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

bobzolnerzak @verizon.net

 

 

 

2005

DREAM PAGES FROM MADAGASCAR TRIP; SUNDAY, 5/22/05: 4:38AM: I'm looking for a place to shower, soaping myself up on one floor, knowing that everyone rides the elevator wet and soapy so I'm OK. In the shower room three guys are playing with each other while an onlooker is under his own shower with a hardon, staring intently at the action across from him while bent over, hands on knees, directing a thin stream of water from in front of him DIRECTLY onto his gaping meatus, obviously trying to cum from the tickly sting of the water on his cockhead, swiveling his hips to accentuate the eroticism, and I love watching him, the action he's watching, and wake aroused (though not quite hard, though I get harder sitting on the john typing this), wondering how hard it would be to set up my shower into a thin stream (even thinner than the one at the Relais de la Reine) to try this myself. Looking forward to Friday night and my first orgasm in over a month! 2) 6:28AM: I'm playing in a kid's playroom, first with a kind of TV set controlled by a large manipulable crystal that controls the picture, but can get only the basic program, which I watch a bit of, but when I try to get something else, it starts the same program over again, and I hand the crystal to a little girl who's interested in watching anything that goes on. Then I'm attracted to a spinning-ball game in a toy stadium that I seem to understand from a distance: spin the spectators into their seats, but when I begin to play with it, it has only one moveable object, and I lose interest in it.

MONDAY, 5/23/05: 5:44AM: I'm having some kind of field trip to Boston, where we're staying in a vacant mansion that belonged to Ruby Roosevelt, the daughter of FDR who just died, and we look from empty room to empty room and try to think how beautiful it looked when it was furnished and in use. Then without transition (or maybe THAT was the dream from 4:28 that I couldn't remember before) I'm riding on a train with the group back to NYC, and have to go to the toilet, which seems to be a canvas seat right in the middle of a subway-like row of facing seats. Ask the last of three people who seem to be waiting for it, and he verifies that this is, indeed, the waiting line for the toilet. Without transition I'm ON the toilet, Sherryl to my left, when some old man staggers through and almost falls in the aisle, and we all agree he certainly isn't a member of OUR group, so someone goes for a conductor to show him out of our car. I try to relax to shit, but with the movement of the train, the seeming solidity of the canvas seat (though there may be a SMALL slit to let the shit fall through), and the self-consciousness of shitting in public with Sherryl and other passengers in plain sight, I find it impossible, though I fart a few times as if to indicate to my neighbors that I really DO have to use it and have a good reason to remain until I finish. Wake with a faint urge to shit and go into the bathroom to finish this at 5:52AM.

WEDNESDAY, 5/25/05: 7:14AM: Incredibly detailed dream of a fantasy sex-park in which hundreds of sexy guys of all ethnicities (based on sex-photos yesterday, no doubt) cavorted on a beach, in rooms, in miniature scenes (I gingerly stepped over model towns and gardens and fields, sometimes having to step in front of herds of horse-size elephants or grazing cows or zebus, trying to get back to find my clothes, remembering taking my pants off at a particular set of cliff-rocks, and leaving my undershirt under a chair and my shirt somewhere else). And everywhere sex: a row of three smiling Philippino boys simultaneously lowering their shorts and a stubby fat cock, a skinny pale cock, and a "normal" one all beginning to get erections at the hint of a command. There were waves washing up on false beaches, tables of food which could be had for a whim, and lots of people from various ships all enjoying this sex tour, at the end of which I knew I had to retrieve all my clothing and it became somewhat of a typical frustration dream because I thought I remembered where I left each item, but the route became more complicated, with rooms and ledges and waterfalls and hallways shifting positions either in reality or in my memory, and not being able to find everything, some having gotten wet, and always the sex-play around, people sucking cocks at random as in the drawings in the gallery, clumped masses of naked bodies, men and boys getting dressed and undressed, some coming on to me until they see how old I am, and hundreds of more details and incidents that I now forget, all in an atmosphere of warm, sunlit Hawaiian or other tropical island lushness and color which could all have been indoors in some fantasyland of gay sex and freedom and beauty. Type this to 7:23.

THURSDAY, 5/26/05: 6:55AM: I'm sitting across from a rather bizarrely beautiful woman dressed in black showing one tit, and she says she's actually a man, lifting her skirt to show a complete male apparatus. Though she's not appealing, I still wake vaguely aroused. Record this late at 9:36AM.

FRIDAY, 5/27/05: 8:23AM: Woke at 6:46AM with a dream I thought to record, but I clearly dozed off again right after: I'm with a large group of foreign people, who all seem to belong to the same family, and they have lots of pets. I'm sitting slouched in a chair in my shorts, and one of their little dogs perches right where my huge erection may have been positioned. I stare at it for a few seconds (I guess this could have been influenced by all the cocks at the Museum d'Erotism yesterday), and I say "Why are you sitting THERE (though feeling rather proud of it)?" and chase it off. Other episodes of joking with people, maybe even eating, have been forgotten now as I finish the LAST DREAM OF THE TRIP at 8:29AM, waiting for Ken's alarm to ring as I sit and pee on the john.

SUNDAY, 5/29/05: 4:24AM: I'm visiting Japan, and go to an elaborate baths on the outskirts of a city, and I don't know how to practice the rituals they're doing, and don't have any way of asking anyone, since it really isn't for tourists and no one seems to know any English, or even be at all interested in my plight. I take my clothes off, but can't figure how to get into a kind of hammock in which one subjects oneself to various kinds of heat treatments, or applications of mud or sand. Then I find a few friends that I came with, but one of them, rather like Paul M, really doesn't want to leave, making SURE I REALLY want to leave, and soon it appears there's about to be some kind of ceremony, production, or festival that starts with an elaborate parade of costumed people, coming around one corner of a hallway which we have to pass down in order to leave, and it seems a great violation of custom to interrupt their patterns just to leave. There were other cryptic actions, though I interacted with no one but my three friends, two of whom seemed equally to have had enough of whatever this place offered, and our bill was comprised of a few items that came out to less than 1500 yen, which I thought was still less than a dollar, so quite inconsequential, though the Paul-like character seemed angry at the amount he had been billed, which was even slightly less than my bill, but even when it was pointed out that it was less than a dollar, he still seemed annoyed, and I guessed it was because he really didn't want to leave, though he, in the dream, really couldn't afford to pay too much, or maybe even didn't have that amount with him. There may have been some small episode in leaving the building that I've now forgotten, and many details from the beginning of the dream have now been left out because I forgot them: the dream may have been in two connected parts separated by a few minutes when I woke and wanted to record the details, but paused long enough to fall back to sleep, but in the same dream. I somewhat doggedly keep typing to see if I come to the end of THIS file, which would have meant that I filled up the ENTIRE machine for this particular trip, even though I already transferred all the data to the computer and will have to re-send all this file and then edit out what came before and what came after, which will be easy enough to do, and I decide to stop typing and pee now at 4:40AM, hoping to be able to get back to sleep to more normalize my jet-lag weariness I felt most of yesterday. 6:17AM: Even WORSE dream: A big group of us is traveling by bus, and are let out in a small town for lunch. We're to go down a street, around a corner to a restaurant, where I have to pee. Try one place that looks like it looks into a mirror over a pool, but it turns out to be an open window, so I can't piss there! To another room, pee over a lot of old machinery, but can't find my way back. Can't find the way I came in, and as I run down one way after another, I KNOW it's not a dream: of COURSE Ken will tell the bus driver to wait for me, but HOW can I find the bus now that it's getting dark and ALL guideposts I'd found are not to be found again. Should I go to the center of town and wait for the bus to find me there? Step down on a goat's head because people won't get out of the way to let me down a narrow stairway which has partially collapsed, but no one even seems to pay attention to me, and there's no one to ask where to go, and I'm running faster, frustration building up to a desperation to get back to the bus, and I have NO hope of doing it when I wake up with a GREAT almost-drugged feeling of relief. One of the WORST in a long time, since I was so CONVINCED that it wasn't a dream and I HAD to get back to the bus or would be HOPELESSLY without ANY recourse in the WORLD. Finish typing at 6:26, absolutely amazed that these two haven't taken up the LESS THAN a PAGE that I had left, and that the batteries haven't given out YET, and I have to pee again. Forgot detail of a man with his shorts below his cock, his erection clothed only in a sort of a red tube of cloth, and I was amazed that no one thought he was obscene, even though he seemed to be in charge of a marching group of children behind him. Many other details, vivid when I woke, have now escaped me, and I type doggedly on, hoping for the signal that this file is filled and I can stop without still wondering how much space I have left: I guess it must be all the line-spaces between the dreams that will account for the fact that this file will SURELY be over the almost-full six pages of all the OTHER files, or is this just another frustration dream in which I'm condemned to type forever until I wake up with the familiar feeling that I DON'T have to find something, or go somewhere, or finish something that I increasingly think I don't have a chance in the world to FINISH, and as I try for the comma the file IS full at 6:32AM---FIRST TIME ALL FILLED??

THURSDAY, 6/2/05: 7:30AM: 1) I'm cleaning my bathtub and see that my new transparent shower curtain has let some very old paint-stains (this seems to be back at 167 Hicks, rather than at 101 Clark) on the top of the rim of the tub closest to the wall become very evident, and I get a razor blade and begin scraping away the tannish paint, some of which curls away easily and cleanly, but some of the thicker sections are tougher to remove, and in doing so I scratch into the enamel of the tub-rim itself, leaving ugly black streaks which I hope is more in the nature of dirt and can be washed away with soap and water after I've removed all the paint, rather than actual scratches into the depth of the enamel, removing some of the white and leaving black. 2) I'm again working at IBM, with a difficult manuscript that has to be edited, and I've written a separate sheet of corrections which my boss looks at incredulously and asks "How is anyone supposed to work with this?" and I explain that I'd intended to letter each correction on the sheet and put the corresponding letter in the manuscript where the change should go. She or he (it isn't clear in the dream) thinks that's the worst possible idea and demands that I mark the changes ON the manuscript itself, and I think this is going to be a very difficult task, and without transition I'm trying to look for a special office in the IBM building, but they've closed one stairway (as they've now closed the basketball court and track and Stairmasters at the gym) and I can't find the elevator I usually use, and have to find puzzling new staircases that take me I don't know where, and the usual frustration-of-finding-my-way dream continues past unknown offices and floors until I wake with relief. 3) (somewhat as in dream 1, and maybe somehow as a coda to dream 2) I'm removing paint-stains from a metal railing, something like my balcony railing, but some of the paint was intended to cover PITS in the original covering, so there are many layers, so thick they almost form bubbles on the surface, and I think that I may have to LEAVE some lower layers or else the whole thing will look like it will need repainting.

FRIDAY, 6/3/05: 7:44AM: Typed at 9:24AM: Forgot most of the details except that I'm in a room with a lot of younger boys, maybe 9-13, and they're all wandering around naked, and some of them start to get erections, which lead the others into getting erections, and I sort of debate with myself if I can start them on a game of jerking off. But don't get that far, wake, and jerk off myself.

SATURDAY, 6/4/05: 7:41AM: Susan M and I are vacationing in Sicily, and she's met an American friend of hers who's lived there for a number of years and is driving us around on our final evening to show us some of the lesser-known sights of the country, probably near the capital since everything is on such a large scale. First there's a kind of restaurant that is combined with an amusement park and gambling joint, and everyone's eating and riding and having lots of fun, and when we get into the car, her friend becomes more and more attractive, and I wonder why they haven't gotten married (he's nothing like Rick: taller, handsomer, and much sexier), or maybe he's even gay! We go to another, larger place, and sit down with the owner, who explained that he found this old monastery for sale on Wooster Street (though he pronounces it, in fun, at first, as "finding a rooster for sale") and then manages to buy up two or three houses alongside that he can break through the walls and make into one huge gambling palace, called "The Pillar," and everyone's there gambling with games that glitter and gleam and seem totally Italian and totally illegal, but everyone's having a good time, and the owner has nothing better to do than brag to us about his accomplishments. I occasionally look at my watch, since we have to be back at 7PM to get to our plane for home, but time seems to move much more slowly here, and it's very much like the Island of Lost Boys in Peter Pan in that everyone has all the fun they ever wanted to have without, seemingly, ever really LOSING anything, or suffering from any losses. Just a magical place, and I could stay there forever, particularly if our host would show any sexual interest in me: once in the car he sort of rolls over to point out to Susan (I'm in the middle) something on the map, and I feel the whole length of his body, which seems to rest easily against mine, and I feel our differences in ages melt away and the possibility of even feeling tbe beginning of an erection from him against me is very exciting. A wonderful evening, a combination of places rather like Sherryl showed me Thursday for my birthday in southern Manhattan, taking me to places I haven't even heard about, let alone been to or participated in. Wake and luxuriate in the memory of the dream, but drag myself out of bed, STILL with the muscle-soreness from my full-out upper body exercise at the gym on Wednesday, and type this to 7:50AM.

SUNDAY, 6/5/05: 9AM: Elaborate dream about being in est, many people sleeping on cots in a large dark room, nothing being said, but people available for questions if you feel a need to ask about what's going on. I'm proud that I know the format by now, know how to handle everything, and know that I'd doing the right thing at all times. Then I'm cold and try to put on my pants, many of which are lying around, and the first pair I try on is much too big around the waist and obviously not mine, but the second one seems to fit. Then I need to pee, so I go to a john and find it crowded with people of both genders doing various things at mirrors, but the only obvious toilet, out in the open, is covered with stuff that I carefully take off the top and put between piles of objects on one side, then lift the lid to find it full of OTHER stuff, like toys, and there's no water in it, so it's clearly not working. Try another toilet, and it's totally full of water to the point of overflowing. Think to look for a sink to pee in, now that almost everyone has left, and anyway I don't care at all since I'll have my back to anyone there, but there's no sink to be found. Think to try another room, but again have no idea where another bathroom might be. Never get to the usual frustration-item of trying to get back where I came from and not being able to find my way, but I lie awake thinking about the possible continuations of the dream in the same kind of frustrating way.

TUESDAY, 6/7/05: 7:45AM: 1) 2:52AM: I'm looking at a TV image of Bob R's huge cylindrical cock, and decide to go over to see it in reality, as he's just across the room, and MY cock is also large, and I'm handling his and mine and wake with a semi-erection, but do nothing about it. 2) 6:40AM: I'm putting together six large objects that seem to be combinations of automobiles and vacuum cleaners: as autos, I think they should have covers so they don't get dirty before we use them months from now for our family outing; as vacuum cleaners I put nozzles into the wrong ends before I realize ends and pieces have to be switched, and when I finally get it together I realize I have to take some of it apart again to thread three wires through one of the nozzle-caps BEFORE attaching it to the body of the dust-container. Throughout, I'm concerned that I haven't had breakfast yet, keep insisting that we have to go out to eat soon, but Mom says that Dad had to go to some Veteran's home which wasn't being supplied with food that day, and brought back lots of bacon and eggs that can be pressed under something like a large iron which will cook the bacon as quickly as a microwave without letting it get all curled up, so I feel better about continuing work with the first of the six objects, realizing that it's going to take a lot of time to do the same thing with the remaining five, except that my experience with the first should make subsequent connectings easier. 3) 7:20AM: I'm working in an office that works with highly classified U.S. Army information, and a stack of papers, maps, and other documents have been loaded onto a desk by someone saying "These were found to have been illegally copied, and now they have to be put back into their original files." I recall that Arnold wanted to see some specific papers that I can't quite recall the subject of: maps of chemical plants? agreements between two specific countries? spy information about a particular enemy?, but I'm quite sure some of these pages may be wanted by him, but I don't have sufficient clearance to look through them myself, and I'm thinking of asking my boss, who's someone somewhat like Mildred, if SHE wouldn't look through them, since she should be aware of what Arnold wants to look at in her capacity as BOTH our bosses. Wake and briefly contemplate noting down these dreams, and then do it to finish at 7:55AM, starting to worry about my 11AM appointment with Dr. D.

THURSDAY, 6/16/05: 7:35AM: I'm preparing to take a shower in a dingy basement, aware that someone else is in the stall next to me, but I try not to look in that direction for fear of being accused of cruising. I take all my clothes off, keeping them in a pile in a corner of the shower stall, then realize that they may get wet, so pull them out, aware that my jeans have gotten spots of wet on the front and back when I pulled them through puddles on the floor. Then I get dressed again, noticing the yellow-brown rim on the back of the collar of my blue dress-shirt that I've worn for a long time, thinking that I'll have to get back to class and sit in a group, hoping they won't notice my dirty shirt and wet pants. Then I'm sitting at a bar, AGAIN needing to undress for a shower, for some reason, and then just can't disrobe THERE, thinking that they'll have to put up with my pong as well as they might (conscious of my smell with Sherryl when I haven't gone to the gym in three days), and I should probably get some deodorant to try to cover up the smell. There are others in the bar who keep looking at me as I take off my shoes, but I put them back on and pretend that nothing unusual happened. Think that it must be as late as 11AM, and I'll be late for class, which will give me fewer choices of places to sit away from others so I won't offend them, and clearly the pressures of the two big indexes, one (Imaging) that I finished yesterday and the other (A Fine Romance) that I'm only 27% through after five hours, with lots more to do, preying on my mind, and I type this just past 7:41AM, less than 7 hours sleep.

FRIDAY, 6/17/05: 5:20AM: Long, multiepisodic dream in which I'm a stranger staying in a kind of storefront apartment of a woman who's trying to make out with me, but she's not very smart, and I use a number of very strange responses to avoid making a commitment for or against her. The one I remember best now involves lapsing into a kind of catatonic state where my eyes are open but I don't respond to anything, though she tries in panic to "wake" me by various means, but then she runs her finger along my thigh, really zapping some nerve that's right at the surface, and I burst into laughter, and I excuse myself as saying "You really found the way to get me out of my state," and she takes this as an even greater sign that we're supposed to be related in some way. She later tries to duplicate this "awakening" by running her finger along a short section of my neck, but since she "rings no bell" I don't have to respond in the same way. At the end I decide I have to get some sleep when everyone else is doing a strange ritual in the tub-like sink: squatting, fully dressed, they take a tiny bit of water on both index fingers and rub their eyes, and that's their bedtime ablution. I know that won't work for me, so I say that I have my own ritual, and take soap and wash my face in the normal way, astounded to see the sink filling with CHOCOLATE-covered water, my skin was so dirty. I ask in amazement "How long have I BEEN here?" and they laugh and refuse to answer me. I lay down and prepare to go to sleep just about as I wake up. Other episodes in which I responded to any question or comment with a one-word answer, like "Ump," or other robot-like means of avoiding conversation, or even movement, I've forgotten now, except that there were multiple segments that seemed to last over a very long period of time, maybe involving eating, urinating, and defecating. Finish this at 5:30, light dawning outside, and I have to pee.

SATURDAY, 6/18/05: 8:12AM: 2) Wake at 8:08AM, having had ANOTHER frustration-dream: I'm sorting through my top "things" drawer and come across what looks to be a 14 postage due stamp, red, with some odd tag at the bottom, which seems to be used but which definitely has original gum on the back. I think to file it in my stamp drawer, but when I look right next to it, I see the remains of a small red balloon that I'd kept which had deflated through the years, but now somehow it had burst into fragments, most of the material in the knotted bottom and a good two-thirds of the wrinkled bottom, but there are little pieces scattered about which I gather up, and then realize that the THEME of the balloon had been this event, or object, which separated into what I had at first thought was the stamp! Then come across a box with "miscellaneous:" a set of pink editing tags which I'd labeled "Paintings," "Drawings," and maybe 50 other categories when I'd looked through some magazine and tore out pages which I then sorted into these categories, but I figured to keep the category-slips for possible future use. There were small rulers, a round metal bottom that maybe came from cough drops or round gummed notebook-paper hole-reinforcers which now contained a collection of keys, a set of indexing-alphabet cards, and other objects among which I found a small collection of washers, and then looked for the key-container to add these washers to, thinking they'd somehow be used together, but I can't find the key-container! Absolutely real-seeming dream which I wake from without YET having that awful "frustrated feeling" as I did during 1) earlier: I'm walking in southern Manhattan, but know that if I continue on Rector Street I'll be going more SOUTH than I want, and see a subway kiosk for a line I've never taken, which turns out to be some kind of local BUS service, with a counter with flyers in another language, and I'm walking into a cul-de-sac of a gypsy-like community that I'd never seen before: it's like walking through the unpaved back-streets of some foreign Slavic town! Find a dusty path along the river that I THINK I recognize, looking at the setting sun to know that I'm going north, to get to my Village apartment, and marvel at my pedal dexterity as I skip down a dusty hill, not worried about slipping on the dust covering rocks, thinking I'll have to come back here to explore the prosperous-looking villas whose back yards I'm going through, and I finally see a street-sign for Stewart Street, which I think I know connects to Broadway somehow, but then come to a blue sign that says "Blaanada" and know that I'm still in some immigrant part of town and totally lost. Keep walking, trying to find the right way to go, and think "And this isn't even a DREAM, I HAVE to find my own way out of this," and as the feeling of frustration builds, I wake and find that it WAS a dream, though thoroughly convincing with the colors of the signs and clothing and materials visible in shop-fronts, the FEEL of my feet on the hillside path, almost the SMELL of the immigrant population, and the conviction IN the dream that it's NOT a dream, with that desperate, dizzying FRUSTRATION at the end! Finish typing at 8:27AM, debating going back to bed.

MONDAY, 6/27/05: 9:25AM: 1) I'm playing Scrabble with Vicki and Susan M, and the tiles are of various sizes, and when Vicki puts down her first word, "disgusting," I can't imagine how she got such a long word with only seven tiles, but the tiles are just lined up in front of her, and I look and see that one of the middle letters is actually composed of two SMALLER tiles, so she actually had ELEVEN tiles to start with, and I glance over to Susan's scoring sheet and see that she's made 107 points, and I'm not even sure that included the 50 points for a bingo. Susan's first word is even stranger, each letter being composed of as many as ten spiky pieces like the Sol LeWitt styrofoam multicolor "peaks" on the Met Museum's roof I saw Thursday, and I can't imagine what the actual LETTERS will look like, which are resting on the tabletop. 2) I'm at a meeting like Actualism with George P, and the room is filling up quickly and I spot the end of a row which is still empty, so I sit to the left of the last person in the row, but immediately two corpulent men sit to my left even though I put my arm out and say "This place next to me is saved," and the guy who took the space makes some rough remark and George has to sit in the row behind. This under eyemask from 8:30 when I couldn't sleep because of sunshine.

WEDNESDAY, 6/29/05: 1) 1:52AM: I'm staying overnight at Helen and Jimmy's on Payne Avenue, drinking soda from a bottle, taking sheets from a sofa-bed to make my bed and piling TV Guides on a table to make room for me. 2) 3:47AM: a) I'm writing down notes for dreams 2-5 so I won't forget any of them, and b) I forget by the time I get to writing it. 3) 4:58AM: I get a discount at a new pub on Brown Street, which was a spin-off of another place down the block, and Arnold has never been to the new place (or to Akron!). 4) 8:20AM: I'm at a large party at what superficially looks like 1221 Dietz, but I'm about to play chess with someone rather like Dror S, and someone rather like Arthur M has made some chocolate brownies on very thin paper off which they can be peeled like decals. (Maybe the chess game was influenced by the Clark Street chess game I've seen each time I've gone to the subway recently.) I suggest we move some stuff from one table, where "Arthur" is arranging things for dinner, to another, and "Dror" takes a tray and slides it across the floor into the bathroom, where it hits the bottom of the sink and breaks into very unlikely quarters, as if someone had bent and almost broken it before, but HE's broken it now, so I sarcastically say "Now you owe us a tray." He smiles apologetically and allows as that's going to be difficult, since this is the last day he can use his ATM card (like my thinking the last day of use of my Natural History Museum card is tomorrow), and he has no more credit cards, so he doesn't have any way of charging something, the implication being he has no cash at all. Finish typing at 8:30AM, still tired from waking up so many times last night because I'm trying to get accustomed to sleeping with the eyemask, particularly difficult now since it's so hot at night that it feels tacky and constricting against my face, to enable me to sleep through the morning without being wakened by the dawn's light beaming across my white walls at 6:30AM and without needing to replace the light-allowing shades before the openings might be changed by the new windows, which should be installed any month soon, now.

FRIDAY, 7/1/05: 3:43AM: Buy some pink cream cheese that Arnold buys and gives me a taste of.

MONDAY, 7/4/05: 7AM: I go to see dentist about 10AM and Sherryl's there and asks me "Where were you? Why didn't you show up at 9:30 for your appointment?" I blank and say "I don't know," because I have no idea. I start to go inside and Sherryl says, "He went to the jail to treat a client. You have to make a new appointment." I wake and REverify that TODAY is 7/4 and my appointment is for TOMORROW at 9:30AM.

TUESDAY, 7/5/05: 6:15AM: I'm having an elegant dinner, possibly in old-fashioned clothes on a movie set, next to an important woman who's a combination of Julia Roberts and Julie Christie, VERY proper, and we're drinking very dark coffee in delicate cups into which I've just poured some of the orange juice, which seems to be a brand or type called orinda, from a pitcher that really discolors the coffee and gives it an unusual taste, and I suggest that she try it, but the suggestion seems to offend her and she doesn't follow it. In a very related sequence, someone related to me, maybe even my grandmother, had participated in a smoking study, and even though my neighbor said it was terrible that she was smoking, I could relate with smug glee that she died at the age of 98, so it could hardly have affected her that much. Wake to find my face-mask up, and look at the clock to think it says 8:15, but when I get up wearily to type my dream find that it's 6:15AM! Finish now at 6:22AM.

MONDAY, 7/18/05: 6:25AM: Went to bed just after 9:30PM last night when I kept dozing off doing Spider, and went quickly to sleep with the air conditioner on, woke chilly to cover myself, then peed at 2:20AM, then dreamed of going on a tour to an old town in Russia, leaving the group at the hotel to wander myself through the old sections where I discovered to my chagrin that I hadn't brought my camera to take pictures of all I'm seeing: old churches with elaborate steeples against the sky, but I can't find the one I sighted with when I went into back alleys and got lost; a trail to a brightly lit swimming pool on a hillside with shallow falls and spillways and at the bottom a wading pool with kids splashing around even though it feels quite cold out: maybe it's a thermal spring which furnishes its own heat; a typical frustration-passage where I think I've gone before, but it narrows to a water-slick green hole through which I can't possibly fit and I have to back out and try another way. I'm aware that this is the first night of the trip and the orientation-welcome dinner will probably be at 7PM and it's just after 6 and I have no idea how to get back to the hotel, but then there seems to be a tour, and we're following a guide across unpaved fields where I look at which properties have sidewalks and which are just farms which come to the edge of the dirt roads winding between indistinct property lines. Pass the brightly colored feet of the base of an old stone statue of a male saint, and then a small XV, or similar Roman numeral-monument commemorating some event, and I recognize the type of monument from my stamps from Russia, and again wish I had my camera. Another section concerned a kitchen which had items out of place, and particularly a refrigerator in which I stored something which didn't quite belong, puzzling over the flames of the compressor right next to the freezer, but figured it had to be designed to operate properly or it wouldn't be sold. Sort of woke in the middle of sections of this, recognized it as a dream that wasn't unpleasant, and sank back into other sections of the dream, aware that I've now slept more than 8 hours, then get up to pee and shut off the air conditioner and look out at the still-foggy humidity-fog over the city, determining not to play more Spider before taking care of the some of the maintenance items on my NEXUS list, aware that I'm using the end of this DREAMS page for NOTEREPL material, but wanting to get to the bottom of the page, hoping to be able to connect material with hyperlinks when I finally get the whole DIARY organized onto the web as I've long desired.

THURSDAY, 7/21/05: 9:40AM: I'm competing against a roomful of solvers with some kind of puzzle published in a newspaper that involves multi-level clues for each letter of a number of three- or four-letter words in short phrases, and I've managed to solve the top half of the puzzle, but others seem to be finished and I can't get a grasp on the technique for the bottom half, even though a female friend of mine urges me on. I finally adapt a technique that sometimes works with the doublecrostic: simply guessing what the words might logically be and see if the clues can't be manipulated to yield my results, which might be partly right to begin with. Wake during the dream (I didn't check the time) and try to get back to sleep and into the same dream to "solve" the puzzle and reduce the frustration-feeling left over, but I don't succeed.

FRIDAY, 7/22/05: 5:42AM: I have a five-ticket to the Boston Science Museum torn, stub put into curator's box, he grabs it, I lose 4-stub later. Search for both, CAN'T find it. John A is depressed and goes in and it's SNOWING!

SATURDAY, 7/23/05: 6AM: Incredibly long and detailed dream of my first day of work at an IBM-Research-type place with three guys and two gals on an enormous project rather like a data-collection system that will eventually control the company (or the world), a sort of super-competent billing and EXISTING system. I'm sort of in charge of them, though I have to learn everything they know before I can begin to understand what's needed in the system we're to prepare. They tell me things I have to know in informal dribs and drabs, and all the while my mind is going through the "formal" system I have to impose on them to collect all the data I need: 1) what's in their desks and minds now, 2) what will be needed in the system now and into the far future, 3) how the company's organized both locally and globally and its position in the world's economy, 4) hundreds of Procedure Manual's pages listing positions, requirements, existing policies, standard operating procedures, rituals to keep, rituals to change, and lists of pages not yet dreamed of needing. As part of my orientation we're going into long-unused offices and finding caches of treasure from---call them previous CIVILIZATIONS in the company which are now long extinct, but from which we might learn valuable lessons about what was and what should be now; one section is almost like an abandoned Toy Store in which there may be old programs, games, operating manuals: the accumulated wisdom of past jobs just waiting to be excavated and evaluated and processed---or thrown out. At one point I have to pee, and just go into a corner and start to produce a flow of liquid, and then behind me come OTHER flows of liquid from the OTHERS lining up behind me, and I note to myself that I'll have to tell them NOT to urinate on the backs of my shoes in the future, but it implies a nice "working" relation with the group who's coming to be as iconoclastic, forward-looking, precedent-ignoring, and humor-filled as I am, which will make for an exemplary group. The peeing episode came from reading yesterday about a Mini-Me who scandalized some TV crew by peeing into a corner ON TV recently; while the whole "organizing" theme comes from my lists for my Internet-site and future life-activities, and maybe even the enormous TV sitting unpacked in my living room at this moment, and the melange of things-to-do sitting on my desk right now. The dream seemed to last for a VERY long time, with GREAT detail, and I only outline it to 6:15.

SUNDAY, 7/24/05: 1) 5:55AM: I'm sleeping at Mom's, and she looks at me in a funny way when she gets up and passes me in bed, and I figure she thinks I look like Dad. A later segment has us going on a bus to the neighborhood of Paul B's house, and I know she knows how to get a bus back home from there, and I know I can walk, some distance, but an easy walk, but I'm not quite sure I'll be able to recognize the street corner to start from when I get there. 2) 7:20AM: I'm visiting the campus of City University of New York with Dennis, and I wait for him to finish lunch in the cafeteria when I'm shocked to see Joe E at a nearby table, and he actually welcomes a chance to talk to me, but soon people crowd around and I can feel the floor vibrating and ask "Are we sitting over the school's furnace-room?" and he answers "Yes" without any emphasis on whether I'm super-sensitive or not. There's some kind of major meeting taking place, and I have a good position for viewing it, right behind some girls who are at a corner of a slightly raised platform, but then some taller guys move in front of them and my view is slightly blocked and I try to find a better place to stand. Some slight conflict, or impatient interaction, with Dennis occurs, but I forget the details now. Nothing terribly important.

MONDAY, 7/25/05: 6:30AM: I'm vacationing in Paris, staying with a group of gay men that I have no idea how I met or where they live, and we go by car to a country inn where I study the water flowing past the gutter and into a subterranean stream to "identify" where we are. They speak mixed French and English, but I understand little of it and have NO idea what I'm going to be doing there. Then I find myself on a bus that's going into the countryside, and it occurs to me that I haven't the SLIGHTEST idea where I'm going or where I came from. I'm carrying a large shopping bag which seems to be my only luggage, with a few items of clothing, some books, a couple of games whose boxes are rubber-banded closed, and maps which are probably of a different country entirely. Look at a carnet which they'd bought me, and it just shows a small pre-printed circle on a thumbnail-size representation of Paris, but with no identifying name or station or arrondisement marked whatsoever, added to which it's torn in some critical places so I can't make out anything on it that even says how much I paid for it or for how long or how far it's valid. Ride along a deep valley with country yokels and get out at the last stop, where a little yellow utility work-vehicle is nosing into a pile of trash to take it away from the vicinity of the terminal. I have no idea how to even ASK for directions, and sit there waiting, with other people at least, for the next bus returning to the center of the city, though I don't even have a telephone number to give me a hint who to call to find where to go or how to get there. Before any feeling of desperation can build, I wake and pee and finish typing this at 6:40AM: UGH!

TUESDAY, 7/26/05: 8:09AM: Went to bed about 1:25AM when I finished integrating and boxing the Madagascar Discarded slides, slept through to wake with a VERY busy dream: I'm in my mother's large apartment, the back room of which is a workshop with about six or seven women working at some light industry, and it's late afternoon so they're about ready to go home, but haven't yet. I'm entertaining a gay friend in the bedroom who's brought in an older man who obviously wants to seduce both of us, bringing out a albolene-like cream that he hopes will excite both of us, but when I feel his body he's not excited at all, but he insists we should all take a bath. When I go to the linen closet which HAD been in the hall before the workshop, I'm amazed that it's been taken OUT to expand the workshop area, the towels and linens now stacked partly in Mom's bedroom and partly in the workshop, and I'm amazed that I hadn't recognized the change before. And before the bed-scene can get embarrassing, there's a buzz at the door and in walks about a dozen young Italians who introduce themselves with names like Otzic and Itzic who have brought food and wine for a party, and I'm AGAIN amazed at the flexibility of the apartment, in that a back storage room now becomes a party room, with tables and chairs for eating and drinking, buffet tables for food, and sofas for lounging and chatting. It's after 8PM by now and the workers have, I hope, gone home, and the older man seems to have vanished, or maybe fallen asleep, and I'm astounded at how well everything is fitting into the hardly-known space of my mother's apartment and how calmly I'm taking all the visitors (maybe I'm taking Diazepam in the dream as I'm taking in real life). Wake with pleasure that I've slept through the over 6.5 hours since I'd gone to bed (maybe the glass of red wine with my 11PM dinner helped), and get up and pee and finish typing this at 8:25AM, hoping to be awake when Charlie calls from Adorama with my 10 mailers.

WEDNESDAY, 7/27/05: 5:45AM: I'm traveling on business to Washington, D.C., staying in a strange hotel room which I seem to be sharing with another guy, and there's some idea of having sex, centered around a mirror on the wall that seems to be tripartite so that the sides can fold in and form a series of images of one's naked body which seems exciting to me, but when I get up on the rickety bedstead, the "mirror" turns out to be cheap aluminum foil, corroded in places, that doesn't quite work as I would fantasize, and then without transition I'm in a lower level of the hotel where there seem to be old johns that don't work, and families staying in broken-down apartments with facilities that don't work, and I'm grasping at structural hangings that don't quite support my weight and I fear being thrown into some terrible sub-basement, wounded from the fall, and not able to get help. Wake feeling vaguely horny, but pee and type this to 5:50AM, still 82E out, and I shut off the air conditioner so I won't be cold typing this, but put it back on and go to bed.

THURSDAY, 7/28/05: 8AM: 1) I'm in the back yard at 1221 Dietz, where I haven't been in a long time, though I still live there, and I'm appalled to see that the yard has been taken over by decaying sheep so rotten they're almost deliquescing into each other: two large females can hardly separate themselves into slimy individuals, and from a corner a tiny lamb, extremely thin, almost transparently white and slimy, staggers around in front of a scraggly hedge, and the neighbors and relatives I'm with are aghast at their condition, and I can't even think how to destroy them to take them out of their misery, let alone wonder how they got into that condition in the first place. 2) Playing some kind of card game with a large number of women, including Vicki, Sherryl, possibly Carolyn and Lina M, at a large wooden table, which involves drawing a card and putting it onto pre-formed stacks like something I vaguely recall called "Sevens," and I'm usually the first one who doesn't have a card to draw and play, and I'm not doing very well at all, but everyone's having fun and it's a kick compared to the FIRST dream.

FRIDAY, 7/29/05: 9:43AM: Two other dreams preceded this, which maybe I'll remember when transcribing the third. I'm traveling with a group in northern Scotland, somehow centering around a point on a northern peninsula called Crainlerich, though I know now that THAT town was somewhere in the center of my rail trip before the Russia-China train trip, and I'd been separated from my group, carrying my jacket on an arm, in the hand of which I also carried a paper bag with three or four packages of junk food that I thought I could have in lieu of lunch in case things REALLY got desperate before I got back to my hotel before dinner. I wandered through a colorful countryside, ending up going up a grassy hill toward a three-story manor house near three teenage girls who remarked how wonderful the old house looked, having been newly thatched, and I thought it looked like something out of Masterpiece Theater, only very much lived in. I remembered that my group was called something like Trocadero, or Dromoland, or some such odd name so that I suspected I could go into any little town nearby and ask where a group of forty or so American tourists were staying on a bus and having some confidence of finding where I should end up. One of the more usual, now, characteristics of the dream was that I was hurrying to get where I should be with the FIRM KNOWLEDGE that I really WAS in a fix and HAD to get there, because even though this had every earmark of a dreadful nightmare, it was REAL and I HAD to find where I was going or it WOULD be terribly difficult to find my way out of my dilemma. I kept hoping the pretzels and chips and snacks in the bag wouldn't tear their way out and be lost in my mazings through bushes and down paths and up hillsides in the search for my group-hotel. I was younger than I am now, but not as old as a tan-faced American who was constantly harassed by a noseless female guide to "tell me what you want from English history," or "what did you learn during my last talk?" so even fellow female tourists observed, "She really IS picking on him!"

SUNDAY, 7/31/05: 10:20AM: I'm traveling with John A in some place like Mexico where most of the people don't speak English, and we've stayed in a rustic cottage for a few days and are packing to leave. For some reason, we'd moved the bed from the bedroom out to a courtyard patio, so the servants are  moving stuff back to where they should be, making things very confusing, and I can't find my blue bag at all. I try to describe it, and they bring out various old hard-sided suitcases that make it clear they don't understand a word I'm saying, and I can't figure where other things are, like my dop kit and clothes and pills. Keep searching through rooms which are stripped clean because they're redoing the place now that we've finished with it, and it seems hopeless to find ANYTHING, and there are other details that I've forgotten by now, but I wake, marveling that I've slept so long after going to bed at 1:30AM after hassling some of the puzzles after the wine with dinner with Stephanie at Chez Henry, and with swollen under-eyelid again from the nitrogen on Thursday. I type this to 10:27AM and begin to get into the next-to-last day home before two weeks with Ken in the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone! And still an index to do!

DREAMS FROM TETONS AND YELLOWSTONE TYPED ON ALPHASMART

WEDNESDAY, 8/3/05: 4:33AM: I'm watching a TV sci-fi movie that suddenly gets very real: people dissolving into bones and ligaments (ligaments from the strings for the beads in the Indian Museum yesterday?) can be manipulated by the characters AND THE VIEWERS to put together a different alien-form. This has a few variations with increasing degrees of fantastication, followed by a short episode when I come back from the bathroom after typing up a dream to find that Ken has moved both beds to HIS corner of the room and is cowering under covers in the cold room (and the room IS cold!), and I say "Wouldn't it have been easier to change the temperature, and where am I going to sleep since you're taking up BOTH beds?" Woke feeling not like typing, but decided it was as good a time as any to start, and anyway I'd been in bed almost 7 hours and there were still almost 90 minutes to the alarm, and anyway I had to pee a SECOND time after peeing about 2:33AM.

THURSDAY, 8/4/05: 5:30AM: I'm making some kind of list of entertainers that involve strips of slides or film that I keep having to interpolate at the end, moving the "last" strip further back and putting new ideas in just before the climax. That happened with six or seven artistes who seemed to be grouped around the end of the alphabet, and though it was complicated, it seemed to be doing rather well. Another section had something to do with a group of friends, but I'd had the dream about 2:30AM and just didn't feel like getting up to transcribe it, so it's lost to memory. Sit on the pot now at 5:35AM and decide to go back to file 1.

FRIDAY, 8/5/05: 4:37AM: I'm watching a TV program of some importance, and I've just finished Part I and can start Part II immediately or I can wait to see it at another time, or rent the video, or even see it in a movie house, but I have other things that I want to do, but I'm suddenly aware that there are other people in my apartment: at first only a rather attractive tall man who I almost wish I DID know, and he lies down on the floor (or I lie down on the floor and he towers over me) and I ask demandingly "Who are you?" He starts to give some stammering explanation, and at some point I go into the bathroom and see that my old toilet has been reduced to a pile of porcelain pieces and a new, wooden-seated, toilet stands where the sink used to be. This is a mystery to me, but it may have been necessary for some reason, and if he's finished his work, there's no reason why he should still be there, so I confront him and tell him to leave but there are other people there now, and it seems that I have a rather large apartment, maybe even a duplex penthouse, and I want to leave, but wouldn't trust any of these people in my apartment if I weren't there, so I start ordering all of them to leave. They begin offering various stories, excuses, pleas: possible relationships, former acquaintances, relatives of friends, possible business associates, and the number of people increase and there's absolutely no one I know there who will help me clear out this mob of increasingly demanding people. One very distinguished older woman seems to be important, but when I accost her by backing her up against a fireplace, she reduces to a poor wrinkled old woman in tattered clothing who cowers before me, so I have no compunction in ordering her to leave, immediately. But her presence is replaced by many others, and toward the end I'm actually pushing people off ledges that are floors of some of the rooms of the apartment, but there's only the public street below, and I order them to leave, now, and even start pushing their defenseless bodies into the gap between the floor and the wall and they fall into the street below, where I don't care what happens to them, since they had no right to be in my apartment at all. Another figure of importance appears, maybe even an elderly relative I don't recognize, but it's gotten so late and I'm so exasperated by the quantity of people that I have to get rid of that I'm not even asking who they are or why they're there, I'm just demanding that they leave, every one, right now, and they begin to do so, some almost vanishing before my eyes, which delights me with its effortlessness, and the number of people begins to decrease, at last, rather than increasing, and I start methodically going from room to room, making sure there are no stragglers hiding in closets, under beds, behind dressers, in bathrooms, in other out-of-the-way corners, and I'm clearing room after room, floor after floor, fairly confident that when I clear an area it will remain clear, with no one new suddenly appearing from an unexpected door, and gradually it seems I clear EVERYONE out of my apartment, and I have a brief sense of relief that they've all gone, that I've succeeded (and at 4:56 Ken says "Are you on the toilet or are you typing, I've been waiting for half an hour" and I leave disgustedly and check that I've been typing for only 19 minutes). He shits as I put on a light outside and continue. After everyone's finally gone, and I can leave the apartment to do whatever it was that I wanted to do without worrying about anyone taking anything, I begin to think about what this MEANS: getting rid of everyone from my apartment---from my LIFE, and think that this might be something sad, or to be regretted, but then I wake up and remark about the LENGTH and COMPLEXITY of the dream, and get up to type it and Ken leaves the john and I finish at 5AM and go back to bed.

FRIDAY, 8/5/05: 11:48PM: Have dream and lay thinking about it and at 11:54PM begin typing: I and two women are buying $90 tickets for Great Adventure, and I've already paid for one and given them $170 more, but they want to close the window without doing anything more for us. I bang on the window and get a panicked head to whom I write a note: "You owe us $140." They don't want to respond and somehow the window becomes part of an elevator (like here at Jackson Lake Lodge) which can go to three different floors, and they try to avoid us that way. But somehow I get a supervisor to listen to me, and I'm wondering how I can prove I gave them a $100 bill, a $20, and two $10 bills without having any kind of receipt for it, but then a woman comes to the window who appears ready to listen to reason and I tell myself it'll do no good to bang on the window anymore or they'll just call the police on us and we won't go anywhere. Wake up here, headachy from too much booze, and type to 11:59PM and take two aspirin.

SUNDAY, 8/7/05: 1:53AM: Almost science-program of a dream about increasingly small units, named by prefixes that somehow indicate the smallness, as milli- means thousandth, billi- billionths, atto- thousand-billionths, femto- billion-billionths, with detailed examples of what physical properties take shorter and shorter times, over shorter and shorter distances, in smaller and smaller quantities, until the smallest atom moves the smallest space in the shortest time---but all elaborately produced with microscopic treatments, or painstaking animations, or mind-bending thought-experiments. But then the dream changed into a detective-style mystery about the killing of people, how their blood stopped, their hearts stopped, until they were frozen into changeless corpses, all lined up like concentration-camp victims in an enormous freezer, and at one point I marveled that the program had the courage to show the, albeit ugly, genitalia of a young handsome gunman hanging down between frozen legs, and I don't know where the program went from there because I woke, wearily got out of bed, sat and peed, and finished this at 2:01AM, sorry that my new watch doesn't light up successfully to tell me the time in the dark. Still have to blow my nose and take a drink of water to ease my food-stretched stomach and assuage a sort of feeling of nausea.

SUNDAY, 8/7/05: 5:50AM: Rolf has come over to my bedroom at 1221 Dietz, at first as only a social meeting, then he's naked and I'm permitted to play with his hardening cock, and then he begins to get out sex-tools that include a black silk sheath that he puts over his very long and thin cock, and gets out a spool of black thread through which are pierced several needles, and he proceeds to insert these needles with quick jabs straight down into his urethra, showing almost no facial expressions. Along in here is also a small black and white dog who seems to be more witnessing than participating, and at another point both the dog and Rolf go along the windowshades alongside my bed and pull them up (no one lives next door) and the white paint is flaking away and wet plaster seems to be exposed, and this seems to be something Rolf expected and looked forward to. He allows me to worship his body, which is now quite pale and slender and sexily-formed, and though he's hard and excited, he's nowhere near coming. I'm not hard through most of this, but it seems to make no difference to him. He continues to insert and withdraw needles, and I don't know how to handle them, but he seems easy with my discomfort. The sex-play continues for a long time, but then we're in the kitchen and he demands that I have lunch while he watches, something that obviously turns him on as he's behind me, erect and now unencumbered of cock, embracing my body and appreciating my cock and body, yet urging me to concentrate on deciding what to eat for lunch. The kitchen counters are lined with small plates that either contain small sail-like constructions of white-meat chicken with little bits of salad on the side, or slabs of dark-meat chicken on little plates like hors d'oeuvre plates, and I remark something about yesterday being Thanksgiving and clearly I should finish up some of these before thinking of making anything more, and he seems to think that's fine, as long as he's permitted to watch me eat. I wake with no particular erection, get into the bathroom to type at 5:50 on my watch, but after only a few seconds I hear the phone ring and so I leave and turn on the light and finish typing sitting on the bed while Ken is in the bathroom, and I finish this by 6:01 on my watch.

MONDAY, 8/8/05: 3:05AM: I'm going through an enormous stack of old magazine articles from my files (seemingly primarily from Life Magazine with its enormous pages and detailed colored photographs---of the enormously famous, fabuously wealthy, breathtakingly beautiful: a young Laurance Olivier being tortured in an early English historical film; Merle Oberon frozenly beautiful about to die for some sin, twin sisters flying off to their island paradise known on no known map of the world, beautiful young starlets who found each other and became deliriously happy together for the rest of their lives, deposed monarchs with their family's jewels and palaces inact, yachts and private jets and triplex apartments on Fifth Avenue and the top floors of Parisian Hotels Particulaires---movie stars, royalty, the financial and industrial heirs), pages and pages which I sort through, bringing back old memories, yearnings, envies, beauties---and I gather them up by the armloads and take them onto the streets of Brooklyn Heights to find an empty trashcan, or one being emptied by a beautiful young Italian laborer, myself realizing only for a moment that in this age of recycling these magazine pages should be bound into a handy bundle for burning or repulping, but I throw them anyway profligately into the capacious wire cylinder, edges of beautiful houses and photographs and people catching on dirty, wet metal edges, and then look for a nearby deli or pharmacy where I can buy tonight's Sunday Times, only to find the store barricaded for destruction, or reconstruction, and I realize my life will change not only with the ridding of these precious icons of desire from my past, but that my future will have to adjust to a new reality, a new store from which to buy my dreams, and I wake with a feeling of nostalgia for the past, for my archives, for my possessions, for the transitoriness of all fame and riches and possessions and hopes and longings, and get out of bed with my notes and my AlphaSmart and finish this on the john in the Mammoth Springs Hotel by 3:18AM, going back to file 2 to update that also.

TUESDAY, 8/9/05: 5:50AM: I'm cleaning out my apartment and have two large boxes, a small steamer trunk, and two larger steamer trunks to get rid of, and it seems perfectly clear to me that Avi and Robin would want them, or if not they could just throw them out. I got onto the subway with all this without too much trouble, but when the subway stopped at 110th Street, and I knew they were living on 111th or 112th, though I'd forgotten to write down their actual address, I knew I would recognize their apartment house when I saw it: Avi lived on the ground floor, two friends of theirs occupied the two floors above, and Robin lived on the top floor. But in trying to get everything in hand while the door was open, I didn't quite manage, and couldn't think of asking anyone to hold the door open for me, so the door closed and I rationalized that maybe they even lived on 113th Street, which would be somewhat more convenient from the 116th Street stop anyway. Somehow the subway became a bus at that stop, and I threw all my stuff out the door, one of the straps of one of the steamer trunks got entangled around the roots of a tree growing just where the bus door had opened, and it was a tough task pulling at the cord until it became detached from the root. When I got all the boxes in my hands and under my arms, I recognized to my horror that I'd taken my shoes off on the subway to be comfortable and had forgotten to put them back ON again, so I had to walk the streets with my black socks on only, which I thought wouldn't be so bad for a few blocks until I realized it had just been snowing, and a team of city street-cleaners were in the process of sweeping and shoveling the snow into (or away from) a large piece of black plastic, so I had to move along the plastic until I found a place clear of snow across which I could step. I didn't even get to the problem of finding their street, but I seemed to know that EITHER Avi or Robin would be home, and I would recognize their buzzers from the doorway, but then the thought went through my mind that THEY never phoned ME for any party or dinner or event, it was always I who phoned THEM, but I consoled myself with the usual thought that I was older than they were and of course they preferred the company of younger and sexier guys, but they liked me anyway, so it was all OK. Woke and got into the bathroom to pee and write this until 6:02AM, deciding to update file 2 with my horrible problems!

FRIDAY, 8/12/05: 4:10AM: I'm in a high-school class that has to move to the next hour's class, which isn't finished yet. It's VERY inner-city, and as I go to one of my last seats, a teenage girl pulls up her panties in the back where she'd been seducing the guy behind her, and I glimpse a huge tit-like cleavage in her ass that has a blue thong between her buttocks that seems truly obscene. An older black man paging through test papers, standing at a table nearby, appears not to have seen anything at all. There's something about a laughing Latina just after that, but I wake, cough, take another Nyquil, pee, and finish typing at 4:15AM.

SUNDAY, 8/14/05: 6:05AM: I've been invited to Robert W's incredibly lavish home in lower Manhattan, seemingly to present an idea for a work of his, or for producing a work of mine, or to be hired in some minor capacity. I've not actually talked to him, but for some reason I took my shoes off when I came in, and, since my project didn't seem to be accepted, it was time for me to go, but I couldn't find my shoes. The people talking to us from the house, and those people seemingly always in a party mode there, had made fun of the sloppy and poor way in which I was dressed, particularly my shoes, and I feared they may have simply destroyed them, yet I had to have shoes on my feet to leave the place and I started (in my inimitable way) to INSIST that they find, or I find my shoes, so I started looking under the skirts of the chairs and sofas in the room in which I'd been meeting with some underlings, but most (not the underlings) were solidly built and had nothing beneath (like looking under beds when I leave a hotel to make sure nothing's been lost under them). Eventually Robert W himself is introduced to me as a kind of sop for my loss, and he asks that I show him the shape of the shoes, so I draw a rough foot with a shoe around it and specify that it had two holes in the sides (as mine do) and four laces up the middle (as mine don't), and he smiles (again, I think, in mockery, but the fantasy that he's somehow "taken" with my simple demands, or my determination, or my personality, takes over and I fantasize, in the dream, that he's somehow fascinated by me and wants to keep me in his entourage for amusement, and also that he's going to design a sort of shoe to replace mine, but it's narrow and pointed (oh, earlier he presented me with a shoe with a high silver heel, which was clearly not mine, but this also led me to believe that he might somehow be interested in keeping me around) like an old-fashioned Chinese bound-woman's foot-shoe, and I even think he started some of his workmen to the task of making me replacement shoes just to get rid of me). After further searches in rooms where important meetings were taking place, which I had no compunction interrupting and picking up the skirts of the very chairs in which they were sitting to make sure my real shoes hadn't somehow gotten under there; it seemed maybe to distract me he ordered some of his minions to entertain me sexually, which quickly turned into an opportunity for me to masturbate them in ways they'd never thought of before, and I remember distinctly telling each of them, "Just give me a chance, show me what you like to do to yourself, and I can develop what YOU do into a NEW refinement which will give you the most powerfully felt orgasms you've ever had." There were a group of four men in a sort of ring, holding hands, and when I said this they broke apart and a short chunky guy that I would have preferred to start with broke away and left, and I was left with a slim Chinese with an almost mask-like smile who showed me what he liked, and then I took his cock and manipulated it to new hardness, and he gasped and said he'd never felt that good, and I continued to build it and he continued to participate until indeed he did have an orgasm surpassing all others he'd ever had. He was replaced by a very young kid who maybe had never masturbated before, and I barely touched his hard cock before streams and streams and ENDLESS streams of cum shot from his cock, feet after feet of white semen, and everyone gasped and lined up for more. Somewhere in here I was offered a tour of the building, which I gladly accepted, marveling that even on the roof he'd constructed stage-sets and scrims to block off the surrounding "real" areas and substitute fantasy-realms of his own, with castles and palaces and mountain vistas (some real-looking, some VERY stagy), and at one point I pulled aside a scrim to see where his house REALLY was and saw a barnacle-encrusted enormous hull right outside, with odd dream-like sea-rocks nearby, and asked the vaguely Oriental woman showing me around where we actually WERE, and she said "Oh, near the docks; that's a submarine docked next to the pier on which we live." I was amazed that no one from the outside had ever publicized this house, its contents, or its location, but figured Robert W was immensely wealthy and could do anything he wanted, and in fact in one room was a figure of a younger, sexier Robert W, rather in the body of a younger VERY sexy---oh, who WAS the dancer who had a very sexy body when young, then ended up a choreographer---something like Tom Williams, or James Spencer, not Talley Beatty, though he was just after that generation---the name is so close---did he dance in earlier "Carmina Buranas" and I could find his name there? ANYWAY, he was rolling around on the floor, as if choreographing for himself, but it was "really" the present Robert W, and I hoped he would let me show HIM how to have a fabulous orgasm, but I was ushered politely out of that room and allowed to continue my sexual fantasies with others, which continued for a VERY long time, with many varied and beautiful and sexy orgasms until I woke with an extreme erection and in the moment of waking THRUST into the sheet almost as if I really wanted to cum myself, and then consoled myself that in only two more days I WOULD be home and could do whatever I wanted again. I may have drifted back into a wish-fulfilling dream in which I jerked off a few more guys (maybe patterned on some of the VERY attractive waiters Xantera recruits from the former Soviet Union to work in all the Yellowstone hotels) and woke STILL hard, so I couldn't get up just THEN to record the dream, and maybe slept some again until I woke soft and looked at the clock at 5:59AM, marveling how close it was to the 5:55AM I woke yesterday, and collected my glasses and notes, went into the bathroom to pee, put the lid down and sat and finished off yesterday and typed this to 6:30AM, reminding myself again to take my first Diazepam.

MONDAY, 8/15/05: 1) 4:10AM: I'm working in filing in some kind of newspaper office, and either the filing system or a contest is based on finding a set of code-words, which may be simple words like "A" or "From" or complex phrases like "Being-In-The-Process-Of" or "With-Like-Objects," and it isn't clear how MANY code-words there are, because no one has ever made a list of them, or because the point of the contest is to find how many there are---and a crux-point is that there might be 26 of them, each starting with a different letter of the alphabet. This may have to do with the number of foreign servers in Yellowstone Park restaurants, or just the foreign country in which this office seems to be situated. I seem to be making progress with the collection of these code-words into significant groupings, or families, but there's no sense of urgency or competition about the process: it's just part of the job. I wake and type this until 4:20AM, having dropped my watch on the floor again and the pen into the john-water, from which I hope it recovers. I sure wish my cough were OVER! 2) 6:58AM: Wake at 6:56 with the "Parsifal" of dreams (in fact, if I remember to transcribe all of it, "Parsifal" enters in): I'm visiting Regina F, formerly Regina S, formerly---I don't know her maiden name. She wants to entertain me, as Marty used to, and takes me downstairs from her apartment (there may have been others with us at the start) and it turns out to be backstage at a small theater company, maybe at BAM, devoted to putting on opera-on-the-cheap, and they're rehearsing some Offenbach, and I move from balcony to backstage to hear bits of it and marvel how good it is, and hear the Director talking to a prospective backer, enticing her with "If you think this is good, you should hear our "Parsifal."" I continue to wander backstage, among rooms full of sets and areas of baroque architecture that I hadn't seen before, and then Regina insists we continue to some friend's apartment where some other semi-professional performance is going on, and it's getting later and later, and we're eating appetizers and drinking bits of beverages and I think I even see the lightening sky of dawn outside, but still she insists I should come along with her, and to entice me she presents me with a beautiful nude couple to embrace, and I try to do justice to the curly-haired (from the woman Ken pointed out at the Yellowstone Lake Hotel dining room last night?) woman who lays her head back on my chest so that I can lick her nipples and run my hand down to her vagina, but someone who knows more about pleasuring her than me comes up with "Oil of Sex" in an hour-glass-shaped insertion-instrument, and inserts one small end to the thinnest middle, and squeezes the remaining exposed bulb so that the liquid is expressed into her vaginal cavity and she writhes into the most exquisite sexual ecstasy while I wish I could do the same with her Apollonian partner, but we're whisked off to another scene of lavish decoration, maybe someone else's apartment, which has a collection of books lining shelves, and Regina suggests that I take and open any I choose, and pull down some priceless volumes that she insists are all the possession of her friend, to whom she introduces me, as earlier she'd introduced me to a female with a plastic face-mask molded to her features who embraced me and said, "You don't remember me?" and I lied and said "Of course I do," and embraced her in return, sure that I knew the unknown person under the disguise. Much later in the dream she returned in another mask, and we repeated essentially the same charade. Maybe we even went outside at some time, but it seems the whole dream transpired in one Paris-Opera-sized structure with underground lakes, multiple performance areas, marble lobbies and Baroque staircases, and hidden alcoves where varied bacchanalia were occurring. Many subsequent details I forget now, except for one touching moment at the end, when I'm leaving what seemed to be the top of a double-decker bus, and Marty's sitting there with a drink in his hand (he hardly ever drank) and an elaborate bracelet on his wrist (he never wore jewelry), and turned a concerned face to me and said, "Magda (whom I don't know) said that I would die in a year, do you think so?" I never paused, but said "I'm sure you'll enjoy the entire rest of your life to the maximum with which you're enjoying it at this moment," and he seemed pleased and mollified with my response and smiled and almost embraced me, which, though he may have wanted to, as---what WAS his second wife's name?---said, he never did. But what other fantastic details have I forgotten: other stage productions, real or in rehearsal---ah, the playing of records from the past which I never knew existed, records (or maybe even DVDs) of historic performances with all manner of dead operatic stars, recordings that I never dreamed existed, in perfect fidelity, a true treasure, all in the possession of the infinite number of friends of Regina that we encountered and moved on to, and I at one point in the dream fancied that Regina might want to make me a constant partner of hers, to take the place of Marty, without whom I was sure she was still lonely despite a vast coterie of incredibly talented, rich, possessed-of-objects-of-extraordinary-value people, who were always ready to be entertained and entertaining. At one point she even said, "I hope you can come back tomorrow, because I have even more to show you." I sort of remember leaving, wondering how I would get home and how I would return, but I STILL know that I'm forgetting dozens of wonderful details: magnificent men dressed in original ballet costumes, opera divas performing highlights from their triumphal successes, volumes of priceless programs from the past, reproductions in photos and recordings and on-stage of legendary singers and dancers, also mixed with sumptuous repasts and intimate sexual encounters that I marveled how anyone so beautiful and desirable would condescend to even look at someone like me, but I was in a past (or a future) where everything, even I, was young (Ken knocks and displaces me at 7:22AM) and beautiful and possessed of unique and wonderful talents which we were happy to display and share with our friends and their friends, of whom I was privileged to be included. Look back to find that I started typing at 6:58, so now at 7:26 I've again typed a dream for almost half an hour.

TUESDAY, 8/15/05: Wake at 3:22AM with a dream and start transcribing at 3:48 after shitting and wiping and flushing: I'm with Susan L in some new-age-type class that involves lining up thought-patterns into linear arrays that take on a concrete meaning and FORM, like structures in the mind that have to be kept aligned, and my reflux has damaged or shortened one of these thought-patterns so that it has to be re-aligned with "the correct" ones, as if my thought-patterns were strands of DNA, each with prescribed sets of consecutive "codes" or "units" that had to be kept aligned, and my reflux had destroyed one of these lines, making it shorter, so that I had to consciously add units to re-align the strands so that the whole system of thought-patterns would again be self-consistent and functional. At times I could hear her reprimanding, disappointed voice saying, "Oh, Bob, you know better than anyone else how this should work! Can't you see you have to put a bit of this element in front of that element to add this component of length, maybe modifying something before or after to make the junction perfect, so that the parallel quality of the patterns are restored? You helped me with this before and I'm disappointed that you can't recognize what's wrong now and fix it yourself: you shouldn't need my help or even the help of the teachers to make yourself function better now." Other elements seemed to be important in the dream, but I don't remember them now and have exhausted detailed recollections of the dream, and am tired, and will now stop at 3:56, possibly to continue with variations on a theme later this morning. 2) About 5AM have some vague dream about some woman, youngish, like Terry K, and I'm sorting things out or arranging something, but nothing specific is remembered, just that there was a dream, and transcribe this at 6:47AM, probably up for the day because I can't sleep any more because of pre-trip, pre-flight jitters.

WEDNESDAY, 8/17/05: 8:16PM: A rare "day" time dream: I've done part of a New York Magazine puzzle, but feel so tired I actually fall asleep in the chair and dream that I'm in the country with someone like Vicki, visiting an unusual outdoors ranch, and as we drive up I see a distant horse jump off a diving board into a pool with an enormous splash, going so slowly that it's clear it's a huge horse a great distance away. We enter the park and enjoy some of the activities, then Vicki wants to ride on the back of a sort of sled that goes atop the horse's back as it dives into the pool, and they rise to the apex and there's a moment's suspense as she soars upward, the sled too, fearing that she and the sled and the horse might be caught by the edge of the board and injured, but she clears the board and soars through the air with a tremendous splash into the water to the cheers of the onlookers, including my relieved self. There may have been more, but I woke and transcribed it directly at 8:25.

THURSDAY, 8/18/05: 8:55AM: Uncle Edward is coming to visit at 1221 Dietz and I'm supposed to be cleaning the place up before his arrival, and just out of the kitchen I find a lot of junk on the carpet in the corner of the dining room by the foot of the china cabinet, and am amazed by the quantity of loose pieces of rug material, plaster from the wall right there and what appears to be pieces from the ceiling, but I manage to scoop it all under the cabinet so that I don't have to get out the vacuum and worry about scooping up such large pieces without clogging the cleaner. Then he arrives early and starts looking at some work I've been doing, and I said I was working on computer models of some of the spacecraft he'd been working on while he was in Dayton, and he said they had already been doing the paperwork on such designs and was pleased to see they had advanced to the stage of computer simulations. Something about a young Rita entered into the conversation, and something about the upcoming dinner for which they were making their usual Sunday visit, but I forgot most of the other details, just getting things ready for their arrival and looking into my bedroom, hoping they don't find anything they shouldn't find.

SATURDAY, 8/20/05: 7AM: I'm around an old swimming hole on a visit to France, and there have been bodies swimming there, naked, for years, and we go to a different place and shine the light on the backs of four young bodies curled into various positions of innocent sex. Later, I wander over the rocks at the shore itself, meeting a very young boy who is still tempted to neck with me, saying disgustedly "Here I am with an old man," and I touch his cock and he cums, turns away in disgust, and I say "I can teach you that there can still be sex after you cum," and he seems vaguely interested. Still later, I look at an old "aristocratic" drained pool that has various levels of seats carved in the bottom rocks, so that people can sit and maybe play with each other, but I can't figure why the bottom would be tiered in seats like an amphitheater: did they come here with scuba equipment to have sex on various levels? I can't see where the water comes from and assume it might just be supplied by natural rains, like the section of the end of a "National Geographic" program I watched while I was broiling my hamburg for a later dinner which still didn't extend beyond five or six hours the interval between taking two clindamycin which I should be taking 8 hours apart, and with one day's supply left, I hope my erratic time-scheduling hasn't jeopardized my chances of curing my cellulitis. When I go to type this dream, I realize it follows the unproofed dreams from the Yellowstone trip, so I proofread and print those pages and finish now at 7:47AM, I guess ready to start the day, even though I slept just over 6 hours.

SUNDAY, 8/21/05: 10:20AM: Wake at 8:15AM with a dream of being in an office that's the living room at 1221 Dietz, and I'd had my desk set up satisfactorily to the left of the door, under the window, but when I return late one afternoon I find that it's been moved to a space (which didn't exist) to the RIGHT of the door, so that anyone going in or out would be impeded by my chair at the desk. Most of the rest of the room was empty, except for the desk of the person who shared the office with me, so I could see no reason for moving me there, and I promptly moved me back to where I was, not caring what the other person would think. Other details about what exactly were in the drawers in what order were present in the dream, but I forget them now.

TUESDAY, 8/23/05: 7:20AM: I'm vacationing with a large group in what may be Africa, and two of us guys are directed to get two large shrimp and cut them in half, and then the lower, smaller, part of the body in half again, and even though all three parts continue to live and squirm, we're directed to eat one of the smaller thirds, which squirm in our mouths but we determinedly chew on them until we can swallow them. Others are given other tasks (like on Ultimate Fighters 2 which I watched last night before bed?), and then later we're told to find the two remaining parts to cook them, but after searching around in various boats where they were last seen, our female leader says it's OK if we simply buy two more and cut them up as before and cook these parts. Not much.

WEDNESDAY, 8/24/05: 4:37AM: I'm touring an old art museum in Washington, DC, which has been turned into a set of what seem to be children's exhibits, and have bought an awkward-shaped donut-like ring of munchies that seems to be comprised of at least six different ingredients of various chewiness, flakiness, dustiness, and fragility that each threatens to drop to the floor, or onto the exhibits on tables, with different crumbs, sugars, fragments, crusts, and corruptions that guards posted paranoically at every corner constantly remind tourists to keep things to themselves, clean, away from the exhibits. I get to a seeming cul-de-sac in which the former labels of pre-Renaissance paintings and sculptures seem to be less obscured, and look down a long blank tunnel descending into the depths which may formerly have housed the major part of the exhibit, but now seems forbidden of entry. I break through crumbly gray paper to get to other parts of my "goodie" to find orange candies that threaten to crumble, breads that crumb at the touch, and other unwrapped sections that seem ready to burst open at a breath. Wonder what this was before and why something would be sold here which would be such a threat to the cleanliness of what's on display now. Wake with AGONIZING pains in my teeth, every one of which on the lower left side seems suddenly possessed of the worst cavities newly bombarded with sweetness of the most penetrating, pain-causing kind, and lie miserably, wiping drool from the pillow and moving away from that wet part of it, until I get up, take two aspirin for the pain, pee, and sit with the too-bright light on to transcribe this to 4:47AM, hoping to mitigate my extreme hypersensitivity, hoping it doesn't continue or I'll be MISERABLE!!

THURSDAY, 8/25/05: 1) 1:32AM: I've gotten a phone call from a University of Akron student praising the new Irish play that's being done this summer, and as I talk to him I suddenly realize it's a play that I've written, and he's praising it to the skies, but at the same time talking about how difficult it's going to be to perform with all the EATING going on for the leading character. I sympathize with him, but emphasize the need to be clear: "You can't imagine Clark Gable, for instance, mumbling into his food which trying to impress Scarlet O'Hara, now, can you?" He seems to agree, but also seems to want specific direction about some things, and I can't imagine why he doesn't ask the play's director, but still feel flattered that the play is being seen in such a positive way. At two or three points in the dream there's the distant, or not-so-distant, sound of fire engines (maybe some went off in the neighborhood as I dreamed), and we can see the redness and smoke from some of them, and then just at the corner there's another emergency, and a fireman from one of the previous fires is still there, holding back traffic and directing attention and a firehose toward a particular manhole that seems to be causing trouble. Then someone asks directions by taxi to the production rehearsal, and I say, "Well, it's right here at the corner of Buchtel and Brown Streets, as everyone in the neighborhood well knows." Then I try to remove myself from being the center of so much attention and get back to my own private work. 2) 7:35AM: Arnold and I are invited to a sort of "older gay guy get-together" at the apartment of a guy who's shortish and baldish, but who could be interesting enough as a sex partner if his personality turned out the right way, especially says "I'll be hitting my seventies" (though he seems to say "eighties," but seems to MEAN to say "seventies") in a year, and then in six months, and I'm curious how close our birthdays ARE, but he won't say, saying he'll "turn 70 in 3010," and I say, with some malice, "Well, at least we know you can't do math." He appears to live in the high 60s on the west side of Broadway, because he looks down to a storefront a few blocks north, over which (as is also not true) Arnold seems to live. There are six guys and two women, who seem to talk to each other and not interact with the guys. One guy has brought a two-liter bottle of a good whiskey, and I ask "Were we asked to bring a bottle?" and he mortifies me by saying "Yes," which means either he's lying or I forgot, so I say I'll bring something next time. "What do you like, hard stuff or liqueurs?" and he replies "Half and half," to which I respond, "What's your favorite half-and-half drink?" which he either doesn't understand or smiles dismissively, so I haven't succeeded in making a joke to his taste, which might jeopardize the budding relationship. He seems comfortably off, has a nicely furnished apartment, but the conversation isn't going very smoothly, and maybe there's not going to be anything developed from the introductions, as one fatter guy reaches across and says "I'm David," and another, "I'm George," and there's nothing in the handshake or personality that comes across as that attractive. One of the women is vaguely Shelley-like and contributes some lightness, but we're all gathered around a large table and I have no idea how the rest of the evening will turn out. Wake with the same sore right eye with which I went to bed, and wash it, but it still doesn't seem happy. My right foot is still slightly swollen, but better, though it still hurts a bit, so I guess I'll just wait for next Wednesday's appointment to see if it's going OK.

SATURDAY, 8/27/05: 7:10AM: I'm watching the choreography of a new piece by a plump woman at something like Dance Theatre Workshop, in which she comes out in a voluminous gown and bounces from side to side like a ball, then finally takes it off and serves candy in new boxes to the audience, and it's just being finished: she says she feels like she comes out encased in a donut. This is the last piece to be done, and it's the last afternoon before the performance, the other three pieces are in good shape, and she manages to get the last details into place before the performance. I wake at 7:10 and feel like looking at SHOW again and type this to 7:14AM and even got my glasses to look at porn slides.

MONDAY, 8/29/05: 12:55PM: At 5:30AM I draw a diagram headed: Elaborate: describing this (maybe that's what it says): followed by a diagram of the complicated hierarchical structure that started at the top extremes with a single person seated at a table (maybe this was influenced by the two dinner tables near the end of "Cleopatra" on Saturday evening-Sunday morning), below which on the one side is a level which might be a corridor or a car-story (a story of the building designed as a road for cars), with the simple word "story" to describe the levels descending to a common meeting point at the bottom, which I labeled "canal," though it didn't seem to be filled with water in the dream. The only remaining detail that was clear in both the dream and my memory of it was the lowest level, where the building finally came together at the bottom, below the canal, with a common wall, on one side of which was a 1912 omnibus in storage from a movie studio which occupied the bottom of the left side of the structure, and right through that wall between was "a pumpkin for Cinderella," like a saved set-piece from some television program which may have been put on in the past by the television studio which occupied the bottom of the right side of the structure. I didn't construct or wasn't consulted about the construction of the building, it was only presented to me as complete so that I could draw the picture at 5:30AM, confident that I'd remember enough details to complete this over seven hours later by 1:05PM, discarding the note.

WEDNESDAY, 8/31/05: 3:20AM: Mom and a male friend (a new husband?) have just moved into a small house somewhat like 1221 Dietz, and I'm looking at a perfectly-arranged array of cosmetics and soaps and lotions in pastel plastic bottles on a formerly-messy shelf in a basement storage, area, and think to myself "This will never look so wonderfully organized as today, the day we've moved back in, and I should take a videotape of it." I mention this to Mom, a younger and more pleasant Mom, and she smiles and agrees, so I want to start with my bedroom, which is still centered on my bed, somewhat larger now, with a set of mussed-up but still fresh sheets from my sleeping last night on them, and a blue-green newly-washed sheet lying on the rumpled bedcovers is obviously my next change, which I don't need yet, so I can fold that away in a corner of the bed as I quickly smooth out the coverlet and am attracted to the array of stuff in the (non-existent) storage cabinet, double-doored, over the closet, which seems to consist primarily of a sort of vanity table half-in, half-out of the leftward open storage-cabinet compartment, and I try to fold the table in in another way so I can close the door to give a great initial feel to the videotape of the room of being minimal, yet capacious, then open the door to show what's stored there. Mom protests, "We're going to need that later today, so you should just leave that the way it is," and I see the logic to her mild statement and move to the next compartment, which can be closed with only a few ends of bedclothing and bodyclothing pushed into its proper place, and then I wake, thinking what an odd fragment this was, and finish typing at 3:28AM to pee.

THURSDAY, 9/1/05: 5:40AM: I'm staying in a sort of trailer home with a younger, somewhat Slavic, guy, and he mentions that he has to take off the broken roof-tiles to replace them, and I get on a ladder the next morning and find they detach from each other rather easily, and when I drop them to the rubberized ground around his house, they bounce but don't break, so I start from the lower left corner where they're in shards, find a towel that he's stuffed along the edge to minimize the leaks, take off the left two or three feet to find another towel, and remove the rest easily, leaving them on the ground so he can clean them up. I see he has TWO units, loosely joined by a common door between them. Then I'm in the kitchen, like at 1221 Dietz, looking at a jammed shelf above the kitchen table for pancake mix, but find mostly strudel and pastas, but then an old plastic package of wrapped, fully formed, pancakes falls down, and I look for directions, and he jokingly points out they were manufactured in 1948 and should be used in three years, and I never find directions anyway.

SUNDAY, 9/4/05: 7:55AM: Possibly inspired by my reading about the homeless in New Orleans last night in today's New York Times, I'm with a group of about 20 in an office which has to be abandoned, but we're none of us sure why or how we're going to be "moved" when we're ready. Dream started in the office as we cleared off desks and packed suitcases, but that part's mostly forgotten, and we ended in a sort of waiting-room lobby at the entrance, all sitting around little tables, where I glanced over at the young lady who seemed to be in charge of our little office, but it was clear she didn't know anything more about what was going on than anyone else of us. I had only one thing left to do, which was to sneak my old shorts out of my suitcase and go to the john across the hall and put them on under my pants (last time I went shortless was my first return from the newly-opened gym on September 1, when I forgot to take my clean underwear to the gym with me), and I woke about 7:30AM and continued the dream in a semi-waking reverie: opened the suitcase, then turned it over because it was upside-down as regards its contents, and decided to put on my spare pair of CLEAN shorts rather than the used shorts I'd intended to put on. Bunched them up in my pocket and went across to the john and changed, figuring that even if we started boarding whatever transportation came for us, it would take so long for the office to clear out that I'd be finished and join the end of the line rather than being left behind alone. Sit more (in my reverie), nothing to read, and finally go back to pee, the last thing I have to do, and then imagination wouldn't permit further expansion on my already-waked dream.

TUESDAY, 9/6/05: 9:30AM: 1) I go into a large loft where Mom is talking on the telephone, surrounded by enormous filing cabinets and huge pieces of furniture suspended from the ceiling because, I know, she's hired an expensive painter to paint the whole interior, and this is the way he gets everything away from the walls without having to move everything from place to place. I think it's strange, but it seems to work, and it's part of the reason he's so expensive. She's still talking on the telephone when I decide that my videocamera's got enough charge on it (with my new battery) that I can video what the place looks like. 2) A fragment about losing something and not being able to find it, forgotten details now. 3) I wake and Rita's waving an enormous bouquet of somewhat wilted flowers in my face so I can appreciate them: "He sent them to me to thank me for coming down to take care of him." I thank her for letting me see them, and then she offers me two "special pills," which I know to be some kind of psychedelic, in trade for one of my LSD tabs. I look into the box (very like my old thermometer case) and find I have just one Buspar-looking pill left, and I say I'm very torn, because I just have one left. I sit on the bed and think about it while she sits quietly, encouraging me to do the trade, and I wake before I can think of what to do, strangely hard.

WEDNESDAY, 9/7/05: 9:10AM: I'm living in a sort of fraternity house with many guys, though I'm still older than all of them, so I don't feel an equal sexually. Individuals have collections of new "papers" which can be animated: mouths open and close, arms wave, body-parts move. One set works as they're unfolded as triptychs, starting with the smallest folded inside the larger ones, then getting larger and larger until the biggest is the last to unfold and act. Another set is comprised of small objects that move when picked up: one is a tiny model of a house where people are having sex, and one man's penis drips a tiny drop that falls to the floor, and I wonder how it works and turn it around to view it from the top and see that there's a tiny reservoir that circulates the fluid internally from penis-tip to floor-receiver, though I wonder why it wouldn't get stuck in time. Others have pull-tabs, with labels like "Handle like you would your own cock," so when it's jerked on, the action starts. I debate suggesting everyone give a show of jerking off to entertain everyone else, figuring I'd do it if they did it, and it would be very sexy, but I'm too shy to make the offer BECAUSE I'm so much older than everyone else.

SATURDAY, 9/10/05: 8:45AM: I'm thinking of having breakfast in a large house with a large number of people, like a family, but it's already 11AM and most of them have eaten and are ready for some holiday- or weekend-like activity, and I don't have the slightest idea of what I'm going to have for breakfast, or even of what's available to have for breakfast. Then I have to pee, and go into a sort of combination kitchen-bathroom-laboratory where there's a large flat white porcelain sink into which I pee, but I've balanced on the edge of the sink a pile of old material that I'd taken out of a storage drawer to sort, and most of it slides into the pee-pool that hasn't run down the drain yet, and I get my old IBM accounting-equipment booklet, a plastic FORTRAN statement-format card, and other old IBM stuff wet with pee, which will probably dry eventually (though I worry about the 40-or-so page thicker booklet), but I think to myself "Maybe this is the time to really get RID of all this old FORTRAN stuff." Wake to feel I have to pee at 8:33, and get to stand by the toilet when I feel a small leakage from my ass, so I sit down quickly and find a small turd surrounded by brown mucus on the floor---sadly, there must be a first time for EVERYTHING?! Clean it us, shit, and wonder what the source of this brown mucus is: the wine last night with the soup? the pernil sandwich for "lunch" at 6PM yesterday? Some disease which will take me even before I have time to finish my enormous twelve-index Hold Rinehart and Winston job? Type this by 8:50AM, going to the MEDICAL and NOTEBOOK pages after this.

SUNDAY, 9/11/05: 6:40AM: Mom and I are trying to change the shape of a loose-leafed enormous green plant sitting in the middle of our dining room table. I think of putting string through some holes in the top of the vase in which it sits and wrapping the string around the sheaf of leaves from the bottom to the top, making it into a sort of beehive shape, into which I also try inserting a piece of cardboard to make it puff out into a more attractive silhouette. Mom tries to do something quick and dirty, which would put the tops of the leaves against the ceiling, and I say we should arrange it so we don't have to cut off any leaves. Mom seems to be in her forties and I'm much younger: 20s or 30s.

TUESDAY, 9/13/05: 7:46AM: I'm sitting at my desk at IBM filling out a form to be submitted with my manuscript of "Acid House" to a publisher. I try to think of anyone who's even READ it to put their names on the long list of references that make up one long section of the connected (which I realize it IS, so I can't take out pages or sections as I, at one point, thought I could) application, and when I despair of thinking of enough names, I look at a copy of the form I'd made out and see that I'd already penciled in two or three names, like Witt(genstein) Ramsey, in Berlin, that I'd met during one vacation to whom I'd given a copy to read, and also thought of the red-headed woman at the desk next to me at IBM who seems to be a combination of two women whose names I could think of only while sitting on the pot, later: the secretary at IBM (Claudia Bernstein) and Susan MacMahon's friend at one of my temp jobs long ago (Ginny Croft). I can't put down a couple of people (who never read it anyway) like Mom or Helen because they're now dead, or of others whose current address I have no idea of, like Larry Ball, who also never read it. Other sections have to be filled out that I'm not certain about, and I feel guilty about taking business-hour time to do this personal project. Wake and think about the continuation of the dream, which includes typing the word "serruptitiously" and doing a spell-check to find that it's really spelled "surreptitiously." Interesting how many current dreams I haphazardly continue to "produce" after I wake, lazing in my earplugs and facemask, thinking when I went to sleep to see if it's near enough to 8 hours that I can "legitimately" get up, or whether I'm slightly hung over, like today, from a too-much-wine Beard dinner last night, when I'll get up and take a few aspirin and lay back down to recover for a half-hour or so. Anyway, continue typing to 7:57AM to get to the bottom of the page, so I can print it out and crawl back into bed now.

THURSDAY, 9/15/05: 2:44AM: I'm staying in a luxury apartment in what looks to be a private house, and as I go up the final flight of stairs to my room, I look down to see Donald Trump in casual leather with his new wife, Melania, just out of sight, and he says to someone below to "Take good care of them," meaning us. I'm back to the room and my invisible roommate is playing with an umbrella, which I see quite clearly in the dream, and there's soft music in the background like the WQXR that I'd been listening to yesterday, like a Ravel "Pavane," and there are luxurious fabrics as promised gifts, and I asked how it was where we were going, and my invisible roommate assured me it was even more luxurious than this, and I stretched, I think both in bed and in my dream, to enjoy the sheer physicality of being alive, "clothed in flesh," and able to still enjoy every sensory pleasure with detailed appreciation. Other details forgotten, but the dark intensity of the sensuality remains now at 2:48AM.

FRIDAY, 9/16/05: 7:30AM: 1) I'm waiting by a seashore for a barge-like boat to leave for the next stage of a European trip, and it becomes later and later as I get enthralled watching the waves crash against the rocks from the vantage point of a window in the lower deck of this dark, cavernous cargo ship, and just as I begin to worry that I'm on the wrong ship and will MISS the correct transport, I go to the entrance to see the tour guide coming to fetch me to the real transport. 2) I'm sitting on a sandy shore watching the waves come in, and they come increasingly high onto the sandy beach, even reaching the side of a road well up from the usual beachhead, and a friend who'd been sitting on a towel gets up and walks backward from the advancing surf, then curses lightly as he sees his towel submerged in a newly-high tidemark. It rises even higher and we're all amazed by how much of the beach is invaded by the waves. 3) I'm in an office, like a talent agency, and people are concerned about how they should appear, but though this is the last dream, it's almost a waking dream and the details have vanished, as if I helped create them when I was waking.

WEDNESDAY, 9/21/05: [note jotted 12:30AM Thursday, from dream about 7AM]: I'm looking at an enormous illustrated catalog that has EVERYTHING in very modular form: curtains, shower curtains, basic pieces of furniture, cut-rate items like IKEA that cover absolutely everything in basic terms. Glossy pages with tiny illustrations with prices and code numbers. "You can even by a HAIRCUT," says a salesgirl snidely, and I sense my hair sticking up in morning-mess fashion. The pages seem very useful and exhaustive, and I won't need any other guide for shopping, so it seems very convenient and useful.

THURSDAY, 9/22/05: 7:10AM: I'm having a huge Halloween party in a very large room, which is now my apartment, surrounded with a lot of outside area in which many people have gathered, including Mom, who's blind, and I'm helping prepare trays of goodies like chocolate-covered doughnuts and iced cupcakes and brownies and fudge from boxes in a kind of storage-refrigerator unit, and I'm handing a tray which is very heavy with a few goodies left on it to a pair of sisters who are helping me. Then Bill Hyde comes in, and I'm amazed to see him (disregarding the fact that he's de---NO, he's not dead---unless he is!), and make sure to tell Mom, who's now sitting in the doorway with lots of wires with plugs in around her, that he's here and I'll bring him over. I'd also been watching a tape of the Canadian Ballet dancing to some musical piece that was on the radio at the same time, and I saw that I should keep the tape because another performance of theirs followed, and Bill then claimed it was HIS tape. Then someone with Shelley's voice called from the floor: "You can Kinkoize your IRS returns, too!" and I shouted back that I only had someone else do my taxes ONCE, and they charged me so much and cost me so much MORE in taxes that I never followed their advice and would never consult anyone else again. Finish typing this at 7:17AM and went above to type my note from yesterday's dream. Finish that at 7:22AM and come down here to finish off the page and print it.

MONDAY, 10/3/05: 9AM: I'm in a combination school and Village Playwrights class or group, and I have an idea to "compose" a play spontaneously by performing it myself in front of them, and come up with the idea of playing Adam, waking for the first time, yet here in this group, and how would I communicate with them. They stand around as I start, and I touch parts of my body, then look at them, then speak gibberish to them. They talk back to me, but I keep shaking my head, not understanding them at all. I want to avoid anything to do with "thinking" and wanted to go direct to "feeling," so I thought about it and reached toward someone's (a girl's) chest (right below her breasts) and "scooped out a handful" and reached to my chest and "scooped out a handful," and then it seems the "play in the dream" went into high gear. Later, a guy comes up to me and says that "I don't know if you knew it, but you did exactly seven plays in seven weeks: you missed some weeks and doubled up in other weeks, but it was exactly seven plays in seven weeks." I tear up in gratitude, because that's, unknowingly, exactly what I'd WANTED to do, and I thanked him for telling me that, since it made my whole point clear. Woke and thought of the dream as some sort of breakthrough, though the elation of the feeling rapidly dissipated.

TUESDAY, 10/4/05: 8:30AM: 1) I'm standing in a street looking at "my" house, which is built in two parts, the left a regular bungalow-type section with two rooms in front and two bedrooms in back, one story tall; the right a roundish brick castle-type building with a turret roof and pretensions. Strangely, the whole block of houses, in which this is about the middle, is under a yellow-flocked ceiling of enormous expanse, about six or eight feet above the highest roofs, most even higher than mine, the one next to mine rather pretentiously blocking out whatever view I would have had in that direction. Look around to see that a whole section of the town is under this roof, and it's not at all clear where the supports to this are, or where the lights come from, since the area seems to be lit with normal daylight. Then, without transition, I'm in a countryside that seems mainly comprised of farms surrounded by roads which are mainly doused in water by waterfalls falling onto one side or the other of each road, some covering the road with water a few feet deep, making it almost impossible to think of walking along these roads. I try going down a few lanes, but try to find someone to ask how to get to "the main part of town." My tour vehicle, whether boat or bus, leaves town in about 40 minutes (the time Vicki said yesterday it takes to get from her apartment to Caramoor), and I'm told in no uncertain terms that it'll take me about an hour to walk there, so I have to take a taxi, but I'm nowhere near a phone, and no one seems to have a cell-phone to help me call a taxi. Wake frustrated. 2) I've hired a local orgy-room for a "regular half-hour session," but a cute kid with great abs and a long cock has "organized" the half-hour around investigating different kinds of cunts, starting with two pairs of tiny doll-like women, who nevertheless seem to be alive, who are frozen in position with their legs spread apart with little wads of cotton stuck in their crotches which have to be pulled out with some difficulty to see their cunts, and then we rather rudely push at their labia to see how they vary: though the kid seems to think they're different, I can't really make out any differences between them. Then there are volunteers, both of which have actual cocks, but the first insists "I wouldn't let them cut it any more" and that she's actually a woman, and the second seems disappointed that we're not interested in her as a sex object because she has a somewhat larger cock. I try playing with the (now two) cute guys who are performing "the experiment" with me, but they don't react to me, and I leave to put on my clothes, aghast that my shorts are wet and covered with a kind of animal shit, but I put them on anyway to leave since I can't just CARRY them, and meet a well-dressed sophisticated woman, very pretty who seems to like me, and I hug her and say "No one inside was anything LIKE you at all," and she welcomes my hug with an enigmatic smile, and I don't even know if she knew what we were doing in there. Wake surprised that I'd slept to 8:30 and finish this at 8:40.

WEDNESDAY, 10/5/05: 10:10AM: After cuming with bidis (see NOTEREPL - 82) I put the light out at 3:22 and wake at 6:51 with the memory of two bidi-inspired dreams that seem to have (though they couldn't have) filled in the entire two hours and twenty-nine minutes: 1) I'm living in a fantastic futuristic world that reminds me of Stableford's "Fountains of Youth," in which sex can take place in different bodies and different environments strictly according to the mental wishes of the participants. A battle between good and evil seems part of the dream, too, as evil sex-partners must be protected against by constructing armored bodies, or sex-chambers, which can be changed by the attacks of the evil ones and bolstered by the defenses of the good ones. Much more explicit sex encounters and escalating dangers and rebuffs occurred in the dream, but I've forgotten the details now. 2) Since the first dream took place in an atmosphere of repression and sinfulness, I almost waking-dreamed a sequel in which sex between brothers was condoned, and I played (as in a movie or TV show) an older brother who starts with a much younger, immature brother who's still willing to be played with, but as the dream goes on, the younger brother develops into a sexy, willing partner who echoes my desires for voyeuristic sex to the point of inviting me to cuddle with him and his partner in a warm bed after they've both had exhausting sex, but are willing to let me participate in their after-sex cuddlings and fondlings. Wake amazed at the seeming length and detail of both dreams, the first bidi-inspired detailed phantasmagoria in a long time, and note that at 6:53AM I had the thoughts: 1) We should have been consenting sexy TWINS, and at 6:55AM the even-more-improved thought: 2) We should be immortal so that we can enjoy the sexiness of our youth FOREVER. Pee and try to get back to sleep, but at 6:59 make the additional note that at some point in 1), which also involved women in some way, since in this fantasy world everyone had the capability of acting bisexually, I looked over a riverbank encrusted with the dried branches of trees that seemed in some way to symbolize a sterile fruitless life and had the striking thought: We should have had CHILDREN to help lengthen the stretches of future bliss. Up at 9:42AM TIRED!!

THURSDAY, 10/6/05: 7:55AM: 1) I'm on an IBM trip upstate, staying in a motel, and we're leaving this morning for the train to back down to Manhattan, and I pack a very large suitcase that's mostly some piece of equipment, just putting in a few articles of clothing around it and having lots of room to spare, but for some reason I'm late getting out, and everyone has left for the station already, and I'm still packing and worry that I might miss the train. 2) My female boss has given me a voucher number to type on a pink slip (which she also gives me) for some kind of shipping label due to be sent out tomorrow, but the carbon isn't quite working on the copy of the slip, or my typewriter ribbon isn't working, and the last four numbers just refuse to come out, though I put it back and try again and again, the last two numbers just don't print, and I'm thinking I can write it by hand, or maybe get another slip, but then (just as with my current HRW indexing project) my desk is LOADED with papers and small slips of notes and cards from local businesses in great unsorted packs, and I suddenly can't find the note on which I'd written down the number I have to type, and everyone's leaving for the day again and I push a huge stack of cards and papers to one side of my desk so that I'll HAVE to sort through them the first thing I get back to work on Monday morning, and then go to the other side of the table that I'm using for my desk, and push ANOTHER huge stack of cards and papers to the far side of the table, which I'll just agglomerate with the stack already there, and hope to sort through everything before most people come into work Monday morning and have the slip with the billing number on it, and I'm hoping no one notices that I'm having such troubles, and I'm determined to handle everything competently, since I seem to be quite young in the dream, and new in the business, and have to do everything perfectly to make a good impression in my first few days on the job. Wake and get up to type this page before I forget any more details, finishing now at 8:02AM, cold in the morning.

TUESDAY, 10/11/05: 8:45AM: At 7:09AM, having dozed on and off since 5:30AM, thinking I haven't slept, I have a short vivid dream of four of us sitting at a table in a coffee shop, two younger punks sitting across from me and Dennis, and one of them says "Here we sit---" and Dennis picks it up: "Four tall, incredibly handsome---" and one of them crudely interrupts with: "And a short, skinny guy who looks like a kid." Dennis looks toward me, rolls his eyes upward, and pointedly scratches the side of his nose with the back of his thumb, saying in his shorthand, with his itch: "Bitch!" I wake and jot note.

WEDNESDAY, 10/12/05: 8:05AM: 1) Earlier, I'm staying in a palatial house as the guest of someone like a handsomer Don Maloof, and he's proposing that we go to the opera (like Denise in Texas Monday night?), and I think he's volunteering to pay for my ticket, but it's not so clear whether he's also going to pay for a gourmet dinner in a very expensive restaurant beforehand, but I'm glad I know him and that he feels generous toward me. Other details forgotten. 2) Just before I wake, I'm packing in Mom's house, which is nothing like 1221 Dietz, to return to NYC, and think distinctly: "I'll have to note in my journal that I spent a blissful two hours, before leaving, packing very meticulously so that I'll have my travel items wonderfully in place for the next five or six trips." Rather like sorting out my pile of "things to do" which is on my list of five things to do today (beside indexing when the Federal Express package arrives from Texas), I'm taking things out of a "miscellaneous" bag and sorting them into very specific smaller bags which identify their use and purpose. Take a supply of very long knives, thinking that I've hardly used any of them in the course of my recent trip, and why don't I just reduce the number to ONE to take on future trips. Sort through a dop kit and put many items into a bag, and then notice a tiny yellow blob at the lower corner of a window nearby, and think THAT'S where my old spare set of earplugs went, and go into the enclosed porch outside and reach through a screen where I can push the window open and reach around the side and pick off the yellow blob which seems to have weathered a season outside, and it's soft and mushy like a chicken liver (which Ken wanted with the tasting menu at Felidia last night), and I wash it and clean off the dirt and extract a small plastic representation of a tank or a car, which image may come from a Hungarian stamp from the 60s, and put that somewhere else. Think that I don't have to leave until 1PM and I can continue this sorting process to completion, and then notice that Mom has typed up a number of labels for light switches and control buttons and cabinet shelves onto a sheet of paper and has been cutting them out and scotch-taping them to the walls and cabinets, and I idly think "Oh, she's preparing the apartment for rental to weekend guests"---which of course she never did---"and these will help them know which switch controls which light, where to put things for ease of remembering where they are, and other useful purposes," and am rather surprised to find her doing that, but not so much that I'd bring it up with her. Wake at 8:01 and pee and transcribe these to 8:15AM, still somewhat ready for bed after the full dinner, very drunk-feeling though we just shared one bottle of wine for $49 and a glass of the same wine for $14 each after that, much less than I'd drink at a typical Beard dinner. But the $193 bill ranks 17 on my $$$ list.

THURSDAY, 10/13/05: 1:51AM: I DREAM of doing HRW-like work on indexing, coming to a bold-faced paragraph that I hadn't done before, with now idea how to index it, and I think that the best solution might be just to put in the whole sentence, as has been done a couple of times when I asked an editor who marked a chapter what she wanted me to do with the marking. Went to bed at 11:30 and took a long time to get to sleep, because after being awake from 2-2:45, I took an Ambien at 3:05AM, when it was clear that Actualism wasn't going to put me to sleep, and I'd tried one round of counting backwards from 100 which didn't seem to be doing it either, obsessing about the unfairness of saddling me with new terms to "always index" just four business days from my first rushed due-date.

FRIDAY, 10/14/05: 10:17AM: Woke at 8:11AM with two dreams: 1) Mildred and I are talking about a building that seems to be a combination of Time-Warner and the old Paramount Tower that's now the Trump Tower: she says I once told her that the building had three main occupiers, and now I tell her that the lobby has only one company occupying it, and she blows up and says that I told her that it was THREE companies, and now I'm telling her its only ONE company, and she can't stand talking to me and stalks off leaving me behind with a gaping expression on my face. 2) I'm in the lobby of maybe the same building, but all the doors seem to be open and an enormous wind (maybe like the wind with the rain last night coming out of the theater) blows through it so everyone's hair is swept around dramatically as they rush across the lobby. For whatever reason, I have to change clothes, and tell Charles to try to protect my body from the view of the other passersby, and he gets an exasperated expression on his face but tries to do so. I take my clothes out of my shoulder bag and smell my new socks, which smell as bad as my old socks, but I try to change clothes while the wind's blowing and wake before I can get much actually accomplished.

SATURDAY, 10/15/05: 6:40AM: John and I are visiting a church, and I'm surprised to see the pews filling with people, and then I remember that it's a Holy Day, and tell John that I always hated coming to church for those, since it was always in addition to the Sunday obligation. We want to visit the top floor, but there's a new rule that two people from the same group can't be up there at the same time, and as I pass a priest in the last aisle, who barely pulls in his feet so that I can pass, he laconically remarks, "You can't go up until your friend is on his way down." I laconically agree. John goes up easily, but I have to ask two guys standing on the top steps to lift me onto the narrow ledge about 4 feet above me by grabbing onto my right leg and boosting me up. They do so and I get up with surprisingly little trouble. Many people wander around the floor, and John greets me by giving me a small wad of ones, saying he'd owed me that "for drinking water and other little things," and I thanked him, saying I was glad to have the added money, and he made some remark about how happy HE would be to have added money too. Can't think what it was (nothing in the dream) we wanted to see up there, and we stayed quite a while before anyone started to say anything about how one of us would have to get down soon. Another earlier dream may have been obliquely about sex, since from about 3:30 to 6 I vaguely thought about summoning up sexual energy from others around me jerking off at that time but I dozed on and off and never even BEGAN to harden. 8AM: Strange segment about unpacking a large peanut-shaped gift-package, finding candies or bonbons inside the larger bottom one, then smaller items in the next-smaller one, then smaller protuberances above that promise tinier objects. Other details surrounding that now forgotten as I type 12:30AM Sunday.

SUNDAY, 10/16/05: 8:55AM: I've gone into a classroom but there are no more seats, so I stand in the back along with five or six others, but then the class goes into a large vehicle, larger than a car but smaller than a bus, for a kind of history tour of the upper West Side of Manhattan, where the teacher points out where old streets have been replaced by large apartment blocks or enormous factories. He talks of Whitman Street, where some old mansion used to be, and drives into a factory parking lot where we get out and go into a huge industrial room, and as we look north a curtain is being parted and an even more gargantuan room is revealed, like a quadruple-size basketball court, and everyone gasps in amazement that there's such a volume of enclosed space in a part of Manhattan that looks impossibly crowded for such a luxurious expanse. Some hint of favoritism: like the pupils in this particular vehicle are prized more than any others by the teacher; and some hint of sexuality: like the closeness of the bodies in the back of the car or the significant looks exchanged by the guys standing in the back of the class, but I wake with a hard-on for the first time in a week and type this to 8:59AM and think to jerk off.

MONDAY, 10/17/05: Wake with a jolt at 5:25AM, certain that I heard a BANG, but it may have been a dream, or something unidentifiable in the building.

TUESDAY, 10/18/05: 5:20AM: I'm influenced by a TV producer to CONSIDER a relationship with an attractive young woman though I see ALL kinds of problems, but it's vaguely OK, for life is more like a TV sitcom than actual reality.

WEDNESDAY, 10/19/05: 7:40AM: It's intermission at some lavish performance, and I go down to the johns to find a line down a stairway for a sort of unisex john (men and women on the same line), so I try to find a place in a lobby-like area to pee, but I'm just about to let go under a shelf on a mirrored wall when I see that the opening is really BELOW me and everyone will be able to see me peeing, so I decide to wait on line as the return-to-seats bell sounds, and it goes quickly, except I experience a flash of anger when an older couple who have been sitting in the front of a nearby pew leap into the line, but then I quiet myself by thinking they'd BEEN on the line and were merely sitting while their turn came up. Down a few stairs and the first room seems to be for shitting: people are swishing water around their own feces on the floor a few feet out from the three walls of the room, and I think it's a strange way to do it, and the smell should be awful but I don't smell anything, and see men peeing against a wall so I do the same thing without actually dreaming about the peeing, then I'm outside, mollified to see that the lights haven't gone down yet in the distant stadium where I can see people sitting in the upper levels far away, people's heads mere dots of color, and somehow find myself on the roof of a temple-like building with Tibetan overtones, ducking under an alien broad-branched tree with fan-like leaves, thinking "If I lived up here, it would be a glorious place to live," and look at the view, the impending performance almost forgotten. Frustration dream with rather little frustration.

FRIDAY, 10/21/05: 8:42AM: Two dreams, one at 1:30 too lazy to record, now forgotten, one about 5:30, only remember the end fragment of hoping some cute kid, rather like Emmett on "Queer as Folk" but cuter, will "stay longer and he might be persuaded to take some more of his clothes off," and, I hope, linger even for sex, but he gathers his stuff and says he's leaving, to my sorrow.

SUNDAY, 10/23/05: 7AM: I'm sitting in the front row of a balcony at a Paul Taylor Dance Company performance, the premiere of a new piece involving a very athletic couple dressed in black tights. I lean over and look down at the two as they take their final acclamation from the audience, and then without transition I'm sitting in the second row of the orchestra, where a sexy sailor with a large white crotch is being cradled by a lascivious woman who outlines his cock and prepares to suck him off right during the performance, but I console myself with the fact that the choreographer and probably most of the company is gay, as hopefully is most of the audience, so no one's going to REALLY mind some forward woman taking her pleasure in the front row during a performance. Wake and jot a note, forgetting a dream that had come hours before.

FRIDAY, 10/28/05: 8:17AM: Type dream, then get keyboard-disconnect problem noted in COMPCHRO, now type dream AGAIN at 8:33AM: Went to bed at 11PM, woke at 5:55AM to pee, thinking I wouldn't go back to sleep, but wake at 8:05 with two dreams: 1) I'm staying in some old-folks apartment, rather like the supers at 320 E. 70th Street, and I know to look in the dim entryway, rather like Spartacus's at 50 Orange Street, the closet on the right on entering has his janitorial equipment, and inside the right doorjamb is a nail with his keys, tied together with rough cord that I can FEEL in my hands in the dream, and I open the door opposite but can't find what I need, so I put the keys back on the nail and creep past the kitchen, next in line, hoping he didn't see or hear me. 2) I'm staying in a large, maybe Upper West Side, apartment of a family with so many rooms that I have my own private bathroom, but my bedroom had been one of the older boy's, and his desktop has pieces of an old war-game or toy-soldier setup on the left, which I think to put away, but I don't really need the space and wouldn't know where to store the stuff anyway. On the right are some of his books and possessions that he's just put down, and I don't want to disturb those either. Go into the bathroom and either a younger daughter or a maid is cleaning up, and I fantasize that she has sexual designs on me, so I don't do what I was going to do and leave, thinking that she's looking at my ass as I leave. Back in the bedroom I put open the top desk drawer to see pages from a textbook like I'm indexing for HRW, and some stamps from somewhere like Denmark, and I wonder if I have them, and think I do, but then notice some which are commemorating Katrina and this year's flood damage, and know I couldn't possibly have those, and I don't recall if it was BEFORE or AFTER the dream that I thought I could look for used copies of whatever year's Scott's catalog completes the---is it North Vietnam?---last country I have to catalog on Amazon or other Internet book services so that I wouldn't have to constantly go to the library to update my collection, and could begin the endless task of transferring all my collection data from the 1973, or whatever, catalogs to THOSE. Finally finish this at 8:45, delayed by keyboard-plug problems!

SUNDAY, 10/30/05: 7:50AM: Bed WAY early at 10PM old time, 9PM new time, and have two dreams: 1) I'm in some strange shower-room with no toilet, and as I'm drying myself I express two soft plum-sized turds which I don't know what to do with, but I see large holes in the drain and drop them through, then rinse my fingers off in the shower-spray and continue drying myself. 2) I'm sitting in the midst of an Amish-like group watching a movie about an Amish-like group, and at one point a man behind me puts his hand on my shoulder in a comradely way, but his wife whispers to him that I'm not part of their group. I think I should be out hiking on this glorious day, but then comfort myself with the thought that I DID walk a lot this morning, and now I'm sitting and resting to walk some more this afternoon. Then I look to the side and there's an old mountain man with his two seemingly pet otters, who slide across the paths and slither through the bushes and bark almost like trained seals, and I think this is a wonderful chance encounter with wildlife for me on this hike. Other sections connected with my travels on that day are now forgotten at 7:55AM.

MONDAY, 10/31/05: 6:25AM: I'm staying in a house owned by an older, vaguely Scandinavian gay guy (who speaks in a low laconic drawl which reminds me of someone specific, but I can't think who), and I want to look at some porno that he may have, and he points to a corner of the bookcase by his desk, where I know some racy books had been, but he confesses that he doesn't have much, and takes down a book that has a tiny photograph of two naked men taken apparently unawares through some white columns, that really doesn't show anything, and for some reason I feel impelled to add, "But it takes me so long to jerk off anyway, since I'm taking Proscar which decreases libido," and they (he has another friend, maybe a lover, somewhat younger, visiting, who remains vague in the dream) mildly agree, saying "Yes, that is a problem," without any condemnation or disapproval. Not much. Back to bed.

SUNDAY, 11/27/05: 8:30AM: Two fragments: 1) I'm looking for a place to store two long back-braces that will support my decaying spine, and find a place in a storage closet that will just accommodate their height and narrowness. 2) I'm leaving a building in the Village with Charles and see a group of old people looking down at something huddled in the left corner of the doorway. Charles says, "Oh, I know what it is," and it's a dying dog who comes out and grabs my foot with the desperation of the dying, so that I have to use my hands gingerly to pry his chin and paws from my foot as he wimpers and finally lets my leg go.

FRIDAY, 12/2/05: 5:50AM: 1) I can't get to a john but feel loose shit sizzling down my inner leg, and when I do get to a john, I'm grateful that the powerful flush, like mine, easily gets rid of the wads of soiled toilet paper that I need to get rid of. 2) I'm watching a very attractive gay guy lying on his back, straddled by an older woman worshipping his lovely body, and think I might be able to buy some of his time too. Somehow I'm given a tiny doll, dressed all in white, with a delicate gold chain around her neck, the tiniest possible diamond earrings both in her ears and at various termination points on her dress at the tops and bottoms of hems, and I ask the woman how I could possibly evaluate such a treasure, as I hold it cupped in my hands where it nestles perfectly. She suggests a shop at Ninth Avenue and 22nd Street, which I note down to take it to. Then without transition I'm riding in a car with someone masculine and sexy, like the young Paul C., who asserts that he CAN be exclusive, "When someone pays me enough to be faithful to him alone for one or two evenings, I can be his without seeing anyone else." Type at 8:20AM.

SATURDAY, 12/3/05: 7:25AM: Notes at 6AM: 1) I'm standing at the top of an enormous sea-hole into the bottom of which water flows in and out at an incredible, but unpredictable rate, and I can hear the voices of two women who have been swimming here for a long time, far below, saying how wonderful it is to ride the incoming and outgoing rushes of water, but I think that the sides of the hole are not-so-smooth rocks that must cut deeply if your body is thrown against them by the currents and random eddies of the huge volumes of water raising and lowering the level in the blowhole. 2) I'm vacationing in some place like Tahiti where many small, near islands give almost unlimited possibilities of activities, yet I've canvassed most of them and wonder how to spend the next seven days here, though it might just be idyllic if simply relaxed into. 3) More or less connected with the previous fragment, I'm trying to set up a schedule (maybe like I'm concerned with Edgardo's and Marina's itineraries when they're here for a now daunting TEN days) for swimming and snorkeling (or maybe it's knowing Shelley's taking the same Norwegian cruise in December that Fred and I are taking in February, and I've asked her to keep track of the places we shouldn't miss and those we should avoid) along different coasts at different times of day and tide, and it all seems very complicated and somewhat arbitrary. Finish transcribing notes at 7:30AM.

MONDAY, 12/5/05: 7:45AM: I'm breaking in a new employee who'll be doing the same job I'm doing in what seems to be a magazine office, and we're looking for a place for submissions for a contest to be collected, and I recognize that my anonymous submission is prominently displayed on my desk, written in black felt-tip on the top two lines of an unlined sheet of paper, signed by a pseudonym, but I still fear that, since it's on my desk, it will somehow be identified with me. I open a closet behind my desk which had been a clothes closet for---and I can't think of my office partner's name for the moment, but when I open his side of the storage closet it contains only overflow from my side. Across the room, high on the wall against which her desk sits, is a kind of medicine cabinet which is hardly accessible with her desk right there, but at the wall next to both of us is a kind of standing desk which has had its large square working area ripped off the top, and its freshly painted brown bulk sits unsteadily on a warped floor, and I say, with amazement, that it used to be MY desk, as I gingerly rock it back and forth on its unsteady legs, but I guess a side of it could be used for a tray for the submissions, and she's eager to get on with it (maybe I'm thinking of Tica's taking over Denise's job with very little background for the specific indexing work she's supposed to get from me) and I'm slightly embarrassed to be showing her these rudimentary areas which are really all mine and none of hers. Dream came after starting Actualism but then dozing off when I woke about 6:30, having gone to bed at 11:22PM and sleeping easily, and finish typing this at 7:55AM, ready for day.

SUNDAY, 12/11/05: 9:45AM: At 4AM I make this note: I'm walking in a Central American country, not quite knowing where I am, and I feel a large turd making its way out of my anus and into my shorts, and I feel acutely uncomfortable, but bizarrely I SPIT IT OUT, quite unnoticed in the crowd, and it disappears from my consciousness, except in the dream. Somewhat later I'm still walking, enormous vistas of countryside showing how far I have yet to go before getting to my hotel to join the group which is supposed to fly, sometime today, to our next stop in the country of Panama, and I realize I have no address of a hotel to give to a taxi (of which there aren't any, anyway), no real idea what part of the city I'm in or heading toward, except that on the way out I recognize a vast ruined amphitheater which I seem to see in the distance, which gives me some encouragement, but I wake from this typically frustrating dream before I get anywhere at all.

MONDAY, 12/12/05: 8:55AM: Note from 6:20AM: 1) I'm in a play in a little theater like the old Thalia, as a fighter who loses his last fight, and I leave the stage and walk up the aisle through the audience, who looks at me with great curiosity. Riding in a car with the playwright, afterwards, I ask him if that last scene (walking away after a little dialogue on the stage) had been recently added, and he answers with a somewhat cryptic "It's only done out of season," and I answer "I guess I saw it IN season the last time, since the scene wasn't there then." 2) Then the driver of the car (the playwright is no longer in the car) says "He slipped his bookstore credit card under the door yesterday," which seems to imply to both of us that he's either minorly abandoning one of his obsessions, or he's getting ready to move or commit suicide, which causes some concern: "He's giving up?" I ask. 3) Looking out the back window as we drove along what could have been the West Side Highway, I noticed an older two-engined military or navy plane flying quite low with smoke coming out of both engines (maybe from watching the National Geographic special about helicopters after midnight this morning), but I'd turned my attention from it for the conversation, but then the driver notes "The plane crashed," and I look to see wreckage along the highway rather like the photo in the Times of the plane that slid off the runway in snow and killed a kid in a car on an adjoining highway, and I say "If you don't mind, I wouldn't mind going back down and looking at the scene," and as we pause at the top of a hill heading in that direction, I guess he's accede to my wish. Finish typing note at 9AM. Then I note that, as I woke, or what woke me, seemed like four sharp raps from my bedroom window, and I lay awake awhile wondering if it could have been someone knocking at my hall door to warn of some fire in the building, but I don't get up to check, and then next morning there's no evidence of anything wrong.

TUESDAY, 12/13/05: 12:40AM note typed 8:57AM: I've just had dinner in a two-level house, rather like the Yauchs on State Street, and shit a VERY gummy yellow shit (second shit-dream in three days?) with HUGE gobs on a number of toilet-paper wipes that has me worried about stains on the tail of my white shirt and on the toilet-seat, and I'm eager to finish in the bathroom, but there seems to be another man in an adjoining john, so I don't feel so pressured to finish. I distinctly think "Maybe I shouldn't take the last three cold pills in my prescription, if it causes THIS." Finish typing at 9AM.

FRIDAY, 12/16/05: 8:20AM: 1) At 1:11AM, my first pee, a vague memory of getting some kind of gold object which gradually became larger and larger until it looked like a platform on which to rest two wires, like the piece I expect to find at Radio Shack that would hold the leads to the Sylvania socket I'm trying to fit into my Kodak Carousel projector. 2) At 6AM I'm waiting in a dark room for a room-by-room tour of a large house to take place: I'm early and the guide isn't there yet. Move from one darkened room to another, thinking I'd better not turn on any lights by myself, and then see a Gladys-Garabedian-type sitting reading in a chair lit by a lamp behind her, and I turn to see a large hallway that I joke "is a room in itself, does it have its own guide?" Then go into a large central area where someone seems to be giving an overall talk about the entire second floor, and I see that the audience is at tables, eating what seems to be a complimentary breakfast, and I'm sorry I didn't find this earlier, but still think there might be time to grab a snack before the regular tour starts, or before I'd miss too much of the tour. The "side area" reminds me of the view of Opaline Cafe, upstairs from the Dahesh, yesterday, when I came out of the john to rejoin Charles after lunch.

TUESDAY, 12/20/05: 8:55AM: I'm standing at a mirror, maybe at the Beard, to check how I look, and see a long black-and-white hair extending from my lower left earlobe. Pluck it with surprising ease and look at it to see that it's comprised of a surprisingly large number of hairs, some totally black, and I'm amazed that it didn't leave a bleeding spot on my lobe.

SUNDAY, 12/25/05: 5:40AM: Took a sleeping pill at 11PM to get to sleep two hours earlier than last night to get myself more on Edgardo's Italian sleeping time to meld with their going to bed early the first few nights of their jet-lag here, and woke with a dream at 5:35AM of touring in Japan, visiting someone like Susie Mead who works in an office, but is taking two days off to go to some kind of meeting, (more like a non-job entertainment that I'm surprised she has the liberty to attend, but she brushes it off as being normal) as I'm in an office learning a new kind of job, and I have many ideas that an American would have but that the Japanese, being very traditional, would not likely have. I keep looking at a tooth-like mountain sharply etched in black and white against a blue sky and ask what those white lines in the slanting crater of the former volcano would be, and she says that it's a table-tennis club. Expensive? Four hundred dollars a year to join. If I had control of a place like that, I'd build a fabulous casino, nightclub, and playground with that great view over the city, and she laughed and said that was just the kind of ideas the Japanese needed from someone like me. I felt good that I had a chance to express my ideas and got the feeling it was possible for me to become a kind of entrepreneur of my "wild" ideas. 7:30AM: Another frustration dream that I MEANT to record when I got up, but by now (10:55AM) I've forgotten everything but that I HAD it: trying to get somewhere---AH, up a hill to the "table-tennis" club, walking, passing under huge blimp-like rides that gave one a VIEW of the hilltop, but I wanted to GET there (having seem for an instant a "flying saucer" on the horizon that turned into a cloud), pushing past people lining up for the narrow stairways on the waiting lines to the rides, totally frustrated at not being able to get there when I WANT to get there.

SATURDAY, 12/31/05: 8:20AM: 1) 1:15AM: A HORRID dream of "bad man" wanting to TORTURE and TORMENT me, I scream "Police!" with no real hope of anyone hearing or helping, and I BITE and SCRATCH and MUTILATE him to make him STOP, feeling very bad to be doing this, but fearing for my safety. Probably connected with my guilt for a) making fun of Edgardo's being cold on Montague Street, and b) making fun of Edgardo's refusal to go onto the pier at Coney Island. 2) 6AM: I'm watching a movie in a tiny theater like the Thalia with an ENORMOUS screen, and can't find a good seat on the side because the screen is terribly distorted by the angle, and the front is just too close. But then the screen starts flapping in the wind and it turns out it's open in the back, and they try to stabilize the flapping screen but then a team of Chinese (I recall the theater is owned by Chinese) comes out with construction materials and they open up a whole new expanded area in the front with clean new seats, and I figure we'll have a much better view of the movie now. Edgardo now comes at 8:25AM and says we should go out to the car so we don't get a ticket, and start early for our day in Dia Beacon before joining Ken at Bouley for New Year's Eve dinner at 6PM.