DREAMS of 2008 1 of 3

WEDNESDAY, 1/2/08: 1) 3:26AM: I'm trying on suit jackets; the salesman is busy. I get two jackets that I take to him and tell him "It's between these in size." I'm shown a pile of sleeves, and I bracket the size in them, too, and take them to the salesman. "Where's the body?" he asks. "Right here," I reply, but they're gone. He shuffles around in the piles, and I insist "It would be between 34 and 35." He's disgusted; I don't know what to do. 2) 5:17AM: I'm packing to leave a hotel room. I'm shaving with an electric razor, which I haven't used in years for a CLOSE shave (only a trim), and I'm blowing the fine dust of shaved hairs out. I select a suit coat to wear with my jeans and rush to get out of the room before the maid comes. I wake, heart pounding, SURE I heard someone banging on my door: a fire? an emergency? a sudden visitor? 3) 6:53AM: I'm FIRED from IBM, and Bill P. gives me stamps as a sort of consolation prize, which makes me happy.

FRIDAY, 1/4/08: 1) 7:05AM: Jeremy Irons, in a TV production, espies the blue folds of the heroine's nun's gown through the bottom grill of a closet, and he knows that she's watching him. 2) 7:45AM: A little computer-game box goes backward in error and spits out pieces of the hardware from the top! 3) 8:40AM: I INSIST on pushing a red felt stiff curtain back from a doorway for a shortcut, feeling guilty as I struggle to replace it as if it had never been used.

SUNDAY, 1/6/08: 5:30AM: The dream ended more or less how she'd wanted it to begin: she came up the steps sing-shrieking a three-tone phrase while her partner strummed an accompaniment on a guitar, rather like the pluckers on violin at the beginning of "The Bolero" last night on TV. Also, the food, inadequate though it was, began being passed around from the back, so my last-row seat got me the first pick of a paltry supply of plastic white forks and a tiny piece of melon from a scant assortment of finger foods on a small tray. I was encouraged so hard to take a fork that I actually felt it would be easier to take one than not. It had started with the sing-shrieker trying to convey how the procession would start, with her and her partner as only the first element of it, and it would succeed when it was much more developed, we'd see. "We" were a group of some kind of esoteric school like Actualism, which I've been thinking of calling for at least a week and a half, starting I think Wednesday the 2th, or maybe it was a gathering of a younger Sage-like group at the Gay Center trying to get some group spirit going among the young men and women who all seemed very shy and who certainly lacked basic "how do you start a group going" knowledge. I felt awkward, as everyone did, yet we all wanted the group, or parade, or opening ceremony, or maybe even election---this could have been a party caucus where no one was used to the procedure, as has been in the news in Idaho and New Hampshire before the awful elections coming up in 2008. I knew no one else in the group and was my usual shy, reluctant-to-interact self. Quite uncomfortable dream, ending in a waking that bordered on breathless panic, on my back, and I wondered if I hadn't suffered from apnea, waking with a shortness of breath that woke me with a pounding heart and a feeling of apprehension and anxiety that immediately made me think of taking a valium. Drink water and finish typing at 5:42AM.

TUESDAY, 1/8/08: 9:15AM: I'm talking to a young man with very full lips, maybe like Angelina Joli's from the awards program last night, who comes closer and closer to my face, and then, to my great surprise, KISSES me, rather intensely, and backs away and then comes in to kiss me again, and makes some remark before he moves off. I think this is very interesting!

WEDNESDAY, 1/9/08: 8:30AM: It's like I'm watching the end of a movie or TV program about mistaken identities, among monks or priests, and the "correct" couples identify themselves to each other, and one pair DO kiss when the "old friend" is identified, but the other turns his head so that the kiss lands on his cheek, which seems somehow cold of him to do. I MISS touches and kisses!

MONDAY, 1/14/08: 7:50AM: Forgot to record a brief snippet where some famous actress, maybe like (can't remember her name, so I have to go to Maltin's to get her name from Ocean's 11) Julia Roberts, in profile, is using her unusually long tongue to lick upward, even unto her nose, again and again, to demonstrate her lingual abilities. Odd snippet.

THURSDAY, 1/17/08: 8:27AM: One of the least-sexy sexy dreams: I'm watching a porn tape which consists of voluminous cum-shots, close-up, over the heads and bodies of people jerking off, and angles are changed and the same spray of cum is photographed in fuzzy detail time and time again, and there's hardly any tension or excitement in the shots: it's more like an advertisement for some special new aphrodisiac that doesn't quite have the stimulating effect it wants. Almost a chore to record it, and maybe my taking Valium the last few days has diminished my imagination for sexy dreams, or dreams of any kind, since the last recorded dream.

PATAGONIA DREAMS

SUNDAY, 1/20/08: 7:12AM: Woke woozy with a VERY detailed dream of HAVING been to a certain shopping area, or restaurant, near a distinctive circular restaurant named "The Shambles," with a sign encircling the top of the place and large glass windows showing the dining rooms. When we got back, we couldn't see it, though everyone admitted they'd seen it before. Now, however, searching for where we'd been before, a large rooming house seemed to occupy the whole block-front, with neat windows decorated with flowery window boxes, lace curtains, and a nicely finished roof. Around the side appeared to be an annex, of almost equal elegance, but then the area devolved into a kind of farming community, and one building appeared to be abandoned, or had construction papers in the front windows, and then someone stood in the door, so it wasn't unoccupied. Next door was a farmyard with chickens and ducks, and what could have been two old babushkas, sisters, helping each other in the front door. We didn't know where we were, or how to get to where we were going, but the details of the countryside were very specific to, say, Estonia or Ukraine.

MONDAY, 1/21/08: 12:04AM: I'm ENDLESSLY deleting character after character to edit some WP5.1 files, continuing even after I wake in a nightmare of unfinished work, reflecting the possible disaster of my having caught some awful cold AGAIN at the start of this trip as I did at the start of the Route of the Maya.

TUESDAY, 1/22/08: 2:12AM: I'm watching, maybe directing, a movie in which person A kills person B in a rage, where person B turns to kill person C, but actually turns to the director of the movie, in a shot captured by some bystander filming the filming, and shoots HIM.

WEDNESDAY, 1/23/08: 3:58AM: 1) Some sexual dream left me hard, but details forgotten. 2) One famous writer is being interviewed on the work of another famous writer, and the subject writer is insisting "That he dealt only in stylistic facts, and not in personal innuendo," but ends up distinctly mouthing the words, "Carl Segal is a faggot!" with a bitchy look on his face.

FRIDAY, 1/25/08: 1) 3:34AM: I'm involved with Actualism, arranging to teach Bruce Lieber's father new energies in First Advanced: he's skeptical, but I say (in a reversal of logic) that he can come play Scrabble with me when I give Bruce the new energy. Then (in another switch) I realize Mom shouldn't be reading MY copies of the introduction to the energies, because she's not actually GETTING the energies, only OBSERVING someone ELSE getting the energies, but I excuse myself for letting her read the pages by figuring she's not going to know what it's all about anyway, so there's no harm done. 2) 7:01AM: Difficult to capture a multi-hour multi-episodic sexual romp: many people, including Joe Easter, all happily hugging and fondling erections and meeting new people and moving pleasantly erotically in comfortable settings, waking to realize it was a nice dream, and settling back into the same sort of idyllic, non-pressured, sensuality. Partly based on the handsome direction-giver and the beautiful honey-eyed Swiss at the pizzeria last night, faces and bodies were accommodating, non-judgmental, and simply, purely, enjoyably sexy.

SATURDAY, 1/26/08: 5:12AM: I'm second in line to give blood from my chest (second dream like this on this trip?), and I hunch over and clench even before the needle is handed to the woman to my right, and she does hers quickly and I take the needle and prepare to plunge it into my right pectoral with my left hand when I wake. Some fragment of an obsessive-compulsive-type previous dream remains of tabulating numbers, or, more precisely, thinking of proper acronyms for things I have to do, or actions before sleep, starting with BA? and advancing to CBG? and then other four-letter combinations, knowing the difficulty of making them agree "in two dimensions" in some medical table or indexing list. Frustrating phase about which I more or less thought "This can only be a dream," which allowed me to terminate the almost impossible augmentation of the "needed" list.

SUNDAY, 1/27/08: 1) 2:36AM: I'm going to get some kind of automatic deposit into my credit card account, and know that I can simply swipe my card at an ATM machine to verify my balance and draw out enough cash to pay for dinner for me and my friend. Also, there's some requirement that I have to do something on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next three months, and proceed to fill in entries for the rest of January; February, which, being short, extends the four-week period into March; and through the end of March. This produces a feeling of great satisfaction in me. 2a) 6:30AM: I'm in some kind of meeting (more details forgotten) and George Hieber, a young, modest-mannered, attractive man, seems also to live at 101 Clark Street, and expresses interest in me in a way that might even be sexual, and I can't wait to look in the phonebook or on the occupancy list in the lobby to see that he actually lives there and what his phone number might be. 2b) I'm lying on the floor of the stage of a great opera house like the Metropolitan, almost naked, prepared to be drawn up at some point in a romantic opera like "Romeo and Juliet" as a crucified Christ. The curtain goes up and I can see that a few people at the extreme side-back of distant balconies might be able to see me, but then extras stand up and block their views, and people next to me begin to utter inanities like "Olive mustard" which seems to have taken the place of "Peas and carrots" as the phrase to be used to simulate animated conversation without having to rehearse actual conversation and needing to say anything meaningful. The hero and heroine are ensconsed on a balcony raised right at the curtain line, enclosed by curtains that would make most of the stage invisible until they were drawn back to reveal the dining scene taking place around me. I have no question about how I got here, how I was chosen, or even what I look like, but again a feeling of great pleasure, like the pleasure in being in Patagonia with perfect weather for the Torres de Paine, suffuses me.

TUESDAY, 1/29/08: 6:35AM: Try to remember details, but only the overall impression remains: some very attractive man finds me similarly attractive, and we have to perform some obsessive-compulsive ordering or sorting or acting-out before we can relax into sensual contact: rather like counting the days before this trip is over and I can get back to all the things I have to do at home before the NEXT trip; at least I've completed the SIXTH trip of my 71st year!

WEDNESDAY, 1/30/08: 4:12AM: Complicated dream: Charles and I and another friend go to an early play: the subject matter is the subject of the play, and is very self-referential. But we are only in the audience, and we have nothing to do with how the play progresses. Then we enter a SECOND theater for a play, and we're asked to show our tickets, but this time we're shown to three seats at a table set for 24 (though it's a small set in a small theater), along half of one side, set with regular place settings, though other settings have wine, some have no plates, some have no silverware; all are different in sets of three, and some even have differences within the three. "Oh," one of us says, "We just came from a play about a play," and as we sit, Charles is busy taking wine from ANOTHER place-setting and filling OUR glasses with it, which I think, momentarily, is rather unlike Charles, but it's something that I might do, so I accept it. Then the other person makes some remark about our presence on the stage, and it quickly becomes clear that the whole evening is going to be an improvisation with the people who have been chosen to sit in these 24 seats (assuming there WILL be others, since before I wake we're the only three "characters" at the table), and I think what a clever idea this is, without being the least bit self-conscious about being placed in such a situation, which of course would not be the case if it were real.

THURSDAY, 1/31/08: 4:28AM: Someone like Charles Busch is putting together a festival of high-camp films, mostly starring him as "her," and they come in groups of three, organized around semi-connected themes: motherhood, spy, movie history, etc. I'm talking to one of her main stars through a steam-fogged glass shower stall, and his thick hairy body is progressively less visible from the muscular neck down to the darkly haired pubic area, and I wonder if would be in bad enough taste to wipe the mist just in the area of his cock to see if he were well endowed or not, but I decide it would be best for the movie (which we're now somehow in, rather than just discussing the production of it) if I didn't, but I'm aroused by the over-muscularity of his torso, and wake semi-erect to get out of bed to type this.

FRIDAY, 2/1/08: 6:25AM: Woke with fragments of RUSHING toward someone with (whether it was HIM or ME was uncertain) an ENORMOUS erection, and feeling WONDERFUL about it, but was too tired to record it then.

END OF PATAGONIA DREAMS
SATURDAY, 2/2/08: 3PM: Take a nap 1-3PM today, and dream I'm waiting to be seated in a restaurant (maybe thinking of Pamplona in just three hours), and think the legs of the woman who shows us to the table MUST be of uneven length, because her LEFT shoe has a very low heel, but her RIGHT leg is so much shorter that she can have ballet slippers on her right foot, and move EN POINTE with her right foot, yet her hips remain perfectly level with no other special effort of her own.

MONDAY, 2/4/08: 1) 3:57AM: I'm washing an enameled aluminum tray that I use in the microwave for heating meals, and find that some of the enamel is getting lumpy in spots, which have to be rubbed smooth, but as I rub harder, the enamel develops small cracks, which, when rubbed harder, become inch-long tears in the surface, which further crack until the enamel peels away in large chunks, leaving only the inner aluminum shell, which unfortunately is broken at one side, so it would have to lined with aluminum foil if I ever wanted to use it again, so it's really become worthless, and I wonder if this is going to happen to the entire set of six on which I've been relying for cooking for a number of years, and I'll have to buy an entirely new set. 2) 5:21AM: HORRIBLE nightmare: I'm on vacation somewhere like northern Scotland or Ireland, with a group but on my own in the countryside, and the face of my camera is breaking into pieces! I walk and feel something slip down my left pant leg, and it's a section of my camera lens that's broken off. I pick it up and try to affix it back to the face of the camera, but other pieces have broken off and there's nothing to really hold them together. Somehow it changes into a kind of helmet that I'm wearing, on which the face guard has cracked along both sides, but as it starts raining, and I'm standing on a formerly deserted road intersection that's suddenly become very busy with auto and truck traffic, so that I have to get out of the road and onto a lawn nearby, the rain comes down harder and I try to take shelter under a tree that's also sort of an umbrella, and other walkers are looking for shelter from the rain, and I wonder if my camera's ever going to work again, and maybe the slides I've already taken have been ruined by the broken camera-body and the rain, but I try to rationalize that at least I still have the TITLES of the slides in my notebook and will be able to remember WHICH slides have been lost, but a general feeling of despair begins to encompass me as I finally wake with the relief that it's only a dream and I'm safe at home in bed.

WEDNESDAY, 2/6/08: 5:07AM: I go down a staircase in a bathhouse in the early afternoon and am surprised to see three attractive men, two naked, one in a bathing suit, cruising each other, and I remain on the stairs, looking down at their athletic young bodies with desire, and one of them actually approaches me with some interest and begins trivial conversation, not being put off by me when gets near enough to have a good look at me, and I feel the first faint feelings of hope that something might actually happen between us.

TUESDAY, 2/12/08: 3:51AM: I'm serving a multi-course dinner in an apartment quite a bit larger than mine, with three or four 4- to 6-person tables on a raised area around a central table-strewn buffet of appetizers, but more people than I'd expected (four tables with an average of five people each would be twenty people but there are clearly more like 35-40 people, though I contradict someone who counts 75 people, and I figure something like 52, so I command tables in the center be pulled to the side to leave a center main table that seats about 20, and then add a chair to the large side of each of the existing tables, and we seem to be seating everyone, so I open my cupboards and tell newcomers to make their own place-settings at the new tables, pulling up odd bar-stools for one of the new tables which is raised on two sides for the needed extra height of the Dennis-like barstools. I encourage everyone to eat more desserts from a stack of little plates I bring out that I hadn't planned to use, and a ten-year old takes a plate and asks if he can have more pie, so I give him a small plate and cut a small piece of pie into three bite-sized pieces, and he protests that he wanted the whole thing, so I just say, "Then take all three pieces," and with a smile he does. I'm rushing around, too busy to eat, and broadcast a general announcement: "You who are helping set up and serving, make sure you get food for yourselves at some point soon," namely, while food is left, and I decide to start filling my OWN plate from the rapidly diminishing supply on the large plates on the serving tables. It's rather like making a meal for the motley crew on an OAT tour that suddenly goes from 16 to 32 in size, and beyond. I think this will make a different sort of dream to report to Sharon tomorrow evening as I finish typing at 4:04AM.

MONDAY, 2/18/08: 1) 6:40AM: Athletes practicing archery up close; in distance, people are in square formations, but something doesn't work. 2) 7AM: I'm at a dance place downtown, not in the 30s, and start dancing NOW.

TUESDAY, 2/19/08: 1) 4:52AM: I'm setting up a travel plan on rivers in Africa, and we'll get wet, will need camps, kids must be safe and have fun. Later we'll end up on "Lake Mombasa." 2) 6:27AM: I'm on a walking tour in a huge, unknown, Asian downtown where all the buildings and streets are old-fashioned poor and crowded, and I get separated from guide and John(?), my traveling companion. I walk into a restaurant, onto main streets, think maybe I should stand still so they can find me, but still want to SEE the city. An intersection has a phalanx of rickshaws and PARADES of people meeting at the base of a bridge over a river. Could they set up a loudspeaker to call my name? Could I go to a porno area where they'd think to look for me? It's UTTERLY hopeless, since I don't know the name of any hotel or even of a GROUP we may be connected with, and I seem to have NOTHING carrying any information at all with me. Wake relieved.

FRIDAY, 2/22/08: 1) 5:33AM: I'm starting to undress in a basement "accounting" department for a soft-porn business, filling a desk with boxes and papers, and bring containers to DRINK: water and soda and coffee and BEER; and to EAT: pastry, desserts, sandwiches, and hunks of fried chicken. Boss won't HAVE any: "No!" RATING next? 2) CAR floods, two wheels gone, BOATLESS because of FUCKING HICKS man in the next room! (NO idea what most of this means!)

SATURDAY, 2/23/08: 1) 4:42AM: Lengthy dream of telling some NEW Adirondacks climber about being invited into people's homes and being shown spectacular views, rather than the HIDDEN green mountains you climb. Wake to think it was REAL, not a dream. 2) 6:08AM: Scenery on the Metropolitan Opera stage tracks around into the left wings, and I have to figure how to film a play for TV, and how to get MAPS and photos into books by drawing them or having them PRINTED. 3) 9AM: I'm taking care of a "missing" chihuahua that's been trained to parade around a) with a handkerchief on its head, b) with shoes on all four feet, c) walking upright on two hind legs dressed as an angel. 4) I'm then taking care of a "missing" parakeet that's come in an enormous cage filled with lots of extraneous junk that has to be thrown out, but it's seeds and other food has to be kept, and it keeps NIPPING me and almost escapes from a gap at the top of its cardboard box.

SUNDAY, 2/24/08: 4:28AM: On Maryland shore, Charles and I get lessons on measuring tides, with gadgets like saucers, and we're left with chains. Inland there's a storm that poses no danger to reinforced houses. Lots of quotations and instructing.

WEDNESDAY, 2/27/08: 5:33AM (even after sleeping pill for concern about today's cystoscopy): Dennis is writing song-titles, as a kind of teleprompter, on the inside of his eyeglasses for his radio program. No idea, in dream, he's dead.

FRIDAY, 2/29/08: 7:17AM: I pay $2 for a locker at the baths, and find another $2 in my shoe when I go to dress later. From prior trip? Middle DETAILS gone!

MONDAY, 3/3/08: 4:28AM: I'm sharing a hotel room with four or five other guys on a kind of business trip. At the end, we're trying to get washed and dressed, but only have a sink in the room, so one of the senior members, who seems to be Patrick Stewart, is in a stretched-out runner's position, naked on the floor, soaping himself up in front in lieu of a shower, just to make sure he's clean, though it's not clear where he's going to get a towel. I'm taking off my pants and jacket, with my New York City Ballet undershirt on as I've been wearing for the past two days, and then we're ready to leave and I have to start dressing again though I haven't washed at all. Prior to this, we were in a strange cafeteria/restaurant where the kitchen was unused, and we were eating whatever was available from glass cases on the counters at which we sat on stools, getting no service except what we could serve ourselves, remarking, "Where could we go, or how do you order food around here?" We eat some small quantity of filler-food, but have no drink options other than water. Though others are around, everyone seems as clueless as we are. In the middle, someone like Matt Damon seemed to insist there was some way to play a record on my---what WERE the four letters of my very expensive turntable: Deal, Teac, Bell?---but the TURNTABLE has been removed, and I'm somehow listening to a pre-amp signal from the record Days of Future Passed that I wanted to hear, but he couldn't play it, though some ancient mechanism seemed to be soaping up the tip of a needle that oozed white foam while scraping against a tabletop where the turntable should have been. "Matt" later came up with a cassette tape that he looked, in vain, for a slot into which to insert it, and I didn't have the heart to mention that this was a one-function---DUAL is the name---machine for records ONLY. I thought, in the dream, that I really should get a new record-playing system, which in fact I already have, yet seldom use. Get my AlphaSmart and sit on the toilet while Paul sleeps and record this to 4:44AM, the first dream in three nights since he's been here: the first two nights I took a sleeping pill, but at 10:57PM I felt tired enough after watching "Spite Marriage," an unknown Buster Keaton last silent film, to fall asleep with only Avodart and Simvastatin, and a morning-forgotten pre-penultimate (third-last) antibiotic pill with two glasses of Poland Spring Water after the feast at Merkato55. Dream also included a section of being in the same bed with KEN (as I am now with Paul) who insisted I was taking up too much room when I wasn't.

TUESDAY, 3/4/08: 8:20AM: I'm in a large room with what may be an orgy group, but everyone is still wearing clothes, no one seems to know anyone else, no one is actually making any kind of conversation, but every so often a couple, looking like they've had sex, come out of another room and settle onto a sofa wordlessly and look at others in other parts of the room. Maybe it's the tentativeness of Paul's overtures for sex (snuggling up against me before he got out of bed this morning, even though it was actually AFTER the dream; of course partly patterned on my sexual overture yesterday morning which in fact went almost nowhere: I only got to see his profuse, now-gray, chest hair, and he got to nibble on my nipples in ways that seemed to satisfy him) that "set the scene" for the tentativeness in the room, with half-hearted leg caresses, long looks into faces without resolution, touches that seemed to lead to no real contact. Very sad and depressing dream, with little overt but much covert emotion.

WEDNESDAY, 3/5/08: 7:39AM: Drank lots of wine showing slides last night, took a sleeping pill with evening vitamins and two night-pills, and got to bed just after 11PM, woke briefly at 5:35AM, then a CONCENTRATED dream of EXTREME reality: I'm just getting off a three-day cruise, in a place that's LIKE New York, but in some ways more like a foreign city that I really don't know, with people who don't know English so there's no one I can ask questions of. I'm with some kind of group, or at least a companion, but they're not around at this point. I finally find the passport exit, and HAVE my passport in a tiny packet of papers that I need to get out into whatever country I've landed in, though it REALLY seems like the END of the trip, but then, after graciously thanking the accented woman who smiles and tells me my passport activities have been successfully completed, I remember that I haven't claimed my SUITCASE from the SHIP! I got off at 2PM and I have the idea it could sail again as early as 4PM, and though I have no idea (no watch) what time it is, I think it's a matter of urgency. At one point I'm descending a LONG flight of stairs, narrow metal stairs with two passageways, and I'm going down a set of flights with files of people coming UP, and finally I find a descending staircase with NO one on it, sometimes with VERY narrow risers, and I FLOAT down, almost falling, very sure-footed and hardly touching each individual step, but SKIMMING down the edges down dozens of steps in a single second, admiring my ability for such speeds with no danger of falling. Then at the bottom I exit some sort of ceremonial gate marking "United Nations," and I know that I have to go BACK inside there to get to the ship to get my suitcase, but when I try to return there are different corridors and stairways, none of which I recognize, and I'm along a stone road where it's beginning to rain, and I stretch out my arms in front of me and see two very important pieces of paper (looking more like restaurant food-lists and visa-card receipts than anything else) getting progressively darker with dots of increasing rain falling on them, and think VERY distinctly: this is so awful that it MUST be a dream, but I'm IN reality and MUST do these things even though it seems increasingly hopeless. Finally reach a rain-slick wall with a MINIATURE stairway going up to a sort of stone seat, where I encounter a WINDOW that prevents me from getting into the corridor that I seem to want to get into, and have NO idea where to go next, where I am, and in desperation wake up, look at the clock to see that it's 7:39AM, I've slept more than eight and a half hours, and I'm drugged with sleep but Paul's already up, so I pee and drink water and say, "What a dream I've had!" and put on bathrobe and slippers, put up the shade, and type this to 7:58AM, numb from the desperation at the end of the dream.

FRIDAY, 3/7/08: 10:35AM: Forgot most of the details, but the dream ended with a fuss about an address written at the bottom of a letter, where a fold or tear made it difficult to read until the two sections were aligned properly.

SATURDAY, 3/8/08: 4:55AM: I'm watching a Broadway production that I thought was called "Oliver," but is more of a history of the early United States, more political than sociological. I'm in a top balcony, in a hut-like structure that has two windows that I constantly shift between, annoyed with the two-foot wide obstruction right in the center of my viewing area that I constantly have to shift from side to side for the best view. I can see spotlights from the top of the theater that highlight different characters, throwing shadows in different angles. Many are choruses, and I think that the lead singer could have been any of the number of people appearing in that scene. It's episodic, and I don't think very good, though supposedly it got good reviews and has been playing for a long time. At the end, I'm somehow on the stage, helping the cast put various things away, particularly at a sort of central bar where I pick up glasses from the floor and put them onto the bar, ending with a kind of glass wastebasket that I pick up by a rope that forms a handle and put onto the bar, not quite knowing why I'm doing this before exiting the theater alone. No real relation to anything in "King Arthur," but rather clearly based on that experience.

TUESDAY, 3/11/08: 8:25AM: I started in a crowded apartment, but the details have been forgotten, as I quickly found myself outside on a dark, muddy street, with no lights anywhere except for two headlights on a slowly moving car which may be parked, or moving slowly toward me, and I look down in four directions from where I'm standing, to see the same country-like roads continuing into the darkness. I'm barefoot, and there're clumps of dead leaves in the streets, but I decide it's not too cold to be barefoot, so I'm in no problem as to health. Then literally decide it must be a dream, so why can't I create something sexy down that dark path into a lane between two lines of trees, and find myself on a sex walkway with people of all ages, all genders, mostly brightly dressed, some actively engaged in sex with partners frontally or backally (maybe reading the articles about Spitzer's sex in the Sun this morning set this up), and absolutely anything seems to be acceptable, except I keep looking for an attractive man, and except for a tall military-like person who looks vaguely like an ugly Jeremy Irons, there's no one who's really interesting. I continue along "sex row" until I get to a more "decent" public area where people are aware of what's going on nearby but just don't care. I figure I've had enough of this and wake vaguely aroused.

WEDNESDAY, 3/12/08: 5:36AM: I'm in an English castle during a war, and a plane flies very low and crashes just outside, out of view. The family inside the castle is stricken: "We'll see our first dead person." Then I'm on a boat waiting to land. I'm wearing jeans and a wet shirt, which is wrinkled, waiting for lunch(?) and a friend to think I'm beautiful. 7:04AM: Continue "to downtown London" with Kensington National Park embossed on a pin. Caught in crowd blessing, and take a few black licorice candies and then some soft chocolate that tastes wonderful, and figure "This is NOT a good way to go."

THURSDAY, 3/13/08: 5:17AM: I'm working at a publishing company and have to mark a perfect manuscript for setting. I have a diagram of how it should be oriented on the final page, but need to find what marks (coordinates? points? corner squares?) to combine two manuscript pages into one final page, one above other.

FRIDAY, 3/14/08: 8:27AM: Having gotten back into bed at 8:09AM, I'm surprised to have had such a detailed dream in such a short time. John and I are vacationing on a river in Central or South America, and I'm in a canoe trying to paddle across the river to a shelter in which John is already setting up a blind so we can watch the birds and animals in the river. At first my paddling is controlled and effective, and I enjoy the speed I can get on the smooth water with just a few digs of the paddle, but then the current seems to change and I have to exert effort to close the few remaining feet to the shore, and paddle with concentration until I seem to be stopped, and look up to see that I've already docked half the boat under the platform on which John is setting up our observation post. I get out and amazed to see white canvas pulled down from the roof to make walls along the river, with plastic windows allowing views outside through rather thick-mesh screen, and a friend I hadn't seen before is focusing his videocamera through the screen and I figure that's going to degrade the quality of his picture. But it looks like we're going to be comfortable here, ready to see what's to be seen.

SATURDAY, 3/15/08: 7:09AM: I'm cleaning a stove; the outside is easy, the inside is caked in grease, mostly soft so that I can sponge it away, but corners are CAKED and I use my FINGERS to get gobs of grease out, sometimes easy, sometimes difficult. Then I start scratching at what's left with my fingernails, but it IS getting DONE.

MONDAY, 3/17/08: 6:33AM: Young people in clubs are playing "Murder," sticking pins to "kill," and some guy sticks woman, who DOESN'T die, but sticks guy BACK, who looks chagrined, then plays along at sinking into death---under a spotlight, having been changed into a garish Technicolor version of a red-lipped Bette Davis sinking slowly into a Hollywood death in the spotlight!
TRINIDAD DREAMS

TUESDAY, 3/18/08: 4:23AM: "Dream of mustache, cane, and clue of dark paper, and with "visa" glasses and long room peoples in room." Maybe I can make sense of note later. To 4:24 to write this.

WEDNESDAY, 3/19/08: 1) 3:40AM: I'm reading a very strange children's book about a man who gradually changes into some kind of insect-monster: the first sign of change is a very long, thin, almost prehensile tongue. This gets more and more alien as he sinks to the ground as a kind of worm-cricket, and the final double-fold back cover shows his face growing increasingly larger until I'm aware that the third or fourth face is filling the whole background, like a cliff, and the entire backdrop is an enormous version of his massive forehead with his expressionless eyes like caves that contain the smaller versions of his entire transformed body. Type while trying to shit. 2) 6:15AM: I'm sitting on a sofa next to a large, long-haired, brown dog, and am suddenly aware that he's snatched a candy-bar wrapper from a small table nearby and has begun to eat it. I try and try to pull it from his mouth, but I don't succeed. 3) 6:30AM: I'm sitting in a room that somewhat resembles my bedroom on Clark Street. Someone like a younger Paul McLean is typing or studying at a desk across from my bed, trying to ignore Bob Rosinek, who asked to look at some kind of book, and I refer him to a chest of drawers, but he opens the wrong drawer and comes upon a small stack of my porn magazines, which he pulls out to look at, evincing great interest, but neither Paul nor I are enthusiastic about sharing his pleasure at finding and looking through them.

THURSDAY, 3/20/08: 4:25AM: I'm in an old Greenwich Village theater with a motley crew as an audience, and we seem to be in the middle of performing a play without a script but with a large number of props that are distributed among the audience members: books, boxes of trinkets, pieces of material, and we interact among ourselves as if putting on a play: I rummage through my box of trinkets (maybe with objects like the clear blue-bead rosary, the silver necklace, the little blue-dressed doll that Errol had dangling from the center mirror of his car for the trip to the Asa Wright and North Shore yesterday), and we seem to make some Beckettian sense out of the objects and our presence there. Then it seems that the famous old actor---not Joseph Bosco, but the old Jewish avant-garde actor with a wrinkled face and large eyes, who may have been married to some other famous actress---who appeared in the original versions of many of the classic experimental plays---is alone on the stage reciting his lines before an audience of maybe eight people, and I wonder how he can be making enough money to even rent this tiny theater---anyway, he goes through his performance, letter-perfect, as far as I can tell---Vidnovic?---though no one really appreciates it, and then we're told that we're all going to do some REALLY famous play, like "Ubu Roi" or something, and we'll all play a part, and are also given places to sit, and it seems to go very well, but very quickly, being over in less than an hour, and we're inclined to applaud when we think it's over, but it's been very short, and we're not even sure that we've actually done the play we were supposed to do---and I still can't think of the name of the very famous actor, but I probably have a picture of him in some old book I have on an unknown shelf somewhere at home, or I'll think of his name as I'm trying to go back to sleep after peeing after finishing transcribing this at 4:36AM, a feeling of sad disappointment about the trip gradually overwhelming me. Eli Wallach, I finally think triumphantly, and type after a small shit that doesn't thoroughly flush down the last three wads of toilet paper at 4:49AM. 6:14AM: I'm riding on the top of a bus, lying down with other men under a black tarp that rises to show I'm naked, and the others are dressed, and I realize I've left my shorts and pants on a hanger where I left my room, so I have to get back. Off the bus, across rooftops covered with ice and snow, look down to see a large drop to a stairway that leads to the street, across another roof to a spiral staircase going down that I'm QUITE sure will be locked at the bottom at street level, but I have no other choice, and start down, snow deepening, and I make two turns and realize it MUST be a dream and wake and wearily get up to turn on the light and transcribe this to 6:19AM, weary, weary, weary! 6:29AM: I'm home, dialing Spartacus, and before it can ring, I hear his voice saying, "Bob?" And I WAKE and hear myself answer "Yes" ALOUD, and type this to 6:31AM, aware of two-minute difference between my watch where I'm typing and my clock at my bedside.

SATURDAY, 3/22/08: 7:05AM: I'm in a kind of Oriental exhibition building (maybe because of the Chinese emphasis in the parts of Paramaribo the bus went through last night): first there's a group game involving throwing a ball to a person, who then turns sideways, seemingly out of the game. I'm invited to join, but I don't, since I have no idea of the rules. Then I'm in a basement pool of opaque tan water, in which many people are swimming as in a health resort, and I even find a dog lapping up the water, so it may even be good to drink. I reach down to clean my anus in the water, since cleansing is apparently part of the custom here, but then notice I'm the only one left, and wonder if I might have exceeded some kind of functioning hours for the facility, and look for a stone stairway by means of which I can exit this pool. Merely curious about all this, as I seem to be about Paramaribo, finding it rather different from what I expected, and not at all certain about what I'll be doing here next.

SUNDAY, 3/23/08: 5:59AM: Paul C. and I and another person have moved small beds around a hotel room in order to have sex without bothering me. Then I have a little TV cassette recorder that I have a porn film in and simply cannot figure how to rewind it, though it's a very simple machine with very few controls. Paul comes over to try to help me, but he can't figure it out either, and thinks I'm stupid for not knowing how to operate my own machine.

MONDAY, 3/24/08: 6:22AM: I'm in London, going to a stylish place for a haircut, though I have the memory of a price list with a haircut at $1.75. This young guy looks at me, puts some kind of electrode on my head that I assume makes all the hairs stick up evenly so they can be cut to the right length without stray hairs being lost in the thicket of other hairs. He puts a kind of apron around me, rather like the one he's wearing, then motions me into a chair and seems to take forever to find a place to put the chair where he can work on me to his satisfaction. At one point we come to a barn-like room that appears to have a revolving floor painted like an amusement park merry-go-round, or skating rink, and I suggest this would be a good place to work, but he ignores me as if whatever I would say was beneath him. He wheels me down a corridor filled with chairs that makes the place look more like a mental asylum, but finally starts pulling hanks of my hair to one side and actually cutting it. This continues for an indefinite time, and then I find myself arrayed in a kind of gown with flowers on it and I'm dumped into a pool, down which I tend to flow toward the end, which I think debouches into the Thames, so I don't want to get too close to that, therefore I propel myself back "upstream" to the circular central pool which seems to be both deeper and hotter. As I'm soaking there, I have a kind of TV-eye view of the street outside and see Queen Elizabeth dropping momentarily into a number of shops at a kind of mall, with lots of people following her and oohing and aahing that she's actually within their view, but then the scene shifts to two low-flying black helicopters that seem to be transporting her along the street to the entrance of Buckingham Palace, which looks like the slightly below-ground entrance on the 77th Street side of the America Museum of Natural History. Then I'm sitting on a bench in a park, and a drunken bum wih one white rose and one red rose comes down the line of people and selects me to pin his pair of roses to boxes I'm carrying on each side of me, or which are rather sitting beside me on the same bench, and I tear them off with disdain as he launches into his spiel about trying to make the world beautiful, and can't I help him out with a small donation, but I just want to be rid of him. Maybe other sections of this languorous dream have been forgotten by the time I finish typing this at 6:37AM.

TUESDAY, 3/25/08: 1) 2:44AM: I'm living in a kind of dormitory overseen by an old woman resembling Mrs. Schmeltzer from Hicks Street. She asks me into the hallway to meet a new renter. I stretch myself out my door, somehow parallel to the floor for an impossible distance, and this rough-looking guy says, "My name is Bob." "But my name is Bob," I protest, and it'll be very confusing if there are two Bobs in the building. Do you have another name, or a nickname?" "My name is Bob," he only repeats, ominously, and Mrs. Schmeltzer doesn't seem about to take my side, and I don't know what to say or do next, but then I wake up. 2) 5:34AM: It started with me standing in front of a teller's office, proffering five or six coins that I knew equaled one American dollar, but he didn't want to give me the exchange. I tried various arguments, but finally said something like, "Look, this is your JOB, please give me my dollar." He already had had my change for a number of minutes. Finally he hands me an envelope printed "One dollar," and I open it to verify that it, in fact, is a genuine (as far as I can tell) dollar. Then I'm trying to get back to my hotel, in a town that now seems to be Rio where a number of people are celebrating Mardi Gras with simple peasant costumes and colorfully painted faces, and I find myself in a dark corner with what look like two flights of stairs going down in different directions, both in darkness, and a car drives up from yet a third direction, looking for a way down, but can't seem to find one, the headlights showing that the two dark passages are indeed only stairways. Start down one at random, only to find that it's now going up into what looks to be some kind of subway station, with entry kiosks lining both sides of a large walkway, and I figure I can find a map that shows where the Presidential Palace is, because I know my hotel is only a short distance from that. Then I wake up, without feeling TOTALLY lost or COMPLETELY frustrated, but obviously echoing some of my problems and concerns about my current trip. 3) 7:02AM: I'm looking down from the landing outside my apartment in a loft-like building, and a limber black woman is climbing a yellow rope attached to the wall and doing splits and acrobatic maneuvers that lead me to compliment her on her strength and agility. Then I realize she's using a tall blue ladder that I need to climb to my apartment landing, and she's replaced that with a short yellow stepladder that reaches only halfway up, so I say, "Hey, you have to put my ladder back!" She sassily replies that I'll just have to buy myself another ladder, because now this is HER ladder and she intends to keep it.

WEDNESDAY, 3/26/08 2:09AM: I'm in the audience at the Met Opera, and an old couple have come late and are wandering up and down the aisle, protesting that the last time they were there, almost no one was there and they had no trouble finding a seat. We tell them that times have changed. Then the conductor, standing in front of an array of gray metal boxes almost like old IBM machines, says that even the way of presenting music has changed: he raises his baton and some of the machines move toward the audience, rotating slightly, people involved with each modern instrument seemingly PART of the instrument, metal-clad, dipping and circling in a precise choreography with the kind of music they're making, while the stage rotates, bringing new instruments into view and giving new perspectives on instruments already in view, Abstract Expressionist or Action-Painting figures playing AS instruments ON instruments, for an amazing effect which, at the beginning, cannot be said to be better or worse, but is certainly different and absolutely visually arresting.

THURSDAY, 3/27/08: 2:55AM: I'm mopping a floor in the White House, as I mopped the shower in Calibi, with Jimmy Carter and maybe Ronald Reagan watching me, and they ask for my opinion about anything, and I start ranting about how FAR we are from "One man, one vote," as it SHOULD be, ranting ON AND ON about how politicians have changed the system AWAY from that ideal. They listen patiently as I continue to mop away at the floor, suspecting they're not really listening to me, but ranting on anyway about super-delegates and the like.

FRIDAY, 3/28/08: 3:46AM: I'm watching the introduction of a show with three featured performers, with a special appearance by Madonna, and the next-to-last star gets the microphone and starts introducing "the best female performer in the world: Aiden Quinn," and the audience erupts into laughter, and Aiden, dressed in a gossamer gown, hams it up from the apron of the stage. Then the phone rings to wake me.

SATURDAY, 3/29/08: 11:46AM: Slightest fragment, possibly brought on my the chance memory yesterday, or maybe even earlier this morning, of Amy's Adam, with encouragement from her, actually kissing me on the lips: the dream involved some other handsome man who was persuaded to kiss me, but being also assured that it had nothing whatsoever to do with either his past, present, or future sexuality; but I found it pleasant.

SUNDAY, 3/30/08: 1) 12:55AM: I'm in a woods with Charles, who loves to pry what he calls "truffles," but which are really spiny caterpillars who have very low mobility and are clustered around the lower parts of thin trees, bushes, and even roots, like worm-shaped sea urchins with yellow-tan spines. Sometimes he pries whole colonies of 5-7 off and jams them greedily into a plastic bag in his coat pocket to eat later. He does this two or three times until it becomes a joke. He really enjoys finding and eating them, and I have absolutely no wish to join him in his bizarre feast. 2) 5:20AM: I've been furnished itineraries, lists, histories, notes, and miscellaneous data, and I want to summarize the important points of each, so I make somewhat the equivalent of index cards, or glossaries, of the data I want to remember, and then make a list of the titles of the information for easy future reference, with elaborate abbreviations and dates. I'm just in the middle of the process, and it seems that the final product will be quite complex, with obvious similarities to my website, my lifelist, and my life itself.

MONDAY, 3/31/08: 3:42AM: Couples are meeting up after class in a very comic way: a white woman obviously interested in a black man turns away from another conversation and actually physically bumps into him, and their eyes exchange that "wouldn't you just KNOW that would happen?" way. Others try to horn in, but it's clear that they're going to end up together. Something happened before that, but I forget what exactly.

WEDNESDAY, 4/2/08: 4:15AM: Woke earlier, about 3:15AM, with a dream fragment I'll record now: Charles and I are entertaining an acquaintance from France, and I've brought along a bookshelf of sound tapes in some old format that I have the idea of taking to an experimental club, or bar, and playing, but neither seems very interested in the idea. At one point they've gone up an elevator to a night club one floor below a very expensive penthouse restaurant, but it occurs to me in my torn blue jeans that they won't let me in because I'm not properly attired. I walk down some cement steps for a number of floors, for some reason also going UP a flight of stairs to a dead end before going back down to the main landing for the stairs to the next-lower floor. Someone like Suzie M. is sort of following me, but I gradually lose her and don't quite know what I'm going to do for the rest of the evening. This all seems to have some vague relationship to my just-completed trip to the Guianas.

THURSDAY, 4/3/08: 8:04AM: I'm having an elaborate dinner on a cruise ship with a horde of people, many of them children, and there are desserts all over the place, but I'm saving a glass of juice for the end, but when I turn around, someone's either drunk the juice or a waiter has cleared it away. Annoyed, I look around to see if there might be some other glass of juice available, but the table is strewn with plates and paper debris, but nothing is drinkable.

FRIDAY, 4/4/08: 6:48AM: I'm walking alone through galleries of modern art in Paris before joining my regular group and our guide for the rest of the tour.

SATURDAY, 4/5/08: 8:20AM: 1) 6:04AM: I'm mopping around the hallway rug in front of the bathroom at 1221 Dietz, moving it aside to clean under it also, and when the mop gets dry it's more like I'm using it as a broom to sweep up the bits of lint and hair and tiny white fluff that have been making it messy. The floor is almost like felt, a brown surface with the feel of a pool-table top, and when it's wet it gets dark and clean-looking, but when it's dry I can't really tell if it's clean or not. I'm using an implement like the plastic-bottom wet-mop I have now, but I have the feeling I'm not doing a very good job. 2) A bit later, Mom couldn't find the glass under-freezer tray in the 1221 Dietz kitchen. I look into the cabinets beneath the counters on either side of the kitchen sink, surprised to find they're almost empty except for one wooden storage box I don't remember ever having, and I wonder what we DID with all the stuff we used to have under there. Finally find the tray propped up against the wall on the right side of the sink, and I wonder how it got there: a whole air of general puzzlement and confusion and "not really being in the right place." 3) 8:10AM: I'm a temporary resident in a mental hospital on the outskirts of a town that I sense to be Philadelphia: I'm in pajamas under a long bathrobe, but I want to go OUT and get either something to eat or some groceries to bring back to the hospital, so I wander through a number of temporary-seeming bedrooms looking for a particular chest of drawers in which I remember storing my regular clothes, but nothing looks like it looked like before: one room that I thought was mine was just too big: my room had only room for two or three beds, and this is an eight-to-ten-bed-sized room. In the next room I can barely open the door because of large packing boxes blocking all the aisles between the beds, and I don't see any chests of drawers like mine. Somehow, now, I'm carrying a small bundle of pink (when did I ever have PINK?) socks and drab brown socks (which are nevertheless clearly mine) wrapped with some white piece of underwear which might be shorts or an undershirt, but I can't change into them until I find the drawer in which I'd put my few shirts and pants. In another bedroom I find an ornate French-style commode whose bottom drawer might be mine, but it's empty. Keep looking, puzzled that I can't locate ANYTHING. Wake with relief that it's only a dream, but still feeling the frustration.

SUNDAY, 4//6/08: 8:06AM: I'm having dinner with friends at a familiar, famous old restaurant in a suburb of Paris, but I wander away from it after dinner for some unknown reason, and then can't find my way back. Have no idea how to contact the friends I came to the restaurant with. Go through street after street, thinking "This looks familiar," but then it turns out to be a false hope. Only after I wake do I think, logically, that I could look in a telephone book for Jean-Jacques' phone number and ask him to come get me, or even take a taxi to the nearest subway stop and go to his place, though I'm not sure what I'd do since I'm not really STAYING with him and thus don't have the keys to his apartment, and don't remember until this moment that his brother lives in the apartment below him, and once or twice before I went to HIM to get into Jean-Jacques' apartment when I was similarly lost. Amazed at the number of FRENCH-oriented dreams, ALL about traveling, and I'm ALWAYS in some sort of problem which leaves me lost and worried and concerned about finding my way to some place that I know rather than being lost somewhere I know nothing about.

TUESDAY, 4/8/08: 7:10AM: I'm working with a young, attractive executive who's just given me a bound booklet of a report that he's giving to upper management, but I look at the smudgy second or third copy of the cover letter that's the first page of the report, and it's almost entirely mistyped: the closing is something like "svv ut" and much else is wrong. He's talking with his staff, but I manage to get his attention and show it to him, and he looks disgusted and grabs it from me and says he'll get someone to fix it for him. I feel like I've done my job, but I haven't gotten the proper recognition for my catching his error.

SATURDAY, 4/12/08: 7:58AM: Matt Dillon and I are sharing some kind of fraternity rooms, in what is probably New York City, and we both move from room to room in random ways that I try to NOT follow so as not to seem to be following him to get better looks at his handsome face as he moves from room to room. In one corner is a teenage girl who says, "This display is really for teenagers," but she allows me to watch a demonstration of "Squigglies," which look to be soft plastic toys that can be separated into grotesque parts when them slime-mold into each other. Another display looks like it's on a hot plate, where the animal or ogre forms skitter around as their bases boil away with a frying sound and they gradually melt into the sizzling background of the hot oil covering the surface. I think some parents might consider this a dangerous "toy" to have in the house. Again, I'm pointedly leaving a room into which Matt Dillon appears to be going, and moving away from the doorway as he exits. All is so casual and random there's hardly any emotional effect at all.

SUNDAY, 4/13/08: 5:36AM: A small woman, somewhat like Rita, and I are looking at the carved wooden lid of a coffin---it really looks more like rush-work, and not very heavy, but she tries lifting one end of the lid and it's heavier than she can manage. Sounds of a distant ceremony indicate we're not alone, and it seems sacrilegious to try to do what we're doing, so we can't be seen. Later, I'm at the foot of the coffin and I manage to move it somewhat to the side, but a distant priest sees something going on and stops his chanting to watch us more carefully, so I realign the lid and try to look innocent. There's the faintest possibility it might be Mom's coffin, but that's not at all certain.

MONDAY, 4/14/08: 8AM: The first part involved sorting piles of stuff on a tabletop, much like the task that awaits me today. Then I found myself in some low eatery, where they sort of threw a hamburg on a grill when you entered, because that was all they served, and mustard came in a yellow plastic canister, while ketchup came in a smaller red plastic canister. When I picked up the ketchup, the outside was dirty and red with caked ketchup that had run over the side in previous uses, so I got a tissue from the holder, wetted it, and tried cleaning off the sides and top (rather like the way I clean off the plastic containers for sauce in the Heart Healthy meals), but the tissue was too wet, the outside too slimy, the slit between the lid and the body of the container to narrow to be cleaned properly, so it seemed almost hopeless, but I continued to swab away, as if anything I could do would leave it in better condition than it was when I first picked it up. A few other customers and the burger-master glanced at me with a combination of curiosity, contempt and wordless exasperation. Which didn't leave me with the happiest feelings when I woke up and contemplated the task-filled day with a kind of depressed anxiety.

THURSDAY, 4/17/08: 8:55AM: In the first segment, a woman like Madge is escorting me to a fancy Japanese restaurant in a kind of mall, where many unsigned entrances lead off mazes of hallways with very few people walking in them: everyone is already eating or being entertained behind various doors. We go into a formal entrance hall where an older woman in a kind of modified geisha costume bows, and I stand with my hands in front of me, slightly inclining at the waist to indicate that I know I'm completely out of my class here, and do not know what to do, or even know how I should be dressed. She looks at my sports jacket with approval, passes over my new baggy blue jeans with a slightly skeptical eye, but avoids dwelling with her eyes on my cloth black casual shoes with slight holes in the sides and indicates that I must be supplied with their shoes. She doesn't ask about size, but an attendant goes to a series of little compartments and draws out a box of shoes that I assume I must wear whether they fit or not, though I feel confident they won't be too small. In that segment, I don't remember even getting into the restaurant itself, but in the second segment we're passing down another stretch of empty hallways with starkly painted facades with signless doors, sometimes blocked with large sofas, and I say to "Madge," "Those must be fancy restaurants," and she smiles and we continue on our way. Then we approach an elaborate door that reminds me of a golden Japanese temple entrance, the door perhaps decorated with a huge Japanese character that may even be its name, and we're inside a dark hallway where "Madge" isn't around and I'm faced with various low tables holding mysterious dark objects that I assume to be places for the preparations of foods totally unknown to me. At one point it seems to me that my jacket isn't appropriate, and I take it off, look for a place to put it, and finally decide to hang it outside the swinging doors that lead into what now seems to be my private dining room, hoping that I don't offend any protocol by doing so. Back at the table, I have a scattered memory of cutting into a custard-like portion of food over a harder lower surface which I can't decide is edible or only part of the serving apparatus. A few other culinary possibilities occur, but then I think I must change something else that I'm wearing, and leave the room to find myself outside, as if enclosed in an enormous multi-building Japanese temple garden, and watch corteges of celebrants in what might be a wedding party, or maybe a theater presentation, going up the stairs to a separate temple-restaurant, and I have the feeling that surely this must be one of the thousand-euro dinners that I've heard rumors of but never really believed. I'd thought to locate my own dining room by feeling in the dimness for my coat on the door, but when I push the doors open I'm in a kind of Disneyland in one room: children are sitting at dozens of tables holding elaborate miniature construction sets; what could be stages display tiny twinkly villages or towns, maybe with little vehicles running in the streets; and at one end is a palisade of wood which might demark the limits of this area, beyond which may be the dirt streets of the small town in which this entertainment center is located, with ordinary people going about their ordinary business on the banks of a small river or canal, or it may only be another section of "Disneyland" which this section has no direct access to. I know I'm in the wrong place, even though no one rushes forward to escort me out, and I think I might look around, but feel that I should get back to my original restaurant, but here I have the typical feeling of near-waking confusion and think, "This must be a dream," and wander around a bit more past unmarked entrances, not being able to find where I am, and having absolutely no idea which direction I should be going, and wake about 8:45, and am just about to get out of bed when the phone rings to check if my Sun has arrived. It has.

SUNDAY, 4/20/08: 7:45AM: Odd fragment about "frost": for "ordinary" frost, like on a window, simply wipe it off; for "permanent" frost, like in the ground, you have to "reverse" it, and I'm led down to the shore of a lake to prove that I know how to do that. Also something about TWO kinds of "permanent" frost, but BOTH of them can be reversed, or they're the reverse of each other.

MONDAY, 4/21/08: 8:05AM: Odd guy is shouting, "Last train is leaving soon, everyone inside," but he's still outside and risks getting on train himself.

TUESDAY, 4/22/08: 5:29AM: Wake with dream, and then lie for a few minutes to feel an INTENSE DREAD building up in my emotions, and I get out of bed at 5:32 to escape the dread and transcribe the dream: I'm visiting a gay couple in their apartment one or two floors above a Greenwich Village avenue, and part of the dream is out on their roof---not a terrace, because the floor is only tarpaper and there is no railing around the roof at all, and I have no idea how we got from the apartment (clearly the whole floor) to the roof, or back into the apartment after he pointed to the bricks of the next building and said something enigmatic like, "Each body takes up about this much room," he said, pointing to a width of about a foot and a half in the varicolored bricks, indicating that a series of crypts, or tombs, occupied the entire floor of the adjoining building. Then we're inside again, one partner is occupied---maybe in the kitchen making dinner, for it's dark outside---and I want to see the body of the shorter, stockier partner, so I reach for the lapels of his bathrobe, and he turns his back to me and slips out of it, showing a glistening skin surface covered with a fine light brown hair on his back, but when he turns, the front part of his body has been burned to almost a black char at the bottoms of his legs, and the boundaries between the burns and the whole skin are as clear as if they'd been drawn by pencil. Even, I see now, parts of his face have been burned: the tip of his nose, pieces of cheek, part of the chin, and I find that LOOKING at it makes it easier to accept, and I get the idea that even though he's VERY drastically disfigured, there's something about his confidence in his good looks that he's defiantly proud of his body, as if the chars were marks of courage or honor that he bore with dignity. I stood as he took off my bathrobe---my body was younger and more defined in the front, as it was when I was in my 30s---and we touched each other, yet more with curiosity than with any ideas of sexuality; the partner could have come into the room and neither of us would have been in any way ashamed or guilty about looking at each other in the nude. Without having the image of my lying down, his body was yet above me, turning to show the demarcations between the almost oily quality of his tanned supple skin, and the matte-black of his burn-char. It was almost as if it were a birthmark rather than something acquired in pain after adulthood. Somehow I remembered the taller, more slender, more attractive body of his partner, but I made no motion toward the other room where he might be drawn into our naked encounter. I recall a feeling of wonder, almost of awe, as I looked over this unsual combination of textures on one body---still, as in the dream, without any overt sexual component to the looks or touches we exchanged. I woke, noted the time, noted that there was not as yet any dawn-light which would have wakened me beneath my facemask, and then felt a creeping dread---not a chill, but a tremor, a foreboding, that made me think for an instant or taking a Valium, or maybe it was in anticipation of my crown (and underlying decay) removal tomorrow at the dentist's, or maybe just in fear for what else negative the day might reveal, like a hangover from last night's Beard dinner that didn't have that much quantity of food or wine, yet I felt as if I might be about to suffer from a horrible hangover which would make the day a loss. Then, after less than a minute suffering under this pall of dread, I got out of bed, put on my robe (my blue housecoat robe, not a white terrycloth robe as we both wore in the dream), and typed this to 5:47AM, now needing to pee and take a Valium (and two aspirin, my mind adds) and get back into bed before the day really starts.

THURSDAY, 4/24/08: 6:24AM: Joe Safko and I are sharing very messy rooms, and I'm trying to make sense out of the masses of clothing and plastic bags stored in an obviously unused bathtub. I bring up an ornate Chinese-style bathrobe which MAY be mine, but there's a zipper at the top, and I've never had a bathrobe with a zipper on the top so it must be his. Then I look into the toilet and there's a bug-eyed FETUS floating in it, and I demand to know where it came from, but he refuses to talk about it and I don't know what to do next.

FRIDAY, 4/25/08: 1) 6:40AM: Forgotten. 2) 7:40AM: I'm riding an above-ground subway, going to some event in the Times Square area, but I look out onto the second floor of a department store and am not quite sure if this is 50th Street and I should be getting off here, or if I should stay on to 42nd Street, but I suddenly realize I haven't the SLIGHTEST idea where I'm going, because I'd forgotten to bring any address along.

SATURDAY, 4/26/08: 7:35AM: Total phantasmagoria of dreams, almost continuous from 4:25AM: I'm a an enormous house party, maybe based partly on Spartacus's and my conversation about various houses at Fire Island (both the Pines, which he said was primarily gay; and Cherry Grove, which he said [contrary to my opinion] was primarily family-oriented), and the "Fire Island" production by Charles Mee, involving scantily clad "beach" goers in changing relationships, moving among the audience, many of which were still munching on their free hamburgers (though only one) and hot dogs, endless red and white wine, and Zywiec Polish beer and Diet Coke, of which I had much and many. The house through which I wandered, in large part looking for a toilet, was primarily yellow-painted, though some rooms were all green, and I'd open doors that looked like bathroom doors only to find closets, or entrances to hallways with many other doors leading off them. Some of the rooms were jammed with people, other wings of the house were totally empty---and there seemed to be very little furniture in any of the rooms, as if the house had been long-since abandoned and was only revived for this almost orgiastic party. Most of the participants were men (maybe thinking of MAN this afternoon), and though most of them seemed dressed, in most of the rooms through which I wandered I had to clasp various scraps of clothing about me so that I wouldn't appear as totally naked. At one point my bare foot, on a wooden floor, definitely felt as if some wound-making stone were almost embedded in my sole, just behind the fork between my big toe and the next toe. At another point I abandoned caution and began sucking on some beautiful cock, though its possessor didn't seem particularly stimulated by it. Some of the people I seemed to know vaguely, or seemed to recognize me in an offhand way, but there was no one I particularly identified as a specific individual. There was nothing to eat or drink, just an endless search through doors and into false-backed closets for a john that I could use---I think at one point I even feared there might be a half-extruded turd protruding from my ass. No rooms seemed to have windows that looked outside, so I had no idea of lightness or darkness outside; all rooms were uniformly lit as if the paint itself were luminous: no light sources of any kind were apparent. I didn't feel uncomfortable, or even particularly lost; I was legitimately present at this gathering, even though I had minimal interaction with any guest (which is usually the case at most parties I attend anyway) (unless they're at Carolyn's, where I've seen most of the people before), here it was as if I'd met no one before, and no one was willing to start a conversation with me. In fact, as I recall, there was absolutely no sound at ALL: no voices, no music, no external noises whatsoever. Never through the three hours of what seemed continuous dreaming---almost lucid dreaming in that I "chose" to continue wandering through these rooms, looking at these people, some few of whom were attractive, but no engagement in sex or even exchanges of signs of affection like hugs or kisses or even touches on the arm or shoulder---did I have the feeling "this is a dream," though there was the faintest idea that I chose to CONTINUE exploring the infinite warren of connecting hallways and rooms. I wasn't hungry, or tired, or drunk; I didn't want to sit down, or even particularly to talk to anyone. Except for the one cock-suck, there was no sexual anticipation or participation. I had no idea who might have been the host or hosts, or how I'd gotten invited, yet I never felt that I did NOT belong, or that I was invading spaces where I wasn't welcome, or at least tolerated. Woke finally, determined to take two aspirin, pee, and type what I could remember of the dream before the memories left me completely.

SUNDAY, 4/27/08: 9:07AM: Woke at 4:53AM, looked at the clock, and recalled that I had another very LONG series of dreams, but I took no notes, went back to sleep, dreamed no more, and when I woke at 8:54AM and tried to remember what the dreams had been about, I couldn't recall any detail: I don't think they concerned travel, or frustrations, or getting lost, or sex, or eating, or doing things around my apartment, or even other people. It may have been something as simple as reading or watching TV, but even though that rings the faintest bell of recollection, I still remember no details whatsoever.

MONDAY, 4/28/08: 7:22AM: I'm getting a huge, sloppily-wrapped, yellow-papered, red lettered birthday/Christmas present from Taylor and Jordan, Lorene's kids (whom I've never met), bulky with three or four group-wrapped gifts.

SUNDAY, 5/4/08; 6:45AM: I'm sorting through old clothes, and some old blue jeans, still on their wooden hanging-hangers, are on top of a metal bookcase or clothes-storage cabinet, and I take one pair down and they're almost new, so I put them into the hamper to be washed, but another pair is severely water-and-mud stained, sand covered, and torn with at least two-inch gashes across each knee, and I take them in to show Mom and say, "I just decided to throw these away; do you think I'm acting too hastily?" She just smiles. Then get other pants out of drawers and fold them into two neat piles preparing to put them into drawers where they'll leave me more space in the closet to hang new clothes.

TUESDAY, 5/6/08: MOST elaborate dream that I'd intended to type, but I didn't, and by now, 11:20PM, have ENTIRELY forgotten. How SAD!

MONDAY, 5/12/08: 8:15AM: I'm traveling with Paul M. in Egypt, and the tour leader is fussing around in a restaurant trying to get all of us packed and ready to return to the ship for our next stop. I glance at the bar and see my passport, a Visa slip, and another routing ticket at one side: I'd recalled leaving it on a table while I ate, and thought someone must have taken it, and considered myself lucky that I found them at all; I really should have put them in my pocket long ago. Out at the curb I see Paul in the back seat of a limo with two Egyptians in front, ready to drive him, as he puts it, "To a tour of the city of Cairo, which we won't be returning to," and I argue with him that we'll miss the ship, but he says that even if we do there are many ferries waiting nearby which could take us to the next island our ship is scheduled to stop in, and says, "We can get there in just six hours, maybe even before our ship would arrive," so I'm ready to go with them. Before that, on some floor with a mess of papers and wet materials on it, almost like the artwork Spartacus and I saw in the hallway going down to the Heights Players production of Carousel yesterday afternoon, and in the middle was a small creature that I thought at first was a large mosquito, because of it's enormous wings and tiny body, but when I looked closer I saw that it was the smallest bird I'd ever seen, with a distinct heron-like head and beak on an ant-sized body with long legs with which it picked its way over the trash on the floor, moving to a clearer area where I can make out its shape more precisely. I was again worried about packing, and thinking that we'd need some knowledge of the local language if we were going to get ourselves onto a ferry that was going to the correct destination, and then find our hotel, or at least our ship, after we got there, but Paul seemed to have no concern about these trivial details. This dream was after I'd peed at 4:34AM this morning, then gone back to sleep after debating starting Actualism, thinking that I hadn't had any SEXY dream in many weeks, maybe even months, thinking it might be do to my month's return to Proscar after having switched to Avodart for a month or more. No TERRIBLE feelings of loss or frustration from the dream, just a sort of mild anxiety that I feared Paul wasn't concerned about the consequences of his "little trip to Cairo."

WEDNESDAY, 5/14/08: 8:05AM: After my "near-death night," getting back to sleep at maybe 6:30AM and waking at 7:30AM, this incredible dream: I'm living in an apartment that's more like my front apartment at 39 East 61st Street than any other subsequent apartment: two front windows overlooking the street from about four floors up, except for the white laminated-wood chests right under the windows; and the first woman in the dream was rather like Joan S., with whom I'd gone to college and then was friendly with when she moved to NYC, though that was after I'd left that particular apartment; the second woman in the dream was a friend of Joan's, and her friend Anita comes to mind. Anita, both in real life and in the dream, did what she wanted to do without any regard for practical reality. In the dream, after some preliminary socializing, I discovered that she'd taken two colorful fish out of a small bowl and put them into the top drawer, which she'd filled with water, of the left chest. I was astounded at her act, saying the drawer certainly wasn't waterproof, and the water would leak out and flood this floor and the apartment downstairs. I looked around for some cup or container which could transfer the fish from the drawer back into the bowl before the drawer could be removed and emptied of water, and located a porcelain ladle (which I never possessed) which seemed to be perfect for the job. Simultaneously, she'd somehow let loose (or maybe brought with her) other small animals which were enjoying greatly their freedom in the apartment: a tiny gray-and-white cat was having a ball rolling over and over on a sofa, trying to paw at or catch one or more of the half-dozen flies that were buzzing around her, as if playing with her; two small rabbits, of unknown origin, had mysteriously become TEN, and there was a brief memory of a previous time when four tiny newborns had been sitting in a small square near four somewhat older ones scampering around, with the two parents at the side, so the numbers were easy to count; other objects, possibly inanimate things like stones or marbles, or living things like snails or even frogs, were also in the water in the drawer, making removal of the water even more complicated. Then there was a noise in the next room, and I turned and was startled to see Mom, back unusually early from work, dressed as she might have been dressed in her mid-thirties, coming into the room, asking with some asperity what on EARTH was going on, and I was relieved that she could take command of the situation. Before her entry, I had the idea I was dressed only in a shirt which covered my genitals, but nothing more; but at the instant of her appearance I glanced down with relief to see that I was now wearing blue jeans (somewhere in the dream was a memory of a man saying, "Zip up your fly!," but when I looked down I saw to my relief that my fly was in fact zipped up). Without transition, having not yet begun to deal with the mess in the apartment, I was in a kind of military or school training class, being instructed that we should always try to be SECOND in line in particular queues, because the first person in line would always be the clerk for whatever bank or shop we were in line to do business with, and the clerks, at the head of the line, would have to vault over the counter or ledge behind which they would then turn to serve the first person waiting to be served, which would be the second person in the line. More details about various small pet-like creatures in the first part of the dream have been forgotten, since my memory says that the first part was long and very elaborate, all in vivid color (the fish were orange and white, smaller versions of the koi in the Brooklyn Botanical Japanese Garden pool; Mom's dress was vaguely pink and blue, and she entered wearing a tight-waisted coat of a darker color, and she was wearing a wide-brimmed black straw hat which I may have seen in photos of her taken when I was just a child). "Joan" had very little to do after the first moments of the dream: maybe she was so embarrassed by the actions of "Anita" that she left the room before Mom entered. No actions were taken in the dream to start to deal with the mess of animals and water in the apartment, which didn't seem to disturb Mom as much as it bothered me, but then it was MY apartment, even though Mom, in the dream, was at an age when I would have been living at home in Akron before moving to NYC. Rich and complex dream.

SATURDAY, 5/17/08: 9AM: I'm at a party, seemingly aged about 40, and I'm very attracted to a young man, call him A, who appears to be equally attracted to me, even though he has a very beautiful face, and I notice later that he wears a large amount of eye makeup. Then I move to another room and see another handsome young man, call him B, who also takes an interest in me, and I'm talking to him when A enters the room and sees us. Neither says anything about the other, but at one point we're all three on a sofa, me in the middle, playing with both their erect and very juicy cocks. A goes down on me, but I'm not very hard, which doesn't seem to discourage him. Then B tries to fuck himself with my cock, and I can't quite bring myself to vocalize the fact that this isn't very appealing to me. I suggest we might be more comfortable if we went to my place. Without transition, I'm in a separate room with A, who's pulling his hair back, having added more eye makeup and looking extraordinarily beautiful, saying that this all couldn't have happened at a worse time. "Why?" I ask, and there's no answer from A, now behind me. I turn and he's crying, saying, "On Wednesday B and I had a commitment service together." "THIS PAST Wednesday?" I ask in great surprise. That seems both to be the case and to be the end of the dream. I wake, trying to continue it in my mind, but nothing more comes of it, and I have not the slightest bit of arousal, even during the most erotic segments of the dream. I attribute this to the fact that tonight will be the last night I'm taking the remaining tablet of the 40 Proscar that I discovered on my shelf 40 days ago and decided to finish them in place of my current Avodart prescription---just to get rid of the Proscar for which I've already paid, and which seems to have the same prostate-reducing properties of Avodart, except possibly with more testosterone-suppressing qualities. So I don't feel any sexual feelings at all. Finish recording the dream (after making a backup on disk A) at 9:13AM.

SUNDAY, 5/18/08: 6:48AM: I'm simultaneously training for a maintenance job in a literary agency and having a script of mine evaluated for possible production as a TV show. For the maintenance job I have a little flexible squeegee with which I'm trying to clean a dark window that might have looked into a now-unused aquarium, about three feet wide and two feet high, and there doesn't seem to be enough water on the squeegee, because the window is very dusty, but I leave streaks of dust on the window that I have to go over and over, yet they still don't clean the window. Someone comes up behind me and observes that I'm not succeeding because the squeegee has become uneven with constant use. I don't know what he means, but he rinses it in clear water until residue, which I hadn't thought of as green until I see it as green in the clear water, rinses away and I can see that the serrated edges of the white sheets that comprise the edge of the squeegee are indeed of unequal lengths, like sawtooth edges of different lengths and widths that never mesh, leaving spaces between the teeth that would leave the streaks. "You learn something new every day," I saw as a wan attempt to show that I appreciate his advice. At the same time, a clerk is editing my script, but at the same time commenting on it: "Maybe the assistant is dead; you never know," which was a plot twist I'd never thought of; "It could be that the heroine is in love with someone else," another complication that would make the suspense more gripping; "The dialogue could be less wordy," which I hadn't thought would be a problem, but he'd typed so many successful scripts that I figured I could do worse than add these suggestions to the script as if I'd thought of them myself. So I silently thanked him for his guidance and resolved to rewrite, incorporating his observations, clearly improving my chances of getting my script approved for production, even wondering whether he was aware he was helping me, or just grousing about his job which had become such a routine to him, having worked there so long, that his comments just flowed freely, without consideration that the author himself might be listening and profiting from what he was saying. Felt lucky to have good advice about both components of my new job; felt lucky to be listening.

MONDAY, 5/19/08: 4:15AM: Fragment of dream in which my mouth is firmly attached to the nipple of a very nice male body, but with little actual sexual feeling.

TUESDAY, 5/20/08: 8:20AM: I'm sitting in the living room of some kind of religious sect, and a young, stern-faced woman hands me a large red book to read. The first half is a rather ordinary text of his conversion to this new religion, but the second half is printed on very thick paper and has propagandistic photos that would appeal only to the densest person, so I'm not interested in that. It seems I should be finished by 3:30PM, and without transition we're walking outside through a grassy field that's had the basis of a road laid in the middle of it, but as we continue away from the house the road becomes more and more rudimentary until it's just a mown path in the grass, and we get to the end of that and she implies that I'll have to find my own way back to the main road, since she has to go back to the house and tend to her next customer. There's no DETERMINED effort to get me to join the sect, but it's clear that she'd prefer that I did and stop stalling.

DREAMS FROM ICELAND

MONDAY, 5/26/08: 7:05AM: Woke with someone asking me to do something, but I forgot what it was now.

TUESDAY, 5/27/08: 2:51AM: 1) I'm writing some kind of newspaper article and get a title from one file, and the text from another file I duplicate behind the title, so I can clear the data in the second file and start a new article in the first file. 2) I'm having some kind of childish argument with a small Oriental man (who's very angry, for some reason), and I make some kind of conclusion and feel as if I've won the argument, much to his displeasure.

WEDNESDAY, 5/28/08: 4:11AM: Started dreams small, in a class like an Actualism class with me trying to teach two or three some of the basics: we start with one simple sentence which the student has to fill in, like "We should become like..." and the good student will think of the word "God," and with triumph we write on the board the sentence "We should become like God," and we feel good because the lesson has been taught, and then the lesson has been learned. This is when I thought, "Well, this is trivial, and doesn't have to be recorded," and went back to sleep. Then, with much detail, very gradually, this small lesson became the center of a small drawing, which elaborated into a system of small drawings, each incorporating minor, but ineluctable, truths, until the lower half of a large piece of paper contained a mosaic of beautiful little paintings, each involving a basic truth, but each also connected with all the other little paintings in the lower half of the large art-work, which, in the upper center, contained an enormous tree-like structure, maybe influenced by yesterday's book-page about Ygdrassil, but which also seemed an enormous space-saver, yet unifier, in the top half of the large art-work, and at the tips of each branch small pendant art-works of jewel-like truths, like Christmas tree ornaments, could be added to produce a gigantic visual mantra, or yantra, containing universal truths universally connected. Through this operation, the group working got larger and larger. I never really LED the group, but I was always sort of foremost in a triangle of people in the first two rows of what was more like an auditorium, from which part of the driving force emanated. Then, from the near left, a sexy naked man strode across the stage, and I thought, "Oh, this is getting interesting." And it turned into sort of an orgy room, maybe kind of like the dark entrance to a small hotel, or bar, down one side street in Akureyri before dinner last night, and there were other sexy naked bodies all around, and I was pleased at the direction the dream was taking: from the teaching and the spiritual to the physical and the erotic. The leader now seemed to be a thin naked young man with a mushroom-headed erection, whose penis-head got larger as he looked down at it, and he came up close to me, gasping, saying, rather like Dennis, only as a younger and much more attractive young man, "Look at it, look at it," and I compliantly and joyfully obeyed, staring at it as he brought it close to my now upstanding erection, as if at a MAN meeting, or maybe the start of Steve's fantasy of using the movie-making function of his digital camera at a circle jerk at the MAN summer gathering, and the kid started stroking his cock, juicing at the end, obviously nearing an orgasm yet wanting to prolong it, which program I was perfectly willing to watch, participate in, and enjoy with him, and in an INTERIM earlier, some small group of attendees levitated above the stage with exclamations of amazement, and others applauded, and in a LATER interim, I was part of perhaps a dozen people who were in a kind of invisible (Wonder Woman?) airplane that rose high above the stage, exclaiming aloud in wonder and some fear, that we were actually FLYING, and we got up to the ceiling and began falling/descending, watching the blue upper walls rise around us as we fell, safely though rapidly, with an ecstatic feeling, and found ourselves back in our seats in the front of the audience as the naked young man, with his red-tipped, mushroom-fluted-and-leafy cock-head, neared orgasm and I got harder, and he got more frantic in his sexual exhortations, and the rest of the audience either enjoyed or left, and he and I were about to cum when I woke with a happy start, took my watch and picked up my AlphaSmart to hide my erection, and went into the john to pee and type this to 4:30AM, happy that Steve didn't have to interrupt me to pee. Just remembered the VERY sexy middle-dream detail that OTHER naked men wandered past, with nice bodies, and then some men in their shorts would slip out of their shorts, and the "prime" young man at first would not remove his sheer white seamless shorts from his slender blond body, but he leaned over me, as if teasing me with his clothedness, and I was intensely gratified when he moved his hands down and gracefully lowered his shorts, leaving himself beautifully naked right in front of me, and I became very happy and aroused, which helped arouse him. And the sexual feelings between us, in our mutual cock-adoration, got wonderfully intense from then on to my waking.

THURSDAY, 5/29/08: 1) 4:10AM: First part of the dream involved some kind of Time magazine quiz about putting five three-part sentences about Meso-American Indians in chronological order by inserting the correct cultural names, like "The Toltec built the columns at Tabasco," or whatever the fact would be that would put them after the Olmec, the first, and before the Aztec, the last. Then it involved some kind of presentation in which a young child was brought out of his autism by a traumatic moment when he struggled for something terribly important by frantically uttered his first words, "Stop it!" Then it went to a living classroom, or tutoring, or care-taking session in which a young autistic boy was being cared for by me in some school-type experience, in which a number of steps had to be executed successfully to show my competence as a teacher, and it was going well enough before the climactic moment: we were riding in the back of a truck, watching some pet or farm animal about to cross the road behind our truck, and a following car threatened to run it down, and, as if watching a movie, the camera focused on the face and arms of the boy as he saw what was about to happen, began waving his arms back and forth frantically, itself a sign of remarkable progress and accomplishment, but then worked his face, then his mouth, then his tongue, and after a few desperate attempts at sounds finally forced out a hissed "Sssss...", and after more facial contortions and arm-waving, in utter narrative suspense, managed to stammer out the words, "S-stop it!" and I immediately remembered the preceding program in which those were the critical first words, and felt unbelievably thankful that a situation arose in which these same words could be evoked from the child under MY care, which was being filmed, or observed in some futuristic way, to show that my expertise could elicit such a remarkable recovery from autistic silence in an individual, promising some real progress with the disease entity, which now reminds me of some article, probably in The New Yorker magazine, that recorded some similar advance in a condition that had been close to, or even identical with, autism, with very similar circumstances leading to a highly emotional and gratifying breakthrough. Woke with a very positive feeling that I must record the dream, but feared a terrible hangover from all the wine last night, but dragged myself out of bed, into the bathroom with the AlphaSmart and my watch and glasses, and thankfully found the plastic container of aspirin and Melitonin in my dop kit, and downed two aspirin before typing and finishing this over-elaborate, partially "invented" dream at 4:24AM, hoping with the aspirin to recover from my hangover by breakfast time. 2) 6:15AM: I'm "working" in a basement room in what may be a university building, in an old storeroom that at one point was made into an Actualism classroom but which hadn't been used for a few years. I'm doing either some outlandish biological experiment OR performing outrageous tortures on small automaton-like creatures that are one step up from insects or arthropods, but are at the same time frighteningly close to miniature human beings with oddly distorted limbs: stick insects combined with dwarf-like humanoids with long black legs, tubular body parts which still seem to have living sensations and nerves through them, and heads which are nightmarish combinations of preying-mantis triangles and tiny human heads with mouths that can scream. I'm crushing their legs with mallets that bend, and I break them into twig-like nests of kindling, and then I attach one end of a "foot" to a rotating device which stretches the materials from which their artificial (or, much more repulsively, humanoid) legs are drawn out into literal ZIPPERS with bits of flesh or tegument clinging to their edges, many inches long until their leg-material is exhausted and it shifts to gastrointestinal spaghettis of guts and organs and vestigial, half-identifiable inner and outer bodily components that may be nerves, guts, blood vessels, tendons, muscles, drawn-out livers or spleens, or other attenuated body-parts extruded from the still-living and horribly suffering sensate creatures that have become the victims of my totally demented experiments. This continues through a series of "animalcules" and "miniatures" until I'm finished, and maybe even found out, because somewhat later I return to this basement hallway to find the doorway to this room painted and plastered with a blue paint that almost makes the former door-position invisible in the wall at the foot of the stairs. A code of some sort identifies the remains of the room, but at some later moment the door opens from inside and I glance in to see wooden partitions being torn out, parts of the room maybe being "put into permanent mothball condition," to make sure no one ever uses the nefarious room again. I watch the whole dream dispassionately, as if it were taking place in another dimension, or another universe, or an alternate reality in which common morality simply has no currency, in which I'm not involved emotionally, and for which I'm certainly not culpable or guilty in any way, even though the bare reporting of the events is---INTENDED---to be as repellent and gruesome as possible. Finish typing at 6:32AM.

FRIDAY, 5/30/08: 1) 4:16AM: Trying to remember details of a sardonic British-type man saying something cutting to me about an unrecalled subject. 2) 6:08AM: I'm watching porno on a strange white-board screen in an apartment with a few guys which includes a large-suited Joe Safko, looking about 30, while I'm clearly at least into my 50s or 60s. Everyone's naked and only half aroused, but then he reaches to fondle me, which gives me permission to touch him, and he gets hard and swoops down to start sucking on me. I'm self-conscious that I may smell, because I have the current-day awareness that it's been two days since I've showered because I like neither the hard/soft water that prevents soap from being easily rinsed off, nor the water-volume control that doesn't rotate under soapy hands. He's eagerly sucking away as I get harder, however, but very quickly he's dressed again in his over-large yellow suit-jacket, saying rather indignantly, "You should think about doing some exercise to get rid of some of that fat, and you should probably eat less." I'm properly cowed, and he's gone from the room before I can respond in any way. Finish typing at 6:15AM, seemingly ready for a small shit again, the hungover feeling thankfully almost gone.

SATURDAY, 5/31/08: 5:13AM: I'm filling out some kind of quiz, starting with a nonsense question like "How would you get an Icelander and a Greenlander to agree to talk about their differences," and then something about an emerald. Not very gripping dream-bits.

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

bobzolnerzak @verizon.net

DREAMS of 2008 1 of 3