sun, so maybe I have TWO week's sunrise-light left, which would take me up to close to the end of October, but looking at my previous list at 10:20AM, I find that I'd recorded thirty whole minutes of sunrise on 10/21, so clearly I have more than I'd thought, so I'll just have to keep watching to see how little direct sun I have in the middle of winter, looking forward to more sun in the summer ALREADY!!

FRIDAY, 10/15/04: 7:45AM: I'm lying on my bed at 1221 Dietz, and Stephanie Sweda is moving around the bed, assuming I'm awake though I'm keeping my eyes closed, and I look up to the ceiling to see water dripping down, and I worry that it's dripping onto my dresser at the foot of the bed, maybe going through the top to wet important things in the top drawer, but when I move to the foot of the bed the drip is more from the center of the room, dripping more on the foot of the bed itself, though not very wet, so it's not on the dresser at all. We're talking about an upcoming trip for which she's planning, and I look at her to see little flecks of dust moving before her face, so I turn to the windows and open them, but it's very windy outside and the wind swirls around the room, really causing a gale in the room, but I find it OK, putting my feet up on the sill, which is embarrassingly ugly: the paint has long since been worn away by the weather and rain, so it's mostly bare wood, though the window slides up and down easily enough, but she rather tight-mouthedly moves to the farther window and shuts it completely, so I shut mine almost completely and we seem to be sitting around a table, four of us, and I remark to Ken, "Oh, did you tell them what a marvelous lunch we had of GREAT sweetbreads just after they left us for the next stage of their trip, just before we joined them in, uh, Tokyo," which was silly of me to say, I thought, since we then flew on to SAIGON, but I didn't consider it important enough to interrupt Stephanie, who was showing us a checklist she'd made out for packing and travel, and I looked at it to see that it was about a five-hour flight, and I puzzled over the Cyrillic characters for the refreshments to be ordered on the flight, recognizing coffee, tea, and water, but looked at the "ou" followed by the "lambda" but then a "pi" and maybe a "kappa" and I puzzled about "ulpka" and wondered what it could be. Back at the dripping ceiling, I was astounded to see that there was a plant, a scrawny spider-plant, still growing just below the ceiling in the middle of the room, like in John's bedroom, and was amazed that it was still alive, because I'd never remembered to water it up there, and I looked to see that other plants which had been in the windows were no longer there, and I wondered how this managed to stay alive, but then figured the water may have supplied it with what it needed. Just remembered a fragment from the start of the dream: I'm lying in that bed listening to a radio (maybe based on the ad for the Bose Radio on TV last night before going to bed) playing rather loudly, and I can just barely hear a male voice talking from the next-door apartment through the wall (like at Dietz, but now an apartment building), and wondered if I was bothering him with my radio, but decided I'd let him complain about it before turning down the volume. Another whole section preceded this, possibly vaguely sexual, but I've now forgotten at 8:02 AM.

MONDAY, 10/18/04: 8:30AM: 1) 3:30AM: Marty Sokol is trying very hard to let me permit him to fuck me (possibly based on Charles's description yesterday of some ballet-dancer's "critically praised" book "Submission" that advocated the ecstatic pleasure of being fucked up the ass), even lying next to me so that I could feel his pig-like long, thin erection pressed up against me, but I would have none of it. 2) 7:30AM (times are approximate): I'm watching some kind of medical or psychiatric treatment in a hospital, or watching a program presenting this treatment, and I, or the camera, focus in on a watcher leaning against a doorway, hooded in a luxurious soft material, and facially the person seems to be Nicole Kidman, whom I don't care for as an actress, but she seems wholly absorbed in what she's seeing, possibly because the technique might affect who appears to be her daughter, about nine years old, standing next to her and equally absorbed in the procedure. I think I knew what the procedure was more specifically just after I woke up, but I lolled in bed, having gotten into bed at 10:30PM after a lot of Spider just to delay my sleeping from the fatigue of the Duane Park Loft Tour at 8PM, which would have gotten me up at 4 or 5AM, much too early for any practical purposes, and finish typing at 8:37AM, fascinated by bright sun-lit activity on the roads and rivers out my window.

THURSDAY, 10/21/04: 9:10AM: I'm traveling with a group of students to enroll in some kind of graduate work, meeting for the second day of enrollment and pass someone who looks like Dror Schwadron that I'd ridden with, possibly in a bus, yesterday, and I smile a greeting to him but he ignores me, and I wonder if I'd done something wrong to annoy him. The group goes through some kind of queue, and at last we're in a rather ratty room, like a seldom-used security area in an airport, and I ask a distracted black guard what we're doing here, and he points to the shelves of cell-phones on trays, again like at an airport metal-detector gate, and says "You're picking up your cell-phones." Since I never had one, I vaguely fantasize that I could GET one now, but that seemed silly, though the arrays of phones had very little in the line of identifying information, being merely slightly different models of the same basic design. Out of this building into a musty corridor that leads to a balcony looking over a central lobby of an enormous building with stairways and corridors leading off in all directions on all levels, and I've totally lost sight of the group I'd come in with, and had NO idea even where we were in the registration process. A diminutive, uniformed woman-of-color dismisses someone she's walking with and bustles up to me with a cheery "And how can I help you?" and I confess to not even knowing WHERE in the registration process I am, and what I'd have to do next (after thinking everyone may have gone to the cafeteria for lunch, but then, discouragingly, I see that it's only about 10:30AM), and she stares at me in disbelief that I'd know so little about what I'm DOING here, and wake with a STRONG sense of loss and lack of purpose. Before that, reinforcing my sense of helplessness, I'd been sitting in the driver's seat of a large car, somehow thinking before that I was just sitting in a car without being behind the steering wheel, and then I jump to attention when we're driving down a highway, keeping in lane, avoiding oncoming cars and passing slower cars in our lane, AND I'M NOT DRIVING! Look over and someone like Cathy O'Sullivan is sitting to my right, much farther ahead in the passenger cabin than I am, and she has a little steering wheel in front of her which she's obviously concentrating on, and she murmurs something about "Borrowing this auxiliary steering wheel from a driver-training car, and I know what I'm doing," and I'm somewhat comforted but still feel puzzled about how I GOT into this position in the FIRST place, and I'm sadly reminded of the Alzheimered mother at the Beard table on Monday, who didn't know where she was, had to be fed her food, and only "came to life" when her old husband would say something supporting to her and she'd smile and pucker her lips and move toward him for a kiss.

FRIDAY, 10/22/04: 8:10AM: Alzheimer-type "odd" dreams: 1) Pointing to a fleck on a fat guy's shirt to say "try the green and yellow" channel, since I think the fleck is part of some arcane instruction-function, but then he brushes it off as a food particle, but I figure it's as good a place as any to start, and then watch TV through a curtain of confetti-like bits of paper on strings in front of the set, tuning to #4 and know it's not the CHANNEL but the PREVIEW channel for information about ALL programs, and then a VERY fat guy gets up to leave the room but pauses to watch the TV, blocking my view, and I say "Please move," and he grunts unpleasantly. 2) Then starting on a trip about 11PM, tired, and whoever's driving has a marked map to "Austin-Munich," our first destination at about 1AM, and I try to look at a map but it's only a local map of the city from which we're departing. Then chat the next morning, and I say "I have ABSOLUTELY no memory of even eating or sleeping last night," and she (the driver) describes a cafeteria-table that seat the three of us for a snack and the casual hotel-keeper who starts (mimicking him): "Of course we HAVE no single rooms left," to try to blackmail us into paying a higher price for a suite, and I MARVEL that I have NO memory of any of this, but of course IT NEVER HAPPENED, since it was all a dream. Comes from Alzheimer's worries AND Paul McLean's call yesterday that he may have throat cancer and cancel our Amazon trip, which brings my yellow-fever and hepatitis A shots into question!

WEDNESDAY, 10/27/04: 9:12AM: Someone's set up my VERY old computer, more like my old Radio Shack Model II than my current PC, between two of his OWN boxes of computer components, and is transferring something like my indexing program results back and forth, and a monitor gets a visual image of each record, then flashes with I/O routines, then goes to the next as a sort of digital counter records 858, 859, as the records increase. When he finishes, I say "Shouldn't you at least look at ONE last record to make sure it's been transferred OK?" probably based on Alison Hagge calling and saying she can't take my WORD 6 document, so I have to re-transmit it with the unknown format "Word Document" and since she doesn't call back, I assume that DID work. But he points to a red-lit format-display on the front of his machine, and some elaborate name is lit, and he says "I will, but I can't do it now," and he rushes off into my bedroom so I assume he's got a fierce call of nature and is dashing into my bathroom. Before that was a fragment like a sequence from "The Lost Prince" where I was looking at a long red streamer that represented one leg of a military uniform, and so there had to be a second long red streamer for the other leg, and I thought, as a joke, to put a red SOCK between the two to represent the soldier's COCK, for which everyone would gasp at my cleverness.

THURSDAY, 10/28/04: 6:25AM: In cafeteria, seeing free slices of cake and pie pass, my friend picks a piece, I'm too late. I go to main table and woman offers me a huge platter of enormous sweet rolls, of which I choose the largest and whitest-with-icing. Later someone in a group of five tries to sit at the head of a table meant only for four, but our table for six is down to three and I figure we should leave so they can have our table. Look to wipe my fingers from the roll-sugar but the napkin dispenser has only PLASTIC bags for takeout-takehome, and only tables on another aisle, for two, face napkin dispensers that have paper napkins, and I think to tell a bus-boy who's clearing the table that all tables should have BOTH, but figure he has nothing to do with it, so I just stew about it. Wake and feel there must have been ANOTHER section in which I was eating crushed glass, like a few nights ago, but can't remember the details. It seems there were many OTHER parts, but I can't remember them now, getting AlphaSmart because details are relatively small and I STILL don't want to just take notes. Pee. Transcribe and edit at 8AM.

MONDAY, 11/01/04: 7AM: I'm living in some futuristic science-fiction movie, where humans share the world with child-like creatures called Voids, and there seems to be a great taboo about them interacting, but one seems attracted to me, and as we sit watching some kind of entertainment, the Void sits next to me with (it seems natural to say) her head against my arm, and I feel a kind of affection toward her, and she's "idly" scratching the very top of my thigh very lightly, and then she's somewhat more directedly touching the trousers atop my genitals, and then I remember they have some kind of penis-like sexual organ and feel the top of HER leg to feel a gristly, almost dog-like length of flesh that seems tumescent, and I rub it around and wonder what it would be like, so I ask her to lead the way to someplace where we might be relatively alone, but she seems not to understand, so I go up a hill, seeing more and more small groups of necking Voids, and see an empty sofa near the top, but it seems to be some kind of service-area reserved for people being served by attendants, and I'm up further to two-seated tables, each with a waitress waiting to serve, and from the top I look toward a far rise where staged ceremonies seem to be taking place, one involving a large group in pairs in procession down a large flight of stairs, with sonorous announcements about "This great participatory spectacle," and I can't find anyplace to go that's even vaguely private, and without transition I'm in a small room with two of my human friends, and get up the courage, when the talk turns to sex, to ask "Have either of you ever---had sex with a Void?" and it seems they're about to answer me in disgusted negatives when I wake up and transcribe this to 7:09AM, tired from yesterday.

THURSDAY, 11/11/04: Note recorded 11/13/04: I shot two people, upward, through a floor above my head, and maybe one of the victims was me.

SATURDAY, 11/13/04: 7:25AM: I'm volunteering at some kind of anti-smoking rally, and come up with the idea that some small group of men and women will be more effective if they DO smoke at some kind of demonstration, deciding that it will be better for adult men and women to do this, rather than the teenagers at whom the anti-smoking campaign is directed. Explain this to Ken, who seems vaguely to agree. We look at the schedule of events, and the first event started at 10AM, and we were there, looking into a gay bar to see no one inside, so everyone must have moved to the next location. Get out to a public square where cars are parked in a triangle, and some rows of shops will be used only in the morning, so we're finished with them. The 2PM rally, according to a map in the booklet of information, will be held at the southeast corner of the Big Island of Hawaii, which in this case is part of a larger Hawaiian Island chain whose western islands are about where the Biminis are really, and there are starting-off locations circled on the map from which the usual taxi fares are printed near the destinations, and the fare from some place along the east coast the US, like in the Carolinas, to this next location is marked at $45, so I can only think that it has to include the short flight from the mainland to the southern-western coast of the Big Island AND the taxi-trip to the town in the southeast, where the area is marked as "Muslim and Indian," and the reason for the selection of this destination is elaborately explained to me, but I don't remember any of it. Seem to go to this point on the coast, but someone is annoyed, saying that the ROUND-TRIP is $90, which does seem a bit high, but I hope Ken will share the fare with me. Before we leave, I have to pee, and go into what looks like a familiar dream-area, where there's a hole in the concrete along an underground passageway leading to a regular women's restroom, but the men's room is supposedly this open hole for a urinal, which seems very inconvenient. I go off to this area, but see that it's really leading down a stairway to a circular position rather like the stairs at the north end of the Bethesda Fountain-area in Central Park leading to the boating pond, and men are standing along the top step preparing to urinate into the waters below, but I feel pee-shy and see that there's a porcelain-tile-lined urinal, private, just to the right of the stairs, so I go there and start to pee, but am mortified to notice that a voluminous spray from my jerk-off-swollen cock is directed UP and to the LEFT, possibly spraying the right-most pee-er to my left, and I point my penis in a right-ward direction to at least let this wayward spray glance off the parapet to my left, below the ledge over which the fellow to my left is looking at me with some asperity, but I don't think he's gotten wet. Wake about 7:15AM and pee and then type this to 7:35AM.

WEDNESDAY, 11/17/04: 9:03AM: I'm cooking something in a kind of crock-pot, and Rita and Denny are waiting for dinner, but when I lift the lid to see how it's going, some timer or temperature or quantity appears to be off, and I'm fearing it's not going to be done, or signaled, or enough for everyone. Vaguely remember something about a "Mr. Havermeier" who was either coming to dinner or had to have certain qualifications, and Rita assured me that he did. Something else about a "Mr. Brice" figured into it, which I knew when I woke at 8:23AM, but has since disappeared by now. I should have sat right down and typed up the dream as soon as I woke, but I figured some details were so definite that I'd remember them (like the actual proper names, which always seem to be the foggiest details in my dream) but after shitting and changing some dirty clothes to be worn around the apartment, I was left with only the above, no other details to pad out this account which is desperate to get to the bottom of the page without talking details that more properly belong on NOTEREPL - 63, which I bring up on the screen to verify the page number, but now I'm on the LAST line and can stop blathering and print this page and get on to NOTEREPL.

SUNDAY, 11/21/04: 7:55AM: I'm looking at an apartment which I can stay in temporarily for some reason, located somewhere near my old apartment on West 57th Street, and probably influenced by the article I read in the Sunday Times last night about the people who bought into the Time-Warner building, some on upper floors "with terraces" which I hadn't been aware of. I've been told that MY temporary apartment has a terrace, and I look out one door to see a very narrow runway, less narrow than a narrow sidewalk, though just possibly admitting a small folding chair on which to sit, looking in one direction, and think that's only marginally a terrace. Then I go into the bedroom and see a glass door behind some curtains which I open and find there's another, larger, landscaped terrace outside there, probably on the other side of the apartment, and when I go out I'm astounded at the size of the area, which allows for a central seating area almost as big as the Astor Court at the Met Museum, and off the end wends a dirt path between lanes of trees, totally removed from the noise and bustle of the city, astoundingly secluded (though I think, "Well, but there really isn't any VIEW at all!"), and I marvel that I have access to such an incredible luxury right in the middle of Manhattan. Finish typing at 8AM.

SATURDAY, 11/27/04: 9AM: I'm somewhere in Europe, on a tour, going east to somewhere in Russia or China, and someone mentions that the whole trip is by TRAIN, which I hadn't quite realized, and I say incredulously "All the way by TRAIN?" and someone says yes, and I think of my former trip on the Trans-Siberian Express and my (whether it was past or future in the dream is unclear) long train-buff ride with Steve Hayes somewhat planned for October from Beijing to Moscow, and think of myself, "I will really have DONE trans-Eurasian trains!" Then I'm talking on the phone with Dick Hsieh, something else about travel, and he says something about "Lots of money," and when I inquire about when and why, there's the sound of a CASCADE of coins dropping to the floor, and I laugh, "And all in CHANGE?" as he goes off the receiver to pick it all up. Another segment about a VERY sexy (acknowledgedly the sexiest air-steward on some airline, possibly influenced by watching the tape of Jude Law, People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive," on Ellen Degeneres last night) man, who seems vaguely available despite his popularity, has lost its details since I woke with the dream about 7AM this morning. Finish typing at 9:08AM, ready for day.

FRIDAY, 12/3/04: 12:34AM: Wake (to pee) with fresh dream of traveling in France with no change of bills in my wallet, and a clerk who had always had change before (like Mildred always has change for lunch) now says something that I take as "Do you have a Ten so that you can give me change for the Twenty that I have," but I have only a white ticket that I say "C'est quelque chose avec une lavandiere,"and show her the ticket and she laughs and says something that sounds like "You have a better intuition than you have the words for," and that I'm right, but I have only a pre-written check from my checking account, and a VERY large bill that I show her a glimpse of, but it's something like 40,000, and she's surprised that I'm carrying around such a big bill.

MONDAY, 12/20/04: 7:36AM: 1) I'm on a trip somewhere, and we have to fly back to some Arctic destination in a small plane, and as we're about to land, we again view a spectacular snow-capped island just off-shore, and come in very low over a tessellated-pavement shallows before managing to land, between two parts of a gate that is so narrow I'm sure the plane's wings won't fit, and sure enough there are scraping sounds at the wingtips, and I look out to see the ends of the wings being dragged back, tears opening in the metal along the forward edges, and I wonder how the plane will ever be air-worthy again, though the pilot seems to imply that this is a perfectly ordinary circumstance. 2) I'm in some sort of training period in a factory where everyone seems to know what they're doing except me, but I come to understand that I have to work at a position with a rickety lamp shaped like a cricket, and I can adjust its position by moving it along a wire and compressing two wire clips to keep it in place, and then rotate it to focus the tiny lamp on the area in which I'm working and compress two wires to keep it at that angle. Then there's a small hook in an otherwise smooth base-area that keeps tearing the paper that I put into the mysterious works, and I figure that hook has to be lowered flush to the surface, but as I'm wondering how to do that, someone more senior comes over to say that he's had problems with the function of this hook, and I figure I must get some credit by coming to that conclusion on my own. Mixed in with this strange engineering intelligence test, there's also our characterization in a play that seems to start whenever the instructors direct, and we're told that we have to dance in some funny way upon entering, and I have to ask if we're all to dance in the SAME way, or in some canon-variation way with the three of us, somewhat clowns, but don't quite get there when it changes to a kind of concert to which we're all listening, and I look at a program to see that this is like the first preview, or the last rehearsal, of only five times listed in the program, and I think I can manage to survive this strange set of dream-training circumstances. Finish typing now at 7:48AM, having survived my total drunkenness last night!

WEDNESDAY, 12/29/04: 7:55AM: 1) 4:40AM: I'm watching (or producing) a movie with an Italian male star, and to "sell" him, I have to find the BEST way of showing his body, which involves making a football-field goalpost (but a modern one, like a tightly belted H) image on which I have to draw lines at points one-third and two-thirds across a specific area, and I cut out a bit of paper that seems to be the size of a third, but larger, and measure it across, and cut off a bit more, and look at tiny indentations in the dust at the base of the area in which I'm working to see where the end of each third goes to see if I can mark the spots meticulously correctly, with lots of people ineffectually trying to help me. 2) 6:50AM: I'm paying a quick visit to the Museum of Children (rather like the American Museum of Natural History, which I was thinking of visiting today, but it's been replaced by another visit to the Metropolitan, which has to be done before 1/7 and the end of the Korea special exhibit which was closed last time I went, with Sherryl) at something like 4:30, when I know it closes at 5 or 5:15, and I have a dinner engagement that night, too. Get off the subway at an unknown entrance, looking something like the Columbia---or even more unfamiliar, the NYU uptown area, and know I have to walk two or three blocks to the museum entrance, but I can't find anything to mark which way I have to walk on the way BACK to the subway, since I suspect I'll be getting out of the museum at a different point from which I entered, like at the Vatican Museums---and get into a crowded lobby with people clustered around the first two or three ticket-givers, but the last two are empty and I go to them, confusing with a lady next to me who drops some card on the floor that's pointed out to her, and I take out my purple Museum membership card and get huffily told I have only a few minutes left, which I accept, and walk through the entrance exhibits quickly: filled with kids, showing elaborate dollhouses and miniature blocks like a production of "A Christmas Carol" all lit up, and glance around a corner into a small alcove with railroad and tiny cars on display, then through a small hallway to stairs going up to exhibits on an upper floor, but I find an even narrower spiral stairs which ascend to a metal spire to which I cling which dips and swoops under my weight, showing off for the kids as I did when I rode the Flying Scooters at Summit Beach Park. Then without transition I'm on the grounds outside where ducks and geese play with a horse dancing obscenely with a bull, rubbing rumps together, and I walk toward the exit about 5:15PM, wondering if I can get back to my apartment in time to have dinner, but maybe will have to eat out before going to some performance on the other side of town that starts at 8PM and I'll be rushed to make since I really don't know how to get to the subway from here, and a taxi will be very expensive, and wake and take notes and finish typing them at 8:10AM.

FRIDAY, 12/31/04: 9AM: 5:04AM: It's "Powers Court," a book about the woman who's unknowingly supported and mentored by George Bernard Shaw, written BY that woman, which Charles tells a more-elegant Mildred about in my dream.