DREAMS of 2008 2 of 3
SUNDAY, 6/1/08: 3:58AM: I'm reporting to a sort of project manager about a client who wants to build the American branch of his international firm as part of a new super-block of offices either IN, or at the border of, Central Park. My boss's boss, unusually, wants me to represent him, so this is very new for me as well as the project manager, so we're not sure how to operate. The president of the company is complaining about the location: he doesn't want his building to be "part" of anything---it should stand out on its own merits. I have to mediate, and start by trying to say that his statement, "We don't want to be phthistic," doesn't mean whatever he thinks it means, but means"---what DOES it mean? Something medical? [It means "tubercular."] Neither of us knows what to do, and I wake, happy that I'm not in that actual position. Odd "business-type" dream for my persona.
MONDAY, 6/2/08: 1) 4:09AM: Dream of staggering complexity involving at least three levels of "reality": 1) programmers in two teams: a) one specifying programs b) the other writing the programs; 2) writers in two teams: a) one sketching ideas onto a set of index cards, b) the other sorting the index cards into two sets: i) dialogue moving the action forward, ii) stage directions delineating the actions themselves. Two files of cards are being painfully separated out: one with the i) set, another with the ii) set. Over all this confusion, there's 1) a real-time filming going on, with actors trying to portray the human emotions that will involve the audience, and 2) a set of directors who are desperate for their next scripts. I'm somehow in the middle of the two teams, at one point patiently explaining that the complexity has so lengthened the process that those who had been on a preliminary team had such an increasing burden they needed another level of implementers between them and the secondary team, just as the same complexity now demands a fourth team to implement the increased work from what had been the second team, now demanding a fourth team acting between what HAD been the second and third teams. No one seems to quite understand me when I try to explain how the demands of writing and programming have become so intertwined that new specialists have to be trained to perform entirely new integrative tasks to handle the immense program file in relation to the enormous script. In here are actual directorial decisions: at one point two opposing armies meet in what should be a battlefield, but these are TECHNICAL people somehow related to the programming and movie-making cadres, without weapons yet morally and politically opposed, as two sides in a war, yet WITH the realization that these aren't ENEMIES but two opposing teams in a kind of CONTEST in which the finished movie will be the result of their COOPERATION, not killing, and the relief manifests in scenes of emotional interactions between individuals on opposing sides actually caressing, kissing, crying on each others' shoulders with combined relief with the realization that in some sense they're all on the same side, facing the same problems, and more UNIFIED FRIENDS than mortal enemies. At another point a detailed shooting script is finally presented and accepted by the directors, and it looks like actual filming can commence and produce a RESULT from the combination of these incredible work-efforts. This is all, somehow, related to my fatigue with the trip, uncertainty about my next actions, my wanting it to be over, yet realizing that each day adds new, unexpected (like the exotic-fish show) experiences that make this mind-bogglingly gratifying, pictorial, emotional, and mentally expanding. Impossible to convey with details of the dream and their "significance" with my hour-by-hour experience of the trip, combined with my longing to just GET THROUGH IT with the least physical discomfort combined with the most satisfying discoveries and activities and experiences. I hope I can make SOME sense out of these scribblings when I transcribe and proofread them when I'm finally home. Finish typing at 4:29AM, feeling somehow detached and at sea, not even sure I'm spelling words correctly. It all, I add, somehow relates to my piles of stuff in this hotel room, unpacked yet not unpacked, in total chaos. 2) 6:34AM: I'm in a plane flying south from somewhere exotic to somewhere more exotic, like from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia, with a plane-load of gay men, many of whom are shirtless and very muscular, and I glance out the window to see rounded mountaintops rather close below, and no one seems to care exactly where they're going because they're involved with meeting others and starting romances in the plane itself. There's some conversation with someone very like Joe Safko (again!) that I've now forgotten. Finish this at 6:38AM.
TUESDAY, 6/3/08: 1) 3:43AM: I'm conducting research on how fast the body absorbs moisture by having famous women lie in a very shallow tub of water wearing only the sheerest of slips, and because their legs are lower, their legs get wet first, then their pubic areas, and they usually are amazed how slowly it reaches the upper body, but I can tell that it's because there's much less water up there, and that this really isn't a successful scientific design for the project. The first to lie down is Hedy Lamarr, and her pubic area gets very elegantly wet, the delicate cloth clinging to the folds of her genitalia. Then comes Joanne Woodward, and the wet cloth reveals that she has a small penis, and I think, "That's why Paul Newman loves her." Wake and at first think I've had no dream, but then the memory (and the silliness of the dream) returns, and I type it out after peeing. 2) 6:20AM: I've encountered a buff Andre Eryol in what may be a kibbutz, and he's looking closely at me and saying how attractive I am, and I run my hands over his broad tanned chest and say that I love looking at him, too, and he's pleased that I said that, and I ask if there isn't some place where we can go to "look at each other in solitude," and he comes up with an idea that involves a coffin that goes to a wailing chamber to be lamented over, and he manages to get a coffin and we wheel it through various corridors, past other wailing rooms, and we find an empty one and put the coffin in a corner and stand looking at each other as he peels off his shirt, and the thickness of his chest, the definition of his pectoral muscles, the glisten of his smooth skin absolutely turn me on, and we look forward to a very sensuous time when I wake, semi-erect, thinking that in only three days I'll be home, and I can indulge myself, and try to continue the fantasy of the dream in my imagination, but it doesn't work, but Steve is up for his shower, and it's later than I thought, so I turn on the light and type this to 6:26AM.
WEDNESDAY, 6/4/08: 1) 12:38AM: I'm looking at a computerized list of where people go who go on a trip (though not to Iceland; maybe some Arab or African country), and I highlight most of them, but those not picked fade from the screen and the numbers assigned become smaller and don't correspond to the numbers on the original list. End at 12:42AM. 2) 4:01AM: Try to remember dream, but can't. 3) 6:26AM: Again only fragments: shame; trying to do something but can't (like remembering a dream); people blaming me for something I didn't do (yet I'm totally inventing these fragments in order to type SOMETHING!).
THURSDAY, 6/5/08: 1) [actually WEDNESDAY, 6/4/08: 11:20PM]: I'm graduating from some college program, and everyone is gathered at Grandma's house to celebrate. I have to make a champagne frappe for everyone, however, and it goes very slowly and I'm not sure I have enough ingredients or enough glasses: the recipe was for eight, but there are about 12 of us. To make things worse, some of the ceremony is to be televised, and it's already started at 9PM when I get down the first four champagne glasses and fill them with the greenish foam and pass one to Aunt Marion, another to Uncle Henry, and then to Uncle Edward and Aunt Anne, and rush back to the kitchen to make four more, and it's more like 9:05PM when I pass out four more glasses, and someone like Grandpa says I'd better hurry, because the introduction to the program is almost over, and I open the cupboard to take down four of MY smaller champagne flutes, figuring they'll contain more liquid for some of the women who have already said, "Oh, this is too much," when I served the larger dessert-coupe glasses filled with the sorbet-like material, and I wake before I have time to fill the last four glasses, so I have no idea whether I had enough to go around, or whether I'd have to pour some from existing portions into the still-empty last few glasses. Finish typing at 11:28PM. 2) 2:33AM: I'm supposed to go to Spartacus's either FOR or AFTER lunch, but I go first to Mom's, at 1221 Dietz, to watch TV. I phone him from there, and he makes some joking change of plans, and he ends by saying, "I'll call you." "You can't call me," I say exasperatedly, "because I'm at MOM'S." Then he laughs and says he was only kidding. "Yeah, I know," I say, and get up from the old red chair in the living room, brush crumbs from my pants from something I'd been snacking on, and prepared to go to his place just down the block. 3) 4:36AM: I'm visiting some Arabic city, probably in Egypt, and I'm waiting for a helicopter (as I am today to take us from Tasiilaq to Kulusuk) to take us to the top of the building where my new apartment, or business office, is to be constructed. We finally board the helicopter and it suddenly takes off, BACKWARD, flying upward at a VERY steep angle, as we, horrified, see how close the copter's blades are coming to the rotten bricks of nearby buildings, but we have to think the pilot knows what he's doing. After a short time he closes in on a side of the building at the top---not ON the roof, but at a sort of dock at the side of the top floor. Without transition I'm looking at the sloppy vacant interior of the top floor, but above is a kind of attic in which at least two goats appear to be living, and I have to ask someone if they're expected to remain there when the apartment is finished. A number of times I get on my hands and knees and start to dust the wooden floors, not in terrible shape, but someone asks why I don't use a broom or mop to dust the floor, and I just know my bare hands will make it cleaner. Look at some bosses of extra dried plaster on the wall between the edge of the wallpaper or veneer and the bare plaster wall that forms one wall of the top floor, which might have to be divided into smaller rooms before it's usable. Other details are forgotten, but at the end, possibly in another dream, I'm talking to someone like Norma about a problem related to the job I'm supposed to be working on here in this apartment, from which I haven't yet looked out at what I assume would be a good view, but with my concentration on the floor I don't seem to have yet located any windows. At one place some pipes are so low I could just touch them with the top of my head when I walked beneath them, and I made a mental note to ask if these couldn't be lifted higher when the new ceiling is put in, hopefully after the goats, who run about from corner to corner of the attic, have been removed. 4) 6:02AM: It's like I'm in a plot for an Indiana Jones movie: the details were clear when I woke, but they're gone now---something about finding something in a foreign place, dealing with sinister foreigners right out of a movie plot. Odd how a dream could be SO clear at the moment of waking, and yet vanish two minutes later.
FRIDAY, 6/6/08: 1) 12:05AM: I'm making (or being told) plans for a camp that has a ramp outside it to rebuff attack; also an overhang makes sure that rain water falls into a ditch just outside the ramp, so it won't be damaged. 2) 5:13AM: I've just been accepted into a sort of gang, or fraternity, or young Mafia-type group, all of whom are living in "my" former house which is much like 1221 Dietz. I don't know the rules, but know that some guys are more important than others, and at the END of the dream decide to get some sleep in what had been, and now IS (at least for the time I'm there) my bed, and one of the top men ALSO has a bed in my room, so I tell him that this was (and is) my bed, and ask him what "the rules" are. He gives me a confusing answer: 1) HE is in charge, and he does anything he wants, 2) he realizes it IS my bed, and I have the right to use it, as I have a CERTAIN freedom here in that it WAS my house (maybe this is more post-Apocalyptic Mad Max than gang-life), but he's still in charge of this room. I'd tried to put stuff in the refrigerator, which turned out to be part of a salad and a raw steak which "happened to be" in my back jeans-pocket, and I just tossed the whole wad of food in with other wads of food in the fridge. Other packets of food, like French fries, were on the floor in places, and I just left them there: whether they were food or trash was hard for me to tell. Sex seemed possible, but more underground and hidden than overt. I didn't feel frightened or intimidated, but I had absolutely no authority: I was more a tolerated presence because this had been my house, but I'd better be careful what I did or said, because I had very little status and could be thrown out if I went too far out of some unknown line that was entirely up to their whims.
END OF ICELAND DREAMS
SATURDAY, 6/7/08: 1) 2:41AM: I'm in a kind of seminar, led by an authoritarian woman, sort of a combination of Shelley and Mildred, and I keep insisting on a point that I think is important, and she wants to move on and ignore me, and to grab her attention I say very loudly, "We're ALL here to LEARN!" She stares at me as if I'd just uttered the foulest profanity, but at some level she recognizes my truth, and at that moment the session ends and she requests that the core team remain to discuss other issues, effectively dismissing me, but I can tell this isn't the end of this argument or power struggle. 2) 7AM: We're in the middle of a violent earthquake, but we're protected because we're sitting in a kind of ship which skims easily over the floor as the building rocks back and forth, and though the water sometimes sloshes over the sides of the boat, we still feel quite safe, just waiting for the earthquake to be over.
SUNDAY, 6/8/08: 6:21AM: Woke twice, thinking I'd had a dream, but could remember nothing. Last was at 6:01AM. Then, lying thinking, I realize that I had been looking at some list of performances and seeing that I'd written in about four or five consecutive evenings of operatic highlights at the City Opera, thinking, "Oh, they might be in the second week of June, maybe I can attend some of them." But I looked more closely at my tiny written dates and realize they're in APRIL, not June, so I just totally missed them. But I can't think how I could have done this yesterday in waking time, so it must have been a dream.
WEDNESDAY, 6/11/08: 8:25AM: I'm vacationing in what may be Africa, walking along a road past foreign settlements, passing people looking at me with curiosity because I'm walking rather than on some kind of tour bus, and I have no clear idea where I'm going, except that I have to get back for some scheduled event that I have to rush to get to.
THURSDAY, 6/12/08: 1) 6:27AM: Three books to be indexes. Fly buzzing behind Mom trying to get out of cool bright room to warm dark outside. 7:25AM: Walk, dressed, into gym, all in shorts or naked, to wait on line for ONE urinal, and I think guy is a WOMAN and push to BACK of square dick-high sink and TRY to pee, everyone watching, and I just CAN'T, and everyone leaves, laughing at me, and I pull up dirty, pee-stained shorts and leave. Then do Actualism 7:25-7:52.
FRIDAY, 6/13/08: 1) 5:44AM: I've been hired by an oddball of the category of Howard Hughes or Bill Gates. He's engaged in some mysterious project for which he needs a particular kind of book that describes specific books on a very limited subject. He has no way of describing the EXACT subject, relying on my knowledge to "know it when I see it." At first I roughly calculate (I don't know how) that he should end up with a library of about 1100 books, but he frowns and says the total number shouldn't be over 100, and that I'll have to look at his present collection to see EXACTLY what kind of books he's looking for. I ask where he finds these---or expects me to find these---books, and he lists a number of used-book shops, starting south of where we are (somewhere in the 160s, I'd guess, maybe associated with some NYC or CUNY campus) with a place on 114th Street (associated with Columbia, I guess) that I don't know about, and that seems to be one strike against me. We end up there, magically, and then I remind him that I haven't looked at his CURRENT collection to see what he already HAS, in addition to the ONE tattered title he showed me to give me an idea of what he's looking for: lists of books about book catalogs, this example from the DISTANT past, and he's not explained yet whether he's looking ONLY for catalogs PRIOR to a certain date, or if it was just happenstance that he showed me a book that was printed more than a hundred years ago. He frowns again, but seems to have the confidence I can do a useful search even though I haven't been given all the parameters OF the search. I'm eager to work for him, since he seems to be a very "important" person, and the pay, without mentioning it, seems to be good because of the extraordinarily specific nature of the work: I essentially have to instantly memorize the couple dozen books he ALREADY has, "intuit" which books I may find that would fit his requirements, and we haven't begun to talk about how much money I have at my disposal in case any of the books are of great rarity and price. At the end of the dream he's expecting me to start looking at the very limited Dewey-Decimal System range from about 699.0 to 701.9 (which I realize is an impossibility in itself, since it would include the outliers of two totally different fields of knowledge) available in this store, which may not even be CATALOGUED precisely: the 600s may be all mixed in together, not in Dewey order, as well as the 700s in that same unsorted condition. I'm eager to start, particularly since he's there to vet my performance, but have no REAL idea PRECISELY what I'm looking for. Wake and decide it's strange enough that I MUST get up and type up the dream to 6:05AM, getting a final message that my one transmission of "over 20,482 kilobytes" to Tris "exceeded the limit of 20,480 kilobytes" possible with these servers. At least it didn't wreck my computer, as I'd feared! 2) 9:05AM: I'm at a dinner party in a NYC hotel, getting up to leave, and Cathy O'Sullivan, from IBM, comes up to me, looking just as she did when she worked with me in the early 60s, and smiles and says, "Hello, Bob." I turn to others leaving my table and say, "This is Cathy O'Sullivan---oh," and then I realize she's married, but I don't know her married name. She whispers, "It's Grisella, now," as if she'd had a different married name before and has a new one now. She's wearing a white blouse with a tiny blue grid on it, which I'd seen somewhere recently but can't place it. I tell her I'm amazed at how little she's aged over the years.
SATURDAY, 6/14/08: 1) 5:35AM: We're on a driving tour for sights, going west from about Chicago to the Sierras in an unlikely day, stopping for some vistas, looking for picturesque peaks, though we don't seem to be taking pictures, and my driving companions never really come clear, though toward the end it's clearly Mom, among others. We get to one showy peak and drive up as far as we can until the road ends in a path that goes up a flight of stairs to a souvenir shop, with a pile of snow blocking any progress on the left. Somewhat later, without transition, we're into a shop where Mom buys a bunch of artificial flowers, then buys a real bouquet and arranges them both into a beautiful armful of flowers, which she gives to a woman working there. I ask her why she did that, and she say, "He was beating her up, and this gave her something pretty to look at; they're going to be married in a couple of weeks, and this will be one of the nice things to happen to her." I'm surprised and wordless. 2) 7:55AM: I'm reading a book in an African lodge (though with many characteristics of the hotel in Tasiilaq), and it's getting near noon, and I know we're supposed to be leaving for the next lodge sometime soon, like 1:30PM, but I'm engrossed in my reading and don't want to stop. Then they start loading small trucks that are pulled by a tractor-like vehicle, which will take us and our bags down the hill ("You can practically see the departure point from here," a guide says, gesturing down a steep hillside to a coastline below), and I know I have to stop reading and start putting my clothes into my luggage. But somehow there are broken pieces of glass on my book and on the floor, and I try scooping them up with my fingers, but then decide to use an index card on which I've written notes from the book, and in the same fingers I'm holding onto two matchbooks---small rectangular boxes---and when I reach out, one of the guides wants to grab the matchbooks (they seem to be scarce and precious), but I hold onto them, saying they're mine, and he can't have them, and he goes off to get a servant to sweep up the glass, while I still have to be concerned to get everything together before getting into the vehicle and departing for the next stop on this trip.
SUNDAY, 6/15/08: 6:15: I'm a guest at a great English manor house in India, and we've just had a lunch (or is it tiffin?) after a hunt, and no one seems to want to leave, and the scuttlebutt has it that these families aren't really as prosperous as they seem: the food for groups like this isn't provided by the local or state government, but by the family itself "out of its own kit," which makes us seem rather like spongers. I feel uncomfortable and figure to get ready to leave to the next manor house, but others are inclined to wait around for the next meal, ignoring the pressure that would put on the resources of this gentle, accommodating family. I figure that, being a practical American, I'll be excused if, in fact, I do leave now.
MONDAY, 6/16/08: 6:53AM: My job is to index a book about a shoreline in an eastern seaboard town somewhere between NYC and Florida. I wander the shoreline and pass a young family and decide to ask them what they'd look for if they read the book. Since they're not "professional" readers, it's hard to even phrase the questions: at one point I ask, "If there's a section called Cumberland Gap, do you want to know where it STARTS and ENDS, or just where the MIDDLE of it is," trying to see if they want a page range, which would be difficult to do, or just a single page-number where a sign, designating the middle of it, might be found. They really don't seem to understand the question, so they can't give me a very good answer. As time goes on, more and more people are drawn into my discussion until about a dozen people are trailing along, trying to be helpful, but not even being definite on whether they'd be interested in the NAMES of people associated peripherally with the area, or they'd just as soon not be burdened with these personalities when the book is really about the shoreline itself. I thank those that are left---many just decide they're not interested enough to spend the time talking to me and wander off---and try to brush them off, but many insist on "helping" me and give me all sorts of extraneous information in which I'm not really interested. Type to 7:02AM.
FRIDAY, 6/20/08: 6:20AM: [Same date=same time]: Four of us are traveling across Tibet and Asia in a train, two males (me and someone very like Doctor Jack from Beard) and two females (dykes, clearly) are sharing two compartments, and we men have the bathroom in ours, and it's the last evening, and I decide to take a final bath, but after I rummage in my chest of drawers (exactly like one of my wooden ones, with the same loose wooden pulls) for my last clean undershirt, shorts, and a pair of clean socks, and go in to fill the tub (wrapping a sheet around my nakedness when I have to go across the hall for the bathtub, which doesn't agree with what I'd said above, but that's the way it was in the dream), I find that the tub is filled with a granular soap powder: Dr. Jack had clearly been planning to do some last-minute laundry, but I didn't care, began filling the tub with water, and then decided I had to take a shit, but my feet were wet and I didn't want to get out of the tub, so I squeezed a turd into one hand, which I prepared to throw the turd into the adjoining toilet and flush down, when he opened the door and quickly turned away with an apology when he saw what I was doing, and I thought to myself, "How lucky it was we had the room with the bathroom; how the women must have planned to use the facilities when we weren't in the room!" Then someone shouts, "There's a Siberian bear outside!" and I race to raise the shades on the windows on one side of the train, wishing they'd said which SIDE of the train the bear was on, and find that we're stopped in the middle of a colorful, poor, grass-sod-roofed village which was more like Russia than Tibet, and I look down one road at think I see a PACK of bears running up the road toward us, but then the first, and the others, turn into large shaggy dogs galumphing along the road, and we all laugh at the sight, and I'm sorry this is the last day of the trip, because the sights have all be equally wondrous.
SATURDAY, 6/21/08: 3:10AM: I'm in the kitchen of 1221 Dietz, ready to go out "begging" (as on Halloween) just before midnight on New Year's Eve, and have to put out a paper for our long-haired dackel, who's eager to go out, but it's too late. I'm talking to a young relative, very like Dennis, in a kind of TV-special holiday feature, and think to just put on a mask and my regular coat to go "begging" to a few neighbors, thinking nothing of the fact that no one will even be awake at this hour to answer the door. Rather old-fashioned feel to this dream.
WEDNESDAY, 6/25/08: 4:58AM: I'm reheating some food on a very large stove in someone else's apartment, thinking "There's sure a lot of MEAT in this BREAKFAST," since a chop under a cream sauce is bubbling at the sides of an enormous frying pan covering two burners. Another pot's contents is already warm enough to eat.
SUNDAY, 6/29/08: 1) 3AM: Bed 1:55AM, up at 2:59AM to pee and remember bits of a dream: we're at an enormous party, like some kind of graduation event, and as we leave the festival hall about 3AM, ANOTHER party enters to BEGIN their celebrations, and we marvel at that. Then we pile into busses and carom through the countryside, coming to the top of a big hill, and Mayor Bloomberg announces, "Now we're about to go down that long, last hill, so hold on!" And indeed we whiz down the hill, passing a subway on the same route, and he adds, "Maybe you can use that at the next stop to get you to Grand Central where you can transfer to your home subway line," and I think I just might try to do that. 2) 7:45AM: A group of us is on line waiting for a flight, and Ken and I join them at the end of their group but in front of another group, and no one complains because they seem to understand that we're the first group onto the plane. Before that, there was some dealing with seating-chart cards, and our seats were on new white cards that stood out from the grayness of older cards when viewed from the edge.
MONDAY, 6/30/08: 6:56AM: I'm faced with a leather-like surface with a series of indented pits, as if a bead necklace had been pressed into it in an interlooping manner, and it turns out to be a puzzle in which names of wines should be filled in in a particular order to fill out the loops with the names of the wines.
WEDNESDAY, 7/2/08: 6:57AM: I've gone into a bathroom looking for the toilet, but all I see are urinals, interspersed with what look like barber's chairs which are merely seats, not toilets. Then look into an empty corner and push on a wall panel at random and it opens into a large room with a few people seated on open-sided toilets. Look at one fellow and ask if he won't please get up, and he sneers and says, "Only when I'm finished," which I thought he was. So he gets up and wipes and leaves, and I see that the toilet seat is a permanent rubberized surface with a two small holes cut into it, so I pick the right hole and sit down and shit. When I'm finished, I reach for the toilet paper and wipe myself a few times, not able to get the soiled paper through the tiny hole in the rubber surface, so when I get up, finished, there's lots of crappy paper lining the sides of the hole into which I have to push the papers; there seem to be no actual flush. Others are waiting for me, and I get another piece of toilet paper and clean the area around the hole to the left, which is VERY close to the side, and then realize that's not where I was, so I clean the area around the right hole, too. Leave without washing, conscious that my hands probably are loaded with fecal remains that I really should wash away.
THURSDAY, 7/3/08: 7AM: Forget earlier dream, but second dream involves a guy, filmed from below, jerking off with great intensity, probably based on the sex scene from "The Bubble" that I watched yesterday. Wake aroused, but do nothing.
FRIDAY, 7/4/08: 6:48AM: I've got a kind of shopping list, and third from the bottom is some special kind of radioactive material shipped from Poland, with necessary papers to fill out, and someone remarks how odd this is.
SUNDAY, 7/6/08: 6:55AM: I'm in church, and I'm very happy when the two loud kids in the pew to my left leave, but a Spanish woman, with a baby with a shitty diaper, sits next to me, and her recorder goes off, and an "expert" says it'll cost $100,000 to fix.
MONDAY, 7/7/08: 3:59AM: In my dream, as in real life, my hair is so short that it won't lie flat, sticking up in all directions, and I look into a mirror and decide to go with a spiky, mousse-like look, which might be attractive in an odd way, and lament that the hair was left longer on the left side, so it looks rather asymmetric, but I flatten it on that side a bit and figure there's nothing better I can do with it.
ST. PETERSBURG DREAMS
THURSDAY, 7/10/08: 1) 3:15AM: I'm working on an encyclopedia, or yearbook, where individuals are assigned a particular person (or year), and we're having a particular problem with some black person who spans maybe many years or many subjects, and someone like Maya Angelou is arguing that maybe the person should be listed in two different places, but I insist that would produce another kind of problem with the file cards which are kept for each article, and we're starting to argue when I wake up. 2) 6:25AM: Amazed to wake so late! Dream: I'm home, but should be at work on a very important project, and I debate just putting on blue jeans and going in, thinking, "How important could a mere pair of pants be? My mere presence is so much more important than the kind of pants I'm wearing," but I'm very conscious of the radicalness of what I'm thinking, and wonder if it isn't just tantamount to quitting.
FRIDAY, 7/11/08: 1) 3:12AM: I'm working on a new application at IBM and look, inadvertently, through some kind of magnifying lens and see literal BUGS crawling over wires and around microscopic electrical connections and elements, and phone a technician, saying, "You're not going to believe this." But, amazingly, he does, and soon he's removed all the extraneous hardware from the "top" of my storage unit (though I wonder if any of THAT hardware may itself be "infected") and fills an aquarium-like bowl with some kind of sudsy liquid that settles into limpid clarity, through which can be seen small animalcules floating, or swimming, to the surface, including (it's hard to believe, but this IS a dream) life-size pink shrimp! Everyone exclaims that this is a real first, and I can't wait for the experiment to be over, the circuitry dried out, and my program tested again in a "bug-free" environment. Type till 3:17AM. 2) 5:02AM: ANOTHER IBM dream: I'm preparing a meeting for two or three people, noting that the much larger room next to mine is available if needed, and when the fifth and sixth person arrives, it's clear we're not going to be gathered around my desk, so we set up chairs around a table in the other room, moving around green-upholstered tweedy sofas with large pillows, interspersed with work chairs, and someone suggests we make more of a circle, which was what I had in mind. Soon there are a dozen people in the room, and space is rapidly running out, though I spy places where two folding chairs can fit between overstuffed armchairs. I'm also looking for tablets, but somehow in my top dresser drawer are only slivers of white tablets that had been torn in half, or even in thirds, and I'm embarrassed to hand out these ragged-right strips of tablet, but a colleague who's come to my assistance has a pack of whole yellow pads that he's trying to get distributed---though with all the tables full, many are going to have to take notes on their laps. I recognize only two people from previous meetings, and have no idea how even the basic introductions are going to be made, but somehow or other the meeting will take place, though I'm so preoccupied with the seating that the SUBJECT of the meeting is the farthest thing from my mind. I just hope everyone gets seated without severely compromising anyone's limbs. Bizarre Marx Brothers' comedy situation. 3) 9:20AM: I've left some meeting and am crossing Fifth Avenue going west with a crowd of people, not certain how I'm getting home. Then, without transition, I'm lying naked on my bed, thinking to cum VERY teasingly by rubbing the back of my cock, and then wake suddenly to find it's later than I'd planned: 9:20AM!
SATURDAY, 7/12/08: 1:42AM: Mish-mosh of dreams: 1) I'm making a list of priorities, and there's an "A" that has to be established, and I write down all the possibilities as a dialogue and find when "A" has to be introduced. 2) A young black soldier is waiting for a check, and, as if in some heart-warming movie ghost story, some voice-over asks, "You mean it's like a check for what his father did?" And I respond feelingly, "Yeah, something like that." And only we can see the father coming out of nowhere (he's dead, of course), embracing his son, who takes it in a very manly way, and then the "ghost" races away and vanishes into the land of contented ghosts, and everyone's left with a warm feeling.
SUNDAY, 7/13/08: 5:07AM: Some complicated financial situation has to be solved for a "CD4" dependent (where CD, as close as I can tell, means "co-dependent") to make reporting exact for the parent or the executor of the will of the parent. Much emphasis is set on "doing it right" for the financial benefit of everyone and the avoidance of taxes or fees.
MONDAY, 7/14/08: 1) 12:48AM: I'm talking on the telephone with Paul M., and he's saying that he'll be here (in NYC) September 28. I'm not sure I'll be in NYC on September 28 and wonder where he got the idea I WOULD be, and ask him, "Did you make definite flight plans for that day?" And there's no answer. Is he taking another phone call? Talking with someone at his place? "Paul!," I say more demandingly, and then wake up without knowing more of his plans. 2) 2:41AM: I'm working with a woman on plans for a new beach-recreation area, and we're looking at a coastline (maybe in Maine) that's very rocky and has been considered dangerous for years. But I come up with an analogy: taking a piece of ham which has veins of fat in it, I turn it OVER and the fat can be scraped off from below, making the other side, however irregular, totally fat-free. Somehow I think this can be adapted to some physical equipment to "regularize" a dangerous rocky coast into an adventurous, yet perfectly safe, play area. To "prove" it, we're transported within an instant to the coastline itself, level rocks of shale-like hardness, broken into pieces varying in size from stepping stones to backyards, mostly at the surface of the water, but interspersed with slightly sunken areas where the different levels of rocks are invisible beneath anything from four inches to five feet of water. "See," I say as proof, "you can be walking on this perfectly safe surface (like a yard), and then in another foot step off into an abyss where the bottom might be a foot down and safe, or five feet down and capable of breaking a bone if you unwittingly step off into it." The waves come rushing in and out, revealing broken rocks at different levels, as if proving my point. "But with the proper pathways, it could be marvelous," I insist. We come to a high cliff-edge overlooking a section of the beach, with a marvelous vista in every direction below, when suddenly an enormous rock on which we're sitting, for no apparent reason, shifts from its base and catapults three of us into the very deep waters below. As in a very good special-effects movie, as if from a distance, we three fall free of the rock, away from it, so that the rock crashes into the water with a cataclysmic eruption of displaced water, whereas our bodies fall freely into clear, deep, blue water, sinking down to perfectly safe sand at the bottom, as at the climax of a stomach-jolting amusement-park ride. The dream suddenly switches to the scenario for a musical climax, in which the music swells to a dramatic climax as the bodies fall through the air, into a paean of joy as the bodies enter the water safely and survive, only to have (this IS a dream!) one person land on his feet, safe for the moment, except there's a SWORD buried upright in the sand, so that the blade drives upward into the throat of the unfortunate male who by chance lands at precisely the wrong point for his death by sword-point, and the emphasis in the dream shifts to the incredible musical opportunity for a slow, stupendous climax, followed by a staccato last few notes that sweep from the triumph of a safe delivery from a fall, into the tragedy of instant death a moment later. Odd images for even one of MY travel dreams. As I was typing the above, a fragment of another, prior, dream floated through my mind, something about a financial arrangement, or another travel plan, but it's gone now, as I finish typing at 2:58AM. 3) 7:58AM: Some fuss about titles in addresses: why shouldn't Mrs. be Mrs. if Mr. is Mr., and what does this blue dot on a label mean, and other trivial details.
TUESDAY, 7/15/08: 1) 3:46AM: I'm teaching grade school in Lima, Peru, and encourage a girl to write a series of articles for the school paper about "guyaba," which might indicate something like guarana, only far more alcoholic. She researches the fruit from which the liquor is distilled, improves on its alcohol content in alchemical ways, and improves its taste by adding herbs and spices at random, which are later added in an industrial process by various abstruse chemicals. Many of the parents are shocked by this project, but I defend it by saying that I'm engaged in the training of a true chemist, and the fact that she dealt with an alcoholic liquor is absolutely beside the point. 2) 6:52AM: I've been invited to a small town in the south of France to see a special exhibit of a certain kind of bear, and when I'm asked if I'm enjoying my visit, I say, "I usually enjoy ANY town in the south of France, and with the bear as an added attraction, I'm very happy indeed to be here." 3) 7:32AM: I'm attending a scientific meeting in the south of France, obviously on the Mediterranean, or maybe even on the Atlantic coast of western France, and I'm talking on the phone on what may be a middle floor of a building, looking out a window, and see an ENORMOUS blue wave (quite unlike the gray-blue waves in the two paintings in the Russian Museum yesterday that I took photos of) (more like the depiction of the wave on the French Polynesian stamp) still far out to sea, but so CLEARLY dangerous that I drop the phone and scramble up the side of the cliff on which the house is built, climbing past the top of the house, SURE I'll be safe there, since the house is old and has obviously stood there for many years, and I look back to see the wave about to break, still at about eye level, and I wonder how far up it will CRASH once it hits the coast, and scramble up a last bit of crumbly soil to a ledge in the basement of the NEXT-higher building on the coast. There's no sound as the wave hits, but many of my scientific colleagues are there, and there are EYEGLASSES scattered all over the place, as if we all took them off to, what?, better see the wave? Bill Petersen is there, grayer than usual, looking concerned, but I'm glad to see he's still there (despite his current triple bypass in NYC), and I remark about the eyeglasses, and he thought he'd found mine, but I remember putting them on top of a barrel head, and in fact find them, just as people are gathered around the glass basement door of this higher building, under which just the tiniest bit of water has eddied, and we're all amazed that it's reached THIS height, and wonder if there's ANY chance that the building we'd left below this has survived in ANY way, including our possessions left in that house, and the house and contents itself. We mill around in a state of shock, not even yet considering that there may be more than ONE wave in this catastrophic event. Wake convinced it must be past 8AM, but now that I finish typing it's only 7:46AM, but I guess I'll stay up, as there's nothing requiring me to be up past 10PM tonight.
WEDNESDAY, 7/16/08: 1) 5:49AM: A small series of sex dreams set in the 60s: I'm friends with Eddie and a number of other guys, and they come over practically every night after we go to an off-Broadway production, or a dance performance, or some other kind of Audience-Extra-type cheap entertainment, and then we have sex at my place. I think it doesn't happen that often, but Eddie sits in a chair opposite and insists, "It was practically every night; it was a lot of fun, but you sort of wore me out with the sex, and we never ended close like I wanted to." Another guy like him said essentially the same thing under almost identical circumstances when I tried to make myself out as some sort of innocent who "just happened" into sex, but they seemed to think it was some kind of planned exploitation. I'm putting a more negative spin on this than was actually present in the dream, but I was surprised that they weren't as happy with the situation as I was, though I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do to change in ways they would have liked. No sex, or even seduction, took place in the dreams, since each of us seemed to know everyone in great detail, but (this is a stretch, but the thought DOES come) it was as if their ghosts were returning to give a sort of "life summary" of our social and sexual experiences over a long period of time, now in the distant past. 2) 8:06AM: I'm attending an avant-garde play in NYC, again in the 60s, and it's so avant that people begin getting up to leave when the play just makes no sense and seems to be going nowhere. I'm singled out to participate, being given a board to hold, then told to move to particular places. At the end, I just want to get out, when they select someone from the audience to talk of his own experiences, I feel urged to leave by way of what looks to be a boarded-over window just behind his seat, so I climb onto a narrow ledge and pry the edge of the board away from the frame in which it's set, only to find it's merely a blank wall-inset, and no exit, so I turn around to try to figure what to do next, and wake. 3) 9:24AM: I'm going down a flight of stairs in an airport, thinking, at random, "It would be difficult to fly to South America from here, since it's about halfway around the world." As I go down the stairs, the steps get smaller and smaller, until there's only room for the back of my heel at each step, but I manage to make my way down easily enough, until a group of Africans behind me start hurrying me along, which almost makes me fall, and I get very angry and start swinging my shoulder bag at them as they come down the last steps, hoping to show them how inconvenient it is to be hassled on such narrow stairs, but they only laugh at me and rush off on their own.
THURSDAY, 7/17/08: 1) 5:19AM: I'm talking with a friend about two things: a) he should add a phone number to his restaurant card that indicates the person wants a GOURMET meal, so the phone number should read something like "I Want A Great Meal," as opposed to his already-existing two that are more business-like. He seems to agree. 2) We're talking about a party I'm attending tonight, hosted by Steve, and though his apartment's capacity is limited, I still think he'll have as many as 35 people there: "I've never known Steve to throw a small party, and I'll really be surprised if there are fewer than 35 people there." My friend remains skeptical. 3) I'm watching a foreign fighter, like a Philippine boxer or wrestler, finishing a fight, and he's taken off his shorts, but his genitalia are hidden by the announcer's shoulder or head. I keep watching patiently, and can for a moment see that his pubic hair is neatly trimmed, and then can see his whole cock, and am then surprised to see---it must be his trainer, or at least "a good friend"---his interviewer start to manipulate his foreskin, as if to make sure it's dry, and he continues to manipulate as the penis begins to get erect, and I can't really believe what I'm seeing, either on television or in real life, as the flaccid cock begins to fill out, and then I wake, semi-erect, with the first, I think, erotic dream of the trip.
FRIDAY, 7/18/08: 1) 7AM: A real nightmare in less than half an hour: I'm in a high-school building where hundreds of us are preparing to be shipped out somewhere: we're not in the Army, but there's some undefined emergency and we're like Reservists who have been activated on the shortest possible notice. I have papers and items that I think are valuable that have to be kept with me, but I also have the feeling that I've left important papers in my hotel room nearby. This is all taking place around Penn Station, which I know is between 8th and 9th Avenues, and I search through many halls before finding a group in which someone knows my name and says, "Zolnerzak!" I look over and recognize a tall acquaintance, who'll be easy to spot in the future, and he's willing to hold onto some things for me while I return to find more important papers. Leave the building at the south side, but where I thought would be an open avenue going north around Ninth Avenue is a wooden fence blocking my way. Go to another corner and see a stack of junk on the street that includes what appears to be an enormous pile of old index cards, which I want to take a handful of, since taking notes on what's about to happen is very important. I tear away hunks of white paper, which is almost like Styrofoam, and one hunk has some kind of flaw down the center, so the cards wouldn't be complete at the top, so I root down for better cards. In the meantime, some guy, like a fugitive, or a madman, is crouching nearby, and I think he's scantily clothed until I look down and can see his penis, which I find comforting and enticing, but go back to looking for the cleanest possible set of index cards. I'd had a bunch of papers along with a manila envelope, and think to sort out the leaves which have somehow been grabbed up with my stuff, and I sort out my hardware: my Swiss Army knife, a small bottle of pills, a razor blade, a small plastic item of importance, and think to put those into the envelope with my papers, but the papers seem to have evaporated in my panic and rush, and I'll just have to go back to my hotel room and find my duplicate passport and other very important documents that I have to keep with me. I'm not sure where ANY of these places are, but I'm vaguely aware they're somehow connected with the old Post Office Building on one side of Penn Station, but in my confused state I'm not sure I can locate it, and try to set up priorities for my next actions, which are increasingly nebulous, when I wake with relief and find I don't have to make any more decisions (as I will definitely feel relief when I don't have to make any more decisions about what to do next in St. Petersburg over the next five days), and that brings a great sense of comfort as I pull up my facemask and type this until 7:14AM, bright sun outside my closed drapes. I think I'll try to get one more hour of sleep before starting this last Friday of the trip. 2) 8:39AM: A bunch of guys are acting like smart-asses at a wedding reception, and the main incidents seem to involve snatching pieces of cake or cookies from tables meant for other people. Someone famous like Jeff Bridges is a rowdy kid in the dream, and there are other semi-stars also, but the details have vanished in my efforts to isolate dream 1) from file 2 and indicate it be transferred before THIS dream.
SATURDAY, 7/19/08: 7:12AM: I'm attending a party somewhere, most likely in the Village of a bygone era, and have to go to the john. Somehow I'm informed that there IS no john where I am now, I have to go a few blocks to a SPECIAL john. Maybe I'm drunk, but I just go along with it as if it were sort of a normal thing---well, no, it wasn't normal, but it was new and different and the Village was known for things like that. So I get out to a street and by some unknown means find myself in an enormous area, like a crazed department store, with display tables, doorways, sales desks, and numbers of people milling around: it looks more like a hippie version of a department store than anything else. Somehow I've acquired three items: a paper cutout of a troll, a plastic doll of another kind of fantasy creature, and another symbol of some kind. I have no idea what any of these mean, and when I try to ask anyone for information or help, they either ignore me or look at me as if I were crazy to expect any coherent data from them. I continue to wander, trying to make SOME sense out of ANYTHING that I see or pass, the urge to shit building up gently all the while, and I begin to think how CRAZY this place is. In the first place it must have been VERY expensive to create, since somehow I'm told that there are nine floors, and the john I've been assigned is on the third floor, and when I ask where the elevators are, one clerk lazily points behind me to a metallic cylinder which I guess can operate as an elevator if you know the right codes, or rituals, but I never enter it and never even know what floor I'm on. At one point I discard two of the emblems I've been given, arbitrarily deciding that the one I've kept is the one I need. Hear people around, only at one point, talking about how they were billed: "It was only 43 cents," "I don't know how much they took off my credit card," or something like, "I don't know, they just opened my wallet and took out what they wanted." I'm beginning to think that not only is this an impossible place to find my way around in, it's not even a place that I want to USE; I just want to get OUT and go HOME, not even considering returning to the party I'd left, since there was no one there with whom I'd come or with whom I was expected to leave, or even anyone who knew me at all. NO one seemed to be actively looking for their assigned john (does this in any way stem from my getting key 1 the first time from the Carlsburg pavilion for the locked toilets outside, and the second time getting key 2, with which I had some difficulty unlocking the lock?). Finally I start making a scene about how ridiculous this all is, and they all start looking at ME as if I'm crazy, and not willing to "play the game" or "go along with a new idea." I again think of how ludicrously expensive it must have been to build this Idiocy of Indeterminancy, and wondered if ANYONE EVER got to take the bathroom break that ostensibly got them here, and as I began to realize I had no idea how to get out the building, and then no idea where I was in order to get HOME from here, the total insanity of the situation simply woke me up, not even with RELIEF at being out of the dream, but just a sensation of the UNLIKELIHOOD of even DREAMING such an endlessly frustrating, conceptually incoherent, elaborately overdecorated (maybe the castles and palaces here in St. Petersburg have some connection) version of anything that could even be CALLED a dream: as if I'd gone over some uncharted border from a legitimate Dreamland to some new area between Nightmare and---I can't even think of an adequate word to describe it, though words like Madness, Insanity, Lunacy, Unreality, Craziness are the words that come first to mind with the best sense of application. Finish typing at 7:31AM, dazedly ready for my day; could it have been the Ambien and the beer (and the trichina?) that produced such a mad---well---dream? And I never even got to the PEOPLE there: all in costumes, none of them attractive, all of them vaguely dangerous or repellent, none of them even remotely sane or reasonable, none even fetchingly naked or semi-dressed, none with even a discernible GENDER, as if the dream were inhabited by a race of aliens who'd banded together to make a totally incomprehensible phantasmagoria for the human race to experience "something completely different." The ultimate, mad, Monty Python sketch; the extreme outer reach of how far-out a dream can get. I wake with a shudder at the thought of possibly being lost in such a place and not be able to get back to reality.
SUNDAY, 7/20/08: 1) 2:12AM: I'm standing at the entrance to a fancy restaurant, in a military uniform, and for some reason I thought it would be "smart" to tuck my tie sideways into my shirt. A dignified woman opposite me, for some reason carrying a sheaf of ties, twice brushed through the length of one. Finally I asked her, "Is that directed toward me?" She smiled graciously and nodded yes. Then I was sitting at a table between two couples, and they were talking about a famous woman at the next table, and suddenly ONE phone was placed at her table, and then ANOTHER phone rang and was placed, waiting, on OUR table, and then a THIRD phone rang and some comment was made. Another set of conversations began, and I thought I MUST be at the wrong table. 2) 4:06AM: Ed Druck and I both come to our common landing, and Ron (from 101 Clark) is waiting for us in a light jacket. I look at my two pieces of mail, and one is a letter which has a 41-cent postage-due stamp on it that Ron has marked that I owe him. And I say, "What a coincidence that we both just get in and both have to give you something, and here you are." He doesn't respond, only waits for me to go into my bedroom to give him a 41-cent stamp.
MONDAY, 7/21/08: 1) 3:06AM: I'm working on a movie about researchers into some dread viral disease, but have to accommodate the fact that the two leading stars have fallen in love, though they're from different cultures. I come up with the solution of gradually moving them closer during the screenings of the dailies, until they find themselves sitting next to each other, and let the rest of the cast and crew realize they're interested in each other. Some details about the actual virus involved have been forgotten---in fact, when I woke, I felt some relief that I did NOT have a dream to record at all! 2) 7:29AM: Someone like Carolyn (but not quite) and I are playing something like Scrabble: a word game that involves 26 lines on a sheet of paper, though we're not quite sure whether the number is 24, 26, or 28. Then she writes the wrong way on her sheet and wants to share mine, but I say that would be impossible, because we'd have to put both our numbers in one little square and wouldn't be able to tell them apart. We quibble about this for a while, then the dream changes: we're about to board a train that's already occupied, and we hope to find a suite to ourselves (sort of like the bus situation yesterday, when 9 people joined our bus with only 9 seats available, and a couple took what had been my "private" double seat), but when we get on one end of a car it looks already crowded, and Carolyn is prepared to stuff her clothing into an end closet which is already overflowing with clothing, and I say we should at least look through the rest of the car to see if there's anything less crowded available, though something tells me that the farther we go toward the front of the train, the more crowded it will get, because more people will be getting on closer to the terminal than far down the platform where we are. It just seems hopeless, and I wake and type till 7:37AM.
TUESDAY, 7/22/08: 7:29AM: A friend and I are about to have a meal in what looks to be the back of a cinema, when they announce the special showing of "the funniest five-smile movie in ages" that will be starting in a few minutes. We decide to see it from the back row, but the place starts to fill up and it looks more logical to see it from the front row, which is quite a distance back from the screen anyway. So I take the second seat on the side, putting my hand on the first seat to save it for my friend, but someone tries to sit there anyway. "I was thinking of saving this," I say weakly. "That's OK," says the woman, "if he comes, he can have this seat." I decide to let it go, since I don't see him anywhere anyway. Wake before the movie has a chance to start.
WEDNESDAY, 7/23/08: 1) 3:29AM: I'm attending a social evening with Dorothy K., who for some reason is carrying a plastic bag. We mingle with people in the group outside the dining hall, which is still closed, until an older man on crutches appears and they open the dining-room doors and we begin to file in, when immediately the couples step into each other's arms and begin dancing to the waltz music being played. I say to Dorothy, half in jest, "Do you want to put your bag down and just sit, or do you want to put your bag down and dance?" And she, to my dismay, wants to dance, so she puts her bag down on the last pair of seats at the table nearest the door and I make the first awkward step in the dance when I wake. 2) 5:24AM: I'm going into a familiar classroom, but mistake the floor I'm on and go into the third-floor room which IS a classroom, immediately realize my mistake, and go back out into the hall, where students are gathering who look at me quizzically as I exit their classroom. Their teacher is about to say something when I rapidly step over piles of what look like coat-check tags, all labeled three-hundred-something to prove where I am, and I wake. 3) 6:52AM: I'm somewhere in California, at an enormous park, and want to go on a particular ride, so I get out a map on a deck of cards and try to find the section of cards in which, I discover, the rides are listed alphabetically, and there's a central map which shows each location. However, the ride I want happens to be in another town, for which I don't have a map, so I find someone who knows that town, and I get a card that's mostly blank and draw a cross on it, saying, "This is the main intersection of town where my bus will come in; show me on this diagram where I'd have to go to get to the ride I want." I just hope the bus ride isn't that time-consuming and that I'll have time to get back here before it's time to leave.
FRIDAY, 7/25/08: 1:35AM: I'm involved in a statistical study about travel, involving the number of people going to particular destinations, and one of the conclusions was that, as the number of people increased, the statistics tended to be more exact, but where the number was fewer, the area in which I had the most interest, that was precisely the area in which the results were the most questionable and unreliable.
SATURDAY, 7/26/08: 1) 1:36AM: I'm in a line to get onto a bus, and I have a seating chart, and see that, if I take one particular seat, I'll be able to see out windows on EACH side of the bus with equal visibility, a definite advantage. 2) 4:12AM: There were previous parts, but at the end I was changing clothes in a gym, and when I dropped my shorts around my ankles there was a large yellow urine spot on the front, and the powerful smell from it caused the next person down to look around with an expression of annoyance. I quickly stepped on the yellow so that he wouldn't see it, but I still feared he knew that the smell came from me, and was relieved when I put on my gym shorts that the smell disappeared, but I was still embarrassed that the event occurred. 3) 8:08AM: I've just arrived in a rural Indian town, and stumble into a library room which is sort of a discussion group or local tourist get-together, with about 15 people sitting in chairs or at tables, some reading, some just looking for something to talk about or someone to listen to. Most of the group seem to be "regulars" who know each other, but they accept me as a new person, only very much later inquiring, without too much curiosity, where I'm from, and usually interpreting my "New York" as "Newark?" The talk is mostly of local affairs of which I know nothing: no great discussion of literature, or travel, or politics. It goes on, unexcitingly, for quite a while before a cat (in a previous episode of this dream, or a prior dream this morning, a VERY large cat rubbed against my trousers, coming up well above my knee, causing amazement with its sheer SIZE) attracts the attention of everyone in the room by managing to tip over a bookcase in front of which it had been lying, scattering books all over the floor, but no one has the energy, it seems, to either reprimand the cat or pick up the books. A few minutes later, the cat manages to tip over a four-foot-tall brightly colored globe, which starts rolling around a circle on the floor from one edge of its tipped base, and the cat knows enough to flatten itself to the floor so as not to be crushed as the rotating globe passes over it in its circular repeated rotation around about ten square (or circular) feet, still seemingly unfazed by its disruption of the order of the room. We all look on in startled amusement, and the topic of conversation changes from one unconnected subject to another. The groups seemed unchanging in composition, having started before I arrived and will seemingly continue, I would hope with some interruption to ingest food, long after I choose to leave.
SUNDAY, 7/27/08: 1) 3:05AM: Two of us on a cruise are looking for a place to have sex, but all the rooms have windows, and stewardesses pass by all the time. At one point we're drinking wine, and some spills onto the edges of two plastic floor coverings, where it looks suspiciously like blood, so that when a stewardess comes into the room to see what we're doing, I'm careful to move forward with my naked legs so that they cover the red edges of the plastic, and I make sure to engage her eyes so that she doesn't look down. Then, after some forgotten details, we're told to get ready, because the next excursion is to Smolensk, so we have to get dressed quickly. 2) 5:20AM: Spartacus and I are trying to park a car, probably rented, since it doesn't really seem to be mine or his, in a few blocks in one direction on a street with many smaller streets between larger streets, say, for example, streets going south from Joralemon between Court and Willow Streets. We have to be somewhere close by at 1PM, and as it moves past 12:30PM we're getting increasingly desperate, and I keep wanting to get somewhere to park it, and Spartacus keeps encountering people that he just HAS to talk to: first a woman who wants to talk about a trip, and I want to shout out, "Spartacus, we've got to attend to the car, you don't have TIME to talk with her; it's not IMPORTANT. SHE isn't the crisis, parking the CAR is the crisis, so pay attention to the CRISIS, not her." I take the car on my own and seem to find an open doorway on a small street between two larger streets, and drive in and find there's just enough room for the car, and though it's probably illegal to leave the car there, I feel I have no choice. Back on the street I try to PRY Spartacus away from the woman, at one point trying to free her fingers which have reached for some buttonholes on the front of my shirt, shouting, "We just don't have TIME to talk to you." Then, for some reason, we're trying to find the car again, and this time a MAN has "buttonholed" Spartacus, who AGAIN insists that it's important that we stop to socialize with him. (I'm reminded of waiting in line for the Shark tickets with Sherryl yesterday, when first a man with a family starts a purely social conversation with the woman selling tickets, while we look at our watches that are drawing closer to 3PM, when we want to take the Shark, knowing there are tickets left for that trip, but fearing we'll just miss it and have to wait until 4PM. Then the woman in front of us, who doesn't speak English very well, is trying to make a decision not only for herself but for someone who isn't there, like a husband or a child, and she isn't sure what THAT person would want to do, and she starts thinking of alternatives, and Sherryl finally asks if we could go in front of her and buy our tickets while she tries to make her decision, and, to our relief, she lets us, and we quickly buy two tickets with Sherryl's credit card.) The man becomes hostile, his large bloodshot eyes coming closer and closer to mine as he insists talking to Spartacus is important, while I come up with the analogy "Look, it's like you're telephoning us, and I just don't want to pick up the telephone: I have no time for conversation, I'll just let the phone ring and won't talk to you, just as I won't talk to you now!" But he grabs me by the jacket and pulls me close and insists that he's HERE, that we WILL talk to him, and I scream again, "I just won't answer the phone," and somehow pull away and try to find where I'd left the car, but none of the doorways seems possible, and some of the little streets seem to have disappeared, and I reach for an insert in a blank wall which may be a garage door pulled down from the top to hide this particular garage entrance, but the insert just pulls out, leaving what appears to be a permanent concrete wall, though, through process of elimination, this somehow HAS to be where I parked the car, yet there's no way to get behind this wall, and I'm getting a feeling of ULTIMATE frustration as it's nearer and nearer to the critical time of 1PM and I still haven't found the car, but MUST find the car, and the guy is still trying to push his face into mine, and I'm WRITHING with frustration, and at last, with relief, wake up and lie for a bit, absorbing the ugliness of the dream, and then start typing, to a minute ago when there was a bright flash from the window behind me and a CRASH of thunder, as if to punctuate my attempt to describe my feeling of terminal frustration in the dream, and I finish typing this at 5:43, 23 minutes beyond the 5:20AM when I started.
MONDAY, 7/28/08: 1:56AM: I'm looking at a guidebook in what might be Russia, though the words are only in English. Words in parentheses are some sort of title, or locator, and I can underline these in part to emphasize what ideas I had when I was in this section, or what I thought about a certain work of art.
TUESDAY, 7/29/08: 5:55AM: Two sections of one dream: a) I'm watching a kind of military exercise from a hilltop in London, and without warning two groups of people get trapped in two glass-fronted buildings in which fires have started, and we, watching, have the horrible feeling that they won't be rescued, and they will try to fight their way out against the clear glass walls, but will ultimately be burned to death in clear view of our fascinated gazes. The final events shift into the second section b) which I now totally forget, except that it was completely mundane and routine, nothing at all threatening or ugly like the prior section.
WEDNESDAY, 7/30/08: 5AM: I'm checking into a bathhouse in Europe, digging into my pocket for two tokens which is the equivalent of the $2 admission fee, but find that the price has gone up to three tokens, which means I'll have no money left for food at all. Having somehow entered, I go through a number of rooms that have tables, as in a nightclub, but there's no real place to leave my clothes. I don't find anyone interesting, and no one seems interested in me (this is probably based on watching "Gay Sex in the 70s" yesterday), but I still have a number of hours to spend here, so I keep looking into rooms that are more or less lit, hoping to find some place to just sit and at least look at some attractive bodies. But I don't find it before I wake.
FRIDAY, 8/1/08: 4:03AM: A friend of mine has proved to me that the numbers of bottles on a shelf in a pharmacy, when added to the other numbers of bottles on nine other shelves, can make an array of numbers like a sudoku square: every number will be used once (though each shelf obviously has more than ten bottles, this must amount to some kind of super-sudoku array of numbers, which might not even be possible), and at one point I notice that one combination of numbers has no 3 in it, and another has only two zeros, which end the last two numbers in the last column. I click a number of plastic bottles together from one row, marveling at the properties of its number of numbers, and my friend makes some startled remark about 2:04. When I ask about its significance, a rising sun appears through a window and we know that it's 2:04AM when the sun rises today. We both take extraordinary satisfaction in the fact that the numbers configure and add up as they do, amazed how a few simple permutations of only a few numbers will still preserve the properties of this super-sudoku set of numbers and totals. Pee before typing the dream and oddly have to pee AFTER typing the dream.
SATURDAY, 8/2/08: 5:30AM: I'm jerking off in a bed under a sheet, and two guys come into the room. One's cute, and clearly has an erection under his shorts. The other one, pudgy, is making fun of us, but may join us in jerking off anyway. I wake semi-erect, very conscious of Paul in bed next to me.
TUESDAY, 8/5/08: 1) 3:30AM: I'm in an Actualism session: not an ordinary one, but one like a preliminary to an advance to a new level, or a "year-end test" that discriminates against those who aren't ready to go to the next level, and I'm "on the carpet" because I don't seem to have made the progress expected of everyone: I didn't have enough "backbone" in my sessions, and I feel cringingly desperate and try to defend myself: "Why didn't you TELL me I was in danger of falling behind?" "What should I have done? COMBINE energies or power rays?" They seem to scorn my questions (the leaders are some combination of John T. and Bruce, who keep expecting me to have KNOWN what to do to avoid my current dilemma), and in a last attempt to make them wrong, shout out what I fear (or maybe hope) was going to be the subject of the next level, "But how can I have a SILVER power ray operating when you want me to combine it with a GOLD power ray; how can that even be POSSIBLE?" And I feel the whole group is against me, either condemning my ignorance or scoring my failure, and I feel I'm going to be left behind and can't think of a way of avoiding it. Wake with relief and type this in the john until 3:47AM (seemingly too long: maybe my bedroom clock doesn't agree with my bathroom watch). 2) 8:15AM: I'm sitting in a British pub before lunch, across from a vacant-eyed woman who's eating very slowly, and I'm not eating at all for some reason. Then it's about 2:15PM and the place is closing down: the clerks are removing the food from the buffet table and putting it away, and it occurs to me that I haven't really had my lunch yet, so I go to the table and find only desserts left. I ask if I can get something like a sandwich or something more substantial, and they wave me back to the kitchen, where an obliging fellow leads me back to a cruddy back room where he opens a wooden door and rummages around to see if he can find anything with more protein, but only comes up with a candy bar. I return to the table, where I'd left my book and watch and notebook, and find that a waitress had cleared it off with a bunch of garbage onto the next table. I make some remark about her not respecting my place, and she has some snippy comeback while I separate out my stuff from my original table and start eating my candy bar, still feeling hungry. And wake STILL feeling hungry!
FRIDAY, 8/8/08: 5AM: I'm in a playwriting (or moviemaking) class with someone like Carr and a group of enthusiastic would-be aesthetes. We're given the synopsis of a movie and told to make a script. I simply don't understand anything about it. Carr tries to explain some of the situation to me, but it still doesn't make sense. Then a film which HAS been made of it is shown, and the husband of Michelle Pfeiffer plays the woman in the part, which astounds the class. The movie makes SOME sense, but I still fail to see how the screenwriter could have gotten what was on film from that unintelligible scenario. Without transition, I'm on a plane making a landing in Brooklyn Heights, and (as in so many dreams in the past, but none recently) we're flying VERY close to the houses on either side of a street very like Hicks Street that's so narrow it doesn't seem possible the plane could be flying so low and not clip a wing on the tops of some of the brownstones on either side of the street. We land, get off the plane, and I feel great relief that another trip has been completed safely. Many "meaningful" details have been forgotten, even though I got right out of bed and typed this in the bathroom by 5:10AM.
SUNDAY, 8/10/08: 4:25AM: The dream swung through many settings and characters, the LAST of which had me walking up a stairway in a ship, hearing Ken playing "The Moon of Monakura" on a piano, and he wanted me to sing it for him as if he were casting a musical and wanted to see if my ear and voice were good enough to recognize this minor key and sing it accurately, and I was rehearsing in my mind, as I climbed the stairs, how I was going to say I RECOGNIZED that this was a difficult piece to sing, and though I hoped to succeed, I also hoped he might coach me to sing it correctly. Before that was some baroque plot with a group of people, maybe on the same ship, but I tried rehearsing the details in my mind before getting up to get my Neo, and now all the previous details have vanished.
MONDAY, 8/11/08: 8:22AM: I'm in a four-person orgy, and I figure I'll be paired with the ugly one of the four; the two attractive ones will clearly go for each other. But then a cute little erection is put under my nose, and I say, coyly, "Well, what have we here?" And I take the tip of my tongue and just lightly touch the wet tip of the penis, and it oozes so much pre-cum that I think he might have actually had an orgasm, but the cock remains hard, and I continue to squeeze it, and it expresses more and more gobbets of mucilaginous glair, to both our delights.
TUESDAY, 8/12/08: 1) 2:29AM: This is getting ridiculous! I wake with a perfectly detailed memory of a dream, wait ONLY A MINUTE before getting up and transcribing it, and the details have VANISHED! Not only the details, but the actual OUTLINE or THEME of the dream! It had something to do with a bus trip, and a test which was almost impossibly hard, and someone lording it over me that I couldn't possibly pass the test, but the central theme is GONE! There was a hint of England, something about an animal, and gloating, would-be superior people gloating over my certain failure. It may have been influenced by the near-win, then humiliating failure of the US Olympic team to get a silver, or even a bronze, medal in gymnastics. I concentrate---it's just GONE! 2:38AM: As I go to pee, it comes back! I'm getting off a Greyhound bus at a road which leads to a military camp at which I'm due the next morning. As the bus pulls to a stop, I get up from my seat and go across the aisle to say goodbye and thank you to two women who'd helped me on the trip, but they don't want me to be too affectionate in my farewells, which I don't quite understand. But I get down my shoulder bag, my smaller kit bag which I sling over my left shoulder to carry under my right arm, and from the top baggage rack take down a heavy, large brown duffel bag which I sling over my right shoulder. I get off the bus and think it'll be an easy matter to hitchhike from this intersection to the military base, since everyone who passes will be bound for the base, and it's obvious from my uniform and pack that I belong at the base. But when I look at the street, empty of cars, for a reasonable place to stand to hitch, where the car can stop to pick me up, I choose a wide part of the road and cross over, only to see a shadowy parade of what looks like black-shrounded women pushing perambulators who seem to be lined up for a kind of bus for which they already have tickets. When I press to the head of the line, conscious that people behind me are agitated because they think I'm trying to get in front of them, I see a man at a lectern-like table with what look like bus tickets priced at $9.07. I figure that's rather expensive, but maybe these women can't afford it and have to look for rides with large bus-like conveyances which are actually stopping nearby and taking some of them aboard. I think I have enough money for a ticket, but I wake before I can purchase one. 2) 6:23AM: Joe Safko and I are dining at a mid-range NYC restaurant, and the time has come to pay the bill. We've had an inexpensive meal and a cheap bottle of wine, yet the bill somehow comes to $88. Joe throws down what seems to me to be an excessive amount of money, so I ask how much he put in, not wanting to overpay. He doesn't tell me, but gets angry and demands that I just pay my half. I get out money from my wallet, then my pocket, and still seem to be about $2 short. The waiter tries to help me by showing me the bill's total of $88 and says, "Just give me $44 and that'll be fine," which also hints to me that Joe has already paid ALL of the tip. I say I've already put more than that in, but the waiter seems to want more. With exasperation Joe reaches into his pocket and pulls out some kind of money order, from which he tears the yellow customer copy and throws an unknown amount into the pot. The waiter adds up what he's been given and wants to give back some overpayment, but Joe refuses to hear of it, insisting we should just leave. We walk out, toward whatever performance we have that evening, still arguing about the amount each of us paid. At the end, there's a fragment of my getting an envelope, or opening an envelope which had been mailed to me, and inside are two cookie-sized, scallop-edged, white paper tickets: freebies to some off-Broadway play I've never heard of. Now instead of Joe Safko, I'm with Spartacus, who says, "Oh, that's a good play," and notes that the tickets are for Monday, so he adds, in jest, "So we should go, but remember, we have to wait for Monday." 3) 9:19AM: I've just cum, in my living room, and am greatly surprised that I forgot I'd had someone in the bedroom; when he comes into the living room I try to disguise the fact that I've just cum by cuddling close to him and leading him back into the bedroom where I stretch him out on the bed and slowly ingest his cock until I have the entire length, including his balls, in my mouth, and figure this will satisfy him until I can get hard myself. We cuddle in various positions, both seemingly satisfied, and I wake vaguely aroused.
WEDNESDAY, 8/13/08: 1) 3:12AM: I'm in the back seat of a taxi and have just arrived at my destination, but we're in Russia, and I don't speak Russian, so the driver hands me a stiff cardboard card with many destinations indicated with little icons, and I somehow understand that my trip is the sum of two particular icons, since there is no "direct" symbol on the chart. I don't know if I'll have enough rubles. 2) 4:58AM: I'm on a team that's investigating a murder. Dennis is on the team. The murdered man's cock has been cut off and curled up and stuffed into a plastic form which has been hidden in the pages of a book. For some reason we have to measure the length of this dismembered cock, and so I direct Dennis to take it out of the form and stretch it out so it can be measured; but we don't have a ruler, so it can only be compared in length with two rifles that we have. It's shorter than the two rifles by a bit, and Dennis is joking about the fact that his rifle is longer than my rifle, but I retort that both are shorter than my umbrella. After the measurement the cock has to be folded back up and put back into its hiding place in the plastic container in the pages of the book, which is now in two parts because the thickness of the plastic container has split the spine of the book. Then the murderer (who's been there all along, saying nothing) grabs a gun and says that we have to take an enormous load of books down to his basement apartment, so the man who was once Dennis, and is now very much like Susan's Rick [only recall 8/14 that Susan's DIED!], is forced to carry an enormous load of books, each of which is almost the size of a man, along with the book that contains the cock, though I'm not sure what has become of the corpse. I'm last in this line of objects going down the basement steps, looking from a great height, and am shocked when the murderer fires from the top of the stairway: the bullet goes through a number of books, which fall forward down the stairway, crushing downward to Rick at the bottom, who makes his way, shaken but unharmed, to a kitchen sink, but before that he'd bounced off a side wall at the bottom of the stairs, and noted the fact that the wall gave slightly when he'd bounced into it, giving me the idea that he was looking for a way to escape by breaking through that wall when the killer wasn't looking. We're all at the sink, washing something, and Rick glances at me significantly to show that this might be the time to try to make our escape. I glance back, trying to indicate that I thought it was too dangerous: he wouldn't hesitate to shoot us. I woke and lay for a while before realizing that I'd had a dream that I should record.
THURSDAY, 8/14/08: 7:39AM: Diane von Furstenburg has brought her new digital camera to a party I'm attending, and I ask her if I can take a couple of photos, and she says yes, while she asks the hostess if she can use her telephone to do some elaborate digital file transfer, which I figure might cost a goodly sum of money, so I think she has some nerve to ask and not find a way of paying for her bill. I wrap a photo that I want to reproduce around her camera aperture and take two test photos, which don't come out very well. I try again by focussing only on one side of the photo, and again it comes out blurred, without the special character I'd been aiming for. I figure I have to sit down and calculate angles properly before using it effectively, thank her for the test, and decide the camera is too technically complicated to be used easily.
SATURDAY, 8/16/08: 1) 6AM: I'm working on the documentation end of a scientific project that involves special equipment placed as monitors at particular places in an elaborate project whose full purpose eludes me. At one point I'm more like a proofreader, with five or six books that seem to have been used to supply anything from a sentence to a full chapter to the final text, but no one has given me any definitive table of contents, or map of the sections of the final text, so I'm not really sure which books should be used where. A number of smaller pamphlets seem destined to be incorporated wholly into the new book. The text somehow influences the programming of one particular piece of special equipment, placed in the left corner of a complicated wiring diagram, and that equipment can be modified to operate in different ways in different parts of the system. My job is very important, but I feel that I haven't been given a sufficient period of training---my supervisors appear to believe I know more about certain technical details and processes than I actually do, though I suppose there's the chance I WAS trained in some rudiments which I've since forgotten, but I'm not familiar enough with the system to even suspect what that training might have involved. I can always defend myself by saying that I thought I was just a proofreader, not a scientist who could lend any particular insight to the formulation of any specific process. I don't feel especially dumb or frustrated: many of my co-workers are equally groping to find their specific function in this super-secret, maybe governmental, project. I transcribe this on my desktop rather than on my usual vacation-time Neo. 2) 7:50AM: THREE short snippets: 2) I'm in the audience for a show-and-tell program taping, and some older guy actually pulls out his cock, very dark at first, then ordinary flesh-colored at the end, and starts playing with it as if to cum, at the end wiping it with a fragment of tissue as if he'd cum. 3) Susan M. ("the dead one") is sitting in my apartment asking about my trip, and, not really in jest, asks, "And did you meet the woman who you'll finally ask to marry you and start raising a family?" And I retort that only she and my MOTHER would think to ask such a questions, and Susan merely smirks at me and asks me to tell her how I liked the trip. 4) I open an old refrigerator door (like the one at 167 Hicks) and there's an internal click and it settles downward on its hinges and won't close properly, and I think to myself, "I really have to get this fixed now, or it just won't stay closed."
SUNDAY, 8/17/08: 6AM: Eddie J. and I are vacationing together in a jungle cabin, and we're waiting for our next tour together, so he comes over and sits on my lap. I start playing with his nipples, but he gets annoyed and tries to steer me into more platonic activities, but I can't understand what he wants.
MONDAY, 8/18/08: 1) 3:19AM: The driver of a "free" taxi takes me to an elegant Paris hotel, but he probably emptied my wallet of $300 cash when he handed me a bottle of WINE as I was preoccupied by giving my baggage to a bellhop. I tell this to a friend as we walk the city afterwards. 2) 5:35AM: A sexy guy turns me on, I chew on his ear, which might have a diamond stud in it, since I can feel grit between my teeth (maybe from my chewing on part of my filling while eating Saturday evening's dinner), and he's very turned on. We play nicely. 3) 7:57AM: There's no teacher for a 3PM class in a college I'm attending with Tom Cruise. Later I try to complain to the principal, but he says, "Who are you to complain about lost classes?" I don't know how to respond.
TUESDAY, 8/19/08: 7:30: WITH palpitations, I get out of bed to try to recapture the three (or more) dreams this morning. 1) 3:30AM: I'm arranging titles for something, and realize that a three-word title (maybe this stems from Charades at Sunday's Games Group) has the same number of characters as a five-word title, so they can be set into the same number of spaces above that which is to be titled. 2) 7:30 (from earlier): Sherryl and I are at Radio City Music Hall for the performance of a famous comic. At first I thought it was John Cleese, but the program says it's someone like Clean Smelly, of whom I've never heard, but Sherryl is a fan and wants to go to the front of the audience and wave at him when he first comes out. I look to the front and see everyone seated, so I suggest she goes FIRST, before everyone gets the idea, so that she'll be right in front. She scoffs at the idea at first, but then she's gone. He's introduced, the audience screams, and then Sherryl's in back of our seating section, and it's clear she should return to her seat from my left, rather than right, since we're closer to that aisle. 3) 7:35: I'm at a party where everyone is trying to be funny. Someone asks "What's the native language of Italy?" and everyone laughs when I respond "Albanian?" Equally, they roar when the question becomes "What's the central geographical point of Italy? and I reply "The Pope!" I think I could start a TV program of my own, saying anything that comes into my head, and everyone will agree that it's refreshingly new and wonderful. Others try the same technique, and some are genuinely funny, but most are trying too hard, like a group that comes out with an obviously rehearsed dance routine of painful inadequacy, but since it's been PLANNED, it's not nearly as funny as it would have been had it been off-the-top-of-the-head spontaneous. Now that I type this at 7:38AM, this seems as self-aggrandizing as some of my sessions with Sharon where I'm the center of the greatness of the universe.
THURSDAY, 8/21/08: 7:35AM: I'm an extra in a play or movie about ancient China, playing a dead person lying onstage at the climax. Since I'm lying down with my feet toward the audience, I won't have to put on any makeup; since I'm a peasant, I don't need any footgear since I can just be barefoot. All I need is a peasant's work garment. I get one from a stack available, and am told, with three or four others who are dead like me, that I don't even need to participate in today's rehearsal, since I have no lines and no actions: I should just show up tomorrow with my garment and I'll be told where to lie. Without transition, it's tomorrow and I can't find my garment. I search and search, asking people who dismiss me, looking everywhere I can think of, but I can't find it. Eventually decide that no one will miss me, so I needn't even bother to tell anyone in authority. As a last desperate stab at meaningfulness, I ask if I was to be PAID for this job as an extra: "Am I going to mess up some list or roster if I don't show up to be paid?" I'm belittlingly told that, to be paid, I'd had to have signed a five-year contract as an extra, which I clearly didn't do, so I can disappear without affecting anyone. Without transition, I become aware that it's 2PM: I was supposed to take a math test about the proof of a specific theorem. I debate taking a cheat-sheet with me to copy out the answer in the testing room, but know I'd be caught. I'll just have to fail the course because I've failed the test, with no hope of a makeup. I don't know what I'll have to do to make up the course, or the credit, in order to get whatever degree I'm working toward. Feel completely helpless & hopeless, which feeling remains as I wake and type these DISMAL dreams until 7:52AM.
SATURDAY, 8/23/08: 8:10AM: After a series of dreams, I'm looking at a comic strip that's drawn with a very small number of tiny lines in each panel of about 20 in the strip, looking either like a hieroglyphic language or a series of drawings looked at through a dense fog. I can't figure out what it means. In the next comic strip, a life-like Jimmy Carter says something like, "I can't figure out what I'm doing in a comic strip."
SUNDAY, 8/24/08: 1) 4AM: I'm looking for a john on a military base, and find a three-person stall more or less open to public view, but I take a seat and have to scrounge around for toilet paper that's not wet with dubious liquids. 2) 7:15AM: I'm browsing a huge airlines-souvenir counter, and there's a mobile with a precarious wing-shaped top that I knock off inadvertently as I pass by, but I carefully replace it.
MONDAY, 8/25/08: 8:02AM: About five Australians are visiting me, and I make it clear to them that I have a Writers' Club meeting from 6:30-8:30PM, so they should either leave before that so I can lock up as I leave, or, if they're leaving after that, they can stay in my apartment as long as they want. They know New York well enough that they have some places they want to see and know how to get there, so I'm confident they'll do what they want. We've gone out to dinner, and when we leave the restaurant they all take off to some previously planned destination, and I look at my watch and see that it's precisely 6:30, so I've missed the beginning of my meeting. As I think about it, I'm not even sure if it's at Akron University (it's a dream, remember), or at the Actualism Center, so I guess I just won't go. Earlier, I'd remarked that this day was very like my day yesterday in Auckland: clear and sunny for most of the day, but very rainy for an hour or so in the middle of the day. As if to prove it, rain starts just as I step toward the back porch of my building, and I wonder for a moment if I have my keys, but two guys who seem to have just moved into the ground-floor apartment are exiting through the back, and one holds open the porch door and the other holds open the house door for me, so I don't have to use my keys at all. I look at the small signs of habitation in the lower apartment, which had been sort of a public lobby before: personal effects on a table, small items I hadn't seen before, which are now placed on other pieces of furniture. I wander toward the front of the house where the stairway is, not even sure if my apartment has a separate locked door or is simply part of this Victorian mansion rather like my grandparent's house in Akron so many years ago.
WEDNESDAY, 8/27/08: 4:30AM: I'm washing elaborate mounds of dishes and other household objects in a small sink surrounded by workspaces on which are piled loads of dishes, articles of clothing and furniture, and other objects like toys and knickknacks which have to be dusted and arranged into shape rather than actually washed. There's a cloth doll whose face is dirty and has to be wiped clean, whose hair must be patted into place, and whose clothing has to be arranged more neatly. The items to be processed are in haphazard heaps all around my work area, and the dish-drying rack is a whole room away. After I walk the length of the room a few times with one or two dishes, I realize I'd better reorganize the space more efficiently or I'll never make any real progress, as new items to be cleaned seem to be coming in, almost as if I'm working in a restaurant rather than just cleaning up in an apartment which has hosted a particularly messy party. No one appears to be helping me, yet there's an implied presence of a large number of people on the fringes of my area who are partly responsible for all this mess, yet they have totally abdicated the job of clearing things away to me. No particular emotion is felt in the dream, only the NEED for the tasks, different as they are, to be accomplished as expediently as possible---making things better rather than worse, making order out of total chaos, leaving the place in good shape, possibly influenced by the fact of my clearing off my desk and do-lists before leaving tomorrow on my trip to Spain.
THURSDAY, 8/28/08: 10:29PM last night: complex dream about writing a celebratory article about dead soldiers from a WWI battle: "They died, knowing that they would be praised here!" At 2AM I scrawled a note about a dream of---and the only words I can read clearly are "all" and "HUGE" and "of the". Great help!
SPAIN/FRANCE DREAMS
SATURDAY, 8/30/08: 5:16AM: I'm in an Army camp, and this short, young, gay Hispanic guy comes up to me and hugs me and starts reciting a love poem, asking me if the sergeant will think this is inappropriate for the unit, but I assure him that since the primary theme of the poem is love, not sex, the sergeant will think it's perfectly OK. Then we have to clean up the doorway leading to the back yard, and I'm picking up dried pieces of lettuce and old cigarette butts from the concrete doorsill, and someone else goes outside to clean what's become a window sash at the bottom of the door, and he's picking away pieces of rust from the supports holding the sash up, and it falls onto the side of his head, lacerating an area about a half-inch by two inches on the side of his head. Though he insists he's OK, I'm sure it must have hurt him a lot and feel sorry that it happened because he was cleaning our property.
SUNDAY, 8/31/08: 1) 1:56AM: I'm part of a production team on a TV program that, for some reason, has a set of actors who can substitute for astronauts who are circling the earth. A process goes down a list of the candidates for these substitutes until the best one is found. Then, maybe as my thoughts continued on the theme after I woke up, Barbara Lea has somehow returned from a military operation in which people who had been astronauts or Presidents were in the process of dying, and she was telling the story about how, when President Truman was dying, they didn't let him know that this was the case, and they made his last days as pleasant as they could. In another example, one injured astronaut was returned to his facility and was "given such a grand party that he never had time to think about how serious his condition was, and he died in the best of spirits." My thoughts then turned to how SHE had to be bolstered for her duties and also praised for the wonderful performances she had given in their benefit. 2) 4:08AM: Carl Spring and I are sitting in a very high-level scientific convention, talking about results that he and his co-worker Adams have just published, and the leader of the convention is praising the work to the heavens, saying, "Carl, if twenty years from now, you're working in China and repeat some of the pages of this work to the highest authorities in the scientific world at that time, you'll be regarded as having contributed one of the leading research papers of all time." We're both intensely pleased at this high praise. Somehow John Connolly is also involved in this project and has his share of the high praise being given out. I'm just about to burst with pride: the project actually SUCCEEDED beyond any of our wildest dreams! 3) 6AM: Mom and I are finishing dinner at a very famous old (but very modern in style) restaurant in the Village, something like The Symposium, but very famous and hard to get reservations for. I'm finishing up the last bit of ham on a plate yellowed with butter from potatoes and vegetables, and I'm aware it's getting close to 8PM, and I'm supposed to attend a show down here at 8:30, and though I'm just finishing dinner, I'm paradoxically glad that I don't have to have a meal before going to the theater. Mom has finished already and her plate's been removed, but she's being "naughty" and taking coarse salt from a small plastic container (like my pill box) from a HealthyHeart nuts container and making a design like a cross on the white tablecloth, and I remark, "That's going to cause a lot of trouble, since they're not going to SEE that you've made a salt design on a white (albeit plastic) tablecloth, and they're going to sweep off the cloth and the salt is going to fly all over the floor." She doesn't care. I've just cut the last bit of ham, with its trim of fat, into two to finish it, when suddenly a curtain at the front of the narrow restaurant zips up and a chorus---as from a church with enthusiastic, almost orgiastic, worshippers---starts a loud and ecstatic paean of triumphant glory to some invented deity, flailing their white-garment-clad arms in the air, shouting their praise, dancing their transports of joy, and I'm almost embarrassed to be there as an unwilling witness. My point of view is then elevated in the air to the side, and I see a main female dancer dashing down the center aisle in a dress so filmy it seems to be made of white smoke, while others follow her rapidly, almost stepping on her train (as some sneaker stepped on the bridal train outside some elegant hotel on our way back from not eating in a restaurant last night), and I marveled at being at such an event, wondering what church it was that this restaurant had been made part of, and my amazement that I'd not known of this, and it had never happened before, and was truly extraordinary. My later theater date was totally forgotten at the end of this brief staged spectacular.