DREAMS of 2007 1 of 2
TUESDAY, 1/2/07: 10:03AM: 1) Fragment remembered about trying to get somewhere, some classic dream, maybe IBM-connected, that I think I ought to tell Sharon about tomorrow when I wake from it, but mostly forgotten now. 2) Something else totally forgotten, but I now remember thinking then that I should remember it. 3) Lying in bed in a room very like my bedroom at 1221 Dietz with Pope Hill (back from the dead) lying to my left trying to jerk off. I don't even feel in the least bit sexy, though I'd like to accommodate his feelings, but the room is also filled with other people who try to ignore us but who obviously can see us. Needless to say, very mixed feelings about these dreams, happy that I at least had the tenacity to sit down and type out as much as I could remember.
THURSDAY, 1/4/07: 1) 2:45AM: Stacks of stamps have been pasted under other stamps, and I try to save those on top, but I can rip up a few and the tiny stacks underneath have values of $3.25 and the like, and I'm happy I looked at this collection. Also something about ticket stubs where, when you add two numbers, I'm in like the 54th seat in the 87th row to see someone famous boxing---or singing. 2) 5:40AM: This time the stamps in the dream are MINT, some in glassine envelopes with 2-4 in a set, all from a certain period, like 1976-1977, or 1981-1982, and I figure I'll just have to get another stock book and fill it with these. Meanwhile I'm looking for attached pairs, sifting through the mass of stamps and envelopes, marveling at the quantity AND quality of stamps, and wake to realize that the guy from Mystic should be calling around now, or I'll call him to hopefully schedule a time before restaurant week starts to interrupt my days.
FRIDAY, 1/5/07: 9:30AM: Most details forgotten, but one of the two dreams involved someone doing a job like indexing that required the clerk to tally responses or citations into an enormous database which was more like a piece of jewelry than a list or a computer program, and I had to accept the fact that he would be working on it for a very long time without obvious progress.
SATURDAY, 1/6/07: 6:09AM: I see to be flying low in a plane over a river which might be connected with Niagara Falls, since a swimmer (or maybe 2) in the river is being swept toward what looks to be the deepening funnel of a whirlpool in the far-left distance, and when we fly closer, to see over the edge of the rim of the whirlpool: it's become enormously deep incredibly quickly, going down to a huge depth, and the swimmer, falling only under the acceleration of gravity, can't fall as fast as the bottom of the whirlpool, which has almost become a black hole, is plummeting below him, being sucked down by a force stronger than gravity, so he's SUSPENDED in the funnel, and I feel terribly sorry for him. 2) 8:55AM: (don't remember, can only transcribe note as clearly as I can make it out) a) boat self-propelled on steam in amorant dance, b) papers with codes which indicate scores 2 to 3000+, which have to be filled out in a certain way, but since I'm typing Sunday evening I've completely forgotten what the note means.
SUNDAY, 1/7/07: 4:30AM: I'm taking notes, recording, a complex SUBWAY screw-up which is as complicated and ramified as my FINANCIAL mess after 12/3/06.
THURSDAY, 1/11/07: 6:13AM: I'm riding in a car that's being driven through remote parts of Britain, passing through a lot of abandoned towns: two- and three-story brick houses and stores with glassless windows, some windows and doors boarded up, some hanging open, and I remark that this isn't the usual tour of Britain. Maybe connected was a later fragment of a parade of cars coming north on Hicks Street and turning right onto Pierrepont Street, with one lone car waiting, going south on Hicks, for the traffic to let him through.
FRIDAY, 1/12/07: 6:40AM: 1) I've constructed a sort of banner-kite: multiple panels of light fabric, maybe three sections of three attached panels that formed three pennoncels (if that's the word for a broad floaty streamer) so light that, with the proper speed and rate of descent, it would FLOAT behind me as I went down a particular spiral staircase, followed by a line of spectators who could see my accomplishment from above and behind if it worked well. I tried a few sample descents, and finally seemed to get it right and in an ecstasy of accomplishment went down the stairs with the banner-kite perfectly afloat behind me---but few seemed to view it, so I wanted to do it again, and this time it was only periodically successful, good for a float for maybe four or five steps, but then it came to rest on a step behind me, refusing to complete the entire circuit of stairs. 2) In a kind of Actualism/Aureon/Esalen setting of a seeking group, I watched the central performance of the session: a kind of firework display clearly influenced by the brief shots of Philippine young men with their bamboo tubes filled with fireworks that they held in their hands until the ultimate explosion, which could burn them dangerously, and someone next to me was chosen and they carried it off so well I could only envy them, and fantasized that I'd be chosen next, but to my amazement a DOG was chosen, who seemed only slightly to understand what it was to do, and somehow I was appointed its adjunct, not to bear the fireworks myself, but to assist it in its display, because it was a dog who could precisely represent a human, and I was to abet in some way I didn't quite understand, and I was annoyed because the group wouldn't realize that I HAD been singled out, but my role was not as prominent as I would have wished it to be. A sheet of dream for Sharon? 3) 9:05AM: I'm walking upstairs at a place more like 167 Hicks than any other, and pass Dror coming in, thinking how handsome he looks with his dark eyebrows (and somehow in the dream I look in the mirror at MY eyebrows and they're thicker and blacker and make me look great!), and he says "Remember those weights I lent you (for something or other); I had to get them back, OK?" And I said it was OK, but it turns out he videotaped my apartment while he was showing his friend's video-movie: "Really fantastic; really great," he enthused. I look at the videotape and remark that my apartment never looked this great: my small lights atop the mirrored bookcases are now revolving nightclub lights, there's a lot more COLOR in my apartment, and it seems much bigger than in real life. I think I should turn on those lights more often. Finish transcribing at 9:22AM.
SUNDAY, 1/14/07: 8:12AM: 1) 3:15AM: I'm in the garden of a large estate, rather like the back garden at the Carnegie-Mellon Museum, with a family group that includes the mistress of the estate. It starts to rain, and there are puddles of water that submerge large clumps of very green grass, so green it might be phony, but she insists that she has to get out the power lawnmower because the grass must be cut while it's raining. Later, there are plowed columns for rows of corn to be planted. 2) 6:42AM: I'm in a bathroom like 167 Hicks, where Mom has just had a bath, leaving a mess, and I get a toilet brush and start cleaning the moldy wallpaper, taking swatches off a wall-top, and the ring in the tub, also changing a light bulb broken in its socket, and end walking down dark streets toward the Empire gay bar which is still dark and closed. Weird!
MONDAY, 1/15/07: 8:30AM: 1) 1:04AM: I'm passing a woman, maybe at a Beard reception, and think I know her: "Margery?" "Yes, how did you know?" "Shafer?" "No, but I think I know you anyway." 2) 4:15AM: A Chinese type like Cissy Wong presents me with a scrap of paper of which she's diagramed what she wants me to program: x/y for a, b, and c, which are explained in a one-word column below, like cost, price, value; and x/z for three more values, like location, date, and volume, but she's said nothing about what the captions on the output will be, whether the values come before or after the captions, and (I think now, after the dream) how the values are going to be read in in the first place. 3) 8:05: (This literally in a few minutes' nap after starting but not finishing Actualism) I've gotten out of the shower in the gym to face someone I'd seen many times before, who'd seemed alternately homophobic and appealing, and now he's at his height of appeal, seemingly coming on to me, and I'm deciding whether to follow up on it, knowing I have a slight erection, but the area is getting crowded and I want to move away with my gym bag, but the first one I pick up belongs to someone else, so I move off to the side and recognize my bag not only with my shoes but with papers that I'd packed inside after a trip to the theater, or New Jersey, or somewhere overnight, but I'm confused about my towel, getting out a blue one that seems too big to be mine, but it's clearly my bag, so I'm clearly confused, and anyone seductive has totally vanished.
TUESDAY, 1/16/07: 7:20AM: I'm at an unpleasant party with people showing off their wealth, with an unappetizing raw-steak-on-a-skewer among lettuce-bedded appetizers. The husband is bitter about "hosting us all later in Fiji."
WEDNESDAY, 1/17/07: 8:07AM: Fragments of erotic dreams: 1) someone with very large white thighs shows promise, 2) someone else is playing with his engorged cock, and I wake both times with the vaguest erotic tinglings.
THURSDAY, 1/18/07: 5:55AM: I hear a whisper from behind on a train car (typed this AFTER I typed Friday, the next day, and hadn't remembered this was the SECOND train-car dream!) "Did you know the nuns get $120,000 to clear the winners of the horse races that take in $200,000?"
FRIDAY, 1/19/07: 7:47AM: I'm sitting on what could be the LIRR, with my left arm, rather awkwardly, placed over the seat-top to my left, and someone in the seat behind that reaches out and begins gently caressing my hand. I respond in as neutral a way as I can, not knowing what he looks like, and the fellow facing me at eleven o'clock, who'd been trying to attract my attention, says "You seem to be preoccupied. He's not bad, either." Encouraged by that, I look around briefly and see a middle-aged man with a rather ordinary face in a dark suit, and my arm is beginning to tire stretched up and to my left, so I move it down between the seats, angling my shoulder so it's comfortable, and feel him renewing the sensual pressures on the ends and edges of my hand. Nice feeling.
SATURDAY, 1/20/07: 6:22AM: I'm attending some vast celebration centering around some planetary change: one focus is an artificial satellite which is due to either change orbit or perform some stupendous signifying feat at 8:10PM, at which time a second focus, like an eclipse or a transition to another season, is supposed to take place, and I inwardly grumble about the fact that both of these are taking place at the same time, and "what are we supposed to look at." We're to change viewing places just before 8:10, and I ask where the satellite is, and an authority with binoculars says "It's either over there, or just between those trees," pointing, and I take a pocket telescope and look between the trees to see a pea-sized lit lune followed by a dark umbra just vanishing into the leaves of the right-hand tree. Back at our arena-type seats, possibly outdoors, I realize I'm now sitting between the father, somewhat like the gay Monty Python star (Shepard?), and the daughter, like Abby Bershatsky, who'd been vying for my attention previously, and I feel slightly uncomfortable sitting between them, but then realize they wanted this so I should be OK with it myself. Vaguely, we were also supposed to enter some strange, possibly extraterrestrial, vehicle at around the same time, making priorities confused, but that appears to be late, and we're all waiting for what we're not quite sure. Other announcements or details in the dream forgotten now.
SUNDAY, 1/21/07: 6:30AM: I'm on a boat or plane in the far north, and it's 70Ε at the North Sea edge. Secret military camp passed, they lose cover, wave to me, and I go back in boat. 7:09AM: Connecticut: (as close as I can make out my scribble): Dozen car-learners on (Long Island) Sound shore, near water rats.
TUESDAY, 1/23/07: 5:53AM: I'm putting a final program together: files, cover letter, and a check, and I look at cover-letter edits and see that check has gone from $6,000 to $7,000.
WEDNESDAY, 1/24/07: 5:35AM: Impossibly complex, yet indistinct, as if through a haze of time or presentation: maybe stemming from an idle thought just before sleep last night that all people's characteristics could be "encompassed" in a five- or six-dimensional tube that could then be laid next to others' characteristics, so that existences might be ranked according to complexity: at bottom, an antediluvian Chinese subsistence-farmer would work the same plot of land in the same way from youth to old age, going nowhere, reading nothing, interacting with only his family, speaking few words, thinking few thoughts, represented by a vaguely purple "excrement-tube" of total accomplishment in thought, emotion, and sensation, through life, of enumerable constituents, for a "life-sum" of a particular total of, say 55.55555, which could be laid "above" a life-sum of 55.55554 and "below" a life-sum of 55.55556; to, at top, a modern American experience-gatherer: practicing many occupations, traveling extensively, reading thousands of books, newspapers, magazines, watching movies and television and all other media of information and entertainment, meeting "the world" in all possible complexity, represented by an incomparably fatter "excrement-tube" for a life-sum of, say 555555555.555, to be compared to adjacent life-sums of 555555555.554 and 555555555.556: permitting an objective "evaluation" of all life: human, subhuman, and suprahuman. That "idle thought" occupied maybe five seconds of hazy pre-sleep quasi-fantasy, yet took more than fifteen minutes to tease into words, to quantify that experience/thought in only one component in one dimension in my excrement-tube. My dream, now at 5:57AM: I'm supervising the deconstruction of (seemingly British) properties into detailed components arranged in long rows on the floor of some huge bare arena-space, which can then be enumerated for an unstated purpose of evaluation on gigantic lists. An accompanying dream-segment, either before or after (or during) this arena-space, involved an endless computer-printout of numbered strings of words (not sentences; possibly lists of the components of the rows on the floor). Confusion arose with my manipulation of these lists: somehow I thought "the number" referred to the line-number (where each numbered string had increasing numbers of lines, from two or ten or fifteen), and the discrepancy between the "numbering number" and the cumulative line-numbers grew greater and greater, producing a seemingly impossible impasse. More difficult, I had to supervise each owner reconstructing these components back into the original properties (buildings, rooms, furniture containing drawers containing items of multiple components) which had to duplicate precisely the original properties which had been deconstructed for the purpose of making the lists. Again, time-expansion to 6:11AM for a dream that lasted maybe five seconds. Undoubtedly linked to past megalomaniacal dream-extensions of "grokking" all experiences, individuals, constructs, theories, books, lists, components, elements, into "systems" of categorizable, comparable units; this page seems pretentious and verbose, yet fetchingly far-reaching and "wise," to 6:19AM.
THURSDAY, 1/25/07: 6:55AM: 1) 4:15AM: All lunch tables being taken as others delay joining me; wait for others to leave? I'd come up first to see many tables available in the shade; no question were we going to sit in many of the long benches available in the direct hot sun with no chance of the shadows getting to these tables for a couple of hours. But gradually they fill, and one table for four I'd had my eye on from the beginning finally had one of its chairs occupied, so that was out of the running. I debated sitting at a chair at a table of six, but decided since I didn't know when my three friends were going to show up, that I couldn't monopolize so much space with only my small tray of food. Others join me, and we decide that since it's already 2:35PM, some will be finishing with lunch and we can get their table. 2) 6:45AM: Eating at small tables in a public area of a park, with others constantly passing nearby looking for small change, rattling cups under my nose, which I ignore; or looking for handouts of small bits of food, which I jealously keep for myself. Others try to engage me in small talk, while I keep absolutely to myself. Many sit near me until I'm simply not going to react to them and then disgustedly move away. Others come near, persistently holding out cups into which they hope I put some small change, and go away empty-cupped. I seem to have infinite patience to suffer them, but I DO wish they'd just leave me alone!
FRIDAY, 1/26/07: 8:13AM: Someone who starts out looking like Amy Fleetman, but ends up more like Julia Roberts, is showing me a film that she'd taken, at great pains, of some project she's working on, but it's getting fouled up in the projector, and she directs me to wind the film, which isn't moving, around the spindle of the take-up reel, so that it'll go through the aperture, but at the cost, I fear, of crimping the film permanently. This happens a couple of times, and she tries to assure me that it's all OK, but I'm embarrassed that I'll be wrecking the valuable film of this important person just so I can see what it looks like. Some prior, compulsive-oriented, dream is now forgotten.
SATURDAY, 2/3/07: 8:34AM: 5:32AM: Student soldiers win against Arabs attacking a fort in North Africa. Others win war-games, mainly strategizing on computers.
SUNDAY, 2/4/07: 4:40AM: I'd been kissing a young guy in a new relationship, but then had to meet him the next evening on the upper West Side to rehearse a play, and walked east on 79th Street and turned north on Seventh Avenue to get to 80th and looked into the bar upstairs to see if they were rehearsing there or around the corner in the downstairs theater. Saw that they were in the back room through the front window, entered, and one of the bartenders, seeing me, joked "Here's business, look smart," but everyone ignored him as I passed through the bar into the back room were two guys were reading a scene at one table and my young friend was standing with two other guys in the middle of the room as I went over and tried, as casually as possible, to engage my friend in a torrid "hello" kiss, but he expressionlessly allowed me to kiss him without participating very much, and the others greeted me and we prepared to sit down at our own table and read from the playbooks. I was much younger in dream.
MONDAY, 2/5/07: 8AM: 1) A very thick-set guy is parading naked before me, as I'm sitting on a sofa very like the one at 1221 Dietz, and I reach out and begin to fondle his thick cock, which grows to pleasant hardness, and he seems ready for sexual fun, and I wake aroused. 2) Someone like Susan is driving through some Arabic country, and the map shows a large open area which I think we can drive through which turns out to be a complex of factories, some abandoned, with walls blocking off thoroughfares, and we end up far east of where we wanted to turn north, but she dismisses my wonderment by saying "We missed the turnoff back there somewhere," which I certainly didn't see; there's no one around to ask where we should go, but there's no real sense of danger.
THURSDAY, 2/8/07: 3:10AM: I'm chosen to be the "patsy" of a 6PM union negotiation meeting to nominate from a body of "damaged former workers" to head the union in important improvements, and I rush ahead of a group that's entering for a SECOND meeting, at 7:30, and squeeze among the last remnants into a closing enormous-doored elevator. I'm ushered ahead of the incoming group by a group of smiling, chanting female workers who seem to be "in" on the ritual election and my part in it.
SATURDAY, 2/10/07: 6:58AM: I'm attending a class on "How to Appreciate Comic Books," which the instructor has made easy by teaching one story per class, and then doing an overview at the end. I stay after one class in his apartment and look through the book to find that one story features a woman who led a tour that I remember being on, and look at a photo (things change in dreams) to see if I can see the back of my head. I can't find me, but he remembers that I was carrying a large roll of something, and maybe he can spot that in what now looks to be a movie excerpt. He talks about two people named Lilo and Stitch, and I ask if they had any connection to the Disney movie, and he says that Lilowalski changed her name to Lilo and John became Stitch, in a sort of reversal that the more difficult name stayed and the simple one became more complicated. He looked through another copy of the book in his downstairs entryway (which reminds me that one of the practices of each class was that each student leave his or her home in a detailed way, and one student said that her hallway caused her such detail problems that she changed her room to enter directly onto the street), and I praised him on using HIS book so that it could be in numerous copies throughout his house for easy reference. No sex involved.
SUNDAY, 2/11/07: 5:30AM: Something about the area of Italian palazzos in relation to total area of cities, as well as the number of meat and pasta dishes on Italian menus.
WEDNESDAY, 2/14/07: 4:22AM: My unmarried sister is going out with a group of friends, and takes me along, but I have no fun, and next evening they leave without me. I walk to the Brown Street bus stop (in Akron) to try to catch up with them but they're not there. Go to an art movie, not knowing what the "9:30 special showing" is and feel depressed that she didn't include me in her night.
SATURDAY, 2/17/07: 3:53AM: Almost a travel-dream: elaborate long-lasting dream of encountering "another civilization" representative in a kind of grungy fair in what may be Akron: they don't exactly SAY they're from outer space, but the feeling is definitely of a culture VERY far removed from anything on earth. The major source of information is contained in a small but thick book, rather like the container of the five volumes of Tom of Finland material from Taschen: sturdy hard covers that contain, in one copy, sections that have come loose from the binding in thick sheaves, like chapters, on various segments of the civilization, while the other copy remains in like-new condition. They lazily hint that I could buy the book, and when I ask how much they draw a strange series of hashmarks under a moveable marker, and then move the marker just after the first two marks, leaving maybe four marks after, and though I have the idea that for some suckers they might mention $100, for me they say $10, and I ask if I could have the like-new book for my $10, they sort of shrug "Yes" and I get out my wallet and hand over $10, which they look at with an alien kind of curiosity. Color photos of good quality appear on most pages, with National-Geographic (which arrived yesterday) type scarcity of text, and a "foreign" Urdu-type character-set appears in the final pages. Later I'm taken into a kind of basement, where I think some interesting relics may be kept, but it mostly seems like a cement basement under an office which they've rented. Though I'm there a long time, saying many things, I'm their only visitor and they seem likely to yield more "secrets" if I continue to inquire innocently.
SUNDAY, 2/18/07: 7:14AM: Possibly after a nuclear disaster, or other enormous social-change calamity, a large number of us are living in very rough barracks, many individuals and fragments of families, sleeping in tiered bunks in close quarters, and for nothing better to do, I'm trying to rid the place of junk, mostly papers, many of which seem to be small calling-card-size handouts that are difficult to remove from moist surfaces because they've become almost glued to them after long times being buried under more abundant trash. I gather and gather, and then look around for disposal buckets which everyone seems to have beside their bunks, but most of which are full. I'm aware when I get to the foot of a number of bunks that people have their small store of personal items there which I'm careful not to consider junk and throw away. At one point a small Latino boy measures the length of my branch-bound square trash-container with a broken twig he always carries, and when it's just the length of my container I say "Bueno" and his mother and he smile, and I think that somewhat later there may be a need for a container for some round object just the size of his twig, and he'll remember that my trash-container will be exactly the right size. A previous dream, maybe two hours before, had involved this same motley, multi-cultural group in close quarters, with the same sort of finicky short-range elaborate computation of some barely necessary component of daily living like food or clothing or elimination, and this environment was expected to continue forever with no possibility of improvement or amelioration. No one was really depressed, or lacking in any basic need, but the crowdedness, the grayness of the clothing and surroundings, and lack of any intellectual stimulation seemed deadly in the long run. No idea or talk about the circumstances that caused this drastic life-style change; no idea of overall authority that could have been responsible for the bringing on or the change from this straitened condition.
MONDAY, 2/19/07: 6:31AM: I'm about 30 years old, having been just transferred from a distant IBM office which might have been on the West Coast, and have only a scribbled phone-memo type message to say who I have to contact and where I have to go. A previous dream, a sort of prequel to this, had me packing my briefcase on a subway platform, with a kind of tray on which were coins and tokens and bits of paper that were clearly mine, but of quite uncertain use, and I had to put them all back into my briefcase, the old one that Helen gave me with my initials on it, so old that it was flaking bits of leather from under the strap, and then a subway was pulling into the station and I had to leave the briefcase on a train-type luggage rack before running down a short flight to stairs to get my subway token before boarding the train, but I somehow knew that the briefcase would get in my way and I couldn't bring it along while buying my subway token, yet I also knew that there wouldn't be enough time to dash back up the stairs and retrieve my briefcase before the subway pulled out of the station without me. Woke from that, about 3:30AM, before resolving that dilemma. I clearly remember, back in my later dream, being told I was in the Beaver Street office, and I knew Beaver Street was somewhere down in the Financial Area, close to a subway stop only one or two away from my Brooklyn Heights apartment, but when I finally talked to a distracted person at the office itself, it turned out to be 1017 Tenth Avenue, somewhere in the 60s, and indeed my street guide says 65th Street, but I couldn't quite get the floor or the name of the person I was supposed to contact. Bernie Broske was there earlier, talking about "me and my wife," and I thought maybe I could find his name in the new Manhattan White Pages I just found and call him for directions. Out to the lobby where the receptionist hadn't left yet, though my watch said it ws 6:50PM by this time, and she said "Walthorpe is interested only in copying his book" and that "that branch transfers data from satellite to earth periodically," which left me worried about how "this simple programmer" would fit into that office. Scribbled more names and numbers onto a small slip of paper and woke feeling VERY frustrated!
TUESDAY, 2/20/07: 5:31AM: I'm back in the dining room at 1221 Dietz, and my briefcase is full of stuff that I brought back from work, but it's somehow gotten entwined with tendrils from an enormous (pachysandra?) plant on the dining-room table. I have to get to work soon, as it's 8:30 in the morning (though still dark out), but I haven't been able to separate my briefcase from the plant, which has three or four major trunks, the second-biggest of which is somehow named Sarah Vaughan, and when I pull on even some thin tendrils they won't break until Uncle Edward comes up and starts disconnecting them with either strength or a sharp knife. Other details forgotten now.
WEDNESDAY, 2/21/07: 8:50AM: 1) 3:20AM: I'm walking through someone's apartment, looking at his porno on the walls, jerking off as I walk, knowing that that's what HE does there, and getting very excited about it. Feel very good in the dream and wake feeling very good, so I jerk off right in bed. 2) 7:30AM: I'm on a long road-trip with Jean-Jacques driving, and when we stop for gas he's begun to drive slightly erratically, so I ask him if he's tired and wants me to drive, and he irritably denies he needs any help. I go inside to try to find a place to pee, and can only find a junk-filled room surrounded by windows. Try to pee, but am so aware of my "exposure" to the outside world that I can't start, and then other guys come in and start using the urinals that I hadn't even seen before, so I end up peeing into a toilet atop which I'm standing on a superstructure of what could be the equipment for a small oil refinery, such is its complicated scaffolding and piping and complexity. Wake and pee.
THURSDAY, 2/22/07: 8:43AM: 1) 4:22AM:I'm piling old porn magazines into manila shopping bags for Bill Petersen to carry onstage in a play he's doing for some gay-organization benefit. Another company is doing it nude, but Bill isn't about to show his body. I've put in some small packages the size of my printer ribbons which might contain old 8mm film, and some smaller magazines like the old Tom of Finland storybooks, and the two bags are almost filled, like I fill my trash bag with paper before taking it downstairs. 2) 7:40AM: Maybe based on the delicious sauces on our plates yesterday at Le Bernardin's lunch, someone offers me a thick strawberry-red sauce-sample which he pours into my palm and I slurp off. Ken's tasted something green and has a trapezoid of green hanging under his nose like a modified Hitler mustache, and someone laughs and wipes it off for him. I look around, now at the top of a sort of amphitheater, and see large assemblages of men and palanquins, based on my viewing of an hour of "Rome" on video just before bed, coming up a narrow concrete-walled channel to the top row of the amphitheater, and then they have to make a hairpin turn and go back down the same way; the men lift the carrier out of the channel to make the U-turn, and a primitive ship-shape effortlessly rotates to go back down, making it clear that this has all been rehearsed beforehand.
FRIDAY, 2/23/07: 1) 4:45AM: I'm attending some commemorative ceremony in a herringbone suit, and some official awkwardly puts a small black-backed silver honorary medal onto the cleavage of my suit jacket. 2) A distinguished chairman of another ceremony, reminding me of George Page from the Nature PBS series, looks to a small group assembled before him to see who would wear a black-ribboned medallion he's about to present to the governing committee, and Ken, nearby, says, "He got it yesterday," and "George" smiles and puts the medallion around my neck with a look of satisfaction, and I feel quite honored. 3) 7:50AM: I'm a member of an enormous extended family which is embarking on some kind of auto trip as a brief vacation, and almost everyone is in a huge towncar when someone has forgotten something, or has to run a last-minute errand, and we all pile out and go our various ways over my protest that we were almost all ready to go, and now we'll be delayed quite some time until everyone is back in the car again. But everyone feels that what they have to do is important and soon there's no one near to even complain to. I decide I have to pee, and pass outside one bathroom to hear someone showering inside, and another is locked, so I wander out onto a lawn in the darkening twilight and figure I can pee behind a gauzy curtain on a weedy lawn away from the street before what looks to be an abandoned house, but as I unzip I find that my eyes are getting accustomed to the gloom and passersby can actually see me as they near, and this isn't the place to pee. Without transition find myself climbing the side of a stucco false-brickwork wall, and reach up to a curving white cornice to find that it flakes away from the top in my hands. I debate putting it back in its precarious place, but decide that it'll then be dangerous to the next person trying to rely on its solidity, and place it on a ledge just under the top of the building, remarking about my action to a couple coming up the wall behind me. Then somehow I'm coming to a busy business intersection, I think somehow to the south of Brooklyn Heights, and am about to proceed in what I think is the right direction when a woman asks "Can I direct you to a Superior Savings Bank?" "No," I reply, "but you can direct me to Brooklyn Heights." She looks around uncertainly and points along an industrial highway, saying "You can take that road; it's not very interesting at the start, but it broadens out with some views to the side---but maybe it would be better if you took that road over there---" pointing in a quite-different direction, uncertainly, and I wake with a familiar combination of frustration at the dream and relief that it was a dream.
TUESDAY, 2/27/07: 5:40AM: Four or five of us (actors?) waiting for a bus in, maybe, rural Maine. I lay on a guy's lap, feeling tired but good. He later lies across my back when I'm on my stomach. He goes into a small hotel to check transportation. I take Valium, feeling sick-warm. 34Ε, I shut radiator off.
WEDNESDAY, 2/28/07: 4:58AM: I'm going to "48 self-help therapies in 48 hours," taught at a skating rink by skaters. I pee and take Valium.
THURSDAY, 3/1/07: 3:54AM: Dream of going back THREE times to company headquarters for a decision. People are talking LATIN. Pee. 6:04AM: Touring Greece, camera stolen; open private reservation (Susan's) to Avgolemono Restaurant. Up narrow wooden spiral tree-stairs, get souvenirs, finish meal and wake.
JAPAN DREAMS
SATURDAY, 3/3/07: 7:16AM NYC time, 3:16AM SF time: I'm shopping with a group in a very imaginative stage-supply shop for props for a play that I'm putting on of my own. Some of the earlier details are dim: I wanted either bones or chopped-off limbs for some horror-film section, and could find lots of fine candidates in wood, paper-mache, and plastic, and made lists of what I could buy cheaply. Then there were little party-favors, like combinations of greeting cards and New Year's Eve props which they had by the dozens, and I kept thinking that the "Jumelle pens" were perfect for a number of uses. I can't begin to reproduce here the richness of the appurtenances of the shop, and the felicitous combination of variety of materials and cheapness of price and adaptability for multiple necessary uses. Nor can I enumerate my companions, all helping me by spreading out to various sections of the multi-level store and bringing various items to my attention, NOR the varied HELP, some dwarfs, some actors themselves, and some are seductive fellows who tried to ingratiate themselves or their products to me with the most charming, fawning, obsequious, flattering comments and flourishes of hand and face and body. A captivating, charming dream: I wish I knew where such a place could be found on lower Broadway, or Soho, where this place seemed to be---and we seemed to be the only customers to have found this quasi-junk shop to be the rich treasure-trove for our specific play-production purposes. So many rich details in the dream, so few enumerated here by 7:25AM, 3:25AM SF time. 5:50AM: I'm riding on a tram in Chinatown on the way to a party at Sherryl's, and it dawns on me that I should take a food-gift, and see tables of colorful desserts, so I hop off the tram, thinking to get something here, and hoping that my subway transfer to her is just around the corner.
MONDAY, 3/5/07: 2:34: I'm video-taping, splicing people's reactions. Had a few fragments later, but took no notes and remember nothing.
WEDNESDAY, 3/7/07: 4:37AM: I'm in a canoe transferring to a small ship somewhere in the South Pacific and look nearby to see a bulky canoe turning over and over in the water and shout to Ken, "Look at the guy practicing to right his canoe if he turns it over." But the almost-constant spinning continues, and the huddled man in the stern seems hardly alive, which makes it somewhat less clear, and then I jump off the ship and find myself in the water with my clothes on, and in a moment of panic think I have my wallet in my pants' pocket, but I feel for it and I'd left it in my backpack on the ship, to my relief. An erotic component was present at the beginning, and I thought "Oh, I'd like to jerk off this afternoon," then morosely remembered I was ON a trip with Ken. Just remembered an earlier section of attending the first performance of a new opera at the NY State Theater, and the program hasn't even been fully printed: there are typed inserts rather like the English pages we got at the Moss Garden yesterday, and students from the first seven rows are encouraged to return to their seats for a photo, and I look around to see tiny students in libretto-study seats with very poor visibility of the stage sitting unhappily behind me, and I think this premiere should have been delayed a week until they got everything completely ready. Finish typing at 4:49AM, feeling rested, but not completely, still vaguely "down" on the trip and group.
THURSDAY, 3/8/07: 2:19AM: I'm letting people on a list tell stories, but to "even them out," they can move a day forward to "jump over" the person before or behind them to make a smoother set of presentations. There was also another "typical" dream, but I forget which type.
WEDNESDAY, 3/14/07: 11:45PM: Carolyn's invited a (sexy) couple to sleep in MY bed, and I rip off sheets to tell them to GO.
THURSDAY, 3/15/07: 6AM: 1) I'm riding in the back seat of a car, maybe a limousine, because the two people in the front seat seem to have an opaque plastic or aluminum window behind them so they can't really hear me, and we're barreling down a highway doing at least 40, or maybe even 50 or 60mph, and a face appears at the back edge of my left-side window, banging on the window for us to stop. "Stop, stop the car," I shout to the driver, who ignores me. "Someone's trapped outside, maybe caught on some part of our car, or running alongside." No response from the front, no change in the panicked young man's face desperate out the window. I wake, marveling I had slept at all, then almost in the same second: 2) I'm crossing a road with Ken, who's asked me to come out of our hut, or tent, probably in Africa, to see some monkeys, and as we cross the road I look to my right and see what appears to be a tree with BLUE blossoms, but when I get out my binoculars it's just an illusion caused by looking at white flowers against a bright blue sky. We cross to the woods and say, "We can't hope to track them because they can so easily escape into the trees, leaving no tracks, and traveling much faster than we could ever follow." Wake, debate not recording these, but decide they're irresistible. Now 6:07AM and I pee again.
FRIDAY, 3/16/07: 2:43AM: I'm watching a young kid reading porno, getting himself excited, his narrow cock erect and standing out in his blue jeans, which he fondles at times, and I ask him if he'd let me play with it, but he says he wants to cum all by himself, without touching, and won't even take it out so I can watch. Wake aroused and think for a moment to jerk off, but then remember I'm with Ken and can't, and feel some small sense of frustration. Type to 2:47 after peeing. I weigh 96kg, 211 pounds?! 6:01AM: I'm in some kind of orgy-palace, with many rooms, and I walk from room to room to see what's available, but I seem to stay too long, because after 11PM they charge $10 just to be there. I don't remember bringing my wallet, but reach into my pocket and bring out a small packet of papers (receipts, maps, notes, etc.), in the middle of which are colorful crumpled pieces of foreign currency with the numbers 10 and 15 on the corners, so with relief I feel I can pay. 6:25AM: Tried the first step of Actualism after prior pee, and it must have put me to sleep because it seems I woke almost instantly with another dream: I'm in La Scala for the rehearsal of an opera, and for a moment I consciously, in the dream, remember other DREAMS in which I end up trying to find seats in opera houses which have impossible seating plans: maybe the first five rows of center seats can see the stage, but all upper levels look out only at the TOP of the stage, and all side seats afford almost no view of the actual stage itself. In this dream, it seems either the rehearsal or the full production has been designed to fill the ENTIRE orchestra-seating area, so that the only audience seats are in the loges and balconies. The set, looked at from above, must have been derived from my view of the open garden we've passed so many times between the Tower Suites of the Imperial Hotel and the Main Building: a gravel path meandering among black-marble flooring with objects meant to evoke a riverside garden with rocks and trees, and the operatic characters have the tiny colorful appearance of the two-inch-high model characters in the Edo section of the Edo-Tokyo Museum seen yesterday. The rehearsal is with only a few instruments, and most singers are only sing-speaking their parts, none full-out, yet the tiers are filled with people coming and going, and I vaguely think "This rehearsal must go on all day until the performance in the evening, and though the rehearsals might repeat, or be slow, you could seemingly sit and enjoy the entire opera (though not full-out sung) without paying for it."
SATURDAY, 3/17/07, 3:55AM: I've been waiting for an old movie to start on TV before Mom falls asleep, and finally it starts with a sequence of old-movie climaxes: some old British actor saying he'll be taking his family back to Scotland, someone like Laurence Olivier solemnly announcing he'll "Return to Manderley," Bette Davis talking of "Going back home," and Spencer Tracy taking Katharine Hepburn "To their old house." But Mom seems to be falling asleep before the movie starts, which promises to end with the heroic family staying in America instead of returning to the old country. 6:15AM: I'm vacationing (or watching a movie about vacationing) in someplace like Shangri-La, with a kind of movie-cast list of friends like Ronald Coleman and---now I can't think of who played Mrs. Miniver---Greer Garson, and I'm responsible for some kind of momentous move or journey or rescue, and wake from the dream with an idea of going back to sleep to continue it, also debating getting up to transcribe it, and stay awake long enough to decide to throw off the too-hot quilt and go to pee again and type this.
SUNDAY, 3/18/07: 2:50AM: I'm buying a plane ticket from a new salesman, and since someone ELSE sold me the ticket, he's annoyed that he's not getting the commission, and though his boss tries to explain it to him, I seem to have the better argument: if the situation was reversed, wouldn't HE want the commission that HE wants to now take away from HER, and he seems to begin to see the reasoning when I wake up, look at the clock, open the cool door to the balcony to get my word processor, go to the john, and sit for ONE MINUTE when Ken knocks on the door and I blurt out in irritation, "I've been in here ONE MINUTE, can you wait a second?" And flush and get out and he sort of shrugs his shoulders, as he does again when I put on the light in the washroom and sit on the stool to finish this, leaving the door open so that I can ask him if he wants the washroom when he exits the toilet, and he "excuses anything he does" and shrugs no, and I finish this at 2:57AM, ready for more sleep.
MONDAY, 3/19/07: 5:48AAM: 1) Erotic: I forget the premise, it might have been part of the "Monty Python" auditions, but an array of male bodies are available for supposedly straight producers who are turned on by the bodies and begin to kiss and lick chests and underarms of provocatively posed musclemen; everyone is getting very excited by the low-level actual-sex content and the high-level eroticism. 2) "Monty Python" participation and auditions: by some ludicrous actuality, I'm an actual member of the group, but much older than most of them and used only infrequently, but nevertheless I'm part of the troupe, and we're auditioning new people to participate in some of the skits, and most are better than I am but still aren't chosen, and it occurs to me I might get more air time if I wrote some skits for my particular talents and attributes, and I'm wondering why I never thought of this before, since all the original members wrote most of the skits they starred in to create their own individual comedic personas. 3) Dictator's "storing" of lava in villages: I'm part of an investigative news team from someplace like PBS which has traveled to some Central American dictatorship like El Salvador or Nicaragua who has cemented his control over the country and maintained his position in the world by "predicting" and/or "capitalizing on" the eruptions of his volcanoes which everyone had generally accepted as being random and unpredictable, which was somehow the reason he had to remain in power, and it turns out in actuality that even HE doesn't know when they'll erupt, but when they do, he channels enormous volumes of molten lava into the streets of his smaller towns, where the inhabitants are forced to live with these stored-up volumes, which over time have cooled to soup-like temperatures and solidified into Jello-like chunks which can be controlled and moved around like construction modules from streets and fields to canyons and gullies for preservation, even though the main streets may be buried only 4 or 5 feet deep, permitting usual use of houses and factories and supermarkets below these varying-heighted chunks of Jello-like lava which will be reheated and released when the dictator decides they will have the maximum "surprise" and "effect" on the rest of the world. We, the investigators, keep trying to get the populace to rise in rebellion, but they stupidly, or loyally, insist that this is the way it's always been, it's for the good of their country, their dictator, and their own well-being and are amazed that we're incensed about such behaviors and want everything to remain the same, while we're preparing as damning a documentary as we can in order to unmask the inhuman actions of this disreputable dictator that the whole world would be better without, and only while typing this does the obvious parallel between this "dictator" and Saddam Hussein become apparent. Finally catch up on these three dreams while sitting on the pot without being disturbed by Ken until I finish now at 6:05AM, having slept nicely more than 8 hours and am ready to start in on my day.
TUESDAY, 3/20/07: 6:17AM: I'm on a ship, getting off on a canoe, but we're not docked, but things pull together and I get in. Women paddling sometimes paddle backward, causing huge laughter. We float over ENORMOUS mysterious, bone-like object---like an elaborate prehistoric pelvis, or some arcane modern sculpture, while linked fish or people swim just below the surface, and I wake with a tremendous feeling of awe.
WEDNESDAY, 3/21/07: 12:12AM: I'm the go-between for a deal in some kind of transmission network between my boss, a combination of Cathy Benson(?), Spartacus's former boss from Travel Dynamics, and some important woman like Princess Diana. She gives me a deal on four items: 1) an already set-up network, old style; 2) improvements for a new-style system; 3) content for broadcasting, and 4) other items I'm not clear about, for a total of four systems for $14,000 each. One of her cohorts immediately asks me "What's OUR cut?" and I have to say I didn't think of that, think of raising the price to $15,000 to include our cuts but then think that could mess up the entire deal, so that my best option would be to present everything as described, saying "Additional taxes and details may have yet to be worked out," and wake feeling it's an actual pending transaction for which I still have responsibility. 3:59AM: I'm on some Malay or Philippine island on a train with a woman like the eternal talker in Vietnam with Fred, and we're going to an undersea photography area. Get a long drink, which I have to drink since it appears the lockers into which we have to put all our belongings are narrow horizontal tubes, but then nothing fits even when I finish my fruit-punch glass, and people are sleeping in front of what may be empty lockers, and many people are shocked that we have to be TOTALLY naked, and then I wonder where we keep the KEY, and I have the number 118 in mind. Then someone makes an announcement to a group of suited black men that we have two choices of sites: an underwater paradise of fish and coral, or a city which has been recently submerged and is a prime photographic target because it still LOOKS like a city but is totally underwater, and the railroad car we NOW seem to be in has regular gym-like lockers available, and maybe there'll be a central depository in which we can keep our keys. All very disorganized, but it promises to be quite a treat when we finally get there, provided nothing is stolen while we're underwater.
END OF JAPAN DREAMS
THURSDAY, 3/22/07: 4AM: I'm in the backyard of 1221 Dietz, looking at various areas of significance: on the left is a cultivated area: each row corresponds to a book or event or product or herb that's listed on a catalog-page for that section. On the right is a regular lawn with an uneven left border that needs tending: at first it just seems to need edging so that the border is even, forming a trapezoid in the middle that could be a rock garden, a path, or a third area devoted to the past history of the garden: small bushes of roses or clumps of dandelion, but as I walk along it some strange items appear: a newly killed fish from which birds seem to have pecked away the eyes and part of the head, and at the very end of my stroll, a fossil small shark, some skin still remaining fossilized on the skeleton, which I think should be left in some form or other to show the variety of what the "back yard" had been over the millennia. 3:18PM: I'm in a kind of commune that's voting either to move or to form a new constitution, and there are few dissidents until I speak up, listing things that should change, or that people don't want any more---but sadly in the half-hour since I woke from my nap and took a shit while paging through New York Magazine I've forgotten most of the details, finishing now at 3:50PM.
SATURDAY, 3/24/07: 3:44AM: I'm walking through an elegant Japanese museum with explanatory signs written in very large individually framed ideographs that appear to be some ancient (or ultra-modern) form of katakana, both ideograph and frame glowing a distinct yellow color tinged with green. A very fat man in a formal black robe, like a Shogun in an ancient scroll-painting, is either the subject of one display or is placed there to read orotundly the inscription itself, giving the effect of some tremendously dignified ritual that we Americans are privileged to see. Finish typing at 3:53, 50Ε out.
SUNDAY, 3/25/07: 7AM: Obviously thinking about the stack of souvenirs waiting to be sorted on my table, I'm going through a stack of papers I'd written for a class, maybe in Japan, and there are xeroxed copies of a blank page numbered "3" that I think to keep, and then in the interests of lightness of files, decide to throw out, along with copies of further pages that appear to be identical, starting with maybe ten sheets and ending with five.
MONDAY, 3/26/07: 11:06AM: I'm on the top floor of the old IBM building, which seems to be round rather than square, and when I find a rare window to look out, I don't see a horizon of skyscraper-tops, I see windows of taller buildings nearby. I'm supposed to pick up something at a reception desk, but it's very busy, people are working there, and the attendants move in and out so I'm not even sure who I'm supposed to be talking to. At one time I try to go up a private elevator to the next floor, but it's easier to use a stairway, and find an abandoned suite of offices which are quite dark, though going up another floor puts me into a presidential, well-lit, populated place that makes me feel very much an intruder. Back down a shaky elevator to a previous floor, and become preoccupied with the feeling that, since I'm leaving, I have to leave behind instructions on how to use or modify my billing program (first dream about this in a LONG time!), but then I figure it's been in use so much, and Roger Evans still knows how to operate it, that I don't have anything to worry about: they'll muddle through with it somehow. Never feel I really fit in, though I'm dressed OK and my age is appropriate for the surroundings.
TUESDAY, 3/27/07: 7:46AM: I'm vacationing (STILL!) in France, on the Riviera, and am touring a craggy cliff at the seaside where it's possible to climb stairs or use an elevator to either view the sea from above at the top of a four-story hotel roof, or from below, about four stories underwater, where the fish and currents and seaweeds and bottom-rocks can be seen to dramatic effect.
WEDNESDAY, 3/28/07: 12:54AM: I'm in France, in a restaurant, and GREAT claps of THUNDER send some people to the FLOOR, covering their heads and ears. 5:12AM: I'm in some kind of transformational group, a couple comes in, and a guru tries chanting to bring them to new levels, and then come long philosophical talks.
FRIDAY, 3/30/07: 7:50AM: I'm showering in Rita's apartment after a trip, and when I rinse off, the shower curtain sheds BROWNISH water, and there're brown stains from my feet even on the floor, and I'm amazed I'd stayed so dirty.
SATURDAY, 3/31/07: 6:55AM: I'm vacationing in Morocco, and it seems the group has left for a little tour in the town while I remain in the environs of our hotel, where we were going to have a crafts demonstration later in the afternoon, and people are wondering how to entertain me, and an older woman starts showing me little handicraft constructions of plastic and cloth that should have been delayed until the group arrived, and after showing me this and that, a group of three girls comes out of a shop and looks expectantly past me down a road, where they figure the rest of the tour will arrive, and I look at my watch to see that it's 3:15, the time they clearly expect the others to start coming into view with their guide. Maybe at the start there was something about food, and cooking with some local utensil, maybe based on the rice-stirrer from Japan that I gave Mildred last night at Le Petit Marché.
SUNDAY, 4/01/07: 5:37AM: I'm traveling in India with a small group, going to a place far in the north like Simla, and remark that the last time I was here, in 1970, we had to go by car for four days, where we could now fly in about a day. I'd been taking lots of pictures, but my camera got its straps entangled with another woman's straps, and when I dropped my camera, it dropped on top of hers, and she, angrily, stomped on my camera after picking hers out of the dirt. I picked up my combination camera-VCR and its parts rattled loosely at its tripartate connections, and I figured "Ah, the film is loose between the parts," and I tried viewing it, starting backwards, the images messed up by noise until I got to a certain part where the pictures were clear, and then I started playing them forward, seeing more and more current images OK, and then got to the critical "current" part and the film seemed to settle itself and it appeared all might be OK. People in the group didn't particularly like me, though, reminiscent of my therapy-session with Sharon about the Japan trip.
MONDAY, 4/02/07: 8:10AM: At first I'm working individually on a new type of vertical crossword puzzle that at first glance seems only to be comprised of the letters of two alternately placed full names---alternate squares indicated by dashed rather than solid lines---but a closer look reveals that some squares are further subdivided into two or three squares, and then that each line has the first one or two or three letters of a word which is clued by a short phrase on the right. Then sections of puzzles, below, refer to groups of people, the numbers of whom are totaled at the bottom of two or three subsections, with a grand total below, in two different columns, so the whole thing is more complicated than I thought. But then it switches into a classroom situation where I'm instructing rather young students (maybe 10-year-olds like in "Oliver Twist," which I saw yesterday) how to construct Scrabble words with the letters of words which they already have, like "masterpiece" and "mayonnaise." Some sophistication is required by putting words on two sides of a construction board, though there seems to be no connection between the words on each side. Then, again prompted by "Oliver Twist," some of the children have been made to lie on their sides near a chain-link fence, through which their arms have been thrust with their wrists handcuffed on the other side, so that I have to reach through with some kind of metal cutter to free them from their unnatural bondage so that they can return to participate in my training class.
WEDNESDAY, 4/04/07: 4AM: Wake from this dream feeling as emotionally exhausted as I'd felt at the end of the dream itself, and at the end of the Japan trip. I'm just about to go on vacation from 1221 Dietz, but Mom and I had been arguing very bitterly about something (or everything), and instead of a sister I had a younger brother whom I didn't much care for (even though he bore a strong resemblance to Matt Dillon), and at the end he admitted he kept a key to the house, and Mom said he could sleep in my bed anytime, which I didn't care for at all, but he and I even hugged at the end as I was prepared to go to sleep for the last time before my extended trip, and I felt exhausted as I looked at the bare room after both of them had left, as exhausted as I felt when I woke.
SATURDAY, 4/07/07: 7:15AM: Actually RETURNED to the same scene as a previous dream: set in 1221 Dietz, Mom is sleeping in her room and I look at a pile of laundry which had just been done, folded and stacked in what looks like a standard supermarket shopping cart standing in the middle of the dining room. I have the feeling that at the end of the last dream, like this one (but I don't bother to check back to see if I ACTUALLY transcribed a dream like this one), I'd done a large stack of laundry in a washing machine that actually "came from" 101 Clark Street, but as I was putting that away, I recognized many dirty bedding items on a chair in the dining room that sitting right near the kitchen at 1221 Dietz: an orange blanket from my current bed; one of the cashmere foot-warmers, bought for me by the Caverzasis, that I use for typing or TV viewing; some of the current clothing items now in my hamper at 101 Clark: more than enough for another washer load, and, in the dream, the paradox between "being" at 1221 Dietz and yet "living" at 101 Clark crystalizes in the thought: "I guess I have a washer somewhere here, but do I have a dryer here, also, as I now conveniently have "at home," but not THIS home? Wake to the thought that this "stems" from the CONSTANT stack of things-to-do that accumulated, most recently, since my 3/22 return from Japan, now 17 days ago, but which started in end-December with my burgeoning concerns about paying taxes, getting money from my Schwab accounts, trying to apply for SCRIE, trying to get my HIP prescription-pay difference back from HIP, website concerns, and other items in my current-30+ stacks that I'm thinking of displaying by turning 8x11 piles 90Ε and getting maybe TWENTY stacks displayed on the coffee table rather than the ten currently there with the remainder littering my desk, except when I pile them all on top of each other and make into a super-tenth on my coffee-table top. GOT to get into them, now that tax-deadline is only a week away, and current bills (like the $300 deposit for Shelley and my trip in September, like the upcoming $4000+ Visa bill with my Central America trip-payment, like cash for my HSBC account) demand cashing in some Schwab One bonds, maybe on-line. Let's hope Joan Brazil, or whoever, doesn't show up tonight so Ken and I won't be going to see Leon so I can get to the last performance of "La Donna del Lago" at the State Theater tonight. Now typing NOTEREPL thoughts at 7:35AM.
MONDAY, 4/9/07: 5:16AM: 1) I'm hawking a loogie with Ken on a trip. 2) A VERY old black man in an elegant Japanese hotel is getting off the elevator at "1" above "G" and I wonder if I should assist him to his suite.
TUESDAY, 4/10/07: 6:15AM: A very slender, pale woman is lying on her stomach with her hand seemingly pressed against her vagina. She seems very embarrassed, as if someone demanded that she masturbate against her will, and very reluctantly she starts to turn over as I try to make her feel better about it.
THURSDAY, 4/12/07: 7AM: I've met a young man, probably an older teenager, through a friend, and improbably he seems to accept me as a sexual partner, though in the dream I'm not QUITE myself as I am now, more as I think of myself in my head now. We start by cuddling with a sheet between us, but then he stands naked next to the friend who introduced us, standing close to him to conceal his genitals, and then asks him, "May I come out?" When his friend says yes, he stands apart, his semi-erect penis nicely visible. We end up in bed together, where I suck and stroke him, and finally ask him "How does your cock feel?" "Nice and hard," he says, "but the rim is starting to be sore because of those things you're doing---that I don't even know the names of." I resolve that he should cum soon, so he won't be over-stimulated and go past the point of real enjoyment of the orgasm. Then another, older, man enters the scene, and we look at my apartment ceiling (white plaster in not very good repair) and he says, "I live next door, in the whole two-floor building with a very high ceiling, and it extends over here," he says, pointing to the ceiling. Earlier, the windows facing the opposite building were unshuttered, and girls from the school there looked out and saw us and remarked about us until we closed our shutters, but it seems the girls always knew who their neighbor was: it was only I who was surprised by their presence. Intended to get back to my new young friend, but woke, pleasantly but not demandingly hard, peed, and typed this to 7:10AM.
SATURDAY, 4/14/07: 6:11AM: I'm studying some kind of esoteric knowledge, and have been instructed to organize something (thoughts? facts? ideas?) onto two sheets of paper so that the left side of the page becomes a solid block of something (same words? same colors? same icons?). Everyone has to do it, and it's been done before so it's possible, yet I have no real idea how to do it.
SUNDAY, 4/15/07: 8:17AM: I'm in a kind of gallery which has, currently, eight exhibits, each connected with one day of a performance of an opera something like Wagner's "Ring," but this one had fourteen performances, each of which had its own section of information about that particular day. Now, on the last day of the first week, there's only one wall on one side with today's exhibit, and next week's exhibits are all along the other wall.
MONDAY, 4/16/07: 4:03AM: A special facilitator has gotten us permission, after many negotiations and a special dispensation from someone quite important, to ride on a very special roller coaster, which I think, on awaking, could be called a Telgi-liner. We go into a special building at the back of a long line, where sometimes people sneak in front, particularly where the floor is being washed with a special solution that makes the floor glisten with freshness and we have to move out of the way to let it dry in spots before we can negotiate a particularly narrow corridor. Finally we're onto the final line, about twenty people ahead of us, and my partner goes for a special lunch, where we can each sample the choice-of-three in a special combination where I can get a tiny pickle with a cube of ham for my sandwich, and just as I wake a "complete" a twist of the dream by "realizing" that one of the loops of the coaster exists actually only in the past, but as we "transfer" to that loop, we go back in time, ride that loop, and "transfer" back to current time to finish the ride.
TUESDAY, 4/17/07: 5:50AM: I'm forming two word-squares: the left one a right triangle falling from the vertical on the left, the right one a right triangle falling from the vertical on the right; using the same letters, lines 1 and 4 "adding up" to lines 2 and 3; different letter-sets for each triangle. What?
WEDNESDAY, 4/18/07: 4:44AM: I'm typing a letter and decide to "inset" a quotation so that I won't need double quotes: Get the "participation" of...
THURSDAY, 4/19/07: 5:28AM: Five or six guys are with me in a porn shop having looked at four or five films, and we're sort of excited, but can't decide on the ones that really turn us on. One guy doesn't like any of them, and I wake feeling that I was probably excited at some point during the dream, but I'd lost any erotic content by the time I woke up
SUNDAY, 4/22/07: 9:03AM: Two fragments: 1) Sun-tanning guy is standing a distance away, waiting for the end of the long afternoon to pack up and come toward me, but I seem to miss getting a good look at him. 2) I'm telling a visitor how to get somewhere: go straight, then turn left, and turn right, and it's on the second floor.
TUESDAY, 4/24/07: 6:15AM: A Japanese hotel manager personally says "Sayonara" to each of 15-20 guests leaving; they're arrayed in parties as few as two and as many as four or five under the letters OOLONG, which has some significance. 7:53: Two young women are finalists in a talent show: dancing, acting, reading lines, and finally singing, and it's become more and more clear that the taller of the two, thinner and more refined, is better than the shorter, with red hair and a lot of guts, but as she slightly muddles the last few words of her song before the judges say she can stop, her awkward smile lets everyone know that even she has come out second-best in the contest.
THURSDAY, 4/26/07: 5:37AM: I'm hearing news from a pilot who's flying someone very important from the West Coast to NYC, but the weather's getting worse and it was "minus an hour" from the first report, an hour into the flight, but it's now "an hour and a half" to NYC and there's only "half that amount" of good weather left before they'll have to land or else fly in very dangerous weather. 8:11AM: I'm due to give something like a slide presentation, in a place that looks like an Actualism retreat-house, in an hour or so, and Bernice sidles up to me and asks "Would you like an ounce?" I look at her quizzically, and people are looking at us suspiciously, so I suggest we go somewhere more private, and walk to what looks like a bedroom with people passing through, but appears to be about to empty out. Bernice shows me a small plastic spoon with a granular whitish substance (reminding me of what I kept wanting to call falafel, though I knew it had another name, that was served with my Rodizio at Iberia yesterday lunch in Ironbound, NJ), and just to make things easier I scoop it into my mouth, where little fragments don't want to seem to dissolve, and wonder what the effect will be. Without transition, I'm trying to get to a particular place in a muddy area that, as a bypass around the normal corner, has a wooden stairway going up and another going down around the corner. At another point in the dream, I'm aware that I'm barefoot, which isn't going to be appropriate when I get where I'm going (somewhere like a museum), but I'll solve that problem later, I think in the dream. I go up the stairway and at the top realize that I've lost one my flip-flops, and looking down I can see it on a ledge about halfway up the stairway. Go outside the wire-mesh fence that has been erected between an outside path and the stairway, and try to reach through a large gap in the fence, but I just can't reach far enough. Go back to an office and people are lined up in front of a rough wooden service counter waiting for service from four or five scruffy garage-attendant types, and someone looks over others waiting and asks "What can I do for you?" I tell him I need some kind of long gripper to reach through the fence, and he comes up with a grocery-arm apparatus that I think will work (think of asking for a nail file to try to clear Susan's projector at the slides Tuesday afternoon), and we are about to go back out when someone suggests we try lost and found, and they present me with two wrist watches. "But I lost a flip-flop, a shower clog, you know," and I hold up the one I have left. "Yeah, we have to contact Lost and Found in Akron, Ohio," one guy jokes, and I feel increasingly frustrated: "I lost it HERE, not in Akron!" He presents me with a smaller size flip-flop, which depressingly has the SAME pebbles muddied onto the toe as the flip-flop I have in my hand, which I realize is NOT the one I had before, and it all seems totally hopeless when I wake up, amazed that I'd not only gotten back to sleep at 7:43 but had this rather complex dream, and lay in be amazed, stretching my arm over my head and coughing, seemingly as a result of the movement, and get up to pee again and get to the computer to type this by 8:30.
FRIDAY, 4/27/07: 3:15AM: I'm a batter for a team in a large stadium, but the selection of bats, only five or six, all seem very light, and I pick up the heaviest one, but it's made out of something like a painted cork, with a strange carving on one side, which I point away from the ball for maximum impact. At first the entire place is dark, like the inside of a lightless garage, but as I look toward the pitcher it begins to lighten up a bit and I won't have to worry about seeing the ball coming toward me. Then the first few pitches are terribly wild, and I begin to think I won't even have to attempt to hit, just get to first base on balls. Then, without transition, some man sitting in the infield has somehow gotten a bullet wound on both sides of his mouth, and someone suggests he bit into a hamburger with a bullet in it, and as people are discussing this bizarre possibility, someone else has either stepped on a bullet or has swallowed one that's gone down to her toes, and her toes begin oozing blood. Again without transition my dream changed into a TV program about strange murders: the first shows an x-ray of a purported scheme to blow someone up, or suffocate them in another's body, with a living person being stuffed inside another living person who is also the back of an overstuffed living room chair, and the program depicts how the person, in being stuffed into such a small space as another person, has his head squeezed through the neck of the stuffed person, enlarging with a grotesque expression on his face as he suffocates inside the victim's body. Another person-stuffing is being illustrated, showing how the mouth becomes grossly distorted before actual suffocation, and I being to think, in the dream, that this is just incredibly horrible and far-fetched, and I don't want to watch any more, and wake. Type this to 3:30AM after taking two aspirin for the almost-full bottle of wine I drank last night, and then peeing, still feeling thirsty for more cold liquid. 10:15AM: After smoking about 1/3 a bidi, I fell back to sleep and had a "Magical Mystical Tour" dream: A group of us are having lunch in an enormous restaurant (maybe based on Iberia in Ironbound, Newark, Wednesday) and dessert is at another station in what has become an even more enormous restaurant: we can go from room to room, each with a different theme, and huge panniers of blackberries are being carried on the heads of black waiters from room to room, but none seem actually to be served (maybe they're plastic?) and some even drop off and disappear on the floor, or are scooped into unfrequented corners of the rooms. I want to call for a hot fudge sundae, but no one seems to pay attention to me (I've gotten separated from the group), so I decide to try another room, but the partitions seem to be getting harder to distinguish, and at one point I find my feet entangled in the wires holding together the paper mache forming an armchair that I'd tried stepping on to get over the barrier that it formed, but I sank through to the floor, legs enmeshed, and I stepped higher and higher to get more of the debris under my feet to free them, and finally stepping into an area so grand that it had a kind of roller coaster of cars going from one area to another. I tried getting into the back of one, but it was designed to be entered from the front, where people were on a line waiting for the next one. Another was conveniently nearby, but someone I didn't know go in, and it seemed designed for only two, and I thought that would be imposing. I wandered off, at one point passing the side of a gigantic amphitheater where a number of performances seemed to be going on at each side, clots of people participating, or watching, or cheering, or moving from stage to stage. At last it seemed to be getting dark, and I'd pass fences that seemed to demark this huge entertainment facility from properties around (when it had switched from inside to outside I wasn't aware), and every so often I'd find the roller coaster tracks buried in the turf, and thought to find a station, or wait for one to stop, but none passed, and people vanished, and I was wandering alone, in almost impenetrable dark, I had no idea where, or how I was supposed to get out to rejoin my group, wherever they were, and I woke, amazed at how a bit of bidi could reproduce a pot-dream of enormous complexity and riveting reality.
SATURDAY, 4/28/07: 3:34AM: I'm in a small grocery store in the country, which may be upstate New York, with a shopping list for Mom and one for me: they don't have gin, but have Mylanta, and I go outside for some reason and when I come back in the door the proprietor puts up the palm of his hand as if to stop me coming to the back, but then he realizes my stuff is already on the counter, so I go up and think to ask for two different lists, but the clerk has already totaled the whole eight items, so I'm content to pay the whole amount. 8:30AM: Remembered dream from about 6:30: I'm working in an office in London, with a secretary who gets off her job downstairs at 6PM and then comes upstairs to work with me as a sort of proofreader, but on this particular day, right outside our building, a lavish parade celebrating a royal wedding is passing by, and many of the employees are on balconies or at windows enjoying the spectacle of period-gowned ladies and titled gentlemen passing under showers of confetti and streamers, with a particularly dense downfall heralding the royal couple itself. Without transition I'm on the parade route itself and see two acquaintances, costumed from a period about a hundred years ago, "holding up a corner" on the parade route, and I chat with them about how the television cameras recorded their presence. Then back into the building I look over a partition to see if the dark-haired secretary is still at her old post just past 6PM, so if her absence there means that she's waiting to help me at her post upstairs.
SUNDAY, 4/29/07: 4:04AM: Obviously stemming from my concern about renewing prescriptions for my "foot fungus" and my "neck acne" (assuming I HAVE either or both of these still), I've been designating which drugs I'm taking by little green circles on a chart, and I "cheat" by deciding WHICH drug I'm out of and WHICH little green circle I'm going to use as a replacement, and change the array of circles accordingly, thinking, as in life, that I know as well as the prescribing doctor which medication I need (or is more effective).
TUESDAY, 5/1/07: 6:45AM: Fragment of someone putting on a babushka, saying that the one she was using now contrasted to the one requiring multiple folds that had entered into the dream before.
WEDNESDAY, 5/2/07: 6:48AM: I'm with a group of younger people, but I'm younger myself, in my "everyone seems to fall in love with me" mode, and a girl claims me almost exclusively, but asks what's going to happen later this evening, and I say "I don't know," and then say "I guess I'll take a taxi where I'm going," which leaves her out, and she looks at me with disappointment, and her boyfriend, on whom I could have had designs, looks on with incomprehension, and I feel I just can't let everyone lay their claim to my time and devotion without, in some way, clearing it with me before, and I go off on my own to her disappointment. A prior plot-line has been quite forgotten.
MONDAY, 5/7/07: 5:30AM: It was so real that I assumed it WAS real: I'm sitting with someone on my sofa, with a book on the coffee table in front of me, and I keep looking at the edge of the book to see a cockroach on the table, which doesn't run away when I try to crush it with the heel of my hand, and it happens over and over, until I remark, "What IS it about this book that seems to harbor roaches?"
WEDNESDAY, 5/9/07: 2:44AM: Judges (and me) are evaluating a Japanese man's ability to swim like a manta ray swims, his seemingly boneless arms undulating in the water gracefully, swimming straight toward our group which is sitting behind a plate-glass below water level, and I say "He's just not PURE enough," me and my Catholic purity, long past observing. Have to remember to say something to Sharon about my Catholic upbringing when I see her this afternoon.
THURSDAY, 5/10/07: 2:07AM: I've gotten an enormous chocolate-and-white iced cake, and I eat one side of it, then another side of it, then the third side of it, then the fourth side of it, leaving only a square from the middle of it, which I arrange so that my incoming family will think was always that way, and they come in and we start to order dinner, but when I'm confronted with a choice of a chicken cutlet, I say "I don't think so," but I taste a crunchy coating of SALT, in my actual mouth, and wake to make a note of it.
FRIDAY, 5/11/07: 7:40AM: Odd fragment: I'm under an overpass in midtown, looking out to check the weather, and see puddles rippled by rain falling from the underside of the overpass, but look beyond, in the street, and see flurries of snow, strangely late it seems, and think I'd better dress more warmly.
SATURDAY, 5/12/07: 5:13AM: I'm at a meeting that might be ASI or another professional organization, and when I'm taking a seat I realize that the orientation of the room has rotated ninety degrees, so what was a back seat before is now on a side, and I move toward a now-back seat. Then the configuration of the room changes again into a circle of seats, but some of the circle is behind a jog in the wall so that all the stage can't be seen, and I try to find an empty seat but there doesn't seem to be one, though finally I find an armchair that everyone around seems to agree is empty, and I can sit there. Without transition, the introductions seem to have started, but here's Orson Welles describing that, when he's working, he's a 55-inch waist, but when he's been self-indulgent, he's an 80-inch waist. Then he reports on being the subject of a sports-car ad, pantomiming getting into a very speedy car and being taken over by its dazzling speed, bouncing back and forth as the car goes around curves, hair blowing in the wind, totally captured by the velocity of this marvelous vehicle. All segments were seamlessly interconnected.
MONDAY, 5/14/07: 4AM: I'm looking for two little pieces from something that may have come in the mail and I'd put into a deep drawer, and when I bend down to look deeper into the drawer, my head blocks out the light and things begin to glow in the dark, making it easier to find the two little pieces I'm looking for.
TUESDAY, 5/15/07: 5:41AM: I'm attending an Actualism reunion at a dinner in a notable restaurant, and I remind myself to tell Chrystal that Joe Safko told me that he wasn't WANTING to attend this dinner. Then I briefly think of the problem that the original dinner was over-subscribed, but this auxiliary dinner was set up at almost the same time at the same restaurant, though I thought to myself the menu must have been changed to exclude some particular dish, or everyone would have been able to attend the same dinner at the same time. 7:14AM: What else could it have been BUT a dream? Dead asleep, I hear a double-tone tweet, sort of like a grade-school clicker, or, as I think a few minutes later, like a greatly amplified smoke-alarm signal from a dying battery, followed instantly by a sort of muffled grunt, very loud through my earplugs, and I jolt upright in bed, thinking someone MUST have entered my apartment, like the Times deliverer (who doesn't deliver on Tuesday), annoyed that I'm not awake to take the paper from him personally, expressing his displeasure. My gaze focuses on what I at first take to be an unfinished portion of some meat on an aluminum-foil tray I'd made for my boiler-oven, but what was it doing on the end of my coffee table? I stare at it incomprehendingly until it resolves into the brown crinkled opened plastic of a vacuum-cleaner belt envelope, put there to remind myself to get another pair of spare vacuum-cleaner belts. Pee and type to 7:27AM, still tingling from the almost-panic of my wakening.
FRIDAY, 5/18/07: 5:51AM: I'm in some far-future dystopia in which everything is very highly controlled. Though in rare cases it's possible to base an existence on a "joke," and then everything is wackily OUT of control. I can't remember details, except that the dream was NOT bleak or ominous.
SUNDAY, 5/20/07: 5:50AM: I've been entertaining a bunch of guys in my apartment, going through VERY old porno tapes to put on TV for stimulation, but most have left and I still have my clothes on, but some middle-aged very cute redhead seems to like me and want to stay, and after many preliminaries he says he has to take a shower, and I start taking clothes off and find what may be enormous bruises and puffs of damaged skin, but may also be only swatches of color from some kind of game we've been playing (maybe color blasting?), and I thus have to have a shower too. Put on a tape while I undress, and try not to think how he'll react when he sees my multi-colored body. Then, without transition, we've moved to an abandoned room that I used only many years ago, and there's no furniture, and he makes some kind of joke about not having my relatives, or a sister, or an old trick, come by, and as if by magic there's a troop of what looks like army trainees outside, talking about using the old house as a training ground, and I confront them and say this is MY place, and they start by agreeing and then try to be troublesome by saying they have their rights here too, and I can't figure out how to get rid of them, and wake and think again that there's nothing to remember, but then details return and I type from 6:05AM to 6:12, getting SOMETHING down. 8:52AM: I'm on some tropical island, high up in a viewing platform that may be part of an exclusive hotel, and I'm enthusiastic about the birds flying around and swooping up past our viewpoint, and I shout out "There's a tropicbird!" but people give me a kind of "Oh, everyone knows that" look and I decide I'd better keep it to myself, though I'd like to ask what the name of the bird with the blue-velvet wings is that has jewels on its back and whose wings flap languidly, like the ray through water from a dream earlier this week.
MONDAY, 5/21/07: 1:19AM: Dream before forgotten, but now I'm staying in an elegant French hotel, almost "Camille" in luxury, waiting for a semi-royal couple to come back to the hotel, and when they do I ask if they've said goodnight to Dennis, and the answer is uncertain, but I know I can telephone locally, using only a few numbers, since he's just in the next suite, and I wake with a violent cough, as if the access to the cough was just a few swallows away, as near as the next-suite phone number. Other details gone.
TUESDAY, 5/22/07: 6:21AM: I'm looking at an expensive book on sale cheap, but as I turn the pages, many are totally black: many of the photographs seem not to have been printed in the copy I'm looking at, so it's hardly worth the price. Later, in what may be London, I'm in a shop with my mates before we go up to our flat, and I see a packet of hot-chocolate powder and ask if I can have hot chocolate in the morning, so they reluctantly shake some out, but then sneakily take the whole container, along with part of a sticky bun, then the whole of the stick bun, wrapping the whole mess in a tattered paper napkin and making me feel foolish about asking. 8:20AM: I'm sharing a room with a very young Eddie J., and he tries to open drapes by turning the lever the wrong way, and I tell him to turn it the other way and they open. I open a smaller pair of curtains on a window over my bed, pulling up a pink blanket to cover a wrinkled pillowcase. When I pick up a pair of shorts to put on, they're plaid, and his. Then, very distinctly even though muffled by my earplugs, I hear a voice saying "Bob, get up," and come out of my dream-sleep to look at the clock and marvel that I've heard the voice so clearly, the first in a long time of this type of audio dream. I'd started Actualism but hadn't finished, and felt refreshed, though I had a hard time getting out of bed to record this, not getting up until 8:50AM, over eight hours sleep since I'd gotten to bed at 12:21AM and definitely had no problems falling asleep, after a bit of counting off the nine tasks remaining in stacks on coffee table, desk, and table in the living room.
WEDNESDAY, 5/23/07: 10AM: Two sets of dreams forgotten: 1) 6AM: Woke with the memory of a very impressive dream, something about walking down a street and experiencing intensifying degrees of enlightenment, so that by the end I'd had a full-fledged apotheosis and woke enthusiastic about the memory of it, but any other details have completely vanished. 2) 8:30AM: I'm in a common room in a woman's prison, and someone hands one of the inmates a sheaf of ripped-off stamps, obviously a memory of the packet of envelopes in a baggie that Sherryl handed me at lunch yesterday that Joe Easter gave her to "give to the guy who collects stamps." I look at the stamp on top: a foil-looking stamp with an irregular outline with the name "French Guinea" printed on it, with florid colors and a vaguely governmental design. "Do you collect stamps?" I asked the woman to whom it was handed. "Yeah," she says, clearly not about to offer me my choice of the lot. "Is your collection here?" I ask. "No, it's at home," she says with strained patience, as if clearly she wouldn't have the collection here. "Oh," is all I can think of in response, letting go the packet of stamps.
THURSDAY, 5/24/07: 5:53AM: I'm watching what seems to be a TV documentary on the existence of a time-fault, maybe inspired by a New Yorker cartoon that depicts a father and son finding "a miniature planet in their attic." Scientists report that they can detect a foreign object, though the nearer they get to it some asymptotic effect bends the space close to it, so that they really can't TOUCH it. But then another effect is investigated: as you draw near it in a certain way, you go back in time, the effect being represented as a smaller and smaller picture on the TV screen as the experimenter goes further and further back in time. They find they can actually pick up an object from the past and transport it into the present: a unique way of "stealing" which is undetectable in the past, since for them and their time-line as they continue into the future, the object is still there, but for the time-traveler they can move away from the time-fault and back into their present with the object from the past still in their possession. A number of examples are shown on the "program," and I wake and type until 6AM.
FRIDAY, 5/25/07: 7:06AM: I'm programming at a company run by Sting, and I'm working on the final phase of an enormous program in which, typically, I'm making VERY slow progress, and he calls me into his office where he's sitting on the floor and starts by saying "I know you're not in a senior position, but you're really the only one I can talk to about this," and proceeds to tell me about this visionary who's come up with the idea of alcohol-salt, AlSal, and he wants me to evaluate the idea and think how it can be produced and marketed, and then without transition I'm out of the office on a mission with Trudi Styler, his wife, who's involved with a bizarre family-like group of people in a weird setting which doesn't give her much time to talk about business, and when she seems to get involved in a lengthy washing-dishes session with women who might be related to her in some way, I say I think I'll be getting back to the office, and she says to hang around because she's only going to be an hour and a half, or so, but I insist I should get back and she agrees. I exit into a strange combination of box and elevator car (ah, another segment in the office has me going up in an elevator that jostles and wobbles back and forth in the shaft, a long time since THAT kind of episode!), and even though one usually exits by climbing over the front wall and going down a slope, I look to the side and see an elaborate catch-mechanism which I figure out how to manipulate to open a kind of side gate, and push it open far enough so that I can squeeze out of the box and push the whole thing to the side enough so that I can squeeze past and get out without leaping over the wall. Sting was sexy sitting on the floor, with oddly muscled legs (like the guy on the subway yesterday that I found so attractive), but there's no chance of anything sexual between us, though I find it pleasant to look at his expressive, though somewhat sullen, face. Wake and type to 7:17AM, obsessing over lost NOTEREPL file!
SUNDAY, 5/27/06: 4:14AM: After smoking for the first time in 12 days, I'm dreaming I'm in an exhibit hall for a school project, and two of us who are maybe teachers are asked to explain each student's productions, and I take some objects from the display table and say what workmanship went into, for example, some pointers with elaborately fashioned tips, and then pick up an overcoat which she's constructed like a real tailor would, with meticulous seaming at the shoulders and down the panels. Go from room to room, trying to get other students and presenters involved with the objects Sylvia has made. One in particular deserves interest: a hollow art-piece, like a hollowed apple, shows a miniature classroom inside, seemingly constructed meticulously from some shiny metal like tin, including a piano in foreshortened detail, merging into a far wall, and as the apple is tilted to permit a view of other parts of the classroom with trash on the floor, peeling walls, and a collapsing ceiling, and someone points out that the edge of the opening has been chipped also, to reflect the somewhat wrecked aspect of the interior. A preceding dream included some sobbing apocalyptic revelation, possibly of the progress made by another student, which brings tears to my eyes and the ones who are sharing in my discovery, but I've forgotten the exact details as I finish now at 4:25AM.
MONDAY, 5/28/07: 8AM: I'm vacationing in the south of France, in a small area described as "tiny, yet with wonderful restaurants," but I'm not as happy with the best in the area, quite like Moulin de Mougin, as I was before, yet look forward to going back and having it recapture its original magic. Other details forgotten now.
WEDNESDAY, 5/30/07: 5:40AM: I'm supervising an archaeological dig, maybe in an old section of Rome, and my boss asks me if I've selected any particular chandelier for our share of the booty, and I say "I didn't think we'd had any chandeliers," thinking of crystal masses hanging from the middle of a ceiling, but my boss sneers at my expertise and says, "We have at least six large lighting fixtures," and I remember now the six Tiffany-glass type lampshades on brass bodies, equivalents of table lamps, and figure he's calling these chandeliers, and I quickly add, "Well, there's a ruby-red one that might clean up well, but it depends on the condition of the---" groining? ribbing?---not thinking of the right word for leading---"connections, if they're all complete, so we can see how they look after restoration." Feel as if he's judging me as incompetent. Another set of findings are blue disks with white diagonals which should be erased if two blue disks are rubbed together, and try to think of another way of erasing the white diagonals without risking breaking both disks.
FRIDAY, 6/1/07: I'm being entertained in some strange city, and I take a selection of various foods of different colors onto a plate and start eating, but then see a line of people at a buffet which has a far greater selection of foods, and think maybe I should get in line, but then I'm sitting on a sofa and waiters are passing with plates filled with food and covered with a plastic sheet, so I think to take one of those, and my partners on the sofa are concerned with my welfare and I feel welcomed, but still uncertain of my position with these unknown people.
SATURDAY, 6/2/07: 4:43AM: I'm having amusing sex-games in a "Les Liaisons Dangereuses: setting, with elaborate, silken, frilly costumes, but my neighbor makes a joke, the butt of which is "pubic hair," called in jest "moss," and he can't forge the joke, keeping reaching for my bush, or his, and saying "Oh, don't forget the moss." More details forgotten.
TUESDAY, 6/5/07: 7:40AM: Having taken Ambien and Diazepam at 2AM, I wake with confused memories of a dream concerning retrieving my missing computer pages: I'm working against an unseen adversary to penetrate the innards of the computer, represented by battlements which have to be broken down one by one. This task is accomplished by an elaborate variation on clicking on the battlement, changing it to a different color or texture, and processing that so that it will fit in with the sections next to it, enabling me to penetrate deeper and deeper into the workings. I have confidence to finally win out, but each step is just about trial and error, and I have the fear that I'll have to have so much luck to get where I'm going that, practically, I have very little chance of succeeding. Wake in a haze, which continues through my typing of this until 7:45, conscious that I have to make the call to GeekSquad soon or I might not be able to capitalize on a cancellation.
THURSDAY, 6/7/07: 4:20AM: It's just before Christmas in a tiny village in France, and everything's messed up: I'm supposed to send postcards, but I don't have any, and I get two sets of 4 stamps, one self-stick, another, less neat, need to be licked, so I put them in my mouth to soak, but then discover I can't find an envelope to put them on. I finally remember the name of the daughter in the family I've stopped off to see, Claire, and ask her for two postcards, and she says something about prepaid ones, but I say I have two stamps soaking in my mouth which I still think I could use. She grimaces ruefully and goes off, and I never see her again. Her father ignores me, and when I came up to the edge of their farm with my father, a group of 8 of them are beside a lake in a semiformal Christmas tradition which ends as we're halfway down the path, and pairs of dour celebrants pass us, not saying a word to us, but clearly disapproving. Dad has to be somewhere else, and is clearly going to be late, and I'm late for something else somewhere else, with no clear way of getting there, if I even knew where "there" was. The stamps are now soggy in my mouth, but I still think I could lay them on a postcard and enough glue would be left to let them dry sticking to the card, but then I don't know who I'm going to address them to! No enormous guilt, just gentle frustration, thinking maybe since I'm HERE I don't need a greeting THIS year, but I'll send these for NEXT year, except what would happen if the postage rate goes up? Grist for Sharon tonight, if we meet tonight. 6AM: John buys the Sunday Times but leaves it out in a large room on a table surrounded by people who grab at it, take various sections (I see the magazine go) and even take the rubber band from the ads and paw through them, one of which seems to be a porno ad for males: I'm sure I see cocks on the naked bodies. Decide I have to go out and buy my own, so I look through a store copy to see if I can find the naked males, but can't, but buy it anyway. 8AM: I'm returning home to 167 Hicks with bags of groceries, and see a tiny elevator I hadn't noticed before, squeeze in, and look for a floor-button panel, but can only see a start button, so I press it and it starts up, and I try to stop it on three, but it keeps on going up to 5 (though I thought we only had FOUR floors) and opens onto the entry into an apartment. I think to go around and go down by the stairs, but the hostess accosts me (I'm hugging a copy of the Times under my jacket) with "I hope you're not stealing my CDs," and I assure her I'm not, but she still insists I stay, and a fat woman sitting on the floor by a stove insists I sit down, even though the floor looks hot, and I do so, and she pulls out the lower oven drawer which has three severed heads in boiling water, though they're still talking, and she asks which I'd like a taste of. I get up and see a vaguely sexy guy playing with himself, and other people having fun, so I figure I'll stay.
FRIDAY, 6/8/07: 3:55AM: I'm the leader of what may be a Roman legion. Having lost a battle to a possibly Germanic tribe, they're civilized enough to say the leaders should battle, with rifles, to determine the winner, who can kill the cream of the enemy. I'm worried, because I've never fired a gun, and fear being shot myself, but I see my opponent wiping his eye and try to convince him that he has "the Evil Eye," and should not thus compete, or he would be dooming himself and his leadership; we should declare the battle a draw. He hesitates, and is about to agree with me when there's an uproar off to the side: they've found an ancient book which had never been found in a complete copy before, and somehow it bears on this battle, and we all crowd around to see what the book says, and I feel relieved that I've been miraculously rescued from this unfavorable duel. Something about soil or mineral possession was part of it too. 7:20AM: I'm lying next to someone and we may have just had sex, but I feel so excited by him that I'm tempted to try to cum again by just clutching my penis in exactly the right way while HE cums, and I feel as if I could cum again.
TUESDAY, 6/12/07: 8AM: Enormous, complicated, over-abundantly detailed, impossible-to-communicate---dream: A humongous index has been done by Marj Mahle, given to me as a printout that contains editing marks, in two kinds of ink: black for the main part of the index, blue for a gigantic subentry under the term "Vend," which happens to be the main noun for a particular type of transaction of which there are dozens of sub-types, all of which are described by the blue subentries. For whatever reason (like my frequent conversations with Marj and Tris and Carolyn: "I don't CARE how these things happened: they happened, they've made the current situation which we have to accept; just DEAL with them as they are now.") the blue subentries are in a second column on each page which may or may not have some connection with the content of the black main entries along which they're set. The blue subentries are edited with vertical lines indicating alignment and spacing, primarily seeming to do with run-in sub-sub entries that haven't been indented properly: they appear to be subsequent sub-sub-entries rather than run-ons from the previous sub-sub-entry. So it seems that Marj has finished her part of the work, and I've looked through her work long enough on this particular morning in the office to be able to communicate what has to be done next to someone in my office who appears to be a combination of Marj Mahle and Vanessa Redgrave, who's busy on another project, running around supervising people, particularly a group of people who are for some reason in an underground bunker rehearsing for some kind of scene for which she's the director, telling people to go here and go there and do this and do that, and though I frantically gesture for her attention, this is clearly her primary responsibility and she has to complete her duties here before she can be appropriated for my project which will take the rest of today and possibly tomorrow, so I'm hoping she can spare the time, though I have the authority to demand that she do it for the successful completion of a very important phase of the whole contract. I'm trying to figure out how best to communicate to her what her duties will be with this complex manuscript, and how it will relate to the final index, when I wake and continue to hash out the details in my own mind: maybe at the beginning I think this is an ACTUAL job and I have to get everything right, but in a few moments I realize that this is all a dream and what I have to do is organize the details in my own mind for the purpose of recording the dream, as I'm doing now, rather like my attempt to reconstruct the previous two weeks, as I did yesterday when I typed about two pages summarizing what I hadn't yet put into NOTEREPL because my Dell shouldn't be used while I hoped that my lost NOTEREPL file wouldn't be damaged and be recoverable by HiTec, which it wasn't. Now at 8:17AM I read over what I've just written, madness at best, vaguely correct and communicative of the complexity of the dream and my effectiveness in conveying its complexity. Finish now, mentally fatigued, at 8:20AM---thinking this dream might be a reflection of my anxieties about operating the thumb drive that I bought yesterday for its possible purpose of transporting files from my laptop to my desktop computer.
THURSDAY, 6/14/07: 2:09AM: Four of us are rehearsing a play, though we don't seem to have books in our hand, so much of it might be improvised. The characters we're playing and the personae we inhabit seem very close to each other. The lead male is trying to impress the lead female by belittling and denigrating two other guys, who might be gay, and I'm the more reticent of the two, so I have very little to do except sit with my head down, in fear of what the bully may do next, and do what little I'm told to do. It's a Tennessee Williams type of play, where no one's very intelligent, but the lead man is cruel and wily about getting his way, the woman is plain but somehow attractive at the same time, and I'm, as I said, playing someone very like me. The dream goes on for a VERY long time, seemingly as drawn out as the tentative session I had with Sharon yesterday evening. There's some sort of threat of violence, and I might even feel a personal sense of fear about how the play will end, as if I'm as much part of the audience as my role calls for a weak person uncertain what his fate in the play will be. The duration of the rehearsal seems much more than half an hour, but I don't remember many details apart from the fact that the two minor characters feel very intimidated, the lead woman appears to think she can control whatever the braggart leading man will do to her, and the leading man seems to be winging it, thinking of what to do next as his actual character would do: determined not to appear weak or indecisive, but with no clear end in view except intimidation and appearing strong for what I guess can only be a prelude to the seduction of the woman. Type with the light on until 2:24AM on my laptop.
FRIDAY, 6/15/07: 5:44AM: I'm vacationing in a desert which is, paradoxically, also under water, because I can look up from the sandy beach on which I'm walking and see fish, large and small, ABOVE me, about which I remark "The water's so clear, it's like the fish are floating in pure, clear air," and, maybe because I'd mentioned Chrystal to Carolyn last night, the word "crystal" is central to my wonder at the clarity of the air in which these pale white, light blue, and faintest green fish float effortlessly above me as I gaze upward while walking on the sand: somehow the CLARITY of the water/air is so pristine that I'm not even struck by the fact that even though the fish are swimming through water above me, I can still breathe without any trouble at all. At another part I'm looking at an eel-like creature on the sand at my feet, moving near a plastic-like tube which might be his castoff skin, and my guide says something like, "Oh, he won't go near that, or into that, now." In another, independent, episode, I'm in a village that's somehow voting on two slates of candidates, one of which is the "practical" slate, the other is the "mystical" slate (maybe again from the talk with Carolyn at dinner last night about "self-improvement cults"), and someone drops off the "mystical" slate of six, and everyone knows that some other choice can be added for those who aren't happy with the present five members; they can nominate someone they would be happy with, without any problems being caused that would shake the integrity of the electoral system itself. Type to 5:58AM, happy to have the corrected time in the corner of the computer screen of my new laptop. 7:40AM: I'm playing a pinball machine that takes credit cards instead of coins, and I have to move away to get something, but tell a person waiting that this is my game, and they'll just have to wait until I'm finished. But then my credit card gets mixed up with others that have been discarded under the machine, like Metro cards discarded at station entrances, and I find one of mine but can't find my major Visa card. Panic, search my pockets, and at one point think that I DO find it in a pocket, but it turns out to be, in the dream, my UBS card, from my talk about my new thumb drive, but it's really my HSBC card, which I'm glad to find, but I STILL don't find my blue Visa card, and think "I was afraid of losing it before, and now I think I've really lost it, and what a pain it's going to be," and just when I've sunk to the deepest despair about losing the card, having searched AGAIN in the piles under the pinball and not finding it, I wake up with a great sense of relief that it WAS only a dream.
SUNDAY, 6/17/07: 6:35AM: A friend of mine in the theater has invited me to go with him to the box office of a popular Broadway musical, and he has an elaborate story, and possibly a fake ID, that he presents to the theater manager and, after asking me how much I'm willing to pay for a ticket, gets two tickets from the counter and presents me one and asks for the $26 I'd mentioned, but somehow I only give him $20 and he's content, since I don't think he paid anything for either ticket. "Did you get Art Ostrin's ID?" I ask, but he ignores me. Then without transition we're backstage, and a female press agent seems to have taken over the responsibility for our presence, introducing us to various people so that no one thinks we've just wandered in from the street and should be chased out, and then the female star enters, looking distracted and not really wanting to meet anyone, hovering in a corner just inside the stage entrance, but my intrepid friend-of-a-friend is doing the "proper" thing and introducing everyone she's brought backstage to the star, who cringes in the corner and holds out a hand to be shaken that already appears to be crushed from endless hand-shaking, and she has absolutely no interest in who we are or what our names may be, and that's so obvious that I really wish our guide hadn't pushed us, but it really MUST be done, it seems. Others in the cast come in, vocalizing, talking with other cast-members, and of such lesser status that they might as well be invisible. My first friend has not been around, and maybe he's doing the same thing for others at different theaters along 42nd Street, which has an entire subculture based on who knows who and who can do what for whom. Others are more comfortable in this environment than I am, but a tiny bit of the thrill of stardom remains in the behaviors of those who are both unimportant and important in this milieu of name-dropping and eagerness to touch the hand while looking at important faces.
MONDAY, 6/18/07: 2:30AM: Someone like Ron Tiekert is explaining why he led his little group on a visit to some American town the way he did: "I knew they didn't want us to go off on our own, because they would have had to assign each of us a guide, so I think people who watch the tape of our visit will be interested in the way I got us all to go bowling." Before that, Charles and Mildred and I were walking along Fifth Avenue and saw a tomb in a private mausoleum that we were curious about. I went to some kind of office on Central Park South and gave the curator there the location of 65th and Fifth, and she came up with a page on which was typed the single word Nadelmann, so I went out and told them whose memorial it was, and we turned on the lights and looked at the bronze urn with great curiosity.
TUESDAY, 6/19/07: 4;23am: I'm supposed to bring a special substitute actor to a movie set at a particular time, but I'm going to be late. Something about sex, too, but I can't think of anything now. 8:50AM:Our small town is celebrating Gay Pride Day with a Stand-Up-and-March theme, and I remark that everyone that's sitting down is making a point that they're NOT gay. Ken wants to get his umbrella and I offer him a bright yellow one, and he gruffly insists that it's not his.
WEDNESDAY, 6/20/07: 5:20AM: I'm traveling in a foreign country, writing about family life, and get an intelligent guy who's willing to talk about the interactions of his children with migrant children who live nearby, and my guide suggests he can talk better it he's standing at a table, and we ask him and he points to a little end table covered with tchotchkas that the guide and I take off and put on surfaces nearby, and he clears his throat and begins. Without transition, I'm riding in the back of a car with Mom, and I'm sorry that it's dark, so, to make her feel better, I say quietly, "China gets more interesting the farther east we go: the west is flat and not very interesting, but as we go toward the mountains the countryside is much more dramatic." She grunts "Tsk" at me and I fear I've wakened her, but I'm still annoyed that she doesn't appreciate how I'm trying to excuse our swerving around these hilly curves in the dark, rather than seeing the countryside, but I bite my tongue.
THURSDAY, 6/21/07: 4AM: A bathroom light fixture hangs near a copper tube that tends to make the electric bulb turn on, or make the socket hot, and spark.
SATURDAY, 6/23/07: 5:55AM: I'm having dinner at huge tables filled with strangers, and a woman sitting across from me is determined that a black man who enters will sit at the end of the neighboring table next to a black woman that she made sure also sat where she wanted her to sit. I don't know why she's making all this fuss. 7:10AM: I've got to get a message to Jean-Jacques, who's on a plane coming to NYC, but can't think how to do it except to leave a message with his airlines to page him as he comes off the plane and hope he hears his name being called. 8:10AM: I'm sitting at a large table in a cafeteria where we're the last three eating lunch, and I've cleared my plate except for a large pile of broccoli in the middle of the plate, and a waiter picks up my two companions' plates and as I take the last peapod in my fingers he grabs my plate without even asking, going away with a VERY exasperated look on his face, and we do realize it's 2:10PM and we should have been finished and out of there by 2PM.
MONDAY, 6/25/07: 4:32AM: I'm vacationing alone in England, waiting for a small theater production to start, in cramped seats under which people sitting in front have stored shopping bags without asking my leave, so I make some catty remark to them, which doesn't affect the crowded situation under my row of seats, which is just behind a sort of aisle, so we can move forward to take up more room. An American sits to my left, and a friend passes him some papers from the doorway, which I ask if I might look at since he has his own section to read, and he agrees somewhat reluctantly. Then, without transition, I'm in the kitchen of some strange eatery where we're supposed to select our own dubiously cooked and gravyed chickens, and someone ahead of me is chided for taking two, even though they're quite small, and I want to break mine apart to make sure it's cooked through, but can't figure how to get it out of its serving pot without its breaking apart before it gets to my plate. Not a first-class theater OR dining experience at ALL. 6:55AM: Someone a combination of Ken and John is sitting in the driver's seat of a rented car stopped to look at some view out my window, and I keep rolling the window down but find that after a minute or so the car automatically rolls the window back up! VERY frustrating, and I try to look for a manual that will tell me how to disable that automatic roll-up. Then I'm in a classroom, I don't know why, and the lesson has to do with a realistic dummy of a baby on a table, and I know I don't need this lesson AT ALL, so I tell Ken that I'll meet him in the cafeteria. I leave by the exit in the rear of the classroom, passing a couple of younger students making a poster for some reason, and not paying attention to the class in front at all. Just before I wake, I have the distinct sensation of lying on my side in bed and shit sliding out of me onto the sheets---so distinct that I feel the sheets just to be sure it wasn't real.
WEDNESDAY, 6/27/07: 4:32AM: VERY long dream of filling in dues' payment in an organization VERY like---well, it IS---Actualism. At first it was maintaining a file of records like videotapes, where there was a worry about space for the bulk of many years' tapes, but then it was just updating a card, with a detour into worrying about their dogs' registrations which, for some reason, also seemed good to record, but then it was just year after year of dues on files of cards like gym-cards, alphabetical, but separated into three or four major classes, THEIR teaching classes, but then the dream segues into a meeting with someone like Bruce Jaffe, who's teaching something like est's About Sex, and he demands to know how many have either fucked or let themselves be fucked by a MAN, with the view to "opening up" their repressed sexuality, or improving their understanding of man-to-man sex, and many are obviously reluctant to say anything until one guy seems on the verge of confessing that he was fucked and actually found it acceptable, but I feel compelled then, to the group, to confess that I myself never really liked being fucked in the ass, but I was certainly nothing but gay. Another clear dream for Sharon this afternoon.
THURSDAY, 6/28/07: 1:47AM: [Following three notes typed as written at night]: I'm twenty minutes late with an elegant escort to a comedy at "The Royal Princess Theater" in the Royal Theater in London. But it's awful, because we're so late it's intermission after the first act already!
FRIDAY, 6/29/07: 4:15AM: I sit in the second row in a doctor's lecture, and I have to get his replacement message because my earlier photos came out very washed out and in some cases actually WHITE, and they have to be re-shot.
SATURDAY, 6/30/07: 7:30AM: I'm watching TV and a guy is asking his buddy to show off his ASS, which he does very blatantly, and I'm astounded that they're showing this on commercial television, and the show-off bends over and spreads his cheeks and the camera lowers so that I can clearly see the back of his testicles and cock, and very attractive they are indeed! His friend is now sitting in a chair in a background, and he appears to be jerking off with most of his clothes on, and I'm even more astounded. Then, without transition, another guy is riding in a jeep down a populated street, jerking off his cock which appears to be situated HIGH on his chest, and I think it might be some kind of prosthesis, but still astonished to see this on TV, and wake excited.
SUNDAY, 7/1/07: Bed before midnight. 1) 1:21AM: I'm contracting top psychological help, finally pass all tests, and will have my first session tomorrow, though I still have to PAY for it. 2) 2:53AM: I'm asking a very busy Jackie-O type, "How many lines in your index, two per page?" She avoids me. Her boy friend makes fun of me: "She doesn't know." Wait till you meet her father; he's very important, very tall. I ask "Is he sexy?" 3) 4:20AM: I'm studying two books, and read them simultaneously even though my teacher thinks another student is reading the second book. I actually FINISH one and feel very proud! 4) 4:55AM: I GET the prize! 5) 5:50AM: Boy about 8, clothed, lies fully dressed along my clothed body. We're both lying on our backs. His brother, about 12, naked, lies beside us and then says he's COLD and lies right next to me, the tip of his semi-hard cock against me. I get semi-hard, know they feel it, and his parents chat nearby as if nothing's amiss. Actualism; up just before 7AM.
MONDAY, 7/2/07: 1) 5:12AM: I'm on the staff of a ship, seemingly modeled after the richness of the Deutschland from the Peter Dielmann brochures, wandering at night in a labyrinthine dark officer's quarters on a lower deck, which I think might be cruisy in the proper circumstances, and there's a public john in the middle of the area which is empty now, but it also looks promising. Then I'm sitting at one of a number of large dinner tables in a dormitory, and two students that I somehow know are "two-week students" are fumbling with the locks to get in through the main glass door, and since they're going to be placed at the only empty table, right in front of ours, my neighbor returns a piece of cutlery ("What did you borrow?" I ask him) to one of the empty place-settings at the table. The room is dark and vaguely Victorian in feeling. 2) 7:52AM: I've been asked to type something for a workmate or classmate, and I go out to find someone leaving a free typing post, so I ask a friend who's typing in front of the free post to save me the free post, and to make it easier, I pass the typing chair up to her to guard my place. Go back to get the material to be typed, and the muddy, sandy ground is extremely vivid: bright yellow, with bits of shiny silica, lots of water, and I can FEEL the sloppiness under my feet. Get to a door and find Ken coming out with lots of stuff in his hands.
WEDNESDAY, 7/4/07: 4:44AM: I give lessons by MEMORIZING them. Then I'm on a ship and fish, like threads, are swimming in the toilet.
THURSDAY, 7/5/07: 3:11AM: Bidi nightmare of ENDLESSLY looking for Knight Hall Room 32XX (silly since it's only five floors high) at the University of Akron for an Algebra class. I never find the building, with all the new buildings on the campus and very uninformative answers from anyone I ask, and I don't even remember EVER taking the class, so there's no background at all.
FRIDAY, 7/6/07: 1) 4:40AM: I'm arranging two teams to get the top five titles for jokes or poems or puns or something like that, putting them on a board so each team's title number is on the top line. 2) 8AM: Frustration dream again: I want to shower, but there's no outlet hose and no water. Talk to a dozen people, but no one wants to DO anything. Connected with "No Word 2007 on desktop"?
SATURDAY, 7/7/07: 1) 5:30AM: I'm traveling through Germany with Dad, and I think to myself that I don't even know which day of our vacation we're actually in, but somehow I'm here more to be with Dad in whatever he wants to do than to do what I would usually do in a foreign country: see museums, go to amusements, eat in fancy restaurants (and I'm reminded of a former dream of Dad, where he's actually RETURNED FROM THE DEAD to be with me, and to relieve his boredom with the afterlife by having experiences with me that he didn't have when he was alive). He gets involved with some locals, talking about automobiles, which I'm not interested in, so I move away and find the end of a bench to sit on and watch passersby, careful not to disturb an old man sleeping on a sort of picnic table to which this vacant bench is attached. At another time, we get out of a car we've just parked in a line of cars along a country road, and a custodian of parking comes by with yellow tickets in her hand, smiling at us and saying we don't have to pay her for parking, though we wonder if this isn't some kind of hint that we should give her some money anyway, even though she seems sincerely happy to talk with us in good English because we know little German. Then I'm sitting in a small shop, a combination of deli and bookshop, at a counter facing a bookcase, and a solemnly handsome young man that I even think I might have met before stands close in front of me and says, "Didn't you buy a lude from me before?" I say I honestly don't remember, not knowing whether he may be serious and unthreatening, or WANTING to sell me a Quaalude, or somehow trying to intimidate me into giving him money, and then he sort of reels back drunkenly against the bookcase, which begins to topple toward him (like I thought the very high chest of drawers that Martine Van Hamel, in "Cinderella" yesterday afternoon, clambered up to get a hidden bottle of booze, might topple over if the movements hadn't really been thoroughly rehearsed), and I sprang forward to hold the top part against the wall, but it tore away anyway, in slow motion, not quite yet spilling out the books, but coming away from the wall as if it might have had some safety attachments that would ordinarily prevent it from falling forward, and other upper sections lazily bowed forward and crashed down on lower sections which parted from the wall to give support to the fallen sections so that no books actually left the cases, and I wondered if this had not somehow been staged, or maybe the books were phony and incapable of falling out of the cases no matter how much they tipped precariously forward. Peed when I got up at 5:33AM and finish now at 5:48AM. 2) 6:55AM (probably recording it very near 7:07AM on 7/7/07!) I'm given bills to be given to South American miners, who are coming out of the forests for their pay before returning home.
MONDAY, 7/9/07: 5AM: I'm spreading open a large colorful map of Paris for a tour group so that they can admire the group of royal palaces and parks in the northern part of the city. An unclear section before that had me displaying another map of a spread-out city like Moscow; everyone admired my having them.
TUESDAY, 7/10/07: 1) 12:48AM: Traffic is SO bad on my street, I tell Helen who's coming back from a trip, that I'll NEVER be able to park. "I think having a RADIO made it handier to drive, somehow---and I never did learn ("You're talking into the wrong end," she said) the car phone. 2) 6AM: A travel agent is trying to figure who wants to go on a flight to Africa that "stops in a few interesting surprise places on the way over."
WEDNESDAY, 7/11/07: 6:30AM: I'm helping friends fill in some sory of letter array for some unknown purpose.
THURSDAY, 7/12/07: 2:25AM: A black and a white left a building (maybe a courthouse) and I said, as if narrating "And David Blaine and 'What's your first name?' Jones left as two separate men, and the white got VERY abrupt and said "DON'T say our names aloud," and I tried to retort WITH their names, but they appeared to be close to wanting to kill me.
SATURDAY, 7/14/07: 6:06AM: I'm traveling in a car with three friends, John among them, and we stop in a small town south of London for lunch. No one else seems interested in food, but I want something to eat, so I go into a small shop and ask what they have, and they go to an array of cheeses and cut off the top of a long triangle of cheese shaped like a Toblerone bar, and I suppose they'll find some kind of bread to put around it. When I ask what kind of cheese it is, they look at me as if I'd ask for a simple explanation of quantum mechanics: "It's cheese," they tell me. Knowing the answer in advance, I ask if they'll take dollars in payment, and, with infinite patience, they tell me No, they only take pounds. It's been a week since I've been on the trip, but I haven't managed to get any currency, so I dash back to the car and see two of my companions sitting on park benches reading, so I pick the more likely and ask if I couldn't borrow forty pounds. He looks at me, maybe impressed by the amount, which I chose thinking it'd look like a more important loan which would certainly be paid back, and also that I wouldn't have to look for more money for a bit. I take the two notes back to the shop and hand one over for a small white-paper-wrapped parcel, and he looks at it in astonishment, goes away for a while, and comes back with a ten, a small folded wad of blue notes that has a five on the outside but which is announces is "twenty five," and then beneath that are two smaller currencies, one green and one red, I guess standing in the place of coins, but then, for the exact change (and I resist asking how precise the scale was on which they weighed and priced the cheese), I get a tiny heap of objects: two or three badges of irregular shape at the bottom, a few plastic chips that might just be souvenirs, and a white bead set in a silver-looking surround that's either the smallest coin of the realm or an advertising gimmick that I don't understand. He takes the pieces of green and red paper, saying "I guess you don't want to keep THOSE," for a tip, but I insist on the gewgaws remain for me as souvenirs. I go back to the car, fearing they may have left since there was no mention of time, and see two kissing feverishly against the front wheel, as if to demonstrate to this lower-class village that we were sophisticated homosexuals who intended to exercise our liberty even though we weren't in London anymore. I unwrap the package and bite into a sandwich which mysteriously has a black-surrounded red-meat patty in the middle, at room temperature, which isn't really bad, though I vaguely wonder what happened to the cheese. My friends ask how much it cost and I haven't the slightest idea.
SUNDAY, 7/15/07: 5:09AM: Groups of us were studying British history, from Parliament to Diana, and I reach up and find blood on the edge of my ear.
MONDAY, 7/16/07: 6AM: I'm having fish, nearly transparent, after having discarded a bit of bone from a deep-fried fish before. There was a sexual component too, but it involved closeness and friendship, not blatant sex.
TUESDAY, 7/17/07: 6:49AM: I'm with a group at some kind of convention or gathering, and we're to compete in a show night, and we decide we're each going to put on a musical number, using only what we have with us, even though some groups are staging elaborate ensemble numbers with everyone doing the same in the same costumes. I look into my bags and find that I have an enormous portable bathhouse, with an umbrella top and a cloth surround below it, and immediately I think it would be perfect for "Singing in the Rain." I tell our leader that, and he says OK, and I have a little yellow umbrella which I can use to start out with, and then come out with the bathhouse as an unbearably funny climax. Then it occurs to me that if I could get a cocktail umbrella, it would be an even better place to start, so I go to the very crowded bar and try to get the attention of one of the bartenders, but there's such a crush that I have a lot of trouble getting one to look at me. I put down my two bags in a place that I know, and finally get a server to look at me, but he asks and returns with the information "We don't have any cocktail umbrellas." I'd tried before to find my locker, but they'd moved things around and I can't find my locker, and then look down and can't find the bags that I put down. By now the bar has emptied out and it's clear my bags are no where to be seen, and I have that vague waking-from-dream premonition that this might just be another frustrating dream, and wake to find that that's the case, and type it up.
WEDNESDAY, 7/18/07: 3AM: I'm unpacking from my bags in the back of a car to take inside a vacation cabin. I find a long, seeded loaf of bread which I bought for toast, but I also have a "utility" loaf for everyday use. I arrange my luggage for small stuff, clothes, and dop kits.
THURSDAY, 7/19/07: 5:05AM: I see a demonstration (patterned on Poiret's gowns at the Met on Tuesday) of how a nun's collar is folded and ironed from just one piece folded four times.
WEDNESDAY, 7/25/07: 5:20AM: We're getting ready to put on a show about New York immigrants: whites have it easy, darker skins have it harder. Before, I was leading a group of older women up a steep brick-paved street to 134th Street.
FRIDAY, 7/27/07: 6:14AM: I'm writing a play about a group of people sitting in a living room talking about sex, usually in small groups of two or three, but everyone in the group is aware of what everyone else is saying. At one point I'm typing a title and cast of characters, but at another point everyone is performing underwater, with clothing and shawls and veils floating upward in the clear water, with no thought about how people are going to breathe in the actual performance, though it's going to be filmed and could, of course, be filmed in short takes between breaths at the surface. I've rewritten a lot of the action, but I'm very disappointed to see that the host/producer has run off a number of copies of my first draft and seems to be accepting that as the final script to which he's added his own lines, making me wonder if he'll even give me any credit in the final production. One scene has people describing how they masturbate, and most women rather typically rub some object, including a small surfboard, up their fronts, and I convulse everyone by crossing my eyes and rubbing a finger over the top of my head, only later realizing that this could actually symbolize what I DO do with my own cock while jerking off. The producer asks me how I think of the actors grouping, and I say, "Mainly in twos and threes, though every so often everyone concentrates on one person's responses." I'm amazed at the volume of pages he's generated, passing out sheaves of pages to each person, some of whom hadn't even been there the previous night when the whole thing started. I wake and lie on my back, thinking that the morning after next I'd be lying here with Paul in bed next to me on the first morning of his four- or five-day visit starting tomorrow afternoon. To the computer to type this, having finished proofing yesterday.
SATURDAY, 7/28/07: 1) 5:30AM: I'm working in some guy's home office, looking to find a john in a kid's room and another, just a toilet, next to it. He keeps milk in a small fridge next to someone else's, and I wonder if I have to buy one for myself or if I couldn't negotiate with him to keep a quart of milk in his crowded little one, which also holds an array of discount mailing cards for various foodstuffs. Then I'm walking outside with the woman of the house and two small children, and a small rodent rushes past and a kid asks, "Is that the golden rat?" The mother says, "Probably not," but then I catch a glimpse of a yellow-sided black-backed rat that's very strange, with its mate walking on the path beside it. Then I follow a pack of ducks to a cliff, where they walk down the vertical walls to a stream below with no difficulty, and I walk right up to the edge to see them in close-packed formation, paying no attention to our looking at them, having no trouble maintaining contact with the water-wet wall. I think I've found a remarkable place to work, when I ever get used to it. 2) 8:10AM: I'm riding in a bus through a rather remarkable landscape: off to the right are huge canyons, water-eroded into fantastic shapes, and at the edge of one vista is a house with an outdoor swimming pool and lawn furniture, and I think "Kids don't realize that us older folks sometimes like to sit and just look at a beautiful view; we don't have to be DOING something all the time." Then I catch a glimpse of enormous purple morning-glory-like blooms growing on single stalks about waist high, and I ask someone like Marj if she knows that such things grow here, and she screams about the idea of such a large flower and says she doesn't know anything about them. A segment about a bulky sexy guy in an apartment, then on the bus, shirtless, comes in the middle someplace.
SUNDAY, 7/29/07: 6:30AM: I'm on a boat going across to a small gay island that I think of as Fire Island, except that this is a smaller, more circular, more exclusive island than Fire Island, and in the middle of the trip I'm surprised to see that our "boat" is now cruising along a highway, so it's an amphibian which I didn't even recognize when I boarded. We pass clumps of naked men having sex behind bushes and trees, who interrupt their activities to wave at us as we cruise by. When we finally land at the crowded shore, I don't even know if we have to pay admission to get on, and get shoved into a corner of a kiosk where I find my flip-flops have inadvertently stepped into a plastic box filled with yellow doggy-do, and I curse the person behind the sales counter for having put the box in such an available location. Look at maps and books for sale, but decide I can find my way around on my own. Walk toward a shore, but find that it's a possibly man-made concrete pool with clear green water that's periodically refreshed by enormous waves (from the TV program on the artist Turner last night?) rushing in from the ocean. The inlet is narrow enough to be leaped with care, and I'm annoyed when someone below me insists on my pulling him up with my plastic bag as his "support for 260 pounds," and I'm surprised he didn't rip it off my arm. I have no idea where I actually am, but it seems like a sensational place to be.
WEDNESDAY, 8/1/07: 7:25AM: Not at all clear about any of the details, except that it involved elevators, waiting to get into rooms, lots of people busy in various activities, yet, even as I type, revealing nothing of its details.
BALTICS DREAMS
FRIDAY, 8/3/07: Very elaborate series of dreams, involving travel with many strangers, but I didn't get up to type them then, and now I don't remember the details. Promise myself to do better later.
SUNDAY, 8/5/07: 2:06AM: A group of us travelers have been at a ranch in South America where the family has been cooking typical food for us, and then they insist we cook the next meal for them. Many many details forgotten now. Now 2:14AM, having sketched Friday's dream, and think "It's now 7 hours earlier in NYC, or 7:14PM, so why am I awake now? And can I get back to sleep after peeing?
MONDAY, 8/6/07: 2:40AM: 1) I'm lying in bed, very deliberately jerking off, and my cock feels very good, building to a wonderful orgasm, when it occurs to me that I'm on vacation with Ken and I'd have to find a way of cuming with him around, and I become less excited, more disappointed, and the dream ends. 2) I'm watching a TV drama in which a woman's brother is unfairly imprisoned, and the camera begins to show her trying to look like her brother (she looks more like Sigourney Weaver than anyone else), and the audience is led to think that maybe she can come to visit him and somehow change places with him, taking his place in prison while he escapes and tries to prove his innocence and get him released from prison, if only she can convince her fellow inmates that she really is HIM. Up and pee and finish this at 2:45AM, still tired from yesterday. 3) 7:20AM: Some elaborate East Indian saga that seemed to go on forever with multiple generations and an enormous cast of characters, but I have no memory of the basic plot except dramas of manners and customs and living that involved details of family and country and cultural history worthy of a Channel 13 multi-chapter series.
TUESDAY, 8/7/07: 5:58AM: Many elaborate dreams beforehand, travels and lunches and plans and conversations, but the only memory left is the final dream of a library book, in such poor shape that it may have been on sale for a dime, directed mainly toward a nine-year-old reader, but the first story is by a favorite author of mine, not Roald Dahl but someone like him, that I wanted, though there was some doubt that the pages cut out with a razor and heavily notated in pencil were actually complete, with the copyright page stuck into the middle of text pages, but when I tried to mentally order them without actually putting them in order, they seemed complete enough for my purpose, and I just had to rationalize my carrying the book in public and reading it, because it was so far below my usual reading level. Woke and couldn't think of a good reason to stay in bed and typed this till 6:02AM.
WEDNESDAY, 8/8/07: 2:36AM: I'm looking for specific books in a known bookshop in which the help seems to have changed entirely: women whom I'd hadn't seen before, with odd, almost Marj Simpson-like greenish beehive hairdos, seemed to be of little help because they would know little of the traditional placement of often-wanted books like reference or science-fiction or poetry. Also, the organization of shelves seems to have been changed: Narrow racks at the "start" of the collection now seemed to hold only paperback science-fiction so dog-eared and worn that I thought they might even be giving them away, while other, more classic sections, seemed no longer to be as comprehensive as they once were, and again were in a more random order. Somehow Charles was associated with my search, and I'd look through books that he could help me with, but pages would be missing; authors would have razored-out reviews of their own books, or removed pages would be replaced by typed copies of text or by pages, mostly incomplete, from other copies, or even from other books. In addition, there was some sort of alphabetical organization I was trying to impose on a catalog of books that I had, or that I wanted, that involved the first letter of the last word of the review, from A-Z, or sometimes even beyond, with sentences ending in "one," or "two," or "three" as the last words past those that began with, say, "yours," or "zenith." I thought his specific knowledge of specific topics, or books, or authors could help me in my very undefined tasks in which the usual catalogs or listings wouldn't be of much help. Woke with the details and peed and had a bit of reflux from "Gloria," and typed to 2:47AM. 6:27AM: I've been editing a heavily marked magazine page, with examples on the first page and explanations of the corrections on following pages, but both so dense it was almost impossible to follow them. Then it became a live documentary about various forms of physical disabilities, concluding with a particularly ugly face that went through various disfigurations of protruding eyeballs, bent noses, misproportioned facies, and idiotic expressions, and then describing the body which was top-heavy with "nothing functioning beneath the trunk" which was covered with a black bathing suit of disturbing smallness and featurelessness. Not a pleasant dream at all, but there was no terrible physical discomfort in confronting it, only the mechanics of making it as correct and readable as possible, though the memory of the details themselves are quite unpleasant. Finish typing at 6:38AM after showering.
THURSDAY, 8/9/07: 1:57AM: I'm producing/setting up/watching a TV program about putting on a new production of "Suddenly Last Summer," or "West Side Story," or some Tennessee Williams show with ONE incredible actress who everyone wants to see in the key role of, maybe, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," and everyone's dying for the part, which would last for only a week to incredibly sold-out audiences, and there was a section when someone incredible like Oprah Winfrey or Alfre Woodard was BEGGING me to let her write to a DOZEN women to let them play the part; she was so enthusiastic about the idea SHE would do most of the work of convincing these consummate actresses to commit to this project, and the public, not knowing from week to week what incredible cast they'd see, would pay thousands for each night, hoping to see their dream in the role, and competitions and play-offs would make each succeeding week more fabulously successful---and what a pity I can't even remember what play it was in the DREAM: "Summer and Smoke?" "The Rose Tattoo?" where even UNLIKELY stars like---who DID "Auntie Mame" and "Gypsy Rose Lee"---Angela Lansbury, or Julie Harris, would play for a week to enthusiastic audiences who couldn't wait to see her, and then after a year away she'd come BACK, with an even more stellar SUPPORTING cast, and it would be an INCREDIBLE money-maker, and a weekly TV show of the best of the best, and my name and fortune would be made---but what WAS the production that was the core of the dream?---I ask again as I finish typing at 2:09AM. Start FILE 6 at 2:26AM!