DREAMS of 2009 1 of 3
THURSDAY, 1/1/09: 7:50AM: I've been trying to fix a small computer, rather like a notebook-shaped laptop, trying all kinds of reprogramming techniques involving a number of people, worrying about the program working after I changed just one instruction, but knowing that I could never test all the instructions to make sure the complicated program worked in every case. Elaborate tiny-type tables of various vitamin potencies and dosages all had to be absolutely correct, but I didn't even have time to READ all the possibilities. Then the final verdict came down: the error was one hole-punch in one program card, all the problems stemmed from that. Once that was corrected, everything worked perfectly, so that all SUBSEQUENT attempts at corrections only made things worse. I was abashed, but VERY relieved.
FRIDAY, 1/2/09: 5AM: I've moved into a new apartment, and neighbors have gathered to tell me NOT to use pesticides, sprinkling miniature, seemingly live, rabbits, deer, bugs, etc. on a newspaper and spraying a pesticide so I can see how the animals suffer before they die to convince me not to use it.
SUNDAY, 1/4/09: 1) 4:45AM: I'm working at my IBM office in the UN Building in NYC, and at 9:27AM I suddenly realize I'm supposed to be giving a slide talk about IBM at 57th Street. I dash over to Uncle Edward, working nearby, and beg him to call that office and set up a room for the show at 9:30. I hear him dialing and saying, "Say Jim, this is Ed," and continue with his talk, ending by saying to me, "You've got the room at 9:30AM Tuesday." "But I told you it had to be TODAY, MONDAY!" "Sorry, that's the best I could do." I grit my teeth and pile everything I need into a bright red suitcase and dash for the door. Try to flag a cab on the Avenue, but traffic is very fast since it's right out of the tunnel and there are no empty cabs in those lanes anyway. I watch as a woman, driving too fast, starts to skid out of control as she prepares for a right turn, but she realizes her error, slams on the brake, and can continue safely around the corner. I proceed south to the street, which I recognize from (other dreams) before: it starts on a cliff top with VERY slippery steps going down to the lakeshore road, and I hear someone describing some of the houses along here to the tourists near me: "Artie Shaw lives right down there. Yes, you can see his fur coat draped over the chair just like in the picture." I dash along, knowing that the cliff lowers toward the east, and race down to the familiar fence separating the road from the beach, but I know if I continue, the beach will become public (as Sandy Beach Park) and the fence will disappear and I can get to the beach, which is now, inexplicably, my destination rather than a taxi to take me to my meeting, now forgotten. Very clear details in the dream. Finish typing at 4:55AM. 2) 9:24AM: Two fragments: a) Burt Lancaster is pregnant. I'm interacting with him as he portrays a role in a movie, and it's remarkable how matter-of-fact he's doing this very strange part. b) I'm living in some third-world country, and I know I've put some stamps into a small paper envelope that's not transparent, but have somehow misplaced it, so I have to go through a stack of these empty envelopes trying to find the one that has the stamps in it.
TUESDAY, 1/6/09: 5:09AM: Two related dreams about the attainment of a certain sense of perfection: in one, a class at a university has gotten ONE evening's dinner in the university's new cafeteria. It had been closed for a time for renovation, and now it seems it's opening to a series of one-time evenings for different Town and Gown groups, and we of the university try not to be jealous that it's not all OURS to enjoy, but that business, charity, industry, and even the homeless have a pre-set time to enjoy what may be a new concept of a perfect cafeteria. Even the seating is controlled: the more creative people sit at the edges, with people of their own kind, so that synergy is to be expected even while eating. More choices of food are available, all at very reasonable prices: it's almost as if---in a dream way---the current economic problems of the world are represented as being solved in this "cafeteria" which aims at the maximum variety and pleasure with the minimum of cost: a natural operation that should be a model for how ALL operations should work. The second dream involved PERSONAL relations in what might be an acting troupe which is also a group of families---some gay, some straight---with unusual frankness and cooperation among the family units, supporting both group, personal happiness, and individual creativity, privacy, and accomplishment which, again synergistically, produces ever higher levels of satisfaction and the environment for even more joy and creativity. Both unite into a seeming paradise on earth: enlightenment ruling relationships and practical functions such as cafeterias. Maybe this implies a parallel to my OWN life: my appreciation of Healthy Heart meals as the granting of a wish I'd had to have my meals prepared for me, coupled with my gradual accomplishment of the tasks from the previous trips, the duties of year-end record-keeping, the increased sociability of meals, visits, possible new relationships, and even a thought at the end of one series of dreams: maybe I could even start WRITING about these marvelous life-situations as a way of PRODUCING such complete happiness!
SATURDAY, 1/10/09: 8:30AM: Fragments: a) Number-handling, where a three-digit number was a personal ID, two-digit numbers were actions, and sheets of directions were passed out in envelopes. b) I take a creamy black liquid from a small jar to spread over the backs of my hands as a moisturizer, wondering where it came from and if I'm really using it properly.
SUNDAY, 1/11/09: 6:35AM: Three fragments: a) I'm doing elaborate mathematical calculations about speed and profitability of shipping on a canal, but the basic improvement seems to be one of clearing the canal of obstructions so that the ships can go twice as fast, which would double the profits. b) I'm walking south in the early morning, just at the edge of the shadow of the sun along the rooftops of Riverside Drive, and I think if I walk fast enough I can get to the curve of the Drive where the buildings go slightly west, so that I can continue to walk in the shade. Cars are passing me, going uptown, on the LEFT, and I think that my slightly erect cock pressing against the front of my Jockey shorts, which I'm wearing under a tight tee-shirt, makes me appear extremely sexy, even though I'm slightly older than prime. c) I'm eating a meal in a pirate ship's dining room, with characters from "Pirates of the Caribbean" sharing the table with me, and had finished large portions of fish on the plate set before me, and get to a last serving of what looks to be the tender white flesh of the tail of a large lobster, but when I extract the piece from its coccyx-shaped shell it seems to end in a brush of pink which has two smaller brushes of pink on the front end, and I'm actually eating an entire small shrimp with its two claws supplying the flesh of the upper part of the y-shaped body, and I exclaim that these small shrimp really have the most wonderful taste and texture, amazed that I've finally grown to like seafood as much as meat.
MONDAY, 1/12/09: 1) 4:11AM: A masturbator moves his hand up and down so quickly that someone jokes that he's aping Heifitz sawing away on his violin. 2) 5:17AM: Untranslatable notes: Pine trees; 4 ways around house. 3) 6:01AM: Dead head in leaves at night.
WEDNESDAY, 1/14/09: 7:26AM: A number of us are either spies or portraying spies for some kind of fictional televised production. We've set up an elaborate code for news items, where the presentation of a certain item would indicate that the next item is to be interpreted as actual fact, whereas the presentation of a PAIR of items would cancel out the indication, and the next item could be safely ignored as padding. But someone's confused the items, and for a while the items can be cancelled by PAIRS of pairs, which makes things very complicated until it's decided that "the truth" would be indicated by a simple white triangle displayed somewhere at the head of the item: if everyone understands this, our coding system will be much more reliable. Without transition, I'm in my entranceway when someone knocks on my door. I open it to find a naked hunk with a flustered look on his face: he's probably knocked on the wrong door, but I realize I can take instant advantage of his confusion by dragging him inside my apartment and ravishing him, but that section of the dream instantly changes to the next section, which I forget, but it involved some kind of control, or trust, going wrong, so that I woke with a feeling of impending doom and briefly debated getting up and taking a valium.
FRIDAY, 1/16/09: 6:30AM: I'm with a group in someone's apartment, and Ken wants me to take $5 in the form of three silver dollars and various smaller coins, and I simply refuse, which makes him hurt and slightly angry, but I say I simply cannot act as everyone's depository for change they don't want, since I don't want it. Then I show off a stack of dimes I've accumulated, and say, "Here's a token," which is a smaller-than-a-dime token about three NYC subway tokens past, and then present a small coin by saying, "Here's an even smaller token," which is actually a foreign coin with a black-bordered crescent moon from some Arabic country. Later, I feel sorry for Ken and am tempted to just TAKE his change and give him a $5 bill, but then defend myself by saying that I just can't do EVERYTHING everyone wants me to do, even if it's not particularly in MY OWN interest. Yet, I counter again, others do things for me, so why can't I return the favor on occasion.
SUNDAY, 1/18/09: 8:07AM: I've dialed a reservation or billing number that I'd called before, (as I got up at 8AM this morning to call OAT first thing in the morning, when their line would be less busy, but find that they only open at 9AM on Saturday and Sunday), and get a pre-recorded message that repeats in detail what I'd told them before and ANSWERS me in detail why they'd done what they'd done before. It involves a visual display, so I must in some way be operating on the Internet for the call. I'm at one question, and two choices are displayed. I click the first choice, and a particular schedule appears. I click somewhere on the schedule and the choices again appear with annotations. At each step, the recorded message tells me why I get that choice: in one case, I'd written them about something, but they hadn't kept a copy of my letter, and she goes to extreme lengths to detail to me why their policy dictates that they don't keep copies of correspondence before we've actually committed to a particular itinerary. In another case, after I'd committed to an itinerary, I said something over the telephone that they hadn't kept track of for ANOTHER very specific reason, which she'd explained to me before and now is explaining to me again in such detail that I'd tempted to bring up Spider on the my computer screen to pass the time while she goes into agonizing detail. I intend to tell someone, when I get a live someone, that all this service maybe of GREAT value to some customers, but the customer should be given a CHOICE whether he or she wants the past to be rehashed in such time-consuming detail. Also, I have a memory of having BEEN through this before, so they should include some indication on their records of what they've told me before, so that I'm not subjected to the exhaustive details again. Yes, I DO value their past service, but if they continue with this level of PRESENT service, I probably won't remain as their customer because their interactive system is so lacking in flexibility that I have to listen to this same stuff again and again. This dream SO reminds me of SO many telephone interactions in the past.
TUESDAY, 1/20/09: 7:48AM: Three dreams: 1) About 4:50AM: I'm looking at small doorways partially blocked with cobwebs, and I'm told that they indicate doors that should not be used in going through a maze inside a building, but the point of the rooms inside is to lead everyone on a particular path from point A to point B. Eventually all the paths will be possible, all the cobwebs cleared, and every room will be accessible. 2) Later: I'm wandering through an amusement park in which every ride is free. I'm waiting on a long line for a rather ordinary ride, and pass an entrance to a special roller coaster with an intriguing name, which I've forgotten, and see that it's at a price of $15 and is served by a special elevator that takes rides up to and down from the start of the ride. The metal green doors to the elevator open and close a few times, but there's never anyone on the elevator, and I figure everyone's interested in the free rides, and hardly anyone will pay that much for only one ride. 3) Just before typing: I'm listening to a small group of people who are looking into the timing for three injections of a suicide serum: the first is taken about ten minutes before the second, which prepares the taker for the third, which will be fatal unless an antidote is administered in a very narrow window of time. I look at these experimenters with amazement: they're playing with their own fatality in order to experience the feelings of being very close to death, which may have a certain sexual component, but I can't believe that anyone would be crazy enough to get so close to death just to experience heightened feelings, and I try to talk them out of trying even the first injection.
THURSDAY, 1/22/09: 7:30AM: I'm on a walking tour of a New York neighborhood like Brooklyn, following a small group of leaders from one street to another, but I get separated at one point, crawling under a narrow opening in one house to visit a particular apartment on a nearby street, but I don't get any report from that apartment as to which way the leaders went after that. I can only think to return to that narrow opening, knowing that I have to contort my body in a particular way on the way back through, but arrive at a small restaurant to find no one from the group there. I ask the owner which way they went, but he doesn't know. I suggest that I'll continue to follow backward the way I got there, but he thinks there's a possibility that they kept going forward along this street, and he says I should wait here while he goes forward to a place he knows where he can ask where the continuing tour-route might go, and then return here to tell me whether he's right or not. I don't know what else to do, wishing that I'd thought to bring my cell phone so that I could call them and ask them where they are now. Prior to this, there'd be a similar out-and-return leg of the tour that one of the leaders failed to lead, and headquarters had to reduce the payment he got for leading the tour based on the half hour that was lost because he wasn't there, and they had to recalculate the time he'd be getting to his subsequent destinations based on that lost half hour. Many of the rooms on the tour were strange in that the ceilings were so low that some of the rafters were carpeted, so that a tall person would feel the carpets just grazing his hair when he went through the room, particularly at doorways, where a tall person would have to stoop to go through or he's be hit in the forehead by the top of the doorway. Could this be a premonition of my trip to Tunisia?
FRIDAY, 1/23/09: 1) 6:37AM: I'm on a ship that's being used for research into cancer that involves irradiating a patient with a lethal dose to treat his cancer. Everyone on the ship has to be aware of the radioactivity of the patient and the dangers being near him and his cabin. Why it's on a ship, and how this patient was selected for this experiment: both are unanswered mysteries. There is a chance the patient's cancer will be eradicated by the radiation, but the idea seems to be that he'll die anyway in just a matter of hours. The reasons behind his kind of project are obscure, but everyone seems to accept these conditions without question. 2) 8:55AM: I'm in my bedroom and find that Paul C. has arrived, put his bags and clothes in various places in the bedroom, and is ready to lie on his side of the bed with me. Another sex-trick is in the room, but I don't know if it's John or Tony or someone else, but I'm rather removed from the situation and ready to let what happens happen without my instigating any particular action. Paul is lying with his head on my chest, and I reach down to find that he's in his typical semi-hard state, so I take out his cock and start sucking on it, and he begins making his usual "very excited" noises without being very excited. The third person looks on with some interest, and I have no idea what will happen next when the fuzzy dream ends.
SATURDAY, 1/24/09: 7:55AM: A fierce band of warriors, maybe Vikings, have a tradition of a violent end, portrayed possibly for a TV series, in which the chief enters into a kind of rage in which even the stone floor of the Great Hall can be raked with furrows from a final paroxysm of intensity. He tries to joke with the children in the audience that this is only play-acting, but all the adults know this is carried out with all the brutality the person can muster, characterizing his battle with the last enemy as "squeezing all the liquid, all the inner empty spaces" from the body with a bone-shattering pressure that compresses the very cells of the body. The ferocity of this final act is pulverizing.
SUNDAY, 1/25/09: 8:24AM: Three fragments: a) I'm in a class that I missed the beginning of, and there's a test which we're going over, and I'm relieved that the teacher is starting alphabetically with the students going over each problem, so there aren't enough problems to get to me. The test involves patterns of color, and I think I might be able to reason through the test questions if I just have enough time. b) A conference is being held in an expensive resort that furnishes a "secretary" for each room, and they're young beautiful women, and I suppose they must provide sex if required, though I wonder if that would cost more than the already great cost of the room. c) I'm watching a TV program about a man getting some kind of exam, and he's told to lower his shorts, and I watch avidly as the shorts lower to reveal the trilobed shape of his genitals, and I hope it goes on longer, and the shorts ARE pulled down to reveal the length of his pleasant cock, and then he even beings to fondle it: grows harder, and finally he starts playing with his erection, and I wonder with amazement how much more it will go on when I wake.
WEDNESDAY, 1/28/09: 8:25AM: I'm in an office responsible for taking care of the records of payment for a large number of people. I've been handed a large number of charges which seem to be in date order, but I'm supposed to contact these people according to their purchases and then file the slips in the alphabetical order of their names, and I can't quite figure out how I'm going to process these because only transaction numbers appear on the slips, and I have no idea how to coordinate dates, names, purchases, and transaction numbers. I try to ask one or the other of my supervisors, but each seems intent on referring me to someone else or one reference document or another, and I can't see how long any of this will take me although my bosses are demanding to know how long it will take me. I suppose this is somehow connected with charges and companies relying on my Visa-card number, which has just changed because of my fear of spurious charges from Sunday's computer virus. And then I'm wakened at 8:18AM by Charles calling to say it's snowing very hard on the island and he won't be able to get in for lunch at Telepan with Mildred and me this afternoon. I'd slept over eight hours without ANY waking for urination and STILL feel slightly underslept or overdrunk as I finish typing this.
THURSDAY, 1/29/09: 6:52AM: A large number of performers are gathered either for the final rehearsal or the first performance of an elaborate production of "Ramayana" in either Central Park or a more southern park in Manhattan. It's a modernistic production where sections of the chorus are distributed among the audience (maybe like the woman who shouted out "My mother died of breast cancer" in the Village Playwrights play last night at the Wings Theater), and it's not quite rehearsed enough that anyone is exactly sure when they're supposed to say what part of the speeches. I've picked up a large plastic bag filled with costumes, or makeup, and am burdened with it through the late afternoon, also picking up other articles that load my arms even after the performance seems to be over and we're all trying to make our way home along what turns out to be a beach area at the southern part of Long Island. At one point I actually reach the shore on a grassy/sandy beach and watch the small waves break against the rocks at the shoreline. Going inland, I reach a series of wire fences that seem to separate private paths to luxurious cottages along the beach, and I don't want to trespass, but I don't know any other way to get away from the beach. I'm constantly in danger of dropping things from the bundles in my arms, and I keep trying to lessen my burden by combining various smaller bags into a few larger bags that will be easier to manage. Pass some old public pavilions along the beach which should lead me to places I know to get back from, but nothing seems resolved by the time I wake up in some confusion at 6:50AM, concerned about peeing and waiting for Carlos to come to fix my kitchen light at 8AM.
SATURDAY, 1/31/09: [Actually 1/30/09: 10:56PM]: An enormous cast is rehearsing for a disaster TV movie about an atomic attack. But a detail we're involved with is the utensil we're going to use for a final meal before the bomb hits, and it seems we're going to use ONE utensil that stands for a knife, a fork, and a spoon, and we joke about it. There's also the odd image of a model ship made out of folded paper that's going to be sitting on the dining table for some reason, and everyone's concerned about the fact that the paper will be so weak we won't even be able to lift it and move it around the table without it going limp in the middle. Odd fragments at an odd time of night.
SUNDAY, 2/1/09: 7:55AM: Obviously concerned about my upcoming trip, I'm sitting in a rather grim cottage while everyone else on the trip is sitting outside talking with each other. I move from my chair and realize that the right lens of my glasses has fallen to the floor. I retrieve it, rather grungy from the floor, and wonder how I'm going to manage to turn the very tiny screw to replace the lens. At another point, I'm about to cross what looks to be a muddy road to get to an area near a beach, but I think better about just jumping down to the road to get across, tentatively test the surface of the "road," and find that it's the mucky surface of a muddy stream of unknown depth, and jumping onto it would be a real disaster. Later, I'm waiting for some kind of tour to leave, but the air is so grim, rather like Greenland, that I can't imagine anything of interest will appear on the tour. Not the happiest omen for a trip.
MONDAY, 2/2/09: 7:22AM: John and I are vacationing in Alaska, driving down remote roads, and have stopped in a colorful eatery with a group of locals who amuse us with their accents and stories. But their oddities tire after a time and we're ready to be on our way when just one more codger has to finish another story about the outback, and John has to pay for our sandwiches and I'm not quite sure how much I owe him, and we refuse to take someone up the road a piece, and we're about to leave when someone drives up with another tale that we just have to listen to in order to complete our understanding of just how locally colorful this place is.
TUNISIA DREAMS
WEDNESDAY, 2/4/09: 1) 2AM: John is on some crazy conservationist drive on television, threatening to appear forever until some mission of his is accomplished. This is happening next to something that I am doing that's possibly equally crazy. Sadly, I forget most of the details, except that HE is convinced I am the mad one, and I am convinced that HE should be committed to an asylum and never let free to do what he's trying to do. Sadly lacking the touching details of the actual dream. 2) 6:08AM: Incredibly detailed, extraordinarily bizarre set of circumstances in a series of dreams connected by a charismatic "visitor" to a household somewhere between "East of Eden" and "The Grapes of Wrath." One section concerns a kitchen sink that's been mainly deconstructed so that the faucet has been reduced to a pipe that comes out of a muddy sump with pieces that had once been part of an ordinary system scattered around the remnants of a shattered sink, so that the water comes directly from a pipe from the ground (possibly patterned after the curious bidet-hose coming from the wall next to the toilet in this Hotel Africa room in Tunis), with bits of metal which had been removed from the working faucet scattered around. I'm trying to wash a few utensils and dishes from a meal the "hero" of the dream (a combination of James Dean and Brad Pitt and Kevin Bacon) had been trying to eat. A bit later I find that the domestic chaos has extended to the bathroom, essentially that from 1221 Dietz: the shower curtain and rod has been taken down and the tub has been replaced with a heavily padded ironing board covered with a flowered-pattern padding which is either the covering of the ironing board or something which is being ironed, very unsuccessfully, on that board. The toilet and sink also seem to be missing from the room, and the lights have been changed into something completely foreign to the room. He's being plagued by "friends" who are either trying to help him or succeeding in sabotaging him so that everything he does turns out badly mismanaged and misdirected. He's so appealingly helpless, nevertheless, that no one really BLAMES him, they just want to try to talk to him to find out what's troubling him, or just to hold him to try to tell him that everything's going to be OK, and maybe in the process trying to wheedle some sexual favors from him. Incidents from the dream stretch on and on, as if they might be partly voluntary on my part: I may be waking up slightly, influenced by the jet-lag and the melitonin and the strange surroundings, and wanting to continue relating to this beautiful troubled young man of surpassing attractiveness, yet of appalling confusion and ineptitude at whatever he tries to "fix" or "accomplish."
THURSDAY, 2/5/09: 4AM: I'm having a meal with Dennis, and I say something to him which causes him to look at me with an expression I'd never seen before: his skin is tight and shiny, as if newly polished, with a slight Chinese yellow in tone, and his lips are pursed as if he's trying to convey a particular emotion with his facial expression, but I'm not quite sure what it would be, except that it's quite foreign to the way he would usually be smiling.
FRIDAY, 2/6/09: 5:09AM: John and someone like Dick C. and I are leaving a sedate place, like a library or a small drug store, and John remarks about the open fronts of the body suits that Dick and someone else are wearing: it seems clear that they're open so low below the navel that neither of them are wearing any underwear whatsoever. John smiles gaily as he reaches inside the pubic cleavage to fondle the cock inside, and even has the nerve to take out Dick's large floppy pale cock, which I think is extraordinarily risky, though we're clustered in a tight circle and it might be difficult for anyone to see what was actually going on. But I really thought John was going a bit far in a public place, not to mention that the fronts were open SO low that someone looking down from a particular angle might be able to see the cocks even without John's publicly displaying them. Despite my prudishness at his actions, however, I admit I thought it was quite exciting and wished something like that could happen in real life. Maybe I'm just obsessing about sexy Gaetano who leaned forward from his seat behind me and remarked, possibly suggestively, that he really felt like he needed a massage. And how I thought of telling him about my Actualism techniques to lure him to my solitary room! Idle dreams, indeed.
SUNDAY, 2/8/09: 7AM: A young Don O. is showing me his new high-ceilinged house with very wide hallways and loads of storage closets for the stacks of belongings he has piled in the center of each room. I compliment him on being so smart as to have planned for so much storage space, and he seems pleased with it. Later, we're having lunch out at a neighborhood diner and I'm telling him that I've decided to move to the University of Florida for my particular studies, and he rather acidly observes that it's not very well-known for its writing courses. I talk about the possibility of going somewhere else, and again he laments its lack of artistic outlets, and I'm sort of defensive, saying maybe I'm looking for an atmosphere in which I'll have to STRUGGLE to produce, rather than being in a place which will just make it easier for me to be creative.
MONDAY, 2/9/09: 6:25AM: Woke about 4:30 with a picture of a dream I'd had previously on waking: I'm sitting at a computer display of numbered areas that somehow correspond to data which should be saved onto hard disks of the same number. There's something of a game about it, too, because sometimes when I click on an area to save it, an area BENEATH it becomes visible for me to process, and it seems like some variation of Spider where, if I do everything right, I can clear off the entire computer screen and have everything saved to hard drives. Colors are associated with the areas, too, as are shapes, almost the shapes of many of the United States.
TUESDAY, 2/10/09: 2AM: I've invited Cary Grant to my apartment to watch something on TV that I think will interest him, but as I look over at him on the sofa, he's fallen gently asleep onto his side. What a disappointment!
WEDNESDAY, 2/11/09: 1) 12:10AM: I've just been asked a question during the intermission of a mime-show just south of 14th Street, and the answer involves the theater that used to be on 42nd Street that closed and moved farther south, at one time becoming a CHAIN of theaters along one whole street, but now it's only in one ratty location, and I have to give its address to win a prize. 2) 4:07AM: I'm a new member of a kind of State Congress, and someone's come up with a good letter to influence the two New York City representatives to vote in a particular way. I tentatively suggest that, since it IS such a good letter, even though I wouldn't be willing to do the work, it might be a good idea to send it to ALL the country's representatives. The head of the system looks at me as if I'm a total lunatic and simply says, "No." "OK," I say, deferentially, but with SOME attempt to be sarcastic. 3) 7:02AM: I'm returning from some point on this trip an hour away from where we are now, and a couple in the back of the bus where I'm sitting tell me that Mamdouh did NOT get my flight itinerary. I panic and try to get the phone number there to try to ring them to see if Mamdouh hasn't left yet and can still get my form. Some woman generously gives me a receipt with a phone number on it (though I have no idea if this would be a LOCAL call from London, where we've ended up, or not), and then I try to find a phone, at about which time my wake-up call comes at 7AM and I realize with relief that we are IN FACT in the same place where I left the itinerary for Mamdouh at the desk, and he just has to pick it up NOW if he hasn't found it yet. Sort of silly dream.
THURSDAY, 2/12/09: 1) 12:17AM: I'm visiting an old office in which I'd free-lanced before, and someone I knew tells me that, since I'd worked for them for the last 22 years, I was actually entitled to a bonus check for consistent service, "For a grand total of TEN DOLLARS," he shouted with mock exultation, and told me I could meet the woman I was waiting to see "in the middle section," which I sort of knew, and went past a number of doorways out of which people were streaming at the end of their day's work. Get to an outer stairway with an edge of snow around stone steps, and am about to go up the stairs when I notice that the doors have fallen out of the doorway onto the stairs, and workmen are busy trying to put them back, so I clearly can't go in this way, and I wake. 2) 4:07AM: Amy Fleetman and I are clearing out our desks, and she finds greeting cards that she's saved of mine that she returns to me, and I do the same for her, and then she finds some that she hadn't even sent yet: one shows a flip-out joke of a woman with a light over her rear which should be a turn-on for her husband, and Amy wants to give it to me, but I tell her there's nothing attractive or funny about it, and maybe she should better give it to someone who would be more appreciative of it.
FRIDAY, 2/13/09: 1) 1:25AM: Wake to pee and remember the faintest shadow of a VERY explicit, VERY sexual (though not very arousing) dream from before, about midnight, which involved a number of attractive men all somewhat available in a series of vacation beds. The situation was so explicitly wonderful that I had no doubt I'd remember it in every detail when I next woke, but of course that's not the case. 2) 4:27AM: Seems I'm missing every other dream. Woke with one before, but didn't record it and forgot it. Then had a dream of a DTW-like space that had just put on a semi-professional dance-work, but now the logo slipped off the billboard and a simple female profile replaced it, and one woman was trying out a new show, itself very simple, and she invited the audience to stick around and watch her rehearsal. It started with about four women at different heights on the stage, simply rolling down from one height to another, and the one on the bottom rolled off the stage entirely onto the floor in front of the audience, then made some kind of remark, and afterward climbed back onto the stage to start the "real" rehearsal as a solo. It didn't look very interesting, and people began slowly leaving the theater. 3) 5:53AM: Each time I think it's the last dream, I have another. This one is again on a stage---and in just those few seconds I forget the details: something about the play ending. Oh, and we're going down a stairway to a subway platform, and the subway's leaving, but we're not in a hurry to get anywhere, so there's no problem. Like waking up this morning. Still a half-hour to go. Keep hearing the heating system click on and off, thinking someone's come into the room, or is moving around in it---and I keep making typos! WILL the day ever begin---and this vacation ever end? Friday, Saturday, Sunday, then Monday home!
SATURDAY, 2/14/09: 1) [Actually 11:40PM FRIDAY]: I'm having the sex-dream of my fantasies: three great-looking Greek gods are in adjoining beds, each tempting me with their bodies. I see resemblences to the three bathers from grade school: a) the brown wiry sexiness of Frank C. embodied in sinewy legs whose snake-like muscularity I literally chew on, salivating with desire; b) the white bulk of Joe K., not really sexy, but so muscular as to embody a fantasy far into the future, who seems to enjoy watching, and c) the Apollonian good looks of Mike M., with his bedable smile and handsome square head, probably the most adult of the three at 17---all these were in front of me and I went from one to the other in an orgy of delight, but awoke neither satisfied or even aroused, though I wanted the dream to continue forever. 2) 3:03AM: I'm somehow in the audience, but onstage, at a revival of a CLASSIC very old off-off-OFF-Broadway play: I'm talking to a legendary character (and get told I'm about to see why he's legendary) who's playing the part of a soldier operating a machine gun from a jeep. But the machine gun is actually, somehow, the cock of this legendary player who's very thin and stretched out, somehow, as the jeep himself, with his cock wrapped in red netting, from which the machine-gun firer is firing convincing machine-gun rounds as he rides directly into the audience, toward the ridiculously close exit, in his jeep. I wonder in the split second of action how the audience can a) recognize the legendary actor moving past so fast, b) recognize that it's his cock that's being used as the machine gun, c) get all this in the millisecond it would take the jeep to get from the backstage area, from which it starts, to the exit, where it ends. But I know I'm privileged to be here watching it, and truly the cock IS legendary! 3) Later: I'm staying in a house which might be Michael Blackburn's, and he's obviously going through a time of problems. He's very self-involved, but surprises me when he hands me two sheets of type-written pages, bound carefully in plastic covers, detailing areas of his life. The first is about "X," who he's mentioned before as being very important to him (he may have wanted to marry her, or may STILL want to marry her except that she's still married to someone else---he'd told me he might tell me who she is, one day, and I think that day may be coming soon, but not today), and other paragraphs are about other people or items important to him. He also presents me with a sheet of paper on which he's placed small cutouts of items, or representations of people, about whom he's less certain than those he's typed about. I look through all the stuff and am careful to take it all back to his room and put them where I first saw them, so that he'd be free to deal with them further if he wanted to. Then I saw that I'd left one of my shirts on a metal folding chair, so I took that off and put the chair where I thought it would be most useful to him. I then went back to my room and tended to my own business, waiting for him to take whatever next step he would take. (I remind myself, however, that he'd died about five or six years ago.) Yet there's an immediacy about "tending" to this dream that slightly concerns me, as if it had something to do with me, personally.
SUNDAY, 2/15/09: 1) 4:48AM: Endless sex dreams: as if I were stuck in the 60s West Village before AIDS but after the "thrill was gone." Enormous party area with everyone trying hard to be sexy and participate, but VERY few actual erections, pleasant bodies, or appealing activities. A number of VERY dark rooms in which NOTHING could be seen and nothing heard except over-dramatic attempts at sounding as if the best sex in the world were transpiring, yet clearly nothing very interesting is going on. At one point I encounter a slender youngish man, very pale, who seems to be covered in some kind of white clay or talcum powder: he might have a nice body, but it's hard to tell even though he is comepletely (oh, let's leave that typo!) naked. I tried playing with his cock and balls, and there seemed to be the dimmest rudiment of an interested response, but nothing really resulted: no erection, no response, no evidence of a body that I'd really want. I kept going from room to room: in some rooms people were completely dressed, but so elaborately it was impossible to tell the gender of the person. This was like a Jack Smith movie that BADLY needed editing. No one was really too old to be a possibility, no one was really too young to be unattractive, but also no one had any kind of definition or physical attribute that would make them particularly attractive. Maybe this was an elaborate takeoff on the current travel group: a lot of people who MIGHT be somewhat interesting, but each of them had their particular turn-off and none seemed to sustain any kind of interest over a long period of time, and in the end I was happy that this trip wasn't much longer than two weeks, and I didn't have to rely on any single one for sustained interest, and it would soon be over and forgotten and the emphasis would be on the things and places seen, rather than the group I'd seen it with---though the guide was competent enough and Gaetano was attractive enough---though no one at the dream-party stood out even as much as either of those two as a "comparison" of personalities. I kept wanting to be excited about participating in this dream, but they were all about as exciting as I was, or as the parties at Leo's and Bob's had been, or as the recent MAN parties had been. Lots of naked bodies, lots of attempts at being personally interesting, some costumes and outrageous behavior, but rather forgettable and listless as a whole, just a little like this trip---and my life? At least my life in New York is more interesting than EITHER this trip OR this dream, and now at 4:59, after typing for a number of minutes, I think I've captured the vague "essence" of the dream and can now pee and go back to sleep. 2) 6:08AM: Five of us in a car are trying to find a particular address in the middle of Brooklyn. The driver and his wife, in front, have no idea where we are. I'm in the back with a guidebook, trying to find intersecting corners on a map to see where we are. An older man is in the center, of uncertain or no relationship to anyone else in the car, and he specializes in making trouble: suggesting turns that aren't possible, and even seeming to want to get involved in sex with either me or my younger companion on the other side of him. In fact, at the end when we might be near where we want to be, we're scrambling for articles of clothing on the floor of the back seat of the car, and not only do I find socks and shoes that we've discarded, I'm sure I find his underwear: why he'd taken it off, except for some pathetic stab at sex, I have no idea, but I find it repulsive. Just as the chaos in the back seat reaches its climax the phone rings to stop this last dream of Sunday morning before departure from Djerba.
MONDAY, 2/16/09: 12:49AM: Mom and I are doing major reconstructions to the kitchen and the back porch of 1221 Dietz. Rita doesn't seem to be there, but we're both adults before age has set in, and my Healthy Heart Meals are a major concern. It started with a cleaning of some kind of major kitchen closet which had primarily been Mom's storage place, and now I've determined we have to share it. A major piece to be placed in the basement, or in HER closet, is a full-body-length wooden leg of uncertain use and history. I meticulously clean the concave outside of this six-foot leg with no joint, and then the convex inside, and it's now ready to be moved elsewhere to free up more space in the kitchen. Other noises make it clear that a second major renovation, supervised mainly by her: a renovation of the back porch, is going on at the same time. I open the back door and find that much of the porch is being enclosed by a series of sun-blocking shutters, and I wonder if in her planning she would have had the wisdom to double it in size and usefulness, but the current state of construction makes that uncertain. I know I have to have lots of space in the refrigerator for my cartons of Healthy Heart foods, and am at least relieved that UPS will have no difficulty leaving each delivery on our front porch until I can refrigerate them. I have to talk to Mom about other major items, but she doesn't seem to be around, and I'm thinking of making a list of major objects that have to be moved. It appears this renovation will be with us for the rest of our lives.
END OF TUNISIA DREAMS
FRIDAY, 2/20/09: 6:54AM: I'm visiting an elaborate London restaurant named Balthazar with a group of people all sitting at the same table. I have a map on which I'm trying to keep the feeding stations at this restaurant in some kind of order, and find a place on the menu in which I can number consecutively from one to ten the foods that I'm going to have. A couple on my left is having trouble: the wife doesn't want to eat, and the husband, next to me, keeps coming up with child-like ploys to have her take a taste of this, a tiny morsel of that, a sip of something else. Three or four argumentative women are sitting to my right, and I'm finishing items on my dish, leaving one particular dumpling in the upper right corner of my plate as a kind of final treat, and suddenly there's a flurry of confusing talk from all directions and I find, in one instant, that the husband has taken something from my plate from the lower left-hand corner, and a pushy obnoxious woman has grabbed my final dumpling, which really annoys me, and I'm shouting at her that I was SAVING that, and she gives me an impish moue and defies me to do anything about it, since she's already gobbled it down. I resolve that this sort of nonsense won't happen again. Wake groggy and type these notes into Neo file 7, hoping to remember to transfer them to WP51 later today.
SATURDAY, 2/21/09: 6:04AM: I'm in London for a very important meeting of high government officials, who have been having very busy days. I'm supposed to be keeping notes on their activities, and photographing some of the events, but the leader is concerned that his people aren't getting enough sleep, and one evening about 9PM he even asks if we'd like to finish for the evening this early, but everyone protests that the work is so important that we should all continue, and I feel that I can even take photographs in the dark and won't be criticized, since everyone's working so hard for so many hours.
MONDAY, 2/23/09: 5:51AM: Another waking with dream details fresh, but I don't remember much now: some kind of military situation in which we're sitting in a room with a plan of an area that we have to mark off, as in a code, with the letters of the alphabet. It's a kind of test, or military practice, and I find it simple, but the details have simply vanished.
FRIDAY, 2/27/00: 3:40AM: A female German friend and I have both made reservations at a rather odd German restaurant where we share a table for eight with strangers, and it also strikes me as odd that she chooses to sit across the table from me, so that we have to talk across other German conversations. By coincidence, we've each made reservations for two for table M, so unless I can cancel my reservation, I fear there're going to be two permanently empty seats near us. I ask the rather pompous man across from me if he speaks English, and he does with a heavy German accent. My friend, however, seems to prefer to speak in German, and after a large meal we've somehow come to be separated by two tables. I wave and wave at her, twice, to try to get her attention, but it's almost as if she's avoiding contact with me, until, finally, she looks at me and raises her eyebrows to see what it is that I want, and I pat the underside of my chin to indicate I'm full and don't want to order dessert; however, she doesn't seem to understand my gesture and I'm embarrassed to see that she's preparing to get out of her seat to come over to ask me what it is I want to say, but there's nothing I can do to avoid it, and feel great anxiety that I've done something quite wrong. In the middle of the meal was an elaborate conversation which I've now forgotten the details of, but it was rather like an unsuccessful random pairing at the Beard house where I feel that I don't really belong. The whole setting is rather 50s-ish, as if we were characters in a movie set during that time, rather than real people who were sharing a vacation, just the two of us, she as a sort of proper Jean-Jacques-like person who was very conscious of the narrow modes of proper behavior in a place like this. The food wasn't bad, but I felt uncomfortable throughout, even though I debated telling her that I liked the place so much that we could even make reservations here for dinner tomorrow night, now that I know how the place operates.
SATURDAY, 2/28/09: 4:44AM: I'm on a jungle trip, but somehow I've become separated from the group, the ship, and the guide, and I don't really know where I am, what the schedule is, and what we're supposed to see today. I find a cabin that I wonder if we have to pay for, but figure it's part of the trip and already assigned to me, so I shouldn't worry. Get to a small gathering of huts and see what may have been a place for a printed map of the area, and a box in which others have put their written postcards, but I ask someone if this is North Carolina, since we might have come back this far north on our way to New York, but am told it's some island in the Caribbean that I've never even heard of. Then see a line of women in island costumes making their way across a path, and am told they're about to perform a dance for a group at a local church, and it occurs to me that I should go back to my cabin and get my camera to take pictures of their dance: that might be interesting. Seem to remember the way back through the woods, recognizing a particular muddy trail and a place where the path crosses a small highway, but then find myself on a high cliff with no way to get down, and, somehow realizing this is only a dream and I'm not about to feel frustrated, just "will" myself having found a way back to the ground near my cabin, but still can't quite locate where I am, thinking I might be missing the start of the dance performance, and very easily climb up a rocky hill in the shape of the ribs of a giant stone radiator, and realize when I get near the top that it won't be nearly as easy to climb DOWN these ribs, and look down to see kids leaping for fun from large heights down to the rickety roofs of nearby huts without seeming to fall or be affected by leaping from such great heights, but somehow know that they can do this because they're kids, which I'm not. At one point in the middle of the dream, I cross a rock on which dozens of tiny creatures are "boogying" their way across the rock: little fish-shaped bugs vibrating as they walk on almost invisible legs, leaves which seem to have a mind of their own, bugs that are beetle-shaped but in various colors which I think might show up well in my camera, and again wonder why I didn't bring my camera with me when I came out for the day. No real feeling of panic, or being REALLY lost, just sort of "out of it" and wondering how I can "find my way back in." Wake with just the slightest feeling of hardness in my cock, and fantasize that my week without Avodart is starting to send more testosterone through my system already. Decide to type dream before peeing, nose running slightly, still quite warm, probably still in the 50s, as it was for most of this February-end weekend.
TUESDAY, 3/3/09: 7:20AM: Probably inspired by the New York magazine article I read part of before going to sleep about a group of male models living in various apartments around NYC for Fashion Week, I'm so outrageously into drugs that I have a set of people living in various apartments: Dennis has a bedroom very much like my bedroom at 1221 Dietz, but it's in my Hicks Street apartment, with his clothes on an impossibly high upper bar in my closet; I have the keys to Bill Hyde's apartment up near Columbia: his key ring of about six keys is placed between two other enormous key rings, each of which has at least a dozen keys---I don't know what apartments these are connected to. At the end of the marathon dream, I've collected his keys because I'm about to go up to his place to finally discard a red backpack which contains the elements of a particular phase of my drug-life: earlier in the dream I'd opened this and another like it a number of times, and they always seem to accept what's pushed into them, very much like the black wheeled suitcase that I take on my present trips. But these red ones are smaller, so that I can put them back to back and carry them by their straps in one hand like bags from Key Food. At a point toward the end of the dream I'm a quasi-prisoner in a Lesbian commune, various of them claiming me as a kind of beard-partner when they want to act straight, but I look over the group (I guess this stems from watching the Graham Norton show at Ken's on Tivo about all the women standing to judge against male self-descibers by sitting down when they're bored with them---just as a few gay men were standing with the women, there seemed to be a few gay men in this Lesbian commune, situated in an apartment that may have been patterned on the long-past Bleecker-Christopher St. apartment of Joan Sumner and her roommate) and judge that there's NO one that I want to stay here with, and without transition I'm in some other apartment in the dream, which seemed to go on all night, passing through at least a three-day weekend in dream-time, with a series of events that I may have consciously THOUGHT of, rather than dreamed, in moments of waking between periods of this dream. With the emphasis in the New York magazine article about everyone being so thin, everyone in the dream was emaciated and had minimal sexuality. Though I was "in" my character throughout the duration of the dream, it was so distant from any qualities of my actual life, save for sheer obsessivity, that I was removed from any emotion attached to "me:" not depression over my condition, not anxiety over my next drug-fix (which only served as the BACKGROUND for the events of the dream: no actual drinking or drug-taking ever occurred). Finish typing, having captured maybe 20% of the details from the dream, at 7:40AM. Should print these out for Sharon this evening.
WEDNESDAY, 3/4/09: 7:05AM: I'm a sergeant in a movie-perfect Army platoon: supervising each individual, but particularly the men in the laundry squad. I train them in using the machines, but I'm also one of the men IN the squad, turning in my own laundry and going into the drying room to check if my laundry, stacking clothes in a drying bin which the now-sergeant is in the process of rotating to facilitate other layers drying, instructing me that "You must have other items of work half-done, so that you're not coming back here when I'm working here, but you wait until you won't be in my way---and this is the way everyone in the squad will be trained." In an earlier section, I'm in charge of a car-wash area, and see a local woman muddied by a car in the street, so I direct her to take off her clothes and jump into the car-wash shower, ordering her to stand still as I wrap her in a towel, and she thanks me and smiles. There are no guns, no military exercises, only a kind of housekeeping detail around the barracks. But I'm doing very well and expect to be promoted shortly, as I expect to promote everyone below me who's doing their job, just as quickly as regulations allow. The dream seems to go on for a long time, like yesterday, with innumerable details of each type of work, soldier, and relationship. And all the details are textbook-perfect in their performance, as if each soldier and officer were a clone of my perfect self, in a movie depicting the working of a perfect unit.
THURSDAY, 3/5/09: 8:25AM: Had an elaborate dream about 4AM, but only remember a very DISTINCT fragment from much later: I'm combing my hair, and looking in the mirror I see that I have a very BUSHY head of hair EXCEPT for a bald spot on the right side somewhat larger in area than an egg, which has a thin trail of baldness in a kind of U-shape running over to the left side of my head. I'm surprised I hadn't noticed this forming THIS CLEARLY, though I had noted before that when my hair was short I could see a pinkness THROUGH the thinning hair in this area.
FRIDAY, 3/6/09: 7AM: I'm looking in my refrigerator at piled-up Healthy Heart meals. At first, I know that I have to soon eat a Gala apple which is beginning to be wrinkled from long storage. Then, when I have to heat something in the microwave, I know to take out many pastry items which will be burnt if I leave them in, though in reality this is confusing the refrigerator section with the microwave oven. Then Charles is coming over to share a meal, and I have to tell him (though of course he isn't going to be handling any of the food directly) that he has to substitute the REAL course for a place-taking course that isn't to be eaten, though I know he's done this before, and will correctly interpret my signal to exchange the two items for the proper purpose.
TUESDAY, 3/10/09: 6AM: I'm watching a TV movie showing the rehearsal techniques of Keith Carradine, dressed in a very loose-fitting, Russian-type white peasant shirt that embraces his neck in a ring of material and emphasizes the slope of his shoulders and the sexy thickness of his chest. The camera is below waist level to his right front, and he clasps his hands behind his neck and sensuously gyrates his torso, saying, "I have to do this three times a day," as he inhales, inflating that marvelous chest, and thrusts his pelvis forward in a most suggestive way. I hold my breath as the camera focuses lower and lower, and he appears to be naked beneath the shirt, and the length of his torso becomes so unreal that I think his crotch MUST be visible below the hem of the shirt, if only the camera would focus there, and there's at first a haze which gets clearer and clearer, and then the picture snaps into a porno clearness and his ENORMOUS semi-hard cock snaps into view, bent slightly toward the viewer, and of such heft that it's almost unbelievable, and I look at the image with such desire that I quickly wonder if I can freeze the frame and go get my camera and take a motion picture of this wonderful sequence so that I can jerk off to it at my leisure, vaguely aware that I can't do it NOW, since the Time-Warner TV-picture repair person will be here between 8-12 this morning. Such a wonderful, testosterone-produced, erotic dream!
WEDNESDAY, 3/11/09: 5:47AM: 1) A fragment about setting up a local "Wheel of Fortune" game, probably inspired by thoughts about the "Slumdog Millionaire" movie. 2) In a kitchen a little like 1221 Dietz, we're moving a big yellow wardrobe, that's sort of like a portable clothes closet, in front of the refrigerator, which is to the right of the back door rather than to the left, and Shelley Winters, taking the place of my mother, shouts through the back of it, "Wait a minute," and we open the door to find her, very tiny, like a little Buddha, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the closet, saying, "OK, now this is like a confessional, who wants to tell their sins?" and we laugh and tell her to come out, we have to move the closet somewhere.
THURSDAY, 3/12/09: 5:50AM: 1) I'm sitting in what may be an African camp, and for some reason it's important to take a photograph of "one mile." It may be a trail in the forest, visible from the air, or a track in a grassland; I have no idea of its significance, but it "feels" like it might be a setup for a movie tracking shot. 2) I'm following two fellows in business suits, quite young and attractive (probably based on the five dynamite gay businessmen at the Beard table with Colleen last night), who are chatting together with great animation as they walk in what looks to be a section in the northern part of Central Park. We're not really on a path, but only moss covers the very old road-like brick surfaces we're walking on, which slope steeply upward at one point, and then at another point, increasing in slope each time, until at the third time it's almost as if we're climbing the wall of a fort on which I'm afraid my shoes will slip, but they seem to have no trouble with slipping even in their business shoes, so I should have no trouble in my sneaker-type rubber-bottomed shoes, but we all three have to use our hands on the crumbly brick surfaces, hoping we won't tumble backwards on the steep slope. When we get to the third summit, we've attained a kind of mesa-top in the grassy park, and I'm surprised I'd never seen this section of Central Park before, and have the vague feeling of being out of it because their conversation really hasn't included me, though they're quite aware that I'm right there behind them as they walk and climb rapidly through the park. 3) Fragment (or semi-awake image) of sitting in Sharon's office, having said something about my childhood, and find myself staring at the floor not knowing what to say next, feeling ALMOST as if I'd just like to CRY. Wonder if I should do so, but I "wake" or come back to consciousness and the fragment is over. 4) Even fragmentier moment when I'm looking out a window at a sky that's VERY clear and blue through white clouds. A portent?
SATURDAY, 3/14/09: 1) 7:44AM: I'm walking in an overgrown garden with a friend who has a small black dackel (probably influenced by the small critters on "Extraterrestrial" last night) that keeps nosing about in the undergrowth finding morsels to eat that worry my friend. "Probably just dried dog shit," I suggest maliciously. Then the dog wanders into a puddle of water that will probably get deeper the farther it goes, and my friend goes to gather him up in his hand and take him to dryer land. An earlier segment forgotten. 2) 8:03AM: Recall earlier segment: Someone like Susie Mead is in the back of a pharmacy run by someone like Doug that I met yesterday. As she puts the light on in a back storeroom, she goes to kiss him, but he demurs, saying, "Not in the business, you know," and she is embarrassed to admit she made a mistake. Then I ask her to put two small rectangles of toilet paper on the back of my neck for some obscure reason: either to protect it from being rubbed by clothing, or to put some medication on two small bumps like pimples that are annoying me back there. She says I should do it myself, but I retort that I can't feel in the back of my neck to make sure I put the strips of paper right where they're needed. End of segment.
SUNDAY, 3/15/09: 6:41AM: I'm about to enter the juror's room in a courthouse when Bernice stops me and asks me to tell the supervisor that she's here, but is having lunch and may be a bit late. I sit in the second row in a crowded room looking at the supervisor reading a paper, and wave my hand to get his attention when he looks up. He comes up to me with his paper in his hand and I point to Bernice's name and tell him what she told me to say. As I put my hand back to my side, I inadvertently put it through a loop of red ribbon that the young Spanish woman to my left has around her arm, and when she realizes my arms is through her loop, she looks at me accusingly, but I self-defensively think, "It's your fault I put my arm through your loop; you shouldn't have had such a big loop so close to me in these cramped seats." But I don't say a word.
MONDAY, 3/16/09: 7:25AM: It's like my life: I've got a section of a desk-like cubicle filled with things to deal with and process: bills, mailings, books, notes, and credit cards, along with a list of companies to change to my new credit card number. At the same time, somehow, I'm at a clerk's window searching through my wallet for my new credit card, going through the compartments of my wallet to find every card but the new credit card, and the clerk impatiently asks for my social-security number so that she can get my account on her computer. Then I find my new credit card under a small piece of gauze at the side of my desk. At the SAME time, my cubicle has somehow become a seat on a train or bus, and I know that the seat will be requested by the next person getting on, because our car is now crowded, and I think that I can just pile everything on the seat (which was the cubicle) into a separate plastic bag that I can process when I get the time and the space. Just like my life.
FRIDAY, 3/20/09: 7:27AM: Inspired by the panorama of interesting faces and characters on the subway ride home from the Beard last night, the dream seems to take place in a large touring car, with three or four people in the front seat, including the master of this menage as the driver. Behind the front seat is a back-facing seat, like a divan, holding four or five people with rather strange and impressive features: some with arresting eyes, a small woman with the hint of a harelip that she camouflages with coy glances and fast-moving moues, and an older son right in front of me; I'm on the left of a third row of front-facing seats. The son holds himself aloof, but I can't help thinking that he's attractive, and when his elbow brushes the front of my body, I purposely suck in my gut so that he might find a beguiling slenderness which could possibly attract him, and, happily, when I lean forward I find he's getting an erection and has partly turned toward me, though still staring thoughtfully into the distance, and seems willing to exchange fond fondles. I wake hard.
SATURDAY, 3/21/09: 4:42AM: Five or six people are establishing a 6x6 grid for photography or an off-Broadway play or happening. They sort of vote on what kind of image, color, picture, or light goes into which square, put it in, and see what it does to the total picture. Reminds me of my juggling of various tasks while Paul's here.
SUNDAY, 3/22/09: 7:38AM: I'm looking through "therapists'" magazine ads: naked men, jigsaw puzzles of naked men, sexy ads, and I wish I could find a private room where I could jerk off.
TUESDAY, 3/24/09: 1) 3:55AM: I'm dipping a sponge into the water in a toilet into which I've just flushed down my yellow, crumbly shit. The water still swirls with a few remnants as I rinse out the sponge and try to wet it in an area relatively clear of floating fragments to get it wet for cleaning my backside. Totally naked, I do this a couple of times, as if at many wiping sessions all condensed into one brief dream that repeats.
WEDNESDAY, 3/25/09: 1) 4:28AM: I'm duplicating two DVDs of an author's biography, with many stories by two authors, a task complicated by unlabeled DVDs. 2) 8:40AM: Wake with memory of a tiny fragment: a very beautiful back of a body is standing naked in front of me, and I somehow know he's into S&M, so I try running my fingernails along his leg to excite him enough to turn toward me. He starts to move away, but I intensify my pressure, hoping to get him to turn around, even to berate me.
THURSDAY, 3/26/09: 1) 6:10AM: I'm trying to seduce Andy M. from VP. What if I was jerking off? Or naked? He's not being rude, but he doesn't really seem interested. Pity. 2) 7:44AM: Possibly influenced by the fact that my stomach ached slightly when I got up earlier, this dream was centered around food. I was first somewhere downtown in a group waiting to get into some theater, when this tall dark-haired woman comes up to me and says, "Bobby, you didn't recognize me?" From her accent, I know she's from the South, and hazard a guess that she's my uncle's second wife, but I can't think of her name, and when she coaxes for a guess, finally hazard "Ann," though of course that's the name of his FIRST wife. She makes some disparaging remark, and I try to cover it by saying that all the WOMEN in the family have multiple marriages, while the MEN only marry once, and of course get THAT backward. Without transition, I'm in a large kitchen, totally unfamiliar, but somehow it's mine, because I'm hungry and feel free to find what's available to eat anywhere. Look into the refrigerator and see many loaves of sliced bread, open to dry out (as Paul always left them), but when I try to pull out a slice, they're interleaved with slices of ham and cheese as if ready for sandwiches. I look at some other food items, and finally put some kind of ground meat (like the bulbous coating around the lamb chops from the Beard which I ate after about a week a few nights ago, which I feared might make my stomach upset because of its age) onto a stove and heated it, and the fat bubbled up to make a kind of bacon-like covering on the top, for which a kitten suddenly leaped onto the table to try to snatch away, but I pushed her away quickly, and an older woman in the kitchen observed that that was the best part of it. I'd earlier complained to her that she came into the kitchen and changed everything around, making my life more complicated: the small table which contained the silverware drawer on one side had been turned around and covered with a cloth, so that I not only had to raise the cloth to find I'd tried the wrong side, but had to go to the other side to get a fork with which to eat the food I craved.
SATURDAY, 3/28/09: 6:36AM: I'm visiting an apartment that has a thick-necked dog that loves to be tickled: it will roll around on the floor in ecstasy as I tickle whatever part of its neck is upward in its thrashing. Its owner is a photographer who has the responsibility of taking pictures of the actions of the lead actor in a scene---not the settings, not the landscapes, only the actions of the lead actor. He has to coordinate his shots with other photographers who are responsible for other parts of the production, whether for a movie or television isn't clear.
TUESDAY, 3/31/09: 1) 4:31AM: Rolf's lover (somewhat patterned on Fred's James, though white) is with us as we walk down a street in Brooklyn to an area of old townhouses turned into shops. I observe that each house is just a shell of its former usefulness. We push open a door and walk up stairs to enter an apartment rather like mine at 320 East 70th Street, and I wish I had my camera along to record what that apartment looked like. We're there, oddly, to look at the stamps which are used in the business he's working for, and Rolf mentions that "He sometimes had his hands and arms just covered with stamps." They nuzzle each other as they talk about the five-hour drive ahead of us to a vacation place we're heading for, somewhere west in upper New York State, saying that Rolf will drive until he's tired, and then the rest of us will take our turns, but it won't be that bad, because the friend wants to drive along "the lake," which he's looking forward to seeing, and "We'll be there before we know it." I still think it's going to be rough, as five hours will end up about 3AM, not a happy time to be awake. 2) 7:37AM: I'm standing at the margin of a pool that's being filled, almost overfilled as the water laps over the side a bit, and then the scene shifts to a REAL seaside with wonderfully colorful fish swimming in the clear water, eating smaller fish, and exotic fish three or four feet wide open their mouths wide to swallow fish a few inches long, and the eaters get bigger and bigger, until a lacy weblike fish six feet in diameter literally floats out of the water and tries to engulf ME on the shore: I have to brush away the fringes of this net-like fish, trying to push it back into the water so it doesn't keep trying to enmesh me in its leather-like shrouds. 3) 7:37AM: Second dream memory: I'm working my laptop and suddenly (like the lightning-induced fast-photo anomaly Sunday night during the Egypt show) it turns totally crazy: coming up with a kiddie-display screen of various candies available to win with the right keys, and I try resetting, and the computer becomes a translucent plain blue with only a deep-blue start button, which when I depress it becomes, again, a kiddie-computer with a multi-colored program called SX which is totally alien to anything I've seen before. Try various buttons to get my word processor back, and nothing seems to work, and I wonder what happened. Also had a section where I'm concerned about a pimple or boil on my left scrotum, just about where it's itching me.
THURSDAY, 4/2/09: 1) 6:33AM: Extraordinary, long-lasting, infinitely seductive dream: it started with a kind of game-board display with arrows pointing in various directions, showing possible progress through a kind of fantasy landscape populated by real personalities of the quality of Clark Gable, Brad Pitt, Charles Laughton, and other Hollywood notables that one would suspect would be played by lookalikes, rather than the actual persons (particularly if they inconveniently happen to be dead). Lesser arrows indicate lesser characters, but a double-strength arrow indicates the main "winner," who in this case IS Clark Gable, in a kind of Steve-Martin-movie-spoof montage of actual movie scenes in which the subject of the dream (not really me) interacts, convincingly real-ly, with the star. The subject of the dream, almost in a "This Is Your Life" motif, moves into increasingly elaborate sets in which his fantasies are played out with ever-larger numbers of "extras" as players, interactors, and facilitators of more-gripping adventures in a dream-like realization of inmost wishes of self-aggrandizing importance and luxury. It may be that I wake, somewhere in here, and consciously desire to continue the elaboration of the dream, which becomes more colorful, lavish, "real," as the dream continues. The climax is only dimly remembered: it might be an award presentation with fabled living actors like those described (Angela Lansbury, Elton John, Joan Allen, ----CAN'T think----Jeremy Irons, Elton John) in the Drama League's mailing that I read last night before going to sleep. Wake enthralled by the magical qualities of the circumstances, even though, as I said, the central character was not REALLY me, but maybe some "new improved" embodiment of me that would be even BETTER than the "real" me, with its "ah-jay" [age] and increasing disabilities as referred to last night by Fred at the Beard when being introduced to Ahjay, the sexy Hyderabadian at Colleen's table with the group from before, from whose table, Colleen rather sadly pointed out, I was removed to sit with Fred at his downstairs table, which Fred at first didn't like, but then was impressed because we got the foods first, and had INFINITELY poured wine by the new host and even a few restaurant representatives. Wonderful evening, much wine and good food and conversation, capped by a wonderful dream, transcribed until 6:50AM. 2) 8:30AM: Arno and I are standing around in jockstraps, both getting hard, and we look at each other longingly and I say, "Could we just play with each other?" He smiles and agrees and we start hugging closely until I'm lying on top of him with his long, purple-red cock crushed beneath me, the tip just at his chin so that he can stick his tongue out and lick his cock-head, which we both find very exciting. Feelings mount in intensity even as we barely move, and I wake in great arousal which quickly fades. 3) 9:07AM: A large group of young people are standing behind the back row in a theater, waiting for the performance to begin, or maybe waiting to be seated, and we're playfully pushing each other back and forth, rather like the group in the crowded greenhouse at the Beard last night, and some of the young men are playfully touching each other, some making motions toward the ass, and a male-female couple detach themselves and move to the other side of the aisle, where the female graciously accepts a diaphanous shawl that she'd left behind in the group, and drapes it languidly around her shoulders. The group is very attractive and lively, like the group at the Beard last night, and I'm pleased to be a part of it.
BHUTAN/NEPAL DREAMS
TUESDAY, 4/7/09: 1) 1:04AM: I'm watching a TV documentary about John-John Kennedy, and he shops at a place like Versace because his mother did, and her face is superimposed on his as he shows off a good suit to his girl friend. Somehow connected with this is an Internet compendium or blog somehow connected with the New York Times and the alphabetization of articles about certain celebrities and noteworthy places, and some commentary mentions how someone like Twiggy will appear in her own right, and then her name will be repeated as part of another person's notation, and how the alphabetization can make one person seem much more "seminal" than another person. 2) 5:55AM: Snippet about maintaining computer files of lists of things to do and things done and other important items.
WEDNESDAY, 4/8/09: 1) [Actually 10:10PM Wednesday.] I'm trying to cheer up a friend who thought he did poorly in reporting a sports show on TV, but when I show him the tape, only at 103 seconds does he make any mistake, and that a small one, so he doesn't think so strongly that he goofed. It involved rows of movie slides, and he actually won an award for coming through that complicated process as well as he did. He phoned all this friends to watch it again, since it was being rebroadcast now. My stomach is upset from going to bed too early after dinner. 2) 12:59AM: I'm reading a printed play by Shakespeare, with a very complicated plot, made worse to understand because it appears to be abridged. Also, it's a library book, and I have to take care to remove orange seeds and crumbs of breakfast roll from the pages. Servants are plotting to uncover the murder of their master by means of an elaborate trap, and the ending is never attained, though some sections are read more than once. 3) 2:30AM: I'm supposed to meet Charles for a breakfast at a well-known business-breakfast place at the foot of Commonwealth Street in southern Manhattan. I get off a subway near a corner I know fairly well, but I'm not EXACTLY sure how to get there, and there's a taxi waiting, so I get in and give the address. Lots of traffic make the going slow, so when I'm about a block away I say, "I'll get off here." I hand the driver a $10 bill for the $2.60 fare and say I want $7 back. He fumbles in a pile of papers and give me a dollar with a green piece of paper underneath that I assume is a five, so I'm about to argue that he still owes me a dollar when I look at the paper underneath and it's a CHECK, worthless without anything written on it, and I think he's made a mistake. Hand it back to him and he seems seriously to apologize for making a mistake, and rummages again in his wallet and hands me a larger packet of paper: but this is ALL junk: advertisements, business cards, receipts for things bought, worthless filler. "I want $7.40," I shout, thoroughly disgusted with him, and he begins acting drunk, as if he doesn't understand me, as if I'm trying to rob him, and threatens to call the police. I simply think he's waiting for me to be so delayed that I'll leave in order to make some appointment, and I'm so frustrated I don't know what to do next, and I wake, thighs still sore from trekking. 4) 4:28AM: SEX-filled dreams. As continuation of "lower-Manhattan search for an office for a specific job?" appointment, I go into a john and find a POOL with naked men available for sex: guys jerking themselves and others off, people watching, men showing muscles, tits with studs through, one strange man with two "nipples" on his stomach, and I'm tempted to join in, but go to another, even larger, place, where a guy comes away from another guy with his erection clenched in his fist as if to stave off an orgasm, and then he bends his neck and starts sucking himself off. Others display themselves as objects for sale, others just for pure auto-erotic display. I'm amazed that this goes on so openly down here and resolve to come/cum here more often. EVERY shop seems filled with naked men and incipient erections and ejaculations, a real homoerotic paradise. Wake vaguely engorged and type this to 4:33, vaguely debating jerking off, but feel that I don't need MORE reasons to feel tired, muscle-sore, and out of breath. But lovely body- and cock-filled dream. In one corner a mother tries to teach her son some water-based game, but he's already attracted to some of the libidinous action only a small distance from the family duo.
THURSDAY, 4/9/09: 1) 12:13AM: I'm evaluating different slogans for some product, and end up with a third that elegantly combines the first and second and feel very proud of it. There was much more than this to it, but I forget. 2) 4:55AM: I've gotten onto an A train by mistake, but I figure I can walk from there to where I would have gotten off had I taken the 2 or 3 as usual. Ride past the modern entrance to St. John the Baptist, only slightly amazed that Akron now has an elevated subway line, but it goes way beyond where I thought it would go, and I try to recognize the names of streets like Chessy that we pass, but still figure I can walk where I want to go when I get off at the next stop.
FRIDAY, 4/10/09: 1) before 3:24AM: I'm getting off a subway very far above the one I have to transfer to, and see someone going down a very narrow metal stairway ahead of me. I follow him down, but he gets off at an intermediate level and my train is arriving even farther below. As I descend, both hands holding firmly to the railings, I can see the head of the train pulling into the platform below me, and it's a race as I go down to get to the lowest level before the train even stops. One and part of the second car pull into the station by the time I'm low enough so that I have the confidence that I'll reach the platform just as the doors are opening, and I feel a sense of relief, because this train doesn't run very often and I don't have time to wait for a second one. 2) 3:28AM: Remembered fragment of sitting in a restaurant before a mother lecturing her children on good eating habits before a blackboard, and she's VERY loud (like Dorji trying to make himself heard by David) so that I finally pick up my plate and look for a table as far away from her loud voice as I can. 3) 3:30AM: I'm supervising a contest of blowing up balloons for some high-school or college students. One team seems to have the method down pretty well: stretch out the red balloon so that it's ready to be filled with air and then blow concentratedly into it while someone also records the time, in case there's a tie as regards to volume. But the other team is ludicrously inept: their cigar- or condom-shaped white balloon seems too fragile to hold together and its stem detaches at the mouth and the half-filled balloon dissolves into a cloud of what looks like cigarette smoke. This amuses that team very much, but I try to explain to them that the point of the game is to get as much volume into their balloon (could this possibly have a phallic content?) (ha?) as possible, not to dissolve their balloon into a cloud of smoke. It seems they'll never learn the point of the contest. 4) 4:54AM: Somehow Dad has moved into an apartment that's more like 1221 Dietz than any other: he has large containers of breakfast foods and staples (maybe this is influenced by the Farmhouse seen yesterday afternoon) on shelves that have hardly ever been used in cabinets in the kitchen and in storerooms we never had, and the refrigerator is full of his stuff. He acts as if this is his natural right (as, indeed, in another life it may have been) and takes it very casually, whereas I wonder how I'm going to fit in. We hardly speak, but some compromise is going to have to be worked out. 5) 4:58AM: Edgardo is visiting my NYC apartment, which isn't like any I've actually had. He's sitting on my lap, facing me, kissing me intently, running his hands through my hair and making noises of utmost passion, while I'm vaguely aware there are other people in the room: one or two men in distant chairs, and a young pudgy woman in a chair immediately to my right, who even seems to want to participate, though I want nothing to do with her. He leaves for a moment, and she reaches over to grab my face for what she hopes is a passionate kiss, but I draw away and say we have to get ready to go to Carnegie Hall, where they're having a concert production of "Stiffelio," "Oh," she says, "I just LOVE that opera." I try to discourage her by saying that, of course, on this evening of performance there may not be any seats at all, certainly not any good seats, still available, but that doesn't seem to cool her enthusiasm. I have no idea what's going to happen next. 6) 6:27AM: I have two columns of computer data, like newspaper columns, and somehow they're intermingled and I have to separate them, which is more complicated than I first thought. 7) 6:31AM: For the SECOND time, I kiddingly punch some elegant woman lightly on the shoulder as a joke at the end of dinner, and this time her entire GLASS of drink spills out of her hand onto her dress. She tries to minimize the trouble I've caused her, but I can't BEGIN to express my regret over having done such a STUPID thing!
SATURDAY, 4/11/09: 1) 2:20AM: Paul C. and I are riding an East side subway that I suspect might be going out of service at 14th Street. It stops at 14th, but there's no announcement of any kind, and many people stay on, and Paul and I are somehow separated, trying to find out if the train will continue north or not. Then the doors close and it starts north again, and I'm of two minds: it will continue as usual, and "Oh, I remember this from before: it stops (somehow like the E does at the World Trade Center southern terminal), and then goes into a little awkward cul-de-sac from which you have to walk a long way to get back to any regular platform from which you can transfer to a regular northbound train. I look around for Paul to tell him this, but can't see him, and then the train DOES stop again, and the doors open, seemingly at the end of the same station, but there's STILL no "terminal hiss" of a final stop, and STILL not everyone gets off, but they ARE all beginning to look confused. But there's STILL no announcement of any kind, and the doors close AGAIN, some people standing undecided against them, and the train goes into a totally foreign part of the station and here we DO have to get off, and I stand on an almost empty platform with no sign of Paul anywhere, wondering if he somehow stayed on the train, or got off earlier, but I try to calm myself by thinking he knows the city very well by now and can get to my place from wherever he happens to be, and thank goodness we have nowhere we must be this evening. 2) A very famous actor is appearing in a play with which I'm somehow connected, maybe as an associate producer, and I'm concerned that he'll give a good performance even for a mediocre audience. But then the presentation sort of changes into a movie, and he's waiting for someone to show up, and the camera focuses very close up to his face, which has very little makeup so that you can see tiny bristles of unshaved hair on his cheeks and chin, surprisingly red, and his face is very appealing, and I'm glad we have him, and I can only hope the audience appreciates that they're looking at the REAL Isaac Von Kleist, right here (paradoxically) on their stage! 3) 3:51AM: I'd tried fixing two aquaria by lining the bottoms with black plastic sheets with white cotton balls on top, but clearly this isn't working, so I'm going back to zero by taking tongs and removing the soggy cotton balls, hoping not to break through the plastic at the bottom and letting contamination through to the bottoms of the glass aquaria. I'm not sure what I'm going to do next, but I'm hoping to hit on some technique that works, short of throwing both things out.
SUNDAY, 4/12/09: [SATURDAY, 4/11/09] 1) 10:02PM: I'm getting ready to have a haircut, sitting in the chair with the sheet around my neck, when the barber gets a phone call from a relative, saying that a cousin has to find a place to stay in the US or he'll be deported. I just MUST pee, so I tell someone to tell the barber I'll be back in just a minute, and run across the street to my backyard at 1221 Dietz (a lot of these!) to pee, looking down at my brown loafers in the squishy mud, and my very strange argyle socks, thinking what a relief it is to pee as the first stream leaves my cock, and wake suddenly, relieved that I haven't wet the bed with my urgency. Finish typing at 10:08PM. 2) 2:32AM: A huge black soprano is singing in a fabulous production of "Cinderella" at the Met. I'm sitting on the aisle in the fifth row, and at one point I'd closed my eyes to listen to the music, which suddenly seemed very close, and she's standing right next to me in the aisle, pointing to person after person as she sings "You, You, You, You" with each broad gesture. At a later moment she disappears behind what looks to be an enormous bear rug that covers the entire bottom of the proscenium, and a mysterious red smoke rises from within and everyone expects some spectacular coup de theatre, though it's only a slight change of scene. She continues to try to address each member of the audience individually with her powerful voice and acting, and the entire performance is totally electrifying.
MONDAY, 4/13/09: 1) 3:47AM: I'm looking at an illustrated book, but the illustrations are so numerous, and so well connected, that it becomes an animated flip-book, and then an actual animated movie. It focuses first on a beautiful young woman, rather like the star of "Titanic," who starts innocent and wide-eyed, but gradually falls in love with the male of the film, who appears as handsome when he is acting lovingly, but as a monster, for example as a lobster, when he tries pursuing her underwater when she doesn't want to be pursued, or an even darker kraken-like monster with filimentous arms hanging down from a pustular globular body when he lets her slide even farther under the surface of the water, but then some of the arms become rescuing hands which pluck her to the surface so she can take a life-saving gasp of air. All very Disney-like, yet menacing, as Disney can be. 2) 5:47AM: So CLEAR in the dream and so HAZY now: great attraction, great achievement, great satisfaction over some kind of physical production or emotional relationship, with people finding each other in fruitful cooperation and love, with joyous faces expressing utmost bliss, but with all the connective dream-tissue totally missing. Like a verbal movie in another language. An experience in FEELING impossible to convey VERBALLY. Happy people after tortuous tests---maybe me after each day of the trip that starts with anxiety and ends with amazement that so much could happen in a single day, with so many varied sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. People's stories: Bill's three wives; David's older woman who just wanted to be held, nothing sexual, and that's what happened and both were blissfully satisfied; Gloria's bastard husband; Carolyn's painful divorce after 40 years; various grandmothers' enjoyments of their grandchildren's accomplishments; trips and meals and lives and marriages. Overflowing abundance; maybe even Buddhistic multiple lives. Shops and traffic and little boys digging into their pockets to see if they have enough coins to get them through another night, beautiful little faces taut with uncertainty and fear. My breathlessness causing me to take another Diamox.
TUESDAY, 4/14/09: 5:40AM: 1) I'm going to a movie at a house just north of 72nd Street and have taken a subway to get there. Visit someone like Avi, who still lives in that neighborhood, and he cautions me that I'm going to be late, so somehow I find myself back in the subway station, and now know not to take what looks like the regular exit, which leads to a tunnel that goes across the street in a piss-smelling passage, and then I'd have to climb a flight of stairs to get back to the street level. Rather I should take what looks like a freight entrance, blocked by a heavy double-hinged wooden door that swings on a pivot if pushed from one side, but it leads directly to the street, down a steep step, just at the theater. When I get to the entrance, I'm somehow INSIDE the lobby, and look out the doors to see crowds of people outside pushing to get in, and I think, "This movie is much more popular than I would have thought." Earlier I passed through the back lobby of an off-off-Broadway theater to see about five or six people in the few hundred seats and think, "THEY aren't going to have a very big audience for this matinee," and observe that the movie is going to be much more crowded, and I'm glad I'm already inside, rather than outside waiting for the crowd from the previous showing to push their way out so that the others can come in. 2) I'm looking for a snack, maybe for the movie, above, and see a tiny stall with a few small items on the counter. One of them is a tin box of foreign candies with a name like Vis Ely, which I have no idea how to pronounce, but I think I've seen them advertised as being very tasty, so I push my way through the crowd to try to get a salesperson's attention and ask for "mumble mumble" and they say, "Oh, you mean Van Beek?" It's NOT what I meant, but I figure it may be more popular, and better, so I say yes. They present me with a small cardboard box open to show five or six twisted masses of white and black substances that might be chocolate, which have fallen out of their crimped-edge cupcake-like paper holders and are now in somewhat of a jumble, and they say, "There are only five or six pieces, and it's just under $5." Well, all I have is a $5 bill, and I certainly don't want to pay about a dollar for a rather insubstantial piece of candy, so I don't buy it. At least the tinned candies would have numbered twenty at minimum, and would have lasted a longer time.
WEDNESDAY, 4/15/09: 2:53AM: 1) Mom has told me to dust everything thoroughly, and as I run a dirty dustrag over the tops of window frames, I'm amazed how dusty they are, showering dust down on the objects below them. I'm in the bedroom at 1221 Dietz, and the tops of the windows are covered with some kind of shelving paper to protect against the dust, but it's become detached and fragmented with age, and I'm careful to keep undisturbed what's in place, sorry that in some places it's the bare wood, as if water-damaged. I go over other objects in the bedroom, but the details are much less clear. 2) "I'll be ready in two minutes." I jotted this down before filling in the first dream, but any details here have gone out of my mind: a vague memory says it was something about personal grooming, like combing my hair or trimming my beard. 3) 5:29AM: I'm having lunch at a table crowded with celebrities, and Michael York extends his hand and greets me by name. I express amazement that he knows me, and he says something like, "After all, we shared that program at CEO," and I have no idea what he means. 4) I'm walking on a beach and see a tiny stream of water going toward the ocean. There's a complicated structure right at the mouth of the stream, and what appear at first to be ants scurrying around this structure. But on looking closer, I'm astounded to see that these are tiny PEOPLE who are moving around a miniature village at the mouth of this stream. I bend to look closer, not REALLY sure of what I'm seeing, and just then a wave from the ocean rushes in and destroys whatever it was I'd seen. Without transition, I'm standing on a city street in a mud-roaded village in, maybe, India, and see a cascade of water rushing down a cross-street, starting with a small onrush, but followed by a greater volume of water that increases the water in the road from maybe two inches to maybe a foot. Other villagers gather and look apprehensively up the road, seeming to know that these mysterious waves come in a series, and sure enough, over the top of the hill, comes another crest of clear, roiling water, which rushes down the hill to an intervening valley, and then rushes up the hill on which we're standing, covering the road with the same pattern of water: first a low-level inconvenience, then a high-level flood. I wish I had my videocamera with me, because this looks like a truly amazing natural phenomenon, and I look forward to finding its cause.
FRIDAY, 4/17/09: 5:12AM: A group of us, some from this trip, have phoned ahead for a Budget Rent-A-Car in some small town in Ohio, and we get there by bus to find a number of parking lots around the station, and somehow I'm expecting to recognize "our" car, but it doesn't seem to be there. Many of us have different ideas of what to do: a number go down a trash-filled stairway to get to some kind of office, but I figure that's not the way to find our car. Look through more and more parking lots, but can see no sign of a Budget Rent-A-Car vehicle. Doesn't at ALL occur to me to look for the local OFFICE, though I DO think that if we can't find it soon, I can call the number on the receipt and ask how we're supposed to locate the car. I never do rejoin the rest of the group, not knowing where they are, and for all I can tell they may have found the car and driven off without me. Frustrating, but I'm managing to handle it without panicking.
SATURDAY, 4/18/09: 1) 4:10AM: I'm trying to help someone to fit some kind of appliance into his mouth which involves drilling a small well between the two lower central incisors. I have only a tiny bit of drill, like a little interdental brush, to which I attach a drill with a bit like the end of a pair of pliers. It doesn't work at first, only slips, and then for a bit I fear that I've drilled the v-shaped wedge one tooth to the RIGHT in the mouth, but then the appliance seems to fit OK and everyone is happy. 2) 4:57PM (yes, PM): I'm in the company of a slightly ditzy woman, and we'd supposed to have had a business meeting of some kind, but it was cancelled at the last minute. So it became a question of what to do for the rest of the late afternoon and evening. "We could go to a movie and then you could get me home to bed in a taxi," she muses. I know she doesn't mean that WE would go to bed, only that the movie would end late enough in the evening that it would be TIME for her to go to bed. "OK," I said, and rehashed some of a conversation we'd had before, almost in rehearsal for this moment, "There's the new comedy at the Rialto." "You know that Paramount only issues duds in February," she remonstrates. I knew nothing of the sort, but I continue: "Then there's the series finale of some trilogy at the Something Else." "I'm not in the mood for that, and anyway I didn't like the first two of the series." "Well," I say finally, "there's always Radio City Music Hall." She looks at her watch, does some mental calculations, and decides that's a possibility, and quickly pulls the door open so we can start on our evening, even though I'm not quite sure what our dinner plans will be.
MONDAY, 4/20/09: 1) 12:36AM: I have trouble even remembering how it STARTED! I'm teaching a class in basic mathematics to some VERY simple adult students by playing Monopoly and then adding their money to see who won. Class started at 6:30PM and should have been over at 8PM, but it's 8:10 and I'm still trying to show the first student the basic principles: count the number of ones, multiply it by 1, and put the number at the head of a column. Then count the number of 5s, multiply by 5, add that result to the column. Repeat for 10s, 20s, 50s, 100s, and 500s. But more time goes past and the task seems impossible, though the students seem to incrementally understand and make infinitesimal progress toward the mathematical understanding which is the point of the class. But as it gets later and later, I tell those who can't stay to just take the money home with them and we'll try to find the right answer during the next scheduled class session. As some students are leaving, I see that Marj, who I called to help out in some way, arrives, and sympathizes with me that this is, indeed, a very difficult situation, "Not to mention," she says with a smirk, "that some of the students seem more than naturally interested in you." In fact, some have been making overt sexual suggestions, and I say something like, "If you ever wanted me to learn the lesson that reality isn't logical, linear, or predictable, and can't be written about as if it were, I absolutely agree with you." Other people arrive, dressed as characters from a 30s Lena Horne movie, and proceed with a torchy song on a stage that appears from nowhere. I'm still trying to make sense of things when a very attractive male student comes up behind me and starts gyrating my hips with his hands to rub against his increasingly hard cock in his loose-fitting, almost zoot-suit-like, trousers. I exclaim to Marj that this has REALLY gone beyond the bounds of ANYONE believing it. There were MANY more details that I've just not had time to recount: the believability of the classroom and the puzzlement of individual, mostly female, students about the process of adding columns of figures, though each seemed to know what multiplication meant, at least. Then the "descent" into illogic took MUCH longer in a much more "logical" way. And Marj entered the action in many more ways. But the end came when I just couldn't handle the sexual assault, and woke in a state of amazement, wondering what combination of food, drink (of which I had none alcoholic since the beer at lunch), or circumstance could have concocted such a phantasmagoria. Dropped the flashlight from my mouth at one point, and must return to file 4 now at 12:48AM. 2) 5:08AM: Vivid memory on waking, now all traces gone: something that happened in the 30s, as in an old movie: nothing dramatic, nothing about travel, nor school, nor family, nor frustrations. Sit and pee and try to get it back. Something about genteel, old-fashioned manners---maybe something from Ohio. Shit a tiny bit, but no morsel of dream is forthcoming from my mulish memory by 5:14AM.
TUESDAY, 4/21/09: 1) 11:25PM Monday night: I'm working on a project to change the main road entering our community. Most monetarily-minded citizens want a row of shops to make money for the town, but a number of people and I really want a GREENWAY entrance, and have approved plans accordingly, and we expect difficulties with our opponents, but we figure we have eco-"right" on our side and are confident that we'll win. 2) 4:20AM: Someone like Regina Sokol and her crew are helping an old European institution label their exhibits. Two old anthropological museums merged about a hundred years ago into a large new modern facility with endless rooms of new storage cabinets ready for new acquisitions, and I envy their expansion capabilities. She and her team are making large signs in English with fluorescent Magic Markers for Insects, Mammals, etc. I go out to an old men's room near the entrance, where the remnants of the two old institutions remain intact. In a seemingly connected dream I'm watching old movies of "the famous pianist Mia Slavenska," maybe the only intact film of her hundred-year-ago career, where she's dressed all in white, in elegant black-and-white profile, playing the piano, but seeming to make fun of herself by making a mistake and shaking her head and starting over, and by getting up, as if confused, and leaving the piano as if she didn't know what she was doing there. Every so often her foot would kick out, because she was playing some famous old Mazurka by Chopin to which people were in the habit of dancing, and she was gently spoofing the custom to dance while playing this piece. This beautiful crisp print made me want to see more artifacts from this great old museum in some Slovakian or Slovenian city.
WEDNESDAY, 4/22/09: 1) 10:17PM: A group of us have stopped at a London airport in order to transfer to another airline to continue with our trip (like us in a few days in Delhi). I insist on getting a certain car, but a trouble-making woman wants something different, so I have to tell her to shut up and do things my way, or get her own car. She goes along with me. We meet a sexy guy, and she wants to have sex with him. Though I'm sure he cares for her, I let them decide it between themselves. Other complications about timing or accommodations ensue, but I forget the details at this point. 2) 2:49AM: I'm dating both Mildred and Jean Harlow, both of whom are young and very attractive and very jealous of each other because each suspects I'm dating the other. It's 1:30AM and I decide I want to talk to them, and both their lines are busy. It's SO unlikely that they'd be talking on the phone at that hour that I conclude they MUST be talking to each other, and I wonder how they found out about each other and what that will do to our relationships; I'm VERY worried about this. Without transition, I'm about to leave for a trip and get a bulky envelope from the last company from which I'd gotten slides processed: they'd gone through their files and found copies of old slides that they forwarded to me. I open the envelope, go through papers stapled to the front and the back of the first and the last of about twenty slides, and recognize the very long "panoramic" slides I'd taken a few years before of some Bavarian castles. I know I'd had them complete from the past, and when I get back from the trip on which I'm about to depart, I'll have to go through my files of slides and find ways of interpolating these duplicate slides, and wonder why exactly I got them at THIS time. 3) 4:18AM: I'm working at IBM, looking for a place for lunch, and realize there's no longer a big cafeteria in the basement but only a fast-food counter on the main floor. I figure a hamburger is all I want, so I go over to find the four guys who are working there just goofing off: one of them has his shirt off and is displaying an admirable six-pack under taut, tanned flesh, shouting to draw attention to himself, and he and his three comrades are on a lower level engaging in a rough-house variety of soccer or football, while everyone waiting for food is shouting down that they want some attention up here. Finally their supervisor arrives and fires all of them, replacing them by a curly-haired woman in 30s makeup who's busily putting huge slabs of frozen hamburger and what look to be very thin-cut steaks on the grill, and she's also starting an assembly line of desserts that includes a very artificial-looking strawberry shortcake that's more color than quality. I figure we'll all be served eventually, but I sure admired the one guy's midsection. 4) 5:19AM: I'm dressed in a Japanese kimono and walk onto a stage full of oriental instruments to take up a mallet and bang an enormous gong to start the stage production, embarrassed when the mallet vibrates among the metal objects on the stage floor, causing a tiny after-effect that I hope doesn't ruin the impact of the initial resounding bong. I crouch in a submissive posture as the performance begins around me.
THURSDAY, 4/23/09: 1) 1:38AM: I've insulted someone so enormously she refuses to ever speak to me again, yet I don't even know what I did that was so terrible. Other details, vivid at the time, now forgotten. 2) 4:23AM: I'm cleaning the area below the kitchen sink in a very old apartment, or maybe even again 1221 Dietz, and come across many rotting shoeboxes filled with junk, some with old letters bearing three-cent postage stamps that I debate the trouble of tearing off and cataloging. Lots of glasses to be arranged, including one heavy-bottomed one with a large chunk missing from the bottom, which I decide can be thrown away. At the back of the area, much of the stuff is piled on top of accumulations of plastic bottles filled with water, like my HH bottles, or even like the plastic bottles on this trip.
FRIDAY, 4/24/09: 3:48AM: I'm wanting to make sure we can stay in the same vacation cottage next year, and think to ask the host if we can leave bedding and towels to make sure we get the same place. In another section, I want to make sure we get the same seats in a theater, also, and want to put something on the seats to ensure everyone knows they're ours when we return next year.
SATURDAY, 4/25/09: 1) 3:58AM: I'm in a little village where the inhabitants are dedicated to forming sentences briefer than the first sentence, somehow ending with the word "I". Everyone takes this very seriously, as if it were a religion, and I'm willing to learn how to live here. 2) 5:24AM: Odd fragment of a man-beast on his hands and knees in a cage who'd managed to grab the end of my pencil in his teeth, and no matter how hard I pull, he just won't let go, his leonine head being tugged back and forth as I try to twist the pencil-end out of his mouth. I console myself that the most I can lose is the eraser off the end of the pencil. Note dream and type it out at 6:28AM.
END OF BHUTAN/NEPAL DREAMS
SUNDAY, 4/26/09: 9:10PM: I'm working with someone like Morgan Freeman, and it involves placing bookmarks near the ends of books, like just at the next-to-the-last pages. The publishing company we were working for had some interest in our doing this accurately.
MONDAY, 4/27/09: 3:48AM: I'm following my tour group into some kind of cave in which we're going to have a lecture about the history of something inside, but I miss the group as they enter, so I take what I think to be a likely entrance and go underground in the hopes of hearing where they are and joining them. Go down a side ramp that spirals close to a wall, rather than taking the central path down, still hoping not to get lost. Hear voices somewhere, but have no idea how to get to them.
TUESDAY, 4/28/09: 1) 3:19AM: I'm in a prison camp that's something like the one in "Bridge on the River Kwai." Oriental prison guards are making us work, but I want to give them trouble by shirking and making them torture me in ways that overseers can't detect, which frustrates the guards and thus makes me somehow "win" over their system. They get very angry at me, but I show my contempt for them by enduring whatever punishment they throw at me. Some of this is happening in caves, having to do with deprivation of food and water, and yet I'm managing to endure whatever they throw at me, rather like I take pride in whatever OAT scheduled for us to do that I could manage without getting sick doing it. A writing component was also involved, as if some kind of international tribunal would eventually read about my treatment and I'd somehow be vindicated, again in a WAY like my putting my journals onto my website to be read by the people I'm describing, regardless of how good or bad my opinion of them might be. 2) 8:55PM: I've either moved to a new phase of life, or I've died and gone to an after-life world. A mentor is trying to dress me for a kind of audition: I'm already wearing a tight pair of white pants, which seems acceptable to my "peers," who look on as I experiment with various items of clothing, and I'm tempted to ask what the situation is here for homosexuals, as three young men are making rather snide remarks about me in secret, but I can't decide if they just find me amusing, or are making fun of me, or are giving me a hard time because I'm gay and they're not. The main item of contention is a tight white shirt. It may be one that I brought with me from a long-past era, when I was thinner, because the shirt can be buttoned, but barely, and they all laugh at the possibility I bring up that I wear a corset (which thought passed through my mind today, thinking of how Mildred keeps insisting I'd look much better if I lost "my belly," but I don't think she'd approve the idea of my wearing a corset), but I DO button the buttons and pull in my gut, and it doesn't look TOO bad, to me, anyway, and I think to put it to a vote of my peers, but they all simply think it's too tight, and I'm trying to figure out exactly what's WRONG with it being too tight, if I'm not actually DISGUSTING in appearance, or LAUGHABLE, because I think it would help in my "audition" if I were really SEXY. Wake with the situation still indeterminate.
SUNDAY, 5/3/09: 1) 4:40AM: I'm being trained by a salesman on a rural route in southern Ohio, and for long time he's been keeping mysterious notes in a large, ragged notebook. When he's about to turn the job over to me, he holds up the notebook and it turns out that each page is labeled with the name of a town on our route, and it's a list of grocery stores, gas stations, delis, or other places where we can use a bathroom. Some of the numbers are just one or two digits, and I figure these aren't phone numbers, but just addresses, or some kind of code that will let me into the john. He hands it over and I look through it to make sure I understand his handwriting and codes. I'm sorry to have to be doing this on my own now, but I'll have to start planning to turn it over to whoever will eventually take MY place in this lowest-level job I've ever had to participate in. 2) 6:55AM: Continuing the rural tradition, I'm living in a ramshackle cottage in the boondocks, but I have a stack of tasks that I have to do at a temp job at IBM, and I have to go there to pick up my paycheck for the past month's salary, since I figure I can't really phone to have them mail it to me, or ask someone else to bring it to me. I'm about to leave, and usually my key, removed from the bottom lock, locks the door to the house in which I'm renting a bedroom, but this time the door doesn't lock because, apparently, there's another renter's key in an UPPER lock, and I don't know what to about that: find the renter and say that it's his responsibility if the door isn't locked? Take the key out and leave it on the table near the door? Ask the owner what to do? But no one's around, and I stand just outside the door, irresolute. Sort of like I'm feeling this week after returning from an exhausting trip and feeling weaker and lazier than usual.
MONDAY, 5/4/09: 6:28AM: I'm unpacking from a trip and come across large sheets of stamps that I got from some place like the Netherlands: they're pairs of stamps, for the most part, with varying quantities of selvage and borders around them. I have only a half-sheet of album page on which to display them, and try to arrange four or five different values of the same set on the page so that they'll be right-side up, in value order, and keep as much of the "fringe" as possible. The final pair makes up almost an entire pane, with attached pieces that make almost a second pane, but I just don't have the room to place them on the page, so I debate removing the remnants of the second pane altogether. Probably the sort of problem I'll hit when I try to display the souvenir sheets I got from Bhutan on the last trip.