DREAMS of 2007 2 of 2
FRIDAY, 8/10/07: 5:10AM: I'm at a meeting like MAN, where I and a fairly sexy guy are talking about how to make a first contact with another nude guy: how to touch a thigh, or maybe even a semi-erect cock, but to be careful not to be too abrupt or hard-handed, particularly how not to be too aggressive with testicles, since a too-hard ball-grope can be a real turn-off if it's too painful, but there's a nice feeling of mutual attraction and both of us seem to be aiming for some nice physical contact that would lead to mutual good feelings with someone we both were rather attracted to. Finish typing at 5:14AM. 2) 7:15AM: I'm visiting Avi, who seems to have a houseful of children, and he's his old cranky self and we try to catch up with news, but I need to call Jean-Jacques, but realize I don't know his phone number, and he's probably not living at home anyway, so I don't know what to do next, and then the phone rings to wake me.
SATURDAY, 8/11/07: 4:49AM: I've returned to an old Gay Activists Alliance or Mattachine office in some old organization building where our offices, which used to occupy the main part of the first floor of a large building, have now been reduced to a corner of the floor, and all the old storage boxes have vanished, and I've long since given up hope of finding some of my old clothes and records and file boxes, and a former officer who's still President greets me with a hug and we mourn the loss of the old space and storage facilities, and I find a few of my old possessions and she talks vaguely about sending anything she finds of mine to me if I can give her my current address, and I rummage through my wallet and an old box and can only come up with outdated address labels from West 57th Street, and I'm embarrassed to find an old set of envelopes mailed to the organization I kept only for the old commemorative stamps on the envelopes, which she interprets as my keeping some kind of history for the organization's purpose, rather than just for my selfish philatelic purpose. I've given up finding lots of stuff now lost, saddened about the reduction of the organization, and I even end up driving through the neighborhood, which appears to have been in an older Broadway district around 44th and Ninth Avenue which is now largely abandoned and derelict, with water-filled gutters and empty store-fronts, and I'm sorry for the poverty of this once-flourishing area and think about the past, and wake to find Ken's stuff strewn about in the process of packing this morning for moving to a new hotel this afternoon, which seems to connect to the "displacement" theme of the dream, and I pee and finish this at 4:59AM, feeling vaguely still tired and depressed and counting the days left on this somewhat disappointing trip, except for some beautiful buildings and memorials, and some good food, but not great guiding or traveling companions or locations. 2) 7AM: I'm looking at some kind of art exhibit, but notice naked men being autoerotic in the corners, and start looking at some glass figures of athletes when the owner, his face painted clown-white, with enormous, black-outlined eyes, comes very close to me and I think something may happen if I ask certain questions.
SUNDAY, 8/12/07: 2:11AM: Fall asleep fairly quickly from before, idly trying to remember what the dream may have been that I'd forgotten, and have a real whopper: I've gotten up in the middle of the night and gone to a very long-ago apartment of Charles's, maybe even in Akron before he moved to NYC, and find there's a girl there that he seems to be involved with, so I figure I should just leave, but then a very young, very handsome boy comes in with whom Charles is obviously having a relationship, and he's very embarrassed that the girl is there when he enters, obviously used to being there, and he doesn't know what to do or say when a small door---in the base of a wall in which no one would expect a door---opens, and in comes a beautiful young Black man, early teens at the oldest, and Charles flings himself backward on his bed with his orange-corduroyed legs thrown at such an amazing angle in the air, with such an astonished and astonishing expression on his face, that I suddenly see him capable of enormous sexual activity and expression, which dumbfounds me, as he squeals out in the most ludicrous way, "WHAT am I going to do NOW?" and I think I just have to get out of there, not even bothering to get my jacket from his closet, which would seem to make the situation even more ludicrous than the Broadway bedroom-farce situation in which we all now find ourselves, and I wake with a lasting feeling of amazement of the utter fantasy, yet completely convincing reality, of the never-before even vaguely related-to-reality dream. Finish typing after peeing at 2:21AM. And as I drink water, I feel, somehow, the dream relates distantly to my being on vacation with Ken! However absurd that actual idea IS! 3a) 5:40AM: Recalled a fragment from before of a small group of athletes being honored for their accomplishments, and I'm interviewing one of their leaders, but I'm attracted to someone standing behind him, wearing only the gauziest pair of shorts, in which what must be the longest cock in the world is dimly visible in its majestic thickness and proportion, and I can't resist reaching out to it, trying to express my emotion by saying something like "This must be one of the most beautiful large cocks in the world," and he seems humbly impressed by my sincerity and allows me to follow its foot-long line as it swells upward, and I wake with a dawning erection and once again long to be home with the time and privacy to do what I haven't done in such a long time, since maybe a week before Paul's arrival at the end of July. 3b) The preparations for some magnificent presentation ceremony at a world-famous museum like MoMA in NYC are being completed: tables and chairs being set up in rows, observation booths being erected around the periphery of the dining area, and the donors and benefactors are beginning to arrive (maybe this is partly caused by Alex's accounts at lunch yesterday about his invitations to royal festivities in Tonga and India), each enormous woman more elaborately bejeweled and dressed than the last, men in golden robes literally flinging handsful of diamonds into the air, matrons with gold-embroidered hems on their sapphire and ruby gowns rustling over enormous shoes as they greet their peers, and I'm moving away more and more to give them room, satisfied that all the preparations are complete and that the world can see their almost obscene wealth in its overweening ostentation. 3c) Somehow connected with this is my task of emptying an ammonia-filled bottle into a pure white sink, emptying and rinsing and refilling and emptying it to make sure no trace of the chemical remains, until the discarded water runs pure with no trace of smell or color, and I'm even tempted to taste it to make sure it's pure, but I don't trust that process and am content to view a clear bottle and a clean sink after the last rinse. Finish typing at 5:53AM and still haven't mustered a shit, but do so finally by 5:55AM. 4) 7:20AM: I'm going shopping in an enormous shopping center with someone who starts out as Mom and ends up as Ken, looking for the right door in. There's a mustering area where we pick up a white device which squirts water onto our fingers so we can pick up items without their sliding through our dry fingertips, which I can't quite figure out how to operate, and as I'm going down some yellow plastic stairs partially blocked with ice and snow, a mother goes down first and her kid tries to push past me on the narrow path, but I don't feel like being pushed aside and perversely block his way, trying to make him understand that if someone wants to walk ahead of him, he should let them go, but he keeps on pushing and pushing, paying no attention to me or the lesson I'm trying to teach him, so I finally wake before we either of us gets to the bottom. Finish typing at 7:24AM.
MONDAY, 8/13/07: 4:52AM: I'm a literary agent trying to get a number of books published at a book fair in Mexico, and I sort through my one hundred submission forms for the last time, happy that the last dozen are only one-page summaries in very much the same form: book title, author's name, author's previous books, previous publishers, and a summary of contents, sometimes with short excerpts. The last one's title is "In the Middle," but the last word seems to be a photo of the young woman who wrote it, and I'm not sure how this fits into the format. Many others are around me with the same sort of sheaf of papers, and the tables for submission stretch across a desert dusty with peoples' moving among all the tables. It all seems rather hopeless, but there are occasional signs of recognition of one or another author, so there seems to be some hope after all.
TUESDAY, 8/14/07: 1) 12:59AM: I'm interviewing an important female physicist as she runs a final experiment to prove her revolutionary new theory about the workings of the quarks inside some special substance: her theory would be proved if resonance lines appeared on a screen, and she started by saying, "You wouldn't understand the theory behind my work, but---," and I say defensively that I HAD studied nuclear physics in the past and was aware of wave theory and reinforcement of effects at resonance points, just as vague parallel lines appeared on the screen that proclaimed the correctness of her theory, and she began dizzily to describe possible future results from the application of her discovery. Finish typing at 1:04AM. 2) 6:55AM: I'm rehearsing for some light-hearted play, and incidents out of early TV programs, like meeting a new girl, or arguing about nothing, or watching auditions, make little connected sense.
WEDNESDAY, 8/15/07: 1) 3:26AM: I'm having a back massage by my old HIP doctor Adnan, or Raman, or whatever his name was, and he's oiled my back and I'm getting aroused, but since I'm lying on my stomach I suppose he's not aware of it, but toward the end, when he's wiping the oil from my body with his hands, and I'm feeling close to blissful, I'm gradually aware that he's rather clasping my body with his, that he might actually be rubbing my back with his front, though it's not clear it's meant to be sexual, or that he has an erection, but I wake with a brief erection and the thought that he shouldn't really be doing this, and if it gets much more explicit I'm really going to have to say something about it. Get up, tired and hot, and pee and finish typing at 3:31AM, thirsty, rather amazed that I haven't yet come to the end of file 8. 2) 5:27AM: I've finally decided to go to a baths in a close but still foreign country, like Canada or Mexico, and I put my clothes into a bag and check it when I realize I should have put my clothes into my blue travel-bag and checked THAT, rather than the laundry-bag-type utility bag that they gave me, so I race after the guy who just took my blue bag and is in the process of shoving it with a dozen others into a locker that's obviously too small for all he's trying to cram into it, but I say, "Give me that blue bag back that you just took," and he obligingly hands it back, and I'm in the process of transferring clothes from one to the other when one of the young attendants points at me and seems to make a joke: "That's the guy with the hundred-dollar bill in his shoe," and I realize that I DID have a hundred-dollar bill in my wallet, which somehow slipped out into my shoe, and I shout, "Yes, that's me!" and a fairly cute guy hands over a hundred-dollar bill, and I go into my wallet for a reward, and spot a ten-dollar bill which I'm about to give him when somehow another guy's bag is on top of mine, and by the time the two bags are separated, I've lost the ten-dollar bill among bill-slips, other pieces of paper, and foreign currency which might be five-euro notes like I currently have in my wallet, and keep paging through, KNOWING that the ten-dollar bill is there, looking more and more foolish as they laugh at me, and I wake and sit on the toilet without peeing and type this to 5:34AM, hoping to sleep just a bit more in the less-than-hour left before the alarm for today, a partial Actualism having already succeeded previously.
THURSDAY, 8/16/07: 12:46AM: 1) I'm evaluating some kind of new animated TV series for TV Guide, and list the three newest entries: a) an old Disney cartoon that suffers from color problems and bad-timing sequences that make the images roll; b) an imported cartoon that's not very good; c) a new method of cartooning, that I helped start, which seems wonderfully promising. 2) I'm supervising a National Geographic Special that tries to prove that parasites didn't get bigger and bigger, because why wouldn't the last big one generate something even bigger? This program proves that the BIGGEST one came FIRST, and that all the others were subsequently SMALLER. 3) 2:59AM: I'm working in an IBM office (first of these in a long time? maybe thinking about getting back to NYC tasks TOMORROW?) and my assistant asks me about something, and I go into my files to find remains of lots of OLD jobs, and I wonder if I should just throw some of these (like Sullivan and Cromwell from 1971) OUT, or move them to some kind of archive file? But I can't ask my ASSISTANT this kind of question, and I don't really know who my BOSS is. I know who hired me, but he's somewhat higher on the organizational list, which, it now occurs to me in the dream, I don't even HAVE. Look around the floor and see secretaries at work, presentations to new clients, people in elevators going up or down, and I don't even know who to ask for an organization chart! I've got to DO something to improve my knowledge of where and who I AM before I can really start DOING my job here! 4) 6:12AM: I've borrowed a four-person game, something like Diplomacy but for only four players, from Paul McLean and have gone with it overnight to stay with a large group of friends of his. At one point I approach a young girl who is, I would guess, a daughter of the couple who's hosting about five or six of Paul's friends in a kind of openly gay sleep-in. I come close to her in an intelligent conversation and she wrinkles her nose delicately and says, factually, "You smell," echoing my feelings of my shirt through yesterday. I go off to the communal bedroom where some of the fatter gay guests tumble from their beds naked, but the four attractive ones have started playing the game, and for a moment I think they've left one of the places for me, but when I sit down and pick up one of the stacks of playing cards, one player, with disdain, says, "I guess you can play that part of the game for me," so there's no space for me, and I decide to leave, going around to the front of the house (somehow the game got transferred to a back garden) to pick up my stuff, but then it occurs to me that the leading player, who knows Paul, should somehow return the game to Paul when they finish, so I decide, though it will make me look like I'm cruising him, that the only way out is to return to the back of the house and get his name and phone number so I can tell Paul exactly who it is who has his game, and I don't really care what the reactions of the other guys will be.
END OF BALTICS DREAMS
SATURDAY, 8/18/07: 6AM: I'm staying with a native family in Central or South America who are showing me some kind of drug that they use for divination, but they laugh at most of my efforts to eat a piece of what looks like over-ripe watermelon next to a grainy part that seems inedible. I take a taste, but nothing happens. I try to follow them into the woods, but step into what I think is solid sand but it becomes very soft and I sink into water up to my ankles as they again laugh at me. Later I jump onto a fence easily enough, but in jumping down I land on a weak part that begins to break away and they have to catch me before I fall and hurt myself, but they're very gracious and amused to excuse my awkwardness because I'm willing to experiment and learn. Most of them are older women and young married men for whom I have no sexual feeling because of their rough dirtiness, like the natives Paul and I met along the upper Amazon last year. Type to 6:08, feeling vaguely dizzy and unbalanced from lack of sleep, or from the effects of the Noctamide taken at 2:20AM, less than 4 hours ago.
SUNDAY, 8/19/07: 1) 1:22AM: I'm talking to a very elegantly dressed fish, who's describing how fish occasionally dine on bird poop, and how they have to sort through it with their mouths to separate out the good bits, amusingly flapping his lips back and forth to simulate the elaborate process of transferring food to spit out to the front of the mouth, while the good stuff goes to the back to be swallowed. I realize what an exceptional bit of information I'm getting as we're entering this fashionable undersea party. 2) 6:14AM: I'm vacationing with Ken in a very remote part of a South American country where no one speaks English, trying to buy food for lunch and maybe looking for a place to sleep, and end in a huge room with beds like cots and piles of matting which can be spread out for more bedrolls, and buy some fruit which looks like the only edible produce. We leave and he takes out a coin which people flock around, to see what he wants to buy, but he uses it to test the solidity of a brick road: it bounces noisily off the road and he steps on it with confidence and enters a bodega across the street, where the old manager comes out expecting to sell us more food, but is discouraged when he sees we're already eating food off trays suspended from straps around our necks, but invites us in through his cloth-draped door anyway, and we find ourselves at a counter with a few young people jostling for position to look at a brown dog-like creature trying to climb up the other side of the barrier or counter separating it from us. When we tire of that, we look at other merchandise scattered over the floor of the shop, eating our sandwiches, and I peel a suspiciously hollow tangerine to find very little dried-out fruit inside. I'm not sure what we're doing next, but I have faith in following whatever plans Ken has already made.
MONDAY, 8/20/07: 3:55AM: I've been drawn out of my apartment without a coat in cold weather by a woman rather like, but much more attractive and fashionable than, Carolyn, who's made us some kind of reservation for a meal or performance intended as a surprise. We try to flag a taxi, but there are none in an area that looks like the corner of Archwood and Brown Streets in Akron. As we wait, I'm describing a typical Akron University class: "A class that is supposed to start at 9AM may finally get going at 9:15, with people still coming in later. Some sticklers start right on time, however, and you'd better be there on time. The dream peters out as I say, "I should have gone to the toilet first," and she smiles, and then I wake and have to pee, cool out at 62Ε.
TUESDAY, 8/21/07: 2:55AM: An extraordinary continental gathering at an old farm property, maybe more properly manor house, in either France or a small country nearby where everyone speaks English, and I'm a weekend guest of maybe a son of a family whose history extends deep into the past, having accumulated hundreds of friends and acquaintances who have gathered for a lunch on a comfortable afternoon outside the heat of summer. Everyone arrives en masse and introductions are informally passed around: I announce that I'm "Bob from New York" to many younger people who return their names with a simple handshake though someone is announced as a Count and I fear I've broken long-standing country protocol by introducing myself first, rather than bowing as others have done before me and allowing the Count to present himself first. Food is spread out on tables under trees as if in a 30s movie by Renoir or the delicate more modern filmmaker who established his style with "Claire's Knee." One young man who may be gay, or simply impressed by a foreign visitor, lays his hand on my arm and utters charming comments about the goodness of my being here and his pleasure in meeting me, though he seems so intelligent and self-possessed that he may be making gentle fun of my lack of manners in such a distinguished country bourgeoisie. Many of the guests seem to be single men, or men not yet old enough to be saddled with marriage while they're still interested in travel or adventures like this afternoon gathering at a famous country gathering place, like in a Renoir painting in a countryside suffused with sunlight and colorfully dressed slumming royalty. I give my name again and again, and endless streams of new people wait to be introduced not only to me but to everyone else who is of more interest locally than I am as a visitor clearly out of his milieu. No one is eating yet, and no one seems to be drinking, though some may have fortified themselves for this afternoon's festivity with alcoholic beverages. Small groups gather among the crowd, commenting on other small groups from other social classes, whether higher, lower, or of equal status is unclear to me, making the chore of introductions even more haphazard and even possibly risky from the point of view of violating customs of which I'm not even aware. But no one seems to take offense at anything I say, nor do they draw attention to any inadvertent gaffe I may make. Someone rather like Laurence Beasley may be the hostess, to whom I am indebted for my invitation to this gathering where almost everyone knows everyone else except me, but I'm not charming, young, or rich enough to be particularly prized as an object for introductions: another way of saying no one is taking responsibility for my meeting or not meeting certain individuals, all appear to be taking place at random, yet there also seems to be a scriptedness, or a protocol, deeply established by a custom of which I am completely ignorant. I'm possibly making horrible mistakes of which I'm completely unaware. The afternoon seems to last for sunny hours, even with the possibility of small groups going off to a stream, pool, or lake for a swim to which I'm not invited and would be reluctant to show a body much less attractive than the majority of the guests. A charmingly unmannered gathering with an underlying societal set of rules of which I'm totally unaware, yet the charm of everyone who accepts my non-understanding makes me feel welcome, yet a stranger, at the same time. I struggle to capture the theatricality of this outdoor fest, yet don't want to make it appear stuffy and remote, yet all, it may be, are subtly lowering themselves to accept my level of untutored geniality where a more formal presentation might have been more appropriate. I may not be dressed in the correct fashion, but no one would have the bad manners to even mention details of which I might have no better knowledge than to just try to be as myself as the complex group of people will accept. Wake from the dream with a degree of reluctance, as if this were a day in a trip to a place in which I would have been delighted to spend more leisurely time, passing the hours in somewhat distant interactions with a palette of people assembled more for color than for actual social relationships. I recall other somewhat stuffy people like the Count, and other, younger, more attractive people who are making no effort to introduce themselves or to suffer my introduction to them. Not that I don't precisely fit in, but I am somewhat out of place and not quite sure how to behave in such a well-established society of which I have so little concrete knowledge, knowing maybe only the hostess slightly and maybe one or two people I may have met recently who may be responsible for my invitation to this selected group, though again it seems more like a cast for a 30s movie, untroubled by political or social problems, concerns, or complications. Again the image of a Renoir or Corot painting comes to mind as a proper frame for the charming gathering. Finish typing at 3:49AM, still unsatisfied by my attempts to capture the beauty, spontaneity, and graciousness of the setting and "cast." As I pee it occurs to me this might be the first informal gathering of 40 or 50 people who have signed up for a trip consisting of people richer or more sophisticated than myself in which I'm initially a stranger, but which may offer the opportunity to get to know some better as the trip continues in different settings and circumstances, like optional side-trips, or meals, or subsequent social gatherings for the entire group or some special-interest subgroup, whether for eating, or opera, or museums, or country walks, or cultural performances of whose future existence I'm not yet aware. At 4AM I can't resist adding the idea that this might be a new life-style to which I might be introduced if I took the slightest effort in that direction, such as sending "the right kind" of e-mail to Alex and Mitch from the Baltic trip, or possibly even a foretaste of some possible earthly or future-life Eden of which I'm getting an attractive foretaste. At 4:06AM I add that these might IN FACT be foretastes of groups of people I may meet on future trips and entertain the idea of reporting at least part of this dream to Shelley (as whatever the OPPOSITE of post-traumatic stress may be) anent our upcoming trip to the Ukraine, and certainly worth taking to Sharon for deeper analysis.
FRIDAY, 8/24/07: 6:24AM: After a preliminary vague section about finding transportation, or a car, to get to a particular section of town, we're ready for some kind of performance or exhibit. Then, without transition, I'm in a living room trying to set up a tall lamp with two bulbs, and it seems that one arm is higher than the other, so that when it's moved out from the wall, with one bulb toward the center of the room, it's too high, so that when my downward pressure on the lamp is released, the arm raises high enough so that the bulb presses against the ceiling and finally crushes down on itself so it clearly won't light. I'm disappointed that this had to happen, but now that it's broken I can't do anything about it. I hope this doesn't bode ill for any of the two windows being installed today! STILL tired, and rather dry-mouthed, but the Ambien CR certainly worked longer than Ambien! Reluctantly into day at 6:33AM, hoping for at least an hour and a half to put stuff away before workmen come in.
SATURDAY, 8/25/07: 6:30AM: Perhaps stemming from Paul McLean's surprise call last night from Florida, I dream that Susan is visiting, sitting on my sofa and asking about my novel (which to my knowledge isn't "Acid House" or "Gain," but something like my website in fictional form, which John is proofreading). I say I'm leaving on vacation in two weeks, and think of giving it to her when I'm away, but then think "I might as well give it to her now, since I won't be continuing it in the next two weeks anyway, and maybe she can come up with an evaluation before I go," though she warns me that she won't be spending ALL her time reading it, so she won't get very far in two weeks. I go to my manuscript drawer and pull out a sheaf of papers wrapped in rubber bands with a title by John on the front, something like "A Study in Personal Reflections," and as I look through I find that he's stopped in the middle of some pages to put in comments on the text, like "Well, I could certainly go lower than that," when I'd described lowering someone's shorts down to his pubic hairs. I remark that she might like John's parts better than MY parts and prepare to give it to her just before I wake. Pee, finding myself VERY unsteady on my feet and also feeling sore of throat and sickish, and finish this at 6:43AM.
MONDAY, 8/27/07: 12:37AM: Ken and I are with a group in Europe, but I'm up a hill when it's announced that the train with the group aboard is waiting for me at the foot of the hill. I start down one way but they shout they're in a direction 90 degrees away. I go there to see a large bus, and just get on board when everyone shouts with malicious glee and zips behind closed wooden doors on every room so I have no idea where Ken is or where there's a free space. But things get sorted out quickly and I'm fine.
FRIDAY, 8/31/07: 6:45AM: Obviously influenced by Carolyn's comment yesterday afternoon about my bathroom "smelling like an old man," I'm taking a bath in my tub at 1221 Dietz, rinsing myself off while standing in a tub full of greenish water (like the greenish water I found in the plant-stub pail yesterday?) covered with little golden dots, like fat particles, and I notice that the water, about a foot deep, isn't going down. I wait patiently a bit, but it still doesn't go down, though it looks clear, so I reach down to the drain and encounter a fluffy, cunt-like mass of hair, which I pull out, which leads to a far LARGER clump of darker hair, matted together and gunky with gunk, and throw it into the toilet, but it's followed by an even LARGER clump of hair, masses of it, followed by a string that finally pulls up a soaked Lyons Company SHOPPING BAG filled with hair that couldn't possibly have gotten down the drain in the first place, let alone being pulled up out of it later. Put THAT, which doesn't fit into the toilet, ON the open toilet top to dry out, and the water in the tub finally goes down and I call in Mom to witness what just happened, who without transition turns into John, who is making some kind of breakfast gruel that wants 30% (like the 30% power for my new HealthyHeart meals?) milk added to it, but he perversely drinks some, puts in tablespoons of milk until it overflows, drinks some more, puts in more milk, and I tell him he'll NEVER be able to tell when he's put in the right amount of milk, and he leaves the whole thing in a huff and I'm left with a white porcelain top, shaped rather like my desk, from which I try to scoop up the liquid to put back into the bowl to drink myself, but as I scoop up the stuff from the countertop, I see that it's more gray than yellow, which indicates I'm scooping up lots of old dust that I certainly don't want to EAT, so I throw the whole thing into the toilet, after removing the now-dried shopping bag from its top, and figure I'll have to start over. Wake, thinking it must be near 8AM, but it's only 6:45AM and I'd gone to bed at 10:10PM, so I've slept a LOT, then pee and finish typing this at 7AM.
SATURDAY, 9/1/07: 8:13AM: I'm being initiated into a higher level of some kind of esoteric school like Actualism, but they're using drugs to help in the initiation, which I'm very pleased to see. At first, candidates prostrate themselves in a pinwheel around the edge of the stage on which the leader sits, but then people are arranged throughout the room, sitting in chairs, while attendants pass double cylinders to them to smoke: a narrow one which seems to be a traditional marijuana joint, and a bulkier, almost ocarina-shaped white bulbous lump that seems to need refueling by sprinkling some kind of hash-dust into the end of it. Mine refuses to stay lit, but I manage to take the joint and ignite the side of the white bulb until I see the inside starting to glow with newly started fire, and I can begin inhaling smoke from both. Begin to get a nice feeling when I wake and think "THIS is the way to do religion!"
SUNDAY, 9/2/07: 3:42AM: I'm supposed to meet Charles to go for pizza at 1PM, as I'm supposed to meet Ken tonight at 7PM, and he phones for directions at 12:30, and I think "At least he has time to get here on time." Then I have to clean up some stuff in my place, quite different from 101 Clark St., starting with a kitchen work-space which Mom has partly cleared off by putting out a few bottles: two liquor bottles that I just put back into their place, and a bottle of gin with only a few dark drops at the bottom that I decide to add to the glass of milk that I'm drinking just to empty the bottle so I can throw it into the glass-disposal bag. Put other stuff into the trash, which is filling, so I try to remove the bag but inadvertently remove only the CONTENTS of the bag, which is mostly used clothing, so I have to stuff them back into the bag and then remove the bag to take down the hall (as in 101 Clark) for disposal. Then I'm in a completely different bedroom, picking up a pair of black pants from the floor and finding it to be VERY dusty, but still basically clean, so I brush with my hand the areas just below the belt to get it mainly dust-free, and hang it on a hanger among other wire hangers in my very bare closet, which is the second from the door in a row of three or four closets, but they're all adjacent to each other, separated only by a white partition, and the one on the right is closed off, like it's for winter storage, and the two to the left of mine are Mom's and not to be disturbed, and mine has clothes mostly in plastic bags for protection. I brought my navy-blue suit coat from the kitchen, and it too is caked with dust, but it brushes off easily, I find to my relief, and I brush it and brush it but then find that, after it's clean, as I brush there are spots of wet appearing, and I decide (though indoors) that it's starting to rain, and I glance at the clock to make sure it's only 12:45 and I still have time to finish and meet Charles at 1PM, and then magically the suit coat is in a plastic bag, from which I can brush the last few raindrops and hang it in the closet and look for the proper plastic curtain to pull across the doorway so nothing inside will get wet, having to test one or two of them to find which one is the inner curtain for MY closet, than part of a system of outer ones which are for all the closets. Close the curtain properly, hanging on its white shower-curtain rings, and turn to leave the room to be greeted by a row of four cats, two smaller house-cats in the middle, what might be a larger dog on the left, and on the right a feral cat, bigger than an ocelot, smaller and sleeker than a baby tiger or leopard, about 18 inches long, that I jostle with my foot to show my happiness with its presence, and I can SENSE the language it's using in appreciation: "I'm so glad you devote your attention to me, singling me out from the others with your foot," and I, even in the dream, marvel that I can understand what it's saying, but knowing, somehow, that that's one of the reasons why I value it so much above the other cats, which I really can't totally understand. Wake and pee and finish typing this by 3:55AM (still time to meet Charles on the corner at 4AM?). 9:40AM: A) As somehow part of a previous dream, where I'd seen a fishbowl with sand in the bottom and plants growing in the sand COMPLETELY dry, and had replanted leaves by simply sticking them into the sand, telling Charles "I've done this before, and they've survived," I stuck in two large green leaves, but in doing so found champagne glasses stuck in upside down, and had uprooted them, uprooting many plants near them, and put them in right-side up, and the filled the whole fishbowl with water, NOW I return to find about a three inches of water over all the sand, obviously not good for the plants, and dip a bucket in to get out excess water, and fill the bucket so full I fear I'll spill it when taking it to the sink to empty it, and anyway have to leave it stand until the sand settles to the bottom so I won't be spilling the sand down the drain along with the water. B) Then I'm serving Communion, which consists of pieces of cotton surrounded by a bit of wafer haloed by an edible-plastic collar, which I have to dip into the oil floating at the base of a number of holes through which the communicants expect their communion to be poked by a priest saying the appropriate words of blessing, but it's me serving this Communion, talking on a telephone at the same time, but quietly, so they won't hear me through the mechanism, clearly not using the right blessing, and I'm wondering about how much oil I have to leave on the Communion-cotton, thinking I might be leaving too much, but no one says anything, and even when (I don't know how I know, but I know) a priest reaches for his, and tugs hard enough that he might pull the wand, on which I'm handling the Communion so I don't touch it with my fingers, through the hole, but I hang on so he can't get the wand no matter how hard he pulls, and he tries it a couple of times, too. C) Three of us are suffering some kind of ear infection, sitting in a common vat of liquid to treat it, but I know that I, in the middle, have an INNER ear infection, while the two on either side have only an OUTER ear infection, and I hope they don't know this, because the liquid in which we're sitting might be able to transmit my more dangerous infection to their ears, (I don't say anything about it, hoping they won't "cotton" to the possible problem. Wake late and woozy from too much sleep.
MONDAY, 9/3/07: 1) 4:40AM: Our tenement, in what could be the far Upper West Side, is putting on a production of "West Side Story," and all the principals are gathering to wait for a bus to take them to a rehearsal, and I've been drafted in some very minor part, as a non-Italian, because I'm doing something else like stage-managing, or financing, the production, and I'm worried about the lines I'll have to memorize even for a tiny part, and I understand I'm being used by the younger, more attractive people in the apartments. We've been standing crammed into the lobby for a long time when I realize almost everyone else is wearing a coat, and I'm just in shirt sleeves, so I say "I guess I'd better go up and get a coat." I start up the four flights to my apartment, puzzled that two or three steps are missing between the second and third floors, and then five or six steps are missing between the third and fourth floor, and I have to cling to the banister while spreading my feet for support on the metal beams under the banister where the steps have totally vanished. Then, at the turning on the fourth floor to go to my apartment door, there's a gap of about ten feet that I can't possibly leap, but I see footprints in the dirt just below the gap, so it's clear that people hop down to the dirt and then hop back up onto the remaining floor. I'm amazed that I wasn't aware of this. Without transition I have my coat and am going back down, easier now that there are no surprises, and find the lobby empty, knowing everyone's on the bus waiting for me, and I'm making up a story that I was down so early waiting for everyone else, that the few minutes they've all been waiting for me just evens things out, though I know it's going to be rough for the first few minutes. They're all in their twenties and I'm maybe as old as forty, but not much more. 2) 8:27AM: I'm attending a theatrical performance by a magician. He's on the stage and everyone's sitting normally in the audience, but his tricks are so seductive, and his manner so welcoming, so as his tricks become more and more hard to see, in his hands or on the floor of the stage, that I gingerly walk onto the stage and begin following him at a distance. He seems to accept me onstage, and begins to signal to me to take things off the floor, like small cards which are different-colored aces of spades, and step on some with my foot as he moves them around without touching them. At some previous point, a chair had floated around the stage with, I was sure, no wires guiding them from the top. Soon others joined me on the stage, and were peering at his tricks, until he went into a little room, manipulated a tiny figure of a man, which he lay on a table and started talking about an orgasm, and the tiny penis on the mannequin oozed a bit of cum, then grew larger and began to shoot like a real orgasm, and everyone gasped, and the magician turned into a commentator who, as a joke addressed the audience in a mock-serious way, saying things like "And it's been proven from a model that an orgasm can be damaging: it should not leave cavitation depressions when it's finished." No one is laughing. "And the size of the testicles diminish as the volume of semen depleted their dimensions," which is totally untrue, but his serious demeanor and professorial manner seem to convince everyone he's serious, and I think of it as a failed comedic routine. Then the act's over, and people are milling about on the stage, and I spot some women with uniforms that imply they're usherettes, and I find one and ask her if she sits through the entire performance. She's unwilling to talk, but admits she does. "Has there been any performance when NO one's come onstage?" "One," she admits briefly. "When do they first start coming onstage?" And she refuses to say anything more. Then I'm outside, in daylight, searching my pockets for a subway token, but then realize we have cards now and don't need tokens. I follow a woman with an umbrella (though there's no sign of rain) to the top of a long flight of concrete steps leading down to a street, and I realize I don't know where I am or how I got there, and think in the dream that my symptoms of Alzheimer's are getting worse. I see a green street-sign that says (I can't remember the right word) "Secaucus," and I don't know where that is, but it might be somewhere to the north of midtown, like Washington Heights, and I soon come to a rock wall below which is a stream of automobile traffic in a trench, like the West Side Highway just south of the George Washington Bridge, and I figure if I follow the streets down to the bottom of the valley they appear to be leading to, I'll find a subway station and I can find out where I am and how to get home.
TUESDAY, 9/4/07: 7:11AM: I'm working, seemingly on an hourly basis, at IBM again, and haven't been on my job for a long time---maybe having just returned from a vacation? My boss, a feisty woman rather like Twyla Tharp, has just issued what I take to be an ultimatum: succeed at two tasks: 1) writing a tiny program that does a very specific mathematical task like multiplying a list of numbers and displaying the results in a simple table, and 2) making an Italian meat dish. Both these are assigned about 10AM on one morning and, she makes it clear, both have to be accomplished by 7AM the following morning, implying that, if need be, I have to work overnight to accomplish the tasks. I'm in a state of mild apprehension about how I'm even going to START these tasks: for 1) I haven't programmed in Fortran in a long time, and though it should only be a few simple statements, I remember the problem I had with simple punctuation and formatting, having to recompile endlessly to even get a program of statements that are ACCEPTABLE in format to the Fortran compiler, and when I wake at 7:03, until 7:11AM I lie in bed thinking of the endless problems I had with the billing program, which Roger Evans finally had to take over, throw most of it out, and complete in a far simpler way than I tried to do. Also thought of the compulsively detailed "documentation" of the program that I did which essentially described every programming step in the detailed fashion that makes talking to Marj Mahle such a time-consuming, detail-oriented, exasperating task. For 2) I know I have to sauté the meat before starting on the sauce, and I have no idea where to get the utensils, the meat, and the stove, not to mention the ingredients, totally unknown, for the Italian sauce. The manager of my boss is the expert on this, and he offers a few words of advice which I fail to comprehend, and at some level I know the task is ludicrous, but it IS an ultimatum and I DO have to succeed at it. My desk is loaded with stuff, and at one point "Twyla" comes over and says that I'm currently subscribing to an entertainment magazine which should never have been addressed to her department, and I should transfer the subscription to another office whose address I'm not sure of: where it is, why I should transfer it, to whom I should tranfer it. Then something else comes up: maybe I'm thinking I should have lunch, and I look at a clock and am astounded to see that it's 4:25PM already, and both Twyla and her boss will be leaving work and I'll have no one to ask about the DETAILS of the tasks I have to accomplish. I decide I have to find her manager, whose name is something like Van Hooten, I think, and go into a basement where I sort of remember his office is, and pass through an executive area where important people are waiting for interviews for jobs, or waiting in line to be ushered into a banquet hall for an important dinner, and at one point I urge a matron to move her chair away from the wall so I can get past her to get to the area I think I have to get to, and she looks at me as if I'm the crudest person in the world. Through a number of transitions, marveling at how enormous this IBM headquarters is and how there seems to be no floor plans or directories that I can consult, I'm in a maintenance area, with sweaty dirty workmen tending heavy machinery which might be boilers or printing presses or heating equipment, and I'm clearly in the wrong area and don't even know how to get out of it. Find myself without transition on the main floor, in the middle of a warren of offices of whose functions I haven't the slightest idea: are these secretaries, programmers, hiring clerks, advertising personnel? It's getting later and later; I'm too tired to stay up all night working; I can't possibly accomplish the first step of EITHER task, and how can I explain it, where can I go, and wasn't this just a temporary job ANYWAY---and I wake in an agony of frustration, immediately aware of how it reflects my stacks of stuff to do: on my desk, on the coffee table, on lists on my night table, on the dining room table. And I lay in bed miserably from 7:03AM, when I wake, to 7:11AM, when I force myself to put on socks and a bathrobe and start typing up the dream before I forget the details, and think about the things I should be doing in real life, and the jobs I had at SBC: the tsunami project, the multi-level questionnaire program that Madge Mao finally managed to accomplish, another project that Judd Boykin handled without my ever really understanding how he should do it, and the JCAS program which I guess DID work, with my triumph of the design of the job card which became its own permanent document, and TOBIAS, which, with unending effort, I finally managed to DEFINE before getting bogged down in the actual programming which Roger Evans finished after I was promoted out of programming into the management of the Fortran H compiler APAR program, where I had to supervise five people of wildly varying capabilities, including myself with the classic Optimization section where I actually, after a number of months, managed to solve ONE APAR, getting unending praise from everyone on my abilities, and then having to quit when faced with the prospect of becoming a manager, a job for which I had even fewer qualifications. Finish typing at 7:40AM, thankfully not as sick-feeling as yesterday.
WEDNESDAY, 9/5/07: 1) 6:05AM: I'm getting a report from a new customer on the first index I submitted to them, and they seem completely incensed over two of the tiniest complaints: a) There were "three shorts," which I take to mean three lines that were shorter than they thought they should be, and the only explanation I can give them is that the program doesn't hyphenate words: they may be used to hyphenation which more nearly fills up lines rather than putting the entire long word on the line below. b) They complain about receiving the index in a "Sanyo packet:" even though I don't know what they mean by this, obviously they think it's a cheaper or inferior way of sending an index, and I hasten to assure them I had nothing to do with the choice of index transmission: "The typographer sent the index to you; I didn't," I said in my defense, though it makes no sense after I wake that the index should have had to go to a typographer in the first place. 2) 8:10AM: I hardly thought I had a chance to go back to sleep again, but a) someone is definitely asking someone else "What if the babysitter doesn't show up?" and b) someone from an elegant dinner party is protesting "We don't want to go to a fancy pastry shop after just having had dinner!" (this might stem from Ken's protesting that I waited until after he'd filled himself with almost three slices of pepperoni-anchovy-green pepper pizza before suggesting I buy a pint of Haagen-Daaz Dulce de Leche ice cream for dessert at my place), and c) I want to buy a lollypop and pull out a wad of bills from my back pocket and peel off the outside bill, which turns out to be a ten-dollar bill so rotten that it starts to fall into shreds as I pull it off the wad, but I assure myself that this isn't a foreign country, and a piece of Scotch tape will mend the bill handily, and anyway it's an awful lot to pay for a simple candy lollypop in the first place.
SUNDAY, 9/9/07: 8:14AM: I've got a large group of people enthusiastic about a play that I've written, but with the expectancies of the people, it seems it's developed into something more: like a "Harry Potter" series of movies featuring a 9-year-old girl whose mother is one of the more demanding in the group, but as the dream "opens," they're sitting around coffee tables---more exactly, sitting along one side of a long ROW of coffee tables in this ground-level loft-type space that affords enough room so that all of them have a script in front of them, leaning forward from sofas reading the scripts on the coffee tables, and I fleetingly wonder who in the group made the effort to make all these copies. They've read about one-third the way through when we're stopping for a present-time summary of impressions, and I specifically ask the girl how far she's gotten, since she obviously is reading slower than some of the more adult, more technical people who had starting reading with her, and she indicates a page, from which I can say, "Oh, so she's just been condemned for lying from this other girl who used to be her close friend, but from the viciousness of her attack, she's clearly very jealous now of the impending stardom of the little heroine," and the possible star looks up to say, "I can understand how that could be," and the girl's mother joins in joyfully, saying, "I'm sure she could do this very convincingly," which means that SHE is enthusiastic about the script to this point, and since she's also one of the producers and suppliers of money, I'm happy to hear she's so pleased with what she's read so far. Before that, I'd heard someone say "The radiators are cold," and when I put out my hands to touch the girl, I was aware they were very cold and apologized for it, and then started to search for my socks which had gotten tangled on the floor with about three pair of long, glittery, one sequin-decorated, women's body-stockings, and I joked that mine were short and black and easy to find, and the mother remarked that the others clearly "weren't my style." Later, I heard noises from the radiators, and said, "Since the heat's up now, you can turn the radiators on if you want, just understand that they have to be turned ALL the way on or ALL the way off, or they'll bang through the night," as if I half expected they'd all be sleeping here tonight. I feel enormously gratified that everyone likes the script, on which I'd worked for a very long time, sort of like the website, and am enjoying my success when I look out a window onto the street and see a youngish Joe Easter, a large smile on his face, tapping on the window to get my attention. Startled, I point to the corner where the door is, and run to meet him at the corner, where he's momentarily lost in a street pavilion with lots of hanging cloths that obscure him for a few moments, and when he comes through a set of hangings, he's talking quietly to a friend behind him, and I hear fragments like, "Place settings, and take care of the ozone," by which I know he means something to keep champagne cold, and I ask, "So you're a restaurateur?" and he replies quietly, "Yes," and with glee I ask "Successful?," and he responds more guardedly, "From my home, with private clients, yes," and then he starts running very fast back to the corner where we'd met, clearly eager to end the conversation and get away from me, and I wonder if it was something I said, or maybe I had bad breath, or something else caused him to return instantly to his previous coldness toward me. Then I wake, get the Sunday Times, and finish this to 8:30.
THURSDAY, 9/13/07: 6:15AM: Sex dreams: 1) I'm in a group watching group-sex, with the "star" having a Tom-like body, cuming in pinkish clear gouts with great spasms in his beautiful body and face. 2) A John-C.-type is in constant teases and orgasms. 3) One guy rolls over in a sort of somersault, and I see that one leg is only a floppy piece of skin, rather like the bottom of the spinal-agenesis woman in the TV program about a week ago. 4) A short guy who loves to kiss is shunned by everyone. 5) I have to get to the Beard for dinner, but can't find anyone wearing a watch to ask for the time. 6) First the room is full of guys then it's empty, and I get up and jot notes before peeing.
FRIDAY, 9/14/07: 7:54AM: I've got two classes at the same hour (like the two TV programs I wanted to watch at the same hour last night?), but I've transposed the purposes of the two classes in my mind. Go to the first class and finish an easy lesson, and the teacher announces the grades for everyone, and my name is last with the only A for the class. As I go to the teacher to leave, she "reminds" me that I have a test in the other class, even though I thought the test was in THIS class, not the other. Race down a number of flights of stairs so narrow that students who want to come up have to wait at the bottom until I descend the staircase to give them room. Then up a short flight and I'm at the door, looking at my watch, realizing that in the 30 seconds before the next class starts I won't be in class yet, but won't be more than a minute late. Then I'm into the back of the enormous auditorium where the test is being given, and monitors are passing out notebooks and pens for the test, and I get to a seat in the last row, ensuring the monitor that I don't want to sit on the aisle, moving the four women at the aisle one seat inward, and slip into a seat in the middle of the row between two widely spaced seats. Open the notebook and see that it's been used a number of times, primarily by someone who was an artist and illustrated her answers in color. I fleetingly think that this might be useful: I'm not prepared for this test (I'm not even sure what the subject is), and some of the answers in the notebook might be answers to the questions asked in this test. Scan the answers, but they don't seem particularly profound, and wake before the test starts.
SATURDAY, 9/15/07: 6:17AM: Obviously based on the slide-show gathering last night, we're in a country house with a primitive kitchen, where I'm entertaining a visiting couple who have brought some food and are cooperating in the cooking of the dinner, but it's complicated because I hardly know them and don't know, for instance, that he likes his steak rare, so I'd been aiming for well done with two oddly shaped steaks in two pans, and quickly decide I won't turn over the darker one, which is very well done on one side and raw on the other, and he tests it, bloody meat just visible in his mouth, and he pronounces it perfect. A bottle of wine comes from an old refrigerator, and another bottle of white hasn't been chilled, but it may be OK anyway. Very mixed set of plates and cutlery at an old-fashioned kitchen table eating area, and some foods are still cooking and some portions are on the plates, and everyone is preparing and sharing some item of food, and it seems to be succeeding just as the party last night did, with casual understanding and friendship even though we all hardly know each other. Later: I'm entering a HUGE typed manuscript into a computer, and it goes on so long that I turn to the last page and see that it has 1750 pages!
SUNDAY, 9/16/07: 4:20AM: I'm supervising the timing of how long it takes for a ball, like a pinball-machine steel ball, to get from one end of a house like the one at 1221 Dietz to the front door. Just to make sure we get a result, we use two balls, which I let go at the same time. My assistant, for some reason, isn't in the house so I have to report what happens: "The first one runs into a cord dangling from the dining room table, and starts slowly going the other way, so that's out of the running. Then the other hits a bump in the rug just at the corner of the sofa, so I write down the elapsed time to that point, then throw another ball from that point, timing it until it hits the door, and adding that to the first time." But my assistant says that isn't right, because we won't have "the" ball that made the transit, to preserve for eternity as the ball that established the time of transit, because there isn't just ONE ball that DID establish the time of transit. I argue that no one could ever know for sure ANYTHING about the experiment unless we TELL them and they take our WORD for it, so WHATEVER we say is equally valid, and anyway, I'm not about to try this experiment a second time and have something ELSE go wrong that we'll have to rationalize about. Wake a wearily get up to type my dream before peeing. 5:50AM: A printer chews up my only copy of an enormous program. I talk to my supervisor about the problem, but he assures me there's no set deadline, and the new project takes 248 programs!
MONDAY, 9/17/07: 3:54AM: I'm being taught to explore a representation of a woodlands: water, rocks, boundaries, but I'm more concerned about looking sexy in cutoff-jeans, with my top button open, but buttoning it at night when others come closer. I'm also directed to study a rock wall, being told it looks "like Pompeii," which I can see with gold outlining black painted curtains.
WEDNESDAY, 9/19/07: 7:30AM: I'm walking up steep steps between walls of rock that seem to be supporting salad selections for the lunch in the cafeteria at the top of this hill, and I then pass through the souvenir-shop sections which sometimes have aisles so narrow I can't possibly fit through, filled with junk on sale before one reaches the food court proper. I get to the final stage but can't seem to find real food, and I look around the tables ranged below, most filled with people, trying to locate Larry P., who I came with.
THURSDAY, 9/20/07: 6:26AM: I'm sitting on a bed playing chess with Arthur Ellenbogen, and I really think he's cheating, since I've been dozing off between moves, and the board looks very strange, as if it couldn't possibly have gotten into this position if I'd been thinking continuously about my and his moves. I was sure I could move my queen to pin his king and queen, but he seems to have taken two moves at once, and his pawn is ready to be queened, which had been impossible before. I say we should stop, which he took to mean we should return to play at some later time, and has placed little plastic cups filled with white and red wine on the board to indicate where our pieces were, and I just pick up each cup and methodically pour the liquids into one glass, thinking that the glass will be big enough to hold all the liquids. Then, without transition, we're in a kitchen not like any of my previous kitchens, looking into the back at some storage containers that appear to contain enormous quantities of an orange fluid that couldn't possibly be orange juice, and I see there's a light cord hanging from a fluorescent light high up on the wall which has hardly ever been used, but I manage to reach the cord and pull the light on. Other crowded shelves are about to overflow their contents onto the floor, and I'm not sure even what we're looking for. Other stuff forgotten.
FRIDAY, 9/21/07: 4:41AM: 1) Daughter gets up, then the mother gets out of bed, but only the pillows of each are shown, no heads are shown, and the daughter is gone, and they seem to be Shirley Temple and Sigourney Weaver. 2) I'm on a scrubby hillside in New Jersey, looking down over the southern tip of Manhattan, and a jet is taking off to the south, but starts side-slipping in the sky, turning more and more over until I see people moving in the upright-side glass cabin, and I run to the top of the hill, hoping to be able to see if it crashes or survives its dive. 3) A two-second flood of yellow mympths.
SATURDAY, 9/22/07: 6:16AM: 1) I'm looking for a seat at a lunch counter, but though many are empty, most have food orders on the counter or possessions on the counter-stools, so I have to ask individuals how many places they're saving for friends, but I finally find an empty seat and take out the desk-drawer-like ice-cream maker below the counter, put in a watery liquid, and turn on the mixer, adjusting the drawer to be perfectly level so there's no torque on the mixer and it goes perfectly smoothly, and I stare at the liquid, never before having seen how the mixture turns from clear to ice-cream opaque. 2) Almost without transition I'm watching a TV program advertising something that requires people to be good kissers, and I look at the guy and think he has just about perfect lips: full, red, exquisitely formed, and he's showing a little girl how to kiss, and I wish I could be in her place, and after they kiss he shows off his prowess by fluttering his lips, pursing them, and making sounds and screwing his face into almost Wodaabe-like grimaces of kissing abilities, and when he walks away from the camera I see that he's quite tall, but the back of his jeans show almost no promise of a nice body inside, yet I'm still attracted to the person because of the absolute desirability of his lips.
UKRAINE DREAMS
THURSDAY, 9/27/07: 1) 2:44AM: I'd taken a series of photos, where the last one showed a sleeper in a perfect position as a climax of a series of moves, but it turns out I faked the final photo, so the series wasn't perfect after all. A previous, very simple, dream now forgotten. 2) 6:10AM: REMEMBER previous dream: I was visiting a noted TV star who was thought to be a female, and when she took off her robe, tiny pre-pubescent tits seemed to belong to a young woman, but then the white robe had a bulge in the front that HE invited me to feel, and in the dream really FELT a small, hard erection, and as I grasped it he CAME, white drops on the rug proving an orgasm, and we both seemed rather satisfied. In fact, just now I tried to REPEAT the dream in a lucid-dreaming type of experiment, but couldn't repeat the FEEL of the cock in my hand.
FRIDAY, 9/28/07: 1) 12:15AM: I'm exercising in the gym, but the black trainer is trying to greatly strengthen his client by forcing him to greater exertion by pushing down on the floor with two rubber-tipped poles like canes, which get in the way of the motion of my machine right behind it. I try to maneuver around his actions, but I can't, and he keeps exhorting his client to greater and greater efforts. 2) 1:56AM: I'm washing parts of my genitalia, but some parts are too close to clean without being separated from others, so I detach my penis from my scrotum and wash each part separately. Clearly a response to part of my scrotum itching from what may be an extension on the fungus. 3) Charles is in a library or a court about to be questioned about something of great importance, but, at the same time, he's trying to think of a subject for a book he wants to write. I try to steer him to some idea he'll like, while constantly being interrupted by some official demanding his attention or the answer to a question. He keeps trying to think of an interesting subject, then connect an author to it, but he's getting nowhere, so I come up with the idea that he take an author that he already KNOWS, like, say, Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams, and writing about some aspect of THAT author that he already knows quite a bit about, since he's read almost everything he's written. Sadly, I can't keep his attention on one subject long enough before he has to pay attention to some library or court topic that some figure in authority is demanding of him, and I feel quite frustrated, as I do now in having to keep recording these dreams on an almost hourly basis. 4) 5:30AM: I'm at an orgy, sucking on a cock with large balls that has promise of nice growth, when a tiny bear-like man rather like Edgardo tries to persuade me to work on him, but I see a chocolate-colored crotch and no discernible cock, so I gently refuse to go down on him and return to my previous object of attraction. 5) Forgot the next one.
FRIDAY, 9/28/07: 1) 11:21PM: I'm unwrapping a Christmas present by sticking a knife into a paper-wrapped package and driving it down into a roasted chicken with a penciled price of $69+ on it, and it's just beautiful, so I say we should have it for lunch immediately, even though Rita has another item of food as a gift. 2) SATURDAY, 9/29/07: 12:54AM: I've gotten a letter in the mail that my Visa account number 179 should be paid, and to access the account I have to enter my zip code followed by my account number---and Spartacus answers. I express amazement because I must have pressed the wrong button and gotten him by mistake, but when I try to explain it to him, he gets into one of his typical arguments, saying that what I'm telling him couldn't possibly be true, so I start by asking some simple question about my transaction, and he goes ballistic, and I figure all I can do is hang up and try to start over again. 3) 3:38AM: How did it start? Somehow, visiting someone like John C., whose collection of drawings and art and books I'd envied, and in a fantasy he let me select some drawings and magazines and books I could take home with me. But my home was transformed into a paradise of levels and rooms and suites which were hosting a magical party of wonderful, beautiful people from all over the world, possibly partly influenced by the New Yorker article I read this afternoon when I was brushing my teeth, about this rather plain woman in New York who founded the periodical "Paper" and selected guests for a series of soirees where famous people met their famous lovers and went on to establish multi-million dollar enterprises based on their mutually supportive creative geniuses. Anyway, my apartment was filled with people who were ordinarily jaded who found fresh stimulation in my company and in the company of those with whom I kept company. The party went through contests in which people chose where they wanted to be, HOW they wanted to be, and decided at which point they would be most happy. But that's current invention, not memory from the dream, though the dream, climbing the tree of unfettered imagination, branched and ramified, almost as in lucid dreaming, in which I could chose which area to magnify. At the end I was alone in my apartment and could return to the stack of drawings I'd gotten from John Connolly, with the aim of finding the most erotic and jerking off to them. But between these episodes there were drinks and sweetmeats and entertainments: THAT was a central theme (again, maybe originating in the naval personnel performance this evening in Sebastopol, where the stage could at one point feature a solo bass or baritone, and at another moment would have dancing girls who would put down laundry hampers that would stimulate competitive dancing among the men---transitions totally unexpected and charming, but better in my dream by not being based on flesh and blood, but only on my almost fever/LSD/grass dream of limitless expansion and ornamentation. People spoke, but in languages that were not understood. Men moved their bodies against each other (THIS was definitely there) and some genitalia were hypertrophied to Dali-esque gigantism, though somehow always with a bit of too-much grotesquerie, like the huge genitals that were chocolate colored, or those which seemed incapable of erection, or those whose proportions were simply too outré to be beautiful or appealing. Yet there were fabrics and sounds and sofas that set scenes of opulence that were still attractive. It went on, the dream, from sex to performance to display to architectural discussions to groupings of new people like the dream a few weeks before the trip where the people accepted me and I accepted them, and as such we could be more wonderfully ourselves, yet gloriously self-realized (which, sadly, has certainly not happened on this trip, not least by our being divided into English and non-English speakers, with no identification as to who is who). But as to the SPECIFICS of the dream, I now flounder for concrete remembrances: musical performances, I think; glittering conversations, yes; fantastic costumes that showed both males and females to utter beauty, but of course. But the vividness of detail is gone, and my typing is more erratic, and the specifics which I would have so liked to preserve have now evaporated. But beauty, surprise, variety, even bestiality (either with beasts or like beasts) wasn't THERE, but it COULD have been there had I wished to climb out on that tree-ramification to include it. It's now 4:02AM (reminding me that when I woke I thought "If it's past 4AM I'll transcribe it, otherwise it'll be impossible," and it WAS before 4AM and it HAS BEEN impossible: what glorious incidents in the dream I hoped I wouldn't forget, and have forgotten. Like a life in which the happiest, most ethereal moments have been permanently forgotten, making the life itself less right and worthwhile, just as the recording of this dream has been less rich and worthwhile than I would have hoped DURING the dream, as if I were actually trying to exceed my imagination in the process of dreaming the dream itself. Getting tired typing, got to get back to sleep, details smothered in the fog of forgetfulness, all hope of added specificity evaporated. Back to bed now at 4:06AM, to lament, before sleep, my inability to communicate the ineffable richness of the dream. 4) 7AM: Fragment of being complained about for something, or complaining, but details not remembered, though it just happened.
SUNDAY, 9/30/07: 1) 4:43AM: Charles and I are browsing in the main lobby of a huge library that's featuring a new exhibit of a revolutionary kind: half real and half virtual. Enormous old books are on display with their pages together, but their edges horribly fragmented by weevils and book-bugs and page-eaters, so that ragged edges swarming with borers and chewers are presented to the viewer, with such reality that you can lift a group of page-ends and see a new array of little white, legged, moving bugs in their hollows in the ravaged pages. Another kind of exhibit occupied other parts of the lobby: virtual forests into which you can reach and sometimes move THROUGH a tree trunk, but sometimes encounter the rough bark and contours of the tree and branch themselves, with grooves making whole areas of the lobby floor shadowy ghosts of copses and half-real trees. We have to be somewhere, and I can't find him, looking from a distance and not being sure whether it's him or just a shadow of someone projected by the display. Great REALITY to the bugs, large and minute, crawling through the ragged edges of the moldering books. 2) 6:34AM: I'm sleeping at Joe Easter's, and get up hungry in the early morning, careful not to wake another guest who's sleeping in the living room. She's brought two large pieces of very thin toast which are lying atop a package of new unsliced bread, so I know they won't be missing anything if I eat one slice of toast, which isn't enough, so I eat the second slice of toast, too. Then see there are two lights on in the living room, but since I don't remember putting either on, they must have been left on all night. I have to go into the bathroom now to get ready for the day.
MONDAY, 10/1/07: 1) 1:15AM: Someone who greatly resembles Rob Lowe (maybe because he was almost one of the solutions for a crossword I worked on last night) is coming over to audition my sister Rita, who might be male, for the part of the young man (who I don't think exists) in the new Metropolitan Opera production of "Parsifal." Clearly I would benefit (by bedding Lowe?) by my sister's casting in the part, and I've arranged a recording to be turned on when he arrives. Various sit-com routines occur, including Don Goodwin's showing up unexpectedly with his nephew to ALSO audition for the part. The dream ends in comedic chaos with no set solution. 2) 3:10AM: Students are waiting in line to substitute for me in taking tests in college: they get paid, it's fair, and I'm known to use many of them, and they use various ruses to be first in line, including trying to be attractive to me. I'm pleased with the whole setup.
WEDNESDAY, 10/3/07: 1) 12:42AM: As odd as it sounds, I'm at a movie studio, selecting the actors in a movie I want to see, and it turns out that when I order an actor who isn't available, the price of the unavailable actor has to appear on my bill, then be cancelled, and the price of the new actor then added to the bill. So I have Actor A, then Actor B, then Actor B's fee reversed, then Actor C, then Actor E, then HIS fee subtracted because HE isn't available, and everyone starts talking and arguing at once, and I think the whole thing sounds crazy, and wake up and try to make sense out of it before trying to transcribe it. 2) 4:20AM: No doubting the details of THIS dream: I'm lying naked in a morning bed right next to Paul M.'s current lover, with Paul behind him pressing him toward me, though saying, "I don't like parallel relationships; when I'm with one guy, I want to stay with one guy." But he continues to make his lover a sandwich filling between us, and I say something about that, and Paul makes a flip reply about my being an exemption from his ruling. and I begin running my hands over the lover's body, pale and smooth and almost hairless, and at the same time running my other hand over Paul's body, red-haired and slender as when he was in his twenties, and I can feel that I'm satisfactorily hard, and young, and it looks like it's going to be a good time when I wake, feeling good, and type this before peeing. 3) 6:48AM: TRIO of dreams: a) books, b) sex, c) Suzie and Joe E. a) I'm looking in a very old section of a very old bookstore, at a shelf of enormous volumes of very arcane literature, some one-shots with collages of objects and pages of poems and jottings, and some lists of recommended books from obscure authors. I ask for one book at a main desk and get it immediately, and ask that it be put aside so I can add to the stack, and she puts it behind a glass case and I ask how to get to another section, and she implies that it's not available, but then a handsome clerk takes me to a hidden corner and many of the books are there, with a map for Horror, Fantasy, and other books that I look forward to looking through. This multiplies to books that fall apart when opened, dusty tomes that no one's ever read, and collections of magazines that fall behind their shelves like pages in my self-erected bookcase. b) I'm at a very crowded orgy, erect cocks everywhere, fingers fondling giant penises on the verge of cuming, with cock-heads that look like slices of liver piled atop each other. I play and suck and get sucked, and it's all quite impossibly wonderful. c) Suzie Mead comes in to see Joe to have him fasten her girdle, and I call to him but he seems to be far out in some kind of garden where he can't hear us. Many details remain undescribed. Finish typing at 6:55AM.
THURSDAY, 10/4/07: 1) 1:47AM: I'm responsible for putting together the details of a deal for a very expensive television program, whose primary investor is a secret Sultan of Saudi Arabia, that a handsome businessman who happens to look like Jerry Seinfeld has "almost" cleared a check for a half-billion dollars from. A very beautiful Egyptian woman is playing an as yet unknown part in this component. Then there's the owner of an enormous theater, who seems willing to contribute his space if it doesn't cost him anything more. In addition, a TV mogul rather like Donald Trump will commit to a first program if the other elements are in place. A fourth participant is involved with a jeweler of immense wealth to either contribute sponsorship or provide the Grand Prize, but only if everyone else agrees. I manage to get everyone in a room to say that their part of the deal has been completed satisfactorily, but in the mode of an ongoing TV series about this deal, it may just be that the check from the Sultan will bounce because the "mystery woman" hasn't yet fulfilled her portion of her commitment, and next week's program will have enormous interest for the viewing audience because something sensational is bound to happen. A final detail: the representative of the Sultan should choose the right front seat of a private jet because in that seat he's guaranteed the best air conditioning. Is that a threat on his life in the next episode? 2) Still in an Arab country, a large number of us are going to dinner by car, but when we turn into nine people, I wonder how we're all going to fit, and then I realize three are in the front seat, three in the next, and three behind them, and I look back and see we're in an 18-passenger car with six rows of seats which Robin Williams is driving. He backs up, not realizing the car is so long, and I shout to him to stop just as he's about to crash into a wall. I ask if he's ever driven a long car before, and he asks me what the difference is, and I say something about having to go farther into an intersection befoe making a turn. Without transition we've finished our meal and it's time to pay the bill for 87,000 Hrivnas, and they say each person's share is 12,000 Somethings, which is the equivalent of $40, and I realize I just have a $20 and a $10 and a few singles, but have large-currency local bills, and pull out a florid red and blue note worth 31,000 Whatevers, knowing that I have to get 19,000 in change, hoping they'll be honest, and we're about to leave and I insist I have to wait for my change.
FRIDAY, 10/5/07: 7:30AM: Fragment of a Technicolor French film farce of a woman getting into a balloon in her yard, her relation holding onto the rope to hold it down, but a sudden gust of wind blows them both away, past a strange cylindrical old mansion that's surrounded in a scaffolding that implies it's being torn down.
SATURDAY, 10/6/07: 1) 1:30AM: Fried eggs are cooking in a strange way: the top part will vanish, and only the bottom part will remain, half-cooked, and can be turned over and cooked to completion. It seems to be a way of training new chefs how to cook eggs, and I'm willing to use this method to teach my students. 2) 5:13AM: Rolf comes over to visit me and a friend who's staying with me, and announces the astounding news that his wife is in town and wants to resume their marriage. He has a hare-brained idea that if he can convince her that he doesn't love her, she will perversely stay with him to try to make him fall in love with her again, which I figure won't work out, and he and I can continue to have sex. I don't know how it works out because some date which is supposed to take place right now doesn't happen for some unknown reason. 3) Kevin Kline is standing with bare legs, rather thin, wearing enormous boots, telling of how he escaped his enemies in Victorian India: "I battled them all to the death, victorious in total glory." A pause; obviously no one would believe him. "Well, then, I just ran faster than anyone has ever run before, and they just couldn't catch up with me." He stares around, hopeful to be believed, but he's not. "I hid in another room, and they never thought of looking for me there, and here I am, safe and sound." And he's believed at last.
END OF UKRAINE DREAMS
MONDAY, 10/8/07: 4AM: Dream of being on Russian ship crew. Note on card.
TUESDAY, 10/9/07: 4:07AM: Shelley and I are off on another trip, this time a cruise with lots of young families with lots of kids, and I'm watching a video monitor of our progress when a meal-line forms right where I am, so I take a seat at a table for two, but it turns out that kids have tiny chairs under the table, so it's already taken. Go to the next table for six, and a woman asks what I do. I say I'm an indexer and she asks if I use a certain British program. Surprised that she knows so much, I say I'm an American, so I have an American program, and then again the table is invaded by a family with four kids and I have to move again, and someone observes that this is going to be a very argumentative trip. Other details forgotten.
THURSDAY, 10/11/07: 4AM: Eating fish and two apples while bells are rung; cows on road above counter. (Whatever THAT note was intended to say!)
FRIDAY, 10/12/07: 4:10AM: I seem to be on a Pacific island, newly arrived, and have come from my hotel, or boat, around a corner of the coast into a settlement of what might be missionaries, or scientists studying the natives, and I'm surrounded by white people speaking English, but I have no idea who each of them is, their relation to each other, or their function. I try to trace my route around the island beaches on a tabletop, but someone replaces it with a map and tries to be exact, but nothing means much to me. I don't know anyone's name, and no one seems to be interested in anything about me except that I don't know anything about anything. I'm wrapped in a blanket over my shorts, but I'm not aware of being hot or cold. People are engaged in cooking or making things, but no one is eating or doing anything specific, and I wonder how I'm going to get back, but at some point lie down and then wake, having slept in a kind of dormitory room where, in the dawn light, I look around and maybe dozens of native heads bob up about the same time and agree it's time to get up. When it's light, I see a pale older man in a kind of plastic webbing, and wonder if anything so transparent can keep the sun off his skin, but then my webbing is drawn away from me by someone saying, "We don't have to cover anything up here." I hope my shorts are clean. I still don't know anyone's name, but I can't figure who to start asking: some mature women appear to be in charge, there are few men who have any appearance of authority, and natives don't appear to speak English. But I feel comfortable, except that I try to type some sort of log into an AlphaSmart, but a man pulls me off the floor and onto a kind of metal stool attached to a wall, as if that's where I should be, except there's no room to type, and maybe I'm being told that it's rude in some way to want to be using an implement that no one else has, or maybe they just don't want to be written about. The fact that I slept is sort of surprising, yet there's no idea that I'll ever actually need to LEAVE here and return to whatever part of civilization I came from, and wonder how it will all end, but without any feeling of apprehension or anticipation. No sexuality at all.
SATURDAY, 10/13/07: 6:25AM: I seem to be in a Russian play, in a large house with many groups of people talking about intimate details with each other (maybe a little like the groups at Carol's "Mongolian Ice" show last night with Shelley), but I know hardly any of them, and though I try to join in with age-appropriate groups (not wanting to go near the groups of young people with whom I have nothing in common), I find no one to really talk to. At length meals are being prepared, and somehow I know I'm not wanted in the kitchen, so all I can do is sit on the side of a sofa and wait for food to be brought to me, which it isn't, though it's getting past 2PM and I'm really hungry for lunch. I really don't know what I, or anyone else for that matter, am doing here, what I'm waiting for, where I am, where I could go to NOT be here, and wake puzzled.
TUESDAY, 10/16/07: 8:25AM: Should have transcribed this when I woke about 3:30AM, but was too lazy to get out of bed. I was with Rolf, who at one point was lying naked in bed, and at another point was working on some project with a friend, and though I kept insisting I was hungry for breakfast, they both ignored me until it was after 11AM and I decided I just had to get breakfast for myself. Another detail involved arrangements of areas on a lawn, though not at all like a graveyard as the detail might suggest, and in the middle wasn't a flat area like the others, but a sloping hole, like the inverted entrance to a storm cellar, and I, in the dream, sort of wondered what it was doing there and what was at the bottom of it. Though the dream was richly detailed and varied, that's all I can remember at this minute.
WEDNESDAY, 10/17/07: 6:30AM: A real obsessive-compulsive's dream: I'm in a bedroom that's very like my bedroom at 1221 Dietz in its relation to the rest of the rooms in a house which seems to be a New York Actualism Center, in the early-to-late evening (maybe a two-hour period, which seems to occupy that actual amount of time, which of course it doesn't), while all the teachers seem to be in the basement, which is a large meeting room, where a voice much like that of Richard Roeper's of "Ebert and Roeper" is droning on about various trips from which he's showing slides (as I do) which he's taken for sociological reasons: comparing cities and towns by their downtown areas in terms of social centers, libraries, meeting halls, churches, and commercial and business halls, not really from a touristic point of view, but more of a study of readiness for an Actualism Center location, or the feasibility of opening there at all. This has been vaguely scheduled, so that the rest of the ground floor is dark (the kitchen is just another meeting room). No porch light is on, so when I see, through the window of the front door, a shadowy figure approaching the Center, I can't see whether there's a note saying the Center is closed, and wonder what will happen if he rings the bell---will someone from the basement come up to answer it, or will they let him gradually realize that the Center IS closed and he'll go away on his own?---but he never even comes up on the porch, obviously concluding that there's no one here. Thus I'm alone, in my former bedroom, KNOWING that it was actually my bedroom though it's now being used as a normal meeting room, with heaps of books, boxes, junk from the past, cabinets and drawers full of my current and former possessions, trying with only very little success to throw out old unusable stuff: primarily bedroom slippers, broken clay flower pots, some books (including my 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica) that I've been sorting through, tearing out singles pages or articles that I still want to keep, much as I did with my old collection of Spartacus's "National Geographics," with an idea of throwing them out, wondering whether if, somewhere in this mass of stuff, there isn't a shopping bag large enough to contain all the trash that I feel can be thrown out to make space for many of the piles scattered over the floor. At one point I find a large plastic bag, broken and leaking at the top, filled with old potting soil, caked and exhausted, from previous pots that I'd saved from the distant past, for possible future use, wondering if it's still viable for use in repotting the broken plant that exists in reality as well as in the dream. I look into various chests of drawers, more numerous than my current bedroom has, though similar to the old wooden chests salvaged from my original apartment at 35 E. 61st Street, to see if empty spaces exist, but they're mainly filled with stuff that I still actually kept at some point: old Doré-etching Bibles, old science-fiction magazines yellowing and chipping at the edges, large piles of old porno magazines, some Spartacus-like piles of regular weekly magazines like "New York" and "New Yorker" and "Time" and "Newsweek," which I never in fact kept, and other stacks of papers, periodicals, and files that have to be moved out of the center of the floor. Additional white-painted cabinets along some walls offer space I never had in any previous room. No bed exists in the room that I can pile things under, as I used to at 1221 Dietz; no closet exists for additional storage, as it did at Dietz; no other space in the building is available for my personal stuff, though I know that if I can put things AWAY sufficiently, behind cabinet doors or in chests of drawers, they'll be safe from all but the most prying eyes of the most curious students, who I hope will never find the more personal stuff, like porno, that I'm determined to cache somewhere in the room. So I have to throw out enough that's currently safely hidden away to provide space for what remains to be put away: some old clothing that still may be usable; the battered remains of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, of which I've managed to page through about the first third of the volumes to save maybe two inches of pages from possibly a foot of volumes; some old science-fiction magazines, like the single "Amazing Stories" that I still have in my file cabinet, that form two foot-high piles that I still want to save; periodicals like old ASI bulletins (which I've already thrown away) or Actualism notes (that I still want to keep); and, most worryingly, porno that I still want to save, which is what I have to be most worried about from the point of view of some innocent student finding in some casual, albeit prohibited, search of closed drawers or cabinets in the room. Some of the objects are so REAL: like the fuzzy-edged bedroom slippers that I'd kept (including the unmated red past athletic shoe), in current tan colors, or obsolete blue and a never-existent unmated single red; like the colorful edge-printed covers of "Amazing," "Astounding," and other science-fiction magazines from the 40s and 50s; like broken clay pots, some of which, unbroken, I still pile in the bottom of my closet; like the crumbling leather covers of the 1911 EB I still keep hidden behind a mirrored cabinet-door; like plastic bags full of plastic dry-cleaner bags, grocery bags, or "possibly-useful-some-day" utility bags which I've kept in the past and still keep in one bottom bedroom chest and under the kitchen sink; that I'm very much in TODAY'S quandary of what to keep, where to keep it, and what to throw out to make room (and in the dream I even think of the possibility of filling some of the empty printer boxes that I currently fill one entire living room cabinet with), that when I wake, about 6:25AM, I think that I'm confronting an ACTUAL task in my REAL life, but it's only a dream and my situation is not QUITE as desperate (my apartment is NOT an Actualism meeting space!, though in fact I spoke briefly of Actualism to Marj on the phone yesterday), though the anxiety and concern is so "current" that I wake almost exhausted from the mental effort spent trying to decide what can be put where to clear up the stacks on my former bedroom floor. At last, now at 7:20AM, after 50 minutes of typing, I think I've exhaustively typed out the remembered (and still exhaustING) details of this Sharon-tonight-perfect dream, on two not-quite-filled DREAMS pages. CLEARLY a reference, I'm compelled to add after I pee, now at 7:24AM, to the quandary I felt yesterday (and continue to feel today): having an index to finish today and tomorrow, many scheduled activities on my calendar, two stamp catalogs to process stamps against, and three DVDs from Spartacus to watch, three VHS tapes from Ken to watch, and "Gothika" and two hours of TV recorded from 1-3AM this morning (and two porn tapes from Spartacus that I DID watch from 11:15PM to 1AM while jerking off earlier this morning), for all of which I joking requested "an extra week of time" from Spartacus when he couldn't find the DVDs with four file-numbers of other things he was looking for to give me to watch! Am I finally finished, now at 7:28AM, more than an hour into the entire dream-waking and recording?
FRIDAY, 10/19/07: 5:35AM: I'm visiting a family in Iceland, out in the countryside, with a small group that has sat down to dinner on a set of small tables for two, covered with a rough-woven yellow cloth, and I can only find a space for one on a narrow table that looks more like the top of a small grand piano, or a coffin with a paragraph-symbol shape, but I more tend to the serving table. When the hostess takes a small bun and dips a large spoon into what looks like a kind of chocolate, and then adds drops of other flavors from small containers on the table, I try to do the same thing, and end up with a combination of flavors that I can't hope to identify. Toward the end of the very long-seeming dream, I dip a spoon into a honey-colored jam-like condiment, and I ask "Is this honey butter?" and she looks puzzled and say it's honey, yes, but with "ginry." "Ginry?" I ask, wondering about a combination of gingerbread and juniper, or ginevra, whatever the basis of gin is. In between, there are children who are using the same freedom to dip into various containers and taste without regard to course or soup or dessert. At another point a teenager lies dreamily on the ground, one side of her face disfigured with a strawberry birthmark, and says "My father has a studio in New York City." "How often does he go there?" I inquire, and get a vague answer, but she adds, "It only takes three hours to get there." "How far are you from Rekyavik?" and she doesn't seem to know, though it must take at least two hours to get to the airport there. Other foods pass by the plate, though I eat more from serving dishes with my fingers, ignoring what the other tourists, who more or less disappear, are doing. Much of the language is Icelandic, which of course I don't know, but the hostess has a few words of English in which she tries to identify various foodstuffs for me, though I never feel like I'm getting a full meal, only a lunch-like refreshment to show off the native ingredients. In the middle, I look out a large window and am shocked to see a monkey in a tree, though I think I see a chain around its neck, and I ask about it and the trees are suddenly filled with masses of interlinked white monkeys, which seem more like decorations than actual wild being who just happen to have been in view. Birds, like the gulls in the Ukraine slides I watched last night, also occupy odd corners and sides of the window-view. I don't remember much of the room, except for the groupings of five or six small tables, each holding two diners and their plates, while I wander around sides of serving tables, maybe using public utensils, at one time leaving a Mexican-looking drinking cup, colorfully horizontally striped, seemingly made of clay, but in the shape of half a flower-vase, so it can lay flat on its side without danger of rolling around. Many other rich tastes and food samples have been forgotten between when I woke and looked at the clock at 5:25AM and finish typing now at 5:50.
SATURDAY, 10/20/07: 6:35AM: I'm eating in an elegant restaurant, alone, and notice a woman at the table across from me paging through a book with colored photographs of men, naked, but only shown full-body down to the crotch. Then realize I'm halfway through my entree but haven't gotten my soup yet, and now there's a guide sitting to my left, and I ask him if he'll inquire if I'll be getting my soup soon, but the guide just dismisses my question as unimportant. Then I have a semi-erection and wonder if anyone will notice (not to mention that I'm not wearing pants which would allow my erection to be SEEN) as I walk out of the restaurant. Then I'm in the parking lot and open my rental-car door to find the key missing, and don't know what to do now, since no one's around. Try to take a key from a neighboring car, but when it pulls out it's obviously much longer than the key I'm missing (thinking of the replacement 3rd floor key that Spartacus had copied for me yesterday), and that car's alarm starts blaring away, so I hastily reinsert the key and return to my car, to find the woman with the car facing mine (as she was facing me in the restaurant) has returned to her car, so I can't even try to steal HER key. Don't know what to do next, except maybe just go into the hotel nearby and sleep, but then I realize it's just a dream and I don't have to worry about figuring it out.
SUNDAY, 10/21/07: 7:48AM: I guess from thinking about Estonia as totally surrounded by Lithuania in yesterday's Times puzzle, I'm in northern Canada in a province called Edisto, which doesn't appear separately on the map (as Estonia didn't in its Russian period), but I have a separate map of it which clearly delineates the Edisto River in orange as bordering and cutting it off from the rest of the country in the northwest. I'd traveled through it and I guess was waiting for my slides to develop. Then I'd captured some sea creatures from the river, surprised at the size of the squid that raced back and forth across the holding pen like a bathtub, crashing into the sides with such noise that I had to assume their beaks were out in front of them, trying to break out of their confinement. In another bizarre sequence, I'm looking INTO a fish to see what it's eaten, and someone says "Mostly fish scales," but there's a little CAT wandering around inside this cavern-like interior, and a half-eaten fish is floating in the mess, too. Something before about fish containing salt and dirt, swimming toward the beach in waves, forgotten now.
MONDAY, 10/22/07: 6:25AM: 1) I'm carrying a package with numbering around its circumference that exactly defines what's inside (dream WAS like this, but not this exactly). 2) I'm in a gay baths, but it has only two showers, and I'm in one, washing, and am completely ignored by a number of people who use the next shower. Then I have to wash my clothes, and try not to get them too wet, and put them all into my blue shoulder bag, hoping they won't get it wet through. I put a fur coat on a table to brush it down, and someone remarks about the strangeness of that, and I let them feel the fur and pack it all away. 3) Something about an amusement park and roller coaster: oh yes, I'm riding a number of rides on it, and finally it just stops in the middle of the pull up the first hill, and people are beginning to get nervous when it doesn't move, and I feel a small anxiety about some cog breaking and the coaster rolling back down the hill and crashing off the end, but I wake before anything moves in either direction.
TUESDAY, 10/23/07: 8:50AM: I'm walking the streets of Manhattan with the news that some sort of oceanic catastrophe, or earthquake at sea, has caused enormous waves to wash ashore elsewhere on the eastern coast, and might hit Manhattan any second now. Groups of us look out to sea and see odd lights on the horizon, as if strange refraction patterns in the air has caused distant island-cities to appear much nearer than they are, or that sunlight is being reflected off the top of enormous approaching waves. John A. and I are walking somewhere in the Village, possibly near a point (having read about these yesterday in "The New Yorker") where on the undeveloped island had been streams which flowed from the center of the wooded island into the ocean, thinking that this would be the site of some first occurrence of water damage, but there's nothing to be seen. Without transition, I'm in a kind of churchyard lined with rock walls about three feet high: in a slot at one point in the wall a slab of granite is moving about three inches up and down, as if some kind of machinery underneath had been simulating underground movement, but a sign "informed" us that this was actual current earthquake activity of "type 3.0," even though I didn't think that such activity could be continuous. Close by, another slab of granite almost identical in size to the first is rocking back and forth, this motion identified by a sign saying this was "type 2.2." I was very skeptical.
WEDNESDAY, 10/24/07: 5:43AM: I'm sitting at my desk and become aware of two round sores at the base of my left wrist, somewhat bloody, and I lick them to clear up the blood, but a bit later find that blood has trickled down my left forearm, seemingly from those two spots, and I roll up my white shirt-sleeve to find the blood continuing, and I lick and lick up the blood until it gets to the bend in my elbow, where the bleeding may have started, but I can't find any source of a cut or sore inside my elbow. Somewhat later I'm walking down the street with Mom, and show her the two round target-like sores at the base of my left wrist, and she shows me an exact same sore at the tip of her unnaturally thick thumb, and we somehow conclude it must have the same cause.
THURSDAY, 10/25/07: 7:45AM: I'm looking to interview people for an article I'm writing (for what periodical it's not clear), and encounter two settings: 1) a stairway up to a set of offices guarded by a door that says "Security," and a guy sitting in the first office asks me what I'm doing here, and after some lame excuse to him, he tells me I won't find anything of interest here. 2) I'm in an apartment building and find myself in a rather bare space that seems to be occupied by two college students. "Show me your stuff," I say, cryptically, and they don't seem to understand (I don't blame them). "Show me your stuff," I repeat, hoping to come up with travel souvenirs, maybe some mild porn, or something that they wouldn't ordinarily trot out to entertain strangers, but they shuffle around the rooms, looking annoyed, and finally they insist they have nothing to show me and I leave.
FRIDAY, 10/26/07: Wake at 7:25, and again at 7:41AM, having just had a marvelously positive dream: I'm in a new apartment, on maybe the third floor of a four-floor atrium building, where I can look out a window on the atrium and see a gathering of people in the apartment to my left on the same floor, and look down two floors below me to see into the living quarters of a family in an apartment which I'd thought was vacant, and can't locate the source of the sound like a dying pigeon that I'm trying to locate. I just dismiss someone, or get off the phone with someone, when I'm told (somehow) that I'm about to get a Fedex (from puzzle yesterday?) delivery, and hear someone coming up the last flight of stairs and open the door to the hall to see a delivery woman with THREE boxes, quite a gift-set for me: 1) a box from a book-production manager (like Herman, who called yesterday), marked "A new job" on the outside, but inside isn't a new set of pages, but a three items: a) a specification for a new job about a firework display, based somewhat on the orb that's the center of the plot of "Lara Croft, Tomb Raider," that I watched last night before bed at 11:25PM. Also in the box is b) a DVD, which I assume is the recording of the LAST firework display I programmed (or indexed) for the same customer, and c) a third item, labeled "Something found during the project," which is a little gift for me, but I don't remember opening it to find what it was; 2) a box that might contain the pages of the book that I'd been looking for for 35 years: "Love in Time," by Johnson Harris, penname of John Wyndham, which I MAY be getting in the mail by Fedex from Indiana University's Lilly Library; 3) a box, maybe of vitamin pills, or I-just-don't-remember something connected to my current life that I'm looking forward to, that I'm delighted to have gotten so early in connection with the delivery of the other two boxes.
MONDAY, 10/29/07: 11:20AM: Odd time to remember an odd fragment of a dream: I phone Ken, and after a large number of rings he foggily says, "Hello?" and I suddenly realize that it's 3AM and I have no business calling him then, and hang up guiltily. No memory of it when I woke at 7:50AM this morning; only now.
SUNDAY, 11/4/07: 5:30AM (before losing an hour as daylight savings time stops today): 1) I'm in an enormous library, many of whose books are behind wooden doors so I have no idea what's there or how people get to them, but I decide to see what titles I can see and possibly borrow. On upper shelves are enormous coffee table books about famous historical figures, or eras, or topics, and I pick up one book that I carry around with me, wondering if I can glance through it there. Wander from room to room, hardly anyone around, looking at books on shelves twenty and thirty feet above my head. 2) I'm in an enormous room in my apartment, and there's an old carpet-like fabric on my desk that I ask John to help clear off so I can shake off the dust of years, and I can see the dust motes cascading off as I shake it in the wind away from the window, and John tsk-tsks that I'm putting all this dust into the air and onto the floor, but I feel good in that the desk-top will be dust-free for the first time in years, even though I know I'll have to vacuum now, further disturbing the dust, wondering whether it might be inhaled into my lungs to some deleterious effect. Can't resist getting up to transcribe this dream until 5:37AM Sunday morning.
MONDAY, 11/5/07: 6:38AM: Some fragment about putting things in order, no doubt caused by my frantic throwing things off my bed from the rush to get ready to show slides, and replug everything that was unplugged in my desperation to connect my slide projector in the living room, involving filling in parts of things between past and future, but the details, sadly, elude me now.
MAYA DREAMS
TUESDAY, 11/6/07: 4:45AM: Three single guys from my trip are gathered in my bedroom, and I think a tanned fellow may be naked, and then I see two of them kissing each other, and then they go into the other bedroom and I wonder if they're having sex and if they'll permit me to participate. Real fever dream, and one of them is even slightly like a younger Peter.
WEDNESDAY, 11/7/07: 6:25AM: I'm staying in some kind of vacation cottage, lying in bed preparing for sleep with the TV on, and it seems to be on a male porn channel that shows hugely endowed stars advertising their films, emphasizing fantastic cum-shots right into the screen, repeated again and again with quantities of cum. I wish I could get this channel at home and maybe doze off, but wake in the morning in a room rather like the one I'm in now, with a white slatted-wood door open to either a common hallway or a common john, and I close it, wondering if anyone had looked in to see me sleeping alone and was tempted to come in to see if I was interesting, and even in the dream I was wondering if my stopping of Proscar would lead to heightened sexual arousal. Pleasantly low-key sexual dream that I recalled when I woke about 4:40AM but was too lazy to transcribe then.
THURSDAY, 11/8/07: 5:58AM: Fragment from 4:56AM: I'm sucking on a cock hidden behind a barrier, but the torso (maybe from the Embara yesterday) is smooth, hairless, tapered to a narrow waist, and as he thrusts forward I thrust lustily forward and wake, semi-hard. A later fragment forgotten.
FRIDAY, 11/9/07: 3:35AM: 1) I'm supposed to find Pope in a bar, so we go into this almost empty bar at an early hour and Pope's asleep in the far-right corner, so I whisper "Pope?" and he wakes up, and John lights up a cigarette and gives it to him to smoke for some very important reason, but due to some unknown factor Pope doesn't want to take the lit cigarette. 2) A similar plot concerns finding some specific person in order to match him up with someone else, sexually, but it doesn't work out.
SUNDAY, 11/11/07: 6:15AM: VERY erotic dreams many times, almost lucid dreaming: many lovely male bodies, primarily cocks that I was sucking and jerking off, participating to some extent myself, but never really getting hard. But wonderful, peaceful, sexually content dreams. Finish recording at 6:17AM.
MONDAY, 11/12/07: 1) 3:21AM: It's like an Italian soap opera: someone is suing some feisty old woman about some business matter, and both sides are convinced they'll win, implying that they'll pay off the judge, or have someone killed, and I'm somehow connected, or a member of the family, but look on from a distance as at a television program. Specific details forgotten. 2) 4:45AM: I'm at some kind of tropical beach resort, going out at 8AM to see beautiful blue waves with white crests foaming onto a perfect beach lined with palm trees, and wonder if the water is warm enough for a swim. Then I look back to my cottage and see that the whole ground floor is flooded (my sinuses?) to about six inches---the drain wasn't working and everything is under water: particularly, I'm horrified to see, my AlphaSmart with my watch on top of it, in about three inches of water, and I take them out and shake them and hope they still work. Don't record this until 6:27AM with Dale in the shower.
TUESDAY, 11/13/07: 1) 12:20AM: Dream starts with powerful image of Bill Hyde, naked, holding out his arms to someone and me, who rush into his VERY tight embrace, and start making love. Other things happen, but it ends just that way, and then I'm alone in facing an idealized figure of Bill Hyde, even more handsome of face and muscular of body, in a red uniform tunic that I caress with my hands to feel his body underneath, then almost rip the tunic off to RAVISH his body with caresses and kisses, and he gets hard and I start to suck on him, and I wake excited. Finish typing 12:27AM. 2) 2:25AM: Wake with EXTRAORDINARY dream. [And find I typed PREVIOUS dream in file 3, which now has to be moved to dream file after I get home!] I'm walking down a strange street, being menaced by an increasing crowd of young men (like we worried about young men watching us as we walked toward the hotel in AG today), and I keep saying, "Why do you want to do this to me?" They're sexy and half-playful and menacing at the same time, and I come to an open door and beg people inside to protect me. The door opens and closes with different people as intermediaries: a young maid, a middle-aged couple, a handsome young man, and then someone DOES let me in, closing the door on the gang, and I thank them, but THIS turns into a kind of hippie party with people looking for new thrills, and there are MANY forgotten details here, but it ends that I have to get HOME, or at least call Mom to tell her I'm OK, and it was 6:30AM and now it's 7:30AM and she's already left for work, but I want to get home, and find myself in a crowd coming out of a subway, and I ask what subway they're coming out of, and three or four people don't even know, until someone says, "The A train," and I think with relief I can take it from this very last station in the south of South Ferry, and take it "all the way" to my stop in Brooklyn Heights without transferring, but I look for a subway token and find only two quarters and smaller change and cry aloud, "I need another quarter!" and some harloty woman says contemptuously, "Well, HERE," and throws a quarter into a mass of garbage in the street, but I find it immediately, and when I add it to the change in my hand, which includes three large quetzals from change from Sarita's yesterday, I find I have three quarters, more than twenty-five more cents in small change, and a crumpled dollar bill, so I CAN buy a subway token, and go toward a familiar-looking station---to find myself entering "the back door" of my apartment without transition, and I walk across the kitchen (layout as at 1221 Dietz) and find the room ROCKING, as if I'm on a SHIP in a STORM, and I bounce from wall to wall in amazement, moving through the dining room into the living room while the house rocks increasingly from side to side, and I can look out large side windows to see we're "sailing" down a STREET in Manhattan, with towers and shops on either side that my "ship" careens between, and I think, "This is so crazy it must be a dream, but it's REAL!" And I lurch toward the front door to look outside and see a mirror topple off the front of the porch, reflecting the back of a blond man in a red jacket breaking into shards, and I cling to everything to steady myself, everything around me vividly colored, rocking violently, and I wake with a start and think "THAT was SOME dream!" [And find THIS is in file 3 ALSO!!!] 3) 5:36AM: [Others in file 3] I'm helping prepare an enormous meal in a mansion surrounded by lawns, and I keep going from container to container separating out what may be lobster-meat chunks from sand-filled waste containers intended for broken plastic pieces, which are pottery-colored and somewhat the same size as the lobster chunks. Three huge pots are boiling away (maybe from the central fire in the restaurant last night), contents bubbling over the sides and sizzling in the fires below, but I have confidence that the chef is seeing to them. I finish various other obsessive-compulsive sorting tasks and every so often glance at a lake, where a set of shadows of trees looks like the reflection of an atomic-bomb mushroom-column, but assure myself they're just shadows. Then a dignified woman, who reminds me of someone like Victoria, but from a prior trip, comes out on the porch with me, and as we grasp the railing we feel a deep rumble and almost hear a distant noise, and we look toward the ominous mushroom-cloud shape and both utter the words we most fear: "It's happened." We stand, aghast, waiting for the wind or light to verify our fears, and I say, "Turn on television to see if they have anything about it."
WEDNESDAY, 11/14/07: 1) 11:37PM TUESDAY: I'm working in a very messy environment in an apartment-office with assistants who remind me of people on this trip. Someone like Pat insists I have to get dressed, and when the doorbell rings, I realize I'm still in blue jeans but have no alternative but to answer the door. A flaky young woman, maybe like a YOUNG Pat, comes in with an old blue IBM binder. I flip open the pages to find 14-inch pages with stories printed on them, with numerically rendered illustrations taking up part of each page. She wants the book reproduced in a modern format, and has an old IBM 360 (which Dale mentioned last night) tape that contains the data. I go to a tape unit and put on the tape in the old way, and come back to the computer to try to display a page on my screen to see the format. "No," she screams, "Just print it out!" I have to sheepishly admit my printer isn't working. She shouts, "Then I'm leaving," and rushes toward the door. "Don't forget your tape," I say helplessly. "I HAVE it," she retorts, and leaves. "She'll probably have to come back here," I say to my cohorts. "I don't think anyone else has one of these operating tape units. Now let's plug in the printer and see if we can get it to work." 2) 1:59AM: How can I possibly remember one-eighth of a dream-play so incredibly complex and emotionally intricate? I'm visiting old friends who are not only a famous male playwright, but, with his wife, a pair of famous actors. After a forgotten prelude of events, the two actors present the final scene of his greatest play. Their living room provides the perfect set, the late-evening hour the perfect time, their previous histories the perfect background for this extraordinary reading. It parallels their own lives, summarizes their own inner and outer battles, and at the same time provides me a gift, from them, of infinite richness and generosity. They enact the play as if living it, moving about me as if I belong as a non-speaking witness to their inmost thoughts and emotions expressed in his previous masterpiece. But wait, there had been a first act, after a sociable prologue, in which a movie of one of his award-winning plays, starring the two of them, had been screened from their private copy of a film, or shown from a privately recorded videotape of their greatest performance. The plot was a breath-taking roller coaster of emotions: first you were sure they had died, and their friends had enacted the perfect tribute to their tragically shortened lives, and the interim feeling was of having seen one of the truly magnificent tragedies to rival Shakespeare, but then the supposed survivors move to a new setting to encounter the still-living protagonists, reversing a tearful denoument into an uplifting positive ending, affirming the glory of life and survival and love. The emotions attending the climax of this pre-recorded performance prompted the spontaneous progress through an enriched coda of mesmerizing nuances of intimate feelings, astounding revelations, intense interactions, uncapturable intensity that stretched the boundaries of human expression. Just before the final apotheosis of the masterpiece, a crowd of friends entered, shouting greetings, presenting gifts, demanding attention, relating stories of their own, competing for rival emotions, yet the original couple finished their finest moments and collapsed into each other's arms in ultimate accomplishment, to which my thanks and congratulations could not hope to convey my privilege and honor at being present at this earth-shattering event, accomplished despite, and possibly enriched by, the interruptions of these invaders. I congratulated both as if I were transmitting the appreciation of all their audiences for all their performances and previous productions in this one ineffable moment of thanks, tribute, and gratitude for merely being present at such a series of unspeakably rich events, and I woke, challenged as how to start, how to continue, and how to finish describing a dream of such power---without even a hint of the actual CONTENT or WORDING or ACTION of such transcendent productions, first on a recording, then in real life. Finish typing at 2:19AM, having tried totally inadequately to describe the barest hint of the emotions, the complexity of the plotting, the shadings of meaning and double-meanings and self-references and unveilings of previously undreamed-of depths that made the experience of the dream itself such an astounding event. Finish this, hopelessly inadequate, at 2:22PM. 3) 6:31AM: I'm in a hospital looking for Charles, but don't see him in many crowded wards, and he might be there with Bill, but I can't remember Bill's last name, so I can't check with registry to see if he's there. Other details forgotten.
THURSDAY, 11/15/07: 1) 12:04AM: I've got some kind of bandage wrapped around my foot, and have to bend in a funny way to get to it to cut it off. This HAD been the second dream, but now I TOALLLY forget the first! 2) 7:40AM, remembered fragment from before: I think I've gotten to the hallway outside my classroom, but the floor is covered with piles of clothes, books, papers, junk, and, most strangely, heaps of COINS that spill over into piles on the floor. Can't figure why it's such a mess, and go in to the classroom to see small desks and small kids, and realize I've gone into the elementary school room a floor below my (maybe high school) room, and that's why it was such a mess. Wonder how I could have made such a mistake and start to search for the stairway to go up, and that's all I remember.
SATURDAY, 11/17/07: 1) 4:50AM: I've gotten a phone call from Mr. Upjohn (remember while proofing that Mario had WORKED for Upjohn) and have to do something important, but I've forgotten all the other details. 2) 6:14AM: I'm at a frantic writer's conference and the leader comes up to me---I didn't even know he knew me---and says in a whisper, "Bob, I've lost your copy of 'The Connoisseur,'" and I look at him to ask, "You mean you don't have ANY copy left of it?" And he phumphers and says, "Of course we can make a copy of the ORIGINAL---" And then a secretary comes up and has files of yellow papers in her hands and starts talking about something else, and I wake to remember I can't find MY copy of it, and Marj had said something about something she found when she was searching her files to see if SHE had a copy of it, and I wake and feel calm, yet feel I have to type this.
SUNDAY, 11/18/07: 1) 2:46AM: I'm in a series of classrooms (maybe from movie last night) where I have to make sure each class contains a person with the same initial letter of first or last name. That's about all I remember. 2) 6:05AM: Beggars are cadging tips throughout a church-going (this IS Sunday!) congregation, but then they think better of doing it IN church and go outside to accost church-goers in the street as they're going home.
MONDAY, 11/19/07: 2:46AM: I've come home from a trip, but a black plastic bag that I'm trying to put on a hanger keeps slipping off it. Two other black plastic bags are blowing around on a large lawn when Charles M. comes toward me and either starts blaming me for something, or I start blaming him for something he hadn't done. Other details forgotten.
TUESDAY, 11/20/07: 1) 3:25AM: I'm walking with two business associates along a stretch of telephone wires, knowing we have to keep our feet splayed or we'll fall through the wires. Suddenly, our friend, walking between the two of us, just raises his arms above his head and falls about forty feet to the ground. We know he's dead, and that he did it deliberately. We can't figure any motive for his doing this to himself, but we look back and think we saw he might be preparing himself to do this. 2) 5:15AM: I'm waiting on line for lunch in a school-like atmosphere, and hear that my camera is REWINDING, though I haven't taken a picture and think I may have only taken 5-6 on this roll. Look at the camera and it's "developed" a kind of face-plate which has twisted like a lid and COME OFF, and I'm concerned that it's actually broken. But can "turn it on" OK and then figure I'll have to find a dark space, maybe the bathroom, take out the film, manually extract the end of the film, take it back to the beginning, reinsert it in the camera, take five or six shots of darkness to get past the pictures I already took (having done this once or twice before, maybe in Africa), and hope not to double-expose any of the film. Feel VERY depressed that this has happened to my camera, but then wake and am relieved it was only a dream.
WEDNESDAY, 11/21/07: 6:38AM: Some fragment remains about fluorescent dots on shoes that identify which remain in pairs, though the idea that it's one dot on the front, two dots on one side, three dots on the other side, and four dots in back is rather like the Mayan number system. Glad there wasn't THAT much to remember to have to type!
THURSDAY, 11/22/07: 4:52AM: It starts with me and Paul C. walking around the corner on Pineapple and Henry, looking for a place to eat, but look up at two corner shops that are NOT on that corner, and find that what used to be something like a Crate and Barrel has closed: boxes in windows, obvious signs of a shop vacating; and the NEXT place appears to be closed, until a closer look reveals what appears to be a costume party taking place in what might be a gay bar: people in theatrical headdresses and strange, maybe S&M costumes, mostly male, in a VERY odd gathering we definitely don't feel like entering. Then, without transition, I'm with someone like Dale and, maybe, Ken, and we seem to have just gotten off a plane in Paris, but I don't quite realize at the start that it's PARIS, but think I'm still in Brooklyn Heights and should RECOGNIZE where I'm trying to find us a place to eat, and think I might be over-tired, or even STONED, and at one point, to get Dale's sympathy, I actually EXPRESS the truth: "I'm so disoriented, I could be STONED or HALLUCINATING!" We wander down strange streets, and gradually I accept the "fact" that we've gotten off a strange Metro stop in an unknown part of Paris, and that's why I'm not able to identify any place we pass. Look at a sidewalk kiosk were people are standing at a "wurst" stand: enormous black sausages are being tonged out of a boiling pot, and a few other customers are lined up eating skinny frankfurters without buns with their fingers, and I think "At least I can identify what they're eating, and I guess we could eat the same stuff without too much danger to our health or digestive system," but it still seems very STRANGE, though I'm comforted by a tin cookie sheet holding pieces of what appear to be thin pieces of cake covered by what looks to be a delicious chocolate icing. But STILL obsessed with the idea that I must be HALLUCINATING, or STONED, or at least DREAMING, and then in fact I wake up and KNOW I have to get up, after looking at my watch and seeing that it's 4:44AM and I've CLEARLY had the strange dream in the last 45 minutes, a summation of the trip and my concern about the upcoming day's flights home. Type now to 5:01AM, past the 5AM Dale originally wanted to set on his alarm, a gecko sounding in my ear, and decide to take a Valium. WHAT a dream! Back to file 5.
END OF MAYA DREAMS
SATURDAY, 11/24/07: 6:40AM: Know I was awake about 6:05, so this took place then: I'm sharing a very open tropic-island hotel with many nearby families or travel groups. Look one way to see a balcony, but another balcony is right next to it; a hallway shows two other entrances just like ours, with people going in and out and greeting us, but we're a close-knit unit and don't want to admit anyone else to our socializing. I pass a desk, or kitchen, where one woman is preparing food and another is punching an adding machine, and I think to ask for a rate sheet, but think I'll just get a number (in an unknown currency) written om a slip of paper, which would do me little good. I'm standing, chatting with two vaguely sexy guys in our group, and then someone ahead comes out of a john, and it turns out that the two guys ahead of me are waiting for the john. Think vaguely of sex and wake with a semi-erection as I get this out of my shoulder bag and type on the living room chair at the balcony, sunrise light just reflecting off Manhattan east-facing facades now at 6:53AM.
SUNDAY, 11/25/07: 1) 5:23AM: Horrible nightmare: I'm vacationing, possibly as a schoolboy with a group of schoolboys, in London, staying in a sort of school-hotel connected to a church in the middle of a nondescriptive neighborhood with no distinctive landmarks nearby. I want to go for a walk, but I promptly get lost. I turn back the way I think I've come, but I don't recognize anything I'm passing, have no map, no address to go by, and there's no one anywhere who I could ask who has any idea were I could be staying. I could describe my frustration endlessly: no map, no brochure, no address, no phone number, no idea of neighborhood or section of town, not even the name of the group I'm with, and I wander street after street, hoping to recognize something, berating myself for taking nothing with me that could help me, and finally wake after endless despair and fruitlessness. Finish typing, depressed, at 5:33AM. 2) 7:54AM: I'm sitting in the front row at a rock concert, an unpleasant fat person to my right, who at times talks to a group of guys in the row behind us. People onstage perform, and a new group comes out that's fairly famous, but some bit of stage dressing hasn't been done yet, so a troupe of workmen come out with construction materials and prepare to fix the situation. The fat guy pushes me to the left for seemingly no reason, and I move across him to sit where he sat, waiting for the performance to begin again.
MONDAY, 11/26/07: 1) 5:33AM: Was still awake at 5:07, thinking MANY things (trips, website), then FORCED first moment of Actuaiism and fell asleep to dream I'm in a therapy session, led from one room to another and feeling VERY unsteady on my feet. Then I'm in a GROUP session, with about eight people seated in what look like classroom desks, and AGAIN I feel very dislocated, and "wake" to find myself asleep across two chairs and the therapist coming to wake me and say we really should start, and I'm wearing a towel (which she'd remarked about before) which has fallen open, and I have an erection, but she ignores it as I pull myself to a seated position, close the towel around me, and sit up to see someone like the guy from Carolyn's long-ago writer's group taking his seat next to me, and, in a feeling of companionability, put my hand on his shoulder to "welcome" him to his seat, and in the dream I can FEEL the soft cloth on his sleeveless shirt move across his fleshy skin beneath, and I hope he doesn't take my motion too personally, or sexually, and wake and type dream to 5:40, having to pee for a THIRD time since 3:11 and 3:57AM. 2) 6:39AM: Ron rings to say he found my food-box OUTSIDE, waking me from another dream: I'm in some kind of institution, and after many inside events, there's a fight going on sort of OUTSIDE, but we can look through peepholes in the wall to watch, and some of the fighters are shirtless, which is nice, and all the while a BAND is marching around a track practicing a new number (their music is on a wooden tray strapped around their necks), also semi-seriously watching the guys wrestling semi-seriously. Debate whether to go downstairs or back to bed; decide on bed.
TUESDAY, 11/27/07: 6:32AM: Two similar dreams: 1) People seated around a table are looking at some kind of form on which addends to their names are either D or d, for some arcane designation, and some are two letters long, which brings up a problem in alignment, and I question the difference between a capital letter and a small letter. 2) Someone like Princess Diana is writing notes for a speech, and trying various forms of expressing a negative, like "Think not," versus "Doubt not," ending up with questioning "Yet not," and, with a grimace "Not not," and with a sort of sigh: "Not." It was funnier in the dream.
MONDAY, 12/3/07: 10AM: Woke at 3AM with a dream, thought to jot a note, but didn't. Then woke at 6AM with another dream, about some woman who seemed to be a combination of Rebekah G. and Mary Louise Parker was offering me something, maybe on a TV show or tryout, and she was puzzled by my lack of action, but I've forgotten most of it, just wanted to transcribe SOMETHING since last week!
TUESDAY, 12/4/07: 1) 3:22AM: As on a TV program, though later it seems I might be one of a tourist group in a repressive foreign country where we see a dramatization of an actual event, a woman had been demanding some concession from a landowner, and, after not even getting an audience after a long period of time, she follows a guard, or other representative of the landowner, up a set of stone stairs, following literally one step behind. Then it appears she may have brought a child along with her, probably a teenage daughter already only a head shorter than the mother, and this trio continues to ascend the stairs, only one step separating the armed guard from the following pair, and then, at a landing, he turns, raises his rifle perpendicularly in the air, and fires straight down into the top of the head of the daughter, who crumples dead between them. The mother, horrified to the point of numbness, backs down the stairs, slowly, one by one, until she reaches an iron fence separating the bottom of the stairs (now that I think of it, rather like the Odessa steps scene in "Battleship Potemkin"), leans back against the widely spaced bars, and relaxes her shoulders so that she easily slips backward between the bars and falls into the river, where she clearly drowns. Viewers are aghast, but there's nothing that can be done about the completed situation. Maybe some small coda terminated the dream, but now at 3:41AM that's all I remember. 2) 7AM: I'm wandering in what could be a new section of Central Park, seemingly not on vacation, just trying out parts of the city that I haven't been in for a while, and see an enormous Tavern-on-the-Green-type complex building that appears to be new, and stroll in to see what it is, and part of it is a kind of nightclub: stadium seating contains variable numbers of people, and wandering "entertainers," some more clowns that anything else, come up and start a one-on-one conversation, which gradually expands to two or three people, and then becomes a show in an entire section of seats, turning into a triumph when spectators fill the last available seats and it becomes a full-out show by this random performer. At one point well into the dream, I ask on successful section-filler, "How do you choreograph the performer to the section?" I hear someone in a distant part of this particular audience comment "Good question," but it's never answered. Very late in the dream I try this "out of the blue" question, and a tiny person (I can't decide if he's a midget partially buried in the floor with only his head exposed, or if it's a kind of remote-control dummy that's operated by someone on the sidelines and is not in itself alive at all) starts putting me down, trying to make me move on, as if it's not appropriate to ask HOW things are planned, only to enjoy them for whatever they turn out to be. One "exhibit" is a kind of house, but more of a dollhouse, and I pick up a piece of furniture like a chest of drawers, and find that each drawer opens, some with sub-sections for different sizes of clothing, and the handles are exquisitely carved from single pieces of wood in filigree-delicate patterns that I'm surprised are on objects that the public could so easily break because of their fragility. I pick up an art-piece that has sub-pieces that come apart and break into their own puzzle-like components. I look into a mirror, manipulate something on a table, and a whole room seems to mutate into a mouth that is chewing the contents of the room in its round orifice, and instinct impels me to check out the back wall of the room, where I find a large handle that turns easily, obviously meant to be discovered and used, so that the mirror reflects this mouth in fast or slow animation, depending on how fast the crank is turned, chewing up and spitting out the contents of the room, and I'm mesmerized by the variety of activities engendered by the simple turn of a crank: sofas are eaten and resurrect as bridge-table chairs; lamps turn into water pitchers; objects seemingly destroyed are turned to show that they were just other objects seen from the rear---but as I turn the crank the noise gets louder and louder, until every other sound in the area is obliterated, and I feel that I should stop, at which point this tiny clown-topped head on the floor berates me for making this noise, and when I try to explain that it seemed CONSTRUCTED to do that, he dismisses me as if I'm trying to explain the point of a joke when that's not the point of the show at all. At another point there's an amphitheater in which the top three rows are more like beds, with people lounging and having food and drinks, and an usher shows me to an empty "seat" and encourages me to do whatever I'd like to do there, but the "entertainer" seems to be at the end of his "session," and people are leaving, so I depart because the center of action has moved elsewhere, but I still wonder why this particular section of seats is designed so differently. Toward the end, I pass what seems to be an enormous, pastel-colored, very expensive restaurant that happens to be serving breakfast on a series of porches overlooking magnificent vistas of newly planted parklands, and as I walk past various stations, it appears you place your order in a small alcove at the beginning (this may be related to Charles' and my lunch at Five Guys yesterday), which has a moving illustration of a menu at the top and sides of the alcove, and then wait until ordered items appear on a moving belt to the right, where you can add condiments or silverware or other items of food to the trays that suddenly appear on the belt. No prices are displayed, and either they're part of the accommodation in what now seems to be a hotel with guests already registered, or there's a fixed price for this buffet that you're supposed to pay before entering the area, which I somehow circumvented for myself, or you get a bill at the end, which would prompt the observation that "If you have to ask how much it'll cost, you don't belong here in the first place." I walk past other pastel-colored (maybe based on the pastel greens and yellows and quasi-oranges of the old and new stones in some of the reconstructions at Copan in the slides I showed Charles yesterday) kiosks which are serving beverages, or desserts, or omelets, or buffets of various meats and hors d'ouvres. People are eating in raised areas, chatting among themselves, or turning to face in another direction where some OTHER kind of entertainer is amusing them from another side. I'm puzzled by all this IN the dream, and equally puzzled now that I've tried to describe the details, finishing at 7:25AM, wondering whether to stay up since I went to bed about 12:15AM and the movers for the curb-cut tomorrow may be expected any time after 7:30AM today.
WEDNESDAY, 12/5/07: 5:37AM: Plants, similar to the ones Carolyn looked at last night in my wastebasket, seem to be dying off: most leaves are brown, only very tiny shoots remain green. But a plant on a ROCK seems to be growing, and when I switch it around the PLANT goes underwater and the ROCK floats on top, with lots of mossy and buddy growth that just might grow interestingly, so I decide to LEAVE it that way and see what happens. Write note only and doze back off.
FRIDAY, 12/7/07: 7:55AM: I'm in a classroom setting, with a teacher somewhat like New York magazine's James Kramer (?), the economic writer, who's asking questions about a book we, as a class, were supposed to have read. He goes down each row of us "students" asking one question, usually getting the right answer, but when he comes to me, it seems it's the hardest question: I don't quite know the answer, but twice in a row I make a guess that turns out to be right; the last question was "How many men went on the mission?" and I guess "Five," which turns out to be the right answer, and he looks at me in a quizzical manner, which I some interpret as wondering whether I'm gay or not.
ARUBA DREAMS
WEDNESDAY, 12/12/07: 9:27PM: It occurs to me these are DREAMS that I'm having: I'm watching a Wagnerian opera from an extreme-side seat, and I can see the hefty Scandinavian soprano "warming up" by doing extraordinarily difficult physical stretching exercises in the wings just offstage, but visible to those few, like me, who have such extreme side seats that we can see her, for instance, on her side, doing like sideways-situps by wrapping one foot around the base of a flat-propper-upper and levering her body off the floor with her leg at such an extreme angle that it would seem impossible that she could lift her torso off the floor with only her ankle and thigh muscles, and we GASP as we watch them (this MUST come from the review of the Shanghai Circus at the New Victory Theater where the music STOPS during the climactic scenes of balance or strength or prop-support when only the gasps and "Oh my God"'s of the audience can be heard). She does two variations of these semi-mythic feats of strength, levering her body sideways in the same impossible method, seemingly only as a warm-up to her momentary performance.
THURSDAY, 12/13/07: 4:20AM: I've returned to 1221 Dietz after a vacation, or maybe a time in jail, and I have to dispossess Rita from living in my bedroom. Her glass-paneled display cases are filled with her shiny dolls and toys, all brightly lit by the sun streaming in through the bedroom windows draped with translucent curtains, and the room is cheerful and bright and very suitable to her young feminine presence, yet I know she has to return to her dingy, almost windowless, bedroom in the basement with little natural light and grayish concrete-block walls which will be much more depressing than her room here. I sit on the bed in something like despair, yet I realize she must move, and it's not as if I didn't have to endure a bedroom like the one she has to move back into when I was her age, and even for many more years than she has to suffer such a room, and I never had the advantage she has had of living in such a cheery room for as long as she has. So the move simply has to be done. Another, similar, theme occupied a second, forgotten, section of this dream: maybe a rehearsal for a play that wasn't going well, or an argument with my mother that was unpleasant, or another kind of difficult decision that had to be made in my favor which would put someone in my family in a more difficult position, but I forget what that was now. Finish typing at 4:33AM, aware of the little time left to sleep this morning.
FRIDAY, 12/14/07: 4:56AM: French restaurant seating arrangements in question. Details forgotten, no computer to type into.
SATURDAY, 12/15/07: 1) 2:14AM: Dream ENDS with Charles and me looking at the top of the Empire State Building from some place in Brooklyn Heights, knowing that someone at that window could see us if we telephoned and arranged to send a flashlight-signal back and forth at a certain pre-set time. Earlier was some detail about food or eating a meal. 2) 3:32AM: Shelley and some male friend are standing by the pool (or our staterooms are tiled like a swimming pool would be), and we can see that the ship is definitely listing because the levels of the water from one side of the wall to the other differ by seven or eight rows of tile. Also, though I don't say it aloud, I note that we can no longer hear the noise of the ship's engines: we're in grave trouble. We refer to some previous event when we heard a noise (as I did just before turning on the light, as if someone were trying to enter my room---and I'm glad that I, uncharacteristically, had flipped the safety catch on the top of the door---and I wonder how much is dream and how much is real). Tired while typing, weary of transcribing more than one dream a night. 3) 4:38AM: I'm lying in bed on a vacation, and my cock has been hard for so long that pre-cum is almost wetting the entire shaft, shining in the light that I turn on. I debate looking at a TV schedule to see if they have any male porn that I could pay for. Then I notice little black dots on the sheet, and for a moment fear they might be bugs of some kind, but they look more like tiny seeds, until I realize that I'd been sitting on a beach and hadn't washed the sand from the backs of my legs and body, and the bed is full of sand. Then, mysteriously, there's WATER also on the bed, as if the bed has become partly a tub, and when I stir up the water it becomes cloudy with suspended sand, and I'm concerned about how the maid is going to clean all this up. Play with myself in the dream, and then wake to find myself hard and play for a bit before turning on the light, wondering if I've included rubber bands this trip, though I think not, and type to 4:42AM, driven by SO many obsessions! 4) 5:19AM: At first I'm standing in my bathrobe and slippers on a leaf-covered street in NYC somewhere, KNOWING this must be a dream, and saying as much to Rita, who's in a room then with me somewhere, and then Sandy Isenstein is there, demanding my attention because some guy wants to sell his farm, and we'd talked about this before but I don't remember any of the details and just want to get back to BED and go back to SLEEP, and other parts happened that I've now forgotten. ENOUGH, already! Type to 5:22AM. 5) 6:26AM: A black female entertainer appears to have small tits that can wobble back and forth, touching in the middle, then flying apart, but they look more like little cocks, maybe manipulated by her fingers, and she smiles down at me as if to say, "Wouldn't you like to know what these really are?"
SUNDAY, 12/16/07: 1) 12:25AM: I'm watching TV at 1221 Dietz, and have to do something in my bedroom, but turn on the light switch and no light goes on (now it's clear to me this is based on the bathroom light going out here in Aruba). I try the hall light and the light in Mom's bedroom, and none go on. Then try the kitchen, no deal. For some reason I have to go outside, and for a second, irrationally, worry that I won't be able to get back inside because the power is out. But back inside, the kitchen door is hard to open because two days' mail has been jammed up against the bottom of it. I never question how I'm able to watch TV, but am sure I have no idea where the fuses are, where the fuse box is, and where I'll find a flashlight to light my way to the fuses and fuse box. Finish typing at 12:31AM. Pee. 2) 3:20AM: I'm doing my exercises in the gym, and one includes inclining forward from the waist with my hands above my head, moving down to waist-line, as I now do as a last stretching exercise, but only to each side. In the middle of a set of about thirty, a friend of mine, somewhat like Rudy Perez, only more handsome, with a nicer body, is standing between two pillars as an object, seemingly, of my worship, and he smiles and says, "It's about time you recognize you worship me," and I smile and continue "paying homage" with my bowing exercise, and he folds his arms and towers taller and more majestic, and I say, not merely flattering him, "You deserve worship when you take that stance," and we're both pleased, as if this is foreplay for enjoyable sex to come, and I wake vaguely roused and type this to 3:25AM. 3) 7AM: Didn't THINK I'd gone to sleep, but I surely didn't merely THINK of this, so I must have DREAMED it: I'm watching TV, some kind of Monty Python program, and Michael Palin and John Cleese are joking about showing their cocks, and then, very quickly, they SEEM to, and I'm amazed, watching, then think, "Wait, this is on tape, so I can rewind and freeze to see if it's REAL or just phony cocks," so I try rewinding, but DIFFERENT scenes come on in which they carry on TVs with strange paper-bag MASKS over their heads, and I think maybe it WASN'T a tape, but then wake, confused, vaguely horny, wishing I were home so I could jerk off, but console myself: I can do that TOMORROW NIGHT, just about 40 hours from now! Now being 7:06AM Sunday, so 36 hours would be 7:06PM Monday, and 40 hours would be 11:06PM Monday, a definite possibility.
MONDAY, 12/17/07: 1) 4:10AM: WONDERFUL uninterrupted sleep, with dream of trying to rewind very old reel-to-reel tape, various kinds spliced together: translucent yellow, opaque brown, which obviously results in more tape that will fit on one reel, and then each reel is severely warped into the rough shape of a kidney bean, so rewinding won't take place uniformly successfully, and someone like Marj is trying a glue/attachment concoction, starting with fish oil and including beef stock and some kind of jelly to make everything work, though it would seem the most remarkable invention if her conglomeration worked, and I insist she keep track of the exotic ingredients so that it can be reconstructed if in fact it DOES work! 2) 4:36AM: Also a segment from "The Phantom of the Opera" where Christine unmasks him and he's terrified at her frightened reaction.
END OF ARUBA DREAMS
TUESDAY, 12/18/07: 2:42AM: What went before I don't remember, but the dream ended in a jury-count that found the defendant guilty. It also included an episode in which one of the jurors sang a Mawdrew Czg(Gorgeous) soprano aria of fiendish difficulty that embellished her decision as a juror.
WEDNESDAY, 12/19/07: 7:37AM: VERY realistic dream: after some forgotten preliminary happenings, I've ordered a hot fudge sundae in a paper cup with a friend, but he leaves and I'm left to finish the sundae on which the top has melted, so I can drink it down, but find much luscious fudge below, and walk into a pharmacy, thinking somehow my 11AM appointment with the dentist is there, even remarking to an acquaintance, "Won't my dentist be happy to examine me just after I've finished a hot fudge sundae?" But then I look at my do-list, identical to the one I've made for today of five items, and find that not only is my first appointment (as it is in real life) at 1PM, rather than 11AM, but it's with a doctor not involved with my mouth, not my dentist, and I'm very relieved, and wake relieved to find the whole thing was a dream anyway. Something for Sharon.
THURSDAY, 12/20/07: 6:20AM: At some high-class club meeting, there's a reunion between two lovers, and both short-haired beautiful women kiss for a long time, not caring what the others think, and other details forgotten.
MONDAY, 12/24/07: 4:58AM: An enormous buffet-dinner party overflows on two or even three floors, indoors and outdoors, through an endless lavish apartment which could only be on the Upper West Side of Manhattan: populated with teachers, sophisticated retirees, young couples with all the advantages, through whom I make my way to see what the latest supply of edibles has been supplemented with. After innumerable main courses it's time for dessert, and first I find what appears to be a sea anemone in aspic, which I take into my bare hand, hoping not to melt it. Then there's a limp lobster-pink sea creature that I immediately identify as a seahorse, which I've never encountered on a food table before. Then I pick up two or three other improbably formerly living viands and present them to a group of diners clustered around a central coffee table and peel the offerings from my hand one by one: foie gras embedded in what could only be Roquefort, sea urchins softened to cotton-candy tenderness, what could be spiders in candy-colored arrays, and other remarkable creatures that I have in my hands mainly for the purpose of showing how many I've collected: thank goodness I'm already stuffed from the more mundane main courses and hardly feel hungry enogh to put any of this exotica into my mouth to physically chew. The party is populated with the type of people I'd always fantasized meeting in the upper echelons of Manhattan society, and my catholic showing-off of my dessert-accumulation is the perfect conversation starter. Finish typing at 5:09AM, hoping to have captured a fragment of a completely realistic dream. It certainly elevated common surf-and-turf choices into outlandish snorkel-and-forest-floor selections.
SATURDAY, 12/29/07: 6:20AM: I'll call it a dream, though much of it wasn't, but I don't feel like calling it the germ of a short story or a play: I've returned to a familiar working environment from the past, not IBM or indexing, but some combination of the two. I'm meeting, and in some cases re-meeting, people who are at the top of our occupation: some I recognize and remember from the past, but one blonde woman in glasses I think I MUST have met in the past (she seems to treat me as if we had) I simply can't place, yet, with her air of having known me well, I can't possibly ask her name. We seem to be drinking, some alcoholic beverages, in a social gathering, yet it's very business oriented. I get the impression we're currently in a group that's called "unattached" to any ordinary chain of command, but when I want to know the "actual" name, or the "functional" name of the group, everyone refuses to tell me, and to someone who seems to be in a position to know I complain very forcefully: "So you say I should spend maybe an hour, or two hours, or four hours, or FIFTEEN hours, trying to find someone who can tell me one or two words of information which you can probably tell me in a SECOND, but won't?" My question remains unanswered. I dreamed, semi-dreamed, or thought in a semi-awake state other facets of this complex working environment and cadre, but no other details come to mind now at 6:30AM.