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DREAMS of 2011 1 of 2

 

SATURDAY, 1/1/11: 10:48AM: Probably influenced by the sore spot on my back and the "blood" spots on my sheets, I dream of a tiny penis-shaped, bleeding-tip GROWTH on the right side of my right knee.

SUNDAY, 1/2/11: 10:13AM: Three dreams, in the order of remembering them: 1) As in a poor soap opera, a "ruined" wife is tearfully accepted back by her "betrayed" husband, who allows one of her former lovers to return for what seems to be a good psychological reason, but the lover only uses the opportunity to force the woman against a wall, kiss her violently, and, at the end, kneel to take an obscene smell in the area of her cunt, then toss a fierce look of utter contempt at the husband as he slams out the door, while the woman again dissolves in tears, pleading with her husband for forgiveness. 2) I'm describing to someone who's almost a stranger, while I question my own dwelling on such details, that my aunt and her husband have moved from their house in California into her mother's home, where they have a wonderfully spacious apartment in a house which will soon be entirely theirs, as her mother is 92 years old and thus will die soon. 3) Paul C. is marking up my Most Traveled People list with black checkmarks, denoting the departments in France in which he knows I've traveled, and I console myself that I can easily count his bold black checks as different from my preliminary tiny blue ink-marks.

MONDAY, 1/3/11: 8:49AM: Complicated "squeezed-in" board game in India. Popping 2-3 huge boils on the back of my left hand.

TUESDAY, 1/4/11: 8:37AM: 1) I've been introduced to an odd theater in someone's house, where the players are seated at an elaborate dining table surrounded by gauzy curtains, and "the play starts" with two people, garbed as at the turn of the previous century, sitting at the right side of the table as the proscenium curtain is slowly rolled up from the bottom to reveal the beginning of the scene. 2) I'm looking at three small silk-paper-thin bills of currency that I'd saved as souvenirs of India. All are in perfect shape, ready to be displayed on the shelves I showed off to Carolyn last night, and I'm turning them over, looking at both sides in admiration, and one in particular, antique red and fragile, I turn over to study a delicately drawn map of Dubai, turning on the light to show to my host, who's more interested in reading his paper, standing in the middle of the dim room, than he is in looking at what I find so beautiful and strange.

WEDNESDAY, 1/5/11: 1) 5:53AM: A group of men are absorbed, maybe in a card game, around a table, but a scene just off to the side suddenly becomes horribly apparent: a man is grimly inflicting endless bloody lacerations with a straight razor, or a scalpel, into the naked body of a helpless victim lying in a pool of blood on the floor. The bloodiness is made more horrific by the hairiness of the body, so that the red and black mingle on pure white skin. The person on the floor is morbidly silent, until the perpetrator calmly explains, "I cut out his tongue first." Everyone groans and tries to move away from the ghastly sight. But the cut, cut, cut continues, each cut opening a furrow of gore. "So he couldn't cry out when I cut off his penis," the monster says in a tone which can only be considered coolly logical. Other men start walking away, or looking for public transportation, while the victim gets up helplessly and the torturer inquires softly, "Won't anyone consider driving him home?" The question "Why are you doing this?" rides in everyone's mind without being uttered, since there's a sick feeling that there IS no reason at all, it's just mindless, sadistic, morally corrupt violence for the pleasure of seeing blood, of torturing for the sake of revolting the viewer, of a sick mind carrying out unspeakable cruelty. Plainly put, no adequate reason COULD exist; it's like mashing a stone over and over and over until it's just a heap of dusty sand. I wake feeling sickened, relieved that it's over, also thinking of the "cuts" as my insisting on playing Spider, and find myself feeling constipated, eventually taking a stool softener for the first time in my life. Strong memory of my "Love me" to Arno from my utter depths of first LSD session---saying I CONSTRUCTED this so he WOULD love me---and he knew, accepted, and said I needed a psychiatrist, NOT him, to deal with my repressed feelings. 2) 9:11AM: In London, big gay groups go to benefit shows, gathering in apartments. We're at one place and I want to drink a Coke. Woman has it. I say "Pay $5" and it's a hit: woman server has a purse and people deposit their $5 gold coins into it. We also have to pay for colored rolls, all on the honor system, which seems to be working. I wake very hot in bed.

FRIDAY, 1/7/11: 7:48AM: Dream of writing sketches and "paying required tax."

SATURDAY, 1/8/11: 8:17AM: I'm vacationing with a very small group in what feels like a northern African country. At one point I'm obliged to make a measurement or conversion that involved complex fractions like 3 2/7 and 7/9, trying to find a small common denonimator, and inverting and combining to find it yields quite simple numbers. We're walking down a street in a small market (I think inspired by the folding terrain of "Inception" that I watched two days ago) and look up at the "sky" to realize there's a PATTERN, like a Mexican or Mayan carving, up there, and the whole community is covered with a ROOF, which explains why it never rains, why the light is so constant, and why everything is so dry. Later, our female guide, combinations of women at Fred's party last night, realizes we have a few hours free time and asks if I'd like to take a small tour in a three-seater plane along the coast, and I say I'd be willing to pay for the whole thing. Also she describes the possibility of taking a small boat, called a Balto, to a nearby island where we can see more of the foreign culture of this native population. I feel we have a very good guide.

SUNDAY, 1/9/11: 4:07AM: Dream of waiting till 3AM for the dentist, talking to a couple from overseas for whom it's just 8PM!

TUESDAY, 1/11/11: 8:14AM: 1) Fat secretaries are racing each other into meeting rooms. 2) Paul C. and I are jockeying to either sit next to, or NOT sit next to, each other on meeting chairs at a conference.

WEDNESDAY, 1/12/11: 5:19AM: A woman confronts me with a cryptic piece of paper on which is typed one sentence, and a few symbols. I ask her what it is, and she says she's not sure, but it involved another sheet that she has in her hand: this contains a schematic of ten strips which can be set at different positions within ten windows, to give combinations of images that can be experimented with. Without transition, the explainer is a very handsome young man, who explains that this sets up pairs of men, so that one of the pair views the other of the pair as he strips, fondles himself, masturbates, and tries in every way possible to stimulate the viewer, until "perfect matches" are found in which each of the pairs is absolutely satisfied with their mates. I think this is a wonderful idea for an ideal grouping of watchers and watchees and wake sexually stimulated, wishing that such a pairing could happen RIGHT NOW!

THURSDAY, 1/13/11: 4:40AM: Avi and I are first on a very deep-diving boat off the coast of Maine, where we descend to a platform where I throw off what looks like a copy of my Atlas from a platform from which it sinks into even greater depths. Then we're on a field trip which ends with our group passing through a number of doors in some kind of college, some holding doors open for others behind them, leaving him in a room where he has a class, and as I leave he loudly announces, "And here you are, in your new figure, with your yellow sweater with a hole in it, standing in front of my class." "But it starts in three minutes," I point out as I leave, and he makes a snide remark about visiting him, and I end by saying, "Yes, but Brooklyn Heights is closer than Maine," meaning he should come to visit me.

FRIDAY, 1/14/11: 1) 6:41AM: A painter is painting a "Pieta" stored in a very narrow space, causing viewing problems. 2) 9:38AM: Shit! I had a filling fall out that the dentist put in yesterday!

SATURDAY, 1/15/11: 7:55AM: Remembered fragment of a conversation with someone, maybe a doctor or nurse, about a scab on my body somewhere, saying that "it'll break into pieces" and I'm not sure if that's a good or bad sign.

SUNDAY, 1/16/11: 1) 6:28AM: I'm at IBM again, looking over the shoulders of a group that's just gotten a new project from IBM Headquarters involving placement of electronics on a board, combined with making a FABRIC with specific properties, and I remark, "Are we involved with THIS project again?" The reply is, "With a difference." "We'll be paid for our work?" I hazard. "We'll be paid for our work," comes the satisfied reply. Then I'm told that Ted Kallner will be working on the job, and I mention that he'd been on it before, and now, I'm told, he's taken apartment above the United Nations, where the project will be undertaken, so that he can just take an elevator to his apartment to sleep, since he spent almost 24 hours a day on the previous job anyway. I semi-wake to muse how old he must be by now, and what he must look like, since he was very large, with a singularly ugly face (though a VERY nice guy who knew how to supervise his workers). Wonder how much they must be paying him, compared with what must be the enormous cost in renting an apartment in the newly modernized United Nations Building, in a very pricey neighborhood. I seem to remember visiting him when he was considering the space, moving from room to room in a mostly empty apartment, admiring the views and marveling at the location on the East River. 6:58AM: Recalled more: the progress (and the physical characteristics) of the primary working material was kept track of by green vertical bars on a larger array of black vertical bars, showing either time elapsed so the measure of some quality, as strength or chemical composition, of the material. In the past, the graph containing these green bars didn't touch the x-axis, implying some sort of experimental, as compared to existential (maybe these were just PLANS, or projections in time) properties. But now, for the first time, the bottom of the bars were GROUNDED on the x-axis, with the green bars all rising to different heights from the x-axis, which gave a REALITY to the property being displayed, and I was pleased with the change, thinking that my prior work may have contributed in some small way to the "earthing" of these almost magical properties. 2) 9:15AM: I'm a guest in someone's apartment, maybe Carolyn's, and I've just brushed my teeth and rinsed my mouth, but decide to leave the toothbrush and mouthwash in a caddy right at the sink, just to show that I'm here. Then look at the bath towels to see which I should use for my shower, noting that I'll have to move jackets and other items of clothing hung on the shower-curtain rack in a semi-circle above the tub, and then it occurs to me I should maybe be using my OWN towels, and I have to think of where I might have put mine.

MONDAY, 1/17/11: 6:18AM: Scarcity: 1) I'm supposed to fly to a nearby island, like Bermuda or Nassau, but there's been some kind of strike and tickets are impossible to get, yet I have a kind of lozenge that is worth $50, and I have four of them: two for the $100 trip out and two for the $100 trip back. I know they're supposed to be valid, but I'm still worried enough to carry extra money along in case they're not acceptable at the time of my flight. 2) A movie is showing only one night at a movie house that had before accepted reservations by telephone. I've phoned for a reservation for myself, and check the newspaper ad, which does list the next three movies, but my reservation is in four or five days, so it's not listed yet, but I'm encouraged that the ad doesn't say that any of the future performances are sold out, but I fear going to the theater and they'll say they don't have a ticket waiting for me, and I won't be able to see the movie.

THURSDAY, 1/20/11: 6:37AM: 1) I'm vacationing in London, going to the hotel's circular outdoor pool, putting on a snorkel mask and sinking to the bottom to watch tiny object floating above me, reflecting the sun, and then, periodically, come a constellation of living creatures, like backward-flying butterflies, or those strange sea creatures that undulate as they swim through the water (I forget their names, something like platyhelminths), and the sun shines through them and they become almost like enlarged mympths that fascinate me by their colorful light displays. The second time they rotate past, their shapes have changed slightly, or the organisms themselves have changed, and their shapes and colors are magnified in the sunlight. 2) I think of applying for a job, or of going back to graduate school, but become aware than the LAST time I went to graduate school I didn't quite finish, leaving before I actually verified what degree, if any, I got, and thought to contact the university and see what my actual degree might have been, but somehow, in the dream, I realize that if I'd gone to ANY school beyond my abortive attempt at Nuclear Energy Technology at Columbia in 1957-58, it TOO had only been in a dream, and I mustn't confuse my dream-education with my actual, physical education. Wake to a musing half-sleep state and then demand of myself that I get up and transcribe these two dreams to 6:47AM, and then pee and get back to bed.

FRIDAY, 1/21/11: 1) 5:43AM: I taking a picture of a stranger as "Rita Hayworth" on Christmas or New Year's Eve, maybe in Moscow. 2) 9:06AM: I'm waiting for a parking space for a museum in a strange American city. There's a driveway which is filled with cars (maybe this is based on the line of cars I saw waiting on Sunday to park in the Museum of Natural History parking lot even though the sign on the street said that the parking lot was full). I get out of the car to see if there's room in the driveway, and see that a car has left, somehow, from the middle, so there IS a space, but I look at the curb, and the lawn on either side of the driveway, and decide we really can't drive over the lawn to use the empty space.

SATURDAY, 1/22/11: 6:53AM: I start by looking in a telephone book to find two identical entries for "PsalesRepresentative," with no address, and I don't think even a phone number. I've come to this small coastal town in England to try to find the author of a scholarly article that I indexed for a publication like the Physical Review. I walk along the opposite shore, knowing that he lives on the other side looking out, and that the whole area is named Bacterium. I see a bus tootle around a corner with the name Bacterium on the front, and think that I could save time by trying to take it, but I have no idea which direction it's going or which direction I should be going. And the distance doesn't seem to be very great, though none of the houses seem to be numbered in any way. Somehow I'm walking through a sort of lab, passing slate-topped tables at which three people are chatting, and I hear someone mention the name "Desmond." "Do you know where Desmond is?" I ask hopefully. They make some joke, and I find I have to clarify: "I mean here in the lab or at home?" And they indicate he's at home, near the far end of the street, in the house with the yellow light bulb on the porch. I turn down a street at the end, and the houses are more like summer cottages: not very substantial, and VERY messy. The second house has a yellow light bulb on the porch, and a dog runs out, barking furiously, and a man shambles after him, calling out something, and I head toward him saying "Desmond?" "Yes, and who are you?" "I'm Bob Zolnerzak, who---" But I don't' have to finish because he recognizes the name and enthusiastically asks me in, asking how I managed to find the place. I tell him the story, and enter a small room with cots or sofas down two sides of the living room with three or four people in chenille bathrobes stretched out, their feet extending over the edges, pointing toward the center of the room, and (oh, I knew already that he was supposed to packing to leave for a vacation the following day) I said, "How can you pack with all this rabble lying about?" I hoped he knew I was joking, with the horrible passing thought that these may all be perilously sick relatives. He doesn't answer, but addresses another man who comes up to the porch in curiosity "This is Bob Zolnerzak." The other person animatedly shakes hands with me as if he'd been waiting all his life to meet me. I wake and marvel at the detail and the LENGTH of the dream, reminding myself that I'd had a similar dream, maybe early last year. 2) 8:55AM: Briefest flash of a roller-coaster that roars up the side of a triangle to a POINT (which is "out of sight" to the upper right of whatever kind of screen I seem to be viewing the roller-coaster on) and then comes down the other side of the triangle from the point BACKWARD, and I think, watching this, that I might not want to try this, since the stomach churning caused by the backward descent after the rapid forward ascent might very well make me want to vomit.

SUNDAY, 1/23/11: 9:07AM: I'm buying a theater ticket for a production of "Henry VIII" at some venue like Lincoln Center, but the casual young man at the desk seems very disorganized. He routinely takes five-dollar bills from people and returns a single and a ticket, but for me he doesn't return a ticket---maybe they're all sold out? I remind him that he didn't give me a ticket, and in what may be a seductive move, he gets down on his hands and knees, presenting me with his khaki-garbed rear with strange wrinkles that seems to suggest either an asshole or a vulva, and when he gets up he presents me with a few small slips of paper and cardboard, asking me if I wanted to appear in the play on the stage, sitting in the back with "old costumes that probably smell," and telling me to go to the Troob Room to get made-up and robed. I ask where it is, and he's too occupied with other duties to answer. I go into the theater, trying to find an usher who'll tell me how to get to the Troob Room, and finally one rather dignified woman offers to lead me there, but she disappears down a long flight of stairs in what appears to be an upper balcony. I look at my watch to find that it's 2:10PM, but know the play hasn't started yet because I can't hear any noises of voices or music. Then the lights come up on the stage behind a rather small proscenium with a scene-blurring scrim, and I see two rows of old men in red robes seated across the back of the stage, and on the fore-stage is a group of children who seem choreographed to move back and forth. So the play has begun. I find a seat in the front row of this middle balcony, on the aisle, and sit down in it, hoping not to be chased away since I don't have a ticket at all. No one speaks in the play before I wake.

MONDAY, 1/24/11: 1) 9:15AM: Split-second dream of dislodging a HUGE chunk of inter-tooth gunk, and find that my lower-left back tooth is BROKEN. This is followed by a VIVID fragment of racing down stairs to try to get on a subway that's just leaving the station, and I follow it toward the end of the platform, hoping that it might stop and open the doors to the last cars, which are now very high above me---which don't open. 2) 10:18AM: Note dream of a woman lawyer processing a case before witnesses, or jury members, in a very factual and clear-to-understand way, and twice she stops to complain about people in the background either tapping their foot, or rapping a small stick against a wall, in a repetitive, annoying way, and I just LOVE the way she presents the case and matter-of-factly tells people unconsciously annoying her to STOP.

TUESDAY, 1/25/11: 1) 4:30AM: Odd fragments: 1) Anne Tallner is looking for me: it is said she was my teacher in the 9th grade. But I seem to recognize her name from IBM; if she was my teacher in the 9th grade, she was a nun, and I would have known her only as Sister Mary Margaret, or something like that, without a surname that I could recognize. 2) Aunt Helen has somehow acquired the charge of a young girl; Helen has gone out and I'm taking care of the girl, who wants to know if she can have some crayons, and I direct her (at 1221 Dietz) into Rita's bedroom, which used to be mine, and she's delighted with all the toys and implements she finds there. Then old relatives return, and I pass Grandpa Vallish on the stairs and he almost ignores me, seemingly slightly angry with me for some reason. 3) Maybe in semi-waking, I (at the end of the fragment) think of writing a science-fiction story about "what's happening," which is that mote-like space ships from some far star have picked up some electronic characteristics of my website (maybe based on the preface to "Big Bang Love: Juvenile A" last night, where "stepping a light-year into space and looking back at the earth will see it as it was a year ago, so stepping back 1000 light-years sees 1000 years in the past, and [as they put it] turning your head to the right can go 10,000 years back, and turning to the left can gain another time-point") and have zeroed in on ME, as its creator and subject, by surrounding my presence with a halo of space ships, to study me, or exalt me, or change me in some molecular way to become aware of them, or help them, or help ME, or do something---well, science-fictiony! Finish typing at 4:42AM. 2) 8:36AM: MAJOR dream: It's about 4-5PM on a Saturday of a three-day "experience" endured without sleep, probably for some "spiritual" reason, and groups of people are staying in apartment-like settings, with new, and sometimes challenging, elements being thrown at them at random. But a nice development was a surprise cart delivering lunches, one large plate containing something like a pizza, another container of what appeared to be mashed potatoes. One of the women of the three or four people in my "apartment" claimed all the mashed potatoes, which I said was OK since I was a meatatarian, and I picked large pieces of thin-sliced ham off the top of the pizza and stuffed them into my mouth. An interlude of candy followed, where I tried to convince another, younger, woman to take my large piece of dark chocolate shaped like a harmonica and trade it for two smaller pieces of light, sweeter, chocolate. She looked at me skeptically, took the dark chocolate, and moved off. Then another cart showed up bearing dinner, again large containers of single food items, and we figured we weren't going to be hungry. Without transition I was wandering outside and found something on the ground that looked interesting in an enclosed (rather than an open, convex or right-angled) corner of a building, but when I stepped closer to look at it, the ground slipped away beneath my feet and I found myself sinking into an uncomfortably hot swamp. I sank rapidly and panicked, calling out "Help, help" as I felt I couldn't pull myself out with my own efforts. A large older man who was sort of swimming in this swamp near the edge turned toward me and rather quickly extracted himself from the quicksand-like muck, seemingly just to get away from me. Other heads popped around the edges of the corner, looking at me curiously, obviously convinced that I wasn't in any danger. I just wanted someone to reach out and offer me a strong hand to help pull me out. When none came, I squirmed and wriggled and found that I could pull myself to the surface by my own efforts, and managed to get myself out. A moment later I was clean from the muck and walking around another part of the outside lawn, thankful that it was near the end of the second day of this "experience" and had only a part of tomorrow, Sunday, before we were free to leave. I was never aware of the real purpose of this "retreat."

WEDNESDAY, 1/26/11: 7:43AM: I'm saying to someone, "I'm not staying to hear you tell me how to fill out this form which is just like all the others."

THURSDAY, 1/27/11: 1) 7:37AM: I'm supposed to go to a meeting, possibly of IBM, in a large office building, on the 7th floor, but the elevator lobby is totally unlit and empty. I manage to feel my way to the elevator button, and I look up to see the tiniest rim of brightness around the indicator above one of the elevators, and I feel, rather than see, the door open. I get in, feel a 7 on the panel of floor buttons, and the elevator rises above the lobby into a glass shaftway which allows a bit of light as I try to count the invisible floors as they pass, but it doesn't stop when I think it should, and can then see that by mistake I pressed 17 rather than 7, but now it's light enough for me to see, so I'm not sure, in the dream, if I press 7 and go back down, or just get out at 17 to wait. Into bare office space, workers moving about, looking at me with curiosity: I'm not a worker, but I shouldn't be there otherwise. I sit at a table and read while others work around me, and then look up to see a familiar woman's face (whose name I can't remember even now) coming toward me, and I say "Oh, you're here too." She doesn't respond, merely sits down opposite me at the table. I can still visualize her dark hair, thin, rather pretty, face, and think she may have been a receptionist or secretary rather than a programmer, but no name comes to mind. No further actions occur in the dream, either. 2) 9:26AM: Maybe in the same context as the previous dream, I'm sitting in a seat in the front row of an outdoor auditorium, waiting for something to happen on the stage. Then others have moved away and I'm looking for my next activity, when I see a brick-lined tunnel sloping steeply downward to some unknown lower level of a main building. I debate going down to see what's there, but when I turn to descend backward, as climbing down a ladder, the opening seems to have shrunk to a dangerously narrow slit, and I begin to fear I wouldn't have enough room to climb back out if nothing promising awaited below. Then two young girls pause near me, and one wonders aloud, "Where could I get a joint?" But the object she requested was more blatantly drug-oriented and much more powerful than a joint, yet I don't recall what the word was. I responded with something like "Well, if you find one, let me know," and the dream ended.

SATURDAY, 1/29/11, 7:45AM: There's a list of typos in a book that is an alphabetized list of play titles, noting that, for about a dozen letters, the first title listed in each of these letter groups is misspelled. I check the first few in the list, and the noted typo doesn't exist. I'm not sure what to do about it. In addition, two actors have applied for membership in some acting organization that requires acting in five plays to qualify for membership. I verify the list of plays, but wonder what kind of proof the organization would require that the plays were actually produced; I think of printing the simplest program listing these titles, to see if that small effort would qualify them. Otherwise, I'm not sure what kind of proof would be needed.

SUNDAY, 1/30/11: 1) 6:30AM: I'm living in a shtetl movie: first, I'm cleaning a barn of a living quarters, finding that the best instrument for cleaning an old carpet covering the enormous floor of the living room is the palm of my hand, though I fear I'll permanently deplete any oil or surface from my palm for ages. I clean part, and still I'm aware many other parts are littered with little bits of lint, scraps of paper, and even filings of metal. Ledges get very little dust, though they haven't been tended in years. I look over a barrier to a room which has become a closet, filled with brown paper bags that "my brother" insists are only filled with his clothes, so I'm happy the whole junk-filled area is his to maintain. "Another, older brother" can now use an expandable wheelbarrow I've had the wisdom to buy him, so he can cart extraordinary loads by unfolding expanding sides and ends, and he asks me "where tomorrow's breakfast at 1PM" will take place, and I'm surprised he's included himself as invited. Other tasks await my accomplishment of them. 2) 9:32AM: Fragment of dressing to go out, noticing that my "sash" looks like an enormous cock, so I move it to the side so it's not so obvious. Then see that I have a carrot-shaped pee-stain on my summer-poplin pants, but decide no one will notice and continue preparing to go out.

MONDAY, 1/31/11: 1) 4:08AM: Circuits are going off gradually and at random, losing power. Then there's like a film strip of a joke, with an animated tennis racket swatting down houses and other constructions on all sides of it. 2) 7AM: I'm trying not to dramatize it, but it was a VERY disturbing dream. I'm the guest of honor in an enormous apartment (maybe based on the array-to-vanishing-point of tables filled with notable actors at the SAG Awards in the Shrine Auditorium in LA that I watched on TV last night just before bed). At some level I think I must have invited the people, but "in reality" I couldn't possibly have done so because I have NO idea of ANY of the names of the people I might have actually invited, and at one point in the dream I thought to myself, "Where are the people I KNOW: Spartacus, Charles, John, Susie, Carolyn, Mildred, Piri, Leon, Elsie, Shelley, Fred, Ceasar, Alexa, Steve, or even the "elusive" Doug?" People aren't really INTERACTING with me, either: they come in and talk with THEIR friends as if they don't recognize me, and I feel distanced and even more fringe-like than I feel at a MAN party. When people DO talk with me, they assume I know who they are, so they don't bother to say their names or describe the circumstances in which I knew them. One pair acknowledge each other as partners of a pair, and they embrace and kiss, and they wonder if I should be included in the kiss, but I have no idea if I EVER would have kissed them---I might know to kiss John and Ivan, perhaps, but not a couple I have no idea who they ARE. Some people have brought gifts, many in elaborate stacks with identifying names that I don't recognize at all, and at one point I mess things up by trying to bring them to a group that's gathered for some other reason, thinking to "honor" the gifters by opening their gifts in front of everyone, but I confuse the nameplates with what was on them, which the gifters try to set right, scurrying around me and changing positions of items, but I don't remember how that episode even played out. At one point, close to a tight-knit knot of people, I confide to one, "I know I don't have Alzheimer's, but it's LIKE I do, since I don't recognize---anyone." I get a sympathetic look, but no one adds any name or explanatory description of the connection between us so I CAN recognize who they are. At another point, guys in a sort of line are naming their ages: "63, 64, 65," as if they were somehow arranged in order of seniority, and I, in an almost whisper, say "75," (maybe this dream somehow symbolizes my 75th birthday party, which isn't in the cards, in two months?) and no one reacts in any way at all---as if I were a stranger uttering my age for no reason. I wake in a state of total bewilderment, wonder what the significance might be, desperate to record some of the details before THEY (like the people, probably) elude my memory. It's now 7:17AM, and I've not managed to capture my FEELINGS of isolation and unknowing in the VERY varied groupings: at one point I pass a side room in which people are seated at tables eating, and I have no idea who may have brought the food (if indeed they ARE eating: the room is distant and dark, and I more or less ASSUME it's a restaurant, so they MUST be eating), or who would be "qualified" to eat. At another point some Oriental woman is busy at an enormous wok, stir-frying colorful objects that are some exotic combination of vegetable and fruit, like red-pepper colored-and-shaped pears, or they could even be an incredible mixture of a dozen colors and sizes of POTATOES, for all I can determine from the sizzling mixture---but there's no sign of plates and cutlery nearby with which to eat the food, no idea where to sit or stand while eating, or who the chef and bystanders are. Yet another woman is at a microphone announcing "zarzuelas," and I have no idea if she's telling a joke and will present---something else, or whether she's serious---and in that case, who IS she? Again, in the dream, I remark to myself that it's strange that I don't see ANYONE that I know that I might have invited: are they all to arrive later, or are gathered in a different room in this immense dream-space? Faces and figures are all older, or darker, or fatter, or stranger than anyone I can identify from past parties, liaisons, trips, or relationships. Again I think of large multi-packaged shopping bags that guests brought in "as gifts for me," leaving them at the side on a sofa until they're attended to in some way of which I have no knowledge. What should I do? Who should I talk with? Again, WHO invited all these people that I can't POSSIBLY have invited without going back to my hundred-plus stack of discarded address-book entries and, somehow, miraculously, been able to contact them---though many are dead, and surely NONE of the phone numbers, even of the still-living, would be current. And, as was so interestingly noted in "Inception," I have no idea how the dream STARTED, or WHERE it is taking place, or even WHEN, though I have the clue that I SAID I was 75, but I occasionally, these days, NOW think of myself as 75. And, going through the "w's", or of WHY---IS it my birthday party, or maybe (though this was not my thought in the dream) I somehow stumbled into an UNRELATED party and mistakenly thought, without really thinking about it, that it was a party for ME. And, looking back at the list of the "w's," I certainly don't have any idea of "how," and have made it abundantly clear that I know not "who." Now it's 7:35AM and I think I've captured (more than enough) details sufficient to indicate the "content" of the dream---with which I am still not CONTENT.

TUESDAY, 2/1/11: 7:07AM: Another multi-layered, different-themed, confusing-confused dream. I'm in someone's bedroom that has been set up by him as a memorial-shrine to the events in his life (acting rather, as I think now, to HIM as my website is to ME). Toward the END of the dream (though the events of the START of the dream are still "in the air"), he asks me what the array of objects in the three alcoves at one end of the room convey to me about the events, or souvenirs, of his life. At first glance, the display appears to be oddly UNIFORM: there are mannequins in clothing, costumes, and coats that appear to represent different times and places and individuals; there are massive arrays of what could be real and also artificial flowers that are more display pieces, even funeral arrangements, than they evoke happenings, or revelations occurring in his past life. A quality of mutedness of color and restraint of design produces a sense of almost drabness that I want to tell him implies a lack of excitement, and challenge, and drama in his life that I don't believe he would really want to convey. Almost without transition, the displays in the central alcove appear to have been removed except for remnants of background wallpaper and one or two small objects---it appears to be actively in a process of reorganization that may have been prompted by my stated (or his intuition of my unstated) opinions. And the elements of both sides have been also reduced, as if a sort of psychic explosion that blasted the central alcove had peripheral effects, mainly at the near edges but continuing toward the centers, on the side alcoves. Again, I can't quite put my impressions into words that he might want to hear, but there's a fragment, at the very end, of lying next to him, in his bed across from the alcoves, an attempt simultaneously for him to comfort me after the extremes at the START of the dream, and for me to comfort him after my "critique" of his treasured memorial-alcoves. Now, to describe the START of the dream: he's recruited me for some undefined (at least to me) kind of divination or prophesying---almost PSYCHEDELIC---session (possibly, unknown to me, even drug- or alcohol-induced) in which he hopes that I either CONTACT some esoteric knowledge, or READ some hidden portents, either by looking at the contents of the alcoves BEFORE he filled them with the souvenirs present at the END of the dream, or by PRESENTING me with mystic objects that he hoped I could INTERPRET for his enlightenment. Again noting that I don't remember the BEGINNING of the dream, an EARLY part of it centered around his presenting me with a kind of jointed statuette of an insect, or amulet, or even demigod (as he might present me with a similar-in-size tiny baby that had to be held tenderly or it would break apart): it was light in weight, of maybe five or six loosely connected pieces of what might have been hollow, corroded, matte-finish bronze or light metal (or even wood painted to look like metal), that represented what could have been a head (overlarge), thorax and body (vaguely insect-like), and undefinable ancillary, smaller pieces that could have represented limbs, or appendages, or smaller parts of an alien kind of body. My initial reaction was a kind of fear, or apprehension: "What IS this; what am I supposed to SAY about this; what is this supposed to REPRESENT; is this animal, vegetable, or mineral; am I supposed to somehow use this as a divination object?" After some foggy, unremembered, mysterious incidents, I was presented with ANOTHER object, or doll, somewhat smaller, almost like a "more normal" representation of the "more radical" former object that was in turn only a simulacrum of some unknown real or imagined, religious or diabolical, invented or intuited, "thing." In both cases I didn't know what to say, or even know what sort of words I was EXPECTED to say. I wasn't even sure if I was thought to be the one with superior knowledge, or intuition, or imagination, who could tell HIM something that HE wanted to know, or if HE was the guru or sage who wanted to impart some esoteric knowledge to ME. On the one hand, the feeling of the dream was of great SUPPORT AND LOVE, in that I wasn't to be frightened or intimidated or even overly challenged---that this was being done as a favor or present (which, as I type, reminds me of the "present" of the party in YESTERDAY'S "comparable" dream) for me; on the other hand there was an element of CHALLENGE: that I LIVE UP to the test or lesson being given me, with maybe the slightest hint of DEMAND that I "get it right" or "look deeply and say something revelatory" or "get benefit for myself (or for him)" thanks to this sequence of events. Maybe two or three shadowy acolytes hovered around the edges of the dream, but the central man could have been my current or former lover, or some quasi-guru or saint, or, only as a now-thought to state what was definitely NOT in the dream, some kind of charlatan or evil-doer who wanted to hoax me into giving him something I might not want to give him. Now, at 7:48, I hope I've captured the salient images of another out-of-the-ordinary dream.

THURSDAY, 2/3/11: 1) 7:22AM: Dream of marking beginning and end of concepts in a book, LIKE indexing, only GRAPHICAL, with emphasis on two contrasting points of view. 2) 8:45AM: a) Crowds walking to huge high rock over swimming hole. b) Girl lying next to me murmuring about "Pheneas, Philibus, Press." c) I'm leafing through books, saying "That's Old," for comics.

SATURDAY, 2/5/11: 7:39AM: An expert in classifying something is insisting that he can match substances against standards to rate them for purity, using a coded bar that he's invented. He can do better than any panel of experts that any industry could put together. Forgot a similar dream from before, involving me rather than this other man.

SUNDAY, 2/6/11: 5:50AM: Dennis is indexing in the "new, emotional" way, and it's easy for him to capsulize large passages according to the FEELING, rather than the CONTENT, in the pages, especially in final summaries of chapters. At one point he says to me, "Wipe my smile off your face," and that gives me a great triumphant feeling about my training him to be an indexer.

MONDAY, 2/7/11: 8:39AM: I'm sitting in a dentist's chair, and he says, "Even you will be able to see what's coming out," and I have the vision of a ridge of filling being extracted from along the middle of my upper right wisdom tooth (which I haven't had for years in real life), which completes an ENTIRE ROW of fillings extracted ALL ALONG BOTH SIDES of my upper teeth, and I'm astounded (and disappointed) that so much work had to be done, even on teeth that aren't there any more.

WEDNESDAY, 2/9/11: 7:11AM: I'm having breakfast with an older woman and a couple of vague additional people. I see a pitcher of milk, but as others are having coffee, I ask if I can make hot chocolate. Put a little milk in the bottom of a pot on a stove and hear it boiling before I can add more milk, which makes a very thick, lukewarm, hot chocolate. As the woman of the other couple leaves, she volunteers to make me copies of a kind of crossword that I don't do, and I tell her I'm more interested in Times-like crosswords and in sudoku, but not hers. Before, a dream fragment centered on positioning four sentences in a given area, somewhat like a puzzle solution, in which letters could curve around non-linear grid boundaries somewhat like Scrabble tiles in an irregular area.

THURSDAY, 2/10/11: 7:25AM: I'm walking the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India or southern Tibet, and am directed toward a particular rather shabby temple outside a stubby chorten, and there's a sexy American traveler inside who tells me that Buddha came to this temple, knelt before the empty altar, and saw The What. "The What?" I said, bursting into tears. "The What," he said, smiling. I buried my head in his sexy crotch and he was somewhat taken aback, but permitted me to let my head remain there as I sobbed my gratitude for being allowed to see such a sacred place and totally grok its importance to me, to him, and to the Buddha.

FRIDAY, 2/11/11: 5:51AM: Can't get (something, a bag?) from subway passengers, so I must cross over, buy a token, and miss my train because of it.

SATURDAY, 2/12/11: 7:46AM: I'm organizing a summer-camp "Special-Games" petition.

SUNDAY, 2/13/11: 6AM: I'm looking for a lost manuscript page.

MONDAY, 2/14/11: 1) 5:35AM: I'm trying to recover from amnesia by going down "avenues" of recalling past events. 2) I'm pulverizing rocks and analyzing the pieces.

TUESDAY, 2/15/11: 10:08AM: I'm at a very low level in grade school, above kindergarten, but no higher than the third or fourth grade. I'm being given a new kind of "word-oriented" arithmetic test: not problems in addition and subtraction, but a double column of about 20 questions that are to be answered in sentences in the spaces provided below the questions. I'm sure that I'll be able to do very well in the test, and in a semi-waking state I think of how I'll express how well I know to explain the processes of arithmetic without resorting to examples that I'd solve step-by-step. The dream went on for a long time, but I was never fully conscious during parts of it because it never occurred to me to feel that I was cold, or that I needed to pee. Much of the emotion was pleasure over knowing that I would do very well in the test.

WEDNESDAY, 2/16/11: 7:35AM: BUGS! 1) Flies! Radio announcement reminds the elders of a village of an epidemic of biting flies twenty years ago, and they're worried about a recurrence, and I think, "There were certainly a lot of hazards in the past that children had to be protected from." 2) Someone named Betty had been paid $2 to give our family at 1221 Dietz, including Uncle Edward, a bunch of desserts: among them, a plastic container with three kinds of cakes wrapped in colored aluminum foil, two the size of large cupcakes, the third a small loaf cake, and I wondered if we shouldn't have paid her more for this quantity of food. I put out three small plates for the desserts to be served on, and Uncle Edward reached under a small shelf overhanging the kitchen table to get three forks for us: the first one, I said looking at the back of it, was dirty and should be washed, the next was OK, and the third, the last one taken from the farthest back, produced two ladybugs that flew up to the wall above the shelf. I remarked about them, and both fell into the oatmeal dish that I was eating out of, and I fished both of them out with my large spoon and dumped them into the sink.

SATURDAY, 2/19/11: 8:08AM: Alexandra phones me after I argue with Mildred on the phone.

TUESDAY, 2/22/11: 1) 6:26AM: I'm handling a box of shoes and bags of candy and popcorn. 2) 7:24AM: I look down from a road on a cliff to see the Titanic burning smokily, capsized at a pier on the river below me.

SATURDAY, 2/26/11: 9:33AM: Many fragments: 1) I'm in a six-passenger bus going one way on a highway, and we pass a larger bus, but with only about six passengers, going the other way, and we know they're going to turn around and join us, so we pull off the highway to stop. 2) Mom gets out of the car to start a fire for a picnic in a grassy field on a hilltop, and I get out into LUSH clumps of bright-green grass, think about reports of some chemical getting into the grass in lower altitudes, and wonder if we're high enough that I can eat the grass as a salad harmlessly. Look for Mom, but she's gone from the crest of the hill, and other women are making picnic fires just down from the crest, and I can't find Mom at all. 3) A friend is debating sending me a Christmas card, but he doesn't know if he's going to get one from me and thus would send me one, so to make his life easier I tell him that "my card is on its way."

SUNDAY, 2/27/11: 8:37AM: Repeat of dream: I'm traveling to China to get injected with a serum which will enable me to "intuit" translating an ancient Chinese script into English, maybe via modern Chinese. Some authorities are very concerned about the side effects of the serum, some don't want me to have it at all, many think the timing of my taking it is very important. I'm supposed to have detailed knowledge of the construction of the serum as an adjunct to my using it properly. It's somehow connected to my prohibition from alcohol, because I'm given a choice of a drink with dinner, and I feel it's very important NOT to have alcohol and take the first step of the serum before I eat anything at all on my first day of arrival. Some charts or diagrams are also very important for me to study while ingesting the serum for the first time---sort of like the "set and settings" importance for the taking of LSD, it occurs to me as I type this at 8:42AM. My specialness in the importance of this undertaking underlies the basic details of the dream.

MONDAY, 2/28/11: 10:27AM: 1) A demanding woman, like Mildred, is sitting next to me in the back of a car, demanding of the car's owner, a pleasant woman, like Alexandra, that she keep an umbrella in the car to be used by passengers who don't want to get wet. Alexandra is looking back at Mildred over her shoulder, trying to be patient and tolerant, and I keep my mouth shut and look out the window with a bemused expression on my lips, hoping that Alexandra can see it and know that I'm sympathizing with her. 2) At the end of some technical meeting, possibly on indexing, I've gone to the office at the back of the hall to claim my free book, a large, lavish hardcover, and there are few that seem to be available, and I kick myself when I ask if they have "another book," because I fear they may think I already HAVE a book and want ANOTHER one, and the woman in the office reluctantly gives me one, but refuses to give me a sturdy plastic bag to carry it in, and I keep insisting "I want my book in a BAG."

TUESDAY, 3/1/11: 8:50AM: 1) Expensive swallowing pills somehow symbolizing pricey meals. 2) Pulling a molted pelt off a small animal to show someone how the dark outer coat contrasted with the light inner coat at the edge makes the color difference greater. 3) Look at a sexy guy lying naked on a bed, and intrigue him into staying there by interlocking my toes with his in a seductive way. 4) Singles sitting in the very front rows of a bus are cautioned that they have to really rush to the next bus so they can get the front rows again. 5) Again something about expensive meals.

WEDNESDAY, 3/2/11: 9:53AM: 1) 7:37AM: I'm sorting through sets of papers, that have to be put in order, that seem to contain lists of objects or dates. Oddly, some sets start with blank pages, so it's easy to update them, if needed. There's no urgency to the task, and I have no idea whether I'm doing it for myself or for some kind of job. 2) 9:31AM: I'm visiting a rather cluttered house in what may be upstate New York. My host leads me downstairs for some reason, and when I try to return to the room in which I'm staying, I ask, "Is there only one way to go upstairs?" and, when I get no answer, go up a narrow stairway to find I'm not where I want to be. I leave by an external stairs to a magnificent view over a green valley below that rises to a wooded hill opposite, giving me a sense of space like the view from the atrium of the Time-Warner Center where Charles and I had desserts at Bouchon yesterday. My host has suggested we make a small trip somewhere, maybe for dinner, but then he says something garbled that I shortly make out to be, "There's a tornado predicted in half an hour." Indeed, I look at a distant gathering of dark clouds over a hill and see what might be the start of a whirling funnel of storm, and I want to get back to my room to get my camera to record this, but in my walking I find myself in town, rather than in the countryside, and I have no idea how to get back to the building I started in. I feel hopelessly lost, with no prospect of finding my way, thinking dismally that this isn't even a dream from which I can awaken and find myself in a known place. And then I wake.

SUNDAY, 3/6/11: 8:04AM: Maybe it's the "influence" of (maybe) having taped "God of War" last night, by the maker of "Gattaca," maybe it's the visions from "Iphegenie en Tauride" last night, but these fragments seem taken from the same movie, or TV pilot, or real-life simulation (how's that for oxymoron?). At one point a group of us have entered an empty hospital-office area, hoping to be able to use the vacant office of a very senior doctor that one of us knows personally, having used that office for a similar purpose to the one we now have: performing a far-future test, or setting up a like test. In another area, our group is riding on a (simulated?) train where the views out the window are possibly real, possibly CGI, possibly a combination of the two---but the emphasis is on the idea that if they're NOT real, they're worth the horrific expense of making them LOOK real even though (it seems) this may only be a REHEARSAL for real life, rather than real life itself. This meta-dream operated on so many levels, so fleetingly, that it takes longer to describe the details of it (inadequately) than it took for observing it during the subjective time of the dream itself. Maybe the Times is outside now, as it wasn't at 8AM.

MONDAY, 3/7/11: 8:33AM: The Times still isn't outside my door. Same "this-can't-be-a-dream" dream: I've done a brief index for a very strange book: a 500-page basic medical text on blood circulation (maybe like the three-page example-text in my Indexing Handbook), which was given me in a bare, bound, coverless signature of pages followed by a thrice-as-thick sheaf of more signature-bound pages covered by a brown Kraft-paper sheet with a title in a foreign language, maybe German, that fell apart into three separate "books" as I paged through it. I know it's Friday morning, and the index is due today, but I have no idea of any specifications for the index until I chance upon a crumpled quarter-sheet of paper with the notation "about 750 lines" pencil-written on it, not in my handwriting. I think that I might have marked, and typed, about one line per page of the medical text, but now that I open the Kraft-paper-faced maybe-1500 pages, it's possible that the publisher wanted some kind of rudimentary index for each of the three "books." But I had to phone the Production Editor to ask whether she wanted these three tiny indexes INCORPORATED INTO the "750-line index," or wanted each separately in one place, or each following each "book." So I had to phone her. I only vaguely recalled her name as "Jane Weatherington," and didn't have HER phone number or the number of the publishing company she worked for. And I didn't know how to use the phone in the odd office in which I was sitting on this Friday morning. I picked up the phone, and got the voice of a male operator talking with someone else. I tried hitting the left button on the bottom of the dial-phone on my desk, and still got the voice of the male operator. A stranger at the next desk suggested some regular phone number that I could dial to get an outside line, which I thought was absurd. I dialed some general-information number and asked for the number of Jane Weatherington, and was told there was no listing. I tried to think of other names that I knew, vaguely, at the publishing company, but had no success. Time was passing until it was about 2PM. I found myself sitting in what seemed to be a park outside my temporary office, AGAIN, as in yesterday's dream, frantically running my fingers through my hair and rubbing my scalp wondering what I could do next, since this was REAL LIFE and no a dream from which I could wake---and I woke! Lay amazed at this second dream-that-couldn't-be-a-dream. Type this to 8:54AM. Debate going back to bed.

WEDNESDAY, 3/9/11: 1) 7:08AM: Dream of sexy "glitter" act for EXOTIC audience. 2) 10:07AM: Flocks of BIRDS swoop down from an enormous vista of sky, and one bird drops a FISH that lies gasping theatrically for breath, then waves its fins like arms and dies before my eyes.

FRIDAY, 3/11/11: 7:42AM: Many fragments: 1) I feel a tickle inside my right crotch at the top of my leg, and unerringly pick up a small fleck that turns into a small louse, 2) I'm supposed to type in an office, but I'm wearing a short-sleeved shirt, so I think I might have to take a sweater (like the one I wore most of yesterday) so I won't be cold if the place is air conditioned, 3) I'm lying next to someone on a beach, describing the lake as "just a perfect place to swim: bottom is completely sandy, it's shallow almost to the center of the lake, and there may even be a few fish that you can see swimming. 10:23AM: Another bit of being in a large room with many naked men sporting enormous erections walking around. I reach out for one, but it's surprisingly soft for all its adamantine appearance, and it's just not very interesting.

SATURDAY, 3/12/11: 7:15AM: Two London-themed dreams, though not at all connected: 1) I've watched an obscure historical play about some minor character from a Shakespearean king-play whose importance has been enlarged into the subject of a pseudo-history, documented by sources that may or not be factual, and I'm trying to sort out what came first and who wrote what by referencing a program, a newspaper, and some other book entirely. 2) John and I have eaten in a London restaurant that I recall having been located on a street map that shows a diagonal set of streets in some off-central position in a non-touristed section of the city. He's taxied to our hotel to sleep on this, our very first day in the city, while I decided I wanted to walk a short distance to some transportation hub and do a bit of sightseeing before locating our hotel for the first time. The street starts with shops and stores and rows of flats, but then I pass whole blocks filled with abandoned buildings and semi-ruined premises that seem to have been unoccupied for a great length of time. I think I must have taken the wrong direction on the street, and try to figure whether I should turn right or left in order to walk two blocks and then turn back in the proper direction that I should have taken in the first place, in order to see different sights before getting to the destination I wanted in the first place. I feel it's strange that I've passed absolutely no one on the street, and there's been no auto or vehicular traffic of any kind, almost as if I'm on the set of a post-apocalypse movie in which nothing has been really destroyed, yet the area is totally uninhabited. I have no feeling of danger, or even of being lost, but this "adventure" has not turned out quite the way I hoped it would, and I hope to reach my hotel soon.

SUNDAY, 3/13/11: 8:35AM: SHIT! Sensuously rich dream of convincing reality: I'm staying in a sort of hotel or dormitory that's enormously overcrowded: even in the bathroom, more people are gathered than should practically be present. Since it's so crowded, I decide to ease my overloaded bowels while still lying in bed on my side with one leg drawn up so that the shit will ooze over the top of the other leg rather than dirtying the bed linens. But the volume is far greater than I anticipated: what I hoped would be a handful turns (turds) into more than thrice that, softer than I'd hoped, also, so that it fairly gushes between my fingers and around the edges of my hand as I grope awkwardly toward the toilet seat. Previously, I'd seen that the bathroom was mysteriously rife with paper towels over almost all porcelain surfaces: sink, toilet, and bathtub. Now I suspect they were hiding shit-covered surfaces, and the only visible roll of toilet paper, lying on the floor next to the toilet, appeared to have shit rolled up in the outer five or six layers of the paper. I managed to deposit most of my handful into the bowl and flush it down, pleased at least that the flush DID seem to operate properly. I wiped excess shit from my hand and hoped the sink would furnish soap and water to clean myself properly when I finished on the john. Though I could FEEL the weight and heat and wetness of the load on my leg and in my hand, and SEE the uniform brown of the mass, I now recall, thankfully, that I didn't SMELL the product, though of course in the dream I KNEW that the others near me could. Again, in the middle of it all, the terrible thought that this was REAL, and had to be DEALT with, and was no just a dream.

TUESDAY, 3/15/11: 1) 6:20AM: I'm touring an off-Broadway theater; the owner slips a free admission ticket into my shirt pocket, and I don't quite know how to react to it, though I AM pleased. 2) 9:42AM: I'm sitting in front of a TV set and face a tray rather like a cookie sheet on which are sizzling two enormous slices of bacon, with tiny condiments heaped on top, and I wonder if I can eat them with my fingers (or would they be too hot?), or should I try to find a knife and fork somewhere.

WEDNESDAY, 3/16/11: 7:20AM: Probably influenced by my infatuation with Tanner from Five Napkin Burger last night, I've become mesmerized by the beauty of a new fellow at some exotic version of the gym: he's awkward in an odd tight pair of shorts in which he feels uncomfortable, and I pass him a number of times and try to make eye contact with him, but he refuses. At home, I pose in front of a mirror in a too-long, silky-blue---chasuble-like---gown, thinking that I should tell him that THIS is what would best be worn, though when I put it on a second time and actually think to tell him about it, the sheer lunacy of the gown itself and my position of trying to strike an acquaintance with him strikes me with such force that I know I could never follow through with it, yet feel embarrassed about it anyway.

FRIDAY, 3/18/11: 8:58AM: I'm at a military base, where a group of us are packing to move to another area, and I suggest to a woman who's packing many oblong boxes in a soft-sided suitcase that she has to find a way to arrange them in the suitcase, since it's obvious that the volume of the case is sufficient, but the odd sizes of the boxes will make it difficult to fit them all in. I have three or four pieces of luggage, and I don't quite trust all of them to have been taken from our room, but when I return to check, I can't find the room again, so I have to trust the transfer has been made. Pass through a number of latrines where young soldiers have to leap from board to board to keep from getting their feet wet in the smelly johns. Then I'm outside, in an area of rural houses with lawns deep in floodwaters: I jump onto floating planks for a bit, but they're drifting downstream when I have the distinct feeling I should be moving in the opposite direction, and make a leap for a lawn that seems to have a fizzy stream making the sod sodden, and I get very wet but my boots seem to be holding out, and I have a sense of that awful "lost and don't know how to get back" feeling for a moment before I wake, with a headache.

SATURDAY, 3/19/11: 7:32AM: I'm staying overnight in a British rectory, saddled with a rather taciturn prelate who looks like Derek Jacobi. We can't think of anything interesting to say to each other, and listen in to the quiet conversation between a second prelate and second guest. I carry around a container of apple juice so I can have a drink whenever I want, rather than going into the kitchen that seems to be the preserve of the rectory, rather than open to guests. I'm not looking forward to staying much longer here.

MONDAY, 3/21/11: Note from morning: 1) I'm catching little FISH in a can? Someone ELSE'S catch? 2) I shoot some of many birds flocking over snowdrifts, and some birds turn into rabbits that I've inadvertently shot.

WEDNESDAY, 3/23/11: 8:10AM: In a busy garden restaurant in the Village, a major inventor has installed his array of puppets in the trees of the garden, so that an operator can manipulate one lever and lower a dozen or so marionettes to the ground so that the legs perform convincing walking or dancing movements while the rest of the bodies interact in lifelike ways. I swoop them down from trees to perform convincing quadrilles while others try to ignore them and just have lunch. I march them in unison in casual conversation with others around them, but only as a pastime, not really ["not really"] manipulating real people to act the way I'm commanding them to act. I have great admiration for the inventor of this revolutionary entertainment.

THURSDAY, 3/24/11: 8:53AM: I'm forced to try to succeed with three kinds of therapy: 1) I'm supposed to help someone, vaguely like Marj, with problems so severe that I have no chance of helping, and since I'm not a trained therapist myself, I can make the choice that I really don't want to be bothered with her at all. 2) I'm supposed to choose from three different kinds of therapy for MYSELF, one of which involves traveling a great distance to talk to someone who isn't particularly interested in my problems, so I can't really see any reason to take all that time for something that isn't going to be of any real benefit to me, another that possibly involves some kind of physical operation (maybe patterned on my biopsies for the nevus on my back, or harkening back to the shock treatment or even lobotomy as depicted in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." The third I never really understood and, again, saw no reason to pursue. 3) Again, in this outer triple, was a technique that was never clearly explained to me. Details were much clearer in the dream before I woke and decided to transcribe it.

SATURDAY, 3/26/11: From 7:58-8:26AM I jot notes from an incredible dream that started simply, with journal notations that extended into long text-lines of events stretching beyond the right margin of the page, and I began considering the multiple connections in Zolnerzone, and the developments I wanted to make in it, and how the richness of this dream would make a perfect entry in the Jewel Box if I could only transcribe it properly---which, unfortunately, I didn't sit down to do until 2:30PM on Sunday, so much of the treasure has been lost. I started with the representation of a BOX, encased in a square, in which was the dream, in which my recent memories of walks through the varied collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art exfoliated into memories of places I've been, books that I've read, other museums whose guidebooks line my bookcases, and the REPRESENTATIONS of these treasures blossom: websites, posters, digital photographs, framed reproductions, stacks of copies, sheaves of memories, and, from those, realities multiply, encompassing worlds within worlds for which many more than the nine dimensions of string theory are required, leading me to evaluate NUMBERS of objects, books in libraries, artworks in collections, PEOPLE, memories within people, reflections of each reality in each memory of each person, not only present people but the akashic records of the memories of every person who ever lived, and the numbers escalate to 10 to the 10th to the 10th to the 10th to the google and the googleplex; and each of these representations are just DOTS in the BOX that I tried to envision at the bottom of the note card, and then adding "Don't forget, this is one dot for EACH Planck-time unit." Then I started listing multiplexes of realities in fiction and actuality: "Fessenden's Worlds," the multiverses of some physicist for whose name I searched among Feynman, Wheeler, Dicke, Einstein, without finding the name I wanted; the trillions of pages of the Internet, growing exponentially with blogs and facebook entries; each image in the enormous Netflix movie catalog; the contents of libraries, not to mention Borges's fictional infinite library. So I tried to capture the dream, after thirty hours of forgetting, and didn't succeed.

SUNDAY, 3/27/11: 1) 8:50AM: I'm sitting next to Spartacus in a balcony row that ends just to my left, and he asks me to move. I look at him in amazement, and he orders, "Detach yourself from me!" Astounded, I don't move, figuring if he doesn't want to sit next to me, HE can move. Without transition, I'm in a room with what appears to be a body encased in plastic, and to counter any possible smell, someone's put a can of air freshener on its side and levered the top so that the spray is continuously on. I think this might be dangerous, but figure the spray will run out before anything bad happens; it's just a strange situation. 2) 11:10AM: I'm looking down at a mass of bugs on my kitchen floor, and I just KNOW that they've come out of the walls to mate, and the wheltering ball does seem to be frantically copulating, chasing, coupling and uncoupling, and I wonder how I can scoop them all up and drop them into the toilet, or into the trash container, without causing them to retreat back into the walls uncaught. Ugly fragment of dream.

MONDAY, 3/28/11: 5:37AM: I'm in a place, with a large number of other people, that could be a kind of "experiment" in "being." I assume everyone here is like me: we don't know what we're supposed to be doing, how we're supposed to behave. No one seems to be "in charge," but I have a feeling there should be some kind of "purpose" for this experiment. At first I had the idea we were supposed to form groups with---I don't know---people we wanted to form groups with. Early on, a group of four or five unattractive fat people seemed to want to recruit members of their group, but I didn't want to be part of THEIR group. Could I start a group of my own? On what basis? How? Just shout out, "I want to be part of a group?" Be more explicit, like, "I want to talk with someone interesting, to make the passing time more interesting?" Or even, "Does anyone know why we're here and what we're supposed to be doing?" As I "thought about the dream in the dream," I began to wonder: "Where do we eat? Where do we sleep? How long will this go on? Does ANYONE know what's supposed to be going on here?" Eventually, sort of "thinking about the dream IN the dream," I began to think this was VERY like---well, LIFE! We don't know why we're here, we don't know how we're going to end up---but we don't want to be bored, we---well, we don't want to be TOTALLY alone, yet we don't want to be with people who are bores, or unpleasant, or who can't be trusted---what made me say THAT? There are no PASSTIMES---no books or movies or television sets or places of entertainment. Could people be having interesting sex somewhere? I'm not even sure about WHERE we are: it seems to be indoors, with low-level lighting that never changes---in a space so BIG it seems to have no walls, no rooms, no "special areas" outside what a group of people could "declare their own," with "their own rules." Though no one seems to have done that yet. Can I just go up to someone I think looks interesting and ask "What do YOU think we're doing here?" "Why are YOU here?" "What do YOU think should be happening---what should we be DOING here?" It's like LIFE, but without any BACKGROUND: it doesn't matter who we WERE, what we KNOW, where we're FROM, what our PREVIOUS history is, we're starting from WHAT OUR PHYSICAL BODIES ARE NOW---hey, where do we SHIT, where do we WASH, and again, how do we get something to EAT? Or, more basically, DRINK? Is there---call it COMMERCE, somewhere? Is it even POSSIBLE to get OUT OF HERE and "go home," wherever that may be in relationship to HERE, though, somehow, the ORIGINAL feeling in the place is "this could only be in or near New York," somehow "where I've volunteered to be," where "if I could get out, I'd know how to get back home to my REAL life." But, again, this dream seems so much an analogy to REAL LIFE that it might, actually, somehow, BE real life, and not "an interesting experiment that I somehow volunteered for and found myself in the middle of with no memory of how I got here or what the terms of my being here ARE." Like---well---this IS my life and NOT a dream---though as I type at my desk at 5:59AM THIS is not a dream. Unless it is? Let's go back to bed---at least I know where THAT is! And, somehow, I know what my background, my previous history, is, and what my REAL---as opposed to DREAM---possibilities for "being and doing and having" are. Continue notes at 6AM: I want to ask Sharon "Is this a SPECIAL---different---well---PRIVILEGED dream? Unique? Exceptional? What does it SAY about me---I want to be---important---memorable? 6:03AM. I want POWER to----? I want power to CHOOSE---to CHANGE???---my life?? It was like LIMBO, like "Lost," like "Gain," like LIFE, all those four-letter words. Note: look up Susan Boyle on Wikipedia. 6:33AM Start Actualism to "evaluate." Up at 7:08AM, sunrise over.

TUESDAY, 3/29/11: 1) 4:57AM: I'm staying in a small house, maybe in upstate New York, with strangers I don't know how I met. The first episode finds me trying to sleep on what may be a kitchen table-top, which my host tries to make more comfortable for me by taking off ragged covers to reveal a porcelain or plastic surface which is littered with crumbs from what may have been chocolate-chip cookies; he brushes the crumbs off so I can be more undisturbed. Then a young fellow awkwardly positions himself on top of me, mumbling something that I take to be an acceptance of my being gay, and I run my hands along his slender back and refer to masturbation, which again he seems to accept with effortless ease, but after a few soft fumblings, he's gone. Later, a small group from the house has decided to go on a small expedition into a store in a nearby village, which turns into a large, old-fashioned emporium with many departments stretching off into well-lit, though under-customered, hallways of polished floors featuring whole rooms of early 20th-century furniture. I, along with a few others from the house, are looking at areas filled with small lamps and vases and curios, arrayed on many levels of large shelves, with precarious ledges fronting each shelf that I decide aren't really safe to negotiate, because protruding cornices display large vases that could easily be toppled and broken. I look down and find I'm on a network of tiny paths, demarcated by tiny white wooden fences, and I see that if I lower myself to the path below after another man clears away, I can get to a small gateway leading to a larger walkway that forms a more central artery through this area of display-goods. Throughout, I'm aware that I'm dressed casually in jeans, maybe with a halter top; a flannel shirt; and desert boots, possibly without socks, that fit sloppily, as if they were quite old and used, but all these are in keeping with the garb of others, I assure myself, so I don't stand out as being a tourist unfamiliar with this locale. Other details may follow in the dream, but I forget them now as I type at 5:20AM. A feeling of comfort and ease (and safety and acceptance) pervaded the dream, as if in some psychic extension of the "everything's OK" atmosphere of the "endless room" that formed the setting of yesterday's dream---and, I now think as I type, possibly in contrast with Mildred's and Susie's concerns about John's destination on Saturday: Syria. 2) 8:44AM: I'm translating text into Spanish, marking words that I'm not sure of, like "wife," and Lorene is helping me by telephoning someone she knows who speaks Spanish, and is jotting possible words in the margins of the text I'm working on. Then I'm walking down a street lined with photographers taking pictures of passersby, and Joe Easter asks how long it will take for a picture to get to him and is told "thirty days." He poses as it starts to snow, and I feel like asking him if he really wants a photo with snow falling in the background, but figure he knows what he wants and don't ask him. Then, inside a living room, three windows in a row are being removed to be cleaned, and I want to scratch an inscription with a diamond on the center one, but figure I can wait until the third window is being cleaned and the second one has already been replaced. Later I'm sitting in a bedroom with three or four women, and Carolyn is sitting in a bright green coat on one bed, but she's falling asleep, flopping comically face-down on one side of the bed, then propelling herself full-length onto the bed, but her momentum carries her across the bed and into a bundle that falls between the side of the bed and the wall, causing a strange woman sitting on a sofa, opposite, to burst into laughter, as do I.

TUESDAY, 4/5/11: 9:40AM: It started in sort of a flophouse to which I returned after many days to find my bed still unmade and surrounded by my belongings, since there didn't seem to be any drawers in which I could store my stuff, but also, apparently, I didn't feel there was a danger of anything being taken, not that I had any possessions that anyone would want. Then it turned into a fairly benign mental institution in which I was I trying to find out when and from where a daily bus would depart to the shopping center in town. It was just a few minutes after 2PM when a nurse dismissed my request by saying the bus had already left at 2, but I figured it would be late, and when I got to a door I found two different people who seemed to be making a roster of inmates who wanted seats on the bus, though there were many people waiting, milling around, though each roster had fewer than a half-dozen names. Then I managed to get a front seat on the bus, which appeared to have about twenty of the thirty seats filled, but we were stopping at another entrance where maybe five or six more people were waiting to board. Later, one of the supervisors was looking for someone to lead classes, or sessions, and though I felt I was qualified I didn't particularly want to volunteer, since that would show my mental superiority over most of the other inmates. The supervisor suggested brightly that one class might be in telepathy, and I thought that was an interesting idea. She suggested another far-out idea that I now forget.

FRIDAY, 4/8/11: 9:37AM: Note dream of being in "big outside room," sort of like "High" set from the Booth Theater last night.

SATURDAY, 4/9/11: 7:55AM: I'm touring on a small north-of-England isle that's not quite Scotland and not quite Ireland, and gives a bill denominated as $40 in a total that includes many sub-charges, which my host-guide (with just a touch of roguish W.C. Fields) keeps mentioning as 65 sovereigns (or something like that) or 15485 of some very-old-fashioned coinage from another century. "But we did have those two rough sandwiches," he said sympathetically, and I do remember a hard-crusted rough-yeasted bread around tough meat that reminded me of my lunch HH turkey burger yesterday. I'd thought I was given a sort of souvenir book in a manila folder with the itemized bill on an 8-1/2 x 11 sheet with a rough print of the coat of arms of the shop, or hotel that contained the shop, on the other side, but when he took the book BACK in getting rid of us, and I had to search (in a very fragmentary aside when I discovered I was barefoot and had to retrieve my socks from a pile of clothing) for the bill, and only at the very bitter end realized that they'd taken THAT back since it would have been proof of their cheat. I also thumbed through ragged-edged maps of what may have been the coast around my stopping place, with vague outlines of neighboring countries across the small estuaries. In a similar fragment, I recall he had a woman about him, scruffy at first then rather sophisticated looking, who may have consumed some of the sub-items on my bill that I recall as having three or four itemized sub-lists with that unquestionable $40 total. Only after I woke did I recognize that typical "frantic search for something lost and never found" aspect of what started as a light pleasant dream and ended somewhat more subject to a dark paranoia of being taken.

SUNDAY, 4/10/11: 8:25AM: I'm a young student in an esoteric academy, training to be paired with someone more advanced in the use of the NOISH (no-ish, not noysh), a circle of energy like an electric hula hoop that, as one of the teachers futilely tries to explain, doesn't spin THIS way (horizontal to the ground), or THIS way (vertically), or THIS way (toward and away vertically), but THIS was (in the OTHER direction, at an attempted angle to each of the other three), in a way that's dangerous if attempted too early and with too much power, yet (maybe as in the injection in the movie "Push") can enable super-human capabilities of THOUGHT, rather than psychic abilities. I think of it as a torus with a knot of density at a CORNER (which of course a torus doesn't have in "real" life) which, like sex, enters an exciting realm of heightened THINKING (not feeling) when it's spun in synchronicity. NOISH involves training, timing, and maturity, as well as unanimity of intention and objective. We're in training to be physicians of the soul, where I'm much too eager, to the point of damaging myself, to make progress before either of us has been fully initiated into the parameters of the power. There is definitely a sexual component to the unity necessary---I'm reminded of a thought I had yesterday in thinking about the power that money gives: "You (older men) take it up after the ineluctable pleasure of the orgasm has dwindled."

MONDAY, 4/11/11: 9AM: Possibly affected by the plush interiors of some of the scenes in "Mildred Pierce" that I watched the end of last night, I'm in a British clubhouse for some kind of ceremony about which I know nothing. I appear to have arrived late, because I see people sitting at tables covered with white linen, eating tiny items from small plates, some place settings already abandoned, with maybe a few cakes left on serving platters. I want something to eat, so after finding that all remaining plates have leftover crumbs on them, I empty the contents of a silver tureen (some kind of dried condiments) into the different contents of another (since everyone's obviously finished with both ingredients) and look for available items to add to my now-empty receptacle. Someone who might be a waiter, or a would-be companion, tries to follow me around, attempting to say that I'm too late for anything to eat, but I keep a steady gap between us by paddling through the narrow canals that now separate the eating tables and serving tables in a small floating drum, or barrel, or some conveyance only large enough for me to propel with a rectangular plank that I'm using as a paddle, with which I navigate with considerable skill and accuracy through the diners who pointedly ignore me. Then, as I'm convinced there's nothing left to be eaten, and some program is about to begin, I wake.

WEDNESDAY, 4/20/11: 8:05AM: I'd been thinking it was a while since I'd had a dream to be transcribed, and am almost shocked to see that it's been NINE days! This was another strange one: I was either watching a movie about, or I was LIVING, the life of a man who wasn't British, but, as a spy, had to BECOME---well, a WOMAN who was a drudge worker of some sort, perhaps even in a mine, or more likely some dreary factory, and he had to even THINK in a language different from the one he was born speaking, and accept friends who had known him before (I guess he had died, and would replace this dead woman?), even to the point of lying in a bed and a man lay behind him/her and maybe even fucked her from behind, as was his custom, and "the spy" had to tolerate it. The final image was of her walking numbly down a foggy street, BEING this person that he had NOT been and now WAS. Very low-key, almost not there, but a WEIRD dream!

THURSDAY, 4/21/11: 8:25AM: Very scientific dream: I'm introducing a technique that prevents identification of a person by destroying their SMELL. I put two rows of thieves, like a jury panel, who are staring at me with disbelief, under the influence of a machine that acts like an odor eraser, just like a felt chalk eraser erases chalk from a blackboard. I perform this erasure on myself, and then on an automobile that's driven before them. Then, convinced that this works, a group gets into an automobile and enters a store in broad daylight and steals the money from the cash register. To flout the cops, they then sit in the car for about twenty minutes, then drive away. Even though the VISUAL is still there, somehow by removing the SMELL I've removed the PRESENCE of the thieves and the automobile. Later a silhouette of the car, like in a TV ad, is presented to the victims, and there's no identification. It appears I've invented and proven an entirely new disguise for people and objects by removing it's odor. I'm a fabulous success and become fabulously wealthy. So THAT seems to be the point of the dream.

FRIDAY, 4/22/11: 5:09AM: A SECOND cat in a house puts in his first appearance looking like a furry SNAKE climbing a cabinet. Someone else in the house explains to me, "It's the child of the other one, so they don't bother each other."

SATURDAY, 4/23/11: Fragment of legs in boots being put onto a table for display, probably based on the New Yorker article on the Coach label for shoes and other luxury goods.

SUNDAY, 4/24/11: 8AM: I'm helping a crew make a large three-layered cake with three tiers of icing of different colors. The woman supervising had told me what percentages of batter were to be added to each of two bubbling pots on the stove, but I forgot, and reluctantly have to wake her to review what I should do next, since both pots seem too dry already and need to have batter added, but I don't know how much. I can't visualize how the three colors of cake quadrants (tridrants?) will appear when buried under the three colors of icing. Another segment of the dream is now forgotten.

MONDAY, 4/25/11: 3:37AM: Woke at 3:23AM with dream, rehearsed it to 3:29AM, got up to transcribe it, and in error opened a second copy of WP51. Got the typical "two copies in use, rename?" and tried WP53 and WP57, and got the "replace disk and start over," so I hit CTL/ALT/DEL, got two WP51s "running," hit one, saved material, closed it, and then closed second one, reopened WP51, checked that MC\NL was OK, closed THAT and opened MC\DH to start typing dream. This should all be in MC\NL, not DH, but for fuck's sake start typing dream: I'm about 40, in a clothing shop, and am wearing an old, tight-fitting, striped shirt that I think Don M. gave me maybe 35 years ago, and a pair of also-tight-fitting, white-cotton, again-striped, bell-bottom pants that I think I bought at some shop in the Village at the urging of Andre E., and I look in a mirror and decide that "this will work," after I tighten the belt two notches when the starting closure was so loose that the pants could slip off my small ass because my waist had grown so large. Then it's become a sort of business meeting and I look across the room and Don M. is leaning against the opposite wall reading some kind of letter. I'm astounded that he's there, and he seems not to recognize me but wants to continue with some kind of business dealing, so I go to FACE him directly, and he kind of ignores me, starting into his business request, then DOES recognize me, looks at me in disdain, as if to ask, "Why are you wearing those AWFUL clothes, and how do you expect me to recognize you when you're so HOPELESSLY out of fashion?" I try to insist that he at least greet me as a friend from the past, which he finally does, and the situation changes in a way that I now forget, having typed this to 3:47AM, uncomfortable in an unseasonally high humidity, in my bathrobe, now needing to pee.

TUESDAY, 4/26/11: 11:22AM: INCREDIBLE! I'm in one house, and a guy comes in and says, "We're moving today." I know it was scheduled (something like FiOS), but I didn't know it was going to be TODAY! Without transition, we're in the NEW place and I'm looking how electrical things have to be rewired, and the next segment of the dream centers around a connection---either input or output, from a telephone machine, or an Internet system, or a cable-TV service---that I pull out to look at and there's a "ping" from a screw, or a connector, that's become dislodged and has vanished onto a surface covered with small screws and other bits of tiny hardware, so I have NO idea what's missing and what here, or somewhere near, should replace it. I look at other ends of connections of two other systems with similar problems, and at one point the female assistant of my mover take me triumphantly to a kitchen wall and shows me---a radio, which I hadn't really wanted in the first place. Then, somehow, away from the newly-moved-in setting, where I vaguely noted that other furniture of mine HAD been moved into place, but I wondered about the wooden floors with no carpets or rugs whatever, we're walking in the countryside, very picturesque, which word I use to describe it, while she's saying that it's rather out of the way, but I say that it's very beautiful, though I'm brought up short by a pigeon pecking at the nether regions of a drugged-looking cat splayed on its back on the grass in front of a fenced house, where the Ozark-looking woman comes squinting to the fence and asks me what house I'm looking for, and I say I just moved in, and she becomes friendlier, though not letting me past her chicken-wire fence. We move to another house, inside, and I wonder how to get out, and open one door to find a simple white panel blocking the doorway, and then look out a window to see a colorful street with small shops, and THAT door opens to a porch that leads to steps about three feet high on which are displayed brightly colored toys and garden ornaments. But, as we step off the porch, we're in another house, and I'm constantly holding the hand of the woman who's showing me around, but then, somewhat defensively possibly, she says that she's "found the one" and starts describing her future husband, for whom I congratulate her, yet we continue to hold hands as we walk. In the middle of the next house I confess that I've forgotten why we came here, and we're in a kitchen, facing a box rather like a pizza box, which has "pot pie" scrawled in black Magic Marker across the top, and I open it to see a very attractive dinner: uncooked steak, about ten ounces, bright red but highly edged with fat, a pool of mashed potatoes, and various small snacks in tiny packets, some with prices like $1.39 marked on their wrappers, and the guy who'd done the original moving is suddenly there, saying, "Only $14.95!" "For how much time?" "For 14 days, isn't that incredible? It's like they're giving it away." "I'm very impressed," I respond, "but I already HAVE a meal plan," though I'm thinking that I've just got three days ordered, starting tomorrow, and since Dennis is living with me we might be able to get through the HH food before starting this plan, and then it occurs to me to ask directions to my new house, because it's getting close to 5PM and Dennis will be leaving work to come home, and he doesn't know where I've moved. When I look down at the meal, the previously red steak has been cooking and is now brown, smoking slightly, and bubbling with fat on the surface, almost ready to eat, and I wonder how I'm going to transport this to my new place. Wake at 11:15AM, ASTOUNDED at the complexity of the dream.

WEDNESDAY, 4/27/11: 1) 4:30AM: I'm testing "flames," that pass through slots and record/tell a secret, but only at the entry of the right "code." 2) 5:50AM: I'm urinating, and experience a SHARP urge to urinate as I finish, and wake with the same "urgent urge." 3) 7:23AM: I'm staying for a time in a large, run-down, country house, where Carolyn astounds me by laying out beautiful large flawless lettuce leaves on a table to dry in preparation for a salad, while I'm sitting in an adjacent kitchen trying to make a bowl of smaller salad with tiny brown-edged bits of wilted lettuce and small sticks of brown-edged celery that I just KNOW I'll have to trim off, but will get brown AGAIN before people eat them. I'd previously been reading on another porch until I was aware of TINY flies buzzing around my head and lighting on the page that I'm reading until I have to leave for an inner room with fewer flies, though I have to brush them away lest I bring them to my new reading area. Pass a table set for LUNCH in yet another room, where beautiful place settings are decorated with MORE pristine lettuce leaves arranged in crosses on three sides of the plates arranged with folded napkins, two drinking glasses, and meticulously placed cutlery. When I return to that table, three sides are occupied with Mennonite-looking women who seem not to be bothered with the clustering flies---they're occupying the sides of the table closest to the fly-infested areas---saying that, of the four empty chairs on the empty side of the table, that I can take a center chair while Charles can sit on my right side, to which I make some comment like, "Yeah, if he even GETS here."

FRIDAY, 4/29/11: 7:45AM: Earlier in the dream I drove a car in reverse out of a parking space on a very narrow street, but got confused at the T-intersection and drove forward on the left, instead of continuing in reverse down the left, because I wanted to drive to the right. Then I was in a bookstore, at first chewing on something that I couldn't finish, so I put two boli into an ashtray in the wastebasket behind the desk I was using---as I had put a small book or magazine into the coat pocket of a stranger's coat by the door, intending to take them back as I left---and wanted to join a group going to a choral concert somewhere else, where the score was marked with the letters of the alphabet where the narration interwove with the singing---but as I left I couldn't resist buying a load of squares of chocolate fudge brownies that the clerk observed "Came to about ten pounds," and had had a meal, also, so that the bill came to $60, and I was happy to remember that my wallet contained exactly three twenty-dollar bills, so I didn't have to use a credit card which probably, for some unknown reason, wouldn't be valid here. Also in my wallet was a pair of wet jeans, which she remarked about, but I reminded her how hard it had rained yesterday. As I was filling out my bill, the woman looked at a yellow sheet on the wall beside the cash register and said, "Oh, you're a Robinson Crusoe," and I admitted that I'd volunteered helping out the former owner over the course of years, even being employed by the place when I was down and out and needed ready cash, and tried to remember his name as Schafer, to which the clerk responded "Yes, Paul Schafer," which didn't sound quite right to me, but I agreed anyway, and wondered how I was going to find the group that had left already for the concert, but consoled myself with the fact that when I left the store, I could just follow the sound of their singing. She called after me as I went out the door to take the yellow copy of my receipt.