DREAMS of 2009 2 of 3
TUESDAY, 5/5/09: 5:13AM: I'm waiting for Charles at some place like the Metropolitan Museum. We're supposed to meet at 2PM, but I have to go to the john. Look around for a men's room, and in various hallways find two women's room, but no men's room. Finally end up outside in a kind of courtyard, where I see an office which has people lined up outside waiting to get in, and I assume THAT's the johns, but when I finally get through the door, a woman ushers me to a little side room that's labeled Men's, but what is inside is a woman at a number-giving machine who brusquely hands me a slip of paper with a number on it. I then go outside to sort of insinuate myself into one side of a line of men waiting to get inside another door, thinking I might be able to get ahead of some of these people, and do get into the room fairly quickly, but this is only an anteroom to a room with many chairs, not all of them filled, and I realize these are only armchairs, not johns, in which men are STILL waiting. I'm glad I have a magazine, and start reading, but then I'm called into another room where men are sitting in WICKER chairs, and though I find a seat ahead of others and start reading again, I realize that people are being called in the order in which their tickets were given out, and that I'll just have to wait my PROPER turn no matter how many people I push in front of. Can't IMAGINE how such a stupid system has lasted so long: it's now something like 2:20, if Charles is waiting for me I'm not there, and even people who WORK here seem to have to wait in the same line: do they sign up for a number when they arrive in the morning? But what happens if they wait in their offices until they THINK their name will be called, and it's already been called and they weren't there? Would they just sit forever? A truly ridiculous system, and I can't imagine how it's lasted so long. The dream is clearly based on my evaluation of the long ride from the Delhi Airport to the Hotel Ibis on the Nepal trip, allowing only a few hours sleep, with almost two hours taken by just getting to and from the hotel, when there are many closer hotels that would cut down travel time. AWFUL!
WEDNESDAY, 5/6/09: 6:21AM: I'm walking toward an intersection, maybe in London, and notice that two entrances to the intersection are blocked off by large black cars, as if some dignitary is going to pass privately, without any conflicting traffic. As I cross the intersection, I glance to one side to see a Rolls-Royce speed toward the intersection just as another black limousine enters from a right angle and is hit by the Rolls-Royce: evidently the roadblock didn't work for one, or maybe both, the vehicles involved in the accident. I think to stay around to report what happened, since I'm the only one on the street, but people are concerned only about those injured in the accident: one man, bleeding only slightly from the head, is led toward a stretcher on the street, and in the distance someone from the other car is similarly treated. I don't recognize any of the victims.
MONDAY, 5/11/09: 9:30AM: I'm in the process of cleaning things up in an apartment that has a basement, rather like 1221 Dietz, with piles of things to be put into wastebaskets, or onto piles of things-to-do, or stored in various places. Of course this reflects my "need" to put things away in my OWN apartment for the past two WEEKS! A coda follows in which I'm in the bathroom of a gym, and a member is dropping his used towel on the floor, and I remark, with all the calmness I can muster, that "There are containers for used towels all over the place, you know." I go out to see other towels strewn about, and resist picking them up myself.
TUESDAY, 5/12/09: 6:35AM: I've been transported (either in reality, or in a media presentation like a TV show, play, or movie) to a new world in which everyone has "a thing" that endlessly creates situations, words, and items that must be described, named, prioritized, and controlled: "This is an equation; that is the color blue; a person who forgets has Alzheimer's; an equation that describes other equations is a meta-equation; that tastes good and is safe to eat; that hurts and shouldn't be repeated." Each person's "thing" can be completely different from anyone else's "thing," which makes it hard to communicate from one person to another about the developments they've made with their "thing." But it seems benign, helpful, inventive, even funny, and life becomes increasingly rich, though sometimes confusing. Maybe the "thing" is a computer, or a pet, or a learning system, or a would-be dictator waiting to take over every other "thing" it can control. Or maybe this is a kind of heaven and the "thing" is a kind of Aladdin's lamp that can produce anything, like the kitchen in "Star Trek" that can combine molecules to produce any known food. Or unknown food. Progress seems limitless.
WEDNESDAY, 5/13/09: 6:40AM: I'm sitting on a chair in a rather rundown apartment, visiting someone I barely know, and a rabbit peeps out from under the chair. I start petting it, and it comes out from under the chair to reveal that it has a head on its other end that's rather more like a cat than a rabbit! This amazes me and I remark about it, but the owner of the apartment dismisses it as the most common thing in the world.
FRIDAY, 5/15/09: 4:22AM: A daredevil is taking off from the deck of an aerostat in a high wind, where everyone is saying he's crazy to be taking off on his own. But he sails free from the ship and turns over in his foil, but manages to right himself out of sight of anyone on the ship and succeeds in landing safely. In the same sense, someone leaps from the ship and catches on, trying to win a prize, but the judges deem that his jump is interrupted by his piggy-backing on the other's foil, though he insists that he's covered the most "points" in his descent and should win some kind of prize, which is open to wild debate.
SUNDAY, 5/17/09: 8:15AM: Dennis and I are spending at least a weekend in a sort of bed and breakfast in a village outside London. He's rehearsing for a presentation at a kind of audition house in the town, and I've heard the story he's going to tell, and I'm trying to advise him to be casual, slightly funny, and very American in his presentation to stand out from the local competition. I've had to sort of scrounge for my breakfast, taking vegetables from a large stock the hostess has obviously raised from her own gardens: arrays of cabbages and lettuces piled around her kitchen work-sink, dozens or even hundreds of seedlings in small plastic planters squeezed into corners of the kitchen. I get a large metal utensil from the sink in which to prepare my breakfast, and after I eat and start washing it out, I find that it wasn't very clean to start with: small pebbles are stuck in corners, bits of old food cling to the edges, and even leaving it cleaner than the way I found it I've left remnants of old meals in the bottom and on the sides when I store it away again. Other people are around "making do" just as we are, so it seems we're behaving the way we should in very unfamiliar circumstances.
MONDAY, 5/18/09: 1) 5:40AM: I'm dining in an extraordinarily elegant (and no doubt extraordinarily expensive) Japanese restaurant, seated comfortably (thankfully) at a table with someone next to me who seems to be a stranger, but the place across from me is empty: it seems my friend didn't show up, but somehow I'm expected to eat both portions of food to be served to the table. I'm not familiar with any of the dishes, though some seem that they might be as exotic as the "baby dumplings" served to a woman who wanted to preserve her complexion in the movie "Three Extremes." I have the first few dishes which have very little volume of food, but the courses keep coming and I wonder how long I'll be able to stuff them into my mouth without overflowing, literally, with food. Three china and crystal drinking utensils are placed in front of me, and I think that I'm supposed to pour what may be sake from an elaborate china tower into a crystal bowl-like container, but when I pour about a quarter of a cup into the container, it appears to grow a spout, so it's obviously a SERVING dish rather than a DRINKING dish, and I try to pour it back into the tower, even though the bowl has developed a sunken corner where the liquid gets stuck, so that I have to evert the tower through 270 degrees to get the liquid out, even though most of it remains in the tower. Then the second meal appears to have begun to be served, and three plates of delicately colored disks of food are placed before me, and the geisha picks up one plate and asks me in Japanese if I'd like some of this, please? I ask her what it is and she replies only in Japanese, but when I make it clear I'd like to hear the name in English, she shyly asks the person behind her, some sort of head mistress, who responds in a whisper that she relays to me: "Locust." "Ahhnh," I say, partly respectfully, partly disgustedly, trying to restrain the latter emotion, and it looks like a kind of pate, so maybe it's only locust livers, or it's so finely melded with some kind of non-insect filler that it might not "taste" like locust at all, but I'm filling up and can't possibly survive more than five or six more courses of equally mysterious food before I can gracefully leave this house of the most exquisite torture, for which I'm paying extortionary amounts of yen. 2) 8:20AM: I'm working on a computer at IBM, printing out a very abbreviated dump of a test of a program I'm working on, and it's followed by an unknown graph labeled "Ceosico Survey," which some clerk, passing by my desk, notices and takes off for some summary file that the office is maintaining. I notice that the printer paper had a dark band at the top, with lines running across as if it were a tablet or yellow pad. I seem to be considerably younger than I am now.
THURSDAY, 5/21/09: 5AM: I'm in the middle of an enormously productive writing session (I have no idea of the SUBJECT of this writing) when I realize that I'm not keeping track of the order of the slips of paper that I'm writing on, and that it'll be difficult to sort out the order if I continue to write without going back and numbering the slips of paper on which I've written. The first 12 or so pages are on the backs of pages that are already numbered 1 through 12, so it's easy enough to transpose the numbers from the back of the sheets to the front. The next 20 or so pages I've written on wedge-shaped pieces of paper that I'd cut skewly from another small set of printed pages, from something like a New Yorker magazine, which had, for some reason, been printed with varying degrees of empty space in triangular areas, which got smaller as the pages progressed toward the back of the magazine. These pages were also numbered on some, but not all, of the wedges, so it was easy enough to write encircled page numbers on the tops of these wedges (rather like numbering the unnumbered slides interpolated into the previously numbered slides in the Russia-China slides I organized on Tuesday evening). This took me up to a set of scribbles that I'd continued onto a set of strips of paper that I'd cut from some source material that, for some reason, I had TWO copies of, so that the strips had sequential numbers that repeated, like 15, 15, 16, 16, 17, 17, etc. So it was easy enough to write, say, 30 on the top of the first 15, 31 on the top of the second 15, 32 on the top of the first 16, etc. As I got to the end of numbering the slips I'd already written, I woke up to consider the following facts: 1) It was good of me to think of numbering the slips while they were few enough that I could remember the order in which I'd written them, without having to refer to the content to determine the order of slips that had been shuffled OUT of order; 2) It was productive for me to start writing WITHOUT considering the order of slips on which I'd written: just get the IDEAS out and THEN worry about putting page numbers on the slips; 3) Then I began thinking about what the possible SUBJECT could have been: a) a fictional story or novel, b) part of a non-fictional journal of some kind (maybe a travel document), c) the start of a PLAY, which I haven't started for a long time, but may be on my mind because I'm thinking that I might organize my current "play" folder in MC as the next sheaf of material to send, unprooofread, to Tris for the website, d) some other, new, not previously considered, subject (of fiction on non-fiction); 4) Lastly, I thought it would be a good idea to get up "now" to type up the dream, with the thoughts that followed, since the body of the dream found me in a freely productive mood and process that I looked forward to benefiting from in my coming days of "freedom" before I had to be concerned with my next trip; 5) Now, as I finish typing, I think it could also apply to finishing up the tasks waiting on my coffee table, reduced to 16 or so since I last recorded the number of them, and then the tasks beyond that: 1) going through Marj's latest package, 2) sending more material to Tris, 3) even more remote projects like starting scanning the oldest slides in order to digitize them before they deteriorate more over the passing time since they were taken. Finish typing now at 5:27AM, content to have recorded the salient features of both the dream and the ensuing thoughts.
MONDAY, 5/25/09: 3:40AM: I'm working for a custom mattress company, on my first job, for a demanding woman who's a combination of Patti Lupone and Tina Levy from Cadman Travel. She's very demanding, but she really doesn't know precisely what she wants: she wants US to tell her what's the best, no matter how much it'll cost. I'm in her monstrous bedroom, seeming to take up the whole house, and start with an enormous piece of foam which I make the mistake of trying to "break" into size, resulting in monstrously jagged edges on which the largest projections are clearly too big (larger than king-size), but the smallest indentations are clearly too small (maybe not even twin-size on length). I've wrapped a very heavy dropcloth-style burlap-texture worksheet around it to camouflage the irregular borders, but she's come in for a visit, and I'm glad my boss is here, but I keep making suggestions that might be wrong. I ask her to lay on it to see how she sleeps, and she sort of curls up and says she wants an enormous bed, but I start talking about the risks if she goes larger than king-size because then it's custom-made, and if anything happens there might be a wait for new sheets, though I don't bother to think that she's so rich she'd probably settle for a dozen or so just to start with. Keep modifying what I'm saying to meet her expectations. Strangely, a kid outside starts playing a violin in a small band outside in a corner store, and I wonder if she has soundproof windows, or if she's prepared for a serenade during the summer months.
TUESDAY, 5/26/09: 3:20AM and 4:55AM: Never had a sequel dream before! At first, my mother, looking very much like Lucille Ball, is having a fabulous costume party (the first dream's memory has largely faded), but I have to stay at home. A handsome soldier comes, who wants to go to the party, and I ask what he wants to wear. He shows me a sketch of a red satin gown, and he says he knows my mother has this, and he wants to wear it to the party. Bewildered, I get the gown and he puts it on. Then he wants a silver sari to go over it, which I get from the closet, and then a mink cape, which he puts on and goes to the party. When the military men come for him after the party, I show them a photograph of what he dressed in, and they're embarrassed and decide not to press charges. In the sequel, I'm waiting at home, having played with old games that Mom had hidden away, and I put them away guiltily when I hear her coming back. I look out the windows and see a parade of party girls following her to the door: all have remnants of the party with them, mainly balloon-like light bulbs in a number of colors, and Mom says something like, "You should have seen the decorations; they were just beautiful." I feel sorry that the party's over, and I figure she's so upset about how the party ended that she won't even bother to punish me for playing with the games that I roughly put back in the boxes in the back of the closet so she won't find I'd played with them at all. Very odd, very mixed-up dream and sequel, many of the details lost from the first one.
FRIDAY, 5/29/09: 8:10AM: I'm hurriedly dressing for a meeting or celebration that starts at noon. I fantasize they're going to have a drawing for some kind of prize, and that I have to be there to claim my prize, even if I'm not present at the very start of the meeting. Either a group like Actualism or some kind of city or state political group hosts this festival or memorial once a year, and it's a real MUST for everyone to attend. But then I'm hungry and don't want to miss the free meal which is provided (at first I think of it as an IBM cafeteria, but then it turns into a kosher Jewish restaurant), even though the place is theoretically closed this late in the morning. I go upstairs and it's mostly dark, but I see a small line forming going up a stairway to the serving area, and I join a friend on line, pushing in front of someone behind him who then pushes in front of me. He passes a silverware dispenser from which I fish first two small forks, then "sin" by touching the food part of one fork with my fingers to put it back and pick up, after other false tries, a fork, knife, and spoon for whatever I'm going to find to eat. Get a plate and two pieces of bread and look at the meat counters, dark and unmanned, but still having their open displays of logs of luncheon meats with cutting knives openly available with a long reach over the glass partitions between the sections, and think to take my own before a curled, bearded, hatted kosher meat man volunteers to get what I want, and I say, "Pastrami, please." "How much, about?" "Oh, three-quarters of a pound." He gets it for me, but it's not more than half a pound, but it's better than nothing, and I figure I can eat the sandwich on the way to the meeting, getting there quickly since it's just a few minutes after noon and I'm only a block or two away from the meeting. Have to walk in the street, against traffic, and as I finish the last bites of the sandwich, literally tasting the greasy pastrami and feeling the last bits of meat squeezed between the remains of the two slices of bread, I worry that someone passing me will cause an accident by making an oncoming car swerve too far into the opposite lane, where a car coming in the other direction will be forced toward the center by pedestrians in the OTHER lane, causing a collision. Wake, still full from my gorging last night.
SUNDAY, 5/31/09: 6:35AM: Mom and I have just returned to 1221 Dietz after an extended vacation. We'd almost denuded the house (which is more like an apartment) before we left, so even pieces of furniture (like the fold-out-typing-table desk which I've only had in NYC) are put away into closets. I'm looking through a pile of magazines, and put the unread ones where they'd always been before: in back of an easy chair in the living room, which looked bare without the pile of to-be-read magazines and brochures. Then I wanted to type, and had to decide which of the three electric typewriters which had been set up in the apartment before (one in the living room, one in my bedroom, one in a vague study which was never really located in the dream; one was my VERY old IBM heavy black keyed electric, one a "new" ball-type that was maybe twenty years old now, and the one I selected now, because it was the newest, quietest, and easiest) to use. I typed on a strange slant---the paper was somehow under the glass top of the desk I was typing on---an entire page without looking at the typed page, and when I slid it out from under the glass, I was disgusted to find there was no RIBBON in the typewriter, and I'd produced a sheet of horizontal imprints which represented each letter of the words that I'd typed. I figure I could somehow reconstruct what I'd typed from the horizontal imprints, insert a ribbon, and retype the page before I forgot what it was I'd typed. Result of typing the website trip descriptions for the two and a half hours before going to bed last night.
MONDAY, 6/1/09: 5:29AM: Wake to see a very early sunrise, to the north of the Witnesses building, just rising into the northern edge of it as I watch. In the dream, I'm climbing a hill in what might be an English town, with a young man just behind me that I consider in an original way: I think he might be cast in a particular role in a movie that someone, even myself, may be thinking of making. I think of how I'd treat the character if I were writing the movie: how I'd garner sympathy for him with the subtlest means of characterization and action. Pass a porch on which a father and son are leaving their house, and glance at the boy and consider what part I'd give him in the movie, what interaction with the young man behind me he might have: lover, crush, thief, questioner. There's something REAL about the way I'm walking, but very UNreal in the thoughts I'm having as I walk---levels of reality waxing and waning.
SATURDAY, 6/6/09: 9:25AM: In a previous dream, about 8AM, Michael Blackburn and I are taking the same laxative, even though he has the sickness that needs to be cured by a doctor using rather unconventional methods. At one point we're sitting around a table with a thin film of medication in the center of the table which we're supposed to surround by a moat of honey, which we do by dipping our fingers into a honey jar and spreading the margins of the medication with honey just inches at a time, until with a final sweep it's properly "surrounded" and we can begin to inhale the medication. Two hours later, in the dream, we find ourselves together in a two-person john, ready to start the series of shits which will empty us out so that we can sleep and begin to recover. I can hear Michael shitting in the inner room, and I'm not quite ready yet when I wake about 8AM. In this dream, Michael and I are supervising the talking cure of a person who wants to help us by cooperating in any way he can, and we all convince ourselves that the best way for him to talk the most is to put him into a small room in which the temperature is raised about twenty degrees, and our last view of him is lying on the side of a pit in which four or five large, fleshy, tree-cactus boughs have already burned through the middle, filling the room with smoke that we momentarily fear might affect the treatment badly---though we dismiss the negative thought that the heat may actually roast the poor fellow to death---but we figure we're only leaving for lunch and will be back in about half an hour, so nothing bad can happen in that short a time.
FRIDAY, 6/12/09: 9:15AM: 1) An Agnes-Moorehead-faced woman, dressed in Amish black with a bonnet on her head, stands in a crowded congregation and places herself at the far end of the aisle in which I'm sitting, as if to make sure I can see her properly, and addresses the people: "I want to prove to all of you that I'm not rich. It's true that 43 years ago I sold 3000 shares of stock (and I thought that this was useless information unless we knew the value of the stock), but even though I can live comfortably, I won't have anything left after I die to leave anyone." 2) Earlier, in a similar pew-like setting, the woman on my right is pressing against my arm (like the woman at the Met Opera last night) as if to establish intimacy, and when I stretch my legs out to relax in the seat, Ken, to my left, slumps down in his seat to extend his two plump legs and encloses my left leg in the scissors of his crossed legs. I wonder what others will think, but figure they can think whatever they like. 3) At the end, after I'd wakened at 8AM and dozed off again, I'm lying naked in bed, knowing that Mom is sleeping in the bedroom across the long hall on Dietz Avenue (though our bedrooms are switched in position), and discover that the shaft of my penis has become more sensitive: the area of circumcised skin has widened to encompass a good half of my erect cock, and when I clasp that section of skin it's particularly erotic, and I figure I can jerk off easily by playing with that segment only, and I look forward to the orgasm when I wake, debating jerking off. But get up and type these dreams. Also type dreams noted from 6/10: 8:21AM: Bus goes at 3PM as I chat in station. Massage cock to edge. "Thud" used in commercial.
SATURDAY, 6/13/09: 6:10AM: I'm leaving my office for my apartment, but I have to show some kind of office manager where my apartment is. We go through hallways on the company property and climb a stair to my front door, which I open and point inside to my furnishings, including my elk antlers, and the guy is puzzled, but has to accept the fact that this is my apartment. At another time, I have to record simple mathematical formulas that imply the company is trying to expand into my space, or rationalize my possession of the space, but I just show that the formulas DESCRIBE the space, rather than CLAIM the space, and they have to leave me alone. At another time, I'm standing naked in a gym-like shower room with a demanding erection that I'm trying to bring to orgasm, but I'm also listening at the door for someone, whether a family member or someone from the business, to discover what I'm doing, causing me embarrassment. That part of the dream has no conclusion.
SUNDAY, 6/14/09: 7:15AM: I'm in charge of maintaining company work records for groups of singers covering different types of recordings. Sometimes I put in individual names, sometimes I put in names of groups. The names, ultimately computerized, are put at the bottom of the music staffs themselves, and people are paid according to the amount of time and difficulty of musical support. I have some interaction with the people and groups themselves, and I'm pleased with the cooperation among the groups and myself and management: it seems like an ideal job for all of us, and we're all wonderfully successful.
WEDNESDAY, 6/17/09: 8:57AM: Woke at 8:37AM, the first sleep-through in ages, and lay, anxious, until 8:50AM, exactly 8 hours after I went to bed, when I got up to shit, and came back to transcribe two sections of maybe one dream. The first is (and was) vague: I'm in some kind of contest of writing or organizing that involves three or four "assistants" who, using a central array of letters and two arcs of locations or positions, when asked properly, will help the ten or so contestants to write or organize a kind of thesis or program of therapy based on the letters (which may be an anagram, or which may be arranged into a word or series of words) and locations (which produce some benefits when they are visited, or moved into a particular order, or modified in some unspecified way). The second is clearer: Maybe on a lunch break from the contest, we're directed to a messy table that turns out to be a slapdash buffet from which we can have a snack. Many of the items in the buffet have been ravaged by others eating from them: pies whose contents have been removed, leaving a crisp and tasty crust which is very savory; bowls of fruit cocktail whose remnants have been slopped onto the table around them; small food caddies that seem to have been, or are, heated, carrying a large hotdog which probably came from the New Yorker cartoon of a sidewalk vendor "reserving" a large one on the side for "special customers." I take bites from assorted platters, working my way along the now-abandoned buffet table, and when I get to two attendants, I ask "Who's the cook? I'd like to commend his pie crusts," and one of the attendants, both of whom I'd taken to be men, is clearly a woman when she replies that the cooks is out, maybe on a trip to the hospital for some reason, and I feel that I have to apologize for getting the gender wrong even though the "his" referred to the cook and not to the person I was querying.
THURSDAY, 6/18/09: 2:22AM: I working on trees on the set of a Sunday night staging of an opera at 1221 Dietz, and Mom is taking a shower as I decide to go to bed and do the rest tomorrow, and proceed through the house turning off lights.
SATURDAY, 6/20/09: 2:53AM: I'm cooking for dinner for a small group of us, boiling three pots of water on a primitive stove for three different ingredients for dinner, maybe potatoes, some pasta, and some vegetable. For some reason I have to put old folded tee-shirts around the burners, taking care not to put them too close so that they catch fire. Maybe somehow I'm just trying to make the cooking area "look nice." Mom is in bed in her bedroom at 1221 Dietz as I call for her to get ready to come out for dinner. 7:55AM: A glittering flow of silver oxide forms a fountain for some purpose. A few of us are gambling with $2 insurance vouchers which look very much like Monopoly money. A bit later, Susie Mead is a scientist, telling us that R/H means rads per hour, though I can't figure how radiation can be measured as a time rate. Still later, we're on a hilltop; above us are trees filled with orange-colored baby vultures (which even in the dream don't seem quite credible) on the ends of almost every branch. Below us is a circular trench which is also filled with orange feathers and lots of baby vultures. Then we're on a beach with lots of sand and debris flying around in a strong wind, and I realize I have my digital camera and think that maybe I should be taking pictures of some of this.
SUNDAY, 6/21/09: 9:13AM: Lots of fragments noted through the night: 1:50AM: I'm standing in a line, rather like the one for food in MAN last night, and someone tries to push in from the right, but I make a point of moving toward the right, between him and the person who had been at the end of the line, establishing my priority. But the fellow who tried to push in, as if refusing to admit of my presence, keeps pushing me up against the back of the person in front of me, keeping up an uncomfortable pressure on my back. I repeatedly reach over my right shoulder with my left hand to push against his chest, saying, "Back OFF!" But he keeps up the pressure, rather like the crazy guy on the subway Friday night who insisted in shouting at me while standing directly over me. I kept trying to ease the pressure against my back, but he never backed off. 5:18AM: I'm sitting in the back of a small plane with a cockpit very like the inside of an ordinary automobile, except that I can look out the side windows and see the wings of our plane frighteningly close to treetops and buildings, and I nervously ask the pilot, "Why are we flying so LOW?" "So the dust won't scratch the plane," the pilot replies, though I immediately think, "But wouldn't the dust be denser the lower we fly?" In another fragment noted then, a small group of travelers are being given a number of skirts: they're made of colorful, luxuriant materials, but they're quite old, so that the elastic around the tops which once would have held them up on the wearers' waists had given out, rendering the skirts unwearable tubes of expensive material. I ask for, and get, a few large safety pins with which, I think, we can secure the floppy tops of the skirts around our waists to hold them up. In addition, somewhat later, I ask for two spoons for reasons I forget, but I'm given a whole set of knife, fork, and two spoons of different sizes, from which I take only the two spoons I'd asked for. 8:46AM: I'm visiting a primitive village, seemingly somewhere in the Balkan countries, where no one speaks English and our small group of two or three speak no word of any native language. We've managed to sleep overnight in a small hut outside our hosts' house, and they come out to suggest we have breakfast before we leave on the next leg of our journey. "Fourm?" one asks, holding out his hand as if offering a small plate. I think I know the root from some other language and suggest "Bread?" He nods and smiles, then unquestionably pantomimes milking a cow. "Butter?" I say, and again he smiles, so I can confidently expect to be served buttered bread, or even toast, for all or a part of our upcoming breakfast.
WEDNESDAY, 6/24/09: 8:56AM: I'm at some kind of conference, but I got up late and am trying to get breakfast. Most of the food in the cafeteria is gone, but I see they have frankfurters, and I like the taste of those and seldom have them, so I ask the server for a very dark, overcooked one. She picks up one that's totally burnt, and I ask for something lighter. She finds a very long, floppy one, and I say that's perfect. She wrestles it onto a plate and puts it on my tray, which is taken up by someone who seems to be a manager who, realizing I'm late, says he'll lead me to a place where I can eat quickly. I follow him through a labyrinthine passage which leads, surprisingly, to a small LAKE through which he wades to get to a stairway leading to a tiered restaurant with tables in ranks towering above us. He goes up a side stairs and I lose him, but hear people I know calling my name, and figure my food's there, but it isn't, and I can't figure how to find out where he's gone, and I'm HUNGRY for the breakfast it seems I probably won't have.
FRIDAY, 6/26/09: 8:20AM: Some kind of theatrical performance ends with bodies, possibly on rafts or boats, floating past on my right: one is a slender body with an erection outlined until a thin bathing suit, and the next is a seemingly legless body with a very short trunk, and the erection here seems to stretch from the bottom of the legless torso to just under the chin, and someone with me remarks about how wonderful this sight is. These views are somehow voluntary, and I wake with an elated sense of infinite possibilities.
SUNDAY, 6/28/09: 7:10AM: I'm trying to walk to my college in London for a morning class, but I know there's no Underground that's near me that I can take (though there must BE one, somehow, even though it may involve transfers), and I certainly can't afford to take a taxi every day, but I have a vague memory that I tried walking once before, and it was just impossibly far. Now I descend from a grassy bank to the middle of an enormous park; no one else is walking there that I can get a clue from (rather like the kid in "The Reader," who's dumped off in the middle of an unpopulated woods on the road to a concentration camp by a German he's offended by suggesting that "the officer," in some terrible story told by the driver, was the driver himself, who can't face his own guilt, who walks on the road so long that it's sunset by the time he reaches the edges of the camp), so I try to orient myself according to what seem to be furrows in the grass of the park that MAY run north-south, so that if I walk perpendicular to them I'll be going roughly west, and I have the sun at my back, now in the morning, so I might be able to follow the direction indicated by my shadow, so long as it's not overshadowed by trees. Finally I can see distant buildings at the western edge of the park, so I can direct my walk toward one building that I seem to remember was on the road that I need to continue on to get to the part of the campus I must get to, even though it seems a ridiculously long distance. Then, as part of the same dream, or in another dream, I'm standing behind a long counter in a restaurant where I want to eat, possibly breakfast (again!), but I've never been in this kind of establishment before, so I don't know if I can sit just anywhere or need to make some kind of reservation to sit down; I don't know how to order: if there's a menu or just a set meal; I don't know how to pay: are there prices on a menu or just a set price, or do the servers tell you according to what you order and eat. Two or three seats seem clustered before each serving position, where an attendant seems to be constructing the meal right at the position, rather than getting the courses from somewhere else, with one lone seat between positions, where I would be uncertain how, or from whom, to order. I get up the courage to ask an attendant how this operates, and the sneering answer seems to be that if I don't know how it operates, I shouldn't be here in the first place: either I can't possibly afford it ("It would be the equivalent of your $40," one of them tells me with a frown), or I don't have any currency that would be acceptable, or that they wouldn't possibly accept any kind of credit card that someone like ME would have. I wake to feel that this uncomfortable indeterminacy seems to rule my present state: I'm tired, but I've already been in bed almost nine and a half hours; I'm feeling slightly hungover, but I've already taken four aspirin to try to cure that feeling; I'm hot and cold at the same time: it's hot and humid in the room, so I have a fan on, but though the fan cools me, it produces a feeling of being cold in my feet and on my shoulders, though I'm sweaty on my arms and chest. I might put the air conditioner on, but it will make the bottom part of the room too cold without cooling the upper part of the room enough to be comfortable. This now symbolizes my life: I'm getting things done, but there are more things to be done; I need to do specific things, but they seem to have been "ready to do" for about a week now without my actually having DONE them; I've sent things to the website, but Tris says it'll take forever to finish if I furnish material so slowly; I've caught up on my journal, but another day has passed and I haven't done THAT day yet, and I have an elaborate dream that I have to type up, not to mention keeping track of what pages I have to print, in addition to which the ribbon seems to be wearing out and I must change it soon to get a readable printed page. And it's now 7:32AM, not time to pick up the Times yet, and I'll go back to bed, regardless of the fact that I've already been in bed too long, and try to get comfortable, even though the simultaneous hot-cold temperature and humidity in the room will continue as anomalous as it has been in the last hour of being vaguely awake. So now I CAN finish typing, having at least caught up with my dreams, and my current ambivalent feelings, for the moment at least. And go back to bed, now at 7:35AM. 9:20AM: Woke about 8:50AM to the mixed feelings just transcribed in NI, and now transcribe the second dream: I'm in an office with six or eight desks in two or three rows, and I have to connect my laptop with an electrical cord that I've brought with me: a brown one like the one I take to Pierrepont Street for my slide shows. At one point I turn and find that I inadvertently put my Neo into a bucket of water! Take it out and turn it upside down to drain (as I did with my remote that I pushed off my chair arm directly into my glass of apple juice a few days ago), hoping the integrated circuits inside haven't been damaged and that the machine still works. Then try to retrieve my electrical cord---and I can't find it! Pull the rug aside and see the extension cord into which I'd plugged my cord, but my cord isn't to be seen. I do find, however, a rather pretty ladies wrist watch, but when I look around for someone in the room to leave it with, the desks have been switched from their rows to positions against the walls, and the room is now dimly lit, as if for a party, and only one woman remains at her desk: one which I don't remember from before at all. I ask her if she IS in this room, and when she says yes, I give her the watch and tell her I found it under the rug. She accepts it without comment. I ask her if she's seen my cord, and she hasn't. The dream ends.
WEDNESDAY, 7/1/09: 5:30AM: A businessman is debating participating in some kind of display, or sales, and a friend suggests he sell small ads and see if THEY succeed. They do, and another friend completes a small corner of the total picture to show that it CAN be done, and he concludes that he WILL do it, and I congratulate him for his courage and foresight. This is a VERY sketchy reconstruction of a dream that had almost vanished.
MONDAY, 7/6/09: 1:42AM: Odd dream of eating Mom's very COLORFUL vegetable soup, spoon by spoon, at 1:42AM in some European town, aware that it's an odd hour, and loving the sharp geometrical edges of each piece of vivid orange carrot, yellow pepper, white potato, red chili, green bean, and light green celery. Toward the end, a man in a car stops to stare at me, trying to get me to look at him, and I fantasize he's "auditioning" me for a part in a movie based on my concentration on finishing every bit of this soup, but he drives on before I finish. 8:45AM: I'm on a kid's TV show, watching test launches of a new kind of jet aircraft, and each one goes slightly wrong, until finally the launch is held when the man in charge has been dozing, and the launch is successful because the jet has been given time to rev up before taking off, which had been needed all along. At one point we watch a dark shadow looming closer of one of the downed jets in the surf directly in front of us, but it never fully appears as we watch. Everything is more of a cartoon, rather than bearing any weight of real loss or disaster.
SATURDAY, 7/11/09: 9:33AM: Mom has had a party last night, and there are lots of empty bottles from liquor and beer in sink, lots of dirty glasses, and in the refrigerator I recognize about two swallows of orange juice left in the bottom of a glass I put there last night. I put on two small steaks (very like the two pieces of beef I had left over from a previous HH dinner that I had for a late dinner last night) to fry in a pan with two large pieces of fat that I'd cut off the steaks, readying the excuse that this is only a very late lunch to explain why my meal is going to be so small. While the meat's still sizzling, I look through the items left on a counter, and they're mainly multiple loaves of Wonder white and wheat bread, having been ripped open for easy access, they're now going stale, so I put them, in the end, into a large plastic grocery bag rather than incorporating pairs of used loaves into one large loaf that will close sufficiently to protect them from drying out. Later, I'll have to wash the dishes which fill the sink, and I'll have to put out many bags of empty bottles. Mom doesn't appear at all, but I know she's here somewhere.
MONDAY, 7/13/09: 1) 2:50AM: Just like a black-and-white movie: I've been given the job of getting a murderer to confess, and set up a look-alike to compose music, using his killed wife's lyrics, and he confesses, lets himself be arrested, and even comes back to the railroad-car-like apartment with the police and me to celebrate his capture and likely imprisonment---it's just like watching an old TV movie: greatly detailed, dialogue complete, plotting perfect, acting competent, the villain rather patterned on Marty Sokol; me a perfect detective. 2) 7:27AM: A young lover and I are visiting some very small European country, and we spent the previous evening alone in vaguely the same area: we both went to a movie theater that showed three different movies from the area, he saw one, I saw another, all rather boring; he walked to the south shore, I walked more in the north, going to a concert in an old church at the end of the evening. I'd been here before and done most of the tourist stuff, but now we're walking together and I compliment him on how he looks: wearing a suede jerkin over a plaid shirt, with a local cap on his head, he looks native and charming, and I hold him close with my right hand along his back, rubbing him approvingly while he smiles broadly. We pass a circus-like street, and I say that this is the terminus of a long rail route that's very scenic with tunnels and bridges, like the train between Basel and Milan, though this is neither city. Before, I'd attended a meeting in a travel company set up like the Beard Foundation, trying to suggest new places that the company could send us on vacation: some have suggested tiny enclaves like "Graz PDR (People's Democratic Republic)" and another PDR which has nothing really to visit, and I remark that they're only trying to fill in their country list, though I'm readying my proposal for the Five Stans. I drifted in and out of dreams all night, as if releasing them now that I'm getting over the flu. 3) 10:25AM: I'm waiting for someone to recover in a primitive hospital in a very poor country. I lie down on a cot, covered by a sheet, in an anteroom, and feel small items hidden under the sheet, and come across two vials of liquid, probably drugs, and feel that the person who "hid" them here had very great faith that no one would find them in this quite public area. I leave them. A woman crawls into the bed at the foot of my bed and in getting comfortable she stretches her foot down and encounters MY feet, gives out a little scream of surprise, and looks at me as if I've interfered with her and pulls her feet back. I wake later to find that the person I'd been waiting for has gone, and I've missed some afternoon production that he and the rest of my group have gone to. Someone tells me to go to 000 Weston Street to pick up tickets left for me for some evening performance. "Where is Weston Street?" "Just that way, you can't miss it." Walk out and find a corner with three street names on it, none of them Weston Street. I look around for someone to ask, and can see only a little brown-skinned man in a khaki uniform sitting in a maze of glass booths at the entrance to a nearby building. I try to get to him, but can't make my way through the maze, so I holler across to him, "Where is Weston Street?" He points in a particular direction, and when I look there I can see a just-readable sign for Weston Street, at which the street I'm on makes a dead end. It's started to rain when I get to the street, and I can find no entrance at this side of the enormous building. Go around the corner and see a sign with 000 on it and find a little shop almost hidden behind the bases of enormous staircases going up to the second-floor entrance. I go into the shop and ask if there have been tickets left for me. He makes a sound with Zs in it, and I say that's my name. He hands me two tickets for today, with the hours 6-9PM written on them, thinks again, and hands me two bright plastic game cards, and then, after checking that it's unused, gives me an enormous punchboard, about 1.5 x 2.5 feet, that I tuck under one arm, fearing that the rain will separate the sections of the punchboard, making it invalid as a gaming tool. Somehow, exiting, I find that I'm ON the second floor, and THIS side of the exit balcony leads only to an enormous gap in the floor, where I stand dizzily at the edge, nearly falling over the edge. I turn to go back the other way, and find myself INSIDE the building, walking on a VERY rotten wooden floor, wet with rain, long unused, that might not be able to support my weight, allowing me to crash through with horrible results. I lie down to distribute my weight, looking for a more solid way of going, but the floor just gets more and more rotten and weak looking. I begin to think that this must be a dream. Then, without transition, the floor has almost totally disappeared and I'm walking on a narrow rafter surrounded by water, with nothing to hold onto for balance, and I have the choice of a thin plank floating in the muddy water at floor level which has no chance of supporting my weight, or a twenty-foot-long rafter ahead of me, submerged in about two inches of water, leading to the nearest wall, with plumbless depths on either side of the rafter. I just can't make it, despair, and wake up feeling AWFUL. I begin to think I've contracted some kind of cold by sitting naked, typing the two previous dreams. Now 10:43AM and the day has hardly started.
FRIDAY, 7/17/09: 8:50AM: Ken and I have driven to some small town, maybe in nearby Pennsylvania or New Jersey, where a yearly festival is underway. We had thought it would be a trivial experience, but everything seems so rich that I'm actually debating asking to stay overnight, though probably everything will be over by 10PM, giving us time to get home in about two hours. We debated where to eat lunch at first, and then contests of parade floats kept us outside where bands of marchers in period costumes fascinated us. A central project was a Twenty Questions contest, but not many people were watching because the questions were all highly technical, concerned with a very limited period of early history about 200 years ago, and hardly anyone knew the answers, so the contest was very difficult and uninteresting. The eight or so contestants were placed in mock forts from which they submitted their answers. Some mock battles were being staged with enormous resources of props and costumes, and one small Oriental man was naked, a very nice compact body, miming fucking his enemies in the ass when they were conquered, which I thought might have a very limited appeal to whoever the judges might happen to be, but it was surely imaginative and pleasant to watch. Other contests were more traditional and competitive, but I've forgotten the details.
SUNDAY, 7/19/09: 1) 4:11AM: There's a great festival in town, but many people have left for financial reasons, and others are sharing the price of ads in a large number of media: print, TV, radio, newspapers, but some sections are blank because no one has paid for those areas. No one knows quite what to make of the changes, but all think we're entering a new, exciting era of advertising because of the altered economic situation. Even the mail system has changed: each mailbox is now taped shut and letters are attached to the outside of the boxes by tape. I detach a series of three from Dad, each labeled "I," "II," and "III," and none of them have postage on them, but only little notes on the upper right of the envelopes saying, "This will now be due 44; this second will be 99, now the third is $1.43," but I'm surprised the post office actually delivered them. No one's at home to open them. Other strange details have been forgotten now. 2) 7:26AM: I and a large group of travelers are going around the world (my trip to Wales starts tomorrow). We're all ages, many children, and we interact incessantly, like in an amusement park, or in a movie of our trip. At the end, we're in an enormous chain walking through the halls and passages in an immense building, doing a sort of "Mother May I" as we climb stairs and pass messages down the chain, open doors and peek into rooms and say magic words that cause things to happen in the rooms that we look at and then pass on to the next doorway or room. Everyone's having fun; no one knows exactly what they're doing or why; some kind of dream-analogy to LIFE?
DREAMS FROM BRITWALE
WEDNESDAY, 7/22/09: 3:33AM: I'm attending a last meeting of some combination of freelancers and indexers (maybe like the Sunday meeting of the Games Group: a few from the distant past, a few who may represent long-lasting new membership), and throughout the evening I have a sweet-bitter feeling of hail and farewell: I'd been to meetings like this before, where some new members feel that the organization can be revivified; but older members, like me, know that we're all part of a dying coterie who have mainly our memories to contribute. At the end, old papers appear from the bottom of what could be an archive box, and I see the signatures of Bob Cookingham (who of course was never connected to indexing and who, having been an organizer of a Brooklyn-based gay-activist group, long ago died of AIDS) and another long-gone past president of ASI (American Society of Indexers, which I suspect still exists in somewhat like the state represented by my dream meeting). At the VERY end, the strains of a distant soft, high, male soprano singing some sweet song of farewell drifts up from a church service coincidentally being held on a floor (or even in a church) under our meeting room. Somehow in the course of the meeting I'd brought an article of food rather like an elaborate pan pizza, but rather than eating it, I put it into some cooking utensil and reduced it somewhat in size so that it fit perfectly onto a plate, boasting a perfectly browned crisp surface, which at the end of the meeting I carefully slid into a plastic bag to take with me to eat alone at a later dinner. Some self-important publisher-type had somehow called the meeting around an enormous manuscript which looked more like over-inked xeroxes of old meeting minutes, but seemed in actuality to be a collection of papers evaluating some kind of new drug, in a format with which I was drearily familiar: many short articles of the same format: the introduction of the drug, the description of the traumas it treated, and strings of anecdotal evidence of effectiveness, all in exactly the same terminology, so that it was extraordinarily difficult to find anything of SUBSTANCE to index without endlessly repeating the same subentries under two or three main entries. At one point he picked up the two-inch-thick document and flipped it back and forth as if teasing those who thought he may be considering asking one of us to index it, yet I somehow knew that, though it didn't need to be done at all, somehow HE would end up doing it, squeezing out some last payment from a dying industry. Prior to the end, there were discussions of previous projects, enormous analytical indexing jobs, talk of experience gained too late to have any current application, and reminiscing about past meetings, maybe even sometimes in other cities beside New York. I seemed always on the point of departure, while others appeared to be on the verge of suggesting new advertisements of services, new publishers to contact, new possible projects which didn't have a chance of bearing fruit. Sweet silent thoughts of a dying profession in a seedy room that was probably someone's apartment, though they wouldn't want to admit they'd rented it for a pittance for this forlorn group. Wake to take myself to the bathroom in Jurys Inn in Manchester to finish typing this at 3:50AM, coughing annoyingly, having slept six hours already trying to make up for a sleepless night on the plane Monday night-Tuesday morning from JFK to MAN.
THURSDAY, 7/23/09: 1:06AM: I've attended a speech by JFK, and am amazed that, when he leaves, he makes a point of singling me out of the crowd and saying how much he appreciates my presence, and thrusts out his hand in a firm handshake, except that it's some kind of fraternal or secret ritual that I'm not familiar with, so my grasp meets only a few fingers. We fumble for a while for a true hand contact, and then he's off out the door. Wake with Ken not able to sleep, light on and reading, but when I start to type this he decides to get back to try to sleep and says, "May I shut my light off?" I sigh and say yes and move into the bathroom to finish this.
FRIDAY, 7/24/09: 1) 2:36AM: Well, no doubt it was a dream: I wasn't talking to myself, telling myself a story. The setting was clear: I was on my large bed at home, meticulously cleaning it and scraping from it a scattering of crumbs and flecks of dirt. It was in an apartment only slightly similar to mine at 101 Clark, maybe more similar to one of Rolf's beds, or a hotel bed, though in the dream it was clearly MY bed that I was cleaning because only I could clean my bed with the thoroughness I thought it needed. Sitting on the bed, watching me, at the "bottom left of the picture" was Rolf, the purported subject of my labored logic during my cleaning of the mattress. At the "upper right," sitting in a chair, was Rolf's sister (he has a brother only), the supposed witness of my attempts to guide her brother, though she was somehow the subject of my ruminations also. I was cleaning the bed as an almost-too-direct symbol of my almost-lecture to Rolf about "cleaning up his life," changing bad habits to good habits, maybe kicking a drug habit, maybe trying to change his psychological outlook so that he no longer punished himself but could appreciate his intelligence and his ability to help others in business. I would scratch and scrape at a recalcitrant fleck embedded in the sheet, while insisting that ANY amount of effort was excusable if the result of the effort was "a clean sheet," or a more rational and enjoyable life. A diligent application, over a long period of time, of concentrated energy might be needed to change a blemish into the purity of absence of blemish [2:45AM Ken opens the door and murmurs "I'm sorry."]. At some level I knew the two of them were VERY aware of my theatrical attempt to say something "profound" in the guise of something "simple." I knew they suspected my motives, and my actions, and I knew that they knew, and they probably knew that I knew that they knew, yet I continued, and they continued, and my analogy got more and more involved, increasingly intense, superlatively manipulative with the excuse that they were aware of my manipulation, but I could only hope that they at least SUSPECTED I was doing this for their good, and not to foster some dark, even more manipulative, personal motive of benefit through my seeming-willingness to benefit THEM "without any profit whatsoever on my part." Though maybe we were all also aware that I was speaking a kind of SCRIPT, provided by myself in advance or by someone else entirely, so that it didn't necessarily (though the closer it would be, the "more convincing" it would be) represent my ACTUAL feelings about their ACTUAL situations. But an underlying understanding of HER love of HIM, and MY love of them BOTH (though, probably, both knew it was primarily directed from ME to HIM), that made the possibly "slightly invented" words to the greatest extent DESIROUS of beneficial change. And my hands got dirtier and dirtier as I collected the flecks and crumbs in one corner of the bed sheet, and the sheet got cleaner and cleaner, and I would hope that their understanding of my message would become clearer and so self-evident that I no longer needed to elaborate on my reasoning, but they would gain the fruit of my wisdom about their situation and act on their own to clear up what I was so involved in "correcting for them," as if they wouldn't in any universe have the possibility of improving their situation without my beneficent assistance---no matter how theatrical and self-serving---as in some way is this dream itself---for an as yet undiscovered set of reasons. Finish typing at 2:54AM, having peed and blown my nose and drunk some water. I do insist, as an afterthought, that all these facets were IN the dream, to whatever slight extent, and not post-dream elaborations of possible hidden themes. 2) 6:58AM: I'm living in a Moslem camp of some kind, surrounded by women who have restrictions about what activities by men they can see: but I'm not quite sure what I can do in their presence: urinate, be naked, other actions? They whisper among themselves as I move among them, and sometimes leave the room at times that mystify me. I'll just have to ask someone, but never get to do it.
SUNDAY, 7/26/09: 6:39AM: I'm at my first day of work at a job I don't completely understand. I've been away from the company (either IBM of some governmental agency) for quite a while, but I comfort myself that I'm not a technical person who has to know all the latest scientific information, I'm more of a sales type who relies on his personality and social skills which tend not to change. Somehow (like on this trip) I've not come in dressed in a suit and tie, so I don't think it appropriate to go around and introduce myself to whoever might be my superiors; I can think of today as a sort of physical orientation to learn my way around the offices and corridors of my new employer. But I don't know anyone to talk with, and don't know any underlings from whom I can gain possible information about my future functions. At one point there's a kind of informal intelligence test where I have to eliminate blocks of data from some kind of Taipei-like game board, and I think I do pretty well at it considering I'm not exactly sure of its purpose. Toward the end, I'm sitting in an auditorium, about to witness some kind of lecture which may or may not be germane to my job, and some heavy-set fellow sits in the aisle seat next to me and nods his head forward, and down, and even farther down, and I fantasize he may have been killed on the job, but then he moves slightly and it's clear he's not dead, as I'd feared, and figure I'm just being paranoid. Really should have worn a tie to work, since the small-desk flunkies just in front of my area are all dressed casually, and the boundary between them and the large-desk functionaries is demarked by dark suits and white shirts and ties. But maybe I have one day's leeway to get started; however, maybe I've muffed my first and last chance to make the best impression. Wake without knowing one way or the other.
MONDAY, 7/27/09: 1) 2:36AM: I've got to deliver two packages: a printer box full of pages of a book to an indexer, and a set of directions for a new index, just a few pages. But I know that someone has been stealing the checks to the indexer, and I'm trying to catch them, so I go to the desk of the hotel next door to the indexer's apartment and try to enlist the aid of the clerk at the desk, who may be the manager, in my plan (not all of this is totally clear in my head, neither in the dream nor afterwards typing it). I get up to the clerk's apartment above the hotel's lobby, and a friend of the clerk is there, who I suspect to be the thief. For some reason the clerk is out in a field behind the hotel, and his "friend" is saying, "Why did you just get me this crummy apartment; you should have gotten me a whole house." I think he's very grabby and say something stupid to him, and he takes out a knife to threaten me. I fear a great fear, but the clerk is now somehow in the room, and, maybe to distract his friend, he takes out a pair of long scissors, opens them, and advances on me menacingly with a shout of some kind of threat. I drop the box of book pages and "rescue" (again, this is confused) the set of directions and try to make my escape from the room, thinking I can drop the pages off at the indexer's myself, and tell HER about the robber of her checks, and let HER try to protect herself against the thief, who might be the clerk's friend. Then I wake up. 2) 6:27AM: A dream of beautiful sweetness and peace: I've been invited to an idyllic retreat from the pressures of the world. Under the gentle guidance of someone who physically resembles (?? the actress who played Mary in "Something About Mary" [Carmen Diaz]) and who seems, in a more spiritual than physical way, an older sister, I'm brought to a demi-Eden (similarities to the immortal community in "Zardoz" abound) where I'm being introduced to the teachers and other beings who have lived here beyond time. I remember most tactually the library of ancient books, enclosed by bindings so old they seem like sections of centuries-old trees, non-linear in their dimensions, but which fit into shelves so perfectly that the concavities on one book's sides exactly match the convexities on the side of the book next to it on the shelf. The shelves are only five or six feet wide, but they're quite high, nearing two feet: the tops of the books are uniform enough that they can be removed without damaging the tops of the bindings or the bottoms of the shelves above, but at the time I'm only fascinated by the old-wood colors and textures of the spines, engraved with letters of gold with the titles and authors of these ancient books of wisdom and knowledge and secrets: none of the authors or titles are known (or even precisely readable), but they all seem hermetic and magical and capable of holding universal truth and beauty. After hours of simply enjoying the serene presence of other people moving through indefinite country landscapes, uninterrupted by buildings or conditions of weather or any other living creatures, there seemed to be a time of departure, and "my sister" was about to drive me and a few other people "away" for the evening. Without transition, I was "back" and "unpacking," taking items from a white sack like a laundry bag and folding them: one in particular was like my red-checked tablecloth, slightly smaller in size so that I could hold it out at full length to shake the wrinkles out of it so that I could begin to fold it, rather puzzled that it seems to have been washed in some kind of starch that made it seem more substantial and almost cardboard-like to fold, yet when I folded it in half, it fell into the "natural" way it had always been folded in this configuration, which led to the natural way to fold it in half again, and again, until it was of a size to be put away on a shelf that I never saw. Other items of clothing were to be put away, but I woke, with a memory of the place I'd just "left," hoping to get back to it soon, thinking, even at the end of the dream, of the---no other word---dreamlike quality of the garden (possibly slightly influenced by the spacious gardens around Castle Howard). And I woke, still partly in the dream, happy to have been there and happy to think that I might, on some level, be able to return. Not quite heaven, but close enough to be tactile and comfortable in a purely physical way, without any reference to "clothing or no clothing," "food or no food," "physical needs or attractions or not." Completely corporeal, yet so light and gossamer that physicality exerted absolutely no pressure on the beingness in that universe of peace and tranquility---with not a thought of the need for anything so "removing" as sleep to change the perpetual ease of existence in this ("blessed" is too simpy a word) easeful realm.
TUESDAY, 7/28/09: 1) 2:02AM: I'm watching Marilyn Monroe in a theater. She's not actually performing a role, it's like she's granted an interview to a small audience seated in a Broadway theater. She's finished with whatever was on the program---no idea whether she was answering questions, reading from a script, or something else---and has no idea what to do next. In perplexity, she says, "I'll be finished in ten, nine---three, two, one." The audience begins to leave their seats and move toward her. I'd been standing at the foot of the left aisle, just staring at her, and she rushes over to me and, in her little-girl voice, says, "Would you protect me from everyone else?" I say OK and lead her into a lounge area in the back of the theater, and sort of push her down onto a yellow sofa, where she flounders for a bit among yellow pillows, and I straighten her up into a normal seated position and try to say something to her to take her mind off her panic in the face of all these other people, who, I'm glad to note, are just leaving the theater and really not trying to get close to her at all. So we're left with the question of what to say next, and I, out of the blue, happen to mention that I like porn films, and she pops open her famous eyes and says, "Oh, I like porn films too, but I have trouble going to see them." I debate asking her to my apartment but I have no idea if she'd like watching gay porn, and can't really feature myself asking her. The dream sort of ends there, but I wake and idly think of what I could have said, and what could have happened next. I was about 30 years of age in the dream and I suppose rather presentable, so she felt comfortable with me without feeling threatened. I, of course, was incredibly impressed that she'd talk with me. 2) 6:08AM: I go up to Henry Garehime and Spike Lee and ask them if I can go snorkeling with them; they seem reluctant, as if I have to pass a test first (or as if they think I'm too old), but I coax them and then I'm swimming out into the murky waters with them, aware of bodies swimming below us already, and I never really get underwater. 3) 6:12AM: Someone, at first like Bob Teitel, later like the black leader at MAN, shakes a long limp cock, but when I play with it he grabs it in his hand and starts stuffing it into my mouth: I can feel the spongy-hard cock-head filling every corner of my mouth as I grab the shaft and try to pump it off; a quite rare kind of dream recently.
WEDNESDAY, 7/29/09: 1) 2:01AM: Somehow someone saw me and either took my picture or reported me to some Casting Director, because I got a call saying I was "definitely" chosen for a part in a Hollywood movie, and they'd be coming to see me audition for the role in just a few days. They were also looking for a few other parts. Somehow this ballooned into an enormous crowd at a theater near me, crammed with hopeful actors, professional and amateur, and I was getting more and more nervous that they'd just take one look at me and decide I wasn't what they wanted any more. A bored voice came over a loudspeaker to announce, "We're only looking for the second male lead and a Type 2 female character part for this production [so don't get your hopes up, suckers]." I was given a typewritten page with two lines on it at the end of the film. "I'll do anything I have to to get into this movie," I said, with as much of "me-ness" in it that I could produce; then I threw myself at a fake window with an elaborate department-store array, maybe even for Christmas, behind it; knowing that a stunt double would probably do the actual scene, but I wanted to show my willingness to IN FACT do anything; "And that was it!" was my concluding line, again said with as much "naturalness" as I hoped was in the photo or statement to whoever was doing the hiring, so that I would IN FACT get the part. I'll never know. Later, maybe in a semi-awake reverie following the memory of the dream, I envisioned two seasoned chorus-line members, both almost famous in their own right, since they were usually the first male and female chorus-line members chosen for each season's prospective greatest smash-hit, talking casually to each other as they began one of their typical rousing show-business finales, completely at ease in their places in the legitimate Broadway theater. 2) 6:28AM: I walk into a public place wearing one of Don Maloof's suits, and there HE is with a new boy friend, and he recognizes his suit and I have to confess to him that a large number of times I used the keys that he gave me to his apartment to borrow his suits, and even his shirts and ties, for an evening, and then returned them when I knew he was on the west coast. He looks at me with deep pain and says, "I just don't understand." I feel awful and want to tell him exactly how and why it happened, but I'm too embarrassed in front of his new friend, so I ask him how he and his new friend are getting along, and he looks at me with a strange look on his face and says, "I just had the most perfect sex of my life last night." I tell him that I'm very happy for him, meanwhile thinking that the small short-haired blond in a suit that seems too big for him isn't quite Don's type, and somewhere later in the very long and detailed encounter Don says, "She's my sister, Dorothy." Or uses some name that I'd KNOWN to be his sister's name; and, knowing Don's habit of inventing stories about himself and his relationships, though I'm quite sure, now that I look at this person, that it really IS a female, I don't quite believe that he actually had sex with his sister, and try to replay what he said that I only ASSUMED meant he had sex with his sister. In the middle of our conversation, some anguished fight breaks out between two or three people near us, one accusing the other of terrible things, the other denying that he'd done such things---rather a typical lover's quarrel, though very clearly an enormously deeply-felt conflict---and Don immediately tries to mediate between the quarreling lovers, getting very emotionally involved, almost crying with the intensity of his identification with one or the other in the conflict, and I try to pull him aside and say some platitude like, "You can't solve the problems of the world, you can only help to solve your own problems, and the problems of those closest to you; but don't take on the problems of strangers." He sort of listens to me, as was his habit in the past, but, again, I can't tell if he's just humoring me and intending to ignore my advice, or if he's actually taking it in, as he's almost always been known to do. Somewhat later in the dramatic evening, I kneel at his feet and say, "I want to make a full confession to you," and the obvious religious connotation is lost on neither of us. His sister isn't present toward the end of the dream, and I'm not clear even about the setting toward the end. After I wake with the memory of the dream, my mind goes through a big scenario of what he and I could have said next, and in real time it only gradually dawns on me that I never DID actually borrow any articles of his clothing, though I did wear some of the suits and shirts that he in fact GAVE me, although many of them were too extreme to wear---some of the flowery shirts, for instance, which didn't quite fit me, and only two or three times did I find an occasion to which it would be appropriate to wear that strange layered-lapel broad-shouldered suit he gave me, which I later reluctantly threw out, because in fact, extreme as it was in design, it rather flattered my burgeoning build. I can't now remember the intricate conversation I invented between the two of us in my semi-sleep stage after the dream, but even later remembered that he's probably dead by this point anyway. But the emotional intensity of the feelings in the dream are undeniable.
THURSDAY, 7/30/09: 1) 6:21AM: I'm attending the opening of a new entertainment complex in what might be a small Welsh town like we've been going through, though most elements are still American. Bernice Cousins somehow seems to be in charge, yet isn't visible. A performance starts at 3PM, but we're supposed to have lunch beforehand, yet when I go to the buffet, I'm told that we're supposed to take seats and our food will be served to us. I look at the available seating, and it's based on the classroom seating in the St. Fagan's Historical Society yesterday: small individual units in which a seat in front has a desk surface attached to the seat-back, which is the "dining table" for the person sitting in the separate seat-table unit behind it. I choose a table that has no one sitting in the seat in front, and find that it's liable to tip toward me because no one has his or her weight in the seat in front. I think to move one seat forward, but the implication is that I'm not only assigned the food, but also the seat to which the food will be brought. In fact, now on my table, a bill of fare appears with a number of items added, most of which make no sense, but it does have my name and a seat number printed at the bottom. How could Bernice possibly know what I would want to eat? And it's just past 2PM, so there's less than an hour to be served the unknown food (I can't really decipher the dozen or so printed items, some of which are just jokes or "free" comments where the "food" would be listed) and start to fret about the whole system. Nothing really happens before I wake up in a rather confused state, realized that I'd just had a dream to be recorded, the first one of the night in which this is my third wakening. 2) 7:33AM: I'm looking into a tiny compartment on the top shelf of a refrigerator, looking for a snack, and remind myself that there's an old container of rice pudding in back of a few other items. Take it out and find that an enormous growth of mold has pushed the lid up about two inches on one side. Amused, I take it to Mom to show her, and she makes some dismissing remark, and I somehow flip it and the top flies off, leaving a doorknob covered with the pudding and mold, which has gotten onto the surrounding wall, which is rough stonework, meaning that it will be terribly hard to get all the gunk out of the crevises. Lots of work, and I don't know how I'll get the place clean.
FRIDAY, 7/31/09: 1) 2:04AM: Three people are in some kind of contest: each has a triangle of lights in front of his position, and the lights show the order of activity in which each contestant has to act in order to win. But the lights change, and so it's really by chance a certain order is "correct." The lights are labeled A, B, and C. 2) Some time after 2:57AM: Dream of going to some institution, probably in Maine, and see Bill Hyde looking quite young in his face, but the limbs of his body are very thin, and he has grotesque, pendulous, pale globs of flesh, which might weigh four or five pounds each, hanging almost like sausages from his upper-arm flesh, and at one point I get up the courage to ask the cause of these, but he appears not to realize they're there. I tell the staff at the hospital (or nursing home) he's in that he's looking real well, and they kind of roll their eyes, as if admitting nothing (and of course Bill died a few years ago). I'm out in some kind of yard with him, trying to act as if everything is normal, but the setting becomes tenuous and the dream ends. 3) After some indeterminate time---certainly these two dreams are connected in theme, but I woke after dream 2, hoped I would remember it, and almost immediately fell back to sleep. Dream 3 clearly ended just before I woke at 4:30. I was in a crowded AIDS-hospice ward: it was filled with bunk beds, almost all full, some in the corner providing the scene of an orgy with four or five normal-looking middle-aged hairy men jerking away on each other's cocks as if they had no illness whatsoever. A cadaverous, clearly terminal, patient is being lifted onto the top bunk diagonally across from the single-bunk orgy, and though his limbs are all bone-thin, his face is still so attractive that the orgy stopped momentarily for the participants to look lasciviously at the new arrival, as if anticipating sex. Then I'd made my way around the periphery of the seemingly endless room to a bed in the center, on a corner of which I sat, and across the bed another patient carefully lowered himself onto the clean sheets to face me, and it turned out to be Bruce Lieber, though his face was very thin and parts of it were charcoal black. "I know you're surprised," he said, "Many people thought I was dead." I tried to make some response, but couldn't think of one. Other faces begin passing down the aisle beside the bed, and some looked at me as if they recognized me, many expecting me to recognize them, and some I thought I knew, while I struggled to remember who some of these others might be. Some were sick-looking, others appeared merely unshaven, as if they'd checked themselves in for the food and accommodation. A couple, grotesquely disfigured in face and body, paused together and one said to me, "Don't you remember? I'm Bob, and this is my lover, Dean Tait; we lived together just down Hicks Street." The name was familiar, but Dean Tait was dead, I thought I knew, and "Bob" didn't look familiar, though both had the remains of attractiveness. Another body, of a person who seemed to be an amalgam of many porn stars I'd watched on video over the years, sat next to me and mumbled some remark while I softly fingered his leg. He was looking into the distance, maybe at a TV screen, not really paying attention to me, and I confess to a guilty feeling as I moved from his leg to gently run the edge of my finger along one of his testicles, finding it smooth and hairless, and since he remained staring impassively ahead, I moved my hand to his cock, which was like a substantial triangular bone encased loosely in seductively soft flesh that I began to move back and forth, actually hoping to masturbate him to orgasm, not knowing whether he felt anything, wanted anything, or even, puzzledly, wondering if this could be his "still functioning" cock or some manifestation of pre-mortem priapism that had nothing to do with any sexual feeling at all. Woke with an erection, feeling terribly ashamed from the dream, as I'd sometimes felt in real life in the past when I'd managed to suck off one of the more attractive participants in a three- or four-person orgy, when I felt that I denied both that person, and the others in the group, the pleasures of his continued erection. Woke and lay a bit in amazement at the content of the dream, then went to the john, peed, and finished typing this at 4:57AM, again marveling at the BIZARRE content of some of these vacation dreams, looking forward to being home, where I could jerk off if I woke so aroused.
SATURDAY, 8/1/09: 6:58AM: John and I are sitting in a room at a small, dim party, and Sherryl comes in and sits to my left. I feel this must CERTAINLY be a dream, yet it's "certainly" real. John looks at her and says, "Sherryl, you're dead." She smiles and says, "Well, for fifty years I'd lived with cancer, and I was tired of it, so I----" And the rest was unclear, and I woke.
SUNDAY, 8/2/09: 1) 3:30AM: I'm supervising a kind of fortune-telling session, and a person rather like a combination Cissy Wong and Maria Hsieh is an expert in this kind of session; I'm relying on her to keep to the rules of this method. I'm supposed to have people sit quietly for a few minutes, then write their answers to five questions. But the participants keep talking back and forth to each other, particularly someone like Vicki Moss, who keeps asking Sherryl about something entirely unrelated that happened previously. I tell---let's call the supervisor Maria---Maria to tell them to quiet down, but she seems reluctant to do so. I start by asking the first question, but now the women who should be participating obediently have gotten out of their chairs and are beginning to move around the room. I try to ask Maria how to handle this situation---it's never happened before---but she doesn't seem able to find a way out of this, and it appears that the session has to be cancelled, and maybe even require that the session "donation" be returned to the unwilling participants. I feel awful and don't know what to do; I debate what to say when I wake and my mind continues to try to find a way out of my dilemma, and I decide to get to the bathroom to type up the dream. 2) 6:42AM: Some Roman general is looking superciliously at his second-in-command, who shoots a piece of iron into his superior's face. It lodges at the bridge of his nose, like a fatal lorgnette, and the image of the dead commander is artistically rendered so that very little gore is seen, but clearly he's dead. Other details forgotten. 3) 8:03AM: John and I are traveling together and stop in a gay hotel where the attendants are dressed in blue, even to facial makeup. A tall handsome fellow is spread-legged as he's trying to unlock our door, and John amuses himself by fondling his genitals. The attendant smiles bemusedly, but knows that he has to react positively, so he makes positive gestures in return. I'm glad we're together again and nuzzle John's ear, which has a tiny gold stud in it, and he smiles and leans into me also. We get into our room, number nine, and it's like a combination of our old apartments on Hicks Street, and another blue attendant is waiting for us to initiate sex, and I think this is going to be a wonderful vacation. Wake to quite a different setting and pairing with Ken shaving in the bathroom, having, I think, said "Good morning" as he moved there. I type this to 8:08AM.
MONDAY, 8/3/09: 1) 3:10AM: I've written five plays, each of which has four scenes. Each of the four scenes has five parts: A, B, C, D, and E. These can be arranged in a vague circle, with A as the top line, BCDE (the rest of the first scene) as the second line, ABCDEA as the third line (the second scene followed by the first part of the third scene), BCDEAB as the fourth line (the rest of the third scene, followed by AB of the fourth scene), CDEABC as the fifth line (the end of the fourth scene and the start of the fifth scene), and DE as the sixth line (the end of the fourth scene). Each part has four-letter word(s) as names: the first part has one four-letter word, the second two four-letter words, the third also two four-letter words, the fourth has one four-letter word. I'd thought, for instance, of "Able" as the first scene's title, "Evil" as the fourth scene's title, "Live Help" as another title, and then I woke and had to type the dream. Each scene has two characters, and would CHANGE impact as the sex of the characters was reversed in each scene in each production, or even alternation of plays. Somehow the ABCs worked out more symmetrically in my dream. At one point, I was coaching Dennis in how to direct my plays written in this format. It seemed much simpler and "neater" in the dream. He was protesting something, and I used the argument to make the presentation even more convoluted. Later, connected or not, I had a ferocious erection and was able to suck my own cock, taking about half its length into my mouth and thoroughly enjoying the sensation of a complete SUCK. Woke erect, consoling myself with the fact that this was now the last complete Monday of the trip, and that late NEXT Monday I'd actually be home at last! 2) 6:29: Actually TWO dreams: a) As in a comic movie, the camera pans up to the driver of the car and it's Jonathan Pryce with a strange expression on his face and a very expressive wide mouth, and he talks with a kind of idiot accent, and clearly I'm watching a comedy since the other two people in the car are famous mostly for comedies, also. b) A patient is getting his examination by a comedic doctor, who wraps a tape measure around his left bicep at least three times, saying "We have to take that measurement again NOW." And it's usually right at 19 inches. Then he takes a "chest" measurement, but the tape somehow slips up around his neck and it goes below 20 inches and the patient comically reacts as if that's his real chest measurement, sort of like a Jacques Tati character. The joke continues with a waist measurement that somehow involves the whole bed and is way over 50 inches, and, again, a bicep measurement that's 19 inches. Wake and record dreams on the toilet.
TUESDAY, 8/4/09: 6:14AM: Someone shows me a beautiful gem in a ring, and he says he got it on West 94th Street. I happen to be going there, find that Vargas Jewelry is on the 8th floor, and get on the elevator to find that 8 is the top, and a couple of people get on and push various buttons, but one pushes 3 after we pass it and she gets off at 5; two others make mistakes, or don't push, and get off at 6, and I'm the only one left as the door opens on 8 to a floor of management offices, so I walk up five steps to a landing and down a flight to Vargas Jewelry. Knock on the door, and it opens onto a small publishing company, and I immediately try to sell them my indexing services, giving them my card, which they marvel over as if they've never seen one before, and I have a simple sample index with me, that shows subentries by States and sub-subentries by state mottoes, and THAT impresses them as I describe how one can thus easily compare one state's motto to another. They assure me we'll be doing business soon as they usher me out of the office.
WEDNESDAY, 8/5/09: 1) 3:18AM: I'm a student in a writing class, and all of us are told that the elements H, O, M, E, S must be present in every successful story; the teacher then proceeds to make us identify each of the elements, and we come up with Heart, Occurrences, Motivations, Emotions, and Sensations. As this process goes on, the teacher (a combination of Hetch O'Shea and Glen Close) relies more and more on me to give the class the answers she wants me to give, mainly by mouthing the word she wants me to say. It starts fairly easily and quickly, but she asks more complicated questions and demands more specific answers. I succeed brilliantly, and she expects me to write a truly successful story. 2) 6:15AM: I'm standing before a mirror, naked, running my hands up and down my body, thinking of sex, and wake aroused and jerk off.
THURSDAY, 8/6/09: 1) 5:15AM: I'm taking my blue shoulder bag into a department-store repair shop, and at first there's a very long line that stretches out of sight ahead down twisting corridors, but the line moves fast and when I get to the repair area---I can see a whole floor of people sitting at sewing machines and repair desks---there's no receptionist or indication of direction, so I just talk to a passing employee and show him the bag. "What do you want done?" he asks. I'd previously emptied the contents of the bag: a black roll of oilcloth, some little items from the front compartment, and my wallet of cash from under the bottom flap in the central compartment, so I unzipped the central compartment and showed him the almost-detached flap. He unzipped a tiny compartment on the outside, that I never used, and commented about this classic "American Express" type of bag, and I said, "If it's such a classic, why don't they just continue to make it." He laughs and says I don't know much about business. He then implies that a repair might be very expensive, and I really should just consider buying a new one. I'm disappointed as I wake up. As I peed, I remembered one last detail: as I leave I'm pushing a wheelbarrow, which I don't remember bringing with me, nor do I remember why I have it, but I'm pushing this small, empty wheelbarrow and wondering how best to carry it on the subway on my way home. 2) 6:02AM: Michael Blackburn and I are standing at the head of an enormous two-flight staircase, and I ask him, "How far do you think you can jump?" I can't imagine him jumping beyond the small landing between the two flights, but he takes off sideways and goes BEYOND the landing and, very much unplanned, hits the side of his head against the bottom of the wall opposite the stairwell in which we're standing. He continues down to the bottom of the second flight of stairs and his momentum carries him out of sight to the right. We at the top of the stairs gasp at what happened, and I start running very fast down the stairs to see how he is, but he walks out of the hallway with a handkerchief held to the left side of his head. "Is it bleeding?" he asks. I see a few dried bits of blood on the neck of his T-shirt and can't tell if it's from this or from before, so I say, "I don't think so." But we're both very concerned.
FRIDAY, 8/7/09AM: 1) 3:42AM: There's a very elaborate blood-circulatory diagram describing the flow of blood in the human body in two ways: 1) from major organ to major organ (like heart to lungs, legs to head, spleen to liver), comprising maybe 13-15 major pathways, connected in every possible way: A to B,C,D,etc., B to A,C,D,etc., C to---etc.); 2) from vein or artery to every other vein and artery, comprising hundreds of minor pathways. The "aim of the game" is to fill in all the lines in the simplest, or most efficient, or most complete way. I'm teaching someone like Dennis the rules of this game, and we've made our way through the first two major pathways and are working on the first minor pathway as an example, and I'm giving Dennis a pep-talk about his capabilities, along the lines of "You're a wonderful person, and you don't have to take shit from anyone; you can learn anything you put your mind to; don't let me intimidate you, you can do this on your own with ease once you learn the basic rules"---and as I slowly wake, the "lecture" continues in my head, and I'm become aware that I'm leaving the dream and entering my imagination, and I get up and put on a bathrobe and go to the john to type this dream. 2) 5:46AM: INCREDIBLY sexy dream: I'm working in some kind of resort with VERY sexy men, and they all seem, in subtle or not-so-subtle ways, to be gay or even to be TELLING me they're gay. They wear semi-transparent pants that allow me to see large white-underweared lumps in the front of their trousers, and they speak VERY sexily as they almost WHISPER into my ear. BUT there's a very attractive WOMAN there, who keeps baring her back, and she wraps a white towel around herself and backs up against me and OPENS THE TOWEL so that the two guys in front of me can see her frontally-naked body, "Even though I'm rather small," she whispers to them coyly. Yet the two guys STILL seem to press close to ME seductively, and I wake aroused---and VERY surprised. JUST at the end of the dream, I'm putting down the phone from a conversation with some boss in an executive office, and as I press the disconnect button on the telephone on the desk, I hear the operator say, "Bob, I've been trying to get through to you: Rosie DeGeneres is on the other line wanting to talk to you." I vaguely know the name, and wonder if THIS has something to do with the extraordinary aura of sexuality about this remarkable office.
SATURDAY, 8/8/09: 1) 1:11AM: A woman is showing off her collection of Church History Journals from 1930 to the present. The early issues were smaller copies than current ones are, and for a while she was missing 1980, but she found that, and now I'm going through each year, verifying that each issue is there for each year. She's celebrating the fact that she has the complete 80-year run. 2) 5:05AM: Mom calls me into the kitchen, like but unlike the one at 1221 Dietz, and looks at me expectantly, as if I should be aware at a glance what she wants me to do. I don't see anything to do in the almost bare kitchen, so I turn to leave the room, but she starts to react with some pointed statement. I wake before I hear what it would be. 3) 7:11AM: I'm in a group of actors who must change for a performance, but we go through an endless maze of featureless white marble hallways, lit very softly, and can see no chairs or tables at which to sit, or even ROOMS as such, just a right turn, a left turn, a right turn, and no directions or signs. "At least you could have signs for Men and Women for the dressing rooms," I think to say, but there's no one to say it to. Finally I hear a voice, as if from a loudspeaker, asking, "You're all adults, aren't you?" It implies that, if we're adults, it won't matter if we're integrated as nude men and women: no children to be offended. "But what if I'm not interested in seeing naked women's bodies?" I want to reply, but, again, there's no one to whom to reply. The situation isn't resolved before I wake and vaguely think that this is another dream that I should record.
SUNDAY, 8/9/09: 1) 4:02AM: I'm in ancient Rome, a guest of two rival princes who are trying to outdo each other in providing good wines and outrageous entertainments to their guests. Each tries to capitalize on the other's weakness---it's almost as if they CHART each success, meaning that the other had a failure there, so that an evening is an alternation of "the colors of success": red when one "is on top" and blue when the other "is winning." Each tries to have the color that dominates the majority of the time of the event. The "terminal" event involves a VERY drunk Emperor who LOVES to fuck---men or women it doesn't matter. The "winning" host supplies a woman that the Emperor can't resist, so he fucks her, but then the other host, desperate to turn the tables, brings in THE most attractive young man, and the Emperor rejects the woman and, with the grossest possible movement, screws the young man---and at this point the dream turns into a televised porn movie, emphasizing the size of the Emperor's balls as he jams his cock into the young man's ass, and then shows the pair rolling over so that the young man is on his back, with the Emperor covering the lower part of his body, but the camera makes sure to concentrate on the jets of cum that shoot from the young man's cock as he's ravished by the Emperor, and it's a MOST erotic scene, even though crude, and I wake erect, astounded at the clarity of the display of the bodies, the crudeness and size of the Emperor's scrotum, and the vividness of the actual CHART that shows the colors of the winner versus the loser: and here the winner's victory is so complete that the end of the loser's part of the chart is completely BLANK: the winner has just totally overwhelmed the evening. 2) I'm reading a book that's printed in white type on black paper, and it tells of an evening spent with two lovers, and ends with a paragraph followed by a single line without a period at the end of it: "And after the lights went out, we
And that's all there was.
MONDAY, 8/10/09: 1) 3:12AM: Two odd fragments: a) I'm eating a tough steak, rather like last night's "traditional beef with Yorkshire Pudding," and keep shifting the knife around to cut it more easily into chewable pieces. b) I'm watching a copy I made of one of Wagner's "Ring" operas, and Mom is finally watching it, for which I'm happy, since I'd tried many times to have her watch it, but it's an odd production in that the faces on the characters switch, for some esoteric reason, from one to the other, possibly to emphasize the changing relationships, and it makes a surreal setting since I'm also in some way trying to chart these special-effect changes in order to make more sense of them. One of the least "rational" dreams in a long time. 2) 5:55AM: I'm with a group about to enter mainland China from Hong Kong. We enter a room where we're supposed to have our passports checked, and everyone has them, but there's some confusion. Chinese enter the room, and our group is fragmented until I can't see anyone who's in our group. Somehow I'm pushed out of the room, don't seem to have my passport (obviously connected with my lost Schwab Visa yesterday), and have absolutely no idea where I'm supposed to go. But I have to move: climbing over buildings, reaching up a column to a crumbling plaster of Paris elephant, hoping it doesn't pull away from the top of the column, to reach the next floor of the facade of a building I have to get into, and then there's a thin metal statue filled with holes (like the Virgin and Child in some cathedral, made purposely with holes in the material "to indicate the vulnerability of the Virgin"), and again it threatens to crumble without giving me the support I need to get where I think I have to go. Early on, I think that I KNOW this isn't a dream, so I MUST get to where I'm going, since I'm not going to wake up from it but will have to COPE with the situation. It gets worse and worse as I lose all sense of direction. It's beginning to get dark, I've lost all my luggage, people are asking me questions in foreign languages and I shout back at them in annoyance, and one old woman says something in English like, "Sorry, but you really need help." "Yes!" I shout back, but she doesn't have any directions to help me with. Finally, after AGES of this frustration and anxiety, I hear Ken's voice from the back of a jeep in which he's riding, saying, "Why didn't you do what you were supposed to do?" or something inane like that. I try to clamber into the jeep, but have to climb in through a window which turns into an ellipse of plastic that I have to turn in a particular way to give me enough room to squeeze past the plastic and its frame to get into the front seat of the jeep, relieved that at least SOMEONE from the group has found me. Wake and lie, dazed, at the utter loss symbolized by the dream, SO happy that this is the LAST day of the trip. 3) 7:25AM: I've been fondled in the rear by a bishop, who makes it clear that he'd like to see me in private later, and I look at myself in the mirror and think that it can't be THAT bad, and I could use the extra money, and I'm happy that SOMEONE still finds me attractive.
END OF BRITWALE DREAMS
TUESDAY, 8/11/09: 9:50AM: I'm at a very crowded party, naked, where most of the guests are nicely dressed, but for some reason whenever anyone knocks at the door, someone in authority will say, "Bob, answer the door," and I'll have to decide whether to leave my sleepmask on or lift it so I can see what I'm doing. Otherwise, no one seems to pay much attention to me, including the people who I admit. Some put on great airs, announcing, "I'm a Kibble---a Kibble from Koa," and they expect to be venerated and treasured for the mere fact that they've decided to attend. Because of the oddity of the accents and costumes, I might think the dream takes place, still, in Britain, yet there's a distinctly American quality to it. It's not particularly sexy, but it's certainly fetishishtic, and consummately strange.
WEDNESDAY, 8/12/09: 4:20AM: A large group of who may be orphans, including me, have been driven to a backstage area of the Paris Opera, where we've been given free seats for a performance, and I sneak a look through a door to see the sides of loge boxes, with the floor of the auditorium only one level below us, and I marvel at the goodness of the seats we seem to have. There's a long commentary, written as a comic strip along one wall, that is meant to introduce us to the production we're about to see, and someone who's reading it to us is busily removing negative comments that have been pasted over or under the "official" text. I'm really looking forward to the performance, as if I'm about thirteen years old and have never seen anything like it before.
THURSDAY, 8/13/09: 5:15AM: I'm vacationing in Mexico, at first in a strange village that seems to have a ROOF over it, so no one has to suffer in the sun. Some of the huts are quite small, but going around a corner produces a view of a broad street with large haciendas taking up large areas of luxurious rooms and vistas, though all in the shade of a late twilight. Then the scene changes and I know we're in Honduras, where people are poorer but the scene is more natural, and I realize that this is just a three- or four-hour train ride from NYC, and with almost no effort anyone can be in a completely foreign town, enjoying the summer weather all year round, for very little expenditure of time and money, and I marvel that more people aren't taking advantage of this idyllic spot.
SATURDAY, 8/15/09: 1) 6:25AM: I'm sailing across the South Pacific on a small cargo ship, not really sure of our route or destinations. I'm not quite one of the family, nor a seaman, nor precisely a tourist: I seem to be along for the ride just to see where we're going, without having anything to say about the itinerary. We stop at one island, mainly for lunch, and I eat some rather strange meats in a stew, thinking that this is what I've taken this trip for. Then I need to go to the john, and I vaguely remember seeing a location marked in a tiny crescent of houses that comprise the only village on the island, and I wander down a central hallway more like a hotel than a native village: large neat bedrooms seem lined up waiting for a tour to use them. I can't find a bathroom anywhere, and come to a family eating, and look to find someone who can speak English, and finally locate an older, red-faced man of whom I ask for a toilet. He seems rather puzzled by my question, maybe fearing I'm sick and going to make a mess of his family's facility, but he points me in a particular direction, and I go off, hoping to find toilet paper in supply. Wake with a faint urge to use the toilet, and sit and type, the impulse being mostly gone; thinking mostly of my dentist's appointment in three hours. Think of looking up Penrhyn Island, and find it's also called Manihiki and is in the North Cook Islands, a possession of New Zealand. 2) 8:20AM: Possibly in the same sort of location, our ship has docked in a community of scholars who are doing tests on people who drop by, and I'm hoping to do very well, though the tests are very modern in that it's impossible to guess what they're testing. l do well on the intellectual part, but I'm in some sort of emotional section of the test, which is being administered by a woman, I discover, who's naked. I'm trying to be gallant and do everything right, but she needs some testing apparatus and goes off to get it. Someone with a gruff voice like Mack Griswold's says that we're about ready to leave, so my woman hurries over with some kind of book, or screen, on which to test my knowledge of various images, but I never manage to finish the tests before I wake up and find it's somewhat later than I'd thought---I'll have to have breakfast fast.
MONDAY, 8/17/09: 5AM: I've been invited into a Russian Embassy in the middle of London as an extension of a tour I've signed up for, and I hear the end of the previous tour with a certain tag that takes place at the X:57 minute at the end of the hour (that I hear again as I'm leaving). A crazy relative comes out of a side room clutching what might be an icon to his chest, which he shows to me furtively, opening a cover to reveal an incredible jewel inside with brilliant lights, and as an inner chamber opens, it seems that I can actually see the thin filaments of what may BE tiny light bulbs to make what may be artificial stones glitter even more brilliantly in their "gold" settings. I marvel at it for the moment that it's opened for me, and then its double layers are closed and he puts it away onto a shelf: maybe I was supposed to offer him a number of thousands of dollars for it, because I seem to start to get the impression that the entire operation is in desperate need of money: that the central Russian government---or princely family---is no longer supporting this elegant establishment, which is getting slightly frayed around the edges, and they need all the outside help they can conjure. I'm shown another room, maybe an elegantly set dining room, and am shown another element from their rich past, and this time I manage to pocket a tiny, maybe golden, or maybe some little trinket that they MEAN for me to keep, like a key to an old book or Bible. I see old relatives who are being tended by even older footservants, and then my hour is up and I'm being hustled out of the tour, being admonished to "Take absolutely nothing," and I feel the minute weight of the key in my pocket. Some bright-eyed minion offers to show me to the door personally, as the rest of the group seems to have left, and I see some old dowager being carted off as if to a storeroom where she can rest before her next tour appearance. I debate with myself whether this person should be tipped---it seems that someone like Mildred, leaving before me, has slipped a quarter onto the table as a tip, and I think this is more of an insult than anything else. I make some comment to this minor servant that it was a good thing this Embassy was established when London was very small, since now it occupied invaluable city-center property which, if needed, could be sold for millions and their whole Embassy moved to smaller, more economical, less pretentious lodgements, and the profits used to improve their financial standing as an independent organization more supportable by tourists' donations. I'm led to the final door at the head of a long flight of stairs to the street and turn to thank my guide, but he's already disappeared for the next tour.
TUESDAY, 8/18/09: 1) 6:09AM: Mom and I are waiting for a bus to take us to our next stop in Mexico: we don't know when it leaves, but everyone says we have to get on early to get a good seat. The two sets of seats in the front, on each side, are arranged around a table for six or eight, so I take the window seat in the next row, which is right up against an angled window which seems to give little extra room, but also removes me as far as possible from other people in the bus. Mom can sit wherever she likes. Lots of fuss is being made about locking our suitcases, even though, as a woman "expert" on Mexican travel keeps insisting, "They can get through any lock VERY easily and you'll find all your valuables missing at the next stop." Thank goodness there seem to be no screaming kids---yet. I'm amazed at the cleanness of the windows and the red plastic seat covers. 2) 8:48AM: It occurs to me that I had a kind of continuing dream/nightmare before and after the previous dream. I'm cooking a very innovative dinner in a small kitchen for me and Mom (again!), and just everything is going wrong. The main course is a steak, which I'm broiling in a kind of toaster in which the steak stands vertically. But the timer hasn't been set properly, and at a number of times, when I'm checking the other components of the meal, I become aware that the steak is being horribly overcooked, almost turning into a piece of charcoal, but I keep delaying DOING anything about stopping the process of cooking it. A pot in the center of the counter (none of this seems to be done on a proper stove, but with a combination of plug-in cookers for a variety of purposes), has been first defrosting and then boiling a kind of Healthy Heart combination meal of shrimp and broccoli, but the broccoli is being boiled to a mush while the shrimp has hardly been defrosted, yet is somehow getting overcooked on the outside while being undercooked on the inside (in fact, yesterday's HH lunch WAS a salad of unheated pre-cooked shrimp and broccoli). In addition, an ACTUAL toaster (as opposed to the quasi-toaster broiling the steak) is smoking because some kind of bread has been stuck inside and won't pop up as it should, and I'm just too occupied with the other components to raise the toast to stop the burning. I'm aware that this is all supposed to be finished by 1PM, for some reason, and it's nearing that time and I haven't begun setting the table or preparing some kind of beverage to go along with this disastrous meal. Increasingly frustrated in the dream, and I finally wake with the relief that it WAS only a dream.
THURSDAY, 8/20/09: 1) 5:13AM: I've returned to IBM to run a job on the newest, very small computer named the 5020 (pronounced fifty-twenty), but am shocked to enter the only room that contains two of them, which room had been always empty before, and now it's full of a class of students doing practice problems, and I ask their leader, someone like----what was his name? Roger Someone, Bruce Someone? [Roger EVANS, recalled at 5:23AM.] who visited me a number of times where we'd share joints and see movies---who tells me that, yes, they plan to use both machines all weekend. I'm not even sure my program has ever even successfully assembled, so I have no idea how much time I'd need, and even though the project is supposed to be finished this weekend, I'm clearly not going to be able to do it, and there's noting whatsoever I can do about it. 2) 5:19AM: There'd been slight memories of a second dream, now totally forgotten.
SATURDAY, 8/22/09: 7:30AM: I'm taking care of a sale of MY books in SHERRYL'S apartment on 7th Street. I'd slept in my car in front of her building, and brought my clothes to put on in her bathroom before opening the doors to the people waiting to look at the books on sale in the---I kept counting and adding more---SIX rooms in which the books were scattered in bookcases, on table tops, and on sofas and chairs. There were vague sections of children's books, scientific books, books that I'd indexed, and books that were not to be sold at all, like my stamp books, some enormous dictionaries that I wanted to keep, though I don't remember seeing any encyclopedias. Someone separated out five DVDs and asked Sherryl how much they were: she referred to a sheet high up at the back of a sofa and said $2.50. The person offered $2, and Sherryl accepted a $10 bill for the five. This reminded me of an article in New York magazine that I'd just read about how to conduct a stoop sale in the summer in NYC. At some times there were crowds of people in the rooms, but no one seemed to be buying much. Then I had to leave for a movie that was starting at 1PM, but since it was already 12:50PM, there was no chance I could get there on time, and debated staying until I would be ready to leave for the 3PM showing, at which point she would have to close the apartment, because she wouldn't be there either. Some books WERE being sold, because there were large spaces where books had been, and I looked at one section of MY books that had to be put into a briefcase because they weren't to be sold either. No one I knew seemed to be in the dream: they all were neighbors of Sherryl's from the old neighborhood where I didn't know anyone except her---Bob Karwowski wasn't there either.
MONDAY, 8/24/09: 8:13AM: Earlier fragment of my indexing a MoMA guide, wondering how to handle shops in the appendix of the book. Now, I'm in some kind of class that keeps getting interrupted by people coming in the door: the last red-headed professor announced the death of a thirteen-year-old from some rare type of cancer. The teacher tried to lock the door, but it didn't hold. Then a student handed me a large plastic table of television stations and asked if I got channel 36. "What is it?" "Something like WHUD from Passaic, NJ." "Isn't that one of those old Public Television Stations?" He didn't seem to know. I tried before to read some old charts on the wall, but nothing made sense.
THURSDAY, 8/27/09: 6:24AM: I'm at Madison Square Garden for some kind of presentation of awards for body-building, but there don't seem to be assigned seats, and no one seems to have a program of what the events of the evening will be or how (or even where) they'll be presented. It's getting close to 8PM, when I assume things will start, and most of the seats in the back of the auditorium are filled---the setup of sets is more like Radio City Music Hall in that there's an indefinite stage area at one side of the auditorium---the stage isn't in the center of arrays of seats as would be "usual" at Madison Square Garden: it's set up more like it would be for the Bolshoi when they presented gala evenings at MSG. But I find it strange that the seats right at the stage don't seem to be occupied: are the seats assigned but the assignees haven't shown up yet? Are they free for anyone who wants them? But it's not clear that the presentation of awards will even be ON the stage. Friends of mine, rather similar to Spartacus and Bob Grossman, have come in, and they seem to think you can sit anywhere you want. I go up to them and kind of indicate I'd like to know what they know about the events of the evening, but they kind of avoid me, as if I'm not welcome to sit with them, though I can't figure out why. Are they ashamed to be seen with me, avoiding me, "together" in the sense that I'm not "one of them"? Groups of participants, whether they're competitors or judges or just particular groups of attendees isn't clear, come in from the sides and sort of parade past the area in front of the stage, but they don't seem to be taking seats at this point. Other small groups have set up folding tables on which are displayed goods to be sold, like T-shirts, medals, trinkets, along with items to be taken, like advertisements, calling cards, and promotional items like pins and nametags, though it's not clear where the boundary is between what's free and what's for sale. People, mostly middle-aged men, rush up to the tables to see what's there, grabbing several of the free items like calling cards and stuffing them into their pockets, but showing no interest in buying anything that appears to be on sale. I don't see anyone else I know, and Spartacus and Bob seem to have vanished into the increasing crowd, but many seats are still empty and I debate taking a front-row-center seat, but fear I might be displaced by someone who has a reserved ticket for that seat. I seem to have a ticket of admission, but it says nothing about seating at all, not even a reference to "sections" to which I may be allowed or denied access. 8PM is drawing nearer, but there's no central microphone or announcement to give any information that I would want but lack at this time. Have no idea what to do or where to go next; and then I wake, look at the clock, go into the living room to see that the temperature is 69 and that the just-rising sun is cherry-red above the horizon, squeezed below dark clouds that almost fill the eastern sky, still a considerable distance north of my south-most visible rising-point. I type this into WP51 until 6:42AM.